Chapter Text
The newspapers had begun to accumulate in a way that felt embarrassing, if Draco allowed himself to think about it, which he did not.
They were stacked on the writing desk in his bedroom, not the sitting room, not the library. His desk. The one Narcissa had stopped asking about in the particular way she stopped asking about things she had already understood. Fourteen issues of the Daily Prophet. Three issues of Witch Weekly. A single torn page from something he had found folded inside Goyle's last letter, which he had read twice before he noticed he was reading it at all.
He told himself it was strategic. He told himself a great many things.
The summer had taken on a quality of waiting that Draco could not name precisely, only feel: in the particular stillness of the Manor at three in the afternoon, in the way the dust moved through the drawing room windows as though it too was suspended, holding its breath. His father's absence had not made the house quieter. It had made it hollow. As though Lucius had been the structural load of a wall Draco had not realised he was leaning against until it was not there, and now every room had a faint instability to it, a sense that if you looked too closely at the ceilings you would find cracks.
Draco did not look at the ceiling.
He read about Harry Potter.
Not obsessively. He would have resisted that word with a viciousness that surprised even himself. He read about Harry Potter the way one reads weather forecasts when there is a journey ahead: clinically, practically, with a view toward preparation. Potter was a problem that would need solving eventually. It was simply good sense to know the shape of the problem before it arrived.
Harry Potter, 16, remains the subject of considerable Ministry speculation following last month's events in the Department of Mysteries.
Draco had read this sentence eleven times. He was not counting.
The photographs were the worst of it, or perhaps the most clarifying. Witch Weekly had run a piece in July, exhaustively speculative and deeply irritating, that included a photograph taken at some Ministry function two years prior. Potter in dress robes, half-turned from the camera, caught mid-word with that look he always had. The one that said he was thinking about something else entirely, something just out of frame, something no one else could quite see.
Draco had spent a long time looking at that photograph.
He had eaten nothing that day. Not from distress, but because the hours had arranged themselves strangely, and by the time he noticed hunger it had already resolved into something else, something quieter and easier to ignore. He was good at that. Ignoring hunger. Ignoring most things, if the occasion required it.
His mother had noticed. She noticed everything, Narcissa. She simply chose what to do with the things she noticed. She had set a plate beside him that evening without comment, small and covered and still warm from the kitchen, and then she had sat across the room and read her correspondence as though she had done nothing at all. Draco had not touched the plate. She had not mentioned it. They had an understanding of sorts, he and his mother, built from years of practicing silence together in the same rooms.
He did not know if that was love. He suspected it might be the closest thing to it. At least in the Manor.
Outside, the grounds lay green under August light. He could hear the fountains. He could hear Mother somewhere below him, the muted sound of her moving through rooms, the precise and carefully quiet way she inhabited the house now, as though she was a guest and trying not to disturb anyone.
He turned the newspaper page.
The Boy Who Lived.
That phrase again.
Draco set the paper down. Pressed his fingers flat against the desk until the skin whitened at the knuckles. Breathed.
The Boy Who Lived was not a person. He had been clear on this point for years. The Boy Who Lived was a headline. A fascination. An inconvenience with a hero complex and no adequate sense. He existed to Draco through newsprint and hearsay, through Pansy's breathless updates and the hushed conversations of Slytherin parents at Ministry functions. Through Crabbe's stupid laughter and Goyle's blank nods and Blaise's careful, studied neutrality on the subject of Harry Potter.
The Boy Who Lived was not a person.
Draco picked the paper back up. Read the sentence again.
The Boy Who Lived.
What he had not been prepared for, what no amount of newsprint had adequately conveyed, was the fear.
He pressed that thought down before it fully formed. He was practiced at that too.
The letter from Blaise arrived on a Tuesday, perfunctory and characteristically sparse:
Zabini, 12 August.
Your mother writes to mine. Mother says she heard from Pansy's mother. The usual.
I read that Potter is staying in London. The Prophet says he was seen in Diagon Alley. Thought you'd want to know.
Draco folded the letter and set it in the desk drawer without responding.
He did not wonder why Blaise had thought he would want to know. He chose not to wonder about that.
Diagon Alley.
He found himself standing at the window with no clear memory of having crossed the room.
The grounds stretched away from him in the heat, formal and enormous and very still, and beyond the gates the world continued on without him, full of people who did not know what he knew and were not being asked to do what he was being asked to do, and somewhere in London, Harry Potter had been seen on a public street, living his ordinary impossible life, and Draco had read eleven newspaper articles about his injuries and memorised without intending to that he walked with a slight favouring of his left side when stressed, a detail from a Quidditch Today interview with an 'unnamed Hogwarts source' that Draco had absolutely not clipped and folded into the back of his Potions textbook.
He returned to the desk and took out the newspaper.
He did not read it. He simply held it for a while, in the way he had learned to hold certain things: carefully, without looking directly at them, the way you would carry something breakable that you were not entirely certain you had the right to be carrying at all.
It was his mother who arranged the trip to Knockturn Alley, which meant it was not arranged at all in any way he understood: it simply appeared in his calendar one morning, written in Narcissa's hand on a card left beside his breakfast, which he had also not eaten.
Borgin and Burke's. 2 o'clock. Bring your cloak.
He had not asked why. One did not ask why, with Mother, nor Father. One simply went, and trusted that they had their reasons, and tried very hard not to think about what those reasons might be, because speculation was worse than the knowing.
Borgin and Burke smelled the way they always had: old wood and acid bite, the particular scent of objects that had been in proximity to Dark Magic long enough to absorb it into their grain. Draco had been in this shop a dozen times. It had never felt comfortable. Comfort, he suspected, was not a property Borgin and Burke's was particularly interested in cultivating.
Borgin himself was attentive in that creeping, eager way most people were about the Malfoy name, and Draco's mother spoke to him in a low voice that Draco recognised as when she needed someone to understand that she was not making a request. He stood slightly apart from them, near the cabinet, and tried to look as though his mind was on something else.
His mind was not on something else.
He was thinking about the task. In the way you can't stop pressing a bruise. Not because it feels good but because you need to confirm it's still there, still real, still the size and shape you remembered.
The cabinet was central to it. The deal. With The Dark Lord. The cabinet was here, in this shop, and he needed to understand it, and his mother had arranged this, and none of this was a choice he had made.
He pressed his palm flat against the surface of the cabinet and tried to feel something useful.
What he felt instead was frightened.
And watched.
He turned.
The shop was not empty.
He registered it in the way the mind registers things it would rather not: an additional presence near the door, a quality of stillness that was slightly too deliberate, the particular quality of attention being paid that had a shape to it even when invisible. Draco had grown up in a house where attention was always being paid. He knew what it felt like to be observed.
He could not see anyone, so he turned back to the cabinet.
He could still feel it: that quality of being watched, of someone knowing, of eyes on him in the darkness of the shop. His chest had gone strange. The fear that had been sitting neatly in its compartment was doing something complicated, pressing against its edges, and Draco thought with sudden violent clarity: I cannot afford this. I cannot afford to look frightened. Not here. Not now. Not ever. Again.
He stepped back from the cabinet.
He said something to Borgin, but he could not have told you afterward what it was. His voice came out steady. He made it come out steady, because he had been practicing steadiness his whole life in preparation for exactly this, and he did not look at the door again as they left.
Outside on the street, the air hit him like a correction. August heat and coal smoke and the faint, rancid sweetness of Knockturn Alley in summer. His mother touched his arm once, briefly, and said nothing. They walked.
He did not look back. But he could still feel it, outside, on the street, being watched. The particular quality of Harry Potter's attention, which Draco had not confirmed was Potter's and told himself meant nothing, the knowledge that someone in that shop had seen something in his face that he had spent the entire summer trying to ensure nobody ever saw again.
Fear.
Just fear. Just that.
He pressed his fingers together at his side until the nails bit into his palm, and he kept walking, and the feeling did not go away.
Back at the Manor, very late, Draco sat at his desk.
The newspapers were still stacked in their pile. He did not add to them. He sat with the desk lamp on and his curtains drawn and the house settled and silent around him, and he thought about the figure he had not seen in Borgin and Burke's, the presence he had felt without evidence, the quality of being observed that had followed him all the way home.
He thought about the Boy Who Lived.
He thought about Harry Potter specifically, which was not the same thing, and which he was finding increasingly difficult to conflate with sufficient conviction.
He thought about the look he would not have had on his face, the fear that had not shown, the cabinet and the task and the Dark Lord and his father's empty chair at the head of the dining table. He thought about Blaise's letter and Pansy's voice and Goyle's blank uncomplicated loyalty, and then he thought, without meaning to, about a photograph in Witch Weekly of a sixteen-year-old boy half-turned from a camera with an expression like he was looking for something none of them could see.
He picked up the newspaper, then set it back down.
He pressed his nails into his palm until the feeling resolved into something smaller and more manageable.
He did not read the article again.
He did not need to. He had already memorised it. He had, without particularly intending to, memorised most of them.
The Boy Who Lived, said the headline, and Draco stared at it in the small circle of lamplight and thought about the look on his own face in the shop's dark windows, the reflected version of himself he had briefly glimpsed: pale, and cornered, and not at all the person his father had been raising him to be.
He turned the lamp off, so he then sat in the dark.
He did not sleep until nearly four in the morning, which had become, over the course of the summer, entirely usual.
Somewhere considerably less grand, in a bedroom above a bustling pub in the centre of London, Harry Potter was also not sleeping.
He had been not sleeping since July. He was becoming practiced at it. He lay on his back on a bed that was slightly too soft and stared at the ceiling, which was the kind of patterned plaster you stopped noticing after the first week, and thought about the Leaky Cauldron and Diagon Alley and the newspaper coverage of the Department of Mysteries, which had been going on for a month now and showed no signs of stopping.
He thought about Sirius.
He thought about Sirius and then, because he could not think about Sirius for very long without bile rising in his throat, he thought about something else.
He thought about Draco Malfoy.
This was not unusual. Thinking about Malfoy had been, for as long as Harry could remember, a kind of reflex, the mind returning to a problem it had not solved yet. And there was a problem. He was certain of it. He had seen Malfoy's face in Borgin and Burke's, or rather he had almost seen it, had seen enough of it from beneath his Invisibility Cloak to register the quality of what was there, which had been nothing like the arrogant performed ease he had expected.
Fear.
Not the sneering, cowardly variety. Not the panic of being caught doing something wrong, though there had been an element of that. It was colder. More contained, more practised, more like what you saw in someone who had been frightened for a very long time or had simply become quite used to it.
Malfoy had stood beside that cabinet and his face had gone through about four different expressions in the space of three seconds, and the last of them, the one that had settled, had been nothing Harry had ever seen on Malfoy's face before.
He had looked cornered. He had looked like someone who did not have a way out.
Harry turned onto his side. Outside the window, the Leaky Cauldron's sign was visible in the lamplight, swinging slightly in the night breeze. He could hear the distant sound of the pub below: voices, the clink of glasses, Tom moving around behind the bar.
Malfoy was planning something. That was obvious, and Harry was confident in it, or he had been at the time, because it fit with everything else: the Death Eaters, Lucius's arrest, the way the Slytherins had been these past two years, increasingly tense, increasingly careful, and now this. Whatever this was. Harry had not seen enough to know.
But there had been a moment when something else had passed across Malfoy's face, and Harry had registered it from behind his Cloak and thought, without deciding to think it: he doesn't want to be there.
He pressed that thought down before it could become anything more complicated.
No. Malfoy was planning something. Malfoy was a threat. Malfoy had broken his nose on the train in fifth year. Malfoy had called Hermione filthy, ugly things that Harry still went rigid thinking about. Malfoy stood on the wrong side of every important argument Harry had ever witnessed him near. These were facts.
Harry closed his eyes. Very tightly.
He lay in the dark and thought, with complete involuntary clarity, about Malfoy's expression in the shop window. The reflected version of him, pale and still and carrying something enormous.
He thought about the fear on Malfoy's face.
He thought about it for a very long time, looking for the place where the shape of them finally makes sense. He did not find it. Or rather, could not.
He lay awake until past three, staring at the ceiling.
He had not decided to go back to Diagon Alley tomorrow.
But he knew, in the way you know things before you have thought them through properly, that he probably would.