Harry

Considering that Harry had lived in a dormitory with our other boys for most of his life, he had had his share of moments where he walked in on someone doing something they shouldn’t, or that they didn’t want others to know about. Like Neville writing in his diary that catalogues the well-being of his plants, or when he catches Ron reading the paperback romances that Hermione had originally bought for him as a joke birthday present or that one time when he walked in on Seamus and Dean kissing before they were ready for anyone to know about.

So he gets the protocol. About how sometimes people living together still want their space, and that the other person sometimes barges in on a private moment without meaning to. That there are things, sometimes not even bad things, just private things, that the other person does not shout to the world. How you have to fight past the embarrassment to make your excuses and exit the room, and a few hours later, you’ll both be over it.

It’s what Harry should be doing right now, only he couldn’t figure out what Draco would be doing that he’s embarrassed about.

“Hey.” It was late, which meant that he was already asleep. Harry hadn’t expected him to be awake—Harry had intended to stay the night at Ron’s house after going out to the pub, afraid that he would be too drunk to apparate safely, but by the time the night was over, he found that he was still just as sober as he had been when the day began, so he came home, anyways. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“No, you didn’t.” Draco said, and then smoothed wrinkles out of the sheets instead of looking him in the eye, mostly because they both knew that he was lying. The only reason Draco had woken up was because Harry had tripped over a pile of books when he walked in and sent them all tumbling to the floor, him along with them. The noise had scared Draco so bad Harry just counted himself lucky he hadn’t been hexed. “What are you doing home?”

“Wasn’t as late a night as I was expecting.” Harry tried to smile, but he couldn’t, because something was definitely wrong. It sort of felt like how Harry would have expected the tension to be if he had ever caught someone cheating on him, which is a weirdparison, because there was neither any agreed upon romantic attachment or another person in the room. “Thought I’de up here.”

I meant to stay over but then I was stretched out on their couch with its lumpy cushions and realized that there was no way that I could fall asleep, not without the sound of your breathing to assure me that everything was okay, that we were safe. I thought that you felt the same way. I thought you’d be happy to have me back for the night. You told me that this helps you sleep, too, or was that just something to make me feel better?

“Yeah.” Draco still wasn’t moving over, not like he always did. He was just sitting there, staring. “Good. Great.”

It takes an embarrassingly long time for Harry to get it. Time where he thinks about how this was all about him, all from some fault he did not know he had, an offense that he had not meant. It takes him through changing his clothes and brushing his teeth and washing his hands twice just to feel the cold water run over his wrists until he turns back to the bed and realizes that something was different.

Draco was wearing a short sleeve shirt.

The fact alone shouldn’t have meant anything. It’s weird, now that Harry stops to think about it, that he had never seen his roommate in a short sleeve shirt before, now that it is approaching spring and the house gets unbearably stuffy. That he would choose to bepletely covered when he wraps himself around Harry and gets buried underneath all the covers.

(This is one of those moments where he can hear Hermione’s voice in his head, moaning on about boys and how impossibly obtuse you are, Harry, I can’t believe it and you’ve got the emotional range of a tablespoon, Harry, which is better than Ron but not by much.)

It means that for the first time during their stay together, Harry can see the dark mark.

He tries to act like everything is normal. He climbs into bed, pulls up the covers, turns so he is lying with his head propped up on Draco’s shoulder. Tries to pretend that he is not staring at the shadow of it against Draco’s skin.

“I just.” There’s a frantic scramble where he tries to free himself from the covers and twists to grab the old jumped flung over the desk chair. It’s one of Harry’s, one Mrs. Weasley made him for the Christmas of his fourth year, the one with the dragon on it. The sleeves are fraying and the colors dull, but it’s gone through the wash so many times its worn and soft. It’s too small on Harry’s frame, but it hangs loose on Draco’s whenever he wears it. Normally, Harry would love to see him wearing it (Ginny always said that he had a thing about that, the people he care about being marked as his own, a possessive streak a mile wide, but he tries not to think about his ex-girlfriend in times like this) but today he stops him.

Draco drops the shirt on the floor, makes a sound in the back of his throat that is only audible because of how close Harry is standing.

“I never wanted you to see it.” He’s not staring at Harry. He’s looking at the ceiling, counting the cracks. “I tried to never let you remember that part of me.”

“But I know that part already.” Harry doesn’t know how to make him understand, if he didn’t already, about how none of that matters anymore. About how ivenesses easier for him than it does for other people and ites free, without any thought of asking for repayment. “I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide everything from me.”

“I didn’t want to hide all of it.” Draco drops his eyes to Harry’s face and manages a smile. “Just this one thing.”

Harry steers him over the candlelight, pulls him down to sit on the bed. Draco follows like he had never thought he should protest, like any wish of Harry’s is something he wants. There’s not even an ounce of hesitation in him when Harry pulls his arm forward, the inside up to face him, like maybe he did want to show him this, after all. Like he’s tired of hiding.

“He never wanted us to et.” Draco’s voice is bitter, and underneath his hands, Harry can feel him tense. “That even if he was gone, even if we ran, tried to put it behind us, he would always be there. A part of us.”

He’s a part of all of us. Harry thinks, tracing the edges of the skull with his finger. What would you say if I told you that I harbored part of his soul, took some of himself into me, was helping some parasitic piece of him live? That for years I could feel what he felt and see what he saw, that my destiny was waiting beneath the skin, right close to the heart, just because he was a coward trying to push away the inevitable?

It’s ugly. Harry wants to tell him that it isn’t noticeable, that it was just another part of him, something that was beautiful, in the right light, but he couldn’t.

He supposes it must have been pretty, once. That it looked a dignified amount of cruel, sitting there on his skin, black against the pale, when all the edges were defined and the glow of the snake eyes seemed to search you out in the darkness, but it seems that when the protean charm broke, so did the beauty. Now it’s a smoky grey, and the edges blur, and it seems to pull and twist the skin in on itself, so the area around it puckers in a scar. And it’s covered in scabs.

“You’re hurting yourself.” There’s old marks and new ones, little rips across the dark mark. Harry runs his hands across it and then looks to face Draco.

“Not on purpose,” Draco says, and then adds, “Not for that purpose.”

“What do you mean?” Harry had known what it’s like to hurt yourself because others hurt you, because here is pain in this world that you cannot fix and you want to control all of that, somehow. He’d seen that reflected at himself in the mirror and when Hermione works himself to death and when Ron gets so angry he punches a wall, seen it in all of them, raging at the injustices of life.

“I tried to get rid of it.” Miserable, defeated, humiliated. “And then I just kept trying.”

“I don’t want you to hurt.” Harry curls into Draco, into his shoulder, and then bends to press his lips on the cuts, like that might make it better. Like if he could want to fix this bad enough, everything would heal. “I don’t want you to have to hide.”

“I don’t want that either.” Draco says, and he is crying, sniffling through tears that are welling up over his eyes. “I just didn’t want you to be reminded of what I had done every time you looked at me.”

“You did nothing wrong.” Harry says, slipping to kneel on the floor at Draco’s feet. The words aren’t true but the feeling behind it is. He does not know how to express that everything that happened was done for a need to survive, because he was a boy, because he got brought up on one side and Harry had been brought up on the other. That the things they both did were decisions born from circumstance. “You did what you had to. That’s all any of us were doing.”

“I don’t want you to hate me.”

Harry almost laughs. He remembered when they threw that word around like it meant nothing, like they knew the feeling that should have gone into it, but they hadn’t. Being able to hate means being able to want to hurt, by looking at someone and only thinking that they were vile and disgusting and worthless, of wanting them to born and being the one to light the match.

“I won’t.” He is still on the floor, still holding Draco’s arms, still tracing the edges of the mark, like if he did it enough it would just wash away, slipping from the skin like water. “Never.”

“Promise?’

Promise that I won’t hate you? That I ive you and I love you and that there’s never going to be a moment where I’ll turn away from you? That’s a done deal, Draco. I made that decision long before I caught sight of what was hiding on your arm.

“Promise.”

本站無廣告，永久域名（fanyan.cc）