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Under the usual circumstances, Draco can’t see the door to his holding cell at the Ministry.

The usual circumstances include total darkness—ink-black, viscous, remarkably consistent—and the sound of his own breathing. Sometimes there are distant, muffled voices, but Draco might be imagining those.

He is not imagining the voices on the other side of the door.

He is not imagining the grind of the key in the lock or the scrape of the teeth on the wards.

Draco holds his breath.

The key turns, and various iron bits click and crunch until tumblers thunk and the bolt screeches and it is possible, quite possible, that they’ve brought a Dementor and intend to shut it in here with him.

In any case, Draco should face whatever comes on his feet.

He can’t bring himself to move.

Light slashes into his cell. Draco throws a hand up to shield his eyes. It’s a Lumos—it must be—but it batters him with the full force of the sun. The beam widens until the light fills the doorway and carves a path into the floor and the wall. Draco’s sat in the centre of it.

A silhouette coalesces in the open door.

It doesn’t matter that the person is wearing robes. It doesn’t matter that his head is turned, presumably to speak to someone. It doesn’t matter that Draco can’t make out his features, only his outline.

It’s Potter.

Possibly they’re letting Potter pronounce the sentences without wasting time on a trial.

“Malfoy,” Potter says. He sounds tired, not triumphant. “I need a favour.”

“No.” What else is Draco meant to say in the face of such an absurdity? “The Aurors? No.”

It’s horribly bright in the staff room Potter’s brought them to. Sunlight streams through the charmed window to Draco’s left. He hadn’t dared hope for even the facsimile of the sun when he was in his cell, and one glance at the false light flooded him with a fantasy: flight. From London. From England. From the wizarding world.

And then Potter had sat across from Draco and asked him to stay.

In London.

In England.

In the wizarding world.

As an Auror.

Defending the world from Dark wizards.

Draco cups both hands over his aching eyes and squints at Potter, sat on the other side of the table in a set of black dress robes. Potter stares at his teacup, expression blankly exhausted. They haven’t kept Potter in a holding cell, have they?

“D’you want something else to eat?” Potter asks, as if Draco didn’t flatly refuse him.

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I knew what you meant,” Draco snaps. “The fucking Aurors? That’s your favour?”

Potter meets Draco’s eyes. “Yeah.”

What a joke. The Aurors!

Draco laughs out loud and finds he can’t stop. He covers his face completely and laughs into his palms until he’s not sure he’s laughing anymore.

When he looks at Potter again, Potter’s got his elbow on the table and his hand over his eyes. As Draco watches, Potter’s chin dimples as if he might cry.

Draco’s stomach sinks. Slow, like it’s freshly drowned. He can only hope it will be waiting for him when they put him back in his holding cell.

“I can’t do this,” Potter says softly, then pushes himself out of his chair. He is crying. Tears leak from his summer-green eyes and run shining down his cheeks. His skin, usually a warm shade of brown, has gone ashen. “I’m sorry, Malfoy, I shouldn’t have—forget it. I’ll just—”

Draco jumps to his feet, leans across the table, and just manages to catch Potter’s wrist. Another second, and he’d have been out of Draco’s reach, possibly forever. “Wait.”

Potter does not pull away. He stands there, his wrist heavy in Draco’s grip and his magic humming, thick and unsettled, in Draco’s chest.

“I don’t know how long it’s been.”

“What?” Potter wipes his eyes with his sleeve.

“Since the Battle.”

“It’s the fifteenth. It’s still May.”

Nearly two weeks in that cell.

It occurs to Draco that he is the one who should be trembling, and he isn’t.

It’s Potter.

Draco keeps hold of Potter’s wrist and goes around the table until they’re face-to-face. Truly, Potter looks awful—sorely neglected, and why? Draco’s heart drums along. It doesn’t know what to do with all this light. It doesn’t know what to do with a miserable, defeated Potter.

“I should’ve said…” Potter swallows. “It’s not a plea deal or anything. It’s—I’ve spoken with the Head Warlock. They’re not going to bring charges against you or your mum. And your dad—you know how he is, it’s—there’s not going to be a trial.”

“Why not?” Draco demands. “But that’s what—of course there’s going to be a trial!” He’s been two weeks in the dark, waiting to be dragged in front of the Wizengamot. To be sentenced to Azkaban. “There has to be!”

“There’s no trial!” Potter shouts, and his magic hits Draco like torrential rain, stealing his breath. “I can’t do it again! I can’t do it! I’m done! I can’t! I can’t!”

Potter tears his wrist out of Draco’s hand and hurls his teacup into the wall. He goes for the teapot next, and Draco’s cup. A saucer narrowly misses Draco’s ear on its way from the cupboard to the table, whirling in on the cyclone of Potter’s magic.

Draco takes Potter by the shoulder—hoping to disrupt him, distract him, something—and before he can say a single word, Potter throws himself into Draco’s arms.

More Ministry-issue china smashes to the floor as Potter sobs, fists in Draco’s robes, clinging and desperate.

“It’s not for the Ministry,” Potter gasps some time later. “It’s not for the Ministry. It’s for me. I can’t go by myself. Please don’t make me go by myself.”

Ah—the favour. The Aurors. Draco had nearly forgotten.

“I’ll go with you,” he promises, if only to stop Potter sobbing himself to death. “It’s all right, Potter. I’ll go with you.”

No one at the DMLE seems to know what to do with the Saviour in such a state.

People come in and out. Potter ignores them, so Draco ignores them as well.

Eventually, a quiet, sandy-haired wix—a Junior Auror, Draco presumes—tiptoes in and presents Draco with parchmentwork confirming that he is being discharged from Ministry custody and that the Wizengamot will not pursue any charges against himself or his family.

He signs the necessary documents with one arm around Potter, who rests his head heavily on Draco’s shoulder and says not a word. The quiet Junior Auror spells a set of dress robes—delivered at some point by his solicitor, Draco presumes—on for Draco, as he does not have his wand and fears that Potter may lose his mind if Draco steps away.

“The DMLE will be in contact,” the Junior Auror says, softly, as if she thinks Potter might be asleep. “Regarding the start date for training.”

“Yes, thank you,” Draco answers. When the door shuts again, he gathers himself. “Potter. Where do you live?”

Potter takes a shuddering breath against Draco’s neck. “Grimmauld Place.”

Draco decides to treat Potter as if he’s terribly ill.

This, at least, makes the first hours at Grimmauld Place straightforward. Draco begins by making his wishes about cleanliness and décor known. As the house transforms itself, he gets Potter into and back out of the bath, then puts him to bed.

“Your wand,” Potter says, his eyes already closed, and searches it out on his bedside table. “I kept it. You can have it. It’s yours.”

Draco gets himself into and out of the bath and into fresh clothes.

He owls his mother at the Manor to tell her of this new development.

I can’t imagine he’ll want me here when he’s well, Draco writes.

Perhaps Potter is terribly ill.

He does not get out of bed for the rest of May.

Not unless Draco coaxes him.

Sometimes, Draco’s got to carry him.

Draco jolts awake in the middle of the night to the sound of shouting.

He stumbles downstairs to find Weasley in the sitting room.

“Please,” he’s yelling as Draco arrives, hands in fists. “You’ve done enough, mate. Leave it to someone else! It’s—”

“I died for this,” Potter shouts back. A framed portrait flies off the wall and breaks on the mantel. “I’m not leaving it to somebody else.”

“Harry—”

“Get out,” Potter spits at his best friend in all the world. A vase is airborne next. “Get out. I never want to see you again. I hope you—”

Draco rushes between them, facing Weasley. His freckles hardly stand out against his furious red flush.

“Another time,” he says over the escalating whine of Potter’s magic. “Come back another time. He’s not well.”

Weasley opens his mouth, shuts it again, and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

It’s worse than it was at the Ministry.

“Just go,” Potter says from the sofa, voice hoarse. “You don’t have to—I’ll be fine.”

Draco turns from the built-in shelves, where he’s been spelling books back into place. “I said I’d come with you.”

“I know.” Potter gestures at himself. “But I’m—”

“Did you really die?”

“Yeah,” Potter says, and starts to cry.

In light of Potter’s apparent resurrection, Draco continues to treat him as if he’s terribly ill.

He also institutes a schedule.

If Potter is willing to say such things to his best friend in all the world, he must be quite serious—about the Aurors, presumably—and he is in no condition to undertake training.

Draco lets Potter sleep ten hours a night. He wages a sympathy campaign during the day.

Potter will come downstairs to eat, but only if Draco claims to be dying of loneliness. Potter will come flying in the garden, but only if Draco claims to have forgotten how to catch the Snitch. Potter will stay up and listen to a story if Draco reads to him, and play wizard chess if Draco challenges him, and write letters to Weasley and Granger if Draco writes his own letters as well.

“I’ve only kissed Cho Chang,” Potter says without any warning in the first week of August. Draco has been conspiring with Grimmauld Place to let in as much sunlight as possible, but the damp, cloudy weather renders his efforts futile. “And Ginny.”

“Oh?” Draco signs his latest missive to Pansy and adds a P.S. In order to let Potter rest as much as he wants, Draco’s got to sleep in the same bed—otherwise, Potter wakes himself screaming several times a night. These kisses don’t seem to have risen to that level of intimacy. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

“No.” Potter makes a face, then bows his head lower over his parchment. “I think I’d rather kiss you.”

Draco exhales through a thrum of heat. It’s everywhere in him, and not at all surprising given that Potter usually ends up on top of him by the small hours.

Never mind, he writes in his postscript. I’ve lost all language.

“If,” Potter continues. “That was, er, something you—”

“Come here,” Draco says.

“You must understand,” Draco gasps half an hour later, Potter straddling him on the sitting room sofa and looking more alive than he has in weeks. “I don’t suffer from a lack of experience.”

“I do.” Potter’s glasses have gone. Draco’s not sure when Potter took them off, or where. He is sure, however, that Potter’s lips look best kiss-bitten. “I’m suffering.”

“I can’t, in good conscience, allow that to continue.”

“Thank God.”

“We’ll have to be methodical. Experiment, if you like. There are—”

“I want you to hold me down and fuck me,” Potter says.

Potter will look Draco in the eye without looking away if Draco tells him to. He’ll spread his cheeks for Draco and let Draco lick him to orgasm if Draco calls him a good, sweet boy, such a perfect thing, so soft and open. He’ll let Draco bend him over the arm of the sofa or push him up against the wall of the shower or fold his knees up to his chest, begging for Draco all the while, and Draco doesn’t have to say anything.

The best time to ask Potter questions is when Draco’s bollocks-deep and has Potter pinned with all his weight.

“Look at me,” he says.

Potter opens his eyes. They’re so green, so glassy with pleasure, that Draco almost comes before he’s ready. As it stands, he pulses inside the hot grip of Potter’s body and tilts his hips for a bit more depth.

“Oh,” Potter breathes.

“What do you need, mon éclair?”

“I want you to call me Harry.”

The summer comes to a screeching halt on the first of September.

Harry made it to the men’s at the low-slung building on the Unplottable patch of Somerset where the DMLE holds the Auror training programme. He’s long since emptied his stomach, but can’t stop heaving. Draco has Harry’s glasses in his pocket.

“I’m fine,” he says, voice shaking. “I’m fine. I just—”

Draco spells Harry’s mouth clean, then pats his back while he heaves again. “You’re not well. We can go—”

“I have to stay,” Harry says, fast, sharp. “I have to. I’ll be fine. I just need—” He shakes his head. “I have to. Oh, God, I might lose it. I might kill someone.”

Draco presses a glass of water into Harry’s hand and helps him drink, then rubs his back until he’s collected himself.

Harry exhales, clutching the glass to his chest. “It still means something.”

“What does?”

“Me.” Harry clears his throat. “Me, being, like…the Boy Who Lived. If they knew what I was like, they would never—but that doesn’t matter. They’ll let me change things because of who they think I am. And—” He closes his eyes for a minute, then opens them. “I owe it to them to try. To everybody.”

“Not to me.”

“Yeah. To you, too.”

The space between them is crowded with moments that might never have been if the wizarding world hadn’t made itself so open and amenable to the Dark Lord, from Harry’s refusal to shake Draco’s hand to the scars all over both of them.

Draco wants to make the only sensible argument.

Harry must notice, because he takes Draco’s wrist in his hand. His left wrist, closest to the Mark.

“If they could get rid of you, they could pretend it was your fault,” he says, voice rough, eyes wet. “They could pretend nothing needed to be different. But it does.”

“Is that why—”

Harry shakes his head.

Draco had thought he was only a warm body, and when Harry came to his senses, he’d see Draco for what he is: Marked, in every sense of the word. By the brand itself and the corruption of his upbringing and even by the fluke of Harry’s grace.

The world rearranges itself around Draco. In the mirror behind Harry, he catches a glimpse of himself in a sunbeam. His Mark is hidden, and everything about Draco is light.

Which is the only reality that matters.

The last wisps of his old fantasy fade away.

“I’ll go ahead of you,” he promises. “I’ll go one step ahead, so you won’t be taken by surprise.”

Harry swipes his sleeve across his eyes. “Okay.”

Three months into Auror training, Draco is certain he’ll need to be twice the Auror.

Three years in, when they pin each other’s badges, Draco is more than twice the Auror.

“Where’s that, er…that—” Harry makes a motion that means potions analysis report.

Draco charms it into a paper crane and sends it flying across to Harry’s desk.

Harry holds out both hands to catch it, his eyes bright.

Draco takes Harry to the Manor at every possible opportunity.

The Wiltshire countryside couldn’t be more different from Grimmauld Place or the warren of offices at the DMLE. Harry has an instant bond with Draco’s mother that Draco finds utterly inexplicable until he learns that after Harry died in the Forest, she kept him alive.

He has a strange, lovely rapport with Draco’s father as well. Having recovered from the total collapse he had after the Battle, Lucius is quite changed.

One summer evening, Draco and his mother sit in the rose garden, watching Harry and Draco’s father play wizard chess on their outdoor set. The pieces come up to Harry’s waist and occasionally scatter petals about the board.

Lucius speaks to Harry exclusively in French. Harry, who does not speak French and has only collected a handful of words, answers him in English. Their conversations have all the rhythm of reality with none of the social pressure, and are oftentimes more honest than Harry realises.

“Vous devriez faire ça plus souvent,” Draco’s father mentions, and nudges a pawn forwards.

“Ouais,” says Harry, one of his few French words. “I had a dream the other night I played Seeker for the Arrows. Felt weird all day afterwards.”

“He thinks he’s only pretending to be good,” Draco tells his mother.

She pats Draco’s hand, laughing.

Before the raid, they stop at the door of their office.

“Three, two, one,” Draco says, and brushes his fingertips over Harry’s eyes.

Harry keeps them closed for a beat, and when he opens them again, he’s calm. Nearly floating.

It’s the same ritual that got them through training and through five years on the force. Draco used to have to do it in front of the Floo at Grimmauld. It took ten months to make their office safe enough to count as home.

The same can’t be said of the rest of the world.

That’s why Draco goes ahead, and why Harry spends so much of his time in the field practically in subspace.

The irony, of course, is that Harry’s aversion to being in the field in uniform is a circuit-breaker. When he’s calm, he’s what the war made him: a lethal weapon with nothing to lose.

They’re posted at the perimeter, as per, though this time that’s a stretch of trees that hem in the grounds of a tumble-down manor house in Sussex.

“Wait,” says Draco, his hand on Harry’s wrist.

“Mmm,” Harry says.

Most of the time, they don’t leave the perimeter. Draco can tell from the pitch and volume of the shouts coming from the site if the raid is going according to plan.

He can’t hear anything over the rustling leaves. So much for the beauty of high summer.

Harry pulls his wrist away.

That’s the only warning. A split second. Less.

“Harry,” he says. Stop, he’s going to say. Wait.

The curse hits Draco’s side, and it cuts deep. It’s pressure, a great, wrong pressure, and then a fiery slash that scatters outwards up to his ribs. The only light is from Harry’s curses. His Crucio is gold.

Draco comes to with Harry in his hospital bed and Weasley hovering over him with a halo.

Weasley turns his head. His diagnostics turn his blue eyes to rainbows.

“Weasley,” Draco manages. His side hurts like blazes.

Weasley bends down, casting. His charms are as cool and light as his blue robes. “Hermione.”

“I’m not—”

Granger appears next to Weasley, her tawny-brown skin drained of warmth. “Is there anything we can say to convince you—”

“I promised him.”

“Anything?” Weasley asks. “Literally bloody anything, Draco.”

Harry stirs against Draco’s undamaged side. Draco strokes his hair, and he relaxes again.

“No.” Draco sighs, and that hurts, too. Lovely. “But I wouldn’t refuse a bit of heroism.”

Weasley’s brow furrows. “Heroism?”

It takes several months of carefully orchestrated visits for Harry to let his guard down around Weasley and Granger. It’s a bit unfair to Granger, who hadn’t had a similar argument with Harry that summer at Grimmauld Place, but such biases change nothing about Draco’s approach. To Harry, Weasley and Granger are halves of a pair and the whole of his motivation to force the world into a new shape.

It takes several more months for Harry to tell them about the panic attacks, and two more months after that for Weasley and Granger to customise a potions regimen that will take the edge off without leaving Harry groggy and ineffectual at work.

Harry steps out of the Floo at Grimmauld after the first week testing the potions with tears sliding down his cheeks.

Draco brushes the tears away without sparing the time to take off his gloves. “It’s only the first trial,” he says. “There will be others, and—”

“It feels so good,” says Harry, voice wobbling. “Not to be out of my mind.”

They spend another year as Senior Aurors.

The benefit of the potions regimen—and of Weasley and Granger’s renewed presence in Harry’s life—is that the time between his collapses is much longer.

The downside is that the collapses themselves are worse.

Harry has one just before Christmas and becomes ill at the thought of going to the Burrow or having anyone at Grimmauld. They ring in the New Year in bed, Harry half-asleep while Draco strokes his hair.

“Sorry,” he mumbles in January’s first fresh minute. “I’m sorry. This isn’t—” He shrugs and doesn’t say anything else.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Draco mentions.

“What?”

“Will you do me the honour of being my husband?”

Harry picks his head up and stares at Draco, eyes tired, skin dull with exhaustion. “Honour?”

Draco opens the drawer of the bedside table, takes out the ring box he’s had since their third year in training, and offers it to Harry. “Yes.”

“Yes.” Harry smiles and rests his head again. “Yes. I would.”

Harry wants to be well for their wedding. He throws himself into it with more fervour than he used to defeat the Dark Lord.

They hold the ceremony in Draco’s mother’s rose gardens and keep the guest list to an intimate fifty people. Both he and Harry wear white robes, and Draco doesn’t have to look through the raft of photos to choose one for the Prophet. It’s the very first: Harry and Draco in front of a blooming bower, Draco’s hands on Harry’s face and Harry’s hands in Draco’s robes, both of them beaming like no one else exists.

Two weeks after the wedding, Harry is promoted to Head Auror. He’s the first person ever to hold the position who insists on keeping his partner.

Two years after the wedding, Harry is promoted again, this time to Head of the DMLE.

“It’ll be a chance to restructure the training programme.” Harry dips a finger in the pot of sauce bubbling on the stove, blows on it in a distinctly Muggle way, and sticks it in his mouth. “Mmm. Like—the whole first year is mental.”

“I quite agree.”

Draco has hope for the promotion to Head of the DMLE. It’s even further removed from the field, and Harry will be able to work with all the department sub-heads at once. They’ll never get to see him dancing to the wireless like Draco is now. Harry bobs himself about, his movements entirely divorced from the beat of the song.

“I got halfway there as Head Auror.” Harry cuts a shy glance at Draco. “That’s not bad.”

Draco goes to Harry. Puts a hand on his hip. Moves with him just for the match. “No, not bad at all.”

“Things between the departments could be better. Things could be better.”

“Not you. You’re perfect. I love you to bits.”

Harry laughs. “I love you to more bits.”

Draco kisses Harry’s neck.

Harry goes into his new offices ahead of Draco, who stays a few paces back to take questions from the press.

“He’s quite motivated to start,” he tells the clutch of cameras and quills. “Leave him to it, would you?” Draco goes through, shuts the door, and wards it. “They’ve gone,” he announces. “Harry?”

It only takes him a moment to look, and in that moment, his sunny hope is dashed.

Draco reaches Harry’s new desk in time to turn Harry away from it before he’s sick. When it’s over, he wraps both arms around Harry and holds him until he stops shaking.

“I looked at the parchments,” Harry says into Draco’s robes. “I can’t do this. I don’t understand them. I was stupid. I thought—I thought—”

I’ll take you away, Draco wants to tell him. I’ll take you anywhere else. I’ll make all your excuses for you. You won’t have to think of this place again.

“I’ll read them to you,” Draco promises. “I’ll read everything to you. Please don’t worry, mon éclair. I’ll read anything you need.”

It takes six months for Draco to make Harry’s office safe enough for him to be able to hear and understand what Draco reads from the hundreds of parchments that come across Harry’s desk. They spend early mornings and evenings at it, drafting Harry’s comments in advance so he can rehearse them.

Draco hires Hermione Granger as the Deputy Head and devotes all his time to putting up impenetrable boundaries between home and the DMLE so Harry’s mind and magic can stand down. They make constant financial disclosures to atone for the fact of their marriage and Draco’s continued existence.

Granger poaches Weasley from St Mungo’s and makes him Head Healer at the DMLE.

Then she goes ahead and dismantles a network of convoluted policies built on a rotten core of supremacist ideals and builds them again from the ground up. Harry uses his status to shield Granger from the sorts of criticisms that might otherwise delay her, but he also makes a point of arguing with her in full view of the department heads and the press. The two of them solicit comment from dozens of current and former DMLE employees and community representatives. Weasley consults on all manner of projects. When Harry ruminates, Weasley entertains the same conversation again and again with minor variations until some missing piece slots into place and Harry moves on. Weasley liaises with St Mungo’s to inform departmental policies. He’s there, where Harry can see him.

“Do you think it’s working?” Harry asks, late one night. “Do you think it’s better?”

“Yes,” Draco answers. “I do.”

The nomination comes just after Harry turns thirty-six, and it’s from a majority contingent of the Wizengamot.

Harry goes silent after he reads the letter. So silent, in fact, that Draco quietly informs the Ministry that they’ll be on leave until further notice.

Then he takes Harry to the Manor, where the wards will keep everyone else out. They spend a week rambling about the grounds. The birds in the branches and the rustling leaves give them something pleasant to listen to.

Draco doesn’t mind when this happens. They have never needed to speak to communicate massive volumes of information and emotion.

Harry radiates frustration, then resistance, then despair. They shag up against a tree, on the bank of the stream, and in the dip of a meadow at the edge of the grounds. Harry kisses hard enough to call it biting, then wants to be bitten. He sprints away from Draco, wanting to prove he can be alone, then wants to be caught. He puts up a fight, then lies on a blanket in the meadow and lets Draco shag him like he’s terribly fragile.

They come out one night when the moon is high. Harry sits between Draco’s legs and rests his head on his shoulder. The wind whispering in the grasses and wildflowers seems like it’s coming from the stars.

“Will you tell me when it’s enough?” asks Harry. “I don’t think I’ll ever be done, otherwise.”

“Yes.” Draco kisses the top of Harry’s head. “I will.”

Draco finds his father in the gardens shortly before they leave. Lucius taps one of the blooms with his wand, and its petals open wider.

“He’s going to accept the nomination,” Draco says. “I don’t know what to do.”

It’s the first time he’s admitted it to anyone. The afternoon is bright and clear around them, and Draco feels utterly transparent. The great trembling terror that should have taken him that day at the Ministry comes all at once. Draco’s father holds him and strokes his hair like he did when Draco was small, and he thinks, suddenly, that he’s never grown up and never will.

“The Ministry is corrupt,” Lucius says in the matter-of-fact tone he always used to tell Draco how the world works. “You will find a great deal of resistance if you try to make it other than what it is.”

“Then—” This is what Draco has always feared and would never say to Harry—that money and power inevitably corrode people’s better natures. They did not fight Harry and Hermione and Ron when they remade the DMLE because it left the rest of the embedded structures intact. “What do I do?”

“You will need to use its customs as means to your ends.”

In the antechamber outside the courtroom, Draco checks the drape of Harry’s robes one last time and kisses his cheek. Harry won the election in a landslide. All that’s left is the swearing-in, and everything after.

“Three, two, one,” he says, and brushes his fingertips over Harry’s eyes.

Harry keeps them closed for a few beats, and when he opens them, he’s determined.

Their robes are a matching martyr red, the same shade as their Auror uniforms. Draco holds the sword of Gryffindor for Harry to swear on. There’s palpable anticipation in the air, its hum broken only by camera flashes.

The charm on Harry’s robes activates at precisely the right moment.

A murmur catches in the crowd, rising as blue bleeds down the fabric. When the colour reaches his hem, it lightens and lightens until—as Harry speaks the last word of his oath—he’s clothed entirely in white.

Harry hates political posturing. The backroom handshake deals make him ill. He spends the first half-hour of every day sick with rage and hopelessness, sometimes sick to his stomach as well.

Then he pulls himself together, and they continue the patterns they’d formed at the DMLE. There are many meetings with Hermione and Ron and any necessary department heads. Harry still has trouble reading official documents in the office, so Draco blocks out time to read them to him.

Draco, as the person who tightly controls access to Harry, is the most publicly visible he’s ever been.

No one knows what to make of him at first. The old guard thinks Draco might be susceptible to bribes. Still more people suspect him of unduly influencing Harry. The rest watch him warily, waiting to see what he’ll do.

Eddard Burke is the first to approach in the traditional way.

He comes to Harry’s office asking for a meeting. Draco stands at the door in his red robes and politely refuses.

“I was hoping to speak with the Minister about the vote on the new statutes. I don’t oppose them necessarily, only I’ve heard whispers here and there that enforcement could be perceived as heavy-handed. Unfair, you might say, when it’s impossible to predict whether an inheritance might contain unseemly objects.”

“I’ll hear your proposal,” Draco offers.

Burke stares at him. He is, Draco knows, waiting for Draco to name the price, as had always been done before.

“And I will...I’d planned to make a donation to...” Eddard eyes Draco again. Draco keeps his expression pleasantly neutral. “...the Ministry’s new anti-poverty programme.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.” Draco puts a hand to his chest and inclines his head.

“And for the Minister...”

“The Minister will not accept any personal gifts,” Draco says smoothly. “I’ll await your owl.”

The Ministry—the wizarding world—is a bigger project by far than the DMLE.

Draco distracts from the lack of access to Harry himself by giving unprecedented financial disclosures to the press and to the Wizengamot. He and Harry take nothing but the salaries decreed by law. After the first two years, they quit drawing those, too.

Harry’s potions stop working in his third year as Minister, and it takes Ron and Hermione a full month to design and brew a suitable replacement.

The stakes are higher, and Harry’s body rejects them, over and over.

Still, he refuses to abandon his post.

They live their lives—their real lives, with birthday parties and holidays and the people they love—in the few hours they can get away.

And...

It works.

Families with seats on the Wizengamot learn to make outrageous donations to the causes championed by the Minister. Hundreds of thousands of Galleons pour into food and housing programmes, werewolf rights programmes, and education programmes designed to decrease Muggle-Magical hostility and, eventually, Muggle-Magical separation. They work with the Headmistress at Hogwarts to modernise the curriculum and provide additional support for Muggle-raised students instead of expecting them to acclimate on their own. Ron spends a full year on the Ministry’s child protection statutes and policies so that what happened to Harry can’t happen again.

The day before Harry’s forty-fifth birthday, Draco takes up his post outside the Minister’s office. He expects a visit or two, perhaps a few more, but the first people to approach aren’t members of the Wizengamot or any of the lobbying groups.

It’s Hermione and Ron.

“Stop it,” Draco says at once. “I will be highly offended if you think I wouldn’t listen to your proposals without—”

“We don’t have any proposals,” says Hermione.

He narrows his eyes at them. “Then what are you doing here? You can go in through the private entrance, you know. You needn’t—”

“We think it’s good.”

Draco doesn’t comprehend Ron’s statement at first. “You think what’s good?”

Ron shrugs. “Things are good here. Like, in the world. We’ve got enough good people to take over.”

Draco opens his mouth to argue.

But he finds, after all these years, that he agrees.

“We made some plans,” Hermione says tentatively. “A bit of a getaway. We thought we’d meet Pansy and Blaise and the others in the south of France, then decide what else we wanted to see. And I’ve made arrangements for succession in all the departments and crucial programmes, so we could talk about the process if—”

“I’ll tell him,” Draco says. “Wait here.”

It’s quiet in the Minister’s offices. Harry has a team of assistants, naturally, but this is one of the hours in the day when he’s not to be disturbed.

Draco finds him silhouetted against the massive charmed windows. Harry likes to stand in front of them and get the sun on his face, even if it’s only made of magic.

The silhouette fades as Draco gets closer, revealing Harry in detail: white robes, black curls, lightning scar over half his face, all of him gorgeous.

“Hi,” Harry says, without opening his eyes. “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” Draco looks at Harry, memorising the moment.

Harry opens his eyes. The summer-green takes Draco’s breath away, just as it always has. “What is it?”

Draco takes his hand. “I need a favour.”

The meaning takes several beats to sink in. Harry’s eyes shine, but he blinks the tears away.

“There’s a plan already made, apparently,” says Draco. “We would start in—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harry says, a sunrise smile lighting his face. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “I’ll go with you.”