Chapter 2: Partners
Harry had cleared half his desk for her. He'd been quite proud of that. He had moved two stacks of unfiled reports onto the floor, binned three mugs of something that had developed opinions, and found a second chair from the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts office that only wobbled a bit.
Draconia arrived at seven fifty-eight on Monday, took one look at the desk, and said, "No."
By nine o'clock the reports were filed. By ten, the mugs had been replaced by a single black teapot that was hers and that he was not to touch. By eleven she'd pinned a map of Knockturn Alley to his partition with every shop that had ever handled a Dark artefact marked in red ink and labelled in a hand so neat it looked printed, and Ron had wandered over, looked at it, and said, "Blimey, Malfoy, can you come and do my flat?"
"No," said Draconia, without looking up.
"Worth asking."
Harry sat on the edge of what had been his desk and watched her work. She'd taken off her coat and rolled up the sleeves of her grey jumper, and the plait was tight again, and there was a pencil behind her ear. She read the Thorne inventory the goblins had sent over the way he'd seen Hermione read, fast and furious, making little marks in the margin. Every so often she said "Idiot," under her breath, about Thorne or the goblins or him, he couldn't tell.
"You asked for me," she said, not looking up.
"I asked for the best."
"Flattery."
"Is it working?"
"No." She turned a page. "You're going to have to stop painting on my wall."
"Can't. It's automatic now. I'd have to stop rescuing you."
"Then stop."
"Stop needing it," Harry said, and ducked the inventory.
They worked Knockturn for three days. It went better than Draconia had expected, which was to say that nobody died and Potter only nearly got himself killed twice.
He was good at the people. She'd forgotten that about him, or never known it. He walked into the back room of a shop that used to be Borgin and Burkes and was now run by a narrow witch called Mrs. Scrope, and within ten minutes he had her laughing and complaining about her bunions and telling him, without seeming to notice she was doing it, that a young man had come in last month with a silver snuffbox wrapped in a Wiltshire newspaper. Draconia stood behind him with her arms folded and watched how he did it. He listened. That was all. He listened to people as though what they said mattered, and they fell over themselves to say more.
She was good at the things. In the same shop she spent a quarter of an hour with her gloves off and her eyes half closed, running her fingers an inch above a shelf of junk, and found the trace of Thorne's maker's mark on a hairbrush that had been through four owners. Potter watched her the whole time. She could feel him watching. When she straightened up and said, "This came from the east wing. His wife's room. It's been cursed and then badly uncursed by an amateur," he looked at her the way people looked at the Northern Lights.
"What," she snapped.
"Nothing. That was brilliant."
"It was routine."
"It was brilliant and you're annoyed I said so." He grinned at her. "I'm learning."
They ate chips that night in the yard behind the Leaky Cauldron, sitting on an upturned crate by the brick wall into Diagon Alley, because she'd missed lunch and refused to admit it and he'd bought two portions and held one out until she took it. She ate them one at a time with her gloves on. He told her about Ron's doomed attempt at a moustache. She told him that Bodrik had once made her open a vault with her teeth, which he was fairly sure was a lie, and she let him laugh, and then, when he'd stopped, said, "It wasn't, actually," and showed him the chipped corner of her front tooth.
He couldn't stop looking at it. It was the first flaw she had ever let him see on purpose.
On Thursday they went back to Wiltshire, to the gatehouse at the end of Thorne's drive, which the goblins hadn't cleared yet. It was a squat stone cottage, dark and cold, full of the kind of dust that meant nobody had been in for months. Except that somebody had. There were footprints in it, and the cupboard under the stairs was open.
"Don't touch anything," Draconia said.
"I wasn't going to touch..."
He touched the coat.
It was hanging on a peg by the door, an old travelling cloak in moth-eaten green velvet, and Harry Potter, who had faced down the Dark Lord and two dragons and a basilisk, brushed past it on his way to the kitchen, and the cloak lifted off its hook like a living thing and wrapped itself around his throat.
He went down hard. She heard his glasses hit the flagstones. The cloak was pulling tighter, the velvet sleeves twisting into ropes, and he was clawing at it, his face going red, then darker.
Draconia knelt beside him. She didn't hurry. Hurrying made mistakes. She looked at the stitching along the collar, saw the pattern, saw the thread of gold that was holding the curse, and said a single word, very clearly, with her wand pointed at the clasp.
The cloak went limp and slid off him like a dead thing. He rolled onto his side, coughing.
She picked up his glasses. One lens was cracked. "Oculus Reparo," she said, and handed them back to him, and sat back on her heels, and waited.
He put them on. He looked at her. He was still wheezing. "Thanks," he managed.
"Strangling cloak. Belgian, I think. Thorne had a catalogue of them." She stood and dusted off her knees. "Four seconds. You'd have had about forty before you passed out. Plenty of margin."
He stared up at her from the floor.
"I'll be wanting my own wall," said Draconia.
She painted it herself the next morning, on the partition beside his desk, in silver, with a Permanent Sticking Charm she had spent the night learning from a book in the Gringotts library. MALFOY: 1. Under it, small: Gatehouse. Belgian cloak. You're welcome.
Ron laughed so hard he had to sit down on the floor of the Auror Office.
Harry didn't laugh. He stood in front of it for a long time with his coffee, and then he went and got the dittany out of his desk drawer and brought it to her, and said, "Your hand's bleeding."
She looked down. She hadn't noticed. The scar across her right palm had split again in the cold, the way it did in winter, and there was a thin line of red across it.
"It's nothing."
"Give it here."
"Potter."
"I know. You can do it yourself. Humour me."
She gave him her hand. He was careful. He tipped three drops of dittany into the split and watched it close, and he didn't let go straight away. His thumb rested on the inside of her wrist. She could feel his pulse, or hers, or both.
"Why do you hate it?" he said. Quietly, so Ron wouldn't hear. "Being helped. I'm not having a go. I want to know."
She almost didn't answer. She almost said something sharp and took her hand back, and then she looked at his face and found that she couldn't.
"Because for two years in my parents' house," she said, "everything was decided for me. Where I slept. Who I bowed to. What I was for. I was a Malfoy daughter, and that meant I was a thing to be managed. My father bargained with me. Then the Dark Lord had me. Then your side had me, at the trials, and my mother bargained for me with you, and I sat in that courtroom while other people decided what I was worth." She took a breath. "After that, I made a rule. I'd never be handled again. I'd never owe anyone. I'd get myself out of every room I walked into, or I'd stay in it." She looked at the gold-and-silver war on the wall. "And then you."
"And then me," Harry said.
"Eight times, if you count the war. I don't count the war. That one's on a different ledger."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he let go of her hand, carefully, as though she'd break, and dug in his pocket.
"Here." It was a coin, an old gold Galleon, scratched. "Hermione made them, years back. Protean Charm. Mine's linked to it. If you're ever stuck, really stuck, you hold it and think about where you are and it'll get hot in my pocket and I'll know." He held it out. "I'm not saying use it. I know you won't. I'm saying it's there. That's different. It's not a rescue if you choose it."
She stared at the coin. Then she took it, and put it in her coat, and said "Sentimental," in a voice that came out wrong.
She found out on Friday, by accident, which was how she found out everything important.
Potter was in a meeting. Ron was eating a sandwich at the next desk, and she was going through the Auror call-out logs for the past two years, looking for any other Thorne pieces that might have slipped through, and she kept seeing the same initials in the margin. Not on the Thorne cases. On hers. Every Gringotts call-out with a curse-breaker named Malfoy attached, for two years. Requested: H.J.P.
"Weasley," she said. "What does this mean?"
Ron leaned over, mouth full. "Means he asked for it. Personally. Any call-out with your name on, he takes it. Has done since about 2005." He swallowed. He looked at her face. He put the sandwich down slowly. "Oh. Oh, Merlin. You didn't know."
"Know what?"
"That none of them were coincidences," said Ron. "Not one."