Thank you to YetiBettyFoufetti for beta-reading this chapter.
Chapter Text
Harry arrived late, like he always did. Draco stared in disbelief as Trey Davidson, the journalist he was rumored to be dating, followed him into Ron and Hermione's cozy living room. On the opposite side of the room Camille was speaking with some Healers from St. Mungo's.
"Blaise," he said, interrupting him in the middle of a story about publication deadlines or something similar.
"It's great to know you're paying attention."
"Nevermind that. Tell me, did you ever hear anything about Harry having substance abuse issues?"
"Potter? Other than when he was a drunk? No, not really."
"Aha."
"But I imagine it's not something he would publicize, so who knows? Everybody has substance abuse problems these days."
"So you never heard a rumor about something worse than alcohol?"
"No, I haven't. Why don't you just ask Weasley? I imagine he'd know."
Ignoring Blaises's idiotic question, he sipped from his drink and watched Trey as he strode across the room carrying two glasses. He was tall and lean, had a thing about him which made him stand out in a crowd. It was all Draco needed to decide he disliked him profusely.
"What do you know about that guy, then?"
"About Davidson? Not much. Good journalist. Mediocre writer."
"You think he's a good journalist?" Draco mocked.
"No, I'm just being polite."
"Come."
Blaise let Draco drag him across the room, sensing the futility of trying to fight against it.
"Hi," Draco said directly to Trey, ignoring Harry. "I hope we're not interrupting. Blaise and I were just talking about your last article in the Prophet."
"Oh, were you?" Trey gleamed at him. He had a radiant smile, the contagious kind. Draco allowed it to contaminate him.
"I'm Draco, by the way."
"I know who you are, of course," he laughed. "So, what did you think about it?"
"I thought it was very well written. Great syntax." He turned towards Harry, who was leaning on the wall with a sour expression on his face. "What did you think about it?"
Harry took his time answering. "I haven't read it yet."
"Well, you should. It's a very pointed critique of the Ministry's diminishing support for wizards living in property. It really makes you think about the role of the government in the fair distribution of resources, even though I have to say, Trey, you could have gone even further in your diatribe. Why stop at the minimum wage?"
"Believe it or not," Blaise intervened, "Draco here suffers from a very common condition which is going to France and coming back so far on the left he'll soon advocate for abolishing private property."
"Which is ironic," Harry added, as if Draco wasn't there, "given that he owns quite a few of them. And that he was raised in a castle."
Draco crossed his arms, mirroring Harry. Even Blaise couldn't find anything witty to say in order to cover up the fact that Harry had done the one thing people didn't do anymore, at least not in his presence.
"People don't generally choose where they are born, Harry. Not the rich and not the poor. If you had read your own boyfriend's article you would have learnt this rather elusive fact about humanity."
Harry cleared his throat.
"I'll keep that in mind. Excuse me, I need to find Ron."
Once Harry was gone, Draco lost all interest in speaking with Trey. He left them alone to complain about the ins and outs of writing for a national paper. On his way out of the living room, he checked to see if Camille was still deep into conversation with the other Healers. He was.
Harry was alone in the kitchen, carefully placing candles on a beautifully decorated cake - which Draco had not expected to ever see Harry doing.
"I see you've found Ron," he remarked from the door frame.
Harry glanced at him.
"You just can't stop yourself from being an asshole, or what?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, did I not react how you wanted me to? Isn't that why you brought your hook up to this party, to make me jealous?"
"Are you drunk?"
"I'm comfortably tipsy, thank you for asking."
"Maybe it's time for you to go home then."
Draco entered the kitchen and closed the door behind him.
"Maybe it's time for you to stop playing silly mind games and just tell me what's your problem."
"This is hardly the moment for that conversation." Harry snapped, managing to topple down half of the candles he had carefully placed around the Happy Birthday, Ron written in golden frosting.
"Let me do it, you uncoordinated beast." Draco pushed Harry out of the way and started picking up the displaced candles with great care. "I don't know why, but I'm getting the impression that with you it's never the right moment for any kind of conversation."
"Take the hint then?"
"We're not children anymore, for God's sake. I'm sorry we misunderstood each other, but there's no reason to make me the villain of the story all over again."
Harry snickered.
"Don't do that. I don't want to pretend we're back in school and I detest you, when I don't."
"Well, maybe I do."
"No, you don't."
"Why wouldn't I? You're still a cheating bully, like you were in school."
He walked Camille to the train station, like almost every Sunday evening, then meandered back to his apartment through empty back alleys. He had learnt which route to take to avoid the crowded boulevards. The days were longer now that summer was approaching. He fell asleep on the sofa while reading one of Camille's history books while the sky was still purple. Around midnight, he moved to the bedroom in a haze. He was woken up maybe one hour later by a sound so loud it felt as if it came from inside his skull.
"Draco, I'm sorry, but there's been an emergency. We need you at a crime scene."
Felix Apparated both of them a couple of miles south of London, onto the front steps of a run down house. Inside, right as he stepped into the front room, he found Harry crouched down next to a lifeless body.
"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Harry asked when Draco got down next to him, pointing to a grayish substance coming out of the man's mouth.
"No. But I've read about it."
"What is it?"
"I need to test it to be completely sure, but based on the consistency, the color and the fact that it's coming out of a dead man's body, it looks like an ancient poison that goes by the name of Slow Death."
"How long until it kills the victim?"
"It's impossible to tell. Could be anytime between a week and six months. And it's virtually impossible to detect before it's killed them."
Harry nodded.
"That complicates things a little. Is it hard to make?"
"I'm not sure about the specifics, I never saw a recipe for it. This is really old Dark Magic. I imagine only a handful of people in Britain could make it. I'd put my money on the fact that it was imported though, since it was much more popular in the East than here."
"Alright. What do you need to test it?"
"Just fill this bottle to the brim. And some of the man's hair."
Harry grabbed Draco's vial and cast a spell to transfer the liquid into it while Draco cut some of the man's hair. He had to struggle to get it into an evidence bag, so he almost didn't notice the fact that Harry's hand was trembling, making it hard to fill the vial. Eventually, he handed it back to Draco.
"Should I go test it now?"
"Tomorrow morning is fine. You can go home."
Draco didn't need to be told twice. He would have much rather spent his night with the cadaver laying on the floor than with Harry. He gestured to Felix, who quickly followed him.
The first thing Draco did when he arrived at the office the next morning was to check the entire potion stock of the BAO. It took him a couple of hours, but he was relieved to see nothing was missing. He could finally get to work on the mysterious potion from the previous night. When he was able to confidently conclude that his initial diagnosis had been correct, he wrote a detailed report of his findings and of the possible leads he managed to trace down based on availability of ingredients and lunar cycles. He sent one copy to Harry, one copy to Ron and one he filed in his own archive. Then he went back to what occupied most of his time these days: trying to decipher the source of the counterfeit products used by Mandelley's gang in their operation. That night, the idea of calling Camille to talk about his day seemed just too tiresome.
I'll do it tomorrow.
But he didn't. And then the letter thing happened.
He wasn't even supposed to be the one sorting through the mail. Usually Anna went through all the mail he received, answered anything she was capable of answering and passed only the most important ones to him. But since he was in the lunchroom when the mail carrier dropped by, he picked it up himself. Between a bunch of receipts, he found a letter addressed to Harry.
Irritated, he considered just throwing it away. Nobody would be the wiser, after all. But since he was right by his door, he decided to take the high road: drop it off and be done with it quickly.
"Letter for you."
Harry had said "Just leave it by the door," without even bothering to look up from his notebook, only to violently barge into his office twenty minutes later holding the letter.
"Where did you get this from?"
Draco had to put down his goggles - he was in the middle of brewing a potion which had the nasty habit of spitting fire when you least expected it - to make sure Harry was really questioning him on the origins of a simple letter he happened to drop off.
"The mail carrier. It got lost between my letters."
The door shut behind him with a bang. Draco sighed and put his goggles back on. He started the very tedious process of stirring the molten metal-like substance when Harry blasted through the door, again.
"What now?"
"I need some potions."
"Well, go get them yourself. I'm busy," he sneered, fighting to maintain a constant rhythm to the stirring. "Just don't forget to sign the goddamn forms!"
Despite his best efforts, he had to start over. Multiple times. It took him all day long to figure out why the potion wasn't turning the bright red color it was supposed to, but he didn't want to give up. When Ron dropped by to ask him if he was ready - they were supposed to get dinner together with some people from the office - he told him to go on without him. He eventually figured out he had not taken into consideration the effect of the indoor temperature on the cooling process. Cursing himself for forgetting the most basic of variables when it came to brewing that particular type of potion, he picked up Harry's form and went into the back room to double check the inventory. Everything seemed in order. He was almost out of the door when he decided to take one of the Mandelley Calming potions home with him, to let it sit in a testing compound overnight. Except only four bottles were left on the shelf. Knowing full well five bottles had been there yesterday, he double checked the checklist anyways before crossing the hallway to Harry's office. The door was locked. He wasn't picking up his phone either.
Fucking hell.
He had to ring the doorbell five times before Harry finally answered the door.
"Harry, are you trying to get me fired or imprisoned? Or both?"
"What?"
"I told you a million times to be careful what potions you take! Do you realize I have people who check the stock every month, to make sure everything's there? Do you realize you took an illegal potion, which you didn't sign for, which could get me in real trouble?"
"Calm down…"
"Don't you tell me to calm down, you twat! It's one thing to be an asshole, it's another one to jeopardize my entire career! To play with my life! Because you can't be bothered to read a tag!"
"I can read just fine."
"Just give me the bloody potion, Potter! You're not allowed to take those. They are evidence!"
"Evidence?"
"Don't even try to act like you don't know what I'm talking about. You're the only one who was in that room today without me!"
"The room?"
It was only then Draco realized Harry wasn't annoyed or angry. He was just trying very, very hard not to laugh.
"No…"
"What?"
"No. Harry, tell me you didn't actually take it on purpose."
"What?"
"Please tell me you didn't actually drink it?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," he laughed, turning on his heels. Draco watched in awe as he let himself fall on the couch, picked up the TV remote and started zapping through the channels.
Riding on the adrenaline wave that descended upon him, Draco closed the door behind him and scanned his surroundings in search of clues. The apartment looked a lot more disorderly than the last time he'd been there. There were take out boxes everywhere on the kitchen counter, some of them unopened or almost full. The living room floor was covered with dirty clothes and papers. He spotted the letter he'd given him that morning on the counter. This time he read the name of the sender: Dudley Dursley. He had no idea who that was. He pocketed it and continued looking for the vial, knowing full well that it was probably not there.
He looked over the kitchen island at Harry. His eyes were closed, a state of affairs which scared him out of his hesitations. He headed towards the door he knew led to Harry's bedroom, a familiar apprehension sending a cold shiver down his spine.
The problem wasn't that he'd never seen this before. It was the opposite. In his family, the only tradition that had been followed to the letter by everybody on his father's side had been an addiction to Calming Potion. On his mother's side, it was Dreamless Sleep.
On the nightstand he found what he was looking for. With a trembling hand, he reached, not for the empty bottle, but for the Prozac tablets resting next to it.