Chapter 2: Not a Cat
By the end of the first week, Harry had learned the following things about living with Draco Malfoy.
He made tea in a pot, with leaves, and warmed the pot first, and looked at Harry's teabag-in-a-mug method the way other people looked at a crime scene.
He sang in the bath. Not well. Mostly Celestina Warbeck, and once, horrifyingly, the Weird Sisters' entire second album.
He kept the surveillance log in handwriting so small and so neat that it looked engraved, and he annotated Harry's entries. Harry would write 2:14 a.m., cat on bins, and wake to find beneath it, in green ink, Not a cat. Kneazle cross. Note the tufted ears. Do try.
He did not sleep on even nights. Harry knew this because the sofa faced the corridor, and on the nights when it was Harry's turn for the bed, he would wake at three or four and see the line of lamplight still under the bedroom door, or hear Malfoy's footsteps going softly to the window and back. On the nights when it was Malfoy's turn for the sofa, Harry would come out for water and find him sitting up in the dark with the curtain pinched open an inch and his wand across his knees.
"You're meant to be off shift," Harry said, on the sixth night.
"I'm resting my eyes."
"Your eyes are open."
"I'm resting them in an upright position." Malfoy didn't turn around. "It's come back twice. The light. Tuesday at one, Thursday at half two. Ten minutes each time. Second floor, east to west, then out."
Harry sat on the arm of the sofa, which complained. "Why didn't you wake me?"
"Because you sleep like you've been Stunned, and I didn't fancy explaining to Robards why I'd hexed my partner in his pyjamas." A pause. "They're very bright, your pyjamas."
"Ginny bought them."
"Ah." Another pause, a fraction longer. "I thought the two of you were finished."
"We are. Five years ago. She still buys terrible presents. It's a sort of tradition." Harry rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "She's got a wife now. Plays Keeper for the Harpies. Throws a mean Quaffle at my head every Christmas."
"Hm," said Malfoy, which could have meant anything, and went back to watching the window.
The trouble with a stakeout, Harry thought on day nine, was that it gave you nothing to do but notice things, and he did not want to notice Malfoy.
He did not want to notice that he rolled his sleeves up to cook, and that the Dark Mark on his left forearm was faded almost to nothing, a grey smudge like an old bruise, and that he didn't bother to hide it in the flat.
He did not want to notice that Malfoy could cook. Properly. That he made a mushroom risotto on the first wet Sunday and handed Harry a bowl without comment, and that when Harry said, "This is actually good," Malfoy went faintly pink across the cheekbones and said, "Don't sound so surprised, it's insulting," and then refilled his bowl without being asked.
He did not want to notice the way Malfoy read: curled sideways in the one decent armchair, legs over the arm, chewing the end of a quill until it was pulp. Or that he read Muggle crime novels, battered paperbacks from a second-hand shop on Charing Cross Road, and argued with them out loud.
"The butler," he announced on day eleven, outraged. "It's the butler. How is that allowed? There ought to be a law."
"There's a rule," said Harry from the sofa. "Some bloke made a list. The detective can't be the murderer, no secret passages, no twins."
"No twins? That rules out half my family tree." Malfoy flipped back a few pages. "Who made the list?"
"A priest, I think."
"Typical. Muggle clergy have no sense of fun." He threw the book onto the pile and stretched, arching his back over the arm of the chair, and his shirt rode up an inch above his belt, and Harry looked very hard at the log book and wrote 9:47 p.m., nothing, and underlined it twice.
On day fourteen, the light came back at eleven, earlier than ever, and this time it went down instead of across.
"Ground floor," Malfoy said. He was already pulling on his coat. "It's going to the cellar."
"Mabel Orr died at the bottom of her cellar stairs."
"I'm aware, Potter, I read the file. I read all the files. I read the files you were supposed to read." He checked his wand, then his pockets, then, after a moment's hesitation, Harry's collar, which had folded under itself. He flicked it straight with one finger and stepped back as if he'd touched a hot pan. "You look like a dropout."
"I'm meant to look like a dropout. I'm between jobs."
"You're between jobs and a hairbrush."
They went down the back stairs and out through the yard, and crossed Knockturn Alley under a Disillusionment Charm that Malfoy cast on both of them, because his were better, which Harry would have argued about if it hadn't been true. Under the charm Harry could feel him rather than see him: a warmth at his elbow, a hand that found his sleeve and stayed there to keep them together.
Number nine's front door was sealed with Ministry tape and three generations of ivy. Malfoy steered them round the side, to a coal chute half-buried in rubbish.
"There," he breathed. "That's where they go in."
The chute was warded. Harry could feel it from a foot away, a prickle along his teeth like the start of a migraine. He'd have gone at it with a Finite and hoped for the best. Malfoy crouched, pulled off one glove with his teeth, and laid his bare palm flat against the iron.
For a long minute he didn't move. His breathing slowed. Harry, crouched beside him, watched the Disillusionment shimmer around the shape of his shoulders, and listened to the alley, and tried not to think about how close they were.
"Old work," Malfoy murmured at last. "Pre-war. Very good. Very nasty. There's a trigger on the left that would turn your blood to mercury. Lovely. I'd like to meet whoever did it and then have them arrested." His fingers moved in a small pattern, like a man feeling for the edge of a page. "There. Unpick that, and that, and leave the right one alone, because that's a decoy, and if you touch it, it screams." He drew a long breath. "Done. After you."
"How do you know all that?"
"Ward work was the one thing my father thought was worth teaching me," Malfoy said. "Ironic, given how things turned out. Go on, Potter. I'm not going first into a dead woman's cellar. I've got far too much to live for. My skincare routine alone."
The cellar was full of boxes. Hundreds of them, floor to ceiling, crates and trunks and hatboxes and one coffin, which Harry chose not to think about. The air was cold and smelled of dust and the same burnt-sugar chemical stink that hung in the stairwell of their flat.
The light was gone. Whoever had carried it had left. But the dust on the floor was disturbed in a clear path to the far wall, where a set of shelves had been pulled out on hinges, and behind them was a small room, a sort of office, with a desk and a ledger lying open on it.
Harry went first. That was the mistake.
He felt it the moment his foot came down: a soft click under the flagstone, a flare of heat. Then something hit him in the chest like a fist made of fire, and he was on his back on the stones with no air in his lungs and the ceiling spinning.
"Potter!"
Malfoy was over him, the Disillusionment gone, his face very white in the light of his wand. His hands were on Harry's chest, pressing, and Harry could hear him muttering, low and fast, a long chain of countercurses Harry half recognised from the Auror handbook and half didn't recognise at all.
"Don't you dare," Malfoy was saying, between spells. "Don't you dare, you absolute imbecile, you walking disaster, I passed my assessment on Friday, do you understand how this would look, Potter, look at me."
Harry looked at him. The burning in his chest was fading to a dull ache. Above him Malfoy's hair had come loose from whatever charm kept it in place and fell into his eyes, and his mouth was shaking.
"Hello," Harry croaked.
Malfoy sat back on his heels and let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for a year.
"Floor trap," he said. "Blasting Hex with a Fiendfyre accelerant. If it had gone off properly you'd be a stain. You're very lucky it was old. You're very lucky I was here."
"I know."
"You don't. You walked straight in. You always walk straight in. You've never once in your life waited to see whether the floor was going to kill you." His voice cracked on the last word, and he looked away, and when he spoke again it was quieter. "I'd forgotten that about you. I'd forgotten how much it used to drive me spare."
Harry pushed himself up on one elbow. His shirt had a scorched hole over the sternum. Malfoy's hand was still flat on his chest, over his heart, and neither of them seemed able to mention it.
"Thank you," Harry said.
Malfoy took his hand away. "Don't. It'll go to my head." He stood and offered Harry the gloved one, the left, and pulled him to his feet, and held on a second longer than he needed to while Harry found his balance.
Then he went to the desk and looked down at the ledger.
Harry saw his shoulders change. He couldn't have said exactly how. They didn't move. They just stopped being the shoulders of a man who'd saved his partner's life and became, for a moment, the shoulders of someone standing on the edge of something very high.
"What is it?" Harry said.
"Nothing," said Malfoy. "Accounts. Ancient. Let's bag it and go before your hex-scorched aura sets off anything else."
He closed the ledger and turned, and as he turned his right hand went to the inside pocket of his coat, quick and neat, the way a card sharp palms an ace when he thinks no one is watching.
Harry saw it.
He saw the edge of a folded piece of parchment disappear into Malfoy's coat. He saw, on the edge of the parchment, a smear of black sealing wax pressed with a crest he would have known anywhere, because it had been carved over the gates of a manor in Wiltshire where he had once nearly died.
A serpent, coiled around a capital M.
Malfoy looked up and met his eyes, and smiled, perfectly pleasant, perfectly blank.
"Ready, partner?" he said.