says. His voice is a low rasp, unfamiliar to his own ears. “It’s—it’s real to me, anyway.”

Draco glares at him, and now that Harry’s not wrapped up in his own shit he can see that it’s the same way Draco’s been glaring at him all day; angry, sure, but more frightened than anything else. It’s a punch to the fucking throat, that Harry can still feel the ghostly sensation Draco’s lips on his when he’s put that expression on Draco’s face. When kissing Harry is what that expression is even about.

“I had everything the way that I liked it,” Draco says, and his voice is so ragged and wounded that Harry sways a little, leans away. “Do you understand—I worked so hard, Harry. I told myself and told myself that if I just kept my head down! And kept trying! That eventually I would have what I wanted! And I did, I was happy, I had my work and my friends and my house and I never wanted for anything! I told myself I could do it and I did it, and it was perfect, and you had to show up and ruin it, didn’t you, because that’s just what you do. Because you can’t fucking help yourself!”

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispers. He is. He’s so sorry he doubts there are words for it in any language. He’s so sorry he could fall to the floor.

“Take it back, then,” Draco demands. “Take it back right now and we can et it and —and solve the bloody case and go back to—to—just take it back, all right?”

“I’m sorry,” Harry says again, because he can’t, however much he might want to.

There’s a beat of fraught silence, and then Draco says, “I have to go.”

“But,” Harry says, “it’s your—”

“I have to go,” Draco repeats, grabbing a handful of Floo powder and tossing it at the fireplace. “Keep an eye on the house—or don’t. What do I care, anyway? What does any of it matter, after all?” He steps into the flames and shouts, “Parkinson Estate!” vanishing in a whirl of the fire.

Harry stands in front of the empty grate for a long, long time.

Eventually he moves to the wet bar, and spends the rest of the day and much of the evening getting well and truly sauced.

It’s not a healthy coping strategy; Harry knows this even as he does it. It’s not the well- adjusted adult thing to do. But fuck if he doesn’t have to do something, and the burn of the Firewhiskey on his lips and his throat is the closest he cane to wiping clean the taste and shape of Draco’s mouth against his own.

He shouldn’t have—he went about it wrong. He’s impulsive and reckless and he never thinks anything through; in all this time he’s been agonizing about Draco he didn’t stop to consider what a guarded, prickly person he is, how poorly he reacts to surprise. Harry should have played it any other way, instead of working Draco up into a frothing rage all day and then just dropping that on him cold, no warning, in the middle of a fight. He didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t make it any better. He didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t make it right.

He tries to be angry with Draco for a while around seven, when he doesn’te back for dinner, but he can’t hold onto the emotion for more than a moment or two. Draco doesn’t owe Harry his love. Draco doesn’t owe Harry anything, except—well, probably the truth of what the thieves were after would have been the least he could do, in the circumstances, but even that anger rings hollow and cold. Harry feels hollow and cold, not even drunk, though he knows logically that he is, he must be. He just feels empty, lost, and every few minutes he catches himself rubbing two fingers against his bottom lip, worrying it, like he’s trying to summon back Draco’s touch, somehow.

He goes to bed eventually, and Draco’s still not home when he wakes up, and Harry takes the Hangover Potion Kreacher brings him and doesn’t feel better at all.

For a while he just lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, and wonders what happens next. Will Draco just stay at Pansy’s forever, or is he going toe home and tell Harry to get out? Harry doubts, realistically, that Draco could stay away from the house for long—but then again, Harry’s apparently ruined everything for him, so maybe he will. Maybe he’ll move to Cairo, and Harry will catch his thieves or he won’t and it won’t matter, either way. Draco will be gone and Harry will…will go back to his old life, in his tiny apartment a few blocks from Diagon Alley, and tell himself not to think about Draco until eventually he figures out how. He’ll go to work, and to Ron and Hermione’s; to the park with Teddy, and the Burrow on Sundays. He’ll sit alone in his booth on the godforsaken Gryffindor pub night. He’ll walk past that corner where the portal to the glen is hidden and won’t move his body like a fish to the ocean, and when his path through the city takes him by Grimmauld Place he’ll avert his eyes and pretend he’s a Muggle, pretend the house numbers jump from 11 to 13, like he used to before. He has plenty in his life, without Draco. He’ll be fine.

The weight of the lie sits on Harry’s chest so heavily that he has to get up, go do something, because he knows that if he doesn’t, it will crush him.

In the end he goes for a run. He doesn’t really mean to—in general, Harry doesn’t exercise that much, having found that instinct and pure bloody-minded determination to win are more useful in most of his fights than muscle definition ever could be. What he means to do is go for a walk, just clear his head, but he’s trying so desperately to escape from his own thoughts that he finds himself running almost five miles in his jeans and t-shirt. It was a nice spring day when he started, but London’s tricky and as malcontent as Harry feels; it’s raining by the time he gets home—to Grimmauld Place—oh, whatever. It’s raining by the time he gets back to the house that used to be his, and Sirius’s, and now is Draco’s, that Harry wishes were his home with such a clawing desperation that it feels unfair to even look at it, let alone step inside.

He does, though. He steps inside, and he looks around the entry hallway, open and airy, fiercely beloved. Harry closes his eyes for a second, trying to affix it in his memory exactly as it looks right now, in case Dracoes through the fire in a minute and tells Harry never toe back again. He’d do it with Draco, too, if he could, if Draco were here—if Harry thought Draco would even let him look long enough to manage it, right now.

He sighs. He goes down to the storeroom. He lets a hand rest lightly on a head of lettuce and thinks of Draco saying, I had everything the way I liked it. Harry thinks that maybe he understands, a little. That maybe he’d be angry too, if he had a place like this, a life like this, and someone as wrong-footed and bumbling as Harry stumbled in and started knocking things over.

He takes some food upstairs to cook breakfast, lays it out on the counter. His favorite chef’s knife is missing from the block next to the range, and Harry looks around for it, checks the sink and a few of the drawers before—

—he feels it sinking, pain white-hot-screamed surrender, into the space just beneath his ribcage from behind.

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