It was, of course, inevitable that a life conducted so near the concealed engines of government should bring him once more into contact with Harry Potter.
There are certain persons whom one imagines, in youth, one will either destroy, escape, or else consign forever to that melodramatic chamber of the mind reserved for old enemies and schoolboy humiliations.
Yet time, with its usual contempt for the grander arrangements of the heart, had seen fit to preserve Potter in Draco's orbit, not as rival, not as nemesis in any classical sense, but as something at once more absurd and more persistent: a professional fact.
In the years since the war, when the Ministry had been obliged to reassemble itself from scandal, blood, and paperwork, Potter had taken the sort of post one might have predicted for him with almost insulting ease.
He had become, in essence and effect, a state-sanctioned catastrophe-Auror.
Cursed objects, criminal disturbances, dark artefacts, illicit operations, inexplicable magical events, wherever some fresh nuisance arose with sufficient violence or theatricality, Potter was sure, sooner or later, to be discovered standing in its vicinity, looking either grim, half-conscious, or improbably windswept.
And because the world had a malicious fondness for patterns, these matters rarely ended with Potter.
They proceeded, instead, outward in concentric bureaucratic torments until at last they arrived, annotated, urgent, multiply copied, and usually faintly singed, upon Draco's desk.
One might have imagined that heroism, in its mature institutional form, would present a neater profile.
One would have been wrong.
Draco saw him, therefore not infrequently: weekly in unrulier months, somewhat less often when the country, by some administrative miracle, managed a brief interval without attempted smuggling, rogue enchantment, ministerial embarrassment, or the resurrection of some buried ancestral horror with a taste for public inconvenience.
Potter would appear in conference chambers, secure rooms, evidence reviews, emergency consultations, or those appalling cross-departmental meetings at which everyone affected grave concentration whilst silently arranging the transfer of responsibility to someone else.
He had an infuriating tendency to look as though he had only just climbed out of rubble, or from under a curse, or through a wall, and to speak of events which had shredded three protocols and half a budget as if they were merely another Tuesday's work.
Draco had once hated him with the violent simplicity available only to the very young.
It had been, in its way, one of the purest things about him.
Yet age had the indecency to complicate all clean emotions.
The old animosity, though never precisely extinguished, had undergone those subtle erosions by which violent feeling is rendered into something at once lesser and more ineradicable.
They could now occupy the same room without open hostilities.
They could exchange remarks barbed enough to satisfy dignity without provoking scandal.
They could even, under professional compulsion, cooperate with a civility so dry and brittle it might almost have passed, to the less observant eye, for mutual respect.
Draco did not care for the term.
Respect suggested an openness of spirit he was unwilling to grant.
But neither could he honestly claim that Potter remained to him merely the sanctimonious, infuriating boy of Hogwarts memory.
The years had done what years insist upon doing: they had placed each man before the other too often, under too many altered conditions, for the original caricatures to survive intact.
He told himself, when forced to account for this cooling, that it was simply maturity.
One cannot hate with adolescent precision forever.
Life interrupts.
Governance interrupts.
Repetition interrupts.
There is a practical deadening that occurs when one has seen the same man bloodied, exhausted, furious, stubborn, and somehow still advancing into the next disaster often enough that outrage begins to acquire the shape of familiarity.
Draco would never, under torture or Veritaserum, have described the feeling as fondness; but neither was it the old venom.
It was something more irritating by far: an enforced and intimate awareness.
Potter had become woven, by professional recurrence and historical accident, into the texture of Draco's adult life.
And that, perhaps, was the true obscenity of it.
For if Draco had needed to identify, with perfect honesty, the most consistent source of the strain now tightening behind his eyes and settling like iron in his bones, he would have found it difficult not to assign Potter a place of honour in the accounting.
The mountain of papers on his desk, that ever-breeding Himalayan outrage of memoranda, revisions, interdepartmental protests, policy amendments, emergency measures, review schedules, budgetary objections, and explanatory reports, might as well, in some secret and fundamental sense, have borne Potter's name upon every page.
It was not that Harry Potter himself drafted these monstrosities; the notion was laughable.
Potter's gifts had never run to administrative elegance.
But he generated them with a regularity bordering upon the supernatural.
Every fresh case into which he flung himself, every dark object unearthed, every criminal operation interrupted, every illicit network exposed, every chaotic success achieved at grievous institutional inconvenience, sent another cascade of consequences roaring into the Ministry's depths.
Regulations must then be rewritten.
Containment procedures revised.
Oversight bodies appeased.
Public language softened.
Internal failings disguised.
And all this, by a law of nature no less cruel for being unofficial, slid eventually onto Draco's desk.
It was almost magnificent, the scale on which one man could disturb a government.
Draco, being neither naïve nor entirely unjust, knew that much of this labour was necessary.
Potter's catastrophes were seldom aimless.
He did, in his exasperating way, uncover genuine threats; and without men of that reckless species, half the nation would likely be dead, cursed, or legislatively embarrassed beyond recovery.
But necessity does not prevent resentment.
On the contrary, it refines it.
There were days when Draco regarded the latest stack of Potter-adjacent consequences and felt, beneath all his hard-won composure, a species of exhausted disbelief that the fate of so many carefully ordered hours should still be dictated by the movements of Harry bloody Potter.