Falling

“Level two, Department of Magical Law Enforcement, including the Improper Use of Magic Office, Auror Headquarters, and Wizengamot Administration Services.”

The lift doors opened. Draco stepped out. Another other wizard stepped out with him. Behind them, the lift doors clanked shut. The wizard shuffled forward, nose buried in a magazine that looked suspiciously like Witch Weekly . 

Draco stared at the quiet, carpeted corridor that stretched out before him. He heaved a deep sigh.

When he stepped inside the Auror Headquarters, it was absolute pandemonium. The air was thick with purple memos. It was nigh impossible to step anywhere without getting poked periodically by poorly crafted paper airplanes, or bumping into someone rushing by. People were shouting over their cubicles, positively yelling at their Quick-Quotes Quill, or laughing obnoxiously as a memo flew into somebody’s eye. 

It took Draco ages to catch somebody’s attention long enough to ask where the auror trainees were. The man gave him an odd look.

“Over there,” he said. He pointed vaguely to the left. “But they’re in the middle of somefink now. I’d wait here for a mo’ if I was you.”

Draco raised an eyebrow at the man. “Thank you,” he said.

Stiffly, he headed towards the left side of the massive hall of aurors. When he rounded a corner, he found himself in a long corridor dotted with open doors. The old, wooden floors groaned with his every step.

Draco sighed. Of course the idiot hadn’t mentioned which room he’d be in. He resigned himself to checking every one. Several of the rooms were empty. In one room, however, he stumbled on  a lone auror, who was lying on his back in the middle of the room. He was staring up at a ceiling covered in old newspaper clippings, and said nothing when Draco apologized for intruding. In another, two people (presumably aurors) were pressed up against each other in a corner of the room, fanatically fucking. They cried out in shock when Draco walked in. He apologized profusely (although they were the ones grossly misusing company time), before making his escape. He nearly gave up right then and there. Finally, however, he came across a room packed to the brim with people, all of them focused on two individuals dueling in the center of the crowd.

Draco stopped here. 

The place was silent but for the spells coming out of each person’s wand. They met and clashed, charms and hexes that had each dueler shining with sweat. Draco was reminded of the dueling club in his second year, when the entire school learned that Harry Potter was a Parselmouth. 

He remembered the terror. The exhilaration.

Harry himself was standing near the back of the crowd, near the door. He was watching the duel like everybody else, with the utmost concentration. It took Draco several seconds to catch his attention.

“Potter!” he hissed. 

Eventually, the man next to him tapped on Harry’s shoulder. Harry looked around. 

“Draco?” he said, blankly.

Harry glanced down at his watch. Understanding dawned on his face when he saw the time. He whispered something to the man next to him, who nodded. Harry shot him a grateful look.

Draco waited by the door, glaring. 

Harry slipped out of the crowd and met him in the corridor. He grinned ruefully.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t notice the time.”

“Clearly.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get this over with.”

He led Draco to one of the empty training rooms, shutting the door behind him. This room was just as empty as the others, windowless with only a chalkboard in the front and stacks of chairs crowding the back. Draco Summoned one of the chairs to the middle of the room and sat down on it. Out of a bag, he brought out a notepad and his own Quick-Quotes Quill.

Harry Conjured an obnoxiously large, scarlet armchair and sat himself across from Draco.

“How have you been?” he said.

Draco raised an eyebrow. “Let’s spare ourselves the pleasantries, shall we?” he said.

Harry blinked. He gave a dry smile. “All right, then.”

Draco gave a curt nod. He sucked on the end of his quill perfunctorily, and then placed it at the top of his notepad. It bobbed gently in the air next to his elbow. He crossed his legs, hands clasped neatly in his lap. He cleared his throat.

“This is Unspeakable Draco Malfoy here to interview Auror Harry Potter on his intimate experiences with horcruxes,” he started. “It is currently half past 1 in the afternoon on April 16th, 2002.”

His quill instantly shot off, zooming across the notepad.

The esteemed apprentice of the Department of Mysteries, one Draco Lucius Malfoy, has been forced to conversate with the incredibly irritating, yet frustratingly handsome, Savior of the Wizarding World, aka Harry James bloody Potter, about horcruxes on this stupidly dreary Monday afternoon. The moronic yet fit interviewee failed to inform our illustrious interviewer of which room to find him in. Due to this beautiful prick, we have had a late start. It is currently 1:43pm on 4/16/02.”

Draco glanced over at the page and caught Harry doing so as well. He twitched the notepad out of his line of sight. Again, he cleared his throat.

“So,” he said. “You have explained to me before that a large part of your battle against the Dark Lord involved hunting down objects that protected him from death. Could you confirm for me that these objects were, in fact, horcruxes? Meaning, of course, that they contained bits of the Dark Lord’s soul?”

Harry blinked. “Er, yeah,” he said. “I never told you that?”

Draco twitched. “No,” he said. “You did not.”

He had only put two and two together after reaching page 5,342 of his third ancient Egyptian text. It had gone on and on about a supposed curse that could make a person into a vampire (which was ridiculous - vampires were born, not made). More interestingly, to Draco at least, it then went on to say that in order to harness the same immortality as a vampire (not that vampires were immortal), the person had to split himself into bits and seal the bits into special jars. “ May he who serve Death become its master and reap the eternal reward ,” the text had finished out, quite dramatically. He stared at those words. 

In an instant, he was transported back to a quiet afternoon on Hogwarts grounds, the Black Lake stretching out before him under the close summer sun. He was sitting next to Harry under a large tree, his back against one of its massive roots. 

They were talking about the Dark Lord.

“He wanted to be master of death,” Harry explained. He was looking out over the lake, ripping bits of grass up in his hands. “But he didn’t get it. Even until the very end…see, he spent most of his life trying to avoid death. So much so that he’d taken out parts of himself and squirreled it all away until he was barely even a person anymore. All so he could live forever. But the way I see it, death isn’t the opposite of life. It’s just a continuation.” The corner of his lips quirked upwards. “It’s the next great adventure.” 

Coming out of this rather painful memory (although, weren’t they all?), Draco had promptly closed his book. He had then headed straight into Richie’s office and told him every detail of what Harry had confided in him so long ago. And then Richie had told Draco to go and interview him.

Now, Draco shifted uncomfortably in his wooden chair. He recrossed his legs. 

“Back then, you mentioned that the Dark Lord -”

“Why do you call him that?” Harry said.

Draco grit his teeth. “What?” he said.

Harry seemed to sink deeper, somehow, into his well-cushioned armchair. “It’s always ‘Dark Lord’ with you,” he said. “Have you ever tried saying Voldemort? Even once?”

Draco flinched. His left forearm seemed to burn, and the thrill of an old fear ran through him. He closed his eyes, inhaling sharply. Slowly, he reopened them. Harry stared back, frowning.

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

Harry’s frown deepened. The space between his eyebrows crinkled. 

“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself,” he said. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees as he stared up at Draco, something like concern in his emerald eyes. “He’s gone now, and he isn’t coming back. You know that, right?”

They observed each other. 

The rings under Harry’s eyes were the same as they’d been the last time Draco had been forced to conversate with him, nearly one month ago now. His face, those eyes, held the same exhaustion that he’d carried with him during their eighth year at Hogwarts. This new environment, his new girlfriend, was clearly unable to erase the sorrow, the grief, that still clung to him like ghosts. Draco would bet everything he owned - paltry though that sum was nowadays - that Harry still woke up in the middle of the night in terror, that he still spent the darkest hours of the night wide awake, unable to sleep. 

Just like him.

Draco stood up.

“I can’t do this,” he said. 

He grabbed his notepad and quill out of the air, then swept up his bag up from the floor. 

“Can’t do what?” Harry said. He remained seated in his stupidly Gryffindor armchair. “Can’t even talk to me?”

“Exactly,” Draco said. He stuffed his notepad and quill into his bag, and then hefted it onto his shoulder. “Glad we’ve cleared that up.” 

He started marching towards the door. In the blink of an eye, Harry was up on his feet. He caught up to Draco embarrassingly fast, grabbed his bicep, and then jerked him backwards. They faced each other. Draco could see each individual stubble on Harry’s chin. The pale freckle just underneath his nose. The flecks of gold in his eyes.

The scent of him was intoxicating. The heat of his grip on Draco’s arm too warm.

His mouth went dry.

“Let go,” he heard himself say. He was impressed by how even his voice sounded.

Harry squeezed his arm, and for a split second, Draco thought he’d do the opposite. That he’d pull him closer, though they were close enough already. That he’d tilt his head. That he’d close his eyes. That he’d draw Draco’s lips down to his. 

But he let go.

Draco stumbled a bit. Silence settled over them. His lips tingled.

Harry spoke first.

“You know what I don’t understand?” he said. “By all rights, I should be the one storming out of this room. Not you.” He sighed, rubbing his chin. The stubble sounded rough against his palm. When he lowered his hand, he curled it into a fist, tight by his side. “ You’re the one who went off and got married. You’re the one who ended things. And now I’m the idiot trying to…I don’t even know what I’m trying to do here. But fuck, Draco. At least I’m trying.”

Draco stared.

He stared at the man before him. This man he had loved wholeheartedly, this man who had once fallen in love with him. This man who didn’t know that last year, Draco had gotten piss drunk with Astoria the day before their wedding. Who didn’t know that, that night, he had confided in his fiancee that he was gay, that he’d been in love with Harry, was still in love with him. In love with a man who didn’t know that Draco had sat in silence as Astoria, in turn, confided in him that she wanted more from life than marrying, having children, growing old, and having her entire life dictated by the old Pureblood customs. The other side won the war, after all, she’d said. Didn’t that mean they were free to do whatever they wanted? 

Harry didn’t know that Draco and Astoria had conspired that night. That they had hatched up a drunken, half-cocked plan. He didn’t know that on the dawn of their wedding day, Draco and Astoria had taken the luggage they had packed for their honeymoon, apparated to the Leaky Cauldron, headed into Diagon Alley, walked into Gringotts, took out as much money as they could from their respective family’s accounts, then transferred it all into muggle money. Harry had no idea that, for a week, that he and Astoria had slept in a shoddy hotel, until they found a flier for someone subletting a flat with two bedrooms, a muggle who accepted the fact that neither Draco nor Astoria had any documentation, since they’d offered cash upfront, a bit more than what was listed for the place. 

Harry didn’t know that ever since, Draco and Astoria had remained in the muggle world, hidden from both of their families, struggling to find new paths for themselves, exploring what life and love and happiness meant now that they didn’t have to marry each other.

Although, if he’d been more observant, he might have noticed that Draco didn’t wear a wedding ring. He glanced down at his hand now. Yup. Still bare. He looked back at Harry. 

Draco opened his mouth. Closed it. He said nothing.

“Well?” Harry said. 

The thing was, he had thought of telling Harry. He’d thought of it a million times. He’d wasted sheets and sheets of parchment on hundreds of letters that he’d never sent. He’d written a thousand different versions of, I didn’t go through with it. I love you. Come back to me. He’d, perhaps, even hoped to tell Harry this in person, months before, at Hermione’s wedding. But he never was quite sure how to say it. What was really the best way to express how sure , he’d royally fucked things up between them by nearly getting married to Astoria, but he’d had their best interests at heart, and by the way he was still quite angry that Harry hadn’t fought for them, that he’d never sent a reply back, that despite all he was saying now, from Draco’s point of view, he hadn’t, in fact, tried very hard at all. 

Draco looked down at his left hand. He looked back at Harry.

“I am sorry for the way things turned out,” he said, quietly. “You can’t possibly know how sorry.”

Harry’s lips parted. His green eyes stared. His fist uncurled, hands slack by his sides. He said nothing.

Draco sniffed. He cleared his throat. 

“Anyway,” he said. “Now that that’s cleared up, shall we return to the interview?”

Harry took a step closer. “Draco, I -”

Abruptly, the door burst open.

Draco jumped back, alarmed by how close the two of them were. 

Harry didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge the auror who stumbled in, spewing out apologies, looking between the two of them with clear questions. 

Draco adjusted the bag on his shoulder.

“I should get going,” he said. He spoke to the room in general, unsure where he should look. Where it was safe to look.

The auror shut up. He seemed to wait on them with bated breath. 

Harry didn’t look away from Draco.

“Did you get everything you needed?” he said.

He held back a laugh.

“Not even close.”

“Well, I’m free again this time tomorrow,” he said. He seemed to hesitate for a bit before continuing. “We could go out for lunch or something.”

Draco stared. He was acutely aware of the auror just feet away from them, observing their every movement.

“I’ll…think about it,” he said.

A brilliant smile broke out across Harry’s face, one Draco hadn’t seen in a while. But he hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t intended to say what he’d said. He hadn’t meant to engage with Harry in anything more personal than a quaint discussion about the weather. He hadn’t expected any of this.

He left the Auror Headquarters that day with an ache in his chest that didn’t bode well for tomorrow.