The Sleeping Beauty Curse

Chapter 14

Robards made Harry take a day off after he'd only been back for five days. Harry had objected – he was used to working ten or sometimes even twelve days straight – but Robards had glared at him and muttered something Harry couldn't quite hear, about interfering fake husbands and want to strangle him with my bare hands, and he thought it best not to inquire any further. It was true that he did feel tired. He'd worked very long days, mostly staring at paperwork for hours on end, although he'd been sent out a couple of times on minor cases when they'd been too short-staffed to cope. And he still wasn't sleeping very well, either, of course. He mostly managed to get to sleep OK, curled up to Draco and drifting off almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, but he was up for at least an hour every night after one of Draco's dreams, and it always took him much longer to fall back to sleep after that.

When he woke up on Saturday, then, given Robards' mutterings, he wasn't entirely surprised that Draco was already up and dressed, sitting on the end of the bed and staring at him. "Chop chop," Draco said, in the most irritating manner known to man. "We haven't got all day. I want to go out."

Harry wondered if he should ask where to, but he decided it would be better off as a terrible surprise, so he just nodded, yawning, and rolled out of bed and into the bathroom to shower and get ready.

They ended up in the West End. In Muggle London. In a bookshop. Harry was simultaneously the most, and least, surprised he'd ever been. "You should have been a Ravenclaw," he said as Draco walked a bit closer to him, clearly nervous, when they opened the shop's main door and went in.

"Wash your mouth out with soap," Draco objected, looking round, interest and anxiety mixed in his expression. It seemed fairly standard to Harry, who'd spent some time in bookshops hiding from the Dursleys over the years: rows of book-stacked shelves, tables stacked with books, and lots and lots of people, some milling around aimlessly, and some powering through the crowds with determination in their eyes. "It's busy," Draco said, stating the obvious.

"It's a Saturday," Harry said, and shrugged. What else had Draco expected? Even Diagon Alley was more crowded on a Saturday, although the shops were smaller and more eccentric. "Do you want to browse, or is there something specific you were after?"

Draco pulled a scroll out of the pocket of his trousers. "I feel naked without a robe," he said as he did so, and wrinkled his nose.

He didn't look naked, but Harry immediately pictured him as such, and blushed. They hadn't been intimate since Harry had been back at work, and even though Harry knew it was stupid, and he'd only end up getting bruised by his desires, he really fucking wanted to.

Draco shot him a delighted look, appearing to see right through him, and then turned back to the scroll. "Let's see . . ." he said, and then shoved the scroll at Harry. "You're the Muggle expert," he said, nose in the air. "You find them."

Harry looked at the scroll. It was . . . Hermione's handwriting. "You . . . you've been corresponding with Hermione?" he asked.

"No, I stole her reading list when she was asleep and vulnerable," Draco said sweetly. "It was the perfect revenge for her kissing me when I was asleep." He gave a deep shudder. "I may never be clean again," he said. And then, when Harry narrowed his eyes at that, added: "For fuck's sake! Because it's Granger. Not because she's . . . you know." He took a deep breath. "A witch of Muggle heritage," he said pompously, and then shot an anxious look at Harry, as if to point out that, see, he wasn't a racist shit all the time now. Just on special occasions.

All this talk of kissing was making Harry feel uncomfortable. He . . . wanted to kiss Draco. A bit. And he didn't like, very much, that anyone else had kissed him, especially while he was asleep. It was weird, and wrong, to think about anyone kissing Draco while he was asleep, even Harry himself. The whole situation was weird and wrong, to be fair, but it struck Harry that Draco had had a pretty raw deal there.