Betas: IgnobleBard, Lilithlessfair and Erulisse; and thanks to Spicedwine for initial Brit picking (any remaining errors were added later and are my own).
"But you're too late. You've missed your chance. I got there first. I overpowered Draco weeks ago. I took his wand from him... So it all comes down to this, doesn't it? Does the wand in your hand know its last master was disarmed? Because if it does...I am the true master of the Elder Wand." —Harry to Voldemort, The Deathly Hallows (during the Battle of Hogwarts)
When he woke up that morning, the first thing Harry thought of was taking the wand and going to Malfoy Manor. If he stopped to Owl Draco or to think about whether he really wanted to do it, he would lose his nerve. Theoretically it probably was more than safe to send the wand by Owl—that's how he had received it after all. But an eerie mental image of an owl being hit by lightning and Draco's hawthorn wand being lost forever kept flitting across his consciousness. Ridiculous, of course. It was hardly as though the roads and byways of the English countryside were littered with package-bearing owls struck down in their prime by random bolts of lightning.
With a measure of partial success, he had tried to obey Draco's last imperative and push thoughts of him to the back of his mind. It felt obvious that the last thing Draco needed was Harry's problems, he had more than enough of his own. The lethargy that peace brought with it was consoling, but the thoughts of the war and its losses were never far away and apt to pop up when they were least welcome. And always, along any of those memories came Draco's face, with a steak of soot down one cheek, his pupils blown with arousal, and his lips red and kiss-swollen. The dialogue played out along with the visual memory:
'What do you think you are doing, Potter?'
'I'm kissing you, of course,' the memory Harry would say, popping open the buttons on Draco's trousers. 'Do you want me to stop?'
'Does it look like I do?' Draco would ask, looking down at Harry's hands, before meeting his eyes with a look of breathless triumphalism. Harry never knew who made the next move, lips crashing together, wet and needy. Meanwhile everything about the incident was completely dominated by the sense of passionate competition which had always ruled their encounters.
Finally, Draco would stop them, but not before he let Harry bring him off, spilling all over his trousers and shirttails and Harry's hand. 'I have to go back inside the Great Hall before one of my parents come looking for me.' Harry would mumble a wandless cleansing spell and Draco would give him a sweet quick kiss and a bland, unreadable glance. 'Harry,' Draco said, the first and only time he had ever called him Harry, 'You know we cannot do this again.' He did not look at all as though he meant it.
They had not spoken to one another at Draco's trial where Harry had testified. He had not been able to bring himself to contact Draco afterwards. It felt to him as though he would be placing Draco in a position of having no choice but to tolerate him out of gratitude.
But that morning, considering that Draco's wand had been missing for weeks, Harry felt guilty that he had not thought of it a single time. The judiciary proceedings relating to the Malfoy family had ended weeks earlier. Then the previous day, seemingly out of nowhere and to his great surprise, Harry had received a package from the Wizengamot containing items belonging to him which had been held as evidence: the contents of his pockets, fragments of clothing and other objects. Included among the random detritus was Draco's hawthorn wand. Harry had never expected to see it again. He had assumed that, after all of the inquests and hearings had ended, the Wizengamot would return the wand directly to Draco.
There were complicated rules and precedents of the Wizarding world that Harry still tended to forget. According to those, the hawthorn wand now belonged to Harry. He had captured it fair and square from Malfoy. Yet Harry had not thought of it as a prize to win and keep. His intent had been simply to disarm Draco at the time. It was incidental and lucky for him that it happened when he desperately needed a wand and he liked the way it felt in his grip. Despite the importance of the wand to Harry's purposes, the wand had remained uniquely Draco's to him.
From the first moment, it felt comfortable against Harry's palm. More than an inch shorter than Harry's own holly wand with its phoenix feather core, the hawthorn wand appeared ordinary on the surface, almost a child's wand, which it had been. In spite of its rather unusual unicorn hair core, its appearance was blunt and inelegant, with a rounded end and serviceable grip. Despite any crisis of confidence Draco might have recently endured, he remained Slytherin through and through, while the hawthorn wand incongruously manifested a straightforward honest appeal. Further, the presence of a unicorn hair lent it an unexpectedly innocent character.
The entire concept of fitting a wand to its holder had always fascinated Harry. How could Draco be matched with such a workmanlike wand? The Malfoy heir, so tall, attenuated and elegant, who insisted upon the highest quality in every object he used, from his peacock quills dyed iridescent black to the creamy pages of the expensive journals he had used for his class notes. Harry remembered his first day in Diagon Alley in Ollivander's Wand Shop how the old wizard said to him, "The wand chooses the wizard." He wondered if eleven-year-old Draco had curled up his pretty mouth in his characteristic sneer at the sight of the uninspired looking wand with its only embellishment a simply carved, black-stained grip. Probably not. More likely even spoiled Draco Malfoy, despite centuries of the most reactionary aspects of Wizarding history weighing upon his child's frail shoulders, had been too overcome with the thrill of holding his first wand to question the choice.
The nature of the grounded and unexciting although highly magical hawthorn wand's choice of Draco felt like something Harry should understand. But muzzy-headed and worn-out, Harry found the point elusive, slipping just beyond his grasp every time he felt close. His head had not cleared since the events at Hogwarts nearly three months ago. He still existed in a fog, relieved but dulled and dispassionate. Perhaps there was something about him with his plebian clumsiness that demanded a spiky, refined wand while Draco with his much sharper mind and aristocratic manner needed only a simple one?
The oddest thing was, as comfortable as Draco's wand had felt in Harry's hand, how could it be that he had not thought of it again from the day of the Battle of Hogwarts until yesterday. A wet and bedraggled Ministry owl, with an attitude of being much put upon, had scratched on Harry's window. It had been late in the afternoon and raining hard, but Harry had briefly considered traveling straight to Malfoy Manor in Wiltshire despite the time and weather. He instead had stretched out in his favorite overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace with a footstool under his feet for hours the night before, holding the hawthorn wand and turning it over and over, until it felt warm in his hand, feeling almost as though he touched Draco through it. He wondered if Draco could sense that he fondled his wand, bizarre and fanciful stuff indeed. Finally, he had retired, sleeping fitfully and dreaming of the wand and Draco's face, pale and beautiful, with a defensive smirk barely hiding its heart-wrenching vulnerability.
Since Harry had no idea what, if any, wards remained intact around Malfoy Manor, he Apparated to a spot several hundred feet down the narrow lane which led up to the front entrance of the grounds. The Manor itself reminded Harry of other historic homes of which there were a number in Wiltshire similar in size if not design to Malfoy Manor. Located off a branch of a subsidiary road, it was not visible from any principal thoroughfares or motorways. If it were to be seen by anyone Muggle or Magical not looking for it, the Manor would not particularly call attention to itself. The effect of glimpsing it on one's horizon from a distance was to sense a mildly off-putting ambiance. It did not present the picture of the stereotypical creepy haunted mansion, but neither would it encourage by-passers to want to seek access to frolic or picnic on its grounds.
The yew hedge around the spacious grounds rose almost two feet higher than Harry's head. The closer one drew to it, the more the hedge blocked one's visibility of the house and its extensive gardens. The house itself, not particularly old by Wizarding standards, appeared to date to the mid-1500s. Hermione had told Harry she had read that it was older by several hundred years. The house was constructed mainly of stone, pale grey in color and had not been allowed to show signs of age, having been maintained in pristine condition.
As Harry walked up the drive from the road to the gate with his thoughts focused on Draco, desperately hoping he would be able to see him. Very likely he would be greeted by a house elf, relieved of his package, and sent on his way. Or perhaps not. Narcissa Malfoy might speak with him and politely accept the wand on Draco's behalf.
In the unlikely event that Draco did consent to see him, Harry did not expect him to be warm. But it would not be out of character for Draco to be courteous in a formal way on his own turf with none of the defensive sniping he used with Harry at school, even if he were disturbed about what had happened when they had last met one on one. Harry admitted to himself grudgingly that he needed to see Draco with the most visceral of cravings, even if it meant that Draco would only accept the wand and thank him. Harry hoped he would have the opportunity to explain why he had not returned it sooner. He wouldn't tell the whole truth. He tried to imagine himself doing that and failed utterly.
"Hey, Malfoy! You're looking good." He had heard through the grapevine that Draco was not looking well. But that was neither here nor there—to Harry he always looked exceptional. Objectively, to even those not hopelessly besotted like Potter, Draco looking poorly would still look good. Draco appearing less perfect was relative only to himself and not in comparison to the rest of the world.
And what ought he to say? "I'm really sorry I jumped on you, snogged you senseless, and rutted up against you in the middle of that whole chaos that comprised the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts. I suppose I was just so happy that you had lived through it and I thought it might be my only chance ever to snog you. It wouldn't have been so bad, if I had not let you so easily talk me into pretending to forget it ever happened. Would it make a difference to you to know that I've regretted not arguing with you about that every minute since then? I've been a mess, moping around, trying to avoid spending time with my friends, acting like a Third-year girl unwilling to give up on an unrequited crush. Hermione is tearing her hair out over me. By the way, she knows I'm here today. I woke her up this morning wanting to talk about us. Ron doesn't know yet. She thinks I ought to come clean with you. You know the clichés. Put my cards on the table. Come right out and tell you how much I want and need you. Do you have any idea what a concession that is for her?"
No. Absolutely no way would he be saying any of that. It was Draco's turn to make the next move, if one was counting, which Harry had been up until the day before. He had been counting every half-smile not stifled quickly enough, every glance he caught that Draco had thought remained well hidden. Harry was not called a bloody Gryffindor fool by the likes of Draco for nothing. He took the biggest chance of either of them.
He was the one who had grabbed Draco in a deserted corridor in Hogwarts and kissed him until he gave up and kissed him back. Then he reached between them, unfastening the top two buttons of Draco's trousers and, taking hold of him, yanked, caressed, and pulled at Draco's lovely long cock until he had brought him off. Draco got big points for admitting, in a breathy, astonishingly erotic voice, "Forget everything I ever said to the contrary. You are totally brilliant, Potter." But then he had lost every credit he had accrued when he told Harry they should never do it again. Then the ball was back in Draco's court.
But Harry was not just courageously foolish or foolishly courageous; he was generous to a fault. Receiving the wand meant that he could come to see Draco while still managing to hide behind a few tattered shreds of dignity. He stopped counting, erased all the debits and credits, when he held the wand in his hand again and determined that he would return it to Draco.
According to Harry, dignity was madly overrated. That was something huge that he could teach Draco. He would simply explain that he had only just received the wand and that he wassorry for not trying to reach Draco sooner, at least to see how he was doing. Just because Draco had told him to leave him alone did not mean that was what he really wanted. Hermione had laboriously explained to Harry that from what he had admitted to her it was highly unlikely that Draco really wanted him to stay completely away. That when he told Harry they ought not see one another again, what he probably meant was that he needed for Harry to work much harder to woo him.
On the other hand, Harry had no reason to believe, except that he had recently heard otherwise, that Draco was anything but certifiably crazy. Draco's living conditions, well-being and hopes for survival during that entire last period in Malfoy Manor had only been marginally better, maybe worse, than those of Voldemort's prisoners locked in the dungeons below the mansion. And Draco had guilt to overcome as well as physical and emotional trauma inflicted upon him by Voldemort and a houseful of Death Eaters. He had also been completely alone, while Harry at least had his friends.
What Harry had heard from Hermione, who claimed Dean Thomas as her source, who had purportedly spoken to Finch-Fletchley, who had heard the story from an unnamed other party, was that Draco was lucid, rational and in reasonably good health. Further gossip making the rounds stated that while Draco's recovery was slow, not unlike that of Harry himself, he was going to be alright. Of course, he would be alright. Like Harry, Draco was a survivor. But there is more to life than surviving Harry thought.
Straight from the horse's mouth-Minerva McGonagall in this case-Harry had learned that Draco had decided to return to Hogwarts in the fall. In a letter Harry had received from her about offering an additional year at Hogwarts for all who had missed most of their last year due to the war, she had included Draco on a list of those of Harry's year who had already expressed their intent to return. McGonagall had also mentioned in a postscript to that same list that she hoped Harry would help him settle in, noting that Draco would most likely encounter some mistrust among the student body in general and possibly be viewed as a traitor by his own house as well.
Maybe Draco would shake his hand. Would Draco's hand feel as smooth as it looked? He'd kissed him open mouthed, stroked Draco's stiff prick and far, far more, but he had never simply touched his hand. The skin on Draco's hips was as baby soft as that of Ginny, but even if it had not been, the magic between them was compatible and explosive enough to make the point moot. Surely Draco could feel that. Such miracles could not be conjured up at will. Immutable fate was not supernaturally derived in Harry's opinion but the result of a coming together of a whole series of factors relating to them both involving their history and that of those who came before them and, of course, Draco's incredible hotness. Would Draco hate him or might he permit Harry another kiss straight away? Please don't fuck with doom and fate, Draco,Harry thought, while simultaneously wondering if he simply was a silly, romantic git destined to have his heart broken. He had accepted the challenge that it might not be impossible that he could win Draco Malfoy's love when had decided to Apparate to Wiltshire. It was no more unlikely than that he could have defeated Voldemort.
Until the day Harry saved Draco from the Fiendfyre, except to strike him or wrestle him to the ground and pummel him, he had never before touched him. He recollected with absolute clarity the feeling of Draco's chest pressed against his back, the ragged pants of breath against his ear, the roar and heat of the flames rushing behind them. Harry had never flown so hard or desperately. The memory of the tensile strength of Draco's long arms wrapped around him was replaced by the smell of him. The acrid scent of fear had supplanted Draco's usual trace of soap and aftershave, fresher and lighter than spring air in a forest clearing.
"Fuck! I am always been such a whinging girl when it comes to him," he thought. "I have it so bad. I've wanted him for years. Even when I suspected that he might be a baby apprentice death eater, I hoped against hope that he was not, wishing I was mistaken I kept right on wanting him. What's wrong with me?"He recalled Hagrid's coarse, compassionate voice as he told him when he was but an eleven-year-old boy, "You're a wizard, Harry." Maybe Harry's magic, extraordinary in its power, had always known that Draco was not all evil. Dumbledore had believed Draco was redeemable. He had been willing to risk his life and that of Snape on the strength of his conviction.
The heavy gate to the inside courtyard of Malfoy Manor stood slightly ajar. As Harry approached, he recognized the dark maroon Auror uniform before he identified the man wearing it. Liam Walsh stuck his head around the wrought-iron tines of the gate, to see who walked up the last few yards of the driveway. Not much older than Harry and with a manner young for his age, Walsh was a raven-haired, blue-eyed Irishman. With skin nearly as pale as Draco's, Liam had prominent ears and a long horsey face that appeared homely at first glance, but which with increased familiarity began to grow on one as remarkably handsome.
Walsh greeted Harry with a grin, a nod and just a hint of a wink, before turning his attention back to Narcissa. Draco's mother smiled at Harry, but continued explaining something to the youthful Auror, pointing in the direction of her formal gardens. Harry had heard those gardens had once been her pride and joy. They now looked sadly bedraggled and in danger of going to seed. Having a lunatic snake-faced Dark Lord in residence for months apparently distracted from activities as mundane as grounds keeping or gardening. House elves were out in full force that morning, straggling with their wheel barrows and rakes behind the few Aurors scattered throughout the lawns and arbors.
Serene and cool, Narcissa Malfoy exuded the same air of patrician composure—that entire aspect of the Great and Ancient Noble House of Black's assumption of natural superiority—which had struck Harry about her when he had originally met her. Lucius Malfoy might have had greater wealth and political power at the time he married the young Narcissa Black, but the Blacks represented a more celebrated part of their people's history. Students at Hogwarts had mentioned to Harry, when he knew nothing of the hierarchy of the Wizarding world in the British Isles, that Draco's mother was a Black. He had inferred from the awed emphasis they placed on her surname that the Blacks, for good or ill, must be considered something extraordinary. That was before he had met or heard of Sirius Black, who only acknowledged the aristocratic privilege of the House of Black with his sardonic contempt for the entire concept.
Observing Narcissa in front of the mansion that morning, Harry noticed for the first time that the bone structure which he found so singularly attractive in Draco's face must have come from the Black side of his family. Even beneath the hideous mask of madness, one had been able to discern that Bellatrix Lestrange née Black had once been a beautiful woman and Sirius Black, old for his years and battered by the time Harry met him, had been considered the best looking of the Marauders, more handsome during their teenage years than even the charismatic James Potter. Draco's brilliant platinum hair came from the Malfoys, but his appearance of supple elegance, the sharp, fine androgyny of his facial features was all Black.
Narcissa focused a constrained smile upon Harry. The warmth behind it enhanced, but did nothing to soften, her austere exquisiteness. "Harry Potter, good morning," she drawled with a tone of blue-blooded assurance that reminded him of Draco also. "What brings you here today?" She extended her hand to him. Without even considering it, he found himself bending over and kissing it. Ron would have choked if he had seen him. He almost choked himself. He'd never kissed anybody's hand. He could scarcely imagine himself doing such a thing. He had only had ever seen it done in historical movies of men in tights.
"Mrs. Malfoy," he replied, blushing in bewilderment. She had expressed her gratitude to him like a real lady after the trials, more explicitly than her husband or even than Draco for that matter, who knew him well by then and, therefore, had more reason to be appreciative.
"Good morning," he said, trying not to stammer. "I hoped I'd catch Draco at home. I have something I'd like to give him."
She turned to the young man standing next to her. "Auror Walsh, you know Mr. Potter, don't you?"
"I've had the pleasure," he said, grinning at her. "We played Quidditch at Hogwarts together-his first year and my last. Youngest seeker in decades, or was it centuries?" Irritatingly confident, he stuck his hand out to Harry with a knowing smirk. Others who knew the fast-rising young Auror had remarked to Harry that there wasn't a man, woman, child or dog with whom Liam Walsh would not flirt. Unexpectedly, Narcissa Malfoy appeared to find Walsh's cheek mildly amusing. She observed Walsh's interaction with Harry with wry smile in Harry's direction. Interesting, Harry thought. Draco's more like Narcissa than his father in a whole series of ways.He was thinking of a subtle ability to combine an unshakeable sense of superiority with dry humor.
"Auror Walsh is in charge of finishing up this undertaking, the cleansing of Malfoy Manor." She cocked her head to one side, keeping her eyes locked upon Harry as she spoke. "If you don't need anything else of me at the moment, Deputy Walsh, I'll take Harry inside. You know to send a house elf to find me if there is anything more that you need my help with this morning." She slipped her hand into the crock of Harry's arm, guiding him gently toward the house. "So, it must be the wand that brought you here today. I told him that you would come."
"I received the package from the Ministry late yesterday."
"Ah," she responded.
"I suppose I could have Owled him or tried to figure out how to place a fire-call, but . . . ," Harry hesitated, embarrassed. "I was afraid he'd tell me to send it along and I wanted to see him." What an idiot I am, he thought.
"I think he wants to see you also, Harry Potter. He saw Pansy and Blaise yesterday and I happen to know he would far rather have visited with you. That did not go very well either. They were tense and Draco was cold, not conducive to mending fences. They avoided him during and trial and for a while afterwards. Then, when the letters went out about reopening Hogwarts and Draco decided to take Professor McGonagall's offer, they decided it was time to contact him. I can understand Blaise's position, but Pansy has been a friend of Draco's since before they could speak." She raised her chin and clenched her jaw in a gesture of defensive fierceness that Harry recognized from Draco.
As Harry listened, he realized that Narcissa assumed that he wanted to befriend Draco. How she knew that he could not imagine. He had surprised himself earlier that morning by drawing the same conclusion.
"Things change," he said. "In this situation the change has been sudden and irreversible. We will all have to start over . . . " He snapped his mouth shut abruptly to prevent the escape of further inane platitudes.
Narcissa squeezed his arm as though in empathy. "These last several weeks have been hard for Draco." She was such a mother. They had been hard for the entirety of Wizarding Britain. "But he speaks of you sometimes and never with any of the old rancor. He is grateful for all you have done, whether he has explicitly told you or not." This was the plea for Harry to forgive Draco for his prickly bloody-mindedness. And again, somehow, Narcissa Malfoy had already guessed that he would. "You look so much better, Harry," she said. "How haveyou been?"
He didn't even think of trying to answer with the polite avoidance he affected with so many others who asked the same question. "I'm getting better. But I still have nightmares." Where did that come from?he asked himself, appalled. But he could not stop. "I'm still so tired. The worst part is that I wake up and wonder what is the point of my life now. For so long I had an absolute purpose and now . . . now what? But I do have my friends around me, most of the time at least. It must be harder for Draco, with so many of his friends scattered and gone."
"So true. But nothing for you to feel guilty about, young man. They made their choices for good or ill, knowing full well the consequences. Not many naïve souls among the young Slytherins," she said, looking up at him with pale, accessing eyes. "What happened between you and the Weasley girl? I saw something about your relationship with her in The Prophet. The headline implied you had split up, but I did not read the article. So inappropriate those speculative articles about people's personal lives."
"Now that is something I do have reason to feel guilty about. I suppose I led her on. Then, in a moment of honesty, I realized it was all wrong. I told her it wasn't going to work for us. She was disappointed and angry. Everyone else was puzzled. How The Prophetgot hold of . . ."
"I see," she said patting his arm. "That is difficult and painful, but less so now than it would have been ten years from now. You are both so young."
They passed more of the red-robed Aurors, perhaps a dozen or so, who busied themselves about the front of the house and the entrance way, inside and out, scanning doors and windows with their wands. Harry presumed they were searching for wards and spells. There was a random but almost lackadaisical quality to their movements.
"Do they know what they are looking for?" he asked, holding back a chuckle at the Monty Pythonesque purposeless looking jerkiness of their gestures.
"From what they tell me it is an inexact science at best and their instructions were less than precise." She released a small tinkling laugh. "It's hard to know what one is looking for when the expectation is that there are more likely than not centuries of old forgotten magic in the least expected corners or objects. I think they already found the worst things within the first three hours they were here: the most recent spells and charms. Unattended magic weakens over time. They are simply being thorough now."
"Interesting," Harry said. "How long have they been working like this?"
"Six maybe seven weeks. They have been going over the house from the inside out. They are almost finished." She shrugged, the implication being that she could not be bothered to complain, that the presence of Aurors removing ancient spells was the least of her recent hardships. "The Malfoys have always provided employment for the English laboring classes, Wizarding and Muggle, with their excesses."
"That's a long time," Harry said, thinking that Hermione would have defended the right to privacy and due process on principle, even on behalf of the morally opaque Malfoys.
Narcissa and Draco Malfoy had been acquitted, even praised for their assistance in protecting Harry and thwarting Voldemort in whatever small ways they had, and the harshest parts of Lucius's sentence would be commuted after only six months served in minimum security at Azkaban, on the contingency that he participate in a program of rehabilitation and pay significant reparations. "A smack on the hands," Arthur Weasley had groused. It was clear, however, that although many were of the mindset of the senior Weasley, the British Wizarding community as a whole wanted to move beyond its divisions as quickly as possible. Voldemort was gone. Relief at that was palpable throughout every aspect of society. Even the economy had rebounded with a flourish that could not have been the result of rebuilding efforts alone.
Most importantly, the line between the oppressors and oppressed had been and still was blurry. It was difficult to distinguish those who operated under actual or virtual Imperius Curses from those who willingly had supported the Dark Lord. Additionally, the culture of Magical Britain instinctively recoiled from mimicking in any way the reprehensible methods of the Muggle Witch hunts of a few centuries earlier. In the wake of throwing off the threat of Voldemort, the quality of mercy was highly valued at a juridical level if not always on a personal one.
As though she had read his mind, Narcissa answered. "Their presence is not a significant violation of our privacy since we have hardly felt at home here since Hetook over the Manor months before the end. The monstrous things that happened here—you saw some of it firsthand-the brutality against his foes and the humiliation of his allies, the eager as well as the reluctant. Perhaps removing all the wards and charms, light and dark, will mean we truly can start over. Make it possible for us to begin to consider it our home again."
Harry thought of Draco, sensitive and tetchy for as long as he had known him about his personal space and privacy. First he had endured the invasion of the manor by the foul and insane Dark Lord and now a small army of Aurors occupied his home. The high ceilings of the entranceway, all stone in a gothic mode, morphed into other architectural forms and styles as one moved into the manor.
They passed through rooms constructed with pre-Tudor-style wood paneling and onto others farther still into the newer sectors which had walls covered in jewel tones of brocade trimmed with gilded plaster crown moldings. The rooms in the main wing contained mostly arched ceilings, but the ones in the side wing where Narcissa led Harry even had a room or two on the far perimeter with flat ceilings with skylights. Throughout the mansion, vast hardwood floors stretched out before them. They were so highly polished that they might have been reminiscent of those of the gymnasium in Harry's childhood Muggle school, had they not been liberally dotted with Persian carpets. The size and palatial aspect of the mansion contradicted anything Harry could wrap his mind around as remotely homey.
Mrs. Malfoy had not vocalized explicitly the nature of her concern for Draco, but Harry, oblivious in some ways according to Hermione, was good at sussing out that kind of anxiety. It was clear to him that Draco's mother believed her son was in serious trouble.
"Maybe Draco would like to stay somewhere else for a while?" he asked. "Someplace without all the awful associations? Could you manage here without him?"
"Harry Potter!" she said, laughing like a girl and looking fifteen years younger in an instant. "You really are an all-purpose hero; you quite live up to your reputation. You're brilliant, as he would say. Yes. I would be fine here alone. I even have friends who have offered to stay with me for a while. My greatest worry at the moment is him. Perhaps you can convince him he needs to get away from here and that September is not nearly soon enough. But let me see if he will even consent to speak to you first." She led him onward into the left wing of the house, away from the central core of the manor, parts of which had appeared vaguely familiar to Harry. He resisted a shudder at the memory of his last visit to the house.
She settled Harry in a room he believed would be called a conservatory or sunroom located in the farthest wing of the building from its central core, overlooking the gardens, still a marvel to him despite their overgrown state. "Maybe if Draco feels well enough to see you, then the two of you can have breakfast together. Meanwhile, I'll have an elf bring you some coffee or tea. Which would you prefer?"
"Thank you. I'd love some coffee, please," he said, unable to resist the opportunity to see what kind of coffee and service a family like the Malfoys would provide. While his previous visit to the manor had felt like a waking nightmare set in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher or Bram Stoker's Dracula, this whole excursion was beginning to remind him of endless BBC documentaries his Aunt Petunia had watched with names like "The Stately Homes of England." But this place was no museum with a family quarters tucked off to one side, neither was it a working manor house, surrounded by farmlands and supporting a village. It was merely the historic seat of the richest family of Magical England, perhaps all of Europe, both admired and feared throughout its history, with its reputation for wielding behind-the-scenes Wizarding political power that rivaled that of the Muggle Medicis at their height. Harry had no idea of the source of the Malfoy wealth, but gentlemen farmers they were not.
"Promise me you won't laugh when you see where Draco has entrenched himself. He has taken over the drawing room above us. She smiled, her eyes sparking with suppressed mischief. Oral history of Malfoy Manor identifies it as the site of the salon where a series of Malfoy widows in their declining years plotted and entertained their friends throughout the 18th and 19th centuries."
"I promise I won't tease him," Harry said, thinking that he was unlikely to have any basis for comparison which would cause him to find Draco's choice of lodgings amusing on the surface. Although the idea of Draco bunking down in an elderly lady's fussy drawing room might be funny, the reason he couldn't sleep in his own bedroom was not.
"Good. Draco's sense of humor is somewhat lacking at the moment. Please make yourself comfortable," she said with an expansive sweep of her hand as she exited the conservatory through large double doors leading into yet another parlor- or maybe they call it a music room, Harry wondered to himself-containing a black lacquered baby grand piano and a concert harp glowing with the rich amber of well-polished wood.
The sun was bright, but the day cool. The morning light caused Harry to squint looking out into the garden, so he took a seat on an upholstered sofa facing inward. Harry had almost relaxed with the sun warm upon his head and the sound of bird calls and muffled tones of a conversation between two Aurors drifting in through the window, when a house elf entered struggling under the weight of a large tray holding a silver coffee pot, sugar bowl, creamer and a cup and saucer. He wore a spotless tea towel knotted over one shoulder sporting a picture of a lighthouse. He placed the tray upon a small table in front of the sofa and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Harry.
"Milk and one sugar, please," Harry said, thinking Malfoy house elves were uncommonly quiet. "Thank you," he added.
"Oh," the house elf exclaimed in a high shrill voice. "Master Harry Potter is as kind as we have heard." He skittered out of the room backwards, bowing and grinning through the hand he had clapped over his mouth.
Harry had barely finished the small cup of coffee and begun thinking about pouring himself a second when the Lighthouse elf was back. Bowing with a renewed attempt at dignity, he said, "The young Master can see Sir Harry Potter now. Please follow me. I will show you."