Harry was told the first rule of the Aurors during his first class in training camp, but he wasn’t really paying attention at the time because the seating was alphabetical. He and Malfoy had taken one horrified look at each other and then spent the entire class almost falling off either side of the desk.
The problem had been solved by mutual and urgent application to the teacher after class, but it hadn’t really been how Harry had pictured his first step on the way to becoming an Auror.
He learned the first rule of the Aurors when he was twenty, in circumstances that also involved Malfoy and a desk.
They’d been partners for two months. It’d been going fairly well, Harry thought. They had a good case record, and Malfoy had some good ideas, and when they forgot to fight Malfoy was even almost all right to talk to.
He was rubbing his eyes and trying to finish a report when Malfoy burst through the double doors and bore down on him incandescent with fury, like an enraged light bulb.
“What,” he snapped, “the hell is wrong with you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Harry snapped back instinctively, and then added: “I think you left a dent in the walls.”
Malfoy went in for gestures like that. It was kind of a pity they hadn’t had a drama club at school. Harry thought it would’ve helped Malfoy to have an opportunity to vent.
“I don’t care about the walls,” Malfoy said. “Now I’m going to recite a few words for you. Stop me if they begin to form a familiar pattern. Ravening ghouls. Graveyard on fire. Last night—”
Yes, Harry thought. Drama club would’ve done him a world of good.
“Oh, that,” he said. “Yeah. What’s your point?”
Malfoy looked like he was about to punch Harry, so Harry dropped his quill and clenched his fist so he’d be ready to punch him back. “My point is,” Malfoy said between his teeth. “Where was I?”
“I don’t know, in bed?” Harry said. “It was pretty late.”
Malfoy looked at Harry down his nose. Since Harry was sitting down and Malfoy had perfected the art of looking down his nose at people when he was eleven and shorter than the entire world, it was pretty effective.
“Look,” Harry said. “We weren’t on the clock. It was kind of a hunch. I get those.”
“I know that,” Malfoy said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve gone with you.”
“Listen,” Harry said. “All my partners so far, we’ve had an understanding. I can follow hunches to whatever—” usually violent and messy—“conclusion they reach, as long as I don’t drag them into the whole mess. That works for me. I don’t really have time to stand around explaining situations to people who’ll just tell me I’m crazy and refuse to go and report me to Shacklebolt. I do best on my own.”
Malfoy’s eyes narrowed. “Not any more you don’t.”
It sounded more like Malfoy was threatening Harry’s life than offering to defend it, so Harry glared back at him and said nothing.
“Now, Potter,” Malfoy spat. “You look, and you listen. I don’t like you and I don’t like this stupid job, but I’m going to get it right and you’re not going to mess it up for me. The first rule of the Aurors is No man alone. It’s on a sign. Right above the no-smoking sign in Shacklebolt’s office. Which means you have to learn to read, and also that I’m going to be along every time you have one of your stupid hunches, watching your stupid back!”
Malfoy gave him a crazed and somehow resentful look, as if Harry had just won the Quidditch Cup again instead of staying up all night fighting horrible ghouls.
“Fine,” Harry bit out. “You can come along and almost get killed. I’m sure you’ll really enjoy it.”
“I’m not scared!”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Who said you were? I get it. You can come along. I won’t take up smoking. Did you have anything else to say?”
“Not really,” Malfoy said in a suddenly calm voice, and he reached down and snapped a handcuff around Harry’s left wrist.
“Hey!” Harry exclaimed, outraged. “What are you—”
He cut himself off because at that point he looked up at Malfoy and became distracted. Malfoy had leaned close to get the handcuff on him, his lashes were lowered and his face intent, and Harry had a sudden flash of memory of himself back in the Black house, back in the war days, looking for Zacharias and finding Malfoy.
For some ridiculous reason he became very aware that Malfoy’s jumper was blue.
Harry seldom gave much thought to which way people tended: it was their own business unless they made it his business too, and he realised he really had no idea about Malfoy. On one hand, there was the drama club vibe, and on the other hand, there was the evidence of Pansy Parkinson. He was pretty sure they’d been an item in school.
Of course, so had he and Ginny. Malfoy had snogged a drag queen at that club once, too, but that had been part of Malfoy’s plan and resulted in a drug bust. He’d whistled at Katie Bell once, but Shacklebolt had reprimanded him so severely for inappropriate behaviour in the workplace that Malfoy’d spent the rest of the day whistling at everyone who went by. Especially Shacklebolt.
Harry had no idea, but they were alone and Malfoy’d suddenly whipped out handcuffs of all things, and turning him down was going to be hugely, enormously awkward—
Of course, Harry thought slowly, he could—not turn him down.
It was a mad thought, because really, they worked together and Malfoy was a twerp, the consequences would be terrible, but Harry had never really cared all that much about consequences. Right now, what he cared about was the sudden difficulty he had just breathing and waiting to see what Malfoy would do next.
Malfoy passed the links of the handcuffs between the wooden latticework partition that separated their desks, then leaned closer to Harry. For a moment he was very close. Harry sat and stared at the intent gleam of his grey eyes, the bridge of his sharp nose.
Then he snapped the other cuff around Harry’s right wrist and stepped back.
“Ha,” he announced, his voice tentatively gloating.
Harry tried to stand up. The handcuffs held him where he was.
“Malfoy,” he growled, all trace of any—thoughts gone with a rush of familiar fury. “What d’you think you’re trying to pull?”
“Well, it’s like this,” Malfoy explained to him, obviously getting more comfortable with the whole gloating thing. “I noticed something while I was in our idiots in training camp. Gryffindors don’t listen. They really don’t. They do much better with practical demonstrations, so I thought I’d provide one.” He grinned like a wolf. “You don’t leave your partner behind. Without your partner, you are chained to your desk.” He paused for effect, and then added sweetly: “You don’t need to thank me.”
“Thank you?” Harry exclaimed. “I am going to kill you! Uncuff me right now!”
Malfoy laid down the syllable with the transparent glee of someone laying down an ace. “No.”
Harry wrenched at the cuffs and felt something like an electric shock bite around his wrists.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Malfoy warned him. “They’re enchanted. I saw them in a—movie—” he pronounced the word carefully—“about Muggle Aurors that I went to. Then I got some and I made them better. It took ages,” he added with pride. “They’re brilliant, aren’t they?”
Harry spoke quietly and clearly, so even the insane could understand him. “I am going to hex you until your eyes fall out of your head and into your lap.”
“I’ll let you out in the morning once you’ve learned your lesson,” Malfoy promised.
“I’m going to punch you in the morning.”
“Yes,” Malfoy said, viewing him with immense amusement. “I thought you might. But this is all kinds of worth it.”
“Malfoy, what if I need to go to the bathroom?”
Malfoy shrugged. “I guess you should’ve gone before I chained you up.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense!” Harry exploded. “You don’t make any sense!”
“Hmm. I’m going to go now,” Malfoy told him. “See you in the morning.”
“Uncuff me right now or I’ll make you regret it! I damn well will go places without you. I’ll go everywhere without you, I won’t even let you in the car, if you don’t uncuff me right this minute.”
Malfoy’s amusement faded and his eyes narrowed again, until they looked like chips of ice. “Don’t push me, Potter,” he warned, and fished around in his jeans. He tossed a small, gleaming key up into the air, and caught it with his other hand. “Or I swear I’ll swallow it.”
Harry wrenched at the cuffs again and again the electric shock bit at his wrists. He felt trapped and extremely stupid and entirely furious. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking. Malfoy was unbearable and in the morning he was going to kill him, no jury in the world would convict him, and he’d have a new partner. Any partner would be better.
“This is for your own good,” Malfoy added in a sanctimonious tone, his eyes dancing with glee once more. “We’re learning and growing together.”
“I’m chained up and you’re full of it,” Harry snapped. “You’re enjoying this.”
“Well,” Malfoy said, and burst out laughing. “Yeah, I really am. Sometimes working can be fun!”
Harry snarled another threat to Malfoy’s life. Malfoy was still laughing as he went out the door, throwing a glance and a wink over his shoulder.
Harry spent the night picturing a bloody and vivid revenge, getting cold and getting cramp and getting steadily more furious. Malfoy came in early enough that even the cleaning staff didn’t see Harry cuffed to his desk, and let him go. Harry, just as he’d promised, hit Malfoy in the face.
Malfoy was a crazy person who handcuffed people to desks, but he wasn’t wrong. Harry remembered what he’d said, tried to keep to it, ended up finding comfort in it.
No man alone. You don’t leave your partner behind.
“If you are here for sex, go away!” Harry said, and slammed the door.
He’d been opening the door on the chain since an unfortunate incident with the milkman, and now that he’d opened the door a fraction and seen Dean Thomas’ face in the chink he was even more aware that this was a wise precaution.
It was very late, and he just wanted everyone in the world to go away so he could try to deal with things. Malfoy, getting married. It wouldn’t be so different. He already lived with Katie, already loved her: it didn’t matter, not really. It wouldn’t change anything.
He heard Dean Thomas snort from behind the door.
“You’re such a tool, Harry. I swear to God.”
This did not exactly strike Harry as the language of love.
“What?”
“Let me in,” Dean said. “Look, I think I need your help. Open the door.” He paused, and then added in a voice that was cringing away from the words it had to use: “I won’t—leap at you. I’ve got peppermint.”
“You’d better have peppermint,” Harry told him. “Because I’ll kill you if you try anything.”
He unchained the door and opened it. Outside, Dean Thomas stood. He looked cross and embarrassed, he wasn’t looking at Harry, and he had a black eye and a bloody nose.
“What happened to you?”
“Oh, this?” Dean asked. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m not sure if I was right to come here,” he said abruptly. “I mean, it’s not like you give a toss about anyone outside your special little circle.”
“I did save the world that one time,” Harry pointed out coldly.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Dean said. “I mean, obviously you care about other people’s lives, it’s just other people’s feelings you don’t notice—”
“Look, I’m sorry about Ginny, but that was a long time ago and—”
“Who’s talking about Ginny?” Dean snapped, starting at the name. “I’m talking about Malfoy. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but normal people don’t chuck partners who’ve helped them get from the bottom to the top without so much as a word of warning, and then expect to pick them up again whenever they feel like it.”
“That’s not how it was,” Harry snarled.
“That’s how it looked,” Dean snarled back. “You know, before I was assigned Louison, I told Malfoy I’d be happy to have him for a partner.”
Harry went still and looked at this partner-poaching menace with sudden cold rage. He was glad he’d kissed Ginny in front of him, he thought. If it wasn’t for the fact that every Weasley including Ginny would kill him if he tried, he’d do it again.
“Did you,” he said. There were no sibilants to hiss in those two words, but he gave it his best shot.
“We get on well and I can cope with him when he gets weird. Sort of. I thought it’d be for the best. But he said no. Don’t ask me why, but he likes you. That’s why I came.”
“And why did you come?”
“Because Malfoy’s tearing up the Auror headquarters and I don’t know what to do!” Dean burst out.
“He’s what? Explain,” Harry ordered. “Quickly.”
“I was in after hours doing a report I should’ve finished weeks ago, and he came in and started smashing things,” Dean said in an exaggeratedly slow voice. “There were desks and plants and giant peppermints flying around. When I asked him what was wrong, he threw a chair at me. He’s gone crazy and he’s going to get fired. Do you know what’s wrong with him? Can you do anything to stop him?”
“I can Stun him if I have to,” Harry said. “Get out of my way.”
He strode back into the room and snatched up his wand, which was lying on the table. Dean followed him inside.
“Do you know what happened?” he pursued.
“He was proposing to Katie Bell tonight,” Harry said tersely, the wand locked in his fingers. “But I don’t understand why that would—she’s crazy about him—”
“Is she?” Dean asked. “I’m not so sure about that. He’s crazy about her.”
Harry could barely hold onto his wand and he certainly couldn’t think. He’d never really thought about it from Katie’s point of view, he’d just assumed that she wasn’t completely stupid and knew what she had, and he didn’t have time to think about it now.
“Do you think we should—” Dean began, but Harry cut him off.
“He’s my partner,” he said, and this time he did hiss the words, the sound heavy and curling around his tongue. “Leave him to me.”
He Disapparated with a crack and appeared in the Auror headquarters in time to dodge an oncoming filing cabinet. He dropped and rolled, the cabinet hit the wall with a crash, and the next minute he was on his feet and staring at Malfoy.
Malfoy’s face was grazed in several places, possibly by flying shards of glass and possibly by flying shards of peppermint. His hair was wild and there was something distinctly frightening about his eyes.
He said: “So Thomas went running to fetch you, did he?”
Malfoy had his wand out and was standing in the middle of a storm. Even as he spoke, there were pieces of furniture flying through the air, hitting one wall and then picking themselves up and hurling themselves against the next wall, as if they were on a furniture suicide mission and would keep on doing it until they were battered into dust and fragments.
Harry raised his own wand and deflected lamps and chairs to get to the moving eye of the storm, where Malfoy was. Malfoy shied away and Harry kept coming.
“What happened?” Harry shouted over the sound of the furniture whirlwind.
“What do you care?” Malfoy shouted back. “Go away!”
“I care,” Harry said. “Tell me.”
Malfoy gestured with his wand and a desk crashed through a window. Glass exploded outside and a faint crash was heard from the street: he took a deep breath and said in a fraught voice: “I—asked Katie.”
“Okay,” Harry said.
“I thought,” Malfoy said and swallowed painfully, as if the broken glass was in his mouth. “I thought I should tell her—I’ve never told her—about the necklace. That I was sorry it hurt her. How much I—how much I loved her for forgiving me. I thought I should tell her.” He laughed suddenly, as if he was choking on the broken glass and trying to spit it back up. “Turns out she didn’t know.”
“Oh Christ,” said Harry.
“Telling your girlfriend you almost killed her is not a good way to start out a proposal,” Malfoy informed him. “It’s also not a good idea to go on with the proposal afterwards. I said to her, I nearly killed you, I didn’t mean to, I meant to kill someone else. Then I said, no wait, I’m sorry, that came out wrong, I love you, marry me.” He stopped and laughed that terrible laugh again. “It didn’t go well.”
“I’ve gathered that,” Harry said.
A potted plant hit the door of Shacklebolt’s office, and fell with a sad slithering sound. Harry thought it was dead.
“She doesn’t want to marry me,” Malfoy said. “She wants to break up.”
“She’s just—she’s just a bit shocked,” Harry told him. “She’ll change her mind. And—even if she doesn’t, Malfoy, it’s not the end of the world.”
A desk almost hit him in the face. He threw himself down, the mass of wood flying over his head and ruffling his hair, and hit the floor behind him with a crash of splintering wood.
He looked up. Malfoy stood above him, looking as if he wanted to cry or murder someone.
“Yes it is!” he shouted. “Yes, it is. For me it is. I—you don’t get it, do you?”
Harry climbed to his feet and shoved Malfoy in the chest. Malfoy stumbled back and then caught himself. “Tell me, then!” Harry said. “That’s what I keep saying! Tell me.”
“I,” Malfoy said, his voice trembling and raging. “My dad. I always tried, I tried to be like he wanted me to be and I could never manage it. I always failed. And then—I couldn’t kill Dumbledore and he was in Azkaban and—Mother died and it was all because of me, it was because I failed.”
He clawed through his own hair: there was a streak of blood in the blond strands.
“Only Katie was so good to me when Mother died, she was so good, and I thought—I thought maybe it was all right that I’d failed. Because people like Katie shouldn’t be killed. Dad was wrong, I was wrong, but I could make up for it. I could be like Katie wanted me to be and she’d love me and that would make everything right, I wouldn’t have failed after all, but if I did, if I failed again, then what good is anything?”
He looked at Harry. He looked bleak and fierce and young.
“If I’m not what she wants,” he said. “Then I’m still that stupid sixteen year old kid who tried to kill Dumbledore and got my parents killed instead. So tell me again that this isn’t the end of the world.”
“It’s not,” Harry said. “You’re still you.”
“I know I am!” Malfoy almost howled at him. “That’s the whole problem. I’m not, I’m never good enough and now there’s nothing left!”
“There is,” Harry told him. “There’s me.”
Malfoy stared at him, caught in a moment of stillness, as if Malfoy was a bird and Harry’d just shot him and this was the moment before Malfoy fell.
Malfoy did fall. He collapsed onto the broken heap of desk as if his legs couldn’t hold him anymore, his clenched fist pressed against his forehead, his arm hiding his eyes. It took Harry a moment to realise that he was laughing again, that spitting up glass laugh, though this time it was quiet.
“How can you,” Malfoy said at last in a torn sort of voice. “How can you just say things like that? How can you be that sure?”
“I don’t,” Harry said. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m sure about some things.”
The Aurors’ headquarters was still now, even if it was all broken. Harry wasn’t sure what he had said, but it seemed to have worked. Malfoy was just sitting there, hunched over himself. His shoulders weren’t shaking, but Harry knew that it was only because he was pulled together so tightly.
Harry knelt by the broken desk, reached out and took hold of Malfoy’s wrist. Malfoy’s hand was still clenched around his wand.
“C’mon,” he said gruffly. “Come back to my place. You can get some sleep, and in the morning you can get her back.”
“In the morning,” Malfoy echoed. “Right.”
He got a hand under Malfoy’s elbow and helped him up. There was a deep gash scored right beside Malfoy’s eye: he reached up and touched it before he thought.
“Don’t do that again,” he commanded softly. “You could’ve really hurt yourself.”
Most of Malfoy seemed lost in misery, but for a moment a bit of him surfaced from misery and looked slightly startled. “Right,” he said again, sounding uncertain, and then glanced around the room. “Hurt, I hardly think so,” he scoffed. “I can take any room. I beat this one to a pulp.”
It wasn’t one of his best efforts, but Harry smiled and relief eased his shoulders down a little.
“Yes, you certainly showed it. Let’s—”
“We’re making a stop,” Malfoy said.
Malfoy insisted that they go to a grocery shop and he bought a bottle of vodka, thin hands trembling in the fluorescent lights.
“I’m sorry to say that I can’t offer you any, Potter,” he said once they were out in the night, unscrewing the red cap of the bottle. “I need it. If you wanted some, you should’ve got your own.”
He tipped the bottle up, his mouth wrapped around the glass neck, and Harry watched the clear liquid swirl away under glass and shadow.
“Quite a week we’ve had,” Malfoy said between swallows. Harry shrugged.
Malfoy was quite clearly using the alcohol as a tranquiliser for himself, so he didn’t collapse and betray anything else or do something other wild thing like destroying their headquarters but worse. He drank deliberately and methodically, his shoulders still taut with the effort of not shaking, and Harry hated it.
He didn’t want Malfoy to have Katie back, not at all, but suddenly in the cold of night and with Malfoy’s pale closed-up face before him, he did. If Malfoy was going to look like this—like a house that had been condemned and was being torn down, then she had to come back.
He’d torn down Number Twelve Grimmauld Place after the war was over and the Order didn’t need it anymore. The line of Malfoy’s shoulders now made him think of his last sight of that house.
He took Malfoy home. Malfoy sat on the edge of his sofa and kept grimly drinking until he more or less passed out and then Harry put him to bed.
After he’d done that he Apparated back to the headquarters and found Dean Thomas already tidying up.
Dean nodded at him. “I see you got him calmed down, then.”
“Sort of,” Harry said.
He started tidying alongside Dean in silence. Dean didn’t ask questions. He’d always been quiet, Harry remembered: quiet, artistic, a good solid guy. He’d talked Seamus down in fifth year. Harry remembered him crushing a glass in his fist when he saw Ginny and Harry together and he couldn’t remember why he’d smiled: it all seemed impossible and faraway. He’d been sixteen and thoughtless and riding on adrenaline and thinking of sunny days, triumph, a lot of things beside the people Ginny and Dean actually were and what they might feel.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t’ve smiled. I mean, back then. I just—I wasn’t thinking.”
Dean straightened up from trying to fix a desk.
“Oh,” he said, and then smiled. “That’s okay.”
They didn’t talk any more after that. Harry kept thinking of Malfoy’s wild, desperate face. He didn’t know what Dean was thinking about, though at one point he gave Harry an apologetic look, stepped over the carnage of what had been a filing cabinet and picked some pieces of peppermint up from the floor. He put them in his mouth.
“Um,” Harry said.
“You can’t find it any weirder than I do,” Dean muttered.
Harry raised an eyebrow. “Want to bet?”
He got home at about six and kipped on the sofa for a couple of hours. Then he woke to a rainy Saturday morning, made a cup of coffee and went into his room.
The heap of the covers on the bed emitted a terrible sound, like an ostrich with its head in the sand and in its death agonies.
“Is that coffee?” Malfoy asked hollowly. “Give it to me.”
Harry leaned over the bed and offered the cup cautiously: the fact Malfoy had said that in no way proved he was actually awake, it just proved he was alive. However after a minute, Malfoy struggled out of the covers, hair ruffled and static and bright in the morning light. He looked kind of grey.
“Where am I?” he said, and then frowned up at Harry and the ceiling. “Oh, I’m in your bed,” he announced in tones of revelation. “Huh. I’m the envy of thousands of women,” he added, sounding mildly pleased. He snagged the coffee cup, caught Harry’s frown and continued consolingly: “Several men also, I’m sure.”
“Oh thanks,” said Harry.
Malfoy tipped back his coffee. “Why did you let me drink so much?” he asked once it was all gone, sounding considerably less lost and confused. “How am I going to win Katie back feeling like someone hit a Bludger into the back of my head and then it came out of my face?”
“How d’you think I should have stopped you?”
“Fair point,” Malfoy allowed. “All right. I’m going to borrow some clothes I haven’t slept in, and then we’re going to go to Katie’s and pretend we’re there to move my stuff out. And you’re not going to let me say anything stupid, and I’m going to—”
He shook his head and climbed out of bed.
“What?” Harry asked. “What are you going to do?”
Malfoy looked over his shoulder at Harry and Harry saw he’d been wrong after all: Malfoy did still look lost. “Beg,” Malfoy said. “Plead. I don’t know. What does it matter, as long as it works?”
It was raining by the time they arrived at the building where Katie and Malfoy lived. Malfoy pressed the buzzer as if he hadn’t been endlessly puzzled by it three years ago.
“Katie,” he said, his voice changing as it always did when he spoke to her, all the sharp edges smoothed away. “Can I come in? Potter’s with me,” he added. “I’ve come to get my stuff.”
She met them at the door. Her braid was messy and she’d been crying, Harry noticed, but all the furniture in the flat was intact.
“Hi,” she said quietly. “Look, Draco, you don’t have to move out—it’s your flat—”
Malfoy’s eyebrows drew together, a faint line appearing between them. “It’s yours,” he said. “I bought it for you.”
“You can’t just give me a flat,” Katie told him.
“I can,” Malfoy said. “I don’t want it: I hate it. It’s yours.”
“You hate it,” Katie repeated, and then she took a deep breath. “See, Draco. That’s what I was talking about.”
“I think I’ll go pack up stuff in the bedroom,” Harry said, brandishing a cardboard box as evidence of their good intentions.
He didn’t want to: he didn’t want to leave Malfoy there in the hall, looking like a soldier going into battle and scared stiff about it, didn’t want to leave her to hurt him again, but this was obviously a private moment and Harry couldn’t insist on hanging around every time Malfoy and Katie were alone together.
He walked into the bedroom, which he noted was cream-coloured with pale roses on the bedcovers. He’d never really thought about it much, but it didn’t look like Malfoy lived here.
Those were his clothes in the wardrobe though, and Harry began piling them haphazardly into the box as he tried to listen and wondered how he was supposed to stop Malfoy saying something stupid.
“Do you not like the flat?” Malfoy was saying. “If you don’t like it, we can move.”
“I do like the flat and I want you to stop it,” Katie told him. It sounded like she was fighting back tears already. “We’re not—we’re not moving anywhere. We’re not doing anything. We can’t. I don’t want to.”
“Okay,” Malfoy said, sounding strained. “Okay. I realise that I—that last night didn’t go well. Pretend I didn’t say anything. You must have known about—what I was talking about last night—you knew I was trying to kill Dumbledore. You can’t have thought there were two killers wandering the school. I mean, that’d be a bit much, even for our school.”
“No,” Katie said. “No, I knew. I suppose I knew. I just didn’t—I never wanted to talk about it. You can’t—you can’t just say things like that, Draco, not just before you propose. That’s crazy.”
“All right,” Malfoy said after a pause. “I won’t do it again.”
Katie took a deep, shaky breath. “I know you won’t.”
Malfoy took a deep breath too, as if he was copying her. “I’ll say anything you want me to say,” he said. “You just need to tell me. I can do this—”
“No!” Katie screamed.
Harry had never heard her scream before.
“No,” she said, in her usual soft voice. “Draco, no. Just—just stop. It’s my fault—I—a lot of girls think about something like this, about a guy coming to her and loving her more than anything, loving her like mad and doing everything to please her. I thought about it. I thought that was something I wanted, but Draco, it’s not. It’s too much pressure. It’s all too much.”
“All right,” Malfoy began again, but she kept talking and he stopped.
“I don’t want this,” said Katie. “I don’t want to be living in some—epic romance or tragedy. I don’t like it, I was stupid, what I want is—is some guy who’ll ask me out for a drink and not ask me for the rest of my life, someone who’ll like me and then maybe love me after a bit and never scare me with it and never—I don’t want to feel like avalanches could happen any minute. I’m—I’m tired of it. I want it to stop.”
“I can stop,” Malfoy told her, with a tone in his voice that said an avalanche could happen. “I will. I’ll do anything you want.”
“I don’t want you to do anything I want!” Katie snapped. “And—and you won’t, anyway. I asked you last Christmas when you almost died. I said that I admired the Aurors but if we were going to be serious I’d prefer it if you found a less dangerous line of work. I asked you to quit. And I know you won’t quit.”
“I can’t quit,” Malfoy said savagely. “He’ll die.”
Harry stopped throwing clothes into the box and just started listening shamelessly.
“He’s grown up,” Katie said, her voice shaking. “He’s perfectly able to take care of himself.”
“He isn’t,” Malfoy growled. “He’ll go off and he won’t have a plan and he’ll do some big hero thing and his luck will run out and nobody will have his back and he’ll die, and anyway, I have to be an Auror, I have to—”
“It’s fine,” Katie said. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t—it wouldn’t matter if you quit.”
“Okay,” Malfoy said, apparently recovering his calm. “Okay, good. Thank you. I’m sorry you’ve felt—pressured or whatever,” he said, pronouncing each word as if he was talking a foreign language. “We’ll—we can take it easy. I’ll move out for a while if that makes you happier. We love each other and we can work this out.”
There was a long pause. Harry could picture Malfoy’s face, and was trying not to.
“Draco,” Katie said in a whisper. “I don’t love you.”
”…Oh,” said Malfoy quietly, as if someone had stabbed him. There was another long pause and then he spoke again, and he still sounded like someone had stabbed him. “That’s—strange,” he said with difficulty. “Since you said that you did.”
“I mean—” Katie said, and the words tumbled out of her, words falling all over each other, not that any words were ever going to be enough. “I mean, I do love you, of course I do, but I’m not—I’m not in love with you. I thought, I thought I could be, and you were always there and you were good to me and you asked me if I did. Draco, you asked me, and I couldn’t say I didn’t.”
“Why not?” Malfoy demanded. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. Why would you say something like that, if you didn’t mean it? I don’t understand—”
“I don’t understand you either,” Katie said in a low voice. “I don’t think we ever understood each other very well.”
“I see.”
“Draco,” Katie said, her voice almost reaching a scream again. “Draco, please don’t look like that. I didn’t mean to hurt you, I never wanted to. I kept trying—I kept hoping—I did think—”
“But you don’t,” Malfoy said, his voice very calm. “No. I see. I understand.”
“Think about it, Draco,” she said, her voice suddenly hopeful, as if Malfoy being calm was ever a good sign. “It’s better this way. I mean, I know you had to—I know you used to tire yourself out on the job or in the practise rooms with Harry on purpose, so we could relax together. That wasn’t a healthy way to live, Draco. We can be friends now. Things will be much better—”
Harry tucked the box in the crook of his arm and lunged for the door before Malfoy killed her.
He found Katie and Malfoy standing on either side of the hall. Katie’s face was flushed, tears clinging to her eyelashes, and Malfoy was leaning against the opposite wall looking like a vampire: his face dead-white and his eyes slitted, searching for a way to hurt her.
“Things will be much better,” he drawled. “I agree completely. I don’t know how I could ever have thought about lowering myself enough to marry a Mu—”
Harry didn’t really recall walking to him, but he suddenly had him pressed up against the wall. Malfoy’s eyes snapped fully open and he glared at him.
Harry glared right back. “Come on, Malfoy,” he said into his ear. “You’re better than this.”
Malfoy cursed, equally low. “No I’m not,” he snarled, eyes glittering. “I’m not, I’m not.”
“We can go,” Harry said. “We can go now.”
Malfoy clenched his fists and pushed Harry back, gently. He closed his eyes for a moment and then straightened up, pulling away from the wall, and walked over to Katie. She stared at him with her eyes full of tears and he reached out and touched the side of her neck, a curl of hair, gently as well.
“I’m sorry,” Katie whispered.
Malfoy bowed his head in an almost formal gesture. When he spoke his voice sounded formal too, like a gentleman bidding a lady goodbye after an evening party.
“You made me very happy,” he said. “I hope you’ll be happy now. I do.”
He lifted his head and stepped away from her, moving for the door.
It was open when Katie asked helplessly: “What should I—what should I do with the rest of your things?”
Malfoy’s moment of grace had obviously been used up. He snarled: “Burn it all,” strode out and slammed the door.
Leaving Harry trapped inside with a crying girl.
“I’ve got to—” Harry said, his voice curt with awkwardness, but also with his entire lack of sympathy or understanding. “I’m going after him.”
Katie blinked back tears with an effort, to his enormous relief. “Take care of him.”
“Oh, I will,” Harry said.
“Do you,” Katie asked suddenly, hands clasped tight together. “Do you think I’m awful?”
“No,” Harry said ungraciously, opening the door with one hand. “I just think you’re an idiot.”
He closed the door behind himself and went down the stairs after Malfoy, fast. He caught up with him as Malfoy was going out the door of the building and Malfoy turned to him, his face still white and desperate, and seized the box out of Harry’s hands.
He threw it in a wild arc across the street, and as it landed in the gutter he shouted: “Incendio!”
Even under the steady rain, the box exploded into flames. Malfoy stood and watched it burn, shoulders shaking in Harry’s thin white shirt.
“I’m glad,” he said at last, and totally unconvincingly. “I’m glad, I’m glad—I always hated that place.”
He turned and ran down the street. Harry left the box burning behind them and pounded after him in the falling rain. They both ran until Malfoy stopped, chest heaving, looking vicious and amazed, as if he’d expected outrunning his own pain to work.
“It’s okay,” Harry promised him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. You’ll—I’m sure you can get her back.”
“No I can’t!” Malfoy shouted at him. “Of course I can’t. Didn’t you hear? Were you not listening? I tried—I tried everything I could think of, I tried every way I knew how, and she doesn’t love me!”
Harry swallowed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard that.”
Malfoy was in his face, looking as if he hated him. “Maybe you don’t understand completely, being a Veela and everything,” he said, spitting the word. “But in the real world, for everybody else, this is how it works. You can’t make someone love you if they don’t. You can’t do a God-damned thing.”
“I know that!” Harry snapped. “And don’t talk to me about the stupid Veela thing. That isn’t—you’re not stupid, even if you are upset. What good is it? It’s pointless and stupid and I hate it, it doesn’t even work, not in any way that might do any good, so shut up about it right now!”
Malfoy looked wild, as if he wanted to punch Harry. Harry wished he would.
Then Malfoy folded up, literally, and sat on the rain-slick pavement with his knees drawn up and his head in his arms.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was rotten of me. You haven’t done anything. Nobody’s done anything wrong, actually. She’s not obligated—so I should, I should be fine.”
He swallowed audibly and stared out at the wet, grey expanse of tarmac.
Harry felt useless and helpless. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t—sit out in the rain. You’ll—catch cold.”
Malfoy gave him a weird look, as well he might since Harry was fully aware that he and Malfoy had spent fourteen hours up to their necks in bog water once on a stake-out. Of course, Malfoy had caught cold then.
“All right,” he said, and Harry took his hand and helped him up. Malfoy trailed in a disconsolate manner to a café, where he asked the puzzled waitress for an extremely Irish coffee and to keep them coming.
“More and more Irish every time,” he said. “Now leave us, we would be alone.”
The waitress gave Harry the eye, but was apparently one of those with natural immunity and didn’t make a leap. Luckily the rest of the café was deserted, since everyone normal and sane was staying home in the warm today.
Malfoy stirred his Irish coffee and stared out the rain-splattered window of the café.
“Look,” Harry said at last, forcing the words out. “Look, if you think it might help with Katie—I’d be fine on my own. If you wanted to quit. Katie was right. I can look after myself.”
“I have counted twenty-seven times when I think you would have died if I hadn’t been there,” Malfoy said in a distant voice.
“I’m sure something would’ve turned up. Several of those times.”
“I’ve got it, thanks,” Malfoy bit out. “You don’t need me. I know. Only I really would prefer it if you didn’t die, and I don’t think it would help with—I don’t think it would help, and besides that…”
He gave a paper napkin his most lethal and disdainful stare.
“I couldn’t kill Dumbledore,” he said to the paper napkin. “But it wasn’t because I thought it was wrong or anything. I just—I couldn’t do it. It was only when Mother died and Katie was the only one there for me and I thought, I could’ve killed her without even meaning to. That was when I thought it was wrong. That was when I felt guilty. That’s what I’m like. I don’t care about people I don’t know. I don’t know how to do it. That was why I was so bad at being an Auror before you, it was because it was all files and strangers and stupid people and stupid rules and all I could do was make fun of everything and hate it, but I wanted Katie and I wanted to make up for—for everything. And you,” Malfoy said, and glanced up at Harry. “You care about justice and strangers living and things. You don’t stop. And if you minded about them and I minded about you and neither of us minded about the stupid rules—”
“I mind about the rules,” Harry said. “Sometimes.”
“Oh, you do not,” Malfoy said with a slice of a grin, disappearing like a crescent moon behind a cloud. “Anyway. That was—that’s how it was. The Aurors worked out. I did make up for some things. I know how to do that now, as long as things stay the way they are. I don’t want to quit.”
“Okay,” Harry told him. “Good.”
“I’m going to ask you for something now,” Malfoy announced, staring off into the distance. “You can say no if you like,” he added, mouth curling.
“Um, all right.”
“If you could,” Malfoy said, glaring harder at the napkin as if making a simple request affronted him in some way. “Promise me to stick around for the next—three weeks,” he said.
“Stick around?” Harry repeated. “I mean, I will, I just don’t—”
“At work,” Malfoy told him, transferring his glare from the napkin to Harry and back. “As partners. Stay,” he added, as if talking to a dog he suspected of being badly trained.
“Right, yes, but for three weeks,” Harry said, feeling an edge of panic. “Um—what are you planning to do after those three weeks?”
“Me? Nothing,” Malfoy snapped. “You can stay after the three weeks too, obviously. I just wanted to be sure you won’t go away for some reason I don’t understand. Not for three weeks, I’ll be all right after that, but right now I’m just a little off balance and,” his voice growing sharp as a needle—“I’d appreciate it if you’d just promise to stick around.”
“I promise,” Harry said, bewildered. “It’s just that, uh, we’ve been partners for three years. What exactly makes you think that I’m going away?”
“Why not?” Malfoy drawled. “You did before. And I don’t know why and I don’t particularly want to know why, either. Katie’s gone: you’re staying, you have to. For three weeks. Then I’ll be fine.”
Now Harry had traded being bewildered for being a little pleased, but mostly hurt.
“Malfoy,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”
“Fine.”
“No, but really, Malfoy. I mean—I can’t explain about before but I won’t do it again. I swear—”
“I’m not really in the mood to believe extravagant promises just now,” Malfoy said in a clipped, brittle voice. “I know that I’m in bits and you’d swear to protect me and do your big hero thing, just like you came rushing back when I was hurt, but I won’t be in bits forever. I’ll be fine. You can leave anytime you want.”
“But I don’t want to,” Harry almost yelled.
“Fine,” said Malfoy, using his new favourite word. “But if you do, you can. Only not for three weeks. You promised.”
He glared at Harry again, this time a little anxiously. It was a bit like a spike seeking reassurance.
“I did,” Harry said steadily. He was sure of that much. “I will.”
Malfoy did not look at him again. He was looking out the wet window of the café. The flaking letters across the window were red and looked superimposed on the cold grey sky.
He did reach out, neatly and with little fuss, as Harry had seen him apprehend a criminal a thousand times, and grabbed Harry’s wrist. His fingers were strong, and the clasp felt about as easy to get out of as his damned enchanted handcuffs.
He was gripping too hard, actually, and it hurt. Harry didn’t mind.
Crabbe and Goyle came to get Malfoy that evening. Harry opened the door to find Goyle holding blankets and a thermos and a frantic expression, and Crabbe looking slightly embarrassed to be in Goyle’s company.
“Thanks for watching him, Harry, we’ll take over from here,” Goyle said, and pushed past him busily.
“But,” Harry said.
“I am not five,” Malfoy said, giving Goyle the evil eye as he tried to settle the blanket around his shoulders.
He looked distinctly small and woebegone under the blanket all the same. He’d had a lot of Irish coffees, and Harry thought a double hangover and melancholy were setting in.
“Of course you’re not,” Goyle said. “You’re our fearless leader and you come up with all the plans. Come home with us and I’ll make you chicken soup.”
“He gets like this,” Crabbe said apologetically to Harry, and nodded at Malfoy. “All right, Malfoy?”
“Not really,” Malfoy said. “More sort of abjectly miserable. I don’t want to move.”
“Just hold on to me while I Apparate,” Goyle encouraged him. Malfoy glared up at him and Harry stared over at him.
“He has a nurturing soul,” Crabbe said loyally.
“Okay,” Harry said.
Crabbe walked over to Malfoy, looked down at him with poorly concealed anxiety and patted him on the back a bit.
“C’mon,” he said. “Up. You’re better off with us, we know how you can be. Come away from Harry before he never wants to see you again.”
“Your silver tongue has convinced me, Crabbe,” Malfoy said, rolling his eyes and trying to get up and away from the Goyle-anchored blanket.
“He can stay,” Harry blurted.
They all turned and stared at him.
“If he wants to,” Harry said. “I mean. I don’t mind.”
There was a pause, the sort that always happened when Crabbe and Goyle tried to think of a way to phrase something exactly right.
“You see,” Goyle said kindly at length. “You sort of don’t know what you’re getting into here. You weren’t around for such, um, highlights as after the Quidditch Cup match in third year or after his Dad—I mean, at the end of fifth year, or… for pretty much all of sixth year. It’s kind of a test of friendship.”
“I don’t mind,” Harry said again. “I’d—it would be fine.”
Now Malfoy had him saying it.
“After all,” he said awkwardly, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s not like I can leave the house much, because of the whole Veela thing. I wouldn’t mind if he sticks around.”
“You don’t have a guestroom,” Crabbe observed noncommittally.
“I could sleep on the sofa,” Malfoy suggested slowly, after a moment.
“Well,” Goyle said uncertainly, peering into Malfoy’s face. “If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t mind,” Malfoy said.
To Harry’s great relief, that seemed to be arranged. Crabbe and Goyle hung around for a while, Crabbe nodding at Malfoy and patting him a lot and once venting his feelings in the kitchen by telling Harry that he’d never liked that girl.
“Not a Slytherin,” he said savagely. “No offence meant.”
“None taken,” Harry said, peering out of the door with horrified fascination at Goyle fluttering, inasmuch as a fifteen-stone man could, around Malfoy in the sitting room.
“If only this had happened with Pansy’s Gryffindor,” Crabbe continued. “She would’ve just castrated him with a spoon and then we would’ve killed him and thrown him in the river. Not that we would,” he added hastily.
“‘Course not,” Harry said.
Malfoy looked angry and ill with misery and he was telling Goyle exactly how much of an idiot he was making of himself, but when Goyle pressed his hand to Malfoy’s forehead Malfoy told him he was an idiot again and leaned in tiredly. Just a little.
When they went, Malfoy kept the blanket and the thermos, which he unscrewed and looked into. To his great disappointment, it wasn’t coffee.
“I don’t even like chicken soup,” he said, peering. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Harry.
“No,” Harry said. “I said I didn’t.”
Malfoy leaned his head against the arm of the sofa. “Good,” he said in an exhausted way. “I can’t—I don’t want to see them being happy together. I’ll start to break things again. It’ll be okay here. You’re all upset about this Veela thing, aren’t you?”
“Well,” Harry said. “It’s not much fun.”
He leaned against the sofa and looked down at Malfoy’s pale unhappy face. He wanted to touch him but he couldn’t work out how, so he settled for patting the blankets around him a bit. Goyle had done it, so it was all right.
Malfoy didn’t seem to object. “Then it’s all settled,” he said. “We can be miserable together.”