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Chapter Text

Tower Bridge isn’t going to work out.

Harry knows from the moment his feet land on the greyish-black ledge almost at the tip-top of the South Tower.

“Well. Fuck-bollocks.” Harry drops his arse onto the ledge, slouches onto the massive gold-fence decoration or whatever it is thrusting out of the stone, and swings his legs sulkily at the North Tower.

Why did he think the South Tower would have a better view?

Why did he think the view was going to matter? Did he think looking at the Tower of London was going to help? Even if looking at an ancient castle and, like, jail did it for Harry, he can’t really see it from here. This side of the South Tower of Tower Bridge faces the Tower of London, but the view is mostly the twin North Tower.

“Sort of does matter,” he grumbles at a passing flock of cormorants down below his battered trainers. The loop on his right laces is about to come undone, like he was barely paying attention when he tied his shoes.

Harry was paying attention. He bought the shoes, what, two years ago? Three? Still gets a pang in his chest when he looks at them. The top eyelet on his right shoe is almost totally free of the upper, holding on by a shoelace that’s only got a few peeks of red left.

God, Harry loved them when he saw them in a shop window on the way to some pub night or other, so he’d gone in and bought them, a shimmering anticipation in his chest like a sunny day. He threw his old shoes in the bin. Told the bloke behind the register to keep the box. Wore the new trainers out.

Made it to the cross-street before he had to sit down and put his head between his knees, his stomach in tight knots and his eyes burning for no bloody reason at all, the sunny-day feeling drowned in guilt and shame.

Harry didn’t know where that awful feeling came from. Imagining what everyone at their regular pub night would say? What they’d think? No, it couldn’t have been them. It had to come from him, but he couldn’t locate where it sat in his body. Couldn’t find which memory brought it on, if it was a memory at all.

The trainers are barely white anymore. The tiny London coats-of-arms are fading smudges.

Okay, so, that’s another in the column against the South Tower.

Harry’s shoes aren’t part of the Tower, but they’re involved in this whole thing because they’re on his feet.

He’s had to be careful with the shoelaces for at least a year. Harry can’t tie them too tight or else the laces will rip that loose eyelet off the upper. He could use charms, obviously, but the spell might not hold if he hit—

Like, there’s so many things to crash into.

The two matching walkways that stretch from the South Tower to the North. The big turret things on the corners of the tower. The roadway itself.

Harry’s not sure how he’d end up on one of the turret-crosses, but he did once end up on the chimney of the school kitchens without meaning to, so it’s not much of a stretch to think that somehow he could end up dangling from an ornament by his shirt or something, probably with only one shoe.

Which is not why he came up here.

He didn’t really come here to jump. He just…

Thought he’d check it out.

See if it was, like, feasible.

Only the angles of the roof below his worn-out shoes are a lot steeper than they’d looked from the pavement next to the Thames. The golden crest is a lot taller. Harry feels pretty small, but not as small as he thought he would.

It’s not like he thought about it for long. Thirty seconds, maybe, leaning on a black railing that’s a shadowy smudge from this height.

He’d pictured…dunno. A swan-dive into the afterlife. Apparating directly into hushed, misty King’s Cross.

The Thames was pink and orange and rushing cheerily, or at least not dragging its feet, and the towers caught the light, so Harry cast a half-arsed Disillusionment Charm on himself, thought ledge, and went.

For some reason, he hadn’t factored in hitting the water, or the whole falling thing. He hadn’t thought about the turrets.

There’s more of a breeze, this high up. A memory from around the time of the chimney incident resurfaces. The towers are sixty-five metres tall—somewhere around there. Harry’s got no idea how deep the Thames is at this bridge, and the sunset has turned the water into a rippling sheet of gold with a ferry trundling through.

He lets out a deep, irritated sigh. For one glorious moment, he thought he’d had a possible solution to the cock-up he’s made of his life. But of course it can’t be simple. There’s accidental magic to think of. The walkways and the ferry and his shoes.

That hadn’t been a problem when Tommy killed him in the Forest. One AK sent him neatly to King’s Cross, which really had been simple: get on the train or don’t. Go on or go back.

Can he be blamed for wanting something that cut and dry when everything else is so painfully fucked? Literally everything else. His house. His job. His life.

Grimmauld Place hasn’t been itself—its decent self—since everyone moved out. Ron and Hermione were gone by July after they finished at Hogwarts. Seamus and Neville went soon after. The Slytherins who stayed there drifted off in stages. Pansy was the only one left when their curse-breaker training got going in September. She ended up sitting so many certification exams that she got a flat closer to the Ministry.

That was about when Sirius started keeping him up nights.

Sirius, or something with his voice and his presence.

Harry’s been a satisfactory curse-breaker, but not satisfactory enough for Pansy to want to stay. He’s taken course after course to specialise and hasn’t managed to finish any of them.

And the rest of Harry’s life—

Well. He hasn’t made it easy on anyone, has he? Harry knows how hard he is to love, and that’s, like, the resonance behind everything else. That first summer after Hogwarts, he’d been awake one night, the rest of the house sleeping around him, and thought what about Godric’s Hollow?

That never worked out, either. There’s a pile of parchments and a few Ministry hearings between him and actually being able to rebuild his parents’ house, and, like, he works for the Ministry. He works for Bill in the Curse-Breaking Department attached to the DMLE. The idea of being called in from Godric’s Hollow doesn’t sit right, but then—

Nothing sits right.

A loud, guttural grunt directly in his ear scares the bollocks off Harry. He jerks to the right with a shout that’s more of a shriek, sliding close to the edge in the process, and a black wing knocks his glasses off.

“Hey!” Harry reaches for his glasses, catching them on the tip of one finger, and uses some incoherent wandless to get them back on. The single, late cormorant from the passing flock gurgles at him some more. “Try that again!” he yells at the cormorant’s arse-feathers, realising only then that he’s holding onto his balance with the strength of a failing shoelace. “Bollocks fuck.”

Harry tosses more wandless behind him—a mild Sticking Charm that snicks the strap of his wand holster directly to the massive gold crest.

Merlin’s arse.

He looks like a twat.

Harry lets the wand holster take his weight. It’s strong enough to hold three of him, thanks to Pansy’s yearlong obsession with reinforcement spells, and he didn’t take it off when he walked out of work earlier.

Good thing, too, because now he can sulk on the top of Tower Bridge without having to worry about falling off when he didn’t plan to.

Wouldn’t be much of a surprise, really. Everything happens to Harry when he’s not expecting it. Every bloody thing.

And when he does try to plan, try to work towards something, it’s always too late.

How’s he supposed to fix that?

It’s not as if he can just, like, ask.

If he’d done any of the things he set out to do—if he’d made it easier for his friends to say yes, of course—and if he was more, like, lovable, and worth it, maybe he could ask, but at this stage—

What else? He’s too late.  

He scuffs his shoes on the slate roof and pretends his face is only burning from the reflected sunset and his chest is only tight because of his wand holster and his eyes are only stinging because of the breeze. Harry pretends, or maybe he just accepts the truth. Mostly, his emotions feel like they belong to another person. They’re too strong or they show up on a horrible delay or he calls them by the wrong name.

A sharp crack splits the air somewhere below Harry and bounces off the South Tower. It ricochets through Harry’s chest a bit, too. His heart wiggles about, does a few uncoordinated flops, and sets to racing like he did fall off the ledge and now he’s dangling by his shirt from one of the turrets.

It was probably, like, a bridge sound. A car door slamming. Something other than a person Apparating nearby.

Definitely not someone Apparating onto part of the bridge.

“Potter,” Draco calls. The wind picks up his voice and carries it straight to Harry.

“Jesus bollocks fuck,” Harry says to his knees. He makes a show of rubbing at his eyes underneath his glasses like he’d been deep in thought, then picks his head up.

Draco stands on the slightly gabled roof of the lefthand walkway, his hands slid poshly into the pockets of his trousers like he’s got his feet on the actual ground. Harry’s heart swan-dives out of his chest and straight into the Thames, then scrapes horribly along the bottom, because Draco is just everything that Harry—

He’s everything.

He’s grey trousers and matching waistcoat and crisp white shirt. He’s sleeves buttoned at his wrists because he doesn’t push them up when he’s doing curse analytics. He’s starlight hair swept into a bun at his nape and soft lips and skin that’s like bloody rose petals.

He’s glowing in the brilliant last gasp of the sunset.

And…

He’s Harry’s ex-boyfriend.

Ex-almost-fiancé.

Harry slaps his hands bracingly on his thighs and then—

Because he really has no bloody idea what else to do—

He waves.

Draco shifts his weight with this easy movement of his hips that will never stop driving Harry mad. The walkway, it turns out, isn’t as far away as Harry thought. It’s close enough that Harry can see the tiny furrow in Draco’s brow.

Harry used to know what it meant. Now he’s not sure he knows what anything means.

“What are you doing up there, Potter?”

“Er…” Harry turns his face into the breeze and imagines it can cool the molten slosh of his thoughts. “Sitting on the ledge.”

“I can’t hear you,” Draco calls.

Harry clears his throat. Merlin, it aches. Is that because of the air? Did he inhale a cormorant feather or something?

“Sitting. On the ledge,” he calls back.

“Potter, I can’t hear you.” Draco holds up one hand and beckons, just like he does when he wants Harry to come in from the observation gallery to consult on a curse. Just like he, er, did. Just like he used to. “Come down.”

“Fine, okay, Jesus,” Harry says, mostly under his breath. His arms tingle with the particular embarrassment of being watched when he thought he was having a bit of privacy. The tight, tender feeling follows the straps of his wand holster across his chest and over his shoulders. He’s got to unhook himself—there—and once that’s done, Harry hops to his feet and turns.

It’s a ridiculously short Apparition. Barely a pinch.

Harry comes out of it too close to Draco. His lungs flatten, forcing out all the air, and in the middle of taking a huge replacement breath, Draco grabs his waist.

Draco actually, like, grabs Harry’s waist, which startles Harry almost as much as the cormorant. Draco usually doesn’t—usually didn’t—grab. Even when it was fast and urgent, it never seemed hasty.

And then, the next second, Draco’s touch isn’t hasty at all. Draco spreads his hand out on Harry’s lower back, firm and confident. He takes Harry’s left hand in his. Harry’s entire body says dance and his feet take a little step towards Draco before his brain screeches that’s not what’s happening that’s not what’s happening you’re a fool holy bollocks what are you thinking are you mad why would you—

Draco takes them into the turn, and they’re on the pavement in the dusky shadow of Develin Tower before his screeching, tardy brain can finish the thought, and Draco’s taking them all the way through the turn and letting Harry slip out of his hands like it’s only natural.

Then Harry has to shove his hands in his pockets, because he’s missed Draco so much since they broke up that it takes him ages to fall asleep and ages to get out of bed and his skin is raw and sensitive everywhere, everywhere, but especially where Draco just touched him. He can feel Draco’s fingerprints on his waist and Draco’s fingers curled through Harry’s.

Oh, for Merlin’s bollocks’ sake, is he going to have to sit down and put his head between his knees?

If he is, then hopefully Draco happened to be walking by the bridge, and now that he’s got Harry on land again, he’ll, like, carry on.

To wherever he was going.

Harry’s just braced for Draco to carry on when Draco brushes past.

Except there’s Draco’s touch again—just above Harry’s elbow, turning him, then drumming lightly on the small of his back—and it’s only a habit to fall into step with Draco.

They leave the pavement, and Draco’s long strides take them down a dirt path and into a garden in bloom.

The path winds through grasses and flowers, tended without looking too tended, just a bit wild. The garden’s grown enough for a few crickets to chirp, tentative little calls like they’re not sure if it’s evening.

“Better, I should think,” says Draco. The rhythm of the words is…off, somehow. Just a bit too fast.

“Er—yeah?” Harry doesn’t know if this is better. He can smell the Cleansing Charms on Draco’s clothes and the faint traces of his hair potion and Draco’s clean, silver magic, which hurts loads more than an AK ever did.

A whisper of pressure at his elbow tells Harry they’re taking the path on the left. “Quite. Whatever were you doing just now, Potter?”

“Sitting on the—”

“I gathered as much. What I mean is—” Two women come towards them, huddled close together, laughing, and Draco steers Harry out of the way with a distracted nod. “What I mean is, why?”

“No reason, really? I just, er, saw the towers, and I’m, like, a wizard, so I went up, and—”

“Merlin’s bells.” Draco pulls Harry to a stop on the edge of the path. Traffic rumbles above them on the very beginnings of the bridge, but it’s relatively quiet down where they are. Not too many tourists on the path with them at the moment. Harry’s heart pounds like he’s surrounded. His eyes feel too large in his head, like they’re straining to see, though it’s not that dark yet. Draco keeps his fingertips on Harry’s elbow and closes his eyes, drawing himself up tall and breathing in deep. “Did you know, Potter—we’re standing in a ditch?”

“Yeah? Sort of. I mean, it’s—” Harry waves at the bridge’s approach on one side of them. “It’s lower.”

“This was once a moat for the Tower, but it was drained in the nineteenth century.”

“Oh.” Harry knew they were next to the Tower of London. He’s been to the Tower of London several times in the course of being a Ministry curse-breaker. But he hasn’t thought about, like, the Tower’s fortifications or whatever since primary school. “I think I did know that, yeah.”

“Sometimes,” Draco continues in the same level voice. “Castings can be influenced by the proximity of certain elements.”

Harry takes a very small step closer to Draco. His mind shows up late and frantic, explaining why in a mad rush.

This is what Draco does when he wants to, like, calm himself.

And if he wants to calm himself, that means he had a reason to feel unsettled, or upset, or worried.

“I’ve heard that,” Harry answers, not moving, not taking his elbow away. “Also that the influence can, er, keep going over time.”

“Right,” Draco says, almost to himself, and takes another deep breath.

When he opens his eyes, Harry’s heart misses a beat entirely.

Because Draco was really worried. Draco’s still really worried.

About Harry.

And—yeah, Harry fucked everything up. Harry—after being dated, like, so comprehensively he’s pretty sure he was being courted—found the ring Draco got for him and freaked out. Harry left. But he can see from Draco’s expression that the breakup doesn’t matter to him right now.

“Listen.” This is not what Harry wanted when he went up to sit on the ledge. This is, like, the opposite of what he wanted. But how in Merlin’s tit is he supposed to explain it to Draco, who he left? His throat cinches around a lump that’s hard as a rock. “Listen, I—”

“Were you thinking about killing yourself again?”

“No,” Harry says instantly. “I mean, yeah, obviously I thought about it. But I didn’t really want—I didn’t think—it wasn’t going to work. I didn’t, like, want it to work. I’m fine. Like, I’m really—I’m fine. I’m good.”

Harry’s voice gets all tight and funny towards the end, which probably doesn’t help his case. He knows it doesn’t because Draco’s touch goes even softer on his elbow.

“Will you come to see Weasley at—”

“No,” Harry says, just as fast.

“Granger, then.”

“No.”

He just can’t explain any of this to Ron and Hermione. They don’t get it, and he doesn’t expect them to, because they’re good. At their lives. At planning things out and doing them.

And the one time he tried to put into words how King’s Cross doesn’t scare him or haunt him, it sort of…comforts him, sometimes, even though he doesn’t regret the choice he made when he was seventeen, Ron nodded in a Healer-ish way and Hermione squeezed Harry’s hand and later he overheard Ron crying in the bathroom and Hermione saying it was a different experience, Ronald, he can’t know what that was like and Ron not saying anything at all.

More crickets sing in the pause between them. The lights on the bridge railings tick on above them, casting shadows at their feet. A bloke belly laughs, the sound bouncing from Tower to bridge and back again.

“Will you come to mine?” Draco asks.

“For tonight?”

Another pause. Draco’s hand is warm on Harry’s arm. Harry’s constricted lungs and chafed skin and sandpaper eyes are starting to take, like, a shape. Maybe even one that he could name.

“Yes.” Draco moves his thumb in a little arc on Harry’s arm. “For tonight.”

Chapter Text

Harry couldn’t have asked for a more cut-and-dry set of choices.

Like, literally. He had no idea those choices were even going to be on offer. Now they’re out in front of him, he doesn’t bother thinking of any others.

And from the steady expression on Draco’s face, the choice really is that cut and dry.

From Harry’s past experience, too.

Ex-almost-fiancé or not, terrible intermittent heart-pains or not, Harry doesn’t want Draco to come to Grimmauld with him. Not only will Draco do that, but Draco has done that, and Grimmauld Place will never keep a son of the house of Black waiting on the pavement.

And since he doesn’t want to go to Grimmauld and can’t face Ron and Hermione…

Well.

Harry wanted an easy choice, didn’t he?

“Yeah. I’ll come to yours.”

People who weren’t almost Draco’s fiancé probably wouldn’t notice any difference in the way he’s standing. Draco usually doesn’t—he usually didn’t—slouch when he’s relieved. He lets out a really soft sigh, like he’s just caught his breath, and drums his fingers on the small of Harry’s back until he starts walking again.

It’s full dusk now, the ditch-that-used-to-be-a-moat filled with purple shadows and lemony pools from the streetlights over their heads. The colours are softer on Draco’s face, but suit him as well as the sunset did.

“The Apparition point at Trinity Square is closest,” Draco mentions. “We’ll take that one home.”

By home, Draco means his townhouse on Connaught Square.

Harry doesn’t think about how close he came to living in Draco’s townhouse. He basically did live there for a little while.

Like—a few months or so.

Like—the better part of a year.

Long enough to know the sycamore tree they land next to in the posh private garden in the centre of the square. The garden that Harry really has no right to anymore, since he’s not with anyone who lives here.

Long enough to recognise the surprised churr-churr-churr of a great tit up in the branches, and the churr-churr of a second great tit answering.

Draco clicks his tongue and reaches into his pocket.

“It’s only me,” he calls up into the branches. Harry can’t see the tits or the nest in the branches, but looking for them hurts less than looking at Draco, so Harry doesn’t notice Draco’s offering him something until Draco grazes Harry’s arm with the side of his hand. “Here.”

Harry puts his hand out, and his fingers meet a little hill of seeds. Draco tips them carefully into Harry’s palm. He doesn’t have to look to know this is the seed-blend that Draco makes specially for the great tits he’s befriended. Harry can’t hope to name the feeling that comes over him—warm, maybe, and the sensation of having laughed so long his stomach aches, like he might laugh again any second.

The Connaught Square great tits would survive without posh sunflower seeds and sunflower hearts and unshelled peanuts that Draco has delivered from Fletcher & Magnus and sorts into wee packages himself, but you wouldn’t know it by how the tits let out matching high-pitched tweets and swoop down from the branches.

“There are no other birds,” Draco scolds fondly as they flutter above Harry’s hand, picking out the seeds they want with precise taps of their beaks. They won’t actually come to him. They’ll only land in Draco’s hand. But they’ll take the seeds that are good enough. “No need to sound the alarm.”

One of the great tits does a pinking call at Draco, who whistles back one of their other songs. Harry’s got no idea how he does that.

Can’t ask, either.

Not right now.

He’s busy holding his hand out and pretending he doesn’t exist. If he exists, then his heart will explode and he’ll have to cough it up or something horrible.

The tits take another peanut or two as a parting gift, then flap back up into the branches, leaving Harry with a scattered quarter-handful of seeds.

And of course Draco’s right there, his hands cupped to receive the extra seeds.

Harry holds his breath and lets the seeds fall into Draco’s palms. They’re good seeds. Wasting them would be an arsehole move. So he’s got to let their hands touch again, and that—

That gives him a feeling like ice splintering under his feet. Giving way a bit.

Draco tips the seeds into one of his packets and tucks it away. “Let’s go in, shall we?”

Harry tries to look at the townhouse like a neutral visitor. Somebody who’s just, like, walking past this corner on the way to somewhere else.

Even if he was just walking past, he’d still think it was beautiful.

Draco’s front door is a lovely dark shade of green with a knocker Harry’s never quite understood. He understands the dragon part of it—half of the silver circle is a dragon—but he doesn’t understand the phoenix part. Nobody he’s ever known has been like a phoenix except for literally Fawkes.

He follows Draco up the two low steps.

“Hello,” Draco says to the knocker. The dragon and phoenix chase each other in a loop set off by flickers of magic. “Yes, we’re back.”

Harry swallows hard. We’re back, like they both stepped out for an errand or dinner or the pub. His feet carry him up the last step and over the threshold. Visitor, he thinks mechanically. Never seen this place before. What a lovely home. What a nice place.

The door clicks shut behind them, and another opens in the wall to the left, revealing the coat closet with its rack for shoes. Draco spells his own shoes into the closet, then continues down the hall, easy, normal.

“Everything is how it was,” he says over his shoulder just before he disappears into the kitchen. “Nothing’s changed.”

“O…kay,” Harry answers. It’s not his house. It doesn’t matter if everything’s the same. He’s only got sweat prickling at his hairline because of, like, the walk, probably. And he’s not short of breath, he’s only been…walking.

He takes Draco’s place at the closet, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, and his heart skips two beats.

Because there are Draco’s oxfords.

With a space next to them.

Room for Harry’s shoes.

Harry’s trainers look even worse lined up next to Draco’s.

He tucks the laces under the tongues. It doesn’t help, but the closet door feels like it’s getting impatient to close, so Harry gives up.

Calling after Draco casually doesn’t seem like an option. Harry’s been inside two minutes, and something awful is happening to his throat. The muscles have gone off. It’s hard to swallow. Then he has to keep swallowing. He didn’t breathe like this before, he’s pretty sure. The bottom of his neck—or the top of his spine, Harry doesn’t know—pinches like a puncture wound.

It’s the same, but it’s so different from the nightmare that is Grimmauld Place. Draco’s townhouse is made up of loads of hardwood and neutral paint colours. It’s got sunlight during the day. Draco’s things aren’t multiplying whenever he looks away.

Harry shoves his hands in his pockets, tries to hold his shoulder blades closer together like Pansy’s always on about, and strolls into the kitchen.

Draco’s not there.

Because he’s stepped out into the garden.

The terrace. Whatever it is. The porch-garden. Patio-garden.

The garden with the deck.

Draco’s out in the moonlight, spelling a bit of parchment onto his owl’s leg while the owl, Aeschylus—who Draco calls Kyle—pecks at the bowl of treats in the branch-shaped ledge sticking out from the tree-shaped owl house where Kyle sleeps when he’s not carrying letters.

Oh—it’s not only the moonlight. Draco’s got a Lumos in a jar on the round, red table, so he glows from all directions.

Harry’s not doing anything. That’s the worst part. He’s just standing there in the kitchen. Tealight Lumoses bob in jars on the worktop. More spell-light shines softly from under the cupboards. The house replaced the Muggle lighting at those spots with a spell network, so it’s Draco’s forever.

None of that is new. All of it is normal and fine.

Harry wants to die.

He didn’t really want to die on Tower Bridge. That was just, like, reconnaissance.

This is like discovering he’s been burning alive for several hours and just now noticed. It smells too good in here, like Draco and Draco’s magic, which is silvery and cool but also sort of warm and sweet, like almond biscuits, and Harry can’t stuff himself full of it.

Draco’s magic is what does it. Or it’s the last straw that crashes through everything underneath. Tosses Harry off the bridge, or whatever.

He turns so fast his hip cracks into the worktop, and then his knee collides with the cork of a wine bottle, because of course Draco’s posh worktop is also a wine rack with bottles sticking out in two directions.

“Bollocksing hell.” Harry bends to rub the throbbing ache in his knee where the wine bottle attacked him and hits his forehead on the worktop. Jostles his glasses off, too. They land on his toes, then go skidding across the kitchen floor. Harry’s got both hands on his forehead, so he can’t catch them. “Fuck!”

A breeze comes in, all tinged with Draco’s magic, and the doors out to the terrace close. Harry’s skin burns. Or it’s his throat. Or it’s—

“Potter.”

“Shut up,” he snaps, too loud, too sharp. “Shut up, please, for the love of fucking Merlin, please, shut up, shut up.”

“Harry.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

Draco puts his hand on Harry’s elbow.

Bloody fucking perfect. Harry’s shaking and he didn’t know. Over what? Over nothing. Some wine bottles underneath the worktop. A kitchen.

“Let’s go get changed.”

It’s, like, four words, and Harry still has to stand there for five six seven a hundred heartbeats while his mind switches over to—

Well, he wasn’t thinking about his bloody clothes, was he?

He’s thinking about them now. Harry’s jeans are fine, but his shirt—

His shirt is making him want to die. He and Pansy never wear short sleeves for curse-breaking—curse-wounds, bare skin, that sort of thing—so Harry wears a long-sleeved shirt that’s just barely, like, compression.

It’s always fine until he gets home. Then the snugged straps of his wand holster flatten the fabric against his skin, a bit overwarm, and that makes him want to die.

Harry presses the heels of his palms a bit harder into his eyes. “I hate all my clothes.”

“I have others.”

“Do you have the—”

“I have the Arrows jumper.”

Harry lets out a huge breath. “I’m really—like, I’m good. I’m fine.”

“Here.”

Draco nudges something against Harry’s knuckles.

He knows exactly what it is.

Harry uncovers one eye and takes the Appleby Arrows novelty tumbler like he’s not bloody mortified.

Only half of him is deathly ashamed, really. The other half is so relieved he could scream.

He hasn’t thought of this tumbler even once since the breakup, almost like he was Obliviated.

Now—

Now, he’s already smashed his head on the worktop and shouted at Draco and made Draco worried. What else is there to hide?

Besides, like, everything.

Harry clicks his teeth on the metal straw and takes a sip.

It’s lemonade.

It’s his favourite lemonade.

“Oh, fucking bollocks.” He lets his other hand fall to the tumbler’s familiar roundness, then tips his head back. That’ll keep the flush from covering his entire face. “I’m really hungry.”

Draco rubs his thumb on Harry’s arm in a little arc. “We’ll shower first. Then we’ll eat.”

“But.” His heart is doing that dying thing again. The aching, spasming, dying thing. “I don’t—we—”

“Everything is how it was,” says Draco. “Nothing’s changed.”

He must mean that it’s the same for tonight.

Harry’s eyes burn a bit more, but the feeling that they’re too big for his head disappears. Something near his lungs releases at the same time. His knees, too.

“Okay,” he says, not sounding choked up at all. “Shower. Yeah.”

By the time they get upstairs and in the shower, Harry’s not embarrassed anymore.

Because he’s exhausted. Eyes-aching, knees-trembling exhausted. He must’ve been tired for a long time before this, but he didn’t feel it.

He wants Draco to wash his hair.

Well—he can’t wash it himself. His arms are too heavy. So he’s just got to let it happen. Draco puts a Repelling Charm on his tumbler so he can drink his lemonade in the shower, so Harry stands there, feeling separated from himself by a wobbly, watery film that’s not from the shower water. It’s his eyes. His gut. Most of his torso, really.

It does not get better.

Every time he opens his eyes, he gets a glimpse of Draco’s pale-pink naked body—mostly his chest, mostly his glistening scars—and a desperate want surges through Harry that he can’t do anything about because he’s so tired and so hungry and he thinks he’d pass out if they shagged or even kissed.

Draco’s got to dry him off, afterwards, and help him into pants and a vest and Draco’s joggers and the Appleby Arrows jumper.

“I feel stupid,” Harry says to the top of Draco’s head. He’s on one knee, tying the drawstring of his own joggers around Harry’s waist. “I hate this.”

“You’re hungry.” Draco looks up at him, smiling a bit, and pats his shin. “Let’s go down and eat.”

On the way to the breakfast nook in the kitchen, Draco opens the front door. Harry’s got no idea why or who he’s talking to until he shuts the door again and he’s got a paper bag in his hand.

“Arayes?” Harry whispers.

“And basboussa.” Draco takes Harry’s elbow again and walks him to the breakfast nook like Harry’s ancient. “And a bit of lentil soup.”

Harry groans desolately.

“I won’t notice if you drink it out of the cup.”

There are also chips, and Draco puts out a tiny bowl of frozen grapes. Harry curls the tumbler into his side and watches his own hand come down onto various bits of food. Is Draco even eating? Not really. He’s got to sit on Harry’s right side and catch his hand at least half the time because his fingers don’t care about getting the food to his actual mouth.

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Harry says around a frozen grape.

“I should think you’re tired.”

“Yeah. Mm-hmm.”

Draco Side-Alongs him upstairs, spells a Lumos into a jar in a guest bedroom, and puts Harry’s tumbler aside.

Helps Harry out of his clothes and into the bed.

Pulls up the covers.

Levitates a heavy blanket—green, soft—over everything.

His magic stays in the room after he’s gone.

Harry’s so tired he could be sick, but he lies there, blinking into the teal-and-blue stained-glass Lumos, and can’t fall asleep.

It’s not enough.

The bed is good, but it’s just not, like, enough. Not what he wants. His skin prickles again, threatening to split apart. That could be his ribs, though. Or his lungs?

Harry crawls out of the bed and gathers up the heavy blanket in both arms. Thank bloody Merlin it’s downstairs to the big bedroom. He drags his shoulder against the wall and barely makes it.

Draco comes out of the en suite as Harry staggers through the door. The magic at the threshold—like Draco’s but not Draco’s, weightless yet somehow, like, substantial—makes Harry’s steps wobble a bit. He’s not even drunk. Not even a little. Why is he like this?

“Here,” says Draco, and this time he’s got to put his arm around Harry. A hand on his elbow isn’t enough. “Nothing’s changed.”

The covers are folded down on Harry’s side, showing a neat triangle of white sheets. Harry tips into them and draws his legs up at exactly the same angle.

Draco re-tucks him in.

Harry can’t stretch out until Draco’s also in the bed. Then his muscles settle a bit, and he can find Draco’s shins with his toes and trace a path down to Draco’s ankles and shuffle sideways like a worm until he’s got his face fully in Draco’s neck.

A part of Harry bristles with shame and hurt and heartbreak. A part of Harry tries not to do this—not to need this.

But that part of him is very small, and he can’t reach it. Might even be in orbit or something. A moon stuck in his gravity but far enough away that he can’t let it take over.

Draco tugs the heavy blanket into alignment over Harry, then slides his arm under it. He rests his hand on Harry’s hip.

It’s quiet.

Quiet.

Quiet.

“Pansy gave her notice today at work,” says Harry.

Draco pats his hip. “I thought she told you she would.”

“She did, but I didn’t think she meant, like—I didn’t want to talk about it if it was going to be—I didn’t. Before. And now—” He shrugs pathetically, eyes smarting. “Grimmauld hates me. And it rains too much. Keep putting me in the Prophet. Sirius wakes me up every night.”

“Mmm.”

“My parents are dead.”

“I know.”

“Dunno what to do.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“Go to sleep.”

Chapter Text

Asleep or awake?

Asleep?

Awake?

Harry can’t tell if he’s asleep or he’s awake. He must’ve been sleeping really hard. His body’s got pleasantly heavy from the weight of his dreams.

Or he’s got a heavy blanket on top of him.

Yeah. He’s got a heavy blanket on top of him.

He blinks without moving. Wouldn’t be so bad to drift off again.

It’s early, anyway, and if Harry moves, he’ll fuck up the moment.

The moment of being…

Okay.

Because he’s in Draco’s bed. The bed they used to sleep in together.

Draco is in the bed, also.

It’s a minute before Harry can fully, like, locate himself and Draco in the bed. He’s pretty sure he fell asleep with his face smashed into Draco’s neck, but he must’ve turned over in the night. He’s on his side, one arm stuck under the pillow, his spine pressed to Draco’s leg.

It’s another minute before Harry’s sleep-slow brain separates the sound of pages turning from his own breathing.

He half-pretends he doesn’t exist.

Draco stretches, recrossing his ankles or whatever, and pats Harry’s elbow.

Harry closes his eyes.

Breathes.

Waits for Draco to lift his hand and turn another page.

Then Harry rolls over and nudges the tip of his nose to Draco’s hip.

Everything is how it was, Draco said. Nothing’s changed.

Nothing could be more the same than this—Draco waking first and reading in bed until Harry wakes up, too. Draco patting his elbow or tapping Harry’s ankle with his toes in a silent, like, signal that Draco knows Harry’s awake but not necessarily ready to talk.

Harry touching his nose to this certain fold in the fabric of Draco’s pyjamas and lying here while the rest of his body gets ready to face the day.

It’s a slower process, after the war. After his first few years on the job, really. For a while Harry got up the way he always did—harshly, all at once, heart already going and going, but in his and Pansy’s fourth year of being partners and Pansy and Ron’s second year of, like, being officially together and his and Draco’s first year dating, Harry and Pansy had got caught in a manor house in Sussex and stayed up for five days, breaking and breaking until they broke the heart—a brass lantern with some writing on it—and the house finally let them out.

Harry freaked out a bit after that. He’d freaked out so much he had to take leave, and after a week, Draco dragged him from Grimmauld to Connaught Square and made him sleep whenever he wanted to. It was, like, ten solid days of sleeping all the bloody time, in pretty much every room of the townhouse, before he could get on a semi-normal schedule again.

The steady rhythm of the pages is, like, really nice.

It stays the same for some time, then gets slower, then a bit slower after that.

Draco drops his hand to Harry’s hair and combs his fingers loosely through Harry’s curls.

“You’ll stay the week,” he says, like they’ve been talking about it for ages. “I’ve decided.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.” Another page turns, slow and thoughtful. “Last night, you mentioned some trouble with your house.”

Harry squeezes his eyes shut, his face going hot. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to go have a look.”

It’s hard to hate how Draco just, like, says things. Another page turns while Draco waits. Harry could argue with him, but when Draco uses this voice—even and quiet and completely self-assured, like, he’s just so sure he’s made a good decision—Harry doesn’t want to argue.

Well—

He sort of does want to argue, but then the urge to fight—or, alternatively, run and hide—comes up against the warm, solid boundary of Draco’s leg, and the wretched, skin-split feeling is already being soothed away by Draco’s fingers in his hair, so Harry scrunches his face and lets his shoulders come up by his ears and then lets them come back down again.

“Why?”

Draco untangles one curl from another. Harry hadn’t known they were at odds with each other like that, pulling just a bit too hard. A little thwap says Draco’s closed his book.

“I’m going to look at the house because it’s been a problem for you since we started dating.”

Harry lies very still.

“And,” Draco continues, “you’re staying the week because you’re still ticking.”

“No, I’m not. I’m fine. I was just, like, tired. And an arsehole.”

Draco does not say anything.

“I know you’re worried,” Harry manages, sounding nearly normal. “But you’re also wrong. I’m really not. I got it all out last night.”

Draco still does not say anything.

“Say it’s because of something else,” Harry definitely doesn’t whinge. “Besides the bridge thing. Because I was just sitting there. I didn’t do anything. I even had a Sticking Charm.”

“You’re staying the week because I can’t stand to be without you,” says Draco.

Harry half-scoffs, half-chokes a half-laugh into Draco’s pyjamas.

“And because you want me to cut your hair.”

“Oh, Jesus, I do.” Harry crushes his face fully into Draco’s thigh. His hair is awful. It feels so awful, and it’s been weeks, and Harry can’t take it, he really can’t, now that he’s noticed. “Merlin’s bollocks, please, please.”

He can feel Draco smiling from how his fingers move in Harry’s hair. Just from how the curl of Draco’s pyjamas shifts a bit with his hips, an inch from Harry’s nose. The dull ache when Harry breathes is, like, an incidental thing that’s got nothing to do with waking up here in Draco’s bed and knowing it’ll only last a week.

Because of Harry.

Because Harry left.

Because—

“We’d better get started.” Draco glides his fingers down and down until his hand spreads out between Harry’s shoulder blades. His thumb moves in a little arc that doesn’t hurt at all. “I shan’t make short work of it.”

Haircuts have never been simple for Harry.

Well—the act itself was simple enough for Aunt Petunia, but those haircuts never lasted. Draco is the only person who has ever been able to actually cut Harry’s hair, and most of the process has nothing to do with cutting.

First, he washes Harry’s hair in the sink slowly. Carefully. Like his hair could fall out any second if Draco used an ounce too much pressure. Draco’s got three different potions and a wide-tooth comb to coax out every tangle. The washing part is so unhurried that Harry falls asleep twice and has to revive himself with lemonade once he wakes up.

Might be a bit tired, still.

Then Draco turns ’round Harry’s chair so he can see his blurry outline in the mirror and bends to put his face next to Harry’s, looking at him from loads of specific angles.

Then he kisses Harry’s cheek.

It’s an easy brush of a kiss—a nothing’s changed kiss—and it lights Harry on fire.

Doesn’t matter that he hasn’t got his glasses on. Harry’s close enough to the mirror to see the rosy flush spread across his cheeks. His bronze-brown skin got warmer, the shade a bit deeper, from going on more outdoor assignments this spring, and still, Jesus bollocks, the blush.

Harry can’t meet his own eyes. He looks at the shiny faucet in the sink instead.

“See?” Draco runs his fingers through the top of Harry’s still-wet hair. “I haven’t forgotten. And of course I won’t cut too much at once. That’s simply not on. I’ve made certain we’ve plenty of time, so there’s absolutely no need to rush. Well take as long as we like.”

Harry doesn’t say anything.

Harry doesn’t have to say anything, because Draco isn’t really talking to him.

Draco’s talking to his hair.

Which felt hilarious the first time he cut it halfway through eighth-year when they’d all got past the shock of living in the eighth-year all-houses tower Hogwarts sprouted for them and the Slytherins had let down their posh, wary guard and they’d all got Butterbeer-drunk together a time or ten. Hilarious and embarrassing and too fairy-tale to be true. Harry knew it wouldn’t work. He knew talking to his hair couldn’t possibly make a difference.

Music makes a difference to plants, Potter, Draco said, turning Harry’s head this way and that to study his work in the mirror. It makes a difference to you.

You’re just talking, Harry told him, loving the entire massive performance in a mad, all-consuming way. That’s not music.

And Draco locked eyes with Harry in the mirror and started singing to his hair.

Draco straightens up in the mirror, his eyes on Harry’s hair, and Harry can’t help it, really. He can’t help staring. He didn’t think he could miss so many different expressions on one person’s face, but here’s another one he can hardly survive without—Draco concentrating, the inside of his cheek caught gently between his teeth, one eyebrow quirking while he debates with himself and murmurs nonsense to Harry’s hair about how lovely it is and how it only needs a bit of redirection.

He must be remembering that first time, too, because after a little while, Draco switches to humming.

Then to words.

“Sur le Pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse, sur le Pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse tous en rond…”

The sun gets brighter in the twist of Draco’s hair on top of his head. It warms the early-morning pink in Draco’s cheeks.

Harry watches him in the mirror until he’s got to close his eyes.

After another wash and a final hair potion, they get dressed.

Harry does not think about the ring box in the top drawer of Draco’s dresser. He doesn’t think about it at all. Not even once.

“Shall we have bacon?” Draco calls from inside the closet. “Or would you like toast by itself?”

The bit of him that wants to pull away—the orbiting mass of, like, hot contempt for how weak Harry is and how needy and how horrible—tries to yank him by the arm. Get him to stop talking. Get him to stop letting this happen.

“Have you got—” Harry interrupts himself by pulling the Arrows jumper on.

Draco comes back into view, the corner of his mouth a fond curl.

“I’ve got cinnamon and sugar,” he says, eyes flicking over Harry. Then he disappears down the hall, his feet patpatpatting on the stairs. “Bibsy?” he calls, voice getting softer as he goes. “Oh, hello. Have you got a minute? Harry—” He can’t hear what Bibsy says, but Draco laughs. “Yes. He is.”

Harry does think about the ring, then.

And with Draco and Bibsy’s voices sounding soft and far away, the thought is like electricity or magnetism or something. It pulls at his knuckles and the centre of his chest and Harry’s fine, really, he’s good, but he’s not got it in him to resist.

Silent steps to the dresser.

A bit of wandless to open the top drawer.

The ring box isn’t there anymore.

There’s an empty space where it was.

Harry pushes that little square next to Draco’s folded socks away and away and further away until it’s not part of him anymore. Until it’s not in his head anymore. Until he can forget about it.

He will never think about the ring again.

He shuts up the memory in the drawer, just like the narrow bed in the cupboard, and goes downstairs.

Grimmauld Place hides itself away whenever the Order is gone. Harry and Ron and Hermione made everybody who piled into Grimmauld for the summer after eighth-year members of the Order because that was easier than arguing with the Fidelius, which the house magic had claimed as part of it or something.

Anyway, he’s not the last of the Order.

He’s just the last person who lives here, like, actively, usually, so they’ve got to wait on the pavement for the house to unfold from the houses around it.

Harry would rather look at anything else.

He’d let Grimmauld fold away in his mind the second he left for work yesterday morning, like he always does. Harry’s good at not thinking about Grimmauld until he’s got to go back in at the end of the day.

He had not, er, planned on coming back here with Draco.

Who looks tall and posh and perfect on the pavement.

Next to Harry, who looks like he looks in his jeans and Arrows jumper and his half-dead trainers.

He hasn’t got anything against pale blue and silver, but the colours aren’t why he needs to wear the jumper right now and with the harsh light of day beaming all over him, Harry feels ridiculous. Embarrassing. Embarrassed, also.

And it’s a harsh light. A thin layer of clouds rolled over the sun somewhere between the haircut and breakfast.

Not Harry’s favourite.

Harry’s a bit torn, because, actually, he thinks a shag would help.

Not, like, emotionally. His feelings might explode if they shagged. Physically, it could be bloody perfect, like it always was before. Like it used to be.

And, like, he can’t stop wanting Draco. Now he’s slept, the relevant parts of him—Harry’s dick, yeah, but his heart also—won’t shut up about how fit Draco is and how smart and how good he is at everything but especially shagging and touching and kissing.

But then—Harry’s starting to think he might not be the best judge of, like, how he feels.

Draco taps his elbow. “Let’s go in, shall we?”

Fine, whatever, they’ll go in. It can’t be as bad as Draco finding Harry sitting innocently on the bridge.

One step inside the front door, Harry breaks out in a cold sweat.

This is worse than the bridge.

That was a bit of fantasy about, like, maybe being dead.

This is about how Harry’s been living.

Which was not supposed to be part of this.

He steps in front of Draco, blocking his way in a mad panic. “Let’s shag.”

Draco blinks at him.

“Let’s leave. To shag. Right now. Let’s go.”

“Harry.”

“I want to.”

“Harry—”

“I do.”

Draco just watches him and takes a long, slow breath. “I believe you.”

“No, you don’t.”

A plate falls over somewhere behind Harry, which means it’s, like, happening again. Draco looks past him, towards the sound, then back at Harry.

“Please,” he says.

“Harry, what’s—” China crashes to the floor behind Harry. He stares deeply into Draco’s eyes like he didn’t hear it. Jesus Merlin fuck, let him pretend his way out of this one thing. But no—Draco’s seen. It’s too late. He puts his off-hand on Harry’s face like a bookmark, his wand already out. “Let me—”

“Look,” Harry says, voice low, like that’ll be enough to keep the house from hearing. More china tink-tink-tinks behind him, and he knows, he just knows, it’s bursting out of the dining room and covering the floor. “It just hates me. It’s just—it’s trying to—I’ve asked it to stop. You don’t have to—”

Draco looks Harry directly in the eye, which feels like being caught out on the bridge-ledge or being tossed into a fire. “The house does not hate you.”

“Yes, it does! I’m, like, a usurper, or whatever! I’m a half-blood! I don’t have—”

“Sirius,” Draco calls over him. “Sirius. Come here this instant.”

Harry closes his eyes. “Oh, God. You can’t just—he’s not, like—I didn’t mean—”

“Can you see him when he wakes you at night?”

“No,” Harry says miserably, leaning a bit into Draco’s hand because he can’t help it. “No, I’ve never—sometimes he laughs, but it’s like he’s—”

“Younger?”

“Yeah.”

“Sirius.” This time, Draco almost shouts. But he sounds a bit like he might laugh, also. “This instant!”

“I told you.” Harry can’t get enough air for a shout or even his normal voice, so he sort of breathes the words at Draco. “He’s not a ghost. There’s nothing to—”

Draco pats his face. “There you are. That’s quite enough with the china, thank you. I understand the urge to help, but this simply isn’t the way.”

Sirius doesn’t, like, answer, but there’s a distinct presence in the hall at Harry’s back that feels Sirius-like and the sound of distant grumbling, like someone complaining in one of the bedrooms upstairs.

And now that Draco’s said something about it—

Yeah. It does seem like the Sirius who was in the photo in his old room. The one with Harry’s dad and Remus and Peter Pettigrew. That photo is still exactly where it was. Harry’s never been able to undo Sirius’s Permanent Sticking Charm.

Draco does something with his wand—Harry can feel it—then takes his hand away from Harry’s face.

“I’ve got him,” he says softly.

“What?”

“Look.”

In the cradle of Draco’s palm, pinned there with the tip of his wand, is a constellation. Eight tiny stars, glinting on his pale skin like little diamonds, except—

“Are those…paint?”

“I should think so. Let’s put him back in, shall we?”

It takes Draco five minutes to locate the painting Sirius’s constellation came loose from, and it only takes that long because he calls Kreacher and the two of them have a long chat about the various paintings in the house’s possession and whether Kreacher is aware of a certain photo album that might have been stored with a collection of family portraits.

Kreacher brings the photo album, then brings the painting, holding it reverently in his knobby hands.

It’s not a painting of the night sky, like Harry thought.

It’s a painting of teenage Regulus. Regulus slouches in a chair, his head thrown back, obviously bored and resentful of having to be in the painting at all. He lifts his wand and spells a paper crane into the air, then slumps sideways and watches it flap about until it leaves the frame.

Harry doesn’t hear a thing Draco and Kreacher are talking about. His throat really hurts. Sirius wasn’t supposed to die in the Department of Mysteries. That was not what Harry planned on. And now they’re putting Sirius back into a painting that’s not even of him. It’s just an empty space where he could have been.

“Kreacher,” he says suddenly. “Why didn’t you tell me he’d got out of the painting?”

“How was Kreacher meant to know Master Sirius had got out of this painting?” Kreacher answers acidly. “Number Twelve Grimmauld Place is always glimmering. The shining light of the most noble and ancient—”

Harry peers down the hall, which is very dim and also cluttered with duplicated china. “Right. Never mind. Thanks.”

Draco guides the constellation from his palm to the painting with a precise swish of his wand. It flies into a cloth draped in the background—midnight blue, twinkling stars.

Teenage Sirius appears in the painting and seizes Regulus, who goes limp, pretending to be dead. Painting-Sirius gets really into reviving Regulus. He shouts at him. Clutches his shirt. Sobs briefly into his shoulder. Regulus can’t stop laughing. Sirius pulls the pocket square out of his robes and wipes his eyes.

“Kreacher,” says Draco, as if he’s only just thought of it. “Would you tell the house we’re going on holiday?”

We’re and going on holiday do horrible things to Harry’s head. “I’m not going on holiday.”

But Kreacher nods like he knows what Draco is talking about. “Right away, Young Draco.”

“Thank you.”

Kreacher Disapparates without another word to Harry, taking the painting with him.

“Great,” says Harry. “Well, that’s my house fixed.”

“For the moment, yes.”

“Then maybe I should—”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

Draco touches Harry’s face again, and Harry turns into it like this isn’t terrible and he doesn’t know the ring box is gone, and then Draco makes it worse because he takes Harry’s face in both hands, and that makes Harry feel like he might lose control of his legs any second and slump to the floor like boiled pasta in his Appleby Arrows jumper even though he doesn’t really support the Arrows.

Harry glances at Draco’s face, finds it too much like staring into the sun, and looks at the banister of the stairs instead.

“That was, like, too easy.” It was a bit sexy, how easy it was for Draco. Or else Harry’s sort of irritated about it. “I’m a curse-breaker.”

“That wasn’t a curse.”

“Still.”

“Potter, you have—”

“Jesus Merlin, stop.”

Draco pauses for, like, a half-second. “Harry. Your vision is utterly useless. The stars were entirely too small to see in the middle of the night.”

“It should’ve been easier. I feel stupid.”

“You aren’t.”

“Well, I feel—”

“You are entitled to feel however you wish. You know that.”

“Good. Because I do.”

“But I shan’t pretend to agree with an incorrect assessment.”

“Well, I shan’t—” Harry can’t think of anything he shan’t do. “Whatever. Are we leaving, then? I hate this house.”

“This house is wonderful,” Draco says loudly. “The picture of gentility and elegance. Clean as well.”

“Stop flirting with it.”

Draco hisses at Harry like he used to when he was teasing, and Harry wants to laugh or scream. He can’t say which. His face is getting hot in Draco’s hands, but he’d rather melt than pull away.

“I remain eternally grateful,” Draco calls. “I shall keep you always—”

A Patronus bursts through the front door, its silvery-white form small enough to make Harry’s heart briefly block his throat—more stars? Is Sirius out of the painting again already? Is there something sinister at work? Like, more sinister than some of the Black family pastimes?—but then it zooms closer, letting out a piercing shriek, and it’s Pansy’s Patronus.

The field mouse sprints across the air towards them, then circles Draco’s head three times.

“Draco! Where are you? Leave it to you to be totally unreachable during an emergency. This is of the utmost—” Ron laughs in the background, which makes Pansy shriek-laugh. “Shut it, I’m trying to tell—Draco. Come here immediately. And bring my work husband. My new home might be cursed!”

Chapter Text

The hair on the back of Harry’s neck stands at being summoned for curse-related reasons.

His first instinct is to Apparate wildly until he gets to Pans—that’s what his training would have him do, and also, like, she’s his close friend—but his second instinct is to recoil.

The furthest he gets is a disgruntled sag, because Draco’s still got his hands on Harry’s face, and Harry doesn’t really want him to let go.

“That’s a load of bollocks,” he barks, slouching ridiculously. “I’m not her work husband.”

Draco traces an arc on Harry’s cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “She only put in her notice, I thought.”

“Well! I’m not going to stay around and, like, wait for her to—what, Bill is just going to drop someone new at her desk? Am I supposed to—” Harry waves at the bannister. “Go around and ask? For a new partner? Merlin’s fucking arsehole. And what curse? Didn’t she—I’m not standing here, waiting! We’ve got to go back to yours.”

“For what?”

“I need my shirt,” Harry snaps, his eyes swimming like he might actually cry over a field mouse Patronus and his former partner calling him her work husband, which he is obviously not. “I’m not wearing this.”

“You’re entitled to—”

“I know, I know, but the sleeves!” Harry flaps his arms to demonstrate the loose, comfortable fit that he loves and is utterly inappropriate for curse-breaking. “I can’t—I’ve got to have my holster!”

“You don’t need to go—”

“I need my holster,” he definitely does not whinge, hating himself. “I can’t think without my shirt and my holster.”

Draco rubs arcs on both Harry’s cheekbones. “I’ve got them.”

“You have my shirt?”

“Yes.”

“And my holster?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do, pack a bag?”

“Yes.”

Harry’s vision turns red, then redder, then purple. His mind is a dark sky with a spray of Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks. A tremendous drum beats between his temples.

At some point, he notices that Draco’s hands have moved to his shoulder and chest, and Draco has moved to Harry’s side.

“—another breath, I think. Wonderful.”

“I am breathing,” Harry wheezes, his vision clearing a bit. “You don’t have to, like, remind me.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You don’t have to pack a bag.”

Draco does not say anything.

“You don’t.”

Draco still does not say anything.

Harry shoves his fingers underneath his glasses and rubs his eyes until he feels less like a lit fuse. “I don’t even know where her new house is.”

“I do.” Draco offers his hand to Side-Along Harry. “Shall we?”

Draco borrows a bit of Harry’s magic to stabilise his Apparition. The tug and give is so normal, so nothing’s changed, that Harry’s heart shatters into a million pieces while they’re in the air. The shards spin out around them in a wide circle.

Then Harry’s feet touch the ground. Draco takes them all the way through the turn and lets go of Harry.

He almost lets go.

The tips of his fingers stay curled into the tips of Harry’s.

All his heart-shards slam back into his chest at once.

“What the fuck!” They left the clouds behind in London. The sun is soft and golden and slanted at an afternoon angle that says you’re going back to Privet Drive soon, don’t forget, don’t stop dreading it for a bloody instant, and it’s, like, an utter joke because that sunlight is coming down on— “This is Godric’s fucking Hollow!”

They’ve landed at the opposite end of the little village from Harry’s parents’ house. Harry’s house. The house where his parents died. The house where his entire life was ruined in advance.

Harry still knows where they are. He’s been here. Loads of times.

“Pansy!” Harry stalks off in no particular direction, hurt curdling into a poisonous lump in his gut. “Which one is hers? Draco, what the fuck.”

“Potter!” Pansy cries, barreling out the front door of a stone cottage sat merrily in the centre of a big garden and racing down a path lined with round stone towards an open gate. A sycamore tree with a thick trunk stands next to the cottage, leaning over a bit like it’s going to put its arm ’round its mate. She’s got her curse-breaking shirt on underneath a pair of green dungarees, her black hair in two plaits that are coming undone and a red flush standing out on fawn skin. “Potter, stop!”

“What the fuck!” he shouts again. “You quit!”

“No, I didn’t, I put in my notice! Potter, wait! Don’t—”

“Don’t what? You called me here! You said I was your work husband! What the fuck, Pans? This is Godric’s fucking—”

Pansy shrieks, a high, piercing note that Harry flinches away from.

He knocks into Draco, jumps forwards through the gate to avoid stepping on Draco’s feet or tripping him or something, and is instantly assaulted by a sound that’s a hundred times as loud as that cormorant and a hundred times as blaring.

Harry covers his ears and shouts what the bloody fuck-hell oh my fucking Merlin Jesus God Pans what the fuck, what the fuck! Until Pansy finally reaches him, grabs his wrists, and pulls his hands away from his ears.

“—the curse!” she shouts over him. “It’s the curse! You—”

“We set it off!”

“Yes!” she agrees, wincing, biting her lip like she’s trying not to laugh. “And it’s—honestly, Potsy, it’s not so awful, if you—”

Something lands on Harry’s head.

Then another something on his shoulders.

He looks up into a light shower of…

Confetti.

Thousands of rainbow-coloured strips of paper float gently down over them.

“Pans…”

“It’s Harmonizing.” Her hands tighten on his wrists. “Convectio class.”

He stares up into the confetti. “Then why didn’t you cast—”

“It’s not tied to an object in the cottage. It’s tied to—”

“The fucking property boundaries?” Harry’s mind is already there. He already knows what she’s telling him, but the full meaning still hasn’t taken its, like, final form. “Like, the whole thing?”

“Yes!”

Harry spins around, pulling his wrists free of Pansy’s grip, and finds—

A hedge.

A massive bloody hedge.

“Where’s Ron?” Harry is scorching rage wrapped in a core of, like, ice. “It’s just us, right?”

“Oh, Pans, you’ve got to be joking,” a voice that does not belong to Ron shouts from a fair distance away. Pansy’s front garden is bigger than Harry realised. “Are we all imprisoned, then?”

Harry whirls around again. Gregory Goyle steps out of the open door of the cottage, ducking his head a bit, then straightening up again. He’s got muscles now, and a suntan that’s turned his skin from pasty white, to, like, tan. Greg’s more than grown into the length of his arms, and he’s got sharp trousers on and a white vest, and here Harry is in the bloody Arrows jumper.

“Where’s Ron?” he shouts at Greg, like an arsehole.

“Out in the garden,” Greg calls back, and lifts a huge hand to wave at Harry. “With everybody else.”

Harry glares at Pansy. “You have other people here?”

“Oh, Potter, please. It’s only Hermione. As if I could leave her sitting home when Blaise—”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Pansy.”

“It was a septet!” She holds her hands up. “Honestly, Potter, I—”

Loads of things happen at once, or almost at once. Harry can’t tell for sure. He strips the Arrows jumper over his head. Then he goes for his vest. He’s shirtless when he lunges for the fence, and then he isn’t. Harry doesn’t know who spells his curse-breaking shirt and wand holster onto him. Doesn’t matter. He goes for the hedge with his bare hands and bare magic.

Pieces come free, smelling sharply of bleeding plants or something, and the hedge gets all up in Harry’s personal space. He finds the ley lines of the spell, curls his fingers ’round, and yanks on them, but the bloody hedge smacks his face. Harry tries again, swiping counters along the ley lines, aiming to slice the strings and rip out the core.

The ley lines won’t come.

And there’s something about the feel of them. Knowing sparks in the back of his mind. It’s little pinpricks like the pixies he and Pans saw once on assignment at the boundary of the Forbidden Forest, too far away to make out just yet.

There’s some shouting. Someone tugs his elbow. Pansy, probably. But this—this confetti business, this curse business—this is not happening to him. Not today. This isn’t what he planned on. This isn’t what he wanted. He wanted to be alone with his jumper and his tumbler and his horrible feelings and not caught in a curse with six other people.

Or maybe he didn’t want to be alone.

Maybe he wanted to be with Draco, or maybe even—

Hedge-fragments sting little cuts into his hands, but he keeps going. Harry’s got enough power to  tear through it. If he keeps pushing—

And then—

He’s off the ground.

Just, like, dangling there.

For a second, he thinks he’s gone mad or gone back in time or both, and he did jump off the tip-top of Tower Bridge, and his shirt did catch on one of those turrets.

But there’s no walkway beneath him, and no water. There’s only green grass and murdered hedge.

Harry kicks his feet. “What the fuck.”

His wand holster shakes him a bit. “You okay, Harry?”

He goes utterly stiff. “Greg?”

“Yeah, it’s me. You were upsetting the hedge, there. We’re not going to have any garden left if you keep it up.”

Harry’s face is going to blister off from the rush of hot blood. “Put me down.”

Greg lowers him until his feet touch the ground. “You okay for me to let you go?”

“Yes.”

“It’s just that we won’t have any garden left if you keep—”

Harry does a duck-spin that miraculously doesn’t send him sprawling, gets out of Greg’s reach, and wipes his forehead with his sleeve. Perfect. The hedge has pressed in on the garden. Still a pretty good-sized garden, though, so Harry doesn’t see why he had to be stopped.

By Gregory Goyle.

Greg grimaces. “Sorry about that. Pansy said—”

“Where—” Harry steps around Greg so he can see—Merlin, he’s so tall, how can a person even be that tall and, like, fit—and understands why Pansy isn’t shouting at him anymore.

She’s with Draco near the house, one hand on his arm and the other on his back, because Draco’s being poshly sick in the grass.

Harry sprints across the still-large garden to Draco’s other side and flings his arms around Draco. “Was it this bloody curse? Because I swear to fucking Merlin, Pans, I’ll—”

“It was only a little snake,” says Pansy. “Not one of the venomous ones. I haven’t had time to ward—”

“Which way did it go?” Harry demands.

“Towards the tree,” answers Pansy. “But I’m sure it—”

Harry lets go of Draco and goes after the snake.

He finds it curled in a tuft of grass at the base of the sycamore tree and crouches down next to it, every heartbeat too huge for his body.

“Listen.” Parseltongue doesn’t feel strange to Harry anymore. It feels like words. The snake perks up, darting its tongue in Harry’s direction. Pansy was right, it’s a small grass snake, harmless, the kind he used to see in Aunt Petunia’s garden. “You’ve got to go. Tell your friends. All of you have got to go. Because we’ve got—my—Draco’s got a thing with snakes.”

The grass snake bobs its head and hisses something that also doesn’t sound much like hissing to Harry. It doesn’t sound like English, either, obviously. If he had to translate it, it would be, like, kind safe to bite.

“I know you’re safe, but he’s—he’s not thinking of you. You’re reminding him of a really bad time with, like, a totally unrelated snake. A lot bigger than you, and mean. And venomous, probably, though I think she mostly, like, ate—” Harry shakes his head. “All of you have got to go. Otherwise I’ve got to come out later and clear all of you away. I can’t have you bothering him. Sorry. I know you live here. But you can’t live here right now.”

Goodbye later, the snake tells him, then slithers out of sight.

“Hey, mate.”

Harry looks up into Ron’s freckled face. Somehow his freckles have tanned, but not the rest of his skin, and he still looks, like, sharp and handsome and not at all gangly like he was when they were kids. He’s got a haircut recently, too. Harry stands up, heart aching, knees wobbly, temples throbbing. “Hey.”

Ron scans Harry’s face, then the front garden, his eyes going wider when he sees the hedge. “Dunno if I should ask. Back garden got a bit snug, too.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to ask whatever you want.” Harry had a task to do—get between Draco and, like, any fucking snakes, and now it’s done the rest of the situation claps him like he’s a bug, smacked between two palms. “We’re here for a bloody week.”

“Oh,” says Ron, like it’s not a big deal. Like he might be totally fine with spending a week in Godric’s fucking Hollow with six other people. Which he probably is, because he’s gone for Pansy and would take any excuse to get out of St Mungo’s for the week and flirt with her. “Good thing we went to the shops, then.”

“Good thing.”

Harry heads towards the cottage.

“You okay, mate?”

“I’m fine,” Harry calls over his shoulder. Pansy’s moved off with Draco, who’s standing up straight, one hand over his eyes. Harry wants to kiss him so badly he thinks he’ll die, but kissing doesn’t seem possible right now, so he keeps moving. “Really. I’m good. Just need—” He makes a vague gesture towards the door. It opens for him.

Pansy’s cottage is cool and woodsy. Plastery, too. Plaster walls. Wood floors with patches of light.

He stomps up a flight of stairs and finds a room with shelves built into the walls, some of them stuffed with books, most of them empty, and spells the door shut.

Then Harry lies down, flat on his back on the round rug in the centre of the room, and shuts his eyes.

He pretends he doesn’t exist.

Pretends.

Pretends.

Pretends.

Harry’s not aware of falling asleep, but he knows when he starts to wake up, because he’s not lying on the floor anymore.

He’s still partially on the floor, but mostly his head is on someone’s thigh.

It’s Draco’s thigh.

And Draco is talking.

The floor is softer than it was when he first sprawled out on it, and his body has got pleasantly heavy.

Or—

He’s got a heavy blanket on top of him.

Harry wiggles his toes and discovers someone’s taken his shoes off, and, yeah, he’s got a heavy blanket on top of him.

“—to my foot,” says Draco. He has his fingers in Harry’s hair, his hand resting on Harry’s head like it’s been there for ages. “Otherwise, I’d have composed myself. No need to ward them out.”

“Then I shall forget all about it,” Pansy answers lightly. “A chore off my list. A burden off my shoulders. Ten entire seconds, saved for me for later use. Perhaps even a minute, and then I can—”

“Oh, shut it, Pans. Of course you must do what makes your heart sing.”

“Quite right. I did want your opinion on the bedroom paint colour, though.”

“Which bedroom?”

“It’s not only mine, this time. And Ron is so…soft-hearted.”

A pause.

Harry lies perfectly still. Pages turn near his head. They don’t sound the same as Draco’s book from before.

The pixie-knowledge from the hedge earlier bobs closer behind his eyelids. Someone—probably Draco—took his glasses off, too, so the frames aren’t pinching him.

A septet.

A heavily reinforced septet.

A septet he couldn’t tear the ley lines out of.

“What,” Draco says. “You don’t think he likes walls the colour of your soul?”

Pansy hisses at Draco. “The colour of my soul is a pure, innocent—”

“Liar!”

“White,” says Pansy, a giggle breaking up the middle of the word. “Although I own a set of lingerie that might do quite nicely for inspiration. Oh, look at your mother. Wasn’t she beautiful?”

“She’s still beautiful,” Draco answers absently. “Did you know, Pans—”

“That she goes to France? In fact I do know that.”

“I can’t help but think—”

“France wouldn’t have been better. You’d have shagged constantly and never gone out.”

“What a nightmare.”

Pansy giggles again, softer. “You know how he feels about French.”

“He doesn’t understand French.”

“That’s probably why it’s so attractive. Sexually, I mean.”

“Pansy.”

“It’s only true. For Harry, of course. Not me. I don’t care one way or another what a man says in bed, so long as he—”

Harry pushes himself upright, the blanket making the movement less powerful and commanding than he hoped for. He ends up with his kneecaps pushed up against Draco’s thigh, far too bloody close, and can’t shuffle away without looking even more ridiculous, and glares his most betrayed glare at Pansy. It’s a bit difficult, because she and Draco have the photo album from Grimmauld open on their laps, and the photos are magical, so they’re all moving, jostling for Harry’s attention.

He is not going to look at the photos. Harry’s busy accusing Pansy with all his soul.

She looks right back at him, her chin up and her plaits re-done and her arms crossed defiantly over her chest.

“It was you.” Harry’s voice comes out low and sleepy, which is far less powerful and commanding than he hoped for. “How dare you?”

Pansy gives him a look. “Of course it was me, Potsy. You can’t have thought I bought a house and moved in without checking it over for curses.”

“It was all of you.” Harry couldn’t tear the ley lines out of the curse because it wasn’t a curse at all. Pansy stripped out all the Dark-adjacent elements and used the same framework. Why can’t he just see that sort of thing immediately? “Who else helped? Because it wasn’t a septet unless—”

“Two rather lovely Unspeakables. And it was seven-centred in both directions. Seven magical signatures to cast, seven magical signatures to trigger.”

Harry snaps his eyes to Draco before he loses his nerve or freaks out completely. “What about you?”

Draco does not say anything.

“No, it wasn’t you, I’d have felt you in the ley lines. But you knew. You completely, totally knew. You told Kreacher we were going on holiday.”

Draco tilts his chin at an I acknowledge I did say that, but it’s not the full story angle.

“You’re going to say it was for two reasons.”

“It was for two reasons,” Draco answers.

Harry glares at him.

Draco does not glare back. He looks at Harry so softly that Harry wants to die. In a hypothetical, non-actual sense.

“Grimmauld will reset itself while we’re away. It will tidy all those dishes and prepare itself for the family to return. No more plates spilling out into the hall.”

“Great!” Harry lurches backwards, away from Draco’s leg. The heavy blanket thumps onto the floor. “Well. That’s my house cleaned, then. I love when my house is clean.”

Jesus bollocks fuck. He can’t even sound bitter about it, because Harry does like when his house is clean, and he can never get Grimmauld to tidy up on his own.

So now he just sounds like an arsehole.

He gets to his feet, which makes him feel worse, since Draco and Pansy make, like, a pretty picture leaning against the wall together and Harry probably looks like a bedraggled, sweaty arsehole.

“What do you expect me to do here?” He gestures around them at the room, which is…nice. It’s a nice room. He must’ve liked it when he saw it. “For a week?”

Pansy purses her lips. “I expect you’ll be quite angry, then quite sad, and then, when you’ve finally got over yourself, you’ll be glad you came.”

Chapter Text

Harry’s in some shower in Pansy’s house, scrubbing furiously at his hair and being completely, absolutely fine for a solid few minutes before he realises he hasn’t brought anything to change into.

Not a problem. Totally not a problem.

Because he’s fine.

He’s, like, good.

Great, even.

Why would he be anything else? His ex-partner rounded up his supposed best friends in the world, plus Blaise—who’s obviously there for Hermione—and Gregory Goyle, who’s there for—

For picking Harry up by his wand holster, apparently.

“I’m fine,” he hisses at the showerhead, which does not answer. “I love Godric’s Hollow.”

His throat squeezes itself shut after that, so hard Harry thinks he might suffocate, which would be really bloody ironic considering he’s in the bloody shower, but after a minute the sensation liquefies and trickles down to his chest, where it adds to his general heartache.

Because Harry does love Godric’s Hollow.

But he, unlike Pansy, has never been able to plan out how to, like, get there. Not physically, obviously, but life-wise. It would’ve meant all sorts of things that weren’t compatible with working as a Ministry curse-breaker with Pans and now—

Well, he’d have to leave Grimmauld if he wanted to live in Godric’s Hollow, and that would mean—

Harry doesn’t know what that would mean.

Does it mean he’d be quite angry, then quite sad, then glad he came?

He doesn’t know that, either.

Harry shuts off the shower and flings himself out.

There’s a clean towel hung on a hook, and all Harry’s clothes are clean, too, in neat piles on a wicker bench. His jeans, curse-breaking shirt, and wand holster in one stack. His vest and Arrows jumper in another.

His face hurts from scowling while he picks the curse-breaking shirt and spells his wand holster on. It’s not better than the Arrows jumper. It’s a lot worse, actually. But this place—

Well, this place is where he is.

He’s not ready for the jumper just yet, though.

A bit of parchment squeezes through the gap between the door and frame, folds itself into an aeroplane, and zooms across the bathroom to hover in front of Harry’s face.

Come downstairs when you’re dressed, will you? We’re having a campfire to discuss scheduling!

xoxo your closest friend, Hermione

Harry crumples the aeroplane into a tiny ball.

Then he immediately flattens it out on his thigh. He swipes the wrinkles out as well as he can, his eyes stinging, folds it nicely, and slips it into his pocket.

He pops the door open with a yank of wandless. The air in the hall is cool and dry and occupied by Draco, who leans against the wall, a sort of posh easiness in him that sets Harry’s hands aching like mad to grab him and just, like, press Harry’s entire self against him and stay there until the week is up.

“I’m not angry,” Harry announces instead. It’s true, a bit. He’s not angry like he was before. He’s a different sort of angry.

Draco does not say anything.

“Is the campfire mandatory or something? Are you here to make sure I attend?”

The corner of Draco’s mouth quirks. “The campfire is mandatory, Potter.”

Harry snarls at him, and something flashes in Draco’s eyes, bright, quick, but Draco steps in before Harry can name it and takes Harry’s face in his hands.

It’s enough to keep anything else from spewing out of Harry, such as every curse word he knows or, like, actual curses.

He closes his eyes. Only for a second or two. Just to, like, get hold of himself.

It’s a bit easier this time.

“Let’s go down, shall we?” Draco’s thumb traces that same arc on Harry’s cheekbone. “I’ll walk you.”

They wend their way through the cottage to the kitchen door, which lets them out onto a deck, which lets them out into the back garden. Another tall sycamore tree shades the furthest corner and holds back a tall hedge.

Harry flickers his eyes hard to the right instead of rolling them. Bit dramatic of Greg to say they wouldn’t have any garden left. They’ve got plenty, and every inch is soaked in loads of late-afternoon early-evening light, gold and warm and summery. There’s a stone fire pit built on the sycamore-corner side. The other side’s got a rose bower and a bloody swimming pool.

Somebody—probably everyone who’s here, other than Harry—put garden chairs ’round the fire pit. Blaise and Ron sit in two of them. Hermione stands near the fire pit, holding a megaphone. Pansy stands with Greg at the edge of the fire pit, her hand on his as he aims at the logs in a low pile in the centre.

Greg’s voice reaches them first. “—know it isn’t, Pans. I’m only saying, what if it turns out wrong?”

“I know the counter-curse,” Pansy answers.

“You haven’t got your wand out.”

Pansy slides her wand out of her sleeve without seeming to move her hand. “I’ve got it out now, haven’t I? One, two, three.” When Greg doesn’t cast, she lets out an offended oh! “One, two, three, Goyle! One, two, three!”

“Incendio.”

A spark flies from the tip of Greg’s wand and lands in the logs, setting them gently alight.

“Well done,” Blaise calls as he applauds. “Inspiring performance.”

Ron claps, too.

Greg does a sheepish bow and lowers himself into one of the garden chairs.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Hermione says through the megaphone, aiming it directly at Harry. The sound jars his bones. “Take your seats, please, and we’ll get started.”

“Why do you have a megaphone?” Harry wants to stomp back inside, but Draco’s fingertips land on his elbow, so light it would be twattish to shake him off, and Harry doesn’t want to shake him off, actually, so he stomps irritatedly towards the garden chairs instead.

“To ensure everyone is able to hear and understand the schedule.”

“You could use your wand,” Harry says testily, and thumps himself into an open chair. He’s too everything to lean back, so he sits up straight and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I am using this,” Hermione answers through the megaphone.

Draco does not sit in the next garden chair.

He climbs delicately into the space behind Harry and folds his legs, and Harry can’t turn and ask him what he’s doing. He can’t even stay upright. He leans back into Draco, who slings his arm over Harry’s shoulder so his thumb hooks onto the bottom strap of Harry’s wand holster and just stays there, casually, like nothing has changed.

Harry doesn’t care about the megaphone anymore.

He very recently slept through the night, then apparently napped for several hours, and his skin definitely hasn’t got less sensitive. Maybe a bit less raw. Feels a bit less torn. The heat of Draco’s hand through his shirt isn’t filtered by that pain.

It’s good.

It’s really good.

Pansy slips into the next garden chair over as Hermione clears her throat through the megaphone.

“We’ll begin with an overview of the schedule for the week.” Hermione flicks her wand, and several feet of parchment snap into the air next to her. She looks utterly professional, even dressed in a bikini top and a sheer, like, wrap skirt that Harry’s pretty sure is charmed to change colours as the sun moves across the sky. Her medium-brown skin shines with more charms, and she’s got her braids twisted up on top of her head, and she looks like she’s really been enjoying herself in Pansy’s back garden. That’s good, too. Harry’s chest aches with the tension of being happy for her, really—because seeing her like this always reminds him of those months in the tent, when they’d both got a sort of ashen, exhausted pallor—and being bitterly jealous and missing her like he’d miss one of his limbs. “We will begin each morning with group individualised exercise. Free weights will be available. Ron has graciously volunteered to lead any interested parties in a yoga practice.”

“What sort?” Greg asks across the row of chairs. Harry tilts his feet down, then back up on the edge of the garden chair. He can’t wear these trainers for group exercise. They’ll fall apart.

“It’s not really yoga,” Ron answers. “It’s a series of Foundation exercises. I can explain in the morning, if anyone wants.”

“But it’s not the sort with the Warming Charms?”

“Merlin, no.”

Greg gives Ron a thumbs-up.

Ron gives Greg a thumbs-up back.

Harry stares at Ron until Ron winks at him, then rolls his eyes until he’s re-focused on Hermione.

“Group individualised exercise is mandatory,” Hermione continues. “Following group individualised exercise, we will have breakfast. Following breakfast, we will—”

It’s just, like, too much.

Too good, being able to see most of Harry’s important people all at once. Too bloody infuriating, that someone else is deciding his schedule. Too embarrassing that someone else deciding his schedule—which Harry hates—is smoothing out some jagged beat in his head. Too frustrating that he couldn’t just plan this himself, like a normal person, like any of his friends, like his ex-almost-fiancé, like Gregory Goyle, like—

He doesn’t know he’s fallen asleep until he wakes up literally in Draco’s lap, a plate over his head.

Harry blinks up at the bottom of the plate until Draco’s hand is on it, and then he understands Ron is giving Draco a plate, and then he understands it's got dark and he’s got hungry again.

Draco charms the plate with a bit of wandless so it’ll wait in the air next to them and pats Harry’s elbow.

He waits a minute to, like, get hold of himself, then sits up.

“Fell asleep,” Harry says.

“You haven’t missed anything,” says Draco, and Levitates the plate into Harry’s hands.

“Oh.” It’s food. It’s food Harry likes. But the sight of it makes his pulse tick up for, like, four different reasons. “Er—”

“Here.”

Draco nudges something against Harry’s arm.

It’s his Arrows tumbler.

“We’ll be going inside for group individualised free time,” Hermione says into her megaphone at some point later.

Harry gets to his feet, his body quite heavy from the food and, he guesses, being tired, and brushes at the front of his jeans in case there’s any dirt.

There isn’t.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he tells Hermione.

She narrows her eyes at him over her megaphone. “Yes, it does.”

In the cottage, Ron and Greg spell dishes clean in the kitchen while they talk about some yoga studio on Diagon Alley. Pansy takes Draco’s elbow and pulls him aside. Hermione and Blaise bend their heads over a length of parchment—the schedule, Harry thinks—and have a murmured chat about it. Blaise rests his hand on the back of Hermione’s neck and pulls her a bit closer.

“I see that,” he says to her. “And I must remind you, my love, that it is essential you put away the books at a reasonable hour.”

“And who decides what constitutes a reasonable hour, hmm?”

Harry goes upstairs.

He can’t stand the curse-breaking shirt much longer, but he’s got to do, like, some things before he falls asleep without planning to again.

The cottage is a lovely stone sprawl on the outside. On the inside, it’s got three floors and only vaguely matches its outer appearance.

Harry climbs to the second floor without thinking much about it. Draco will want to sleep in a room that looks over the back garden, and it’s better if he knows he’s got a bathtub nearby, and the bed’s got to be just so.

There’s one room that meets all the necessary criteria. It’s got the view, and the bed, and even an ottoman at the foot. The spell for the bed hurts like five or six heart attacks. It’s never been simple for Harry. He’s got to use his wand to cast it how Draco likes, but it goes off like nothing’s changed.

Harry breathes out the horrible familiar ache of it, holsters his wand, and sets about warding the door.

Draco’s mother came to the townhouse on Connaught Square and warded Draco’s bedroom door the day he moved in. That was before Draco and Harry were dating, and when Harry found out about it, he’d freaked out a bit for no reason and Floo-ed to the Manor directly and rushed about calling for Narcissa.

He realised how mental he was being when Narcissa stepped out of a sitting room wearing a set of staying-in robes and an absolutely calm expression. Harry recognised that calm from seeing it on Draco’s face.

He should’ve sent an owl.

It was urgent, though.

Narcissa didn’t seem to care that Harry was being mental. She showed him how to cast the wards anyway. It was the sort of complicated spell framework he and Pansy had both spent loads of time studying and arguing about, so he wasn’t totally in the dark. Still, it took an hour or two of practice on one of the doorways near Draco’s bedroom at the Manor for Harry to get it perfect.

He can’t imbue it with Narcissa’s magic or anything, but he can make it feel like a sister spell.

Not, like, a Bellatrix spell.

Not like that.

That was also the first real conversation Harry ever had with Draco’s mum. The times they spoke at the trials didn’t count.

He finishes the casting on the doorframe and walks through a few times to be sure the ward is how it should be, then steps into the attached bath.

Not bad. Harry Extends the bathtub and runs a thin layer of Warming Charms over the floor. Pansy’s already got a thick stack of towels and flannels and—suspiciously or kindly—Draco’s favourite hair potions.

Harry could lie down again.

He goes downstairs instead, skirting the sitting room and kitchen. Everybody else is in there. He can hear Draco saying did you know, Weasley and Hermione laughing and Pansy talking curse-breaking theory with Blaise.

Harry’s ribs loosen up.

Not much. Just a bit. Enough to breathe deeper. He’s got no idea how they got so compressed.

He lets himself out the front and holds out his hand for a wandless Lumos.

It bobbles out of his palm and floats a pace in front of him, lighting the path from house to hedge.

Harry starts at roughly the place he tried to rip it apart and Vanishes the hedge-pieces left on the grass. A glance at the cottage—nobody’s looking.

He casts his mildest Diagnostic Charm at the hedge.

The green mirror-lines shoot out from his fingers like always, but then the hedge…

Blows them out like a candle.

Harry’s magic turns into a puff of smoke a few inches before it touches the shrub.

He casts again.

The hedge blows his charm directly back in his face, ruffling his hair.

“Fine, Jesus, okay.” He holds both hands up for a second, showing he’s given in, Merlin’s bollocks, then reaches into the hedge with his fingers spread apart. Harry wraps his entire hand loosely over the first ley line he touches.

They’re stronger than they were. The ley lines themselves are thicker. Warmer to Harry’s touch, too.

It’s not just reinforced. It’s self-reinforcing. Anything Harry—or anyone else—puts into it will get absorbed by the framework and make it stronger.

Or else it will get blown into his face.

So if Harry wants to destroy it, he’ll have to destroy it. He can’t just slip away in the night.

“Nice one, Pans.” Harry moves on to counting the ley lines—seven, obviously—and feeling out the framework so he can see where everyone’s magic fits in.

He hadn’t felt Draco’s magic before, but now—

Harry goes from section to section, tracing the ley lines with his fingertips and checking for gaps on the off-chance he can make a quick getaway.

There are no gaps.

His sense of Draco’s magic in the casting flickers in and out like those far-off pixies. It’s here, but is it only here because Draco was the seventh person across the boundary? Is it not Draco’s magic at all, just similar magic?

He doesn’t expect to, like, figure out the answer now. It’ll come later if it ever does.

Clockwise from path to garden. Harry steps away from the hedge to put out the embers left in the fire pit. Wings flap overhead as his Aguamenti hisses in the last of the embers.

It’s Pig, Ron’s owl. The fluffy Snitch of a bird bobs wildly across the garden and zooms up to one of the sitting room windows on the side of the cottage, a roll of parchments ten times his size bouncing from a string tied to his leg. He taps the window with his beak, whistle-hooting for attention, and after a second the window opens and Ron leans out.

“Bloody hell, Pig, why didn’t you get help? You’re an old man! Look, Pans—it’s the forms for—” Ron pulls Pig inside, his voice cutting off as the window closes.

Harry goes back to the hedge.

He’s just crossed the midline towards the rose bower when he feels the pulse.

It registers at the line of his knuckles, and all at once, Harry knows he’s felt that pulse all along. He’s only just now noticed because it’s so subtle. It’s like noticing his own heartbeat.

Only it’s not really a pulse, like Harry’s heartbeat. It’s something else.

Pansy’s curse-that’s-not-a-curse is ticking.

You’re staying the week because you’re still ticking.

Harry doesn’t tighten his grip on the ley lines. He doesn’t loosen it, either. He closes his eyes against what feels like a lightning strike, it’s so bright and close and obvious.

Harry’s running out of time.

This week is all he’s got, and the not-curse is counting it down for him.

On the other side of it, there’s nothing. Pansy leaves him at work. Draco leaves him everywhere else. Blaise and Ron and Hermione and, yeah, Gregory Goyle go back to their lives.

They’re giving him a week.

When Pansy said he’d be quite angry and quite sad and then he’d be glad for this, that’s got to be what she meant.

Which means…

This is his last chance to be lovable.

That’s a pretty tall order, especially for Harry. He’s got to be reasonable.

This is his last chance to be as easy to love as possible.

“Maybe just, like, easy to put up with,” he says to the hedge. “Let’s not go overboard.”

Okay, so, he’s got to be less difficult and annoying and worrisome to people. He’s got to, like, talk to his friends and generally be at Curse Sleepaway Camp. Pansy already expects him to be furious, and Harry doesn’t quite know how to stop, which leaves him with getting over it fast.

Well, Harry bloody hates that. He hates all of it, actually. The only thing he’s happy about is that he’s getting this one chance to have his friends remember him in a decent light when they move on with their lives.

Harry draws his hand out of the hedge and breathes in the damp night air and lets it fry up his lungs and his chest.

He’s barely aware of crossing the garden to the deck. It only occurs to him when the kitchen door opens and Draco’s there.

Lovable, he thinks. His mind locks on to how bloody beautiful Draco is and how much Harry wants to touch Draco’s hair and how much he just wants him, every part of him. There’s not much processing power left over to come up with a real plan. Question?

“Can I sleep with you?” Harry blurts. “Tonight, I mean.”

Draco’s face softens, his eyes getting wider, and thank bloody Merlin it wasn’t an unlovable annoying arsehole thing to say.

Bloody. Fucking. Perfect. Harry’s shaking and he didn’t know.

“Harry.” Draco takes Harry’s elbow and ushers him in like it’s Draco’s house and not Pansy’s. “Have you got tired? Of course you have. Let’s go up now, shall we?”

Chapter Text

There’s no way Harry will actually be able to fall asleep.

Not with the non-curse ticking.

But maybe that’s his heartbeat.

Under the covers next to Draco—including his heavy blanket—Harry closes his eyes, holds his breath, and tries to decide if the muted twin echo is real or in his head.

Or in the spell.

Or just, like, in the house.

He falls asleep listening and wakes up to the sort of dark that means it’s too early to get up.

Draco’s dreaming.

Harry knows from how he breathes—a bit faster and shallower than when he’s only sleeping. The knowing is so automatic Harry has time to deflect the sensation that the various sections of his heart are peeling apart and send them orbiting like all the rest.

Orbit seems a bit closer with Draco lying on his stomach like that, both arms under the pillow and his face almost turned into it.

Harry eases out of bed little by little and tugs the blankets over Draco. Pads into the bathroom and splashes water on his face. Does his teeth. Puts on a pair of joggers Draco packed for him—honestly, when did he have time to pack an entire bag, mostly with things for Harry?—and a vest and the Arrows jumper because he’s just got to wear it. Finds his glasses.

He’s not the only one awake.

Ron’s sat at the kitchen table, a little Lumos pinned to the windowsill, tea and a stack of parchments in front of him.

“Hey, mate,” he says softly.

“You’re up early.”

Ron gives Harry the same rueful, wide-eyed look that he’s given Harry since they were eleven. “I’ve been on nights too long at Mungo’s. Hopefully I’ll be able to switch it over while we’re here.”

“The parchmentwork didn’t help?” Harry crosses to the fridge, which hums with charmwork rather than electricity and looks in, then starts opening cupboards.

“Probably would’ve if it was only reading, but I’ve got forms. Pig brought them last night.”

“Forms for what?”

Grimmauld had a mind of its own about where—and if—the shopping should be stored, and Harry could never find anything. He goes through all Pansy’s cupboards twice.

Everything stays the same. Nothing moves or disappears or hides from him.

Somewhere in his weird feelings-orbit, there’s, like…

A sigh.

A relieved one.

Draco likes a massive amount of sugar in his tea along with an oh, bollocks, didn’t mean that splash of milk. His coffee is more complicated. Harry Levitates a saucepan out of one of the cupboards and brings it silently to rest on the side.

“Licensing is a process,” Ron says. “A bloody long one. But it should be done and dusted soon.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I hope.”

Sugar. Water. Golden syrup. All three go in the saucepan. Harry stirs his finger above the saucepan, aiming the wandless lightly into the ingredients so they don’t come flying out.

Saucepan on the hob. Low heat. Harry Summons a wooden spoon from the holder on the side and stirs while the sugar melts, increasing the heat a bit when the time is right. He beckons a wandless Accio at Pansy’s kitchen drawers. Harry could brush the sugar off the sides of the saucepan with magic, but he can’t feel the crystals, so he usually does it—usually did it—with a pastry brush and a bit of water.

He’s got to keep brushing and stirring until he’s got it simmering over medium-ish heat.

Then he can stop.

Harry beckons again, but he’s forgot the name for what he wants and the look of the one at Connaught Square.

“Bollocks. I need the—” He mimes hooking the thing on the side of the pot.

Ron aims his wand at the worktop. “Accio sugar thermometer.”

It floats up out of the same holder the wooden spoon came from, loops in Harry’s face, and lands in his hand.

“Thanks.”

“’Course, mate. What are you making?”

“The sauce for Draco’s coffee.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you learned how to make candy?”

Harry hooks the thermometer on the side of the saucepan and watches the needle swoop around the dial.

“It’s not candy,” he says. “Just, like, caramel. Just a sauce.”

“Just,” Ron says.

“Yeah. Just.”

The silence that falls over the kitchen isn’t, like, comfortable. Harry stares at the bubbling sugar and casts another Lumos so he can see the shade of the caramel and the exact placement of the needle in the dial.

He should ask Ron a question about the licensing or whatever, but he can’t think of one.

“Did you—er—is there something you wanted to ask me about?” Harry says into the saucepan. Heat crawls up the back of his neck. “We don’t have to pretend this isn’t, like, whatever it is.”

“Would you stand up in the wedding if I proposed to Pansy? Assuming she says yes.”

Harry turns all the way around, clutching the wooden spoon he doesn’t really need. “What?”

Ron watches him from the table. “Would you stand up in the wedding? I’d need a best man.”

“You—” Harry’s managed to spell the boiling sauce into his throat without realising. It sears all the way down. “You’ve got four brothers who’ll want—”

The scrunched-up face Ron makes is another one straight out of first-year. “Oh, yeah, and I’m supposed to choose one of them over the others? Don’t think so, mate. And don’t you think you count?”

“Count as what?”

“A brother at least. And then some, obviously.”

“Right. Obviously. Yeah. And—yeah, I—I would? I mean—I would.”

“That’s that sorted, then.”

“But I’m—” Harry gestures at himself. He’s not dressed for a wedding. And obviously Ron doesn’t mean right this minute, but it’s more than the clothes. It’s Harry. He doesn’t know if he can pull off being likable when all this is over. “I’m like this.”

“Yeah.” Ron grins at Harry across the dim-lit kitchen.

Harry grins back.

The delighted feeling he’s got is skin-deep, though, and below that there’s, like, horrible confusion—because he didn’t know Ron was thinking about proposing and probably should have known—and a sharp, terrible jealousy and maybe another layer of heartbreak, which makes no sense.

Below all that, there’s something else.

He doesn’t have to bear it for long. Harry remembers the caramel and whips around again just in time to save it from being utterly fucked.

Harry stirs in the heavy cream and the vanilla and the butter.

He’s pouring the finished syrup into a jar when a meteor jets in from the outer reaches of his stupid feelings and crashes into him. It’s hotter than Fiendfyre and branches out along all his veins.

Just as Harry thinks fuck-bollocks, I’m so bloody furious, Blaise steps into the kitchen. The dawn-light peeping through the window suits his cool, dark-brown skin and softens the angles of his face.

“Potter. Weasley.” Blaise flashes a smile at the both of them and glides over to the cooker. “Tea for either of you?”

Ron takes a sip of his. “Mine’s gone cold if you’re offering.”

“I am indeed. Potter?”

“No. Thanks. No. I’m—” Harry Levitates the jar to the windowsill to cool. “I’m—thanks. I was just going to—” He sticks his thumb over his shoulder and gives Blaise his biggest smile.

There’s a beat of silence as he leaves the kitchen, his jaw clenched against the awful raging fire that’s taken him over.

Fuck bollocks. Harry wasn’t any easier to put up with just then, was he?

“We could have tea later,” he whisper-calls into the kitchen. “If you wanted.”

“Of course,” Blaise whisper-calls back. The kettle clinks on the hob. “Weasley, tell me you are not still at that same pile of parchmentwork.”

“Wish I could.”

“That sort of filing is a beast.”

“Tell me about it,” answers Ron.

Harry keeps his footsteps purposefully silent on his way upstairs. He could stomp right through them. Through the entire house.

But that would not be lovable, or likable, or even easy to ignore.

Draco’s stood by the window when Harry silent-stomps into the bedroom.

“Harry,” he says, his voice still gravelly with his sleep.

“Shut up,” Harry whisper-snaps. “Shut up, bloody please.”

He launches himself into the bed and curls up in a ball around his pounding pulse.

The mattress dips.

Draco touches his elbow.

Harry covers his ears. It makes his heartbeat twice as booming as before. His breath is harsh and loud, and he’s sure he can hear the ticking now. It’s got to be more likable to do this here, in front of Draco, rather than in front of Ron, who just asked him to be his best man, and what did Harry do?

He got all sorts of weird, horrible feelings about it.

“I feel,” Harry says, his own voice muffled and strange. “I feel so stupid.”

“Mmm.” Draco moves, and Harry braces for him to pull away or get out of the bed. He doesn’t do either. Draco curls around him, his knees not quite fitting to Harry’s. Because he really has no bloody idea what else to do, Harry stretches his legs to match Draco’s and wriggles backwards until Draco puts his arm around Harry and oh, wonderful, bloody perfect, Harry’s shaking again. “Has something happened?”

“No.”

“It hasn’t?”

“I—” Harry’s abs cramp. He didn’t know they were so tense. “Ron asked me to stand up in his wedding. Like, if he proposes to Pans.”

Draco does not say anything.

“And I said I would, obviously. And I’m—I’m happy. I’m really happy for him. But if he’s really going to propose, then where’s he going to live? Here, right? Because Pansy lives here now. And she’s leaving the Ministry, so she’s going to be, like, here.”

Draco still does not say anything.

“I hate it so much,” Harry admits. “And I’m so—I’m—I can’t. I can’t do this. I can’t stay here a week.”

Harry’s not going to be able to rip a hole in his feelings and escape them. He’s not going to be able to let them out, either. Not while he’s being the best, most likable version of himself.

He’s just going to have to keep, like, living with them. And keep them tucked away. Harry can’t eject them all over everyone here.

Not this week.

“I’m afraid we haven’t got any choice in the matter.” Draco rubs over Harry’s breastbone with the heel of his hand. “Would you do me a favour?”

“What?”

“Would you give it three days?”

“That’s not—that doesn’t matter. The spell won’t run out for—”

“A week, yes. But if you don’t feel better after three days, we’ll make a run for it.”

Harry half-scoffs, half-laughs. Pansy’s too good at spell reinforcement. It would have to be a massive effort. Everyone would know. They’d all know. And Harry’s feelings might come with it, and then what?

“It’s early yet,” says Draco, his touch flitting from Harry’s elbow to his hair. “Why don’t you sleep a bit more?”

“I can’t,” Harry says.

“Oh, please, Potter. You must know—”

“Stop calling me that.” Comes out as more of a whisper than Harry meant. “You’re killing me.”

He’s already drifting, his arms so heavy he can’t keep covering his ears.

Next Harry knows, his glasses are being lifted away. He whinges a bit. Principle of the thing.

“Shh, mon éclair.” His glasses click nearby. “I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

Draco doesn’t so much wake Harry as drag him out of bed. He’s bleary and disoriented and not sure how long they’ve been in the cottage at all. Harry stands by the bed with his eyes closed, sipping lemonade from his tumbler, while Draco spells different clothes on him, then escorts him downstairs for group individualised exercise.

Pansy and Hermione are already lifting weights when Harry follows Draco into the back garden. Pansy lies on her back on a bench to do bench-presses or whatever with Hermione spotting her. Blaise does full-on pull-ups on a bar nearby.

“What the fuck,” Harry breathes around his metal straw. “Why is everyone so fit? What the fuck?”

Draco laughs. “Exercise, I imagine.”

“Don’t want to exercise.”

“Alas, it is mandatory, so exercise we shall.”

“I shan’t.”

“You shall. Here’s your place. I’ll be here, next to you.”

There are mats on the grass. Mats Charmed to the ground and dry.

“Morning, Harry. How’d you sleep, Draco?” Greg says from Draco’s other side.

“As well as can be expected,” Draco answers. “What about you?”

“Didn’t sleep at all.” Greg does not sound bothered in the least. “I took down at least fifteen ideas for biscuits.”

“What sort?” Harry clicks his teeth on his metal straw and glowers pointlessly at Ron, who’s checking something over on a bit of parchment.

“That’s entirely too many,” says Draco. “You’ll exhaust your customers.”

“Shortbread biscuits, Harry,” Greg calls over Draco’s head. “And you haven’t heard the rest, Draco, so hold your judgement.”

“Pardon me. Consider it held.”

“Little biscuits.” Greg makes a circle of his fingers. “Size of two Galleons. A shortbread base for all of them with variations.”

“People do become animals over miniature biscuits,” Draco allows.

“Okay.” Ron Banishes his parchment and claps his hands. “Are we ready to get started?”

Ron’s Foundation class—or whatever it is—absolutely destroys Harry.

It destroys Greg, too, which makes him feel a bit better about how much his thighs shake. Every muscle, actually. Harry had no idea standing on a mat and spreading the world apart with his feet or whatever he’s supposed to be doing could be so hard.

He can’t stand it.

But he’s going to stand it, because standing it is more lovable than quitting.

Harry’s not very good at standing it at the moment.

“How much longer?” he barks after they’ve been at it two or three hours.

“Five minutes,” Ron answers serenely. “It’s a long twenty, isn’t it?”

Harry presses the tips of his fingers together even harder, making his ball of tension or whatever the bloody hell it is perfectly round. He hates this.

“This is a nice, er—this is a decent challenge,” he tells Ron through gritted teeth.

“Can be surprisingly difficult the first few times, but if you stick with it—”

“If I stick with it, I’ll be—” Jesus bollocks fuck, it’s infuriating! This whole—this standing thing. These exercises. Harry didn’t know his body would collapse over this. “I’ll be so fit! I’ll even be able to get out of bed! Wow! Great!”

“Slowly come out of your hinge,” says Ron, actually bloody smiling. “Shake everything out.”

Harry leaps out of his hinge and stomps in a circle around his mat.

And when he gets all the way ’round—

“Fuck.”

“Better, isn’t it?” Ron grins at Harry, both hands on his hips, looking like he’s really bloody enjoyed himself. “Seems impossible, and then—” He snaps his fingers. “Better.”

Harry snaps his fingers, and the back garden disappears.

It’s not, like, a common thing to be able to Apparate like that, but Harry’s frustrated enough to manage. Plus, he’s, like, seconds away from being so unlovable the cottage kicks him out.

He intends to sulk in the shower, but falls asleep on the floor instead.

Draco’s there when Harry wakes up again.

Actually, Draco’s waking him up again, this time for breakfast.

Harry fumes through breakfast with a smile on his face and bitter anger in his heart, then puts his head down on the table and falls asleep.

He fumes through group individualised hobbycraft. Draco holds a lesson on folding paper cranes—which is not bad, actually—and Harry folds seventeen cranes according to Draco’s instructions, which do not include crushing the cranes or clawing them into tiny pieces. Afterwards, he goes to the kitchen for more lemonade and sits down for a minute to gather himself, only for Draco to shake him gently awake some thirty minutes later.

He fumes through lunch, which seems like it might be specifically for Harry because Ron makes ten or twelve of Harry’s favourite things, then brings out the recipe book he’d got his mum to make for him and passes it around while they eat. Harry has a bit of everything and seconds of treacle tart. He makes it to a bedroom on the first floor before he passes out.

By the afternoon group educational forum, he’s glowing embers and pays such close attention to Greg’s lecture on the effects of moonlight on icing that he can practically taste it. He even asks if Greg has plans to make biscuits while they’re at the cottage, and Greg beams at Harry, his face going red, and says he will.

It’s great. He has to nap about it.

This keeps happening. His temples throb. His teeth hurt. His muscles turn to acid.

And then Harry’s eyelids get weighted and he drops off wherever he happens to be. His body apparently thinks it can save him from being unlovable by hauling him down into dreams every ninety minutes.

He’s sparking by the group poolside debrief (weather permitting), which Harry spends floating on a lilo shaped like a huge red ice lolly, not enjoying himself but also sort of enjoying himself. He falls asleep on the lilo and wakes up under a tangibly heavy layer of sunblock charms.

He’s fully blazing by dinner. Nothing terrible has happened. Nothing bad has even happened, unless you count Harry’s multiple naps. He’s been really likeable, but it’s like his happiness for Ron. It’s extremely bloody shallow, and having to keep it up puts pressure on the gap between how Harry’s trying to be—lovable, for Merlin Jesus’s sake—and how he feels—generally useless, permanently pointless, angry about it for no reason.

He burns through group campfire conversation, which Harry spends telling curse-breaking stories with Pansy and laughing until his stomach hurts, then climbs into bed shaking yet again, though this time he’s really bloody clear on why it’s happening.

Harry’s going to die of the tension.

Or—

He’s going to fall asleep.

An entire day of this, and still, he’s not awake five seconds after Draco murmurs Nox.

The second day is much the same. Harry creeps out of bed while it’s still dark out to make more caramel sauce. This time, he finds Pansy’s espresso machine and figures out the finicky magic and stirs all the parts of Draco’s coffee together, including the milk, so it has time to chill.

He’s exhausted afterwards, but it’s not as if Draco—or anyone—will let him spend the day peacefully in bed.

Harry won’t let himself do that, either.

He is going to be likable.

Even if he does not know why he’s still so angry.

Maybe he’s just waiting for both shoes to drop, or whatever. Waiting for this to come apart. For everyone to slip up and let him see how ridiculous they know this is.

Draco practically carries Harry outside for group individualised exercise. Harry watches Greg do fifty push-ups in a row in a state of white-hot outrage and a sort of awe, smiles so much during more Foundational whatever with Ron that his cheeks ache, and falls asleep at the kitchen table, his toast half-eaten.

It’s hard to be likable when he wants to scream, but Harry does his best.

On the afternoon of the second day, Hermione brings her megaphone into the garden and points it at Harry.

“It’s your turn to lecture,” she booms.

“What the f—for real?” Harry clenches his fists. More than a few leaves fall straight off the sycamore tree. Likable. Lovable. He unclenches them and puts both palms up. “Me? I mean—I will, if you want, but I don’t know anything, so—”

Pansy thrusts her hand into the air. “Oh, Potsy, tell them about curse orientation!”

He smiles viciously at her, realises he looks mad, and strides enthusiastically to the spot near the firepit where Ron and Greg lectured yesterday afternoon—after Greg’s icing lecture, Ron lectured on wizarding licensing law for some reason.

“It’s nice to look at things from different angles,” he begins. Feels good to almost-shout, and he’s got an excuse, but Harry clears his throat and vows to keep himself under control. Blaise sits forwards on his chair. Draco stands behind Blaise, watching with his silver-grey eyes wide and attentive. Hermione, Pansy, and Ron sit cross-legged on the grass in front of the chairs. Greg straddles a garden chair, then thinks better of it and scooches himself over to Ron. “In general, I mean, but especially in curse-breaking. Pans, do you have something I could—”

An iron box hurtles through the air. Harry catches it before it hits him in the face.

“Thanks.” He lifts the iron box in a sarcastic cheers that doesn’t come off nearly as sarcastically as Harry hoped. Pansy snickers. “Anyway, I’m mainly talking about curse-breakers. We ignore half the stuff in front of us when we’re in the field, which—” It’s bloody ridiculous, is what it is. “—is, like, something we can improve, or whatever.”

Harry tosses the box up a bit and catches it on its way down with a wandless Hover Charm.

“This is a curse,” Harry says, then curses the box. “As you can all see—”

“Bloody hell,” Ron coughs, then gets up from the grass and pounds his chest. Greg blinks hard, then wipes his eyes with his hands. Hermione sits utterly still, leaning into Blaise. Blaise sits utterly still, both arms around Hermione. Draco and Pansy are the only two people behaving normally. Harry’s face gets hot. “Everybody okay?”

“Yes, of course,” says Draco, then shakes his head like he’d been concentrating so hard on Harry that he didn’t notice the effects of Harry’s curse. “Blaise?”

“We’re fine.” Blaise strokes Hermione’s hair, drops a kiss on the top of her head, and jolts upright, putting his hand over hers like his intense feelings for Hermione are any sort of a secret. “We’re all right.”

Ron drops back down to the grass and waves apologetically at Harry. “Go ahead, mate. Just a bit surprised, that’s all.”

Harry watches Ron for a few seconds, because what the fuck? He’d cursed the iron box so normally.

“Sorry,” Harry says in his very most likable tone. “About that. Not, er, intentional. Anyway, what was I saying?” Harry swivels back towards the box and casts his baseline Diagnostic Charm. Glowing green mirror lines sprint out from the surface of the box and snap into place around it. “As you can all see because of the Diagnostic, this curse has a recognisable framework. Usually, breakers will stop here, which is fine if you want to be shit at your job or if you’re, like—” Merlin’s arse, this is difficult. He’s difficult. “—new at this sort of work and don’t know any better. But really, we should be looking from multiple angles.”

Harry extends his hand towards the box and walks in an arc until he’s right in front of Pansy.

“This is the orientation the curse was at when it was constructed, or cast, by me.”

“Oh,” says Hermione from near Harry’s feet. A tiny, proud glow appears in his chest for a second or two.

“But this view doesn’t show the second-order factors that are, like, heavily influencing the directionality of the curse.”

“Directionality?” Greg says, his hand raised a bit.

“Curses cause damage, right? But the intention of the caster isn’t always, er…outwardly focused. Like—the point of the curse might actually be to protect the artefact or the family or property or whatever, which has a noticeable effect on things like the amount of carnage the curse will cause or the amount of magic the curse will siphon to reinforce itself.”

Harry brings his hand down slowly, rotating the iron box and the Diagnostic.

Then he steps aside so everyone else can see what was formerly the top of the curse construction.

“From the outside it looks like a normal curse, but it won’t necessarily behave like you’d expect a curse in the Domination school to behave. This one’s directionality is inwards when you’d expect it to be outwards. So, like, if you noticed this patterning of the inner ley lines—” Harry traces one in the air, keeping his hand far out of range. “You’d also want to look for…”

It’s like the pixies.

Sun glints off the top of the box. Some of the beams refract off the ley lines. Flashes of light, too small and too far off to arrange into a constellation.

“For what?” Blaise asks. He’s leant forwards in his chair and clasped his hands, his eyes slightly narrowed in concentration. “What would you also want to look for?”

“Er…” The curse is beginning to thicken, subtly distorting the Diagnostic around it. Fine, Jesus, okay—Harry might’ve cast it with a bit more live power than he meant. He casts a short series of containment charms using the Diagnostic for a frame, then snugs it tight around the box. “You’d also want to look for…” Harry twists the intersecting ley lines and representation lines around one another with sixteen fast little pinches. It’s not technically a Ministry-approved protocol, but it works every time. The last step is to set them in opposition to one another, which Harry does. All the mirror lines slice through the box. The curse breaks with a soft click. “Power wells,” Harry finishes finally. “Usually external. Stable enough to draw on for a long period of time.”

Harry Summons the box, then tosses it back to Pansy. He’s either angry enough to have a stroke or exhausted enough to lie down in the grass.

In the end, he splits the difference and makes it to a garden chair in time to put his head down before he falls asleep.

On the third day, he wakes up feeling…

Less angry.

Group individualised exercise goes off at the same time. Harry complains all through Ron’s Foundation class, but he forces himself to make all his complaints positive, which makes Ron roar with laughter.

Harry sits through breakfast, not quite fuming, but with an aching back from staying so tense.

And then…

Group individualised hobbycraft proceeds according to the schedule, and so does lunch, and at the end of the group educational forum, something, like…yields a bit. Like soft ground under his feet. He’s okay to count on the schedule. It’s not going to disappear.

Not until the end of the week.

Harry’s not glad he came yet, but he’s not sad, either. The band of tension around his waist lets off a bit more minute by minute, though, and the scalding tide in his torso recedes.

He’s not proud of being so predictable.

Draco knew this would happen.

Another sunny afternoon sees them out to the pool for group poolside debrief.

Harry feels a bit separate from it all, like he’s watching from a distance. He dangles his feet in the water and lets everyone talk around him.

On the other side of the pool, Draco’s eating an ice lolly.

It’s bright red, and Draco does not seem to realise what he looks like when he’s eating a bloody ice lolly. Harry cannot understand how he does it so poshly. And he’s doing it while Pansy plaits his hair, so that’s also—

Well.

It’s also making Harry want to freak out a bit.

From, like, jealousy.

Pansy finishes the plait. Draco finishes the ice lolly.

Then he Banishes the stick and pulls his shirt over his head without breaking off the conversation he’s been carrying on with Ron.

Harry can’t look away.

It’s the blue swim trunks and the delicate scars and the starlight hair. It’s the way Draco looks at Ron with total seriousness, even though Harry’s pretty sure Ron’s talking about the Cannons never winning in his lifetime again.

Pansy climbs off her pool chair and touches Draco’s elbow. He leans down to listen to her, then pats her shoulder and answers Ron, who’s about to laugh.

And then Blaise steps in with a stack of towels and slings one over Draco’s shoulder, squeezing a bit as he does.

And then Ron pats Draco’s face, teasing and familiar, and Draco’s eyes are all crinkled like they are when he thinks something is really funny.

Harry knows what he’s looking at is friendship. He knows what he’s looking at is good friendship.

But it doesn’t bloody feel good.

The daggers through his ribs let Harry know he wasn’t done being angry.

The splash lets Harry know he’s got to his feet.

“Harry.” Hermione puts her hand on Harry’s arm. “Are you okay?”

Oh, bollocksing hell. He’s been obviously unlikable, and Hermione noticed. Everyone probably noticed.

He opens his mouth to say of course I am and makes the mistake of looking at Hermione.

Her honey eyes dart over his face, full of, like, compassion and understanding, and Harry can’t take it. He really can’t.

“Not really, no. I mean—no. I’ve got to—I need—just—”

Harry grabs her hand and squeezes it and then he’s got to get out of the garden. His lungs strain to hold in an enormous surge of anger that’s, like, not related to anything except how Harry doesn’t belong here with all these lovely people and he especially doesn’t belong here when everyone else can touch Draco whenever they want and he can’t because they broke up because Harry left.

He doesn’t know where he’s going until he’s in Draco’s bedroom.

Until he turns ’round to ward the door and runs directly into Draco.

“What is it?” Draco’s hands go to Harry’s face. “What can I do?”

“I can’t,” Harry gasps. They’re in swim trunks, for Merlin’s bloody sake. There’s no shirt for Harry to curl his fists around. He finds the curves of Draco’s shoulders instead. “I want out. I want you to get me out. Please. Get me—”

Draco doesn’t grab.

Didn’t when they were together, doesn’t now.

He drops a hand to Harry’s neck and his other hand to Harry’s back, and it’s really only then—how could he not have noticed?—that Harry understands how hard he’s been pulling Draco towards him.

The next second, Draco curls his hand around Harry’s nape and spreads his fingers out on Harry’s back, firm and confident.

Harry’s entire body says kiss, and then Draco’s mouth is on his, and it’s only natural to give himself up and let Draco take over.

Chapter Text

Draco tastes like the ice lolly.

Harry’s never been in love with strawberries before, but he’s ready to take a vow to only eat strawberry ice lollies for the rest of his life. That’s how good the kiss tastes. That’s how good Draco’s mouth tastes.

Doesn’t stay cold for long.

It’s a hard, biting kiss that doesn’t stay hard or biting very long, either, because Harry’s got to taste as much of Draco as he can, and he can’t do that with his teeth. Harry’s back meets a wall—he doesn’t care which wall it is—and Draco presses into the space between them, all warm skin and sunblock charms and one hand fitted firmly under Harry’s jaw.

Harry’s entire body says yes. The kiss turns deeper and sloppier. His glasses come halfway off, but neither of them stop, and he doesn’t care how ridiculous he looks. He doesn’t care that he keeps jerking his hips towards Draco’s like he’s desperate. He doesn’t care that he is desperate.

It’s just not, like, enough.

Not all of what he needs.

Harry throws his arms and, like, most of his weight around Draco’s neck at the same moment Draco’s arms go around his waist, and then Draco shoves him elegantly against the wall again, which is the hottest thing that could possibly happen to Harry.

It takes a few more heartbeats for his brain to catch up. It’s hot because some part of Harry was worried that Draco would treat him like he’s fragile or wounded or something, and Harry isn’t.

He really isn’t.

With his arms around Draco’s neck, Harry can’t push back with his hands, so he pushes back with his entire body instead. More and more of his blood rushes southwards, overwhelming his dick.

Which, Harry realises suddenly, has been sorely neglected. He hasn’t even wanked in the shower in a week or two. He’s been—

What has he been doing?

Not this, and that’s the biggest mistake of Harry’s life.

But he’s making up for it.

At least a bit.

Or maybe he’s never been this hard, and it’s making him lightheaded. His entire dick throbs with his pulse.

“Oh, bollocks, my heart is in my cock,” Harry slurs into the kiss. It’s got to be the combination of blood loss and relief that’s making him like this. Wait, no—not blood loss. Blood reorientation. “Jesus Merlin fuck.”

Draco licks into Harry’s mouth. He adds pressure to the small of Harry’s back, bringing their hips together, and then he’s got his fingers in Harry’s hair, and when he tugs Harry’s head back it’s only natural to let Draco make a long stretch of Harry’s neck and it’s really only natural to stay open for the nip on Harry’s bottom lip and the tender bite afterwards and Draco pulling off with a low, frustrated sound that Harry thought he’d not get to hear again.

And then Harry’s looking up into Draco’s face, his head sort of cradled in Draco’s hand. Draco pulls his hair just hard enough for Harry to shiver himself into a bloody perfect sparkling pain and, like, concentrate for a second or two.

He stares at Draco—silver-grey eyes, huge pupils, a sunburn blush high on his cheeks and streaming down to his neck and glowing on the tips of his ears, his starlight hair coming loose from his plait, his lips shiny on top of the red from the ice lolly.

This expression—the one where Draco’s eyes are narrowed just a bit and they glint in the shadows cast by his eyelashes and Draco studies Harry super intently and breathes all quiet like a cat or something that’s ready to pounce—means Draco wants to fuck Harry.

He wants it a lot.

He’s watching Harry so he can decide what to give him and how exactly to give it.

Harry’s got just enough brain left over to know that his mouth is hanging open—doesn’t care—and he’s breathing hard—doesn’t care about that, either—and he’s right on the verge of turning into a puddle—really doesn’t care, doesn’t care, doesn’t care.

Draco’s hand flexes on Harry’s jaw. He takes a final quick breath, the skin ’round his eyes hinting at a very certain smile, and nips Harry’s lip again.

“You want out of your body, is that it?”

“Yeah,” Harry rasps.

“I should think you’d like it to hurt.”

A pathetic, animal sort of whine comes out of Harry’s mouth.

“Oh, darling, I know. Let’s take you down, shall we?”

Let’s is only, like, a nice turn of phrase.

All Harry’s got to do is kneel on the ottoman and bend over the foot of the bed. His swim trunks are gone by then, though he doesn’t remember Draco Banishing them specifically. He remembers quite a bit of cool, silvery magic and trying to get his mouth on Draco’s and Draco’s hand on his nape, and when his chest hits the covers, all that blurs like his vision.

Because Draco took his glasses off and set them aside.

Harry’s not really looking at the closet. He can’t really see it. The closet is not part of this, but it is in front of his face. Harry can just make out the toe of one of his trainers through the cracked-open closet door.

That’s the only door in the room that’s not warded. Harry’s head buzzes lightly from Draco’s ten or twelve Muffliatos, or maybe it’s just being completely naked and bent over the foot of the bed while Draco leans over him and brushes his lips over Harry’s earlobe.

“Remind me.” The warmth of Draco’s breath gives Harry another full-soul shiver. “What’s your word?”

Oh, bollocks.

Harry doesn’t know any words.

His mind shuffles through the English language along with some Parseltongue nonsense and finally holds up Harry’s word like a trophy.

“Snatchers,” he says.

“Good boy,” says Draco, and Harry drops straight down into the lovely, thoughtless haze where he belongs.

He doesn’t have time to beg Draco to spank him.

Draco drums his fingers on Harry’s left elbow, then his right. Harry knows exactly what that means. It means to fold his arms behind his back.

It’s only natural.

And it’s only natural for Draco to lock his off-hand around both Harry’s arms.

And it’s the most natural thing Harry’s ever done to tilt his hips a bit and let the rest of his body get heavy on the bed.

“Are you ready, mon éclair?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, and means to follow it up with a yes for maximum clarity, but instead he sort of whimpers please.

Jesus Merlin hell and bollocks, it’s been too long. Harry can’t remember how long it’s been, but it’s longer than anyone could’ve expected him to bear.

He just needs Draco like this. Needs Draco’s hand coming down in a totally predictable rhythm. Needs the heat and the prickle of it that bleeds out from Draco’s handprints and covers Harry’s arse from the tip-top to his sit spots. Needs to get strained and whiny under Draco’s hand and have Draco push back, unlocking whatever it is inside Harry that keeps him so bloody tense all the time. Needs Draco over him, behind him, saying, good, wonderful, such a sweet boy, shh, yes, j’avais besoin de ça aussi, oh, make that sound again, it was so pretty. Needs to cross into the place where he’s slack on the blankets, his bones and the pressure of Draco’s hand holding him where he needs to be, taking it, taking it, taking it.

Needs to stop pretending he’s anybody but himself.

Harry knows he’s making noise and can’t stop.

Then he knows he’s crying and can’t stop.

Then he’s rutting against the bend in the mattress and Draco has his fingers on Harry’s hip to pull him into place again.

“A bit more, sweetheart. Just a little more. For me, perfect boy. Yes.”

Then Draco’s cooing in his ear, his fingertips on the base of Harry’s spine, and Harry understands very dimly that he’s supposed to crawl up onto the bed, so he does.

His arse is like hot coals or something. It’s a white sort of pain, a bit redder every second. Harry’s completely weightless until he drops his head onto the blankets again. He’s over some pillows now, he thinks, and Draco shifts his knees apart and coos at Harry some more until Harry flops his arms backwards and Draco catches his wrists.

“Let’s give you something to do with your hands, shall we?”

The something is holding himself open for Draco.

Harry’s pretty sure all the air in the room is made of Draco’s magic. It’s all over him and in him and his skin is supersensitive in the best way Harry’s ever felt.

But maybe it’s not so much the air, or the magic.

Maybe Draco’s tongue on his arsehole is magic, too.

Harry is a puddle—a quivering, panting sort of puddle—by the time the thick head—fuck, how is he that thick?—of Draco’s cock is notched to his hole and Draco’s hands are on his hips and Harry realises Draco’s been talking to him for quite some time.

“—yourself. Ah—yes.” His hands tighten on Harry’s hips, but he doesn’t push forwards. “I want you to do this part, mon éclair. Come this way. Oh, don’t whinge, my darling. I’ll fuck you just as soon as you’re ready.”

There’s, like, a lot of lube, but even so, it takes work. Harry’s got to focus with everything he’s got left to coordinate his muscles and bear down at the right moment and ease himself onto Draco.

“Oh, fuck,” he gasps. That is a stretch. “Oh, fuck, oh—”

“Not yet,” Draco says quickly. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

Harry bites down on his lip. He was about to come. He’s so close it feels like holding his breath, only centred in his cock.

He’s got no choice but to whine, then, because otherwise it’s literally going to spill out of him. Harry tenses his thighs, but that makes them tremble harder, which makes him clench everything, which makes Draco say what sounds like a curse word in French.

Next Harry knows, he’s pinned to the bed and stuffed full of Draco and somehow Draco gets his hand between Harry’s body and the pillows and Draco wraps his fist around Harry and that’s all it takes to make him come so hard he doesn’t see stars, he sees, like, galaxies.

They fuck an entire second time.

Draco turns pink all the way down to his nipples. His hair comes completely out of its plait, and Harry could look at the white-blond waves for the rest of his life.

They’re in the bath when Harry becomes aware of himself as a person with a brain and a body again.

Hot water trickles down his back, dripping off the flannel in Draco’s hand. The droplets hit the water underneath Harry.

Draco’s humming a song. It’s the song he sings when he cuts Harry’s hair.

His head is so clear that he can’t avoid knowing what he knows now.

“Directionality,” he says.

“That’s right,” Draco answers, and keeps humming.

“Goes the other way.”

“I should think so.”

Draco’s humouring him, but Harry’s only fucked out, not making things up. His ribs don’t get tight around his lungs this time. His lungs expand, aching where they meet his bones.

“I wanted out, but I got, like, in.”

Harry did get to escape for a little while, but being under like that—

It didn’t erase his orbiting feelings.

It made them right-sized and fit them into his body. It mashed the separate parts of Harry together—the person he was trying to be and the one he is. And now that he’s good and mashed, there’s room left over for something else.

Harry doesn’t have long to wonder what’s going to fill the empty space.

His breath catches around the ache in his lungs, which is really a sort of stabbing pain in his heart, and all at once his eyes sting like mad and Harry’s pretty sure he can’t breathe.

“Oh, fuck,” he chokes. “Oh, fuck, I’m so sad.”

Harry’s really bloody sad.

He’s sorrowful at dinner and grief-stricken by group campfire conversation. It turns into a horrible pit in his throat that he can’t swallow.

Luckily, Harry’s been through, like, a war and dying and things like that, so he can just wipe his eyes on his sleeve and carry on. It’s easier to be likable or more tolerable when he’s sad, anyway.

What else is there to do? He can’t drown in tears, so he pretends he’s not crying and lets Draco chivvy him to all the group individualised activities, which Harry likes or at least treasures for the future despite his watery vision.

Still doesn’t make any sense.

What does make sense is that it feels like everyone else is dying.

Like—they’ll all die someday, but Harry’s going to lose them all in a matter of hours.

Fine, okay, Jesus—in a matter of days or weeks or months, and he doesn’t know how to make himself into someone who won’t. He can only be half-likable for a limited amount of time.

Even worse, everyone at the non-curse-cottage acts like this is totally normal.

Draco stays within arm’s reach, wiping away any tears that happen to fall out of Harry’s eyes and letting Harry tip over onto him whenever the weight of his grief gets to be too much, which is often.

Ron spends one group individualised free period under Harry’s heavy blanket with him, whispering what he thinks are hopeful statistics for the Cannons.

Pansy hexes Harry whenever she thinks he looks too sad, so he brings himself out of it long enough to chase her around in the garden until she screeches for mercy.

Blaise asks Harry for advice on getting Hermione to stop reading before three in the morning.

Greg bakes Harry two hundred miniature biscuits.

At group campfire conversation on the fifth day—when Draco’s sat between Blaise and Pansy, having some sort of secret aside—Hermione climbs onto Harry’s garden chair and wraps her arms around him so tightly that she squeezes some tears out of his eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, her voice pitched low so she doesn’t interrupt Ron and Greg’s conversation, which is a teasing argument about Exploding Snap or something.

“Dunno what to say,” Harry says in his weird not-crying-but-actually-crying voice.

“You could say what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he answers instantly. It’s true, isn’t it? They’re all here and alive and none of them died. “I mean, obviously, some things are wrong, but it’s like—it’s—” He gestures at the fire, which doesn’t deserve it. “Everything, sort of. It’s like—Sirius and my parents and—and everyone. I’m still in the Prophet every week and I haven’t done anything for ten years.”

Hermione makes a sound of disagreement.

“I haven’t, Hermione. I’ve barely got any certifications. I didn’t do the parchmentwork for my parents’ house. I couldn’t even fix Grimmauld. It’s everything, sort of, but it’s really just—it’s me.”

“What’s you?”

“I’m not, like—” Worth any of this, is what he wants to say, but Hermione will argue, and they’ll go ’round in circles about it, and he’ll eventually stop arguing because her logic is better than his or whatever. “I dunno.”

Hermione does not say anything.

She keeps her arms around him until it’s time to go inside.

The activities go by, taking the hours with them.

Harry spends the night before the last one half-awake, his face in Draco’s neck. He can’t fall asleep for fear of missing a second of it.

When the sun comes up, Harry’s surprised to find himself…

Determined.

To be as likable as he can today. Even lovable. To make the most of the hours he’s got left. He ignores the fast tickticktick under his skin, off-time with his heartbeat so he can just make it out all day.

Tomorrow, they’ll all go back to their lives, and he’ll go back to Grimmauld, and then he can—

Do whatever it is people do when they stop being likeable.

Hopefully he doesn’t explode. Kreacher would have a fit.

On the last afternoon, the weather doesn’t permit for group poolside debrief.

Harry spends the slot of time on his knees, rain pattering on the roof and Draco’s fingers in his hair.

Draco’s quiet in the shower. He washes Harry’s hair like he’s going to cut it. Gentle. Meticulous. He doesn’t skip any of the steps.

Harry shuts his eyes and tries not to die of how much he loves it.

And how much he loves Draco.

“I don’t know what to do,” he finally manages to say. Harry doesn’t know what to do about anything, really, but mostly about tomorrow, when Harry’s done with the cottage, and his friends are done with him.

“I do.”

“What?”

“Go downstairs for dinner.”

Harry sticks his hand into Draco’s on the way downstairs, just, like, needing it, and Draco curls his fingers through Harry’s and squeezes.

Pansy shrieks in the kitchen as they get close, and Ron laughs at her. Harry slips his hand out of Draco’s even though it feels worse than actually dying and takes a deep breath. This is the last dinner. The last evening. The last campfire later. The last night. He can get through it. He’s going to be so lovable.

“You’re not serious!” Pansy shriek-shouts. “Ronald Weasley, you are not serious. I thought you meant—oh, stop it! I thought you meant—”

“I am serious.” Ron’s voice wobbles a bit. Harry’s a step away from the kitchen door and that tiny wobble is like a red flare against a dark sky. Like—he feels it. The seriousness. His feet keep moving him towards the kitchen. “I’m really bloody serious, Pans.”

Harry’s brain shows up late and out of breath. Stop, stop or something.

Harry doesn’t stop.

He steps into the kitchen just as Ron holds his hand out.

Draco slides his hand onto Harry’s waist. Harry doesn’t know why, and doesn’t know, and doesn’t know, and then his eyes reconnect to his useless brain.

There’s a box in Ron’s hand.

It’s a ring box.

He opens it, his hand moving so fast it blurs in the golden light coming through the windows. Pansy’s face goes brilliantly pleased. Completely shocked. She’s wearing dungarees and her curse-breaking shirt again, and Harry just knows she’s going to be furious about it later—dungarees, Potter? Really? For my own engagement? What was I thinking?—and he’s going to die.

The floor goes out from under Harry.

It’s the same feeling he had in Grimmauld Place during fifth-year when he’d walked in on Molly with the boggart that looked like Ron’s dead body. Lungs empty. Brain full of ice. Falling forever.

“Harry,” says Draco.

Ron and Pansy whip their heads towards Harry, and both of them start for him.

“I’m so happy!” he shouts, his voice cracking. “I’m so happy for you, bloody fuck!”

The tickticktick in Harry’s head goes silent.

Chapter Text

The very first thing Harry does is stomp into the sitting room and drop his arse onto the rug. He curls up as tight as he can around his knees and covers his head and—

And pretends.

He pretends this isn’t happening. This is not happening.

He doesn’t exist at all, actually, and he never existed.

Harry’s a bloke with a normal house that never keeps him up at night for years on end and normal feelings and a normal life he hasn’t ruined. He breathes out hard into his knees, realises he’s hurting his own neck, and gets up again.

The second thing he tries is pushing his fists into the wall. Harry only means to do it lightly, but the plaster starts to crack under his knuckles, splitting the skin, so he shoves off and stomps outside.

He is being so bloody unlikable.

“Oh, fuck,” he says in the general direction of the sky. “I’m totally freaking out. Fuck fuck fuck.”

Two great tits sing fast alarm songs in the sycamore tree, and Harry goes towards it, hoping he, like, hallucinated the entire Curse Sleepaway Camp and is back in the park at Connaught Square, starting over.

If he could do that, he’d get up the next morning and tell Draco it was so kind of him to let Harry stay over, but Harry’s great, really, and he’s got to leave the country.

It’s too warm. It’s too lovely. It’s too June, and he’ll have to go back to Privet Drive, and his entire life outside the cupboard or the locked bedroom will seem like a story he overheard in a pub. It won’t belong to him. It’ll be so bloody real when he climbs on the Hogwarts Express again, but it will never, ever stay real.

His throat hurts, which is what lets Harry know he’s shouting at the hedge at the top of his lungs.

He leans his head against the sycamore tree next to the house.

The bark turns into Draco’s hand.

Harry straightens up. It takes him a long time—a minute, or an hour, or a year—to drag his eyes from Draco’s hand to his wrist to his arm and finally to his face.

Draco is perfectly, utterly calm.

“I’m fine,” Harry tells him. “Like—I’m good.”

“You can’t hit your head on the tree.”

“Fine, okay, Jesus. I wasn’t. I was just leaning on it.”

“Come over here.”

“Fine,” he snaps, and lets himself be led to the lawn between the cottage and the hedge.

Hermione and Blaise are by the fire pit, involved in some sort of heated discussion. She’s got her face very close to his, and he’s smiling at her like he’s so proud of being able to argue with her.

Maybe they’re not arguing. Maybe they’re flirting. Because they’re in love, and neither one of them has walked out over nothing.

Harry stomps away, sits by the hedge, and breathes.

Draco sits next to him and holds his hand.

“I’m fine,” he keeps saying.

“I know,” Draco answers, every time.

The trouble is, Harry’s burning up. All of him is turning to smoke and ash, then starting over again with another spark that grows into an ember that grows into full-on flames.

He keeps coughing it up and out, then laughing at how stupid he feels, then getting hit with another swell of rage. Harry punches divots in the lawn. He tears off chunks of the hedge. He grits his teeth and bangs his head on Draco’s shoulder until Draco holds him still.

That’s the worst of it. That’s got to be the worst of it. What else could possibly happen?

Harry’s drinking sugary lemonade out of his tumbler when a shadow flits across the garden.

He looks up in time to see Kyle in mid-descent, his wings spread out majestically against the sky and a letter tied to his leg.

Draco reaches up to take the letter, tucks it under his arm, and reaches up again to offer Kyle some treats.

“What’s that?” Harry asks around his straw.

It’s a purple Ministry envelope.

Draco looks at him for a beat or two. Stop, stop says his brain, too late. Because Draco’s long fingers are already working at the flap, and he’s taking out the letter, and it’s formal correspondence from the Ministry or whatever.

“Bill’s accepted my resignation,” says Draco.

Harry’s not really there for what happens afterwards.

The sensation of sobbing flashes into his awareness. A scrubbed-raw pain in his throat. His knuckles hurt so badly, and it’s only later that he understands he’d made fists in Draco’s shirt.

He just—

Has no control.

His feelings are not in orbit anymore. They’re eating him from the inside out.

There are Hermione’s hands on his face.

There’s Ron’s voice in his ear.

There’s Greg holding out a biscuit that looks tiny in his huge palm.

There’s Blaise, asking Harry a question about curse orientation.

“There are, like, loads of dimensions,” he hears himself say, then hears himself break off into painful laughter. “You’ve got to turn it and look. Dunno how else to put it.”

There’s Ron again. Harry screams that he’s so bloody happy for him he could die, he wants to die, fuck.

There’s Pansy, spelling his curse-breaking shirt and wand holster onto him.

The almost-compression and the snug fit of his holster make him feel so much better.

Then he wants to die, because the shirt and holster are all he’s going to have left, and Harry hates this shirt, and hates this holster, and can’t bear to take them off.

There’s Draco’s shoulder again. There’s Draco stroking his hair and tracing an arc on the back of Harry’s hand. There’s Draco saying something to him in a steady tone, like nothing’s changed, like nothing’s wrong. Harry can’t tell if it’s in English or French. He doesn’t think it makes a difference.

There’s Draco humming that song, like he does when he’s cutting Harry’s hair and everything is fine.

This is the most unlovable he’s ever been.

This is the most unlikable, too. There’s no way any of these people will want to be anywhere near him when the week is up. Harry doesn’t want to be near himself.

It’s so embarrassing—worse than the bridge, worse than his house, worse than his entire life—that every time Harry resurfaces, he can’t take it. He knows he should be embarrassed, and he is, but the feeling doesn’t stop at the fiery flush in his cheeks or his racing heart. It’s everywhere. His skin is so raw it feels like it’ll come off. Everything that touches him itches or tickles or irritates except Draco’s hands.

He doesn’t want to know what he says to anyone.

If they care for him at all, they’ll Obliviate him later.

He has no idea how long it’s been when he gets to his feet.

Perfect. It’s been a long time. Long enough for the moon to come out. It’s a plump, cheery disc in the sky, casting stark shadows everywhere it touches.

Harry’s bruised himself somehow. All over his body. It’s interfering with his breathing a bit, so he’s got to do something about that.

And—

He’s got to do something about the situation they’re in.

There isn’t any going back from how Harry’s just acted—how he’s still acting, he’s pretty sure. No fixing what’s broken. It’s an easy choice. Go on or stay here.

Harry can’t think of anything more lovable than getting them all the bloody hell out.

Because he can sense the rest of them—Ron and Hermione and Pansy and Blaise and Greg—hovering near the cottage, probably waiting to see if Harry spontaneously combusts. That’s a good thing. They can stop Draco going up with him if that happens.

He brushes some grass off his clothes and discovers he’s wearing the Arrows jumper and a vest and not his curse-breaking shirt. Harry doesn’t remember changing, so someone must’ve done it for him.

“Very lovable,” he says. His voice is hoarse from all the shouting, probably, and his throat is horribly sore. He looks about—blurry, no glasses, doesn’t need them—and Draco is still there, his face worriedly pale and his expression as neutral as Harry’s ever seen it. “I’m really sorry about this.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be.”

“What?”

“I wish you wouldn’t be sorry. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

Harry lets out a laugh that feels like the time he got really ill when he was six or seven and thought he’d swallowed glass or something, then casts a Lumos and pushes both hands into the hedge.

Draco puts his arm around Harry’s waist. He does not say anything.

The original ley lines are just there. Harry tests them, letting the ley lines brush against his knuckles.

His Diagnostic Charm didn’t work before.

Harry’s pretty sure he knows why.

“What are you doing?” asks Draco.

“Just seeing if something is, like, feasible.”

“If what is feasible?”

“Just…something. Don’t worry about it.”

Draco does not say anything.

“I mean.” Harry’s got to swallow hard to get his voice to work. “The property is a box, when you think about it. It’s a sort of box.”

“Yes.”

“But we’re inside the box.”

“Yes,” Draco says again.

“I’m just—I want to see something.”

Harry doesn’t need to turn the whole framework, really. That’s a good option if the artefact or the framework or whatever is small. Bit more difficult if it’s the size of a house and a garden and two sycamore trees and some great tits.

What would be nice is if he could cast a Diagnostic.

But since the hedge blew his others out, he’s going to need a workaround.

“Nobody ever casts in layers for no reason,” he mentions to Draco, who already knows this. “Wouldn’t be worth it.”

“I should think not.”

Harry can hear the question in Draco’s voice, even if he doesn’t ask it.

“I thought this was a single layer before.” He presses a bit harder on the ley lines, but doesn’t put any magic through them. “I was wrong.”

“Harry…”

“Yeah?”

A beat passes, and Harry thinks Draco might argue with him about putting his hands in the hedge. He might tell him to stop, or suggest having a drink of lemonade, or maybe take him to bed.

“Would you mind if I cast a Protego?”

“No. Go ahead.”

Unlike Harry’s Protegos, Draco’s are a silver-white colour that remind Harry of a Patronus. It slips down over them like moonlight, shimmering on their skin along with the actual moonlight.

“Pretty,” Harry comments, because it is.

Then he reaches past the original ley lines, just a bit.

His fingers meet a second set of ley lines. They’re a diamond lattice. Harry traces the lines with a fingertip, getting a sense of the diagonals.

This is where the pulse is coming from. The tickticktick that’s still going, even after Harry has lost his bloody mind.

Harry knows exactly what this second layer means. He even knows how it was built. Oh, wow—his brain’s caught up. Lovely to see it, now that it’s too bloody late.

It’s familiar magic, is all. Magic he’s worked with before.

“Pansy’s a really good curse-breaker,” he tells Draco. “I think she might be an even better curse-caster.”

“This spell isn’t a curse.”

“Spell-caster, then. She’s a master frameworker. Whatever. She’s good.”

“I agree.”

Harry takes a deep breath. His vision is strange and his hands are trembling and he feels like he could freak out again for a long time, just swan dive right back into another wobbly.

Not yet, though.

He’s got to do this first.

“The directionality of the inner layer is towards us.” Draco probably knows this, too. “But the patterning here—” Harry plucks one of the outer lines. “—goes out.”

“You gathered all that from touching it?”

“Well, it’s, like, visualisation, or whatever. I can imagine how it looks. I can feel it, also. Where some of that magic is going. Out. Away.”

Harry closes his eyes.

He’s got it, now. Ripping the hedge apart with his bare hands wasn’t the solution, clearly.

Finding the second-order factors—the intent of the caster, and the additional layer of the frame—this was the solution.

This part of the spell framework isn’t warded like the inner bit. The lattice doesn’t fuss when Harry sends some of his magic across it in an invisible Diagnostic. He doesn’t need the visuals, anyway. He just needs the mirror lines.

And from there, it’s simple, really.

Just a series of tiny pinches, twisting the representative lines around the real ones. He’s got to will it through the lattice so that the pinches he makes here echo all around the spell framework.

“Harry,” says Draco.

Harry keeps pinching. Everyone’s going to be so relieved when they can get away from him. He’s going to be relieved, because distance is the only thing that will keep him from hurting them or annoying them or driving them mental.

Pansy was right. He will be glad he came here.

“My darling, please.”

“Shh. It’s okay. I’m almost done.”

The last of the twists in the spell framework zip along the lattice and meet up with Harry’s fingers.

Merlin’s bollocks, Pansy was so clever. She’s really smart. It’s a miracle he got to work with her this long.

“She reversed it, you know? The secondary framework is on the outside instead of the inside. Probably because of where they did the casting from and all that. And it’s, like, double reinforced. Because the main framework absorbs magic and, like, keeps it in, but the outer framework takes it somewhere else. So if somebody really freaked out, any accidental magic or whatever would go to the connected power well.”

Draco does not say anything.

“It’s a massive well.” Harry can feel that, too. The sheer size of it. The distance between the lattice and the well is, like, far, but the connection is still strong. Of course it is. Draco’s here. “Really old.”

Draco still does not say anything.

“Probably seems like there’s no way to undo any of it, but they’re connected. They both need each other, so if one falls, the other one will go, too.”

“Is that a theory?”

“No.”

“Then—”

Harry’s got the twisted ley lines between his fingers. Setting them in opposition to each other only takes a pinch.

The lattice does not go down with a soft click. It cracks under Harry’s fingers, and he jerks his hands out of the hedge. A series of chimes like shattering china travels outwards and around the entire garden—the entire property. Draco’s Protego flares, making them into twin ghosts just as the hedge explodes into a storm of confetti.

All the bits of paper flutter down around them, glancing off the Protego and falling soundlessly to the grass. Their colours show as they pass through Harry’s Lumos, bright for a second, then fading to grey.

Harry turns stiffly away from the hedge so he can speak to all of his ex-friends at once.

“Surprise,” Harry calls. “You’re free.”

Harry’s not brave enough to watch them leave.

He Apparates himself to the library-in-progress on the first floor and flops onto the round rug, flat on his back.

A few tears run out of his eyes in warm, itchy lines, so he swipes them off his temples and breathes.

Merlin Jesus fuck, he’s done it now. Blew his cover. Acted mental. Embarrassed himself and all the people who used to be his closest friends. Wore himself out, too. Harry’s limbs are wrung out, like boiled pasta.

He thinks longingly of his heavy blanket and falls instantly asleep.

“Potter. Psst.” Someone nudges his arm with the toe of their shoe. “You are a rather adorable sleeper. Never tell Draco I said that. Potter.”

“Uh.” He’s not quite awake yet and really doesn’t want to be. “They gone?”

“What are you on about?” Pansy shakes his shoulder. “Wake up.”

Harry’s eyelids are sort of stuck together, but he pushes past the urge to pass out and opens his eyes.

Pansy leans over him in a violently yellow jumper with a purple R down the front, her hair—still crinkled from yesterday’s plait—hanging down into her face. “Get up.”

“S’early.”

“Yes, Potsy, the sun is coming up. Rise and shine, if you will.”

He rolls onto his side, away from her.

Pansy plants her foot between his shoulder blades and kicks him onto his face.

“Fine, Jesus, okay.”

Harry gets to his knees first, then climbs to his feet. He’s still in the Arrows jumper, but someone charmed it clean in the night.

While it was on him.

He bounces a bit. The floor’s quite soft, too.

Harry rubs his hands over his face and casts the charms for his teeth and yawns so hard his jaw cracks.

“Have you quite finished?” Pansy stands with one hip jutted out, tapping her foot.

“Are they gone, then?”

“I ask you once again—what are you on about?”

“Is everyone else gone? They’ve got to be gone, right?”

Pansy scoffs like Harry’s suggested something disgusting. “Of course they’re not gone. They are sleeping, because nighttime is for everyone getting their beauty sleep individually or whatever it says on the schedule.”

She pronounces it shed-ule, which makes Harry laugh.

His chest hurts.

“I’ll go before—”

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake,” she hisses, then sticks her arm through his and hauls him towards the door. “You’re not sneaking out like some petty thief. You’re going for a walk with me.”

“I don’t have my—”

“Here are your glasses.”

Harry’s glasses streak through the air and slam onto his face. “Ow!”

“Shh. People are asleep. Let’s not be rude.”

Chapter Text

A single great tit sings in the sycamore tree as Harry and Pansy tiptoe out of the cottage. She whistles off-key to the branches. The bird fusses at her, then goes back to singing.

The only sign of the hedge is the confetti on the grass. It’s starting to dissolve already, the edges peeling into shimmers of magic and blending with the dew.

Harry holds the front gate open for Pansy, who nods to him like she’s at some high-society wizarding gala and not padding outside at dawn in an oversized Weasley jumper and leggings and slippers.

They slip-scuff their way down the lane.

It’s the twin of the lane Potter Cottage is on.

“Pans, is this—”

“It’s the same lane.” They crest a low hill, and Pansy blinks into the pink-orange sunrise. “It jogs a bit here and there, but it’s the same lane through the village.”

Tears sting in his eyes, but Harry opens them wide behind his glasses and lets them dry a bit.

The houses on either side of the lane get closer together after a minute or two. It’s not much farther to the village—Harry can see what he thinks of as the far end of the little square from here.

Godric’s Hollow is still asleep, except for the two of them. Green fields disappear into the early-morning mist in the gaps between cottages. Soon that mist will burn off, and then they’ll be able to see the distant trees.

That’s a relief.

A lazy puff of a breeze skates across Harry’s face. He gets a breath of salt off the sea and his whole chest squeezes. What’s he waiting for? Pansy was there all week. Pansy was there last night.

“Do you, er…want…to talk about it?”

Pansy gives him a sidelong look. “Talk about what?”

“Come on, Pans.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to disregard our pact.”

They made a pact in training never to do Legilimency on each other unless they were dying. Pansy believes in pacts and Harry’s pants at that sort of thing, so it hasn’t really come up.

“No, obviously I don’t. But, like—I was—” Harry has no bloody idea what to do, so he shrugs. “I freaked out.”

“Well, yes.”

“What d’you mean, well, yes?”

“I mean—” She waves her hand dismissively at the square. “Well, yes. I mean—it’s entirely understandable, Potsy, after everything.”

“After what?”

“Oh, Potter, you can’t—”

“Dunno what you’re talking about!”

“After everything.” Pansy nudges him with her pointy little elbow. “One thing leads to another. A bird in your hand is the same as a flock.”

“…what.”

“Potsy, it happens with you. It simply does! The schedule”—shed-ule—“gets to be oppressive, or you become overtired, and people put in their notice with only a year’s warning—”

Harry stops in the middle of the lane to argue. “I didn’t know you meant last week! I thought you meant, like, later!”

“Shush.” Pansy takes him by the arm and pulls Harry along. They’re at the shops just outside the square now. The paved lane turns to cobblestones under their feet.

“Don’t shush me.”

“I will shush you, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. I didn’t bring you out here to reminisce about our beautiful friendship and my great many accomplishments, you know. There is a larger purpose.”

“This is the square,” Harry grumbles as they cross into it. “Did you bring me here to look at the square? Because I’ve seen it.”

“You haven’t seen this.” They make a sharp turn onto the pavement. This row of shops is the first to get the sun, and the light is three times its size from reflecting off all the windows except one, which is blocked with parchment.

“I literally have, Pans. And don’t you dare take the piss about—”

“Your eyesight is appalling, Potsy. It makes me ill to consider it.” Pansy drags them to a stop. “But you do have your glasses on, so you’ll be able to comprehend this revelation.”

She slides her wand out of her sleeve with a dramatic flourish and swishes it at the window of the nearest shopfront.

The huge sheet of parchment inside the window rolls itself up and flies out of sight.

“It’s an empty shop.”

“Oh, for Merlin’s bloody actual bollocks—”

Pansy swishes her wand again.

Painted letters unfurl across the glass. Harry takes a tiny step back on instinct, his heart lifting—he loves this sort of magic, can’t help it, he was raised by Muggles—and watches the words unfold from a big ampersand in the center. Magic glints and shines around the letters as the spell settles in. Pansy’s got an iron grip on Harry’s arm—sort of hurts—but he can feel her anticipation through it, so he doesn’t mind.

The visible traces of magic fade out, and Pansy holds her breath.

Harry blinks, then blinks again, then finally remembers he’s probably meant to be reading the sign.

Park & Sons, it reads.

And below it, smaller, in a tidy, official-looking type: CURSE-BREAKING AND MAGICAL REPAIR.

“Park and Sons?” Harry’s voice comes out weird and breathless. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” Pansy confirms, sounding extremely pleased with herself. “It’s a play on Parkinson. I knew you’d understand it immediately.”

“But—” Harry’s eyes are full of tears for no reason. Every time he blinks, the shop window sharpens for a second, and he can see them in it. Pansy in Ron’s jumper. Harry in his Arrows jumper. They don’t look like they usually do when they’re at work. They look like new people. The sort of people who might work inside the shop. “What is it?”

“Curse-breaking and magical repair.”

“Yeah, I read that, but—”

“It’s our agency.”

Harry cannot say anything. He gasps weirdly, trying to breathe, and thinks it’s pretty impressive that he’s still standing.

“I found it hurtful, Potsy, when you wouldn’t listen to all my plans despite being obsessed with the dulcet tones of my voice.” Pansy sighs. “But eventually, I came to understand that you’re the sort of person who has to—forgive me or don’t, I don’t very much care—see things before you’re sure.”

Harry still cannot say anything.

“I do love curse-breaking,” Pansy continues. “It’s especially entertaining when it’s in the context of a successful partnership. However, as a result of our close proximity, I could not help but notice that the Ministry schedule”—shed-ule—“does not agree with you.”

“No?” Harry croaks.

“Merlin, not in the slightest. And, given the choice between forming our own independent agency and watching you become a shell of yourself and crumble into pieces, I chose to form our own agency.”

“You didn’t—” Oh, Jesus, he’s got to get hold of himself. “You didn’t have to lock us in your house for a week to do that.”

“Needs must.”

“Needs did not must.”

“They most certainly did. Draco was at his wits’ end. And you’ve been at yours, as is patently clear to all of us. Then you took a jaunt onto Tower Bridge, so—”

“Did Draco tell you about that?”

Pansy hesitates for a second too long.

“He didn’t?”

“You of all people should know that the directionality of information—”

“How did you know?”

“You can’t possibly be suggesting that I broke our pact.”

“How, Pans?”

“We’ve cast any number of Locating Charms in each other’s presence over the years. Any one of them might have landed on your right shoe. You could’ve cast it. Only Merlin knows.”

“Pans!”

“Water, bridge—oh, that’s awful, I am a bit sorry about that—but it’s in the past now, is it not? Regardless, it seemed only too appropriate to move your birthday celebration up.”

He tears his eyes from the shop window to stare at Pansy.

“You were going to lock me in your house for a week for my birthday?”

“Not by yourself! With friends and loved ones, of course! And what better gift could you possibly receive than the gift of time? Honestly, Potter, why did you think there was so much confetti? I didn’t have time to alter the spellwork in light of the circumstances.”

“Jesus, Pans.”

She rubs briskly at his arm. “I wasn’t leaving without you. None of us are.”

“What d’you mean, none of—”

“You really have been falling apart, haven’t you? Ronald has been filling out his licensing parchmentwork in front of your face. He’s starting a private practice.”

“Where?”

“Here!” Pansy points to a shopfront on the opposite corner of the square. “And Greg’s been going on and on about his café.” She points again. “Although at this stage, I think he’ll have to consider a name change. Lunch When You Want It doesn’t make the least bit of sense for the amount of biscuits he’s got planned. And of course we can’t have an agency without a curse analyst, so I poached Draco from the Ministry.”

“Hermione?”

Pansy drops her hand and purses her lips. “One can hardly expect a pair of Unspeakables to leave the Ministry, but that’s no matter. Somehow, our dear Granger convinced them to give her a permanent Portkey for when she and Blaise make their move.”

“Their move to…Godric’s Hollow?”

Pans beams at him. “Now you’re catching on.”

They don’t talk on the walk back to Pansy’s cottage. Harry’s throat is too tight, and his head is too full of thoughts, and half of him is happier than he’s ever been and half of him wants to scream because this is, like, everything he wanted.

Except for, like, one thing.

One person.

Pansy opens the gate for him.

Light catches Harry’s eye.

It’s the new light on Pansy’s cottage, yeah, but it’s mostly the sun in Draco’s hair.

He’s up on the roof, leaning against the chimney, his photo album open in his lap. He looks down at them as the gate swings shut.

Harry and Pansy both wave at the same time.

Draco waves back, then beckons to Harry.

“Don’t fuck it up,” Pansy whispers, and kisses Harry’s cheek.

It’s, like, the smallest Apparition up to the roof. Barely a pinch. Harry lands on top of Draco, nearly straddling him, and has to toss himself to the side.

Draco catches Harry before he can roll off the roof and pulls him close.

“Absolutely not,” says Draco. “You may not fall off the roof.”

“I wasn’t trying to. I was trying to get on!”

“Try a bit harder, would you?”

“I will, I will!”

They’re sat on a flat bit of roof that Draco probably spelled there for the occasion of looking at photos or whatever. From this height, they can look over the wildflower fields. The mist has lifted enough to see the trees in the distance.

Oh, perfect. Harry’s shaking.

He takes it as a sign that if he waits even one minute, he won’t say anything at all.

“Draco,” he starts, and everything he’s wanted to say crowds into his mouth in a jumble of nonsense. “I’m sorry. I’m really—I ruined everything, and it was for, like—it was for nothing. I wish we didn’t break up. It’s all I can think about. It’s killing me, actually. And I know I can’t take it back, but I—”

“We broke up?”

“Oh, God, you know I found the ring and freaked out. And then I didn’t—I, like, hid. At my house. For, like—”

“For six weeks, yes. When did you break up with me?”

“When I left!”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah? I mean, I didn’t do a formal, like—”

“No letter. No announcement in the Prophet. Nothing at all, really. I’m not convinced it counts.”

“But…you broke up with me, too.”

“I’m certain I didn’t.”

“I looked in your dresser,” Harry forces out. “I looked. The ring was gone.”

Draco’s hold around Harry’s waist becomes incredibly gentle. He moves a bit, sliding a hand into his pocket.

Two great tits tee-ter tee-ter at each other in the sycamore tree. They sound like they’re fighting, or dancing. Harry can’t bring himself to look at Draco. He ends up staring at the tops of his shoes, which look ratty and horrible in the sunshine.

Draco nudges something against Harry’s arm.

Harry’s looking through a thick sheet of tears, but there’s no mistaking that box.

He puts his hand over it, feeling like he might burst apart like the clock of a dandelion, trembling like mad.

“Are you sure?” Harry says, his voice completely normal. “Are you—because—I think I freaked out like I did because I’m, like—I’m difficult.”

“Difficult how?”

“To, er…to love. I’m just—I—I freak out and leave and I hate my clothes and I’m—”

Draco kisses Harry’s temple.

He crumples sideways, his head landing on Draco’s shoulder, and survives to the next second, and the next, and the next.

“You are not difficult to love.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You’re not. You’re so easy to love that I spent years nursing a not-insignificant amount of heartbreak over how cruelly you rejected me.”

“I wish I hadn’t—”

“Nonsense. I was being a twat. I deserved it. This time, I think perhaps you were trying to protect me, in your misguided way.”

“I was trying to keep you from having to deal with—”

“Do you honestly think I see loving you as dealing with you?”

“Well…yeah.”

The two great tits fly out of the branches, circle the top of the sycamore tree, and plunge back down.

“You weren’t protecting me, you know. From whatever it is you imagine is so difficult about you.”

“Well…it can’t be fun, when I’m like—”

“It can’t be fun feeling that way, can it? Of course I don’t enjoy seeing you in such distress, but I want to be the one to help you out of it. What could I possibly want more?”

“I don’t know! I—”

Draco opens his hand on Harry’s chest and traces an arc over Harry’s heart with the pad of his thumb.

“What I mean to say, mon éclair, is that I think love is easier than you realise.”

“What—just, like, in general?”

“Yes.” Harry can feel Draco smiling from the tiny spot where his jaw touches Harry’s face. “Loving you is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

“But I’m so—”

“Yes, you are so. You are so good and kind and loyal. You’re quite funny when you put your mind to it. You’re not unintelligent.”

“Hey!”

“You see things in ways I’ve never thought of before. You’re an exceptional curse-breaker. And I shan’t leave out how lovely you are in bed.”

“I am really lovely in bed. That doesn’t make it, like, even. Between us.”

“Even?”

Harry lets out an enormous breath. “I’ve never done as much for you.”

Draco shakes his head just slightly. “Wherever did you get that idea?”

“That’s maths, Draco.”

“It’s not Quidditch, mon éclair. I simply shan’t engage in keeping a tally of who’s scored more goals.”

“Well, I’ve got a lot less than you.”

“I seem to recall that you were responsible for warding the bedroom door. You sent all the snakes in Somerset packing. You’ve been making caramel syrup every morning. For me! When I didn’t ask!”

“Of course I did! Why wouldn’t I do that?”

Draco sighs. Everything about his sigh is fond. “Did you know, Harry, that you’re rather astonishing? You’ve felt so awful, and you did all those very many things simply because I was here.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m forced to assume that’s because you love me.”

“Oh, Jesus, I do. I love you, like, madly. I’m completely mad.”

“You’re not. In fact, your singular flaw is that you didn’t give me a chance to tell you how much I want you to be my husband before you panicked.”

“Er.” Harry’s shivering quite a bit, but he’s not panicking. “You could tell me now.”

“Wonderful! I very much want you to be my husband, perhaps more than anything. I don’t care about the wedding.”

Harry picks up his head so he can stare at half Draco’s face. “You do care about weddings. You love weddings. You want to get married in your mother’s rose garden.”

Draco makes a bit more space so they can see each other, pushes the ring box into Harry’s hand, and touches his face, making a little arc on Harry’s cheekbone. “Did you know, mon éclair, that my mother goes to France?”

Oh—oh.

Draco’s nervous.

“Yeah. I do know that. Because you and Pansy were talking about it. But I wasn’t really listening, because I was angry.”

“Do me a favour, my darling, and look.” Draco taps his fingers on the photo album.

Harry leans against him and looks.

The first photo is of Lucius and Narcissa in a shaft of light, totally lost in one another, both of them in white wedding robes. There are more wedding photos, too, but Draco turns a few of the pages.

The next photo he points to is clearly at, like, some sort of Yule gathering. It’s taken through a crowd. People’s arms move in and out of the frame, hands waving as they talk, but the subject of the photo is Draco’s mother.

She’s sat alone in a window seat next to a massive window, her legs drawn up, and the look on her face—

“She’s tired of that party,” says Harry.

“She gets tired of parties,” Draco says. “She gets tired of people. She gets tired of all the obligations her life has asked of her. She gets tired of footsteps in the hall, and people opening the door to her rooms, and getting owls.” He keeps turning pages. There are more photos of his mother, alone in her rose gardens or alone in the library with a book or alone with a quill in her hand, a length of parchment in front of her. “When I was younger, my father would take her hand and say soyez comme l’oiseau, Cissy.” Draco’s smile is so wide it shows his dimples. “Be like the bird, Cissy. He meant—go to the chateau in France and be alone. And when she came back, she would feel better again.”

Harry’s so in love. Makes it hard to think. He clutches the ring box for reassurance. “Dunno what that means.”

Draco runs his fingers through Harry’s hair. “It means—marrying you is not about the wedding, or the ring. That’s only the smallest fraction. If you said yes, I’d get everything else, too.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, everything. I’d get to wake up first so I can watch you wake up. Have you any idea how adorable you are when you sleep? I’d get to listen to your terrible jokes. I’d get to wipe away your tears when you cry.”

“But—”

“I want the rest, too, in case I haven’t made myself clear. I want to fix anything that’s keeping you up at night. I want to give you your Arrows jumper when you hate all your clothes. I want to Silence every last thing that bothers you. I want to take you on holiday before you’re sitting on the top of Tower Bridge.”

“I don’t actually want to die. I’m not even—I’m not sad. I was sad about, like, some things, but I’m not—I’ve just felt so stupid, like…I can’t get to my own brain. Everything’s so hard. I just wanted something to be easy.”

“I should think you’re tired,” Draco says softly. “I should think you’ve been tired for a long time.”

“Yeah. Dunno what to do about that.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“Come home so I can make things easy for you.”

“But—”

“I want to make things easy for you.” Harry’s really never seen so much sincerity in one person’s eyes before. The silver-grey colour only magnifies it. But there’s still a bit of uncertainty, like, clinging to him.

“What if I’m still the same when things are easy?”

“What if they’ve never been easy before?” Draco whispers, his eyes shining, and takes the ring box. Harry’s got no idea how he manages to open it one-handed, but he’s pretty sure that’s what’s happening. “What if you let me make things very, very easy for you, and we find out what it’s like together, because you can be any way and I’ll still love you more than magic? More than I love my own heart? What would you say to that?”

“Yes,” Harry manages. “I’d say yes. I’m saying yes.”

“Then here.” Draco’s got to lean over the photo album to kiss Harry. He stops just before their lips meet and slides the ring onto Harry’s finger. “Have me.”

They shag on the roof.

Harry’s pretty sure Draco casts a strong Disillusionment Charm, but he doesn’t stop to check.

When they’re both winded, Harry Apparates them to the bedroom overlooking the garden, landing them directly in bed.

“Pansy showed me the shop,” he tells Draco as they collapse onto the pillows. “I guess she thinks everyone is moving to Godric’s Hollow.”

“Oh, yes.” Draco stretches, looking a bit like a satisfied cat. “We are.”

“You can’t—”

“We can. We can all do exactly as we please. Haven’t you always wanted the people you love in one place?”

“Yeah, but—”

“We met about it, and we all agreed it was for the best. Not only for you, of course. Weasley is tired of night shifts. Granger needs to learn to sleep. And Greg is going to be extremely successful, if I have anything to say about it.”

“But…where are you going to live?”

Draco widens his eyes. The silver-grey sparkles. “Didn’t I say? I’ve bought the cottage just next door.”

As Harry’s falling asleep, something occurs to him.

“Hey, Draco?”

“Mmm?”

“What was the second reason?”

“For what?”

“The holiday thing. At Grimmauld.”

“Oh, that." Draco yawns. “It was so the house would know you planned to return. You’re not abandoning it by having a second home or spending most of the year elsewhere, you know. Old wizarding houses understand that sort of thing.”

Harry likes that, actually.

He's almost asleep again when a second thing pops into his mind. Something about the magic in the hedge. The outer ley lines.

“Hey, Draco?”

“Mmm?”

“Is your mum an Unspeakable?”

Draco smiles just a bit, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

The cottage next door could be a sister to Pansy’s. They resemble each other just enough to be recognisable—the pattern in the stones here, a window there. There are no curtains hung yet, so from the side garden where they cross, Harry can see it’s like Draco’s townhouse on Connaught Square. Bright. Clean. Safe.

They go inside.

On the second step down the front hall, something snaps near Harry’s shoe.

Harry freezes.

His shoelace broke.

The eyelet tore away with it.

Freezing won’t fix anything. Harry knows that. But on a more pressing level, Harry doesn’t know anything. The only way he can keep what he’s got is to stand perfectly still and pretend he doesn’t exist.

“Well done,” Draco says, like nothing’s changed. “I thought the laces would go within a year. You’re rather hard on trainers.”

Harry cannot say anything.

He’s sort of aware of a subtle wash of magic, but he can’t look up.

“Here.” A box enters his line of sight, blocking out his old, defeated trainers. When he still doesn’t move, Draco taps the box gently against Harry’s belly. “Open it.”

Harry finds the edge of the lid with his thumb and flips it open. Weighs a bloody tonne.

Inside are his shoes.

Just how they were when Harry loved them the first time. White with crisp red shields and crimson shoelaces.

“They don’t make these anymore,” he sort of breathes at the box.

“I saw your face at that pub. I’ve put several pairs away.”

Harry doesn’t need to look at the shoes anymore. He looks at Draco instead. “You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

Draco dimples at him. “I did tell you. Let’s go see the rest, shall we?”

Chapter Text

Harry’s new flying helmet isn’t going to work out.

He’s tried to spell the buckle on the straps closed, like, fifteen times, and it won’t go. The tiny prong in the centre keeps missing the tiny hole.

It’s driving him absolutely mad.

He lifts his chin, trying to see the strap in the mirror, and pinches at it a few more times.

“Fuck-bollocks,” Harry hisses at his reflection, then paces around the bedroom in a wide circle. He shakes out his arms as he goes and breathes deeply, then goes back to the mirror for one more try.

And…

Fails.

“Fuck!” He jumps up and down hard enough to rattle the floor, which doesn’t rattle at all. It’s triple-reinforced. Harry can jump as hard as he wants.

This helmet is made for him. It’s made from dragonhide and was specially fitted to Harry’s head and even specially fitted to his flying goggles, which Draco got for Harry after he freaked out about too much wind getting in his eyes.

Everyone’s waiting for him, also. Because it’s Harry’s birthday. He’s thirty-five years old and he can’t get this buckle on.

He locks eyes with himself in the mirror, stabbing one finger to the glass.

“We were up late last night,” he tells his reflection in his sternest tone. “And up early this morning. It’s fingers! Oh, fuck, I’m hungry.”

Harry Summons a stack of five miniature biscuits from the bowl on his bedside table and puts them all in his mouth at once.

Then he goes to the huge bedroom windows that look out on the back garden.

It’s completely full of people. It’s a good thing they combined gardens with Pansy that first summer and fenced both of them together. She’s still got the pool, which is nice for when Harry wants to lie on a lilo and forget he’s got a body, and he’s pretty sure this party wouldn’t fit in their back garden alone.

Harry’s got a lot of friends here, and loads of people he loves, and some others he never thought would fall into either category. Under the shade of the sycamore tree that sits right on the boundary of their gardens, Lucius Malfoy solemnly oversees Scorpius—Harry and Draco’s oldest—and Marigold—Ron and Pansy’s oldest—playing curse-breaker, both of them wearing tiny wand holsters and pointing play wands at various leaves and twigs. Scorpius has Draco’s hair and Marigold has Ron’s, so they’re usually the most visible children in any crowd.

Nearby, Pansy’s talking to Narcissa, who’s got the baby. Leo got Harry’s skin and Harry’s hair and is the roundest baby Harry has ever seen. People go mad over his chubby round cheeks, Harry included.

He feels a bit more confident the second time around. Honestly, he’d freaked out a bit after Scorpius was born. His piercing dinosaur cry was, like, harrowing.

It made Harry feel mental, with all the hairs on his nape standing and his stomach in knots, and he cried more than once about how he wasn’t supposed to feel that way, he felt so horrible, and Draco had got Harry a pair of massive headphones and Charmed them just right so he could hear Scorpius without losing his mind, and everything was easier after that.

Anyway, Leo’s fully passed out in Narcissa’s arms, so there’s nothing holding Harry back from the birthday Quidditch match. Plus, Kyle is grumpily supervising the whole scene from a branch in the tree, and he’ll hoot an alarm at top volume if he thinks anything’s gone wrong. Not to mention the generations of great tits who will gladly give their lives for some of Draco’s special seeds.

The match is most of the reason Harry’s too keyed up to do the buckle on his helmet. Pansy sent her field mouse Patronus into their bedroom at actual dawn this morning, shrieking at top volume about spell activity in the field. Harry Apparated out immediately, half-awake and fully naked, and the second his feet touched the dewy grass, he was instantly blasted with the sound of five hundred trumpets blaring and a cannon-like explosion, combined with Pansy screaming your dick is out, Potter, what the fuck!

Two sets of Quidditch hoops burst out of the ground, spraying a storm of confetti into the sky, and the wildflowers turned into a tended oval field, and stands shot up, spewing more confetti absolutely everywhere, and when it was all over, Pansy was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak and finally manage to choke out happy birthday, Potsy and he’d said thanks, I think I’ll get dressed and Apparated away to the sound of her cackling.

In the very centre of all the Weasleys and more friends than Harry realised they had and six-months-pregnant Pansy and Hermione and Blaise—who are supporting different teams—and Greg and everyone, there’s Draco.

His Quidditch kit twinkles, constellations swirling across the midnight-blue fabric. Draco looks like a prince or something, his broom balanced on the ground and his own helmet dangling from his fingertips, and he’s been watching Harry.

Draco beckons.

It’s the smallest Apparition. Barely a pinch. Harry lands close enough to kiss Draco full on the mouth.

“You taste like biscuits,” says Draco when Harry finally pulls himself away. “Would you rather eat first?”

“No. I’m good. Like, really good.”

Draco pushes Harry back a bit so he can look at Harry’s Quidditch kit, which is yellow with sunbeams dancing over and through it. “I thought Pans could’ve done better than Suns and Stars for the teams, but I was wrong. Look at you!”

Harry’s face goes all hot. “You’re the fittest Star. Has anyone told you?”

“Oh, yes. All the guests formed a line earlier to compliment me. Have you got everything you need?”

Harry grins helplessly at Draco, because really, he does. “I couldn’t get my helmet on. Fingers.”

“Ah! Let me.” Draco pulls his own helmet on haphazardly, which makes Harry feel faint with lust and probably love, then puts Harry’s helmet on for him. Draco’s fingers never get tired. He does up the buckle, pulls down Harry’s goggles, and tests the fit, his mouth in a serious pout. “There. Better?”

“Yeah.” Harry pulls Draco’s helmet into place for him. “Also, you’re perfect.”

Draco glows at him. “I know.”

The party follows the teams to the stands. Harry and Draco stop to kiss Leo’s cheeks, then briefly interrupt Scorpius and Marigold’s game to kiss them, too. Ron’s playing Keeper for the Suns. He slings his arm around Harry’s shoulders. “Happy birthday, mate.”

“You, too. Er—thanks.”

“Look at the size of these stands!”

“Massive, right?”

“Bloody hell!”

They’re looking less massive by the second, though. The entire party’s filtering in and finding seats, and Harry’s pretty sure some other people got wind of the match somehow, because there’s no way this many people like him enough to come to his party.

Well—

There is a way.

Harry’s not got time to dwell on it or cry or anything. Greg’s out in the centre of the pitch, tapping his wand into the trunk of balls to send the Snitch and the Bludgers spiraling up into the air. Then he tucks his wand away and takes the Quaffle in one huge hand and Hermione’s megaphone in the other.

“Mount your brooms!” he shouts at all of them.

Harry climbs on his broom. It’s a Lightning Bolt, out last year just in time for Harry’s thirty-fourth, not that Draco had waited that long to give it to him, and it’s ready to fly. So is Harry. He looks past Greg to where Draco’s on his broom, his grey eyes sharp.

Draco’s not looking at Greg. He’s looking at Harry.

Greg hurls the Quaffle over his head, and Harry pushes off, the rest of the Suns going with him, the Stars streaking up and up and up.

From this height, the world is a green sprawl dotted with wildflowers. The party is a collection of rectangles. One table is a rainbow of gifts. Another is a rainbow of food. A third has a huge round circle in the centre—Harry’s cake, which Greg baked at his café, and which is not miniature at all.

He and Draco are going to the Manor to stay with Lucius at the end of August so Narcissa can go to France for a long weekend. Scorpius and Marigold are starting preschool in September. Two birthdays ago, Hermione gave Harry a stack of parchments that transferred all the rights to his parents’ cottage fully and officially to Harry, so they’re working on restoring it, bit by bit.

Harry’s life feels so much bigger than he thought it would. He feels so much smaller. In, like, a good way. His body doesn’t take up so much of his brain when he’s, like, slept and eaten and let Draco know things about him before Harry does. Sometimes, Draco will say soyez comme l’oiseau, mon éclair, which apparently means be like the bird, my flash of lightning—or for Harry to take his broom and fly until the patchwork countryside gives way to the sea, with nobody’s eyes on him and his kit fitted just right and the breeze blocking everything out but his heartbeat. He always feels better when he lands in the back garden afterwards.

Harry’s going to be so happy to get his feet on the ground again.

But for now, he’s happy to fly.

He circles the pitch, searching for that tiny golden glint.

Harry’s eyes catch on Draco instead, all long, handsome lines in dark blue, pieces of his starlight hair coming loose from his plait and sneaking out of his helmet. He’s flying a bit below Harry, coming ’round the far curve of the pitch.

Draco stands up a bit on his broom, then drops back down into his seat. Harry would bet anything he’s seen the Snitch.

There’s nothing more cut and dry than this, is there? What else is Harry supposed to do with his heart out ahead of him? With his everything out ahead of him, really? Draco’s just there. He’s, like, a star, shining in the sun.

Harry leans into the dive, the wind rushing in his ears, and goes after him.