Hours later Harry looked up and rubbed his aching neck. He had scoured every encoded spell in the play but discovered nothing that would help him. He watched his pale fingers trace along the inscribed lines of ink and felt a wave of anxiety about the lessening frequency with which he noticed them.

Don't get used to it. You are Harry Potter. Your fingers aren't graceful, your hair isn't neat, you are not a Malfoy.

"Much Ado About Nothing" contained some interesting spells, one of which stood out to him in particular. The Dark Lord had scribbled notes in the margins of the ledger, declaring it an act of folly, one that relied on the weakness of the one who wielded it. He had only partially applied the cipher to translate the passage into a spell before abandoning it as useless.

It was short but sweet in sentiment. Harry scanned it over and over and read it softly out loud.

"Serve God, love me, and mend."

It was a healing spell, he was certain. But he wasn't sure he understood what Voldemort had meant by weakness. Was that simply a reflection of his distaste for love? In which case the spell was probably worth knowing, if a man of Voldemort's philosophy had rejected it.

He dug around in the desk drawers until he found a scrap of paper and a quill, then scratched out the line, the cipher, and the partially translated note. He paused only long enough to notice that his handwriting was wrong, then jammed the paper into his pocket and stood with a great number of cracking joints.

"Bloody hell, Malfoy, you clatter like castanets," Harry muttered.

He checked the time and was surprised to see how much had passed. Where had Draco gone? A quick perusal of the first floor yielded nothing. He passed a house elf here and there who each addressed him as the lord of the manor. It didn't seem necessary to correct their mistake.

Upstairs he found Draco in his master suite, lying in bed and gazing at the ceiling. Harry knocked softly as he let himself in. Belatedly he realized Hermione and Ron might not be the only ones with poor boundaries. Sure, he'd knocked, but only as the tiniest show of manners.

Draco glanced at him and chuckled softly. "It's so strange to see myself like this."

"Try seeing—"

"Yes, I understand fully that it is strange for you, too," Draco sat up and moved a book from his lap to the bedside table.

"What is that?"

"'Romeo and Juliet,'" Draco held it up. "Just the text, no cipher notes. I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, trying to see what the Dark Lord saw. The ciphers are there, but seeing them is the trouble."

Harry sat in a chair beside the bed and said nothing. Draco narrowed his eyes.

"It feels like I'm seeing what my father saw. Holed up in his home, consumed by his delusions of power, and there enters his son," he frowned. "Not the person he was supposed to be."

"Your father was proud of you," Harry said.

"No he wasn't," Draco snorted. "When it came down to it, I didn't want what he wanted, and where he expected success, I delivered failure."

"Not killing Professor Dumbledore wasn't a failure," Harry said. "Your father or Voldemort may have thought so, but they were wrong. You were right."

Draco fiddled with the book in his lap. "I know."

They were quiet for a while, each remembering that night. Harry wondered if Draco knew that he had been there, but it seemed like the wrong time to ask.

"Show me your arm."

Harry was startled out of his reverie. "Which one?"

"The right one. Did the spell give you my Dark Mark scar?"

"Yes," Harry pulled up his sleeve and held his arm out for inspection.

Draco captured his wrist and pulled him onto the bed before pushing his own sleeve up past the elbow. He scooted right up next to Harry so that their hips and shoulders and feet were touching, then he pressed their forearms next to each other so he could see the marks side by side.

"Absolutely alike," he murmured.

He graced his fingertips across the slight discolouration where the mark used to be. He wasn't restrained with his contact, he leaned his weight against Harry and seemed comfortable. His touch slowed and he stroked the pad of his thumb across Harry's skin, almost like a caress. Harry could feel Draco's breath on his neck. His cock, completely unconcerned by the weirdness of the situation, firmed up in response. He pulled away and huddled on the edge of the bed, embarrassed that he'd reacted to his touch.

Draco watched him squirm and appeared uncomfortable now, too. His hands and eyes were restless, his brow furrowed in confusion.

"Let's change your hair," he said suddenly. "I need you to look less like me and more like you."

"Yes please," Harry said.

Draco sat him in a low-backed chair and studied him from above. He checked a spell book, stood before him and recited an incantation three times, and then worked a bit of product through before stepping back to judge his work.

"Glasses," he held his hand out. Harry handed them over.

Draco carefully popped out the lenses and then slipped them over Harry's ears. When he was done he handed over a mirror.

That's just absurd.

Harry's hair was now black and styled with product to look like a messy thicket of unkempt locks. And his glasses now framed his eyes as they should.

But none of it looked right. His skin tone was too pale to pull off black hair. The messiness was too structured and instead made him look frightened. And the shape of the frames were all wrong for the lines of his face.

He set the mirror down. "Somehow it's worse."

"Agreed," Draco grimaced, "but it doesn't feel as disorienting to look at you now. So maybe you should keep it that way."

"I'm not leaving this house like this," Harry pocketed his lenses. "If we have to go anywhere I'm changing it all back."

"Fine."

They went downstairs to find an owl waiting for Draco with a note from his solicitors. He read it, cursed, and dashed off an angry response. He reread the message, crumpled it into a ball, paced and fumed, then scribbled out another one. When he went to lash it to the owl's leg he was rough and had to fend off an assault of beak and talons, which only made him angrier. He walked away, took a breath, then set his jaw and returned for another try. This time he managed to get it tied on and released the owl with a string of profanity.

This Draco, the one frustrated by the world around him, angry and rash, this was the one Harry recognized. His previously mellow demeanor stood out in stark contrast to the one Harry faced now.

Draco paced back and forth across the parlor as the owl ascended into the afternoon sky. "They're my father's possessions!" he barked. "They're rightfully mine now." He paused to watch the owl's receding silhouette. "It's letting him win, Potter. Don't you get that? Even if we figure out workaround spells for all of the curses, he still wins. Because he did this to us, and he took the secret of the Shakespearean ciphers to his grave."

Harry realized belatedly that he was speaking of Voldemort. For a moment he wasn't sure whether he meant his father would win. It struck him for the first time ever that for Draco the distinction may have been fine. His father's obsession with the Dark Lord must have felt like he was ever-present.

"Is that why you're helping?" Harry asked.

"Is what?"

"You were trying to help the Ministry with the curses before you found out about me," Harry pointed out. "Are you helping because you don't want to see Voldemort get away with it?"

Draco goggled at him like he was dense. "Of course that's why I'm trying to help. Isn't that obvious?"

"Well," Harry shifted uncomfortably. "No."

Draco's anger evaporated and was replaced by a sag of defeat. He looked away and shook his head. "You never figured out that once i saw it I didn't want it anymore, did you?"

Harry felt terrible. "Sort of, I guess. I mean I wondered but I didn't know for sure."

Draco sighed, his gaze still averted. "And that's why I'm your only hate," he said flatly. He walked out of the room and left Harry stinging with the truth, as surely as if he had been slapped across the face.

oOo

Supper was tense. Harry moved his place setting down near Draco's end of the table, but his rival refused to look at him and had little to say. Harry noticed that there was no dairy anywhere in the meal and wondered if he should mention that he knew about the lactose intolerance. The closed-off frown on Draco's face told him to save it.

After supper Draco showed him to a guest suite on the opposite end of the hall from his own bedroom. Without so much as a good evening he departed for the night.

Sleep was elusive. Harry tossed and turned and chewed his lip—Draco's lip—as their earlier conversation rolled over and over in his mind. And every time he drifted off he was jerked back to consciousness by the dry-leaves rustle of Old Paul's voice.

"Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably."

He rolled over and punched his pillow into a more comfortable shape.

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

He flipped onto his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head—Draco's head—to block out the sound. But the sound came from within.

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

He tossed the covers back and planted his feet—Draco's feet—on the floor, then went straight from his bed to the master suite. This time he remembered his manners and waited after he knocked.

"Come in."

Harry slipped through the door and found Draco looking as wide awake as he was. He knelt at the side of the bed and took Draco's hand in his.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I know you turned away from the dark path. I didn't want to believe it, it was easier to hate you if I didn't. I needed to hate you, Malfoy, after all of those years of bullying and anger. But I don't need that hatred anymore. I don't hate you. I'm sorry I ever did."

Draco stared at him with wide eyes. He swallowed and nodded and left his hand in Harry's.

"I'm sorry I ever hated you, too," he said softly. "It wasn't until I got what I thought I wanted that I realized how wrong I was about everything. Probation gave me time to think, and I realized I hadn't hated you for a long time. It surprised me to hear that you still hated me."

"You're just such a prat," Harry laughed weakly. "It's hard to separate that from your actions."

"Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me," Draco said.

"'Much Ado About Nothing,'" Harry recognized the line from his reading earlier in the day. "Is that a coded spell?"

"No," Draco smiled. "It's just poetry."

Harry was overcome by an enormous yawn and excused himself for the night. He felt good, optimistic that he had released his hate for Draco Malfoy. Surely the spell was weakening if he could make such a tremendous change. As he laid in bed and drifted off to sleep he thought about waking up to his own face.