Draco

Harry’s late again.

And even though it’s irrational, even though it’s not even that unusual, even though Harry doesn’t need to tell Draco where he’s at or when he won’t be home at his usual time, it still makes a bubble of panic rise in his chest, so big that he can’t really take a full breath. It’s silly, but at the same time it’s not, because the last time Harry didn’te home on time, something was very wrong, someone was hurt, and they all had to face something they didn’t want to. Draco didn’t want to have a moment like that again, where you know something is wrong and you have to wait for someone to tell you what it is, which one of your friends are in trouble.

Only, when the door opens, Draco knows that he shouldn’t have bothered to worry, because Harry was late for a very different reason.

He’s drunk.

Like, actually drunk, drunker than Draco had ever seen him, and Draco doesn’t really know what to do with that, because the only person he’s ever seen get trashed was Pansy off of peach schnapps, and that was really only the one time.

“What the bloody hell happened to you?” He’s staring down at him, sprawled out on the hallways floor. His hair is a mess, and the smell of what he’d been drinking was clinging to him, like he’d dumped the contents of the whole bar all over him. He’s also got his coat half on and half off, like he couldn’t quite remember how to do it.

“Went to a bar.” Harry titled his head and smiled at him, like there was nothing strange about this. Like they always have drunken conversations on the hallway floor after midnight. “Had a few drinks.”

“How many is a few?” If Draco was worried that he was nagging, he shouldn’t have. Harry just smiles again, and then he laughs, and then he stares over at the umbrella stand, which was also tipped over and on the floor, umbrellas spread out all around it.

(He seriously doesn’t get why they have it there. It’s a nuisance. Neither of them even use umbrellas. Draco uses a spell to keep dry, and Harry—well, Harry can’t be bothered with any of it, so he sort of just walks through the rain and lets Hermione dry him off.)

“Only a few.” Harry shrugs. “I only fell because of that thing.”

It’s only then that Draco notices the blood on the inside of his arm, seeping from his shoulder on down. And then he sighs, because really, nothing good ever happens when Harryes home late.

e on,” He holds his hands out to him, but Harry just takes them and hangs on, making no move to get up. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Stupid,” Draco murmurs. Harry’s shirt is unbuttoned and halfway off, and Draco has one hand poking at the edges of the wound to see how deep it goes and the other laying on the inside of his arm. He’s worried that he might be hurting him, but either Harry has an unhealthily high pain tolerance or the alcohol is keeping him from feeling it. “What made you think it was a good idea to apparate?”

“Wanted to get home to you.” He was sobering up and maybe starting to feel everything a little bit more. Draco had forced him choke down a cup full of coffee before they did anything else, still on the floor of the hallway, because he didn’t think he could handle this version of Harry without any warning. “Knew you would be worried about me. It was faster. Fastest. Whatever.”

“Yeah, well.” Draco doesn’t know what to say to that, because it seems to be implying that they have a sort of relationship they don’t, the kind where they keep tabs on each other and shape their schedules around each other, and in general just be better friends than they really were. It wasn’t fair, to be confronted with this when he knew that Harry didn’t mean it. “I’d rather be worrying than have you hurt yourself.”

He dibs a wash rag into the water basin. Draco has to clean Harry’s whole arm to see where the cut starts, and he’s starting to think it might have been easier to say the hell with it and dump dittany all over him, just to get it over with, because being this close to him is infuriating. He tries not to think about it, and watches the water instead, watching how the water runs pink after it hits his skin.

“Ron did this once.” The thought seems to calm Harry, and he looks down at his shoulder with something like curiosity. He even makes a move to touch it, so Draco forces his hand back down to his side. “Was a lot worse though.”

“What’d you do?”

“Hermione dumped some potion on it. Kept his arm in a sling for a while.” Harry was still staring at his arm, but he was also looking at something else, something far away that only he could see. Draco’s noticed that that happens sometimes. “But we just kept on hunting.”

Draco does not need to ask what they were hunting. The whole world knows what the three of them were off doing. “Bet he’s got a wicked scar.”

“Yeah.” The corner of Harry’s mouth twitches in an attempt of a smile, but he’s also still looking at that other place, the faraway place. “Way cooler than mine.”

“Hey,” Draco leans closer to him, uses his free hand to smooth Harry’s wild hair back, and really, really hopes that he doesn’t remember any of this in the morning, because Draco is sitting way closer to him than is strictly necessary. “It’s over, alright? You won.”

He does not say we. Draco is careful to never say we.

“No.” Harry says, and Draco wonders if this is what made him drink so much tonight, the memories hiding in that faraway place. “It’s never over.”

He thinks Harry is just going to get his bearings and go to bed, so he leaves him to his own devices and heads back into the sitting room, where he could watch the steps in case Harry needs help walking up them. It’s a mistake, though, because Harryes out with two glasses and a bottle of firewhiskey, the good stuff that you only buy if you’re going to give it to someone as a gift.

“You want one?”

He’s already pouring, and Draco wants to say no, because he is tired and Harry has already had too much to drink and is only now starting to sober up, and also because lines and blurring and he feels like they are constantly in danger of diving into uncharted waters, ones that they won’t ever be able toe back from.

e on.”

It’s unfair, the way Harry is looking down at him, how intimate this feels, with the blanket piled in his lap and the lighting low and the way Harry is smiling at him, like he knows, has always known, that Draco is unable to say no to him. That he knows he will not stop Harry from getting what it wants, when it matters.

“Don’t make me drink alone.”

Harry shakes the drink at him a little, and Draco cannot stop himself, just reaches out to take it from him, like it is not his own decision to make.

An hour later, Draco is a lot more drunk and Harry is a lot more sober, and they are both sitting in the claw-footed bathtub that Draco had thought was so cool, both fully clothed but soaking wet.

He can’t remember how they got here, but somewhere in the back of his mind he knows that this is a bad idea and that he should be getting out of it while he still can. What will they do when it’s time to get out? Or if they fall asleep and then wake up the next morning in freezing cold water, wondering how the hell they thought this was a good idea? Or when they had to sit across from each other at the breakfast table the next morning and pretend that everything is the same?

He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t move, either, because Harry has enchanted the bubbles to float and Draco is morphing them into different shapes at Harry’s request, because they’re grown men who like to do things like this. (They’re only eighteen. Is eighteen grown? It feels like it.) They’re also so close together that they’re knees are pressed up against each other, and sometimes Harry will catch at his arm like he wants to say something important, but never does.

“What are we doing?” Draco doesn’t know what he is asking, exactly. If he means this moment, as in why are they pretending this is something mates would do if they were sober, or on a larger scale, as in why he was even here in the house at all, or in general, as in, what are they thinking about these feelings growing up between them like flowers that are only going to be choked out by weeds, because he knows that Harry is feeling them too.

“I don’t know.” Harry is blindingly innocent at times like this, the embodiment of everything that is good. He is not someone who is prepared to expect disaster at every turn, even after everything he has seen. “Do we have to know?”

Draco liked the sound of that, the not knowing, even if it sort of terrified him.

“No.” He laid his arm out flat along the edge of the tub, and after a moment Harry copied him, their hands lying close enough so their fingers touched, but just barely. “We don’t.”

They moved from the bathtub to the bathroom floor, leaning against each other to stay upright, Harry’s head on Draco’s shoulder.

“I really don’t think I want to be an auror anymore.”

His words break up the silence, and Draco understands what all the drinking was about, the clinginess, the not wanting to be alone. It had nothing to do with him at all.

(But it did. It had everything to do with him, with the both of them, and he knows it.)

“Then don’t.” The answer seemed so simple when he said it like that, even though he knew it was anything but. Harry was not a boy who was raised to stop fighting. He lived his life as a soldier for a war he didn’t know existed from the very moment he was born.

“I don’t know how to be anything else.”

“Then don’t be anything.” Don’t you think you’ve given enough? Isn’t it time that you got a chance to rest, to figure out what life is when there are no wolves snapping at your hells and keeping you running? “Just be Harry.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

The confessions you make when you are drunk are always the sort of things you would never say while sober. That’s the whole entire purpose of drinking, to find the truth behind the lies you tell yourself.

“I do.” It’s only because he was certain Harry wouldn’t remember that grabbed hold of his hand and pressed a kiss to the back of his knuckles, still wondering that he got the chance to do this. He does not feel like he deserves it, still. “I’ll help you find him.”

本站無廣告，永久域名（fanyan.cc）