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Come Night's Fall

Summary:

After Harry disappears from society, Draco finds him living in a secluded cabin on the edges of a small town, harboring a dark secret he’ll do anything to preserve.

As Draco slowly wears down his walls, he comes to realize that they're not alone in the forest - there's something out there, lurking just beyond the trees.

But come night's fall, all will be revealed.

Notes:

thank you so much to Booktopus for the incredibly attentive beta read and for fixing my PLENTIFUL em dashes. and thank you to jalesidor for the always-remarkable beta work, and for helping me tweak, title, and generally wrangle this fic into submission.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

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The second Harry spots him, he has his wand to Draco’s throat.

Harry wasn’t expecting him. Granger would have tried to warn him that Draco was coming, that she’d finally relented and told him where Harry had been hiding all this time. But as Draco understood it, Harry never returned her or Weasley’s owls, never visited London, and, from the looks of the scraggly cabin behind him, didn’t have a working Floo.

In ways, Harry is unrecognizable. He’s stockier now, nearly brawny, muscles hidden behind red flannel, jawline hidden behind a thick, dark beard. But the look in his steely green eyes is one Draco could place anywhere: burning fury, rageful indignation.

His stony gaze flicks over to the wand in Draco’s right hand, lifted with his left in defense. “Drop it.”

Draco drops his wand to the ground. Harry could have disarmed him with a passing thought, but it doesn’t look like he’s doing much thinking right now.

“Harry —”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Phoenix-cored holly presses into Draco’s throat and backs him against a tree. “Harry,” Draco tries again, his voice shaky. “Calm down. It’s me.”

Harry’s eyes narrow, and for a second, Draco thinks he might actually shoot off a curse.

Then his shoulders slump and he lowers his wand.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing here,” Harry says. “But you need to leave.”

There’s a patch of dirt on Harry’s forehead, like he wiped sweat away after working in the earth. An errant leaf is caught in his thick hair, and his tan skin has deepened from the sun. When they catch the light, his eyes are the precise shade of green of the leaves on the trees behind him. It’s almost hard to believe that he was ever anywhere but here, like he sprung from the forest, fully-formed.

Draco slowly drops his hands to his side, letting out a relieved sigh that mixes into the breeze. “We both know that isn’t going to happen.”

Harry lifts his gaze slightly above Draco’s head to where the sun is slowly lowering in the sky. He closes his eyes, shakes his head just once, then opens them. “It’s too late anyway,” he says, almost to himself. “Fucking hell.”

He holds his hand out, and Draco’s wand flies into his open palm. “Come on,” he says, pocketing it. “We need to get inside.”

*

The cabin is small, but it still seems too big for Harry alone. As the sun fades outside, painting the limby trees in ink-black silhouettes, Harry boils water in a pot and pours it over cheap tea bags in mismatched cups. As he walks around the kitchen, his footing is uneven, like he’s trying to cover up a slight limp.

“There’s a bed in the spare room,” he says. “You’ll leave at sunrise.”

Draco watches as Harry lights a bright lamp on the small kitchen table. It’s like he’s forgotten magic exists.

“Why are you here, Harry?”

Harry pushes a cup of tea and a box of sugar cubes toward him. “Don’t leave the cabin until dawn,” he says as if he hasn’t heard. “Don’t unlock any of the doors. In fact, don’t touch anything. And don’t use any magic until you’re far away from here.”

“Harry—”

“Draco,” Harry says, the angry glint returned to his eyes. “This is my home. You are not a guest here. You are an intruder. You need to do as I say until tomorrow, and then you need to leave.”

Draco winces. “It’s like you’ve completely vanished from the surface of the planet,” he says. “Can’t you at least tell me why?”

The ire fades from Harry’s eyes. He studies Draco silently, the white light of the lamp catching his fingers as he runs them ponderously through his beard.

“Don’t try to Apparate,” he finally says. “Don’t do anything magical, wandless or otherwise, until the sun comes up. Do you understand?”

Harry’s words wind meaninglessly through Draco’s mind. Harry doesn’t wait for a response — he takes the lamp and walks into the hallway, leaving the tea to grow cold on the table.

*

Draco has developed quite the penchant for wearing Harry down over the years. It was a necessary skill when they worked together as Aurors, where Draco quickly learned that the only person in existence who was more stubborn than himself was Harry.

But it’s as though something has changed in him since he disappeared over a year ago — as though something was lost, as though he’d forgotten that Draco was no longer his enemy. Draco’s fruitless attempts to get through to him feel like slinging jinxes at a brick wall.

“Can’t you tell me why you came out here?” Draco asks as Harry removes books, clothes, and tools from the bed in his spare room, stacking them carelessly in the corner.

“Did something happen to you?” he asks, following as Harry pulls sheets from a closet in the hallway, returning with his lopsided gait to tuck their edges under the mattress.

“Are you running from something?” he asks as Harry drops to the ground to fix a lamp for the room, screwing and rewiring the Muggle mystery in his hands.

Harry ignores Draco’s every word as though he’s an irritating ghost haunting the cabin. One of the wires buzzes faintly in his hands, and the lamp floods the room in stark white light.

“There,” Harry says, standing and placing the lamp on the bedside. “That should get you through the night. There are spare clothes in the closet. Take whatever you need.” He glances out to the hall, the interior of the cabin swallowed by the night. “Honestly, it’s best you stay in this room until morning.”

“Christ, Potter,” Draco says, pushing his hands through his hair in exasperation. “Don’t you know I was going mad worrying about you?”

The sheen of impassivity scatters from Harry’s face. He closes his eyes as though nauseated. “I need you to tell me you won’t use magic tonight, Draco.”

“You have my wand.”

“Draco.”

“What is all of this?” Draco says. “Why are you out here living like a Muggle? Harry, I don’t understand—”

“You’re right,” Harry interrupts. “You don’t. So you need to listen to me, or you’re going to get us both killed.”

Draco swallows. “Killed by who?”

Me, if you won’t bloody listen,” Harry huffs, showing the first spark of humanity Draco has seen since his arrival.

Draco crosses his arms. “We both know that I’m not leaving without some kind of explanation.”

Harry’s eyes roll up to the ceiling. He closes them, letting out a long sigh through his nose. “I think I do know that,” he says ambivalently, then opens his eyes, fixing them on Draco. “Just tell me you’ll stay here tonight.”

“Fine,” Draco says. “Fine.”

Harry’s gaze flickers between Draco’s eyes, like he’s trying to catch him in a lie. “Good,” he says finally. He turns from the room and pulls the door closed behind him.

The sound of Harry’s uneven footsteps fade as he walks away from the door. After a spell of silence, the floorboards creak underfoot as he returns. There’s a sharp schlck as a key pushes into metal, a click as the door locks Draco within.

*

The thought of sleep doesn’t even cross Draco’s mind. He always feels naked without his wand, and his nerves are frayed with irritation, the beam of fluorescent lamplight stirring a headache behind his brow.

The cabin grows thick with the day’s lingering warmth, the air rich with the sweet musk of earth. The entire night seems to stir — he can hear wind pushing against the walls of the cabin, the anguished cry of coyotes spilling from the distance. Behind it, the sounds of Harry moving around the cabin, floorboards squeaking in complaint.

Eventually, Harry’s footsteps quiet and stop.

Draco knows that Harry is almost certainly too far gone. If not even Granger and the entirety of the Weasleys were enough to bring him back from whatever edge he’s found himself on, there’s no hope that Draco can.

But, then, when Harry told them to stay away, they were foolish enough to listen.

Draco rummages through the door of the bedstand and retrieves a handful of paperclips, a screw, and a fork. He kneels at the door and tries them one by one in the lock, snapping a prong of a paperclip off as his frustration mounts.

He leans back onto his hands, staring at the keyhole, glinting against the bright light of the lamp. He switches it off, plunging the room into darkness, then wraps his hand around the doorknob. Draco closes his eyes, his hand warming as he pushes his magic just slightly against the tips of his fingers — until, with a click, the door unlocks.

Moonlight floods in through the windows, casting sharp square boxes onto the wooden cabin floors. Draco steps lightly, returning to the kitchen to find a candle above the fridge, a box of matches in the pantry.

There isn’t much to the home — two small bedrooms, Harry shut into one of them. A tiny, lived-in kitchen. A humble living room, a small hearth from which the scent of smoke ribbons through the air, stirred from recent flame.

Draco pauses at the window in the living room, staring outside. The wind whips the foliage of the trees into chaos and whines against the cabin. An axe protrudes from a tree stump, a pile of wood next to it. There’s a plot teeming with lettuce and beanstalks, and a small hut in the distance. The night seems to move with a current of its own, everything swaying and churning with the wind, the occasional flit of a fox or owl dashing through the darkness.

Draco can’t comprehend how many nights like these Harry has sat through: quiet, solitary, but not entirely alone.

Nearly every surface of the living room is piled with books. Draco raises a few to read the titles in the candlelight: volumes about magical theory or crop rotation, novels about everything imaginable, ranging from profound to inane. He can nearly envision Harry moving through his days, chopping wood, tending saplings, returning inside to read by the fire only to wake the next morning and do it all again. Secreted away out of sight — retreating, or maybe hiding.

Harry may never tell him the truth. But he knows that it must lie in here somewhere, in this cabin, or in the woods beyond.

The wind whistles louder against the cabin, and a cool dread traces down Draco’s neck. Something rustles just outside, the movement of trees, or the stirring of something larger.

His hand itches for his wand as he slowly makes his way to the window, squinting out into the night. Moonlight trickles in through the tree cover, casting an ambling pattern of misty white as the leaves shake with the wind. The reflection of his own face in the window flickers with the candlelight — his brow knit, his eyes narrowed.

He blows the candle out.

At first, Draco thinks it’s just the movement of the night, his mind playing tricks on him. Then it moves again.

The creature is ink-black, shrouded in a coat of matted fur, too large, too fast, and too close. As it moves laboriously through the trees, Draco can only just make out its features: a dark, bristling coat, black eyes glinting in the moonlight. It steps upon pawed front feet and hooved hind legs.

It’s too big to be a horse. It’s too big to be anything, its movement too fluid, its antlers too many.

Draco —”

Harry stands by his open bedroom door, eyes bewildered and furious behind the frames of his glasses, darting from Draco’s face to outside the window and back. “What did you—”

In that moment, the creature’s eyes flick to the cabin, piercing into Draco as if it can see him within. Its face alone makes his stomach twist — it’s long like a deer, but its lips pull back into a snarl, revealing long yellow fangs.

There’s something about its eyes that makes Draco’s heart stop. They’re too intelligent, too seeing. They’re too human.

The beast pitches its head back and lets out a guttural, throaty roar. The sound pierces Draco’s ears, the very floors of the cabin shaking with the vibration.

“Stay back,” Harry shouts at Draco over his shoulder as he runs into the night. Draco clamors after him, but stops short, wavering at the threshold of the cabin. He didn’t need to be told to stay behind. He’s not like Harry — without his wand, he’s utterly defenseless.

The beast’s uncanny face looms around a tree, towering several feet into the air, its antlers as thick as the branches above and tangling into the foliage. Harry plunges into the darkness, edging toward the beast with his wand raised; Draco can just make out his outline, cast in the light of the moon.

The beast leers down at him, reared back onto its hackles, its face wrinkled into a snarl. Harry stands before it, wand raised, body stiffened as if in mid-attack, and Draco can only just hear it above the rustle of the wind.

Harry’s voice. Speaking to it.

The beast’s snarl deepens and it releases a growl that thunders through Draco’s ribcage. It seems repelled by Harry’s presence. Harry jabs his wand toward it, and the beast haunches back further. Then he lowers his wand slightly, his voice growing quieter.

With a snap, the beast lurches forward and bites the air, inches from Harry’s face. It lets out another growl and bats an open paw at Harry, throwing him to the ground.

Harry —”

Harry lifts onto an arm and throws a spark of green light from his wand. The creature hisses as the curse bursts against its side, growl deepening as it backs into the dark of tree cover. It rears back into the night, thunderous footfall retreating into the distance.

Draco runs to Harry’s side and drops to the ground, hands trembling against the earth. Harry pulls up onto his knees, holding his shoulder with his opposite hand. He scrunches his face in pain, sucks in a deep breath of air, and then casts his gaze out into the woods. Suddenly, the night seems devoid of life.

“Fucking hell, Harry,” Draco stammers. “Christ, let me look at —”

Harry stands shakily and pushes past him, walking back to the cabin as though Draco isn’t there at all.

Draco takes one last glance into the night — rustling in the wind, but silent, empty — before following Harry back into the cabin. He finds him at the kitchen sink, his shirt unbuttoned and one sleeve off, the tap running behind him. His flank is dark with blood.

“Fuck,” Draco breathes. He hadn’t even seen the creature hit Harry there, but it’s as if he were gashed by a long claw or a blade. Harry holds a damp towel to his side, pulling back crimson.

Draco reaches out a hand. “Harry—”

“Don’t,” Harry says, shutting his eyes. “Don’t touch me.”

“What can — can I—”

Harry’s eyes snap open, flecked with ire and pain. “You’ve done enough.”

Draco returns his glare. “Don’t be ridiculous. Give me my wand, I can—”

Harry rings the towel into the sink, spattering it with red-stained water. He winces when he presses it back to his side. “What, so you can call it back here?”

Draco’s face falls. It feels like his mind is moving a thousand miles an hour to make sense of everything he’s just seen, to absorb what Harry is saying. “We need to heal it. You can—”

“Tomorrow,” Harry says, ringing out the towel again. He holds it to his side and grabs a box from the pantry, pulling out gauze and tape. “After daybreak.”

Harry tips forward suddenly, his face twisted in pain. He catches himself with a hand against the sink, pressing the towel against his wound with the other.

“Merlin,” Draco whispers. “Here.” He puts his arm underneath Harry’s good one and lets Harry lean into him as he leads him into a chair.

Harry takes his glasses off and puts them on the table. His skin is clammy and slick with sweat. He looks like he might pass out — which is probably the only reason he doesn’t resist when Draco sits him down, leaning over to assess his injury. It’s bleeding heavily, but it’s superficial. He takes the gauze from Harry’s limp hand.

Draco works carefully, his fingers trembling with adrenaline and the clinging echoes of fear. Harry hisses as Draco presses gauze against the gash, the white material immediately saturating with blood. Draco adds another layer, then another, until it’s staunched.

He moves Harry’s hand down to the gauze to hold it in place as he tears off a length of adhesive tape. “What the hell was that thing?” he asks. His shaky voice reveals it: the fear, the panic.

Harry doesn’t answer for a long moment. He watches as Draco runs a finger down a strip of tape, pressing it against Harry’s skin, and then tears off another piece.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Draco pauses. “Harry.”

“It really doesn’t concern you.”

Draco looks up at him. Harry looks exhausted and sick, more so than the wound can account for. He returns Draco’s gaze with equal exasperation.

Draco looks back to his work. He knows how this works, Harry’s anger. He knows he has to choose his words carefully.

“You came here to stop it,” Draco says. A guess.

Harry takes a long breath, then another.

“I came here to be alone.”

Draco seals the last edge of gauze, his fingers lingering on Harry’s skin, and tries to choose his words. But he can’t get the questions out of his head, and they spill from his mouth unbidden.

“It’s like you’ve tamed it,” Draco whispers. “Like you were communicating with it.”

Harry shifts slightly away from his touch, pulling the other sleeve of his flannel back on and buttoning it up. He puts his glasses back on and pushes off of the chair.

“I told you not to use magic.”

“I —” Draco stammers. “I didn’t know.”

“No, you didn’t,” Harry says. “Now you do. So maybe don’t try it again.”

Draco’s frustration morphs into anger. “Or what?” he says. “Or you’ll take my wand and lock me in a room?”

Harry huffs a sardonic laugh. “Apparently not even that’s enough to keep you from being an utter arse.”

Draco straightens. “Maybe if you’d explain any of this — maybe if you’d explain it to me, or to anyone, like — I don’t know, your friends — maybe if you hadn’t up and —”

Draco catches himself, the emotion in his voice, the volume, the way it’s hardening Harry’s face. He tries again, softer.

“I didn’t know where you went, Harry,” he says. “You just disappeared.”

“Thanks,” Harry snaps. “But you don’t have to worry about me.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Draco says, fighting his instinct to bite back. “I just — It was like you never existed, and I didn’t...” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t handle the thought of never seeing you again.”

Harry’s eyes fall to the space between them. He stares there for a few long moments as Draco hears his own words ring out over and over in his head. But he can’t take them back.

Harry drops back into the chair with unfocused eyes. He presses lightly at his side, pulling in an almost imperceptible breath, and then finally meets Draco’s gaze, emerald green cutting into the darkness.

“I’m sorry, Draco.”

Draco hasn’t seen Harry in the entire year before — but he hasn’t really seen him today until now. His face softens, misery mixed with regret mixed with something softer, which he casts upon Draco from glistening eyes, some wall having crumbled within him.

And suddenly, it’s all a little too intense.

“Alright,” Draco says. “Let’s get you lying down.”

The night is warm, but Draco makes a fire anyway. Harry lies against the armrest of his worn couch, presenting surprisingly little resistance as Draco brings him water and redresses his wound. It’s something they’d had to learn to navigate over the years — tending to one another, out in the field, back in their office after missions. Neither of them were quick to grant vulnerability to others, which must be why they ease so quickly back into it now, like a well-fitted glove.

Harry falls asleep on the couch after the third redressing. Draco sits at his feet, watching the ambling air within the cabin slowly lick the dying fire out of existence, gazing occasionally out of the window where the night breathes in darkness.

*

When Draco wakes, he’s laid out on the couch. He doesn’t remember how he got there, but he knows he didn’t move there himself. He understands it as slowly as the dawn creeps in through the window: Harry moved him while he slept.

Draco finds him in the kitchen. He looks like he’s been awake for hours, drinking a cup of tea with an empty one beside him, reading a folded-open newspaper that reads Fox Forge Gazette in blocky letters.

“Hey,” Harry says, confoundingly casual. “Tea?”

Harry makes Draco a cup and pours himself a third. He toasts them slices of sourdough bread and slathers them with butter and cherry preserves from an unlabeled mason jar.

“You make this yourself?” Draco asks as he realizes it.

Harry nods sheepishly. He looks a decade younger than he did the night before. “Bread, too.”

Draco looks down at it, wheat-white and pocketed with carefully risen air bubbles.

“I have a lot of spare time,” Harry says.

Draco blinks at him, his mind slowly processing the events of last night. It all feels like a nightmare lingering in his mind. “You’re healed.”

Harry’s face falls slightly. “Magic, erm — it only attracts it at night,” he says. It seems that he, like Draco, would rather not remember.

“Right,” Draco murmurs, unsure what else to say. “Then I can have my wand back.”

“Sure,” Harry says, nodding. “Whenever you’re ready to leave.”

Draco huffs. “Do you honestly expect me to —”

“Which will be soon.”

Harry returns Draco’s furrowed look. Draco tries to soften his own. It’s all heading in the wrong direction.

“Fine,” Draco says. “Keep the bloody wand. But I’m not going.” His voice drops. “Not without you with me.”

“Merlin,” Harry mutters to himself.

“It’s a mess without you, do you know?” Draco says. “I honestly don’t know how the department got anything done before you enlisted. Everyone’s always asking after you. Not just the Aurors. Everyone.”

“I’m sure everyone is very bored without the weekly gossip about me in The Prophet.”

Draco shakes his head. “It’s not like that. It’s — it’s confused everyone. Granger and Weasley are always wandering around like lost puppies.”

Harry’s lip twitches.

Draco knows he’s dangerously close to pushing too far, from Harry shutting down, but he can’t stop himself. “Are you ever planning on coming back?”

Harry glances out the kitchen window like the answers lie among the trees. “I don’t know, Draco,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters,” Draco says, his voice rising. “You — you’re Harry fucking Potter. Of course it bloody matters.”

Harry gives him a withering look. “If you came here to try to convince me to re-enter society, you can save it,” he says. “If people can’t figure out what to do without me, that isn’t my problem.”

Draco grimaces. Harry doesn’t even see his two best friends. Draco suddenly feels incredibly stupid for thinking Harry would care about seeing him. “Thanks for that,” he grumbles before he can stop himself.

Harry doesn’t seem to know what to do with this, this oblique confession, so he sidesteps it. “Look,” he says. “My leaving had nothing to do with anyone other than me. I’d love it if, for once in my life, I could get a little privacy and peace.”

“You have a funny definition of peace if that’s how you spend most of your nights.”

Harry’s glare holds fast for a second. Then he slumps, his face softening, like he’d suddenly lost the energy to keep up the front. His voice comes out low, gravel, pure exhaustion. “Draco, you really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So tell me.”

Harry studies him in silence.

“Harry — we were partners for five years. Don’t you know you can trust me?”

“I—” Harry says, eyes widening as if surprised Draco would ask. “Of course I trust you. It isn’t that.”

“Can’t you kill it?”

Harry suddenly looks as though he’s going to be ill. He glances out the window again. “You need to leave, Draco.”

Draco’s shoulder slump. He can’t fathom the thought of leaving here without Harry. He knows he definitely can’t without answers. He can’t spend another day the way he has in London — confused, aimless, untethered, the same way the entire wizarding world had been since Harry disappeared.

“I came all this way,” Draco tries slowly. “At least give me something to tell Granger other than that you were caught on the bad end of a duel with a hellspawn.”

“Don’t—” Harry says, his voice pinched. “Don’t tell her about this.”

“I won’t,” Draco says. “Not if you let me stay.”

Harry sizes him up for a beat.

“Just for another day,” Draco says.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says. “But you’re going to be very, very bored.”

*

Harry is only slightly right.

For being such a small cabin, it requires a lot of upkeep. Harry takes him through his day — tying scraggly squash vines to stakes in his small plot, clearing leaves from the solar panels that keep his small generator running, chopping wood for the occasional fire.

Draco watches the movement as Harry works: the high arc of the axe above Harry’s head, and then down precisely in the middle of a piece of wood, cleaving it cleanly in two. He can tell it’s something Harry has done hundreds of times out here alone, thousands.

Harry looks up and holds the axe out to Draco. “It’s harder than it looks,” he says, as if reading Draco’s mind.

Harry is a Gryffindor, and that means this is a challenge. But when Draco swings the too-heavy axe above his head and only makes it inches into the wood, he realizes at the sound of Harry’s laughter that it was actually a setup.

“Oh, sod off, Potter.”

Harry wipes a tear from his eye, like it’s the first time he’s laughed in months. “I said it was harder than it looks.”

They venture into the forest to check his game traps, which are all, to Draco’s relief, empty.

“You honestly live out here eating wild rabbits?” Draco asks while they walk back to the cabin. Harry carries a crossbow as they walk the woods. Draco doesn’t ask whether it’s for hunting or protection.

Harry hesitates. “Sometimes,” he says noncommittally.

“And to think you could eat like a prince if you wanted to.”

Harry’s laughter seems to catch in the air, bouncing off of the trunks in the trees. He props the crossbow up against the side of the cabin. “Fancy a walk?”

They walk into Fox Forge, the town that Hermione had directed Draco to Apparate into. It’s a small, quiet place, with spread out houses and a very humble main street that’s little more than a grocer, a post office, and a small elementary school.

When they walk into the shop, the man behind the counter greets Harry like he’s family, pulling out a few bags of non-perishables that he must come by for every week. Harry introduces him to the shopkeep, Alec, who prattles about the weather and the town’s gossip. Draco watches the entire thing like it’s a very confusing theater performance.

“Kids okay?” Harry asks casually. “Safe?”

“Oh,” Alec says, his face dropping slightly as though Harry has switched languages. “Yeah. Everyone’s fine, Harry, thanks for asking.”

When they leave for the cabin, each carrying a bag of cereals and tea and canned food, Draco lets it all wash over him again.

“Is it the people?” he asks cautiously. There is an exceptional charm about the town, Draco will admit. Children run down the street as they walk back to the edge of town, neighbors catching up between their vast yards. “Is that why you’re here — to protect them from whatever that thing is?”

Harry’s face falls. He shifts the bag into his other hand. “Don’t you ever take a break?”

“I just don’t understand what it is,” Draco says. “I don’t know what’s keeping you here.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Draco,” Harry says quietly.

Draco fixes his eyes on the ground, watching his feet tread over the collage of decaying debris as they walk into the forest. “I truly must not.”

*

Harry’s mood lowers along with the fading sun. What little progress Draco has made breaking down his barriers seems to vanish as the sunset casts the sky in yellow, then pink, then orange, then cool teal-blue. By the time stars begin to poke through the dark, it’s as if Harry is someone else entirely.

Privacy, Harry had asked for. Peace. Draco tries to give it to him, sitting in the living room and listening to the sound of Harry chopping onions and carrots in the kitchen as the aroma of a warm stew drifts through the air.

Draco has to fight to keep his eyes off of the windows. With the growing darkness of the night, fear crept into him like disease, a tightening of his throat, a prickle at the back of his neck. Memories of the creature flash through his mind unbidden: the long snout, the raised lips, the eyes, too seeing, too human.

Harry doesn’t remind Draco about the magic. He must know he doesn’t have to, not anymore. Draco would do anything if it meant never seeing that thing again in his life.

Harry emerges from the kitchen with two steaming bowls of stew, each with a few slices of sourdough. He puts one into Draco’s hands and sits on the couch across from him, angled in.

The stew is delicious, or maybe Draco is famished. Draco was expecting to have to navigate around unidentified meat from Harry’s traps, but finds only onions, sweet carrots, and a variety of beans. “Since when do you know how to cook?” he asks.

Harry chuckles. “I guess since forever,” he says, swirling his sourdough in his bowl. “I had to cook a lot growing up. Suppose it was Molly who taught me how to actually make things taste good, though. And I’ve—” he hesitates. “Yeah. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time.”

Draco can’t imagine Harry has been alone for more than a few days at a time his entire adult life before this. “Granger,” he says carefully. “And Weasley. They never come by?”

Harry shifts. “Erm,” he says. “Not really. Have, once.”

“But you didn’t let them stay,” Draco says. “Not long enough to see it.”

Harry doesn’t respond. Draco chews a tender carrot, studying him. “It must be lonely.”

Harry looks up from his bowl. “I dunno,” he says. “Can be.” Then he straightens, as if catching himself. “But I keep busy.”

“Well, you must be very bored to do this amount of reading,” Draco says. “I actually didn’t know you could read.”

He succeeds in getting a laugh out of Harry, and the air lightens. “Isolation can really drive you to extremes.”

As they eat, Harry tells him about the people in the town — the community he lives on the outskirts of, the shop owners, the teachers, the parents and children he knows only in passing. Draco gives him updates on London — cautiously at first, until Harry stops bothering to act unmoved by it. The new Minister for Magic had beat out her opponent in a landslide; Minerva had retired as the Headmistress of Hogwarts; Robards was overhauling the Auror internal accountability measures.

“That’s something I don’t miss,” Harry mumbles with a wry smile. “All that paperwork.”

“I don’t know how you could miss it,” Draco says. “I always did both of ours, or don’t you remember? You’re too much of a disaster to be trusted with a quill.”

Harry stands and takes Draco’s empty bowl, stacking it on his own. “Right. It had nothing to do with your being an utter control freak.”

“Oh, it’s been so long,” Draco says. “I simply can’t recall.”

Harry laughs and walks into the kitchen. Draco listens to the sound of the dishes stacking in the sink, water running. He stands, taking a candle as he walks over to the desk in the corner, peering through the stack of books upon it.

The water stops in the kitchen. Draco can hear the sound of floorboards creaking, like Harry is shifting on his feet.

“Might not be terrible,” he says from the next room. “Some company. Sometimes.”

Suddenly, Draco can feel his heart beating in his chest. He thinks for a second he may have misheard.

Harry reappears in the doorframe. He chews the inside of his lip for a beat, and then smiles. “Maybe eventually you’ll even learn how to chop wood.”

Draco scowls, grateful for the lifeline of banter to pull them to the surface of whatever confusing waters they seemed to be swimming in. “Malfoys don’t do manual labor.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, turning back into the kitchen. “It shows.”

Draco stares at the empty space where Harry stood, the trees rustling outside of the window, and tries to parse Harry’s words: what, if anything, lies beneath them. What it meant that Harry seemed to have pushed Granger and Weasley out of the cabin as quickly as possible. What it meant that he was asking Draco to return.

Draco picks up one of the books on Harry’s desk, trying to let the feeling of dry paper ground him. Reality seems to be seeping into the cabin as the sky grows darker, the moon’s light slowly trickling in through the windows as it rises.

Draco thumbs through the book — a particularly boring and ancient-looking tome about vegetable pickling. A bit of yellowed paper drops onto the desk. He unfolds it. It’s a newspaper clipping.

Animal Behind Latest Mauling Remains Unidentified, reads the article. Its creases are deep and fraying, like it’s been folded and unfolded dozens of times.

Authorities still unsure what type of animal is responsible for the latest maulings, which left nineteen dead and six injured in Fox Forge and surrounding communities, the article reads in part. Park rangers confirm that the bite and claw wounds left on the victim do not match that of a bear, wolf, or bobcat.

Many locals have expressed increasing fear following this attack, the likes of which have not been seen in six months.

“[We] don’t know how much longer we can stay here,” lumber worker Jac Greston told the Fox Forge Gazette. “This thing keeps coming back.”

The article is cut before its conclusion. Draco pages through the rest of the book, and a flurry of papers drop out: dark pictures that look like they were lifted from crime scene records.

He lifts them one by one to the candle: the interiors of destroyed homes, cabins and small grocery stores, ravaged as if a tornado had torn through them. Campgrounds stained with blood. The lifeless eyes of the maimed — fixed in final moments of terror or glassy-eyed forfeit, bodies drenched in blood, slashed with red, and, in most cases, missing several limbs.

Draco’s stomach lurches.

Draco.”

Draco drops the pictures and they fall in a flurry to the ground. Harry is frozen in the threshold of the room, staring at the photos on the floor: blood, limb, massacre.

“It’s—” Draco stammers. The images in the photos stain against his mind, bodies ravaged and torn apart beyond recognition. “It’s — it’s that thing.”

Harry crosses into the room and gathers the pictures from the floor. He picks up the book, folds the pictures back into them, and puts it on the mantle silently.

“It’s—”

“This was a mistake,” Harry says, his eyes fixed on the book. “You really shouldn’t be here.”

“Fuck, Harry,” Draco says. “Why didn’t you tell the Ministry?”

“This has nothing to do with them.”

“People are dying,” Draco says.

“Yeah, thanks,” Harry says. “I noticed.”

Draco shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he says for what feels like the thousandth time. “I don’t understand why you don’t just kill it.”

“They’re safe,” Harry says quietly, as if he hasn’t heard what Draco said. “I’m doing what I can to keep them safe.”

Draco doesn’t know what to do with the anger spreading in his chest. He looks at the book on the mantle, at all of those secrets held within. But he’s seen photos like that before — he sees them all the time. And Harry has, too. Something about this is different.

“You know, people are killed in London every day,” Draco says, turning to Harry, that stubborn silence, that infuriating brick wall. “If you want to spend your whole life being a martyr, you don’t have to do it all the way out here.”

“Draco,” Harry says, his voice low with anger. “You don’t —”

“No, I know I don’t,” Draco snaps. “I know I don’t understand, Harry, because you won’t attempt to explain a shred of it. Am I meant to just — watch you die out here alone?”

Harry shakes his head. “You don’t have to watch.”

Harry turns back into the hallway/ Suddenly it all feels just like the night before — like Harry is a stranger, like Draco is an intruder. Draco seethes on his trail as Harry locks the front door, then the side, and then rounds on Draco in the kitchen.

“I don’t think I need to remind you,” he says, speaking slowly, like Draco is a child. “I’d refrain from using magic unless you have a death wish.” He glances out the window in the kitchen, where the thick foliage of the trees sways in the night.

“Harry—”

Harry closes his eyes. “I’ll leave your wand on the table when I go out to check the traps tomorrow morning,” he says quietly. There isn’t anger in his voice, or malice. His words are nothing but a plea. “Don’t be here when I get back.”

He pushes past Draco into his bedroom and locks the door behind him.

*

Under other circumstances, Draco might Apparate back to London right then. But he can’t Apparate, and even if he could, he knows that he’d never be able to leave Harry here, not knowing what he knows now.

Draco listens to Harry’s movements slow to an eventual stop in his bedroom, like he’s cleaning, or working, or maybe pacing around the room. He’s seen this happen with Harry time and again: the way he gets folded up in cases, in the plights of others, unable to pull himself away from suffering when he thought there was something he could do about it. But this was more than that. Nothing about this town, the killings or the beast, seemed to add up to Harry’s stubborn attachment.

It’s like he’s on a suicide mission.

Draco pulls the photographs out of the book on the mantle and stares at them as if the desecration they contain could explain any of it. He reads and rereads the last line of the newspaper clipping: This thing keeps coming back. This thing keeps coming back.

He turns to the window, where the night is quiet and empty. In flashes, it’s as if he can see it among the trees, the mismatched limbs, the burning eyes, the dozens of antlers springing from matted black fur like thorns.

He opens his hand briefly to summon his wand — and then thinks better of it.

Draco crosses the cabin slowly, pulling on his boots by the door before unlocking it. The click of metal on metal reverberates into the night. He freezes, listening for sounds of Harry stirring that never come, and then pushes the door open.

The crossbow is precisely where Harry left it, leaned up against the side of the cabin.

Draco watched Harry do it once, and he tries to replicate the memory, pulling the arrow back until it clicks into the stock. It’s heavier than it appears, and the tension of the string, ready to fly through the air at a moment’s notice, feels a bit like spellwork.

He glances over his shoulder, back into the cabin, and then returns his gaze into the night.

He’ll have exactly one shot.

Draco walks into the forest, shifting the crossbow into one hand and extending the other. He’d learned how to do this as a party trick, and wasn’t sure he still remembered how. A few moments of concentrated energy pass, his hand trembling slightly with effort.

Then a spark of flame catches in his palm, casting the undersides of the leaves above him in flickering orange and yellow light.

The night is silent, the air stale with placidity, only punctured occasionally by the distant cry of a coyote. Draco shifts, spreading his legs slightly, and realizes he’s trembling.

The flame sparks in his hand. He closes his eyes, pushes past the icy veil of fear, and concentrates. When he opens them, a flame the size of a pear blisters against his palm.

The night remains still.

Draco drops his hand, the flame extinguished. If he had his wand, he could do something massive, something unmissable. But he doesn’t have his wand. And he isn’t Harry.

The chill of fear in his body slowly morphs into fury. He pushes deeper into the forest, crossing over tree roots and dewy earth until the cabin fades into the trees behind him.

He opens his hand again, draws his might, and casts. The flame towers up in a foot-high flume of golden light.

“Show yourself,” Draco roars into the night. “Or are you afraid?”

At the first sight of movement, Draco balls his fist, staunching the flame. Something looming stirs in the distance, something that was there all this time.

The beast turns its head slowly, the black silhouettes of its antlers turning behind the trees. It gazes out at Draco and blinks.

Draco drops his quivering hand. There’s something so uncanny about its gaze — something glinting behind its eyes, like it knows who Draco is.

The beast moves laboriously, rising onto its front paws, and then its back hooves. It spills through the forest like a fluid, lumbering behind the trees, its matted fur glistening, its heavy breaths just audible above the wind.

Draco takes a shaky step backward, raising the crossbow as the creature ambles toward him almost curiously. He notices distantly that its steps are uneven, treading lightly on one of its hind hooves as if it’s injured. It locks its glassy eyes onto Draco, glimmering in the night.

The creature pitches its head back and lets out an earth-shattering roar. Draco stumbles backwards, falling onto the ground, his heart pounding in his ears, his entire body stiff with fear.

The beast sets off toward him in a gallop. It weaves between the trees so quickly it’s as if it was made of the same liquid black of the night sky. Draco scrambles to his feet, planting them firmly in the ground. He raises the sight of the crossbow to his eye as the beast bolts forward, trying to steady his breath. He has only one arrow. He has to wait until it’s close.

A growl rips out from the beast as it charges. Its feet shake the very ground beneath it, plumes of leaves and debris thrown into the air in its wake. Draco aims the sight right between its eyes, fingers quivering around the trigger.

Draco —”

It happens all at once: the beast snaps its jaw inches from Draco’s face, so close he can feel its hot breath. Draco’s fingers curl around the trigger, firing his only arrow into the night. Harry crashes into him from behind, throwing him to the ground, pushing the angle of the crossbow up and away.

The beast lets out a rippling cry of misery and pain, an echo from deep in its throat. Draco pushes up onto his arms to watch it tip sideways, crashing into the ground, a burst of leaves and branches flying through the air and then fluttering slowly to the earth.

Draco climbs to his feet as another anguished roar echoes through the forest. The fletching of the arrow juts out of its side, dark blood spilling out of the wound onto the forest floor. The beast huffs hot, confused pants.

It looks up at Draco with those chilling, uncanny eyes. They’re too human, brimming with pain, and, unfortunately, still alive.

A groan rings out behind him. Draco tears his eyes away from the beast’s miserable gaze.

Harry is on the ground, one knee pulled under him as he pushes feelby up on an arm. He lets out another moan, attempting fruitlessly to choke it back behind his teeth. Draco drops to his knees beside him.

“Harry—” he says frantically. “What—”

Harry winces in pain as Draco tries to turn him by the shoulder. Harry falls onto his back, his hands clenching his side, bunched into the fabric of his shirt. Draco watches as the fabric fills with dark blood, spilling out between his fingers.

“Fuck,” Draco breathes. “Fuck — what —”

Harry’s eyes are glassy, and he stares up at Draco like he’s on the verge of passing out.

Draco pushes Harry’s hand gently against the wound, and then pulls back to unbutton his own shirt. “Harry, stay with me,” he says, pulling it off and pressing it against the wound, placing Harry’s clammy hands atop it. “Harry. I need — Fuck.”

Harry’s eyes roll back into his head, fluttering closed. Draco wipes his blood-soaked hands against his undershirt, trying to think — and digs through Harry’s pocket, pulling out his wand.

The beast lets out a pathetic whimper behind them. Draco can hear it shifting, sinking into the forest ground. He pushes Harry’s shirt up. There’s a hole in his side as if he’d been hit with a bullet. Blood pours from it slowly like a river. Draco swallows hard.

He points Harry’s wand at the wound and casts. “Vulnera Sanetur.” Ice blue light flows from the wand, but when it clears, the wound is still there, still bleeding.

“Fuck,” Draco says again. “Fu- Episkey,” he casts. “Vulnus Sacrio,” he tries. “Cutifingo.” He pulls in short, bursting breaths, watching the spells pass over Harry’s body as if they were nothing but light.

Out of the corner of his eye, the beast clamors up onto its front legs, releasing another pitiful growl. Draco watches it attempt to labor to its feet before dropping back onto the earth with a yelp like a wounded dog. Its blood pours out toward them, painting the brown and green of the forest floor in crimson.

All of it connects in Draco’s head at once.

He raises Harry’s wand to the beast. The creature turns its gaze to Draco, its eyes swimming with misery.

Vulnera Sanetur.”

The creature lets out a growl. It shuts its eyes, baring its fangs, hot breath hissing through curled lips. Draco puts a hand in Harry’s — clammy and cold — and casts another at the creature.

Vulnus Sacrio,” he casts, and the beast winces, yelping. It pushes up shakily onto its front paws, then its back. “Sanguis Restituo.”

Harry coughs beneath him. Draco looks down as blood spills from his mouth. Harry blinks his eyes open, squinting into the night.

Cutifingo,” Draco casts at the creature. It shudders as the wave of magic crashes into its fur, and then leans its head to the sky, roaring up toward the star-specked sky. Draco watches as it snarls at him, taking slow, uneven steps back into the forest, its eyes locked on his. Then it turns in a flash and darts into the night.

Harry pulls his hand out from Draco’s, clenching his side as he pushes up onto an arm. “Easy,” Draco says, and loops his arm underneath Harry’s shoulder, helping him to his feet.

Draco wants to say hundreds of things, ask hundreds of questions, make hundreds of apologies. Harry stumbles, falling into him, and coughs again, bloodspray catching the light from the moon, and Draco pushes all of it down.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs as he helps Harry slowly back to the cabin. He doesn’t chance a single look behind them.

*

Draco hardly manages to keep Harry conscious long enough to finish healing him before he falls into an uneasy slumber on the couch. Draco sits on the floor in front of him, occasionally poking the fire or glancing out the window as the night grows long. He didn’t know how to heal Harry with anything other than magic, but something told him the creature wasn’t returning again tonight.

Draco watches Harry sleep in the flickering glow of the flames. Every time he closes his eyes, it all flashes before him: a snarl of bared fangs, Harry crumpled on the forest ground. The labored breath of the wounded creatures, mixed with Harry’s breaths — dying. So he tries not to close his eyes at all.

Harry shifts in his sleep, matted black hair brushing against the armrest of the couch, a bandage wrapped tight around one ankle. Draco pulls the blanket up to Harry’s shoulders.

Eventually, the sun pushes through the branches of the trees. Draco pulls himself from Harry’s side, drawing the desk chair up to the window, and gazes out at all of it, the tameness of it, the quiet. He doesn’t realize that he’s fallen asleep like that until he’s pulled from it by a warm hand on his shoulder.

Draco looks up. The sun hangs bright in the midday sky overhead. He turns, and Harry is already walking out of the room.

Draco follows him into the kitchen. He expects fury, rage, maybe even an errant hex. Instead, he finds Harry pouring boiling water from a pot into two cups.

“Hey,” Harry says.

Draco blinks at him. “Hey.”

Harry puts the pot back on the stove before sitting across from him. Draco watches from the door frame as the steam swirls off of the tea, its heat vanishing into the air. Harry stirs sugar into one cup and sips it, looking out the window. The silence seems to take on its own presence in the room, interrupted only by the chatter of birdsong.

“How’s your —” Draco says eventually, guilt washing over him in waves. “Are you alright?”

Harry tips back the last of his tea. “Yeah, fine,” he says, not turning from the window. “You did good work.”

“I —” Draco stammers. “Harry, I wouldn’t’ve —” he says stupidly. “Not if I had known.”

“Right,” Harry says, finally turning to him. “Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief to not have to explain it all.”

Draco sinks into the chair across from him. “I actually think you could do a touch more explaining.”

Harry gets Draco a fresh set of clothes, delivering them to him in a stack with his wand atop it. They walk out into the woods surrounding the cabin, weaving among the trees as Harry checks his traps. As they walk, Draco’s eyes track the forest floor, seeking out the mismatched tracks of forepaws and hindhooves.

“It’s some kind of curse,” Draco guesses eventually. “Linking you together.”

“I don’t think so,” Harry says, leading them away from another empty trap.

“It’s attracted to your magic,” Draco says. “It’s drawing its powers from you.”

Harry shrugs. “Dunno,” he says impassively. “It was attracted to your magic, too. But you didn’t end up with any crossbow wounds.”

Draco winces away from the memory, the guilt. “Then you came out here to stop it,” he tries. “You read about it in the papers and came out here to stop it, and it latched onto you.”

Harry seems to ponder this as he re-opens a snapped trap. It’s clenched upon the bushy tail of some animal that seemed to escape without it. Draco looks away.

“No,” Harry says when he stands.

“Then it’s something else,” Draco says. He’s exhausted from the guessing, from Harry’s reticence with answers, but he’s grateful Harry is speaking to him at all. “It followed you here from London.”

“I think someone would have noticed it walking around London.”

Draco huffs. “Then you created it in the secret lab located beneath your cabin.”

Harry laughs. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

“It’s nice that you’re so unconcerned about this.”

Harry looks up from another trap. “Do I seem unconcerned about this?”

Something stirs in the distance as Harry leads them further into the forest. The frantic sounds increase as they approach, and Draco can make out the long limbs of a young dear, scuffling against the forest floor. Its leg is clamped in a trap, crushed within metal. It uses the other three to try to clamor away as Harry approaches it.

Draco stops short, keeping his distance as Harry drops to his knees beside it. The creature tries to buck away from his grip as Harry puts an arm around the length of its neck, holding it still as it struggles beside him. He brushes his other hand gently across its side, scratching through its fur, comforting it. A spark of green magic bristles from his fingertips.

The deer slowly slumps in his grip. Its eyes droop closed. It tips forward onto the ground.

Harry glances up at Draco, then looks down to open the trap. He throws the dead deer over his shoulders, and Draco follows him silently back to the cabin.

“There must be some way to break the connection,” Draco says. “Or to kill it — just it.”

Draco’s stomach churns at the thought of having to witness Harry’s butchering skills, but he just drops the deer on the ground outside of the cabin, exposed to the elements. Its sightless eyes are already clouding. There’s a patch of dark blood on Harry’s shoulder from its mangled leg.

Draco realizes he’s been asking the wrong questions.

“Harry,” he says. “Why did you come out here?”

Harry straightens and studies him, like Draco has asked something else. “I told you,” he says. “I needed some privacy. Some peace.”

Peace. From the demands of the Aurors, maybe. Privacy, perhaps, from The Prophet. But not from Granger and Weasley, from his family. Not from Hogwarts, the only home Harry really ever had. Not from Draco. There was something bigger there, something that was brewing then, maybe still brewing now, like a sickness.

“Do you think —” Draco says. “Do you think maybe you created it?”

Harry freezes for a beat. Then he brushes his hands on his trousers and walks back into the cabin.

Draco thinks maybe it’ll be like that first night again — Harry shut off, hidden behind a newly instated wall. But Harry just leads them into the living room, thumbs through a stack of books, and pulls one out, handing it to Draco.

Draco opens it. A small collection of newspaper clippings is nestled in the middle. Draco flips through them, their meanings blurred together in a smattering of common words: Creature, Mauling, Unidentified, Slain. Underneath the headlines, a collage of photos of destroyed homes, people sobbing, trees torn up by the root.

The most recent is from less than a month ago.

“It came here after I did,” Harry says slowly as he watches Draco thumb through the articles, unable to keep the expression of shock off of his face. “Or — maybe you’re right. Maybe I did create it.”

Draco doesn’t respond. He closes the papers back into the book.

“It’s not always here,” Harry says shakily. “But when I’m — I don’t know.” He sucks in a breath. “Worse. That’s when the attacks happen.”

“You said —” Draco says, his mind spinning to catch up. “I thought you said you were keeping them safe.”

“I am,” Harry says. “I’m trying. But it just — it just keeps happening.” He drops onto the couch, like he’s lost the energy to stay upright. “It keeps coming back.” He looks up at Draco, misery etched under his eyes. “It keeps killing.”

Harry drops his head into his hands. The wind outside sings between the leaves of the trees. Something cries out in the distance, birds chirp, a squirrel or racoon patters across the roof. Harry’s words come out low, swirling with the chatter of the earth around them.

“I should have let you kill it.”

Draco crouches in front of him. “Stop,” he says. “You can’t do that.”

Harry lifts his head from his hands and shakes it slightly at the ground. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it,” he says. “Should have just let you.”

Something catches in Draco’s throat. “There has to be some way to sever the link,” Draco says. “We can go to the Department of Mysteries.”

Harry shakes his head again, finally meeting Draco’s eye. “I don’t think it’s linked to me, Draco,” he says. “I think it is me.”

The words reverberate in Draco’s ears, bouncing off the walls of his mind. The images of the photographs spill through Draco’s memory: all of that ruined flesh, those ravaged bodies, the glassy eyes of the innocent.

Reality passes over him like the day fading into night. As long as Harry was alive, that thing would be, too.

As long as Harry was alive, people would die.

“It would be the right thing to do,” Harry says, as if he can see the inside of Draco’s mind. “To kill it.”

Draco’s laugh surprises them both. “I was never much interested in the right things.”

Harry smiles scornfully, and then his face falls. “I do what I can to — to keep it wounded. Just enough so that it won’t leave the forest.”

“You’re injuring yourself.”

Harry glances away. “Better me than more of them.”

“This is —” Draco starts, his head spinning. “You can’t go on like this, Harry. This isn’t any kind of life.”

Harry lets out a croak of a laugh. “You’re right. I can’t,” he says. He stands, his face suddenly hardened. “You should leave.”

Draco looks up at him from the ground. “Honestly, Potter. Don’t you know by now that won’t work on me?”

Harry gazes down at him expressionlessly for a long moment, chewing the inside of his lip. Then he shakes his head. “Right,” he says. “Then I suppose we’d better find something to eat for dinner.”

*

They eat the last of the stew and sourdough in the living room as the sun lowers in the sky. Draco’s mind is hazy with exhaustion, and Harry seems determined to distract both of them by filling the cabin with chatter. He explains crop rotation to Draco, tells him how he differentiates between the mushrooms that can nurture you and the ones that can kill you. He talks of woodworking and foraging and fishing, and eventually the gossip of the town he’s gleaned from his brief interactions with its people.

“It’s a different culture than it is in London,” Harry tells him as Draco leans against the armrest of the couch. “Learned the hard way that dropping by unannounced is sort of the way things go around here.”

Draco shudders. “I thought the appeal of this place was not having to see your neighbors.”

“Don’t have to, not much,” Harry says, chuckling. “And normally when they come round, they at least bring baked goods.” He smiles at a memory. “Alec’s wife nearly caught me levitating firewood once, though.”

Draco blinks hard to keep himself from dozing off. “Do you reckon she’ll have you burned at the stake?”

Harry’s eyes drop, and his lip twitches slightly. “Maybe,” he says. “She — erm.” He pauses, tapping at the ceramic of the bowl. “She’s. Died,” he murmurs. “She’s dead.”

Draco puts his empty bowl on the floor. “Harry.”

Harry looks like he’s going to be sick. He closes his eyes and pulls in a long breath. “Nevermind.”

“Harry,” Draco says. “It isn’t your fault.”

Harry’s gaze lifts above Draco’s face, out into the dark window behind him, like he’s speaking to it instead of Draco. “You’ll be due back with the Aurors soon,” he says distantly.

“Well,” Draco says cautiously. “Yes. Not everyone is afforded an illustriously long sabbatical like Harry Potter.”

Harry smiles, but doesn’t take his eyes off of the window. “They’ll ask about me.”

“Robards isn’t really the type to ask about weekend plans.”

“Hermione will,” Harry says. “And Ron.”

“I’m not going to tell them, Harry,” Draco says quietly. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

Harry finally meets Draco’s gaze. “Then maybe I can teach you how to properly swing an axe,” he says. “Next time you come by.”

“Right,” Draco murmurs, caught in the green of Harry’s eyes, the question etched behind them. “Maybe.”

It’s all suddenly too intense again. Draco nudges Harry lightly with his knee. “In return maybe I’ll try to teach you how to cut your disastrous hair with scissors instead of a hacksaw.”

Harry laughs, his hand flying into his hair. It is disastrous. It’s perfect.

“You should get some sleep,” Harry says, standing to collect their bowls. “I know you didn’t get much last night.”

“I’m fine,” Draco says. A barely-contained yawn betrays him. “I want to hear more about the mushrooms. It’s all very fascinating, and not boring in the slightest.”

“Fine,” Harry says, taking their dishes to the kitchen. “Maybe it’ll put you to sleep.”

Harry never gets the chance. Draco is asleep before he returns from the kitchen.

*

Draco isn’t sure what stirs him from sleep — the whistle of the wind against the walls of the cabin, the slight chill in the air after the fire dies, or maybe something else entirely. He sits up on the couch, taking his surroundings into focus as memories of his hellish dreams pour through his mind — the agony of victims in their final moments. Claws and fangs ripping into flesh, crunching bone, tearing limbs.

The dark face of the creature looming over the dead.

Harry looming over the dead.

Draco stands, rubbing the images out of his eyes, hugging himself against the chill. Harry’s bedroom door is open, and Draco glances into it as he passes, its contents as messy as a teenage boy’s.

He doesn’t find Harry in the kitchen or the spare room, either. He turns down the hallway and finds the door to the cabin has been left wide open.

Draco’s throat tightens as he peers out from the threshold, and then slowly steps into the night. The panic doesn’t hit him until he turns to the side of the cabin.

Harry’s crossbow is gone.

Draco walks into the trees before he can think better of it. The night seems still, suddenly devoid of life, as if it was frozen in time.

He’s lost within minutes. The dark limbs of the trees cage him in from above, every flit of an animal or bird in the night makes him flinch. He draws his wand, holding it out before him, though he finds he feels just as defenseless as he did without it.

He hears it first, the wet, slick sounds of devouring. The snap of a heavy jaw, the crunch of bone between teeth.

A cluster of branches move behind the trees. Draco slowly realizes that they’re a network of too many antlers. He can just make out the curve of the beast’s back, the shifting of its form as it tears flesh from bone. It rests on its haunches, its back hooves curled beneath its body, its front paws gripping its prey as it gorges.

Draco raises his wand out, a hex or curse heavy on his lips, but something stills his hand. He sidesteps slowly, angling around the creature as another figure comes into sight: red flannel, disastrous black hair.

Harry sits on the forest floor, a few paces away from the creature. Draco steps closer slowly as the scene comes into focus. Harry watches it, his knees drawn up to his chest, with the familiar apprehension of tending an open flame: wary, but warmed.

The sounds of ravenous chewing echo through the forest as Draco looks down at the creature’s bloodstained mouth. It’s picking apart the small deer from earlier, its body ravaged, nothing but the white and red of bone and blood, save for its intact face, its glassy, faded eyes.

Draco can only just see it, the glint in Harry’s eye as he watches the creature feed. It’s something like curiosity, or wonder.

Or maybe something like affection.

Icy dread wraps Draco’s throat like a noose, spilling down into his chest as he looks between them. He edges slowly back toward the cabin, away from what he knows he was not meant to witness.

A twig snaps beneath Draco’s feet. They both whip their heads to look at him. Green eyes shining from behind the moon-glint of glasses. Black eyes brimming with insatiable hunger, with rage, with anguish.

Draco freezes as their eyes burn into him, exposed, shocked, or hungry. Then both of the creatures — man and beast — blink at him slowly with complete recognition.

Notes:

this fic was written for HP Fearfest's day 16 prompt, Ancient Evil. HP Fearfest is an open collection taking place on AO3 and tumblr! read more about it here, and join in!

you can find more of my creepy fearfics on my tumblr. thank you so much for reading and please leave a comment if you enjoyed (or were creeped out, or perplexed, etc)! cheers!