Chapter 3: Write It Up
Harry didn't say anything that night.
He bagged the ledger. He logged the floor trap. He let Malfoy put dittany on the burn in the kitchen, Malfoy's mouth a thin line, his fingers cool and very careful, and when Malfoy said, "You'll have a scar, you know, another one, you're going to run out of skin," Harry said, "Collecting them," and Malfoy almost laughed. Then Harry went to bed, because it was his night for the bed, and lay awake in the dark listening to Malfoy not sleep on the other side of the wall.
He thought about the seal. He thought about the war, about a drawing room and a chandelier and Hermione screaming on the floor, and about Fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement, and hauling Malfoy onto the back of his broom through the smoke. He thought about a trial where he'd stood up and said, He didn't identify me, he could have and he didn't. He thought about the hawthorn wand in brown paper, and the letter that never came back.
He thought about Malfoy's hand flat on his chest, and the way his voice had cracked.
By morning he'd decided he was going to be an Auror about it, which meant asking.
Malfoy was at the stove when Harry came out. He'd made eggs. He'd made eggs the way Harry liked them, which was a thing he should not have known, which meant he'd been watching Harry make them for two weeks with that same silent, exhaustive attention he gave to wards and murder mysteries.
There was a cup of tea at Harry's place at the table. A teabag, in a mug. The string hung over the side.
Harry looked at it for a long moment.
"Don't make it a whole thing," Malfoy said, without turning round.
Harry sat down. He wrapped his hands round the mug. Then he said, "What's in your coat?"
The spatula stopped.
The flat was very quiet. Outside, someone was dragging a crate over cobbles, and the bored mirror in the bathroom was humming to itself. Malfoy turned off the hob with a flick of his wand and stood there with his back to Harry, and Harry watched his shoulders do the thing again.
"How long have you known?" Malfoy said.
"Since you did it. You're good, but I was lying on the floor looking up at you. Angle was in my favour."
"Of course it was." Malfoy laughed, a short, unhappy sound. He reached into the coat hanging on the back of the kitchen door, took out the folded parchment, and set it on the table next to Harry's eggs. He didn't sit down. "Go on, then."
Harry unfolded it.
It was a receipt. A very old-fashioned one, the kind written by hand and witnessed by a Notary charm that still glowed faintly at the bottom. Received of L. A. Malfoy, Esq., the sum of four thousand Galleons, in consideration of the matter of I. Fenwick, concluded to satisfaction. The date was April 1999. It was signed with a flourish: M. Orr.
Harry read it twice. Then he put it down very carefully, as if it might go off.
"Your father paid Mabel Orr to get rid of Fenwick."
"It looks that way." Malfoy's voice was flat and polite and very far away. "Fenwick worked contract for Gringotts. In ninety-eight he'd been hired to inventory the Manor vaults for the reparations board. I remember him. He was kind to my mother. He found something my father hadn't declared, I'd guess, and my father decided he'd rather not pay the fine." He paused. "Father was under house arrest at the time. He couldn't do it himself. He'd have needed someone local and discreet. Mabel Orr was both, until she wasn't."
"Until somebody pushed her down her own stairs."
"Yes. I imagine she tried to renegotiate." Malfoy finally turned. His face was composed, but his eyes weren't. "He died three years ago, Potter. In his bed, at home, with my mother reading to him. Nobody can arrest him. I was going to read it properly. I was going to work out what it meant. I was going to hand it in. I swear to you I was going to hand it in. I just wanted," and he stopped.
"What?" Harry said.
"I wanted to be the one who found it," Malfoy said, very quietly. "Do you understand? Not you. Not some clerk at the archive. Me. I read those three files the first night Robards gave them to me and I saw Knockturn Alley, and I saw nineteen ninety-nine, and I knew. I've known since I was eighteen that he did things I'd never find out about. I joined this ridiculous office to find out. I wanted to be the Malfoy who put it right." His mouth twisted. "And then I stood over that desk and saw his name and I panicked like a fool. So. There it is. I'll write it up myself. I'll tell Robards it was me who hid it. You won't be in it."
Harry looked at him: twenty-eight years old, in his shirtsleeves, the faded Mark showing on his arm, spatula still in his hand like a weapon he'd forgotten to put down. He looked like someone waiting to be sentenced.
"Sit down, Malfoy," Harry said.
"I'd rather stand."
"Sit down. Your eggs are getting cold, and I'm not having it said you can make mine properly and starve yourself."
Malfoy hesitated. Then he sat, across the little table, stiff as a man at a tribunal.
"We'll write it up together," Harry said. "Tonight. Both names. You found it; I saw you find it; you told me the next morning when I asked. That's what happened, near enough. Robards will shout. He shouts at me most weeks. It's sort of how he says good morning." He pushed the receipt across the table, back towards Malfoy. "And then we're going to find out who killed Mabel Orr. Because your dad didn't push her. He was under house arrest, and in any case he'd have hired someone to do it, and that someone was in that cellar two nights ago carrying a lit wand and stepping round a floor trap they knew was there. Which means they're alive, Malfoy. And we can arrest them."
Malfoy stared at him.
"You believe me," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"You threw yourself on my chest and called me an imbecile for five minutes straight. I don't think you'd have bothered if you were planning to frame me."
"Four minutes," said Malfoy faintly. "At most."
"It felt like five."
"You were concussed."
"I was not concussed."
"You said hello. Very slowly. Like a Flobberworm discovering speech."
Harry grinned at him, and Malfoy, against every evident intention, grinned back. It changed his whole face. It made him look lighter and less careful, more like somebody you might want to know.
They spent the day on it. Malfoy spread the ledger across the sitting room floor and found the names: three of Orr's regular buyers, two dead, one alive and living in a cottage in Little Hangleton under a name that was nearly his own. Harry sent an owl to Hermione at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, who sent back a reply in under an hour that said You two are sharing a FLAT? and then, underneath, the address of the probate clerk. By six they had a warrant request on its way to Robards and a sketch of the case board pinned to the back of the bedroom door with a pair of Malfoy's cufflinks.
By nine they were on the roof.
It had been Malfoy's idea. "We can see the back of number nine from up here," he'd said, which was true, and then he'd brought two mugs and a blanket and a bottle of elf-made wine, which was not standard surveillance procedure.
The chimney pots ran away from them in crooked rows towards Diagon Alley, where the lights were warm and gold. Down here they were green and wrong. Malfoy sat with his back against a stack, his knees up, the blanket around his shoulders. Harry sat beside him, close enough to share it, because it was November and it was cold and that was the only reason.
"Can I ask you something?" Harry said.
"You'll do it anyway."
"The wand. When I sent it back. You never wrote."
Malfoy was quiet for a long time. Down in the alley, a cat that was not a cat went from bin to bin.
"I wrote eleven letters," he said eventually. "I've still got them. They're in a drawer at the Manor. One of them is nine pages long. One of them just says thank you, and then a stain where I put my teacup on it and gave up." He tipped his head back against the brick. "None of them were right. You'd testified for me. You'd given me back the one thing I had that was mine. And I was a former Death Eater living in my mother's house, and you were Harry Potter. I didn't have anything to say that was big enough."
"You could've said thanks."
"I just told you, the thank-you one had a teacup stain."
Harry laughed, and Malfoy's mouth curved, and then neither of them was laughing. The blanket had slipped. Malfoy's shoulder was against his. Harry could feel the cold coming off his coat and the warmth underneath it.
"You make my tea wrong on purpose," Harry said, "and then you make it right."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You annotate my log entries."
"Someone has to."
"You stayed up every night for two weeks so I wouldn't have to."
Malfoy turned his head. They were very close. His eyes were silver in the light from Diagon Alley.
"Potter," he said, and his voice wasn't steady at all, "if you're about to do something stupid, I want it on record that I'm a probationary officer and this is a serious breach of protocol and I'll have to write it up."
"Write it up, then," said Harry, and kissed him.
Malfoy made a small noise against his mouth, surprised, and then not surprised at all. His gloved hand came up and fisted in the front of Harry's jumper, holding him there, as if Harry might think better of it and go. Harry had no intention of going anywhere. Malfoy kissed the way he did ward work: slowly, carefully, with total attention, finding the edges of things. He tasted of elf-made wine. When they finally broke apart, he kept his forehead against Harry's and breathed out, shaky, nearly a laugh.
"Zero professionalism," he murmured. "Robards will have us both."
"Robards doesn't have to know."
"Hermione Granger knows. Hermione Granger has known since she read the word flat. By morning, the whole of Level Two will know." Malfoy pulled back an inch, just far enough to look at him, and his face was open in a way Harry had never seen it, unguarded and bright and a little terrified. "Harry," he said, trying the name as if he expected it to bite.
Something lurched in Harry's chest that had nothing to do with the old burn.
"Say it again," he said.
But Malfoy was looking past him, over his shoulder, down into the dark of the yard behind number nine. His hand tightened in Harry's jumper.
"In a minute," he whispered. "Don't move. Somebody's just come out of the coal chute, and he's looking straight at us."