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The wind lashes at him, tearing at his hair and his skin and his robes, and nothing at all is important in the world except the golden ball hurtling forward a few yards ahead. The golden ball, and the red-robed seeker stubbornly some few feet in front of him.

(He shouldn’t be playing. There are more important things in the world, and he’s neglecting them. But… he’d just wanted to keep something. Childishly. Just for a little longer.)

They veer and they swoop and they dive, and they fly, they fly, and Draco can hardly tell where he ends and where his broom begins. Like this, it hardly even matters that it’s Potter, that he’s behind, that he’s probably going to lose again. It’ll matter later, perhaps, when his feet are back on the ground. But not now. Now, there’s just the snitch, and the red of Potter’s fluttering robes.

And then several things happen in such quick succession that he’ll only be able to realize exactly what in retrospect:

The snitch flits suddenly lower in its trajectory. The change in direction costs it some of its forward momentum, and this causes Potter to gain on it, though it remains out of range by virtue of now being nearer to the ground than he is. Potter, realizing this, rolls abruptly on his broom to hang upside down. One hand is already beginning to release the handle to reach out-… and Potter doesn’t see the bludger. The poorly aimed bludger, shot off by Draco doesn’t even know which team, which has flown low. Except Potter now flies low – and it hits him right in the side of his head. And Potter just goes loose. Drops like a rag from his broom, velocity continuing to carry him forward, but his body quickly beginning to arc downwards. They’re high up, but not that high up; he’ll be crashing into the ground in no time at all. And Draco…

Draco was already chasing. He catches.

Potter’s limp body crashes down over his. The sudden weight drops too far forward on his broom, and abruptly the tip is pointing sharply downward. They lurch down, going faster instead of slowing, and gravity begins to tug Potter away from him. Draco wrenches upwards with all his might, gets his arm somewhere around Potter’s middle and fists his fabric so tight in his hand that his knuckles grind with it. The broom struggles, strains beneath him to change velocity according to his directions…

The landing is ungraceful enough that it jars his bones, and there’s Potter and broom everywhere, tangled in him and in his robes. He gets free of them, sprawling Potter to the grass but keeping a hand under his head all the while. The skin just above his temple is split, bleeding. Salazar knows where his glasses have gone.

Draco gets his wand out, and the magic pouring from him makes Potter grimace despite not regaining consciousness.

Then Draco is wrenched away.

“Foolish game!” Madame Pomfrey snarls, falling to her knees where Draco had just been kneeling. “Foolish, foolish game! Do you know the damage a blow to the head can do!?”

She demands this of seemingly no one in particular – or perhaps of everyone around – and then she’s swallowed up by a flock of Weasleys descending from the sky. Or, two of them, at least, but then Granger is there too, and then the rest of the Gryffindor team, and… and just about then, it starts to dawn on Draco what has just happened.

What he’s just done.  

“Clear away!” Pomfrey bellows. “Clear away!”

Severus’ fingers are digging in to his shoulder, still the same grip from when he’d dragged him to his feet. Dragged him away from incriminating himself further, as though it wasn’t already well too late. What have you done, the grip itself seems to say, what have you done?

“Poppy!” McGonagall gasps, arriving in a flurry of tartan. “Poppy, is he alright?!”

“He’d sure as anything have broken his neck if young Malfoy hadn’t caught him,” Madame Pomfrey declares, as though that horrible point needed to be both emphasized and underlined. “As is, he might yet be fine, but I’ll need him in my wing as soon as possible. Here, Minerva, your steadiest levitation, if you please! Severus, bring Mr. Malfoy along with us; I need to know what healing you did, young man, and I’ll want to check you over once I’ve reassured myself that Potter will be fine. Come along, now, come along!”

Tugged forward in Severus’ unrelenting grasp, Draco does come along. Feeling the eyes of the entire school on the back of his head, he comes along. He’s enveloped in a sea of red, robes and scarves and hair, and he remains the only speck of green. His eye catches on his own team. They are by the posts, half the field away, huddled together with their brooms in their hands. They stare at him with a sort of blank-faced confusion on their faces that he thinks must be mirrored on his own.

Up to the castle. Up, up, up the stairs.

Potter will not die, Pomfrey declares, after several minutes of intense casting. Nor is he likely to suffer any permanent injury. She repeatedly states that it was very good luck indeed that Draco caught him, since the fall might very well have broken his neck. Very good luck indeed. Potter even wakes up shortly thereafter (and Draco finds that his eyes studdenly stuck at the far corner of the room) and Pomfrey fusses only a little bit, before turning her attentions toward Draco.  

Draco is uninjured, excepting a slightly twisted knee from the landing. He hadn’t even noticed the pain.

Pomfrey lets him go.

Severus, too, lets him go. With a long and dark look, he lets him go.

Draco goes.

Away. He goes away. Tries to go away. Deep, deep into the castle, away from the entrance, away from where there might be people, away from everybody that saw.

Everybody saw, he thinks, staring blankly before him as he walks to wherever his feet take him. Everybody saw everybody saw everybody saw. The hallways swallow him up, envelops him, hides him, and the castle is empty with most students still out by the pitch; it’s a lovely spring day, so a good majority will probably stay out as long as there is light, even with the game cut short. But, then, just some few moments (hours?) later, Draco realizes there isn’t. Isn’t any light. Not any longer.

And they’re all going to be coming back. Coming for him.

His feet take him by route. The bathroom door swings open. It’s empty, as always, but empty also of Myrtle. That’s fine. That’s fine. He- he didn’t want to see her now anyway, he doesn’t think. He doesn’t want to see anyone ever again, preferably, if that could perhaps be arranged.

His breathing feels cold inside of him, going down. He doesn’t understand why or how that works. The rest of him is not, though. Cold, that is. He’s hot. Very hot. Blood thrumming through him, scorching. His face, his hands, his chest. He’s perhaps sweating. He refuses to look at himself in the mirror as his feet walk him over to the sink, bends over to splash water into his face before he can check so that he doesn’t ever have to know whether it’s the case or not. He drags a hand up and back over his hair, strands tousling and standing every which way, but at least not dripping more water all over his face.

He stares at himself in the mirror.

Oh. Would you look at that. His eyes have taken over in the dripping of water all over his face, instead.

How dignified.

 “Malfoy.”

Draco spins.

He already knew who it was, of course. (Who else could it be, really, it was always him, always always always only ever him.) He’d recognized his voice.

“Potter,” he snarls, or perhaps gasps, and he’s taking up the entire frame of the door. Has stopped there. Trapping him.

And he’s seeing.

Draco must do something. He realizes this, and his blood thrums even hotter. Must- must start to fix this. He’s perhaps not breathing at all, any longer now, he doesn't think. It can’t be over. It can’t be. Not because of something so small, something so stupid, not after everything he’s done, not after Potter has chased him around and hounded him can he have ruined it by this. It can’t be over. It can’t, he must do something to fix everything. Must make sure that-… Must make sure that-… Must make sure-!  

Draco tears his wand out (and Potter just stands there – even pulling back his arm to begin to cast, Draco realizes this, that Potter’s just standing there and staring at him doing it) and shouts:

“CRUCIO!”

And then they both stand there, watching absolutely nothing at all happening.

And then, finally, Draco goes cold.

Potter’s face hardens with resolve. “We’re going to see Dumbledore.”

And, oh, they might as well, mightn’t they? Because it is over, so he might as well get expelled too, why not? Not Azkaban, since he didn’t actually manage the Unforgivable, but still expelled, because he did try for an Unforgivable, and that’s certainly well into the realm of unforgivable even if it turned out he wasn’t any good at it. It’s just when it’s capitalized, evidently; plain old unforgivables, he’s got down to pat. And according to the prescripts of both sides, too, as it’s turning out.

Might as well be expelled, really. He’ll live out life as a hermit somewhere, and perhaps that will have some chance of him not fucking up every single thing he stumbles into. 

Potter gives the password to the gargoyle outside the headmaster’s office, because of course the Golden Boy has the password to the headmaster’s office. Stepping up on the revolving stairs behind Potter is the first time the thought comes to him that, he really did just come along, didn’t he? All the way here. No running or protesting or fighting him off.

Well.

Fighting back never has worked out even a single time before today, anyway, so there probably wasn’t ever any point.

The stairs spit him out on the landing. Potter grabs his arm, now, and hauls him forward, calling out their arrival: “Headmaster!”

Potter drags them through the door before getting an answer, because of course he does, and Dumbledore is sitting behind his desk as though having expected them, because of course he does, and Potter shakes him slightly by the grip he has on his arm.

“Tell him,” he prompts.

So Draco does: “I cast crucio on Potter.”

“What? Not that,” Potter protests impatiently. “Tell him about what’s going on!”

Draco stares at Potter, understanding nothing.

“Tell him what you’re doing,” Potter urges, getting more annoyed, as though Draco is being wilfully vexing.

“Mister Potter,” the headmaster says in a politely staying tone, and then turns his horrifying blue stare on Draco. “Mister Malfoy. Have you perhaps… gotten tangled up in something?”

Draco tangles in everything. He trips and snags and catches and is so bloody tangled up he might as well be a bloody mummy by now, wrapped from head to toe.

So he answers: “Yes.”

And then he tells him everything. Because why not.

The failed attempts, and then the attempt that was just starting to look like he perhaps wouldn’t fail at all. The headmaster then wants a little tour and sure, why not, so Draco gives it, goes to his Room and shows off the vanishing cabinet and points out the runes and the enchantments and the spell work he’s done, and gets bewilderingly enthusiastic comments from the headmaster regarding the complexity of his magic, and then the headmaster sends his patronus to Severus of all people, but then, why not, why shouldn’t his godfather also bear witness to the utterness of his downfall, so then the story gets retold, in brief (in confusingly brief, actually, why does Severus not demand more detail?), and then Severus says “it’ll be too dangerous to the boy to unravel it now”, and the headmaster says “and to his loved ones as well, no doubt”, and Severus responds “I will see what I can do”, and the headmaster nods and says “you have my gratitude, Severus”. And then-

And then they all turn to Draco again.

“I do believe it’s been a very long day for you, my boy,” the headmaster says. “I’m sure you’re eager to retire back to your dorms.”

Potter speaks up – for the first time since telling him to talk, back in the headmaster’s office, Draco realizes: “I’ll take him.”

Draco frowns, because it’s not like he can’t find his way from here back to his own dorms, but then Severus and the headmaster both nod as though this makes perfect sense. So perhaps Potter is to be his jailor, then?

Indeed, Potter grabs his upper arm again and begins to steer him along. He thinks idly that Potter certainly seems to have a good grasp of the path between two points of the castle he should have no reason to ever visit, but Draco decides he won’t comment on this. In fact, he decides to say nothing at all. His resolve in this is tested somewhat when Potter comes to a stop right in front of the correct patch of blank wall, all on his own, but Potter probably carries with him all the secrets of the universe, so why shouldn’t he have memorized the entrance to the Slytherin common room, really?

Potter stares at him, frowning. His eyes really are astonishingly green. Seems odd that the Golden Hero should have something so overtly Slytherin about him, Draco thinks.

Potter shifts slightly.

Something about it reminds Draco of the feel of Potter’s torso pressed against his own by the force of interrupted gravity, the feel of his robes clutched in his hand. Salazar. And everyone saw.

“Well,” Potter starts then, and Draco braces for what pronouncement of doom will follow.

Potter says: “See you tomorrow.”

Then he gives a slight nod, and walks away.

Draco… Draco is left not quite knowing what to do. Are they all just going to… leave him here? Unsupervised? After he admitted to trying to cast an Unforgivable on Potter himself, to attempting to murder the headmaster, and then following it up with revealing a nearly fully executed plan of bringing Death Eaters into Hogwarts? That… that doesn’t seem right. 

He stays in place a little longer, but Potter doesn’t come charging back, and there’s really only so long one can stand in a hallway just staring at the stones. So he goes inside. Goes to bed.

When he wakes up… well, if he heads to class according to his schedule, they’ll at least not accuse him of running or hiding, he figures. So he does that.

And he could almost believe that yesterday was some sort of wildly concocted fever-dream, if half the castle didn’t erupt into not-so-furtive glances and whispers whenever he walked past.

Because everyone saw.

But it’s not like he’s got a better idea of what to do, so he just keeps going to his classes.  

Then, some days later, Severus gives him detention for nothing at all, for failing to brew his potion correctly in class. Half the cauldrons in the room are in a worse state than his, but Severus tells him in a cold voice that he’s been dangerously inattentive. The Slytherins all think Draco’s being punished for saving Potter.

Draco thinks he’s being punished for saving Potter.

Until Severus starts his detention by dragging him up to the Cabinet.

“I have determined that it will take me too long to retrace the steps of your mending,” Severus tells him. “It will also serve to reaffirm your standing to keep yourself involved.”

Draco stares blankly up at him.

Severus looks impatient and tells him: “Your foolish display turned heads but, under the influence of the Veritaserum, I’ve sworn to our Lord the bitterness of your regret. He remains disappointed in your intervention, but was… entertained at the notion that there should have ever been a possibility that the Boy Who Lived would meet his end during a childish schoolyard game. His destiny is… other than this, our Lord is convinced. That our Lord holds this conviction spares your actions from being viewed as an outright move against our cause. The point was… emphasized, however, that true remorse – true loyalty – is best expressed in actions.”

Severus indicates the Cabinet. Draco keeps staring at him, feels like he’s seeing layers and layers and layers, with no idea which one is going to be the final reveal.

But then Severus continues: “The Headmaster will put contingencies in place, of course, but in such a way that the response will seem organic, rather than pre-planned.”

Draco swallows back the question which side do you belong to, because he isn’t sure how he’d answer it himself, any longer. Who would have him.

This doesn’t hinder him from setting to work, though; his task has been laid out, same on both sides, and so any thought of whom he is doing his duty to is pushed aside in favour of simply doing. Severus, perhaps, is the closest thing to an answer, however. The professor feigns a black ire and has set up detentions for him thrice a week for the rest of term, and it stirs up a furious hiss of gossip, especially amid the Slytherins. Somehow, though, his godfather has managed to influence things such that the whole matter takes on something akin to the shape of the truth; that the punishment has come from their Lord, and that Draco’s time in detention is spent fulfilling a task in His name. In a roundabout way, this serves to reaffirm his status, his place – he has stumbled, yes, but not even any of the seventh years has a task like his.

And so he performs it.  

He’d already been near enough to completion that there no longer remains anything to figure out; in this, too, he only needs to do. Doing, however, is not uncomplicated. He strains and he sweats and he works, and he comes to class so wrung out that he’s not sure he even has first-year spells still left in him.

Dumbledore visits him, once.

Unannounced, he arrives, and the Room lets him in without any indication to Draco. He simply straightens, wipes the sweat from his brow, and then notices the headmaster out of the corner of his eye. He startles, badly, produces a sound he’d never willingly own up to, and his heart starts up such a thundering in his chest that he thinks he just might explode. He feels caught. So very, very caught.

The headmaster smiles.

“You work very diligently at your task, Mr. Malfoy,” he says. “It is nearly complete, if I’m not mistaken?”

Draco doesn’t have the breath to answer verbally. He nods.

Dumbledore nods, too.

Then he says: “I have something to ask of you. When the day comes, allow Severus to send you to the dungeons. If he is not there to give you the order, claim to have been given it in advance. Go to his offices and, if you are not interrupted, bring enough rare and valuable ingredients with you to justify your excursion.”

Draco looks at the headmaster.

“Why?” he asks.

Dumbledore… Dumbledore closes his eyes briefly and lets out a slow breath. His whole hand moves over the back of his blackened one.

“Because there are some things I would spare you.”

Then the day comes.

The night. They pour out of his Cabinet, and it feels irrationally like a violation that they’re there, here, in the Cabinet that is his, in the Room that is his, even though that was the whole point. Has always been the whole point. Severus is there, and he tells Draco: “Go to my chambers. There are items too valuable to leave behind.”

Draco’s aunt protests. “Don’t send the poor boy away from the fun, Severus! He needs the experience!”

Severus shoots her a withering look. “Only he and I can move through the castle without attracting attention, and only I have access to all the parts of the castle you might want to reach. Experience can be had in the future.”

His aunt sneers at this, but does acquiesce. “Well, run along then, boy! Be quick about it and perhaps you won’t miss out on all the fun!”

So Draco, numbly, does.

He is caught by Professor McGonagall, not five minutes after having arrived.

“Oh,” she breathes, staring at him with horror and regret, hardly looking herself at all. “Oh, child.”  

In Draco’s hand, the cloth sack Severus had left out for him hangs limply.

“I had hoped…” she says. “But, it has begun, hasn’t it?”

Draco, suddenly finding a lump in his throat, nods mutely. McGonagall shuts her eyes.

“Well,” she says. “Well, then.”

There’s no chance remaining of her thinking him merely a student, out doing something he shouldn’t. Something childish. Something benign. Draco wonders if this is when she will attack.

Instead. Instead she sweeps suddenly forward, whirls around the room and fills the sack in his hands, and then herds him out of the room.

“I think-“ she starts, voice hoarse and ragged. She hesitates, and then starts over: “I think you’d better go with them. I think that will be safer. I won’t make you, Mr. Malofy, understand that, I would never make you, but I do think it will be safer. Not- not for you, I am afraid, but for those you love.”

She looks at him with such pity and such sorrow, and Draco half thinks that she must be hallucinating. Must see someone else before her, and not him. But she’s right; it will be safer. For his mother, it will be safer.

“I will go,” he tells her.

She nods, lips going tight. “Yes. Yes. We can’t be seen together, then. You take left, and I will keep right.”

They are already at the junction, so Draco steps away from underneath McGonagall’s arm still around him, and heads in the direction indicated.

“Mr Malfoy.”

Draco stops, turns.

“Do take care.”

He doesn’t really know if that’s an option still open to him. Still, he nods.

Goes.

He heads straight for the grand entrance, figures he’ll have the best chance at intercepting someone there rather than one of the many side exits. He’s nearly there, nearly out, when someone explodes down the stairs to his left.

Potter looks nearly as shocked to see Draco as he is to see him. For a moment they just stare. Potter’s got his wand in his hand, ready to cast, and perhaps now Draco will finally be attacked.

Instead, Potter chokes out: “He killed him.”

All warmth immediately leaves Draco’s body. He feels like he imagines one does in the instant one is struck by an Avada Kedavra, in that brief moment of time just before death arrives; like something essential to life has been pushed out of him.

Somehow he understands exactly what has happened, even though the statement should be too vague.

There are some things I would spare you.

Potter says it again: “He killed him!”

He’s found emotion this time, like hearing himself say the words has brought the reality of it home. And he’s angry, and quickly tears start to spill down his face. He’s furious, actually, and he grips his wand and he’s going to-

“Potter, listen to me,” and Draco doesn’t know how he finds the nerve, but suddenly he’s stepped forward and grabbed the Chosen One’s robes in a fist. Just as tight as that day on the quidditch pitch. “They must’ve decided. Together. They must have agreed that Severus would-“

The breath is stolen from him as he’s about to say the words. The enormity of it-

“Why?” Potter snarls in his face, steps closer rather than away. “Why would he do that!? Why would he let himself be-!”

“Because he was already dying!” Draco yells back. “Because like this, at least it serves a purpose! Because now they’ll never question Severus again!”

No one will, Draco realizes. No one will and, oh, Merlin, how could that old bastard ever have asked this of him?

Potter is gripping him back. Has his robes in the fist of the hand that’s not wrapped around his wand.

“Do you-! Are you sure?” he asks, still half-yelling into his face.

Draco has no bloody clue why the Golden Boy would have any reason to believe a word out of his mouth, but answers: “Yes.”

Potter stares at him for another moment, with those Slytherin-green eyes of his, then steps away. Draco’s hands seem to have forgotten that they were holding him fast and lets go. Potter doesn’t look convinced. But, then, he did look convinced before. He backs away some more steps, towards the grand doors already flung open to the night, but then stops, right before turning. He looks at Draco as though taking him in for the first time.

“You’re going with them?”

Strangely, it does not sound like an accusation.

Again, Draco answers: “Yes.”

Then can’t help himself from adding, even though it shouldn’t matter: “I have to.”

Potter nods, as though this makes sense. “Okay. Good luck.”

Then he’s gone.

Then Draco is gone. Gone off to his home, that neither feels like his nor a home, and he does not know which side he belongs to. This side will have him, now. He has redeemed himself from his fumbling catch of Potter, has – while not the person behind the wand – been instrumental in the death of Albus Dumbledore. He did what none other has managed in this War, nor the last: opened the doors to Hogwarts to let in the Dark Lord’s cause.

This leaves him… middling, in rank. No longer outright shunned or doubted, but neither is he held in any esteem. He could perhaps have capitalized to make it so, if he’d seized on the mood that night. If he could have shown himself to be hungry, and ambitious, and keen, then he could perhaps have used his first success as forward momentum.

But he doesn’t.

Can’t.

He grasps for obscurity, instead. Tries to shroud himself in it, to survive.

Then Potter shows up.

Hideous and disfigured and with overgrown hair, Draco will still be able to tell it’s him the instant he looks properly at him. He does his best to not look properly. Then his aunt goes mad over a sword, Perhaps-not-Potter and Definitely-Weasley are sent to the dungeons, and he has to watch as his aunt demands that Granger stay and-

And then the elf Dobby shows up and Potter takes his wand from his hand and-

And then Draco has to live, wandless, in a house where the Chosen One has slipped out of the grasp of the Dark Lord.

When they are ordered to go to Hogwarts, Draco half thinks himself asleep. That it is a dream; his cursed existence within the walls of the Manor will never end, so it must be.

But they do go, and Draco doesn’t wake.

He takes the opportunity to split from the group, says something to no one in particular about taking advantage of knowing the castle. He realizes in the moment that he sets off that he’s going to try to find Potter. He doesn’t know why, or how, but nearly every single Death Eater is there with the very same goal. At least he’ll blend in.

Vince and Greg appear from somewhere and attach themselves to his side. It’s almost comforting in its familiarity, but there’s also something in their sneering that seems to put him on the outside, rather than invite him in. It underlines the fact that they’ve been here, at Hogwarts, while he’s been at the Manor, for the full duration of the school-year. They have, for good or for ill, had to fend for themselves.

Draco, perhaps out of sheer force of habit, ends up outside the Room. He stares up at the hidden entrance, come face to face with the aimlessness in his chosen course of action. Strangely, Vince and Greg take charge, then, and stagger him further by performing a fully passable Disillusionment Charm over them. They tell him to stay still, and to be quiet.

Distantly, he’s darkly amused that even when they’re taking charge, they’re still following his plans.

With pay off, though, as it turns out – Potter, Granger, and Weasley come charging round the corner. Potter paces the steps, and the trio slips inside.

Vince and Greg grin viscously at each other. “Let’s get them.”

Draco trails behind.

Made small by the towers of objects around him, Potter has his back to him and is reaching out for something seemingly well above his head. Vince and Greg raise a respective arm.

“That’s my wand you’re holding, Potter,” Draco blurts.

Potter startles, proving how unaware he’d been. His eyes dance over Vince, Greg, then finally fall on him, a couple of paces behind. Draco can’t read the look on his face.

“Not anymore,” he says, tightening his grip on the hawthorn wand. “Winner’s keepers, Malfoy. Who lent you theirs?”

The length of pale aspen is in his hand at his side. He tells him: “My mother.”

Potter nods, as if this information is worth something to him.

“So how come you aren’t with Voldemort?”

Potter’s eyes move between Vince and Greg at the question, not him, and Draco wonders if he reads too much in that even as he flinches at the use of the name. He gets little chance to ponder, though, because in the next few seconds, everything devolves into chaos. Vince and Greg start shooting off spells, apparently completely heedless that the mass of objects, should they come crumbling down, will just as surely crush them, too.

“Don’t kill him! DON’T KILL HIM!” Malfoy yells, and they barely pay him any attention.

And then there’s fire.

And the fire is alive.

He loses track of Potter, Granger, and Weasley, tries to keep track of Vince and Greg in the chaos, but Vince was running heedlessly, outpacing them, disappearing around corners as Draco tries to make Greg run faster, come on, faster- Greg is hacking, coughing – until he isn’t. Until he’s stopped and Draco stops too, realizing after a few too long moments of silence that the quiet is bad and he double backs. Greg has lost consciousness. Draco heaves him onto his back, doesn’t even have time to lighten him with a spell because the flames are already licking at his heels and-

And they’re going to die. They’re going to die here.

Then, through the flames, bursts Potter.

He’s found a broom somewhere, because of course he has, and Draco raises a desperate hand towards him. Even as Potter grasps it, he knows that it’s no good: Greg is too heavy and his own hand, covered in sweat, slides instantly out of Potter’s–

“IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I’LL KILL YOU, HARRY!” roars Weasley’s voice, and, as a great flaming chimaera bears down upon them, Weasley and Granger drag Greg onto their broom and rise, rolling and pitching, into the air. Draco clambers up behind Harry, grips his robes in his fists.

Then they touch solid, unburning ground again, and Draco tumbles off, ends up face down, gasping, coughing, retching.

“V-Vince,” he manages, as soon as his throat stops seizing long enough to push the word out. “Vince-“

“He’s dead,” Weasley snarls harshly.

Draco closes his eyes and tries to breathe through it. So stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Self-inflicted; couldn’t be called anything else to unleash Fiendfyre in a room you yourself had no clear way out of. But… he has always known they aren’t particularly bright. That’s why he needs to look after them. …Needed to.

Stupid.

Weasley, Granger, and Potter are talking, their voices barely registering.

“-if we can just get the snake-“

Granger breaks off as sounds of duelling reach them. There’s fighting and an explosion and… and Draco staggers off. Can’t even bring himself to check on Greg, whom he feels irrationally furious with. Draco couldn’t be here, so they had to look out for each other. Why didn’t they realize that they needed to look out for each other?

There are spiders and giants and gods know what, but Draco pushes downwards, downwards. A masked Death Eater gets in his face, apparently not recognizing him, and Draco stuns him viciously, uncaring of who sees him doing so. He doesn’t know which side he’s on. Who will have him.

He ends up at the doors to the Great Hall. Realizes his mistake only as wands rise to meet him.

“Draco Malfoy,” professor McGonagall’s voice booms. A hush falls. “Welcome.”

It’s a declaration. The wands lower. Draco hesitates a second, still, before going inside; the admission feels unearned. He finds an out-of-the-way corner to sit down in. Drifts.

Then, some time later, a commotion starts up. Someone yells. McGonagall orders students back, back, pushes to the front herself. Then she screams.

“NO!”

Draco feels turned to ice, struggles forward with the crowd to see, he has to see-

Potter lies dead in Hagrid’s arms. He could have been sleeping, save for how the Death Eaters jeer. His mother and father stand behind the Dark Lord, behind his aunt. His mother looks ashen; her sister jubilant. Never have they looked less alike.

Voldemort doesn’t want Potter as a martyr, tries to unmake him as such. A spectacle breaks out as Longbottom suddenly bursts from the crowd in a mad dash, purposeless and futile, and is immediately – predictably – struck down. The Dark Lord then descends into some vainglorious speech of uniting all under the banner of Slytherin, summons the Sorting Hat to make his point. And sets it on fire atop Longbottom’s head.

No. No one else burns.

Draco is moving before he even knows what he’s doing, pushing through the throng and raising his mother’s wand. His summon is so sharp that the flames wink out as the hat flies through the air.

And then there is an uproar. Somehow, it is not because of what Draco has just done. Rather, it is the giants roaring at one another, set off seemingly by the one that’s smaller than all the rest. It is the cry of what sounds like hundreds of voices, the thundering of hundreds of feet, coming from the distant border of the school grounds. It is from the suddenly falling rain arrows and the screams this prompts, the clatter of hooves on stones as a pack of centaurs arrived.

“The snake!” Longbottom yells amid it all, freed from his body-bind somehow, running at him. “The snake, Malfoy, we have to get the snake!”

The snake is at Longbottom’s heels, fangs bared to strike, having laid – as ever – at rest at her master’s feet. Draco fears that bloody snake almost as much as he does the Dark Lord.

He doesn’t know what sort of idiocy grips him – he drops his wand.

He drops his wand, and he sticks his hand into the hat, and with all his might he swings.

Longbottom throws himself out of the way just in time, has laid up the strike perfectly for Malfoy to take. And take it, he does. With a single stroke, Draco slices off the great snake’s head, which spins high into the air, gleaming in the light flooding from the entrance hall, and Voldemort’s mouth is open in a scream of fury that nobody can hear, and the snake’s body thuds to the ground at his feet-

“HARRY!” Hagrid shouts. “HARRY – WHERE IS HARRY?”

He has inadvertently saved Draco’s life; likely, that is the single collection of words that could have been uttered to draw the Dark Lord’s attention away from him with the immediacy required for him to survive what he has just done. The chaos ramps up even further as both sides surge to find the answer, to fight the other side back, and the Dark Lord is swallowed up behind the surge of bodies. It’s pandemonium, all manner of creatures running to and fro amid spells and arrows and hurled rocks. Draco is standing with a bloody sword in one hand and a hat in the other, and Longbottom is the one to snatch his mother’s wand up from the cobbles.

“Run!” he yells at him. “Run, Malfoy, RUN!”

He does. Longbottom tugs him along, keeps a grip on his arm while all the while shooting off spells, and there’s as much of a risk of being accidentally crushed as being purposefully targeted by magic. Then they’re in the Great Hall, and there are house elves everywhere, now, too, one standing atop a fallen rock and screaming like a bullfrog for the rest of them to fight, fight in the name of his master.

Longbottom keeps herding him, firing of spells and flicking up shields, as he pushes them further and further in. Then Grayback is there, snarls traitor, and Draco is so frightened he’s clammy with it, might throw up – and then Weasley is suddenly there, too, and he and Longbottom somehow bring the werewolf down together, leave him unconscious and bound on the floor.

Draco grips the sword and the hat.

Then Potter is there. Alive. Alive and goading Voldemort with a calm such that he seems taken over by the spirit of Dumbledore himself. Voldemort is seething, mad with fury, still attempting to talk Potter down from the pedestal he’s been put upon. As though he hadn’t just died for them. And then come back to save them.

Then there’s battle. Furious battle, spells going back and forth, and Draco can hardly breathe as he watches Potter hold his own, watches him stand up to him-

And then the breaking dawn paints the scene with blinding light.

“EXPELLIARMUS!”

The Dark Lord’s wand sails through the air. With a seeker’s accuracy, Potter catches it. The Dark Lord roars his fury, twists around and yanks the wand from the hand of a spectator with a flick of his wrist. The moment his fingers are wrapped around the wood, he casts:

“Avada Kedavra!”

“Protego!”

Draco’s heart leaps in terror as Potter casts – casts and stands there, as though this were an ordinary spell crackling towards him and not a bolt of death, green light pushing back the red of the dawn as it hurtles forward and-

And rebounds from the shield.

Potter stands firm, arm raised with the Dark Lord’s – Dumbledore’s – wand in his hand. And in front of him lies Lord Voldemort, body crumpled and face vacant.

It’s over.

It’s over.

And Draco doesn’t know what to do with himself. Doesn’t know who will have him.

“Have you considered becoming an artificer?” Granger asks him, eleven months past the battle. She’s found him in a corner of the library, where Draco is attempting to push as many of the probability models for spell failure rates into his head as possible, in preparation for tomorrow’s NEWT. He’d been so deep in his reading that he barely even understands her words as spoken English, blinking as he comes up from his fugue.

“The Ministry employs a not insignificant number, as I understand it,” Granger continues, as though this was information he had requested. “In several different departments, too. Harry told me about the Cupboard you worked on. I think you’d be good at it.”

Blinking more, Draco realizes that Granger is looking rather harried herself, her hair a huge bush with no less than two quills in it. She has a smear of ink across the bridge of her nose and a bit of her cheek, and she isn’t actually looking at him as she speaks. Instead, she’s frowning at the bookshelf to his right.

It’s rumoured that she’s taking nine NEWTs, which would put her two above any other student. Draco himself is taking six. Is taking this many only because he still doesn’t know what to do; has gone back to Hogwarts mostly to postpone the decision. Because McGonagall told him he was welcome.

(The part of him that’s probably chronically stuck with the impulse of defending himself underperforming as compared to a muggleborn wants to bring up the fact that the average number of NEWTs for a student at Hogwarts is three.)

“Also,” Granger says. “You haven’t happened to have seen Numerical Structures in Spellcraft by Borage, have you?”

Draco blinks, still only having half unspooled his mind from the intricacies of the models, and tries to catch up to the conversation at hand.

“Uhm.” He clears his throat. Frowns. Lifts his own book to check the spine. “I have it.”

“Oh,” Granger says, finally looking at him. At his book, rather, really. “Well. Can you tell me when you’re done, then? I’m in the corner by the astronomy charts. The blue armchairs, by the window.”

Draco, hesitating for just a moment, nods. Grander nods back, then leaves.

When Draco later rises to depart from the library – admittedly a little earlier than he’d intended, as the knowledge of Granger waiting for his reading has gnawed at him – he walks by her table and hands her the book.

“Thank you,” she says, a little absently, taking it, in the middle of scratching something down on a roll of parchment that’s spilling down several feet over the other end of the table. When she finishes this, she glances up at him and smiles briefly. Explains: “I’m hoping to get a better understanding of the inverse Malifax calculation. I’ve tried reading Fawley, but she only describes the why, not the how, and I can’t seem to get the details to stick in my mind without understanding the underpinnings.”

“The primary functions are to account for ley-line interference or temporal distortion,” Draco finds himself telling her. “And it differs from a Perdita in that it doesn’t assume a null for wand–environment mismatch.”

Granger’s eyes light up. “That’s what the constant for the wood-transference is doing there! I didn’t realize, without the corresponding core-value, but that’s cancelled out by the multiplication with the negative Rho, isn’t it!” 

Draco nods, confirming this, even though she’s not looking at him any longer.

“Oh!” she exclaims, head bowed as she writes furiously. “Oh, of course! I get it now, and, oh, right, with the inverse you-…” she trails off, as her writing absorbs her attention.

“Well,” Draco says, to the back of her head. “Goodnight, then.”   

“Yes,” she says absently, still writing. “Yes, goodnight.”

Draco leaves.

He manages all six of his NEWTs: three O’s, two E’s, and one A. Granger gets all of her nine, of course, and before breakfast is even over, she’s already been semi-mythologized on account of only having gotten a single E – and this being her lowest grade.

She finds him in the library again, the day after – the third to last day of school.

“Should we write our applications together?” she asks him, already sitting down opposite him. “I know we’re not aiming for the same program, but I think there’s still enough commonality that we could benefit from it. And a second pair of eyes is always good, right?”

Draco looks at her blankly. “What application?”

Granger looks at him, befuddled. “Well, for the Ministry’s artificer apprenticeship program, of course. Hold on – have you sent it in, already? They only started accepting owls yesterday!”

She seems almost affronted by his assumed quickness to action, taking the seat opposite him in a huff.

“No,” he answers, finally, feeling a bit… adrift from the situation. “No, I haven’t sent it in. I haven’t written anything.”

Somehow, the words because I am not going to apply doesn’t then leave his mouth.

Granger’s face brightens. “Oh! We can get started together then! Or, well, I’ve done a few drafts, of course, but those have mostly been for warm-up: I haven’t quite found the right tone, yet, I don’t think.”

Draco stares at Granger as she rifles through her bag for supplies, and wonders what on earth sort of program she imagines she could apply to that wouldn’t immediately accept her on nothing but an indication of her interest.

And what sort of program she thinks would have him.

“Granger…” he starts, with an idea of outlining at least this latter point.

“Yes?” she looks up at him.

He looks back, and finds that his voice won’t quite work. Finally, he says: “I haven’t brought any parchment.”

She smiles. “Oh, that’s alright, I have plenty!”

Indeed, she brings out a fresh roll immediately and hands it to him. “There you go.”

“Thanks,” he manages, and gets out one of the self-inking quills he tends to keep in his pocket.

Granger has gotten out all of her supplies and already started writing. She’s started anew, as she said she would, but is writing with a speed and fluidity that suggest she has pre-composed something in her mind.

Draco lifts his quill and-

“I don’t know what to write,” he tells Granger.

She looks up at him, seeming a little surprised. “Oh. Well… from what I read, they mostly want to hear about your relevant accomplishments, challenges you’ve overcome – that sort of thing. Why don’t you write the first thing that comes to your mind, and start from there? Perfection is the enemy of doing, right? It’s usually easier to edit than start afresh, I find.”

By the time she’s speaking the last words, she’s already half absorbed back into her own essay.

Draco’s not much clearer on what he is to write, but can’t bring himself to bother her again.

So he starts writing.

By the time he finishes, he’s extended the parchment thrice and he’s dragged his hands through his hair so many times that it’s almost certainly standing every which way. It feels like breathing again when he straightens up, like breaking the surface of a lake he hadn’t realized he’d been submerged in.

Granger is watching him, he realizes. Has probably been watching him for a while.

“Give it here,” she says, holding out her hand.

What he has poured out on the page, he seems to have put there so utterly that none of it remains in his head to be referenced; he barely knows what he’s written. Some jumbled mess of- of everything. With reluctance, he withdraws enough to leave the parchment unguarded. He can’t bring himself to actually give it to her.

Granger gives him a look at that – a little impatient with him, he thinks – and then leans a bit further forward to be able to grab the scroll.

Then she sits back to read.

And reads.

When she is done, she is wiping tears from her face. She does so carefully, with her left hand, holding the parchment in her right; making sure not to get it wet.

“This,” she says, voice quivering just a little. “Send in this. Just as it is.”

He does as Granger tells him.

And, two months later, he stares in disbelief at his acceptance.

He starts his training the same week as his father is sent to Azkaban. His first day, he arrives thinking that, surely, they will immediately tell him that there’s been some mistake, some mix-up; obviously they would never admit him, just- just some other Draco Malfoy.

Nevertheless, he suffers the stares that follow him upon his arrival at the Ministry. Takes the elevator to the indicated floor. Follows the signage indicating the path towards the Master of Wards and Works, and then finally finds the door with a sign reading Spellwright Constance Holcroft.

Draco knocks.

Spellwright Holcroft, he quickly learns, is bothered with very little else than doing things right. She wears her black hair in a severe bun at the back of her head and possesses a practically encyclopaedic knowledge of anything relating to arithmancy, arcane objects, or ancient runes. She also has a habit of referencing this knowledge in everyday conversation, as though were it part of collective consciousness, and clearly views any confusion about her precise meaning as a revelation of fairly acute deficiencies – as though one has just admitted to not knowing which end of the wand to grip.

Draco barely sees anything that isn’t held between the covers of a book during the first three months.

He is reading when Granger finds him.

“Oh Merlin, you too?” she says, standing wide-eyed in the frame of his open door. “If I have to read another preparatory work predating iron cauldrons, I might actually go insane. Can we go to lunch?”

By the fact that Draco’s eyes won’t quite agree to focus on her as he looks up, he suspects that he is, as a matter of fact, in somewhat dire need of a break. He is reluctant to agree to her proposition, however; he hasn’t actually spoken to Granger since that day in the library. He isn’t sure where they stand. Isn’t sure where he wants them to stand. It would be easiest, he thinks, if she’d just… not talk to him again.

But Granger is, quite clearly, already standing here. In front of him. Asking.

And it is thanks to her that he is here, at all.

“Okay,” he says, putting down the book and starting to rise. A terrible crick in his neck catches him on the way up, as if to underscore the point of just how long he’s been sitting like this, and he grimaces. “Yes, alright.”

He is nervous about the attention they’ll surely draw but, thankfully, it turns out they’ve overshot lunch with about two hours, and the cafeteria is all but deserted. That leaves only the nerves of how to deal with Granger. Resolved to the safer path of speaking as little as possible, Draco slowly spoons soup into his mouth, and tries to hum noncommittally as she talks. Unfortunately, Granger has been set on a go-through of the entirety of British Wizarding Law, dating back to the Avebury Council of 903, and Draco…

Draco has a hard time remaining unengaged.  

“Hold on, wait,” he demands, as she brushes past what seems to him like all the salient details. “Are you saying that there wasn’t originally any distinction made between sustained and momentary influence?”

“Right!” Granger exclaims, perking up that he has caught this. “I couldn’t believe it either! It doesn’t come up until 1657, actually, which is staggering. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, prosecuting!”

Granger sweeps the mess of her hair away from her face with her whole arm and somehow manages to smear ink on her face despite there not being a single quill or pot around.

Before leaving, she’s talked Draco into meeting her for lunch same time next week.

It becomes a regular thing. He has always known Granger to be outwardly unrestrained in her bookishness, but has always contemptuously assumed part of it was an act she put on; a role she played up for the specific sort of social capital it has earned her. It isn’t, though. It very much isn’t. The image he’d constructed of her in his head had begun to crumble already from their limited interactions during their compensatory year at Hogwarts, but here the last of it is swept away near instantly. Granger seems to have the capacity to find nearly anything interesting, genuinely interesting, and Draco has never spent time with anyone like her before. Has been used to aloofness being the ideal to strive for, in all areas, and to any engagement too keen being viewed as uncouth.

He finds her… very un-Slytherin.

(And, almost reluctantly: refreshing.)

They talk a lot about their work, their studies.

The first time Granger says “when I told Ron and Harry about what you said yesterday, they” Draco chokes on his food and starts coughing. She exclaims, half standing in her chair to reach across the table to smack him on the back.

“Draco! Gosh, Draco, are you alright?”

“Fine,” he chokes out, eyes watering, still holding the napkin over his mouth. “Food just went down the wrong way. Continue.”

She watches him doubtfully for a moment, but then picks up where she left off. And she still says the same thing: when I told Ron and Harry. And, obviously, Draco thinks in retrospect. Obviously, she spends enough time with him that it’d earn a mention. And it’s not… it’s not as though he thought their meetings were a secret, necessarily. Hells, Potter and Weasley work at the Ministry as well, being in the auror training program, and while they never have ventured to the levels this far down, there isn’t anything stopping them from doing so. He just… well.

Has gotten used to having this, without there being consequences.

He expects them to come, following the conversation that day. Jumps if someone moves too loudly in the hallways, if there’s a flutter of a robe even near to the auburn shade of the aurors’.

Granger notices, but is kind enough not to call attention to it.

And he grows used to it, eventually, that Weasley and Potter know about his meetings with Granger. Becomes habituated, even, to her mentions of them – though it never quite stops being strange to hear their comments to something he’s said or done relayed back second-hand.

Potter’s. It’s usually Potter’s.

(Or, perhaps, these are simply the ones Draco can’t help but take more note of, that spike his pulse the sharpest.)

Granger gives him another two months before she asks:

“Are you busy tonight?”

She asks it with such light innocence that Draco is immediately suspicious. “How so?”

“Oh,” she starts, pretending to be busied with spreading the butter on her slice of bread more evenly. “I’m meeting up with Ron and Harry at the Leakey at six, and I was just thinking that you’d maybe like to-“

“No.”

She looks up, and Draco realizes that he’s perhaps spoken rather forcefully. Harshly.

“No, thank you,” he corrects himself carefully, and finds that he must pay keen attention to getting his napkin just right on the table. His face is flushed and he feels rather the same as he expects he would had she told him that, at six, there would be a storm of uncaptured Death Eaters coming to his location. “Perhaps another time.”

He glances up briefly, but it’s still plenty long for him to see her catch him in the lie.

She still smiles at him, though, if a little sadly. “Yes… Another time.”

She is kind, Granger. Prone to bouts of ferociousness but, at her core, kind.

Not that her kindness matters much, when forces beyond her conspire.

“Spellwright Holcroft,” auror Johnson greets with a nod, eyes flicking briefly up towards Malfoy standing a step behind and to her side. “Good to see you again. And I’m sure you recognize trainee Potter.”

“Good to meet you,” Potter says, nodding to Holcroft as well. His eyes move up to Draco’s. Stays there, for what feels like an eternity. “Malfoy.”

Johnson looks briefly between them. Doesn’t acknowledge Draco’s presence, still. “Well, now that we’re all acquainted…”

Draco did know, of course, that Spellwright Holcroft was the de facto liaison to the Auror Department. Had known from the very start. And the fact had prompted some trepidation, back when she’d been announced to him as his mentor, but it had been tempered by the prospect of the type of work it would give him access to. Now, standing here, with Potter in a room that he has been lulled into thinking about like somehow vaguely separate from the rest of the world (in the same way Severus’ offices used to, in a time that feels like another life entirely) he feels that that calculation was done in grave error.

He feels as though he has deluded himself into thinking that he could do this.

Potter… leaves. Eventually.

Draco waits for three minutes, which he knows is enough to get on the elevator, even on days when there’s a crowd, and then excuses himself to the bathroom.

Halfway to the bathroom, he stops. Realizes that he can’t go there. Just can’t.

(The idea that he’ll somehow summon Potter by stepping into a bathroom while experiencing what’s well on its way to becoming a panic attack is as ridiculous as it is hard to shake.)

He stands, staring blankly at the hallway walls, until he suddenly realizes what he’s doing.

He goes back to Holcroft’s offices and nods along to her explanation of the project they’re about to undertake. He’s about to undertake.

And Draco is, perhaps, an idiot – because the work is interesting. Spectacularly so, and he finds that he actually isn’t much bothered by the prospect of the curse laid over the object snapping its jaws at him; it won’t, he knows, as long as he does things right. There is a predictability in that that he appreciates.

There isn’t, in Potter suddenly stopping by.

Draco is on his knees in the workshop, the plinth of the Lightward placed in the centre of the magically inert marble inset in the floor, and he is reaching with both hands up towards where the crystal orb sits affixed at the very top of the structure’s innards. The Lightward is a hollow construction, even though it doesn’t look it, about five feet tall, and Draco has to sort of wedge himself into the narrow opening he has managed to give himself by getting one of the six facets of the plinth to detach. The crystal at the heart of the magical lattice is just barely within reach above, surface slippery perfection, and if he can only manage to get his fingers into the divot he knows will be there, he can-

“Malfoy.”

Draco startles, bangs his head terribly, and scrambles to his feet with colours still dancing in front of his eyes.

“Potter?” he says, and the syllables come out in sharp disbelief rather than in the shape of the greeting it should have been.

He has disposed of his robes long ago, his shirt is rolled up to his elbows and has come untucked from his trousers from all the reaching and twisting, and he suspects his hair looks like he’s been playing quidditch in a storm. He is also sweaty, and quite probably flushed.

Potter looks… put together.

Draco tries to make sure he’s straightened up fully, even though the sharp pounding in his head makes him want to hunch in on himself.

“Yes?” he prompts, when Potter just stands there a little while longer. He is staring at him with something in his eyes that Draco can’t quite put a name to, and it’s like his body thinks they’re back in Myrtle’s bathroom again, Potter blocking the only way of escape.

They wouldn’t send Potter. If they’d changed their mind and decided that he needed to be punished, they wouldn’t send Potter. Draco knows this; despite him being Potter, he isn’t fully licensed yet, and as such does not have the authority to bring someone into custody.

But, then again… he is Potter.

The sweating, Draco tells himself, is an aftereffect of exertion.

Potter blinks, seeming to catch himself at something, and starts looking about the room.

“I’m supposed to check in,” he tells him.

Draco’s brow furrows.

“Six workdays into a work projected at five months?” Draco demands, a waspishness dragged along in the wake of the fear.

(It’s not just fear, though. Something far pettier has been stirred up, too, along with it, competing to be the keener discomfort. Is keener, just for the fact that he’s feeling it at all: he wishes he didn’t have to stand in front of Potter and look as he does. He wishes that Potter would turn around and come back in ten minutes, just to give him a chance to make himself presentable.

To- to make himself a match, for Potter.

For Potter’s put-together-ness.)  

They haven’t seen each other in nearly half a year, save for that time in Holcroft’s office and the fact that Draco sees Potter in the Prophet at least once a week. There’s a… presence, to the Chosen One, in person, that doesn’t come across in print. Draco hasn’t forgotten this, but he has grown unused to it. He can’t quite manage to merge the man in front of him with the person whose second-hand opinions will sometimes be delivered to him over lunch by Granger.

For not the first time, he wishes keenly that he knew every single word Granger has conveyed about him to Potter, just so that he could know what-…

Just so that he could know.

“Like I said,” Potter said, shrugging a little, eyes still travelling around the room, “just… checking in.”

He looks… a bit uncomfortable. Possibly a little like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

Suddenly Draco’s stomach turns to lead. The words have sunk in. Not the repetition, but what he’d said the first time.

I’m supposed to.

Right.

“I see,” Draco manages, biting out the words, an anger that almost feels like nausea welling in him. “And does auror Johnson not imagine that Spellwright Holcroft would take issue with any inclusion of harmful structures in an item meant to protect?”  

Draco’s face is hot. He feels himself feeling hurt, stupidly, as well as somehow caught, even though he hasn’t done anything to deserve the oblique accusation. 

“Hold on,” Potter protests, finally turning to look back at him, frowning as he does. “It wasn’t my idea to come.”

The words strike somehow dreadfully true, and Draco feels a mortifying burn in his eyes.

“Of course not,” he says, doing his best to get his face as blank as he can possibly make it. “Conduct your investigation, auror Potter; I shan’t obstruct.”

He steps deliberately to the side, clasps his hands behind his back, and pins his eyes to a spot on the opposite wall.

Potter starts to protest: “What? It’s not-!”

But Draco finds that he can’t stand to hear whatever he’s about to say.

“As my own guidance would not be fit for purpose,” he interrupts, raising his voice to drown Potter’s out, not taking his eye off his chosen spot of wall, “I suggest you consult with one of the Spellwrights, to get a better insight into the work. Holcroft is, of course, preeminent in artifact-curse interactions but, if you find her judgment… lacking, I’m certain she’ll be able to refer you to another.”

Potter stares at him in what looks like disbelief.

Finally, it rankles to the point that Draco can’t help himself: he turns his head to look him dead in the eye.

“Malfoy,” Potter starts, eyes beginning to narrow, “I don’t know what you think is going on here, but-“

“Oh, I think it’s quite clear, auror Potter,” Draco cuts in.

Potter’s expression turns frustrated. “Why are you being like this!?”

Oh, it is nausea now, isn’t it.

“I don’t know,” he seethes, “I guess I'm just stuck this way.”

“I didn’t choose to come here!” Potter repeats, throwing his arms out. “I’m not the one who thought this was necessary!”

“But you are here!” Draco snaps. He can’t even articulate it with more precision than that but, somehow,  that is the heart of the issue: Potter is here. Potter is here.

“I-… yes!?”

Draco barks a laugh at Potter’s bewildered anger. He can’t quite say what’s so (bitterly) amusing about it but, nevertheless, he finds it so.

“And I’m sure your purposes will have been served with only this one visit, won’t they?”

Potter opens his mouth to retort, but then… closes it again. Says nothing, lips narrowing.

“Well,” Draco says. Then… then he can’t think of anything else to say. The amusement has gone out of him. “Well.”

The silence almost seems to push down over them.

After some moments, Draco can no longer bear it. The effort it takes to draw breath is completely outsized to what it should be. He uses the inertia to push the words out. To try to get this to end, if just for now:

“As I said, I recommend you consult with a senior Spellwright, on account of the complexity of the work. Holcroft herself, or else obtain a recommendation from her.”

Potter stares at him again. Moments tick away like molasses, and Draco forces himself not to look away.

Potter breaks away first.

“Fine,” he bites out, abruptly already moving, and he sounds bitter too, somehow. “Fine. If that's how you want it to be.”

He slams the door behind him.

Draco doesn’t dare shift from his spot for another half minute. Then, when it becomes clear that Potter isn’t about to storm back in, the adrenaline seems to leave him in such a rush that he almost topples with it, has to lay a hand against the wall to keep himself upright. He exhales in a shaky rush, and it feels like it’s the first time he’s done so since the moment Potter came into the room. He looks to the Lightward, the one panel he has managed to safely separate still floating gently about three feet away from the main pillar.

With annoyance, he quickly wipes wetness from his cheek with the side of his thumb.

The next day, he heads for Spellwright Holcroft’s office first thing. She only looks up briefly after she’s called for him to enter, so he’s left addressing the top of her head. The great-plumed quill she favours bobs and swishes as she writes and it draws his eye as he speaks, again and again.

“Therefore, my conclusion is that there is no reason to prolong the process,” he finishes up, distantly satisfied that his voice has been steady and detached throughout, so far. “And, as such, my suggestion is that I be struck from the program with immediate effect.”

Holcroft doesn’t immediately reply. Her quill scratches against the page, and it almost seems to echo in the well-organized room. It feels so quiet that Draco finds his stomach tightening at the thought that he might have been speaking overloud. That he has been half-yelling the sum of his inadequacies in his haste to lay them out.

He holds his hands steady behind his back and does his best to keep his shoulders loose.

Finally, Holcroft – still writing – asks: “You are finished, then?”

He doesn’t know in which sense she means the word but, then, the answer is the same no matter: “Yes.”

“Hm,” she says, a small and unimpressed noise, just shy of a scoff. She glances up at him, sweeps her eyes over him, and her lips purses. “Well. You’ve had me quite fooled, Mr. Malfoy; I thought you intelligent.”

Draco blinks, the condemnation a completely different one from what he had been expecting. He… finds that he can’t quite seem to decide whether it strikes him deeper, or not at all, because of it.

She makes a vague, dismissive gesture towards him. “Perhaps if there are no such egregious cases in the future, I can be convinced that this represents a momentary lapse.”

She goes back to writing.

Draco stands there, and doesn’t know what to say. What is happening. Perhaps he is exactly as dim-witted as Holcroft now thinks him.

“My answer is no,” she tells him, quill scratching parchment, “if my previous statement did not make that sufficiently clear.”

“…no?” he echoes, attempting to piece the reply together with what he has said to create meaning. He fails.

“No,” she repeats and, perhaps making allowances for his lacking intelligence, clarifies: “You may not resign.”

Draco’s stomach lurches. “Spellwright, perhaps I did not explain well enough, the Aurors-“

She stops writing and looks up, and the look on her face is enough to halt the words coming out of his mouth.

“The Aurors shall continue to conduct their own business, as we shall continue to conduct ours,” she tells him firmly. “I will not see any changes made to the schedule we have laid out for your training. You will remain primary on the Lightward and I, as your supervisor, will continue to evaluate your work – as I have done since the first day of your training. And I, as your supervisor, will be ultimately accountable for the quality of said work – as I have been, since the first day of your training. Ministry regulations are clear on this. The bylaws of the Spellwrights’ Guild are clear on this. I suspect, however, that you are correct in concluding that the aurors intend to provide additional supervision on the Lightward-project. That is their prerogative, and I will not meddle in how they have chosen to spend their resources. Neither, however, will I allow their decisions to alter my own. I suggest, Mr. Malfoy, that you adopt a similar approach.”

Draco swallows.

Swallows again.

I will be ultimately accountable.

The impulse to argue her points wars with the wish to take her at her word, to run away with it before it can be withdrawn. There’s so much gratitude in him that he feels clammy with it, that it seems to be crawling up his throat. And it twists with shades of fear, too, because how can she be so sure that he will do no wrong? He always does wrong.

“Yes,” he manages. Isn’t sure it fits, quite, as a response. Can’t quite produce anything else, anyhow.

Holcroft examines him steadily for some moments, holding his gaze. Feeling stripped bare, Draco doesn’t look away. He can’t imagine what she sees.

What she sees in him.

It does appear that there is something, though, because she nods briefly, as if to herself, and then tells him, not unkindly: “Back to work with you, then. We’ve wasted enough time on this matter.”  

Draco goes.

Potter, as he expected, does return. Still buffeted by Holcroft’s staggering faith in him, Draco finds himself even angrier than the first time. It is… not on his own behalf, he realizes some minutes into the ordeal, but rather Holcroft’s. Potter has always thought he knows best, better than even the adults around them, better than their teachers. (And Draco has always been told to listen, to do as his told, to not question-) And Draco has always found the habit infuriating, but this is a new shade of it, that Potter should think that he has a better grasp of Draco’s motivations and work than his mentor, that he thinks that his judgment is somehow the superior. He doesn’t even know him! He doesn't even-!

Potter leaves. Eventually.

Determined to not face what’s to come unprepared, Draco undertakes a brief side-project. The copper discs are on hand at the workshop, and so are the materials for etching. He borrows key features from one of the earlier tasks Holcroft had set for him, and he has the whole thing completed in less than three hours.

He smooths his thumb over one copper piece, gone dark and dull with the etching. Then he transfigures the mug on his desk into a glass bowl and drops the disc into it. The other of the pair, he places sixty paces out from the workshop.

When Potter arrives next – when an individual, dressed in clothing bearing the particular interweave of protective magics used on aurors’ robes, passes through a specific spot in the corridor – the coin in the bowl starts jumping and vibrating, the sound of metal on glass loud in the room.

The sixty paces give Draco time to be prepared. To have straightened himself out. To have, at least, finger-combed his hair back into relative neatness.

(To push away that cold something, blooming like ink in water, tasting disappointed and bitter and sad.)  

It becomes a weary monotony. Twice a week, Potter will arrive, staying for no less than thirty minutes.

In the beginning, Potter makes more attempts at that forced, feigned, politeness, as though thinking Draco is more likely to slip up and reveal a dark masterplan in the middle of a friendly exchange. Draco meets this with more hostility than anything else Potter tries, though, and this makes him leave off any consistent efforts in keeping to that particular strategy. Potter grows sullen, instead. Grows silent.

Sometimes there are questions, plainly – by the word choice and intonation – tasked to him by someone other. Draco finds himself wondering if there’s just the one stubborn bastard that has set Potter to this task, or if the whole of the auror department really has deemed that they don’t have anything better to do than to look him over the shoulder.

He doesn’t bother wondering why Potter is the one who has been sent to carry out the work, though: it’s always Potter.

(During his most bitter days – his most fatalistic, self-scorning – he thinks that it always will be, for him.)

At least Potter, too, seems miserable with it.

He’s taken to sitting in the chair by the desk in the corner of the workshop, rather than leaning up against the wall as he’d done during his first few visits. He eventually forms the habit of asking, usually sometime within the first five minutes of arriving, that Draco explain what he is currently working on. It is, they’ve both learned, the one question Draco will reliably give a clear answer to. He doesn’t dare do otherwise. Potter has not taken his advice of having one of the Spellwrights come check on his work, as far as he has been able to figure, and nor has he been instructed to give any additional reports beyond his weekly consults with Holcroft. This, Draco figures, means that his accountings to Potter are presumed to be the means by which his treachery is to be discovered – meaning that anything less than a full and thorough description could be viewed as obfuscation.

So he is thorough. It is a challenge to put words to what he’s doing, to the half-formed theories and the angles he’s pursuing, to one who isn’t accustomed to doing this sort of work. To one who doesn’t know the language of artificing. He’ll catch confusion on Potter’s face, and he’ll try to find other ways to explain, use other words, until Potter at least looks like he’s understood. And even when his mood seems the dourest, or darkest, he does appear to listen. Draco figures that the reason might be that Potter is expected to relay his words in a report, or else take the memory of them to a Pensieve, to be examined by someone more knowledgeable.

But there is still only Potter in the room with him. Only Potter’s eyes that track his movements back and forth, as he sometimes takes to pacing as he talks. Only Potter, who will sometimes step closer to get a better look at some component or other that Draco has indicated.

He’s explaining his current theory of the mechanisms used to weave the curse into the structure of the Lightward’s magic, precluding any activation of it that won’t also activate the curse, when Potter leans particularly close to peer at the rune he’s pointing at. And it is, perhaps, the scent of him that causes it: The sense-memory of Potter’s limp body crashing into his chest is so powerful that it nearly drives the breath out of him all over again. The feeling of how the broom had tipped with the weight of him and how Draco had wound his arm around his torso to-

Draco squeezes his eyes shut, just barely longer than a blink.

He’s grown taller, Potter. Draco still has about an inch on him, but Potter has added bulk since they were sixteen, too; hazards of auror training, most like. Perhaps, if the situation were to repeat itself, Draco wouldn’t manage to pull the broom up. Perhaps the Chosen One would just slip from his arms and crash to the hard ground below, taken out by the combined force of a stray bludger and gravity, and damn the Dark Lord’s dreams of a grander death for the child he made his nemesis.

Potter asks another question, and Draco blinks the memory away.

(The Lightward is to keep Potter safe, too. Draco has found himself thinking this, again and again, while working under his watchful eye. The fact of it feels horribly obvious, then, nearly the same as that day on the quidditch pitch, when everybody saw. But Potter doesn’t see, it seems. Remains as convinced as ever of Draco’s nefariousness.

It is… a mixed blessing.) 

“You do know that Harry wouldn’t keep this up if he had any choice about it, right?” Granger asks him during lunch, not for the first time.

The repetition doesn’t really lessen the twist in his gut. He knows the intention of her words, but he can’t help but also hear the truth underneath: Potter would not have him. They won’t be finding their way to the unlikely friendship that he and Granger have managed to cultivate, because Potter would not spend even this time with him, if he had any choice about it.

“I know,” he answers her, because he does.

She sighs. “You really are too stubborn, the both of you. I don’t know how you ended up back like this. You were fine last year, at Hogwarts, weren’t you?”

Were they? There hadn’t been any open conflict between them that year, naturally (no sane person would deliberately set out to provoke the Wizarding World’s Chosen One in the wake of the Dark Lord’s defeat, and to do so while also having one’s continued freedom debated in the papers on a near daily basis would have been nigh suicidal) but it had not passed Draco by that Potter had kept up the habit of keeping an eye on him. He hadn’t particularly minded; it had been deserved, and between incessant nightmares and trying to follow his parents’ trials via owl and papers, he honestly hadn’t had the energy to mind much of anything.

But perhaps he should have protested, then, if only to spare himself the situation he is in now.

“I suppose we were,” is all he answers, though, deliberately bland; unable bear the thought of having to listen to Granger’s perspective on his experience, just now.

She has tried a couple of more times to get Draco to join the trio at the Leakey, after that first invitation. It’s been months since she asked last, but he knows that she still harbours the hope that the four of them will just magically get along one day. It plainly makes her miserable that Potter’s visits have not only failed to spark this camaraderie, but have instead actively re-stoked hostilities.

(Rarely has he witnessed Hermione Granger failing to bend things according to her will, and he finds it grimly amusing that it is at him her vast capacity has hit an obstacle it can’t overcome. It feels like proof: he has made his bed, and now he has to lie in it. Is meant to lie in it.)

(A more uncomfortable perspective, one that he has attempted to push from his mind, is the idea that he might be… sullying her. As though his bad-ness is contagious, somehow, and the lustre of her goodness will be rubbed off if she spends too long in his presence. That Draco can never be lifted up, and so he must instead drag her down.)

“Maybe… maybe if you’d just try to talk to each other…?” she suggests, her tone one of forced lightness. “About… how you’re feeling?”

Draco has to suppress a flinch from the mere thought.

“I’m not sure that’d do us much good,” he tells her, trying to be as diplomatic as he can be about it.

Her mouth goes tight in a way that suggests disapproval, or perhaps simply that she doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t press him further about it.

At least, Draco thinks, there will be an end to it. He will finish his work on the Lightward, and then Potter will be released from his obligation to supervise him, and Draco can get on with living his life – without Potter in it.

He is on schedule to complete the project within the allotted time. He can’t help but feel proud to have managed this, especially considering the disruption of Potter’s never-ending visits. Admittedly he has found that explaining things to Potter sometimes has helped him in gaining a new perspective on a particular problem, as well as serving as a sort of dry-run for his reports to Holcroft, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the only work he can afford to do while Potter is present is the sort that is certain to not demand his full attention. And, since Potter has been deliberately keeping an unpredictable schedule, keeping to any sort of project-plan has been like trying to wrangle doxys.

It is also a problem increasing rather than diminishing in scope, he’s found; as he’s nearing completion, bottlenecks are becoming more frequent. The next one, looming on steadily larger on the horizon, is the task of severing the curse from the Lightward’s power-source. The Lightward’s magic initiates based on proximity, and the curse is simultaneous-parasitic, so he can’t introduce power into the system without triggering activation of both – and without magic in the system, any building back up of the protective magic will have to be done blind.

Which is a terrible idea.

He scrubs a hand through his hair as he stares at the plinth, indecisive.

He has done a majority of the work of the decoupling already, but the last bit will have to be done all in one go. The curse has a six-point rootwork, tethered to each of the axes of the Lightward’s main magical structure, and once he’s detached one the curse will become unstable. He’ll counter this with spellwork, of course, but with a six-point root the work will demand a great deal of concentration, lest the curse wobbles out of place and descends on him as he tries to pry it away.

He needs something like an hour and a half, he estimates. Much longer than that and his supports will start to wear thin, anyway, so he had better be able to sort things out in that timeframe. And it’s nearly the end of the day, a Friday, nearing four o’clock; Potter might even have gone home already. Will most definitely have done so within his ninety-minute timespan. Potter also visited yesterday and, even with his efforts to be unpredictable, Draco can only recall a single instance of him having visited on consecutive days.

He should do it now.

It is only that…

No. No, only nothing – he will do it now.

(It is only that, yesterday, Potter had seemed on the cusp of something during the whole of his visit. Of saying something. Oh, he’d said things, of course, the usual things, but nothing of it seemed to be that something that was nagging at him. He had left without saying it, whatever it was, and Draco had carried around the tension bracing for it in his shoulders for the rest of the day.)

(And through to the night, a foreboding like a knot in his stomach, mind whirling with what it might be.)

(And yet, not only foreboding, because some fanciful thing in him, apparently not beaten down properly, also hoped. Hoped that maybe Potter would say that he’d seen. That, after several months of forced visits, it had become clear that Draco’s intention really hadn’t been to do anything nefarious, wouldn’t be to do anything nefarious and that…  that he was fine. Fine to be let out into polite society, fine to keep being friends with Hermione, fine to… be.)

(And yet still, the truth of it is this: it is likely nothing at all. The most probable situation is that Draco has read too much into things, fancying that he understands Potter in a way he most certainly doesn’t. Perhaps Potter had merely had some case that he was working over in his mind, or a headache, or eaten a disagreeable lunch, and Draco is making all out to be about him when it almost definitely isn’t.) 

Draco takes a deep breath. Then he steps forward and rucks up the legs of his trousers slightly as he gets to his knees in front of the plinth. This will perhaps be the, for him, most significant step forward in doing away with the curse: with magic in the system, all panels of the Lightward can finally be opened, instead of just the one he’s carefully pried away, and he’ll finally be able to do practical work without having to get down on his knees.

He starts, as is prudent, with the axis nearest to east.

It is, really, the type of work that had drawn him to artificing in the first place: the type that swallows him up. Other thoughts can keep niggling at him as he unwinds the first root, that single task not enough to demand all of his attention, but, then… as he finishes this up, the task begins of compensating for how the curse's magic has gone unbalanced. As a child, he once watched a harpist tune his harp before one of the feasts his parents used to hold, and this is how he thinks of it – a delicate finding of just the right tension. And then holding it.

When he does, he keeps the figurative grip steady – and starts on the second root.

(The rest of the world has fallen away.)

The roots have a symmetry to them, enough that he can learn from one and bring the knowledge forward into the next. The structure of a curse-root needs to be adapted, however, to fit to the specific axis it’s tied to, and the variation this forces is enough that the work never becomes repetitive.

The third.

This curse is exceptionally well made – as he’s been aware since first blush – and the curse’s root is matched, enmeshed, with the axis to the point that it’s only barely discernible where one magic begins and the other ends. But, in this, it’s a little bit like unwinding a long and tangled bit of string; gently tugging and tugging to get to the next knot. Unwinding it.

Fourth.

Lightwards run on starlight. Nearly half a year, this one has been kept in a dark basement, to drain any trace of magic entirely from the system. It’s empty. Entirely empty. The fact that Draco isn’t currently writhing on the floor in agony is proof of this; the Lightward activates with human proximity, and the curse activates with the Lightward. And yet… buried deep in the web of the structure’s magic, he can’t help but think that he can feel it… stretching. Expanding into confines no longer so restricting as, piece by piece, the cure is pried away.

His heart beats faster with the feeling. With the anticipation. It had been the same with the Vanishing Cabinet – bit by bit, he’d put the magic back together. Made it whole.

Made it live.  

“Malfoy.”

He’s yanked back into reality with a force like a blow. His eyes are straining and his knees are aching and Potter is somehow in the room without so much as a jingle from his coin. All his supports teeter precariously before he slams them back into place.

“Yes?” he grits out, pressing some magic into the half-unwound root he suddenly no longer has the concentration to work at. He lifts his head slightly, but doesn’t look up. He can’t look up; looking up would require resources he doesn’t currently have.

“Do you-… I need to talk to you,” Potter tells him.

Draco hears him take a few steps further into the room. Then he halts, still near to the door, and for a brief moment he thinks that maybe this will at least be a brief visit – Potter will say whatever stupid thing it is that he’s needed to say and then he will bloody leave.

But then Potter starts walking again, goes to his usual spot by the desk in the far corner, and Draco hears him pull out the chair to sit down.

He presses his eyes shut briefly.

“You can keep working, I just-… I have to say some things. Okay?”  

Can he keep working? For perhaps the first time, Draco considers whether it would actually be worth it to ask Potter to leave. Not even for long, just until he’s finished with the curse removal – another fifteen, twenty minutes. Just this once. He can feel sweat gathering on his brow, how his hands have begun to tremble. It would be – common sense, surely? Even to one unaware of the particular delicacies in the practice of artificing, the concept of I need to concentrate on this or else things might go terribly wrong can’t be foreign one? And Potter, after all his visits – after sitting through all of Draco’s meticulous descriptions – surely can’t still be completely unaware. Maybe- maybe Draco could just tell him, and he’d… understand.

He actually opens his mouth to start speaking.

Then he realizes that what he wants to say amounts to: I find your presence so distracting that I can’t reliably concentrate while you are here.

The horror of it shoots like ice through him. For a moment, he just ends up frozen with it, breath going in and out through his still-open mouth, staring blankly at the stone barely an inch from his face. He almost-… But there is a way relay the sentiment with nothing but professionalism, he’s sure. The truth, really, and nothing less, of the work demanding he not be disturbed. By anyone. But he’s still elbows-deep in the magic, and his tongue feels thick in his mouth, and finding the right words is like trying to thread a needle while riding a bucking hippogriff.

He teeters between the impossibilities for another moment. Then:

“Of course,” he bites out.

The curse tremors, and he has to force himself to breathe all the way down into his stomach to not allow his supports to lapse further.  

“Okay. That- thanks. This is-… I mean, I’m not very good at this. So… could you maybe… I don’t know, just let me talk first, if that’s alright?”

I am literally a captive audience, Draco doesn’t say. “Fine.”

He rests his forehead slightly against the cool stone of the Lightward’s exterior. Perhaps he can just tune Potter out? If not enough to keep going with his work, then at least enough to get the supports fully solid again. Or… he’d really like to finish work on the fifth root; there’s no way to shore up the half-finished detangling properly, and there’s a- a sparky quality to the unwound fragments of magic, that makes him wary of leaving things as they are for much longer.

He tries to shift his stance to take some strain off his left knee, which is aching the worst, and he’s really quite desperately wants to wipe his brow, but both his hands are occupied by pressing down on the relevant runes and keeping the copper ring around the crystal out of alignment. His shoulders are also starting to feel the strain of having had his arms raised slightly above his head for nearly an hour.

Potter begins speaking, and Draco resolves not hear him at all; if he’s not in need of Draco’s response, then his attention really can’t be all that necessary either.

(His stomach is a bundle of nerves at the thought of what Potter might have to say, but he’s also fairly certain that he doesn’t want to hear it. That, if he is at all able, he should spare himself the knowing.)

He squeezes his eyes shut.

He needs to get this over with. Now.

He rips out the scaffold from beneath the remains of the fifth. It’s a spectacularly bad idea, even with the structure as half-formed as it is. The curse lunges at the sudden release, and it hits him like a giant’s hand closing around his whole skull and squeezing. Draco grits his teeth at the force of it, breathless for a moment, but- but there’s also a connection there, somehow, and he realizes that he can follow it down, down into where it’s buried in the axis, and the foulness of it is like a flavour he can taste.

He wrenches it out.

With more force and less care than he should, he gets the last of the fifth out in one fell swoop – free, suddenly free – and pushes up a full support underneath-

And staggers under the weight of it.

His vision flickers. He teeters, sways hard enough that his shoulder collides with some force with the stone of the plinth. This-

This is harder than he thought it would be. Much harder.

He’s only worked classic three-roots before, and it’s dawning on him just how badly he’s underestimated the change in scale; underestimated just how steep the difference is between one in three and one in six. How much more lost stability he must make up for.

He’s breathing harshly, his whole chest heaving.

Potter is still speaking.

“… caught in feeling like it was unfair, since I didn’t think I’d done anything to deserve it…”

No. No. He isn’t listening. Isn’t going to listen.

There’s no way out but through; he focuses on the sixth. Just this last one. Just one, and then the mass of magic he’s balancing can be dispelled.

The thread.

If he can just find-

“… was just ridiculous, to me. I thought we’d have a bloody laugh about it, about…”

The thread.  

He can feel his heartbeat pounding in his head. Feel sweat making strands of hair stick to his forehead. Keeping up all five supports, keeping them all in equilibrium, feels like trying to plant his feet while being whipped about by a hurricane. He’s drowning in it. Doesn’t have any equilibrium to give.

The connection. If only he can-

But then, instead, he hears Potter say, in a tone of voice that seems to cut through everything:

“This just really isn’t how I want us to leave things.”

Pain.

It is immediate and incandescent. Draco understands at once what has happened: That connection he had sought – bloody sought – when left unattended for a single instant… Starved of power from the Lightward, the curse hadn’t hesitated when an alternative presented itself. The pain is a great distraction but, as he knows to look for it, not enough to entirely bury the chilling sensation of too much magic leaving him too fast.

But it hurts. Gods, it hurts.

He locks his jaw, pushes the insides of his knees against the plinth between them to find some sort of stability, and tries to yank back. It’s his, his magic, and he will control it.

But it’s like being thrown into pounding rapids; he controls nothing, not his magic, not his sensations, not his attention. He is pushed, this way and that: drowns in pain, tries to tug back his magic, hears Potter saying means I should just leave you alone but, more pain, maybe if he can get the supports to-, obviously that’s up to, pain, not the supports then but- pain. Pain. Pain, pain, pain.

A sound is squeezed out of him, despite his clenched jaw.

“… Malfoy…?”

Draco grits his teeth. His eyes are already shut. He’s possibly crying, but he’s too busy feeling like every single one of his bones are being bent to the point of snapping to be able to tell.

“Draco, are you alright?”

The torrent rips him under again. He thinks he hears Potter swearing.

Then – relief.

He gulps for air as though he really had been drowning, and his head is spinning so badly that he barely knows which way is up.

“I’m doing- something,” Potter tells him, from somewhere to his left, far closer than before, “and I think I’m holding it. But, I’d probably be good if you-“

“Yeah,” Draco cuts in, because he can feel it, can feel Potter’s magic like massive hands pushing the curse away from him – and later he will quite possible have a small crisis at the sheer scope of Potter’s power, used to do something Draco isn’t even sure is technically possible – but holding it like that is like trying to hold back sand, and so he throws himself back at it.

Had his work with the fifth root been too fast, sloppy, then he doesn’t even want to know which adjectives Holcroft would have used to describe what he does now. But it has been in him, used him, and its like the connection from before but manyfold.

He tears wildly at all the strands of the root he finds, with more abandon than he’d have dared were it not the very last, and flecks of pain shoot at him as payment for his recklessness. But this is the last, and the worst that could happen already has, and Potter’s magic is dancing like sparks along the periphery of his awareness as he keeps the curse from sinking its teeth into him again. So he tears and he pulls, and he ignores the metallic taste in his mouth, ignores and the feeling of his magic being pared down to nothing at all, just a little more, just a little longer, just-

Done.

It’s done. He sags with it, more pain that he’d been really been aware he was feeling suddenly leaving him as the curse abruptly winks away. The absence of effort is-… He has a headache. His shoulders ache, his knees ache, his-

He’s been hauled to his feet, suddenly. He trips with it, vision going spotty as his blood pressure struggles to keep up with the change in position, and he thinks he’ll fall right back over. Feels like he falls right back over, except he never hits the floor. Instead, there’s the wall, and the impact is relatively gentle, and something gets in the way of his head smacking into the stone at all. His legs feel nearly not there at all from him having been kneeling for so long, but he’s kept upright by the fact that he’s more leaning than he is standing.

And also by being held in place.

“Are you alright?” Potter asks urgently from very near. “Draco, come on, don’t pass out on me again.”

“I’m not passed out,” Draco protests indignantly, except for how his voice is a rasp and he really doesn’t manage anything near indignance at all.

“Okay, good,” Potter says, steady in a way that serves to remind that he is really quite good at dealing with a crisis. “I’m going to push you some of my magic, alright? One, two, three-“

Draco sucks in a breath and blinks his eyes open.

“What are you doing?!” he demands.

He feels like he’s been dunked in an inferno, except in a way that’s like having had a luxurious forty-five minute bath condensed into half a second, and- Merlin, Potter really is very close. It is Potter’s hand that’s at the back of his head, he realizes, keeping it from making contact with the hard stone. Potter’s other hand is right where his chest meets his armpit, half pinning him in place and half holding him up. His whole body is barely a foot away.

“I told you,” Potter tells him, looking at him with those staggeringly green eyes, “I’m pushing you some magic.”

Potter really is looking at him quite intensely. Looking… looking at his pupils, Draco realizes, once Potter’s concentrated frown registers. Something that he doesn’t want to name disappointment pinches at him.

“You can’t just do that,” he protests, feeling- feeling discombobulated with all he’s feeling, and also really quite keen to be done with it. He bats Potter’s hand away from where it’s been cushioning his head from the stone, unable to bear the feel of his fingers in his hair. “You couldn’t have known that we’d be compatible.”

“Yes I could,” Potter counters, retreating slightly but keeping his other hand on his chest. “I’ve used your wand.”

Draco pinches his lips together. Right. Right.

“Are you alright?"

Draco blinks his eyes back open, having not quite realized that he’d shut them.

“I’m-” he course corrects before he snaps fine because, while it is embarrassing to be held up by Potter, it would be even more embarrassing to drop to the floor right in front of him – which he suspects is what were to happen, should he step back entirely. So he grits out: “-going to be. Just give me a minute.”

 “’course,” Potter tells him, annoyingly gracious.

Draco shuts his eyes again. Forces himself to breathe deep. Potter’s push of magic still lingers like a flush all across his skin, but it’s already feeling mostly like his own, like something he could use; the yawning chasm of having nearly been bled dry shovelled in. The aftereffects of the curse is an ache, a sensation like the worst of the nights of growing pains he remembers from when he was young, unable to sleep and sobbing from the sheer relentlessness of it. But he is older now, has borne far worse pains, and nothing is actually broken. His knees will be bruised, and his shoulders will need that numbing salve with dittany before he’ll be able to sleep. The pins and needles in his calves and feet are abating. The indignity of having been saved by Potter, yet again, he suspects he will have to suffer without remedy. Ever the s-

“Wait,” he says then, opening his eyes. “How did you know how?”

Potter looks confused. “Know how…?”

“The curse,” Draco snaps impatiently. “How did you know how to counter it? How do you know how it works?”

Because, while it had been more a matter of power than finesse, Potter had managed to effectively loosen him from the curse’s grasp. It wouldn’t have been a stretch to realize that Draco had been afflicted by it, of course, even with it being presumed dormant – but that would have made the obvious counter a shield. Which would have done precisely nothing, obviously, but Potter couldn’t have known that.

Oughtn’t have known that.

Except Potter was now looking at him like he was worried that Draco was worse afflicted than he’d previously thought.

He says, a little warily: “Malfoy. You’ve been telling me how it works. For months.”

And that-

That’s so far from what he was expecting.

“You… remember that, right? You remember that you’ve told me?” Potter asks, still in that careful tone, watching him very closely.

Draco does remember. Obviously, he remembers. He remembers struggling to find non-technical language. Remembers watching Potter’s face for signs of confusion. Remembers the knot in his stomach for fear that something he said would be misconstrued in Potter’s reports. He-

He just didn’t think that Potter had listened.

Not- not like this. Not to the point that he could apply- could extrapolate.

 The revelation has hit him almost like another bout of vertigo, and he feels flushed with it. Hot.

“I remember,” he bites out. “I’d just assumed that you wouldn’t.”

And it’s not-… He could (or at least some earlier version of himself could) quite easily have this be some sort of sneering taunt; something in the vein of being staggered that Potter could possibly be in possession of enough brains to understand the subject matter. But in reality… it isn’t anything like that at all. It’s-…

He blinks, tries to gather himself. This isn’t-… Potter is conducting an investigation. Is investigating him. This- It’s clearly nothing more than diligence. A bit more dedication to the mundanities of his task than Draco had expected. 

Potter, who seems still a little worried that Draco’s bewilderment might be tied to amnesia, is still watching him carefully.

“Well,” he says. “I did.”

Draco endures his gaze with his eyes pinned to the corner of the room, feeling like he won’t be able to breathe quite right until he’s not watched any longer. He thinks he could stand on his own now, at least long enough to traverse the distance to his chair, but somehow he can’t seem to find the words to speak up.

Slowly, the clinicality of Potter’s examination it seems to ebb. Potter withdraws slightly, takes half a step back and lets his hand drop from where he has been bracing Draco up against the wall. A new sort of frown puts furrows in Potter’s brow, and Draco feels the tension winding even tighter. He swallows.

“How much…” Potter starts, finally, a little haltingly. “How much of what I told you, before, did you actually hear?”

Draco can’t help how his eyes flick up to Potter’s face. He also can’t quite stop himself from feeling guilty, at the tone of Potter’s voice, even though he surely can’t be to blame for Potter just barging in and starting monologuing.

“I was… preoccupied,” he says, going for haughty and not knowing how well he manages.

Potter looks at him a moment, a funny turn to his mouth. Then he scoffs, and shakes his head. He takes another couple of steps back, and the chill of the room fills the vacated space.

“Yeah. Yeah, that- figures. I should have asked.”

Something about hearing the self-recrimination makes Draco say: “You did ask, I believe.”

“Barely. And you weren’t going to turn me away, were you? Not while I was here on auror business.”

This makes Draco realize something: Potter isn’t wearing his red robes. He’s in plain black ones, clearly part of his own wardrobe, non-official. Which would account for the lack of chime from his alarm. That is not the bigger realization, though:

“You’re… not here on auror business, though, are you?” he ventures haltingly, even though he can’t think what else could possibly have given Potter cause to-

“Has something happened to Granger?” he demands, trying immediately to get properly upright. His mind runs away with him, guilt flaring hard and fast – could she be hurt? Could Potter have been coming to tell him, to ask him something, and Draco had just ignored him? Could-

“No, Merlin, Malfoy, calm down!” Potter tells him firmly, pushing him back against the wall. “Hermione’s fine, it’s nothing to do with her!”

He almost doesn’t believe him, the surge of adrenaline from his own invented calamity somehow more convincing.

“It was just… me,” Potter says, awkwardly, in the face of his lingering suspicion. “I just… I wanted to talk.”

Draco narrows his eyes at him.

“You wanted to tell me something,” he says, half correcting.

Potter shrugs, then nods, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

This just really isn’t how I want us to leave things.

He almost flinches at the remembering, like he’s already conditioned himself to expect pain to follow. There seems to be an obvious way to interpret the words – but it’s equally obvious that the obvious isn’t right. Unease stirs, dread, and Draco feels too scraped raw to deal with this. Too tried. Too-…

He wishes he could just go home.

(That he could be left to exist in a space where he will not be perceived. Evaluated. Found lacking.)

“Well,” he says instead. “I’ll listen now, then.”

There’s a measure of sourness to his offer that is quite possibly too large to serve up to one that has just torn him from the clutches of a curse – to the Hero of the fucking Wizarding World – but Draco can’t seem to filter it from his voice.

Potter quite plainly picks up on it. His mouth pinches.

“No,” he says, after a beat. “No, you’ve only just recovered. And it’s already-“

“Potter,” Draco snaps. “Talk.”

He stares at him, something dark in his eyes. Whatever this is, it’s plainly not going the way Potter has planned it.

“Talk,” Draco demands again, because damn him if he’s going to wait any-

“We’re fighting,” Potter bites out abruptly. “And you’re almost finished with the Lightward.”

“We’re not fighting,” Draco immediately protests because, two years past the War, that’s still not a good survival strategy.

Potter stares at him with disbelief. “Yes, we are.”

“We-!” Draco bites the words back before he fully makes Potter’s point for him. Sucks in a breath, tries again: “I am almost done with the Lightward, and that means that it will no longer matter whether we are fighting or not.”

Something that looks almost like hurt – but obviously isn’t – flashes across Potter’s face. Then it hardens with resolve.

“I think it matters,” he argues. “I want it to matter.”

Draco squeezes his eyes shut. Then finds that’s not enough and rubs his hands across his face as well.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. I’m sorry, then, for whatever I did. Is that good enough? Are you satisfied?”

“No!” Potter exclaims incredulously. “You’re not sorry-“

And Draco is about to tell Potter that he can be sorry about whatever he bloody wants him to be, just as soon as he tells him what he’s done, when Potter finishes with:

“- you’re the one who’s angry.”

Draco blinks at him, entirely off kilter.

“What?”   

“You are,” Potter insists. “You’ve been angry ever since the first time I came down here.”

And Draco’s temper does flare at that, if nothing else. “You first came down here to accuse me of sabotage.”

“Merlin, Malfoy!” Potter swears. “I don’t-! I wasn’t accusing you of anything! I was just doing my job!”

“Which is investigating crime!” Draco bursts. “Your presence is an accusation!”

Potter whirls away at that, does a little half-turn and presses the heel of his hand against the scar on his forehead as though it pains him, before he comes back around. “Look, I get that you think that, now, but- But I don’t actually get to choose. Johnson’s the one who- I thought we’d laugh about this, Malfoy!”

“Laugh?” Draco demands, outraged. “What, exactly, in that whole situation, is in any way funny?”

“It’s ridiculous!” Potter says, throwing his arms out. “It’s funny because it's bloody ridiculous! Obviously you wouldn’t do anything like what Johnson’s imagined!”

Obviously?

Draco gapes around his retort for a moment, mouth empty of words. It feels almost like he’s right back in that torrent again, tumbled and thrown every which way, except now it’s not pain – it’s just Potter.  

“Obviously?”

Potter looks at him as if he’s stupid. “Yes, obviously!”

The condescension irks, the lie of it.

“Well,” he snarls, “you’ve certainly changed your tune since sixth year!”

Potter gives him a flat look. “You were working to let Death Eaters into the school, then.”

“I did let Death Eaters into the school, then,” Draco points out.

“Because Dumbledore told you to!”

Like that matters, Draco thinks. Like that has ever mattered to bloody anyone.

“Not that you let that alleviate any of your suspicions,” he sneers, “during our last year.”  

Potter has his mouth open for a retort when the meaning of the words seems to suddenly sink in. He blinks, confusion abruptly clearing the annoyance from his face.  

 “What?”

Draco’s stomach clenches almost violently, because he can’t. He can’t. It’s one thing for Hermione to have convinced herself that everything was over and done with between the two of them, that everything was fine, but that Potter himself would try to-

“Don’t give me that,” Draco snaps. “Did you honestly think I didn’t bloody notice you watching me?”  

Potter- Potter’s eyes go wide, and he blushes scarlet. “What?”

“Oh, it’s one thing that I was spared Azkaban,” Draco says, making a sharp and dismissive gesture. “But quite another that I was let back into Hogwarts, wasn’t it? Among all those innocent and impressionable children?”

Potter gapes at him, still flushed, as though it has genuinely shocked him that Draco knows this. That he’s been noticed. It feels as though Draco should find this darkly amusing, Potter never quite as smooth or as surreptitious as he thinks himself, but instead- Instead it makes him angrier. Potter really has taken him for a fool.

“I made a first-year cry once, just from walking into the library at the same time as him,” Draco says, struggling to keep his breathing even, “and the third-year Hufflepuffs always walked in one large group from their Transfiguration on Thursday mornings, because I passed that corridor on my way to Potions from Charms. And you are their Saviour; of course you had to keep watch.”

“Keep-!?” Potter scrubs his hands harshly across his face, blows out something that doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a groan or a scoff or part of a laugh. “Oh gods, that’s not-“  

“Oh spare me!” Draco snarls. “It’s not as though I ever expected anything else! You’re the hero, aren’t you? And that’s just what heroes bloody do, isn’t it – keeps watch, looks after things, makes sure no one does anything bad."

“Christ, Malfoy!” Potter bursts. “You’ve got this all wrong!”

“Oh haven’t I fucking always!” Draco snarls, throwing his hands out. “Tell me, then, saint Potter – what is right!?”

Potter, for a moment, looks like he’s actually going to give him an answer. Has moved his body to, has taken the breath to – and then, in the instant before sound actually comes out of his mouth, he chokes it back. Goes wide-eyed and tense and his jaw snaps shut as though he’s worried that something is about to tumble out whether he wants it to or not.

“Potter.”

He doesn’t even know if he says it in warning or in demand.

 “I wasn’t watching you,” Potter repeats, almost entreating, as if he’s really asking him to believe it.

And Draco feels like he might just tear his hair out, because he just can’t understand the bloody point of it.

“I’m not bloody blind, Potter!?” He feels on the verge of something. Laughing, perhaps. Crying. His tone has struck somewhere where it sounds like he’s asking, too. He thinks he is, perhaps. Is begging. “Would you just-?!”

He’s so mad he chokes on it. Runs out of words.

And Potter must see that he has to give him something.

He blurts: “I was just looking.”

Draco does laugh, then. He sounds insane. “Looking?”

Potter wets his lips. Shifts his feet, then nods.

“Yeah,” he says, a little hoarse. “At-… yeah.”   

Great. Great. They’re splitting bloody hairs. Is this supposed to be better?

Potter is looking at him like he’s bracing for something. Waiting for an impact. Draco feels inclined to give it to him, has to flex his fingers just for the sudden overwhelming ache of it.

“God, Potter, why are you here?” he asks. “Oh, right, I remember – you don’t want us to be fighting!”

Potter at least has the good sense to look sheepish about the situation. Still, he mulishly insists: “I don’t.”

“THEN LEAVE!” Draco explodes. “Leave! Leave me the bloody hell alone, or do you not fucking realize that’s the only thing that’s going to-“

“We could at least try to talk about it!”

“Why?!” Draco exclaims, throwing his hands out. “There is no fucking point to this, Potter! We can just bloody go our separate ways and never see each other again! Why can’t you just let this be!?”

“Because I want us to be -friends!”

There’s a little hitch before the last word. The sound of Potter’s voice loud enough that it’s ringing through the room – and yet that hitch seems to have been louder still.

Draco stares.

Potter stares back, gone a bit wild around the eyes.

The laugh is like a sound punched out of him.

“Salazar, Potter. You can’t even say it,” he marvels.

Potter’s expression morphs in an instant, one fear seemingly trading off with the next.

“No,” Potter starts, shaking his head rapidly. “No, hold on, that’s not-“

“Maybe you should have practiced,” Draco sneers, voice dripping with condescension. “Such a hard lie to stomach, for the noble Potter, that he’d ever be friendly with the Death Eater.  A few more goes in the mirror, and maybe you could have had it.”

“Malfoy-“

“Was that the plan, then?” Draco asks, still mock-sympathetic. “That I’d think us such bosom pals that I’d lay bare all my scheming? Confess all my misdeeds?”

“Would you stop!?” Potter bursts. “How many times must I tell you, this is just me! I’m not here because-! And you weren’t even a fucking Death Eater in the first place!”  

“I should stop?” Draco asks, humour blown away in an instant. “I should stop?! Potter, why don’t you fucking start?! You’ve told me a hundred things that this isn’t, rambled on about-! So it’s just you, you without your bloody robes, you without Jonson telling you to be here – great. So fucking tell me then. Tell me- tell me what this is about! What do you want from me?!” He shoves a finger towards him. “And don’t lie this time.”

Potter looks at him. Looks at him for a long, stretching, moment, and Draco can see the shift in him. Something giving way.

(He’s been wanting to get this over with. The way Potter looks at him now makes him realize that over with might really mean just over. An end. And he’s going to have to stand here and watch Potter arrive at it.)

“Okay,” Potter says, swallowing. “Okay…”

Draco clenches his jaw. His fists, again, briefly. He can see the buildup. Can see Potter struggling with lingering uncertainty, see him dismiss it, see him resolve himself to-

“Do- you like… men?”

It doesn’t even parse as English for a moment, so far away are the words from what he’d been expecting. When they do, when they hit, they immediately suck the air from his lungs. He’s been standing up on his own for a while, but suddenly he has to feel for the wall at his back with a hand.

“What’s it to you?” he snaps, body rigid with fear.

Potter looks at him. Looks at him a little like he had earlier, like he thinks Draco might have gone dumb from a hit to the head.

“I’m asking,” he tells him, a strange tone to his voice. “That’s what.”

Draco thinks this clears up precisely nothing. He should give him a lie, except that Potter’s motivations for the question are so fucking opaque that Draco doesn’t know what shape he ought to give it for it to work. Feels like he’d tangle himself from going in blind at the attempt.

And the silence is stretching for so long that it will soon be its own sort of answer.

So, voice gone a bit raspy with fear, he forces out: “Yes.”

For a moment, it's like a light goes on in Potter’s eyes. Like relief, except Draco doesn’t know him well enough to be able to tell. And… and then it dims, as neither of them speak. Move.

“Oh,” he says, into the silence. “Oh…”

Draco can feel his heart in his mouth. Can’t speak.

This isn’t illegal, even if viewed as uncouth in many pureblood circles; overt sexuality without proper purpose. But Potter isn’t pureblood. Well, is, literally, but not socially. And- and Draco hasn’t done anything. Not in general, and not towards Potter specifically. Has never sought him out, has never initiated any interaction- He’s avoided him. He-…

He can’t.

“But you’re not…?”

Potter trails off before there’s any chance of meaning being gleaned from his words.

Draco has to swallow before he can manage: “…not?”

Inexplicably, Potter flushes. Deep and red across his whole face, he flushes. He looks away, and then to the floor, and then finally back at Draco.

“Interested,” he says, then.

Impressively, annoyance starts to chip at the fear.

“In?” he presses.

Potter draws for breath. Draco feels as though on a precipice. Then:

“Me.”

“No.”

The sharp vehemence is so reflexive that Potter’s single syllable has barely registered before he’s countered with his own. Then he has to do a sort of mental double-take, because no. No. Nononono-

“Have I given any indication that I would be?” he snaps, thick with contempt and anger to cover up the fear. “Or do you simply expect any and all with the right inclination to be swooning at your feet?”

Hurt, now. Hurt and- and Draco doesn’t think that one even needs to have met Potter, at all, before, to be able to read it.

“Of course not,”  Potter says, pushes out, all in one breath. He takes a couple of more steps back away from him. “Of course-… No. I-… I was just asking.”

There’s relief in that answer – Draco hasn’t been giving anything away; Potter was just asking, idle curiosity. But the feeling won’t actually come. Instead he feels… an ache. A loss. Disappointment. To have had this thing so near, and yet not at all – that must be the explanation for it.

That he seems to see it mirrored in Potter, that is… projection.

His heart is thundering.

Potter’s jaw is working. His eyes are on the floor.  

Then, they flick up.

“I would like to be friends,” he says. “I mean, it’s not only-… That is really why I came here. I didn’t mean for… this. To get in the way.”

Draco does know what resolve looks like on Potter. It is perhaps beaten into the Gryffindors, he thinks, for them all to have this particular, peculiar, trait in such overabundance. He can also read an apology in the twist of his mouth. Lingering embarrassment from how he shifts his feet. And his eyes are green, and the way they dart away from him doesn’t manage to cover for the fact that they’ve gone a bit sad.

The shock of it is so huge that he finds himself speaking it out loud:

“You’re interested in me.”

Potter looks at him. His eyebrows furrow slightly even as his lips pinch. He looks uncomfortable.

“Well… yeah?” he says.

Draco presses his palm flat against the wall.

Potter watches, still that discomfort on his face.

“Do you… get it, now?” he asks, making a vague gesture in the air with a hand. “That I haven’t been – suspicious, or whatever?”

Looking. Potter was-

“…years.”

The blush on his face intensifies again, and he ducks his head briefly.

“Well,” Potter says, glancing up at him. “Yes?”

He says it almost like he’s asking for permission. His lips quirk up a little bit, self-deprecatingly, but there’s something of a question in that, too. Could we just find this funny, please?

Draco is fairly certain that he can’t.

“I don’t know why you look so surprised,” Potter says, grin ticking up a little further, clearly pushing on with trying to make light of this.

It has the opposite effect.

“You don’t,” Malfoy asks flatly.

Potter’s face falls, then trips towards something like confusion.

“No…?” he confirms, but a little cautiously, like he’s now recognized that something is wrong but has yet to figure out the shape of it.   

Draco squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t know how to- is he supposed to enumerate all of his-

He’s angry. Angry that Potter is, apparently, an idiot.

(He knows he can’t have this. Knows. So why is Potter-?)

“Hermione likes you,” Potter says, and Draco opens his eyes to find him watching him carefully, almost calculatingly. “Why is it so surprising that I would, too?”

The curl and hitch of his innards at the statement is sharp to the point of being nauseating. He does his best to breathe through it, to receive it in an as beside-the-point manner as it was delivered.  

“Granger has a different set of rules than the rest of us, wouldn’t you agree?” he replies, aiming for dismissive. “And a history of dedicating herself to strange causes.”

Potter’s brow furrows tight. “You’re a strange cause?”

Draco shrugs wordlessly, finding a spot on the far wall for his eyes to rest on. He makes sure to keep his body loose, his shoulders down.

“Draco, she just likes you,” Potter says, and Draco can’t help how he jolts at the sound of his given name in Potter’s mouth, to the point he nearly misses what has followed. But then it comes in repeat: “You’re not-… She just likes you.”

The claim zings through him. Through his whole body. Shame follows in the wake, murky and bitterly unearned; he is not the one to have made the claim. He-… he isn’t the one who has let himself be fooled. (It is a question of when Granger will grow disillusioned with him; he has always kept himself fully aware of this.) It sits strange inside him. Like a hot coal he keeps trying to jerk away from to keep from burning, except he never actually manages to create the requisite distance.

“She talks about you enough that-… I mean, it was before, too, obviously, but…”

Fanned, the heat of the coal flares bright. Draco presses his jaw shut, focuses on drawing in even breaths through his nose. He can feel Potter looking at him.

Can’t bring himself to look back.

“She’s stayed out of all of this, mostly,” Potter keeps on, making an encompassing gesture with his hand, seemingly flitting from one Granger-related thought to the next. “Us, I mean. Hasn’t wanted to pick sides, I don’t think –“

Hermione Granger, not picking sides between him and Harry Potter.

“– but she did say that she thought that you were upset because you believed that I thought the same thing as Johnson does. That I though that you might really do something with the Lightward, I mean. And I didn’t really think she could be right. I thought it had to have been something that I’d done. Before, I mean, to make you upset with me. Because…”  

The silence stretches for so long that Draco can’t help it; his eyes dart to Potter. He is looking at him, brow deeply furrowed. He blows out a short breath, shakes his head.

“I just don’t get it. If I really thought you were like, bad, or something, don’t you think I would have had an issue with Hermione spending time with you? That Ron wouldn’t? That Hermione herself wouldn’t? Do you honestly believe she’d spend time with you as, what, some sort of project? I mean, obviously we’ve noticed that you’ve changed. That you’re different from when we were kids. Everyone has.”

The burn has grown so large pressing against his insides. He can feel it in the back of his throat, behind his eyes.

“Well, not Jonson, but he’s a prick.”

There’s nowhere to run, but still he has the urge to. He can’t speak.

Potter looks at him for another long moment. Then he sighs heavily and scrubs a hand through his hair.

“That’s all I wanted to say, I guess,” he tells him. “That… That I’m sorry I just assumed that you’d get that I’d be on your side. If I hadn’t gotten mad back, then we could have sorted all this out a lot faster.”

Potter looks at him a little expectantly, a little hopefully, as he finishes up. When Draco just stares back, wide-eyed and mute, his expression shutters somewhat.

“Alright…” he says, shifting his weight and scratching a bit at the side of his nose, glancing away at seemingly nothing at all before looking back. “Well… I suppose that’s that, then. I’ll… see you when I see you?”

Something lurches in him at the thought. For all that he’s anticipated this moment, it now feels come to soon. Too soon after all of this. He hasn’t- he can’t process it yet, and now Potter will just leave?

(Draco will never seek him out. He will have himself convinced this is some sort of elaborate hallucination not five minutes after Potter has left. Isn’t even, right in this moment, completely certain that it isn’t.)

Potter takes a couple of steps backwards, towards the door. They’re staring at each other, and somehow it feels significant that Potter hasn’t turned around. Draco doesn’t want him to turn around. He wants to beg him to wait, to just give him a moment, but his tongue won’t work and his body seems too caught on making air move in and out of him like a bellows to be commanded to do anything else.

Potter starts to turn.

(Wait nearly springs out of him, propelled by sheer adrenaline, but-)

Then Potter hesitates, motion just barely started. He settles back on both feet, shoulder’s again parallel to Draco’s own.

“I’m…” Potter cringes in on himself, seemingly in advance of what he’s about to say. But he still says it: “This-… I don’t- I mean, you’ve already said, but, just-… you’re definitely not? Interested, I mean? In me.”

Potter’s flush goes back up, in force.

Draco sneered at him for the question the first time, and yet he’s asked it again. Asked it again, because see you when I see you plainly meant we probably won’t ever really speak again. So Potter has asked a second time. Just to be certain there isn’t a chance here that he’ll let pass by.

Draco should know that this isn’t how the world works. He should know that no matter what he says or does, this is not a thing he can have. That it has to be a ploy or a ruse or a feint, or even something so simple as a lie. But…

But Granger isn’t the only one with her own set of rules; this is Potter.

Heart thundering in his chest, Draco steps away from the wall. Potter’s eyes widen, but he stays put. So Draco takes another step. Another. Then they’re near enough to touch, too near, nearer than one stands to another just for a conversation. Draco lifts his hand and, after a moment of hesitation, dares to place it against Potter’s chest.

Draco’s heart beats wildly.

And Potter stays put.

Draco wets his lips. His eyes flit over his face; the round spectacles, the bolt on his forehead, his stupidly green eyes, his lips. His eyes. His lips. He leans forward.

Stops. Can’t. Merlin, what is he doing? He feels insane. Completely insane. This is Harry Potter. This is- Potter. Potter, who he’s- At eleven he’d asked him to…

But Potter hasn’t turned him away, this time. Has stayed put. Is looking at him. Is waiting. Will, perhaps, not only have him, but wants him.

So, steadying himself with his hands against Potter’s chest, he leans closer still. Stops, again, so near that he can feel the heat of him on his cheeks, feel his breath move across his lips. Holds there, just to give Potter the chance to move away if he wants to. 

He doesn’t.

So Draco kisses him.

Presses his mouth against his for one, long, dizzying moment.

Then he pulls back.

Potter blinks his eyes open. He just looks dazed, at first – and then a wide smile blooms across his face.

“I maybe… spoke too hastily,” Draco manages, face hot, “the first time you asked.”

Impossibly, Potters smile seems to grow wider still.

“Well,” he says. “I guess it’s good that you got a second chance, then.”