He recognized him just a second too late to safely return to the back room without being noticed, but he did it anyway, turning on his heels so fast he almost ran into a bookshelf. The new girl – the one who'd fetched him – followed him.
"Hey, are you alright?"
He could hear him calling his name from the front of the store.
"Yes, just tell them we can't process their return at this hour, or whatever!"
"But I just told them we can!"
"Just get back there and tell them whatever you want!" he hissed as he closed the door between them. Alone in the makeshift storeroom, he felt how hot he had become from the sheer shock – Potter! - and embarrassment. What was he embarrassed about anyway? To have been seen running away, cowardly, from Harry Potter? He'd done so much worse than that. It had been so long since he last saw him - or just another wizard for that matter - that he instinctively fled, as if he was a criminal in he was not! Not entirely, anyways. Not knowing what to do, he continued what he was doing before– checking book titles off an endless list – mechanically yet somehow frantically, slightly afraid Harry might walk in at any moment, ignoring all rules and pretense, as he does, but nothing happened for a long time. It was the new girl who popped in again sometime later.
"They're gone, by the way, so you can come out."
"Thanks, Leanne. Sorry about that."
Draco untangled himself from the rows of tags someone else had left hanging off the shelfs and emerged in the stark light of the empty bookshop.
"So, who was that?"
Leanne was leading the way to the checkout desk, where they'll have to count the money and fill in the daily reports. It was now completely dark outside, and Draco felt the tension of the day – the morning exam he probably failed, the mess with his scholarship, the Potter encounter – giving way to something much more horrible, but at least more familiar.
"Just a guy I used to know that I didn't want to talk to."
"Well, he really wanted to talk to 're lucky his friend was in a hurry. Ah, he left you a note. "
Draco let go of the pack of bills he had just removed from the till and snatched the paper from Leanne's hand. He didn't know what to expect: something terrible? But instead, in a barely decipherable font, the note read:
040 618 9533
Call me,
Harry
He threw the paper in the bin below the desk and started counting the 20 pound bills.
"They looked pretty strange, your friends"
After so many years living amongst the non magical, Draco could finally appreciate just what made wizards stand out in a crowd, even when sporting muggle clothes. He was just glad he'd learnt how to blend in.
"They're not my friends. But yes," he agreed, wondering, but just for a second, who Harry's companion might be.
On his way home the shock of what had happened started to wear off and was replaced by the realization that he simply couldn't afford not to study for another night, despite how drained he felt. Going to the library was a safer bet than trying to do an all-nighter right next to his bed so he took a left instead of a right in front of the hospital and made his way to the university library. He felt pretty shaken up, but he didn't want to think about that, so he forced himself to think about his exams instead.
It was on arriving on the second floor and taking his usual place by the large windows, that he was forced out of his thoughts by a familiar glimmer. He ignored it at first, but not even a minute later he heard a weird noise coming from the same, apparently empty space. A hard to describe noise, something like fabric settling. Paranoid, he stared intently. No, it couldn't possibly be that. But something felt really off about the whole thing. Still staring, he was reminded of another instance he had had the same intuition. He definitely did not want to think about that either.
Nothing happened for a good five minutes, so he went back to his books. Two hours later, the feeling was completely gone, which only made him more persuaded it had been there at the beginning. But what would be the point in that, he asked himself, more to convince himself there couldn't possibly be any. Why would Harry Potter suddenly follow him to the library under the invisibility cloak, like when they were children?
By the time he finished the three-hour exam the next day he'd managed to convince himself he had avoided, once again, any sort of contact with the magical world and that he had been nothing but short of crazy to believe Harry Potter had been following him last night. He arrived at work for the evening shift around 2 o'clock, sleep deprived but feeling slightly better, where he found Harry waiting for him by the checkout counter, looking rather intimidating.
"Don't run away again, Malfoy, I need to talk to you."
Ignoring him, he managed to squiggle past him and place himself behind the counter, which became like a barrier between them, where he could pretend to busy himself while trying to figure out what to do.
"Potter, I'm at work. As foreign a concept that must be for you, I'm sure even you understand at work people generally have work to do and can't be seen chatting away their day", he concluded while taking out some documents from a random file. Hoping that would dissuade Potter was, however, rather naive.
"Just five minutes. I see you're…uhm…busy"
A queue was starting to form behind him. Begrudgingly, aware of the trap he had entered by replying to Harry and starting what resembled a normal, civilized discussion, from which one couldn't simply walk away without some form of logical conclusion, Draco pointed to a small table placed in front of the large storefront window where customers could sit and read, and started scanning the pile of books a young woman placed on the counter.
After stalling for as much as he could and catching Harry looking at him a couple of times, he called a colleague to take his place at the till. On the second chair there was a pile of books some customer must have left behind. He placed it on the table and started to sort the books by category, thus avoiding having to look at Harry.
"So you… work in a muggle bookshop then."
Placing one book down in its category - non fiction - Draco snickered.
"Still a keen observationist, I see. You must be an Auror or something, Potter. "
Harry half-laughed, as if unsure what attitude to adopt in his presence. That gave Draco the confidence to look at him, which Harry seemed to have been waiting for.
"Malfoy – Uhm, Draco."
He drew his chair closer to the desk, as to convey how serious he was taking their little talk. Draco immediately pictured him doing this hundreds of times, in bare and cold interrogating rooms.
"So, you've been… well?"
No matter how innocent it sounded, Draco knew that behind those words the only sentiment Harry entertained was pure, undistilled pity. He would have preferred the hate it had replaced.
"I assure you, we can skip the pleasantries. Just tell me what you came here to tell me."
"Ok, then, as you wish. It's about, er, Narcissa."
Draco's face hardened. Suddenly, all of his worries about this encounter seemed very distant, very childish, as if the real world had finally revealed itself to be much more cruel than he'd anticipated.
"My mother?"
"I… yeah. Last year, we found this in her Azkaban cell. But since we didn't know exactly where you were… well… here it is."
This was all just so surreal, Draco was starting to feel dizzy. Here he was, at work, where he had worked for the last two years, just after having finished an insanely difficult exam he has been studying for for months, having been so busy, so tired, so stressed he had almost completely forgotten that life used to be completely different, so involved in this new life that only the nightmares still persisted from the old one, and now he had to think about his mother .
Harry had placed an envelope between them. Draco didn't dare touch it.
"What's inside?"
"A letter. Addressed to you."
"When did you find it? My mother died four years ago."
"Last year, when we searched the prison for possible communication tunnels. She had hidden it in between two concrete slabs."
"Why did you take it?"
Harry looked very uncomfortable all of a sudden.
"I found it and, well… if I had shown it to my supervisors they would have probably read it or destroyed it and… I didn't want that to happen."
"Why not?" he asked incredulously.
"It was just important to me to do this. For your mother. Please take it."
Draco knew what Harry was talking about. He had heard the story - from Harry's mouth at his mother's trial, from his mother the last time he had seen her, from the papers where it had been retold, regurgitated and finally distorted until it stopped resembling reality. It had obviously not been enough to keep her out of Azkaban.
"No."
He had risen without noticing, and was now staring down at Harry and the envelope. He could never be sure, but he thought he knew what that envelope contained, and he wanted nothing of it.
"I don't want it. Give it to your bosses or burn it, I couldn't care less."
That's when Draco noticed a strange looking man holding a book in his arms, staring at Harry's back through the storefront window. Harry opened his mouth to argue but Draco cut him off.
"I think your boyfriend's waiting for you."
"What?"
He hadn't really meant it, he was just teasing out of a habit he didn't think would have persisted but somehow did. To his surprise Harry turned around immediately and, upon seeing the man, exclaimed "Oh, fuck!". The solemn atmosphere that had grown between them suddenly dissipated. The man shook his head at Harry, mouthed fuck you , then turned around and disappeared from view. In disbelief, not knowing whether this was a joke or not, Draco asked: "Wait, is that really your boyfriend? "
Harry started gathering his things in a hectic frenzy, looking rather alarmed.
"Spare me your homophobia, Malfoy. I'm going now, OK? Sorry to have bothered you, I do hope you will be able to recover from it!"
He was aware Potter most likely reached the conclusion that his comment had been homophobic because of all the years he had known him as a bullying bigot, which only confirmed what he already intuitively had guess: that everybody will always think of him as the same horrible person.
"Fuck you, Potter! For your information, I've known I was gay since I was five!"
Harry turned to look at him, and so did a couple of the customers that had been close enough to hear him.
"Jesus, OK. Sorry, I didn't know."
And then he turned back around and left. The letter was still on the table, between the piles of books Draco had sorted through their conversation.