Frenemies Part 1 (Patreon)

AN: Hello everyone! Here is Frenemies Part 1! This will be another short series similar to You're Losing Me. I expect it to run for 3 chapters. The next part will be out in about a week or so. We will get to the smut eventually, but this chapter will hopefully set up Harry and Daphne's dynamic.

Hogwarts starts at 14, making these characters 19 at the start of the series.

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Even if Ron and Hermione didn’t want to believe him, Harry knew that Draco was up to something. Something had been off about him all year; maybe it was his unusually pallid skin, the bags under his eyes, his plummeting test scores, or his shifty behaviour—or maybe it was all of the above—but Harry knew that something was wrong with Draco.

After the incident with the cursed necklace Katie had been given, Harry had started keeping a much closer eye on the man. Slughorn’s Christmas party had revealed that Draco and Snape had made an unbreakable vow, but Dumbledore insisted that Harry trust him that the situation was handled and that Snape remained on their side. Even Mr Weasley and Professor Lupin had agreed that he should trust Dumbledore.

Well, while he was willing to ignore the situation with Snape for now, he wasn’t about to give up his focus on Draco.

Since the return from the Christmas holidays, Harry had been tracking Draco as best he could. The Marauder’s Map was a useful tool in that regard, but he’d yet to find Draco doing anything suspicious yet. But what was most curious was that his two lumbering shadows, Crabbe and Goyle, were acting strangely according to the map. Harry found them standing in deserted corridors and roaming the castle at odd times and in unusual places. And every time he spotted them, Draco was nowhere to be seen.

Honestly, Harry couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to figure out where Draco was all those nights.

At first, Harry wondered if Draco was leaving Hogwarts. As an adult, he’d be able to apparate anywhere he liked once he escaped the wards. The Forbidden Forest seemed like the perfect place for Draco to make an escape, but he never went anywhere close to it. After scouting out every possible exit for several days, Harry was forced to reexamine his assumptions, and that was where he realised his mistake.

The Marauders Map was imperfect; not every room in Hogwarts appeared on it. Places like the Chamber of Secrets and even a secret passage that his dad and his friends hadn’t found weren’t on the map despite the fact that they existed in the school.

And one room that made the most sense for Draco to be in was the Room of Requirement.

It was the perfect explanation. Although the room normally formed on the seventh floor, exits could be placed elsewhere in the castle if needed. It explained why Draco’s goons were hanging out in random corridors: they were waiting for Draco to leave the Room of Requirement.

But it was still just a hypothesis. So, Harry waited until one night when he saw Crabbe and Goyle on the map. Harry slipped on his invisibility cloak and tracked them down, only to find a pair of awkward looking first years.

He had double checked the map several times before he realised that they must be under a polyjuice potion to disguise themselves. So, Harry had waited in a nearby alcove.

It wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that a door formed in the wall and Draco stepped out. He looked exhausted, but he still collected Crabbe and Goyle and headed back off to the Dungeons.

Thankfully, Harry had managed to reach the door into the Room of Requirement before it disappeared. When he stepped inside, he found a massive room of clutter and debris everywhere. It looked like a thousand-year-old lost and found. Despite his best attempts at scouring the place, he wasn’t able to figure out what Draco had been doing in here.

So, he retreated back to his dorm to get what little sleep he could. Then, the next morning, he planned his next move.

Harry faked being sick two days in a row so that he could stay in his dorm and stare at the map for the next time Draco went to use the Room of Requirement. Hermione had been terribly concerned and insisted that he go visit Madam Pomfrey, but Harry played it off well enough. Professor McGonagall had even come to visit him, and he was forced to tell her that he’d be back to his classes the next day.

Thankfully, that evening just before supper, Harry spotted Draco heading to the seventh floor with Crabbe and Goyle.

And that was where Harry was now. He’d donned his invisibility cloak and rushed to the seventh floor corridor where the normal entrance to the Room of Requirement was. When he arrived, Draco had already gone inside, and Crabbe and Goyle were back in their polyjuiced forms of two young first years.

There was no way he was going to be able to slip past them, so he’d have to stun them or something.

Harry studied them for a few minutes. He couldn’t tell which was Crabbe and which was Goyle, but he supposed it didn’t matter much in the end. Both of them were big, lumbering idiots who were more likely to use their fists than their wands; thankfully, their fists wouldn’t do much damage while they were in the forms of those first years.

After watching them, he realised that they were doing nothing but standing there awkwardly, gazing off vacantly at the far wall. Occasionally, one of them would pull a sweet out of their pocket and pop it in their mouth, but they were otherwise still.

Harry crept closer to them and planted his back against the wall several feet away from the door. The two men were perfectly lined up for him.

“Flippendo,” he murmured under his breath, using the vocal incantation to give him that little extra bit of control to his spell.

The boy closest to Harry was struck head on by his spell and went flipping end over end and crashed into the other boy. They both went down in a heap on the ground, and Harry quickly fired off a couple of quick stunning spells at them.

“That was easy,” Harry muttered to himself as he pulled off his invisibility cloak. He walked over to the two men and slammed his heel down on one of their noses, relishing in the sound of the sharp crunch that came when their nose broke and started gushing blood. “That was for Katie.”

“I always wondered how you managed to sneak around the castle so well.”

Harry whirled on his heels, a curse on his lips, only to hesitate when he found himself facing down the wand of another Slytherin: Daphne Greengrass.

Everyone knew who Daphne Greengrass was, even if they hadn’t actually met or spoken to her. Daphne’s beauty and reputation as the heiress to one of the most wealthy families in Britain was well known throughout Hogwarts. Ever since she became of age a year ago, she’d allegedly received dozens of proposals from various men from England and beyond.

It wasn’t hard to imagine why so many seemed smitten with her. Daphne looked as stunning as any Veela Harry had ever seen. She had a slim figure but with prominent curves in all the right places. Her bust was among the top ten biggest in Hogwarts, and her legs seemed to go on forever. Her face was beautiful unlike any other, and her cold blue eyes had this incredible smouldering look that made you feel like you’d be happy to be crushed beneath her feet. And with her stunning long blond hair framing her beautiful face, it was clear as day as to why so many men—and even a few women—seemed to lose their ability to speak around her.

Given how intimidating she seemed, it was understandable that few really knew her. Other than those poor souls who stammered out a proposal to her, she seemed to only have a few close friends who she stuck around with. Everyone else seemed to be beneath her notice, but Harry knew that wasn’t quite true.

After all, she’d been one of the few to offer him a kind word when he’d had his name pulled out of the Goblet of Fire a couple years ago. She’d said that even he wasn’t stupid enough to risk his life like that, and the shock on his face when his name had been announced was too genuine. She’d wished him well, and then she’d disappeared before Harry had been able to formulate a response to her.

It had been the first time he’d looked beyond her beauty and seen her as a real person.

Unfortunately, their relationship since then hadn’t been quite so smooth.

“Greengrass,” Harry glowered at her. He tried to subtly redirect his wand so that he’d be able to block any spell she sent his way, but a sharp look from Daphne stilled his movement.

“You really should do a better job of scouting out your surroundings first,” she replied haughtily. “If Draco was half as clever as he was ambitious, he would have had more than these two idiots watching over him. You were so fixated on them that you walked right past me.”

Harry ground his teeth together in frustration. “What are you even doing here?” He asked her accusingly.

Daphne raised an eyebrow at him. “Watch your tone, Potter. You know as well as I do that Draco is up to something, and we both have a vested interest in finding out exactly what that is.”

“So you can relay it back to your Death Eater buddies?” Harry snapped.

Daphne’s eyes narrowed and her grip on her wand tightened. “I’d suggest you reconsider your beliefs if you think that anyone who associates with the children of Death Eaters is destined to be one as well. Just because Tracey made a deal—”

“She was selling dark artefacts to Crabbe and Goyle!” Harry shouted at her.

“She had no choice,” Daphne retorted hotly. “Her family was being threatened.”

“Like that’s any excuse,” Harry responded, growing angrier by the second. “She just kept her family safe so that another innocent girl could end up nearly dying instead. Katie did nothing to deserve what happened to her, unlike your friend who deliberately bought dark artefacts from Borgin and Burkes!”

“She was doing it to try to defend herself!” Daphne shouted right back at him. “She’s a half-blood, like you, and that means that she’s never going to be safe from creeps like Draco and his ilk. She couldn’t have predicted that Draco already had his eyes on that necklace or that he was going to do what he did with it.”

“So I guess she just gets to walk off scot-free then, is that it? She gets to go on living like nothing happened while Katie is stuck in St Mungo’s recovering—”

“Tracey has nightmares about what happened to Katie!” Daphne interrupted.

“I bet that’ll help Katie feel better,” Harry replied sarcastically. “I’ll just pop round and let her know how much self-pity Tracey’s wallowing in and—”

Before he could react, Daphne’s Expulso Curse struck his chest and sent him flying back down the corridor. He hit the ground hard and bit into his tongue.

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?” Daphne shouted as she stalked towards him.

Harry spat out a glob of blood onto the floor. “Takes one to know one,” he retorted as he got to his feet with his wand at the ready.

This wasn’t the first fight they’d had about this topic, nor the first time she’d cursed him. He’d cursed her before too, but it was usually his words that pushed her over the edge first. He was too angry about what had happened to Katie and she was too protective over her friend. They always just went in circles and ended up flinging spells at each other.

Really though, he knew that they shouldn’t be doing this. Tracey had been the one to come forward to Harry and reveal her part in everything. Her guilt over the situation had been eating up at her, especially after she saw just how distraught he was at his friend’s life-threatening injury. She’d admitted everything, explained the situation fully, and told him that she understood if he needed to turn her in to the authorities.

Harry hadn’t done that. He saw true bravery in what she’d done in coming forward to him, and she seemed genuinely remorseful. He’d been content to leave things lie, hoping that she wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

But then Daphne had cornered him the next day and threatened him if he told anyone about what Tracey had done. She didn’t care that Tracey had left that decision up to him; Daphne didn’t want to see her best friend punished for this.

And thus began their ceaseless fighting.

As he faced down Daphne, Harry felt a little lingering guilt over his harsh words about Tracey. He didn’t really mean them; he was only saying them to upset Daphne.

Maybe she was right; he was a bastard.

“I’ll tell you what, Potter,” Daphne sneered at him. “If you—”

Daphne froze in mid stride, her ears perking up as she heard something in the distance. Harry glanced back over his shoulder and heard something too: the sound of footfalls in the distance and a quiet meow that rang out shortly after.

Both of their eyes landed on the two unconscious bodies and the pool of blood beneath the one with the broken nose.

“Wingardium leviosa,” Daphne whispered hurriedly, lifting the two unconscious bodies and floating them over to a nearby alcove where a stone statue would hide them from anyone who didn’t peer purposefully inside.

“Evanesco,” Harry added quietly, vanishing away the blood from the stone floor.

“Get over here,” Daphne hissed at him, waving him over to the next alcove.

Harry didn’t need to be told twice; he rushed over to Daphne’s side and pulled his invisibility cloak back out. He threw it over himself and then raised it with his arms.

“Get inside,” he told Daphne. He didn’t realise what a mistake that was until her face was inches from his and her front was pressed up against him.

Trying to force his thoughts onto other things, Harry lowered the invisibility cloak around Daphne and double checked to make sure that their feet weren’t showing. Unlike the alcove they hid Crabbe and Goyle in, they didn’t have any protection except for the invisibility cloak here.

“Impressive,” Daphne murmured in awe as she looked at the intricate detailing on the inside of the invisibility cloak.

There was a thin gap that Harry held open that allowed them to see out into the corridor. It only took a few moments for Filch and Mrs Norris to come round the corridor. Filch was stooped low and glaring around the corridor as though he expected to find unruly students in need of discipline, which, Harry thought, wasn’t actually too far from the truth. Mrs Norris was trotting along much more happily.

“I heard you,” Filch called out, his sunken eyes scanning the corridor.

Harry snapped the gap in his invisibility cloak closed. He didn’t need to risk Filch catching a faint glimpse of them.

“Come out!” Filch shouted.

A moment of silence passed, and then Filch grumbled something under his breath.

Harry listened carefully as Mrs Norris trotted straight past them. Filch’s thundering footsteps followed, and then the two of them faded into the distance.

A minute passed, and then another before Harry felt confident enough to lift the cloak back up. Daphne promptly took a few good steps away from him, her cheeks lightly flushed.

“I’m sorry, alright?” Harry told her before she could say something else that would get them fighting again. “I know Tracey didn’t mean for Katie to end up in the hospital, and she apologised for what she did. That doesn’t erase what happened, but I can’t hold it against her since she’s shown genuine remorse.”

Daphne blinked at him as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “That’s right, you can’t,” she said in agreement, eyeing him suspiciously like this was some trick.

“But your love for Tracey doesn’t give you the right to threaten me over the whole situation,” Harry added. Daphne looked like she was about to interject, so Harry continued to speak before she had the chance. “If you had explained your perspective about what Tracey did first and asked me not to turn her in, maybe we wouldn’t be bickering like children every time we see each other.”

“I don’t bicker like a child,” Daphne replied petulantly.

“Yes you do,” Harry retorted. “And so do I, so I know it when I see it.”

Daphne shook her head and snorted. “Merlin, are all Gryffindors as infuriating as you?”

“Only the clever ones.”

“So none of them?”

“I think Hermione would beg to differ given that she’s beat you out for the top spot in our year five years running.”

Daphne glared at him, and he knew that he’d touched a nerve.

“You see?” Harry shrugged with a trying smile. “Bickering like children.”

Daphne rolled her eyes at him, but Harry could see that she was suppressing a smile of her own. “I accept your apology, Potter. And I suppose that I could have handled things differently on my end as well. Things work differently in Slytherin.”

“Was that supposed to be an apology? Because normally you’re supposed to say ‘I’m sorry,’” Harry chuckled lightly.

“It’s the best you’re gonna get,” Daphne snapped.

“Alright, fair enough,” Harry replied, holding his hands up in surrender. As he slowly lowered them back down to his side, he glanced at the door to the Room of Requirement. “Seeing as Filch is gone and Draco’s two goons are out of commission, do you want to go see what he’s up to?”

“Together?” Daphne asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Don’t sound so disgusted by the prospect now,” Harry replied sarcastically.

“You’ll excuse me if I have reservations given the very elaborate rumours of dangerous, foolhardy missions you seem to end up in every year,” Daphne retorted.

Harry shrugged. “Fair point, I suppose. But we both want to find out what Draco’s up to, and I’m not leaving here without figuring it out.”

Daphne let out a very exaggerated sigh. “I suppose you can tag along with me—”

“How generous of you.”

“But,” Daphne narrowed her eyes at him. “No heroics or anything crazy that’s going to end up with me in the Hospital Wing at the end of the night.”

“I promise nothing,” Harry replied with a cheeky grin.

“Gryffindors,” Daphne grumbled under her breath as she stepped out of the alcove.

Harry chuckled and followed behind Daphne. He could handle this playful banter, as long as they weren’t going to start shooting spells at each other in the end.

The door to the Room of Requirement was sealed tightly shut. Daphne tugged on the handle and tsked. “Locked,” she muttered before pointing her wand at it. “Alohomora.”

There was an audible click as the door unlocked itself. This time when Daphne pulled on the handle, the door swung wide open for them.

Just like the last time Harry visited the Room of Requirement after he saw Draco, the room was filled to the brim with discarded and abandoned things. Massive stacks of old furniture, moth-eaten clothes, and dusty books created a weaving maze throughout the cavernous room.

Daphne looked blown away by what she was seeing. “I never knew there was a room like this in Hogwarts,” she murmured.

“It’s the Room of Requirement,” Harry told her.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. “Isn’t that the room where you and your friends got busted by Umbridge and her Inquisitorial Squad last year?”

“Yes,” Harry replied smoothly.

Daphne slowly nodded her head. “Draco and Pansy were terribly obnoxious the night that happened. Though, obviously their tune changed after what happened at the Ministry.” She was looking at him more curiously now, like he was a puzzle to be solved. “What really happened at the Ministry that night? The Ministry put out their own press release, but…”

That night wasn’t something he ever wanted to relive, especially not right now when he was close to finding Draco. “Another time,” he replied noncommittally.

Daphne looked for a moment like she wanted to press the issue, but her tact won out. “Another time,” she agreed. “So, how are we going to find Draco in this mess?”

“Fuck!”

Harry turned in the direction of the frustrated voice. “I think I figured out where he is,” he said innocently.

Daphne snorted. “Clever,” she rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

As the two of them proceeded forward, taking great care to be quiet as they prowled through the stacks of mismatched objects, Harry whispered over to Daphne. “When we find him, I’ll confront him head on if you want to sneak around and hit him from the back.”

“Not a very noble suggestion,” Daphne replied teasingly. “I like it.”

Draco’s cursing grew louder as the two of them neared his position. He sounded frantic and desperate as he stomped around and cursed up a storm. For the life of him, Harry couldn’t imagine what Draco was doing to cause him to react like this. Perhaps he was finally having a complete breakdown.

Finally, as Harry rounded a bend of what looked to be a stack of old fish tanks, he spotted Draco just ahead of him in front of a tall, old cabinet. Draco’s face was covered in sweat as he paced back and forth in front of the cabinet with a panicked expression on his face. He was fingering his wand nervously and hyperventilating.

For a moment, Harry’s anger towards his old nemesis faded as genuine concern filled him. Whatever Draco was going through didn’t look any fun, and he wanted to know what was wrong.

But then the memory of what happened to Katie flashed through his mind, and Harry knew that he couldn’t go easy on Draco after what he’d done.

“Alright, you…” Harry trailed off as he turned around and didn’t see Daphne anywhere near him. “Daphne?” He whispered.

He scanned around the nearby area looking for her. It took a few seconds, but he eventually spotted a flash of her blond hair through a gap in some old destroyed furniture. She was circling around, looking to get to the opposite side of Draco just as they’d discussed.

Satisfied, Harry turned his attention back to Draco only to find a pair of grey eyes staring back at him.

For a moment, neither of them blinked. Draco looked terribly surprised to see Harry’s head sticking out round a corner in the Room of Requirement, and it was like he didn’t know how to react or proceed.

Carefully, Harry stepped out from cover and into open view. He had his wand in his hand, but he kept it down low at his side.

“Draco,” Harry called out cautiously. “What are you doing in here?”

Instinctively, Draco’s eyes flickered over to the cabinet just behind him. Then panic set in on his face when he realised he just gave away the game.

“Don’t come any closer!” Draco shouted at Harry as he pointed his wand at him.

Harry raised his wand in turn and readied himself to block whatever Draco sent his way, but he quickly realised that Draco’s hand was shaking so much that there was little chance of him firing a spell that required any precise wand movements.

“Put down your wand, Draco,” Harry said evenly as he carefully stepped behind a small stack of trinkets that provided cover for his lower half. “You’re not going to hurt anyone here again.”

Draco’s face twisted into something resembling sadness. “I didn’t mean to,” he spat out, like he was angry with himself. “She just… she was stupid is all.”

Harry felt his blood boil at Draco’s words. “She wasn’t stupid!” He shouted back at Draco. “She was innocent, and you cursed her!”

“Didn’t mean to,” Draco repeated as his mind spiralled downward.

Suddenly, there was a racket from behind him as an old chair tumbled down one of the stacks of old furniture. Draco spun on his heels and unleashed a flurry of silently-casted spells towards it, and that was when Harry struck.

With his back turned, Harry sent a silent stunner right at Draco, but the man somehow seemed to sense that it was coming and threw himself out of the way of Harry’s spell. Draco tumbled and rolled across the ground as another spell came from elsewhere in the room. The spell struck right where Draco had been and gouged into the stonework, sending up little sharp fragments of stone into the air.

“Avada Kedavra!” Draco shouted, firing off the green spell towards where the spell had come from.

Panic flooded through Harry’s mind as he saw Daphne’s blond hair spin out of sight. He couldn’t tell if she’d been hit or not from his current angle, but even if she hadn’t, he knew that this was a real fight now. Draco wasn’t holding back anything, so neither would Harry.

Harry dashed forward out of cover, hoping to close the distance between himself and Draco, and hurled two powerful blasting curses at his back.

Draco spun back around and dodged the first one, but the second one clipped his thigh. He screamed as a loud crunch was heard, and Draco went flying back onto his arse on the floor. His dark-coloured trousers began turning an even darker shade as his blood started to stain it.

“Avada Kedavra!” Draco shouted again. “Avada Kedavra! Avada Kedavra!”

The killing curses soared towards Harry, but Draco was injured and exhausted. The first one went wide by at least several metres, and the second one struck the floor before it could reach Harry. The last one fizzled out on the tip of Draco’s wand.

Harry leapt over some debris and shouted “Expelliarmus!”

Even sprinting, his aim was true, and Draco’s wand went flying out of his hand and into a tall stacks of assorted objects nearby.

Before Harry could reach him though, Daphne suddenly leapt out of cover and tackled Draco onto his back.

“You bastard!” She raged, hammering one of her fists against Draco’s eye. Draco screamed as Daphne’s punches continued to rain down on his face. He feebly tried to protect himself, but Daphne wasn’t giving him a chance to get his arms in front of his face.

Harry came to a stop just a couple feet away. Daphne showed no signs of stopping, and Draco just continued to scream while his leg bled freely.

“Daphne,” Harry said carefully so as to not startle her. “Stop.”

“He tried to kill me!” She shouted at Harry as she directed her fury towards him for a moment.

“I know,” Harry raised his hands in surrender again. “Trust me, I know better than most what it’s like to have someone try to kill you, but we can’t just kill him in return. We’ll get the Aurors involved, and they’ll deal with him. His dad is in Azkaban now, so he won’t be protected from the consequences of his actions.”

Daphne’s chest heaved as she took in a deep breath and turned her hateful gaze back to Draco. His face was bloody from cuts from her punches and his clearly broken nose. There were tears and snot running down his face too, making him look a right mess.

Daphne spat in his face and shoved him back down to the ground. She climbed off of him, and Harry fired the stunner that knocked Draco out.

“He was working on a vanishing cabinet,” Daphne muttered as she glanced down at her hands. Her knuckles were bloody and cut, but none looked to be broken. “Probably trying to smuggle more dark artefacts into Hogwarts.”

Harry glanced up at the triangular-shaped cabinet. “This thing can do that?”

“They’re made in pairs,” Daphne explained. “They link together and can send things back and forth.”

For some strange reason, the cabinet seemed familiar to Harry. He examined it carefully, trying to remember where he’d seen it before.

Then, all of sudden, he remembered: Borgin and Burkes! There was a cabinet exactly like this that he’d hidden in back before his second year when Draco and his dad had visited the shop.

Maybe the other cabinet was still there, or maybe a Death Eater had bought it. Regardless, Harry wasn’t going to let anything else get smuggled inside.

“Incendio,” he said, lighting the cabinet on fire.

Together, he and Daphne watched the cabinet turn into a pile of ash on the ground. The crackling flames exploded as bits of magic were destroyed in the cabinet before the entire thing collapsed into a great big heap. They stayed there until the fire burned out, and then Harry doused the ashes with water to prevent anything from accidentally catching on fire after they’d left.

“We should take him to Dumbledore,” Harry told Daphne as he gestured down to Draco.

Daphne nodded her head. “Probably,” she replied, before she winced and grabbed her hand again. Harry could see that it was starting to swell a bit, and those cuts needed to be looked at.

With a cheeky grin, Harry slung an arm around Daphne’s shoulder. “So, you remember what you said about not ending up in the Hospital Wing tonight?”

Daphne’s glower didn’t bother him in the slightest.