Archive of Our Own

Draco receives the summons in September.

Ailing health, it says. Deteriorating since his spell in Azkaban—

—never received the Kiss—

—nevertheless—

—impacted his mental faculties—

—as per your mother’s will and testament, your obligation—

Theo, from his spot on the other side of the studio, frowns at him. Both of his hands are wrapped around a mug of strong black coffee—the same coffee Draco’s been drinking since he woke up an hour ago—and behind him, through the wide, arched windows, Kongens Have is rousing, the sun a moody orange as it climbs above the line of autumn-brittle trees along the park’s main entrance.

“Will you be back?” he asks. “Would you like me to come with you?”

“Yes, and no,” Draco says, turning the parchment over, looking for more small print.

“What about the elves?”

“There’s only one. It’s not enough. The rest are gone. That’s why I have to go. There’s no one else.”

“Your aunt?”

Draco looks at Theo over the top of the letter and laughs dryly. “Aunt Andromeda? Are you pulling my leg? Lucius hated her.”

Theo shrugs.

What he means to say, of course, is do you have to go?

Draco can hear it in his desperate silence.

Can feel it in the dark tug inside his own chest. Do I have to go?

“He is my father, I suppose,” he says tightly.

_____

Draco’s old bedroom is on the draughty north side of the Manor. It’s been called the Lincoln Room for centuries.

“Why?” Draco once asked his mother weepily as she read him his bedtime story, the same day he’d interrupted Lucius poring over old floor plans in his offices.

“Go away,” his father had said sharply, not looking up from his quills and his plans and his smoking glass of whisky. “Ask your mother.”

It was the year they decided to demolish the ground floor nursery in favour of a new games parlour. Two years before Hogwarts.

“You don’t need that room,” Lucius had said, firm and dark, putting a hard stop to Draco’s hysterical protests.

“It’s the colour.” Narcissa, looking pale and tired, placed a hand over her stomach, her fingers loosely curled, the heel of her pointed boot angled against the hardwood floor as she slowly swayed herself back and forth in the big wicker rocking chair beside Draco’s bed. She touched the embroidered silk hangings, gestured to the woodland tapestry on the wall facing the windows, the one with the knight in the black armour kneeling over a slain deer, its heart resting, scarlet and large, in the cupped palm of his bloodied hands. “Lincoln green.”

The Lincoln Room is on the second floor, above the old chapel. It smells exactly like it always has—juniper, horsehair, the lawns after a hard and hot summer shower. Only now, it carries with it a bit of a musty undertone. A whiff of neglect.

With a flick of his wand, Draco drops his luggage on the floor at the foot of his old bed. Dust flies.

“Who the devil are you?”

Draco turns slowly and looks up.

“Ah,” he says. “I forgot about you.”

He tries to remember when he sat for this portrait. Fifteen, was it? The year he got really tall.

Fifteen-year-old Draco looks down at him from his gilded frame above the walnut door. His hair is short, neat, parted and combed back with stiff pomade. He’s in formal robes—small black bowtie, stiff white undershirt, dainty pearl robe pin. He’s holding his old wand, the Malfoy family ring gleaming, silver, from his pinkie. The apples of his cheeks bear a youthful pink flush; Draco remembers, exactly, how he felt sitting for the handsome young man who painted him.

He smothers a grin and tilts his head. “Hello, Draco.”

Painted Draco’s nose wrinkles. His parents must have forgotten about him. Perhaps they forgot about the Lincoln Room entirely, after he left.

“You’re me, aren’t you?” painted Draco asks after a beat.

Draco pulls up a chair and climbs onto it. It’s not quite tall enough to stand face to face with his fifteen-year-old self, but it’ll do.

He plants a hand on the wall by the frame’s edge for balance, and he says, “I’m you.”

“You look old.”

Draco snorts. “To you, I suppose.” He runs a thumb along the edge of his painted robes. The artist had been talented, had poured a lot of Draco into the work: his nosiness, his affectedness, his impatience—

“What are you doing here?” painted Draco demands.

“Trust me,” Draco hums. “You don’t want to know.”

Draco slips his fingers under the frame and gives it an experimental tug. The latches snap free, and he huffs beneath the sudden weight of it, carefully balancing it on his shoulder with one hand and wriggling his wand from his pocket with the other.

“Hey! Don’t do that! This is my room!”

“Not anymore, I’m afraid.”

With a crackle of magic, Draco steps down, both hands in the air, the painting hovering above his head. He sends it to the hallway where the rest of the Malfoy portraits have been missing in action for years, sold or destroyed. The wall tapestry still bears the vibrant ghosts of their frames where the sun hasn’t bleached the fabric beyond repair. Squares and rectangles and ovals and oblongs, neat rows and columns spanning the entire hall.

Draco sets his portrait on the floor by the fireplace, propping it next to a mahogany sideboard covered in dusty crystalware. “There. This is your room, now. Isn’t it nice?”

“This is a hallway,” painted Draco says through painted, gritted teeth.

“Do you want me to cover you with a sheet or not?”

A pause. “Not.”

Draco nods. He turns on his heel, running his hands through his hair. It smells of the Portkey terminal. His entire outfit does.

“Hang on,” painted Draco says. “Tell me something?”

Draco stops halfway down the hall. He turns. “Yes?”

“Am I very important now? You, I mean. Are you important?”

The words are left unsaid, but Draco can still hear them.

He always wanted us to be.

“No,” Draco says blandly.

Painted Draco scowls. “Why the bloody hell not? I work so hard. Are you at least married?”

Draco snorts, patting his wrinkled shirt pocket for his cigarettes. He taps one out of the packet into the palm of his hand. “Definitely not.”

“What do you mean, ‘definitely not’? I’m incredibly popular! I have all the girls in school lining up, begging me to take them to Hogsmeade—”

“Draco,” Draco says. “You do realise it’s me you’re talking to? What I mean to say is, you don’t have to”—he waves a hand around, unlit cigarette snug between his knuckles—“do that? You can be honest.”

Perhaps it’s not in painted Draco’s magical fabric to be honest about these things. How hilarious.

Draco-at-fifteen lifts a pink, pointy nose in the air. “I’m very popular.”

“You’re a homosexual,” Draco says, nudging his bedroom door open with his foot. He steps inside and pops his cigarette between his teeth, but before he closes the door, he gleefully adds, “And a virgin. Good night.”

_____

It’s been a week.

Draco can’t sleep in the Lincoln Room. He can’t explain why.

He has no one to explain why to, though, so he supposes it doesn’t really matter.

The empty portrait gallery has become his sanctum, his hideaway. His father can’t make it up the stairs and Flinty, the Malfoy family’s last surviving house-elf, will leave him alone here. In the spare hours Draco has to himself, it’s his.

His portrait, though. That’s stayed.

He’s alright, really. He only chips in every now and again, and usually only on Draco’s calling.

This morning, like every morning, he unpeels himself from his makeshift bed—the saggy chaise longue dragged out from the bedroom, Transfigured just big enough so his legs won’t dangle off the end—and he smells dusty floors and the old, unclean tapestry. He smells paint and turpentine. His things from home—easels and brushes and palettes and rags—are scattered haphazardly across the hallowed hall, turning this mediaeval gallery into a studio. The view of the Wiltshire hills is a begrudgingly inspiring one, when Draco is alert enough to be elbow-deep in work.

Yesterday, the gallery in Berlin called, wondering, with pushiness disguised as concern, how he was getting on.

“The show’s calendared for January and we don’t have a theme,” they had said—they being Fritz, an artsy Berliner in his mid-twenties with a close-shaved head and an earlobe full of tiny gold hoops that had sparkled in the fire-call’s flames—to which Draco had replied, distractedly, paint flecked on his fingers and in his hair, “It’s fine, it’s all fine, but please, go through my agent next time. Theo. He’ll answer all your questions.”

He’d shown Theo some of the pieces he’d been working on since his arrival—half-painted views of the Manor from numerous window frames, some of them known to Draco, some of them completely made up. There was his apartment in Copenhagen. His old flat in Dublin. A hotel room he once stayed in after a media tour in Tokyo. “Maybe it’s a theme,” he’d said. “Looking outside from the inside of somewhere safe?” He’d sighed. “Too depressing for Berlin?”

Theo had snorted. “Berlin thrives on moodiness. It’s perfect.”

A cry from downstairs startles Draco from his thoughts.

“Father?” painted Draco asks cautiously from his new spot on the east window seat. Outside, the October morning is blustery and grey.

Draco nods and pushes his feet into his slippers.

_____

Theo is large and broad and firm like a Muggle rugby player. Draco can tell fire-calls are awkward for him, the way he has to crouch on his knees, fists on the floor, shoulders hunched forward. He swipes one big hand over his dark, floppy hair, pushing it from his eyes, his fingers brushing the edges of his glasses and warping the flames around him.

“How’s old Albion?” he asks, seconds after the fire bursts to life.

Draco shifts position, arm stretched over one bended knee, his other hand flat on the old hardwood floor. He glances out the window. It’s getting dark. The wind is howling gently against the glass, the sound of it mingling with the crackling from the fireplace.

He rubs an eye. He has no idea how he looks. Tired, probably. Theo’s too polite to say anything.

“Dull and grey and cold,” Draco says.

“Copenhagen’s cold.”

“I miss it.”

Rain patters against the windows, slips down the glass in lazy rivulets. Painted Draco’s eyes are closed.

Theo asks how Lucius is.

Earlier, after Draco hastily brushed his teeth, washed his face, and combed through his hair with wet fingers, he’d flung on some clothes and raced downstairs, sprinting through the echoey, wide hallways and galleries and smaller chambers to Lucius’s new dwelling off the ground floor parlour, a door away from the old games room and Draco’s former nursery.

Flinty had already been there, wringing his hands, his little feet slapping against the floor as he paced, clearly waiting for Draco to tell him off. Lucius was mumbling something about porridge. It was all over the floor—bowl upturned and cracked down the middle, milky oats splattered on the threadbare rug, on the marble fireplace. There was a bit of it stuck in the short, silvery hair on Lucius’s chin.

“I don’t like it,” Lucius had said over and over between uttered swear words as Flinty ran around the room after Draco, tugging on his sleeve, trying to explain, “It’s the second bowl he’s refused, Master Draco, sir, the second bowl!”

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Draco had said calmly, using magic to clear everything away, ignoring the strange smell under his nose as he leaned over Lucius in his chair and carefully rearranged the blanket to cover his legs—a punchy mix of spilled milk, antibacterial potions, lavender soap, must and sweat—ignoring too the glassy quality of his father’s eyes as his ranting and raving stopped with a rattled gasp and a frown.

“What on earth are you wearing, boy?” Lucius had asked with an alarming level of clarity, snatching the blanket from Draco’s awkward grasp. “You look like a common Mu—”

“Don’t go there,” Draco had said, his gaze swinging down hard to meet his father’s. Lucius’s mouth had flapped open and closed like a fish. His breath had smelled worse than his body. Draco had to wonder if Lucius still saw him as a boy, if he looked up at Draco’s face and saw the painted version of him there instead, green and proud; a child. “You have to eat. You’ll take whatever Flinty gives you, or I’m discussing a stomach line with the Home Healer when I meet with them this week. Alright?” Lucius had said nothing. “Good.”

The entire time, Draco’s hands had gripped the wooden arms of his father’s wheelchair so hard he’d given himself splinters. They quivered when he hurriedly let go, and his head had buzzed with adrenaline, barely-suppressed fear surging through his body like a particularly potent and awful drug.

“Take me out back and AK me if I ever end up like that,” Draco says grimly, idly biting his thumb. He’s still twisted towards the windows with his profile to Theo, and he hears Theo shift. The flames warp and crackle again.

“Do you think it was all Azkaban?” Theo asks. He sounds uncertain.

“I think he’s evil,” Draco says plainly. “Evil spoils fast.” He rubs his forehead with three fingers, closing his eyes. He sighs. “I didn’t—no. I don’t mean that. I’m tired.”

“Let me help,” Theo says quietly.

“I’ve got a meeting with a Home Healer on Saturday,” Draco says. “From St Mungo’s. It’ll be fine.” He pauses. “He used to hate me so much, you know?” he adds bitterly. “And now he can barely say anything to me. It’s just—it’s so strange. And he’s still my father. He’s my father who led me to—who told me to—”

“Draco…”

Draco clears his throat. It aches. He runs the back of his wrist over his nose, over his cheek, hating that it comes away wet. “He’s still my father.”

“Yes,” Theo says gently. “That, he is. Perhaps take a step back, though? Once the employee from St Mungo’s has arrived, I mean.”

Draco looks up from his fingers. He curls them loosely against his thumb. His family ring is gone, replaced by a thinner, silver band. Just plain. He wears another on his index finger. Together, they glint under the Charmed flames of the fire-call.

“He’s going to die soon,” he says.

Theo nods.

“Should I care more?” Draco asks after a moment of weighty silence. Should I be less relieved? he almost adds, but Theo doesn’t answer.

_____

Seventeen years ago, the year he turned twenty-two, Draco’s parents gave him an ultimatum.

Lucius had just returned from Azkaban. Five years he’d been in, just five, and he’d worn that same, slightly dishevelled ‘let’s just carry on with it, shall we’ mask Draco recognised from the last time. His eyes, though—they’d been different. Duller; crueller, somehow.

Draco should have seen it coming.

Back then, and at least up until that point, life had been—

Well. Not perfect, but it was certainly tipping towards something better than it had ever been before.

Draco had gone back to school, had gained his Hogwarts certificate, then he’d spent four wonderful years playing at idle boulevardier, stretched out on neatly trimmed lawns and pond jetties, swanning around parties and balls and clubs clutching champagne bottles with his closest friends. He’d drank some and partied more, had snuck into the city with Pansy and Theo on weekends where he met his future art tutor during a midnight museum social. Theo’s father had the keys to all the best archives in the city, the ones that kept the Muggle art above ground and the wixen treasures below it.

“I’m Da Vinci and you can be my Melzi, my Master Francesco,” the man had said upon learning of Draco’s penchant for sketching and watercolours in his downtime (every day had been downtime, back then), leaning against a faux marble column at the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, a room full of sad, religious Renaissance paintings Draco had found nauseating and disturbing in their stillness. When he’d informed this man—not Leonardo, but Baldur, a thirty-year-old wixen portrait artist from Vienna—that just because he had a hobby didn’t mean he was an artist, nor a talented magical artist at that, Baldur had taken one look at Draco’s hands and had disagreed. He’d written his name and the address of his school on the continent on a small piece of parchment, folded it, and slipped it into the pocket of Draco’s jacket.

Draco had hidden that parchment between the pages of a heavy book for almost a year, only to dig it back out the morning Lucius made him choose his lot in life, quietly praying Baldur’s gesture had been genuine and more than just an obvious invitation for sex.

Draco had rested his head on his mother’s knee as she cried for him. He can remember, almost exactly, the feeling of her fingers in his hair as she’d said, quietly, bewilderingly, “I always tried to save you,” and “you were such a sensitive boy, a good boy,” and “please reconsider,” and “you can live whatever life you want here, Draco, you can. Just say yes, the Greengrasses will understand. We can ask them to understand.”

That next morning, Draco wordlessly snatched the Gringotts cheque left for him in his father’s study and tried not to think of all the things he was leaving behind.

_____

Saturday comes around. Rain litters the foyer in uneven splotches, dripping from their new arrival’s shoes and hair.

“I’m ever so sorry,” he says, flustered, wiping flattened curls off his forehead, blinking wet lashes as Flinty takes the jacket off his back with a quick snap of his fingers. The water clears away, too. “Oh,” he says, laughing. “I’ll have to get used to that. Er, thank you very much.”

Flinty bows, leaving them alone in the entryway.

Draco tries to remember the last time he saw Justin Finch-Fletchley. Sixth-year, probably, and back then Draco had hardly paid him any mind.

Justin’s much taller now; lanky, with fine wrists and thin fingers and buff-coloured hair. He has a wide, thin-lipped smile and long, pale lashes, and as he approaches Draco to shake his hand, he lifts his dimpled chin and smooths his other palm down the front of his lime-green robes. “I should have doubled-up my Apparition with an Impervius Charm. I had no idea Wiltshire was so sodden!” The Manor’s wide, double-doors close gently behind him, the murky light from outside draining away from the floor, from the walls, leaving them under the warmer glow of twinkling lamplight. “Long time, no see.”

“Very,” Draco says. “I had no idea you were working at the hospital.”

Justin nods. “Medicine. It’s my father’s trade, and his father before that, and his before that, only—of course, I rather fell into a different branch of it.” He laughs briskly. “Magic.”

Draco nods. “Well,” he says. “Thank you for coming. Follow me.”

He guides Justin into one of the Manor’s lighter sitting rooms with a view of the rose bushes. Not that it makes any difference, with the weather so poor.

They have tea and biscuits, and Justin runs through his credentials without any of the pomp or bluster he was so known for in school. At thirty-nine, he is calm, considered, earnest, discreet; Draco’s grateful for it.

Justin agrees to start right away. Four days a week, three hours a visit. St Mungo’s charge through the nose for it.

“My nurse is a Muggle,” Lucius says later, at dinner. If it were up to Draco, he’d be eating alone, in his gallery hall with his work and his newer, better things and his old portrait. His hands are mucky with paint and his father’s gaze keeps flitting to them with a foggy sort of disdain.

“Healer, Father,” Draco says lightly, pushing a roast potato around on his plate. “He comes highly recommended. He’ll be good for you.”

Lucius’s snort is wet and ragged. “What rot.” He coughs into the back of his wrist, his eyes watering. “Have you seen his—his walk? How he minces around? He’s a pansy. Just like you.”

Draco likes to think of himself as old enough to know better, to react… smaller, yet he can’t help the rush of blood to his cheeks, a ghost of shame washing over him, the humiliation he’d felt as a boy. He won’t give in to it.

“Be quiet and eat your beef,” he says after biting his tongue so hard it stings.

_____

Two people arrive on Draco’s doorstep at the same time the next afternoon: Justin, who Draco is expecting, and Theo, who Draco is not.

“Theodore Nott,” Justin announces when he appears with a loud pop! on the gravel.

The rain is gone, and the air smells like earth and the promise of early autumn sunshine. Draco’s relieved. He’s looking forward to the estate feeling less like a pulpy gothic novella.

“Justin Finch-Fletchley,” Theo says, glancing at his Healer robes, the corner of his mouth tugging up into a surprised smile.

Draco looks between them with an impatient sigh.

“Yes, right you are, Draco,” Justin says, ducking through the door, carrying his large Healer’s bag in one hand. “Don’t mind me, I’ll go to your father’s room now and—” He hesitates, looking over Draco’s shoulder at Theo, still standing on the driveway. “Very nice seeing you, Theodore. Have a good day.”

“He’s grown up, hasn’t he?” Theo says on Justin’s hasty departure, craning his neck.

“Oh, don’t,” Draco says, stepping outside instead of inviting Theo in. “What—”

“—am I doing here? Berlin called again,” Theo says. “So I took the first Portkey I could to London and Apparated here from my dad’s. Sorry.” He doesn’t sound or look sorry at all. He offers Draco a cigarette, one of the nice ones from the Portkey lounge. Draco takes it with a scowl.

“And you couldn’t have fire-called me instead?”

“I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Fine,” Draco lies.

They’re approaching the glasshouse, the same place Draco found a pair of his father’s old dress shoes in a plant pot earlier in the week. He keeps coming across out of place objects all around the Manor. Old mugs on the high-up shelves in the library. A toothbrush and riding helmet in the scullery. Copies of Witch Weekly in the wet bar. His mother’s embroidery basket in the kitchens, next to the bread, with a pile of rusty old Knuts and robe pins. Little breadcrumbs of Lucius’s absentmindedness over these past few years that Flinty hasn’t bothered fixing. It’s exhausting.

Draco rubs his eyes.

“Yes, sounds it,” Theo says dryly. “You need some time off.”

“It’s only been a few weeks,” Draco mutters. “How pathetic is that?”

“A few weeks in this”—Theo waves a hand around, at the Manor, the overgrown gardens, the empty grounds—“hell, is an eternity. Especially on your own. Come on, Draco. You were never meant to come back here.”

“She wanted me here for this,” Draco says quietly. “She didn’t want him to be alone. Besides,” he adds brusquely, folding his arms across his jumpered chest, picking up the incline towards the hills behind the house, “there’s no one else. There’s no one else to file the papers, no one else to work through the deeds with the solicitors. This is all on me.” He laughs, breathy and humourless. Takes a quick drag of his cigarette. “He’d probably find it hilarious and very deserved if he were in his right mind, don’t you think? This is what you get, boy,” he says, a passable impression of his father’s nasally drone, “for shirking duty. It’s his last ‘fuck you’.”

They stop at the top of the hill, all of Wiltshire’s sky stretching out on all sides around them. The sun is struggling to pass through the clouds, but Draco can feel its heat against his cheeks and forehead. He’s breathless, and most of his hair has come loose, whipping in the wind around his face and shoulders.

Theo’s all pink and sweaty from the walk. “What are you going to do?” he pants. “After?”

Draco explains. Last night, he’d dug out the Manor’s deeds from his father’s office and took them up to his wing to read through them. Painted-Draco had asked, on inspection of Draco’s dust-covered hands and red-rimmed eyes, what they were.

“Files,” Draco had murmured, licking his thumb and turning the page, wincing against the bitter taste of muck and old paper.

“Files? Files for what?”

“You ask too many questions, for a portrait. The artist must have really liked me, hm?”

Painted-Draco had backed down with a flush, resuming his position with his wand held loosely in both pale, dove-winged hands.

Painted-Draco isn’t real. He isn’t real insofar as he doesn’t have a soul, he doesn’t have feelings, per se, but Draco still can’t quite bring himself to admit to him that he’s getting everything in order for the transfer of ownership, that he’s passing the Manor and everything in it to Wixen Heritage. He doesn’t have the heart to tell painted-Draco that he'll probably end up behind a roped display for wixen visitors from all over the world to gawp at; one of the last surviving Malfoy portraits.

“At least he turned out to be good,” someone might say.

“Did he really, though?” another might reply, their eyebrow raised.

“It’s the right thing,” Theo says. He puts a big hand on Draco’s shoulder, urging them back down the hill towards the Manor. “No one will be able to look after this place better than WH.”

Draco nods wordlessly.

Theo sighs. “What should I tell Berlin?”

Right. Work.

Draco rubs his temples. “I don’t know. Forget that for now. Stay for dinner?”

_____

“What’s this?”

Justin leans over the arm of the old brocade sofa and slips his fingers down the furred edges of the pile of papers there: unopened letters, copies of the Daily Prophet and The New York Ghost dating back months and months, marketing slips from Flourish & Blotts and Wiseacre’s and all sorts. He picks today’s Prophet from the top of the pile and unfolds it.

“Owl Post,” Draco says from his spot in the adjacent settee, legs stretched out, ankles crossed atop a matching blue and silver ottoman, the colours faded with age. “I’ve just been collecting what I’ve found around the house and—” He stops himself with a laugh. “Were you this nosy in school, Justin?”

The paper sags and Justin looks over the top of it, sheepish, his cheeks whisky-pink.

Draco picks out another chocolate from the box on his lap, popping it into his mouth, chewing slowly over the melting caramel. Beside him, Theo swirls his glass, ice clinking, head tilted back, gaze pointed at the ceiling. He smiles lazily.

It’s late. Draco had been discussing food options for Lucius with Flinty when he overheard Theo chatting to Justin in the foyer. He’d trailed off, mid-sentence, when Theo asked Justin outright if he had any plans for dinner, if he’d like to join them, because, “it’s an awfully long Apparition journey from Wiltshire to London, isn’t it?”

It bloody well is not.

They’re lounging in the west wing’s sitting room, well-fed, drinking Draco’s father’s best Japanese whisky and sharing chocolates sent that very morning from an old school in Paris where he once taught a summer class. With sympathy and regards. Justin’s Healer robes are draped over the empty armchair by the hearth, and Theo keeps snatching glances at his arms, freckled and exposed in his short-sleeved t-shirt the colour of fresh parchment. There’s a dark red stain on the ringed collar, just a dot; Draco’s equally too polite and too afraid to ask him what it is.

Lucius is asleep in his chambers. Has been for hours.

Draco waves a hand. “I’m joking,” he says, but Justin folds the paper anyway and tosses it onto the antique coffee table between them.

“Do you still read the Prophet?” Justin asks. “In Copenhagen?”

Draco Summons the paper into his hands, folding it open over the chocolate box. The headlines are all relatively mundane and non-controversial: The Magpies have triumphed against the Bats in Norfolk; a new head has been announced within the Department of Magical Artefacts; a young and handsome pro-Quidditch player has just celebrated his wedding in Salisbury.

“Not really,” he says, turning the page.

“They interviewed you though, didn’t they? I remember reading something.” Justin’s eyes are bright, curious. “I remember seeing your picture.”

Draco laughs, picking out caramel from his teeth with his tongue. “A few times. Horrible. Every time they ask I always think, this will be the time I say no. But this one”—he pokes Theo’s arm, and Theo grins at him—“manages to convince me otherwise.”

“It must be awfully exciting, Draco,” Justin says wistfully. “Being an artist. Travelling the world and—people knowing you, as they do.”

“It’s more insular than you’d think,” Draco hums, turning another page, but Justin doesn’t seem to hear him, because Theo’s getting up to sit beside him instead, asking in a low voice if he’d like a refill, his arm draped over the back of the sofa behind Justin’s head.

Draco hides a knowing smile behind the pages.

He reads a snippet of a review of a new book on the history of the Beauxbatons Academy, scans the job ads. He flicks to the travel section—that and the personals had always been his favourite as a boy—and he reads the lists of wixen properties available for rent over the Mabon period.

HAVE YOU BEEN TO BLACKDOWN?

Take the trail along the River Otter and discover the official Wixen Area of Natural Magic (WANM) in the Blackdown Hills between Somerset and Devon. Recharge your core, get inspiration, or just switch off. Cabins and rooms across the village available to rent—

Draco lets the page drop with a frown. “Have you ever heard of Blackdown? It’s not far from here, is it?”

Justin’s interest piques again. “Oh, yes—that’s where Potter’s village is, isn’t it?”

Draco blinks, his chest turning strangely full, something that steals the breath from him. Theo sits up straighter, his arm slipping away from behind Justin.

“I mean, I heard… Harry Potter… owns it,” Justin says, less sure of himself now as he scopes out the odd new silence between Draco and Theo. “He bought it. The whole wixen village, there in Blackdown. It’s where he lives, and—I’m sorry, have I overstepped, or…?”

Draco clears his throat. “No, no. Of course not, it’s just—I didn’t know. Did you?” he asks Theo, who immediately lifts his fingers from his knee in a shrug.

“No, I didn’t.”

“What’s it called?” Draco asks. “The village?”

Justin smiles. “Deerhall.”

_____

Draco’s years of idle high living had also been a time of quiet reconciliation, where Draco’s friends had found themselves drinking in the same bars and clubs and pubs as Harry Potter’s friends, and at some point, they all sort of forgot why they hated each other so passionately in the first place.

“What’s this?” Harry had asked Draco once, brazen and tipsy in the dark corner of a trendy new bar in Diagon. It was the first direct question Harry had asked him outside of school—two years after eighth-year, three years after the trials. Before then, it’d been all distant, perfunctory nods, glances of polite acknowledgment as they crossed each other’s paths, but even those had been imbued with some sense of—curiosity. Draco can see that now.

Draco had blinked, looking down at Harry’s fingers where they pressed so boldly to the collar of his shirt, some new thing he found in Chelsea on what he and his friends liked to call “Muggle jaunts”—shopping, drinking, partying in those glossy, overflowing streets that had once felt so forbidden to them as children. He’d felt his lips tuck up into an amused, hazy sort of grin as he’d said, “a shirt, obviously”, unsurprised by the slow, sultry heat pooling low in his belly.

Harry had slipped his fingers under the top three buttons, feeling out the stiff, expensive stitching. Draco had pressed his own hand to the small of Harry’s back, tugging him closer, too buzzed to feel any real shock or nervousness that they were coming together like this, because since the start, really, it had all felt inevitable in some way.

“There’s no collar,” Harry had said.

“It’s called a grandad collar.”

“It looks good on you.”

Their kisses had been hot and open from the off, going on and on and on as everyone else in the room moved to a different rhythm, and later, when Draco asked Harry if he smoked, they’d walked out together into the pale London twilight, their arms brushing, their nerves buzzing as they found a shadowed spot between the club and the back of St Michael’s to hurriedly get each other off with their hands.

They’d smoked, after, under the old church spire. Draco can still remember how the night had smelled: steely and wet and earthy from a brief, late summer downpour.

Harry had kissed him, short and firm and a little damp. He’d tasted of salt. One of them had said—after almost two decades, Draco can’t remember who—“let’s do this again sometime.”

They had, about a month later, in Harry’s Islington townhouse. He’d called on Draco after a ball at the Parkinson residence, and when Draco had stepped through Harry’s fireplace in his tails, his bowtie hanging loose around his neck, Harry had greeted him wordlessly with a kiss. He’d pulled Draco over the grate—Draco hopping on one leg, almost knocking over the companion set—and laid Draco out on his bed. After fussy zips and fussier buttons had been hastily and clumsily seen to, Draco had stared at the shadows moving across the ceiling, panting and hot all over as Harry took him into his mouth. At the time, he’d been too afraid to tell Harry how bad he’d wanted it. He’d been too afraid of coming too soon and giving himself away.

It hadn’t mattered in the end, because after four or five long licks and a deep but uncoordinated suck, Harry had begged Draco to come on is face, and those words alone had been enough as Draco scrabbled to rub the slippery head of his pulsing cock, aiming it just in time and spilling messily across Harry’s lips and cheek.

That’s how it went, for a while. Harry calling on Draco. Draco calling on Harry. Fancy meeting up tonight, are you alone, are you busy, are you awake. And, at the time, while Draco had been certain Harry was sleeping with other men, Draco himself had been unmoved by anyone else but unable to confess as much to Harry, because—Merlin, the humiliation.

It’d been fun, uncomplicated, and Draco wouldn’t spoil a good thing with something as gauche as infatuation.

Harry, of course, had made it a little difficult for him, from time to time: the sex, the all-consuming nature of it, the way it made Draco think about Harry when they were together and the way it made Draco think about him when they weren’t; the small gestures, like cooking Draco fry-ups on particularly bad mornings after big nights out; how he’d listen to Draco, generously and patiently, as Draco vented about his locked-up father, the same father Draco had echoed so brainlessly in school when he knew it was the quickest and dirtiest way to get under Harry’s skin; how he’d sometimes read his bedside books aloud on Draco’s request and laugh good-naturedly when Draco pointed out all the implausibilities and plot holes and made Harry “do the voices”.

His kisses. The hurried, hot little presses of his mouth when he was just about to come; the open, lazy, filthy things they would share right before their clothes would start coming off.

Other times, Harry had made it—easy.

There were the small, frivolous things, like being too hot to sleep beside, and liking onions, and loudly supporting the Cannons, and how his socks would never match. And then there were the bigger things, like public displays of affection when they weren’t officially seeing each other, and conversations like—

“What do you want to do? Now we’re out of school?”

“I don’t know. I rather like this, right now. The in-between bit. I’d like to do that for a while.”

Harry’s brow had wrinkled. They were naked, smoking in bed on top of rumpled sheets like a couple of bon vivants, Harry’s head on his chest and his scarlet training uniform crumpled on the floor at their feet. “Don’t you want to do something good?” he’d asked.

—Yes, it’d been fun and uncomplicated, until it wasn’t.

And even though he’d fallen in love, at some point during the chaos—unwilling, unprepared—Draco supposes he saved them both, in that regard, when he left.

_____

After Justin leaves via the entrance hall’s fireplace, Theo drags Draco back into the sitting room for another drink and says, “I always thought he’d end up with Ernie Macmillan.”

Draco raises one cool, amused eyebrow.

“Theo,” he says. He’s stretched out on the settee, head resting against a musty old ruche cushion.“I know the wixen population is rather small, and the gay wixen population is even smaller, but—don’t you think that’s a rather fanciful notion? Ending up with your school boyfriend?”

“Merlin, you’re much posher when you’re sloshed,” Theo says with a barked laugh.

“But”—Draco waves his glass in the air—“what I’m saying is, it’s not entirely realistic to end up with your first love, is it?”

Theo hums. It’s a familiar sound, all sly and smug and suggestive. “Don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never been in love. Have you?”

Cheeks burning, Draco sighs through his nose and stares at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the plaster, thin and spidery, running all the way from the chandelier to the moulding.

“Stop that,” Draco says with a click of his tongue. He sits up on one elbow, pulling the cushion out from behind his head. He tosses it at Theo, who catches it easily in one hand. He should have been a Quidditch player.

“Come on, then,” Draco says. “Time to brush up on your Transfig, you swot. You can stay the night.”

_____

Draco finds the village name halfway down the page.

Deerhall.

He presses his thumb against it, sliding the edge of his nail underneath the print to make a faint line against the paper. Behind him, a pale yellow Lumos orb hovers inches above his left shoulder, the only point of light in the room besides the blueish glow of the post-midnight sky as it filters through the hallway’s windows.

Theo snores softly from his makeshift bed by the fireplace. His arm is flung above his head, and his glasses are gripping on for dear life on the tip of his nose.

“I might want to go,” Draco murmurs into the quiet.

Theo snorts awake. “Mm?”

“I said, I might want to go. To Deerhall. To see him. Do you think I should?”

Theo shuffles against his Transfigured pillows and smacks his lips. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he tilts his face towards Draco, the orb bathing his features in warm, flickering light. “Yeah. Yes, you definitely should go. A fine idea.”

Draco frowns. Painted-Draco is staring straight ahead in his frame, haughty and bored. He hadn’t been very impressed by their new arrival’s plans for sleeping over.

“That’s Theodore Nott? Do you have giant’s blood in you or something? What the hell happened to you?”

“Charming,” Theo had said, tapping painted-Draco on the end of his little nose. “You’re just jealous you’ll never grow up to be as big and strong as I am, you reedy little git.”

Theo takes off his glasses and opens his eyes. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking, if I don’t go tomorrow, I might never.” It’s a little dramatic. Draco purses his lips as soon as the words leave them. It’s a terrible idea. He hasn’t seen Harry in almost twenty years, who knows if Harry still thinks about him? And even if he does, what if he’s still angry, what if all he remembers is their fraught conversations, and how Draco had taken the easy way out without a second glance? “I shouldn’t leave,” he backtracks. “I can’t just drop everything and leave my father with Justin, I—”

“I’ll stay.” Theo clears his throat and closes his eyes again. He drops his glasses onto the blankets. “It’s just a couple of days. Go. I know you want to.”

It’s a terrible idea.

Draco tosses the paper aside and rubs at his eyes. The Lumos orb flickers out, plunging the room into hazy blue moonlight.

_____

“Are you sure?” Draco asks Theo over breakfast the next morning.

Rain patters against the winter garden’s glass roof. His bag is already packed and waiting for him in the Manor entryway: spare jumper, one pair of socks, one pair of underwear, his toothbrush. Just enough for a single night’s stay. Unpretentious and unassuming.

Theo pokes at his omelette. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m sure.”

“Just one night. Perhaps not even a night, I might not find a spare room, I may only be gone a few hours, I—”

“Draco.” Theo stretches across the table—Victorian cast iron, Shropshire-made, Draco’s mother’s favourite—and places a hand on Draco’s forearm. “Please. For the love of Merlin. Go.” He smiles. “The castle will remain intact, I’ll make sure of it.”

Draco takes a breath and nods.

The Apparition instructions on the travel article place Draco at a forked path alongside River Otter, about two and a half miles from Deerhall. It isn’t raining in Somerset, but the clouds are grey and the ground is wet along the trail, a path shaded by thick, Autumn-turning woodland that smells of damp bark and the mushrooms sprouting from the trees and earth along the walk. It’s muggy, and after about a mile in, Draco’s jumper starts to feel itchy.

The rain begins a light shower. It’s a cool relief, so rather than casting an Impervius Charm or tugging up the hood of his raincoat, Draco lets the drizzle dampen his warm face. By the time he makes it to the end of the last half-mile—a steady incline towards the cobbled foot of the village—the ends of his hair are curly and damp, sticking to the collar of his coat.

He sees an inn first, right on the corner. The Old Crup. Movement behind the foggy windows suggests it’s fairly busy.

If anyone’s going to know the ins and outs of a village, it’s the local pub’s landlord.

The smell of lunch hits Draco immediately upon entrance—savoury pies and chips and battered fish from the Channel. Most of the tables are taken, but he finds a spot along the bar, and he studies the taps and the beermats advertising the local ale. It’s all so—English. Perhaps he’s been softened by Europe, because his first urge is to order himself a large glass of red.

The landlord—short, bearded, of indeterminate age—eyes Draco curiously. Draco clears his throat and asks for a pint of ale.

“I know you,” the bartender says, plopping the glass on the bartop in exchange for Draco’s Galleon. “I’d recognise that hair anywhere.” He smiles. His teeth are alarmingly white. “Yeah, I know you.”

He doesn’t, of course, but the familiar smugness in his tone sets Draco on edge. He wipes a hand over his clammy forehead, pushing back a few stray curling strands of hair. “Oh, do you?”

“Growing it out like your dad, are ye?”

Oh. He knows Draco because of—

Draco is used to interested, erudite members of the wider wixen world approaching him to ask about his art, his process, his exhibitions, his interviews. He forgets that most people in wixen Britain recognise him because of who he was when he was a child.

“I—no, I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,” he says. He clears his throat, gathering his hair back, twisting it into a sloppy knot to keep it out of the way and off his neck. The landlord frowns, drumming his thumb against the tap still tight in his grip. After a moment, he laughs, easy and unbothered.

“New round ‘ere, aren’t you?”

Draco draws deep from his glass. He’s thirsty, and overwarm, and nervous. “Is it that obvious?”

The landlord peeks over the bar to stare at Draco’s nice boots. “A little. Here for the healing benefits, then? Or just our famous ale?” He smiles his blinding white smile.

“Er, well. I saw the ad in the Prophet, and…” Draco glances around furtively. No one else is listening to them. “Is it true that Harry Potter lives here?”

“Lives here?” the landlord asks with a sly chuckle. “This whole village is Harry Potter.”

Right. Of course.

“Where can I find him?”

“Oh, he’s always bopping about here and there and everywhere, is Harry.”

“Yes,” Draco says patiently. “But where does he live?”

The landlord squints at Draco. “I can’t just go out giving Harry Potter’s address to every Tom, Dick, and Merlin, you know. D’you know how many tourists ask me that question?”

“I’m… an old school friend,” Draco says, wiping sweat from his top lip.

“Be that as it may—”

“Look, he’d want to see me. And I pose no threat, I assure you, I—”

The landlord sighs. He points behind Draco’s shoulder. “Just keep walking up that hill there. To the end of the village, near the fields. Most people know it’s his, anyway, but—you can’t get in. No one can get in.”

Draco drinks deeply from his glass, leaving it on the bar half-full. “Thank you,” he says, fishing his bag up from the floor.

“Oi,” the landlord says. Draco turns, halfway to the door. “Be careful, mind. Just—be careful.”

_____

The drizzle stops quite abruptly, and the sun pushes in through the thin grey clouds, turning everything hot and fragrant. Draco ties his coat to the back of his rucksack and continues up the hill, pushing itchy jumper sleeves to his elbows. He’s panting slightly by the time he makes it to the fence bordering the fields.

There’s a country house, nestled between criss-cross of green hills and moated within a body of dark water. It’s smaller than the Manor, but by no means small—red brick, climbing vines, sash windows, moss-covered garden walls. As Draco climbs over the fence’s stile and gets closer to the front of the house, he can see that it’s gated, and he can feel the magic radiating from it in ripples and waves, tingling at his skin and making the little hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He gets as far as the wild lavender growing at the foot of the garden wall before he sees him.

Harry wanders in and out of view from an upstairs window, pushed open to let the fresh air in. He stops, obviously sensing a stranger in the vicinity of his wards, and Draco grips the handle of his rucksack hard, his head tilted back, his face flushed from the rain and the sun, his lungs tight.

It’s as if Draco knew where, exactly, to look.

It’s as if he knew, where, exactly, he’d find the still point of the turning world—Harry, who at thirty-nine is rose-golden and everything and too much and at this moment, too close and too far away, somehow.

Harry leans out of the window. His hair is as wild and curly as ever, his beard dark. He’s filled out a little, but his glasses are the same, his scar is the same, and his stunned expression is the same expression Draco recognises from a lifetime ago, and when Harry opens his mouth to speak, nothing comes out.

Draco feels the magic around him sizzle, then slip off, like a wave approaching the shore only to disappear again.

“It’s you,” Draco breathes.

_____

It hit Draco a month after he moved away.

Twenty-two and taking a moment to pause between the heady exhilaration of moving to a new city—with his own bank account, his own schedule, and a freedom that had been chosen by him—he found himself moved by, of all things, a torn-up paperback. It was crammed on the shelf in the tiny English-language section of a second-hand bookshop in Vienna’s 7th District. He’d turned it over in his hands, breath caught in the back of his throat as a thousand feelings and sounds and images flooded to him at once: the scritch of Harry’s fingers as they slid along the edges of the pages; the way he would scrunch his nose to push up his glasses so he wouldn’t have to let go of his book or of Draco’s hair; the low grumble in his chest, the noise he’d make between harder sentences or passages Draco knew he found touching but wouldn’t admit to it aloud; the warm tickle of his toes as they slid along Draco’s ankles.

Draco had been with Baldur at the time and Baldur’s sometimes-girlfriend Else, who reminded Draco of a bleach-blonde Pansy, with her cat-eye liner and deep, scratchy voice. She’d asked him, “What are you looking at?”

Draco had been unable to reply for what had felt like an eternity, but must have only been half a minute.

“I’ll never see him again,” he’d moaned later, over coffee and cigarettes in Mariahilf.

“That’s not true,” Else had said emphatically, tapping ash into the smart crystal tray between them. “So, you arrange to see him between classes. No big deal?”

“Big deal,” Draco had said. “Massive deal. He’s different than I am. He has a lot of commitments, he—”

Don’t you want to do something good?

The words had haunted Draco for years.

“—he’s famous. He has a public role. I don’t. And besides all that, he has no idea how I feel about him. And he can’t know. He’s far too important.”

Else had shrugged one careless shoulder. “So give it time. You never know what might happen in the future.”

Draco had nodded, but much like the old Rankin title he’d left on the shelf in the 7th District, he didn’t think he’d ever see Harry again.

_____

“It’s you.”

There’s a high-pitched buzz in Draco’s ear. He lets go of his bag strap and the world tilts on its axis.

“Draco?” Harry calls out from somewhere above his head.

Draco touches his fingers to his top lip. They come away wet, warm, red.

“Draco!”

_____

Draco can’t remember hitting the ground, but he must have.

There’s a hand on his cheek and a hand in his hair, brushing it back from his forehead.

There’s a man hovering over him, mumbling Latin under his breath.

The air smells of nettles and petrichor and warm mud and stone.

The man is Harry Potter. The smell is the weather or his magic, Draco isn’t really sure. Gingerly, he touches his nose. It’s dry.

“Merlin on a bike, you’re okay,” Harry breathes. His hands slip away, but not completely. They come to rest on Draco’s chest, palms flat, fingers wide. Solid and warm.

“I’m okay,” Draco says faintly. He blinks. Harry sits back on his haunches, hands slipping away. Draco misses them immediately. “What just happened?”

Harry scratches the back of his neck. “Magic surge, of sorts. I er… well. It happens sometimes. When I’m shocked, or—unprepared.”

Draco sits up slowly, wincing against the stiffness in his back. He looks around. His bag is halfway up the drive, close to the open gates.

“I might have pushed you a bit,” Harry says, embarrassed.

Draco rubs at his arm. “A bit?”

“I fixed it! I fixed you. Do you feel okay?”

Draco nods. He gathers his hair, messy and half out of its tie. He can feel his face growing hot. He’s not sure where to look. It’s like he can only take bits of Harry in at a time—his black curls; his eyes; the curve of his soft, worried mouth; the jagged edges of his scar; his scabbed knuckles; his sinewy forearms, on show beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his seaweed-green jumper—like taking him in all at once will cause another calamity. “I’m fine.”

Harry licks his lips and falls back onto his bottom, pressing his hands to the gravel, his knees loosely bent. He runs the back of his wrist across his forehead and lets out a slow breath through pursed lips.

“Hello,” Draco says quietly.

“Hello,” Harry says.

“How are you?” Draco asks, because it’s all he can think of right now, and it doesn’t sound like enough, but—it’s really all he has.

“I’m…” Harry looks around. At the big country house, its sprawling garden and moat, and the hills, leading to the forest, to the village beneath it. “Merlin, I don’t know, Draco. I’m fine. I’m good. How are you?”

“Yes, good.” Draco touches his nose again, his lip, testing it for more blood. His fingers come away clean.

Harry wipes some dust from the knee of his jeans. “Do you still like tea?”

_____

Harry’s home is large, echoey, cool. The floorboards are natural and bare, the walls neutral. The light streaming in from the windows overlooking the garden seems to do most of the decorating: the way it casts golden light and shadows across the sage green window seats and jute rugs and the wooden shoe rack in the large hall, lined with the same size wellington boots and walking shoes.

Harry’s kitchen is clearly well-used, well-loved. The ceiling is low, with exposed beams and a stone hearth, a line of more modern kitchen cabinets and a wide, ceramic basin. The kitchen island in the middle of the room serves as a dining spot, surrounded by wooden stools and underfoot shelving stuffed full of cookbooks and magazines. There’s a half-eaten plate of toast, an open book, a stool halfway out of its place.

Draco wipes a sweaty hand across his thigh whilst Harry’s back is turned. His bag and coat are in the hall. His boots are still on his feet, but Harry is in his socks. One green and blue stripes, one plain black.

“You’re visiting?” Harry finally asks. He has a teaspoon in his hand. Beside him, magic heats and brews their tea in a smart, transparent pot.

Draco nods. “Yes, I—”

It seems like a lot, to unload everything all at once, when they haven’t said a word to each other since Draco left.

“My father,” he says carefully. “He’s very ill. I’m here to—get the arrangements moving.”

Harry frowns. The spoon bounces slightly in his fingers. “I’m not sure if you want me to tell you I’m sorry. But I am.”

“You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying. It’s a lot to deal with.” The kettle whistles, and Harry turns to it, waving a casual hand in the air. Two cups come flying out of the cupboard. “Do you still take milk and sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar,” Draco says. He walks further into the room, his legs a little stiff, and he carefully sits down on a stool as Harry serves up the tea. Harry slides into the seat beside him, twisting around to face him. Draco can feel the warmth radiating from his body. Can smell the scent of his clothing detergent, and beneath that, something earthier. Something that’s just Harry.

“To be honest,” Draco says, “I’m not really sure how I feel about it. I suppose it’ll all come out in therapy one day.” He smiles ruefully.

“Where do you live now? How long are you over for?” Harry’s gaze is bright, and it bounces around Draco’s face: his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

“I live in Copenhagen. I’ve been there for a few years. I’m here for as long as it takes for my father to—”

He cuts himself off.

Harry nods. He almost looks like he regrets asking the question, but then he asks, again, “How long are you here? In Deerhall, I mean. How’d you—I mean.” He smiles. “Why are you here?”

“I found an article about this place in the Prophet. Yesterday,” Draco admits. Harry looks pleased, but also wary, perhaps. “And I found out about you. And I was curious.”

“You’ve never been curious before,” Harry says, a little dryly.

“No,” Draco says. It’s a lie. Of course he’d been curious, that month after he’d moved to the continent, and for months after, but he hadn’t allowed himself to mourn for too long. It had felt sad, pathetic, even, to mourn a relationship that had barely been a relationship, to mourn over lost love that had been wholly unrequited. “But I’m here.”

Harry sighs. “You’re here. Do you have a place to stay?”

“I wasn’t planning to stay,” Draco says. Another lie.

“You’ve come all this way.”

“Wiltshire’s not far at all.”

Harry shrugs. “But still. You don’t want to catch up? You’re staying. I insist.”

“Here?” Draco asks, looking around, his stomach doing all sorts of unusual things, a feeling he hasn’t experienced in years.

“I have room,” Harry says. “Let me show you.”

_____

“Oh, you expect me to sleep here, do you?”

The gall of him. Draco almost can’t believe his own words, the way they slip, so casually, so suggestively, from his tongue. He’s not in his early twenties anymore—he barely recognises himself as the same person—but the more time he spends with Harry, the closer to Harry he gets, the more those old feelings and urges come back to him, jostling to take the steering wheel.

He rubs a hand over the back of his warm neck, laughing at himself.

Harry laughs too, bright and surprised. Good-humoured, he asks, "You don’t like it?”

He’s definitely caught onto the suggestion of Draco’s tease, which is, Merlin—it’s too much.

“No, I do, very much,” Draco says truthfully. He sets his bag on the floor by the foot of the bed: a large, bleached-wood frame piled high with soft white bedding and pillows. The sash window is open, letting in the cool breeze. The barely-there curtains flutter with it.

Draco walks around the bed, glances out the window, touches the edge of the wardrobe door—tall, wooden, antique. The floorboards creak underneath his boots, loud in the weighty silence that’s suddenly surrounding them like a physical presence. The few sips of tea Draco managed downstairs roil around in his stomach nervously.

Harry rests his shoulder against the doorframe and crosses his arms. Draco can feel his eyes on him, watching his every move. His jumper folds tighter across his body, highlighting the lines of his chest, giving Draco a peek of his collarbones, the collarbones Draco always liked to—

Draco bites his tongue and pushes his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He sits against the window ledge. Outside, birds chirp in their nests.

“Have you been around the village much?” Harry asks.

Draco shakes his head. “I only just got here. I had a drink down in the pub.” He decides to omit the part where he asked for Harry’s address. “They warned me about this place,” he adds. Harry’s dark eyebrows crawl up his forehead. “They were very taciturn about it. Are you hiding something?” he teases. “Or is it just because you have a habit of flinging people down the drive when they come to say hello?”

Harry rolls his eyes and pushes himself from the doorframe. He pads across the room and sits on the ledge beside Draco, close—so close. Their thighs are barely an inch apart. Draco tucks his hair behind his ear, just for something to do with his hands.

“It’s a bit he does. Martin, I mean,” Harry says. “The pub landlord. He likes to dramatise the rumours to give tourists a bit of a scare. A bit of a thrill.”

“Rumours?” Draco asks. “What rumours?”

He barely knows anything about Harry anymore.

Harry laughs, husky and low. “That I’m so magically powerful that I can just look at someone and they drop dead?” He leans his head back against the window frame, his sharp Adam’s apple jutting from his throat. Draco glances at it, at the wiry cords of his neck, the thick dark hair just covering the sharp angle of his jaw. When he guides his gaze back up to meet Harry’s, Harry’s eyes are hooded, his long lashes swept downward.

Draco clears his throat and forces himself to look straight ahead, his cheeks filling with heat. “I can believe that,” he says dryly.

“I mean,” Harry says, the grin clear in his voice. “Part of it’s true. Maybe not the dropping dead bit, but the magically powerful bit.”

“Always so modest,” Draco says lightly.

Harry laughs again. The sound of it rumbles through Draco’s chest and tickles at the back of his teeth. He hasn’t thought about missing Harry in years. Here, with Harry standing right next to him, Draco misses him rather desperately.

“What happened to joining the Aurors? Unless—are you…?”

Quietness creeps between them again. Draco looks at Harry, studying the sad uptick of his mouth. Harry nudges his glasses with a curled knuckle and sighs.

“Yeah, I packed that all in pretty soon after you left,” Harry says.

Draco can believe that, too. He’d heard the rumours about Harry—that he was difficult to place in training because he kept wiping the floor with his fellow trainees. That his seniors were afraid of him. That, perhaps—and this was one of the more vicious rumours—the Ministry were rubbing their big, corrupt mitts together, poised to place Harry where they wanted him as soon as he’d earned his badge. That he was never a man to them; never a real person.

Draco’s glad Harry got out. Relieved, even. Draco would never have had the backbone to tell Harry that to his face, back then, but then again, their exchanges and intimacies had stood precariously on half-truths and Draco’s false display of casual affection. Honesty had never been a big part of their friendship.

Harry scratches his chin. Draco can hear the bristle of his beard against his fingers. “Maybe a year after you left? It’s a bit hazy now.”

“It’s been a long time.”

Harry looks at Draco closely. “A really long time. Ron’s gone, too. Left soon after I did. He works in the shop with his brother now.”

Draco hums. “And what about you? What do you do now? Besides own a village.”

“Well that just makes me sound like a knobhead,” Harry says.

“It’s not a lie, is it?”

“Which part?”

The knots in Draco’s stomach give way to something else—something warmer, something easier. He untucks his hands from his pockets and presses them to the window frame, leaning back to match Harry’s stance. “Do you work?”

Harry nods. “Bits and bobs. I run magical walking tours in the summer. I teach a couple of guest Defence classes at Hogwarts. I do odd jobs around the village and for friends. Some charity work.”

“You still see them often? Your school friends, I mean.”

“Oh,” Harry says, emphatic. “Absolutely. They’re family. I didn’t hole myself up in here like—I don’t know, like some sort of fairytale pariah, despite what it looks like.” He smirks. “Despite what Martin told you.”

“Sorry,” Draco says, laughing. “I haven’t been keeping up with things around here as much as I used to,” he admits.

Draco feels a gust of cool wind against his back, followed by the sharp sound of rain pattering against the windowpane. The room darkens quickly. Harry twists around and wrestles the window closed. His arm brushes Draco’s shoulder. Draco could move away, should move away. He doesn’t.

“So,” Harry says, sitting back down and wiping his arm where it got wet, flattening the dark hairs there. Outside, heavy rain pelts against the drive and thunder claps in the distance. The sound of it is muffled, and with the world now fully shut out, the space between them turns closer somehow. Draco knows Harry feels it too—it’s in the way he drops his voice, it’s in the way he softly murmurs his words like they might get caught. The little hairs on the back of Draco’s neck tickle and raise.

“I’ve told you what I do,” Harry says. “It’s your turn.”

“I paint,” Draco says. “I’m a painter.”

Harry’s smile is suddenly a little sheepish. “I know,” he admits. “But everyone knows that, don’t they?”

Draco thinks of his earlier exchange with Martin. “Not everyone.”

“Everyone who reads any wixen outlet or listens to the wireless does.”

“Have you been looking out for me, Harry?” Draco asks before he can help himself. He smiles a little, pleased at the way Harry’s ears turn pink.

“Maybe,” Harry says. Draco wants to ask more, urgently needs to know more about that, but Harry adds, his words bursting out on a breath, “I can’t believe you’re here,” and Draco’s courage is swept away on a wave.

“Can’t you?” Draco asks.

“It’s been so long. Tell me about Copenhagen. Do you like it? More than home?”

Home. What is home? Draco’s not sure he’s ever really known, not since leaving the Manor. He hums thoughtfully and leans his head against the closed window, a little too aware of Harry’s keen gaze. “Theo and I’ve been there for about five years now.” Time flies. Five years in school had felt like a lifetime; five years in his thirties has gone by in a flash. “We were in Riga before that.”

“Theodore Nott?” Harry asks. “He’s your—agent?”

Draco nods.

“Is he—are you two…”

“Oh. Gosh. No,” Draco says. “Merlin, no. We’re not a couple. We’re colleagues, and we’re very good friends. I see him as more the brother I never had, I suppose. We don’t live together or anything like that, despite what the press says.”

“Is there someone else?”

Draco shakes his head. He doesn’t mention that he’s never been in a stable relationship. Something has always gotten in the way: work, travel, distance. He sleeps around plenty, when he’s in the right mindset for it. Usually on press tours, when he knows he’ll never have to see the other man again.

“What about you? Do you live in this big house all alone?”

Harry shrugs. Smiles. “I like the space.”

“It suits you.” At Harry’s laughter, Draco feels his face go warm. “Not being alone. Christ. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—this home, this lifestyle…” He waves a hand in the air. “Slow living.” He groans.

Harry’s eyes dance. “You haven’t changed much, you know that?”

“Just a few more wrinkles around the eyes?”

Harry boldly presses his thumb to Draco’s temple. Draco gets a delicious noseful of him—earth, nettles. His hand is warm where it cradles Draco’s jaw, and his thumb slightly calloused. “Nah,” Harry says. “Not even that. You look good. You look happy.”

“I didn’t look happy before?”

“Not this happy.”

Harry wraps his fingers around a loose strand of Draco’s hair, running them through it until they taper off at Draco’s throat. “I like this,” he murmurs.

Draco tries to jump onto his last train of thought, but he’s faltering. “Are you disappointed I didn’t do anything good?” he finally asks, the words falling brazenly from his lips before he can stop himself.

Harry makes a face. His hands are back in his lap. Draco misses them. “What d’you mean?”

Draco feels foolish, surfacing an ancient exchange they had almost two decades ago, when they were barely adults. “You asked me if I wanted to do something good.” At Harry’s continued bafflement, Draco adds, “Back then, you made me feel like I wasn’t choosing an honourable path. By—I don’t know. Relaxing after the war.”

Harry’s eyes widen. “I can’t remember saying that. Merlin. What an arsehole. I’m so sorry. Fuck. Did I really?”

Draco sighs, pinching his nose. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a bit blurry. It’s all a bit blurry.”

“Look,” Harry says. His voice is firm again. Certain. “I probably did. I was… not in a good place, back then. No wonder you—fuck. Draco, I was so gutted when you left.”

“I had to,” Draco says.

“No, I know that. I know. And you told me why. And we never—”

He cuts himself off. Draco nods. Strange, how they can leave things unsaid now and understand exactly what the other one means. Draco wonders what’s changed, other than time.

“Can I show you something?” Harry asks.

_____

“This is a bit embarrassing.”

They’re in a different part of the house—downstairs in the study, a cluttered and chaotic space and nothing like anything else Draco has seen in the rest of Harry’s home so far. He thinks of his own place in Copenhagen, the lofty expanse of his living side versus the mess and disorder of his studio side. He smiles and finds a spot on a nearby sideboard to lean against whilst Harry uses magic to pull books and boxes from shelves above his head. Beside him, the window overlooks a water-logged and cobbled stable yard, a row of sheds and what looks like a coach house. Draco wonders if Harry keeps any animals.

“I have a messy room too,” he says, watching Harry reach for a red folder, the Muggle kind with metal ring binders and plastic pockets.

“That’s not the embarrassing part,” Harry mumbles distractedly, leafing through the folder’s pockets, keeping it tilted towards himself and obscured from Draco’s view.

“Oh,” Draco says. “Well. I’ll be embarrassed for you, then.” He frowns. “What’s in the folder?”

Harry sighs and closes it. He holds it out for Draco. “I’m not insane,” he adds after a beat.

“This is…” Draco says, opening the folder and letting the pockets fall to one side. Harry sits on the overstuffed brown sofa between his bookshelves, leaning forward and folding his arms over his knees. “Me,” Draco adds, seeing it now. Paper clippings, mostly from the Prophet and a few newer wixen magazines. Pamphlets and flyers. A folded-up exhibition poster from one of his first shows in London.

“I’m not insane,” Harry says again. He holds out a hand. “I was just—interested. And happy for you. And I wanted to keep it all to… I don’t know.”

Draco raises an eyebrow over the top of the folder. “Wank over?”

Harry closes his eyes and sighs through his nose. “Of course not. Twat.”

Draco’s laugh is soft, wheezy. He bites his lip. “I’m actually kind of touched,” he admits. He circles round to join Harry on the sofa, resting the open folder on his knees. He carefully pulls out a handful of clippings and starts unfolding them. “I mean. It’s a little strange. But also very thoughtful. Very you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harry mutters, biting his thumb, looking at Draco through a swath of dark curls. He pushes them back, and half of them stick up. “It’s just—whenever I see something about you, I keep it. I don’t go looking for it. I’m not that sad.”

Draco hums, dubious and playful. Harry nudges him with his elbow.

“Oh god, look at me here,” Draco says a few minutes later while taking his time to read each piece Harry had deemed worthy of holding onto. “This was one of my first magazine interviews. I must have been… what, twenty-seven? Twenty-six?”

Harry points at the article. “Yep, twenty-six.”

Draco stares at the picture of himself leaning against an empty desk with his arms folded. His hair is curtained and he’s wearing glasses and a black turtleneck. He looks very serious. “Who did I think I was?”

Harry grins. “I think you look really good there. I mean. You always look good. You’ve always looked good. And I’m sorry I was such a dickhead, back when we—”

“You weren’t,” Draco murmurs. He stuffs the clippings back into the folder and closes it. “We were young.”

“But still. I want you to know this now,” Harry says. “I want you to know that I think you did the right thing. I really do. I think you went after your happiness, and you found it, and look at you now.”

Draco’s not sure it’s fair to say ‘look at you now’ when ‘now’ he’s exhausted and struggling to care for his dying father, but he’ll take it. He’ll probably take anything from Harry if given half the chance. In all these years, that urge hasn’t waned.

“Did you really never think about me?” Harry asks. He sounds young.

“Of course I did,” Draco confesses, setting the folder aside. He sighs, angry with his younger self. Angry with Harry’s younger self. “I felt—very strongly about you. But I was hurt. I didn’t want to tell you how I felt because I was under the impression I didn’t mean anything to you.”

Harry’s laugh is rough. “And that made it easier for you to leave,” he says in wonder. He pauses. “You know. There was so much in my life back then that meant fuck all to me. Absolutely fuck all. But you were never that.” He shakes his head. “You were never that,” he says again.

They smile glumly at each other. Draco knocks his shoulder into Harry’s. “We were young,” he says again.

“We were stupid.”

“Speak for yourself.”

A sudden flash of lightning fills the room with a blue glow. Rain pelts harder against the window.

Harry presses his hands to his knees and stands. “Are you hungry?”

_____

Harry says something about it being too wet and miserable to hike down to the village, makes some offhand remark about how they’ll have to settle with his cooking instead, then effortlessly whips together one of the best meals Draco has had in ages.

“‘Settle’, my arse,” he says, scraping a piece of crusty bread through the dregs on his plate, gnocchi and leeks and creamy, mustardy sauce warm in his stomach. He picks up his tumbler of wine—it’s so Harry, to serve a top shelf Chablis in something designed for drinking water and squash—and smiles as Harry responds with a slightly befuddled raise of his eyebrow. “You made it out like you were going to serve me slop. That was delicious, thank you.”

Harry shrugs. He clears their plates away with a casual sweep of magic that makes the hairs on Draco’s forearms prickle and stand on end. He shivers.

“I don’t know what you’re used to,” Harry says. “For all I know, all you do is eat at all those fancy Muggle restaurants in Copenhagen and wherever else you’ve lived.”

Draco grins. “I think you’re overestimating how much money I earn.”

Harry leans forward across the kitchen table, wine in one outstretched hand, his chin in the other. He grins back at Draco. “You’re not usually this modest. What’s changed?”

Draco laughs weakly. “Oh, fuck off.”

Harry sits back with a yawn. “Do you want to watch a film or something? I’ve got a television. Have you ever seen a Muggle film?”

“Okay, now I know you’re really winding me up,” Draco says, getting up to refill their glasses. He holds his breath when he feels the pass of Harry’s hand against the small of his back, and he pauses pouring for just a second before continuing like nothing happened. Harry’s always been tactile, he reminds himself—with him, with his friends.

They retire to Harry’s living room—low beamed ceilings, white walls, squashy green furniture, a ship in a bottle on the mantel. Harry takes the couch. Draco takes the armchair, just to be safe.

Halfway through A Room With a View, when Helena Bonham Carter is being kissed in a poppy field, Draco turns to Harry—eyes barely open, wine glass empty—and murmurs, “Can I borrow your owl? Before bed?”

Harry nods and closes his eyes. “Yeah. Course. Just call out for her and she’ll come to your window. Dorothea.”

_____

Theo,

Before you ask, yes, she’s Harry’s. Be nice to her.

Trust all is well at the Manor. How’s my father?

I’m fine. Weather here is terrible. Should be back some time tomorrow.

Yours,

D

_____

Draco,

Your father is his usual bad-tempered self, though he slept most of yesterday. Justin and I found an old chess set in the study, I hope you don’t mind. He plays a good game, although I’ve always been terrible, haven’t I?

Sleep well. I’m sure you will.

I look forward to hearing about your trip. Don’t rush home.

Your friend,

Theodore Leofric Nott

_____

Draco is in the churchyard. It’s night time, warm, and the sky is a twilit-blue. He doesn’t hear the sound of the city—Muggle vehicles, rowdy drinking crowds, sirens, industry—only the light breeze, birds, the trickle of a nearby river. Is he in London? He doesn’t know.

He’s smoking against a wall, the ancient bricks rough against his back. Harry is with him. He’s younger, clean-shaven. His t-shirt is a little too big for him, enough to show off the sharp lines of his collarbones, slightly glittered with sweat, the way his skin would get in those packed bars, in his bedroom.

“I like you like this,” Harry says bafflingly, plucking the cigarette straight from Draco’s lips.

Draco closes his eyes and remembers pressing his face into Harry’s warm neck a thousand years ago, remembers the jerk of Harry’s wiry body as he uncoiled and came in Draco’s hand, eager and vibrant and gasping into the quiet. Draco remembers how it had felt, thinking he’d discovered something in Harry no one had ever found or been shown before; remembers how delusional he’d been, toying with the idea that no one could ever possibly find that secret slice of Harry again, that it was Draco’s to keep, even if Harry offered himself up to a thousand other people.

When Draco looks at Harry again, Harry is older, with his slightly longer curls and wry smile and soft, lived-in clothes. He takes Draco’s breath away.

“What are you thinking about?” Harry asks.

“You,” Draco admits more readily than he would have liked. He tries to bite his tongue, but he can’t. Not here. “The past.”

Harry tosses the cigarette. It disappears into the air like it never even existed. “You’ve got to quit that, by the way. It’s not good for you.”

“Smoking or thinking about the past?”

Harry doesn’t say anything. Instead, he pushes away from the wall to slot himself against Draco, hip to hip, thighs scissored. He’s every bit as hot as Draco remembers him being. He’s hard.

“Do you want this?” Harry asks; like he even has to ask, Draco thinks wildly, fuzzily, nodding and pulling Harry closer like he used to, like they used to, not questioning logic or time or anything at all the moment the churchyard turns into Harry’s dusty old sitting room in Grimmauld Place, not questioning the indistinct whereabouts of their clothing as he drags Harry on top of him on a huge, nearby armchair he doesn’t recognise but must know, somehow he must know it, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s wet between his spread thighs and Harry is sliding into him, long and hard and hot and everything, he’s—

“Harry,” Draco says desperately, tasting his mouth because he can, and in the hazy push of a dreamt-up wave the room around them warps, threatening to pull away from them entirely. It must mean something. It must mean it’s almost over.

Harry’s hair is wet and it’s in Draco’s face. He’s breathing heavily. “You never did sleep all through the night,” he pants.

_____

Draco wakes with a gasp.

He stares at the ceiling of the unfamiliar room as reality slowly slots itself back together, as his mind catches up with his body to remind him where he is. It’s dark, and it smells of burnt wood, decaying forest, cold air. He shuffles further into the warmth of the soft bedding, and it’s then he realises he has a hand wedged inside his pyjama bottoms. He’s hard, his prick wet and throbbing against his fingers.

He groans.

A creak in the floorboards outside the open door of Draco’s bedroom startles him. He yanks his hand free with a wince, clutching the duvet, sitting up on one elbow.

“Harry?”

Another creak. Draco can just about make out Harry’s outline by the top of the stairs.

“Sorry.” Harry’s voice is scratchy. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Draco lies back heavily against the pillows and wills the blood between his legs to find somewhere else to settle. “What time is it?”

“Almost five. I was going to go out for a walk.”

Draco blinks hard. He runs a hand over his face, wiping sleep from his eyes. “At five in the morning?”

Harry laughs softly. Draco hears him walk closer to the door. “Yeah. Sometimes I like to go out early if I er—well. It helps clear the cobwebs a bit. Ever heard of forest bathing?”

Draco laughs too, because it’s absurd. This whole thing is so—absurd. “Obviously not,” he sighs.

“Do you want to come?”

Draco’s face heats at the implication. He closes his eyes.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Just—give me a few minutes.”

“Alright,” Harry says, and he’s walking away again. “I’ll meet you at the front door. Wrap up warm.”

_____

Draco heeds Harry’s advice, and after brushing his teeth and finger-combing his hair into something resembling less of a crow’s nest, he layers up and meets Harry outside on the chilly portico. The grassy hills around Harry’s home are thick with low-hanging fog; the sky is a strange, powdery grey, with warmth just creeping in at the edges as autumnal dawn makes its slow approach.

“Morning,” Harry says, a little too cheerfully. Draco laughs.

“Morning.”

He falls into step with Harry.

“So,” Draco says at the edge of the woods, where the mist is thinner but the sky is darker beneath the criss-cross of branches overhead. “Forest bathing? Does one get naked for such an activity?”

“No,” Harry chuckles, casually, breathtakingly, letting out a small army of Lumos orbs with a wave of his wandless hand. Draco watches, stunned, as light crawls along the forest floor and settles amongst the moss and fallen leaves, dimming to a pleasing orange glow that somehow makes him feel warmer, that somehow makes him feel safer despite the great expanse of unknown stretched out before him.

“But,” Harry says, eyes sparkling. “I could make an exception.”

Draco clears his throat. “Could you now.”

Harry grins and shakes his head, taking Draco by the hand and dragging him further into the forest. Fallen branches crunch beneath their boots, and he finds a clear spot of ground for them to sit, using his elegant magic to keep it dry for them.

“You have to sit like this,” Harry says, crossing his legs, waiting for Draco to do the same. He passes a hand over Draco’s face without touching him. His fingers smell of trees and earth. “Close your eyes. Breathe.”

Draco feels silly, but does as he’s asked. He’s too tired to argue.

It’s the sounds he notices first. The light breeze through the thickets. Waking animals—bird calls, the flutter of small wings. Harry’s gentle breath.

Then it’s the smells—damp bark, turning leaves, wet grass, rich earth. Harry’s magic. He breathes deeper.

“Good?” Harry asks after what feels like a lifetime.

Draco nods. He can’t remember the last time the world slowed down for him like this. He opens his eyes. Harry’s looking at him closely, leaning back on his hand, one leg outstretched on the forest floor. Draco twists slightly to mirror him.

“What would you say?” Harry asks him, eyes searching Draco’s face behind the slightly smudged lenses of his glasses. The lights on the ground around them twinkle, fading in and out as sunrise creeps closer. “If I told you I wanted to kiss you?” He licks his lips. “For old time’s sake?”

“Only for old time’s sake?” Draco asks after a beat. At Harry’s little shrug, at his little smile, Draco finds himself smiling too, and he says, lips tingling in anticipation, “I’d let you. Of course I’d let you.”

Harry gathers himself and stands. He offers Draco his hand, and when he pulls Draco to his feet, he doesn’t let go. He walks them further into the woods until they’re standing against the thick, gnarled trunk of an ancient yew, and it’s there that Harry slides his fingers across Draco’s cheek.

They kiss. Soft, short, warm. It’s nice. Nostalgic.

Draco pulls back with the intention of smiling sadly at Harry. Of saying something meaningless and conclusive like, well, we did that, but Harry doesn’t let him. He pulls Draco closer and into another kiss, deeper this time, hot and searching; it’s the kind of kiss that can scramble a man’s head, the kind of kiss that feels like gasping for air after a century of being held underwater. The kind of kiss that says, I felt it all too, and I’m sorry I didn’t let you know.

“I dreamt of us last night,” Draco admits breathlessly, pulling back. Harry keeps a hold of Draco by the elbows.

“What were we doing?” Harry asks.

“What do you think we were doing?”

Harry drops his head back against the tree and laughs. Draco can’t help himself; he buries his face into Harry’s throat, pulling down the thin material of his neck warmer to expose his warm skin, kissing Harry there before he’s encouraged, with a gentle tug of his hair, back up to meet Harry’s mouth in another deep, open kiss that threatens to steal the breath from him.

They pull back to stare at each other.

They turn. Harry presses Draco up against the tree, hands hot as they work their way into the edges of Draco’s open jacket, as he palms at Draco’s ribs over the material of his jumper. He pushes it up to Draco’s sternum, baring Draco’s skin to the cold air and sliding down with it, smearing hot kisses across Draco’s chest as he goes. Draco’s hand slips over the back of Harry’s neck and into his hair as Harry unbuckles Draco’s belt and pushes his trousers down to his thighs.

“Fuck,” Draco gasps.

Harry settles one knee onto the ground and cups Draco’s cock over his underwear, a stroking pass of his hand that leaves Draco dizzy. When he does it again, Draco is almost embarrassed by the pitch of the moan that escapes his throat. He swallows hard, clutching Harry’s hair in one hand and his shoulder in the other.

“Do you want…?” Harry looks up at him. Draco stares back.

“Do you even have to ask me that?”

Harry presses a hand to Draco’s stomach and pulls down the elastic of Draco’s underwear, licking a stripe up the length of Draco’s cock when it swings free.

Draco shivers deeply. Harry takes him into his mouth, where it is molten, perfect, the same heaven Draco remembers well even though so much else about him has changed. Harry is more confident now, is more present somehow too, and he looks up boldly at Draco as he sucks him off, his fingers stroking Draco’s hip, keeping his jumper raised, his lips tight as their gazes lock and burn.

Draco moans. The branches around them quiver. The fog thins.

Harry closes his eyes as he builds a taut, wet rhythm, and Draco gasps out, “Can you fuck me?” He thinks of his dream. Of the perfect slide of Harry on top of him, of the heightened, blooming pleasure of it as they fucked Draco awake.

Harry pulls back, saliva wet on his lips and chin. “Here?”

Draco clasps Harry by the elbow. “Yes. Here.”

They used to take it in turns when they were younger, but Draco can’t ever remember asking for it like this. It was usually always on Harry, to make the demands, for Draco to follow them and pretend he had some semblance of control in the matter.

Draco turns and Harry braces his hips in a warm, capable grip, pulling his lower half away from the rough bark of the tree, leaning over Draco as Draco folds himself forward, head bowed, palms pressed against the bark like he’s praying to it. He hears the clatter of Harry’s belt, the snitch of his buttons and fly.

Draco groans when he feels those hands slide over his buttocks, when he feels thumbs slowly pry him open, when he knows Harry must be looking at him right there as he utters the magic they used to use on each other carelessly. He pushes back against Harry’s fingers, turns his head to press his mouth against the slippery fabric of his raincoat.

The feeling of Harry sliding inside him after almost twenty years nearly undoes Draco on the spot. He grunts against his arm, pushing back against Harry, squeezing his eyes shut.

Close your eyes.

He hears the forest. He hears Harry, panting, breath gusting against the crook of Draco’s neck. He smells Harry, only Harry—earth and nettles and his sweat.

“Oh,” Harry says, picking up a steady rhythm, Draco’s hip clutched in one hand while the other slides up Draco’s covered back and down the length of his arm, coming to rest on the back of Draco’s hand where it’s pressed against the tree. Harry pushes his fingers between Draco’s knuckles, gripping tight. “Oh, I—”

Draco lifts his head. His hair is in his face. It’s damp from the humidity. “You? What? You what? Harry.”

“Missed this,” Harry breathes, letting go of Draco’s hand and gathering his sweaty hair back. Draco opens his eyes. The forest floor is glowing. “Missed you.”

“Harry,” Draco says again, his head heavy in Harry’s grip, his cock now in Harry’s fist as Harry pulls him off to the tempo of his hard thrusts.

Draco comes with a yelp, startling waking birds in their nests.

“Is this what you meant by catching up?” he asks Harry later, soon after Harry seizes inside him with a shudder. Draco rolls his neck, delighting in the sensation of Harry’s release inside of him, hot and dripping against the inside of his legs.

Harry laughs, a wheezing sort of sound, and presses a tender kiss to the side of Draco’s head, the kind of kiss that would have made Draco’s heart ache, back in the day.

“Maybe,” Harry says cryptically. He clears his throat. “Let’s head back inside. It’s too cold to stay out like this.”

_____

They make their way up to Harry’s bed where they pull off each other’s clothes but don’t fuck. Instead, they kiss, sleepy and sated, naked limbs sliding against naked limbs as they find new ways to slot against each other.

“I really can’t stay,” Draco murmurs into the back of Harry’s neck, gently sifting his fingers through the dark hair on Harry’s abdomen.

“I know,” Harry says into the pillows. “It’s alright. You don’t have to tell me that. I know you can’t, Draco.”

Draco closes his eyes and lets himself drift for a while.

_____

When they wake again, it’s closer to breakfast time. They fuck.

Draco fucks Harry on his back, his hair curtaining their faces, keeping them cocooned as he holds on tightly to Harry’s leg and thrusts into him helplessly, panting his name into their messy kisses, his tongue salty with the taste of Harry’s skin.

After, they eat buttery toast on top of the bedsheets and Harry, ever the optimist, asks Draco, again, how long he plans to stay in England, after—

“—the funeral?”

“My goodness, Harry,” Draco says wryly between sips of rich, dark coffee. “Try not to mince your words, now.”

“You alluded to it yesterday. I’m being more direct,” says Harry. He Vanishes the plate they’ve been sharing.

Draco wipes crumbs from his fingers and gathers his hair back. Harry reaches out to touch it, to twist it through his knuckles, the pads of his fingers massaging slowly over the nape of Draco’s neck. Draco sighs and closes his eyes, letting Harry take his empty cup from him too. “It’ll all depend on how quickly I can hand over the Manor.” He cracks an eye open. Harry is looking at him curiously. “I’m donating it to Wixen Heritage. It might need some more work done to it before they can take it, I’m not sure. I might have to hire someone, a Curse-Breaker or… I don’t know. Someone to help. So I can’t put a number to anything right now. It could be months. It could be a year. I hope it’s not.”

They must be grown up, because Harry’s reaction is not to frown or throw a strop or shut Draco up with a kiss or another fuck. His reaction is a slow, sympathetic nod, a squeeze of the back of Draco’s neck. “You’re welcome to visit me here. Whenever you need a break from it all.”

And Draco’s response is not to shrug Harry off or pretend his offer is anything but genuine, either. It’s to let out a slow breath. It’s to show relief and gratitude and the slither of vulnerability he’d been so afraid of Harry seeing in him all those years ago.

Merlin, he’s tired.

He rests his head on Harry’s chest, allowing himself to feel the tiny spark of hope Harry’s invitation has aroused in him.

“I found an old portrait of myself, you know,” he murmurs sometime later, when he’s starting to feel too warm to lie around in bed. He shifts a bit, but not enough to knock Harry’s fingers from his hair. Harry seems to get the message though and peels himself away from Draco, pushing the sheets back and standing, naked, to stretch. Draco lies on his side, his head in his hand. “The little shit. I’m—he’s—fifteen.”

Harry shudders. “God, I hated you back then. But I’d kind of love to meet him.” He grins. “See if he’s as awful as I remember.”

“Oh, he’s worse,” Draco says, trying not to dwell too much on the thought of Harry wandering the grotty Manor hallways, of him interacting with his father and seeing the state of Draco’s quarters. It’s too bleak for the man Harry has become. “Trust me, he’s no way to remember me.”

Harry crouches by the side of the bed, resting his chin on his arm. Draco reaches out to touch his hair.

“But I know he’s not you,” Harry says. “Not anymore.”

_____

“Have you got everything?” Harry says. It’s the second time he’s asked the question in the past five minutes; he’s nervous, and he seems giddy too, and Draco wonders if it’s the reason the air around them is vibrating slightly—the way it tickles at the back of his neck and fills his chest with warmth. Maybe it’s just him. Maybe it’s just his own feelings of—

He’s not sure. Comfort? Joy? Hope?

“Toothbrush, socks, yep, everything,” he says, swiping his hair off his shoulder, glancing at the sky. They’re on the portico again, and the grey clouds are drawing in over the morning’s sun.

“Well,” Harry says. He slides his hands into his pockets. He’s in his socks. One yellow, one purple.

“Well,” Draco says.

“C’mere.”

Their hug is brief, but tight. Draco runs a hand over Harry’s jumpered back.

“Apparate safely,” Harry mumbles into Draco’s shoulder.

“Always.”

“Show off.”

Draco snorts. “You can bloody talk. Oh great forest whisperer.”

He steps back, leaving a respectable amount of space between them again. Harry pushes his hands into his pockets once more and sways back and forth on the balls of his feet, staring at Draco as Draco pulls his wand from the back pocket of his trousers.

“I have to go, Harry,” Draco says.

Harry nods. “Yep. Yeah, I know. I know.” He smiles; lopsided, reassuring. “Remember what I said. Don’t be a stranger, alright?”

Draco nods, and with one last glance—at Harry Potter, the still point of the turning world—he steps off the porch and lands on the gravel path outside the Manor.

Theo is there, waiting for him on the lawn. Justin is on the garden set reading a book to Lucius, who is wrapped up in heavy winter robes, his pale face scowling. Theo lifts a hand in greeting. Draco closes his eyes, and with a decisive breath, he drops his bag onto the grass.

“Hold on,” he says, and with a twist, the earth zips out from underneath him again and he stumbles back onto Harry’s porch in Somerset, and straight into Harry’s arms. Harry braces Draco’s elbows as if he was expecting it, and laughs.

“Bloody hell, what did I tell you about travelling safely? Are you in one piece—”

Draco shushes him with a kiss.

“I’m sorry,” he says between kisses, Harry’s hands sliding over his shoulders, down his back, bundling him closer. “I really do have to go.”

“Then go,” Harry murmurs, pressing one last kiss to Draco’s mouth, his cheek, the corner of his jaw. He pulls back with a smile. “You know where to find me.”

_____

“They told me you’d be up here.”

The air on the gallery’s rooftop is frigid and frosty. Draco tears his gaze from the park and colourful streets of Kreuzberg stretched out below, just visible beneath the orangey glow of streetlight. He buries his chin a bit further into his scarf and takes a draw of his cigarette, the smoke fogging his view of Harry in his puffer jacket.

“Hi,” Draco says.

“Hi.” Harry smiles. He crosses the distance between them in five easy strides, and the kiss he presses to Draco’s mouth is uncomplicated and warm and something that is becoming breathlessly, steadily familiar. He plucks the cigarette from Draco’s fingers and tosses it over the wall.

“Resorting to violent tactics, are we?” Draco asks, but Harry just laughs and kisses him again, in that way that leaves Draco vibrating in his skin—a slight part of lips, a gentle brush of tongue. “Have you seen it yet?” he whispers, their mouths a hair’s width apart. “The show?”

Harry shakes his head. “I was hoping you’d take me round and show me yourself.” He licks his lips, steadying his hands on Draco’s waist, his soft green eyes searching Draco’s face. “How’s the Manor? Your dad? Do you need me to come over again and take a look at any of the wards? Or objects? Or just—I don’t know. Be there with you.”

Draco sighs through his smile. Harry’s first visit had been back in November, Draco’s resolve crumbling easy; now that he’s let Harry in, he’s finding it incredibly difficult to keep him out, despite the joyless state of the Manor.

But he’s fine. He’s learning to trust that it’s fine.

He shakes his head. “Everything’s much the same. Lucius is—Lucius. When I left him this morning, he was sleeping. He just sleeps.”

“Flinty’s good,” Harry says. “He’ll look after him.” His eyes sparkle. “How’s young Draco? I miss him. Tell him I’m asking for him.”

Draco groans. “Oh, don’t. He’s got enough of an attitude problem as it is without lording that over my head.”

Harry tilts his head back and laughs. His breath makes white clouds in the air, and Draco can’t resist the shaking of his own shoulders, the ease and warmth he feels when he laughs along with him.

They bundle their coats and scarves into the gallery’s austere, white cloakroom, and Draco adjusts the collar of Harry’s corduroy shirt, charmed that he’s smartened up for this in the only way Harry knows how.

The room is crowded, the drinks are flowing, and Theo has a hand on Justin’s arm where they stand to admire a canvas with none other than Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, the former clutching a rounded, pregnant belly, the latter’s nose wrinkled in thought as he tilts his head to study the painting of the Manor from an old ship’s porthole. Draco’s stomach flips nervously. He hasn’t seen them since their London days. When Harry had mentioned to him last month that they expressed interest in coming along to the opening, Draco hadn’t hesitated in ensuring they were added to the guest list. Now, seeing them in the flesh, his palms begin to sweat.

“Don’t stress,” Harry says, passing him a glass of champagne. “We’ll get to them later. Show me,” he urges.

So, Draco does. He guides them through the paintings of the Wiltshire landscape as seen through the windows of his past and the windows of his imagination. They drink champagne and Draco only allows himself to get derailed once or twice by journalists covering the opening, their questions annoyingly probing around the nature of his and Harry’s relationship, something that has been swirling in the press for the past few weeks—ever since Draco was spotted in Deerhall by someone from the Prophet.

“That’s enough of that, thank you very much,” he murmurs under his breath, steering Harry away, towards the final piece of the show. His palms start sweating anew as they sidle along with the crowd until they’re directly underneath the wide and imposing canvas, the largest painting of the exhibition—a house atop a rolling landscape surrounded by thicketed forest and a dark moat. There’s no window frame in this one, only those that belong to the house itself. In the top right hand window—flung open, curtains fluttering—a figure wanders in and out of view.

“It’s—mine,” Harry says, and perhaps upon hearing himself, his portrait leans out of the window. His dark curls stick up, and he nudges his glasses up with one curled knuckle. He lets his arm hang out of the frame, watching something—or someone—in the distance.

Draco nods.

“It’s yours,” he murmurs into his champagne glass, feeling uncharacteristically shy about his work. He couldn’t give a toss what the art magazines say in their write-ups, but Harry’s opinion matters. It matters a great deal.

Harry squeezes Draco’s waist in full view of the crowd, in full view of the journalists, in full view of their friends.

“I think it’s perfect.” He tilts his head. Raises his eyebrows. “It’s stunning. All of it.” He pauses. “Do I really look that dishevelled?”

Draco laughs, looking down as Harry lets his head rest briefly against Draco’s shoulder. He gets a noseful of his hair; it smells like steel and snow and nettles and Harry’s glorious magic.

“Yes,” Draco says truthfully.

Harry takes him by the hand, and they absorb themselves back into the crowd.

Above the last canvas, the exhibition name is painted in blocky sans serif. Homecoming.