“They—what?” Harry says, heart rate picking up. “To go where?”
“Blaise’s,” Draco says. He’s still looking at his hands; his voice is flat. “Or the old Parkinson Estate, or Malfoy Manor. Pansy thinks I should go with her to Cairo; she’s sure it’s some crazed maniac trying to enact vengeance on my father through me, like that thing with the Dolohov boy a few years ago.”
“We looked into that, though,” Harry says, voice admirably even given the way his mind is screaming He’s leaving! He’s going to Egypt and never coming back! Grab him while you still can and run for the hills! “I must’ve run down a dozen leads on the Lucius-revenge angle; everything came up clean.”
“I told her that,” Draco says, throwing his hands up a little, “and she tried to bribe me with access to an upcoming archeological dig. They both think I’m being, what was it, ‘willfully stubborn,’ and that an old house that isn’t even my ancestral home isn’t worth dying for.”
“You’re not going to die,” Harry says. It comes out as more of a growl.
“Oh, well,” Draco says, all dark amusement, “in that case. I suppose I’ll just owl them that there’s nothing to worry about, and they got their knickers all in a twist for nothing.”
Harry doesn’t say anything to that. He just stares out at the glen in mute dread, wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do now. He wants—Draco needs to be safe—if Draco wants to leave and Harry talks him out of it and he dies it’ll kill Harry too, he’ll want it to, but. He doesn’t want Draco to be run out of Grimmauld Place, not when he’s worked so hard for it and loved it so well, not when he’s proved himself the type of person who doesn’t run out on much of anything at all. He doesn’t want Draco to move to Cairo, or even Wiltshire; he’d be leaving behind too much, the wet bar and the storeroom and Vicky and Kreacher…and…and…
…and Harry. Fuck it all.
“You’re not going to do it, are you,” Harry says. It’s not what he means to say. He means to say, What do you think you’re going to do, or, Have you given it any thought, or something like that, a non-committal and non-pressuring option. But instead he’s said this, the only small victory of the whole experience that his voice does come out non-committal, so it’s a statement, not a question, which doesn’t make him look quite so twelve years old.
It’s still not great, though.
But then Draco turns to stare at him, and Harry draws in a deep breath that he forgets to let go for a moment. The look on his face—there’s this little smile playing around his lips, in his eyes, this slight furrow to his brow like Harry’s some kind of startling, remarkable surprise.
“No,” he says slowly. “Of course not. I was upset that they thought that I might.”
They look at each other for a long moment, standing there over the water. Draco’s eyes are warm and watchful; they flick to Harry’s mouth and then back again and Harry thinks, for a second, that maybe…maybe it’s all going to go a different way than he’s expecting, after all. Maybe it’s not the most insane notion to ever cross his mind, the thought that he and Draco might be—something, somehow. After all, it’s not like Draco’s a normal person; he’s strange, the way that Harry is strange, and also not at all the way that Harry is strange —in a way that’s all his own. He likes Harry, doesn’t he, as much as he likes anyone? He lets Harry come around; he shows Harry his private spaces. He talks to Harry, the endless way he talks to everyone but the real way, too, just sometimes, just lately. He’s looking at Harry’s mouth.
Harry could take the risk, could lean forward right now with birdcall and his own heartbeat loud in his ears. He could kiss Draco just to find out what would happen. He could see.
He says, “Letting go isn’t an area of strength for you, right?” and knows, as he does it, that it’s a cowardice.
It seems to break the spell; Draco jerks as if stung, though his voice is completely calm when he says, “The power of memory, at least, you seem to have grasped. No, Potter. It’s not.” His eyes rove for a moment, a bit wildly, as if he’s looking for something else to focus his attentions on. They fix on the bag over Harry’s shoulder for the first time. “What’ve you got there?”
“Oh,” Harry says, remembering. “Right.”
He pulls their brooms out of the bag—his own from his apartment and Draco’s from Kreacher, who helpfully informed him that Draco had four brooms, but would probably prefer this one, because the other three were fragile antiques behind glass cases and Draco might kill Harry for looking at them wrong.
“I just figured,” Harry says, faltering at the total lack of expression on Draco’s face. “Er. I mean. The other night—I asked—and you didn’t say no, so I just thought. Well. Maybe I’d see if you wanted to give it a go?”
He tosses Draco his broom, a little because Draco’s gone all still and strange and Harry wants to make sure he’s not catatonic with delayed shock or something. He snaps out a hand to catch it, though—Seeker’s reflexes, Harry thinks, wondering why exactly that particular thought is such a punch to the chest and then dismissing it, because Draco is grinning at him.
“You know—I say, is someone coming through the portal?” he says. Then, because he’s a cheating little bastard and always has been, he throws himself into the air with a mad cackle the minute Harry turns his head. “Race you, Potter!”
“Race me to where?” Harry calls, already kicking off after him. Draco, hideous cheat that he is, doesn’t answer, so Harry catches him up and then slides into the air beneath him, flips himself upside down so he can stare up at Draco, make sure their broomsticks are lined up. Harry can’t win if he doesn’t know where they’re supposed to be going, but he can sure as fuck still tie.
“You’re mental!” Draco calls down at him, laughing. “You’ll knock your fool head off! Come back up and I’ll tell you where we’re racing to!”
“You will not,” Harry calls back, and Draco laughs again and then takes off straight up into the air, a winding, dizzying climb. Harry follows. Harry doesn’t know how anyone could do anything else.
He never does find out where that finish line was supposed to be; in the end they mostly end up chasing each other around, each pulling out whatever tricks they’ve got to try and show the other up. Draco does an impression of Viktor Krum that’s so absurd and over-the- top that Harry nearly falls off his broom laughing, and Harry tells Draco about the World Cup he went to with Ron and Seamus three years ago, shouts the story of how Seamus nearly threw over Dean for a leprechaun after a few meads too many through the rush of wind and speed. It’s good—it’s clean—it’s fun, and when they touch down at last they’re both breathing heavily, grinning with delight.
“This was a brilliant idea,” Draco says, and then, seeming to remember that it was Harry’s, quickly adds: “Not that you’re any less stupid in general, of course.”
“Oh, of course,” Harry agrees mildly, rolling his eyes. He wants—well, what he wants is to draw Draco in by the lapels of his jacket, kiss his wind-chapped lips long and desperate and a little bit filthy against the wall of the bridge, but. This is okay. This is nice. It’s not more than he can bear, just to be Draco’s friend; it’s more than he should even expect, and he’s grateful for it. He’s sure he can figure out a way for it to be enough.
They go home—they go back to Grimmauld Place, Harry reminds himself, for what feels like the hundredth time—and Draco says that he’s starving, and won’t it be tragic when the thieves come back and he’s inconveniently already dead from malnutrition. Harry pulls a face at his histrionics but heats him up a plate of Fuck You Uncle Vernon Chicken, though he doesn’t mention what he calls it when he places it in front of Draco on the table.
After a long, slightly nerve-wracking moment of staring at it, Draco says, faintly, “Is this coq au vin?”
“Hell if I know,” Harry says, shrugging, as he drops into the chair across from him. “Could be, I suppose.”
Draco sniffs at it; pokes it with a fork; takes a bite. His eyes widen. “It is—wait. Potter. You know how to make coq au vin, but you don’t know that it’s called coq au vin?”
Harry shrugs again. “I guess? I don’t know. It’s just something my aunt used to have me make for dinner parties as a kid; I don’t think I ever knew what it was called. The recipe kind of stuck with me, I suppose.”
Draco hums around a mouthful, an interested little noise. When he swallows, he says, “Did you cook a lot as a child?”
Harry tenses up, but there’s no careful pity in Draco’s voice, just curiosity. “Yeah,” Harry says, and surprises himself by adding, as lightly as he can, “It was kind of a ‘Don’t cook, don’t eat,’ sort of situation.”
“How charming,” Draco mutters, tone sharp with anger, but then changes tack so quickly Harry doesn’t have time to feel—to feel however that was going to make him feel. “I just meant—did it start back then, was my question. Your whole bizarre secret food obsession, I mean.”
“It’s not bizarre,” Harry says, a little defensive. “And it’s not a secret, and—no. Not really.” He’s never really thought about it before, and his next words come out slow as he casts back in his memory. “When I cooked as a kid I just did it because I was hungry, mostly, or because I was told to, and I knew they’d take it out of me if I didn’t. I never did it for fun, or to make me happy or anything.”
“Does it now?” Draco’s tone is casual, but gaze is probing, intense. “Make you happy, I mean.”
Harry has to consider the question for a long time. Cooking’s mostly just something he does; he’s never really prodded himself for an emotional reaction to it, or wondered all that much as to why. Everyone has to eat, and he’s good at it, and there aren’t any huge, horrific stakes on a sandwich or a pot of stew. No one ever prophesied that neither he nor the chicken stock could live while the other survived, and he likes that, the steady, reliable, never-waving nature of it all. It helps him think. It calms him.
“Yeah,” he says eventually, and steals a mushroom from Draco’s plate. “I think so.”
“You think so,” Draco says, rolling his eyes. “Some days I genuinely wonder how you survived to adulthood—where you won’t remain, Potter, by the way, if you don’t leave my mushrooms alone.”
Harry shrugs, and maybe grins a little, and sort of very slightly wishes Draco would kill him, because if he’s fighting for his mushrooms it means he likes what he’s eating and that makes Harry’s chest hurt, which is pathetic, and also horrible. He backs off, though, and lets Draco finish his dinner, and is just about ready to get up from the table and consider the possibility of going back to bed when Draco clears his throat.
“I asked for coq au vin every year on my birthday from ages six to sixteen,” Draco says, eyes on his empty plate, so quietly that Harry almost doesn’t hear him. “I haven’t had it since the war. I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought.” He looks up at Harry just for a second, this flash of eye contact there and gone again, and Harry’s heart breaks a little when he smiles down at his plate. “It’s really good. I’d forgotten.”
“I,” Harry says, hopelessly overfull of a thousand things, but not one of them something to say. That clearly meant something to Draco; it meant something to Harry, too, not that he could begin to explain even to himself what or why. Still, despite that (or perhaps because of it), the only thing he can manage to work out of his mouth is: “I, er. I call it ‘Fuck You Uncle Vernon Chicken,’ actually. Because—well. Because my Uncle Vernon never liked it very much.”
Draco lifts his head to stare for a second, but then he laughs, shaking his head. “You really are a very strange man, aren’t you, Harry?”
“Like you’re one to talk,” Harry says, good-naturedly enough.
“Oh, I know that I’m strange,” Draco agrees. “I’ve probably known that as long I’ve known anything. But from you…” he pauses, shrugs. Smiles down at his plate again. “From you it’s a constant surprise.”
Harry goes to bed that night thinking of the look on his face, the warmth in his voice, all these little ways it turns out they intersect perfectly, without intersecting at all. Maybe it’s not such a workable problem, being in love with Draco. Maybe Harry’s been doomed all along.
Chapter 10
Over the next three weeks, Harry gets used to it.
What a lie. He’s not even able to convince himself that it’s true in his bleakest moments, the ones where he needs it most; he doesn’t get used to it. How could a person get used to it? Harry wakes up every morning and stares up at his ceiling and marvels that people walk around every day, being in love, and there aren’t more folks just—dropping dead on the street of it, the way he feels like he’s going to about a third of the time. It’s unimaginable. It’s insane, carrying around this many feelings in your chest for someone else; Harry barely has room for his own, most of the time. He thinks maybe he’s just not properly equipped, and then he decides that that doesn’t matter, because it’s happening anyway. He’s stuck with it, and it’s not the most underprepared he’s ever been for a situation, probably. He fought Voldemort when he was eleven; that’s probably true.
