Chapter Text
The first indication that Draco Malfoy had lost his mind came in the form of tea. Harry had slept badly, which was no longer remarkable enough to deserve comment. He had slept badly in August beneath the muttering pipes of Grimmauld Place, badly during the final week at the Burrow while the ghoul in the attic knocked against the floorboards, and badly on the Hogwarts Express despite the compartment door being locked and Ron’s shoulder wedged solidly against his own. Hogwarts had not improved matters. The castle had been repaired, but repair could not make it innocent; every groan of stone dragged Harry awake with his wand already raised, his lungs locked around a curse before he remembered that the walls were settling rather than falling.
By the fourth morning, he had acquired the particular exhaustion in which the world became both painfully bright and faintly ridiculous. The Great Hall rang with cutlery, conversation and several hundred students performing normality at one another. Harry sat between Ron and the empty place Hermione had abandoned for the library, staring at a pot of tea with the dim conviction that pouring it required more advanced magic than he currently possessed.
A pale hand entered his field of vision, took the pot and filled his cup. Harry followed it upwards to find Malfoy standing on the other side of the table in immaculate school robes, although the shadows beneath his eyes suggested that he had not discovered some secret Slytherin immunity to nightmares. His hair had grown since the trials; without the severe quantity of potion he had once inflicted upon it, a few strands fell across his forehead and softened a face that had become thinner during the war.
“What are you doing?” Harry asked.
Malfoy glanced pointedly at the cup. “I had imagined that was apparent.”
“You’re pouring me tea.”
“An astonishing display of deductive reasoning. Perhaps you should consider becoming an Auror.”
Ron stopped chewing as Malfoy added a little milk, then one spoonful of sugar. Harry looked down at the result and found it precisely the colour he preferred. “How do you know how I take it?”
For the first time, Malfoy appeared less than entirely composed. His fingers tightened around the silver handle before he returned the pot to the table. “You have consumed breakfast in the same room as me for seven years, Potter.”
“You spent most of those years plotting my death.”
“Yes, and I did so observantly.”
Ron made a noise into his toast that might have been a laugh or the opening symptoms of fatal suffocation. Malfoy ignored him, withdrew a small blue bottle from his robes and placed it beside Harry’s cup. The glass was no longer than Harry’s smallest finger, and something pearlescent shifted inside it, catching the enchanted sunlight overhead.
Harry regarded it suspiciously. “What’s that?”
“A mild restorative. It should reduce the headache.”
“I don’t have a headache.”
“You have been pressing two fingers against your left temple for the past six minutes.”
Harry removed his hand from his temple. Malfoy’s gaze followed the movement before returning to his face with an expression Harry could not decipher. He had been wearing variations of it since they had returned to school: his mouth set in careful neutrality, his shoulders rigid beneath his robes, as though every encounter required him to choose between several dangerous paths.
It was disconcerting. Harry had understood the sneer. He had understood the hatred and the fear beneath it, once he finally learnt to look. This quiet attention offered him nothing familiar to push against.
“Did you make it?” he asked.
Malfoy’s chin lifted a fraction. “Yes.”
“Is it poisonous?”
“If I intended to murder you, I would choose a method less likely to implicate me before breakfast.”
“That isn’t a no.”
Malfoy’s mouth twitched. The movement vanished so quickly Harry might have imagined it, but the tension between Harry’s own shoulders slackened. Malfoy uncorked the bottle, drank a measured mouthful and set it down again. “There. If one of us collapses, Weasley may summon assistance.”
Ron swallowed his mouthful of toast. “I’m considering letting nature take its course.”
Harry took the bottle. The glass was warm from Malfoy’s hand, and the potion tasted faintly of mint and rainwater with a bitter undertaste. He waited for his throat to close. Instead, the pressure behind his eyes loosened with such gentle efficiency that he nearly groaned.
“That’s brilliant,” he said before caution could intervene.
Malfoy stilled, but only for a moment. Then he inclined his head with peculiar formality. “I’m pleased it suits you.”
Harry finished the potion. “Thanks.”
This time, there was no mistaking the change in Malfoy’s face. Surprise stripped it bare, leaving him almost young, before his features softened into a quieter expression; he looked at Harry as if the word had been placed carefully into his hands. “You’re welcome.”
Harry expected that to be the end of it. Malfoy had seen him suffering, provided a potion and behaved like a person rather than a poisonous decorative shrub. They had both done stranger things during the previous year.
Then Malfoy sat in Hermione’s empty place, and Ron’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“Eating breakfast.”
“At the Gryffindor table?”
“There are no House tables this year,” Malfoy said, reaching for a clean plate. The staff had made a great ceremony of the change on the first evening: four long tables remained, but students were permitted to sit wherever they wished, as if the removal of an invisible boundary might heal all the damage caused by the visible ones. “Or did you sleep through McGonagall’s speech?”
“I was hoping everyone would politely ignore that bit.”
“A reasonable expectation. Gryffindor has always regarded integration as something best achieved by inviting everyone else to become Gryffindors.”
Ron turned to Harry with the expression of a man requesting permission to commit violence, but Harry only drank his tea. It was perfect. “Leave it.”
“Leave what?”
“Whatever this is.”
Malfoy, who had begun spreading marmalade over a piece of toast, glanced sideways at him. “I assure you, Potter, I am capable of surviving Weasley’s conversational gifts without your intervention.”
“Fine. Then both of you leave it.”
Ron’s eyebrows rose, but after a moment he returned to his breakfast. Malfoy ate with the careful precision of someone who had been taught that meals were another performance upon which the family honour depended, although Harry noticed that he took only one piece of toast and no eggs. When Pansy Parkinson entered the Great Hall several minutes later, she saw him beside Harry and stopped so abruptly that Blaise Zabini walked into her back.
Her gaze moved from Malfoy to the empty potion bottle beside Harry’s hand, then to the tea in his cup. Malfoy met her eyes and raised one eyebrow with such lethal elegance that Parkinson closed her parted lips again, seized Zabini by the arm and dragged him towards the opposite end of the table.
“Odd,” Ron muttered.
Harry watched Parkinson sit down with her back very deliberately turned towards them. “They’re Slytherins.”
“Fair.”
Malfoy exhaled through his nose. Harry caught another glimpse of that almost-smile before Malfoy concealed it behind his cup.
The following morning, he was there before Harry. The seat to Harry’s right had been claimed with a folded copy of the Daily Prophet, and a cup waited beside his plate, steam curling from tea already mixed with the correct quantity of milk and sugar. Malfoy himself stood near the staff table in conversation with Professor Slughorn, his spine straight and one hand tucked into his pocket while the other shaped some restrained, elegant gesture.
Harry hesitated. The Great Hall had enough space now that only half the school had returned, and Malfoy had not asked him to join him. The newspaper might have been left there by accident, although Malfoy did very little accidentally and had certainly never abandoned a possession in his life. Even during their worst years, his schoolbag had looked as if it had been packed by a team of highly disciplined house-elves.
The tea smelt strong and hot, and Harry had woken three times during the night. He sat down. Across the hall, Parkinson lowered her face into her hands.
Harry took a cautious sip. Beside the cup lay another restorative, this one the colour of amber. A narrow strip of parchment had been tied around its neck.
For the headache, read the message in Malfoy’s angular handwriting. Take it after eating, since apparently someone must remind you.
Harry snorted and put the bottle in his pocket.
By the time Malfoy returned, Ron and Hermione had arrived. Hermione greeted him politely, although her attention lingered upon the occupied seat and waiting tea with a sharpness Harry recognised from the weeks preceding a particularly difficult examination. Ron looked at Malfoy, looked at Harry, and accepted the situation with surprising ease.
“Morning,” Harry said.
Malfoy stopped behind the chair. He had clearly expected the place to remain available; Harry could tell from the quiet certainty with which he had reached for the newspaper, yet finding Harry already there made Malfoy’s composure falter. His gaze dropped towards the cup, taking in how much Harry had drunk, before rising again. “Good morning.”
“Your potion worked.”
“I’m aware my potions work.”
“Could’ve turned me purple.”
“That would hardly be an improvement.”
Harry grinned. “You’d miss my eyes.”
Hermione’s spoon struck the side of her bowl. When Harry looked at her, she coughed hastily into her napkin while Ron stared at his sausages with great determination. Malfoy had gone strangely pink across the tops of his cheekbones.
“You all right?” Harry asked her.
“Perfectly,” Hermione managed. “Do carry on.”
“My tolerance for hideous spectacles remains limited,” he said, sitting down. “Your eyes would be considerably less objectionable if you did not insist upon framing them with those.”
He pointed at Harry’s glasses.
“They help me see.”
“A tragic failure of design.”
“You’ve been insulting these glasses since we were eleven. You need new material.”
“I have repeatedly suggested that you need new glasses.”
“I like these.”
“They are held together by magic, misplaced optimism and what appears to be Spellotape beneath the left hinge.”
Harry removed them and inspected the arm. “That’s been there for ages.”
“Yes,” Malfoy said with feeling. “I know.” He held out his hand.
Harry looked at it. “What?”
“Give them to me.”
“No.”
“Potter.”
“I’m not giving you my glasses.”
“You walked into the Forbidden Forest to surrender to the Dark Lord but draw the line at corrective lenses?”
“I didn’t exactly surrender it.”
“An important distinction to make while blind.”
Harry glanced at Hermione, expecting support. She had become absorbed in her porridge with an intensity that bordered upon cowardice.
Malfoy kept his hand extended. His fingers were long and pale, the nails neatly cut, the faint white trace of an old curse disappearing beneath his cuff. Harry remembered those hands shaking on the Astronomy Tower, then one of them closing around his wrist in the Room of Requirement while fire devoured everything behind them. He remembered reaching back, and the memory arrived without accusation. That was new too.
“If you break them,” Harry warned, surrendering the glasses, “I’m telling McGonagall you attacked me.”
“By improving your vision?”
“People will believe me. I’m a national hero.”
“You’re a national nuisance.”
Without his glasses, Malfoy dissolved into pale shapes and dark cloth. Harry watched him lift his wand and heard two murmured spells, followed by the delicate click of metal moving against metal. When Malfoy returned the glasses, the Spellotape had disappeared. The hinge moved smoothly, the frames sat straight upon Harry’s face, and several tiny scratches across the lenses were gone.
Harry blinked as the Great Hall sharpened around him. Malfoy watched him with unsettling concentration. “Better?”
“Yeah.” Harry adjusted the frame, although it no longer required it. “Much.”
“You should replace them properly.”
“They work.”
“They offend me.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
Malfoy’s gaze remained upon the repaired hinge. “Perhaps.”
The word was gentler than Malfoy usually allowed, and Harry did not know what to do with it. He therefore resorted to what had always worked when Malfoy became impossible to understand: he reached across the table, stole half of Malfoy’s untouched toast and bit into it.
Malfoy stared at him. Harry paused with the toast halfway back to his mouth. “What?”
Ron shut his eyes. Hermione’s hand froze halfway towards her tea, while at the far end of the table Pansy Parkinson made a strangled sound. Blaise Zabini thumped her between the shoulder blades without looking up from his newspaper.
Malfoy’s attention moved slowly from the toast in Harry’s hand to Harry’s mouth. The flush returned, spreading this time down the elegant line of his throat.
“If you wanted another piece,” he said, his voice curiously strained, “you might have asked.”
“It tastes better when it’s stolen.”
“I see.”
Harry finished it. Malfoy remained silent for the rest of breakfast, but his expression had lost the wary uncertainty it had carried since the beginning of term. In its place sat a private, almost luminous satisfaction that made him look indecently pleased with himself.
Harry decided that rebuilding his family’s reputation must be going well. He did not think about the tea again until the next morning, when the cup was waiting.
By the end of September, Draco Malfoy had become part of Harry’s breakfast. It happened without discussion: Malfoy occupied the place to Harry’s right, prepared his tea and produced restorative potions on the mornings when the shadows beneath Harry’s eyes were particularly severe. In return, Harry saved the seat whenever he arrived first, stole food from Malfoy’s plate when Malfoy neglected to eat and warded off anyone inclined to make a scene about his presence. Nothing had been agreed upon, which suited Harry. Agreements required conversations, conversations required naming things, and unnamed things were much easier to keep.
Malfoy had become tolerable after the war. That was all. He had also become useful in the library, where his notes on advanced transfiguration were irritatingly precise. He knew how to silence the portraits near the eighth-floor corridor when Harry needed somewhere quiet, and he had discovered that Harry could not bear anyone approaching him from behind and adjusted without ever mentioning it. On the nights when sleep would not come, Harry sometimes found him awake in the common room McGonagall had assigned to the returning eighth-years, reading beside the fire with an empty chair nearby. Malfoy never asked why Harry sat down, and Harry never asked why the chair was always there.
It was strange, certainly, but the whole year was strange. Hermione and Pansy Parkinson had begun revising together. Neville spent alternate weekends helping Professor Sprout restore the damaged greenhouses. Ron had voluntarily enrolled in Muggle Studies after discovering that the course involved taking apart household appliances. Compared with the sight of Ron Weasley holding a screwdriver and demanding to know why Muggles had imprisoned lightning inside a toaster, Malfoy learning basic human decency hardly seemed worthy of investigation.
The second indication that Malfoy’s behaviour was more than a temporary lapse came on the final Friday of September. Rain battered the windows of the eighth-year common room, turning the grounds beyond them into a black, shifting blur. Most of the students had gone to bed, leaving Harry on the rug before the fire with an essay balanced across his knees, pretending to read the same paragraph on defensive enchantments for the sixth time.
Malfoy occupied the armchair beside him. His shoes had been abandoned beneath the table, his tie hung loose around his collar, and one ankle rested across the opposite knee. Harry had never seen him look so untidy before returning to Hogwarts. It was not much by ordinary standards, but on Malfoy it possessed the intimacy of undress.
“You haven’t turned the page in twenty minutes,” Malfoy said.
“You’ve been watching me for twenty minutes?”
“I have been suffering your presence for twenty minutes. Observation is an unfortunate consequence.”
Harry let the essay slip onto the rug. “I hate this place.” The confession escaped before he could catch it, and Malfoy’s book lowered.
There were some things Harry could say to Ron and Hermione, and some he could not. They loved Hogwarts too fiercely. Even after everything, it remained the place that had rescued all three of them from other lives, and Harry could not bear to place his grief inside their gratitude. Malfoy, however, said nothing; he merely waited while Harry watched the fire and found himself wanting to fill a silence that demanded nothing from him.
“I thought coming back would make it feel like mine again,” Harry admitted. “But everywhere I look, I remember something. Half the time it isn’t even the battle. It’s just—everything. Every year. Every bloody corridor where someone tried to kill me.”
“The castle does have a regrettable fondness for repetition.”
Harry laughed despite himself, and the sound hurt less than he expected. Malfoy closed his book and set it aside. “My mother wished me to remain at home.”
“Why didn’t you?”
A longer silence answered him. Malfoy looked towards the rain-dark windows, his face reflected faintly in the glass.
“Because if I remained there, the Manor would become the whole world,” he said at last. “And I already know what happens when Malfoys mistake their house for the world.”
Harry turned to look at him. Malfoy met his gaze without flinching, although the fingers resting upon the arm of the chair curled inward. It was not an apology. Harry had received several of those already: carefully phrased statements before the Wizengamot, a private acknowledgement in McGonagall’s office, one terrible conversation beside Dobby’s grave in which neither of them had managed to look directly at the other. This was smaller and somehow more honest. Malfoy had not asked to be forgiven; he had simply allowed Harry to see the shape of what remained.
“The Dursleys’ house used to do that,” Harry said.
Malfoy’s expression tightened. He knew enough now; everyone did. Harry rubbed his thumb along the worn edge of his essay. “Even when I was at Hogwarts, part of me was always waiting to go back. Like the cupboard was the real place and everything else was temporary.”
The rain filled the room. Malfoy moved from the chair to the rug beside Harry, not close enough to touch, but near enough that the fire caught in the silver-blond strands of his hair.
“Then perhaps,” he said carefully, “we might prevent either house from becoming the world.”
Harry glanced at him. “How?”
“By leaving them.”
“Bit difficult tonight.”
“I did not mean this precise moment, Potter.”
“You should be more specific.”
“I shall commission diagrams in future.”
Harry smiled and looked back at the flames. Malfoy remained beside him, their shoulders separated by only a few inches and all the history neither of them yet knew how to cross.
After a while, Malfoy said, “Would you permit me to see to your comfort while we are here?”
Harry frowned. “You make that sound incredibly sinister.”
“I am attempting to be sincere.”
“That’s probably why. You haven’t practised.”
Malfoy’s mouth flattened, but beneath the annoyance lay genuine tension. His entire body had acquired that unnatural stillness Harry had noticed at breakfast, as if the answer mattered far more than the question deserved.
Harry considered the tea, the potions, the repaired glasses and the empty chair beside the fire. Malfoy had already been seeing to his comfort for nearly a month. Apparently he needed permission to continue being inexplicably decent, because pure-bloods could turn anything into a ceremony if given sufficient time and expensive stationery.
“You already do, don’t you?” Harry said.
Malfoy inhaled softly. Harry waited, but when no answer came, he prompted, “Well?”
“Yes,” Malfoy answered. His eyes brightened with an astonished, almost unbearable hope. “I suppose I do.”
“Then I permit it.”
“You permit it,” Malfoy repeated, as if testing the shape of the words.
Harry nudged his knee against Malfoy’s. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Malfoy looked down at the point where they touched. When he raised his eyes again, the smile had escaped him entirely. “I shall endeavour not to.”
Harry retrieved his essay. Malfoy returned to his chair after a minute, although the quiet between them had altered in some way Harry could feel but not explain.
The following morning, Pansy Parkinson took one look at Malfoy’s expression and demanded to speak with him privately. Harry assumed this concerned Slytherin business.
It did not occur to him that he had just accepted a formal courtship.