Chapter 3
There were worse things than mending curtains. Even when the curtains were paisley. Even when the curtains were tight in the clutches of a very stubborn, very sticky, toddler.
“Just don’t you try any of your…your death eater tricks,” the boy’s mother said. She was waifish and fair-haired and completely soaked from the rain, holding onto one end of the thick fabric with an air of harried exhaustion. That was all she could reach – the rest of it was bundled against her little boy’s chest, his chubby arms entirely full.
Draco did not say that his death eater tricks (at least the ones pertaining to upholstery) were the very reason he was employed here. He just nodded politely and knelt down in front of the child. The boy was a contrast to his mother not only with his dark hair and rosy complexion, but also in his friendly grin.
“Hallo,” Draco said to him. “What seems to be the trouble, then?”
“Watch,” his mother said. She pulled hard on her end of the fabric, and the chubby baby’s face fell instantly into wobbly misery. The little mouth opened and he began to howl. It was an incredible sound. He was holding so tightly to the curtains that as his mother pulled he was lifted right off his feet.
“He’s obsessed!” she shouted over the din. “And don’t you dare try and tell me it’s not a curse. They’ve turned us away at Saint Mungo’s twice now, but I know my son. And I’m not leaving this shop until you take the spell off these things!”
The child’s screaming was definitely magically enhanced, Draco thought. He was pretty sure it was about to shatter the windows.
“Yes, alright,” Draco said. He raised an eyebrow at the tea trolley against the far wall, which rolled itself over and began to nudge the mother’s leg. “Please help yourself,” he told her. “You may as well warm up while we sort this out.” Then he scooped up wailing toddler, curtain and all, and deposited him on the counter where with a happy wiggle he reverted immediately to smiling. There were still tears on his fat little cheeks, which Draco was feeling the appalling urge to pinch. He’d always been a sucker for a nice smile.
Antiquodities was a shop that had taken over from Fortesque’s ice cream parlour. They sold an eclectic mix of beautiful old things, curiosities and junk, with a heavy bias towards the junk. Their speciality, especially since Draco had come along, was removing the barbed little curses purebloods tended to have woven into the (sometimes literal) fabric of their homes. An awful lot of property had been redistributed after the war, and it turned out people these days didn’t like their wallpaper to ooze blood when the muggle mother-in-law came round for tea.
Draco had been three days sober when he’d seen the sign, and Granger’s words about help were rolling around in his head like empty bottles. He’d considered everything from Auror work (an aspiration he’d abandoned upon realizing with a blush that all his daydreams there revolved around partnering up with Potter and repeatedly, heroically saving his life) to Healing (similarly, except in these fantasies Potter was mortally injured and Draco and Granger had to pour together over esoteric texts to research a cure) and then here it was, a literal sign in the dingy shop window: Help Wanted.
Even Draco couldn’t have grandiose fantasies about retail work. And it had seemed appropriately humbling, the idea of Lucius Malfoy’s only son selling mouldy old snuff boxes. And when he’d walked through the door the same tea trolley they had now, with its offerings of hot water and assorted biscuits, had rolled itself over to wait politely by his elbow, empty cups clinking in welcome. Welcome was in short supply these days: Draco had been thrown bodily out of Madam Malkin’s the week before.
And he had needed the gold.
And: besides, Draco was used to this sort of thing. He’d explained that at the interview. He had a way with wallpaper, he’d said, and with old-fashioned, mean-spirited magic. And then he’d lifted the cold-foot jinx from the matching pair of crushed velvet footstools by the till in under a minute and Mrs. Melhuish had hired him on the spot.
Now Draco stretched out the bit of curtain fabric he could reach without wrestling with the small child sitting in front of him. He didn’t need to see the whole thing, just the inside seam. You could usually feel spellwork in the stitching there.
He hadn’t told Melhuish during his interview that the matching footstools had been from Malfoy Manor. Or that Draco had been the one to put that particular jinx in place. Father had taught it to him the summer after his thirteenth birthday. Anyone without at least one magical parent who dared to prop his feet on one of them would be doomed to not only perpetually icy toes but also a paralyzing case of indecision.
Old-fashioned, mean-spirited magic indeed.
None of that described the paisley curtains.
“The light-repellant charm on these has degraded,” Draco said to the harried mother who had just put three lumps of sugar in her teacup and still looked as if she was considering dumping it over his head. “It happens sometimes with older fabrics.” He tried to speak calmly, disarmingly. “The rune for darkness is just one stroke more than the rune for dark-haired,” he went on, “so as the stitching frays the charm shifts focus and starts to attract anybody with black hair. It’s nothing sinister.”
“Well fix it!” she said, not remotely disarmed. “I don’t want him growing up with…with some kind of fetish!”
Someone snorted.
Draco looked up from the rosy face of the little boy straight into that – familiar, equally rosy though significantly less plump – of the man who had just walked in the door. It was a nice face, wearing a nice smile, but Draco felt something lurch inside his chest at the sight of it.
“If you’ll just leave them here,” he said (less calmly now) “I can have them mended within the hour.”
“Yes, fine,” the woman said. She shoved her teacup at Draco (it sloshed down his front of course), swooped in and plucked her child from the counter. The child clutched at the curtains a bit too slowly and missed, his little hands waving wildly in the air as he began to scream again. His mother gave Draco one last despairing look, heaved the boy onto her hip and left the shop. The door blew shut with a bang. It was beginning to truly storm out there.
In the blessed silence that followed her departure Draco fumbled beneath the counter for his sewing kit, threaded the smallest of his silver needles and took a deep, steadying breath.
“Hello Potter,” he said.
The answering “Hello,” was much closer than he’d expected. Draco did not stab himself with the needle. He took another slow breath and looked up.
Potter was leaning on the counter. The smile was gone – perhaps Draco had imagined it – and the expression that replaced it was impossible to read. Potter’s face looked the way it did in the newspapers these days: friendly and a little blank. Draco flexed his fingers. He had seen Potter a handful of times over the last five years, not including his trial, and they had spoken on several of those occasions. There had been nothing in those painfully polite exchanges to make Draco nervous, but…
But Draco was fighting the urge to say, I haven’t been breaking any laws, Potter. He could feel his mouth trying to sneer. He brought his hand up just in case it succeeded, and then he was just standing there holding onto his jaw like an idiot.
“It’s nice to see you,” Potter said, sounding a little surprised.
“That’s just the curtains,” Draco told him, muffled and flustered and thrown and hating this.
Potter grinned. It was so quick: blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. But it was a grin. Draco was sure of it this time. “It’s not,” he said. “I heard you explain to that woman. I can definitely feel the charm – it’s a bit like the imperious, actually, feels kind of good and easy. But also it’s just nice to see you.” He shrugged.
Draco was not sure he’d ever felt so wrong footed. “Likewise,” he choked out.
“I just came in to browse,” Potter said, taking mercy on him. “But you do this stuff too?”
Draco did not roll his eyes. He did not say, still can’t read, Potter? and raise an eyebrow at the sign by the counter that read: "curse removal and antique repair available on request." He did not let go of his jaw. He just nodded.
Potter ran a hand over the paisley curtains. He had very square, tanned hands. Gardener’s hands, Mother would have called them. There were scars across the backs and along the knuckles and they should have looked clumsy but Potter touched the fraying fabric so gently. Like a child stroking a cat for the first time, or an egg. Unsure of how much pressure to use, how not to injure this fragile thing. Draco had to look away.
He looked at the other man’s face instead. Potter was frowning. And that wasn’t any better, because Draco remembered that frown from Hogwarts. He’d talked about it to Pansy, furrowing his own brow in imitation and dropping his voice. “Potter THINKING!” he’d grunted out, like Potter was a caveman. Pansy had shrieked with laughter. But it wasn’t a stupid frown, not really. Just a careful, intense one.
“Do lots of people have cursed curtains?” Potter asked.
Draco had to release his jaw to answer. He took hold of the curtains instead, tweaked the fabric neatly out of Potter’s grasp. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. I’d have thought Grimauld Place would have been crawling with nasty little hexes. Have a biscuit.” This last came out rather briskly, and the glance he cast towards the wall had enough anxiety in it that the tea trolley fairly rammed itself into Potter’s knee. Potter looked rather taken aback. But he took a biscuit. One of the chocolate ones. He handed one to Draco as well, absently, just as if they were sitting in a kitchen together.
“A lot of the time it’s things like this,” Draco went on. “People buy an older magical house and they don’t really know what to look for, so they see dark magic where things are just falling apart a bit.” He wasn’t eating his biscuit, was just holding it. His fingers felt sweaty. He swallowed. “But sometimes it really is cursed curtains.”
Draco waited for Potter’s face to darken, for him to ask what kind of horrible, twisted people would turn their home into a maze of hostile magic, but Potter was just…looking at the shelves.
“It’s brilliant in here,” Potter said.
Draco swivelled his head to look too. The shelf nearest them was a jumble of cookware and assorted kitchen décor. There was a very old butter churn with a warped paddle, some indecently large whisks, and many, many mismatched teacups. He could not currently see a single thing that ought to be labeled brilliant. But Potter had walked over and was inspecting the wooden churn.
“Are you…interested in making butter?” Draco asked. Which was a surreal thing for him to be asking Harry Potter.
Harry Potter grinned. “Dunno,” he said. Then, “probably not.” But he kept looking.
There was something wrong here, Draco thought. There was something different about Potter. It wasn’t the fact that he’d filled out, or that the desperate stubble on his face had turned into a respectably neat beard. No. The Potter he knew had always seemed like a coiled spring. He’d been so intense. All that energy, all that focus. Draco remembered what it was like to be the subject of that intensity. Now Potter seemed to be turning it on…shopping?
Draco did not move. He couldn’t. He had absolutely no idea how to handle any of this.
“Do you like it?” Potter asked from the other side of the shelf.
Draco, absurdly, looked down at the biscuit that was still in his hand. The chocolate was melting all over his fingers. “I…”
“Sorry, your job,” Potter said. “Do you like your job.”
Draco decided to eat his biscuit.
After a long silence, Potter poked his head out from between shelves. “With the curtains and everything,” he said.
Draco shrugged, feeling a little helpless. “There’s a market for it,” he said finally. “Big, lethal curses, you can take to a professional. Sometimes different departments in the ministry. But what I’m talking about…it’s just a thousand little things. Bill Weasley doesn’t have time to mend every bathtub that won’t hold hot water for a muggleborn. And if you weren’t raised in that kind of house, you don’t even know what to look for a lot of the time.”
Potter came fully out of the shelves now. He looked a bit stricken. “Is that a thing?” he asked (with far more urgency than Draco thought the subject warranted). “Bathtubs that only go cold for muggleborns?”
“Of course it is!” Draco snapped. “If it’s cruel and petty you can find it on an old pureblood estate.” Now Potter would look at him with the old, familiar disgust, he thought. But the look didn’t come. Potter’s face was stuck in an almost comic dismay. Oh.
“Potter,” Draco said. “You aren’t still living in Grimauld Place, are you?”
Potter nodded.
“And,” Draco went on, “I suppose Granger and Weasley visit you quite often, do they?”
Now the expression changed, but not to the loathing Draco had been waiting for. Potter looked, just for a split second, bereft. Like the toddler who’d had his magic curtains pulled away, all misery and hurt. Then it was gone. “Just Hermione,” Potter said.
There was a long pause. Then: “What are you doing after work?” Potter asked.