May, 2000
"This is all Hermione's fault," Ron said to Harry with excessive gloom.
Harry opened his mouth to agree heartily, but shut it again when he caught sight of her expression. It said, quite clearly, that if he agreed with Ron out loud, he would not be long for this world. Besides, it wasn't entirely Hermione's fault, he thought, matching Ron's excessive gloom without even trying. If anyone was to blame, it was almost certainly Blaise Zabini. It was Zabini who'd swanned by Hermione's desk in the Magical Creatures Department first thing that morning, after all, and suggested that this would be the perfect way for the three of them to end their work day, didn't she think? Clearly, Hermione had been so horrified by the idea that she'd temporarily lost her mind and agreed on the spot. Possibly, too, she'd known that Harry would have done exactly the same. Even so . . .
"Oi, Harry! You agree with me, don't you?" Ron said, giving Harry a glare that indicated that his best mate better back him up or else.
Hermione sniffed. Meaningfully.
"Oh, I, er . . ." Harry said, and decided there was nothing to gain from agreeing with either of the pair of sods: whoever he sided with, disaster would follow. "Perhaps we should just get it over with," he said, one hand winding itself almost subconsciously tighter round his wand.
"Indeed," Hermione said, in a voice that suggested she was brooking no argument. "In fact, if you two stopped faffing around, we would already be finished and in the pub."
A spasm flickered over Ron's expression. Harry quite understood. Afterwards – well, after he'd popped back to the Auror Headquarters, very quickly – would be the pub, and a happy pint or ten and a life free from . . . what they had to do to earn the pint. But before the pub and the pint . . .
"This is, like, my worst nightmare," Ron said.
"Oh, really?" Hermione said without sympathy. "You'd better work on that. What will the other Aurors think of you when a boggart jumps out and, instead of it being the usual spider, it's Draco Malfoy, puckering up?"
Ron reflected on this, and Harry – despite the horror of the situation – couldn't stop his lips from twitching.
"They'll understand," Ron said eventually, pulling a face of disgust as he dragged his mind out of whatever hell pit it was occupying. "Wouldn't be surprised if everyone's boggart turns out to be snogging Malfoy after all this. It's not like we're the only ones who've had to go through this torment!"
"Exactly," Hermione said, giving her 'long-suffering' tone of voice another vigorous workout. "So, for goodness' sake, let's go and get it over with!"
Ron's face fell, and then contorted in a strange way – which Harry supposed was him girding his loins. "Right," he said, rather strangled, and then raised his chin in the manner of a man facing his doom head on. "Let's go."
^^^^^^
It was a bloody weird situation they'd found themselves in, Harry thought as they lined up outside the window of the red-brick, condemned department store that hid St Mungo's, checking if the coast was clear before they slipped through. Clear of Muggles, at any rate. The area was apparently free of reporters, but in Harry's experience all that meant was that they were better concealed than usual and the face he'd be pulling in the resulting front-page photograph would be all the more ridiculous.
"Come on!" Hermione hissed, and shoved first Ron and then Harry through – a little more violently than was really necessary, in Harry's opinion – before following herself. But before Harry could work himself up to complain, Hermione had already smiled at the Welcome Witch in reception and was striding in the direction of the third floor – Potion and Plant Poisoning – at a quick pace, without looking back.
Harry exchanged a glance of despair with Ron, and then turned to follow her, nearly having to run to keep up as she zoomed up the stairs at inhuman speed.
Anyone would almost think she wanted to get this over with.
Harry didn't want to zoom up the third floor; at least, he wanted to zoom all right – in the opposite direction, and from there he wanted to hide under his bed and never come out again until Hermione swore an Unbreakable Vow that he would never, ever, under any circumstances, have to kiss Malfoy.
"Oh Merlin," Harry said, feeling his stomach – already at boot level – drop even further, attempting to leave the building without him.
"What?" Hermione called back, slowing down her pace a fraction but not stopping.
"I'm going to have to kiss Malfoy," Harry said mournfully. It sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous.
Ron let out a breath that was, on balance, more likely to be one of sympathy than a pant, despite their quick pace up the winding stairs; after all, he was going to have to kiss Malfoy too.
Hermione paused at that and turned to look back. Her jaw was firm and her expression hideously determined. "It'll be over quickly," she said in a very Head Girl voice. "Just a quick brush of lips and that's it." She shuddered, briefly, before turning and resuming her ascent, and Harry remembered that, yes, she had to kiss Malfoy as well.
"Then we can burn the germs off with alcohol," Ron said wistfully – and breathlessly – from somewhere behind Harry's left ear.
Harry wanted to laugh, but he couldn't quite manage it. The situation was peculiar – and dire. Six weeks ago – six weeks! It felt like years, to Harry – Draco Malfoy had fallen asleep and failed to wake up. At first, no one had cared much, apart from the Auror department, who'd reluctantly added the investigation to their already unscaleable mountain of cases. The Malfoys had managed to wriggle out of any punishment after the war and still had their Manor and their millions, but money – to the Malfoys' evident surprise – hadn't been enough to buy them a return to wizarding society. Even now, just over two years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry couldn't think of anyone who'd be willing to say – in public, at least – that they respected, or even much liked, Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy.
Harry hadn't been able to muster up much sympathy for them in the weeks and months after the war ended – not even for Malfoy, who'd been the star of article after unflattering article discussing and dissecting his role as a 'baby Death Eater'. In Harry's less charitable moments, often late at night when he was still in his cramped cubicle in the Auror office and so tired that his actual bones hurt, he'd thought it served Malfoy right: he'd always gone on about Harry's taste for fame, so now it was his turn, and good luck to him.
Still, even Malfoy hadn't deserved to be cursed, and when the sorry tale of the Malfoy heir – fast asleep and unable to be woken – hit the news, it hadn't taken long for the tone of the articles to shift from scathing to something more sympathetic. And when the Sunday Prophet devoted almost a whole issue to an amazing exclusive – that Malfoy was the victim of an ancient love curse, and could only be woken by his true love's kiss – that was pretty much it, as far as the wizarding public were concerned: it was romantic and charming, and 'poor Draco' had definitely been misjudged by them all. Soon the search was on to find Draco's soulmate – and fast.
Except, six weeks, and several dozen kisses, later, Draco slept on.
Hence today's little jolly, Harry thought gloomily as they reached the third floor far too quickly for comfort, and Hermione led the way through the door and into the long, almost offensively jolly corridor, studded with multi-coloured doors. Behind one of these doors, Harry knew, Malfoy lurked. For some reason, knowing that the press's explanation of Malfoy's condition was complete bollocks didn't help cheer him up much. He'd still have to kiss the fucker, after all.
When all this was over, he was going to . . . to . . . carry on with his job, that's what he was going to do, given that most days he barely had time to take a piss, let alone solve all the cases that piled up on his desk. To Harry's annoyance, Malfoy's case hadn't even made it to his desk, let alone to the top of the pile. Robards had taken one look at Harry's face when he'd heard the news and assigned it to a different Auror. One who hadn't been to school with Malfoy. As if Harry couldn't be trusted to be objective when it came to Malfoy, or something! But when Harry had complained, his boss had just laughed heartily and asked Harry if he was lacking for things to do, because he had several other cases he was more than happy to pass over. Harry, who thought that if he had a bigger workload he might literally be crushed under the weight of it, had taken the hint.
Bearing all this in mind, it was probably a good thing, Harry reasoned gloomily as he trudged along the horrible, jolly corridor, that the severe shortage of trained Aurors – and people who wanted to become trained Aurors – had led to his department working more closely with the Unspeakables in recent months. And he thought that if he tried really hard, and instituted a rigorous daily regime of mental exercises, he might be able to avoid their complex secrecy requirements and inconsistent rules from driving him completely round the twist. E.g., right now, as Harry approached his Malfoy-shaped doom, he was perfectly aware that Draco Malfoy had been poisoned by a variation of the Draught of Living Death, with a specific – currently unknown – person spelled to be the antidote, while at the same time completely unable to set the press straight on their ridiculous 'true love's kiss' bollocks for fear of breaking the Ministry's Internal Secrets Act.
The fact that he had the strongest of suspicions that the source of the Prophet article had been the Unspeakable department itself made it all the more infuriating. It wasn't that Harry had evidence for this, exactly. But it seemed a remarkable coincidence that as soon as Malfoy's friend Zabini – who was unspeakable in all possible senses of the word – had taken personal charge of the case, it was suddenly front-page news and Malfoy almost instantly converted from pariah to prince.
Zabini had taken charge, too, of creating a tightly-controlled list of unfortunate witches and wizards required to try their luck at being Malfoy's Princess Charming. Zabini's first act had apparently been to classify Harry, Ron and Hermione as 'people who would never, ever, be the cure to any curse that struck Draco Malfoy'. On the plus side, Harry thought, this strangely unflattering classification had meant six happy weeks without having to kiss Malfoy. On the demerit side, however, it had meant six weeks of vague dread, combined with an irritatingly persistent feeling of guilt. He'd agreed with Zabini, damn it. There was absolutely no way in hell he'd be able to wake Malfoy up. But at the same time – whatever Ron said – it didn't sit right with him that he wasn't doing something to help. On balance, despite the futility of the exercise, he was glad to finally be getting it over with.
Harry blinked, realising that in his eagerness to get the thing over with he'd come to an abrupt halt and was in actual danger of going backwards. Hermione, a determined shape up ahead, was walking with great purpose towards a candy-striped wooden door at the very end of the corridor that read 'Helbert Spleen Ward' in enormous gold letters. It didn't seem to have a door handle, so she knocked on it and waited. She had that expression on her face that Harry loved and simultaneously feared – he thought of it privately as her SPEW face. It said that nothing, and no one, would distract her from her annoying purpose. For a moment, however, there was no response, and Harry had the happy daydream that no one would answer the door and they'd be tragically forced to leave immediately.
Ron was clearly thinking along similar lines. The side of his head bashed into Harry's. "Let's run," he hissed. "While she's not looking."
Harry, his resolve melting away in the face of imminent peril, could see the wisdom of this approach, but it was too late. The door made an alarming creaking noise, and out of the wood shot what looked like an enormous, thin brass telescope with an equally enormous eye blinking out of its end. "Yes?" a disembodied voice boomed, and the eye whirled around to scan up and down the corridor, stretching far enough to nearly shoot up Harry's nose.
The eye had eyelashes, Harry noticed as he leapt back, trying not to be skewered. And very bright pink make-up on its eyelid. Out of the corner of Harry's eye, he could see Ron do a similar contortion, leaping behind him as if it was every man for himself at times like these.
"We're here to see Draco Malfoy," Hermione said firmly, as if it was normal to be talking to an eye. "Unspeakable Zabini sent us. We have an appointment."
The eye retracted back into the door, and Ron shuffled out from behind Harry, his expression a bit sheepish. "What?" he said, when Harry gave him a look, and shuddered. "It was wearing mascara," he said.
Harry decided not to inquire any further. He had the rest of his life to take the piss out of Ron; right now he had more urgent things to worry about. The door was swinging open, and a head, which had its full, normal complement of eyes, was peering through it. The head was attached to a body, which emerged too, dressed in eye-wateringly bright lime-green robes. "Welcome to Spleen!!!" the woman said with excessive enthusiasm. "I'm Madam Iatric, the Healer-in-Charge. No need for you to introduce yourselves!" she continued with a beaming smile as she ushered them inside, putting paid to Harry's last-minute, wistful plan of flinging the invisibility cloak back over his head and making a run for it.
Harry looked round quickly, in case of sudden Malfoys, but instead of blonde horrors he found himself in what appeared to be a reception area. The room was completely round, with a central, round desk, and the curved wall was broken up by more identical dark-wood doors than it seemed reasonable to be able to fit in the size of the room. When Harry looked back, he realised he couldn't even tell which door he'd come in through.
"So sorry about the security measures," Madam Iatric said, clasping her hands together and staring at Harry with very wide eyes, as if he was a new and rare breed of human she'd never seen before. "Obviously, you are always welcome here," she said with heavy emphasis. "Harry Potter! Here! In my ward!" she added with glee, almost as if to herself. "But with a celebrity patient here in Spleen, we needed a little extra something to keep out the reporters. The media do so love to try and sneak in and take his photo!"
Hermione – going up again in Harry's estimation – gave a sort of cough that covered up a retch.
"Gosh, where are my manners," Madam Iatric said, her hands fluttering around her face. She withdrew a short stubby wand from her robes and dashed over to the enormous central desk, giving it a swift tap. A pale blue box popped up, a mass of equally pale blue tissues frothing out of it, and Madam Iatric frowned. "No, no," she said, tapping the desk again. This time, a dark-wood bench erupted from one side of the desk, nearly taking her legs out from under her. "Sit, sit!" she said to Harry. "I'll take you through one at a time." A swish of her wand had a lilac clipboard zooming out of a drawer and slapping into her hand. She consulted the paper on it thoughtfully, then turned a beaming smiled on Hermione. "You first, dear!"
Ron almost ran to the bench and flung himself on to it, in case Madam Iatric changed her mind and made him go first. Hermione gave him a death glare, but then seemed to remember that she was Hermione Granger, founder of SPEW, and rallied. Madam Iatric waved her wand again and the walls of the room seemed to spin, in a faintly sick-making manner, one of the doors coming to rest gently in front of her. Patient: D Malfoy read the brass plate on the wood, which seemed to gently shimmer into existence as soon as Harry looked at it, as if it was pretending it had been there all along.
Hermione raised her chin and followed Madam Iatric through the door. It was, Harry thought, clearly a door of great evil, and he sat down heavily next to Ron, hoping Hermione would come out again unscathed.
Ron was gripping the edge of the bench very tightly and staring in abject horror at the door. "Who's next?" he said hoarsely. "You or me?"
Harry considered this for a moment. Both options had their drawbacks. "If I go first, does that mean that when you kiss Malfoy you'll technically be snogging me too?"
Ron gave a mock shudder, breaking out into a grin. "I'd really rather not, mate. No hard feelings."
Harry grinned back. "Don't worry," he said airily, "just because I fancy blokes as well as girls, it doesn't mean I'd stoop so low as to snog you."
Ron blinked, and then put on an expression of extreme outrage. "What's wrong with me?" he demanded, and waved his hand over his freckled face, as if Harry was guilty of ignoring the obvious. "Don't you have eyes?"
"Yes," Harry said solemnly. "I'm afraid so."
Ron gave him a shove. "I'll have you know I am a very fine catch," he said loftily. "It can't be helped if you have terrible taste."
"Whatever you say," Harry said, trying not to crack up. But, unhappily, he didn't have to try for very long, because Hermione suddenly reappeared, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and looking extremely disconcerted.
"Who's next, dears?" Madam Iatric asked, marking Hermione's name off on the sheet of paper on her clipboard with a very shiny quill and looking expectant.
Ron shot up. "Me!" he said, and gave Harry a dark look before he turned, shoulders hunched, and followed Madam Iatric into Malfoy's private room.
Harry sniggered, and then got put off by the look on Hermione's face as she came towards him to sit down – a little like she'd been hit squarely between the eyes with a Bludger. "Well?" he asked, after Hermione had fished out her lip balm and reapplied it for the fourth time in a row.
Hermione jumped, as if she'd been lost in her own private little hell. "Well, what?"
The question seemed obvious to Harry, but he asked it anyway, unnerved by Hermione's very shiny lips. "How bad was it?"
Hermione shuddered. "It was . . . strange," she said. "He still looks like Malfoy, only . . . only . . . prettier," she concluded, to Harry's disbelief.
"Prettier?"
"It was quite unnerving," Hermione said in a faraway tone. "Almost as if he were a different person."
"But—" Harry started.
Before he could finish, though, Ron shot back into the reception room, as quickly as if he'd been fired out of a cannon, his face a glowing beacon of embarrassment. "Oh Merlin," he said as he flung himself back on to the bench next to Hermione, pulling a face like he didn't know whether to laugh or be sick.
"What? What?" Harry asked, but Madam Iatric, clearly sensing danger, was suddenly by his side and inserting a 'helpful' hand under his elbow. Harry rose to his feet, entirely against his will, and as he was half-dragged, half-guided towards his doom, Ron didn't have the common decency to reply.
^^^^^^
"I'll just sit here, Harry, dear," Madam Iatric said, perching herself on the very edge of a high-backed chair next to the bed and gazing at Harry with extreme interest. "Oooh, this is exciting!" she added, and then cleared her throat, schooling her features into something she clearly thought was a little more professional, but not managing it very well.
Harry, dithering near the door, looked away from her – which meant looking at the figure in the bed, instead. Draco Malfoy lay, very still, tucked up in white, starched sheets. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved with each breath. With his white-blond hair and pale skin, he should have looked dead. Instead he looked . . . peaceful. Serene.
It was far too disturbing for words.
Harry frowned in mute appeal at Madam Iatric, who beamed back expectantly, stars in her eyes as she gazed at him. "Go on!" she said, still sounding far too thrilled about the whole vile business. "Just a quick peck on the lips," she added – unhelpfully.
Harry approached the bed. As he got closer – was it his imagination? It had to be his imagination – a soft pink blush spread across Malfoy's cheeks and down his throat.
"He is asleep, isn't he?" he asked.
Madam Iatric's overexcited, awed expression morphed into one that suggested she'd discovered why people said you should never meet your heroes. He supposed it was a bit of an idiotic thing to say. "Yes, dear," she said, in the determinedly cheerful voice of someone pandering to the hard of thinking.
Harry took another couple of steps forwards and perched on the side of the bed.
It took everything he had not to leap up again when . . . when his weight made the mattress tip slightly, and Malfoy's head turned towards him. It had to be his weight, right? He shot another – this time more desperate – look of mute appeal at Madam Iatric, which didn't help matters at all, as her eyes had widened to the size of very wide things, and when he twisted back at top speed to check that Malfoy – the bastard – really was still asleep he pulled a muscle in his back.
Malfoy was definitely asleep. At least . . . he looked asleep, and Harry reasoned that if he'd been Malfoy and had been lying down like that, all defenceless and in his pyjamas, he'd have . . .
He'd have waited until Harry Potter – surely the person he hated most in the whole world – bent down over him, and then he would have punched him so hard that his nose ended up at the back of his head.
Well, that wasn't a very helpful line of thought.
Harry stared at Malfoy a bit more. What had Hermione said? That he was . . . prettier. He fucking wasn't pretty. He'd been a pointy-chinned git at school, and while he'd grown into his features, Harry supposed, his face was still too sharp and angular for comfort. But . . . possibly it was down to the cursed sleep, but there was something unsettlingly ethereal about him right now. As if he'd slipped through a curtain from another world, and if Harry closed his eyes, just for a moment, he might vanish.
No, not pretty at all.
Madam Iatric cleared her throat, and Harry nearly fell off the bed. Right. To business. All he had to do was . . . lean forward, which would mean practically lying on top of Malfoy, and kiss him.
He leapt to his feet. Surely coming in from a standing position would be easier? More . . . impersonal? He shot another look at the Healer and found she was now giving him a look that suggested she was about to offer him a bed on the ward too, so he thought he might as well get on with it.
Only . . . if he went in from a standing position, he'd have to support himself with his arms either side of Malfoy's head, and that would be seriously weird, so he sat down again and leaned in a bit. Maybe if he took it in stages, he reasoned, it would be . . .
But no – this was worse. Malfoy smelled glorious – fresh, and somehow green, like the scent of grass after a rainstorm – and it was seriously giving him the creeps. So he told himself firmly that this was Malfoy, who was a dickhead of the highest order, and leaned in a bit more. It felt like the room held its breath, but as Harry was holding his breath, he channelled his inner Hermione and told himself that the most logical explanation was the correct one. So he closed the gap, pressed his mouth squarely on Malfoy's – oh Merlin, his lips were so warm – and pulled back again, so fast he gave himself vertigo. The room spun, so he closed his eyes for a few seconds until it stopped.
Thank fuck that's over, he thought, opening his eyes to check that Malfoy was still sleeping. He was, thank Merlin. Still ethereal, however. Still extremely . . . unpretty. But still asleep. That was the main thing, Harry told himself, trying to settle his churning insides. That was that.
Harry was just about to stand up, to go and tell Hermione that, regardless of the facts, he was going to hold a grudge against her for making kiss Malfoy for the rest of eternity when—
Fucking, fucking hell.
Malfoy made a little sighing noise, as if he'd had a particularly nice dream, his lips curved into a smile, and he opened his eyes.