Chapter Text
Sweat beaded on Harry’s brow as he pressed the cutting edge of his chisel to the Warding Stone.
The Smithery was always as hot as a furnace itself, warmed by the heat from the forges set at every Wardsmith’s individual station. The building itself was large and domed with a funnel top that every chimney snaked up towards like humongous lengths of ivy. It had struggling Cooling Charms in dire need of refurbishment pressed into the stone and mortar. It was a valiant, if rather ineffective, attempt to keep the people within from melting just as surely as the ferrous metals they worked with.
The clang of metal on metal rang in Harry’s ears as he slowly chipped away at the chalked outline. When he had first begun apprenticing at the Smithery, the ringing sounds and the waves of heat would make him woozy and nauseous. He would stumble to the dorm and trip onto his uncomfortably hard, just slightly too tall standard-issue bed. Once horizontal, he’d try desperately to fix his aching eyes on a still point within the spinning, spartan room.
Harry hadn’t realized not every Wardsmith endured this sort of heat sickness. He had thought it was a normal hazard of the job, and his inability to push through, perhaps, indicated that something integral about his body had become irreparably damaged at some point throughout his turbulent, hardscrabble life. Harry had called himself weak in his mind, his own voice echoing with the cadence of Uncle Vernon’s hateful diatribes.
Draco had found Harry sprawled on his bed, the covers untucked, his steel-capped workboots still laced to the shin, three hours after his third shift at the smithery. He had scowled at the sight of him, a furrow cleaved between fine brows that Harry could envision better than he could see just then.
“Have you been hexed?” Draco asked, in a manner that conveyed deep skepticism of any affirmative response.
Harry grunted, shaking his head ever so slightly. He thought, if he was very quiet and very still, perhaps the pain would not attack him.
He was not unfamiliar with pain after years of enduring Voldemort’s unwanted connection. He knew the contours of the sharp stab in his scar, the way it throbbed in his forehead and spread throughout his head and neck like some viscous poison in his veins. He knew the gnawing hollowness and shaky vertigo of too many skipped meals as a begrudgingly tolerated but nevertheless familiar companion. He knew the ache in his tired muscles and his overworked lungs, breaths fluttering fast as hummingbird wings like he could not get too attached to the air around him.
Draco had not been raised for such endurance, however. Draco had never had suffering kneaded into the marrow of his bones. It is why he had crumbled so, during the war. There had been no struggle to shore up the mettle he lacked, no expectation that the hand which fed him would backhand him too. It had been to his detriment, then.
The tug on Harry’s laces returned him to his uncooperative body. He felt as though his soul had been drifting somewhere alongside the floating motes of dust within the orange bolt of evening light by his ceiling. Draco was crouched beside the bed, one woollen-clad knee on the unswept floor, his long fingers wrapped around the heel of Harry’s muddy boot.
“Before you sully your fine sheets of burlap any further,” he huffed, shaking his head. Harry did not have to see Draco’s dorm to know he took exception to the amenities the Wardschool had provided. Harry wondered, in a vague, unformed way that would never be realized into a true question, whether Draco had packed away the bedding provided or had simply set it alight upon first setting foot in his room.
“It’s not healthy for us, living together,” Draco had said to him on their first day at the Wardschool, when Harry collected his keys and realized that Draco had selected two separate dorm rooms for them. “We feed off one another.”
Harry wondered if he still thought so, while his eyelids sunk shut as though affected by a gravity all their own. His steel-toed boots thudded one after another to the floor, and Harry thought, measuring the sound of his fading footfalls, that Draco had counted his good deed for the day completed in full. Harry had not expected him to return. The creak of the old wooden floors under his unhurried steps was a surprise.
“Sit up,” he said beside him, one firm hand pressed to the thick fabric of the cloak that Harry had not bothered to shed. “Come on now.”
“M’fine,” Harry grumbled, because he was. He was not writhing in agony crumpled on the cold ground before the tip of a Death Eater’s wand. He was not dying between roots of ancient trees, surrounded by people so evil the ground beneath them froze over and cracked as they slavered for his demise. He was not weeping behind a locked door in a cramped cupboard, knowing deep within the vacuum of his starless soul that nobody would come to save him.
Honeyed indulgence was in Draco’s voice, warmed like cinnamon. “Sure,” he replied, but the insistence of his touch did not falter. With the stiffness of someone crouched at the edge of a vast canyon, Harry managed to sit up, gripping the side of the mattress for fear that he would pitch forward any moment.
“Drink,” instructed Draco, the cool glass of a phial already at Harry’s lips. Neither Draco nor Harry remarked at the trust he showed, swallowing automatically without asking what it was. Draco had shown how adept he was at violence in their years together before the Wardschool, clumsily revealed in hot flashes of emotion, all of which coalesced to create a tepid, watery, halfhearted brew. Anything more dire than a broken nose had him lurching with sickness worse than Harry’s own.
The loose windowpane rattled, shook by the winter wind which in its ill-fitting frame. The Warming Charms hissed as they activated. The room collected a stuffy, dry heat, as the humid, thick beat of Harry’s nausea lessened. Draco waited by the simple, unused desk, only a few steps away from Harry’s bed and yet across the entire span of the cramped room. His hands were clasped behind his back, the faint red light of the Tempus counting down between them mingling with the orange of the setting sun that caressed the sharp planes of his face.
“When was the last time you ate?” he asked, when the Charm dissolved to zero and the dizzy ache reverberating through Harry’s body was nothing more than a faint shadow of discomfort. “When was the last time you drank?”
Harry scowled. “I went to the canteen this morning,” he said as though presenting an argument. He felt small, his feet and hands too clumsily large for his body, as though he had shrunk back to his nine-year-old self. He felt as though Draco had become the school nurse Harry had visited for the third time that week complaining of headaches and nausea, who would scold him “you can’t keep coming to me just because you don’t like learning,” and send him off with guilt and shame as a remedy for the empty sucking feeling beneath his ribs.
“A cup of tea doesn’t count,” Draco said. The wool of his cloak folded under his arms as he crossed them over his chest. The gleaming onyx and silver of the Malfoy signet ring caught the dying light, his left hand cupped around the point of his elbow. It was easier to look at than Draco’s expression, in which Harry would have to catch the tightness of lips thinned in disapproval, the sting of narrowed sharp eyes. Harry would read that he had done something wrong in Draco’s movements, that he himself was the wrong thing, and it would haunt him throughout the withering final days of autumn.
The next morning, Draco collected Harry at 7am. It was an exhaustingly fresh and frigid hour, one at which Draco himself looked as cool and crisp as the hoarfrost collecting on Harry’s small lozenge windows.
In textbook contrast, Harry shuffled to the canteen with grit irritating the inner corners of his eyes and oil collected in greasy smears across the lines of his forehead and the groove between his mouth and chin. One shoulder of his cloak was too tight, bunching the sleeve of his frayed Weasley jumper, while the other was collapsing off his tricep. The wind nipped at the skin of his chest beneath the ever-loosening knit, the buttons of his cloak undone. The drape of his scarf flapping behind his back was reminiscent of the duvet which was left trailed on the dorm room floor at the foot of his bed, cast off and useless.
When Draco made Harry’s breakfast, he fixed his plate like he had done throughout all of eighth year.
He piled Harry’s plate full of buttered toast, steaming scrambled eggs, and crisp bacon from the buffet while Harry trailed alongside him like a tired, yawning crup. He pressed a mug of tea into Harry’s hands, dark and thick with a spoonful of sugar, the waterline already stained from the tannins.
The woman beside them had dark, thick hair. It brushed the bunched sleeve of Harry’s cloak as she reached beside them for the tongs that Draco still held in one hand.
“I am not finished,” he said cooly, levitating Harry’s plate far to Harry’s opposite side, away from her reach in a short, curt gesture that indicated she had been exceedingly rude indeed. His own plate was still empty, and Draco took his time filling it, lingering in front of the fruit spread and the pile of squashed croissants until the queue behind them was bottlenecking and grumbling with impatience.
Draco had not taken pains to befriend the others in their cohort at the Wardschool. Harry was content to follow his lead. He had met enough people over the course of his adrenaline-studded lifetime: he wasn’t ready to take the risk of meeting anyone new, not in any substantial or meaningful way.
He had his two best friends, though Hermione remained at the bottom of the world recovering from the war with her parents and Ron buried himself alive in deliverables at the Auror Department. He had his scattered friend group, almost all of whom had fled to the far corners of the world as though the scum of Voldemort’s infectious decay could only be washed off by foreign waters. He had Draco, who pressed a guiding hand to the small of his back while Harry yawned openly into his tea.
Draco stowed his wand in the holster at his forearm, tucked beneath the sleeve of his cloak. With their plates levitating beside them both, he strode through the canteen in a way that forced the most aimless of the students milling about to shuffle sleepily out of his path. The dining area wended between towering trees, which reached their spindly branches towards the grey clouds behind the massive rain-splattered skylight.
“I will fetch you for breakfast every morning at seven,” Draco said. Harry didn’t think to argue: it would have been like arguing the rain wasn’t wet or his tea wasn’t hot. Draco stated the future of their routine at the Wardschool like it was an immutable fact carved on a stone tablet.
“Alright,” Harry said. He hated early mornings and hated being told what to do, but he clung to routine with the same fervent desperation that a keelhauled sailor clung to the rope.
Breakfast was their staple, but lunch and dinner fluctuated. Harry struggled to eat in the mornings, the strange slow-moving emptiness of the night before clinging to his insides and making him feel vaguely ill at the sight of food. Draco, ever his foil, was once again Harry’s contrast: in the evenings, he would get lost in his research, pointed nose pressed against the holes in old pages left by only the most ambitious of bookworms.
Harry would have to skulk through the Wardschool’s draughty library, the heavy thud of his boots echoing on the marble floor of the foyer announcing his incongruous presence. The front doors, of heavy oak and hundred year old stained glass, would swing shut with a soft swish. The scent of rain and fecund earth no longer blocked out the smell of damp wool and dust.
His footsteps would be muffled by the time he reached the stacks, layers upon layers of old rug and carpet capturing the sound, but he would feel no less caught out. Harry could hide in the heat and clang of the Smithery: the hard-won concentration and judder of physical exertion could consume him until he felt his own self-awareness pour out of him and into the wardstones he worked on. In the library, each clumsy movement of his maladroit presence felt unignorable.
Harry would find Draco squirrelled away deep within the bowels of the library, surrounded by small towers of books like basalt columns around him. He liked to take a moment, hidden between the wooden shelves layered in tomes like he was crouched in the Forbidden Forest, to watch a skittish wild creature go about its business undisturbed.
Draco’s library books were always living, breathing beings, exhumed and revitalized by the magnetic force of his single-minded focus. His pages were dog-eared and inkstained. He decorated them with underlined sentences and starred passages, the arc of his graceful cursive swooping through the margins. He used bits of thread or torn corners of notebook pages, quills and biros and buttons as bookmarks. He broke the spine of his books and splayed them facedown at the page of his choosing, cracked open like clams.
Every evening when Harry arrived, Draco would say, “Wait, wait,” with a distracted wave, and Harry would sit down for an additional span of time—anywhere ranging from a few minutes to a half hour—for Draco to finish his research. Harry had taken to tracing the loops of Draco’s p’s and b’s and the peculiar little beaklike twist of his z’s with his fingertips, following the lines of his script in his untended castaways. He read over notations about runic circles and environmental magical frequency and the patterns of ley lines strung higgedly-piggledy across Great Britain.
Draco’s carrel in the stacks was under siege on all sides by a regiment of tomes. Some, Harry had sworn had never moved before. He wondered if Draco collected these books, like the magpie of his Patronus, simply to count them.
It would have made more sense to sort through them and break down their militant lines to make way for his newest research, but instead, Draco spent another ten minutes as Harry’s stomach began to rumble, seeking out a forgotten corner of a bottom shelf to stash the newest additions to his hoard. Harry wondered how many of the Wardschool’s library books Draco had salted away only to forget about, though he wisely never voiced this concern.
Harry still had a few hours to go until he drew Draco from the depths of his research. Harry spent most of his days working on their combined apprenticeship—every Wardsmith was paired with a Wardsmaker at the Wardschool, and Harry and Draco received their respective education in close contact, for when they would have to work together in the field.
Today, however, Harry was working on a side project.
~*~
Harry turned his chisel to round the corner of the sharpest angle of the protection rune and braced his wrist. He loved the feeling of the hammer striking, loved watching his own design reveal itself in the hunk of metal. It gave him a sense of calm to strike order into the world with his hands and his hammer. The Smithery gave Harry a tactile sense of satisfaction that very few other things ever did, and none that did not involve Draco.
The first time Harry self the heady mix of certainty and power had not been when he had fought Tom. Not even when he returned to the Battle, his soul more unburdened than it had ever been—even then, there were so many things out of Harry’s control.
Harry had never felt the easy slide of control clicking into place like a hinged latch between his shoulder blades, pulling them together. Not until he and Draco had begun to duel.
After the Battle, during the endless, tiresome expanse of days that was their eighth year, Draco had struggled greatly. He had been filled with an explosive ire matched only in might by the frigid spear of his self-loathing. But Harry had been equally blighted, overcome with survivor’s guilt of a strange and twisted type and calcified with the fear and rage of knowing that he had died, and worse, he had returned…for what?
They had not meant to start dueling. It had simply occurred, and then happened again, and then again: it had become the routine that Harry clung to. The days were counted by the number of times Harry had seen the point of Draco’s hawthorn wand aimed at his chest.
Harry hadn’t wanted a duel, the first week back at the wartorn and battlescarred Hogwarts castle, some corridors still cordoned off and steaming acrid dark magic. He hadn’t wanted anything at all, only quiet, so that he could melt into the festering rot of grief and pain that had become his insides after the trials.
“Fucking ugh,” he had groaned under his breath, entering the eighth year boys’ dorm to see three beds, only the centre one unadorned.
The first closest to the door was decorated with a Hufflepuff yellow scarf hanging from one of the four-posters, the duvet and bedsheets crumpled as though its occupant had spent a night or two in the castle already. Two different pairs of dirt-crusted shoes laid on their side by the foot of the bed. Beside them, a trunk sat protected with neither manual lock nor the telltale shimmer of even the most basic ward.
Harry snorted uncharitably. Close to the door, belongings everywhere, no precautionary measures to be seen—clearly the boy who had returned to Hogwarts, Ernie (or was it Justin?), had never had the same sort of unsavoury experiences that led Harry to continuously cull his belongings to a tight, easily portable bundle. Like a bird, Harry’s bones still felt hollow from months of constant flight.
The bed farthest from the door was entirely unremarkable. The trunk was nondescript. The bedsheets and duvet were tucked tight enough between the mattress and the frame to bounce a Galleon off of, not a wrinkle in sight. Any indication of the inhabitant’s personality was tucked away just as tightly, save for the oil sheen of dark magic rippling where the wards met the floor.
There was only one student Harry knew of at Hogwarts talented at dark magic and bold enough to use it.
Harry slept in the Room of Requirement.
He missed the cadence of Hermione’s breath next to him as he kept watch in the tent. He felt the warmth of Ron’s lanky body next to him, all long limbs and kneecaps, like a phantom limb. The threshold of the eighth year boy’s dorm felt wrong. It made the always-there pit in Harry’s belly feel even more hollow.
The room Harry was provided was sparse and white. It felt almost clinical, out of place at Hogwarts, like a doctor’s office on the few times the Dursleys had been forced to bring him to the pediatrician or the quietest rooms in St Mungo’s. There was little but a low white bed, linens and duvet made neatly with indents in the crisp pillows. A small nightstand. Curtains, softly rustling beside the magical cracked window, which let out to the treetops of the Forbidden Forest.
No trunk. No shelves. Harry didn’t have anything to bring—he had abandoned his school trunk beside his bed in the eighth-year boy’s dorm. He had only brought it because Kreacher made it up for him.
Harry shuffled down to breakfast the next morning wearing the same clothes as the night before. His face felt crumbly with grease, his eyes gummy, his teeth coated in a thin film of grime despite the Freshening Charm he’d cast. He shoveled food onto his plate and then into his mouth without caring what it was he was eating.
He sat through his classes with similar listlessness. Barely fifteen minutes would go by before his head was resting in the crook of his elbow. Sometimes, he took his glasses off, folded them to the side of his desk, and closed his eyes. Professor Flitwick’s familiar voice helped him forget that the castle was still burnt up and crumbling in some sections. Harry tried to forget that he felt burnt up and crumbling in some sections.
The second morning, Harry opened the door to the high, melodious tinkle of Dennis Creevey’s camera lens shattering.
Dennis was hunched at the bannister to the stairwell, torn between looking down among the moving staircases and gawking at his broken camera. His face was a strange colour of pinkish purple that obscured the freckles across his cheeks. He looked liable to cry, scream, and collapse all at once.
“Go fetch, loser,” Draco snarled. His back was to Harry. His shoulders were bunched by his jaw in a way he had only begun doing throughout sixth year, when Voldemort’s extortion of his parents’ lives, like an ox’s yoke, had crushed his pin-straight posture.
“What’s going on?” Harry asked tiredly.
Dennis blinked, face clearing, and implored, “Oh, Harry, Malfoy’s gone and tossed my wand through the moving staircases—could you please Summon it back?” He clutched his broken camera to his chest as though in supplication. Harry eyed it with distaste.
“Oh, Harry,” Draco snivelled uncharitably. Clearly, he was of a similar mind regarding the press. No wonder about it, either, considering the way The Prophet had mudraked him in their headlines throughout the whole summer. “Creepy’s gone and camped out trying to get a photo for the past twelve hours—could you please kick his arse?”
Harry cringed, running a hand through his greasy, tangled hair. Nothing could have been worse for his temper in that moment than a camera flash in his face. Had Dennis done that, both his wand and his camera would be at the bottom of the stairwell, and maybe himself, too.
“Dennis, leave me the fuck alone,” Harry said.
Dennis’ mouth dropped open with an audible pop. Beside him, Draco preened. His shoulders straightened, his neck elongated, and Harry wondered if the albino peacocks studding the Manor lawns were relatives of his.
Harry continued, “Go fetch your wand and don’t do whatever that was again.”
“I only wanted to ask what you thought about—”
“I don’t care,” Harry interrupted.
At the same time, Draco cut in, “Potter doesn’t have thoughts, Creepy.”
He looked Harry up and down out of the side of his eye as Dennis spluttered by the bannister, and smirked as he continued, “He simply vibrates with righteousness, and the spirit of justice compels him to act.”
Harry scoffed, shrugging his cloak more securely onto his shoulders. The castle struggled with draughts, the warming wards damaged from the Battle. “Shove off, you git.”
He started down the hallway, towards the landing of the moving staircase, and Dennis tried to follow. Once again, he was thwarted by Draco.
He brandished his wand at Dennis with a threatening leer that was likely far more intimidating to the fifth-year than it ever had been to Harry. Harry wondered who Draco had studied and who he was trying to copy with it, whether his father or someone more nefarious.
Harry Summoned Draco’s wand with a lazy wave over his shoulder, watching with a dry crackle of amusement as Draco fumbled and snatched at the length of hawthorn. He looked as though he would stamp his foot when his wand landed, once again, in Harry’s grasp.
The shape of it felt right in the back pocket of Harry’s jeans, pressing against his belt as he descended the stairs.
“Fucking give that back,” Draco cursed, scrambling to follow hot on his heels. When he bumped shoulders with Harry, a gesture only a hair’s width less aggressive than a shove, the tips of his ears were flushed red.
“Nah,” Harry replied, tugging his cloak more securely around himself. Dennis hadn’t followed either of them, remaining by the bannister to prod glumly at the shattered bits of his camera lens, clearly waiting for the staircase Harry and Draco were descending to move. “I don’t want to, actually.”
Draco scowled, shoulders up to his earlobes as he shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. He haunted him all day, a pugnacious spectre at his shoulder, a sour expression puckering his cheeks throughout all their classes.
He sat beside Harry and muttered uncharitable things about the replacement DADA Professor, a mousey, timid woman who glanced at the two of them sitting in the farthest corner of the room at least a dozen times throughout the hour.
He glared into his Angel’s Infusion as though it had personally orchestrated his wandlessness throughout Potions. He chopped the valerian root precisely, though with far more force than necessary as he brought down the small paring knife.
He wisely drew the line at mouthing off to Headmistress McGonagall, who had remained in her post as Transfiguration Professor. She did, however, send a mild look at the two of them slouched side-by-side in their seats, Draco with his arms crossed moodily and Harry leaning back with one ankle kicked over his other knee.
By the end of the day, Draco was seething, and Harry had had more fun than he could remember in the past year.
At the end of his wits, Draco cornered Harry on their way to the Great Hall for dinner and commanded imperiously, “Give it back.”
They were in an alcove away from the flowing current of students queueing for their dinner. Although the stares never abated for either one of them, they were wise enough to give them their space. Maybe word had spread about Dennis, searching for where his wand had rolled on the ground floor for over an hour that morning.
“Duel me for it,” Harry said, as though he’d planned on saying it. He hadn’t, but the moment he did, he knew it was right. It was the only thing that alleviated the rotten feeling in his heart and stomach.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Duel me for it,” Harry repeated, and that’s how they began.