A/N: Thanks to SableUnstable as usual for sorting my nonsense out- bang up job! And THANKS to all the wonderful people who reviewed/followed/faved, you make this challenging process totally worth it!

Eighteen: Fresh Air

The next morning, Draco woke feeling far more cheerful than he had in many years. Having a goal that was something good, something possible, something that wouldn't get him killed, was a miracle. Obviously he knew that if he was to join Potter on his journey to find however many horcruxes Voldemort had managed to make, then getting killed was probably more likely, but he wasn't dumb enough to even consider that.

After Potter had gone back to his own room the night before, Draco had laid in bed and decided that he was going to help the Order as much as he could until his mother arrived, then go with her to the safety of New York. Surely all the information he could provide about the cup – and, it had occurred to him, the sword Bellatrix had been so concerned about – would put Potter on a fast track to ending the war. Hopefully that would mean that Draco's father would be able to serve his time in Azkaban and be released in due course, rather than being caught by an angry mob and subjected to the Dementor's Kiss without so much as a trial.

As he got up and dressed, his thoughts were mostly occupied by the promise of a large plate of Mrs Weasley's scrambled eggs that awaited him downstairs. When he arrived in the kitchen, however, he discovered that his good mood was to be tested. Both Ron and Ginny Weasley were present, along with Lupin. Draco wondered briefly what Arthur Weasley was up to; his wife and children were living here, why wasn't he with them?

Taking his seat, while carefully leaving a few empty chairs between himself and the other three, Draco began to fill his plate from the large tureen of steaming scrambled eggs that sat in the middle of the table. No one said good morning to him, but then he didn't really expect them to, and Draco was quite happy to eat in silence. It was just as he filled a mug with coffee that the quiet clinking of forks on plates was interrupted.

"I still don't see why he has to be here," Ron grumbled angrily to Lupin. The ex-professor was spreading marmalade on his toast and had his nose buried in the Prophet.

Lupin made a tired noise and reluctantly glanced away from the article he was reading. He looked fleetingly in Draco's direction before he said to Ron, "because Dumbledore said so."

"Yeah well," Ron muttered mutinously, "he's a nutter isn't he? Old Dumbles."

Lupin's mouth twisted a little, like he wanted to smile. Instead, he shook out his paper, found his place and replied dryly, "I think that when you're as clever as him, it's called eccentric rather than being nuts."

Draco hid his own smile at Lupin's reply behind his coffee cup. He really couldn't fault Ron on that, as it must look insane from his point of view; a mean, spiteful son of a Death Eater allowed to live in the Order's safest place. But at least Ron wasn't actually directing his anger at Draco anymore. His whining was easy enough to ignore.

Draco chomped his way through three bits of toast – all of which were sagging with the weight of perfectly scrambled eggs – and two cups of coffee in silence, constantly aware of the other Weasley who had yet to make a fuss. It was really starting to get to him, if he was honest with himself – he could almost feel Ginny Weasley's glower boring into him from across the table. Eventually, after finishing his fourth piece of toast, he couldn't take it anymore.

"Will you just say it!" he snapped, meeting her glare with one of his own.

"I don't know what you mean," Ginny said loftily, her eyes narrowing in smug victory. "Sounds like you have a guilty conscience to me – like you know you shouldn't be here."

"Ginny," Lupin interrupted in that same tired voice, his eyes not leaving the Prophet. "Could you just go back to fuming in silence please? I'm trying to read."

"How can you?!" Ginny burst out, directing her fierce glare in his direction. "How can you sit at the table with him? You should hear the things he said about you when you were the Dark Arts professor."

"I'm sure I've heard worse," Lupin said mildly, gracing her with a quick, quelling glance. "Eat your breakfast. There is no point whining, he's here to stay."

Ginny, her plate empty, got up noisily and stormed from the kitchen in a huff, letting the door bang loudly behind her as she left. Ron, however, who was refilling his plate with toast from the rack in the middle of the table, seemed to think eating his fill was more important than any protest.

Wandering back up through the house after breakfast, Draco found himself wondering where Potter was, and if their cooperation would extend into daylight hours. Probably not, as it would enrage Weasley, and Draco wasn't naive enough to think that Potter would give up his best friend just to theorise about the Dark Lord's horcruxes. Besides, they couldn't actually do anything about them from this house, anyway, since they weren't allowed to leave.

Draco passed his own bedroom and continued on, up to the third floor and the library. He had been considering the best way to deal with the locket that Kreacher had given them the night before. Potter had insisted on taking it with him, muttering something that sounded like, "stupid prophecy, should be me I guess." Obviously Dumbledore would have to be told, but Draco rather liked the idea of presenting the old man with a destroyed horcrux; he felt like he had something to prove. Like he would be able to leave with his mother guilt-free if he'd done his part.

The fact that he already did feel the niggling beginnings of guilt whenever he contemplated his departure really wasn't a good sign. But what good would it do to stay here, to get caught up in the fight all over again?

None.

For some unfathomable reason, he'd been offered this chance to make the decisions he should have made the first time. Perhaps if he'd been sorted into Gryffindor, one of those decisions might have been to join Potter on his quest to defeat the Dark Lord, smite evil from this land, and so on. But he hadn't been. Slytherin was the house that suited Draco, because with the gift of hindsight, he could see that the best thing for him to do was share his knowledge and then get the hell out.

The library was quite sunny when he entered, the window a large one which showed a beautiful clear day. Draco crossed the room to look out properly; he'd been indoors for a whole week now, and the sunshine streaming in through the glass was glorious. The third floor was high enough to see over the row of houses behind Grimmauld Place, so there was an almost unencumbered view of a blue, cloudless sky, the tiled roofs of houses and their many knobly chimneys forming a sort of zigzagging underline to the peaceful sight.

Draco sighed, reminding himself that in eleven days time he would breath fresh air again. He wondered what the summers in New York were like, and if he and his mother were going to be living in the city or 'up state' as the Americans said. He'd like to be in the country again, if he had the choice.

"Gorgeous day," Potter's voice said from behind him, shocking Draco into whirling around, his right hand going straight for his wand. His mind had been so far away.

Potter chuckled at his over-the-top reaction. "Calm down."

"All very well for you to say," Draco grouched, "sneaking up on people."

Harry was still far too amused for Draco's liking, grinning like an idiot, clearly pleased to have given Draco a fright. "I was here the whole time, you walked right past me."

Shoving his wand back into his pocket, Draco sent Potter a dirty look instead of commenting. Potter shrugged at him, squashing his smirk down with apparent effort to say, "do you want to come up on the terrace? You haven't been outside since you got here, have you?"

"No," Draco said, feeling uncomfortably like Potter was reading his mind. "I was just thinking that."

"I could tell." Potter shrugged again. "Come on, I've been looking for ways to destroy that locket." He held up a pile of books. "These ones look the most creepy, I figure that would be the best place to start."

However, Draco was still stuck on Potter's invitation to the terrace. "We can go outside?" he asked.

"Yep, it's inside the wards." Potter nodded and turned to lead the way out of the library. "No one can see us up there. Like planes or satellites or anything."

"What are satellites?" Draco asked as Potter opened a narrow door on the little landing balcony that separated the library from Sirius's bedroom. Draco had just assumed it was a cupboard last time he'd been up there. It was certainly as dark as one, but held a steep, claustrophobic staircase instead of brooms or linens.

"You know, the muggle space stations," Potter continued, as though Draco was just unfamiliar with the term rather than the entire concept. "They take pictures of the earth from outerspace."

Draco was most certainly unfamiliar with the concept. "Seriously?" he asked. The fact the muggles had even figured out how to fly without magic boggled his mind, let alone hundreds of them at a time squashed inside a massively heavy metal aeroplane.

"Yes," Potter assured him. "Seriously. They've had them for nearly thirty years. I remember learning about it at primary school. My uncle told us, well, he told my cousin, I just happened to be making breakfast in the room at the time, that he remembered watching the moon landing on telly when he was a boy at school."

"Wizards have never been to the moon," Draco said, wondering now why they hadn't. Why none of them had ever had that idea. Muggles were much more adventurous. It was a strange contrast, Draco thought. "They really are much cleverer than we give them credit for," he mused. "Muggles I mean."

Potter looked back over his shoulder at him as they reached the top of the narrow staircase, his expression dubious in the dark. "You're still Malfoy, right?"

"I am," Draco confirmed. He blinked when Potter opened the door to the roof, and had to squint and shield his eyes with his hand as bright glaring sunlight flooded into the stairwell.

The sunshine outside was perfect. The air, while still smelling of London, was cool and much fresher than inside. The roof terrace was small, with planter boxes lining the edge, the dirt in which looked recently turned over – Draco remembered conversation from dinner on his second night there, about Black and the kitchen sieve, looking for buried gold on the terrace. He was definitely crazy.

"Aren't you worried what Weasley will say when he finds us up here?" Draco asked as they sat down on the warm concrete and spread the books out between them.

"He'll get over it," Potter said, "this is kind of important. By the way, I asked Sirius if he could get Dumbledore to come back as soon possible, so we can tell him what we've found out."

"Okay," Draco agreed. It was so weird to sit there, opposite Harry Potter in the broad daylight, talking as though they were friends.

They took a book each from the pile Potter had deemed "creepy" and began to flick through them in silence. Draco's one contained directions for many spells he thought were vulgar, but nothing so far that he thought would be strong enough to break the enchantments the Dark Lord would have placed on the locket that held part of his soul.

"How many do you think there are?" Potter asked after a while, shading his eyes with his book to look at Draco. It was quite hot on the exposed rooftop, enough that Draco could feel the back of his neck beginning to burn. Potter had shucked his jumper while they had been reading, revealing the same canons t-shirt he wore for sleeping. Draco wondered if he'd gone straight to the library upon waking, like he felt he didn't even have time to change his clothes because the task ahead was so important. "These horcruxes, how am I even going to know that I've found them all?"

"I really don't know," Draco said, "but there can't be that many. Everything I read about them suggested that even making one would make your soul very unstable."

They continued on and the glare from the sun gradually began to get to Draco, the words on the page hard to read as the pale paper reflected the sunlight. There was a little patch of shade cast by one of the bigger pot plants, a bushy tree with thick shiny leaves that grew in an old wine barrel next to the raised tile lip that marked the edge of the terrace. "I've had enough sun," he announced finally, and heaved himself to his feet to plonk down in said shade, pleased to open his book and not be blinded by the glare. Potter joined him after a moment, bringing the stack of books they had barely made a dent in.

"How do you even know about them at all? Horcruxes, I mean," Potter asked when he'd sat down in the shade, too.

"My father collected rare books, I used to read a lot," Draco said, wondering if mentioning his father was wise.

"Oh," Potter said, obviously not knowing what else to say. He fell silent again, flipping pages, and Draco found himself distracted from his own book, watching Potter as he looked over page after page, his lips moving slightly as he read the words before him. It was so hard to reconcile the boy next to him with the one who'd appeared at Hogwarts to fight the Dark Lord. He looked similar, although obviously less blood covered and battle worn. This Potter seemed so innocent, and while daunted by the task ahead of him, he also seemed hopeful.

Hope was something that had long abandoned Draco. However, he could remember being sixteen; how the world had looked. The prospect of service to the Dark Lord had been an honor, not a burden – the likelihood of triumph had been a given. Of course I'll succeed, he had thought at the time, I'm so much cleverer than everyone else. But that was sixteen-year-olds in a nutshell, wasn't it? No foresight, no real grasp of repercussions.

"Are you alright?" Potter's voice broke into Draco's train of thought.

"Fine," Draco replied quickly, looking back at his book, realising that he'd completely lost his place. "Just thinking."

"Are you really leaving in two weeks?" Potter continued a moment later. Draco fancied he sounded less than pleased about that.

"Eleven days now," Draco answered, not able to look at him properly as his niggling guilt made itself known once more. He ignored it as best he could.

"But what about all this?" Potter frowned. He really didn't seem to grasp Draco's position or inclinations very well. "You have to help us figure it all out."

"I really don't," Draco said bluntly, "and you'll have Granger and Weasley to help when I'm gone."

"I suppose," Potter murmured, and there was no doubt that he was unhappy about Draco's departure. They fell silent again, and Draco could only stare blankly at the words on the page in front of him, absorbing nothing at all.

"So this is where you're hiding!" a loud voice said suddenly, surprising them both. Ron had just come through the door to the terrace from the staircase. He, too, had to shield his eyes from the brightness as he looked across the small space. "What are you doing?" he asked, taking in the books and Draco sitting next to Potter. "Why is he here?"

"Ron," Potter said, and he definitely sounded nervous as he got hastily to his feet, "I told you last night that he helped me, warned me that Voldemort's vision was fake. He stopped Umbridge from finding us in her office. He's actually really helping."

Potter's guilty babbling did nothing to convince Ron to venture any closer to them. So, with little more than a grimace at Draco as he picked up his sweater, Potter crossed the hot roof, and after a few quiet words to Ron that Draco couldn't hear but made Ron laugh, they went back inside together.

Draco was left alone on the roof, surrounded by Harry's books and feeling rather cold, despite the sun.

A/N: Fair warning- the next chapter is giving me hell, like laptop lid slamming, swearing at the empty room in frustation, hell. so feel free to motivate me as you see fit.

Thanks for reading! xx