When they came back from the practise rooms, Harry at least feeling tired and relaxed in every muscle, there was almost a festival feeling about the headquarters. Harry found himself weirdly touched by the fact that nobody had taken down the mints.
“We didn’t realise how much work you two did,” Dean’s partner Louison said, lazy sod that he was. “There’s that old tobacco shop in Knockturn Alley, your contact there seemed to want a bribe—”
“It’s a cover,” Malfoy said, looking very guilty.
“And the bouncer in front of that dodgy Sinistra’s place, he looked like he thought he was going to get hit—”
“It only happened one time,” Harry said, feeling his face flush. “And he deserved it.”
“The Unspeakables are complaining. That terror Miss Granger called us all incompetents—when are you guys coming back?”
“When you can be in Potter’s presence without chewing peppermints,” Malfoy said absently, as Harry wavered, torn between avenging Hermione’s honour and stepping hastily away from Louison. “Shacklebolt’ll want all this stuff from Hogwarts filed and I only have half an hour before I meet Smith for lunch,” he added. “Give me your notes, Potter. I bet the imbecile archivists have been messing with my records again. When will they learn not to tinker with godlike perfection?”
Malfoy leaned in and snatched the notes before they were out of Harry’s bag and then strode off quickly, so Harry was still sitting dazed by the sudden onslaught of closeness, warmth, damp fair hair and shower-flushed skin when Malfoy was at the door thrusting Cuthbert out of his path.
When he finally looked away, he was outraged to see his hopeless yearning mirrored on Louison’s face.
“I wish I had a partner who’d do my filing for me,” Louison sighed.
Harry fixed him with a look that promised him death by claws some bloody night—mine—and then Louison’s mouth went slack around his peppermint and he said, terrifyingly: “Make me yours before you kill me” and Harry was about to yell for Malfoy when Ron tapped Louison on the shoulder and got him full in the face with the mint spray.
“Thank you,” Harry said, and meant it with all his heart.
Ron shrugged. “Well, I had a spare couple of hours. I thought I’d drop by.”
After Louison had stopped complaining that he thought he was blind and wandered off to be louche and French elsewhere, Harry looked over at Ron and saw him fiddling with things: laying Harry’s ruler straight, zooming a quill in the air, and hiding Malfoy’s morning paper under a file. He wasn’t looking at Harry.
“What,” Harry said. “What is it, what’s gone wrong?”
“Oh nothing, you know, nothing,” Ron answered, and at random: “So Malfoy’s still living with you, then?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, staring.
“Been a while, hasn’t it,” Ron said, and he still sounded distracted but Harry hardly cared. “Like, three months sleeping on someone’s sofa isn’t what you’d call normal, exactly.”
“Malfoy isn’t what you’d call normal, exactly.”
“True,” said Ron. “But he could, you know, buy somewhere enough like Malfoy Manor to live in—well, okay, on a dramatically smaller scale, but somewhere all white and posh like a stupid wedding cake, you know the kind of thing he likes—”
“Or he could live in actual Malfoy Manor,” Harry said.
The silence clanged between them as if someone had dropped a metal bowl on a marble floor.
“Ron,” Harry said.
“I don’t want to be having this conversation,” Ron said loudly. “You live with each other, you live in each other’s pockets, how can you not—”
“Ron, what happened to Malfoy Manor?”
Ron crossed his arms over his chest and stared into the middle distance, wincing a little as if he was envisioning himself talking to Pansy about this situation and getting slapped upside the head.
“Malfoy sold it a couple of years ago,” he answered in a low voice. “He was buying votes so his father wouldn’t get the Dementor’s Kiss. It was during the time when you’d ditched him: I kind of—I thought he would’ve told you about it.”
“Oh,” Harry said, hollow.
He thought of Shacklebolt saying that Malfoy’d had a fight on his hands making sure that Lucius Malfoy didn’t get the Kiss, and of Malfoy’s face when he tried to talk to him in the kitchen (during the time when you’d ditched him), not just bleached by the fluorescent lights but sickly pale, faint blue and purple around his eyes like ghostly bruises. Harry hadn’t thought about it then. He wanted to have something to do so he wouldn’t have to think about it now.
He wanted someone to hit, so he wouldn’t have to feel—he didn’t even know what the word for it was, feeling helpless for someone else.
Harry remembered the first time Malfoy had fallen asleep in the car seat next to him. Malfoy had just been talking and talking, in that way he was only starting to get used to, and then Malfoy’s forehead had hit Harry’s shoulder and Harry had leaped right from lulled calm to surprise before he realised Malfoy was out cold.
Nobody had ever really slept with Harry before. He’d always thrown out Zacharias right afterwards and he’d been in that cupboard downstairs when Dudley used to climb into bed with his parents and even in Hogwarts people had slept behind curtains, so it was—it was strange. Malfoy was warm and relaxed and vulnerable. He was even noisy in his sleep, and that was familiar, and Harry just hadn’t wanted him to wake up or knock his head or anything. He’d put his hand up to the back of Malfoy’s neck, steadied him, kept him safe and felt a little steadied himself for some reason as the night sky streamed past their windows and Malfoy’s breathing in his ear became a rhythm: as keeping Malfoy safe became something he could measure time by.
When Malfoy needed to be kept safe, though, he hadn’t been there.
“It’s okay,” Ron said. “He had Katie, and all that.”
“Great,” Harry snapped.
“I don’t know why we’re even talking about this,” Ron said. “This wasn’t what—but that’s why Malfoy should move out, anyway. That’s the thing. What with the way you are, and the way Malfoy is. He knows he’s a little much. He didn’t tell you about the manor and he wouldn’t be living on your sofa if he wasn’t completely slammed and I really don’t want to be having this conversation at all. But I’m the only one who knows this stuff. Unless Hermione’s figured it out by now. Please tell me Hermione’s figured it out by now!”
“Sorry,” Harry muttered.
He didn’t know what the hell Ron was saying. First he said that Harry hadn’t been there and God, how Malfoy must have felt, and now he was apparently suggesting that Harry not be there again for some crazy reason. And apparently this wasn’t even what Ron had come for. He’d come to—not talk about something else.
“What’s going on?” Harry rapped out, and Ron stared at him. Of course, Harry thought slowly. He hadn’t ever heard Harry’s interrogation voice before. “Does this have something to do with—”
“Out to lunch,” Malfoy’s voice said behind them. “Later, Potter.”
It might have been Harry’s imagination, but he thought that Malfoy’s voice sounded funny and clipped. He almost whirled around to face Malfoy and demand to know what was going on, but Harry knew how to conduct an interrogation on his own if he had to. Malfoy was tricky, he could slip or twist his way out of almost anything. Ron was the easy mark.
“Ron, don’t keep something important from me,” he said.
He didn’t lie in interrogations. Malfoy was the one who did that. He used the truth like a weapon.
“Okay, look,” said Ron, and his hand moved in a restless, useless gesture that revealed as it tried to conceal. To the empty file which lay over Malfoy’s morning newspaper.
Harry snatched at the paper as if it was the Snitch, far too quickly for Ron to even dream of stopping him. He spread the paper out over his desk and his breath snagged and caught in his throat. He didn’t recognise the picture, but it wasn’t a nice one.
He was with Ritchie. He didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. His face was in profile, dark hair and clean lines and so intent on something outside the frame that it seemed cruel. Ritchie’s face, always handsomer in reality than Harry ever remembered it, was tipped up to his: he looked starry-eyed and adoring, enchanted.
It was very clear that someone could have taken a knife and cut Ritchie out of existence for all Harry cared.
Those of us who wondered how Harry Potter won mass adulation through his reputation as the Boy Who Lived, by this time worn incredibly thin, and the doubtful glory he gained in the last war need wonder no longer. Recent revelations concerning this very questionable hero’s ancestry have provided us with the answer.
Harry remembered Malfoy asking if he could break the story to the press, and Malfoy at school whispering to Rita Skeeter, held like a secret in his palm. Under his fingers the ink smeared the black and white of the paper into a grey mess, and he wondered numbly if Malfoy had thought this was funny.
This also explains the luck in love enjoyed by Harry Potter, a notoriously sullen and reclusive man. Several of the lovers he so casually acquires and tosses aside have reported both Potter’s contemptuous attitude towards them during affairs and a feeling of being compelled. One must of course give Potter the benefit of the doubt and assume—or at least hope—that he exerted this influence unconsciously.
He remembered Malfoy saying, It’s clear our views on that sort of thing are rather different.
“Yeah, I’m going to,” Harry started, and then had no words to finish with.
He shoved the horrible paper away and got to his feet, ignoring Ron, not even hearing whatever sharp thing he was saying. He went after Malfoy, shoved past lunch-going crowds and ignored Dean and Ginny holding hands at the door and saw a blond head. He went to the rail of the balcony, the steel pressed hard against his palms before he’d even known he’d grabbed it, and he was about to yell down at Malfoy to stop and wait for him to come yell at him some more when he saw it wasn’t Malfoy.
The real Malfoy, unmistakable once you really looked, was cutting through the crowd with even more vicious elbow-work than usual. He reached Zacharias Smith and Harry only actually registered the way he was walking, that slow practise room prowl, when Malfoy stopped walking and punched Smith in the mouth.
Smith almost spun falling and his head cracked against the marble floor. Harry wasn’t at all surprised: Malfoy usually pulled his punches just a bit, but he hadn’t pulled that one.
When Smith tried to get up, Malfoy kicked him. He staggered and almost fell back down and then launched himself at Malfoy in a clawing rush, succeeding in doing injury only to Malfoy’s shirt before Malfoy hit him again.
Dimly Harry heard Dean’s low dismayed noise and saw him rushing downstairs, Louison sliding down the banisters after him. Ginny gave a roar of enthusiasm about the fight, her elbow knocking Harry’s as she came to the rail.
“Hit him!” she yelled with indiscriminate approval. “Hit him again! Go—are we for Malfoy? I hope we are. I hate being on the losing side, and he’s beating the hell out of Smith.”
Dean and two security guards were holding onto Malfoy now. He was struggling, lip cut in the scuffle and truly appalling insults pouring from his bloody mouth. Louison was not holding onto Smith terribly hard, but then Smith was not trying terribly hard to get away, so that seemed fair.
“Yeah,” Harry managed, blood pounding in his temples so hard that he couldn’t think, so relieved he didn’t care. “Yeah, we’re for Malfoy.”
Unfortunately assaulting people in the Auror headquarters turned out to be a fairly serious offence, so Malfoy and Smith were put in the Aurors’ holding cell for offenders with some official standing.
Fortunately Harry was pretty familiar with this place. He nodded to the guard, who seemed extremely and rather insultingly surprised that Harry wasn’t the one behind bars this time, and told him to fetch the usual judge and tell him it was Mr Malfoy who required his assistance. The novelty of the situation would probably get Umber here faster.
He strolled into the dim room and towards the bench from which Malfoy usually delivered his speeches about Harry being an idiot. Smith and Malfoy were in separate cells, little box rooms separated from each other and Harry only by bars. Malfoy was giving Smith a filthy look through narrowed eyes. He glanced over as Harry came in, but looked back almost at once.
Smith looked at Harry, and looked confused. Of course, it was possible he had a concussion.
“The author of the lead article in the Prophet, I presume,” Harry said. “What an honour.”
Smith flinched.
“People get sued for slander,” Malfoy mused aloud.
“People get sued for assault too,” Smith pointed out.
“That wasn’t assault,” Malfoy scoffed. “When we get out of here I’ll give you a demonstration of real assault—”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No,” Malfoy said, and smiled a sharp smile that always upset the interrogation subjects. It looked even worse when his smiling mouth was stained with blood. “I was making a generous offer. Threatening you would be saying, oh, for instance—”
“Don’t bother, Malfoy,” Harry said. “He’s not worth it.”
Smith made a choking sound and Malfoy’s mouth did something funny, twisting in on itself as if he hadn’t liked that for some reason. Harry leaned forward and tried to catch Malfoy’s gaze with his own.
“I don’t even care,” he said. “What does anything that git has to say matter? When I thought for a second it was you, that—”
Malfoy’s gaze turned to him then with a vengeance. He just looked wide-eyed, just shocked, for an instant. Then he looked like he was trying to gain perfect control of wandless magic in order to cut Harry’s throat with his eyes.
“You—thought it was me?” he said, voice icy after that startled beat. “Thanks, Potter.”
“No,” Harry said. “Wait. That’s not what—”
The guard came in and said: “The judge is on his way, so I was thinking you might as well come out and have some cocoa or something—”
He had the key turned in the lock and Malfoy’s door was opening when Malfoy stood up and seized the bars, swinging the door shut with main force.
“No,” he said, suddenly and horribly polite. “Thank you, Vespasian. Would you Owl the judge—I’m sorry to trouble you—and say he needn’t bother coming in? I can wait for justice to take its course. And its time.”
“Malfoy, don’t be ridiculous,” Harry exclaimed.
The guard—Vespasian, Harry had known his face was familiar—blinked, and said: “You want to be—”
Malfoy nodded with a decisive air, as if he was not obviously and self-evidently crazy. “I insist on being incarcerated.”
“No he doesn’t!”
“You shut up,” Malfoy snarled at him. “What’s the difference between this place and your stupid flat, anyway?”
Harry shut up, stung, and Malfoy saw that he’d hit him on the raw. His lip curled, a smug malicious curve of satisfaction, and Harry wanted to hit him on the nose.
“Okay I’ll just be outside,” said Vespasian in a rush, obviously deciding they were crazy and might turn dangerously crazy at any moment.
“You shouldn’t kick someone when they’re down, anyway,” Harry muttered as the door clanged shut behind the guard. “That isn’t a fair fight.”
“Of course you’re right, not the done thing at all,” Malfoy said, his voice like a knife he was playing with, which might slip and hurt him or someone else in a flash. “What I should really have done was have George Weasley sit on him while I hit him. That would’ve been the truly Gryffindor way to handle it.”
Smith snorted. Harry didn’t spare the time to glare at him.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I was fifteen years old!”
“Well, I was fourteen when I told Rita Skeeter a few things for her rag, and as a fourteen year old it was my moral duty to behave like a twerp at all times. But of course you still do that, don’t you, so you think it’s perfectly okay to assume that I’d still—after nine years, as if nothing had—”
“I thought you’d think it was funny, too,” Smith put in sullenly.
“You can shut up also,” Malfoy said, gaze wheeling like a hungry vulture. “Don’t think you’re off the hook. You’re both on the hook. There is plenty of room on the hook!”
Smith gave him a look that said he thought Malfoy was insane. Harry kind of saw where he was coming from, but he bristled all the same.
“Can we please talk about this at home,” he said, giving Smith a warning glance.
“I don’t have a home,” Malfoy said flatly. “And I’m going to Crabbe and Goyle’s after I get out of here. You may go to your home immediately. I wish you would.”
“I wish you’d make more sense,” Smith said, and Harry was appalled to feel a moment of wholehearted sympathy with Smith’s opinions. “Every time we meet up we talk about how useless Potter is and you obviously can’t stand the sight of him, so what are you doing hitting me—”
“Am I the only one here,” Malfoy demanded, “who thinks that you should treat people you’ve slept with, with just a tiny bit of respect? You both make me sick.”
There was a pause in which Harry carefully did not look at Smith and felt too unhappy to look at Malfoy. He tried to ignore the reel of memories Malfoy’d set playing in his head.
It was Smith who’d made the first move. He’d always been around Grimmauld Place being useless, like some kind of circling hyena, and Harry was so tired that the whole world seemed dark and he couldn’t cope with the things he had to do and all the blood he had to spill to get to Voldemort. He’d just been studying maps one day, and looked up into a kiss. To this day he didn’t know why he hadn’t hit Smith. He’d been too desperate to lie to himself, he supposed, and it’d been the only relief on offer.
It had never been anything more than a relief, a release from tension, with Smith or with anyone else. It hadn’t even ever been fun. And he wasn’t good at being—soft, or anything, and he’d had no time or patience for it back then. He’d had the world to think about.
And he hadn’t liked him.
“You don’t understand,” Smith said hoarsely. “It’s—horrible. Don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed how he twists the world around him, how people like him and think well of him when he can’t even remember their names. I know you hate it as much as I do! Every day, the whole school, the whole world seemed to revolve around him and resound with his name, everyone looked at him and—and I did too. He always got everything he wanted—”
“No I didn’t,” Harry broke in violently. “Are you stupid? I never wanted any of that, I wanted—”
He’d wanted his parents back: wanted love. He’d wanted never to go back to the Dursleys and they’d always sent him back. He’d wanted to be one of the Weasleys but he could never quite manage it. Even before Malfoy, there had been a thousand things he’d wanted and never had a chance of getting.
Malfoy gave him a cool look. “I see your point,” he told Smith, his drawl a long distance away from any expression of feeling. “It always made me furious, too. But it wasn’t his fault. And you’re not telling me everything.” He pointed this out with the same air he always used during interrogations, cruel and lazily pleased by his cruelty. “So you really liked him and he didn’t like you back,” he said, mocking as if Smith was a child. “It happens. But once you care about someone, you do the best you can for them. No matter what they do to you.”
“It wasn’t like caring,” Smith spat. “You don’t know what it’s like to do things and then not remember why you did them, not remember deciding to do them.”
Malfoy raised an eyebrow. “Sure I do,” he said, all ice and not giving an inch. “Happens all the time.”
Harry thought about the glazed warmth in Wood’s eyes, and the way Ginny had loved him long before she knew him at all. He wasn’t looking at Smith or at Malfoy anymore: he was looking at his own hands, rubbing the wrists convulsively. He hadn’t meant to do any of it. Malfoy knew that.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “If you did anything you didn’t—want to do.”
“Don’t apologise to people who slander you, you imbecile,” Malfoy ordered.
“It was what I did want to do,” Smith said in a low voice. Harry still couldn’t look at him. “That’s the problem.”
“Oh, cry me a river of blood tears,” Malfoy sneered.
Smith was a git who’d blackened his name in the national newspaper. Wood liked Quidditch so much he didn’t really make time for people. Baddock was kind of glittery and horrible, and that Italian stranger hadn’t seemed any better than he should be. Even Ritchie had been really nasty to Malfoy on occasion, and Harry’d had to pretend not to hear because Ritchie was his last chance and he didn’t know what else to do. But none of them had deserved anything that would have made them less than the people they were.
He was very grateful he’d stepped away from Wood. Saving himself at the expense of others wasn’t what he did: it never had been.
“Vespasian!” called Malfoy, and Vespasian appeared like a jack in the box.
“Do you want to leave now?” he asked with pathetic hope, and Malfoy frowned at him.
“No,” he said. “I’d like a rubber ball. I wish to keep amused.”
Vespasian threw his eyes up to heaven or Shacklebolt in the floors above. Neither came to his aid, so he went and fetched Malfoy a rubber ball. Malfoy began throwing it with great force at the walls, eyes intent on it rather than anything else. He made sure that the bars nearest Smith and Harry got hit with resounding thwacks.
“You are so annoying,” Smith said after a while.
“Really, are you going to make up lies about me in the paper?” Malfoy demanded. “Or do I have to sleep with you before I get so lucky?”
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “You offering?”
Actually Harry kind of hoped Smith died.
“I am not.” Malfoy threw his ball three times at Smith’s bars to emphasise this.
“Everyone knew about you and Blaise Zabini.”
Smith could really die any time that was convenient.
Malfoy threw the ball at his bars with even more force, smirked, and caught it. “You’re no Blaise Zabini.”
“Come on, we’re leaving,” Harry said, trying to put in his voice his absolute refusal to let Malfoy stay in the cells with awful encroaching Smith a moment longer. He heard his voice come out like a whip and he didn’t care much, because it made Malfoy turn away from Smith.
Malfoy spun and threw the ball at Harry’s face. It rang against the bars and sprang back to Malfoy’s hand. “No.”
Harry should apologise, he knew, but he didn’t want to right now. He was glad to have Malfoy looking away from Smith and right at him, to be at the centre of whatever storm Malfoy happened to be causing.
“Malfoy, can’t we just—”
“What do you think of me?” Malfoy burst out. “That bloody disgusting article, and you instantly believed—I can’t—”
“The article made it pretty clear the writer knew what you were like in bed, too,” chimed in Smith, who seemed to have decided he was on Malfoy’s side despite the fact that half his face resembled an aubergine.
Harry thought it was probable that his whole face suddenly resembled a pomegranate.
“I didn’t read the whole thing,” he said quickly.
“Anyway, I do know what you’re like in bed,” Malfoy said, examining the ball as if he wished he could throw it both ways at once. Harry made a choking sound and Malfoy looked vaguely smug. “Baddock told me,” he clarified. “Said you were athletic and bad-tempered. Imagine my surprise.”
“I’m not—”
“Masterful summary, I’d say,” said Smith.
“You shut up! God.”
“Yes, we’re both thoroughly despicable and unpleasant individuals, we are not worthy to talk to you. So as the only free man in the cells, why don’t you get out?” Malfoy demanded.
“I’m not going,” Harry said flatly. “I’ll sleep here if I have to.”
“You’ll have to,” Malfoy informed him. “Because I really like it here. I may never leave.”
Harry answered him by lying back on the bench, one hand pillowing his head. Malfoy resumed throwing his ball and Harry shut his eyes, listened to the incessant thump that said let me out, let me out while Malfoy’s lips said he refused to leave, and tried not to think about all the people it was possible he’d hurt.
Because he knew Malfoy well enough to recognise viciousness as a response to pain: he’d hurt Smith, all right.
Add viciousness to arrogance and blond hair, and Harry supposed it was possible he had a type.
While he was trying not to think he managed to sleep, measuring the sound of Malfoy’s throws as he’d become used to measuring his breath, and half-woke to the sound of Smith’s voice in the dark.
“—think of it as a public health warning,” he was saying. “He’s not like other people—other Veela—not controlled, he never has been, and he doesn’t care what he does. He could enslave people. You could be next.”
With his purple bruises lost in shadows, Harry could see something he didn’t care about: Zacharias Smith was handsome. Handsomer than Malfoy, he supposed. Probably handsomer by quite a lot, objectively considering the honey-blond curls catching glints of light and the sculpted curves of his face. Smith’s eyes moved now, furtive under lowered lids, and he looked at Harry and saw Harry looking at him. Harry felt almost ashamed of catching the look of naked want on Smith’s face, as if he’d seen some secret he had no right to see.
He looked away to Malfoy, who was concentrating ferociously on throwing his ball. His arm must be starting to ache but he showed no sign of it, pacing the floor of his cell like a caged tiger. Moonlight didn’t catch glints in his hair, it just made it white, a stark colour against the sharp uncompromising lines of his face and falling into the dangerous glitter of his eyes. Compared to Smith, he didn’t look handsome and he didn’t look peaceful and he certainly didn’t look safe.
Harry supposed that if Smith was still looking at him, he could probably see Harry’s secret quite easily. He looked away.
“Not me,” Malfoy drawled, very calm. “I’m immune.”
“You sure?” said Smith, and then Vespasian broke through the door and said that the Firenze-Brown house was under attack. Harry bolted upright on the bench and Malfoy dropped the ball, grabbed Vespasian through the bars and demanded to be let out.
The Aurors posted to Lavender and Firenze had been distracted by two things: the attack on Hogwarts and the fire. The kidnappers had broken into the Gryffindor dormitories first, Firenze and the Aurors had been summoned away, and then they’d set the fire. Using banshee fire, which couldn’t be extinguished with a spell.
At least that was what Harry had gathered, but it was hard to hear through the crackle of flame and the thump of falling beams.
“Lavender?” he shouted, striding past the other Aurors into the burning house. He tried not to choke on smoke. “Lavender!”
“Harry!” she exclaimed and came running, baby Fornax scooped awkwardly into her arms. She was bent double with his weight. “I can’t leave, the Auror went upstairs to get Jas—”
“The Auror?” Malfoy repeated on a cold note, and Harry looked over his shoulder and met Malfoy’s eyes. “Get out now, Lavender, we’ll deal with it.”
He almost ran headlong into a fire and then grabbed at a rail and hauled himself over the smoking ruin of the stairs, smelling his shirt start to scorch as he moved, walking along rafters that were burning and unsteady towards the noise that wasn’t fire.
Until he found little Jasmine in her pyjamas on the burning floor, and a dark figure stumbling away from her, limping and bleeding.
There was blood all over the floor and Jasmine looked scared but unhurt. Obviously nobody had expected the little girl to kick like a horse.
She shied away from the figure, panting, and saw Harry through a loose mane of hair, rolled like a human and sprang like a goat into his arms. Harry lost his breath at the smack of her full weight against his chest and thought for a moment that the guy was going to get away.
But of course Malfoy was there, able to follow him like a shadow, like a second self, when they really needed it. The man stumbled backwards right into his chokehold and Malfoy met Harry’s gaze over his captive’s shoulder, fierce and almost laughing by firelight.
“Please struggle,” Malfoy advised the prisoner. “Do it as much as you like. I’m in the mood for some brutality.”
The man sagged, limp, and they were both glad later when they found out he was under Imperius. The real kidnapper—assuming that he or she didn’t always just send out people under Imperius to do his bidding—had got clean away with a little girl from Gryffindor.
“Don’t go crazy,” Malfoy said, taking Jasmine away and holding her with far more ease—Katie’d had a niece or something, Harry thought. He pressed Harry’s wrist hard as he did it and then bent his head over Jasmine’s, murmuring something to her about being sorry. “His ancestors seized sheep up in their talons,” he said. “That’s why you were handled like a sack of meal. The Aurors in general have wonderful child-rescuing skills, I know you’ll find your next rescue experience with us more satisfactory.”
“Thank you, Harry,” said Lavender, once she’d put down her son. She gave him a kiss on the cheek, smelling like burned hair. “You said you wouldn’t let my children be harmed and you didn’t: thank you.”
“Sure,” Harry said. That little girl had been taken, though. He hadn’t kept her safe.
“Don’t go crazy,” Malfoy said again, once Lavender had carried Jasmine away and Harry was leaning against the cold black skeleton of the Firenze-Brown house. “Think instead,” Malfoy continued, arms crossed over his thin torn shirt as some small protection against the night air. Harry looked a question over to him, and Malfoy answered it without glancing at him, his eyes ranging over Hogwarts in the distance. “Eugenia Varley doesn’t live with her mother—the nonhuman parent, apparently. Nobody knew about her except other members of that LAST organisation, and anyone who got a look at our list sometime between two and ten today.”
Harry nodded towards Firenze, running towards Lavender and the children. “You don’t seriously believe it was one of them.”
“Probably not, considering you were attacked at the Aurors’ ball,” Malfoy pointed out. “No. I think it was one of us.”
“Oh well,” said Harry. “That’s just great.”
They were silent for a while. Harry was thinking over a list of suspects and he knew Malfoy was doing the same, and neither of them offered a name they wanted to discuss. Harry suspected that Malfoy felt much like him, too tired to analyse this.
“Think about it in the morning,” he said at last. “Come on.”
“See you tomorrow,” Malfoy said at the same time, his voice colliding with and not yielding to Harry’s. “Or no—tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it. Meet you at the office Monday? We’ll need to go through everyone’s files.”
“What?” Harry asked. “No—look, no, you’re coming back with me.”
Someone had taken a child: he wasn’t letting Malfoy go, he didn’t have to now, there was no Katie Bell for him to go back to and Harry could need him, could insist on keeping him.
“I’ve been imposing on you too long in any case,” Malfoy said, in very polite tones. “I’d rather go to Crabbe and Goyle’s, honestly.”
Harry knew that voice, all right, and it struck real fear in him for the first time today. Malfoy’d used that voice for a while after the time when they hadn’t been partners, he’d been on his best behaviour and Harry had felt desperate as an animal locked out of home.
“I’m sorry,” he told Malfoy, and remembered why he hadn’t told him before, remembered he’d wanted Malfoy to look at him and remembered too what had happened to Malfoy while they weren’t partners.
There was another lesson to be learned from Smith, then, besides the fact he shouldn’t go near people he couldn’t be kind to. He shouldn’t be like Smith, either: shouldn’t let the fact he couldn’t have what he wanted make him cruel.
“Are you,” Malfoy said, his voice colourless.
The first time Harry’d been thrown into the Aurors’ cell, some time when Malfoy was off at a dinner with Katie and Harry had recklessly decided not to disturb him and got into trouble without him, Malfoy had come still wearing his suit. He’d fetched Septimus Umber, who he had some kind of blackmail information on, to get him out. He’d stayed with Harry and told him he was stupid until Harry stopped shaking with fury.
You care about someone, Malfoy had said, you do the best you can for them.
Malfoy started to move away and Harry grabbed his wrist on instinct and then gave a moment’s thought to this and grabbed his other wrist too, pushed him up against the blackened wall, held on tight so Malfoy wouldn’t be able to hit him and pressed in close so Malfoy wouldn’t have leverage to shove him.
Malfoy leaned his head back against the charred wood in order to glare at Harry better. “Let me go. Or I’ll thump your thick head with my head so hard your skull cracks and I’ll kick you in the kneecap so—”
“Yes, yes, in a minute,” Harry said, his voice low because Malfoy was so close, muscles straining against his and it reminded him suddenly and vividly of Oliver against the Quidditch shed… only this time it was really Malfoy. But that wouldn’t solve anything. “I mean, I’ll let you go in a minute. Just listen.”
“Let me go now!”
Malfoy looked so mad he was ready to spit, vicious and furious and hurt, too, and Harry said: “Shhh, shhh,” in a cracking voice he was trying to make gentle, the way Malfoy could make his voice gentle, and Malfoy swallowed. “I’m sorry,” Harry repeated. “It didn’t—that article didn’t sound anything like you. I never thought you’d do something like that. I didn’t think at all. If I had I would’ve known it wasn’t you.”
The article hadn’t been funny or playful, not at all, and almost everything Malfoy did had a touch of that mad creativity or the way he always pulled back. He’d been stupid.
“It was just that—you’d talked about the press and I was,” Harry said, and drew in a breath and then kept talking, voice still helplessly low against Malfoy’s ear, cheek brushing his. “I was scared. I tried to tell you: it was Smith, so it didn’t matter. But if it had been you, it would have mattered so much and I was too scared to think and—that’s all. It wasn’t you. It was me. And I’m sorry. Come back.”
“For the last time let go,” Malfoy said, his tone taking on a wild edge.
Harry let go and stepped back. The night air was very cold now he wasn’t pressed up against Malfoy: it was pathetic how much he missed how warm he was, after contact for a handful of minutes. Malfoy was still furious and he didn’t know how to fix it.
He heard Malfoy take a shaky breath. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That makes—that makes sense. I couldn’t work it out, how you could think that, you know how I feel about you, but that makes sense. Let’s go back.”
“Actually, no,” Harry said.
Malfoy, leaning against the wall and looking shaken, looked suddenly exasperated.
“No?” he repeated. “Do you have some sort of illness, Potter, because you just said—”
“No. I mean, that’s not what I meant.” Harry stopped, aware that sentence was going nowhere good, and there was a moment of quiet where he summoned up the words he wanted.
He looked around, Hogwarts with every window blazing distress signals and people running over the grounds, and thought that this was spectacularly bad timing for a talk and didn’t stop. He tilted his head, trying to see Malfoy from a new angle, but Malfoy looked the same: tired and pale and infinitely desirable.
“No, I don’t know how you feel about me,” Harry said, still quiet. “Tell me.”
“What?” Malfoy snapped, eyes suddenly narrowed and furious. “Oh, for—is this the time? I’ve had a really bad day, Potter. I’d like it to be over now. In fact, I’ve had a really bad few months, and I’d appreciate not being asked ridiculous questions at the dead of night. I’ve had enough—”
Harry stood and did not speak. He was looking at Malfoy, his whole body focused on that one act.
Malfoy did not say what he’d had enough of. He pushed away from the wall and paced a few steps, as if he was still in the cage, frowning as if he had a headache. Harry didn’t like seeing him in pain, not again, and he opened his mouth to say it didn’t matter, forget it, they could go home now.
“I don’t know,” Malfoy spat, the words bitter in his mouth. “The same way you feel about me, I suppose. I mean, we’re—we’re friends, aren’t we? Sort of.”
Harry willed his shoulders to keep straight, not to give in to weariness until he’d done something to wipe out that trace of uncertainty in Malfoy’s voice at least.
“Yeah. Yes,” he said, low and defeated. He reached out the way Malfoy had when he’d had a bad dream and touched the nape of Malfoy’s neck: the gesture felt too clumsy, wrong, and he dropped his hand after an instant. “God, Malfoy,” he said. “Of course we are.”
“Now that’s cleared up, can we go home?” Malfoy asked, taking several steps back and changing his tone dramatically. “I’m exhausted, I’ll have you know, and I’m starving. I can’t believe they don’t feed you in that cell. I shall definitely register a complaint.”
“Okay,” Harry said.
Malfoy was already making for the gates to Hogwarts, but glanced inquiringly over his shoulder. “Coming?”
Harry came, knocking shoulders with Malfoy to tell him silently that he was inexplicable and infuriating, not that Harry minded all that much.
“I think I shall use the telephone,” Malfoy informed him, “and order Chinese. Do you fancy Chinese food?”
“I can ring for it,” Harry offered.
“No, I am best at the telephone,” Malfoy said. “I took Muggle Studies, you know, and I got top marks in telephoning people. I am a highly trained expert. I’m aware that you’re a gifted amateur, obviously, and that you used telephones frequently as a child, but I feel you miss some of the subtler nuances.”
Harry laughed, soft and relieved. “You’re mental.”
“Just because you’re not master of your own telephone, don’t take it out on me,” said Malfoy.
In the end, despite Malfoy’s masterful telephoning, they were too tired to eat much of the Chinese. Malfoy put it in the fridge.
“I still feel better having eaten,” he said, coming back to the sofa. “Poor Smith: I hope they let him out. Or at least gave him a sandwich.”
“Yes, you seemed really sorry for him around the time you were beating him to a pulp,” Harry said slowly, arm over his eyes. His shoulder ached where a rafter had just missed it: his bones were aching, he was so tired. “For which, I should mention, thanks.”
There was a creak as Malfoy settled back against the sofa too, and then a pause. Then: “I do feel sorry for him,” Malfoy admitted.
“I never,” Harry said, “I never led him on. I didn’t—I was never even nice to him.”
“Well, that hardly matters,” Malfoy said, and Harry lifted his hand from his eyes and looked at him. Malfoy’s always-restless hands were playing with the edge of his quilt, kept on the floor beside the sofa. Harry frowned a question at him. “You’re part Veela,” Malfoy said, very matter-of-fact. “The point isn’t just to be supernaturally attractive so you intimidate half the prey. You don’t want them to stare in awe and not approach you: that’d mean not eating. Think about it—part of the lure is that the magic makes them think it’s possible for you to like them back. That’s what Smith thought. He thought he could have you.”
“Oh,” Harry said, and felt sick.
“Also the fact that you were sleeping with him might have been taken as some kind of expression of interest,” Malfoy said, sharp and not so terribly distant.
“I didn’t mean to,” Harry told him.
“I know,” Malfoy said, a little warm for the first time today. “And none of it excuses what Smith implied about you, for God’s sake. That was an outrage. I shall write a very strongly worded letter of complaint to the paper, you see if I don’t.”
“Hm,” Harry mumbled, warmed but only reminded by comfort of how tired he was. He didn’t want to get up, he realised. He wanted to go to sleep right here, for Malfoy to curl up against him and sleep on his shoulder. Malfoy’d done that twice, when it wasn’t in the car. Harry liked that.
Malfoy shoved at his shoulder instead.
“Get up and go to bed, I want to sleep here,” he commanded, and Harry hauled himself up off the sofa and went towards his bedroom, almost walking into the stool at the kitchen counter on his way.
He opened the bedroom door and looked over his shoulder for a last glance at Malfoy, just to be sure he was here and he wasn’t going anywhere, and saw Malfoy reaching for the bowl of peppermints on the table.
Malfoy looked up at Harry’s quick intake of breath, and as Harry looked at him, sleep struggling with a sudden feverish speculation, Malfoy’s eyes narrowed.
“I hadn’t brushed my teeth, God. I just wanted a mint!” he snarled, and threw the bowl.
Harry stepped quickly into his bedroom, and heard it hit the door.
When Harry came out of his room the next day he found Malfoy already up, coffee and Chinese food steaming at his elbow. Malfoy looked up from his newspaper and smiled at him briefly as he came in, making a gesture that said he was invited to share the Chinese and giving him a stern look that said he was forbidden to touch the coffee.
Harry was a little puzzled, but Malfoy’s sleeping habits often went weird during a case. He put on the kettle for tea and poked doubtfully at the sweet and sour chicken with his fork.
“Is this breakfast food?”
“It’s breakfast time and it’s Chinese. So it’s dim sum,” said Malfoy, with the air of one making an unshakable argument. “Delicious dim sum.”
He strained his mouthful of delicious dim sum with a swallow of coffee, and then returned to his newspaper. Harry got his cup of tea and leaned against the counter across from Malfoy, his head bowed. Malfoy sometimes reached out and ruffled his hair: he didn’t today.
“What’s in the paper?” Harry asked. “No more articles from Smith?”
“Not in the property section,” Malfoy returned.
Harry looked up and saw Malfoy’s face, which was arranged to look absolutely calm, though searching morning light revealed a pin-scratch frown between his eyebrows.
“Not this again,” Harry said with dread. “I said I was—”
“Yes, I heard,” Malfoy told him. “I’m not angry with you. It’s just something that I should do, I think. It’s been three months. I’m much better. And frankly if I sleep on a sofa any longer I am going to get back problems, and that would be tragic in the bloom of my youth.”
Harry looked desperately at his tea and stopped himself telling Malfoy that really, the bed was available anytime he liked. He tried to think of some way out of this awful situation.
“I’m moving in somewhere wizardly this time,” Malfoy said with great conviction. “Not anywhere like that horrible flat. But I would like a television and it would be a shame to let my elite telephoning skills get rusty. Do you think I could get them installed? I suppose given the fact that I can Apparate anywhere I want, I don’t need to worry about a commute. Do you think this place in Hogsmeade looks nice?”
“No,” Harry said firmly.
“It would be good to be in a wizarding community,” Malfoy said wistfully. “Professor Snape could come for tea on the weekends. Not that I’m not looking forward to living by myself, obviously. I never have, not really, and actually I think it will be brilliant. I’ll have a swinging bachelor pad. Maybe I’ll get a house elf. Do you imagine that you can interview them before you buy them and check out their conversational skills?”
Harry imagined that Malfoy had no idea that apprehension was showing clearly in his voice.
The idiot must also have forgotten how many times he’d dragged Harry out after work in the time between when he’d bought the flat and when he’d managed to install Katie, not that Harry had ever minded.
“I never meant to live alone,” he said slowly, turning his cup of tea between his hands and not daring to look up. “I never—I never wanted to. Ron and I thought we’d live together until he and Hermione got married, but then Ron went for other things and had to move home and then he was the richest wizard in England and—it all fell out differently from how I’d thought it would. It was never—living alone wasn’t ever what I had planned. I don’t like it. I’d rather live with you.”
He looked up at last, and was dazzled and amazed by Malfoy’s smile.
“Really?” Malfoy asked. “You want to?”
“Yeah.” Harry smiled back, helpless, and then cleared his throat and looked away before his face betrayed him. “So—you can start looking for a place with two bedrooms, then.”
Or not. Whatever.
“I already was looking for a place with two bedrooms, I refuse to live in miserable squalor,” said Malfoy loftily. “Now I shall look for a place with three. Oh good, we can bring Cyril to live with us. I feared he would pine for me. Do you not want to live in Hogsmeade?”
“I like London,” said Harry. “Also, I do not think Snape will want to come for tea at my house.”
“He could slip hilarious Potions into your teabags,” Malfoy suggested brightly. “He knows I don’t touch the stuff. That might make him happy. Well, anyway, come here and look at this one. It’s terraced and period and those are good things, aren’t they?”
Harry looked at the shine of his bright head over the newspaper, the lingering curve of his smile.
“I like it,” he said.