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hp_shoreofangst2019-06-04 08:16 am
smirkingcat) wrote in hp_shoreofangst2019-06-04 08:16 am
Entry tags:
[Fest-entry:] Something Broken, Something Blue
Title: Something Broken, Something Blue
Author/Artist: Wolfram_Hartao3
Rating:
Prompt: : He always thought there would be an end, that someday Harry would realise that he did not have to track down every single bad guy on his own. He had waited through the years of dating, through the years of engagement and the years of marriage. Now 4 years after Harry had made it Head Auror he simply can't take it anymore. The constant fear, the constant feeling of being not as important as the job, the constant nagging of the other Gryffindors to let Harry do his job and be more supportive. They don't have to see Harry badly wounded, refusing to go to St Mungo's because it could be bad publicity, they don't have to heal him on their own. They didn't have to spent most of their days and nights alone without their partners because none of them stayed on active duty that long.
He simply can't take it anymore.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Era: after the 2nd war
Word Count:
Content/Warning(s) none
Summary: Draco spends a lot of time anxiously waiting for floo calls. One time he was perched on his chair by the fire long enough that he read the entirety of the Ministry ‘pamphlet’Safeguarding Important Wizards and Witches: a forty-eight step process.
Author's Note:
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Something Broken, Something Blue
Draco spends a lot of time anxiously waiting for floo calls. One time he was perched on his chair by the fire long enough that he read the entirety of the Ministry ‘pamphlet’Safeguarding Important Wizards and Witches: a forty-eight step process. Really it could have been summarised in a memo with three bullet points:
1. The Head Auror is notoriously a target, and far too valuable to risk out in the field.
2. The Boy-Who-Lived aka Harry James Potter aka our Grand Saviour should never be placed in danger. The backlash against the Ministry if he was lost would be… near catastrophic.
3. No one on the Ministry’s Very Important Wizards & Witches list should be involved in extreme-risk cases. These include, but are not limited to: serial killers, ex-Death Eaters and conspiracies formed by radical fringe groups.
But when Pansy tells Draco that an Auror left in pursuit of the ex-Death Eater fringe-group serial killer, he knows exactly who it is before Pansy has to tell him. His first, ridiculous thought is should I give the ministry a copy of their pamphlet? I seem to be the only one who has read it.
It’s not like the Ministry wouldn’t know of the danger of the killer, of the wreckage he is leaving behind. Draco has seen the bloody attacks splashed across newspaper pages the past month along with everyone else. He has watched how Harry freezes when he sees them, and then goes into work earlier, stays later. There are nights Harry comes home and shuffles into their bed at 2AM, injured, and nights - worse - when he comes back safe because he hasn’t managed to find anyone to fight. On those nightshe barely responds to Draco’s questions: how was work, how was your day, shall I tell you about mine? And he is gone by the time Draco leaves for work at 7.
But Draco refuses, refuses, to take today’s newspaper out and look at the corpses the killer leaves, knowing Harry has gone off-book to chase him, alone.
Pansy looks like she’d like to reach a hand to touch his at the table, but that’s not how their friendship has ever worked. Instead she sets her teacup on the saucer decisively. “You need to stop him.”
“Harry? He’ll be fine. He’s the best dueller of our generation. I’m sure he took a couple of other Aurors with him.” Inside Draco thinks: Back-up? What’s back-up? Only that useful thing you don’t realise you need until it’s too late.
Pansy glares at him.
“Pans, I know you think I always worry but-”
“Because you’re sweating. You’re paler than even a Malfoy should be. And you’re about to break the teaspoon you’ve forgotten you’re holding.” He carefully unclenches his fingers and returns the spoon to the table. Right. Uncommonly powerful deduction skills, Pansy has.
“And,” Pansy adds, “you were planning to present at the Edinburgh conference after this tea, and you seem to have forgotten it entirely.”
Sure, she could have a point. But Draco? Draco is fine. He’s safe in his own home, behind strong wards, drinking tea with one of his oldest chums. They’d be no point torturing Draco for information, because he doesn’t know squat about his husband’s whereabouts. He is possibly one of the safest men in Britain, right now.
“I knew what this would be like when I married him.” Except Draco hadn’t. He’d thought… Merlin it sounds stupid now, even in his head, but he’d thought maybe he could help hold Harry back from the edge.
Of course he’d admired how Harry threw himself into danger ahead of the rest. There was something incredible in it, and also something incredibly hot. At school he had hated that Harry was applauded as a hero, but it turned out he really was one. Ready to die for almost anyone.
But Draco also saw where it came from. Dursley’s and Dumbledore. Both had drilled into Harry that it didn’t matter if he was hurt, as long as he saved the world slash stayed hidden and made no noise.
Draco had thought, like a fool, that when Harry heard the words till death do us part, he’d know someone cared more than anything. He’d thought it would be enough.
Pansy has an uncomfortable look on her face that on anyone else he’d call sympathy.
“I’m fine,” he insists. “But if you’re so tired of my perfectly calm state - and of course I’m not sweating, Pans, Malfoys don’t sweat - then why don’t you go back to work and I’ll just rest up here. Harry will be home, eventually, he always is.”
Pansy, with much grumbling and slow final sips of her tea, departs.
Draco wouldn’t say that he falls to pieces, after she leaves. Not quite.
Whatever it was, after ten minutes, he pulls himself together. Casts a few fixing charms on the items in the room, and a cleaning charm on his own shirt. He won’t think like that. He can’t, even in his own head. It will… it will be too much. Near catastrophic, wrote the Ministry, and that’s how it feels to Draco now, that he is near catastrophe.
He apparates to St Mungo’s to stop himself thinking, and asks them to prepare a room. The bemused secretary directs him to a healers office he has not visited before.
He’d hoped he’d be able to speak to Healer Grey, who seemed to understand a little of the situation. Draco knew that if he had a room already prepared, he could quietly floo Harry into it and not cause a fuss. Otherwise Harry refused to come to St Mungo’s for all but the most life-threatening injuries, when he was unconscious and his Aurors brought him unknowingly. Harry hated how the press latched onto it, speculating about how close to death Harry was and how their whole society would fall apart in minutes. (You’d all do fine without me, Harry had insisted on seeing those articles, and Draco thought, I wouldn’t. But maybe Harry needed to tell himself he wasn’t worth much, to keep taking the risks he believed were needed).
So it is Draco who asks Healers weirdly specific questions about injuries he doesn’t have, so he can try, and Merlin he has to try, to save Harry some pain. He knows he hasn’t done enough to lessen the long-term damage accumulating with each poorly-healed curse.
This time he truly regrets not checking the Healer’s name as he enters the office. Because here, behind an official Healer’s desk, is Katie Bell.
After the war Draco had apologised to almost everyone he had hurt. He even told Hagrid how sorry he was about Buckbeak, because it wasn’t a Death Eater act but it was still a really shitty one.
But Katie Bell… he didn’t have the words. He’d tried anyway of course, sent a letter to her after he was acquitted, apologising, offering recompense in whatever form she wanted to ask for. In his mind, he owed her a life debt, even if the magic didn’t take like that. But she had been out of the country, and never replied. By the look on her face right now, either she hadn’t got his letter, or she really hadn’t been convinced.
“Are you in immediate danger?” she asks, voice utterly cool.
“Not me. But Ha-”
“Then get out.”
He does.
***
Three days later, with no word from his husband, Draco finally takes up camp at the Ministry. He has already contacted everyone he knows or knows how to threaten. He has stalked Knockturn Alley, has attempted to re-infiltrate the edges of the pureblood-leaning crowd and he even convinced Zabini to subtly probe the men he was sleeping with for information.
Nothing.
Well, that’s not true. Glimpses. But nothing that can bring his husband home safe.
Harry could be investigating covertly, too rushed with the adrenalin of the chase to figure out a means of contact, or he could be dying in the corner of some dark alley, too broken to call for help.
Every moment Harry is gone, both possibilities exist. Like Schrodinger’s cat: dead or alive. Until he finds out, Harry could be alive. Draco almost doesn’t want to look inside the box.
But also every moment Harry is gone, Draco pictures him dead. And not the deaths he had nightmares about before, which, he realises now, were a gift. Now he sees Harry like the gruesome corpses in the Prophet, bodies slack-faced from crucioafter crucio, their limbs hacked away, their eyeballs and belly-buttons gutted out until they were a congealed mass of flesh.
He doesn’t try sleeping. Dreamless Sleep potion hasn’t worked for him since the overdose, and the alternative is worse. Pepper-up is almost the same as sleep, anyway.
So he goes to the Ministry. He sits in the corridor next to Weasley’s Auror office, because he knows news will reach there first, long before they think to contact him. One time Weasley informed Neville that Harry had survived his mission before he told Draco. Apparently, “old habits die hard”. Draco and Harry had only been engaged then, but little changed after the wedding. Gryffindor loyalties remain.
Hermione was the only one who ever seemed to understand. They used to catch eyes and half-smiles, waiting in the corridors of the Ministry for their partners. Both of them young, war-damaged, and on edge every time their Auror boyfriends stepped outside. But since she became pregnant with Rose a year ago, Weasley confined himself to office work.
When Draco saw Rose just days after she was born, Merlin she had looked so wonderful and smelled so innocent, he had asked Harry if Harry would do the same as Ron, if they ever adopted.
Harry had looked desperately sad, for just a second. His voice cracked when he said, “I don’t seek out danger.”
And Draco had been left to fill in the rest. That danger found Harry anyway (though Harry did seek it out, and denying it had been cruel, really. Harry just hadn’t wanted to say: I chose the wizarding world over you. As if Draco couldn’t have coped, or something.)
So Draco can’t even bear the thought of adopting, because he can only promise the kid one parent, and that parent is so constantly, stiflingly anxious about the other that he’s not sure there’s room to let in anything else.
Draco won’t be letting that out today. He is always careful how he speaks in the Auror office. This is not, he knows, his domain. So he sits quietly, and doesn’t let himself breathe too fast, or think too hard, or cast a muffliatoand then scream.
Then Hermione (she asked him to call him by her first name early; Weasley never offered) comes barraging into the office through Weasley’s office floo. Draco spots her through the glass door and bursts through the door himself, shutting it tight behind him.
“Your galleon!” Hermione is shouting at Weasley. “Mine heated up - did yours - can we?”
Weasley fumbles in his jacket pocket, reaches out his galleon. Hermione had modified them so full messages could be sent wandlessly. When Hermione and Weasley put theirs side by side any secret messages Harry sends will appear (Harry said it would protect Draco not to be involved. Draco… has opinions on that).
Weasley and Hermione bend their heads together to read the galleon. He strides over and shoves between them to take a look at it. He is done with caring whether it is rude.
In his lair. Setting him up. Will call if properly injured.
Oh Merlin. In the murderer’s lair? That was such a - it was the most Potter plan imaginable. Aggravate the enemy until he tries to kill you, and maybe you’ll get him mid torture.
“Properly injured,” Draco finds himself saying it as he thinks it, even though he is supposed to stay quiet. “That means he is already somewhat injured.”
“He’ll tell us if it gets too much,” Ron says, sounding altogether reasonable.
Fuck reason. “You’re not pulling him out?” Draco asks.
“We trust him,” Weasley says simply, as if that is all this was, a question of trust.
“But-”
Hermione speaks calmly and slowly over him, as if to a child. “Harry’s one of the best. He wouldn’t appreciate being pulled off the chase.”
“I know he’s the best they have. I just…” don’t think he should risk his life every weekend. Draco can see Weasley growing irate, his neck reddening to match his hair.
“The people Harry is saving are important,” Hermione says, like Draco doesn’t care at all about the rest of the world.
“I know they’re important, I just think some back up or support would be-”
Weasley finally explodes. “You need to ruddy well support him!” he almost-shouts. Hermione places a hand on her arm, but she looks angry too.
“Ron’s just frustrated, Draco,” she says. “We are all are. Though really,” and she sounds strangely like McGonagall. “A little support wouldn’t go amiss.”
Fucking hell.
And then in a quick rush before Draco can break every one of his rules about silencing himself in the Auror’s office, Harry appears in the office. He is grasping a portkey in his right hand, crucio-ed to an inch of life. It’s some kind of coma, Hermione says, speaking rapidly while casting twenty dozen diagnosing charms, but Draco’s too busy looking at Harry’s left arm and casting fast, exhausting, blood-replenishing and curse-weakening spells at what used to be an arm but is now some kind of stump, and Weasley is yelling orders at the other Aurors and Draco vomits in the corner of Weasley’s office while they all apparate away from him.
Finally, he is done expelling everything he’s eaten and he steadies his head enough to apparate to Mungo’s, alone, to track his husband’s broken body once again.
***
St Mungo’s is a hellish place if all you have to do is wait. Draco sits by Harry’s bedside as a conveyor belt of friends, admirers and colleagues come to visit.
Some give Draco concerned looks, others glares, and the rest just ignore him as a fixture of the room. It’s a coma, and then deep, Healer-induced sleep, so there’s nothing to see, really.
Not that that stops Draco watching for Harry’s every muscle twinge for five days straight.
At one point the waiting becomes so awful that he goes to Healer Bell’s office. Listening to her blame him over and over might shut up the voice in his head that blames himself; he’s contrary like that.
They do not even start with small talk.
“What a delight to see you Malfoy. Of course, I’m busy, but how could that mean anything to you?”
“You’re busy and yet he’s still lying there, isn’t he Bell?”
“Maybe you should apply your own extensive curse knowledge. Wasn’t it one of your friends who cast -?”
“Don’t you dare-.”
“I know what you deserve, Malfoy,” Bell spits his name.
“I know. Look, of course I know… There is almost no one on this earth that could deserve Harry. And I’m in the bottom five bloody percentile.”
“Oh, I’d say you’re worse than that.”
“But I know you care, Bell, it’s clear you do.”
“Healer Bell.”
Draco raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Healer Bell,” he says and it comes out like a plea.
She softens by the tiniest margin. “I’m involved in long-term recovery. What they’re working on now isn’t my expertise. There’s nothing I can do to help him.”
“But you can help him. Long-term. Harry - Harry fucking sucks at recovery. And he always manages to persuade the healers to let him get away with it. After this,” if there is an after this, but Draco’s not thinking that, not thinking at all, “would you…?”
“Would I what?”
It comes out of Draco in a rush. “Check in on him in his office, once a week, pretend it’s a Ministry scheme, pretend it’s you trying to seduce him away from me - I don’t care. But please, please, check up on him. And for Merlin’s sake don’t tell him that’s what you’re doing.”
“And what if I did seduce him? Can’t be that hard to win him. You managed it.”
“Honestly?” Draco says. “Some days I think the only thing that will keep that man alive is a live-in healer. I might even fucking thank you, in between watching my life fall apart.”
Bell looks a little shocked at that.
“Thank you, Healer Bell,” Draco says, backing away to the door, retreating into formality because baring his soul comes with an awful awkward silence.
She sighs gustily and it sounds like she’s letting a touch of the anger go. “At least you’re aware he’s more than you deserve.”
“He’s more than this fucking country deserves. And yet he sacrifices himself for it constantly.”
“That… is not how a Gryffindor would view it.”
“Well I’m not ever going to be one of those, am I?” Draco says, bitterness corroding him.
“I’ll do what I can,” he hears her promise, as the door is shutting behind him.
***
When Harry finally wakes up, seven days after he portkeyed into the office, it all falls apart much more quietly than Draco expected.
Harry blinks at the St. Mungo’s lights and Draco dims them for him. Then Harry sits up, and reaches for Draco with his good arm.
Draco takes his husband’s hand, grasps it, wants to hold on forever. He thinks, stupidly but for the first time, that Harry must have lost his wedding ring with his left arm.
“Did you have a good time at your conference?” Harry slurs out, his mouth still slow on the reflux of the spells.
“You think I- You think I went to my-? With you here?” Draco is flabbergasted, can barely form the sentences. He is pissed.
“You didn’t go?” Harry sounds genuinely confused.
“OF COURSE I DIDN’T GO!”
Draco is yelling. A Healer pops their head through the door, and Draco lowers his voice.
“Harry, I can barely think when you’re gone. Let alone - like this. What would I have done at the conference if you had died?”
Harry shrugs - as much as you can shrug, half-propped up in a bed. “No good living forever.”
This is it, Draco thinks. This is what falling apart is. Not crumbling, just… gone. Done.
He had done everything he could think of, but he couldn’t be the sacrifice’s husband. If he loved Harry any less, maybe he could withstand Harry’s injuries like they weren’t blows to himself.
He always thought there would be an end, that someday Harry would realise that he did not have to track down every single bad guy on his own. He had waited for it, through years of dating, through their long engagement, their years of marriage. It has been four years since Harry became Head Auror, and it looked like he would be in it for life now.
It’s funny that Draco had really believed they might get away with it all.
“Are you crying?” Harry asks into their silence.
Draco just shakes his head.
“We can fix this,” Harry insists. “Change things. I know I’ve been too busy lately, getting hurt too. It’s just, with this one…” he trails off. Both of them know thatevery killer becomes ‘this one’.
“You can’t change you,” Draco says, because Harry Potter is a force of nature and a symbol and an enduring flame. And Harry himself has got lost somewhere within it, and Draco is just getting burnt.
“I can’t do this without you,” Harry says, quietly, almost too himself. “Without knowing you’re safe.”
Draco squeezes Harry’s hand tighter, wishing he could hold onto it until Harry let go of everything else. They shouldn’t be having this conversation with Harry barely awake. But Draco suddenly understands how it must have felt for Ginny, to love a hero and watch the hero give her up for the good of the world. To ‘keep her safe’, when safety wasn’t what she wanted, or needed, or even got.
Harry had split with Ginny to devote himself to the greater good, but here Draco is, holding onto Harry like he might die tomorrow, and Harry is clinging back like Draco is a tether that will keep him sane.
Neither of them knows how to look to each other for a comfort that isn’t mired in constant, terrifying danger.
“So far,” Draco tells his husband with a deep, resolving breath, “you’ve been doing all of it without me.”
Author/Artist: Wolfram_Hart
ao3Rating:
Prompt: : He always thought there would be an end, that someday Harry would realise that he did not have to track down every single bad guy on his own. He had waited through the years of dating, through the years of engagement and the years of marriage. Now 4 years after Harry had made it Head Auror he simply can't take it anymore. The constant fear, the constant feeling of being not as important as the job, the constant nagging of the other Gryffindors to let Harry do his job and be more supportive. They don't have to see Harry badly wounded, refusing to go to St Mungo's because it could be bad publicity, they don't have to heal him on their own. They didn't have to spent most of their days and nights alone without their partners because none of them stayed on active duty that long.
He simply can't take it anymore.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Era: after the 2nd war
Word Count:
Content/Warning(s) none
Summary: Draco spends a lot of time anxiously waiting for floo calls. One time he was perched on his chair by the fire long enough that he read the entirety of the Ministry ‘pamphlet’Safeguarding Important Wizards and Witches: a forty-eight step process.
Author's Note:
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Something Broken, Something Blue
Draco spends a lot of time anxiously waiting for floo calls. One time he was perched on his chair by the fire long enough that he read the entirety of the Ministry ‘pamphlet’Safeguarding Important Wizards and Witches: a forty-eight step process. Really it could have been summarised in a memo with three bullet points:
1. The Head Auror is notoriously a target, and far too valuable to risk out in the field.
2. The Boy-Who-Lived aka Harry James Potter aka our Grand Saviour should never be placed in danger. The backlash against the Ministry if he was lost would be… near catastrophic.
3. No one on the Ministry’s Very Important Wizards & Witches list should be involved in extreme-risk cases. These include, but are not limited to: serial killers, ex-Death Eaters and conspiracies formed by radical fringe groups.
But when Pansy tells Draco that an Auror left in pursuit of the ex-Death Eater fringe-group serial killer, he knows exactly who it is before Pansy has to tell him. His first, ridiculous thought is should I give the ministry a copy of their pamphlet? I seem to be the only one who has read it.
It’s not like the Ministry wouldn’t know of the danger of the killer, of the wreckage he is leaving behind. Draco has seen the bloody attacks splashed across newspaper pages the past month along with everyone else. He has watched how Harry freezes when he sees them, and then goes into work earlier, stays later. There are nights Harry comes home and shuffles into their bed at 2AM, injured, and nights - worse - when he comes back safe because he hasn’t managed to find anyone to fight. On those nightshe barely responds to Draco’s questions: how was work, how was your day, shall I tell you about mine? And he is gone by the time Draco leaves for work at 7.
But Draco refuses, refuses, to take today’s newspaper out and look at the corpses the killer leaves, knowing Harry has gone off-book to chase him, alone.
Pansy looks like she’d like to reach a hand to touch his at the table, but that’s not how their friendship has ever worked. Instead she sets her teacup on the saucer decisively. “You need to stop him.”
“Harry? He’ll be fine. He’s the best dueller of our generation. I’m sure he took a couple of other Aurors with him.” Inside Draco thinks: Back-up? What’s back-up? Only that useful thing you don’t realise you need until it’s too late.
Pansy glares at him.
“Pans, I know you think I always worry but-”
“Because you’re sweating. You’re paler than even a Malfoy should be. And you’re about to break the teaspoon you’ve forgotten you’re holding.” He carefully unclenches his fingers and returns the spoon to the table. Right. Uncommonly powerful deduction skills, Pansy has.
“And,” Pansy adds, “you were planning to present at the Edinburgh conference after this tea, and you seem to have forgotten it entirely.”
Sure, she could have a point. But Draco? Draco is fine. He’s safe in his own home, behind strong wards, drinking tea with one of his oldest chums. They’d be no point torturing Draco for information, because he doesn’t know squat about his husband’s whereabouts. He is possibly one of the safest men in Britain, right now.
“I knew what this would be like when I married him.” Except Draco hadn’t. He’d thought… Merlin it sounds stupid now, even in his head, but he’d thought maybe he could help hold Harry back from the edge.
Of course he’d admired how Harry threw himself into danger ahead of the rest. There was something incredible in it, and also something incredibly hot. At school he had hated that Harry was applauded as a hero, but it turned out he really was one. Ready to die for almost anyone.
But Draco also saw where it came from. Dursley’s and Dumbledore. Both had drilled into Harry that it didn’t matter if he was hurt, as long as he saved the world slash stayed hidden and made no noise.
Draco had thought, like a fool, that when Harry heard the words till death do us part, he’d know someone cared more than anything. He’d thought it would be enough.
Pansy has an uncomfortable look on her face that on anyone else he’d call sympathy.
“I’m fine,” he insists. “But if you’re so tired of my perfectly calm state - and of course I’m not sweating, Pans, Malfoys don’t sweat - then why don’t you go back to work and I’ll just rest up here. Harry will be home, eventually, he always is.”
Pansy, with much grumbling and slow final sips of her tea, departs.
Draco wouldn’t say that he falls to pieces, after she leaves. Not quite.
Whatever it was, after ten minutes, he pulls himself together. Casts a few fixing charms on the items in the room, and a cleaning charm on his own shirt. He won’t think like that. He can’t, even in his own head. It will… it will be too much. Near catastrophic, wrote the Ministry, and that’s how it feels to Draco now, that he is near catastrophe.
He apparates to St Mungo’s to stop himself thinking, and asks them to prepare a room. The bemused secretary directs him to a healers office he has not visited before.
He’d hoped he’d be able to speak to Healer Grey, who seemed to understand a little of the situation. Draco knew that if he had a room already prepared, he could quietly floo Harry into it and not cause a fuss. Otherwise Harry refused to come to St Mungo’s for all but the most life-threatening injuries, when he was unconscious and his Aurors brought him unknowingly. Harry hated how the press latched onto it, speculating about how close to death Harry was and how their whole society would fall apart in minutes. (You’d all do fine without me, Harry had insisted on seeing those articles, and Draco thought, I wouldn’t. But maybe Harry needed to tell himself he wasn’t worth much, to keep taking the risks he believed were needed).
So it is Draco who asks Healers weirdly specific questions about injuries he doesn’t have, so he can try, and Merlin he has to try, to save Harry some pain. He knows he hasn’t done enough to lessen the long-term damage accumulating with each poorly-healed curse.
This time he truly regrets not checking the Healer’s name as he enters the office. Because here, behind an official Healer’s desk, is Katie Bell.
After the war Draco had apologised to almost everyone he had hurt. He even told Hagrid how sorry he was about Buckbeak, because it wasn’t a Death Eater act but it was still a really shitty one.
But Katie Bell… he didn’t have the words. He’d tried anyway of course, sent a letter to her after he was acquitted, apologising, offering recompense in whatever form she wanted to ask for. In his mind, he owed her a life debt, even if the magic didn’t take like that. But she had been out of the country, and never replied. By the look on her face right now, either she hadn’t got his letter, or she really hadn’t been convinced.
“Are you in immediate danger?” she asks, voice utterly cool.
“Not me. But Ha-”
“Then get out.”
He does.
***
Three days later, with no word from his husband, Draco finally takes up camp at the Ministry. He has already contacted everyone he knows or knows how to threaten. He has stalked Knockturn Alley, has attempted to re-infiltrate the edges of the pureblood-leaning crowd and he even convinced Zabini to subtly probe the men he was sleeping with for information.
Nothing.
Well, that’s not true. Glimpses. But nothing that can bring his husband home safe.
Harry could be investigating covertly, too rushed with the adrenalin of the chase to figure out a means of contact, or he could be dying in the corner of some dark alley, too broken to call for help.
Every moment Harry is gone, both possibilities exist. Like Schrodinger’s cat: dead or alive. Until he finds out, Harry could be alive. Draco almost doesn’t want to look inside the box.
But also every moment Harry is gone, Draco pictures him dead. And not the deaths he had nightmares about before, which, he realises now, were a gift. Now he sees Harry like the gruesome corpses in the Prophet, bodies slack-faced from crucioafter crucio, their limbs hacked away, their eyeballs and belly-buttons gutted out until they were a congealed mass of flesh.
He doesn’t try sleeping. Dreamless Sleep potion hasn’t worked for him since the overdose, and the alternative is worse. Pepper-up is almost the same as sleep, anyway.
So he goes to the Ministry. He sits in the corridor next to Weasley’s Auror office, because he knows news will reach there first, long before they think to contact him. One time Weasley informed Neville that Harry had survived his mission before he told Draco. Apparently, “old habits die hard”. Draco and Harry had only been engaged then, but little changed after the wedding. Gryffindor loyalties remain.
Hermione was the only one who ever seemed to understand. They used to catch eyes and half-smiles, waiting in the corridors of the Ministry for their partners. Both of them young, war-damaged, and on edge every time their Auror boyfriends stepped outside. But since she became pregnant with Rose a year ago, Weasley confined himself to office work.
When Draco saw Rose just days after she was born, Merlin she had looked so wonderful and smelled so innocent, he had asked Harry if Harry would do the same as Ron, if they ever adopted.
Harry had looked desperately sad, for just a second. His voice cracked when he said, “I don’t seek out danger.”
And Draco had been left to fill in the rest. That danger found Harry anyway (though Harry did seek it out, and denying it had been cruel, really. Harry just hadn’t wanted to say: I chose the wizarding world over you. As if Draco couldn’t have coped, or something.)
So Draco can’t even bear the thought of adopting, because he can only promise the kid one parent, and that parent is so constantly, stiflingly anxious about the other that he’s not sure there’s room to let in anything else.
Draco won’t be letting that out today. He is always careful how he speaks in the Auror office. This is not, he knows, his domain. So he sits quietly, and doesn’t let himself breathe too fast, or think too hard, or cast a muffliatoand then scream.
Then Hermione (she asked him to call him by her first name early; Weasley never offered) comes barraging into the office through Weasley’s office floo. Draco spots her through the glass door and bursts through the door himself, shutting it tight behind him.
“Your galleon!” Hermione is shouting at Weasley. “Mine heated up - did yours - can we?”
Weasley fumbles in his jacket pocket, reaches out his galleon. Hermione had modified them so full messages could be sent wandlessly. When Hermione and Weasley put theirs side by side any secret messages Harry sends will appear (Harry said it would protect Draco not to be involved. Draco… has opinions on that).
Weasley and Hermione bend their heads together to read the galleon. He strides over and shoves between them to take a look at it. He is done with caring whether it is rude.
In his lair. Setting him up. Will call if properly injured.
Oh Merlin. In the murderer’s lair? That was such a - it was the most Potter plan imaginable. Aggravate the enemy until he tries to kill you, and maybe you’ll get him mid torture.
“Properly injured,” Draco finds himself saying it as he thinks it, even though he is supposed to stay quiet. “That means he is already somewhat injured.”
“He’ll tell us if it gets too much,” Ron says, sounding altogether reasonable.
Fuck reason. “You’re not pulling him out?” Draco asks.
“We trust him,” Weasley says simply, as if that is all this was, a question of trust.
“But-”
Hermione speaks calmly and slowly over him, as if to a child. “Harry’s one of the best. He wouldn’t appreciate being pulled off the chase.”
“I know he’s the best they have. I just…” don’t think he should risk his life every weekend. Draco can see Weasley growing irate, his neck reddening to match his hair.
“The people Harry is saving are important,” Hermione says, like Draco doesn’t care at all about the rest of the world.
“I know they’re important, I just think some back up or support would be-”
Weasley finally explodes. “You need to ruddy well support him!” he almost-shouts. Hermione places a hand on her arm, but she looks angry too.
“Ron’s just frustrated, Draco,” she says. “We are all are. Though really,” and she sounds strangely like McGonagall. “A little support wouldn’t go amiss.”
Fucking hell.
And then in a quick rush before Draco can break every one of his rules about silencing himself in the Auror’s office, Harry appears in the office. He is grasping a portkey in his right hand, crucio-ed to an inch of life. It’s some kind of coma, Hermione says, speaking rapidly while casting twenty dozen diagnosing charms, but Draco’s too busy looking at Harry’s left arm and casting fast, exhausting, blood-replenishing and curse-weakening spells at what used to be an arm but is now some kind of stump, and Weasley is yelling orders at the other Aurors and Draco vomits in the corner of Weasley’s office while they all apparate away from him.
Finally, he is done expelling everything he’s eaten and he steadies his head enough to apparate to Mungo’s, alone, to track his husband’s broken body once again.
***
St Mungo’s is a hellish place if all you have to do is wait. Draco sits by Harry’s bedside as a conveyor belt of friends, admirers and colleagues come to visit.
Some give Draco concerned looks, others glares, and the rest just ignore him as a fixture of the room. It’s a coma, and then deep, Healer-induced sleep, so there’s nothing to see, really.
Not that that stops Draco watching for Harry’s every muscle twinge for five days straight.
At one point the waiting becomes so awful that he goes to Healer Bell’s office. Listening to her blame him over and over might shut up the voice in his head that blames himself; he’s contrary like that.
They do not even start with small talk.
“What a delight to see you Malfoy. Of course, I’m busy, but how could that mean anything to you?”
“You’re busy and yet he’s still lying there, isn’t he Bell?”
“Maybe you should apply your own extensive curse knowledge. Wasn’t it one of your friends who cast -?”
“Don’t you dare-.”
“I know what you deserve, Malfoy,” Bell spits his name.
“I know. Look, of course I know… There is almost no one on this earth that could deserve Harry. And I’m in the bottom five bloody percentile.”
“Oh, I’d say you’re worse than that.”
“But I know you care, Bell, it’s clear you do.”
“Healer Bell.”
Draco raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Healer Bell,” he says and it comes out like a plea.
She softens by the tiniest margin. “I’m involved in long-term recovery. What they’re working on now isn’t my expertise. There’s nothing I can do to help him.”
“But you can help him. Long-term. Harry - Harry fucking sucks at recovery. And he always manages to persuade the healers to let him get away with it. After this,” if there is an after this, but Draco’s not thinking that, not thinking at all, “would you…?”
“Would I what?”
It comes out of Draco in a rush. “Check in on him in his office, once a week, pretend it’s a Ministry scheme, pretend it’s you trying to seduce him away from me - I don’t care. But please, please, check up on him. And for Merlin’s sake don’t tell him that’s what you’re doing.”
“And what if I did seduce him? Can’t be that hard to win him. You managed it.”
“Honestly?” Draco says. “Some days I think the only thing that will keep that man alive is a live-in healer. I might even fucking thank you, in between watching my life fall apart.”
Bell looks a little shocked at that.
“Thank you, Healer Bell,” Draco says, backing away to the door, retreating into formality because baring his soul comes with an awful awkward silence.
She sighs gustily and it sounds like she’s letting a touch of the anger go. “At least you’re aware he’s more than you deserve.”
“He’s more than this fucking country deserves. And yet he sacrifices himself for it constantly.”
“That… is not how a Gryffindor would view it.”
“Well I’m not ever going to be one of those, am I?” Draco says, bitterness corroding him.
“I’ll do what I can,” he hears her promise, as the door is shutting behind him.
***
When Harry finally wakes up, seven days after he portkeyed into the office, it all falls apart much more quietly than Draco expected.
Harry blinks at the St. Mungo’s lights and Draco dims them for him. Then Harry sits up, and reaches for Draco with his good arm.
Draco takes his husband’s hand, grasps it, wants to hold on forever. He thinks, stupidly but for the first time, that Harry must have lost his wedding ring with his left arm.
“Did you have a good time at your conference?” Harry slurs out, his mouth still slow on the reflux of the spells.
“You think I- You think I went to my-? With you here?” Draco is flabbergasted, can barely form the sentences. He is pissed.
“You didn’t go?” Harry sounds genuinely confused.
“OF COURSE I DIDN’T GO!”
Draco is yelling. A Healer pops their head through the door, and Draco lowers his voice.
“Harry, I can barely think when you’re gone. Let alone - like this. What would I have done at the conference if you had died?”
Harry shrugs - as much as you can shrug, half-propped up in a bed. “No good living forever.”
This is it, Draco thinks. This is what falling apart is. Not crumbling, just… gone. Done.
He had done everything he could think of, but he couldn’t be the sacrifice’s husband. If he loved Harry any less, maybe he could withstand Harry’s injuries like they weren’t blows to himself.
He always thought there would be an end, that someday Harry would realise that he did not have to track down every single bad guy on his own. He had waited for it, through years of dating, through their long engagement, their years of marriage. It has been four years since Harry became Head Auror, and it looked like he would be in it for life now.
It’s funny that Draco had really believed they might get away with it all.
“Are you crying?” Harry asks into their silence.
Draco just shakes his head.
“We can fix this,” Harry insists. “Change things. I know I’ve been too busy lately, getting hurt too. It’s just, with this one…” he trails off. Both of them know thatevery killer becomes ‘this one’.
“You can’t change you,” Draco says, because Harry Potter is a force of nature and a symbol and an enduring flame. And Harry himself has got lost somewhere within it, and Draco is just getting burnt.
“I can’t do this without you,” Harry says, quietly, almost too himself. “Without knowing you’re safe.”
Draco squeezes Harry’s hand tighter, wishing he could hold onto it until Harry let go of everything else. They shouldn’t be having this conversation with Harry barely awake. But Draco suddenly understands how it must have felt for Ginny, to love a hero and watch the hero give her up for the good of the world. To ‘keep her safe’, when safety wasn’t what she wanted, or needed, or even got.
Harry had split with Ginny to devote himself to the greater good, but here Draco is, holding onto Harry like he might die tomorrow, and Harry is clinging back like Draco is a tether that will keep him sane.
Neither of them knows how to look to each other for a comfort that isn’t mired in constant, terrifying danger.
“So far,” Draco tells his husband with a deep, resolving breath, “you’ve been doing all of it without me.”