Chapter Text
It was rare that Harry ever beat Draco to their workshop. The Friday before Draco and Astoria’s aptly-named Greengrass-Malfoy Divorce Celebration was no exception.
By the time Harry trundled through their sunny yellow door, the bell attached to it chiming merrily, Draco was so absorbed by his level-three star matrix that he didn’t even react. The air within the shop crackled with the electric tingle and ozone scent of dispersed magic.
When Draco was as focused as he was now, he didn’t seem to notice how the wave of his fringe fell towards his left eye. He sank his teeth into the pink of his bottom lip, pressing hard enough to whiten the skin. His eyes narrowed, sinking a vertical line between his brows. Harry was certain this furrow of concentration and annoyance, so often worn, hadn’t become a permanent fixture on Draco’s face only due to an undoubtedly meticulous skincare routine.
Harry sometimes wished he, himself, would get cursed. Not, like, badly. But like, just enough so that Draco would look at him like that.
All Draco’s silvery intensity and sparking magic bent towards him, like Harry was the sun and Draco’s lovely face the center of a sunflower. He wouldn’t have to bite his lip—Harry would do that for him.
He had already removed his fine wool cloak and unbuttoned the top of his collared shirt, spangled with little silver stars. A stained, twice-refilled coffee mug sat drained beside him at their scuffed worktable, a breach in protocol only he could commit. Draco was allowed food and drink near the cursed artefacts—unlike Harry, he could be trusted not to do something so foolish as spill coffee on a deadly, ancient cursed object. Harry, in an assessment that was not wholly unearned, was most certainly not to be trusted.
Harry’s hair was in tangles, though that was nothing new. It seemed to react more amicably if he didn’t try to tame it. He swiped it off of his forehead anyway, now out of the line of fire from the reporters who meandered about their shop, while scrubbing away the bits of toothpaste residue he could still taste at the corners of his mouth. Really, if he wanted a fair shot at beating Draco to work, he’d have to move into the spare flat they kept open for guests above the shop.
With his hawthorn wand, Draco prodded tentatively at the diamond choker in the center of the salt-lined star. It sparkled with beautiful, elegantly set diamonds, which were scattered glittering amongst twinkling emeralds. The green ribbon it was woven upon looked to be made of the smoothest silk.
The furrow between Draco’s brows deepened. Harry knew he always resented when a curse-maker had good taste.
“G’mornin’, sunshine,” Harry yawned, shuffling over to him. The frayed hems of his jeans trailed audibly on the hardwood as he came up to Draco’s side.
Nodding to a butter-stained paper bag at the front desk, Draco muttered without turning to look at him, “Breakfast is over there.”
Harry grunted his thanks, and within moments, he had crumbs by the corner of his mouth instead of toothpaste. He flipped through his notebook, skimming the scrawl he’d penned the evening before with butter greasing the pads of his fingers. The almond croissant Draco bought from his favorite bakery on Diagon snowed powdered sugar all over their reception desk, and though Draco always wrinkled his nose at Harry’s eating habits, he’d never tried to buy him anything less messy.
“Yours is still in here,” Harry said, the pastry rustling the brown paper bag as he shook it. Never one to stay too far from his beaten path if he could help it, Draco’s routine was a no-frills butter croissant, which often sat untouched until midafternoon.
Draco hummed, waving him away. No doubt he’d been kept up thinking about this necklace all night before. He wouldn’t be dissuaded from his prey with such a meager reward yet.
Madame Marguerite Rosier, of an off-shoot of an off-shoot on the Rosier tree, had brought the diamond and emerald choker that was now sitting within Draco’s matrix to their shop just before closing on Thursday afternoon.
She had interrupted Draco’s evening cigarette, the sole treat he regularly afforded himself and which he always took while Harry locked up, as per their daily routine. Unskilled as Draco always was at disguising his foul mood, it had hastily become Harry’s duty to walk her through the intake process.
Draco’s annoyance, however, had been blown away on the gusts of his piqued interest the moment he levitated the top off the heavily warded and ornately carved wooden box she’d brought in.
While Harry collected her information, Draco had scribbled down which hefty tomes he’d have to retrieve from the least ruined parts of the Malfoy library. But as Madame Rosier departed and Harry leaned back in the reception chair with a heel to the side of the desk and a puffing exhale, he saw that Draco was nonetheless glowering at Madame Rosier’s turned back, bell dinging cheerfully as she went.
“Ruined my routine,” he muttered in sulky reprimand, casting an anchored Protego over the necklace and storming out the door. Harry reinforced his spellwork, which Draco had taken as an insult when they began working together until the only thing that incinerated a whole fleet of Howlers was Harry’s sizzling, snapping wards.
His protections had been undone at arse-o’clock in the morning in any case, when Draco began working. Harry yawned again just thinking about it. He considered Draco’s face through watering eyes and wondered if he Glamoured his eyebags away.
“It takes their heads clean off,” Draco mumbled, re-reading the equations he had inked onto the curling parchment beside him. He glanced back at Harry, who was distracted by thumbing grit out of one eye and smearing a fingerprint across the right lens of his glasses as he did so.
Draco added clarifyingly, clearly unconvinced he was being given Harry’s full attention by the way his words began to deepen into a dry drawl, “The wearer, I mean, if they try to remove it.”
“Like the story,” Harry mumbled through his last mouthful of croissant, readjusting his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. Draco made a face, knowing Harry would be squinting through a haze of grime and grease until the end of time, and flicked a Cleaning Charm at him.
Harry continued unfazed, though he couldn’t help the pleased, triumphant little smile that pressed into his cheeks. “The lady with the red ribbon? Green ribbon?” He waved a hand vaguely. From its pot by the windowsill, the Snake Plant that had always fancied Harry waved back, hissing in the watery muffled way it always did when he wandered around with nothing much to do but bother Draco and kill time. “A ribbon of some color, anyway.”
Draco cast a mildly scathing glance to the Snake Plant before turning back and closing out the loose tendrils of magic flowing from the star matrix. Safely secured within, the necklace looked as harmless as some of the heirlooms in the Potter family vault.
Draco clapped his hands together as though to dust them off, but, pristine as always, he had nary a speck of salt, chalk, or dust on him. Unlike Harry, who likely somehow had all three sprinkled liberally across his person, and he hadn’t even been awake for more than forty minutes.
Harry waggled the butter-stained brown paper bag at him. “Eat, before you waste away,” he said, feeling not a little like Molly Weasley. Draco had always struggled to remember to eat, even all the way back in eighth year, throughout which he never managed to shake the vaguely haunted look that resided somewhere in the sunkenness of his eyes and the hollow glint of the light on irises nearly as colorless as he was. Say nothing for sixth year. Harry pushed those memories aside with a small, tight-lipped frown. He was quite happy to leave that image of Draco in the past.
He walked over to the reception desk, aware as always of the Rules that were admittedly almost all Draco’s anyway. Draco had likely memorised them and all the ways in which they did not apply to him, but for Harry’s sake, he’d stuck a parchment to the wall beside the reception desk with a Permanent Sticking Charm. In obnoxiously large letters, ostensibly so Harry could read it no matter where he was in the shop, Draco had drawn in his elaborate cursive, “STANDARDS OF CONDUCT”.
“No Reporters” was of course near the top of the list, as well as “No reheating fish, honestly Potter, you heathen”. “No Weird Sisters on Monday Morning,” Draco had added when Harry had tried fiddling with the wards enough to add a speaker system, which had landed him with three smoking radios one day after another and a speaker that only emitted operatic French, though that could have been a prank bewitchment on Draco’s part that Harry still hadn’t figured out how to dispel. The speaker was currently residing under the kitchen sink in Grimmauld Place, swatched in Silencing Charms and wrapped in a thick layer of takeaway plastic bags and duct tape.
“No Snitches near the Cursed Objects” was somewhere around the same height as “No food near the Cursed Objects,” next to which Harry had written “No Fun Near the Cursed Objects”. Draco had added a tidy little spell that caused the parchment to boom this particular rule throughout the shop whenever Harry committed an infraction of the Rules, no matter how large or small.
Then, of course, were the smaller Rules. “No Parseltongue in the shop,” was one that Harry always ignored, gleefully greeting the Snake Plants and bracing himself for Draco’s booming enchanted voice, glancing mischievously over his shoulder as he did so to see the little frisson of what must've been annoyance shake through the actual Draco who scowled back at him.
“No Romilda Vane,” with a moving photo of hers that looked to be cut out of the Hogwarts yearbook, smiling and blinking a little awkwardly as she waited for the flash of the camera. Arrows were drawn to her face, as if she would have be anyone else, over which a large red X was drawn. After Harry had explained the love potion incident with Ron, Draco had been incensed.
Not because of his own involvement— Draco hadn’t seemed moved in any way shape or form regarding the cursed mead when he thought Slughorn had gluttonously drank it, and the only aspect of the actual story that seemed to make him pale was realizing that Harry could have drunk some of it too.
No, regardless of how morally dubious his own actions were, Draco certainly had quite a few choice words about Romilda Vane. Many of which Harry daren’t repeat—not because of the foul language, though from inflection alone Harry could surmise as much, but because Draco had seethed most of it in spitting, cutting French.
“No French in the shop”, Harry had added the next morning. They didn’t have a shower cold enough or close enough for him to handle it.
There was quite a prolonged silence in which Harry tried very hard to not remember Draco’s expletive-laced French and failed very decidedly indeed, trying not to sweat as Draco stood beside him ripping small bites from the croissant with his hands over the torn paper bag like a plate, because of course dear posh prince Draco couldn’t stand for something so plebian as spilling crumbs on the hardwood.
Draco smelled woodsy, of cedar and pine, even though Harry was certain the last time Draco had ventured into any wildlife was with Harry himself back in first year. His lithe form seemed to radiate heat, and Harry palmed his fringe off his brow with a distracted hand, swallowing hard.
Draco broke the silence with a hand held delicately over his mouth as he chewed.“You have not responded to my letter,” he said. “Do you intend on coming?”
Harry had intended on letting said letter soak through and rot into the bottom of his rusted, heavily-warded mailbox. The intricate gilded calligraphy, written on the sort of heavy expensive paper Harry was always vaguely afraid of handling, would drip and smear until it was completely illegible. Harry had intended on never giving what was written in it any sort of thought at all.
This was for two reasons.
The first reason was that Draco, who was argumentative and unwaveringly intelligent and extremely exacting, was married to Astoria Greengrass. This meant, of course, that Harry could only have Draco’s Rules at the shop. It meant he could only admire the rise and fall of his chest from across the worktable, or beside him en route to a job, or during a few, harrowing projects gone awry, as he lay in the hospital bed of St. Mungo’s. It meant Harry could only have Draco’s touch in whispered fingertips as they passed a book or a parchment or a coffee from hand to hand.
Draco was married to Astoria Greengrass, and that meant Harry had to mete out his desire. Had to measure and dole it out in tiny drips, just enough so that what little Draco gave him back would be enough to satisfy, just for the moment.
It hurt his heart, this rationing. So Harry did not think about it, and did not think about why it was necessary.
The second reason was that Draco, who was breathtakingly beautiful and talented and surprisingly, heart-achingly silly, was divorcing Astoria Greengrass. And all of Harry’s desire would burst the floodgates if he ever let himself think about that, ruining their steady routine and their reliable Rules and every day that Harry looked forward to tasting Draco’s silvery, sparking magic in the air.
“Er,” Harry coughed, feeling as though that last bite of almond croissant had taken every last bit of moisture from his mouth down with it. “Yeah. Alright.”
Draco smiled.
“Perfect.”