Chapter 3: Come Upstairs
You don't speak to him for six days.
It's not difficult. You both live in the same building, but you've had practice now at going up and down the back stairs without making a sound. You leave by the Floo. You come back by the Floo. You do your shopping in Hogsmeade, not Diagon Alley. You don't write any clues. You don't push anything under the shop door. On the second day, there's a note under yours, cream paper, folded once, and you put it on the mantelpiece without opening it and look at it every evening and don't touch it.
On the third day there's another. You put it on top of the first.
On the fourth day, there isn't one, and that's worse.
You know you're being unfair. You know what he did was kind. You know that every other landlord in London looked at your application and saw the word Muggle-born and found a reason, and that he looked at it and saw a person and a crossword setter, and did the decent thing, and didn't ask for anything back, and that you're living in a beautiful flat at half the rent because of it. You know.
But you've spent your whole life in the wizarding world being somebody's charity case. The scholarship for your wand. The second-hand robes from a fund for Muggle-borns at the Ministry, the kind of thing that people are very kind about and never, ever let you forget. The kind professor, years ago, who said you were very bright, considering. You'd thought this flat was the first thing you'd got entirely on your own. Your name, your job, your money. It turns out he'd had a hand on the scale the whole time. And worse, much worse, you'd started to think of him as somebody who saw you as an equal.
On the sixth day, you open the notes.
The first one says: I should have told you. I know I should have told you. I'd like to explain, if you'll let me.
The second says: You haven't set a clue in four days. Cuffe's running reprints of your old grids. People have noticed. The man in Ottery St Catchpole thinks the Goblin Liberation Front have taken you. I'm inclined to agree with him.
There's a third one, on the mat that morning. You hadn't heard him put it there.
It's not a note. It's a clue.
Rearrange a note to make amends (5)
You stand in your hallway for a long time with it in your hand. Then you sit down on the floor.
It's the simplest clue he's ever written you. You notice that. You'd have dressed it up. But you can read it, and it's not difficult, and you know he made it easy on purpose, the way you'd make a clue easy for someone you wanted to get it.
You get it in about four seconds. It's not a clever answer. It's simpler than that. It's the oldest word for what he's doing, what he's been doing for years in a shop that people throw stones at, buying the worst books in Britain and making them safe and giving away spellbooks and keeping a flat empty above him because people don't tend to queue up.
It's a word you'd been too angry to see.
You get up off the floor. You go to your desk. And for the first time in six days, you set a crossword.
It takes you all night. It's the hardest grid you've ever built, because the clues have to be fair, and good, and clean enough that Cuffe won't notice, and the grid has to do something it isn't supposed to do. By four in the morning your eyes are burning and your floor is covered in crumpled paper and you've had six cups of tea. By five, it's done. You send it to the Prophet by Floo with a note to Cuffe begging him, just this once, to run it in tomorrow's paper instead of Friday's. You've never asked him for anything before. He writes back, Fine. Don't make a habit of it.
The paper comes out at seven the next morning. Your crossword is on page twenty-two, where it always is. It looks exactly like it always does.
Except if you solve it, and if you look at the squares down the left-hand edge of the grid, the first letter of every answer reading from top to bottom, they spell out three words.
You don't wait to see if he's solved it. You can't. You sit on the top stair outside your flat in your dressing gown with your knees pulled up and your own copy of the paper in your lap and listen to the shop below come awake. The bell over the front door. The candles lighting. The kettle. The rustle of newspaper. Then, nothing, for a long time.
Then, very faintly, through the floor, a sound you've never heard him make. He's laughing.
The back door of the shop opens. Footsteps on the stairs. He stops on the loose third one, the one he'd warned you about the first night, and doesn't seem to notice when it creaks.
He's holding the Prophet folded open to page twenty-two. He's done it in fountain pen, every square. There's ink on his fingers and his cheek, as usual. His hair is wild. He looks up at you sitting on the top stair, and you see him swallow.
"Your clue for 3 Down," he says. His voice isn't quite steady. "Is unfair."
"It's not."
"It is. Reversals across a word break aren't allowed. You told me so yourself, on the twelfth of October, for about forty minutes."
"Rules change." You look at the paper in his hands. "Did you read the left side?"
He looks down at it as if he hasn't, though you know perfectly well he has. Then he reads it aloud, slowly, the three words going down the edge of the grid.
"Come upstairs, Draco."
The stairwell is quiet. Somewhere below, his kettle has started to whistle, and neither of you moves to stop it.
"You hadn't forgiven me," he says. "Yesterday."
"I hadn't understood you, yesterday." You turn your own paper over in your hands. "I thought you'd done it because you felt sorry for me. I've had people feel sorry for me my whole life. It's the worst thing a person can do."
"I didn't feel sorry for you." He comes up one more stair. "I'd been doing your crosswords for three years. Every Friday. Before I ever knew your name. I used to sit in the shop at night solving them when the books wouldn't let me sleep, and there was this voice in them, clever and funny and quite unkind, and I thought, whoever that is, I'd like to have an argument with them. Then your application came across my desk, and there was the name, and the four refusals, and I just…" He breathes out. "It wasn't charity. It was selfish. I wanted you near enough to argue with. I didn't tell you because I knew if I did, you'd leave, and you'd be right to, and then I'd never get to see what you'd do with 11 Across."
You stare at him. "The FERRET clue was terrible."
"It was a disgrace. I've kept it in my desk drawer for two months."
You're laughing before you can stop yourself. He's smiling at you from three stairs down. It's a smile you haven't seen on him before, crooked and uncertain and much softer than he usually lets his face look, and something in your chest that has been clenched for six days lets go.
"Your clue," you say. "Under my door. Rearrange a note."
"I know it was easy."
"It was insultingly easy." You get up off the top stair. That puts you one step above him, your eyes level with his. "The answer was atone."
"Yes."
"You've been doing it for years, haven't you. The books. The shelf in the window. All of it."
"Trying to," he says. "It doesn't really ever end. You don't get a certificate."
"No," you say. "I don't suppose you do."
And you kiss him.
He makes a small, surprised sound against your mouth, and the newspaper falls out of his hand and slides all the way down the stairs and through the open door into the shop. Then his hands come up, ink-stained and careful, and cup your face as if you're one of his rare first editions, something he's afraid of cracking. He kisses you back slowly, like he's going to take his time, like he's been thinking about it for three years and refuses to hurry it now. He tastes of tea with lemon. Your dad's dressing gown is falling off one shoulder. You don't care. You get your fingers into his hair, finally, the way you've wanted to since the night with the Kneazle grimoire, and he leans into you on the narrow stair like a man who's been standing up a very long time and has only just been allowed to rest.
When you break apart, his forehead is against yours, and his eyes are closed.
"The kettle," you say.
"Let it boil dry."
"Your shop's open. There'll be customers."
"Let them steal things." He opens his eyes. They're grey, and close, and a little stunned. "I should tell you something else. In the interests of full disclosure. Since that's apparently important to you."
"What?"
"There's a Gringotts file. On my desk. It's got your rent in it."
"I know. Half."
"I've raised it." He looks very serious. "To the full rate. As of this morning. I thought you'd prefer it. You'll be paying me an obscene amount of money to live upstairs from a man whose books scream."
You stare at him for a moment. Then you laugh, properly, into his shoulder, so hard you have to hold on to him to stay upright on the stair.
"That," you tell him, when you can breathe again, "is the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me."
"I know," Draco Malfoy says, quietly pleased, his hand moving in slow circles on your back. "I read your crosswords. I know exactly what you like."
Downstairs, the kettle finally screams itself silent. The bell over the shop door rings, and somebody calls, "Hello? Mr Malfoy?" Neither of you moves. You stand there together on the stairs between his half of the building and yours, his half and yours, until it stops making any sense to tell the difference.