“I knew you,” Draco says, and rolls his eyes, “were actually coming in here to produce breakfast. You nitwit. Go to bed, you look unwell.”
“But,” Harry says, “you said—”
“Yes, well, that was making the assumption you slept,” Draco says, “which you obviously didn’t, and which is on me. I must have allowed my expectations to raise to ‘basic human functionality’ again. Silly. A rookie mistake.” He gives Harry a dark look. “When I agreed to let you stay here I didn’t mean ‘Awake, every minute of the day, stumbling about looking consumptive and unsettling my houseguests.’ Go. Sleep. I’ll awaken you if there’s crime.”
“They’re more unsettling than I am,” Harry mutters, because he feels in his heart that it’s true.
Draco openly laughs at him. “Oh, Potter,” he says, as though Harry is a very amusing dog who has just done an entertaining trick, and walks back off towards the parlor.
Harry tells himself, as he climbs the stairs back to his old bedroom, that there’s no reason to love such an obnoxious little git anyway. That Draco is condescending and insulting and has terrible taste in friends. That what would really make Harry happy is someone friendly, and likeable, and without any childhood grudges, who never bosses him around or calls him names or laughs in his face like an asshole.
He doesn’t believe a word, though, and he falls asleep knowing it.
It’s nearly dark when Harry wakes up. He stretches, groans, and drags himself out of bed—he’s got things to do, however much he might like to lay here and let the world drift away again. Sleep hasn’t done him the kindness of scrubbing his feelings for Draco out of his mind, but he didn’t really expect it to, and he decides that he’s just going to…put it aside, for the moment. Deal with it when it comes up.
Draco’s not in the house, which is a small mercy. Kreacher tells Harry that Draco told him to say he was going out, and hadn’t been kidnapped, and that Harry should refrain from doing anything insane is his absence, so Harry goes back to his own place to pack up some of his stuff, take a shower. His ancient old showerhead hisses and spits and Harry finds himself reaching through the shower curtain for his wand, annoyed, and casting a couple of restoration spells he learned when he and Draco were fixing up the museum the first time. It helps, and Harry pats himself down with a towel afterward wondering why he never bothered to do anything about it before; wondering if he’s just been here all these years, quietly and systematically ignoring things that were bothering him, when he could have fixed them with just a little attention.
He stands in his living room for a few minutes, towel slung around his waist, dripping on the already warped wood floors, and for the first time sees what Draco must see when he comes here. This place is horrible. It’s cold and it’s dark and there are large discolored patches of the walls from mold and water damage; half his appliances barely work; he can hear a vicious row playing out between his next-door neighbors, the sound so familiar that it’s essentially become white noise. Harry wouldn’t be ashamed to live here if it was all he could afford—god knows he’s lived with worse—but it isn’t by a wide margin, and wasn’t even when he bought it. He could live in a place cleaner and more comfortable and better maintained than this one on his Auror salary alone, forgetting the money he inherited from his parents and the largely untouched payment he accepted for Grimmauld Place seven years ago.
And Harry is, he realizes, ashamed to live here. That’s why he never has Ron and Hermione over; that’s why he’s never hosted a dinner party, or even a birthday party, or a smaller, less horrible alternative to the pub nights. He doesn’t want the people in his life to come here and see this, Harry’s unchanging grotto of privacy, how little he cares for the things that are just for himself. He’s had seven years with this place; it doesn’t have to be what it is. Harry could have fixed it up a dozen ways, if he was determined to keep the space itself for location or whatever other reason—he just didn’t. It just never seemed that important.
“Sorry,” he says to the empty room, even though this is a Muggle apartment in a Muggle structure and almost certainly can’t hear him or care. “I’ll do better when I come back. Or,” he adds, thinking of Grimmauld Place’s open, airy sprawl, about how these days it doesn’t look like it could belong to anyone but Draco, “I’ll find someone better, who can.”
He gets dressed, packs up some clothes, shoes and toiletries, and then grabs his invisibility cloak, his broom, and the Malfoy case files. They’ve been sitting next to his armchair for a month, so heavily, fruitlessly poured over that most of the edges are dog- eared, and Harry feels a thick rush of guilt as he hefts the box under one arm. He should have solved this already, it’s his fault everything’s happened, if he were just a better Auror this whole thing would never have played out—
—but that, Harry remembers, is not productive. He swallows it down, throws his belongings into a duffel bag, and goes to St. Mungo’s.
Hermione’s in rare and terrifying form when he gets there, seventeen open files on her bed and a container of Chinese food in one hand as she bosses two assistants around. She says hello to Harry and then shoos him out almost immediately, so Harry and Ron take Rose for a walk around the grounds outside. Harry’s quiet, caught up in his thoughts, so he startles a little when he glances to his left and realizes Ron is giving him a measuring look.
“You all right, Harry?” he says.
“Sure,” Harry says. “Just…thinking.”
“Okay,” Ron says gamely. “Thinking, that’s always a good thing to do.” He pauses, and then, uncomfortably, adds, “I’m…here if you need to talk about anything, though. If you ever do, I mean. Even if it’s…well. Whatever it is. You can talk to me.”
Harry feels a surge of sharp affection for his straightforward, easy-going friends, who don’t ever come across as trying to embarrass him for their own amusement, or give the suggestion that they’re covered in invisible spikes. But then he feels one for Draco, too, at the thought of how he weathered all the Weasleys last night, long after he could have gone home. They might seem straightforward and easy-going to Harry, but he’s sure that to Draco, Pansy and Blaise seem—well. No. He can’t imagine Pansy and Blaise being defined in either of those ways by anyone.
Still, though. It was a nice thing Draco did. Especially nice, even, seeing as it’s Draco.
“Thanks, Ron,” Harry says, and means it, but doesn’t take him up on his offer. He goes back, instead, to Number 12.
Draco hasn’t returned, and Harry’s hungry, so he makes dinner—that French dish with the wine he can never remember the name of, but thinks of privately as ‘Fuck You Uncle Vernon Chicken.’ It’s not bad, and he eats a hearty helping, washing it down with a glass of the wine he used in cooking it. When Draco still isn’t back after he does the washing up—or, well, after he starts to do the washing up and Kreacher lets out a warcry and starts slapping and poking at him until he steps aside and allows the professional his work—he starts to worry a little. It is, Harry realizes quickly, a lot more horrible to worry about Draco now that he fully understands why the worry is happening, and he only lasts about twenty minutes before he decides it’s either act or lose his mind.
He has a pretty good idea of where Draco might be once he really thinks about it, and it doesn’t take long for Kreacher to help him track down a few things, to grab his scarf and jacket from the pile of stuff on his bed that he brought over from his apartment. He’s on the street corner in Muggle London not fifteen minutes after he decided to go, staring, a little despairingly, at the spot where the portal to the glen should be.
“Probably only stays open for you if you actually see it open,” Harry mutters. He knew that was a possibility, but he hoped…oh, well. No getting around it now.
Harry looks over both shoulders, sighs heavily, and makes an attempt at the fish-to-the- ocean gesture Draco pulled the other night. It does nothing except make Harry feel very foolish, and when he tries again all that happens is that someone across the street yells, “Shake it, baby!” and does a little wolf whistle.
He tries a third time, figuring that if this fails he’ll just go back to Grimmauld Place and deal with the indignity of sitting around fretting, instead of the much more immediate indignity of being stared at by laughing Muggle strangers. But this time it works; the portal opens, and Harry strides through it quickly, looking around.
From a distance he can see Draco’s white blonde-head in the moonlight. He’s sitting on the bridge, his legs dangling over the edge, throwing pebbles. Harry walks the little path down.
“You see,” Draco says, without looking around, when Harry gets close, “this is the problem with telling someone where your secret lair is. It’s really a very significant flaw.”
“I can go,” Harry offers, even though he doesn’t really want to. “If you want to be alone or whatever.”
“Now, why would I come here if I wanted to be alone?” Draco’s voice is bitingly sarcastic, and Harry slumps a little; this was stupid. Love is stupid, and it makes people stupid. He should have stayed at the house and left well enough alone.
“Right,” he says, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ll just,” he jerks a thumb over his shoulder, not that Draco’s looking at him, and turns around, starts walking back up the path.
“Oh, for god’s sake, Potter,” Draco calls after him. Harry turns; Draco’s jumped down from the bridge and is standing next to it, hands on his hips, eyebrows up. “I was joking. What’s gotten into you?”
Well, since you mention it, it turns out I’m madly in love with you and I’m not handling it well, Harry does not say. Instead he shrugs, and walks over to lean with his back against the bridge. “I don’t know. Weird day, I guess.”
“Well, there is that.” Draco turns back out towards the water, his mouth pulling into a tight little line. Harry notes distantly that they’re in the reverse of the positions they were the other night, when Draco poked and prodded all his balled up emotions out of his chest, and wonders if he’s supposed to return the favor or not. If it was a favor, that is. Harry’s still not totally sure.
He’s pretty sure, though. He sighs. “Did it…er. Not go well with Pansy and Blaise, or something?”
Draco glances at him, startled; then he lets out a brief bark of laughter. “Dear god, I’ve created a monster. Is it so much to ask that you just stand there in your usual stoic silence, maybe making the occasional pithy comment? I mean, honestly.”
Harry rolls his eyes. “I do not stand in stoic silence, Malfoy.”
“That’s actually a little distressing,” Draco says, though his voice is light. “That you don’t know you do it, I mean. Next you’ll be telling me that your hair is like that on purpose, and you’ve never said ‘er’ in your life.”
“Er,” says Harry, and then scowls when Draco smirks. “You—shut up!”
“There it is,” Draco says cheerfully. “Now, wait for it, you’ll sulk a minute, and then you’ll forget that you’re sulking and just stare broodily out into the night, like you alone carry the world’s troubles. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times. In many ways, Potter, you’re actually very predictable.”
Harry opens his mouth, shuts it again, and then, hating himself for it, does actually look out at the water in sulky silence because—because—because whatever! Because he feels like it! Because Draco can predict Harry’s stupid moods better than Harry can, but he can’t see that Harry’s heart beats faster in his chest every time Draco so much as turns his head and it’s too much, on top of all that, to be expected to say something.
It takes a minute for Draco to stop laughing at him, but then, in a conciliatory tone, he says, “It went fine with Pansy and Blaise.”
Harry shoots him a questioning sidelong glance, but doesn’t say anything that could be latched onto and used as a distraction. Draco, Harry thinks with a vicious little twist of satisfaction, is in many ways very predictable himself.
Draco rolls his eyes. “Oh, for the love of —if you must know, yes, fine, it wasn’t the best afternoon we’ve ever passed. They’re just a bit…” He trails off, whips a pebble out into the water, and sighs. “Blaise inherited the Zabini Estate when he was fourteen—his mother, you know, she didn’t want the place to end up with some spurned husband by mistake. And Pansy…well. Pansy had a really hard time after the war.”
“She said,” Harry says quietly. He’s been thinking about it all afternoon. “For what it’s worth—”
“Oh, don’t,” Draco says, holding up a hand and fixing Harry with a fierce scowl. “Whatever you’re going to say—Merlin, I can just imagine it. ‘But Malfoy, I too feel I should have been served up to the Dark Lord on a platter to save the lives of schoolchildren!’ You are personally responsible for all the consequences of every decision ever made in the history of the world, Potter, I know. But nobody thinks that—even Pansy doesn’t think that—and this isn’t about that, anyway, so just spare me, all right?”
“Er,” Harry says, nonplussed. He’d only been going to say he was sorry for her trouble, even if that thought Draco laid out as a hypothetical maybe did cross his mind today, once or twice. “All right.”
“Good,” Draco snaps, and turns his gaze back to the water. When he speaks again, he sounds calmer. “The point is, anyway, it was—hard, for Pansy. Well, it was hard for all of us, but especially for her and me. I’d been right in the center of things, acquittal or no, and she’d said what she said, the way that she said it.” He shrugs a little; the movement is brittle, and Harry wrestles with the insane urge to try and reach out and…pat him, or something. Touch him somehow. “We dealt with it in different ways. I decided to stay, and learn, and try to be…someone better, I suppose. I thought that if I worked hard enough, if I grew up and became someone else, the world would forget what I’d done. I wasn’t totally right; there are some people for whom, some situations in which, I’ll always be who I was at seventeen. And that’s all right. That’s the price. Most of the time my life is better than I ever expected it to be—better than I probably deserve.” Draco sighs again, drumming his fingers against the stone. “Pansy…well, Pansy left.”
“Sometimes people run from things they don’t know how to handle,” Harry says, knowing the truth of it all too well.
“Oh, I know that,” Draco snaps. He throws all his remaining pebbles into the water, hard, as he says, “I’m not angry with her. She can do what she likes. But they—neither one of them really understands what it is to make something, you know? To pour yourself into changing something, the way I did with that house. The way I did with myself.” He scowls down at his empty hands, and, abruptly, says, “They want me to leave.”
