Archive of Our Own

I follow the hated

path of monotonous walls

that is my destiny.

Severe galleries

which curve in secret circles

to the end of the years.

   – “The Labyrinth”, Jorge Luis Borges

***

Harry wasn’t sure why Astoria Greengrass was sitting in his living room, but he was sure Luna had something to do with it.

Luna appeared out of the kitchen, balancing two teacups and a pot. He’d invited her over for dinner tonight. She’d arrived at Grimmauld Place before he had–more than two hours before the invitation time.

She had looked in on the house a few times in the past–when Harry had been travelling with Hermione and Ron on the Continent, and ever since, the place had had a fondness for her, and a tendency to let her in whenever she turned up.

“I just came by to visit the house before our dinner,” she said, when she saw him coming in. “You can just ignore me.”

“And…,” he glanced meaningfully at Astoria, but didn’t want to say anything that might seem rude about her presence.

“Oh, Astoria stopped by and I let her in. It’s awfully rainy to wait on the step.”

She stepped closer, and dropped her voice to what she probably thought was a whisper, “I made her tea. She seemed upset.”

“That’s…uh…very kind of you.” He recovered himself a little, “Thanks Luna. I’ll just go…say hello.”

He didn’t take clients at his home. He’d let the secret-keeping lapse a few years after the war–too much of a hassle every time he wanted to have friends over. But that didn’t mean he wanted to let all the people he met for work in his door. Instead, he had a little basement office near the Ministry. He shared the floor with a magical genealogist and a witch who was trying to start her own parchment supply company. It didn’t seem to be going well. She always had bags under her eyes.

But Astoria seemed so frazzled, nearly in tears, that he didn’t have the heart to send her away, and tell her to come to his office during business hours.

Luna had come with him to set down the tea, and serve each of them, before she wandered away to do whatever it was she did in Harry’s house. Probably best not to know.

Now, Astoria clutched her tea like a lifeline, and looked up at him with worried eyes, “Is it really true you find people when the aurors can’t? Daphne said you found Blaise’s cousin Elsbeth when Auror Jorkins had given up.”

“I find people if I can,” he said. He’d been in the business long enough that he was wary of making promises. “But often no one likes the answers I turn up. People sometimes don’t want to be found. More often than not, a missing husband has run off to Cornwall with his mistress than run afoul of anything serious.”

She nodded her head a little, and then seemed to actually register what he’d said, and started shaking it. “But Draco’s not run off. He’s a recluse. I don’t think he’s left the Manor in ten years.”

Just what he needed, to go searching for Draco Malfoy. But he was a professional, so he didn’t let his annoyance show on his face.

“Alright, so Malfoy’s missing. Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me everything.”

He pulled his battered notebook from one of his pockets, and a biro from the other and held it poised, ready to start taking notes. This was more to convey his interest than anything else. Largely, the details of cases lived in his head, not on a page.

“Yes,” she said. And then she did start–at the very beginning.

“Draco and I got married very young. I was 19 and he was 21. We weren’t well suited, and it didn’t last.”

Harry remembered that–the marriage announcement he’d read in the Daily Prophet, and the divorce scandal he’d heard about from his friends who read other, less reputable papers. 

“But we stayed friends. I don’t think he really…has anyone else. He’s drifted apart from everyone from Hogwarts, and he rarely leaves the Manor. He gets all his groceries delivered, and we write, or floo, or I come to dinner, but we never go out. He’s very sad, I think, but things were okay. But then his father died, and his mother the next year–dragon pox–and he has no one relying on him anymore.

“Anyways, one day I tried to floo call him, and it didn’t go through. I don’t mean that he wasn’t there or didn’t pick up. It didn’t go through–like the Manor wasn’t on the floo network at all. Which is impossible. So I apparated to the gates and rang, and still got no response. I tried to go inside–he never took me off the wards even when we divorced–and I could–but that’s because the wards were down entirely. The estate was looking terrible–way worse than when I’d last visited. It had been going a bit untidy, but nothing like this. 

“So I went inside, but it was strange. I know that house like the back of my hand. And it had changed. There were extra rooms, and corridors. And they led into each other in ways that they shouldn’t have. I kept going further and further in anyways, looking for Draco. But there was just nothing, and no rooms I recognized. I got scared and tried to turn back, but the hallway had changed. Inside, the wards seemed to be working in some form, even if they weren’t recognizing me, so I couldn’t apparate out. It took me hours, and every kind of tracking spell I knew to get out of there again. And I didn’t see a single sign of Draco the entire time.

“I went to the aurors to tell them that he was missing, but–I’m just his ex-wife. They checked some artifact that says that the Malfoy line is still intact–which means that he couldn’t have died–and shooed me away, saying he doesn’t have to see me if he doesn’t want to. But that’s not what this is!” She finished defiantly.

“So where do you think he went?” Harry asked, genuinely curious.

“Nowhere!” she said. “I think he’s still in the house! It has a curse on it of some kind, and he’s trapped and can’t get out.”

***

Harry hadn’t set out to be a private investigator. He’d intended to be an auror. And he’d started out that way too. Only, that had been a lot more giving tickets for unlicensed apparition, and a lot less arresting dark wizards. And then when an actual meaningful case did cross his desk, and not get immediately tossed to a more senior wizard, he had one month of actual—incredibly frustrating—detective work, during which he found no leads on the missing witch, before Deputy Director Boardman told him he had to give it up and go do actual work—by which he meant, give out more tickets for petty offenses.

So Harry did, but only during working hours. Then he spent his weekends and evenings either blowing off Ron and Hermione, or dragging them along as he found dead-end after dead-end, unwilling to look the missing woman’s family in the face and say he’d given up.

Then a breakthrough. 

It had been her son–Bill Keddle–who’d reported her missing, and for want of any other leads, Harry had interviewed him for the fourth time. Nothing official of course. They just got pints at the local pub. If nothing else, it was something to let him know that someone still cared and was looking for his mum. 

Bill’d come over after work on a Tuesday, to find the door to her little cottage standing ajar, furniture overturned, and most ominous of all, her wand in the middle of the floor, snapped in two.

There’d been no sign of any blood, and the magical traces run by forensics didn’t reveal any major workings–just some basic kinetic spells that had moved and smashed the furniture.

It was a real, proper mystery. The only problem was, Harry didn’t seem able to solve it.

The facts of the case remained the same, and Bill hadn’t remembered any new details this time–not that Harry had expected anything else. They got to talking about other things–Hogwarts and past holidays. Mostly Harry just let Bill talk. It seemed like he needed someone to talk to, more than anything, now that his mother was missing.

“We used to have this little seaside cottage on a tiny island completely concealed by magic. My grandparents lived there until they died, and my grandmother always used to tell me that it was made by fairies. Though I think it really was goblin-work–with the money their family made from speculating after the First Wizarding War. I haven’t been back there in years. The other day I looked for the key, but I couldn’t find it. I suppose my parents must have sold it, though it’s a terrible shame.”

And Harry didn’t say anything then, but he felt an idea scratching and growing at the back of his brain. And by the time they parted, it had grown enough that Harry thought to ask, “Say, Bill, that cottage–where did you say it was again? I wouldn’t mind checking it out.”

Bill had a child’s knowledge of the cottage’s whereabouts, and Harry already knew that it wasn’t registered under Merle’s name. He’d already had the Department of Records pull everything they could find on her. Now he went back and requested her parents’ records. Those were very shoddy–no address listed, and no record of any property ownership at all, which was strange. 

He looked through Merle’s records again to see if there was any hint of a sale–and there, in her Gringotts account history (and hadn’t that been a chore, subpoenaing those records), a sizeable inheritance from a Ralph Conebush, Merle’s uncle.

Then it was just one more trip to the Department of Records, at which point he discovered that old Ralph’s death certificate had never been properly filed, so while his bank assets had been turned over to his heir, his real estate remained technically in his name–specifically, one little island just off the Isle of Skye.

At that point, it took a weekend portkey (he took Bill with him, to get past the family wards) to find Merle alive and well and living in the cottage, as she had been the whole three months she’d been missing.

As it turned out, she had some rather alarming gambling debts, which certain unsavory figures had been using intimidation to try to collect. So she had trashed her own house and fled, leaving Bill an unsigned, coded letter wedged in a potted plant outside his house. Bill said he’d never found it, but when Merle described where she’d left it, it was still there, if badly water damaged.

Merle’s testimony was enough to take down several unsavory characters involved in the gambling ring–on either charges of unlicensed gambling, or intimidation. 

So Harry got a few arrests out of the case after all, and the grudging approval of his superiors, who still didn’t want to admit that it had maybe been worthwhile to keep looking into the case after all. It was all very good job and never do it again and he got assigned another batch of pointless petty ticketing and inspecting as unspoken punishment.

But Merle and Bill were extremely grateful, and very voluble in their gratitude. That is to say–word got out. And not a month later he was looking for a missing husband. That one was much easier and less interesting. He was hiding out in a muggle hotel under a haze of protective charms so his wife couldn’t find him to serve him with divorce papers. 

He didn’t take payment for that one, but he did for the next, and the one after that–both could afford it. Pretty soon what was supposed to be his career was just his day job. He listlessly filled out paperwork while the majority of his mind thought up new leads on his actual–unsanctioned–cases.

It wasn’t sustainable. And he didn’t need the money enough to willingly work what was quickly becoming two fulltime jobs at once. So in under a year he’d quit the aurors and became a private investigator fulltime. He dug into his inheritance to get started, but word had been getting around and soon he was making money, if not all that much. But he still had his fortune, so it was work he needed, more than money. And work–good, useful work–he now had.

It had been a long time since school–thirteen years. Who knew how many since he’d thought of Draco Malfoy. It was almost nostalgic to be reminded of him. Not that he had much good to say about the rotter. But it had been long enough that he didn’t think he hated him anymore. 

And no one deserved to be swallowed up by a cursed house. Not even Draco Malfoy.

“Alright,” he told Astoria. “I’ll take the case.”

***

Hermione thought it was a terrible idea.

“Wizarding houses are notoriously fickle,” she said, “Especially ones you haven’t been invited to.”

“Astoria added me to the wards contract. That’s as good an invitation as you can get.”

Hermione huffed. “That’s not what I’m saying. Wizarding houses are extremely susceptible to the desires and the magic of their owners. If the house is keeping everyone out, it’s probably because Malfoy wants it that way. You barging in there isn’t going to change that; it just might make the house take drastic measures to get rid of you.”

Harry grimaced, not loving the picture she was presenting him. “I promised Astoria I would try. So I can’t back out now.”

“Fine,” Hermione said, “I just want you to know that I told you so.”

“Noted,” Harry said, only a little irked. “Now what did you say you had for me?”

For obvious reasons, he no longer had access to Ministry resources, and their supply of spell shields, tracking artifacts, and forensics specialists. What he did have, that was often better, if rather more judgemental, was Hermione’s assistance. 

He could make do on his own for most things. He knew plenty of tracing and forensic spells, and of course, defensive magic was his specialty. But if he needed something really specific–a map of someone’s movement over the last week from a single drop of blood, an artifact to get around an ancient obscure warding spell, or instructions on how to order a muggle background check–then Hermione was there to provide.

She, of course, had her own more-than-fulltime job. She’d recently moved on from her role at the Department of Protection of Magical Creatures (she’d finally succeeded in having it renamed from the Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures) and now was the Deputy Head of Magical Law Enforcement. But somehow she still had time for his projects. She said it was because she was so busy with administration these days, she rarely got to do her own research anymore, and enjoyed the opportunity. Where she got her infinite time and energy from, Harry didn’t know. He was reasonably confident she hadn’t managed to squirrel away a surviving time-turner. Presumably he would have to start fending for himself when they started trying for a baby next year. But it was Hermione, so maybe not even parenthood would stop her.

“I’ve just got a few things,” she said, and then pulled out a giant basket. That was Hermione for you.

***

The Manor was worse than he’d remembered it. Not just in terms of disrepair, although there was that too—and more than just from age—there were chinks in the turrets, a broken window, and the entry gate was horribly bent and twisted, though it still latched—probably propped up by centuries of wards. The gardens were in more disarray than even a decade should bring–the hedges wild and thorny and blocking the paths, vines grown up the walls.

But he’d thought the years would make it less menacing, and they hadn’t. Instead the menace seemed to grow to match his own greater experience.

He walked up to the gate and announced himself. Nothing happened. He hadn’t really expected it to. So instead he flipped the latch–nothing stopped him–and gave the precarious gate a hard shove. It swung open with a screech.

Ron and Hermione exchanged a dubious glance, but Harry wasn’t going to stop now.

He looked back one more time when he got to the door. He could just see his friends waiting at the gate. They wouldn’t stay here. They both thought this was a terrible idea, and so, had wanted to see him off. But if the house was cursed it might take him days to resolve it.

Neither of them had liked that. It made it very difficult for them to know when they should come in and rescue him.

The front door opened at a turn of the knob. It wasn’t locked.

And then he stepped in and closed the door behind him. 

He wasn’t a complete fool, so the first thing he did was tie one end of his ball of yarn to the inner front doorknob, and the other to his belt. The yarn was a cheery yellow. Harry was pretty sure it had been one of Hermione's knitting projects before she gave that hobby up as insufficiently stimulating.

Of course now it was enchanted. Harry had tuned out the exact explanation of what she’d done. He had a sort of automatic filter for when she started citing too many obscure sources. But to his best understanding it was now of infinite length, and extremely resistant to any sort of magical tampering. 

The second thing he did was call out, a little hesitantly, “Malfoy? Draco Malfoy?”

There was no reply, not even an echo. The house felt very empty. He hadn’t even felt the wards as he’d stepped through.

The door opened into the Grand Hall, with its long, dark, wooden table, where Voldemort and his followers once had sat. It wasn’t terrible and menacing, like the gardens. It was just dusty and grey. 

He cast hominum revelum, not expecting much, and indeed not finding anything. So there wasn’t much for it–he just started opening doors and wandering through the place. 

At first it seemed like an ordinary house. Well–as ordinary as any old wizarding house could seem to Harry. He loved Grimmaulds Place, but it was a townhome, and before he moved in properly he hired wizarding contractors to redo it in the modern style, and clear up the old and broken artifacts while they were at it. And before then, the house had been in a horrible state of disrepair.

The Manor was different. On the outside, it was crumbling. Inside it was still and untouched like a tomb. The furniture, the walls, the portraits–everything was in perfect repair–a little dusty, a little spiderwebbed. It felt … colorless. The walls and hangings were grey–the wood floors and fixtures were black–or bleached white like a bone. He could have chalked that up to purebloods’ gloomy style, but when he looked down at his hands, even they looked greyed-out instead of pink with color. He shuddered, and looked away.

The house was huge. More than a mansion, it was practically a castle. Half of the rooms he couldn’t see the use of, but even the ones he knew were ridiculously oversized. The Dursleys had had two ceiling-tall bookshelves of hardbacks they never read in the drawing room–to impress company. Malfoy Manor had aisles and aisles of winding shelves, so tall that they disappeared in the gloom overhead. It might have had more books than the Hogwarts Library. Hermione would have had a field day. But he didn’t stop to look.

Then, for the third time in a row, the door he opened revealed a potions laboratory with no other exit, and the same ominous char marks covering half the floor. At that point, he had to rethink things, and start taking Astoria’s warning more seriously. It wasn’t that he hadn’t believed her. He’d grown up with Hogwarts’ moving stairways, and the disappearing Room of Requirement. But a room that could move to three different places in the Manor? That was something else.

He’d been traversing the ground floor by making radiating forays away from the entry, trying to get the layout into his head, only leaving enough yarn down to take him back to the front door. But that wasn’t working. He needed another tactic. 

Harry started experimenting. Just looping some string into a room wasn’t enough to fix it in place. Even looping it around furniture wasn’t enough. When he doubled back, he found the armchair he’d wrapped the string around inching its way closer to the doorway. Presumably, when it made its way out, the house would be able to shift the room again. Putting the yarn around permanent fixtures–banisters, the handles of built in cabinets–was more successful. But at a certain point he’d gone over portions so haphazardly that he was tripping over the string and had to give it up, undo it all, and start over from the front door again, taking every right turn, and–when he wanted to double back and check his progress, tying the yarn off, and then laying down more that he then picked up all over again when he wanted to proceed further. But this way, the yarn didn’t get tangled, and the same path never had more than two layers of yarn at once, and the rooms stopped changing so dramatically, although if he didn’t watch his feet, the house occasionally moved a footstool into his way to trip him. 

It was late by the time he got into the rhythm, moonlight streaming in through the windows when he found them, and he retraced his way to the drawing room where he collapsed onto an antique sofa that thankfully was more comfortable than it looked.

He slept long and well. And in the morning he started up again. Going through rooms upon rooms–far more than should ever have fit into one floor even of this enormous house. Like it had extra rooms it only pulled out when they were needed–and now it was throwing all of them in Harry’s way. Most of the rooms he saw the first day had been the same rooms, just presented over and over in a mixed up order. Now there were new ones–baths larger than the prefect’s bathroom at Hogwarts, a vast room something like an armoury whose walls were mounted with countless swords and brooms and wands and other artifacts that Harry couldn’t identify, a sunroom filled with countless plants that were now wilted and grey. He wove his way through all of them, taking every door, winding his way through the library stacks and putting down string so they had to stop shifting on him. And then he’d made his way back to the drawing room, and there was only one door left, and it took him back to the Grand Hall. 

At that point he was certain he had it–he’d fixed in place every room on the ground floor. He was almost certain that that meant the house would have to let him through. So he looped the string for a second time around the big carved handle on the inside of the front door and started retracing his steps.

It must have taken more than an hour, carefully going through every room–every cupboard even–before he found the one door that hadn’t been there before. It was at the back of a little closet at the end of a long room otherwise filled with floor to ceiling mirrors. The door was wood, non-descript and of half-height. 

Harry opened it to reveal a spiral stairway leading up. By then, he was very tired, but he couldn’t wait. He wasn’t so sure the stairwell would still be there in the morning. Thankfully, after he got to the top, the first door he turned into was a plain bedroom, dusty and grey, but comforting in its mundanity. He collapsed into the bed and was out like a light.

***

It was a strange dream because it felt so ordinary. He blinked his eyes open and he was in the same room–but much altered. The dusty rug was spotless and bright with color. The room lamp that had refused to turn on was illuminating the room with a warm glow. He was sitting up against the headboard, looking down at something in his hands.

“Were you dozing off reading again?” said a voice. 

Harry started a little and jerked to look upwards.

It was Draco Malfoy–but he didn’t look tired and wan, like in the photos Astoria had given him. He was smiling a little, and wearing old-fashioned nightclothes with white and blue stripes. He looked soft.

“I was just–” Harry started

“Giving yourself back pain again,” Draco said, though not unkindly. “Go to bed, sweetheart. The paper will still be there in the morning.”

“In the morning there will be a new one,” he groused.

Draco huffed and gently pried the paper out of his fingers. Harry–inexplicably–let him. And let him take the glasses off his nose, and fold them carefully onto the sidetable, and push him down so his head lay on the pillow, and turn off the light, and get in beside him, and then gently stroke his hair.

***

The house was making it harder for him again–moving boxes to trip him, hiding doors behind curtains or tapestries. 

He was trying to do what he had done on the ground floor, map out all the possible options, but it was taking longer, the house fighting him for every room. To make any progress he had to open every cupboard and feel over every wall–while holding up a shield charm, since the house had gotten the bright idea of dropping a portrait on him. He’d looked up when he’d heard the slight scrape as it came off the wall, and had only just managed to cast protego before it bounced off his shield and hit the floor with a crash, heavy wooden frame splintering into pieces. He’d winced. That could have been his head.

He didn’t think he’d finished near to half of that floor when he couldn’t continue anymore. He looped the yarn through the handle of the glass case in the trophy room, and then made his meandering way back to the bedroom where he’d slept the night before. It felt safer for some reason.

“Harry,” a voice whispered in his ear, and he sat upright with a jolt. 

The room was bathed in soft golden light. Draco sat sideways on the bed, leaning towards him, a scowl on his face. 

“I told you to wait up,” he said, sounding peeved.

“Sorry,” Harry said, disoriented. 

“Well,” Draco said, “I guess I’ll let you make it up to me.”

And he pushed Harry down flat again. 

Harry could have pushed him off. Should have. But well–it was a dream. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it. So he let Draco straddle him and kiss him as he lost himself in the pleasure of touching and being touched.

***

He began to feel a little awkward, when he woke up. He hadn’t thought much on Malfoy in the years since school, and he certainly hadn’t thought he’d had the kind of sexual fixation that his dreams seemed to suggest. Sure, he was a nice enough looking bloke, but Harry could have sworn he’d never looked at him twice. Not that way. 

He shrugged a little and put it from his mind. He was spending a lot of time thinking about Malfoy, in this search. Perhaps that was having a strange effect on him. Nothing to do but keep going.

It felt easier somehow that day. There were still just as many cupboards and doors to check and look into and fix in place with his string, but the house had given up on dropping things—at least for now—and soon he lost himself in his meticulous work. It took all of the day but he finally checked all the doors and cupboards but one. And when he opened it up, it was a huge marble staircase. A staircase leading down.

It took him back to the drawing room, which made some sort of sense–of course Malfoy Manor couldn’t just have one stairway. The other stairway had been very narrow and cramped—servants stairs—and nothing compared to the grand wide sweep of this one.

So he kipped on the couch again. He was expecting the dream this time. But there was nothing–he slept long and deep and if he had any dreams, he didn’t remember them by the morning.

The light was pouring in through the windows when he woke up, and he pulled some tea and bacon butties out of his bag. Hermione had convinced Esmerelda’s to make him an endless lunchbag once she gave them a line to his account–so he didn’t have to cook or find the bathroom when he needed water. Practical as ever, Hermione had also given him an enchanted chamberpot, though so far he’d been able to find the bathrooms when he needed them, and thus avoid that particular practicality.

The room had shifted a little in the night. The doorway of the drawing room had gotten larger, and now he could see a glimpse of the front door. He could leave any time. It had been four nights and he was no closer to finding Draco.

He walked up and put his hand on the knob–it twitched a little, as if willing him to open it.

“Got you,” he whispered, and turned around and went right back up the stairs that he had come from, spooling out yarn as he went.

The house had been practically begging him to leave. Which meant he was getting closer. He slept on the first floor but in a different bedroom this time—this one very small with a narrow little hard bed—and dreamed of Draco again:

He had more control of himself in this dream, at least to start. He was sitting on the bed, legs off the side. Draco was standing in the doorway, leaning sinuously against the frame. Harry couldn’t help but follow the line of his spine with his eyes.

“I’m supposed to find you,” Harry whispered.

“What are you talking about, silly. I’m right here,” Draco said with a sweet smile. “The real question is what you’re doing in the servants quarters when we’re supposed to be lunching with Mother.”

“Narcissa’s dead,” Harry said bluntly, and then winced at his own callousness.

Draco flinched as if struck. “Why would you say that,” he said. There was something in his eyes, an awareness that hadn’t been there before. “Harry, why would you say that?” And his tone was sincere, almost pleading, as if he really wanted to know.

Harry opened his mouth to reply, but words escaped him. Draco stood looking at him for a long moment, and then he shook his head a little, fiercely, as if discarding the interaction, and pasted a smile back on his face.

“Come,” he said, “Mother’s waiting.” And he grabbed Harry’s hand and towed him away.

***

The next day he made it to the second floor before he collapsed, exhausted. He’d been sleeping longer, he’d noticed. Like the house was taking something out of him. Or the dreams were.

“What are you even doing here,” said Draco the next night. 

Harry had been too tired to hold out for a proper bed. Instead he’d laid down on the first sofa he’d run into.

“It’s not the most comfortable,” he admitted, “But I was tired.”

Draco narrowed his eyes and continued staring at him. “Why are you looking for me?”

He almost said I wasn’t looking for you, but what came out was, “Astoria sent me,” and then he realized that this was a dream again, and he was able to shake off the strange domestic fantasy that had overtaken him.

But he did too good of a job. Already, the dream was slipping away and Harry was coming awake, his heart pounding.

For years after the war he’d had dreams of terrible things. Sometimes during the dream, it seemed real. He believed the horrible things were really happening. But when he woke up they always melted away into unreality. They weren’t like the visions from Voldemort at all, really.

But these dreams…these dreams were something different. Not visions exactly–not the same as the ones from school. But there was something…meaty about them. Something real. He was beginning to think that Draco from the dreams, somehow, was…really Draco.

And that worried him, because it wasn’t something he was familiar with. How could you take someone out of dreams and put them back into the real world?

He didn’t know.

All he could do was keep going. 

Only the next day, he…heard something. 

The softest sound, really. There were no house elves or other living things in the house. Not even a mouse or a pixie or a spider. Nothing. And so it was eerily quiet. Not even the natural noises of a house settling. All he heard was the creak of the floorboards under his feet, the soft rustle of his robes, the loud huff of his breathing, and then, when he couldn’t stand the quiet anymore, the sound of his own voice, talking or singing or humming to bring something of life to the place.

But then this sound. It sounded like it was close by, in the next room maybe. Like soft feet on floorboards. In his excitement he rushed over, nearly tripping on a carpet in his haste. He flung the door open and looked inside—

And there was nothing there.

It was a small room, and a little shabby. It looked like it had been a nursery once. The wallpaper was curling a bit, but it still displayed lines of ducks, waddling placidly across the wall before disappearing in the corner with a cartoony splash. In one corner was a scratched up rocking horse, and in another, a heavy wooden crib. A low bookcase lay against one wall, full of a mess of papers and small books, and what looked like a child’s art projects.

There was no second door–not even a closet. The furniture was too small to hide behind–though he checked under and in the crib just in case, feeling silly. 

There was a window, though it was shut. He drifted towards it and gazed through. 

He started back. Outside, the garden was meticulously arranged and in full bloom, a riot of color. Not at all like the overgrown mess it had been from the outside. It was beautiful, but also kind of horrible. For one, it reminded him of how dull and colorless the house was, and made him desperately long for fresh air, green grass, and blue sky. But the discrepancy between this beautiful garden view and the tangled mess he should have seen also made him feel that it actually wasn’t a real window at all, and if he smashed it or tried to open it, there’d just be smooth wallpaper behind it—no real connection to the outside world.

He tried to convince himself to try the window, to open it.

And then once more, footsteps, but outside now. 

With relief, he rushed out, following them. But again, nothing.

And then the same sound a room over and he repeated the whole process until he was panting and out of breath. He took the time to sit down and recover and realize how silly he was being. He wasn’t going to catch whatever ghost it was—clearly they didn’t want to be found. Ghosts could generally hide themselves or appear as they wished. This was an ancient wizarding house. Surely there was more than one spirit about, and ghosts got bored. It might just be enjoying making sport of an outsider. 

So he had some lunch, and then he went back to his meticulous progress—look in every door, loop yarn over built-ins, repeat. 

He still heard the footsteps–sometimes even sounding like they came from the same room, and maybe he looked over still, but he didn’t let it draw him away from his task, and for his efforts he was rewarded by a stairway to the third floor.

And at the top of it, he found a cozy bedroom. It was comfortable in the way that many of the ornate rooms weren’t, and it looked lived-in–clothes strewn around, bed unmade. There was a desk with some papers on it, and there were quidditch posters on the walls. It was Draco’s childhood room, he was sure. Whether Draco still lived in this very teenage space, or if the house had somehow preserved it as it was, he didn’t know, but it somehow felt like the right place to stop for the day. Like he was closer to him here than he had been. 

And he did have dreams that night, of soft touches and warmth, but they were hazy and indistinct, and in the morning, when he woke up, Draco Malfoy was sitting on the bed, staring at him.

Harry sat bolt upright. “I found you!” he said. He was actually still feeling rather disoriented with sleep.

Draco snorted. “Actually, it seems more like I found you. You’ve just been sleeping! And what are you doing in my house!”

“Looking for you! Astoria’s been worried.”

Draco scowled, “We’re not married anymore. It’s not her problem.”

Harry snorted, “Sure. So you really want to be stuck in this cursed labyrinth. Come on. Let’s go. And then we can get a curse breaker to find out why the house has gone all wonky.”

Draco looked even more displeased but after a moment he just said, “Fine,” and flounced out the door.

Harry got up, put on his shoes and freshened up with a charm, and followed him out. 

He made Draco go in front of him–some instinct to not let him out of his sight, now that he’d found him. He didn’t take up the yarn behind him, instead unspooling more as they descended down the dim stair, lit only by thin windows high above, like an ancient church. And the light didn’t seem to make it all the way to the ground. Instead it caught on the dust and the air, with a yellowy glow, the only color in the room.

He’d done it, he’d thought. He’d found him.

And then Draco went down another step into one of the rare shafts of light, and his hair glowed white like a torch, and it was beautiful, he was beautiful. Draco had heard him stop, and turned around as if to see why, and his skin was glowing too, like it was on fire, and he was smiling.

And that’s when Harry noticed that it wasn’t just the paleness of his skin and hair. The light was actually going right through him.

“Draco,” he said, and held out his hand like he was calming a nervous animal. The other man looked at him quizzically, but unconcerned. As if he didn't know, as if he didn’t realize. And Harry took the yarn from the pouch on his belt, where it was unspooling as he went, and he darted forward to try to loop it around Draco’s wrist.

It didn’t work. Or rather it did, but horribly. The yarn made a perfect loop around his hand, and then when Harry tightened it, it went right through, tightening into nothing, and as it did, making Draco’s hand look wispier, and even less real.

Draco pulled back, “Ow, that hurt,” he said, affronted, but not particularly concerned. As if he hadn't noticed what had happened, or like it wasn’t anything strange.

“Draco,” he said, and then paused far too long, not wanting to say it, not wanting to ask. But the other man was looking at him, and he had to say something, and he was always brave, he was a Gryffindor, so– “Draco, are you…dead?”

The other man laughed, “What are you talking about? I’m standing right here.”

It wasn’t the right reaction. The right reaction, from Draco Malfoy, would have been contempt. Not this blythe unconcern.

“Let’s go back upstairs,” Harry said, softly. And with just as little concern, Draco agreed. 

There was a window in the bedroom too–there were too many windows in this house, an architectural impossibility in a building this large, which should have had far more interior rooms. The golden morning light was filtering in, onto the bed, putting color back into the patches it touched, and without much trouble he got Draco to sit down where he could look at him.

He thought he was going to have to convince him that he was dead, that he was a ghost. But when he looked at him in this light he looked more…solid. More real. And then Harry remembered what Astoria had said, that the Ministry had confirmed he was still alive. Right here, he certainly didn’t look like a ghost.

With only a little hesitation, he took Draco’s hand. It felt solid, warm and real.

“What are you doing–” Draco said, but Harry was already wrapping the yarn around him, like he could fix him into place, like he had the house.

He’d untied his end of the yarn from his belt, and now he retied it as tight as he dared around Draco. “Let’s try again,” and Draco went with him, with the bemused tolerance of one humoring a crazy person.

Once again, Harry made him go first. 

But they hardly got two stairs down before Draco handed him the yarn back. “I don't think much of your knot tying,” he said, “Haven’t you learned the charm for a permanent knot?”

He hadn’t actually. But that wasn’t what had gone wrong. It was still tied, a circle around the end, that had somehow fallen off Draco’s wrist.

“Why don’t you cast it,” Harry said, testing.

And Draco went distant for a moment, and then said, “I would, but I left my wand in the study.” As if that was a normal thing, something that any wizard would do.

So Harry took them back up again. He hadn’t beaten the house yet after all.

All he could think to do was keep going further in. ‘In’ not being any direction in particular, but rather the direction which made Draco more present, more real. He made Draco keep walking in front of him as they explored the third floor, and as he did, he thought he was almost beginning to sense it, not a pull, but a direction of repulsion, like there was a place that the house was instinctively trying to keep him out of. And that was where he needed to go.

And it was working. As they entered a storage room with the roof so slanted it touched the floor, home to a teetering assemblage of dusty old boxes, a wrinkle appeared in Draco’s forehead, and he turned around to Harry and said, “I did try to leave.”

“What happened?” Harry asked, relieved that Draco seemed now more aware of his situation, and despite himself, curious. Did Draco just fade away?

“It was hard, hard to make myself go. And the lower down in the house, I start to…forget, if that makes sense. But I did make it once, to the front door. It wouldn’t open. I banged my fists against it, kicked it, anything I could think of.” He shook his head, a little like he was trying to clear the memory.

Why didn’t you use your wand, Harry wanted to ask, but he didn’t. 

“It’s a curse,” said Draco, “It has to be,” and his voice was pleading, as if he needed Harry to agree with him.

“A curse. Of course,” said Harry, even though he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t that he knew what this was. It was like nothing he had seen or experienced before. But it also didn’t seem like any curse he’d ever heard of. But arguing didn’t seem like it would do Draco any good.

So he just said, “We need to keep going in. We need to find the center.”

And Draco nodded in agreement, but Harry was pretty sure he could see something in his eyes. Something that looked a lot like fear. 

Moving forward got harder. The house wasn’t moving the furniture around so much anymore. Wasn’t trying to drop things on him, or trip him. But it still felt physically difficult, like he was pushing through water instead of air, or like there was a strong headwind.

Draco didn’t seem to experience any of the physical difficulties, but he grew increasingly anxious as they continued, pacing, and darting glances. 

It felt like they’d spent only a couple of hours exploring before Harry had to stop. He pulled out his endless lunchbag, and the tea and sandwiches revived him a bit. He pulled out tea and snacks for Draco as well, and pretended not to notice that the other man wasn’t eating or drinking, just sloshing the tea around in the cup, and picking at the bread.

The meal restored him a little, but the second well of energy was short-lived. They barely got any more done before they had to stop again. Just another few rooms–hardly an hour. And yet, perhaps it had been longer, for even though it was late May, the light had already failed, though Harry would have sworn it was barely past noon. It was like he was moving incredibly slowly and hadn’t noticed. Or like the rest of the world, the outside world, the real world, had sped up around them.

Harry didn’t mention it, and Draco didn’t either. Harry just lay down on the couch of the stuffy threadbare little sitting room they’d ended up in. He didn’t see where Draco slept. If he slept at all.

He did see him in his dreams again though.

“Why are you trying so hard?” Draco said, softly. “You don’t care about me. You don’t even like me?”

“You’re lost,” said Harry, in confusion. Wasn’t that reason enough? “You’re lost in this terrible house.”

“It’s not a terrible house,” Draco said, latching onto, in Harry’s opinion, the entirely wrong thing. “It’s my house. Mine. It’s all I have.”

And that was silly. Draco must have been one of the richest wizards alive. If the papers were to be believed, the Malfoy fortune had hardly suffered at all from the war. He could have anything money could buy, and the Malfoy name probably still had the clout to get him lots of things money wasn’t supposed to buy either–friendship, love, respect. But Harry remembered what Astoria had said, about Draco, and how sad he’d been, how alone. It reminded him of himself somehow. That lonely kid under the stairs, who saw long bleak years stretching out in front of him, and couldn’t even imagine anything better.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Harry said.

Draco said, “You’re just here because Astoria cried,” which was a little too insightful, but not at all what Harry had meant. He didn’t mean to be one of those other things. What was Draco to him? He wasn’t one of his friends. He was a job. 

And Draco saw all that on his face and said, “It’s alright,” and he turned away.

But maybe that had been what Harry meant afterall, because he grabbed Draco’s arm and said, “No wait–”

“I’m not going to hang around until you decide what you want,” said Draco, and tried to shrug him off.

“I know what I want,” said Harry, and kissed him.

He woke to the taste of him still on his lips.

It was a little awkward actually. These too-real dreams he’d been having about Draco seemed a lot less weird and harmful when there wasn’t a real Draco in the waking world.

Well, mostly real.

They weren’t talking about how Draco wasn’t eating or doing magic. Or the way he had gone transparent on the stairs. 

The Draco in his dreams was warm, and open. The Draco in the waking world was increasingly anxious and snappish.

And they’d gone through the entire third floor–except for one door.

Harry expected it to be another stairwell, perhaps up to an attic. But it wasn’t.

It was a study. There was a huge desk of dark wood, floor to ceiling bookshelves of old, gilt books, dark green wallpaper with an abstract leafy pattern, curtained windows, thick carpet.

It looked out of place on this floor, where every room had a heavily slanted roof and most were older, and more threadbare, less opulent. Except for this one study, this floor held the less used rooms, perhaps the servants’ quarters and storage.

There wasn’t anything particularly notable about the room otherwise, except, oddly, incongruously, a heavy iron door in the middle of the wall behind the desk. It looked very awkward where it was wedged between two bookcases.

He tried the handle.

It was locked.

Draco was staring at the door, something unreadable on his face.

“What’s wrong?” asked Harry.

Draco snapped, incredibly agitated. “You can’t go in there. Something terrible is there.”

“What?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know!” he said frustrated, tugging at his hair with both hands.

“Alright Draco,” he said, trying to calm him.

But the door drew him in–the same sense attuned to it that had led him this far. The sense that whispered keep out, go away. 

“Sorry,” he whispered and drew his wand.

“Don’t–”

“Alohamora.”

And the door creaked open.

Harry pulled it open and for a moment he couldn’t see anything in the dark. Then, with a wordless lumos, the dark was illuminated, revealing a cramped stairway going down.

It was an unappealing prospect: A tight, spiral stair made of unfinished wood, strewn with cobwebs, smelling musty and close. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to go down it. But it didn’t seem like something to fear, exactly.

He turned back to Draco, to ask, but behind him, the room was empty. Draco was gone.

He called to him, but there was no answer. The room felt empty. He knew, instinctively, that there was nothing for him, going back. The only way forward was the stair. Something in him balked at it, and yet, that sense he’d begun to develop, begun to follow, was insistent. He must go down the stairs.

It was easier, going down. As if whatever had been trying to keep him away had given up, now that he was this close. It felt just like an ordinary stair.

The same sort of iron door was at the bottom. And when he opened it…

It was the same study.

It was disconcerting, almost dizzying, because he was coming into the same room he’d left at the top of the stairs, but from the other direction.

Except, sprawled at the desk, was an insensate Draco Malfoy, one hand loose where his wand had rolled out of his grip, the other grasping for a bottle that had spilled and oozed something dark, viscous, and menacing.

Harry tried to rush towards him.

He hit a wall.

It was like a solid barrier of air. It felt the same as the force that made the house hard to walk through, like he’d had to swim through the air, only magnified ten thousand times in strength. He couldn’t get through. He couldn’t reach him.

In desperation, with no other ideas, he cried out, “Let me help him! Please!”

A desperate plea–to the house. The house whose wards had been trying to keep him away, to keep Draco safe.

There was a noise like a whisper.

And then Harry stumbled forward, gathered Draco into his arms, and apparated them away.

***

“I changed my mind as soon as I took it,” Draco said, much later, once he was allowed visitors. “But all I could think to do was raise the wards.”

He’d seemed embarrassed, but he’d agreed to let Harry see him. He would be out in a few days, he said, though there would be medications, and a therapist.

Astoria had been in too, though she wasn't there when Harry came by. She had stopped by his office to thank him–his actual office this time, and not just his house.

“Are you going back to the Manor?” Harry asked.

“Yes,” said Draco, and smiled. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Harry was a bit more skeptical, but when Draco’s invitation came by floo a few weeks later, he agreed to stop by, and when he did, he found himself in a place altogether changed.

June was making itself known in the garden. There were flowering vines crawling up every wall, and even the ominous hedges had put out flowers, and a smattering of some deep purple fruit that Harry couldn’t identify. A soft buzzing was in the air, as countless bees went between the blooms. Tiny jeweled beetles caught the light here and there, and the trees created pleasant patches of shade with their full crowns of leaves.

Draco had tea for them in the garden and he looked better. He was less pale, as if he’d been working in the garden, and finally gotten some sun.

They ate and chatted, and then Draco gave him a studying look, and, as if he’d liked what he’d seen, he casually leaned over, and kissed Harry full on the mouth.

Harry sat there doing nothing like a block, and when Draco backed off again, he said, “Umm.”

There was some color in Draco’s cheek.

“Sorry, I misinterpreted,” he said primly.

“No it’s just–” Harry said, not really sure what ‘it just was’.

Draco sighed. “It’s alright Potter,”–so they were back to Potter now– “I’m not going to try to kill myself again if you turn me down. I just thought we might pick things up where we left them off. I was wrong.”

“What do you mean? We’ve never…” Harry trailed off with a blush.

Draco arched his eyebrow incredulously, “Only nearly every night you were in the Manor.”

“But those were just dreams!”

Draco scoffed. “Do you still know nothing of magic? Of course dreams are still real.”

“Oh,” said Harry, and then he felt his face burn even more as he remembered some of the other things they’d done in their dreams.

“Well,” said Harry, and kissed Draco. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.