Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It’s as much a shock to Draco as anyone else that he’s accepted into St. Oswald’s School of Mediwizardry. He’d applied to six other schools, too, four in France and two in Germany, fully expecting that he’d be going abroad for his healer training, where the name Draco Malfoy wasn’t a huge black stain on his resume, swallowing up his excellent N.E.W.T. scores and two letters of recommendation. He’d only applied to Oswald’s at all because it was his dream school, consistently ranked as number one in Europe, with direct pipelines to St. Mungo’s residencies and research fellowships on the bleeding edge of their fields.

(The fact that the school was conveniently close to the long-term care facility where his mother now took up permanent residence was merely coincidental—or at least it was if a non-Slytherin asked.)

So when he receives the owl back three weeks to the day after submitting his application of enrollment, he’s so stunned by the opening line—Dear Mr. Malfoy, We’re pleased to offer you a position in the St. Oswald’s mediwizardry course beginning in October—that he has to read it three or four times before it really sinks in.

He’s less stunned by the owl that he receives a week after that, from St. Oswald’s Dean of Mediwizardry herself, requesting a private meeting with him before the start of term to discuss Draco’s special circumstances.

“Was there some inadequacy on my application?” is how Draco opens the conversation. His voice is tense and defensive, though he wishes it weren’t. After the War, it was a struggle to be anything other than tense and defensive.

Dr. Olivia Llewellyn, the Dean, senses Draco’s discomfort before she even takes her seat across from him at her desk. By the time she’s arranged herself in the massive leather armchair and folded her hands into a professorial sort of position, her expression has turned considering.

“No,” she says after the lengthy pause. “In fact, your application was excellent. It’s not just anyone who receives a recommendation from the Headmistress of Hogwarts.”

Draco purses his lips. Three months into Draco’s eighth year, after being beaten bloody by a cadre of Gryffindors looking to get some postbellum street justice, McGonagall had pulled him into her office. She’d asked who’d assaulted him, and of course he refused to say because Draco is a Slytherin, dammit, and if the War had taught him nothing else, it was how to pick his battles. Then she’d given him a long look and asked him about his plans after graduation. He’d told her he was going to be a healer, which had taken her off-guard, and she offered to write him a letter of recommendation if he needed one.

And, QED, Draco is a Slytherin. He wasn’t going to turn something like that down, no matter how unexpected it was.

“And yet I have special circumstances?” Draco returns, trying very hard to keep the defensiveness from becoming too obvious.

“It’s about the War,” Dr. Llewellyn says, and Draco prickles. “You were a Death Eater.”

“Yes,” he answers, voice tight. As if he could ever possibly forget. As if the world would ever let him forget.

“We have a few other students coming in with you who lost loved ones to the Dark Lord,” she says. “Are you familiar with Hannah Abbott?”

Draco glares down at his hands, gripping his knees, and sternly commands them to stop trembling. It mostly works.

“You’re rescinding my acceptance,” he says.

Dr. Llewellyn is silent just long enough for Draco’s stomach to drop into his feet.

He tells himself that this is fine. Draco was already accepted to his back-up school, L’académie de la magique médicale d’Orléans, and even though it’s only the second-best school in Europe and Draco will only be able to see his mother at most once a month, it’s fine, and he can make it work; he can still make something with what’s left of his life.

“In future,” Draco hisses, and stands up, sweeping his cloak off the back of his chair and over his shoulders, “you can just send an owl.”

“Mr. Malfoy,” Dr. Llewellyn suddenly says, “why do you want to be a healer?”

The question startles him, if nothing else. He hugs his cloak tight around his chest and stares hard at her.

He wants to ask, What does it matter? You’re not going to let me be one, anyway.

Instead, he says, “I’m tired of hurting people. I want… I…”

Dr. Llewellyn’s gaze is unnaturally still and unbearable. Draco regrets at once being so honest in his answer. He should have offered something more polished and empty.

Another long silence lapses. Draco isn’t sure what he’s waiting for—perhaps just relief from the intensity of Dr. Llewellyn’s penetrating stare.

Eventually, she says, “I’m not rescinding your acceptance.”

Draco startles.

“I am, however, formally advising you of the very thin ice on which you will tread, should you choose to enroll at St. Oswald’s,” she continues. “It is on Minerva McGonagall’s good word and clear evidence of your academic rigor that I am extending you one chance, Mr. Malfoy. If you are anything less than a model student, you will be kicked out of the program. If you cause any problems at all with your fellow students or the staff, you will be kicked out of the program. If you so much as set a toe out of line—”

“I won’t,” Draco says, when his mind finally catches up with his mouth. “I won’t, Dr. Llewellyn. I’ll be exemplary. On my honor.”

“Honor,” she repeats, frowning. “Not the first thing I’d expect an ex-Death Eater to swear on.”

Draco tries very hard not to react—or at least to hide all sign of it. He keeps his face carefully controlled as he says, “Just to be clear, you’re not rescinding my acceptance?”

“I am not rescinding your acceptance,” she confirms, “but I want you fully aware of the fact that I do not like you.”

Draco opens his mouth, then snaps it shut. He can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, surely his future superior admitting to hating him is undesirable, generally; on the other, at least she’s not pretending at civility. Honest malice is better than false kindness, surely?

“All right,” Draco says, very slowly, after a protracted and uncomfortable pause.

“I lost good friends in the War,” she says, and Draco once again chooses not to react. “I am taking a risk on all those ideals You-Know-Who tried so hard to crush—goodness, decency, forgiveness. But you have a long way to go in proving to me that you were worth that risk.”

Draco takes a slow, steady breath. He doesn’t have a way to say I promise I have learned my lesson that doesn’t sound shallow and obsequious. He can’t tell her about the six months he’d spent in Azkaban pending his trial, about how he’d only gotten out on the unexpected and unrequested testimony of Harry Fucking Potter of all people, about how he’d been receiving so many death threats that he had to make himself Unplottable just to stop the owls from coming, about the multiple assaults. He can’t tell her about how, if the goal of it all was to make him penitent, it had worked—but that he suspected that the goal was actually just to see him brought low, and that had also worked. He can’t tell her that Draco thoroughly and exhaustively knows better now in a way that she, or anyone, will believe him. He’s learned as much from experience.

So he doesn’t bother trying. He meets her eyes, swallows down his pain, and says, “Understood.”

“I didn’t realize this place was so fancy.”

“She’s my mother!”

“But I mean, the Ministry took nearly everything, didn’t they, out of the Malfoy vault? How can you possibly afford a place so swanky?”

Draco purses his lips. In truth, he can’t really afford a place this nice. Between the bills for his mother’s care facility, St. Oswald’s tuition, and keeping himself fed, he’s cutting the line very, very thin.

But Greg doesn’t need to know about Draco’s nutrition spell-based plan to cut corners.

“I’m making it work,” he lies, as together they exit through a large set of double doors and into a well-manicured garden. It’s a lush little sprawl of green grass and huge rose bushes, dominated by a willow tree in the center. Men and women in soft green robes stand swaying in the sunlight, talking to themselves, rubbing at their skin, or wandering aimlessly through the grass.

And, on a bench by the brick fence, his mother, staring at nothing.

Draco crushes down the stab of grief he always feels when he sees her these days. “Hi, mum.”

“Hi, Mrs. Malfoy,” Greg chimes in. Draco is so grateful that Greg still talks to her directly. Pansy had outright refused to see her at all—I can’t bear it, Draco, she’d told him, through big watery eyes, she was like a mum to me after mine died, and I can’t see her like that, I just can’t, I’m sorry.

Draco crouches down in front of her, smiling. “I was accepted into St. Oswald’s,” he tells her. Of course, she says nothing, doesn’t even look at him, not even when he reaches out and takes her hand in his. “It’s right on the other side of the city. Ten minutes by broom.”

Still, she says nothing. Draco is still working on training away the disappointment he feels every time she doesn’t acknowledge him.

Greg sits down next to her on the bench, stretching out his legs out and turning his face toward the midmorning sun. It’s late summer, bright and beautiful, the only hint of autumn is the crisp tang of the air. Draco had gone with her on holiday to Cornwall more than once, and she’d always talked about how beautiful it was and how she might like to spend her dotage there. It’s why he’d chosen this facility over others that might have been cheaper.

“Still can’t believe you’re going to be a proper healer,” Greg says. “All those generations living in idle wealth, and now the next Lord Malfoy is going to have a job.”

“I’m a disgrace to my bloodline,” Draco answers, and sits so Greg is on one side and his mother on the other. He supposes it’s a joke in the strictest sense, but neither of them laugh.

“You never did say,” Greg continues, “why a healer?”

Draco doesn’t answer for a time. The reason he’d given Dr. Llewellyn had been true—perhaps a bit more true than he’d intended to be—but Greg knows him well enough not to be satisfied with something so straightforward. No self–respecting Slytherin would.

“I just… I’ve made a lot of mistakes, you know?”

Greg doesn’t say anything.

“And those mistakes hurt a lot of people—” (he tries, decisively, not to think of hot air stinging his eyes and the acrid scent of smoke) “—and I don’t know if I can make up for all of that, but I…”

“Never knew you were one for penitence,” Greg says, with a small, fond smile.

“I haven’t had a good track record with knowing which ideals are worth fighting for, so I’m trying something new. Penitence seems… safe.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re on the right track.”

Greg scoops Draco into a one-armed hug, and Draco smiles into his shoulder. Between six months in Azkaban and a fraught eighth year at Hogwarts, life hadn’t been easy after the end of the War. Greg had been one of the few things in Draco’s life that made it bearable.

He hesitates right on the edge of saying as much out loud. But though Draco’s willing to try out this penitence thing, he’s still not sold on sincerity.

(Besides, Greg knows already. He’s intuitive like that, always able to pick away Draco’s layers until he finds the mushy core. Thank Merlin he’s a friend; he has far too much blackmail material to be Draco’s enemy.)

“How’s Millie?” Draco asks, instead of saying something absurd like Thank you for being kinder to me than I’ve ever deserved.

“All right,” Greg answers. “Still a bit glum, but I think her job at Knockturn is helping. You know her. She likes having things to do.”

“I should drop by soon,” Draco says, “before term starts. Say hello.”

“You just want her mince pie.”

“Well, yes, obviously I do, but I was going to leave that implied, Gregory.”

Greg laughs, and so does Draco. His mother doesn’t, just sits there and sways. And it’s never easy visiting her, but he tries not to hold that against her. He’d have gone mad, too, if he’d been forced to watch his husband take the Kiss.

St. Oswald’s is about four hundred years old, the first mediwizardry school in England and certainly the best. Draco had known that the distinction had come from centuries of experience in churning out some of the finest healers to walk the earth. What he hadn’t realized is that they accomplish these results by trying to kill their students and letting only the most determined survive.

Fortunately, Draco has always been very determined.

And it’s a good thing, too, because the curriculum is absolutely brutal. The first two years are classroom only: anatomy and physiology, principles of healing magic, brewing and botany, magical pathology, mundane pathology, surgery. Draco gives up some luxuries like free time, personal hygiene, and sleeping more than three hours at a time, but he gets top marks in every class.

(Draco makes a few initial attempts to befriend his fellow medical students, then discards the idea when he comes back to his dormitory one evening to find “DEATH EATER” scrawled across his door in putrefying pig blood taken from the autopsy lab. He cleans it up, then spends the weekend at Greg and Millie’s because he misses Millie’s mince pie and definitely not because he’s ashamed to show his face at his own school.)

At the end of year two, the students choose their specialization—Draco chooses A&E, one of the more notoriously taxing, because apparently he hates himself—and going into third year, their time is split between classroom and field training at various hospitals, depending on ranking. Draco is stunned to discover that Dr. Llewellyn recommends him to apply for a slot at St. Mungo’s, and even more surprised when he gets it.

And it’s certainly refreshing to be recognized primarily by the stripe of Oswald blue down the sleeve of his white healer robes and not by his name or hair—or worse, the Dark Mark, which needs to be covered up for sanitary reasons anyway. All he needs to do is go where he’s told, answer questions put to him, and help the mediwizard or -witch to whom he’s been assigned for whatever rotation he’s on.

“Patient is a twenty-two-year-old Auror,” Dr. Winnis says as Draco and her three other medical students trail behind her into the spell damage ward, “fresh off a fight with a few potion smugglers. According to his partner, he was hit with at least three different jinxes at the same time, though he can’t recall which ones. Mr. Malfoy, this is your area, isn’t it?”

Draco purses his lips and very carefully doesn’t rise to the bait. Just because he’s primarily recognized by the blue stripe on his sleeve doesn’t mean he’s escaped his past entirely. But even two-and-a-half years later, the Dean’s warning is still ringing in his head. If you so much as set a toe out of line—

“What are the four primary physiological effects of Dark Magic?”

Draco answers quickly. “Physical, structural, psychic, and metamagical.”

“Correct,” Dr. Winnis says. “And Ms. Abbott, what is your first step in identifying which of those effects your patient is dealing with?”

“Er,” Hannah answers, “examining life signs?”

“No.”

“Reading the magical signature?” Parvati volunteers.

“No. You’re both forgetting something obvious,” Dr. Winnis says.

“Visual assessment,” Draco mutters to Hannah under his breath, but she hardly has time to realize that Draco’s talking to her before Dr. Winnis is continuing:

“Visual assessment,” she says. “You can’t very well be expected to diagnose a patient without looking at them, can you? So let’s look.”

The spell damage ward of St. Mungo’s is huge and echoing, not because it’s more crowded than any other ward, but because patients damaged by magic need to be kept well away from any other magic that might complicate their prognosis, which isn’t easy to do in a place like St. Mungo’s. The only answer was physical distance.

As Dr. Winnis heads for one of the three occupied beds, this one surrounded by a pale blue curtain, she says, “Patient is male, blood type A-positive, conscious and alert and complaining of pain in the ribs.”

Then she pulls the curtain aside with a spell, and the recognition punches him in the stomach.

“Potter?”

“Malfoy?”

He’s sitting upright in bed, propped up by a few squashy pillows. Weasley is in the chair at his bedside, still in his maroon Auror robes.

“You’re a healer?” is Potter’s initial reaction.

“I’m a medical student,” Draco answers reflexively. Defensively.

Draco’s first thought, past the initial shock of seeing him is, Fuck, he’s filled out, because he really has. Those years as an Auror have broadened him across the chest and shoulders, and in his pale yellow patient’s gown, Draco has an excellent view of his biceps, straining under the flimsy fabric.

Draco’s second thought is, Oh, shit, he’s glaring at me, and Draco’s immediately on edge. Maybe if he pleads illness—

“I see you two are familiar,” Dr. Winnis says. Draco’s frantic gaze lands on her. She’s never liked him—none of the healers he’s trained under have—but surely she wouldn’t be so cruel as to— “Malfoy, why don’t you go ahead and give me a preliminary assessment, then?”

Draco grinds his teeth. Potter is glaring at him as he produces his wand from his sleeve, glaring as he approaches his bedside, and glaring as Draco pushes aside the hospital gown to reveal his (excellently defined) chest and stomach.

“No obvious injuries or deformities, but I can sense the Dark Magic lingering near the left side costal cartilage.” He applies pressure to the area with the tip of his wand. “Does that make the pain any worse?”

“No,” Potter answers, so angry that he’s actually red in the face.

“That’s good, right?” Weasley asks. He’s shifting his weight from side to side on his chair, obviously uncomfortable with his friend’s barely-contained fury.

“Not really,” Draco answers. He’s trying very hard not to acknowledge the elephant in the room that is Harry Potter’s righteous anger. It seems to fill the whole wing. “It means that the damage is internal and static.”

“Correct,” Dr. Winnis says. “What is your first step, Malfoy?”

“Topical salve for the pain, then a full scan to identify the signature of each jinx that was cast, then specific dispel in order of severity, assuming they aren’t entangled.”

“All that work for three jinxes?” Parvati scoffs. “A general countercurse could get rid of them all in one fell swoop.”

“He’s an Auror, Patil,” Draco says, fighting down the caustic edge in his voice. He’d gotten chewed out by Llewellyn twice for taking a harsh tone with his fellow students that, Draco is almost sure, would not have been a problem if he had been anyone else. “He’s not getting hit with a jelly-legs or trip jinx. A general countercurse won’t affect something more severe than a Flagrante, and in fact could exacerbate some of the more malevolent Dark Magics.”

Potter makes a small sound which can only be an angry scoff. Draco looks back in time to see him averting his gaze.

“Well reasoned, Malfoy,” Dr. Winnis says after a few angry seconds of Parvati stammering at him. “Why don’t you go get the salve from the alchemical lab?”

“Happily,” Draco answers, perhaps too quickly, and flees from the wing.

“Fucking hell,” he hears Potter snarl just before he makes it through the door.

The jinxes Potter was hit with end up being entangled, which requires surgery. Fortunately, surgery is far out of the purview of a third-year medical student. Less fortunately, it does keep him in St. Mungo’s for a few days, so Draco can’t completely avoid him.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t give it his best shot, though. Through a complicated combination of well-timed tea breaks and strategic offers of assistance to nurses and orderlies, Draco manages to avoid Potter for the majority of his stay.

“You’re pretty attentive for a medical student,” says the only other patient in the spell damage wing, when Draco changes his poultice for the fourth time in one day. The nurse had been very grateful for Draco’s help, albeit confused.

“I strive for excellence,” Draco replies. The fragrant green goo hisses quietly as it smears across the smoldering burn on his ribs.

“Your boss isn’t even here to be impressed,” the patient continues.

Draco would look around to verify, but decides it’s probably more important to make sure the poultice is re-applied before the hex burns off any more of his skin. “In that case,” he says, without stopping the careful movement of his wand, “I’m out of here. After all, I only got into healing to earn praise from my superiors.”

The patient chuckles. Just as Draco finishes up with the poultice and rises—

“I can’t believe you’re a healer.”

“Circe’s bouncing tits!”

Draco nearly flings the jar of poultice through the nearby window in the process of wheeling around. There’s no saving the tray of medical instruments, though, which goes to the ground with a tremendous clatter that echoes through the whole wing. When Draco’s eyes finally find the source of the noise—

“Potter,” he says, frantically casting a spell to right the tray, “you really shouldn’t be up this soon after surgery.”

“I’m restless,” is Potter’s flat answer. “And Dr. Winnis said short walks are fine.”

Of course she did. “Well, far be it from me to contradict your attending healer. Good morning.”

He tries to leave. Potter, infuriatingly, follows.

“Why did you get into healing?”

“I can’t imagine how that’s any of your business.” Potter should really not be able to move this fast eight hours after surgery.

“I’m just curious,” Potter replies, making a flimsy attempt at sounding casual.

“Naturally,” Draco sighs, slipping behind the relative safety of the nurses’ station. “Can’t have the nasty little Death Eater starting a career. All this studying and working, he’s probably up to something.”

A pause. “Are you up to something?”

“No!” Draco whirls, slapping his hands flat against the counter. “Potter, I get that you have no reason to trust me, but I’m just trying to make something from the fragments of my life that were left following the end of the War, all right?”

Potter frowns.

“I’m not on some secret mission from Dark Lord 2, I’m not killing Muggles and drinking their blood for strength—with the schedule I’m working, I have neither the time nor energy for evildoing!”

“Harry?”

Draco turns. Coming into the wing is, horrifyingly, Dr. Winnis and Head Auror Robards.

“I just came to check on you. Is everything alright?” He’s clearly addressing Potter, but he’s looking at Draco, who is desperately regretting making that joke about drinking Muggle blood.

“Apparently Draco Malfoy doesn’t have time for evil anymore,” Potter answers, deadpan.

Robards frowns. Winnis is staring at Draco like she’s trying to set him on fire with will alone.

Fear knots itself in Draco’s stomach. Surely, he thinks, surely they wouldn’t kick him out just for making a joke?

They kick him out for making a joke.

“I told you when I accepted you to Oswald’s, Mr. Malfoy,” Dr. Llewellyn says, “that if you set a single toe out of line—”

“But I didn’t do anything!” Draco insists, frantic. “It was just a joke! You don’t honestly think I’ve been drinking Muggle blood?”

“At this point, it doesn’t even matter if you are! I have the Head Auror sniffing around now, asking questions, talking about opening an investigation, because you just had to mouth off to Harry fucking Potter—”

“He was—” Draco begins, throat humiliatingly tight. “I only—”

Draco’s mind goes back to the day they’d met, over two years ago now. Same song, second chorus. He is utterly impotent, completely incapable of saying what is true in a way that she will believe.

I’ve staked my livelihood on becoming a healer, he wants to say. I have so few employment options available, he wants to say. I’ll have to leave the country to find work, he wants to say, and if I do, I’ll never get to see my own mother.

Draco has always been determined. He repeats this fact to himself over and over, hoping that they will draw the venom from the wound.

“Will you at least give me the opportunity to transfer my credits?” he asks, hating the way his voice breaks. For one horrible moment, he thinks she’ll say no—that she has no option but to formally expel him, and isn’t that what he deserves? It’s not about a joke, after all, it’s about that fucking mark on his arm—

“You have two weeks,” she says. “If you aren’t gone by then, you’ll be dragged off campus by Aurors.”

Draco tells himself that it is a success, that he narrowly avoided the complete destruction of his future, that he ought to be satisfied. He tells himself these things because it is the only way he’s going to make it through in one piece.

With a few hasty owls to France, he transfers to L’académie in Orléans. He spends money he doesn’t have on a Portkey to Paris, and is forced to fly south from there because registering for an international Apparation license costs money doesn’t have even less.

(He spends his last day in England with his mother, explaining over and over again how he won’t be able to visit her except on holidays and her birthday, and how sorry he is, and how this is ripping him up inside, but he doesn’t have an option anymore, and please don’t worry about him because Father always made sure to keep Draco’s French sharp and the Loire Valley is so beautiful. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at him, but he still waits until he leaves before he bursts into tears.)

And the school at Orléans is fine. It is only the second-best mediwizardry school in Europe, their courses less strenuous, but they have their own pipelines to several major hospitals throughout France, and Draco is almost never glared at by strangers or spat at on the streets.

If it weren’t for the horrible, aching distance between Draco and his mother, and everyone else he knows and loves, he might even like it. But as the years go on, that distance aches harder, and Draco finds it difficult to like anything.

He graduates with top marks, because it’s very easy to study when you don’t have anything else in the country you care about. He turns down the offer to give the valedictorian speech and in fact skips the graduation ceremony altogether because there’s no one who can afford the trip to watch him walk anyway, but does take the Hippocratic Oath when he’s given his diploma privately by the Dean the day after.

Draco’s mentor recommends him for a residency at a little hospital in Rennes, where they have a pioneering emergency medicine fellowship that, if Draco plays his cards right, he just might be able to join in a year or two. Draco almost wants to say no, to ask his mentor to recommend him something in England, because it’s been two long years without seeing his mother and friends due to an infuriating combination of red tape and lack of disposable income, but she doesn’t have any connections in England—very likely the only reason she’d mentored Draco at all—and Draco tells himself that it’s fine, that once he starts earning a healer’s salary he can certify himself for international Apparation and visit properly. The English Channel isn’t that wide, after all.

It’s called Hôpital Saint-Hélier, in the city quarter of the same name, hidden from non-magical eyes along the banks of the river that runs through Rennes. And it is small, but it’s also very, very good. It has a beautiful surgical theater, an expansive alchemy lab, and a lecture hall, which hosts plenty of fascinating experts for which staff get first dibs on tickets.

And as Draco settles in there, as he slowly becomes friendly with his colleagues and begins to actually practice medicine, and as he starts making a real salary and is no longer forced to skip meals and flatshare in the worst parts of the city—Draco discovers that he is something resembling happy.

It’s a small happiness, and very fragile, but it’s real. Draco holds onto it tightly, unsure, in those first few weeks after he finds it, why it feels so novel, until he forces himself to admit that it can only be because he’d spent nearly half a decade desperately unhappy.

In Draco’s second year at Saint-Hélier, on an unassuming Tuesday in August, he runs into someone he doesn’t expect coming out of a lecture on recent advancements in the magical treatment of neuropathy.

“Ah,” Draco says, because he had quite literally run into her, “je vous demande pardon.”^[1]

“Il n’y a rien à pardonner,”^[2] the woman he’d run into answers graciously, before immediately switching to English: “I thought that was you, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco hasn’t spoken English in so long that it takes him a few moments to recall that he still knows the language. It takes him slightly longer to recognize the woman who’d addressed him.

“Madam Pomfrey?”

“I would recognize that particular shade of blonde anywhere.”

Draco stares at her, open-mouthed. He’s so dumbfounded by the sight of her that he’s not sure what to say.

“I’d heard rumors that you went into mediwizardry,” she says when Draco’s silence stretches, “but I confess that I didn’t expect them to be true.”

Finally, Draco manages to shake himself out of his stupor.

“I, er,” he falters, then tries again, “I graduated two years ago out of Orléans, then was accepted here as a resident.”

Her brow lifts over two blue eyes, twinkling with surprised delight. “Were you? I know that Saint-Hélier is very choosy. It speaks well of your potential that you were accepted here right out of school.”

Even if Draco knew how to respond to praise these days, he wouldn’t be able to. He can’t believe she’s here. “I’m sorry, are you—I didn’t expect you to be in France, let alone speak the language well enough to attend a medical lecture—are you French?”

She smiles patiently. “Je suis à moitié française—comme toi, non? Malfoy, c’est un nom français.”^[3]

“Moi, je ne suis qu'un quart. C'était la langue de mon père, qui me l’a appris.^[4] I suppose I know now why you insisted on the honorific madam.”

She chuckles. Around them, the flow of people exiting the lecture hall rumbles as it moves, the drone of muttered words, the whisper of white healers’ robes on tiled floors. Draco takes the momentary lapse to study her more carefully: she’s aged since Draco last saw her, though he supposes that’s to be expected. There’s more silver in her hair, more lines around her eyes, but she still has the familiar matronly bearing to her, severe without being unkind.

Without meaning to, he thinks about his theatrical, overwrought reaction to being swatted by a hippogriff in third year. Guilt pulses familiarly in the center of his chest.

“What’s your specialty?” she asks, mercifully drawing Draco out of his own thoughts.

“I—er, A&E. There’s a fellowship in the field I’m hoping to join here eventually, but for now I’m doing my residency, which I’m coming to love.”

Pomfrey barks a single laugh. “Most young healers balk at working in A&E.”

“No, I find it immensely rewarding,” Draco insists. It’s not the first time he’s heard the assertion—every time he meets a fellow healer for the first time, he has to spend two minutes minimum defending his chosen specialty. “There’s a satisfaction in helping someone through a terrible medical crisis that other specialties can’t match.”

Draco watches as Pomfrey’s expression changes. He can’t quite tell how, but the longer the silence lasts, the more nervous he gets. The last time he’d run into someone who knew him from his youth, he’d had to outrun the hexes that had been slung in his direction moments later.

When Pomfrey pulls out a small business card with her name and Floo address at Hogwarts, Draco startles, taking it only after a few befuddled seconds.

“Once you’re out of your residency,” she says, “why don’t you send me an owl?”

“I,” Draco answers, then doesn’t finish the sentence because he doesn’t know how. Is he networking right now? Is this what networking is? He’d never done it before, assuming that he’d have to succeed on pure merit, since no one would ever be willing to do him favors or make connections on his behalf.

“It takes someone special,” Pomfrey continues, “to come out of the kind of darkness you lived through wanting to help people.” She pauses a moment, smiles. “Besides, those of us crazy enough to specialize in A&E ought to stick together.”

She turns on a heel and heads off, leaving Draco alone in the now empty hallway, feeling oddly disoriented. He realizes, as the sounds of her footsteps fade, that he can’t recall the last time someone had said something so kind to him.

He sniffs back a sudden wave of emotion, then sternly tells himself that he has paperwork to do.

“Coming in hot!”

“Out of the way! Out of the way!”

Draco hurries to catch up to the gurney hovering down the hallway at top speed, wandlessly casting a charm to sterilize his hands as he goes. “What have we got?”

“Splinching,” the triage nurse answers, struggling to maintain the wand posture that keeps the patient moving smoothly through the air. “Walk-in.”

“You’re telling me he walked in on those?”

His legs are little more than mangled red meat, his chest cavity concave, his whole body shuddering and fighting the thin blue stasis charm keeping him from dying. Draco really can’t even say with confidence that the patient is a he at all—there’s nothing identifiably human to see under all the blood and raw, exposed muscle.

“All right, smartass, it was more of a fall-in. Are you going to do doctor stuff anytime soon, or should we just keep wisecracking all night?”

“Maybe if you stopped bringing me the most horrid shit I’ve ever seen, Angelique—on my count, one, two, three—”

Draco, Angelique, and two orderlies who’d hurried over to help, all combine their magic to press Angelique’s stasis spell into the wider healing ward that saturates the hospital. There’s an audible crack as it settles, and the patient makes a gurgling sound that might have been a scream, if he’d had a tongue or functioning vocal cords.

“Vital signs,” says a new voice from behind. Draco recognizes it at once: Dr. Barrau, his attending physician.

“Heart rate 120,” Angelique says at once, as Draco lights up a hasty lumos to check pupil reactivity—and it’s a small wonder he can even find a pupil in all the mess, “blood pressure 80/55, respiration rate—I can’t quite get a read on respiration, I think the lungs took the worst of it, the spell can’t—”

“GCS 9,” Draco says. “No reading on respiration rate implies lung inelasticity.”

“Which in turn implies…?” Dr. Barrau prompts.

“Pneumothorax?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Get a tray ready,” Draco tells Angelique, who hurries off. By the time Draco’s cut off what’s left of the patient’s clothes with a few careful spells, she’s back at his side with a wide metal try, and Draco’s pressing his wand against the mangled wall of the patient’s chest.

He pushes his magic; the body resists. Draco grits his teeth.

“I can’t get through the pleura.”

“Then push harder,” Dr. Barrau answers.

“Is there a Dr. Malfoy in here?” comes a nervous voice from the far side of the room.

“Not now,” Angelique barks.

Draco grinds his teeth and focuses his magic and pushes, and a gash opens up between all the other gashes, one that slices directly into the side of the chest. A thin red fluid fountains out, which Angelique deftly catches in the tray and hurries to Vanish.

“It’s kind of an emergency,” the nervous voice continues.

“And what is it you think this is,” Dr. Barrau answers imperiously, “basket weaving?”

“Respiration rate is 20 breaths per minute,” Angelique says.

“Call down to transfigurative and open an OR,” Draco says, sealing the wound back up once the fluid stops draining. “And have the lab bring up—I don’t know, maybe just a bucket of blood replenishment tonic? Maybe just drag the whole cauldron up?”

“Shall I write ‘bucket’ on the prescription order?” Angelique answers archly. She’s already heading toward the nurse’s station to send a memo.

“What’s your next step, Malfoy?” Dr. Barrau asks. “Until surgery is ready for him?”

“Stabilize hemodynamics,” Draco replies, mind churning, “in this case, I’d say magically instead of mechanically, since there are so many wounds.”

“Dr. Malfoy,” the nervous voice tries again.

“Maintain vital signs, intervening as necessary—I’m going to start a scan to get an idea of what internal structures were damaged in the splinch—”

“Dr. Malfoy, your mother is dead.”

He’d been trying so hard to focus on his patient that Draco doesn’t know, for those first few seconds after his attention is finally drawn away, what he’d heard.

But he works it out soon enough.

The word, when it finally comes, passes through his lips riding a ragged breath: “What?”

He stares at the source of the nervous voice—Draco recognizes her as one of the witches who works in HR, though he can’t remember her name because—

His mother is—? Did she just say that Draco’s mother is—?

“Shit,” Angelique mutters behind him. “Draco, I—”

“Malfoy,” Dr. Barrau says, “go on.”

“I—” Draco’s hands, slick with blood, are trembling. “My patient, my shift isn’t—”

“I’ll cover your patient and your shift,” Dr. Barrau continues, firm. “Go.”

Draco goes. It feels like his legs are moving all on their own. His vision tunnels, making the witch from HR seem further away with every step forward.

His mother—his mother is—

“I’m so sorry to do it like this,” she whispers. “I’d have pulled you aside if I could have, but…”

She keeps talking. Draco can’t hear her.

His mother is dead?

Draco had been trying, since the beginning of his residency, to push through his international Apparation license. Because of his dual citizenship in France and the U.K., it had to go through both magical governments for approval. France had given him no issues, and had approved everything on their end within three weeks.

The U.K., on the other hand, had been dragging their feet. After submitting all the paperwork, Draco heard nothing for six months. His Floo calls to the Ministry had gone unanswered. When he went to arrange for a Portkey back into London so he could demand an explanation for the delay in person (and maybe finally see his loved ones after an unbearable three years), the Ministry had also failed to approve that. In desperation, he’d done away with the Unplottable spell just so the Ministry could answer his owls of inquiry, but their responses were all vague and gave Draco the distinct impression that he was being given the runaround. The only question was why.

Not long after his mother dies, he figures it out.

“I’m sorry, a what?”

“As part of the post-War effort to prevent the repetition of unfortunate mistakes,” says the extremely agitated witch from the other end of the Floo call, “all those associated with the Dark Lord’s efforts were placed on a special watch list—”

“I was cleared of all charges!” Draco protests, but the witch keeps talking.

“—which monitors, among other things, all their comings and goings into and out of the United Kingdom. All those associated are on the list, regardless of personal culpability—”

“So a citizen who’s never been convicted of a crime cannot freely return to the country in which he was born—”

“Your paperwork has been received, Mr. Malfoy, and is being processed. It is simply taking longer than normal, as part of a broad measure to safeguard the interests and peoples of Great Britain.”

Draco feels like he’s losing his mind. “Longer than normal? I tried to set up the Portkey last month. I applied for my international Apparation license three years ago! I haven’t been home since 2003!”

“Then surely,” the witch snips, “you can wait a while longer for your paperwork to go through the system.”

“My mother is dead,” Draco says. He tries to sound angry, but his voice betrays him and fractures under the weight of his grief. “She’s rotting in cold storage because I can’t get home to make arrangements for her funeral! Please, I’m not a threat to the interests of Great Britain, I’m a son who’s grieving and just wants to do right by his mother!”

“Perhaps you should have anticipated that there would be heightened scrutiny on you, Dr. Malfoy, when the maniac to whom you swore your allegiance hit the ground. I see no harm in your inconvenience, considering all you’ve done.”

Draco stares into the fire, distantly aware of the way his shoulders are shaking. He feels oddly separate from his own body, hazy and delirious.

Is this really happening? Is he not going to be able to put his own mother in the ground because his country still hates and distrusts him? How long will he be on this watch list? Will he never see his friends again, never see the Manor again, never wander the winding streets and browse the shops of Diagon Alley again?

Draco knows that, despite being cleared of all legal charges, he still has sins to reckon with. He knows he’s still got a long way to go in making up for his mistakes. What he doesn’t understand is why they’re punishing a dead woman for his own transgressions.

Merlin, she’ll be given a pauper’s grave. She deserves to be interred among her family, and instead she’ll be in a pine box a hundred miles from home.

“Please,” he says, but realizes, with a horrible lurch, that the call had already been ended. Draco is on his knees in front of the fireplace in his little flat in the magical quarter of Cesson-Sévigné, staring into a dark hearth.

The first sob catches him off-guard. The second shreds his throat all the way up.

He doubles over and claps both hands over his mouth in a futile attempt to muffle the sounds of his heartache.

Though Draco had spent a total of five years in France since leaving St. Oswald’s, he’d had little time to form real relationships. The first two years were finishing medical school, monopolized by reading academic journals and studying and suffering through rotations. The next three were at Saint-Hélier, where his attending physician appreciated his work ethic and the nurses liked that he didn’t talk down to them, and they were friendly, but not friends. He's a resident, for Merlin's sake—he barely has time to sleep, never mind socialize meaningfully with his colleagues.

Which is why he finds himself, in those first few weeks following the death of his mother, in effective exile from the country of his birth and grieving, largely alone.

He gets sympathetic smiles from the nurses and an awkward thump on the shoulder from Dr. Barrau, but not much more. He tries very hard to remain functional—his patients need him to be—but with each agonizing day where he can’t go back to England, can’t get his mother’s affairs in order, can’t get one of Greg’s warm bear hugs or Pansy’s fond scolding, Draco feels himself wearing down. Little by little, as water weathers stone, his hold on himself and his emotions erodes.

“Draco, you speak English, right?” Angelique asks him, about three weeks after his mother’s death (he still does not have a Portkey).

“I am English,” he answers without looking up from his paperwork. His coworkers tend to forget; Draco has no discernible accent when he speaks French.

“Would you mind taking a walk-in? The patient’s eleven, but it seems like a straightforward injury, and no one in pediatrics speaks English.”

Draco sighs. He’s done this before—Brittany is a popular vacation spot for the English—and it always goes badly. Those who don’t recognize his name outright usually work it out during the inevitable sequence of Oh, you’re British! and So where’s your family from?

Still, it’s not like he can refuse to treat an eleven-year-old just because Draco has a reputation. He sighs and rises up from the desk in the doctors’ lounge, grabbing the file out from Angelique’s waiting hands before gliding past her.

It hasn’t been a good day. Draco had to watch a young girl burst into tears after her mother died from injuries sustained in a mugging gone awry, and then spent a frantic thirty minutes in the medical supply closet having a sobbing fit of his own, wracked with guilt from failing her mother and his own. His eyes are unfocused and still a bit raw as they skim the entry paperwork, and it’s a struggle to read the chief complaint: “shoulder injury from flying.” At least it should be an easy fix.

“You know, it’s not the flying that injures you,” Draco says as he comes into the exam room, “it’s—”

“Malfoy?”

He looks up sharply. He’d know that voice anywhere—and apparently Harry Potter can say the same of him.

Draco should be terrified. The last time he saw Potter, Draco’s entire life was upended. Who knows what the wanker might be capable of this time around?

But Draco’s not terrified. He’s too tired to be scared. Seeing Potter there, still looking indecently fit in a tight shirt and Muggle jeans, the first reaction Draco has is: “You must be joking.”

“It’s what?”

Draco forces his attention to refocus. His patient—an eleven-year-old male, as the file had advised, with an obvious deformity in his right shoulder—has bright blue hair and a curious expression. He looks oddly familiar, and Draco’s heart lurches at the sight of him before his mind can figure out why.

“It’s not the flying that injures you,” the boy prompts, “it’s what?”

“It’s…” Draco swallows. There’s no way this is actually— “It’s the sudden stop at the end.”

The boy snorts. Draco turns his eyes frantically back down to the chart, where at the top, scrawled in chicken scratch handwriting—

“Edward Lupin?”

“My friends call me Teddy.”

Merlin, this is Nymphadora’s boy. The one Andromeda had been raising. Draco’s cousin, and one of the only blood relatives he has left.

The one whose life he’d so desperately tried to be part of after his trial. Andromeda had slammed the door in his face before Draco could even tell her why he’d searched her out.

It gets a little harder to breathe.

Draco forces himself to speak, though his voice wavers. “Nonsense.” He forces himself to look at him, though his eyes burn. “Teddy isn’t any sort of nickname for Edward. Your godfather must have misspelled it on the paperwork. Surely your name is Tedward.”

Teddy laughs, a high, clear sound. Draco’s heart thuds painfully against the front of his chest.

“Tedward’s not a real name,” he says.

“Tedmond?”

“No!” He’s laughing harder.

“Tedison?”

“No!” Draco wants to bottle the sound of that laugh and wear it on a chain around his neck. “It’s Teddy, short for Edward!”

He has the Black nose, Draco notices with a horrible, lovely lurch of emotion. His hair shimmers from blue to daffodil yellow—a Metamorphmagus, just like his mother. Merlin, Draco’s missed so much of his life. He’s missed so much of everything, trapped an ocean away from everyone he loves.

“Malfoy,” Potter growls, forcing himself back into Draco’s awareness. Draco’s breath shudders as his eyes turn away from his cousin to Potter’s glowering face.

He swallows. He knows he likely only has a few more moments before Potter drags his godson away and Draco will, likely, never see him again. He starts forward, producing his wand from his sleeve and turning all his attention to Teddy, forcing himself to smile. He’s going to make the most of this.

“Are you in France on holiday?” Draco asks him, and carefully casts a spell to numb the clearly dislocated shoulder. It must hurt terribly, though Teddy’s putting on a brave face. Still, as the spell sets in and the pain dissipates, his posture visibly relaxes.

“Yes! We came to see the championship game in Nantes, and then Harry took me flying along the coast. Then I fell really far and landed on my shoulder. I’m not a very good flier yet. Do you know Harry? He seems to know you.”

Potter opens his mouth to reply, and Draco’s quick to speak first. He knows the second Potter gets a word in, it’ll be the beginning of the end, and Draco intends to make this last as long as he can.

“So you’re eleven, huh?” he asks, and begins the careful process of pushing the bone back into its socket with a slow, steady spell. “Are you going to start Hogwarts this year?”

“Yeah!” Teddy answers at once, enthusiastic and, mercifully, distracted. “I’m really excited.”

“What house do you reckon you’ll be in?” Draco asks, and with a muffled pop, his arm snaps back into its proper shape. Thanks to the numbing spell, Teddy doesn’t even appear to notice.

“I don’t know. Harry says it doesn’t matter, but I think he only says that because he wants me to be in Gryffindor even though Granny wants me to be in Slytherin. Harry’s proper scared of Granny.”

“Andromeda is a formidable woman,” Draco agrees.

Teddy cants his head to one side. “You know Granny?”

“Malfoy,” Potter says again.

“Let me tell you a secret, Tedwin,” Draco says, bending forward to his level and putting both hands on his shoulders. “It actually doesn’t matter where you’re Sorted, because either way, you’re going to have so much fun at Hogwarts.”

“Malfoy.”

“You’re going to make loads of friends and have so many adventures, and you might even learn a bit of magic, too.”

“Malfoy.”

“And I hope your life is wonderful, and please know that if I could—”

He’s grabbed by the shoulder and dragged out of the exam room. The door slams behind them, echoing like a crack of thunder down the hallway.

“Malfoy, what—!” Potter begins, incandescent with anger. Draco can’t force himself to care. All he can think about is how he might be able to steal just one more minute with Teddy. Merlin, he’s so sweet, and Draco is so starved for any kind of familial affection that he aches with it.

Draco presses his palms into his eyes, shudders, tries to breathe. He’s crying, he realizes belatedly, the wet tracks of his tears smearing under his hands.

After a protracted pause, Potter asks, “What are you even doing in France? I thought you were working out of St. Mungo’s.”

The hands on his face curl into fists. Draco lifts his gaze, turned furious, to Potter. He knows he shouldn’t rise to the bait, but there’s so much going on inside him—heartache and anger and desperation and frustration—that there’s no room left for restraint.

“Are you trying to be funny?”

Potter frowns.

“Yes, well done, Potter; get the wretched Death Eater kicked out of medical school and then feign ignorance about why he’s slumming it in France. Very droll. Aren’t Gryffindors meant to be chivalrous?”

“Malfoy, calm down. I’m not—”

“Fuck you, calm down!”

Draco is aware, distantly, that he is shouting, that there are scattered nurses and orderlies around the hallway staring, and that he should probably stop.

He doesn’t stop:

“If your goal was to hurt me, mission accomplished. And rest assured, seeing the only family I have left right on the heels of my mother’s death is a thousand times more agonizing than being chased out of England. Truly, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“Malfoy—”

“Especially since I know you’ll never let me see him again. Why did you—” Draco’s throat is tight, his vision swimming, his hands fisted and trembling at his sides. “Why couldn’t you have wandered into any other hospital in Brittany?”

“Malfoy, look,” Potter says, firm, then tries to reach out and grab his shoulder again. Draco recoils, physically slaps the hand away.

“Don’t touch me!”

From behind, Dr. Barrau’s voice emerges, grim and dour: “Draco, qu’est-ce qui se passe?”^[5]

“Stay the fuck out of my life, Harry Potter!” He’s fully screaming, vision haloed with red. “My attempts at finding happiness have, I assure you, been thoroughly dashed already! I do not require any further assistance to be miserable!”

Dr. Barrau barks, “Draco!”

Draco shouts back, “Ne te dérange pas! Je démissionne!”^[6]

Draco rips his stethoscope off from around his neck and hurls it in Barrau’s direction as he storms away. Why shouldn’t he quit, after all? Potter would have made it happen for him—again—if Draco hadn’t.

There is a frenetic restlessness alight under his skin, an intractable need to change something, go somewhere, do anything. He doesn’t even rightly know what it is he means to do, but does know, with dreadful certainty, that he will not, cannot, keep doing what he’s been doing and survive.

Draco submits his formal letter of resignation the next morning, effective immediately. Then he spends the next month upending his life in France.

He breaks the lease on his flat in Cesson-Sévingé three months before it’s up for renewal and suffers the early termination fee. He packs everything he needs into a shrinking trunk and sells everything he doesn’t need. Then he buys a Muggle compass that he straps to the handle of his old Nimbus 2001.

He can’t get the Ministry to approve an international Apparation license or even a fucking Portkey, but they can’t stop him from flying.

The trip from Cherbourg-en-Cotentin to Bournemouth is about sixty miles and takes Draco almost ten hours to complete with the headwind. By the time he finally lands on British soil, it’s nearly midnight and he’s exhausted and his back aches but he’s home.

He spends that first night in a little bed & breakfast on the seaside, and in the morning he Apparates (legally and intranationally) to Knockturn Alley. And though he’d had weeks to think about what he’d say when he saw him again, the only thing that arrives at the end of his tongue when the door opens is:

“Hey, Greg.” Draco is trying fiercely to keep the emotion out of his voice, because Merlin, it is so good to see him—

“Draco!”

He’s wrapped up in a crushingly tight bear hug, which is what does it. Draco sniffs, then sobs once, then hugs him back and buries his face in his shoulder, while from behind, more familiar voices emerge:

“Is that him? Greg, is that Draco?”

“Draco Malfoy, you insufferable git, you’re late.”

Millie is scampering down the hallway toward the front door of her and Greg’s shared flat. From the living room, Pansy is slinking over, long-limbed and languorous, already holding a mimosa.

He sniffs wetly, and before he can even conjure the right words, Millie’s piling onto the hug and Pansy is demanding for them both to move, you wretched beasts, he’s long overdue for a swift kick in the balls, but she hugs him, too, and Draco hadn’t even realized how much and how desperately missed them until all that lifeblood comes painfully flooding back into the numb limb.

Draco had made all of them exceptions to his Unplottable spell, of course, so he could communicate with all of them via letter, much to the dismay of his long-suffering barn owl, but through his final month in France, he’d barely had time to send Greg a note saying he was coming back to Britain and when to expect him. None of them had any idea of why or how he’d finally made the jump.

He spends the rest of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon telling the story, from Harry Potter and Teddy Lupin to the agonizing flight across the Channel. Naturally, they all interject with questions and rude comments, which makes the process take much longer than it should.

“So I found a nearby Muggle inn and slept like I was dead, and then I came here and we’re all caught up now,” Draco concludes.

“I can’t believe Potter got you fired twice,” is Pansy’s first assessment.

“I mean, technically—” Greg begins, hedging, but Pansy waves her hand dismissively.

“Near as,” she says. “Speccy git. Why even bother testifying on your behalf if he’s just going to try to ruin your life every chance he gets?”

Draco sighs. He finishes off the mimosa Pansy had made him during the anecdote about accidentally letting the Muggle who came to buy his bed frame see the moving photographs on the walls. Draco still doesn’t know what an “animated giff” or a “why fy” is, but is glad the Muggle had talked herself into the explanation.

“At least you’re home,” Millie says. The living room of their tiny little flat is not big enough for four, and despite Draco’s protests, she’d situated herself on the floor in front of the couch to make room for Draco and Pansy. “That’s good, right? You can finally see to your mother’s affairs.”

“They probably already put her in some backwoods cemetery,” Draco despairs, rubbing his forehead with one hand. “I’ll do what I can to move her to the family plot, of course, but I just know that exhumation is going to be such a nightmare, especially now that I don’t have any income.”

“You’re a healer,” Greg protests. “I’m sure you can find work.”

“I haven’t even finished my residency. I’m only allowed to practice medicine at all under an attending healer—and what sane mediwizard this side of the Channel would let me practice on their license, especially after I got chased out of Oswald’s?”

A heavy, defeated silence follows. They all know—they’ve all experienced—just how impossible it is for anyone with the stink of Death Eater to get a fair shake in the world after the end of the War. It’s not right, but how could they change it? Who’d care to listen if they complained? Even odds drawing any attention to how bad it had gotten would make it worse.

“There is that clinic,” Millie says slowly, “past the White Wyvern.”

Draco frowns. The White Wyvern is just down the street from Greg and Millie’s flat, which can only mean— “Since when does Knockturn have a clinic?”

“But that place is so skeevy,” Pansy says, frowning.

“You’d be hard pressed to name a business that isn’t skeevy on Knockturn,” Millie says. “Sure, they’re dodgy, but they take all comers and let you pay under the table. I bet they’ll pay you that way, too, Draco, if you ask.”

The idea makes him itch. Any medical facility willing to pay and be paid under the table is almost certainly unaccredited and therefore illegal, the kind of place that could strip a mediwizard caught working there of their license. And that’s to say nothing of whatever suspect medical praxis they take part in, since they don’t need to worry about safety standards.

Still, Draco has a sneaking suspicion that he won’t have much option. Merlin, he’d graduated from the second-best medical school in Europe, and now he’s considering taking a job in a back-alley clinic.

“I… I’ll think about it,” he says eventually, staring into his mimosa, where the bright orange liquid catches the sunlight from the nearby window. “First things first, though—I need to take care of Mother.”

“Of course,” Millie agrees. “And you’ll stay here till you’ve found your own place, won’t you?”

“Millie, I couldn’t possibly impose—”

“I won’t hear a word of protest, Draco Malfoy! You’re back in England for the first time in nearly five years. Your family vaults are empty, your ancestral home is picked clean, and you’re still grieving your mother. You’ll stay here.”

“It’s not a problem, Draco, really,” Greg insists. “We have a spare room, and some nights the kneazle might even let you use it.”

Draco tries to keep the surge of aching gratitude from showing on his face, lest his friends mock him for it, but he can’t stop himself from feeling it. He’d forgotten how nice it is, having friends looking out for him.

“It’s either them or me, darling,” Pansy offers, “and I don’t think you could handle my nightly rotation of hunks. I remember how bloody virginal you were in school.”

“Shut up, hag,” Draco snaps, a bit too quickly, because it’s true and they all know it, and he desperately hopes they don’t figure out that it’s still true—

“Oh, you were such a virgin in school,” Millie adds, the traitorous bitch. Draco just never had time for romantic dalliance in Hogwarts, between figuring out he was gay and trying to survive the War, and Merlin knows he’s had even less time since medical school—

“D’you remember that one time he caught Blaise and Daphne snogging in the common room,” Greg says suddenly, driving a knife of his own into Draco’s back, “and he shrieked like a banshee—”

“Et tu, Gregory? I thought we were friends!”

“—and threatened to snitch on them to Snape?”

“It was against the rules!”

“And we Slytherins have always so valued following the rules,” Pansy croons, making Greg cackle.

Draco buries his face in both hands and mutters, “I changed my mind, I’m going back to France,” which makes them all laugh harder.

When Draco goes to his mother’s old long-term care facility, reluctant but resolved, to ask after her remains, he’s surprised to discover that, according to staff, an “anonymous executor” had intervened to take care of her burial. Draco had been prepared to break into a cemetery with a shovel if he had to, but instead is given an address where, he’s told, the executor had her interred just before her body would have been turned over to the state.

“I think this is the old Black family plot,” Draco says, once he hears the bang of Pansy’s Apparation behind him.

“It has all the trappings of it,” she answers. “Ancient, dreary, twice as big as it needs to be.”

Draco feels like he should be offended, being half-Black himself, but finds that there’s not much about her point he can dispute—it is ancient, dreary, and far too big. It’s about four or five acres, at an estimate, dotted with massive, gnarled trees and surrounded by a wrought iron fence snarled with ivy. Even the weather, the joyless gray overcast typical of England in early spring, adds to the ambiance.

The massive gate is closed and, Draco suspects, magically sealed. But he also suspects that the nature of the magic sealing it should allow him, Black by blood, entrance. He reaches out and touches the metal. It shivers reactively, and, with a groan, swings open.

He heads slowly inside, steps rustling the ankle-high grass. Pansy matches his stride, at which point he notices—

“What are you wearing?”

“This is what you wear to a wake.”

“What a bitter ex-wife wears to her former husband’s wake, maybe,” Draco says, eyeing the asymmetrical hem of her black dress, bolero jacket, and glossy black heels that must surely be difficult to walk in on soft earth. “And this isn’t a wake.”

“No, it’s not.” She slides a pair of shiny black sunglasses onto her face, which doesn’t make her look any less like a bitter ex-wife. “But we can’t give her the send-off she deserves, so I refuse to give her anything less than my best.”

Draco says nothing. He doesn’t trust his voice. He turns his eyes forward and breathes slowly.

The plot is easy enough to pick out—the dirt is fresh, the headstone shiny and new:

NARCISSA BLACK MALFOY
1955–2009
Devoted Wife & Beloved Mother
A Hero, When It Mattered Most

There’s a wreath of lilies resting at its base. Draco suddenly finds himself trying very hard not to cry.

For a time, they both stand in silence. A cool wind comes through the valley in which the cemetery is situated, rustling the leaves on the nearby wych elm.

“I bet this is Theo’s work,” Pansy says eventually. She’s taking great pains to sound mild and conversational, but her shaking voice betrays her. “He escaped to Stockholm, you know, with his father and sister, before the Ministry had a chance to seize anything. Smart boy. I should have thought of that.”

Draco swallows. More silence lapses, more wind hisses.

“Anyway, with the Nott pile largely intact, I’m sure he had enough to grease some palms back home. It seems like something he’d do.”

Draco doesn’t know. He wishes he did, and maybe he’ll owl Theo later to ask. For now, all he knows is that this person—this “anonymous executor”—has utterly overwhelmed Draco with his kindness, thoughtfulness, and generosity.

After a time, Pansy conjures a bouquet of daffodils and crouches to rest it, reverently, against the wreath already there.

“Not everyone gets a mother as good as yours,” Pansy whispers to him, and Draco shatters to pieces.

He will be glad, in the hard hours that follow, that Pansy had been there with him, foregoing her usual barbed sarcasm in favor of petting his hair and whispering reassurances. He will acknowledge in hindsight that she had been the only reminder that he still had reasons to put himself back together.

Draco applies to open residency slots in fifteen different hospitals and clinics throughout England. He gets fourteen form rejection letters and one interview wherein the third question is, “Oh, you’re that Draco Malfoy?” At the end, the interviewer says she’ll reach out with the hospital’s decision and then doesn’t.

He considers going back to France more than once. It would be so much easier—he’s still a citizen, after all, and its magical government doesn’t hate him. He’d lived there for nearly five years and hadn’t gotten even one death threat screamed at him on the street.

But Draco knows—now from experience—that if he leaves England again, it will be a nightmare to return, and he’s not sure he wants to risk leaving the country of his birth forever. For all its flaws, England is his home. The only people left in the world he loves are all here.

So, reluctantly, Draco takes the step he was always going to take and applies to the clinic in Knockturn Alley.

“The Orléans Academy of Medical Magic? Are you sure you’re at the right place?”

“I’m sure.”

“Isn’t that the second-best medical school in Europe?”

Draco grinds his teeth. He can tell his interviewer—an aging, hawkish wizard with more salt than pepper in his hair and furrows around his eyes—means well, but it’s difficult to be flattered by a sentiment like What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?

“I graduated with top marks and completed two of my three years of residency at—”

“Yes, I read your CV,” the interviewer says. “You’re overqualified. Valedictorian, picked for one of the top hospitals in France, and you’ve already published an article in a French medical journal whose name I can’t pronounce. The question isn’t if you can do this job, the question is why you want it.”

He stares at Draco expectantly. Draco stares back. If he’s seen his CV, surely he’s also seen the name at the top of it. Is he really going to make Draco say it out loud?

When the silence stretches, Draco finally sighs and says, “Look, Mister—”

“Doctor.”

“—Doctor?”

“Dr. Thomas Weissberg. I’ll be your attending physician, if you don’t come to your senses before the end of this interview.”

Draco can’t resist the obvious question: “What’s an attending physician doing interviewing his potential resident?”

“Look around, Dr. Malfoy.”

Draco pauses, looks around. They’re in what Dr. Weissberg had called the doctor’s lounge, but which to Draco’s eye looks more like an oversized closet. It has a rickety table with two chairs, a single ratty couch, and a Muggle microwave on a water-stained formica counter.

“Do you think this clinic has an HR department?”

Draco supposes that’s fair. “Do you do your own payroll, as well?”

“I have a goblin for that, fortunately. She owes me a favor, does it under the table. That’s how this clinic operates. We get our potions ingredients on the black market and our medical equipment from pawn shops. We have to, because the Ministry doesn’t know we exist.”

“That’s a lot of crimes to admit to someone you haven’t even hired yet,” Draco says gamely.

“You deserve to know what you’re getting into,” Dr. Weissberg says, “because you have a lot of potential. You should be working at St. Mungo’s, not here.”

“St. Mungo’s wouldn’t even give me the time of day,” Draco says before he can stop himself.

Dr. Weissberg cants his head to one side, his expression turning considering. After a long lapse of silence, he eventually asks, “Who’d you piss off?”

Merlin, Draco really is going to have to say it, isn’t he?

“Do you really not recognize my name?”

“Should I?”

“My father—my family was—” Draco swallows. He’d memorized this speech years ago, had used it before, but it never got easier to say it out loud. He takes a slow, steadying breath. “I… was a Death Eater. During the War. I took the Dark Mark at sixteen and I… believed in the cause. For a time, anyway. I’ve learned better, not that anyone is prepared to believe me, which is fair enough. Situations reversed, I wouldn’t believe me, either. That kind of evil typically dies rather than reforms.

“But, there you are. That’s why I’m not at St. Mungo’s, despite all that potential. That’s why I haven’t had second thoughts about this interview. I want to be a healer. I want to do some good to make up for all the bad. And right now, this clinic is my only way to do that. No one else will hire a Death Eater. And maybe you won’t, either, now that you have the whole context. I certainly wouldn’t blame you.”

Draco stares into his lap. The silence that stretches between them is agonizing, broken only by the soft ticking of an aging, lopsided clock on the opposite wall.

“Sixteen?”

Draco swallows, nods.

Weissberg says something in Yiddish under his breath. It sounds suspiciously like swearing.

“If I were still being punished for shit I did at sixteen, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be a mediwizard right now, I’ll tell you that much.”

“It wasn’t a youthful indiscretion,” Draco says. His voice comes out colder and harder than he intends.

“Sure it was. A big one, and a bad one, but you know as well as I do that the prefrontal cortex is still developing even into your 20’s. Did you even have anyone in your life telling you different?”

Draco hadn’t. But he also doesn’t want to excuse his own actions. So he says nothing, still staring into his lap.

“Look, Draco,” Dr. Weissberg says, flipping shut the folder holding his CV and leaning forward over it, “I opened this clinic because I have a very sincerely held and boring belief that all people deserve medical care. But people in neighborhoods like these get turned away from places like St. Mungo’s. And if the Ministry is going to refuse to accredit a clinic in an unsafe area, where a clinic is most needed, then I’m going to open one that’s unaccredited, and keep it running with thoughts, prayers, and black market reagents. I’ll take payments under the table, or on credit, or not at all, because I’d rather have a poor man walk out of here without giving me a knut if the alternative is him dying on the street.

“This place might become a problem for you one day. I’ll try to keep you out of any legal trouble if it comes to that, but I can’t promise I’d be successful. If you’re really sure you want to work here—well, I’d be crazy not to hire the fucking valedictorian of the second-best school in Europe.”

Draco feels like he’s been hit over the head.

“You’re… not worried about hiring a Death Eater?” is the first question that occurs to Draco to ask.

“My nurse is a recovering meth addict and my receptionist still moonlights as a hooker,” Weissberg says. “I think this place’s reputation can survive a Death Eater for a resident.”

And so: Draco takes the job.

The clinic doesn’t have an actual name—the weathered white sign over the door just says “CLINIC”—but Draco comes to understand that the residents of Knockturn Alley refer to it as Doc W’s. Apparently he’s something of a local fixture, the only one willing to treat their ailments, deliver their children, and heal their wounds without asking too many questions.

It’s not as prestigious as Saint-Hélier, of course. It’s not even as prestigious as being a stressed out med student at Oswald’s. Still, Draco finds it difficult to dislike. As a Slytherin, he’s actually rather admiring of how Dr. Weissberg keeps it running—a complicated combination of sweetheart deals, under-the-table agreements, and strategic bribery. For a clinic with an apothecary lab in the boiler room and an isolation room in the attic, it operates with surprising efficiency and impressive outcomes for their patients.

(And it’s fantastic, living with Greg and Millie. Granted, the flat is run-down and infested with mice and the landlord is a bastard and it’s way too small for the three of them plus Millie’s kneazle, but Draco is so happy to be around his friends again that he doesn’t even mind living in what is, by any reasonable definition, squalor. Millie makes mince pie every weekend and Draco buys rounds at the White Wyvern every Friday, and Pansy stops by with less regularity and, typically, alcohol to share. Draco knows he shouldn’t impose on their hospitality—he could afford his own flat—but every time he mentions it, Greg gets a kicked-puppy expression and Draco tells himself he’ll worry about it next month.)

The pay is shit, and the clinic roof leaks on rainy days, and one time Draco gets mugged on his way home, but all-in-all, he’s content. He lacks the prestige, perhaps, that his top-tier education might otherwise afford him, and it could be said that he’s not living up to his potential, but he has the things that matter, doing work that matters. After all he’s lost—and all that’s been taken from him—he is more than willing to count his blessings.

Tuesdays are notoriously slow in the clinic, because Tuesdays are when the Aurors do their weekly patrol down the main drag of Knockturn Alley. Most of the residents are involved in criminality of one sort or another, and Draco, who himself is employed by an extremely illegal clinic, is in no position to judge. Still, most of the locals find reasons to stay inside, or even be out of London entirely, every Tuesday, which leaves the clinic reliably empty and the employees—usually just Draco and the receptionist, Genevieve—bored.

“Never have I ever crashed my broom.”

Draco narrows his eyes. “You’ve never crashed a broom?” he replies, skeptical.

“I never even had a broom, you posh bastard. Some of us didn’t come from money. Drink.”

It would be unethical to drink on the job, of course—and despite what some of the practices of the clinic might suggest, Draco does care about ethics to the extent it’s possible—so instead, he and Genevieve drink Pepperup for games that would otherwise require alcohol. It’s cheap, plentiful, and as unpleasant as it is harmless. Honestly, Draco would have an easier time with booze. At least booze doesn’t run the risk of catching your hair on fire.

“In my defense,” Draco says, as he picks up his third flask, “I was on my house Quidditch team. I flew a lot.” He throws the potion back, then coughs loudly, sending plumes of fire through the air. “Fuck, did Weissberg brew this with lava?”

“Probably, knowing him.” Genevieve leans back in her chair and kicks her feet up on the front desk, pointy stilettos mussing the stacks of paperwork. “Your turn.”

“This game is too easy when it’s me against you,” Draco says. “I can’t imagine a single thing you haven’t done. Never have I ever stayed up for twenty-four hours straight.”

“You went to med school! You never pulled an all-nighter?”

“My record is eighteen. I fell asleep face-down on the bathroom floor after my pathology exam let out. Drink, harlot; I know you’ve been on benders.”

She drinks, and her face contorts as smoke comes billowing out of her ears. Draco chuckles as she tries to shake the heat out of her head.

“It only gets worse every time,” she despairs. “Never have I ever—”

“Dr. Malfoy? Doctor!”

The voice is muffled at first through the dirty plate glass window. Before long, though, the little silver bell over the door jingles as it opens, and as a woman Draco vaguely recognizes from the neighborhood comes hurrying inside, her young son slumped against her side and wheezing.

Draco’s on his feet in an instant, yanking his stethoscope off his neck and popping the eartips in place. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she—Draco thinks her name might be Rachel—answers, and though her eyes are shining with tears, her voice is steady and her expression set in that particular way mothers get when their child is in danger. “He was up in the attic with me while I was trying to get rid of the ghoul, and he just started coughing, which turned into wheezing—”

“How long ago did the coughing start?” His lungs sound fine—or as fine as they can sound through the horrible wheezing.

“Just a few minutes. We’re right next door.”

It sounds—and looks—like an allergic reaction, likely to the ghoul. Magical allergies are often much more severe than their mundane counterparts. The boy’s face is starting to swell, and his wheezing keeps getting higher and higher in pitch. Draco hurries him over to the exam room, and as he does, shouts at Genevieve: “I don’t suppose we have any ground doxy wings?”

“Those things are fifty galleons an ounce!”

So much for plan A. Merlin, what Draco wouldn’t give for the resources of a proper hospital, or even a proper clinic. “High potency soothing salve?”

“We ran out last week, the dealer’s having trouble sourcing some of the ingredients.”

And there goes plan B. The wheezing is getting more labored. “Do we have fucking epinephrine?”

“What the fuck is—?”

“Never mind,” Draco says through his teeth, “regular soothing salve it is. I suppose I’ll just manually keep his airway open while we wait for it to kick in, shall I?”

Genevieve, who for all her sass is acutely aware of the fact that a young boy is choking on his own throat, hurries out into the lobby. Draco returns his attention to his patient.

“I’m about to magically force open your trachea,” he says to him. The boy is staring at him with wide eyes, but he seems too scared to really comprehend him. “It’s going to feel very weird, but it will make breathing easier, all right? Try to stay still.” He raises his wand.

Then the front door of the clinic crashes open with a great shattering of glass and screech of metal.

“Down on the ground! Down on the ground!”

“This is a raid! Put your hands above your head!”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Draco cries, wheeling around just in time for one of what must be a dozen Aurors burst into his exam room, grab him by one shoulder, and slam him into the ground. Pain bursts in his temple as it collides hard with the tiled floor. His arms are wrenched behind his back.

The woman whose name is probably Rachel shrieks something incomprehensible before being grabbed herself. Genevieve, still in the supply closet, is screaming bloody murder in the background. And through the stars still bursting in Draco’s vision, he can see the poor little boy on the exam table start turning cyanotic.

“Let me go!” Draco’s hysterical, thrashing. “Stop it! That’s my patient!”

“This is lawful entry,” says a new voice from behind, and Draco lifts his head toward it immediately, “per a warrant signed by the Wizengamot for search and seizure of—”

“Potter?”

Draco doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Potter got him kicked out of med school and drove him out of two different countries—why wouldn’t he also try to get him arrested?

He’s in his maroon robes, the sharp angles of his lapels making his chest look unfairly broad. His expression is bewildered as it takes in the scene in the exam room—Draco, who can tell by the way his vision warps that he’s concussed; Probably Rachel, hysterically sobbing for the Auror holding her to let me go and please, my baby; and the young boy, who is no longer wheezing, and is in fact distressingly silent and listing to one side.

“Potter,” Draco grinds out, “I get that you hate me, I get you want to ruin my life, but please—don’t take it out on an innocent child.”

“I,” Potter says, stunned.

“He’s going into anaphylactic shock,” Draco cries, volume rising with his tremulous terror. “I have to open his airway or he’s going to die!”

“Lieutenant,” the Auror holding Draco’s arms says, voice unsteady, “protocol says—”

“Let him go,” Potter says.

“Sir—”

“The boy’s turning blue and you’re restraining the only healer in the room! Let him go!”

Thank Merlin, Circe, and Salazar himself that Potter’s hatred for Draco is eclipsed by his do-gooder instinct. The Auror releases Draco’s arms, and Draco scrambles toward the boy, now slumped onto one side on the exam room table.

Draco grabs him by the back of his neck with one hand; with the other, he positions his wand against his purpling lips. “Aeresacto!”

The spell takes; the boy wheezes in a frantic breath, and the blue tinge fades as he begins to pant raggedly. Probably Rachel sobs in relief.

“Genevieve!” Draco calls, not daring to take his eyes off his patient for a second, lest he lose concentration on the spell, “I need that soothing salve!”

Behind, there’s a bit of commotion. A deep voice yelps, “Shit!” and something clatters to the floor. A moment later, Genevieve runs in with a bottle in her hands. Draco takes it and uncorks it with his teeth before drizzling the pale blue contents over the boy’s swollen throat. It’s going to take at least ten minutes to kick in, during which Draco will have to maintain complete concentration on keeping his airway open, but at the very least—

“He’s going to be alright,” Draco says, hoping Probably Rachel can still hear him through her frantic sobbing. “You’re going to be alright.” He hopes his patient can hear him, too. “I’ll make sure you’re alright.”

Draco spends the next twelve hours in an interrogation room, being asked the same twenty questions over and over.

“Who furnishes the clinic with its supply of Sopophorous?”

“I’m running out of ways to say ‘I don’t know.’”

In the beginning, Draco had been defiant and angry; that had faded away around hour six. Now Draco sits slumped forward over the metal table between himself and his interrogator—Chalmers, according to the witch who keeps popping her head in every few hours to call him out of the room—with his hands in his hair. He’s exhausted, and starving, and definitely concussed, and he doesn’t even know if he’s under arrest because instead of answering any of Draco’s questions, Chalmers just keeps asking his own.

“You’ve been working there for near-on two years now. You don’t know where you get your stock?”

“I don’t do inventory,” Draco says, for what must be the fiftieth time. “I’m an attending healer.”

“When do your shipments of dragon blood arrive?”

“I don’t know. Not on my shift. Please, it must be past midnight. I don’t know anything about our suppliers and never have. Am I under arrest? I just want to go home.”

“Legally, we can hold you here for forty-eight hours without arresting you,” Chalmers answers flatly, and Draco tries to stifle the sob to middling success. “And we can always arrest you later, Death Eater. If you want to get out of here, I suggest you start answering my questions.”

“I don’t know the answers!”

“You’ve been working there for two years—”

The door opens. Draco doesn’t bother to look up, assuming it’s the same witch it always is, calling Chalmers outside for a while, before he comes back and starts the whole wretched process over again.

But the voice that comes is deep and sharp as broken glass: “Chalmers.”

Reluctantly, Draco lifts his eyes.

There he is: Harry Potter, with a five o’clock shadow, his dark hair tousled even more than usual. It would be so much easier to summon up some righteous indignation if Potter didn’t insist on looking so bloody fit all the time. Also if Draco weren’t so desperately, impossibly tired. And still bloody concussed.

“Lieutenant,” Chalmers says, sounding surprised. “Did we find—?”

“Get out,” Potter says. There’s an edge of real anger in his voice, which seems to confuse and unsettle Chalmers in equal measure.

“Lieutenant, I’m not done here.”

“Did I stutter, Chalmers?” Now Draco can see Potter’s anger as well as hear it, in the hard line of his brow and the downturn of his mouth. “Did I give you the impression that when I said ‘get out,’ it was anything less than a direct fucking order?”

Chalmers stands up so fast that the legs of his metal chair shriek against the concrete floor. He flees the room, chased by Potter’s intense green glare. He keeps glaring until Chalmers’s footsteps fade out of earshot, at which point he returns his attention to Draco.

“Bit rough for the good cop,” Draco can’t resist saying.

“Are you hungry?” Potter asks. “Thirsty?”

Draco stares back at him in silence. The words don’t quite process correctly. He watches in delirious silence as Potter, anger now subsumed by what can only (yet cannot possibly) be guilt, flinches.

“What am I saying? Of course you’re hungry. You’ve been here for twelve hours.” He ducks out of the room briefly and says something to someone out of Draco’s line of sight. Then he heads back inside and sits down across from him, leaving the door propped open. He says, “Wescott’s bringing you some food. Do you like Thai?”

“Everything with a mouth likes Thai food,” Draco says before he can stop himself. Then, “Potter, I can’t give you answers I don’t have. It doesn’t matter how long you keep me here. I do not know where the clinic gets its supplies—”

Potter holds up one hand. “I’m not here to ask questions,” he says.

Draco’s head feels fuzzy. The medical part of his brain unhelpfully chimes in with a list of symptoms of the concussion he’s failed to treat.

“Then why are you here?” Draco asks, wary.

“To get you some food and something to drink before I let you go,” he says. “Can’t have you keeling over on the way out.”

“You’re letting me go.” Draco knows he sounds incredulous, because he is. He doesn’t let himself believe it. He can’t. After the last couple years, he’s learned better than to trust in hope, fragile and flighty and always so disappointing.

“You shouldn’t be here at all,” Potter says. “This is way beyond the scope of the warrant. Chalmers is just a prick who’s angling for a promotion in the worst possible way. Malfoy, I—”

Potter’s words catch. He frowns, averts his eyes, runs his hand through his wild black hair. Draco stares at the hand as it moves, knobby knuckles and fading scars, and wonders if perhaps he passed out and is dreaming. Maybe Potter will say something about how sweet young things like Draco shouldn’t be treated this way, then bend him over the table and fuck him within an inch of his life. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d had a dream like that.

After a protracted silence, Potter finally continues: “Malfoy, I owe you an explanation. Several explanations, actually. And several apologies.”

“What,” Draco answers. He can’t even muster the strength to make it sound like a question.

“And, afterward, if you’re willing to hear it, I’d like to make you an offer.”