Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Another Country	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9526 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this writing.

Chapter List
- 1-Another Country
- 1
Title: Another Country

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Rating: R

Wordcount: ~36,000

Warnings: Angst, profanity, sex, issues of disability (Harry has brain damage and Narcissa has missing limbs).

Summary: Brain-damaged by a Dark curse, Harry is seeing auras that no one else can see and visions that don’t come true and speaking Latin instead of English. The Healers want him to go back to normal. Draco Malfoy thinks his future should be different from his past.

Author’s Notes: While Harry’s disability might seem similar in certain aspects to existing ones, especially aphasia, it is magical, made-up, and not intended to be identical. No disrespect is intended to those who have similar disabilities or anyone else. Also, while the Latin has been triple-checked, I may have gotten something wrong. The poem Draco quotes to Harry is Catullus 5, slightly altered.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –L. P. Hartley, “The Go-Between.”

Another Country

            Harry folded his arms and glared at the Healer. She was a young woman with blonde hair, big green eyes and, at that moment, a slightly glassy look on her face.

            “It’s simple,” she said with strained patience. “Look.” She held up the bowl of soup in front of her. “I know you can understand me. That means you should be able to speak. Bowl. Say it.”

            Harry curled his lip and spent a minute studying the Healer until her expression looked as if it was ready to fly into a thousand pieces. “Scaphium,” Harry said.

            The Healer pressed a hand over her forehead. “No,” she said, “that’s not right. But since I’m the teacher here and the only one who speaks English, I suppose I’m the only one who can say it right.”

            Harry sneered at her some more and didn’t answer. She had just said that she knew he could understand English, even if the ability to speak it was slipping from him. Why would she assume that he wouldn’t know and respond to her insults?

            “This is hopeless.” The Healer set the bowl of soup down on the table next to his bed. “You’re hopeless. How can we release you back into society again if you won’t make an effort?” She put her hands on her hips. “I’ve heard all my life how great Harry Potter is, how determined, how powerful a wizard, but if you can’t even shape your lips around a simple word…”

            Harry rolled his eyes, picked up the bowl, and started eating the soup. It was chicken-flavored, not his favorite, but then, the staff at St. Mungo’s who “tended” him largely refused to change his food unless he succeeded in asking for it in English. Harry had struggled to do that until the end of last week, when he realized that the foreign grammar settling in his head felt easy and natural and the English seemed to disappear between his tongue and his brain. He could still comprehend it, he still thought in it most of the time, but he refused to look like an idiot and a fool when he had another language that worked perfectly well for speaking.

            It worked perfectly well for thousands of years, he thought mutinously. Now if only I had someone who could understand me.

            “Enjoy your meal,” said the Healer nastily, and slammed out of the room. Harry heard raised voices immediately. Someone who didn’t have to deal with him was probably scolding the Healer—Harry thought her name was Leonora—with great force. And then they would send someone new in, and that person would get disgusted with him, too, and then they would send someone new in, and it wouldn’t end unless Harry could convince them that he just wanted to adapt and go home.

            They won’t let me, he thought as he finished the soup with a loud slurp and lay back on the bed. His room at St. Mungo’s was bare, the walls a pale blue, the single picture a forlorn dog that spent most of its time cowering in the corner of a painted house. English grammar books covered the tables, and charts of the varying levels of damage that Greyback’s curse had done to Harry. He knew them all by now, backwards and forwards. They want me to change back to what I was before.

            When will they realize that I can’t and that’s all right? Harry closed his eyes and swallowed loneliness in place of food. I just want to change in the ways I can, instead of concentrating on the ways I can’t.

*

            “I don’t know what will happen, Draco.” Narcissa spoke with her eyes trained on the blanket and her hand resting in her lap. Although her hair drooped slightly in front of and shaded her face, Draco knew from a month of experience at her bedside that she would be looking at the place where her right hand should have rested, and did not. When she turned her head slightly to the side, it was to look at the curve of air that her right arm should have occupied, and did not.

            “I don’t think anyone does.” Draco had learned to answer with quiet, easy patience. The first few days after the attempt on his mother’s life, he had screamed louder than anyone. And then he had seen how that distressed Narcissa, and he had decided that she was the one with the most right to yell about what had happened to her. He would be as supportive as he could. The fact that the St. Mungo’s Healers had tried to replace Narcissa’s arm with one of flesh or grow a new one three times, and had been baffled by the Dark magic in the wound, was another thing to treat with patience. “We’ll wait and see.”

            His mother looked up at him, eyes so haunted that Draco reached out before he thought. Luckily, he managed to reach over and take her left hand in time for it not to look strange.

            “And what happens if they can’t replace it?” Narcissa whispered.

            “Then you’ll have an artificial limb,” Draco said, raising an eyebrow, as if to ask her what else she thought would occur.

            “And if it looks ugly?”

            Draco sniffed. “With our money? We’ll make sure that one won’t. I always thought Made-Eye Moody only carted that ungainly wooden leg around out of sentiment, anyway.”

            Finally, his mother smiled and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “I feel better when I’m near you,” she whispered. “Would you tell the Healers to come in again? I can feel my right hand hurting.”

            Draco nodded and stood up. Even though, from what he had read, the pain in the missing arm was perfectly natural, his mother thought of it as a weakness and preferred not to feel it at all.

Draco squeezed her wrist. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Farewell.” His mother always sounded calmest and most self-possessed when he departed. Draco preferred to think that was because he had done his best to cheer her up instead of because she liked to see him going, although he was wise enough to know that was probably a part of it.

He stepped through the door and nodded to the women hovering down the corridor, one full Healer and one trainee. They immediately hurried inside and shut the door behind them. Draco listened hard and thought he could hear the click of a lock.

He sneered mildly and started walking. St. Mungo’s was anxious about his mother and had, more than once, nearly kicked him out of the room altogether. Of course, money was as good about stopping that as it was about finding a pretty artificial limb.

Something in silver, perhaps. Or will she want the one arm to look so different from the other? Ivory might be the better choice.

“You have to let us help you!”

            Draco raised his eyebrows. He was near the end of the Spell Damage ward, and it was to be expected that one would occasionally hear a patient screaming in pain and torment. It was less likely to see a Healer standing outside the door of a private room and waving her arms.

            A string of expert Latin profanity answered her. Draco felt his jaw drop open. His parents had insisted that he learn to speak Latin as one of his native languages, feeling it would give him an extra advantage when it came to spells, and that insult was quite a creative one.

            Most people wouldn’t think you could do that with a penis.

            After his admiration faded, however, Draco had to admit to curiosity. Who would be swearing in that way in St. Mungo’s? Draco thought he knew almost all the other pure-blood children who had learned Latin as a native tongue, and he hadn’t heard that any of them were in hospital.

            He eased forwards and peered around the Healer, who was ranting at the patient. She showed no sign of noticing him; instead, she was repeating a great deal of nonsense about “we know best” and “you must realize that” and “haven’t made any effort to help us help you.” Draco could see into the room, and the only thing he had to fear from her was that her swinging elbows would hit him in the face.

            Harry Potter stood there, his arms folded and his face red with anger as he glared. His hair looked even more ruffled than usual, and absurdly, Draco’s first thought was that they had tried to make him comb it and that was what had upset him. The hair on the left side of his skull looked as if it had recently grown back. Draco could see the old traces of a burn there.

            He snapped his fingers. Now he remembered. It hadn’t seemed important, because it had happened a day before the attempt on his mother’s life, and Draco had concentrated all his energy on her and the arrangements they needed to make for her instead of wondering about stupid things such as what his former rival was doing. But there had been an announcement in the Prophet about how the Heroic Auror Potter had sustained a direct hit from a Dark curse. Draco knew he’d been chasing one of the former Death Eaters, still free after five years, if not which one.

            The snapping of his fingers called the Healer’s attention to him. Draco might have thought her pretty, but she would have had to keep her mouth shut if he ever invited her to the Manor. Her voice could have cut through stone walls around his skull. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “This is a private room.”

            “And this is a very public altercation,” Draco said, to see how she would respond.

            The woman clapped her lips shut and glared some more. Meanwhile, Potter had taken a step forwards, his eyes wide. His mouth worked for a moment as though he needed to think before he said, “Malfoy?”

            “Hullo, Potter.” Draco nodded to him in turn.

            “Get out of here!” the Healer apparently decided to explode. “You have no right to be here!”

            “In fact, my mother’s a patient on this ward,” Draco said cheerfully. And my father just donated enough money to St. Mungo’s to pay your wages ten times over. That was not the sort of thing that a harridan who couldn’t keep secrets needed to know, though. “I was passing by, but the screaming caught my attention.” He looked at Potter and smirked a bit. Potter only shrugged and turned away to kick at the bed.

            The Healer fell on his words with the eager glee of someone who’d been left alone in the company of uncomprehending people for too long. “It’s this curse he sustained,” she said rapidly. “He can still speak English, but he won’t. He keeps speaking Latin now, just because he claims that’s easier.” She gave Potter a look of disdain so perfect Draco was attempted to appoint her an honorary Slytherin. “I never thought someone like him would be such a coward.”

            Draco had to bite his lip, hard. Not because the Healer’s insults were that good, but because Potter gave her such a perfect look of slow-burning contempt, Draco wanted to laugh aloud.

            He had to know more of someone who could give a glance of contempt like that. It was an impulsive decision, yes, but he’d had to make quick decisions often since his mother was wounded. This was another one, and he was free to leave if it didn’t work out.

            He stepped forwards, past the Healer, who glared but didn’t try to stop him. Draco wished she would make up her mind. Did she want him out of a private room or taking advantage of the free, loud explanation she’d been pleased to offer?

            “Quid agis?” he asked Potter softly. “Medicos exagitare potes, sed non debes eos exagitare.”

            The delighted widening of Potter’s eyes was wonderful to watch. Draco’s only regret was that it left him unable to turn around and watch what happened to the Healer’s face at the same time.

*

            The words leaped straight into Harry’s brain and clicked. For the first time since he’d been hit with the curse, he’d really felt that his mind was his own again, or even better than before; he didn’t remember it spinning like this, clear and keen and sharp.

            Of course, it would be just like Malfoy to tell him that he shouldn’t irritate the Healers. But Harry didn’t care. Someone understood, and if Malfoy thought Harry should go back to being the normal person everyone thought he had been before the curse, at least he had the good sense not to say it.

            “I can irritate them all I like,” he snapped back, and watched as the words traveled like arrows across the distance between them and found a home in comprehending ears. Malfoy grinned at him.

            “I agreed with you about your ability,” he responded mildly in Latin. “I only questioned its wisdom.”

            Harry studied him with hungry eyes. If Malfoy spoke his new language, then Harry would be seeing a lot of him. And he had heard what Malfoy said about his mother being a patient on the same ward.

            For the first time in what seemed like years, Harry wondered about someone outside this room; he wondered what had happened to her.

            Malfoy had grown since Harry had seen him last, and only up. He was lean, slender, in a way that reminded Harry of the white hunting dogs that one of the shops they’d raided had had, waiting to be crossbred with Crups. Hermione said they hunted by sight, though Harry couldn’t remember what she called them. From the clear, commanding grey of Malfoy’s eyes, he certainly hunted by sight.

            His face was pointy, but his expression was quieter than it used to be. Kinder, too. But perhaps Harry only thought that because he was kind enough to speak in the first place.

            “They want me to speak English,” Harry said. “The only words I can manage now easily are proper names and a few simple ones, like—” He struggled, the smooth flow of his language, language used the way it ought to be used, broken and shattered. He shrugged and returned to what he could say. “It doesn’t matter. I keep telling them that, but they insist that I have to speak English and treat me like a spoiled child when I don’t. They seem to think I’m not as smart as I was, all because I can’t make them understand me.”

            “Considering how small your stock of intelligence was in the first place, I shudder to think what they must see now.” Malfoy grinned again. “But yes, I’ve noticed that people will speak slowly and loudly in one language instead of bothering to learn another. As if that helps.”

            Harry snorted in agreement and glanced out at Leonora. She looked as if she was ready to faint or throw a fit. Harry hoped that he wouldn’t miss either if it happened.

            “I think I’m smarter than they are now,” Harry muttered, “because I know two languages, and they only know one.”

            Malfoy cocked his head. “You can understand English, then?” At Harry’s nod, he said, “So what did the curse do?”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “They still don’t know,” he said. “All they know is that I got my wand up in time and managed to cast part of a defensive shield, so the spell that hit my brain had some of my magic mingled with it, instead of being a pure curse. And since then, I’ve been seeing auras, and visions, and speaking Latin.” He shook his head, shutting his eyes for a minute. One of the quick attacks of despair he’d had sometimes since the curse was coming over him, and he would kill himself before he would cry in front of Malfoy. “They think they can change me back, somehow, but since they don’t know the first thing about this spell, they haven’t succeeded yet.”

            Malfoy was so quiet that Harry thought he’d left. When he looked again, though, Malfoy was leaning forwards, studying him out of those clear eyes. Harry blinked as an aura of white and gold sprang up around his head, transparent and misty, like a lamp lit amid falling snow. As usual, he had no idea what that meant or why he had suddenly started seeing it.

            “Then the question becomes what you want,” Malfoy said. “Do you want to go back?”

            Harry gaped at him. He could credit that Malfoy might be curious, but he sounded almost—sincere. Why would he ask Harry something so personal, something that had nothing to do with magical theory or the facts of spell damage?

            But just like he’d had to talk to someone who understood him even if that person was Malfoy, Harry didn’t think he had the power to refuse Malfoy’s sympathy now. He shook his head gloomily and muttered, “I don’t think it’s possible.”

            Malfoy raised a reprimanding eyebrow. He would have made a great professor, Harry thought; that eyebrow could have induced guilt in any student who’d forgotten to do their homework. “That’s not what I asked.”

            Harry turned away and gripped his own chin. He wanted to protest that he hadn’t really understood because of the Latin, but that wasn’t true. Latin was flowing like water in his head now, clearer than English.

            So he had to answer.

            He peeked over his shoulder, half-hoping that Malfoy would have solved the problem for him by going away, but Malfoy still stood there. Harry licked his lips and said slowly, “I don’t—I don’t really want to go back. They’ve kept me here so long that I’m starting to get used to it, or I think I could if they would let me forget it for one fucking minute.” He spat the last words; he couldn’t help it. “They won’t. They don’t want me to leave until I’m ‘normal’ again. And I keep failing their tests, and then they tell me that I have to go all the way back to the beginning. And my English is getting worse all the time, so they tell me that they have to keep me for observation.”

            Malfoy narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “I don’t think you would live a fully normal life even if you left,” he said. “You have a magical inability to speak English, or to write it, I assume?”

            Harry nodded shortly, thinking of the way that Patricia, one of the other Healers and gentler than Leonora, had started crying when his English words gradually acquired endings that shouldn’t be there and started moving around in the sentence, the way Latin words were free to.

            “Then it’ll still be a hard life,” Malfoy said, “no matter how well you may be able to understand and respond to English. And Latin’s hardly a tongue on everyone’s lips.”

            “I would prefer it to this,” Harry said stubbornly. “And just because I can’t speak English anymore doesn’t mean that I couldn’t learn another language. Like French, or something.” The Healers had told him that they thought he would never speak anything but Latin again, but then, they didn’t know the first thing about how the curse had actually affected his brain, and they kept trying to get him to speak something other than Latin anyway. So Harry didn’t feel inclined to listen to them.

            Malfoy raised both pale eyebrows this time. “That’s true enough. I hadn’t thought of that.”

            “Something the great and powerful Draco Malfoy hadn’t thought of?” Harry looked at him mockingly. “I’m shocked.”

            Malfoy smiled instead of getting angry, and his face was illuminated as if by a white lightning flash. Harry stared, charmed in spite of himself. Had Malfoy always had the potential for this sort of look? Or had he changed so much in the past few years that he had become capable of it?



            “I like the way you talk,” Malfoy said.

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Of course you would, since you’re the only one who can hold a normal conversation with me, and it gives you the chance to prove that you’re special after all.”

            Malfoy smiled, but didn’t confirm or deny the accusation. “And my mother suffered a—mishap with Dark magic as well,” he said. The tone of his voice told Harry not to ask more about that right now. Harry thought he understood those tones better in Latin than in his old language. “I’m trying to convince her that mourning the past doesn’t work, that we have to more forwards into the future, even if that is another country.” His voice brightened briefly with passion, then sank back into normality. “I could do the same with you.”

            “No need for that conviction.” Harry didn’t want to be pitied, and there was a light that could become pity in Malfoy’s eyes.

            “No?” Malfoy left the question hanging, which infuriated Harry, because couldn’t he have seen that from the words they’d just exchanged? But Malfoy went on before Harry could make some comment on his intelligence. “Well, then I could help convince other people that you know your own mind best and should be allowed to move forwards without glancing over your shoulder.”

            Harry blinked at him. “You’d be willing to do that even with all the history between us?” he asked finally.

            “That history was with another person,” Malfoy said.

            Harry drew himself up. He hated people who acted as though he was “damaged” in some way, like the Healers who were certain he’d become a child again simply because he wouldn’t do as they said. “I’m not completely different, Malfoy,” he said. “I didn’t become someone else, someone lesser, just because of what happened to me.”

            “Not someone lesser,” Malfoy said. “But I think it’s foolish to deny what happened to you. Isn’t that what they’re trying to do?”

            Harry chewed his lip. No matter how long he stood there and thought, Malfoy simply remained still in all his glassy glory, so at last Harry had to admit the truth and nod. “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t like the way you phrased that.”

            “Think of it as a mere opinion, then, something I need to think to commit to helping you and you don’t need to,” Malfoy said equably. “Do you want my help?”

            He didn’t make it sound like a threat, Harry thought. It was just an offer, and Harry could pick it up and accept it or not.

            That, more than anything else, except perhaps the distant, calm look in Malfoy’s eyes, was what made him say, “Yes.”

*

            “Hello, Father.”

            Lucius looked up and nodded briefly to Draco. He stood in his study, with the door open enough that Draco could see him. A map of Europe was spread on the table in front of him. He held his wand in one hand and a dead dove in the other, its breast slit open. The blood from the wound dripped onto the map as Lucius moved the bird’s body in careful circles. “Is Narcissa well?”

            “Yes,” Draco said. “Still suffering twinges in her missing arm, but that’s to be expected.”

            “Of course.” His father’s eyes narrowed and he bent over the map, drawing in his breath with a harsh hiss. Draco nodded to him again, though he doubted Lucius saw it, and went on up the stairs to the second floor.

            The Aurors had proven—unhelpful—when it came to tracking the people who had attacked his mother. Draco didn’t think they’d deliberately neglected clues, but they had neglected the search, and treated Draco and Lucius as if they were the suspects rather than relatives of the victim. Certain mental scars inflicted on the general wizarding population didn’t go away any more easily than the Dark Mark did.

            So Lucius had begun tracking the would-be murderers himself. He was using blood magic and Dark Arts, which would have concerned Draco, except for two things. Lucius had quietly repaired the Manor’s wards after the war, so that someone would have to be standing practically on top of them to feel any use of illegal magic now.

            And family honor demanded vengeance. Draco was more comfortable soothing his mother, while Lucius couldn’t be near her without tensing and beginning to talk of what would happen to the people who dared to maim his wife. Draco was more than happy to leave the task of pursuing their enemies up to him.

            We all have our roles to play, Draco thought as he opened the door of his private library.

            After the war, his parents had decided to surrender one of the wings of the Manor to him, in acknowledgment of his adult status as well as the fact that they did not like to sunder their family so soon after an event that had almost destroyed them. Draco could therefore have the solitude and room he desired without leaving his ancestral home. The library was his favorite part of the house, and he used it often.

            The sunbeams of early July poured through the windows and fell on the bookshelves, shadowy and deep so as to protect the books and scrolls and ledgers they housed from any ill effects of the light. The scrolls were numbered and the books arranged after a system that was important and meaningful only to Draco. It amused him to think that someone who was trying to find important documents among them and use them to embarrass him would probably have more trouble locating them in the first place than the effort to embarrass him was worth.

            In the center of the library sat a rug that shimmered with curves of red and green and black, depicting a battle that had taken place between wizards and Muggles centuries ago. Draco stepped onto it and concentrated, extending his hand in front of him. The rug shimmered and split open near the far corner, growing what seemed to be tendrils at first, though they quickly formed into a comfortable chair. Draco sighed and sat down in it. It was his favored kind: curved to be kind to his hips and spine, yet straight enough that he wouldn’t slouch and ruin his posture.

            “Epiphany,” he called.

            This time, it was the bookcases that shimmered, and a white blob of mist detached itself from the lowest shelf on the left and floated towards him. By the time it had reached his feet, it had formed itself into a small, slender, transparent figure with long, swirling hair, as different from a house-elf as could readily be imagined.

Epiphany, his book-spirit, bowed to him and said expressionlessly, “How may I serve you, master?”

“Fetch me the issues of the Daily Prophet for the first week of June,” Draco murmured, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. Of course he knew the date Potter had been wounded—the date of his mother’s attack was etched into his mind, and the attack on Potter had happened near that—but he wanted to see the full run of the paper’s coverage, and he didn’t want to stand and get it himself.

“Of course, Master.”

            Epiphany floated off the floor and towards the shelves. Draco watched her from beneath his eyelids. Epiphany was a fine enchantment, though she had taken much careful working and reworking of the spells. He had named her what he did, when she finally came into being, because of his surprise at how long it had taken.

            Now, though, he had her, and in a moment, he would have all the news of Potter’s curse that he could swallow.

            Epiphany found the issues of the paper without pause—that was her function, to know everything in this particular library and fetch it for him—and came coiling and dashing back like a small breeze. Draco put his hands up to receive the newspapers and briefly brushed his fingers through her body. It felt as if he were touching a soft, fine drizzle.

            “That will be all, Epiphany.”

            Her hair swirled around her again as she bowed, and then she vanished into a faint sheen of light on the shelves. Draco turned his attention to the papers.

            The first picture of Potter showed him lying on the ground, staring at the sky. Blood poured from his temple, and the moving photograph showed his hair flicking aside as someone, probably his partner, cast a wind charm to see how bad it was. Draco whistled under his breath at the sight of the genuine hole in the side of Potter’s head.

            The first article told him that it was Fenrir Greyback who had wounded Potter as he and Weasley closed in on him and that Greyback had died in the altercation, but little else that Draco didn’t already know. He read on through the week and watched the initial panic change to pity.

            No wonder Potter looked at me the way he did when I presumed to feel sorry for him, Draco thought idly as he flicked through the pages.

            The paper said that Potter couldn’t speak English any more, that he didn’t know where or when he was, that he resisted the attempts of the Healers to help him. There were a few hints that something else might have happened, but the wilder stories faded without being picked up. Draco reckoned that what had really happened to Potter was enough to satisfy the public’s craving to know more about their hero.

            Draco’s favorite sentence came from the last article that was specifically about Potter himself; there were others that connected the attack on Potter and the attack on his mother or used the moment to criticize St. Mungo’s, but he wasn’t interested in reading them.

            “It is to be hoped that Mr. Potter will realize how important his life is to the British wizarding public and try again to become the icon of heroic action that we all need.”

            Draco rolled his eyes as he snapped the paper shut. No matter what happened to him, or how he managed to adapt, Potter would never be that hero the paper wanted again. He was a stranger in his own country, since he couldn’t make himself understood in his own language, and Draco thought that he probably shouldn’t live by himself if some of the other reported effects were so bad.

            But the perusal of the articles had given Draco what he wanted: a reason to maintain his interest in Potter. He nodded to no one in particular and summoned Epiphany to take the papers back to their proper place.

            Yes, he did not regret making the offer of help.

*

            “How are you today, Harry?”

            Harry sighed. He enjoyed Hermione’s visits, but she was as determined as any of the Healers to get him back to “normal,” and he knew that her politeness was really only a cover for the lectures she would begin soon.

            He understood, he really did. He couldn’t say a word that Hermione heard for herself anymore; she used a Latin dictionary to grasp a bit of what he was saying, and no more than that. Or she had him write it down and then went home and translated it. So she would know what he felt and thought about things, but only hours later.

            Harry thought that the people who wanted to help him really had to hear how he felt about it from moment to moment, in free-flowing conversation—

            The way Malfoy had.

            But Malfoy wasn’t here right now, and Hermione was, talking with a desperately bright light in her eyes. Harry sighed again and focused on her.

            “The Healers tell me that you aren’t eating your food as much as you should be, Harry,” Hermione began.

            Harry gave her a look. One thing he had noticed was that she said his name much more often since the attack, as if she thought that he had changed into a different person, too, and this was a way to convince herself that she was still speaking to her friend.

            Hermione didn’t grasp the look, and gave him a confiding smile. “The food can’t be that bad, Harry. You’ve had worse, I’m sure.”

            Only at the Dursleys’. But it was the behavior of the Healers that Harry wanted to tell her about if he could, and not the food. He shook his head and reached out an impatient hand. Hermione raised an eyebrow and gave him the parchment and quill. She tried to look solemn, but her mouth quivered hopefully. She probably thought that Harry wanted to write down what he had to say, and that was “a stride towards communication.”

            She didn’t know that Harry only did this because he had to, and that someday he was going to find a better substitute for the English words that traveled in at his ears and not out through his mouth again.

            As always, Harry spent a few moments concentrating while he held the quill. He should be able to write down the words if he could hear them, right? He’d learned how to write when he was a kid, and the spell couldn’t have damaged all the parts of his brain that controlled language. The words should come out of his hands.

            But they didn’t. The only difference between trying to write and trying to speak his abandoned language was that Harry could actually feel the twitch of the magic barrier that insulated his brain from producing English, flexing and bending like a wall made of pudding.

            He shuddered and wrote down his complaints about the Healers. This was something he felt every day, so maybe it was different from all the other things he wanted to say and couldn’t. Hermione could take it over and look at it, and meanwhile the Healers would go on treating Harry like he was a spoiled child who refused to get better, instead of being unable to do what they wanted.

            He smiled as he wrote. He hoped that he would get to see Hermione come storming in, full of indignation and rage, and give Leonora a piece of her mind. Leonora thought she was special because she had a natural Healing gift she could use even without a wand. It wasn’t Harry’s fault that the injury in his brain had resisted her gift, and she shouldn’t be taking her disappointment out on him.

            “I’m glad it’s something happy, this time.”

            Hermione reached out and put a hand on his arm. Harry lifted his free hand and squeezed back, then completed the last sentence with a flourish. One of the things he loved about Latin was that the verb could travel around the sentence. He had put it at the beginning of the sentence and in the middle and at the end, just for variety, in the message. He handed the parchment to Hermione.

            “The Healers?” Hermione had learned to recognize that word, at least. She looked earnestly at Harry. “You know they’re only trying to do their best by you?”

            Harry had perfected a slow, cynical look. He knew he’d perfected it because Leonora had told him so, not because they let him have a mirror. He gave it to Hermione now.

            “They do want the best,” Hermione said. “There are some of the most skilled Mind-Healers in the world here.”

            Harry wished there was a simple expression or gesture that he could use to point out the fact that they hadn’t cured him so far, and maybe she was overrating their skill. But there wasn’t, so he pointed towards the door instead and gave Hermione a hopeful glance.

            “It’s not for the best,” Hermione said. “Or not unless you want to go into the garden.” The garden was an interior courtyard that St. Mungo’s had filled with flowers and trees, but it was too small for Harry’s tastes, and too familiar by now.

He shook his head and tapped the key that Hermione usually wore hanging around her neck. It was the key of the first flat she and Ron had owned together after they left Hogwarts. They didn’t own that flat anymore, but Hermione had made a copy of the key, and Harry knew it symbolized home to her.

Hermione sighed, a wistful sound. “I wish I could, Harry. But it’s not for the best.”

            Harry turned his back on her and folded his arms. Why couldn’t she see that staying within four walls for a solid month except for brief trips to the garden was killing him far faster than the wound would have, even if they went away from the ambient magic of the hospital that the Healers were convinced stabilized it?

            “We’re all doing the best we can, Harry,” Hermione whispered. “We all want you well. You know that.”

            Harry stamped his foot. That wasn’t enough. He knew Ron was worried about him, and Ginny, and Dean, and everyone else who’d visited. The problem was that they were so worried, so preoccupied with how they’d almost lost him, that they didn’t seem to remember he was alive and right in front of them and needed other things instead of endless coddling.

            Hermione’s visit didn’t last much longer after that. Harry knew she was eager to go home and translate what he’d written. He wondered why she didn’t bring the Latin dictionary with her to his room, but he hadn’t seen it since she had given up attempting to use it to understand his speech. He didn’t know why, and he couldn’t even ask. The sentences he could write down were too precious to be wasted on stupid things like that.

            No, instead he had to make arguments about why he should be allowed the normal human privilege of going home. He hadn’t felt the curse in his brain change for a fortnight. He thought St. Mungo’s had done all it could for him, and now he should be allowed to start living his life and go back to his own variation of normal.

            Harry scowled. The problem was, no one else thought so, and they outnumbered him and had the walls and wards on their side.

            Except maybe Malfoy.

            It shamed Harry to think how much he was looking forwards to seeing Malfoy again. Of course, it probably wouldn’t happen. The offer he’d made to help Harry had seemed genuine, but probably it had slipped his mind again the moment he went home, and he would never—

            Then the door opened and Malfoy walked in.

            Harry almost lunged forwards to greet him. In the end, though, he managed to restrain himself to a slow nod and a smile.

            “You can speak to me, Potter.” Malfoy’s voice was lazy and heavy through his words, reminding Harry of sunlight pouring down on ice. “Or did you forget that?”

            “I’m so frustrated that it feels as if I’m forgetting lots of things,” Harry admitted. “Hermione was just here, and she won’t listen to any complaints I make about the Healers. I think she would if I could just get them across in words she understood.” He felt a brief sense of betrayal, since he was complaining to Malfoy about one of his best friends, but loyalty couldn’t persuade him to shut himself up behind mental walls any longer.

            “Why don’t you walk out and leave the Healers behind?” Malfoy asked softly. “I would have thought you could do that.”

            “I tried the minute I felt better. They think I’m mentally incompetent to judge anything, since the curse affected my brain.” Harry made a foul gesture at the door to show what he thought of that. “Ron and Hermione are so worried about me—and they think my intelligence is affected, since I’m losing my grasp on English—that they go along with whatever the Healers suggest. If I left, they’d bring me back. And who else could I hide with?” He scowled. “Besides, could you imagine the headlines? ‘Who Kidnapped the Chosen One?’ ‘Country Worried as Boy-Who-Lived Continues Missing.’”

            Malfoy laughed. The sound was sharp and lovely, Harry thought, like a splinter of snowflake. “Your friends could learn Latin to communicate with you, surely.”

            “Hermione tried,” Harry admitted. “But she said that I spoke too fast and she couldn’t keep up with my pronunciation. Apparently it’s different from what the dictionaries told her it should be.”

            “It sounds fine to me.”

            Harry smiled warmly at Malfoy, despite everything. Then he sat down on the bed and said, “Now. You spoke of helping me. What else can I do, besides learning some language which the curse doesn’t magically prevent me from speaking?”

            Malfoy took a seat on the chair Hermione had used. He blazed like a candle in Harry’s dull room, and Harry was half-afraid one of the Healers would sense his presence there just because he was so different from everything else nearby. “You mentioned that your curse had other effects. I’ll need to know what those are before I tell you what you should do.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. There was a hint of smug delight in those last words. He still thinks it’s fun to order me around, even though years have passed since he was a prefect.

            But it wasn’t enough smug delight to bother him, after all that had happened to him. Harry tucked his legs up beneath him and sighed. “Well, for one thing, I see auras around people.”

            Malfoy raised his eyebrows. “What do they look like?”

            Harry let his eyes unfocus and his gaze drift across the room as if he had lost his glasses and was looking for them. It took a minute longer than usual, perhaps because he had never seen the aura around Malfoy before, but then the air around Malfoy’s head and shoulders turned gold and white and brown. “A colored silhouette,” Harry muttered, “with the colors clearly separated. They radiate out from you and get fainter the further they travel.”

            “Do they interfere with your sight of other things?” Malfoy asked. “With your concentration? That could be a sign of the curse affecting your sight.”

            Harry blinked in pleasure, and the aura vanished. No one had discussed his curse with him like that before. The Healers used technical terms that he couldn’t understand, as if it was somehow important that he not know what they meant, and Hermione slid into them without noticing. Sometimes Harry had thought, based on their words, that he could lose his sight and other times that he couldn’t. It didn’t help that they couldn’t comprehend his descriptions of what the auras looked like except at the most basic level. “No. They only appear when I’m tired or letting my mind wander. The one I saw around you vanished the moment I reacted to your words. And they don’t mean anything, as far as I can tell. The ones I see around the Healers and my friends change from viewing to viewing.”

            “Hmmm.” Malfoy cocked his head to the sight. “What else?”

            Harry closed his eyes and bit down on his tongue. The pain seemed to fill his mouth and radiate throughout his being. His tongue turned cold and numb, and Harry felt himself shivering. He opened his eyes and saw Malfoy staring at him.

            Well, he saw Malfoy staring at him first. Then an image of Malfoy stood up from the chair and walked through the wall. Another one melted out of his body and keeled over to the floor, a strangling snake around his throat. A third one leaped into the air and soared about on large silvery wings like a bird.

            Harry couldn’t control his response, and snorted. The visions were gone in a second. Malfoy asked, “Well?”

            “I see futures that can’t possibly come true,” Harry said. “How will you walk through the wall when you leave here? Or grow wings? Or get strangled by a snake? It’s like being a Seer, but absolutely useless.”

            Malfoy’s face twisted. “Some viewings are metaphorical, rather than true and straightforward prophecies—”

            “I’ve asked after the people I saw futures for,” Harry said. “Or the Healers said. Nothing I saw has come true, in any version whatsoever. In fact, in one case the opposite came true. I thought one Healer who helped heal the hole in my skull was going to marry the man she was with, but it turned out she’d eloped with someone who doesn’t work at St. Mungo’s. Shouldn’t I have seen that if the visions had any truth at all?”

            “It does seem likely.” Malfoy leaned forwards on the chair, hands clasped, and looked at him in fascination. Harry could tolerate that, because he knew that Malfoy did consider him as a sort of project. The Healers were supposed to be helping him, but he hated their false “compassion.” Malfoy could be as academic as he liked about it. Harry knew he would never get any more than curiosity from him.

            He felt regret about that for a minute. Malfoy was beautiful enough that—

            Harry shrugged one shoulder and shoved the thought into the back of his mind. He hadn’t had time to think a lot about his preferences, which had swung more and more in the direction of men, before Greyback attacked him. He didn’t have time to think about it now. His concern had to be the curse.

            “I don’t think it’s damage to your eyes,” Malfoy said. “But the curse is interacting with your brain and moving you in the direction of…wisdom.”

            Harry blinked. “What?”

            “Think about it.” Malfoy’s voice edged only a little higher, but Harry thought that was the equivalent of leaping to his feet and pacing about in excitement, for him. “Seers are considered wise. Those who can see auras are, or were thought to be at one point in history, Seers of another type, sensitive to the moods or fates of the people they were seeing. And Latin’s been considered a language of wisdom among both Muggles and wizards for centuries.” He faced Harry with a narrow smile. “Your shield and Greyback’s spell both had different purposes. But when they hit your brain, I think their purpose was transformed. The curse is giving you what could be seen as wisdom. Granted, since the original magic was Dark, the things it does are either useless or annoying. But that’s the basis that unites all of them, I’m certain.”

            Harry sat very still for a minute. No one else had been able to offer him an explanation so elegant and unified, and he was afraid to reach out for it.

            He was afraid to hope.

            He half-wanted to argue. Why hadn’t the Healers seen that? Why hadn’t Hermione?

            But then, he was becoming increasingly convinced that the Healers would need help finding the paper to wipe their arses with, and Hermione wanted rational explanations for things. She would ask how Dark Arts and a shield could cause brain damage based on wisdom, and would conclude they couldn’t, so she would keep searching for a different answer.



            “All right,” he said at last. “That sounds reasonable. What does it mean?”

            “I don’t have the slightest idea yet.”

            Harry stared at Malfoy, then laughed. “At least you’re honest.”

            “It’s harder to lie in Latin,” said Malfoy, with a face so innocent that Harry was immediately sure that he had done exactly that.

            Harry shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “So what does it mean in terms of what we can do? Do you think I can convince the Healers to let me go if I tell them what connects these separate things?”

            “I’ve got to know St. Mungo’s Healers fairly well since my mother was attacked,” Malfoy said. Harry wondered again what had happened to Mrs. Malfoy, but again, it didn’t seem like the right time to ask. “They didn’t want me at her bedside. They didn’t want to take away the pain of a missing limb when she asked.”

            Harry winced. At least that didn’t happen to me.

            “I had to argue and fight and argue again before they would listen to me and realize that their way of doing things was not necessarily the best way.” Malfoy’s eyes glittered, and his hands clenched slowly into fists. Harry watched him in fascination. His beauty wasn’t destroyed but transformed by his anger, as though cold sunshine was falling on an iceberg. “I think that the same thing has to happen to you.” He leaned forwards and peered into Harry’s eyes. “Will you let me translate for you, Potter?”

            Harry licked his lips. “I just—”

            “Yes?” Malfoy’s voice was slightly impatient.

            “Why are you doing this?” Harry asked. “I know that I need you, because you’re the only person I know who speaks Latin, and you seem to have a grudge of your own against the Healers, but why are you putting so much time in for me? Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he added hastily. The last thing he wanted was for Malfoy to get so offended that he would walk right out the door. “But what’s in it for you?”

*

            Draco relaxed. When Potter first started talking his reasons for helping, he had expected a tirade about Slytherin selfishness and ambition.

            But it seemed that Potter had changed in more ways than the obvious. He could accept, without taking a stand on a moral pinnacle over it, that Draco wasn’t someone to simply walk up and begin heavy labor out of sheer compassion.

            “Like I said,” he murmured, “I know something about how much Healers tyrannize over patients that they aren’t certain how to cure. I will take great pleasure in thwarting them.”

            Potter raised an eyebrow. “And that’s enough?”

            His voice slid smoothly over the Latin vowels in a way that Draco couldn’t remember it doing with English. He wondered what Potter would say if he told him that. Probably a stammering denial and a blush. Yes, things had changed, but Potter had not fundamentally altered his personality.

            “Yes,” Draco said. “It is, for right now. Of course, when you’re free of hospital and you’re considering giving your story to the papers so that they can understand what really goes on here, then you might remember me.”

            “To all those papers that write in Latin,” Potter muttered, and leaned back against the pillows on his bed, scowling.

            “We’ll find a way,” Draco said. “Perhaps you can learn French and give it to them that way. But there’s no use in giving up before you start, Potter.”

            Potter blinked and looked at him, assessing. Draco expected more arguments, but Potter inclined his head and took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

            Draco learned at that moment how powerful a jolt of surprise Potter could give him simply by admitting that he was right. It felt as though his feet were about to leave the ground. His mouth seemed to flood with sugar water.

            How powerful a jolt, and how sweet.

            Draco licked his lips and swallowed back the imaginary sugar water. “We need allies,” he said. “People we can convince of your sanity and your willingness to work on being independent again in some other place than St. Mungo’s. Would it help if I spoke to your friend Granger?” There was no malice in his voice when he said her name, and he watched Potter take note of it with a faint rise of his eyebrows.

            “It would help, and you have to,” Potter said. He sat back up again, but tucked his feet up beneath him. He looked oddly defenseless. Draco hoped it was only the hospital robes that made him look that way, or they had worse problems than the fact that no one wanted to try and understand what the curse had done to Potter. “You’re the only one who can speak for me.”

            He rubbed his hands up and down his arms as if rubbing away a chill. Draco had seen his mother make the same gesture when she realized that she had to trust him to argue for her, since the Healers didn’t seem to listen to any patient.

            Draco narrowed his eyes. He wouldn’t want to be in the same position himself, dependent on someone who could betray him, but if Potter didn’t dare trust him, then they were doomed. “Remember that,” he said sharply, “but don’t hesitate to argue with me.”

            Potter looked up abruptly. He seemed to study Draco with eyes that pierced deeper than any pair of eyes possibly could, at least when they belonged to a wizard who hesitated to use Dark Arts.

Then he laughed. “Of everything we have to struggle with,” he said, “I think my not arguing with you is the last thing we should worry about.”

Draco smiled and stood. “So long as you haven’t learned the helplessness they wanted to enforce on you,” he murmured. “I was only checking.”

“Of course you were.” Potter held out his hand, his eyes steady. “Hermione’s supposed to visit at two tomorrow. Can you come?”

Draco gripped the hand and felt the pulse throbbing, strong and steady, for a moment beneath his fingers before he answered. “I will be here.”

Potter watched him go, fingers on his throat as if he was feeling the difference that actually being able to speak his new native language made. Draco paused at the door to look back, but didn’t speak the taunting insult he’d planned on.

Not with those green eyes as steady as the pulse.

He shut the door and went down the corridor to visit his mother. He told himself he was glad that Potter was being so adult about it all, and that they didn’t need to spend time butting heads. Perhaps a month under the curse with no one else who’d succeeded in helping him made Potter more tractable.

            He didn’t allow himself to think, because he didn’t want to, of the way that Potter seemed to affect him.

*

            “Harry! How are you?”

            Harry smiled and hugged Hermione. He was glad that she’d come without Ron, at least this time. Ron more usually visited in the evenings, anyway, since he was still busy with his work as an Auror during the days.

            The work I’ll never perform again.

            Harry tried his best to ignore the bitterness. The one piece of advice the Healers had given him that had proved useful was not to think too much about the past. If he couldn’t be an Auror again, then he couldn’t, but that didn’t lessen his ability to live a good life. He could do other things.

            Time to do them, he thought, and nodded to the parchment that Hermione carried with her, raising his eyebrows.

            Hermione frowned for a moment, but then seemed to remember what he’d written the other day. “Oh, the Healers,” she said. “They say that they’re still treating you the same as they ever were, Harry. They’re giving you good meals and trying to give you good exercise, but you won’t cooperate.” She paused and regarded him severely.

            Harry growled. He knew that Hermione loved and respected the rules, and she’d studied the guidelines for hospital visitors so many times by now that she must know them by heart. But the Healers hadn’t been able to find anything wrong with his eyes that would explain the visions and the auras, and they didn’t know why the curse prevented him from speaking English. They just kept saying that he should be able to, and then they blamed him when he couldn’t.

            “I know that they might not be everything you could wish for,” Hermione began in a soothing tone. “I know that they exasperate you, and you wish you could go home. But, Harry, they’re the ones who know best. They’re the ones who can treat a curse like this.” She took a deep breath, and Harry saw the glitter of tears in her eyes.

            “I’m so frightened,” she whispered. “I’m so frightened that you’ll never get better, that you’ll have to stay here for years like Neville’s parents. Please, Harry. Can you go along with them? For me? So that you can be free again someday?” She reached out and held his hand, staring earnestly into his eyes.

            Harry might have melted. But Hermione had asked him this before, and nothing had actually changed. The Healers continued to look for what they thought should be there instead of at what actually was.

            Besides, he had an advocate now.

            Who, at the moment, was opening the door behind Hermione. She turned around with a mild look, probably assuming it was Leonora or one of his other failed attendants.

            She stiffened all over when she saw Malfoy. Harry was glad that he held her hand, or he thought she would have tried to pick up her wand. As it was, she bowed her head in a way that made Harry wince, because her neck must be so tense, and spoke in a constrained, chill tone. “Malfoy. What do you want?”

            Malfoy nodded to Hermione and looked over her head at Harry. Harry understood what he intended to do when the Latin words flowed out of his mouth. “Agitne hoc semper?” Does she always do this?

            Hermione stood still this time, instead of stiff. Harry thought that was at least an improvement. He massaged her fingers and nodded at Malfoy. “Yes. And she was just trying to convince me to lay back and let the Healers have their way.”

            “But that doesn’t work.” Malfoy took a step forwards that Harry would have called aggressive, except he couldn’t envision Malfoy becoming that upset over him. Hermione backed up a step. Harry didn’t think she was frightened; from the way she positioned herself, she was trying to protect him from Malfoy. “Tell me, Granger,” Malfoy said, shifting back to English and looking at Hermione. “Why haven’t you, or someone else, arranged to learn Latin now that Harry speaks it?”

            Harry. His name had never sent a spark and a thrill through him before.

            “Or why didn’t you cast a translation charm that would allow you to hear what he says as English?” Malfoy continued relentlessly. “I know that that isn’t beyond the range of advanced magic—which the Healers should certainly have access to.”

            “The barrier in his head from the curse won’t let us use charms like that,” Hermione said, firing up with true best friend temper. “We’ve tried. And I don’t care if you speak Latin, if you’re trying to talk Harry out of receiving help, then—”

            Harry had never seen the coldness of Malfoy’s face turn hard since meeting him again, but he watched it happen now.

*

            How dare she.

            Granger might not know about his mother being in hospital. She might not be able to know how profoundly Draco had changed since those days when he was in school and had cared mostly for the next day or the next week instead of the next decade. She had no real reason to think that someone Sorted into a House she despised could ever really change.

            But she had heard him speak Latin, and she had seen that Potter’s face didn’t turn blank with shock on seeing him. And she was intelligent enough that Draco was inclined to demand more of her than he did of someone like Weasley. She could not give him the benefit of the doubt. She could not link his presence here with her friend’s unhappiness, and realize how extreme it must have been to send him seeking Draco’s company in preference to the Healers’.

            She had leaped immediately to the conclusion that condemned her friend, instead of the one that would allow him to retain some dignity.

            Draco looked at her with an expression that he knew would shut her up, and then shifted his eyes back to Potter’s face. “Do you want me to tell her in detail about the Healers?” he asked. “Or translate what you say?”

            “You don’t know enough details, I think.” Potter looked stunned, still, but sounded calm. “Besides, if she hears you talking to me and then repeating something, she’ll probably think that it came from me.”

            “Probably?” Draco glanced at Granger, who was standing as though someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on her head—shocked and yet resisting the shock, convinced that the person who had done it to her must be the one in the wrong.

            “Probably,” Potter repeated. “Hermione’s very reluctant to adopt new ideas once she gets one stuck in her head. Besides, there will be at least one English word in what I say: the Healer’s name. If she hears me say it and you repeat it, then perhaps she’ll let herself be convinced.” He let his lip curl a bit. “Hopefully.”

            Draco nodded and waited. Potter rubbed Granger’s hand and then stepped around her so that he was between Granger and Draco instead of the other way around. Draco relaxed without meaning to. He wanted to shake his head and snort in derision at himself, but the reaction of being more content when Potter was close was simply an honest one.

            “There’s a particular Healer named Leonora who’s been making my life miserable,” Potter said briskly. “They wanted her to try and Heal me by laying on her hands, which she can do to other patients. Apparently she’s never failed before. It didn’t work, and now she blames me. I don’t know for certain if they won’t assign her elsewhere until she cures me or if she simply is stubborn and wants to find a cure, but she taunts me and treats me like a slow child.”

            Draco nodded and repeated that to Granger in English. Granger’s eyebrows rose, and she looked more shocked than ever. Draco approved. As long as they could keep her off-balance, then they didn’t have to cope with a flood of reasons and excuses for her behaving as she had done.

            “Leonora? But I know her. I’ve met her. She would never do something like that. She’s been patient and gentle with Harry every time I’m here.” She folded her arms and glared at them both, though Draco thought most of the force in her look fell on him. “If you can’t come up with a better lie than that, Malfoy, I think you should leave.”

            “It’s not a lie,” Potter snapped. Draco could hear the strain in his voice, like the strain of ropes trying to bind a dragon, and could only guess how many times he must have tried to hold his temper in check when one of his friends disbelieved him. “She just doesn’t treat me badly in front of you. Why would she? She knows that you’re her ally.”

            Draco took some glee in repeating that, especially with the hurt way that Granger’s eyes widened. She was chewing a curl of her hair now, and her gaze darted back and forth between them as if she was trying to see the invisible strings that she must feel Draco was trying to control Potter with. But her jaw was sticking out more, too, and Draco thought she wasn’t far from a decision.

            Just make the right one, he thought at her in irritation. Potter needs the support of his friends.

            And why should I care about that?

            Draco laid the consideration aside for later, carefully wrapped in golden tissue and secured in an ivory box. He had laid many thoughts aside in his mind like that, among them thoughts of the war and the way he had had to torture people. He had never gone back to them. Why should he? Dwelling on questions that had no answers and feelings that no longer resonated did no one any good.

            “I could,” Granger whispered, “I could remain here under a Disillusionment Charm and see what happens the next time she comes in to talk to you.”

            “You could,” Potter said at once. “Or you could trust me.”

            Oh, that made Granger’s cheeks turn pink. She glanced back and forth between Potter and Draco, then said, “You must be desperate, if you’re letting Malfoy speak for you.”

            Potter nodded tightly, once. His arms were folded, the nails of his right hand digging into his left elbow. Draco reached out and folded his hand back without thought. Potter blinked at him and relaxed his posture.

            “I want out of here,” Potter said.

            Granger seemed to understand this almost without the translation. Her eyes darted to the walls of Potter’s room, and she nodded a bit. “I can see why you would,” she whispered. “But they know best how to treat you here.”

            “Not without someone by my side to fight for me,” Potter said. “And I haven’t had anyone like that.”

            Granger looked up with her eyes full of guilt. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she whispered. “I would have, if I knew.”



            “I know that,” Potter said, and bridged some of the gap between them by reaching out and squeezing Granger’s shoulder. “But the important part is that you believe me now, and work with Malfoy and me to get me out of here. All right?”

            Draco felt himself almost fade into the background as he translated Potter’s replies and then Granger responded. Because Potter didn’t have to have him translate the English, the link was constant, a one-way circle, instead of having to flow back and forth twice through him. Granger listened to his voice, but spoke to Potter; Potter responded to her words, but depended on Draco to speak for him.

            If someone had asked him how he would withstand a situation like this, Draco would have laughed and predicted boredom and active pain. He hadn’t planned to spend his afternoon reconciling Gryffindor friends. He had been sure that Granger would need a lot more persuasion, and he had looked forwards to providing that persuasion.

            And yet, he was content to fade into the background now. He was content to watch the play of emotions across their faces and note the way that lines of tension slowly faded from around Potter’s eyes.

            Why?

            Another useless thought, laid aside in silver paper and ebony box to be opened when some bell that would never ring sounded. Draco had so rarely felt contentment like this that he was disposed to exult in it rather than drive it out of existence with too much questioning.

            Finally, Granger said, “All right, I’ll speak with the Healers. They’re used to thinking of me as an—ally, the way you said. It might be that they would take what I said more seriously.”

            “That’s the best plan,” Potter said and Draco translated.

            Granger still stood looking at them with a faintly shaking head before she turned and walked away. Draco was glad she had gone. Perhaps she would eventually become his ally as well, but for the moment, she made him uneasy when her attention fixed on him.

            “I want to leave this room,” Potter said suddenly. “Can we visit your mother?”

            Draco turned to stare at him in astonishment. Potter looked calmly at him, his head tilted to one side as though he made a suggestion like this every day and was only waiting now to see how Draco would respond to it.

            “I—I reckon we could,” Draco said. His voice was hoarse, and he had to clear his throat a few times before he responded. “I don’t know how she’ll react to the sight of you.” It was the only warning he could offer. Perhaps he should have refused, but the offer made his contentment grow, and that he was unwilling to lay aside. “She might not want to see you,” he added as an afterthought.

            “I know.”

            Draco stood staring at him for a moment, because he didn’t know this new and strange Potter who could accept that someone might not slaver with joy at the sight of him.

            But in the meantime, he shook his head and turned to lead the way down the corridor.

            He found another reason for joy as they passed Healers who stared at him and Potter. Once or twice they opened their mouths, but no one said anything. They’d been cowed into submission by him and the Malfoy money, and they seemed to assume that Potter couldn’t understand English anymore, either.

            Draco was hoping for some more spectacular reactions later, when the news of Potter being out of his room spread, or when more Healers knew about Granger’s questions.

            For now, though, the joyful way Potter looked at the walls and stretched his arms out quickened Draco’s breath and almost dimmed his nervousness as he laid his hand on the door of his mother’s room and urged it open.

*

            Narcissa Malfoy seemed graceful and perfectly symmetrical even without one arm. Harry didn’t know how she did that.

            Nor did he know how she looked at him with deep eyes when he stepped into the room, nodded once, and simply held out her remaining hand, saying, “The last time I saw you was in the Forbidden Forest. You appear to be in less danger than you were then, Mr. Potter, Dark curse or not. Welcome.”

            Harry had held her hand and muttered some incoherent words about Voldemort and how she saved his life and how he owed her a life-debt. She had done him the grace of ignoring those, since she couldn’t understand them anyway, and was now talking quietly with her son. Harry perched on a chair in the corner of the room, studying both of them.

            More of his attention wandered to Draco, though. He was smiling gently, his eyes fastened on his mother’s face. It didn’t seem as though he was ignoring the gap where her arm had been, either. It was simply that her expressions, her face, were more important to him. He stroked her hand once and asked in a low voice if he could get her anything. Mrs. Malfoy shook her head and began talking about some kind of investments. Draco seemed to know what she meant, because he bent closer and answered attentively. Harry tried not to listen.

            I never knew—I never knew that he could be like this.

            Of course, five years could do a lot for a person. Harry, who felt he was really steadier and more adult than he’d been five years ago, knew that. But he hadn’t known that Malfoy would change so profoundly in the direction of a decent human being.

            Mrs. Malfoy laughed. It seemed to be at something Draco had said, because immediately he pretended to puff up and said, “Fine, don’t take my advice then,” in a playful tone.

            Mrs. Malfoy shook her head, her smile faint but amused for all that. “Draco, darling, I simply don’t think that one should try to avoid all attention. Most people on seeing me will immediately know that I have a false arm. And silver will be lovely, for me to look at if nothing else. I do not need ivory.”

            Draco leaned back with one elbow on the table beside the bed and smiled at his mother. Harry picked up the narrowness in his smile and was sure that he had advised an inconspicuous arm just to make his mother pick a more obvious one. He wanted her to feel proud and as though she wasn’t diminished by what had happened to her, Harry thought.

            I wonder if he’ll try to manipulate me the same way? But since Draco had already settled it that he was helping Harry, it seemed that any manipulation would have already happened.

            At that moment, Draco turned his head and caught Harry’s eye. His smile deepened, but the narrow edge simply became more prominent. Harry smiled back nervously and hoped that it wouldn’t look nervous.

            “Mister Potter.”

            Harry turned around sharply. Leonora stood in the door of Mrs. Malfoy’s hospital room, her pointed glare saying that she ignored everyone in the room but him.

            “What is this nonsense?” she asked in a chilly, haughty tone Harry had learned to hate, because it always meant he was about to be scolded like a child. “Miss Granger has come to me and had the gall to say that I am not treating you properly. What did you tell her? Why did you complain?” She stepped closer. “I am your Healer, no one else.”

            Harry opened his mouth to respond, but the first Latin word had hardly emerged when Leonora shook her head.

            “You will respond in English,” she said, “which I know you can understand, like a proper adult, or I will have no choice but to report your non-cooperation to the rest of the Healers. Imagine what they will do to you.”

            Harry clenched his hands as a familiar feeling of frustration spread through him.

            And then Draco was there, standing between them like a living wall.

*

            Draco recognized the kind of person this Healer Leonora was at once, because he used to be that kind of person himself.

            She had the ruins of self-satisfaction on her face; she had a valuable talent and was used to exercising it, but she hadn’t yet got over finding a challenge that defeated her talent. It was the way Draco knew he used to look when he played Quidditch against Potter and discovered that, no matter how good he was, he would never be good enough. And her chin was pointed with sullen anger. If she couldn’t conquer the person who had presented the challenge, she would at least make them suffer.

            Draco knew that look even better.

            However, it was possible that she might be reasoned with. Draco had become the kind of person who could be, and Potter was not diplomatic enough to make the try. Therefore, he held her eyes and said in his calmest, most soothing, most authoritative voice, “You know that he cannot speak English. The curse prevents him. I am his translator, since I understand Latin. I trust that that is acceptable?”

            Leonora gave a small toss of her head, and Draco realized at once that his assessment had been slightly off. Leonora was not merely spoiled, but someone who had never had her self-complacency shaken before. It would take more patience than Draco could muster, perhaps, to break through that barrier.

            “If he can speak it, he can understand it,” Leonora said. “I don’t care what game he’s playing, he ought to be able to see when to stop it and let someone who understands what brains are supposed to be like take over.”

            Draco stood close enough to Potter that he could feel him shaking with rage. Draco had to admit himself a bit impressed. Such overwhelming condescension wasn’t common in the life of someone like Potter.

            In school, Draco would have said that he could use doses of such condescension to help him learn something about the way ordinary people lived. But the situation had changed, and he had changed, and he no longer wished to say that. Therefore, no one else should think it.

            But as much as he wished to say that, he thought he should let Potter speak. After all, that was the whole point of difference between him and the Healer. He stepped aside, with a short bob of his head, and looked at Potter.

            The man was not as stupid as Draco had once believed him to be, or else the years had improved him in the same way they had improved Draco. He at once moved forwards, eyes so hard that the Healer blinked and backed up a step.

            “You’ve done nothing but blame me for your failure since I got here,” Potter whispered. His voice crisped and crackled deliciously at the corners, making Draco feel as if he stood near a large fire. Like all fires, it might burn out of control, but that was the price for being near such warmth. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care about you. You can’t cure me, and as far as I’m concerned, you never will. It’s not my fault that that might make your superiors distrust you. I’m leaving St. Mungo’s and going elsewhere, to learn how to live again instead of simply get healed.”

            Draco translated the moment Potter finished speaking. He couldn’t imitate the fire-tone of Potter’s voice, and he didn’t try. He selected a heavy, flat tone instead, one that should clang Potter’s choices as flat as a coffin lid over the silly Healer’s ambitions.

            When he finished, Leonora’s face was white, and she looked as if this second challenge might well destroy her. She fisted her hands behind her back and gave Potter a cold little bow. It would have been more impressive if she hadn’t tottered at the end of the bow with rage.

            “I will tell the other Healers about this,” she said. She probably meant that to sound impressive, too. In reality, it sounded like the way Draco used to whinge in Hogwarts when he threatened to tell the professors something Potter had done. Draco gave a mild shudder as he watched Leonora whip out of the room.

            I am glad I am not that person anymore.

            “I’m sorry this happened,” Potter said. Draco glanced over his shoulder and found that those ridiculously large green eyes were liquid with guilt. “I didn’t mean to argue in front of your mother, when she must—”

            Draco glanced at the bed to be sure, but, as he had thought he would find, his mother’s eyes were bright with fascination and she held several of the blankets clenched in her hand.

            “Mr. Potter, you should not apologize,” she said. She had read Potter’s expression better than the Healer, and also decided to acknowledge that he could participate in the conversation anyway, which was more than that slip of a Leonora had ever done. “That was the most entertainment I have had in long days.”

            “I have to go, now,” Potter said. He seemed able to move on from his guilt faster than he could have at Hogwarts, Draco thought. He was staring at the floor in distress and biting his lip. “I just—I wanted to wait until Hermione could tell all the Weasleys about it, but I’ll have to seek shelter in the Burrow now. I can’t stay here.”

            Draco translated the relevant parts of that for his mother, who snorted and said, “Of course you can’t stay here, Mr. Potter. And I see no need to honor this place with my presence any longer when I have decided on the kind of arm I want.” She flung back the covers of her bed and rose. She was the only person Draco knew who could make hospital robes look regal.

            “Mother?” Draco stared despite himself. Until this afternoon, she had seemed so reluctant to decide things. Of course she would be. It was a shock to get used to a Dark injury, and especially one that so affected her looks. Far more than looks was important to a Malfoy, of course, but it affected the perceptions of observers. Draco had thought it would take another fortnight at least to coax his mother out of the room, into areas where others could see her.

            Then he saw the way her eyes were fastened on Potter’s embarrassment-darkened face, and he understood. She had someone to compare herself to, now. She had someone who was visibly weaker than she was. She could muster her strength and fling a veil of the right kind of condescension over Potter, who was so bewildered that he would be grateful for the kindness instead of resenting the motives that had inspired it.

            “Of course we must leave,” Narcissa said, and her beauty shone through her like an icicle, and Draco had to look away to catch his breath and his tears. “And you shall come with us to the Manor, Mr. Potter.”

            The ulp noise in the back of Potter’s throat needed no translation. Draco looked back in time to catch his mother’s merciless smile.

            “Of course you shall,” she said softly, and it sounded less like an invitation than a threat.

            Draco didn’t bother glancing at Potter, because, no matter what his objections, he knew they would be swept aside by the force of his mother’s personality.

            As Narcissa went on, detailing the protections of Malfoy Manor that would keep Potter safe in case of another attack by Death Eaters, and how he would be able to heal in peace and privacy with no one from St. Mungo’s intruding, and how she intended to complain to the hospital administrators over the way Potter had been treated, Draco reached back and squeezed Potter’s hand, hard. Perhaps it had been involuntary, but he had done this for Draco’s mother.

            Draco intended to see what could be done for him.

*

            Malfoy Manor was—big.

            That was the impression Harry had when he stepped into the house, and for long minutes he could see nothing else. The arched doorways and huge windows and halls that looked as if they were designed for feasts were there, but they all looked—big.

            Then other words started to intrude. The house was light and bright and cold, too. The colors seemed to be either white or shades of blue and yellow that blended into white or grey. The air of the place had a tingling shock to it, and Harry could only imagine that it was winter inside and summer outside. He shivered in spite of himself.

            If he’d been alone, he would have backed away. But Draco and Mrs. Malfoy were behind him, and Mr. Malfoy—Lucius—must be somewhere about. He straightened his shoulders and marched forwards.

            As he passed along the central corridor, with staircases and doors leading off it like tunnels through a rabbit warren, he started catching glimpses of warmth. Many doors stood open; many fires burned in many hearths. There were rooms done in deeper blues or yellows, including one that looked as if it was entirely underwater, with mounted fish on the walls. Harry felt himself beginning to relax. Of course, that was more likely to be some rare collection of magical fish than a hunter’s room, the way he’d sometimes seen in Muggle houses, but it was still something a bit more familiar.

            Then he glanced up and saw Lucius Malfoy stalking down the central staircase, carrying a complicated contraption in his hands.

            Harry stared. The contraption seemed to be made of silvery wires, with bits of flesh impaled on various ends and small starbursts of frozen blood at the joins. The bits of flesh still had fur attached to them, and here and there Harry could make out what seemed to be a paw or a section of an ear.

            Harry swallowed, queasy. He was sure it was blood magic, and even more certain that he didn’t want to know what it would do. He glanced down and away.

            But the sound of soft footsteps and rustling robes halted, and Lucius said something that forced Harry’s eyes back up. “Narcissa.”

            There were so many tones in that word that Harry couldn’t have named them all. He didn’t think that he wanted to try. His eyes traveled instinctively from the way Lucius stood still, the contraption held in light hands, to Mrs. Malfoy.

            She smiled up at her husband and walked up the stairs to meet him. Her single arm swung to the side to balance her, and on the other side, she occasionally leaned on the railing. When she stood next to Lucius, she put her arm around his neck and simply stood there. Perhaps she didn’t want to kiss her husband in front of strangers, Harry thought. He was blinking. His heart seemed to have frozen, and he didn’t know where Draco was.

            Lucius said softly, “I am going to find the ones who attacked you, Cissa. I’m going to destroy them.”

            Narcissa pulled her head back, her look of love lively and appreciative. “I appreciate that, Lucius,” she said. Then she did lean in.

            A sharp tug on Harry’s arm distracted him. Draco hissed into his ear, “We don’t want to stand here staring when they deserve to have a private moment,” and pulled him across the corridor into a room decorated with all the colors of fire.

            Harry swallowed and staggered and stood and stared where Draco had put him while he shut the door firmly behind them. The fire color of the room wasn’t an illusion, he saw. The tapestries glowed with gold. A phoenix was carved above the fireplace mantel. The red carpet and chairs would have done for the Gryffindor common room.

            “I didn’t think you’d have a room like this,” he said, the only thing he could say.

            “Great-Aunt Hortense was always eccentric,” Draco said, and took a seat by the fireplace. A wave of his hand—Harry wondered absently if that was wandless magic or just a spell keyed to the house—made flames spring up in it. “No one else in the Malfoy family would have chosen this color scheme.”

            Harry frowned. “Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you get rid of it?”

            Draco stared at him with his lips parted, looking as if he might have just realized that Harry was made of dung. “Change something an ancestor touched?” he asked. “A room that she particularly asked in her will might not be disturbed?”

            “Well, I didn’t know about the will,” Harry muttered, feeling absurdly awkward, and shuffled over to another chair. He shut his eyes and tried to shake the feeling of shock out of his body. It wasn’t just seeing the blood magic Lucius Malfoy was practicing and the way he and Narcissa had touched, he was sure. It was also the strangeness of finding himself here again, free of hospital at last, but in a place that was alive with memories of torture and Voldemort and Dobby dying and Bellatrix torturing Hermione—

            Harry felt his stomach heave and clenched his teeth against it. When he opened his eyes, Draco was watching him with an expression of understanding that had no understanding behind it.

            He can share my feelings on the surface, Harry thought, but this is his home, and that’s stronger for him.

            He shifted in his seat, uneasy that he could read Malfoy so well, and wondering why it was so. Malfoy seemed to interpret his movement as something else, and politely raised his eyebrows. “Are you hungry? I can send one of the elves for food, if you would like.”

            The nausea squirmed in Harry’s stomach again. He hastily shook his head. “No, that’s all right,” he said, voice too high. “I just—it’s odd being here.”

            Malfoy smiled, an expression that seemed to drape over his features instead of sit on it. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

            Harry licked his lips. He didn’t really want to discourage Malfoy from helping him, but at the same time, he had to know. “Why is this happening?” he asked. “Is helping me really worth all the trouble?”

*

            Draco wanted to roll his eyes, but he saw Potter’s honest, perplexed face, and he knew it would be better to settle this once and for all than have the question keep recurring. He had already thought it was taken care of, but here it came back again, like a dead mouse resurrected by the Rodent-Lifting Curse.

            “Yes,” he said. “It is. I like being the only one who can do things. I’m the only one who can translate for you right now, the only one who could have extracted you from hospital with a minimum of fuss. And, as I’ve told you already, I have a dislike of the Healers after the way they tried to tyrannize over my mother. They did not want to admit that there were things they couldn’t do. With your extraction and the story that you’ll tell in the future, it will become obvious how incompetent they are.”

            Potter shook his head. His eyes were wide and uncertain. Draco restrained impatience. He could understand that. Until this point in time, Potter had had evil counselors. Even Granger seemed to assume that Potter’s intelligence had diminished simply because he no longer spoke the same language she did.

            “I could offer you money,” Potter said.

            “That would be most welcome.” Draco laughed at the expression on Potter’s face. “You thought I would refuse? I already said I would help you without money, but I’m hardly going to turn it down if you’ll give it to me.”

            Potter went on staring. Draco leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Well?” he asked.

            “How much have you changed? Why?” Potter’s voice was low.

            Draco relaxed. He had thought it would be a harder question. In reality, he had rehearsed the tale often and quietly to himself, wishing he had an audience. The house-elves hardly counted, and his parents knew the story already, having been there to watch it happen.

            Draco was proud of what he had become. To show it off to Potter was a pleasure.

            “After the war,” he said, staring at the far wall until he knew that Potter’s eyes were fixed on him in fascination and it was safe to look back, “I began to think seriously about the choices I had made. I discovered they were few, actually. So many times, I was swept along by the tide of circumstances. I did things not because I truly considered them or valued them or even because they could benefit me, but because they seemed like a good idea at the time. And I let my pride rule me too much. If I discovered later that I made a bad decision, I still stuck with the original one, because I thought changing my mind would make me look weak.”

            Draco shook his head with a faint smile. He could picture the boy he was talking about as someone separate from himself now, a flawed child with a permanent pout. It was pleasing to turn the figure over and discuss its faults when he was no longer it.

            “Pure pride is not like that. Pure pride is like pure metal. It can be melted down, recast, and refined from impurities before it is molded into new shapes. It changes in the doing, but that does not make it weaker.”

            Draco idly looked to the side to see Potter leaning forwards in his chair, hands clasped between his knees. Yes, he was the perfect audience, swallowing every word as if it were a rare fruit. Draco ducked his head a bit, turning it, presenting the profile that he knew would look most attractive to an observer sitting where Potter was.

            Why should he not do that? He liked to look attractive, and there were few people who could have the Chosen One’s eyes fastened on them.

            “I decided that my pride was pure silver, and that I would shape it as I pleased.” Draco looked up at the ceiling and stretched out a hand, knowing Potter would understand the gesture to refer to the whole house, as Draco intended it. “I began to take pride in the appearance of my home, in knowing the deeds of my ancestors, in appreciating the virtues and the beauty that they had handed down to me, and knowing how to counteract the flaws. The whole education of a pure-blood child once consisted of that, did you know that? Our power was our family, not what we could achieve as individuals. Of course, certain Malfoys did extraordinary things, but their extraordinariness was the gift of the family that had raised them, not something inherent to themselves.”

            “I can’t imagine you being content to only learn that.” Potter scratched the back of his head.

            Draco rolled his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. He said that deliberately in English, for the harsh sound of the words, though he had been sliding in and out of both English and Latin in his speech. “Times have changed. We live with more people, other people who have knowledge that exists outside the pure-blood family. But why not take that knowledge and bend it to the old standard? There is nothing wrong with that.”

            Potter scratched behind his ear this time. Draco made a mental note to tell the house-elves to give Potter shampoo that would counteract dandruff and an itchy scalp. “I can see some people who would say there was.”

            “Ah, but those people are no longer alive,” Draco said, holding up a finger. “Or, if they are, they are stupid and I don’t have to listen to them.”

            Potter tried to conceal a smile, but was unsuccessful.

            With a faint smile at him that made Potter blush in interesting ways, Draco went on. “I combined my education at Hogwarts with the education I picked up from the books in the Manor while I was under house arrest. I began to see that there was no reason that I could not change myself into a creature that would suit what I was—no reason in the world except fear of outdated standards. I changed. What you see now is what you emerged from the chrysalis.” He extended his arms like wings and had the satisfaction of seeing Potter’s eyes travel up and down the lines of muscles for a moment before he snapped them away.

            “My pride is different now,” Draco said. “I am different now. More patient with people, because so few of them can touch my pride. More willing to indulge myself, because I know when it would be a good idea not to do so. More determined to give pride to those people I know want it, as my mother did after she lost her arm. More determined to punish those who cause true damage, the way the Healers do.”



            “But you’re not interested in every charitable cause in the world?” Potter asked.

            “Why would I be?” Draco turned his head to the side so that Potter could look at his profile again. “There are other people to be that, and in any case, the thinner I spread myself, the fewer people I can help. It’s better for me to give money and time to those I am truly interested in. My pleasure makes me more likely for me to see a difficult task through.”

            Potter said nothing for long enough that Draco thought it best to look at him and make sure he wasn’t frowning. No, he still had a smile on his face, but it was of a different kind. He chewed his lip for long moments. Draco thought it a filthy habit, but then, Potter hadn’t had his education and had spent a month cooped up in a place that did him no good at all. He could be excused some indulgences.

            “That sounds as if it should be wrong,” Potter said at last. “But your logic is a lot better than it used to be.”

            “Yes, it is,” Draco said, rather disposed to accept the compliment to his present self than to resent the injury to his past self. He leaned forwards. “And what was your logic, meanwhile? That you should contribute to every cause? No wonder you look exhausted.”

            Potter blinked at him. “I look exhausted because the Healers tire me out.”

            “Of course you do.” Draco gave him a significant look. “And you didn’t answer the question. Did you try to spread yourself too thin? Did you try to do every good thing because you couldn’t bear to think of someone else accomplishing them?”

            “I was an Auror,” Potter said shortly, frowning. “That naturally limited what I could do.”

            “But you tried to save every victim,” Draco said, “and you were usually forced to ignore your own pride. I know you.”

            “You know more about my old self than about the new one.” Potter folded his arms and gave him a stubborn glare. “I’m in the same position with regards to you.”

            “The difference between us is that I am trying to give you some sense of how much time has passed,” Draco said patiently. “I’m handing you the knowledge to answer all your questions, if you pay attention. What have you told me about yourself yet?”

            “That I’m exhausted,” said Potter, with a pointed yawn.

            Draco stood at once and inclined his head. “Yes, and I believe my parents should have left the main staircase free for your passage by now,” he said. He delighted in the way that Potter flushed at that. He probably wanted to pretend that seeing Draco’s parents kiss in public didn’t surprise him at all, but there was no chance of that. “I should have let you rest at once instead of pulling you into this room for a lot of meaningless talk.”

            He’d meant that phrase as the sort of empty complaint that he and his friends exchanged all the time, and was surprised when Potter took it seriously.

            “But it wasn’t meaningless,” he said, leaning forwards and staring at Draco. “I learned that you’re finally independent and not just considering what other people think about you anymore, and I’ve learned that you’re a very good talker, in English and in Latin.”

            “And are those valuable things?” Draco asked quietly, standing still. He could feel Potter’s gaze on his back and shoulders and hands like a warm caress. Of course he had been trying to provoke exactly that sort of admiration—he always did, because he enjoyed being admired—but this was different. Potter showed his emotions more honestly than most of Draco’s friends did.

            “Yes,” Potter said. “Very valuable. I’m glad to know that you’ve grown up.” He smiled at Draco and traveled out of the room, keeping one hand on the wall as if he needed it so that he wouldn’t fall down.

            Draco took the time to clap his hands and quietly ask the house-elf who appeared to change the color scheme of the room he’d appointed to be Potter’s. The green could stay, he thought—it was a deep shade and would probably be soothing to Potter’s eyes—but he could add a bit of red and gold.

            After all, it was not as if Draco would be sleeping in that room. He could sacrifice a touch of aesthetics for the sake of Potter’s comfort.

*

            Harry woke slowly, so slowly that it seemed as if he was rising from the bottom of a warm sea to the surface. He blinked and then rubbed his eyes. His hands barely moved. The bed he lay on was comfortable, finally, and his hands wanted to stay where they were.

            Finally, he sat up, leaned back against the pillows, and looked around.

            The room was big enough to contain twenty beds, but there was only this one, in a cage of some sort, wooden poles that stood around it, planted in the floor. Harry saw rolls of cloth along their sides and suspected that curtains could be pulled between the poles, if you wanted to do it. The bed itself was a huge wooden frame, carved with leaping foxes and dancing dolphins, while an eagle spread its wings above Harry’s head.

            The curtains and the cloths along the poles were green, but the walls had a deep red tint to them, and every painting showed at least a hint of red and gold. Harry was surprised they had two such rooms in their house, but maybe this had been Great Aunt Hortense’s room, too, and they hadn’t wanted to change it.

            He dragged himself out of the sheets at last, rubbing his head—which still feel oddly clear from lying on such a comfortable pillow—and looking out the window. It was an enchanted window, of course. Harry might not know exactly where in Wiltshire Malfoy Manor lay, but he knew it wasn’t anywhere near a white beach shaped like a half-moon that extended long arms out into a dark blue sea.

            That didn’t matter. The smell of sea salt and the sharp breeze coming in through the window were as good as the real thing. Harry closed his eyes and drank it all in.

            Two days ago, he had thought he might never leave St. Mungo’s again. Most of the people who had come to see him since his accident had grown used to seeing him there, and assumed he would stay. Harry might have lost hope and become resigned, because what else was there to do except hope that his curse was cured?

            He couldn’t act alone. Of course, Hermione and the Weasleys would never leave him alone, not really, but they were so anxious that they wanted him to stay in St. Mungo’s, too.

            “I would never stop blaming myself if something happened to you because I told you to leave hospital when you shouldn’t, mate,” Ron had told him. There had been tears in his eyes.

            Harry blinked and shook his head, banishing the vision. He leaned towards the window and breathed in the salt again.

            There would be a confrontation with his friends. Even though he had told Hermione what was happening, that didn’t mean she was completely reconciled to Malfoy helping him. And he hadn’t told the Weasleys at all. They would be upset when they found out where he was, let alone who he was with.

            But Harry was resigned to that. The Weasleys were still his friends. They had tried their best to help him. They had always visited him in the month since Greyback had cursed him. They would understand.

            He would make them understand.

            In the meantime, he drew in another breath and then turned towards the crack of a house-elf, who was bowing to him and asking in a squeaky voice what he wanted for breakfast.

*

            “I am honored to have been called upon, Mrs. Malfoy.”

            Draco was already impressed. Blaise had recommended this maker of artificial limbs, Madame Anna Ivanovna Ranevskaya, but he’d never actually needed her services. Draco had been prepared for someone who would exhibit discomfort around his mother the way the Healers in hospital had experienced it, and look away from her and at him with an appealing expression, and talk far too much about money.

            If Madame Ranevskaya had ever thought about money in her life, or been in a place grand enough to intimidate her, it didn’t show. She was a small, neat woman with perfectly quiet manners. Other than a nod when she came in, she hadn’t once glanced at Draco. All her attention was for her mother.

            Of course, that attention was somewhat overwhelming—Madame Ranevskaya had piercing dark eyes and an air so sharp that Draco could imagine his father faltering before her—and so Narcissa’s answers weren’t quite as assured.

            “In silver, you said.” Madame Ranevskaya waved her wand, and a quill scribbled instructions out on parchment. She looked back at Narcissa and considered, her head on one side. “Is it to be the exact model of the other? Of course it must be symmetrical, but there are many ways to achieve that. The same muscles? The same length? To join at the shoulder? To come down the same distance?”

            Narcissa said, “Yes, in silver. I…” She turned and looked at Draco, as if he would have all the answers to questions that he had not considered in detail.

            Draco raised his eyebrows back and leaned against the wall, though he wasn’t crass enough to put his hands in his pockets or shrug. He wanted his mother to make these decisions. The long-term effects of being in hospital could cripple people if they started relying too much on others. Draco wanted his mother to stand up on her own. She needed to take command of her own life once again.

            She’ll always live with one arm gone, now. Best that she accept that.

            “I…” Narcissa faltered and blinked, but turned away from him to face Madame Ranevskaya again. “Yes, I want silver,” she said, as if she was using the words to give her some small space of time to consider her next ones. If Madame Ranevskaya suspected the same thing, she showed no sign of it on her smooth, calm face. “And it must look like the other.” Suddenly Narcissa lifted her chin, and the spark Draco had known and loved in his mother from his earliest childhood was back in her eyes. “It would be foolish to pretend that I was unchanged. I shall dare people to stare, and the stares to hold something besides approval.”

            “Very good, my lady.” Madame Ranevskaya nodded with a touch more approval than Draco had seen from her so far, though Draco wondered the next moment if he was imagining it; she was so verygood at controlling her emotions. “To join at the shoulder?”

            “Yes, to look exactly like the other.” Narcissa turned her head and looked directly at the wound for the first time, or so Draco thought. He was sure that she hadn’t given it that much of a narrow-eyed glare before, as if it were a spoiled pet that had a propensity for getting lost in her robes. “Although more beautiful.”

            “Metal can match living skin and muscle when it tries.” Madame Ranevskaya waved her wand again, and the parchment snapped into a single roll and skimmed back to her. She caught it and tucked it, and the quill, away. Then she stood in silence with her lips moving for a moment, so utterly unselfconscious that Draco felt unable to mock her as he could have, and nodded. “Like this?” she asked, swirling her wand before her.

            A trail of sparks became a floating, transparent, turning model of a silver arm. Draco caught his breath. If it was a little more solid, he would have taken it for the real thing. It was lovely, and when Narcissa advanced and held up her own real arm next to it, there wasn’t a hair of difference except the color and the transparency.

            “That’s perfect,” his mother whispered. “Does it exist yet?”

            “Not yet,” Madame Ranevskaya said, assured as before. “In three days, it will. I need time to cast and forge the pure metal.”

            Of course she does, Draco thought. I needed time to reforge my pride, too, and my mother needed time to prepare herself for this. We can’t fault an artist.

            His mother seemed to think the same thing. “Take all the time you need,” she said, with a gracious smile, the smile she had used before the attack. “I would rather have something strong and beautiful than something early.”

            Madame Ranevskaya dipped a small curtsey. “You shall have something that is both, my lady, by all the power that I carry in my hands.”

            His mother nodded back to her, and then Madame Ranevskaya stood and strode out of the room. Narcissa turned around with a stretch of her arm that Draco remembered her giving in the past when some troublesome duty had been well attended to. Her empty shoulder rose and fell at the same moment.

            That was a good sign, Draco thought, though his mother flushed in the next moment. Her original arm was gone, but she would wear a new limb there. He didn’t want her to become used to such unnatural gestures as the Healers had recommended, such as keeping the shoulder swaddled at all times and the sleeve pinned shut.

            Perhaps other witches and wizards would have to do that, and the Healers had recommended those measures with the best faith in their efficacy. (Though Draco rather doubted that last part). But Draco’s family had money, and they intended to use it.

            “Was Father pleased to see you?” Draco asked, as he escorted his mother to the door of her room.

            “Oh, yes.” His mother’s flush faded, and the look that Draco loved but rarely got to see, the gentle love she wore towards Lucius, bloomed there. Narcissa looked at the far wall and hummed beneath her breath.

            Then she seemed to remember she had an audience and veiled the love again. “You know what I mean to him,” she added.

            “And to me.” Draco kissed her cheek.

            His mother started to respond, but the air in front of them turned dark, then silver. Narcissa reached at once for her wand with her left hand. At least she had mastered that gesture early, Draco thought. “An intrusion into the wards?” she asked.

            “Unless I am much mistaken,” Draco said, walking past her to fetch Potter, “these intruders have red hair and a common surname, in every sense of that word.”

*

            Harry was glad that he had learned enough while he was in Auror training to recognize the signs of people trying to get through wards, although he didn’t get the specific warnings because he wasn’t tied to the Malfoy bloodline. He managed to get downstairs and to the front doors before Malfoy or his parents appeared.

            Not that Harry thought Lucius Malfoy would be much of a problem. The man stood in the center of a glorious blue aura, at least to Harry’s eyes, behind a half-open door he passed, and tossed chopped pieces of frogs into a wooden bucket. More frogs croaked nervously in cages behind him. Lucius looked utterly focused. Harry had no idea what he was doing and no desire to know.

            But Draco came striding down the center of the main entrance hall, the one he and Harry had crossed yesterday, with his head lifted and his eyes sparking with that molded pride he’d told Harry about. Harry’s main objective was to prevent that pride and Ron’s from clashing. Because of course Ron would be here, even if other members of his family also were. And probably Hermione.

            Harry hoped that Hermione could help him restrain Ron.

            He wasn’t counting on it.

            “Listen,” he said to Malfoy, “I know it’s your house, but would you mind translating for me instead of sending them off right away?”

            Malfoy gave him a single haughty look. Harry met it, and wondered how many people down the years had seen a look like that and simply backed away, without thinking about what might be behind it.

            Merlin knew he might have done the same thing before yesterday, and the conversation they’d had that convinced him, at least, that Malfoy really had changed since they knew each other in Hogwarts.

            When Harry stood up to that look instead of retreating before it, Malfoy gave him a thin smile and a cool nod. “I would be delighted to have you speak beside me,” he said, and opened the doors.

            Harry stepped forwards and watched the wards dissolve in front of him like blood in water, barely hearing Malfoy whisper behind him, “After all, aren’t we trying to give you your own tongue again?”

            It wasn’t just Ron and Hermione. Ginny peered anxiously over Ron’s shoulder, and Mrs. Weasley stood behind him, hands on her hips as if she imagined that she could scold Malfoy Manor into giving Harry up. Her eyes filled with tears when she saw him, and she hurried to him and caught him in a hug.

            “Oh, Harry,” she whispered in his ear. “We were so worried.”

            Harry caught his breath and nodded, patting her on the back. He smiled at Ron and Ginny at the same time, and looked at Hermione. Hermione gave him a resigned shrug, as if to say that she had tried but she couldn’t hold them back. Harry suspected that she hadn’t tried very hard. She might still distrust Malfoy herself, after all.

            “I’m all right,” Harry said, and Malfoy spoke up next to him, translating. Mrs. Weasley immediately let Harry go and stepped back as if she’d been burned, staring at Malfoy.

            “You speak Latin?” she whispered.

            “Yes,” Malfoy said in English. “The Latin he speaks. He’s asked for my help.” He looked entirely too delighted with that, especially with the way he looked the Weasleys over, as if he were measuring their ability to stand up after he made that declaration.

            Harry gripped his arm and shook his head at him warningly. Malfoy only smiled. “I think you should speak, Harry,” he said, raising his voice. “Too many people, even those who mean you well, haven’t heard your voice for too long.”

            Harry blinked. He hadn’t realized how much he’d picked up the manners of silence, the ones that he had sometimes thought the Healers preferred him to have. But Malfoy was correct, so he faced his friends. Malfoy spoke after he did, voice so flat that he seemed willing himself to fade into the background.

            That will never happen, Harry thought. Or at least it’ll never happen for me, not now.

            “I know that you only wanted what was best. But I was going mad there. The Healers would have done me more damage than the curse could, in the end. The auras and the visions I see aren’t constant, and I can see through them. And it’s time to stop pretending that the language issue will ever change. I want to be with people who don’t treat me like a child.”

            Ginny looked thoughtful as Malfoy spoke, but Ron only shook his head, eyes locked on Harry’s face as if he hoped he could stare him into thinking and feeling the same things that Ron did. “Don’t you see?” he whispered. “You are with someone who treats you like a child. I can see the smugness in every line of his face.”

            “Why does he treat me like a child?” Harry asked. “Yes, Ron, I know you don’t like him, but that’s not what I mean.”

            “He translates for you,” Ron answered in a revolted voice.

            Harry clenched his fists. Ron’s revulsion was too much like what he had felt himself when he realized that he would need someone to either learn Latin or speak after him. Helpless, caged, held away from everyone around him. That was the period when the Healers’ insistence on him returning to his old self had seemed to make the most sense. Why would he insist on inconveniencing everyone by sticking to this odd, old language that the curse had imposed on him?

            But he’d accepted the limits. If Ron loved him—and Harry was certain he did—then he could bloody well do the same thing.

            “That’s necessary,” Harry said evenly. “I found someone who could speak Latin and who’s willing to help me.” Malfoy translated the inflection, too, and although Harry didn’t look at his face, he was certain that a trace of an amused sneer showed up there. “Yeah, I wish I could still speak English. But I don’t think that will ever happen again. Maybe someday I can learn French or something else, and then we can chatter away in that. But for now, a translator is the way it has to be.”

            Malfoy translated that, and then turned his head to Harry and added softly in Latin, “The way it has to be?”

            Harry smiled at him and shook his head. “Truth and a phrasing to calm Ron down at the same time,” he answered.

            “Ah,” said Malfoy.

            “How do we know that he isn’t twisting your words and saying the wrong thing?” Ron demanded. “It would be just like him.”

            “Have you noticed that he doesn’t need to translate your words?” Harry snapped in irritation. “That’s because I can still understand English, even if I can’t speak it. I would notice right away if he was trying something like that.”

            “Oh. Right.” Ron blinked and fell silent for a minute after the translation, as if he was trying to think up some new objection.

            Hermione moved in with one. “Are you sure this is where you want to stay, Harry?” she asked quietly, eyes intent. “We’d be happy to have you at the Burrow, or at our flat if that’s too crowded for you.”

            Harry tilted his head at Malfoy. “And would you be happy to have him?”

            Hermione held up a book that Harry recognized as her Latin dictionary. “I could try again to learn it. I shouldn’t have given up so soon.”

            “No, you shouldn’t,” Harry agreed with a small smile. “But no, thank you, Hermione. I’m comfortable here for right now, and that’s enough.”

            She considered him with narrowed eyes, and then said, “I’m still going to learn Latin.”

            “Good,” Harry said. “It would be nice to have someone else to talk directly to.” He turned and looked back at Ron, wondering if he would make some other objection.

            Ron had been staring back and forth from him to Malfoy in dismay, Harry saw. He didn’t know how long he’d been doing that, but it was evidently long enough for Ron’s jaw to progress more than halfway down his chest. At last he snapped it shut and said in a mournful voice, “Holy shite, I reckon you really are comfortable with him.”

            “Ron!” Mrs. Weasley and Hermione said at the same time, in voices so similar that Harry grinned, although only Mrs. Weasley rapped her son on the back of the head and hissed, “Language!” at him.

            “Yeah, he is,” said Ginny. “I saw that right away. I don’t know why it took the rest of you so long to catch up.” She gave Harry a bright smile, and Harry was reminded why he had liked to date her when he had. “Malfoy’s good for him. He was starting to look tired and defeated in hospital, remember? Everyone thought it was from the effort of fighting his curse, but it’s obviously more than that if he looks so much better already. It was probably the weight of the Healers’ disapproval and that silly little girl who didn’t have anything better to do than whinge about the failure of her Healing gift.”

            Harry gave an exaggerated nod at Ginny, then said through Malfoy, “I didn’t expect you to accept it right away. But I do want you to accept it eventually. I’ve made my decision about where I’m happy and comfortable.”

            It didn’t escape him that Malfoy laid a possessive hand on his shoulder when he spoke those last words. Harry leaned back into Malfoy’s touch and raised an eyebrow at his friends in response.

            Ron chewed his lip and nodded so slowly that Harry thought some glaciers would have moved faster than his head. His voice seemed to take him longer to pull out of his throat, but he managed at last. “All right, mate. All right. If you’re really happy and he really treats you well.” He glared at Malfoy so hard that it seemed he wanted Malfoy to draw his wand and menace Harry right that minute, so he would have an excuse to attack him. “But when he doesn’t, I’ll hurt him.”

            Harry stepped forwards and squeezed Ron’s hand, hard. He could hear Malfoy muttering about a lack of graciousness, but he knew his best friend better, and he knew that was as much as they could count on from Ron—and even then, only because Ron loved Harry more than he hated Malfoy.

            “Thanks, mate,” he said.

            Either Ron had learned that particular Latin phrase or he guessed the meaning, because he was shaking his head and muttering about how Harry would have done the same for him before Malfoy started translating.

            With Ron won over, it didn’t take the rest of them long. Mrs. Weasley hugged him hard and promised him home-cooked meals; she either didn’t notice or didn’t care that Malfoy bristled about that, probably at the insult to his house-elves. Hermione made a final promise to learn Latin and stared into Malfoy’s face as if she could see the future of what he would do there. And Ginny gave Harry a grin and a glance at Malfoy that he knew well. She’d done the same thing when they were out sometimes and a handsome bloke had passed. Harry suspected, now, that she’d known about his declining interest in women before he did and was trying to come up with some way to signal it to him.

            But that’s the thing about Ginny, he thought, as he hugged her and ignored Malfoy’s small retching noises. She has a big enough heart not to take things like me breaking up with her personally—at least when it wasn’t because of me cheating on her or something.

            “Be as happy as you can,” Ginny said softly, stepping away from him. “When they first told us about your injury, I didn’t say anything, because it would sound insensitive—”

            Harry had to grin. For Ginny, that was remarkably diplomatic.

            “But, well, it didn’t sound so bad.” Ginny peered at him earnestly. “I mean, seeing auras and visions? Not what it could have been. And you can still understand English, so you’re still in touch with one half of the world.”

            Harry nodded back. He understood what she meant, which was enough to make up for any insensitivity she might have shown. And he had felt pretty much the same way. He had less wrong with him than the Healers thought he had, and they would never be able to cure the most annoying things, so why not let him out of hospital?

            Ginny tapped him on the arm, told him to take care, and walked away to Apparate with the rest. Harry watched them go until Malfoy tugged on his arm and said something imperious about being cold, which was ridiculous, since it was the middle of July.

But Harry wasn’t going to be argumentative. The confrontation with his friends had gone well. He followed Malfoy happily back into the house.

*

            There were some things, Draco had once thought, too unusual to ever be bound into a matter of routine. They would distort the universe around them, rather than becoming harmonious elements in a pattern. The Dark Lord was like that, and the house arrest his father had suffered for two years after the war, and his mother’s injury. Certainly, Harry Potter coming to live in their house was part of the same order.

            But time had proven him wrong on the first two, and it seemed determined to prove him wrong on the most recent occurrences, as well.

            Madame Ranevskaya had come back with a silver arm, which was not quite the perfect model of his mother’s other one that she had promised. Narcissa had responded with an anger that Draco at first thought would drive the artificial limb-maker out of the house altogether, but in the end, both of the women appeared to like each other better for the cold pride they had in abundance. Draco never knew how he could step into a room that felt chill from all the repressed hostility and yet see them smiling at each other.

            Once the limb was fastened on, his mother had to study how to control and move it and wield magic through it—which was much harder than it would be with an arm of flesh—and that occupied most of her time. Meanwhile, Lucius continued researching the blood magic that would enable him to wreak some horrible sort of vengeance on the Dark wizards who had hurt Narcissa. Draco was content not to know much about that. Seeing his father appear with scratches from the claws of animals he had vivisected or a long spray of brilliant red on his hands from a slit throat was enough to tell Draco that the magic would be powerful and his mother avenged.

            And meanwhile, there was studying with Potter.

            Or, as Draco was finding it increasingly hard not to call him, Harry.

            He was much more interested in everything Draco proposed to study than Draco would have thought could be the case. In school, Potter was known as a daring adventurer, not an intellectual. If he studied at all, Draco thought it must be for exams, and that he would forget the information as soon as he had made a passing mark.

            Here, he took to French and to the study of magical brain injuries with an impetuosity and breadth of understanding that stole Draco’s breath. He tried to tell himself that part of that was probably because the curse, as it had evolved in Potter’s brain, was based on wisdom and had increased his intelligence, but that didn’t account for the zeal.

            Take that morning in the library during the second week, for instance.

*

            Harry bowed his head over the book in front of him and squinted at it. His lips moved as he silently formed the French words to himself. He knew his pronunciation wasn’t perfect yet—Malfoy had said so—but he also knew that he intended to work until it was perfect. Malfoy could put that fault-finding faculty to work for once and correct his mistakes when he made them.

            The words were strange, and Harry’s memory wasn’t any better than it had been, and so the things he memorized still tried to rebel and run away from him. But he could look at French words and see the way they had twisted off from Latin, or places they had changed and why and how they had changed. He hadn’t been able to do the same thing with English—not that he had ever seriously tried to learn another language when he was speaking English only, anyway. It gave him heart to keep working.

            He put his finger on the page so that he could trace a line, and felt an immediate disapproving stare. Harry rolled his eyes. Malfoy seemed to feel that Harry should read without any help at all, as though he had been born with a book in his hands.

            That wasn’t the way that Harry wanted to read, so he didn’t. And Malfoy could correct him and help him, but that didn’t mean that Harry would take everything he had to say with equal seriousness.

            “Say the word that you’re learning now to me,” Malfoy said, his voice not an interruption but a whisper that seemed to blend with the information tumbling through Harry’s head like an acrobatic set of butterflies.

            “Livres,” Harry said at once. He didn’t care if it wasn’t right. It was vibrating in his head and on the tip of his tongue, and the encouragement made it easy to say it.

            Malfoy didn’t respond for some time more. Harry went on reading, and repeating words softly to himself, and tracing the page with his finger when he needed to. Who cared what Malfoy thought, anyway?

            Finally, though, the silence from the other side of the table became so thick that Harry sat back and cocked his head at Malfoy. “You don’t like me learning so fast?” he asked.

            Malfoy shook his head, a faintly dazed expression on his face. Harry thought it made him come as close as he ever did to looking sweet. “That’s not it,” he said. “You pronounced that word perfectly.”

            Harry would have smiled, except that Malfoy’s voice was too stunned to be flattering. “You expect me to fail all the time, don’t you?” he asked. “You don’t trust me much or have much faith in my intelligence.” He wanted to slam the book and storm away from the table, except that would hardly be mature.

            “Determination can’t replace intelligence,” Malfoy said. “I know that you want to learn this, but that doesn’t mean you can.”

            “And yet, you agreed to take on the burden of teaching me anyway.” Harry had remembered that himself in the pause between him speaking and Malfoy speaking, and it calmed him down a little. “You must have some faith in me, or you would never have agreed to do that. I don’t think you fight for hopeless causes very often.”

            Malfoy’s lips finally lifted in a reluctant smile, and he nodded. “That is true,” he said. “I did not think you would repay my faith so soon.” He paused and eyed Harry.

            Harry didn’t know how to respond. Yes, some things had shifted in the last fortnight, but they’d spent so much time in studying and so little time in life-changing conversations that Harry didn’t think he was a completely different person, or that Malfoy could see him as completely different.

            “Er, right,” he said finally, and turned back to pick up the book of French words.

            Malfoy reached out and closed a cool hand around Harry’s wrist. Harry looked at it with a withering glare, expecting Malfoy to immediately snatch it back, but Malfoy kept it there, and spoke in a tone as measured as a pulse, which meant that Harry had to look at him.

            “Your accusation holds more truth than I wished to acknowledge,” Malfoy said quietly. “I shouldn’t have been surprised at your desire to learn and your mastery of basic concepts, even if I was surprised at the speed. Forgive me?”

            Harry sat there, staring at him in surprise for a few minutes.

            Malfoy Manor was—different from every place he’d ever been. Of course, that was easy to say when it was so luxurious, but it was more than that, Harry thought. Things seemed to happen at a slower pace inside its walls. People became statues, giving careful, considered responses, and Harry thought he’d even started speaking more formally since he came here. It was like the house was a museum and it transformed the people who inhabited it into works of art.

            And it made small things seem strangely important. Harry didn’t think Malfoy was asking for forgiveness jokingly, even though it would have been a joking question at Hogwarts.

            He said that his pride was important to him, that he’d made it so. I’ll probably get him angry if I don’t act like it’s important, too.

            “Yes, I forgive you,” he said, and put his free hand over Malfoy’s wrist in turn. He didn’t know what to do with it once it was there, so he gave a little stroke with his fingers and pulled it back quickly, returning to his book with purpose this time.

            Malfoy didn’t interrupt him again. Harry forgot him for a little while, too busy wrestling with the intricacies of French verbs in his head. But he glanced up when he thought the silence had gone on too long and found Malfoy watching him with his chin propped on one hand. He seemed to watch steadily, without blinking. Harry thought he could have leaned close and counted each pale eyelash, if he wanted to.

            Why would I want to? Harry looked back at his book, and cursed the blush that crept up his cheeks.

*

            Potter was stubborn. He plowed through books that had defeated him once a second time, and repeated things to himself until he understood them, and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to read. Draco finally told the house-elves, who wanted to slip sleeping potions into his tea, to leave him alone. Potter knew what he was doing, even if it was unconscious instead of the carefully realized plan that Draco would have made. If he needed to learn this fast, then Draco would leave him alone to do so.

            Potter was observant, more observant than Draco would have given him credit for, though some of that might come from his training as an Auror. He noticed when Narcissa grimaced in pain one morning as her silver hand knocked over her cup, and cleaned up the mess with a single flick of his wand before the house-elves could even be summoned. He left Draco alone when he truly wanted to be alone, and Draco sometimes didn’t realize the delicacy until he looked up and found the room empty of one dark-haired wizard.

            Potter was judgmental, but silent. Sometimes his eyes burned when he looked at Lucius, and Draco could imagine that he disliked the almost palpable reek of Dark magic that hung around his father. But Potter would always turn his head away and ask about another book, or, if they were at table and Lucius had walked through the room with blood on his hands and an expression of maniacal determination on his face, for Draco or Narcissa to signal the house-elves for more food. (He seemed to have a strange reluctance to signal the house-elves himself).

            Potter was considerate. His friends came to visit him, and he made sure that he met them in another part of the house and that they kept their voices down. He never let any of them persuade him to leave or insult Draco and Draco’s family, at least that Draco could tell.

            Potter was more handsome than Draco had reckoned as well, though he was almost sure that was the effect of the light in the Manor. No one could possibly look good in hospital.

            And Potter was almost certainly incurable.

            Draco wondered for a time how he could tell him, and then realized that he might not need to.

*

            Harry squinted at the words on the page in front of him, which swam stubbornly, choked with a haze that made them blink in and out of his vision. He rubbed his eyes. He’d got enough sleep last night, so what was wrong with him?

            “Potter.”

            Harry glanced up and put his book aside. Malfoy was sitting on the chair beside him. As usual when Harry got involved in a book, he hadn’t heard anyone else enter the library. He nodded to Malfoy.

            “What is it?” he asked. Usually the nod was a signal for the conversation to begin, and Malfoy wasn’t someone who often passed up that chance, but he stayed silent now and simply studied Harry intently.

            “What do you think your odds of removing the curse from your brain are?” Malfoy asked. His voice was so neutral that Harry couldn’t tell which response he was searching for.

            Also unusual, Harry thought, though in reality he knew that Malfoy had tried to avoid telling him everything. He didn’t want to blind Harry and make him jump to conclusions. He rubbed his jaw and considered acting more optimistic than he felt, but there was really no reason to do that.

            “Small,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been concentrating on learning other languages and making sure that the auras and visions aren’t going to cause me any danger.”

            “Why small?” When Malfoy wanted to, he could use nothing more than a tilt of his head and a tone of his voice to make you feel that anything you said was unnecessary, unless it was what he wanted to hear.

            Harry tensed as he answered. He didn’t like his efforts to live with the curse being ignored. It felt too similar to what the Healers had done to him. “Because most magical brain injuries are a result of just one spell, not a combination of them, and most of the treatments have to remove them instantly to be effective. Or at least within an hour after the injury. And even then, the patients have a long and slow recovery process. I’ve had mine for almost two months,” he concluded, and his voice fell to a whisper in spite of himself. “I don’t think it’s going away.”

            Malfoy nodded slowly. “And you’ll live with that?”

            Harry glared at him. Sometimes he could understand why Malfoy seemed so reluctant to trust his words; they’d been enemies or indifferent to each other for a much longer time than they’d been trying to help each other. But this was getting old.

            “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t decided that,” he answered. “I don’t like it, but yes, I’ll live with it.” He turned away and glared at the book he’d been trying to read. The words were clear enough now, but they told him nothing new. The things he was saying to Malfoy were simple and true, and he wished that Malfoy would realize that, too. “It’s so much better than it could have been,” he muttered.

            “I thought you would come to this conclusion,” Malfoy said, rising to his feet, “but I did not know how long it would take you to get over the wishes that things could be different. My mother went through that phase for weeks.”

            Harry raised an eyebrow at him. “I do wish that things could be different.”

            Malfoy paused, his hands clenching into fists for some reason. “Then will you spend your time in useless whinging?”

            Harry laughed. “Hardly. I’ll whinge, of course, but I’ll spend more time in research and practice with my new life. Haven’t I proved that sufficiently by now?” he added. “Maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems that you thought better of me when I first came here. As time passes, you keep acting surprised that I’m hopeful, and then suspicious that it won’t last.”

            Malfoy tensed for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. “Forgive me,” he said, as he had when Harry accused him of doubting his intelligence. “I suspect that I saw you in the light of a victim when you were in hospital. Now you are rid of that burden, but the ones you still have to carry are heavy. Perhaps I think you will falter under them.”

            Perhaps, Harry thought. He’ll still tell me a reason that’s likely instead of the real one. But he didn’t want to argue about it right now, especially since Malfoy had faced him and was waiting for his forgiveness.

            “You’re forgiven,” Harry said. “And I’ve carried heavier burdens. I haven’t faltered under them.” His voice shook for a moment and he bit his tongue to stop it. The memory of walking to his death—what he thought would be his death—and confronting Voldemort still held more terror for him than the curse ever would.

            “That was years ago,” Malfoy said, with a small wave of his hand. “Perhaps I thought you’d got out of the habit, or forgotten what it was like.”

            Perhaps again. Harry fought to keep from rolling his eyes, which he suspected would be counterproductive. “I haven’t,” he said. “I did my duty once. I’ll do it now.”

            “Even though there is no world asking for your duty?” Malfoy asked softly. “Even though you don’t owe it to anyone, and your friends would have been happy enough for you to stay in hospital and take the easy way out?”

            Harry looked at him in incredulity. “I owe it to myself, Malfoy,” he said. “And you, since you’ve been good enough to take me to live in your house and offer me help. I take my debts as seriously as my burdens,” he added.

            Malfoy went still then, and excused himself from the library a moment later. Harry rolled his eyes and picked up the book. He had assumed he would understand Malfoy better once he spent time in his presence. Obviously, that hadn’t worked.

*

            After that conversation with Potter, Draco felt as though someone had taken off a thick torque that he was wearing to oblige his mother. He couldn’t have removed the burden himself without seeming rude, but it did so crush one’s shoulders and restrict one’s breathing.

            Potter was not perfect—Draco doubted that someone perfect would have let himself be caught by the combined spells that created the curse in the first place—but that didn’t matter. He was willing to fight his part of the struggle. That would be enough.

            And at dinner that night, when Draco’s mother made a small sound of discomfort and pulled at her new arm where it joined the shoulder, Potter asked, “Do you need some more exercise with that, Mrs. Malfoy?”

            Draco was frozen in surprise for long moments before he could loosen his tongue and translate for Potter. From that way that Narcissa turned her head and glared at Potter, she had the idea of freezing him with her glare.

            “What makes you think I do not get enough?” she asked, and her voice sang like ice crystals falling off the edge of the Manor’s roof in a high wind.

            “Because you’re still so clumsy with it.” Draco felt his jaw drop open. How am I going to say that? Potter nodded to the center of the tablecloth, clean now but the site of a spill of salt earlier in the evening. “Besides, everyone can always use more exercise.” He smiled blandly at Narcissa and leaned back in his chair.

            Draco wouldn’t have translated that for a thousand Galleons if he had the choice, but his mother’s eyes were piercing. He mumbled the words, at least until he remembered what his mother used to do to him when he mumbled, and would still say to him. He pulled himself upright and delivered the translation in as nearly firm a voice as Potter had spoken the original words.

            Narcissa waited so long after that that Draco felt the temperature fall several degrees in the room. He managed not to shiver, if only because his mother would have considered that an overly theatrical gesture.

            Finally, she said, “What could you do for me that I could not do for myself, or training with my husband?”

            Potter bowed his head. “I was Auror-trained, ma’am. I can’t be an Auror anymore, but I retain the reflexes and the spells. And I know that you have trouble making the magic flow through your arm. Dueling someone who can fight like I do would improve your coordination of magic and silver.”

            Amazing, Draco thought as he turned the Latin into English. If anyone else said that, it would have sounded arrogant. This time, it just sounds as if he’s making a statement of fact.

            Draco thought it had something to do with the way that Potter kept his eyes fixed so intently on Narcissa, as if he was interested solely in her response and not the reaction she would have to his advertisement of skill and training. Potter was not invested in himself in the way that many people were. He didn’t like to be scorned, but he didn’t go around anticipating scorn and coming up with strategies to deflect it. It made him a challenge to be around.

            Perhaps that sort of challenge is what my mother needs.

            Narcissa waited so long that Draco’s uncertainty passed into certainty and then back out again. Then she inclined her head sharply. “I might as well try it,” she said.

            Potter smiled and bowed his head. “I hoped you would say something of the sort, ma’am. Should we try for a dueling session tomorrow?”

            Draco’s mother must have understood more Latin than he thought she did. She was nodding before he had translated the whole of the little speech. “Yes. There is a room on the second floor that would do perfectly. Have the house-elves or Draco show you to the way to it if you cannot find it.” She rose and swept through the door as though such a decision naturally meant the conclusion of the meal.

            Potter rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. He had turned back to his plate to pick among the crumbs when he seemed to notice the way Draco looked at him for the first time. “What?” he asked defensively. “Should I not have done that?”

            “I am surprised you did,” Draco said calmly. He had found that a calm tone worked best on Potter, who naturally bristled if someone seemed to doubt him now.

            “Why?” Potter stabbed one particular crumb with much more viciousness than it deserved and carried it to his mouth. “Do you think I still can’t care for anyone but myself? That time’s past.”

            Draco raised an eyebrow at the hardness in Potter’s voice. “I don’t know if there’s a time when you ever cared for anyone but yourself,” he said. “I sometimes think you would have been better for it.”

            Potter shook his shaggy fringe out of his eyes and peered suspiciously at Draco.

            “No,” Draco continued, “I am simply surprised because so few people can handle my mother well. There is a reason that she gets along with my father and I—people who have lived with her for years and whom she has, essentially, trained to her moods—and perhaps with the house-elves, insofar as one can call them beings one gets along with.” He delighted in the way Potter grimaced at that insinuation, and paused a moment to study the expression before he went on. “When you ventured to speak, I thought she would cut you down the way she has so many in the past. But you managed.”

            “I think we’re somewhat alike,” Potter muttered, tugging at his fringe this time. Draco’s fingers itched to reach up and stop him. Must he always be touching himself that way?

            Though I can think of one way in which watching him touch himself would give me great pleasure.

            Draco sucked in a breath and lowered his eyes. His mind did spring impetuously about and leave him behind sometimes.

            “I mean,” Potter continued, in the tone of someone who was only paying attention to his own thoughts and probably wouldn’t have noticed if Draco had written his in fire on the ceiling, “we both suffered from Dark magic that can’t be cured. We both wanted to be out of hospital, even though the Healers thought they were doing the best they could for us. We’re both inhabiting the same house. We both don’t have a hope of hiding what’s wrong with us.” He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t we try to help each other?”

            “But you’re helping her,” Draco pointed out. “Not the other way around.”

            Potter gave him an astonished glance. “Why do you think that matters?”

            Draco shook his head slightly. He understood Potter much better than he had, but there were still things that could surprise him. Potter was probably incapable of understanding that not all acts of charity were mutual or desirable.

            “Besides,” Potter added, and his smile was faint but present, “she’s going to help me, too. I want to retain my dueling skills. Perhaps I’ll be an Auror in France, perhaps I’ll set up as a private dueling instructor, but I need to make sure that I don’t lose some of the only training that I’ve received.”

            Draco opened his mouth to snap that Potter had no need to go to France or be a dueling instructor if he didn’t want to, and then closed it, disconcerted. Of course Potter had that need, if he wanted to make his own living. There was no reason for Draco to think that he could stay in the Manor all his life.

            There was no reason for him to feel devastated that Potter wouldn’t stay in the Manor.

            “Something wrong?”

            Draco looked up into Potter’s quizzical gaze and shook his head. How was he supposed to respond? There was apparently a feeling in him that he had not put there or nurtured with long and careful reading and self-cultivation. It had been years since that had happened.

            “All right, then.” Potter turned away. “Will you show me the room your mother was talking about, so that I don’t have to subject myself to her withering sarcasm in the morning?” He shot Draco a teasing smile.

            Draco nodded automatically and followed Potter away from the dining room, struggling with the feeling as he went. What the fuck did it mean?

            Oh, a stupid question. He knew what it meant. Perhaps more to the point, could he allow it to grow?

*

            “And are you really happy here, Harry? You can tell me, you know.”

            Harry smiled at Hermione and came close to shaking his head, except that then she would think it was an answer to her question. They were strolling on the Manor’s grounds, almost beyond sight of the house (though not beyond sight of the albino peacocks that strutted across the gardens; Harry had to wonder whose idea that had been. Lucius Malfoy’s probably, so he could have animals around that he wouldn’t mind sacrificing at a moment’s notice). And Draco wasn’t with them, because Hermione had insisted on speaking to him alone.

            That meant she could only ask yes-or-no questions, but she appeared determined to use the chance to interrogate him anyway.

            “Just nod, Harry, please,” she said now, and Harry blinked, realizing that he had drifted away from the conversation into his own mind. “Or shake your head,” she added, as though she had suddenly realized a negative answer was possible. She leaned forwards to stare at him, practically holding her breath.

            Harry nodded at her, and Hermione leaned back. “Are you going to try and go to another country after this?” she asked.

            Harry hesitated, then shrugged. It was strange. He was taking steps that he thought ought to prepare him for the future when Draco was no longer by his side a hundred percent of the time, but somehow, he had trouble calling up pictures of that future. His imagination tended to fill with the cool corridors of Malfoy Manor instead and the comfortable bed in his room, which was making him appreciate sleep in a way he never had before.

            And pictures of a certain man.

            Harry knew that would come to nothing, though. It had to. He could find sanctuary with the Malfoys for a few months—and bloody strange sanctuary it was, too—but he couldn’t live forever in a house with someone who used Dark magic or someone who needed as much attention and care from him as violently as Narcissa Malfoy did. He never knew when he would say something that angered her. Similarly, she would nod approvingly at something else random he said and treat him kindly for the rest of the afternoon, and Harry would never know what made the difference between one thing and the next.

            And Draco?

            Harry sighed. Yes, he could see Draco in his future—he had begun to admit that to himself when he realized how acutely uncomfortable he was at meals that Draco missed, even if no one else was there, and when he noticed that he was relaxing each time Draco came into the library—but he couldn’t separate Draco from his family. It would be stupid of him to try.

            “Are you unhappy after all?” Hermione had an uncomfortably keen eye for noticing things when she wanted to.

            Harry drew himself up. He wasn’t going to be the means of making his best friends despise Draco. If Draco wanted to have that happen, he was quite capable of doing it himself.

            “No,” he said. Hermione recognized that word, at least, because she smiled. Harry continued, watching her closely. She had been studying Latin; he wanted to see how close she was to being able to understand him if he spoke it. “I want to stay here, and I want to be able to see Draco every day.”

            Hermione stared at him, then shut her eyes. “Can you repeat that?” she asked.

            Harry did, more slowly. He watched Hermione’s lips moving through the words and felt an irritated spasm of longing for Draco. Yes, he had to respect other people’s limitations on understanding him just as they had to respect his, but with Draco it was so effortless.

            You’re studying so that it will become effortless with other people, too, remember? At least the ones who understand French.

            Harry rolled his shoulders in what he thought of as a shrug but which would probably be more ambivalent to someone else. He wanted to learn to speak French, yes. It would open a whole new world for him, yes. He couldn’t go through life with only one person understanding him easily, yes.

            But sometimes he thought he would have liked to stay here and only speak to Draco and at least see what happened if that did.

            Hermione gasped suddenly and made Harry look at her. She had actually fallen a step back from him, he saw, blinking. She pointed a finger at him and said, “I don’t know everything, but I know enough. You want Draco Malfoy?” Her voice broke on the last words with what Harry thought was incredulity.

            “No!” Harry snapped. “To see Draco.” That verb was basic enough that Hermione ought to know it.

            “Oh,” Hermione breathed. She was standing straight up again and looked much more relieved. “I’m sorry. But it sounded that way.”

            Harry grunted, but said nothing in response. He was wondering if his denial of wanting Draco was that convincing after all.

“I just wanted to make sure,” Hermione went on, laying her hand soothingly on his arm. “We all want to make sure that you’re as happy as possible, Harry, since we did so little to help you when you were in hospital. You know that, don’t you?”

            Harry wanted to say that they couldn’t have known he was that unhappy, but he didn’t really believe it himself. He settled for laying his hand over Hermione’s and giving her a wan smile.

            “He’s been good for you,” Hermione whispered, standing on her toes to kiss his cheek. “I’ll tell that to anyone who asks.”

            Too good for me, Harry thought, but that was not something he would have said to Hermione even if she could understand it.

*

            The dueling sessions between Potter and his mother had been going on for more than a week when Draco came to watch them.

            He had not done so before because he had thought that neither spectator would especially welcome his presence. His mother had her pride, no less cold and strong than Draco’s. If she made a mistake, she would not want him to witness it. And Potter must have strong memories of what had happened in Hogwarts when they watched each other at work or play.

            But when he finally stepped into the room, he discovered something he never would have expected: they were both far too caught up in the contest to pay any attention to him.

            The room Narcissa had chosen was an enormous one, with stone walls but bright tapestries and large fireplaces that kept out the chill. The floor was stone as well at bottom, but covered with a soft, magically reared growth of grass to provide some traction. Draco knew it had been used at various times as a garden, a conservatory, and a courting room where young couples could retire for a “romantic” moment away from their parents. He did not know if it had been used as a dueling room, but he would not be surprised. History had a way of coming true in Malfoy Manor.

            Potter and his mother were spinning and chasing each other over the grass in the center of the room. Draco leaned a shoulder against the doorway and watched idly. Or, at least, he hoped it would look so to anyone who glanced at him.

            In reality, observing two of the most important and interesting people in his life as they hit at each other with curse and countercurse could never be idle.

            His mother favored the Dark Arts, of course, but she also favored a reserved economy of motion that made some of her spells look less impressive than they really were. It was only when a dark star uncurled in the air some distance from her or a trailing spark of white became a shadowy dragon with extended claws that one realized how skillful she was, how daring, how strong.

            Potter’s fighting had no style at all that Draco could see. But he knew that Potter would never have survived as long as he had in the Aurors if he didn’t follow some rules. Draco sorted out the first chaos of the duel and forced himself to look again, trying to find patterns in the unexpected, in the sharp turns of wrist or the way that Potter’s feet scuffled and stamped across the grass, tearing up the blades.

            A pretty mess he will leave for the elves to clean up, Draco thought, but his thoughts tore and frayed in front of the spectacle that awaited him.

            And there it was, the guiding rule of his fighting. Potter fought defensively for the most part, leaping up in the air and rolling as much as he cast spells, trying to avoid magic that Draco knew he could have deflected. He never used the Dark Arts. His specialty was the shield. Once or twice, when Narcissa’s silver arm twitched and sent her spell awry, he could have hit her badly. He chose not to.

            Draco would have despised someone who fought that way if the fighting was merely described to him. But watching the way Potter did it banished all the shades of contempt that could have touched the matter.

            Potter moved subtly and imperceptible from defensive to offensive magic as soon as he thought he could do it. Draco would never have seen it had he not been watching, but Potter set up a pattern that Narcissa soon fell into: appearing to just counter every binding spell, and at the last moment spin aside from it or raise a shield in response. In reality, Draco knew, his lithe escapes proved that he had more energy than it appeared, more room to do as he liked. But in the heat of battle, it would be very difficult to convince oneself of that.

            His mother did not try. Draco knew her temper. She had sometimes been led to say more than she thought wise or take actions that were risky because the excitement of the moment had baited her on. And now she began to aim binding spells more and more often at Potter’s left side, which he seemed to have designated his “weak” one.

            No weakness involved, Draco thought, as he watched Potter’s chin come up and his eyes flash, his hair fly and his feet dance. Even a month in hospital could not deprive him of the skills he had learned, the natural grace of this waltz. He had been a fool to think it would. Shall I hope that my mother notices in time?

            She did not. She overextended herself, lunging forwards to put a binding spell in place over Potter’s apparently slow, clumsy feet.

            And Potter took her.

            He shot his arm forwards, then pulled it back. The air in front of him hissed and then exploded, and when Draco had finished blinking away the white smoke that overwhelmed his vision, his mother was lying on the ground, tangled in a net that looked as if it had risen from the depths of the sea. It was woven of weed, or so it looked, and there were weights hanging off it that made it resemble a fishing net. Draco stared. He had never heard of a spell that conjured a net of that type, and he could not imagine the necessary incantation for it.

            Potter panted, his eyes bright and his mouth slightly open, as if he realized how uncouth it would be to show more than that. Then he noticed Draco in the doorway, and nodded. He was unwinded. Draco shook his head in envy as Potter jogged forwards to stand over his mother. She had tried to stand up or untie the net, Draco saw. In response, the net clung closer around her, its weed gripping her skin in a wet manner that would irritate someone far more phlegmatic than Narcissa. Draco feared what would happen to Potter when she regained her balance.

            Potter might not have noticed her mood. “Do you yield?” he asked, and they must have arranged the signal beforehand, because Narcissa showed no sign of not understanding. Instead, she lay still, a cool and considering expression on her face. Draco watched her eyes measure the distance between her feet and Potter.

            If he had noticed, then someone else had, too. “Do try it,” Potter said, and the eagerness in his voice seemed to convince Narcissa it wouldn’t be a good idea. She dropped back with a slight huff and a nod of her head. Even that was restricted; the weed had wound itself firmly into her hair. Well, at least she would have house-elves to bathe and attend her later, Draco thought, biting his lip so that he could hold back a chuckle that would surely get him in trouble.

            “Good.” Potter moved his wand, not speaking the incantation, and the weed net burst into clear, soundless fire, which broke away from the meshes like foam. Narcissa understandably lay still, but when Draco looked a few moments later, she had no trace of burns or ash on her. Potter had made the gesture impressive, but harmless. And he turned away with a faint trace of a smile on his lips that said he knew it, too.

            “Draco?”

            Draco glanced at him. Potter nodded.

            “I wouldn’t have hurt her, you know,” he said. Narcissa had already regained her feet and was examining her flesh arm as if she thought it might be tarnished by the weed in a way that the silver wasn’t.

            “I know that,” Draco answered in Latin. He knew his mother would be able to follow a bit of their conversation, but not everything, and that was his desire at the moment. “But I wondered about your humiliating her.”

            Potter shrugged. “Not in any way that she wouldn’t have been humiliated in the first place by agreeing to a duel with me.”

            The certainty in his voice made Draco look at him hard. “Do not assume you understand our pride that well,” he said.

            “Well, not all the vagaries, certainly,” Potter said, and grinned. “But that doesn’t mean I’m entirely unfamiliar with it.”

            “Tell me how you learned.” Draco moved closer to him. It seemed an uncomfortably important conversation at the moment, and they might have been the only ones in the room. Perhaps his mother had left. He could not glance over his shoulder to see, not for the moment it would take. Potter commanded his gaze.

            “By watching you,” Potter said. His smile had finally faded, but he still examined Draco with a quiver to his lips that could become a smile. “Your pride is similar to hers. It demands honor, and acknowledgment, and no deliberate humiliation.”

            “But we can be offended by slights that you find hard to understand.”

            “Yes.” Potter cocked his head. “And there are many things I believe in that you find hard to understand. Respect for house-elves, or that blood purity really makes little difference. That it was necessary to die to save the world.” Draco blinked, but Potter had continued as though those words meant nothing more than the others did. “It doesn’t mean that those things need to make impassible barriers between us.”

            Draco hooded his eyes at the mention of barriers. It was the same word Potter had used when talking of language and the way that his friends could not easily comprehend him now.

            “Did you study to understand our pride only because of the language?” he asked quietly.

            Potter raised an eyebrow and examined him attentively. Draco withstood the gaze, but it was harder than he would have thought it would be. After all, since he had embraced his own pride, he had cared little for what anyone outside the walls of Malfoy Manor thought.

            “In the beginning? Yes,” Potter said, and his face was clear and reflective and amused. “Now? I don’t know.” He paused, then added, “I’m not sure what else you would want me to say. Isn’t that enough?”

            Draco bowed his head slowly. His neck felt frozen; it was a battle to conquer it. Yes, he had to accept Potter’s answer because nothing else would have been honest, and he thought it best to accept honesty and honesty only from someone who was so different from himself.

            Then why do I wish he could have said something different?

            The thought trembled and mutated and changed the way that light on water did.

            And who is to say that it might not be something different, in the future, when he has time to settle what he wants and appreciates? When he has learned French, and he is not as dependent on you as he once was?

            It was Latin that brought him here. It is not necessarily Latin that will keep him.

            Draco stepped back and smiled at Potter, who was watching him with the sort of transfixed stare Draco was sure he himself had been using for the last five minutes. Good. It was time that Potter should be in Draco’s position, and not have things all his own way.

            “I look forwards to what other reasons you might find to stay,” he murmured, and left the room.

            He noted on the way that his mother was watching them with a set expression, but that did not trouble him. She would find a way to express her displeasure if she felt it. He would bear it and live with it as he had borne it and lived with it many times before. And he did not think that Potter would regard it at all—at least not if it stood in the way of true happiness.

            Draco paused at the top of the staircase that led up to his rooms and laughed aloud when he realized what he was thinking.

            True happiness? Yes, perhaps I might find that.

            He did not know that, not for certain. But he knew that his heat beat like wings when Potter was near, and he was determined that that beat should not go unanswered.

*

            Harry pushed a hand through his hair and spent a moment staring at the closed door in front of him. It was one he had been up to many times, but never passed. He and Draco did their studying in the library, not in Draco’s rooms. For one thing, the books and the library-spirit that Draco had created to help him study were there; for another, Draco had seemed to want to guard the privacy of his own chambers, and Harry saw no reason not to allow him that.

            But now, he had a question and he wanted Draco’s opinion.

            There’s nothing wrong with asking for it, he told himself firmly, and rapped on the door. The worst he can do is tell you to go away and stop bothering him.

            Flinching a little in inner expectation of that kind of rebuke, Harry waited. He could hear the sound of someone moving around inside the room, but the movements didn’t approach the door for so long that he started scolding himself again.

            He was probably sleeping and you woke him up—

            Then the door opened and Draco stood there, yawning and rubbing his fringe, which hung in his eyes.

            Harry stared in spite of himself. He had never seen Draco like this, with the harsh curves of his face softened, the corners of his eyes still washed in sleep, and his mouth slack and loose. He ran his tongue over his lower lip as if trying to get rid of the taste of sleep as Harry watched, and Harry had to yank his eyes away from the glistening trail that it left behind.

            “Yes?” Draco asked, voice, it seemed, slightly accented with his weariness. “Did you want something?”

            Harry looked fixedly at the floor. “I didn’t mean to wake you up if you were having a nap,” he babbled. “I just thought, since it was two in the afternoon and I hadn’t seen you for a while and I was having doubts that I could come and talk to you, but I should have realized you were busy, I—”

            “Potter.”

            Harry paused. That wasn’t his first name, of course, which he had spent more time than was healthy yearning to hear from Draco’s lips. But it was gentler than most pronunciations of his last name he’d heard from Draco, and the hand that landed on his arm a moment later was heavy and soft and warm, like a feather pillow.

            “I don’t mind,” Draco said. “You couldn’t be expected to know that I was asleep just now. I had a hard night last night.”

            “Why?” Harry dared to look up and meet those eyes. He had expected the customary caution to return to them, but Draco gave him a smile like the touch of his hand instead, and Harry couldn’t have looked away if a typhoon had blown through the house.

            “Worrying about useless things,” Draco said quietly. “Whether my father will find the people who cursed Mother. Whether Mother will ever learn to use her arm. Things that are going well, and moreover which I can’t affect. I have to wait and see the results.” He lifted his shoulders in a tiny shrug.

            “What, no worry about me?” Harry teased. He wasn’t sure why he did it; he felt his mouth open and the words form around his tongue and teeth without his conscious volition.

            Draco fixed him with an intense look and stepped closer. Now his chest rested against Harry’s shoulder, or was so close that it felt like it did, and his arm leaned against Harry’s for support.

            “Lots of it,” Draco breathed. “But all on subjects that I thought you might consider inappropriate, and I didn’t dare voice them to you.”

            Harry shivered. He tried to remind himself that he would have to leave Malfoy Manor when he had gained some mastery of French, that this was only a temporary stop and it was ridiculous to allow himself to feel like this for Draco.

            But his rational mind, which he sometimes thought had been forced to clarify itself when he could communicate with no one except by nodding or shaking his head, said sharply, Bollocks. People who want you to feel neutral towards them don’t act like he’s acting.

            Harry met Draco’s eyes and tried to believe that someone proud and whole could want someone like him, damaged. He tried to make sure his voice was calm and normal, too. He succeeded far better at one than the other. “Well, why don’t you tell me what you were thinking of, and I can tell you whether it was inappropriate? After all, that’s the only way you’ll ever know.”

            Draco held Harry’s gaze, while his smile deepened. “Why don’t I?” he asked. “I simply wondered what would happen when you’ve learned all the French you can and wanted to go find some other place to live.”

            Harry blinked. “That’s what I wonder about, too.” Is he going to tell me to leave early? Yeah, maybe he doesn’t want me to feel neutral towards him, but what if the flirting was meant to make me uncomfortable and scare me off?

            His rational mind snorted.

            “Do you want to leave?” Draco’s fingers stroked up and down his arm now. It was very subtle, so slow and slight that it would have provided them both with some deniability if anyone else was watching, but Harry knew what he felt. His breath caught, and he had to swallow several times before he could respond.

            “Not forever,” Harry said. “But this is your family’s home. I can’t stay here as a guest forever, either.”

            “Not as a guest,” Draco said.

            “Do you want me to pay?” Harry had the feeling it was a blunder when he saw Draco’s eyes narrow, but he didn’t know what else to say. Draco’s words didn’t sound like the words of someone who wanted a closer acquaintance.

            “I don’t take close friends among my parents’ guests,” Draco said sharply. “Or my lovers, for that matter.”

            He lifted his chin in a way that told Harry pride had done the work of courage, and made Draco the first one of them who was able to speak of it.

            Harry reached out and caught his hand. “I thought I was your guest,” he said, while delicately parting Draco’s fingers with his own and sliding them back and forth along the skin between one finger and the next.

            Draco relaxed all at once, as though someone had turned his pride from ice to water. He tightened his fingers, restricting the movements of Harry’s, but made up for it in a moment by raising Harry’s hand to his lips. “Oh, you are,” he whispered. “But it’s hard to remember that when you touch me so like a lover.”

            “If I said that I think I might want to be one,” Harry whispered, leaning closer, “would you accept me?”

            He didn’t understand the way Draco froze and stared at him suddenly, but so far, none of Draco’s strange actions had gone entirely without explanation. Harry waited patiently now, assured that he would be granted one.

*

            Draco had thought this was a bit of flirtation to Potter, leading to thoughts and actions that he would shy away from when it came to the test. To have him put his face near Draco’s and speak about seriously accepting his offer was—

            It was wonderful, and vivid, and startling. Draco swallowed and refused to let himself look away. If he had borne the shame over his mistakes in the past, he could bear this. To fail with Potter would not be nearly as humiliating as admitting that he had made the wrong choice in joining the Dark Lord.

            It should not be, he amended the thought a moment later. But the feelings burned in him with an unnatural intensity that made him feel as if he should burst into flames and simply cease to exist if Potter refused him.

            I am being melodramatic.

            But it did not change the way he felt.

            “I might,” he said, as he spoke the words that he knew he needed to speak, “if I could have your assurance that this mattered to you, and was not a bit of light play.”

            There. He had done what he could to save his pride. If Potter played along and let him keep it, Draco would take risks and bear the consequences. If not, then Draco at least knew to retreat before he had been too deeply bruised.

            Potter’s eyes lit with a spark that Draco could not dismiss as hurtful; it was too deeply-buried, and too bright. He was seeing a flame from the most intimate part of Potter’s self. He rested out and rested his hands on Draco’s shoulders. Draco shuddered. That grip was so gentle, but stronger than any chain Potter could have forged.

            “That sounds like a request for an explanation about why I’m even considering you as a lover,” Potter murmured. “Am I wrong? Because, if not, that’s exactly what I’m going to favor you with.” He paused, as if he could imagine that Draco was mad enough to interrupt.

            Draco gave him a sharp look of encouragement, and Potter laughed and toyed with his hair for a moment before speaking.

            “You helped me,” he said. “That was the foundation of it.”

            Draco was not so enchanted to forget to arch a sarcastic eyebrow. So is this like a patient falling in love with his Healer? He hoped the words were written on his face, because at the moment he didn’t think he could speak them.

            “I had to know more about you,” Potter said, apparently catching the nuances, “because that was so unlike you. Or so unlike the man I had thought I knew. Probably better to put it that way.”

            Much better, Draco thought.

            “But you explained that to me,” Potter said. “And you explained your pride.” His voice deepened. “Can I possibly express how attractive that was? To see you existing as yourself, without apology, but also without the shell of pettiness and arrogance that so often comes with pride? You said that you think of your pride as pure metal. Well, you made yourself into someone who shines with it, and I couldn’t help responding.”

            Draco lowered his eyelids over his eyes. He couldn’t help responding to the knowledge that Potter had been seduced simply by the way that he carried himself, the way he presented himself to the world.

            “I’m surprised that no one’s approached you before now,” Potter breathed. “Surely someone else could see what a treasure you are.”

            Draco couldn’t purr because he wasn’t a cat, so he settled for reaching up and catching Potter’s fingers in a tight grip.

            Potter grinned at him. “If I’m the first,” he said, “I’m flattered that I took the time to look at you and listen to you when others didn’t. And if I’m not, then I’m flattered that your own taste kept you there for me instead of settled with someone who has the money and connections to flatter you with everything you desire.”

            Draco squeezed his fingers sharply, to remind him to get on with the compliments. The confession of his pride had been almost a month ago now. There had to be more recent reasons that Potter would decide he wanted Draco as a lover.

            Potter took the hint.

            “And then you stayed in the process of helping me,” Potter said. “In the perfect way, because you challenged me and never let me lean on you completely. You were my conduit, my communication with the rest of the world, but it didn’t feel like that. I never felt dependent, or oppressed by my dependence.”

            Draco surveyed him skeptically. Considering how much Potter had hated the Healers trying to help him in hospital, that was a rather extraordinary confession.

            Potter laughed at him. “Maybe I’m forced to rely on you more than anyone else, but it doesn’t feel that way, and what it feels like is important to me. And you let me help your mother. Do you realize how important it was, to feel that I could contribute something instead of simply subsisting on your charity?”

            Draco hoped he was successfully hiding his astonishment. It seemed that half of what he had done to win Potter’s attention and regard was unconscious, or at least something he had let happen instead of really, consciously going about it.

            “You know,” Potter said, his voice suddenly coy in a way that Draco had never heard it, “I might like to have an account of the way that you decided I would be worthy enough to flirt with.” He ducked his head and looked up through his eyelashes in a way that was so bad Draco was tempted to laugh and tell him never to do that again, except as a parody.

            But since he had given Draco such a lovely speech, Draco decided that he could be a bit more sensitive than that. He put his other hand on Potter’s free arm and drew him closer, chuckling as Potter’s eyes widened. “I might want to give that to you,” he said. “But grant me the time to come up with the proper, eloquent words. Not all of us are as accomplished at speaking compliments as you are.”

            Potter blinked. Undoubtedly it was the first time he had been told that.

            “You know,” he said suddenly, before Draco could do what he had planned on, “when you say things like that, I don’t care that you’re the only one who can understand me.”

            “Right now,” Draco said. “Add that right now to the end of all your mental sentences like that.”

            Potter smiled, but didn’t seem as if he would be deterred. “You’re enough,” he said. He used one thumb to rub Draco’s cheek, making Draco’s mouth fall open and his eyes flutter shut.

“For now,” Potter added then, and cocked his head and smiled.

Draco decided that he had to get some of his own back. Potter had seen how deeply he affected Draco. Well, it was time for him to see how much he was connected to Draco’s slight movements over his skin.

            “Allow me to do another kind of explaining with my mouth,” Draco whispered, and leaned forwards.

            Potter reacted as though he hadn’t been expecting the kiss at all, with a gasp and a flutter of his own eyes. But Draco got what he wanted when he slid his tongue, carefully, over Potter’s teeth and into his mouth. Suddenly Potter was alive, twisting against him, strong as a sea serpent, exuberant as a unicorn, his arms crushing shut around Draco’s neck and his leg grinding forwards as if he wanted them to start rubbing against each other right here in the open corridor.

            Draco gave himself up to it, to the push and the shove and the pull and the tangle of tongues. Sometimes he thought he was winning, sometimes that Potter was. And at times the whole thing soared into some realm beyond speech, as when he lost track of whose tongue was where and their blended taste splashed into his mouth like fine wine.

            Finally, Potter drew back, leaving one hand in place on the back of Draco’s neck as if it were his anchor while his mind spun and darted through that realm Draco had already entered. Draco was pleased with the way his eyes looked huge and glossy when he opened them, his pupils swollen to enormous extent.

            “That,” Draco said, with a tiny smile that he hoped wouldn’t widen into a moronic grin, “is the way that I make speeches.”

            Potter didn’t take long to recover, and Draco didn’t know whether to be gratified or annoyed when he leaned close and whispered, “Shall I show you how it can blend with the way that I do it?”

*

            Harry had never known a time like those days after he and Draco had decided on admitting their attraction. It flowed past as if they were immersed in sunlit water, happy and busy.

            He could see, sometimes, this becoming the pattern of the rest of his life—

            Except that he always ran up against the fact that he needed something to do; he couldn’t simply sit in Malfoy Manor.

            For now, though, he could. And Draco felt the same way, if his gentle touches to Harry’s hand and the way he leaned over to breathe on his neck when he went past him were any indication.

            They took it carefully. There were kisses for what seemed like a long time before there was anything else, drugging, honey-slow kisses that left Harry feeling as though he had danced on a carousel for minutes afterwards. There were those glancing touches Draco was so much a master of that he made Harry feel clumsy and heavy in comparison. Once Draco held Harry against the wall of the library and simply breathed into his mouth from a distance of three inches, until Harry was fighting his grip and surging forwards with black streaks exploding in front of his eyes—and then Draco let him go, smiled, and walked away.

            But Harry knew what he ultimately wanted, and he thought he could have it, with a quiet confidence that was new to him.

            Things had still changed. Draco still had to be there to translate for him he wanted to speak to Narcissa, his friends, or, on the rare occasions when he was obliged to have such interaction, Lucius. Harry found himself less and less interested in those things that had been his life before the curse, like Auror work. Because it wasn’t possible for him anymore, he seemed to have narrowed his sights and set his mind on something that was.

            Ron, he knew, didn’t like that. He cast Draco distrustful glances every time they were together, even though they didn’t argue. And he kept talking as if Harry could still be an Auror, and ignored the way Harry tried to remind him, gently, that it was impossible for someone to be in the field who couldn’t communicate quickly with his partner or interrogate witnesses.

            But there were other things that had changed, things Harry barely noticed until Ron brought them to his attention.

*

            “You read more than Hermione does.”

            Harry started and put down his book. He and Draco had been sitting on a couch in one of the numerous studies in Malfoy Manor, trading conversational French back and forth. Draco had as smooth a voice in that language as he did in English or Latin, and Harry had tried to concentrate on the difficult sounds instead of letting himself be captured by the way Draco’s tongue lapped around his lips. He had known Ron was going to drop by soon, but he hadn’t heard him come in.

            “Mrs. Malfoy let me through the wards,” Ron added, in response to Draco’s hard stare. “I think it was better that she did.”

            Considering Lucius’s latest experiments had involved rabbits which still twitched when he carried them, impaled on spikes, through the drawing room, Harry could only agree. He put his book down in his lap and said, “How are you?”

            Ron listened to the translation, but without taking his eyes from Harry. His gaze was bleak. Harry blinked and looked harder at him. Had something happened to someone in his family? That was the only reason Harry could think of why Ron would look so upset.

            “I’m fine,” Ron said, which seemed to get rid of that theory. Ron actually wasn’t a very good liar. He leaned forwards the moment he finished speaking, his hands clenched in front of him. “How much do you read in a day, Harry?”

            Harry blinked again. He hadn’t thought about it, and anyway, the reading varied, since sometimes he read about magical brain damage and sometimes he read more French and sometimes he read the wizarding novels and fairy tales he hadn’t had a chance to read growing up. He just knew that it was a lot.

            “Probably one and a half books,” he said, after thinking about it. “Or it might come out to that. But I don’t know how to count grammar lessons in there.”

            “You never used to do that,” Ron said after the translation, in the firm tones of someone proving a conclusion. But Harry had no idea what the argument was supposed to be, so he ended up staring at Ron stupidly.

            “Of course not,” he said. “But then I was in hospital for a month and couldn’t speak, but I could still read. And then I came here and started learning how to cope with my condition. And that’s really the only way to learn more.” He smiled and tried to make a joke, because now Ron was staring at him fixedly, as if he could understand some of the Latin words without Draco’s intervention. “I reckon I should be glad that I didn’t lose the ability to read English, as well, or someone would have had to read to me. Imagine how long that would take.”

            Ron waited until Draco had spoken the last word, and then spun around and paced to the other side of the room, his fists locked tightly together behind his back. Harry glanced at Draco, but Draco seemed as baffled as he was, though more inclined to be angry about it. His look at Ron was grim, and he tapped his fingers together on the book he held as if he wanted to rip out the pages.

            Ron spun around. “You’ve changed, Harry,” he said. “You told me once that you wanted to be an Auror because you wanted to save other people. Perhaps you were trying to make up for what happened during the war, perhaps you weren’t, but either way, it was important to you. What do you feel about that now?”

            Harry opened his mouth, and then realized that Ron was right. He had helped Mrs. Malfoy since he came here, and maybe he had helped Draco by being present, but he hadn’t felt the drive to save the world that had once been the central fact of his life, even after Voldemort was killed. He frowned and tugged at his hair.

            Ron nodded, apparently realizing he had no answer. “You haven’t felt it,” he said quietly. “You’ve stayed here and never once come to visit us. You’re happy to see us when we come, but you don’t appear to miss us much from one time you see us to the next.” He looked at Draco and then away. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed the way that you smile at him. You never would have considered being with another man before your accident, Harry, let alone him.”

            Harry opened his mouth to snap that he had considered sleeping with a man before he got cursed, and then paused. Was that true? It seemed that he could remember dreams about men and the desire to date them before his curse, and it seemed that that was the reason he had broken up with Ginny.

            But the one time she had come to visit, he had hinted something to that effect, and she had looked at him with puzzled eyes and shaken her head.

            “We bored each other to death, Harry, remember?” she’d asked with a little laugh. “We knew each other too well after all those years in Gryffindor and especially since we spent time together after the war.” She’d paused, and then added softly, “Don’t you remember?”

            Harry wondered now if Ginny had told Ron about that conversation, and if that was the reason he was here now.

            “You’re suggesting that the curse changed Harry in more ways than the obvious,” Draco said flatly.

            Harry was grateful to him for putting it so baldly. It kept him from having to think about the words in other ways.

            “Yes,” Ron said. “What if it gave him thoughts and desires that he didn’t have before? It’s changed his personality and his regard for us. It might have changed his memories.” He looked at Harry, and there was an appealing, yearning pity in his face that stunned Harry. “We miss you so much, mate,” he whispered. “But it’s like you moved to another country, and you never invite us to visit you there.”

            Harry lowered his head. He wanted to deny what Ron was saying, but what if he was right, and Harry had never noticed because he was just too used to coping with the effects of his brain injury?

            He touched one hand to his temple. I thought I got off lightly. I thought everything was all right in there. Was I wrong?

            A hand covered his. He glanced to the side and saw Draco rising to his feet, though he never took his hand from Harry’s. That gave him an odd, half-stooping posture as he confronted Ron, but he didn’t seem to notice—which made it graceful.

            “If you are right,” Draco asked, in a calm, grave voice, “what then? We have researched carefully, and the Healers at St. Mungo’s did their part—” Harry wondered if Ron would notice the minor sneer in Draco’s voice “—but no one could find a way to reverse the effects of the combined spells. Do you want Harry to live in misery because of something that he can’t change? Or will you accept the consequences of it and help him live with it?”

            Harry blinked again. That wasn’t at all something he would have thought to say.

            And, to his surprise, Ron reacted to it with calmness instead of blustering or drawing his wand and trying to destroy Draco’s house. He cocked his head to the side and said, “If it’s an inevitable part of him, then of course I would want to help him live with it. I want Harry to be happy, and at least we do get to see him sometimes. But what if you’re exacerbating the effects by always keeping him with you? Shouldn’t he stay with us for a while and see if that brings him back to his former self?”

            “That assumes that bringing him back to his former self is an essential or desirable goal,” Draco retorted without hesitation.

            Ron’s face turned red then, and Harry got ready to move between them if he needed to. “Of course you would say that,” Ron muttered, “when you get to enjoy his company every day.”

            Draco twisted to the side, as if he was thinking the same thing about getting between people, but assumed that it was Harry who needed the protection. “I’m trying to defend him,” Draco said, and his voice had become as cold as light snowfall, “to help him. And I brought him here in the first place because I could speak Latin. Can you do that? Or even French, the language that he’s endeavoring to learn?”

            Ron leaned around Draco and spoke directly to Harry as if Draco didn’t exist. “I just want my best mate back,” he said.

            Harry looked into his eyes and wished he knew what to say—and wished that he could say something Ron would understand directly, since he seemed to distrust Draco’s translations so much.

            Then the memory of what Draco had said to him when he first came to Harry in hospital returned to him. Harry sat up straighter and gave Ron a smile, so he would know Harry wasn’t angry with him.

            “I have to live with what happened to me,” Harry said quietly. “I can’t ignore it. The Healers were trying to make me ‘normal’ again, and they made me feel inadequate because I couldn’t master what they saw as simple tasks. I’ll try to visit from the different country, mate, but I can’t move back.”

            Draco promptly translated, his voice quiet and without any extra inflection of his own. Harry knew that meant he approved.

            Well, he knew it from that and the way Draco’s hand closed in a tight squeeze on his own.

            Ron folded his arms. “I can’t believe that you don’t care about saving people anymore,” he said flatly. “That was your whole life, mate. Don’t you remember? Don’t you care about all the people who are suffering now that you aren’t there?”

            “Aren’t these people who would suffer when any Auror absents himself from the job?” Draco retorted without hesitation. “Why should all the responsibility be on Harry? It sounds like you’re trying to guilt him for something that he can’t help, and I don’t like your tone, Weasel.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and squeezed Draco’s wrist more tightly than was comfortable as he stood up. Draco was angry on Harry’s behalf, yes, but that didn’t give him the right to use insults to Ron.

            This time, he moved forwards so that he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Draco, but slightly in front of him, leaning more towards Ron. If either one of them could appreciate symbolism, Harry hoped they would think about what that meant.

            “You’re right,” he said to Ron. No matter how angry Draco was, Harry knew he could count on him to translate. “You’re right that I don’t think any more about saving people, or at least I only think about it when I regret that I can’t be an Auror now. But I’m resigned to that. I know it mattered to me, but it doesn’t now. I’ll have to live with that, and if I’ve lost something precious—well, that’s not the only thing I’ve lost.”

            Ron folded his arms during the translation, and stared at Harry as if he thought that he could make him back down. Harry looked back, sad and a bit angry and a bit wistful, but determined.

            I have to live with what exists, and not what I wish existed. Draco taught me that lesson. I would have had to live with it if he hadn’t wanted me back. It’s one thing to struggle to change things, and another thing to try to change gravity and the other realities of the world.

            “You haven’t lost us,” Ron said. “But you’re close to that.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. He’d thought Ron was past this. “Why? Because I’ve changed? I would have thought that you could put up with that, Ron.”

            Ron half-turned away when that was translated, then said, “If you spend so much time with Malfoy that you don’t want to spend any with us, then yeah, I think we’re lost to each other. I told you, it doesn’t matter how far away you live, we’ll visit you, but it’s hard to do that without an invitation.”

            “What other invitation can I give you?” Harry snapped, stepping towards him. “I’ve told you I can’t talk to you directly unless you learn Latin or French, but I’ve visited with you, and I’ve talked with you, and I’ve agreed that it’s a shame that I can’t be an Auror anymore. I don’t know what you want other than that.”

            Ron turned his back as Draco’s voice died into silence and stared out the window for a minute. Draco opened his mouth to add something else, but Harry touched his wrist and held him silent. He’d seen that particular stillness from Ron before. It meant he was considering something deeply, and he would probably make up his mind to do the right thing if no one interfered. The last time Harry had seen him like that, it was right before they arrested a Dark wizard who had been responsible for the deaths of several Aurors.

            Ron had arrested him rather than destroying him. His best friend was a good person at heart. Harry kept that in mind, the way he always had, no matter how exasperated he got with him.

            Ron finally turned back around and said, “It really bothers me that we can’t talk without him overhearing.” He jerked his head at Draco, his eyes narrowed.

            Again Draco looked as if he wanted to add something, but Harry bore down on his wrist. Ron usually offered a complaint before a concession. It let him keep his pride, which, in many ways, was just as strong and pure as Draco’s. “I know,” Harry said. “But I trust him. Deeply. It’s no different than Hermione overhearing everything we say.” Draco translated with one eye on him and one eyebrow raised, as much to say that he thought Harry was mad.



            “I don’t like that either,” Ron muttered, but the complaint was practically formal.

            “I wouldn’t say that to her,” Harry said, and something, maybe the tone in his voice or the way his eye sparked, made Ron understand it before the translation. He grinned back and then sighed, a sigh that seemed to come from his toes and expel a year’s worth of frustration and grief instead of only a few months’.

            “As long as you’re happy, mate,” he said. “I wish you were still the same person, but then, I might as well wish for Greyback not to have cursed you.”

            “That would be much the more useful thing,” Draco said. Harry permitted it, because he understood some things about Draco just as he did about Ron now, and Draco would probably have exploded if he’d tried to hold in the remark any longer. To Ron, he offered the same shrug and headshake he had to Draco.

            Ron clenched his teeth, but repeated, “As long as you’re happy.”

            Harry settled for a nod and a wide smile, because he thought that Ron deserved an answer he could understand without interposition.

            Ron smiled back. It was small and reluctant, but it was a step in the right direction, and before he left, Harry could clasp his hand with no regrets.

*

            Isn’t he worried? I would have been worried if someone had told me how much my behavior had changed without my noticing.

            But from what Draco could observe, Harry was mostly interested, these days, in studying and kissing, not necessarily in that order. Days slid by like fingers of sunlight sliding across the carpet, and Draco was so busy during them that it was only at night, lying in his bed, for the moment without Harry’s presence, that he realized how happy he had been.

            Draco had encouraged Harry to act like that, of course. If he couldn’t change the existence of the curse—and none of the research they did had so far shown them how to counteract a wisdom curse or even anything similar to it—then he might as well accept it and learn to cope with its effects.

            Somehow, though, he hadn’t expected Harry to take his advice quite so much to heart.

            A hand dropped onto his shoulder. Draco tilted his head back and blinked up at Harry, who was looking down at him with a quizzical expression. “A Sickle for your thoughts,” he said. “I called your name twice and you didn’t hear me.”

            Draco shook his head. “Just thinking.” He stretched his neck up for a kiss, and Harry reached down and obliged, then loped around the couch to take up a grammar book that lay on the opposite side of the table.

            Draco bit his lip and studied him. Harry shifted a bit, but otherwise didn’t show that he felt the gaze. He had apparently decided that Draco should be allowed to look at him if he wanted to.

            Not only did Harry never talk about saving people anymore or seem to miss his friends much, even though he was always glad when they visited the Manor, but he didn’t seem to object to the Dark magic Lucius was performing to find Narcissa’s attackers, either. Draco was glad, since it made his life easier, but—

            “Do you really not want to go back?” he asked.

            Harry smiled, but didn’t look away from the book. “Would it do any good if I did?”

            “I don’t think so,” Draco said quietly. He had not been without hope, when Harry came to the Manor, that they would find some way to reverse the combined spells. But once again, Harry Potter seemed to be the center of a unique magical event. Draco knew no reason why the love magic of one mother, and not all the other mothers who had loved their children and would have died for them, should have defeated the Killing Curse. He knew no reason why a combination of a defensive shield and a curse should have changed Harry’s mind in such odd directions. Perhaps he should be glad that it had been no worse.

            Harry nodded and looked up, his eyes so bright and direct that Draco found it impossible to feel sad himself. “Then I won’t brood on it,” he said calmly. “Yes, I’ve changed. But I don’t think change has to be a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t cause me to hurt others.” He eyed Draco sideways. “You don’t think it’s made me do that?”

            “I’m not one of those who feel slighted by you,” Draco had to answer. On the one hand, he didn’t really care about the Weasley family’s feelings, but on the other, he knew that their being unhappy would contribute to their storming the Manor eventually.

            “I’d hate it if you felt slighted,” Harry breathed, and laid aside the grammar book. The movement he made over the small table in Draco’s direction could only be called stalking. Draco let his eyes flutter shut and released the moan that wanted to work its way out of his throat.

            “Before I’ve even touched you,” Harry murmured into his ear. “That’s quite a compliment.” The next moment, his hand skimmed over Draco’s chest, poking and tapping in places that stirred a frisson of fire along his nerves, and Draco didn’t have to feel as embarrassed.

            He covered Harry’s wrist with one hand and leaned forwards to kiss him. Harry submitted to the kiss for a moment, then tangled his fingers in Draco’s hair and yanked his head back. Draco yielded, conscious of his own deeper breathing and the rising erection between his legs.

            They had always stopped at kissing before. He doubted they would now.

            “I want,” Harry said into his ear, stopping every few words to lick and kiss and nip, “very badly, to have you on a bed and be able to do whatever I want with you.”

            “Nothing stopping you,” Draco whispered, moving a hand to Harry’s hip, “except your own discretion, and mine.”

            There was no response for a time, and Draco opened his eyes.

            The brilliant shine of Harry’s eyes needed no translation.

*

            Harry’s hands shook when he laid Draco down on his bed. They had gone to his rooms, and not Draco’s. Harry didn’t know if that was deliberate. He couldn’t remember who had made the decision.

            He couldn’t remember much about the last few minutes, to tell the truth.

            He laughed at himself for the shaking of his hands, and saw Draco’s eyes narrow in on his face. He shook his head helplessly and lowered his head to bury his mouth in the hair at Draco’s nape. “I can’t help it,” he whispered. “I want you so much. It’s making me dizzy and I feel like my body’s buzzing with lightning.”

            Draco raised a hand that clamped down on the back of his neck with far more possessiveness than he had shown so far. “Well,” he whispered back. “Then I can excuse it.”

            Harry began to move again, with hands and lips made clumsy by desire and shock. Not fear, he thought as he kissed his way down Draco’s chest towards his groin; at least, he didn’t think so. What was there to be afraid of? Draco had done so many things to help him in the last month that it was silly to be afraid of him now. He would definitely tell Harry if Harry was doing something he didn’t like.

            The last month.

            Perhaps that was it. Harry’s life had changed completely in one month, after the casting of the curse, and now it had changed again, and he didn’t think his senses or his brain had quite caught up.

            Especially my brain.

            Draco arched his head back and cried out when Harry sucked at the skin above his navel, and again when Harry breathed on his cock. Harry had so far been shoving his shirt and trousers out of the way as needed, but now he took the chance to strip them off, followed by his own clothing. It didn’t help that his hands were shaking, or that Draco lay there, breathing heavily, and watched him with eyes that had gone dark like black suns and let him do what he liked.

            Harry kissed his chest again, rubbed his cheek against it, and then slid down and took Draco’s cock in his mouth.

            He had never done this before, but once again, the dizzy surge of excitement caught him up and carried him over any possible fear. He had never learned to speak French or lived in Malfoy Manor before, either, but that didn’t matter. He had done them, and failing at them didn’t mean the end of the world.

            Draco closed his eyes, his lashes soft streaks of light against his face, and breathed in tandem with the licks and caresses of Harry’s tongue up his shaft. Harry wondered if it was an accomplishment to cause that, or if it was something that everyone could manage the first time they sucked cock. He wondered if Draco was noticing, if it mattered, if there was something wrong with him that he had noticed that response of all Draco’s possible responses, and then the questions broke apart into mental laughter again.

            He loved this. It let him fly without a broom. He never wanted it to end.

            Draco’s back arched and his brow furrowed and he made a soft little sound in the back of his throat. The soft little sound built to a sob and a cry, and then he was clawing at the blanket as he came.

            Harry opened his mouth wider and tried to relax his throat. He had heard that people should do that.

            It didn’t help much. Draco’s cock bounced off his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and he ended up choking and dripping semen onto the bedspread anyway. He comforted himself with the memory that house-elves were responsible for cleaning this up, and then reared back on his heels and looked at Draco.

            Draco looked—happy. Soft and flushed and half-sleepy, but also half-predatory, he folded himself forwards in a long, slow motion and gave Harry the warmest kiss he’d ever had.

            “Lie back,” he whispered.

            Harry did, and gasped as Draco melted down his body and then took Harry’s cock in his mouth in return. It was no more than Harry had expected, after what he did for Draco, but somehow it had the specialness and intensity that he’d wanted and thought he would never experience.

            And was it conceited to expect it in return?

            Again Harry’s thoughts broke when they got too moral, and he closed his eyes so as to better concentrate on the way that Draco’s tongue worked up and down, the way it lashed at the end of each stroke—how is he managing the level of concentration that requires?—the soft breath puffing over him, the sudden firm suction when Draco drew him further into his throat, the hands rising to stroke his thighs and reach back to fondle his balls, the sensation of increasing fullness and tightness and warmth—

            He came without warning, but it seemed that Draco didn’t mind it any more than he did. He had more experience swallowing than Harry did, though. He pulled back and let his tongue curl around his lips as he caught the last drops, and Harry opened his eyes just in time to see that happen. He shuddered, his body stirring as if it could come again.

            “Good?” Draco asked softly, crawling up beside him.

            Harry looked up. There was a flicker of uncertainty, hidden but visible, like fire behind a grate, in Draco’s eyes. It heartened Harry in an odd way. Draco had seemed so perfect and self-contained, most of the time, it was a relief to find out that there was one thing he wasn’t sure he was good at.

            And he had helped Harry so much. Harry had only helped him a little in return, mostly by helping his mother.

            It was a pleasure to be able to reach up, bring Draco in for a kiss, and murmur against his lips, “Better than I ever dreamed.”

            Draco dropped his head forwards to rest on Harry’s shoulder, but Harry saw his smile before he did so.

*

            Draco woke slowly, disoriented with the combination of discomfort that came from sleeping in a strange bed and the comfort that someone else was with him. He blinked over Harry’s shoulder at the window for a long time before he recognized it. Then he sat up and rubbed at his forehead. No one was there to see him, so he indulged in a good long yawn.

            Of course, when he closed his mouth and looked again, a house-elf was watching him. It bowed solemnly and said, “Master Draco Malfoy is to be excusing me, but Master Lucius is wanting to speak with him.”

            “Of course,” Draco murmured, and looked around for his shirt and trousers before he gave up and borrowed Harry’s. He couldn’t remember how they had come off Harry, which might be a bit worrying, but wasn’t.

            Harry isn’t like anyone else, he thought, pausing to look back at him once before he opened the door of the bedroom.

            Harry was curled up with one arm over his head. Defiant bits of black hair still stuck up around his hand, of course. His breath was light and easy, and it ruffled the hair. Draco could see the corner of one eye, sticky with sleep, and the expanse of bare chest, marked with more red bites than he remembered leaving. Sheets smothered the rest of his body.

            Draco shuddered in deep satisfaction and turned to go find his father.

            To his surprise, Lucius already stood outside the door. He stared Draco in the eye and lifted a cage of iron above his head. Draco, squinting, managed to make out what looked like two shrunken human heads in it.

            “I found them,” Lucius said simply.

            Draco looked quickly at his father for permission, then reached out to touch the side of the cage. Agonized screams promptly sounded in his ears. The cage itself contained the memories of their deaths, and would for anyone who touched it.

            Draco pulled his hand back. His love and longing was different—he would not wreak such a revenge if someone hurt Harry, because Harry would not want him to—but he did not wish to cast aspersions on his parents’ bond. What Lucius had done, Narcissa would want and understand and approve. And it had been what his father needed to do.

            “Good,” he said. “I trust they paid in full?”

            His father’s eyes flashed, with one more glimpse of the mad look they had shown all summer. “More than in full.” That made sense to Draco, since cutting off his wife’s arm would necessitate a debt so great Lucius would be anxious to show his victims the interest that had accrued, as well.

            Then Lucius turned and walked away with the cage, and his strides looked like the strides of a sane man. Draco nodded, knowing that his father would join them for breakfast later that morning and look perfectly normal. He had accomplished his revenge. It was now done and past, and it would not linger in his mind.

            Draco stepped back into the bedroom and studied Harry for a moment. Yes, he has changed. I think he’ll accept what Father did, and once he never would have.

            But if Harry accepted it, Draco saw no reason why it had to change. He had been a champion of Harry’s making his own decisions about his mind and preferences from the time he had seen him in hospital.

            Was it really only a month ago?

            Well, why not? A month was enough time to make up one’s mind to live well with a disability. A month was enough time to find love, to give up a hobby, to seek for and close in on murderers. (Lucius’s hunt had taken two months, but then, he had had two to find).

            Enough time to come to another country.

            Harry rolled over and stretched out a hand, automatically seeking him.

            Draco walked towards the bed, enjoying the fall of sunlight on his skin from the enchanted window, the roll of his muscles, the firm steps of his feet. Then he bent over Harry and began to whisper.

            “Vivamus, meus Harry, atque amemus,

            rumoresque senum severiorum

            omnes unius aestimemus assis!

            Soles occidere et redire possunt;

            nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

            nox est perpetua una dorimienda.”

            Harry’s eyes opened and fastened on him with perfect understanding.

            Draco smiled and continued.

            “Da mi basia mille, deinde centum;

            dein mille altera, dein secunda centum;

            deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum—”

            He didn’t get to finish, as Harry rose, wrapped an arm around his neck, flipped him to the bed, and set about making the poem a reality.

            The End.
- 1
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Another Country