Chapter Text

CHAPTER ONE.

I. The Silence Cedric Left Behind

“Kill the spare.”

The words lived inside Harry now. Not as sound, but as residue something half-absorbed into the bones, impossible to shake free. Every time he closed his eyes, Cedric fell again. There was no drama in the memory, no slow motion, no heroic framing. Just the blunt finality of a command obeyed.

The world had gone quiet afterwards. The kind of quiet that followed an explosion.

Now, in July, Hogwarts basked under warm sunlight that felt almost obscene in its gentleness. The castle had always felt alive to Harry; this summer, it felt like a place holding its breath. Dumbledore had insisted on “advanced independent study” followed by “strategic training” — phrases that made Harry feel more like a soldier than a student.

But he had agreed. He couldn’t have gone back to Privet Drive. Not with the nightmares, the Ministry denying Voldemort’s return, and the feeling that the ground beneath his life had shifted for good.

For a few days, Hogwarts felt like a refuge. Mornings by the lake. Afternoons flying beneath the treeline until the cold air wrung the noise out of him. Evenings spent beneath the soft glow of enchanted lamps in the common room, Hedwig nearby like a quiet witness.

He almost believed he might heal.

Almost.

And then, one morning at breakfast, he realised he wasn’t alone.

Draco Malfoy sat at the far end of the Great Hall posture perfect, expression shuttered, eyes ringed with sleeplessness. His shoulders no longer carried the effortless arrogance he had worn like a uniform since first year. Instead, they held something tight, hunched inward, as if bracing against impact.

Dumbledore had mentioned “another student” staying the summer, but Harry had expected someone easier someone who didn’t immediately stir a knot low in his stomach.

Malfoy’s gaze rose once. Just briefly. His mask slipped for half a breath, revealing something Harry had never seen on him.

Fear.
Or perhaps exhaustion.
Or the weight of a world he could not name.

Whatever it was, it unsettled Harry far more than open hostility ever had.

II. The Uneasy Steward

The evening air in the Headmaster’s office was thick with the scent of old parchment and the soft, resinous burn of a single candle. Sunlight had bled away hours ago, leaving the room washed in the soft, blue-grey hush of twilight. Fawkes dozed on his perch, feathers dim but warm, his breathing steady as the faint pulse of magic in the walls.

Snape stood stiffly near the hearth, black robes settling around him like smoke held in place by gravity. His arms were crossed; not defensively, but in preparation—an attitude of someone who knew he was about to dislike whatever was coming.

Dumbledore steepled his fingers. “Severus, thank you for coming.”

Snape’s mouth thinned. “You sent a phoenix to retrieve me from my laboratory. I assumed the matter was urgent.”

“It is,” Dumbledore said. “And delicate.”

Snape exhaled sharply. “You say that every time you wish me to do something profoundly inconvenient.”

Dumbledore smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Then I am becoming predictable in my old age.”

“Unlikely,” Snape said dryly.

Dumbledore’s expression sobered. “The war will not wait politely while our students finish their OWL and NEWT schedules. Preparations must begin now.”

Snape’s chin lifted slightly. “Meaning?”

“I want you to take on two pupils this summer. Formally.”

Snape stared. “Two.”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess,” Snape said. “Potter.”

“And Mr. Malfoy.”

Snape closed his eyes for a brief, strained moment. “Of course.”

“Your disappointment wounds me,” Dumbledore said lightly.

“It should not,” Snape replied. “I am, after all, the only sane man in this castle.”

Dumbledore ignored this. “Harry and Draco will remain here for the duration of the summer. I want you to oversee their training—defence, practical combat, physical discipline, and supplemental potions mastery.”

Snape’s eyebrow arched with slow, lethal precision. “If this is an attempt to fashion me into some sort of Merlin forbid—mentor, I must protest.”

“No,” Dumbledore said, “it is an attempt to keep them alive.”

Something flickered behind Snape’s eyes, quickly shuttered.

Dumbledore leaned forward. “Draco is in far more danger than he realises. His home is… no longer a sanctuary. And Harry carries wounds he pretends he does not have. Both boys will be walking into a storm when September comes.”

Snape’s voice dropped, quieter. “And you intend to arm them.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said. “But I cannot be their only guide.”

Snape paced once, a thin circle carved into the thick rug. “You overestimate my… suitability.”

Dumbledore’s gaze softened with an affection Snape refused to acknowledge. “Nonsense. You are precise. Patient enough when it matters. And you see what others overlook.”

Snape barked a humourless laugh. “If you are attempting to flatter me, I suggest you stop. It makes my skin crawl.”

Dumbledore’s tone remained gentle. “You are, Severus, the only person who understands the dangers both boys face from different sides of the same war. The only one who knows how fragile their footing is.”

Snape’s jaw tightened. “Potter is reckless. Impulsive. Entirely too prone to emotional theatrics.”

“And Draco?”

Snape hesitated. “Draco is… cornered. By circumstances he didn’t choose.”

Dumbledore nodded. “Then you see why I chose you.”

Snape’s voice turned brittle. “And what if I refuse?”

“You won’t,” Dumbledore said kindly. “Because you care.”

Snape went rigid. “Do not presume to—”

Dumbledore raised a hand. “Care is not weakness, Severus. It is precisely what makes you the right man for this task.”

Silence filled the room, as taut as a bowstring.

Finally, Snape said, quieter than before, “I will do it. But do not mistake obligation for indulgence.”

“Of course not,” Dumbledore said. “You are far too prickly for indulgence.”

Snape’s eye twitched. “I despise you.”

“I know,” Dumbledore said, smiling. “Shall we discuss the schedule?”

Snape muttered something dark under his breath that made Fawkes open one eye in what might have been pity.

But he stepped forward.

He accepted the schedule.
He accepted the responsibility.
He accepted the two boys—fragile, volatile, and entirely unaware—who would soon become his most difficult summer assignment.

And though he would never say it aloud, not even to himself:

A part of him was already preparing to protect them.

III. The Art of Holding Steady

Snape’s lessons remained sharp-edged, each instruction delivered with the finality of a verdict. He still moved through the training chamber with the precision of a man expecting disaster (which, to be fair, his classroom always was) and determined to meet it one step ahead. But something in him had shifted.

The sharpness was unchanged.
The vigilance was new.

He watched Draco with an intensity Harry didn’t understand. It wasn’t favouritism, nor suspicion. It was something quieter—an alertness that seemed to track the invisible tremors running beneath Draco’s composure. Every hesitation, every stiff breath, every moment Draco steadied his wand hand against a shiver he thought no one saw—Snape saw all of it.

And then there was the way Snape watched Harry.

Not with affection or gentleness—Snape knew neither—but with the weary recognition of someone who had witnessed too many children carry more than their share. When Harry’s knife clinked against the cutting board because his hand shook, Snape’s eyes flicked toward him. The look wasn’t unkind, but calculating, as though he were diagnosing a wound Harry had not admitted he had.

Not warmth. Not sympathy. But recognition.

Snape’s barbs were still sharp, but the edges wavered with something almost protective.

“If either of you insists on duelling like sleep-deprived puffskeins,” he said dryly, “please alert me beforehand so I may prepare adequate medical supplies.”

Draco stiffened. Harry nearly laughed.

Snape gave him a flat look. “Potter, if you are determined to find humour in mediocrity, I suggest doing so after you’ve blocked at least one spell today.”

Yet the insult landed with less venom than usual. Harry could feel it. Draco did too.

Sometimes Snape’s eyes met Harry’s, and the man quickly looked away—as though emotion, even one as mild as concern, were a private failing he could not afford.

Harry wondered what conversations Dumbledore had with Snape.
He wondered what Snape feared they were walking toward.

Harry had left the training chamber for the evening, exhaustion thick in his limbs. But Snape did not depart. He stayed behind, standing in the half-shadow of the tall windows, his arms folded as though holding something in place within himself.

Dumbledore stepped in a moment later, quiet but unmistakable, light catching the silver threads in his beard.

“You were watching them closely today,” Dumbledore said.

Snape didn’t turn. “They need watching.”

“They need guiding,” Dumbledore corrected gently.

Snape let out a brittle, humourless breath. “You expect so much from two children who can barely keep their hands from shaking.”

“They are no longer children,” Dumbledore replied. “Not in the ways that matter.”

Snape’s jaw tightened. “Do not pretend you do not see it—the cracks forming in both of them. Potter’s magic is volatile. Malfoy is exhausted to the bone. They are unravelling.”

Dumbledore’s eyes softened. “And yet they are helping each other stay upright.”

Snape’s laugh was short and caustic. “Yes. Let us rely on mutual trauma as a stabilising force. A brilliant strategy.”

“You underestimate them,” Dumbledore murmured.

“I underestimate no one,” Snape snapped, then softened his tone with effort. “You have placed them on a converging path, Albus. One that neither fully understands. If they fall—”

“They will not fall,” Dumbledore said.

But there was a shadow in his eyes that made the certainty ring hollow.

Snape finally turned to face him. “You should be honest with them.”

“And you?” Dumbledore asked quietly.

Snape looked away again. “I am being honest, in the ways I can be.”

There was a long silence.

“They remind you of things,” Dumbledore said gently.

Snape’s shoulders tightened. “Do not psychoanalyse me.”

“It is not analysis,” Dumbledore replied. “Only observation.”

Snape exhaled slowly, the sound weary and unwilling. “I see what they will be asked to carry. And I know how it feels to be given no choice.”

Dumbledore’s expression softened in a way that made Snape turn sharply from him.

“That is why,” Dumbledore said, “they have you.”

Snape flinched at that—barely, but Harry would have recognised the movement.

When Dumbledore left, Snape remained in the chamber a long while, staring at the doorway where the boys had stood earlier. His expression was drawn, thoughtful, burdened.

Not a guardian.
Not a friend.
But someone who watched because he knew the cost of failing to.

And because, somewhere beneath the layers of bitterness and self-protection, he cared in ways he wished he didn’t.

IV. A Room That Answers What They Do Not Say.

One suffocating night, Harry walked through the castle like a restless ghost. His thoughts chased themselves in tight circles. Cedric’s empty eyes. Voldemort reborn. The knowledge that the world expected him to face it again.

He walked past the seventh floor wall three times before the door appeared.

He didn’t remember asking for it.
But the castle always knew.

The Room offered warmth: firelight, two chairs angled toward one another, a small table with a mug already steaming.

Harry stepped in — and froze.

Malfoy sat in the nearer chair, a book folded in his lap. His eyes were unfocused, pulled inward as if trapped in a memory he couldn’t escape. At the sound of the door closing, he startled — a subtle, fragile movement — and shut the book.

“If you’re looking for space,” Malfoy murmured, voice low and rubbed raw, “I’ll go.”

Harry should have said yes. But the loneliness in Malfoy’s tone lodged in him.

“You don’t have to,” Harry said.

A pause. A tiny shift. Malfoy’s shoulders dropped by half an inch — a surrender so small it almost wasn’t one.

The Room conjured a second mug.

They sat without speaking, the fire catching the thin line of exhaustion beneath Malfoy’s eyes. The silence felt oddly companionable, as though both boys had been carrying a weight shaped the same.

Finally, Harry said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“The castle is large,” Malfoy answered, not looking at him. “Except when it isn’t.”

Harry understood. More than he wanted to admit.

After a long stretch of quiet, Malfoy added, as if tugged against his will:
“This room gives you what you need. Not what you want.”

The question slipped out before Harry could stop it.  “What do you need?”

Malfoy’s gaze snapped to him, bright and aching. For a heartbeat, he looked utterly breakable. “A moment to breathe,” he whispered.

Harry swallowed. “Yeah. Me too.”

It wasn’t a truce. But it was the first gentle thing they had shared.

V.Threads in the Quiet

Dumbledore claimed that keeping Harry and Draco on overlapping schedules would be “mutually beneficial,” a phrase vague enough that Harry immediately distrusted it. In practice, it meant that Malfoy was suddenly woven into the background of Harry’s days—not loudly, not even deliberately, but with a constant quietness that Harry didn’t know how to interpret.

Malfoy appeared in the library just as Harry settled into a chair; he slipped into the training rooms moments before Harry arrived, and their footsteps echoed in the same hallways with an uncomfortable, almost orchestrated familiarity. What struck Harry wasn’t the frequency, but the absence of all the old signals — no sneers, no muttered barbs, no pointed looks meant to provoke.

Instead, Malfoy moved with a careful, almost brittle restraint, as though bracing for an impact he couldn’t quite anticipate. His hands often hovered near his robes in a defensive curl, his gaze flicking quickly to every sudden sound. It was not paranoia. It was vigilance—the kind Harry recognised intimately.

Once, during a defensive practice, Harry’s spell misfired — a sharp crack, light flaring across the desk. Malfoy flinched violently, not at the noise but at Harry’s reaction to it. There was a split second when their eyes met across the drifting haze of magic, and something passed between them — not understanding, not sympathy, but the sudden, unwanted recognition of another person carrying a burden too heavy to name.

Harry looked away first, unsettled by how familiar the expression on Malfoy’s face had been.

When the session ended and Malfoy slipped out quickly, head down, Dumbledore closed the door with a soft click and regarded Harry with the weary patience of someone who had long grown accustomed to unspoken truths.

“You noticed,” Dumbledore said.

Harry nodded. He didn’t know how to explain what he had seen, only that it left a tight pull beneath his ribs.

Dumbledore stepped closer. “Mr Malfoy startles at the same things that trouble you.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t mean sameness,” Dumbledore allowed. “But pain rarely remains isolated. It echoes. It finds its reflection in others.”

Harry shifted his weight. “Why tell me this?”

“Because neither of you is as alone as you imagine,” Dumbledore said quietly. “And because you see more clearly than you think. Fear has many shapes, but it leaves similar shadows. Even in boys who believe themselves nothing alike.”

Harry breathed out slowly. The room felt heavier, as if the truth had thickened the air.

Dumbledore’s expression softened, but there was a sadness in it too. “Give him room. Should the opportunity arise, give him kindness. It may surprise you to discover how little of it he has known.”

Harry wasn’t sure how to respond, so he didn’t try.

Later, when he encountered Malfoy in the corridor—a brief crossing of paths, Malfoy clutching a stack of books too tightly, eyes moving with caution—Harry felt something tug inside him. Malfoy didn’t raise his chin in challenge or avert his gaze in contempt. Instead, he looked at Harry with a fleeting, unguarded tension, as though trying to gauge whether he was about to be struck or offered something less harmful.

It lasted only a heartbeat, but Harry saw it clearly.

And for the first time, he understood—really understood—that Malfoy wasn’t avoiding him out of superiority or disdain. He was trying not to break where someone might see it.

Harry didn’t call out to him. He didn’t force conversation.
He simply let the moment pass without adding weight to it.

But he carried it with him afterwards, steady and unresolved

VI. Lessons in Balance. 

July deepened, and with it, the tempo of their duelling sessions. The training room at the edge of the Transfiguration corridor grew hotter by the day, its high windows cracked to let in slanted ropes of evening sunlight. Dust motes floated slowly in the gold haze, catching the movement of their spells like drifting sparks.

Snape stood at the far end of the room with his arms crossed, his expression sharpened into something between disdain and reluctant concentration. He tapped his wand once against his sleeve — a signal to begin.

Harry and Draco circled each other on the polished floor, breath steadying, wands poised.

“Potter,” Snape said mildly, “your stance suggests you’ve prepared for a duel with your shoelaces.”

Harry shifted his weight, suppressing the prick of embarrassment. “I’m balanced.”

“You are leaning,” Snape corrected, “which is what people do immediately before they are knocked flat by a basic Stunning Spell. Malfoy. Fix him.”

Draco startled. “Fix—?”

“Show him,” Snape snapped, as though Draco had asked something offensively obvious. “You paid attention in class. Or at least used to.”

Draco moved toward Harry with tentative steps, eyes flicking between Snape and Harry. “Here,” he murmured, touching Harry’s elbow lightly. “You’re too rigid in your knees. If you ease your weight forward—yes, like that—you won’t overcorrect when you dodge.”

Harry adjusted, the change subtle but undeniably helpful.

“Better,” Draco said, stepping back.

Snape let out a long-suffering exhale. “Finally. Now perhaps neither of you will injure yourselves before the enemy has the chance.”

They resumed their positions.

Snape flicked his wand. “Begin.”

Draco struck first. A clean, sharp spell — nothing decorative, simply efficient. Harry felt the intent behind it, the focus Draco had been working to regain all summer. He dodged cleanly, counterattacking with a disarming charm that Draco deflected with surprising steadiness.

Draco’s wand hand trembled slightly, but not enough to break the spell’s trajectory.

“Malfoy,” Snape barked, “stop strangling your wand. It is an instrument, not a hostage.”

Draco huffed an irritated breath but loosened his grip.

Harry pivoted, following instinct more than thought. He cast a nonverbal shield, feeling the magic thrum through his palm in a way that was becoming familiar — not confident yet, but no longer fragile.

“Potter,” Snape said without looking up from his notes, “if you flinch like that again, I will remove points from Gryffindor retroactively.”

“That’s not even—” Harry began, then cut off when Draco’s next spell snapped against his shield.

The rhythm between them changed.
They moved more intuitively, no longer reacting to fear or habit, but to each other’s cadence — small corrections in balance, shifts in stance, the quick reading of eyes and shoulders before the spell formed.

Dumbledore watched from the doorway, his presence soft as evening light. When they paused to catch their breath, he stepped forward with the quiet authority of someone entering a chapel.

“You are learning from each other,” he said. “You may not yet see it. But you are.”

Harry glanced at Draco, caught off guard by the truth in it.

Draco looked away instinctively, but something in him loosened — a tiny, unguarded warmth that flickered across his features before he locked them into place again.

Snape rolled his eyes skyward, as though invoking the mercy of some unseen deity.
“Sentiment,” he muttered, “is a luxury none of you have earned. Potter — again. Malfoy — I expect your next parry to resemble competence.”

Draco stiffened, bristling…and then, unexpectedly, Harry saw the edge of a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. Only for a moment. Quickly hidden. But real.

They resumed their stances.

Harry felt steadier this time. Draco’s eyes met his just once — a brief, almost imperceptible acknowledgement.

An understanding.
Thin as thread.
Stronger than it seemed.

They moved again, faster, cleaner, more in sync — two boys finding the beginnings of a rhythm neither had asked for but both needed.

When they finished, sweat slicked their hair, and the room smelled faintly of scorched air and summer dust. Snape surveyed them for a long moment, his expression unreadable.

“At last,” he said quietly, “something resembling progress.”

It was not praise.
But it was close enough.

Harry found himself smiling — and caught Draco doing the same

VII. The Library, and Other Quiet Places

Harry sat in the library two tables away and pretended to read, though his eyes kept drifting toward Malfoy. His books weren’t what he supposed were the usual Slytherin selections — not vanity charms, not social manoeuvring texts. No, these were darker. Heavier. Occlumency. Enchantments. Nobody studied the mechanics of spells; nobody studied willingly. (Except, of course, Hermione).

Harry felt a twist low in his chest. Malfoy was preparing for something too.

When Malfoy approached his table, Harry braced for an insult. Instead:

Your stance yesterday was too rigid,” Malfoy said, voice low but precise. “It leaves you off balance.” Malfoy didn’t sound mocking; he sounded analytical, as though this were a matter of technical correction rather than pride.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Thanks.”

Malfoy shifted his weight, the movement small but telling. His fingers fidgeted briefly with the edge of his sleeve, and he studied the floor rather than Harry’s face. “If you want to… fix it,” he added, the hesitation almost awkward. “It’s just—your feet were too far apart. You brace as if the spell’s going to hit before it is even cast.”

Harry considered the words, then nodded. “Right. That makes sense.”

Malfoy seemed surprised he agreed so quickly. “It’s not criticism,” he said quietly. “It’s… correction.”

The distinction felt important.

Harry rose slowly from the chair and settled into his duelling stance. He watched the frown settle on Malfoy’s face and the subtle gesture of his hands. Harry adjusted his stance on the stone floor, mimicking the posture Malfoy had described. When he settled into it, he felt something subtle shift—balance redistributing, weight resting lower in his hips, the tension in his shoulders easing.

Malfoy’s eyes flicked to Harry’s feet, then up to his face, assessing the change. “Better,” he murmured.

For a breath, they simply stood there—two boys in the middle of a quiet library, summer light warming the stones beneath them, neither quite knowing what they were stepping into.

The space between them stretched, not hostile this time, but tentative.
A thin thread drawn between them, humming with something Harry couldn’t name yet.

He didn’t dislike it.

And Malfoy, Harry noticed, wasn’t running from it either

VIII. The Professor at the Window.

From the window of the duelling classroom, Snape watched the two boys leave across the green grounds below, their figures small against the lengthening summer shadows. They didn’t speak, but their steps fell into rhythm without conscious effort — two separate threads beginning, reluctantly, to intertwine.

Influence was inevitable now. Connection too.

Snape felt the old familiar tightening in his chest, the one that arrived whenever he saw vulnerability forming in places where the world would strike hardest. He had spent a lifetime trying to prevent such attachments in his students — not out of cruelty, but out of pragmatic compassion. Affection gave enemies leverage. Dependency created weakness. Isolation was safer, colder, but survivable.

And yet here were Potter and Draco, drifting into each other’s orbit like two half-starved creatures finding heat for the first time.

Snape wasn’t sure whether it unsettled him or eased something in him he refused to name.

He leaned one hand on the sill, watching their silhouettes merge briefly as they turned a corner. Children were not meant to shoulder the weight of a war they had no hand in starting. They should not have to live inside the debris of choices made decades before they were born. And yet here they were—walking straight into the same storm that had claimed so much of Snape’s own youth.

It was almost laughable, the irony.

He felt the familiar ache of memory then, the sharp, private sting of the past. He had once been a boy burdened too early, steered by fear and anger toward a future he barely understood. No one had stopped him. No one had warned him honestly. And Lily—Lily had paid the price for his arrogance, for his blind devotion to the wrong master, for choices he had believed were harmless until they weren’t. Her death stood like a monument in the middle of his life, a failure he had tended for years like a wound that refused to close.

He looked back toward the empty classroom, where Harry and Draco had disappeared moments before. Protecting them was not redemption—he had long since abandoned such fantasies—but perhaps it was a way to keep the past from repeating itself. Or at the very least, a way to ensure that someone else’s brightest person did not die because the adults around her had not acted in time.

He closed his eyes for a moment. He did not pray — not in any manner recognisable as prayer — but a tight, reluctant hope coiled in his chest despite every effort to smother it. In the quiet, resentful way of a man who no longer believed the world capable of mercy, Snape hoped the summer would hold long enough for both boys to find some steadiness. Enough to survive what waited beyond September.

Snape stayed at the window a moment longer than he meant to. When the boys finally disappeared, he lowered his gaze—and caught the faint reflection of his own face in the glass.

For an instant, he didn’t recognise himself.

The man staring back at him looked older than Snape ever intended to become: the streaks of grey more pronounced at his temples, the lines around his mouth carved deeper by years of holding things too tightly—secrets, guilt, the stubborn ache of choices that had shaped far too much of his life. There was a hollowness around his eyes he preferred not to examine.

He straightened his posture sharply, as if that alone might erase what he had seen. He despised the intrusion of self-awareness, despised even more the weariness clinging to him like a second shadow.

“That expression becomes you, Severus,” Dumbledore said gently behind him.

Snape stiffened but did not turn. “I don’t recall inviting commentary.”

Dumbledore moved to stand beside him, hands folded neatly before him, gaze following the to the school grounds below where the boys had walked moments earlier. “You looked as though you were remembering something.”

“I was not,” Snape said flatly.

“A pity,” Dumbledore murmured. “Reflection, though uncomfortable, can offer clarity.”

Snape’s nostrils flared. “Clarity is rarely useful. It tends to reveal what we would rather ignore.”

“Or,” Dumbledore said, “what we ought not to ignore any longer.”

Snape finally turned to him, eyes narrowed. “If this is yet another attempt to convince me that overseeing Potter and Draco’s training is anything short of a catastrophic idea—”

“It is not,” Dumbledore said simply. “I believe it is the right one.”

Snape let out a slow breath, almost a hiss. “You assign me children who will soon be pushed into the path of a war they cannot possibly win alone. You place them under my instruction and then speak of clarity and reflection like some sentimental sage.”

Dumbledore’s voice softened. “I place them with you because you understand the cost of being unprepared. And because you are far more capable of guiding them than you allow yourself to believe.”

Snape looked back out the window, jaw tight enough to ache. “They are beginning to rely on one another.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said. “And on you.”

Snape closed his eyes briefly, as if pained. “That,” he said, “is precisely what concerns me.”

Dumbledore rested a faint, steady hand on the stone windowsill. Not a touch of comfort—Dumbledore knew better than to offer that—but an anchor, a quiet presence.

“They will need you,” he said. “And each other.”

Snape’s voice dropped low. “And if I fail them?”

Dumbledore’s answer was soft, heavy with the kind of faith Snape had never known what to do with. “Then we will stand together to bear the consequences. But I do not believe you will fail.”

The silence that followed was deep, stretching toward something neither man named.

Snape finally spoke, voice quiet, edged with resignation. “The summer will not be enough.”

“No,” Dumbledore agreed. “But it will be a beginning.”

And on some level—one Snape did not admit even to himself—that frightened him more than anything.

IX. The Shore Where They Do Not Speak 

The night was silver and still when Harry returned to the lake. He walked along the bank until he saw a figure sitting upon a low rock.

Malfoy.

Harry approached quietly, unsure if he should speak. Before he could decide, Malfoy said, “Were you hoping to be alone?”

Harry almost said yes. But he didn’t want to lie.

“No,” he murmured. “Didn’t want to interrupt.”

“You didn’t.” A breath. Not quite humour. More like resignation.

Harry sat beside him, leaving just enough space to be respectful. The grass bent under their weight. Their hands brushed once — lightly, a whisper — and neither pulled away. The sky reflected in the lake like a second, quieter world.

“When the castle sleeps,” Malfoy said softly, turning a pebble between his fingers, “my mind doesn’t.”

Harry’s chest tightened. “Mine either.”

“Nightmares?” Malfoy asked.

“Memories,” Harry answered.

“That’s worse,” Malfoy said, voice low.

They didn’t speak for a long time afterwards. They didn’t need to. The silence between them no longer felt sharp — just heavy with the things they both carried.

“I used to feel safe here,” Draco murmured. “Before everything shifted. Before I did.” He hesitated. “It doesn’t feel safe anymore.”

Harry thought carefully. “Maybe it will again.”

Malfoy’s breath snagged — startled, as if the words mattered more than he expected them to. He looked away, but something inside him eased, almost imperceptibly.

The moment held.

They walked back to the castle slowly, their steps falling into a rhythm neither questioned.

They didn’t say goodnight.
They didn’t have to.

The shore stayed with them long after they parted.

X. The Conversation That Isn’t

It began subtly.

Harry would walk into a room, and before he could think, his eyes were already searching for pale hair and a familiar guarded expression. Draco always seemed to sense it, flicking his gaze up and then away quickly, as though eye contact was a currency he wasn’t ready to spend.

Harry didn’t know what he was looking for.
Only that Draco seemed less… alone when someone was trying to understand him.

He noticed the small things first:

• Draco’s hands were shaking when he cast too many spells in a row.
  
  
• The way he lingered in doorways, as if assessing their safety.
  
  
• The hollowed look he wore the moment he thought no one was watching.
  
  

Mostly, Harry noticed how often Draco reached for his wand even in harmless moments, fingers brushing the handle like someone checking a pulse.

Harry recognised that. He had lived with that same reflex since the graveyard.

One evening in the library, Draco slid into the chair across from him without invitation. Neither commented on it. The daylight slanted between them, soft and amber.

Draco finally murmured, “Potter… why do you keep looking at me like that?”

Harry blinked. “Like what?”

“Like you’ve figured something out that I haven’t.”

Harry hesitated. The silence stretched. “You look,” he said slowly, “like you’re waiting for something awful to happen.”

Draco’s breath caught. Not sharply — just a subtle hitch, the smallest betrayal.

“Perhaps I am,” Draco whispered.

And then he returned to his book, spine held too straight, as if bracing himself against meaning.

XI. The Greenhouse and the Lantern Light

Draco didn’t know when it started — the trembling in his hands, the tightness in his lungs, the way his pulse stuttered at sudden noises. He didn’t think of it as fear. Not aloud. The Malfoy vocabulary for fear was limited, bleak, and mostly ornamental.

But the truth lived in the back of his throat.

His father had become someone he no longer recognised — brittle, desperate, burning with a fervour Draco didn’t dare examine too closely. His mother had become silent and watchful in ways that unsettled him more than yelling ever could.

Draco feared the future in a way he had never feared anything before—not Quidditch accidents, not detentions, not even Potter’s wild defiance. Those were manageable fears, theatrical and obvious. This new fear was different. It lived under his ribs like a slow-blooming bruise, spreading into places he had never allowed vulnerability before.

He had always been told what he would become. A Malfoy heir. A Slytherin of distinction. A wizard whose name carried influence, whose choices bent rooms into alignment. Expectations had been laid at his feet so early he’d never questioned whether they belonged to him or to the people pressing them into his hands. But now, the shape of his future had begun to twist into something he didn’t recognise, a path narrowing toward a mark he didn’t yet bear but felt all the same.

There were moments—quiet, dangerous moments—when he asked himself whether he had ever truly had a choice. The life mapped out for him had never been offered; it had been assumed. His talent was not his own. His ambition was mandatory. His obedience was a matter of lineage, not loyalty. The walls of the Manor had been built from those expectations, and he had grown up learning to fit himself into the spaces between them.

But something had shifted after the graveyard. Fear was no longer an abstract thing. It was a presence at his shoulder, whispering of futures that ended in servitude, in violence, in the kind of irreversible allegiance he wasn’t sure he could survive. He could feel the weight of his father’s failing standing behind him, pressing him forward—not out of love, but out of desperation for the family name to remain unbroken.

And beneath all of it, there was a quieter truth, one Draco barely let himself acknowledge: he didn’t know who he was without those expectations. He didn’t know what he wanted, only what he was told to become.

That was the real terror—not the Mark itself, but the possibility that he might be nothing at all without the path laid out for him.

He remembered one evening near the end of Easter, the Manor unnervingly quiet, when his mother paused outside his room with a softness that did not belong in a house built on sharp edges. She didn’t knock. She simply opened the door and stepped inside as though afraid that hesitation would make her lose her nerve.

Draco had been pretending to read, but her expression—thin with sleeplessness, eyes bright with something he couldn’t name—made him sit straighter.

“Put the book down,” she said, not unkindly.

He did.

For a moment, she only studied him, as if committing the angles of his face to memory. Then she came to sit beside him on the edge of his bed. The mattress dipped slightly under her weight, familiar and foreign all at once. He could smell lavender from the sachets she tucked into drawers, something he associated with childhood, not danger.

“Draco,” she said softly. “I need you to listen to me. Properly.”

He nodded, throat tight.

“I do not know what the future holds for your father,” she began, and Draco felt something cold twist low in his stomach. “And I do not know what the Dark Lord will demand when he rises fully. But I do know this: you must protect yourself first.”

He stared at her. “Mother—”

“No,” she said, a gentle command. “You must hear me. There are loyalties this family has held for generations. Some of them are now poisonous. Some were always poison.” Her voice trembled—just once. “I will not watch you be swallowed by the same mistakes.”

Draco swallowed hard. “What are you saying?”

“That you are more important than legacy,” she whispered. “More important than pride. More important than the expectations of men who would use you as a shield for their own failures.”

He had never heard her speak that way. Not about the family. Not about his father. Not about the world they were meant to serve.

His mother reached out, brushing his hair back from his forehead with a touch that made Draco feel suddenly, unbearably young. “If the Headmaster offers refuge this summer,” she murmured, “you take it. And you listen. And you learn. Do you understand?”

Draco nodded, though his chest felt too tight to breathe. “Yes.”

“Good.” She pressed a hand briefly to his cheek, steadying him in a way he didn’t know he needed. “Things are coming that you are not meant to bear alone. Do not be brave at the cost of being safe.”

She stood then, smoothing her robes, her composure pulled back into place with practised precision. At the door, she looked back at him once more.

“I love you,” she said quietly. “Enough to let you go where I cannot follow.”

And for the rest of the term, whenever fear coiled cold and sharp in Draco’s spine, those words were the only thing that kept him steady.

When Dumbledore offered him a summer at Hogwarts, for “extended study,” Draco took it with a speed he hoped didn’t look like running. Because he needed distance. Because the Manor felt like a closed fist. Because, for the first time, he wasn’t entirely sure he would survive the future waiting for him there.

And because, quietly and unwillingly, he hoped that stepping away might give him the chance to imagine a future that wasn’t already written.

But Hogwarts wasn’t the shelter he remembered. It was a place full of memories — some bitter, some complicated — and a single presence he hadn’t expected to be confronted with so relentlessly.

Harry Potter.

Draco had prepared for hostility, not for the unnervingly gentle way Potter sometimes looked at him. Not pity — he would have rejected that — but recognition. As though Potter knew exactly what it felt like to be afraid of where you came from.

Draco didn’t know what to do with that.

So he said nothing. And in saying nothing, found himself saying too much.

XII. The Shift

It happened one afternoon on the way down the staircase from the Astronomy Tower. Harry was deep in thought, spiralling over a training assignment gone wrong. His wand had sparked — violently — and Snape had dismissed him early with a tired “We will try again tomorrow.”

Harry hadn’t meant to walk beside Draco. They simply converged on the same stairwell, footsteps echoing in reluctant unison.

Draco kept pace with him in silence for three flights. Then, unexpectedly, he spoke.

“You’re holding your wand too tightly,” he said.

Harry blinked. “What?”

“That’s why it’s sparking. You’re clenching your grip when you anticipate casting. It disrupts your wrist alignment.” Draco tilted his hand slightly, demonstrating. “Relax here. And here.” Without waiting for Harry’s permission, he grabbed his hand and wrapped his thin fingers around his wrist. His skin was warm against his, and Harry felt heat spreading across his chest.

Harry stared, not sure whether to be grateful or confused. “Why are you telling me this?”

Draco hesitated. His expression shifted — open, then shuttered, then open again.  “Because watching you nearly blow up a desk is distracting.”

Harry snorted before he could stop himself.

Draco looked faintly offended. “I was attempting to be helpful.”

“No — I mean — thanks. Really.”

Draco looked away, the faintest pink colouring his ears.

They descended the last flight without speaking, but something had changed — not dramatically, not obviously, but unmistakably.

A thread had formed between them.

XIII. Quiet Moment.

The castle’s evenings grew longer, the light stretched thin and golden. Cicadas hummed outside the open windows. The heat made their limbs heavy during practice, and often both boys ended training soaked in sweat, sitting on opposite sides of the room with their backs to the same wall.

They rarely spoke after sessions — exhaustion stripped away bravado — but the silence felt less brittle now.

One evening, Draco broke it.

“I never thanked you.”

Harry looked up. “For what?”

Draco didn’t meet his eyes. “For… not asking.”
He swallowed. “About my family. Or what’s happening outside Hogwarts. Most people would have.”

Harry shifted, surprised. “You don’t owe me answers.”

Draco’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Maybe that’s why I don’t mind sitting with you.”

And then he closed his eyes, head resting lightly against the wall, breath finally uncurling from the tightness in his chest.

Harry watched him — quiet, steady — and thought, not for the first time, that maybe the summer wasn’t just about becoming a better fighter.

It could be about learning not to be alone.

XIV. The Small Confrontation

It was not a confrontation in the way they had both imagined. There was no shouting, no accusations hurled like knives. Instead, it unfolded in Snape’s office as a kind of compacted civility: words that had mattered much longer than either boy had expected to say aloud.

Harry had been summoned. Not for punishment — the summons had been quiet, almost reluctant — but because Snape had wanted to see both of them.

Draco arrived seconds later, silent as always, but his face was open in a way Harry had come to recognise: taut, honest, hanging on whatever discipline he could muster.

Snape watched them both approach with a narrowed expression that betrayed nothing. The office smelled faintly of soot and bottled ink. Sunlight slanted in through a high window and caught dust motes like suspended stars.

“Sit,” Snape said.

They obeyed.

He did not begin with a reprimand. He began with an observation that might have been a question if he had possessed the inclination for gentleness.

“You two have been occupying the same spaces for most of the summer,” he said. “It would appear you are… influencing each other.”

Draco shifted, a small, contained movement. Harry felt the heat rise behind his own ears — not embarrassment so much as a vulnerable awareness.

“Is that wrong?” Harry asked before he could decide it was foolish.

Snape’s jaw ticked. For the first time in months, Harry saw something like a tired exhalation cross the older man’s face.

“Wrong is an imprecise word,” Snape said. “I would prefer inevitable.”

Draco’s eyes sharpened. “Are you reprimanding us for it, Professor?”

Snape’s lips quirked. “I am reminding you that choices have consequences. You are soldiers of circumstance, whether you like it or not. The only courtesy you can afford one another is honesty.”

Harry met Draco’s gaze then, steady and soft. Draco’s throat worked a little as he swallowed. There was a frankness there Harry had watched arrive in pieces all summer.

“You are not alone,” Harry said simply.

The admission landed between them with a weight that needed no further decoration.

Snape, surprisingly, did not offer a lecture. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled.

“If you continue in this way,” he said, voice dry as flint but threaded with something softer, “you will learn to fight better. You will also learn to rely on one another in ways that will become inconveniently useful.”

Draco’s lips curved the faintest fraction of a smile. “Inconveniently useful,” he mused. “I can live with that.”

“Good,” Snape said. “Then do not disappoint me. Be useful. To each other, to your teachers, and—if you can manage it—be useful to yourselves.”

They left with no promises bandied like tidy contracts, only the slow, mutual acceptance that had been growing between them: discreet, deliberate, and true.

XV. An Evening of Small Things

The following nights were quieter still. Dinners were punctuated with small talk that felt less like avoidance and more like the first careful stitches of a new habit. Harry noted how Draco laughed sometimes — a short, surprised sound that arrived as though he had forgotten it was his to make.

One evening, Harry and Draco were found in the herbology greenhouses, leaning over a tray of wolf ’ s-bane under the amber light. Draco talked about something obscure and arcane — a subtle tempering charm that could steady volatile potion ingredients. Harry listened, genuinely interested, as though the topic were a map he intended to learn.

“You have a good eye for precision,” Harry said.

Draco’s reply was almost embarrassed. “It helps. When your life comes with instructions and consequences, you get good at noticing the small things that don’t explode.”

Harry’s hand brushed his. It was incidental, accidental-feeling, yet it carried with it the promise of steadiness. Draco didn’t pull away.

They worked in companionable silence until the lamps were low. When they finally left, the castle felt smaller, kinder, somehow rearranged to make space for two people learning how to occupy it together without crowding.

XVI. The Shore Where They Do Not Speak.

The last night of the summer that felt wholly like summer — not the thin, anxious edge of autumning days but a warm, full evening — Harry returned to the lake alone at first. He had not meant to be alone for long.

He found Draco already there, seated on the low rock where they had once watched the water before returning to school. The surface lay smooth and reflective, mirroring the pale moon and the watchful stars. A cool breeze turned the long grass to ripple and hush.

“Hi,” Harry said, sitting down a careful distance away.

Draco glanced at him and then at the lake. “Hi.”

They spoke of small things at first — the weather, the ridiculous stubbornness of one professor or another, the odd complaints Snape made about the quality and quantity of tea at Hogwarts. These were the façade of normality, a way of practising ordinary speech, the way one practices a new spell.

Then the conversation slowed. The air between them changed as inevitably as the tide.

“Why did you stay?” Draco asked softly, surprising Harry by the directness. “At Hogwarts. For the summer. Why not go home?”

Harry hesitated slightly at Draco’s question. The lake was still enough that he could see his own reflection shift when he finally answered. “Because Privet Drive isn’t the kind of place you go to feel safe,” he said quietly. “People talk about how I’m treasured there, or spoiled, or whatever the papers say… but none of that has ever been true.”

Draco blinked, confusion cutting across his features. “You mean those stories — the ones about your relatives treating you like—” He stopped, as if the word miserably tasted wrong in his mouth. “I thought those were exaggerations. People embellish everything about you.”

Harry let out a breath that felt too big for his chest. “They didn’t have to exaggerate much.” He shrugged, not self-pitying, just stating a fact he had learned to live around. “It was a place I survived, not a place I belonged.”

Draco looked at him then — really looked — and something in his expression shifted, brittle and unsettled. “I didn’t… I never imagined…” He shook his head once, sharply. “You always seemed like someone who had people behind him. People who wanted him.” His gaze drifted back to the water, troubled. “I didn’t realise how alone you were allowed to be.”

They sat in companionable quiet for a while, listening to the water lapping softly at the bank. Above them, stars wheeled, and the night held them like something patient.

Finally, Draco shifted, his movements deliberate. He turned to Harry, eyes honest in the moonlight. “If we end up in trouble,” he said, “after this summer, will you still stand with me?”

Harry’s response was immediate, without thought. “Yes.”

Draco let out a small, almost disbelieving sound. “Even if I’m not exactly like you imagine?”

“Especially if you’re not like I imagine,” Harry said.

Draco’s shoulders eased. He reached out, taking Harry’s hand with quiet surety. The touch was neither dramatic nor showy. It was simple and binding, the kind of clasp people use to steady each other as the world tilts.

They didn’t say more — the words had done their work. The night folded around them like a promise.

When they walked back toward the castle, their steps matched without effort. Their hands and fingers brushed. The path seemed less lonely than it had at the beginning of the summer. The lake’s hush trailed behind them like something that had seen them and understood.

XVII. Snape, Who Sees Too Much

Severus Snape had learned to read children the way other men read books — slowly, thoroughly, by looking between the lines for all the things left unsaid.

Potter was an open page written in the blunt strokes of grief and loss and anger. Draco, however, was an exercise in erasure. A boy unspooling thread by thread, just enough to keep walking without falling apart entirely.

Snape watched them during a late-afternoon session from the shadowed corner of the Defence chamber. The room was silent except for their uneven breaths and the soft hum of wards adjusting to accommodate younger magic.

Draco’s spellwork was precise but frayed at the edges, as though he was holding too tightly to something brittle. Harry moved with bursts of instinct tempered by exhaustion; he tried too hard to hide.

They circled each other, cautious yet drawn forward, as if their magic recognised a storm in the other and understood—without instruction—that weather should be met together or not at all.

When Harry overextended and stumbled, Draco caught his arm on reflex.

Neither spoke.

But Snape saw the moment Draco realised what he’d done — the tightening of his shoulders, the flicker of panic in his eyes, the immediate withdrawal. As though human contact was a crime, he had forgotten how to allow himself.

Potter blinked at him, confused but not offended. He opened his mouth to ask something, then seemed to think better of it.

Good, Snape thought. Curiosity was a dangerous blade in the hands of children.

Still… he couldn’t ignore the shift.

Two boys standing at the edge of something unspoken, learning by accident that touches could be shared.

Snape rubbed a hand across his face and wondered when exactly everything had gotten so complicated.

XVIII. The Shape the Summer Took.

Summer ended not with fireworks but with the subtle adjustment of everyday things: lessons shared with less trembling hands, letters written in steadier hands, the knowledge that two boys carried less alone.

They had not become friends in a single, dramatic gesture. Friendship had arrived as a series of small decisions: to sit in silence instead of flinching away, to offer a hand instead of a sneer, to admit fear aloud and let someone else hear it.

Snape watched them both prepare for the term with a look that could have been pride if the world allowed him such indulgence. Dumbledore gave a small nod in the corridor, his eyes kinder than they had been months before.

In the quiet room where a mug had once steamed and three chairs had angled toward each other, the embers were cooler now, but not dead. The castle had kept their conversations, their silences, the small ways they had learned to hold each other. Magic had not fixed everything — there were dangers ahead, and scars both knew would take time to fade , but something had changed off the map of what either expected.

They had, in the space of a long, slow summer, learned a new verb: they could keep each other.

And for now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two. 

The Shape of Hope.

I.The First Week Back

The Gryffindor common room was loud enough to hide a small even the loudest of Fred and George’s fireworks, which Harry suspected was exactly why Ron and Hermione had chosen to wait here some noise to disguise the fact they’d been pacing.

He’d barely stepped through the portrait hole when Hermione surged forward, her book forgotten on a table, curls bouncing.

“Harry!” She stopped just short of crashing into him, her hands hovering as if trying to decide whether she was allowed to touch him. A second later she made the decision anyway and wrapped her arms around him. “Oh, thank goodness.”

Harry blinked, startled. Hermione wasn’t usually… clingy. But her hug felt steady, grounding in a way he hadn’t realized he needed. He wrapped her arms around her and let the weight of her settle against him.

When she finally let go, Ron moved in with considerably less subtlety, clapping Harry so hard on the back he felt like he’d been hit by a bludger. 

“You look alive,” Ron declared. “Which is honestly more than I expected, given—” He gestured vaguely that seemed to encompass all of Harry. “—everything.”

Harry laughed, but the sound felt thin around the edges. “Nice to see you too.”

They all stepped aside as a group of second years pushed past, chattering loudly. A paper crane flitted past, a first year was sobbing in the corner, awkwardly being comforted by Ginny.

With a dip of her chin, Hermione steered them towards the relative quiet of the window. Ron and Hermione both looked back at Harry with matching expressions: equal parts Relief and Worry. Expressions he’d become all too familiar with.

“So,” Ron said, leaning an elbow on the back of a chair, “how was it? You know… summer. At the castle. Without us?”

Hermione’s eyebrows knit together. “Headmaster Dumbledore said it would be more secure for you, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t lonely.”

Harry hesitated. He hadn’t planned on talking about this not yet. He hadn’t even figured out how to talk about it. The summer felt like something fragile pressed between the pages of a book: private, delicate, impossible to describe without disturbing it.

“I wasn’t really alone,” Harry said at last. 

Ron’s face split into confusion. Hermione simply looked startled.

“What?” Ron asked. “Who else was stuck there?”

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Malfoy.”

Hermione’s mouth dropped open. Ron made a choked sound that might have been a laugh or a short-circuited brain.

“Malfoy?” Ron repeated, frowning. “As in… sharp elbows, sharper tongue, heir-to-the-ferret-legacy Malfoy?”

Harry didn’t quite manage not to smile. “That one, yeah.”

A beat of stunned silence settled over them.

Hermione recovered first, leaning forward with a gentleness that didn’t soften the worry in her eyes. “Why was he there, Harry? Truly.”

Harry let out a slow breath. “Dumbledore thought it was safer. For both of us. We ended up on the same training schedule.”

Ron’s confusion deepened. “You trained. With Malfoy.”

“Sometimes,” Harry said carefully. “And… it wasn’t as awful as I expected.

Ron looked inexplicably betrayed. “Not that bad? Harry, you do remember who he is, right? Bloke insulted you since you were eleven. He’s practically allergic to being decent.”

Harry huffed a quiet laugh. “Yeah. I remember. But he wasn’t… like that this summer.”

Hermione leaned closer, eyes narrowed in the way she used when sorting puzzle pieces. “Meaning what, exactly?”

Harry hesitated, searching for a way to describe it that didn’t reveal too much. “Meaning we weren’t trying to hex each other every five minutes. He was… different. Quieter. And....” He sighed. “He didn’t treat me like I was a bomb about to go off. That was… new.”

Ron looked torn between horror and grudging interest.

“So you and Malfoy were… what?” he asked. “Cordial?”

Images flashed unbidden: Draco’s hesitant smile at the end of summer, the reluctant truce forged between training sessions, the strange magnetic pull that had begun long before Harry wanted to acknowledge it. 

Harry gave a small, reluctant smile. “Something like that.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. 

Hermione blinked again, then said very softly “I’m glad you weren’t alone.” She tilted her head. “You mentioned training schedules. Was it just the two of you?”

“No,” Harry said. “Snape was there. He gave us duelling practice. And reading material, and had us prepare potions ingredients and practice Occlumency. It was you know….” he shrugged “Boring.”

Hermione looked offended on principle. “Harry, that hardly sounds boring. Occlumency over the holiday? Or strategic magical theory? Or ”

“More like… meditating and listening to Snape monologue.” Harry shrugged, trying to look miserable. “Dumbledore said it would ‘build a disciplined mind.’”

Ron’s face drained of color. “Snape? All summer? Harry, that’s not training. That’s torture?”

Hermione didn’t look horrified. She looked intrigued. “You had private instruction from Professor Snape? Harry, that’s a once in ageneration opportunity! He...”

“ ....is a bat,” Ron finished flatly. “An unfair, sarcastic, dungeon-dwelling bat.”

Harry couldn’t help it; he laughed properly for the first time all evening.

Hermione elbowed Ron. “He’s also one of the most accomplished duellists alive. And his potions work”

“Hermione,” Ron said warningly, “if you start praising his potions while Harry’s standing right there still smelling like summer detention”

Harry raised his hands in surrender. “It wasn’t detention. Snape wasn’t… awful.”

Hermione looked pleased. Ron looked personally betrayed.

“You were stuck with Snape and Malfoy all summer,” Ron said slowly, “and you’re telling me you came out of it thinking they’re… what? Tolerable?”

Harry shrugged, uncomfortable. “They weren’t the worst part of the summer.”

Ron opened his mouth probably to ask what was the worst part,but Hermione shot him a look that clearly said not now.

Instead, she reached out, warm and steady, resting a hand over Harry’s.

“We’re just glad you’re back,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” Ron muttered, finally relenting. “Even if you did form Merlin, help us some kind of truce with Malfoy.”

Harry dipped his head to hide a smile, but the warmth in his chest curled deep. “Yeah. Of course. He’s still a prat.”

Ron nodded firmly. “Good. It would've been weird otherwise.”

Ron’s outrage was still gathering strength when Hermione spoke again, her voice softer, but far more cutting in its precision.

“Harry,” she said, “you sound… different when you talk about him.”

Harry froze for a moment too long. Hermione noticed. Of course she noticed.

“Not in a bad way,” she added quickly, though her eyes searched his face with the same quiet attention she used on ancient runes. “Just… different.”

Ron stared between them, baffled. “Different how?”

Hermione ignored him gently. “Did something happen this summer? Something you haven’t told us?”

Harry swallowed. “No…..”

“That’s not an answer,” Hermione murmured.

“It’s the only one I’ve got,” Harry said, trying for lightness and failing. “We were thrown together more than either of us wanted. Things just… shifted.”

Ron groaned. “Please tell me this is not one of those situations where you get stuck in a cave overnight and become best friends. Because Malfoy in a cave is my personal nightmare.”

Hermione shot him a look. “Ron.”

But then, more quietly, Ron added, “Look… if he was less of a git to you this summer, I guess that’s… good. Weird. But good.”

Hermione’s gaze softened, though a tight line of concern still lingered around her mouth. “Harry, whatever happened, you can tell us.”

Harry nodded, hoping they couldn’t see how much those words landed.

“I know,” he said. “And I will. When it makes sense.”

Hermione didn’t look satisfied, but she didn’t push. Ron clapped Harry on the back with an affectionate, slightly too-hard thump.

“Just don’t let him talk you into dropping Quidditch,” Ron said seriously. “Death Eaters, dementors, giant spiders fine. But if Malfoy ruins our chances for the Cup, we stage an intervention.”

Harry laughed, the tension easing just enough.

Hermione watched him a moment longer, thoughtful in a way that made Harry glad she hadn’t put the rest of her theories into words.

Ron, still recovering, cleared his throat loudly. “Right, well. If you ever need reminding he’s a git, I’m available. Full time. No charge.”

The castle’s corridors always felt narrower in early autumn, as though the cold pressed in and made tempers sharper. Students wrapped in scarves hurried between classes, breath misting faintly in the air.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione rounded the corner outside the Charms corridor mid-conversation about Umbridge’s latest decree when they nearly collided with a cluster of Slytherins.

Draco stood at the front of the Slytherin group, posture perfectly erect as if bracing against an invisible wind. Crabbe and Goyle hovered behind him like mismatched bookends, massive and uncertain in the way of boys who only knew how to follow one person. Parkinson lingered at Malfoy’s shoulder, her expression already twisted into a practiced sneer, as if she had prepared insults the whole walk from the dungeons.

Ron stopped so abruptly that Harry nearly collided with him.

“Oh, brilliant,” Ron muttered. “The welcoming committee.”

Harry didn’t miss Malfoy’s slight inhale quiet, controlled, the kind someone takes before slipping back into a role that no longer fits.

The world narrowed corridor noise fading, Ron’s anger dimming until it was just the two of them. Harry didn’t know what message passed between them, only that he felt it in his ribs: a quiet plea, a warning, something softer underneath.

“Well, if it isn’t the" Ron began, loudly enough to turn heads.

Malfoy cut in with a sigh so put-upon it bordered on theatrical, except the weariness in it was real.

“Spare me, Weasley,” he said, sounding tired in a way that made Parkinson’s head snap toward him. “I don’t have the energy for your tragic lack of creativity today.”

Ron’s ears flared instantly red. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hermione stepped between them with the speed of someone who’d spent four years preventing stupidity. “Ron please—”

But Ron was already too wound up, shoulders squared, posture tense. “If you’ve got something to say, Malfoy, say it!”

A muscle in Malfoy’s jaw tightened. He took one step forward not threatening, exactly, but precise, deliberate, reclaiming the space between them. His chin lifted, that aristocratic tilt Harry remembered all too well. His grey eyes were sharp, but not cruel; alert, searching for something.

“Fine,” Draco Malfoy, voice cool. “I think you’re—”

His gaze flicked.

Not at Ron.
Not at Hermione.
But at Harry.

It was quick,half a heartbeat, barely perceptible,but Harry felt it like a physical jolt. Something tightened under his ribs. Malfoy’s expression didn’t change, but the moment stretched thin, taut as spell-thread.

Then Malfoy cleared his throat, the mask snapping back into place.

“—as predictable as ever,” he finished smoothly, turning his attention back to Ron as if nothing had happened at all.

But Harry’s pulse hadn’t settled.
And Malfoy’s eyes were brighter than they had been a moment before.

A flicker,gone too fast, seen only by the one person who knew where to look.

“I think,” Draco said, voice clipped, “that I have better things to do.”

Ron blinked. “What?”

Even Parkinson looked startled. “Draco?”

Ron, caught mid-argument, flailed for footing. “You...you’re backing down?”

Draco scoffed, but there was no heat to it. “I’m walking away. Try to keep up.”

He moved to pass Harry. For a heartbeat, their shoulders brushed.

The rest of Slytherins swept past, Malfoy at the lead, posture stiff but not hostile, something in him rattled by what almost happened.

Harry exhaled slowly.

Ron spun around so fast his robes flared. “What the bloody hell was that?”

He tried for neutrality, smoothing his face into something blank. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just… tired.”

Hermione’s eyebrows climbed in a slow, deliberate arc, the kind she reserved for answers she did not believe for more than half a second. “Tired,” she repeated, her voice soft but threaded with skepticism.

Harry shrugged, fingers tightening involuntarily around the strap of his bag. His pulse thudded too loudly in his ears. “Stress. Umbridge. Ancient Runes essay” he said, forcing an easy tone he didn’t feel. “Who knows?”

He shifted the bundle of books in his arms, “I told you, we get along. Sorta.”

Ron seemed entirely satisfied with Harry’s explanation. He waved a hand as they walked, already losing interest. “Honestly, Malfoy probably just woke up in one of his moods,” he said. “He has more of those than most people have socks.” He shrugged, as if that settled the matter completely, and launched into a rant about Umbridge’s latest decree, blissfully unaware of the tension still humming beneath Harry’s skin.

II. Lessons in Control

“Mate! Finally!” Ron exclaimed, beaming at him as though Harry had simply wandered off for a snack instead of being interrogated for an hour by a new professor who talked like honey and hid barbs like razors. “Thought you’d gone and gotten yourself eaten by a Chimaera, or Merlin I don’t know, drafted into Umbridge’s pink army.”

Harry managed a laugh, though it came out thinner than he meant. “Nothing that exciting. She just had… questions.”

“That woman hates questions,” Ron muttered darkly. “And that voice. Like she’s trying to soothe a blast-ended skrewt.”

Before Harry could respond, Hermione was already moving. She crossed the room in a few quick steps and wrapped her arms around him. Her hug was warm, solid, familiar in a way that made something in Harry’s chest loosen. She smelled faintly of parchment and peppermint steam from the tea she favored lately.

“Harry,” she said quietly, pulling back enough to search his face. “Are you alright? She didn’t well she didn’t say anything out of line?”

Harry hesitated. The soft lighting from the fire flickered across Hermione’s anxious expression and Ron’s tense posture. The common room hummed with the usual evening chatter, but there was an edge beneath it now students glancing over their shoulders, books closing just a little too quickly when certain topics came up. Even the shadows seemed more watchful.

“She talked,” Harry said finally, shrugging. “That’s all.”

Ron snorted. “That’s bad enough. She cornered Dean earlier and lectured him for ten minutes about ‘civilized wand posture.’ Told Seamus he was holding his quill like a delinquent.” He paused, making a disgusted face. “What even is a delinquent wand grip?”

“Apparently,” Hermione said with the weary authority of someone who had already looked into it, “it’s whatever she decides it is that day.”

Ron groaned.

Harry tried to smile. “Well, she didn’t lecture me about wand postures.”

“No,” Ron said, narrowing his eyes, “because she prefers subtler torture techniques.” Hermione elbowed him, but she didn’t deny it.

They all stood there for a moment Harry between them, warmth on either side and something sharp, unseen, watching from far away. He could still feel Umbridge’s syrupy voice lodged somewhere at the base of his skull, her gaze weighing him with that unsettling mixture of politeness and suspicion. But here, in the soft golden light of the common room, surrounded by the familiar armchairs and the gentle crackle of the fire, it loosened its grip.

Ron slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders and steered him toward the hearth.

“Come sit,” Ron insisted. “We saved you a seat. You look like you could use it.”

“I’m fine,” Harry began but the seat was warm, and the room felt safe in a way it hadn’t all day.

Hermione sat on the ottoman beside him, earnest and worried. Ron propped his feet on the table with a dramatic sigh.

And for the first time since Dolores Umbridge took up position as Professor at Hogwarts, Harry felt the tension ease just a little.

III.What We Do Not Say.

The Room of Requirement shifted around them with the soft familiarity of a place that had long since learned their unspoken needs. Tonight, it offered warm lanterns, thick cushions in deep green and burgundy, and a small fire crackling gently in a hearth. The air felt hushed, as if holding its breath.

Harry dropped onto one of the cushions with a sigh that seemed too heavy for someone his age. Draco eased down beside him more controlled, more elegant but the exhaustion in his posture betrayed him. His posture was tense, his eyes shadowed, his fingers worrying the hem of his sleeve.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Finally, Draco exhaled, the sound low and brittle. "She’s suffocating us. She doesn’t want us to learn anything."

Harry didn’t need to ask who.

Draco’s mouth tightened. "The inspections. The detentions. The way she prowls around as if she owns the castle." His gaze flicked toward the firelight, reflections dancing in his grey eyes. "Professor Snape loaths her. That should tell you everything."

Harry tried for a laugh, but it came out thin. "She hates me."

"She hates anything she can’t control," Draco said quietly. "And you… well, you’re impossible to contain."

Harry pulled his knees up slightly. "Feels like I can’t breathe half the time. Quidditch, homework, all that extra Occlumency lessons… and—"

He stopped.

Draco looked at him, something sharp and pained flickering across his face. "And me."

Harry shook his head immediately. "You’re not making it worse."

"Aren’t I?" Draco’s voice was barely a whisper, too defensive, too careful.

Harry moved a fraction closer before he realized he was doing it. "No. You… help. More than you know."

Draco’s breath caught. "How?" he asked, sounding truly unsure.

Harry tugged at a loose thread in the cushion. "When I’m with you, everything slows down a bit. The pressure. The noise. It stops pressing so hard."

Draco’s expression softened not dramatically, but like frost melting along the edges of a windowpane.

He shifted closer, their knees brushing. "You do that for me, too."

Harry’s throat tightened. "Yeah?"

Draco huffed a quiet, humorless breath. "I've been drowning all year expectations, threats, eyes on me everywhere I walk. But you—" He hesitated, then met Harry’s gaze fully. "You are the only thing that feels like air."

The words landed in Harry’s chest like a warm spark, blooming outward until his whole body felt too full.

He reached out hesitant, offering rather than asking and Draco didn’t move away. Their hands met between them, fingers brushing, then curling together with the kind of certainty that felt stolen and sacred.

Draco’s voice dropped to a whisper. "This is mad."

"I know," Harry whispered back.

Draco’s thumb brushed Harry’s knuckles. "It’s also… something I don’t want to lose."

Harry squeezed his hand. "You won’t."

They leaned into each other, shoulders pressing lightly, warmth shared in the dim light. The fire crackled softly, the Room surrounding them in a cocoon of safety as if sheltering something fragile and growing.

IV. A Castle That Watches.

Hermione had barely settled at a corner table in the library when she fixed Harry with the look that usually preceded a lecture.

“You promised,” she said, sliding a stack of books toward him.

Harry sighed, but not unhappily. The quiet felt good this year grounding, almost safe. Ron, already slumped in his chair, looked as though he were preparing himself for execution.

“Alright,” Harry murmured, taking one of the books. “I—I don’t mind it, actually. Studying.”

Ron’s head snapped up. “You what?”

The indignant volume earned at least seven disapproving shushes from nearby tables. A Ravenclaw third-year dropped her quill.

“I don’t mind it,” Harry repeated, flushing. “Not always.”

Hermione’s eyes softened, pleased in the way someone is when their friend grows in ways they’d hoped but never forced. “You’re improving because you’re trying,” she said gently. “And you should be proud of that.”

Ron muttered something that sounded like a traitor under his breath.

Harry was about to respond when a shadow fell across the table.

Draco stood there, arms full of books that were unmistakably too advanced for fifth-year coursework. His expression was composed, but there was a faint tension at the corners of his mouth a hesitation so quick Harry almost missed it.

“Granger,” he said with a polite stiffness that surprised all three of them. “Potter. Weasley.”

Ron choked on air.

Hermione blinked. “Malfoy…?”

“I need that table.” Draco’s chin tipped slightly toward the empty chairs beside them. “Everywhere else is full.”

That, at least, was true the library was overflowing with students pretending they weren’t watching the scene unfold. Heads dipped behind book spines every time Draco’s eyes flicked in their direction.

Harry cleared his throat. “You can sit. If you want.”

Draco’s gaze flicked to him brief, unreadable, but warmed by the smallest shift in his posture.

“…Fine,” he said, placing his books down far more delicately than he ever handled anything in Potions. “As long as Weasley doesn’t throw anything.”

Ron sputtered. “Why would I Hermione, why is he Harry, why are you?”

Harry stared determinedly at his textbook, face carefully neutral. “We’re studying, Ron.”

“Studying,” Ron echoed, as though Harry had personally betrayed both him and the sanctity of Quidditch.

Draco slid into the chair beside Harry with a careful, measured quiet, as though he were entering a room made of spell-etched glass. They  didn’t touch, but the space between them felt charged a subtle current of awareness neither dared acknowledge. It wasn’t dramatic or sudden; it was simply there now, woven into every breath they shared.

Hermione noticed immediately. Of course she did.

Her eyes flicked from Harry to Draco, then back again, taking in the way Draco angled his body just slightly toward Harry, and the way Harry’s pulse visibly jumped in his throat. But instead of interrogating, or even arching a knowing brow, she only turned a page with deliberate calm. A small, private smile tugged at her lips the kind she wore when she’d just solved a puzzle no one else had realized was on the table.

Ron, meanwhile, looked between them as if trying to determine whether he’d wandered into the wrong universe.

And around them, the library reacted in its usual, unstoppable way.

Whispers slipped between shelves, hushed but persistent like wind stirring dry grass before a storm.

“Potter and Malfoy… together?”
“Did they switch tables? By choice?”
“Is this a duel? A very silent, academic duel?”
“No, look they’re sharing ink. This is unprecedented.”

A Hufflepuff at the next table leaned so far sideways she nearly toppled off her chair. A group of Ravenclaws began writing frantic notes, not for homework but for the inevitable rumour scroll pinned in their dormitory.

None of it was loud. None of it was hostile.

It was simply the school holding its breath, collectively leaning in to witness the strange, impossible sight of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy sitting shoulder to shoulder not enemies, not competitors, but something shifting into place with the quiet inevitability of a turning tide.

And in the middle of it, Harry felt the barest brush of Draco’s knee against his own fleeting, light, almost accidental.

But Draco didn’t move away.

The Hogwarts rumour mill spun in real time little gasps, soft snickers, wide-eyed glances darting between bookshelves.

Harry felt the weight of those eyes, but instead of anxiety, something steadier settled in his chest. A quiet certainty he hadn’t expected.

Draco opened a book with a soft rustle of pages.

“Well?” he murmured, quiet enough so that only Harry heard,  keeping his gaze fixed on the text. “Are you going to study, or are we performing for the entire school?”

Harry hid a smile.“Studying,” he said. “Definitely studying.”

Draco’s quill paused the smallest, nearly invisible acknowledgement.

And for the first time in a very long time, the school didn’t feel like a place where Harry was being watched. It felt like a place where he was choosing to be.

The Great Hall was loud in the way it always was during dinner students talking over one another, plates floating down the tables, candles drifting lazily overhead. The familiar noise should have calmed Harry, but instead it made him acutely aware of every thought he didn’t want to have.

He sat between Ron and Hermione, doing his best impression of someone eating dinner like a normal person. He kept his head down, ladled stew onto his plate, nodded at something Ron said about Quidditch formations, laughed when Hermione chided Ron for talking with his mouth full.

Perfectly normal.

Except his eyes kept drifting left.

And left again.

And—

“Mate,” Ron said, nudging him, “that pasty isn’t going to sprout legs and run off. You can stop staring at it.”

“Right,” Harry muttered, blinking down at his untouched food. “Just thinking.”

“Are you?” Hermione asked, not looking up from her stew but sounding far too perceptive for Harry’s comfort.

From across the table, Fred and George exchanged a look so synchronized it was practically choreography. Without saying a word, they both leaned forward, bracing their elbows on the wood.

“So,” Fred began casually, “who is he staring at?”

“Not who,” George corrected. “Where. Slytherin table.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Upper left quadrant.”

Harry nearly dropped his fork. “I wasn’t—! I’m not staring at! ”

“Upper left quadrant,” Fred repeated, eyes sparkling with mischief. “Isn’t that where young Malfoy is holding court this fine evening?”

Harry’s face went hot. “He’s not holding court.”

Ron snorted. “Please. Malfoy wakes up in the morning and starts holding court before he’s even put on trousers.”

Hermione cleared her throat in a sharp, diplomatic way. “Everyone stop. Harry’s allowed to look around the Great Hall.”

“Of course he is,” George said. “But he’s been looking in the same direction for—” He checked an imaginary watch. “—ten minutes.”

“I haven’t,” Harry said, which was instantly disproved by his eyes flicking left again out of pure reflex.

Fred let out a low whistle. “There he goes! Honestly, Harry, you have the subtlety of a stampeding hippogriff.”

Harry forced himself to plant his elbows on the table and stare straight ahead like he was in a military drill. He absolutely, definitively, did not look left.

Which was how he knew without looking that Draco Malfoy was doing the same thing on his end of the hall. Harry could feel it like a pressure in the air, as if someone were tracing a line of attention along the back of his neck. A strange, quiet awareness hummed between them. It made the room feel slightly too warm.

Ron leaned in and whispered loudly. “If you have to check whether he’s plotting, just do it quickly. Like ripping off a bandage. Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not making it weird,” Harry muttered.

“You’re definitely making it weird,” Fred said gently.

Hermione sighed, though there was a small smile threatening at the corner of her mouth. “Honestly, all of you are impossible.”

“Thank you,” George said brightly. “We work hard.”

Harry finally gave in and allowed himself one glance just one across the hall. Malfoy was sitting very straight, cutting his roast chicken with unnecessarily precise movements, Parkinson talking at him without pause. Crabbe and Goyle flanked him like usual. His expression was composed, indifferent, utterly unreadable.

Except, just as Harry looked away Draco’s eyes shifted, almost imperceptibly, scanning the Gryffindor table.They snagged on Harry.

Harry dropped his fork loudly onto the floor.

“Oh for Merlin’s sake,” Ron groaned. “Tell me he didn’t just Harry, he didn’t did he?”

Fred leaned back, satisfied. “Well. Mystery solved.”

Hermione laid her napkin carefully beside her plate, expression tightening into a different kind of concern. Thoughtful. Patient. Watching Harry with the sort of care that made him feel exposed and seen all at once.

Harry cleared his throat, cheeks hot, pulse skipping. “It’s nothing.”

Fred and George shared a look that said it was very much something.

Ron shook his head like he wished he could erase the last five minutes from existence. Hermione reached out and gave Harry’s hand a small, warm squeeze under the table, just enough to ground him.

Harry waited until the corridor was empty before slipping the parchment from his pocket. The Marauder’s Map unfurled with a soft crackle, warm under his fingertips, the familiar ink blooming into corridors and names he now knew by heart. He wasn’t looking for trouble: he was checking the path to Snape’s classroom, making sure that Umbridge, currently roaming the west stairwell, wouldn't spot him.

He didn’t hear Draco approach until the air shifted.“What is that?”

Harry startled, nearly dropping the map. Draco stood a few steps away, posture taut, eyes flicking between the parchment and Harry’s face with alarm sharp enough to sting.

“It’s nothing,” Harry said too fast, folding the map reflexively behind his back.

Wrong answer.

Draco’s expression hardened. “You don’t hide ‘nothing.’” His voice didn’t rise, but something inside it tightened, an old instinct, polished by years of needing to read danger before it struck.

“It’s a map, that’s all,” Harry tried again. “Just, Hogwarts. Helps me keep track of where people are.”

Draco’s breath caught. “People like who?”

Harry blinked. “What—?”

“You’re tracking me.” Not an accusation a quiet, wounded certainty.

Harry froze. “No, Draco, I’m not—”

“Don’t lie,” Draco whispered, and the words weren’t angry. They were small. “I knew Dumbledore had reasons for all of this. Pairing us. Pushing proximity. I knew it was too much of a coincidence.”

 “That’s not, Draco, I swear to you, I’m not spying on you.”

Draco’s gaze flicked away, jaw working. “Then who?”

Harry swallowed hard. “Umbridge. Anyone. It’s just… safer.”

“Safer,” Draco said, his voice tightening around the word. He shifted back a fraction, not enough to flee, but enough to brace himself. “Naturally. The Gryffindor version of safe. The sort that never quite applies to people like me.”

“What?” Harry said, baffled.

Draco huffed in frustration. “Never mind.”

He turned as if to leave, but hesitated. Only a heartbeat, but Harry felt it like a tug. “I don’t want to be another threat you track,” Draco said quietly.

He didn’t look at Harry as he spoke. His gaze stayed fixed somewhere down the dim hallway, shoulders held in a rigid line that wasn’t anger so much as self-protection. The torchlight shifted across his profile, highlighting the tension around his mouth , the kind that forms only after months of bracing for the worst.

“I don’t want—” He stopped. The breath he drew in was shallow, as though he’d run out of words before he’d even fully let them form. When he tried again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “I don’t want that to be all I am.”

The simplicity of the sentence made it cut deeper. There was no dramatics, no sharpness, just a quiet ache that felt older than either of them should have had to carry.

Harry felt something tighten under his ribcage. Draco’s posture so carefully composed, so determinedly still reminded him of someone standing at the edge of a truth they had rehearsed but never dared to speak aloud.

“Draco,” Harry said, stepping close enough that his voice didn’t have to cross a distance.

Draco’s jaw tensed. He still didn’t turn. It was as if he’d already decided what Harry would say that nothing could shift the shape of the history between them.

“You’re not,” Harry said, his voice steady but gentle. “You’re not … that. Not at all.”

Draco’s breath faltered, almost imperceptibly.

Harry continued, choosing his words with care. “You are important to me. And you’re not limited to the roles people have pushed onto you.”

Only then did Draco turn, slowly, as though it took effort to let himself believe there might be more to hear. His eyes were guarded, but not entirely closed off a quiet uncertainty beneath the surface, the kind that comes from years of being told who you are before you’ve had a chance to decide for yourself.

Harry held his gaze, offering neither pity nor dismissal, only honesty.

“You’re allowed to be more than what you were raised to be,” he said. “More than what anyone expects.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The hallway felt strangely still, not tense, not uncertain, but suspended, as if something between them had shifted in a way both subtle and significant.

When Draco finally exhaled, it sounded less like surrender and more like relief, even if only by a fraction.

Harry stepped forward, unfolding the map carefully until Draco could see it really see the dots, the names, the whole castle pulsing gently with life.

Draco stared. “You look for me,” he murmured, barely audible. “But not like that.”

Harry’s voice was steady. “I look to avoid you getting caught in crossfire. Or cornered by the wrong people. Or dragged into something by accident.”
A pause.  “And maybe just… because I like knowing you’re not alone. And…erm, also when you are alone in the Astronomy tower” he said, blushing.

Draco’s breath stilled entirely.

The tension between them shifted not eased, but deepened into something fragile and bright.

“I misread it,” Draco said eventually, voice hoarse.

Harry hesitated before speaking, tracing the worn edge of the map with his thumb. Draco stood close beside him, close enough that Harry could feel the warmth radiating from him, close enough that he didn’t need to look to know Draco was watching his face instead of the parchment.

“It’s getting harder,” Harry said quietly.

Draco stilled. “Harder?” he repeated, searching Harry’s expression.

“Not—” Harry shook his head, trying again. “Not being around you. That isn’t the problem. It’s… everything around it.”

Draco’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in irritation, but in that careful, guarded way he had when something mattered more than he wanted to admit. “Go on.”

Harry let out a slow breath. “The way people stare. The library was… ridiculous. One table, and suddenly half the school’s cataloguing our posture like it’s a strategy textbook. And that’s when we’re only studying.”

Draco huffed a wry laugh.

Harry continued, softer now. “I’m not… ashamed of this. Of us. I don’t want to hide you, or pretend we’re back to pretending.” His voice dipped, steadier. “But I’m not the one they’ll go after first.”

That landed. Harry saw the flicker in Draco’s expression not quite fear, but recognition. A lifetime of knowing exactly how quickly public opinion could turn on a Malfoy, and how little mercy they’d extend.

“I saw Umbridge watching us today,” Harry added. “She notices everything she can use. And if she decides you’re a liability…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

The silence that followed was heavier than the last not awkward, not painful, simply true.

Draco looked down at their fingers resting inches apart on the map, his voice quieter when he spoke again. “You think she’d punish me to get to you.”

Harry’s throat tightened. “I think she’d enjoy it.”

Draco’s breath left him in a carefully controlled exhale. He didn’t deny it. Of course he didn’t.

Harry forced himself to meet his gaze fully, honestly. “I don’t want hiding to be the answer. And I don’t want to pretend none of this is real just because other people might twist it.” He swallowed. “But I can’t risk you. Not like that.”

Draco’s fingers brushed his a fleeting touch, deliberate, steadying. “You think I haven’t considered all of that? I have.” His voice was quiet but firm. “But I also know what it costs to live your life at the mercy of other people’s judgments.”

He leaned in just slightly; not enough for scandal, but enough for truth.

“And I’m tired of letting them decide who I’m allowed to stand beside.”

Harry’s breath hitched, warmth spreading through himt, tempered by a thread of sorrow. “Draco…”

“I know,” Draco murmured. “We need to be careful.” 

Harry exhaled, tension easing in his chest. It wasn’t a solution. It wasn’t a plan. It was something smaller, quieter agreement. 

V.Footsteps Outside the Door

Harry didn’t mean to check the Map that night.

The dormitory was quiet, the fire in the grate reduced to soft embers, Ron’s breathing already deep and even behind the curtains of his four-poster. Harry told himself he only opened the Marauder’s Map out of habit the same habit that had kept him alive more than once.

He tapped the parchment lightly with his wand.

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

Ink unfurled in delicate, crawling lines.Parts of the castle lay quiet, others restless with late-night movement, Filch prowling, a few students lingering near the Astronomy Tower, Snape patrolling like a shadow with purpose.

Harry’s gaze drifted downward almost without intention.

And then it stopped.

Draco Malfoy
standing motionless in the corridor outside the Gryffindor dormitory staircase.

Not passing by.Not pacing. Just standing. Seconds stretched into a full minute.

Draco didn’t move.

Harry sat up slowly, the quilt sliding down to pool around his knees. He felt something low in his stomach not fear, not confusion, but a quiet, startling ache.

After several more breaths, Draco’s footsteps finally shifted.One slow pace. Another. Then he turned sharply and vanished from the little inked corridor.

Harry stared at the empty spot for a long time after.

Draco was alone the next afternoon, tucked at the edge of an alcove by the Arithmancy corridor. Harry found him without consciously deciding to look.

He stopped a few steps away. “You were near the Gryffindor tower last night.”

Draco didn’t startle. He merely closed his book, careful and composed, but not indifferent. A faint crease appeared between his eyebrows.

“I didn’t expect you to check the Map,” Draco said quietly.

“I always check the Map,” Harry replied. “Especially at night.”

A short silence.

Draco looked down at his shoes.“I suppose that was foolish of me.”

Harry shook his head. “I’m not angry. I just… don’t know why you came.”

Draco let out a slow exhalethe kind someone makes when they’ve debated with themselves far too long already. When he spoke, his voice was steady, but there was no mask in it.

“I wanted to know if you were alright.”

Harry’s breath faltered, subtle but noticeable.

Draco continued, eyes still lowered. “After… everything lately. I heard about your detention. With Umbridge. I thought—” He hesitated, then finished quietly, “I thought I should check.”

Harry’s chest tightened, a knot of warmth and something heavier threading together. “Why didn’t you… send a message?” he asked quietly. “Or an owl?”

Draco let out a faint, humorless breath ,not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “Because anything I send to you gets noticed,” he said. “And anything noticed becomes a rumor. Or ammunition.”

He finally looked up, eyes steady and unbearably candid.“Walking to your door was already one risk too many. Announcing it would have been worse.”

Harry felt the truth of that settle uneasily between them. Gryffindor’s door opening to reveal Draco Malfoy would’ve been a spectacle the whole house no, the whole school would talk about for months. 

“So you just… stood there?” Harry asked, softer. “Why?”

Draco hesitated for only a moment. Because I didn’t know how to reach you,” he said, “without making things harder for us both.”

There was no bitterness in his voice, only a quiet honesty that made Harry’s breath catch.

Harry stepped closer not enough to breach caution, but enough to close the emotional distance between them.

“You could have sent something,” he murmured. “Something small. Something no one would question.”

Draco shook his head slowly. “I didn’t want to risk it being intercepted. Or read. Or twisted.” His gaze flicked to Harry’s, and there was something raw in it now. “I didn’t want to drag you into more scrutiny.”

Harry exhaled, tension loosening. “Draco… you wouldn’t be dragging me into anything. I make my own choices.”

Draco’s jaw tightened, then eased the smallest shift, but a meaningful one.
“I know,” he huffed, “but there are some choices you shouldn’t have to make because of me.”

This time, it was Harry who looked away first not out of discomfort, but out of the quiet weight of understanding.

When he met Draco’s eyes again, his voice was steady.

“Next time,” Harry said, “just find a way to let me know. Even if it’s subtle.”

Something like relief faint, but real crossed Draco’s face.

“I’ll try,” he said.

And it was enough. But because they were still choosing each other, even in the smallest, quietest hours of the night.

V. Lessons in Control.

Potions class smelled of damp stone and simmering roots the kind of heaviness that clung to clothes and skin long after anyone left the dungeons. Cauldrons hissed softly across the room, silver knives tapping in uneven rhythms as students diced ingredients with varying degrees of competence.

Harry sat with Ron as usual, his notes open, quill poised. He was doing a passable job of appearing focused, though the low hum of awareness pulsed under his ribs again the sense of someone else thinking about him.

Malfoy’s table was diagonally ahead of theirs. He worked with Parkinson, though “worked” was generous: Parkinson was mostly complaining about what the fumes were doing to her hair, and Malfoy’s thin smile was sharp enough to cut diamonds.

Snape swept through the room, robes whispering against stone. His voice echoed low and resonant. “Your aim this evening is accuracy,” he said. “A concept that apparently eludes most of you.”

Snape continued prowling between the benches, the air around him cooling by several degrees with each step. Students straightened reflexively as he passed, as if he were some sort of atmospheric pressure system capable of generating storms on command.

At the Gryffindor side of the room, Neville was locked in a losing battle with his sopophorous bean. It kept sliding out of his grip, bouncing dangerously close to the edge of the table.

“Steady, Neville,” Hermione whispered, trying to help without appearing to help.

“I—I’m fine,” Neville said, though his hands were trembling hard enough that Harry could hear the clink of his knife against the cutting board.

Seconds later, the bean shot from Neville’s fingers like a tiny, rebellious missile, arcing gracefully through the air before landing directly in Dean’s simmering cauldron.

The reaction was immediate an alarming hiss, a violent puff of purple smoke, and a shower of sparks that singed the sleeve of Dean’s robe.

Snape materialized behind him with the uncanny speed of a man who existed in a perpetual state of readiness for disaster.

“Longbottom,” Snape drawled, his voice icy and impeccably calm, “I see we are continuing your proud family tradition of turning simple tasks into catastrophes.”

Neville blanched. “I-I’m sorryProfessor, I didn’t—”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Snape said, cutting him off. “That would require forethought.” He surveyed the bubbling, slightly smoking cauldron with a disdain so refined it might have been artwork.

“Ten points from Gryffindor,” he announced, “for assaulting Dean’s brew with… whatever that attempt was.”

Ron groaned. Hermione looked stricken. Neville looked like he might sink into the flagstones.

Snape’s gaze slid toward Draco’s table, cool, calculating, before drifting back to Harry as if measuring something only he could perceive.

“And another five,” Snape added, still watching Harry, “for Potter being unable to keep his classmates from turning my classroom into a demonstration of why some wizards should never be left unsupervised.”

Harry blinked. “What did I—?”

“Existing,” Snape said crisply, already turning away. “It is terribly distracting.”

Ron choked on a suppressed laugh; Hermione elbowed him so sharply he nearly spilled his ink.

At Malfoy’s table, Parkinson fussed over her notes and her hair, but Malfoy sat very still, stirring the clockwise loop of his potion with a hand that was steadier than it had been minutes before.

Ron muttered something sour under his breath. Hermione jabbed him with her quill.

Harry reached for his jar of sliced ginger root and froze. The jar was empty. He frowned. He was sure he’d prepared it before class.

As if feeling the attention on him, Malfoy glanced over his shoulder.

Their eyes met for a brief, charged second. Malfoy hesitated then turned back to his cauldron, murmured something to Parkinson and reached for his own jar of ginger root. Instead of pouring it into his cauldron, he set it down… and nudged it subtly to the far edge of his table.

Toward Harry.

Harry blinked.

Was he meant to…?

Malfoy didn’t look again. He simply adjusted his posture, pale neck stiff beneath the neat line of his collar, pretending to be entirely absorbed in the slow figure-eight motion of stirring.

Harry rose quietly, ignoring Ron’s low “what are you doing?” and crossed the small space between their tables. He picked up the jar. For a moment, Malfoy stared intently into his cauldron. Parkinson smiled, something venomous at the tip of her tongue, but a jab on her foot made her clamp her mouth shut. For a moment she looked like she’d bitten into something vile, but was too polite to spit it out.

Harry cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he murmured.

Malfoy’s eyes flicked sideways, not fully meeting Harry’s, but close enough Harry saw the tension in the set of his mouth, the delicate swallow at his throat.

“You’re missing half your ingredients,” Malfoy murmured back, tone clipped but low enough that only Harry could hear. “You wouldn’t get through step three without it.”

Harry held the jar a little closer. “Still… you didn’t have to.”

Malfoy’s breath left him in something too controlled to be a sigh. “Potter, if your cauldron explodes, it will affect me as well. Consider it… self-preservation.”

Harry didn’t smile, but something in him loosened.

“Right,” he said softly. “Self-preservation.”

Malfoy’s hand tightened around the handle of his stirring rod, knuckles pale. “Get back to your table,” he murmured, voice quieter, the edge thinning into something else. “Professor Snape is watching.”

Harry glanced up.

Snape was indeed watching expression unreadable, eyes sharp, as though he were tracking the direction of a spell they didn’t know they had cast.

Harry nodded once, retreated, and returned to his seat.

Ron hissed under his breath the moment Harry sat down. “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” Harry said. “He just… had extra.”

Ron stared at him like this was the least believable sentence ever uttered. Hermione didn’t look at Harry at all she watched Malfoy instead, as if she were trying to reconcile two conflicting versions of reality.

Harry kept his gaze on his cauldron, pretending not to feel the weight of Malfoy’s attention drifting toward him again, soft and fleeting as a fingertip brushing skin.

Snape stopped beside Draco’s table, eyes narrowing, voice low enough that Harry barely caught it.

“Mr. Malfoy,” Snape said, “if you are going to attempt subtlety, do attempt it properly.”

Draco stiffened. “Sir?”

Snape’s lip twitched almost, but not quite amusement. “Do not let your partner manipulate your flame. She will scorch the entire batch.”

Parkinson looked affronted. Draco exhaled with visible relief.

And Snape, from across the room, made a noise under his breath that might have been a sigh, long-suffering, resigned, and entirely aware he had lost control of a situation he had never wanted to manage in the first place. Merlin save him from teenager’s hormones. 

VI.Arthimacy Equations.

Harry had been trying truly trying to act as though everything was Business as Usual. But Hermione’s eyes had the precision of a scalpel, and Ron’s puzzled frown had become a near-permanent fixture, like it had taken up residence on his face.

It finally broke one evening in the Gryffindor common room.

Harry sat curled in the corner armchair, Shields of Will open on his lap, though he hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes. The Marauder’s Map lay half-hidden beneath the book, angled just enough that he could track a small ink dot drifting along the castle corridors.

Hermione’s book snapped shut with decisive force.

“Harry.”

He jumped. “What?”

“You’re at it again,” she said, folding her arms. “Staring at that Map like you’re about to derive some complex Arithmancy theorem.”

Ron blinked. “Wait—you don’t even take Arithmancy.”

Hermione didn’t look away from Harry. “Exactly.”

Ron squinted at him. “Yeah, mate. And it’s always, weirdly, after Malfoy’s been around. Not that I’m saying you’re looking at him, but,well, you kind of are.”

Harry’s stomach lurch-rolled. “I—what? No. I’m not—It’s just… Umbridge.” He winced at how quickly the excuse flew out. “She’s everywhere lately. Makes me jumpy.” He quickly folded the map away.

Hermione’s eyes narrowed. “Professor Umbridge is dreadful, yes, but you weren’t this distracted in the first year’s troll incident.” She leaned forward. “If something’s bothering you, Harry, you can tell us.”

Harry tightened his grip on the book. “It’s just stress. Training.Exams. And Umbridge is breathing down our necks. That’s all.”

Ron watched him with that unmistakable, quietly worried expression Harry hated. Not distrust, just Understanding. “We’re here, you know,” Ron muttered. “If it’s more than that.”

Harry glanced down at the pages. “I know.”

He meant it. But this whatever was growing between him and Draco felt too fragile to expose yet. Too new. Too easily misunderstood.

Hermione exchanged another look with Ron. She didn’t press further, but the suspicion in her eyes lingered, thoughtful and sharp.

VII. What Light Reveals.

The Room of Requirement greeted them with soft lantern light and an expanse of open floor. It had been offering this same familiar setup since the summer when Dumbledore first hinted that strengthening their Patronuses might steady their minds as much as their magic.

Harry stepped inside first, instinctively rolling his shoulders as if settling into a well-worn memory. Draco followed, wand in hand, tension coiled beneath his composed facade.

"It’s the same tonight," Harry said quietly. "The room knows what we’re here for."

They took their usual places facing one another, a few feet apart. A routine born from long practice. Harry always started, not out of ego, but because Draco steadied himself better after seeing Harry cast.

"Ready?" Harry asked.

Draco nodded but didn't speak.

Harry lifted his wand. The memory there were many nowrose easily. "Expecto Patronum."

The silver stag erupted into the room with confident grace, cantering lightly before slowing to a watchful halt beside Draco. Its glow softened the sharp planes of his face.

Draco looked away, jaw tight. "Show-off."

Harry didn’t rise to the tease. "Your turn."

Draco inhaled slowly. He had made progressmassive progress from the barely visible wisp he'd managed in July. But still, every attempt cost him something. Harry could see it.

"Think of something good," Harry murmured. "Not perfect. Just… good."

Draco closed his eyes as if bracing against a gust of wind only he could feel.

“Expecto Patronum.”

His breath fogged faintly in the dim corridor. A ghost-silver shimmer rose from the tip of his wand, thin, fragile as cobweb and then flickered out before it even formed a shape. The light dissolved like mist scattering in sunlight.

Draco’s jaw clenched. “Useless,” he muttered, voice low and hoarse with frustration. “Absolutely useless. I don’t—”

“Draco.” Harry stepped forward before he realized he’d moved. The corridor was cool, the stone walls still holding the breath of night, but Draco radiated a tense, trembling heat, anger, fear, exhaustion all braided together. Harry reached out instinctively, not touching, but close enough that Draco could feel his presence. “You’re almost there. You’ve been almost there for weeks.”

Draco opened his eyes. They were storm-grey, sharp as flint and equally close to shattering. A muscle in his cheek jumped.

“Then why won’t it work?” he asked quietly. “I’m doing everything you said. Everything Professor Snape explained. Everything in the bloody book.” He swallowed, throat working. “I’m trying.”

Harry knew that. He’d seen the late hours, the trembling hands, the fear Draco carried like a second spine too rigid, too brittle. He’d seen the way Draco lingered after the summer lessons ended, asking careful questions with a softness that didn’t match the sharp edges he showed everyone else.

Harry could have said a dozen reassuring things. Could have pointed out how far Draco had come, how the shimmer was stronger than last month, how even attempting a Patronus under this much pressure was something remarkable.

Instead, he told the truth that had settled slowly, quietly, undeniably into place over the last month.

“Because you’re trying not to feel the thing that would make it strongest.”

Draco inhaled sharply not offended, not angry. Startled. “What thing?” 

Harry didn’t mean to step closer, but he did. The space between them shrank to almost nothing just shared breath and the echo of something unspoken. Harry swallowed. "Hope."

The word landed like a spell of its own.

Draco looked at him for a long moment long enough that the stag shifted beside them as if uncomfortable witnessing something so intimate.

Draco closed his eyes again, gathering himself with the kind of brittle composure Harry had learned to recognize. Every movement: the lift of his wand, the set of his mouth was practiced restraint.

“Expecto Patronum.”

A shimmer rose, fragile and translucent, the beginnings of a shape struggling to form. For a moment, the corridor brightened. Then the light thinned and collapsed, dissolving into the cold air.

Draco let out a quiet, frustrated breath. “I don’t understand why it keeps slipping away,” he murmured. “It shouldn’t be this difficult.”

Harry stepped closer, instinctively softening his voice. “You’re not failing. You were stronger this time. It held.”

Draco opened his eyes. Their usual sharpness was muted, replaced by exhaustion and a confusion he didn’t try to hide. “Then why does it vanish the moment it begins to take shape?”

Harry hesitated, searching for words that didn’t feel intrusive. He’d seen this determination in Draco for weeks now the quiet persistence, the late hours, the way he tried to force his magic into neat, controlled lines. It was everything he’d been taught to be. It was also the thing holding him back.

“You’re trying to stay detached,” Harry said finally. “You’re reaching for a memory without letting yourself feel the part that gives it strength.”

Draco’s gaze dropped, as if he were afraid of being seen too clearly. The corridor’s lamplight brushed across his face, catching on the tension in his jaw.

Harry reached out a careful gesture and rested a hand on Draco’s shoulder. He felt the subtle tremor beneath his fingers, the faint looseness that came when Draco allowed even a fraction of his guard to lower.

“Let’s try again,” Harry said. “With me here.”

Draco drew in a slow breath and nodded. “Don’t step away.”

“I won’t.”

He lifted his wand. The air shifted between them, quieter, almost expectant.

“Expecto Patronum.”

This time, the glow was steadier, soft silver spilling into the corridor, illuminating the stone walls, catching briefly on Draco’s hair and the pale curve of his cheek. Harry felt Draco lean minutely into his touch, not enough to draw attention, but enough to show trust.

The light grew, then wavered. Harry felt the moment Draco pulled inward, instinctively tightening around whatever emotion he was holding back.

The spell faltered.

The glow receded.

Draco lowered his wand with a quiet exhale, his shoulders heaving once before he caught himself. “I felt it,” he said, voice tight. “For a moment, I thought it might hold.”

“It will,” Harry answered. 

Draco nodded, though his expression was unsettled rather than encouraged. He looked down at his wand, then at Harry’s hand still resting on his shoulder.

“What if the thing I’m avoiding isn’t something I can afford to feel?” Draco asked quietly.

Harry didn’t release him. “That’s not for me to decide.”

Draco’s eyes lifted. There was a vulnerability there that had been growing between them for weeks, unspoken but persistent, surfacing now with nowhere to hide.

“I think I know what it is,” he said. His voice was steady, but his breathing wasn’t. “I just… don’t know what happens if I let myself say it out loud.”

Harry didn’t move away. “You don’t have to say it now.”

Draco’s fingers tightened around his wand, then loosened again. The silence between them felt charged, uncomfortable only because it was honest.

Then Draco drew a slow breath, stepped one inch closer, and tried again.

"Expecto Patronum!"

This time, silver flared.

A shape formed a small, lithe, bright. A white skinny, elegant, looking dog, sleek and sharp, standing on delicate paws. Its tail furled elegantly behind it.

Draco stared, speechless. Then he scoffed.

Harry felt something inside him break open, and warm, fierce, overwhelming.

"Draco," he whispered, the name slipping out like gravity. 

The silver Afghan dog Patronus glowed softly between them, its fur a brilliant wash of pale silver, the light settling over Draco’s face like moonlight breaking through stormclouds. He stared at it as if afraid to blink and lose it, his breath coming shallow and uneven.

“I…” His voice faltered, then steadied, quiet as the light itself. “I did it.”

Harry felt the words land somewhere deep in his heart, tugging at a place that had been tight and restless all summer. “You did,” he said, unable to keep the warmth from his voice. “You really did.”

He should have stepped back. He should have given Draco space to revel in the moment.

 Instead, instinct moved him forward just an inch, just enough for the heat between them to gather and shift.

And then there was no distance left at all.

He kissed him.

It wasn’t a practiced gesture, not something Harry had weighed or rehearsed. It was soft, tentative, a question more than an answer. The brush of his lips against Draco’s was almost nothing warm breath, the faintest pressure, ut it felt like stepping through a door he’d been standing in front of for far too long.

Draco went utterly still.

Harry felt the sharp jolt of fear I've misread this, I’ve ruined everything, the familiar clench of self-doubt rising fast but before he could pull away, Draco’s hand lifted. His fingers found the front of Harry’s cloak, hesitated for the briefest second, then curled into the fabric with a trembling resolve.

He leaned in.

Not with certainty, but with need quiet, aching need that had been simmering unspoken between them for weeks. The kiss deepened only slightly; neither of them rushed it. It was the stillness that made it powerful in the moment where two separate breaths became one shared space.

The Patronus flickered, caught in the current of their closeness, then steadied, its glow strengthening. Silver washed over them both, softening every edge.

Harry drew back slowly, just enough to see Draco’s face. Draco’s eyes were half-closed, dazed and luminous in the shifting light, as if the world had tilted under his feet and he was still finding his balance.

“Sorry,” Harry whispered, voice low, rough. “I shouldn’t have—”

Draco opened his eyes fully. Whatever fear had been there moments ago was burned away, leaving something steadier, something unmistakable.

“Harry,” he murmured, barely above a breath, “don’t apologize.”

Harry swallowed hard.

Draco’s hand was still gripping his cloak, not with force but with a kind of fragile determination, like he was afraid the moment might vanish if he let go too soon.

“Do it again,” Draco said quietly, no demand, no bravado. Vulnerable, honest, and something Harry had never heard from him before.

Harry leaned in.

This time the kiss unfolded more slowly, more deliberately. Soft, warm, steady. A promise taking shape in the space between them. Draco’s hand slipped from his cloak to his sternum, fingers splayed as if relearning the shape of someone he’d only seen at a distance before now.

The Patronus shimmered around them, its long, elegant tail, lifting in a slow, luminous arc. The Room of Requirement glowed with silver light.

When they finally drew apart, they didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The corridor felt suspended quiet, suspended, holding its breath around this moment they had created together.

Harry exhaled. Draco did too, shakily, as if releasing something he’d been holding for years.

The Patronus flickered once more, then dissolved gently into the air, leaving only the warmth between them quiet and undeniable.

For a long moment after the Patronus disappeared, neither of them moved. The room  felt impossibly small, held together by a silence that wasn’t awkward or uncertain, but thick with everything they’d admitted without a single spoken word. Draco’s hand hovered near Harry’s sleeve as though it hadn’t quite decided to let go; his eyes were lowered, not in embarrassment but in something closer to reverence, as if he were memorizing the air between them.

When he finally stepped back, it was slow, reluctant, controlled in the way Draco always tried to be. “I should go,” he said softly, though his voice held the uneven thread of someone who knew he was leaving something behind, even temporarily. Harry nodded, equally unsure how to break the spell the moment had woven around them. They parted with no plan, no assurance only the echo of that kiss lingering between them like the afterglow of a spell that had rooted itself deep.

Harry didn’t feel his feet until he’d climbed two staircases; everything in him felt a half-beat ahead of his body, bright and unsteady, as if his heart couldn’t quite contain what had happened. Every torch seemed to burn sharper, every shadow seemed softer, and the castle’s night-silence hummed around him with a kind of permission he’d never felt before. His mouth still tingled faintly. His fingers wouldn’t quite be still.

By the time he reached the Fat Lady’s portrait, his heart was still racing,exhilaration, disbelief, fear, all tangled together. He pressed a hand to his chest, trying to steady himself, but the truth rose anyway: he had kissed Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy had kissed him back. And somewhere in the darkened corridors below, the memory of it was still warm.

When he finally whispered the password, he almost laughed at the tremble in his own voice.

Nothing in the common room had changed.
Everything in him had.

Sleep didn’t come.

Harry lay awake in the dim light of the borrowed dormitory, the moon casting long blue shadows across the ceiling. His fingers grazed his lips. They tingled still in the faint echo of Draco’s mouth.

It had happened hours ago.

But his body hadn’t caught up. His mind definitely hadn’t. He sat up abruptly, running both hands through his hair. “Bloody hell,” he whispered to no one. Harry pressed his palms to his eyes, willing his heart to steady.

He had kissed Draco Malfoy. And Draco had kissed him back.

Warmly. Willingly. Fully.

Harry’s stomach flipped half exhilaration, half dread. “What does this mean?” he whispered. “What does this mean for me?”

Because it wasn’t like the kiss was nothing. It wasn’t a mistake.It wasn’t curiosity. It was… want.

And Harry didn’t know what to do with that.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood, pacing the length of the room. His thoughts spiraled faster than his footsteps.

Does this mean I’m gay? The thought hit hard. But I still like girls. Well some of them. Cho is nice. Wood was awfully fit. He tried to think about Hermione. About kissing her. He felt queasy. Something else? The labels tangled and slipped between his fingers, none of them fitting neatly.

All he knew really knew was that he couldn’t think about anyone else the way he thought about Draco. Not Cho. Not Ginny. No one.

No one had ever made him feel like.

He really wished he had somebody to confide in.

Ron, with his bluntness, his jokes, his tendency to panic first and understand later. Harry loved him like a brother, but Ron wasn’t subtle or gentle about these things.

Hermione might understand. Or she might overanalyze it until Harry wanted to crawl into the lake and stay there.

He fell back into his bed with a groan.

Sleep did not come.

VIII. Fault Lines.

Harry slept poorly and woke early, the edges of last night replaying in fragmented flashes: Draco’s soft breath, the warmth of his hand, the Patronus glowing around them. He dressed before anyone else stirred and slipped from the dormitory, hoping the cool morning air would ground him.

But the castle was always trickier than that.

He turned a corner on the third floor and nearly collided with Malfoy.

Malfoy froze mid-step, hair slightly mussed, robe unbuttoned at the top, looking nothing like the polished shield he wore around other people. His eyes widened just a fraction, but Harry saw it.

“Morning,” Harry said, trying to sound steady.

Malfoy opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “Harry.”

It was the first time Draco had said his name like that without hesitation, without edge, almost like a confession in itself.

Harry felt warmth crawl up his spine. “About last night—”

Malfoy’s gaze flickered to the floor and then back up, as though he were trying to calculate a posture that would give nothing away and failing spectacularly. “I haven’t… stopped thinking about it,” he admitted quietly.

Harry’s breath caught.

“I don’t know what this is yet,” Malfoy continued, voice low, careful, “but I don’t—regret it.”

The corridor felt too narrow for all the things Harry wanted to say. He nodded instead. “Me neither.”

Something eased in Malfoy’s stance, like tension unwinding itself by degrees. They stood in comfortable silence for a moment longer,quiet, shy, uncertain,but the space between them was undeniably altered.

Then the breakfast bell chimed.

Draco exhaled slowly. “We should go.”

Harry didn’t miss the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of Malfoy’s mouth.

The dungeon corridor was as dim as usual, lit by a handful of torches that guttered in the draft that swept up from the lower vaults. The air smelled faintly of damp stone and something metallic. Students milled around the doorway in the slow, resigned way of people preparing for a double lesson of misery.

Malfoy walked beside Harry, just close enough that the occasional brush of sleeves felt deliberate, even if neither acknowledged it. His expression was composed, almost serene, far too composed for someone who had kissed Harry only hours before. Harry envied him that ease. He’d barely slept a handful of hours and still felt the echo of the moment lingering in his ribs like a pulse.

As they stepped inside the classroom, Snape turned from the blackboard, wand in hand. His eyes swept over the entering students, quick, sharp, practiced. They landed on Harry first, then Draco.

They stayed there.

“Potter,” Snape said, voice slow and edged like a blade being drawn, “miraculously early. Has the sun risen in the west?”

Harry felt heat rise to his face. “Just....woke up early,” he muttered.

Malfoy didn’t look at him, but Harry saw the flicker of a smirk there and gone.

Snape exhaled in a long, suffering sigh. “Of course. A Gryffindor ‘just waking up early.’ Highly suspicious.”

He made a note on his attendance scroll with a stroke so emphatic it nearly tore through the parchment.

Students took their seats. Cauldrons clanged softly, cabinet doors creaked, and the room filled with the usual sound of shifting supplies,until a metallic crash split the air.

Neville had dropped his cauldron lid.

Again.

Snape closed his eyes for a brief, tortured second. When he opened them, the expression he fixed on Neville was one of weary disbelief.

“Longbottom,” Snape said, voice low and venomously calm, “if incompetence were a regulated magical substance, you would have exceeded the permitted quota before breakfast.”

Neville opened and closed his mouth, face pink with mortification. “I—sorry, Professor, it slipped—”

“Ten points from Gryffindor,” Snape announced. “For endangering us all with your inability to hold objects designed for children.”

A ripple of tittering laughter ran through the Slytherins. Snape cut it off with a single glacial look.

He moved down the aisle between the tables, robes whispering across the flagstones. When he reached Harry and Draco’s workstation, he stopped. He didn’t speak. He just stood there for a moment, gaze flicking from one boy to the other.

It felt like standing under a magnifying lens.

“Mr. Potter,” Snape said at last, “if you plan to maintain any semblance of academic performance this year, I advise you to remove that… distracted look from your face.”

Harry stilled. “Sir?”

Snape’s eyes narrowed. “Do not insult my intelligence. I have seen that expression on far too many students who believe subtlety is a strength they possess.”

Malfoy’s posture went rigid.

Snape’s attention shifted to him. “And you, Mr. Malfoy—” He paused. The disdain should have followed. It didn’t. What came instead was something grudging and deeply reluctant. “Do not encourage him.”

Malfoy blinked, taken off guard. “I’m not—”

“You are,” Snape said with quiet finality, “and I am not paid nearly enough to manage the consequences.”

Harry swallowed hard, the implication buzzing under his skin.

Snape leaned in slightly, lowering his voice so only they could hear. “Whatever… entanglements the two of you believe you are concealing, rest assured: the entire castle will notice long before either of you possess the good sense to address them responsibly.”

Harry felt Malfoy stiffen beside him.

Snape straightened, picking up a piece of chalk as if the conversation had been trivial. “Now,” he said, projecting his voice across the room, “we will proceed with today’s lesson, assuming no one attempts to set themselves on fire before the hour is over.”

Neville dropped his metal stirring rod with a clang.

Snape didn’t bother hiding his sigh.

Harry was packing away his cauldron when he noticed Draco lingering by the shelves, rearranging vials he had no real reason to touch. Snape approached him with the purposeful restraint of someone who disliked conversations he knew he must have. Harry didn’t mean to listen, he simply moved slower, stacking ingredients one by one while the low murmur of voices carried across the nearly empty classroom.

“Mr. Malfoy,” Snape said, voice pitched low enough to warn but not reprimand, “I will say this once. Whatever… attachment is forming between you and Potter manage it with caution.”

Malfoy’s breath hitched almost imperceptibly. “Sir, I—”

Snape cut him off with a raised hand. “Do not insult either of us by pretending I’m mistaken. I saw enough between you to recognize the beginning of something neither of you is prepared for.”

A beat of silence. Malfoy didn’t move.

Snape’s tone softened\.barely, but unmistakably. “Your father is not the only one who would object. There are… forces at play you do not yet understand. Be prudent.”

Harry’s pulse quickened. He stayed frozen, fingers wrapped around a jar he’d stopped pretending to sort.

Malfoy’s reply was quiet, stripped of its usual armor. “I don’t know how prudent is… possible anymore.”

Snape exhaled,long, resigned, tired in a way Harry had never heard. “Nor, it seems, do I.”

He stepped away, robes sweeping behind him, leaving Malfoy staring at the flagstones as though the ground had shifted beneath him.

Harry slipped out before Malfoy could notice he’d heard anything at all.

VIIII. Correspondence I.

Dear Padfoot,

I hope everything is going as well as it can. Things here are… busy, I guess. Snape has been piling on extra work, and Dumbledore’s got me doing extra Patronus and Legimilincy practice in the evenings, which is helping. I think.

I wanted to write because something’s changed a bit with Malfoy.

Not a lot, don’t worry, but enough that it feels strange not to mention it.
He’s… different. Or maybe I’m just seeing things I didn’t before. He’s not as loud as he used to be. Less interested in starting fights for the sake of it. Less… childish. That’s probably the word.

We’ve had a few decent conversations during lessons. Nothing important. But not awful, either. He’s even helped me with a potion step once or twice, not because he had to, but because he didn’t seem to want me to blow myself up.

I’m not saying we’re friends. More that he isn’t always what I thought. And I guess I’m wondering if it’s possible for someone you’ve disliked for years to turn out to be… not terrible.

Anyway. I hope you’re well.

Tell Remus hi from me.

Harry

Harry,

Not terrible?

Malfoy is a Malfoy—capital M, italicized, underlined. Trust me. I knew the lot of them long before you were born, and I can tell you without hesitation that the family traits include: arrogance, cruelty, an overuse of hair tonic, and a complete inability to take responsibility for their own actions.

His father was a menace at school. Narcissa was subtler but just as bad. The whole family line is a catalogue of bad decisions dressed in expensive robes.

If the younger Malfoy is tolerable, it’s because he’s plotting something. They always are.

Honestly, it’s good you’re noticing a change. Use it. Get close enough to find out what he’s up to. If he’s acting strangely, there’s a reason and with Voldemort back, I don’t like the idea of any Malfoy playing nice.

And before you tell me I’m paranoid, Black family rule number one: If a Malfoy is behaving, be suspicious.  They don’t behave unless they want something.

Keep your guard up. Don’t let him get inside your head. You’re too good for their games, Harry. Remember that.

Give Snape hell for me,

Padfoot

P.S

Moony says hi.

Harry set the letter down slowly, the parchment softening under the warmth of his hands. What he’d hoped for a bit of perspective, a bit of openness was nowhere in the ink Sirius had spilled. Every line pressed against him, folding something small and hopeful back into its box. Sirius meant well. He always did. But the distance between what Harry had written and what Sirius understood yawned wide enough to swallow the truth whole. And for the first time, Harry felt strangely alone with it.

The second letter arrived two days later, delivered by an irritable school owl that pecked Harry’s knuckles as if resenting its role in the whole exchange. Harry unfolded the parchment with a mix of dread and reluctant affection.

Sirius’s handwriting was even more chaotic this time inkblots, uneven lines, and the unmistakable slant of a man pacing while writing.

Harry,

I’ve been thinking about what you wrote.
Probably more than I should. Remus says I’m overreacting, (which means I’m likely onto something.)

You’re a good person. Too good. You tend to see the best in people: even when the best is buried under ten layers of bad decisions and designer arrogance. Malfoy is clever. That’s what worries me. He’s exactly the sort who could twist your kindness into something useful for himself.

And don’t give me that look you inherited it from your mother, and I know when you’re doing it even through parchment.

Listen to me, Harry. Malfoys don’t change. They pretend to change.

If he’s acting civil, it’s a mask. If he’s helping you, it’s a strategy.
If he’s getting close Merlin help us it’s because someone told him to.

Please don’t make the mistake of trusting him just because he managed one decent day. I’m serious. (Don’t smirk at that. I can feel you smirking.)

I know this sounds harsh. It’s not because I don’t trust you.
It’s because I remember what it’s like to be young and desperate for someone anyone to understand you. It makes you blind to danger and too forgiving of the wrong people.

Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.

— Padfoot.

Harry sank back in his chair as he read, throat tight. The words weren’t angry they were protective, earnest, clumsy. And completely, painfully wrong. He folded the letter with care, as if gentleness might quiet the ache it left in its wake.

Remus’letter. came tucked beneath Sirius’s, the parchment smoother, the handwriting steady and deliberate. Harry hadn’t noticed it at first he almost missed it entirely.

The note was not long.

Harry,

I saw Sirius writing to you.
Forgive the man he leads with his heart, even when it is poorly informed.

He means to protect you. But in doing so, he sometimes forgets how much you’ve already learned to protect yourself.

You wrote something that has stayed with me: that you are seeing sides of someone you hadn’t expected.

That, Harry, is not naivety. It is growth. It is what happens when the world stops being divided neatly into enemies and allies.

I don’t know what’s shifting between you and young Malfoy. I don’t need to. But I know the look of unexpected connection. And I know the danger of ignoring it out of fear.

Whatever you are navigating, do it with honesty with yourself most of all.

And please remember: you don’t owe us the version of yourself we’re most comfortable with.

If you need me, write.

—Remus

Harry read the letter twice, then a third time, a slow breath catching somewhere behind his ribs. He blinked away something wet that was clinging to his lashes. He wiped a hand across his face. For the first time since his kiss with Draco, he felt something other than fear or confusion.

He felt understood.

IX .Later.

The afternoon corridor was quiet, empty of students, lit by soft slants of late sunlight spilling through the high windows. Harry was walking toward the library when he rounded a corner and almost collided with Malfoy.

They stopped in the narrow corridor almost chest-to-chest, too aware of the echoing hush around them. Anyone could walk by. Anyone could see.
Which, of course, was when Draco chose to speak first.

“You look like you ran here,” Draco murmured, gaze flicking down Harry’s robes. “Very subtle. Very inconspicuous. Truly, a master spy.”

Harry huffed a laugh despite the tight coil in his stomach. “Says the boy who corners people in corridors like a Victorian ghost.”

Draco’s mouth curved, quick, sharp, involuntary. “At least I do it stylishly.”

The banter should have cooled the moment. It only sharpened it. Their shoulders were close enough to brush with every inhale, and Draco’s eyes kept dropping barely, briefly to Harry’s mouth, as if pulled there against his will.

Harry swallowed. “This is… stupidly risky.”

“Mm,” Draco agreed, but didn’t move. “Someone could turn the corner at any moment.”

“We should probably step apart,” Harry said.

“Yes. Absolutely.” Draco didn’t move either.

A beat passed, dense and humming with the magic that seemed to wake whenever they stood too close.  Somewhere down the corridor, a door slammed. They both startled, but neither stepped back.

Harry’s voice came out softer than he intended. “I do actually own an Invisibility Cloak, you know.”

Draco blinked at him, then let out a quiet, incredulous laugh. “You have an Invisibility Cloak and you’re still meeting me in a corridor like this?”

Harry shrugged helplessly. “Didn’t think to grab it.”

“Potter,” Draco whispered, almost smiling, “you’re going to be the death of me.”

They leaned in at the same moment not close enough to kiss, but close enough that Harry felt Draco’s breath warm against his cheek, close enough that Draco’s hand twitched like he wanted to reach out and didn’t dare.

For a heartbeat, the corridor existed only for them. Then footsteps sounded at the far end. Draco stiffened. Harry’s pulse lurched.

They pulled apart in a single, practiced movement too quick, too guilty and Draco slipped back into the shadows with a grace that looked rehearsed.

And that was the moment Umbridge rounded the corner.

She gasped loud, theatrical, syrup-thick. “Ahem, hem.” she trilled, plastering on her smile like a weapon dipped in sugar. “Loitering? In close proximity? How very… undisciplined.”

They sprang apart as though burned.

“Professor,” Harry said stiffly.

Malfoy straightened like he’d been snapped back into his skin. “We were simply—”

“Simply what?” Umbridge asked, voice dripping with saccharine suspicion. “Conspiring? Whispering? Behaving inappropriately?”

Her eyes darted between them with the gleeful hunger of someone who lived to find fault.

Harry clenched his jaw. “We were talking. “Which is still allowed, last I checked.”

Umbridge’s smile widened to something brittle and bright. “Do be careful, Mr. Potter.” She then turned to look directly at Malfoy. “Some conversations are… unbecoming of proper students.” She let the implication hang in the air, pointed and ugly.

Harry felt Malfoy go rigid beside him.

“Now run along, both of you,” Umbridge said, flapping her hand. “I must ensure the corridors remain a place of… purity.”

She tottered off in a cloud of pink tweed and self-satisfaction.

When she was finally out of sight, Malfoy released a breath through his teeth. “That woman,” he muttered, “is a blight.”

Harry huffed a half laugh, half groan. “You okay?”

Malfoy glanced at him sideways, something soft and reluctant flickering beneath the practiced mask. “I will be. Once I stop imagining feeding her to the Giant Squid.”

Harry’s mouth quirked. “Tempting, but she’ll probably give it indigestion.”

Draco shifted, uncomfortable but not moving away this time. “We’ll… talk later?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Later.”

Draco met Harry’s eyes once more, something bright and unguarded flickering there.

“Next time,” he murmured, “bring the cloak.”

And then he was gone.

X. The Importance of Quidditch Strategy.

Harry was halfway through lunch when Snape swept past the Gryffindor table, robes hissing like an omen. He didn’t stop Snape never stopped, but he did angle his head just enough to speak in a low, cutting murmur no one else could have possibly heard.

“Potter,” he said, voice like a cold draft, “if you’re going to parade your emotional disarray through the corridors, kindly keep it away from my classroom.”

Harry froze, fork suspended mid-air.

By the time he managed to blink, Snape was already at the staff table.

Ron frowned. “What’d he say? Something about homework?”

Harry coughed into his sleeve. “Something like that.”

Hermione’s gaze sharpened immediately. “No. He said something specific. Your whole face changed.”

Ron stared between them helplessly. “What whole face? His face looks like his face.”

Hermione ignored him. “Harry, you’ve been… off. Quiet. Distracted. That isn’t nothing.”

Harry busied himself with aligning his fork and knife. “I’m just tired.”

“Your eyes look tired,” Hermione admitted gently, “but that’s not what I mean. You’re thinking about something. Or someone.”

Harry’s heart lurched painfully. He kept his expression neutral through sheer force of will. “Everyone is thinking about someone. It’s Hogwarts. We live in a castle full of people.”

Hermione didn’t smile. “That’s evasion.”

Ron pushed food around his plate, frowning harder. “Is this about Umbridge? Because honestly, I get it. I’ve had, like, five anxious thoughts today and all of them involve her wearing pink.”

Harry let out a strained sigh.  “Ron… no. It’s not Umbridge.”

“So homework?” Ron guessed.

“No.”

“Quidditch?”

“No.”

A pause.

“Are you quitting Quidditch?” Ron asked suddenly, alarmed.

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “RON. No.”

Hermione leaned closer, her voice soft but unwavering. “Harry. Whatever it is, you’re carrying it alone. You don’t have to.”

He could feel the truth pressed against the back of his teeth, restless, aching, desperate to escape. He wanted to tell her everything, to give shape to the confusion that kept him awake at night: the training sessions, the letters from Sirius, Draco’s softer edges, the Patronus, the closeness, the weight of possibility.

“It’s just…” Harry swallowed. “I’m… seeing someone differently than I used to.”

Hermione blinked, then softened, recognizing something unspoken without needing the details. “Oh,” she murmured, “I understand.”

Ron watched them both with increasing alarm. “Alright, what’s going on? And please tell me you’re not quitting Quidditch. Because if you are, Harry, I swear—”

“I’m not quitting Quidditch,” Harry said, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s more like… I’m dealing with a different kind of game.”

Hermione nodded in quiet understanding. “One with a… complicated strategy.”

Harry huffed a soft laugh. “Yeah. Feels like I’m chasing something I didn’t even know was on the pitch.”

Hermione added gently, “And maybe the goalposts aren’t where you thought they were.”

Ron blinked. “Right. So you’re… what? Trying a new formation? Switching positions? Is this about practice schedules?”

“No,” Harry said quickly.

“So… someone else is changing positions?” Ron asked, sounding genuinely concerned. “Because if someone’s messing with your game, I’ll talk to them.”

Harry and Hermione exchanged a look equal parts Fond and Weary.

“Ron,” Hermione said, resting a hand on his arm, “it’s not about Quidditch.”

“It sounds like Quidditch,” Ron insisted. “You’re talking about pitches and goalposts and chasing things what else am I meant to think?”

Harry let out a quiet breath, eyes dropping for a moment. “It’s personal. Not… team personal. Just me.”

Ron’s expression softened, even if he still didn’t understand. “Alright. If it’s something you need to sort out, that’s fine. Just don’t disappear on us, yeah?”

Harry managed a small smile. “I won’t.”

Hermione squeezed his hand under the table, silently telling him she understood more than he’d said aloud. Ron returned to his stew, muttering about how emotional conversations should come with a rulebook.

And despite everything twisting inside him, Harry felt strangely grateful for both of them.

And somewhere at the staff table, Dumbledore watched Harry over the rim of his half-moon spectacles.

It was the look of a man who had overseen far too many teenagers navigating far too many life-altering emotions and had decided, cheerfully, disastrously, that subtle guidance was needed.

His expression started as fond concern, softened into something like pleased curiosity, then settled into a thoughtful frown that suggested cogs turning in ways Harry instinctively distrusted.

Harry caught the gaze by accident. Dumbledore’s eyebrows rose, gently encouraging.

Snape, seated beside him, froze mid-sip of tea.

Dumbledore lifted his teacup just slightly. The gesture wasn’t a thumbs-up, not formally. It was more of an ambiguous, grandfatherly twitch of the fingers: Are you alright, dear boy? I approve of your mysterious emotional growth. Carry on.

Harry, mortified, nearly dropped his fork.

Snape stared at Dumbledore as if personally offended by the display of goodwill. “Headmaster” he hissed, leaning in sharply, “what are you doing?”

Dumbledore blinked with great innocence. “Offering support.”

“Support,” Snape repeated flatly. “For Potter’s latest spiral into whatever hormonal catastrophe he’s managed to engineer?”

Dumbledore’s gaze drifted back to Harry, twinkling. “He seems to be navigating something delicate.”

Snape actually set down his teacup to glare. “Headmaster, I beg you: stop encouraging him. Potter does not require support. Potter requires discipline. And possibly a leash.”

Dumbledore hummed. “He requires understanding.”

“He requires confinement,” Snape muttered.

Dumbledore ignored him completely and offered Harry a small, solemn nod as though bestowing a blessing on an event he didn’t remotely understand but thoroughly approved of.

Harry stared back in mute horror, cheeks burning.

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose. “Headmaster, if you do not cease this behavior, I will resign. Again. This time permanently.”

“Oh, Severus,” Dumbledore said mildly, patting his arm with infuriating fondness. “You say that every year.”

“And one day,” Snape growled, “I shall mean it.”

Dumbledore only smiled, serene and maddening.

Harry looked down at his plate, wishing deeply that the potatoes would swallow him.

At the staff table, Snape glowered, Dumbledore twinkled, and the castle felt suddenly too small to contain the number of adults with opinions about Harry’s private life.

XI. It’s Not Exactly Spying When You Are The Headmaster.

Harry found Draco again two nights later, though found wasn’t quite the right word. He had looked for him.

The castle had that late-evening hush the quiet that made footsteps echo and secrets feel closer to the surface. Draco was standing near a side window overlooking the Black Lake, moonlight tracing the line of his profile in pale silver.

He didn’t turn when Harry approached, but his posture tightened as though he had known Harry was coming long before he arrived.

“Is this how you use your Map?” Draco asked, leaning one shoulder against the stone archway. His voice was low, steady on the surface, but Harry knew that tone now. It was the one Draco used when he was trying very hard not to feel something.

Harry snapped the Map closed a little too quickly. “Erm—instincts?”

Draco’s lips curved, not quite a smile. “Instincts,” he repeated. “How convenient. Tell me, Potter were these same instincts involved in those little nighttime wanderings of yours?”

Harry blinked. “What wanderings?”

“Oh, please,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. “You’ve had that Invisibility Cloak since first year. You expect me to believe you never used it for… romantic excursions?” The last words came out lighter than air, but the faint stiffness in Draco’s posture betrayed him.

Harry stared at him. “Romantic—what? No!”

A beat. Draco’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly.

“Oh,” he said, too lightly. “Right. Of course. Obviously. Silly thing to assume.”

“Draco,” Harry said slowly, “were you… jealous?”

Draco scoffed an elegant, practiced sound\,but colour crept along his cheekbones. “I wasn’t. I’m not. I merely wanted to know.” He cleared his throat, gaze shifting away. “It would be useful intelligence. Strategically.”

“Strategically.” Harry stepped closer. “And for your information, I didn’t take anyone on secret dates.”

Draco’s eyes flicked back to his, startled. “You didn’t?”

“No.” Harry’s voice thinned with honesty. “I’d never even kissed anyone before.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward it was heavy, meaningful.

 “You hadn’t.”

Harry shook his head once. “You were the first.”

For a moment Draco didn’t move at all. Then his expression softened in a way Harry had almost never seen vulnerable, earnest beneath the sharp edges.

“Then,” Draco said quietly, “I suppose I should admit something in return.”
He swallowed, eyes steady on Harry’s. “You were my first as well.”

Something in Harry eased tension he hadn’t even known he carried.

Draco looked away quickly, as though he’d revealed too much. “Not that it matters,” he added, though his voice betrayed him. “Except that… perhaps it does.”

Harry stepped just close enough that their fingers almost brushed. “It does.”

As if summoned by the words, a soft cough echoed down the corridor.

Both boys snapped their heads toward the sound.

They had barely stepped apart when Malfoy’s gaze flicked down the corridor, wary. “Someone was there,” he said quietly. “I heard footsteps.”

Harry winced. “Yeah. That was well. Headmaster Dumbledore.”

Draco’s face went beautifully, catastrophically still. “What?”

Harry scrubbed a hand over his face. “He wasn’t spying, exactly. He just… does this thing where he appears out of nowhere whenever I’m having personal growth. It’s a talent at this point.”

Malfoy stared at him, horrified. “And he saw us?”

“He gives me these looks,” Harry said, grimacing. “One I know way too well. Sort of… ‘Ah, Harry, how lovely to see your emotional life evolving, please don’t mind me hovering like a decorative gargoyle.’”

Draco blinked. “That’s… disturbingly specific.”

“Experience,” Harry muttered. “Years of it.”

“And Snape?” Malfoy asked, voice tight.

Harry gave a humorless huff. “Oh, he was there too. He didn’t say anything, but he gave me this stare that basically translated to ‘I am not paid enough to witness whatever this is.’”

Malfoy paled. “So they both know.”

“They know something,” Harry said. “Not what. Not really. Believe me, Snape doesn’t want to know. He looked like he’d hex himself unconscious to avoid understanding.”

Malfoy let out a slow, shuddery laugh and leaned back against the wall, rubbing a hand over his face. “Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. We’re doomed.”

Harry stepped closer again, gentler this time. “It’s not doom. It’s just… them. They’re always like this.”

Malfoy peeked at him through his fingers. “You’re frighteningly calm about it.”

“That’s not calm,” Harry said softly. “That’s resignation.”

Malfoy exhaled and pushed a hand through his hair. “Snape’s been… lecturing me,” he admitted. “In his usual way. Lots of looming. Cloak billowing. The occasional death glare.” He straightened his posture, dropped his voice an octave, and delivered a surprisingly accurate imitation: “‘Mr. Malfoy, whatever idiocy you and Potter are currently entertaining, I suggest you desist before I’m forced to intervene.’” Malfoy rolled his eyes. “He’s convinced we’re on the brink of catastrophic judgment. And believes, naturally, that it’s mostly your fault.”

Harry snorted despite himself. “Sounds about right.”

Malfoy’s expression softened. “He’s not wrong about the danger. Just… wrong about everything else.”

Harry looked at him really looked and felt something slip in his chest, something he’d been trying and failing to hold in place since that first kiss. Draco’s eyes were tired but searching; guarded but wanting; so full of questions no one else ever cared enough to ask.

“Yes,” Harry said. “Something is.”

XII. Patterns of Protection.

Harry waited outside the Room of Requirement, the cool stone wall at his back and the Marauder’s Map open in his hands, its familiar inked lines pulsing like a heartbeat. He’d traced the corridors three times already, following the loops of Ron’s wanderings near the common room and Hermione’s steady circuit from the library to the tower. They were both looking for him not actively, not frantically, but with the quiet expectation that he would join them eventually, fall back into their orbit like he always did. The guilt tugged at him, soft but persistent. He told himself it was harmless, that everyone had secrets, that slipping away for an hour wasn’t betrayal. Yet the lie sat uneasily.

He folded the map closed, fingers lingering on the edges as if it could give him courage. He wasn’t used to wanting something for himself, or to hiding that want from the people who’d fought beside him. But tonight he waited anyway, heart thudding, breath held — because he’d promised Draco he would come. 

The Room of Requirement always seemed to know what he wanted.

Harry stepped inside and exhaled.

Tonight, the room had shaped itself into something soft and calm: low shelves, a scattering of cushions, warm lamplight, and a window overlooking an illusion of summer trees. It looked like Hogwarts in the depths of winter and belief the burgeoning summer outside.

Draco was already there.

He stood near the conjured window, arms folded tightly, eyes fixed on the false dusk beyond the glass. He didn’t turn when Harry entered, but Harry knew Draco had heard him his shoulders gave the smallest twitch.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Draco said without facing him.

Harry moved closer, leaving a careful space between them. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to.”

Draco huffed a faint, humorless sigh. “Wanting things is… complicated.”

Harry waited. Draco always spoke more truth after a pause.

And he did. “Wanting things has consequences,” Draco said, voice barely above a whisper. “In my family, desire is just another trap. Another weakness to exploit or punish.”

Draco finally turned, eyes shadowed, guarded but fragile. “And now here I am. Wanting something again. And I don’t know how to be… brave about it.”

Harry took a slow step forward, deliberate enough that Draco could stop him if he wished. 

“You’re allowed to want this,” Harry said quietly. “You’re allowed to want anything you choose.”

Draco shook his head, a faint tremor running through his fingers.
“You don’t… understand,” he said quietly. “I’m built from the very people who taught me fear. Who taught me that wanting the wrong thing could ruin a life.”

He paused, then let out a slow breath the kind that sounded like he’d been holding it for years.

“In my family,” he continued, voice low and steady, “you’re not raised to be a person. You’re raised to be an heir. A continuation. A statement.” Draco’s mouth twisted, not quite a smile. “You’re told what your future looks like before you can walk: you’ll marry someone suitable, uphold the lineage, expand the influence, keep the Malfoy name polished and untouchable. Your worth is measured in alliances and obedience.”

He looked toward the conjured window, the false moonlight catching in his pale lashes. “You’re taught to fear wanting anything that doesn’t fit that picture. Anything… human. Anything that might be considered soft, or inconvenient, or your own.” His voice roughened, bitterness threading through it. “There was never space for choice. Not in that house. Not with the weight of my father’s expectations. Every path was already drawn for me. And none of them led anywhere I actually wanted to go.”

He swallowed, jaw tightening. “So if I reach for something outside of that… if I choose something different… it feels like betraying the blueprint of who I’m supposed to be. And I don’t know what that makes me. Weak? Foolish? Doomed? I don’t know.

Harry’s voice softened. “Choosing something different is how you stop being them.”

Draco stared at him really stared the kind of gaze that stripped away masks. And for the first time, Draco didn’t look like he was bracing for impact. He looked like he was trying to imagine what it would be like not to.

Harry reached out, very gently, and brushed his fingers along Draco’s wrist. A soft touch. A question.

He didn’t pull away.

Harry wrapped his fingers around Malfoy’s wrist. Felt the coldness of him, the wild pulse beating beneath his skin.

“Harry,” he murmured, voice unsteady, “if I choose this… if I choose you… it becomes real.”

Harry’s chest tightened in a way that felt strangely steady not fear, not exhilaration, something quieter. “It’s not nothing,” he said, voice low. “You know that as well as I do.”

Something flickered in Draco’s eyes not warmth exactly, but an unguarded question, as if he were testing the weight of Harry’s words against everything he’d been taught to expect.

Harry stepped a little closer, slow enough to be interrupted. “We don’t have to define it,” he murmured. “We don’t have to label it or promise anything. Let’s just… ”

The room responded softly: the lamps brightened a shade, the air warming as though the magic approved or simply recognized honesty when it was finally spoken aloud.

Draco’s posture went tight, then terribly still. He searched Harry’s face with a scrutiny that felt more like self-preservation than doubt as though he was measuring whether Harry was solid enough to lean toward without falling.

When he finally lifted a hand, it was hesitant, almost careful. His fingers brushed Harry’s jaw with a touch that was more inquiry than confidence; a silent are you sure? rather than a plea for reassurance.

“Harry,” Draco said quietly not asking, not confessing, just saying his name like something fragile he wasn’t used to holding. “I don’t… know how to do this.”

Harry’s breath shook once, but he didn’t pull back. “Neither do I.”

Their second kiss was nothing like the first.

The first had been instinct a flare of adrenaline, the shock of realizing the person you’ve been bracing against is suddenly the only one you want to lean toward. 

This kiss was an answer.

Slow. Intentional. Two people moving not out of panic or longing but out of recognition.

Harry felt Draco hesitate for a heartbeat, as though checking every last reason he shouldn’t be doing this bloodlines, expectations, the shadow of his father’s voice, the eerie precision with which the world had taught him where his desires were allowed to point. He exhales once, a quiet surrender, and then leaned in.

The room softened around them, as if their magic had settled into the same rhythm warm light pooling at their feet, the conjured summer dusk outside the window deepening into something gentler.

Draco kissed like someone discovering that hope wasn’t a trap after all. His hand slid into Harry’s hair with a hesitant kind of wonder, as though expecting the moment to vanish if he held on too tightly.

Harry kissed back like someone realizing that offering comfort wasn’t weakness but choice that he could give without losing anything, that he could want without the world collapsing around him.

They moved together with a trembling certainty that came only from mutual decision:yes, I see you. yes, I’m still here.

Harry’s fingers found Draco’s waist, not tugging, just anchoring. Draco’s breath stuttered against Harry’s mouth, the sound so small and real it undid something inside Harry he hadn’t known was knotted.

When they finally parted, it wasn’t with reluctance. It was with the soft, stunned stillness of people adjusting to a new gravity.

Their foreheads rested together, breath mingling in the warm hush of the room. Draco’s hand remained at Harry’s jaw, thumb brushing slowly along his cheekbone as if silently confirming that Harry hadn’t disappeared.

The Room of Requirement glowed around them not brighter, exactly, but warmer. The space seemed to wrap protectively around the shape of them, acknowledging a decision made, a line crossed, a truth spoken without words.

“We really did this,” he murmured not a question, not regret, just quiet awe.

Harry swallowed softly. “Yeah. We did.”

And for the first time, neither of them stepped back.

XIII. Lessons in Legilimency.

The classroom was colder in the evenings. The torches hissed low, throwing long shadows that seemed to move with a mind of their own. Snape paced before Harry with the same quiet precision he always had, robes trailing like a dark tide behind him.

“Again,” Snape said, without preamble.

Harry braced himself. Snape’s wand lifted.

“Legilimens!”

The world lurched sideways.Images tore loose: the lake shimmering in late August, Draco’s pale profile half-lit by moonlight, a brush of fingers when passing a spellbook, the strange quiet between them that had felt almost like trust.

Harry slammed the gates of his mind shut with sheer will. The images snapped away, leaving a hollow ache behind his eyes. He stumbled, catching himself on the edge of a desk, his protest caught in his throat.

Snape lowered his wand with exasperated restraint. “Potter, I said clear your mind, not fill it with… whatever adolescent sentimentalities you seem determined to protect.”

Harry glared at the floor. “I’m trying.”

“Trying,” Snape repeated, voice flat. “A fascinating word. Usually uttered by those who would prefer not to name what, precisely, they are trying not to think about.”

Harry felt heat crawl up his neck.

Snape noticed, of course. He always did. The faintest flicker of Harry’s thoughts the ripple of instinctive panic, the tightness around his heart was met with a slow narrowing of Snape’s eyes. They were dark and unblinking, sharp as ink bleeding into parchment.

“There is… interference,” Snape said at last, and the words were deliberate, measured. “A disruption in your mental landscape. Something new.”

Harry felt his stomach clench. He swallowed, trying to soften the jagged edge of his pulse. “It’s not—anything important.”

Snape let the silence stretch between them, as though giving Harry the opportunity to hear how unconvincing he sounded. Then he lifted a single eyebrow in a gesture so slight it carried the weight of an entire lecture.

“Forgive me,” Snape said, tone dry enough to rust metal, “if I do not accept your definition of ‘important’ as a reliable metric.”

He stepped closer, not abruptly, but with the quiet inevitability of someone who has spent years reading the spaces people try to hide behind. His gaze swept across Harry’s expression, searching for the faultline beneath the surface. It felt clinical at first: a professor cataloguing symptoms, a healer assessing damage. But something in it was steadier than that, more attentive, almost cautious, the way one might examine a spell that could trigger if touched too quickly.

Snape’s voice lowered, stripped of theatrical disdain, becoming something quieter and more dangerous.  “Potter,” he said, “you will not be able to shield your mind if you refuse to acknowledge what sits at its center.”

The words landed heavily. Not cruel, not taunting. Simply true.

Harry’s breath hitched. His grip on the desk tightened until the wood creaked under his fingers. Snape watched him, waiting not for a confession, but for recognition. For honesty. For Harry to stop flinching away from the thing he didn’t yet dare name.

And suddenly the classroom felt smaller, the shadows closer, the torches dimmer. Because Snape wasn’t probing for tactics or technique now. He was probing for the truth Harry had been trying to smother since the train ride back.

Snape sighed, quiet, weary, as though the burden he carried extended far beyond Harry’s failures in Legilimency.

“Until you face it,” Snape said, voice a fraction softer, “it will remain your weakest point.”

 “I’m not—nothing’s at the center,” Harry muttered in an unsteady voice.

Snape hummed, unimpressed. “A fascinating attempt at denial. Unfortunately transparent.”

He turned away, pacing once, hands clasped behind his back. The cool, damp air pressed in around them.

“Headmaster Dumbledore,” Snape said, “in all his infinite wisdom, is under the charming illusion that is fostering… camaraderie among you and your peers will somehow steel you for what lies ahead.”

Harry frowned. “Is that… wrong? ”

Snape stopped. Looked over his shoulder. “It is not naïve,” he said. “Merely costly.”

Something in his tone shifted then, quiet, almost weary. Harry felt the change without knowing why.

Snape faced him fully. “Attachments,” Snape said, “are dangerous things in wartime. They make you predictable. Vulnerable. And sometimes, Potter… they make you foolish.”

Harry felt his heartbeat quicken. “Are you saying I shouldn’t—?”

“I am saying,” Snape interrupted, “that if you insist on forming… connections… you must be aware of their weight.” His gaze sharpened like the edge of a potion blade. “And of the consequences should they be discovered.”

Harry exhaled shakily. “Malfoy’s not—”

Snape’s expression barely shifted. But that was enough.

Harry shut his mouth.

Snape stepped closer, lowering his voice to a tone Harry had rarely heard: not gentle, but unmistakably human.

“Whatever is unraveling between you and Mr. Malfoy,” Snape said, “has not gone unnoticed.” He paused, letting the words settle. “The world you are walking into does not care for fragile things, Potter. Guard them carefully.”

It was a warning, softened by something like reluctant concern.

Snape took a step back.

“We will continue,” he said. “And perhaps this time, try not to let your mind wander to… distractions.”

Harry nodded, throat tight.

Snape lifted his wand again.

“Clear your mind,” he said quietly. “Before someone else learns what you’re trying to hide.”

XII. Correspondance II

The owl arrived during breakfast, a familiar dark shape swooping down so confidently that Harry’s stomach sank before he even untied the string.

Sirius’s handwriting sprawled across the parchment in sharp, impatient strokes.
Harry braced himself and opened it.

It wasn’t kind. Not cruel, either just deeply Sirius. Full of worry dressed up as bravado, and love disguised as suspicion.

Harry,
Dumbledore thinks there may be activity brewing again. I'm looking into it. Don’t react if Umbridge notices you, she’s nosing about places she shouldn’t.
If Malfoy is at Hogwarts this summer, it isn't a coincidence. Keep your eyes open. Learn what you can. He’s his father’s son, and that’s not something one sheds easily.
Be careful. And write back.
—Padfoot.

Harry exhaled slowly, folding the letter before anyone could see the way his fingers shook.

Ron craned his neck. “Bad news?”

“Not exactly,” Harry said. But the tightness in his voice betrayed him.

Hermione frowned. “What did Padfoot say now?”

Harry forced a thin smile. “Nothing I want to talk about.”

Draco wasn’t hard to spot at breakfast. He never was not for Harry, not anymore. He sat at the Slytherin table with his usual poise, back straight, expression cool and composed as he listened to something Zabini was recounting. He looked, on the surface, entirely like himself.

Harry tried not to look. He failed.

His gaze drifted across the Great Hall, almost of its own accord, and landed on Draco just as Draco glanced up. For a heartbeat one suspended, breathless instant their eyes caught.

Draco’s lips curved into the smallest smile. Not the sharp, practiced smirk he wore like armor. Something quieter. Softer. Almost shy.

The kind of smile that belonged to late-night corridors and whispered conversations, not the glare of the midday hall.

Then, as quickly as it appeared, it disappeared.

Draco blinked, straightened, and rearranged his expression into something appropriately uninterested. He lifted his fork, angled his chin, and pretended he hadn’t looked at Harry at all.

But Harry had seen it.

And his stomach gave a slow, traitorous swoop.

Sirius’s letterfolded in Harry’s pocket like a warning he wasn’t ready to face felt heavier than ever. His throat tightened with something close to shame.

He didn’t make it through the DA training session intact.

The moment he raised his wand, something in him seized the frustration, the guilt, the tug-of-war between Sirius’s warnings and the warmth of Draco’s presence. His magic surged too fast, too bright.

The nearest lamp exploded in a flash of sparks.

Harry staggered back, horrified. “I—I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” Ron said sharply, stepping forward before Hermione could speak. “Harry, stop. You’re spiking your magic.”

Harry shook his head, “I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” Ron said, steady but not forceful. His eyes were sharp, assessing, but there was no judgment in them. “That wasn’t a miscast. That was—you.”

Harry opened his mouth, but another tremor of wild magic rippled up his arm. His wand glowed faintly. “Harry. Sit. Down.”

But Harry didn’t sit. He stood there, blinking hard, trying to swallow the pressure in his chest the weight of Sirius’s letter, the fear of losing Draco’s trust, the shame of wanting more than he had any right to.

“Breathe,” Ron said quietly. “Just breathe.”

Harry’s shoulders loosened. The glow around his wand dimmed

XIV. Sirius.

The silence in the Great Hall felt unnatural.

Hundreds of quills scratched in uneven rhythm, a soft storm of parchment and ink. The giant pendulum swung ominously from second to second. Even the enchanted ceiling above seemed subdued, clouds drifting lazily over a pale sky as if keeping watch.

Harry tried to focus on the question in front of him—Explain the counter-resonance principle behind shield charm rebound—but the words slipped in and out of meaning. His scar prickled. Not sharp pain, just a warning.

Breathe. Clear your mind. Anchor to the present.

But the pressure grew, blooming at the base of his skull like a bruise spreading outward.

Not now. Please, not now

A faint ringing filled his ears.

The Hall dissolved.

A corridor appeared dark, cold, endless. Torches guttered in unseen drafts. A shiver crawled down Harry’s spine as his feet seemed to move on their own.

He knew this place without knowing why or how or when.

The Department of Mysteries.

He saw Sirius.

Bound. Struggling. Eyes wide with fear.

“Harry! Harry, help me—”

A voice high, cold, eager, whispered like ice in his ear.

Come to me.

Harry’s heart lurched so hard it almost stole his breath. Sirius’s voice, raw, desperate echoed down the corridor, threading itself into every old wound Harry still carried. It felt true. Too true. The kind of truth that bypassed logic and struck bone.

“Harry—don’t leave me behind again.”

Harry swayed.

It sounded exactly like him. The exact timbre, the exact cadence, the exact way Sirius said his name when fear edged his temper.

The corridor around them thinned into shadow edges blurring, perspective bending. A familiar panic clawed at Harry, tightening like a fist. His heart began to stutter, the way it had when Dementors had hemmed him in on both sides years ago, dragging memories to the surface with claws.

He reached out—

—and something inside him flinched.

Not at Sirius.
At himself.

The fear felt wrong.
Not misplaced—wrong.

It surged too fast, too clean, like a spell pulled taught on an invisible thread.

A voice Snape’s, patient and maddening rose from somewhere deep in Harry’s memory:

Look for the seams. Manufactured emotion feels urgent, not real.

Urgent.

The terror flooding through him wasn’t layered, wasn’t tangled with memory or grief or history. It had no shape, no texture. It was pure force, sharp and blinding and hollow at its center.

His pulse hammered harder. Sirius reached for him again hand trembling, face stricken. “Harry, please don’t turn away from me.”

Harry shook. Part of him still wanted to run to that familiar voice, that familiar warmth. The longing was real. The ache was real.

But the emotion behind it too smooth.

Like someone had carved a space inside his mind and poured panic into it.

Harry pressed a hand to his sternum, grounding himself in the feel of his own heartbeat. Not mine.Not real.

The corridor flickered, a slip in the illusion’s veneer.

Harry closed his eyes, forced his lungs to expand. He steadied the frantic surge in his mind, pushing back not with anger, but with clarity.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered.

The floor shuddered beneath him.

Sirius’s outline blurred, edges dissolving into pale static. His hand wavered in the air, then fractured, like ripples tearing across a reflection.

Harry’s breath hitched, but he held the line. “Not real,” he said again, stronger. “You’re not him.”

Hermione turned a worried look at him, before she quickly resumed her focus on her on paper.

The vision trembled like glass under a hammer.

Harry pushed harder into the center of the fear, into the heart of the spell pressing against his thoughts. He felt the foreign presence strain, retract, crack.

And then—

—it shattered.

The corridor split apart with a soundless break, shards of light dissolving into smoke. The false Sirius vanished, leaving only the echo of his last desperate plea hanging in the air.

But his mind—finally—was his again.

Harry gasped and grabbed the edge of his desk, the wooden surface grounding him in the present. Hermione glanced behind her again, eyes wide and worried, but he shook his head.

He finished the exam. He barely held the quill steady.

XV. Padfoot.

Harry steadied himself against the wall, fighting for breath he couldn’t quite pull all the way in.

“Potter.” Draco’s voice quiet, taut, wrong.

Harry turned.Draco stood half in shadow, pale and tense, as though he’d been pacing. His eyes swept over Harry’s face with open alarm.

“You look like you’re going to collapse,” Draco said, unable to hide the concern from his voice.

Harry swallowed. “I… Malfoy, I need to talk to Snape.”

Draco’s expression shifted fear, suspicion, understanding, all at once. “Come with me.”

He didn’t grab Harry roughly he steadied him, fingers curling around Harry’s elbow as though Harry might fall.

That was when hurried footsteps echoed from the far end of the corridor.

“Harry?” Hermione’s voice cut through the haze tight, strained, already brimming with concern.

Ron appeared beside her, red-faced from running, eyes darting wildly. “Mate—what happened? You bolted out of the Hall like a you were chased by a dragon—”

Both of them froze when they saw who stood with Harry.

Malfoy. And worse, Malfoy looking… worried.

Hermione’s gaze flicked between them, sharp and assessing. “Harry, you’re white as parchment. Are you hurt? Should we take you to Madam Pomfrey?”

Before Harry could answer, Ron jabbed a finger at Malfoy, bewildered and indignant. “Why do you look like you care? No offense, but since when do you—”

Malfoy shot him a cutting glare, sharp but hollow, lacking its usual venom. “I found him like this. Someone had to check he wasn’t about to hit the floor.”

Ron’s mouth fell open. “I—sorry—what? Malfoy helping? Malfoy not being a complete—”

“Ron,” Hermione hissed, stepping between them. She looked at Harry again, worry deepening. “What happened? You look… shaken.”

Harry swallowed. His voice wavered despite himself. “It was just—something in the Hall. A… moment.”

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed. “A moment?” The softness sharpened into something more like suspicion focused entirely on Harry, not Ron. “You barely made it ten steps without losing your balance.”

Hermione moved closer to Harry, lowering her voice. “Was it a spell? A vision? A… something else?”

Harry didn’t answer immediately; he felt Malfoy watching him with quiet intensity, Ron hovering protectively and confused, Hermione already assembling possibilities in her head.

The three of them formed a small, uneven circle around him.

Malfoy, pale and tense, stood like a question Harry hadn’t figured out how to answer.Hermione looked ready to drag him to the infirmary by force. Ron looked as though someone had hit him with a Confoundus charm and forgotten to lift it.And Harry had the sudden, dizzying realization that all three of them Ron, Hermione, and Dracowere genuinely worried about him.

Harry closed his eyes, swallowing down the last tremor of the vision. “I’m fine,” he managed. Then, more firmly than he meant: “Don’t worry.”

Ron stared at him as though he’d just announced he was moving to the moon. “Don’t, Harry, you can’t expect us not to worry when you look like you’re about to keel over!”

Hermione’s hurt was quieter but sharper. “We’re your friends. You don’t get to decide whether we care.”

Harry winced. He hadn’t meant it like that. He just needed space, clarity, somewhere he could think without the world pressing in. “I just need to see Professor Snape, about Padfoot” he said, forcing the words out evenly. “Malfoy will take me, it’s alright.”

Hermione and Ron exchanged a look:equal parts concern, confusion, and the faint sting of being shut out. 

Harry felt Malfoy’s fingers tighten against his arm as he manoeuvred him down towards the dungeon and away from the hurt and stunned expressions of his friends.

When they reached Snape’s office, Malfoy didn’t knock.

Snape threw the door open ready to snarl until he saw Harry.

“Explain,” Snape demanded.

Harry did words spilling out of him. Headache. Vision. Occlumency. Voldemort. Padfoot. Department of Mysteries.

Snape went very still, the air around him tightening with a tension Harry didn’t recognized. His eyes flicked once to Harry sharp, assessing, and unmistakably alarmed before he lifted his wand.

“Expecto Patronum.”

The silver doe burst from the tip in a sudden bloom of light, too bright against the dim, narrow corridor. For a moment the world paused. The doe paused, as if listening, then bounded soundlessly away, vanishing through stone as though the castle were made of mist.

“We will determine if this is real before you do anything foolish,”Snape said. But his voice lacked its usual venom.

Silence closed in after it hard, metallic, suffocating.

Harry felt Malfoy step closer without thinking, as if instinctively placing himself at Harry’s side. His breath brushed Harry’s cheek, uneven and tight.

His throat tightened. Images flashed unbidden bodies on stone floors, the roar of green light, Sirius falling, Cedric still and unmoving, Draco’s pale hands, trembling, covered in blood he never meant to spill.

The doe returned.

“Padfoot remains at Grimmauld Place,” Snape said quietly. “Alive and uninjured. I must talk with the Headmaster”

Harry sagged with relief. Malfoy’s hand hovered almost touching Harry’s back, then retreating.

Snape paused mid-stride.“You resisted him, Potter, That changes everything. And now Voldemort will meet somebody who is ready for him.”

XVI. Mothers.

The door to Dumbledore’s office swung open without a knock, which meant Severus Snape was not in the mood for ceremony.

Dumbledore looked up from the shallow silver bowl of his Pensieve. “Severus,” he greeted mildly, as though Snape hadn’t just stormed into the room like a thundercloud in robes.

Snape stood stiffly in front of the desk, hands clasped behind his back with an iron control that did nothing to soften the intensity in his face.

“He is staying,” Snape said without preamble. “Draco. At Hogwarts. For the foreseeable future.”

Dumbledore nodded. “Yes.”

Snape’s mouth curled, though it wasn’t quite a sneer. “I assume you already anticipated this.”

“I offered them both,” Dumbledore replied gently. “But she thought it more prudent to stay at the Manor.”

Snape’s expression flickered pain, anger, something more complicated before settling into sharpness again. “His mother remains at the Manor. With Lucius. With Him.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said softly. “She is making her own kind of sacrifice.”

Snape’s sigh came out tight. “You understand the danger this places the boy in.”

“I do,” Dumbledore said. “But the danger he would face at home is… considerably worse.”

Snape turned away, pacing once in front of the desk. “He is terrified,” he said quietly, as though admitting something he’d rather die than say. “And he is too proud to show it. He has nowhere left that is safe.”

“Except here,” Dumbledore murmured.

Snape stopped pacing. “Temporarily,” he corrected. “The Dark Lord will not ignore Draco’s absence forever. Sooner or later, he will require the boy’s loyalty. Or his usefulness.” His voice dropped. “And if Draco cannot give him either…”

Dumbledore’s eyes darkened. “I know.”

Snape looked at him then a sharp, cutting stare, full of a fear he would never show anyone else. “Albus. You realize what this means.”

Dumbledore didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he folded his hands, considering something deeper than the surface conversation.

“I do,” he said softly. “The choices of parents echo in their children’s lives. Sometimes as burdens. Sometimes as shields.”

Snape stiffened. “Narcissa is trying to shield him,” he said quietly defensive without meaning to be.

“Yes,” Dumbledore agreed. “She is.”

Snape exhaled shakily, anger slipping into something more brittle. “He reminds me painfully of how easily the vulnerable can be devoured if the adults around them fail.”

Dumbledore’s gaze softened as he looked at him. “He is not you, Severus.”

Snape flinched. Subtly. But Dumbledore noticed.

“I know,” Snape said after a moment, voice tight. “Which is why we must not repeat the mistakes that shaped me.”

He paused.

“And we must not let him become another weapon in a war he did not choose.”

Dumbledore studied him for a long, quiet moment. “You care for him,” he said gently.

Snape’s jaw snapped shut. “I care,” he said, voice low and severe, “about my students not being fed to wolves while the adults argue philosophy.”

Dumbledore’s eyes warmed not with amusement, but with something closer to gratitude. “Then help me protect him.”

Snape looked away, hiding the full extent of what flickered in his expression.

“Of course,” he said quietly. “But I fear Draco Malfoy’s path is about to become far more complicated than even he realizes.”

Snape lingered at the threshold, half-turned to leave, when Dumbledore spoke again quietly, as though naming something dangerous. “He showed himself, Severus. At last.”

Snape’s posture stiffened; he did not turn back, but his voice was low and edged. “The Ministry will deny it publicly for another day or two, but the truth is out. The Dark Lord has abandoned subtlety.” 

Dumbledore nodded, eyes distant in a way that suggested he was watching memories overlay the present. “Our duel made that inevitable. He intended to break me before the world’s eyes. Failing that, he chose revelation over patience.” 

Snape exhaled sharply, an old, bitter sound. “He will move faster now. He will demand more of his inner circle. And those who refuse—” 

 “—will be made examples of,” Dumbledore finished softly.

Their eyes met then: understanding, grim and unvarnished.
“War in the open will not make him weaker,” Snape said. “It will make him bolder. He no longer hides behind masks.”

“No,” Dumbledore agreed. “But neither do we. The lines are drawn now. Every choice the children make Harry, Draco, all of them will be taken as allegiance.”

The silence that followed carried the weight of prophecy, of history repeating, and of two men bracing for a storm they had both seen before one from within its heart, the other from the outside.

When Snape swept out of the office, the heavy oak door clicked shut behind him with a finality that echoed through the tower. The silence that followed was deep,not peaceful, but weighted. As though the castle itself had paused to listen.

Dumbledore remained seated for a long moment, fingers resting lightly against the edge of the Pensieve, watching the memories swirl in muted silver.

“So,” he murmured to the empty room, “the boys will stay.”

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. Severus had been right. Nothing about Draco’s presence at Hogwarts would remain simple for long,nor would his mother’s choices.

Narcissa Malfoy.

A woman born into cruelty, yet shaped by devotion. A woman who had spent her entire life learning how to walk through danger without disturbing the dust.

Dumbledore knew what it cost someone like her to remain in the Manor now. Her son her world, her heart had always been her compass. Every choice she made bent toward Draco’s safety, even if it required bending herself into shadows. Even if it meant stepping into peril so he wouldn’t have to.

It was a kind of love the world often misread.

Lily’s love had been bright and blazing: fiery protection made visible. Narcissa’s was quieter. Older. A love that moved like a hidden current beneath the darkest waters.

Dumbledore suspected—no, feared—that Narcissa would make choices even he could not foresee. Choices that lived in the grey spaces between morality and survival. Choices born of desperation and brilliance, the kind only a mother could justify to herself while the world named it treachery.

He had seen it before: the way love, pushed to its limits, became something formidable. Something that could carve new paths through fate. Something the Dark Lord had always underestimated because he never understood it.

Perhaps Narcissa would protect Draco in ways Albus had not yet imagined.

He rose from his chair and walked slowly to the window, gazing down at the darkened grounds where two familiar silhouettes moved through the courtyard Harry and Draco, walking side by side, steps slightly out of sync but moving in the same direction.

“Children in a war,” Dumbledore whispered. “Bound by choices none of them should have had to make.”

He pressed his hand lightly against the cold windowpane.

He thought of Harry shaped by loss, carrying a prophecy he never asked for.
He thought of Draco, haped by fear, caught between blood and survival.
And he thought of Narcissa, moving through the Dark Lord’s inner circles like a ghost with teeth, masking her terror behind polished civility.

Whatever she was planning, and Dumbledore felt certain she was planning something, it would be for one purpose only: Draco’s safety.

The wind outside shifted, rattling the panes.

“Let us hope,” Dumbledore murmured, “that I have read her heart correctly… and that Severus has not read mine too clearly.”

XVI.The Room That Knows Them.

The Room was quiet, and had taken the form of their potion’s classroom. Harry suspected it was because it was the place where Draco felt safe and in control.

Draco stood at the far desk, fingertips digging into the wood, knuckles white around a piece of parchment. His reflection trembled in the dusty window pane.

Harry stepped inside. “Draco?”

Draco didn’t answer.

Harry approached slowly. “You don’t have to pretend with me. Not now.”

Something in Draco snapped. “He’s living in my house.”

Harry froze. He didn’t need to ask who. But the name came anyway.

 “The Dark Lord. He’s… taken the Manor. My home. My mother’s home. Since father failed at the Department.”

The air left Harry’s lungs. He took a step towards Draco. The air around him simmered with magic, making the air on his arms rise to the current.

Draco’s voice cracked. “Every day, I wake up wondering if he’ll still be pleased with us. Or if today will be the day he decides we’re better used as examples.”

Harry stepped closer, horror rising. “Draco—”

Draco shook his head hard, eyes burning. “I’m terrified. Every second. And I don’t know who I’m allowed to be anymore. If I defy him, I’m dead. My mom is dead. My father is…my dad is dead.  If I obey him, I lose myself.”

Harry placed a firm, steady hand on Draco’s back.

Draco inhaled sharply, but leaned into it.

“You’re choosing differently,” Harry murmured. “Every day.”

“How can you believe that?” Draco asked hoarsely.

“Because I see you,” Harry said, voice low, the words landing between them with the kind of certainty that can’t be taken back. “Not him. You.”

Draco didn’t move at first. He stood with his back half-turned, shoulders tight, as if holding himself together by force alone. The moonlight from the Tower window cast him in pale silver, and for a moment Harry thought he wasn’t going to respond at all.

Then something in Draco’s posture faltered subtle, a crack forming through steel.

He turned sharply, not with anger, but with a kind of desperate momentum, as if he’d run out of places to hide. His face was drawn, eyes bright with something sharp and unsteady. He didn’t look like a boy raised on pride and polish. He looked like someone standing at the edge of a life he no longer recognized.

His breath hitched once, twice and then he stepped into Harry’s space, almost stumbling.

Harry caught him without thinking.

Draco pressed his face against Harry’s shoulder, the fabric of his shirt bunching in Draco’s grip as if he were holding on to the last solid thing he had left. Harry felt the trembling first, tiny, erratic shudders under skin stretched too thin then the sharp, uneven beats of his heart. And then, slowly, the warmth of tears soaking through cotton.

It broke something open in Harry.

Draco Malfoy, who walked the halls like he was made of marble and expectation, who never cried, never cracked, never let the world see a fracture was shaking in his arms.

“I don’t know what happens now,” Draco choked out, the words muffled and raw. “Everything I was supposed to be… none of it matters anymore. My father,my house,everything is collapsing, and I can’t—” His voice fractured, “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be without all of it.”

Harry tightened his hold, one hand steady at the back of Draco’s neck, the other fanned across the sharp line of his spine, grounding him. “You don’t have to know yet,” he murmured. “You just have to breathe.”

Draco’s fingers dug into the fabric of Harry’s cloak, clutching like someone afraid of being pulled away. “They’ll expect me to choose,” he whispered. “The world will expect it. Either side. Death Eater… traitor… there’s no path where I’m just me.”

Harry exhaled, slow and steady, trying to anchor them both. “There’s a path,” he said quietly. “It’s the one where you’re still here. Still choosing. Still fighting to be more than what they made you.”

Draco’s breath broke on a sob, quick, involuntary, painful in its honesty.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the weight of Draco’s despair settle against him. This wasn’t a boy being dramatic. This was someone seeing his entire future crumble and having nothing solid left to cling to.

Except Harry.

“You’re not alone,” Harry said, voice barely above a whisper.

Draco didn’t answer, not in words, but he didn’t let go. His grip only tightened, as if the truth might escape if he loosened his fingers.

And for a long, quiet stretch of time in the Room, Harry held him while the walls of Draco’s world finally, irrevocably fell away.

The room shifted.  Lanterns glowed amber. A fire crackled low. A soft rug and cushions appeared, warm and inviting.

Harry put his hand on his back, guiding him towards the sofa. Draco sat heavily.Harry joined him, close but not crowding. His heart tightened painfully. He hesitated —then reached out, brushing Draco’s wrist.

“Summer is coming,” Draco said, voice thin. “Father would want me to go back, try to….redeem the family name,” Draco stared at the crumpled note in his hands. “But Professor Snape said he’d talk to the Dark Lord, convince him I should stay here, train with Dumbledore….” a slight pause, his eyes flickering “....grow closer to you.”

Harry opened his mouth to reassure him but Draco shook his head sharply.

“Dumbledore… he offered my mother and me sanctuary. Here. At Hogwarts. He said the school always protects those who ask.”

Harry blinked, stunned. “You’re staying? What about your mom?”

“She’s… staying. For my father,” Draco whispered, each word dragged out like it scraped his throat. Saying it aloud made the truth heavier, not lighter. “I can’t go back. Not while he’s there. Not while the Dark Lord is turning my home into a fortress… a prison.”

The admission hung between them raw, trembling, brave in a way Draco rarely allowed himself to be.

Harry didn’t speak immediately. Relief hit him first sudden, fierce, almost dizzying, but behind it came something quieter, deeper: a dawning understanding of what Draco wasn’t saying.

“That must be hard,” Harry murmured. “Having your mother there and… not being able to see her.”

Draco exhaled shakily, a sound too close to breaking. “She insisted I leave before they could use me. Told me it was the only choice left. But she she stayed.” His voice thinned to a whisper. “She always stays.”

Harry felt something tighten low in his chest. He thought of his own mother a woman he had known only in stories, in echoes, in the shape of sacrifice burned into his very skin. He thought of the power of a mother choosing her child over everything else. How that choice had protected him, shaped him, saved him.

“Mothers…” Harry swallowed. “They do impossible things for us. Things we don’t always understand until later.”

Draco’s eyes flicked up bright, wounded, searching. “I don’t want her caught in the crossfire. But she won’t leave him. She won’t leave the Manor.” His voice wavered. “And I can’t go back. If I go back now, I won’t come out again. They’ll make sure of it.”

Harry nodded slowly, feeling the weight of Draco’s fear settle into him. “She’s trying to protect you,” he said gently. “Even if it means staying somewhere dangerous herself. Even if it hurts you both.”

Those words seemed to still Draco, as though he hadn’t let himself consider that angle hadn’t let himself believe Narcissa’s choice might have been love, not abandonment. After a long moment, Draco looked away, blinking hard. “Maybe,” he whispered. “I’d like to think so.”

Harry’s voice softened. “You’re not alone here. You know that.”

Draco didn’t answer, but he didn’t pull away either.

Finally, he forced a breath in and said, quieter still, “And I’ll… well, Professor Snape thinks it’s wisest if I remain for advanced tutoring. Under supervision.”

Harry almost smiled at the carefully neutral phrasing, but he kept it gentle. “I’m glad,” he said simply. “That you’re here. That you’re safe.”

Draco’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, and for a moment just a moment the fear eased from his face, replaced by a flicker of trust so fragile and precious Harry felt the urge to protect it with both hands.

Harry huffed a quiet laugh. “Advanced tutoring. That’s one way of putting it.”

Draco leaned his shoulder lightly against Harry’s. “It’s training. Isn’t it? Preparing us.”

Harry swallowed. “Feels like it. All the lessons… the extra training… dueling, Occlumency… the Patronus work… everything suddenly matters.”

Draco let out a sigh, not quite defeated, not quite hopeful. “We’re children. And they’re shaping us like pieces on a board.”

Harry turned toward Draco, really looking at him this time at the exhaustion threaded through his posture, at the stubborn steadiness in his gaze. “Maybe we can’t stop people from trying to use us,” he said quietly. “But we can decide what we do with that. We get to choose who we stand with. That part is still ours.”

Draco’s expression shifted, something fragile and wry crossing his face. “Funny,” he murmured. “I spent most of my life being told choice was an illusion. That everything was already decided for me.” His thumb brushed lightly against Harry’s hand not asking, just acknowledging. “But you make it feel like there’s a way to step off the path without falling.”

Harry hesitated only a moment before lacing their fingers together. Not a declaration. Not a pledge. Just a quiet acknowledgment of the direction they were both already moving in.

“It doesn’t have to be easy,” he said, voice low. “It just has to be ours.”

Draco exhaled, shoulders dropping the smallest fraction. He looked down at their joined hands, then back up at Harry with an honesty he rarely let himself show. “Then… I suppose I’m choosing this,” he said. “Choosing you.”

Something warm loosened in Harry’s chest not triumph, but relief, quiet and deep.“And I’m choosing you,” he answered simply.

Draco hesitated before sliding his own hand into Harry’s, slow and deliberate, as though testing whether the world would allow him one small, honest comfort.

Their fingers laced together.

No dramatics. No confessions. Just warmth.

“Thank you,” Draco murmured eventually, voice hushed. “For… before. I wasn’t expecting…” He trailed off, searching for a word that wouldn’t give too much away.

Harry found one for him. “You’re allowed to fall apart,” he said softly. “And you’re allowed to let someone see.”

Draco’s eyes closed, a faint tremor running through him, not pain; release. “That’s not something Malfoys are taught.”

Harry leaned his shoulder against Draco’s, anchoring him. “Maybe you can learn something different.”

Later, in the privacy of his bed, the curtains pulled shut and listening to the gentle sounds of the rest of the room sleeping.  He thought about Narcissa Malfoy: elegant, distant, composed… and choosing to remain in a house turned hostile rather than abandon her son to a war he had no business being dragged into.

Harry understood sacrifices. He understood what it meant to have a mother who stood between you and death, who made choices you only recognised as love much, much later.

Draco’s voice echoed in him: She always stays.

There was something in that. Something Harry couldn’t quite name yet, but felt solid and realas though a thread had been tied between Narcissa’s choices and Draco’s future.

Love had power. Memory had power. Harry, of all people, knew that. And there was a strange ache in his chest as he wondered what, exactly, Narcissa had given up to keep Draco alive.

XVII. The Promise of Summer.

The castle felt strangely hollow on the last evening before term ended, noise echoing differently as trunks thudded down staircases and students hurried to pack the last of their belongings. Harry lingered near the courtyard archway, waiting under the pretense of enjoying the evening air though really, he was listening.

Footsteps approached.

Draco emerged from the shadowed corridor, a small satchel slung over one shoulder. His hair caught the orange glow of sunset, making him look softer than Harry was used to. He noticed Harry immediately, of course he did, and paused, as if weighing the wisdom of walking on.

Draco stopped a few feet away, hands in his pockets, expression carefully neutral. “You’re not on the train tomorrow either.”

Harry nodded once. “No. Dumbledore wants me here. Extra training. Safety, he says.”

Something flickered behind Draco’s eyes a tight, quick reaction Harry couldn’t quite name. “I suppose that means Snape’s part of it.”

“Yeah,” Harry said with a faint sigh. “Lucky us.”

Draco huffed, and though it wasn’t a laugh, it was close. “He’s already warned me five times not to bother you. Which naturally makes me want to bother you.” He hesitated, the humor fading into something quieter. “Are you… all right with it? Staying here, I mean.”

Harry looked at him really looked. Pale skin. Drawn expression. A tension that sat beneath every breath as though Draco lived braced for impact. Harry wondered if the idea of Harry staying meant more to Draco than he could say.

“I think so,” Harry murmured. “It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a home.”

Draco’s jaw tightened. “You do know you have options, right? Even if you don’t… always see them.”

Harry felt something loosen in his chest. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m starting to.”

They stood in the long corridor of the courtyard, the last chatter of departing students drifting behind them. The space between them felt charged not tense, not awkward, just full. A moment waiting to tip somewhere neither of them could name.

Draco shifted, uncertain. “So… tomorrow. When everyone’s gone.” He didn’t finish the sentence. He stepped a little closer, the movement small but intentional. “If you want to find me,” he said, “you will.”

Harry held his gaze for a long, quiet moment. “I will.”

Then he turned and disappeared into the dim corridor without another word.

The news didn’t break gently.

Harry hadn’t even fully formed the sentence when Ron nearly choked on a Bertie Bott’s bean. Hermione froze mid‑page‑turn, eyes snapping up so sharply it was a wonder her neck didn’t crack.

“You’re WHAT?” Ron demanded, voice echoing off the common room walls.

Harry shifted uncomfortably. “Staying. For the summer. At Hogwarts. The entire hols.”

Ron stared as if Harry had announced he had decided to pursue a career in potions. “Again!? But, but you always come to the Burrow! Mum’s already knitting you a jumper! Fred and George were planning something chaotic involving fireworks and—”

“Ron,” Hermione cut in gently, though her eyes stayed locked on Harry. “Why?”

Harry hesitated. “Dumbledore thinks… it’s safer. After everything.”

Hermione’s expression softened around the edges. Worried, but understanding. “Harry, if this is about—”

“It’s not just that,” Harry said quickly. Hermione’s eyes narrowed.

Hermione’s eyes softened, the sharp edge of suspicion giving way to something more tender. “Maybe we should stay, too,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “If you’re here all summer, if it’s dangerous enough that Dumbledore wants you close… maybe Ron and I should be close as well.” 

Ron nodded immediately, worry overtaking his earlier bluster. “Yeah — Mum wouldn’t like it, but she’d understand. We could write home, explain—”

Harry cut them off with a small shake of his head. “No. You two should be with your families. You deserve that.” His voice tightened despite himself. “You deserve a normal summer. Real rest. Real people who miss you.” 

Ron opened his mouth to argue again, but Harry pressed on, gentler this time. “Go home. Let your mum fuss over you. Let Hermione’s parents drag her to the beach or something. Just… have a life outside of all this.” He forced a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

Ron scratched the back of his neck, guilt flickering across his features. “Well… if you change your mind,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “I could, you know… stay for part of the summer. Or come up on weekends. Or bring you Mum’s treacle tart by owl if they won’t let me through the gates.” His ears went red. “Not that it fixes anything. I just… don’t like the idea of you dealing with all this by yourself.”

Harry’s chest tightened again, but this time it was because Ron meant it. Meant all of it, in the fumbling, loyal way only Ron ever could.

Harry swallowed. Hard. “Thanks, but I will be fine. Really”

Hermione studied him for a long moment intense, piercing, far too perceptive. Harry looked away before she could read too much. His cheeks grew warm.

Finally, she sighed. “Fine. For now.”

Ron clapped Harry’s shoulder. “We’ll owl you every day. Even if Mum has to wrestle the quill from us.”

But Harry wasn’t really listening.

Because his gaze had drifted unbidden, unwanted, too telling toward the far side of the  courtyard where a pale figure slipped past the doorway. Draco Malfoy didn’t look back, didn’t glance over, didn’t even slow as he turned into the corridor beyond.

But Harry’s pulse quickened all the same.

His friends argued next to him about the ethics of having summer homework, their voices rising and overlapping, familiar and safe. And yet, under all of that comfort, something shifted in him sharp and quiet.

The knowledge that the summer ahead wouldn’t be spent alone after all. Draco had become an unexpected constant, a presence threaded into Harry’s days in a way he wasn’t ready to explain to Sirius, Ron or Hermione not yet. 

Harry forced himself to focus on his friends again, to laugh at Ron’s indignation and nod at Hermione’s pointed glare.

Already aware that whatever the summer held, Draco would be part of it.

When Snape swept out of the office, the heavy oak door clicked shut behind him with a finality that echoed through the tower. The silence that followed was deepnot peaceful, but weighted. As though the castle itself had paused to listen.

Dumbledore remained seated for a long moment, fingers resting lightly against the edge of the Pensieve, watching the memories swirl in muted silver.

“So,” he murmured to the empty room, “the boy will stay.”

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. Severus had been right. Nothing about Draco’s presence at Hogwarts would remain simple for longnor would his mother’s absence.

Narcissa Malfoy.

A woman born into cruelty, yet shaped by devotion. A woman who had spent her entire life learning how to walk through danger without disturbing the dust.

Dumbledore knew what it cost someone like her to remain in the Manor now.
What it meant.

Her children her world, her heart had always been her compass. Every choice she made bent toward Draco’s safety, even if it required bending herself into shadows. Even if it meant stepping into peril so he wouldn’t have to.

It was a kind of love the world often misread.

Lily’s love had been bright and blazing fiery protection made visible.
Narcissa’s was quieter. Older. A love that moved like a hidden current beneath the darkest waters.

Dumbledore suspected no, feared—that Narcissa would make choices even he could not foresee. Choices that lived in the grey spaces between morality and survival. Choices born of desperation and brilliance, the kind only a mother could justify to herself while the world named it treachery.

He had seen it before: the way love, pushed to its limits, became something formidable. Something that could carve new paths through fate. Something the Dark Lord had always underestimated because he never understood it.

Perhaps Narcissa would protect Draco in ways Albus had not yet imagined.

Perhaps she already had.

He rose from his chair and walked slowly to the window, gazing down at the darkened grounds where two familiar silhouettes moved through the courtyard Harry and Draco, walking side by side, steps slightly out of sync but moving in the same direction.

“Children in a war,” Dumbledore whispered. “Bound by choices none of them should have had to make.”

He pressed his hand lightly against the cold windowpane.

He thought of Harry shaped by loss, carrying a legacy he never asked for.
He thought of Draco shaped by fear, caught between blood and survival.
And he thought of Narcissa moving through the Dark Lord’s inner circles like a ghost with teeth, masking her terror behind polished civility.

Whatever she was planning and Dumbledore felt certain she was planning something it would be for one purpose only: Draco’s life.

And the cost?
He feared it would be steep.

The wind outside shifted, rattling the panes.

“Let us hope,” Dumbledore murmured, “that I have read her heart correctly… and that Severus has not read mine too clearly.”

Because if Narcissa Malfoy chose to wield love as her weapon, the world would not understand the shape of the danger until it was upon them.

And for Draco for Harry for all of them the consequences would ripple far beyond any one summer.

Later that night, long after Dumbledore had dismissed him with that infuriating blend of reassurance and refusal, Snape sat alone in his office, the dim firelight painting the walls in restless shadows. Their conversation replayed in his mind with the clarity of a curse. Draco’s presence here is necessary, Dumbledore had said. He has a role to play. Meaning what, exactly? Another pawn on another board? Another child asked to fill the void left by older men’s failures?

He rubbed his forehead, exhaling slowly. The Dark Lord would want an explanation he always did. And Snape, bound by a web of oaths and consequences, would have to provide one that didn’t unravel under scrutiny. The lie needed roots, something Voldemort would deem plausible: Draco was at Hogwarts for “advanced preparation.” Under Snape's direct supervision. Being shaped sharpened into something the Dark Lord could eventually claim as his own. Voldemort would welcome that narrative. He enjoyed the illusion of inheritance, of legacy. Of reclaiming what Azkaban had taken from Lucius.

Snape would have to paint Draco as isolated, ambitious, and strategically placed. Not entangled. Not softened by proximity to the boy Voldemort was obsessed with destroying. If the Dark Lord sensed even a hint of allegiance forming in the wrong direction, Snape knew precisely how swiftly the boy would be punished for it. How his mother would suffer.

His hands curled into fists. For all Dumbledore’s talk of “roles” and “balance,” the man seemed oblivious or willfully blindto what this would cost Draco if Voldemort discovered the truth. And Snape, who had once been a lonely, desperate Slytherin boy swallowed whole by someone else’s grand design, felt a low, familiar anger simmer beneath his ribs.

He would construct the story carefully, he decided. Draco remained at Hogwarts because Snape needed him close because Dumbledore, irritatingly sentimental, believed the boy still redeemable because Lucius’s imprisonment demanded oversight and discipline. Enough truth to anchor the lie, enough misdirection to keep the Dark Lord’s attention fixed somewhere other than two boys whose magic had begun to resonate in ways Snape did not want to contemplate.

And in that quiet, firelit room, one thought settled with cold certainty:

He could not trust Dumbledore to keep Draco safe.

So he would have to do it himself.

Chapter Text

Chapter three.

Interrupted Orbit.

I. Advanced Summer Curriculum

Dumbledore’s office had always felt too alive for someone trying to keep his thoughts contained. The walls hummed with old magic; light spilled through stained windows in soft, shifting colors. Draco stood very straight in the center of it all, hands clasped behind him so the headmaster couldn’t see the faint tremor in his fingers.

Dumbledore didn’t speak at first. He simply regarded Draco with that infuriating blend of patience and pity gentle, steady, intrusive in a way that didn’t feel like prying so much as seeing.

When he finally folded his hands atop an old, worn book, he said, “I am glad you agreed to stay, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco inhaled sharply through his nose. “My mother insisted.”

“And you listened,” Dumbledore said softly. “That is not nothing.”

Draco’s jaw tightened. “My father is in Azkaban. Everyone seems to think that tells them everything they need to know about me.”

Dumbledore took this without flinching, lowering his gaze over the rim of his glasses as if weighing the truth inside the boy’s voice.  “Your father made choices,” he said. “Hard ones. Irreversible ones. They do not define the totality of who you are.”

Draco looked down, tracing the carpet with unfocused eyes. “People don’t see it that way. In my world, reputation is inherited. Expectation is inherited. I’m supposed to carry the Malfoy name, the values, the alliances. There isn’t room for… deviation.”

The last word tasted like something dangerous.

Dumbledore’s office did that to him. It nudged truth loose from the places Draco fought to hold it. Unwelcome honesty began sliding to the surface.

“You speak of duty,” Dumbledore murmured. “But duty often masks fear—fear of disappointing those whose opinions feel inescapable.”

Draco felt something twist beneath his ribs. A rebellious flare of anger. A fragile note of agreement.  “Family isn’t optional for me,” he said quietly. “It’s all I have left.”

“Family,” Dumbledore replied, “is not limited to blood. It can be chosen. Found. Formed through the people who stay when the world shifts beneath your feet.”

Draco frowned. He wanted to scoff. To dismiss it. But the words caught somewhere deep inside him snagging on memories of hands in his hair, whispered promises in late hours of the night, Harry’s breath against his collarbone as though it were the only steady thing in the world.

He pushed the memory back. Hard. “I don’t know if I can trust that.”

“You do not have to,” Dumbledore said. “Not yet. Only allow the possibility that your future may be shaped by something other than the legacy you were born into.”

“I don’t trust this,” Draco said, voice thinning. “I don’t trust—”

“Me?” Dumbledore supplied gently.

Draco didn’t answer. Silence did it for him.

“You do not need to trust me today,” Dumbledore said after a moment. “Only to let your life become larger than other people’s expectations.”

Draco swallowed. His throat felt tight. “And if I can’t?”

“Then this summer may teach you how.”  No threat. No promise. Just an open door Draco wasn’t sure he had courage to walk through.

But he nodded anyway because he had nowhere else to go, because everything felt suspended, because part of him longed for something different even if he feared wanting it.

“I’ll try,” he said.

And Dumbledore for reasons Draco could not understandlooked as though that was enough.

“This summer will not be simple,” the headmaster said as Draco turned to leave. “Its lessons will be demanding… and its company will be meaningful.”

The word sat strangely in Draco’s stomach. Heavy and warm at once.

He stepped out into the corridor—and stopped. Snape stood waiting, as if he had always been there.

His dark eyes raked over Draco once, sharp and assessing. Something in his expression shifted.

“The headmaster,” Snape said quietly, “has a talent for prying open doors one is not prepared to walk through.”

Draco froze. But Snape continued before he could react.

“You will manage it. Not because it is easy. But because you have survived far more suffocating expectations than this.”

A faint inclination of Snape’s head. A gesture that meant more than it showed.

“Come,” Snape said. “You are no use to me unravelled. We will sort the parts worth keeping from those you can no longer afford to carry.”

There was weight in the words no longer afford. Weight, and shared history.
A shadow of something both of them had once borne under a name neither dared speak anymore.

It was as close to comfort as Snape ever offered, brusque, unadorned, and strangely steady.

Draco followed without a word.

The classroom was quiet in a way Hogwarts classrooms rarely were empty light, empty desks, empty air holding its breath. Harry pushed the door open with the familiar dread that came from years of Snape, only to halt.

Draco was there. And no one else.

He sat near the front, posture composed but not calm, fingers tapping an uneven rhythm against parchment that didn’t match the stillness of the room. His book was open, unread. His mind somewhere Harry could almost reach without speaking.

Draco looked up at the sound of the door shoulders creeping upwards, then recognition.

“Oh.” A small smile curved, hesitant and warm. “It’s you.”

Something loosened in Harry’s chest. It always did.

“No Snape?” Harry asked, letting the door click shut behind him.

“No homicidal sarcasm yet,” Draco replied lightly. “Strange, isn’t it?”

Harry laughed before he could stop himself. Draco’s eyes flicked to him, startled, softening then shuttered again, because someone might walk in, because someone might see too much. Even here, even alone, old instincts were hard to unlearn.

The lamps overhead gave a faint, uncertain crackle. A tendril of magic shifting its weight.

“He’ll show up eventually,” Draco said. “Perhaps he’s collecting himself so he doesn’t murder us on sight.”

“That sounds right,” Harry murmured, sliding into the seat beside him without thinking. His body simply knew the route. Draco’s gaze drifted to him brief, assessing, warmed by something quiet.

“You’re early,” Draco said. “Accidentally, I assume.”

Harry nudged him gently. Draco didn’t move away. He never did, not when no one else was here to see. The lamps hummed again, low and restless.

Harry cleared his throat, reaching for something safer. “So… Dumbledore’s curriculum. It’s a bit intense.”

Draco’s head tilted sharply, “You could say that.”

Harry glanced sideways. “Did he talk to you about the dueling sessions? And the cooperative spellwork?”

Draco’s fork paused mid-air, so subtle he probably believed Harry wouldn’t notice. “He mentioned cooperation,” Draco said carefully. “And alignment.”

He said the word like it tasted foreign. Dangerous. True.

Harry offered a thin smile. “He told me we ‘balance each other.’”

Draco scoffed. “Of course he did. He always sounds like he personally invented balance.”

“He does,” Harry muttered, unable to hide a grin.

He pulled a book from his bag and slid it across to Draco. “This was in my stack. It has a Malfoy name. Thought you should have it.”

Draco inhaled quick, shallow, the kind of breath he takes when something hits him where he isn’t braced.

“It’s nothing,” Draco said finally. “Old. Pureblood families collect books like they collect grudges. Probably meaningless.”

Harry nodded, relieved at the answer even though he felt the lie move through the air like a draft.

“You didn’t mess anything up,” Draco added.

Harry studied his face. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look—”

“I’m fine,” Draco said too quickly. “Just tired. Odd sleeping alone again.”

Harry caught the Slytherin deflection for exactly what it was. Alone again meant without Harry. Meant the dormitory felt colder, and the castle hallways felt too wide, and the nights felt too quiet.

Harry answered in kind, offering his own truth only halfway. “Dumbledore said the summer’s meant to… prepare us.”

“Prepare us,” Draco echoed. “Cryptic. Comforting.”

“Dumbledore.”

“Ah. Yes.” Draco’s lips twitched. “Never knowingly answers a question he hasn’t replaced with three more.”

Harry hesitated. “Did he tell you why he thinks we’re suited to train together?”

Draco’s gaze sharpened—a flick, a cut, a flare. “He suggested we have ‘compatible skills.’”

Harry’s pulse stuttered. “He said something similar.”

Neither of them pushed. Neither of them asked. The air between them tightened, then contracted into a silence too heavy to dislodge.

“At least we have Snape,” Harry said after a moment, sitting back, “to keep things grounded.”

Draco snorted. “Snape doesn’t ground people. He vaporizes them.”

“Exactly.” A small curl of Draco’s mouth. “With any luck, his contempt will distract from whatever Dumbledore has planned.”

Harry shook his head, amused. “I hoped we’d get a break from his lectures.”

Draco leveled him with a look, half smirk, half truth. “If you think Snape is going to lighten his teaching style just because the school is empty, you’re delusional.”

Then, more quietly: “You seem… unsettled.”

Harry rubbed his palms together, sorting the memory. “Dumbledore said people sometimes begin to change before they notice it themselves. Quietly. Under the surface. And that it can feel… disorienting.”

Draco went very still.

Harry continued, softer now, “He said it isn’t dangerous. Just unexpected. Makes the ground feel unsteady.”

Draco’s stare shifted away for a heartbeat—betrayal of something tender, vulnerable—before returning. “He said that to you,” Draco murmured, “thinking of me.”

“He didn’t say your name,” Harry whispered. “But… yes.”

Silence settled like snowfall soft, slowing the world around them.

Draco leaned back, folding his arms loosely. Not defensive. Bracing. “What does he expect you to do with that?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said honestly. “Be nearby. Pay attention. He meant no one should have to go through… whatever this is… alone.”

Something deep inside Draco paused like a string held taut.

Harry lowered his voice. “Something’s shifting. You feel it, too.”

Draco didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His eyes answered.

“If something is changing,” Draco said at last, barely a whisper, “I’ll manage it. I always have.”

“I know,” Harry said. “You don’t need me hovering.”

A tiny exhale half disbelief, half reluctant fondness. “That would be a relief.”

Harry smiled. “But I’m still going to be here.”

Draco closed his eyes once slow, pained, sincere before meeting Harry’s gaze again, worn and honest. “I never asked for that.”

“I know,” Harry murmured. “That’s why it matters.”

Draco looked away as if the words had landed somewhere he couldn’t defend.

“You’re impossible,” he said finally, voice thin.

“So I’m told,” Harry said, smiling.

The wall sconces flickered just once but Harry felt the shift like pressure changing in a storm.

And then—

The classroom door slammed open.

Harry jolted. Draco didn’t but his shoulders tightened, a small contraction Harry had learned to read like text.

Snape swept into the room, a torrent contained in black fabric.

“Potter,” he greeted, voice flat with irritation. “Early. I suppose even the unintentional can occasionally produce a favorable result.”

His gaze slid to Draco. “And you are precisely on time, which is only slightly less concerning.”

Draco lifted his chin in a gesture that would look arrogant to anyone but Harry. “Reassuring to know punctuality disappoints, sir.”

Snape stared at him long enough for something unspoken to pass before he whirled away with a snap of robes sharp enough to cut air.

“Do refrain from attempting civility,” Snape said, “before I’ve had my tea. I lack the capacity to endure it.”

Harry swallowed laughter. Draco didn’t bother.

“And sit far enough apart,” Snape added without turning, “that I am not forced to mediate whatever… dynamic the headmaster seems determined to foist upon us.”

Heat climbed the back of Harry’s neck. Draco raised an eyebrow, elegant disbelief.

“We’re here to train,” Draco said.

“Yes,” Snape replied, voice clipped. “And we will. Provided neither of you inconvenience me further a feat I recognize may be beyond your reach.”

He drew his wand in a single, controlled arc. The classroom obeyed at once desks gliding back, chairs folding, candles re-aligning with mechanical precision. The board slid upward, revealing a long stone dueling line that lit briefly at Snape’s presence.

“Stand,” Snape commanded. “Properly.”

He waited until they obeyed. “Wands out. And try not to explode anything.”

Harry reached for his wand. The moment the warmth, the closeness evaporated like steam in cold air, leaving only the faint hum of something they weren’t done naming.

Snape circled them the way a hawk marks the air slow, predatory, unimpressed.

“Potter,” he snapped, “you’re leading with your right foot again. Do you intend to announce your opening spell?”

Harry corrected his stance, heat rising in his cheeks.

“And you, Malfoy,” Snape continued, voice slicing clean through the quiet, “your elbow is locked. Attempt a deflection like that and I will be forced to scrape you off the floor with a Serving Charm.”

Draco’s eyes narrowed, but he loosened his arm with controlled precision.

“Marginal improvement,” Snape muttered. “Barely.”

Then—“Begin.”

Harry cast first, a precise Stinging Hex. Draco deflected, the shield blooming into place cleaner and stronger than Harry expected. Their exchange found rhythm shield, counter, pivot, parry careful, deliberate. Not graceful, not yet. But attentive. A new kind of instinct forming in the space between them.

Their sweat began to bead and fall. Their heart beats synced without meaning to.

For the first time, their magic didn’t clash.

It aligned.

Snape’s eyes flickered at that curiosity, suspicion, restraint.

“Again,” he said. “And stop anticipating each other’s weaknesses. Anticipate each other’s strengths. You are not dueling to win. You are dueling to avoid dying.”

A brief glance passed between the boys quiet, charged, a thread pulled taut between them.

This time Draco moved first, a precise Expelliarmus that hit Harry’s shield with enough force to make his arm jolt. Harry countered with a textbook deflection spell; Draco pivoted, eyes sharp, and answered with a Binding Hex that brushed so close to Harry’s sleeve he felt the heat.

Harry managed a shaky grin. “You’re getting faster.”

Draco’s lips quirked. “Try keeping up.”

“I’ll do more than try.”

Snape stopped dead, disgust blooming with visible horror.

“Oh fantastic,” he drawled. “Banter.”

He stalked toward them, robes cracking like a whip.

“Yes, by all means, flirt mid-combat—discuss the weather, trade recipes, ponder your favorite tea blends! I’m sure any half-competent Death Eater would be too charmed by your sparkling repartee to murder you.”

Harry blinked. Draco stared.

Snape continued, voice climbing like a storm gathering its full, righteous fury:

“Let me be painfully clear. Monologuing during battle is idiocy. Bantering during battle is idiocy inflicted by two people simultaneously. If either of you attempts to narrate the emotional arc of this duel while the other is casting, I will glue your tongues to the roof of your mouths.”

He stopped inches from them, eyes narrowed to predatory slits.

“And banter,” he added, voice a quiet, venomous hiss, “is simply monologuing performed by two idiots instead of one.”

Draco turned faintly pink. Harry swallowed.

“Again,” Snape said, flicking his wand. “Say another word to each other and I’ll deduct points retroactively for every year you’ve both been enrolled at this school.”

Neither spoke again.

The next drill was harsher, faster spells, tighter dodges, the air crackling with controlled bursts of magic. Their movements synced in frightening, seamless ways that made Snape narrow his eyes each time it happened.

Finally, Snape slashed his wand downward.

The air froze.
Even stray sparks stopped mid-flight.

“Enough,” he said. “You are not entirely hopeless.”

From Snape, it was glowing praise.

Harry dragged an arm across his forehead. Draco straightened with the stiff dignity of someone refusing to show fatigue.

Snape paused in the doorway and looked back. For a moment—only a moment—something sharp and unreadable cut across his face. Concern, Harry thought. Or warning. Or dread. Or all of them crushed under Snape’s refusal to name anything vulnerable.

“You will continue this every morning,” Snape said. “If you manage not to kill each other, we will begin advanced spellwork by the end of the week.”

He swept out, robes flaring like exclamation marks.

Harry and Draco stayed where they were, breathing hard into the settling quiet.

“Well,” Draco said.

Harry huffed a crooked smile. “Well.”

A ghost of a shared victory flickered between them small, unspoken, real.

“You weren’t terrible,” Draco added, almost grudging.

Harry grinned. “You either.”

Draco rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth betrayed him.

“Same time tomorrow?” Harry asked.

Draco nodded. Simple. Certain. “Yes.”

And for the first time all summer, Harry felt something strong and steady beneath the exhaustion.

Snape hadn’t meant to return. He’d merely forgotten an instructional text on counter-hex alignment—something obscure enough to keep Potter from hurling himself into danger with his usual Gryffindor abandon.

But when he opened the door—

He froze.

Harry and Draco stood near the center of the room, wands lowered. Both flushed. Not speaking. Just exhaling in the same uneven rhythm, bodies unconsciously angled toward one another.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed about something Snape hadn’t heard.

Draco murmured something—too quiet to catch—his gaze unguarded in a way Snape had seen only in rare, fleeting shards.

Their arms leaned closer. Their steps drifted inward. Harry tugged lightly at Draco’s sleeve, a silent question, and Draco, after the briefest hesitation, let him. Their fingers brushed. Then Harry wrapped his hand around Draco’s.

Draco let him.

The back of Draco’s neck flushed the faintest pink.

Snape nearly gagged.

Of course. Of course. Emotional entanglement.

Exactly what he had feared.

He shut the door with a silence that felt like resignation and pressed his thumb to the bridge of his nose. “Absolutely not,” he muttered, stalking down the hallway. “Not this summer. Not under my supervision.”

He walked five more steps. Stopped.
Sighed once, heavily.

Then, with the bone-deep weariness of a man who already knows fate intends to mock him, Snape added under his breath:

“…They had better not make a habit of this.”

Snape swept into Dumbledore’s office with the air of a man personally wronged by existence. His robes flared like a tempest. Fawkes offered a sympathetic trill from his perch; Snape glared back at him with the solemn hatred of someone who refused to tolerate optimism in any form.

Dumbledore looked up from a spread of parchment, eyes twinkling with a warmth that Snape found intolerable.  “How did the first sessions go?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just engineered Snape’s descent into a personal circle of hell.

Snape folded his arms. “They are—unfortunately—alive.”

“Splendid,” Dumbledore said, his smile blooming.

“It is not splendid,” Snape corrected sharply. “Potter has begun narrating his own duels. Malfoy—Merlin save us—has taken to offering critiques during the exchange. They converse, Albus. While casting. About technique. And…” His voice caught. He seemed to taste the word before he spoke it. “…feelings.”

Dumbledore brightened. “Feelings?”

“Yes,” Snape ground out. “Encouragement. Compliments. Insightful commentary. I anticipated chaos, but not the emergence of some sort of—” he snapped a hand through the air, “—emotional resonance.”

“Ah.” Dumbledore steepled his fingers. “And do you find this… problematic?”

Snape hesitated. That alone felt like losing ground.
“They are coordinating,” he admitted, the words dripping out like reluctant confession. “Their casting rhythms are beginning to align. Instinctively. Irritatingly. Effectively.”

A glint of triumph lit Dumbledore’s expression. “I suspected their animosity would fall away once given room.”

“You suspected,” Snape repeated icily. “I must endure it.”

Dumbledore only smiled, the faint curl of lips that always made Snape feel as if he had walked directly into a carefully laid plan.

Snape’s robes settled around him like gathering storm clouds. “I remain unconvinced that pairing them benefits anyone. Potter’s friendships already provide structure. Weasley’s obstinate loyalty, Granger’s improbable competence—they are his natural cohort. His unit.”

“Harry learns different lessons from different people,” Dumbledore replied mildly.

Snape stared at him. “That is not an answer.”

“It is,” Dumbledore said gently, “the only one you are prepared to hear.”

Snape’s jaw clenched. He stepped closer to the desk, lowering his voice into something darker.  “Why, Albus? Why Malfoy? Why now? Why not Harry’s friends, Ms. Granger, tolerably acceptable and Mr. Weasley? Two volatile talents do not create stability. Unless you are hoping for something else entirely.”

Dumbledore did not flinch. He did not look away. And that—more than anything—unsettled Snape.

“I hope,” Dumbledore said softly, “that they will teach one another what no spellbook ever could.”

Snape’s breath stilled. “You are playing at something,” he said, voice a quiet threat. “I have watched you place pieces on boards you never fully controlled. Potter and Malfoy are not experiments.”

“Of course not,” Dumbledore said.
 

And Snape could not tell if it was truth or wish.

He exhaled sharply, a sound layered with frustration and something heavier fear he would never admit. “What you are doing has consequences you cannot predict. Their magic is already… interacting. Shifting.”

“Which is why,” Dumbledore replied, “they must learn what it means. Together.”

The word landed like a curse.

Snape felt the implications snap into place. His pupils thinned with sudden clarity.  “You want to unlock it,” he whispered. “You want them to stabilize each other. Two cores forced into alignment.”

Dumbledore did not smile.  He did not deny it.

Snape took a step back as if struck, anger sharpening into something cold. “They’re children.”

“They are nearly grown,” Dumbledore corrected quietly. “And the world they enter will demand more of them than childhood allows.”

Snape hated that he wasn’t wrong.
But he hated more the realization that Dumbledore had known all along what their resonance might become what two magically aligned hearts could achieve under strain.
How potent.
How dangerous.
How irreversible.

“A fire,” Snape said hoarsely. “You are playing with fire.”

Dumbledore’s gaze shifted to the window, where two figures walked the courtyard close enough that the space between them looked like an afterthought. Their steps fell in the same quiet rhythm.

“Yes,” Dumbledore murmured. “But perhaps, Severus… it is a fire that may yet learn to warm, rather than destroy.”

Snape did not answer.

Because the truth—the terrible, coiling truth—was that he feared the opposit

II. The Shores Where They Speak

Late-afternoon light stretched across the slope above the lake, turning the grass gold and the water silver at its edges. The breeze skimmed along the surface, scattering light like broken glass. Harry lay back with his hands behind his head, letting the hush of water against the shore settle into him.

Draco rested beside him on one elbow, face turned toward the lake, expression unguarded in the warm half-light. It softened the sharpness of him; made him look almost young.

Draco’s fingers brushed Harry’s tentative, testing.
Harry turned his palm upward. Draco’s hand slid into it.

They didn’t speak for a long while.

Finally Draco said, voice low as if worried the air might break, “Snape says my countershield is improving. But I can’t tell if he means it, or if he’s preventing me from imploding.”

Harry smiled. “If he didn’t mean it, he’d phrase it like an insult.”

A soft huff from Draco almost laughter.

Silence again, but easier now.

Harry turned his head. “What would you do?”
Draco blinked.
“If you didn’t have to worry about any of this. No war. No expectations. If you could choose something for yourself.”

Draco looked back at the lake, where the Giant Squid drifted lazily beneath the surface, one tentacle rising, falling.
“No one’s ever asked me that.”

Harry waited.

“I imagine a house somewhere quiet,” Draco said at last. “Not the manor. Smaller. Ceilings that don’t echo. Walls that don’t… listen.” He swallowed. “Waking up without someone measuring every breath I take.”

The breeze shifted Draco’s hair, and he didn’t bother tucking it back.

“And maybe,” Draco said, clearing his throat, “I’d work. Properly. Not inherit something. Not fulfill a role. Something requiring actual skill potions, maybe. Or curse-breaking. Something precise. Something I could be proud of because I did it, not because my surname opened the door.”

His thumb traced the back of Harry’s hand.

“Though obviously,” he added, almost prim, “I would do all this while dressed impeccably. A future worth wanting should not involve sensible robes.”

Harry snorted. Draco tried for dignity and failed, mouth twitching at the edges.

“If I’m rebuilding my life,” Draco said, “I intend to look good while doing it.”

Harry squeezed his hand. “You always do.”

Draco’s shoulders relaxed pride and relief, braided with something softer.

“And you?” he asked quietly.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment, searching for an answer he’d never allowed himself. “Something simple,” he said. “A place with real sunlight. A job where the world doesn’t end every other week.”

His voice softened. “Maybe I’d travel. See something that isn’t Hogwarts or Privet Drive. Just… be somewhere new.”

Draco listened as if every syllable mattered.

“But I still want to help people,” Harry added. “Not because I’m supposed to. Because it feels right. Healing, maybe. Protection work that isn't a constant crisis. Something that lets me build instead of brace.”

Draco’s gaze warmed in a way Harry still wasn’t used to.

“Well,” Draco murmured, “it would be naïve to hope you’d entirely outgrow the Gryffindor savior complex.”

Harry blinked. Draco smiled gently.

“I mean it kindly. It’s one of your better flaws.”

Harry huffed. “A better flaw?”

Draco’s expression softened. “Some people hurt the world because they’re afraid. You keep trying to mend it even when it hurts you back. It’s infuriating. And admirable.”

Heat bloomed in Harry’s chest. “Maybe I just want to do something good.”

“You already do.” Draco squeezed his hand. “Whatever you choose, you will.”

Harry swallowed, the words landing deeper than he expected. “You would too.”

Draco looked down as if startled. “Choices are easier to admire,” he murmured, “when you haven’t had many.”

Harry eased his grip and Draco’s hand relaxed against his.

“Yeah,” Harry said softly. “I know.”

Draco glanced at him small flicker, small opening.

“You deserve choices now,” Harry added.

“I’m not sure I know how to use them,” Draco admitted. “I was always told what mattered. Who mattered. What shape my life should take.”

Harry leaned forward. “My life was mapped out too,” he said quietly. “By prophecies and expectations I didn’t choose. I’m still figuring out who I am when no one needs me to be anything.”

Draco inhaled, slow and careful. “Maybe,” he said, “for the first time, that might actually be true.”

Harry reached for him.

Draco shifted closer until their chests pressed, warm through their robes. Not urgent. Not desperate. Just steady. Gravity.

When their lips met, it was slow asking, not taking. Draco’s hand rose to Harry’s jaw, fingers threading into his hair. Harry leaned into the touch, world shrinking and warmth and the scent of summer grass.

They parted only enough to rest their foreheads together, breaths mingling.

“It’s strange,” Draco murmured, glancing at their hands, “wanting something not carved out of fear or obligation.”

Harry brushed his thumb over Draco’s knuckles. “Doesn’t make it less yours.”

Draco exhaled. “No,” he said quietly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

They lay back together, fingers intertwined, letting the rhythm of the lake carry the quiet. For a little while, they imagined a world where wanting each other wasn’t a risk but a beginning.

The practice hall door slammed open, and Snape swept in with the billowing authority of a man who expected his robes to enter five seconds before he did. Harry privately wondered whether the fabric was enchanted to possess its own disdain.

He and Draco had been waiting long enough for Draco to look elegantly bored and for Harry to start bouncing on his heels.

Snape surveyed them with the expression of someone forced to herd Blast-Ended Skrewts. “Wands out,” he ordered. “Do try just once not to disgrace yourselves.”

Harry stepped into position. Draco mirrored him with effortless precision, wand lifted, posture immaculate in a way that made Harry want to ruin it on principle.

“For Merlin’s sake, Potter,” Draco muttered. “Your stance looks like you’re about to sprain something.”

“Maybe I’ll sprain you,” Harry hissed back.

Snape’s voice cracked across the room like a whip. “I heard that.”

Draco smirked. “He started it.”

“I do not care who started it,” Snape snapped. “I care who dies first. Begin.”

Harry fired first, a sharp hex aimed just wide enough to test Draco’s reflexes. Draco deflected clean, fast and the spell snapped sideways straight toward Snape.

Snape batted it away with a lazy flick, expression promising immediate and disproportionate retribution.

“If either of you imagines,” Snape said, deadly calm, “that your childish antics will fluster me—”

Harry and Draco exchanged a look.
Dangerous.
Shared.
Stupid.

Harry struck a theatrical pose worthy of Lockhart. “Surrender now, Malfoy. You’re outmatched.”

Draco snorted. “Please. I’ve battled grindylows with more finesse.”

“Oh, is that what you see in the mirror every morning?”

“At least my hair obeys gravity,” Draco shot back.

Harry lifted his chin. “Gravity fears mine.”

“Clearly.”

They both fired.

Twin spells streaked toward Snape one scarlet, one silver synchronized without conscious coordination. Snape swept his arm outward, dispelling both with a crackling burst of force that jolted Harry’s wrist.

“Do you imagine,” Snape said, voice flat and disdainful, “that you are funny?”

“Yes,” Harry and Draco answered at once.

They glared at each other for ruining the timing.
Snape groaned into his hands. “Again.”

This exchange was faster: Harry’s hex skimmed over Draco’s head Draco’s shield arced too wide Harry pivoted to avoid the rebound Draco adjusted instinctively

And in that scrambling motion, their shoulders collided.

A quick, warm spark.
Barely a brush.

 But—

Something shifted.

Not sound.
Not light.
Just a pressure change, like the inhale before a storm breaks.

Both froze for half a heartbeat, caught in the sensation without understanding it.

Snape understood it instantly.

His eyes narrowed, wand rising almost imperceptibly evaluating, measuring a reaction he had hoped not to see so soon.

He broke the moment with a violent snap of his robes.
“Well?” he barked. “Are you dueling or staring meaningfully at each other until I die of boredom?”

They lunged back into motion.

Hexes. Shields. Counterspells.
The room filled with motion, sparks, and the sharp scent of charged magic. Their rhythm sped past conscious coordination—Harry’s feints syncing with Draco’s dodges, Draco’s shields catching spells Harry hadn’t warned him about.

Snape parried everything with effortless fluidity, lips pulled taut in something between irritation and—Merlin forbid—amusement.

At one point they both fired at Snape and each other simultaneously. Snape twisted with elegant precision, dispelling the spells so cleanly that Harry and Draco skidded backward on a gust of displaced magic.

Smoke drifted lazily.
Snape remained untouched.

Harry was panting.
Draco’s lips pressed into a tin line of frustration.

Snape folded his arms.

“Your form is sloppy,” he said.
“Your timing is inconsistent.”
“Your banter is atrocious.”

A beat.

“But together,” Snape added, “you are… marginally less incompetent than you are apart.”

Harry blinked.
Draco stared.

“That,” Snape said sharply, “was praise. Do not expect it again.”

He turned on his heel, robes flaring like punctuation, and swept out.

The air hummed faintly behind him.

Harry let out a ragged laugh. “Did he just—?”

“Yes,” Draco said faintly. “And I think it physically injured him.”

They stood together for a moment, the memory of that strange magical flicker tightening the space between them.

Harry nudged Draco’s arm. “Lunch, then another round? I want to try that shield spell again. You’re better at it.”

Draco tried to look unimpressed and failed. “As long as you stop trying to sprain me.”

Harry smirked. “Absolutely not.”

They’d barely resumed sparring five minutes at most when the dueling chamber door opened with the quiet inevitability of someone who refused to knock out of sheer principle.

Headmaster Dumbledore entered with his hands folded neatly behind his back, expression bright with a curiosity that suggested he already knew precisely what he was interrupting.

“Good afternoon,” he said pleasantly, as though he’d wandered into a knitting circle rather than Snape issuing death threats.

Snape’ jaw tensed so sharply Harry heard the click. “Headmaster. If you intend to supervise, please by all means. Perhaps in your presence they will refrain from converting my lesson into a social hour.”

Dumbledore’s eyes slid between Harry and Draco both flushed, breath uneven, standing far closer than any traditional dueling stance required. Something warm flickered in his gaze.

“Oh,” Dumbledore said lightly, “I suspect they are learning a great deal.”

Snape’s eye visibly twitched. “They were bantering.”

Dumbledore pressed a hand to his heart in theatrical concern.
“Severus, surely you cannot be cruel enough to deny them the development of interpersonal skills.”

“Interpersonal—?” Snape sputtered. “Albus, this is combat training, not couples therapy.”

Both boys made identical choking noises.

Dumbledore continued serenely. “Cooperation under duress often begins with small points of connection, you know. Trust. Familiarity. Mutual respect.”

Snape stared at him, horrified.  “Mutual frustration, perhaps. Respect is… ambitious.”

Harry’s face burned. Draco’s did something similar, only far more dignified.

Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled. “I daresay you underestimate them, my dear boy.”

“I do not underestimate them,” Snape snapped. “I underestimate the universe’s appetite for cruelty. And yet—here we are.”

“Progress is progress,” Dumbledore said cheerfully. “Even when wrapped in banter.”

Snape closed his eyes like a man seeking inner peace and finding absolutely none.

“I must return to my correspondence,” Dumbledore said, already stepping back toward the door. “But do continue. You are all doing beautifully.”

“We are not—” Snape began, but the Headmaster was gone, leaving Snape’s outrage to evaporate behind him.

Silence followed. Thick, awkward, humming with the very energy they were all trying not to acknowledge.

Snape exhaled through his nose slow, furious, resigned.

“Again,” he said sharply. “And for Merlin’s sake no commentary.”

Harry bit his lip to keep from smiling.
Draco failed entirely.

They walked out of the dueling chamber side by side, but with just enough distance between them to pretend the distance mattered. The corridor felt too quiet, every footstep loud, every breath suspiciously noticeable.

Draco kept his gaze trained forward, mouth set in a carefully neutral line.
Harry pretended the mosaic floor tiles contained ancient wisdom about defensive footwork.

Only when they reached the stair landing did Draco speak.

“Well,” Draco said finally, voice controlled, “that was… humiliating.”

Harry blinked. “Snape yelling at us?”

“No.” Draco shot him a sidelong look layered, sharp, unreadable. “The part where the Headmaster implied we were—” he made a minimal, elegant gesture “—bonding.”

Harry’s stomach swooped treacherously. “Right. That.”

Silence stretched again dense, warm, charged, the kind that knew what it was about without naming it.

Draco exhaled through his nose, more slowly than he intended.
“Since when,” he asked, almost contemplative, “does Dumbledore take an interest in my interpersonal development?”

Harry frowned. “You think that’s what he was doing?”

“I think,” Draco said carefully, “that Albus Dumbledore never asks a question he already knows the answer to unless he means to guide someone somewhere. And I would very much like to know why he’s guiding us.”

Harry swallowed. “He said something earlier… about letting people choose who they—”
Harry cut himself off.

Draco’s brow arched, sharp even in exhaustion. “Who they what, Potter?”

Heat crawled up Harry’s collar. “Who they… let matter to them.”

Draco slowed half a step, gaze sharpening. In the stairwell’s dim light, something in his expression flickered wariness, yes, but also curiosity. And something like fear. Or hope.

“Hm.” Draco looked away, hands tightening. “That is uncomfortably observant of him.”

Harry let out a nervous laughter. “Yeah. He’s good at that.”

Draco leaned lightly on the banister, eyes narrowing in thought.  “It just seems odd,” he murmured. “Of everything he could be watching why this? Why now?”

Harry hesitated.

Because something in you is changing.
Because you’re becoming someone I can’t stop seeing.
Because we’re not just learning spells and he knows it.

What he said instead was soft, simple: “Maybe he thinks we shouldn’t do any of this alone.”

Draco made a sound—half huff, half incredulous sigh. “Merlin save me from Gryffindor sentiment.”

But he didn’t step away.

Not immediately.

Instead, after leaving the dueling chamber, he paused on the narrow balcony overlooking the corridor below. From here, he could see the faint silhouettes of Harry and Draco moving under Snape’s unforgiving scrutiny flashes of light, the rhythm of spells, the cadence of two young magics learning—uneasily, unknowingly—to share the same air.

He exhaled a soft, private sound. Equal parts fondness and resignation.

Youth, he thought, was one of the few forces more potent than any spell he’d ever studied.

When he finally reached his office, he closed the door with a gentle click and crossed to the small table by the hearth. Steam rose from the teapot. The scent of bergamot curled around him as he settled into his chair.

From the portrait above the bookshelf came a prim, unimpressed hum.

“You’ve been meddling again, Albus.”

Dumbledore smiled without looking up. “Good afternoon, Dilys.”

Dilys Derwent stepped forward in her painted frame, robes whispering as she folded her arms. “You may greet me all you like. It doesn’t change the fact you’ve nudged two emotionally threadbare young men into close proximity and called it curriculum.”

Dumbledore poured his tea, steam ghosting across his spectacles. “Nudged,” he repeated. “Such a generous word. I prefer to think of it as… arranging the furniture of fate.”

“Mm,” Dilys said skeptically. “And Severus? Do you expect him to endure this?”

“I expect Severus,” Dumbledore replied mildly, “to complain with great creativity.”

Dilys sniffed. “He will be livid.”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

Fawkes gave a soft, knowing trill from his perch.

Dumbledore chuckled. “Yes, yes, my friend. I’m aware I lack subtlety.”

Dilys tilted her head, studying him with a healer’s eye. “Are you certain this is wise? The boy is fragile.”

Dumbledore’s brow lifted. “Which one?”

Dilys hesitated.  “…Both.”

Dumbledore’s eyes warmed, the light in them softened by something older, heavier.  “Precisely why neither should be left to navigate such shifts alone.”

Her expression faltered sympathy threading through her disapproval.

“You’re gambling with tender things,” she murmured. “You arranged that training again with an agenda you refused to name.”

Before he could answer, another figure slid into his frame with a huff of dust and aristocratic disdain.

“Oh do continue,” drawled Phineas Nigellus Black. “It’s been years since anyone scolded him properly.”

Dumbledore sighed, though amusement flickered in his face. “I assure you both, I am meddling far less than you think.”

“Albus,” Dilys said sharply, “you are trying to mend old wounds by stitching new people into their outline.”

Dumbledore stilled.

“You cannot rewrite your mistakes through them,” she continued softly. “Not through their friendship. Not through their pain. And not by nudging them toward each other as if they were pawns in your sentimental little endgame.”

Phineas, for once, was quiet. He studied Dumbledore with dark, hawk-like eyes. “She has a point,” he said at last. “You do have a rather dangerous… tendency.”

Dumbledore set his teacup down with unusual care.“I am not attempting to rewrite the past.”

“No,” Dilys said gently. “You’re attempting to compensate for it.”

And that—finally—made his expression falter.

“Harry and Draco are fragile in different ways,” she went on. “And what’s stirring between them… it is not something you can shepherd without consequence.”

Dumbledore’s gaze drifted, distant.  “I am not blind to what moves beneath the surface.”

“Then you know,” Dilys pressed, lowering her voice, “that the old magic waking in that boy waking in both boys does not take kindly to being steered.”

Phineas straightened in his frame. “Ah. So we’re speaking of that. The resonance.”

Dumbledore lifted a hand. “Names are less important than caution.”

“Caution?” Dilys echoed. “Caution won’t save them if this grows beyond your expectations.”

“Nothing grows beyond my expectations,” Dumbledore said gently.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Phineas snapped. “This magic is older than you. Older than Hogwarts. Older than the first wandmaker to bind intent to core.”

Dilys nodded. “And far more dangerous than a well-meaning nudge between students.”

Dumbledore hesitated.
A small thing.
But his portraits noticed.

“They must choose their path freely,” Dilys said. “Without your hand hovering over the board. You cannot predict how this will unfold.”

Fawkes trilled softly greement threaded with warning.

At last Dumbledore inclined his head.  “I will… step back. A little.”

Phineas snorted. “We shall believe it when we see it.”

Dilys softened. “We only want them safe. Whatever stirs between them will not abide interference.”

Dumbledore folded his hands.  “I understand. But nor will I abandon them to face it unprepared.”

“Remember,” Dilys said, “the line between guiding and steering.”

A shadow crossed Dumbledore’s expression old, sorrowful, familiar.
“Yes,” he murmured. “That line has cost us all enough already.”

He leaned back in his chair, letting the calm light spill across the desk. Too many young people had been devoured by the ambitions of others. Too many bright threads pulled into patterns not of their making.

The portraits watched him in silence.

Then Dilys spoke, voice soft but steady.  “You know what this is, Albus. What it might become. And you know who else once responded to power stirring beneath the surface.”

The room went still.

Phineas’s painted eyes narrowed. “Ah. Him.”

Dumbledore’s shoulders tightened barely, but enough.

Dilys continued.  “Tom Riddle walked these halls brilliant, magnetic, hungry. Unprepared for the depth of the magic he awakened inside himself.”

“Unprepared?” Phineas scoffed. “He embraced it like a spark embraces a powder keg.”

“But if he draws near either boy,” Dilys said, “if he senses even a whisper of resonance he will know its shape. And he will try to take it. Twist it. Make it his.”

Dumbledore’s grip on his teacup tightened.

“He understood old magics better than any student I ever taught,” Phineas said grimly. “If Tom sensed something of this magnitude forming between two wizards, he would see a gift. A weapon.”

Dilys’s voice gentled.“We failed him once failed to guide him, to restrain him, to see what he was becoming until it was far too late.”

She watched Dumbledore with sympathetic severity.“These boys are not Tom. But the force stirring between them is older and stronger than anything Tom ever touched.”

“And if he senses it,” Phineas murmured, “it will draw him like blood draws a shark.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment—just long enough for memory to catch up with him. The handsome boy with the dark eyes. The brilliance. The hunger. The terrible promise.

“That,” he said quietly, “is precisely why I do what I do.”

Dilys frowned. “Because you fear history repeating?”

“Because,” Dumbledore said, opening his eyes, “I know how Tom reacts to unclaimed power. And this—this magic—must not fall into his hands. Or his influence.”

A beat.

Phineas leaned forward. And you believe Potter and Malfoy together… are safer than either alone?”

“I believe,” Dumbledore answered, “that mutual recognition is a shield Tom never mastered. Perhaps never understood.”

Dilys softened. “Even so—do not try to shape their path to undo your failures with him.”

Dumbledore exhaled. “Well,” he murmured, “if the world insists on unraveling, perhaps letting one or two threads knit together would not be the worst outcome.”

A knock at the door broke the quiet.

“Enter,” Dumbledore said.

Snape strode in, scowl sharp enough to cut stone. “Headmaster,” he announced, “you will undo everything I am attempting by indulging in this—this—romantic cheerleading.”

“Romantic?” Dumbledore repeated, eyes twinkling.

Snape made a sound that might have been a growl.

“Do sit down, Severus,” Dumbledore said warmly. “You look in need of tea.”

“I require something significantly stronger,” Snape muttered, collapsing into a chair with the theatrical misery of a man persecuted by fate. Dumbledore slid a teacup toward him.

Snape glared at it as if expecting poison. “They are already… entangled,” he said darkly. “Your interference is not helping.”

“Interference implies I initiated something,” Dumbledore said mildly.

Snape waved a hand, searching for vocabulary large enough to contain his disgust. “Potter and Malfoy require discipline, not whatever this is. Their proximity is not despite your delusions a pedagogically sound strategy.”

“On the contrary,” Dumbledore said, “it appears to be working quite well.”

Snape slumped further.  “If you do nothing, they will—Merlin help us—stumble into catastrophe together.”

“If I do nothing,” Dumbledore corrected gently, “they will simply find their way on their own.”

“That,” Snape snapped, “is precisely what concerns me.”

But beneath the irritation, something else flickered worry. Memory. Old wounds.

Dumbledore’s smile softened.  “Severus… I expect little from matters of the heart. But I do hope. For hope is the one force Tom never mastered.”

Snape’s expression twitched barely, but unmistakably.

Hope.
It had been Lily’s strength.
And his undoing.

Love the one power Tom had never understood.

Snape inhaled sharply, forcing old memories back behind armor forged long ago. He opened his eyes and leveled a cold, steady gaze at Dumbledore.

“Hope,” he said at last, “is not a strategy.”

“Perhaps not,” Dumbledore allowed. “But it remains a kind of strength. One Tom could never wield.”

III. Correspondence. 

Harry bent over his desk with the kind of posture that suggested he was preparing for battle rather than correspondence. The castle was quiet the kind of hollow quiet Hogwarts only managed in summer, when its stones seemed to breathe between terms.

He dipped his quill.

Dear Ron and Hermione,

Hope you're both all right. Hogwarts is… the same as always, just emptier. Too quiet. Too echoey. A bit boring, honestly.

Dumbledore has me on something he’s calling a “summer development curriculum,” which mostly means I’m getting more lessons than any person should survive. Duelling drills with Snape (yes, Snape), Occlumency refreshers (also Snape), and a dozen other “growth opportunities” that sound like they belong on motivational posters.

It’s not all bad. Some of it’s useful. Some of it’s exhausting. And some of it’s… strange.

Malfoy’s here too. Apparently on the same programme. He’s—well—actually kind of decent sometimes.

Write back soon. I could use the distraction.

—Harry

He set the letter aside before he could start rewriting it with the truth.

Nothing in it betrayed the way Draco’s presence tugged at him like gravity. Nothing hinted at the spark of something unnamed curling beneath his ribs. It was safer that way safer than honesty, safer than letting Ron and Hermione read what even Harry himself had not yet dared to name.

He reached for another sheet of parchment.
Fresh. Untouched.
Dangerous.

He hesitated for a long moment before writing.

Padfoot,

I’m safe. Hogwarts is quiet this summer, but it’s… all right. Strange, sometimes. Snape is putting me through dueling drills that would make Moony proud, and I’m learning more than I expected.
(Please don’t tell him I said that.)

Dumbledore thinks the extra training is important. I don’t disagree.

Ron and Hermione want to visit, but security’s tight. I’ll see them when term starts. Being here on my own isn’t as bad as I thought. There’s space to think. 

Snape’s lessons are difficult, but I’m getting better.
(Don’t tell him that, either.)

Hope you’re all right. Write soon.
—Harry

P.S. Say hi to Moony for me.

It wasn’t a lie.
But it wasn’t the truth.

Not the truth of Draco’s shoulder brushing his in the corridor, or the way their magic sometimes hummed in the same rhythm, or how Draco’s laughter rare, startled, unwilling lingered in Harry’s chest long after it faded from the air.

Harry folded the letter neatly.

Some truths need time, he told himself.

The reply arrived three days later, delivered by a stocky school owl who refused to release the envelope until bribed with an entire box of treats.

Harry tore it open.

Harry,

Good to hear you’re alive and not being force-fed deathcap fumes by Snape.
(It nearly happened to me once. He’ll deny it.)

Things on my end are busy. Dumbledore has me helping with a few things nothing dangerous, don’t make that face but it means I can’t pop up to the castle. He says there are “movements” to watch. Didn’t say what kind. I’m starting to think he tells each of us something different just to keep us dizzy.

Moony says he’s pleased you’re training with Snape. (Merlin knows why.) Says you’ve got “instinct.” Of course you do — you’re James’s son.

Now then, about Malfoy.

You said nothing, which tells me everything.

I don’t trust that boy. Never have. Malfoys don’t make moves without motive, and Lucius’s motives are never good. If Draco’s there, someone wants him there. That should make every hair on your neck stand up.

So keep your guard up. Be friendly if it keeps him talking, but don’t let him close enough to do damage.

If you can learn something—anything—about why he’s there, you should.

Dumbledore will want to know. And it’s no harm if you keep a step ahead. You’re strong, Harry. Stronger than you think. Use that. Use everything you’ve got.

Write soon. I worry when you go quiet.

—Padfoot

P.S. Moony says hi.

Harry read the letter twice.
Then again.

The words didn’t soften.

The parchment crackled under his fingers thin, delicate, as though it might tear from the strain of holding too much expectation.

Be strong.
Use everything you’ve got.
Spy on Malfoy.

Not an order, not exactly.
But a push. A nudge back into a role Harry thought he’d outgrown.

A familiar ache bloomed beneath his ribs a soundless, shapeless hurt that had followed him for years. He pressed his palms to his eyes, swallowing something sharp.

He had wanted a godfather.
What he’d been given was a comrade.

He picked up the letter again, thumb brushing the crease.

How could Sirius ask him to weaponize this strange, fragile thing growing between him and Draco?
How could he not see that Harry was tired bone-deep tired of being used like a compass pointing toward war?

More than that:

Sirius’s distrust felt like a judgment on Harry himself.
On his judgment.
On his heart.

As if caring tentatively, quietly made him naive.

As if reaching for Draco meant Harry didn’t understand danger.

He leaned back against the cool stone wall, letting the castle steady him.

He loved Sirius. He would always love Sirius.

But Sirius’s world was carved from battle scars and old loyalties sharp-edged places where tenderness was indistinguishable from risk. Harry wasn’t sure he wanted to live inside those lines anymore.

Not when, for the first time in years, he’d found something that felt like choice.

He folded the letter carefully.

Some truths, he thought, needed courage not time.

Draco found it waiting on his pillow when he returned to his room a single sheet of parchment folded with surgical precision, the Malfoy seal pressed into wax so pale it was nearly colorless.

His stomach tightened before he even touched it.

Lucius Malfoy’s handwriting was as exacting as his tone: elegant, cold, immaculate. A blade disguised as script.

Draco,

I have been informed of your continued residence at Hogwarts for the summer months. While the decision was not one I would have endorsed, I trust you will conduct yourself with the discipline expected of a Malfoy.

You are instructed to maintain strategic awareness of those around you. Circumstances may shift rapidly in the coming months, and alliances both visible and invisible will be of significant import. You are not to engage in unnecessary fraternization, particularly with individuals whose loyalties remain questionable.

Your education remains your highest priority. I expect you to advance in your studies beyond the standard curriculum. Any sign of complacency would be deeply disappointing.

Your mother sends her regards.

You will write soon.

— Father

Draco stared at the signature for a long moment, searching for warmth where none had ever existed. The flourish at the end of the script was flawless, remote a reminder that affection was not a commodity Lucius considered necessary when shaping a son.

Expectation without care. Demand without devotion. A ledger of obligations masquerading as guidance.

He folded the letter the way he had been taught: once, neatly, without hesitation.

Then he sat on the edge of his bed, elbows braced on his knees, the world blurring at the edges.
Strategic awareness.
Alliances.
Fraternization.

Every word chosen with surgical intent.
Every sentence tightening the old, familiar knot beneath his ribs.

The worst part was how predictable it all felt cold, clinical, safe in its cruelty.
Draco almost missed that predictability.

Almost.

He slipped the letter into the drawer beside his bed the drawer reserved for things he did not want but could not throw away. A broken cufflink from childhood robes. A set of quills that no longer wrote. A vial of ink his mother had given him at eleven, half-dried now but still uncapped.

The letter fit there too: another relic of a life Draco had not chosen, but still carried.

He closed the drawer gently. Almost tenderly.

Throwing it away would mean admitting he no longer wanted what his father wanted for him. And Draco did not yet know how to live in a world where that was true.

His gaze drifted toward the window, where the training grounds shimmered in the fading evening light.

Harry’s voice resurfaced, unbidden:
Tomorrow?
Yeah. Tomorrow.

Draco pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes.

He didn’t know what he was doing.
He didn’t know what he was allowed to want.
But he knew this: whatever was growing between him and Harry, his father would despise before it even had a name.

And for the first time in his life, Draco wasn’t sure that mattered.

Draco arrived precisely eight minutes late which was enough to make Snape’s eyes narrow the moment he slipped into the room.

Harry noticed instantly. His gaze snapped to Draco, searching for the version of him he’d seen yesterday and finding only blankness.

“Positions,” Snape ordered.

They obeyed.

But Draco’s movements were too perfect. Too precise. Every motion rehearsed, as if he were performing a spell demonstration rather than participating in a duel.

Harry cast first a gentle Disarming Charm, more question than challenge.

Draco blocked it flawlessly.
Soullessly.

Snape’s brow dropped a degree.

“Again.”

Draco complied, but his spells were brittle clean lines with hollow centers. Glass masquerading as steel.

Harry hesitated. “Are you—?”

“Potter,” Snape snapped. “This is a dueling session, not a pastoral intervention.”

Still, he watched Draco with the dark, analytic gaze of a man who knew exactly what kind of letter could turn a boy into a statue overnight.

Lucius’s shadow practically clung to the edges of Draco’s stance.

When Draco’s shield flickered just once, just enough Snape sliced through the tension with a sharp gesture.

“Stop.”

Both boys froze.

Snape stepped between them, studying Draco with the precision of a man trained to spot injuries that never bruised skin.

“Mr. Malfoy,” he said quietly — too quietly — “you are casting as though someone is standing behind you with a sledgehammer.”

Draco’s head jerked up, mask cracking. “I’m fine.”

“Yes,” Snape said dryly, “and I am a cheerful optimist with unshakeable faith in teenage emotional stability.”

Harry choked on a laugh. Draco didn’t.

Snape let out a slow, aggravated breath one layered with something disturbingly close to concern.

“You will both take five minutes,” he ordered. “Hydrate. Stretch. Attempt not to brood within my line of sight.”

He turned sharply, decisively but not quickly enough to hide the flicker of recognition in his eyes when Draco looked down, arms curled across his chest, cradling an invisible weight. 

Snape knew this posture.
Knew its origin.
Knew its author.

Lucius, he thought bitterly.  Always Lucius.

He would not ask.
Draco would not answer.
But Severus Snape had spent too many years in the Malfoy orbit not to recognize when the father’s ghost had walked into the room.

And he would be damned if he let that ghost unravel whatever fragile progress the boys had made.

“Five minutes,” Snape repeated. “And then you will both attempt to duel like competent human beings.”

Draco didn’t respond.
Harry watched him.
Snape watched them both.

Then, quieter than he meant to—quieter than he ever allowed—

“Neither of you,” Snape said, “is required to perform for ghosts.”

Snape turned away at once.

He had already said too much.

Harry found him easily.

He hadn’t meant to. He’d been walking the quiet corridors only to clear his head, letting the old floorboards creak beneath his feet in a rhythm steady enough to drown out the churn of thoughts irius’s letter, Draco’s brittle spellwork, Snape’s sharp-eyed suspicion. But somewhere along the path, something in his chest gave a faint pull. Not painful. Not alarming. Just… directional.

By the time he noticed where his feet were taking him, he was halfway up the Astronomy Tower.

The door stood almost closed.

Harry pushed it open with care.

Draco stood at the railing, washed in moonlight. His pale hair caught the wind, his shoulders held in a tension too neat, too deliberate the posture of someone who had been holding their breath for hours and had forgotten how to release it. For a moment he looked carved from stone: elegant, composed, and one fracture away from breaking.

Harry didn’t speak.

Draco turned slightly when he sensed him, a soft sigh not startled, but exposed. As though Harry had stepped into the middle of a thought he’d hoped to keep unspoken.

“You’re up late,” Draco murmured.

“Could say the same about you.”

A humorless sound escaped Draco. “Sleep isn’t… cooperative tonight.”

Harry stepped beside him, leaving a respectful sliver of distance. The tower opened into the sky, the lake gleaming below, long black ribbons shivering with the breeze. He could hear Draco breathing — quiet, steady, strained.

“Your casting was off today,” Harry said softly. It wasn’t blame. Or a question.

“I know.” Draco’s fingers tightened on the railing. “It won’t happen again.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Harry frowned. “You don’t have to pretend everything’s fine.”

Draco huffed a laugh dry, self-mocking. “Don’t I? That’s rather the family specialty.”

Harry’s chest tightened. Not with frustration. With recognition.

Silence settled between them, cold wind threading the gap.

“My father wrote,” Draco said at last.

Harry didn’t move, but he felt something inside him harden. “Was it bad?”

“A Malfoy letter is never bad.” Draco’s voice was thin, almost careful. “It is precise. Instructional. A reminder of one’s… obligations.”

He exhaled, shakily controlled.
“Expectations. Alliances. Appropriate conduct. And warnings about misplacing loyalty.”

Harry felt the sting for him. “I’m sorry.”

Draco startled a small, involuntary flicker of surprise. Affection was not something he was used to receiving without a price. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

“No,” Harry said softly. “But it still hurts.”

Draco turned fully then, and Harry saw it: the exhaustion; the faint redness around the eyes; the barely-held line of someone who had been propping himself up with discipline alone.

“I kept the letter,” Draco whispered, shame buried beneath the confession. “I couldn’t burn it.”

Harry nodded, gentle. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

A tremor crossed Draco’s expression. “You don’t think that means I agree with him?”

“No.” Harry let his fingers brush cold stone. “I got a letter too.”

Draco’s gaze snapped to him.

“From Sirius,” Harry said. “He thinks I should be watching you. Reporting on you. Treating you like a threat instead of—”

He hesitated. The word sat raw on his tongue.

“—instead of someone I want to understand. Someone I want to be near.”
A blush warmed his cheeks. “Someone I… want to touch.”

Relief hit him so suddenly he couldn’t disguise it the relief of finally saying it out loud.

“I didn’t tell him anything real,” Harry continued. “Not to protect you. To protect myself. Because I don’t think he’d hear the truth. Not the parts that matter.”

A broken laugh escaped him. “I guess we both have letters that are hard to burn.”

Something in Draco softened, cracked not breaking, but opening.

Harry stepped closer. “You don’t have to be what he wants,” he said. “Not with me.”

Draco swallowed, throat working around emotion he couldn’t name.

Moonlight caught the hope in his eyes. And the fear. And something tentative underneath both.

“Harry,” Draco whispered, almost warning.

“I’m not asking for anything,” Harry said gently. “Just… don’t carry this alone.”

Draco’s eyes closed — just once, just for a heartbeat — and his shoulders dropped, the smallest release of a weight too long held.

When he opened his eyes again, he met Harry’s gaze without the mask.

“…Thank you.” 

One late afternoon, the sun slanted through the high library windows, turning the drifting dust into molten gold. Harry was hunched over a page of notes, jaw tight with concentration. The margins were a mess of arrows and half-corrections Hermione’s training had stuck, even if her precision never had but he was trying. Really trying.

Draco approached quietly and stood behind him, scanning the page.

“You’re citing the wrong source for that ward,” he said.

Harry blinked up at him. “Am I?”

Draco leaned closer, eyes flicking between Harry’s scrawl and the open book. “Yes. Check the appendix the counter-application shifts the structural base.”

Harry stared. “You read the appendix?”

Draco’s mouth twitched, elegant and faintly smug. “It was useful. Stop being surprised when I know things.”

Harry snorted despite himself, and Draco added, softly, “The rest of this is good.”

Harry’s ears warmed. “Thanks.”

He looked down at their notes his messy script, Draco’s neat annotations where he'd leaned over earlier and something in his chest tugged unexpectedly.

And then the thought came, uninvited but honest:

I like this.
I actually like this.

Studying.
Working through ideas at a steady pace.
Not rushing to finish before dinner, or pretending not to care, or trying to absorb weeks of theory the night before exams.

He liked understanding things.
He always had.
He just… never had the space for it.

Hermione had been a brilliant guide, but she moved too fast.
Ron his best mate in everything that mattered treated homework like a chore to be survived, not shared. They had learned side by side, but never together.

Harry had never had this the quiet hum of someone thinking with him, not ahead of him or behind him or sighing over him. Someone who treated the work like an art, not a battle or a burden.

Merlin, he thought, if I’d shaken Draco’s hand that day in Madam Malkin’s…

He pictured it:

Afternoons like this one heads bent over the same parchment, debating theory instead of trading insults. Learning not as competition but conversation. A friend who didn’t tease him for asking questions or hesitate to argue a point on its merits.

He felt a sudden, unexpected ache not yearning, but grief for a road untaken.

Is this what it could have been?
Is this what I missed?

Draco shifted in his chair, parchment whispering.

Harry’s hand moved before he could think, sliding beneath the table to brush Draco’s sleeve. Tentative, shy, seeking not attention but contact.

Draco stilled.

Harry tugged lightly — hardly a touch at all — a silent question he didn’t know how to voice.

After a heartbeat, Draco’s fingers slipped into his.

Slow. Careful. Deliberate.

Their hands rested together in the shadow between them, unnoticed by the world but unmistakably real.

And in that fragile, quiet moment Harry realized something with startling clarity:

Maybe I didn’t miss it.
Maybe I’m finally getting it.

The dueling classroom was too quiet.

Not peaceful heavy, the way a room becomes after witnessing something it has no business hearing. The lanterns along the walls flickered with long, uneven shadows, carving Snape’s profile into something sharp and restless.

They left the practice room together after their morning session, both a little winded, both pretending they weren’t. The corridor beyond was cool and dim, the stones holding the night’s chill despite the late-summer sun outside.

Draco walked a pace ahead at first, his posture meticulously composed but Harry knew him well enough now to recognize the tiny signs of strain: the faint tremble in Draco’s fingers after a heavy spell, the way he flexed his jaw to hide it.

“Your shield work was good,” Harry said quietly.

Draco didn’t look at him. “It was adequate.”

“It was better than adequate.”

A soft exhale something like annoyance, something like relief.

They moved toward the staircase together, the space between them narrowing naturally. Draco slowed without thinking; Harry matched him without thinking. Their shoulders didn’t touch, but the air felt warmer where they nearly aligned.

Draco spoke again, voice lower. “You keep watching me.”

Harry blinked. “I was making sure you were all right.”

Draco stopped. Just stopped. Not dramatically just enough to make Harry stop too.

He turned his head slightly, not quite meeting Harry’s eyes. “You don’t need to do that.”

Harry opened his mouth to respond, but Draco cut in before he could.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Most of the time.”

There was a fragile honesty in it. A truth offered reluctantly. It softened something in Harry’s chest.

“I know you do,” Harry said simply.

That earned him a glance quick, sharp, unsettled. Draco looked away again, but his voice was steadier when he spoke next.

“It’s just… if you keep looking at me like that, Potter, people might start to think there’s something you’re not saying.”

Harry’s breath stilled. He wasn’t sure what answer Draco expected. He wasn’t sure he had one.

Draco didn’t wait for a response. He continued down the stairs, a little too briskly, the line of his shoulders a fraction tighter.

Draco didn’t move away when Harry matched his pace.
Not even a breath.

Something settled between them quiet, steady, almost imperceptible, as though their magic had begun listening before either of them had spoken.

It held as they crossed the corridor, as they stepped through the classroom door, as they took their places opposite one another. A faint awareness, nothing more but present, unmistakably so.

They raised their wands. Harry’s sleeve was half burnt through; Draco had a scorch mark grazing his hip. They looked battered, but standing. Stronger. More dangerous.

Snape pressed his thumb into the inner curve of his left wrist, feeling the faint burn beneath the Mark.

The Dark Lord was restless.

Restlessness meant scrutiny.

“Again,” Snape said, though both boys were flagging.

Harry grimaced. “Sir, we’ve—”

“War does not pause for celebrities, Potter” Snape snapped. “Your limbs must obey before your mind has time to second-guess.”

Draco stiffened at the tone cold, exacting, the tone Snape reserved for pressure-cooking fear into obedience. Yet something in Snape’s eyes didn’t match it. His gaze flicked to Draco’s wand grip, then to Harry’s stance. Calculating. Worried.

He lifted a hand for them to begin again.

The hand trembled.

Both boys saw it.

Draco’s voice softened. “Professor…?”

Snape crossed the room in three steps, black robes snapping behind him like the trailing edge of a storm.

“Everything is wrong, Draco,” he said quietly.

They reset. Harry cast; Draco deflected. Their movements were crisp, controlled, almost too sharp as if the tension in the room were working through them.

Snape paced around them, steps measured, hands clasped tightly behind his back. His expression was its usual mask of disapproval, but there was something else underneath alertness, or dread.

He opened his mouth to correct Draco’s footwork when a tight, muted pulse crawled up his arm.

He stilled.

Not the searing call of punishment.
Not the vicious yank of an order.

The summons.

Quiet. Expected. Inescapable.

His jaw locked. He pressed his fingers into his sleeve until the tremor stopped, but Draco saw. Draco always saw.

“Sir?” Harry asked. “Is something—?”

“Put your wand down,” Snape said. The words were even, but stretched thin.

Draco had gone pale. He didn’t ask which summons. He already knew.

“How long?” Draco murmured, stepping closer.

“Long enough,” Snape replied.

Harry looked between them, unsettled. “What does that mean? What’s happening?”

Neither answered.

Snape inhaled once, through his nose, grounding himself against whatever waited for him on the other end of the Mark.

Finally he straightened, and the mask slid into place.

“I am required elsewhere,” he said.

Draco’s throat worked. “Is this… about me?”

“No.” The answer was immediate, clipped. “This concerns administrative matters.”

Harry frowned. “Administrative?”

Draco didn’t look at him. “Internal work,” he said softly the kind of soft that meant don’t ask.

Silence settled over the room like a cold cloth.

Snape looked between them and said, with quiet fury, “I have risked my life for sixteen years. I will continue to do so. But I cannot protect idiots who refuse to train.”

The words were harsh.
The fear behind them was not.

Draco’s fingers curled into fists. “Then teach us more,” he said. “Teach us what matters.”

For a heartbeat Snape stopped breathing.

Something like pride flickered through him brief, rare, quickly buried.

“You are not ready for everything, Mr. Malfoy.” His voice softened. Just enough to be felt. “But you are ready for more.”

He turned to Harry.

“And you, Potter, must learn to control your Gryffindor idiocy. The Dark Lord will exploit any crack he finds.”

Another pulse shivered beneath his sleeve sharper, impatient.

Snape’s eyes closed briefly. When they opened, the man was gone and the double agent was back.

“You will remain here,” Snape said. “Both of you. Continue the exercises. Do not leave unless absolutely necessary.”

Draco stepped forward, involuntary. “Sir—”

Snape’s reply was quiet, almost pained. “Not you, Draco. Not this time.”

Something wordless passed between them ear, and a brittle understanding forged over years of secrets neither could speak aloud.

Snape’s voice dipped. “The Dark Lord searches for weakness. For deviation. Your famil—” he swallowed the word father “—has been under scrutiny since the Ministry.”

A thin flicker of pain crossed Draco’s face.

“And I,” Snape added, “am expected to report on your progress. On both of you.”

Harry’s stomach dropped. “Are you going to?”

“If I were,” Snape said coldly, “you would both be dead.”

He looked at Harry. “Stay with him.”

Harry nodded. “I will.”

Snape gave them one final look one sharp, heavy sweep of his gaze that carried warning, regret, and something like hope then swept from the room.

The latch clicked.

Draco flinched.

Harry moved closer. “Draco… what does this mean?”

Draco straightened as if assembling armor, rib by rib.

“It means,” he said quietly, “that for the next hour, everything we do must look ordinary.”

Harry nodded. Even if nothing felt ordinary at all.

Draco finally looked at him. There was fear there—thin, trembling—but wrapped so tightly in discipline it almost disappeared.

“Please,” Draco whispered, “just… don’t ask questions yet.”

Harry didn’t move away.

“All right,” he said.

He didn’t notice the hum at first.
Subtle. Almost imagined.

But then it tightened threading up through the floorboards, through the soles of his shoes, rising like a low vibration beneath the world. The torches dimmed by a shade, then steadied. 

Something had stirred.

Something tied to them.

“Draco…” Harry said softly. “Tell me you felt that.”

Draco stood rigid, magic too close to the surface. “It reacts when I don’t want it to,” he said. “I’d prefer it didn’t. Especially now.”

Another faint rumble passed beneath the floor.

Draco shut his eyes, breath controlled, pulling his magic back with disciplined precision. Slowly, the trembling in the air receded.

“If the Dark Lord is reviewing the ledger…” Draco said, “we’ll know soon enough.”

Harry’s voice gentled. “Tell me what you need.”

Draco hesitated. Then:

“Stay close. If anything changes… you’ll see it in me first.”

So Harry stepped nearer not touching, not pressing, just beside him.

“All right,” he said.

Draco’s tension eased by a thread.
Small. Almost nothing.

But enough.

Snape did not sit.

He stood before Dumbledore’s desk with shoulders squared, posture rigid, an unmoving silhouette carved out of restraint rather than calm. The lamplight flickered over his face, sharpening every line of fatigue he refused to acknowledge.

“He asked about Draco,” Snape said without preamble.

Dumbledore’s fingers stilled atop the parchment before him.

Snape continued, voice even but stretched thin. “He inquired after Draco’s progress. His… usefulness.” The last word left his mouth like something foul. “He pressed for details on how Draco is being trained. Why Hogwarts is necessary.”

Dumbledore’s eyes sharpened. “In what context?”

“The cover story holds,” Snape said crisply. “For now. He believes Draco is here under my supervision to refine the skillset required of an operative who may be redeployed when the time is… advantageous.” His tone was brittle as frost. “I emphasized the advantages of structure. Discretion. Distance from political scrutiny. I gave him the version of Draco he prefers to believe in a sharpened instrument, not a liability.”

Disgust threaded soft but unmistakable through his words.

Dumbledore’s expression dimmed. “And he accepted this?”

“For now.” Snape wiped a weary hand across his face, “He considers Draco’s presence at Hogwarts to be strategic repositioning.”

Dumbledore waited.

Snape finally said it. “He expects leadership.”

Dumbledore’s mouth tightened. “Leadership,” he repeated. “In what form?”

“A symbol,” Snape said coldly. “A young aristocrat, ambitious and loyal. He imagines Draco rebuilding the ‘natural order’ among pure-blood families. Encouraging allegiance. Identifying resistance.”

Dumbledore leaned back, sighing heavily. “He intends Draco to be a recruiter.”

“And more,” Snape said. “A figurehead. Someone to shape sentiment among the students. Someone who inspires obedience simply by inheriting the right name.”

A shadow crossed Dumbledore’s face grief, old and tired.

“What did you tell him?” he asked quietly.

“That Draco shows promise,” Snape replied, every syllable dripping with disdain, “and that he is malleable under proper guidance.”

He paused.

It was a long, brittle pause.

“And Potter?” Dumbledore asked.

Snape’s lips curled into something almost like a grimace. “He asked whether Draco still resents Potter. Whether their rivalry remains… motivating.” His voice lowered. “Voldemort assumes Draco’s value lies in proximity to Potter as an adversary. It is one of the few blind spots he has left.”

“And what did you say?” Dumbledore pressed.

“That Potter irritates Draco, and working near him sharpens Draco’s resolve.” A dry, exhausted whisper. “A lie he was eager to believe.”

Dumbledore nodded once. “The safest lie is the one he already hopes is true.”

Silence grew between them heavy, thick, coiling.

“He is watching Draco,” Snape said finally. “The next inquiry will be sharper. He will not be diverted easily.”

“Because Draco is changing,” Dumbledore murmured.

Snape’s gaze flicked sharply to him a quiet, unmistakable confirmation.

“Potter complicates everything,” Snape said at last. His voice, stripped of sarcasm, was something close to weary. “Draco is shifting. He moderates himself around Potter. He allows Potter to see things he hides from everyone else. Restraint. Hesitation. His… gentler instincts.”

Dumbledore’s eyebrows lifted, but he remained silent.

Snape pushed on. “That is not influence it is vulnerability. And that is the most dangerous thing Draco can offer anyone at this moment. Least of all Potter.”

Dumbledore’s tone softened. “Vulnerability is not a flaw.”

“In wartime?” Snape snapped. “It is a target.”

Dumbledore’s voice gentled further. “He is not being watched for softness, Severus. He is being watched for autonomy.”

Snape’s head turned sharply at that. “Do not pretend the distinction will save him.”

Dumbledore did not deny it.

Snape paced once, twice, robes trailing like a storm-cloud behind him.

“The Dark Lord expects obedience. Predictability. A dutiful heir who has rediscovered ambition.” His voice dropped. “Instead, he will find uncertainty. Independence. And Potter.”

“And Potter,” Dumbledore echoed softly.

Snape stopped pacing. “Draco has already been given a burden to repay Lucius’s failure. Not one designed for achievement one designed for sacrifice.” His voice was razor-thin. “Every breath Draco takes is weighed against his mother’s safety.”

Dumbledore’s eyes shuttered closed for a brief moment.

“And now,” Snape continued, voice cracking at the edges though he controlled it ruthlessly, “you are pushing him closer to Potter. You are cultivating a bond that demands trust — honesty — alignment. A bond that invites attachment.”

He stepped closer to the desk, shadows trembling around him.

“You are forcing him toward a choice.”

Dumbledore opened his eyes slowly.

Snape finished, quiet and devastating:

“Between his mother… and Potter.”

It hung between them like a tolling bell.

Fawkes gave a low, mournful trill.

Dumbledore’s voice, when it came, was soft as rain. “Severus… he must not be left to choose alone.”

Snape stared, incredulous. “You would rather he choose Potter.”

“Severus,” Dumbledore said gently, “you assume that closeness endangers Narcissa. But you forget what Voldemort fears most.”

Snape’s jaw tightened. “He fears very little.”

“On the contrary.” Dumbledore leaned forward, blue eyes bright with painful clarity. “He fears what he cannot control. What does not bend to his logic. What grows without his design.”

He let the next words fall with careful weight.

“The magic awakening between Harry and Draco — this resonance — strengthens the one part of Draco the Dark Lord has never been able to touch.”

Snape’s stare was sharp, almost cutting. “And what part is that?”

Dumbledore smiled tired, sad, sure.

“Choice.”

Snape’s breath caught, barely perceptible.

“It is not love for Potter that will save Narcissa,” Dumbledore continued. “Nor obedience to Voldemort. It is Draco’s capacity to choose something beyond fear. Beyond legacy. Beyond the script written for him before he could speak.”

Snape’s eyes were two deep wounds. “Choice is precisely what the Dark Lord punishes.”

“Only if he perceives it,” Dumbledore said softly. “And Tom has never understood bonds that form quietly beneath conflict, beneath expectation.”

Snape looked away.

Dumbledore’s voice lowered. “We must strengthen them. Not to accelerate affection. But to fortify what will protect them both.”

“You are preparing them for a role they do not understand,” Snape whispered.

“Yes,” Dumbledore said.

“They are children.”

“They are also the ones Voldemort does not understand,” Dumbledore replied.

Snape’s fists clenched. “And if Voldemort discovers this connection? If he sees even the faintest shift in Draco’s allegiance—”

Dumbledore’s gaze gentled. “Then we protect them. As long as we can.”

Snape’s voice broke on the next words, though he kept them level. “You ask me to train them like warriors. To mold them into weapons he cannot turn. To prepare them for slaughter—”

“Severus,” Dumbledore said quietly, “you are saving them.”

Snape closed his eyes.

A long breath.

A long, tired breath.

“I fear,” he whispered, “that it will not be enough.”

“So do I,” Dumbledore said.

Harry wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking.

The halls were washed in the grey-blue light of pre-dawn, the hour when Hogwarts felt half-asleep and half-aware, as though the castle itself was listening. His thoughts had been circling since the previous night Snape’s tension, Draco’s rigid composure, the quiet thrum of magic he couldn’t name. It all sat beneath his ribs like something unfinished.

He stopped only when he realized where his feet had carried him.

Snape’s office.

Harry stared at the door for a long moment. He almost turned around—almost—but the weight in his chest refused to shift.

So he knocked.

The door cracked open at once, as though Snape had been standing right behind it. His eyes were alert, sharp, but tired in a way Harry had never seen when he was teaching.

“Potter.”

Harry swallowed. “I—I wanted to thank you, sir.”

Snape blinked. It was the closest Harry had ever seen him come to looking caught off guard.

“For what?” Snape asked, voice flat but thin at the edges.

“For keeping us alive,” Harry said.

Snape’s mouth twitched an expression too complicated to name. Somewhere between disbelief and the grief of someone who had been holding his breath for sixteen years.

“Do not thank me, Potter,” Snape said quietly. “Do what I tell you. That is thanks enough.”

Harry nodded, slow and earnest. “Still… I know you’re risking a lot.”

Snape’s gaze flicked sharply aside. “More than you know.”

Harry felt something tighten in his throat. He forced himself to speak anyway. “Then I’ll make it worth it.”

For a heartbeat—just one—the mask cracked.

Behind it, Harry saw the man: furious, exhausted, terrified, protective. Someone who had been bracing himself against the world so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen.

“See that you do,” Snape whispered.

The door clicked shut before Harry could reply.

He stood there for a long moment, heart pounding with something like clarity.

Snape wasn’t just training them.
He wasn’t just preparing them.

He was preparing to save them.

Even if it cost him everything.

IV. Resonance

Dear Ron and Hermione,

Hope you’re both doing all right. Things here are… busy. Snape has us doing advanced dueling drills already, which is exactly as fun as it sounds.

Snape is in a mood, even for him. I think teaching an almost-empty school is making him more sarcastic didn’t think that was possible, but here we are.

Malfoy and I train together.
It isn’t terrible.

We didn’t hex each other once, which feels like a school record. And Snape didn’t throw a cauldron at either of us, which definitely counts as victory.

It’s odd being almost civil with him. Not normal, exactly, but not constant war either. He’s… different when the castle is quiet. Still a prat, but less theatrical about it. He’s… actually kind of okay.

Ron, don’t panic. I haven’t lost my mind.

Write soon. Miss you both more than I expected.

—Harry

Hermione read Harry’s letter once. Then again. Then again each pass deepening the crease between her eyebrows.

Ron was sprawled across her bed in the Burrow’s attic room, hanging upside down like an overturned beetle and eating a biscuit like it was a tactical exercise.

“Well?” he asked through crumbs. “Is he alive? Has Snape murdered him yet? Has Dumbledore drafted him into a troll-fighting initiative? Has he eaten anything besides toast?”

Hermione handed him the letter.

Ron skimmed three lines before making an affronted sound that echoed off the sloped ceiling.

“More dueling lessons? With Malfoy? Over the summer? That’s—not right. That’s child endangerment.”

He read farther.

Then froze.

“Wait. ‘Malfoy is actually okay’—WHAT?”

Hermione sighed. “Yes. I noticed that too.”

Ron sat upright so fast he nearly knocked over the lamp. “What does he mean okay? Malfoy’s never been okay! He’s—he’s—Malfoy!”

Hermione folded the letter with the gentleness of someone handling a dangerous magical artifact.

“Harry downplays things,” Ron snapped. “If he says something is fine, something is definitely not fine.”

“I know,” Hermione murmured. “But I also know Harry. If something were wrong, he wouldn’t hide it from us.”

Ron stared at her with a mix of worry, disbelief, and begrudging acceptance of Harry’s eternal chaos.

“At least he hasn’t quit Quidditch,” he muttered.

Hermione rolled her eyes but smiled. “Come on. Let’s write back. And… maybe ask a few clarifying questions.”

Ron groaned. “He’s going to hate that.”

“He’ll survive,” Hermione said briskly. “He always does.”

Dear Padfoot,

Hope you and Moony are doing all right. Snape’s lessons are brutal. I’m doing intensive dueling, defensive transfiguration, precision hex work you’d actually be impressed. (Don’t tell Snape.)

Malfoy trains with me every day.

I know what you’re thinking but it’s not like that. He’s tolerable if he’s focused. And he’s really good at defensive spells, which I guess makes sense. Snape pushes us hard enough that we have to cooperate or die, and Malfoy’s sharper than I remember.

I’m paying attention. I know this year is going to matter.

Write when you can.

—Harry

Dear Remus,

Things aren’t too exhausting. Strange, but manageable.

Snape has us working harder than usual precision drills, synchronizing spellwork, all that. He keeps hinting it’ll matter “far sooner than I think.” Comforting, right?

Malfoy’s here too. Honestly… he’s been surprisingly steady. Sharp, but steady. We’re not friends—not really—but we’re not ripping each other apart either. It’s like a truce. Odd, but it works.

Please don’t tell Sirius I said that.

And thanks for reminding me to eat. Snape’s sessions are draining enough I sometimes forget.

Hope you’re well. Write soon.

—Harry

The Room had softened itself again candlelight pooling low, cushions arranged without pattern, blankets gathered like quiet invitations. Draco sat hunched on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, gaze fixed on something Harry couldn’t see.

Harry lowered himself beside him, careful not to crowd.
“You okay?”

Draco hesitated, eyes shifting once. “Do you tell them everything? Your friends.”

Harry’s voice caught. “…Not everything.”

Draco nodded, but it wasn’t agreement more a bracing for impact. “And this?” he asked, voice quieter.

Harry studied him, really studied him the guarded tilt of his chin, the tension at his throat.
“I don’t know how to explain this yet,” Harry said. “To anyone. I’m still… figuring out what this is.”

Some of the tightness around Draco’s eyes loosened. His shoulders dropped a fraction.
“So I’m not something you’re hiding,” he murmured. It wasn’t an accusation. It was fear.

Harry reached out before he thought better of it, taking his hand. Draco’s pulse hammered against his fingers.
“No,” Harry said, steady. “I’m not ashamed of you.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty it settled between them like something shared and fragile. Harry felt the words rising in his chest, unshaped but certain.

I care about you.
I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t think I want to.

Draco exhaled, a slow release, and shifted closer. “Me too.”
The simplicity of it landed with more weight than Harry expected.

They might have stopped there.
They didn’t.

The quiet drew them together until Harry felt Draco’s breath on his cheek. Something in him slipped the careful discipline of the last weeks giving way to instinct. He leaned in.

Draco met him with the same decisive hesitation, as if both of them had been waiting for the other to move first.

The first kiss was soft, exploratory the kind that asked a question. The second answered it. The third deepened into something deliberate, Draco’s hands sliding into Harry’s hair with a tremor he didn’t bother to hide. Harry pulled him closer, feeling Draco melt into the touch, all resistance dissolving into warmth and certainty.

When they parted at last, foreheads touching,  Draco let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh or sigh more a quiet release he hadn’t meant to let slip.

Their fingers remained twined, unmoving, the warmth between their palms more grounding than the cushions or the candles or even the magic that shaped the room.

Later, when Draco walked Harry back toward Gryffindor Tower, their hands brushed once, then found each other deliberately. Draco lingered near the portrait hole, close enough that Harry could feel the warmth of him.

“Goodnight,” Draco murmured, voice low, steady, private.

Harry lifted Draco’s hand to his lips without thinking.

“Goodnight,” he whispered.

Draco’s expression soft, hopeful, undone in a way he would never show anyone else stayed with Harry long after the portrait swung shut.

Snape stepped out as if carved from them, arms folded, eyes sharp enough to flay. “Mr. Malfoy.”
His gaze flicked over Draco’s disheveled hair, flushed mouth, glowing skin.

“You’re returning late.”

Draco stiffened, summoning the full weight of pureblood composure.
“Lost track of time.”

Snape raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. One imagines that is quite easy when one is… distracted.”

Heat crawled up Draco’s neck. “I was studying.”

“Mm.”Silk, sharpened to a blade.
“And does Mr. Potter regularly assist with your late-night academic endeavors?”

Draco dropped his gaze. “Professor—”

Snape sighed long, weary, too honest. A sound from someone terrified of caring. “Be careful,” he said quietly. “Whatever you are courting… do not underestimate its cost.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“No,” Snape answerednot mocking, but mournful. “You truly don’t.”

Concern flickered over his face before he snapped his mask back into place.

“Go to bed,” he ordered, stepping aside. “Before exhaustion worsens your already questionable judgment.”

Draco passed him and did not see the way Snape watched him go, worry carving new lines into a face already carved by too much.

Snape was in one of his merciless moods.

He paced the duelling chamber like someone waiting for a verdict, wand in hand, eyes sharp. Without warning, he sent spells snapping across the room sometimes at Harry, sometimes at Draco, sometimes at both.

Harry barely got a shield up before the impact rattled his arm. Draco blocked the next curse, but his stance faltered.

“Again,” Snape said.

Draco’s wand dipped. “Sir—”

“Do not speak,” Snape cut in, softer than a shout, far more dangerous. “Move.”

Three spells followed in a blur. Harry caught the first. Draco countered the second sloppy, but successful. The third struck Draco cleanly in the ribs.

He dropped without a sound, the air punched out of him.

Harry spun. “Stop!”

Snape froze.

For half a heartbeat, something raw flickered across his face—horror, then fury at himself—before the mask slammed back into place.

He flicked his wand sharply. Harry hit the floor on his back.

“You are dead,” Snape said. “Both of you.”

Draco curled inward, one arm cradling his ribs, wheezing thinny and painful. Harry reached him at once.

“Draco. Look at me.”

Draco managed, “Just winded—”

“You’re not,” Harry said.

Snape approached, mouth set, movements clipped and precise. He knelt, reaching for Draco but stopping when Draco flinched.

Snape pulled back immediately. His voice, when it came, was flat. Controlled.
“Potter. Take him to the infirmary.”

Harry shot him a look edged with anger. “He shouldn’t have been hit.”

Snape didn’t defend himself.
He only said, quietly, “Go.”

Harry helped Draco to his feet Draco leaning on him more than he meant to and guided him out. Snape watched them leave, standing perfectly still, the weight of what he’d done settling into the lines of his face.

He did not follow.

Madam Pomfrey healed the bruising with a firm hand and sharper scolding. By the time they left, Draco’s breathing was steadier, though he held himself carefully.

Harry hovered a little closer than usual as they walked back toward the dungeons.

“You should rest,” he murmured.

Draco’s mouth curved, faint and tired. “If I rest any more this summer, I’ll forget how to hex you properly.”

Harry huffed —almost a laugh—but the words didn’t settle the tightness in his chest.

They reached the main hall just as the great doors opened.

Not hurried. Not dramatic. Just decisive large, ancient hinges rolling back as though in acknowledgment.

Sirius Black stepped inside.

The torches along the walls flared in a brief updraft of heat. Not magically just a shift in the air, the kind that followed certain people when they entered a room.

Sirius paused on the threshold, brushing wind-tangled hair from his face. He was leaner than Harry remembered, built of long nights and narrow escapes, his robes carrying the wear of travel and weather. But his eyes—those grey, restless eyes—were alive in a way that cut straight through Harry.

The moment he spotted him, the hard lines in his expression softened. Something fierce and unguarded lit his face.

“Harry!” he called.

Harry’s heart stopped. He hadn’t realized how much he needed to hear that voice.

Sirius strode forward and pulled him into a tight, desperate hug arms around him like someone anchoring a piece of themselves they thought they’d lost.

Harry let himself fold into it, just for a moment.

When Sirius finally eased back, his hands on the back of Harry’s neck, the warmth on his face vanished. His gaze snapped past Harry.

And landed on Draco.

Draco had gone very still. Straight-backed, composed, but still. He looked like someone assessing which direction the blow would come from.

Sirius stepped slightly in front of Harrynot aggressively, but instinctively. Shielding without thinking.

“Malfoy,” Sirius said, voice even.

Draco inclined his head with practiced politeness. “Cousin.”

The word was soft, bland, but edged with something older an acknowledgement of a shared house name neither of them particularly wanted.

Sirius’s expression tightened. Not hostility. Not anger.

Recognition. And disappointment that wasn’t Draco’s fault, but landed on him anyway.

“What’s he doing here?” Sirius murmured, not quite low enough.

Harry stepped in before Draco could retreat.
“He’s here for training. Same as me.”

Draco’s eyes flicked to Harry—quick, questioning—and Harry tried to give him something steady in return. A reassurance. A promise he’d explain.

It wasn’t enough. Draco straightened subtly, drawing the remnants of his composure around himself.

Sirius didn’t look convinced, but he forced his features into something lighter. He slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders, the gesture meant to be affectionate but weighted with a protective anchor.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get lunch. Just us.”

Harry hesitated only a moment, but it was enough for Draco’s gaze to shutter.

Harry’s chest twisted.
“Yeah,” he told Sirius softly. “All right.”

Sirius guided him away.

Just before the corridor curved out of sight, Harry looked back.

Draco remained where he stood hands at his sides, posture withdrawn with the careful control of someone reassembling their defenses piece by piece. He didn’t call after Harry. Didn’t move.

Didn’t need to.

The stillness said everything.

Chapter Text

Chapter four: 

The Last Summer

I.Summer Interrupted. 

Sirius didn’t speak at first.

His arm remained slung around Harry, loose but purposeful, guiding him down the corridor with a stride too brisk to be casual. He wasn’t angry. Harry knew Sirius’s anger hot, reckless, loud. This was sharper, quieter. The kind of tension he carried when he was reading a room the way some men read battlefields.

“Dumbledore said I could visit,” Sirius said at last, voice roughened from travel. “He thought it might do you good.”

“It does,” Harry said quickly. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Sirius didn’t answer right away. His steps slowed just slightly, enough to tell Harry he’d heard more than the words he’d heard the strain beneath them.

When they entered the Great Hall, the shift in atmosphere was immediate. Even sparsely occupied, the room responded. A few teachers looked up. The torches flickered in a small draft. The space felt alert.

Harry felt Sirius take this in with the ease of someone trained to notice threat before comfort.

They sat at the Gryffindor table. Sirius waited until Harry had food in front of him before resting his elbows on the table and speaking again.

“You’re tired,” Sirius murmured. Not accusing. Observing.

“Snape’s been pushing us,” Harry said. “Hard.”

Sirius’s jaw tightened just enough to be noticeable. “Draco too?”

Harry hesitated. Sirius saw it of course he did and something in his gaze narrowed, not in anger but in calculation.

“He’s part of the training,” Harry said carefully.

Sirius leaned back, studying him. “You’re being vague.”

Harry looked at his hands. “It’s… complicated.”

Sirius didn’t pounce on that. Instead he was very still for a moment, the way he used to be before tipping over into mischief or into something far more serious.

“Complicated,” Sirius repeated quietly. “Between you and Draco.”

Harry’s heart kicked hard enough to feel in his throat.

He didn’t deny it.

Sirius exhaled slowly. Not furious, not dramatic. Just a quiet release of tension.

“You know,” he said, voice low, “when I saw him in that doorway… he looked like someone expecting the floor to drop out from beneath him.”

Harry looked up sharply. “He- what?”

Sirius shrugged, expression unreadable. “Old habits run deep in that family.”

The words weren’t cruel. They weren’t dismissive. They were simply true. Spoken by someone who had grown up under the same crest, the same expectations, the same silent corridors and colder silences.

Harry’s chest tightened. “He’s not like them.”

Sirius’s gaze softened a fraction. “I didn’t say he was.”

Harry blinked. The subtlety of that response its lack of condemnation made the room feel different around him.

Sirius continued, thoughtful, not hostile:
“But Harry… when you look at him, you change your stance, you do….do this thing with your hands. You pay attention to him in a way you don’t even realise.” He paused. “I notice things like that.”

Heat crept up Harry’s neck.

“Sirius—”

“I’m not asking you to explain anything you aren’t ready to.” Sirius lifted a hand, forestalling protest. “I just need to know you’re safe.”

Harry swallowed. “I am.”

Sirius studied him again, the way a man looks at the last thing he trusts in a world full of uncertainty.

“All right,” he said finally.

He reached over and ruffled Harry’s hair with a gentleness that didn’t match the tension in his shoulders.

“But if he hurts you,” Sirius murmured, “I reserve the right to hex him in ways that will impress even Snape.”

Harry snorted despite himself. The sound cracked the tightness around his ribs.

Sirius leaned back, letting the conversation pause. But his eyes kept flicking toward the doors toward the corridor Draco had disappeared down. Not hostile. Just aware.

Noticing.

Harry realised then that Sirius wasn’t angry at Draco.
He was afraid of the world that might hurt Harry through him.

And somewhere beneath all of that, something quieter still:

He recognised the look on Draco’s face because he had once worn it too.

Sirius spotted Snape at the far end of the hall.

And Snape, halfway through a stride, froze.

For a heartbeat, the Great Hall fell silent in a way that had nothing to do with sound a tension threaded through old history, old grudges, old wounds.

Then Sirius moved.

“Snivilus,” he said softly. Not loud, not childish but low and edged, the way someone speaks when something in them has already chosen the battlefield.

Snape started down the aisle with measured precision, each step controlled, each fold of his robes carving through the air like a dark tide.

“Black,” Snape returned, voice a thin blade. “How unfortunate.”

“I hear you’ve taken over Hogwarts’s little summer curriculum,” Sirius said.

“Duelling practice,” Snape corrected smoothly. “Something your godson requires.”
A twitch of muscle at Snape’s forehead barely there, but unmistakable.
“I push them,” he added, “because the world will not be gentle.”

Sirius’s laugh was sharp and humorless. “Please. You’ve been waiting for an excuse to hex him since he stepped onto the grounds.”

Snape’s gaze flicked unguarded for a fraction of a second to Harry. Pain. Fear. Something that didn’t fit the mask. Then it vanished.

“That is not what I do here,” Snape said. “Not—”

Sirius stepped forward; Snape tensed.

Harry darted between them before the moment could fracture.

“Stop! Sirius, don’t—”

“Move, Harry.”

“No.”

The word landed like a quiet explosion.

Sirius stared at him and Harry felt the hurt hit before the anger. A confusion sharp enough to wound.

“You’re defending him?” Sirius whispered.

Harry opened his mouth uncertain, afraid of the wrong words but Snape cut in before either could escalate.

“You two,” Snape said, voice dangerously calm, “are going to tear each other apart.”

Harry looked between them, his own voice unsteady. “And for what? To prove who hates the other more?”

Sirius’s eyes dropped to Harry’s trembling hands.
He lowered his wand.

Snape lowered his an instant later.

Sirius paced the length of the empty classroom, boots striking stone with a restless rhythm. Shawn sunlight slanted across the shelves, dust drifting like ash in the beams.

Harry stood by the window,  hands shoved into pockets.

It had been a good visit. It had been a good morning. And then—

“I don’t understand,” Sirius said abruptly. “Snape, I can stomach. Barely. But Malfoy?” He stopped pacing. “What is Dumbledore thinking? Leaving you here with him?”

Harry’s stomach tightened. “He’s just a student.”

Sirius turned sharply. “He’s a boy raised to kneel at Voldemort’s feet. A boy trained to worship blood purity. Someone who would hand you over for approval.”

Harry flinched, visibly.

Sirius stopped, astonished. “Harry?”

Harry stared at the floor. “Not all of them.”

Sirius huffed. “You sound like Remus. Always thinking people can be better than they are.”

“Maybe they can.”

“Harry—” Sirius scrubbed a hand over his face. “You’re talking about him, aren’t you?”

Harry’s fists clenched. “I’m saying you don’t know everything.”

“Oh, I know more than enough.” Sirius’s voice hardened. “I grew up with that family. Draco’s father his whole lot—”

“People change.” Harry’s voice cracked with the force of it.

Sirius stepped closer, confusion turning into something sharper. “Harry, you’re sounding—”

“My mum?” Harry tried, reaching for levity he didn’t feel.

“No,” Sirius said, and his eyes broke. “Not like James.”

The silence that followed was heavy and uneven.

Harry swallowed. “Sirius, I— I saw things. In Snape’s memories. When I failed at Occlumency.” His breathing quickened. “I saw you. And my dad. And what you did to Snape. Snape wasn’t innocent, but it wasn’t— it wasn’t a fair fight.”

Sirius’s face went still.

Harry forced himself on. “I know who my dad became. I know he died for me. I know he was good. But the boy I saw— I can’t make him match the man everyone praises.”

The confession hung in the air like a fragile thing.

Sirius exhaled, something old and weary inside it. “James was brilliant. And arrogant. And sixteen.” He sat slowly, the strength draining from his posture. “He grew out of it. He tried. Lily made him see himself. We all did. Eventually.”

He looked up, eyes raw with memory.

“He would have hated knowing you saw him like that.”

Harry blinked hard.

Sirius went on softly, “He wasn’t cruel, Harry. Not at the end. And that’s who he truly became.”

Harry nodded. He didn’t agree completely, but he nodded.

A beat.

“What do you regret?” Harry asked.

Sirius startled then gave a short, humorless laugh.

“Plenty.”
He rubbed at his chin.
“We thought we were the heroes of every room we walked into. We laughed at things that weren’t funny. We confused pride with bravery. And I—” Sirius’s throat tightened. “I didn’t see Snape as a person. Not until too late.”

Harry absorbed this quietly.

Sirius studied him then, eyes narrowing with dawning understanding.

“This isn’t about James anymore,” he murmured. “Who are you talking about, Harry?”

Harry’s heart skipped painfully.

“Things aren’t black and white,” he managed. “Not anymore.”

Sirius sagged against the desk. “I just wanted you to be like James.”
He shook his head.
“Not the cruel bits. The brave bits. The loyal bits. The certain bits.”
A slight hesitation.
“Maybe that wasn’t fair.”

Harry’s voice was barely there. “I’m not him.”

Sirius looked at him for a long time.

“No,” he said softly. “You’re Harry.”

The words landed gently. But they left a hollow ache in Harry’s chest.

“I don’t want to fight,” Harry whispered.

“Neither do I,” Sirius said, exhaustion bleeding through. “Let’s… try not to.”

They shared a strained, fragile smile.

But as Harry walked out, the ache stayed. The weight of everything he hadn’t said everything involving Draco, everything shifting too fast pressed on his ribs until it hurt.

Snape’s classroom door was barely ajar before Sirius pushed it open, his posture strung tight with a purpose Harry hadn’t seen in years.

“I want to see what the dungeon crow has been teaching you,” Sirius said. The usual bite was there, but not the usual recklessness behind it. This wasn’t a jab. It was worry, wearing an old coat.

Harry blinked. “Sirius—”

But Sirius brushed past him, eyes sweeping the room with an alertness that belonged more to an Auror than a fugitive. He took in the wardlines carved into the floor, the defensive sigils chalked along the edges, the scorch marks Snape hadn’t bothered to scrub from last night. His hiss left him in a long, quiet exhale.

“This isn't a Defense curriculum,” he murmured. “This is battlefield conditioning.”

Draco stiffened near the back of the room. Sirius’s gaze caught him cool, assessing, not contemptuous but sharp, as if he were cataloguing a threat he couldn’t yet define.

“You’re children,” Sirius muttered. “And Severus Snape is drilling you like you’re weeks from deployment.”

“We might be,” Draco said not defensive, just factual. His knuckles were white around his wand.

Sirius turned to him. “And Snape? What exactly is he preparing you for?”

Harry’s eyes met Draco’s a quiet, shared understanding of everything they couldn’t say.

Sirius saw the exchange. His gaze narrowed.  “There’s something happening between you,” he said softly. “Something Snape knows. Something Dumbledore’s counting on. Even I can feel the air tingling.”

Draco’s breath hitched; Harry’s chest tightened.

Sirius stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Whatever this training is whatever they’re building you’re going to show me.”

Snape’s voice cut across the room like a scalpel. “Black. If you intend to disrupt my classroom, do it with less melodrama.”

Sirius turned, bristling but Snape wasn’t wearing his usual disdain. His expression was held too tightly, strained at the edges. He was calculating.

“You’ve been training them,” Sirius said. “I want to know what they can do.”

“Why?” Draco asked before he could stop himself. The question was crisp, respectful, Slytherin.

Sirius blinked, caught off guard. “Because Harry’s my godson. And you’re…”
A beat. Something unsteady. “You’re his partner. In training.”

Heat crept up Draco’s neck.

Snape stepped forward. “This is not a spectacle.”

“No one asked you,” Sirius snapped.

“No one needs to,” Snape replied coldly. “Your presence announces itself.”

Harry groaned softly. “Please, can we not?”

But Draco had already moved to the center of the room, jaw set with that familiar, brittle determination.

“If Mr. Black wants a demonstration,” Draco said, “he’ll have one.”

“Draco—” Harry warned.

“I don’t need rescuing,” Draco murmured. “Not from you.”

Sirius looked at him for a long moment. “I never said you were weak.”

“No,” Draco said quietly, raising his wand. “But you assumed it.”

Even Sirius flinched at that.

Snape gave the dueling rules with clipped precision. Sirius agreed. Harry positioned himself at the ring’s edge, stomach knotted.

The duel began.

Sirius opened with a light hex testing. Draco blocked with a shield so smooth it barely disturbed the air. Sirius arched a brow.

“Not bad. Your father always relied on brute force. Sloppy. Predictable.”

Harry hissed, “Sirius—”

But Draco didn’t rise. He recalibrated his stance, the kind Snape had hammered into him through exhaustion and repetition.

Sirius circled. “Lucius Malfoy was a coward,” he said. “A man who hid behind his wand and his mask.”

Draco’s grip tightened. But his wand didn’t waver.

Sirius continued, each word an incision. “I bet your father taught you nothing worth using, that Snape had to start from the ground up.”

Harry stepped forward. “Sirius—stop.”

Draco lifted a hand to halt him, gaze never leaving Sirius. “I’m fine.”

And then he moved.

It was fast enough that Harry’s heart caught in his throat Draco vaulting over a low hex, countering midair, shifting his weight into a stance that was unmistakably his own: Snape’s precision, Draco’s control.

Spell after spell flew Sirius escalating, Draco absorbing and redirecting, his movements tight and elegant. He was fighting with discipline, not rage. With thought, not impulse.

Sirius noticed. His expression sharpened into something calculating, professional. “You fight cleaner than your father,” Sirius said. “He never had your restraint.”

There Draco faltered, just barely.

Sirius pressed. “Your mother carried the spine in that family. She protects you, doesn’t she? Lucius never protected anyone.”

That hit the nerve Sirius hadn’t meant to hit.

For half a heartbeat Draco froze.

Then
He inhaled.

Everything about him changed.

Harry felt the shift before he saw it.

A quiet pull, like the air between them tightening. Draco’s focus drew sharp, and Harry’s magic—without conscious thought—leaned toward it. As if their magic moved to the same beat.

It startled him.
It startled Sirius.

Snape went stone-still.

Draco cast.

Sirius’s shield snapped up but the angle was wrong, thrown off by that some unseen current. Draco’s second spell slid under the guard. The third detonated behind Sirius’s stance, knocking him off-center.

And the fourth—

The disarming charm sang through the air, clean as a bell.

Sirius’s wand flew, spinning once before Draco caught it neatly.

The room fell silent.

Sirius stared at him not angry, not wounded, but genuinely astonished. “Well-fought,” he said quietly.

Draco inclined his head. A gesture with centuries of pureblood etiquette behind it and none of the arrogance.

Harry’s heart thudded once, hard.

Draco turned to him. He looked flushed, breath uneven, eyes bright with something Harry hadn’t yet found words for.

Harry smiled at him warm, unguarded.

And Draco… looked like that smile was something he didn’t know how to receive, but desperately needed.

Draco returned to the practice room alone, wand clearing cushions with clipped precision. Snape entered without sound.

“Sit.”

Draco obeyed.

“You lost focus,” Snape said.

Draco’s mouth thinned. “I—”

“Do not interrupt.” Snape’s voice was sharp but not cruel. “Black spoke of your father. You let it land.”

Draco looked down.

Snape’s tone softened by degrees. “Your father is not the ground on which you must plant yourself.”

Draco swallowed.

“And yet,” Snape continued, “you recovered. Brilliantly.”

Draco looked up startled.

Snape sighed. It was not dramatic just weary. “I taught you to think. Today, you proved you can.”

A long pause.

“Harry Potter,” Snape said, more gently than Draco expected, “is a complication. But he is not a weakness unless you make him one.”

Draco said nothing.

Snape crouched in front of him, eye-level.
“You are not your father,” he said quietly. “You will not become him unless you choose to.”

“Was I truly that good?” he whispered.

Snape’s mouth twitched. “You were exemplary. Don’t let it go to your head.”

He turned to leave. “You are safe here,” he added. “As safe as any of us can be.”

And Draco believed him.

The Room of Requirement shaped itself the moment they stepped inside dim light pooling softly across scattered cushions, shelves receding into the shadows, the scent of cedar and parchment settling. Nothing excessive, nothing suggestive. Just quiet, and space, and the kind of stillness that felt like permission.

Draco stood a few steps away, shoulders tight, jaw set in a way that wasn’t defensive so much as bracing. Harry could see it the effort to hold himself controlled, contained, when he was anything but.

“Draco,” Harry said quietly.

Draco exhaled as if he’d been without air too long. He didn’t turn. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to decide how fragile I am.”

Harry stepped closer slowly, carefully, but without hesitation. “I’m not.”

Draco’s laugh was soft, a little disbelieving. “You think I don’t know that look? I’ve spent half my life being assessed.”

“Then look at me,” Harry said.

Draco did. It wasn’t defiance it was surrendering a shield he’d worn for years. His eyes were sharp, tired, too open.

Harry reached out, brushing his fingers along Draco’s wrist. A small touch, nothing more. Draco didn’t flinch. His breath shifted—a quiet, involuntary catch—and Harry felt a faint hum rise against his skin, the echo of Draco’s magic answering the contact without permission or intent.

Draco swallowed. “You feel it too.”

There was no point in pretending. “Yes.”

Something steadied in Draco almost relief, almost resolve. He stepped into Harry’s space, close enough that their foreheads nearly touched.

“I don’t want to be afraid of this,” Draco said.

“You don’t have to be.”

Draco huffed a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “And yet.”

Harry’s voice lowered. “Then let me help.”

Draco didn’t pull away. Instead he lifted his hand, fitting it against Harry’s cheek with an unexpected, deliberate confidence thumb brushing just beneath his ear. An unmistakable choice.

Harry’s pulse quickened . “Draco…”

Draco leaned in, slow but sure. “I’m done pretending I don’t want this.”

The kiss wasn’t cautious. It wasn’t uncertain. Draco kissed like someone who had made a decision steady, seeking warmth rather than reassurance, the kind of kiss given by someone allowing himself honesty for the first time in years.

Harry responded in kind, hands sliding to Draco’s waist, drawing him closer with a quiet certainty that steadied them both. Their mouths met again, slower, longer no rush, no panic, just two people choosing to be close in a world where choices were rare gifts.

Draco’s fingers slipped into Harry’s hair, not trembling this time. Bold. Intentional. He murmured against Harry’s mouth, “You shake everything loose in me.”

Harry whispered back, “Good.”

Draco pressed his forehead to Harry’s, voice unsteady but sure. “Stay with me tonight.”

No fear in the request only need, and trust.

Harry’s answer was simple. “Yes.”

The Room shifted subtly around them lamps dimming to gleaming gold, cushions rearranging themselves, a narrow bed appearing against the far wall, softened by gentle light. Nothing lurid. Nothing hurried. Just comfort.

Draco tugged lightly at Harry’s shirt. “Come here.”

Harry followed, letting Draco guide them toward the bed. They sat first facing each other, knees brushing, breaths mingling then leaned back together, Draco folding into Harry with careful intention, Harry’s arm sliding around him like instinct.

They lay there quietly, sharing warmth more than urgency, hands tracing slow paths along sleeves and arms, kisses trailing from mouth to jaw to cheek, soft and lingering. The magic between them hummed like a pulse under the skin calm, steady, answering without pressure.

Draco curled against him, one leg sliding between Harry’s, his voice low against Harry’s throat. “I’ve wanted… this. Not just the kissing. The closeness.”

Harry’s fingers threaded through Draco’s hair. “Then have it.”

Draco exhaled long, soft, the sound of something loosening deep inside him.

The lanterns dimmed by degrees, the world narrowing to beating hearts and fingertips and heat.

They kissed again unhurried, deepening slowly hands sliding beneath layers one button at a time, the room falling into gentle shadow around them.

The last thing Harry remembered clearly was Draco’s fingers curling at the back of his neck, and the soft, quiet sound he made when Harry pulled him closer—

—and then the night closed softly around them.

II. A Lack of Comfort.

Dumbledore’s office was quiet in the late-afternoon light, the kind that softened the angular shelves and cast long gold bars across the floor. Instruments clicked softly to themselves. Fawkes dozed.

Sirius did not.

He paced with slow, agitated strides, like someone who had spent hours arguing with himself before climbing the stairs to argue with someone else.

“Albus,” he began, voice low and tight, “keeping Malfoy here is dangerous. And pairing him with Harry all summer tell me that isn’t exactly what it looks like.”

Dumbledore folded his hands, his expression neutral but attentive.
“I take it your visit raised questions.”

Sirius let out a huff that bordered on a laugh. “He’s powerful. Stronger than he should be at sixteen. And I don’t just mean magically. He’s controlled. Calculated. That’s not normal training it's preparation.”

“For what?” Dumbledore asked softly.

“For something you’re not telling me.” Sirius’s voice steadied, losing its rough edge. “Harry may pretend it’s fine, but I saw the ward lines in that classroom. I saw what Snape is drilling into them. You’re training them for war. Not school.”

Dumbledore didn’t deny it. He simply inclined his head a fraction, acknowledging the truth without embellishing it.

Sirius pressed on. “And Malfoy—Draco—he’s not just keeping up with Harry. He’s meeting him. Matching him.” His brows tightened. “You saw what he did in that duel.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore murmured. “I did.”

Sirius dragged a hand through his hair. “Albus, I’m not blind. I saw them in the courtyard. They move around each other like… like they’ve already built a language I don’t understand.”

Dumbledore’s gaze drifted briefly to the window. Two figures small from this distance but unmistakably them crossed into the shadow beneath the archway.

“They have,” he said simply.

Sirius turned toward him sharply. “And you’re comfortable with that?”

“Comfort is not the word I would choose,” Dumbledore answered gently. “But I am… not alarmed.”

Sirius stared at him. “You should be.”

Dumbledore’s tone remained imperturbably calm. “Tell me. What precisely do you believe Mr. Malfoy will do to Harry?”

“That’s the point,” Sirius snapped quietly. “I don’t know. And Harry feels something for him trust, at the very least. Attachment, if we’re being honest. And Malfoy—” he hesitated, as if the next words were difficult to admit “the boy looks at him like he’s never had someone stand on his side before.”

There was a long, contemplative silence.

“Sirius,” Dumbledore said at last, “Draco Malfoy is a child raised in a world that has offered him little compassion and even less choice.”

“So was Harry,” Sirius countered. “But Harry didn’t—”

“Ah.” Dumbledore lifted a hand. “Harry did. He does. He continues to. Every day. He is not as different from Mr. Malfoy as you want him to be.”

Sirius’s mouth tightened. “That isn’t comforting.”

“No,” Dumbledore agreed. “But it is true.”

Sirius stepped closer to the desk. “Albus, he could hurt Harry.”

“He could,” Dumbledore said without hesitation. “But he has not.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t.”

“Nor does it mean he will.”

Sirius breathed out through his nose, steady but strained. “You’re gambling.”

Dumbledore’s eyes warmed with something old and weary. “I am allowing Harry to choose.”

“That,” Sirius said quietly, “is the gamble.”

Dumbledore didn’t argue. He simply regarded Sirius with a depth of understanding that made Sirius look away.

“They are young,” Dumbledore said. “Not finished. Not fixed. Both standing at a crossroads shaped by expectation and fear. And somehow… they seem to have found one another.”

Sirius’s lips twitched. “I still don’t like it.”

“I would be concerned if you did,” Dumbledore replied.

There was almost a smile in it, but thin, worn around the edges.

Sirius pressed a hand against the back of a chair, grounding himself. “If Harry gets hurt—”

“He will be hurt,” Dumbledore said softly. “We all are, when we grow into ourselves.”

Sirius closed his eyes. “That’s not the kind of hurt I mean.”

“I know,” Dumbledore said. And he did. It was clear in his voice. “But this… connection between them? It will shape both boys in ways we cannot foresee. Perhaps dangerously. Perhaps wondrously.”

Sirius opened his eyes. “You really believe Draco Malfoy could protect him. Not harm him.”

Dumbledore considered his answer carefully. “I believe he could be the reason Harry does not have to stand alone.”

Sirius swallowed once, hard. “And you’re willing to risk it.”

Dumbledore folded his hands again. “Not risk,” he said softly. “Trust.”

Sirius let out a low, shaken exhale. “I still don’t like it.”

“You are not required to,” Dumbledore said gently. “Only to understand that your godson is becoming someone who makes his own choices. Even the ones that frighten you.”

Silence settled again heavy but honest.

Sirius looked toward the window one last time, toward the space where Harry and Draco had disappeared minutes before.

“It scares me,” he admitted quietly.

“I know,” Dumbledore said. “It scares me as well.”

Sirius’s visit ended sooner than Harry was ready for.

The two of them stood just outside the Entrance Hall, where the morning light pooled in pale gold on the flagstones. Sirius’s hands were on Harry’s shoulders steadying rather than clinging and Harry could feel the residual tension in them, the kind that came from sleeplessness and too many half-formed fears.

“You’ll write,” Sirius said quietly. It wasn’t a request; it was a tether.

“I will,” Harry promised.

“And you’ll look after yourself.”

Harry managed a small smile. “I do try.”

Something flickered in Sirius’s expression something softer than frustration and deeper than worry. It was the look of someone trying to memorize a face before parting ways again.

Before he could say more, another presence settled into the corridor like a moist draft.

“Fascinating,” Snape said dryly, approaching with the measured steps of someone who’d already rehearsed his tolerance. “We appear to be staging farewells before breakfast now.”

Sirius closed his eyes once, briefly an exhausted concession to the universe before turning. “Perfect. I was wondering how long it would take you to ruin the mood.”

Snape’s expression did not shift. “I had no intention of participating in a mood.”

Harry exhaled, half a sigh, half resignation. “Can we not do this?”

Sirius didn’t rise to the bait this time, though Harry could see the old habits tugging at him. Instead, he looked at Harry again studying, thoughtful, almost reluctant to leave.

“When did you get taller?” Sirius asked, voice unexpectedly soft.

Harry shrugged. “Sometime this summer. I didn’t really notice.”

Sirius did. Harry could see it in the way his godfather’s gaze gentled, taking in the angles of Harry’s face, the steadiness in his posture.

“You look more like her,” Sirius murmured. “Not just the eyes there’s a bit of Lily in the way you hold yourself now. The way you think before you speak.”

Harry didn’t trust himself to answer. 

Snape turned his face slightly away, jaw tightening with a familiar tension Harry couldn’t quite decipher.

Sirius gave Harry one last touch a steady hand at his cheek, brief, careful as though anchoring the moment for both of them.

“I should go,” Sirius said quietly. “If I stay, I’ll only start another argument I’ll regret.”

“I know,” Harry said. “It’s all right.”

Sirius nodded once, deeply, then stepped back. “Take care, Harry.”

He didn’t look at Snape as he left not out of hostility, but because the leave-taking was already sharp enough, and he had no room for old feuds.

His cloak swept behind him, the color catching in the light as he crossed the courtyard and disappeared beyond the gates.

The moment the silhouette vanished, the world seemed to settle.

Snape remained standing a few paces away, arms folded not defensive this time, but composed, withholding commentary because, for once, he understood Harry needed quiet more than correction.

When he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual edge.
Just a low, almost reluctant acknowledgment.

“You handled him well,” Snape said.

Harry let out a soft breath that might have been a laugh. “I’ve had practice.”

A faint, wry sound something like agreement escaped Snape.

“Yes,” he said. “So have I.”

The two stood in brief, companionable silence. Not a tender exchange exactly, but no longer barbed. A truce forged in sincerity rather than necessity.

Then Snape straightened, robe sweeping behind him as he turned toward the castle.

“Come, Potter,” he said, tone returning to familiar structure but lacking its usual bite. “You still owe me twenty minutes of wandwork you attempted to avoid this morning.”

Harry followed, still carrying the echo of Sirius’s touch, and the unexpected steadiness of Snape’s approval.

Something had shifted.

He wasn’t sure what it meant yet.

But it felt real.

Draco hadn’t planned to stay.

He told himself he’d only stepped under the archway to catch a moment, to let the sound of the birds in the courtyard settle around, to feel the warmth of the day on him,  until his thoughts stopped scraping raw. But instead of leaving, he found himself watching Harry talk with Sirius Black.

Harry laughed at something Sirius said shoulders loosening, face open in a way Draco rarely saw except in small, private moments.
It was… disarming. And it clawed at something that wasn’t jealousy so much as recognition of a life built from a different kind of inheritance one Draco had never been offered.

Sirius hugged Harry before leaving. A brief embrace, but fierce enough that Draco had to look away.

Snape passed by next, giving Draco a single knowing glance the kind that said he had seen everything Draco didn’t want seen. Neither of them stopped.

And then Harry turned, scanning the courtyard. When he spotted Draco in the archway, his expression shifted subtle, but unmistakable. Relief. Affection. Something almost like quiet certainty.

Harry walked toward him without hesitation. “You ready?” he asked, voice steady.

Draco blinked, trying not to let the sight of Harry’s softened expression unbalance him. “For what?”

“Our next lesson,” Harry said. “Snape’s waiting. And if we’re late, you know what he’ll do.”

Draco gave a low exhale that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t remind me.”

Harry nudged him lightly a measured, familiar gesture. An invitation. “Walk with me.”

Draco did.

Their steps fell into an easy rhythm, the courtyard emptying behind them. A quiet space opened between them not distance, not hesitation, but something chosen. Their hands brushed once, then again, and Draco didn’t pull away.

The path toward the classroom felt less like returning to training… and more like returning to each other.

Snape had commandeered the old Transfiguration classroom. The desks were shoved against the walls; pale light stretched across the scuffed stone, catching motes of dust still drifting in the air.

Draco and Harry faced each other in the center. Snape stood between them, arms folded, mouth drawn in a near-snarl.

“I expect focus,” Snape said, voice clipped. “Not whatever fog the two of you drift through on your better days. Begin.”

Harry lifted his wand. Draco mirrored him.

Snape stepped aside.

Their first exchange was textbook: Disarming, Shielding, a neat counterspell. But the rhythm settled too quickly, too smoothly. Draco adjusted his stance to anticipate Harry; Harry shifted before realizing Draco had even moved.

Their spells collided.

Instead of breaking apart, they folded together in a brief ribbon of silver-blue before dissipating.

Snape’s eyes narrowed — a flicker, nothing more, but enough.

“Again.”

Draco attacked first quick, low, precise. Harry dodged and countered. Draco met the counterspell not with resistance but with a small shift that aligned to the exact trajectory Harry favored under pressure.

They cast again.

one pulse, warm and startling, skimming across the stones.

Snape’s breath hitched.

“Stop.”

They froze.

Snape walked toward them with slow, deliberate steps, as if approaching a fire he could not afford to mishandle.

“That,” he said, “was not talent.”

Draco wiped a bead of sweat from his cheek. “It looked like talent.”

“It was Resonance,” Snape snapped. “A shared magical signature strong enough to mesh under pressure. Rare. Powerful. Dangerous.”

Harry and Draco exchanged a look — not fear, exactly, but the sharp awareness of something significant shifting beneath them.

“When magic mirrors emotion,” Snape said quietly, “control must be absolute. If either of you falters, you could injure each other without intention.”

Draco went still.

Snape’s voice dropped further, the closest he ever came to caution. “Control yourselves. Or stay apart outside training.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He swept toward the door, robes cracking like tempered glass behind him.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Early.”

The door shut.

Harry exhaled. Draco stared at the floor where their spells had met, expression taut with recognition and unease.

“Harry…” Draco said softly. “What did we just do?”

Harry’s pulse thudded. “Something we’re not supposed to?”

Harry hadn’t meant to stop. He had only paused because he heard voices through the narrow opening of the classroom door Snape’s low rasp, unusually sharp, and Draco’s thinner, tight at the edges.

“…not ready,” Draco whispered. “He knows that. I told him I’m not—”

“You do not have the luxury of readiness,” Snape cut in. “You were given instructions. You will follow them.”

“Orders,” Draco murmured. “Let’s call them what they are.”

Snape inhaled sharply, as though reining himself in. “You will be watched. Every corridor. Every hour. You cannot hesitate.”

“I’m not hesitating,” Draco said except the tremor betrayed him.

Snape ignored the lie. “Your mother’s safety depends on you staying ahead of this. That you keep up the role. If you slip too much—”

“I know,” Draco whispered. “I know.”

Snape stepped closer; his voice softened in a way Harry had heard only once before. “You will not fail.”

Then he turned — sharply — sensing something.

“Someone’s there,” he said.

Harry’s blood froze.

Draco strode toward the door; Snape grabbed his arm before he drew his wand.
“Wait.”

Harry pressed himself behind a suit of armor, forcing his breathing silent.

Draco yanked the door open and scanned the corridor. His shoulders dropped a fraction.

“I just—need a moment,” Draco muttered.

“Take it,” Snape said, “then compose yourself.”

Draco stepped out fully.

He started walking and saw Harry.

He froze mid-step.

“Harry,” Draco said, voice thin but steady.

Harry straightened. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”

“What did you hear?” Draco asked.

“Nothing specific,” Harry lied, attempting calm. “I just heard voices. Thought it might be Filch.”

Draco studied him one long, quiet second.
Not suspicion.
Recognition.

“It was nothing,” Draco said, too quickly. “Snape was lecturing me. Again.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing.”

Draco’s gaze drifted to the floor. “Harry, let it go. Please.”

The plea was soft, but it carried weight the weight of someone holding too much already.

Harry opened his mouth.

Draco turned away before he could speak.

Harry watched him go, the corridor stretching between them like a faultline neither could cross not yet, not safely.

And somewhere deep under his ribs, the resonance pulsed once sharp, warning, afraid.

III. Snape Does Not Get Paid Enough.

The abandoned classroom was dim, lit only by late-afternoon light spilling through high windows. Dust moved lazily in the beams, as though the room itself had paused.

Harry closed the door softly behind them.

Draco reached for him immediately not frantic, but certain. Harry stepped into the touch without hesitation, hands settling at Draco’s waist as Draco’s fingers slipped into his hair.

Their kiss unfolded slow and deliberate, the kind of intimacy born from choice rather than impulse. Draco’s hand cupped Harry’s jaw, thumb brushing the edge of his mouth; Harry leaned into him, letting the warmth between them settle into something steady and unguarded.

They kissed until Harry’s back touched the desk, until Draco’s breath stuttered, until the room felt small around them. His hands slid down to knit into the fabric of Harry’s cloak, as if to pin him in place.

Then—
The air shifted.

A faint hum vibrated through the floorboards. Magic stirred, tender and aware, threading through the space between them. Draco inhaled sharply; Harry felt the pull low in his chest, like an answering chord.

They broke apart at the same moment, eyes wide, heart beats unsteady.

Draco’s hand remained against Harry’s cheek. “Did you—?”

“Yes,” Harry whispered. “I felt it.”

The resonance coiled between them subtle, electric.

Harry leaned in again

The door slammed open.

Snape swept in like a catastrophic inevitability wrapped in black robes.

“For Merlin’s sake,” he snapped, “if you insist on forming an unstable magical conduit between you, at least refrain from doing so in a classroom older than half the ghost population—”

He stopped.

His eyes flicked to their hands.

Their faces.

Their proximity.

The charged air.

A look of pure, exhausted horror crossed his features.

“No,” Snape said flatly. “Absolutely not.”

Draco jerked away from Harry like he’d touched a live wire. Harry straightened instinctively, heat pounding in his face.

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose. “If the two of you had been ten seconds further along, I’d be peeling your remains off opposite walls.”

Harry opened his mouth. “Professor, we were—”

Snape held up one finger, deadly. “Do not finish that sentence. Whatever explanation you provide will be unacceptable by definition.”

Draco bristled. “We weren’t doing anything dangerous—”

Snape turned slowly. “Mr. Malfoy, given what I just witnessed, I am not inclined to debate your definition of ‘dangerous.’”

He exhaled, long and suffering. “From now on, any interaction between you will occur under supervision. My supervision. In controlled environments. With appropriate grounding wards. And absolutely none—” he gestured vaguely, appalled, “—of this.”

Harry blinked. “…Professor, did you just say you’re going to supervise our snogging?”

Draco made a strangled sound between a gasp and a curse.

Snape closed his eyes. “Potter. I am supervising your magic. The fact that your… romantic entanglement appears to trigger magical instability is merely an unfortunate complication.”

Harry bit back a laugh. Draco failed entirely, a quiet, incredulous huff escaping him.

Snape stared at them as if personally offended by the concept of youth.

“If the pair of you are quite finished humiliating yourselves,” he said icily, “you may leave. Preferably before the castle develops opinions.”

He waved them toward the door with something like despair.

Draco lingered for half a second enough for Harry to feel the unresolved pull between them then slipped out.

Harry followed, heart still thrumming with resonance and the unmistakable ache of wanting more.

The stone gargoyle had barely begun to shift aside before Snape swept past it, taking the spiral staircase two steps at a time. His robes snapped with each stride, dark and precise as a storm front.

He did not knock.

Dumbledore glanced up as the door opened sharply, quill hovering above parchment. A faint smile touched his mouth.

“Severus,” he said warmly. “You have that look that suggests something… enlightening has occurred. Tea?”

Snape shut the door with controlled force. “No. And ‘enlightening’ is one word for it.”

Dumbledore folded his hands and waited.

“They resonate,” Snape said flatly.

A gentle blink. “Harry and Draco?”

Snape’s glare sharpened. “No, Potter and the mop cupboard. Yes, Harry and Draco.”

He began pacing, agitation barely masked. “Their magic merged twice after I explicitly forbade any further testing. Deliberate alignment. Emotional reinforcement. Completely undisciplined.”

Dumbledore’s eyes glimmered. “A natural conduit between two young wizards is—”

“—volatile,” Snape interrupted. “Unpredictable. And with their particular temperaments, it is an invitation for disaster. You know how dangerous this can be.”

Dumbledore’s attention drifted to the window. Down in the courtyard, Harry and Draco crossed the flagstones side by side, walking close enough that their sleeves brushed. Something soft, unguarded passed between them as Harry leaned against Draco and Draco allowed the contact.

Dumbledore’s sigh was almost fond. “Magic often recognizes truths before we do.”

Snape made a sharp, incredulous sound. “Magic also rings alarms long before anyone listens. And this—whatever this connection is—already hums when they stand within arm’s reach. If they lose control, the blast radius will be impressive.”

“You’re worried,” Dumbledore said gently.

Snape stopped pacing. “I am responsible. I know what happens when a child is left to navigate dark expectations alone.”

Something flickered in Dumbledore’s expression. “Draco is not you, Severus.”

“No,” Snape said quietly. “But he is alone in ways that mirror my own isolation far more than I care to admit.”

He drew a breath, steadier than before, but strained. “You placed them together deliberately. Shared space, shared lessons, shared pressure. And now their magic interlocks. You knew this was possible.”

“I knew it was likely,” Dumbledore corrected softly. “Compatibility of that kind does not happen by accident.”

Snape turned toward him, disbelief shading into anger. “Albus—he is a Malfoy. The Dark Lord is circling him. His mother is hostage to a plan neither of them understand. And Potter—Potter is tied to a prophecy that will drag him into the center of every war to come. And you look at this entanglement and call it promising?”

Dumbledore’s eyes cooled with something old and sad. “I call it necessary.”

“For whom?” Snape demanded. “For you? For your strategy? For the Order?”

“For Harry,” Dumbledore answered simply. “And perhaps—for Draco as well.”

Snape sank into a silence edged with dread. “And if it goes wrong?”

Dumbledore’s answer was equally quiet. “Then we adapt. And we protect them.”

Snape turned away, staring out the window at the empty courtyard. “They are children,” he said, more to himself than to Dumbledore.

“For now,” Dumbledore replied.

The words landed like a weight.

Snape’s posture stiffened, but he inclined his head once an acknowledgment, or perhaps a promise he hadn’t intended to make:
he would not allow either boy to be consumed by fate without resistance.

IV. The Start of Something.

As August wound down, the castle changed. The halls felt less like shelter and more like a waiting room. Term was coming; the world beyond Hogwarts was pulling its shadow closer.

Harry felt it in his bones the shift, the tightening.
But he also felt steadier. Anchored. As though something between him and Draco had become a quiet point of gravity.

On the final night before the students returned, he found Draco in the Room of Requirement again. Tonight it had shaped itself into a long chamber with a wide window overlooking the lake. Dusk stained the sky in bruised purples and deepening blue.

Draco stood by the window, arms loosely folded. “Do you ever think about what comes after all this?” he asked, voice soft enough not to disturb the room.

“All the time,” Harry said.

Draco huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh, if there’d been more certainty in it. “I keep pretending I won’t have to find an answer.”

“You might not need one,” Harry said gently.

Draco’s mouth twitched not quite a smile. “Hopeful of you.”

Neither pressed the point. It wasn’t a night for answers.

The Room settled into lamplight and quiet warmth, the air touched with the scent of rain on stone. Outside the conjured windows, stars began to bloom, clear and sharp.

Harry sat on the low couch. Draco joined him, leaving the smallest space between them an opening rather than a barrier. His posture was composed, but the sharpness had eased. His knees angled faintly toward Harry. His hands rested loosely on his thighs, still but no longer tense.

“You okay?” Harry murmured.

Draco’s eyes stayed on the window for a moment before he answered. “I don’t know. But I don’t feel so… alone in it.” His voice dropped. “That helps.”

Something tightened in Harry’s chest.
He let his hand inch closer on the cushion not touching, just near.

Draco noticed. Harry saw the way his breath shifted, subtle but unmistakable.

A moment later, Draco turned his head slow, deliberate as though choosing to look at Harry rather than at whatever waited outside these walls.

“Harry,” he said quietly.

The world didn’t contract; it steadied. As if they were standing at the edge of something neither had named but both had already stepped toward.

Harry raised a hand, brushing the back of his fingers against Draco’s cheek. The touch was barely there a question more than a gesture.

Draco drew in a sharp sigh, not startled, but recognizing something he’d been expecting without admitting it.

He leaned into Harry.

Harry moved that last inch and Draco met him halfway. Their lips brushed tentative, careful, real. A soft press, a slow exhale. Draco’s hand lifted, curling at Harry’s chin as if grounding himself. Harry breathed out against him, steady and grateful.

They kissed again, deeper, still unhurried. Certain.

When they drew apart, their foreheads rested together in the tender quiet.

The Room dimmed, as though stepping back to give them space. Starlight sharpened above them.

Harry’s thumb traced gently along Draco’s cheekbone a quiet confirmation.

As he touched him, something warm unfurled beneath the skin of the moment. Not a flare, not a surge a quiet pulse of shared magic, the faintest stirring of resonance rising between them. A soft alignment. Two signatures brushing, recognizing, agreeing.

Harry felt it first a tingling at his fingertips where they rested against Draco’s skin. Draco felt it moments later; his heath stilled in something like quiet awe.

The magic didn’t crash or dominate. It settled. Harmonized.
Ancient and new at once.

Draco closed his eyes. “We’re really doing this,” he murmured.

Harry’s voice was soft, grounded. “Yes.”

Outside, the summer night continued its slow, inevitable descent.

Inside, something else was beginning.

Chapter Text

Chapter Four. The Last Summer

I.Summer Interrupted. 

Sirius didn’t speak at first.

His arm remained slung around Harry, loose but purposeful, guiding him down the corridor with a stride too brisk to be casual. He wasn’t angry. Harry knew Sirius’s anger was hot, reckless, loud. This was sharper, quieter. The kind of tension he carried when he was reading a room the way some men read battlefields.

“Dumbledore said I could visit,” Sirius said at last, voice roughened from travel. “He thought it might do you good.”

“It does,” Harry said quickly. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Sirius didn’t answer right away. His steps slowed just slightly, enough to tell Harry he’d heard more than the words he’d heard the strain beneath them.

When they entered the Great Hall, the shift in atmosphere was immediate. Even sparsely occupied, the room responded. A few teachers looked up. The torches flickered in a small draft. The space felt alert.

Harry felt Sirius take this in with the ease of someone trained to notice threat before comfort.

They sat at the Gryffindor table. Sirius waited until Harry had food in front of him before resting his elbows on the table and speaking again.

“You’re tired,” Sirius murmured. Not accusing. Observing.

“Snape’s been pushing us,” Harry said. “Hard.”

Sirius’s jaw tightened just enough to be noticeable. “Draco Malfoy too?”

Harry hesitated. Sirius saw it of course he did and something in his gaze narrowed, not in anger but in calculation.

“He’s part of the training,” Harry said carefully.

Sirius leaned back, studying him. “You’re being vague.”

Harry looked at his hands. “It’s… complicated.”

Sirius didn’t pounce on that. Instead he was very still for a moment, the way he used to be before tipping over into mischief or into something far more serious.

“Complicated,” Sirius repeated quietly. “Between you and Malfoy”

Harry’s heart kicked hard enough to feel in his throat.

He didn’t deny it.

Sirius exhaled slowly. Not furious, not dramatic. Just a quiet release of tension.

“You know,” he said, voice low, “when I saw him in that doorway… he looked like someone expecting the floor to drop out from beneath him.”

Harry looked up sharply. “He…what?”

Sirius shrugged, expression unreadable. “Old habits run deep in that family.”

The words weren’t cruel. They weren’t dismissive. They were simply true. Spoken by someone who had grown up under the same crest, the same expectations, the same silent corridors and colder silences.

Harry’s chest tightened. “He’s not like them.”

Sirius’s gaze softened a fraction. “I didn’t say he was.”

Harry blinked. The subtlety of that response and its lack of condemnation made the room feel different around him.

Sirius continued, thoughtful, not hostile:
“But Harry… when you look at him, you change your stance, you do….do this thing with your hands. You pay attention to him in a way you don’t even realise.” He paused. “I notice things like that.”

Heat crept up Harry’s neck.

“Sirius ”

“I’m not asking you to explain anything you aren’t ready to.” Sirius lifted a hand, forestalling protest. “I just need to know you’re safe.”

Harry swallowed. “I am.”

Sirius studied him again, the way a man looks at the last thing he trusts in a world full of uncertainty.

“All right,” he said finally.

He reached over and ruffled Harry’s hair with a gentleness that didn’t match the tension in his shoulders.

“But if he hurts you,” Sirius murmured, “I reserve the right to hex him in ways that will impress even Dumbledore.”

Harry snorted despite himself. The sound cracked the tightness around his ribs.

Sirius leaned back, letting the conversation pause. But his eyes kept flicking toward the doors toward the corridor Draco had disappeared down. Not hostile. Just aware.

Noticing.

Harry realised then that Sirius wasn’t angry at Draco.
He was afraid of the world that might hurt Harry through him.

And somewhere beneath all of that, something quieter still:

He recognised the look on Draco’s face because he had once worn it too.

Sirius spotted Snape at the far end of the hall.

And Snape, halfway through a stride, froze.

For a heartbeat, the Great Hall fell silent in a way that had nothing to do with sound, a tension threaded through old history, old grudges, old wounds.

Then Sirius moved.

“Snivilus,” he said softly. Not loud, not childish but low and edged, the way someone speaks when something in them has already chosen the battlefield.

Snape started down the aisle with measured precision, each step controlled, each fold of his robes carving through the air like a dark tide.

“Mr. Black,” Snape returned, voice like a thin blade. “How unfortunate.”

“I hear you’ve taken over Hogwarts’s little summer curriculum,” Sirius said.

“Duelling practice,” Snape corrected smoothly. “Something your godson requires.” A twitch of muscle at Snape’s forehead, barely there, but unmistakable.“I push them,” he added, “because the world will not be gentle.”

Sirius’s laugh was sharp and humorless. “Please. You’ve been waiting for an excuse to hex him since he stepped onto the grounds.”

Snape’s gaze flicked unguarded for a fraction of a second to Harry. Pain. Fear. Something that didn’t fit the mask. Then it vanished.

“That is not what I do here,” Snape said. 

Sirius stepped forward; Snape tensed.

Harry darted between them before the moment could fracture.

“Stop! Sirius, don’t ”

“Move, Harry.”

“No.”

The word landed like a quiet explosion.

Sirius stared at him and Harry felt the hurt hit before the anger. A confusion sharp enough to wound.

“You’re defending him?” Sirius whispered.

Harry opened his mouth, uncertain, afraid of the wrong words but Snape cut in before either could escalate.

“You two,” Snape said, voice dangerously calm, “are going to tear each other apart.”

Harry looked between them, his own voice unsteady. “And for what? To prove who hates the other more?”

Sirius’s eyes dropped to Harry’s trembling hands.
He lowered his wand.

Snape lowered his an instant later.

Sirius paced the length of the empty classroom, boots striking stone with a restless rhythm. Shawn sunlight slanted across the shelves, dust drifting like ash in the beams.

Harry stood by the window,  hands shoved into pockets.

It was a good visit. It had been a good morning. And then 

“I don’t understand,” Sirius said abruptly. “Snape, I can stomach. Barely. But Malfoy?” He stopped pacing. “What is Dumbledore thinking? Leaving you here with him?”

Harry’s stomach tightened. “He’s just a student.”

Sirius turned sharply. “He’s a boy raised to kneel at Voldemort’s feet. A boy trained to worship blood purity. Someone who would hand you over for approval.”

Harry flinched, visibly.

Sirius stopped, astonished. “Harry?”

Harry stared at the floor. “Not all of them.”

Sirius huffed. “You sound like Remus. Always thinking people can be better than they are.”

“Maybe they can.”

“Harry ” Sirius scrubbed a hand over his face. “You’re talking about him, aren’t you?”

Harry’s fists clenched. “I’m saying you don’t know everything.”

“Oh, I know more than enough.” Sirius’s voice hardened. “I grew up with that family. Draco Malfoy’s father his whole lot ”

“People change.” Harry’s voice cracked with the force of it.

Sirius stepped closer, confusion turning into something sharper. “Harry, you’re sounding like— ”

“My mum?” Harry tried, reaching for levity he didn’t feel.

“No,” Sirius said, and his eyes broke. “Just….not like James.”

The silence that followed was heavy and uneven.

Harry swallowed. “Sirius, I saw things. In Snape’s memories. When I failed at Occlumency.” His breathing quickened. “I saw you. And my dad. And what you did to Snape. Snape wasn’t innocent, but it wasn't a fair fight.”

Sirius’s face went still.

Harry forced himself on. “I know who my dad became. I know he died for me. I know he was good. But the boy I saw….  I can’t make him match the man everyone praises.”

The confession hung in the air like a fragile thing.

Sirius exhaled, something old and weary inside it. “James was brilliant. And arrogant. And sixteen.” He sat slowly, the strength draining from his posture. “He grew out of it. He tried. Lily made him see himself. We all did. Eventually.”

He looked up, eyes raw with memory.

“He would have hated knowing you saw him like that.”

Harry blinked hard.

Sirius went on softly, “He wasn’t cruel, Harry. Not at the end. And that’s who he truly became.”

Harry nodded. He didn’t agree completely, but he nodded.

A beat.

“What do you regret?” Harry asked.

Sirius startled   then gave a short, humorless laugh.

“Plenty.”He rubbed at his chin. “We thought we were the heroes of every room we walked into. We laughed at things that weren’t funny. We confused pride with bravery. And I— ” Sirius’s throat tightened. “—I didn’t see Snape as a person. Not until too late.”

Harry absorbed this quietly.

Sirius studied him then, eyes narrowing with dawning understanding. “This isn’t about James anymore,” he murmured. “Who are you talking about, Harry?”

Harry’s heart skipped painfully. “Things aren’t black and white,” he managed. “Not anymore.”

Sirius sagged against the desk. “I just wanted you to be like James.”
He shook his head. “Not the cruel bits. The brave bits. The loyal bits. The certain bits.” A slight hesitation. “Maybe that wasn’t fair.”

Harry’s voice was barely there. “I’m not him.”

Sirius looked at him for a long time.

“No,” he said softly. “You’re Harry.”

The words landed gently. But they left a hollow ache in Harry’s chest.

“I don’t want us to fight,” Harry whispered.

“Neither do I,” Sirius said, exhaustion bleeding through. “Let’s… try not to.”

They shared a strained, fragile smile.

But as Harry walked out, the ache stayed. The weight of everything he hadn’t said, everything involving Draco, everything shifting too fast pressed on his ribs until it hurt.

Snape’s classroom door was barely ajar before Sirius pushed it open, his posture strung tight with a purpose Harry hadn’t seen in years.

“I want to see what the dungeon crow has been teaching you,” Sirius said. The usual bite was there, but not the usual recklessness behind it. This wasn’t a jab. It was worry: wearing an old coat.

Harry blinked. “Sirius ”

But Sirius brushed past him, eyes sweeping the room with an alertness that belonged more to an Auror than a fugitive. He took in the wardlines carved into the floor, the defensive sigils chalked along the edges, the scorch marks Snape hadn’t bothered to scrub from last night. His hiss left him in a long, quiet exhale.

“This isn't a Defense curriculum,” he murmured. “This is battlefield conditioning.”

Draco stiffened near the back of the room. Sirius’s gaze caught him cool, assessing, not contemptuous but sharp, as if he were cataloguing a threat he couldn’t yet define.

“You’re children,” Sirius muttered. “And Severus Snape is drilling you like you’re weeks from deployment.”

“We might be,” Draco said, not defensive, just factual. His knuckles were white around his wand.

Sirius turned to him. “And Snape? What exactly is he preparing you for?”

Harry’s eyes met Draco's quiet, shared understanding of everything they couldn’t say.

Sirius saw the exchange. His gaze narrowed.  “There’s something happening between you,” he said softly. “Something Snape knows. Something Dumbledore’s counting on. Even I can feel the air tingling.”

Draco’s breath hitched; Harry’s chest tightened.

Sirius stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Whatever this training is, whatever they’re building you’re going to show me.”

Snape’s voice cut across the room like a scalpel. “Black. If you intend to disrupt my classroom, do it with less melodrama.”

Sirius turned, bristling but Snape wasn’t wearing his usual disdain. His expression was held too tightly, strained at the edges. He was calculating.

“You’ve been training them,” Sirius said. “I want to know what they can do.”

“Why?” Draco asked before he could stop himself. The question was crisp, respectful, Slytherin.

Sirius blinked, caught off guard. “Because Harry’s my godson. And you’re…”
A beat. Something unsteady. “You’re his partner. In training.”

Heat crept up Draco’s neck.

Snape stepped forward. “This is not a spectacle.”

“No one asked you,” Sirius snapped.

“No one needs to,” Snape replied coldly. “Your presence announces itself.”

Harry groaned softly. “Please, can we not?”

But Draco had already moved to the center of the room, jaw set with that familiar, brittle determination.

“If Mr. Black wants a demonstration,” Draco said, “he’ll have one.”

“Draco, ” Harry warned.

“I don’t need rescuing,” Draco murmured. “Not from you.”

Sirius looked at him for a long moment. “I never said you were weak.”

“No,” Draco said quietly, raising his wand. “But you assumed it.”

Even Sirius flinched at that.

Snape gave the dueling rules with clipped precision. Sirius agreed. Harry positioned himself at the ring’s edge, stomach knotted.

The duel began.

Sirius opened with a light hex testing. Draco blocked with a shield so smooth it barely disturbed the air. Sirius arched a brow.

“Not bad. Your father always relied on brute force. Sloppy. Predictable.”

Harry hissed, “Sirius— ”

But Draco didn’t rise. He recalibrated his stance, the kind Snape had hammered into him through exhaustion and repetition.

Sirius circled. “Lucius Malfoy was a coward,” he said. “A man who hid behind his wand and his mask.”

Draco’s grip tightened. But his wand didn’t waver.

Sirius continued, each word an incision. “I bet your father taught you nothing worth using, that Snape had to start from the ground up.”

Harry stepped forward. “Sirius stop.”

Draco lifted a hand to halt him, gaze never leaving Sirius. “I’m fine.”

And then he moved.

It was fast enough that Harry’s heart caught in his throat. Draco vaulting over a low hex, countering midair, shifting his weight into a stance that was unmistakably his own: Snape’s precision, Draco’s control.

Spell after spell flew Sirius escalating, Draco absorbing and redirecting, his movements tight and elegant. He was fighting with discipline, not rage. With thought, not impulse.

Sirius noticed. His expression sharpened into something calculating, professional. “You fight cleaner than your father,” Sirius said. “He never had your restraint.”

There Draco faltered, just barely.

Sirius pressed. “Your mother carried the spine in that family. She protects you, doesn’t she? Lucius never protected anyone.”

That hit the nerve Sirius hadn’t meant to hit.

For half a heartbeat Draco froze.

Then—
He inhaled.

Everything about him changed.

Harry felt the shift before he saw it.

A quiet pull, like the air between them tightening. Draco’s focus drew sharp, and Harry’s magic without conscious thought leaned toward it. As if their magic moved to the same beat.

It startled him.
It startled Sirius.

Snape went stone-still.

Draco cast.

Sirius’s shield snapped up but the angle was wrong, thrown off by some unseen current. Draco’s second spell slid under the guard. The third detonated behind Sirius’s stance, knocking him off-center.

And the fourth— 

The disarming charm sang through the air, clean as a bell.

Sirius’s wand flew, spinning once before Draco caught it neatly.

The room fell silent.

Sirius stared at him not angry, not wounded, but genuinely astonished. “Well-fought,” he said quietly.

Draco inclined his head. A gesture with centuries of pureblood etiquette behind it and none of the arrogance.

Harry’s heart thudded once, hard.

Draco turned to him. He looked flushed, breath uneven, eyes bright with something Harry hadn’t yet found words for.

Harry smiled at him warm and unguarded.

And Draco… looked like that smile was something he didn’t know how to receive, but desperately needed.

Draco returned to the practice room alone, wand clearing cushions with clipped precision. Snape entered without sound.

“Sit.”

Draco obeyed.

“You lost focus,” Snape said.

Draco’s mouth thinned. “I— ”

“Do not interrupt.” Snape’s voice was sharp but not cruel. “Black spoke of your father. You let it land.”

Draco looked down.

Snape’s tone softened by degrees. “Your father is not the ground on which you must plant yourself.”

Draco swallowed.

“And yet,” Snape continued, “you recovered. Brilliantly.”

Draco looked up, startled.

Snape sighed. It was not dramatic, just weary. “I taught you to think. Today, you proved you can.”

A long pause.

“Harry Potter,” Snape said, more gently than Draco expected, “is a complication. But he is not a weakness unless you make him one.”

Draco said nothing.

Snape crouched in front of him, eye-level.“You are not your father,” he said quietly. “You will not become him unless you choose to.”

“Was I truly that good?” he whispered.

Snape’s mouth twitched. “You were exemplary. Don’t let it go to your head.”

He turned to leave. “You are safe here,” he added. “As safe as any of us can be.”

And Draco believed him.

The Room of Requirement shaped itself the moment they stepped inside dim light pooling softly across scattered cushions, shelves receding into the shadows, the scent of cedar and parchment settling. Nothing excessive, nothing suggestive. Just quiet, and space, and the kind of stillness that felt like permission.

Draco stood a few steps away, shoulders tight, jaw set in a way that wasn’t defensive so much as bracing. Harry could see the effort to hold himself controlled, contained, when he was anything but.

“Draco,” Harry said quietly.

Draco exhaled as if he’d been without air too long. He didn’t turn. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to decide how fragile I am.”

Harry stepped closer slowly, carefully, but without hesitation. “I’m not.”

Draco’s laugh was soft, a little disbelieving. “You think I don’t know that look? I’ve spent half my life being assessed.”

“Then look at me,” Harry said.

Draco did. It wasn’t defiance, it was surrendering a shield he’d worn for years. His eyes were sharp, tired, too open.

Harry reached out, brushing his fingers along Draco’s wrist. A small touch, nothing more. Draco didn’t flinch. His breath shifted a quiet, involuntary catch and Harry felt a faint hum rise against his skin, the echo of Draco’s magic answering the contact without permission or intent.

Draco swallowed. “You feel it too.”

There was no point in pretending. “Yes.”

Something steadied in Draco almost relief, almost resolve. He stepped into Harry’s space, close enough that their foreheads nearly touched.

“I don’t want to be afraid of this,” Draco said.

“You don’t have to be.”

Draco huffed a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “And yet.”

Harry’s voice lowered. “Then let me help.”

Draco didn’t pull away. Instead he lifted his hand, fitting it against Harry’s cheek with an unexpected, deliberate confidence thumb brushing just beneath his ear. An unmistakable choice.

Harry’s pulse quickened . “Draco…”

The kiss wasn’t cautious. It wasn’t uncertain. Draco kissed like someone who had made a steady decision, seeking warmth rather than reassurance, the kind of kiss given by someone allowing himself honesty for the first time in years.

Harry responded in kind, hands sliding to Draco’s waist, drawing him closer with a quiet certainty that stabled them both. Their mouths met again, slower, not in a rush, no panic, just two people choosing to be close in a world where choices were rare gifts.

Draco’s fingers slipped into Harry’s hair, not trembling this time. Bold. Intentional. He murmured against Harry’s mouth, “You shake everything loose in me.”

Harry whispered back, “Good.”

Draco pressed his forehead to Harry’s, voice unsteady but sure. “Stay with me tonight.”

No fear in the request, only need, and trust.

Harry’s answer was simple. “Yes.”

The Room shifted subtly around them lamps dimming to gleaming gold, cushions rearranging themselves, a narrow bed appearing against the far wall, softened by gentle light. Nothing lurid. Nothing hurried. Just comfort.

Draco tugged lightly at Harry’s shirt. “Come here.”

Harry followed, letting Draco guide them toward the bed. They sat first facing each other, knees brushing, then leaned back together, Draco folding into Harry with careful intention, Harry’s arm sliding around him like instinct.

They lay there quietly, sharing warmth more than urgency, hands tracing slow paths along sleeves and arms, kisses trailing from mouth to jaw to cheek, soft and lingering. The magic between them hummed like a pulse under the skin calm, steady, answering without pressure.

Draco curled against him, one leg sliding between Harry’s, his voice low against Harry’s throat. “I’ve wanted… this. Not just the kissing. The closeness.”

Harry’s fingers threaded through Draco’s hair. “Then have it.”

Draco exhaled long, soft, the sound of something loosening deep inside him.

The lanterns dimmed by degrees, the world narrowing to beating hearts and fingertips and heat.

They kissed again unhurried, deepening slowly, hands sliding beneath layers one button at a time, the room falling into gentle shadow around them.

The last thing Harry remembered clearly was Draco’s fingers curling at the back of his neck, and the soft, quiet sound he made when Harry pulled him closer. 

 The night closed softly around them.

II. A Lack of Comfort.

Dumbledore’s office was quiet in the late-afternoon light, the kind that softened the angular shelves and cast long gold bars across the floor. Instruments clicked softly to themselves. Fawkes dozed.

Sirius did not.

He paced with slow, agitated strides, like someone who had spent hours arguing with himself before climbing the stairs to argue with someone else.

“Albus,” he began, voice low and tight, “keeping Malfoy here is dangerous. And pairing him with Harry all summer tells me that isn’t exactly what it looks like.”

Dumbledore folded his hands, his expression neutral but attentive.
“I take it your visit raises questions.”

Sirius let out a huff that bordered on a laugh. “He’s powerful. Stronger than he should be at sixteen. And I don’t just mean magically. He’s controlled. Calculated. That’s not normal training, it's preparation.”

“It is.” Dumbledore asked softly.

“For something you’re not telling me.” Sirius’s voice steadied, losing its rough edge. “Harry may pretend it’s fine, but I saw the ward lines in that classroom. I saw what Snape was drilling into them. You’re training them for war. Not school.”

Dumbledore didn’t deny it. He simply inclined his head a fraction, acknowledging the truth without embellishing it.

Sirius pressed on. “And Malfoy Draco he’s not just keeping up with Harry. He’s meeting him. Matching him.” His brows tightened. 

Sirius dragged a hand through his hair. “Albus, I’m not blind. I saw them in the courtyard. They move around each other like… like they’ve already built a language I don’t understand.”

Dumbledore’s gaze drifted briefly to the window. Two figures small from this distance but unmistakably them crossed into the shadow beneath the archway.

“They have,” he said simply.

Sirius turned toward him sharply. “And you’re comfortable with that?”

“Comfort is not the word I would choose,” Dumbledore answered gently. “But I am… not alarmed.”

Sirius stared at him. “You should be.”

Dumbledore’s tone remained imperturbably calm. “Tell me. What precisely do you believe Mr. Malfoy will do to Harry?”

“That’s the point,” Sirius snapped quietly. “I don’t know. And Harry feels something for him, trust, at the very least. Attachment, if we’re being honest. And Malfoy— ” he hesitated, as if the next words were difficult to admit “—the boy looks at him like he’s never had someone stand on his side before.”

There was a long, contemplative silence.

“Sirius,” Dumbledore said at last, “Draco Malfoy is a child raised in a world that has offered him little compassion and even less choice.”

“So was Harry,” Sirius countered. “But Harry didn’t ”

“Ah.” Dumbledore lifted a hand. “Harry did. He does. He continues to. Every day. He is not as different from Mr. Malfoy as you want him to be.”

Sirius’s mouth tightened. “That isn’t comforting.”

“No,” Dumbledore agreed. “But it is true.”

Sirius stepped closer to the desk. “Albus, he could hurt Harry.”

“He could,” Dumbledore said without hesitation. “But he has not.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t.”

“Nor does it mean he will.”

Sirius breathed out through his nose, steady but strained. “You’re gambling.”

Dumbledore’s eyes warmed with something old and weary. “I am allowing Harry to choose.”

“That,” Sirius said quietly, “is the gamble.”

Dumbledore didn’t argue. He simply regarded Sirius with a depth of understanding that made Sirius look away.

“They are young,” Dumbledore said. “Not finished. Not fixed. Both standing at a crossroads shaped by expectation and fear. And somehow… they seem to have found one another.”

Sirius’s lips twitched. “I still don’t like it.”

“I would be concerned if you did,” Dumbledore replied.

There was almost a smile in it, but thin, worn around the edges.

Sirius pressed a hand against the back of a chair, grounding himself. “If Harry gets hurt ”

“He will be hurt,” Dumbledore said softly. “We all are, when we grow into ourselves.”

Sirius closed his eyes. “That’s not the kind of hurt I mean.”

“I know,” Dumbledore said. And he did. It was clear in his voice. “But this… connection between them? It will shape both boys in ways we cannot foresee. Perhaps dangerously. Perhaps wondrously.”

Sirius opened his eyes. “You really believe Draco Malfoy could protect him. Not harm him?”

Dumbledore considered his answer carefully. “I believe he could be the reason Harry does not have to stand alone.”

Sirius swallowed once, hard. “And you’re willing to risk it.”

Dumbledore folded his hands again. “Not a risk,” he said softly. “Trust.”

Sirius let out a low, shaken exhale. “I still don’t like it.”

“You are not required to,” Dumbledore said gently. “Only to understand that your godson is becoming someone who makes his own choices. Even the ones that frighten you.”

Silence settled again, heavy, but honest.

Sirius looked toward the window one last time, toward the space where Harry and Draco had disappeared minutes before.

“It scares me,” he admitted quietly.

“I know,” Dumbledore said. 

Sirius’s visit ended sooner than Harry was ready for.

The two of them stood just outside the Entrance Hall, where the morning light pooled in pale gold on the flagstones. Sirius’s hands were on Harry’s shoulders steadying rather than clinging and Harry could feel the residual tension in them, the kind that came from sleeplessness and too many half-formed fears.

“You’ll write,” Sirius said quietly. It wasn’t a request; it was a tether.

“I will,” Harry promised.

“And you’ll look after yourself.”

Harry managed a small smile. “I will try.”

Something flickered in Sirius’s expression, something softer than frustration and deeper than worry. It was the look of someone trying to memorize a face before parting ways again.

Before he could say more, another presence settled into the corridor like a moist draft.

“Fascinating,” Snape said dryly, approaching with the measured steps of someone who’d already rehearsed his tolerance. “We appear to be staging farewells before breakfast now.”

Sirius closed his eyes once, briefly an exhausted concession to the universe before turning. “Perfect. I was wondering how long it would take you to ruin the mood.”

Snape’s expression did not shift. “I had no intention of participating in a mood.”

Harry exhaled, half a sigh, half resignation. “Can we not do this?”

Sirius didn’t rise to the bait this time, though Harry could see the old habits tugging at him. Instead, he looked at Harry again studying, thoughtful, almost reluctant to leave.

“When did you get taller?” Sirius asked, voice unexpectedly soft.

Harry shrugged. “Sometime this summer. I didn’t really notice.”

Sirius did. Harry could see it in the way his godfather’s gaze gentled, taking in the angles of Harry’s face, the steadiness in his posture.

“You look more like her,” Sirius murmured. “Not just the eyes, there's a bit of Lily in the way you hold yourself now. The way you think before you speak.”

Harry didn’t trust himself to answer. 

Snape turned his face slightly away, jaw tightening with a familiar tension Harry couldn’t quite decipher.

Sirius gave Harry one last touch, a steady hand at his cheek, brief, careful as though anchoring the moment for both of them.

“I should go,” Sirius said quietly. “If I stay, I’ll only start another argument I’ll regret.”

“I know,” Harry said. “It’s all right.”

Sirius nodded once, deeply, then stepped back. “Take care, Harry.”

He didn’t look at Snape as he left, not out of hostility, but because the leave-taking was already sharp enough, and he had no room for old feuds.

His cloak swept behind him, the color catching in the light as he crossed the courtyard and disappeared beyond the gates.

The moment the silhouette vanished, the world seemed to settle.

Snape remained standing a few paces away, arms folded not defensive this time, but composed, withholding commentary because, for once, he understood Harry needed quiet more than correction.

When he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual edge.
Just a low, almost reluctant acknowledgment.

“You handled him well,” Snape said.

Harry let out a soft huff that might have been a laugh. “I’ve had practice.”

A faint, wry sound, something like agreement, escaped Snape.

“Yes,” he said. “So have I.”

The two stood in brief, companionable silence. Not a tender exchange exactly, but no longer barbed. A truce forged in sincerity rather than necessity.

Then Snape straightened, robe sweeping behind him as he turned toward the castle.

“Come, Potter,” he said, tone returning to familiar structure but lacking its usual bite. “You still owe me twenty minutes of wandwork you attempted to avoid this morning.”

Harry followed, still carrying the echo of Sirius’s touch, and the unexpected steadiness of Snape’s approval.

Something had shifted.

He wasn’t sure what it meant yet.

But it felt real.

Draco hadn’t planned to stay.

He told himself he’d only stepped under the archway to catch a moment, to let the sound of the birds in the courtyard settle around, to feel the warmth of the day on him,  until his thoughts stopped scraping raw. But instead of leaving, he found himself watching Harry talk with Sirius Black.

Harry laughed at something Sirius said, shoulders loosening, face open in a way Draco rarely saw except in small, private moments.
It was… disarming. And it clawed at something that wasn’t jealousy so much as recognition of a life built from a different kind of inheritance   one Draco had never been offered.

Sirius hugged Harry before leaving. A brief embrace, but fierce enough that Draco had to look away.

Snape passed by next, giving Draco a single knowing glance, the kind that said he had seen everything Draco didn’t want seen. Neither of them stopped.

And then Harry turned, scanning the courtyard. When he spotted Draco in the archway, his expression shifted   subtle, but unmistakable. Relief. Affection. Something almost like quiet certainty.

Harry walked toward him without hesitation. “You ready?” he asked, voice steady.

Draco blinked, trying not to let the sight of Harry’s softened expression unbalance him. “For what?”

“Our next lesson,” Harry said. “Snape’s waiting. And if we’re late, you know what he’ll do.”

Draco gave a low exhale that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t remind me.”

Harry nudged him lightly, a measured, familiar gesture. An invitation. “Walk with me.”

Draco did.

Their steps fell into an easy rhythm, the courtyard emptying behind them. A quiet space opened between them   not distance, not hesitation, but something chosen. Their hands brushed once, then again, and Draco didn’t pull away.

The path toward the classroom felt less like returning to training… and more like returning to each other.

Snape had commandeered the old Transfiguration classroom. The desks were shoved against the walls; pale light stretched across the scuffed stone, catching motes of dust still drifting in the air.

Draco and Harry faced each other in the center. Snape stood between them, arms folded, mouth drawn in a near-snarl.

“I expect focus,” Snape said, voice clipped. “Not whatever fog the two of you drift through on your better days. Begin.”

Harry lifted his wand. Draco mirrored him.

Snape stepped aside.

Their first exchange was textbook: Disarming, Shielding, a neat counterspell. But the rhythm settled too quickly, too smoothly. Draco adjusted his stance to anticipate Harry; Harry shifted before realizing Draco had even moved.

Their spells collided.

Instead of breaking apart, they folded together in a brief ribbon of silver-blue before dissipating.

Snape’s eyes narrowed a flicker, nothing more, but enough.

“Again.”

Draco attacked first quickly, low and precise. Harry dodged and countered. Draco met the counterspell not with resistance but with a small shift that aligned to the exact trajectory Harry favored under pressure.

They cast again.

This time, the two spells didn’t clash. They met. They resonated—one pulse, warm and startling, skimming across the stones.

Snape’s heart tripped in his throat. 

“Stop.”

They froze.

Snape walked toward them with slow, deliberate steps, as if approaching a fire he could not afford to mishandle.

“That,” he said, “was not talent.”

Draco wiped a bead of sweat from his cheek. “It looked like talent.”

“It was Resonance,” Snape snapped. “A shared magical signature strong enough to mesh under pressure. Rare. Powerful. Dangerous.”

Harry and Draco exchanged a look   not fear, exactly, but the sharp awareness of something significant shifting beneath them.

“When magic mirrors emotion,” Snape said quietly, “control must be absolute. If either of you falters, you could injure each other without intention.”

Draco went still.

Snape’s voice dropped further, the closest he ever came to caution. “Control yourselves. Or stay apart outside training.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He swept toward the door, robes cracking like tempered glass behind him.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Early.”

The door shut.

Harry exhaled. Draco stared at the floor where their spells had met, expression taut with recognition and unease.

“Harry…” Draco said softly. “What did we just do?”

Harry’s pulse thudded. “Something we’re not supposed to?”

Harry hadn’t meant to stop. He had only paused because he heard voices through the narrow opening of the classroom door Snape’s low rasp, unusually sharp, and Draco’s thinner, tight at the edges.

“…not ready,” Draco whispered. 

“You do not have the luxury of readiness,” Snape cut in. “You were given instructions. You will follow them.”

“Orders,” Draco murmured. “Let’s call them what they are.”

Snape inhaled sharply, as though reining himself in. “You will be watched. Every corridor. Every hour. You cannot hesitate.”

“I’m not hesitating,” Draco said, except the tremor betrayed him.

Snape ignored the lie. “Your mother’s safety depends on you staying ahead of this. That you keep up the role. If you slip too much ”

“I know,” Draco whispered. “I know.”

Snape stepped closer; his voice softened in a way Harry had heard only once before. “I will ensure that you do not fail.”

Then he turned sharply, sensing something.

“Someone’s there,” he said.

Harry’s blood froze.

Draco strode toward the door; Snape grabbed his arm before he drew his wand.
“Wait.”

Harry pressed himself behind a suit of armor, forcing his breathing silent.

Draco yanked the door open and scanned the corridor. His shoulders dropped a fraction.

“I just need a moment,” Draco muttered.

“Take it,” Snape said, “then compose yourself.”

Draco stepped out fully.

He started walking  and saw Harry.

He froze mid-step.

“Harry,” Draco said, voice thin but steady.

Harry straightened. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”

“What did you hear?” Draco asked.

“Nothing specific,” Harry lied, attempting calm. “I just heard voices. Thought it might be Filch.”

Draco studied him one long, quiet second.
No suspicion.
Recognition.

“It was nothing,” Draco said, too quickly. “Snape was lecturing me. Again.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing.”

Draco’s gaze drifted to the floor. “Harry, let it go. Please.”

The plea was soft, but it carried the weight of someone holding too much already.

Harry opened his mouth.

Draco turned away before he could speak.

Harry watched him go, the corridor stretching between them like a faultline neither could cross, not yet, not safely.

And somewhere deep under his ribs, the resonance pulsed once   sharp, warning, afraid.

III. Snape Does Not Get Paid Enough.

The abandoned classroom was dim, lit only by late-afternoon light spilling through high windows. Dust moved lazily in the beams, as though the room itself had paused.

Harry closed the door softly behind them.

Draco reached for him immediately, not frantically, but certain. Harry stepped into the touch without hesitation, hands settling at Draco’s waist as Draco’s fingers slipped into his hair.

Their kiss unfolded slowly and deliberately, the kind of intimacy born from choice rather than impulse. Draco’s hand cupped Harry’s jaw, thumb brushing the edge of his mouth; Harry leaned into him, letting the warmth between them settle into something steady and unguarded.

They kissed until Harry’s back touched the desk, until Draco’s breath stuttered, until the room felt small around them. His hands slid down to knit into the fabric of Harry’s jumper, as if to pin him in place.

Then—
The air shifted.

A faint hum vibrated through the floorboards. Magic stirred, tender and aware, threading through the space between them. Draco inhaled sharply; Harry felt the pull low in his chest, like an answering chord.

They broke apart at the same moment, eyes wide, heart beats unsteady.

Draco’s hand remained against Harry’s cheek. “Did you— ?”

“Yes,” Harry whispered. “I felt it.”

The resonance coiled between them was subtle, electric.

Harry leaned in again 

The door slammed open.

Snape swept in like a catastrophic inevitability wrapped in black robes.

“For Merlin’s sake,” he snapped, “if you insist on forming an unstable magical conduit between you, at least refrain from doing so in a classroom older than half the ghost population ”

He stopped.

His eyes flicked to their hands.

Their faces.

Their proximity.

The charged air.

A look of pure, exhausted horror crossed his features.

“No,” Snape said flatly. “Absolutely not.”

Draco jerked away from Harry like he’d touched a live wire. Harry straightened instinctively, heat pounding in his face.

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose. “If the two of you had been ten seconds further along, I’d be peeling your remains off opposite walls.”

Harry opened his mouth. “Professor, we were— ”

Snape held up one finger, deadly. “Do not finish that sentence. Whatever explanation you provide will be unacceptable by definition.”

Draco bristled. “We weren’t doing anything dangerous. ”

Snape turned slowly. “Mr. Malfoy, given what I just witnessed, I am not inclined to debate your definition of ‘dangerous.’”

He exhaled, long and suffering. “From now on, any interaction between you will occur under supervision. My supervision. In controlled environments. With appropriate grounding wards. And absolutely none— ” he gestured vaguely, appalled, “— of this.”

Harry blinked. “…Professor, did you just say you’re going to supervise our snogging?”

Draco made a strangled sound between a gasp and a curse.

Snape closed his eyes. “Potter. I am supervising your magic. The fact that your… romantic entanglement appears to trigger magical instability is merely an unfortunate complication.”

Harry bit back a laugh. Draco failed entirely, a quiet, incredulous huff escaping him.

Snape stared at them as if personally offended by the concept of youth.

“If the pair of you are quite finished humiliating yourselves,” he said icily, “you may leave. Preferably before the castle develops opinions.”

He waved them toward the door with something like despair.

Draco lingered for half a second, enough for Harry to feel the unresolved pull between them, then slipped out.

Harry followed, heart still thrumming with resonance and the unmistakable ache of wanting more.

The stone gargoyle had barely begun to shift aside before Snape swept past it, taking the spiral staircase two steps at a time. His robes snapped with each stride, dark and precise as a storm front.

He didn't knock.

Dumbledore glanced up as the door opened sharply, quill hovering above parchment. A faint smile touched his mouth.

“Severus,” he said warmly. “You have that look that suggests something… enlightening has occurred. Tea?”

Snape shut the door with controlled force. “No. And ‘enlightening’ is one word for it.”

Dumbledore folded his hands and waited.

“They resonate,” Snape said flatly.

A gentle blink. “Harry and Draco?”

Snape’s glare sharpened. “No, Potter and the mop cupboard. Yes, Harry and Draco.”

He began pacing, agitation barely masked. “Their magic merged twice after I explicitly forbade any further testing. Deliberate alignment. Emotional reinforcement. Completely undisciplined.”

Dumbledore’s eyes glimmered. “A natural conduit between two young wizards is— ”

“ —volatile,” Snape interrupted. “Unpredictable. And with their particular temperaments, it is an invitation for disaster. You know how dangerous this can be.”

Dumbledore’s attention drifted to the window. Down in the courtyard, Harry and Draco crossed the flagstones side by side, walking close enough that their sleeves brushed. Something soft, unguarded passed between them as Harry leaned against Draco and Draco allowed the contact.

Dumbledore’s sigh was almost fond. “Magic often recognizes truths before we do.”

Snape made a sharp, incredulous sound. “Magic also rings alarms long before anyone listens. And this whatever this connection is already hums when they stand within arm’s reach. If they lose control, the blast radius will be impressive.”

“You’re worried,” Dumbledore said gently.

Snape stopped pacing. “I am responsible. I know what happens when a child is left to navigate dark expectations alone.”

Something flickered in Dumbledore’s expression. “Draco is not you, Severus.”

“No,” Snape said quietly. “But he is alone in ways that mirror my own isolation far more than I care to admit.”

He drew a breath, steadier than before, but strained. “You placed them together deliberately. Shared space, shared lessons, shared pressure. And now their magic interlocks. You knew this was possible.”

“I knew it was likely,” Dumbledore corrected softly. “Compatibility of that kind does not happen by accident.”

Snape turned toward him, disbelief shading into anger. “Albus he is a Malfoy. The Dark Lord is circling him. His mother is hostage to a plan neither of them understand. And Potter… Potter is tied to a prophecy that will drag him into the center of every war to come. And you look at this entanglement and call it promising?”

Dumbledore’s eyes cooled with something old and sad. “I call it necessary.”

“For whom?” Snape demanded. “For you? For your strategy? For the Order?”

“For Harry,” Dumbledore answered simply. “And perhaps for Draco as well.”

Snape sank into a silence edged with dread. “And if it goes wrong?”

Dumbledore’s answer was equally quiet. “Then we adapt. And we protect them.”

Snape turned away, staring out the window at the empty courtyard. “They are children,” he said, more to himself than to Dumbledore.

“For now,” Dumbledore replied.

The words landed like a weight.

Snape’s posture stiffened, but he inclined his head once an acknowledgment, breath or perhaps a promise he hadn’t intended to make:
he would not allow either boy to be consumed by fate without resistance.

IV. The Start of Something.

As August wound down, the castle changed. The halls felt less like shelter and more like a waiting room. Term was coming; the world beyond Hogwarts was pulling its shadow closer.

Harry felt it in his bones, the shift, the tightening.
But he also felt steadier. Anchored. As though something between him and Draco had become a quiet point of gravity.

On the final night before the students returned, he found Draco in the Room of Requirement again. Tonight it had shaped itself into a long chamber with a wide window overlooking the lake. Dusk stained the sky in bruised purples and deepening blue.

Draco stood by the window, arms loosely folded. “Do you ever think about what comes after all this?” he asked, voice soft enough not to disturb the room.

“All the time,” Harry said.

Draco huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh, if there’d been more certainty in it. “I keep pretending I won’t have to find an answer.”

“You might not need one,” Harry said gently.

Draco’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Hopeful of you.”

Neither pressed the point. It wasn’t a night for answers.

The Room settled into lamplight and quiet warmth, the air touched with the scent of rain on stone. Outside the conjured windows, stars began to bloom, clear and sharp.

Harry sat on the low couch. Draco joined him, leaving the smallest space between them an opening rather than a barrier. His posture was composed, but the sharpness had eased. His knees angled faintly toward Harry. His hands rested loosely in the space between them.

“You okay?” Harry murmured.

Draco’s eyes stayed on the window for a moment before he answered. “I don’t know. But I don’t feel so… alone in it.” His voice dropped. “That helps.”

Something tightened in Harry’s chest.
He let his hand inch closer on the cushion not touching, just near.

Draco noticed. Harry saw the way his breath shifted, subtle but unmistakable.

A moment later, Draco turned his head slow, deliberate as though choosing to look at Harry rather than at whatever waited outside these walls.

“Harry,” he said quietly.

The world didn’t contract; it steadied. As if they were standing at the edge of something neither had named but both had already stepped toward.

Harry raised a hand, brushing the back of his fingers against Draco’s cheek. The touch was barely a question more than a gesture.

Draco drew in a sharp sigh, not startled, but recognizing something he’d been expecting without admitting it.

He leaned into Harry.

Harry moved that last inch and Draco met him halfway. Their lips brushed   tentative, careful, real. A soft press, a slow exhale. Draco’s hand lifted, curling at Harry’s chin as if grounding himself. Harry breathed out against him, steady and grateful.

They kissed again, deeper, still unhurried. Certain.

When they drew apart, their foreheads rested together in the tender quiet.

The Room dimmed, as though stepping back to give them space. Starlight sharpened above them.

Harry’s thumb traced gently along Draco’s cheekbone, a quiet confirmation.

As he touched him, something warm unfurled beneath the skin of the moment. Not a flare, not a surge, a quiet pulse of shared magic, the faintest stirring of resonance rising between them. A soft alignment. Two signatures brushing, recognizing, agreeing.

Harry felt it first a tingling at his fingertips where they rested against Draco’s skin. Draco felt it moments later; his heath stilled in something like quiet awe.

The magic didn’t crash or dominate. It settled. Harmonized.
Ancient and new at once.

Draco closed his eyes. “We’re really doing this,” he murmured.

Harry’s voice was soft, grounded. “Yes.”

Outside, the summer night continued its slow, inevitable descent.

Inside, something else was beginning.