Chapter Nine.
The Price of doing Business.
"The heart is the only broken instrument that works."
-T.E. Kalem
London. 2003.
There had been a moment, years ago, when Harry had thought that he shouldn't extend a laurel to Draco. He had thought that involving his once bitter rival to a shared co-habitation would be tantamount to throwing a wolverine into the bath with himself. He had put those feelings away and shaken the hand he had once denied, only to to find that it was one of the wisest decisions he had made.
No one could ask for a better friend than Draco, once he was sober that is, because so few people had cared for the man as he was that when Harry did it changed the nature of the relationship. That morning Harry found himself mixing tea in the kitchen for three people before Amber walked in to tell him that she had to fly back to the states for a little while. Some crisis had come up at the gallery and she wanted Draco to be in London for Harry. Harry said he would explain the situation to Draco and told her that the door to his flat was always open to her.
Harry finished making the tea and sat down at the kitchen table to compose a letter that he knew to be overdue. The letter was to Hermione, and was nothing more than to set up a time to get together the following day. He looked around for a scrape of paper to write it on and came up empty.
On the fridge he saw a note in Draco's familiar handwriting addressed to Amber. It read,
Amber,
It is Two in the morning and you're already asleep. Since you'll be awake before me I just wanted to let you know, Good Morning, Beautiful. I love you more today than yesterday, and less than I will Tomorrow.
-Draco.
Harry took it down, hoping Amber had read it before she left and wrote his note to Hermione on the back of it. He summoned an Owl from Diagon while he sipped his tea and squinted into the light of the sun every time he looked out the window for it.
When he was lashing it to the leg of an owl Draco walked in and pulled up a chair. He was rubbing his eyes.
"You see Amber?"
"She had to fly back home. There was some kind of thing happening at the gallery. Something about a guy calling himself Roanoke."
"That asshole?" Draco waved his hand dismissively, "That guy is the biggest pain in my ass there ever was."
"High praise." Harry smiled.
"Dude paints these tripped out, completely unrecognizable portraits of people from his life who he thinks don't 'get him'. Shit doesn't even look like people, just paint splotches and pseudo geometric shapes. It's ridiculous. Throws a shit fit every time some one hangs one of his paintings upside down, which is every time. He's threatened to walk out a hundred times. Says he won't use our gallery again if the problem isn't fixed. Insists on speaking only to one of the owners every time it happens."
"So why even hang his shit in your gallery?"
"Believe it or not, his shit sells like hot cakes. I see a portion of that every time it's sold off the floor in my gallery. Got to host him so I can afford to host the talent I really want to." Draco shrugged, "Price of doing business."
"That kinda sucks." Harry commented.
"It does, but it's life." He rubbed his temple, "It's very kind of Amber to deal with him. I had to fly back and deal with his sorry ass and I woulda put him in such a leg binding jinx..."
"I'll bet you would." Harry smiled, "So, breakfast?"
"You're not going to cook something?"
"I never cook something." Harry pointed to the take out menus by the fridge, "I'm rich. It's a luxury I have. How soon they forget."
"Forget nothing." Draco indicated the fridge, "You have food in your fridge. Nobody keeps food in there fridge doesn't expect to cook something eventually."
"That?" Harry waved it off, "That shit is just for show."
"Same old Harry."
"From you, I get this?"
Draco shrugged, "You didn't take your walk yesterday, I figured it must be some kind of personal growth or something."
"Heaven forbid." Harry said evenly, "My life has just been too hectic for a walk lately."
Harry pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it up, "You wanna order something?" He asked after the first puff.
"I guess we can do that." Draco scratched his chin, "We could always go somewhere, if you're in the mood to put on your big boy going out pants."
Harry glanced down at his paint stained and elderly sweat pants, "Something wrong with these?"
"Not if you're looking to pull off homeless chic." Draco smiled, "But in any other context, I'm afraid that there is a lot wrong with them."
"Fine." Harry took a long drag, "Let's assume that I'm willing to take off these tremendously comfortable sweat pants, which I love despite your mockery, where would you even want to eat?"
"I could go for some fried eggs and a couple of kippers." Draco patted his stomach, "Haven't had kippers in ages."
"We could do Indian food." Harry pointed out.
"That sounds like a take out kind of thing."
"They are really comfortable, man."
"You are the laziest person ever. You know this, yeah?"
"I had read that somewhere." Harry agreed.
"Long as you know." Draco stood up, "I'm going to get dressed, I'm going to go out and get some breakfast. You can join me, but the sweat pants aren't invited."
Draco left the room whistling an old wizarding world tune. Harry looked down at his sweat pants, stroked them affectionately.
"Don't listen to him." He said soothingly to his sweat pants, "He just doesn't 'get' you."
After a moment he heard Draco reply, "I heard that."
* * *
Hermione was walking around her office in a slight daze. Her talk with Ron and Luna had not managed to convince her stomach not to turn when she had walked on Ginny and Neville staring into each others eyes and making vague references about the depth of each others souls when she had returned home the previous night. It did little, in fact, to help her out that morning when she found them feeding each other either.
Hermione was convinced that if she didn't move out at some point in the near future she would find herself unable to keep even the softest foods down before long.
At work she was lost in her head. She had received an owl from Harry asking if she wanted to do anything the next day. It was almost sad because it read exactly like a note between friends ought to read. She knew that they had agreed to see where things went between the two of them. She knew that. And it had made so much sense to her when they had said it.
Now? Not so much.
She wanted nothing more than to take a second stab at love with him. Her mind had worked itself out to one simply fact. That fact was that love had turned Neville and Ginny into barely functioning retarded people. Simple as that.
What that meant to her in the grand scheme was that if those two idiots could find one another anything but utterly ridiculous then her and Harry, two people of solid intellect, should have little problem forgoing the unbearable awkwardness and get underway with becoming functioning retarded themselves.
It made good sense.
Except that the note was ruining that supposition with it's friendly demeanor. She hated that stupid note. She hated that her reply held the same stupid jovial "let's be friends forever!" tone. She even, after much scrutiny, discovered that she hated the wallpaper in her office and the color of the sun. Also she had discovered that the laughter of babies was off putting and smiles were totally intolerable.
She blinked twice before she stopped rummaging through the file cabinet just outside of the break room. She couldn't remember what she was looking for, or why she had decided to look for it in the only empty file cabinet in the whole office.
She excused herself for lunch and left the office.
Once she was gone Bryan clapped his hands to get the attention of the team.
"Yes, the Boss is acting odd. No, you can't have the day off. Yes, get back to work."
* * *
Draco had ordered fried eggs, two rashers of bacon and four extra orders of kipper. Harry ordered a coffee and some oatmeal. He then watched as Draco buried his face in the plate and sucked up all of his food.
"Hungry?" Harry ventured.
"A bit." Draco said without pulling his face from his meal, "Now don't ask me questions that need responses until I'm finished."
"What am I supposed to ask you?"
"You suck at this." Draco looked up, "Just tell me about you and Hermione and why you're such an unbelievable wimp while I eat. I swear I'll listen."
"Right. Okay." Harry leaned back, "I'm not a wimp, by the way, and you eat like a monster does. I'll just warn the owners not to seat any children by your mouth, less the suction draws them in. Because I don't think you'd even notice."
Harry crossed his arms, "And it's not like I'm lost and confused with Hermione. We're just in a bit of a gray area there. What would be the point of rushing into something when it would almost certainly backfire and hurt us both. It just seems stupid."
"Not that I wouldn't like to do that, I would. I'm human at best and that means I got urges and needs and desires and all that crap like normal people, the kind not currently impersonating a hurricane on top of their breakfast, you know normal, I'm just like that. Which is to say, not like you, freak show."
"But you have to understand what a daunting task it would be to just open myself up to her. I mean it would be like offering my innards to be crushed. Imagine how your eggs feel right now. All huddled, worried that the big scary monster with blonde hair and no personality is going to destroy everything that ever mattered about them. That's where I am."
"I'm your breakfast, that sad, lonely, doomed plate of food and Hermione is your ugly mug. All teeth and destruction. You can see how that might be scary."
Harry paused.
"None of this is even bothering you a little?" He waited for a reply that didn't come, "Dude, you are really locked into that breakfast."
Harry sighed and shrugged his shoulders, "Okay then. It's like this, since I have to fill the silence with something other than the sounds of digestion, I love her."
Harry smiled to himself, "Ever been happy just saying something? Like the words reach into your heart and caress it. Tell it the tender, beautiful lies that life requires to be happy. It's like that every time I say that I love her. Because it's the barest truth that there is. I love her. But it's a beautiful lie, man."
Harry paused, looking for the words to articulate his point, "Not the loving her part. That's untouchable. But, me? Not even a little. I'm touchable, man. I get hurt. And that's the oldest lesson out there. Kid sticks a paper clip in a socket and it shocks him. He's hurt, but he doesn't go around sticking metal in light sockets anymore. We learn to avoid the things that have hurt us. It's so simple. It's fucking biological."
"And she hurt me. She hurt me really badly. No one had ever hurt me like that. Not Ginny, not Cho, not Voldemort, and not even you. In all those years, all the shit you said to me and mine, that hurt, but it a scratch on the surface of my resolve. She left scars."
He put his hands together and leaned forward, "I mean when you're not good enough for your best friend in the entire world, the one person that's always supposed to have your back and like you for who you are. Faults and all. I mean, who then is supposed to assume that they're good enough for? It's a fucked up kind of cycle."
He shook his head, "And when I was finally over it. I mean, dude, I was finally living my life again and all of a sudden there it is. Round two. What am I even supposed to do with that? How do I look at her and not think, she's going to hurt you again. She's a light socket, man, and I'm a fucking un coiled paper clip."
"Shit." He leaned back, "It's weird just talking about it."
Draco spun his finger to indicate that Harry keep going while he moved on to his second helping of bacon.
"Fine." He rolled his eyes, "I love her, but I don't think I can trust her. I want to trust her. I want to so badly. And she's grown. She's this whole new person, with all this shit I know nothing about. Hard working, had a serious boyfriend in the interval, she's lead this life and she's an adult now in ways I never saw coming. Because I wanted to hate her when I first got her. I was prepared to."
He paused, lost in the recent past, "Then she smiled at me. Goddamn her. She smiled at me."
He played with the handle on his cup of coffee, "All of a sudden I wasn't even mad at her, not really. All that pain was still there, bubbling below the surface, but I wasn't mad at her anymore. I couldn't hate her. I couldn't throw it in her face."
He laughed, "I was going to storm into her office and tell her off. Be all, 'You did this! You threw me to curb and you just expect me to forgive and forget and fuck you!' but I just didn't have it in me."
"Have you ever seen her smile? It's the most amazing thing in the world. Her eyes light up and it moves down her from there. She glows, like she was lit from within and behind. Sometimes she'll curl her lower lip slightly, so that her top row of teeth stand out on that blanket of wonderful pink skin. Your insides turn into liquid and your stomach gets warm and all of a sudden you're smiling back. It's involuntary, like a reflex. She has a smile that creates smiles."
He shook his head, "Would you listen to me? I sound like an idiot. Here I am, telling you about how wonderful she is in the same breath as I tell you how horrible she is. I don't even know how to separate the two notions. They just battle it out all day in my head, and it has it's effect. There are these moments when I just can't talk to her. We get all quiet and let the silence become stale around us and then like magic I'm in love with her and want to chat away like a fool."
"And I see what it does to her. She isn't plagued by it like I am. She suffers the silence because she's waiting for the talking to start again. She's waiting for the laughter. I know it has to bother her. It bothers me just looking at it. But I can't help it. And I think, maybe even more than my desire not to let her hurt me, and this is just a thought, a once in a while kind of thought. But I get the feeling that inside of me there are two more notions fighting. One says that she'll hurt me again, the other... The other says fuck my feelings. I don't want to hurt her."
"Do you think you might?" Draco asked.
Harry looked over and saw all three of Draco's plates clean and empty. His eyes popped a little, "How long have I been yammering away?"
"Long enough." Draco answered.
"Clearly." Harry rubbed his neck, "Blimey."
"So." Draco leaned forward, "Do you think you might end up hurting her?"
"I don't know." Harry worried at the fraying ends of the table cloth, "How would I know something like that?"
"Okay." Draco stacked his dishes and moved the salt and pepper to the center of the table, "You love her, yes?"
"Yes."
"Okay, she's the salt shaker and you're the pepper."
"Okay?"
He started to bang them together, "You guys keep hit or missing. You keep doing this dance of collision, neither one walking away together."
"Following."
"Everyone knows that salt stands next to pepper. That's where they belong." He placed them side by side at the end of the table, "It's how it works. They look right together."
"Sure."
"Because if I were to keep forcing these stunted collisions on them, well, they would break."
Harry smiled, "So we belong together?"
"You don't?" Draco countered.
"How do you mean?"
"Since you were eleven with this girl, Harry. Eleven. Always together, always side by side. Two people fighting for each other and themselves, the whole time. Even when other people left you, there she was. Always by your side. Until you gave her up."
"Ron-"
"Ron is Ron's business. He always was. You? Your business is being a self martyr. Always giving up on you and what you want so that other people, sometimes people you don't even know, can be happy and safe... And sober."
"Malfoy-"
"And you picked that. No one made that call for you, as easy as that is for you to cling to. It was your choice. You made it with her and you've been making it every day of your life since you gave up on her, because that's who you are and that's wonderful. But every now and then you have to be able to step outside of the problems in other people's lives and say to yourself, 'This is what I want. This is what I want for me' because if you don't this is what you get, buddy."
"And what is this?"
"An empty life in an empty flat with the girl you ought to be sharing your life with nowhere in sight." He crossed his arms, "That's what this is."
* * *
When she returned from lunch Hermione went straight to her office and looked over her event planner for the upcoming weeks. She knew that she had to attend the big events indicated, that was in stone. She had to be there to drum up donations and support. The note from Harry was on her desk. She picked it up and read it again.
She knew what it said but she scoured it for some deeper meaning that wasn't present to her mind on her first dozen times read through it. It wasn't there again. She turned it over to check the back. She knew that Harry hadn't picked up any paper to write on and had a habit of reusing others. She had seen him do it.
She stopped dead in her tracks. The note was written to that girl Amber. It was just a note saying how much he loved her and was signed by Draco Malfoy. But it wasn't contents which caught her eye, it was the handwriting.
She sprang up and spent the next few minutes digging through her files and her desk until she found what she was looking for. She laid it down next to the note and compared the handwriting. It was a match. She held up her long sought after piece of paper.
It was a donation slip, with a generous amount filled in, for her charity donations. One of nearly a half dozen she had received from the same person over the last few years. The slip had "Name withheld" filled in where the name was supposed to go. Now she knew who it was, her mystery benefactor, the man she had been so consumed for so long with finding so she could invite him formally, and it was Draco Malfoy.
"No fucking way." She said.
She got up and left the office, telling Bryan to clear her schedule for the rest of the week on her way out.
Bryan Stood up, clapped his hands and insisted that, despite how odd her behavior was today, that work was still not canceled for them.
* * *
When Harry and Draco returned home they found Hermione sitting in their living room. She looked mildly put out, but otherwise almost euphoric. She turned her head when she noticed them gawking at her from the corner of the room. She composed herself and pointed at them.
"We need to talk." She said sternly.
Draco elbowed Harry in the ribs, "You're up."
"Okay." Harry agreed.
Hermione shook her head, "Not you, Harry. I need to speak with Malfoy."
"What?" The boys both said at once.
"Harry, if you wouldn't mind giving us some time." She said.
Draco shrugged, "Looks like you get your walk today after all."
"Looks like." Harry nodded.
Draco turned to Harry, apology in his eyes, "Her, I'm sorry."
Harry raised his hand to quiet him, "Price of doing business."
He stepped out and found himself at the footsteps outside his building. He looked up, confusion covering his face. He shook his head and picked a direction. He walked off, letting everything drain from him, or expecting to.
He couldn't seem to squelch his anxiety. He found himself waling without purpose and with a deep well off bile boiling inside him. He knew that Draco was loyal, he knew that Hermione wasn't interested in him, he knew so many things that made so much sense.
But he was jealous anyway. Deep down, ugly, in his bones jealous and no matter how much walking he did, how much he ignored himself and concentrated on the sights and sounds around him, there is was. There was not heartbeat in city, no wanderer's sense of accomplishment, there was only the vile jealousy and the afternoon spread out around him like a suffocating pillow.
* * *
Ginny and Neville were curled up on the couch, watching a DVD from the collection beside Hermione's bookshelf. It was a curious muggle thing, but they both discovered that they enjoyed it. So they both got under a blanket, arranged themselves with the twin purposes of comfort and maximum physical contact with each other and turned on Dark Crystal.
Within minutes the of the opening of the movie the problems on Thra and the heroic journey of Jen the Gelfling were merely background noises. As is often the case with new love, for Ginny and Neville, the world around them was an inconvenience and the time spent together their reward for suffering through it.