Chapter Text
The sink is overflowing. In the puddle spreading across the tiles, Harry watches his face. There’s blood under his nose. He licks his upper lip and tastes that very particular flavour. Not nice, but not unpleasant either.
He should get up now, climb back onto the step stool and turn off the tap before an adult arrives. He doesn’t. He is mesmerised by his reflection, by the little ripples dancing around him. The water slips into the hollow lines between the tiles, like tiny streams joining and parting. It’s fun. If there were tiny boats the size of ants, they could sail around the bathroom.
His daydream ends when the door bursts open behind him. Aunt Petunia's voice fills the doorway, assaulting him with nonsensical insults that barely register in his distracted mind. He is too slow to get up before she does it for him. She grabs his arm with her witch-like fingers and yanks him up so roughly that his feet leave the floor for a second.
“Look what you’ve done, you useless boy!” she wails, holding him firmly in place while she leans over the sink and turns off the tap with her other hand. “I ask you to do ONE simple thing, and you still manage to make a mess!”
The soft melody of the stream stops, replaced by the funny noise of gurgling as she removes the plug from the sink. Harry stares at his wet toes, but he can feel that she’s glaring at him with her piercing, ugly eyes. “Do you think water is free?”
No clue. Is it not?
“I’ll have you paying the bills next so that you stop treating this house like a hotel!”
What’s a bill?
“Why’s your nose bleeding?”
She asks a lot of questions. Is he supposed to know the answers? He can’t even remember how he ended up on the floor. The last thing he knew, Aunt Petunia was sending him to wash his face. Then he vaguely remembers a voice calling his name — though it didn’t sound like any familiar voice — and an ache in his chest, the remnants still lingering even now. He shrugs his shoulders. She hates it when he does that.
“Stop shrugging like a dimwit! Use your tongue.”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
She starts swearing under her breath. She loves doing that.
“Look at the mess you’ve made! You’ve stained my floor tiles,” she snaps at last, shoving a towel into his hands.
Harry hesitates, but chooses to use it to wipe the blood off the floor rather than his nose. As he does so, the puddle around Aunt Petunia’s feet only grows larger. It fuels her wrath.
With unnecessary force, she drags him out of the bathroom and down the stairs. On the way, they pass Dudley, who is peering out of his bedroom door with his usual snooping look. How humiliating. How exposed Harry feels. He’s lucky Uncle Vernon is away; Harry finds him the scariest of all.
As she thrusts him into the cupboard, Aunt Petunia says, “You’ll stay there until you’ve thought about what you’ve done,” and Harry nods, even though he has no recollection of doing anything wrong. All he did was lie on the floor with a nosebleed — and even at his young age, he knows that isn’t naughty behaviour. Only, it doesn’t take much for his uncle or aunt to punish him, and that he knows all too well.
Harry doesn’t like the cupboard: it’s small, dark, it smells musty, and it’s crawling with cobwebs. Still, there are some perks — such as being excused from chores and from Dudley’s punches. The biggest problem is that it’s only morning, which means he’ll most likely miss lunch and maybe even dinner.
He shifts to sit more comfortably on the bed and wipes the rest of the blood with his sleeve. Some reaches his lips again, although this time he doesn’t like it at all. The urge to cry wells up in his throat, but he manages to contain it in a quiet hiccup.
Still, it returns in waves — ragged breaths and trembling lips. There isn’t much to do in there to distract himself: sleep, play with a few broken toys that are as tired of seeing him as he is of them, or lose himself in his own mind — the last of which seems to have been the cause of his punishment. But there’s something else Harry does when he feels sad.
He reaches under his pillow for a piece of wrinkled white paper he stole from Uncle Vernon’s study months ago, and places it right in front of his crossed legs. This paper is there for a very specific purpose: to become a letter for his parents.
Harry doesn’t know how to write yet, of course, but he knows exactly what the letter should say, for he’s been rehearsing the words over and over until the day he’s ready to write them down. Every day he leans over the blank page, and with his lips brushing against it, he whispers:
“Dear Mummy and Daddy,
I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what you look like, but I love you very, very much. Mrs White at school says that you are in the sky. I believe her because she’s my teacher. Is it cold up there in the sky? Because sometimes it’s very cold here, so it must be even colder in the sky.
Do you have beds in the sky? And pancakes? I love pancakes, even if Aunt Petunia doesn’t want me to eat too many. Dudley always has more.
But I am very good. I don’t cry too much and I say thank you and please, and I listen to the adults. I miss you a lot. Do you miss me? I don’t know how to get to the sky yet. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon don’t want me to go on a plane, and I don’t know how to fly. But I’ll do it. I will find you. Wait for me.
I love you.
Harry.”
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
Anywhere Out of the World
It’s always the same spot on the same bench. The same wait, dreaded yet already charged with nostalgia, stomach knotted with apprehension. The same letters clutched in clammy hands. The doors close, the engine chimney spits out dense smoke, a whistle sounds, and the wheels begin to turn with a rhythmic clatter. Once again, the train pulls away, moving slowly enough to fill him with regret, though he wouldn’t board it even if it stopped.
And still, he repeats to himself: next time, maybe.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
He calls it the ‘World Beyond’. It’s a name, he has to admit, reminiscent of what Aunt Petunia would deem a read-worthy romantic novel. He later learns that a more accurate term for it would be ‘the Limbo’, but he prefers his appellation. A need to assert control in something over which he has no control at all.
His first experience in the World Beyond occurred two months after the end of the war. They were playing chess — as they always did to distract themselves from crying — and Ron was trying in vain, and not so subtly, to let him win while Hermione pestered: “He won’t improve that way, Ron.”
Harry collapsed onto the sofa just before Ron finally checkmated him.
“I won’t lie, I first thought you were faking it because I was winning,” Ron admitted later.
But he hadn’t faked anything. In a split second, everything became a whirl before his eyes, his whole body stiffened, Ron and Hermione’s voices faded into incoherent mumbles, and a frightening sense of losing control crashed over him until he was there. Back to that place. The World Beyond isn’t exactly like his experience at King’s Cross Station. First and foremost for the painful absence of Professor Dumbledore. And then for how different it looks, how different it feels. Going outside the world, going beyond it, beyond space and time, where nothing is linear, or substantial. One trajectory, one end, one destination. He’s never succumbed to it, but he knows. He knows exactly what awaits him over there, what to do, where to go.
Waking up is brutal, as if his heart is being ripped out of his chest, as if he is being dragged back into the world of the living with animalistic brutality, without scruples.
When he opens his eyes the first time it happens, he is lying on his back, exhausted, nauseous, sore, surrounded by a deafening din of worried people all talking over one another.
They are frantic, confused by what could have possibly happened to him. He joins them in their confusion but doesn’t speak, the same way he never elaborates on his near-death experience in the Forest. Why? He isn’t sure. Probably because being able to die and come back isn’t normal. And he’d very much like to be normal.
“How long have I been out?” he asks.
“A few minutes…” Hermione says.
Minutes? Odd.
Soon enough, he wants to go back. It only takes him a few weeks to realise he can trigger his cardiac arrests himself — only a few weeks before he starts going on purpose. He learns exactly how long to stay so he can wake up on his own, when to go so no one will notice — usually at night — and begins a journey of obsessive routine between these two opposite worlds without finding a purpose in either of them. He just likes the peace up there, the lack of pain, the instant of solitude, that strange sensation of having more control and freedom than in the real world, even though he never did anything more than sit on that bench and watch the train come and go. But he has a choice. He could board if he wanted to. He could reunite with his parents if he wanted to. And that’s the addictive part of it all.
Only the more he goes there, the more difficult it becomes to come back. The cardiac arrests — or whatever they are — increased with or against his will, the way to come back grew blurrier, darker, a thick fog he lost control of.
His friends end up taking him to St Mungo’s the day they almost fail to wake him. The Healers don’t understand — no surprise there. And so they do what they can with the little — no — information they have. They give him potions to prevent the attacks from happening, and strangely enough, it’s been working rather well. He has indeed stopped travelling to the World Beyond, only for the World Beyond to come to him. Flashes, voices, emotions. It’s much less frequent, less scary or dangerous. But it does happen, just like it’s happening right now, at dinner at the Burrow. Harry hates it, but he promised himself and the others to stick to his potions. For an instant, he blanks, feels emotions that are not his, emotions he doesn’t even know if they belong to someone he knows, someone alive or long gone.
He tries his best to ignore them, as most of the time they don’t make any sense, or at least don’t bring anything substantial to his life. Sometimes, he gets a nosebleed, but he doesn’t worry much about that. He’s always had nosebleeds.
He comes back to his senses just in time for dessert. Treacle tart. Perfect timing. Molly is walking over to the table with that smile she wears whenever she’s about to utter the well-known, long-awaited comment: “I made your favourite, Harry.”
She says that every time. Not that he can blame her; he’s the one who’s made a habit of gobbling down and refilling countless slices of the tart ever since his first meal at the Burrow ten years ago.
He smiles in turn and says with a funny voice, “Thank you, Mrs Weasley…”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the expected expressions of lassitude etched on some faces — the semi-concealed eye roll from Ron. It would be delectable if Harry wasn’t so allergic to being the centre of attention. At least no one seems to have noticed his moment of absence, a clear sign that he’s getting better at concealing it. This small victory fills him with pride. He eats three slices of treacle tart. It makes Ginny smile, her always-so-pretty smile.
Later, he finds himself in her bedroom, lying on her narrow bed that she’s never changed or even enlarged since she was a little girl. Still a single bed. It’s the kind of detail that sends mixed signals to their relationship. Of course, it might mean nothing. But it somehow always does.
Her bag is at the foot of the bed, open with a pair of long, thick socks spilling out of it like the tongue of a thirsty dog. She’s not very organised. They have that in common.
“Are you ready to leave?” he asks, only to remember he’s already asked her earlier before dinner.
She doesn’t seem to mind the repetition.
“Mostly. I’ll finish packing tomorrow morning.”
“But you leave tomorrow morning.”
At her lack of reaction, he asks, “Are you excited?”
She shrugs. “I’m nervous.”
“You? You’re never nervous.”
“I’m always nervous.”
Ah. Is she, though? Harry doesn’t argue. Just another thing he’s misjudged about her. At this point, she must think he doesn’t know her at all.
“You had another episode earlier, didn’t you?” she asks as she settles next to him.
He rolls his head towards her. Outside the small window that hangs above the bed, a burgeoning shower begins to patter against the pane. As crooked as the roof of the Burrow is, it won’t be long before there’s a steady stream of water covering most of their voices.
“Nothing escapes you,” he says.
“I just know how to look,” she says. “Where do you go in those moments?”
“Nowhere.”
She doesn’t believe him. He can tell. But at least she has the decency not to insist. He loves that about her. It’s not like he’s lying anyway; he doesn’t go anywhere during those episodes — quite the opposite, in fact. There’s always that nagging feeling in his chest, a deep-down ache of sadness that feels familiar yet not quite his own.
Never mind that. He’s made a promise of never dwelling on any of that anymore. Not if he wants to keep up a facade of life.
In a soft movement, he tucks Ginny’s hair behind her ear. Her skin is pink from the sun and her freckles are more prominent. He wants to kiss her shoulder but holds back. She must have noticed his hesitation because she clears her throat and asks,
“Are you still taking your potions?”
“Of course.”
That’s not what he wants to talk about — not with Ginny. She’s the only one who’s never made such a big deal out of his ‘condition’, as they all call it. She’s been worried, like any decent human being with feelings would be if their loved one was having regular, unexplained near-death experiences, but never did she suffocate him with overprotectiveness or treat him like a terminal patient. She even laughed when he got rejected from the Auror training test because “he blanked in the middle of a training fight.” This reaction was borderline insulting, however, and they had a fight over it — a fight that resulted in a rough night of sex unlike any they’d had before.
They remain silent for a while, Harry staring at the slanted and ragged ceiling so as to not let his wandering thoughts trigger any embarrassing reactions down below.
“Are we getting back together?”
The question is barely out before he regrets asking it.
She takes time to answer. A flash of thunder spills into the room, and a second later they both flinch slightly at the noise.
“Maybe we should wait until I come back to decide?” she finally says.
Ouch. Perhaps even more humiliating than a straight ‘no’.
Their relationship has remained quite unclear ever since Dumbledore’s funeral. They have sex. He likes the sex. But that’s pretty much it. And now she’s leaving for a five-month training programme in America with her Quidditch team — five months without that one thing they’re still sharing. He still has his hands, he thinks, but they’d never achieve the level of satisfaction Ginny offers him. Blast it. He covers his impending erection with the first cushion he can find. The night nonetheless calls for a well-deserved, rather desperate wank.
“Yeah, all right, sure,” he says with the best detached tone he can muster.
She gives him a smile he doesn’t know how to interpret.
“Will you be all right while I’m gone?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“You won’t get into trouble?”
“I never get into trouble.”
Then, like a mockery of the sky, another bolt of lightning strikes just above the house, making him flinch so much that the back of his head clunks the wall behind him. Both hands clutching his painful head, he swears under his breath while having to endure Ginny’s giggles.
“I could cancel my training, you know,” she says.
“Oh, do shut up.”
Her laugh slowly fades into a sigh.
“I’ll miss you,” she says.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
The water from the shower head on the wall burns his shoulders, yet his attention and hands are elsewhere. It’s two in the morning, but George and Angelina are still awake. He can hear them talking in the living room, their occasional laughter interrupting his wanking spree to the sole memory of Ginny’s smile. Every day he reminds himself that he should move out of George’s flat, get his own place. Despite his best efforts, Harry’s self-gratification fails to work, so he resigns himself to a lonely, boring shower instead. The water is too hot. With soap in his already barely functioning eyes, he fumbles blindly for the tap.
That’s when it hits him again. Two episodes in one day, a record. He has just the time to turn off the tap before he blanks, and his chest constricts with pain, with that strange desperation, urgency, almost supplication. He closes his eyes and waits, as he has best to do for it to pass. It takes longer than usual. A weird sensation fills his chest, as if water filled his lungs, choking him, drowning him from the inside, he can’t breathe, can’t move, only endure this foreign cry for help that rips his heart apart. And then…
“HARRY!”
Harry flinches at the voice. His heart beats so fast it makes him dizzy. He extricates himself from the shower as best he can and responds with a crack in his voice,
“Yes?”
Apart from Angelina’s distant laughter, there is no sound coming from behind the door. For a long minute, Harry stands still with his arms hanging limply on each side of his soaking wet body, a smidgeon of an erection – last remnant of his bleak attempt at pleasure in life – pointing timidly towards the blurry door. Eventually accepting that no one has called him, he grabs his towel, moves to the sink and puts his glasses on. As he raises his head, the small, foggy mirror spits out the reflection of a pathetic young man with blood all over his face.
What the hell was that?
Chapter Text
‘We look forward to doing business with you,
Fred & George Weasley.’
Harry tucks the letter into the envelope and tosses it onto the stack on his right. They just signed a sale agreement with Morocco. Five hundred Loonar Loop Luminators, two hundred Portable Swamps and seventy-five Lucky Dip Boxes. The best deal Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes has ever signed so far. There is much to be proud of: their first international trade and an additional income for at least the rest of the year, enough to put George’s mind at ease.
After wasting a long minute staring at an empty space on the shelf between two boxes of inventory yet to be restocked, Harry stands for a well-deserved stretch. The clock reads a quarter past eleven in the morning. Twenty minutes left to get to the owl post office. He picks up the pile of letters, stuffs them into his satchel, and climbs the stairs to the shop. It’s crowded. Nothing surprising there; it’s been like this every day since George reopened at the end of the war. A constant stream of hubbub that only dies down at closing time. Yet people buy little. They wander around the shop, hoping to see amusing things that will help them take their minds off their grief. They come in groups, all ages, to chat and browse, and then leave with almost empty hands.
Harry heads for the door. Heads turn as he walks by, people point at him, say his name, smile at him; the more polite ones greet him with a ‘hello’, which he returns with an awkward nod. When George offered him a job in the shop after his humiliating failure as an Auror, Harry accepted mainly because he would spend most of his time in the basement with boxes of merchandise for company. Although George had suggested that he should be at the till, as his popularity would draw in customers, Harry quickly dismissed the idea, insisting that the twins’ jokey nature was their trademark.
“Except I’m on my own now,” George had replied, to which Harry could only respond, “Anyway, I can’t deal with customers in my condition, can I?”
It was the first and last time he had used the excuse of his ‘condition’ to his advantage. George probably wasn’t entirely convinced, but he never insisted again, no doubt too emotionally exhausted to care. Besides, the crowd clearly didn’t need Harry to come.
So, for four months now, Harry has been working every morning in his little corner, signing contracts on behalf of ‘Fred & George Weasley’ and labelling boxes of Canary Creams. He doesn’t hate the job. Doesn’t like it either. It’s just enough to fill his time, keep his mind occupied.
As he finally makes his way to the door, Harry says to George as he passes, “I’m going to the post office,” but George doesn’t hear him, too busy selling the benefits of his new Skiving Snackbox upgrade to a group of young girls who don’t even look as though they’ve brought any money.
Outside, the wind of a rather dreadful early September day makes Harry want to go back inside. Brittle leaves drift over the pavement and stick to his shoes, his curls fly, tangle, dance carefree, and fall across his eyes so that he needs to push them back with his free hand. Luckily, the owl post office is nearby — just an alley to cross, and he’s already reached the door with the bell whose cackle provokes a chain reaction of dozens of owls flapping their wings and hooting in unison.
Mrs Berrycloth is busy at the counter with a man who, judging by the enormous size of his mailbag, will likely block the queue for a good while. Harry uses the time to look around the shop, stopping by each perch where owls of every colour and shape wait for a new owner.
One in particular never fails to catch his attention: a female screech owl, perched beneath a slanted beam at the far end of the room. Her feathers are deep black, sprinkled with white specks that make her look grey from a distance. Her striking green eyes always seem to search for his, and once they meet, Harry doesn’t want to do anything but walk over and pet her. Onyx, her name is.
Everyone keeps insisting Harry should buy her, that it would help him move on from Hedwig to have new company.
“She’s even got your eyes,” Ron had joked, though his attempt at humour had landed awkwardly.
Too soon after Hedwig’s death.
It’s always too soon. When is it ever the right time to replace someone dear to us?
It’s just an animal.
It’s all the same. It is love still.
So for now, he is content to spend time with Onyx at the post office, without any commitment other than hoping she won’t be bought by someone else. Mrs Berrycloth must have noticed his interest, for she keeps offering unsolicited, trivial anecdotes about whatever the owl happens to do, which, stuck in an owl post office, isn’t much of anything extraordinary or varied.
“She defecated on a customer’s hat the other day.”
Well done. One more reason to adopt her.
It’s a busy day at the shop, with a steady stream of people coming and going and the bell ringing continuously, much to the owls’ annoyance. Right next to Onyx, a small group of witches and wizards are chatting. Harry no longer listens to conversations of that sort, relegating them instead to background noise. Most often their talk revolves around politics: endless complaints about the current state of the Ministry and its lack of resources. Some think the world is better today; others pine for so-called better days, when they felt they had more power, more importance, at the expense of those who bore the consequences.
Only this time is different. Their attention is fixed solely on the window, and the usual politically sophisticated chatter sounds more like teenage gossip — the sort Harry finds himself more inclined to pay attention to.
“I can’t believe we’ve got another potion shop settling in Diagon Alley, as if we didn’t have enough with Slug & Jiggers and the Diagon Dispensary.”
“Not to mention Mr Mulpepper’s,” chimes in a tall man with a funny-looking moustache Harry struggles to drag his eyes from. It’s almost perfectly rectangular, black, so bushy it covers the entirety of his upper lip; when he speaks, he looks like an articulated marionette. Harry only stops staring when Onyx bites his finger to bring his attention back to her. Jealous sort.
The woman who made the first comment lets out a mildly convinced grunt.
“All I’m saying is that another shop means more competition for the others.”
“But that’ll drive down the competition’s prices.”
Now she throws him a murderous glare that renders him silent for the rest of their chatter.
“Not everything is about prices. It’s about principles. It gets worse after knowing who the buyer is.”
“And who is it?” another woman with a large feathered hat asks.
“The Malfoys’ young heir.”
An odd twinge lodges in the pit of Harry’s stomach at the mention of the Malfoys. He wishes he’d heard wrong, but the name keeps coming out of the witch’s mouth as she spits all her disdain for the family. He can’t blame her much for that. But why would Draco Malfoy open a potion shop in the middle of Diagon Alley? Could she be wrong?
At this point Harry has stopped pretending he’s not eavesdropping altogether. Approaching the window, he peers out to get a glimpse of that new potion shop. A few artisans bustle about outside, busy replacing the sign with a new name in silver, elegant letters: The Silver Apothecary. Others levitate boxes and large pieces of furniture, and Harry wonders how he could have passed the street without noticing the fuss. He leans further to his right in an attempt to see inside the wide open door, but there’s no sign of Malfoy.
“Money does everything, doesn’t it?” the same sulky witch grumbles. “A lavish fortune and you can afford to open a shop even after committing war crimes.”
“I know about Lucius Malfoy’s position in the war, but the son? He was just a child, wasn’t he?”
“Just a child? Are you being serious, Margareth?”
Given how loudly she’s talking, ‘gossip’ no longer seems an appropriate choice of word. Now the entire shop is treated to the conversation.
“The boy was a Death Eater! He had the Mark.”
“Mr Potter, would you perhaps like to send your letters?”
Harry jumps at the mention of his name. Mrs Berrycloth stands behind an empty counter, her eyebrows raised above her spectacles and a warm smile she never forgets to flash at him. The group of gossipers all turn their heads in unison towards him, as if he’d been invisible until now.
“Oh, Harry Potter…” the man whispers, and Harry ignores him, even though it’d give him another opportunity to look at his fascinating moustache.
They all watch as Harry hurries over, clutching his Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes bag against his chest and hunching his shoulders in a vain attempt to make himself look smaller. As he drops the bag onto the counter for her to take it, he tries to get another look at the potion shop, but from here all he can make out is a narrow section of wall where the drainpipe climbs like wild ivy.
“Did I tell you about Onyx’s prank last Friday?”
“No, what happened?” he asks absentmindedly, his eyes back to the street, straining for another glimpse of the new apothecary.
She did, in fact, already tell him about Onyx’s prank last Friday.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
He would have to wait until the evening before he finally spotted Malfoy. As usual, the group meet at the pub — Ron, Hermione, Neville and Seamus — and settle on the first floor, at the same table, same seats, same day and time.
Dean couldn’t make it this time, and Luna wouldn’t be back in London until tomorrow. She doesn’t really like coming anyway, especially without Ginny. She never said so directly, but they all got the hint when she once described their nights out as “testosterone gatherings,” making Ginny laugh and Hermione bristle in the process.
“And what am I? A flower pot?” Hermione had protested indignantly.
Poor Hermione, now the only girl left in the group since Ginny went to the United States. No doubt she shares Luna’s opinion now.
Sitting directly opposite Harry, between Ron and Neville, she watches him accept one of the pints Seamus is handing round the table, while she sips her pumpkin juice. He does his best not to meet her gaze, which he suspects must be tinged with exasperation.
“You know, Mum indulged in a few butterbeers when she was pregnant with me,” Ron told her in her first month. “And I ended up all right, didn’t I?”
Hermione had looked at him with a commiserating smile before saying, hand on his shoulder, “I’ll stick to an alcohol-free pregnancy, sweetheart.”
Whether out of a desire not to feel alone or out of genuine concern for him, Hermione then began advising Harry not to mix alcohol and potions.
Bullshit.
She was probably confusing it with medicine, a rule she must have heard from her parents when she was a child, perhaps a sick, alcoholic uncle who unwittingly set a bad example. But potions have nothing to do with it. He’s never seen a wizard give up alcohol for any reason whatsoever.
“A treatment is a treatment. I’m just saying that you should be careful.”
“Or you could leave me alone for once, let me enjoy at least one thing.”
“It’s not like we’re depriving you of everything. Give it a rest.”
He didn’t respond to that. It wasn’t worth it. He could have given countless examples of times when they treated him like a child.
“You know what, do whatever you want,” she ended up sighing, with an eye-roll so typical of her.
And that’s what he does. He nonetheless drinks very little, making do with just one drink a week, as if part of him couldn’t help but heed Hermione’s words.
You never know… she’s often right, after all.
They were talking about Seamus’s mildly interesting dating life, something about a girl he’d met in Ireland, when a group of familiar faces emerged from the stairs. A genuine “Bloody hell” slips straight out of Ron’s mouth, and a long silence instantly falls over the room as Pansy Parkinson, Blaise Zabini, Gregory Goyle, and Draco Malfoy settle at a table in the corner, drinks in hand. Even Seamus, who normally can’t stand being interrupted, twists around in his chair, rather indiscreetly, to watch the scene.
“Is that Malfoy over there?” Hermione asks. “Haven’t seen him in ages.”
It is undoubtedly Malfoy, with his grim gaze and platinum hair, though a little less combed than usual. He’s dressed head to toe in black, which makes his pale skin stand out all the more. Of course, he’s chosen to sit right in Harry’s line of sight, facing him, though he hasn’t spared him so much as a glance since walking into the room.
Hermione diverts her gaze to Harry and asks, “Wasn’t he abroad?” as if he ought to know everything about Malfoy’s whereabouts. No idea where this comes from. But it’s Neville who answers.
“The Malfoys came back two weeks ago,” he says. “From France.”
All eyes turn to him, urging him to elaborate with raised eyebrows.
“I saw Malfoy a few days ago; he came to the greenhouse. He’s apparently opening a potion shop and asked me to supply for him.”
So the witch at the post office was right.
“He’s opening a shop?” Ron snaps Harry out of his thoughts.
“Right across from the post office — I saw it this morning,” Harry says, and Ron throws him a baffled look.
“And you didn’t care to tell us?”
Harry shrugs. He could have explained himself, but Ron’s attention is already back on criticising Malfoy’s looks.
“He looks terrible. Rat-faced, and his hair’s stuck in clumps with slug wax. Makes me want to grab him by the neck and pull his hair out.”
“Do it then,” Seamus says with a smirk.
“No, he won’t,” Hermione interrupts. “Because Ron is a mature adult now, and he’s over that childish bickering. Right, Ron?”
“Right…” Ron mumbles.
Seamus mouths “coward”, which makes Neville give a faint chuckle. That’s enough for Ron to turn to him and say, “Don’t tell me you accepted his offer, Nev.”
“Well… I sort of did, actually.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“Ron.” Hermione gives his arm a gentle squeeze.
His gasp was so loud Harry was sure the Slytherin group must have heard it. He checks. They’re all in deep conversation, unbothered. Malfoy is sipping his Firewhisky with mild interest in whatever his friends are saying.
“He started by apologising for everything. To me and Luna.”
Harry turns back to Neville, who tries to justify himself with the desperation of someone accused of murder.
“Apologies, my arse. He just needed your help,” Ron says, to which Neville insists,
“He sounded genuine. And his family has already paid their debts.”
“Debts? With their wealth it was like paying with a grain of salt.”
Fair point. Following their trial, the Malfoys were fined an amount so insignificant compared to their immense fortune that it made the front pages of the newspapers.
“His mother is dying,” Neville finally says.
They lapse into silence. Even Ron stops his string of counter-arguments. At least for a moment.
“Narcissa Malfoy?” Seamus finally breaks the silence, as if Draco could possibly have another mother no one knows about.
“Like… she’s ill?” Ron asks after Neville’s nod.
“Yes.”
The news comes as a shock to Harry, a shock he cannot fully comprehend. He is openly staring at Malfoy now, observing his every expression, searching his eyes, his mouth, his gestures for some evidence of a son grieving his mother.
For the rest of the evening, Harry only half-listens to Ron resuming his argument that nothing — not even losing his mother — can justify Neville agreeing to supply Draco Malfoy with plants for his shop. Harry feels bad for Neville; for his misunderstood kindness, for standing by values that never quite match those of the people around him.
“Ron, no one deserves to lose their mother, not even him.”
Although Ron doesn’t hold back, speaking loudly — too loudly, in fact — Harry hasn’t caught what he said to prompt Hermione into reminding him of such a fundamental, basic truth.
“I’m not saying that, but let’s not all pretend we suddenly care for him,” Ron says then. “Harry, back me up?”
“What?”
“You haven’t said a word since that arse showed up, mate.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
And that suited him perfectly. What could he say? That he doesn’t want to back Ron up? That he can’t afford to care, let alone waste his energy on hating? After the war, he promised himself he would move on. Move on from his past, from his traumas, his regrets, and from the people who never brought him any good. The Malfoys, needless to say, were among them. It’s been more than a year since he last saw Draco, a year since he even thought of him. It’s done him good, he tells himself. But now Malfoy is back, with a new shop only a minute away from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and the shocking news that his mother is dying.
“You’re Malfoy’s number one hater; you can’t tell me you don’t have any opinions,” Ron insists.
“I’m—”
Confused. That’s the word.
And it takes only a single second for Harry to find himself unable to look away from Malfoy, a single second in which all his efforts unravel. Why? What is it about Malfoy that fascinates him so deeply, that makes it such a considerable effort to ignore him?
“I should head off, I’ve got a lot of work tomorrow morning, a new delivery from Argentina and…”
Neville doesn’t bother finishing his sentence, probably judging it unimportant now that he’s changed the subject. Harry couldn’t be more grateful to him, unlike the rest of the group.
“Already? But it’s so early!”
Ignoring Seamus’s complaint, Neville collects his cloak from the back of his chair and sends an awkward smile around the table.
“I’ll head off as well,” Harry says as soon as their gazes meet. “I’m tired.”
He’s not, really. But now that the entire night has shifted into debating whether or not Malfoy deserves to lose his mother, he’d rather lie awake in bed alone for hours than join in that argument.
Of course Ron has a point. Do Malfoy’s family problems make him worthy of sympathy from his enemies? Is that enough for Neville to agree to work with him? Does it erase all the evil he’s done? But then again, is it Ron’s place to tell Neville how to run his business? Is there a point at which forgiveness becomes impossible? And if so, is Draco Malfoy one of those whose soul is too soiled for repentance?
In any case, it isn’t something Harry wants to face tonight. He says goodbye to his friends—who try in vain to keep him a little longer — before following Neville towards the stairs. On the way, Pansy lets out a giggle that prompts Harry to cast an accidental glance at their table. Though he withdraws quickly, he still catches Malfoy’s eyes. They look tired, weighed down by a kind of sombreness that would twist any ordinary person’s heart. Harry doesn’t know what it is that suddenly makes him want to change course and sit with him, what makes him want to talk to him after years of wishing he didn’t even exist. Is it pity? Malfoy has never shown pity to anyone. But does that mean he shouldn’t be given any?
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
That night Harry doesn’t sleep. He’s already tossed and turned in bed for two hours before he hears the front door open to let George and Angelina in. They’re drunk. Harry can tell by the way their whispers — almost louder than their normal voices — are punctuated by childish giggles. For a while he tries to ignore them and sleep, though he knows already it’s doomed to failure. Another night of insomnia. One of many.
In his mind, the evening’s events replay: Malfoy’s grim face, Neville’s words, the news of Narcissa Malfoy’s fate. How cruel it is. As the minutes drag by, he finds himself imagining Narcissa Malfoy’s heart decaying, her skin turning grey and rotten until it dissolves and leaves nothing but bone. His thoughts wander towards her family, towards Draco, watching his mother fade away with no way to save her. His pain, his desperation, his helplessness.
A door slams and snaps Harry back to reality, only for that now familiar nauseous wave to crash over him a minute later — the twinge in his chest, the surge of overwhelming emotions that don’t even feel like his own.
Another episode. He can’t let it happen. Not that there’s much he can do to control them, apart from forcing himself to stay in the present. Hold his feet to the ground. He needs water. He needs to get up.
At first glance, the living room seems empty, sunk in darkness and an oddly suspicious silence. It’s been a year now since Harry moved in with George — or rather, since he borrowed Fred’s room — and he still can’t shake the feeling that the place isn’t truly his. Most evenings in the flat are spent making himself as invisible as possible, avoiding George whenever he can. He goes to bed early, then stays shut away in his room until morning, giving himself no more than five minutes to get ready for work.
George inadvertently makes things easier by spending most of his time at the shop, and most of his free time either drinking or tangled up with Angelina. But then there are times when George’s quite specific loneliness cannot be covered with his girlfriend or booze anymore, and so he puts all his remaining energy in replacing Fred, and so he tries, he tries as hard as he can to see some of Fred in Harry, until his own self conviction stops working and he comes to the painful realisation that Harry could never be Fred, never be enough, and he spends the following days ignoring Harry until he forgets and tries again.
In the dimness, the moon picks out Angelina’s form. Crouched on the sofa, her shoulder bare beneath George’s hand, she leans forward with a rocking motion, her lips pressed against his.
Despite the obvious pleasure in this bout of fondling, Angelina quickly becomes aware of Harry’s presence. With a sharp movement she pulls away from George’s embrace and straightens up, tugging the fallen strap of her top back onto her shoulder.
“Blimey, Harry!” she exclaims.
George, whose reflexes are clearly dulled by the amount of booze in his system, takes several seconds longer to notice Harry.
“Hey, Harry,” he says at last, his voice low and oddly slurred, though, unfortunately, not unfamiliar. “Didn’t know you were here.”
“Surprise. I live here,” Harry replies, forcing himself not to sound too sarcastic.
Angelina lets out an awkward chuckle.
“How’s it going?” George asks.
Really? Small talk? In the middle of the night, with Angelina still straddling him, half-dressed, while Harry struggles to fight off an impending episode and the urge to be sick at the sight of someone he considers a brother and a school friend having sex in the living room?
“Don’t mind me, I was just getting water,” he mumbles.
As he turns his back to the sofa and pours himself a glass, he overhears Angelina trying to coax George to his feet.
“Come on, let’s go to your room,” she keeps repeating, but by the time Harry heads back to his own, the couple still hasn’t left the sofa.
At least it stopped the episode, only to be replaced by a crushing wave of loneliness. He misses Ginny. Or perhaps just the idea of her: her hugs, her kisses, her scent, the love she used to give him. He pictures himself at George’s place, sitting on the couch with Ginny’s weight against him, her lips pressed to his, sucking the pain out of him.
His night ends with yet another wank.
Chapter Text
There are very few activities that fill Harry’s time after work. One of them is sitting on the upper floor of the Leaky Cauldron, tucked away in the most secluded corner by the window, writing letters. Another is visiting Molly at the Burrow. She is always ecstatic to have him, which gives him a twinge of guilt, knowing his real intention lies in spending time with Ginny when she’s around. The last option — and the one he has chosen today — is to meet Neville and Luna at their greenhouse, doing little more than chatting and admiring each of their newly acquired plants.
On reflection, the greenhouse might be his favourite place to be. He enjoys the quiet, the peace, the company of his friends. In that tranquillity, he takes comfort in watching them work together: the way Neville’s cheeks redden every time Luna compliments him, how obvious his feelings are for her, and how strangely at ease he seems with the fact that hers are not mutual. Life feels simple there. Simple, and beautiful in its smallest details.
Luna returned this morning after two weeks in South America, working with herbologists who specialise in plants that grow only in that region — names Harry can’t, for the life of him, remember. Sending her to handle business deals instead of Neville wasn’t something anyone would have bet on at first, yet she silenced them all by proving herself far more capable than expected, bringing back seeds from all over the world, each rarer than the last. Since they started, their greenhouse has steadily climbed the ranks to become one of the most trusted and sought-after suppliers by the biggest markets: Diagon Alley, St Mungo’s, and Hogwarts.
When he sees her, Harry surprises himself by giving her a hug — an unusually intimate greeting for the two of them — and realises it’s too late to pull back. Without a word, she gives him an awkward pat on the back before slipping from his arms and returning to her pots.
For a while, Harry settles on a lone stool beside Neville and watches him wrestle with a Fanged Geranium. Only the sounds of tools, leaves, soil, and ceramic scraping against the wooden staging tables fill the air. A plant to Harry’s left gives off a strange smell, and for several minutes he tries to place it. Dog fur. It smells like wet fur — like a muddy dog returning home after playing outside in the autumn rain.
“You look exhausted, Harry.”
He jumps at Luna’s voice but tries to hide his embarrassment by readjusting his jumper on his shoulder.
“Do I?” he asks with a brief chuckle.
Luna doesn’t reply; her silence makes it clear his exhaustion must be written all over his face.
“I had quite a short night,” he says.
“Your insomnias?” Neville asks.
“Sort of. And George and Angelina’s not-so-quiet display of intimate activities…”
“I’ve always found it rather odd that George is dating Angelina Johnson,” Luna says, cutting across him. “She was Fred’s girlfriend, if I remember correctly, wasn’t she?”
Harry shrugs the comment off. If only that were the only odd thing George did. But who is he to judge anyone’s coping mechanisms? None of them can imagine what it feels like to lose a twin. Who knows what strange things he would do in George’s place? Grief makes people do strange things…
“Neville, can I ask you something?” he hears himself say.
Neville lifts his head at once, wearing that familiar, slightly startled expression he always gets, as though he still can’t quite believe people genuinely want to speak to him.
“Of course. Anything.”
“It’s about Malfoy.”
Neville’s face tightens, his expression folding into a wary frown.
“Oh. Look, I just see him as any other customer, I—”
“No, I don’t care about that, really,” Harry cuts in. “I just… you said Narcissa Malfoy was ill?”
“Oh. Right. Yeah.”
“What does she have?”
Neville hesitates.
“She’s got a fairly severe form of Withering Blight.”
Harry frowns, prompting Neville to go on.
“It’s an old and rare illness, to be honest. Some people say it’s more of a curse than something you catch, but I suppose it can be either. It doesn’t kill you straight away. It just… eats away at you, bit by bit.”
“Eats away at you…?”
“Your magic basically drains out of your body. You’re exhausted all the time, you lose your appetite, your skin turns grey, like you’re rotting away. And it keeps spreading, bit by bit, like blight in a crop. Doesn’t matter what potions they try, nothing takes. In the end… the body just gives up. It’s pretty nasty.”
Nasty is quite an understatement.
“So there’s no cure?”
“Well, the optimists will always tell you there’s always a cure somewhere, but I have a hard time believing it.”
“How long?”
Neville shrugs. “I don’t know, it depends. Could be a few years, could be a few weeks.”
A silence settles over the greenhouse, broken only by the soft squeaking of various plants — either thirsty or simply grumpy.
“Was it Malfoy who told you about his mother?” Harry asks.
“No. He didn’t mention her at all.”
“So how do you know all that?”
Neville lets out a small laugh.
“Oh, you know. I supply St Mungo’s — rumours spread, news travels fast…” He pauses. “Now that I think about it, that was probably confidential…”
He looks up at Harry, worry creeping into his voice.
“I should tell the others to keep it private, shouldn’t I?”
“Oh, Neville.” Harry can’t help but laugh “Yeah, you probably should.”
Neville joins in, chuckling as he scratches the back of his head.
“I know Malfoy isn’t a good person, and I understand Ron’s point, but…”
“You don’t have to justify yourself,” Harry says, before heaving a quiet sigh. “I suppose I feel bad for him too, in a way.”
Neville gives a few small nods. As he turns back to his pots — clearly ready to end the conversation — Harry hurries to ask,
“So he came to you a few weeks ago?”
An uneasy look crosses Neville’s face.
“Oh. Um… yeah. Around two weeks ago.”
“And he apologised?”
“He did. I think he was a bit surprised to see Luna, but I suppose he felt he had to apologise to her as well.”
“And how does that sit with you — his apology?”
“It’s… fine, I guess. I thought he owed one to Luna most of all, you know… with what happened at the Manor and everything.”
They both glance at Luna, who takes a good ten seconds to realise the conversation has drifted back to her.
“I like to believe that the act of apologising is humbling enough on its own. It doesn’t cost me much to grant him forgiveness in return,” she says at last, speaking to the trowel in her hand.
“Well, we’re not going to become best mates, obviously,” Neville adds. “But I think I can manage doing business with him. He’s changed, you know.”
Harry looks at him. “Has he?”
“Yes. Quite a lot, actually.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, he’s just… different.”
“He’s losing his mother,” Luna says.
She approaches and sets the pot down on the workbench. “It’s as simple as that.” Then she gives them a smile that feels oddly out of place, considering what follows. “All three of us are well placed to know what that feels like, aren’t we?”
A question rises in Harry’s mind: do Neville and he really know what it feels like? Is losing a mother the same as never having one? The frown on Neville’s face suggests he shares the doubt. Still, neither of them says anything. They simply nod, mechanically.
“Do you think he opened a potion shop to find a cure for her?” Harry asks then.
At this point, he knows he sounds oddly insistent about Malfoy, but he finds he doesn’t care.
“I don’t know,” Neville says. “I told you, Malfoy didn’t say a word about his mother.”
“You think there could be something else?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… just something off. I mean… it’s Malfoy.”
At that, Luna lets out a peculiar sound, something between a chuckle and a doubtful hum, yet she doesn’t speak. Neville looks at her for a moment, as though waiting for a delayed comment, but when it becomes clear she has no intention of adding anything, he turns back to Harry.
“No idea, mate. I don’t think there’s anything dodgy about a potion shop. All I know is he’s selling cheaper than the others. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.”
So he isn’t doing it for the money. Neville must be right – Malfoy’s new lack of greed is the most obvious sign that something has changed in him.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘⋅
It only takes Harry a week to abandon his resolution to erase the Malfoys from his life and pay a visit to the new potion shop. Why? That’s a perfectly valid question, one he has asked himself repeatedly in the days leading up to this decision. A very stupid decision, Hermione or Ron would most likely say if they ever found out about it. But of course Harry has refrained from telling them, just as he always does whenever he does something even he himself can admit makes absolutely no sense.
He goes on a Tuesday, right after stopping by the post office to send off three new business contracts with the South-East Asian region — deals George is so hopeful about that he miraculously stopped drinking for the four days of negotiations.
It’s already half past twelve, lunchtime, as his stomach doesn’t hesitate to remind him with loud, painful grumbles. Harry loiters in the alley, head tucked between his raised shoulders against the wind, and hesitates for a full five minutes outside the shop door. His gaze keeps drifting to the post office window across the street, where he can see Onyx pretending to doze off whenever a customer gets too close to her perch. He only snaps back to reality when an old witch suddenly grabs his arm with long, knobbly fingers.
“It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Potter — an honour…”
With obvious, almost painful awkwardness, Harry slips out of her grip and gives her a sheepish smile. She unfortunately interprets as an invitation.
“My granddaughter is just a year below you, she was in Hufflepuff at Hogwarts, perhaps you know her, La—”
“I have to go,” he blurts, and before she can say another word, he pushes through the door into the potion shop.
He has never considered himself outgoing or comfortable with fame and attention, but now he would admit that those flaws have only deepened with time, until his one obsession has become the wish to be the most boring, forgettable person alive.
His abrupt entrance sets off a bell so faint it hardly seems worth having; no one comes to greet him, and for several seconds Harry has nothing to do but look around. The shop is far emptier than Slug & Jiggers, and Harry can’t tell whether that is a deliberate minimalist choice or simply a lack of stock. In front of him, a long counter blocks access to a wooden staircase that leads up to a mezzanine overlooking the rest of the shop. As Harry’s gaze follows the intricate carvings in the balustrade, a figure appears at the back of the balcony.
It is strangely startling to see Draco Malfoy there — as if, until now, Harry hadn’t managed to fully connect the idea of Malfoy’s shop with Malfoy himself. One hand resting on the rail, Malfoy stares down at him, eyebrows lifting slightly as he recognises the intruder. He says nothing. Harry doesn’t either. They stand there, frozen, locked in a silent staring contest, Malfoy’s lips pressed into a hard line, Harry’s slightly parted.
At last, Malfoy moves towards the stairs. As they draw closer, eyes still locked in that tense silence before words have a chance to break it, Harry finds himself imagining how things might have been if they had never met before — if they didn’t hate each other. Just two young men, the same age, each trying to make something of his life.
And then—
“What do you want, Potter?”
The brief illusion of possibility dissolves.
Surprise hardens into suspicion on Malfoy’s face. Deep frown lines crease his forehead, and his pale eyebrows drop over his eyes. What is Harry doing here? Another good question. Harry should have expected Malfoy to ask it.
“I—so you opened a potion shop?”
Malfoy glances pointedly around the room
“Obviously.”
“Right.”
The awkwardness is excruciating. It’s not as though Harry can simply say he came out of curiosity, that he heard Malfoy’s mother was dying, and something in him, whether a misplaced fascination with the Malfoys or a deep, inexplicable urge he hasn’t yet understood, pushed him to come here with no plan and no sensible reason.
“Um… I heard your shop sells things cheaper,” he says at last, which earns a short, dry laugh from Malfoy’s thinned lips.
“Why? Having money troubles?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then why do you care?”
Fair question. Harry ignores it and pretends to study the shelves. Most are empty, but the few that aren’t display perfectly ordered and labelled flasks, arranged by type, size, and colour.
Neat freak.
“Are you trying to stick your nose in my business again?” Malfoy asks, cutting through his thoughts.
Harry snaps his attention back to him.
“No.”
He isn’t. Well… maybe. Under Malfoy’s obvious suspicion, Harry looks around the shop again with forced interest before asking, “Would you happen to sell Heartsease Draught?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Do you sell it?”
“For you?”
“Yes.”
Malfoy raises an eyebrow.
“The average age for that potion is over ninety.”
“Well, I’m always the exception, aren’t I?”
Malfoy dismisses the joke with a judgemental pout, though he seems to consider the request.
“How much do you need?” he asks at last.
“One per week.”
“One per week? What is wrong with you?”
“You’re being quite unprofessional,” Harry notes, which earns him one of Malfoy’s signature murderous glares. Only a thin thread of patience seems to keep him from reverting to his old self. After a long, controlled breath, he swallows whatever insult was about to follow.
“You’re right. I don’t care,” he says sharply. “However, this particular potion takes a long time to brew and requires proper expertise, so I don’t sell it much cheaper.”
Harry nods. It takes him a moment to realise he’s staring – openly studying Malfoy, searching behind his eyes for some hint, some proof that something is wrong with him, something that justifies Ron’s concern. But the more he looks, the less he finds – nothing but exhaustion, framed by deep dark circles.
“Right,” he says, more to himself than to Malfoy.
“Right,” Malfoy echoes.
Maybe Harry should leave now. There isn’t much else he can do here, nothing else they can talk about. He has already made the stupid decision to ask about potions – out of panic – apparently the only excuse he could come up with for being here. So yes, he should leave. Now. Turn around, walk to the door, and leave.
“Potter?”
“Mmh?”
His vision blurs. The lines of Malfoy’s face — his suspicious frown that hasn’t shifted once — begin to fade. Harry blinks, a long, deliberate blink that does nothing to fix it. A familiar twinge grips his heart.
No. Not now. He can’t have an episode here — not in this shop, not in front of Malfoy. Shit.
“Um…” is all he manages.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The twinge spreads like poison, crawling through his veins until his throat tightens. It feels like drowning, water forcing its way into his chest, choking him, burning his lungs raw. And that sadness — God, that sadness — an ache so deep it feels like the grief of a hundred souls. It isn’t his. He knows it isn’t his. And then comes the voice, distant yet insistent, calling his name again and again—
“HARRY!”
The next thing he knows, he’s on the floor, cold stone against his outstretched limbs. A lukewarm liquid slides from his nose – blood. A nosebleed. Again. Also… did Malfoy just call him by his first name? And why does he sound — worried? What—
“I swear, Potter, if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you ought to tell me, because I am not dealing with that.”
Oh. He does care.
“Cheers,” Harry mutters, staring up at the crooked ceiling beams overhead.
“I’m serious.”
“No doubt.”
Harry finally rolls his head towards Malfoy, or at least towards the neatly polished leather shoes planted close to his face. Above the shoes: Malfoy’s part critical, part concerned gaze. Without thinking, Harry lifts his arm with the surprising expectation that Malfoy will help him up. And, even more surprisingly, Malfoy does. For a few additional seconds the world keeps spinning around him, the only sense anchoring him being Malfoy’s hand around his forearm, a tight, firm, comforting grip. A second later, Malfoy seems to have noticed his act of kindness as he releases Harry’s arm with unnecessary speed, as if it had come on fire and burned his palm. Harry nearly loses balance again without the support, but avoids another humiliation in extremis with a deep breath. On his feet and finally steady, he watches Malfoy rubbing his hand against his trousers almost theatrically, surely to wipe the intimacy of his gesture away.
“You really can’t help but make a show of yourself, can you?” Malfoy says, then asks with what sounds like disgust, “Are you ill?”
Harry takes his time to answer, not only because the question seems inappropriate coming from someone whose own mother is ill, but also because he isn’t sure his own condition can even be called one.
“No,” he replies at last, wiping the blood from his nose with his sleeve. Malfoy gives him another look of disgust, as if Harry had just licked his fingers after dipping them in muck.
“Then what just happened?”
“I thought you didn’t care?”
“You just fainted in my apothecary.”
Harry sighs.
“What happened?” Malfoy repeats.
“I don’t know, stress? I suppose? Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not contagious.”
“What are you stressed about? Being late for lunch at the Weasleys’?”
This time, Harry’s the one flashing a judgemental glare, which causes nothing but a rather unexpected smile to form on Malfoy’s lips.
“What?” Harry asks.
“I’m being a jerk, aren’t I?”
“Well, nothing out of the ordinary.”
The smile lingers, a soft and somehow innocent smile without that usual tinge of mockery. It looks so unfamiliar on Malfoy that it doesn’t quite fit the rest of his face, it could almost be pulled off with one hand like a post-it on a wall. Finally, it vanishes, and Malfoy says with a detached tone,
“Are you buying some Heartsease Draught or not?”
Right, the potions…
“Oh, um, yeah, sure.”
“I can have some ready in two weeks. Does that work for you?”
What is he doing? Is he actually buying potions from Malfoy’s shop? Is he actually giving money and attention to him?
“Yeah, perfect, I’ve still got enough to last until then.”
“Anything else?”
“No, that’s all.”
“All right.” Malfoy pauses for a second, prompting a silence that either suggests Harry to get the hell out of his shop right now, or simply waiting to find something polite to say to a customer who’s just placed an order. At last, he repeats, “All right,” before adding with a nod towards the floor where Harry fainted a minute ago.
“Maybe try to get a hold of your stress next time, my parquet’s expensive.”
“Wow, you really lasted twenty seconds in your awareness of being a jerk.”
Malfoy sucks his teeth, his nostril flaring slightly.
“Well, you make it extremely difficult,” he mutters.
Harry chuckles. Shit. A laugh, even a rictus, runs the risk of boosting Malfoy’s already enormous ego to the point of making him believe he is the funniest and most influential person in the world.
“I’m going now,” Harry hastens to say.
“Two weeks.”
“Yeah, two weeks.”
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
This visit to the apothecary brings him to several conclusions, some more expected than others – such as the realisation that he and Malfoy have, for the first time in their lives, exchanged words without fighting, cursing each other, or very nearly trying to kill one another. He could almost say their encounter went well, aside from Malfoy’s usual hostility – an antipathy so constant that its absence would make him seem almost unnerving, if not downright dull. Beyond his interaction with Malfoy, Harry cannot stop, in the days that follow, from replaying his episode in his mind. Not only did it strike at the worst possible moment in front of the worst possible person, but it was also unusually violent. Never, since he began taking his potions, has he felt such grief, such pain in his chest that he collapsed. And that voice, that pleading voice that keeps echoing in his ears, which, for a brief moment, blended with Malfoy’s.
“He called me by my name.”
Ah. That might be the most surprising part of all — the fact that Malfoy, Draco Malfoy, called him by his first name to wake him. Of course, Harry hasn’t brought it up with him, not even when he went back to pick up his potions two weeks later. Maybe it isn’t important. Maybe Malfoy’s tongue slipped in a moment of panic. Or maybe Harry simply imagined it.
The Heartsease potion Malfoy sold him is actually cheaper than the ones at Slug & Jiggers. Two Galleons less. Harry can’t help pointing this out, which immediately earns him a threat to raise the price by two Galleons above Slug & Jiggers. Harry has never met such a hopeless salesman. And yet, to his surprise, he places another order. He doesn’t even think about it — it just happens — and Malfoy doesn’t object.
That same evening, back at the flat, he convinces himself that he is only doing this to keep an eye on Malfoy, to maintain some illusion of control over this strange situation. In the end, his own reasoning persuades him just enough to ignore the flicker of empathy and renewed interest quietly taking root inside him. He refrains from mentioning any of it to Hermione and Ron, out of shame, perhaps, or simply because he knows them too well and can already predict exactly how they would react.
How can you know he won’t poison you? Hermione would demand straight away, and, honestly, she wouldn’t be wrong. Perhaps he should worry about that too.
Instead, he speaks to Neville and Luna, who promise not to say a word — despite being, objectively, the two least reliable people when it comes to keeping secrets.
“He’s a good potion-maker,” Neville tells him, sniffing the Heartsease Draught. “Nothing wrong with this. You can drink it.”
“You honestly thought he would try to kill you?” Luna asks, tilting her head. “You? Harry Potter?”
“Precisely because I’m Harry Potter, yeah…”
She gives him a look she rarely uses — one reserved for moments when one of her friends says something profoundly stupid. It isn’t as sharp as Hermione’s judgemental stare, but it still carries enough weight to make him feel ashamed. She even gives him a few seconds to reflect on his own foolishness before speaking again.
“I reckon Draco Malfoy has better things to do than rot in Azkaban for murdering the most famous wizard in Britain.”
She’s right. What was he even thinking?
“You know,” she adds mildly, “if you don’t trust Draco Malfoy, you probably shouldn’t buy from his shop.”
Her accuracy is starting to annoy him.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
His second interaction with Malfoy — outside of exchanging money for potions at the shop — takes place a month later, in the early evening on the tenth of October. Harry has been seated at his usual corner table in the Leaky Cauldron for an hour, the surface cluttered by an enormous teapot that has already been refilled three times. In retrospect, it is a miracle he hasn’t yet needed to use the loo, though he assumes fate will catch up with him the moment he finally tries to fall asleep tonight. Next to the pot sits a cup of pinkish steaming tea. Beside that, several sheets of parchment and a quill.
It has been an especially draining Thursday at the shop, one that put George into a particularly foul mood and made the hours feel like days. They received a complaint from a customer claiming that her sister had married a dangerous man while under the influence of a love potion.
“We’re not the only ones selling love potions,” George fumed for the fifth time, pacing across the basement under the helpless gazes of Angelina and Harry
“They’re everywhere; you can buy one on every bloody corner!”
“That doesn’t make it a good product,” Angelina repeated, each time with less patience than before.
“It’s one of our best sellers!”
“What I’m saying,” she countered, “is that this little ‘incident’ should be a wake-up call for us. Love potions are dangerous, George.”
Lacking her support, George turned immediately to Harry.
“Harry? Back me up here?”
Again? Why does everyone keep needing him to back them up? He hesitated, unsure where he stood on the matter. He had, shamefully, never really thought much about the possible dangers of love potions before. But something told him Angelina was right.
“Well, rumour has it Voldemort was conceived because of a love potion,” he said with a shrug.
George stared at him, utterly stunned
“Really, Harry?”
“What?”
“Wait, is that true? How do you know that?” Angelina asked.
“Dumbledore told—”
“Can we not?” George cut them off.
One thing Harry has learned from living and working with George is that George hates being wrong. Another is that he hates it even more when no one agrees with him. Perhaps it comes from growing up with someone who was always on his side, no matter what. Perhaps he and Fred had got used to backing each other blindly in every bit of nonsense. And no matter how hard they try, neither Angelina nor Harry can offer that same blind loyalty.
It took three exhausting hours of debate to convince George to withdraw the love potions from sale, and another hour to help him write a letter of apology, which Harry dropped off at the post office before heading straight to the Leaky Cauldron. It was one of those evenings when he needed to be alone — to write, to breathe — and he enjoyed a full, peaceful hour to himself before Malfoy appeared, drifting into view with a glass of Firewhisky in one hand and the other buried in his trouser pocket. For a moment, Malfoy surveyed the room, clearly searching for a place to sit, before choosing the table by the window, directly opposite Harry.
Five minutes. That’s all it takes. Five minutes of feigned disinterest, of Malfoy pretending to care about his Firewhisky and Harry pretending to care about his letter, before Malfoy, for whatever reason, stands and walks over to his table. He hovers there with his glass in hand.
“Not with your friends, Potter?” he asks when Harry finally looks up at him.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“There’s a French saying—‘Better to be alone than in bad company.’”
“We have that one too.”
So that’s his excuse to remind everyone he lived in France. Typical.
Malfoy shrugs, nods at the empty chair, and sits without waiting for an invitation. He sets his drink down, fingers hooked lazily through the handle as they tap a steady rhythm against the glass.
“So you consider your friends bad company?” Harry asks, watching Malfoy’s fingers.
“It depends. They’re good at making me feel intelligent. I made the mistake of surrounding myself with idiots back at school. I suppose I enjoyed feeling superior.”
“Ouch.”
As humble as ever.
“I’ve decided to surround myself with inspiring people now. But I suppose I could make an exception for you.”
Good thing Harry isn’t drinking his tea, because he would have choked on it. Instead, he lets out a laugh of disbelief.
“Who said I wanted to hang out with you?”
“Oh, I don’t know — maybe the fact that you switched potion suppliers, for a start?”
“You’re cheaper.”
“That again? Since when has money ever been a problem for you?”
“Every Galleon counts.”
“Sure.”
Harry exhales through his nose, heat creeping across his cheeks.
“What are you doing here, anyway? Not working?” he asks.
“Closed early.”
“Business not doing well?”
“It is, thank you. I just wanted a break.”
A long silence settles between them. Malfoy drinks his Firewhisky in slow, deliberate sips while Harry fiddles with the feather of his quill, torn between returning to his writing, forcing another topic of conversation — neither of which appeals to him with Malfoy sitting across from him — or simply packing up and leaving.
“What are you writing?” Malfoy asks suddenly.
Harry’s gaze flickers between the parchment and Malfoy.
“A letter,” he says, a touch of defiance in his tone.
“To who?”
“My parents.”
He has no idea what possesses him to answer honestly.
“Your parents?” Malfoy repeats. “The dead ones?”
“Yup. The dead ones.”
“Interesting. Do you do that often — write to dead people?”
“I suppose so. Ever since I learned to write,” Harry says. Why did I say that? Why can’t I ever just lie?
Malfoy studies him for a moment, elbows resting on the table, one hand cupping his chin. “And why do you do it?” he asks at last. “Writing to your dead parents, I mean.”
“It helps.”
“Helps with what?”
“Coping.”
Malfoy says nothing to that. Whatever hint of amusement had been lingering on his face disappears, and he gives a few distracted nods, eyes distant. In that moment, Harry feels the urge to say something about Narcissa, anything. I’m sorry about your mother. Is she all right? How are you handling it? But the words stay trapped somewhere between his chest and his throat. Instead, he just looks at Malfoy, and whatever expression he’s wearing, Malfoy reads it wrong.
“What are you staring at? Seen the ghost of your parents or something?”
Clearly, Malfoy is determined to make compassion difficult.
Chapter Text
The first thing that makes Harry realise he’s back in the World Beyond is the complete absence of pain.
It’s a sensation he could never put into words; so strange, so unimaginable to the living. The absence of pain is the absence of self. Nothing stings, itches, tightens, or burns; it’s like lying on a surface for hours without ever feeling discomfort, without ever feeling cold, without feeling at all. And it’s as frightening as it is fascinating, for it is the exact opposite of being alive.
Perhaps it’s that very absence of pain that makes waking so traumatic, when his lungs fill with oxygen again and his heart begins to beat, when blood courses through his veins and the machine starts up once more. When his entire body is suddenly seized by all the agony in the world, every muscle drawn taut, every organ fighting to reclaim the energy it’s been deprived of.
Perhaps it’s that excruciating pain of waking that drives him to go back so many times, that makes him addicted to the feeling of nothingness.
The potions, unfortunately, don’t provide it. They don’t replace the morphine that is to drift in the limbo. He could simply stop drinking them — the thought has crossed his mind more than once. It would be easy, even. But it would be selfish. And selfishness is not yet a liberty Harry has allowed himself to possess.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
The uncanny encounter with Malfoy at the Leaky Cauldron should have remained a one-time occurrence. They happened to be at the same place at the same time, both alone. Yes, they spoke a little more than expected; perhaps Harry revealed more than he usually allows, and perhaps Malfoy hinted he didn’t mind his company, though, in retrospect, it was surely nothing more than a joke. Still, Harry would never have expected to see Malfoy there again, barely a week later.
Just a coincidence, one might say. Maybe Malfoy enjoys the peace the pub offers in the early evening as much as Harry does, before herds of witches and wizards pile in and make the place louder than a greenhouse full of mandrakes. Maybe his apothecary isn’t doing particularly well, indulging him with too much time and too many Firewhiskies.
Harry doesn’t own the pub’s upper floor anyway. What’s he supposed to do about it?
At least they don’t talk much. Most evenings when Malfoy closes his shop early and turns up at the pub, he settles in a different corner and spends hours buried in thick potion books, his face set in deep concentration as he mouths over passages and scribbles notes in the margins. It’s oddly fascinating to watch — how Malfoy holds himself with that effortless elegance, back perfectly straight, which makes Harry painfully aware of his own deplorable posture, hunched like some half-evolved primate rather than a young man.
There’s an unearthly serenity about Malfoy, a self-contained spectre detached from whatever lies beneath, masking the fatigue, the pallor, the things clearly eating away at him. But when Harry watches long enough, the façade thins, revealing the cracks: a fleeting frown, the brief bite of a lip, eyes closing for a heartbeat, fingers curling into fists. It’s subtle, gone almost before it appears — details only someone with too much time and too much interest would ever notice.
And then, sometimes, they talk. Always in the early evening, just after Malfoy arrives, and never for long, as though they both seem to harbour the unspoken fear that one of their friends might suddenly appear with butterbeers in hand. Their conversations seldom venture beyond familiar, safe topics, and though Harry’s mind is overflowing with questions about Malfoy’s intense potion-reading sessions, he does his best to curb his nosiness and avoid pricking Malfoy’s already fragile patience.
Malfoy, however, seems far less restrained when it comes to his own curiosity. He has developed an oddly persistent interest in Harry’s letters. At first, he limits himself to perfunctory remarks whenever he spots them —“Writing to your parents again?”— before retreating to his table or steering the talk elsewhere. But soon enough, those casual comments turn into genuine curiosity, compelling him to sit across from Harry.
“And what do you write about?” he asks one evening.
“That’s personal.”
“I’m not asking to read them. Just a general idea.”
The question touches Harry more than he expects.
“Well… anything, really. Mostly about my life. About them. I ask them questions, and then I answer the ones I think they’d ask me, if they could…”
It’s only then that Harry realises his fondness for Malfoy’s interest comes from one fact alone: Malfoy’s mother is dying. And guilt twists in his chest, because he has always resented the pity others have shown him, yet here he is, doing the very same to someone he once despised.
“Isn’t it frustrating not to get answers to your questions?” Malfoy asks.
Harry shrugs. “No. I’ve made peace with that, I think.”
“Have you ever tried to send any of them?”
His tone suggests it’s meant as a joke, so Harry chuckles, but nonetheless answers, “You know, when I was young, I thought I could find a post office that would take my letters up to the sky.”
Malfoy snorts. “Idiot.”
“Yeah, such an idiot I was. Almost like I believed in magic.”
Another pause, one of many that have begun to settle between them like a habit. During these silences, Harry tries not to look too much at Malfoy, tries to appear as disinterested as possible in whatever is happening between them.
Eventually, he asks,
“Would you ever try it? Writing to your parents.”
Malfoy’s expression contorts into something halfway between disbelief and disdain.
“Why would I? They’re not dead, as far as I know,” he replies.
“All the more reason to write to them?”
“How adorable. I think you’re forgetting who my family is, Potter.”
“You mean loving parents who’ve spoiled their child rotten?”
“We don’t write letters. We don’t go around declaring ‘I love you’ like some nauseating fairy-tale family. Can you actually imagine me being sentimental with my father?”
“What about your mother?”
Silence again, heavier this time.
“You’re the most delusional, slushy person I’ve ever met,” Malfoy says at last. “Did you know that?”
It doesn’t take long for Harry to reach the awful realisation that he has grown to enjoy Malfoy’s presence at the pub — this unexpected disruption to his writing evenings, these often useless conversations and nosy questions — and that the days without it feel duller, tinged with something close to disappointment. It isn’t Malfoy specifically, Harry tells himself. It’s the simple comfort of knowing there is someone else here with too much time on their hands. It’s the feeling of being useful to someone whose life seems just as chaotic and lonely as his own.
He could easily be useless, he thinks. He could aspire to it. A quiet life spent drinking, wanking, and writing to his dead parents while watching his friends prosper. But that would be delusional to believe it could last.
The moments that most emphasise Harry’s sense of failure tend to occur during his visits to Mrs Weasley. Those days always unfold in exactly the same way, as though he steps into a time loop the moment he crosses the threshold of the Burrow. She sits him at the kitchen table, stuffs him with scones and biscuits until he is too full to contemplate dinner, and subjects him to a long, well-meaning interrogation.
Harry has soon learnt that the first rule is never to mention Fred, which, somehow and sadly, means never mentioning George either, and therefore never talking about Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. Unfortunately, omitting his job erases half of his existence and leaves only the other half: the one that is painfully dull and embarrassingly empty. And thus over time, Mrs Weasley has developed the peculiar habit of asking about everyone but Harry. She asks after people she barely knows or barely cares about — Seamus, Dean, or even people Harry doesn’t even see anymore, like Cho — before inevitably drifting towards the only subject that seems to matter: Hermione’s pregnancy.
“Everything’s fine,” Harry replies, almost by rote. “Hermione’s doing well, and so is Ron.”
She would fall silent for a moment, pretending to brush a few crumbs from the table, only to mutter, seconds later, that Ron and Hermione don’t visit as often as she’d like. Harry would then find himself offering excuses he has rehearsed far too many times:
“They’re just very busy.”
“I don’t think Hermione likes me very much.”
“Of course she does, Mrs Weasley. She cares about you.”
The truth is, Hermione may not despise Mrs Weasley, but she has definitely hated visiting the Burrow ever since becoming pregnant. Mrs Weasley has a knack for offering unsolicited advice, which, to put it mildly, clashes dramatically with the Muggle approach Hermione is used to.
“Harry, she told me to drink a cup of Grindylow blood every night!”
“Wait, I thought she was joking?”
“Joking? Mrs Weasley never jokes.”
And then there are the moments when Mrs Weasley tries to prise information out of him about whatever is (or isn’t) going on between him and Ginny. He can see she has nurtured high hopes for the two of them, dreams of a wedding large enough to make the front page of the Daily Prophet. Once, she even ‘joked’ about how thrilling it would be to have a grandchild with ginger hair and green eyes. In hindsight, it might have been that comment which led Ron to endlessly tease Harry about that owl at the post office having his eyes.
Mrs Weasley was particularly distraught when Ginny announced her plan to study abroad. First came the excuses: Ginny was her only daughter, she didn’t want her so far away, the UK surely had similar Quidditch programmes, Quidditch was a dangerous and unreliable career anyway. But nothing enraged Ginny quite like the moment Mrs Weasley finally let Harry’s name slip into the argument. Sometimes, Harry allows himself to believe that Mrs Weasley is to blame for Ginny’s refusal to commit, that Ginny was so infuriated by her mother’s attempts to control her life that she chose to do the exact opposite of what was expected.
And then Hermione would smack him on the back of the head and say, “You idiot, self-centred boy.”
And so Harry spends an unhealthy amount of his free time wondering whether the dullness of his adult life has indeed made him self-centred. Does he blame the world for his misery? Does he sometimes wish he had become the successful figure everyone once expected him to be? In seeking anonymity, does he secretly yearn to be seen more than ever—to have that grand, ostentatious wedding packed with journalists and politicians who would spend weeks talking about him and his triumphs?
“Potter. Wake up.”
“Bloody—”
Malfoy’s voice jolts him so violently that Harry spills a quarter of his drink across the table.
Malfoy is sitting opposite him. With a quick movement, he pulls his arms away from the pumpkin juice-soaked tabletop, straightens in his chair, and lifts his glass out of danger.
“Hey, relax,” he says with a snort.
“Sorry, I didn’t notice you were here.”
“You looked rather pathetic, so I decided to check you weren’t decomposing on your chair or something.”
Oh, how Harry wishes he didn’t secretly find those dry, snide openers amusing. They drag him back to earth, remind him that to certain people, like Malfoy, he is anything but important.
“That’s very kind of you. I could return the compliment.”
Malfoy ignores his reply, as he usually does whenever it touches his ego. Still, he fixes the collar of his shirt absent-mindedly, as though that might also fix the deep dark circles beneath his eyes.
“What were you thinking about?” Malfoy asks, his tone detached.
“Nothing.”
Malfoy sighs. “That’s what I feared. An empty brain.”
The glare Harry throws him goes unseen; Malfoy’s attention has already shifted to the table.
“Not writing today?”
Harry looks down at the remains of his pumpkin juice. He would have preferred a beer, but he has decided to save his only alcoholic drink for when the group arrives for their regular ‘testosterone gathering’.
“I’m done writing already. You’re rather late today.”
“Yeah, I had some… errands to run.”
“Family mat—”
“The weather’s terrible today. Can’t believe it already feels like winter.”
Harry closes his mouth at the interruption and swallows back his attempt to broach the sensitive topic of Narcissa. If Malfoy resorts to talking about the weather to cut him off, there is clearly no point pursuing that avenue.
“We seem to run into each other a lot, don’t you think?” Malfoy asks then—typical, out-of-the-blue Malfoy. “Almost suspicious, if you want my opinion.”
“We both work in Diagon Alley. I don’t see what’s suspicious about it.”
“But perhaps it’s not that surprising after all,” Malfoy continues, completely ignoring Harry’s words. “You do have this tendency of finding your way to me wherever I am. Almost an obsession, now that I think about it.”
“You’re the one coming over to my table. And I was never obsessed. I followed you around at school because I suspected you of being a Death Eater, you twat.”
Harry knows he has won that round, yet still feels his neck burn at the mere idea of Malfoy thinking he’s obsessed with him.
Malfoy says nothing, his tongue caught at the corner of his mouth, curled into a dumbfounded smirk. For the next minute, they stare at each other in complete silence, until the clock strikes seven and the floor slowly begins to fill with tired, thirsty wizards.
“My friends are about to arrive,” Harry says.
“Right, I’ll leave you alone.”
That isn’t what he meant, but he says nothing and nods, watching Malfoy rise to his feet.
“I can already hear Weaselby’s beautiful nasal voice.”
“Hey, don’t call him that.”
An eye-roll threatens to form on Malfoy’s face, but he chooses instead to smooth the hem of his cloak in a mechanical gesture, then heaves a sigh that leads into words not even directed properly at Harry.
“You know, I’ve been thinking.” Good grief. “Maybe we could…”
“We could what?”
Malfoy pauses.
“No, never mind.”
“What?” Harry insists.
His gaze fixed somewhere beyond the window overlooking the street, Malfoy seems to weigh his options, debating whether to speak at all. Finally, he draws a long breath and turns towards Harry—though not quite meeting his eye.
“Would you like to get dinner someday? Outside of Diagon Alley, I mean.”
And he’s the one calling Harry obsessed? It must be a joke.
“Oh wow. Are you all right?” Harry says with a laugh.
“Right. Forget it.”
“No, yeah. I mean… why not.”
The vagueness of his answer seems to unsettle Malfoy; his nostrils flare slightly as he inhales.
What is wrong with him… what is wrong with them?
For a moment, Malfoy looks as though he is reconsidering his own invitation, as if it hadn’t been his idea in the first place.
“Maybe in Muggle London?” he finally suggests.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, shove off.”
“Joking, joking.”
“It’s just for privacy,” Malfoy says, sounding offended.
“I know.” Privacy? “Do you like Chinese food?”
“What’s that?”
“The food Chinese people eat?”
Footsteps and familiar voices drift up the stairs, growing louder with laughter.
“Whatever floats your boat,” Malfoy mutters, before heading towards the staircase. He disappears down a step or two, cloak brushing the banister, and Harry is left staring after him, unsure what to do with the odd warmth spreading under his ribs.
A few minutes later, Ron, Hermione, and the others finally appear, soaked through from what Malfoy had indeed described as terrible weather.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
They meet in Muggle London at six o’clock the next Friday.
It took nearly an hour of arguing for Harry to explain to the group why he wouldn’t be able to join their usual Friday-night drinks.
“You always come,” Ron insisted, sounding outraged, as if Harry had just told them he was leaving the country and never coming back.
“Sometimes I don’t,” Harry argued.
“Yeah, when you’re sick. Or that time you literally had a stroke in the living room and we spent the night at St Mungo’s with you. Are you planning on having a stroke tonight? Did you take your potions?”
“Ron?”
“What?”
“I have a date.”
What, in Merlin’s name, was he thinking? The conversation — and his friends’ reactions — kept rolling through his thoughts the entire time he sat on that plastic chair at the restaurant, waiting for Malfoy.
Using a date as an excuse not only unleashed a swarm of new questions about this mysterious “girl”, but also provoked a very obvious surge of brotherly protectiveness from Ron, who found it deeply unfair that Harry would “move on from Ginny so easily”. And so Harry had to fumble his way through an excuse for a girl who didn’t even exist, insisting it was nothing serious and wouldn’t lead anywhere, which, unfortunately, did absolutely nothing to improve the situation.
Malfoy arrives fifteen minutes late, a delay normally considered reasonable, but which, in this context, feels like an endless abyss of nervousness and deep introspection about every questionable decision Harry has made in his adult life, dining with Malfoy being the icing on the cake. After a minute spent gazing around the restaurant, most likely searching for Harry, but also taking in the sheer unfamiliarity of a Chinese establishment, Malfoy finally locks eyes with him and walks over. Of course he doesn’t apologise; instead, he takes a seat with an unnecessary sigh, disgust etched on his face.
“Interesting place,” he says without a shred of conviction, his eyes sweeping the room once more before landing on the plates and chopsticks laid out in front of him.
He picks up one of the chopsticks, rolls it between his fingers as though it were some alien magical artefact, and for a moment Harry fears he’s about to do something mortifying, like use it as a wand. Fortunately, Malfoy sets it back down, and Harry realises he is perhaps the only one immature enough to draw such comparisons in the first place.
“Did you tell your friends about this dinner?” Malfoy asks then.
“No, of course not.”
Malfoy nods, and their attempt at conversation collapses once again. In a desperate effort to fill the silence, Harry chuckles and says, “It’s like having an affair.”
Malfoy throws him a baffled look.
“What is wrong with you?”
“No, I mean, not that we’re going to shag or anything. Just the secrecy of hanging out.”
Perhaps the awkward silence wasn’t that bad after all. Like a miracle from the sky, one of the waiters — a rather short Asian woman with fading aubergine hair, the stubborn white roots already pushing through — finally returns to take their order, after having urged Harry at least five times while he was waiting. Malfoy frowns at the menu in silence and lets Harry order, which results in Harry choosing almost half the dishes in the hope that one of them will suit Malfoy’s taste.
“You want something to drink?” Harry asks once he is done ordering.
“Water.”
“You don’t want tea?”
“I’ll have water,” Malfoy repeats, firm and clipped.
The waitress jerks her chin toward the opposite side of the restaurant, mutters, “Water’s over there,” and walks off, shouting their order to the cooks behind the counter, her voice swallowed by the constant hubbub of hungry customers and clattering plates.
The sight of Malfoy looking overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of his surroundings pushes Harry to try and ease the atmosphere, but he finds nothing to say, especially after the embarrassing comment he made earlier. They wait for their food in silence, each desperately searching for something to fix their attention on. Malfoy appears oddly absorbed by a faded poster stuck to the wall behind Harry, while Harry has never been so fascinated by a blue Mini Cooper as he is now, parked just outside the window.
It is only when steaming plates and large circular bamboo baskets begin to occupy the space between them that they finally acknowledge each other’s presence again, as though the food has created a temporary bridge between them.
“So we’re supposed to eat with that?” Malfoy asks, eyeing Harry as he picks up his chopsticks.
It’s only the second time in Harry’s life that he has eaten Asian food, the first being when he was seven, dragged along to a business lunch Uncle Vernon had been invited to. His uncle’s excitement over a possible promotion must have briefly overridden his hatred for Harry’s existence. Harry vaguely recalls Uncle Vernon’s boss demonstrating how to use chopsticks (having declared himself a connoisseur of Asian cuisine after spending two weeks in Hong Kong), but that distant memory proves insufficient for Harry to hold the utensils properly, let alone convince Malfoy that they are as efficient as a fork.
Still, Harry doesn’t back down. He spends the next five minutes battling with a slippery dumpling that refuses, for the life of him, to be picked up.
“Next time I get to pick the restaurant,” Malfoy says, staring at the crime scene Harry has created — the mutilated dumpling lying in the basket, its meat and vegetable filling spilled in a glistening pool of oil. “I know a rather fancy French gourmet place a few streets from here.”
“Well, I like Chinese food better,” Harry mutters, scooping up the corpse of the dumpling with his fingers before shoving it into his mouth.
Malfoy doesn’t comment. Instead, he raises his hand to summon a waiter and asks for proper cutlery, much to Harry’s embarrassment, which only intensifies when the waiter returns with two sets. Still, it takes Harry only a couple more minutes before he resigns himself to the fork.
“Are you still with that Weasley girl?” Malfoy asks abruptly. The randomness of the question makes Harry choke slightly on his mouthful before spluttering,
“Why?”
“I’m merely trying to make conversation.”
How generous of him.
“Oh. Um… it’s complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“You know, she’s busy, focusing on her Quidditch career and all…”
Malfoy raises an eyebrow. “And I gather you’re not so busy. What happened to you, anyway? I heard you work at the twins’ shop?”
“I do,” Harry replies defensively.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?”
Malfoy shrugs. “It’s just not the life I pictured for you back at school. Well, assuming you managed to survive, obviously.”
“And what did you expect exactly?”
“Head of the Auror Office. Minister’s bootlicker. Something of that calibre.”
“You see me as the Minister’s bootlicker?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t think being an Auror is licking the minister’s boots. It’s ensuring everyone’s safety from—”
“From?”
People like you.
He can tell Malfoy knows exactly where this is going, and is only waiting for him to finally cross the line into the awkward, sensitive territory neither of them seems ready to tread.
At his silence, Malfoy says, “So why aren’t you an Auror? Protecting the world from…” He leaves the end of his question hanging in a vulgar imitation of Harry’s voice, punctuated by a smirk.
Harry stares at him for a beat, weighing his options between lying, changing the subject, or being honest. Strangely, he chooses honesty, perhaps hoping Malfoy will reciprocate if the tables turn.
“Um… I failed the Auror test.”
“You failed?” Malfoy snorts. “How is that even possible?”
“If I tell you, I have a feeling you’ll make fun of me.”
“Try me.”
“I—I fainted.”
A laugh bursts out of Malfoy’s throat, louder and more genuine than any Harry has heard from him before.
“Oh, Potter. What is it about you that craves being the centre of attention? I’d have thought you’d grown out of that after school.”
“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” Harry snaps.
“Then what is your problem?”
“None of your business.”
Malfoy lifts his hands in surrender, still smirking.
“So, coming back to the Weasley girl. She dumped you because you’re not as successful as she’d hoped?”
Harry ignores the jab and starts stacking the empty plates, sliding them toward the edge of the table.
“Want the last dumpling?” he asks, pointing at the cold shrimp dumpling slumped in the basket. Malfoy shakes his head and watches Harry stab it with his fork. It’s one mouthful too many, the kind that makes his stomach rebel. When he finally swallows, he looks back up at Malfoy with a pout of defiance he has spent the last minute constructing.
“That’s not how it is. We just have different priorities, and we’ve decided to take our time.”
“What’s your priority, then?”
“What about you? Why did you open a potion shop? Why did you leave France?”
Malfoy smiles at the sudden diversion but doesn’t object.
“Because Potions is what I excel at.”
Harry notices he has ignored the second question.
“I didn’t know you were that talented at Potions,” he says, making Malfoy bark a laugh.
“Are you joking? I was the second best in class after that mug—Granger.”
“Ah. I suppose Hermione was shining bright enough to overshadow your talent, then.”
“Or maybe you were too focused on your abysmal skills to stop your cauldron exploding.”
Funny. But a little too close to the truth.
The short waitress with the aubergine hair returns and clears the stack of plates, to Harry’s mild disappointment at not receiving so much as a word of thanks for his good deed.
With nothing left on the table to sustain the conversation, they pay the bill and step outside. A fine drizzle slants through the lamplight, turning the orange glow into blurred streaks. It was already night when they met, but after dinner it always feels somehow deeper — the sort of darkness that either urges you home to bed or tempts you into the mysterious nightlife of London.
Unsure which way Malfoy is leaning, Harry simply follows, hands buried in the warmth of his jacket’s pockets. They walk in silence for half the length of the avenue, their pace unhurried, maintaining a careful distance between their shoulders, far enough not to look intimate, close enough to suggest they know each other.
“So, where do you live?” Harry finally asks, once the silence has stretched to breaking point. “Back at the Manor?”
He can feel Malfoy’s sideways glance.
“What is it with this interrogation?”
“I’m just trying to make conversation,” Harry replies, echoing Malfoy’s earlier words.
“Touché. No, I don’t live at the Manor. I’ve got a flat above the shop.”
“You don’t live with your mum?”
The words slip out before Harry can stop them. Malfoy frowns.
“No, I don’t live with my mum, what’s it to you?”
“Don’t you think you should?”
The frown deepens.
“What’s your problem?”
Harry can’t hold it in any longer. The thought of Malfoy working a job he doesn’t even need instead of being with his dying mother feels absurd.
“I just think you should spend time with her, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. Perhaps you could enlighten me?”
Malfoy’s voice has dropped into something low and dangerous.
Why does Harry have to be like this? Maybe Malfoy is right, maybe he can’t help but stick his nose where it doesn’t belong, leaping straight into other people’s problems.
Too late now.
“Look,” he says carefully, “I may have heard some rumours about your mother…”
Malfoy stops dead, forcing a passing man to swerve at the last second and unleash a string of muttered curses as he goes by.
“What did you hear?” Malfoy asks.
Harry hesitates.
“That she was ill?”
“And where did you hear that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he blurts.
“Where?”
“Here and there.”
“Here and there,” Malfoy repeats, slowly. “Well, they’re called rumours for a reason, Potter. My mother is perfectly fine, thank you for your concern.”
“Okay. Good to hear,” Harry says, though he knows the damage is done. The air between them has shifted completely, and he wants nothing more than to reach back in time and slap himself senseless.
“You’re unbelievable,” Malfoy mutters at last, jaw tight. “What a bloody waste of my time.”
With that, he strides off, much faster than before. It’s a blatant signal that he no longer wants Harry anywhere near him, yet Harry immediately follows.
“Wait, Malfoy!”
Malfoy quickens his pace, forcing Harry into an awkward half-run. Harry keeps calling out, his voice far too desperate, as though he were chasing the love of his life, and the mere thought makes humiliation flare hot under his skin. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, why he suddenly cares so fiercely about fixing something that was never whole to begin with, why offending Malfoy now feels like catastrophe rather than routine.
“Malfoy, wait, please!”
He finally manages to reach him and grabs his arm.
“Fuck off,” Malfoy snaps, wrenching himself free before marching on. Harry trails behind him like a stray dog.
“Can we talk?” Harry calls to Malfoy’s back.
“We’ve done enough of that already, don’t you think?”
“Look, I’m sorry. You’re right, they’re just rumours, and I should’ve kept them to myself.”
Malfoy stops abruptly once again, and this time it’s Harry’s turn to nearly collide with him.
“But you didn’t, did you? Because you’re incapable of shutting up and keeping things to yourself.”
Harry bites back the retort burning on his tongue. The hypocrisy is almost laughable coming from someone who has never once questioned his own faults.
“Can we talk?” he repeats, softer this time. “Please?”
To their right, a pub buzzes with noise, its warm light washing over Malfoy’s face and turning his rain-damp hair pale gold. A handful of smokers loiter near the doorway, doing a spectacularly poor job of pretending not to eavesdrop.
“Let’s go inside?” Harry suggests, nodding towards the door.
Malfoy follows the gesture with a sceptical glance and shakes his head. “Why on earth would I go in there with you?”
“Come on,” Harry insists. “I don’t want tonight to end like this. Let’s go inside. Just a drink.”
Malfoy’s face gives nothing away. He bites his lower lip, eyes narrowed, but remains silent, staring at the pub as though weighing whether stepping through the door would be an unforgivable concession. Harry says nothing more; any further insistence would tip him straight into the territory of unbearable and pushy, and Merlin knows he’s already toeing that line.
So he turns and walks towards the entrance, hoping — pathetically, desperately — that Malfoy might follow.
To his surprise, he hears footsteps behind him.
He holds the heavy door open for Malfoy just long enough to be polite, while doing his best to look nonchalant. The pub is far busier than he expected. Louder, too. He manages to find two seats at the far end, close to the washroom, whose wide-open door leaks a persistent undertone of humans’ business beneath the more dominant scents of wood, booze and sweat.
“So, what do Muggles drink?” Malfoy asks the moment he sits down, raising his voice over the din.
He makes it very clear that he’s moved well beyond discretion. His expression hasn’t shifted from anger, and he certainly doesn’t intend to make the rest of the evening pleasant for Harry.
Still, Harry shows no sign of giving up. He orders two whiskies on the rocks and drinks in silence, watching the bartender’s hands manipulate the shaker with impressive dexterity.
Out of the corner of his eye, he catches the slight grimace that twists Malfoy’s face at the first sip, but Malfoy nonetheless downs the entire glass before Harry has managed a quarter of his. Malfoy orders another, then gulps that one down just as furiously. By the time he calls for a third, his shoulders are visibly tense. He leans forward on the counter, presses his palms over his closed eyes, and remains in that position for a long while.
“You’re awfully quiet for someone who wanted to talk so much,” Malfoy’s muffled voice slips out from behind his hands.
“Um… tell me about France. Why did you leave?”
Harry jumps as Malfoy abruptly straightens. First, he drains the rest of his third whisky, then waves at the bartender for a fourth, before finally turning to Harry.
“You know what?” he says, voice dry as parchment. “Let’s not do that. What did you hear exactly about my mother?”
“We don’t have to talk about this.”
“But we will. I’m asking you now. So answer.”
They look at each other like two wild animals deciding whether to strike.
“I didn’t hear much. Something about a curse, that’s all.”
Malfoy gives a few curt nods, then lets out a humourless snort.
“Did you come to my shop because of these rumours? Did you start writing your stupid letters to your dead parents in public just so I’d notice?”
“No—no, absolutely not!”
Friday-night fatigue mixed with more alcohol than Harry usually allows himself clouds his thoughts. He is terrified of saying something he shouldn’t, something that will push Malfoy even further into this already deplorable mood. He sighs.
“Look, I came to your shop because I heard you were settling in Diagon Alley. I hadn’t seen you in a while, didn’t know what you were up to. I was curious. And yes, maybe I felt some compassion for your situation — I mean, the rumours — but that’s not why I started buying potions from you. And the letters… I’ve been writing them since I was a kid, I swear.”
He pauses, then adds quietly, “I’m glad the rumours were false.”
At this, Malfoy closes his eyes and drags a hand down his face. Then he shakes his head, as though dealing with an imbecile.
“Fuck off, Potter. You know very well they’re not false.”
A long silence follows. Harry traces the embossed pattern on his whisky glass while Malfoy stares into the distance, jaw clenched.
Finally, Malfoy speaks.
“If I tell you, can you promise not to meddle in my life anymore?”
He turns his head towards Harry. His eyes are wet now, so full of tears they glisten in the dim pub light.
“You don’t have to,” Harry says, which prompts Malfoy to repeat the question word for word, this time with far less calm and even less patience.
Harry reluctantly nods. And so Draco tells him. Narcissa fell ill in late July of last year, just a few months after the war. They moved to France to find some peace, in the quiet village in Brittany. But the illness started to spread a few months later, which is the main reason why they moved back to England.
“I think she just wants to be home, you know?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
It is quite clear that Malfoy is omitting important details in his story, such as the fact that her “illness” is, from Neville’s perspective, a curse.
“Why don’t you spend more time with her?” Harry asks, as softly as he can.
It does not land well.
“Shut up. What did I tell you? You don’t get to tell me how to handle my problems. My mother is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. So stop talking like she’s going to die.”
His hands, curled into fists against the counter, are trembling.
“She won’t die, all right? I won’t let her.”
Harry doesn’t dare contradict him. He can feel the delusion in Malfoy’s certainty, that he’s trying to convince himself far more than Harry. So he lets him, even though he knows the blow will be far more brutal if Malfoy continues refusing to prepare for the inevitable.
For the next half hour, Harry helplessly witnesses a version of Malfoy he has never seen before: depleted, unravelled, drowning his emotions in endless refills of whisky he loudly declares “absolutely disgusting” each time he downs a glass, only to order another from the increasingly irritable bartender. In the end, the alcohol does something nothing else has ever managed: it strips Malfoy of his dignity.
He is now slumped over the counter, arm folded beneath his head like a makeshift pillow, hair dishevelled, mouth half open, eyes squeezed shut. For a moment Harry wonders if he has fallen asleep and even considers shaking him, but as soon as he reaches out to Malfoy’s shoulder, Malfoy mutters,
“You piss me off, Potter. You piss me off so much.”
Harry withdraws his hand to his lap.
“You’re just a bloody orphan with a messed-up life, you don’t even look good, and yet… and yet I’m always so bloody jealous of you. Why? There’s nothing to envy about you, and I’ve spent my whole life still being jealous. I hate you so much.”
Malfoy snorts, a hiccup jolting his shoulders.
“Why would you worry about me and my mother? You don’t know what it feels like. You don’t have parents.”
The group of friends beside them keep throwing stunned glances in their direction, clearly appalled by the viciousness of Malfoy’s words. And Harry finds himself absurdly trying to justify them — he’s drunk, he’s Draco Malfoy, this is how he speaks, I’m used to it — before wanting to punch himself for bending his self-worth low enough to excuse such an arse.
His gaze catches one of the middle-aged men seated behind Malfoy, but all Harry can manage is an awkward all-good smile the man pointedly refuses to return.
“Why do you care?” Malfoy mumbles against the counter. “You don’t even like me.”
A heavy silence swells.
“Maybe we should go home now. We’re both tired. And drunk,” Harry says quietly.
He is answered with a grunt. Slowly, Malfoy lifts his head and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
“You piss me off,” he repeats, barely above a whisper.
“All right.”
As Harry goes to ask for the bill, he sees Malfoy lean towards him with dangerous intent. His first instinct is to brace for a punch. His reactions are dulled by the drinks, so it takes a split second too long to realise Malfoy isn’t aiming for his jaw.
He’s kissing him.
If one can call it a kiss. It is unlike any of those Harry has experienced in his life, for it is deprived of all gentleness a kiss is supposed to provide. It’s abrupt and forceful, more akin to a headbutt, except instead of bone, it’s Malfoy’s mouth colliding with his. There is no gentleness, no hesitation, no warning. Malfoy’s lips are dry and unyielding; his breath reeks of whiskey, soy sauce, and ginger. The whole thing lasts barely a heartbeat, but it’s enough to send Harry’s pulse into a frenzy that feels dangerously close to another episode.
Then it’s over. Malfoy pulls away and folds back into the same slumped position as before, head buried in his hands as if nothing has happened.
Harry remains motionless, neck burning, unable to form a single coherent thought. Around them, conversations falter. The few customers who were shocked by Malfoy’s words are now staring openly. Some whisper. Others laugh under their breath or shake their heads, full of opinions they don’t bother hiding.
For once, people aren’t judging Harry for who he is, but for what has just happened to him. And somehow, that feels even worse. Suddenly, Harry is ashamed. And he is ashamed to be ashamed. Never had he imagined being kissed by a man, let alone in a public pub, and least of all by Malfoy.
The urge to leave intensifies. He shoves a random handful of Muggle notes onto the counter, far more than necessary, and grabs Malfoy’s arm, no longer caring about consent. Malfoy grunts, tries to wrench himself free, but Harry drags him along regardless.
“Let’s go home,” Harry keeps repeating until they reach the street.
The weather feels like a joke, like some ridiculous cliché from a cheap film, all wind and downpour, as though the night had decided to provide its own dramatic commentary. The rain lashes at Harry’s glasses, turning his vision into a blur of clustered droplets. The cold seems to jolt Malfoy awake, because he finally manages to tear his arm away. He wipes the spot where Harry held him with a look of disgust so exaggerated that Harry can only roll his eyes.
“I hate you,” Malfoy mutters, though this time, Harry’s sympathy has evaporated.
“The feeling’s mutual. Go home.”
“I will. Don’t tell me what to do.”
Now Harry wants to hex him. Apparently, all he needed to recover that old familiar urge to hurt Malfoy was one night at a bar and a stolen kiss.
“Fine,” he snaps.
They still Apparate near Diagon Alley together, but part ways the moment they step onto the cobblestones, not even bothering with a goodbye.
George’s flat is eerily quiet. No laughter, no whispers, no shagging moans Harry is used to overhearing. They must be asleep. He kicks off his shoes and tiptoes across the living room, which, now that he thinks of it, is a courtesy George never bothers to extend to him. Absentmindedly, Harry turns his head towards the sofa and is startled to find George slumped across it. He hesitates, but eventually changes course and heads in his direction.
For a moment, Harry stands still before the sofa, staring at the sleeping form of his friend. He feels dizzy, exhausted, numb. The evening with Malfoy lasted only a few hours, yet it feels as though days have passed. So much happened that the most shocking moment of all — that bloody kiss — barely stands out the way it should. Perhaps because it wasn’t romantic in the slightest, but something closer to a spiteful act of desperation.
“George?”
He receives nothing more than a soft snore in response. George shifts, his head rolling from one side of the cushion to the other. Outside, a flash of lightning pours white light into the room, and Harry flinches. His hazy thoughts drift back to Malfoy, how drunk he was, how furious. This makes him both sad and upset.
“George, do you think I’m self-centred?”
Notes:
Oh, Harry...
Thanks for reading! I've just realised that I haven't shared a single end note since I started posting. I hope you enjoy this story!
Chapter Text
Maureen Nicholls.
That’s the first name that popped into Harry’s mind when he came up with his date’s name. It also happens to be the name of one of his bullies from primary school, but he tries not to blame his brain too much for the irony. At least it’s a believable name for a “Muggle young woman he accidentally met in London a few weeks ago.”
The only problem with using the name of a real person is the mental picture that accompanies it — the very real Maureen Nicholls, a blonde six-year-old girl forever flaunting the newest, trendiest trainers and accessories, somehow influencing the entire class to beg their parents for the same. She even had a brief “love story” of about a week and a half with Dudley before she got bored of him (the only sensible decision she ever made).
She never missed an opportunity to look down on Harry for his oversized, worn-out clothes, or to repeat all the horrible things Dudley said about him; one of which being that he smelt so bad his parents had abandoned him. The rumour spread so far that even Harry began to believe it himself, forgetting in the process that his parents had died, not left. He can’t remember how long that strange period lasted, when he developed a constant fear of smelling bad, of it being the reason other children always kept a careful distance from him. He would scrub his skin far too hard in the shower in the hope of washing the stench away, constantly smelling his clothes, his shoes, even his schoolbag just to make sure it wasn’t emanating from them.
“So what then, you two are dating now?”
Harry has no idea how Ron managed to reach that conclusion, considering the only thing Harry said was that the date wasn’t too bad. Sprawled in an armchair by the fire, Ron stares at him with a defensive look, ready to argue against absolutely anything Harry might say.
“Love, I think I heard your mum call for help in the kitchen,” Hermione finally intervenes.
“Haven’t heard anything,” Ron mutters.
“I did. Go help her.”
Ron’s face scrunches into an expression of pure martyrdom, but he obeys, sighing heavily as he drags himself towards the kitchen.
Hermione waits until he’s gone before scooting closer on the sofa. For a moment, Harry’s attention drifts to her huge belly brushing his arm. He concentrates briefly, wondering if he might feel the baby move if he focuses hard enough.
“How did it really go?” she asks earnestly.
He looks up and shrugs. He has always been a terrible liar, so he settles for something as close to the truth as possible.
“It was all right, but maybe not under the best conditions.”
“How come?”
He improvises a story that captures the general chaos of the evening, carefully omitting every detail that might reveal Maureen’s true identity.
“But did you kiss?” Hermione asks, and at that Harry has to inhale deeply to stop himself from either laughing or crying at the unbelievable conversation he’s having.
“Sort of?”
In hindsight, he can hardly call what Malfoy did a kiss. It felt much closer to an attack. Or at the very least, a mistake. Perhaps Malfoy had been aiming for a headbutt and missed. Perhaps he had simply been too exhausted and drunk to put any strength behind it, and ended up collapsing, however briefly, onto Harry’s face. Or perhaps it had been deliberate: a twisted, drunken attempt at revenge through non-consensual intimacy rather than their usual brand of violence.
“She was just very drunk. And not in a good mood.”
Hermione’s eyes widen.
“She was drunk? Harry, please don’t tell me you drank as well. You know you shouldn’t.”
And there they are.
Still, he is almost grateful the conversation has drifted away from Malfoy kissing him. He will happily talk about alcohol with Hermione if it means avoiding that topic.
“Hey,” she says softly, “I want you to meet our baby, Harry. All right?”
She knows it is the ultimate way to stop Harry from doing anything stupid or dangerous. They asked him to be godfather two months ago, something he immediately took very seriously. Of course they also had to ask Ginny to be godmother, because everyone sees them as a lifetime couple. Everyone except Ginny, apparently.
“I only had one glass,” he promises, the first truth he has spoken all evening.
This earns him a hug from Hermione, sudden and unannounced, as though she is congratulating him for doing the bare minimum with his health.
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
He keeps things deliberately vague about whether he plans to see Maureen Nicholls again, just as he has no idea whether he truly wants to see Malfoy after the disgrace of that night at the pub.
The following week, he decides to buy his potion at Slug & Jiggers instead. He hates the experience, first and foremost because of how much busier the shop is compared to the steady, almost welcoming emptiness of the Silver Apothecary. Wedged between groups of witches and wizards staring at him without the slightest hint of shame, Harry tries to request his dose of Heartsease Draught by silently handing Mr Calderwood a folded scrap of parchment with the words scribbled on it, only for the gesture to draw even more unwanted attention.
He can feel them inspecting the vial Mr Calderwood eventually passes across the counter, right up until Harry shoves it deep into his pocket. Some of them even feel entitled to ask questions they would never dare ask a stranger. Harry responds with tight smiles and vague explanations about “new experimental products at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes”, which earns him a sceptical frown from Mr Calderwood at the blatant lie.
Still, Harry finds it easier than facing Malfoy. And surely Malfoy feels the same, because for nearly two weeks they don’t cross paths at all. Guilt sometimes jolts in Harry’s chest, a sharp pang that makes him wonder whether he should make the effort to reach out, to try again.
The day Neville accidentally mentions that Malfoy visited the greenhouse that very morning — apparently quite demanding when it came to particularly rare and infamous plants — Harry is surprised by a flicker of jealousy at the idea of Malfoy talking to Neville but not to him. He hides it well, though, adopting the nonchalance he wishes he genuinely felt, unwilling to display even a modicum of interest in such a brat.
“He’s really trying to find a cure for his mother, then?” he asks, feigning detachment.
Neville answers with a long sigh, shaking his head.
“At this point, I think he’s just desperate.”
Desperate.
The word smolders in Harry’s mind, feeding his initial sympathy the way a single sip of beer can drag an addict back towards the bottle. He pushes the thought away as best he can. Plenty of people are desperate. That doesn’t excuse insolence.
Whether he likes it or not, they end up running into each other again the following Friday evening at the Leaky Cauldron. While Harry waits for his friends to clock off and join him, he’s caught off guard by the sight of Malfoy striding straight up to his table, dark circles carved so deeply beneath his eyes that Harry’s first words can only be,
“Are you all right?”
The surprised, almost offended reaction on Malfoy’s face makes Harry aware of his rudeness. Too late.
“Good evening to you too,” Malfoy replies. “You know, most of the times I’ve seen you, you’ve looked utterly miserable, and yet I’ve had the decency to pretend not to notice, and certainly not to point it out.”
Harry grimaces but lets the jab pass; it’s well deserved. In any case, Malfoy changes the subject quickly.
“Haven’t seen you in a while. Are you ignoring me?”
“Are you?” Harry shoots back, perhaps a little too quickly for someone trying to sound indifferent.
“I’ve just been busy.”
“Me too.”
The slow nod Malfoy gives him is anything but convinced. Something tightens in his expression. He leans back in his chair, crosses his legs, and says,
“Too busy to even buy your potions?”
“Oh. Um. I went to Slug & Jiggers.”
“Why?”
What does he mean, why?
Harry shrugs, giving a few quick shakes of his head in a ‘that’s just how it is’ manner.
“Well, anyway,” Malfoy says. “I don’t really care, but just so you know, I brew Heartsease Draughts just for you. So if you decide to buy elsewhere, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know, so I don’t waste time and ingredients for nothing.”
Harry suddenly feels like a scolded child.
“I can come and pick it up,” he says. “I wasn’t planning to stop buying from you, I just thought… I just decided to alternate.”
“Again, I don’t care. I’m simply telling you there’s a potion ready just for you.”
Harry inhales through his nose, swallowing the rudeness. “Right. I’ll come by next week.”
“Good.”
A few seconds stretch out in an uncomfortable silence that forces Harry to look up at Malfoy.
“Did you come over just to say that?” he asks.
“Partly.”
“And the other part?”
Malfoy hesitates. He bites at the tip of his tongue, gaze drifting to the corner of the table.
“I think we should do it again,” he says at last.
“Do what?”
“Hang out,” Malfoy replies, as if it should be obvious. “I could use some company.”
Harry scoffs despite himself. “Are you being serious?”
Malfoy raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”
He can’t be. Or else the only explanation is that Malfoy genuinely doesn’t remember what happened at the pub. Either way, the idea of being yelled at and treated like the stupid orphaned trash he is doesn’t exactly sound like an appealing night out Harry is eager to repeat.
“Why?” Harry asks.
“What do you mean, why? I told you, I could use some company.”
“Why me? You could find company somewhere else.”
Malfoy clicks his tongue, annoyed. His jaw tightens as he gets to his feet.
“Right. Don’t forget to pick up your potion next week,” he mutters, before turning his back on Harry.
Harry watches him go and realises, belatedly, that he feels like a jerk. He tries to weigh his options quickly, his thoughts tripping over each other, but there’s no time. His mouth moves before his brain can stop it.
“When?” he calls out.
He braces himself for the humiliation of being ignored, of watching Malfoy disappear down the stairs without a word. Somehow, that would still be less embarrassing than outright rejection.
But Malfoy does stop. He glances over his shoulder, lets the silence hang for a beat, then says,
“I don’t know. Are you free tonight?”
Oh. He doesn’t waste time. Harry feels his shoulders ease.
“French?”
“French.”
Deep down, Harry knows that skipping another Friday drinks will cause a stir in his friend group. And then there’s the question of why he always has to put himself in these situations, to the point of even crafting a fake love interest just to cover up the fact that he’s hanging out with Draco Malfoy. Why is he even doing that? This former school bully, Death Eater, spoiled brat who never misses a chance to humiliate him? If only there were at least an inch of self-respect somewhere, hidden among this jumble of empathy.
Yet this second dinner with Malfoy goes surprisingly well. Maybe because, for most of it, Harry lets Malfoy flaunt his knowledge of French cuisine, nods along to everything he says, and makes sure not to bring up any sensitive subject at the table, even though the temptation is strong, given how obviously sad and exhausted Malfoy looks behind his snobbish façade. Maybe because Harry barely speaks at all, too lost in his own thoughts as he broods over his conversation with Neville. If Malfoy is truly that desperate, there’s a good chance Narcissa Malfoy isn’t doing well at all, which might explain the invitation.
“You’ve been very quiet tonight,” Malfoy remarks as they amble down the street, stomachs heavy and minds dulled by digestion.
Harry fumbles an excuse about simply being a bit tired, causing Malfoy to offer to call it a day.
“I mean, we can still get a drink if you want to,” Harry hastens to say.
“It’s fine. I’m a bit worn out as well.”
Still, they keep each other company for a bit longer, neither seeming motivated to be the one to take responsibility for ending the night. Christmas illuminations line the London streets, infusing warmth into people’s hearts as they grapple with the winter chill. Hands in his coat pockets, Harry walks in silence beside Malfoy. He doesn’t know where they’re heading, doesn’t think Malfoy knows either. They just walk.
Before long, his mind drifts. Floods of random daydreams roll and clash into a psychedelic film with no common thread, no beginning and no end. He thinks of the dinner, of Malfoy, of Christmas, of Ginny, Quidditch. Now he wants to fly. He hasn’t flown in ages. He should ask Ron to spend more time together; they could fly at the Burrow. If only Ron wasn’t so swamped with work. If only they were young again.
Then he snaps back to reality when his arm brushes Malfoy’s, only to realise how close he is to him. He quickly adjusts his path, tries to focus on keeping it straight. When the quiet walk drags on too long to remain free of awkwardness, Harry says,
“Should we go?”
Malfoy nods, but says nothing. A thin cloud of breath escapes his lips before he presses them together. He looks distant, his gaze fixed somewhere ahead. Harry follows it, squinting into the dim. Across the thoroughfare, a woman kneels to fix her son’s scarf. The little boy’s pout morphs into a giggle as she says something, all the while gently tickling his stomach. He squeals, wriggling out of her fingers.
The scene makes Harry huff a small chuckle before he turns his gaze back to Malfoy and notices the nostalgia etched on his face, the heavy bags of sadness swollen beneath watery eyes.
“Let’s go?” Harry repeats, unable to find anything else to say or do without crossing the boundaries he set for himself a few hours ago.
Malfoy takes his time before finally answering with something other than a nod. Shifting his gaze to Harry, he says in a low voice,
“Actually… do you mind staying a bit longer?”
This was not, by far, on Harry’s list of expected answers. He wipes his damp nose tip to buy himself some time and gauge his options, only to say, with a kindness that fuels his urge to slap himself,
“No worries. Where do you want to go? A pub?”
“No, not a pub,” Malfoy says quickly, before pausing. “I have a better idea.”
Upon walking up the narrow path of Diagon Alley, Harry starts wondering if Malfoy hasn’t changed his mind again and forgotten to tell him to go home already. It’s only when Malfoy holds the door of his potion shop open for him that Harry understands the better idea was nowhere else than the apothecary itself. He hesitates for a second, his mind racing through a list of hypothetical activities one could do in a potion shop at night. Perhaps Malfoy just wants to talk.
“Are you coming in or what?”
Harry obliges under the pressure. Inside, the shop shines with its usual coldness. The room is so dark that he can barely make out the furniture. With a wave of his wand, Malfoy lights the sconces before heading straight to the back behind the counter. Harry follows him, despite the drastic rise of wariness creeping in as the list of possibilities shrinks with each step. At the back of the shop is the potion storage, a squarish room framed by looming shelves, the ceiling crossed with large beams and a dangling, rather rustic chandelier. At the far left of the storage room, a ladder covers a third of the wall. Harry watches Malfoy climb onto it to fetch an assortment of small vials, which he then opens, mixes, and pours with surgical care into an empty one.
“I’m sorry, but… what is going on here exactly?” Harry asks.
Malfoy wiggles the flask between his fingers to show him.
“Something better than Muggle drinks.”
“Are you—are we drinking this?”
“This, Potter, is the gate to my sanity in this insane world.”
At Harry’s obvious mistrust, Malfoy heaves a sigh and steps closer. He lifts the vial right up between their noses. His eyes lock with Harry’s, closer than they have ever been.
“It’s safe. I’ve been drinking it every now and then whenever I want a moment of peace.”
“What is it?”
“Just a mixture. Some Calming Draught and a bit of hellebore syrup. And… some other things.”
Some other things. Harry stares at the greenish concoction with great scepticism, but no less interest.
“You don’t want to talk instead?” he asks anyway, and Malfoy scoffs.
“I’m not interested in talking. Besides, if we do want to talk, it’ll always be more interesting after drinking this. Trust me.”
The comment bothers Harry somehow. Just like that, it reduces him to nothing more than a loneliness filler, a drinking partner with no added value beyond being there. Nevertheless, the feeling fades as quickly as it comes. Maybe he is just a stopgap, but at least he’s not completely useless.
“I’m already on potions. I don’t think it’s safe for me,” he argues nonetheless. Not that he cares, but he figures his friends would if he died because of a stupid potion shared with Malfoy.
“When did you become so boring?” Malfoy asks, his tone unnecessarily accusatory. It earns him a glare, sharp enough to remind him of his own responsibility, given that he is the one supplying Harry’s potions in the first place. “Why do you take Heartsease Draughts anyway?”
“Oh, um. Nothing important. Just some minor heart issues. Stress, remember?”
“Right.” Malfoy considers this for a moment, frowning at the potion. “Should be fine, then.”
Nothing in his tone makes the statement remotely convincing, yet it is enough for Harry. As he watches Malfoy casually down half of the mysterious vial before handing him the rest, Harry realises that perhaps it was for the best that he failed that Auror exam after all. He drinks the mixture with the same heedless ease he would apply to pumpkin juice. It tastes sweeter than expected — one of the rare potions that doesn’t resemble poison brewed straight from hell.
He hands the empty flask back to Malfoy.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait,” Malfoy replies, “and let the magic happen.”
With that, Malfoy lowers himself directly onto the floor, his back resting against one of the shelves — a profoundly un-Malfoy thing to do. Harry follows suit. They sit in silence, each staring into their own corner of the room.
As the long, dull and mind-numbing wait drags on, Harry begins to question this entire turn of events. Maybe he should have insisted on going to some stupid, random Muggle pub instead. Or simply gone home to sleep. Or wank. Or try something he never usually does, like reading, meditating, or even talking to George.
Then the potion finally kicks in.
It begins with a faint tingling in his fingers and toes, followed by a cool current unfurling through his body. Goosebumps rise along his skin; his muscles slacken; his heart slows, and slows, and slows, so much so that he fears it might simply stop. He turns his head, searching for Malfoy’s gaze, desperate for reassurance, only to find his eyes closed.
Never has Harry seen him look so peaceful. Every inch of Malfoy’s body is loose, unguarded, blissfully suspended in this simulated death.
Harry watches him for another minute, transfixed, and has no time to look away when Malfoy finally opens his eyes again. Malfoy smiles, such a rare occurrence that even in that state, Harry notices it.
“Don’t fight it,” Malfoy murmurs softly.
It would normally make Harry want to fight it all the more, but he can’t summon the energy. He attempts a chuckle that comes out closer to a grunt.
“You know, when I’m sad, I do other things than taking drugs,” he says, each word thick and sluggish, as though he’s wading through molasses.
Malfoy laughs. “Like what? Shagging the ginger girl?”
“No?” Yes. “Like… for example, I go flying with Ron. We could fly sometime, if you want.”
Malfoy’s silence is answer enough. Harry resigns himself to it. He shifts, nudging himself into a more comfortable position, and lets out a long, slow breath. Gradually, he allows his body to sink fully onto the floor, relinquishing himself to the potion’s grip.
Warmth blooms through him, clashing with the chill of the tiles beneath his back. Even so, he tries to welcome it, to give it space, to let it settle. The heat spreads like fire.
It's as if all his senses sharpen, his muscles loosen, his pores open. When he draws a deep breath, every scent in the shop seeps into him, even those sealed inside glass flasks. The entire blend intertwines and intoxicates him. When he exhales, years of anxiety leave his mouth and drift before his eyes in a dark mass, like a storm cloud.
The temptation to reach out and pass his hand through it is strong; however, the fear that it might begin to rain on him holds him back. He cannot believe all of it had been lodged inside him — how his body could have functioned with such a parasite. Then the cloud finally dissipates into the air, without taking with it that lingering sense of euphoria.
He basks in the quietude for a long while, listening to his own breath with the same attention he might give to a beautiful song heard for the first time. The music echoes in a perfect rhythm, deep and vibrant. It could be jazz. His breathing is jazz. He likes the idea.
“I’m so freaking lonely.”
The sentence lands so suddenly that Harry wonders whether it is real or merely a hallucination. Unsure, he focuses, listening for Malfoy to speak again, but nothing.
“Me too,” Harry says, just in case.
It must have been real after all, because Malfoy tuts and whispers,
“Bullshit.”
It isn’t, but Harry doesn’t feel like arguing right now, too afraid of drawing the dark cloud back into himself and silencing the music. Still, it feels wrong not to say anything, so he asks,
“Do you want to talk about your mum?”
“Shut up.”
“OK.”
Harry presses his lips together and breathes in through his nose. At least he tried. Obeying Malfoy’s curt order to stop talking, he decides to focus instead on the dust mites that volley around the room. They look as though they’re dancing. Maybe they can hear his music too. It’s lovely.
“She’s dying,” Malfoy says suddenly.
The music stops. A long silence follows, during which Harry holds his breath as a deep sadness settles in his chest, but the clear-headed part of his mind works overtime to avoid ruining everything. How cruel it feels to share something so intimate in this fogged, softened state of consciousness.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says at last, hoping he didn’t only think the words.
He turns his head towards Malfoy, sneaking a look at him.
“Hey, Draco?”
Draco gives him a sideways look, eyebrows lifting slightly.
“Can I call you Draco?” Harry asks.
“No.”
Harry tries to swallow, but his mouth is dry. “But you called me Harry, remember?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I fainted in your shop, you called me Harry.”
“I don’t remember that. And I seriously doubt it,” Draco murmurs.
“Well, you did,” Harry whispers, and a sense of unfairness stirs in him, tangled with an urge to cry. Fortunately, the feeling is soon overtaken by a deep fatigue. He could fall asleep, he thinks. The warmth of the potion is already beginning to fade. He gathers what little strength he has left and manages to say,
“You know I’m here if you want to talk.”
He vaguely hears Draco reply, but he can’t make out a single coherent sentence. His soul seems to slip loose from his body, his arms too weak to move, his hands too slack to hold on. Too frightened to watch his life gutter out before his eyes, he squeezes them shut.
The cold of the tiles beneath him returns, sharpening until it burns through his jeans, through his palms. Then, a second later, it’s gone. He’s gone.
A bright light brushes his eyelids, coaxing them to open, but Harry resists, afraid of admitting he’s back in limbo. He stays rigid for what feels like an endless stretch of time, tense, terrified of moving even a fraction. Still, something is different this time, subtly wrong compared to his past experiences up there.
An odd sensation creeps up his legs.
Water.
The sensation of his body sinking into cold water surges, rising slowly, almost sadistically, swallowing his legs, his hands, his arms, seeping into his clothes and weighing him down.
“Harry!”
That voice — again that voice — echoes, distant and yet impossibly close, calling to him, pleading like a last hope before death. Then a hand, warm and gentle, closes around his own. It feels so tangible, so undeniably real, that hand.
A voice. Softer now.
“Hey, Potter. Breathe.”
Draco. Then Harry isn’t entirely in the World Beyond after all. Perhaps he’s caught somewhere in between. The hand tightens, anchoring him to his body. Fingers brush over his knuckles, slow and grounding, and Harry hopes it will never let go.
“Breathe,” the voice repeats, barely a whisper.
Harry obeys, drawing in deep breaths and letting them out in unsteady waves. It helps. He can feel the water receding, inch by inch, the storm inside his chest easing until the fury ebbs away.
It still takes him a long time to open his eyes. The bright light is gone; only a room sunk in half-light and silence remains. He forces himself to turn his head, despite the dizzy rush that grips him. Everything feels unbearably heavy: his limbs, his thoughts, his body itself.
To his right, Draco doesn’t move. Still seated on the floor, eyes half-lidded and unfocused, he looks utterly lost to the potion, already far away. And yet it is unmistakably his hand that encloses Harry’s, firm and unyielding.
Harry doesn’t try to pull free. His throat remains tight, allowing only shallow breaths through. Instead, he shifts closer, inching towards Draco and waiting in silence. For what? For how long? He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.
Exhaustion overtakes him without mercy. His eyelids grow heavy. Eventually, he rests his head against Draco’s shoulder, and when Draco does not move or say a word, he allows himself to drift into sleep.
It is undoubtedly the strangest night Harry has ever lived through — caught between dream and waking, limbo and life, unable to tell the real from the unreal. He wakes with the sense of being even more exhausted, as though he hasn’t slept in months, as though he hasn’t yet closed his eyes at all.
Everything around him is exactly the same, frozen in time. When he lifts his head from Draco’s shoulder, Draco stirs and mumbles,
“Y’okay?”
Harry nods, not caring whether Draco can see him or not. Either way, Draco says nothing else.
Harry remains seated for a long while, staring across the room, every muscle aching, his limbs heavy and numb. He has no idea what time it might be — somewhere between midnight and ten in the morning. Or perhaps they’ve remained in that room far longer than that. Perhaps hours. Perhaps days. Weeks.
“I should head home,” he whispers at last.
He expects a reaction, but none comes. He waits a little longer, as though it might change anything. At this point, he can’t tell whether it’s the world or himself that’s moving in slow motion.
A few scattered thoughts drift through the hollow shell his mind has become, ricocheting off its edges. First and foremost: why is he calling Malfoy Draco? Why does it feel right? And why is he here at all? For a moment, he even wonders where the hell he is, before memory snaps back into place.
By some small miracle, he manages to haul himself to his feet, one hand braced against the shelves. He looks down at Draco.
“I’m going home,” he repeats.
This time, Draco responds with a faint, delayed grunt.
“You’ll be all right?” Harry asks.
Another muted sound, somehow enough to prompt Harry to leave Draco behind. He surprises himself by retaining enough clarity to pull his Invisibility Cloak from his pocket and drape it over him before making for the door.
The alley outside is virtually empty. Judging by the dim light, it must be right before sunrise, not long before the early risers begin to emerge for work. Harry staggers home, grateful for the short distance between the Silver Apothecary and his flat.
George’s bedroom door is closed; not that Harry expects him to be up already. He skips the shower, but still takes what might be the longest piss of his life before slumping onto his bed.
The day passes in a blur, broken up into periods of half-wakefulness and deep, hazy sleep, tangled with strange dreams that skirt the edge of nightmares. He might have heard movement in the flat — doors opening and closing, perhaps even voices — but he can’t tell whether any of it was meant for him.
When he finally wakes without feeling like he’s on the brink of death, he finds himself cocooned in his covers, his pillow smeared with both dried and fresh drool. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his jumper, realises he’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, then laboriously sits up and begins to reflect on his life choices.
His head aches in the familiar way it does after surviving a war, except this time, there’s no accompanying sense of accomplishment.
After judging himself for several long minutes, his stomach rumbles with agonising hunger. It gives him just enough strength to drag himself out of bed, his brain slipping into autopilot as he makes his way to the kitchen. The bright light flooding the flat forces him to squint as he fumbles towards the cupboards.
He reaches for the handle of his favourite drawer, the one that holds the good bread, and proceeds to tear into it as though his life depends on it. The sensation is both the best and the worst at once. He can feel the lingering poison being soaked up by the crumbs, even as every mouthful threatens to make him sick. Still, he finishes the slice and drinks enough water afterwards to make him burp his way to the bathroom. In the small, round mirror, he catches his reflection for the first time since yesterday. Not only does he look paler than parchment, but his nose and half his cheek are smeared with dried blood, the red turned almost brown, cracked and crusted. He hadn’t even noticed his nose had been bleeding. He looks away from the mirror, repelled by the sight of his own pathetic face.
Unlike the bread, the shower is, by far, the best thing he’s experienced in a long while, with none of the side effects. He stays under the hot water for far too long, stopping only when the tips of his fingers begin to wrinkle.
His stomach protests again, this time begging for something more substantial.
Back in his bedroom, Harry hears noise coming from the living room, but the absence of conversation suggests George is alone. He pulls on the first clothes his hand finds in the wardrobe and then sits on the edge of the bed for a moment, weighing his willingness to socialise with his flatmate.
He hasn’t quite made up his mind when his door is flung open with a violence that makes his heart jolt.
George stands in the doorway, one hand still wrapped around the doorknob. His gaze flicks up and down Harry in a series of slow, judgemental glances.
“I see you’ve finally decided to wake up,” he says, his voice clipped.
For a second, Harry isn’t sure his voice will make it past his throat. It feels as though he hasn’t used it in far too long. “Rough night,” he manages, offering a smile that does nothing to soften George’s expression.
“Had a fun time?” George says.
It sounds like a trick question, so Harry answers with a brief shrug.
“You do realise you didn’t come in to work this morning, right?”
Shit.
“Shit.”
George studies him for a long moment, lips pressed together as though holding back something sharp. At last, he asks,
“Can we talk for a second?”
“Look, George, I didn’t mean to skip work today—”
“Can we talk?” George repeats with much less patience.
Without waiting for an answer, he lets go of the doorknob and walks away.
In the living room, Harry finds George pouring himself a generous amount of butterbeer into his favourite mug. The anger on his face hasn’t faded — if anything, it seems to have deepened — and something tells Harry this isn’t just about work. He waits for George to finish his sip and finally look up at him.
“Is this about that Muggle girl? Maureen or something?” George asks.
“What?”
“The Muggle girl you met. Did you spend the night with her?”
Maybe it’s the potion still fogging his head, or maybe it’s just how ridiculous the question sounds, but an incredulous huff slips out of Harry before he can stop it.
“News travels fast, I see.”
George frowns. “So you did spend the night with her.”
The conversation shifts quickly into a condescending interrogation, the sort only an adult speaking to a child would feel entitled to conduct. George has never spoken to him like this before, never taken such an interest in Harry’s personal life — and it was better when he didn’t.
“What if I did?” Harry says, his tone hardening to match the chill George has set.
“What about Ginny?”
“What about her?”
“I thought you were together,” George says.
“I’m sorry, but how is this any of your business?” Harry snaps. At least he’s fully awake now.
George’s face twists slowly into a look of disbelief. He takes another sip of his butterbeer — larger this time — then sets the mug down with a heavy thud. It’s a small miracle it doesn’t shatter.
“Well, it’s very much my business, because Ginny happens to be my sister.”
Another uncontrollable scoff escapes Harry. “I knew Ron was protective of her, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take an interest in Ginny’s dating life.”
“I do,” George says flatly. “And I find it pretty disrespectful that you’re going on dates while she’s away building her career.”
“That’s rich, coming from someone who’s shagging his dead twin’s girlfriend.”
Harry knows the moment the words leave his mouth that he’s crossed a line, the kind you don’t come back from, but he couldn’t care less. As expected, George’s expression darkens instantly, fury flashing hotter than if Harry had actually punched him. A second later, his cheeks flush scarlet.
“Fuck you.”
“Well, am I wrong?” Harry snaps. “Your dating life after Fred’s death hasn’t exactly been exemplary either.”
“Keep Fred’s name out of your mouth.”
George steps closer, an attempt at intimidation that falls flat when Harry doesn’t budge.
“What is it with this family, treating Fred’s name like some taboo you’re never allowed to touch?” Harry fires back. “Is that really how you want to remember him? By pretending he never existed at all?”
“Shut up.”
“Or what? It’s been a year and a half, George! Maybe it’s time we acknowledge how fucked up you are because of what happened! How fucked up it is to think it’ll help to forget about Fred.”
“Don’t tell me how to cope with my grief!” George is shouting now, jabbing a finger hard into Harry’s chest. “You don’t know what it’s like to live without him! No one fucking knows! Yeah, maybe I am fucked up, and maybe because he’s all I think about, every single day!”
“Then talk!” Harry yells back. “Say it out loud! Don’t lock it all away and numb yourself with alcohol!”
George lets out a bitter, humourless laugh.
“Oh, right,” he says. “Coming from the one who completely shut himself off after Cedric died. And after Sirius. And—”
“I was a fucking teenager!” Harry shouts. “And I was alone!”
“You were not alone,” George fires back. “You had us!”
They both stare at each other in silence, panting.
“Why are we even talking about this?” Harry asks at last, his jaw clenched so tightly it aches.
“Right,” George snaps. “Why talk about you when we could talk about how pathetic my life’s become instead. Brilliant idea.”
“Yeah,” Harry says. “Maybe we should, actually.”
George shoots him a glare.
“You’ve changed,” he mutters.
“I’ve changed? You’ve fucking changed, George!” His frustration builds to such a degree that the words catch in his throat. “You drink every day. Every fucking day. Look at you. There isn’t a single night you don’t stumble home completely smashed, barely able to walk in a straight line.”
“Fuck you.”
“Right. That’s it, then. That’s all you’ve got,” Harry fires back. “Because you know I’m right. You know you’re wasting your life away because you can’t imagine living without Fred.”
“Can we fucking stop talking about him?”
“Fine! Fine,” Harry snarls. “Then if we’ve decided to erase him, maybe you should start by not making me sign every bloody business deal with his name on it.”
George falls silent. He just glares at Harry, eyes burning with something close to hatred. Harry doesn’t have the energy to keep pushing. This is going nowhere. If it goes on, it might turn physical.
“I’m leaving,” Harry says.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. To drink. Party. Maybe I’ll go see Maureen and fuck all night.”
He has no idea why he says it. The words land heavy, and the embarrassment that follows keeps him from looking at George’s reaction. Without thinking any further, he bolts for the door, shoves his feet into the nearest pair of shoes, and grabs a jacket that’s definitely not warm enough.
As he yanks the door open, the urge to correct one last thing claws at him. He turns halfway back towards George, who still hasn’t moved from the kitchen counter.
“By the way,” Harry says, “Ginny and I aren’t together.”
When he said he would fuck, his mind was fixed on the fictional idea of Maureen Nicholls, and mostly on the intention of pissing George off. However, as he steps into the freezing alley, clogged with a thin layer of snow, the urge to follow his thoughts through to the end seizes him with a sense of urgency. Rarely has he felt so humiliated, so controlled, betrayed, trapped in a tiny cell of his own life, guarded by none other than his loved ones. He would like to feel even an ounce of remorse for having struck a sensitive nerve with George, but he finds he cannot. On the contrary, he should have shown even less restraint.
Before he even realises it, he finds himself standing in front of the Silver Apothecary, and he does not bother to check his surroundings or pull on his Invisibility Cloak before stepping inside. The bells chime softly, and a distant voice calls,
“The shop is closing.”
Harry catches sight of Malfoy tidying up at the left side of the shop. He strides towards him with determination, his neck burning and his heart aflame. Before Malfoy has time to register his presence, Harry is standing right in front of him.
“Potter?”
“Let’s fuck.”
Chapter Text
“I beg your pardon?”
“Let’s fuck,” Harry repeats.
Malfoy’s eyebrows draw together, creasing his forehead. “What is wrong with you?” he asks quietly. It only sharpens Harry’s impatience.
“Oh, plenty of things are wrong with me,” Harry snaps. “So?”
Malfoy presses his lips into a thin line. “Granted. But why, exactly, would I have sex with you?”
“For fuck’s sake. For the same reason you kissed me in that bar. Because you hate me.”
Silence settles between them. Malfoy studies him the way one might observe an unpredictable creature in the wild. His gaze drifts past Harry’s shoulder towards the door, the wide shop windows, then returns to him.
“Come with me.”
It catches Harry off guard. But when Malfoy turns and heads towards the back of the shop, Harry follows without protest.
Despite the warmth indoors, his body trembles in sharp, restless spasms. He curls his hands into fists, shoulders drawn tight around his neck. Once they’re out of sight of the windows, Malfoy exhales slowly and takes a long, deliberate look at Harry’s face.
The expression is serious, clinical almost, like one of the healers who used to examine him, trying to determine what was wrong with his heart.
Malfoy studies him for what feels like a full minute before he finally speaks.
“You’re upset.”
“No shit.”
A presumptuous expression crosses Malfoy’s dimly lit face, as though a deep pride has swelled inside him now that he has finally identified the sickness poisoning his patient.
“So, do you want to fuck to get your mind off how miserable your life is?” he asks.
The question turns over in Harry’s mind once, twice. He hates how accurate it sounds.
“Sure.”
Another silence follows, until Malfoy nods with a wry, almost why not kind of smile.
“Sounds fair,” he says.
Then he closes the distance between them with a single step and kisses Harry. This time, not a flicker of doubt crosses Harry’s mind about whether it is a real kiss or an accident. Malfoy’s tongue finds its way between Harry’s lips, and they taste each other for the first time. There’s no lingering taste of whisky or soy sauce this time.
Only Malfoy.
Draco.
Whoever he is.
Everything feels so different from how it was with Ginny that Harry has the disorienting sense of starting from scratch, as though this were his first kiss, his first real brush with intimacy. The difference in height — his head tilting back instead of bending forward — the difference in strength, in restraint; it feels less like romance and more like a collision.
When Harry threads his fingers into Malfoy’s hair to steady himself, he can’t help but notice the contrast: it's finer, shorter, nothing like Ginny’s.
And yet it feels good. More than good. It is precisely this difference he needs, here and now. Slowly, he gives way to Malfoy. He pushes every thought from his mind, forcing his muscles to loosen, surrendering entirely to the madness of the moment. He returns the kiss with far less innocence and restraint than ever before, matching the rhythm with acute precision.
He does not know how long it lasts in that small, dark room, where the sharp, sour scent of potions finally begins to seep into his senses. All he knows is that he wants more.
He needs more.
He makes it known by deepening the kiss, his movements growing more insistent, punctuated by a low, uncontrolled groan that spills into Malfoy’s mouth.
It works.
Malfoy leads him upstairs.
They are nearly running, as if their time is running out, as if their skin would burn to ashes if they were parted for even a second.
In a room Harry doesn’t spare a moment to observe, their mouths clash, never breaking contact, their tongues tangling as their fingers work blindly to strip each other bare. When the last layers of their clothes lie heaped at their feet, Malfoy steps back, tugging Harry by the arm and pulling him down as they fall onto a bed that cushions them with a faint bounce.
Every particle of air around him smells good — the scent at Malfoy’s neck, which he explores as intently with his mouth, the fresh linen whose softness brushes against his shins and hands. He can feel himself tensing, throbbing, all his rage transmuting into thrust as Malfoy slips his fingers into his hair and grips him firmly, pulling him forward, deeper into the hollow of that neck he now craves to bite. He does, only to almost instantly lick it, as if to heal a wound that stirs nothing but a moan from its victim.
Then he goes down, and down, his mouth tracing the hollow lines of Malfoy’s chest, until his lips come across slight embossings that make him finally pull his head up, just enough to catch Malfoy’s gaze, then, as his glance drops, a web of thin scars.
He barely has time to react when Malfoy says defensively,
“Don’t you dare apologise.”
Harry looks back up at Malfoy’s face, which is now shadowed by a frown.
“What?”
“I saw that look on your face. Don’t you dare apologise.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You looked like you were.”
“I wasn’t,” Harry retorts.
“You had that stupid face you make when you're feeling guil—”
“Will you just shut up?”
Malfoy does, and for a moment they stare at each other in a strange sort of standoff, the sexual tension suddenly overtaken by something far more prickly.
“And what if I did apologise? What’s so wrong with that?” Harry asks defensively.
“It would mean I’d have to apologise to you in return,” Malfoy says, “and you know there’s nothing I hate more than that.”
“You apologised to Neville. And Luna.”
The mention of their names renders Malfoy mute for a beat. He looks away, his jaw tight. “Yeah. Well. I suppose it’s harder with you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“I see.”
Malfoy’s frown deepens. “Do you actually want me to apologise?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? It wouldn’t hurt, would it?”
“Mmm.” Malfoy seems to be thinking hard, the sort of concentration usually reserved for life-or-death decisions. He clicks his tongue, runs a hand through his tousled hair, and mutters, “Maybe I will, one day. When I’m ready.”
Harry lets out a brief scoff. “Take your time. You know where to find me.”
A moment passes in complete silence. Malfoy is propped up on his elbows; Harry is still straddling him, though he no longer has any clear idea where this is going.
Eventually, Malfoy asks with raised eyebrows and clear impatience, “So, are we fucking or what?”
Harry feels his heart racing, but it isn’t excitement. This interlude has completely thrown him; his rage has thinned into numbness, guttering out like the stub of a candle. Suddenly, he feels a sharp prickle of shame at his own exposed flesh, at the sight of Malfoy’s nudity, at the whole situation.
Still, he tries. Slowly, he leans forward, hovering his lips over Malfoy’s, poised to kiss him. He keeps his eyes shut to dull the embarrassment, trying to dig even a spark of desire from the pit of his stomach. Their lips meet with an almost ironic prudishness, nothing more than a shy peck. It is terribly, painfully awkward.
The sheer dissatisfaction of it makes Harry cringe at the thought of everything that led them here. He can’t. He can’t have sex with a man, he can’t have sex with Draco Malfoy.
As he swings his leg over Malfoy to slip off the side of the bed, fumbling to cover himself with a corner of the blanket, Malfoy throws him a baffled look but stays silent.
“I don’t think I can,” Harry says bashfully, his eyes searching for anything to focus on other than Malfoy’s still-exposed body. He hears Malfoy sigh, then the shift of the mattress as Malfoy straightens into a sitting position.
“Well, that was underwhelming,” Malfoy says.
Harry screws his eyes shut in a desperate attempt to erase himself from existence. He feels wretched. Perhaps some potions could reignite the state they were in the day before, that numb, fever-dreamed exaltation. He finds himself suggesting this to Malfoy, only for Malfoy to dismiss it instantly.
“Not two days in a row. That’s dangerous.”
Since when do they care about danger? Harry doesn’t insist.
“Some Firewhisky, then...?” he asks regardless.
“Are you really that repulsed by me?”
“What? No—”
Harry is lost. He waits for a moment, hoping his brain will miraculously manage to sort out his jumbled thoughts.
Instead, it comes out of the blue. No warning, no signs, no reason. Just a slight tightening of the throat before Harry feels tears stinging his eyes. Never in his entire life has this happened so suddenly, without any time to bottle up his feelings or at least hide away from peering eyes. The fact that his emotions have decided to explode in front of Malfoy is a clear sign of just how cruel life can be to him.
“Blimey, what the hell?” Malfoy exclaims with the same outrage he’d shown when Harry fainted in his shop. “Why on earth are you crying in my bed?”
Perhaps out of pure instinct, Harry attempts to hide his face in his hands, even though it’s far too late for that. With his knees drawn up against his chest, his shoulders begin to shake with every sob.
“Don’t you think I should be the one feeling miserable right now?” he hears Malfoy say.
“Piss off. You’re not the only one with problems.”
“Right…” Malfoy mumbles. “But you are aware that I’m hardly the right person to cheer you up or offer you a shoulder to cry on, aren’t you?”
Harry exhales sharply and wipes his nose with his forearm. “No shit.”
He cannot tell how much time passes as they sit on opposite sides of the bed, waiting in a silence broken only by Harry’s occasional sniffles and shaky sighs. Once his vision finally clears, he wraps his arms around his legs, rests his chin against his knees, and slowly takes in his surroundings. The room isn’t large; there’s just enough space for the bed, a wooden desk cluttered with stacks of books and parchment, and a trunk tucked between a wardrobe and the narrow window. It is hard to imagine Malfoy making do with so little after a lifetime in a sprawling manor. The question of why he chose to live here instead of with his parents surfaces once again, though Harry can’t quite bring himself to care for now.
“I feel so lonely,” he admits at last, and before Malfoy can retort, he adds, “I know you don’t believe me, but I am. And I’ve never felt so lost and so… useless.”
The room stays silent at this confession. Somehow, it pushes him to open up further.
“I had a row with George yesterday.”
“The twin?”
“Yes.”
A silence, then, “Why?”
Why? Good question. Harry sniffles.
“I’m not sure. It’s just become so bloody difficult to communicate. I have this constant feeling that no one understands me anymore, and as a matter of fact, I don’t understand myself either. I know my friends just want what’s best for me, and I’m sure they care, but… they just don’t get it right. Not that I can blame them; it’s not as if I tell them anything anyway. They must think my life has improved massively since the war ended, and it has. I’m not saying it was better when Voldemort was trying to kill me every other day, but… I don’t know what to do, you know? I haven’t a clue how to live my life, or how to be happy. I spend my days watching the others building their families and their careers, following a routine that drives me insane just thinking about it.” He pauses to wipe his nose. “But the worst of it is that I feel guilty for complaining. I suppose I should be grateful to be alive, and for life to have become so boring and repetitive, because it means we’re at peace. We’re safe. And I feel so wretched for not becoming the man I ‘should’ have become.”
“What man do you think you were supposed to become, exactly?”
Harry turns his gaze to Malfoy. For a moment, he had forgotten he wasn’t talking to himself.
“Some war hero. Successful. Probably married by now.”
The grimace on Malfoy’s face almost makes him smile. “I don’t know who expected that of you, but if it's any comfort, I was absolutely envisioning you as the loser you are today.”
This time, Harry can’t hold back the smile.
“That’s not what you said at the Chinese restaurant, though,” Harry says.
“Do you remember everything I say?”
“Maybe.”
Surprisingly, Malfoy returns the smile before scooting closer to Harry, finally covering his own lower body with the same corner of the blanket. Their proximity sends shivers down Harry’s spine, but he doesn’t budge.
“Look. Life sucks. That’s a fact,” Malfoy says, staring Harry straight in the eye. “With or without You-Know-Who, with or without peace. We’re all struggling in some way; it’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others.” He shrugs with a curt nod. “And yes, we’re all useless. You included. It isn’t about finding some grand purpose in life — it’s simply about filling your days with things that keep you busy enough to stop you thinking about how useless you are, but also make you at least a little happy.”
He pulls away, leaning one shoulder against the wall.
“Is that what you do?” Harry asks.
“I try.”
“And what makes you happy?”
“I don’t know, making fun of you, for a start,” Malfoy says, his insolent smirk deepening at Harry’s scowl. “Otherwise... learning, making potions, reading. A bit of sex from time to time doesn’t hurt, either.”
“So you’ve done it before?” Harry asks, his eyes darting up and down their bare bodies.
“Done what? Sharing my bed with a naked, whimpering baby who coerced me into listening to his trivial life struggles without my consent? No, never.”
“I meant sex with a man.”
“Ah. Yes, of course I have,” Malfoy says, as if it’s obvious. “What about you? Did you give it a go with all the red-haired brothers, or did you just settle for the girl?”
“Ew, what? No!”
“What, not even with the King Weasel?”
The sudden image of Ron kissing him invades his imagination, and he can’t tell whether it makes him want to laugh or be sick.
“How could you even suggest that? You’re disgusting,” he says with a grimace, and Malfoy nods.
“Ah. So we can finally agree on something. Weasel is ugly.”
“No, he’s not!” He gives Malfoy’s shoulder a punch. “It’s just that I see him like a brother.”
“And that will always fascinate me — how you chose, of your own free will, to make your family traumas even worse.”
“You’re such an arse.”
“Thank you.”
Harry sighs and rolls his head against the wall to look at Malfoy. “Have you always known you were into men?”
“It’s not about being into men or women,” Malfoy says. “But if you want to know when I started sleeping with men, my first time was in France, last year. Fun fact: it was only afterwards that I painfully realised he looked somewhat like you.”
“Oh wow. Scarred forehead and glasses?”
“Thank God, no. Just black hair and a stupid face.”
“I see. Do you have a thing for ugly men, or do you just happen to enjoy fucking the things you hate?”
“Both, I fear.”
Their chuckles mingle.
For reasons he can’t quite understand, Harry feels an irresistible urge to kiss him again. It is strange how the lines of Malfoy’s face can morph in Harry’s perception from despicable to endearing in a split second. So easily, so suddenly. He is like the weather. Unpredictable; rainy in the morning, bathed in sunshine in the afternoon. Had the sun ever shone before, during their teenage years? Had Harry been too blind to see it, or had it simply been obscured by a storm too violent?
“What are you thinking about?” Malfoy asks quietly.
Harry shakes his head. “It’s just strange. How everything can end up so different from how it was before.”
“Right,” Malfoy says flatly. His tone suggests nothing but complete disinterest in whatever self-reflection Harry might be attempting. For a moment they look at each other, their gazes jumping between each other’s eyes. Then, without another word, Malfoy crawls out of bed and proceeds to collect his clothes from the floor, his bare backside unashamedly exposed. He gives his black shirt two sharp shakes before smoothing it down with his hand, then dons it and spends the next minute buttoning it in silence.
“So, when are you planning to be upset again?” Malfoy says upon fastening the last button.
Harry throws him a confused look, but Malfoy doesn’t see it. Still, the silence that follows must have prompted him to clarify: “No, because while I can tolerate a one-time disappointment, you must understand that I’m left wanting rather more. So, when do you intend to make up for the time you stole from me?”
“The time I stole from you—” Harry repeats slowly.
The sheer audacity of it would baffle him if it weren’t coming from Malfoy. Harry gets up in turn and takes his time dressing, adjusting his glasses and making a half-hearted attempt to flatten his hair while checking his reflection in the windowpane. He looks particularly haggard tonight, weighed down by the lingering exhaustion of their drugged adventure the night before.
He turns his attention back to Malfoy. “Well, the person most skilled at upsetting me is none other than you,” he says.
Malfoy scoffs. “True.” He pauses for a second, a sharp glint in his eyes. “Then I shall have to find the best way to ensure that you get very, very upset indeed.”
That night, Harry walks home with no clear idea what Malfoy meant; what he is supposed to expect, or when. He cannot even decide whether it was real or merely another one of Malfoy’s careless provocations, thrown out without intention. In the end, he forces himself not to dwell on it. As the days pass and nothing happens, he eventually relegates it to a mere afterthought.
In contrast, his row with George takes up more of his mind. It seems to have left an open wound in their relationship; George patently shuns him, avoiding him like the plague. There are no more late-night stretches on the living room sofa, no absent-minded conversations in the morning, but instead a bedroom door kept firmly shut. Harry returns each evening to what might as well be an empty flat and leaves each morning with the unsettling sense that he lives alone, that having a roommate was some strange, half-remembered memory from another lifetime.
He nonetheless goes to work with a carefully mustered sense of motivation and good spirits, less out of any real desire to make peace with George than from a need to have nothing else to reproach himself for. He spends the next few mornings hidden away in the shop’s basement, packing and unpacking parcels, signing contracts with the same old “Fred & George Weasley” before heading to the post office. There, he lingers for nearly an hour each day, absently stroking Onyx while the postmistress watches them with thinly veiled insistence.
“She’d be happy with you, you know?” Mrs Berrycloth says at last on a particularly quiet morning.
He hadn’t even heard her approach. Now standing on the other side of the perch, Mrs Berrycloth reaches out to stroke Onyx’s neck, right at the spot she likes best.
“You know, I’ve had quite a few interested buyers for her. Beautiful as she is, it’s no surprise,” Mrs Berrycloth continues, her attention on the owl before shifting back to Harry. “But I’ve kept making excuses, because I firmly believe you ought to be her owner.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Harry says quietly.
“Why not? She likes you very much, I can tell. She’s never as excited as when she sees you.”
The temptation keeps growing, and at this point Harry no longer understands the reason for his stubborn refusal to adopt Onyx. Perhaps it is a form of self-punishment, the belief that he does not deserve her, or perhaps simply the genuine fear of losing her too. What does not belong to him cannot hurt him.
Onyx closes her eyes beneath Mrs Berrycloth’s touch. Her beauty only sharpens Harry’s hesitation. He says he will think about it, earning a look of mild disappointment from Mrs Berrycloth that irritates him more than it should. He leaves the post office telling himself she has no right to be so insistent, that it is almost cruel.
The thought follows him back to the shop, absorbing his attention so completely that George’s voice barely registers at first. It is only when a hand moves sharply in front of his eyes that Harry blinks and finds George staring at him.
“Earth to Harry,” George says lightly.
This attempt at humour comes so abruptly after days of deliberate avoidance that Harry cannot find the right reaction. He offers a mirthless smile and tries, unsuccessfully, to work it into something warmer.
“Right. Sorry.”
George dismisses the apology with a flick of his hand.
A steady stream of customers fills the shop, and only then does Harry notice Lee Jordan at the till. Their gazes meet briefly, just long enough for a polite nod.
“Didn’t know Lee was working with us,” Harry says, but George ignores him.
“Hey. Look, could we talk?”
“You’re the one ignoring me,” Harry points out.
“Right. You’re not exactly making much of an effort either.”
It takes a considerable amount of restraint for Harry not to sigh or roll his eyes at the audacity. Unwilling to fuel this childish exchange of blame, he nevertheless agrees to follow George downstairs. George gives Lee a quick signal before slipping past a group of youngsters entertaining themselves by sampling the display potions. It would normally irritate him, but he says nothing and takes the stairs two at a time, Harry close behind.
The basement is not unlike a maze: a miscellany of boxes, open cartons, samples, broken and half-tested products, all existing in semi-harmony with the empty snack wrappers and bottles Harry never quite gets round to throwing away. Harry would argue it is a very organised mess. Fortunately, George seems to share the same understanding of order.
Perched on the edge of Harry’s desk, George takes a moment before continuing. His hand drifts absently across the clutter until it settles on a crumpled paper ball, which he begins to roll between his fingers.
“Look, I’ve been thinking a lot these past few days,” George finally says, then clears his throat as though even these few words had sucked up all his energy. “I don’t want us to fight. You’re like a brother to me, and I care about you. It’s rubbish that we’ve ended up like this.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for a reaction, but Harry remains silent. “I shouldn’t have interfered in your situation with Ginny. You’re right. It’s none of my business.”
This may be the first time Harry has witnessed George’s vulnerability, the letting go of that infamous ego that never once allowed him or Fred to apologise for anything. The unfamiliarity of it surprises Harry so much that he, in turn, lets his own pride slip.
“Cheers. I suppose I shouldn’t have said those things about Fred and Angelina either.”
“Well, yeah,” George says. “But you weren’t entirely wrong. At least about Fred. It’s just that — I need time.”
“I know.”
The paper ball George had been worrying between his fingers has now turned into a small graveyard of torn white strips, half of them scattered across the floor, the rest crushed and frayed between his fingers. Harry wants to catch George’s attention and show him that he understands, but George won’t tear his eyes away from his hands.
“It’s hard to talk about him,” George murmurs.
“I know,” Harry echoes. “I’m sorry.”
A long silence ensues. There are many things Harry would like to say; about grief, about George himself, yet he can’t bring himself to touch upon the sensitive topic yet again.
At last, George pushes himself up from the edge of the desk and lets the remains of his paper artwork fall onto the surface.
“So… we’re good?”
Harry smiles, this time without having to force it. “Of course.”
George returns a shy smile. For a second, it looks as though he might step forward and attempt something akin to physical affection. But that would be nothing short of a miracle, perhaps even so shocking that Harry would start questioning the real identity of the person in front of him.
Indeed, George doesn’t initiate any hug. Instead, he nudges a box with his foot for no apparent reason and clears his throat.
“I should get back to work. Busy day…” he says.
“Right.”
George heads towards the stairs, then slows halfway up and turns back, one hand still gripping the railing.
“About work,” he says, as if remembering something he had meant to say earlier. “I asked Lee to give me a hand at the shop. He said yes. He’s also agreed to help with the contracts and parcels.”
Harry frowns slightly. “Are you firing me?”
“What? No, of course not.” George looks genuinely startled. “It’s just that I’d understand if you wanted to do something else... It’s not exactly your dream job.”
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I want to quit. I like it here.” Harry gestures vaguely around the cluttered basement. “I want to help you.”
For a moment George simply stares at him, and something unguarded crosses his face. Then a real grin spreads slowly at the corner of his mouth, bright and boyish. He nods several times in quick succession.
“Right,” he says, nodding once. Then again. “Right. That’s… yeah. Great! Brilliant!”
Never would Harry have imagined that his presence at the shop could mean so much. But he finds he likes this enthusiastic version of George. It eases something in him too.
“So…” the old teasing note slips back into George’s voice, “who’s that girl you’re seeing? Is she cute?”
“Um, I thought you needed to get back to work?”
“Come on, just one minute.”
And just like that, Harry finds himself missing when they weren’t talking. He clears his throat to stall for time.
“She’s… quite pretty, yeah, you could say that.”
“Are we ever going to have the pleasure of meeting her?”
“She’s a bit shy.”
“Shy? I didn’t know you had a thing for shy girls,” George says.
“Oh, she’s not shy with me.”
Harry doesn’t even know what he is saying any more, which is his main problem whenever he lies — there seems to be no limit to how far he is willing to sink in his panic.
George throws him an amused smirk that makes everything worse.
“Good for you, mate. You deserve it.”
⋅∘∙☽༓☾∙∘
It happens on a Friday night, two weeks later. Long enough to stop being on guard, almost enough time to relax at the thought that it was just empty words. It is a particularly lively evening at the Leaky Cauldron, bursting with energy, where the clinking of whisky glasses and butterbeer glasses mingles with the sound of boisterous conversation and laughter. In their usual corner by the stairs, Harry clinks his empty pint against the third round his friends have ordered. Hermione keeps offering to join him in ordering a glass of pumpkin juice, which he keeps declining with a terse smile. He would rather drink air than sip juice right now.
An hour ago, Ron announced that George would be joining them in ten minutes. It’s a first, and it makes Harry wonder if this is some kind of resolution George has made after their reconciliation, a way of proving to the world that he’s actually working on moving on and socialising again. And so, for the past fifty minutes, Harry has busied himself with checking the staircase for his arrival, with a strange, almost paternal hope that George will not bail. He seems to be the only one who cares, as Ron eventually asks him,
“Are you waiting for someone?”
Yes. Your own brother, idiot.
“Are you sure George said he’d come?” Harry asks.
“Oh, right—”
Harry doesn’t listen to the rest of Ron’s sentence, as his gaze falls once more on the staircase, or, more precisely, on the person climbing it. It doesn’t even take two seconds for him to understand what is about to happen.
He watches Malfoy walk towards their table, a heavy feeling of sheer helplessness settling in the pit of his stomach, making him want to vomit the lone pint of butterbeer he had hours earlier. He watches the smile spreading across Malfoy’s face, the sceptical expressions forming around the table as they all notice the unsolicited presence looming right behind Hermione and Ron. Harry attempts a subtle, threatening shake of his head, but Malfoy pays him no attention.
Instead, he swivels his malicious gaze around the table like a snake selecting its next meal. Unsurprisingly, Ron volunteers to speak first.
“What do you want, Malfoy?”
“Good evening to you too. I just thought I’d pay a little visit to my dear classmates. We all work and live in the same area, it would be a pity to ignore each other, wouldn’t it?” Malfoy says, nodding at Neville like an old, good friend that he isn’t. Neville blushes but nods back, albeit with much less assurance.
“Fair. How’s your mother?” Ron asks, looking faintly pleased with himself at the jab. Yet Malfoy remains unfazed.
“Thank you for asking. It’s very kind of you to show interest in my family’s well-being. She’s well, actually. And yours? I believe I saw her the other day. Is she expecting yet again, or can she not, for Merlin’s sake, stop eating your father’s food portions?”
“Don’t talk about—”
“Speaking of pregnancy,” Malfoy interrupts, his gaze shifting to Hermione, whose hand has grasped Ron’s arm firmly to hold him back. “Congratulations on yours.”
She releases Ron’s arm, allowing him to stand, though he seems frozen in place. In a low, surprised tone, Hermione asks, “How do you know?” and Draco sniggers.
“Rumours travel fast, as you are well aware. Anyway, poor child, not even born yet and already doomed to have either ugly red hair or cheap broom-bristle hair on its head. And don’t get me started on the personality, with the parents’—”
“Malfoy, stop,” Harry snaps, before his friends can start a fight that would lead nowhere except to being banned from the Leaky Cauldron.
Malfoy finally deigns to look at him.
“Oh, hi, Potter. Good to see you. How are you doing since last time?”
A few “Last time?”s echo around the table, prompting Malfoy to add, “You haven’t told your friends?”
“Told us what?”
Ron has clearly lost what little patience he had left.
“Oh, you haven’t, I see. Potter started buying his potions at my shop. We happen to see each other quite frequently. I could almost say we’ve become good friends, haven’t we?”
Absolutely nothing functions in Harry’s brain any more. No reaction, no words, no comeback. He simply stares at Malfoy, fury building inside him, and that fury spreads an obvious, sadistic satisfaction across that arsehole’s face.
“What are you even talking about?” Ron turns to Harry. “Harry?”
Malfoy has won, and he knows it. All he had to do was throw the match and bask in the self-sustaining wildfire.
“Be serious. Of course it’s not true,” Harry mutters, averting his gaze from any sign of judgement and clinging instead to the only neutral spot he can find: his empty glass.
Unfortunately, it does not shield him from Malfoy’s snide remarks.
“I thought Harry Potter never lied? A myth collapses… I’m almost disappointed.”
“Could you just get the fuck out of here, Malfoy? We’d like to enjoy our evening without your stinking presence.”
“I’m so sorry, Finnigan, but could you for once try to communicate in proper English? I don’t understand a word you’re saying in this accent of yours.”
The tension immediately skyrockets as several wands are pulled out and aimed at Malfoy.
“Alright, we get it. You’ve put on a little show. You can leave now,” Harry snaps, rising in turn.
Their eyes meet and hold, but Harry is too blinded by anger to perceive anything behind Malfoy’s expression besides that irritating smile. He cannot believe Malfoy chose to act in public, let alone involve his friends. He feels betrayed.
For a moment, no one moves. Wands remain raised, and the hum of the pub gradually fades into a strained, watchful silence. Then Malfoy finally gives a slow nod.
“You’re right. I have some business to attend to anyway.”
He throws one last deliberate glance around the table, unbothered by the threatening circle of wands aimed at his face. His gaze stops once more on Harry as he adds, “See you soon, Potter,” before making his way towards the stairwell.
Only when his silhouette has fully vanished and they have all sunk back into their chairs, wands shoved into their cloaks, do the various conversations across the room begin to swell again. At their table, an uncomfortable stillness pervades, as if Malfoy had secretly cast a Stunning Hex. The spots on Ron’s cheeks have deepened significantly, from the pale pink of a few butterbeers to a furious crimson. His leg bounces beneath the table in a steady rhythm that even Hermione’s gentle stroke cannot soothe.
“Ron, don’t give his words too much importance. It’s not worth it,” Hermione says at last, but her words go straight over his head.
“What the hell was that even about? Freaking arsehole.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Harry spots the insistent look Hermione gives him, as though she is trying to read his mind with her genius magical skills.
He spends the next minute shielding himself from the curses and insults his friends spit out about Malfoy. He ignores the questions aimed at him directly, ignores whatever excuses Neville comes up with to justify Harry’s supposed decision to befriend Malfoy. Why is Neville doing this anyway? This only adds to Harry’s frustration.
He has never felt so torn, caught between wanting to apologise for what just unfolded, even though he is not responsible for Malfoy’s words, the rising guilt at the thought of spending time with such an arse, and the terrible realisation that a small part of him — small as it is — wants to laugh.
“Neville, it was already something that you agreed to do business with this piece of shit, but I can’t believe Harry would give him any galleons, or time, or whatev—”
“I have to go.”
“No, Harry! Stop running away like this!” Ron nearly yells as Harry snatches his jacket from the back of his chair.
A few heads turn in their direction. The tiny urge to laugh has vanished from Harry’s throat.
“I do whatever I want, Ron.”
“So he was telling the truth?”
Harry suppresses a sigh. “That’s not what I said.” He tosses a few galleons onto the table for his Butterbeer. “See you later. And sorry for what just happened.”
He can hear Ron arguing, starting to follow him as Harry hurries down the stairs, but Hermione must have stopped him, because Harry reaches the ground floor alone.
Outside, the winter cold slaps Harry in the face, almost harder than the humiliation he has just endured. He squints into the night, where shop windows bleed warm amber light into the thick wool of the fog. Still, he quickly spots Malfoy loitering ahead, hands in his pockets, plainly biding his time. Anger resurges at the sight of such arrogance.
Harry dashes towards him, nearly slipping on the wet cobblestones, and shouts, “Malfoy!”
Without even bothering to stop, Malfoy glances over his shoulder, a well-prepared smirk plastered across his face. His plan worked, obviously.
“Potter,” he greets, with false surprise.
Only when Harry blocks his path does Draco deign to stop. His smile doesn’t budge, prompting Harry to make a menacing move that is immediately misinterpreted. Malfoy chuckles.
“Steady on, Potter. Do you want us to do it right here? In public?”
“Shut up.”
Malfoy obliges, at least for a moment, until Harry’s silence prompts him to open his mouth again.
“So… what are we doing now?” He swivels his gaze left and right. “A little campfire between Quality Quidditch Supplies and the Owl Post Office?”
“Just shut up! I can’t think.”
Two drastically opposite cravings fight for dominance: punching Malfoy straight in the nose — which seems the most reasonable and logical option — and kissing that disgusting smirk away, biting it, sucking it until it deforms unremittingly. As neither option should have an audience, Harry releases a long, shaky exhale. He gauges the situation for a few seconds more, then seizes Malfoy by the sleeve.
“Let’s talk somewhere else.”
As Harry hauls him toward the apothecary, he hears Malfoy repeat, “Talk?” followed by another low chuckle.
He only releases Malfoy upon entering the shop, slamming the door behind them with a violent thud. Malfoy doesn’t flinch. He stands straight and patient, his eyes never wavering from Harry.
“What on earth went through your mind?” Harry says.
“Oh, come now, it was rather fun, don’t you think?” Malfoy says. “I had to stop myself from shoving Weasel’s face into the table when he brought up my mother, but the rest was deeply satisfying.”
“You literally insulted Mrs Weasley.”
“Well, he started it.”
“How old are you?”
Rather than answering, Malfoy bites his lower lip in a wry smile. It is only then that Harry realises how close they are; even in the darkness of the shop, where no candles are lit, he can make out every sharp detail of Malfoy’s face.
“I can’t believe you went to such lengths just tohave sex with me,” Harry mutters. “I’m not sure how to take it.”
Malfoy raises his eyebrows, looking genuinely amused. “Are you being serious? We’re talking about humiliating a Weasley; I’d do that for free.”
“They’re my friends, Malfoy. I won't have you disrespecting them like that.”
“So…” Malfoy steps even closer, “Are you upset, then?”
“Of course I am!”
Malfoy nods. “Good.”
Then he leans forward — just a little, no more than necessary — and kisses Harry ardently, his hand winding around Harry’s neck to hold him captive.
Harry wants to protest, to say he doesn’t want this, but that would only be to convince himself. His back bangs against the wooden door he slammed shut only a minute ago; the brass knob digs into the small of his back with every thrust of Malfoy’s tongue. But before the pressure turns to real pain, Malfoy has already pulled away. They share a single, searing look before Harry’s gaze drops to his own belt being unbuckled.
“What are you doing?” he asks, even though he knows exactly what.
Malfoy doesn’t bother explaining. With a quick, practiced snap, he rids Harry of his trousers and boxers, letting them pool around his calves.
A kind of panic grips Harry, but it is diluted by a curiosity he might describe as unhealthy, or perhaps it is simply excitement; he isn’t sure. All he knows is the white-hot pleasure that floods his veins the moment Malfoy’s mouth closes around him. He cannot tell if the sensation feels so new because he hasn’t had sex in ages, or because Malfoy’s technique is so drastically different from anything he has ever experienced. Malfoy seems to know exactly what to do, exactly where his tongue should slip and wag and thrust, as if he doesn’t just read Harry’s mind, but shares it.
Harry’s breathing shallows, hitching in his lungs in sharp spasms. He feels his knees weakening under the sheer, overwhelming weight of it.
Never before has he felt so many conflicting emotions at once. With his hands pressed against the wood and his lips clamped shut to stifle a moan, his gaze falls on the large window that runs the length of the wall. They are completely exposed. The image of passers-by stopping to peer inside suddenly clouds his thoughts. What if Ron had actually managed to follow him? What if he saw them? Saw exactly what they were doing?
In a normal world, Harry should be ashamed, a kind of shame he would never recover from.
But in a normal world, Harry wouldn't be getting sucked off by Draco Malfoy.
Another thrust.
“Fuck, Draco…”