Chapter Text
McGonagall is apologetic when she calls him to a meeting.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” she says. “I meant to do this so much earlier. Time gets away from the best of us, I suppose.”
He nods, tells her he doesn’t mind. They’re not sitting in front of the fire this time. It’s too warm for that, anyway, with April’s sun beating down on the castle. Instead, she sits behind the desk and he sits in a hard backed wooden chair in front of it, eating Ginger Newts from the tin. It feels much more casual this way, actually, when she’s not trying so hard to make it so.
“I’ll be brief,” she promises. “Do you have your list?”
“No,” he tells her. “I tried to write it, I did, but…”
“Harry, if you are still settled on being an Auror, I will still help you achieve that goal, but I had hoped you would be able to provide a few reasons for me.” She flips through his file, marking a few notes in the margins. “Your grades have greatly improved this year, actually. I’m very impressed.”
“That’s what happens when no one is trying to kill you, I guess,” Harry says. “But professor, I don’t think you understand. I’m not planning to be an Auror anymore.”
“Oh?” she asks, peering at him from above her glasses. Her quill is still as she asks him, “Then what have you got planned for after graduation?”
“I don’t know,” he tells her honestly. Before she can argue, he adds, “I like it like that.”
She closes his file and puts the quill aside. Taking off her glasses, she settles a bit more comfortably into her chair. She takes a Ginger Newt for herself and tells him, “I like to hold these meetings because most graduates of Hogwarts are only just now beginning to consider what their future looks like and I would like to help them make realistic choices to help them get what they need.
“But Harry, already your life has been dictated by need, although rarely your own. I had hoped, through these conversations, to find out what it is that you want to do rather than what you thought you needed to do.”
“And if I don’t know what I want to do?” he asks.
“That’s okay,” she says. “I’m just happy you’ve figured out which question you’re meant to be answering.”
Something settles inside him then, one last, panicked part of him that still felt as though he owed the world something. He takes another Ginger Newt and picks up his bag from the floor beside him.
“Before you go, though,” McGonagall says, stopping him. “I am curious to hear if you have any ideas for the year ahead.”
He’s realising now how many things he wants. It’s an easy list to fill; he hardly has to think about it. He just imagines a dark room, candlelight reflected on the glass, on the lake below. Draco asking him where he would go, saying, “That’s quite the list.”
“I think I might travel,” he says. McGonagall nods, smiling, and Harry is pleased to see that the worry that always seems to hide somewhere in her eyes, a worry reserved just for him, appears to be finally gone.
Harry tells Ron and Hermione just about the same thing later.
Ron just says, “Greece?” and Harry nods, tells him, “I keep dreaming about the beaches.”
They don’t seem all that worried about him either, as though sometime in the last couple of weeks they both just decided together to stop. They create a map for him, cities he lists off the top of his head and Hermione offers to book all of his Portkeys. When Draco comes over later, the Fat Lady swings open to let him in, chiding Harry for sharing the password with non-Gryffindors. They both make space for him, moving so he can settle next to Harry. It’s just another natural progression, really.
It’s the same at breakfast. Sometimes Harry joins Draco at the Slytherin table, Pansy conspicuously stealing food off of Harry’s plate as though she’s testing him. Then he’ll take the last strawberry crepe, which he knows is her favourite, and she gives Draco an even more conspicuous approving look.
And then sometimes Draco sits at Gryffindor, and Ron and Hermione ask him about his classes and the Potions mastery he’s thinking of applying to. He even makes nice with Ginny, grudgingly agreeing with her that Gwenog Jones is the best Quidditch captain in the league.
They’re all eating breakfast together when Draco, and the rest of the student body, finds out that Lucius Malfoy has died.
The owls swoop low over the tables, dropping mail and parcels and rolled up editions of the Daily Prophet . There’s a murmur, then a silence as mail is ripped open and parcels are examined and the Prophet is flipped through. Then the murmur starts up again, as do the eyes, moving past Harry and settling on Draco beside him in a way that feels a little too reminiscent of the Sorting Ceremony.
It’s Neville ( trusty, kind Neville , the only one of them who subscribes to the Prophet ) who passes Harry a paper and he smooths it out in front of him and Draco. The front page is rubbish, something about Victor Krum’s new affair, and Harry quickly flips past it. Then there, the third column from the right, accompanied by a picture of the signature long, platinum hair, the cane, the dark expression, is the announcement.
Death Eater Down: Lucius Malfoy found Dead in Cell
Draco stands abruptly, the sound of his chair scraping against stone jarring in the now-silent room. He takes the paper from the table and folds it under his arm. Addressing the surface of the table, his voice carefully blank, he says, “If you’ll excuse me,” and walks slowly out of the Great Hall.
Harry watches him leave. Then his eyes find Pansy’s across the hall and with a wordless discussion, she stands and follows him out.
It’s sunny outside. It doesn’t feel right, to have the sun on his face, a warm breeze ruffling his hair, while his father is dead. He walked out of the hall, through the castle and out onto the grounds, not really sure where he was going. He’s still not sure, has just stopped at the edge of the grass, looking out over the rolling hills, the distant green peaks of mountains beyond the forest. The lake glitters in the sun and it’s beautiful. It doesn’t seem fair.
He hears footsteps behind him, then a pair of arms wraps around his waist. Pansy presses her cheek against his back, holding him too hard. She sniffles; Pansy has her own memories of his father.
“I think,” Draco says, his voice coming out in a breathy rasp. “I want to go home.”
Of course, he can’t go home; no place fits the description. The Manor, now in possession of the Ministry, felt like more of a prison by the time he left it, and Hogwarts, his home for eight years, is ready to say goodbye to him. Really, he thinks, feeling very small, he just wants his mother.
He sits on the grass, letting the morning dew soak through his trousers. Pansy sits with him, staying close, holding his shaking hands in her own. She’s crying a little bit. He feels as though he should be crying too, but no tears seem to come.
They sit beside each other for a long time, until Pansy stops crying and merely holds onto him, until he feels like he might be about to start. The first Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures classes start coming out of the castle and Draco rises, helping Pansy up, helping her brush the grass from her skirt.
“He wasn’t a good man,” he tells her. She nods, smoothing her hand over his hair. “I didn’t even like him very much, towards the end.”
“Me neither,” she tells him, wiping away the tear-tracks on her face.
“But he was still my father,” he says. The shock is beginning to wear off, and he wants to get somewhere private before he loses his composure. “And he really, really loved me.”
That’s the worst part, really. When Draco goes back to his dorm, alone even though Pansy offered to come with him, he looks over his desk, at the trinkets lining it and his bookshelves. All of them expensive gifts from around the world, a handcrafted clock from Switzerland, jade statuettes from Singapore, a cigar box made of pure gold from Spain. Each diplomatic event his father had to be away from home for, he brought a token back to remind Draco he was thinking of him even when he was gone.
Draco always remembers learning about his mother’s lie that saved the world, remembers Potter saying how she had run through the castle, defenceless, shouting his name. But his father had been right there with her, trying to find him too.
His father’s letters are in a drawer in his desk, piled under several unfinished essays, a folder of notes on historical prophecies. He pulls them out, spreads them over his bed. Through the blacked-out words, he recognizes a common theme, one he’s noticed and ignored. There is a desire for forgiveness there, behind the bravado, and a wish to be respected and loved by his son again.
He wishes he hadn’t thrown so much of his father’s correspondences away. When his father had been living, every reminder of him hurt, a sting of betrayal. Everything Draco had learned to hate about himself felt like a direct tie to his father, to what had been cultivated within him, to what he had once idolised. Every decision he made, although his own, was in some way to live up to a certain expectation set for him. And then Lucius Malfoy had been wrong. Draco had once thought he’d known everything. It turns out he knew nothing.
Draco had suffered for it. It went beyond the choices he’d made, beyond the consequences those choices had reaped. He’s lived his short life in a kind of miserable stress, afraid of who he was, afraid of who he had to become. Even now, determined to change for the better, a part of him worries that he’s become someone his father would have hated. If he never responded to his father’s letters, he never had to give him the power to make him feel afraid like that again.
He reads the last letter from his father, sent back in February. He’d opened it, scanned it over breakfast and tucked it away, crumpling the paper carelessly. Now, Draco smoothes it out.
Draco,
I know you are upset with me. It does not feel very mature of you to not respond to my letters. You don’t understand what it is like in here. I could use every kindness my own family is able to give me. Azkaban is [blanked out].
I know you graduate soon. I would like to hear of your plans. I had always imagined you in politics, like myself, but Narcissa tells me of your scores in school and your commitment to your studies. I could also see you pursuing academia, if you so choose. There are many very respectable careers in the study of Arithmancy. As long as you don’t work in [blanked out] with the [blanked out], and instead help to preserve the longevity of [blanked out].
Narcissa tells me that you do not like to discuss the prophecy. I know I have mentioned it in many of my previous letters. I wonder if this is why you do not respond to them. Although I have assured her that I will not bring your prophecy up, I want to remind you of the visiting date that I mentioned in my last correspondence. At the end of March, Azkaban is allowing family a short window to visit with us in the low-security London location. While Narcissa is currently barred from re-entry into the country, I would appreciate being able to see you, Draco. You are still my son, and I still care for you. I’ve only ever wanted the best for you.
Come visit me, Draco. I didn’t know enough, before. Now I do.
Lucius Malfoy
Draco had never responded. He’d missed the visit in March, and now it was too late.
When Crabbe had died, Draco’s grief had been focused on the past, on the version of Vince that he’d held in his mind, his friend, his defender, someone as young and naive as Draco had once been, before he too had been twisted into crueller and crueller shapes by the war and the terrible things expected of them. He had missed the space of someone at his side, the person no longer there.
Draco’s father had been gone from his life for a year now, more than that if Draco counts those years following fifth year, when Lucius had returned from Azkaban withdrawn and cold, even more so than before. There is no one really to miss, then, only a figment, only the potential of a better version of his father that only time could have allowed.
Looking at those trinkets, watches and statuettes and cases, hurts; thinking of his father, kind and gentle once, when Draco was still a boy, hurts. The past is in the past, all those sharp and glittering moments, pretty broken glass memories that cut when he handles them too carelessly. He doesn’t want to remember his father as good because then he becomes someone to miss, someone worth mourning.
The potential is gone now. He could have talked to him again. He could have responded to that last letter he sent, back in March. He was only forty-six. Draco could have forgiven him. He could have wished him a Happy Christmas. His father could have told Draco that he loved him one last time. Draco could have told him so too.
And there it was again, grief taking the shape of regret.
He falls asleep surrounded by the opened letters, just around midday.
He wakes around dinner. Pansy is there, somehow in the boy’s dorm room. Blaise, who sits on his bed quietly changing out of his uniform, must have let her in.
“Draco, get up,” she says. She tugs him to sitting, then to standing.
“I’m okay,” he says. “He was really such a bastard.”
“I know,” she tells him, but doesn’t let him go. She runs her fingers through his hair, brushing it off his forehead. She hands him a fresh shirt, one that’s not been wrinkled from midday sleeping. He changes in front of her, not self conscious. They don’t bother with a tie and Pansy asks him to wait for her as she carefully picks up and re-folds each letter from his father, placing them in a stack on his desk.
“Pansy,” he says once she’s finished. “Have I ever told you before that you’re a good person?”
“You have,” she says, taking his arm. “But I’m always happy to hear it again.”
“I can’t go to the Great Hall,” he tells her.
The common room is quiet when they walk into it. Whoever is there gives them their space. No one gawks or even looks at them as they pass.
“I know,” she says. “You don’t have to go there. But someone’s been arguing with the wall for the last hour, and I think you’re the only one who can shut him up.”
Who could it be but Harry?
He’s leaning against the wall across from the entrance to the dorms, running a worried hand through his hair. When he sees Draco, he pushes himself off the wall, coming forward, reaching out, but stopping before they touch.
“Draco…” he says. His eyes are bloodshot, the rims red, presumably from rubbing at them. His hand is still reaching out, waiting there between them for Draco to accept it.
“I know you didn’t like him,” Draco says, his voice wavering and thin. The hallway is empty but for them; this part of the castle is silent with everyone at dinner. It’s a relief, at least, that this part of his life has not been made into a spectacle.
“He was a complicated man,” Harry says, but it’s obviously sugar-coated. Harry had testified for Draco, for Narcissa. Not for Lucius.
“He was a bully,” Draco says. “A tyrant. A bad father. A bad man.” He can’t stop himself from continuing. “He was a Death Eater.”
“Yes,” Harry agrees.
Draco sighs. It’s so much easier to remember his father as a villain. “Did you know,” he asks, blinking back tears. “That he had a sweet tooth?”
Draco takes Harry’s hand. He lets Harry pull him in and wrap his arms around him. He rests his temple against Harry’s, presses his palms against his back to feel him breathing, slowly, so wonderfully warm and alive under Draco’s hands. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Harry is muttering against his neck, stroking his hands up and down Draco’s back.
“Fizzing Whizbees were his favourite,” Draco tells him quietly, thinking of the way his father used to smile at him when he was a child. Wide and toothy, genuine and loving, if only in that one way. “He used to keep several boxes of them in his study.”
His father, the Death Eater, is dead. His father, the villain, is dead. His father, the person, is dead.
His father is dead.
Harry takes Draco to Gryffindor Tower, pulls him into his bed with him, and they lie together, curtains drawn. Harry whispers names in Draco’s ear, Remus, Sirius, Tonks, Fred , tells him about the people he’s lost, people Draco knew of, but never really knew. He tells him about that long walk to the forest, how he had been alone, and then not, thanks to the Resurrection Stone.
Quicker than falling asleep , Harry tells him, and Draco hopes so. He really, really hopes so.
Harry listens as he tells him about his father, an outpouring of rage and longing, a constant burning wish for more and better that he’d always been ashamed of. He can’t stop himself, and Harry, the person that he is, lets him, although Draco knows he has his own memories of Lucius, none of them good. But Draco’s desperate, can’t stand the idea of his father being remembered the way the papers paint him — a servant, a failure, a cardboard cutout of a villain. He wants Harry to understand that there was a version of Lucius that was worth mourning.
They skip all their classes that day, and the next. They stay in bed until noon, sleeping and then talking. Draco lays his head on Harry’s chest to listen to his heart beating. He likes that he can feel the vibration of each word as he says it. He likes that he can do this at all, that he allows himself to do this.
In the afternoon, they go outside. They walk together around the lake, as far as they can before it gets dark. They watch dragonflies dart between the reeds at the side of the lake and bat Highland midges off each other’s arms. Harry helps him catch a red admiral butterfly with an Arresto Momentum and they watch as its wings slowly beat in the air, as though trapped in amber. Draco can only watch for a moment before casting Finite .
They get their food from the kitchen that night, thanking the house-elves who let them eat by the hearth, even though it’s too hot. Harry brings up the subject of classes — NEWTs are just weeks away and Draco has been trying, at last, to care. More than Harry has been, at least.
“I don’t think I can,” Draco says. “I just don’t see a point.”
“I think you might regret it,” Harry says. “At least go to Potions.”
So Draco does. Harry goes too, sits with him even though he’s been Ron’s lab partner all year. Then Draco goes to Arithmancy, because Harry asks him too. Harry sits with him there, too, even though he’s not even taking the class, even though he fidgets and stares out the window and colours in all of Draco’s spiral doodles.
His mother sends him a letter, which he receives over breakfast. It’s his first day back in the Great Hall, sitting at the Slytherin table with Harry by his side, Hermione and Ron close by but giving them their space. The letter is stained with tears and blotted ink, smelling of lavender. His mother seems to be coping similarly to him. It starts with good riddance and ends with I miss him .
The postscript reads, “I wish I could be with you, Draco. I wish I had never done anything that led to me being separated from you.”
They have all made so many mistakes.
Harry reads the letter over his shoulder and Draco lets him. He sets the letter down as Harry reaches the end and wraps a warm arm over Draco’s shoulders, pressing a brief kiss to his neck. Draco looks around to see if anyone saw, but no one is looking, and if they had, they didn’t seem to care.
This, at least, doesn’t seem like a mistake. Perhaps someday he may consider it one, but he’s not sure how he can when Harry makes him feel this way. When he waits for him after class, when he presses warm open-mouthed kisses to Draco’s neck, when Draco sleeps curled around him, face pressed into that mess of unruly hair, arm wrapped under his sweater and splayed on his skin, Draco feels like he got away with something. One night it comes to him, the dark truth of it, and he shares his thoughts with Harry, without any prior hesitation.
“I don’t think I deserve it anymore,” he tells Harry.
“Hmm?” Harry mumbles, voice heavy with near-sleep. The closed drapes block out any light, make the space of Harry’s bed feel private, intimate, safe in a way Draco never would have thought it could be.
“When I first heard my prophecy, a part of me thought… yes, that makes sense,” Draco says. He can feel Harry waking up. He shifts in Draco’s arms, turning to face him, though Draco can’t see his face. Draco opens his arms to make space, though.
“After everything I did, it made sense that I deserved something like that. Punishment.” Draco can feel Harry’s breath against his face. He wishes he could see him. “I’m not sure I believe that anymore.”
“I don’t believe it,” Harry tells him. Draco can imagine the sincerity in his eyes, always so genuine, always so fiercely protective of those he cares about. Draco can’t believe he counts among that number. “I think you’ve been through enough. We’ve all been through enough.”
“I know,” he says. He moves his hands from where they rest on Harry’s hip, skimming his fingers over his side, his arm, the side of his neck. He finds his face and traces it gently, imagining the high cheekbones, the thick eyebrows, the crooked nose. Harry’s next breath shudders out of him and Draco can feel that too, under his fingers.
“I want to live,” Draco tells him. “I don’t think I’ve said that yet. I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.’ But they’re not the same thing. Not really.”
Finally, he presses his hand flat against Harry’s cheek and curls his fingers into his hairline. Moving his head closer, he stops a hair before their lips touch. “Harry,” he says, lets their lips brush, just slightly. “What do you want?”
“I want to kiss you,” Harry says breathlessly.
Draco huffs out a laugh. “I mean out of life.”
“To kiss you,” Harry says again. “I just want…” he pauses and Draco wonders if he’s thinking Aurors, Grimmauld, white picket fence.
“I want to enjoy myself,” he says finally, whispering it like a secret.
“I think,” Draco says just as quietly. “That’s what I want too. And I think that maybe I deserve the things I want. As long as I don’t hurt anyone. As long as I don’t regret them.”
“Don’t regret, then,” Harry says. “Just kiss me.”
Draco does, lifting his head from the pillow and meeting Harry’s lips with his own, missing the mark slightly in the dark, laughing as he fixes his position. Harry’s hands find his shoulders, wind their way through the hair at the back of his head, pulling to deepen the kiss. Draco opens his mouth and Harry licks into it, pulls his lower lips between his teeth.
Draco pulls away only to find his cheek, his jaw, his neck. He mouths his way to Harry’s collar, drags his teeth along the bone and feels the movement of Harry’s gasp before he hears it.
I want to be someone who deserves him, Draco thinks. I’m going to become someone who deserves him.
His hand slips down Harry’s abdomen, fingers catching the hair on his lower stomach. The small space is filled with the sound of their breaths, Harry’s muttering of, please, Draco, please .
Draco feels overcome with the sound of him, the scent of him, the feel of Harry beneath him. He presses his front, borrowed t-shirt rucked up and cock straining against his boxers, against Harry’s hip; he chases his pleasure, then slips his hand into Harry’s underwear and helps him find his, too.
Later, sweat cooling on his hairline, head resting on Harry’s bare chest, Draco asks, “Can I come to Greece with you?”
Harry’s running his hand through Draco’s hair, twisting the strands between his fingers. His voice is low and warm as he says, “You can go anywhere you want with me, Draco.”
In the weeks leading up to NEWTs, Draco insists they spend more time in the library. It’s difficult keeping Harry inside, especially when the days grow warm and lovely, the skies blue and expansive above the castle. Sometimes he lets Harry persuade them into studying outside, even though he knows it’s only a matter of time before the notes and books are set aside. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they skip rocks, sometimes Draco ends up with his back in the grass, Harry on top of him.
Pansy seems to be panicking, muttering the dates of Ogre Wars and the names of runes in the hallways between classes. He persuades her to the Gryffindor table one day, when he joins Harry and his friends. Ron and Hermione have mostly accepted him as an annoyingly persistent part of their friend’s life; while their conversations often falter when he joins Harry across from them, they no longer give Harry wide-eyed questioning looks or study his expressions while mentioning Muggles or Hermione’s dentist parents. When Pansy joins them, though, their conversation lapses, and they exchange a look.
Pansy, to her credit, seems unruffled, taking a seat and moving a plate of cucumber sandwiches as she plunks her Ancient Runes textbook down. Hermione and Ron slowly pick up their conversation about house-elf rights or werewolf discrimination or whatever Hermione’s current crusade is.
Harry nudges Draco’s side, giving him a meaningful expression as he nods at Pansy, who is flipping desperately through her textbook. Draco shrugs and inclines his head toward Hermione, whose attention is catching on Pansy’s finger tracing over the chapter on Runic Invocation.
“Draco, can you read through this and explain it to me like I’m a first year?” Pansy says. “I feel like I’m reading another language.”
“Pans, I’m not in Ancient Runes,” he tells her. “I hardly know what it means either.”
She pouts. “But you said you could help me.”
Hermione’s attention has been fully snagged now, and she reaches for Pansy’s book, only stopping to ask, “Mind if I take a look?” once the book is halfway across the table.
“Oh, would you?” Pansy says, brightening. “I just don’t get what we’re supposed to be invoking.”
Then Hermione and Pansy spend the rest of lunch poring over the text, Hermione over-explaining and Pansy ruthlessly insulting the entire field of Ancient Runes until she understands it. Hermione, surprisingly, just laughs.
Later in the common room, Pansy details to Draco exactly how much better Hermione is at explaining things than he is. She also thanks him, then tells him to ‘wipe that stupid look off his face.’
“After the next week of exams, we’ll only have one more week until graduation,” she says. She stretches her arms over her head, twisting in her chair until her back cracks. “One more week at Hogwarts.”
“Then it’s the rest of our lives,” Draco agrees, moving her ink pot out of the way of her twisting arms.
Pansy looks back at him, sympathy written over her face. It takes Draco a moment for him to figure out why. “You could have a long time, Draco,” she says, taking the inkpot back. “We still don’t know.”
“You’re right,” he says easily. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And until then?”
He smiles at her, pointing to her book. “Pass our NEWTs. Get a job. Have some fun.”
“Did you finish your application?” she asks him, closing the book and leaning back in her chair.
“I sent it in this morning,” he tells her. He’d settled on a couple of Potions Masteries to apply to and sent out his favourite today, working with a Master in Leeds who studies the effects of lacewing fly life-stages on potions outcomes. “And yours?”
“All sent,” she confirms. “The position starts in September, though. What will you do until then?”
“Greece sounds nice this time of year,” Draco says. “But since I still have a year on my sentence, Potter has agreed to the Lake District.”
She reaches for his hand across the table, squeezes his fingers hard. Her face is painfully sincere when she says, “I am so, so happy for you, Draco.”
He brings her hand forward, presses it against his chest. “Thank you, Pans. I am, too.”
On their last day at Hogwarts, they skip the graduation ceremony. Harry takes Draco down to the lake, lays him in the grass and kisses him breathless. Then they lie side by side in the warm sun, squinting against the blue of the sky.
“The Portkey is tomorrow at nine,” Draco reminds him again. One more night in the dorms, and then it’s three weeks travelling between the beaches of Cornwall, another couple of weeks by Dartmoor National Park. Harry’s never gone anywhere — not to Greece, not to Tanzania, not to Guatemala. Not even to the West Country.
“I know,” Harry says, rolling onto his stomach. His lips are puffy, hair a characteristic mess. “I’m the one that booked it.”
“Well,” Draco says. “Did you see Macmillan’s parents before the ceremony? One would have thought he died rather than gotten a P on his Defence exam.”
“He might as well have,” Harry says, laughing. “Did you see — he was crying just as much as them.”
“That’s not very nice,” Draco chides, smiling.
“You’re not very nice,” Harry says, draping an arm over Draco’s stomach, using it to pull him closer.
Draco huffs, but allows Harry to press his lips to Draco’s jaw. “Is that so?” he asks, bringing his hand up to Harry’s hair. “How can you stand me, then?”
“Stand you?” Harry says, lips moving against Draco’s neck. “Can’t you see I’m choosing you?”
“Even if I might die soon?” Draco asks, distracted by Harry’s hands under his shirt. But then the hands are pulling away and Harry’s head is lifting, his bright green eyes meeting Draco’s.
“So might I,” Harry says, and Draco gives him a withering look, one of his best. He pulls Harry back down and Harry acquiesces.
Returning his lips to Draco’s collar, he says, “I’ll grieve you after you’re dead,” unworried, unhurried as he presses his cheek to Draco’s sternum. He meets Draco’s eyes again, flushed and unruly and so regretfully handsome that Draco can’t imagine how it took eight years of knowing him for Draco to fall in love.
“Let me enjoy you first,” Harry says and Draco decides that yes, he will.