Archive of Our Own

It started— as most things between them did— with an argument.

Harry couldn't even remember what it was about now. Something stupid. Something that had them chest to chest in an empty corridor after curfew, voices low and sharp, and then Draco had said something particularly cutting and Harry had grabbed him by the collar and—

Well.

They didn't finish the argument.

Afterwards, in the dust and dark of an unused classroom, Harry was still trying to remember how to breathe. His back was against the wall. His heart was doing something stupid. He looked sideways at Draco, who was—

Draco was just. Gone.

Not gone gone. Still there. But he'd sort of— folded. Down against the floor, back against the wall beside Harry, and his whole body had gone completely, totally slack. Like someone had removed his spine. Like every sharp edge he owned had been packed away somewhere. His head lolled against Harry's shoulder and he made a sound— low and soft and so deeply satisfied that Harry felt his face go warm.

"Malfoy," Harry said.

Nothing.

"Malfoy."

A slow exhale. The kind that meant I heard you and I've decided you're not important enough to respond to right now.

Harry looked down at him. At the pale curve of his jaw. The loose hang of his mouth. The way his hands had gone completely limp in his lap, incidentally framing his soft cock.

He looked— Harry didn't have a word for it. He'd never seen Draco Malfoy look like that. Unguarded. Almost… sweet.

"Are you dead?" Harry asked.

"Mn," said Draco.

"Helpful."

But he didn't move. And when Draco's head grew heavier against his shoulder, Harry didn't pull away. He looked up at the ceiling and told himself this was nothing. Told himself it didn't matter that Draco Malfoy, of all people, trusted him enough— even accidentally— to go boneless.

He almost believed it.

────୨ৎ────

The second time, they'd established the Rules.

The Rules were Draco's idea, which was very on-brand. He'd shown up at Harry's dormitory door three days after the corridor with his arms crossed and his chin lifted and said, coolly, "If we're going to do that again— and I'm not saying we are— we should be sensible about it."

"Sensible," Harry repeated.

"No feelings. No talking about it. No— attachment."

"Right," said Harry.

"Good," said Draco, and stepped inside.

So. The Rules. Which Harry was absolutely fine with, because he didn't have feelings, and he was perfectly comfortable with this being exactly what it was, which was nothing. Nothing important. Just two people who happened to—

Anyway.

The point was that the second time happened in Draco's room, which was private because he'd managed to secure a single for Eighth Year, and it was— fine. It was more than fine, actually, it was— that wasn't the point. The point was after.

Harry was lying on his back staring at the ceiling, one arm crossed behind his head, doing a very good job of being normal about everything. He turned to say something— he didn't know what, something appropriately casual— and stopped.

Draco's mouth was open.

Not dramatically. Most definitely not unattractively. Just— his jaw had gone slack, and his lips had parted, and the very tip of his tongue was lolling out of his mouth like he was a puppy in a patch of sunlight who had entirely forgotten to be a person.

He was staring vaguely at the canopy above his bed. His eyes were half-closed. He looked completely, utterly vacant.

Harry stared.

Draco did not notice Harry staring. Draco was, clearly, not noticing much of anything.

Harry felt something begin, very dangerously, in the region of his chest.

Don't, he told it.

He pressed his lips together. Pressed them together harder. The corner of his mouth twitched. He thought about something miserable— homework, Voldemort, the specific agony of Quidditch in cold weather— and none of it worked because Draco Malfoy's tongue was still just sitting there, peeking out between his lips, and he looked so soft and so unaware and so entirely unlike himself that—

Harry laughed. He couldn't help it. A short, sharp exhale of sound that he immediately tried to smother with his hand.

Draco blinked. Slow. Like coming up through water. He turned his head toward Harry with tremendous effort and looked at him with the unfocused confusion of someone who had briefly forgotten what language was.

"What," he said. Not a question. Just the word.

"Nothing," Harry managed.

"You laughed."

"I didn't."

Draco looked at him for a long, hazy moment. Then, apparently deciding this wasn't worth the effort of pursuing, he turned back to the canopy.

The tongue reappeared almost immediately.

Harry rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow and stayed there until he'd gotten himself under control.

Don't, he told the thing in his chest again.

It was already too late.

────୨ৎ────

The Rules were holding up fine. Perfectly. Harry wasn't thinking about Draco any more than was reasonable given that they kept— given the circumstances. It was fine.

The third time was a Sunday, and Harry was fairly certain they'd been in Draco's room for an embarrassingly long portion of the afternoon. He should probably go. He had homework. He had— a life. Other things.

He was building up to leaving, in a minute, when Draco spoke.

"Your hair smells like that shampoo," he said.

His voice was slower than usual. Blurred at the edges. His face was somewhere in the vicinity of Harry's collarbone and he didn't seem to have any current plans to move it.

Harry blinked. "What?"

"The shampoo. The one that's—" a pause, thoughtful, like he was working very hard on this— "good. It's the good one."

Harry looked down at the top of his head. "...Thanks?"

Silence. Draco's hand was moving in a slow, absent circle on Harry's arm. He didn't seem aware of it.

"I like it," Draco said finally.

Harry's heart did something he didn't have permission to feel. "The shampoo."

"Mn." A long pause. Harry could feel him breathing, slow and even, and thought maybe he'd fallen asleep, and was preparing to feel a completely unjustified amount of disappointment about that, when Draco said—

"I like you."

Very quietly. Into Harry's collarbone. Like it had just occurred to him and he saw no particular reason not to say it.

Harry stopped breathing.

The hand kept moving. Slow circles. Draco's eyes were still closed.

"Malfoy—"

"You're—" Another pause. Harry could feel him searching for the word, or possibly for consciousness. "You're good. You're a good— mm." He seemed to lose the thread entirely. His hand stilled. His breathing deepened.

He was asleep. He'd fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence.

Harry lay there in the quiet with his chest cracked open and his heart doing something terrible and told himself it didn't mean anything. He was half asleep. He didn't know what he was saying.

I like you.

Harry stared at the ceiling for a very long time.

He didn't leave.

────୨ৎ────

Fourth time, Harry told himself he was paying less attention. He was being normal. Casual. Unbothered. Not noticing things he wasn't supposed to notice.

He noticed everything.

He noticed that Draco fell asleep faster now. Like his body had learned, somehow, that this was safe— that whatever happened after didn't require him to be braced for anything. He went under quickly, quietly, and it was— Harry hated how much that meant to him. That Draco Malfoy had decided, on some level below conscious thought, that Harry Potter was not a threat.

He also noticed the hands.

Draco was asleep. Definitively asleep— Harry had checked, had said his name twice and gotten nothing. Out. Completely.

But his hands were still moving.

Slow, absent patterns on Harry's skin. His arm, his side, the curve of his shoulder. Not going anywhere. Not doing anything. Just— touching. Like his hands had their own reason for it, something underneath sleep and consciousness and rules, something that just needed to be in contact. Needed to keep hold.

Harry looked at those hands. Long fingers. Faint scars. He'd spent years thinking about those hands for all the wrong reasons, and now—

Now.

He turned his head away. Looked at the wall. Tried to catalogue everything he was feeling and assign it somewhere harmless.

He couldn't.

The hand found his and stopped moving. Just rested there. Warm.

Harry closed his eyes.

This is nothing, he thought. This is nothing, this is nothing, this is—

He turned his hand over underneath Draco's. Laced their fingers together.

Draco slept on, undisturbed.

Harry held his hand in the dark and didn't sleep at all.

────୨ৎ────

The fifth time, Harry arrived already knowing something was wrong with him.

Wrong being relative. He'd been— not fine, lately. He was fine. He was keeping to the Rules. He wasn't— he didn't have feelings, he was just— paying closer attention to things. In a completely normal way. The way Draco's guard came down. The way he existed in this particular space, after, that he didn't exist in anywhere else. The way Harry seemed to be the only person who'd ever seen it.

That felt like something. He kept trying to make it feel like nothing.

After, Draco lay beside him and blinked slowly at the middle distance like a man returning from a very great distance. Harry watched him and kept his face very carefully neutral.

"We should—" Draco started.

Harry waited.

"Actually, no, I forgot what—" He stopped. His eyes were barely open. He looked at Harry with an expression of gentle, sleepy confusion, like Harry was a puzzle he'd decided to find charming rather than solve. "Mn."

"You were saying something," Harry offered.

"Was I." Not a question. A vague acknowledgement of the concept.

"You started a sentence."

Draco considered this with tremendous effort. "I don't— what was—" He blinked again, slower. "You're very—"

He stopped.

Harry's heart stuttered. "I'm very what?"

Draco looked at him. The unfocused grey eyes moved over his face like he was reading something he already knew by heart. He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Then he nodded— once, solemnly, as if he had completed a thought to his own satisfaction— and turned, and tucked his face against Harry's chest.

Within two minutes he was asleep.

Harry lay there with you're very— sitting in the centre of his chest and no idea what came after it, and thought, with great clarity, that he was absolutely fucked.

────୨ৎ────

The sixth time, Harry had made a decision.

He hadn't meant to. He'd spent six weeks carefully not making decisions, carefully not examining things too closely, carefully keeping to the Rules and telling himself they were working. They were definitely working. He was fine.

He was fine, right up until Hermione had said, quite gently, over breakfast, "Harry, you get this look on your face when Malfoy walks into a room," and Harry had said "No I don't," and Hermione had just looked at him, and that had been more or less that.

He had feelings. He had them in a catastrophic and inconvenient quantity. He didn't know what he was going to do about that.

He went to Draco's room, because Draco's room had started to feel like a place where things got better, because apparently he had no self-preservation instinct, and it was— the same, all of it, until it wasn't.

After, Harry lay in the dark and listened to Draco's breathing slow.

He should go. That was the thing— he could go. He usually went, or Draco did, because that was what you did when things were nothing. You didn't stay. Staying was the kind of thing that meant something.

Harry decided to go. He shifted, careful, beginning to untangle himself—

Draco made a sound.

Small. Soft. The tiniest possible noise— almost below hearing— and his arms tightened. Not awake. His eyes were still closed, his breathing still slow, his face still slack with sleep. But his grip had gone firm and definite, and that sound—

Harry stilled.

He looked at Draco's face. Slack and open and young-looking. The face nobody else got to see. And he thought about hands making patterns in the dark and I like you murmured into his collarbone and you're very— hanging unfinished in the air between them, and he thought—

He thought: he knows.

Not consciously, maybe. Not in a way he'd thought through and decided and announced, very properly, with the appropriate Malfoy preamble. But somewhere underneath it all, somewhere in the part of him that kept reaching out even in sleep, that made small sad sounds when the warmth started to leave—

He knew.

Harry settled back down. His heart was going very fast.

He lay there for an hour. Maybe more. He watched the grey light begin to shift and Draco's breathing change as he rose slowly toward waking, and he thought: I'm going to have to say it. I'm going to have to actually say it.

He'd faced Voldemort. He'd walked into the forest to die.

He was absolutely terrified.

Draco came awake in stages, gradual and slow. The way he always did here— none of the sharp alertness he wore everywhere else. He blinked. He registered Harry. He registered that Harry had, evidently, not left.

Something moved across his face. Very briefly. Something careful.

"You're still here," he said. His voice was rough with sleep.

"Yeah."

A pause. Draco looked at him with an expression Harry could almost read. "The Rules—" he started.

"I know," said Harry. "I think we should change them."

Draco went very still.

"Or— get rid of them. I think we should get rid of them." Harry held his gaze. "I think we've both been— I think this stopped being nothing a while ago. For me." A beat. He felt very exposed. He'd felt less exposed facing down a dragon at fourteen. "And I think— maybe for you."

Silence.

Draco was looking at him with an expression he'd never worn in any corridor, any classroom, any place that anyone else could see. Open. Wary. Like he wanted something badly enough to be frightened of it.

"You stayed," Draco said. Quiet.

"I stayed."

"You've never—"

"I know."

Another silence. Harry watched something shift behind Draco's eyes. Watched him weigh it— the cost, the exposure, the very great vulnerability of saying a true thing out loud after you'd spent years protecting yourself from having to.

"I meant it," Draco said, finally. Barely above a whisper. "The shampoo thing."

Harry felt the corner of his mouth lift. "The shampoo thing."

"I meant—" He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Lifted his chin like he was walking into something difficult and had decided to do it properly. "All of it. The things I said. I meant all of it."

I like you.

You're very—

"Yeah?" said Harry softly.

"Don't make me repeat it, Potter, I've only just woken up—"

Harry kissed him. Differently from all the other times— slower, less urgent, with the particular quality of I have nowhere else to be. Draco went still for just a moment, and then kissed back.

When they broke apart, Draco looked at him.

"This is going to be very complicated," he said.

"Probably," Harry agreed.

"Everyone is going to be unbearable about it."

"Almost certainly."

Draco looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned, and pulled Harry's arm around him, and settled back against his chest with the familiar bonelessness, the full-body exhale of someone coming home.

"Fine," he said, into the quiet.

"Fine," Harry agreed.

He pressed his mouth to the top of Draco's head.

Outside the window, the castle was starting to wake up. In here, it was still just the two of them and the grey morning light, and Harry thought— this. This is what it was always moving toward. All the arguments and the nothing and the rules that never really worked.

This.

Draco was already half asleep again. His hand found Harry's and held on.

Harry closed his eyes and stayed.