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There’s a loose floorboard outside the room where they’re keeping Draco. After three weeks, Harry still trips over it every morning, letting out a volley of unimaginative curses as frustration wells up inside him.
“You could fix it, you know,” Draco says, mildly, as Harry stumbles into the room. “You’ve at least got a wand.”
Harry scowls at him, but it lacks any venom. He’s bone-tired, four years deep in a war he can’t seem to win, leading a meagre resistance against Voldemort’s overwhelming forces, the voices of the lost keeping him awake at night. Too fucking tired, in any event, to think of what bloody charm would nail a floorboard back into place.
“Did someone …” he starts to ask, but Draco cuts him off, pointing at an empty plate on the sideboard. The first week he was here there were disagreements about how often a defector who might be a traitor should be fed. It took Harry a few days to hear about it. The resulting burst of wild magic blew a door off the barn outside.
That week had been more or less nothing but disagreements, from the moment the Northey family had owled to say a Death Eater was hiding in their basement and trying to contact Harry Potter. The Northeys were terrified. Middle-class pure-bloods who didn’t consider themselves collaborators but certainly didn’t want any trouble, and if someone didn’t come to remove the interloper post haste they’d have no choice, they were sure the Order would understand.
Kingsley and Arthur had gone together, bringing an exhausted, filthy-looking Malfoy to the abandoned farm they’d been using as a safe house—no one was ready to risk some sort of Trojan horse attack on Grimmauld Place. They bound him to a bed in one of the back rooms as they tried to decide what to do with him. Veritaserum wasn’t something they just had lying around, and even if they had, Hermione insisted, Draco was likely too skilled an Occlumens for it to be reliable.
Harry left it to the adults to sort out while he led another round of skirmishes in Yorkshire, helping a small group of Squibs to safety, and returned to the middle of a blazing row about whether or not the only effective way to be sure that a Malfoy was truly a turncoat would involve a lot of Crucio.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he spat, nursing one wrist where he’d caught a stray curse as he’d apparated away with the last of the refugees. “We’re not torturing anyone.” George opened his mouth to start arguing again, but Harry, tired and in pain, slapped his good hand on the table so hard all the candles in the room flared like bonfires. “Enough,” he seethed into the shocked silence. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll know if he’s telling the truth.”
Harry doesn’t know what he’d expected. Perhaps the old Malfoy antagonism; a sneer and some jibe about how Harry was too stupid to understand the information he was being offered. Or forced sincerity perhaps, pleading with Harry to believe him.
Instead, Draco seems just as exhausted as he is. Jittery in a way that speaks of the same lack of sleep. The same tightly-wound anxiety that claws up inside at inopportune moments and threatens to lash out of him, a magical incarnation of his own monstrous failure. Draco doesn’t seem inclined to convince Harry of anything, really.
“I signed my own death warrant when I left, Potter,” he’d said quietly when Harry released the Incarcerous Kingsley had left him bound in. Harry had thought back, to whispering “I am about to die” before continuing into the Forbidden Forest, and knew then and there that there’d be no question of Draco being cast out. Not on his watch.
As the weeks have worn on, Harry’s run off the Order members who were “forgetful” about Draco’s meals. He’s dug around for some jeans, a sweater and some plain-looking underwear in the pile of clean clothes Molly keeps miraculously producing, because all Draco had with him when he ran was one battered duffle and the robes on his back.
And so now Harry comes each day and relieves whichever Order member is standing guard overnight. Cho, this week, who was able to use Draco’s information to rescue twelve Muggle-born children and their teacher from a residential school in Bath and said to Harry afterward, “He’s all right by me.” When Cho’s outside Draco’s door, Harry feels okay about leaving. He goes back to Grimmauld Place and stays up long into the night plotting with Kingsley and Robards, discussing plans for raids and ways they can disrupt the Death Eaters’ operations; when they finally turn in, he paces Sirius’s bedroom until sleep claims him for a scant few hours. Then he goes back to Draco.
They sit on opposite sides of a desk he dragged into the bedroom, maps spread out between them, and Draco talks until his voice starts to sound ragged and worn, drawing arrows on the maps and writing detailed information beside buildings in his tiny, spiky handwriting.
“They’ll change it, all of it, as soon as they decide I’m not actually dead,” he concludes wearily, running a hand through his hair. It’s long, falling in his eyes. Molly had forced Harry to sit still last month as she attacked him with a shearing charm, complaining that he’d fall off his broom if it got any longer. He wonders whether Molly would agree to cut Draco’s hair, and decides he doesn’t want her to.
He shrugs. “We’re making use of it as quickly as we can.” He’s not naive enough to think that Draco’s information has turned the tide, but after months of defeat the run of successful raids has been lifting morale. He continues to leave an Order member at the safe house each night, but they’re no longer instructed to keep Draco in his room.
The morning after Draco’s intelligence helps them dismantle a key Death Eater supply line through Sussex, the sun is shining and Harry sits with him in the kitchen garden at the farmhouse on some rickety wooden furniture.
“What now?” Draco asks, the tremor in his voice giving away more than he probably intends.
“Nothing. What do you mean?”
“I’ve told you everything,” he says, smoothing a hand over the map in front of him, weighted down at the corners with pebbles against the crisp spring breeze. “There’s no need for you to … If you come back tomorrow, I won’t have anything new for you.”
Harry rubs at his wrist, still aching from the curse damage. They only have a couple of healers, and they’re so overworked he doesn’t like to ask. He tries to imagine going back to Grimmauld Place and leaving Draco here and … not returning. He swallows bile.
“You’re safe here,” he manages, which isn’t really any kind of answer but seems important all of a sudden. Draco doesn’t meet his eye. “Besides, there are still things … questions we have.” It’s a vague enough way to say I’ll be back.
Ron and Hermione volunteer for the overnight shift, which Harry suspects has more to do with a desperate need for some privacy than a newfound wish to look after Draco Malfoy. He doesn’t really begrudge them that, but somehow he does begrudge them heading to the farm each night after dinner while he paces. And thinks. And then tries not to think.
“Tell me about the Mark,” he asks, as they walk together past the outbuildings to a creek that meanders through the property. And Draco tells him about the spellwork, and the way the Marks summon, and the dark blood-curse he used on his own arm to sever the connection when he ran, leaving the skin scarred and burnt-looking. And none of that is the answer Harry wants. None of it answers, Why? Or, What did it feel like? Draco displays his arm without shame, and Harry’s fingers twitch because he wants to touch that damaged skin and know what it feels like, and he doesn’t know why.
The sun is setting when they get back to the farmhouse and Draco says he wants to give him something, walking back to his room. Harry drifts along after him, wondering how poorly George would react if he brought Draco back to Grimmauld Place for dinner. He trips on the floorboard and swears, slamming his weak wrist into the doorframe to right himself.
Draco laughs, and Harry is so startled by the unfamiliar sound that he blinks in surprise before the pain catches up with him, turning his reaction to a hiss and a wince.
The smile falls off Draco’s face. “Give me your wand,” he sighs, exasperated, and Harry hands it over without really thinking. Draco fires an Infigo at the floorboard, which smoothes itself firmly into place, then he reaches for Harry’s hand. “May I?”
Harry’s confused, but he doesn’t flinch when Draco gently takes hold of his forearm, raises the wand between them, and incants. The feeling of relief is instantaneous, as the inflamed nerve endings settle and a cool wash of magic passes over his arm. Harry exhales heavily.
“Thank you.”
Draco hands his wand back with a small smile, crouching to pull his duffle out from under the bed and rummage around in it. When he stands and turns back to Harry he has a small, dented red cardboard box in his hand.
“Happy birthday.”
Harry’s chest feels tight, like someone is squeezing him too hard. “How did you…”
Draco flushes. “I overheard Granger and Weasley last night. Weasley suggested they conjure you a cake and got an absolute earful about wasting war rations and Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.”
All the breath leaves Harry in a huffed laugh.
“Well, she was right,” Draco muses, which only makes Harry laugh harder.
“No, I mean, he was winding her up,” Harry clarifies, smiling widely. “That’s like one of the few things Ron actually knows about magical theory.” It makes him unaccountably happy to hear about this moment of levity for reasons he can’t explain to himself, let alone Draco.
Draco. Who is still holding the little red box.
Harry reaches out to take it. The cardboard is creased and worn at the corners. “Should I …?”
Draco manages to both shrug and nod at the same time, affecting a kind of indifference that doesn’t convince Harry. “I mean, I don’t have a wand, so it’s not like I could conjure you anything.”
Harry opens the box and bites his lip. His eyes feel hot and prickly all of a sudden. Inside are four fancy chocolate truffles. The kind Draco’s mother used to have sent to him at Hogwarts all the time before… Before. The chocolate has seen better days, turning a little white at the edges. He looks up at Draco, holding his breath.
“They’re the last ones she gave me,” he says softly.
Harry is assailed by vivid memories of Narcissa in the Forest, lying boldly to the Dark Lord, giving Harry just enough time to get away, before her treachery was uncovered and her fate sealed. His tears well up. “I can’t.”
“She’d be pleased, I think,” Draco whispers. “We’ll share.”
He reaches into the box and takes out a truffle, popping it into his mouth, and Harry does the same. It explodes in an overwhelming sensation of dark cocoa and orange and it’s so vibrant on his tongue after so long of eating only to stay alive that he doesn’t even know how to process it. Certainly doesn’t know how to process how vibrant and alive Draco Malfoy suddenly seems, lit by the fading orange light spilling in through the bedroom windows.
When Harry kisses him he tastes like salted caramel and a future Harry had long since given up on. One that he finally feels he might be ready to believe in again.
~