Princes in Exile

This chapter was written by literaryspell.

Peachy was definitely demoted, Harry decided. He ran his hands through his hair—he needed a shower. He needed a drink—but that wasn’t going to happen.

From her former status as partner in crime, having hid the egregious stain of ink on the no-doubt priceless carpet, Peachy's status was now harbinger of doom.

And though house-elves normally liked Harry, Peachy had taken an almost gleeful tone when she'd told him the extent of his shame.

The day had been lost entirely. He'd woken late after his absurdly long night with Ron at the Hog's Head. He had no idea how he'd got to the manor—he would have been much more comfortable waking up in the privacy and comfort of his own flat while achingly hung over. In his flat, he knew where the Hangover Potion was. He didn’t even have to look at the taps in the shower to know what heat was best to remedy his ails. His kitchen, if nothing else, had crackers, his failsafe Very Bad Morning snack. Draco probably didn’t even know what crackers were.

It only made sense that he'd have made his way home last night—

Then Harry remembered… It'd been an hour before last call. He couldn’t recall what they'd been talking about, but Harry had referred to the manor as 'home'. Ron had stared that wide-eyed Weasley stare of incredulity and judgement before laughing uproariously.

"First Justin, now this? Harry, you need help!" Ron had cried, looking only half amused.

So taking him to Malfoy Manor when he'd pleaded with his best friend to take him home was Ron's idea of a joke, it seemed. Damn him for managing to stay half a drink more sober than Harry every single time. Next time, Harry promised himself, he'd pace himself better and see how Ron liked treatment in kind. Maybe he'd take the sloppy git to Hermione's parents' house and see how that worked out.

Although an amusing distraction, the night before had nothing on the morning after. After an hour and a half of misery, Harry had showered, shaved, dressed, and gone downstairs to find Draco so they could get a start on the lessons, despite the fact that Harry's head was throbbing with no relief in sight. So he couldn’t say he was disappointed when he hadn't been able to find Draco. He'd returned to his room, deciding to send a few letters. Hermione had been demanding updates on Draco's progress, so he wrote her a letter saying that it was slow but steady, with Draco being a more tolerable student than Harry had predicted.

He kept the door to his bedroom open so that if Draco returned to his room from wherever he'd disappeared to, Harry would see him pass. He never did. After finishing his correspondence, writing a bitchy letter to Ron threatening retribution (then finding himself in a game of owl one-upmanship with Ron, who was supposed to be working but had all sorts of ideas on how to torture Harry, some that were more creative than he'd ever given Ron credit of being), he'd puttered around his room, tidying what little the house-elves didn’t. He even made a write-up of the days that had passed and the progress Draco had made, noting the incident of Draco internalizing the spell and almost killing himself. Harry didn’t have the stomach for that again.

Part of him wondered at his reluctance to see Draco in pain—he was pretty sure that had been high on his lists on things that would make his day during school. Now… it was like Draco didn’t even care that he could have cooked from the inside out, but Harry did. All that mattered to Draco was getting his wand back. It was obviously a matter of pride, and while Harry had some inkling of what it must be like, he'd only been a wizard for a few years longer than he'd been a Muggle (or thought he'd been one). Draco had been a wizard his entire life. Losing a wand was akin to losing a hand.

If Draco couldn’t show significant progress soon, Harry wasn’t sure he could be party to Draco hurting himself in the process.

Not that any of that bloody well mattered—not after what Peachy had told him.

It had been almost evening when Harry had finally cast his blueprint spell—the same spell that had revealed Draco's whereabouts when the manor wards had immobilized him—and found Draco in his study. He'd gone down, acting as though nothing was wrong. And at that point, nothing besides a little headache had been. He'd had no idea Draco knew about his late night entry. They'd had a quick lesson during which Draco had managed, under close scrutiny, to wandlessly cast a warming charm—yes, it had quickly got out of control, and Harry had had to counter it, but it was certainly progress.

And then… Peachy.

He'd mentioned to Draco that he had a headache, and Draco had said he'd send Peachy with a potion. So he'd let the eager little house-elf into his room under the impression that she would come bearing relief, not horror.

In no uncertain terms, with no leeway, and as truthfully as possible—for house-elves, she swore, could not really lie—she informed Harry that not only had Draco seen his sorry state the night before, but Harry had…

He'd… Oh, Merlin.

He'd kissed Draco Malfoy. On the mouth. Possibly with tongues; Peachy ruefully admitted she hadn't been close enough to judge that.

As soon as she said the words—words that branded themselves in the foremost of his thoughts in gaudy neon letters—Harry remembered.

It was blotchy, the memory, with no clear beginning or end. It was made of sensation more than sight or sound. A hard, ungraceful press of lips. A softening—on whose part, he wasn’t sure. A slight movement, just a brush. Then it was over. A kiss.

Add to that the fact that Draco neither mentioned nor alluded to the kiss, and Harry had no idea what to think. It was the perfect opportunity for Draco to ruin his life, to turn it upside down, to humiliate him beyond the normal parameters of the word. But he'd done none of that. If it hadn't been for Peachy's animated retelling, he never would have known what he'd done.

No, he admitted to himself, it hadn't been a great kiss. Draco was too hard, unresponsive. Harry had been, of course, sloshed. But there had been something. And he'd kissed Draco for a reason—had he been hoping for a shag? Because even he could have told himself that would never happen. Draco was way too cold to have feelings that matched Harry's heat when it came to sex.

Now that the day was over, Harry felt only relief. Draco was apparently happy to pretend the kiss had never happened, and Harry thought that was a brilliant course of action. Of course, something had been bothering Draco all evening, Harry now recalled. But he didn’t let himself worry over it. If Draco wanted him out of the house, Harry would have found himself on the driveway with asphalt burns on his arse. Draco obviously needed him and Harry hadn't proved himself useless, despite his overindulgence.

Harry got into bed, thinking about what he'd have Draco do during the next day's lesson. His thoughts rambled and moseyed, and he found himself wondering why it seemed, in the past few years, he'd been blackout drunk so many times. Alcohol had never been a big deal to him—when everyone had been drinking, Harry did as well, just because it seemed to be the done thing. Now, though, it was more like… everyone started drinking as soon as Harry did. And because he felt like everyone wanted to be drinking, he drank—a lot. Somewhere along the line, things had shifted. He didn’t want to be the person everyone looked to before they raised their glass.

He couldn’t remember the last time he'd had one beer, one glass of wine. But where had drinking until there was nothing left gotten him? Passed out on the cold marble of the Malfoy foyer, forcing a snog on his enemy. That wasn’t a good place.

*

Once more in the field by the pond just behind the manor, Harry and Draco sat—on a blanket, this time.

"Nice touch," Draco said, nodding at the blanket Harry had Transfigured from a doily in his room. He sat down, cross-legged, and waited in silence for Harry to announce the game plan.

Draco had been abnormally quiet—and not just quiet but lacking in vitriol, something that made Harry worry that he had a terminal illness or something. Breakfast had been silent and without barbs. Their first morning lesson had gone off without a hitch, Draco speaking only to address Harry's questions or ask his own. It was unnerving.

"Thought I'd spare your trousers this time," Harry said. He sat as well, arranging his legs out before him as he leaned back on his hands. The sky was overcast, but the warmth of the sun settled on his face through the grey.

Draco nodded and they sat in silence that was nothing but awkward. Harry wondered if things would ever go back to how they were before he'd made such an arse of himself, and then he wondered why he wanted that. He should be pleased with this new, reserved Draco. He wasn’t being rude or condescending, or arrogant and unbearable. But he wasn’t himself, and Harry didn’t like to think that something he'd done had caused that.

He'd never directly faced the aftermath of a drunken episode like that. With Ron, they always laughed about it. Even Hermione would roll her eyes at his antics, giving him a soft smile and possibly telling him to ease up, but her concern was never overwhelming, and he'd always felt cared about, not embarrassed.

He cleared his throat. "Shall we get started, then?"

"Please do," Draco said. He got into what Harry thought of as his 'thinking position'. He straightened his back, tilted his chin up, and put his hands on his knees, relaxed but completely still.

Knowing that Draco always did best in the beginning of the second lesson of the day, ostensibly because he was warmed up but not overworked from the first lesson, Harry said, "I want you to try to cast Incendio." He paused, letting Draco consider the spell, roll around the wand action inside his mind. He wouldn’t try it until Harry said go, so Harry gave him a moment. "I don't want some huge combustion or fireworks. Just a small flame, like you were lighting a match. In the grass beside us. Think of the blanket like a pool of water. The fire can't come in here. You control the fire. You want it small and steady. And remember not to pull it back inside yourself when you're finished. Just… cut the thread of magic, don't draw it back. If the fire doesn’t die, I'll douse it. Don't worry about that. You just make the flame, that's it."

Over the past week, Harry had become better at explaining wandless magic. He wasn’t entirely sure how it worked—the books had varying theories on that—but he knew how it felt to him, so he tried to get that impression across with Draco. By the time he finished speaking, Draco's face was peaceful, his eyelids lightly closed, pupils motionless behind them.

"Ready?"

Draco gave a very small nod.

"Go ahead."

A line appeared between Draco's eyebrows as his concentration intensified. After a moment, his nostrils flared, but no fire appeared.

Harry was used to using Draco's concentration as an excuse to study him. He knew Draco's face better than his own these days. He kept his peripheral vision on the grass, looking for the flame, but his main focus was Draco.

He had black eyelashes, but the very tips were blond, making them longer than they appeared at first. The black lashes lining his eyes were thick enough that it looked like make-up—in fact, at first, Harry had been convinced it had been. His theory had been supported by the fact that his lips were red, too bold a colour to not be enhanced somehow. But that, too, was natural, Harry had discovered. Draco's face was sharp, angular, and everything looked so intense when taken in at once. But individually, from his nose to his ears to his eyebrows, his features were stunning. Annoyingly so.

He even had one freckle—one!—just beneath his lower eyelashes on the left side. Other than that, his translucent skin was unblemished.

The smell of burning grass tore his attention away from his study of Draco's face. He looked over to see a solitary strand of grass burning down to the ground, slower than a normal flame would burn. Draco was controlling it.

Harry glanced at him. There was a bead of perspiration on his temple, but the temperature-telling charm he now insisted on casting every single time revealed his temperature was normal.

"Very good, Draco," Harry said. He spoke softly so as not to interrupt Draco's focus, but Draco liked to be told if what he was doing was actually working.

Draco nodded to show that he'd heard. The flame flickered and died once it hit the ground. The grass strands around the burnt one hadn't even singed. His control was improving.

Draco opened his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. After wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he looked at Harry. "Are we ever going to pick this up? I don't want to be moving on to levitating charms on my seventieth birthday."

Happy to have the old, whinging Draco back, Harry smiled. "You're actually doing really well. You're way ahead of where the books say you should be. According to them, you should still be doing meditation and finding your inner magic and all that. The books describe wandless magic as a lifelong pursuit. You're taking the condensed course already." His voice deepened with warning. "Don't rush it, Draco. This can be dangerous." The episode from the day before last still haunted him, Draco's red, sweaty face imprinted forever in his memory.

Draco rolled his eyes, but he didn’t push to try something different.

"Why don't you see if you can control two flames this time?" Harry offered. The truth was, he was almost as eager as Draco to see his power improve—and not just because he wanted out of the manor and back into his own flat. Watching Draco improve gave him a heady sense of satisfaction.

Draco sighed, sounding put upon, but obediently closed his eyes. After a moment, a flame sprang up beside them, dancing on top of a strand of grass. Seconds passed, and another flame touched down on a strand a hand-span away from the first.

Harry was about to praise Draco again when a third flame appeared. Then a fourth.

"Draco," he chastised. "Don't go too fast."

Draco, his eyes still closed, just scoffed—a small smile touched his lips when a fifth and sixth flame started up, all within the same small area.

Harry got his wand out, the spell ready on his tongue. Merlin, Draco was going to be the death of him. He wanted Harry to teach him and yet always assumed he knew best.

"Draco," he said, one last warning before he soaked Draco with water for the second time. "Cut the thread. Now."

And as if the flames had existed in a vacuum, they disappeared completely. Draco let out a shaky breath and opened his eyes. His grin was unabashed as he looked at the several half-burnt strands of grass. He looked at Harry, almost seeming like he was expecting praise, but the expression died on his face, replaced by the more familiar self-contented sneer.

Harry ran his hands through his hair, tugging at the messy chunks. "You need to start listening to me," Harry said, his voice almost a growl. "I can't help you if you just do whatever the hell you want!"

Draco's eyes were cold. "I think I can manage a few flames, Potter. Honestly, there's no need to get your knickers twisted."

The problem was, of course, that Harry wasn’t certain Draco could handle a few flames. Last time, Draco had attempted a warming charm and heated his core temperature. If he'd lost control of the flames and taken the magic inside himself, Merlin only knew what could have happened. A fire inside a body would be a messy thing to heal, way beyond Harry's abilities. He was an Auror, not a Healer—he hated feeling like Draco wasn’t safe with just him there.

At length, Harry sighed. He couldn’t explain to Draco that he was worried—Draco would just laugh at him. All he could do was be around when Draco inevitably lost control.

"Okay," Harry said. "One more time. A bigger flame. Try to see if you can move it in a line. And just one this time, thank you very much." He looked sternly at Draco, who had the grace to look slightly chastened.

He got back into his thinking position, hands on his knees, face tilted up. Only a second passed before a flame, larger as instructed, latched onto several strands. It flickered there for a few moments before Draco grunted, and the flame moved along in a slow line, devouring strands of grass in its wake, but the damage never extending beyond the berth of the flame.

"You're showing excellent control." Complimenting Draco no longer made bile rise in Harry's throat as it had at the beginning. "Now, get ready to let the flame go—but don't cut the thread. Keep your magic available. You're going to keep the flame burning and then cast a water spell to put it out. Two spells at once—keep your focus on the water spell; spend only a fraction of magic on the fire. Defence and offence. Light and dark. Devote both sides of yourself to your magic."

Draco looked as though he was taking in every single word. His concentration was so intense that Harry almost wanted to keep talking, just to have Draco listen to him so carefully. But he could already see that Draco was thinning the thread of magic between himself and the flame: it stopped moving in a line, and the bulb of fire became a little less precise, a little more wild.

Harry waited for the water spell, but it didn’t come.

He looked at Draco, whose face, instead of being red as Harry had feared it would be, was much too pale. To Harry's horror, Draco coughed and water spilled from between his lips—lips that Harry had kissed, damn it!

Draco's eyes opened in panic, his hands jerking to his throat as more water poured from his mouth.

"Oh, my god," Harry gasped. He froze for a half-second—long enough to see Draco's eyes fill with fear—and then launched into action. With a wave of his hand and the strongest concentration he'd ever afforded his own wandless magic, Harry Banished the water from Draco's lungs.

Draco coughed and hacked—more water kept leaking from his mouth and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. The Banishing spell had worked, but the water had replaced itself in Draco's lungs. Horrible gurgling noises escaped him. His hands that had been clawing at his neck and chest clenched into fists. His eyes closed and he went slack, falling over onto the blanket.

In the corner of his eye, Harry saw the flame die, snuffed by an invisible force.

The thread had been cut. Harry Banished the water again, and now that Draco was unconscious and his magic asleep, it didn’t come back. He was breathing again.

He checked Draco's pulse, fingers slipping on wet, cool skin. It was weak but steady and growing stronger.

"Goddamn you," he whispered to Draco's form. He'd fallen on his side and to any outsider he'd seem as though he was having a kip.

Harry pulled his knees up and rested his chin on one, wrapping his arms around his shins. He stared at Draco. Would Draco kill himself for love of magic and the pursuit of perfection? Could he ever be content just moving at a normal pace?

Was Harry going to have to watch him die one day, helpless and impotent as some internalised spell destroyed him under Harry's less-than-ideal tutelage?

Anger rushed him like the Hogwarts Express. "Rennervate!" he cried, wand aimed at Draco's motionless body.

Draco sat up with a watery gasp. He immediately began coughing and choking, but it settled after a minute. He seemed unable to meet Harry's eyes.

"You're a fucking moron," Harry told him, his voice calm—all the shaking was going on inside his head.

Draco sneered, but it was weak—there was still a tinge of panic in his normally masked face. "No magic is without risk."

Harry shook his head. "It's not my risk, though. So why do I feel like I'm the one suffering?"

"You're suffering?" Draco snorted. "I'm the one who nearly drowned in the middle of a field!"

"Yeah, but it was your fault! You seem perfectly content in condemning me to watching you die. I can't take it! I did not sign up for this."

"Maybe I just need a better teacher."

Harry stood so fast his vision went white for a second. His hands were still wet from touching Draco. He wiped them on his denims. "Maybe you do. Good luck with that." He turned to leave. The entire scene gave him déjà vu—and then he remembered what Draco had said the last time he'd threatened to leave. That no one but Harry cared if he lived or died.

Damn it.

He couldn’t let Draco find another teacher, one who might have ulterior motives, one who might hurt or exploit him in some way.

Leaving Draco wasn’t an option—it was as clear as day. Alone, Draco would never stop practising his wandless magic, and he would die. Maybe not right away, but it would get beyond his control and kill him, Harry had no doubt about that.

He turned and faced Draco, whose eyes were trained on the burnt patches of grass. He was abnormally pale and his fingers, as they caressed a scorched strand, were trembling.

"I'm staying," Harry announced. He took a deep breath. "For good. Until this thing is done. But you will listen to me, Draco. Or else." He didn’t elaborate because he had no idea what he could threaten Draco with, but it seemed to be enough.

Draco went still, but after a long moment, his fingers plucked the grass he'd been playing with. He didn’t look at Harry, but he nodded.

Harry went back inside, knowing he might be staying at the manor a long time.