For what it’s worth, Draco tries not to be in love with him.
Once the war ends, the world is dim and hazy and wild. For two months, it rains incessantly in Wiltshire. Draco watches his mother’s rose garden flag and flutter, run amok with weeds and ivy from his bedroom window. He spends May and June not doing much of anything but staring— out the window, at his ceiling, at his parents when they try to coax him to dinner. House arrest is not a death sentence, but Draco is empty and vacant and a little dead anyway.
He thinks of Harry sometimes. Harry, limned in fire on a broom, reaching for him, Harry, dead, not dead, clambering to his feet, wand raised, calling the Dark Lord Tom, Harry, who had met his eyes over the Aurors’ shoulders as they handcuffed him to accompany him to the Manor until the Wizengamot had the time to figure out what to do with the Malfoys. Harry, and the world winces into sharper focus, bleak and dull and unbearable. Draco tries, for all he’s worth, not that it’s much, to stop thinking of Harry when that happens.
There’s the trial. Harry Potter is in a suit, his hair damp and brushed and unfamiliar. He speaks for Draco and his mother. Draco recognises the image of Narcissa emerging in Harry’s testimony— haughty and determined and fearful and loving, a mass of contradictions worthy of exoneration after the payment of some hefty fines. His own image he recognises in snapshots and flashes— scared, yes, Merlin, yes, indoctrinated from a young age, that too, in the grip of something bigger than himself, yes, he’s never felt so small. There are other things Harry says, new, like an ill-fitted outfit hanging off him— brave when it mattered, really? and never killed anyone, technically true but the intent was there all through sixth year, doesn’t he deserve to be punished for that? and helped in bringing down the fall of Tom Riddle at great personal risk, a tall order at best, an embellished lie at worst.
Harry believes in a man Draco isn’t sure he ever was. The Wizengamot seems to believe him, and he’s exonerated too, with a magic-monitoring charm on his wand for eighteen months.
No one testifies for Lucius. He goes to Azkaban. Draco watches, dispassionate, as the Aurors handcuff his father again. Lucius watches him back, equally dispassionate. “Take care of your mother,” he says before he’s pulled away, and Draco manages a short, tight nod. That’s that.
Love, or the situation about Harry Potter as Draco takes to calling it, begins two more months after the trials.
“Malfoy,” says Harry, the picture of wide-eyed surprise. They’re in a bar on Knockturn. Pansy, Blaise and Theo finally dragged him here, Draco you need to leave that stuffy old Manor for your own good.
“Harry Potter,” Draco says, because he can’t bring himself to call him Potter anymore, and Harry sounds awkward outside his head.
“It’s good to see you,” says Harry, a sudden grin stretching across his face. Draco has to blink the light of it out of his eyes. “You’re looking better.”
It starts then, in the bar. The stirrings of life in a dead man. It’s annoying and brutal and the kind of thing that keeps Draco waking up and getting himself out of bed every morning and the nightmares occasionally at bay.
They run into each other at the bar, over and over, and each time, Harry begins conversation. Each time, it lasts a few minutes longer, until they’re spending half an hour or more chatting over drinks at the counter. Or, rather— Harry chats, Draco listens and tries not to let his heart spring out of his chest. Each time, Pansy looks considering, Blaise rolls his eyes and Theo peers studiously into his drink when he comes back. Draco wonders if Harry’s friends have their own set of patented reactions and if they’re half as lenient as his friends’.
Draco starts sleeping with Theo about it, eventually. Which is to say Draco starts sleeping with Theo hoping the sex will take his mind off dark hair and green eyes and that rapid, quicksilver smile. It doesn’t help that Theo has dark hair and blue eyes, and smiles at Draco like the sun. It makes him ache with want and loss, and the sex is great, but Draco has to end it within a few weeks.
“It’s Potter, isn’t it,” Theo says when Draco tells him.
There’s no point denying it, so Draco doesn’t. “It’s not you,” he says, and Theo’s lightly amused baleful glare is enough for their friendship to remain stable, if a little stilted.
Blaise takes him shopping and Pansy brings him alcohol and when Greg starts stepping out of his house again, he tells Draco awkwardly, “Well, Potter’s missing out, isn’t he?” Millicent, who starts coming to pub nights gives Draco a once-over and tells him he needs to get a job. Daphne tries to set him up with her sister, and takes it astonishingly terribly when Draco tells her he’s sure Astoria’s lovely, but has an entirely wrong set of bits.
“You should be more open minded,” she tells him, sniffing. “Astoria‘s open minded!”
Draco can only think to blink at her.
Harry’s in the papers almost every day. Sometimes because he gives speeches, but mostly because The Prophet’s society section can’t think to write anything better than “Harry Potter spotted in Diagon’s Sunday Market, with turnips! Turn to page 6 for seven delicious recipes that make fresh and inventive use of the Chosen One’s Chosen Veg!”
It’s all well and good except for the part where the accompanying photos of Harry, scowling or blank or frustrated or very occasionally, smiling at children, sends Draco’s body into overdrive. He finds himself tracing the line of Harry’s mouth, the tops of his cheekbones, his hairline. He thinks his mother notices, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Would you like to get a drink sometime?” Harry asks.
They’re not at the bar. They’re in a cafe and Draco is reading a horrible romance novel at the window.
“We get drinks all the time,” Draco says. He wants to step on his own toes.
“Yeah,” Harry says, laughing. He runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, course, just— I was wondering if you maybe wanted to. You know. Just us.”
“Just us?”
“Forget it,” Harry says, and sighs. He turns away and turns back. “It was good seeing you, Malfoy.” He turns away again.
“Harry,” Draco says. The look on Harry’s face when he turns back again is wide-eyed surprise again, like that first time in the bar. “I— a drink sounds lovely.”
Harry looks uncertainly pleased.
“Just not on Knockturn,” Draco says.
“We could go to Hogsmeade,” Harry says. He’s— the ridiculous man— bouncing on the balls of his feet, fidgety and buoyant and beautiful. “Or London. The Muggle bit. Or Diagon, really, but the reporters—” He grimaces.
I’ll go anywhere with you, Draco wants to say. “Anywhere,” he says instead, hacked short and inadequate.
But Harry smiles at him like he’s the sun. The persistent ache throbbing through Draco abates for a moment.
So this is peace, Draco thinks. Meets Harry’s smile with his own, wonders how Harry thinks it looks. There you are.
for the @drarrymicrofic prompt, “cranes in the sky”. this is a little all over the place and i’m not particularly happy with it, but here’s a decidedly-not-microfic about failing at not being in love with harry james potter. oh draco, you’re exactly like me.
