Chapter Text
The spell that hit him was lightless and soundless. In fact, if it hadn’t lifted him from his feet and thrown him into a display of artisanal pickled vegetables, Draco wouldn’t have known he’d been hit by anything at all. At least he hadn’t been the target, for once; it was a simple case of bad luck — wrong place, wrong time. The wrong place being Underborough Market and the wrong time being the morning of the Aurors’ attempt to capture a serial killer.
At the time all he knew was that one moment he was handing over twelve sickles for a focaccia, and the next, people were screaming and he was lying on the ground in a daze. The spells bounced off the bricks, crackling like fireworks as the ceiling spun above him.
The shouts quieted and the distinct Disapparition cracks told Draco it was safe to move. Slowly he sat up, peeling cucumber slices off his Muggle jacket with a grimace. With dismay, he saw there was a long rip in the hem where it had gotten caught on a nail. He would need to go home to change. He glanced around the wreckage of the pickle stand and saw his focaccia had fallen out of its paper bag and was lying on the dirty cobbles.
Not only was he going to be late for lunch, he would also be empty-handed. Pansy was going to hex him. He groaned.
“You alright down there?” a deep, male voice asked and Draco’s stomach dropped as his day got even worse.
He looked up to see Potter approaching him, full Auror-mode, his red cape snapping behind him with definitive authority. He could tell the moment he recognised Draco lying amongst the vinegared vegetables; for a second, the professional façade disintegrated, leaving Potter looking a lot more like a twenty-six year old than an experienced Auror, but then he snapped back to the job at hand.
“Potter,” he greeted shortly.
His cheeks burned as he tried to get to his feet but his foot slipped on a piece of glass; Potter jerked into action, one hand wrapping around Draco’s elbow and the other grabbing his hand. There was a sharp, strange pain that stung his throat. It felt as if he was swallowing a flame and he choked, his hand shooting to clutch his throat as if to hold it together but — just as he thought he was going to scream — it faded as quickly as it appeared.
“Are you okay? What hit you?” Potter asked. He was still holding onto Draco and he pulled him closer as he interrogated him, his eyes flicking all over Draco’s body for some sort of injury.
Draco yanked himself from Potter’s grip. “I’m fine,” he said, but the words were gravelly, like he’d picked up a lifelong smoking addiction. Self-consciously, he cleared his throat.
To his immense frustration, Potter noticed this. His eyes narrowed and he frowned pointedly at the mess Draco had been lying in. “What were you hit with? There were some nasty curses flying around.”
Draco rolled his eyes. “It was just a Stunner.”
“You need to get checked out by a Healer,” Potter decided.
“Merlin, Potter, I’m fine, look.”
He jumped up and down a couple of times to demonstrate his fine-ness but Potter didn’t budge. In fact, he had a blank expression like he wasn’t paying any attention to what Draco was saying. He blinked a couple of times and then shook his head.
“It’s routine,” he said bluntly. “Any collateral needs to get checked over — come on.”
“Collateral?” Draco asked, outraged, as Potter grabbed his elbow and steered him towards a corner of the market that had been cleared for Healers to inspect the other unlucky bystanders.
There was quite a lot of collateral. Three harried-looking Emergency Healers had set up a makeshift triage, and a long line of wizards waited to be checked over. The red-robed Aurors buzzed around like flies, interviewing the injured, talking to each other in low voices, and helping shopkeepers collect their scattered inventory, Vanishing unsalvageable debris. Most of the wounded bystanders just looked a little dazed but there were a few who were monopolising the Healers’ time with bloodied robes and tear-stained cheeks.
Potter practically dragged him to the end of the queue. A witch who was sitting against the wall gingerly holding her wrist glanced up at them and then did a double-take when she spotted Potter. Draco scoffed and crossed his arms. Potter looked a bit uncomfortable as he scratched the back of his neck with his wand.
“Right, well, here you go,” he said.
Draco sighed deeply. “How long is this going to take? It is Saturday, in case you hadn’t realised — I’ve got plans.”
“I think St. Mungo’s are sending over a couple more Emergency Healers any moment now, so it shouldn’t be too long.” He didn’t sound particularly confident. Someone called for Potter and he glanced at Draco uneasily. “I’m just going to…” He trailed off, nodding towards the senior witch who was calling his name.
“Whatever.”
“You’ll stay here and get checked?” Potter asked.
He rolled his eyes. “You aren’t my mother, stop babysitting me. Go do your job.”
“This is my job,” Potter said, but the Auror called for him again and he thankfully left.
A nearby upturned crate made for a good enough seat and, though it creaked, it held under his weight. He shrugged out of his jacket and examined the rip with pursed lips. Luckily, it would be easy enough to fix with Reparo and the pickled scent would be gone with a dash of odour-ousting potion. The queue hadn’t moved an inch.
He reached for his wand, and the woman in front of him in the line gasped and pulled her child closer to her side. Her mouth hung open, stretching her face into a mask of horror as she stared at his forearm. It was mid-summer and Draco had rolled his shirt sleeves up before putting on his cloak, because he’d tailored his coat, like all his clothes, to fit tightly around his forearm.
Too late, he flipped his hand over, pulling his arm close to his side to mask the black serpentine lines marring his sallow skin. The woman stepped out of the queue toward the Aurors, pulling her child behind her robes.
He was on his feet, Apparating before she could say a word.
Wiltshire was far enough from central London that he landed in the Manor’s entrance hall in a breathless pile, the long-distance Apparition leaving him winded and nauseous. The marble tile was blessedly cold against his burning cheeks.
When his stomach settled, he sat up and stretched. He hated Apparition but at least he now had an opportunity to change out of his vinegar-soaked robes. He wondered if Potter would notice his absence and chase him down for not staying to get checked over. He doubted it; surely the Chosen One was far too busy commanding a team of Aurors to pay attention to Draco.
It was probably better this way. He wouldn’t be wasting a Healer’s time when there was nothing wrong with him; after all, he was quite good at determining the after effects of dark curses. If there was a curse out there that Aunt Bella hadn’t tested in front of him then he very much doubted an overworked Healer would be able to spot it.
I’ll go to St. Mungo’s if I feel like I’m dying, he resolved.
He checked his watch: it was nearly noon. Pansy was going to crucify him.
Due to the patchy layout of public fireplaces connected to the Floo Network in London, he got to Hyde Park an hour later than their agreed time, sweaty and irritable after the long walk from the Leaky Cauldron. A picnic in the park had been Pansy’s idea. Draco had sulked about sunburn until she promised they could sit in the shade of a tree and told him to stop being a crybaby, at which point he relented for the sake of his pride.
He’d changed into a different outfit: grey trousers and an olive green jacket with cuffs that gripped his wrists tightly. He kept his shirt sleeves rolled down. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky which meant that the park was crammed with scantily clad Muggles, sunbathing on towels or playing games that were all centred around throwing and catching an assortment of different shaped objects. No one spared him a second glance as he passed.
He found Pansy underneath a large oak, leaning against the trunk, fanning herself and reading a book. He dropped the baguette he’d bought from a Muggle cornershop on the picnic blanket.
She jumped as the bread glanced off her ankle and glared up at him. “What time do you call this?” she demanded.
“I got held up,” he said, sprawling down opposite her in the shade. “You look especially gorgeous today.”
He meant it sincerely, though the compliment’s authenticity was lessened slightly when it came from Draco, given that she was wearing a dress he had made for her. It was floor-length, but made out of a light cotton that wasn’t too hot in the London summer. She wore it over a long-sleeved blouse made of a white, gauzy fabric. She hadn’t bothered to straighten her hair into her usual severe bob, and the short strands curled softly around her temples, just brushing the bottom of her earlobes.
She picked up the baguette, its plastic sheath crinkling in her hand, and pointed it threateningly at him as if it were her wand.
“I thought you were going to Underborough to get nice bread,” she said.
“I did and then I got stuck in the middle of some Auror raid — hence the baguette and the lateness.”
“Auror raid?” she said, her eyes lighting up in anticipation. “What happened?” she asked, leaning closer.
He recounted his morning in great detail as Pansy ate her way down the baguette, making sympathetic noises at the appropriate moments. He couldn’t help but exaggerate some parts, but he kept the Potter reveal until the last moment.
“So, there I was: probably a little bit concussed, stinking of vinegar, pickles sliding into my socks — and of course, that’s when Potter comes along.”
Until that moment, Pansy had been listening in rapt attention, but as he said Potter’s name, her gaze drifted over Draco’s shoulder and her lips twisted. “That’s funny considering he also just appeared behind you,” she said.
Draco spun around and sure enough, there were Potter, Weasley, and Granger (or the Granger-Weasleys, he supposed they were now) wandering off the paved road through the middle of the park, heading for a free patch of sunny grass. They were wearing the kind of clothes that gave Muggle fashion a bad name in the wizarding world: shapeless, ugly denim jeans and baggy t-shirts. Granger’s ill-fitting dungarees were stretched across her enormous, swollen stomach. Does she not know maternity clothes exist? Draco wondered.
Compared to the uptight Auror who forced Draco to see a Healer that morning, Potter was unrecognisable. Gone was any hint of self-assured authority, replaced by a man who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a hippy commune. His top was several years old (judging by the holes in the hem and flaking letters), his jeans were ripped, and he was wearing a ridiculous elasticated headband to keep his shaggy hair from falling into his eyes.
They hadn’t noticed Draco and Pansy in the shade of the oak as they stopped and began arguing about something — Weasley gesturing up at the air angrily. Eventually they walked a few metres further away from Draco and Pansy. Weasley dropped an ugly carpet bag on the ground and pulled out an enormous blanket, which he and Potter spread half in the shade and half out. He reached in the bag again, his arm disappearing up to the shoulder and displaying a total lack of care for the Statute of Secrecy. This time he pulled out a camping chair which Granger sat in.
“Ugh,” Draco grimaced, turning away from them and back to Pansy before they noticed him staring. “What are the chances?
Pansy rolled an olive between her thumb and index finger as she regarded them speculatively. “I haven’t seen any of them in years. They look the exact same.”
“That’s only because you see their faces in the Prophet every bloody day,” Draco groused. “Weasley’s fatter than he was at school.”
She popped the olive into her mouth and smirked. “Good point. So, you were saying — Potter pulled you out of the vegetable stand like you were a damsel in distress?”
“He got to act the hero and humiliate me at the same time. He must’ve been in heaven.”
“Was he an arse?” she asked sympathetically.
Draco grimaced. “Worse, he was professional. Escorted me to a Healer and everything.”
“I don’t know how you withstood the indignity,” Pansy said with a sardonic smile. “What Healer did you see?”
“I didn’t hang around long enough.”
“Draco!” Pansy scolded.
He rolled his eyes and said, “I’m fine.”
It wasn’t enough, she was already fishing her wand out her handbag. Startled, Draco subtly glanced around them.
“What about the Muggles?”
She waved away his concerns. “No one’s looking at us. Just, here — scoot closer to the tree.”
“I don’t scoot, it’s undignified,” he sniffed, and then scooted to where he was told. Against the trunk of the oak, Pansy knelt in front of him and pointed her wand at his chest. “Are you sure you’re qualified for this?” he asked.
She glowered and poked him. Hard. “Fuck off or I’ll make it hurt.”
He mimed zipping his lips and then sat still, letting Pansy work. She tucked her hair behind her ears, her forehead was creased in concentration as she muttered a long and complicated spell.
It had taken Pansy years after the war to find a job. He hadn’t known any of this for the first year; he’d been too preoccupied with his mother, and his friends had been so busy trying to distance themselves from any Death Eater links that they hadn’t spoken except for the condolence letters.
He’d resented them for it at first, even after the apologies, but after a few months back in the wizarding world, he understood why they’d acted like that. For all their lives, they’d been on top of magical society — it was difficult to adjust to one where they were at the bottom. The others hadn’t even been Death Eaters, just Slytherins, and yet Pansy had still spent three years bouncing from unemployed to temporary job and back.
If Draco had been able to distance himself from the atrocities of the War, he would have done exactly the same as them. He couldn’t begrudge them forever.
Even after they’d made up, Draco had been going through his own problems with debts and job hunting, so he hadn’t realised just how miserable Pansy had become until she bounded up to him two years ago, a letter accepting her onto the further education mediwitch training course in her hand. Pansy wasn’t the caring type and Draco, though he’d been happy for her, had privately doubted she’d last a year. She hadn’t quit though; instead, she’d taken to nursing like a duck to water.
Despite not being a full Healer, she’d learnt some tricks over the last few years. He winced as she cast some kind of diagnostic spell that felt like someone was slowly lowering him into an ice bath.
“Keep still,” Pansy snapped as he shivered.
He had a feeling that was why she enjoyed her job so much, she got to spend a large portion of it ordering people around. Pansy had always been the bossy type.
He gritted his teeth against the cold and sat as still as possible. To keep his mind off the bone-chilling discomfort, he watched Potter and his friends. He hadn’t seen the three of them together outside of photos in the Prophet in years. It didn’t look like much had changed from school: Weasley was sitting in the shade, his back resting against Granger’s legs as she sat with her nose in a book, one hand curled around her stomach. Potter was splayed out in the sun, like a lizard basking, his face tilted up towards the blue sky. He was tossing a ball in the air and catching it with his eyes closed.
Insufferable show-off.
He zoned out, not noticing the passing of time until Pansy sighed and sat back on her heels, dropping her wand onto the picnic blanket. The sun’s warmth gradually returned, the warm breeze wrapping around him like a blanket.
“Well? How long have I got left?” he asked mournfully.
She slapped his closest body part — which happened to be his ankle. “You’re fine,” she admitted.
“I hate to say ‘I told you so’ but…”
“Better to be safe than sorry,” Pansy groused.
“Look on the bright side, you got to show off your fancy new spell, which had the bonus of making me feel bad.”
She rolled her eyes and tore off a bit of baguette. “Don’t act so hard done by, you got to stare at Potter.”
He spluttered. “I— You— I was waiting for you to finish, not staring.”
“Of course,” Pansy said, not sounding at all convinced but she changed the topic, throwing the half-eaten baguette at him. “Put this far away from me or I’ll eat the whole thing. Have I told you about Mrs. Mudgeon yet?”
“Should you be telling me patient names? Surely it’s confidential.”
“Pfft.”
“Your caring attitude really fills me with confidence in our healthcare system.”
“Do you want the gossip or not?”
He leaned back, reclining on his elbows. “I’m listening.”
Malkin’s Magical Tailoring was an unassuming shop on an unassuming London high street, hidden amongst the plethora of Muggle nail salons, kebab takeaways, and charity shops filled with unwanted items. The road was too narrow for the volume of traffic that Muggles insisted on sending down it and conversations were often interrupted by the blare of horns as double-decker buses brought traffic to a standstill. Malkin’s Magical Tailoring masqueraded as a nameless independent dry-cleaner. On one side, it neighboured a real estate agent that displayed sun-bleached pictures of bedsits and house shares, and on the other, an empty alley. The nearest wizarding business was an old pub a ten-minute walk away, whose fireplace Draco used to commute.
Same Day Dry Cleaning - Quality Repairs and Alterations declared the faded signage above the only window, which was coated with a layer of greyish-brown frosting from grime kicked up by passing vehicles over the years. Even if the windows had been clean, the clothes rack blocked any view of the interior. It was stuffed full of Muggle suits and dresses wrapped in clear plastic bags and tagged with a variety of coloured paper labels. Like most things in the shop front, these were just for show and collecting dust.
Between the dirt and lack of signposted opening hours or cost, Muggles rarely came in.
A loud buzz rang through the shop as Draco pulled the heavy door open. Other than the small desk with an empty till and the floor-to-ceiling display of enormous metal boxes with circular glass doors, the shop was empty. He didn’t quite know how the metal boxes worked, but Maggie assured him they were what Muggles used to wash their clothes and were important for the guise of a Muggle dry cleaner.
“Draco?” Maggie called, her voice drifting through the doorway in the far corner.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he called back. The door was ajar, Draco nudged it open with his foot to find Maggie sat at one of the two work tables with her feet propped up on the tabletop, absentmindedly plaiting a strand of her waist-length purple hair as she read a Muggle newspaper. AUTHORITIES STILL SEARCHING FOR CAUSE OF SATURDAY QUAKE IN BOROUGH MARKET the headline blared above a static photo of shellshocked, ash-covered people running away from a collapsing building.
“Morning!” she sang out, chucking the paper down on the table.
“You’re here early,” Draco said.
“Yeah, well, seeing as it’s my business and all, I feel like I should try and be here for opening at least once a week.”
“If you’re here for opening once again this month, I’ll eat my hat.”
Maggie stuck her tongue out. “You’re not wearing a hat.”
“I’ll eat yours then.”
She wore a blend of Muggle and magical fashion. That morning, her indigo dress was sleeveless and knee-length, cinched in at the waist and then flaring out over her hips. Over the top, she wore a half-cape that fastened at the neck with a row of three small gold buttons. It fell mid-way down her forearms. Both the cape and dress were the same shade of blue as the wide-brimmed witches’ hat that she peered out from underneath.
She ignored him. “Is one of those for me?” she asked and clapped her hands gratefully as Draco handed her a coffee, as well as the paper he was carrying under his arm — carefully folded so Muggles on the street wouldn’t notice the moving photos.
GILES THORNE IN CUSTODY AFTER UNDERBOROUGH RAID, it announced along with a photo of the man himself, holding an Azkaban slate in his claw-like hands. If it hadn’t been for the occasional blink, Draco would have thought it was a Muggle photo. Then, under the mugshot, a smaller subheading read AUROR OFFICE UNDER FIRE FOR MUGGLE INJURIES.
“He’s so creepy,” Maggie said with a shudder when she saw Draco looking.
“I think it’s the eyes,” he said. The man had a certain spark of madness in his thousand-yard stare.
“They’re saying he’s claimed five of the killings but it may be as many as twenty.”
“Good thing they got him,” he said as he shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the coat stand by the door, his nose wrinkling.
There were several concealment charms on the door between the Muggle front and the sewing room. They were so strong that Draco would sneeze if he lingered by the doorway for too long, but Maggie was terrified of accidentally breaking any of the secrecy laws and having her business shut down, so she’d spent far too much of her start-up money hiring the kinds of security professionals that were more used to warding the Quidditch World Cups than a small, independent business.
Any Muggle who glanced at through the doorway would see a couple of desks and a few cheap sewing machines, rather than the self-sewing needles that were charmed to hem and embroider whilst hanging in the air. To Muggles, the pictures on the wall just looked like cut outs from magazines, not the wizarding photographs and illustrated fashion plates of models haughtily watching Draco and Maggie work in the most up-to-date styles of robes.
The entrance to the wizarding portion of the shop was in the alley that ran alongside the edge of the building. Where Muggles saw a side door with a STAFF ENTRANCE ONLY sign, wizards saw the shop front as it was meant to be: a cherry-wood door with frosted glass, Malkin’s Magical Tailoring painted across the glass.
Still, even with all the security measures and an assurance from a Muggle Protection Office that the shop complied with regulations, Maggie still insisted on never having both doors to the sewing room open. It sat in the middle of the shop and without all the wards, it would be technically possible for a Muggle standing in the dry-cleaners to look through the sewing room to the wizarding half of the shop.
“How was your weekend then?” she asked.
“I’ve had better.”
“What happened?”
“I decided to buy some focaccia.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. When he didn’t offer up any additional information she prompted, “And it wasn’t up to your very high standards for posh bread?”
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t even get to try it before I got caught in the middle of an Auror raid,” he said, glancing pointedly at the papers.
She gasped and clapped her hands together. “You were at Underborough on Saturday morning?”
“The normal response would be ‘Gosh, Draco, are you okay?’, not delight,” Draco said.
“Were you there when they actually caught him?”
“Yes — but I didn’t see anything,” he said quickly. “I got hit by some spell and spent all of the action lying on the floor.”
Maggie sighed. “That’s a shame.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t worry, I’m perfectly fine but thank you for your concern.”
She flapped a hand dismissively at the mention of Draco’s wellbeing. “Apparently Harry Potter was the one who brought him down. Did you see him?”
Of course he was, Draco thought, his lip curling. Bringing down the Dark Lord wasn’t enough for a lifetime, apparently — he just had to be responsible for stopping every dark wizard in Britain.
“I told you, I didn’t see any of the action.”
“Not even a glimpse?” she said, the disappointment clear.
Maggie was, in many ways, the ideal employer. She was an excellent designer, filled with boundless creativity and the kind of optimism that one could only achieve before they turned twenty. One could potentially criticise her optimism as venturing toward naive fantasy, but she’d left Hogwarts after failing all but two OWLs and managed to open the tailor within a year and then, more impressively, kept it open for the next four years. Her grandmother visited the shop regularly to moan at Maggie for her lack of loyalty to the family legacy in an obvious attempt to guilt-trip her into closing up shop and working at Madam Malkin’s, but Maggie was brave enough to stand up to her each time. Draco was especially grateful for that, given that there wasn’t a hope in hell that any shop on Diagon Alley would hire him.
He owed Maggie Malkin his career. It was a fact they were both aware of, but she never lorded it over him or even acknowledged it. From the way she listened to him and valued his opinions, an outsider would probably assume Draco had applied to the job with a list of relevant experiences as long as his arm.
In reality, he’d heard about Maggie’s opening from Blaise’s mum’s friend who knew the Malkins and the next week, he’d packed his work into a suitcase like an artist’s portfolio and waited outside the door until Maggie let him in. He’d been so desperate for the job, he brought anything he thought might impress her: his fourth year robes he’d altered for fun that resulted in McGonagall docking ten house points; three identical fairisle jumpers he’d made when practicing his knitting charms under house arrest; cloaks he’d embroidered with shaking fingers in the dead of night when he couldn’t sleep, listening for any sound of Voldemort or Bellatrix in the hallways.
He’d probably stunk of the crup kennels he’d been working at, but Maggie hadn’t asked about it. She’d simply inspected his work and then asked, “Are you any good at transfiguration? I need some mannequins but I can’t manage more than a collection of arms and I don’t think displaying the robes on some sort of eldritch horror is going to entice people.”
Draco had transfigured a broken stool into a mannequin on the spot, and that was that.
However, despite all of her many, many selling points, she was also a self-proclaimed Harry Potter fangirl. She’d never met him, or even been in the same room as him — Maggie had started Hogwarts the year after the battle — but that was probably why she was in love with him. Draco suspected it was much easier to find Potter bearable if you only read about his exploits in the weekly gossip rags, than if you’d had the misfortune of having a conversation with him. But, while he understood that Potter fans were inevitable with the Prophet dedicating at least five column inches to what Potter’s hair looked like, he wished he didn’t have to work for one.
Mercifully, Maggie didn’t know the extent of Draco’s involvement with Potter. She knew that they’d been at Hogwarts together and they knew of each other, but whereas Potter’s name was written in textbooks, Draco Malfoy was slowly fading into obscurity which was… fine.
He could tolerate it.
He sighed, and shook his head.
“I ran into him, yes,” he said, turning away from Maggie to look over his current project, a simple alteration of some ugly dress robes. (He shouldn’t complain: any business was good business.)
Maggie squealed. “Did you talk to him?”
“Briefly.”
“You have to tell me everything!” she said, pulling a chair from one of the other sewing tables and sitting on it backward, resting her elbows on the backrest and putting her chin in her hands.
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
“Well, what did you talk about?”
“I can’t remember, Maggie! He told me to get checked over by the Healers.”
“Surely there was more than that?”
“We didn’t have a quick catch-up on each other’s lives, Maggie. Potter and I really aren’t friends.”
A muffled knock interrupted Maggie before she could continue her interrogation. They glanced towards the source of the sound, where the indistinct silhouette of a waiting customer was visible through the frosted glass. They exchanged a surprised look. No one had ever turned up at opening time.
“We’ll continue this later,” she promised ominously as she went to open the door.
He Accioed his work from the mannequin and kicked the door shut, closing the sewing room off from view of any customers who had a habit of ignoring the signs to keep out and interrupt his work. Although he wouldn’t mind being distracted from the robes he was working on.
They were hideous: forest green with red trim, like someone had challenged themselves to design the ugliest Christmas robes for a joke. Sadly, their owner — a stout man in his thirties — took them completely seriously. He dropped them off a week ago and asked Draco to alter them to fit after he’d put on a few pounds. Draco took them with the idea he could accidentally set fire to them instead because it went against all of his morals to let such a crime against fashion exist, but his professional code of conduct (and Maggie glaring daggers at his back) had so far stopped him. At least they were nearly finished and were being collected later today so Draco wouldn’t have to look at them any more.
He was double-checking the measurements one last time when Maggie called his name from the shop front, her voice sounding oddly high-pitched and breathless.
He sent the robes over to an empty desk with a swish of his wand along with a self-stitching needle and thread and walked to the shopfloor, curious. He tried to school his expression into something polite before he got there. Maggie had told him his face while dealing with customers looked like someone realising they’d trodden in dog shit.
“How can I—” He cut off his question when he realised who it was chatting with Maggie. “Potter,” he said, shortly.
Potter stumbled and caught himself on the front desk, looking just as surprised to see Draco. Maggie looked like she had died and gone to heaven.
“Malfoy,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“You didn’t expect to see me at the place I work?”
Potter’s brows twitched. “You work here?”
“Why else would I be hanging out in the staff room on a Monday morning? For fun?” he said with an eye-roll. Potter stared at him blankly and Draco sighed. Aware of Maggie’s wide-eyed stare between the two of them, he cleared his throat and asked, “What do you want?”
“Someone at work said they got some robes repaired here. I was wondering if you could fix this.” He gestured at the robes laid out on the front desk — though ‘robes’ was a generous description. Draco picked up one of the scraps of red fabric and raised an eyebrow as he examined the ragged edges.
“Don’t the Aurors have a uniform department who could just give you a new set?”
“They, er, don’t like me very much,” Potter admitted, glancing around the shop anxiously as if he was expecting the Ministry suppliers to come jumping out from behind a mannequin.
“Dare I even ask what happened to this?”
To his surprise, Potter blushed.
“It’s confidential,” he muttered.
“Alright,” Draco said dubiously. He spread out the different scraps on the table, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. “Is this all of it?”
“Most of them?”
He shook his head and cast a folding charm that stacked the robes into a neat pile which he pushed towards Potter. “You should go talk to your uniform suppliers.”
Potter looked disappointed but resigned; however, as he went to pick up the robes and leave, Maggie piped up.
“But Draco, you managed to fix that wedding dress last year even though the skirt was half gone,” she pointed out.
The little traitor. Draco glowered at her, any positive emotion he had ever felt towards the woman evaporating.
“We made those robes in the first place so we had matching fabric and the pattern on file.”
“Surely we have something to match the Ministry uniform?” She blinked at him innocently.
“There are probably specific standards for Auror robes that I don’t know,” he said through gritted teeth.
Potter jumped back into the conversation. “As long as they’re red, I doubt anyone would really notice.”
“You wouldn’t notice but you’re blind and you dress like that. I refuse to take your word for it,” Draco sniped and pushed the robes towards him again, but Potter didn’t move to pick them up this time. He glanced between Draco and Maggie, rubbing the nape of his neck.
“Are you sure you can’t? I’d…” He grimaced, as if someone was forcing him to swallow nails. “I’d really appreciate it, Malfoy.”
This was a new experience, Potter asking Draco for his help for once. Maybe if he refused again, Potter would start begging…
Maggie shifted her weight next to him and pinched Draco’s thigh behind the desk. Draco sighed and drummed his fingers on the folded scraps of fabric.
“What on Earth did you do to offend the uniform suppliers?”
“I think it was a culmination of lots of little things,” Potter said awkwardly.
Draco could feel Maggie’s eyes drilling holes into his temple as he deliberated. He imagined what it would be like to work with her if he said no to Potter and found it was actually pretty easy to picture: she would probably kill him.
“Fine,” he sighed. “I’m not making any promises, and I’m also not giving you a Chosen One discount or anything.”
“What about a friends and family one?” Potter asked with a small smile and it took Draco an unpleasant beat before he realised he was joking.
“Ha ha,” he drawled. He picked up the scraps. “Maggie will give you a token — when it turns green, it means you can come back to pick them up.”
“How long will it be?”
“Around seven to nine days. What?” he asked in response to Potter’s wince.
“Is there any way you could do it by Thursday?”
Draco glowered at him. “Skipping the queue will cost extra,” he said, though he wasn’t sure the two projects they had counted as a queue.
“How much?”
“Twenty galleons,” Draco made up on the spot. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Maggie’s jaw drop and he surreptitiously kicked her.
Potter crossed his arms. “That sounds extortionate?”
Draco shrugged. “Up to you. If you don’t want to pay, you can wait a week or take it to the Auror tailors.”
“Okay, okay,” Potter sighed and Draco tried not to look outwardly triumphant.
“Fine. Maggie’ll sort out the token for you then,” he said and walked back into the sewing room without a second glance.
He dumped Potter’s robes on a free table and checked on his other work. The ugly Christmas robes were hemmed, but the needle and thread had got bored in his absence and had started embroidering curse words in looping, flowery cursive.
“Very funny,” he said scathingly, summoning a stitch unpicker. “Where did you even learn those words?” The needle dropped to the table innocently.
He was in the middle of removing ‘Merlin’s saggy balls’ from the collar when Maggie came bounding in, looking even more manic than usual.
“What was that?” she demanded.
“What was what?”
“You said you and Harry Potter barely know each other!”
“What? I never said that,” he protested. “You knew we were in the same year at Hogwarts.”
“You purposefully misled me.”
He ripped out one of saggy’s gs forcefully. “I wasn’t purposeful — we aren’t friends. Before Saturday, I hadn’t spoken to him in years.”
“Yeah but you definitely have some kind of history…” Maggie said and suddenly there was a suggestive grin playing at the corners of her lips. When Draco looked up at her, she waggled her eyebrows.
Oh to be young and not filter every relationship through the war years. At first, Draco had taken Maggie’s innocence about the war as purposeful ignorance but over the years he’d come to realise that she did know a lot about the war, after all, she was ten when Voldemort was defeated. The difference was that Maggie hadn’t lived through the worst of it, so her first thought when people brought up events that had happened to them when they were younger wasn’t ‘what side were they on?’. It usually made talking to her refreshing but Draco hated the moments when he had to spell it out for her.
“Stop whatever line of thought you’ve got going on,” he said, holding up a finger. “We have a strained relationship from that time my Aunt imprisoned him in the basement while she tortured his friend. And numerous other occasions that are just as awkward, trust me.”
The Sixth-floor boy’s bathroom. The Astronomy Tower. The War Trials. His mother’s funeral. The scenes that played out behind Draco’s closed eyes every time he tried to sleep. It was strange and infuriating and humiliating how Potter was always there; how he got a front row seat to watch the countless ways Draco’s life collapsed around him.
Maggie’s hand on his shoulder made him jump. She was watching him with a creased brow, her smile replaced by a frown.
“Oh,” she said, her voice very small. “I’m sorry — I don’t think sometimes.”
He covered her hand with his and squeezed gently. “It’s okay. Your lack of brain cells is my favourite thing about you,” he said sincerely.
It worked, she laughed lightly and pulled her hand away, slapping him lightly on the arm. “Fuck off,” she said jovially and then sighed happily. “Merlin, Harry Potter in my shop! I wish I’d taken a picture to send to Granny. Do you think he’d pose for a photo if I asked when he comes to get his robes?”
Draco remembered Potter’s expression whenever that Creevey boy asked him for a photo at Hogwarts and smirked. “Yeah, you might as well ask.”
“Maybe he’ll mention us in one of his interviews — that would be amazing.”
Draco didn’t want to pop her bubble. “Maybe,” he agreed. “I should do some actual work before I have to give Mr. Fitzherbert his robes back with ‘Tits!’ written on every pocket.”
“I think it adds some personality.”
“The last thing these robes need is more personality,” Draco said, wrinkling his nose. As Maggie left, the self-stitching needle began to roll across the table towards the scraps of Potter’s robes. “Don’t even think about it or you’re going in the drawer,” he warned before putting his head down and getting to work.