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"Ah!" Pansy yelped and Draco instinctively yelped back.
"Ah! What? What is it?"
"What is this?" She demanded from him while flapping a piece of parchment in his face.
"Ahhh," Draco hedged while trying to think of an explanation of why Harry Potter had owled him his new address this morning. Draco himself actually had no idea, seeing as how they'd neither seen nor spoken to each other for several months now.
Draco -
You'll be happy to hear I've finally moved out of Grimmauld. Here's my new address in case you need it. Floo's not hooked up yet, but come by sometime. I'll give you the grand tour.
- Harry
"Grand tour! Presumptuous of him." Pansy scoffed, not waiting for Draco to answer. She held the paper like it was rancid and flicked her wrist toward the fireplace. "Shall I dispose of this for you?"
Draco felt a shiver of alarm go through him, but before he could even reach for it, Blaise snatched the parchment out of Pansy's hand to read it. The whole Slytherin lot were here tonight. Draco had no idea why his flat had become the designated meeting spot before parties--it was the smallest and the dingiest--but like clockwork, the whole cadre of them had popped through his fire to drink his wine and flick through his correspondence before they would all troop out to the evening's party twenty minutes late. Draco watched helplessly as Potter's missive traded hands, from Blaise to Theo to Millie to Astoria and Daphne, even Greg took a quick glance at it.
Draco lost track from there because Pansy was looming over his seat on the sofa.
"You weren't actually thinking of going, were you?"
"It's a bad idea."
The scowl dropped off Pansy's face, but she launched into her usual litany against Potter anyway. Draco had started tuning it out after the fourth or fifth time he'd heard it and he looked around the room to see if anyone was free to save him. They weren't, but at least they weren't giggling over his post anymore. And before long, Draco was being chivvied out of his sofa seat towards the fireplace.
Pansy placed her arm in his. "Just forget about him. We're going to have fun tonight."
"Right," Draco said, before stepping into the flames.
Hours later found Draco wedged into another sofa. Between the wine at his flat, the drinks here, and the spliff he'd been passed several times this evening, he wasn't sure whose sofa it was. It felt like every recent Hogwarts graduate (and dropout) found their way to the same parties night after night, no matter whose flat or house or manor it was.
Luna Lovegood leaned her back against Draco's side and draped her legs over Greg's lap next to him, sitting on the sofa sideways to chat to Ginny Weasley who was hanging over the back. Michael Corner was laid on the coffee table with his top off, Romilda Vane doing body shots off of him.
"I told my mum, yes, I know that he's my ex," Ginny was saying to Luna.
"Can't two people reconnect?" Corner seemed to murmur to himself, gaze fixed on Ginny even with Romilda practically draped over him.
"But I only see Harry as a friend!" Ginny finished vehemently.
Draco stared at her hazily; it felt like he could see the words take physical form and float in the air for a moment.
That's the biggest lie I ever said, Draco thought to himself. Even though he hadn't said it at all.
Draco abruptly felt like he couldn’t be at this party anymore. He turned to the side to tell someone who could plausibly be asked about his absence several hours later when Pansy noticed, but he was alone on the sofa. Greg and Luna and Ginny had been there just a second ago, he was sure. Except they weren’t now. He looked around the room and didn’t spot any of them. But he did see Pansy aggressively snogging a ginger; one of the Weasleys he presumed. There were at least three of them in attendance. For her sake, he hoped it wasn’t Ron. Because even if he was currently off-again with Granger, everyone could tell getting involved in the middle of that was a bad idea.
Draco lurched off the sofa to find a fireplace—the one in this room was out, deemed too hot to keep a fire in while dozens of sweaty bodies drank in the same room—since he knew he was too fucked up to apparate.
He didn’t hold out hope that many of the other Slytherins were still left here. Blaise and Theo would have usually slithered off to their next stop on their night of bad ideas right about now. Millie always left early, before things got too out of hand.
Retching noises emanated from a doorway ahead of Draco. As he stumbled past, he saw Astoria clutching weakly at the toilet bowl in the loo while Daphne held her hair back.
“I told you drinking all of those at once was a bad idea,” she chided her sister.
Draco hurried on, not trusting his own stomach to hold up if he had to see any more. Eventually he found his way to an empty sitting room with a fire roaring and a pot of floo powder. He mumbled his address hastily, and with some luck, found himself getting spit out on to his own hearth, where he laid for a few minutes.
He turned his cheek to try and get in more contact with the cool hearthstones and his eyes landed on a bit of parchment underneath his coffee table.
He should probably have a glass of water and some hangover potion.
He should probably take a shower and get in bed.
Draco should probably not have reached for the parchment, read it over three times, and tucked it away in his pocket.
But he did. That’s exactly what he did.
The flat was a wreck. After rifling through the whole place, the best he turned up with was a Disposabroom with three months left until the charms expired. Draco held the keychain size broom in front of his face: guaranteed for 60 minutes once expanded and activated. He couldn’t remember why he had this instead of a proper broom, but it would have to do. Not a drop of sobering potion left in the place, and it would take an act of god for Draco to subject himself to the Knight Bus.
It took three attempts to activate the charms—it turned out that years of elocution lessons crumbled in the face of three hours of drinking and smoking—but soon enough he was diving off the railing of his tiny balcony and heading off towards the suburbs of London.
The wind started picking up almost immediately. Disposabrooms were meant to be cheap and cheerful, useful in a tight spot, but without any of the extra built in safety, comfort, or manoeuvring charms of a full size broom. Draco fought the broom for twenty minutes, almost colliding with a non-magical owl, before looking for a place to land. A streak of lightning and a not-so-far off rumbling of thunder sent him spinning for the pavement.
The moment he touched down in a deserted alley, it started pouring. And so, sodden, with a slightly shrunken broom in one hand, Draco raised his wand arm and called the Knight Bus.
The purple bus roared into place in front of Draco, throwing water across his shoes in the process. He should’ve probably just got back on his broom and kept flying, but Stan Shunpike looked at him expectantly from the open door and so Draco shuffled on to the loudly idling bus.
Draco gave Potter’s address and dropped a galleon in Shunpike’s hand. His change went flying as the bus slammed into motion. Draco very nearly went flying too, but instead stumbled a few steps before falling face first onto a bed as it slid past. He could hear the sickles clinking as they bounced off windows and went rolling underneath the other beds on the bus, lost to him forever.
Draco struggled to right himself on the bed and very quickly realised he wasn’t the only one in it. An elderly wizard smiled at him, looking thrilled to have a squirming lapful of drunk (though rapidly sobering) young man to himself. Draco hastily levered himself to standing with his broom, scrambling away and sitting heavily in the first empty seat he could find.
There was a witch sitting across from him rummaging through a bag of potions. Another one next to her, looking nearly as sodden as Draco and shivering. A couple shared an armchair that bumped from one side of the bus to the other as they aggressively snogged.
The Knight Bus squeezed itself through traffic at its frantic pace and then went flying over a bump in the road.
A viscous red potion splattered Draco from head to waist. He looked down at himself and then back up at the witch across from him, now holding an empty bottle and starting to babble an apology.
The bus lurched to a halt. Shunpike called out a stop that definitely wasn’t Draco’s.
Fuck it, Draco thought.
“It’s fine,” Draco said to the witch and took himself off the bus and back into the rain.
Draco hunched over to fit himself on the now child-sized broom. It was still raining, but at least it was rinsing the potion off of him and the lightning had stopped. He was starting to question the whole endeavour now: showing up at Potter’s new house in the middle of the night, soaked through and stained with mysterious potion didn’t seem like a surefire way to restart… well, nothing really. It’d been a few messy handjobs in the loos, and then Potter hadn’t shown up to a party for months and there was no reason for them to correspond. Until an owl had shown up with Potter’s address.
Draco wasn’t expecting anything. He just wanted to see Potter’s house. He’d been invited, after all. And if it turned out that this was just a very bad idea, then there was no reason Draco couldn’t sit on a roof until he felt like he could apparate without splinching himself.
The navigation charm startled him out of his thoughts with a ping and a spray of orange sparks. Draco was right above Potter’s house.
He looked down and hovered uncertainly, now well and truly doubting that this was going to go well. Now that he’d had some time to think about it, surely Potter meant for Draco to write back first and schedule something. You didn’t just turn up unannounced after one short note. It just wasn’t done.
Draco nudged his broom to turn around and found that there wasn’t actually a broom underneath him to nudge anymore. His hour was up.
His yell was cut off with a thump as he landed on Potter’s roof, just a few feet below him. But before he could relax, Draco found himself sliding down the pitch of the roof. He scrabbled at the shingling, but couldn’t get purchase on the wet tile and slid off the edge. All of this and he was going to end up in a broken heap in front of Potter’s house.
Except instead of landing on pavement or stone, Draco landed with a soft bounce on a rather strong cushioning charm. He laid there, dazed, and found himself staring up at Potter, with his wand in hand and looking like he was an inch away from falling out of his own window.
Potter had clearly just woken up and his hair was more of a wreck than usual. The neck of his t-shirt was stretched and dotted with holes from having been pulled and picked at. He clearly hadn’t paused to put on his glasses before lunging out his window and his face was pinched with the effort of squinting down at Draco and the shadowed street. To put it bluntly: Potter looked dreadful. And yet, all thought seemed to flee Draco’s mind at the sight of him.
“Who’s there?” Potter called down.
“It’s me,” Draco said and then realised that didn’t explain anything. “Ah, Draco, I mean.”
Potter’s eyes widened and he blinked. “Draco? Hold on a second.”
Potter pulled himself back inside and disappeared from the window. Draco flopped his head back down. The rain had tapered off and the cushioning charm was actually quite comfortable, but all of that was lost on him. Draco stared up at the cloudy sky. unseeing. He’d spent an hour yesterday deploring Pansy for her taste in men, and then debating the merits of several wizards featured in Witch Weekly with her. One look at Potter and Draco couldn’t remember a single one of them.
Potter re-emerged from the window with his glasses on. “What are you doing here?”
Draco raised his head again. “You invited me to see your house.”
Potter stifled a laugh. “And you thought two in the morning was the best time to do that?”
Draco stiffened and suddenly felt very cold in his rain-soaked clothes. He slid himself off the cushioning charm to stand up. “Well I’ve seen it now. Very nice… brickwork. Sturdy roof. I’ll just go.”
“No!” Potter exclaimed and then repeated in a more hushed voice when the lights snapped on in a house across the street. “Just… stay right there for a minute.”
This time when Potter pulled himself inside, he shut the window behind him. A minute later, some lights on the first floor went on, and then the front door opened with a faint creak.
Potter stood in the doorway, outlined by the warm lights inside. He peered out at Draco, the corners of his mouth starting to tug up into a smile. Potter stood to one side, an invitation in the open space of the doorway.
“Hi,” he said.
Draco hesitated for a moment and then stepped inside. “Hey.”