Chapter Five
Instead of talking to Andromeda about 12 Grimauld Place, Harry got himself lit on fire.
It wasn’t like that exactly. Correlation does not equal causation, Hermione might have said. Since Hermione wasn’t here, Harry’s brain said it for her while he watched the flames run up his leg. This is not Draco Malfoy’s fault, he thought. And then he snorted because what a stupid thing to be thinking when you’re trapped in a public loo with an escaped salamander.
“Come off it,” he said to the salamander. It was backed into a corner and making little hissing, crackling noises. The floor around it was on fire but only feebly so. It seemed to be putting most of its energy into igniting Harry’s trousers.
“Aguamenti!” Harry said, and a stream of water extinguished the flames. The salamander stamped its clawed feet (they were like tiny orange coals) and immediately the fabric (what was left) began to steam. “No,” Harry told it. “Come on, not again.” He lunged for the little creature and it dodged him, skuttling up along the wall and leaving a trail of peeling, bubbled paint.
“Bollocks,” Harry said. Then, “Stupefy!”
“Alright in there, mate?” Dixon asked from the other side of the door. Harry hadn’t hit the salamander, of course. He had managed to hit one of the urinals, which had cracked and was spouting water on the linoleum. Well, that was good. It would keep the flames down. Basically a tactical decision.
“Fine, yeah,” Harry got out, lunging again. This time he slipped in the water from the urinal and fell hard. It knocked the wind right out of him. Flat on his back on the floor he could see the salamander clinging to one of the light fixtures directly above him. He heard the door crack open to his left and then a little intake of breath from Dixon, who said nothing: just withdrew his head and went back to keeping watch for muggles.
Ron would have laughed. Stupid of Dixon to be so polite all the time. As if it would make Harry angry to be laughed at, as if he couldn’t take it.
But of course it did make Harry angry even just thinking about Ron laughing. Laughing and wrangling dragons, looking all cool and windswept in Romania while Harry lay smouldering in dirty loo water trying to catch a lizard with bloody Dixon minding the door.
Harry sat up and flung his wand at the salamander, which squeaked in terror and fell off the light fixture onto his lap. Of course. He singed his fingers badly keeping hold of it while he scrambled for his wand to cast a containment field. In the see-through bubble the little creature writhed and flickered, orange to red to blue and back again. It reminded him of the jarred flames Hermione used to conjure back in school.
“I got it!” he called to the door.
It didn’t take them long to get the place back to reasonably presentable. Dixon knew a lot of handy little spells for things like cracked urinals, even if he didn’t much fancy getting lit on fire. There wasn’t anything to be done for Harry’s robes though.
“Oh just leave it,” Harry said eventually. Everything below the knee was basically charred, sodden rags. He didn’t seem to have a lot of leg hair left either. “They’ll give me new ones again.”
“I expect there’ll be paperwork though,” Dixon said nervously.
Harry, who had indeed filled out the “requisition for replacement of junior auror robes” form seven times by this point, just snorted. Then he sighed. “You said they hatch in clutches?” he asked. “How many to a clutch?”
“Ten to thirty,” Dixon said in his flat little voice.
So it was too late, when Harry finally got off work, to think about visiting Andromeda.
“It’s been too late all week,” he told Draco Malfoy when he popped into Antiquodities on his way home. Malfoy was just locking up but he let Harry in with a concerned furrow to his brow. “Monday was crowd control at the Quidditch game against Slovakia – you must have read what happened. And then Tuesday through Thursday we were in Scotland chasing all through the highlands. It was really muddy. I brought you shortbread.”
Harry handed over the shortbread, which was in plastic packet and had crumbled somewhat. “It’s quite posh,” he told Malfoy by way of apology for the crumbles. “The speckles are tea or something.” Not or something. They were earl grey tea, with extra bergamot. Harry had bought five different kinds to make sure which was the best, and the earl grey was it. But he didn’t want to sound like he cared too much. It was probably weird enough bringing Malfoy treats.
Harry was ready for Malfoy to find it weird. He had a whole thing all set to say about how Malfoy had brought him biscuits before. How he’d been so nice about the house. How it was just a little thank you gesture and not to get all worked up about it. But he didn’t need to say any of that in the end, because Malfoy just took the shortbread. His mouth was open.
“And…what happened today?” Malfoy said rather faintly.
“Oh,” Harry said. He looked down at the remains of his robes. “There was this mad old man breeding salamanders in Marylebone.”
Malfoy snorted. “And you thought you’d give them a cuddle, did you?” he asked with an exasperated roll of his eyes. Harry, who dealt with that sort of look from Hermione all the time, knew better than to say anything else. It was better to wait it out. While he did that he glanced around the shop, noting with interest that the big, decorative butter churn seemed to have been sold.
Waiting it out took a lot less time with Malfoy than it did with Hermione. It was really only a second before the other man was sighing noisily and snatching his coat from a hook near the door.
“Very well Potter,” he said. “Come along then.”
Harry grinned. He followed Malfoy out onto the darkening street. There was a bit of a breeze, but the sky was clear and it was going to be a beautiful night. “Are we going back to yours?” he asked.
“We are going to the pub,” Malfoy said shortly.
The pub was quite close. It was a muggle one, not the Leaky Cauldron, but Malfoy seemed very familiar with the menu. He ordered himself some cottage pie and Harry a pint of lager (“we can’t both be stone cold sober for this, Potter”) and when they arrived he sat back with a waspish sort of look on his face. “So?” he asked.
Harry wanted to say, “So what” just like he was twelve years old, but he was also pretty tired and Malfoy didn’t look like he’d find it funny. Instead he shrugged one shoulder and looked out across the pub. “It’s nice here,” he said. It wasn’t, really. It was just a pub. Someone was shouting about football down the other end.
Malfoy kicked Harry’s chair. When Harry looked at him, startled, Malfoy was scowling. “You didn’t turn up at my workplace for the second time in as many weeks to make small talk, Potter,” he said. He took a bite of his cottage pie (with what seemed to Harry an unnecessarily violent wielding of his fork) and asked, “What do you want?”
“I want you to move in to my house,” Harry said.
Which wasn’t what he meant to say at all. He would have been completely horrified by the fact that he had said it, except that Malfoy looked horrified enough for the both of them. And that expression on that face was remarkably cheering. Horrifying Draco Malfoy was a little bit like seeing the Hogwarts Express or eating Molly Weasley’s treacle tart, Harry thought – there was a powerful nostalgia to it. Harry had had a long, stupid day, but Mafloy’s face was fixing it.
At least he hadn’t said that.
Harry sipped his beer and looked at Malfoy’s face some more.
“I…you…” Malfoy said.
He was wearing a grey shirt again. Maybe it was a requirement at the shop. Harry had always associated grey with the muggle world – with faded hand-me-downs and horribly dyed uniforms. Magical fashion was so often flashy and bright; what Aunt Petunia would have called “gaudy,” and he’d found it all immediately charming. If a fourteen year old Harry had ever imagined what Malfoy might wear as a grown-up he would probably have thought about jeweled tones. (He wasn’t completely sure what jeweled tones were, and definitely hadn’t been thinking about Malfoy’s clothes at fourteen, but if he did know, if he had been…)
Not grey, was the point. He would never have expected grey. And he would never have expected it to look so good. He would never have expected to like it.
“Excuse me?” Malfoy said.
So, alright, it was fucking Harry up a little, how much he liked seeing horrified Malfoy in a soft grey shirt at the end of a long day. That was fine. That was information.
“I’ll pay you,” he said, which probably didn’t actually sound any better, and now Malfoy was just staring with his mouth slightly open, fork dangling forgotten from his fingers. Harry made a real effort to pull himself together. He had meant to ask this, he realized. This was why he’d been avoiding Andromeda all week, why he’d bought the shortbread and stopped at the shop today.
“You were right about the house,” he told Malfoy. “It was fine when I thought it was just falling apart, but if it’s actively trying to kill Hermione…you said you could fix it. In your letter. You said it would be straightforward. So if you came to stay for a while…”
Malfoy put the fork down. He nodded. Then he shook his head. “I was happy to identify the problem,” he said, “but I can think of a dozen people off the top of my head who would be better suited to treat it.”
“Yeah, but I want you,” Harry said.
Malfoy stared for another long moment. Then he cleared his throat. He picked up his fork and stabbed at the cottage pie. It didn’t really look like it needed stabbing, being mostly mashed potato, but Malfoy stabbed it anyway. “You can’t have me,” he said, almost sounding as if he meant it. “This would be a full-time endeavor. I have a job, Potter. I have a life. I’m not going to drop everything to become a house elf to the Boy Who Lived. Stop making excuses and talk to my aunt.”
“They don’t call me that anymore,” Harry said. “Now it’s mostly War Hero Harry Potter. And I don’t really want to ask Andromeda. How’s your pie anyway?”
Malfoy stabbed at it some more. Then he looked at Harry with such miserable indignation that Harry had to laugh.
“Sorry,” he said when Malfoy looked ready to stab him next. “One of the salamanders looked at me just like that earlier. At least you’re not lighting me on fire.”
“Just watch me,” Malfoy muttered. Then he said “Look, what’s really going on here? You must know people would be falling over themselves to help you, even if you want to ignore the obvious candidates. Why are you darkening my doorstep?”
“I didn’t plan to,” Harry said honestly. “I’m kind of improvising here. I do that a lot. But I think it’s a really good idea.”
Malfoy did not look any happier. “Why?” he asked.
“Because you made Hermione mad,” Harry said.
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew that at once. Malfoy stopped looking so wonderfully indignant. His whole face closed up and went serious and still, and that was even worse than before. That made Harry want to bundle him up and fucking soothe him.
“No,” he said. He leaned across the table and took hold of Malfoy’s wrists like Malfoy was going to try to get away. It was definitely a weird thing to do, but it was better than bundling. “No, I mean you made her mad, Malfoy. She doesn’t get mad anymore. It was great. I need you to move in to my house and make Hermione mad all the time.”
“You’re mad,” Malfoy said, but he didn’t pull his wrists away. His skin was soft and cool.
“Please,” Harry said. “Just for a couple months. I’ll talk to your boss. I’ll pay her too. And you don’t have to make Hermione mad all the time. Sometimes you could just talk about arithmancy or really complicated blood magic stuff. And we’ll help with the spellwork.”
Malfoy frowned. Then he looked down at the table, to where Harry’s arms were gripping his, and he gave a little gasp. “Potter, what happened?” he asked.
Harry took his left arm off the table and shook it so the sleeve fell down to hide the ugly claw marks on his forearm. They were healing, but the poison made it slow. And they were very deep.
“I told you,” he said. “There was this whole flock of harpies in Scotland.” He had transferred Malfoy’s wrist to his right hand when he took his left away, so now he was holding both of them in one hand and it occurred to him that maybe he was bullying Malfoy a bit. Holding onto him like this. Malfoy’s hands were very tidy. Harry was probably getting soot on them.
But Malfoy was too busy minding about Harry’s left arm to pay any attention to his right. He looked green. “ “It was muddy,” ” he whispered. “You told me it was muddy, Harry.”
It had been really muddy. When Harry had taken his boots off Thursday night the bottoms of his feet had been all white and wrinkled and tender. It had taken forever to get warm again. At least hunting salamanders had mostly been dry.
“Harry,” Malfoy said again. His voice was soft. “Harpy venom is excruciating.”
“Yeah, but there’s this great bakery in Edinburgh,” Harry said, letting go of Malfoy’s wrists at last. Malfoy didn’t seem like he wanted to leap up and leave the pub anymore. “I’d go there all the time if I could.”
Malfoy put his face in his hands.
They were quiet for a long moment.
Then Harry said, “I’m worried about Hermione.” It was easier now, not being distracted by Malfoy’s face. “I’m worried I’m fucking it all up. I don’t know what else to do.”
Malfoy looked at him. He picked up his fork again and ate some of the cottage pie, but the violence seemed to have drained away. Harry drank his beer and watched Malfoy eat, which was rude and weird but in the grand scheme of their evening probably didn’t even register. He knew he should be ashamed of his behaviour over the last hour, but he just felt calm.
Hermione didn’t need scarves or cat toys or flying bicycles. She had looked more alive after one argument with Malfoy than she had after months of Harry’s fussing.
“One month,” Malfoy said abruptly.
Harry couldn’t do anything about the grin spreading across his face. “Yeah?” he asked.
“One month,” Malfoy said again. “If you can convince Mrs. Melhuish not to fire me. And I’ll expect room and board, Potter. Three square meals a day. Proper ones, with vegetables and…and whole grains.”
“Done,” Harry said. His easy compliance clearly annoyed Malfoy, who was looking more pink than green now.
“You’ll clean my room thoroughly before I arrive,” he said. “No doxies in the curtains or boggarts under the bed. A working bath. I’ll deal with the curses but there had better be hot water.”
“Did you want foam bath and chocolates as well?” Harry asked, which just deepened the pink.
“Yes, thank you,” Malfoy said furiously. He stood up and rummaged in his pocket for a few pounds, which he tossed onto the table. He hadn’t bothered to count them, Harry was interested to see. Muggle money was clearly familiar to him. “And I can trust Granger to be presentable, but I’ll thank you to maintain proper dress while I’m in residence.” He sneered down at Harry, looking just for a moment shockingly like his old self. “That means trousers, Potter, not rags and soot.”
Then, mouth clamped firmly shut, Malfoy turned on his heel and swept out of the pub.
Harry grinned at the startled bartender and ordered another drink.
It had been a good day after all.