Draco had always known he was attracted to Potter. It was something that had sparked within him a whole lot of grief and self-hatred in fourth year—not because it was a boy, but because it was Potter —until he'd realised that he could be attracted to him and still completely hate him, and the world suddenly felt right again.

He no longer hated Potter, but he also suffered no delusions about how dreadful an idea it was to consider him anything more than a mild, sexy annoyance. And yet, every time Draco thought back to yesterday afternoon, pushed up against the wall with Potter's eyes roaming over him like he was water in a desert, he managed to completely forget why.

Still, he was a professional, and Potter was an idiot, so he pushed the thought out of his mind as best he could. By the time he opened the door to Potter that afternoon, he was more likely to hex him than snog him, and that was exactly how Draco liked it.

Potter still smelled like alcohol, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as yesterday morning, and Draco ignored it.

"We'll work in here," he said, crossing the room and opening the door.

In the centre of the room, a large, red circle had been drawn on the ground, surrounding the package from yesterday. There had never been much furniture in the first place, but what there was had been pushed against the walls: neatly stacked rows of shelving, several small tables, and a single chair. The numerous books that didn't fit into the bookcase had been piled symmetrically in the corners.

A small Pensieve sat on the table next to the package, shimmering faintly beneath the strength of the wards Draco had set. The first time they drank the Transition Potion, the wards on the door would activate and their memories would be stored in the Pensieve. It was only when the spell sensed that the curse had been successfully disarmed that the wards would come down and their memories could be returned.

He felt Potter come to stand behind him and look around the room, and when Draco turned to look at him, he had an expression of calculated interest in his eyes. It made Draco feel unusually self-conscious, and he covered it with a fierce glare.

"Do you need to go through the procedure?" he asked, feeling a perverse need for Potter to say 'yes, please, Draco, guide me and hold my hand'.

Potter just stared at him.

Draco let out a long, slow breath. Potter might be closer to some semblance of normalcy than he had been yesterday, but he still looked like he'd just leaped off the back of a motorbike while it was still moving. How did someone like that become an Unspeakable? Everything about him—his beaten-up leather jacket, his arrogant slouch, his untameable hair—screamed brawns-no-brain. And yet, even Draco was finding himself forced to admit that Potter was hiding a level of intelligence with unknown depth.

"I know the procedure," Potter confirmed when the silence had stretched on too long and Draco didn't know how to break it without starting an argument. "It's my specialty."

Well, damn. Wasn't that just a sentence that begged clarification. Draco closed his eyes and counted to ten, forcing himself to swallow down the insatiable need to know more about Potter, always more.

"Then, let us begin," he gritted out instead.

He handed Potter the two potions he'd prepared with the ingredients from this morning, held his own glass up in a mocking salute, and drained them both in quick succession. The first one—the Chameleon potion—wasn't too bad, but the Transition Potion tasted like pig swill. He closed his eyes, trying not to choke on the flavour, and felt a hand come to rest on his shoulder, its owner staggering for balance.

"What the fuck is in that?" Potter gasped.

Draco turned to him, an insult on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't grasp a hold of it. The room was blurring, Potter's face distorting before his eyes into a thousand colours and shapes that didn't seem like they could possibly fit together and yet managed to all the same. All at once, Draco realised his error, but before he could work out how to operate his mouth to warn Potter, he fell forward, his forehead brushing against the red chalk of the circle, and passed out.

*

With slowly creeping clarity, the room came into focus. It was smaller than Draco remembered—emptier too—and the colours didn't seem right. He sat up with a small groan, rubbing his head where it had clunked against the floor.

"Bit potent," Potter mumbled from beside him, sitting back on his hands and rolling his head around to stretch out his shoulders. "I thought it was meant to take a couple of minutes, so we could at least sit down first."

"Yes, well, it's obviously a touch stronger than expected, isn't it?" Draco snapped. "How's your head?"

Potter levelled him with a stare. "I don't know," he said pointedly. "It aches a bit, but since this is only a metaphysical representation of the curse rather than a real room, for all I know I'm bleeding to death on your workroom floor. There's nothing we can do about it now, so let's just get started."

Draco rolled his eyes. "You'd know, Potter. Anything that happens to your body out there happens in here, and vice versa."

Potter grunted, apparently annoyed that he had overlooked something that Draco hadn't. Draco mentally chalked up a win, and then he put it out of his mind and focused on their surroundings.

"Fucking bollocks," Draco hissed, climbing to his feet and looking around at the curse. After a long moment, he admitted, "I didn't expect it to be an entire room."

The room they were in, now that Draco looked around, was very obviously not the workroom they had left behind in the physical world. It was approximately four metres square, and its most striking feature was its walls: they looked like the inside of a mechanical watch, interspersed with sections of metal lattice that pulsed gently with a faint white light. Draco turned around slowly, looking the walls up and down and determining that there was definitely no door. Thankfully, the floors and ceiling were ordinary floorboards and plaster, and they had no sensation of hot or cold in here, so, apart from being surrounded by imposing layers of moving metal, it was a relatively pleasant place to be stuck for the next few hours.

Potter moved in a slow circle, examining the walls closely. "And we're not going to remember any of this once we wake up?" he breathed, unmistakably awed despite the roughness to his tone.

"Not a whit," Draco agreed, moving to the centre of the room and taking his toolkit from his pocket. "I don't suppose you know anything about watches, Potter?"

"Only that Arthur likes to tinker with them," Potter said, distracted, as he leaned in to study a tiny gear ticking around on its own for no apparent reason.

"So, nothing helpful, then," Draco said flatly.

"'Fraid not."

"Right," Draco huffed, laying out his apparatus on the floor. He selected a tiny wand—the size of a chopstick and used for locating the first loose thread in a curse's shield—and picked a wall at random. "Then just focus on keeping us anchored and shut up."

He heard the sound of clothing rustling and something heavy hitting the floor, and just for a moment he froze as the mental image of Potter undressing and lying back on the ground, legs spread, hit him out of absolutely fucking nowhere. A terrified whimper escaped the back of his throat, and he whirled around in horror.

Potter looked up at him, one eyebrow raised, from his perfectly innocent position on the floor, sitting on his leather jacket for comfort. "Something wrong, Malfoy?"

"Nothing." Draco spun back around and glared at the wall.

Perhaps he didn't have his latent fantasies as under control as he'd thought. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He simply could not afford to deal with this right now—it was too dangerous to become distracted in here. In the same way that he'd pushed aside all unnecessary thoughts when the package had exploded, he pushed aside all thoughts of Potter. He would focus on what needed to be done, and that was it.

Now, the more important question was: how in Merlin's name was he going to unknit the first layer of the curse's shield, when the entire curse was presenting itself as an analogue mechanism? A vision of jamming the wand into one of the gears and watching the entire thing stutter to an explosive halt ran through his mind, and he viciously dismissed it.

"Stop."

The word was quiet, reluctant, but Draco heard it all the same. He thought about ignoring it, but that wasn't why he was here. Fighting against Potter was only going to risk their safety, and in the quiet recesses of his mind even he could admit it was a stupid idea.

He turned around, and Potter gestured for him to sit down.

"We don't have much time," Draco protested.

"It's not going to matter if we keep butting heads," Potter said bluntly.

Draco paused for a moment, and then took a seat on the floor in front of Potter. It would seem he wasn't the only one suddenly all too aware now that the danger was real.

"What is it?" he asked, the words dragging themselves out.

"We need our minds to be wholly on the task," Potter said before reaching into the front of his shirt.

For a moment, Draco stopped breathing, but then Potter drew his hand out again, bringing a small pendant with it and holding it up so it was gently swinging from the black cord around Potter's neck.

Draco couldn't hold back a laugh when he saw it was a tiny anchor. "Subtle."

Potter smirked. "It can be easy to lose yourself in these dream-states," he said, running his hand down the cord until his fingers lightly brushed the top of the anchor. "Anything real and tangible helps prevent that from happening." He looked up suddenly, and Draco felt caught in the intensity of his gaze. "You don't need to worry; I've done this before. Not for this spell, but for many, many others. I'm good at it. My magic is tuned to the anchor," he gave it a little wave, "and the second we start to lose ourselves, I'll feel it. I'm not going to let us get consumed by this curse, Malfoy, so just focus on figuring out how it works."

How could he possibly figure out the curse when Potter was looking at him like that? He swallowed, searched for the words, and then swallowed again. It was pointless. No matter how many mysteries Potter kept throwing at him, he had to just shove them away or he'd never be able to focus on the task at hand. It's not like he was going to get any answers anyway.

He nodded, but just as he stood up to get back to work, Potter reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.

"Malfoy, if there's something bothering you, you have to get it off your chest now," he warned. "We can't be distracted."

It was almost like this was a third Potter, sitting in front of him. He was unlike the happy, light-hearted person he was with his friends, and again unlike the brooding, volatile person that Draco was becoming so intrigued by. Was it really just that they were both making the effort, for the first time, to work together? If Draco had known that was all it took to get his proverbial handshake, he would have threatened their lives long ago.

"Why did you become an Unspeakable?" The words were out before he could stop them.

Potter blinked in surprise. "Really?" he asked, incredulous. "That's what's bothering you?"

"It doesn't make sense," Draco spat. "You've never liked any of this—the Ministry, secrets, gossip. It's not you, Potter. Why did you do it?"

Potter stared at him before exhaling in a long breath. "The Horcrux was still inside me," he said, and Draco felt like he'd just been punched in the stomach.

The walls seemed to fade around him as Potter kept speaking. He'd heard about the Horcruxes. The whispers had spread after the battle, no matter how much the Ministry tried to keep them contained. He'd never fully believed them.

"After the war, I could feel it. Dead, but lingering, rotting away in my blood. The Unspeakables wanted to study me, like I was some kind of lab rat. Given half the choice, I reckon they would have left it inside me just to see what it did."

"So, you became an Unspeakable to do what they wouldn't," Draco guessed, the words sending shivers down his spine.

Potter nodded. "Beyond that, I don't want to talk about it. Can you accept that as the answer, Malfoy? Or is it still going to distract you?"

Draco felt the weight of Potter's admission settle against him. He wondered if anyone else knew; he had the strangest sensation that he might be the only one. Potter's eyes were too heavy, too bitter, for this to be something he was comfortable admitting.

Something between them had changed, and Draco didn't yet know what it was.

He nodded, and Potter released his wrist, Draco only now realising that he had been holding it all this time. His skin felt cold at the loss of contact.

"We've only got about an hour left of the potion before we wake up," he said, his voice coming out rough. "I'd better get to work."

Drawing deep on recesses of strength he hadn't known he'd ever need, Draco finally managed to stop thinking about Potter. The room faded into the background until all he could see in front of him was the set of three brass cogs he had chosen to focus on first. He had decided it didn't matter where he started—the most important part for now was to get beneath the curse's outer shield.

When you first began work as a curse breaker, they taught you that curses were like a series of babushka dolls with teeth: find the opening without getting bitten, and you'd slowly get closer to the curse's core until you were able to destroy it. It wasn't until Draco was in his sixth year of training that he realised that was utter bullshit. Curses weren't like babushka dolls at all; they were like balls of yarn that were made out of barbed wire. The only consolation was that centuries of study and practice had given their profession a collection of maps to work by. Once you knew what you were looking for, you could locate all the little pressure points, poke them one by one, and the wire would unravel in a neat and orderly fashion, like the layers of a doll.

Draco didn't need the wire to unravel, but he did need to know where the layers were and what they did. He might not care about the Weasleys, but he couldn't escape the image in the back of his mind of Ron stretched out on a hospital bed, unconscious while the unknown curse did Merlin-knows-what to his mind.

He ran the tiny wand over the space above the cogs, feeling for the slightest shift in air pressure that would indicate a weakness. The wand was attuned to the smallest movement, but even with its advantage all Draco could feel was smooth resistance. He had been hoping he could at least slip beneath some of the curse's defence mechanisms without risk, but luck did not appear to be on his side.

Knowing that it would alert the curse to their presence, he gingerly tapped the smallest cog and waited. For a split second, everything stopped moving, like a sleeping animal hitching its breath, and then it started again, and Draco let out the breath he had been holding for several minutes.

He heard Potter breathe a sigh behind him.

"How's it going?"

The question was quiet, respectful. Draco wouldn't have known Potter had it in him.

"The first part is complete," Draco said, running the tiny wand around the cogs to make sure there was no more resistance. "It let me inside."

"Seems strange that you need to get inside it when you're already technically in it," Potter mused.

Draco turned around to study him. He had a point; that same question had been bothering him since they'd started. "I didn't think we'd be inside it," he said, stepping into the centre of the room and looking around at the moving walls. "I thought our minds would put us in the workroom and the curse would be where the package is, just with a different appearance. But despite the fact that we do appear to be inside the curse itself, its defences are still there."

The walls continued to move without stuttering, and Draco decided it was enough time to be certain they were safe. He drew out his notebook from his front pocket, cast a spell with the smaller wand, and began to note down several figures in succession as the spell gave him readings.

Beside him, Potter was leaning back on his hands and twirling the pendant around in circles. It was maddening.

"Must you do that?" Draco asked, snapping the book closed and glaring at him.

"Keeps me focused," Potter said, grinning widely up at Draco before he slipped the pendant back into his shirt and stood up. "Did it work?"

"I have the figures," Draco tucked the book back into his shirt pocket and patted it carefully. "So, I can start the map now."

"Pressure points, right?" Potter asked.

Draco felt a familiar spike of irritation in his forehead. "I liked you better when you were an imbecile," he muttered.

Potter laughed. "Don't be a twat. You never liked me at all, Malfoy."

"I always did have good taste."

He ignored Potter's snort of derision and began to pack up his tools. "I'll begin the map tonight, but I'd prefer not to try dismantling any part of the curse until we see what all the layers can do."

"Of course." Potter's easy acquiescence was disturbing. "Any ideas so far what kind of curse it is?"

Potter's tone was deliberately casual, but Draco could hear the note of longing behind the question. He stopped what he was doing and looked up. Potter's face had reverted to the bitter mask Draco kept catching glances of, and it was all Draco could do not to demand answers.

"Not yet," he said quietly. "But I will. We'll solve this, Potter, I promise."

It was a dangerous thing to make promises he didn't know he could keep; more dangerous still when the one he was making them to was staring at him like he might actually believe them.

Before he could think of a way to take the words back, the room around them began to fade, distorting into a mess of grey and white streaks that eventually gave way to brown floorboards.

*

Draco groaned, pushing himself up from the floor and stretching out his stiff limbs. He felt Potter stirring behind him, and he had the strangest sensation of lost time, like there was a memory lingering just out of reach. But even though he knew he had been working inside the curse for nearly two hours, the last thing he could remember was the taste of that vile potion.

Potter pushed his hair out of his face and rubbed his cheek with a grimace.

"Little warning next time, Malfoy?" he asked, lip curling in disgust as he rubbed his temple. "I'd prefer not to die from fucking stupidity, if I can help it."

Despite the acid in his words, Potter's brow was furrowed in confusion, like he too was trying to remember something that didn't make sense. They looked at one another, and Draco felt the strongest urge to reach out and comfort Potter. His hand twitched, and Potter's eyes dropped to it, confusion giving way to something that looked awfully like fear.

Draco's heart skipped, and in a moment of regression he fell back on the familiar.

"Then perhaps next time you might choose not to swim in a bathtub of Firewhiskey before attending such an important work meeting," he said with a sneer. "Or does the precious Saviour not actually care about his friends as much as he professes to?"

He knew instantly that he had gone too far. The colour drained from Potter's face, leaving behind tightly controlled rage. A distant part of his brain acknowledged that it was a testament to just how much Potter did care that instead of responding, he simply turned and walked out, the door slamming behind him.

After a few seconds of frozen horror, Draco turned and punched the wall. It crunched satisfyingly beneath his knuckles, leaving a small indent of his strength behind. The skin was instantly grazed and bleeding, and Draco stared at it numbly, unable to reconcile the sensations flooding him because he couldn't remember anything that had just happened, at least, not before he'd apparently ruined everything.

As his racing heart began to slow, Draco was left wondering why it felt like he'd just lost something very important.

*

Now confident that he could contain the curse if it exploded, Draco unwrapped the parcel that evening. He did it from a distance, well away from the protective circle of red chalk, and when the cardboard fell away in wispy threads he felt a surge of disappointment.

It was a box.

He had hoped the package might contain a clue towards the nature of the curse, but it would seem it was only further mystery.

The wooden chest had a shiny inbuilt lock, and Draco wasn't going anywhere near that for all the galleons in Gringotts. With a sigh, he checked the shields around the circle and left the room. When he found himself at the liquor cabinet, staring uselessly at the lock whose key was still somewhere behind the armoire, he swore and left the apartment for Diagon Alley. He couldn't very well drink at home, not after tearing into Potter for it. He'd go and have a civilized drink with company at Xander's, the new bar down the end of the strip.

The streets were covered in a light, dusty snow when he left, and he found himself thankful for the extra scarf he'd thought to grab on his way out the door. Since his apartment wasn't far from the Leaky Cauldron and the entrance to Diagon Alley, he opted to walk instead of Apparating, mostly in the hopes that it would clear his head enough that he could make sense of the last few hours. His mind was a swirl of horrible, festering emotion, and if he couldn't clear it with a walk at least he could be certain to drown it with alcohol.

He never claimed to be well adjusted.

Few people were out this late on a Tuesday, and the night descended around him in that quiet softness of new snow, making him feel like the only person living for miles. For a moment, he almost turned around and went home, unwilling to ruin the sensation with the sound of drunken revelry, but then thoughts of Potter crept into his mind and he almost ran the last few streets to the Leaky just to escape him.

The warmth of the Leaky settled over him in a burst of colour and sound the second he opened the door, and he managed to slow down enough to pass as a normal person instead of the increasing wreck he was becoming. Unfortunately, he hadn't made it more than five steps towards the back entrance when he heard his name being called, and all illusions of a quiet night of sulking at Xander's slipped away.

"George," he said, nodding at the redhead tucked into the corner booth. "Morgan. Enjoying dinner at the Leaky?"

George grimaced. "As much as we can at the moment."

Draco inclined his head, unsurprised at the sombre atmosphere surrounding their table. Barring the solitude and poor choice of venue, they had probably had similar intentions to him, coming out tonight.

"I won't disturb you." Draco lifted his hand in farewell, but George made a noise of protest, and Morgan reached out to grasp his hand.

"Join us," she said, and George nodded.

Draco was hard-pressed to deny the owner of such a welcoming smile, even if she wasn't exactly his type and was remarkably more demonstrative than he was used to in acquaintances. Ignoring his usual voice of restraint and warning, he nodded, ordered a glass of wine from Tom at the bar, and sat down.

"We won't insist on work-talk," Morgan assured him. "Harry has already told us that it went well today and you're making progress."

Draco found himself both surprised and grateful, and then surprised again once he acknowledged that Potter would have to have mentioned this after their argument, which meant that he was still holding Draco in at least semi-professional regard. And he didn't look like he had mentioned their disagreement either.

"I do have one question," George said sheepishly. "I don't understand how you can know that at all if you can't remember what happens while you're working. That's right, isn't it?"

Draco took a sip of the wine—surprisingly good—and tried to think how best to sum up the experience without becoming too technical. "We can't remember it, no," he agreed. "In the past, curse breakers had to scrawl notes on their body, so that they could read it when they awoke from the trance. Fortunately, we're not so backwards now, and we can take items in and out of the dream-state with us, so long as they're on our person. I can see from my readings that we've succeeded in plotting the first—" he hesitated, "layer, for lack of a better word. Once we've plotted all the necessary points out, I can look at my notes, map out the curse and its constituents, and then dismantle it from the outside with relative safety. When the curse unravels, it triggers the last part of the identification spell, so our defences can come down and the barrier that the potion and the wards constructed between us and our memories will disappear. Then, we'll remember what the trance looked like." He allowed himself a small smile. "I have to say, I'm dying to know what it looks like."

"Ah." George nodded. "So, it's a little like reverse engineering a tracking spell—you have to locate all markers before you can get to work on the whole."

Draco blinked. "When did you all get so bloody intelligent?" he snapped before he could stop himself.

George burst into laughter, and Morgan choked on her drink.

"I think you weren't really looking close enough, Malfoy," George said, but the twinkle in his eyes showed he wasn't really angry.

Draco considered how different they were now, even to when they had met in the shop just the other day. Something had changed.

The thought echoed in his mind, seeming poignant in a way that he couldn't place. For a moment, he had a fleeting glimpse of a wall filled with gears. He shook his head, clearing the confusing image away.

"Yes, well," he said, staring down into his wine glass. Abruptly, he looked up and asked the question that had been bothering him ever since this whole business began. "Why did Potter become an Unspeakable?"

George shrugged. "No one knows. It's driving Ron crazy," he broke off, his face a sudden mask of undisguised pain.

Draco felt certain he was intruding, but a pointed look from Morgan told him to stay seated. She entwined her fingers in George's and squeezed gently, the two of them sharing a look of such deep affection Draco felt something hollow inside his chest cry out in longing.

"He's stable," she said softly, speaking to both of them. "And the Healers say there is no mind damage at this point in time. Draco and Harry will find the solution."

Draco stared at her, wondering where George had met this lady. She was such a calm, steady presence—so unlike the chaos of their large family—that he couldn't imagine the two of them even finding each other, let alone falling in love. But then, what did Draco know about love? Perhaps there was something to the old "opposites attract" adage after all.

"Where did you two meet?" he asked in an effort to change the subject.

Morgan smiled, and even George's lips quirked.

"I, er," she said, glancing at George. "I was chasing a pinwheel firework down the street."

Draco's eyes widened in alarm.

"A miniature one!" She clarified. "And modified to sing a terribly rowdy version of God Save the Queen as it went." She gave an affected sigh. "My brother likes to tinker."

"I'm still not allowed to meet him," George said with a smirk.

"Of course, you're allowed to," Morgan protested, rolling her eyes. "He's just hard to pin down."

"I think you're just scared we're going to make an even better pinwheel."

Draco snickered into his wine, and just like that the soreness of Ron's coma had passed. They settled into safer topics—the shop, Draco's work overseas. Draco found himself enjoying both the wine and the company far more than he had expected, and by the time he was ready to go he was surprised to find the last patrons were leaving as well.

"You're not so bad after all, Malfoy," George said, clapping him on the back. "Harry was right."

Draco staggered, certain that no one—not even Blaise—had ever done that to him before. He cleared his throat.

"You're... surprisingly pleasant... as well," he managed, ignoring George's bellowing laughter and Morgan's one-armed hug.

He waved them off as they Apparated away, and then began trudging through the drifting snow back to his apartment. It wasn't until he was halfway home that the rest of George's words filtered through, and he staggered to a halt, propped up against a freezing lamp post for support. What had Potter said about him? George hadn't been talking about his work just now; he'd been talking about him, as a person. Draco was sure of it.

What had Potter said?

The memory of Potter's face when they'd last parted ways shoved its way into Draco's mind. He dropped his head back against the lamppost and groaned. Whatever positive thing Potter had said about him, he likely wasn't saying it anymore.

"You fucking twat," he hissed to himself. "You absolute, complete, bollocking, fucking—"

"Oi!" An upstairs window shoved loudly open and a muffled voice called down. "If you're gonna have a bloody meltdown, mate, piss off and do it at home!"

"Swivel on it!" Draco snapped back, before pulling himself together and striding away, coat tails whipping around him.

*

When he answered the door the next morning, Draco made sure he had showered, groomed, and drunk a triple strength hangover potion. Even still, it felt as though Potter was eyeing him suspiciously.

"About yesterday," Draco said, trying to work out how exactly an apology to Potter should sound. By all accounts, it was unfamiliar territory.

"Forget it."

Potter pushed past him and strode straight to the workroom door.

Draco gaped after him indignantly. He was just about to insist Potter regain any manners he had once possessed, when he noticed that Potter was wearing the same clothing as yesterday. He frowned, wondering how to broach the question—or what the question might even be—but the workroom door was already banging shut, leaving him alone.

When he entered the room, he found Potter already sitting cross legged, staring mutely at the circle and presumably waiting for the potion.

"We said we need to trust each other, remember?" Draco snapped. "We can't be fighting, or the curse can take advantage of our weaknesses."

Potter looked up at him, and for a moment his eyes appeared dead. "I trust you," he said, his voice filled with a sincerity that was at odds with his expression. Then, he added, "It doesn't mean I have to like you."

Draco spluttered. "How can I trust someone who looks like they want to stab me the second they're offered a sharp object?"

Potter gave him a feral grin. "Don't give me a sharp object."

Before Draco could protest, he interrupted again.

"Malfoy, I promise I'm going to do everything I can to look out for both of us. We're in this together. But I'm not going to pretend our relationship is something it isn't. That's why you wanted me as your anchor, isn't it? Because you can trust that everything I say to you is honest, and because you don't have to second guess anything I do?"

Draco mentally added "mind-reader" to the dubious list of things he guessed Unspeakables did.

"Yes," he said reluctantly.

"Good. Now give me the potions."

After a moment of silent arguing in his head, Draco fetched the two glasses and handed one to Potter, sitting down beside him. They drank in silence and lay back on the floor just before everything faded to black.

*

This time, the room materialised far quicker, and he didn't have the aching head he'd had yesterday from the fall.

He did, however, have a painful mixture of conflicting memories. Everything from the dream-state came flooding back, slotting into space his brain hadn't known was there.

Slowly, he began to remember everything he'd felt standing with Potter in this space yesterday. He remembered Potter's confession—why he had become an Unspeakable—and the strange truce they had formed. It was like waking from a dream and realising everything you thought you felt was wrong, different. Except this was the dream, and out there was real.

He turned to face Potter and saw his own shock mirrored back at him.

"Malfoy," Potter breathed, and Draco was certain he'd never heard his name said like that before. He ran a hand across his face. "Shit. I didn't—" He broke off and laughed bitterly. "We really don't remember any of this, do we?"

Draco shook his head mutely, and the words fell out like they were the most natural thing in the world, "I'm sorry I insulted you last night. I went too far. I didn't mean to accuse you of abandoning your friends."

Potter's eyes widened in shock. "An apology?" His lip quirked. "I must be dreaming."

Before Draco could make a quick retort, the smile fell away from Potter's face.

"I'm sorry for acting like a dick, er, out there." He waved a hand vaguely. "I knew you didn't mean anything by it. I think I was just latching onto an excuse to sulk."

"Ah, a play for more attention," Draco said, nodding thoughtfully. "I should have guessed."

The atmosphere was relaxed, teasing, and that alone would be enough to unsettle him because this was Potter. When had it become acceptable to make jokes with Potter? But that wasn't the half of it, because inside Draco was seething with a turmoil of emotions he couldn't name. He remembered the anger and bitterness that he felt outside of the dream-state, but as the minutes passed it was being overridden by the increasing sense of warmth and tentative curiosity that seemed to define their relationship in this space. He wondered if Potter felt it too.

He cleared his throat and took out his toolkit. "Since I'm inside its defences now, I should be able to get a little further today. I'm hoping to locate two pressure points, maybe even three."

"Anything I can do to help?" Potter asked, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking awkwardly around the room. "It doesn't take much attention to monitor the anchor, and I've got a bit of experience in locating nasty curses."

His voice was casual, but something in it made Draco look up. His posture was stiff, the leather jacket sitting awkward and bulky on his shoulders. He remembered suddenly his confusion when Potter had walked in that morning.

"You're wearing the same clothing," he said. "I know your sense of taste is irreparably damaged, but you still show a tendency to shower regularly. Did something happen last night?"

He meant had something happened with Ron, but another meaning popped into his mind and his face suddenly flamed. Potter's cheeks turned pink, and Draco wondered if it was too much to ask that the dream-state open up a pit for him to crawl into and die.

"No," he said roughly, shaking his head. Their eyes caught briefly, and for one breathless moment Draco could have sworn Potter's gaze was heated, staring into him with an intensity he'd only imagined before, on nights that he was particularly drunk and lonely. Then, Potter turned away. "Nothing happened."

He paused and then seemed to slump forward. "Okay, fine, I'm not dealing with this too well, all right? And when you had a go at me for drinking on the job I ended up going to the Ministry and researching all night." He gave a wry grin. "It was that, or drink another bottle of whiskey."

"Did you find anything useful?" Draco asked, opting to ignore Potter's vulnerable admission in the same way one might attempt to win over a wild animal by not looking at it straight on.

"No idea," Potter admitted. "I couldn't remember any of this, so I didn't know what I was looking for, did I?" He looked around with a thoughtful expression. "Though, I kept wanting to read about wizard clocks, which in hindsight makes a lot of sense."

"Wizard clocks?" Draco asked, taking out a box of fine purple powder from his toolkit and walking over to the area of the mechanism he had started on yesterday. "I thought Muggles had mechanical clocks as well."

Potter joined him, his shoulder brushing against Draco's arm so briefly Draco thought he might have imagined it.

"They do," Potter said, "but wizard clocks monitor a lot more than just time. The Weasley's clock keeps track of where each family member is, and I've seen Luna wear a watch that maps the moonrise. Muggle clocks definitely don't do that."

Draco stared at him askance. "What do they monitor then?"

"Just time," Potter said, chewing on his lip like he was holding back a laugh. "Just regular, old time."

"Barbaric," Draco breathed.

He unscrewed the lid of the container, took a pinch of the purple dust, and blew gently onto the largest gear.

One by one, a series of wheels lit up with a gentle, purple light until they were surrounded by an undulating strip of purple on all four walls.

"There's our first pathway." Draco couldn't contain a smile. "I have to say, I had been imagining I would use this powder to illuminate the veins of a leaf, or the framework of a cupboard, or something equally simple to observe."

Potter murmured something in agreement, but he was too busy taking note of the train of wheels to respond properly.

Draco drew his wand from its holster and muttered an incantation, one of the diagnostic charms he had cast many times on the parcel already. This time, instead of sending back a series of conflicting readings that put the curse into multiple categories of curse magic, it sent back a set of figures that Draco recognised instantly.

"It's a compulsion charm," he said, looking up as Potter's eyes snapped to his. "That explains why I kept getting readings from the tacit branch—tacit curse magic covers anything that manipulates and controls the victim. I've never seen it used concurrently with the mercurial branch, but I guess we'll find out how that works soon." He selected another pot from the toolkit, this time of pink dust.

"Shall we try another?"

Potter smiled at him, bright and glorious, and for a second Draco's heart stopped.

"Thank you," Potter said. "I knew you could do it."

Draco's fingers, wrapped around the pot of pink powder, felt strangely numb, like he was floating a few inches above himself. "We're not quite there yet," he managed, his voice rasping strangely.

"But we will be."

"How are you so certain?"

He wasn't only asking one question, and he wondered if Potter knew it. How was he so certain Draco could do it? How was he so certain he would? How was he so certain that the two of them, here, could make this work without killing each other?

Potter's eyes slid away for a second, nervous. "I had to research quite a lot when I was isolating the Horcrux. I didn't understand what I was reading until I was halfway through, and then I couldn't stop. I hadn't known they'd seized it from you—I would never have guessed they'd taken it and refused to give it back."

Draco frowned, trying to work out what Potter was babbling about, and then it hit him. Dread filled his stomach, and for a second he thought he might throw up.

"You read my journal."

All his notes, every sick, desperate thought and memory of when Voldemort had been living with him. He'd written it down—anything to keep sane, to have some form of company—and then the Ministry had seized it all during his trial. They'd taken everything from him, every record of every dark act he and others had done.

It didn't matter that it had only proven his innocence, his complete lack of control in every part of that years-long nightmare. It was his, his soul stripped bare, and Potter had read it all.

He tuned slowly back in to the sound of Potter's voice, realising that he was still talking, droning on and on in an increasingly desperate sort of way.

"I would have stopped reading, Malfoy, honestly, except it was your journal that gave me the answers I needed. I couldn't ignore it."

Draco pinched the bridge of his nose. A throbbing headache had just started up in his temple.

"What answers? Potter, it was the desperate raving of a sixteen-year-old who thought he was going to die within weeks; how could it possibly help you?"

"The cabinet," Potter said softly, and suddenly, terribly, it all made sense.

"You didn't have to kill the Horcrux; it was already dead," Draco said, his voice sounding weak even to his own ears. "You just had to remove it."

It had taken him all year to work out what the cabinet was missing. A broken Vanishing Cabinet that Vanishes items into a state of perpetual limbo—he'd spent months looking at it from the wrong angle. He'd tried to repair the connection between the two, so that it stopped Vanishing things to the wrong place, but even once the connection was repaired it kept failing him.

Vanishing spells worked on the same principles as Apparition: destination, determination, deliberation. The destination for a paired cabinet was easy: the other half of the pair. But when one half of the cabinet had been operating with a new destination for so long, any determination to get back to the old way of doing things was gone. And recalcitrant cabinets who had gotten quite used to Vanishing things to undeterminable locations certainly weren't willing to make deliberate decisions to return to such a rigid structure. It wasn't until he'd given it a reason to change course that it had finally started working again. Of course, that had meant enhancing the link between the pair so it was exciting and new, which didn't exactly relate to Horcruxes.

If an ancient cabinet had proven so unwilling to cooperate, Draco could only imagine what it would be like trying to Vanish the residual debris of a Horcrux. An ordinary Vanishing spell would never have worked, and that thing had been in Potter's body, in his blood. It wouldn't want to leave, not without a damn good reason to go. Trying to give it a destination—trying to override its Dark will with your own determination and deliberate intent—would be near impossible.

And Potter had somehow used his rambling notes to come up with a solution? How was that possible? Unless he had done what Draco suspected he had. But it was so unlike Potter, so impossible to conceive...

Their eyes met, and Draco felt his face drain of colour at the expression he saw there.

"You made a pair."

Slowly, Potter nodded. "Not a real one," he insisted, and for a moment his eyes grew distant. "That's... You don't want to do that. I used the mangled cup to create an echo and drew the Horcrux out into that."

The way Potter said it, it sounded so matter-of-fact, almost peaceful. Like lancing a wound. But Draco knew better.

"George said no one knows why you became an Unspeakable."

Potter laughed bitterly. The remains of the mystery fell into place, and Draco decided he probably no longer had to wonder why Potter was all sharp edges and hollow stares, these days.

"I tried to tell Hermione once," he said, looking down at the ground. "Right at the start, when I was certain I could still feel it inside me. She was horrified. She spent a full week researching everything she could get her hands on, and by the end she was in tears, terrified that I was going to die. No one's ever been a Horcrux before. There's not much research on it. I ended up lying to her and telling her I'd been diagnosed with a tropical fever, just so she'd stop worrying."

Potter bent down suddenly and plucked another container of powder from the toolkit. "I'm glad I didn't tell them. Once I realised what I'd have to do to get rid of it... well... you can imagine how they'd have reacted if they found out."

Draco could. Potter had carried this with him, alone. No matter that he hadn't needed to recreate the evil acts one was required to do to create a Horcrux—just creating the echo of such evil would be awful enough, letting it mix with your own magic, producing something so horrible, so twisted. Draco felt sick, and sicker still at the knowledge that Potter had done it alone, with the threat of failure and unknown consequence looming over him every step of the way.

Draco didn't need to imagine what that felt like.

Potter unscrewed the lid from the container in his hand and studied the green dust inside. Draco thought that might be the end of the conversation, but just before he turned away, Potter looked up at him.

"I know you can do this because I know what you're capable of, Malfoy," Potter said, and in a voice loaded with meaning, continued, "and I know what you're not. I know what you went through in that house. I'm sorry that I found out the way I did, but if I had to go back and do it all again, I would, because it got that thing out of me. I owe you for that."

Draco gaped at him. After a long moment of silence, he said, "I give you permission to read my journal, Potter."

The room seemed to hold its breath as they stared at one another, each surrounded by lonely memories best forgotten. After a moment, Potter reached out to clasp him on the shoulder. It was only brief, the barest touch of skin on fabric before he turned away, but it was like nothing Draco had ever felt before: warm and gentle and a little bit awkward, but all the more powerful because of it.

They stopped talking after that. Potter created a path of green cogs that twisted up most of the wall, and Draco discovered a pink pathway that circled the room several times. It was silent as they worked, Draco noting down the readings from the spell, and Potter monitoring the anchor to make sure they weren't in danger. Draco felt like he was attuned to Potter's every move, like every breath and every brush of their arms against each other was a conversation he'd never bothered to listen to before.

"That explains the psychical readings," he murmured, once he'd noted down the final reading. "Not only does this curse contain a compulsion spell, but it alters your conscious state. It must be why Ron won't wake up. If it had been part of the explosion, it should have passed by now, but since it's lingering—"

Potter crossed the room in two strides and stood beside him, staring down at his notebook eagerly. "You mean the Healers need to search for an inhibitor? Like a tranquilizer dart or something?"

Draco dropped the notebook by his side and glared at him. "Can you stop doing that? It's very disconcerting. If you wouldn't mind just drooling and staring vacantly at the wall every now and then, I'd be so much more at ease."

"Get over it, Malfoy," Potter laughed, true relief infesting his voice, and then in a gesture Draco had no way of predicting, he picked Draco up and spun him around in a delighted circle.

"Put me down this instant!" Draco demanded, his heart giddy and light.

Potter did, but Draco almost wished he hadn't, because when he slid down to the ground, Potter didn't let him go as Draco thought he would, but pulled him closer instead. The room felt smaller than before, his skin hypersensitive to the slightest movement against it. He wasn't sure if he was imagining the look in Potter's eyes, because there was no way Potter could be looking at him like that, not when he wasn't drunk.

Then, he felt the tug of the potion, warning him their dream was coming to an end.

Potter's face twisted into something close to fear at the same moment Draco recalled the way the two of them had left off in the real world.

"Shit, do we have to go back?" Potter asked with a wry grin, stepping back nonetheless.

"I'd rather not," Draco admitted.

He had to turn away from the look in Potter's eyes, unable to comprehend exactly what he might be seeing—too scared that he was only seeing what he hoped for. He pulled out his notebook and wrote a message to himself: check Weasley for psychical inhibitor.

The room began to shimmer and fade.

"See you on the other side, Potter," he said, his lips twisting bitterly as their eyes caught and held.

*

It was smoother, this time, waking up in a seated position instead of slumped over on the cold floor. His limbs were still stiff, but they lacked the dull ache of injury. With a start, he realised he had slipped into a relaxed lean against Potter, and he pulled himself upright before it became obvious.

As Potter groaned and stretched beside him, Draco couldn't help but feel he looked different. There was something about the hard set to his jaw that looked familiar now. Or... Draco frowned. Not familiar, but... recognisable. Something. Like there was a secret there that he just couldn't quite remember. It made his chest ache, and for the second time in as many days he had to catch himself just before he reached out to hold Potter.

"Did we find anything?" Potter asked, standing up and dusting down his jeans without looking at Draco.

Draco pulled out his notebook and scanned it with surprise. "We found a lot," he said, eyes widening. "In fact, I think we don't have too much more to analyse. There's a note here too. It says—"

He was interrupted by a tapping on the window. A large screech owl hovered on the sill, and Draco recognised it as one of the swift birds favoured by St Mungo's. His heart dropped into his stomach.

"Potter," he began, but Potter had already opened the window and torn the note from the bird's leg.

Draco fished around in his pocket for a treat and gave it to the indignant bird, who immediately flew away. A muffled sound of despair came from behind him, and he turned back to see Potter already halfway out the door.

"Wait," he snapped. "What happened?"

"He's having a seizure," Potter yelled over his shoulder. "Can I still Apparate from the hallway?"

"Yes, I've added you permanently to the wards," Draco answered. "You can Apparate from anywhere here, if you want. But, just wait a second, I have information."

But Potter had already gone.

Draco made a growl of frustration and grabbed his coat. Stupid Potter and his inability to think for five seconds. He looked down at his hands and realised they were shaking. When had he started to care about a Weasley? He locked his front door behind him, shivering in the icy air of the hallway, and Apparated to St Mungo's.

He wasn't sure they'd let him in, since he wasn't family, but as it happened it didn't matter. Five steps into the foyer, and he found Potter pacing up and down in front of the entrance to the Spell Damage.

"Potter, stop," Draco snarled, continuing before he could be interrupted. "He likely has an inhibitor—I left a note in my book. Can you get us into his room?"

"He's in surgery." Potter's words sounded almost dead. "We can't go in until he's out. If he makes it out."

To Draco's horror, Potter's voice broke on the final words. He wondered distantly if he was about to see him cry. The cold, clinical walls of St Mungos were oppressive and bleak; Draco could think of nowhere worse to spend your final days, lying in a coma before dying on a surgery table. At least there were no barbaric practices like in Muggle hospitals, with knives and skewers and whatever else they jabbed inside you, but it was a small relief.

"We need to get a message to the Healers," Draco insisted, looking around for someone he could accost. "He's probably been overexposed."

They managed to flag down a Healer and express enough urgency that the Healer ran off immediately with the message. But that meant that all there was left to do was wait, and the atmosphere between the two of them was becoming increasingly stilted.

"What kind of inhibitor?" Potter asked suddenly, taking a seat on one of the wooden chairs lining the wall.

"I'm not sure." Draco felt suddenly hesitant. "The note only said to look for an inhibitor, but the readings above it show that we discovered psychical tendencies in the curse. It means he's likely under a sleeping spell, but since it has lasted longer than twenty-four hours, I strongly suspect there's something attached to him that's dragging it out."

It was the first time they had approached anything close to a civil conversation since yesterday, and he felt the strangest sensation that he didn't want to mess it up. He recalled George's words from last night, and the painful certainty that he'd ruined it all—whatever it was—before it had even begun. A younger Draco would have picked a fight with Potter just to spite himself and revel in his own misery. Older Draco was getting rather sick of his own bullshit.

He rustled in his pockets, searching for some spare sickles, and felt a rush of success when he found some.

"It sounds like we're close to the end, then?" Potter asked before Draco could offer to get them hot chocolate or tea.

He made a noise of agreement. "We also found the source of the explosion. There are small mercurial readings, but they're so negligible it looks like the explosion was only intended to draw attention." He considered that properly for the first time, feeling suddenly lighter at what that news meant. "Which is an excellent result, Potter; it means that the explosion hasn't done any curse damage at all. Whatever the curse's purpose, I'd bet my money pouch that it lies within the box."

"The box?" Potter frowned, and Draco remembered that they hadn't had a chance to discuss that nature of the package.

"Merlin, you really were sulking when you came into the workroom this morning, weren't you?" Draco drawled. "You didn't even notice the package was unwrapped."

Potter glared at him mutely but didn't respond.

Remembering his recent determination to keep things civil between the two of them, Draco let go of his rising ire and held out the Sickles in his palm like an offering. They glinted in the bright light of the hospital waiting room, and Potter stared at them in confusion.

"I'm buying tea," Draco said, figuring that if he kept his sentences as short as possible, he couldn't fit any accidental insults into them. "Would you like some?"

Potter opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Then, he looked at Draco with an odd expression that made Draco's heart race.

Finally, he nodded, and Draco escaped.

On his way back, two steaming cups of tea in his hands, he bumped into George and Morgan.

"Two teas, one hot chocolate, and one black coffee," George was muttering repeatedly, before he realised that Draco was blocking his path. "Oh, Malfoy. How long do you think Percy will complain if I bring him a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows instead of his black coffee? He managed fifty minutes one time, but that was without the marshmallows. I reckon I can get him up to two hours."

Draco blinked, trying to process what response would be required. "Why not try for three?" he asked faintly.

George grinned. "You're on."

He clapped Draco on the back, ignoring Morgan's eye roll, and recommenced his mutterings.

"Two teas, two hot chocolates, extra marshmallows and whipped cream if they've got it."

Draco shook his head and walked back into the waiting room, where he found most of the Weasley clan huddled around Potter like a red-headed Protego. He slid through a gap between Ginny and Fleur, nodded briefly to Granger, and handed Potter his tea. He wanted to ask if all Weasley's grieved like there was a punch-line waiting to happen, but a quick glance at the rest of their solemn faces answered the question for him.

Potter's fingers brushed against his as he took the paper cup, and Draco felt a rise of irritation at the way it made his heart leap. He sat down in his surprisingly still vacant seat and marvelled at how the strange circumstances of the last three days had led to such an unpredictable moment.

It wasn't as though he hadn't seen Potter since school. When Potter had been an Auror, they had run into each other with alarming frequency. If Potter was in a good mood, they'd trade insults; if he was in a bad mood, it would mean a grunt and a rude shove which Draco coolly and maturely ignored, right before hexing him when his back was turned.

It was one of the reasons that Potter's promotion had bothered him so much; why hadn't he seen it coming? He'd put Potter's increasing surliness since Hogwarts down to the general brutish demeanour that seemed to go with his job description, but now that Potter had demonstrated such unprecedented depth of intelligence and skill, Draco was at a loss. It was clear now that he wasn't like the other Ministry-approved thugs—boorish and mean simply because their entire life's purpose centred on running around outside and chasing down the latest target. So, why then was he so much less cocky than the Potter he remembered at Hogwarts? And how had Draco underestimated him so poorly?

The sound of someone complaining loudly and indignantly about the quantity of marshmallows in his cup broke through Draco's thoughts, and he returned to the present. He felt Potter shift beside him, glancing up before quickly looking back down again at his cup.

Draco waited. In a few moments, his patience was rewarded.

"I'm sorry," Potter said quietly, so that only he could hear. "I think I've been a bit... difficult to get along with the last couple of days."

Draco snorted. "Is that what you call it?"

Potter glared at him, and Draco forced himself to remain quiet lest he ruin this momentous occasion.

"You haven't exactly been a pleasure to talk to, yourself," he snapped, still under his breath.

"I have been the pillar of polite conversation, considering our circumstances." Draco was affronted.

"You've been an arse."

"So have you."

Potter pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. It was obvious he was trying to be civil, and since this was what Draco had been waiting for all along, he made himself reluctantly put aside the sarcastic retort that was on the tip of his tongue.

"It has been a stressful time for everyone," Draco conceded. "Let's just agree to move forward."

It was remarkable, how easy it was to use the veil of professionalism to mask even the most long-standing of disagreements. He just had squash the tiny part of him that said the day was only worthwhile if he'd managed to insult Potter in three different ways, and remind himself that there were more important things than winning. Apparently.

It was nonetheless surprising when Potter nodded, and it forced Draco's thoughts to return, once again, to the baffling mystery that was Unspeakable Potter.

"He's awake and doing well," a pleasant voice interrupted them, and all the conversation fell quiet as the family turned, as one, to the nurse.

Then, it was a mad rush of everyone talking at once, getting in each other's way, insisting they be the first to see him. Draco fell back, having no desire to see Weasley at all, and wanting only to speak to the nurse. After a moment, it was determined that Molly, Arthur, and Granger would be the first, and then, if he was up to it, the others would file in two at a time.

Potter's eyes met his through the crowd, and he felt a jolt of something uncertain race through him, like maybe he was meant to be there with him. He was hit again by the strange thought that there was something he and Potter knew, something that was theirs alone, but he just couldn't quite grasp a hold of it.

When the family had dispersed, Draco asked the nurse if he could speak to the Healer in charge. He felt Potter join him as they were led down the corridor to a small office, its door decorated in festive tinsel and marked with a wreath in the centre.

A tall woman with a fierce pixie-cut rose to meet them.

"I was just about to find you," she said with a warm smile. "You two are in charge of the case, I presume?"

Potter nodded, and the woman gestured for them to sit down. "Thanks to your message, Mr. Malfoy, we were able to locate the source of Mr. Weasley's mysterious illness." She held up a small, metal object, the size of a pea.

Draco felt his knees give a little at the knowledge that they had done it, they had achieved something that was not only unusual in current theory, but that had quite possibly saved a life. Potter made a small noise beside him, but Draco politely ignored it.

He took the tiny bead and examined it. Up close, he could see it was covered in hooked spines, presumably to latch onto the victim. Likely, it had burst into the room with the initial explosion, although Draco wondered what possible purpose that could serve, since it rendered the recipient unconscious before they had a chance to open the package.

Potter moved closer to him, examining the bead over his shoulder. He brought with him the smell of pine needles and cinnamon.

"Have you been rolling around in Christmas trees?" Draco asked, wrinkling his nose.

It wasn't that the smell was bad; he was disgusted that it smelled so nice. He wanted to lean into Potter and just breathe in the scent of his collar.

Potter looked at him oddly, before reaching out to take the inhibitor and turn it over in his palm. "Funnily enough, no. Though I did just buy mine. Why? Do I smell like a tree?"

"Something like that."

"The inhibitor was found just under Mr Weasley's armpit," the Healer informed them. "Quite easy to miss in the initial testing. We're lucky we found it when we did, as I'm certain it was responsible for the febrile convulsion. Typically, we see them in children rather than adults, but as we know, this is not a normal case. As soon as it was removed, Mr Weasley began to respond to treatment—rather quickly, I might add."

"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Potter asked, before casting a couple of protection charms over the bead and slipping it carefully into his shirt pocket.

"Never." Her eyes turned grim. "We'd like to keep the patient for another day, just to monitor him since this case is so unusual. At this stage, there is no indication of long-term damage."

But there could be. Draco didn't need to hear her say it aloud to know the danger. They said goodbye to the Healer, but Potter stopped him in the corridor.

"I've read about these before," he said quietly. "There's a diagram in one of our records; I'm fairly sure it matches this exactly. I can check it out later tonight."

Now that he was looking closely, Draco could see how bloodshot Potter's eyes were. There were dark circles underneath them, and although he was alert, his body seemed to sag.

"As much as offering self-care suggestions to you goes against every ounce of free will in my body," Draco said with a sigh. "Don't you think you should sleep instead? The urgency has disappeared—Weasley is awake. You're of no use to me if you're falling asleep on the job."

Potter raised an eyebrow. "That really took a lot out of you, didn't it?"

"You have no idea."

He gave a sigh and scratched the back of his head, staring distantly at the far end of the corridor, where the Weasleys waited.

"Maybe you're right," he said reluctantly. "We don't want to rush this."

"Precisely," Draco agreed.

They met up with the Weasleys again, and before Draco knew it he was being shepherded into the hospital room with Potter. He tried to object, but it sounded rude, and by that point it was already too late.

Draco had always hated the smell of St Mungo's. It was worse in the actual rooms; something about the spell residue and stench of varying ailments and curses combined together to produce something potent and raw. It made him think of Aunt Bellatrix, which came of no real surprise but still sent waves of nausea running through him every time.

He came to a halt at the foot of Ron's bed and resisted the urge to shuffle his feet like an awkward schoolboy.

"Malfoy," Ron said slowly. "Mum told me you were working with Harry on the case."

"Wonders never cease," he said by way of agreement.

Potter snorted, and then to Draco's shock said, "Malfoy figured out you had the inhibitor. It's thanks to him you're awake."

The room fell awkwardly silent. Potter stared mulishly at Ron, some kind of wordless communication happening between them, while Draco discretely but firmly mutilated his palm with his nails to distract himself from the possibility of just Apparating out of this whole situation.

"Er," Ron said finally, looking at the bedsheets. "Thanks, Malfoy."

"Technically, it could have been Potter," Draco suggested, making a split-second decision to trade the glow of praise for the chance of undoing the new and terrifyingly friendly way that Ron was now looking at him. "It was only a note from the dream-state—we don't know who discovered it."

"But you weren't the one walking off and refusing to listen," Potter said, and Draco felt suddenly lightheaded.

He didn't say anything to that, and as he watched them he found it felt oddly as if he were standing in the wings of a stage, eyes drawn to the spotlight. The two men before him were nothing like the children he had known, always in each other's pockets, sharing inside jokes without even needing to communicate. There was something stilted between the two of them now.

Draco had thought Potter's infuriating mood swings were something that only happened around him, like Potter was so conflicted by the need to be civil to Draco whilst simultaneously wanting to slam his face into a brick wall that it kept leaking out in fits of petulance. Now, he wasn't so sure.

"Have you eaten yet?" Potter asked. "I can get you something from outside, if you like. No need to eat this slop."

"Nah, it's all right, mate," Ron insisted, talking over Potter a little. "Mum's bringing me something, and you know how she is. It'll be so much I'll probably have to share it with the whole ward or something."

Potter laughed, a little broken, and they fell silent. Just when Draco couldn't stand it any longer and was about to make his excuses, they both started speaking at once.

"I'm glad you're—"

"It's really good to see—"

Draco closed his eyes against the painful scene and only opened them again once they were saying good bye.

"See ya, Malfoy," Ron said, catching his eye.

For a second, he thought there might be something there—a question, a plea. But he didn't speak Gryffindor and he was far too tired for this shit any longer. Besides, it was late and he was probably imagining it.

He lifted a hand in farewell and followed Potter out into the corridor, just as Percy and Ginny passed by them.

"Five marshmallows," Percy muttered, while Ginny covered her mouth with her hand and nodded very seriously. "Who puts five marshmallows in anything?"

"Perhaps they thought you might want to eat your hot chocolate instead of drinking it," she remarked thoughtfully.

Their conversation faded into the background, and Draco pulled Potter aside before they reached the rest of the clan.

"I'm going to leave now," he said, trying to ignore the way Potter seemed more distant than before. "We'll keep working the day after tomorrow, unless you have any objections?"

Potter ran a hand through his hair, obviously reluctant to waste a day, but even as he tried to argue it, he was yawning. The bustle of the hospital seemed to grow quiet around them as Potter deliberated. Draco found himself strangely fascinated by the set of his jaw, the small furrow of concern between his brows. It was like he was staring at someone new. He wondered if Potter still confided in Weasley and Granger the way he'd used to at Hogwarts, because he couldn't imagine the man in front of him confiding in anyone.

Oddly, Draco found himself wishing Potter would confide in him. The confusing mess of animosity and competition that had always stood between them began to melt away, leaving behind something familiar. It was like he was eleven again, sitting at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall at breakfast, head still foggy with sleep. The hospital walls faded, and once again he was staring across at the vibrant, laughing, messy-haired boy with a longing that could only exist in those moments between sleep and awake when he couldn't quite remember his father's expectations and the pressure of the indefinable role he was expected to play.

He waited for the bubble to burst, for the fear and uncertainty of being a Malfoy to come seeping back in, but it never came. He was an adult now, and he'd left all of that behind him.

But the messy-haired boy wasn't laughing anymore, and Draco wanted to know why.

With a growing sense of horror, Draco began to recognise the complicated swirl of emotion inside him. The need he kept feeling to reach out to Potter, to comfort him, began to make an awful sort of sense. He had to get out of here before Potter noticed.

"I have to go," he said, and turned swiftly on his heel before Potter could say anything.

He thought he heard a confused sound behind him, but he ignored it and kept his eyes straight ahead at the foyer doors until all he could see was the twinkling Christmas lights casting a soft glow into the night.