I'd barely gotten back from visiting my friend at St. Mungo's on Christmas Day when I heard voices upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time; Draco followed at a much more sedate pace.

A tall, red-haired man was leaning against the wall near my door. He edged over and laughed as it swung open. "Still haven't learned to go up stairs like a normal person?" he asked, and I grinned. "Hey, Astoria. Happy Christmas."

"Happy Christmas, Bill," I said. I was turning to greet his wife when Johanna barrelled into me.

"Auntie Tori, Alec is letting the baby play with the dragons!" I glanced over toward the living room - my nephew seemed to be entertaining Bill's daughter with a very elaborate story about dragon wars.

That tracked. She seemed to be absorbed in it, which is more than I could say for any of us, who'd heard his stories at least ten times.

"Johanna." My brother's tone made her mouth snap shut. "I told you to let your brother tell his stories. Complaining to your aunt isn't going to change that."

She spun around and stomped toward the stairs. My brother and sister-in-law exchanged looks. "I've got it," Addison said when he took a step toward the living room. "No, Bren, sit down - you dealt with the meltdown this morning."

"You sure?"

She sighed. "Yes. It's good for her to realize that pouting isn't always going to get her your attention, anyway."

In the silence that followed, I looked over at Bill's wife. "Hi," I said, feeling a little awkward. I'd known Bill Weasley for about as long as I could remember - he and my brother had been good friends since their first year - but I didn't know his wife very well at all. She smiled at me, but before she could say anything, I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me.

"Hey," Draco said. "I wasn't sure if - oh." I glanced back at him. He didn't meet my gaze. "I - "

"Draco, this is Bill," I said, interjecting. "Bill, this is Draco."

"I know," Bill said flatly. His smile was gone.

I glanced over at my brother. He was doing a fairly admirable job of holding back a grimace. "So, Bill -" he started.

Then Bill's wife swept across the room to give Draco a hug. "It is so good to see you," she said. He stiffened - he clearly hadn't been expected such a friendly greeting. "Harry was just telling me about the work you have been doing together last week."

"Of course he was," I heard Bill mutter. "So how have you been doing, Astoria?"

They left shortly after that - Bill and Draco pointedly avoided having to acknowledge each other on their way out, though Bill gave the rest of us a very warm goodbye and Draco actually returned the parting hug from Bill's wife.

"Sorry," Brendon said after we'd sat down in the living room. "His mother owled them to push back dinner when they were just about to leave, so they stopped by here to kill some time."

Draco shrugged, and after a moment, he said, "I didn't know she and Harry were so close."

That made my brother laugh. "Yeah, well. That's a long story."

"Didn't he rescue her sister during the Triwizard Tournament?"

"Apparently not that long. Yeah - not that Gabrielle was actually in any danger, but neither of them knew it at the time, and Fleur is all about the principle of the thing. There's other stuff, too - it's a weird friendship. Bill isn't always thrilled by it."

Draco looked mystified. "Why not? I thought all the Weasleys loved Saint Potter, and it's not like Harry's the one who fell flat on his face asking her to the Yule Ball."

"What?" Brendon and I asked at the same time.

Draco looked a little bewildered. "Yeah - Weasley - Ron, I mean - kind of yelled it at her while she was walking by. He ran away before she and her friend started laughing. It was really fucking funny. But why isn't Bill thrilled with it?"

Brendon sighed. "Because on things where Harry and Ron don't quite see eye to eye, Bill tends to trust Ron's judgment, and Fleur usually takes Harry's side - they kind of think alike."

Draco shook his head. "Sorry, I think I'm hallucinating. I could have sworn that you just said that Potter and a French veela think alike."

Brendon threw back his head and laughed. "Fair," he said. "It's true, though - I got to know Fleur pretty well during the war, and I've been working with Harry for a few years."

Draco still looked skeptical, but he didn't say anything else, and after the silence had just started to spread out to become uncomfortable, I changed the subject. "Oh - Brendon, I meant to ask, did you donate a lot of money to the permanent ward at St. Mungo's? There's a star on the door with our name on it."

He shook his head, looking mystified. "We don't have that kind of disposable income, especially not with the house and the kids. Maybe it was Mum and Dad?"

"Maybe."

I saw Draco shift his weight from one foot to the other out of the corner of my eye. "It - it was me," he said. We both jerked our heads over to look at him, and he made a face. "Yeah, this is why I didn't say anything. No, it's just - I came into some money after the war - like, that's mine, not my parents' - and I just kind of - I dunno, donating my salary to the hospital seemed like a good thing to do, since I didn't need it, so I have been. I guess I hit some kind of threshold in the fall or something - they told me I could get a star on the door, but I didn't think the name "Malfoy" was going to be good for anyone to see and I don't want my father getting credit for it, so I told them to put your last name on it instead - it's partially on you that I have that job at all, so it seemed fitting. It's not a big deal."

I exchanged a mystified look with my brother. "You've never mentioned that to me," I said.

My boyfriend shrugged again. "It doesn't - I wasn't looking for praise. It didn't even occur to me that you'd see it."

Brendon seemed to sense that Draco was feeling genuinely uncomfortable, so he changed the subject.

I had something else eating at me, but I waited until we were back downstairs to raise it. "Draco, why don't you like Bill?"

Draco collapsed onto my couch and buried his face in his hands. "Please don't touch me," he said when I rested my hand on his shoulder. I withdrew it, and he took a deep, shuddering breath. "It's not that I don't like him - I don't even really know him - but it's my fault his face is like that. It happened the night - the night that Professor Snape killed Professor Dumbledore. It's my fault Greyback was there."

He was starting to shake. I wasn't sure what to say, so I didn't say anything.

"I mean, I didn't know he was going to be there! And Dumbledore even said it, and I don't think he knew I didn't mean for Greyback to be there, and that's when I knew that I was stuck, because even if he'd gotten out of there he would have taken it back. And I deserved to have it taken back, I shouldn't have let any of them in there, and the only reason nobody died was that fucking potion that Potter won in class." He let out a strangled laugh. "Using Snape's old textbook, so there's a round fucking circle for you."

He didn't say anything else, and I cleared my throat. "Draco, I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know enough," he said into his knees. "You know it's my fault, and you hate me for it, and I don't even blame you. I deserve it."

I took a deep breath. I hadn't realized that Bill's fight with Greyback had happened the night Draco let Death Eaters into the school, which really did make it his fault. "Why does Fleur like you, then?" I asked stupidly. I immediately regretted asking the question, but to my surprise, it actually made him laugh. When he picked his head up, his face was flushed and blotchy.

"I mean, I think Bill just doesn't like me because Ron doesn't - I got way too drunk with Potter one night and ended up getting angsty about the Greyback thing, and he seemed genuinely confused at my feeling like that was my fault."

"Fine," I said. "So why does Ron dislike you if you like Harry enough to get drunk with him?"

Draco sighed. "I mean, Potter saw me in some moments I'd really have preferred no one ever see me in, so he knew how fucked up I was. Weasley - Ron, I mean - didn't." He hesitated. "I mean, I did once accidentally poison Ron, but that was really unintentional - it's not like I stomped on his nose or anything."

"Whose nose did you stomp on?" It was a disturbing image - somehow the physicality of it felt even worse to me than magic.

He looked like he was deeply regretting opening this can of worms. "Potter's. Then I left him stunned on the floor of the Hogwarts Express under his invisibility cloak. I'm actually still not sure how the fuck he got free - I didn't want anyone to find him until the train got back to London."

There was absolutely nothing about Draco's friendship with Harry Potter that made any sense at all to me. "And he decided to be your friend after that?"

Draco let out a snort of laughter. "Oh, that probably isn't even in the top ten worst things we've done to each other, he had his nose healed before he even got into the Great Hall. That doesn't hold I candle to the time he walked in on me sobbing my heart out to Moaning fucking Myrtle and I tried to crucio him, so then he used sectumsempra on me." When he saw my expression, he quickly added. "He didn't know what it did - fucking idiot, using a spell he didn't know the first thing about."

"Seriously, Draco, how are you friends?"

"I have no idea. I mean, in my defense, I didn't rat him out on the Astronomy Tower that night."

"What do you mean?"

He sighed. "I mean, I was pretty sure he was nearby - there were two broomsticks, I knew he had that stupid cloak, and I didn't see him downstairs in the fight even though I saw everybody else. It fit."

"Why didn't you say anything?" The answer to the question suddenly really mattered to me, now that I was thinking about what an awful person he'd been.

"Greyback." He was staring at the wall. "I don't know that I would've said anything anyway, but Greyback being there made it really easy."

"But you said he cursed you."

Draco sighed. "Yeah, well. I was more focused on the blinding pain and all the blood and knowing that I was about to die, but I remember his face - I think that was the most scared I ever saw him. Bit hard to hold a grudge over it, really." He forced a laugh. "You know, I think that's the closest anyone's ever got to killing me. In a roundabout way, I guess it helped you, though - I know that's why all his friends learned to deal with sectumsempra."

That was entirely too much to think about, and while both Bill getting attacked and the star on the door were much more significant than my boyfriend's history with Harry Potter, the latter was all I was finding that I had the emotional energy to grapple with just then. "I just… how are you friends?"

Draco sighed. "One thing I'll give Saint Potter is that if you tell him that he was right and you mean it, he'll let just about anything go." He studied me for a minute. "Are you changing the subject on purpose?"

I shrugged. He seemed to understand that that meant yes.

"Are you just trying to be nice to me? You don't have to, I'm the one who fucked up. I should feel bad."

"I'm never nice to you," I pointed out, and he managed a small smile. "I just - it was a hard morning, and I think I can't deal with serious stuff right now."

"Oh. Okay." He studied me for a moment. "Uh - I'm not really sure what the mood is right now. How do you feel?"

"Are you asking whether you can kiss me to distract me from how I'm feeling?"

His face flushed a little. "Yeah," he said after a minute. "I - it's fine if you don't want to, no pressure, I just -"

He stopped talking when my lips met his.

i know that this is out of order - i'll move it to the right order in the next few days, but i don't want to confuse anyone who gets the notification with it being at chapter 10, haha. i'll hopefully be uploading a (fairly smutty) follow up to the may 2002 chapter in the next few days - it's about half done, i'm just having a hard time motivating to finish it.

anyway! thanks so much to everyone for reviewing + to you for reading - more reviews/faves are super appreciated, and if there are any moments you'd like to see that i haven't written, please let me know!

- branwen