Harry

They are packing up to leave.

He can’t believe it, honestly. Even though he had been the one to sign the papers for the cottage, a part of him must have thought that it was too good to be reality, like he had been living in half a day dream for these past few weeks. Harry had spent so long living a life where happy endings are nonexistent that he must have been constantly preparing himself for the other shoe to drop, but now, with only a few days until the move in date (and before Luna and Ginny’s wedding) he finally is able to ept that he might be getting his happy ending.

“That’s it then.” There was a loud ripping sound as Draco taped over the top of the box, looking around the living room. He despised doing things the muggle way, but despite how many times he had tried (and Merlin, had he tried, all last night, the tape twisting and bunching and sometimes getting so wrapped around Draco that Harry had toe cut him out of it), he couldn’t levitate the tape dispenser in a way to get it to lay neatly over the folds of the box. “Did we get everything?”

“I think so.” Draco picked up his notebook and leafed through it until he found the right page. He had made lists for every room in the house. When Ron saw it, he had given a low whistle and said that it was a shame that Draco and Hermione hadn’t been friends back in school. Imagine the study schedules, He had muttered when their backs were turned, and Harry thought that that was a good enough reason for the two of them to never have been allowed in the same room together back in school, had they not hated each other. “ording to the list.”

“And the list is always right.” Harry tugged the notebook out of his hand and threw it down on the table, distracting him with a kiss, because if he doesn’t head this off before it starts, Draco will spend the evening checking and rechecking and rechecking the recheck, working himself into such a state that Harry has to run through everything they had packed before he can walk away from the boxes. “It seems smaller, now. All packed up.”

The whole house did, really. Harry had thought about turning it over to the ministry like Draco had suggested in the beginning, turn it into some sort of museum, but he decided against it, because he did not think that Sirius would have liked that. His godfather, who had spent his whole life wanting nothing more than to break free of this place, would have wanted to strike a match and burn the whole place down himself. It felt like the best way to honor him, making sure that Grimmauld Place dies with the ones who had lived in it.

(In a way, walking away from this house felt like the final act of saying good bye to all those ghosts he had been afraid of facing. The first step to working through the grief he had ignored, where he walks through rooms in the house and greets memories like old friends— of Sirius, of Fred, of Mad Eye, Remus, Tonks, even Dobby, like this house was the bad parts of those memories, the raw, bloody parts that are still scabbing over, and once Harry walks out of this place for good, the memories will ease their aching, turn bittersweet instead of the white hot burning they are now.)

That’s not to say it’s been easy. Just as the house had fought against the cleaning crew back in Harry’s fifth year, it was fighting against them now, like it could sense that when Harry and Draco drag their boxes out the door, it would be shut in, left to fall into dereliction and disrepair. Harry had picked up the crusade against its many rooms all over again, and together, he and Draco had torn the heads of house elves from the wall (they buried them in the ruins of the Malfoy garden, because Harry could not stand the act of just throwing them in the garbage like Ron had urged them to, not under Kreacher’s watchful eye and Hermione’s glare), broken into boarded up closets to clear the shelves of anything dangerous, and sealed up the cellar for good, until it was nothing but an old, creaking house with nothing left to offer the world.

Even if he tried to sell, Harry wasn’t sure that there would be anyone crazy enough to buy it. The thought fills him with a little bit of joy, like he had done right by Sirius after all.

(It’s sort of a fuck you, too. Like, hey, painting of Sirius’ crazy mother, remember when you would yell about mudbloods and traitors and filth? Now you can scream all you like, until the paint fades and the wallpaper peels and you are nothing but rot, no one will hear you, though it is a new level of crazy to seek revenge against a painting.)

“Maybe you’ve just gotten bigger.” Draco grins up from his spot on the floor, surrounded by empty boxes and pile of rubbish that they were giving away and that always present tape dispenser. “Too grown up for it now.”

Yes, Harry thought, kneeling on the couch cushion above him and bending over so he can hug Draco from behind, that must be it.

Draco

As the house empties, bing more and more like a new place altogether, Draco is finding it hard to sleep again.

He hides it, because he does not want Harry to worry. It’s not something to worry about, just a side effect of the house looking like someplacepletely new, with new smells and sounds and none of the oldforts it used to hold, and now not even the sound of Harry’s breathing and the old trick of counting the cracks spiraling over the ceiling s enough to lull him back to the calm, so even though Draco had promised himself that he would try to move away from it, he turns back to what he does best.

He cleans.

Today it’s the attic, the last thing to tackle just because he hadn’t intended to clean it. Who cleans the attic? But here he is, dusting and mopping and wiping the layer of grime off the windows, and it’s pathetic, he knows, toe back to this, but he can already feel the tension ebbing from his shoulders, feels the way his skin starts to fit him again.

This is okay, Draco kept telling himself, his thoughtsing in time with the strokes of the rag against the window, the one he kept cleaning even though it didn’t have a speck of dust left on it. This is fine, that you have to do this, that you need to have something to fall back on sometimes. It isn’t every night, just when things get bad. Everyone has stuff that they do to make life easier to take, when life gets back. He wrings the washrag out. Some people snort powdered dragon hide. All you do is clean.

He’s almost calm again, but when he sees Harry standing in the middle of the room, somehow having appeared without ever having made a noise, he still jumps.

“Harry.” He bunches the rag in his fist like he’s trying to hide it, but then relaxes, because it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong and how else could he explain this away, anyways? “Did I wake you up?”

“Did I wake you up?” Harry mimics, his voice cold and clear, his face screwed up. “Nice of you, to be considerate.”

Harry was angry, and Draco could not respond, because he was unable to shake the feeling that he had been slapped.

(If he were topare this to something, he would say it’s like the time back in the final battle where a death eater had not believed that he had been on their side, and then someone —he never did learn who—had cursed him out of the way, but instead of letting Draco thank him, a fist hade flying out of nowhere and punched him in the face. He suspects it was Seamus.)

“That’s not the right question, anyways.” Harry didn’t look angry anymore, just a little bored, like he had better things to be doing than to calm down his nervous wreck of a boyfriend. “The better question would be what are you still doing here?”

“I’m cleaning.” Draco was almost relieved that this is what it was about. He had no idea that it upset Harry this much, was all.

“Not here as in the attic, you idiot.” Harry advanced on him, and for the first time in a long time, Draco felt afraid. “I meant here as in this house. I thought that you were leaving —I overheard the call with the realtor. You should have left the moment the ministry cleared you.”

Draco wanted to be tough. Wanted to yell, maybe, or fight back, or at least throw the rag down and stride right past Harry and out the door, to Luna’s or his mother’s or even Hermione’s, but he doesn’t. Instead he just stands there, not even bothering to brace for the impact of the conversation, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of him, unable toe up with a single cutting response. He misses being able to be mean.

“I thought—”

“That I wanted you? That I loved you? That you were finally getting that happy ever after, when the rest of your life had been so horrible?” He was laughing at him, Draco realized. Laughing in a way that was not laughing but a cold cruel mocking that, to be perfectly honest, Draco didn’t think Harry had the ability to be capable of. He was wrong. “I didn’t want you here. I was trying to do you a favor to keep you out of Azkaban, not have you stick around for the rest of my life, and really, Draco, how could someone like me love someone like you after everything you had done? Do you think that there’s iveness for things like that, or that it woulde so easily? Whatever you thought—” He crouched down, at level with Draco, because by then Draco had attempted to flee and stumbled. “You were wrong.”

He kept going, saying all the awful things that Draco had been worrying about over these past few weeks, about how he was not worth this, worth anything, how Harry did not love him, that he could not love him, after everything he had done, and it didn’t make sense, really, but it also did, it also didn’t really evene as a surprise, because wasn’t he always expecting this moment, where Harry realizes what Draco has always known and decides that it was not possible for him to love Draco back? If Draco thought about it in the right light, he could almost trick himself into thinking that it didn’t hurt.

Except.

Except there was another Harry crouching beside him, shaking his arm, saying his name, over and over, looking from Draco to the mean Harry (who was much hotter than the Harry beside him, incidentally, both because the Harry beside him had rolled out of bed and because the mean Harry had all of Draco’s favorite aspects of him, only turned up to eleven), until he finally shoved his way in front of Draco and pointed a wand out at the mean Harry, his hand shaking.

“Ridiculous,” Is what he says, and for a second Draco thinks that he had fallen and hit his head, that it’s some strange dream, because really, is this new Harry about to argue with himself? But then it morphs into a dementor, and then Harry repeats the word and it whizzes back into a closet that Draco must have opened without meaning to, and his head be a little more clear.

“It was a boggart,” Harry says, a bit redundantly, stowing his wand in the back pocket of his pants without looking Draco in the face. “That’s all it was, Draco. Just a boggart.”

“Oh.” Draco felt like crying. In

本站無廣告，永久域名（fanyan.cc）