October, 1998

Draco made burnt eggs for breakfast the next morning, and the act was so endearing that Harry had to make a big show of eating everything on his plate and then asking if there was any more leftover.

Harry supposed that Draco making him breakfast probably had something to do with him agreeing to take a week off trailing the suppliers, although he was already wondering how much leniency there was going to be within that agreement. The thought of spending a week solely inside Grimmauld Place was daunting, Malfoy or no Malfoy, but the thought of what could happen in a week while Harry wasn't actively trying to fix this predicament was even more so.

It wasn't as though he had stumbled onto anything huge so far; he was mostly still researching, and hadn't actually gotten rid of any of the product yet, but at least he was doing past week he had been hanging around the dilapidated apartment building that Draco had described to him in Hogsmeade. He would stay hidden and watch as the same people entered and left the building, noting which of the unaccompanied visitors made their way into the village afterwards and, usually, into The Boar's Head. Most of the known suppliers he had pegged down were using the pub as somewhat of a meeting place, but he noticed that others were disapparating, often in groups, to another location. He had asked Draco about this, but Draco didn't seem to know anything about a gathering place, and he had always just picked up his product from drop-off spots or other suppliers when he was doing his rounds. Over the past few days Harry had been working on enchanting a remote device that would allow him to participate in side-along apparition without having to make physical contact with any of the suppliers, something he could slip into their things without them knowing so he could find out where it was that they were all going. He had told Draco of his plan, and had been met with a less than enthusiastic response.

It wasn't too irksome that Draco seemed bothered by all of this – that much made sense to Harry. These were the people he had been associating with since June, and Draco surely had some complex feelings about exposing this operation, whether he was being forced into it or not. Only a completely unobservant person, however, could miss the fact that something had been off about Draco since yesterday afternoon.

Draco was solemn and distant since they had gotten back from the hospital. He had woken up with dark circles around his eyes, even though Harry was sure they had slept next to each other the whole night. Harry would catch him staring off into space, a look of deep despair in his eyes before Draco would notice he was being watched and correct his gaze immediately. Each time it was a little clunkier, like he was growing weary of having his guard up.

He had been making up for this melancholic, reserved demeanor with several bursts of random energy throughout the day. He had kissed Harry enthusiastically in the kitchen several times while they were having breakfast, had grabbed Harry's hand and danced to the stereo when they were tidying up, and when they were both in the study that afternoon watching a show about space travel on the television, he had initiated sex with Harry yet again. Harry had pivoted this time, telling Draco he wasn't in the mood, but leaving out the part where he was concerned about Draco's erratic behavior and general well-being, and didn't want to have intimate contact with him while he was in this state. After this conversation Draco had reverted to the somber, detached shell of himself, answering Harry's questions with one word statements and curt nods.

Something was wrong, but Harry had no idea what it was or how he could figure that out. Each time he asked Draco if something was going on, he responded with a smile and a reassurance that he was "fine, just a bit tired." The more that Harry asked him, the more he seemed to revert into this shell, the smile becoming more forced, the words seeming less true.

It could have just been his mother, Harry supposed. Maybe seeing her in such a vulnerable position had shaken something within Draco, perhaps he was just thinking about mortality in general and the memories he had with her. That could have been the case, Harry supposed, but Draco had said yesterday that she was doing well, and that Andromeda was coming to visit her periodically. If it was really Delev's men that Draco was concerned about, why would he have asked Harry to stop investigating? Didn't he want out of this mess as much as Harry did? The fact of the matter was that this wave of darkness passing over Draco didn't line up with what he had been telling Harry. Harry didn't know if he should be concerned by that yet.

It was getting to the point where Harry was so confused by this behavior he considered writing a letter to Hermione about the whole thing, telling her everything that had been going on and begging for some of her intrapersonal expertise. He contemplated getting out a quill and starting his letter right there in the study while Draco poured over one of his medical textbooks, but then he remembered that he wouldn't be able to write about his and Draco's relationship without mentioning all of the other illicit activity they were wrapped up in, and decided this was best not to put such things to paper for others to easily find.

Instead, he just sat there in the room with Draco, pretending to watch what was on the television, looking over at Draco every couple of minutes to monitor any changes in his mood. When a couple of hours had passed, Harry suggested they lay down for a little bit, remembering Draco had mentioned he was tired a couple of times that morning. Draco told him to go ahead, and that he would join him after grabbing a quick shower.

Harry lay down in the bed they shared together, pretending to drift asleep but really just listening to the shower in the room next door, making sure nothing he heard indicated that Draco was in trouble. The minutes passed, then turned into a half hour, and Draco still hadn't emerged. The water was still running.

Draco could have just been enjoying the hot steam of the shower, using it as a stress reliever, but with their encounters in the past and his own reservations about the way Draco was acting today, he wasn't about to take any chances.

"Draco?" he called, knocking on the door to his bathroom. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," he responded, a bit muffled, but other than that, nothing worrisome. "I'm nearly done."

"Let me know if you need anything," Harry responded, deciding to give him a bit of space. He trotted downstairs quickly and checked the contents of Draco's trunk in his study. The Laethelixir was all accounted for, and nothing looked like it had been tampered with. He breathed out a sigh of relief he hadn't realized he had been holding as soon as Draco had entered the bathroom.

He was okay. It was all going to be okay.

Harry returned back upstairs where Draco had changed into a gray sweater, and was combing his hair back into the sleek, blonde pouf that he normally styled it in.

"I thought," Harry began, trying to brainstorm as he went, "that maybe we could do something together. Some kind of project while we're stuck in the house." He mostly just wanted something that would take Draco's mind off of whatever it was that he was preoccupied with. Now that he thought of it, there were a couple of things that he had been meaning to tackle around Grimmauld Place that he just hadn't had the time or energy to begin. Now was probably just as good a time as any.

"Yeah?" Draco said, running the comb through his hair again. "Like what?"

"We could work on that cursed wallpaper together," he suggested. "Especially the yellow stuff in the spare bedrooms, it smells like mildew."

Draco nodded, setting his comb on the dresser.

"Sure. I'll go get my wand," he said, giving Harry a smile when he passed him in the doorway.

Harry couldn't help himself.

He quickly dove into the bathroom and began looking through the items on the shelf of the shower, searching for anything that might be suspicious or dangerous. He looked behind the mirror and underneath the towel rack on the wall, peering inside the candelabra mounted near the ceiling to see if there was anything concealed inside. He was about to dismiss this as merely his own paranoia when he noticed a rolled up towel tucked inside the cabinet under the sink. He listened for Draco's footsteps on the stairs, and when he didn't hear them he pulled out the towel and unfolded it.

A small, sharp dagger clattered to the floor, one that he instantly recognized.

It was the same dagger that he had pulled out of Dobby's heart right before he had buried him on the shore of Shell Cottage. But no, it couldn't possibly have been, he had buried that knife with the elf. There was no way Draco would have this now, no way he could have gotten it, unless…

He thought back to that day at Malfoy Manor, of Bellatrix, of Hermione's arm which was now permanently marred with a scar bearing the word "mudblood". He remembered Draco's own scars which obscured his Dark Mark, the ones that distorted the skull on his forearm. He felt a sudden lump in his throat, and quickly wrapped the dagger up in the towel once more and hid it beneath the mattress in the bedroom.

He felt sick to his stomach knowing what Draco had been doing while he was right on the other side of the door. Harry could have stopped it, he should have known that Draco wasn't in a good place right now, and he shouldn't have left him on his own for that long. He cursed to himself under his breath, hating that he had let this happen. He would have to get rid of that dagger the first chance that he got.

Draco was coming up the stairs with his wand, so Harry took a deep breath and tried to forget that he had found the knife. He would talk to Draco about it, but not now. Now they just needed to focus on something else, something to take their mind off things.

…

The wallpaper was probably one of the worst projects that Harry could have suggested, but they had already begun, so it was too late to change his mind now. They had to use a combination of jinxes to pry it off the wall, and then another spell to ensure that it wouldn't regrow itself. It was slow moving, the two of them probably only successfully removing two feet every 10 minutes.

They started in the bedroom next door to Harry's, but after about an hour of work decided to switch locations to see if it would be a bit easier elsewhere. Regulus's old room, which Draco had helped clean out when he had first moved in, still sported the old, musty green wallpaper, but thankfully was about half as difficult to remove. They worked at that for the next part of the day, each of them peeling and jinxing until Harry felt about ready to collapse with fatigue. He was finishing up the section behind the bed when Draco called out to him from across the room.

"Harry, come here. I think I found something."

Harry perked up, wondering what could have been left in this room after all of the sweeps that they had done to remove it of dark artifacts over the years. Draco was holding a frame that he had just removed from the wall, one that Harry had not been able to make budge in his many attempts to take it down over the past couple of months. It was a large painting he had not looked at much when it was hanging on the wall, showing a darkly painted, wooded landscape with a small cabin that did not look too dissimilar from Hagrid's. He had always thought it was the Forbidden Forest depicted in it, but looking at it now he could see that the trees were different, more spindly and twisted than the trees at Hogwarts. He hadn't seen something as grotesque as those woods in real life before. Draco was not looking at the painting, however, but at the back of the frame, which Harry could now see contained a small wooden flap a little bigger than a galleon.

Draco laid the painting down on the floor and began to pry open the flap, taking a knife off of Regulus's writing desk to do so. Harry's body seized up for a moment, and he made a mental note to go through and remove all of the knives that he could find in the house so Draco couldn't use them.

"Why don't you let me do that," he offered, but Draco had already gotten the wooden part open and was pulling it off of the frame.

"Harry, look," he said, bending over the newly revealed hole in the back of the picture. Harry scooted next to Malfoy and peered inside. There was a very thin silver ring with a delicately engraved floral pattern, as well as a yellowed, folded up piece of parchment. Draco reached his hand down to retrieve the ring, but Harry stopped him, grabbing his wrist abruptly.

"Don't touch it. It could be dangerous, this is Regulus's room. He was a death eater."

"So am I."

"Draco, I'm serious. Dumbledore put a cursed ring on his finger and it would have killed him if Snape hadn't first. We shouldn't be messing around with this."

"Can I read the parchment at least?" Draco asked, his eyebrows raised as he awaited Harry's decision. Harry was glad that Draco had perked up a bit, but he was still incredibly apprehensive about what was in this frame.

"Take it with your wand. Don't touch it."

Draco did as Harry said, using a hovering charm to remove the paper from its compartment and then setting it down on the floor where he used what sounded like a laundry spell to unfold it. Harry recognized Regulus's neat handwriting instantly, and bent his head down to read what was on the paper.

"They're just numbers," Draco said. "It doesn't look like there's a pattern."

"Wait," Harry said, because he had noticed a tiny, scrawled message at the very bottom of the page. He read it out loud to Draco, mulling it over in his head. "Abscondam et apparitio".

"That doesn't make sense," Draco said, furrowing his brow. Those are the words for spells, for hiding or making something appear, but they can't be used together. It wouldn't do anything."

Harry looked sideways at him, impressed that he understood what was on the page.

"What if it's not a spell, then? What if it's a message, like 'hide and seek?'"

"Yes! Or…" Draco gave Harry a knowing smile, turning the picture back around to look at the cabin in the woods once more. "Hiding in plain sight. It's a map to these woods. The numbers are a code of some sort. I wonder if Regulus used it, somewhere he could go if he needed to hide."

"Didn't do him a lot of good, in the end," Harry muttered darkly. "I don't know if this is a good idea. It could have dark magic involved…"

"I can test for that. I know some of the spells."

"You're not thinking of finding this place, are you?" Draco had already taken out his wand and was starting to mutter an incantation under his breath, but Harry placed a hand gently on his elbow to stop him. "Even if it was a map, how do we know it's safe? What if it's still being used by Voldemort's old followers?"

Harry had to admit that he was not normally the person raising concerns about safety, but things were different when it came to Malfoy. There was a part of him that felt like he had to do everything he could to protect Draco, some instinct that he would not have recognized within himself several months ago.

"He betrayed the Dark Lord," Draco said, pointing again towards the painting. This could have been his backup plan, a place he had set up to hide in case he needed to lay low for a while. Don't you think a place like that would help us given our current predicament? Just in case?"

Harry looked at Draco with his Hawthorn wand still outstretched and a look of excitement in his eyes, something he hadn't seen on Draco in quite some time. He didn't know how he was going to be able to disagree with him.

"We just need to figure out what the numbers do," Draco muttered, turning again to look at the unfolded piece of parchment on the hardwood floor.

"They're coordinates," Harry said, not knowing how it had clicked so simply in his head, but remembering when he had studied these in primary school. "It's probably part of the spell he wrote, to transport him to that location."

"And the ring is enchanted to take the wearer there," Draco said, nodding to himself. "It's like a portkey. I just need to make sure it's not bearing dark magic, and then…" He looked at Harry expectantly, as though asking for approval.

"Let's make sure we're right about the ring," Harry said, swallowing hard. "Then we'll see."

…

The surge of adrenaline from the hidden ring had certainly cheered Draco up; he was acting as Harry normally did whenever he came home at the end of the day with some exciting new leads he had discovered.

They had both levitated the ring and parchment downstairs, careful not to drop them, and placed the items on Harry's kitchen table so they could figure out what purpose they served.

"What if it's older than Regulus, what if it's some ancient wizarding place that hasn't been discovered in hundreds of years?" Draco suggested, rolling up his right sleeve so he could concentrate on brandishing his wand. He left the other sleeve rolled all the way down.

"It was in Regulus's handwriting," Harry said. "He might not have made this place, but the note is from him."

"Do you mind if I - " Draco held up his wand indicating that he was about to perform a couple of charms.

"No, go ahead. Just… be careful."

Draco spent the next several hours tinkering with the ring, trying an array of different spells and then getting his school books out of his trunk so he could experiment with a couple other ideas. Harry gave it his own shot, trying some of the things that he had learned in Auror training as well, but it turned out he didn't have the expertise that Draco did when it came to dark enchantments. After making the ring glow slightly and do sort of a barrel roll with his wand, he decided to make them tea instead.

"Harry," Draco prodded him, and Harry realized he had been asleep, his head leaning against the wall of the kitchen. He was still sitting at the table.

"I found something," He had a thick, dusty old book in his hands, and turned it around so Harry could see it. "It's my great, great grandfather," Draco said, pointing to the silver ring that he wore on his finger. Harry's attention was drawn not to the ring, but to the man in the portrait. It was Phineas Nigellus, the same man whose portrait had accompanied them on their search for Horcruxes, their own reluctant informant into the goings on at Hogwarts when they were camping in the woods. The floral engraving on the ring he was wearing seemed to match the one that they had found upstairs in Regulus's room.

"It was supposed to be passed on to each firstborn son in the family, but obviously when Sirius was disinherited, Regulus must have gotten it. My father had one too, it's a popular tradition in pureblood families."

"Do you still have yours?" Harry asked, mostly just out of curiosity.

"No. Besmirching the family name by fucking lads is its own league of disinheritance in this world. My father never even gave it to me."

Draco said this all in a matter-of-fact tone, but Harry knew it probably felt like pouring salt into an open wound for him to talk about his past like that.

"Sorry… I didn't mean to…"

"It's okay. Don't be sorry."

Harry looked away uncomfortably, remembering what Draco had said on the roof about homosexual relationships being stigmatized in some circles of the wizarding world. He hadn't even considered until now that he might have to personally face the repercussions of this stigmatization now that he and Draco were in a relationship. It would be a media blitz, as Bennett had told him it would be, but there would also be discrimination on other levels, like within his own job. Was he equipped to handle that, on top of everything else that he had been dealing with since he started on as an Auror?

He decided to pocket that for a future moment, once they had gotten out of all of this mess with Delev. Once they were finally free to make decisions about their lives.

"So," Draco continued, "Regulus decided to put an enchantment on the ring, instead of keeping the tradition going. Maybe he knew he wouldn't have anyone to pass it on to."

"Maybe he knew Voldemort was going to kill him," Harry suggested, remembering that Regulus was relatively certain of this when he sought out to replace Voldemort's horcrux in the cave.

"So he used it instead as a connector to a hiding place. Maybe to keep him safe just in case he found himself trapped?"

"Or he left it for Sirius? Just in case things got out of control with Voldemort after he died?"

"It's possible," Draco said, nodding. "He just hid it a bit too well."

"Do you think it's safe?" Harry asked. "All the spells you've been casting, have you found anything yet?"

"It seems like it's just been charmed to act as a two-way portkey. I haven't found any traces of dark magic on it yet."

"Right, good." Harry nodded, looking at the silver ring upon the table. It was comforting to know a bit about the history behind the ring, just so that they both knew it wasn't a foreign object planted by Voldemort himself. He found himself staring into space for a moment, thinking of the possibilities of where it could lead.

"So… Do you want to use it?" Draco asked slowly. "See where he wanted to take us?"

Harry hesitated, the uncertainty still weighing heavily on him.

"I don't know, Draco, it could be dangerous. What if we can't get back?"

"Don't you think Regulus would have built a way to get back into the ring? And how is it any more dangerous than staying here right now?"

"Nobody's tried to attack us, I think we're perfectly safe here."

"Nobody's tried to attack us yet!" Draco said the words very forcefully, and with a hint of desperation in his voice. Harry furrowed his brow again, looking at Draco.

"Do you know something you're not telling me?" Harry asked, point blank. "Is there another reason you don't want me tailing Delev's followers?"

"No," Draco said, looking down at his hands. "No, I just… I want to have a plan. I want to have somewhere we can go if we're in trouble. I couldn't live with myself if you were…"

He didn't finish his sentence, but he didn't need to. Harry's expression softened, and he lifted up Draco's chin to face him.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I promise. You're going to have a hell of a time trying to get rid of me, drug dealers or no drug dealers."

Draco nodded, taking one of Harry's hands and interlocking their fingers upon the table.

"I want to see if this works," he said. "Please, just trust me. I would be able to tell if it were dangerous."

"Okay." Harry squeezed his hand in response.

Draco picked up the ring, placing it on his third finger and speaking the spell that was scrawled on the parchment between them.

Harry felt a jolt in his stomach, and everything faded to black.