#drarry squad

Draco remembers rumours about cupboards, broken glasses held together with tape, and a child who learned to treat any object he wanted as something meant for somebody else. Harry is no longer that child. His suit fits properly. His wallet contains his own money. No one stands at the entrance to tell him what he’s permitted to touch.

Draco walks towards the arcade.

Harry follows after half a second. “I thought we weren’t going in.”

“Less talking, more walking,” Draco says, waving a dismissive hand.

Heat and noise close around them.

The floor is covered in patterned carpet designed to conceal every possible stain. Rows of machines blink beneath a low ceiling, their screens casting restless colour across the people gathered before them. Teenagers crowd the racing games. A group of girls occupies some sort of dance platform, stomping through a sequence while their friends shout contradictory instructions. Two boys fire plastic weapons at animated monsters, each impact producing a flash of red light. Harry stops near the token machine and pulls out his wallet.

Draco crosses his arms. “What exactly are we doing?”

Harry feeds a fiver into the machine. Tokens crash into the metal tray. “Skiving off properly.”

He gathers them with both hands, laughter already moving through his voice, and points towards an air-hockey table near the back.

The table’s surface has been scratched by years of plastic pucks. Violet light glows around its edges, and the score display above it flickers between zero and eight before resetting itself. Harry places Lauren’s chips and both jackets upon an empty chair. Draco entrusts him with the prescription case only after moving it well beyond the reach of a nearby child holding a blue slush drink.

Harry feeds two tokens into the slot.

Air rushes through the holes across the table, lifting the red puck until it begins drifting of its own accord.

Harry pushes one striker towards Draco. “First to seven.”

“We have six minutes.”

Harry nods. “Then lose quickly.”

Draco removes the silver ring from his right hand and places it inside his trouser pocket. “You’ll regret that.”

Harry serves before Draco has properly taken hold of the striker.

The puck strikes the side wall, rebounds, and vanishes through Draco’s goal.

The machine produces a triumphant electronic noise. One point appears beneath Harry’s side.

Draco looks at the display with narrowed eyes.

Harry spreads his hands. “You were saying?”

Draco turns his glare on him. “You served before I was ready!”

“You were holding the striker,” Harry says calmly. 

“I was removing jewellery!”

Harry cocks his head. “That sounds like poor preparation to me.”

Draco retrieves the puck from the slot. “Enjoy the point, arsehole.”

Harry bends his knees and lowers his body towards the table, the pose reminiscent of a Seeker leaning into a dive. “I intend to.”

Draco serves directly at his left hand.

Harry blocks it. The puck ricochets between the walls, red plastic moving too quickly for Draco to follow beneath the coloured lights. Harry drives it back. Draco catches the edge with his striker and sends it spinning towards the corner. Harry overreaches. The puck slips behind his wrist and drops through the goal.

“Well, well, well. Look what we have here! One each,” Draco says.

The next point lasts longer. Harry’s reflexes remain offensively good. He blocks with short movements, never lifting the striker farther than necessary, and uses the walls instead of aiming directly for Draco’s goal. Draco learns the pattern after three returns and changes the angle at the final moment.

The puck clips Harry’s knuckle. He snatches his hand back. “You hit me!” he whines.

Draco rolls his eyes. “You placed your fingers on the playing surface.”

“I was defending!”

Draco smirks. “Yeah. Poorly.”

Harry examines the reddening mark and returns his hand to the striker. “Dirty tactics.”

“Winning tactics.”

“Spoken like a true Slytherin,” Harry teases.

“Losing like a true Gryffindor: loudly and with all the dignity of a kicked kneazle!”

A pair of teenagers have stopped beside the table. One holds a motorbike helmet against his hip while the other watches Draco’s painted nails flash around the striker.

Harry scores again.

Then Draco.

Harry takes the fourth point after the puck bounces twice against Draco’s goal without entering and then drops through while Draco is already turning away.

Draco points at the machine. “That shouldn’t count.”

“It went into the goal.”

“It hesitated!”

“Perhaps it wanted to make sure.”

“It was deciding against you,” Draco retorts.

Harry shrugs. “Well, it chose me in the end.”

The teenager with the helmet laughs. Draco ignores him.

Harry scores the fifth point and celebrates by raising both arms. His white shirt pulls free of his waistband along one side, and his curls fall across his forehead. He looks younger beneath the coloured lights, not because the years have disappeared from his face, but because delight has taken temporary possession of it.

Draco should have had this with him.

Not this exact room or this scratched table. Something equally foolish. A place where the greatest danger was losing a plastic puck and the only consequence of touching Harry was the startled pleasure that travelled through both of them. At seventeen, they had possessed battlefields, distrust, nightmares, and every inherited reason to hate each other. At Mindhaven, even tenderness had developed beneath observation and curfews. They had kissed as though time were always preparing to remove one of them.

They’ll never be those boys again.

Draco doesn’t want to be. Those boys knew how to survive and almost nothing about enjoying the fact that they had.

Harry bends over the table, guarding a six-to-five lead with excessive concentration. Pink light moves across his glasses. His mouth is open around laughter he hasn’t released yet. Draco strikes the puck against the side wall. Harry turns to intercept it. The puck rebounds from the opposite side and drops through the unguarded goal.

Six each.

Harry straightens. “Lucky.”

Draco points his striker at him. “You mean calculated.”

“You weren’t even looking at the goal.”

“I didn’t require it,” Draco says, lifting his chin.

The machine spits the puck back between them.

Blaise’s eyes drift towards the windows.

“What name?”

“Mr Zabini.”

Draco blinks. “That is your name.”

“One of them.”

“And if Harry sees it written in an appointment book?”

Blaise lifts one shoulder. “Then Potter will learn that I am a thoughtful man attempting to purchase a rare record for my husband’s birthday.”

“While arriving with the former lover he kissed in a lavatory two days ago.”

Blaise grins. “I wasn’t going to mention that part to the woman on the telephone.”

Draco turns away before Blaise can see the heat rising beneath his collar. He reaches for the sugar bowl, lifts its silver lid, and stares into it. “Go alone.”

“I require support.”

Draco replaces the lid. “For purchasing a record?”

“For evaluating authenticity.”

“You learned the band’s name forty-eight hours ago.”

“Which is why I require someone with experience identifying elaborate fraud.”

Draco tuts. “You also spent your childhood among pure-blood aristocrats!”

“My point exactly.” Blaise spreads both hands in a gesture of elegant defeat. “My instincts are exhausted.”

Draco closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. The silence that follows lasts long enough for Blaise’s amusement to ease away. When Draco looks at him again, Blaise has set his espresso aside and placed both palms against the marble. Some of the performance has left his face.

“Draco,” he says, quieter now, “Will’s birthday is approaching. He mentioned one impossible thing without believing anyone would remember, and I have found the only shop in London with a realistic chance of obtaining it.”

Draco glances at the parchment again. “There are hundreds of record shops in London.”

“I telephoned thirty-three.”

Draco’s head lifts. “You did not.”

Blaise’s expression remains composed for half a second longer. “Eleven,” he admits. “Though six of them had offensively poor customer service.”

“You telephoned eleven record shops?”

“One of the men in Soho laughed when I asked about the pressing.” Blaise’s jaw tightens with the memory. “He was extremely condescending.”

“Perhaps because you pronounced Joy Division as though it were Joie de Vésion, you toffy git.”

Blaise shoots him a cool look. “Cauldron. Kettle. Regardless, he won’t be receiving my business.”

Draco looks at the note again.

Sunlight has broken through the clouds for the first time in days, lying in pale rectangles across the kitchen floor. Rainwater still gleams along the garden wall outside, trembling whenever the wind moves through the climbing roses. It's an obscenely pleasant morning, the sort that makes London feel briefly washed clean.

He thinks of Harry standing beneath the gold Needle & Groove sign, one hand resting against Idris’s back. He thinks of the battered sofa, the orange cat, and the upstairs window where two mugs waited beneath the rain. He remembers Harry saying the shop’s name with quiet pride, then looking almost embarrassed by how much it revealed.

Going there would be intrusive. It would also be unbearable. This second thought is less effective as a deterrent than Draco would prefer.

It's a blue morpho. He knows the species at once, having drawn its broad wings and iridescent scales hundreds of times, but this one is unfinished. One wing blooms across Harry’s skin in saturated shades of blue, every vein and delicate marking rendered in intricate detail, while the other dissolves midway into faint black lines and untouched skin. It should look incomplete. Instead, it appears suspended between sketch and flight, as though still in the process of becoming itself.

Something about the design catches at the back of Draco’s mind. The elaborate patterning inside the completed wing, the narrow curls worked between its veins, even the peculiar angle of its body all feel intimately familiar, not merely similar to his work but somehow shaped by his hand. But Draco cannot remember ever drawing this particular unfinished morpho for Harry, and the harder he reaches for some explanation of how Harry came to know its precise design, the further the connection retreats.

“Harry,” he says, unable to pull his gaze away. “Is that a blue morpho?”

Harry follows his stare and immediately stiffens. “Oh. Er, yeah. About that.”

Draco steps half a pace closer before remembering himself. “Why is it unfinished?”

“I got it in Berlin,” Harry explains, rubbing the back of his neck as his words begin tumbling over one another. “The artist took the piss at first because I was very particular about the design. Said most people don’t ask him to leave half their tattoo unfinished. But that was the point.”

“The point?” Draco asks, still perplexed.

Harry’s hand hovers near the butterfly without touching it. “It reminded me of you. The morpho did, I mean. But it wasn’t only about freedom or changing into someone better. I used to think recovery meant I would eventually become finished. That one day everything wrong with me would be corrected, and then I could start living.” He gives a small, self-conscious shrug. “Berlin taught me that wasn’t how it worked. I could still be healing and have a life. I didn’t have to wait until every part of me was fixed.”

Draco looks again at the half-rendered wing. The bare skin between its unfinished lines no longer resembles an absence. It's possibility deliberately left open.

“And the pattern inside the wing?” he asks, unable to silence the question.

Harry’s fingers close briefly around the shirt tied at his waist. “I had a design I wanted him to follow.”

There's something carefully incomplete about the answer. Draco studies Harry’s face and then the butterfly again. Those curling lines belong somewhere in his memory. He knows they do. The recognition nags at him, persistent as an unfinished thought, but Harry’s nervous expression stops him from pressing.

“And er, I chose the spot because…” Harry begins, then falters.

Draco knows why.

His gaze falls involuntarily to Harry’s hip again. At this distance, he can see where the unfinished lines taper over the sharp bone, frighteningly close to the place Draco had once pressed his lips while Harry lay beneath him, flushed and trembling.

The memory returns in a hot, vivid rush. His fingertips dragging slowly down Harry’s ribs. The muscles of Harry’s stomach tightening beneath his touch. Harry’s hand winding into Draco’s hair as Draco kissed the ridge of his hip, then dipped lower before returning to torment that same sensitive patch of skin. Harry had arched beneath him, thighs tightening around Draco’s shoulders, his glasses abandoned somewhere beside the bed and his lips parted around Draco’s name as though pleasure had stripped it down to prayer.

Heat surges through Draco with such humiliating force that he has to drag his attention back to the ink, swallowing against the sudden dryness in his throat. “It looks good,” he says, though the words are woefully insufficient.

Harry lowers his eyes, his earlier confidence disappearing. “It made me happy,” he says after a moment. “It reminded me of your talent. Your compassion. How badly you wanted to be free and find peace.” His fingertips hover near the unfinished wing once more. “But it also belongs to that time, and I don’t want to pretend none of it happened. I don’t want the worst of it to erase everything that was good, or the good to excuse what went wrong.”

Draco stares at him. Once, Harry had treated memory like a weapon. He had clung to the good until it justified ignoring the harm, and then allowed the harm to poison everything that had been real between them. Now he speaks as though both truths can exist together.