Heaven Through a Window • Drarry •

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Heaven

Draco gripped Harry's hand as they walked up the approach. Losing his job and country should have felt like a pyrrhic victory, but Harry was so great a prize the cost paled into insignificance.

"Never use the front door, whatever you do," Draco told him. "It's cursed."

"Good to know."

Passing through the coach gate, they entered a courtyard. "The stables, which are empty, of course," Draco said, nodding to a great door opposite. "And this..." He turned to the heavy oaken door, and tugged away the red ivy that crept towards the handle, "is the door you must use."

He ignored the keyhole and placed his wand on an inlaid golden scarab. "Nox. The password is 'pure-blood'."

Harry snorted.

The door groaned open. Wall-mounted candles flickered along the low-ceilinged hall of weathered oak and lime-rendered walls.

The first door led upstairs. Draco closed it and cast, "Colloportus!" He marked a glowing X on the door. "It's cursed in a variety of unpleasant ways."

The next door opened into an oak-panelled reading room. A deer head hung on the wall, its antlers covered in cobwebs. An abandoned pack of Self-Shuffling cards arranged itself on a gaming table next to a tarnished ashtray.

Harry removed a gigantic cobweb draped over the crystal chandelier with a wave of his wand. "Why is the upstairs cursed?"

"Should intruders arrive in the night to kill us in our beds, they will go upstairs in search of us. I locked it as it isn't safe for you to be waking up and wandering around before you're better."

They discovered a bathroom and a bedchamber, and finally a large parlour with a kitchen through an archway. The walls were white lime plaster, and the ceiling had swirling friezes in the shape of runes and painted floral frescoes.

Draco unlocked his trunk and woke up his cat.

"Is this Blue?" Harry asked.

"Hello my darling," he said, kissing Blue on the head.

She yawned and went back to sleep, tucking her face under her paw. Typical.

"That's a great cat," Harry said.

"Yeah, well... I only accept the best." Draco met Harry's eyes and his breath caught in his chest.

Draco cleared his throat and he pulled out a portrait from his trunk. "Ah," he said. "My mother has packed my late wife, I'm sure this won't be awkward at all. Hello, Astoria."

"You made it, then," she said. She looked between the two of them. "Hello, Harry."

"Good evening."

"Where would you like to hang?" Draco asked.

"Somewhere useful, please."

He put Astoria in the hallway and unpacked tins of mackerel for Blue, oven gloves, a sack of potatoes, lavatory paper, gardening gloves, a pouch of Bezoars, lavender bags for their robes, sheet music, elderflower cordial and Chocolate Frogs.

Meanwhile, Harry relished using magic again and banished everything to its proper room, and cleaned the kitchen cupboards.

"You should get rid of the other wand," Draco suggested. "Don't wander far."

Harry nodded. "That's wise."

An unbeatable wand was suicide. "It's called self-preservation, Potter," he announced, opening Harry's trunk. "Look it up."