Chapter Text
The glass didn't fall. That was the part Harry couldn't explain afterwards, standing in his kitchen at two in the morning with water dripping from the counter and blood on his palm. The glass didn't fall. He'd reached for it, fingers closing around the rim the way they had a thousand times before, and then it simply wasn't there anymore. Not shattered on the floor, not knocked from his hand. Gone. Dust. A fine powder of what used to be glass scattered across the countertop like sand, and his hand was bleeding from cuts that shouldn't have been possible because there was nothing left sharp enough to cause them.
He stood very still in the dark kitchen, breathing through his nose, listening to the tap drip.
That's the third time.
The first had been two months ago during a routine training exercise at the Ministry. A Stupefy that should have hit the practice dummy and instead split apart mid-air, three separate bolts of red light slamming into three separate walls while Harry was thrown backwards hard enough to crack his skull against the floor. Ron had crouched beside him, face white, asking if he was alright. Harry said he was fine. His nose was bleeding. The blood looked darker than it should have, almost black in the fluorescent light of the training room, but when he wiped it with the back of his hand it was red again. Normal. Just blood.
The second time was quieter. He'd been reading on the sofa, half-asleep, his wand resting on the arm of the chair beside him. He didn't touch it. Didn't move. But the wand rolled, slowly, towards his hand, and when it made contact with his skin, every light in the flat surged so bright the bulbs burst. He sat in the dark afterwards, glass crunching under his feet as he moved through the flat checking for damage, telling himself it was a power surge. Muggle electrics were unreliable in wizarding homes. Everyone knew that.
But the lights in his flat weren't connected to muggle electrics. The whole building ran on enchantments.
Now this. The glass. The cuts.
Harry turned on the tap and held his hand under the cold water, watching the blood swirl pink down the drain. The cuts were shallow but they stung, thin lines across his palm like someone had drawn on him with a razor. He dried his hand on a tea towel, wrapped it loosely, and sat down at the kitchen table.
The flat was silent. It was always silent. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room in a converted townhouse in Kentish Town, sparsely furnished because Harry had never worked out how to make a space feel like home. The walls were off-white and mostly bare. A few photographs on the mantelpiece, the frames mismatched. Quidditch posters in the bedroom from years ago that he kept meaning to take down but never did.
He pressed his wrapped hand flat against the table and stared at the dusting of glass on the counter.
Something is wrong with me.
The thought arrived clean and certain, the way bad news always did, settling into his chest with a weight that felt permanent. He'd been ignoring it for weeks. Months, if he was honest, because there'd been smaller things before the three he was willing to count. A tingling in his fingertips that came and went. Dreams that left scorch marks on his pillowcase. The way his magic sometimes felt too big for his body, pressing outward against his skin like something trying to get out.
He should tell someone. Ron. Hermione. A Healer.
He picked up the tea towel, rewrapped his hand, and went back to bed.
He didn't tell anyone.
"You look like shit." Ron dropped into the chair opposite him the following morning.
They were in the Auror office, a wide open-plan room on Level Two of the Ministry that buzzed with activity from seven in the morning until well past dark. Desks were crammed together in clusters, parchment stacked in precarious towers, interdepartmental memos folding themselves into paper aeroplanes and sailing overhead. The noise was constant. Harry usually found it grounding. Today it scraped against his skull like sandpaper.
"Cheers," Harry muttered, dropping into his chair. He'd slept badly. The cuts on his palm had healed overnight, which should have been reassuring except that they'd healed completely, no scabs, no marks, as though they'd never existed at all. He'd checked three times.
"Seriously, mate, did you sleep?"
"A bit."
Ron gave him that look. The one that said I know you're lying but I'm choosing not to push it because the last time I pushed it you got weird and defensive and didn't speak to me for three days. It was a very specific look. Ron had perfected it over the years.
"Kingsley wants to see you at nine." Ron changed the subject with the practiced ease of someone who'd learned that Harry Potter opened up on his own terms or not at all. "Didn't say what about."
"Brilliant."
"Could be another commendation."
"If they try to give me another plaque I'm hexing someone."
Ron snorted and turned back to his own desk, which was buried under enough paperwork to build a small fort. Harry pulled the first file from his pile and opened it without reading it, staring at the pages while his mind circled the same thought it had been circling since two in the morning.
Something is wrong with me.
Kingsley's office hadn't changed in five years. The same heavy oak desk, the same towering bookshelves, the same view of enchanted London through the window behind his chair. Kingsley himself looked older, though. Greyer at the temples, the lines around his eyes deeper than they used to be. The war had aged him. The job had aged him more.
He gestured for Harry to sit.
"How are you, Harry?"
"Fine, Sir."
"Hmm." Kingsley leaned back in his chair and studied him over the rim of his glasses. The silences were deliberate, Harry knew that by now. Kingsley used them the way other people used questions, leaving space for the truth to fall into.
Harry didn't fill it.
Kingsley folded his hands on the desk. "I've received a report from Healer Whitcombe. Regarding your training incident two months ago."
Harry's jaw tightened. "That was nothing. A misfire."
"A misfire that produced three simultaneous impact points from a single-cast spell, which is, according to Whitcombe, physically impossible under normal circumstances."
"My wand's been acting up. I was going to get it looked at."
"Harry." Kingsley's tone was gentle, which was worse than stern. Stern he could argue with. "This isn't a reprimand. I'm not pulling you from duty. But the incident was flagged by the monitoring department and they've recommended a diagnostic assessment."
"I don't need an assessment."
"It's not optional."
The words landed flat between them. Harry pressed his lips together and looked out of the window, watching an enchanted pigeon circle the rooftops. His wrapped hand ached under the desk though there was nothing left to ache.
"Where?" he asked, after a pause.
"The Department of Mysteries. They have a specialist team for cases involving unusual magical anomalies. Level Nine. You'll be seen by their core stability researcher."
"A researcher. Not a Healer."
"The nature of the anomaly requires a different approach. Whitcombe's initial scans showed irregularities in your core that don't correspond to any known medical condition. The Department of Mysteries has better equipment and, frankly, better expertise."
Harry exhaled through his nose. Level Nine. The Department of Mysteries. He hadn't set foot down there since fifth year, since Sirius, since everything that came after. The thought of it curdled something in his stomach.
"When?"
"This afternoon. Two o'clock. Report to the main entrance and someone will meet you."
"Can't wait."
Kingsley didn't smile, but his expression softened. "It's a precaution, Harry. That's all."
Harry nodded, stood, and left without another word.
It wasn't a precaution. He could feel it in the way his magic pulsed beneath his skin, heavier than it should have been, pressing against his bones like a tide that didn't know how to recede.
Something was very, very wrong.
The lift down to Level Nine took longer than it should have.
Harry stood alone in the rattling cage as it descended, watching the numbers tick backwards. Eight. Seven. Six. The air grew colder with each floor, a creeping chill that settled into the metal walls and made his breath visible in thin wisps. By the time the doors opened onto Level Nine, the temperature had dropped enough that he was grateful for the thick jumper under his robes.
The corridor was narrow and dimly lit, stretching ahead in a straight line before curving out of sight. The walls were dark stone, polished smooth, and the only sound was the low mechanical hum of something running behind them. No windows. No paintings. No memos. Just the hum and the cold and the steady echo of his own footsteps.
A woman was waiting at the end of the corridor. Late forties, sharp face, hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful. She wore charcoal robes with no insignia and held a clipboard against her chest.
"Mr. Potter. I'm Whitfield, senior case coordinator. Follow me."
She didn't offer a handshake or a smile. She turned on her heel and walked, and Harry followed, because the Department of Mysteries apparently operated on the assumption that small talk was a security risk.
They passed through three separate doors, each requiring a different unlocking spell from Whitfield, each heavier than the last. The corridor split and reformed. Rooms branched off to either side, their doors closed, some of them humming with contained magic that made the hairs on Harry's arms stand up.
Whitfield didn't turn around. "The researcher assigned to your case is our foremost specialist in core instability and post-artefact magical resonance. He's been with the department for two years and has published extensively on the interaction between Hallow-class objects and human magical systems."
"Published?" Harry frowned. "I thought everything down here was classified."
"Internally published. Within the department." She stopped at a door marked only with the number nine and turned to face him. "A few things. Your sessions will be confidential. No information will be shared with the Auror department or any external party without your explicit consent. The diagnostic process will involve sustained magical contact, memory access, and core mapping. You will be briefed on each procedure before it begins. You have the right to terminate any session at any time."
"Right."
"Any questions?"
"Who's the researcher?"
Something shifted in Whitfield's expression. Not quite amusement, not quite sympathy. Something between the two that made Harry's stomach tighten with a preemptive dread he couldn't explain.
She opened the door.
The room was small, windowless, and clinically bare. Stone walls, stone floor, a single examination table in the centre that looked less like medical equipment and more like an altar. Instruments lined the far wall on metal shelving, all of them unfamiliar, ticking and pulsing with a faint bioluminescent glow. The ceiling was low. The light came from nowhere identifiable.
And standing beside the examination table, reading a file with his back to the door, was Draco Malfoy.
Harry stopped in the doorway.
The years had changed him. That was the first thought, unwanted and immediate. He was taller than Harry remembered, or perhaps he just held himself differently. Straighter. The sharp, pinched angles of his face had settled into something more defined. Cheekbones that could cut glass. A jaw that was harder than it used to be. His hair was shorter at the sides and longer on top, swept back from his forehead without the rigid precision of their school years, a few pale strands falling forward as he leaned over the file.
He wore the same charcoal robes as Whitfield, no insignia, and beneath them Harry caught a glimpse of a white collared shirt buttoned to the throat. His sleeves were down. Of course they were.
He turned around.
His eyes were the same. That particular shade of grey that had no business being as striking as it was, cool and sharp, registering Harry in the doorway with an expression that cycled rapidly through surprise, irritation, and something more controlled that snapped into place like a mask being fitted.
"Ah." A single syllable. Flat and colourless.
"You're joking." Harry's voice came out flat.
"I assure you, I am not." Draco closed the file and set it on the table beside him. His voice was calm, measured, professionally detached in a way that Harry found immediately infuriating. "I was told I'd be receiving a patient with an unstable core and post-Hallows exposure. I was not told it was you. Had I been, I might have requested a transfer."
"That makes two of us."
They stared at each other. Five years of silence sat between them, heavy and shapeless. Harry hadn't seen Draco since the trials. Since the courtroom, since the boy in the chair who'd looked like he was being held together by nothing more than the suit he was wearing. He remembered the way Draco's hands had shaken when they asked him to state his name for the record. He remembered the hollowness in his face, the bruise-dark shadows under his eyes, the terrible stillness of someone who had stopped expecting anything good to happen.
The person standing in front of him now was different. Not unrecognisable, but altered. Composed where he'd been fractured. Contained where he'd been raw. Whatever the last five years had done to Draco Malfoy, they'd given him walls, and Harry could see them clearly because he recognised the architecture. He'd built the same ones himself.
Draco pulled a stool from beneath the table and sat down, crossing one leg over the other, the file open on his knee. The mask held. Every movement deliberate, unhurried, as though Harry Potter appearing in his examination room was a minor inconvenience rather than a collision of two lives that had spent the better part of a decade tangled around each other.
"Sit down, Potter."
Harry didn't move.
"I can stand."
"You can, but it will make the initial scan more difficult and I'd rather not spend longer in this room than either of us needs to." He gestured towards the examination table with a pen. "Please."
The please sounded like it cost him something. Harry crossed the room and sat on the edge of the table, his legs hanging, hands braced on either side. The stone was cold through his trousers.
Draco flipped open the file and skimmed it, his eyes moving rapidly across the page. Harry watched him read. The pen in his hand tapped a slow, rhythmic beat against the edge of the folder, the only sign that anything beneath the surface was less than perfectly controlled.
"Your training incident. Two months ago. A single-cast Stupefy split into three separate projectiles upon release. Correct?"
"Yes."
"Any other incidents since then?"
Harry hesitated.
Draco looked up. His gaze was steady, clinical, the look of someone accustomed to extracting information from people who didn't want to give it.
"Potter. I can't help you if you lie to me."
"I'm not lying."
"You're hesitating, which in my experience amounts to the same thing."
Harry's jaw clenched. He looked at the instruments on the wall, the ticking, glowing things he couldn't name, and breathed out slowly.
"My wand moved on its own. Rolled towards my hand while I was sitting on the sofa. When it touched me, every light in my flat blew out."
Draco's pen stopped tapping.
"When?"
"Six weeks ago."
"What else."
"A glass. In my kitchen. I reached for it and it disintegrated. Turned to powder in my hand."
"Were you casting?"
"No. I wasn't even thinking about magic. I was just... reaching for a glass of water."
Draco wrote something in the file, his handwriting small and rapid. Harry couldn't read it upside down.
"Anything before the training incident? Anything you might have dismissed or attributed to other causes?"
Harry swallowed. The room was very quiet. The instruments on the wall ticked steadily, measuring things he couldn't see.
"Sometimes my fingers tingle. Like pins and needles, but deeper. In the bones." He paused. "I've had dreams that left marks. Scorch marks. On the pillowcase."
The pen stopped again.
"How long?"
"How long what?"
"How long have you been experiencing symptoms, Potter. All of them. Not just the ones dramatic enough to flag at the Ministry."
Harry stared at the floor. The stone was grey and featureless, polished to a dull shine. He could see the blurred reflection of his own shoes.
"Eight months." Harry looked at the wall. "Give or take."
The silence that followed was worse than any response. Draco set the pen down on the file and looked at him with an expression that Harry couldn't read, which bothered him more than it should have, because he'd spent years reading Draco Malfoy. In school it had been easy. Sneer, smirk, cruelty, fear. A limited palette. This was something else. This was a face that had learned to give away nothing.
"Eight months," Draco repeated. "You've been experiencing progressive magical instability for eight months and you waited until Kingsley ordered you down here to seek help."
"I thought it would pass."
"You thought the cumulative magical consequences of mastering the three Deathly Hallows would simply pass."
"When you say it like that—"
"It sounds idiotic? Yes. Because it is."
The words had teeth but his voice stayed even. Professional. That somehow made it worse. Harry would have preferred anger. Anger was familiar ground. This quiet, measured disapproval felt like being assessed and found wanting, which was exactly what was happening, which was exactly why he'd avoided this for eight months.
Draco rose from the stool and moved to the instruments on the wall. He selected something that looked like a glass prism attached to a copper frame and brought it to the table, placing it on the surface beside Harry's thigh. "I need to run a core diagnostic. It will take approximately twenty minutes. I'll need you to remove your outer robes and your jumper. The scan reads better through fewer layers."
Harry shrugged off his Auror robes and folded them, setting them on the table beside him. The jumper came next, leaving him in a white t-shirt that was slightly too tight across the shoulders because he kept forgetting to buy new clothes. The room was cold and the goosebumps rose immediately along his arms.
He caught Draco's gaze flick across him, brief and involuntary, before snapping back to the instrument.
"Lie back."
Harry lay down on the examination table. The stone pressed cold against his shoulder blades and the base of his skull. The ceiling above him was low and featureless, the same grey stone as the floor, and the light that came from nowhere cast no shadows.
Draco's footsteps were quiet as he moved to the side of the table. Harry heard the click of the prism being activated, a low hum rising from the copper frame, and then Draco's hand was hovering above his chest. Not touching. Close enough that Harry could feel the warmth of his palm through the thin cotton of his shirt.
Draco's fingers hovered an inch above Harry's chest. "I'm going to place my hand on your sternum. The diagnostic requires a point of physical contact to anchor the scan. It may feel uncomfortable. Your magic will likely react to mine and given the instability you've described, that reaction may be stronger than expected. If at any point the sensation becomes unbearable, say so and I'll stop."
"Fine."
"I mean it, Potter. Don't suffer through it because you think endurance is the same thing as strength. They're not."
Harry looked up at him. From this angle, Draco's face was closer than it had any right to be. The sharpness of his jaw. The pale length of his throat above the buttoned collar. The shadows under his eyes that suggested he kept the same kind of hours Harry did, the sleepless, restless hours of someone whose mind didn't know how to stop.
"Just do it." Harry closed his eyes.
Draco placed his hand flat against Harry's chest.
The reaction was immediate. Harry's magic surged, a rush of heat that started in his core and radiated outward through his bones, his blood, the roots of his teeth. It wasn't painful, not exactly, but it was overwhelming, a sensation of being seen from the inside, his magic responding to the presence of another's the way a flame responds to oxygen, reaching, expanding, pushing against the boundaries of his body.
Draco's breath hitched. His hand pressed harder.
"Breathe." His voice was no longer quite so steady. "Potter. Breathe."
Harry breathed. The surge receded, slowly, pulling back like a tide, leaving him shaking and damp with sweat. His hands were gripping the edges of the table so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
Draco didn't remove his hand. Through the haze of sensation, Harry could feel the steady pulse of Draco's magic flowing through the point of contact, cool against the heat of his own, threading through him like water through cracks in stone. Searching. Reading. The prism on the table hummed louder, the copper frame glowing faintly blue.
For twenty minutes, neither of them spoke. Draco worked with his eyes half-closed, his concentration absolute, his lips occasionally moving silently as though reciting something to himself. Harry stared at the ceiling and focused on breathing and tried not to think about the fact that Draco Malfoy's hand was pressed against his heart and his magic was moving through him with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with everything he thought he knew about the person attached to it.
When it was over, Draco lifted his hand. The absence was abrupt, a coldness rushing in where warmth had been, and Harry's body flinched towards the contact before he could stop it. If Draco noticed, he didn't say.
He stepped back. Picked up the prism. Studied it.
Harry sat up slowly, his head swimming. "Well?"
Draco didn't answer immediately. He was turning the prism in his hands, the copper frame casting shifting patterns of blue light across his face. His expression had changed. The professional composure was still there, the mask still in place, but something behind it had moved. Tightened.
Draco pulled the stool closer and sat. "Your core is fractured. Not damaged. Fractured. There's a difference." He placed the prism back on the shelf and turned to face Harry. "A damaged core is like a broken bone. It heals, given time. A fractured core is like..." He paused, searching for the word. "Fault lines. In rock. The structure is intact but the stress points are spreading. Your magic is leaking through the fractures and it's doing so at an accelerating rate."
The room felt smaller. The hum of the instruments felt louder.
"What's causing it?"
"The Hallows. Your exposure to all three created a resonance pattern in your core that your body was never designed to sustain. For a time, it held. Your core adapted. But the resonance is unstable and the fractures are the result of your magic slowly failing to contain it."
Harry swallowed. His mouth was dry. "What happens if it keeps spreading?"
Draco met his eyes. The grey of them was very still, very clear, stripped of anything that might soften what he was about to say.
"If left untreated, the fractures will widen. Your magic will become increasingly erratic and uncontrollable. Eventually your core will lose structural integrity entirely."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning your magic will destroy you from the inside. It could take months. It could take years. I don't have enough data yet to give you a timeline."
Silence.
Harry sat on the edge of the examination table in the bowels of the Department of Mysteries and absorbed the information the way he absorbed all catastrophic news, which was to say, quietly, with his hands braced on his knees and his gaze fixed on a point slightly to the left of the person delivering it. A survival mechanism he'd developed at eleven and never outgrown. Take it in. Store it. React later, alone, where no one can see.
"Can you fix it?" he asked. His voice was steady. He was proud of that.
Draco's jaw worked. He looked down at the file on the stool, then back at Harry. The mask slipped for half a second, something raw flickering across his features before being swallowed.
Draco shook his head. "I don't know. The fracture pattern is unlike anything in our existing research. I've studied Hallow resonance theoretically but there's never been a living subject to observe. You're the only person in recorded history who's mastered all three."
"Lucky me."
"The process of treatment, if treatment is possible, will require extensive core mapping. Which means repeated sessions. Sustained magical contact. Memory access." Each word placed with deliberate precision, his eyes on Harry's face. "Your core fractures likely correspond to specific moments of extreme magical stress. The Hallows, the war, the... the night in the forest." He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. "I'll need to trace those fracture points back to their origins. That means going into your memories, Potter. Not surface-level recall. Deep access. The kind of memories you don't think about because thinking about them would—"
"I get it."
"Do you?" Draco's voice sharpened slightly, the first crack in the professional veneer. "Because this isn't Legilimency. I won't be watching from the outside. The core mapping requires me to be in the memory with you, experiencing it as you experienced it. Your fear, your pain, your—" He stopped. Breathed. Pulled the mask back into place. "Everything. I will feel everything you felt."
Harry stared at him.
Of all the people in the world. Of all the people who could have ended up sitting across from him in this cold, humming room, asking him to crack himself open and let them see inside. Draco Malfoy. The boy who'd watched him from across the Great Hall with a sneer on his face. The boy who'd chosen the wrong side and paid for it with everything he had. The boy Harry had saved from a fire and then never spoken to again.
The boy, a smaller, quieter voice said, who you watched during the trial. Who shook so hard his teeth chattered. Who looked up at you from the defendant's chair with eyes that held nothing in them because everything had already been taken.
"How often?" Harry asked.
"Once a week. Possibly twice, depending on how the mapping progresses. Each session will last between one and two hours."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes."
Harry nodded slowly. He looked at his hands, the hands that had shattered a glass without trying, the hands that couldn't be trusted to hold a wand without something going wrong. The hands that had held the Resurrection Stone in a forest and let it fall.
"Alright." The word came out before he could think better of it.
Draco blinked. The composure wavered again, minutely, like a candle in a draught. He'd expected a fight, Harry realised. He'd braced himself for resistance, for stubbornness, for the version of Harry Potter who argued with everything because admitting he needed help felt too much like admitting weakness.
Five years ago, he would have been right.
"Alright," Harry repeated. "When do we start?"
Draco studied him for a long moment. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find it, because he nodded once and picked up the file, tucking it under his arm.
"Next Tuesday. Two o'clock. Don't eat for at least four hours beforehand, the mapping can cause nausea. Wear something comfortable. No robes, no shoes. And Potter."
"What."
"Don't be late. My schedule is extremely precise and I refuse to rearrange it for you."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Draco held his gaze for one beat too long. Then he turned away, busying himself with the instruments on the wall, his back straight, his movements controlled, every inch the composed researcher who had his life meticulously ordered.
But Harry caught it, just before he turned. A tremor in his hand. Barely visible. The faintest shake in his fingers as they closed around the prism.
He didn't mention it. He picked up his jumper and his robes and left the room.
The lift back up to Level Two took forever. Harry stood alone in the rattling cage, rising through the floors, the temperature climbing with each level. By the time the doors opened he was warm again, the chill of Level Nine already fading, and the noise of the Auror office crashed over him like a wave.
Ron looked up from his desk. "How'd it go?"
Harry hung his robes on the back of his chair and sat down. For a moment, he didn't say anything. He stared at the pile of case files on his desk, the memos sailing overhead, the ordinary, familiar chaos of a life that suddenly felt very fragile.
"Fine." Harry pulled on his jacket and didn't look back.
"What did they say?"
"That they need to run more tests."
Ron frowned. "What kind of tests?"
"The kind they do in the Department of Mysteries, Ron. I didn't exactly get a pamphlet."
"Right. Sorry." Ron held up his hands and turned back to his own work, the concern still visible in the set of his shoulders. Harry felt a stab of guilt for the sharpness in his voice but couldn't summon the energy to smooth it over.
He pulled the first file from his pile. Opened it. Read the same sentence four times without absorbing a word.
Your core is fractured.
Your magic will destroy you from the inside.
I don't know.
He closed the file. Pressed his palms flat against the desk and breathed.
Under his skin, his magic hummed and pressed, restless and hot, and for the first time, now that he knew what it was, now that someone had given the feeling a name, it frightened him.
Three streets from the Ministry, tucked into a narrow lane between a newsagent and a dry cleaner's, there was a pub called The Cask. It was the sort of place that didn't try to be anything more than it was. Dark wood, low ceilings, a handful of regulars who minded their own business. Harry had been coming here since he moved to London, drawn by the anonymity of it, the blissful disinterest of muggle strangers who didn't know his name.
He sat at the bar and ordered a whiskey. Then another.
The bartender, a heavyset man with a shaved head and kind eyes, didn't comment on the speed of his drinking. Harry appreciated that. He wrapped his hands around the glass and stared into the amber, watching the light refract through it.
Fractured.
It was a good word for it, he thought. Better than broken, which implied a clean separation, a before and after. Fractures were messier than that. Fractures spread. You could walk on a fractured bone for weeks without knowing it was there, carrying the damage inside you, feeling the wrongness without being able to name it, until one day the structure that had been holding you up simply wasn't enough anymore.
He thought about Draco's hand on his chest. The coolness of his magic, threading through the cracks. The steadiness of it, careful and precise, moving through Harry's internal chaos with a certainty that bordered on gentleness. He thought about the tremor in Draco's fingers as he turned away. A fracture of his own, maybe. Hairline. Hidden.
He finished the second whiskey and didn't order a third.
Outside, London was grey and ordinary. Traffic crawled. People walked past with their heads down, lost in their own lives, carrying their own unseen damage. Harry pulled his jacket tighter and started walking, no direction in particular, just movement, because standing still with the knowledge of what was happening inside him felt impossible.
His magic pulsed once, hot and sharp, and the streetlight above him flickered.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked faster.
Draco didn't leave Room Nine for a long time after Potter was gone.
He stood at the instrument shelf with the prism in his hands, turning it slowly, watching the residual readings pulse through the copper frame. The data was extraordinary. Terrifying, frankly, but extraordinary. He'd spent two years studying Hallow resonance in the abstract, building theoretical models from fragmentary historical records and the Department's own classified archives. He'd mapped hypothetical fracture patterns, written papers on the potential interaction between Hallow-class artefacts and human magical cores, presented his findings to colleagues who'd listened politely and then asked, But is there any practical application?
Now the practical application had walked into his examination room and sat on his table with his sleeves shoved up and his jaw set and his stupid green eyes looking at Draco like he was bracing for a punch.
Draco placed the prism back on the shelf with a steadiness his hands didn't feel.
The scan data was worse than he'd let on. The fractures were extensive, spreading outward from the centre of Potter's core in a pattern that looked like lightning, if lightning moved slowly and ate everything it touched. The resonance from the Hallows was embedded so deeply in his magical signature that separating the two would be like trying to pull a colour out of a painting. It was part of him now, woven into the fabric of his magic, and it was tearing him apart.
He sat down on the stool and pressed his fingers against his eyes.
The professional thing to do would be to flag the case as beyond his capacity. To recommend that the department assemble a team, bring in specialists from St. Mungo's, escalate to the Wizengamot if necessary. Potter was a high-profile case. The saviour of the wizarding world, his magic slowly destroying him from the inside. It would make headlines. It would become a spectacle. People who'd shaken Harry's hand and called him a hero would line up to offer opinions they weren't qualified to have, and Harry would sit in the middle of it, exposed and scrutinised, and Draco knew from bitter personal experience exactly how that felt.
He picked up the file. Read through his notes. Read them again.
I don't know, he'd told Potter. I don't know if I can fix it.
That was true. He didn't know. But he also hadn't said the other thing, the thing that had been sitting behind his teeth since the moment his hand made contact with Potter's chest and felt the sheer, overwhelming force of his magic.
He hadn't said that despite the fractures, despite the instability and the deterioration and the very real possibility that Harry Potter's magical core was in the process of catastrophic failure, what he'd felt beneath his palm was the most powerful, most extraordinary magical signature he'd ever encountered. Fractured, yes. Failing, possibly. But alive with a depth and intensity that took his breath away.
He closed the file. Pushed it to the edge of the table. Stared at the wall.
Don't, he told himself. The same word he'd been telling himself for years, in different rooms, about different feelings, all amounting to the same useless instruction. Don't care. Don't get attached. Don't let this matter more than the science.
He locked up Room Nine, extinguished the instruments, and took the long way back through the department because the short way passed the Hall of Prophecy and some days the whispers from behind the door were louder than others.
The corridor was cold and quiet. His footsteps echoed.
He had seven days before Potter came back. Seven days to review the data, build a mapping protocol, prepare himself for the sustained magical intimacy that the treatment would require.
Seven days to construct whatever walls he would need.
He had a feeling it wouldn't be enough.