Chapter Text
~D~
Blaise's club had a staircase designed and possibly charmed to make everyone descending it look magnificent. Draco appreciated this greatly as he made his way down. It was his first visit back since the off-season had begun and it wouldn't do to have an entrance that was anything less than befit him.
The crew had colonized a salon off the cocktail floor. Pansy saw him first and did not get up, which from Pansy was her version of a hug.
"He returns," she said. "Tanned. More alabaster than your usual ghostly pale. Have you been outside?"
"Shockingly Puddlemere has us train outdoors and Dorset gets slightly less rain than Cornwall." He kissed her cheek, took the drink Blaise was already holding out – Blaise had always poured for people the way other people poured a comforting mug of tea – and was halfway into the seat opposite before he registered the man draped along the chaise.
The last time Draco had seen him in person, Theo had been nineteen and sharp-boned and dressed like a tragic poet preparing for a duel. The bones had settled. The shoulders had opinions now. The letters he sent to update them during his years on the continent had been frequent, filthy, and illustrated with no useful information about these changes. He was wearing something dark green and watching Draco conduct this entire inventory with an expression of profound, hospitable patience.
"Take your time," Theo said. "There's a lot of me."
"There's more of you than the owls suggested."
"The owls were about my adventures. My body was implied." He unfolded upward – Theo had never simply stood up in his life – and pulled Draco into an embrace that lasted a beat longer than necessary and was, irritatingly, warm. He smelled like cedar and something underneath it Draco couldn't place. "Hello, darling. You've gone and gotten famous."
"You've gone and gotten fit. One of us has an excuse."
"I work wood for a living. It's very physical."
"You don't have a living. You have hobbies and a fortune."
"He's memorized my situation," Theo told the table, delighted. "Five years apart and he's kept notes."
Draco sat. The drink was perfect – Blaise's drinks were always perfect, it was his one sincerity – and the salon settled back into its rhythm around him like water closing over a stone. Pansy resumed a story about a client who'd cried at a fitting. Blaise contributed the acoustics of a man who already knew every ending. Daphne was expected later and would be discussed until she arrived. Five years and the crew ran the same as ever: gossip as a shared economy, everyone's holdings some degree of public.
He watched Theo across it. He was aware he was watching Theo across it. Theo, mid-anecdote, was performing for the table – hands, whole torso, a pause placed like a conductor – and it was the same act Draco had watched him build at fifteen, refined now into something with genuine range. The room two salons over could probably feel it. A waitress had found four reasons to pass their table.
The act had never worked on Draco. That wasn't new. What was new was the machinery under it – you could see, if you'd known him from before, exactly how good he'd gotten.
"– and that," Theo concluded, "is why I'm no longer welcome in Bratislava."
"That's the version he tells," Pansy said. "The letter was worse. I had it framed."
"You framed my correspondence?"
"I framed the good page."
"There's a market for this," Blaise said in the tone of a man already calculating sums.
Theo turned the full wattage on Draco then, chin propped on his fist. "And you. The papers have been thorough. Witch Weekly ran a spread in April I can only describe as devotional. ‘The seeker who came in from the cold’. There was a photograph of you dismounting a broom that should've required a permit."
"I've seen it. My publicist framed it."
"Everyone's framing things this year. Was the Chaser true? The one from the Harpies reserve with the–" Theo made a gesture of considerable specificity.
"A gentleman doesn't confirm."
"A gentleman," said Pansy, "was seen leaving her building at seven in the morning wearing the previous evening."
"A gentleman doesn't confirm out loud."
Theo laughed – the real one, the short one, not the one he sold to rooms – and something in Draco's chest registered it and was overruled. "Look at you. You've learned how to charm. Actually charm. Last I saw you, your entire strategy was cheekbones and mild scowling."
"It was an excellent strategy."
"And now the papers have you at – what's the current count, Blaise, you're the bookmaker."
"I don't discuss my clients' positions," Blaise said. He then immediately followed with, "The odds on him being attached by September are seven to two."
"Seven to two." Draco set his glass down. "Insulting."
"It was nine to two before you walked down my staircase like that."
"Whatever the count," Theo said, waving it off, "it's charming. Genuinely. The apprentice does the master proud."
And there it was. Draco felt his jaw begin to clench and converted it into a smile, because five years of press conferences had taught him that much. "The master."
"I've been on the continent, darling. The continent is finishing school. You've been in Cornwall and Dorset being rained on and famous. It's not a competition."
"It's absolutely a competition. Everything with you has been a competition since we were nine and you cheated at gobstones."
"I innovated at gobstones."
"Do you know what it takes to pull discreetly when there are photographers who know your window ledges?"
"Do you know what it takes to pull in Prague with no fame, no photographs, and a language you learned that afternoon?" Theo had come upright now, boots on the floor, forearms on his knees, and the drape was gone. This was the other register – the one the rest of the room never got, quick and precise, eyes bright with the pure joy of an argument worth having. "You play with a home crowd, Draco. Everyone in your pool arrives pre-seduced by the sports pages. I work unassisted."
"Unassisted. You inherited a face."
"So did you, and yours does half your talking."
"Children," Pansy said, "you're both stunning, you're both insufferable, and I'd pay real money to see this settled."
The silence that followed was brief and anticipatory.
Draco looked at Theo. Theo looked at Draco. Years of shorthand did the negotiating before either of them opened his mouth, which was how Draco knew – with the same cold, clean certainty he got when the Snitch changed direction – that they were absolutely going to do this.
"Terms," he said.
"Neutral ground." Theo gestured at the club around them, magnanimous, a landowner donating a field. "Blaise's establishment, tonight's crowd. We alternate. One of us names a target for the other – anywhere in the building – and we assess prospects. Points for progress. Deductions for leaning on fame."
"Deductions for leaning on the accent you brought back from Florence."
"That's just my voice now."
"It is not–"
"Adjudication," Blaise said, "goes through me. House takes ten percent of the bragging rights."
"What are the stakes?" Pansy asked, already delighted, already composing the retelling.
"Winner's choice," Theo said, and something about the way he said it – light, offhand, watching Draco over the rim of his glass with those blue eyes that had never once in two decades missed anything – made the phrase land somewhere lower than it should have.
Draco drained his drink in one controlled swallow and stood, rolling his shoulders, surveying the cocktail floor beyond the salon's arch the way he surveyed a pitch before the whistle. Crowded tonight. Good crowd, mixed, well-dressed, at least five people he could see who'd already noticed the table noticing them.
"You can choose first," he said.
"Bold of you to concede the title before we've started." Theo rose beside him, close enough that Draco caught the cedar again, and scanned the floor with the serene focus of a man reading a wine list. "Mm. The witch at the end of the bar. Grey silk, terrifyingly good posture, sending back a cocktail with footnotes. She's yours."
Draco followed his gaze. The witch in question appeared to be dismantling a bartender in fluent, unhurried detail.
"She'll eat you alive," Theo said fondly.
"She'll try." Draco straightened his cuffs. "The wizard by the far window for you. Reading a book. In a club. He hasn't looked up once."
Theo's smile spread slowly, sharp and catlike.
"Oh," he said, "I've missed you."
~T~
The wizard with the book was named Lucas, he was reading a treatise on ley-line cartography in a nightclub because his sister had dragged him out and abandoned him, and it took Theo four minutes to get him to dog-ear a page.
Four. He'd budgeted fifteen. The book was genuinely interesting – Theo had opinions on ley-line cartography, which was the trick nobody ever expected, that his opening move was meaning it – and by the time he drifted back to the booth in the salon with the man's floo address written on a cocktail napkin, Draco had already returned from the bar and was sitting with the insufferable stillness of a cat that had eaten something expensive.
"The grey silk witch," Pansy reported, "laughed. Out loud. Twice. I've seen that woman at events for four years, Theo. I've never seen her teeth."
"He didn't lean on the fame?"
"She asked what I did," Draco said, "and I said I worked outdoors."
"Morgana. Understatement. He's using understatement on civilians." Theo dropped the napkin on the table like a duelist's glove. "Lucas. Ley-line cartographer. Wants to show me a nexus in Wales."
"That's not a euphemism?"
"It's both. That's the artistry."
Blaise took the napkin and looked it over once, unimpressed as a customs official, and set it back down. "Point each. Continue."
They continued.
It became, over the next two hours, one of the great nights of Theo's decadent and well-documented life. Draco sent him after a table of Beauxbatons alumnae on the grounds that his French was "decorative"; Theo returned forty minutes later with three names, an invitation to a vineyard, and lipstick on his jaw that he wore back to the booth like a campaign medal. Theo sent Draco after a stern-looking curse-breaker who supposedly loathed Quidditch, and watched from across the floor – nursing something Blaise had built out of smoke and bad intentions – as Draco did the thing Theo had genuinely not seen before.
Because it was new. That was the fascinating part. The boy Theo remembered had operated on cheekbones and waiting, a beautiful statue that occasionally condescended to be approached. This creature leaned in. Listened with his whole spine. Deployed his attention like it was a controlled substance, gave the curse-breaker forty seconds of total focus and then withdrew it, and Theo watched a woman who hated everything Draco represented turn her body toward him by degrees, chasing the light. Somewhere in Cornwall, in the rain, Draco Malfoy had taught himself to be charming towards people, and the results were –
Well. The results were worth studying. Theo was a craftsman. He appreciated technique.
He was still appreciating it when Draco slid back into the booth, dropped a card on the table – the curse-breaker's, professional face, personal floo inked on the reverse – and said, "She thinks playing Quidditch is a symptom of arrested development."
"And you agreed?"
"Passionately. It's my greatest flaw. I'm hoping to be cured."
"You're a menace." Theo said it with real warmth. "You've become an actual menace. I'm so proud I could weep."
"Tally," Pansy demanded.
Blaise consulted whatever internal ledger he kept behind those unhurried eyes. He'd been adjudicating all night with the gravity of a man ruling on maritime law: points awarded, deductions issued (Draco, once, for a witch who'd recognized him – "pre-seduced pool, half value" – and Theo, once, for what Blaise had called "structural cheating," which Theo maintained was simply multilingualism). The salon had gradually accumulated an audience of the crew's satellites, drifting in and out with the tide of the evening, and at least two side-bets Theo knew of.
"Four confirmed for Nott," Blaise said. "Four confirmed for Malfoy. One deduction apiece. Quality of prospects – comparable. Degree of difficulty – comparable. Style points–" he paused, and Theo watched him decide against honesty in favor of peace. "Comparable."
The word landed like a dropped tray.
"Comparable," Draco said, with vowels long enough to hang laundry on.
"You cannot be serious." Theo pressed a hand to his chest. "Blaise. Blaise. I got a man to close a book."
"I made a woman who hates my entire profession give me her personal floo."
"I have a vineyard invitation–"
"I have a standing offer to be intellectually rehabilitated–"
"It's a draw," Blaise said, in the tone of a door closing. "The house has ruled. The house is bored of ruling. The house has a shipment of elf-made brandy arriving at the service entrance that requires more supervision than either of your egos." He stood, buttoned his jacket with two economical movements, and collected his glass. "Try not to set fire to anything that isn't insured."
"This is a corrupt establishment," Theo told him.
"Deeply. That's the margin." And he was gone, up toward the service floor, leaving behind the particular silence of an argument with nowhere to go.
Pansy lasted another four minutes. She spent them describing, in vivisectional detail, everything both of them had done wrong all evening – Draco fidgeted with his cuffs before every approach, apparently; Theo's dismount from the Beauxbatons table had been "a bow, Theo, you bowed, this isn't a recital" – and then a song started somewhere in a nearby room and a wizard she'd been ignoring strategically for an hour walked past the salon arch, and she rose like a tide.
"Don't wait up," she said. "Don't kill each other. If you kill each other, do it in something I made for you, the press coverage would be marvelous."
And then it was the two of them, a booth built for eight, and the wreckage of the evening's glasses.
Theo poured himself sideways along the banquette, boots up, head tipped back against the leather, and studied the ceiling. Blaise had enchanted it at some point – a slow drift of constellation, tasteful, expensive, wrong for the season. Theo had noticed that his second week back and never mentioned it. You didn't spend your best material on ceilings.
"A draw," he said. "A draw. Five years of transcontinental fieldwork and I'm held to a draw by a man whose face does half his talking."
"You're the one who established my face as a legitimate instrument. Fifth year. You made me stand by the fire in the common room because it was, and I quote, good for morale."
"I was fifteen and testing a theory. Everyone had a role." Theo rolled his head along the leather to look at him. Draco had claimed the center of the booth – one arm along the back, glass balanced, the picture of a man entirely at his ease, except Theo had known him since before either of them could read and could see the competitive machinery still turning behind the grey. The draw was sitting in him like a splinter. It was wonderful. "Fine. Since the house has corruptly denied us a verdict – post-match analysis. Strategy review. The curse-breaker. Walk me through it."
"She'd built her whole evening around being unimpressed. So I gave her something to be unimpressed by, agreed with every conclusion, and let her win an argument she'd expected to fight for." Draco turned his glass once. "People will forgive you anything if you let them be right in public."
"Adequate. Derivative of my Salzburg method, which you read about in my letters, but adequate." Theo reclaimed his glass from the table without sitting up properly, an operation requiring more spinal flexibility than dignity, and drank. The night was in that pleasant loosening hour; the music in the other room had gone slower and lower, the salon lamps burned amber, and Draco was watching him with the fractional narrowness that meant he was still, on some floor of that meticulous head, replaying the tally and looking for the missed point. Twenty years running, and it had never once failed to entertain.
Which was, Theo would later maintain, the only reason he asked. Idle hands. A verdict denied. The purely academic interest of one professional in another's methods.
"Hypothetical," he said, to the ceiling. "For the completeness of the review. Say the house had run one more round, and Blaise – corrupt, brandy-distracted Blaise – had named me. What's the approach? What does the great outdoorsman deploy on Theodore Nott?"
He expected – and he'd examine this later, the fact that he'd had an expectation ready, that some department of his mind had drafted the scene in advance – a joke. A drawled I'd simply wait for you to seduce yourself, something in that register, and then they'd volley it for a round or two and pour another drink.
Draco didn't answer for a moment.
Theo, still watching the ceiling, became aware of the quiet the way one becomes aware of weather changing – pressure first, information after. Then the leather shifted. The warmth of another body arrived along his right side, unhurried, and Draco's voice, when it came, was not the drawl. It was pitched for a distance of four inches, low and even and considered, directly into his ear.
"Nothing," Draco said. "Every move I have, you've seen the scaffolding. Every move you have, I was there for the patent." A pause, and Theo felt it as breath against his ear. "So I wouldn't play you. I'd just tell you what's going to happen."
Theo's pulse did something undignified. He kept his eyes on the constellation.
"For instance," Draco went on, in a steady tone, "you've been performing all night, and you're good, you're genuinely the best I've seen. But you've been coming back to this table between rounds like it's a corner between bouts, and I don't think you've noticed. I have. You perform for someone, Theo. Tonight it was me. So I'd start there – I'd tell you that I know the act has an audience of one, and I'd watch you decide whether to deny it."
"Speculative," Theo managed. "Unfalsifiable. Deduction for–"
"I'd tell you," Draco continued, unbothered, quieter, "that I've watched you touch everyone in this club tonight – the shoulder, the wrist, the jaw, you're generous, it's charming – and that you haven't touched me once since we began our game. Which from anyone else means indifference and from you means you're being careful. And then I'd tell you exactly how careful you're not going to be later. In detail. Because you like detail. You like knowing someone's done the reading."
Merlin's beard.
"And the detail?" Theo heard himself say, "For the record."
"I'd tell you that all that flexibility you've been wasting on banquettes has better applications, and I'd name three. I'd tell you that a man who narrates everything is begging for something worth narrating, and that I can put you somewhere past narration – that there's a version of you about twenty minutes in who can't finish a sentence, and I want an introduction. I'd tell you–" the voice dropped further, into a register Theo had never heard from him, patient and absolutely certain, an unhurried drawl, "–that you'd try to make it a competition, because you make everything a competition, and that I'd let you think you were winning right up until I had your hands pinned and your mouth occupied, and then we'd see what the cleverest man in the room sounds like when nobody's listening but me."
Silence. The ceiling drifted. Somewhere in the next room, the slow song ended and another began.
Theo took a breath and inventoried himself with a professional's honesty: heart rate elevated, glass forgotten, and a full-body attentiveness he rarely felt. The boy with the cheekbones had gone away to the seaside and come back with this – anticipatory, precise in the specific way of a man who did his research – and had been sitting on it all evening while Theo graded his fieldwork like a schoolmaster.
He turned his head. Four inches. Grey eyes, entirely composed, one eyebrow at a fractional angle that on anyone else would be a shout.
"Well?" Draco said, normal volume, infuriating. "Post-match analysis. You wanted the strategy review."
Theo started to laugh. He couldn't help it – it came up from somewhere real, delight in its pure uncut form, the joy of being gotten, of five years of letters collapsing into a man who'd been taking notes the entire time.
"Deductions," he said, when he could. "Several. You leaned on years of privileged access. Pre-read pool. Half value at most."
"Appeal it. The adjudicator's counting brandy."
"And the assessment contained material errors. I'd have your hands pinned first. There's an order of operations."
"There," Draco said, and the smirk that went with it was old and new at once. "The competition. Right on schedule."
Theo looked at him – really looked, the way he permitted himself perhaps twice a year, mask set down on the table between the glasses where it belonged with this one particular person – and felt the evening reorganize itself around a conclusion it had apparently been building toward since the staircase.
"Winner's choice," he said. "That was the stake. And the house robbed us of a verdict."
"It did."
"Seems to me the round has to be replayed. Properly. Somewhere with fewer adjudicators."
Draco set down his glass with the finality of a man initialing something.
"My townhouse," he said, "has none at all."