What’s the point of playing it safe if you never learn what it feels like to burn, anyways?
They still sleep together.
Draco had been afraid they wouldn’t, and since it is one of the days that they sleep in Harry’s room, it is up to Draco to decide whether or not he will be brave enough to try. He knows that Harry will be kind about it, make an excuse about wanting to stay up late or having a head ache, but both of them will know, and Draco didn’t want to face that. He stands outside his room for a while, long enough that the ticking of his clock is starting to drive him insane, but then he shifts his weight and the boards creak under his feet and he knows that it is pointless to keep waiting, since Harry knows he is there anyways.
“Hey.” He knocks and then pushes the door the rest of the way open, hesitating in the doorway. “Do you still want to…”
He trails off, and Harry glares at him. His hair is even messier than usual. Draco, on the other hand, looks even more put together.
“Shut up.” He throws the blankets in what was probably meant to be a sign of welcome but was really just angry looking. “Get over here.”
Draco doesn’t argue, just crosses the room and then crawls into bed, and then starts the routine of counting Harry’s breaths until he can fall asleep. But that doesn’t work, because Harry is angry and Draco can tell, so he punches the pillow flat and lies on his back to follow the cracks cutting apart the ceiling like a spiderweb, hoping that might work, too.
It doesn’t.
There’s a paper sitting on the nightstand, he notices. It’s dark, but he can still make out the headline in glowing print and he knows that Harry must have been reading their article up until the moment that he heard Draco outside the door. “Is it because of me?”
He hadn’t meant to talk about it. He didn’t want to make things bad for either of them. He didn’t want Azkaban, didn’t want this final sign that he was never going to reach redemption. Draco’s learned that if Harry gives up on you, then maybe you aren’t worth saving.
“What?”
“The paper. They talked about you and Ginny all the time.” Draco claws at the dark mark and then realizes that Harry might feel the motion, so he switches to twisting the sheets between his fingers instead. “Are you so upset this time because it’s me?”
Until the words were out, he didn’t realize how much this mattered to him. How much it bothered him, that even after everything, all the things Harry said and did and all the times he protected him, a part of him still thought of him as that jerk from school who wasn’t worth his time, a kid who got wrapped up in things that were way over his head without realizing it and was now just another person for him to reach out a helping hand to. That maybe, just maybe, even with everything, the thing that was keeping them apart was not how much Draco was afraid, but rather the fact deep down, Harry knows who Draco is and that he would never really want him. And if that’s the truth, Draco can’t even find it in himself to blame him for it.
“No.” He can hear the rustling of blankets that meant Harry was jerking back awake, maybe propping himself up on an eyebrow and turning over to look at him, eyes squinting to make the fuzzy outline of Draco’s face a little clearer. Draco doesn’t know for sure. He won’t turn and face him. “No, of course that’s not it. Of course it’s nothing to do with you.”
If this were different, hands would be reaching out to him, holding him, and maybe Draco would not be so afraid just to turn his head to the right and see if Harry is telling the truth. If things were different, they wouldn’t need to be having this conversation.
“Then what?” There’s heat in the back of his eyes, and hiding in his throat, and his fingers are trembling again, so he clutches the sheets tighter, half afraid he’s going to rip the fabric. “Why are you so upset?”
“Because it was about me.” Harry says, and then there are hands on him, one of Harry’s hands on his shoulder and the other still on the bed for balance, and this time, Draco really does to look at him. “Because we had this nice night, this great night, and it wasn’t supposed to be about anything bigger than you and me dancing. And now it’s been made into this huge thing, like it meant something it didn’t, and it makes me feel like…like…” He falters, searches Draco’s face, and Draco can see him swallow. “Like I was supposed to be doing something different. That we were doing something wrong.”
“Do you think we are?”
“I didn’t.” Harry’s eyes are wide. “I don’t want to be. Do you think we are?”
“Sometimes.” Draco broke eye contact and looked at his arm instead, went to trace all the freckles together. He liked doing that, when they were both drifting off to sleep. “But rarely.”
“It looked like something it wasn’t.” Harry said, and it was with the tone of someone who was trying very hard to convince themselves that a lie was the truth. “That’s all that was.”
“It looked like something because it is something.” This was a leap that Draco was not prepared to take—he had never been very good at not getting hurt in the landings. “And they just saw it before we did.”
“We can’t be something.” It pains him to say it, Draco can tell, but that doesn’t change the fact that it still stings, to be turned away even when you weren’t offering anything. “You said that yourself.”
“But I still want it.” They are so close that they only have to speak in whispers, and Draco wonders who they were kidding, why they were pretending, how this was any better than just taking that chance and dealing with the fall out. If he were a braver person, he would lean in and kiss him. But he’s not. He’s the kind of person who looks to save himself before anyone else, who always has escape routes and back up plans, and he will not do something that has the potential to cause him so much pain. “Don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” His hands are in Draco’s hair, now, and he is kind of on top of him now, and there is something digging into Draco’s ribs but he doesn’t complain, just takes what can be given to him, takes this one time, this one kiss, even if it breaks everything, even if it’s the last time he ever got to touch Harry like this. When they break apart, it feels like falling, and there is nothing there to catch him, but there are worse ways to break. “You have to know that.”
“I don’t.” Confessions come easier in darkness. “I’ve tried telling you, I don’t.”
“You have to,” Harry repeats, a murmur on Draco’s skin, and even though he knows this means nothing, that it is just a continuation from the strange feeling that had been left over from the night before, that in the morning there will be awkward silences and awkward grins and a promise to forget this even though they never will, he does not stop it, even when it might have been smarter (safer) to do so.
Chapter 26
Harry
There’s a full scale fight going on in Diagon Alley and even though he was in the middle of a duel and curses were whizzing by so close to him he could feel the wind on his skin, all Harry can think about is that this really isn’t what he wanted to happen when he was trying to gather enough nerve to tell Draco that it was over.
(Not over, over. He was going to make that clear before he even started talking. They could still live together, and be best friends, and act like they can’t function if they don’t walk around like they’re attached to the hip, but there’s certain things that they need to get rid of if they’re ever going to manage to become something more. Things like the bed sharing, and the hugging, and the kissing without talking about it, and saying I love you and pretending they mean it platonically even though they both know the words are too heavy in their mouths to mean that little. It wouldn’t turn into anything if they kept throwing road blocks up in their own way.)
In Harry’s head, his thought process was simple. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to keep all of that, it was just that he was under the impression that maybe they would have a sturdier foundation if they threw away all their shaky beginnings and started building it all up from scratch. In his head, Draco would understand, and the two of them could shift their not-so-functional relationship into something better, and move past being just friends when they were both standing on solid ground, with Draco not having the knowledge that one word from Harry could send him back to Azkaban hanging over his head.
It was easier to think of saying something than actually forcing the words out, so even though Harry was trying to soften the blow with a night out and ice cream that he bought (he always buys, because he likes to consider himself a gentleman, even though Draco always scrunches his nose up and gives him this look, like he knows exactly what he’s trying to do and thinks it’s completely stupid), he couldn’t quite make himself do it. Draco just looked so happy, and for once he wasn’t checking over his shoulder for imaginary enemies every five seconds. There was ice cream stuck to the side of his cheek but Harry wasn’t telling him, and when they left the store, Draco took Harry’s hand in his like there was no question that that was where they belonged.
Like, after all this time, they had just become an extension of each other, and that hurts, hurts so bad that Harry forces the words up from behind the lump that was growing in his throat and tries to make the words crash through the barrier that had formed behind his teeth, but they don’t come, not even close. “Draco.” Draco turns to face him, and he is holding both hands now, tilting his head to look up at him because he is on the flat ground and Harry is still standing on the step above him. “Draco, I need to tell you something.”
He’s confused, but he does not look worried. There might have been a time where those words would have sent him into a panic, thinking that this was over and Harry was sending him away, but now their friendship was set in stone, up until the moment Harry says what he had brought him here to say and sends it all crumbling back into pieces. “What’s that, Harry?”
Draco also looks beautiful. They are under a streetlight, and his hair, which has grown much too long to be as sleek and shiny as it was back in Hogwarts, falls over his face in a fuzzy halo. Harry resists the urge to push it away from his face and looks up at the sky instead, which is streaked with the last strands of a sunset.
(He’s almost sorry that he had to say it in a place this lovely, but he has no other option. He could not do it at home, with all the memories, and he could not bring himself to taint any part of their life with his words. It had to be someplace different, somewhere that had the least chance of following them home.)
“I just…” He gives up on trying to be strong and reaches out to him, and Draco melts into his touch. It could be perfect, if Harry let it. It could be everything, if he would just give up on trying to do things the right way. If he would only stop trying to save him when he might not need saving. Might not want saving. “We need to stop. To do something different.”
He still isn’t getting it. “What do you mean?” Draco starts to take a step back, falters, and then comes back towards Harry again, because he still cannot fathom the thought that Harry might be the one to hurt him, after all his worry about what strangers might be thinking. “I don’t understand.”
“I know.” Harry takes a deep breath, shakes away the tension that had settled in his shoulders. “We just—”
He intends to tell him that it’s over. That’s what he had brought him there for, and that’s what he was going to do, even if it killed him, just as soon as he gathered up the nerve, but then the street exploded in what he thought must have been half of George’s stock of fireworks, and he found that he had run out of time.
Draco
It’s like the war again, because spells are flying by him and it’s scary and he could die at any moment, but it also isn’t, because this time, finally, he is fighting on the right side of things, with Harry disappearing somewhere into the fray, swallowed up by the smoke and the flashes of lights, and George leaping out of the busted display window of his shop, sleeves pushed up to the elbows and robes billowing out behind him.
(It’s a glorious entrance, wand spinning and red hair flashing through the smoke and landing in a crouch, a snarl in his voice and a smirk on his face, like he could not wait to tear someone to pieces. It was almost terrifying to see him, and Draco was kind of jealous.)
“You alright mate?” George crosses the few steps to him like they’re seeing each other from opposite ends up of a bar, nothing special, just two friends running into each other after a long week of work. The glass crunches under his feet, and his eyes are darting around the street, and when he draws even to him, Draco can see that he is bleeding from his daredevil leap through the window.
“I’m fine. You?” He nods down at his arm, which is cut open and bleeding, dripping down his hand and catching at his wand.
“This?” George doesn’t even look at it, just flashes a grin at him. “That’s nothing mate. Wait and see what I do to them.”
It’s almost ferocious, the way he walks forward into the smoke. He cuts an impressive figure, and within a few seconds, it becomes clear that he is just as skilled at dueling as he is at charms. George can see his outline even when the fight swallows him up, the vibrant spiky hair and the too-long robes that whip around at his ankles, the snapping of his spells and the bark of his laughter. It’s almost like they are watching him come back alive after months of being asleep, right there in Diagon Alley.
Only when he loses sight of both George and Harry does Draco shock himself into action, yanking off his jacket and walking forward. He can’t see what he is fighting, but he knows where it is—he can follow the hazy outlines, throws back spells when one comes towards him, and within seconds, it is like he is doing nothing more complicated than following the steps of a dance he had been taught long ago and almost forgotten, stepping backward when they step towards him and pressing forward when they draw back, answering one curse with one hex, hoping beyond hope that Harry is not hurt, even though he lost sight of him long ago.
“Look at you.” There’s a voice behind him that sounds like gravel, and without turning around, Draco knows who it is, but he turns anyways. “Always were a hotshot.”
