The Sleeping Beauty Curse

Chapter 20

It was odd being back home and back to work. Back to the normal routines, which Harry had, just a couple of months ago, never, ever thought would be normal. Waking up with Draco. Going to sleep with Draco. Going to work during the day and daydreaming about Draco. Kissing Draco. He was so absent-minded at work that Robards got genuinely irritated with him. Harry could tell this because his boss stopped shouting, in favour of muttering. "Do you want to pinch my job or not, Harry?" he snapped, beneath his breath. "Because I'm starting to think you're going soft."

Harry did want to pinch his job, and as soon as possible. He stomped out of the Auror office to go and tell this to Kingsley, and Kingsley gave him a very kind, very uncomfortable look, and pointed out that Harry could hardly be promoted to Head Auror while all it would take for a dark wizard to bring him down would be to chop off his ring finger.

Harry thought that it would be kinder of this imaginary criminal to just pull the ring off, rather than cut off the finger along with it, and said so, which prompted Kingsley to give him a lecture about taking responsibility for your actions, and making the best of a situation. This didn't make Harry feel much better. Hadn't Kingsley all but promised that he'd make sure the bond was fixed? What had happened to his former optimism? Harry thought, sourly, that if Kingsley was going to give up hope, he could at least have the courtesy to actually come out and say it, rather than making it sound as if it was Harry just being stubborn.

He ranted about the lecture at Draco when he got home for a while before he realised that Draco wasn't an ideal sounding board for this. Draco had gone kind of pinched and sour, and Harry was just about to awkwardly apologise for raising the seemingly forbidden subject of the bond, and what the bloody hell they were going to do about it, when Ginny banged in through the Floo, followed by the whole Harpies team.

"You're coming to my birthday party at the Burrow this weekend, Harry," Ginny said in passing as the girls trooped down the stairs towards the pitch, chatting nineteen to the dozen.

"Am I?" Harry asked, feeling relatively sure this was the first time Ginny had mentioned it.

"Yes," Ginny called as she vanished down the stairs. "Draco too."

Happily, this new and unexpected terror – going to the Burrow, the heart of Weasley territory – seemed to completely throw Draco, distracting him from what they'd been talking about before. At least, Draco let the subject drop, and he didn't raise it again, which was as good as forgotten, Harry hoped. He felt tied up in knots enough about the bond, and whether or not he and Draco should complete it, without Draco tying himself up in knots about it too.

By the morning of the party, Draco looked like he was going to be sick. Where he wasn't green coloured, he was pure white, and he must have tried on at least four different outfits before Harry told him firmly that he should stop stressing, because Ron would definitely take the piss out of him, whatever he wore.

Draco seemed to see the wisdom in this and calmed down a fraction, but he was still pale and stressed all day. He was pale and stressed during the party too, sticking to Harry's side like a grumpy shadow, and complaining when he thought no one else but Harry could hear that the house was too noisy and too full. Too full of Weasleys, Harry thought he meant, but didn't say it. Draco was clearly trying so hard he was about to snap, a cloud of almost visible iciness surrounding him, until Ginny finally turned up – late to her own party – and gave him a swift and loving punch to the kidneys, before heading straight off to find Astoria in the crush. "This is my birthday party, ferret face, not a funeral," she said bracingly. "Cheer up or I'll body-bind you and prop you up by the buffet, so you're forced to watch Ron eat." She shuddered. "It's like a feeding frenzy in a piranha tank," she added thoughtfully. "I don't know how he stays so thin."