Chapter Text
He swore under his breath, the “fuck me,” low and gutteral and also muffled by his hands with which he covered his face.
The world was clearly mocking him. Mocking him to the point of… he didn’t know to the point of what exactly but he knew that it was currently laughing at him in earnest.
“Why, Potter,” said Draco Malfoy, standing next to him, looking at the doors that closed behind him just seconds ago and sealed shut as if they were never there. “I thought that I wasn’t your type.”
“Oh, for… Shut the hell up, Malfoy,” said Harry, painfully massaging his face thinking how much would it hurt if he gouged his own eyes out and if it was worth it. The alternative was to look at Draco Malfoy’s smug smile that made his blood boil and not in an angry way, oh no, the reality was far worse than that. “I’m trying to think.”
“Well, out of the two of us you’re the Auror, so please, do your job that you’re paid for and please do it quickly. I have a fundraiser I need to attend in…” Malfoy took a pocket watch, silver and shiny, out of the inside of his thick black coat and opened it with a very soft click; the hands of the clock were gold and he saw that its face was glittering with stars. “Eleven hours. And I still need to change into something more formal.”
Harry scoffed against better judgment but shut his face seeing the look on Draco’s face; the one raised eyebrow and a challenge in his grey eye to say something. After a beat of silence the silver-haired man turned, his back to the doors — or where the doors previously were — and took a long, anguished breath.
“Since you will be doing your Auror work,” he said the last words with the sort of disdain one pureblood would use to an house elf. “I will carefully look around and see if we aren’t in more trouble than we think,” he added, taking the wand out and making a few steps to the jungle behind them.
Harry wanted to stop him; grab him by the arm and shake him, scream at him that they were in this mess because he didn't do his curse job well enough and because he ignored his warning, but stopped himself. What his line of work taught him was that he should first think and only then act — something he was really working on — and knowing that this argument would mean nothing and would only make them hate each other more (if it was even possible) he decided to shut up.
Best idea you had so far, he thought bitterly, wand already in his tight grasp and he sighed, again, and started casting to see what he had gotten himself into.
Not every day one would get stuck in a world that didn’t — couldn’t — exist, but here he was, The Boy Who Lived, with his worst enemy, proving the world wrong yet again.
It started, as all stories do, innocently. More so, not only because of who called the case in but by who took it over. Because Harry Potter didn’t like to think that he was an Auror figurehead, nice for pictures but not so welcomed on the ground, but for the last couple of weeks, months even, he found himself assigned to cases that were high profile, not very challenging and boring as hell. And to make matters worse he couldn’t do anything to change it; by now even the Aurors around Robart’s office knew it because Harry has been more and more vocal about his dissatisfaction with the arrangement of cases that were assigned to him.
“I am not asking for another Lord Voldemort,” he said to Robart just two weeks prior, after throwing a very thin folder with a case that had a lot of publicity and politics involved but not much Auror work. “Just… Give me something worthwhile! I am a good Auror, am I not?”
Robart sighed. Took off his glasses, gently placed them on a document he was writing before Harry stormed his office. He placed two fingers on the bridge of his nose, between the eyes, and sighed.
“Potter. That’s the third time this month you have been… unsatisfied with the work you were given. Are you telling me that the cases assigned to you are not up to your standards?”
Oh, thought Harry, trying to sooth his face into a relaxed mask of indifference while trying not to flinch and show how deeply his boss’ words cut to the bone, he is good.
“Sir,” said Harry, really trying not to sound like a spoiled child. “I just think that after three years of being an Auror you would stop treating me like a teenager. You do not need me in the papers, I don’t need to see my face in the Daily Prophet any more than the wizards and the witches of this community. I am just asking you to reconsider,” he gently placed a hand on the folder he just threw. “The cases that you’re assigning me.”
Robart narrowed his brown eyes. After a heart beat, another, then the third, he faintly shook his head.
“Finish the one you have. I can’t promise anything, Potter. Just give us your best. And get out of my office. Dismissed!” He said, impatiently waving a hand and returned to writing as if Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, didn’t storm his office mere minutes ago.
So, Harry left. Finished the case that required him to navigate more reporters than meeting the witnesses, closed it in record time even. And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
He didn’t expect Robart to give him anything spectacular, but something that would require to use his brain and not only his mouth to smile for the photos.
What he got was: an old woman that half the time didn’t remember who he was or what was her name, an old house that was probably haunted, and Draco Malfoy.
The first two were… manageable. Miss Perrywinkle was a lovely woman with an agreeable amount of cats — four — which, to Harry’s surprise, did not want to eat him on sight (some used to more than others, he always liked dogs better). The first time they spoke she gave him more tea and biscuit — he couldn’t just say no to an older woman! — then Ron’s mum, mixed his name three times, but otherwise was lovely. Chatty, in a sort of grandmotherly way, always talking, changing topics, adding one thing to another until you and her didn’t know where she started from.
So, there was Miss Perrywinkle, her four cats and her chattiness.
Then there was the house. Located on the outskirts of London, placed under similar spells as Grimmauld Place, it was a two storey building with an attic, a single tower to which Miss Perrywinkle lost the key to, a basement and apparently a ghost problem.
“Ghasted thing that ghost is,” said Miss Perrywinkle over a second cup of lovely jasmine tea. “Really horrendous, making all sorts of noises that nobody wants to listen to, waking me in the middle of the night. One of my sisters, Beatrice, used to do the same thing you see, waking me up in the middle of the night. I think she got it from our mother, Esther, who lived through the worst time during the World War. Did you know that in France....” and off she went, which Harry welcomed with a smile, a polite node and a bite of the exquisite biscuits. They were lovely; not too hard and not too moist. He wondered if the woman would give him the recipe.
The ghost wasn’t the main issue that Miss Perrywinkle had with the house. It made some noises in the night, shook the house a couple of times, but overall it wasn’t why the called for the Aurors.
When Harry thought about his next case he didn’t think that he would get a haunted house with a haunted garden and haunted cemetery, but.
Here he was, trodding through the mud, his trainers a lost cause, to the mausoleum of Perrywinkles, to meet the cursebreaker that the woman hired a few days ago to solve this case before it became something bigger and more dangerous.
The ancient, heavy metal doors were open and Harry peeked inside the long hall, that stretched down, down, into the darkness. He took out his hand which after a quick Lumos became the only light in the damp and dark stone walls.
As he crossed the threshold a shiver ran through his back and Harry gritted his teeth holding the wand tighter. The steps were steep and slippery, his footsteps were echoing in the corridor making it seem as if there were more people walking down into the earth. Miss Perrywinkle told him that the curse breaker was already there, working diligently for about two weeks. “You see,” she said, picking up one of the four cats and putting it on her laps without missing a beat. “I think that all the noise and the fuss is because of the ghost in the cemetery. Five generations of Perrywinkles were buried there, in a bloody mausoleum, and I am sure that it’s one of their ghosts that is making everything go bonkers around here. I already hired the best curse worker there was, but the situation has gotten dire. Please, Mister Putter, please help,” and for the love of God, how could he say no?
When he finally stopped at the bottom, the stone plate beneath his feet smooth and solid under his feet, he breathed a little bit better.
Until he heard the noise.
Harry stopped, a few steps after he came down, and listened, wondering if he didn’t go crazy. He had to be, because what he was hearing was a voice that he thought he forgot, mumbling some words weaving here and there a “fuck,” or, “asshole,”. He blinked a couple of times, startled, his heart beating fast and not only because of the stress. He went forward and followed the voice to the end of the corridor, where he turned left to stop a few meters before a man kneeling in front of a stone sarcophagus.
“I would not stand there if I were you,” said the man, not even bothering to turn Harry’s way. “You’re standing on somebody’s grave, that is,” he added as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, said a spell quietly under his breath and made a complicated gesture with his wand, and then swore not so quietly.
Harry stared. Just stared, dumb fooled and unable to process the information properly.
The man had longer hair — it would reach his jaw if it wasn’t gathered up in a messy bun — but they were still almost silver and even in this light they looked almost like silk. Harry thought that maybe, if he had enough courage to touch them, they would feel like the most luxurious thing in the world. The man’s face was sharper and a little bit tanned, his eyes focused in front of him. He sighed, deeply; Harry watched the rise and fall of his chest under an black, woolen coat, how impatiently the wand flickered in his hand, fingers long and slender.
“Didn’t you hear,” started Draco Malfoy and turned towards Harry, stopping in the very moment he laid eyes on him. Harry almost flinched; it wasn’t like the years weren’t good but they were not exactly bad on him, too. He grew into himself; his arms were wider now and he was less bony, but his dark brown skin didn’t have the same shine as it did before, thanks to the odd hours, lack of direct sunshine and the general problems with sleep that Harry had. His hair was still a total mess: even though he cut it regularly it still had a life of his own.
Draco seemed to take him all in, from head to toe and Harry could swear that something of an almost smile, the corner of his lips, turned up. “Well,” he said, his grey eyes as steely as his voice. “Did not expect you here. Potter,” he nodded and stood up in one fluid motion from the floor he was kneeling on, wand still in hand.
“Malfoy,” Harry also nodded because that was the customary greeting between old childhood nemesis, was it not?
They stared at each other for what felt like an eternity, Harry’s skin prickling with an electricity, buzzing just under the surface.
“I would ask what you’re doing here but I think I already have the answer,” Harry gestured with his wand at the books Malfoy casually spread out on the floors; the symbols and runes written in white chalk around the square, simple sarcophagus that seemed to be done from one piece of stone.
“Ah, yes. As always so observant,” Draco gave him a dry smile and Harry gritted his teeth before he said something stupid. “How did Miss Perrywrinke manage to get the famous Harry Potter on her case? You only get the ones with the most photos for the Daily Prophet, don’t you? Please don’t tell me they’re waiting outside, I didn’t do my skin care routine this morning.”
Against himself and better judgment, Harry smiled. Because no one gave him shit like Draco Malfoy did. And in the light of the few torches Draco had on and which gave the inside of the mausoleum a soft glow the man looked… good? Better than the last time Harry saw him, which was at the trail. Even though, at that time, the Malfoy’s were put under much scrutiny by the judges and the community he still walked to that jury room as if they should be kneeling before him and be glad for it.
He saw some of that boy in the man standing before him, in the way he held his head up high, how he looked at him and didn’t see The Boy Who Lived but just a menace from school that seemed to follow him even to his job.
“Just…” For a moment Harry was looking for appropriate words, combing hair with his fingers and he shook his head slightly. “Just... forget it. Yes, hi, it’s me, I am the Auror. You’re the Curse Breaker. Let’s just…” He sighed, deeply, turning off the Lumos spell and pocketed the wand. “Let’s just get on with it.”
Draco raised an eyebrow.
“What Potter, you don’t want to sit on a cold floor, do each other's hair and laugh at the memories of how we tormented one another at school?”
Harry laughed at that, his chest a little bit lighter than when he walked in. “Yes, fine, we can do that if you really want, but after the job.”
“Oh please, you don’t have to keep the Prophet photographer waiting on my behalf, you can take the pictures by yourself.”
He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the uneven, round shape ceiling, thinking of how much he did not want to punch Draco Malfoy right now. How the hell did he know, after meeting him the first time in what, seven years? how to push his buttons was beyond Harry. But Draco did it so effortlessly, like he was born to do it; to piss him off, to make Harry want to rip his head off, to push him against the wall and…
Well. Do things.
Harry cleared his throat. “There are no photographers waiting outside and there won’t be if you don’t tell anybody. I don’t want any press here. Do you?”
Draco looked at him as if suddenly he grew a second head. “Do I want journalists sniffing outside? Potter I had to move out of this country to get away from them!”
“Oh,” said Harry simply. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t know, why would you know,” Draco sighed and turned toward the sarcophagus. “I won’t tell anybody, so don’t worry,” he added, quieter and softer.
“Ah, alright, thanks.”
“Eloquent as ever.”
Harry rolled his eyes but smiled. “Yeah, yeah. So, tell me, what do you think is wrong with this place?”
Draco looked at him for a heartbeat and for a splint of a second Harry thought that he was going to say something but changed his mind at the last moment. He turned to the sarcophagus, scowling.
“It’s...complicated,” he said at last, not looking at Harry, who stepped closer, intrigued by the chalk drawings.
“Yeah, no shit,” muttered Harry, brows drawing closer as he tried to decipher Draco’s writing. It was sort of all over the place and not, runes draw carefully with a precision that he never could muster — run drawing wasn’t his strongest suit, never was, he just sort of, ah, went for it? His gut feelings have helped him in the past and he wasn’t going to not listen to them anymore — the lines were straight and perfect, as if Draco had a layout he used. The runes went from the wall all around the sarcophagus to the others side of it, creating an ominous half circle.
“So protection runes, against seen and unseen and…” Harry paused, looking over a more complicated rune and he stifled a whistle because his teachers at the Auror’s training would positively piss themselves if they ever saw a masterpiece like that. “Is that combination of runes for uncovering secrets, making invisible visible again and summoning all in one?” He straightened and backed away a step to be sure that he didn’t disturb anything; it looked as if Malfoy spent at least a couple of hours, if not days, drawing them, and the last thing Harry wanted to do was to smudge anything.
His eyes met Malfoy’s who looked at him with a sort of puzzled look on his face and Harry hated that his heart skipped a beat, heated that he had to pocket his hands because suddenly they started to get sweaty. “What? I’m an Auror after all,” he said, more defensively than he liked, but being around the other man always put him on the edge. He knew, unctuously, that Malfoy wouldn’t whip out his wand and petrify him on anything like that — the school days where they looked at each other and plotted how to get the other were long gone — but he still had the urge to pin Malfoy to the wall and demand his deepest secrets.
And yes, his dreams about that involved kissing. And more. Sometimes. He wasn’t proud of them! He thought, before, that he dreamed about… combinations with Malfoy because he put a nasty spell on Harry, when he wasn’t looking.But, apparently, when you don’t think about your sexuality when you’re a teenager because you have other things to do, like saving the world and so on, it comes back at you and bites you in the ass when you’re twenty and confused why you’re attracted to both men and women.
These days he was okay with who he was. Not out, at least not to the wide world beyond the mausoleum, but to those who were closest to him. He tried to date muggles, but it became complicated sooner rather than later. He enjoyed having someone who was a muggle as his partner, at least for the first couple of months, as at that point he still could explain things. But then his job — the odd hours, him disappearing in the middle of then night and so on — put a shadow on the relationship.
There was only one person whom he told the truth about himself. He was a nice bloke, tall and quite handsome and took good to the “I’m a wizard” thing. They just sort of fizzled out and he had to modify his memory in the end. He cried after that for three days straight.
Oh, Sam. He missed him, even though it’s been almost two years now.
“I know that, Potter, you don’t need to remind me. If you’re looking for validation, though, you’re definitely looking in the wrong place.”
Harry just sighed, deeply, from within his bones, “You just sort of looked as if you didn’t believe what I was saying, that’s all.”
“Remember, the last time I saw you, you were a mumbling idiot who had more luck than brains.”
“Yeah, well, you weren’t better either.”
Malofy scoffed at that and Harry looked up from the runs at the man. “We both were shitty teenagers, let’s agree on that.” Malfoy wiped his hands still covered in chalk in an expensive looking handkerchief, which was probably monogrammed as all pureblood things did, Harry though. “Let’s hope we grew out of our childish behaviour and are better adults now.”
“Don’t know about you but I’m pretty good at adulting,” Harry smiled wildly.
“So what, you now know that you should, actually, iron your jeans?”
After a beat of silence Harry said, ”Wait, what? You should iron your jeans?” To which Draco laughed, head tilted back and for a moment Harry lost his ability to breath, seeing the other man’s smiling face, the outline of his delicate throat.
Something squeezed Harry’s chest, a feeling that was dormant before inside his body and it took every ounce of restraint not to walk to Draco and outline his throat with his tongue.
He could feel his cheeks blushing and not for the first time in his life he was glad that his darker complexion hid the first signs of embarrassment very well.
“How the hell are you alive, Potter?” Asked Draco, quite theatrically wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes. Harry shrugged at the question.
“Sheer luck, I guess?”
“Well, maybe some of it will rub off on me,” Draco looked at him and Harry had to nervously swallow.
“Yes, maybe. So, what’s your take on the case?” Harry preyd his eyes away from the handsome man’s face, hoping that the blush didn’t claw it’s way deeper inside his cheeks, making his freckles more pronounced. He inherited his dark skin and wild hair from his father, but the freckles and eyes were from his mom.
“Did Perrywinkle tell you what the main problems were?” Asked Draco taking a step back from the tomb, hands in the pockets of his coat, looking more like a prince with a dark past who came to the catacomb of his family to bring a curse upon his enemies than a curse breaker on a job.
“Yes; the problem is not the ghost in the house, which is weird in itself, how come the ghost doesn’t bother Perrywinkle,” Potter shook his head not understanding the old lady at all. “But she said that the main problems are the noises from here and that the thing scares not only her but her neighbours as well.”
“The noises, for one thing,” Draco straightened his index fingers, counting. “There are also things missing, not much or many but still it’s a noticeable loss. Then,” third finger went up. “There are the doors.”
“What's wrong with the doors?”
“Aurors,” Draco muttered under his breath, shaking his head in disapproval. “The doors are new. These are the fourth ones in a matter of weeks. Miss Perrywinkle had to replace each one of them because they were always destroyed from the inside.”
“Oh,” said Harry, feeling a cold shiver go down his spine. As if Draco felt it too, he looked at the other man and nodded.
“And there are the lights They usually come at night, near full moon or right after it. They don’t look like ghosts, either.”
“You saw them?”
“Yes, I’ve been here for quite some time, Potter, believe it or not.”
“I’m…. not trying to undermine anything you saw, Malfoy, just checking.”
Draco narrowed his eyes. “When I say I didn’t see ghosts then I mean it. And yes, I saw ghosts,” he said, seeing Harry opening his lips and wanting to ask precisely the same question. “You forgot where I grew up.”
Shit, yeah, thought Harry, his mind showing him the walls of Malfoy Manor, the furniture that looked more ancient than those in the antique store, how the portraits looked at him, only their eyes moving as if they were frozen in place, following his every step.
He wondered how the place looked like now, with Lucius dying in Azkaban and Narcissia taking over everything. Did they sell it? He heard about some of the pureblood families going bankrupt but he never heard that rumor about Malfoy’s. As soon as the judgment was done, with Harry talking for Narcissia and Draco’s lighter sentencing, the young Malfoy was out of the country, continuing his studies on the continent.
Harry always thought that Malfoy would be the Master of Potions; he was good at it, he basically worshiped the ground Severus Snape was walking on and the course work… It wasn’t that it didn’t suit him either (Harry allowed himself a glance at Draco’s lean body, how his brows furrowed as he was looking at the runes, his mind clearly elsewhere).
He could only nod; saying anything else was meaningless. Because what do you say to somebody who was used by those around him; by those who should protect him at all cost? What do you say to such a person who had to leave his country because otherwise his every move would be scrutinized? Draco didn’t have Blaise’s charm or Pansy’s network of people who still wanted to talk to her. Harry worked with both of them, separately, on a few cases; Zabini was too much of a flirt for his taste and Pansy’ dry sense of humor was a tad too dry for him. Nevertheless, he enjoyed their company and when Balise asked him out for a drink, he brought Ron and Hermonie and everybody else who was available. Their group stunned Blaise for a second, then he rolled his eyes and said, “Well, the rumours that all Gryffindors are joined at the hip are apparently troue. I guess the first round is on me, eh?” In the end they closed the pub at three in the morning, slightly wasted and more friends than colleagues.
“So, what’s your theory then?” Asked Harry, bringing the conversation, and his thoughts, back to the topics at hand.
Draco sighed. “It’s intriguing, to say the least. I’m not entirely sure, but hopefully thanks to this,” he pointed at the runes with his chin. “I will know more.”
“So you got it covered, then?”
Draco gave him a look that would make Harry take a step. “What, Harry Potter already bailing? Is the case too boring for you? Too…”
“None of those things,” Harry interrupted, before the other man could finish. “I just wanted to ask how I can help, seeing that you have the situation under control.”
“Far from it,” Draco laughed, the sound echoing from the walls. Harry closed his hands in his pocket, trying not to flinch under the hollowness of the sound.
They clearly have changed. He, well, for better or worse, has grown up and for the better part of his early twenties, tried to catch up to everybody around him without having the same experiences as them. While others thought about their exams and crushes he was trying to save the world. It became evident, especially after the world was saved, that there wasn’t much to do for The Boy Who Lived except, well, live. It turned out that if you haven’t done the “living” part in a long, long time, it can become a little confusing and depressing.
And there was Draco. Harry sometimes, when he was lying in the darkness of his small flat, would think about the other boy, the man he had become. Who had to run and hide, who had to carry the burden of his family’s sins and who would be forever judged by them. Who had loving parents but who, in the end, betrayed him on some level.
He didn’t know what was worse; how his mother clearly loved Draco but who couldn't choose the wellbeing of her only child over anything else.
Harry blinked and he was back to the damp interior of the vault, Draco’s echo laugh slowly fading away.
“But don’t worry, Potter. There will be a job for you to do.”
“That’s all I ask,” said Harry and his heart beat a little bit faster. He only needed that; work, something to do, to pass the time that was otherwise empty. After running for so long he found out that normal life was a tad too tedious for his taste. Or maybe he just wasn’t doing it right? He didn’t know.
“Well then,” the blond man gave him a mocking smile. “Let’s put you to work, shall we?”
“Alright,” said Harry, ignoring the feeling of heat creeping up to his neck, the way his pulse get faster as something uncoiled in his veins, eager.
The trouble he didn’t want was already there, brewing under his skin, but at least he had something to do. For now.