apped in endless nervous conversation with Trent, or something.

He doesn’t realize he’s falling asleep until someone’s shaking him awake, hesitantly, a warm hand on his shoulder.

“Hey,” Draco says, when Harry opens his eyes. He’s leaning over Harry and looking rougher than when Harry saw him last; there’s a grey pallor to his skin, dark circles under his eyes, and a crookedness to the way he’s standing, because he’s got all his weight on his right side. He’s smiling, though, small and a little fraught, his eyebrows up over the slice across his cheek, and Harry aches just to look at him, a tight, coiled knot in his chest.

“Hi,” he says, and stretches a little in his chair. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“People usually don’t, in positions like that,” Draco agrees. Harry realizes a little fuzzily that Draco’s not in pajamas anymore—he’s dressed, wearing soft-looking black trousers and a navy blue sweater that’s too big for him, sleeves hanging down by his thumbs. “Some of us didn’t have time for ufortable cat napping, of course. Some of us were much too busy dispatching your deeply tiresome new partner—honest to god, Potter, you could have warned me, he is so terrible. Talking to him was itself an assault.”

“Sorry,” Harry says, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, good, yes, laugh at my suffering,” Draco says. Then he smirks, and holds up a black duffel bag which Harry didn’t even realize he was holding. “I’ll tell you what, how about you keep mocking me and I withhold this perfectly serviceable change of clothes I brought you?”

“You—what?” Harry says, blinking. “I—what?”

“Well, if that doesn’t just take the fun right out of it,” Draco mutters, but he tosses Harry the bag anyway. “Clothes, Potter. Shoes. The things that humans wear to differentiate us from the beasts. You’re wee.”

“I—thanks,” Harry says, a little bewildered, as he opens the bag. It just gets stranger, though, because inside: “These…are my clothes.”

Draco gives him a narrow-eyed look. “Did you take some kind of blow to the head while I was away? I’ve only been gone a few hours! What, was there a madman roaming the halls with a mallet, striking likely-looking people on the head? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I meant how did you get them,” Harry says, even as he pulls a sweatshirt on over his pajama top. It’s a red one, old and faded, that he bought at a Muggle museum years ago; it’s one of his favorites, and distantly he wonders how the hell Draco’d known.

“Oh, well,” Draco says, waving a hand. “I went to the hovel. Your security is terrible, Potter, you bring shame to the Aurors, breaking in was not even hard.” He meets Harry’s startled eyes and falters, just for a second, before he continues, “Anyway, I’ll never step foot in that benighted space again, it's genuinely tragic. I regret ever even thinking that you might prefer your own clothes while you waited with,” he looks to his left, and then, faintly, as if noticing them now for the first time, “…the, uh. Entire Weasley clan, apparently?”

“Hi Draco,” says Neville, with amiserating little frown. “Looks like you had a rough night too, huh?”

“Yeesh, yeah,” Bill says, nodding at him with a grimace. “You all right there, Malfoy?”

Draco looks possibly even more gobsmacked than he did when Ron said it, but it does, at least, jerk Harry back to wakefulness enough to remind him that he’s got things to do. He pulls on his shoes while Draco is saying, “Uh, yes, I’m—just great, thanks,” and then stands, throws his jeans over his shoulder for later.

“You’re not great,” Harry says firmly. “You’re getting admitted. Right now.”

“Oh, fine,” Draco says, sullen. Then he looks Harry up and down and, smirking, adds, “That’s quite a look, Potter.”

“Shut it, Malfoy, I’ll finish changing in a minute,” Harry says, rolling his eyes. To the Weasleys, a little awkwardly, he adds, “Sorry, I, er. He’s got to get—checked in, and things. Can one of you send me a Patronus if you hear anything?”

There’s a moment of silence, in which every last one of the Weasleys, even Penelope, cocks their head to the exact same angle and just kind of…regards them, for a moment. Harry thinks it’s going to haunt his nightmares.

“Sure, Harry,” Ginny says at last. Her eyes are tired and worried, but she sounds like she might be holding back laughter. “You got it.”

Harry and Draco take off down the hall for the fourth floor intake desk at speed. After a few seconds, in a shaken voice, Draco says, “Do you know, I suspect that moment is going to haunt my nightmares.”

Harry laughs, even after this bleak night. He can’t help himself. “Yeah, well,” he says, “you can tell your Healer all about it.”

He waits again with Draco in another section of the fourth floor, watches while Draco fills out some forms, fiddles with his quill, and prods absently at the cut on his face a few times, wincing each time he does it. Harry reaches out twice to grab his hand out of the air and stops himself, both times, but it’s a close thing, and he thinks Draco notices the second one. It stops him doing it, at least, and this time when the Mediwizardes out and says, “Just family,” Draco puts on his poshest voice and does the whole song and dance about Harry Potter and the safety of the nation again, with more or less exactly the same results.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Harry hisses to him as they follow the Mediwizard through another set of Staff Only doors.

Draco favors him with a large, vicious grin and says, “Not on your life, Potter.”

The actual appointment doesn’t take that long. The Healeres in and does an examination, gives Draco some potions for the bruising and internal damage, makes quick work of his rope burns, and then spends a couple of minutes attempting to spell the cut on his face closed. Eventually she sighs, takes off her gloves and throws them in the trash.

“Best I can do, I’m afraid,” she says ruefully. The cut’s not red and bloody anymore, but it’s still an angry dark pink, stark against Draco’s pale skin. “That’s a nasty spell, whatever it was. I’m rmending a course of dittany, twice a day for one week, to go along with the potions I’ve given you. It should heal up all right, but there will probably be some scarring.”

“Oh,” Draco says in a small voice. Then he looks at Harry, and his mouth pulls into a strange little expression—not quite a smile, but not so miserable as a frown. “Ah, well. Maybe I’ll tell people I’ve been fighting dark lords.”

“Interesting, Mr. Malfoy, yes,” the Healer murmurs, clearly not listening as she writes on his chart, but Harry gives him the finger behind her back. It looks like it makes him feel better, though Harry couldn’t really say why.

They go back to the waiting room filled with Weasleys, which has be an encampment of sorts in the time they were away. Molly’s pulled out practically an entire dinner she had shoved into her purse, and Bill and Ge are playing a subdued game of Exploding Snap in one set of chairs, Arthur and Ginny in another. Percy’s pulled a massive stack of files out of his briefcase, which must have an Expanding Charm on it, and Penelope’s reading what Harry thinks is a Muggle novel, though he’d have to actually look at it to make sure.

Harry goes and puts his jeans on, and then he and Draco mostly sit in the far corner, not really talking about anything much. Nevillees over for a while, and they chat about Vicky—well, Draco and Neville chat about Vicky while Harry listens vaguely, anyway—but then Neville gets drawn into some argument Ginny and Molly are having, and Draco lets him go easily enough. They have a couple more conversations with various Weasleys as the next hour passes, never for more than a few minutes, and Harry thinks it should be weird, probably. It is, a little—Ge, in particular, seems to be having trouble getting past the Draco Malfoy of it all—but mostly everyone’s friendly, if a little guarded. They’re good people, and Harry thinks Draco being here at all probably goes a long way, and anyway he still looks a bit pathetic, ashen and grey except for the angry slash across his face, the heavy, purpling circles under his eyes.

Harry’s not planning on ever, ever mentioning that last part to him, of course. The shame would probably kill him.

He thinks Draco’s going to give into exhaustion at one point, the way Harry himself did right before he showed up—there’s a long silence in which Draco slumps further and further down in his chair, and when his head hits Harry’s shoulder Harry figures he’s out for the count. He’s glad of it, thinks Draco needs the sleep, and regrets it when Draco jerks upright less than a minute later, the motion a little flailing, uncontrolled.

“Sorry,” Draco says quickly, “that—sorry, I was—sorry.”

Harry squints at him, waves a hand. “It’s fine,” he says, and then, feeling his face heat a little for reasons he can't entirely explain, adds, “I mean, I didn’t—I wouldn’t mind. You can sleep, if you want.”

Draco hesitates, and then says, “What, me? In this hospital? Surrounded by Weasleys? Please, it would be terribly uncouth, I’m not even tired, stop projecting.” It’s a strange voice he uses, slightly higher pitched than usual. Harry shrugs, but he doesn’t miss the way Draco keeps cutting glances at him after that, these curious little sidelong looks that Harry can’t interpret, and which he breaks off every time Harry meets his eyes.

As they sit there Harry feels it again, that sensation from the previous morning, this stretching, shifting something—like he’s wearing different glasses, and suddenly the world looks totally unfamiliar and exactly the same. He feels almost…it’s like being on the edge of a cliff, he thinks, broom in one hand, ready to jump. It’s that same gut-churning anticipation, that same mix of adrenaline and excitement and the distant, barely acknowledged dread of something going badly wrong; not enough to tarnish the experience, just to heighten it, give it weight. He doesn’t know how

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