Small Braveries

Three weeks later, Draco was enjoying a lovely cappuccino in his favorite café off of Frakshun Alley reading what drivel TheProphet had to offer when a gigantic white stag barreled in through the wall to his left.

Draco definitely didn’t release a high-pitched, undignified shriek. It was more of a manly yelp. Or a grunt of surprise. Yes, a grunt, that was exactly it.

“I’m sorry,” the beast apologized in Harry Potter’s voice. “My owl couldn’t find your place because of the wards, and I have a bit of an issue that needs solving, er, now. Please come to mine as soon whenever you can today—I’ll pay whatever you like.” With that vague little tirade, it shimmered into nothing, leaving Draco with a half-spilt cup of coffee dripping onto his trousers and his heart pounding out of his chest. Luckily, the café was small and the hour was later in the morning, so no one else had been around to witness the tragedy that had became of his fine Italian weave, nor his embarrassing reaction. 

Well , Draco thought, it’s not like I had much booked for today anyway . 

Spelling his trousers dry and brushing his hair out of his face, he rose with as much stateliness as he could muster, and strode out of the door to the apparition point. 

He had a certain Savior to see. 

_*_

“Thanks for coming,” Harry said in a harried voice, opening the door before Draco even got onto the front stoop. His hair was even wilder than usual, and he looked distinctly frazzled. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, I know this is last minute. Oh! This is Frida,” he said, jumping as a dark-haired woman with a monobrow walked through him and shuddering. “Ugh, Merlin, that was odd.”

“You have more than just her?” Draco asked with a raised eyebrow, figuring as much from the urgency of Potter’s missive. 

“Yeah,” Harry grimaced. “A lot more.”

He held the door open for Draco to walk in, letting him survey the damage. Even just entering the house, Draco could feel the otherworldly energy emanating from the walls. Usually, in his line of work, that sort of thing was just a faint whiff in the air. Grimmauld Place hit him like a brick in face.

“Merlin, Potter,” Draco spluttered, looking at the retreating form of Frida, glancing around at two or three various other spooks just in the front room . “How many of them are there ?”

“At least a couple dozen,” Harry admitted sheepishly, tugging an errant lock of his flyaway curls behind his ear. “I fell asleep last night and there were none, but I woke up for work this morning and they were all here. And, well…no Poltergeists like Peeves have shown up yet, but I’d rather get this whole thing fixed before one does.”

“Agreed,” Draco said immediately and meaning it wholeheartedly. He looked around the room, still wide-eyed. 

Turning back to Harry, he said, “I think I need to go to my lab.”

_*_

“Alright.” Draco had exhausted his stores of potions, everything from plant-based to blood-based, dealing in permanence, disappearance, and energy transference. He brought his big volume of runes—which he could actually feel weighing down his bag, even through the undetectable Expansion and Featherlight charms—as well as all the journals he’d transcribed ghost language into from the various ancient texts he’d spent so much time hunched over as he was beginning to learn necromancy that it was truly feat of magic that he didn’t have scoliosis. Or a lauded thesis. But the latter probably had more to do with his disastrous personal reputation than magic. 

Harry ran his hand through his increasingly disarrayed hair, a habit that Draco had discovered was exacerbated by stress. His bottle-glass green eyes bounced from one object to the next as Draco laid them all out on the dining room table, keenly surveying them with the sharpness of an Auror’s gaze. 

“What are you going to do?” the Savoir asked, feeling rather in need of direction for what he was going to do.

Draco tsk d. “No clue,” he replied bluntly. Undeterred by the unimpressed expression on his client's face, he continued, “First, I believe, I’ll ward off every room in the house to make sure no malicious otherworldly beings have taken up residence.”

 “Such as?” Harry wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

Draco glanced up. “Demons,” he said lightly. “Those are the worst. They also act as beacons for the stranger sort. Having that crossed off the list will mean that we can continue as planned.”

This conversation just got better and better. Harry’s lips were tight as he asked, “And if you can’t cross it off?”

“Then I can refer you to an excellent exorcist, by the name of one Theodore Nott, but I shall promptly vacate this house and everything around it, and strongly urge you to do the same,” Draco replied, meaning every word. “I’ve learned my lesson once. I don’t get mixed up in the powerful Dark anymore.” 

Harry nodded, sucking on his bottom lip. “That seems reasonable.” He paused. "Nott is an exorcist?"

Draco snorted inelegantly but didn’t reply. Instead, he began the arduous task of calling every spectre out of the nooks and crannies of the old house, starting with the attic and moving down. 

“There’s a ghoul in the attic,” Harry supplied helpfully as he ascended the stairs. 

“A what?”

“A ghoul. In the attic. He’s been there for years.”

“Well…does he pay rent?”

Harry looked befuddled, his dark eyebrows furrowed and thrown together. “Of course not.”

“Then why haven’t you evicted him yet? Years, Potter? And you didn’t think to call on me sooner?”

Harry shrugged. “Seemed a little harsh. All he does is rattle around the pipes a bit. Though sometimes the plumbing is off and I can’t help but think he has something to do with it.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Naturally.” 

Astounded as he was by Harry’s undiscerning tendency for self-sacrifice, Draco had a job to do. He’d get every spook out of this house if it killed him.

_*_

Eight hours later, Draco was nearly dead himself. 

“They just keep coming,” he murmured, staring at his notes with a hand in his hair, elbow on the table even though he knew it was terrible manners. Grimmauld Place was a hovel—he wouldn’t be surprised if Potter put his feet on the table. Or the Weasel. Under those circumstances, one Malfoy elbow was more than acceptable. “There’s just so many of them, I don’t understand.”

Harry shrugged, tossing a handful of cinnamon into the stew he was making. “I’d say ask Hermione, but she was the one who mentioned you were a necromancer,” he said. “She’s always my go-to whenever I’m stumped.”

Draco blew a dusty lock of hair out of his eyes. “I can do my own job, Potter. This is just a much bigger job than I thought.” He’d sorted out that on average pretty much every room in the very large Grimmauld Place had at least one unwanted inhabitant. Except for the ghoul in the attic—which had apparently been present for far longer than this particular problem—most of the spooks seemed to stay on the ground floor, which was odd. Usually they picked darkened rooms or secluded spaces, like cabinets and closets—or, in the case of one particularly stubborn ghost, a toilet filter. The ground floor was by far the most well taken care of: Harry spent most of his time there except when he slept, and as a consequence it was, though still dreary and depressing, a good deal more inhabitable than the rest of the house. 

“I just don’t understand ,” Draco said, reading the same line on his notes for the fifth time that sitting and tugging on his fringe. Harry side-eyed him—Luna always insisted that Draco was actually second in their year, just behind Hermione. Had he not been tangled up in Dark Arts or distracted trying to one-up Harry all the time, he may very well have tied with her for valedictorian, and wouldn’t that have absolutely infuriated all interested parties. 

He could see that part of Draco now as he flipped through his notes and wrote addendums so carefully his nose nearly skimmed the page, a ferocious scowl on his face the whole time. He let him be for a while, figuring it was better to have the blond tire himself out than to interrupt him and have his wrath turned onto an actual person. 

Instead, Harry waited until the stew was done cooking and ready to serve, stirring and humming occasionally. He levitated dinner onto the table, taking care to put it far away from Draco’s papers. 

“Eat,” he said simply, taking his own oven mitts off after he put the freshly baked bread on a cooling rack on the table. 

Draco blinked, drawn out of his state of intense focus with a perplexed expression. “What?”

“I’ve made us dinner.” A translucent, balding man in a tartan flannel and chunky glasses walked through the wall to Harry’s left and made his way through their meal. “As well as Bob, though he can’t eat anything. Hullo, Bob.”

“They don’t understand you,” Draco explained, as though to a small child. “They speak ghost language.”

“Yes, well, I like to be polite to my houseguests--" 

“They appreciate it, I’m sure,” Draco snorted, taking in the blank expression on Bob’s face as he wandered through the wall to his right.

"--How did the Hogwarts ghosts speak to us?”

Draco shrugged. "House magic. Or Castle magic, I guess. Builds up over the centuries. These ghosts haven't lived here long enough to be affected." 

He glanced at the stew in the pot before him and tried not to wince when his stomach growled. “Thank you," he said quietly, shocking Harry. "But I can’t eat here. You’re a client.”

Harry passed him a bowl anyway. “Neither of us realized your job would take all day, and I’d say six in the evening is a good enough hour to take off. It’s good, try it. Beef stew. One of my best.”

Draco raised the spoon to his lips, tentatively, and was pleasantly surprised—though in retrospect perhaps he shouldn’t have been. The aroma coming from the pot as it was cooking had been heavenly, but he’d been too absorbed in his task to notice. “It is…acceptable,” he slowly admitted, not wanting to inflate the Chosen One’s ego any more than necessary.

Harry, however, beamed as though Draco had just given him the best compliment in the world. “I love cooking,” he said, gesticulating with his utensil. “It’s well enough that Kreacher doesn’t like to—I prefer doing it myself anyhow.”

“Your house elf doesn’t cook?” Draco was appalled. All the house elves his parents had were fantastic chefs: it was one of the reasons he was so pants at it. Occasionally he had Flipsy come over to his flat from the Manor, but more often than not he just ended up eating whatever was convenient, or smoking a cigarette instead. Whenever Luna found out he did that, though, she had the unsettling tendency of sneaking various oddly shaped and pungent fruits under his pillow ‘to cleanse him’. He was never really sure how she dismantled both his muggle lock and his magical wards to do so, but manage it she did every time. She really was much cleverer than she appeared, that Lovegood girl. 

“Well, he will cook,” Harry amended. “He just doesn’t like me, so when he cooks for me it’s usually fairly awful. Besides, I learned when I was little, I don’t mind.”

Draco hummed. That made much more sense. 

He still acted as though the stew was merely passable, though.

Even if he did have two helpings. 

_*_

The next day, Draco came back and tried again. And the next day. And the next.

No matter how many times he tried banishing Potter’s unwanted guests, more came in their place. Or, in the case of Dennis, he simply returned. 

“Why do you like this bloody place so much?” Draco shouted at him one day as Dennis startled him by floating out of the toilet while he was trying to fix his hair, tragically messy as it was from accidentally creating a vacuum to the netherworld in the mouldy guest bedroom down the hall. He was still trying to comb bits of goo out days later, and pea green never was the best color on him to begin with. 

“There’s just so many of them!” Draco yelled, ready to tear out his hair and throw all his journals in the fireplace. 

“Yes,” Harry said, sitting on the couch and watching him struggle, blinking owlishly while halfway stuck in a woman’s translucent upper intestine. “Yes, there are.”

Draco huffed. He didn’t like not knowing things. He could usually figure things out pretty quickly. And when he couldn’t, he usually got himself into a lot of trouble trying to. “There must be something in this house,” he grumbled angrily. “There must be. Some sort of portal left half-closed, something. Maybe one of the Blacks dabbled in the netherworld and fucked something up—there’s never been a spill like this before. Merlin!” Draco’s furious muttering was marked with a startled exclamation, having found an old man’s head appear in his lap. The man rose through the sofa and Draco’s thighs to the ceiling, whereupon he continued his journey upwards and drifted out of sight. 

Draco glowered after him, a clenched jaw and clenched fists. He very nearly ripped his papers. 

Harry was laughing at him. Well, at least his head wasn’t stuck in some woman’s belly. Draco thought it was Frida again.

“Potter, I’m leaving,” Draco announced, shutting his books with a snap . “I can’t work here.”

“So you’re just leaving? With the house like this?” Harry asked, gesturing around wildly. “I can’t live here!”

“No,” Draco said faintly, a small frown on his lips and a strange expression on his face. His eyes looked far away. “I suppose you can’t.”

Harry raked his hands through his hair, a thinking habit. “I can’t stay with Hermione and Ron,” he said to himself, thinking. “Not with Rosie. I could go to Andy's...” He winced. Teddy hadn't stopped crying for more than thirty minutes at a time in the past two weeks. He'd just done godfather duty yesterday night, and had been looking forward to sleeping finally.

Draco was still scrutinizing him, as he thought. “Come back to mine and Luna’s,” he proposed, to Harry’s utmost shock. 

“You’re inviting me to stay at your flat?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, possibly mine. Only if Luna doesn’t have space. But you may not want to stay with Luna, since it’s the second week of November.”

“What does the second week of November have to do with it?”

“It’s when she says one of her bizarre magical pests breeds. She chants and waves palm fronds around at three in the morning every night to dissuade them from entering the building.”

Harry seemed to be mulling it over, so Draco added, “I once went over there to tell her to quiet down, but unfortunately it seems she prefers to engage in that particular activity in the nude.” And while wearing the strangest hairpiece—Draco couldn’t even begin to guess what it was made out of.

Harry looked a bit pale, but that could have been the ghost whose stomach he was still inside. “So…you’re offering your flat. When a few days ago you were reluctant to even eat dinner at my place.” Harry raised an eyebrow. “Eager to see me again?”

“Please,” Draco sniffed. “This will just be in the meantime. I haven’t yet finished my job as I agreed, so. And also I’d like to go over some things with you, and take some scans to rule a thing or two out.”

“Scan what?”

“You,” Draco replied. “To help me see if this is potentially a multi-faceted problem or not.”

“Ah. That’s reassuring.”

“Quite,” Draco said, and left Harry to pack.

None of this had anything to do with Potter’s cooking skills. Or his stupid hair. Or his bottle-green eyes, so intense when they met Draco's own. 

Absolutely none.