Chapter Text
The prohibition came into effect at precisely nine minutes past seven on a Thursday morning, midway through breakfast and three syllables into Harry’s opinion of the Daily Prophet.
“Those absolute fu—”
The word vanished. It did not catch in his throat, nor did his voice crack around it. There was no cough, choke or warning flare of magic. His mouth continued to form the remainder with perfect conviction, but the sound itself had been removed from the world so thoroughly that even the enchanted ceiling seemed to pause and consider the sudden absence.
Harry stared across the table. Hermione lowered her cup of tea with the grave attention of someone who had just watched a dangerous theory prove itself in laboratory conditions, while Ron, whose mouth was full of toast, made a strangled noise that scattered crumbs down the front of his robes.
“Oh,” Hermione said. “She really did it.”
Harry turned upon her. “You knew?”
“I suspected.”
“And you didn’t think to fu—”
Silence swallowed the offending syllable again.
Ron folded over the table.
Harry could hear him trying not to laugh, which was worse than hearing him laugh outright because Ron’s attempts at restraint involved a series of wet, injured gasps and the occasional slap of his palm against the wood. Several younger students had begun watching. Ginny, seated three places down, did not bother concealing her delight at all.
“Mum said she was going to,” Ron managed at last. “You heard her.”
“Your mother says she’s going to do lots of things. She’s been threatening to wash your mouth out with soap since you were six, and you still speak like a concussed docker.”
“Seven,” Ginny corrected. “He was seven when she started threatening the soap. At six, she still thought Fred and George were teaching him those words by accident.”
Harry ignored them both and seized the letter lying beside his plate. It had arrived with the morning post in a familiar green envelope, carrying a short and deceptively affectionate message from Molly about eating properly, sleeping enough and remembering that surviving a war did not exempt him from possessing manners. Harry had assumed the warmth crawling briefly over his fingers when he opened it had been the result of some harmless maternal charm.
He should have known better. Molly Weasley had raised seven children, defeated Bellatrix Lestrange and once made an entire room of Order members feel guilty for allowing Harry to listen to a conversation taking place inside his own house. There was nothing harmless about her maternal magic.
He looked down at the closing lines again.
You may have your full vocabulary back when you demonstrate that you can go one entire week without using obscenities as punctuation. I am sure Hermione will be willing to monitor your progress.
All my love,
Molly
P.S. Attempting to circumvent the charm will restart the week.
Harry read the postscript twice before very carefully placing the letter upon the table. “I am seventeen years old.”
“Eighteen,” Hermione said.
“I have killed Voldemort.”
“No one’s disputing that.”
“I was legally declared an adult before I had finished being hunted through the countryside, and she thinks she can put a fu— a bloody— a sodding vocabulary restriction on me?”
The charm permitted bloody and sodding, apparently, though it stripped them of much of their satisfaction by making them sound like concessions. Harry felt as though he had arrived for battle and been issued a teaspoon.
Hermione reached across the table for the letter. “Technically, she hasn’t restricted your vocabulary. She has only prevented you from vocalising a small selection of words.”
“A small selection?”
“How many can there possibly be?”
Harry looked at her.
Hermione’s confidence faltered. “Perhaps we shouldn’t test that here.”
From somewhere behind him came a soft, aristocratic snort.
Harry closed his eyes.
There were people whose laughter could be ignored. There were people whose mockery could pass through a room without finding the exact seam between Harry’s ribs. Draco Malfoy possessed neither of those merciful qualities. His amusement had always been designed for penetration: thin as a blade, polished to a shine and generally accompanied by an expression suggesting that Harry had personally lowered the average intelligence of the species.
The eighth-year students had been placed together at the far end of the Great Hall, a decision McGonagall had described as an opportunity to establish unity and Hermione had privately called an act of administrative sadism. It meant that Malfoy was close enough to overhear everything while remaining just far enough away to pretend he had not been listening.
Harry turned.
Malfoy sat at the opposite end of the table with a cup poised near his mouth. He looked infuriatingly composed for someone who had spent the previous evening setting fire to his own Transfiguration essay. His hair had grown longer since the war, falling across his forehead in a pale sweep that he tucked behind one ear whenever he was concentrating. Harry had noticed this only because Malfoy’s concentration tended to precede something irritating, dangerous or irritatingly dangerous.
“What?” Harry demanded.
Malfoy lifted one shoulder. “Nothing.”
“You laughed.”
“I breathed.”
“You breathed sarcastically.”
“That sounds like a personal sensitivity, Potter.”
Harry pushed himself upright. Ron caught the sleeve of his jumper, either to restrain him or to ensure he remained close enough for Ron to enjoy what followed.
“Are you fu—”
“Fucking,” Malfoy supplied.
The word landed cleanly in the space Molly’s charm had carved from Harry’s sentence.
Silence spread through the nearby tables. Even Ron stopped laughing.
Harry stared at Malfoy, whose cup remained suspended before his lips. There was no smile upon his face now, although a tiny brightness had appeared in his eyes.
“—kidding me?” Harry finished. “You—”
“Fucking.”
“—idiot, I wasn’t asking you to—”
“Fucking.”
Harry’s jaw snapped shut.
Malfoy took a measured sip of tea.
Ron looked between them. “What was that?”
“Since your mother has banned Potter from swearing,” Malfoy explained, setting down his cup, “I have volunteered to help him.”
“You did not volunteer,” Harry said. “Nobody asked you.”
“Bitch,” Malfoy added serenely.
Harry surged to his feet so abruptly that his shoulder knocked Ron aside, forcing him into Hermione with a startled yelp. She caught both him and her tea through reflexes refined by years of friendship with Harry, but Harry barely noticed. He was already striding around the end of the table, propelled by a fury so clean and immediate that it felt almost medicinal.
Malfoy watched him approach without moving. That, more than the smirk or the elegant boredom or any insult he might have chosen, made Harry want to seize him by the front of his immaculate school robes. Malfoy had once flinched whenever Harry crossed a room too quickly. He had spent the first month of term tracking every wand drawn within ten feet of him, though he disguised it well enough that most people mistook vigilance for arrogance. Somewhere between October and now, he had stopped doing it with Harry.
Harry had not decided what that meant. He had nevertheless noticed the precise week in which it changed.
“You think you’re funny,” Harry said, stopping before him.
“I know I’m funny. The uncertainty lies in whether you possess the range to appreciate it.”
“Stop finishing my sentences.”
“Then stop beginning such predictable ones.”
Harry bent forward, bracing one hand against the table. “Malfoy.”
“Potter.”
“This is your only warning.”
Malfoy’s gaze dropped briefly to Harry’s hand, then travelled back to his face with deliberate leisure. “You’re going to need to be more specific. There are several things you might be warning me against, and some are far more interesting than others.”
There was a pause.
It was not a dramatic pause. Harry refused to grant it that much importance. It was merely a brief and ordinary failure of his mind to produce language, caused perhaps by lack of sleep, residual irritation or the peculiar way Malfoy’s voice had lowered upon the word interesting.
Behind Harry, Ginny made a small choking sound.
Harry straightened. “You are such a—”
Malfoy waited.
The Great Hall appeared to wait with him.
Harry knew at least six words suitable for the occasion. Molly’s magic hovered beneath his tongue, warm and vigilant, prepared to murder every one of them before birth. He could have settled for prat. He could have called Malfoy an arse, which the charm apparently considered vulgar but not ruinous to the moral fabric of society. He could even have exercised the maturity Molly believed was buried somewhere inside him and walked away.
Instead, Harry looked directly into Malfoy’s expectant grey eyes.
“Go on, then.”
Something changed in Malfoy’s expression. The amusement remained, but its edge shifted, becoming less like mockery and more like curiosity. He leant back against the table, considering Harry with the care he usually reserved for difficult spells and opportunities to cause lasting social damage.
“Insufferable, interfering, self-satisfied fuckwit,” Malfoy said at last.
Harry felt the words settle into him one by one.
“That,” he admitted, “was actually fairly close.”
Malfoy smiled slowly. It was not the polished curl he wore through most conversations, nor the brittle weapon he had carried back to Hogwarts as though no one would notice his hands shaking behind it. This one caught briefly at the corner of his mouth before spreading, startled by its own existence.
Harry had seen Draco Malfoy frightened, furious, bloodied and begging. He had seen him sneer across classrooms, weep in bathrooms and stand paralysed beneath the weight of choices no sixteen-year-old should have been given. He had never seen him smile quite like that.
It did something deeply inconvenient to Harry’s stomach.
“Excellent,” Malfoy said. “I accept the position.”
“There is no position.”
“Your gratitude is touching.”
“I am not grateful.”
“Of course not. Gratitude would require emotional literacy.”
Harry opened his mouth.
“Fucking,” Malfoy supplied.
“I hadn’t even said anything!”
“You were about to.”
“You don’t know that.”
Malfoy rose, gathering his books beneath one arm. When he stepped around the bench, he came close enough that the wool of his sleeve brushed Harry’s hand. It could have been an accident, except Malfoy glanced down at the point of contact before looking up again.
“Potter,” he said, with unbearable softness, “your face has been shouting at me since 1991.”
He walked away before Harry could answer.
For several seconds, Harry remained beside the opposite end of the table with Molly’s charm warm beneath his tongue and an entire catalogue of forbidden words crowding uselessly behind his teeth. Across the hall, Malfoy reached the doors, paused beneath the arch and looked back.
Harry raised two fingers at him.
Malfoy’s laughter followed him into the corridor.
Behind Harry, Hermione released a long breath. “Well.”
Ron sounded genuinely bewildered. “Are they going to kill each other?”
“No,” Ginny said. “And I think that may be the problem.”