The Echo of a Soul

The alley breathed like something alive, damp and sour, the stones sweating out a night’s worth of secrets. Harry stood just inside the shadow of a warped lintel, wand hand steady, the other pressed to the small speaker in his ear that connected him to the Aurors placed along the crooked lane. A shiver of old fear threaded through the chill; Knockturn Alley had a memory for faces. It always remembered his.

“On my mark,” he murmured. His voice sounded older to him than it ever did in his head. “Shacklebolt’s team, east end. Dawlish, keep your line tight. Don’t spook them.”

A dim light flickered in a window across the way—green, then out—exactly as the informant had promised. Illegal potions operation, high-end, coded shipments to half the continent. Harry had seen too many of these in the last year. He could name the smell of a basement where Amortentia was brewed without windows; he knew the pitch of a cauldron pushed too hard, the way it whined when the brew turned volatile. He knew that after the arrest and the reports and the Ministry photographs, he’d still walk away with the same ache under his breastbone and a face that the Prophet would plaster on the front page. The Boy Who Lived still doing what he was told. Still living.

He shifted, feeling the pull of a scar under his shirt. Rain in the air. Soot on his tongue. A pub door groaned and then closed further up, sending a ripple of whispers along the lane. He didn’t look. He kept his focus on the warped wooden door marked with a flaking horseshoe. The workshop, their source insisted; born out of it, all of it. A dozen nights of planning, a half-dozen warrants, and a promise to Hermione that he’d be careful. He had nodded. He was always careful, until he wasn’t.

“Potter.” Proudfoot’s voice, hushed amusement in it that put Harry’s nerves on edge. “You’re a ghost out there?”

“Breathing,” Harry said. “Three, two—go.”

They moved as one entity, a murmur of boots on stone swallowed by the alley’s greedy dark. The east-end team sealed the exits with a sheet of shimmering air that tasted of ozone. The door blew back under Harry’s hex and wood splintered, the sound too loud in such a tight place. He stepped over the threshold with his wand up and the smell hit him—metallic, sharp, cloying. He saw vats in the half-light, copper dented black at the rims. Fumes hung like a curtain.

“Ministry!” Dawlish barked behind him. “Wands down!”

Someone ran. A figure darted behind a bank of barrelled ingredients marked in cramped script. Harry flicked his wand; rope snapped through the air and tightened around a leg, dragging the man hard across the damp floor. He skidded, knocked a crate, and the slats fell apart to spill dried hellebore and a fine glitter that made Harry’s eyes water.

“Don’t move,” Harry said, stepping past him. “Hands where I can see them.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

Two more people stood at the far wall, one with stained fingers and the other clutching a ledger to their chest as if it could shield them. The younger one’s pupils were blown wide, the residue of a potion that made you braver than you were but not smarter. They dropped the ledger. It fell open at his feet, columns of figures and a list of names that made his stomach lower. He’d be adding statements, confessions, affidavits. He’d be canceling dinner with Ron. He’d be lying awake at two in the morning, staring at the crack in his ceiling.

“We’re not—” the stained fingers started, then stopped when Harry’s gaze settled. “We’re not selling to kids.”

“Congratulations,” Harry said, scanning the room with a sweep of wandlight. “That will sound very good in front of a judge.”

A door at the back banged open and a man erupted through it, firing without aim. Spells burst like sparks against vats and brick, painting the air white-blue. A cauldron whined. Harry felt the old instinct rise—the clear line inside him that had nothing to do with whether he wanted to be here. He countered, shielded, moved. He didn’t need to think. He didn’t need to be brave. He only needed to do what he knew how to do.

“Get the wards down,” he called over the crackle. “The whole building’s stacked with volatile compounds. If one goes—”

“I’m on it,” Proudfoot said, already melting into the rear. “Five minutes.”

Harry caught the edge of the attacker’s cloak with a binding charm and hauled him off balance. Their eyes met for a split second. The man’s were startled, furious, not evil. Harry had learned the hard way that it was rarely evil. It was desperate. It was bored. It was something that got teeth when you fed it too long.

A flash of something—a reflection?—skipped over a mirror-like surface at the back and for a brief, stupid second, he thought of his kitchen sink at Grimmauld Place, the way the dawn light slipped over it when he made coffee alone. He shook it off and disarmed the man with a tight arc that sent the wand flying into Dawlish’s waiting hand.

“Clear the left,” Harry said. “Check the cellar.”

Cellars always housed the worst of it. The illegal, the fragile, the experiments, the bodies. He kept his face blank, the way Robards had taught him in the early years, so that his team wouldn’t flinch if he did. He moved toward the back door the attacker had burst through, keeping low. He caught sight of himself in a tarnished bit of metal—jaw clenched, hair damp against his forehead, the scar a pale, low line. He looked like a man doing what he was supposed to. He didn’t look like the boy who’d once thought that winning would buy him peace.

A figure came up from the cellar with hands raised, a woman with a thick plait and a bruise edging purple at her temple. Her lips shook. “It’s not mine,” she said. “I just brew. I don’t ship. I don’t—”

Harry nodded once toward the Auror at his side. “Take her,” he said softly. “Get her statement. Make sure she’s not hurt.” The woman’s gaze snagged on his scar, the way so many did, like they couldn’t help it. He pretended not to see it.

The last room was small and hot, lined with shelves of bottles labeled in two kinds of ink, one over the other. A single window, opaque with grime. In the corner, a sealed chest hummed—a charm gone old and mean. He crouched, wand tip glowing. His shoulder ached when he leaned down, Gryffindor bravado having turned into a right rotator cuff somewhere in his thirties. He smiled, humorless, at the thought and tapped the chest. The hum sharpened.

“Careful,” Proudfoot warned from the doorway. “That’s a resonance lock.”

“I know.” Harry slid his wand along the seam, murmured, and the lock unfurled with a reluctant hiss. He lifted the lid. Inside, nestled like a secret, vials glowed with a soft silver light he didn’t recognize. Not Amortentia. Not Felix. Something colder.

His stomach tightened. “Bag these. No breakage. I want them in a containment field before they’re within ten feet of anyone from Evidence.”

Proudfoot whistled low. “New stock?”

“Looks like,” Harry said, even as his mind leapt ahead to long nights at a desk and the endless shuffle of parchment. Reports. Interviews. The Committee. The letters asking for statements for books he would never read. He closed the chest, sealed it, and stood too quickly. The room tilted for a second and he pressed a hand to the shelf to steady himself.

“You all right?” Proudfoot asked.

“I’m fine.” He was. He would be. He always was. The line held. The team wrapped the space in their neat spells and a net hissed over the ceiling as ventilation warding set in. Outside, the alley swallowed their noise and pretended not to care. Harry walked out into air that hadn’t learned anything from any of this, lifted his face to it, and almost laughed. He wanted, absurdly, to be back at the sink in his kitchen, watching the light make a shine on the stainless steel, hearing the kettle click off.

“We’ve got them,” Dawlish said, satisfaction rolling off him. “Good lead.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. He rubbed his thumb over the ridge of his wand handle. “Good lead.”

He glanced back once at the cracked sign over the door and then looked away. The Prophet would call him tireless in the morning. He felt very tired. He shoved his hands into his pockets and moved on to the next thing he was supposed to do. The rain finally started, thin and insistent, and Knockturn Alley exhaled as if relieved to be washed, even a little.

Draco adjusted the cuff of his coat and told himself that the damp did not seep. Knockturn had a particular chill that felt intentional, as if the street had learned how to linger on a person. He hated being here. He hated that his most reliable source for imported dittany essence had suddenly decided to become scarce and insist on face-to-face handoffs in alleys with names no map recorded. He hated the way he scanned windows for faces he knew and high collars and the glint of a signet ring that would mean trouble.

He could have sent an assistant. He could have sent an owl with a warning about terminated contracts and penalties. Instead he had come himself because if he wanted Beatrice Blume, the cautious supplier with the best contacts in Lisbon, to keep dealing with him, she needed to see his face and his legitimacy and his patience. Pansy had said, with a tilt of her mouth, that Draco was getting very good at patience. He wasn’t sure it was a compliment.

“Two minutes late,” Beatrice said as she slid from a shadow between a wand shop and something that had once been a cobbler’s. She was small, a stooped woman with sharp eyes and fingers stained the color of basil.

“The rain,” Draco said smoothly. “You haven’t committed to punctuality, so I thought we might be starting a trend.”

Her mouth twitched. “You cheek me in this street, boy, and see where I leave you.”

Draco inclined his head. “I have a schedule.”

“Everyone does. That’s why the good things sell,” she said, and tapped the leather satchel at her hip. “Half measure tonight. I don’t like the feel around here. You’ll have the rest tomorrow at the shop.”

He reached for his wallet and the second he did, the air tensed. A pulse rolled down the alley like the first beat in a march. He knew that feeling. He’d felt it as a child when his father would walk into a room with news he wanted to be asked about. A collective held breath, and then—

The door to the workshop across the way burst inward, a flare of light pooling across slick cobbles. Shouts followed, clear and controlled, the clipped timbre of Ministry training. Draco’s stomach dropped. He would have known the rhythm of those orders anywhere, even after all these years. He didn’t look toward the flash. Looking made you part of it.

“That’s Auror work,” Beatrice hissed, already stepping backwards. “No deal. Another time.”

“Wait,” Draco said under his breath, keeping his hands in plain view. Panic was something he managed now. He had learned how to make a face that meant nothing. The trick was to hold still. “Walk. Don’t run.”

“Spare me,” she snapped, but she didn’t run. She melted into a side cut as a pair of figures barreled past, wands up, robes flaring. Smoke bit down the back of Draco’s nose and he tasted tin. The past tried to slide over him; he pushed it off. This was not that. He pressed his back to the damp brick, head turned away, and quietly locked down the instinct that told him to find a corner and make himself thin.

A crate skidded on a film of spilled something and slammed into his boot. He stumbled, caught himself, and looked down at the slats. The ink on the side bled where rain had hit it: hellebore. The memory of Professor Snape’s voice rose without permission, precise and unforgiving. Draco didn’t need the reminder to keep his hands to himself.

Spells cracked like whips. He counted, without meaning to, the pattern of deflection and response. Someone knew what they were doing. Someone had practiced until their movements were muscle more than thought. The sound wasn’t the chaos of a street brawl. It was tidy. It was trained. It was the sort of sound that made people like him step into a doorway and pretend to be part of the brick.

“Move it, sir!” an Auror barked at the edge of his hearing. Draco didn’t turn his head, didn’t give them his face. He slid one step deeper into the recess, palms open and visible. “I’m not involved.”

“Everyone says that,” the Auror said. Boots and breath and the tang of ozone, then they were gone, a push of air in their wake.

He should leave. He should Apparate directly to the Manor and wash the smell off his clothes and be grateful for old magic that still recognized him as a son. A shout cut across the alley, sharp with a fray in it that made Draco’s skin rise. He resisted the impulse to look. He failed. He glanced.

Potter was a line of motion against the light, moving with a focus Draco had once resented because it was too pure, because it was not a performance. The shape of him was older, the shoulders set, the jaw rigid, the hair damp and refusing to be anything but a mess. He wasn’t supposed to be beautiful in the middle of this, but Draco’s mind had always been a traitor at inconvenient moments.

“Brilliant,” Draco muttered, steadying his breath. “Of course it’s him.”

He ducked his head and attempted to make himself very obviously uninterested. The street, indifferent, ignored his strategy. A spell went wide—panic, not skill—and split a drainpipe above him. Black water gushed and splattered down his shoulder and into his collar. He flinched, heat and cold all at once, and nearly collided with a runner careening out of the workshop. The man’s sleeve brushed Draco’s fingertips, wet, and the flash of silver at his cuff was unfamiliar enough that Draco’s attention snagged on it for a fraction of a second. He’d cataloged strange things for years. It was a reflex.

A jinx glanced off the stone inches from his head. It sparked and faded with a smell like burned sugar. Draco’s chest tightened. This close to aim, you didn’t have time to be dignified. You had to move. He pivoted out of the recess, calculated the angle that would put brick between him and most of it, and went for the edge of the alley where it narrowed. He almost made it.

“Malfoy,” someone said, close, in disbelief that wasn’t surprised. Potter, of course, because the world liked a theme. Draco only paused for the barest fraction before he kept moving.

“Working,” he said without stopping, and he didn’t know why his voice came out even. “Not with you.”

Another spell arced, this one like a stroke of mercury. It hit something behind him with a sound like someone sucking in a breath through their teeth. People shouted. Someone fell. The air took on a higher note, a thin whine that Draco recognized too late—the way a cauldron complained when pushed past reason.

He felt the pull before he understood it, a soft pressure across his skin that made the hairs on his arms stand. He didn’t think of anything sensible. He thought of being fourteen and feeling something tug at the back of his neck that turned out to be a hand he couldn’t see. He caught the edge of an iron railing and held on as if the world might try to slip him loose.

“Down!” Potter’s voice this time, sharp and closer. A body hit him—an Auror or a suspect, he didn’t know—and shoved him into the wet stone. He absorbed the impact with his shoulder and tried to pry himself free. Everything smelled like rain and old metal and that thin sugar-burn.

“I’m not—” he began, but the words vanished.

For a second, the world narrowed to a single point of cold light. It was not heat, not impact. It was a spreading clarity that started between his ribs and moved out, drawing a line from somewhere he didn’t recognize straight through him and—impossibly—through someone else. He could have sworn he felt another breath layered on top of his, ragged where his was steady, an echo that wasn’t his at all.

Draco’s fingers splintered a sodden bit of wood and the pieces stuck to his palm. He heard his own heart, and beneath it, louder, an old fear that he had not invited. When the light disappeared, it left behind a strange quiet in the street, a half-second of white noise like the sea. Then the din returned, as if it had never stopped.

He let go of the railing. His hand shook. He took one careful step and then another. He didn’t look back. He didn’t let his gaze touch Potter again. He rounded the corner of the alley and made himself walk as if nothing odd had happened to him at all. He had a satchel to acquire tomorrow and a lab bench he wanted to wipe down before sleep. He had learned to arrange his life in neat rows, and he would not let a bit of Ministry chaos knock them out of place.

Behind him, he could still feel the ghost of that cold thrill under his skin, a hum that didn’t belong to him. He told himself it would fade with the rain. He tucked his hands into his pockets because they wouldn’t be still. He kept going.

Harry felt the shift before he saw it—the way magic gathered at the edges, tightening like a knot. The suspect they had been corralling, a thin man with eyes too wild to be brave, stumbled back over a broken crate and slammed into a shelving unit. Bottles rattled. One fell and burst, an acrid sting rising with the vapor. The man’s wand arm trembled. He looked cornered and, worse, willing to go for something reckless.

“Hold,” Harry called, signaling Dawlish with two fingers. They fanned, tight formation, wands up. The man’s breath hitched.

“Drop it,” Harry said, low and even.

The man smiled, a bleak, too-wide stretch. His mouth moved around words Harry didn’t recognize. The language crawled. It wasn’t Latin. It wasn’t anything Harry had learned, and he’d learned more than he’d wanted to. The sound of it scraped against the back of Harry’s teeth.

“Shields,” Harry snapped, already moving to a deflecting stance.

The wand came down in a vicious arc. Silver light cracked from the tip like water under ice. It wasn’t a bolt; it was a sheet, thin as spun sugar and twice as treacherous. It flashed across the room and through the open doorway, faster than his Protego could rise. Harry had one dislocated thought—the way the air tasted just before a storm—and then it hit him.

It wasn’t impact. It was a line, drawn and then driven straight through his sternum and out through the alley. Cold swept through him, bright and clear, and something else with it: a second heartbeat that wasn’t his, doubled in his ears. The world sharpened to a point and widened again. His knees almost buckled. He caught himself with a palm against the damp doorframe and dragged in air that stung.

“Potter!” someone shouted. Dawlish, carrying too much alarm in his voice.

“I’m fine,” Harry said through his teeth, because he meant to be. He forced a breath. The suspect sagged, the magic spent, and collapsed sideways. Shackles snapped shut around his wrists with a clean click that made the room feel steadier.

Harry stepped out into the rain-slick alley and blinked hard against the streaked light. His vision doubled for a fraction of a second, like a charm gone wrong, and settled. People were moving again; sound came back in layers. A wet chill slid beneath his robes and clung to his skin. He flexed his hand. It tingled.

“Sir.” Capper came up alongside, eyes taking stock. “You took it.”

“I’m standing,” Harry said. He looked down the alley in the direction the light had gone, but there was nothing except water coursing along the gutter and the metallic drip of the broken drainpipe. For a heartbeat he thought he saw a pale shape disappear around the bend, a flash of fair hair, but the rain blurred everything. “Secure the scene. Two Healers,” he added, voice firming. He wasn’t going to collapse in Knockturn. Not again. Not ever.

They moved because he asked them to, and within minutes a triage tent unfurled at the mouth of the alley, yellow canvas cutting the grey. The Healers stepped in, brisk and steady, the flurry of their presence a relief. Harry submitted to their wands and their questions. He answered because it was habit, because it gave shape to the moment.

“Name?” the younger Healer asked, a witch with freckles and a no-nonsense bun. Her wand tip glowed a calm blue as she traced along his ribs.

“Harry Potter.”

Her eyebrows flicked up, and then settled. “Any immediate pain?”

“Cold,” he said, surprised to hear it. “It passed.” He didn’t mention the echo of a breath that hadn’t been his. It sounded ridiculous spoken aloud, and they needed clear facts, not the way his skin remembered a phantom line.

She hummed once, a sound of recognition without understanding. “Circulatory charm shows no abnormalities. No curse residue on the surface.” She angled her wand, then frowned. “There is a…frequency spike. Like a resonance, but it’s not mapping to your core. It’s peripheral.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I don’t know, Mr. Potter,” she said, unruffled and honest. “But I’m not seeing harm. Do you feel dizzy? Nausea?”

“No.” He was still and let her finish, the glow running over the taut lines of his forearms, the thrum of his scar, quiet today. Outside the tent, Aurors gathered statements and levitated contraband into sealed crates. The rhythm of it soothed him.

When she finished, he shrugged back into his damp cloak. “Send the report to the Auror Office,” he said. “I want your notes on the resonance.”

“Of course.” She hesitated, then added, “There was a second trace, faint and…not here. It looked like you brushed another field. If you feel anything odd tonight—headache, fever, unfamiliar emotions—contact us immediately.”

His mouth tipped at that. “Unfamiliar emotions?”

She didn’t smile back. “Magic is messy. Be careful.”

He stepped out into the alley again, and the rain had softened to a fine mist. The suspect was being floated past, eyes half-lidded, muttering a wet syllable that made Harry’s jaw tighten. He’d get the transcript of that incantation if it killed him. He turned to check in with Dawlish and then paused, scanning the crowd. The prickle under his skin lifted again, subtle and impossible. His gaze snagged on the corner where the alley narrowed. Empty. He told himself to stop chasing shadows.

Across the way, another triage cot had been unrolled. A familiar profile sat on its edge, posture stiff with disdain and something else coiled tight underneath. Malfoy’s hair was damp and pushed off his forehead. His coat was clean despite the rain, his hands clenched on his knees as if they belonged somewhere else.

Harry’s step hitched. He told his feet to move on. They didn’t, not at first.

The second Healer glanced up as Harry approached and seemed to weigh the risk of telling him to give space. She settled for a harried nod. “He’s fine,” she said, preempting whatever Harry was going to ask. “Startled and soaked, but fine. No curse residue we can detect.”

“I told you I was working,” Malfoy said, flat and cold, as if the words had been practiced. He had kept his voice even. Harry heard the effort in it anyway.

Harry’s mouth was dry. “You shouldn’t have been in the alley.”

“Half of London shouldn’t be in Knockturn,” Malfoy shot back, the edges softening just enough to give him away. His gaze flicked to Harry’s chest with a quick, involuntary pull, as if he expected to see a mark. He looked away just as quickly. “Did you—” He stopped. He pressed his lips together.

“Whatever that was,” Harry said, keeping his voice low, “it hit both of us.”

Malfoy’s jaw shifted. “I noticed.”

The Healer made a note on her clipboard with a tapping charm. “Same resonance mark on both,” she said, not looking up. “No active curse. No cause for containment.”

Harry nodded, though relief didn’t come with it. “You can go,” he said to Malfoy, not trusting the shape of anything else.

“I was going to,” Malfoy said, as if Harry had suggested he might linger. He slid off the cot, movements controlled, courtesy arranged like armor. He hesitated as if he might say something sensible and then didn’t, pale eyes cutting past Harry to the tent’s canvas flap and the street beyond. “Auror Potter.” He made the title a blade and a truce at once, and then he was gone, the back of him straight, unhurried.

Harry watched the place where he’d been for a beat longer than he should have, then turned on his heel. Dawlish was barking orders. Reports needed to be filed. The suspect needed to be catalogued and booked. He had a list of tasks, and they were ordinary enough to be a comfort.

He rolled his shoulder once as he walked, testing for a pull that wasn’t there. The cold line through his chest had faded to a suggestion, a thought you only remembered when you held very still. He pushed through it and went to work, telling himself, as the Healer had, that magic was messy and tonight had simply been one more mess.

When the last crate had been sealed and the paperwork started, the sky had turned from slate to black. Harry signed his name and sent three owls, then lingered in the doorway of the abandoned workshop, listening to the quiet settle back on the alley. He rubbed two fingers over the place beneath his sternum where the light had threaded through. There was nothing there. He let his hand fall and told himself he’d sleep.

He Apparated home. The pop of it cleared the damp from his ears. In the sudden hush of his kitchen, he leaned against the counter and exhaled, long and slow. He didn’t think about pale eyes in a rain-slicked alley. He didn’t think about a second breath layered with his. He washed his face and told himself this was done.

Across the city, Draco stood in the entrance hall of the Manor, rain dripping from his cuffs onto marble he’d polished himself that morning. The house recognized him and warmed. He didn’t move for a long moment. He lifted a hand and pressed his palm to the center of his chest, as if testing for a bruise. There was nothing to feel. He let his fingers fall, and then he went to his lab to tidy the bench, because order was the only thing that had ever made his mind quiet. He told himself the hum under his skin would be gone by morning. He told himself a lot of things that felt like sense. He kept going.

The first thing was the floor. Harry recognized it, the veined marble of the Malfoy entrance hall, but it didn’t shine. It swallowed light. The house had always felt cold to him—bone-deep and quiet—yet this was different. It was familiar in a way he did not own, the way a scar is familiar to the skin that healed over it. The dark wood gleamed with fresh polish. The chandelier’s crystals chimed with the draft. The air of the Manor smelled of beeswax and something more sterile beneath it, a sharp, medicinal sweetness that clung to his tongue.

He knew where he was with the total clarity of a memory. He knew more than that. He knew the weight of the robes over his shoulders, too heavy and tailored too well, dragging his posture into a line his body didn’t want to hold. He knew the pinch of a mask held between careful fingers. He knew that if he took one more step forward, the snap of a wand to his ribs would make him nauseous. None of that was his. Harry tried to step back and found his feet move forward instead.

The hall stretched, doors opening and closing with the measured rhythm of routine. Voices came from the drawing room, low and idle, edging toward cruel. Harry’s gut went tight, then tighter, at the sound of them. Not his. It ran through him anyway, swift and total.

“Draco.” Narcissa’s voice, soft but cutting through the murmur. A hand landed, cool and correct, on the sleeve. Harry looked down and saw the pale cuff balanced over a wrist as sharp as the edge of a quill. “Your father is expecting you.”

Harry—no, Draco—nodded. The skin at the back of his neck prickled under hair smoothed too flat. His mouth tasted metallic. He was aware of two heartbeats, one pounding, one steadying it, and neither belonged to Harry anymore. He moved in the direction Narcissa’s hand applied, and the doors opened to the drawing room like a wound.

He hated this room. That thought came fast and unadorned. It had the carved fireplace, the peacock-blue walls, the gilded mirror that reflected everyone in shards. The long table stood ready with decanters and crystal, as if they were hosting a party. They were. The guests smiled with thin lips and shark eyes. The rug masked the sound of footsteps. It didn’t mask the other sounds. Harry knew those sounds. He had made them. He had heard them. He had survived them. Draco didn’t think of himself as someone who survived things. He thought of himself as someone who endured them without moving.

Lucius looked up, and the air went sharper. “You’re late,” he said, smooth as the scotch in his hand. The cane leaned at his chair like a third participant in the conversation.

“My apologies,” Draco said. Harry heard the level cadence of the word, could feel the effort of keeping it so. Every muscle wanted to tremble and none of them did. He walked to the fireplace. He knew to stand at his father’s left, a step back. He knew to hold still.

The mask in his hand felt slick. He pressed the inside of his thumb against the edge. The sting grounded him. It wasn’t enough.

“Put it on,” Lucius said, bored with the preliminaries.

He lifted the thing to his face. The world narrowed. He could taste his own breath trapped inside the mask, hot and stale. The eyeholes turned everyone into caricatures. Harry wanted to tear it off; Draco wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t. He slipped it over, and the clasp clicked, a small, decisive sound.

Bellatrix laughed from the far end of the table, head tipped back, dark hair wild. “He looks precious,” she sang. “Our little prince.” There was the thinnest crack in her voice where joy met hunger.

A noise came from the other side of the door, muffled and awful in its restraint. Harry’s stomach turned. Draco kept his chin up. “May I ask—” he began, and stopped because the question was stupid and dangerous. May I ask who. May I ask why. May I ask to be elsewhere. His tongue felt too big for his mouth.

“Stand there,” Lucius said, pointing to a corner that made the angle of sight acute. “And keep your silence.”

He did. The room shifted with footsteps on the other side of the drawn curtain. A wand flicked. The weight of magic in the air climbed, pressing on the inside of Draco’s ears until a thin ringing started. Harry remembered the precise heft of his own holly wand in his palm at seventeen, the way it had fit him perfectly. Draco’s wand felt like an obligation. He kept his hand off it. He knew what was expected of him here: nothing but presence and compliance.

The curtain opened. Two figures entered, flanked by masked men. The prisoners kept their eyes lowered. One stumbled and righted himself too quickly. The sound he made was too human for this place.

Something hot and raw flared through Draco’s chest. Harry had felt anger like this, hot and sharp and honest. Draco’s flared and folded in on itself, contained by habit until it went cold again. He couldn’t afford to let it show. He had learned that the hard way. He kept his feet exactly where they were. The mask hid nothing at this range.

“Draco,” Lucius said, almost gentle. “You will observe.”

Observe, Harry thought, and wanted to spit. Draco thought nothing. That was the discipline. He climbed inside the quiet the way you reach for a coat you hate and put it on because the weather demands it. The sounds began, and the room obliged by absorbing them. Draco counted the facets of the chandelier. He counted his inhales and exhales, measured, shallow. He let the terror move through him like an electrical current he couldn’t ground. He imagined it didn’t touch him.

He was young. Younger than Harry remembered himself being, not in years but in edges. He wanted to be older in a way that would protect him. He wanted his father to look at him and see something solid and useful. He wanted his mother to look at him and not flinch.

“Look at me,” someone said. Not to Draco. One of the prisoners. Desperate. Harry’s gaze jerked even though he didn’t mean it to. Draco’s eyes, behind the mask, found a face. Dark hair. No, not him. Not this time. A stranger. Worse for being unknown.

“Draco,” Bellatrix purred, as if discussing a dessert. “What do you think we should ask him first?”

The terror didn’t spike. It sank, heavy as lead. If he answered, he implicated himself. If he refused, he humiliated his father. If he said nothing, he failed. He understood there was no correct response and that none was expected. This was theatre. He was a prop. He felt it burn.

He did what he was best at. He kept his mouth closed and made his eyes blank with effort. His heart pounded so loudly he was sure the room could hear it. The chandelier chimed. The scent of beeswax and magic pressed tight around them. The wand movements were exact and bored. The electrical hum in Draco’s bones rose until his fingers wanted to twitch and didn’t.

He could feel, faintly, a second awareness under his, reaching for him. It startled Harry inside the dream—the way Draco felt it and dismissed it as a symptom of nerves. He didn’t know there was someone else at the edges with him. He didn’t know Harry was there, braced in a corner of him, helpless and furious, breathing in time because he didn’t know what else to do.

The door on the far side banged open with a gust of winter air that cut through the heaviness. The masked men turned their heads as one. Lucius sighed, annoyed at the interruption. The world wavered, the chandelier’s crystals blurring and then snapping back into focus.

“You will remember,” Lucius said, low, to Draco, as if imparting instruction in the correct use of cutlery. “What is asked of you.”

Draco nodded because he had trained his neck to obey. The cold pushed against his teeth from the inside. His mouth tasted like pennies. He stood. He kept standing. The commands and the cries blurred into a dull roar. The silence afterward rang worse.

When it ended, it didn’t end. It never did. The drawing room emptied in an orderly fashion. The decanters were refilled. Narcissa walked past him and did not touch him. The mask left a mark on his cheekbones that would fade by morning. He reached up and unfastened it with careful fingers. He stared at the inside of it, the curve that fit a face, his face, as if it had been molded there.

He wanted to wash. He wanted a window open and a wind that didn’t smell like this house. He wanted to crawl out of his skin. He set the mask down with precision he didn’t feel. He moved. He always moved.

Harry woke with his hand clenched against his chest, fingernails dug hard enough to sting. He was sitting up before his eyes focused, breath harsh in the quiet of his bedroom. The sheets were tangled, damp with sweat. The room was dark, ordinary. The hum of the city through the open window was blessedly indifferent. He dragged a forearm across his mouth and found it unsteady.

The terror didn’t belong to him. It stayed anyway, pooled low and sour. He put his feet on the floor and pressed them to the rug like it was proof of where he was. He flexed his hands and waited for the shake to subside. It didn’t. He stood and paced the length of his room twice, three times, listening to his own breath and the echo of another that wasn’t here.

He leaned both palms on the dresser, head tipped down. In the mirror, he saw the outline of himself in the dark and, splintered behind it for the barest second, a flash of pale hair and cool eyes that didn’t meet his. He blinked and it was only his reflection again. He swallowed hard.

He would call Hermione in the morning. He would tell himself this was a curse’s side effect. He would pretend he hadn’t felt the exact weight of a mask on bones that weren’t his, the stale heat of breath trapped behind it, the steady expectation of a father’s disappointment. He scrubbed a hand over his face, grimaced at the salt on his skin.

Sleep wasn’t coming back. He went to the kitchen and turned on the tap just to hear the water. He stood like that until the glass in his hand was empty and the light through the window shifted to the first suggestion of morning. The feeling in his chest didn’t soften. It wasn’t his. He knew that with total certainty. It made it worse.

The cold hit like a physical blow, sucking everything warm out of the air in a single indrawn breath. Draco knew that kind of cold. It wasn’t temperature; it was subtraction. It took the edges off things until all that was left was the ache.

Fog rolled low over the ground, dense and clinging, curls of it threading around his ankles. He couldn’t see the walls, only rough stone in suggestions, damp and close. The smell was old rot and something sweet gone wrong. The first hint of the rattle reached him before he saw anything. Then a shape pulled itself out of the dark, tall and wrong, the suggestion of a tattered cloak and a mouth that wasn’t a mouth.

Dementor, his mind supplied, clean and clinical, the way he had seen it in textbooks and from a distance on the Hogwarts Express. Seeing one now made the word useless. Blackness leaked from it, swallowing the thin light as it moved. The air took on the weight of a storm.

He hadn’t called it here. He hadn’t chosen this. Something else had—someone else.

The terror came, practiced as breath, but there was something else threaded through it, a heat that didn’t belong to him. Draco’s fear ran cold, always had. This was hot, an uprising. A refusal. It felt out of place in him, like a flare burning too close to his skin.

It stood ten feet away and every memory he didn’t want cut open started to bleed. His mother’s fingers tight on his wrist in a hallway that smelled like flowers and panic. His father’s voice modulated into disdain. Bellatrix’s laughter. The mask cupping his cheekbones like a hand. The sound a boy made and then didn’t make.

He waited for the part where his knees went, where the hope seeped to nothing and left him empty. He knew that pattern. He braced for it. It didn’t arrive. Something else did. It ran up his spine like a spine being built.

No, said a voice that wasn’t a voice. It was a stance, a grip, a habit made into bone. It was defiance as plain as breath.

Draco’s hand went for his wand without thought. The holly weight met his palm like it knew him. He frowned at that—he had never owned holly. The thought slid by, outpaced by the icy rush of the Dementor drawing closer.

Expecto— He knew the spell in theory. Slughorn had never required it. He’d practiced in an empty classroom once, had produced nothing but sparks and a hollow shame he pretended was irritation. He couldn’t do it. He had never been able to do it.

But the incantation didn’t feel foreign. It was muscle memory he didn’t own. It filled him with a heat that bypassed thought entirely.

“Expecto Patronum,” he said, and for a moment the words belonged to someone who had spoken them a thousand times and meant them, who had stood on a shore and made something luminous chase nightmares into the trees. His arm lifted. The Dementor dropped an inch closer, the rattle a warning and a promise.

Nothing came out of his wand. His throat should have closed in shame. Instead, a surge of anger rose—clean, bright. Not at himself. At the thing and what it took. At everything it represented. It was Potter’s feeling. Draco recognized the flavor of it now, a forward momentum that wouldn’t accept defeat as default.

Light gathered anyway. Not from his wand, but from the air, from a point just to his left where nothing had been a second before. It coalesced with shocking speed. Heat touched Draco’s cheekbones, the new warmth of a fire catching. A shape burst into being with a rush like a breath released after too long underwater.

A stag. Silver, clean, so sharply defined it hurt to look at. Its antlers were a crown of light. The rush of its arrival shoved the cold back a pace. Its hooves struck the stone and found no echo. It moved like it knew the ground better than Draco did.

The Dementor recoiled. The stag lowered its head. The distance between them felt alive with something that reminded Draco of hope except not his own. He stood in it regardless. The first wave of warmth soaked in past skin, past bone.

He hated it. The heat under his skin wasn’t his. It was Potter’s. He could feel the stamp of it, the way it was built on years of practice and a dogged refusal to surrender. He never wanted anything of Potter’s. He didn’t want it now.

But he didn’t step out of it. He couldn’t. The alternative was the ice, and he had lived with ice long enough.

The stag charged. It hit the Dementor like light cutting fog. The creature fell back, cloak flayed to shreds by something that had no edges. The rattle turned into a scream that was more absence than sound. The stag pressed forward. It didn’t falter. Draco felt the push like a hand between his shoulder blades, urging him to stand up straighter than he ever had in that drawing room.

Memories tried to bite, to drag him under. His mother’s hair smoothed behind her ear as she said, Dinner is at seven, love, as if telling him would make the night ordinary. A boy’s eyes, wide and wet as glass, turning towards him. The burn of a Dark Mark not yet given and already present. The urge not to be this person so strong it was a taste in his mouth.

The warmth held, a barrier and a balm. He hadn’t known that was possible. He hadn’t known the spell could feel like this from the inside, how it could make breathing easy when nothing else did. He thought of himself at thirteen, pretending he wasn’t afraid on a train that smelled like wool and damp. He thought of Potter striding down the corridor with a ridiculous silver animal at his shoulder like it had been made for him.

The Dementor retreated, unable to hold ground against the shining animal that belonged to someone else. The fog thinned enough to show the arch of a tunnel and beyond it, an open space he recognized and did not—a patchwork of memory that clicked into place. Stones lined in the pattern of the Ministry; the echo of a voice he had heard too often in the newspapers; the particular dread of believing you were going to die and standing anyway because there was no other choice.

Potter. That was the shape of it. Potter’s defiance, Potter’s anger, Potter’s stupid, relentless conviction there was always another way.

Rage shot through Draco so clean it took him by surprise. Not at the Dementor. At the trespass. At the way his hand had known the heft of a wand he had never used, at the way his mouth had formed a spell that wasn’t his. At the uninvited warmth in his bones, sinking in as if it belonged.

“Get out,” he said, to the air, to the stag, to the sensation of someone else’s spine built inside his. His own voice sounded thin. The stag turned its head towards him for the briefest instant, eyes that were not eyes gentle and implacable. It wasn’t listening. It didn’t have to. This wasn’t a conversation. It was memory doing what it wanted.

The Dementor fled, the rattle fading into the whisper of the fog. The warmth stayed a heartbeat too long, as if reminding him of a thing he could not produce without help. It made him feel raw. Exposed. Weak.

When the light went, it took the borrowed steadiness with it. The cold rushed in, filling every empty space it could find. His breath clouded in front of him. He tasted iron. He lifted his chin and made his face smooth, because that was what he knew how to do.

He recognized the bones of the place now: the corridor outside the courtroom in the Ministry where Potter had dragged his godfather’s name and body through the war and back. Draco had been here in paper only. He had not stood under that arch. Now he was standing in the echo of Potter’s worst nights, and it made his skin crawl.

“Stay out of my head,” he snapped into the grey, even though he knew he was saying it to a ghost of a moment. The answer wasn’t a voice. It was a pulse along his nerves, faint and sure as a heartbeat. Not his. Shared.

He woke furious. The darkness of his bedroom swallowed him whole. His sheets were cool, his pillow stiff. He sat up too quickly and the world tilted, his chest tight with leftover cold that wasn’t weather. He wanted to put his fist through something. He wanted to peel Potter out of his bones and throw him as far as possible.

His breath fogged in the air for the smallest second before the room remembered itself and warmed. He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum, as if he could grind the unfamiliar heat out.

Harry Potter had been there. Not just in the sense of a name in a story but inside Draco’s body, in the way his arm had moved, in the catch of his breath, in the unwelcome steadiness that had held when Draco’s would have shattered.

He threw the covers back like they’d offended him and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor was solid. The world stayed where it was. He closed his eyes and saw a stag burn silver against the dark and hated how badly he wanted the warmth back for a single, treacherous heartbeat. He opened his eyes and smiled without humor at the ceiling.

He would find the source of this and end it. He would not have Potter inside his sleep. He refused the idea with his entire body and still felt the echo of a hand he had never held at his shoulder, saying, Stand.