Chapter Text
The champagne in Harry Potter’s glass had gone warm three speeches ago. The delicate bubbles had long since dissolved, leaving behind a flat, coppery sweetness that coated his throat.
It sat heavy in his stomach, a sickly sweet, acidic reminder of the evening’s sterile obligations. Around him, the crystal chandeliers of the Ministry Atrium, specifically enchanted to mimic a perfect, star-filled sky that never threatened rain, only perpetual, flattering twilight, shattered the artificial light into a million fracturing diamonds, casting a glittering, suffocating net over the crowd. The air, perpetually filtered, smelled of expensive perfume, stale cigar smoke, and the faint, metallic scent of newly minted Galleons.
They were celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Reform Act, or perhaps it was the sixth. Harry had lost count somewhere between the third toast to "Unity" and the second tray of caviar that cost more than a Firebolt. The whole charade felt like a well-rehearsed opera where the audience knew all the songs but none of the true suffering.
He had learned, over the grinding, monotonous years of peace, that the Ministry needed very little excuse to pat itself on the back, drink expensive wine, and parade their Head Auror around like a prize stallion. He was the most valuable commodity they possessed, the living proof that everything was fine. He was the garnish on their banquet of self-congratulation.
"And so," Minister Shacklebolt was saying from the podium, his voice deep and rolling like distant thunder, magnified by a Sonorus that made the very floorboards vibrate and the glasses chime, "we look to a future unburdened by the shadows of the past. A future where blood status is but a footnote in history, and merit is the only currency of value."
Applause rippled through the room, polite, practiced, and deafeningly loud. Harry clapped mechanically, his hands numb, his fingers stinging with the residual magic of the evening’s required handshake charms. The words rang hollow, bouncing off the gilded tiles and the marble pillars. Unburdened by the past. It was a beautiful, calculated lie, written by speechwriters who likely hadn't seen a curse thrown in anger in their lives, and whose biggest concern was whether their summer robes matched their spouse's.
Harry adjusted the collar of his dress robes. It felt tight, a stranglehold of velvet and silk that seemed to shrink with every passing minute, pressing into his Adam's apple. He was thirty-two years old, the Savior of the Wizarding World, the youngest Head Auror in a century, and he was slowly suffocating in open air, drowning in praise and privilege.
People looked at him. They always looked. Eyes slid over him like physical touches, hungry, assessing, and possessive, demanding a piece of his narrative. They didn't see a man; they saw an icon, a statue to be polished and admired, a commodity whose value was tied directly to his perpetual charisma. They looked for the scar, now hidden beneath a glamour he wore not for vanity, but for a shred of privacy, a thin film of magic that blurred the jagged lightning bolt just enough to make him look ordinary to a passing glance. They looked for the war hero who had walked into the forest and come back. They looked for the man who had everything.
They never looked close enough to see that his eyes were glazed over with fatigue, that his hand twitched toward a wand that wasn't there every time a champagne cork popped, or that he was lonelier in this crushing crowd than he ever was in the echoing, dusty silence of Grimmauld Place. The noise of the crowd was a high-pitched drone in his ears; he could barely distinguish one vapid compliment from the next.
He felt a hand, clammy and insistent, clamp down on his arm. It was a wizard from the Department of Magical Transportation, a man whose name Harry had forgotten three seconds after learning it, and whose breath smelled heavily of garlic and expensive claret.
"Mr. Potter! Splendid speech by Kingsley, eh? The integration of the werewolf registry into the workforce, groundbreaking stuff. Truly historic."
"Groundbreaking," Harry echoed, his voice flat, his gaze unfocused. He didn't mention that the registry was still used by every major landlord in London to deny housing applications in ninety percent of wizarding districts. He didn't mention the raids he still led on underground wolf-fighting rings that wealthy patrons like these secretly funded, betting on the brutality of others.
"Quite right. Well, keep up the good work. The Auror office has never looked sharper. We all rely on you, Harry. Truly."
Harry forced a smile that felt like a painful grimace. The weight of their reliance was crushing him. He caught Hermione’s eye from across the room. She was trapped in a three-way conversation with the Head of International Magical Cooperation and a stern-faced goblin liaison, looking desperate, her knuckles white where she gripped her handbag. She gave him a microscopic nod, a frantic, pleading permission to bail. She would cover for him. She always did. Ron was already gone, having whispered something about Rosie’s fever an hour ago, though Harry suspected he had simply snuck out to escape the stifling perfume and politics.
Harry set his untouched glass on a passing tray, the clink of the crystal sounding impossibly loud in his own ears, slipped behind a marble pillar wrapped in charmed ivy, and whispered the incantation to drop the Ministry's detection charms. Then, he was gone.
The air outside the Ministry visitor’s entrance was biting, carrying the wet, metallic tang of London rain, diesel fumes, and the damp smell of old stone. It was a jarring, welcome transition from the perfumed stagnation of the Atrium, and Harry inhaled the unfiltered city air greedily.
He didn't apparate immediately. He walked. He needed the noise of the Muggle world, the blessed anonymity of the traffic, the indifference of the wet pavement under his boots. He walked past commuters with umbrellas who cursed the weather, past taxis splashing through puddles, past the life that moved on without magic, a life where he was just another tall, dark-haired man.
He walked until the expensive fabric of his robes was damp at the hem, heavy and dragging. He walked until the noise of the city faded, replaced by the hushed, oppressive silence of the darker magical districts. He wasn't heading to Diagon Alley. The brightness there, the cheerful consumerism, the windows full of self-sweeping brooms and singing teapots, it made his teeth ache tonight. It felt like a thin veneer painted over a rotting wall, and he was tired of veneers.
He found himself, as he often did on nights when the insomnia clawed at him and the Dreamless Sleep potion sat untouched on his nightstand, drifting toward the fringes. The places where the Ministry’s light didn't reach, where the truth of the world still festered.
He moved past the entrance to Knockturn Alley, too touristy now, too sanitized since the Ministry’s PR-driven raids, and went lower. He navigated toward the forgotten veins of the city, down the slick, cobble-broken steps that led to the places decent wizards pretended didn't exist, where the poverty was too stark, the desperation too raw.
The Warrens.
It wasn't officially on any map. It was a tangle of subterranean streets that ran beneath the foundations of Gringotts and the river, a place where magic went to rot and die. It was older than the Ministry itself, a parasitic growth on the city's magical ley lines, the city's shame. The air here was thick, viscous, tasting like copper and decay, heavy with the smell of sulfur, unwashed bodies, and cheap, unregulated gin. The darkness wasn't just an absence of light; it was a physical weight, pressing against the lungs, dampening the senses, sucking the hope out of everything.
Here, the "Reform Act" was a joke. Here, the war hadn't ended; it had just changed shape, becoming a war of slow, grinding survival, fought against hunger and cold.
Harry paused in the shadow of a crumbling archway that wept black slime. He needed to shed Harry Potter completely. The face was a liability here. A target for criminals seeking prestige, or just another bully looking for an easy mark.
He pulled his wand, the holly warm in his hand, and tapped it against his temple. The sensation of the Glamour dropping and the new Transfiguration setting was like cold egg yolk sliding down his skin, followed by a slight burning as his features rearranged themselves. His jaw squared, becoming brutal and blocky. His nose hooked slightly, crooked, looking broken and poorly set. His messy jet-black hair lightened to a nondescript, greasy sandy brown, and his vivid, world-famous green eyes dulled to a muddy, bloodshot hazel. A final muttering incantation, and he grew three inches, his shoulders deliberately slumping to disguise the rigid, upright posture drilled into him by Auror training. He transmuted his fine dress robes into a rough, canvas coat stained with oil and grease, and heavy workman’s boots that had seen better decades.
He wasn't the Head Auror here. He was just another drifter. A mercenary, perhaps, or a man running from debt collectors. A nobody. A ghost in the machine. A man called... Alastair.
He moved deeper into the Warrens. The shops here had no signs, only symbols scratched into the rotting wood: a potion bottle for illicit brews that could cure a cough or melt a stomach; a crossed wand for illegal dueling rings; a cracked coin for fences who asked no questions about bloodstained heirlooms.
He needed a drink. A real one. Not the Ministry’s champagne, but something that would burn the numbness out of his chest and remind him he was alive, that he still had a physical presence.
He spotted a low doorway, the lintel sagging precariously under the weight of the building above. A rusty lantern swung above it, glowing a sickly, necrotic green that illuminated the dust motes dancing in the heavy air. The Wyvern’s Cough. Harry had raided it twice in his early years as a Junior Auror for harboring dark artifact smugglers, but it had reopened within the week both times. It was a cockroach of an establishment; disgusting, resilient, and impossible to kill.
He pushed the door open. The wood shrieked in protest on its hinges, and the air hit him like a physical blow.
The noise hit him first, a low, throbbing, chaotic hum of conversation in a dozen dialects, punctuated by the clatter of glass and the occasional harsh, barking laugh. The smell was next, a vile cocktail of unwashed bodies, stale beer, thick, oily, purple and grey smoke that smelled of cheap opium and burnt sugar, and underlying it all, the coppery tang of fresh enchantments being cast and the cloying stink of old bodily waste.
Harry kept his head down, shoulders hunched, moving with a predatory crouch that belonged to his new persona, slipping to the far end of the bar, into the deepest shadow.
"Whisky," he muttered to the bartender, a massive, muscular goblin with a missing ear and a gaze that suggested he would happily sell his own mother for a Galleon. "Firewhisky. The cheap stuff. And leave the bottle. I ain't leaving soon."
The goblin grunted, his lip curling in a silent sneer of contempt. He slammed a chipped glass onto the scarred wood. He poured a measure of amber liquid that looked suspiciously viscous and smelled like lighter fluid. Harry tossed a Sickle onto the counter, letting it spin.
He turned his back to the bar, leaning on his elbows, scanning the room in the mirror's reflection. It was the usual clientele, the dregs of the magical world. Hags huddled in a corner, their skeletal fingers trading secrets or body parts wrapped in oily rags. A few werewolves, looking rough and sick, eyes yellow and feverish in the days leading up to the moon, nursing drinks that barely touched the side of their condition. Men in deep hoods who kept their hands near their wands, watching the door for a raid or a rival.
And the staff.
There were two servers working the floor. One was a young witch with a tired face and a harsh demeanor, shoving through the crowd with elbows sharp as knives, shouting back at the patrons who grabbed at her skirts.
The other was a man.
He was moving through the tables with his head bowed low, carrying a tray heavy with iron tankards. He was thin. Not just slender, in the way Quidditch seekers were, but dangerously gaunt, his frame almost skeletal beneath his clothes. He wore Muggle attire, a grey, oversized jumper that hung off his shoulders like it was on a wire hanger, the wool pilled and unraveling, and trousers that were stained at the knees. His hair was hidden under a knitted cap, pulled down low over his brow, obscuring his face.
Harry watched him idly, sipping the burning whisky that tasted like ash and regret, exactly what he wanted.
There was something about the man’s movement that snagged his attention. A fluidity. Even dodging a drunk patron’s grasping hand, the man moved with a precise, almost elegant economy of motion that didn't belong in The Wyvern’s Cough. It spoke of training. Of breeding. Of years spent walking corridors where the portraits watched you, teaching you grace.
A large wizard at a table near the center, a man with a beard like a tangled briar patch and robes that smelled of dead fish and cheaper cologne, suddenly slammed his fist onto the table as the server passed, rattling the empty mugs.
"Oi! You missed one, filth. Spill under the table. You think you're too good to notice it?"
The server stopped. He didn't speak. He didn't sigh. He just turned back to the table with a mechanical, heartbreaking obedience. The wizard pointed a sausage-like finger at a spill on the floor, ale mixed with something darker, perhaps blood from a bar fight earlier in the night.
"Clean it up," the wizard sneered, his yellow teeth flashing. "Use your tongue if you have to. Show us how low a Death Eater can go."
The table erupted in laughter. Cruel, wet laughter that stripped the humanity from the air and made Harry’s skin crawl.
Harry felt a familiar coil of cold, hard anger tighten in his gut. It was an old companion, this righteous indignation. He hated bullies. It was the foundational trait of his personality, the thing that made him a good Auror and a terrible politician. He gripped his glass, the glass groaning under the pressure of his fingers, debating furiously whether to intervene. But he was undercover. He couldn't blow a crucial Auror cover for a simple barroom taunt. He had to think like a mercenary, not a hero.
The server didn't argue. He didn't pull a wand. He didn't even look up. He slowly knelt on the filthy floorboards, the wood sticky with years of spilled spirits and muck. He pulled a rag from his back pocket, a grey, grim thing that looked like it had been shredded from a potato sack, and began to wipe the spill.
"That's it," the bearded wizard jeered, leaning down, his breath rank with cheap gin. "Know your place. You're less than the dirt you're wiping."
He kicked out. It wasn't a playful tap. His heavy, steel-toed boot connected solidly with the server's ribs. The sound was sickening, a dull thud followed by a sharp exhale. The server gasped, a wet, broken sound, and crumpled sideways, dropping the rag. He curled in on himself instinctively, protecting his head, making himself small, retreating into a position of fetal defense.
Harry’s hand went to his wand beneath his coat, his fingers closing around the worn holly wood. Enough. Cover be damned. The sheer malice was too much.
But before Harry could move, the server scrambled back up. He was shaking. Visibly shaking, tremors running through his limbs like a powerful current, but he forced himself upright. He grabbed the rag, finished wiping the spot with frantic, terrified speed, and then stood up, clutching the tray to his chest like a fragile shield.
As he turned to retreat to the bar, the rusty lantern light caught his face for the first time, hitting it full-on.
Harry froze. The air left his lungs in a rush, a silent, sickening punch in the solar plexus. The sound of the bar faded to a distant echo.
The face was gaunt, the skin pale and translucent like stretched parchment, pulled painfully tight over cheekbones that protruded sharply. There were deep, purple-black circles under the eyes that looked less like exhaustion and more like old, persistent bruises. A faint, jagged scar, old and silver, ran from the temple into the hairline.
But the eyes. The unique, familiar, stormy grey eyes. The ones he had stared into a thousand times across a dueling pitch, a classroom, or a battlefield.
Draco Malfoy.
Harry stared, his brain struggling to reconcile the image with the memory. The heir to the Malfoy fortune. The boy who had strutted through Hogwarts like he owned the very stone it was built on. Now, a ghost in rags.
It’s a trick, Harry’s Auror instincts screamed immediately, a reflexive denial against the sheer misery before him. It has to be. He’s running a grift. He’s hiding.
Malfoy was slippery. He was cunning. Maybe he was dealing in illegal artifacts, using this squalor as the perfect cover.
Harry turned back to the bar, his heart hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against his ribs. He had to know. He couldn't just walk away. The sight of Draco Malfoy reduced to this state was a visceral shock, shaking the very foundations of his post-war complacency.
He watched in the reflection of a dirty, cracked mirror behind the bar. Malfoy deposited the empty tankards at the cleaning station. The goblin bartender grunted, a sound of pure disgust, and without warning, cuffed Malfoy upside the head with an open palm.
Malfoy didn't flinch away. He leaned into it, his shoulders already hunched, accepting the blow as if it were a fundamental, unchangeable law of nature. Gravity pulls down; fire burns; Draco Malfoy gets hit.
That lack of reaction, the utter, resigned silence, disturbed Harry more than the kick had. It spoke of conditioning. Of a long, brutal campaign to break a spirit that had clearly succeeded.
"Another," Harry told the goblin, his voice gravelly, masking the tremor in his throat. "And one for the lad." He jerked his chin toward Malfoy.
The goblin narrowed his eyes, his gaze venomous, looking from the coin to Harry, then back to Malfoy. "He doesn't drink on the job. Unless you're paying for... other services. He's expensive for what he is."
Harry felt bile rise in his throat, bitter and hot. The implication hung in the air, a vile, crushing weight. He dismissed the thought instantly, he saw the exhaustion, the pain, the hunger. Malfoy was too weak, too broken, to be anything but a servant. "Just a drink. He looks like he’s about to keel over. I don't want him dropping my next round."
"Suit yourself. Five Sickles."
Harry paid, overpaying just to get the interaction over with. The goblin barked out a name. "Draco! Customer. Get your arse over here."
He didn't use a pseudonym. He just used the name. Draco. Like he was a pet. Or a servant. Or property.
Malfoy approached. Up close, the devastation was total. He smelled of old sweat, bleach, cheap disinfectant, and the faint, metallic scent of blood. His hands, resting on the edge of the bar, were red, chapped, and raw, the skin split at the knuckles, swollen from cold and constant washing. He didn't look at Harry. He looked only at Harry’s boots, fixated on the cracked leather.
"Sir?" His voice was a rasp, dry and brittle like dead leaves. It sounded unused, a muscle atrophied from disuse.
"Drink," Harry said, sliding the glass toward him. "Take it. You need it."
Malfoy stared at the glass. He didn't reach for it. He looked terrified. His eyes darted to the goblin, then back to the drink, calculating the cost of acceptance, the inevitable punishment.
"I... I can't, sir. Thank you. I have to work."
"Manager said it's fine," Harry lied smoothly, projecting an air of indifference that cost him immense effort.
Malfoy hesitated. The trembling in his hands was pronounced, a visible palsy. He reached out, his fingers brushing the glass, and Harry saw it, the faded, dull, ugly grey Dark Mark on his left forearm, peeking out from under the frayed cuff of the jumper. It looked like an old, neglected burn scar now.
But right above the wrist, clamped tight around the pale, thin flesh, was something else.
A thick, copper band. Runes were etched into the metal, glowing faintly with a pulsing, oppressive reddish light that seemed to dim and brighten with Malfoy's own pulse.
A Magical Dampener. A Ministry-issue parole cuff. Level Four.
Harry’s breath hitched. He knew those cuffs. He authorized the use of them on high-risk prisoners during transport to Azkaban, the ones they couldn't risk having access to even accidental magic. Level Four dampeners were brutal, archaic things. They didn't just suppress magic; they inverted it. They made accessing one’s core physically painful, like grabbing a live wire. They reserved them for violent, psychopathic dark wizards, mass murderers.
Why in Merlin’s name was Malfoy wearing one? His sentence had been probation and fines, not complete, torturous suppression. Who had authorized this? The cuff was a punishment in itself, a constant, agonizing headache on the soul.
"Drink," Harry urged, softening his voice just slightly, trying to inject a note of safety into the command.
Malfoy lifted the glass with two hands to steady it. He took a sip, coughing violently as the cheap spirit hit his throat. A faint, almost transparent flush of color rose in his pale cheeks, highlighting the painful gauntness of his face.
"Thank you," he whispered, the words barely audible over the din of the bar.
"You new here?" Harry asked, trying to sound casual, like a bored patron making conversation.
Malfoy flinched at the question, as if it were a trap set by the Aurors themselves. "No. Three years."
Three years. Harry felt sick. Three years in this hole, serving monsters. "Rough crowd tonight."
"It's always..." Malfoy trailed off. He looked up, his grey eyes finally meeting Harry’s glamoured hazel ones for a split second.
There was no recognition. Not a flicker of the old hatred, the old rivalry, the old life. Just a hollow, bottomless exhaustion. A pleading silence. Don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me. I'll do whatever you want, just don't hurt me.
"Hey! Death Eater! Get back to the toilets!"
The shout came from a booth in the corner. A heavy, stoppered bottle of something dark smashed against the wall a foot from Malfoy’s head, showering him in glass and stinking liquid. Malfoy dropped to the floor instantly, covering his head with his arms, curling into a ball. It was a practiced motion. A reflex born of hundreds of repetitions.
The bar erupted in jeers, a chorus of delighted cruelty.
"Look at him cower! Like the dog he is!"
"Daddy can't save you now, can he?"
"Do a trick, Ferret! Bounce for us!"
Harry gripped the edge of the bar so hard the wood groaned, and he felt the splinters dig into his palms. This wasn't just bullying. This was ritualized torture. Malfoy was the entertainment. The jester in a court of monsters, paid in pain.
The goblin bartender sighed, wiping a glass, utterly bored. "Get up, Draco. Clean the glass. If you're bleeding on the floor, I'm docking your pay. Every Knut."
Malfoy scrambled up, moving with a desperate haste. There was a cut on his cheek, welling bright red blood, and he winced when he put pressure on his left side. He didn't touch the cut. He grabbed the broom and dustpan, moving toward the broken glass with his head bowed, his body language screaming submission and terror.
The group in the corner stood up. Three of them. Young, dressed in cheap, magically-reinforced robes that mimicked high fashion, eyes bright with malice and too much alcohol. They blocked Malfoy’s path.
"We're talking to you, traitor," the leader spat, adjusting his belt. He had a lazy eye and a wand twirling in his fingers, hawthorn, short, aggressive. "You think you're too good to answer us?"
"No," Malfoy whispered, staring at the floor, focusing on the dirt beneath his boots. "Please. I just need to clean this before..." He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence, the threat of punishment hanging too heavy.
"Please," the wizard mocked, pitching his voice high and simpering. "Please, sir. Beg. That's what you're good at, isn't it? Begging for your life. I heard you begged the Dark Lord. I heard you begged Potter, and he let you live, the spineless wretch."
He raised his wand. "Expelliarmus."
It was a weak cast, a bully’s hex, but at point-blank range against a dampened wizard, it worked. The broom was ripped from Malfoy’s hands, clattering across the room. Malfoy stumbled back, hitting the wall with a dull thud.
"Oops," the wizard grinned, looking at his friends for validation. "Now pick it up. Crawl."
Malfoy looked at the broom, twenty feet away. Then at the wizards blocking him. His mind was clearly calculating the risk of disobedience versus the indignity.
"Crawl," the wizard insisted, his voice dropping to a seductive, cruel whisper. "Crawl and get it. Like the snake you are. Use your stomach, Malfoy."
The bar went quiet. They were watching. Waiting for the final humiliation. The atmosphere was so thick with the scent of cruelty and anticipation that Harry could almost taste it.
Harry felt the magic under his skin itch, hot and demanding, rising like a tide. It pooled in his fingertips, begging for release, begging to incinerate the three men. He could drop all three of them in two seconds. A simple, stunning trio. He could reveal himself, flash the badge, and the room would clear in a heartbeat.
But he remembered the file he had requested years ago, Malfoy’s parole file. The warnings about the public still finding him "offensive," the Ministry's careful monitoring of his "public perception." If Harry Potter, Head Auror, rescued him, it would guarantee Malfoy was dragged back into the light only to be destroyed again. And if this was a cover...
He lowered his hand from his wand. He had to think like the drifter, Alastair. He had to be clumsy, not heroic.
Malfoy lowered himself to his knees. His face was blank, a mask of sheer dissociation. He placed his hands on the dirty, damp floorboards.
The wizard raised his boot, aiming for Malfoy’s fingers.
Crack.
The sound was sharp, like a whip. Harry’s wandless pulse of silent magic had hit its target, the wooden leg of the wizard's chair, the empty one behind him, snapped cleanly. The chair collapsed with a loud clatter and a cloud of dust.
Distracted, the wizard turned, his eyes wide and confused. "What the?"
In that one second of confusion, Harry moved. He lurched off the barstool, feigning a clumsy, drunken stumble, and plowed directly into the leader of the group with the lazy eye.
"Whoa there, mate! Didn't see you!" Harry slurred, putting his full weight, enhanced by the subtle Transfiguration spell, into the man.
The wizard, already off-balance and turning, went down hard. Harry went down with him, making sure to drive his elbow into the man’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. The wizard wheezed, sputtering, his wand clattering harmlessly away.
"Watch where you're going, you clumsy oaf!" one of the friends shouted, grabbing Harry’s oil-stained coat.
Harry shook him off with a guttural growl, channeling the aggressive drunk, letting the protective beast near the surface. "He was in my way! Spilled my drink! Messed up my night!" He stood up, towering over the gasping wizard on the floor. He glared at the other two, letting the controlled violence radiating from him do the talking. "You got a problem with me, you little shits?"
He let a bit of his true magical aura leak out. Not the Auror’s authority, but raw, dangerous power, the silent threat of a man who would fight dirty and finish the job. The air around him grew heavy, static-charged.
The friends hesitated. They looked at Harry, big, scarred, and clearly looking for a fight that didn't involve spells. They looked at their wheezing leader. They were bullies, not warriors. They preyed on the weak. They backed down.
"Come on, Jenson," one muttered, helping the man up. "Let's go. Not worth the trouble. Place smells anyway. Let the ferret rot."
They shoved past Harry, throwing one last, weak insult at Malfoy, who was still kneeling, frozen, eyes wide with the shock of having been saved by an apparent nobody.
Harry watched them leave, tracking them until the door swung shut. He turned to Malfoy.
Malfoy hadn't moved. He was staring at Harry with those wide, grey eyes. He looked like a cornered animal who had just witnessed another animal protecting it, a confusion of instinct and logic. He didn't understand why the stranger had helped. In his world, help usually came with a steeper price than cruelty.
"Get up," Harry said, dropping the drunk act, though he kept his voice rough, flat.
Malfoy flinched, the sound of Harry's voice breaking his paralysis. He scrambled to his feet, backing away until his spine hit the cold, damp wall. "I didn't... I didn't do anything. I don't have any money. I can't give you anything for that."
"I don't want your money," Harry said. He looked at the cut on Malfoy’s cheek. It was bleeding freely now, a stark red line on white canvas. "Go clean yourself up. Now."
Malfoy stared at him, confusion warring with raw fear.
"Draco!" the goblin roared from the bar, slamming a heavy mug down. "Stop fraternizing and get that glass up! You're on thin ice, boy! One more word and you're sleeping in the street!"
Malfoy jolted, the conditioning snapping back into place. "Yes. Yes, sir."
He scurried to the broom, retrieved it, and began sweeping the shards with trembling hands. He didn't look at Harry again. He didn't dare. He finished the task with frantic, perfect efficiency.
Harry went back to his stool. He ordered another drink he didn't intend to finish. He sat there for two hours, nursing the glass, his gaze never leaving Malfoy.
He watched Malfoy work. He watched him drag heavy kegs up from the cellar, his thin arms straining, the copper cuff glowing angrily with every exertion as his magical core fought the physical drain. He watched him endure the pinches and slaps of the patrons with a stoic, heartbreaking silence. He watched him eat a crust of bread left on a plate while busing a table, furtive and desperate, checking to see if anyone was watching, hiding the act with his body.
It wasn't an act.
Harry had been an Auror long enough to know the difference between a cover and a life. You couldn't fake the deep, bone-aching tremors of exhaustion. You couldn't fake the hollowed-out look of starvation, the visible atrophy of muscle. You couldn't fake the way the soul seemed to have vacated the eyes, leaving only a biological imperative to survive until the next sunrise. Draco Malfoy had been hollowed out, reduced to his most base needs.
At 2:00 AM, the bar began to clear out. The goblin wiped down the counter with a rag that was arguably dirtier than the wood, counting the takings with a greedy smirk.
"Get out," the goblin told Malfoy, not looking at him. "Back tomorrow at six. And you owe me for the broken glass. Took it out of your tips. Not that you had any. Sleep fast, you filth."
Malfoy nodded mutely. He went to a coat rack, pulled on a threadbare cloak that looked like it had been salvaged from a bin, wrapping it tightly around his bruised frame, and slipped out the back door into the unrelenting rain.
Harry waited ten seconds, then followed. The disillusioned charm hummed around him, a cloak of invisibility that felt like a betrayal.
The alley behind the pub was pitch black, lit only by the distant, sickly light of the city above. The rain had picked up, turning the cobblestones into a slick, treacherous path.
He tracked the solitary figure ahead.
Malfoy didn't go toward the apparition points. He couldn't apparate with that cuff anyway. He walked deeper into the Warrens, where the buildings leaned together like conspiring giants, blocking out the sky. He walked with a noticeable limp now, favoring his left side, the rib kick had done damage, likely cracked or broken.
They walked for twenty minutes. The surroundings grew progressively worse. The air was colder, thick with condensation, and the magical signature of the area was foul, decaying. Rats the size of kittens skittered in the shadows, unconcerned with the wizard.
Malfoy stopped at the entrance to what looked like a collapsed cellar of a bombed-out apothecary, a forgotten place, blasted during the war and never repaired. There was no door, just a heavy, rotting blue tarp hung over the opening, tied crudely with a piece of twine.
Malfoy looked around, checking for followers, scanning the darkness with the hyper-vigilance of paranoid intensity. He didn't see Harry. He slipped behind the tarp.
Harry approached cautiously, his heart thumping dully in his chest. He could hear movement inside. A cough, wet and rattling, sounding deep in the chest, likely bruising the injured ribs further.
He peered through a gap in the fabric.
The space was tiny, no bigger than a large closet. The floor was packed, freezing dirt. The walls were damp stone that glistened in the flickering light. There was a single, threadbare mattress on the floor, stained and hopelessly lumpy, smelling of mildew and hopelessness. A single candle provided the only light, casting long, dancing shadows of misery.
Malfoy had taken off his wet cloak. He was sitting on the mattress, his shirt pulled up. He was trying to bandage his ribs with strips of torn cloth, hissing in pain with every shallow breath. His torso was a map of scars, some old and silvery from Sectumsempra, the curse Harry had cast in a bathroom a lifetime ago; others new, angry, and purple. Burns. Cuts. Marks of a hard, brutal life.
But it was what was on the small, upturned crate serving as a table that stopped Harry’s heart and banished any lingering doubt that this was a ruse.
A photograph. It was moving, but barely, the enchantment struggling against the damp and the oppressive anti-magic of the area. A picture of Narcissa Malfoy, looking regal and proud, standing in the sun-drenched gardens of the Manor. Her smile, even in the fading image, was a beacon of impossible elegance.
And next to it, the small pile of coins. Knuts, mostly. Maybe two Sickles. A pitiful, heart-wrenching hoard.
Malfoy touched the photo with a shaking finger, tracing his mother's face. He didn't wipe the tear that tracked a clean line through the dirt on his cheek.
"Almost," he whispered to the empty, freezing room, his voice cracked, broken, stripped of all its former arrogance and filled with a desperate, singular focus. "Almost enough. I just need one more day, Mother. I'll get the potion. I promise. I just need a little more time. Hold on."
He curled up on the mattress, pulling the thin cloak over him, shivering violently as the damp cold of the earth seeped into his bones.
Harry stepped back, the rain plastering his hair to his forehead. He felt cold. Colder than he had ever felt in the presence of a Dementor. The cold of true, utter injustice.
This wasn't justice. This wasn't probation. This was a slow, agonizing execution, conducted by society, sanctioned by the Ministry's willful blindness. The Level Four cuff was a torture device. The starvation was deliberate neglect. The abuse was public ridicule.
Harry Potter turned and walked away, his boots silent on the stone. He didn't go home to Grimmauld Place. He went to the nearest apparition point, fighting the urge to tear the building down with a single blast of wandless magic, and cracked away to the Ministry.
He wasn't going to sleep. He was going to his office. He needed files. He needed records. He needed to know who had signed off on that copper cuff, who was monitoring Malfoy's probation, and why Draco Malfoy had been left to die in the gutter while his peers toasted to "Justice" and "Reform."
Harry wasn't bored anymore. The restless energy that had plagued him for months, the deep, existential malaise of a man who had won the war but lost his purpose, had crystallized into something sharp, cold, and desperately focused. It was a searing, protective fury.
He had a case. And for the first time in years, it was fiercely personal. He was going to help Malfoy, whether the man wanted it or not, and he was going to do it from the deepest shadows of his privileged life.