Draco was mysteriously absent after their time in Harry's kitchen.

For the first day or so, Harry assumed it was normal. He clearly just needed some time to decompress and sort out whatever the fuck that was. Merlin knew Harry did. So Harry spent his nights at Blondies or Garlics and Shots, drinking in band after band, washing it down with cheap beer and watching punks make out in dark corners.

He even spent a day going through Sirius's entire writing desk, searching for notes between him and Snape. He found a couple more, just as friendly as the first, but with no greater insight. They'd discussed how inheritance worked—which meant Harry was right, Snape had helped Sirius sort this out, and make sure it all went to Harry.

But he hadn't been able to work out anything more. Like why they'd become friends. And how.

Then he'd found another note.

Don't be a fool.

Now this sounded more like the Snape that Harry knew.

Lupin is as flawed as the rest of us mere mortals, no matter how high of a pedestal you've elevated him on.

You tell me he doesn't want an inch of it—threw you away like last night's leftovers.

He is lying.

Stop wasting your time with men who were only ever meant to be a fling. You had something precious in your hands. It got scared. It ran away.

Don't let it.

And stop making me write this drivel where anyone could read it. You will ruin my reputation.

Harry had no idea what to make of that. He read the note over and over, until it creased in his hand. Were Sirius and Remus together? Was Bill the fling that Snape was referring to?

Just thinking about it all—how messy it was—made his head hurt and his heart ache. Snape might complain about his reputation, but knowing what Harry did about Snape's true motives, his advice was strangely the only part that made sense. He'd been a cruel, bitter, twisted man, but he'd clung to his love for Harry's mum above all else. Whatever you made of that, it showed what he valued.

The rest of it... it was so much more than Harry had ever imagined going on between these walls, while Sirius was locked away and Harry was stuck in school.

He tucked the note carefully back in the desk and shoved it from his mind. Sirius's tangled love life was in the past, it couldn't be changed now. And Harry had bigger things to worry about, like how three days had passed, and Draco hadn't answered a single owl.

They were meant to be meeting in approximately five hours' time to track down the third constellation. After that, there were only two left. They were nearly halfway, and the thought left Harry feeling strange. Light. Almost empty. He kept hearing Sirius' laugh echoing round and round in his head.

But then, his thoughts would skip, running away in a different direction, and suddenly all he could hear was Draco.

Draco, spread out before him on the table. Shirt lifted above his abdomen. Abs tensed as his hips writhed upward, pushing his cock into Harry's mouth. All he could hear were those soft whimpers.

And the longer the silence stretched between them, the more Harry became worried that he would never hear it again.

It was that thought which finally propelled him through his fireplace without thinking, without pausing, and had him landing head first, covered in soot, at the hearth of Malfoy Manor. Harry blinked down at his blackened hands and winced.

Why did he always have to act without thinking?

But, he thought as he knelt back and brushed soot off his torn grey jeans—even greyer now than before—why break the habit of a lifetime?

He stood, looking around the room that he'd found himself in. It was the only fireplace in Malfoy Manor that was connected to the public Floo, and it appeared to be in some sort of main parlour. But the parlour was dark and empty. A slight wind whistled through from a pane of broken glass on the western side, and there were cobwebs swaying in the breeze.

Harry shivered. Where the fuck was everyone?

Immediately, a sliver of ice raced down his spine. Had something happened? Was that why Draco hadn't responded to him?

"Hello?" he called tentatively, wincing at the echoing sound of his own voice in the quiet room.

He took a step into the room, moving carefully to soften his slow footfalls, and then, when nothing attacked him, shoved his hands in his pockets and moved further into the house.

The hallways folded around him in darkness, leading him deeper and deeper into the manor. And still the halls were silent.

Harry walked through them on instinct, following a faint thread of something—something warm and familiar. The scent of cornfields on a summer day, the crispness of new rain on stone.

It was Draco's magic, he realised. Magic that he knew intimately from when Draco had been inside his mind. And magic that, after reading that poem and Sirius's lyrics, he could no longer help but think of as a soul.

He followed the scent down the hallways and then froze, stopping as movement crossed in front of him. Shimmering white—familiar and yet not.

It was a ghost.

Malfoy Manor had ghosts now.

As the ghost crossed from one wall to the other, moving perpendicular to the hallway, it paused halfway and looked at him. He didn't know the ghost's face. Didn't know who they'd once been or who they might be now.

Just another victim of the Manor—of the war.

With one final lingering glance, eyes flicking to Harry's lightning bolt scar, the ghost moved on.

Harry let out a shuddering breath and walked quicker down the hallway now, taking solace and refuge in that cornfield scent. Before long he heard raised voices, echoing from an open doorway down the hall. He came closer, pausing just out of sight in the shadows.

"How dare you?" Narcissa hissed. "How dare you presume you can do this?"

"But I can do this," Draco's calm, cool voice answered. "And I have been doing this, mother. When are you going to accept that these little temper tantrums won't make a difference?"

"Your father is out of his mind with worry—"

"My father," Draco interrupted, "is out of his mind, full stop. He is not present in this world anymore. Whatever he thinks of how I spend our money doesn't matter. It's meaningless." His voice lowered, softer now. "You need to let him go."

The sound of something smashing against a wall had Harry retreating back into the shadows. But it wasn't far enough because Draco soon turned the corner and stilled, eyes locking with his.

It was too dark to read his features, to know what he thought of Harry eavesdropping. But all he did was sigh and resume his walk.

"After me, Potter," Draco said mildly as he passed him. "You don't want to speak to her in this mood, trust me."

Harry waited until they were in a well-lit, surprisingly cosy drawing room that appeared to have been half transformed into a greenhouse before he spoke. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop," he said quietly. "I was only worried."

Draco glanced at him over his shoulder, hands stiff in his pockets as he faced the window, as if taking in the sight of the rain dripping down the glass. "It's all right," he said finally. "I don't blame you."

Silence fell once again.

"What was it about?" Harry asked hesitantly, coming to stand next to Draco as he turned back to the window.

The atmosphere between them was different.

He'd expected a fight when he walked through, to be honest. Expected Draco to throw back what they had done in Harry's face. To say it was nothing. It was pathetic. He didn't want Harry that way. It'd been a mistake. Why would he ever want to be with a loser like Harry?

Or, if that hadn't happened, he'd expected Draco to just dismiss him. To ignore the whole thing and move right along.

But this was something different.

The thing that had happened between them wasn't ignored. Harry could feel it in the air between them. He could feel it in every shift of Draco's feet, every silent glance they shared.

He could feel it like lightning trapped in a crystal ball.

But they weren't talking about it, because they were talking about this instead.

And this, too, was something Harry never expected Draco to divulge. Not to him.

"I'm spending the Malfoy money," Draco said simply, casually. "Giving it away, galleon by galleon."

He sounded almost sing-song, but in a dreary, mournful sort of way. The corner of his lip twitched into wry amusement.

"Would you like to know where I spent the most recent several hundred galleons?"

Harry raised an eyebrow.

Draco bit his lip, the grin forming fully now, the amusement brightening his face as the reflection of the rain shadowed across it. "I gave it all to S.P.E.W.," he said in delight.

Harry's lips parted. "What, Hermione's S.P.E.W.?"

"The very same," Draco chewed on his lip, finally meeting Harry's gaze. "They're already spending it on Christmas socks."

Harry made a strangled sound, and then he began to laugh. After a beat, Draco followed, and the two of them were laughing, leaning against the window as the cool condensation from the glass pressed against Harry's feverish cheek.

"No wonder she was pissed."

"She'll get over it." Draco waved a hand. "They're always screaming these days. Always fighting about the way forward. Father will never understand it." He tilted his head, gave a mournful sort of shrug. "He's too far gone. They didn't even bother putting him in Azkaban. There's no point. But Mother..." He shook his head sadly. "She's still clinging to what could have been. Not Voldemort." He only hesitated briefly before the word. "But the rest of it, you know—parties and prestige and money."

He tapped his fingers against the glass, leaning on his hand now.

"Sometimes I think she's deliberately blocking out the war. Not even thinking about it. Because if she did, she'd know that we needed to turn our backs on it as fast as possible." His eyes slid sharply to Harry. "Not for a public relations reason, no matter what you might think of us."

His gaze lingered for a moment, as if waiting for Harry to answer the unspoken question: what he did think of the Malfoys. Harry remained silent, and Draco looked away.

"But because if we are to heal, and by we"—he twirled his finger in the air—"I mean all of us. Then we need to change." He stared grimly out the window, the smile falling off his face. "We need to change and accept our wrongs, and fix what we can, and let it all go. Every last drop of it. Because any piece of that horror, any inch of it, that remains in our blood... under our skin..." He glanced briefly at his left arm, still propped against the window. At the inky black mark on his forearm. "Anything that lingers," he said, still staring at it, "will fester. It will become a cancer. And..." He gave a soft, self-deprecating little laugh. "Harry, if I survived a war, I would like to live, god damn it."

The Muggle curse made Harry jolt, snapping him out of the strange trance he'd descended into. Draco had called him Harry. He hadn't done that out loud before, even though Harry had long since changed to calling him Draco.

"Do you regret it?" Harry found himself asking.

Draco didn't even scoff, didn't dismiss him with a laugh or give a rude answer. The words fell off his tongue so quickly, it was like he'd been bursting to say them. "Every damn day," he spat. "Every second of every day. I'm sick to my stomach when I think about it. Every memory of it, every thought I once had when I genuinely believed I was better than the rest of the world, haunts me. I'll never forget the war, no matter how hard I try."

He dropped his hand, straightening.

"But I'm glad of that. There's a difference between letting go and forgetting. With every person who recognises I've abandoned my old beliefs, I can let go of another piece of it, and it's like letting go of thorns piercing my skin. But to forget..." He shook his head. "I might also forget the people who need help from political families like mine. From money like mine." He swallowed thickly. "From me."

Their eyes met once more, and Harry felt it. Cornfields in a storm, the scent of rain on stone, Draco's magic in his mind and Draco's cock on his tongue. And he wanted so badly to have it again right now, in this very moment.

Draco's eyes darkened, his tongue coming out to wet his lower lip as his gaze fell to Harry's mouth. "Not here," he said softly, and Harry—realising that he had been reaching for him, moving, falling into his orbit as inevitably a neutron star—let his hands fall and stepped back.

"We should go," Harry said, not recognising his own voice. "The third constellation's in the Tower of London, isn't it? We need to Apparate a little way away and then walk up."

Draco nodded slowly, his eyes distant.

And for a second, Harry thought he could see it—the regret for what they'd done together. But that wasn't quite right... because there was still longing there, too. Draco was conflicted. There was something deeper going on in his thoughts, something that Harry wasn't getting. Something he hadn't yet understood.

But Draco wasn't going to tell him.

He merely stepped back from the window, slipped his hands into his pockets, and jerked his chin toward the Floo. "After you."

*

They trudged up the stairs of the White Tower, leaving their tour guard behind them and taking advantage of the shadows and their magic to duck beneath the cordon that hid certain rooms for maintenance.

"Did you see anything below?" Draco whispered to Harry once they were shoulder to shoulder again, hiding behind a door.

"Nothing." Harry twisted his mouth in a grimace. "I can't even feel it either."

"Feel it?" Draco asked, raising an eyebrow.

Of course, they hadn't yet been able to discuss everything about the souls and the magical core. "Yeah," Harry said slowly, reluctant for some reason to share what he'd discovered. "There was this poem."

He explained it quickly, watching as Draco's eyebrows shot up his face.

"It could be a metaphor," Draco said hesitantly, lips pursed as he mulled it over.

"Maybe," Harry said, knowing that it wasn't.

"But you can feel it? Even though you don't have Black blood?"

"Yep."

"Huh." The pinched look sharpened, and Harry, an idiot to the end, wanted to kiss it off his face.

When the hallway outside was quiet, they slipped out again, cloaked in Disillusionment Charms because Harry's invisibility cloak was too small for two grown men.

They climbed and climbed, ducking into each room, searching for any sign of the magic with the cockrun, until finally they paused at the base of a thin staircase that led higher than the main building.

"It's the little turret thing," Harry said, craning his neck to look up into the darkness.

Draco rolled his eyes. "The little turret thing," he muttered, shaking his head in disgust. "Yes, Potter, let's climb the little turret thing, before the men with their little pointy metal things catch us."

Harry ignored him and stepped inside, and the second his foot landed on the staircase, he knew this was it. From the hushed silence descending behind him, he knew Draco could feel it too. They climbed the final few feet into a bare room.

"There's nothing in here," Draco said quietly, sounding almost sulky.

Harry grunted in response, and in silent agreement they split up to search the tiny room top to toe. But even though they could feel the magic here, there was nothing in sight. No glinting mirrors, no tiny pinpricks of starlight captured on earth. There was nothing.

Until, in irritation, Harry pointed the cockrun down at his feet.

"Draco," he said.

Draco turned immediately, eyes falling to where Harry was glancing down at the stone beneath them—at where it glinted with magic.

"Well, fuck," Draco muttered. "I guess we're digging up the White Tower then."

They dropped to their knees, wands out, and—working as quickly as they could—began to lever the mortar out from around the largest stone. It took long minutes, minutes where they were waiting to be discovered. Not necessarily by the tower guards, but by some wixen who surely would feel what they were doing.

But nothing happened, and together they levered the stone up to find a chest.

With careful fingers, Harry lifted it out of the floor and set it before them. The lid gave a soft click, and then eased open.

Harry gasped.

Delicate instruments made from golden metal and glass lined the inside of the chest, and there were mirrors everywhere, each one reflecting dazzling light back on each other until the velvet-lined lid of the chest sparkled with not just a constellation, but an entire night sky.

"Fuck," Draco breathed again, eyes wide. "This is..." He shook his head. "I don't even know how you can discern which constellation you're meant to be capturing here." His frown deepened. "And what if you say the wrong one?"

Harry closed his eyes, holding up a hand as he grew still. He felt rather than heard Draco protest with a silent grumble, but he ignored him, tuning the sound out, and just listened. Listened to the magic he'd been able to feel. To the echo of laughter, to the sounds of magical cores dancing together.

He listened, though it was impossible, to the scent of a cornfield in a storm. Let it wash over him and guide him. And he felt, in a way he couldn't explain, which constellation was truly captured here and which were just mimicries of light.

He felt which constellation was waiting for him.

"Ursula," he said without opening his eyes.

He heard Draco scramble next to him, pulling the crystal ball out of the satchel, and then his eyes snapped open as a whirlwind descended on them.

It lifted the hair at the base of his neck, swirling around them—a tornado that touched nothing except him and Draco.

And it wouldn't stop touching them.

He braced himself on the floor, edging closer, one hand finding Draco's shoulder as the two of them stared around in open-mouthed wonder.

The magic sparkled. This wasn't lightning; this was a crystal storm, and it was rising and rising, but Harry wasn't afraid. He felt his heart beating, and through the fingers pressed against Draco's collar, felt Draco's beating in tandem.

The magic swelled before them, a crystalline cloud sparkling as if it was regarding them, considering them.

And then, like sand falling in an hourglass, it seeped into the crystal ball and grew still.

"I felt it," Draco whispered into the silence. His eyes met Harry's. "I thought you were making it up. I thought..." He shook his head. "I thought this whole thing was bullshit. Just another way that the Chosen One gets given everything laid at his feet, but..." He stared back at the ball. "I felt it. Magical cores, souls—I don't know what it was but this magic is alive. It needs you. It needs your help. It needs to be cared for, to be loved." The frown on Draco's face was deepening, something glinting in his eyes as he continued. "It's been years since it was ever really cared for or loved. It's been years since the magic had that, obviously, because the Black family was tragically emotionally deficient. How many centuries, Potter, has it been waiting..." He lifted his eyes "...for you."

Harry's heart stopped.

The air was so still between them. He leaned forward just a little, and once more that regret shone in Draco's eyes. But it wasn't regret, he realised; it was fear. Fear mixed with such longing that Harry didn't know what to do, didn't know how to reconcile those mixed messages.

And he didn't have to, because Draco reached up to tangle long fingers in Harry's hair and pulled him into a kiss.

It wasn't like the others.

This was soft and tender, aching, and through it he could still sense that fear, that longing, the mixed swirling emotion of it all.

The lightning crackled in the ball by their knees, and Harry found his hands falling to Draco's waist, slipping beneath his shirt to press against warm skin. He pulled him closer until Draco was half sitting in his lap, knees braced on either side of Harry's as they each lifted up into the kiss, deepening it.

That's all it remained—a kiss—and yet it was still somehow more. With each second that passed, Harry felt himself becoming deeper and deeper entwined, felt Draco's nails rake down his back in pure desperation, in need.

Draco's tongue slipped into his mouth, tasting him, twining with his as they kissed and parted, kissed and parted again and again.

Harry had never wanted anyone like this. It was like Draco had always been under his skin, and Harry had wasted years trying to get him out, when it was where he belonged.

This was where he belonged, under Harry's skin.

Harry kissed him fiercely, desperately, ignoring the rattling of the lightning at their feet, ignoring everything.

Finally, they pulled away, foreheads pressed together, breath heaving.

"You're not such a bad kisser," Draco said finally, lifting up but not pulling away.

Then the corner of his mouth twisted into something that wasn't amused but almost wretched.

"Suppose you do this a lot then," he said. "Going out to your punk gigs and kissing boys in the dark." He lifted his chin and finally pulled away, eyes glinting as he rose and brushed himself off. "And there's nothing like a little hate to get the blood going, is there? We all know you love an adrenaline rush."

Harry frowned, staring at him, but Draco had already turned away.

Was that how Draco saw this? Just a little hatred to get the blood going?

Shit, was that why Draco was doing this? Because, well, he'd said it himself. Things at home were rough, and he was struggling to move forward. To let go of the war. And what better way to move on from the war than to have the Saviour in your bed, right?

Unease slid low in Harry's gut, and he tried to think of a way to ask. But how did you ask someone that? How did you ask if you meant anything to them without baring your soul?

Because, Harry realised, that was what he was doing. It was what he'd always been doing. Baring his soul, falling and falling for the boy in front of him.

He swallowed thickly, rising to his feet, busying himself with returning the chest to the floor and then the stone above it.

He wanted to know, wanted to ask, but what if the answer was yes?

Yes, Potter, this meant nothing.

Yes, you're an alright friend, but beyond that you're just a nice distraction.

Harry had spent a long time in his life uncared for, unloved. And for the first time, he'd begun to feel hope. He wasn't ready to give that up yet.

And so, as they returned to the street outside, and Draco prepared to leave with a wave, telling him the final constellation still had to be located and he'd contact him in a few days when it was ready, Harry let him.