Title: The Stealing of the Fire
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: Angst, fluff, present tense
Wordcount: 5200
Summary: Draco doesn't think it's a big deal when Harry Potter is brought into St. Mungo's suffering from the Stolen Fire Curse. Even Potter doesn't seem to think it's a big deal. But that's only until Draco sees the effects of the curse—and realizes he would do anything to cure it.
Author's Notes: This is another of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics, for a request by Cutiepie120048, who asked for "Draco Malfoy has realized he's never seen anything more beautiful and alive in his life than Harry Potter. When a curse turns him cold and apathetic, he knows how he'll go to bring him that." The only things I would like included is major fluff and Harry shedding silent tears at one point by something sweet or moving Draco said to him.

The Stealing of the Fire

"Honestly, Hermione. It just isn't the big deal you think it is."

Draco curls his lip as he walks into the office where he's going to try and treat the Wonder Auror, Harry Potter. Potter is almost certainly right, he thinks as he checks the notes he's inherited from the mediwizard who started this case. The Stolen Fire Curse? So it makes him a little less warm? Poor precious Potter, needing an extra blanket at night."

"If it's not a big deal, then it's also not a big deal to stay here and see the Healer, is it?"

Draco hides his smile as he steps around the corner into the office painted a soothing blue that so many patients of the Spell Damage War spend time in. He's never liked Granger, but he'll give her credit for a clever tongue.

Potter immediately turns and focuses on him. "Can I go home now, Healer?" he asks.

Draco stares back, too stunned to reply. He thought the words were forceful, but then he got close to Potter. Only his movements are. His eyes are dull, so glazed that for a moment Draco thinks the curse must have affected his sight. His hands are dangling next to him, and his voice is a monotone.

But the worst thing is something other than that. As long as he's known Potter, the word Draco has always thought of him by is burning. Burning with impatience, blazing with anger, leaping up like a torch when he jumps on his broom and flies after the Snitch. Draco accepted without thinking about it that Potter would always be like that, the flame that would light Draco's kindling.

He could have never seen Potter again, and still been content with that knowledge.

The fire is gone. Draco's hands tighten on the edges of his clipboard where the parchment lies.

"Can I go?" Potter asks, slow and pathetic. He doesn't even sound like he cares about the answer, despite arguing with Granger that he doesn't need to be here. He blinks at Draco and doesn't seem to care that his Healer is his school rival, either. "Why do I need to do this?"

Draco takes a deep breath and speaks to Granger, over whom a cloak of profound sadness seems to have fallen. "His insisting that he doesn't need to be here is part of the curse, isn't it?"

"Yes," Granger says quietly. "The only way he can break it is to express a sign of deep sorrow and a sign of deep happiness in the same day, but the curse itself works against that, by muffling his emotions."

Draco clenches his jaw. Admittedly he never thought he would be dealing with a case exactly like this when he became a Healer, but he's going to go and live with Muggles if he can't bring Potter around. He wants that fire back. It should exist in the world and spark and annoy people even if those people aren't him.

"Tell me the one who cast it is—under arrest," Draco requests of Granger, biting back the "dead" he might have used in the same moment he thinks it. He needs Granger to believe that he is a law-abiding citizen.

And it's true, really, except sometimes on new moons when Draco bumps into a former Death Eater, but Granger doesn't need to know about that.

"Yes. His name is Jack Cassans. Another Auror trainee who was jealous of Harry, apparently." Granger leans back and casts Potter a look of quiet despair. "But he can't lift the curse. It can't be broken by anything except the means I told you of."

Draco nods and takes the chair in front of Potter. The glazed eyes track him without a hint of interest. He might be Romilda Vane or some other insignificant Gryffindor from Potter's Hogwarts years for all he cares.

This is going to stop, Draco thinks, and nods. "I'll be taking over primary care on this part of Potter's case."

Granger hesitates. "I requested you, because I thought you could make Harry feel more than any other Healer here, but I didn't know if you would want to."

"Oh," Draco says, his eyes lingering on that pale, twisted, not-right face, "I want to."

"I don't understand. Why am I in this room? Why can't I just go home?"

Draco smiles at Potter. Potter stares pathetically back. It makes Draco want to do some drastic things to Cassans, the bastard who cast the curse, and he has to remind himself the Aurors would notice if he disappeared from their custody.

"Because you're under a curse," Draco says. "You'll be staying here until you're better." He gestures around the room. Honestly, it's a nice one, especially for the Spell Damage ward. Potter has a view from a window that opens on a garden that is filled with softly swaying trees and the sound of splashing water. Even winter-blooming flowers, magical ones trained to thrive on cold, glow in their beds. And the room itself has numerous chairs, books on wizarding history and some Muggle fiction, a fireplace (with the Floo connection disabled), a cabinet of games and puzzles, parchment and ink for writing, a comfortable bed, a shining table where Potter can write and look out the window.

"I'm not under a curse. I've always been like this."

Draco smiles tightly. No murder, no murder, no murder, he chants to himself. "No, you haven't. Don't you remember hating me in Hogwarts? Fighting Voldemort?" It's been years, and so Draco has managed to train himself out of the flinch. "You felt passion then."

Potter hesitates for the first time since Granger helped Draco drag him up here. "I don't—I mean, I know I did it, but that's because I had to. He couldn't threaten people."

"What about getting angry at me? Did you have to do that?"

"I don't remember that."

But Potter sounds a little disturbed, and his eyes flicker away from Draco for a moment. Draco nods. "I think you do. And the memories will become clearer and clearer the more time you spend here."

"You can't hold me here against my will."

"You're under a curse. Your will is compromised. So yes, I can."

"I'm not under a curse."

"Then why can't you remember hating me in Hogwarts?"

"I never hated you. You didn't rise to the level of hatred. I hated Snape and Voldemort."

Draco clasps his hands to his heart, pretending to stagger, while inwardly he crows. "Such a level of regard! Such a clear memory! That means that you must remember everything else, right? You must remember why you hated them. What the hatred was like."

He stops and looks at Potter, but his eyes are already dulling again. Draco sighs. Well, he didn't really expect defeating the curse to be that easy.

"So you'll be staying here until you can remember things like that," Draco says with forced cheer.

"That's not fair."

But Potter speaks the words the way an exhausted child might speak them, by rote, and then collapses into a chair, his hands dangling between his knees as he stares down at them.

Draco swallows. He had no idea how hard it would be for him to see this. He's going to have to be extra nice to himself during the week, or fortnight, or however long it takes him to cure Potter of the curse. (Not that he isn't nice to himself on a regular basis, but usually it's a "you deserve chocolates from Honeydukes" type of nice. This is going to be a "Sleep in on Sunday and ignore the Floo and have a long leisurely wank" type).

"Let me know if you have questions, Potter. I'll send the mediwitch to get you settled in. You can ask for any books and any kind of food you want."

The Potter he knows would explode at someone being that patronizing, condescending, to him. This one stares blankly at the wall.

Draco spends the entire trip back to his office convincing himself that, no, he can't seek out that bloody stupid Auror trainee and slip him some sort of poison. Or maybe he can make it look like suicide. He knows a few people who would help.

"And you didn't think that he could still affect you this much?"

"Well, no, Mother. Why would he? It's been years since Hogwarts, and I've barely seen him since then except preening on the front page of the Prophet."

"Was it preening, Draco? Or trying to get away from the camera?"

Draco scowls into his cup of hot chocolate. He is not in the mood for the painful, soul-searching type of nice.

Mother finishes her own chocolate and watches him patiently across the table. Almost the instant that Father passed—worn down by the Dementors that guarded him in Azkaban while he waited for his trial—she moved out of the Manor into this small, sunny house decorated with stars on the ceiling and the windowpanes. It's nice. Draco spends more time here now than he does in the Manor. That place is…haunted.

And not by the ghost that used to wander into his bedroom and shriek about her drowning in the fishpond while she waited for her Muggle lover, either. Draco learned to tune her out early on.

"You know it was trying to get away from the camera, Draco." Mother isn't in the mood to let him hide this morning. She puts down her cup and examines him from head to toe with that same leisurely examination that used to make him squirm when he hadn't brushed his hair or had yelled at one of the house-elves. "You know that you want him back for reasons other than irritation."

Draco picks up one of the biscuits and munches it aggressively at her. Mother makes a patient noise. "Please do not get crumbs all over the floor."

A failed experiment, then. Draco lays the biscuit aside. "Yes, but it's been years since I've seen him, and I couldn't say that I cared about him before this. I don't know how to make sense of my own reactions, Mother."

"You said you could be all right as long as he existed somewhere in the world and you could assume that he hadn't changed. But seeing that change in front of your eyes? That's what is different, Draco." Mother considers him while she does up a sweep of pale hair with a comb that has almost fallen off her head. "And I am doing nothing but confirming suspicions that you had already."

Draco cringes for a moment, then straightens. "Yes, Mother. I—may have no chance, even if I bring him back from this curse."

"But you will have more of a chance this way that you would otherwise. I am sure your clever mind has already planned that out."

Draco gives up and goes around the table to kiss her on the cheek. "You gave me that cleverness, Mother."

"Indeed." Mother pats his cheek. "Give my love to Mr. Potter when he recovers and can appreciate it, and tell him that he isn't lying about on the floor of the Forbidden Forest to be rescued this time. Getting him out of hospital is going to be up to you."

Draco settles himself into a chair in front of Potter's bed. He already knows perfectly well how the night went, given the reports of the mediwitches, but he calmly ignores the glare that he gets from Potter. "How are you?"

The glare melts into something like helplessness. "I want out." But even that has declined into a monotone, different than it was yesterday.

"That's not an answer to my question, Potter. How do you feel? Do you want something else to eat? New pillows? New blankets?"

Potter glances around as if the walls are closing in on him, and then that reaction, too, flickers out like a spark that someone stamped to death. "I want out?" More a question than a statement, and he looks at his hands as if he doesn't know why they're lying on white sheets.

Draco stamps out his own flicker of fear. He spent yesterday afternoon and most of the morning reading about the scholarship on the curse. This is advancing fast, which isn't surprising. It feeds on the fire it steals, and the more passionate the person it's cast on, the worse it gets.

"I wanted to remind you of something," Draco says, and takes out the Pensieve that he's prepared for Potter. The Director of St. Mungo's wasn't happy about Draco's request to use his Pensieve, but Draco hasn't reformed that far, and a vague insinuation of releasing blackmail was all he needed to get enthusiastic cooperation. "Look into the memory."

"Why?"

Dull, apathetic. Draco wants to strangle someone. He reminds himself that strangling Potter will be counterproductive, and swallows. "It's a memory of our interaction at Hogwarts. I don't think you remember me that well, given that you're sitting here and not raising a stink about me treating you." He infuses arrogance into his voice. "I refuse to be forgotten like a worthless Muggle."

"Muggles are worthless?"

The ways I could influence him if I hated this curse a little less, Draco thinks, with a faint sigh for lost possibilities. "Come and look into the memory, Potter."

As he suspected would happen, a sharp command is strong enough to move Potter right now. He has few desires, so he responds to the ones that other people have about him. It's probably how Granger got him into hospital in the first place. He edges forwards across the bed and lets his head flop into the memory.

Draco descends with him.

It's the time when he went onto the Quidditch pitch dressed up as a Dementor to scare Potter. He watches as the memory-Potter on the boom, tiny from the height he's at, conjures his Patronus and then whirls away and dives after the Snitch. Draco averts his gaze from his younger self running and shrieking and flailing with Vince and Greg, and concentrates on the man beside him.

That man blinks several times, and then the memory ends and they both lift their heads from the Pensieve. Potter stares at him. "Why would I do that?"

"Because you were angry that I was coming onto the pitch," Draco replies, hating that he has to explain this. "And you thought I was a Dementor, so you wanted to stop me."

"But—I know about the Patronus Charm."

"Yes?"

"It's supposed to come from happy memories."

"Yes?" Draco is beginning to remember why he never wanted to the kind of Healer that deals with pulling teeth.

"I don't—I've never been that happy. I don't understand. Did you take the memory from me and change it somehow?"

And that's what happens with the rest of the memories that Draco shows Potter that day, even memories that Potter wouldn't have any reason to know he has, times when Draco spied on Weasley and Granger and Potter from around a corner or something. Potter doesn't laugh when his friends laugh. He doesn't get angry when Draco pulls a prank on them. Even a memory of the time when he let Death Eaters into the school provokes no anger or irritation. In desperation, Draco shows him the moment that he called Granger a Mudblood, and Potter only earnestly requests an explanation of why the insult is so bad.

Draco marches out of hospital that evening with fury of his own brewing in his gut. He hates Auror Trainee Cassans. He will try to get in on his punishment any way he can.

And his fear is burning him up inside, too. He knows he only has a limited time to bring Potter back from the coldness before he's lost to it forever.

"Auror Potter tried to escape this morning, sir."

That announcement actually cheers Draco up as he makes his way towards Potter's room with a chart of the man's reactions in his hands. "He said he wanted to go home."

"Excellent," Draco murmurs as he steps into Potter's room. That means that Potter is starting to get some of his memories and desires back, and that means—

But his steps falter when he catches sight of Potter. His eyes don't even look like the same green, they're so glazed. He turns in a careful circle and stares at Draco as if was a hydra. Then he shakes his head.

"I want to go home." His words are small and monotonous. He might have been saying that for hours.

"You can't right now." Draco folds his arms and lounges against the doorframe, alert for any movement that Potter might begin to make towards him. "Do you remember why you're in hospital and who brought you here?"

His confusion deepens. "No." But then the confusion is washed away from his face, as neatly as if someone has come up and scrubbed dirt from it.

Draco clenches his hands in front of him, and doesn't bother hiding it. Potter is too far gone to read the motion and use it against him, anyway. Does he even have any notion of politics left? "Then why do you know that you want to go home? What made you start thinking of that?"

"I know this isn't home."

Draco pounces on the fragile thread of memory. "Good. Then what do you remember of home? What do you like to do there? What meals do you like to cook?" He assumes that Potter cooks for himself since Granger would hardly allow him a house-elf.

"I remember—I remember—" For a moment, Potter puts his hand to his forehead, and he turns a scowl on Draco. "Did you do something to me? Maybe a Memory Charm?" But even those words aren't as angry as they should be, and he drops his hand and stares at it a second later.

"Potter. Listen to me." At least Draco's soothing voice is still working. "You've been subjected to the Stolen Fire Curse. Your mood has been affected. Your emotions are being drained. And even the desire to hang onto your memories is leaving you. I'm your Healer, Draco Malfoy. You need to hang onto those memories. Do you understand? You have no chance of recovering if you don't want to."

And the more the curse burns up his desire, the less chance he has to recover, which means the curse burns up more of the desire…

"I should know you. I know you, don't I?"

"You do," Draco says, and Summons the Pensieve that he filled with collected memories from Weasley and Granger last night. "But there are some people that you know even more. Will you watch the memories with me?"

The only good thing about the Stolen Fire Curse is that Potter isn't as stubborn as he normally would be. He blinks and nods. "Sure?" He even sounds like he's asking a question.

Draco sits down, and invites him into the Pensieve, sure this will work.

And hating that lack of stubbornness even as it makes his work easier. It is simply wrong.

Draco sits on one of the balconies of Malfoy Manor, a place that neither his father nor the Dark Lord ever came, with his hands over his face. The soft sound of crickets fills the night air, followed by the noise of peacocks crowing.

He was so sure the tactic of showing Potter memories from his friends would work. They shared a lot more joy and sorrow with him than Draco ever did. And there had been wrenching moments in there, moments that Draco is still a little stunned and awed that Weasley and Granger didn't mind him witnessing. Of course, they were thinking of giving strength to Potter, not to him.

No reaction. Potter was curious at first, and gasped a little when his younger self continued past fallen rubble into a basilisk lair and he and Weasley and Granger sneaked past a three-headed dog, but his reactions wore away to nothing as the afternoon went on. When Draco surfaced from the last memory, he found Potter staring at the wall.

By the time he left to go home, Potter had forgotten his name.

Draco swallows now and looks up. He doesn't want to lose Potter—didn't know how badly he didn't want that until his whole body was on fire from the longing. But he can't think of anything else to try. He knows from his reading on the Stolen Fire Curse that the ending is very near, and also that memories are accepted as the only way to treat the effects.

He firms his will as he sits there. So what if memories are accepted as the only way to treat the curse? Draco has never acted like a traditional Healer, and he isn't about to start now, when something he values so much might slip through his grasp due to inaction.

Draco casts his mind back to his own memories of Potter. He has to feel both joy and sorrow in the same day in order to be healed. Draco started with sorrow, since he thought it would be the easier emotion to make Potter remember and provoke, but now, he has to admit that he's never actually seen Potter crying spontaneously. He faints when Dementors come near, but that's not sorrow, either.

He did see—

Draco snaps his head up. That's it. He knows what he's going to do tomorrow.

And if he gets sacked for his unorthodox treatment methods, it'll still be a lesser pain than living in a world without Harry Potter.

"Where are we?"

There's no curiosity in Potter's tone. Draco clenches his fingers for a moment on the hidden handle of the thing he holds, and then turns away from the Apparition and faces Potter. He nods a little as though to congratulate him on the question.

"This is called a field," Draco says, slowly, and a brief spark shows in Potter's eyes for a second. "And do you remember what this is?"

He takes out Potter's Firebolt from beneath the Invisibility Cloak. Getting Granger to lend him both of them was harder than sneaking Potter out of hospital. Everyone assumed that it was Potter's desire for privacy that ordered other Healers and mediwizards to stay away for the last few days.

Potter stares at it. Then he ventures, "A broom?"

"Yes." Draco reminds himself of what he knows he saw; he revised the memories in the Pensieve last night, for Merlin's sake. He won't allow himself to doubt his actions now. He steps forwards and presses the broomshaft into the man's hand. "You fly with it."

"How?"

"Like this." And Draco grabs Potter's leg and slings it over the broom, and then he grabs hold of his waist, hauls himself onto the broom behind Potter, and launches them both into the sky with a kick off from the ground.

For a second, they're whistling through clear, cold air without a sound from Potter, and Draco's heart drops to the bottom of his lungs. He thought this would work, but it's not going to, and the curse will turn Potter into a soulless shell, a living corpse like the one a Dementor's Kiss leaves—

And then Potter abruptly throws back his head and whoops aloud.

Suddenly Draco isn't the one controlling the broom. Potter's hands descend on the shaft and take that choice away from him, and they hurtle through the air, twisting and turning the way that Draco remembers Potter doing in some Quidditch games at Hogwarts. They slide, they lift, they fly upside-down. Draco digs his hands into Potter's waist to hold on, because otherwise he knows he'll be thrown off, no matter how much experience with brooms he has.

And all the time, Potter is laughing.

The sound pours from his lips as unselfconsciously as the song of a bird, and Draco basks in it, resting his forehead against Potter's shoulder when he thinks he can get away with it. Potter doesn't seem to notice, except that his muscles flex a little and he breathes in, and then he leans back so that more of him is touching Draco's face.

But given the Sloth Grip Roll they do a second later, that doesn't last for long. And it might just be coincidence.

Draco's heart is filling his ears with anxious blood by the time Potter lands again in the middle of the field. The flight broke through the curse, but they still have half the cure to go, and there's always the possibility that it will be temporary and only last as long as Potter flies. He can't spend the rest of his life on a broom.

Even if you'd like him to spend it on your broom.

Draco catches his breath and slides off the Firebolt, limping a little as he lands. He meets Potter's eyes—and knows in a second that the curse really is half-broken. The fire is back there, shimmering and gleaming behind the green surfaces of Potter's eyes as if it never left. Draco stares, entranced.

"You—you really did it. God, I felt so grey when I was going through that." Potter drops the broom on the ground as he reaches out to clasp Draco's hands, and Draco thinks his heart might burst with happiness, being more important to Harry Potter than his Firebolt for even a second. "Why did you decide that you were the one to do that?"

"I chose to handle the case because I wanted to bring you back."

"I know. I know that. But—why? Because you would get fame and adulation from treating the famous Harry Potter?"

Potter's eyes are searching his, needing something. Draco lets go of some of the inhibitions that would normally keep him from speaking. He's not entirely sure what Potter needs, but he needs Potter to know the truth.

"Because I couldn't stand not seeing the fire in your eyes. If you lived somewhere out in the world, fighting evil and having a family and despising me? That was fine. Everything would be as it should be. But having you lie back on a bed for the rest of your life and stare at the ceiling and probably starve to death because you wouldn't have enough motivation to eat your food? No." Draco's hands tighten until Potter would be wincing in pain if it was anyone else, but Mr. Hero keeps gazing at him as if this sort of thing happens every day. Draco hopes not. "I wanted to bring you back. To see you smiling and laughing again. To have you get angry at me for the things I did in Hogwarts. I showed you all those memories and you didn't even react.

"It's not right, Potter. Hate me or—" Draco shears off; he still has one inhibition left, then. "Feel friendly towards me, still, I needed you to react. You've not alive unless you have that fire. And I'm not alive unless you are."

Those last words are far more honest than he meant to be, but Draco wouldn't take them back, because Potter's eyes widen, and it's as if Draco gets to see beyond the curtain of the fire for a minute. And then Potter bows his head, and a tear slips out of the corner of his eye.

Draco hears a distant noise like steel snapping, and knows it's the curse. He permits himself a smug smile.

Potter looks back up at him, and then leans forwards. Draco isn't entirely sure what's happening until he feels the chilled, clumsy lips on his own. Potter makes an uncomfortable sound in his throat and starts to lean back, probably because Draco is the one not reacting this time.

Draco reaches out and wraps his hands around Potter's neck and kisses him with all his power.

Potter gasps—well, maybe he's Harry now—and kisses Draco hard, harder, until abruptly they overbalance and fall on the grass. Harry laughs then, propping himself up on his elbows so that he can lean over above Draco and smile into his eyes. Draco touches his cheek and lets his own fire shimmer out of him. He hasn't felt this powerful or this wonderful in years.

"I can't wait until I get out of hospital and I can see you without it being one of your patients dating you," Harry whispers.

Draco starts. He honestly didn't remember that restriction. It's even stranger that Harry would. "All it takes is signing a piece of parchment. Not that I remember you as one to abide by the rules, Harry."

"Yeah, but I don't want to get you in trouble."

Now, that does sound like the Potter he knows. Draco smiles and extends his hand. Harry grasps it, and they pull each other to their feet.

"Strange thing," Harry says as he hangs up his cloak by the door of the flat he and Draco started sharing a month ago. "You remember Jack Cassans? The Auror trainee who cursed me?"

"I have more pleasant things to do with my time." Draco leers at him from over a stack of paperwork, remembering how some of those pleasant things took up most of the last evening.

Harry blushes, but smiles. "Yeah, it's just that he got cursed with something complicated and medical that apparently makes him vomit every time he lifts his wand to cast an offensive spell. The Healers can't figure it out. It's like there's no trace of a curse. They just know there has to be because he was never like that before. His career as an Auror is over unless they figure out how to remove it."

Harry's voice is casual and his stance lounging, but Draco isn't about to be fooled by that. "How strange. Did they look for a potion instead of a curse?"

"Yes." Harry's attention sharpened.

"But no results, right?"

"No."

"Hmmm. Maybe Snape is still alive somewhere and read in the papers about what happened to you and decided that Cassans deserved an untraceable potion."

"Draco, did you do something to him?"

Draco widens his eyes and shakes his head. "Of course not, Harry. Now, what are we going to have for dinner?"

That distracts Harry, as Draco knew it would, into trying to persuade him to go to Granger and Weasley's for dinner. Draco, wrapped up in Harry's arms, allows himself to be persuaded.

And carefully smiles down at the stack of paperwork, which contains the different pieces of scattered information he used to put together the curse on Cassans, and which is going to be filed away in extremely boring folders marked VOMITING SYMPTOMS OF WIZARD CHILDREN UNDER THREE, where no one will ever find it.

The End.