Your Fortnightly Drarry Story (Back by Popular Demand)

4. An Investigation by Mr Malfoy

Harry never dealt well with getting ill or recovering from an injury – that was evident enough from Hogwarts and when poor Poppy had to deal with him. He supposed it was because he had never been allowed to be ill as a child and was always so active as a teenager and adult. And because there were moments when he tended to be a bit of a drama-queen; he was his father's son at times, so he'd been told by those who knew (mostly by Sirius who had ribbed Harry endlessly after accidently blowing up his Aunt Marge, storming out of the house, and immediately planning his life as an outcast).

So, when Harry broke his leg and two ribs during a disastrous raid, he struggled to do anything but languish restlessly in his bed while desperate to get back to work. The raid had been another of Robards's imaginary hiding places for Rowle, this time a run-down and abandoned Victorian warehouse in the Nottingham Lace Market district. The warehouse, unfortunately, had very rotten flooring and beams and Harry had disappeared through four floors worth of rot and a hole in the ground to land very painfully in one of the many caves that the city was built on (it seemed to Harry that abandoned warehouses were inevitably a bad omen in The Stories™ too).

Despite casting a panicked wandless cushioning spell, his landing was bad because caves floors tend to be quite rocky, though fortunately it wasn't worse (that is, fatal). He could categorically confirm that wandless magic wasn't as powerful as wand magic. He could also categorically confirm there was nothing in those caves apart from a multitude of rats. Harry didn't like rats, funnily enough (nothing to do with Peter Pettigrew, honest). If the fall and landing were bad, the wait before extraction from the cave was worse. Thankfully, the St Mungo's Healer had healed the breaks easily enough before he was moved but the leg break was particularly bad and he had to rest it and stay off work for the rest of the week and then desk duty for the week after. And use crutches until they announced otherwise.

On the third day of being utterly miserable at home and sending various women (Molly, Mione, and Luna) in his life packing because he was being very grumpy with all their bloody fussing, there was a tapping at his window and a very haughty owl flew into his apartment. He knew it was Draco's owl, purely because every piece of fiction ever written decreed that Draco's owl was very haughty. He also knew it was Draco's owl because everyone else he knew had stepped into the twenty-first century and embraced Muggle technology by getting a mobile phone. The owl held its leg out with distaste so Harry could retrieve the attached letter.

The paper had six words scrawled across it: Open your bloody Floo for me.

Harry snorted, scribbled 'okay' underneath the note with his address for the owl to take back. Then he rushed into his sitting room (as fast as his bad leg and crutches would allow), opened the Floo network and tidied away the cut-out magazine pages. He then put the kettle on and faffed a little and really didn't know what to do with himself because Molly had cleaned his apartment for him and Mione had insisted he got in the shower and that he dressed properly rather than stay in his pyjamas all day and Luna had brought over a lot of plants and strange looking flowers that were supposed to do something magically healing for him. Beyond levitating the aggressive Cobra Lily away from the hearth, there was nothing for him to busy himself with.

When Draco stepped through the Floo system, he looked remarkably elegant, mostly because he didn't stumble across the hearth in Harry's normally style (also annoyingly noted in many of The Stories™). Draco was carrying a large covered bowl of soup. Harry wondered how none of it had split as he was sucked through the Floos but he didn't like to question.

'I understand,' Draco drawled, looking around Harry's apartment with clear intrigue, 'that you are supposed to bring soup for invalids and sick persons.'

Harry tried not to laugh. 'I'm not sick but thank you. I happen to like soup, a lot.'

'I know,' said Draco.