Headlines
The next morning, Draco realized that he’d never been given a clean slate in his life. He’d worked towards one, of course, and he’d dreamed of one during his less self-destructive nights leading up to his trial, but he’d never been given one. Even before the war, everyone had known what his family was. They’d looked the other way or chosen to ignore it whenever the Malfoy fortune could benefit them, but they’d known deep down that Draco was a part of a dark lineage. If not because of his parents’ choices, then because of his father’s general assholery.
But now Draco had a clean slate. Potter had chosen to forgive the years of bullying, the wrong choices, the dark magic—everything. Even the war. He’d done it so that Draco would choose to forgive his own indiscretions, but he’d still done it. And now they were even. A fresh start, Potter had called it, that was less about forgetting and more about choosing to leave things in the past.
The freedom was terrifying. He’d spent the last five years trying to fix what he could and prevent any further damage to his public image, of course, but he’d never started on completely neutral ground—not even as a child. There were a thousand ways he could fuck this up at any moment. And it was all riding on… what? His ‘good judgment’? Merlin, he hoped not.
But there’d been a hot chocolate on his desk this morning when he’d walked into his office. It was a kind he’d never tried before that was obviously expensive and that had something like cayenne pepper added in to really bring out the sweetness. On the side, Harry had written: tabula rasa . Clean slate.
Then, beneath that: correct my Latin and see what happens, you pretentious git.
Draco didn’t need to correct it. He did, however, need to swallow a lump in his throat as he read over the words again and again. That cup did not get thrown away when he was finished.
Harry started out the next day feeling lighter than he had in ages. Maybe it was the sudden absence of guilt wearing down on his shoulders, or maybe it was the knowledge that he could pop in and say hi to Draco whenever he felt like it now. Not that he would, of course—but he could .
He’d missed that casual escape from the chaos of the Ministry and, if he was being completely honest, he’d missed Draco. There was something about Draco… Something raw and genuine and magnetic that the blond didn’t seem to be aware of but that he exuded nevertheless. It called to Harry like a siren’s song. It made him feel real and painfully human. Usually, he was smart enough (or at least not stupid enough) to listen to it and he maintained their surface level friendship. But sometimes…
Sometimes, his curiosity won out. Sometimes, his anxiety flared and he thought about showing up to Draco’s office without a word of explanation, collapsing onto the settee and burying his face in the cushions as the blond rubbed his back. He wondered if Draco would say anything, or if he’d just exist with him. Draco probably hummed while he brewed, Harry thought, so maybe he’d hum some French pureblood children’s song that Harry had never heard of until the world didn’t feel like it was closing in on him.
It was all a fantasy, of course. Harry would never actually show up to Draco’s place of work mid-anxiety attack and demand to be taken care of. But it was a comforting thought nevertheless and it wasn’t hard to imagine—just dangerous.
Draco tried not to let his newly repaired relationship with Harry distract him from his work. It was a losing battle, but he tried. The Broken Crown case, as far as he knew—because Merlin knew the Ministry would never keep him out of the loop—was not going well. They had plenty of new victims, but still no new leads or evidence. More and more, the deaths were starting to be ruled as suicides with an asterisk noting their suspicious nature rather than as potentially staged homicides, which complicated the legality of the case quite a bit.
Because if people were genuinely committing suicide, then the question became: why? If it was Broken Crown’s doing through some kind of unbreakable vow or compelling magic, why was he doing it? And, more importantly to Draco, how was he doing it?
Sure, there were potions that could change a person’s behavior. Love potions to make someone infatuated with you, charisma potions to help you nail a job interview, and even obedience potions that Healers used on patients who were a danger to themselves until they could be restrained. But suicide-inducing potions? That was beyond even the wildest rumors of what was being developed or sold on the streets right now, according to Harry, and Draco had never heard of such a thing in any ancient pureblood tome.
And it also didn’t answer the ‘why’. What did Broken Crown get out of these deaths? The word terrorism had been tossed around a few meetings, but even that didn’t make sense because no one was claiming responsibility for the deaths. There was no obvious rhyme or reason to any of the victims. If they’d been silenced because of something they knew, there seemed to be no pattern or connection to explain how they might have known it. So far, only a handful had ever even met each other.
The good news was that other Aurors had been brought in on the case so, while he and Harry (and presumably Aidan, though Draco had heard suspiciously little about the psychoanalyst lately) ran with leads or investigated potions, other Aurors documented crime scenes and dealt with interviews. Draco was perfectly content to never visit another crime scene in his life. He hadn’t told Elle about Adriana yet—and, honestly, he wasn’t sure that he was going to as long as the case was active—but it made him… uneasy. The last thing he needed was another trigger.
But, the even better news, in Draco’s opinion, was that he was getting close to a workable Wolfsbane recipe. According to Andromeda, the October full moon had been the easiest one in years and, if Draco could manage to weed out a few of the side effects, he would have something worth fine-tuning into a final product. Andromeda herself had suggested a few of the experimental ingredients, including steeped green tea and tannins from a seven hundred year old chestnut tree on the estate. Provided nothing dramatic or destructive happened, Draco was confident that he could have a working prototype by the new year.
He hadn’t told Harry about the success. Ever since the Auror had transferred the contract into Andromeda’s name, Draco had gone radio silent on the progress of the potion. If anyone asked, it was a case of client-brewer confidentiality and, since Harry was no longer the client, Draco wasn’t at liberty to discuss it with him anymore. But Andromeda had told him it was fine. With her permission, Draco could have made casual conversation about the brew the way he had before everything had gone to shit. He didn’t, though.
Part of him wondered if Andromeda was updating Harry about the potion herself, but he was too chicken to ask. Something about the potion and the whole ‘Mr. Doe’ situation still felt a bit too raw to poke at or investigate, and Draco didn’t want to jeopardize their new tentative truce. Besides, part of him was still reeling from the accusation of attempted murder Harry had thrown at him the last time something had gone wrong. He wasn’t holding against the Auror—clean slate and all that—he was just… still processing.
“Have fun last night?”
Draco grimaced at the voice. Justin Bender was leaning against his doorway and, of course, right beside him stood Willa Bright. The former was holding a copy of the Daily Prophet while the latter eyed his ingredients shelves as if he might have some new, rare ingredient she could ‘borrow’. They were careful not to cross the threshold into the room, which would have activated the wards and summoned Harry. Instead, Bender just pretended to skim the paper in his hands. Even from across the room, Draco could read the headline.
Harry Potter caught out with Malfoy ~ Wine and Dine a Death Eater?
“We’ve seen him popping in and out of Whirlwind at all hours recently,” Bender continued. “But I never would have guessed he was here for you. What was it? Parole violation? They found your fingerprints somewhere incriminating?”
Draco glared. Internally, something twisted painfully in his gut and he fought his lungs to take in air at a normal rate. Bright and Bender were ignorant. He knew that, and yet it still cut deep that the only way they could see Harry visiting him was in his Auror capacity. They didn’t know him and they didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Whirlwind doesn’t hire people on active parole. If I were a suspect in a case, I would be placed on temporary leave, which—given the number of times you’ve tried to convince Kaiser that I’m guilty of something—you both already know. What are you doing here? Did you need something?”
So far, Draco had made a conscious effort to keep his eyes trained on the stack of papers in front of him. He knew that Bright in particular hated being ignored and that acting disinterested was a surefire way to piss them both off. Which, come to think of it, he wouldn’t have done a month ago. Maybe having Harry in his corner was making him cocky?
“No, we don’t need anything from the likes of you , Malfoy. Just thought we’d pass the news along and let you get ahead of Kaiser’s inquisition.”
Bender tossed the paper on his desk and the pair waltzed out, sneering back at him over their shoulders. Draco watched them leave, then stared at the door for a good thirty seconds before forcing himself to breathe.
Everything was blurry. He trained his eyes on the doorframe, refusing to let them drift as he felt his own sense of balance go to shit. If he just stayed still, he wouldn’t fall. Even if it felt like he was currently plummeting towards the ground and even if everything in him was urging him to compensate and catch himself, he stayed perfectly still.
His eyes found the headline again. Wine and Dine a Death Eater. It’d been years since he’d seen his own name in that huge, garish font the Prophet seemed to love, but it’d been even longer since he’d seen those two words. People had called him it a thousand times, of course, and even his parole officer had hissed it at him once or twice but he hadn’t seen it spelled out like that—bold, black, and for all the world to see.
Draco took another long, fortifying sip of his hot chocolate.
He and Harry looked good together. The picture was a huge, color image that captured them raising their glasses, clinking them together, and the flash of Draco’s eyes as they flickered up in surprise. It didn’t look like surprise now, though. Now, the intensity of his stare and the certainty in Harry’s expression stirred something electric in the air between them that the camera had managed to catch.
They were the epitome of contrast. Draco’s pale skin, dark clothes, and even darker Mark seemed beautiful when they were paired with Harry’s dark skin, pale clothes, and fucking gorgeous eyes. Like mirrors of one another, only opposite. Beautifully contrastive.
Draco caught himself. He focused on the Mark branded on his forearm, situated in the center of the photograph. There was nothing beautiful about that—even next to Harry—and it only served as a reminder of who he was. One frontpage photo of him with the Savior didn’t change his past.
Still, Draco cut out the picture and tucked it into the top drawer of his desk. He kept the headline attached to it in an attempt to humble any future hopes or ambitions the picture might inspire, but he hid it away all the same. Like a secret.
Harry leaned back in his chair, popping his back and glancing across the room to where Aidan had set up a temporary desk on the other side of his office. Aidan had always hated when he cracked his joints. He did it again, just to watch the vein in the other man’s head bulge a bit.
“If you’re looking for attention, you only have to ask nicely, dearest.”
Harry didn’t rise to the bait, but he stopped cracking his back and moved to his fingers. Ninety percent of the time, he was very focused on his work and he accomplished far more than he needed to. The other ten percent, though… That was split between thinking about Draco at the most inopportune times or annoying the shit out of Aidan for daring to take over part of his office. Given that he couldn’t Apparate to Whirlwind currently, that left Aidan.
Joy.
“Any progress on the La Belle case yet? Or Reinhart?”
Aidan didn’t lift his eyes from the folder in his hands but he shook his head. They were both frustrated by the lack of progress on any case filled as a potential Broken Crown victim—everyone was. Without a motive, every theory they had was just speculation.
The worst part, though, was that they weren’t flying blind on the whole motive thing. They’d found a few pages of what looked like a manifesto and copies had been distributed throughout their entire team. Broken Crown fancied himself a fixer. The pages they’d obtained were obviously incomplete and from the middle of whatever rant the author had gone on, but it wasn’t difficult to read. Snippets of Harry’s copy had even been highlighted.
A broken crown for the savior of a broken system.
Letting us down.
Cast aside.
Treated like rubble.
Clean up.
Purify.
Start again.
Justice.
Harry kept a straight face until he got to ‘purify’. Words like purity were still synonymous with blood status in most of the Ministry and the whole thing felt a bit… cult-ish. Clearly, he was reaching out to a group of people who felt jilted in the aftermath of the war and that could have had an number of consequences, according to Hermione, but what did that have to do with the suicides? What kind of cult leader routinely killed their followers? And why?
Draco came back from lunch and immediately went back to the stack of books he’d left on his desk. A few hundred pages worth of potion ingredient translations, a recipe book from the fourth century, an appendix of plant genetic code, and even a copy of Merlin’s Malaise-Inducing Mixers that Andrea had gotten him a blackmarket copy of. It wasn’t likely to be relevant, but it was interesting. And who knows? Maybe a recipe for disfiguring your enemy’s genitalia would hold the key.
Draco was a firm believer that answers existed, one only had to find them. These answers, however, were proving harder than expected to find and Draco was about five chapters away from breaking out his hideous reading glasses. He didn’t need his glasses to immediately catch something out of place, though.
A scrap of paper stuck out of one of the lower books.
Fear should have been his first instinct, but Harry popped into his mind and he reached for it. A secret note? It wasn’t Harry’s handwriting, unfortunately. He read it nevertheless.
You’re losing it.
That was… unexpected. Draco turned it over his hand, examined the scratchy script, and held it up to the light. It was generic office parchment with no secondary layer. The handwriting wasn’t one he’d ever seen before—Draco had a habit of remembering handwriting he found unique—but it wasn’t typeface or quill-printed.
He tucked it into the front of his desk drawer and returned to his research. For a while, Draco considered the possibility of Bright or Bender slipping it in when he’d gone to lunch, but the wards wouldn’t have let them. Harry would have already shown up if the wards had so much as quivered. So, that left… who?
Draco let himself forget about it. He focused on the recipes he would need a few double batches of in preparation for the coming holiday rush. The stack of books on his desk dwindled as he began slumping in his chair. No answers yet. He tried not to let that bother him as much as it did.
Harry won’t be upset by my lack of progress.
Draco stopped. Where had that idea come from? Since when did he care what Harry thought about him or his work? Okay, yes, maybe he’d always cared. Maybe a better question was: since when was the thought of Harry not being upset a source of comfort to him?
He ignored it and went back to researching.
Harry was losing his mind. He’d been at the Ministry since 6am that morning—not because his shift started then, but because he’d woken up from another nightmare and hadn’t been able to go back to sleep—and he was going insane. Aidan kept clicking his Muggle pen. It’d started around 2pm and, at first, he’d tried to ignore it but the psychoanalyst had realized it was bothering him.
Click. Click. Click.
Harry had passed the point of wanting to snap the pen about an hour ago. He’d imagined pushing his magic towards it, breaking the plastic and watching the blue ink splatter all over Aidan’s face. But he knew it would only make their tentative cooperation even harder. So, rather than inadvertently start a prank war with his office partner, Harry pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled down an invitation.
He sent it off with a flick of his wand. Aidan watched it go and Harry could see his curiosity written into the crinkles around his eyes but he didn’t offer an explanation. He didn’t have to anymore.
Around 4:30 that evening, a small green envelope appeared on his desk with a little puff of smoke. Draco rolled his eyes as he picked it up, as if someone might be watching him or catch the fact that he was impressed, and pried open the wax seal. Potter had acquired a flair for the dramatic recently. If he was being honest with himself, Draco was not opposed to it. The ornate handwriting (a spell, of course, because Harry’s handwriting was atrocious) and the wax seal reminded him of the letters he used to get from his mother back at Hogwarts. It was a painful kind of nostalgia, but it was more to cling to than he’d had in years.
Get drinks with me after work? I know a place I think you’ll like. -H
Of course he said yes. There was no question about it, really, because the immature part of his brain had yet to get over the novelty of Harry fucking Potter inviting him out for drinks.