Chapter Text
“Lucius,” Harry yells. “Come out.”
He crosses his arms and plants his feet, shuffling to the side to avoid a yellow buttercup. This meadow on the Malfoy Manor grounds is nothing but wildflowers and green grass.
Harry never thought he’d be familiar with the sprays of white clover or the cheeky spikes of a patch of Love-in-a-Mist that probably crept out of the main gardens and exploded in a blue cloud at the edge of the wood. Like, he knows this specific patch of Love-in-a-Mist, and he couldn’t have seen that coming, not if he spent a thousand years as an Auror with the DMLE.
Feels like he’s been standing in this field for a thousand years.
And he hasn’t. He hasn’t. Harry Apparated out to the gardens when it became clear that Lucius sneaked out of the main house while Harry and Pansy were doing their usual dance with Narcissa—declining tea twice, then finally giving in when a tray heaped with butter biscuits appeared on the nearest side table.
Narcissa always pretends they’re a surprise, and Harry always pretends he doesn’t fancy them and is just being polite, and Pansy always pretends it’s a social call, never mind that they’re in full uniform.
And, yeah, Harry did feel like freaking out a bit while he was eating his third biscuit. Lucius wasn’t there, and Pansy was chatting with Narcissa about different rose varieties, and Harry imagined for a second that he’d have to ask Narcissa outright about where Lucius was, and the thing started to happen.
So he was relieved when a house-elf popped into the sunroom like she had read Harry’s mind and said Lucius wasn’t in the main house.
Harry’s never going to admit he was relieved to anyone.
He is never going to admit that he sort of likes it at the Manor, and that he’s sort of jealous of Malfoy for growing up with butter biscuits, and that he’s got no idea how to make a place like that for himself. Kreacher would die laughing if Harry ever asked him to make butter biscuits appear on a tray at Grimmauld.
Anyway, Harry searched the gardens, which is likely a place for Lucius to be as anywhere else, and found nothing but a thread of magic. Harry followed the thread around a big burbling fountain and through a hedge and across a load of gently rolling hills, all the way out to where the field starts to turn wild and run away into the wood, breathing the fresh country air and moving at the fast pace he always wants and never has space for.
Horrible.
“Lucius,” Harry bellows. It’s bad enough that being at the Manor makes him feel like Draco Malfoy might come ’round a corner at any second and look at Harry with those big, silvery eyes of his and somehow know Harry’s thought of him every other minute since Malfoy’s trial, where Malfoy had been pale but poised despite everything that had just happened in the antechamber and Harry had nearly gone mad before the Wizengamot and the rest of the wizarding world.
He can almost feel Malfoy watching him now, cool and silent.
Mental. Absolutely mental.
If Lucius doesn’t come out—
Harry’s heart beats faster. That’s always the start of the thing, and he’s not going there. Not in this meadow. Not on this day. Because Harry’s not going back to the house without finding Lucius. He’s just not.
“You have to the count of—” What’s a reasonable count? Lucius could’ve gone anywhere in the forest. “Five!”
Harry takes an annoyed breath and inhales a sort of fairy-story scent—wildflowers and earth and the damp shade under the nearby trees. The forest on the Manor grounds is a fairy-story, too. It’s old and rustling and alive with squirrels and bird-calls and if Harry wasn’t an Auror, he’d rip off his robes, escape into the trees, and never come out again. He’d build a house in a tree. He’d make clothes out of leaves. He’s a wizard—he’d figure it out.
“Lucius, what the fuck,” Harry says under his breath. One of his curls tugs itself out of the elastic holding his hair out of his face. The breeze tosses it directly into Harry’s mouth. He spits it out, his face hot for no reason—it’s not as if Malfoy can see, Malfoy isn’t even here, he teaches at Hogwarts, which hasn’t let out yet for summer hols—and shoves it back into his bun. He threatened to count down from—what was it?—five, and now he’s got to, otherwise he’ll look like he can’t keep his word. “Five!” he shouts at the top of his lungs. “Four! Come out, or I’ll—” Quit. He’ll quit. He’ll just quit. He’s not going to have the thing happen over this. “Three!”
Lucius appears above the trees with a whoosh of magic, his dark green Quidditch kit flapping dramatically behind him, and soars overhead on his broom. It’s a Cirrus Thunderblaze 700, and Lucius has had it since he was at Hogwarts, and this is not something Harry should know because of his job.
But Harry does know, because he and Pansy have been coming to the Manor every three months since they were in training to confirm that Lucius Malfoy hasn’t gone back to his old ways.
Which he hasn’t.
Because Lucius Malfoy snapped after the Battle.
He just…completely broke, and Harry knows that because he was there in the antechamber outside the courtroom on Level Ten, sweating in his robes and staring at the door, his pulse loud enough to cover whatever Malfoy was saying to his father.
And now Harry has spent the last decade of his life having his photo taken in the Ministry Atrium and making quarterly visits to the Manor, where Lucius has either talked continuously about things like broom restoration in a soft, reverent voice or been silent, not seeming to know anyone is there at all.
That is not what Harry thought it would be like to be an Auror.
He thought it would be…
Well, he thought eventually it would be sort of like Hogwarts.
The difference between what Harry thought his life would be like and what it is like has started to chafe, these last few years. Something’s always off. His uniform doesn’t fit right. His desk in his office doesn’t seem like his. It seems like it belongs to somebody else.
Harry wouldn’t mind if it did belong to somebody else.
Except that would mean he’s wasted ten years of his life on this Auror business, and what does a bloke do about that?
Quit?
Harry lets out a primal scream at Lucius’s silhouette and slumps down in the grass.
Lucius does a slow loop and jets back towards Harry, then comes to a graceful stop in the air some twenty feet up. He looks younger than he did when he was an arsehole, a breezy flush across fair cheeks, and Harry happens to know—Jesus, why does he know this—that it’s not down to any weird charms or potions, it’s down to Lucius’s expression. He’s more thoughtful and open than he ever was when Harry was in school.
The way he peers down at Harry from his perch in the sky, his white-blond hair coming loose from its plait underneath his helmet, makes Harry feel…
Seen.
It would remind him of Malfoy, except Harry doesn’t let himself be reminded of Malfoy. Not from looking at Lucius’s face. Not from being seen by him.
Merlin’s bollocks, he hates it.
“I have to inspect your wand,” Harry calls to him, not getting up. “Throw it down.”
Lucius watches him for another few beats, then reaches into his pocket. Harry can’t see what he’s got until Lucius un-Shrinks…
A Quaffle.
“Mr Malfoy—”
Lucius pitches the Quaffle at Harry with surprisingly good aim. Harry deflects it before it hits him in the face and hops to his feet, the Quaffle rolling quietly away in the grass.
“That’s a Quaffle,” he calls, ignoring how his nerves are lit up with the idea of Quidditch. The idea of flying. The idea of racing through the sky, someone close on his heels and the wind in his face. “Not your wand.”
Lucius reaches into his pocket again. What’s he got? It’s wand-like, but no, he’s un-Shrinking it, so—
Harry jumps out of the way of a Cirrus Thunderblaze 100, which Lucius aims like a javelin.
“Lucius Malfoy,” Harry scolds at the top of his lungs. Where did that voice come from? Professor McGonagall, maybe. The memory of how she used to scold Harry and his friends sends a pang through Harry that twists his stomach. “I’m an Auror.” Harry gestures at his robes. His scarlet Auror robes. Which could look like a Gryffindor Quidditch kit, if you were really invested in believing it. “This is not what—”
Lucius goes for his pocket again.
He doesn’t have to un-Shrink the Snitch. Its wings unfurl in his hand, glinting, shining, and it’s like Lucius bloody Malfoy has caught himself a sunbeam.
Lucius locks eyes with Harry, and every muscle in Harry’s body tenses. He’s got to be on his broom. He’s got to be pushing off, eyes on the Snitch, because if he’s on the ground when it gets loose, that’s time he can’t get back. His pulse is in his fingertips. His throat.
He’s got to be inspecting Lucius Malfoy’s wand. That’s what Harry’s here to do, not get drawn into a spontaneous Seeker’s match. No matter how much he wants to be chasing down the Snitch.
Oh, God, he does. Harry wants to be up above the trees and flying away from all this so much he almost doesn’t care that Lucius is having a laugh. Trying to bait Harry into a game. He clamps down as hard as he can on his, like, whimsy or whatever it is that makes him want to leap onto the Thunderblaze and go, just like he has for the last ten years. He’s got it under control. He’s got everything under control, and especially himself.
Harry’s not going to give in. He’s not.
He’s not.
Lucius narrows his eyes, and Harry can see it—he can just see the satisfied smile that’s about to flicker over his face, because Lucius thinks he’s won.
“No!” Harry shouts, and his self-control darts out of his grip and sprints for the woods, cackling. His body jerks to the left, where the Thunderblaze landed after it didn’t spear Harry through the chest. His Auror training wants to keep his feet firmly on the grass, but his pounding heart wrenches his right leg into action, so Harry trips over his own feet and goes sprawling onto his side.
Lucius whips the Snitch at Harry.
It catches an updraft midway between them, its wings a gold blur.
Harry scramble-crawls for the Thunderblaze, his mind a stormy mess of duty to the Aurors and Dark wizard plot and this is the Golden Snitch, and it’s the most important ball of the lot and it’s very hard to catch because it’s so fast and difficult to see and it’s the Seeker’s job to catch it.
Then he’s in the air, chasing the gold flash like it really is his job.
“Just say it.” Harry pushes his quill into the parchment too hard and slashes a hole in it. “Bollocks.”
“Say what?” Pansy’s not helping him at all with their report. She’s got to read yesterday’s Prophet, apparently.
“Well, that was lovely,” he says in her accent.
“I quite agree,” she says with a little sigh, tilting her feet on the surface of her desk. “A lovely way to spend the morning.”
Harry scoffs at her.
Pansy scoffs back at him, not lowering the paper.
“This job is going to drive me mad,” he says to his parchment, then swipes a Reparo across the surface. It mends the quill-slash but smudges the ink. “I’m going mad.”
“But you had such a lovely—”
“It wasn’t lovely.” Harry crumples the report into a ball, hurls it into the bin, and Summons another form. His skin prickles hotly under his clothes, and his cheeks are still tense and burning even though they left the Manor hours ago. He’s never going to get over this. “You could’ve come out and—”
“And what?” More crinkling newspaper. “Harangued you? I hardly think you need my help in that department.”
“What?”
Pansy lets out her long-suffering sigh. “Potter, you’re quite skilled in haranguing yourself.” She drops her voice for the next bit. “To harangue means—”
“I know what haranguing means, thanks.”
“Do you know what calming your tits means?”
“Calm your tits.” Harry stabs the quill into the new report and ends up with an enormous blot of ink pooled across the lines for Time of Supervisory Visit and Parties Present.
Pansy snickers, and Harry stares hatefully at his report. There is no point in filling this out. It’ll be the same as the last report, and the one before that, and the one before that.
His tits aren’t feeling any calmer.
Maybe Pansy will say so. Maybe she’ll say what’s twisting your nipples, Potter? Because sometimes she does that, and if she does, Harry will give in and whinge about how he feels like a git for spending hours chasing Lucius Malfoy halfway across Wiltshire and how he didn’t do one Dark spell, not even a hex or a jinx, and how Harry never even thought he would because it was the same as always—skipping over how bloody weird it is that always goes along with the Manor in his head now—and maybe at the end they’ll come ’round to how no one was even visiting and maybe Pansy will say no, but of course Draco wasn’t there, he’s in and then she might say where Malfoy is this summer and Harry will say oh that’s lovely for him and roll his eyes so Pansy knows Harry doesn’t really care where Malfoy is, he’s just overheated and disgruntled because minding Lucius Malfoy’s Quidditch hobby is not the same thing as catching Dark wizards and Harry might not want to catch Dark wizards anymore, not because of Pansy but because most of the job is parchmentwork and having their photo taken and he doesn’t want his photo taken anymore, he wants to build a house in a tree.
Or whatever.
A bell rings in the hallway, startling Harry—who spills ink all over his report again—and then keeps ringing. He Vanishes the entire report as Seamus Finnigan shouts over his ringing. “Hear this, Parkinson? I reckon you’ve never got such good news in your life!”
“Seamus,” Dean Thomas says, just loud enough to be heard over the bell.
“We won, a stór! They’ve got to know!”
Seamus’s bell is a thousand-year-old charm-reinforced handbell Seamus found when he was curse-breaking in Cormac’s Chapel on the Rock of Cashel and took straight to Our Lady’s Well in Kenmare to dip it in the water there or something. He’d come to their pub night ringing it and ringing it and ringing it. Harry hadn’t heard of ancient-arse bells having an effect on curses before that night, but he became a believer.
The ringing gets closer and closer until Seamus bursts into their office and tosses the bell into the air, where it rings itself in a full circle, then drops back into his hand.
Dean stands in the doorway, hands in his pockets and a smile in his eyes. He’s got a red shirt on that brings out the summer-warm undertones in his brown skin, and for a second Harry can see him how he was when they met in first-year.
“Well?” Seamus breathes hard, probably from ringing his bell. The blotchy, excited flush across his sandy-pale skin gives away how massively excited he is. “Do you know?”
“Know what?” Pansy asks. She’s got her feet back on the floor and her paper down, and she’s got her hands flat on the desk, leant towards Seamus with bright eyes. “Seamus…Seamus Finnigan…is it—”
“It is!” Seamus shouts. “Today’s the day!”
Pansy claps her hands over her mouth. “Who is it? Tell me.”
“Who’s what?” Harry says.
Seamus stuffs a hand into his pocket and pulls out a Shrunken copy of the Prophet, which he un-Shrinks and then snaps open.
“No!” Pansy cries.
It’s sort of coming back to Harry—a betting pool they’d formed, like, seven years ago about which of their former professors would fall in love first. It was the blurry end of the night. Seamus laced all his fingers together. Pomfrey, he said with total seriousness. Trelawney. Mark my words.
“Yes!” Seamus yells back. “Madam Pomfrey and Professor Trelawney! Eloped! Retired! All on the same day!”
He tosses the Prophet onto their desks, pushed together in the centre of the room.
And there they are.
Madam Pomfrey and Professor Trelawney, kissing in front of the Black Lake.
Seamus puts his hands on the table and leans over them, his grin so wide it borders on evil. “Know what this means?”
“You owe me ten Galleons?” Harry guesses. He vaguely remembers agreeing with Seamus. Nothing about his bet.
“It means Hogwarts needs a Divination professor. And.” Seamus drums his fists on the table. “Rumour has it they want Weasley back at the Ministry.”
“What?” That can’t be right. Arthur would’ve told Harry at some brunch or dinner or something at the Burrow.
How long’s it been since Harry visited?
Maybe he missed it.
“That’s two professors the Headmistress is hiring.” Seamus stands tall and wiggles his fingers at them. “We could all be there next year.”
Oh—because Seamus and Dean are going. Something about the Forest.
“We have jobs already.” Harry Summons another parchment-form and slaps it onto the desk, refusing to feel his racing heart. “We’re not going anywhere.”
They’re not going anywhere.
Harry maintains this position through the solstice and into July, not that anyone makes it easy for him. Seamus is constantly bell-ringing in their office. Dean does nothing but smile fondly at Seamus, which for some reason makes Harry feel like a thundercloud.
Seamus also signed Harry and Pansy up for a new subscription to the Prophet. It pops into their office at least once a day. There’s more reporting on Pomfrey and Trelawney’s Italian honeymoon. They officially announce Arthur Weasley’s move back to the Ministry.
On the fifteenth of July, Harry storms into one of their regular pubs in the sticky late afternoon and tears off his outer robes. He’d thought Pans was right behind him, but she’s not there when he flops into their regular booth and considers Banishing the rest of his clothes, to fuck with everything.
He settles for taking off his uniform jacket and orders a frozen Butterbeer, so he’s sipping it sullenly through a curly straw charmed to change its shape every thirty seconds when she finally gets there. Pansy takes off her robes with a graceful swirl, hangs them up, and drops a velvet bag onto the table.
“Oh, good,” she says as she slides into her seat and opens the velvet bag. “I was willing to force you to have a frozen Butterbeer at wandpoint if it came to that.”
Harry’s shirt is sticking to his back. He sips more frozen Butterbeer, staring at Pansy.
“What’s that?” he says around the straw. The curly section changes with a tiny pop. Harry checks—a flower.
Pansy takes out a box and a booklet. “Just a deck of cards.”
It’s not just a deck of cards. It’s a deck of tarot cards. Pansy ignores Harry while he gives himself brain freeze and grits his teeth through it. Tarot cards.
Is she joking?
When Harry opens his eyes again, the midsection of his straw is a star and Pansy’s got a single card pulled and is consulting her booklet.
“Ah! The Wheel of Fortune,” she says ominously. “A change is coming.”
Harry’s straw pops, the flower curlique taking the shape of a heart.
He signals for another frozen Butterbeer.
August is cloudy and damp unless it’s a downpour. No one will shut up about Hogwarts. There’s rampant speculation about who’s going to fill the open positions. Pomfrey and Trelawney go on another leg of their honeymoon, this time to Antarctica. The Prophet runs a photo of them kissing in front of a colony of penguins.
Harry is not going anywhere.
Pansy is not going anywhere.
Lately, she’s been watching him across their desks like she thinks he’s going to change his mind.
And why would he do that? Why? Because of Lucius Malfoy? Not likely.
On the last Wednesday of August, the charmed window in their office gives them a view of iron-grey clouds and spitting rain. Harry crumples up a length of parchment and throws it at the window.
The view ripples, then stabilises to show a deluge.
A copy of the Prophet pops into existence on their desk. Harry reaches to bat it across to Pansy and freezes, his hand an inch from the photo on the bottom half of the front page.
Draco Malfoy, Professor of Astronomy at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, at the shops in Arles in Provence, France.
It’s the worst photo Harry has ever seen.
Draco Malfoy, in some waistcoat nonsense and white shirt in some potions shop in France, half-turned away from the photographer and smiling, sort of, like he’s been told a joke. Glancing at the camera, light in his eyes. Turning again towards the shelves. Glancing. Turning. Glancing. With his hair in a bun at his nape. With—with himself.
And the article. The interview. Whatever it is.
When posed the question of whether he’d applied for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts, Malfoy appeared momentarily surprised. “No, I didn’t apply.”
As time was running short, did he think his former schoolmate and current Senior Auror Harry Potter would apply?
Professor Malfoy laughed. “Apply for a position at Hogwarts? I can’t imagine he would.”
Perhaps in the event Hogwarts can’t fill the position before the start of term?
“I can’t speak for Harry Potter, of course,” Malfoy said. “But judging by the public record, he’s quite satisfied with his work at the DMLE. Why seek out a challenge when you’re comfortable? I don’t blame him.”
Harry’s lungs burn. He’s been holding his breath.
His heart is doing the thing. It’s doing the sodding thing.
He gasps as subtly as possible and remembers that Pansy is in the office with him.
Harry snaps his eyes to hers. Pansy’s frozen in her seat, a fan of tarot cards covering her mouth.
Neither one of them moves.
Then Harry gets hold of himself, yanks his chair out from under his desk, and sits down hard. He needs parchment. He needs a quill. He needs to slam a few drawers on his desk.
“Potter,” says Pansy. “What are you doing?”
Dear Headmistress McGonagall, he writes.