Chapter Text
"Do you know why people cry, Potter?"
"I'm sure you're about to tell me."
Malfoy didn't look angry, which was still a strange look on his face. The confrontation had left him. He seemed resigned. Part of Harry was relieved to see him like this, to see him being reasonable - the part of him that had feared they would kill each other in the first week. Another part, tucked away in the depths, was... dismayed. The part that thought about their wedding night every bloody night, as if that was the main point.
"Because it does them good, afterwards," Malfoy said, glancing at him. He was an apparition, in St. James's Park, all grey in the greenery, all stiff in the soft, alive background of foliage. Amongst the mundane nature, he looked both lifeless and out of place, too pale and too eye-catching. Neutral ground my ass. It didn't matter where or when, when it came to Malfoy. "Our body takes pity on us, when we're in pain. It tries to make us feel better."
He must have seen the photos of the funeral. Everyone had seen them. The hero's tears. Harry had attended many such ceremonies, gatherings and upturned patches of soil since May 1998. It had been too raw then, perhaps, too chocking, too much for his body to process, for him to be sad, and not dead, and not furious, and not guilty. But to actually read Ginevra Molly Weasley on the marble tombstone, in golden letters, just close enough to his heart to tear it apart, just distant enough from the way he'd always called her to cause that cold, foreign feeling... He'd cried so hard he'd worked up a fever the next night. He'd been convinced that he would never be able to stop. He was not sure if it had done him any good to cry.
But it had been this winter, and now it was spring, and if Harry paused, if he took a breather, he would sink. He would fall so low that nothing and no one could ever bring him back. So rather than point out why Malfoy had had to bring up crying of all subjects regarding their recent engagement, rather than take offence, rather than attack him back, Harry chose dry, easy humour. "I would have thought you'd been too sheltered to turn out a masochist."
Malfoy smiled thinly, without looking at him. As if he were sharing a joke with the bloody ducks. "What luxury these people have," he said, "that they need to seek out pain to find it."
That, Harry supposed he could understand - that they shared, even if nothing else. The pain found them on its own, like a big girl. Like a big boy? Girl?
"My condolences for your mother, Malfoy," Harry said, sincerely.
He gritted his teeth, and Harry added this to the endless list of topics to avoid when they would be married. Every time he thought about it, words were crossed out. One day there would be nothing but a book full of erasures, and not a single letter left.
"Your assistant sent me the details that the PR team agreed on," said Malfoy. For once, Harry was relieved that everything was being dealt with by someone other than himself. That his life was in the hands of others, for so many things, because there weren't enough hours in his day to handle matters like his own mail or cooking breakfast or planning his own wedding. "I'll be there on time."
Harry didn't dare make a joke about grooms being left alone at the altar and white lady horror stories. He didn't have the heart for it. Instead, he merely said, "As long as you don't cry, that's all I expect from you."
The air was heavy between them. It was a far, far cry from all that was expected of Malfoy regarding this wedding. So far that Harry feared he'd been rude - he swallowed, trying to figure out how to defuse what he'd just said, but Malfoy didn't look wounded. "Did you bring the papers?"
It took Harry a few awkward seconds to realise what he was talking about - as if they weren't the only reason they were here in the first place. He pulled the parchment from his thin coat - rain-grey eyes followed the motion, his hands, the space where the lapels opened on the white shirt he wore underneath. Harry swallowed his embarrassment - his clothes were brand new, wordlessly bought and dry-cleaned and replaced by Eliza, who considered it part of her job to make sure Harry didn't look like a clown in public.
He approached a bench. By tacit agreement they had never sat down, never stopped, really - walking, even aimlessly, was less uncomfortable - so Harry kept up the streak, crouched down in front of the bench instead of sitting on it, and used the seat to sign the parchment. He passed the self-inking quill to Malfoy, who bent over the paper. As he read, Harry really noticed his clothes for the first time, the polished Chelsea boots, the tie - old money Muggle, head to toe, dusty and elegant. He supposed Malfoy couldn't have come to a Muggle park in star-spangled dress robes, but still.
The parchment glinted for a few seconds once Malfoy had traced the last shape of his intricate signature, sealing the obligatory twenty-two day delay before the ceremony. If either of them had been forced, magically or otherwise, to agree, the magic infused in the parchment would realize it within that time and invalidate the contract. Harry had been sceptical, pointing out to the team that they were being forced. They had looked at each other in embarrassment. Forcing yourself out of duty and under the pressure of the International Confederation of Wizards didn't count as non-consent, it turned out.
Harry pocketed the parchment, suspiciously warm under his fingertips, and fished the ring from his trouser pocket. It was possibly the only thing he had picked out himself, in this marriage. You needed bands to be wizardly engaged, so he'd gone out and bought a ring. For Malfoy. Alone. He'd gone to a Muggle shop, without much thought, convincing himself in hindsight that it was out of spite, to humble Malfoy by making him wear a piece of Muggle metal for the rest of his life. But he had not chosen it out of spite. He had figured that the only option for Malfoy was white gold. Something masculine, with a white diamond inlay so it wouldn't look cheap on his upper-class figure, but not too flashy in the hope that Malfoy would be able to globally ignore its existence.
Harry took no pleasure in the pain and abasement Malfoy had to endure in having to marry him. It was not a game, a cruelty of life that he could secretly gloat over like a transparent kid sending snowballs into his face.
He felt ancient and exhausted.
He placed the ring in Malfoy's outstretched palm, so fixated on the precise movements of his long fingers that he forgot to glance up to witness his silent reaction to his choice of ring in the quarter of a second it usually took him to mask his emotions. The gold slipped neatly onto his left ring finger. Jesus Christ. The left one. Inches away from the Dark Mark carefully hidden by layers of tight-fitting clothing.
Harry had a brief horrific vision of black strands stretching across Malfoy's white skin like cursed brambles, wrapping themselves around the glistening ring, swallowing it.
When he had the sense to look up, Malfoy seemed hesitant as he took Harry's ring from inside his coat. It was carefully arranged in a case, and instead of giving it to Harry, Malfoy opened it as if to present it to him, as if waiting for his appreciation.
It was yellow gold, more of a signet ring than a wedding band, shaped like a stag's head. Harry took it absentmindedly and slipped it on; the fine, crafted antlers wrapped around his finger. It was fancier than anything he owned, but it could look okay on his brown skin. Its weight was also strangely comforting, familiar, and it was solid enough that he didn't have to worry about damaging it.
A stag.
"It belonged to Charlus Potter," Malfoy stated. "Dorea née Black kept it through the rest of her life."
Harry liked it, strangely enough. It was new and not new at all. And he appreciated the gesture of not having him wear anything that belonged to the Blacks or, God forbid, the Malfoys.
Harry had no idea what to say to him at this point. He finally settled on, "There's a discreet place to Apparate, over there."
Malfoy's mouth tensed. "I came by car."
Surely the world would spin off its axis if Malfoy ever used a car for transportation. Harry hadn't been in a car in years. "What?"
"What?" Malfoy repeated impulsively. And there was a hint, just a hint, of the irate, unbearable boy on his features; a glint of whatever was boiling constantly and invisibly under the thin surface of his skin.
"I… Why?"
"I never took my Apparition licence. Under the terms of my probation, I need the permission of a rank five or above Ministry official to do so."
Harry sighed, "You have a piece of paper?"
But Malfoy gritted his teeth, the vein in his temple ready to burst, and Harry held up his hands before causing him aneurysm. "Suit yourself. Malfoy."
As Harry walked away, he forbade himself to turn to look back at him.
Back in his office, he found Eliza already there. He'd had enough time between his Apparition and his crossing of the Ministry to rack his brains about what he should or shouldn't have said, and closed the door harshly behind him.
"Why wasn't I made aware of the fact that Malfoy passed his driving test at some point?"
She didn't even look up from her file. "Good afternoon to you too, Harry. He hasn't. He has a driver. The Malfoys have had cars since it became a thing among the Muggle aristocracy in the 1890s."
"Why on earth?"
"So they could mix with the Muggle elites when they needed to. Lucius Malfoy himself used to whine to senators from time to time, back in the days. We're not talking about the Blacks here - you know there's Muggle blood in the Malfoy line."
Harry nodded, sat behind his desk, fidgeted, calmed himself. Eliza had learned to humor him when he got into a Malfoy frenzy; she probably understood that they didn't go away on their own, that he needed answers, even if no answer ever fully satisfied him. Malfoy was not a puzzle, not a monument to be uncovered; that implied a certain finitude. It was more like... a thirst. As soon as it was quenched, it returned.
Harry stared at Eliza long enough for her to deign to look up at him. He was as tired of this little daily ritual as she was, but he certainly wasn't going to ask out loud.
She sighed and finally pulled an Auror memo from her binder. "He went to his mother's grave in the night. He bribed the guard to let him in." It was usual. They turned a blind eye to it, ever since the time he'd dared to go in the daytime and ended up at St Mungo's. "And he did some volunteer work at the old families orphanage this morning."
Like every Thursday. At the purebloods' orphanage, because people weren't willing to let these kids mix with the others for fear of contagion from their innate evil, and because none of the others would allow him in; except that 'pureblood' wasn't something you could say anymore, the decent word being 'old families'.
"He had eggs for lunch," Eliza added, and although Harry was confident that this information was indeed on the record, he snapped at her snark. He wasn't a madman. It wasn't as if he wanted to know any of this. It wasn't even his idea. The heightened and continuous surveillance, which had been dropped a few weeks after Malfoy's trial when it was clear he wasn't involved in anything nefarious, had been resumed by the Ministry when the idea of the marriage had germinated - long before Harry had accepted it, and even longer before he'd been made aware of that 'possibility'.
He clenched his fist under the desk so as not to bang the wooden surface like a Muggle child - so as not to blow up the vase under the enchanted window, which had only a few days to its credit, like a wizard child. His thumb touched his ring, and he twirled it compulsively, anchoring all his concentration on it. "I'm going to marry a godforsaken Death Eater. Excuse me for wanting to know what he's up to."
"He's been on probation for a year and he never slipped. At this point, I think we can agree that he's, if not decent, at least smart enough to do what's expected of him - which is to spend his considerable fortune on charity and to hide his face from wizarding society."
"You think he's smart."
"We wouldn't have chosen him if he wasn't. The Twenty-Eight Committee had suggested other candidates than him, as you know."
Harry had been given many reasons for that choice. He'd been told that Malfoy’s money would certainly come in handy, that his castle in the north of London would be perfect for expanding and relocating part of the Ministry, that it would help to keep an eye on him, that he'd been involved enough in the war to make the ritual work but not so much that public opinion could never accept him, that he was ‘young and good-looking enough for the PR team to work from’, that he was from the top old families which still meant something to many wizards, that his story was tragic enough to find a plausible narrative in which he would eventually be absolved through repentance, that the fact that he was not a woman would prevent the most compassionate pain in the ass from portraying the ritual as a barbaric and abusive mysogynist ceremony, that he had a sense of decorum and bearing that would make him politico-compatible. Harry had no trouble imagining him at galas, sober and contrite, the very image of the redeemed sinner who had seen the light of reason and righteousness. The com staff were bound to get a hard-on for him. They already did. The hero and the anti-hero.
But that's not what Eliza told him then. "He..." She seldom hesitated. "He's like that flame inside you. Even in the worst of times, when you're slipping away, he keeps you grounded in this world."
"Because I hate him."
Harry didn't particularly want him dead, but he couldn't understand why he was alive, why he was free, when so many good people, brave people, were gone. Well, he could: Malfoy was simply a cockroach. Despite everything he'd been through, nothing seemed to stick to him, nothing weighed on him. He looked young still, and free of dark circles, and upright, and Harry had no doubt that he would recover from this war, that he would have knitted his way back into the public and political arena with or without the wedding. He made it look so unfairly easy.
"I'd rather have you furious than catatonic," Eliza said softly. "But the decision is yours, in the end. It's not too late to say no."
Harry blinked, flabbergasted that she hadn't noticed the ring when it was all he could feel - cool as metal and warm because of his skin and heavy and fine and massive and foreign and familiar. Anchoring.
He pulled the parchment from his pocket and handed it to her. "It is too late, actually. You can tell everyone it's done."