[One-shot] The Last Runespoor
Sep. 30th, 2007 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: The Last Runespoor
Genre: Harry/Draco friendship.
Rating: G. Yes, really.
Warnings: DH SPOILERS. Ignores the epilogue. Non-linear.
Summary: Harry, an expert in cleaning up dangerous snakes, has made the acquaintance of Draco Malfoy, teaching at Hogwarts, while he works on removing Runespoors from the Forbidden Forest. They have different opinions about what’s going to happen when Harry captures the last snake.
Notes: Written at the request of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
megyal, who wanted a fic where Harry and Draco are friends.
The Last Runespoor
“Should have known I’d find you out here, Potter.”
Harry smiled and, because he could, kept his head bowed as he finished the last bites of his breakfast, a domed set of scones with bits of ham and butter baked inside them. They tasted absolutely delicious, and he paused, letting the mingled flavors slide over his tongue, before he looked up to meet Draco’s eyes. Draco stood framed by two trees half a dozen paces away, fighting to keep a look of disgust off his face and failing.
“Look at you,” he said, and took a step forwards, though not fast enough to conceal the basket hanging from his arm. “Sitting on a tree root and eating like a savage when you know you would be welcome in Hogwarts’s Great Hall.”
“If you’d ever tasted Mrs. Weasley’s cooking, you wouldn’t be saying things like that,” said Harry mildly, and stood, swatting bits of bark and dirt from his robes with the flat of one hand. Draco made a further horrible face, as much to say that not using one’s wand for such tasks was beneath contempt. “And what’s that I see? Someone was concerned I missed the meal in the Great Hall, so he brought me a picnic breakfast?” He stepped around Draco, reaching for the basket.
Draco turned neatly to face him, and landed a slap as neat on his reaching hand. “That’s for lunch,” he said mildly. “I thought you could use the excitement after you face your Runespoor. It’s the last one in the Forbidden Forest, isn’t it?”
“So far as I can tell.” Harry gave the basket one more longing glance, then reminded himself how hungry he’d probably be at noon and turned away. The trees around him shimmered, thick with the layered leaves of high summer. Dozens of smells struck him in the nostrils if he paused long enough to sniff, but Harry had lived in the Forest for two months now, and they had ceased to be something he took the time to notice. He watched, instead, the way the sunlight dimmed beyond the clearing where he’d eaten, and the small, scurrying things, not always with four legs, that ventured out of the shadows to nose at the crumbs he’d let drop. “I’ve tracked it to its lair, and it’s definitely not had any visitors.”
“Two heads or three?”
“Two.” Harry grinned and touched the tools of his trade one by one, though by now he was so used to their weight that he would have known at once if something was missing: net, crooked stick, U-shaped stick, mesh bag, canvas bag, taming collar, wand. “I’ve seen it once. The stump’s long-healed. Seems this one’s critic was especially virulent, so the other two bit it off as soon as possible.”
“I suppose you don’t want company?”
“Malfoy,” Harry said, already examining the beginnings of the faint trail that he knew led to the Runespoor’s lair, “when have you ever been company I wanted?”
“I forgot your undying enmity towards me.”
“It is,” Harry said solemnly. “Absolutely undying. So hurtful that I wake up cursing your name and lull myself to sleep with thoughts of your untimely demise.”
Draco fell into step beside him, now and then glancing at him from the corners of his eyes. It was a habit Harry had noticed and come to cherish. It was as though Draco didn’t dare to look straight at whatever gave him pleasure or joy, but couldn’t resist sneaking glimpses of it from time to time to be sure it was still present.
“Untimely?” Draco mused. “I don’t think it would be that if you killed me, Potter. You’ve developed a rather startling sense of punctuality in the years since we’ve known each other.”
Harry grinned as he used his wand to bend back branches, sending sunlight flooding down the trail he needed to find. “You’re just saying that because I managed to save you once. Next time, I might not be so quick. Since we have undying enmity and all.”
*
The hissing from ahead was absurdly gleeful—and it came from a Runespoor who had cornered a human victim. Even if he hadn’t been a Parselmouth, Harry thought he could have told that by now; he’d spent enough time in Burkina Faso learning to hunt Runespoors on their native ground that he could hear their moods in their hisses.
As he sprinted around a tree and then leaped a low-lying log that had almost tripped him, he could make out the actual words in Parseltongue.
“Ssso good…going to eat you…”
“Nooo,” intervened a petulant voice that Harry knew would come from the dreamer head. “Going to sssspend time assssking him quessstionsss. Ssso much we want to know, yesss indeed.”
“Bite him now, or you will lossse him to your ssstupidity,” said the critic.
Harry grinned as he slid down a slight slope and landed in the clearing where the magical snake had trapped its human prey. It had been a long time since he’d seen a three-headed Runespoor. The way the snake snapped towards him, and the pattern its triple necks wove themselves into when its eyes located him, told him the Runespoor was also delighted to see him—though for different reasons.
He didn’t glance at his latest rescue. He couldn’t afford to take his eyes from the Runespoor for a moment. Luckily, his training permitted him to take the necessary equipment in hand without glancing away.
“Bite him,” said the planner and the dreamer heads both at once, and the critic had no complaints. The snake slid directly at Harry, the heads spreading out so that it could come at him with the widest possible angle of attack.
“You don’t want to do that,” Harry said calmly in Parseltongue. “You have no idea who I am, what I am, or what secrets of wise Runespoors I could tell you. I have caught and questioned many of them.”
The dreamer reared back, its eyes glossed and distant. “A Ssspeaker,” it said. “We could learn so much if we quessstioned him.”
“Fool!” said the critic. “He will try to control usss!”
“We are attacking,” insisted the planner, and the Runespoor’s body continued to slither forwards.
The slight surprise always took every snake who had not actually heard of Harry aback at first, though, and that meant he was able to win a moment to stretch out the net and the U-shaped stick. He slid the net over the closest head, the planner, and slipped the crook of the stick around the two other heads, confining them into a small area.
In some ways, despite the extremely venomous fangs and the three heads, the Runespoors were his easiest prey. The dreamer and the critic immediately forgot him in their indignation at being pressed together—and the third head, raging and striking uselessly at the inside of the net, was unable to order them to stop. The dreamer and the critic bit and entwined, and a moment later the dreamer screamed and drooped like a useless length of string. The critic was more poisonous than either of the others alone, which was why they had to combine when they wished to get rid of their third.
The critic turned its attention to Harry, but by then he’d moved the stick, and he prodded the critic head safely into the net with the planner. Then he leaped over the long, writhing body, pulled out the canvas bag, and carefully shook the body into it. One of the heads dented the bag inches from his fingers. Harry wasn’t worried. The cloth was thick for a reason.
“Calm down,” he advised the snake. “I won’t hurt you, but you can’t stay here.” Then he turned to face the other human to be sure he’d speak English, while mentally shaking his head. By the time he could move this Runespoor outside the Forbidden Forest, it might have only one living head, or be entirely dead. It was the most self-hating one he’d encountered in a while.
He caught his breath when he realized that he knew the gray eyes staring back at him. He’d known Draco Malfoy was the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts, but he hadn’t planned to cross paths with him. The Forbidden Forest had a Runespoor infestation, and so Harry was going to stay on the grounds for the summer, at Professor McGonagall’s invitation, and clean them out. Malfoy was supposed to stay in the castle or go home—why wasn’t he at his fancy posh Manor?—or travel around the world, as pure-blood wizards with lots of money had suddenly discovered a fashion for a few years ago. What was he doing out here?
Malfoy made a show of flicking a piece of lint off his robe, then looked up at Harry. “Potter,” he drawled. “As always, you arrive at the last possible moment.”
Harry found himself doing something he would never have contemplated in the face of a remark from Malfoy when they were both still adolescents.
He found himself grinning.
*
“Is that it?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “How did you ever get away with anything in school?” he asked over his shoulder, in an annoyed but much softer voice. “You move through the Forest as if you had a pile of stones in each boot.”
“Some Slytherins have silence, some have charm,” Draco answered instantly, and glanced at him from the corner of his eye again. “And I asked you a question, Potter. Is that the serpent’s lair?”
“And some Slytherins have melodrama,” Harry muttered, crouching and peering through the tangle of blackberry brambles so that he could make out the lair better. It was a low mouth, which for a long time had prevented him from tracking down this Runespoor. They usually preferred bigger dens that they could rear to their full heights in, or stretch out on the threshold of. But there was no reason why a cautious, hunted snake wouldn’t choose a smaller space where it could curl up comfortably or strike out at an intruder. And since this Runespoor was two-headed, it could curl up tighter than usual.
“What will you do once you capture it?” Draco asked.
Harry paused in pulling out the crooked stick and the taming collar. He had become adept at reading Draco’s glances, but he knew his voice even better—perhaps because Draco guarded his face, but wasn’t as good with his words and tone.
And now he could read longing in it, and something that was not loneliness, but a presentiment of it.
Isn’t this strange, that I can tell he’s feeling that?
But his own mind answered at once, No stranger than wandering into friendship with him in the first place.
*
Draco had become a Hogwarts professor, and Harry had become an expert in capturing magical snakes in areas where they were unwanted and releasing them back into areas where they could live in peace. If anyone had asked him when he was eighteen, Harry would have said it was more likely to end the other way around, even if he was a Parselmouth.
But he had opened his eyes three months after the fall of Voldemort, and watched the sun shining on the Burrow, and breathed in the scent of grass shimmering in August heat, and decided, Damn it, I’m going to do something fun with my life.
It took a while for the Weasleys to accept that Harry considered “fun” running around the world, tracking down ancient snake experts and persuading them to share their knowledge with an upstart young wizard, and capturing magical creatures that didn’t always listen to him just because he was a Parselmouth and could kill him with one well-placed bite. There was a misunderstanding with Ginny, who had apparently entertained fantasies of immediate marriage, that still made Harry wince when he thought of it. There was also a period when Ron had urged him to take the Elder Wand if he was going to enter a field that dangerous, and Harry’s repeated, mild refusals had been the cause of more than one spectacular shouting match.
But it had all come out in the end. Harry had accepted that most things did, as long as you didn’t hope and plan for them to happen exactly one way, and then break your heart trying to achieve the impossible.
He knew, because he’d acquired snippets and snapshots and glimpses of Draco’s life from odd remarks and sudden tilts of his head and responses to jokes, that something similar had happened to him. There was no particular reason he should have ended up the Defense professor at Hogwarts, but there was no particular reason why he shouldn’t have, either. He’d taken the job almost as a lark, and then he had it. And five years later, he was still here.
Draco kept coming into the Forest to see him, even though he didn’t have to. He badgered Harry to eat in the Great Hall or visit his rooms, which Harry often did to keep him happy, although he was much happier with sunshine and constantly moving wind around him. Draco gave no straight answers the few times Harry asked what his motivation was for seeking out his company, and in the end Harry learned not to ask.
By the end of July, if no earlier, they were friends. Draco had come upon Harry, covered in blood from a Runespoor he’d had to fight and kill, lighting the birthday candles on the cake Mrs. Weasley had baked him and blowing them out in a slant of evening light, because he could. He’d stayed for a piece of cake, and then for seconds, and then for thirds and fourths and fifths. Altogether, Harry thought three-quarters of the cake had gone down Draco’s greedy gullet.
He glanced sideways at Draco, who lay with his head on a root, an action he usually disdained as plebian, and snored with his mouth open.
There was no resentment at the thought of how much cake Draco had taken, only amusement, and gladness that he had been there to share it. Harry could have gone home to the Burrow, of course, but that would involve a great deal of fuss and preparation that he had no desire to face. He wanted to celebrate in the Forest, instead, surrounded by the reminders of the life he’d made for himself—even if the reminders stank.
But he didn’t mind sharing with Draco.
He must have stared too hard, because Draco had opened his eyes and said grumpily, “Kindly leave a man with a bloated stomach to sleep.”
“Sure,” Harry said. “If you enjoy having smears of chocolate on your front teeth and a beetle in your hair.”
He laughed heartily, and had his revenge for the cake, as if he had needed any, at the frantic scrambling Draco did a moment later.
*
Harry would have said something about the loneliness in Draco’s voice, because it wasn’t a usual emotion, which they laughed their way around, or a war emotion, which they never discussed. But he couldn’t, because just then the Runespoor emerged from its den.
This was a desperate charge, a tactic that Harry had encountered before, but not for a long time. He was nearly taken by surprise, nearly surprised into witlessly dropping his tools as the snake whipped towards him, mouths open and necks extended, tail drawing meaningless patterns of fury in the dust.
But he wasn’t, and that nearly made all the difference in the world for someone with the cleverness and quickness to hunt magical creatures at all.
Harry jumped, vaulting over the snake and landing between it and the bank of mixed earth and stone that contained its den. For a moment, he worried the Runespoor would try to bite Draco, but it obviously knew him and the danger he represented, because it faced him in a single graceful motion and charged again.
Harry turned hard to the side, using one of his feet as a pivot, so that he could bring his crooked stick down on the middle of the Runespoor’s back. One head turned to deal with that; the other tried its best to bite Harry’s chest.
But Harry had known it would do that—the crooked stick provoked that reaction from each and every two-headed Runespoor—and he was ready. He dropped flat to the ground, avoiding the front strike, and let the second head close its jaws around the stick. It might have looked thin and easy to shatter with a single clamp of fangs, but this was magic-toughened and warded oak, and the snake hung on in surprise as Harry flipped it around and upside-down, slamming the Runespoor against the earth.
The head, pinned, shrieked in agony. The second one, which had drawn back and bobbed while it looked for some in to Harry’s throat or shoulder, turned to view the agony of its comrade, which gave Harry an opportunity to snap the taming collar, a slender band of steel, into place about its neck.
And once the taming collar was clamped on even one Runespoor head, the contest was over. The collared head drooped, and the one held on the ground by the stick ceased to scream. Harry, sprawling in what he knew was a ridiculous posture, left arm stretched away from his body as if broken, his legs curled half under him, his right arm poised in midair from the snap of the collar, let his head fall back and panted in exhilaration.
The sunlight was bright and sweet and soft above him. The trees drew back here—the Runespoor had probably dripped venom on the ground and killed their roots so that it would have a spot for sun-basking—and Harry lifted his face into the warmth and closed his eyes. The red pressure against his eyelids made him remember the morning he’d decided to start on this path, and though he wasn’t as young, he felt the same sense of dizzying possibility.
Slow applause started from the side. Harry rolled his eyes in that direction and found Draco.
“Impressive, I must say,” he said, and then let his hands fall. He shifted from one foot to the other, as if casually, but Harry had seen him do that before he asked questions such as what had made Harry a snake-hunter. “But for once, your famed punctuality deserted you. You didn’t have time to answer my question before the snake came out of its hole. Some might say that is not gentlemanly behavior.”
“What was your question again?” Harry asked. He honestly couldn’t remember. His mind felt scrubbed as clean as the sand where the Runespoor had slithered before he d caught it. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, his body aching with a good kind of weariness.
“What are you going to do now?”
And then it all made sense—the loneliness, and the basket Draco had brought with him, and the continued pressures, more frequent in the last few days than usual, for Harry to come and spend time inside Hogwarts. Harry sat up. “Well, I’m certainly not going to vanish into the distance and never visit you again,” he said.
Draco’s jaw dropped open. Immediately, he turned away and coughed, pressing one hand to his throat. “Dust,” he said.
Harry rolled his eyes, but didn’t insist on his own interpretation. Friends would let friends have their guilty little secrets. “I find I rather enjoy Hogwarts this time of year,” he said casually. “And I think I could even learn to like it in autumn and winter and spring, too, now that I’m no longer a student dreading twelve-inch essays on the latest goblin rebellion.”
Draco did nothing for a long moment. Then Harry saw the corner of a smile lift his mouth. “Did you know,” he asked, still staring off to the side, “that the Headmistress is talking about hiring your friend Granger to teach the History of Magic, come the start of the next term? Binns has—pardon the pun—given up the ghost at last.”
Harry threw some sand at him, because that pun deserved it, and then drew out his canvas bag to gather up his docile Runespoor. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Hermione would be great at it. But I think I would want to come back to Hogwarts even if she doesn’t accept the position.”
Draco faced him fully. He just kept staring. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I had—no idea that Hogwarts had—that many attractions for you, now that you’ve finished clearing out the Runespoor infestation. From what you’ve told me, you like to keep on the move.”
Harry closed the bag on top of the Runespoor and slung it over his shoulder. He had to handle this just right, he knew. Friend or not, Draco was still proud and touchy. “Well,” he said. “It’s true that I need to travel for some of my profession, but magical snakes have increased in Britain lately. There’s Ashwinders making a nuisance of themselves in Wales. And another colony of Runespoors in Scotland, not far from here; I just heard of them last week. I think they’re probably migrants from the Forest. Not to mention reports of a basilisk coming in from London, creeping through the Ministry, eating anyone who dares linger there late at night…”
“Rumors of basilisks are rubbish, Potter.” Draco’s eyes were shining, though, and for once he wasn’t sneaking quick glances at Harry, but looking his fill.
“Not all rumors of basilisks,” said Harry. “I ought to know.”
“Yes, but you attract the unusual,” said Draco loftily, turning his back. “I suppose I can see why you’d want to return to Hogwarts, after all. We are rather out of the ordinary here.”
“And why would I want to stray far from a man who makes me lunch?” Harry asked happily, and then cast the Summoning Charm on the picnic basket before Draco could say anything.
Draco shouted and gave chase. Harry, more used to running in forests, could have left him behind easily, but he chose to dash just past trees and then dangle the basket around the trunk and wave it teasingly.
Maybe, someday soon, he and Draco would be able to actually talk about the friendship they’d more or less stumbled into.
For now, though, there was sunlight, and wind, and trees, and the thrill of the chase. And delicious smells rising from the basket. Harry wondered how many sandwiches he could eat before Draco caught him. And what hex he’d receive once Draco found out he’d done so.
No matter what it is, we’ll be all right.
Genre: Harry/Draco friendship.
Rating: G. Yes, really.
Warnings: DH SPOILERS. Ignores the epilogue. Non-linear.
Summary: Harry, an expert in cleaning up dangerous snakes, has made the acquaintance of Draco Malfoy, teaching at Hogwarts, while he works on removing Runespoors from the Forbidden Forest. They have different opinions about what’s going to happen when Harry captures the last snake.
Notes: Written at the request of
megyal, who wanted a fic where Harry and Draco are friends.The Last Runespoor
“Should have known I’d find you out here, Potter.”
Harry smiled and, because he could, kept his head bowed as he finished the last bites of his breakfast, a domed set of scones with bits of ham and butter baked inside them. They tasted absolutely delicious, and he paused, letting the mingled flavors slide over his tongue, before he looked up to meet Draco’s eyes. Draco stood framed by two trees half a dozen paces away, fighting to keep a look of disgust off his face and failing.
“Look at you,” he said, and took a step forwards, though not fast enough to conceal the basket hanging from his arm. “Sitting on a tree root and eating like a savage when you know you would be welcome in Hogwarts’s Great Hall.”
“If you’d ever tasted Mrs. Weasley’s cooking, you wouldn’t be saying things like that,” said Harry mildly, and stood, swatting bits of bark and dirt from his robes with the flat of one hand. Draco made a further horrible face, as much to say that not using one’s wand for such tasks was beneath contempt. “And what’s that I see? Someone was concerned I missed the meal in the Great Hall, so he brought me a picnic breakfast?” He stepped around Draco, reaching for the basket.
Draco turned neatly to face him, and landed a slap as neat on his reaching hand. “That’s for lunch,” he said mildly. “I thought you could use the excitement after you face your Runespoor. It’s the last one in the Forbidden Forest, isn’t it?”
“So far as I can tell.” Harry gave the basket one more longing glance, then reminded himself how hungry he’d probably be at noon and turned away. The trees around him shimmered, thick with the layered leaves of high summer. Dozens of smells struck him in the nostrils if he paused long enough to sniff, but Harry had lived in the Forest for two months now, and they had ceased to be something he took the time to notice. He watched, instead, the way the sunlight dimmed beyond the clearing where he’d eaten, and the small, scurrying things, not always with four legs, that ventured out of the shadows to nose at the crumbs he’d let drop. “I’ve tracked it to its lair, and it’s definitely not had any visitors.”
“Two heads or three?”
“Two.” Harry grinned and touched the tools of his trade one by one, though by now he was so used to their weight that he would have known at once if something was missing: net, crooked stick, U-shaped stick, mesh bag, canvas bag, taming collar, wand. “I’ve seen it once. The stump’s long-healed. Seems this one’s critic was especially virulent, so the other two bit it off as soon as possible.”
“I suppose you don’t want company?”
“Malfoy,” Harry said, already examining the beginnings of the faint trail that he knew led to the Runespoor’s lair, “when have you ever been company I wanted?”
“I forgot your undying enmity towards me.”
“It is,” Harry said solemnly. “Absolutely undying. So hurtful that I wake up cursing your name and lull myself to sleep with thoughts of your untimely demise.”
Draco fell into step beside him, now and then glancing at him from the corners of his eyes. It was a habit Harry had noticed and come to cherish. It was as though Draco didn’t dare to look straight at whatever gave him pleasure or joy, but couldn’t resist sneaking glimpses of it from time to time to be sure it was still present.
“Untimely?” Draco mused. “I don’t think it would be that if you killed me, Potter. You’ve developed a rather startling sense of punctuality in the years since we’ve known each other.”
Harry grinned as he used his wand to bend back branches, sending sunlight flooding down the trail he needed to find. “You’re just saying that because I managed to save you once. Next time, I might not be so quick. Since we have undying enmity and all.”
*
The hissing from ahead was absurdly gleeful—and it came from a Runespoor who had cornered a human victim. Even if he hadn’t been a Parselmouth, Harry thought he could have told that by now; he’d spent enough time in Burkina Faso learning to hunt Runespoors on their native ground that he could hear their moods in their hisses.
As he sprinted around a tree and then leaped a low-lying log that had almost tripped him, he could make out the actual words in Parseltongue.
“Ssso good…going to eat you…”
“Nooo,” intervened a petulant voice that Harry knew would come from the dreamer head. “Going to sssspend time assssking him quessstionsss. Ssso much we want to know, yesss indeed.”
“Bite him now, or you will lossse him to your ssstupidity,” said the critic.
Harry grinned as he slid down a slight slope and landed in the clearing where the magical snake had trapped its human prey. It had been a long time since he’d seen a three-headed Runespoor. The way the snake snapped towards him, and the pattern its triple necks wove themselves into when its eyes located him, told him the Runespoor was also delighted to see him—though for different reasons.
He didn’t glance at his latest rescue. He couldn’t afford to take his eyes from the Runespoor for a moment. Luckily, his training permitted him to take the necessary equipment in hand without glancing away.
“Bite him,” said the planner and the dreamer heads both at once, and the critic had no complaints. The snake slid directly at Harry, the heads spreading out so that it could come at him with the widest possible angle of attack.
“You don’t want to do that,” Harry said calmly in Parseltongue. “You have no idea who I am, what I am, or what secrets of wise Runespoors I could tell you. I have caught and questioned many of them.”
The dreamer reared back, its eyes glossed and distant. “A Ssspeaker,” it said. “We could learn so much if we quessstioned him.”
“Fool!” said the critic. “He will try to control usss!”
“We are attacking,” insisted the planner, and the Runespoor’s body continued to slither forwards.
The slight surprise always took every snake who had not actually heard of Harry aback at first, though, and that meant he was able to win a moment to stretch out the net and the U-shaped stick. He slid the net over the closest head, the planner, and slipped the crook of the stick around the two other heads, confining them into a small area.
In some ways, despite the extremely venomous fangs and the three heads, the Runespoors were his easiest prey. The dreamer and the critic immediately forgot him in their indignation at being pressed together—and the third head, raging and striking uselessly at the inside of the net, was unable to order them to stop. The dreamer and the critic bit and entwined, and a moment later the dreamer screamed and drooped like a useless length of string. The critic was more poisonous than either of the others alone, which was why they had to combine when they wished to get rid of their third.
The critic turned its attention to Harry, but by then he’d moved the stick, and he prodded the critic head safely into the net with the planner. Then he leaped over the long, writhing body, pulled out the canvas bag, and carefully shook the body into it. One of the heads dented the bag inches from his fingers. Harry wasn’t worried. The cloth was thick for a reason.
“Calm down,” he advised the snake. “I won’t hurt you, but you can’t stay here.” Then he turned to face the other human to be sure he’d speak English, while mentally shaking his head. By the time he could move this Runespoor outside the Forbidden Forest, it might have only one living head, or be entirely dead. It was the most self-hating one he’d encountered in a while.
He caught his breath when he realized that he knew the gray eyes staring back at him. He’d known Draco Malfoy was the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts, but he hadn’t planned to cross paths with him. The Forbidden Forest had a Runespoor infestation, and so Harry was going to stay on the grounds for the summer, at Professor McGonagall’s invitation, and clean them out. Malfoy was supposed to stay in the castle or go home—why wasn’t he at his fancy posh Manor?—or travel around the world, as pure-blood wizards with lots of money had suddenly discovered a fashion for a few years ago. What was he doing out here?
Malfoy made a show of flicking a piece of lint off his robe, then looked up at Harry. “Potter,” he drawled. “As always, you arrive at the last possible moment.”
Harry found himself doing something he would never have contemplated in the face of a remark from Malfoy when they were both still adolescents.
He found himself grinning.
*
“Is that it?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “How did you ever get away with anything in school?” he asked over his shoulder, in an annoyed but much softer voice. “You move through the Forest as if you had a pile of stones in each boot.”
“Some Slytherins have silence, some have charm,” Draco answered instantly, and glanced at him from the corner of his eye again. “And I asked you a question, Potter. Is that the serpent’s lair?”
“And some Slytherins have melodrama,” Harry muttered, crouching and peering through the tangle of blackberry brambles so that he could make out the lair better. It was a low mouth, which for a long time had prevented him from tracking down this Runespoor. They usually preferred bigger dens that they could rear to their full heights in, or stretch out on the threshold of. But there was no reason why a cautious, hunted snake wouldn’t choose a smaller space where it could curl up comfortably or strike out at an intruder. And since this Runespoor was two-headed, it could curl up tighter than usual.
“What will you do once you capture it?” Draco asked.
Harry paused in pulling out the crooked stick and the taming collar. He had become adept at reading Draco’s glances, but he knew his voice even better—perhaps because Draco guarded his face, but wasn’t as good with his words and tone.
And now he could read longing in it, and something that was not loneliness, but a presentiment of it.
Isn’t this strange, that I can tell he’s feeling that?
But his own mind answered at once, No stranger than wandering into friendship with him in the first place.
*
Draco had become a Hogwarts professor, and Harry had become an expert in capturing magical snakes in areas where they were unwanted and releasing them back into areas where they could live in peace. If anyone had asked him when he was eighteen, Harry would have said it was more likely to end the other way around, even if he was a Parselmouth.
But he had opened his eyes three months after the fall of Voldemort, and watched the sun shining on the Burrow, and breathed in the scent of grass shimmering in August heat, and decided, Damn it, I’m going to do something fun with my life.
It took a while for the Weasleys to accept that Harry considered “fun” running around the world, tracking down ancient snake experts and persuading them to share their knowledge with an upstart young wizard, and capturing magical creatures that didn’t always listen to him just because he was a Parselmouth and could kill him with one well-placed bite. There was a misunderstanding with Ginny, who had apparently entertained fantasies of immediate marriage, that still made Harry wince when he thought of it. There was also a period when Ron had urged him to take the Elder Wand if he was going to enter a field that dangerous, and Harry’s repeated, mild refusals had been the cause of more than one spectacular shouting match.
But it had all come out in the end. Harry had accepted that most things did, as long as you didn’t hope and plan for them to happen exactly one way, and then break your heart trying to achieve the impossible.
He knew, because he’d acquired snippets and snapshots and glimpses of Draco’s life from odd remarks and sudden tilts of his head and responses to jokes, that something similar had happened to him. There was no particular reason he should have ended up the Defense professor at Hogwarts, but there was no particular reason why he shouldn’t have, either. He’d taken the job almost as a lark, and then he had it. And five years later, he was still here.
Draco kept coming into the Forest to see him, even though he didn’t have to. He badgered Harry to eat in the Great Hall or visit his rooms, which Harry often did to keep him happy, although he was much happier with sunshine and constantly moving wind around him. Draco gave no straight answers the few times Harry asked what his motivation was for seeking out his company, and in the end Harry learned not to ask.
By the end of July, if no earlier, they were friends. Draco had come upon Harry, covered in blood from a Runespoor he’d had to fight and kill, lighting the birthday candles on the cake Mrs. Weasley had baked him and blowing them out in a slant of evening light, because he could. He’d stayed for a piece of cake, and then for seconds, and then for thirds and fourths and fifths. Altogether, Harry thought three-quarters of the cake had gone down Draco’s greedy gullet.
He glanced sideways at Draco, who lay with his head on a root, an action he usually disdained as plebian, and snored with his mouth open.
There was no resentment at the thought of how much cake Draco had taken, only amusement, and gladness that he had been there to share it. Harry could have gone home to the Burrow, of course, but that would involve a great deal of fuss and preparation that he had no desire to face. He wanted to celebrate in the Forest, instead, surrounded by the reminders of the life he’d made for himself—even if the reminders stank.
But he didn’t mind sharing with Draco.
He must have stared too hard, because Draco had opened his eyes and said grumpily, “Kindly leave a man with a bloated stomach to sleep.”
“Sure,” Harry said. “If you enjoy having smears of chocolate on your front teeth and a beetle in your hair.”
He laughed heartily, and had his revenge for the cake, as if he had needed any, at the frantic scrambling Draco did a moment later.
*
Harry would have said something about the loneliness in Draco’s voice, because it wasn’t a usual emotion, which they laughed their way around, or a war emotion, which they never discussed. But he couldn’t, because just then the Runespoor emerged from its den.
This was a desperate charge, a tactic that Harry had encountered before, but not for a long time. He was nearly taken by surprise, nearly surprised into witlessly dropping his tools as the snake whipped towards him, mouths open and necks extended, tail drawing meaningless patterns of fury in the dust.
But he wasn’t, and that nearly made all the difference in the world for someone with the cleverness and quickness to hunt magical creatures at all.
Harry jumped, vaulting over the snake and landing between it and the bank of mixed earth and stone that contained its den. For a moment, he worried the Runespoor would try to bite Draco, but it obviously knew him and the danger he represented, because it faced him in a single graceful motion and charged again.
Harry turned hard to the side, using one of his feet as a pivot, so that he could bring his crooked stick down on the middle of the Runespoor’s back. One head turned to deal with that; the other tried its best to bite Harry’s chest.
But Harry had known it would do that—the crooked stick provoked that reaction from each and every two-headed Runespoor—and he was ready. He dropped flat to the ground, avoiding the front strike, and let the second head close its jaws around the stick. It might have looked thin and easy to shatter with a single clamp of fangs, but this was magic-toughened and warded oak, and the snake hung on in surprise as Harry flipped it around and upside-down, slamming the Runespoor against the earth.
The head, pinned, shrieked in agony. The second one, which had drawn back and bobbed while it looked for some in to Harry’s throat or shoulder, turned to view the agony of its comrade, which gave Harry an opportunity to snap the taming collar, a slender band of steel, into place about its neck.
And once the taming collar was clamped on even one Runespoor head, the contest was over. The collared head drooped, and the one held on the ground by the stick ceased to scream. Harry, sprawling in what he knew was a ridiculous posture, left arm stretched away from his body as if broken, his legs curled half under him, his right arm poised in midair from the snap of the collar, let his head fall back and panted in exhilaration.
The sunlight was bright and sweet and soft above him. The trees drew back here—the Runespoor had probably dripped venom on the ground and killed their roots so that it would have a spot for sun-basking—and Harry lifted his face into the warmth and closed his eyes. The red pressure against his eyelids made him remember the morning he’d decided to start on this path, and though he wasn’t as young, he felt the same sense of dizzying possibility.
Slow applause started from the side. Harry rolled his eyes in that direction and found Draco.
“Impressive, I must say,” he said, and then let his hands fall. He shifted from one foot to the other, as if casually, but Harry had seen him do that before he asked questions such as what had made Harry a snake-hunter. “But for once, your famed punctuality deserted you. You didn’t have time to answer my question before the snake came out of its hole. Some might say that is not gentlemanly behavior.”
“What was your question again?” Harry asked. He honestly couldn’t remember. His mind felt scrubbed as clean as the sand where the Runespoor had slithered before he d caught it. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, his body aching with a good kind of weariness.
“What are you going to do now?”
And then it all made sense—the loneliness, and the basket Draco had brought with him, and the continued pressures, more frequent in the last few days than usual, for Harry to come and spend time inside Hogwarts. Harry sat up. “Well, I’m certainly not going to vanish into the distance and never visit you again,” he said.
Draco’s jaw dropped open. Immediately, he turned away and coughed, pressing one hand to his throat. “Dust,” he said.
Harry rolled his eyes, but didn’t insist on his own interpretation. Friends would let friends have their guilty little secrets. “I find I rather enjoy Hogwarts this time of year,” he said casually. “And I think I could even learn to like it in autumn and winter and spring, too, now that I’m no longer a student dreading twelve-inch essays on the latest goblin rebellion.”
Draco did nothing for a long moment. Then Harry saw the corner of a smile lift his mouth. “Did you know,” he asked, still staring off to the side, “that the Headmistress is talking about hiring your friend Granger to teach the History of Magic, come the start of the next term? Binns has—pardon the pun—given up the ghost at last.”
Harry threw some sand at him, because that pun deserved it, and then drew out his canvas bag to gather up his docile Runespoor. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Hermione would be great at it. But I think I would want to come back to Hogwarts even if she doesn’t accept the position.”
Draco faced him fully. He just kept staring. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I had—no idea that Hogwarts had—that many attractions for you, now that you’ve finished clearing out the Runespoor infestation. From what you’ve told me, you like to keep on the move.”
Harry closed the bag on top of the Runespoor and slung it over his shoulder. He had to handle this just right, he knew. Friend or not, Draco was still proud and touchy. “Well,” he said. “It’s true that I need to travel for some of my profession, but magical snakes have increased in Britain lately. There’s Ashwinders making a nuisance of themselves in Wales. And another colony of Runespoors in Scotland, not far from here; I just heard of them last week. I think they’re probably migrants from the Forest. Not to mention reports of a basilisk coming in from London, creeping through the Ministry, eating anyone who dares linger there late at night…”
“Rumors of basilisks are rubbish, Potter.” Draco’s eyes were shining, though, and for once he wasn’t sneaking quick glances at Harry, but looking his fill.
“Not all rumors of basilisks,” said Harry. “I ought to know.”
“Yes, but you attract the unusual,” said Draco loftily, turning his back. “I suppose I can see why you’d want to return to Hogwarts, after all. We are rather out of the ordinary here.”
“And why would I want to stray far from a man who makes me lunch?” Harry asked happily, and then cast the Summoning Charm on the picnic basket before Draco could say anything.
Draco shouted and gave chase. Harry, more used to running in forests, could have left him behind easily, but he chose to dash just past trees and then dangle the basket around the trunk and wave it teasingly.
Maybe, someday soon, he and Draco would be able to actually talk about the friendship they’d more or less stumbled into.
For now, though, there was sunlight, and wind, and trees, and the thrill of the chase. And delicious smells rising from the basket. Harry wondered how many sandwiches he could eat before Draco caught him. And what hex he’d receive once Draco found out he’d done so.
No matter what it is, we’ll be all right.
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Date: 2007-10-02 04:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-02 03:16 pm (UTC)