Final Exams at the Curse-Breaker's Academy - Anonymous - Harry Potter (2024)

Draco was about to menace both his instructors, Goldstein, Turpin, and then himself. He was going to lock himself in Malfoy Manor and leave himself to the peacocks for good. He was going to drop out, join a freak show, become a travelling vagabond and rail-hop until he grew a beard that rivalled Albus Dumbledore’s. He would have to, and swiftly, because what he really wanted to do was take one of his clenching fists and wring Harry Potter’s Chosen neck, and a life sentence in Azkaban would surely disincline the goblins from hiring him.

The timer above Draco’s head rang four times, red numbers flashing “20.00.00!” with every trill. Twenty hours left until the deadline, and Potter still hadn’t made any progress that Draco could decipher.

“I don’t know!” Harry cried, meeting his thunderous gaze. “I don’t know. Look, I can figure it out, but do you have to be so…present?” He raked an agitated hand through his mop of hair, even more ambitiously voluminous with the stress of finals. “Just, like, I dunno, leave or something.”

“I can’t bloody leave!” Draco squawked in indignation. He thought he might stamp his foot to prove a point if it wasn’t so childish. “Goldstein made fair sure of that!”

Two weeks prior was when it all went pear-shaped. Ruthers had divvied up their class of 30 and handed out partnered assignments. Malfoy, D. and Potter, H. had been their assigned partnership, written in ink that may as well have been blood, for the horror Draco felt when he beheld it.

Ruthers and Thompsin, the two instructors for their year, followed the Dean’s insistence to the letter: One cannot be an accredited curse-breaker until they become a successful curse-maker. In addition to the usual paper examinations, this practical application period was the focal point of their exams. Only through devising a curse of their own, and breaking those of their classmates, could they graduate the Curse-Breaker’s Academy.

And Draco would be absolutely damned if he flunked out because his partner was an incompetent buffoon.

“Surely Granger hasn’t been doing your homework for the past three years as well,” Draco sneered. “I would have noticed.”

“It’s not that,” Harry grumbled, tossing another book from his bag onto the table with a resounding thud. “It’s just, this stupid curse…fuck off.”

“Eloquent as always.” Draco added an eye roll for good measure. Potter had 24 hours from the inception of the curse to find a cure before Ruthers stepped in. If their instructor intervened, he would liberate Draco from the curse and would place Potter with another partner to take a second crack at succeeding the practical.

Except that couldn’t happen, Draco thought with gritted teeth, because if the Wizarding World’s precious Saviour failed at anything related to Draco Malfoy, he knew whose head would be on the pike, and it wouldn’t be the one that had never acquaintanced a comb.

The Academy based their practicums on a three-strike policy, which Draco opined was criminally generous, but Gringotts only hired those who had gotten a marked Successful on their first try. He couldn’t have the papers airing any scruples over his talent, his skill, or his professionalism in order to get in.

Yesterday Lisa Turpin, Goldstein’s partner, had cursed Potter with a pernicious weather-based number. One couldn’t tell looking at his hair – it actually seemed to be one of its more well behaved days – but Potter was covered in a fine layer of static electricity, shocking himself and anyone else upon contact. It got worse with emotion, which Draco learned by heckling him. He had given them both a big enough shock that it left a small burn hole in Draco’s second-best button down.

He had been in the midst of diagnosing the curse when it happened. He honestly couldn’t remember what he had done. Level 5, no extensive internal or external damage, non-invasive contact-based work, the Rune cycle drawing upon the electricity inherent in their environs. Very subtle casting, meant to increase in damage over time. Difficult to pinpoint until debilitating. Just the type of challenge Draco liked.

“Stop fidgeting, Potter, you imbecile, if you keep moving around through the scan I’ll have to do it all over again.” Draco’s mind was whirring, and he couldn’t wait to get started on the Rune cycle, but he had to make sure he had assessed the curse correctly. If only Potter would stay still. “Here, just–” Draco reached out and laid a hand on Potter’s wrist to calm the incessant spinning of his wand from finger to finger. With an audible crackle they both yelped on contact and jerked away.

“Shit, Draco, are you—” Potter began, reaching out immediately before thinking better of it, drawing back with a wince.

“Perfect,” Draco hissed, a feral sort of grin crossing his features, that triumphant predatory feeling of adrenaline streamlining through his veins reminiscent of Hogwarts Quidditch games whenever he tore after the snitch. He got out his notepad and the salt to begin drafting his rune circle, feeling electric himself. The static was a tidy bit of work that Turpin, a muggleborn, clearly thought would trip up pureblooded Draco. It just might’ve done too, had Draco not developed a reluctant, guilty fascination for muggle science.

This interest had occurred, quite against his will, during his mandated community service at the Magi-Muggle Museum. Triple M was an initiative spearheaded by Headmistress McGonagall for muggleborn students recently accepted into Hogwarts as a way to get their bearings before school began, and for pureblooded children to become introduced to muggle culture. During Draco’s year of mandated community service there, he had learned about electricity, automobiles, and mobile phones, those phenomenally ingenious creations. They worked like magic, but they weren’t. Draco had been absolutely possessed with a need to understand how, forever unable to leave a puzzle unsolved.

Not that he would tell that to anyone else, of course. On a daily basis he avoided the topics of muggles and the Golden Trio and the Mark on his arm with more daring flexibility than he had ever thought himself capable. In eighth year, he had flung himself into study for his NEWTs with a tenacity previously unknown, the fear of not being accepted into any advanced degree program hunting him like a fox to a rabbit until the wee hours of the morning, now that he couldn’t ride on his family name.

Healing wasn’t glamorous or exciting, and Draco was dubious any patient would willingly submit to a Death Eater’s care, no matter how many qualifiers about youth and reluctance recorded within his official dossier. Though Draco had a good head for numbers, finance seemed interminably boring. Despite his pride, Draco knew that he did not have what it took to be a professional Quidditch player, not even for the B-leagues. The idea of Auroring or performing any Ministry job was laughable at best, if not outright delusional.

So, Curse-Breaking it was.

The Curse-Breaker’s Academy, then Gringotts. He would be paid well, have an extremely well-regarded career, and most importantly, would spend minimal time on the British Isles while doing it.

The only issue was, even if the goblins were unscrupulous about their employee’s turbid histories, they were incredibly exacting in their expectations.

Draco had met with the goblins the year he began at the Academy, to…establish his gratitude, as the inheritor of the Malfoy and Lestrange fortunes, that his family money had been so well tended throughout the recent unrest. He impressed upon Grimjaw, the goblin assigned to his dossier, that he would be happy to continue as a satisfied client for his sizable inheritance. If, upon the completion of his studies, he were given an opportunity to shadow the Director of the Curse-Breaking Division for a week, he would not even mention to any interested media the notable absence of a certain priceless artefact in his dear Aunt Bella’s hoard. And, of course, he would be happy to pay a hefty investment management fee, so Grimjaw could best figure out how to reconfigure his assets to earn back the loss of the damaged item.

Some might say it was dishonourable, the way Draco was going about it. But the glint in Grimjaw’s eye evolved from dull boredom and greed to begrudging appreciation as their discussion progressed. Goblins never took an exchange at face value, and they loved a deal when they thought they had negotiating power. Draco was certain, were he to get the shadowing position, he would still have to be top spot in the Academy to convince them he would be worth their investment. Greasing palms had just gotten him the foot in the door.

Which is why none of his activities at the Academy, and especially not during final exams, could be coloured with anything other than perfection.

“You have nineteen hours and fifty minutes,” Draco intoned. He was killing time, when not badgering Potter, by conducting research of his own. Potter had volunteered them to be cursed first, the daft idiot, and so both he and Draco would take their turns cursing Turpin and Goldstien respectively after their trials were resolved.

“You’re not helping!” Potter snapped, glaring up from his textbook. He was red-faced with agitation, Draco noted with a smirk, and tossed his ever-growing hair back over his shoulder.

They were set up in the common room of their dormitory floor. Students had ninety minutes after the casting of the curse in the curse-breaking theatre to observe the initial effects and begin their evaluation. After that, they were left to their own devices as to where they wanted to take their work, and left to return to the theatre whenever they found a solution. Draco had baulked at the idea of setting up camp in one of their private quarters and he refused to go in public with his hair the way it was…and was continuing to be.

Fucking Goldstein. Draco bet he’d done it on purpose, the twat. An attempt to make Draco look foolish, when anyone who looked at him knew he took pride in his appearance. Especially his hair.

Goldstein had always been so reserved in Hogwarts and in the Academy. Draco thought perhaps cursing frogs to expel from his throat would be an appropriate revenge, if he could figure out a way to do so that didn’t impede upon his breathing. The Curse-Breaker’s Academy was nowhere near as lax as Hogwarts in terms of safety, and Thompsin had made it abundantly clear that if anyone’s curse actually injured the recipient, the caster would be put on a scale from probation to expulsion depending on the grievousness of the infraction.

Draco had been nervously grateful for Thompsin’s clarification, sternly delivered with a steely eye to the graduating class. Though being assailed for his past mistakes occurred less frequently now years after the war, it was an ever-present worry at the back of his mind. It was what had confirmed a career in Curse-Breaking for him; back in eighth year, he had been hexed and jinxed six ways to Sunday whenever he attempted to traverse the corridors unaccompanied. If this was what mere Hogwarts students were capable of, he feared, he’d better learn how to protect himself before he ventured out to face the frothing masses.

He and Potter had found, if not quite camaraderie that year, then something different from the usual jaw-clenching animosity that crackled between them. Draco had refused to go to Madame Pomfrey for his miseries, too prideful by half and unable to fight the unshakeable belief that he deserved every bit of it. He shouldn’t have been surprised that Pansy had taken up the helm to defend his safety on his behalf by appealing to Potter and his ilk. That sneaky bint, too resourceful than was good for her with no mind for nasty little feelings like shame or ego. She had abandoned Britain—and Draco with it, he had loudly, mournfully, and pointedly informed her—and moved to Switzerland with her aunt Rosie after eighth year. Even though she and Draco had plans every year to summer outside of Lucerne together, he still missed her dearly. Even with the vile taste in his mouth that her Yuletide visit to the Manor this past winter had left.

“Do you think it’ll be on the floor by the time you finally parse out the counter-curse?” Draco mused with false insouciance, inspecting the end of a lock that had now grown to his upper thighs. To his distaste, it had begun to turn up at the ends, and Draco feared the longer it became, the more it might come to resemble his least-favourite aunt’s wild curly mane. “If it begins to trail, you’ll have to carry it yourself. I’ll not have it dragging on the ground like some unhygienic animal and spelling it gives me split ends.”

The red in Potter’s face increased as his gaze raked down Draco’s hair, flush reaching his neck. The expression on his face certainly did not seem to be distaste, though Draco didn’t care to try figuring out what it was. “I’ll crack it before then,” he mumbled, less mulishly than Draco would have expected, and turned back to his reading.

Potter had insinuated himself infuriatingly into Draco’s life by the end of eighth year. For every course Draco didn’t share with Pansy, Greg, or Theo, Potter was there to accompany him through the halls. That first week, after a drubbing so thorough Draco had scarcely even wanted to be tended to by his dorm-mates, Potter had accompanied him through the entirety of every class he attended alone, as well as walking with him.

The professors, after that first, confused day, hadn’t batted an eye–it seemed that being the Chosen One, Slayer of the Dark Lord, destined for Auror greatness with an acceptance into the DMLE Training Programme without a single N.E.W.T., meant he could do whatever he damn well pleased. More so than usual, anyway, considering the trail of mischief and mayhem that had always pursued him no matter what year.

That year, Potter was always in Draco’s space, sitting right next to him or walking so close their shoulders brushed. At first they snapped at one another, trading jibes and insults as was only right and proper. As the year progressed, however, their discourse began to feel more like banter, like the jocular ribbing the Slytherin Quidditch team engaged in off-pitch or the spiky half-fond insults traded amongst Draco’s inner circle. Draco would admit to no one, let alone himself, that by the end of the year he had actually begun to enjoy, nay, even look forward to the time they spent together.

But then Potter had gone off to his D.M.L.E. training, and Draco had gone to the Triple M. Draco hadn’t expected to see him again except likely in the papers, star-spangled headlines heralding his newest heroic initiative.

Despite any notions of Malfoy stoicism, Draco’s shock had been clear to view on orientation day. Just as the inauguration ceremony commenced and his classmates began lining up for the swearing-in, dressed uniformly in their shapeless standard-issue navy robes, Draco’s eye was caught by the stumbling, hurrying form of Harry Potter, soot-stained and fresh out of the floo…in formless blue.

“Draco!” he had called brightly, sidling up next to him in line and hip-checking a disgruntled girl from the year below them in Hogwarts out of the way. She let out an annoyed little huff that Draco couldn’t help but echo.

“What in Salazar’s name are you doing here?” he hissed, delicately brushing off his robe where Potter had surely smeared ash.

Potter shrugged, apparently delighted by Draco’s acerbic tone. He peered around with an exaggeratedly witless expression on his face. “Golly gee, Malfoy, looks like I’m gonna be a Curse-Breaker, doesn’t it?” he asked sarcastically, joyfully matching Draco’s exaggeratedbelligerence with alacrity.

“You can’t be a Curse-Breaker,” Draco protested as the line began moving. The Dean was announcing something that he would have liked to pay attention to, had he not more pressing matters. “I’m going to be a Curse-Breaker!”

Potter made a face. “Can’t see why we can’t both be.”

Draco scoffed. “Potter, have you given any thought to this charade? This bizarre fascination you’ve got with me is totally out of line–”

“I reckoned I’m in it, actually,” Potter grinned, completely shit-eating and looking immensely pleased with himself. “The line, I mean. For the Academy.”

“– and I must insist that you desist with this nonsense at once, before I call upon the authorities from whom you have so woefully lost your way this morning.”

“I quit the Aurors, actually,” Potter announced with an abundance of defiant pride. “Months ago. D’you not get the Prophet at the Manor anymore?”

“What do you mean, you quit?” Draco muttered belligerently, distracted by the rapidly approaching podium. There were only a handful of initiates between them and the Dean.

Draco had, in fact, stopped getting the Daily Prophet delivered to the Manor at some point during his tenure at the museum, during which most headlines regarding him were venomous speculative pieces about which muggle he would lure next into an ancient macabre blood ritual. He should have cancelled his subscription far sooner, if he was honest with himself, but he’d gained a bit of a thing for self-flagellation throughout his post-bellum journey of self-improvement. It wasn’t until Pansy threatened to illegally floo to his house and forcibly kidnap him to a much-needed vacation off Lake Geneva unless he got his mopey head out of his arse that he had the wherewithal to recognize what an awful effect all the libel had on him.

“I quit,” Potter repeated slowly, as though Draco was either very young or very stupid. “Do you need a dictionary? I would’ve thought you had access to one, all that money of yours, but I guess there’s no accounting for class.”

The scoff Draco released was so loud it turned heads. An initiate three people in front of them shushed him with vehemence, poised for her name to be called to the stage. “Oh, fuck off, you Blibbering Humdinger,” Draco whispered ferociously, thinking Luna would be proud of his creative use of one of her more favored creatures. “I don’t need you to bird-dog my every move like it’s sixth year all over again.”

“Who said I’m doing this for you, you self-obsessed little weirdo?” Potter cocked his head in a mocking way that never failed to get Draco’s blood boiling. “Maybe I just like pissing you off.”

And Draco would have had a rebuttal to that, he was certain, had Potter not shoved him onto the stage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“You have seventeen hours and thirteen minutes,” Draco informed Potter, sending coloured sparks up around the red numbers above his head. Luna had introduced him to kazoos at the party she held upon receiving his entrance letter to the Academy, and Draco sorely wished he had one now to pester Potter with.

Seventeen hours and thirteen minutes was still plenty of time for Potter to gather himself. Draco was tentatively optimistic, but it was at this interval that his hair began to skim the floor from his seat, and he wanted to be sure Potter was aware of the urgency of his predicament. He gathered his locks meticulously in his hands and smoothed it into his lap, musing over the futility of tying it all up. “You have to make sure you only slow the growing process, and don’t halt it entirely,” Draco reminded him, peeking at some scrawled equations on the parchment next to Potter’s elbow. “If you fuck up my hair, you won’t see the other side of finals, and it won’t be for your expulsion.”

“I’m not going to halt it entirely,” Potter argued, hastily erasing a string of scrawled spellwork from his notes. “I know what I’m doing, Malfoy.”

Draco eyed Potter’s hair doubtfully.

“Shut up,” Potter muttered, looking at his books again. The red flush was back high on his cheeks.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You didn’t have to! I can hear you looking, you twat.”

Draco sucked his teeth blithely and smoothed out a tangle in his lap. “My practicum took me two and a half hours.”

“Yes, prodigy Malfoy, we can’t all be blessed with the unparalleled ability to be a complete pretentious knob at all waking and most non-waking hours,” Potter resignedly replied, his mouth in a reluctant moue of amusement and annoyance.

Draco gasped. “So many big words! And here I thought you were still monosyllabic.”

“Perhaps you’re just not as observant as you think you are.”

“Impossible,” Draco sneered imperiously.

Potter rolled his eyes, threw his glasses onto his open book and pinched the bridge of his nose. He took a few deep breaths before replacing them and snapping shut his book. “Alright, and I know this will really be a challenge for you, Malfoy, but I need you to be quiet for the next half hour or so.”

Draco hummed, pulling the feather of his quill from his lips and jotting down a string of runes he calculated would make Goldstein croak like the bullfrog he would expel when he next opened his mouth in Draco’s presence.

Outwardly simple curses such as a bad bout of static electricity or ever-growing hair, or even, Draco had to admit, his own idea of barfing bullfrogs, could, to the unscrupulous onlooker, seem unintelligible from jinxes. What the Academy had taught them was that the difference was in the mechanics of the spellwork. Jinxes and hexes were usually surface-level, easily remedied with a short counter-jinx, comparable in many cases to Charms work. In contrast, curses were often layered and more malicious in purpose.

Weasley’s backfired slug-spitting jinx in second year stopped by itself eventually, Draco had later learned with considerable regret. If only it had never stopped, he had mused forlornly. Certainly the two of them would have developed a better rapport if so.

In contrast, curses did not simply wear out. If not intercepted by Draco or Ruthers, Harry’s static electricity would have built until lightning bolts burst from his fingertips, sizzling himself and anyone else. If left to its own devices, Draco’s hair would grow until his head was too heavy to lift from the ground. If unattended, Goldstein would continue emitting bullfrogs and would, unable to command his oesophagus, starve. Though Saint Potter would likely call this reactionary curse hyperbole, Draco figured only such a punishment or one of equal measure would fit Goldstien’s grievous infraction of meddling with his hair.

To undo such curses, the Curse-Breaker had to delve into the layers of spellwork like a clockmaker delicately eviscerating the gears from their confines. Every section needed to be vivisected with precision, isolated, stripped from its other working parts, and dismantled meticulously. Repeat this ad nauseam until the spell work was bereft of its utility, and then banish the remains in reverse order. That was how they taught you at the Curse-Breaker’s Academy, ranging from works on inert objects such as cursed music boxes to shadowing cases on living beings such as patients in the blood curse ward of St. Mungo’s. Curse-Breakers who aspired for a medical specialisation could look forward to another five years at Mungo’s in apprenticeships until they became certified to practice.

Luckily for Draco, he disliked people on principle. He opined the less he saw of generally everyone the better for all humanity. Unfortunately, Potter had wormed his way out of Draco’s definition of ‘generally everyone’ with the tenacity of one very stubborn termite, determined to undermine Draco’s very robust foundations.

There had been many moments of softness between them over the past three years at the Academy, gentleness that made Draco’s skin feel too small for his body. One of the first was in their first year of study when Draco had decided to go out for drinks with some of their class members who hadn’t known him during Hogwarts. It was a tentative overture to make friends, one which his mind-healer had encouraged him to pursue. Regular mind-healing sessions had been yet another overzealous Ministry mandate for an aspiring young ex-Death Eater’s reformation attempt. He was required to attend weekly visits for five years post-sentence with an annual attestation from his provider that he remained in good health.

Draco had only had half his beer when the world started to slip sideways. He always cast a charm on his drinks in the Academy cantine, as he had done here in the muggle pub. It was a hard-won habit from dark days in the Manor surrounded by unsavoury individuals, and it served him well. But this bar was a muggle establishment, and his charm only picked up potions or curses. A modification he made swiftly the day after, not that it helped him then.

Draco had gotten himself a mobile phone during his tenure at the Magi-Muggle Museum. All his coworkers used them and they discouraged sending owls, as they startled some of the more recent members of the wizarding community. Draco had taken it up with considerable hesitancy, becoming easily frustrated by the miniscule buttons far too small for his fingers, and the loud noises it emitted when evidently displeased, and the keyboard which decided to slide out at odd times when he was trying to open the infernal device and then not at all when he needed it. But after the first learning curve was surmounted, he reluctantly conceded that perhaps the ugly hunk of heinous muggle invention – Mathilde had called it plastic, which certainly was not any of the noble metals or accursed substances, but some sort of mongrelization of the two – had its charms. It shat on him far less than Pansy’s owl Hermes, for one. And it was faster, usually, when he could figure out what the staircase at the top right meant, all the bars moving up and down strangely with whatever universal vibrations they were picking up. Luna had told him something like it in eighth year, but he had thought she was full of it, not that he would ever criticise her for her beliefs, not when they allowed her to remain the only halfway positive person within ten acres of the Malfoy Manor dungeons that horrible year.

He used this infernal device to remain in contact with Mathilde, his supervisor at the museum with whom he had standing a weekly brunch date even after his tenure at the Triple M. Potter had ogled it in Draco’s hands that first week in the dorms, and then promptly insisted they exchange numbers.

“Why?” Draco had asked, glaring at him suspiciously as he hovered by the kettle. He hunched himself protectively over the muggle device.

“To wish you good morning, sweetheart,” Potter replied sarcastically, blowing a smug little kiss to Draco as he snatched the phone from his startled hands. “If I forget my keys again, this is easier than trying to dismantle the wards.”

Draco baulked. “The Dean put those wards in place herself!”

“Yeah,” Potter agreed, tossing the phone back to Draco, “and they were bloody hard to rip through.”

That night at the bar, as Draco stumbled away from his classmates and the world rapidly began to go wobbly, Draco had called Potter. He answered on the third ring.

“Draco?” he mumbled, his voice groggy. None of them got enough sleep that first semester, and if Draco knew Potter’s study habits, he had likely been kipping on the library sofa in between memorising runic code. “What’s up, love?”

“Potter,” Draco said, disliking the way his own voice sounded. “I don’t feel well, I…fuck, I’m so stupid.” He had to lean against the wall of the bathroom stall where he had hidden himself. His vision was starting to go blurry, and Draco thought distantly that he should have felt alarmed. “I think someone spiked my drink.”

Draco heard a magnificent rustling from the other end of the line, and then a breathless, “Where are you?” sharp and crisp in his ear.

“That pub by the rotary,” Draco explained, thinking that it would be quite nice to sit down. He did so, right on the sticky bathroom floor. Distantly, he thought some other version of himself would despair at the state of his designer trousers. “The loo, I’m hiding in the loo.”

“Alright, love, hang on,” Potter said, before an almighty crack rang out in the small washroom, echoing through the telephone receiver. “Draco?”

“Here,” Draco called. His voice had a floaty quality, in contrast to the heaviness of his limbs, which felt like they may drag him through the floor as though compelled to the earth’s very core.

A whispered, faraway Alohomora rustled from behind the stall door and Potter was there, in his space, one hand cupping his face. “Hey, darling, can you look at me?” Draco blinked fuzzily, trying, but all he could see was the green of Harry’s eyes in a slow, meandering slide, as though dripping down his face. If Draco could have focused, he would have heard the rattling of the faucets in the sinks, of the doors on their hinges, while Harry struggled to contain his feelings.

“Okay, alright.” Harry exhaled slowly, taking deep breaths in and out while cradling the side of Draco’s head, his hands shaking as he stroked his cheek. From faraway, Draco could hear Harry counting down from five under his breath, his voice only a whisper and Draco’s pulse in his ears a rushing river.

When Harry spoke again, his voice was firm but despairingly gentle. “You’re doing so well. I’ve got you. Here, wrap your arms around my neck, I’m going to side-along you back to mine, alright?”

Draco wound his arms around him, tucking his face into the juncture between Harry’s neck and shoulder. Harry was spinning, everything was, but he smelled of old books and crackling magic and the warm, comforting masculine scent of his soap and his shampoo and, underneath both, his body. He was stable and steady beneath Draco’s hands even as the world lurched around them.

Draco vomited on Harry’s dorm room floor. He had been too busy to get his hair trimmed as usual that first semester, and so Harry held it away from his face as he retched, stroking his back with his free hand and making small soothing noises. A cabinet rattled and swung open, revealing a small glass vial that soared towards them.

Harry sat Draco down against his bed with his head between his knees and snatched the vial from the air. As Draco dazedly watched three spinning sets of hands grasp the glinting glass, he was reminded of all the snitches Harry had caught in their youth. Of all the darting precious things that sought the open sky and yet found themselves inevitably drawn to Harry’s calloused palms. Every time. Delighted, almost, to be caught.

Draco was lost in swirling thoughts, but Harry was grounded and talking. “Alright love, I dunno how much you’ll remember but this is a cure-all, yeah? Hermione makes me carry them ever since I got doused with that love potion by that crazy fan last year. Here, tilt your head back for me.” Draco let Harry tilt the potion into his mouth, swallowing it little by little. Despite his wiser instincts, Draco had never felt the need to check anything Harry ever gave him for tampering. “Just like that, love. You’ve done so well.”

With Harry, the only fear Draco could remember feeling was the fear of the tempting unknown, the tantalising warmth of letting himself be captured. Of eschewing those lonely open skies for a gentle hand and a low, kind voice.

Draco felt light and heavy all at once, but even with just one swallow he could feel himself coming back into his body. Harry was brushing his fringe back from his eyes, saying, “You’re alright darling. There you go.” He held Draco’s left hand, his thumb on his pulse at his wrist. With his hand in Draco’s hair already, he brought him close to press his face into the crown of Draco’s head, inhaling deeply. “There you go. You’re alright now.”

They sat together until the roil of Draco’s stomach settled into something leaden and dull. His eyes felt crusted over, his mouth foamy and desert-dry, and there was a steady, faraway pounding of his pulse behind his left eye.

“Do you think you can move yourself, or would you rather I levitate you?” Harry’s hand was stroking down his back in slow, hypnotising motions. It made Draco want to burrow into him and never move again.

“Where?” Draco croaked, squeezing his eyes open and shut.

“Just onto the bed. You should try to sleep it off a bit. I’ll stick around.” Harry smiled softly, his face still so close. There were fingerprint smudges on his glasses lenses. Draco could see the bruising under his eyes and the furrow of his brow. He had that small line by his nostril that only emerged when he was angry, worried, or both. “Hermione’s potions are even better than yours always were, since she was never wasting half the class angling to ruin my work and didn’t ride on her godfather’s coattails, but I’d rather you…I’d rather be here.”

“There’s no need to cast aspersions on my potion making,” Draco grumbled. He shrugged Harry off and wobbled to his feet, at which height he could physically feel himself turning a sickly shade of green. He swallowed heavily and gritted his teeth, lowering himself gingerly to the thin twin mattress, the same diabolically uncomfortable standard-issue all students got. “I can do it myself.”

“Yeah, you showed me, your highness,” Harry agreed amiably and hovered, ready to catch Draco if he fell. “So robust. No aspirations here.” He piled his pillows atop one another to prop Draco up and pushed him gently back into them.

“A malapropism, Potter," Draco corrected, exhaling deeply as he sank into the softness around him. “It’s aspersions.”

“Gesundheit,” Harry grinned, looking pleased.

Draco sighed once more, pained and beleaguered. He felt spitefully pleased that the seat of his ruined trousers were further ruining Harry’s appallingly cheap bed sheets, still unforgivably and irreversibly grimy from their position on the loo floor. Would Harry even wash them after Draco left? Draco was unsure. Harry was so altruistic, he may not even let the house elves clean them. Perhaps he would prefer to cart them down to a river and hand-wash them with a Victorian washing dolly. Draco abruptly thought of Harry churning laundry in a river, with his clothes soaked and stuck to his lithe form and his forearms beaded with water and sweat as he worked, and decided all at once that he was clearly still mightily addled despite Potter’s claims of Granger’s skill.

Blissfully unaware of Draco’s unfavourable musings, Harry continued smoothing Draco’s hair and the blankets around him. His hands fluttered around Draco, the back of one pressing against his flushed forehead and reddened cheeks.

“Do you feel feverish?” Harry asked with concern. “You feel a bit hot to me.” He waved a hand at the sink in his room, at which, a clean washcloth began wetting itself and floated over to them.

Harry pressed the cool fabric against Draco’s burning cheeks. Mortified, Draco tried to snatch it away, but Harry batted at his hands.

“I’m alright,” Draco grumbled mutinously.

Harry made a noncommittal noise and didn’t stop his ministrations. Draco’s eyelids began to feel a thousand pounds, every blink longer than the last. Eventually, Harry added, “It’s ok if you just want to sleep, but it’s also alright if you feel unwell or have to vomit. I can Conjure a bucket if you tell me. I can spell the bedding clean and then ask the elves to turn down the bed early tomorrow. I don’t want you to try suppressing anything if you don’t have to. If your body needs it, that’s what matters. I just want to make sure you’re alright.”

Draco sighed. He took one of Harry’s ever-moving hands and held it as though he meant to drag him along into the viscous, dark heaviness that was pulling Draco under. “I know, Harry.”

Harry brought Draco’s hand up to his lips, where he kept it pressed, less a kiss than a prayer for the desperation and tenderness of it all. “I just want to keep you safe,” he whispered into his skin, so softly Draco wondered if the words were meant for his ears.

Regardless, he struggled to keep even one grainy eye open to gaze at Harry. “You just wanted to get me in your bed,” he murmured. With leaden limbs, he fished his wand out of his pocket, his fingers rubbery and uncoordinated, and charmed Harry’s lenses clean so he wouldn’t have to look at the smears. “Not even cotton, I bet. Some scratchy muggle blend.”

Harry smiled. “You’re right,” he agreed, pushing his glasses up on his nose and getting another blasted fingerprint on them, likely just to antagonise Draco. “I’ve always wanted to see you lower yourself to my plebeian standards.” His words were mocking, but his tone was honeyed and warm, and he once again pushed strands of Draco’s fringe out of his one opened, bleary eye. “Go on, have a nap. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Draco distantly felt compelled to protest on purely contrarian grounds, but he didn’t truly want to, and sleep pressed at the edges of his vision. Oblivion stole him away, rocked to unconsciousness by the slow movement of Harry’s thumb on the back of his hand.

Sometime later, Draco awoke. He felt overheated in an uncomfortable, vaguely sweaty sort of way, and felt shaky with dehydration. The window was still covered by curtains, the overhead light turned off in favour of Potter’s small desk lamp. Even the dim yellow glare still hurt his eyes.

“Water,” he groaned, and a glass appeared in front of him, attached to Potter’s hand.

Potter was already casting a diagnostic charm on him before Draco had taken his first sip. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like shit, obviously,” Draco grimaced feebly over the rim of the glass, his knees pulled to his chest. The hard mattress beneath him made him squirm with discomfort. Draco wondered if he could sneak into the kitchens and bribe a house elf to help him switch it with one of the ones from the Manor, transfigured smaller. Not that Potter would appreciate it, of course. “Where’d you learn that?”

Harry glanced away from the trailing acronyms and numbers back to Draco. “The diagnostic charm?”

Draco nodded.

“Auror training. It’s one of the first things they cover, for if any of us trainees got landed in a scene and we needed to stabilise a victim while more senior members went after the perpetrator. Didn’t make it past the first real crime scene, but, well.” Harry motioned to Draco’s general form. “It comes in handy, every now and then.”

Draco hummed noncommittally. “We’re in the dorms?” He felt stupid for asking the moment the question left his lips. Of course they were.

“Yeah, my dorm room,” Harry replied. “You can sleep more if you need to. The cure-all tends to leave me feeling wrung out.” He smiled ruefully, all that boyish charm that the papers loved to print under speculations of his next fling, always some adorable pixieish female celebrity with a babydoll-round face and doe-like eyes. Of course. Never some chthonic, pointy, viperous man that half the population still suspected of nefarious covert evildoing. “It’s a fair bit better than Hermione’s cleansing spells, which always make me feel, er, disgustingly healthy, like I’ve never had a drunk cig in my life. Can I get you anything else?”

Draco wasn’t really listening. He was trying to cobble together what happened in the time between the nightmarish pub bathroom and Potter’s floor. “Did we walk here?”

“Ah,” Potter flushed and scratched his head, the nervous tick he did when he embarrassed himself. Draco thought he needed to do it more often. Potter so rarely felt embarrassed of himself when he rightfully should have been. “No, I apparated us in.”

Draco furrowed his brow. “The Dean’s wards—”

“Yes, I know, and I expect a Howler or a summons to her office about it again tomorrow morning.” He shrugged. “If you ask me, it’s just good Cursemaking practice, figuring out flaws in your security. I’m doing her a favour.”

“A favour that’d get anyone else expelled,” Draco harrumphed.

Potter waved him away, clearly unworried. “Mm. Do you want anything else? Soup or tea? I can get one of the elves, I asked after their names the first week here and they said I could call on them whenever.”

“The masses never cease to adore,” Draco sighed, sinking back into bed. “Oh how your sunlight shines upon them.”

Harry shrugged uncomfortably, shifting in his seat as he glanced away from Draco for possibly the first time since the diagnostic charm had faded. “I wanted to make sure they were being treated alright.”

Suddenly, Draco was overwhelmed by the memory of Potter speaking at his trial, talking about how Draco and Dobby had saved him at the Manor. He thought of Granger and her ridiculous H.U.R.L. endeavour or whatever it was, and of how Dobby always tried to treat Draco with patience and understanding, despite the fact that, even as a child, he had not deserved it.

Draco’s throat constricted, but he forced the words to come anyway. “That was good of you. They deserve…They don’t deserve to be treated poorly.”

Potter smiled and patted his hand. “‘Course not. Come on, your majesty, I’ll summon Leedy from the kitchens and we’ll have a good midnight snack.”

They had. And then Draco had showered and promptly returned back to his own room at the reasonable hour of 3am, stewing in self-righteous anger and self-loathing at presuming to believe he could deserve a fun night out without something going off the rails.

The next day of classes, Potter cornered Draco between periods and hedged he had a case if he wanted to lodge a complaint. Draco just sighed, already overwhelmed with his schedule and disgruntled by being asked to think of this again. Throwing himself into his work so he had an excuse to ignore his personal qualms had always suited him well before – surely Potter knew that.

“It was off campus, and it could have even been a muggle,” Draco murmured, trudging to the cantine with his third cup of coffee clutched in trembling hands. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Potter insisted, all fiery indignation. “After I got drugged by that fan, Hermione made me go to this resource centre and speak with a counsellor. Just because nothing happened doesn’t mean it couldn’t’ve, Draco, and that’s not your fault. You deserve to feel safe!”

“Like a house elf,” Draco muttered, still half reminded of Dobby in that strange way his mind had of sometimes clinging to things, clocking out of the conversation and mentally rifling through the notes he had just taken in their lecture on determining the different qualifications of cursed artefacts.

“Sure, yeah, like a person,” Potter argued. He had acquired a surly tilt to his jaw at the change in Draco’s tone, like he knew Draco had begun tuning him out. Perhaps he did. If he had let himself realise it, it would have been arresting, and likely downright frightening, for Draco to understand that Potter knew him this well. “Look, you didn’t deserve it in eighth year and you don’t deserve it now, yeah?”

Draco pulled a scornful face. “Nobody ever drugged me in eighth year.”

“No, they just bludgeoned the bloody fuck out of you,” Potter huffed, looking mutinous and also strangely fragile. He repeated, in much the same tone as the night before, “I just want you to be safe.”

“You sound like Pansy,” Draco observed, ignoring the flip in his stomach. “Or Mother.” But the delicate expression was on Potter’s face still, uncontainable and upsetting on his heroic features. Draco stopped walking and put a hand to his shoulder. He pressed enough so Potter could feel it, enough so they both could, his palm just beneath the juncture in which he had put his face not twelve hours before. Potter took a deep, stuttering breath, one Draco could feel beneath his touch.

He wanted to say, I’m okay. He wanted to say, This is nothing. Or even possibly, I don’t know why you keep helping me. But none of those felt exactly right, and none felt exactly true. Potter had brought his hand up to grip Draco’s wrist, the scarred one that read I must not tell lies. And if Potter couldn’t, well. In some belated crisis of conscience, Draco felt it unfair to lie in return.

So instead, Draco quirked a curious eyebrow and, like the coward he was, took an easy way out. Stepping away, he asked, “Neither of them put you up to this, did they? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Potter glowered predictably. “Nobody put me up to this,” he said moodily, kicking a twig out of their path like a truculent child. Mischievously, he added, “Your mother says hello, though, and wishes you’d write more.”

“What!” Draco squawked. “How would you know?”

Potter shrugged, a devilish grin twisting his lips. “She reached out to thank me after your trials and we kept in touch. Nice lady,” he grinned, delighting in Draco’s dawning horror. “She invited me to your Yule celebration gala at the Manor this year. She said she’d be delighted to host me.”

“You stay away from my mother!” Draco barked at him.

Potter laughed, the imbecile.

After their final lecture of the day, Draco told Potter apropos of nothing, “I go to a Mind Healer, you know.”

“Do you?” Potter asked around an ambitious bite of chicken curry sandwich, spraying crumbs onto the canteen table. “Really?”

Draco cringed, tossing a napkin at him. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Obviously yeah,” Potter replied, taking the napkin and wiping his mouth. But it was with good-natured empathy that he added, “That’s good, Draco. I’m glad. I hope it helps.”

Draco nodded, deciding promptly that he had reached his quota for sentiment for perhaps the next year entirely. “Chew with your mouth closed, you animal. Every time I see you eat it’s like your first time being sat up and pushed in. Were you raised by a troop of orangutans?”

Potter snorted. “If only. Watch me often, do you?”

“Like a train wreck,” Draco nodded seriously. “With horror and macabre curiosity.”

Potter threw his used napkin at Draco’s earnest expression.

Somehow, Potter always knew when to engage him when he drew back behind the veneer and when to push against the shield itself. Soft smiles and vulnerable glances, all perfected to tear to shreds Draco’s cavalier facade. They were just like the looks Potter threw at Draco now, gazing at his ever-growing hair when he thought Draco was not paying attention.

In turn, Draco watched Harry spin his biro in his fingers and another memory floated to the forefront of his mind, unbidden.

They were in Diagon Alley, hunting for presents for Teddy’s fifth Christmas. Draco followed Potter to Quality Quidditch Supplies to make sure Potter didn’t endanger his nephew with Gryffindorish ideas about safety charms. Potter remained to see what Draco bought and to purchase twice as much. He had a reputation to uphold as godfather, he reminded Draco, and he would empty all the Potter and Black vaults before he let Draco usurp him.

A dire plume of paparazzi had gathered outside Quality Quidditch Supplies, milling about like innocent citizens with nothing better to do than kick rocks between the cobblestones as they lay siege and waited. Potter clutched their gift bag in one cold-bitten, white-knuckled hand like a shield and his wand in the other.

He looked like he was steeling himself to go to war all over again as he gazed through the window, hidden by the sales display.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Draco admonished. Before Potter could respond or he could overthink, he threw open the door and swanned out of it. The reporters jolted at the sound, their ears perked and their fanged mouths salivating. As the cameras flashed, Draco cast a handful of Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder into the air and dragged Potter into the small wind tunnel he made as the world darkened around them, just big enough to get them through the anti-apparition wards.

“Anywhere else you want to go?” Draco asked casually, slinging an arm around Potter’s shoulders to keep him in the wind tunnel, stirring the air lazily with his wand. He’d gotten quite good at his Instant Darkness escapes, ever since he started employing them in eighth year after a particularly rough and Potterless encounter. Smugly, he thought, May as well give them some drama if they want a story so badly.

“Er–” Potter took a moment to gather himself, still holding himself so tensely from no doubt the projected paparazzi battle. Draco took the moment of quiet to listen to the sounds of reporters cursing and fumbling for their wands, and he smiled to himself in victorious satisfaction. “Erm, I–I think I’ve got to go back to the dorms.”

Torn from his triumphant reverie, Draco gave him an assessing look. “Alright, hold on, I’ll side-along you.”

Potter stumbled to a seat on the bench outside their dorm building and plunged his head between his knees. Draco thought he might’ve been sick before he heard the ragged breathing.

“Potter…” he began, stepping up to where Potter had slumped.

“Fine!” Potter gasped, clearly not. “I’m…fine…”

Draco crouched on the ground at Potter’s feet, where he could easily make eye contact from his hunched position if he were to remove his head from his knees. “Hey,” he said softly, putting a hand on the gravel between Potter’s feet. “Open your eyes.”

Harry did, looking at him with wide eyes glazed in panic from behind his glasses.

“Deep breaths,” Draco said, demonstrating. “In, and out. Like me.”

Harry tried, but on every inhale his breath stuttered and seemed to get caught in his throat. His eyes began to get wild once more, and he covered his face with his hands, shaking.

“Can I touch your hand?” Draco asked, loud enough to be heard over Harry’s panting. Harry nodded, once. Draco pulled Harry’s right hand from his face, gently but firmly, and put it over his own chest just above his heart. “Feel my breathing. I’m here.”

Harry clung onto the fabric of Draco’s jumper, his nails digging into the fibres. Draco stroked the back of Harry’s hand with his thumb. He could feel him shaking as the waves of panic crashed.

“Don’t…” Harry sobbed. “Don’t leave.”

“I’m right here.”

Harry released another haggard, juddering breath. Draco remained quiet for a long while, straight-backed and alert. He did not try to make Harry breathe with him. He did not try to make him listen or pause. He only held his hand, sitting with Harry as the emotion spilled over.

Draco’s feet had gone numb, his knees gone sore from the uneven gravel, before Harry returned to himself. He clutched Draco’s hand in his clammy palm, his fingertips white with pressure.

Draco counted down from ten, a number on every long exhale. They went through it together multiple times before Harry could match him, and several times more before Draco thought Harry might be able to manage something else.

“Five things you can see, Harry,” he said, curling his fingers around Harry’s palm, still at his chest. “Tell me five things.”

“You,” Harry hacked. “The…the sky. The lamppost—behind you. Your hair. Your coat.”

“Alright,” nodded Draco. “Four things you can feel.”

Harry took a shuddering breath. His hair was wild and his eyes were wet, but then no longer contained that same manic quality of a spooked horse. “Your jumper. The bench beneath me. The ground beneath my feet.” He took another shuddering deep breath. “Your hand.”

“Three things you can hear.”

“Your voice,” he said immediately. “Our classmates walking around. The leaves in the breeze.”

Draco nodded again. “Good job, Harry. Two things you can smell.”

Harry took another fortifying breath, this one through his nose. It had lost its shaky quality. “The spring flowers,” he replied, looking at Draco as though he contained everything the universe could offer him, if only he never looked away. “The…you. Your cologne.”

“Alright,” Draco indulged quietly. “Anything you can taste?”

Harry grimaced, bringing his free hand to cover his mouth. “Aftertaste of that coffee we got.”

“I’ll make you tea. Do you feel better?”

“Not really,” he admitted on an exhale, releasing Draco and rubbing his hands through his hair. “Calmer, but still awful. Those things always wipe me out.”

Draco was reminded of the faraway times as a small child, when his parents would lock him away in his chambers when he had his temper tantrums, when Dobby would come even though Draco was certain now that he had not been ordered to do so, to sit with him and hum until Draco returned to some teary semblance of quietude.

Draco could not hold a tune. He could play the grand piano in his drawing room, and had done so often, that heinous summer before eighth year. He found it calming, but he didn’t think Harry would appreciate being apparated all the way to Wiltshire in his current state.

“Come,” Draco said, flowing gracefully to standing and holding a hand to help Harry up. “If you’re alright to walk.”

He set Harry up in Harry’s own dorm, pressing the bespoke quilt Molly had made him into his arms and stowing Teddy’s gift in Harry’s closet. “I will be back,” Draco had promised, and he was soon enough, carrying two mugs of tea with his messenger bag of homework slung over his shoulder. A record player levitated behind him, an antique that Draco saved from the throwaway pile at the Magi-Muggle Museum and had painstakingly repaired.

“I always play this whenever I’m overwhelmed,” Draco admitted, putting on Für Elise. “Don’t make some remark about how I’m insufferably pretentious even with muggle culture.”

“You’re just the first person I know who would play Beethoven on anything,” Harry said. He snuggled deeper into Molly’s quilt and reached out for the steaming mug that Draco floated towards him. “But that’s not a bad thing.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Draco affirmed, and sat at Harry’s desk, inches away from the bed in the tiny dorm room, to begin his reading.

Harry laid into the quilt, curled around his tea, and listened quietly. Draco lost himself in his readings, only resurfacing when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“I…” Harry appeared desperately embarrassed, his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed at the multicoloured threads of Molly’s knitting. Seeming to manfully summon all of his Gryffindor courage, he asked, “Can I hold your hand again?”

“Of course,” Draco acquiesced immediately, his whole self bending towards Harry like a flower to the sun. “Do you want anything else?”

“I don’t know,” Harry admitted, intertwining their fingers. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Learn what?”

“That,” he waved around, searching for the words. “That counting thing.”

“Ah.” Draco smiled, less happily than self-deprecatingly. “I don’t keep my mind healer around just as a ticked box for the Ministry, you know.”

Harry hummed, but said nothing. His gaze went far off, though his hand was still tight in Draco’s.

“Do you want to talk?” Draco asked. Harry shook his head before Draco had even finished the final word.

Draco nodded, and offered instead, “I could read to you.” He swallowed his own embarrassment, gesturing with his papers. “‘Examined Properties of Runic Ciphers on Periodic Metals’ isn’t the most riveting reading material, though I know you have yet to read it too. If you have a book you’d prefer, I could do that instead.”

“This is fine,” Harry hurried to say, voice hoarse. “Runic Properties are fine.”

“Runic cipher, Harry,” Draco corrected with some awful, unspeakable tenderness he did not let himself examine, and began from the beginning.

Potter did not like the paparazzi. Draco did not like that he hadn’t realised to what extent Potter did not like the paparazzi until that evening. He wondered if it had anything to do with that fan and that love potion, and Draco seethed, sickened and regretful that he had cancelled his subscription to the Prophet before he had been able to storm into their offices and show them what a real Death Eater did for fun.

The next morning’s headlines, which he was sure to purchase, included a large photo of Draco elegantly stepping out of Quality Quidditch Supplies with his head held high. Across his steely eyes, his fringe swept, long on top and shorn short on the sides with some obviously muggle contraption. Draco had selected the hairstyle because it made him chuckle nastily to think of his father rolling in his cell.

Draco watched himself in the photo as, with his chin held high and with a lazy glance from side to side, he slashed a hand in front of himself and cast the photo into darkness, almost fast enough to obscure the face of the other man whose arm he held as the picture darkened.

Golden Boy and Death Eater: An Illicit Affair? the headlines screamed. Draco skimmed the page, clicking his tongue in disappointment. He had anticipated an entertaining wealth of salacious and wildly incorrect details fabricated about him and Potter, delivered in the most riveting manner by the Prophet’s very best prevaricators.

What he instead wasted his precious time and valuable energy consuming was a dull witch’s even duller speculation on what Draco had been doing at the Magi-Muggle Museum, whether or not he had paid off Mathilde to convince her to speak so highly of him, who he had slept with or blackmailed or bribed to get into the Curse-Breaker’s Academy, and what in sweet Godric’s name he was doing quite literally hanging onto the arm of the most eligible bachelor in the British Isles.

Draco supposed, with a gloomy sort of resignation, that all of Granger’s advocacy on libel and slander reform might have actually been going somewhere. If everyone was going to treat him as though he was evil, he wanted to have a little fun with it. It was even better when they spun their yarn themselves so he knew which expectations to live up to. Yet here it was in black and white, some unoriginal milquetoast storytelling, most of which Draco suspected had been plagarised from prior editions.

“Shit, Draco, I’m so sorry,” Potter apologised the moment he stumbled upon Draco in their floor’s shared kitchen reading the front cover (for more details about the disgraced Malfoy Family and where they are now, turn to page 5!). “I didn’t realise they’d gotten photos of us, I swear, you joke about me stalking you but half the reason the Academy has the perimeter wards key coded both muggle and magic is because of them stalking me. They won’t leave me alone, and now they’ve dragged you into this rubbish…” Potter paused to read the headline for likely the first time. “An affair?” he scoffed. “They don’t still think I’m dating Ginny, do they?”

Draco tsked. “From the hex Ginerva gave the last reporter, I would suspect they prefer to give her a very wide berth,” he remarked, recalling his own misfortune at the end of Ginerva’s signature spell. He sighed and shrugged, putting on his poshest of affects. “Anything either of us do will always be but grist for the mill of these insipid yellow journalists. These headlines are purposefully misleading. They make absolutely no conjecture on our sex lives, would you have it? I was so looking forward to reading it.” He hummed thoughtfully, pleased to see a small smile tugging at Potter’s lips from his diatribe. “Tell me, are all the women you associate with so talented at violence?”

Potter smirked as he walked to the kettle, rummaging around in the cabinets for a mug. “Just where you’re concerned,” he answered sweetly. “‘Cept Luna, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“No, she would rather put me through the heinously torturous process of forgiving me my utmost failures, as it were,” Draco sniffed, a strange, jumbled up emotion pulling at the corner of his mouth that he pushed down at once. Luna was a lovely friend, a truly wonderful human, and for all Draco had tried, he could not shake the memory of her, dirty and too thin in the Manor cell, clasping his hand through the grimy cellar bars with a small, reassuring, heartrending smile.

“No, I’m disappointed in this nonsense, really,” Draco barrelled on, shaking the newspaper in Potter’s face, which had gentled in a way that made Draco feel vaguely unwell. “They don’t say anything inspired about me at all. They say that I’m an intransigent layabout and a swindler who has weaselled my way into your good graces, no doubt to take advantage of your guileless good nature. It does not paint you in a good light, I must say. I don’t know about you, Potter, but I think,” Draco glanced around surreptitiously and put his hand to his mouth, as though shielding it from view, before he said very loudly, “I think they think you’re a moron, Potter.”

“Ah. But you don’t think so?” Potter asked, an eyebrow arched knowingly as he sipped his tea.

“No, I do not think so,” Draco said primly as he straightened in his seat, smoothing the paper across the tabletop, and Potter glared at him suspiciously until he continued, “I know it for a fact.”

Potter’s eyes had rolled then as they did now when Draco announced, “Fifteen hours and fifty-two minutes left!” with a tetchy burst of confetti from his wand.

“I would get this done faster if you didn’t interrupt me every half hour,” Potter protested reproachfully.

“I’m not interrupting,” Draco argued. “I am reminding. Guiding, even. Where would you be without me?”

“Better off, likely,” Potter grumbled, as Draco interrupted with verve, “Lost! You would be lost, Potter, you would not have passed our first semester’s examinations if I had not given you a copy of my study guide.”

“I might’ve,” Potter maintained, flicking a crumpled sticky note at Draco. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Draco shrugged and looked down his nose imperiously. “I like knowing you owe me a favour.” He snatched the sticky note and began un-crumpling it. It read Follicle curses, Braithwhite, pg 256, in Potter’s chicken-scratch.

“Makes you feel important?” Potter guessed, leaning back in his chair and watching Draco’s hands as they smoothed his note and began re-folding it into a paper crane.

“I am important.” Draco puffed out his chest to prove his point, tossing locks that were now well past floor-length in his seat over his shoulder dismissively.

“Anthony should’ve cursed your head to match your overinflated ego,” Potter remarked, following the movement of Draco’s hair with his eyes. “Suppose that would’ve been a health risk, though, on account of how big it would’ve gotten. Would’ve crushed everyone in the theatre.”

Draco sniffed and gestured with his partially-formed crane. “My ego is perfectly proportionate to my accomplishments. I’m going to be valedictorian.”

“We’ve still got a week of finals! Besides, what’re you thinking of doing for Goldstein’s curse?” Harry lurched forward, chair legs all clacking to the ground, to peer at Draco’s notes. “Can I see?”

Draco snapped his notebook shut and hunched around it protectively. Pushing his quill behind one ear, he brushed back a stubborn few locks into place once more and huddled his crane at his chest. “I’m not telling you. You have to break Goldstein’s curse before I disclose any insight to you of my devious machinations.”

“Devious machinations,” mused Potter. “Seems positively…hair raising.” He beamed, waggling his eyebrows.

Draco buried his head in his hands. “I’ve no idea why I put up with you,” he groaned.

“Just a little hint? I’ve no clue what I’m going to work on for Lisa,” Potter griped. “The whole point is not to hurt the other person, so I’ve got to figure out some sort of curse that won’t matter if my magic goes above and beyond with it like it always does.”

“Don’t you dare go above and beyond on my hair,” Draco warned him, glaring. “If you curse my hair off I will violate the terms of my probation, and you won’t be there to testify at my trial and keep me out of Azkaban. I’ll languish in a cell next to Father and wither away in the knowledge that I finally managed to make him proud, only after eschewing my family values, engaging in homosexual behavior, and sporting muggle attire, by slaughtering the Boy Who Lived Slightly Too Long where he stood.”

“What homosexual behavior have you engaged in?” Potter asked accusingly. “You didn’t tell me about that.”

“Interested, are you?” Draco purred, leering over to paw at Potter’s ragged hoodie sleeve. “I don’t tell you everything I do. I’m an enigma. I could be having big gay orgies in the basement of the Rakepick building when you have pickup Runes class.”

Potter shook him off, flushed and scowling. “Sure, Rapunzel. It’s good to have dreams.”

“I could be!” Draco sank back into his chair, arms crossed. His flaxen hair floofed around him as his back hit the cushion with a whump. He blew it out of his face crankily. “People think I’m very attractive. The Prophet seems to think I’ve already performed myriad sex acts for all and sundry.”

“Since when are they saying that again?” Harry glowered darkly. If he still had Turpin’s curse on him, Draco was sure they would have both gotten shocked. “I’ll make a statement in the Quibbler. Or, which reporter was it? I’ll sick Hermione on them. I bet she still has that jar from fourth year somewhere in her expandable bag, the one she kept Skeeter in.”

“Oh, much as I do love revenge, extortion, and kidnapping, Potter, I don’t know,” Draco sighed, fiddling with his paper crane. He stared at it stubbornly as he continued folding a wing. Those articles had come out years ago, right after the end of the war, vicious little speculative things about how he had managed to survive in a madhouse of death and debauchery which had flung him even deeper into depression than he had already been in. He’d hashed it out with Pansy and Greg when he’d spent a week in the Slytherin dorms, hardly able to rouse himself for class – he didn’t want to exhume old skeletons, even when they scratched at the door at times like these.

“I prefer it, honestly. If the people covet me for my body, they will underestimate the sheer scale of my intellect. It’s much easier to manipulate people when they assume you’re stupid,” Draco lectured him, his back straightening and his nose pointing to the sky as he took on a professorial tone.

Potter wisely did not remark on how often Draco called him stupid. Instead his eyes bore into him, too knowing by half, the way they always were whenever Draco tried to dance over vulnerable topics. His gaze tore through Draco’s layers of artifice, making him want to tear off strips of his skin and hang them to dry as though creating a macabre substitution for Boomslang skin with which he may brew Polyjuice Potion and abscond to Honduras and lead a life of reclusive obscurity.

To this discomfort, Draco naturally retorted, “Shut up,” and turned back to his crane once more, determined to finish its small body and spell it to peck Potter’s knowing eyes out. “You have a curse to break, Scarhead, and fifteen hours and thirty-nine minutes left to do it.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In flashing red numbers above Draco’s head, the alarm for “15:00:00!” went off. Draco stretched and groaned. Potter looked up from his scrawl, peering blearily with unfocused eyes at Draco’s raised arms amidst the blinking lights. Draco’s crane orbited his head in lazy loops.

“I’m going to bed,” Draco yawned, setting down his notebook. He had one third of the curse schema for Goldstein’s demise drafted, and another four days to work on it. Sketching the outline was always the hardest.

Draco loved to bedevil the details of a curse, booby-trapping the unsuspecting breaker by making sure they were as cleverly hidden as possible, tucking them away like precious secrets. Those hidden gems, uncovering them was like getting to know the inner workings of another person’s mind, like reaching into their churning soul and seizing their knowledge for his own. If he had not suffered so much with the Vanishing Cabinet and all its environs, he may have even enjoyed making those repairs in sixth year.

He rubbed his face, yawned again, and stood. Unbeknownst to him, his hair had long grown past the point of getting in his way, even when he walked. He took his first step—

And crashed directly into Potter’s shoulder, where it had appeared before him at the expense of half their papers and Potter’s chair, now all strewn fluttering to the floor.

“What?” Draco asked of the chaos around him, his pulse racing. He removed himself from Potter’s shoulder. “What did you do?”

“You tripped,” Potter explained, somehow both sheepish and defensive at once. “I caught you.”

“I would’ve caught myself,” Draco muttered peevishly, stepping away and straightening out his collar. “All this fanfare— are those my notes on the floor?” The notes that Draco had very meticulously ordered in neat piles just moments before? Draco’s crane began wagging its beak in alarm.

“I’ll put them back!” Potter hastily assured them both, knowing rather intuitively at this point in their upper level academic career that Draco did not push off his beauty sleep lightly, and when forced, would bite the heads off of those around him in admirable emulation of his namesake. “Come on, Rapunzel, I’ll carry your hair.”

Though his tone was hard-pressed, Potter’s hands were gentle, almost reverent, as they lifted Draco’s hair into his arms. He caressed the fine blond strands until they walked to Draco’s room, just down the corridor from the small kitchen.

“Let me braid it back, love,” he insisted, a small smile on his face as he looked back and forth between Draco’s hair and the crane, who looked as though it might have begun attempting to make a nest. “So you don’t trip if I’m not there to catch you.”

Draco could feel his heart stutter in his chest, suddenly much more awake. “It’ll grow out,” he protested, trying to ignore the endearment. He knew Potter only used it because he liked to be needed, that unfathomable walking saviour complex at work again. “How do you even know how to braid?”

“I can braid it again in the morning,” Potter parried, as though it were that painfully simple. He ignored Draco’s question, the half-accusation it was.

“You’ll have this curse knocked out by the morning,” Draco warned, but opened the door to his room, a rather less spartan to-do than Potter’s own. Silvery blue and grey plush bedding on what woefully remained a twin-sized bed—had Draco the reputation to bear the Dean’s wrath like Potter, he could have fiddled with the wards and expanded his room enough to fit a King, but he didn’t want to give her any excuse to give him the boot. He was already pushing his luck lingering around the walking disaster that was Harry Potter.

Plants were on every available ledge and shelf in Draco’s room, and wedged into a few unavailable ones as well. The small jungle reminded him, when he became claustrophobic in the middle of the night, that he was somewhere with warmth and light, and not back in the Manor cellars, holding someone’s hand outside the bars but feeling just as much a prisoner.

His small rug, rescued from his bedroom in the Manor, slithered up to them and hissed a greeting. “Hello, Jör,” Draco yawned.

Apparently unsatisfied with the greeting, Jör continued hissing. “Potter, what is he saying?”

Potter flushed. “He, er, likes your hair.” Jör released a loud, combative hiss. “His name is Jör?”

“Jörmungandr,” Draco told Harry, as though it was obvious. To the rug, he sleepily directed, “It’s too late to be so loquacious.”

Jör made a familiar wiggling motion of disagreement, the belligerent little fool. The rug curled in on himself and blinked up at Potter with not a small hint of malice in his button eyes.

“Can area rugs bite?” Potter asked. He had often stood at the entrance to Draco’s room, leaning against the doorway inelegantly to badger him late in the evening, but he had never before stepped foot through the threshold.

“You’ll find out,” Draco replied wryly. “I’ll need you to carry this until I can find a hair tie strong enough.”

“Oh,” Potter breathed. “But…your wards?”

Draco shrugged. “You’re already keyed in.”

The expression Potter made then reminded Draco of Harry’s Patronus, wide eyes and frozen in stillness. The muggle phrase “a deer in headlights” floated to the forefront of his mind, which Mathilde had had to painstakingly explain to him on his first day at the Museum when a muggleborn child’s father referred to him as such. Draco was uncertain if it was a come-on or an insult, and had been completely stymied to decipher the appropriate response. Mathilde had very wisely, upon seeing his expression, stepped in.

Draco arched an eyebrow at him. “Is that a problem? I’d like to be in repose posthaste, preferably already, so you can braid it then or not at all. It’s not like you were making any headway on your counter-curse. None observable to the human eye, anyway.”

“No problem!” Potter hastily replied, louder than before. His fingers tightened in Draco’s hair as if in reflex, unfurling almost as fast and hastening to smooth it down carefully. As long as it was, Draco could hardly feel his touch. “No, I…it’s not a problem.”

Draco nodded imperiously. He summoned his old training, the contours of his mask feeling too small now that he seldomly sported it, to appear as unflappable as he would have liked to be while rummaging through his things. His first order of business was finding something sturdy enough to keep his hair up as he readied himself for bed.

His first hair tie snapped almost immediately. The second held for a few moments, then whapped Potter in his speccy face, to Draco’s great amusement. He finally found one that held after much trial and error, likely more than strictly necessary by the way Potter grumbled. Draco gathered his things, and tried not to look as though he was scurrying to his personal washroom, a tiny closet of a thing that held little more than a toilet and sink.

He changed and cringed as his hair tie snapped, his hair flowing out around him. He noticed that his hair at this length had a bit of a wave to it, somewhere in between the typical pin-straight of the Malfoy clan and the unruly dark curls of the most beloved and most reviled two members of the Black family. Which one was which depended on if you were asking Harry or Great Aunt Wallburga’s portrait. Promptly forsaking the whole hairy endeavour, Draco went through the motions of washing his face and brushing his teeth while very purposefully thinking about absolutely nothing.

The timer above his head showed “14.51.32!” and counting, bright red and casting light down onto his face as though he’d gone for a light run, or was in hell. The latter was far more probable than the former.

Potter was making conversation with Draco’s rug when he reappeared, the nuisances both. “What are you two scheming about?” Draco demanded, gathering his hair over his shoulders and climbing onto his bed. “Nothing good, I suspect.”

“Jör is very protective of you,” Potter noted, stepping gingerly around the glaring rug.

Jör flicked out a pink tufted tongue tetchily, his button eyes narrowed and head cocked as though Potter was just a very large stuffed vole, waiting to be struck.

“I’ve had him since I was an infant.” Draco blinked at Potter, who was now looming above him. “Will you sit down, or are you going to keep standing there like some gormless gollum? You may kneel at the foot of my bed if it pleases you.”

Potter scoffed. “Big words for someone with a timer instead of a crown. Scoot over, your highness. Here,” Potter grabbed a pillow and plopped it to the side, just a bit away from the headboard so he could gather Draco’s hair.

“You have to use the wide-tooth comb to separate it,” Draco instructed, laying down and turning his back to Potter, trying to convince himself he was just snatching some 20-minute kip on the library couch instead of on his own bed with his head nearly in Potter’s lap. “Then the boar bristle brush to smooth it out.”

“Alright,” Potter said fondly, gentle fingers slipping through the strands as he divided Draco’s locks.

“Where did you learn to braid?” Draco asked again, his question never answered.

“Teddy,” Potter replied with warmth. “The days he likes it long, he prefers me to tie it up so it doesn’t get in his face.”

“Tedwin never asks me to braid his hair,” Draco pouted. He closed his eyes and sighed into the feeling of Potter’s fingers working.

“Teddy loves you,” Potter argued, knowing despite Draco’s best intentions that this was a point of deep insecurity. He had never quite received a…nurturing environment at the Manor, and fretted immensely that he would somehow become possessed by the spirit of Lucius’ more strident demons regarding child rearing, foundationless in no small part because Harry and Andromeda would never allow it.

When Draco had first voiced these fears aloud, forcing Potter to promise to oversee him carefully with Teddathy when Andromeda was not present to ensure Draco did not irretrievably fuck up his lifelong mental health, Potter pointed out that Lucius Malfoy would never conceive of rolling around on the ground roaring with gusto, pretending to be a slain dragon, as Draco had during almost every visit throughout Tedgar’s knights and dragons phase. “He always changes his hair blond when you visit. And he lets you play dinosaurs with the Triceratops, that’s his favourite one.”

“Naturally,” Draco hummed, fighting to stay awake. “It’s the only one with a crown.”

Potter chuckled, running another hand softly over the hair by his ear. It was right where his crown, if he had one, would have sat. “Yeah, your majesty.”

His fingers whispered over Draco’s forehead like a balm, and he slept.

The next morning, Draco awoke to his mobile alarm discordantly with his timer, which flashed “6:00:00!!!” above him. It flared with much more urgency than Draco recalled prior. It wasn’t even his degree on the line, just his already tarnished reputation, and here he was getting hassled by Potter even in absentia. He covered his face with his pillow and groaned, surrounding his head in a muffling charm for another five minutes of blessed inertness.

Draco lay there for a good while, mustering his energy to get out of bed, before he noticed Jör acting strangely. Draco cancelled the charm to find Jör had begun hissing urgently at his door. Propping himself on his elbows, Draco watched a small paper crane struggle valiantly from the crack under the door and flopped up onto his bed, flying lopsidedly from a poorly refolded wing.

Follicle curses, Braithwhite, pg 256 Bringing breakfast! Don’t get yourself (or your hair) all twisted in knots. -H

Draco sank back, a small smile playing on his lips before he could catch it as he smoothed the crumpled side of the paper back into place. His thumb passed over the chicken scratch scrawl while he carefully folded the origami back into place.

He felt a familiar dull thud reverberate in his chest as he did so. It was one which occurred now with disconcerting regularity and it sounded, to Draco’s ears, like the steady, plodding footsteps of a funeral procession for someone who had yet to realise the bed they had so meticulously made was, in fact, a coffin.

He rubbed his sternum, inhaling deeply through his nose and out through his mouth like his mind healer had taught him. The feelings welling inside him made him feel seasick. The last time he had felt such a way, so very viscerally, was when Pansy had visited him last Yule, just after he and his mother had returned from a festive morning spent in a dull stupor, visiting Lucius in Azkaban.

Pansy had caught a Portkey to London to surprise him, a bright spot to make up for the dour event the holiday so usually was. Draco had expected to do naught but sulk and mope about in stuffy, fancy clothes, including while visiting Lucius. Every time he was made to shuffle past the Dementors and their ghostly plumes of freezing fog, he reminded himself to keep his back straight and eyes forward, and never to remember that, had Potter not been uniquely persuasive in his desperation to keep Draco out of even more cruel methods of torment on top of what members on the Dark Lord’s side of the war could contrive, these monstrosities could very well have been some of his closest companions for the remainder of his unthinkable life.

He so benevolently was graced the privilege of spending quality time with a hoard of his least favourite dark creatures every time he walked shakily into the prison to witness the shell of the man, who had once been his contentious, arrogant father, stare blankly at nothing with eyes devoid of light and perhaps of soul, despite the lack of a Kiss. Draco and Narcissa huddled beyond bars so frigid they hurt to touch, their voices stolen from them. Azkaban ate all words, all future and past actions. In those awful cells, there was only the awful present and the all-consuming cold.

Joyeux Noel!

Draco slung back another large swig of the Bordeaux that one of the elves - now paid very handsomely, thanks to Granger’s SPEWing - had fetched from the wine quarters. They no longer used cellars since Draco had first returned to the Manor and seen the stairway down. Shivers crawled down his spine at the same time as the very house itself shifted, bricking up the passageway. Draco could only hope the entire space had ceased to exist.

The Manor was angry at Lucius, and bitter towards Narcissa, much in the same way he was. Draco always had the comforting feeling that the Manor felt a sort of kinship with him after the war, as though they had been two unwitting victims forced to bend to the wills of villainous creatures. On Draco’s bad days, such as most Yules themselves, he wondered about the wisdom in the Manor’s affection and the Wizengamot’s decision. Was he not a villainous creature himself, to have done all he had?

The ding from the floo room and the unmistakable click of Pansy’s designer heels on the marble floor only partially fanned away Draco’s toxic miasma. Self-pity clung to him like thick smoke even as he listened to Pansy and Narcissa’s pleasant chit-chat.

Narcissa discussed how well her flower garden was doing as though she had not spent the morning visiting her incarcerated spouse, and Pansy happily waffled about the fashion in Switzerland. Though he was glad to see his best friend, he refrained from adding anything of note. He knew his disagreeableness would permeate whatever conversational foray he attempted, and he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to stop it.

Pansy noticed. Unfortunately for him, Pansy had never grown out of her voracious taste in gossip, nor any of her alacrity at airing her opinions as though delivered from on high. She put two and two together and made five, because Draco thought it was obvious that his gloomy mood had everything to do with nostalgia for glittering Yuletides past, and nothing to do with a speccy wild-haired git.

“Dating Potter, are you?” Pansy asked archly once the two of them had retired to his drawing chambers, knowing the Prophet was a load of freshly steaming Thestral shit. Still, her slim shoulders wiggled in anticipation like a cat after a mouse. “An affair, is it not?”

“It is not,” Draco insisted, taking another sip of his Bordeaux and holding his glass in front of his mouth like a shield. “Neither an affair nor a reality.”

“Mm.” Pansy’s painted mouth was in a moue of concentration. For once in her life, she seemed to be mulling over her words before she said them. “But you wish it were.”

It was posed as a fact, not a question. Draco responded as though it had been one anyway. “I do not!” he squawked in indignation, his wine sloshing in the glass.

“Let’s see,” Pansy said, counting off on her perfectly glossy red nails, the same shade as the wine she was partaking in. The flush in her cheeks could have been inebriation, but Draco suspected it was in fact the excitement of airing long-held grievances that had given her such colour.

She cleared her throat delicately. “All throughout Hogwarts, you spent more time than anyone else in our entire House on your hair, making sure it was that perfect little slicked-back helmet look for when you and Potter inevitably made eye contact across the entire Great Hall, you monstrous weirdos. Then, in sixth year, the one year you weren’t stalking his every move, he was panting at your heels. You risked your life to save him at the Manor, even though I gave you the dressing down of your life afterwards, to which you did not listen, and I knew you would do some improbable Gryffindor bullshit in that stupid Battle of all places so I volunteered him up as a human sacrifice before you could sacrifice yourself, you bleeding fool,” she monologued, brandishing her wand at him as he opened his mouth to protest. “I’m not done,” she growled. “You never thanked me for that, also.” She sighed. “Being the better half of your brain is so thankless sometimes.”

“Yes, Pansy, thank you for nearly committing a war crime for me—and I’m very successful,” Draco whined petulantly. He tried not to remember that awful battle, the way he had scrambled out of the Potter’s hold after the Feindfyre to flee like the coward he had been and hide while his betters fought the evil he was branded as. “I’m going to be valedictorian!”

“I’m the half of your brain that matters,” Pansy argued, sticking out her bottom lip pugnaciously. “Anyway. I suppose I must take the blame for at least some of this. I couldn’t defend you in eighth year, and you thought you deserved all that drubbing, you self-loathing little idiot,” which she said with untempered affection mixed into her irritation, as she reached out and patted his knee.

She forged onwards relentlessly, “So what was I to do but go to the Saviour who so conveniently has been head over heels for you since before he even figured out he’s bent? But I thought, Draco is a smart lad. Surely he’ll be sensible. Maybe he’ll get a career with the Unspeakables, like he dreamt of when we were ten, before he ever met that self-righteous arsehole who keeps getting him nearly killed. But no! ”

Pansy punctuated this exclamation with a flailing glass, spilling her wine with the force at which she propelled herself forward, sticking her nose into his face. It was much more fitting on her face in her adulthood, though prettier when not viewed through crossed eyes. With the two humans distracted, Jör slithered to the small wine puddle eagerly, tongue flickering to lap it up.

Draco watched him morosely as Pansy continued, doing anything not to meet her indignant eyes and the truth he would find there. “You almost got out, a year at the triple M for probation and I thought, I can stay in Switzerland. I can work in finance. I’ll make oodles of Galleons laundering money at some boutique Swiss bank, and my best friend will settle down with some nice single dad to resolve all his bizarre daddy issues. Ha!”

“I don’t need a minder,” Draco argued. There was no point in refuting her last jab, much as it rankled. He had just returned from visiting Lucius in Azkaban not eight hours prior. “Potter and I are just…”

“I’m not done,” Pansy reminded him, stooping to let Jör lap wine from her glass before taking a viciously gleeful inhale. “You went to the Curse-Breaker’s Academy and I thought alright. More of a Gryffindor pursuit than I would have figured. But maybe it’s a reputational thing! Taking one for the team, spearheading an initiative to prove to the world that us Slytherins can be valiant and brave and all that rot. But then for three years it’s Potter this and Potter that and I swear to Merlin, Draco, if you two do not shag I will resurrect the Dark Lord myself just to sacrifice Potter to him again!”

Her chest was heaving by the end of her diatribe. She looked immensely pleased with herself despite the exertion. She took a dainty sip of her wine, fixing the corner of her perfect lipstick unnecessarily. “Well, that has certainly been brewing for a while.”

“Sounds like it,” Draco agreed, still holding his wine glass up like an armoured shield. He chewed his lip thoughtfully, patting Jör on the head as he slithered to his side of the sofa in search of treats, trying to focus on anything that would steer this conversation back to more comfortable waters. Throwing caution to the wind, he asked, mostly joking, “Do you really think he would shag me?”

“I’ll rip my hair out,” Pansy responded immediately, groaning so loudly Draco wondered whether he should put up privacy wards, lest Narcissa get the wrong impression about his sexuality. “Mine and yours, and then you’re paying for the repairs. Draco, Merlin, how dense are you? Have you seen yourself? Do I need to drag you back to Sicky Nicky’s flat so you can see how even he still wants to shag you after you chundered in his rose bushes?”

“That’s Sicky Nicky,” Draco lamented. “Of course someone we call Sicky Nicky wants to fuck me. He’s probably the only one who would.”

“Potter is in love with you!” Pansy wailed. The sound was not unlike what a widow mourning her late husband at an open casket funeral would make. “I am going to the wine wing, I am stealing all your bottles, and I am returning with scissors to give us both a fringe. I swear to Circe. You’re impossible.”

Draco made a noise of protest, knowing better than to argue. Pansy could be just as incoherent and stubborn as he could when she was in a mood. He watched her take deep, steadying breaths while it felt as though his own had been stolen from his lungs.

Draco was caught by her words like a merman in a fisherman’s net. Potter is in love with you. It couldn’t be. He would never love Draco, not as he was, with a sordid past and the scarred body and mind to prove it.

But his mind supplied him a library of soft touches, a hand on his bicep, a gentle guiding touch on his back to the cantine, the way Harry had caressed Draco’s cheek when he felt ill and said “You’re alright. You’re alright now.”

He thought of the brilliant beaming smile that lit up just before Potter shot him some wry comeback, the way his eyes danced when Draco started in on him, always delighted to be insulted. Draco wondered if it was not the insults that pleased him so much as knowing he’d achieved Draco’s undivided attention, and then flushed at his hubris, knowing he was not and would never be worthy of someone like Harry Potter.

The shame at feeling as though he would deserve such a thing washed over him, hot and merciless. “I can’t talk about this,” he choked out, feeling overwhelmed. He could feel his eyes prickling, to his own horror.

How cruel, to have something so treasured so close, to have others dangle it in front of him. Like Tantalus in the garden, he knew the moment he dared reach for it, it would be snatched out of his grasp forever. As all beloved things were.

Draco had never once caught the snitch, after all. Not against Harry. Never when it mattered. He could never have anything when it truly mattered, not anymore.

“I can’t handle this,” he croaked.

Pansy sighed, her shoulders slumping but her expression softening as she took in Draco’s own wrecked one. “Oh, darling.”

“I can’t, Pans,” he cried, mortified at how his voice wavered and cracked, forcing the words through anyway. “He can’t, because if he does—if he does, I, I…” his voice eluded him, stolen by emotion, that rough stone in his throat, pressing on his oesophagus and choking him. “I don’t deserve him, and he’ll—he’ll leave,” he managed in a wobbly, broken whisper.

Pansy’s red lips were a tight line of sympathy as she dragged him into her embrace, the softness of her arms and chest a welcome comfort he clung to. She stroked his hair and whispered things to him, things that reminded him of being held by another, and made him cry all the harder for it.

In bed, Draco stroked the crane’s small head and once more felt fragile and tense, vibrating with emotion like a plucked harp string about to snap.

Potter is in love with you.

Draco knew he had no chance. He had no chance. The past day had felt like the crescendo of Für Elise, all the beautiful sounds of their togetherness keyed so wonderfully they had driven Draco off a cliff, and now, in the diminuendo that followed, the feelings he so feared and hated welled up within him in the lovely few notes.

He took steadying breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth as he tried to breathe through the waves of emotion. Like his mind healer had taught him, he tried to notice his body, the sensation in his tense muscles and aching chest, to combat the desire to let himself float away and throw on his mask.

He couldn’t do that, not if this was real, not if there was a chance, even a small one.

Potter loves you.

If there was ever a time to spearhead an initiative to be brave and valiant and all that rot…wouldn’t it be now? When it seemed like the risk was its smallest, with Pansy’s words echoing in his head, and little crossed out notes wobbling around his bedspread, and the lingering feeling of Harry’s hands through his ever-growing hair?

But what if he leaves me? Draco wanted to cry, releasing the crane before he accidentally ripped the little being, allowing it to hop over to where his hair had pooled on the duvet and make a little nest for itself as it had so desired the evening before. He grabbed a free pillow instead and hugged it to his chest, staring into the middle distance and feeling mired in tar-like hatred. Hating his feelings. Hating himself. Hating Harry most of all for eliciting these responses in him with his atrocious, idiotic affection.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t. If a few tears fell from his eyes to be wiped onto the pillow, Jör couldn’t see him from this angle anyway.

It wasn’t long before a knock sounded at the door, at which time Jör had begun softly hissing in distress. Harry, who arrived with a floating box of pastry, entered the room smiling. He faltered when he caught Draco’s reddened eyes and blotchy face.

Draco noticed the logo from the place around the corner where he went when he couldn’t focus and needed the chatter to quiet his mind. It was emblazoned on the sides of the paper cups Harry held. He could see the pain aux raisins and almond croissants tucked in their cardboard carryout box. His favourites.

“You have five hours and forty minutes,” Draco informed him, as though the timer wasn’t above his head in bright red, grown to nearly half the size of Draco himself.

Hesitantly, looking as though he dearly wanted to ask but knowing, damn him, that that wasn’t what Draco needed, Harry shrugged. “Still enough time to get you breakfast.”

That terrible fond smile was back. Potter put their coffee on the bedside table. His hand now free, he reached up to brush back Draco’s hair from where it had escaped. To Draco’s distracted estimation, it seemed to have grown a full two feet overnight. Perhaps even the full height of Tedgar. “Can I rebraid this? I can’t do anything fancy, but if we get it in one long braid it’ll be easier for me to carry.”

Overwhelmed by the unguarded affection in Harry’s demeanour and exasperated by his own traitorous emotions, Draco grabbed a pain aux raisins from the platter and began single-mindedly unravelling it. Besieged, that’s what he was, and he needed to do something to get the frenetic fear energy out before he began panting like a cornered prey animal.

Draco had maintained his rules for his entire rapport with Potter - keep it shallow. Don’t think too much. Don’t feel too much.

If there weren’t rules, things could get dangerous. They could get vulnerable. Draco would make assumptions, and then he would be a terrible, terrible fool. Because he would assume Harry would stay, when anyone, even muggles, or children, or the deaf-blind could see that Harry shouldn’t, that he wouldn’t, that he deserved so much better.

But Draco was trying to be brave.

Too thoroughly disquieted to stay still, Draco had half a mind to break into Harry’s room and douse him with one of Granger’s cure-alls just to be safe. He eyed him suspiciously through a watery haze, wondering if another deranged fan could have sprinkled Potter with something to make him act in this way of slowly escalating kindness towards Draco against his will.

Perhaps it was one of Draco’s many enemies, determined to humiliate both of them. What little appetite Draco had crumbled with the pastry in his hands at the thought. Maybe it was Pansy, the stupid bint, snuck here from Switzerland to meddle in Draco’s rapidly dwindling mental health again. Unable to decide what to do, he focused on dismembering his pastry with renewed determination.

Harry witnessed the carnage, both eyebrows raised in that way that Draco knew meant if he could raise only one he would’ve, but he couldn’t, and he would never know that it took Draco six months of staring in the mirror before third year to manage it. Draco was so upset that the thought didn’t give him a single ounce of satisfaction.

“Hey, Draco. Is it the curse?” Harry asked. He had removed his hand from Draco’s hair, but he remained so very close. He continued, heart-crushingly, maddeningly, infuriatingly earnest, “Are you worried about it? I can fix it, love, I promise. I’ll have you right as rain, I swear.”

Draco made a strangled, helpless sound, angrily wiping away a tear as it endeavoured to escape his lashes. “You’re so stupid,” he protested thickly.

“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Harry pressed him. His hands hovered around Draco as though aching to hold him, ready to catch him if he fell as though he hadn’t already fallen apart. As if he was not any less compelled than a Snitch to Harry’s open arms. “Please let me fix it.”

Draco separated a particularly large hunk of pastry from its whole and dropped it onto the plate, pushing the carcass of it away, sickened.

Steadying himself, he took a deep breath and blurted, “I don’t have orgies in the basement of the Rakepick building.”

“Er,yeah,” Harry said, clearly thrown by Draco’s apparent change of topic. “I know.”

“The Prophet used to make all these vulgar insinuations about me, but the most I’ve ever done is kiss some drunk muggle guy in Bern at a house party with Pansy, and it felt wrong and bad and he used way too much tongue and then Pansy and I sat on his porch and smoked all of his cigarettes until I vomited into his rose bushes and we left without saying goodbye,” he admitted, winding a lock of hair around his fingers tighter and tighter. “I get really competitive, and I have to be the best at things, and I’m clearly not the best at this, so you should probably stop touching my hair and calling me love and never write me origami notes again, and—and, you blundered up her wing something awful, look at her. You did her so poorly, I had to fix her when she came in, she was crawling. She couldn’t even fly,” he admonished, desperately trying to distract himself before he did something humiliating like cry, losing what little courage he had mustered and cursing himself for it. A coward and a fool you are.

Draco’s hands shook as he pulled his hair, still wrapping and unwrapping it around his twitchy digits. He felt more breakable and vulnerable than Harry’s earthbound crane, unable to take wing and flee from this insurmountable obstacle before him. “She was all lopsided and—and broken.”

Harry’s face was still far too close, still a terrible mix of concern and worry and fondness. Why hadn’t he moved away? Draco had voiced so much that was forbidden already, put words to the parts of their dynamic that had kept hidden and made it real in a way that it hadn’t quite been before. Worse yet, he had done so and backtracked, the cringing thing he was. It made Draco wish Goldstein had cursed him into a swarm of bees, to burst apart in this terrible buzzing energy and fly away, disparate, never to be put whole again.

Callused hands grasped his own and gently tugged his hair from his grasp, unwinding it from where it had turned his flesh white and pink with pressure. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I don’t care if you’ve slept with nobody at all or a hundred different people,” Harry said quietly. “I don’t care how many people you’ve kissed, Draco.”

Because he doesn’t want to be with you, an insidious little voice whispered in the back of Draco’s mind. You’ve embarrassed yourself already. A frown tugged at the corners of his mouth and he tried to tug his hands back in a mortified, half-hearted withdrawal. “Oh.”

Harry’s grasp remained firm and his thumb stroked the back of Draco’s knuckles. The rough skin of his fingers and palm rasped across Draco’s unweathered skin. “But…I hope, would you, ah. I want to kiss you. If you do too, that is.”

Draco’s eyes snapped up. Harry was staring at him, his gaze unyielding and intense. “I beg your pardon?”

Harry swallowed heavily. Draco was close enough to follow the motion with his eyes. He took a shaky breath and repeated, “Can I kiss you?”

Draco blinked, and then he was moving, despite his better demons, and his hands were threading in Harry’s ridiculous unruly hair, so much shorter now than his own. He could feel his stubble on his cheek and then Harry’s lips, deceptively soft on his own. He felt Harry’s tongue slide past his lips, and melting into the contact, Draco pressed their bodies closer as they twined themselves around each other.

When they parted, seconds or minutes or hours later, the timer had hardly changed. Draco felt as though it should have, as though something should have changed, for how giddy he felt compared to just moments before.

“You’re so lovely,” Harry whispered, holding the back of his head in one hand and Draco’s hip in the other. He felt Harry’s breath warm against his cheek.

Draco scowled, pulling away as he could feel his cheeks heat, his shoulders hunching with discomfort as he scoffed. He rubbed his forehead to obscure his face, annoyed that he couldn’t just accept a compliment when it was so genuinely delivered.

“Would you prefer handsome?” Harry looked him over, cocking his head. “I guess you are that, I mean, you’re definitely masculine, but I dunno, I never associated the word handsome with someone so…pointy.” He tweaked the end of his nose playfully and Draco smacked his hand away.

“Even when complimenting me you wind me up,” he grumbled, leaning to get a bit of space between them and gathering his hair, threading his fingers through the ends before they tangled.

Harry grinned. “It’s just so easy,” he smirked happily, watching Draco’s hands work as he settled to lay on Draco’s bed. His hand was still a warm presence holding Draco’s side as though one small break in contact would make Draco disappear forever.

“Nothing about me is easy,” Draco sighed, rolling his eyes. Draco knew that better than anyone.

“No, you’re very difficult, Malfoy,” Harry readily agreed, the smile still broad on his face. “You’ll never convince me otherwise.”

Draco harrumphed. In for a Knut, in for a Galleon, he supposed. “I am,” he glared, resolutely focusing on Harry and ignoring how his cheeks were still sensitive from the rub of Harry’s stubble, ignoring how his lips felt puffy and sensitive from spending time beneath Harry’s own, and ignoring how he loved the feeling of Harry’s hands on him and felt like he would burn alive from the heat that radiated from his palm even now on his side. “I’m mean, and I’m judgemental, and I’m easily bored. I’m vindictive and I can be cruel, even though I try not to be, and…and my mind-healer and I are working on those things together, coming to terms with them, as they seem to be indelible factors of my personality, but–I’m not going to have a totally different personality if we–well, whatever we do.”

“Dating?” Harry asked hopefully, his fingers tensing a bit around the meat of Draco’s side. “Can we do dating? I mean,” he shoved his free hand in his hair, suddenly bashful and looking like he’d embarrassed himself in his eagerness, “erm, that’s what I’d like. To date you. Properly, that is.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Draco admonished, “Have you not listened to any other word I’ve been saying?”

“I heard you,” Harry shrugged. “I know you’re mean. Do you think I’m stupid? Don’t answer that,” Harry hastened to add, holding a hand up to cut off Draco’s ready response. “I like that you’re mean. I’d be upset if you stopped being mean.”

“Ah,” Draco replied, running him through with an assessing look. He squared his shoulders and raised his chin, suddenly aware of how his posture had collapsed in on itself as he made his nervous confession. On a fortifying breath, he exhaled, “Well. I like that I’m mean too. I’m not telling you for absolution—I like who I am, and if I was going to seek absolution somewhere, it wouldn’t be from you. I’m just…telling you so you know.”

Grinning, Harry leaned in. His hand rubbed down Draco’s side and curled around the outside of his thigh. “I’m glad we agree.” His knuckles dragged on the fabric of Draco’s trousers. “Will you let me take you out? Then you can be mean to me in exciting new venues.”

Draco considered this. “If you—” the thought nearly took his breath away, but he steeled himself and continued, reaching for that courage that had always eluded him. “If you leave me, you shall receive a far sight worse than Goldstein’s frogs.” Draco told him, almost chiding, but still leaning into him. Compelled to be captured, just like a snitch. “I’ll violate my probation and it’ll be all your fault. You should be ashamed of yourself already, honestly.”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, his tone indulgent as he set up and leant in, mirroring Draco’s movements.

“I bite,” Draco warned, and he wasn’t sure if it was entirely metaphorical with Harry so involved in his personal space and touching him like that and gazing at his lips in a way that Draco had only thought attainable in the dreams he Occluded.

“Good,” Harry smirked, and kissed him. Draco could taste his smile.

The kiss was a slow, heated affair, Harry’s hands delightfully hot and possessive on him. The buzzing sensation was coursing through Draco again when they parted, his distress replaced by a heated, molton pleasure.

Harry pulled away, their breaths mingling and their noses brushing. Draco could feel Harry’s hair, coarser than his own, brushing his forehead. Apropos of nothing related to the buzzing feeling now electrifying Draco’s body, Harry asked huskily, “Are frogs what you’re doing for your curse?”

Draco glowered. Harry smiled, shifting ungracefully so he could wind his fingers gently through Draco’s hair. “I like that you can be a spiteful bastard. I like that you’re argumentative, that you’re opinionated, that you don’t give an inch. Draco, you think I don’t know a thing about not liking yourself?”

“I like myself fine,” Draco argued crossly, benevolently reiterating what he had just said earlier, because clearly Potter still had issues with paying attention. “It’s everyone else who doesn’t.”

“Sure, yeah. But Draco, everyone—everyone else tries to make me out into this hero figure, this idol instead of just a person. Every time I do something remotely human, like when I swore at that witch for trying to snatch Teddy out of my hands for a photo, or when I Incendio’d that reporter’s camera—”

“I forgot that you did that,” Draco recalled, smiling. That had been just after their initiation ceremony. Draco had set the reporter’s toupee on fire too just to join in on the fun. The papers had called Draco a public menace, and insinuated he was using some sort of heretofore unknown mind-control technique on their Golden Boy. “They blamed me for it.”

“Exactly!” Harry exclaimed. In his excitement, he accidentally pulled Draco’s hair, making him wince and shove at Harry’s shoulder. “Sorry, love, I didn’t mean—here, let me,” he spluttered, removing his hands and settling himself behind Draco so he could begin braiding. Draco let himself be manoeuvred, suspicious but content. He sighed as he felt Harry’s fingers begin to comb through the hair at his scalp and separate it into sections, melting into his touch.

“None of them see me,” he continued, his voice low and relaxing as his hands worked. “None of them give me the space to have bad days, or be moody, or tired, or grumpy—not the reporters, or any of the fans who keep stalking me, or any of the witches or wizards who’ve tried to shag me only to try to tell the papers whatever stupid details they think will give them fifteen minutes of fame.”

“You wouldn’t happen to recall the names of some of those people?” Draco asked, manufacturing his tone into something casual and disinterested.

Draco could hear the laugh in Harry’s voice. “Why, so you can hex them in new and creative ways?”

Draco tsked. “Not hex, Potter,” he scolded. “Honestly. What kind of a program do you think we’re in?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“One hour!!” Draco hollered with the alarm. It was now definitely its most eye-watering shade of red, and loud enough that Draco felt his molars shake in the back of his mouth. “ONE HOUR, Potter!!”

“I got distracted,” Potter grinned lazily, laying back and enjoying the eyeful he was getting as Draco, in a rumpled state of dishabille, hurled himself out of the bed they had thoroughly unmade. They hadn’t had sex, much to Draco’s chagrin, but it wasn't for lack of eagerness on either part. It was Potter’s fault. But, to his credit, they did almost everything else.

Draco beelined for his closet. Potter held up Draco’s braid as he went, made up only to become debauched once more from their morning together. He kept it away from Draco’s feet as he moved, the great mass of it sliding through his hands like an unspooling rope.

Picking up his own recently discarded pyjamas to throw with the laundry as he went, Draco levitated Potter’s bright orange Chudley Cannons socks from the floor in disgust and hurled them at him at speed. Potter, the wanker, caught them in one hand.

They had done more than Draco ever had that morning, romantically speaking, but Potter, the absolute righteous tosser, had stopped them.

He had said that when they had sex for the first time, he wanted it to be without a timer counting down above them. He wanted to make sure neither of them felt pressured, and both of them felt safe in their relationship. He wanted to be sure that Draco was sure of not only what he wanted, but that he could say no at any time. Even though their collective desire had been made very clear, it was these nuances he worried about, and Harry wasn’t certain either of them were quite there yet.

Draco wouldn’t admit he had been relieved and frustrated in equal measure by that steadfast boundary. Perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted to get into Potter’s pants so badly had they matched the bright-orange of his socks. But that desire had been tinged with the apprehension or newness, the overwhelm of something huge moving too fast for Draco himself to feel capable of stopping. So he let out a breath, with his back turned to Harry, and begrudgingly allowed himself to feel grateful to the git.

As Draco rifled through his dresser for his trousers and button-down, musing darkly about the ways he could inconspicuously take down the entire Chudley Cannons starting line and reserve players, Potter announced to his turned back, “I’m bisexual.”

Draco glanced backwards and struck a pose, cocking his hip. “Just figure that out now, did you?” he asked sarcastically. “The past five hours together were some sort of extended fugue state, then?”

“Nah,” Potter protested, visibly enjoying the view regardless of the past five hours in Draco’s semi-clothed presence at a much closer distance. “I’ve known. Since eighth year.”

“Right,” Draco muttered darkly, going through a list of all of their male yearmates. Michael Corner was fit, though Draco suspected the two had not much in common besides the strange, yet perhaps alluring, history of dating Ginerva Weasley. Perhaps it was some sort of trauma bond. Maybe Dean Thomas. He always seemed like he had a bit of a pash for that Finnegan character, though.

Draco shuddered. Hopefully Potter preferred more of a challenge than some sycophant who was halfway in his pocket already. The past morning, say nothing for the appalling amount of conversation they had engaged in regarding their collective future, would suggest that sort of a preference.

“Go on, who do you think I shagged?” Potter smiled, that same shit-eating one that made Draco want to use his head as the mop his hair resembled, and relaxed more comfortably into his sprawl. “I can see the wheels turning. I kinda like it when you get all brooding and jealous.”

If Potter had not been in Draco’s bed, he would have thrown a shoe at him. As it were, Draco was of the mind that the Egyptian cotton had suffered enough for one day. Potter, however, had not suffered nearly enough.

“Jör, attack,” Draco instructed, pointing insistently. “I demand it.”

Potter, the incorrigible troublemaker, began hissing something suspiciously fawning and good-natured at the rug, offering it the shredded bits of Draco’s long-forgotten pastry.

“That’s cheating!”

“It’s not cheating,” Potter sniffed, his nose in the air, clearly aspiring to make his impression as obvious as possible. “It’s simply enabling myself of all available resources.”

“Your resources tell me you have fifty-five minutes left to curse-break me in front of Ruthers,” Draco countered, swivelling now that he was dressed—no overhead jumpers for him today, it would take all fifty five minutes to shove his hair through the neckline, a cardigan would have to do—and gesturing to the timer. The shorter strands of his hair, escaped from the braid, fanned out around him like a shining carpet. Merlin but it was heavy without Potter holding it up. “You will bring me to the curse-breaking theatre immediately, Potter, and you will return my hair to its natural state, or I will strangle you with it.”

Potter shrugged, infuriatingly insouciant. Rather than panicked by his approaching demise, he seemed mesmerised by the view, the end Draco’s braid finally whipping out of Harry’s hands more than halfway across the dorm room. “It can wait a bit more, can’t it? Like, fifteen minutes. I can break it in less than thirty, I know I can.”

Draco baulked, horrified at how sanguine Potter was about his obvious imminent catastrophic failure. “You must be out of your mind! Potter, it’s on my head if you fail this ridiculous exam–”

“Literally,” Potter joked, pleased with himself as always to discover a pun.

“—and you will not perform some slapdash endeavour that will leave my hair follicles permanently damaged and knock me out of the running for Gringotts!”

Potter tugged the locks he held gently. “I figured out the rune chart in the first few hours,” he admitted, drawing Draco closer. “I just spent the last day or so…finishing it.”

“You mean procrastinating,” Draco assessed archly, moving back into him readily despite his acerbic tone.

“No,” Potter argued, “I mean perfecting it. I care about you, and you care about your hair, and I,” he paused, running his fingers through where it began at Draco’s scalp to cup his head behind his ear, “can’t say I disagree.” He kissed him gently on the lips, the gesture so filled with admiration that it made Draco feel uncomfortably jellied from the inside out. “You’re so lovely, darling.”

Draco pulled a nauseated expression as the skin on his shoulders seemed to crawl. “I am lovely,” he huffed, defensive in a way that Potter had done nothing to warrant but Draco was certain he deserved anyway because of how revoltingly uncomfortable he made him feel.

Draco was defensive, also, against the voice in his head that was slowly quieting from the force of Harry’s reassurances that he chose to believe in, the voice which tried to convince him that he was wretched and ugly and horrid. Stalwartly, he repeated, “I am”, to quiet it.

“You are,” Potter agreed with every fibre of his Golden Boy confidence. And when he said it like that, the voice got quieter still.

Draco wanted to say something prickly—perhaps he could remind Potter of when Draco broke his nose a lifetime ago, that small crooked bump still so noticeable on the bridge just under where his glasses joined, or perhaps when Draco had been punched in his own after squawking about some asinine hippogriff—but Draco commanded his bravery, what little he had left, and held his tongue to keep it down where his other demons lay, docile if only for the moment.

In all their games together, Draco had never been one to outstrip Harry, no matter how fast he flew. So instead, he breathed in deeply, inhaling the scent of grass and books and ozone that made up Harry Potter, and, feeling gentle hands caress his hair, allowed himself to be caught.

Potter passed his practicum with flying colours. Of course he did. Like a snitch in the hand, the universe let both Draco and his degree flutter into his outstretched palms.

More importantly, four days later, Thompson had to intervene on Turpin’s failed attempts to halt the exponentially increasing eruption of Goldstein’s regiment of frogs, which marshalled around him in a restless and ever-growing cacophony of croaking amphibians throughout the 24-hour block.

Thompsin congratulated Draco on a particularly well-crafted curse, praise he accepted with a triumphant, viperous little smirk directed halfway across the theatre to a sourly scowling Turpin and a greenish Goldstein.

It was the same smirk he wore when he accepted his position as valedictorian, two days later.

Nothing could stop him from Gringotts. Not even Potter, who kissed him with enthusiasm at their graduation ceremony, right on stage for everyone to see. And those camera flashes made sure it would indeed be everyone.

Let the Prophet speculate about that. Draco had more important things to think about. Like who to bribe, jostle, or pester next, to make sure his foot in the door became his arse in the seat. The Director of the Curse-Breaking Division wouldn’t know what hit her.