Chapter Text
“I’ve got something I’ve got to tell you,” Draco says, and then swallows hard. Madge leans against the Aga rail with her arms folded – the scar from the Slicing Hex is livid against her pale-gold skin, perilously close to her eye. The words stick to his tongue like burrs, and he takes a deep breath, looks down into his tea. It shakes in time with his hands. They’ve waited till morning, till after the chores. They’ve waited long enough. He’s got to do this.
“No shit,” Madge says.
“Madge,” Ned chides her. Then, to Draco, “take your time, son. It’s alright.”
“No,” Draco says, and then has to choke back the sudden lump in his throat. “No, it’s not. I…my father…Merlin.”
Ned’s face is so kind, and he reaches out to rest his hand on top of Draco’s, his skin tough and weathered like the old cliff face at Malham. “Breathe.”
“Yes,” Draco manages, watery. “So, um. Wizards exist. That’s the easiest place to start, I guess. We live in secret for reasons that were probably good at the time, and uh, well there’s this whole thing in wizarding society about blood. Um…it’s been taken for granted for centuries that people with pure blood – people who haven’t married non-magical people, Muggles, and wizards who weren’t born to Muggles – are better than others. There are twenty-eight families in Britain that are pureblood all the way back, and uh…mine’s one of them.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” Madge murmurs. Draco’s mouth goes bone dry. Ned squeezes his fingers.
“Yeah,” Draco says, hoarse. “My um, my father, the man that you saw last night, he was part of a pureblood supremacy group called the Death Eaters. It was led by this monster who called himself Lord Voldemort,” Draco shivers at the name, still, takes a careful breath, “my father was his right hand man, the second time around. He’s dead now. Potter got him at the end of the war, a couple of years ago, but my father got away. Hence, everything.”
“How did we miss a war?” Ned asks, his eyebrows drawing together.
“You didn’t. The Brockdale Bridge disaster. The freak explosion in Surrey. Most of the disappearances and random accidents between 1996 and 1998 would have been to do with it. It destroyed bits of the Ministry, most of Wizarding London, half of our school in Scotland. Hundreds of witches and wizards died. I don’t know how many Muggles. They, um, we took people and kept them prisoner, killed them. It was fucking horrible from start to finish.”
They lapse into quiet. Draco closes his eyes for a second, waits for the inevitable question. Madge eventually puts him out of his misery.
“You said we.” Her voice is very gruff. “Were you a Death Eater too?”
Very slowly, he pulls his hand from Ned’s, shoves up his sleeve and turns his wrist over so they can see the Dark Mark, the ink fraying around the edges. The snake’s mouth is open, ready to strike.
“This was what Voldemort branded us all with,” he says, as though whispering it will make it unreal somehow. “I was sixteen when I got it. My, um…I…my father, I just wanted to make him proud, but when it happened I realised that actually I had been so stupid…” Draco pushes his fingers into his eyes. He can’t stand to sit there and look at them, look at their pity, their horror. They’re going to turf him out. He’s going to be alone again. Merlin, he can’t do this.
“Where was your mother in all of this?” Ned’s level. Draco doesn’t pull his hands away. Madge mutters something under her breath that he doesn’t catch.
“As trapped as I was. Voldemort would hurt me more than he already did if she stepped out of line. I don’t blame her.” He takes another breath, but it barely reaches his lungs, gets stuck in the back of his throat. “She was killed by my Aunt Bellatrix in the last battle of the war. I spent three years in prison, for aiding and abetting. I’d helped Potter in the end so I got off lightly, and yes, well. I wasn’t welcome back in the wizarding world when I finished my sentence. That’s why I moved up here.”
There’s silence for a second, and then Ned’s rough fingers are curling around Draco’s wrist, tugging. “Hey. Draco. Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Draco.”
Draco sets his shoulders, musters every ounce of his flinching, cornered courage, and lets Ned pull his hands away from his face. Madge is there too, has abandoned the Aga to sit down. She’s scowling, and Draco tries not to recoil away from it, tries to meet their judgement bravely. He knew it was going to turn out this way. How could it not?
“Your fucking father is so fucking lucky I only had a shotgun,” Madge says just as Ned opens his mouth. Draco stares at her.
“Madge.”
“Don’t Madge me. I mean it. What a fucking…what sort of parent encourages their sixteen year old son to join up with a hate group and fight a fucking war? Oh great, let’s murder people for some father-son bonding, Jesus Christ.”
“You…” Draco starts.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Ned says. “I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t…you, I didn’t do enough, I…I watched people die, people get horribly tortured and I didn’t…” Draco tries to explain, but he doesn’t get very far at all before he’s interrupted.
“You were sixteen,” Madge snaps. “I don’t fucking care what you did, you were obviously fucking coerced.”
“You aren’t going to be able to make us leave, Draco. We’re family, like you said last night, and that means you’re stuck with us,” Ned tells him, and that is the last straw. Draco chokes on a sob.
“Oh come here, you complete dipshit,” Madge says, exasperated, and pulls him to his feet, wraps her arms around him. He presses his face into her jumper, breathes in lavender, breathes out the fear, the hurt. They’re not leaving. They are not leaving. After a moment, there’s the scraping of chair legs on the kitchen floor and Ned comes to join the hug.
“What about Harry?” Ned asks, when Draco has found a fragile balance again, no longer feels as though he’s going to rattle apart into pieces on their tiles. Outside, rain mists across the yard, and Ned lets go, turns to flick the kettle on again. “You said he killed this Voldemort, but isn’t he the same age as you?”
Draco steps out of Madge’s arms and goes to get the teabag tin, swiping at his eyes. He doesn’t really want to think about Potter, about the hug, about all the things Draco didn’t say but wishes he had. About the fact that Potter left, after everything. “He’s the Chosen One.”
When he turns back, Madge is frowning at him in a deeply sceptical manner. “The Chosen One? Seriously?”
“It’s what the papers called him when we were still at school.” Draco pauses, “He defeated Voldemort accidentally as a baby, and then when Voldemort got resurrected, Potter was Public Enemy Number One.”
“Where the hell were all the adults during this war?”
“Using us,” Draco says, thinking of Dumbledore, of his father. It feels so strange, admitting this on a rainy autumn morning in a cheerful kitchen to a pair of Muggles who are giving him identical pissed off and disbelieving looks with a fresh mug of tea in his hands. “Or in denial. There were a few who fought from the beginning. But there was a prophecy.”
“A prophecy,” Madge says. “I’m sorry, Draco, but that is fucked up. A prophecy isn’t a fucking excuse.”
“Quite,” Ned agrees. “I guess he’s not a police detective, then.”
“He’s an Auror, now,” Draco shrugs. “It’s the wizarding equivalent.”
“Will he be back?”
“I don’t know.” Draco says, and takes a scorching gulp of tea to avoid having to answer any more questions about Potter. Madge drains her mug in one go and dumps it into the sink.
“Well. Traumatic backstory hour over. I’m going to go check Randy McShaggerballs survived his first night and his first fucking battle. Come on, Draco.”
She kicks his boots across the kitchen at him, and he bends to put them on. When he looks up, Ned is smiling.
“Family,” Ned says again, and Draco feels the weight of it settle like a old, warm blanket around his shoulders. He pulls it closer, shoves on his coat, and follows Madge out into the rain.
*
He finds the letter that he’d stuffed behind the plants three mornings later, stares at it – the purple ink, the shimmer of the translation charm. He should probably stop hiding from it, he thinks ruefully, pads into the kitchen to get a knife. The envelope slits cleanly open, wafting the smell of spices and seawater and he perches on his favourite chair at the kitchen table, leans on his elbows. Tuwalole’s writing has barely changed. It loops giddily across the page in long, descriptive sentences and he presses his cheek into his fist. It’s been such a long time since the enormous letters they used to write each other about their cultures and schools and shared love of potions. It’s been such a long time since that last panicked letter he’d written her, the summer he came home to find Voldemort sitting in his father’s favourite chair. He’d never received the reply; part of him wonders whether, if he were to go back to the Manor, he’d find it in his father’s old desk.
At the end the letter reads:
I know I am yet to have a response from you, but I will keep writing – my grandmother tells me to persist, that one day you might need this letter. Your last letter was terrifying, Draco, and I was so scared for you and for the rest of Wizarding Britain. It has been a dark century for your country. I hope you live, and I hope the new millennium brings you some peace.
In the event that you do receive this, I (and my whole family) formally invite you to spend some time with us in Dar es Salaam when Uagadou closes for the holiday. I could even take you to the Mountains of the Moon to gather potions ingredients like we always talked about in school! Let me know, and I shall start putting arrangements in place – it would be wonderful to finally meet you in person.
Be alive, please. Be safe.
All my love,
Tuwalole Hamadi
By the time he reaches the end, he realises that the words are blurring and his eyes are stinging. He puts aside the letter and tries to calm down but it’s a lost cause. He doesn’t know how long he cries for, in the end. Dog noses the door open at some point and wriggles under the table to rest his head in Draco’s lap and whines a little until Draco reaches down to pet his ears. It’s over, he tells himself as he hiccups towards calm, goes to fill the kettle. It is all over. His father is gone, Voldemort is gone, the Dementors are gone. He’s got Ned, Madge, Luna, Tuwalole. Pansy, when she finally decides to reappear in his life. The years are unspooling out ahead of him like a silvery, moonlit river and they all belong to him. Maybe he can finally start believing it.
He wipes his face and takes a deep, shuddery breath, imagines he can feel the oxygen diffuse red and vital through his veins.
Later, he goes outside into the damp afternoon and perches on the old curtain wall and writes back, writes the whole sorry mess of it out again onto the recycled paper the charity shop sells with the first biro pen he acquired. Afterwards, he feels hollowed out, a cave filled with the brittle bones of speleothems, but also like he’s never been cleaner in his life.
After a moment of staring into space feeling the spit of drizzle on the back of neck, he adds a postscript:
I would like love more than anything to see Dar es Salaam and the Mountains of the Moon. However, the conditions of my parole mean that I’m no longer allowed out of the British Isles. Perhaps you’d like to come and visit instead? There’s plenty of space, peace, and quiet out here – it might be a nice place for you to finish writing that book you were talking about?
Afterwards, he spends a solid hour trying to tempt Achilles down from his tree. When the dratted bird finally allows himself to be convinced onto Draco’s arm, Draco ties the letter to his leg, strokes the soft feathers on the top of his head.
“Fancy going to Uganda?” he asks.
Achilles huffs in a very put-upon way, pecks Draco’s fingers, and takes off – spiralling up and up and up until he’s nothing but a speck against the thick grey clouds.
*
The weeks leaf over like pages in a notebook. The sun comes back out like a watery egg yolk, blinding in the pale late-November sky, and Draco is fine. He’s absolutely fine. He spends the run up to Christmas down at Foss Farm with his family and the farmhands, being fussed over and fed a truly ridiculous amount of mince pies and roast dinners. When the New Year comes, he wraps up warm and builds a swing seat in his oak tree for the sole purpose of spending hours hunched into it with Dog, ostensibly embarking on the part-time university degree the librarian helped him choose but actually wondering what Potter’s up to, why he hasn’t come back.
It’s a stupid question to which Draco knows the answer: Potter hasn’t come back because it was just a job. He was here to catch and lock up Draco’s father, and now that’s done. According to the Daily Prophet Robards sent, Ms Everett wiped the floor with the defence at the trial and the bastard is in the deepest, darkest hole the International Confederation of Wizards could collectively find. Potter doesn’t have to be here anymore, shuffling around like a zombie in the mornings with his electric-shock hair and his long fingers around a big mug of coffee or singing to himself around the garden. He’s not accidentally bumping into Draco or looking at him for those long endless minutes and…
It’s fine. It’s life. Draco has, against all odds, survived. Having Potter here was a nice daydream and now it’s over.
“How’s Harry?” Ned asks one blustery January day when they’re washing the tractor after several hilarious incidents with cows and mud.
“I don’t know,” Draco says, leaning further over to scrub the tractor’s roof. Soap suds run warm down his arm, into the sleeve of his t-shirt. “Haven’t heard from him.”
Ned looks at him for a second, and then turns back to the window. “Madge says you need to get yourself a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend, I suppose. Fill up the time a bit.” Then, conspiratorial, “she’s dying to set her niece up with someone, if you’re interested.”
“I appreciate the sentiment but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Suit yourself.”
Luna comes back from Iceland for good this time bearing icicle-thin pillars of rock magic from seven different volcanoes. She helps him line them up on a shelf, and then she spends an afternoon lying in the grass with the chickens wandering all over her and if he feels his throat tighten at the thought that the last time she was here, so was Potter, it’s too bad because he shouldn’t pine for someone who is obviously not interested. Luna doesn’t say a thing. When she leaves, she gives him an enormous hug, pressing her face into his shoulder.
“I’ll bring you some grass from Bolivia,” she says, “It calms chickens with attitude problems.”
He snorts, and hugs her tighter, hopes that it says what he can’t verbalise: you’re the best and what in the actual hell did I do to deserve your friendship. She steps away. “It’ll be alright, you know.”
“Of course it will,” he says, and walks her down the path, watches her Apparate away. He stands there for a while, tipping his face to the sun. She’s right, she always is. He’s got a home, a family, a whole fucking menagerie of ridiculous animals, his freedom – asking for anything more would just be selfish, and he got sick of being selfish a long time ago.
He’s about to turn to go inside when there’s a noise from the lane, a squeaking of bike pedals. Reflexively, he reaches for the pocket knife he’s taken to carrying around with him after one too many nightmares and then tells himself off for being ridiculous – no potential assassin is going to cycle up that hill. He squints in the direction of the oncoming figure, who is swathed in an enormous red jumper with gold patterning and hunched over the handlebars.
“Hello?” he calls, confused. The wind riffles through the leaves above his head like it knows something he doesn’t.
“Merlin’s sake, this sodding bike!” The figure squeals to a stop, slings a leg over and dumps the bike in the dust. “In perfect working condition my arse.”
Draco’s heart is very suddenly in his mouth. He has to be hallucinating. This can’t be real. “Potter?”
Potter’s walking towards him now, skin darker like he’s been somewhere hot and caught the sun, every step purposeful, deliberate. He stops about three feet from Draco as though stopping is an afterthought, meets Draco’s eyes for one second and then looks down and up again like he can’t believe Draco is here. He’s bloody well not the only one.
“Hi,” he says. Draco stares at him, his heart hammering against his ribs. Potter is here and it’s nothing like Draco thought it would be. There’s a new scar on his chin, recently healed, and his hair is an explosion of black against the manganese blue of the sky. Everything Draco’s tried to push away comes thundering back, fills his nose and mouth and lungs, closes over his head.
“What are you doing here?”
“Sorry,” Potter says. He gives Draco a rueful smile. “I really am. I was going to owl but there was literally no time. We got a lead on Theo Nott but then that turned into a four month long wild goose chase down the north-west coast of Africa because Merlin’s balls that man is good at sliding out of tight situations, and then between that and having to give evidence for your father’s trial and just…it’s not an excuse, I know, but I just…and then I splinched myself so Hermione made me take the train up here instead of Apparating and then…oh, and Parkinson’s gone to New York, but she’ll come see you soon. She promises.”
“You…it’s fine, Potter. I figured.” And it really is. Potter looks exhausted again. His jumper hangs that little bit loose and now he’s stopped talking he’s started fidgeting with the cuffs of his jumper as if he’ll keel over if he doesn’t keep moving. Draco very nearly reaches out to him, fights the urge mercilessly. He can’t. It’s been over four months. He can’t just fucking assume; he can’t take that leap. It’s not fair to anyone, least of all himself. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Your question,” Potter says, with a sigh, and then very deliberately takes a step closer, right into Draco’s space. His closeness is like pinpricks against Draco’s skin. Draco knows without looking just how much he’d have to move so that they’d be touching. Something tense and unsaid has left Potter’s face, and he leans in a centimetre closer. “I, um…had some time to do some thinking, in the desert. I fucking loathe the desert, by the way, please remind me of that in future. Anyway. Ron was bored so he gave me the lecture on healthy communication that he’s practising for his kids-”
“Granger’s pregnant?”
“Merlin no,” Potter’s laugh is sudden, quick, “no, no way. Figure of speech. Don’t knock me off topic.”
“Sorry,” Draco murmurs, breathing in the smell of sweat and wool and fresh air. Potter sways closer, centrifugal. Draco’s breath gets stuck in his throat and refuses to dislodge, his hands are clammy.
“Anyway. I was thinking…”
“Shocker.”
“If you keep interrupting me I’ll never get this out. I’m running on three consecutive coffees and less consecutive sleep and this was a fucking stupid idea but I can’t leave it alone.”
“Get what out?” Draco asks. On an unnameable urge, he lifts his hand towards Potter’s face, brushes his fingers within a millimetre of Potter’s cheek. What the fuck is he doing? He’s about to snatch it away, but Potter’s suddenly got his fingers wrapped around Draco’s wrist, holding it there.
“I really like you,” he says into the space between them. “I really like you. I like the way you smile whenever Madge says something rude, and how careful you are with your animals and your garden, and the way your eyebrows furrow right before you say something sarcastic. I like how your brain works and I think you're really attractive, and..." Potter breathes out. Draco cannot look away, cannot believe this is happening, "I know we haven’t had the best history, and I know there’s like, the tiniest chance this whole thing is reciprocated or even if you’re interested in men in that way but I just really like you and I had to say something and…”
Draco leans forward and kisses him. Potter wraps his arms around Draco’s neck and kisses back, and Draco has never felt like this before, effervescent and as though the world could just float away and he wouldn’t notice a single thing. Potter starts laughing against Draco’s mouth because he is a disaster of a human being. Draco pulls away just a little, keeps his hand against Potter’s cheek. “You’re a fucking mess.”
“I’m your mess,” Potter says, his smile brighter than a fucking supernova. His hand is splayed against Draco’s lower back, and he can feel the gravity exerted by every single centimetre of contact. He feels like his brain is dissolving through his ears.
“Unfortunately,” he manages, and pulls Potter close again, focuses on kissing him, on the feeling of his hand in Draco’s hair, on the…
Dog barks and comes running up the path, nearly colliding with them because he is a traitor with no respect for anything resembling a private moment. Harry steps away to pet him, but snags Draco’s hand in his, looks up with Dog half in his lap vibrating with excitement. In the sunshine, he’s the most breath-taking thing Draco has ever seen.
“So,” Harry asks, like he’s the only one in on some massive cosmic joke, “can I stay?”
Draco’s smile is very nearly painful. He squeezes Harry’s hand. “Do you think I’d let you leave?”
*
“Why are you so good at this?” Harry whines, trying to get the latest addition to their pile of lambs to latch on to the bottle he’s holding.
“I’m innately talented at everything I do,” Draco says from his spot against the Aga, gently disengaging another lamb and holding out his hands. “Give it.”
“I can do it.”
“You obviously can’t.”
Harry glares at him for a second and then relents, plopping cross-legged onto the floor opposite Draco and hefting the bleating, confused bundle of wool and legs into Draco’s lap. Another lamb stumbles over and collides with Harry’s side, and he scoops that one up like a baby instead, rocks it back and forth and watches as Draco easily gets the first lamb to stop being confused by the its own aliveness and actually latch onto the bottle. He gives Harry a very smug look from beneath his eyelashes. Harry lets his wriggling charge back out to clatter around and fall over things and slides closer onto Draco’s lap so he can kiss him, the first lamb cradled between them. Somehow Draco is managing to feed it whilst still kissing Harry. Maybe he is innately talented at lamb-handling – not that Harry would ever let him have the satisfaction of knowing it.
Harry barely registers the sound of the door opening until he hears Madge saying, “For fuck’s sake. Why do I keep catching you two snogging in my kitchen? You own a fucking castle to snog in, Draco Malfoy! Why do you do it in my house?”
Harry pulls away but doesn’t get off Draco’s lap, looks up at Madge and Kath, her vet intern who Draco apparently knows from last year.
“I just can’t keep my hands off him,” Harry says very innocently, and Draco snorts.
“You’re a fucking menace.” Madge rolls her eyes. "Make us a brew?"
“A cuppa would be nice,” Draco says, leaning forward to brush his lips against Harry’s nose, and then turning back to his wriggling lamb.
“You're going to keel over from caffeine poisoning if you keep this rate up,” Harry says, but gets up, winds his way through the chaos to get to the kettle. Kath has picked up a lamb with brown ears and joined Draco on the floor. Harry makes tea, takes a mug over to Madge, and they both stand and watch Kath and Draco try to teach their lambs some complicated hoof-tapping game complete with baffled bleating. Kath is explaining something that sounds vaguely biological and Draco is grinning at her. Harry feels his heart swell against his ribs. He’s back at the office on Monday after a couple of weeks of leave, and the first fucking thing he’s going to is turn his desk back into a desk, start acting like everyone else, like he doesn't have something to prove. He can’t wait.
“You are such a fucking sap,” Madge says, and he drags his eyes away, back towards her.
“Huh?”
“I said,” she repeats, “I’m glad you’re happy.”
“Yeah,” Harry says, taking a sip of his tea. “I am.”