“What, all of them?” Ron demands, releasing Harry’s head, and takes off in the direction she’s pointing at once.
“Sorry,” Hermione says to Harry and Draco, already following him. “Catch up with you two later?”
She goes without waiting for a reply, vanishing into the crowd after Ron, which is— pretty fitting, Harry thinks, things being what they are.
When he looks back at Draco, Draco is still looking at him, the same considering, assessing gaze as before. Harry shifts a little under it; he’s not sure he wants Draco to see whatever it is he’s picked up on, the petty, stupid ugliness of Harry’s train of thought tonight.
“Potter,” Draco says eventually. “You want to get out of here?”
Harry does.
Draco, still relatively sober, leads them outside, sneers when Harry reaches for his wand, and insists on Apparating both of them himself. Harry expects them to land in the warmly lit halls of Grimmauld Place; instead he blinks to see a familiar Muggle street near Diagon Alley, about three blocks from his apartment.
“Oh,” Harry says, his heart sinking. Draco’s just taking him home, maybe thought he could use a nice—constitutional, or something, first. Walkies, Harry thinks bitterly, and pulls his coat a little tighter around himself. He thought…well, it doesn’t matter what he thought. Obviously Draco has no interest in entertaining Harry in this state, and it’s not like Harry blames him.
He wants to go home, to be alone with his thoughts, less than he’s ever wanted to do anything. He would rather have stayed at the damn bar. He supposes there’s nothing for it now, though, and starts walking.
He only makes it a few feet before Draco says, “Potter?”
Harry turns. Draco is still standing in the exact spot they landed, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. “Where, exactly, are you going?”
“Er,” Harry says, “home?”
Draco looks at him blankly for a second, and then realization seems to dawn. “Oh, yes —your place would be around here, I suppose. No, of course we’re not going there, you idiot. It’s horrible there.”
“Oh,” Harry says again, mollified in spite of the insults to his apartment and his intelligence, respectively. He looks around as he walks back over to Draco; this street is mostly weekend-empty office buildings, a couple of closed little Muggle shops. “What are we doing here, then?”
Draco fixes him with a steely look. “Look away, Potter.”
“What?” says Harry. “Why?”
“Don’t ask questions,” Draco says, and groans. “It’s such a simple request—‘Look away, Potter,’—a Kneazle could do it! Are you really going to force me to consider you less intelligent than a Kneazle?”
“Kneazles are very smart animals,” Harry says, and crosses his arms over his chest. He doesn’t break eye contact with Draco.
“Oh—you—fine,” Draco says, flushing bright red, “but I swear to god if you tell anyone I’ll ruin you.”
Then he…he….
Harry really doesn’t know how to explain it, even to himself. Draco just kind of—it’s not a shimmy, exactly, sort of more of a—wave, Harry thinks, except with his whole body. It reminds him a little of people cheering at the Quidditch World Cup, the motion of jumping out of their seats and throwing their arms in the air, except that Draco started it already standing so he just kind of—rocks his hips forward and back, and then his torso, as he lifts his arms over his head, pulls them as far back as they’ll go.
There’s not even time for Harry to process, yet alone laugh at, the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen in his life, because the air around them starts to shimmer and ripple. Then, with the distant sound of a bell chiming, it almost—rips—and a little doorway-sized gap appears between the two buildings closest.
“What,” Harry says, staring.
“You’ll see,” Draco says, and tilts his head at the gap. When Harry doesn’t move, Draco grabs him by the jacket sleeve, rolls his eyes. “You’d think you’d never seen magic done before, Potter. Come on.”
He draws Harry through the portal.
Chapter 6
They step out into a forest.
Harry gasps a little; he can’t help himself. They’re standing at the mouth of a glen, looking down onto a long winding creek cutting through it. The walls of the narrow valley are lined with trees, and even in the moonlight, even though it hasn’t quite turned spring, there’s the suggestion of verdance sketched into every line of the place. Harry can hear birdcall, the hoots and cries of wild owls and song thrushes. The air tastes and smells different than it did a moment ago—fresher. Clean.
Harry, a little wildly, looks back around through the portal, where he can still see Muggle London in all its mundane glory, painted in grey asphalt and the distant glow of streetlamps. He looks back to the glen. It doesn’t get any less surreal.
Draco laughs, a bright peal into the darkness. “Good, isn’t it?”
“Good,” Harry repeats, dazed, not even really hearing the word. “Malfoy, where are we?”
Draco smiles; when he speaks, he sounds a bit like he does on the tours he gives at the museum. “So, there was this mad wizard in the 1660s who was convinced Diagon Alley was going to be the site of some terrible accident—I think a centaur told him or something, I don’t remember now. Anyway, he bought up all this land thinking that, when the disaster in question hit, people would want to rebuild somewhere else. And then, incredibly enough, there was a fairly devastating fire in Diagon about ten years later, but no one wanted to move. It’s almost as if,” he adds, in a pointed little voice, “wizards grow attached to their homes and places of business, because the structures themselves develop personalities over time.”
Harry sighs. “Are you ever going to let that go?”
“Letting go isn't really an area of strength for me,” Draco says, looking away. Harry follows his gaze down to the creek, watches the way the water curves and winds. “It wasn’t for Isidore Dibbler, either; that was his name, the man who bought the land. When the Statute of Secrecy was passed, he sealed this place up, convinced that someday everyone would be ready to quit Diagon for good and he’d get rich. Then he died. He didn’t have any kids, or anyone to inherit, and he spent all the money he had buying the land in the first place, so as far as I can tell it just sat here for centuries, hidden anyway. One of those things that just sort of…fell through the cracks.”
“That’s…” Harry says, and before he can choose between insane, incredible, or some combination of the two, wonders: “Wait, so how’d you find it?”
“Oh, years ago I came across his journals in a collection of old books I bought at auction,” Draco says, waving a hand. “I do that sometimes; you can learn very interesting things that way. The barmy old coot went on and on for six hundred pages about how he’d been denied his rightful fate as the owner of New Diagon—not much of a creative thinker, Dibbler—but about halfway through there was a map which marked the place I Apparated us to. Underneath it said ‘Go To Thee Spotte and Speak Unto It With Your Body As The Fish To The Ocean; Only Then Shall You Walk The Path.’ So, I. Uh. Well.” Draco shrugs, looking a little embarrassed. “I spent two days standing out there trying to speak with my body as the fish to the ocean, in fact.”
“What,” says Harry, already laughing, “just kind of—wiggling around?”
“More or less,” Draco admits. “The Muggles thought I was a busker; they threw coins at me. It wasn’t one of my more dignified moments.”
Harry laughs some more, delighted just at the thought of it, but the sound dies in his throat as he looks around again. The moon is high over the glen, beams of light lancing down over the trees, the water, the plants and animals that have been left to their business here for centuries, untouched by human life. It’s beautiful, in a rough, uncomplicated way. Simple. Pure.
“Seems like it was worth it,” he says at last.
Draco turns to him and smiles, a slow, warm one that Harry doesn’t see very often, can never quite interpret. “Yes,” he says. “It was.”
“Have you ever showed anyone else?” Harry asks, on impulse.
Draco freezes, and then says, loudly and as if he didn’t hear Harry’s question at all, “Come along, now, Potter, we can’t linger here all day.”
So: no, Harry thinks, grinning a little as he follows Draco down the path to the heart of the valley. He hasn’t. He found this place on his own, and kept it for himself—didn’t tell his mother, or Blaise, or Pansy, or even Neville, who would probably give up a limb or two to walk a patch of magical forest that’s been more or less suspended in time. It sounds like Draco, who opened a museum in his home but put heavy wards and blocking charms on the part that he lives in, who’ll talk incessantly about any topic except the shit he really means. He likes stuff like this: open secrets. Things that could belong to everybody, but, one way or another, turn out to just be his.
He’s brought Harry to walk this ground that no one but him has touched for hundreds of years, to see this place he has kept close to his chest, private, all this time. It means something; Harry’s sure. He just can’t quite figure out what.
He walks with Draco in companionable silence, their steps guided by a path that’s been worn into the ground—by Draco, Harry realizes. It couldn’t really have been anyone else. “How much time to do you spend here?”
“Some,” Draco says, with a little shrug. “More than I probably should; less than I’d probably like. It’s peaceful.”
Harry rolls his eyes. “Because you’re such a peaceful person.”
“Well I would be,” Draco says, shooting Harry a look of dark irritation, “if everyone around me wasn’t so stupid and infuriating all the time.”
Harry laughs. “So it’s their fault that you’re a tetchy little git, is it?”
