Then again, they’re standing here in a glen that’s been hidden away since 1690 where Draco apparently comes to yell about his feelings, so. Maybe it’s not.
“I grew up in a museum,” Draco offers, after a while. Harry slants a look at him, knowing full well where Draco grew up, and Draco rolls his eyes. “That was a metaphor, Potter. I meant—surrounded by beautiful things that I wasn’t allowed to touch, or even think about touching. If they could have, I think my parents would have put me under glass, too; it would have been so much easier for them. So much quieter, and less embarrassing, and closer to what they wanted in a son.” He Summons a few pebbles up off the ground and starts skipping them across the water, lip curling a little. “It doesn’t compare to being locked in a cupboard like a spare broom, of course, but it fucked me up a little anyway. There are even times I’ve thought it served them right, my mum and dad, to watch the Dark Lord all but burn the place to the ground.” He stops, and sounds a little surprised when he says, “You know, I think I’ve had a bit more to drink than I thought.”
Harry holds out a hand for the flask automatically, but Draco pours pebbles into it instead. It’s better; Harry starts skipping them, trying to beat Draco’s distances absently, still listening to him talk.
“Sometimes,” Draco says, “I think I started my own museum just because I wanted—oh, I don’t know. A do-over, or something. Like it was an attempt to soothe some sad, pathetic part of me that’s still six years old and terrified to breathe on anything too hard, having not figured out yet that the only way to avoid that was not to really breathe at all. Sometimes I think that’s all it’s about: my life, the choices I’ve made.” He sighs, scowls. “But I try not to, Potter. D’you want to know why?”
Harry’s not sure he does, but he asks anyway: “Why?”
“Because that would make it about them,” Draco says. “My whole adult life, my passions, the things I’ve invested my time and energy in—that would make it about them, would mean it was all for them, and I don’t want that. Even if that is how it started out, on whatever level, it’s not that way now; now it’s for me.” He nudges Harry’s shoulder with his own, just a shade too hard for it to be an entirely friendly gesture. “Maybe you are fucked up, you know? I think most people are, one way or another. Most worthwhile people, anyway. But if you think that means you can’t figure a way out of things that make you unhappy, or that your oldest friends are going to suddenly drop you just because they’re having a kid— their second kid, Potter, aren’t you having this breakdown a little late?—well. Then, honestly, you’re even more of an imbecile than I’ve always thought.”
Draco throws all the pebbles left in his hand into the creek; they splash and plop into the water below them. “All anyone can really do,” he says, “is try to carve out a space for themselves in this world, and hold onto the people they love for as long as they’ve got them. That’s it. I’ve spent the better part of my life wading through the past and I can tell you with some certainty: that’s pretty much all that we’ve got. You’re not disqualified just because you’re not a particularly well-adjusted person.” He nudges Harry again, and when Harry turns his head to look at him, Draco offers him a crooked smile. “Anyway, who wants to be one of those?”
They stay in the glen for…oh, Harry doesn’t know how long. Hours, probably, just walking around, drinking, not talking about anything much. Draco shows him a cave where the stalagmites sing (“Do not ask the stalactites in the cave down the way to do this,” Draco warns him, “they can’t and they’re very sore about it, they will fall on you with great vengeance”), and a little thatched hut where Draco suspects Isidore Dibbler spent his final days.
Harry, who’s had an Auror’s instincts drilled deep into his bones whether he likes it or not, looks around and says, “Hey, did anyone ever find his body?”
“Oh, you are a ruinous, terrible person,” Draco says after a long moment, “let’s get out of here, I can’t believe you just said that, I hate you,” and takes him to offer some Firewhiskey to a massive, gnarled fairy tree instead.
They keep drinking, passing the flask back and forth between them, until they’re cackling over every little stupid thing the other one says, filling the valley with sound. Draco does an impression of Ron’s drunken Auroring speech that’s so dead on that Harry nearly wets himself, and Draco actually cries with laughter when Harry tells him, a little breathlessly and not sure how they got on the topic, about blowing up his Aunt Marge when he was thirteen years old.
“The little dog,” Draco says, wiping his eyes, “Potter, truly, you’re a marvel,” and Harry takes a page from Draco’s book, keeps the tiny pocket of warmth that blooms in his chest at this comment just for himself.
Eventually they stumble their way back to the portal. It closes behind them automatically, and Muggle London looks strange, bleak, after so long in the safe haven of the glen. Harry feels his spirit dim a little to think of going back to his apartment, where it’s cold and it’s dark and the pipes creak and the air never smells clean. Still, it’s a better prospect than it was earlier in the evening—a better prospect than, maybe, it’s ever been before.
“You can come back to mine,” Harry decides, directing the words at the Draco he thinks is the real Draco, and not the two standing on either side of him, who Harry suspects are imposters borne of drink. “For the Floo! Since we are—not fit—for the other one. Appearing and such. You know.”
“I will not go,” Draco declares loudly, right in Harry’s face, “to that HOLE! And nor should you, holes’re terrible. None will go to the hole tonight, Potter! Not for one minute, not even for Floo. I would rather—” he sets off laughing again, has to gasp the next words through his mirth, “take the Knight Bus like—a teen on the run from justice for—for— crimes of engorgement—” At this point he loses control of speech entirely, just covers his face with his hands and howls. He stumbles with it, apparently too overcome to hold onto his mastery of balance; Harry reaches out a hand to steady him automatically and somehow ends up with Draco leaning against him for support, his whole body shaking with laughter against Harry’s.
It’s nice. Warm. Harry doesn’t mind it.
They do, in fact, end up taking the Knight Bus back to Grimmauld Place, but Harry doubts he’ll remember a lot about it.
When they get home—to Draco’s home, Harry reminds himself; to the home that could have been Harry’s but never really was, and has long since belonged to Draco—Draco climbs the stairs and Harry follows. He doesn’t realize they’ve turned onto one of the warded staircases until Draco says, “This’s where the spells are; Kreacher, turn off the spells!”
“The wards do not affect guests who are with Master Draco,” Kreacher says, appearing with a crack. “As Master Draco usually knows very well.” He looks and sounds like he is a bit put out by their show of debauchery; Harry doesn’t really blame him, but just can’t bring himself to care all that much right now. Kreacher’s mad at him anyway, because Harry keeps cooking and it’s like, against the old codes or whatever—the house is sad about it—something. He’ll figure it out when he’s sober.
“Hey,” Harry says, a thought popping into his head and eclipsing all others in its glory. He pokes Draco, who’s a few steps above him, right in the middle of his back. “Can we go back sometime? With brooms? And fly?”
“We can do whatever we like,” Draco says, in a briefly dignified moment at the top of the stairs, “we are grown men in the prime of our lives.” Then he ruins it somewhat by adding, “I must bathroom. Then: sleeping. Take whatever bed you like.”
“‘I must bathroom?’” Harry yells down the hallway after him. “Really? Is that how you say it in posh?”
“Oh piss off, Potter, you enormous twat,” Draco calls back, but he’s laughing when he throws a rude gesture over his shoulder.
Harry makes a beeline for the first bed he sees, a big one with light grey covers on that’s —whatever. In a room that wasn’t Sirius’s, and that’s about all he’s got. He falls on top of it fully clothed and with both of his shoes on, and, blissfully, closes his eyes.
“Oh my god,” Draco says, what could be a moment or an hour later, “Potter, not this bed. I didn’t mean this bed!”
“You said I could have any bed,” Harry says, not opening his eyes, “that I liked. I like this bed.”
“I like that bed too,” Draco says. “Because it’s my bed. Now get out.”
Harry cracks one eye open. Draco is wearing pajamas now. They look soft. Also: he is glaring at Harry, which he probably thinks is very menacing, except that what he probably doesn’t know is that his hair is all—sticky-uppy. Hilarious.
Harry is just drunk and amused and comfortable and twelve years old inside enough to let himself say: “I don’t see your name on it.”
“Oh, for the love of god—” Draco starts.
“And I’m the one who’s in it.” Harry has found that sometimes, when one is talking to Draco Malfoy, one has to think like Draco Malfoy and just talk whenever one feels like it, regardless of whether or not it’s rudely interrupting. “So, you know. Squatter’s rights, Malfoy.”
Draco make a muted little noise of outrage and then, mutinously, flops down next to Harry on top of the covers. “Now I’m in it, and it’s my bed. That beats your squatter’s rights two to one! Get thee hence, thief!”
“I was here first,” Harry points out, deciding to let ‘Get thee hence, thief!’ go because he’s tired and, if he remembers it, it’ll be a nice gift for poor tragic Hangover Harry in the morning.
“It’s my bed!” Draco says, for the third time in as many minutes. He’s acting all hysterical about it, but the way where he’s kidding, so it’s fine. If he were really mad he’d pretend like he wasn’t. “It’s my house.”
“That,” Harry says, smirking at Draco, “was mine first too.”
Draco groans. Harry grins and closes his eyes; it’s his bed, dead to rights.
Time goes a little fuzzy for a second, but then: “Get out,” Draco says, kicking him half- heartedly. He sounds sleepy. Soon his kicks will stop.
“You get out,” Harry tells him, muffled against the pillow. God, it’s so soft. “Dead…to rights.”
“Not even—sense,” Draco murmurs. “Find your own, 's what I say.”
“No, you,” Harry argues, and passes out.
Harry wakes up slow.
He hurts, but he’s—comfortable. His own bed’s not this comfortable. Maybe Ron and Hermione’s guest room? No, and not the Burrow either; there’s no mysterious lumps in the mattress, no distant sounds of yelling. He should probably open his eyes and make sure he hasn’t been taken prisoner or something, but he sort of doubts it. All of his limbs feel like they’re reporting for duty, and he doesn’t think kidnappers would put him in a bed this soft, with sheets that smell fresh and clean, a pillow like a cloud under his aching head.
God, his head. What happened last night? He’s never awoken in this sort of pain in an unfamiliar bed before; even when he’s gone out and pulled, he’s always taken partners back to his own place, rather than submit to the unknowns of a stranger’s living environment.
He rubs his cheek against the pillow and makes a soft sound. Maybe his policy of not sleeping in strange beds has in fact been incredibly stupid all this time; this one, wherever it is, is definitely an upgrade.
“Mrrph,” says someone to his left.
Now sure that he is not alone, Harry really has no choice but to open his eyes. He cracks them the absolute smallest amount possible, not even enough to be able to properly see, but it’s an agony anyway, the light of the room all but searing his retinas. He pushes through it with only one groan of anguish, because he is a man and will not be brought low by daylight, and opens them the rest of the way.
Draco is laying on the pillow next to his.
Harry regards him for a moment; his face is screwed up in a grimace, clearly not wholly asleep but not wholly awake, either. Harry can relate. They’re not touching, but they’re so close that they almost might as well be; Draco’s sprawled out across most of the bed, loose in near-sleep the way he isn’t in life, where he’s all carefully controlled motion. Harry’s the opposite, has slept as long as he can remember curled into a tight, question-mark sort of shape, arms wrapped around the bottom half of his pillow, head buried in the top.
Draco’s hair is in his eyes. Harry has the absurd, half-formed thought that he should— touch it, or something—before he wakes up enough to recognize that as nonsense.
What did they do last night? Harry’s fully clothed—even his shoes are on—and he considers panicking and throwing himself out of the bed for a second, but he doesn’t. It’d be stupid; Draco’s fully dressed too, albeit in pajamas, and anyway Harry’s not insane enough to think that they might have…whatever. Gotten up to anything untoward. It’d be crazy, like he told Ron and Hermione that one time they…
