Harry would not walk away from this one. Not this time. He’d let Draco push him away every other time, every time Harry tried to show him how he felt or tried to save him or even just tried to kiss him, just the one time so he knew what it felt like, but he could not, he would not, turn his back on this time.
“Of course not.” Draco sounded like a bit of his old self again, exasperated in the way he is every time Harry says something he thinks is stupid. “But there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?”
Harry still doesn’t move, just stands there, thinking of all the nights they’ve had before this, where they both lie awake in the separate rooms and stare at the ceiling, thinking of the ghosts that still must be haunting them. Where Draco cleans until his skin is rubbed raw from the bleach and Harry climbs through every corner of the house. How they sleep and face their ghosts alone, all those heroes and martyrs and old friends that only show up in their dreams, and a part of them is selfish enough to like it, even though it would be better for everyone involved if they would learn to let go.
“Don’t be stupid.” Harry crosses the room, the floorboards creaking under his bare feet. He wants Draco to give him a sign if this is okay or not, if he should keep going or turn away, but he gets nothing, just Draco’s eyes roaming every line of Harry’s face, maybe trying to find some sort of signal himself. “There’s always something.”
“Harry—”
Draco swallows his protest, and Harry pulls back the covers, climbs underneath them, right beside them. He tells himself that this is the right thing and not a huge mistake, that one of them will have to make the first move if either of them wants any peace. Tells himself that between the two of them, he has always been the brave one, and this is what brave people do: crawl under the covers with a man that he loves, a man that he thinks loves him back but will never admit it, and waits for him to walk away.
“Shut up.” Harry punches at the pillow just to give himself something do and then lies down, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was worth it if he was just going to be doing the same damn thing, waiting, watching the whole night instead of sleeping. “Just sleep, Draco.”
He feels him watching in the darkness, and part of him wants to reach up and touch his face, to slide his hand up his arm and trace the veins that stand out against the skin. To pull him down to him, trace along the edges of the dark mark, tell Draco that he loves him and not have it be refuted on the sole basis of what they used to be to each other.
“I never sleep,” Draco says, but there is no longer any frantic breathing, and in the end, he does lay back down beside him, even if Harry is sure that neither of them get much sleep.
The next night, Draco makes himself a sleeping draught.
Harry tries not to think that it’s anything to do with him.
They’re still not sleeping, either of them.
Harry keeps going around the house, even though it was a habit that he thought he had been able to stop ages ago. He peeks behind curtains, moves chairs around the room to see if anything is hiding behind them. He pulls on doorknobs and rummages through cupboards, shoves the clothes to either side of the closet so he can see all the way to the back. Harry manages to stop short of poking his way through Draco’s room, contenting himself with pressing his ear to the heavy oak door and seeing if he can hear anything.
(He doesn’t ask Kreacher to check up on him, no matter what Draco might have suggested the next morning.)
He knows Draco isn’t sleeping either. Things keep showing up cleaner than ever, and Harry stumbles down to the kitchen in the morning to find a full breakfast waiting for him, even if there is no Draco in sight. His hands are always raw and chapped, too, even when Hermione started leaving some of her lotion for him to try.
“This isn’t working.” Harry tells him one night, when the two of them find themselves in the kitchen at the same time. Harry had been triple checking the locks on the front door, and Draco was scrubbing the floors by hand. He couldn’t tell which one of them was more embarrassed to be caught. “Not for either of us.”
“That’s what sleeping draughts are for.” Draco was talking from his place on the ground, then realized how it must have looked, so he got up, knees groaning and soap suds dripping off his hands. “That’s all I was waiting for.”
Right, Harry thinks, looking at the bucket and the collection of sponges on the counter. Like you weren’t going to bottle it up to use tomorrow and just keep going, from the floor to the windows to the kitchen sink, and then to the bathroom, all of which is practically spotless because I know for a fact that you cleaned the whole downstairs the night before.
“Whatever.” Harry’s annoyed, suddenly, because if it wasn’t for Draco and his stubborn idea that he could do everything on his own, Harry wouldn’t have to do this. Instead, he could just wake up and turn his head to the side and reassure himself that Draco was still there, still alright, still breathing, how neither of them were about to be murdered by death eaters. He could just check the room, then, not the whole house, and when Draco started with his compulsive cleaning, Harry would be able to bring him back to bed. It would work out better for both of them.
“Harry.” Harry doesn’t turn around, and then there is a hand on his arm, so light he could ignore it but so pleading that he doesn’t. “Wait.”
Harry does wait. And he turns around, finding him face to face with a steaming goblet full of Draco’s potion.
Part of him, the nasty part, wants to say no. That if Draco doesn’t want his help, Harry won’t be taking anything from him. But he can’t quite bring himself to do it.
He takes the goblet, forces himself to try and show a bit of gratitude. “Thanks.”
Draco isn’t fooled, but that doesn’t stop him from tapping the rim of his own cup against Harry’s, quirking an eyebrow together. “Cheers.”
They drink it together, but when Harry goes back to bed, Draco stays.
There’s screaming again, but this time, Harry stays in bed.
He counts the cracks in the ceiling, discovers that there’s fifty-seven of them, and then counts them again. And again. He keeps trying to tell himself everything is fine, that no one is attacking anyone, that there is nothing hiding in his closet or under the bed, that if anything, he needs to call Hermione like she had told him to, anything to stop this before it starts, because Draco is fine, you are fine, stop being an idiot.
Only everything must not have been fine, because the door creaks open a second later. Harry almost hexes the person standing in the doorway before the brain catches up with his panic and he realizes that it was Draco he was about to send to St. Mungo’s.
“Draco?” He sits up and blinks against the blurry image in front of him, groping in the darkness for his glasses. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t say anything.” Even though Harry had heard it every day, he still wasn’t used to this pleading tone in Draco’s voice, how he asks instead of demands, and asks it in a way that made it clear he was expecting to be turned away each time. “Please don’t say anything.”
“Okay.” Harry didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. He didn’t know how to help anyone, anymore. “What do you want?”
“Can I just stay here?” He looked so small, hunched in on himself when he should be filling up the room. “Just for tonight.”
“Yeah.” Harry scrambles for the lamp and then winces at the sudden light, trying to clear a space beside him. It was an incredibly small bed. “Anything.”
Anything. It was such a small word, but it meant so much. Draco didn’t seem to have time for second thoughts tonight, just walked to the edge of the bed, hesitating before going any further.
“It’s alright Draco.” Harry reaches up and pulls Draco’s hand away, the one he had been using to claw at his arm. “It’s going to be okay.”
“It won’t,” Draco says, shoulders shuddering, but he still gets into the bed, falling into it more than climbing, like it had taken all his strength just to get this far. He buries himself in the covers and turns away from Harry, leaving him to decide how to do this.
You said you were the brave one, Harry thinks, reaching his arm around Draco and hoping he won’t be turned away this time. You said you’d be the one to make this easier for him.
He’s not sure that it’s going to let them sleep easier, but it has to be better to count each other’s breaths than count cracks in the ceiling. Harry just hopes that Draco feels the same way.
Chapter 23
Harry
They’re both staring down at the owl.
It’s a tight scroll, the ministry signature embossed across the seal in wax so golden it almost seems to shimmer. Neither of them make a move to break it open, too afraid of what might be hiding inside—a death notice, an arrest warrant, a call to arms, or maybe even worse, a notice that Draco was somehow forgiven and would be free to leave any moment he so chooses. In Harry’s experience, the ministry rarely brings good news.
“Do you want to open it?” Draco’s voice is hushed. They’ve both gotten quiet since the whole sleeping in the same bed thing started, like now they didn’t need to worry about drawing attention to each other. Whenever Draco wanted noticing, Harry was already looking.
“No.” Harry holds the scroll out to him, the owl hooting balefully at the window, waiting for one of them to sign the scrap of paper saying that it was received and understood. “It’s addressed to you.”
Harry wanted to know what was inside as badly as he needed to keep breathing, but he also didn’t have a clue what it might contain, and as he watched the emotions flicked across Draco’s face, he realized that maybe he didn’t want to.
“What?” Draco threw the parchment down to the table in disgust and Harry ripped it up. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve cleared the manor.” Draco’s hands were shaking again. Harry had thought it was getting better. “All evidence has been removed, everything dangerous taken out, and the property is returned to the only next of kin with a clear name.” His tone made it clear what he thought about all of this, dripping in derision. “Me.”
Harry didn’t know what was upsetting him so much, if it was the manor and the memories it held, of the fact that the ministry had the audacity to claim it as their own in the sake of justice, or maybe it was the fact that they considered him with the best reputation.
“That’s a good thing, right?” He felt like he was treading into unknown waters, where he won’t know how deep it goes until he takes the step off solid ground and falls down into the deep. He never had learned to swim. “To have your home back?”
Draco looked at him like he was stupid, then threw that scrap of parchment into the fire, not relaxing until he sees the corners curl and blacken. “You can’t go home again, Harry.” He passed behind him and clapped a hand down on his shoulder in a way that might have considered friendly, had they not been half asleep with their arms wrapped around each other only hours before. “Not even sure I’d want to.”
