Good Vibes
Harry was absolutely certain that Andy was going to berate him for being rude to Draco and leaving without even saying goodbye, but he was equally certain that staying even a moment longer in that room would have been disastrous. Draco had changed after the war and he was—apparently—very much Harry’s type.
Absently, Harry supposed that that realization should have surprised him. Where his mind had previously been leading him was a far cry from schoolyard enemies or hurling curses in a haunted bathroom. He wasn’t surprised, though. Something about it felt necessary or fated or…
Inevitable.
Draco Malfoy was inevitable and unavoidable because Harry had spent almost a third of his life hyper-focused on the blond. He was magnetic. A magnetic git, maybe, but magnetic nevertheless and Harry was beginning to wonder if his status as a spoiled twat had shifted after the war as well.
Who was he kidding? The former Slytherin was so different that Harry had struggled to recognize him aside from his magical signature. Andy was blatantly Muggle-raised and not at all shy about it because she’d grown up far from all the blood purity shit Europe had struggled with and Draco seemed to have taken to her easily enough. She hadn’t made any snide comments or complaints about the blond, either.
Harry had unconsciously been expecting to see the Draco Malfoy he’d locked eyes with across a courtroom all those years ago. That Draco had been impossibly pale, sickly, and in pain. He’d sat emotionlessly through his own trial and watched Harry testify with empty eyes and trembling hands. There’d been bandages over his Dark Mark, Harry remembered, and at first he’d thought it was some kind of sympathy play to hide the Mark from the Wizengamot, but then he’d seen the patches of dried blood on the gauze.
He ached, even now, to see the damage and to know who had done it. Had it scarred? Had Draco done it to himself, or had another prisoner—or, God forbid, an Auror—done that to him? Was it recent? If so, why had he had the same bandages wrapped tight over his left forearm during his mother’s trial weeks later?
Harry had so many questions. Draco didn’t owe him any answers, of course, and especially not while Harry still wore a glamour to their meetings but he couldn’t help wondering. Hermione had called his behavior in Sixth Year ‘obsessive’ and, though he would never admit to it, in hindsight he kind of agreed with her. Focusing on Draco was easy and effortless in a way that school (and now work) just wasn’t.
“Did you tell him about the recipe?”
Hermione’s voice didn’t even make him jump. She set a mug of tea on his desk, which he accepted even though they both knew he hated tea. He took a pity sip of it, nearly spat it out but managed to swallow, and cast a basic silencing charm at the door of his office. The witch across from him raised her eyebrow, cancelled it, and cast a much stronger one.
“It didn’t go well?”
She was sipping her own tea, Harry noted, which smelled of peppermint this morning. That was good. He’d learned to guess at Hermione’s moods based on her choice of morning tea and had been expecting lavender or chamomile if she was still stressed about whatever meeting she’d had the day before.
“No, it went fine. I took him to dinner and managed to convince him to let me add to the wards. Andy should have delivered the recipe to him this morning and I asked her to be on hand as an assistant for the day so he could multitask with his other brews. We’ll see if it works tonight, though.”
Hermione raised her eyebrow again. Harry loved her—he really did—but she’d adopted a rather irritating habit of looking at him like she knew something he didn’t whenever he brought up anything to do with Draco.
“You are aware that you gave him a recipe without instructions and with no warning or time to prepare, right? Let me repeat: without instructions . Even with Andrea helping him, do you really think it’s reasonable to expect a finished product by tonight?”
Harry shrugged and made a very obvious attempt at concealing his wand as he cast a spell to turn the tea into strong, black coffee. She made a disapproving scowl at him, but said nothing. Besides, by Harry’s understanding it was going to be a very late night so he deserved to be caffeinated for at least part of it.
“He’ll do it.”
Another eyebrow raised at him across his desk. He knew he’d sounded far too confident for it not to be suspicious but he was confident. Draco was an incredibly gifted potioneer, even if Harry would never say it to his face, and if anyone could decipher Snape’s instruction-less recipe it would be the Slytherin prodigy.
“What makes you so sure?”
Because I’m the one who asked .
Harry swallowed hard and pushed that very unhelpful thought back into the depths it had come from. Draco didn’t owe him anything and it was probably a combination of sheer curiosity and Andy’s attitude that were pushing him to get the potion done. No, it decidedly wouldn’t be good to start thinking of Draco that way. Even if he was pretty sure he was right.
“He’s good at his job, ‘Mione.”
“I know he is, but things can still go wrong or get delayed very easily, you know. Remember how many times you and Ron had to stay late and completely redo a potion for Snape?”
Harry did remember, though he tried not to. But he had no concerns about Draco or his ability to get the potion done by tonight. He hadn’t even given Draco a deadline, he realized, or an explanation but the blond was smart and he would guess. Harry knew instinctively, in the same way he knew when he interrogated a suspect, that Draco’s attention was fine tuned and his senses were on high alert. Constantly . Harry could do a lot with those senses… He wondered idly what Draco was like behind that wall of attitude and pride he’d built between himself and the rest of the world.
Again, Harry shook his head and pulled himself out of his thoughts. It was hardly fair to start thinking about him as if they were forming some kind of connection. For Merlin’s sake, Draco didn’t even know it was Harry he was working with! Regardless, Harry was certain that Draco both understood the recipe and would have a finished product ready by tonight.
Draco didn’t need to be given a deadline.
“You’re doing it again, Harry.”
He snapped back to the present, only to see Hermione studying him curiously over the rim of her mug. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought she looked annoyed.
“Doing what?”
She snorted and didn’t even try to hide it as she rolled her eyes. They both knew what she meant. He was ‘obsessing’ again and the greater part of his attention belonged entirely to the blond potioneer they were currently discussing.
“Am not.”
Hermione just shrugged and shot a quick spell at his cup. The peppermint hit his nostrils just as she cancelled the silencing charm and laid a hand on the door.
“Tea is good for you, Auror Potter. Just… be careful, okay?”
He nodded, but didn’t need her to spell out what he should be careful of. They both remembered Sixth Year. But, he reminded himself, Hermione hadn’t seen Draco since the war and she couldn’t have known how much he’d changed.
Speaking of changing, he would need to ask Andy to do a subtle—emphasis on subtle —inspection of Draco’s protective equipment. Harry couldn’t understand why the blond had reached for a tourniquet rather than just heal the wound with his wand but he knew he hadn’t built enough of a foundation with the man yet to be able to ask. He imagined it was the same reason the wards on the place were all external.
Maybe the room resisted magic? There hadn’t been any suppressant or dampening wards that Harry had noticed, but maybe the room resisted magic for its own reasons? He bloody hoped not because he was planning on casting all kinds of spells and wards on it tonight.
Either way, he was not going to let Draco get hurt again.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re not very talkative?”
Draco rolled his eyes and adamantly refused to look up from his desk. He’d just finished the last calculations for each of the trial Wolfsbane batches and Andrea—relegated to stirring duty until Draco told her to stop—was punishing him.
“I can be very talkative, for your information, but I’m focused and currently have nothing to say. If you’re so desperate for conversation, then by all means.”
He gestured vaguely in her direction and heard a scoff but the rhythmic scrape of her stir stick against the bottom of the cauldron didn’t falter. After a few beats of silence, he began to wonder if he’d been too snarky. Andrea had seemed to be able to take it as well as give, but maybe that had just been a show or power play?
“Alright, asshole, make the guest do all the work, why don’t you? What made you become a potioneer?”
Ah, so he’d been right in guessing that they could feed off each other’s antagonistic energy. He shot a glance at her over his shoulder when he hoped she wasn’t looking and was relieved to see that the potion was now an oily yellow mixture. Her expression was calm and not at all angry, he noted. That was good.
“I’m good at it,” he finally answered. “And it’s all I’ve ever really been trained to do aside from Dark arts.”
Another glance over his shoulder revealed no change in her expression. He’d been ready for her to react to that statement or maybe to become uncomfortable and stop making conversation but she seemed unaffected.
“Ah, I take it the potioneering godfather played a role in that?”
Of course. Draco cursed her gently under his breath and cursed himself for falling into the trap. She’d been just waiting ever since that first question when he’d elected not to explain Snape or the recipe, itching for a chance to ask again. He couldn’t really blame her, though, and he grudgingly respected the determination.
“Yes. Severus was… a complicated man. But he was incredibly gifted with potions and he was Potions Master at Hogwarts for most of my time there. Not many people liked him, but he was skilled. He’d tutored me privately for years before I even started school, though, so it was easy to excel in his class.”
“And also why Mr. Doe thought you’d be able to turn his list of ingredients into a recipe?”
Draco shrugged, despite knowing there was a fair bit of truth in that statement. Very few people at Hogwarts had known that Snape was his godfather but the man’s favoritism and Draco’s obvious high marks in his class hadn’t gone unnoticed. ‘Mr. Doe’ had probably done his homework before ever even contacting Draco.
“Probably, though he doesn’t seem to have a strong grasp on potion making in general so perhaps he’s just ignorant or has high expectations.”
“He’s not.”
The sudden sharpness of her tone made Draco lift his head without even realizing it. He nearly stabbed himself with his quill, but Andrea was staring resolutely into the cauldron and seemed to need no further prompting for explanation.
“He’s not ignorant,” she amended. “He isn’t a potioneer, of course, but he has an instinctive understanding of a lot of things that most people have to be taught. He does have high expectations, though, I’ll give you that. Especially for you.”
Her tone had softened and that last little detail caught Draco’s attention like it was a golden snitch. He set down his quill, but didn’t turn to face her.
“Especially for me?”
His own voice was light and curious—intentionally so—but even still Andrea seemed to sense some kind of deeper intrigue. She smirked at the cauldron, carelessly shrugging.
“Well, we’ve already established that he has an occupation and, granted I haven’t told you what that occupation is, I think you’ve probably guessed. In this unnamed occupation, he is hardly a rookie or an assistant to an assistant. He has high standards for everyone he works with. But he seems to have especially high expectations for you, dear Draco, and he seems more confident than usual in your ability to meet them. I have yet to figure out why that is.”
Draco’s stomach flipped as he took in those words. The man expected a lot from him, of course, but Draco had assumed it was either blissful ignorance or a generic personality trait. But he had higher-than-normal standards for Draco? And was, according to Andrea, more confident than he usually was in Draco’s ‘ability to meet them’?
“Maybe he’s capable of seeing the absolute treasure that I am, unlike some people.”
Andrea laughed, and Draco let the anxiety of her previous remarks give way to the little burst of pride he felt at having been able to make her laugh.
“Oh he definitely sees you as a treasure, sweetheart, no doubt about that.”
Draco chose not to read into that statement. He rolled his eyes and shrugged it off as Andrea just being coy with him, waiting for her next question. Wait. She’d asked him two questions now, didn’t that make it his turn?
“What made you become a Gatherer?”
Andrea shrugged and began adding bits of honeysuckle without being told. Draco was once again silently impressed. He was less curious about why she’d become a Gatherer, honestly, than about why she hadn’t become a potioneer.
“I’m good at it,” she answered, flashing a smirk over her shoulder. “And it’s a bit of a family trade. The boring contracts can get tedious but once you’re good enough for people to notice, the interesting requests start pouring in. It’s like a treasure hunt that you get paid to do.”
Huh. He’d never thought of it like that before. But, then again, he’d grown up surrounded by Snape’s impressive—and frankly intimidating—ingredient supply so he’d never considered hunting for anything. It was either available, or it wasn’t.
“Malfoy, what the hell? I didn’t authorize an assistant potioneer to your workshop. And you ! Who even are you? Who authorized you to be here?”
Kaiser was standing moodily in the doorway and Draco had to stop himself from shrinking back or trying to take up less space. He was not in the mood to deal with Kaiser.
“My name is Gatherer Moody and I neither work for you nor need your authorization.”
Andrea’s cold, testy voice was enough to make him take a step back. He’d never heard that level of dislike in her tone before even when Bright and Bender had clearly snubbed him. Kaiser, evidently, did not know how to handle it either.
“Excuse me?”
But Andrea did not back down or even blink. She put a hand on her hip and kept the other on her stir stick, which Draco realized she was still diligently making circles with in the cauldron.
“I said my name is Gatherer Moody. I don’t work for you or Whirlwind, I have prior authorization to be here which you can check with Corporate for, and I don’t appreciate the tone you’ve taken with me and my colleague. Please leave.”
The request was so blunt that neither Draco nor Kaiser seemed to know what to do with it. Draco swallowed the lump in his throat that always came from seeing Kaiser angry and tried to focus on the measuring he was supposed to be doing, but he couldn’t look away from Andrea and Kaiser. The former was unwavering and beginning to reach for her wand, the latter quickly muttered an excuse and dismissed themselves.
Not for the first time, Draco thanked the gods, Circe, and Merlin that Andrea had taken a liking to him. If she’d been against him, nothing could have saved him.
“You really aren’t a fan of them.”
It wasn’t a question, but Andrea merely shrugged and leaned back against the wall as she continued to stir. Her focus on that was really commendable. Draco hadn’t had to remind her to keep stirring even once yet, which Draco was sure was a new record for any assistant or partner he’d ever had.
“Eh, I’m a big believer in energies or vibes or whatever you want to call it. They do not have good vibes. I like my vibes and I don’t appreciate anyone polluting them. Simple as that.”
Draco didn’t comment on that and instead merely nodded in acknowledgment. He took a spoonful of a bright, neon pink potion brewing near the door and tested a few drops on a fresh sage leaf. Two drops burned through the leaf, but one crystalized into a tiny gem. A third of the way done, then.
They continued to work in a strangely comfortable silence and he noticed immediately that Andrea wasn’t watching him or sneaking glances at him over her shoulder. She was making no attempts to surveil him at all, interestingly enough. Draco had assumed she was here as half-assistant half-informant for their mutual employer, but perhaps he’d been overly cynical?
For almost two hours they worked quietly side by side. At one point, Andrea had demanded that they stop for lunch and had stood guard over his office while he ran to the nearest cafe that sold food. When he returned, there were no papers or bottles out of place and she didn’t appear to have moved from her station at the cauldron. Interesting.
It was another hour later, after the remains of their meal had been safely spelled away and after the warding potion had been left to simmer, that Draco felt her attention slip back onto him. She was subtle about it, but he’d spent too many years on edge not to notice. He wasn’t interested in pushing her, though.
Instead, he continued to move about the room and make any adjustments he needed to any of the currently bubbling cauldrons—which was all of them. At least this month’s paycheck would be nice, he thought.
Andrea, as if reading his mind, was currently mid-perusal of his equipment. His thick, warded robes, his shatter-proof glasses, his toxin mask which was definitely not expired… Her eyes made quick work of it all. Evidently, she was not impressed. This was only his second day of truly knowing the Gatherer and being in close proximity to her, but he was willing to bet that she would speak her mind soon enough.
“Can I ask you a question that is both incredibly invasive and unprofessional?”
The voice in the back of his mind screamed that of course she couldn’t—they hardly even knew each other! But he liked Andrea. Maybe he wasn’t a big ‘believer in vibes’ like she had declared herself to be, but he couldn’t deny that her presence was easy to be around. He liked her, regardless of the job. And she knew a lot of information about their employer, apparently, which Draco was still hoping to be able to pry out of her.
“Alright, what do you want to know?”
She pursed her lips, considering him for a moment as if she didn’t already have the question locked and loaded in her mind. She did—of course she did—but she put on a good act. If he hadn’t seen the similarities between her own tendencies and Pansy’s, Draco might have believed that she was genuinely struggling to word it right.
“Is there anyone that you’re not on edge with?”
Leave it to Andrea to find the one question that would absolutely gut him. It left him reeling, with no quick retort or snappy comeback to offer. ‘Himself’ would have been the obvious answer but it was far from the truth and he had a feeling she knew that. His silence was deafening. She seemed prepared to wait him out, though, so he did his best to force out a response.
“No, not anymore.”
A hint of sadness flickered across her face and he thought she might push it. She liked pushing him, he’d realized, but that hadn’t been nearly as surprising as the realization that he liked being pushed . It didn’t feel like a power play or a manipulation tactic when it came from her. Andrea was genuine and good-hearted (as far as he could tell) and he liked that she pushed him to tell her things because it felt like a firm, steady reassurance of yes, I truly want to know and I want you to tell me .
Even Pansy usually stopped after his first deflection or refusal.
But, to Draco’s equal surprise and confusion, Andrea let the subject drop entirely after he answered. She moved back to her settee and gracefully arranged herself there. In the lull, she picked up his notebook and skimmed his messy notes on what he’d guessed Snape’s recipe meant as if she were looking for her next step. Was she really not going to keep digging?
Draco found himself glad that she’d stopped, though, despite just admitting to liking the push. That had been a bigger confession than he’d initially realized and he was beginning to feel the effects of it. His face was hot and his hands were shaking. He wished he could take it back because it suddenly felt like far too much to share with a complete stranger—but, even as he thought that, he knew he didn’t regret it. And he would say it again.
Andrea had an aura or an energy about her that soothed Draco’s strung out nerves. She was calm, authentic, and she’d defended him from Kaiser of all people. Her bluntness and her sass, despite poking at him for a reaction, were nice to be around because he knew she couldn’t be angry and snarky at the same time. Every quip was a gentle reinforcement to the energy they had brewing between them.
“Draco, dearest,” she cooed from her plush throne. “Your next step says to simmer for one hundred and sixty two minutes and I’m bored . Any chance you’ve got something else for me to do? Because if not, I’m taking a nap.”
Draco rolled his eyes but couldn’t suppress a small smile. The nicknames and the over-the-top dramatics and the attention span of a child all reminded him of Pansy. His childhood best friend and former fiancée could be just as petulant, especially after a few drinks and the similarities were refreshing, in a strange way. It only added to his overall comfort with the Gatherer.
“Is my company not enough for you, you wench? Me ? Boring? You wound me with the implication! Curse you and your withering attention span, you godless—”
“Non-denominational Christian.”
“You god-full, potentially-church-going harlot! Fine! Abandon me in my time of need and go meet your sweet prince—”
“Gay.”
“—cess in the realm of dreams! And here I was, a poor lowly creature, thinking that I could deserve the attention of someone so pure!”
Andrea snorted and threw his notebook at him.
“Oh sod off you melodramatic wanker.”
But she was laughing under her breath and fighting to contain a grin. Draco was pleased by this and once again strangely proud at being able to elicit such a response. He liked making her laugh. She conjured a pillow, still hiding a smile, and resolutely turned her back to him.
“Some assistant you are,” he muttered, only to be met with her middle finger. “Yeah, yeah, get your beauty sleep or whatever it is you do at night. I’m sure our great Mr. Doe will hardly be sending you home at 5pm sharp today so you might as well sleep now and be less whiny about it later.”
Another notebook was thrown in his direction, but landed a few feet short. Draco noted that she’d been careful not to actually hit him or to accidentally mess with any of the cauldrons.
“You’re so kind with those sweet, sweet words my darling, you make me wonder what I ever did to deserve them. But I assure you this is not what I do at night.”
She winked at him and Draco started to retort but she’d already cast a silencing bubble around her head and turned her face back into the cushions. Shame, Draco thought, because it felt like he could banter with her for hours. If she had been anyone else and if she hadn’t just blatantly admitted to being gay—and, he suspected, had at least guessed about his own sexual preferences—he might have thought she was flirting with him.
As it was, Draco was more than content with friendship and a chance to absorb her energy.