r,” says Harry, and then scowls when Draco smirks. “You—shut up!”

“There it is,” Draco says cheerfully. “Now, wait for it, you’ll sulk a minute, and then you’ll et that you’re sulking and just stare broodily out into the night, like you alone carry the world’s troubles. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times. In many ways, Potter, you’re actually very predictable.”

Harry opens his mouth, shuts it again, and then, hating himself for it, does actually look out at the water in sulky silence because—because—because whatever! Because he feels like it! Because Draco can predict Harry’s stupid moods better than Harry can, but he can’t see that Harry’s heart beats faster in his chest every time Draco so much as turns his head and it’s too much, on top of all that, to be expected to say something.

It takes a minute for Draco to stop laughing at him, but then, in a conciliatory tone, he says, “It went fine with Pansy and Blaise.”

Harry shoots him a questioning sidelong glance, but doesn’t say anything that could be latched onto and used as a distraction. Draco, Harry thinks with a vicious little twist of satisfaction, is in many ways very predictable himself.

Draco rolls his eyes. “Oh, for the love of —if you must know, yes, fine, it wasn’t the best afternoon we’ve ever passed. They’re just a bit…” He trails off, whips a pebble out into the water, and sighs. “Blaise inherited the Zabini Estate when he was fourteen—his mother, you know, she didn’t want the place to end up with some spurned husband by mistake. And Pansy…well. Pansy had a really hard time after the war.”

“She said,” Harry says quietly. He’s been thinking about it all afternoon. “For what it’s worth—”

“Oh, don’t,” Draco says, holding up a hand and fixing Harry with a fierce scowl. “Whatever you’re going to say—Merlin, I can just imagine it. ‘But Malfoy, I too feel I should have been served up to the Dark Lord on a platter to save the lives of schoolchildren!’ You are personally responsible for all the consequences of every decision ever made in the history of the world, Potter, I know. But nobody thinks that—even Pansy doesn’t think that—and this isn’t about that, anyway, so just spare me, all right?”

“Er,” Harry says, nonplussed. He’d only been going to say he was sorry for her trouble, even if that thought Draco laid out as a hypothetical maybe did cross his mind today, once or twice. “All right.”

“Good,” Draco snaps, and turns his gaze back to the water. When he speaks again, he sounds calmer. “The point is, anyway, it was—hard, for Pansy. Well, it was hard for all of us, but especially for her and me. I’d been right in the center of things, acquittal or no, and she’d said what she said, the way that she said it.” He shrugs a little; the movement is brittle, and Harry wrestles with the insane urge to try and reach out and…pat him, or something. Touch him somehow. “We dealt with it in different ways. I decided to stay, and learn, and try to be…someone better, I suppose. I thought that if I worked hard enough, if I grew up and became someone else, the world would et what I’d done. I wasn’t totally right; there are some people for whom, some situations in which, I’ll always be who I was at seventeen. And that’s all right. That’s the price. Most of the time my life is better than I ever expected it to be—better than I probably deserve.” Draco sighs again, drumming his fingers against the stone. “Pansy…well, Pansy left.”

“Sometimes people run from things they don’t know how to handle,” Harry says, knowing the truth of it all too well.

“Oh, I know that,” Draco snaps. He throws all his remaining pebbles into the water, hard, as he says, “I’m not angry with her. She can do what she likes. But they—neither one of them really understands what it is to make something, you know? To pour yourself into changing something, the way I did with that house. The way I did with myself.” He scowls down at his empty hands, and, abruptly, says, “They want me to leave.”

“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 nevering 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 ess to an uing 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. Ites 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 nonmittal and non-pressuring option. But instead he’s said this, the only small victory of the whole experience that his voice doese out nonmittal, 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 ets 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 Harrye 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 ispletely 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 someoneing 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!e 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

本站無廣告，永久域名（fanyan.cc）