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Harry literally exploded into being in front of his and Draco’s house in Godric’s Hollow, spreading dust and gravel everywhere. He burst inside and threw off his Auror robes onto the polished wood floor, running over to the staircase and skipping two steps at a time.
Once he reached the door to Draco’s study, he skidded to a stop.
“I came as fast as I could,” Harry panted, holding onto the doorframe.
Seated at his work desk in the far corner of the room, Draco was illuminated by the bright light of his computer screen, magic isolation wards rippling the air around him.
“Oh, good,” he said absently, typing away at his keyboard, barely sparing Harry a glance.
Harry coughed from exertion and pressed a hand against his heaving chest. “You—your message said it was really urgent?”
That seemed to have distracted Draco from whatever he was doing, for he looked at Harry very solemnly.
“Yes. Can you take a seat so I could explain everything?”
The mood Draco was broadcasting at that moment could only be categorised under the Very Weird and Slightly Ominous kind. Harry entered what was otherwise a sun-filled room, glancing warily at the lowered blinds, then sat himself down in the red beanbag in front of Draco’s desk.
(The beanbag was Draco’s newest addition to his study: another random Muggle item that he believed worked well to blot out the surrounding magic. It’d replaced an old pinball machine Harry had retrieved from a boarded-up pub that some illegal Felix Felicis dealers had been using as a hideout. Draco swore their internet worked much better with the beanbag in place—and a functional computer and internet connection were the least Harry could provide for his stay-at-home husband.)
“Harry,” began Draco, “during the past several months, I have managed to ingratiate myself with the fans of what is currently the most successful Kpop boy group in South Korea, and I now find myself in a singularly unique moral predicament which I need your help resolving.”
Harry blinked. He understood—some of those words, for sure. But just to be on the safe side, he ventured, “Come again?”
Draco sighed, looking quite beleaguered.
“It started out when an internet friend asked me to help them run their fansite. Are you familiar with the blogging and social networking platform Tumblr?”
“I am not,” Harry said in a very level tone.
“Well, it’s—a website. People use it for all sorts of things. Posting photos, art, works of fiction, information of common interest. I find it to be a veritable treasure trove of niche Muggle phenomena,” Draco sniffed. “But I use it for my Kpop stuff, of course.”
“Of course,” echoed Harry.
Draco cleared his throat. “So, I’ve been helping this person out—her name’s Nina, she’s from Portugal—I’ve been helping her run this Tumblr blog for the past few months. It’s, you know. A fansite. We share photos and videos and translated news articles. And—”
“Wait, can we just circle back to—you listen to Korean music?” Harry said.
Draco frowned at him.
“I mean, sorry, it’s just. I’ve never heard you play Korean music!”
“Well, yes. When I can get those abominations to work properly, I do,” Draco groused, gesturing at the pair of headphones currently dangling off the side of his desk. “The music is quite catchy. I find that it helps me unwind. And—well. It’s more about the community for me, really.”
Harry nodded slowly, making a mental note to stop clocking in so much overtime at the office and start thinking of ways to get Draco to go out more.
“Anyway,” Draco continued, “the group has been doing really well as of late, so their fanbase has blown up. We went from fifteen thousand followers to 250,000 in three months!”
“Is that a lot,” Harry asked, genuinely unsure.
Draco looked at him pointedly. “Yes, Harry, that’s a lot. Will you stop interrupting?”
“Yes,” Harry mumbled.
“Thank you. As I was saying…”
The following fifteen minutes of that conversation felt like someone had got Harry drunk, then Confunded him, and then proceeded to inundate him with information in a vaguely familiar language. New concepts were introduced to him in seemingly no related fashion, like the ‘horrific tagging system’ on Tumblr and ‘custom domains’ and ‘ad money’ (which, apparently, Draco was ‘raking in’ from all the ‘views and clicks’ the blog had been ‘garnering’ lately); there were mentions of a ‘hacking attempt’ and a ‘mod’ crying to Draco about it over something called ‘Skipe’; then a slight digression into a story about a ‘fellow admin’ faking their own death online so they could disappear with the money they collected from the presales of their ‘fanzine’ (“Not that I would ever accuse anyone of faking their own death, mind, but that’s definitely what happened.”); then, circling back to the main point, a fortuitous meeting with an Indonesian ‘big name fan’ who introduced Draco to some other ‘big name’ Koreans; and finally, Draco having to obtain a Muggle passport to use as proof of identity when registering on a Korean ‘fancafé’ dedicated to an ‘OTP’ he ‘shipped’ within the group.
“That’s what you needed a Muggle passport for?!” Harry screeched.
“Anyway, this is where things get weird,” Draco warned, to Harry’s great alarm.
The weird part was that some of these Koreans ended up being stalkers of the boy group Draco liked. And they sometimes shared their stalkerish intel in this ‘fancafé’ that Draco, now their unwitting accomplice, was a part of. And—Harry could only hope he’d understood this bit correctly—one of them really loved Draco’s ‘sideblog’ dedicated to the pairing he ‘shipped,’ so they shared with him the actual phone number of one of the group members as a token of their appreciation for his contributions to the fandom. And with it, Draco had gained access to this Korean celebrity’s profile picture on some instant messaging app.
Harry was heavily contemplating rescinding his decision to come back from the dead when Draco finally reached the end of his tale.
“Long story short, the girl I run the OTP sideblog with—her name’s Joy, she’s from Chicago—she has sort of… put me in a difficult position. And I thought, why not ask my husband, the ultimate arbiter of goodness and morality, what he thinks?” Draco beamed. “So. Now that you know everything: do you think it would be okay if I posted his profile picture on my sideblog? It’s just a really lovely selfie of him and the guy everyone ships him with.”
Harry stared at him unblinkingly.
“Harry?”
“I,” Harry said, then stopped, unsure about which insanity to address first. “I’m sorry, did you say you—spoke Korean with all these people?”
Draco waved a hand in the air flippantly. “I’m conversational. It gets easy once you’ve figured out the sentence structure; then it’s just a matter of slotting the right word form into the right place.”
Harry stared at him some more.
Draco stared back expectantly. “Well?”
Harry, having nothing else to do, remembered his wedding vows. There hadn’t been anything in them about indulging outlandish internet hobbies, but he supposed there was some parallel to be drawn between this and supporting Draco no matter what, and helping him in his time of need, and…
Harry held Draco’s eyes. “Draco, no. That would be very wrong to do, and Muggles would consider it an invasion of privacy. Though I’m sure you know that already.”
Draco snapped his fingers in the air. “See, that’s what I told Joy! I told her it was wrong. I sent her the photo over DM because I’m a generous friend, but now I kind of regret it, that bint might end up posting it on her personal blog.”
Harry exhaled a long-suffering sigh; buried his face in his hands. “I… got out of work for this.”
“And what a moral dilemma you’ve helped solve,” Draco said, planting a kiss on top of Harry’s head. “Since you’re already here, let’s have lunch together.”