aCanadianMuggle

Pansy knocked her sunglasses down her nose and raised one eyebrow at the peach? coral? no, apricot scarf that was carefully tied around Draco’s neck. Potter was pretending not to have noticed and was desperately trying not to stare at Draco’s arse whilst failing miserably. She snorted into her drink as Blaise sidled up behind her.

“Have they talked to each other yet?” Blaise murmured into her ear.

“Not yet,” Pansy said distractedly and took another sip.

Draco can feel the cold lightly brush against the nape of his neck as the voice ruffles him awake, heart racing.

“Don’t perform modesty, you’re clever enough to slither us into Hogwarts.”

Spring/summer book stack as I try to shift gears back to writing.

Standouts -

Dungeon Crawler Carl - feels like a book in the same game-within-a-game vein as Ready Player One or Snow Crash. The AI that powers the game is hilarious in a way I wish I could be whilst writing, and I’ve also read book 5 and 6 through Libby (thanks to a friend for loaning me 1, 2, 3 & 4 - I’ve subsequently bought the first book for me, and am racing through the rest).

Never Whistle at Night - a dark fiction anthology of the scary things that’ll eat you in the dark? Sign me up for indigenous writers scaring the pants off me.

“Do you think he’ll remember us?”

Hermione shrugged next to Harry, tucking a thick strand of curl behind her ear and pulled her hat further down over her ears.

“He’s been in this form for a long time, Harry. I’d be surprised if his brains weren’t scrambled by this point, but my research on memory loss, compounded with my parents…”

Harry tuned Hermione out as she whispered about case studies and experimental magic. Not loud enough to break the muffliato he’d set over the blind, but enough to calm him with her very human presence at his elbow.

Eventually Hermione trailed off in a sea of dates and papers before gripping his elbow tightly. “I promised I’d help you, and I will. If I can get him back as himself…”

She cut herself off as Draco bounded into the clearing, white against the snow, his black-dipped tail and twitching whiskers showing off the ferret body he’d been forced into by the Wizengamot after the war.

Draco cautiously slipped towards the trap they’d baited with food.

Harry can feel the damp snow seeping into his trainers with the same creeping inevitability as the cigarette in front of him burning down to the butt.

Thin fingers gracefully glittering with rings snuff it out against the brick before Draco turns and slips back into the apothecary behind the potions smugglers.

« Stop looking at my arse, Potter, » Draco mutters over the mental link that all Auror partners share on stakeouts.

Unlike Muggle children, all the proper Wizarding families - not like the Weasleys - that grow up in Manors make sure their heirs are fluent in Latin by three.

Draco knows the declination - clinare: clīnicus, clīnicī, clīnicō, clīnicum, clīnicō, clīnice. He has always known how to lean towards power - his own, his parents’, or the Dark Lord’s - and has been praised for it.

Potter has never inclined in any way. He always stands defiant - green eyes blazing - every time authority tries to put him in his rightful place.

Contumaciater.

Recta.

As rigid and unbending as his wand-wood.

So it is in that moment, when he’s asked if it’s Potter that Draco stutters out a denial. This ruffian they’ve dragged in - the one shedding clumps of dirt on the expensive carpet - can’t be Potter.

The stranger’s head inclines upwards and Draco realizes he’s wrong - then finds that he’s not inclined to change his answer.

He’s found a new power to bend towards.

Like going down an incline.

They meet at the edge, cautious and circling.

“The darkness is safe - away from horrors, wrapped up in sleep. It’s only when you’re hauled out that you’re harmed. Screamed at. Hated. Light brings death through as a train, shoots towards me in flames of green, and shines brightly on memories best forgotten.”

“The light is safer - it’s where my mother watches my back, where Snape gives me a nod, where your hand reaches through flames and hauls me away into safety. Few things can harm you in the light. Dark is where evil comes to scratch against your will and pull you down.”

There are over twenty million trees in the Forest of Dean. Hermione told Harry so when they were camping there.

She had been strung out after Ron left and had led Harry by the hand in a maniacal way from tree to tree.

Introducing him.

Touching the bark.

Tasting their magic.

Telling him their histories, use in potions, lore…

Everything about Draco Malfoy drunk on a stool at the Leaky Cauldron is unlaced from head to toe.

His robe ties lie across plackets that show how they’d been hastily loosened - as though the man inside were desperate to get out of them. Stays and buttons in fussy lines are misbuttoned or half done up across his shoulders and down the side. Thin locks of platinum hair, mussed at the corners, hide in the folds. His boots are unzipped across his calves, gaping into the room.

Even his handkerchief seems to be trying to escape his pocket and hangs as though waving surrender.

Harry notes it all as a long-practicing Auror, along with the man, pale and lithe, who looks as though he were poured, sloppily, into the dress robes that can’t currently contain him.

“Malfoy,” he nods at Draco as he slips, uninvited, onto the stool next to him. “I heard about your…” and at that, Harry can’t help but hesitate.

“Ex?” asks Draco, he eyes nearly rolling as he tries to focus on Harry’s face. “It happened nearly as you said it would last year.”

Harry nods, drumming his thumb against the underside of the bar and his heel on the footrest. The silence between them feels hollow, fragile.

Draco, polishing off his martini and setting the onion to his teeth in a final crunch turns towards Harry as though it were a challenge. “Are you here to say I told you so?”

Travelling is always a fun way to spend time.

And it’s a great place to learn about new people and cultures.

Harry is having a hard time remembering why he’d been so resistant to Ginny dragging him to the club as he watches Draco Malfoy sinuously shift in and out of the pulsing lights. The colours flash in sequence over his head and Harry is starkly reminded of Hermione’s lectures on the deep-sea anglerfish that lures in its prey with a bright glow in the darkness.

The music thumps deep into his bones as the singer moans loudly - “why don't they… do what they say, say what you mean?”

Ginny, arms wrapped around Luna’s waist, follows Harry’s gaze with glee before pushing him toward the lean form that seems inevitable. Magnetic.

A sliced smirk that cuts Harry to the bone as he sidles into orbit.

🎶 “…and baby one thing leads to another!” 🎶

Draco had always been weak.

Weak at resisting Potter’s allure.

Weak at resisting Voldemort’s call to power.

Weak at reentering society after an inglorious defeat.

It was clear when he gathered up a weeping Saviour, clutching him to his chest like a rare emerald, wiping away the tears with his sleeve.

As Harry - not Potter - confessed his weakness for danger was driven by a hollow sadness within.

It was then that Draco realized that weakness only shows you where to build up your strength and shore up inside.

It’s the casual nature of Potter’s attentions that clench at Draco’s heart.

Draco, head and shoulders in one of the many machines he tinkers with in the depths of the Ministry, appreciates how it distorts Potter’s voice. All the better to keep him at arm’s length from Draco and not wrapped around him in his fantasies.

“Yes, I’ll let her.”

Of course Potter will. He’s had a string of one-time-dates to ministry events as Draco’s smouldered at him across the dance floor.

Extracting himself from the machine that goes “ping!” Draco looks over at Potter, forcing himself not to react as he takes Potter in. Tall, broad-shouldered, smirking as Draco messes his hair as he removes the thick spell-o-scopes from his eyes.

Potter raises an eyebrow. “So…?”

“Alright, Potter,” Draco replies, tired of wanting. Sure that whoever it is that Potter intends to ask to the next event will trip over her heels in excitement.

“But it doesn’t make any sense.”

Potter’s brows knit together over eyes so deeply green that Draco can’t help but avoid their full intensity.

“It’s magic, Potter, and adheres to the Briggs-Headley Theorum of -“ Draco starts as Potter shoves his fists into his hips and Draco suddenly has to start not looking at a new piece of Potter’s anatomy.

“I hate this.”

“Understood, but we still have to go to the peak, which is where the -“

“It’s in a pit, Malfoy. Peaks are at the top of mountains, not the bottom of crags.”

When Draco thinks of it, all he can grasp is a roar of rushing water. Powerful as the ocean, but contained between banks of Harry’s power.

It’s not a drip, a trickle, a bubble, a brook, a creek, or a stream. Those are traversable. The worst that’ll happen is getting your ankles wet.

No.

The power of Harry’s love will rip you from the water-smoothed stones and fling you into a strong river current you’ll never escape from.