Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The house feels lonely.

It’s the first thing he thinks when he blinks his eyes open to the soft, diffused morning light filtered through the gauzy white canopy of his bed. Harry isn’t lying beside him, and the world is quiet, and there is no hum or whisper of the crackling, electric power that surrounds Harry, and the house feels lonely. He hasn’t even checked if Harry really left. He doesn’t need to.

His fears are confirmed when he walks past the study and Harry’s sweater is gone from its place over the back of the red armchair. Draco’s bedroom is full of little reminders, impressions and memories and pieces of Harry, but the rest of the house has been swept clean, barren. Even the tattered baseball cap Logan gave him is missing from the truck. 

Logan is the first to know, of course, because she strolls into the courtyard late that morning to find Draco mourning by the pool like some sort of Renaissance painting, gazing wistfully into the water.

“What the hell?” she pulls him up and into the house, then sets to making him tea. She doesn’t hide her distaste, glancing with contempt at the bag of Earl Grey, but Draco feels no need to spark the familiar debate. 

Once she puts the kettle on, she turns back to him, “Are you going to tell me what’s happened?”

“Harry left,” he replies in a small voice.

She rolls her eyes, “I suppose I should’ve known. Why are you acting like he’s died?”

He doesn’t really want to talk about it, but maybe if he tells Logan, she’ll tell Pansy and then he won’t have to. He explains what happened, down to the exact words, and at the end of it, Logan frowns.

“Ah. Classic miscommunication. Obviously, he wanted to take your relationship somewhere else, and he just freaked.”

“Or he realized he actually hates me.”

“I mean, I don’t think he would have started fucking you if he hated you. He doesn’t seem like the type.”

Draco gapes at her, “Excuse me?”

She frowns, “What?”

“What makes you think we were…”

“ Were you not?” Logan asks, somehow managing to sound scandalized by the idea of friendship .

“No!”

“He has quite literally moved into your house! He sleeps in your bed!”

Draco doesn’t really have a response for that. He supposes, absent the years of history between them, it could very well look like something romantic from the outside, or at the very least intimate. With all the context removed, he might believe it too.

“For most of the time we’ve known each other, he did actually hate me,” Draco says, “For good reason.”

“Right. Your dark past that you refuse to tell me about in any real detail.”

“The point is that we were getting into physical fights like three years ago. And we didn’t really talk that much, not until he came here.”

“You cannot be serious,” Logan laughs her wheezing laugh, “I 100% thought you invited him here specifically and explicitly to seduce him.”

“What the fuck?”

She points a finger at him, accusing, “It is so not my fault you two have the weirdest relationship to exist. What were you doing inviting a childhood enemy turned acquaintance to your massive property in a foreign country? What was he doing accepting? And then staying here for months? If either of you behaved like normal humans, maybe I wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions!”

“I just wanted to take care of him,” he says miserably.

“God, there is no way,” she runs a hand through her hair, tugging a little at her scalp, “You mean to tell me that all those little cups of tea, the midnight rendezvous at the hot springs, the time you put your arms around him to show him how to change a tire like a fucking rom com… that was what? Just perfectly normal, heterosexual behavior?”

“Obviously not for me! But I don’t even know if he likes men, much less me.”

“ I feel like that puzzle’s been solved,” Logan says, “You know, by virtue of the fact that he kissed you .”

“Maybe he was just confused. Or he realized that I’m pathetically in love with him and he felt bad for me. Or-”

“Draco. A breath, please.”

He obeys, inhaling as deeply as he can and letting all the air back out in one long rush, “The truth is, I don’t know why he did it. Because he left.”

The look that she gives him isn’t pitying, really, but it makes him feel the same wave of God-don’t-look-at-me shame, the longing to disappear. He kept this beautiful, terrible secret for so long because he had to, because it allowed him to help, and then because he couldn’t let go of that feeling, the one that said someone knowing would be the end of the world. But maybe he also kept it because of this. Because he didn’t want anyone to see how much he still wants, how much he still hopes.

He hears Pansy’s footsteps coming down the hall before he sees her, and he prepares himself to talk her down from homicide. He can’t decide who she’ll be angrier with, Harry for hurting him, or Draco for letting it happen. At the very least, he’s expecting a strong I told you so.

But Pansy sees him, and he must look as awful as he feels, and she scoops him up in her arms and holds him tight. For a very long time, she doesn’t say anything.

“What happened?” she asks, soft, absent of all judgment.

“He left.”

Logan does explain it to her, in the end, because it’s taking everything Draco has to keep himself from completely falling apart. Pansy is quiet, after.

“He kissed you?”

Draco nods.

“And he didn’t say anything else?”

“No,” he says, voice hollow.

“You’re in love with the dumbest man to ever live, I hope you know that.”

All in all, it’s tamer than Draco had expected. But maybe Pansy is holding herself back, for once, for Draco’s sake. He doesn’t think he could handle having to defend Harry breaking his heart in a brand new, terrifically worse way, and he would. He’d still defend him from anything.

He wonders if that instinct will ever leave him.

“Just let us baby you for a few days,” Logan says, pinching his cheek.

He sits back while Logan and Pansy make waffles, and it’s just as comforting as it is painful to watch. Logan knows how Pansy feels, he’s sure of it, and she’d never do something as reckless as kiss Pansy without meaning it. She cares too much, about Pansy, about this life they’ve all built together, layered on top of each other and intertwined.

Maybe she doesn’t want Pansy the way Pansy wants her, but she’s careful anyways. He has to accept that Harry just didn’t think of Draco like that, like something he wanted to protect, even if Draco wasn’t something he wanted to love.

“Honey,” Logan whispers, equal parts amused and frustrated, “That is absolutely the wrong measuring cup.”

Pansy frowns, reacting only to the correction, not the pet name.

Draco turns to the space beside him, for a moment expecting Harry to be there to catch Draco’s incredulous smile, to have a conversation without saying a word. There’s just an empty stool.

He hasn’t cried yet, but he’s close to it now. For a couple of weeks, he had gotten everything he’s ever wanted, and he thought he was allowed to have it, for now even if not forever, even if Harry didn’t share his feelings. It still felt like they were something. Not quite friends, because they’ve always been just a step too close and a step too far for it, but a team, maybe.

He thought the ending, at least, would be less brutal.

A letter comes from Hermione. Draco spends twenty minutes just staring at it, unopened, on the table in the study. It’s probably just a response to the last one Draco had sent her, telling her about the lab in North Carolina that he’s been given access to for a few days in October and the curse breaker who will be overseeing the experiments. He’s still nervous, about the tone most of all.

Nothing much has changed. She’s as friendly and as direct as ever. But, tucked in at the end, is a singular line that strays from her strict focus.

I promised I wouldn’t interfere, so this isn’t a request or even an encouragement, but I have a feeling you’re not actually angry with him and if you want him to know that, you’ll have to tell him explicitly.

Draco frowns. He’s not angry. But he swore to himself that he wouldn’t chase this, that he wouldn’t walk on crushed glass alone, not for anyone. How far can he go before he starts to hurt, before he starts to bleed? He thinks that this, maybe, is the fault line. He can’t let Harry go, he won’t, but he also won’t let himself wander through the desert searching for a mirage.

What was it he thought, when he first invited Harry to Juniper Valley? Tomorrow, I will worry about myself. Better late than never.

Pansy inspects the letter after him, “So she wants you to… what? Send him an owl? I promise I’m not upset about something that’s clearly upsetting?”

“She’s just saying that he’s not going to take the first step,” he says, voice bending low beneath the combined weight of the past five years, “I love him. I want him here. Safe. Happy. And he was happy. He was. I don’t need him to feel the same, and I don’t want him to think he’s not welcome here anymore, or that there are conditions to that. But I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can offer it again, after everything. I think I need to stop standing still while he cuts me open.”

Pansy hums in response. He can see the gears turning in her head, the machinations of a mind he has no chance of keeping up with.

He glares at her, “Do not. Whatever you’re thinking right now, it’s not a good idea.”

“I’m the better overlord, remember?” she reaches out to ruffle his hair, “Everything is going to work out perfectly.”

Whatever she was planning, it doesn’t come together before she leaves at the end of the month. It’s just a couple of weeks, and Draco is dreading the yawning emptiness of the house a little, Harry’s abrupt departure followed so quickly by Pansy’s, but he isn’t actually concerned about it. He knows how to keep himself together, how to tread water, how to swim with the current and ride the tossing waves.

“I don’t like this,” Pansy says, “You’re sure you don’t want me to stay?”

Draco rolls his eyes, “I’m fine, Pans. A little heartbroken, but that’s not exactly a recent development. I’ll survive without your constant attention for a couple of weeks. Besides, Logan will still be here.”

“I know, I know.”

He suspects that her frantic pacing has more to do with where she’s going than the fact that she’s leaving him behind. Aster, her half-brother, is returning to Hogwarts this year and she’s going back to England to see him off at King’s Cross. She’s protective of him, in that odd way of hers. He’d been pulled from school in the middle of their sixth year at her insistence, and Draco is fairly certain that she’d only gone back last year to make sure it would be safe for Aster.

“Go see your family. I promise not to gaze wistfully out the window too much while you’re gone.”

She calls in reinforcements anyway. Ginny shows up a few hours after Pansy’s left and stays for a couple of days. Draco is a little surprised she hasn’t dragged Dean and Luna along with her, especially because she only has a week left before fall training with the Harpies.

She lets him avoid it for a while, lets her presence be comfort enough, watches him closely. But she doesn’t look at him like she’s waiting for him to fall apart. She doesn’t look at him like she’s worried. She looks at him like he’s a puzzle, a riddle. And when that careful assessment seems to resolve itself, he knows he’s out of time.

“We need to talk,” Ginny’s voice is low, and Draco’s not sure what emotion is coloring it, “Do you want to go on a walk by the river for a bit?”

It reminds him of the walks they used to take in Crawley Down, along a different river with different scenery, Draco’s heart split in almost exactly the same place.

“You didn’t have to come,” he says after several minutes of walking in silence.

“Pansy asked me to. It sounded dire.”

“I’m fine.”

“Then I’ll have a nice visit before I report for training.”

“You didn’t have to come alone, either.”

Ginny hooks her elbow in his, pulling him into her side, “I thought you’d be more honest if it was just me. Are you going to make me ask?”

“I don’t know what you want to know.”

“I’m going to make some assumptions, based on everything I’ve seen in the past couple of hours, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. You have feelings for him.”

There’s no point in confirming it, really. She knows.

“I just want to know how big of a deal this is. To you.”

Draco stares blankly at her. Surely this is not a conversation they need to be having. She knows the answer, she must. Everyone must, now, if they all know what happened between him and Harry. If they know he let Harry kiss him, if they know he wasn’t the one that pulled away.

“Gin. Do you really need me to say it?”

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“It’s a big deal. Come on. You know-”

Ginny frowns.

Draco’s never said it. Not like this. Pansy had figured it out, and she had told Blaise and Logan, and whatever words he used to tell Claire and Arabella, he doesn’t remember them, and he’s not sure they would be sufficient for Ginny.

So he borrows the ones she used, “You know. Big, embarrassing, et-fucking-cetera.”

“No way.”

“What?”

“You… Him? The whole time?”

“Since I was fourteen.”

“When,” Ginny pauses, recalibrates, “At the trials. Hestia, when she was answering questions about why you turned, she said… she said that you were scared. You realized how serious it was, when he came back. The maze. Cedric. But that wasn’t it, was it?”

“It was part of it.”

“But the other part.”

“I loved him. And I was scared.”

“Not for yourself.”

“Not yet. I knew my father wouldn’t… he wasn’t going to protect me. But I didn’t know if he’d actively put me in danger, not until the summer, and by then it didn’t matter. It was already part of the plan.”

“You loved him. You wanted him to be safe.”

“And I knew I could help.”

“Draco.”

“I know it’s hypocritical of me to ask, but could you just… leave it?”

There’s a second of silence, when Draco realizes what he’s just admitted to, and then Ginny shoves at his shoulder, nearly pushing him off the bank and into the swirling water.

“You engineered it! The game! The kisses!”

Draco can’t keep the startled, defensive look off of his face, “I wasn’t going to! I swear, I was fully intending on staying the fuck out of it. But then-”

Ginny narrows her eyes, “Then?”

“…Harry suggested it?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Seriously?”

He shrugs, skin hot and prickling with discomfort.

“I can’t believe you. You know what, no, what I actually can’t believe is that when we had that stupid conversation about you being self-sacrificial, I already knew.”

“Already knew what?” Draco asks, because he knows now she didn’t have any idea he was in love with Harry.

She groans, “Fucking nothing.”

He stares at her.

“I was right. You were being stupid.”

“From my point of view, it feels a lot like I was right.”

Ginny looks, a bit, like she wants to shake him. He doesn’t let himself think about why that is, or about the rest of their conversation, because it’s too sensitive, still.

He misses Harry all the time, everywhere. In the passenger seat of the truck, on the other side of the bed, in the spring late at night. He misses the tentative affection and the easy intimacy that their history has turned into and even the lingering antagonism, now that the sting is taken out of it, now that it’s a joke they’re both in on, now that it feels like Draco&Harry, just the way that they are with each other, strange and stupid and not painful at all.

A week on from Harry running, and Draco isn’t sure he’ll ever be ready to prod at the lingering bruise, the poisoned veins.

Kit shows up unannounced in the middle of his wallowing. For a brief, insane moment, he thinks that Pansy must have called her too, but then he sees the look she’s wearing.

It’s uncharacteristically dark, blank, “Blaise Zabini has been arrested in connection to a murder. He’s in Grindavik. Iceland.”

“What?”

“I’ve found legal representation for him. I can send someone from London, if you’d like, but I thought you might want to go yourself.”

“Yeah, yes, I’ll go. The… The victim?”

Kit knows exactly what he’s asking, though he’s never spoken to her directly about Blaise’s family life, “Male. Late twenties. Net worth in the millions.”

“Do you know if… Is she still around?”

“I don’t know,” Kit replies, steel in her eyes and pure rage in her voice, “It’s the first thing I asked, too.”

Maybe it’s not quite uncharacteristic. After all, Kit has always been welcoming, efficient, determined to help in any way she can, even when it goes beyond the bounds of her job. Maybe he just hasn’t seen her pushed to this, before.

He doesn’t wait for Logan to get off of work. Kit follows him in her car to the store, and he leaves the truck for Logan to drive home.

“Oh, hey,” Logan grins at him for a split second before she registers the expression on his face, “What’s going on?”

“I have to go to Iceland for a bit and help Blaise out with something. I’m not sure how serious it is yet, or how long I’ll be gone, so I just wanted to let you know.”

“It’s serious. I can tell from your face. Does Pansy know?”

“No, no, I’m going to try and figure it out first. If it’s not resolved by the end of the week, I’ll tell her. It’s just… his mom isn’t the most reliable person, and he’s traveling with her at the moment and I think she’s left him in a really bad situation. The truck is in the lot, Kit is going to take me to the airport.”

Logan nods, “Okay, yeah, go. I’ll make sure the doors are locked at home and the greenhouse doesn’t overgrow and everything.”

He smiles a little, in the midst of it all, when Logan calls Juniper Valley home. He wants it to be true.

He wants her to park the beat up silver car she never drives anymore in the lane outside instead of at her grandfather’s house. He wants her to stop gathering her things every night, stashing them in an unobtrusive corner, like she’s a guest. A visitor. He might have to shuffle things around, convert the lounge to a bedroom for her, find a way to explain away a magical add-on, but he’s going to make it real.

He knows Logan won’t ever let go of the store, but he can already see the weight of it on her shoulders easing. She doesn’t have to keep propping up the skeleton of a family long splintered, not when she has Draco and Pansy now. Someday, she’ll give in and let them pick up shifts, split the burden more evenly, share it the way they already share everything else.

“If Harry comes back while you’re gone, I reserve the right to tell him how intensely you’ve been pining.”

He takes it back. He’s not helping her with fucking anything.

The portkey is nothing, now. He orders a ginger green tea from a cafe on the way to the lawyer’s office and the nausea slips easily from his body and from his mind.

The lawyer Kit found is local, a hulking middle-aged man with a pinched mouth and rectangular glasses. He’s not particularly chatty, but he manages to get Draco into the police station and sitting in a dim room with Blaise within a couple of hours.

Blaise looks… scared. It’s a worrying departure from the relentless apathy he’s been practicing for as long as Draco has known him.

“She just left,” he says, and he manages to keep his voice flat if not his face, but Draco suspects it’s less an intentional erasure and more pure, unfiltered shock, “She left me there.”

“Blaise-”

“Is this how you felt?”

Draco clenches his jaw, “Something like this, yes.”

It’s not really his mother, though, that he thinks of. It’s his father, and the world cup, and the bone-chilling realization that there is nothing in the world he could do to earn the same kind of loyalty that he’s spent his entire life pledging. That he could die for it, and his father would think it was a necessary sacrifice.

“I had help,” Draco says, “And you’re going to have all the help you need, do you understand?”

As always, Violeta Zabini has covered her tracks well. The only loose end she left behind her was her son, and with a good lawyer and a few more hours, Blaise is released on the condition that he stays in town a few more days in case the police have more questions.

Kit has booked a nice suite of rooms in a boutique hotel close to the city center, and Draco orders food delivery and doesn’t ask Blaise to tell him what happened.

He wishes, briefly, that he’d owled Pansy. Maybe she would know how to talk to Blaise, how to take that shattered, wounded look from his eyes. Draco knows from experience that it’s the shock that’ll haunt Blaise. All of the hurt will blur together eventually. The surprise, the moment that the rug is pulled from under your feet, never fades. It lives forever, clear and perfectly preserved in a body’s instinct.

It’ll haunt him, because try as he might, he will never truly feel it again.

Violeta doesn’t bother coming back. She sends a note via courier to tell Blaise where she’s gone and who she’s with, and she asks no questions about the mess she left behind, though she clearly knows. She’d sent the note to their hotel room, after all.

“You’re going to find her,” Draco says, “After everything.”

He knows he has no right to lecture Blaise, not about this. But he knows exactly what path Blaise is on, exactly where it leads, and he wants nothing more than to spare him from it, even if it’s hypocritical. Even if it makes Blaise hate him. Even if they never speak again.

“You don’t understand.”

Draco doesn’t even bother responding to that. They both know it’s not true.

“Not everything gets tied in a little bow.”

“Yeah, thanks for the reminder,” Draco tries to keep the anger from his mouth, but it overflows past his teeth all the same, nearly visible in the space between them, “You know even if she never does it again, you’ll wonder. Every time, you’ll wonder if this is going to be it, the moment when she leaves you behind again, and you’ll feel sick in the same exact way. And I love you, but if you really think this is the last time you’re a fucking idiot.”

“We are not the same.”

“You’ll feel sick in the same way, but the stunned, betrayed feeling? This is the last time you’ll get it. You’ll remember it for the rest of your life and you will never feel it again because you will forever be expecting it. You’ll see it coming. You won’t be able to stop seeing it coming.”

“Your dad was a terrorist.”

“Yeah, and the first time he left me behind was the last time I was caught off guard by it. I stayed, but I didn’t stay for him, and I never followed him again.”

Blaise doesn’t apologize. Draco doesn’t either. The suite is empty when Draco wakes up in the morning, and sitting there, eating pönnukökur on the balcony, he’s overwhelmed by just how tired of fighting, of being left to bleed, he is.

It’s not pleasant, going home afterwards. He isn’t quite happy, even if he is relieved, to be back at Juniper Valley. It feels like giving up.

But it’s a fleeting, shallow pain.

He can feel himself getting stronger, his roots growing deep and immovable into the desert, independent of his family or his friends or the things he’s done. It makes him sad, to see Blaise follow his mother where she’s leading him, but it doesn’t shake Draco.

He’s as sure of his freedom, his footing, as he can be without returning to England to test it.

He may be miserable, over Blaise and over Harry and still, always, over his parents. He has a bad night’s sleep back in his own bed, and he cries in the shower in the morning, and he makes his own Earl Grey, and he doesn’t let it tear him apart.

But he can’t keep looking at his copy of Wuthering Heights on the bedside table, marked near halfway with a folded scrap of paper. He has nowhere else to put the green rock Harry found in the river or the photo Marcie took of the two of them on her disposable camera or all of the memories of him, but he can put the book back on the shelf that Harry took it from. He can put it back in the office and he can close the door and he can stop looking at it every morning and every night.

He flips the pages open. The improvised bookmark isn’t blank, like he’d expected.

Harry, it says, in Draco’s own writing. He recognizes it, immediately, as the note he’d left at Grimmauld before coming to Juniper Valley. He doesn’t need to unfold it, to let his eyes skim through the neat, careful letters. He knows exactly what it says.

I meant it. Love can’t be wasted.

And the page that it marks is one Draco has taken a pen to.

Heathcliff, if I were you, I’d go stretch myself over her grave and die like a faithful dog.

“Well,” Draco whispers to himself, “Fuck.”

Harry comes back before Pansy does, but he doesn’t use the office portkey. He stands on the porch and knocks on the front door, and it swings open for him, Juniper Valley welcoming him home. Draco stares at him from the other end of the entryway.

“I shouldn’t have left like that,” Harry says in a rush, “I know you might not want me here, anymore, but I… I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ll go if you tell me to. But Ginny thought… she said you told her that you wanted me to be safe. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt as safe as I do here, with you.”

Draco pushes aside his instinctual anger at Ginny for doing what he asked her not to do, because, well, he has no leg to stand on there. And because Harry looks terrified. Like he’s bracing for a fall.

“Are you going to come in?”

Harry glances down at the threshold. He steps over it. The door closes behind him.

Draco thinks of the Manor’s garden wall, of fourth year and the Great Hall and the moment he fell in love and left his old life in smoldering ruins. He thinks of the climb, the cuts on his feet, the sudden drop. He thinks of every word Harry has said to him over this endless summer.

I keep thinking you’ll just get it, and then it throws me when you don’t.

That doesn’t work on me.

I do. Believe you, I mean.

When it was all over, when I woke up, it was you.

Like I kept something that I should have returned.

You just offer it up, so easily.

I just want to understand.

This is home for you, isn’t it?

Can I stay?

I’ll come with you.

I can’t talk to them about it like I talk to you.

I don’t worry about it so much, with you.

You’re a sweet drunk, you know that?

I don’t want to be anywhere else.

And this feeling, it’s something that happened to Draco, and then something he chose, over and over and over, no matter how scared he was, no matter how much it made him bleed. He’s always felt that love is looking out at a sea of pain and stepping into the waves, and maybe he was right, but it was never the pain that proved it, it was the step.

It was an arm extended, offering a wand or a cup of tea, reaching for something unattainable, finding the strength to carry a burden that is not your own. He has spent so long loving Harry, quietly, not expecting any repayment, that he’d missed all the signs.

A look returned, a hand outstretched. Harry has always been right there with him.

“You’re in love with me,” Draco breathes.

It seems miraculous, impossible, but he knows it’s true.

Harry shuts his eyes tight, “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve made it weird, and I’ve ruined our friendship, and I’m so sorry.”

Draco laughs, and he can’t scrub the incandescent happiness or the affection from the sound, “You haven’t ruined anything. Harry, what on earth are you talking about?”

“I kissed you,” Harry says miserably, “Even though I knew you didn’t have feelings for me.”

He blinks a few times, “What? What makes you think I don’t have feelings for you?”

“Um. All common sense and precedent? And the fact that you’re in love with someone who is not me.”

“Darling,” Draco smiles, helpless, “I’m in love with you. Obviously.”

“But-”

Draco takes Harry’s face in his hands, draws him close, foreheads almost touching, “The person I’m in love with is you. Has been the whole time.”

Harry frowns, “You never look at me.”

“I’m looking at you,” Draco brushes his thumb over Harry’s cheek.

“ Draco, do you realize that most of our friends think you have some mysterious soulmate who died in the war ?”

He recoils, “Why would they think that?”

“You kept saying it was tragic! Doomed!”

“I thought it was.”

Harry wrenches himself from his hold, fully separating them, just so he can look at Draco like he’s never seen him before, like Draco is the one offering up new information, “Christ. I’ve been obsessed with you since I was eleven. Everyone knows this. Everyone makes fun of me for this.”

“Sorry for taking our mutual antagonism at face value.”

“How long?” Harry demands, “When did it change for you?”

Draco ducks his head, futilely trying to hide the rising color on his cheeks, “When everything did. Fourth year.”

“Oh,” he brightens, standing taller in front of Draco, “Me too.”

“Really?”

“Well, it was more that I realized boys were an option. It’s- the Muggles who raised me, my aunt and uncle, were against that sort of thing. Not that they ever talked about it much at all. Putting the, like, minor hero worship crush I had on Cedric aside… Once I realized it was a thing I could feel, it was you. It took me an embarrassingly long time to admit it to anyone else but fourth year is when I knew.”

“Was there a specific moment?” 

“Not really. I think because I already had a bit of a crush on you, before I realized what it was. Was there a specific moment for you?”

Draco smiles, “Yeah. The welcome feast. I saw you laugh from across the hall, and it felt like I was about to step right off the edge of the world.”

“Draco.”

“I know.”

And then Harry pulls him back in, and they don’t say anything else for a very long time.

They get a few hours of peace before Draco has to pick Logan up from work. They’ve fully given up on the pretense of working on projects at this point, since they never started on another when they finished the spring, and he’s still holding out hope that Pansy will make a move soon and solve the problem of bedroom availability for him.

“Hm,” Logan glances warily at him as she settles into the passenger seat, “What’s up? You were doing your whole wilted plant routine this morning, and now you look like someone watered you and set you in the sun.”

Draco can’t help it. He blushes.

“What?”

“Uh, Harry maybe came back-”

Logan whoops, a loud, joyful kind of sound that makes Draco’s hands jerk the steering wheel. Luckily, they’re still parked in front of the store and not on the road.

“And? I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, yeah, you were right.”

“Beautiful. Did he also think you were trying to seduce him?”

“Oh my God.”

Summer fades slowly, the first week of September stretching out for miles in front of Draco. The heady, shimmering haze of it feels infinite.

“I never want to leave,” Harry confesses in the soft, secluded dark of their bed, and Draco knows he isn’t talking about the way the curtains drop from the ceiling and seem to block the rest of the world out.

“Yeah?”

“I panicked, the last time. I was gone before I slowed down to feel much of anything about it. But the first time, after Ella and Marcie’s visit, it was… It felt like I was leaving everything about myself that mattered here.”

Draco brushes Harry’s curls off his forehead, “Is that why you came back?”

“Mm. A little. I got home, or… back to Grimmauld. And I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said. About loving something, and staying, hoping it’d love you back. About getting tired of waiting. And I realized that I was never going to get what I wanted there. Sirius is gone. He’s not… he’s not there. He hated that fucking house. And there’s nothing noble about waiting for a ghost. If I was going to wait on anything, hope for anything, I was going to do it for you. So I came back.”

A flushed teenager sells shaved ice out of a rickety wooden shack on the side of the highway, where Draco has realized most things worth eating in Castilleja are. It’s painted white and what once would have been a bright royal blue. Now the color is sun-washed and the paint is flaking off in thin strips, exposing the weathered boards underneath.

“What the fuck is tiger’s blood?”

The girl behind the counter looks, a little, like she wants to die. Draco can sympathize. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose with the back of her hand and flushes darker.

“It’s, um, a combination of strawberry and watermelon and coconut. It’s good. Especially if you add cream.”

“Cream?”

“It’s not really cream. Just soft serve mix.”

“Christ,” Draco mutters, “I’m going to pass out in the middle of eating this, aren’t I?”

“You know, until a couple months ago, I thought only little kids had sugar crashes.”

“Shut up.”

“What the hell, I’ll get tiger’s blood with cream. Draco?”

“Dare I ask what a pickadilly is?”

The girl’s eyes light up, “Oh, it’s shaved ice with pickle juice instead of syrup! A lot of people get it with crushed Hot Cheetos or gummy worms.”

“I’ll take blue coconut, please.”

“Lawless bloody country,” Harry breathes as they move aside to wait for their order, “Pickle juice. And hot crisps? What could possibly possess someone to eat that?”

“Logan is kind of obsessed with pickles. And hot crisps. I think it’s a thing here.”

“And she thinks beans on toast is a crime.”

Their shaved ice starts to melt in the time it takes for them to walk back to the truck, Harry’s running down his sun-dark skin in vibrant red rivulets. He smiles, sharp, and lays his tongue flat against his forearm, looking right at Draco as he drags it slowly towards the protruding bone in his wrist.

Draco feels it everywhere, overheated, body suddenly too small to comfortably hold the tide of want at bay.

“Um,” he coughs, “What. What were you saying?”

“God, you’re pretty when you blush.”

“I think that’s a sunburn,” Draco lies.

“Uh huh.”

Logan tells him there’s supposed to be a meteor shower that night, so he leads Harry out to the river after dark. He doesn’t want to be the first one to say it, but it’s sort of underwhelming. The meteors fall in thin white streaks against the black sky, scattered and minutes apart.

“I thought it would be more exciting.”

Draco presses an elbow to the space between two of Harry’s ribs, but doesn’t dig it in, “You’re so annoying.”

“Baby. You were definitely thinking the same thing,” Harry leans in to press a wet, open kiss to the warm skin behind Draco’s ear, “I don’t think either of us are patient enough for stargazing.”

“I think… I think you should speak for yourself. I can be patient.”

“Oh, can you?”

“I waited for you, didn’t I?”

He feels the gentle scrape of Harry’s stubble and teeth on his neck like a warning, a reminder that Harry had been waiting, too. He was never in it alone.

Draco laughs breathlessly, “And you’re the one that broke, in the end. So my point stands.”

“Brat.”

“You like it.”

“Baby.”

Draco gasps, once, twice. Harry chases the third with his gorgeous mouth, threading his strong fingers through Draco’s, easing him back onto the riverbank.

“We can’t do this here,” Draco’s voice goes high, almost a whine, and Harry smiles against the corner of his lips.

“We’re not doing anything.”

“Harry.”

“No, I want the other one.”

Draco moans, embarrassingly, “Darling.”

“We’re just kissing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Draco squirms on the ground, testing, just to feel the force of Harry’s body holding him down. He can’t believe he ever felt the deadened, numb chill of seventeen. It’s a distant memory now, another life altogether, so impossibly far from the knife-edge, incandescent blaze of nineteen that it’s as if it happened in a dream, on another planet, to someone else.

“Please.”

“You can be patient,” Harry says, “Right?”

“I can,” Draco whispers, straining up towards him, “But you can’t. So I don’t think you’ll make me.”

He’s right. Harry relents quickly, dragging Draco back to the house and pressing him against their locked bedroom door. And then Draco kneels and takes Harry in his mouth and teaches him patience.

Draco spends an early morning working out exactly how to do what he wants, how to make it look the way it does in his head. He means to wait until after he takes Logan to work for the day, but Harry brings him tea and apparently he really can’t be patient, not anymore, not when it comes to Harry.

He takes a sip of the Earl Grey, “Do you want to see what I’ve been working on?”

Harry comes around the table, sliding a hand into Draco’s hair, scratching lightly at his scalp.

“Glamours?” he asks, looking down at the book Draco has cracked open in front of him.

Draco tilts his head back, accepting a soft brush of Harry’s lips against his own, smiling, “Look up, darling.”

The room darkens, first, magic-powered lights flickering out when Draco nudges at them. He makes the night sky on the ceiling, a vast array of glittering stars, spiraling constellations, and planets hanging overhead. And then he tells the meteors to fall, in bright, burning streaks.

“What,” Logan says from the wide open doorway, “The fuck?”

Everything stops. The swirling galaxy, Harry’s breathless laughter, Draco’s smile. It all freezes, for a moment, and then drops. The false stars bounce and scatter on the floor before vanishing into nothing.

Draco and Harry look at each other. Pansy is going to be furious that they did this without her, that they were careless enough to make it necessary, but despite that and despite the fact that it’s technically against the law, they’re in agreement. It’s time.

“Do you want to maybe sit down?”

When all is said and done, Logan takes the news spectacularly well.

“Oh thank God,” she sighs, “I thought it was some kind of murder sex cult. Like the Mansons.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Logan waves her hand around, still looking stunned, “I’ll show you some documentaries.”

“You’re… not upset? Confused? You don’t think we’re crazy?”

“Well, I just saw that shit, so unless it’s a mass hallucination I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s better than a cult, Jesus. When you said you all went to school together, and then traumatized kids who don’t know anything about pop culture kept showing up to stay at your weirdly remote house, I thought it was going to be so much worse, honestly. Magic is fine. Great even!”

“Alright,” Harry says, baffled, “Well.”

“Wait but all that about your dad, and about turning him in…”

“Still true,” Draco pauses, “It’s, uh, a little more complicated than that. I can tell you whatever you want to know, but it’s not a fun story, and I’ve never had to actually tell it before, so.”

Logan accepts it easily, shaking her head, “I have so many questions, but most of them are stupid, and all of them can wait.”

“What’s your stupidest one?” Harry asks with a slightly open-mouthed grin, the precursor to his laugh.

Someday, he knows, he will tell her everything, when it’s a more distant memory, when it no longer feels like the ghost of war is just behind him. She’s curious, she always is, and he finds that he would like her to know. But he’s relieved that it won’t be today.

Pansy returns to a Juniper Valley fundamentally altered. Harry is back, and Logan knows about magic, and Draco can’t manage to be worried about anything at all, not even Pansy’s reaction.

“How was it?” he asks when she arrives in the study.

She shrugs, “Aster was all Hufflepuff about it, as usual. Completely unconcerned. Worried more about his cat than anything else. Dad cried. Nya went completely mental once the train pulled away.”

“As well as can be expected, then.”

“Yeah. I’ll be getting a full report of your pining from Logan, by the way, so don’t even bother trying to tell me you were fine.”

“Well…” Draco can feel his face heating despite himself, “About that.”

Pansy stops in the middle of the hallway, and in that split second of stillness, the door to the courtyard rattles open and Logan and Harry come in from outside, their laughter filling up the next room.

“I hoped I’d get a few more days of peace before you resolved anything,” Pansy says wistfully, “I guess I’m happy for you, or whatever.”

“You know you could at least pretend to be shocked.”

“And why would I do that? He basically told me he was in love with you weeks ago.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

She rolls her eyes, “Basically being the operative word. On the off chance I was making a false assumption, I refrained. I did what I could without causing permanent emotional damage, so you can’t accuse me of negligence. Why do you think I started dragging Logan out of the house for things?”

“Because you want to date her but you’re too scared to ask her properly.”

“And why exactly does that have to happen at the mediocre Italian restaurant in Castilleja instead of, I don’t know, in my very beautiful and sound-proofed bedroom here?”

“I don’t know?”

“You can be shockingly dumb, sometimes. If I was going to actually hit on Logan, I would’ve done it by now. Honestly.”

“Wait, you’re not going to hit on her?”

“Draco. No. She’s shown absolutely zero interest in me. She treats us almost exactly the same way. I’m not in the business of humiliating myself like that.”

“Like me, you mean.”

She grins, “You said it.”

“Just,” Draco lays a hand on her forearm, “Loganknowsaboutmagic. And I’m not sure you’re right, about her treating us the same.”

Pansy turns, slowly, a thundering expression on her face, “She knows what?”

It’s ridiculous, and a safety hazard, and there are infinitely easier ways to do it, but Draco can’t help himself. When Harry’s things arrive, delivered by a team of four burly American wizards, they empty the entire room and spread all of Draco’s things on the floor of the hallway outside.

He doesn’t want it to feel like Harry has just moved his things into Draco’s bedroom. He wants them to fill the room together, equal parts his and Harry’s.

“Do you want to put anything on the walls?”

Draco would do anything for Harry, but he thinks this might be a difficult concession for him to make. He silently hopes Harry says no.

Harry scrunches his nose, and Draco doesn’t have to restrain himself, so he kisses the wrinkled bridge of it.

“Wouldn’t it ruin the whole,” he gestures broadly at the propped open door, the fluttering white curtains, “Mood?”

“No,” Draco lies.

“I think it would. I don’t want it to stop feeling the way it does.”

“Oh thank God,” Draco sighs.

Harry rolls his eyes, “You are not as good of a liar as you think you are, you know.”

“Okay, why do people keep saying that? I’m an excellent liar!”

“It’s your eyes,” he says, “They give you away.”

“They do not.”

Harry laughs, “They do! I’ve always thought they were beautiful, you know. The most honest part of you, the part I could always read, even if I couldn’t translate.”

Draco wants to cry. He kisses Harry’s face again instead, his brow bone this time.

“You’re one to talk.”

Hours later, they’re still bickering fondly over things neither of them care much about, like bookshelf space and which of Draco’s things to put in storage somewhere else in the house.

“And this?” Harry brandishes a button, round and shiny and illustrated with his face.

HARRY POTTER PROTECTION COMMITTEE

Draco blushes, “Harry.”

“Didn’t realize you made another variation.”

He considers shutting up about it, but he doesn’t have to anymore, and it’s not like Harry doesn’t already know.

“It’s the original version,” Draco says, resigned, “Pansy might have another variation, too. I never meant to distribute the disguised ones.”

“The disguised ones?” Harry’s mouth drops open.

“Yes.”

“You really were fucking obsessed with me.”

“We’ve had this conversation already.”

“Yeah,” Harry grins, a little stunned, a little cocky, “But I like being reminded. And…”

“And?”

The tone of Harry’s voice, the way he’s holding himself, shifts into something steadier and gravely earnest, “It doesn’t quite seem real, that we were on the same side the whole time. That we could have just talked to each other.”

Draco shrugs, “As much as I believe that I shouldn’t have been asked to choose, I did make the choice myself, you know. I could have talked to you, really, and I knew that I could. But I made the choice, and I don’t think I ever would have made another one. I didn’t want to leave my mother, and I wanted to help.”

“I know. And I’m not saying you would have run away from home and joined the Order. You could’ve been on the Inquisitorial Squad,” Harry says, “And fed them false information. Or helped me draw up DA lessons. It makes me… I don’t know. A lot of it was shit. But sometimes it was fun, freeing. Us against the world, you know? There’s no real use in imagining what it could have been like, but sometimes I can’t help it. I don’t like that you didn’t get that part.”

Harry’s right. There’s no use in torturing himself with it, but for a moment, he wishes time reversed.

And he knows, now, that he was failed. He knows where and how it happened, knows each of the people who looked at him and decided that he wasn’t worth the protection they owed him, that fourteen was old enough for them to ignore it. Through it all, he never once regretted the choice he made in Dumbledore’s office.

He told his mother that he could have been safe, but that was never going to happen, and it was never what he wanted in the first place. He would not have been safe, by Harry’s side, though he might have had that sometimes, the breathless hope of youth. He doesn’t regret the loss of either.

But he would have been loved.

The smoky, earthy smell of roasting green chile becomes easily recognizable, comforting, a foundational sense memory that accompanies every trip to the grocery store. One afternoon, Draco stops to watch the roasters, huge cylindrical cages, rotate over an open flame in front of the squat stucco building.

“I have a confession to make,” Harry whispers, “I hate green chile. It tastes awful.”

Draco turns an incredulous look on him, “You keep that to yourself. In fact, I’m forgetting you said that as we speak because if Logan ever finds out, she’ll run you out of the state.”

Harry’s touched every corner of his life now, cast lumos on every dark corner, drawn out every bit of pain and examined it with steady, careful hands. He’s reassembled it. And the second Draco steps back into it, steps back into something he used to do alone, used to do without thinking or feeling very much at all, it’s transformed. Like the saturation, the clarity, has been dialed up.

They buy groceries, and Harry gets him arguing over granola, which he has never had an opinion about before. Food, in general, has long been a necessary struggle, a minefield of texture and taste and survival. He ate because he had to, and most enjoyment of it had vanished with his appetite, years ago.

He still has trouble recognizing when he’s hungry. He still forgets to eat unless he’s reminded, sometimes. And he enjoys food now, enjoys making it and eating it, and Harry didn’t do that. Draco did, and Logan did, and Arabella did.

But Harry won’t let him ignore it. Draco says he doesn’t care what kind of granola they buy, even though he’s the only one who eats it, and ten minutes later he can fully articulate every preference he has, from the size of the chunks to the types of nuts to the flavor.

Draco says he doesn’t care, and Harry dares him to.

They stop at the fruit stand, and Matías is nowhere to be seen. One of his cousins rings up their total. It’s only when they’re loading the produce into the bed of the pickup that Matías appears, jogging up to them with a folder in his hands.

“Hey, I haven’t seen Logan around lately, and I’m not sure I can get away long enough to drop by the store before closing, so could you give this to her?”

Draco restrains himself enough to leave it closed.

“Sure.”

“Thank you,” he sighs, “And… Let her know there’s no pressure, yeah? I just need to have an answer by the end of next week.”

Draco narrows his eyes as Matías retreats. The second the passenger door closes, Harry steals the folder, flipping it open.

“Hm.”

“What is it?”

“An itinerary. And other things. Pamphlets. A campground reservation.”

“He’s inviting her camping?”

“Looks like a group thing. There’s arrival times for different people, so…”

Logan seems to know what it is as soon as she sees the folder with her name printed on the upper right corner in a neat script.

“Oh. It’s the camping trip.”

Draco and Harry look at each other, then back to Logan.

“Yeah,” Draco says, “Matías said there’s no pressure, he just needs an answer by the end of next week.”

“I really though they would’ve given up by now,” Logan mutters.

“I can just swing by the fruit stand tomorrow and tell him no for you?”

Logan doesn’t reply. She just looks at the folder, pained.

“What is it?”

“My old friends. From high school. They plan a camping trip every year, and they always invite me, and I always say no. Well, Matías invites me. I don’t… I’ve never worked up the courage to ask if anyone else actually wants me there.”

“I think it’s safe to assume they do,” Harry says, “You know, if you keep getting included in the plans. Do they talk to you outside of this?”

Logan shrugs, “Not really. But it’s not exactly their fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t myself, back then. The person that they think they know doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did. I constantly felt like I was locked somewhere deep inside of myself, like something else was living my life for me, making my decisions. And the first chance I had, I got out of Castilleja and cut all contact with everyone who knew me. Obviously I came back, and Matías was still here so we talk, but not like… it’s all surface level. He knows we’re not really friends. Not anymore.”

“Okay, but they clearly still think of you as part of the group. Have you ever thought about, I don’t know, apologizing for ignoring them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Logan snaps, “I can’t. I… I guess I never stopped feeling like I was something… unknowable. Unlovable. And I was afraid that seeing them again, or really talking to Matías, would just confirm it. They’d see that I was different, that I had been wearing this, this mask the whole time they knew me, and they wouldn’t want to know what was underneath. That if they did, they’d hate it.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Draco says gently.

Harry bites his lip, hesitates, “I think you’re wrong, for what it’s worth. I think it’s easy to feel like you’re alone, invisible even, but it’s usually not true. People still see you. People still love you. And no matter how hard you try to keep yourself safe and distant and disconnected, you can’t keep people from caring about you. It’s just not something that’s up to you.”

“Maybe that’s true for you-”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

And when Harry glances at Draco, his eyes are warm, adoring.

Logan sighs, “If I… Would you go with me? I know Matías usually brings one or two of his siblings, and the rest of them bring partners when they have them or other friends. I think I could do it, now, maybe. If I didn’t have to do it alone.”

“I wouldn’t let you do it alone,” Draco says, “None of us would.”

Draco sits on his bed and watches as Harry begins to undress, peeling the shirt off of his body and thumbing open the button on his jeans.

“Are you excited to meet them? Logan’s friends?” Harry asks.

Draco is momentarily distracted by the sharp line of his hipbone, “Oh, uh, yeah. And I think you’re right, they probably know her better than she thinks they do.”

Harry pauses, shuffles closer to stand between Draco’s knees, “I was talking about you. You got that, right?”

“Yes, Harry, I got that.”

“Mm. Just making sure.”

“Sometimes I can’t believe it,” Draco says, “How much we missed.”

“Yeah?”

“Most of it, I can’t make myself regret. Because you’re alive, and Dean and Luna and Marcie and Ginny are too. I don’t know if that would be true if I hadn’t been there. I only wish…”

“What?”

“I could have been loved, if I had been with you.”

Harry shakes his head, immediate and insistent, “You were. You didn’t know it, but you were. I already loved you then. Luna loved you. I know it didn’t make a difference, but it’s important to me that you know that you were loved the whole time.”

“Darling,” he laces their fingers together and whispers, just for the two of them, “Of course it makes a difference.”

“You can’t be serious,” Draco says, flat, “Pans, you won’t even go hiking with us. What are you doing tagging along on a three-day-long camping trip?”

She tosses her hair in defiance, “There’s nothing wrong with trying something new.”

It clicks for him when they’re all introduced, the weird tension between Logan and Sacha, a woman with strawberry blonde curls cascading down her back and freckles dotted over every inch of visible skin.

“They’ve been weird about each other forever,” Robbie says, matter-of-fact, when Draco tries to subtly probe for details, “It was obvious that Sacha had a crush on Logan, but Lo’s always been harder to read.”

“And Matías?”

“What about him?”

“Did he always have a thing for Logan?”

Robbie is tall, towering over everyone but Harry, who has shot up four inches over the past year. He has a piercing in his ear and a feeling about him that Draco recognizes. And he’d given Draco an appreciative once-over when he first climbed out of the truck, which was more embarrassing than flattering, really.

Later, Harry had laughed and kissed his face and said, “I can’t take you anywhere.”

But in the moment, he’d glared furiously at Robbie and laced their fingers together as soon as he wedged himself between Logan and Draco.

Robbie tilts his head, “Matías doesn’t have a thing for Logan. Everyone knows she doesn’t date men.”

Draco blinks and traces the contours of his first conversation with Matías. God, he’d been warning Draco off because he thought Draco was going to be homophobic about it, not because he was jealous, and Draco had only tried to antagonize him further. Harry laughs at him for that, too.

Logan isn’t comfortable in their company the way she’s comfortable in the kitchen of Juniper Valley, or in the way she’s comfortable behind the counter of the store, but it’s clear that they all know her well, broken down to bare essentials. Matías, Robbie, Christine, Sacha, Logan. Draco can see the places they slot together, the places where the rest of the group are always a half-step behind.

Christine tells a story about their time in high school but they keep cutting each other off halfway through a sentence to start the next part, talking over each other and grinning at a joke that hasn’t quite been told yet. The outsiders, Draco and Harry and Pansy, but also Matías’s brother, Luis, and Christine’s husband, Nabahe, are stuck playing catch up.

He doesn’t mind. It’s nice to sit back and let it all wash over him. It’s nice to have this scrap of knowledge too, this bit of Logan he didn’t before. It’s nice to know that Logan was always seen, always loved, even when she couldn’t accept it.

Harry and Draco volunteer to set up one of the tents, which proves to be a mistake when they devolve into bickering within five minutes. Normally, Draco doesn’t mind it, flinging half-hearted insults back and forth, but he can feel the glaring sun getting to him, making his words come out sharper and meaner.

He closes his eyes, “I’m going to stand over there for a minute.”

“Draco-”

“It’s fine,” Draco opens his eyes again, and Harry looks like he’s just been punched, so he tries to soften his voice more, “I’m fine. Just overheated and frustrated. And I know we play at it, but I don’t want to actually fight with you. So I’m going to stand over there, in the shade, and drink some water.”

Harry nods, but his face is still wary, hurt.

Actually being with Harry is as terrifying as it is lovely. They’ve both waited so long for it, waded through so much pain to get here, and though it doesn’t feel anything close to fragile, Draco wants to treat it with care. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get to a point where he can be reckless with it. Where he can forget just how miraculous it is that he gets to have it at all.

Pansy sidles up to him once he’s cooled off a bit, “You know you’re going to fight. It’s kind of inevitable.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be over something this stupid.”

And, late at night in their tent, Draco shuffles as close as he can to Harry’s body, warm and tense.

“Hey,” he whispers, “You know I love you. It’s just a tent.”

Harry sighs, looking right at Draco, “I know. I don’t like the idea of you leaving when you’re mad.”

“Harry,” Draco says, trying not to smile, “You could see me the whole time. And I wasn’t actually mad, which is why I wanted to go. Because I didn’t actually care about the tent.”

“I’d rather fight than watch you leave. I know a fight isn’t going to kill us.”

“Me walking away from a petty argument isn’t going to kill us either.”

Harry stares at him for a moment, muscles still locked, and then he turns away, “Alright.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“This is important to you.”

Harry shrugs, eyes focused on anything but Draco, “I know it’s irrational. I know you weren’t actually leaving.”

But Draco thinks, perhaps, that a part of him didn’t.

“If it’s something you need, you can have it,” he says, “You can have anything. I won’t leave during an argument. I just want you to know that it wasn’t what I was doing. I’m not going to leave you, certainly not over a tent.”

“I know,” Harry replies softly, and lets the tension melt out of his body.

“I won’t do it again.”

In the morning, they wake early enough to watch the sun rising over the edge of the mountain, golden and bright. It’s Draco’s favorite time of day, when the world is quiet, and the air is cold and clear and each breath in is ?. Soon, everyone else will be up too and they’ll eat breakfast and go white water rafting in a nearby river, but for now it’s just Draco and Harry and the sun.

Harry leans on his shoulder and yawns, “I bet you a hundred galleons that Pansy hates rafting.”

“There is no way I’m taking that bet.”

Draco and Harry, predictably, love it. When they break for lunch halfway through their route, Harry tucks a wild laugh into the crook of Draco’s neck, folding himself over to manage it.

“We should go repelling again,” he says, breathless, elated, “I wanted to do the straps in your harness last time and I didn’t get to.”

Draco smiles indulgently, playing absently with his fingers, trailing a light touch over the veins on the back of his hand, his wrist, his inner arm, “Whatever you want.”

“I didn’t think I’d like this, you know.”

“What, rafting?”

“Adrenaline,” Harry nips at Draco’s neck for emphasis, but also to be a fucking tease, “I thought I’d had enough excitement for one lifetime. But it’s sort of like… you remember when I was talking about you missing the fun parts?”

“Yes, I remember the conversation we had not two weeks ago.”

“Draco,” he says, in the same tone he’d say asshole, “I’m trying to be nice. Let me be nice to you.”

“What you’re trying to do is tell me that river rafting is comparable to the years of shared near-death experiences I missed out on enjoying.”

“Well, yes. But also I’m having fun. Because you’re here, and we get to do stupid and slightly risky things together instead of separately, and when I imagined what it might be like to be with you, it was something like this. Except this is better because there’s way less chance we actually die.”

Draco is uncomfortably damp, getting just a little cold in the shade, and he’s never been happier.

“Don’t say a fucking word,” Pansy seethes, twisting the water out of her hair, “Or I swear to Merlin, I will drown you in the river.”

Draco couldn’t speak if he wanted to. He’s laughing too hard to even breathe properly, bent at the waist, gasping and wheezing and going red in the face. Harry is holding it together, probably because unlike Draco, he doesn’t have years of ruthless tormenting to get revenge for. All the time Pansy spent ribbing him about Harry makes it very easy, actually, for Draco to find this hilarious.

After all, his useless gay pining is over. He’s secured the love of his life. They have mature, thoughtful conversations about how they want to handle disagreements. And now Pansy is doing humiliating shit in pursuit of a girl, and Draco is going to milk every fucking second.

Camping was one thing. Rafting was another. She could’ve stayed back with Nabahe, who had begged out of it. But she came, and then she got distracted trying to listen in on Logan and Sacha’s conversation and fell into the river.

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she mutters.

When she clambers back into the raft and they set off again, she sits by Draco, further away from Logan and Sacha, so he knows she doesn’t mean it.

Draco is in charge of making dinner that night, a version of Arabella’s jambalaya recipe made in individual foil packets and cooked beneath hot coals, followed by Dutch oven peach cobbler. Harry lingers, as always, at his elbow.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t take you up on that bet.”

“I can’t believe that actually happened,” Harry whispers.

Draco smiles gleefully, “I know.”

“I do feel kind of bad. She was so embarrassed.”

He rolls his eyes, “I have no sympathy for her. Do you know how hard she made fun of me for you? This is cosmic justice. Besides, she could’ve gotten something out of it. Logan was worried enough for a hug, at least, or like half an hour of undivided attention.”

“You’re such a Slytherin,” Harry says, in the same tone he’d say I love you, “But also you’re right. Falling into the river should have been the plan all along, really.”

Logan comes back to Juniper Valley with a renewed lightness, a peace she didn’t always have before. Pansy comes back with a renewed determination to ignore whatever is happening between them.

It’s true that Logan is inscrutable, sometimes, but Draco thinks he gets it now. Meeting her friends had been the last piece of the puzzle, the last bit of history and harm that he hadn’t put together yet. And Logan doesn’t treat Pansy the way she treats Draco, or the way she treats Harry, or the way she treats her old friends. It’s softer, sweeter, far more careful.

Like something she’s afraid to break. And that, more than anything, convinces him. She pulls back, not in the same way that she’d pulled back from Matías and Robbie and Sacha and Christine, and not for the same reasons, but it’s the same instinct. It comes from the same desire to avoid the sting of rejection.

Neither of them are likely to take the leap, but they’re not going anywhere either. They have time. So Draco won’t meddle. Or, at least, not unless Harry gets him drunk and asks him to again.

Logan flings herself into the backseat of the truck after her shift, waving a bright orange paper over the center console, “I have been waiting for this all summer. Your very first Railfire.”

“My first what?”

“Railfire! It’s a Castilleja tradition. Well, really, it’s an excuse to get wine drunk on Main Street and set shit on fire. It’s fun! Kind of a public safety nightmare but fun!”

“None of that was a coherent explanation.”

“It’s, like, the town’s signature festival. We do it every year, the last Saturday in September. There’s a parade and a bunch of other stuff and then there’s a huge party on Main Street with food trucks and wine and bonfires.”

“And it’s called Railfire?”

“Technically there’s an official name that’s like Harvest Fiesta or something dumb but everyone calls it Railfire, because of the railroad. And the fire.”

“What?”

“Castilleja used to have a big train station. Well, it wasn’t that big, it was just bigger than it should have been, given the size of the town. And there was this guy, he was an investor in the railroad and he owned a bunch of businesses in town geared towards travelers. The whole town hated him, and eventually someone set fire to the entire block where the station was, so it burned a couple of his hotels and restaurants and stuff. And the station, obviously. It spread through a lot more of the town, which was bad, but it basically drove him out of town. And we threw a party. And then we kept doing it every year.”

Draco laughs, “That can’t be real.”

“I’m serious! That’s where it comes from!”

“So to celebrate arson and the destruction of the entire town, you have a parade?”

“A parade, fireworks, a cornbread competition, sheep races, and a talent show. And the party.”

“Americans,” Harry says, just to rile Logan up.

She doesn’t take the bait, “It’s more a New Mexico thing, I think. Just wait until you learn why Truth or Consequences is called Truth or Consequences.”

So they watch the parade in the morning, each float gaudy and fire-themed, and then they wander around the closed streets of Castilleja, eating frybread drizzled in honey and sipping lemonade from obscenely large jugs. Draco eats mango sticky rice for the first time, bought from a Thai food truck he’s never seen in town before, and they usually aren’t quite as affectionate in public as they are at home, but Harry pulls him in and licks the sweetened coconut milk from his mouth.

The party is big, and loud, and takes up two blocks. Draco drinks more red wine than he ever has in his life from the cheap plastic cups they’re selling from a stall on the pavement. Pansy remains composed, no matter how much she has to drink, but she gets progressively sadder as the evening goes on, staring furtively at Logan when she thinks no one is paying attention.

Harry tips his head onto Draco’s shoulder, “If we leave early, Pansy will have to go back to Logan’s place with her.”

“I’m not doing this again,” Draco says, lying.

Harry hasn’t been drinking, and his driving lessons have been going well enough that Draco won’t fear for his life on the way back to Juniper Valley. But the plan had been for all of them to stay at Logan’s.

And Draco’s not drunk, really. He hasn’t been drunk since the night of Harry’s birthday in Crawley Down, when he blacked out. He’s tipsy, and the love of his life is in front of him, beautiful and smiling wide and asking him to go back to their empty house.

Harry hooks a finger in one of Draco’s belt loops, “Home?”

As they leave, he sees Logan pulling Pansy into a lazy, uncoordinated waltz.

“I need your help,” Pansy says through clenched teeth, like it’s painful to say, “Logan’s next day off, I need you to keep her out of the house.”

“The whole day?”

“I’m sure you can manage it.”

“Yeah, of course I will,” he coos, “And I think it’s sweet, Pans. That you’re doing something for her.”

“I’ll garrote you in your sleep.”

“Alright,” he holds his hands up.

She pokes at his chest with a threatening, blue-lacquered nail, “You are not going to ruin this. Not a word to anyone. Including Harry.”

“I’m not agreeing to that.”

“Fine,” Pansy rolls her eyes, “But I mean it. It’s a surprise, so you guys can’t let anything slip to Logan.”

“I promise.”

“Don’t eat dinner, bring her back at six, and then stay away.”

Draco opens his mouth, a laugh already on his tongue.

“In. Your. Sleep.”

They go repelling again, because it’ll keep them all day, and because Harry said he wanted to. Soon, it’ll get cold and eventually it’ll start snowing, though they’re far enough out of the mountains that it’ll never get too deep, and they’ll do a little less of this.

Harry gets to check Draco’s harness. Logan gags.

After, when they leave Logan, confused, at the door, Draco takes Harry to Santa Fe. It’s not for business, but they still meet Kit for a late dinner at one of the many rooftop bars she loves. They share nachos and Harry orders a beer that Draco steals a sip of, shuddering at the taste after months of sweet wine and Logan’s margaritas.

Kit leans across the table, “Anything you’d like to inform me of?”

“We’re not engaged!” Draco says, a little too fast and a little too loud.

Harry shoots him a wide-eyed look. Kit laughs in his face anyways.

They stay at the same hotel Draco had when he first came to New Mexico, and he rides Harry into the soft mattress until they’re both shivery and wordless.

Sometimes his love for Harry is an oasis, the water he’d walk through a desert for, the cool, paradisaical refuge from the relentless heat and hunger. It’s a bottomless pool, an ocean, waiting for him at the end of the world, ready for him to lower himself into.

Sometimes, like tonight, it’s a flash flood. It’s wild, alive, dangerous. It leaves him washed clean and imprinted with ephemeral streams, a memory set in his skin of everywhere Harry has been, a path for him to follow whenever he wants. He calls the rain and Draco drowns and they never stop reaching for each other’s hands.

Logan and Pansy don’t offer up any information about the night before, and Draco doesn’t make a big deal out of it when they start exchanging kisses over breakfast, and Harry keeps his mouth shut even though Draco can tell he desperately wants to interrogate them. He knows it’s difficult, still, for both of them to let themselves have this, and to have it where other people can see. So he puts aside his desire to know and he hides his smile in the cup of tea Harry places in his waiting palm.

Late in the autumn, after the first barely-there snowfall has hit Juniper Valley, Draco goes back to England. He’s tested their preliminary solution for the Room again and again in the lab, reaching the point where they’re as sure as they can be that it’s viable without actually putting it into action.

Andromeda welcomes them with open arms and a grinning, babbling Teddy. He’s not quite talking, in that in-between stage where the sounds are becoming more and more like words but haven’t really formed yet. Draco watches Harry speak to him like he’s holding a full conversation.

“I’m so happy that he has you,” Andromeda says quietly, “And that you have him. I worry about you both.”

Draco’s first instinct is to tell her not to worry, that she doesn’t need to, but then he remembers the first real conversation he ever had with her and he stops himself. She worries because she cares, and that’s not pointless.

“Thank you.”

They go to the school in the morning, meeting Hermione and Ron at the gate. Inside, a team of curse-breakers, Professor Islington, and Headmistress McGonagall wait for them on the seventh floor. It’s a ten hour day, ending after the sun has set and the castle has gone still and hushed around them again, and when it’s done, when the Room once again presents itself in answer to a question that Draco can’t quite articulate, he’s the one to open the door.

He remembers wishing for a homecoming, for the Room to appear to him and welcome him in. He doesn’t need it like he did then.

And he doesn’t feel it, when he steps inside to find the charred remains of a long extinguished fire. The Room of Hidden Things is no more, at least the version of it that he knows, and there is no sense of recognition, no kinship with the ashes or with the discarded objects they once were.

There’s a rush of gratitude, from him, from whatever magic binds the Room together, but he feels no pull, no desire to stay here, to make it a sanctuary again. He is only glad that it can go on serving the students of Hogwarts. He is only glad that he helped.

Out in the cold air, on the front steps of the castle, Harry winds an arm around Draco’s shoulders, linking their hands loosely, “Ready to go home?”