Chapter Text
Friday,
4 AM
Draco's just closed the door of his bedroom after the previous version of him disappeared into the past when a loud chime alerts him that someone is in front of the door of his office. For one singular, guilty, moment, he considers ignoring it. The last thing he feels like dealing with right now is a student crisis. But… he’s an adult responsible for a whole House of students. And it is the precise point in the night where no one but those who absolutely and desperately need him would come to his door.
So he takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and goes to see what disaster has appeared in the dungeons while he’s been recklessly using a potentially dangerous, and heavily restricted artefact.
The person standing in front of the door of his office is not a student.
The person standing in front of the door of his office does not appear to be a messenger of an apocalypse either.
The person standing in front of the door of his office is in their pyjamas, beaming up at him, and the last person Draco expected to open his door to at that moment.
“Harry?”
“Draco, hi,” Harry whispers. Draco’s heart pangs as it does every time Harry says his name, but especially so lowly, so softly, so… seemingly filled with fondness.
“Is everything alright?” Draco asks, because it is only reasonable to ask such a thing and because something not being alright is the only reason Harry could be seeking him out at this hour.
Harry chuckles at the question instead of answering. He shifts his weight on his feet and bites his lip—devilishly charming through and through, or maybe just appearing so to those who have already lost their hearts to him—before asking back: “Oh, isn’t that my line?”
Draco refuses to swoon. He refuses to do something desperate and pathetic like pulling Harry by the lapels and kissing him right there in the hallway where anyone could see them—or rather, anyone who might be having a huge Head-of-House jurisdiction problem might see. He crosses his arms over his chest. He leans against his doorway. He focuses on breathing evenly. He raises an eyebrow.
“I’m pretty sure the person finding a strange man at their doorstep at four in the morning is the one asking that question,” he says finally.
“A strange man, huh?”
“Well, this feels pretty strange.”
Harry laughs again and takes a couple of steps closer to Draco. Draco follows his movements with his eyes and wonders if this is on purpose. If this is just another of Harry’s supposedly clever strategies of coming close to Draco without spooking him. As if Draco could ever be spooked by Harry’s closeness—as if he doesn’t crave it, as if he doesn’t feel like he could jump out of his skin to touch him quicker.
“Now you know how I’ve been feeling the whole day!” Harry says in that half-whisper half-shout way and Draco wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to keep his voice down—everyone is asleep already, or still —but before he can, Harry is talking again already. “You just kept… popping up! Whenever I had a moment of free time, you appeared, like, like magic .”
Draco squints, trying to guess the appropriate response to this… rant. Was it complaining? Should he apologise for ‘popping in’ constantly? When lived over a three-day period, his encounters with Harry really didn’t feel so frequent, but until this moment, he hadn’t even considered how they must have looked like to everyone else.
“I’m sorry?” he offers, and it makes Harry shake his head violently.
“No! No, don’t apologise! I loved it! I mean, I enjoyed it. It was fun. I liked talking to you. But we talked so many times today and you always came talking about talking but then we never even ended up talking about the thing you wanted to talk about and I couldn’t sleep because all these awful scenarios kept running around my head about what could be bothering you—”
“It’s not bothering me—”
“You don’t even want to admit that it’s bothering you! It’s awful! It sounds terrible. Draco— Draco , I’m concerned about you,” Harry says, so earnestly, that it makes Draco feel sick to his stomach. It’s too late an hour for this. For so much… sentiment.
“Whatever it is,” Harry continues, because Draco doesn’t know how to stop him, “we’ll solve it. Just tell me what it is, I promise we’ll fix it together. We’ll fix this and then we’ll fix the wards and it’ll all be great and proper again, yeah? Come to the Burrow with me. We’ll fix it over Christmas. It will be okay. Please. Trust me.”
Draco just stares at Harry’s awfully wide, green, green eyes behind those stupid glasses and that determined expression all stark in the eyebrows and the way Harry is smiling but not smiling. He looks so encouraging. So open. So… Harry .
“I’m in love with you.”
He blurts it out.
It’s out there.
He said.
Somehow, the weight of it is still right there, draped over his heart.
“Me too,” Harry grins, like Draco’s said some grand jest, “I’m so great, right—”
“No, Harry—” Draco interrupts him quietly, but firmly, “—that’s the big secret. That’s the… topic I wanted to discuss with you. I am in love with you.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“M-hm, quite.”
“Oh.”
And suddenly, the reality of this—of this secret being so incomprehensible that Harry cannot even form a single word in response—cracks like an egg over Draco’s head and he slams the door closed, uncaring for the rudeness or the nonsensicalness of it.
Harry flashes forward in the same second the door is slammed.
Draco barely even conceptualises his moving let alone registers its meaning.
Harry screams.
Draco gasps.
The door is opened once more.
“ Fuck ,” Harry whispers but the pain in his voice is so loud it echoes and echoes and echoes.
He’s folded over, knees bent and both hands squeezed between them. His face is a grimace.
Draco rushes forward immediately, drawing out his wand and casting diagnostic spells as quickly as is possible with shaking hands. “Oh dear Merlin!” he mutters with his hand rubbing instinctive semi-soothing circles on Harry’s back. “Are you okay?! Why would you try to stop the door?”
“Why would you slam the door in my face?!”
“You weren’t saying anything! I was running away from the consequences of saying something stupid at four in the morning!”
“It’s not stupid!” Harry insists, finally looking up at Draco. His eyes are teary but he looks more frustrated than angry.
“It is ! Give me your fingers.” Draco grabs Harry’s hand before Harry can even move it and starts casting an Episky after Episky until all four of the damaged fingers of Harry’s right hand are back to normal. He casts a cooling charm too because the numbness of it is absolutely preferable to the numbness of the Episky. “Merlin,” he murmurs when he’s done, as he massages Harry’s fingers, checking for anything he might have missed, “I’m so stupid, why would I say that to you?”
“Well, why would I say I love you too?”
“Exactly!” Draco nods quickly and drops Harry’s fingers. “You wouldn’t!”
“But I did !”
“What?”
“I said I love you too.”
“You didn’t.”
They’re standing again—Harry’s pain forgotten—but now much closer than before. Only the doorway is separating them. One step between Draco’s body and Harry’s.
“Yes, I did, I said I loved you too,” Harry repeats.
“ When did you say you loved me too?” He sounds desperate now, Draco knows, but of all the outcomes he imagined, this… game with his heart as a quaffle is by far the worst.
“Just now.”
Draco stares at him because it’s hard to believe you’ve heard a statement such as that one with your own two ears. Many thoughts rush through his head, the words morphing into as many meanings as there are languages, as many worst-case scenarios as one can fit in a span of a second. He knows what he wants to believe. But his wants have so often been foolish dreams that hoping for them to be true is a mistake he’s wary of making once more.
Still, because he’s already embarrassed himself and because in just three days Harry will be leaving the castle giving them both the ample opportunity to calm down and decide to pretend that this night’s never happened, he looks at an open flame and decides to play with fire. “That’s an awful way to confess your love for someone.”
“Well, no takesy-backsies.”
Draco’s heart has stopped at some point. He’s fairly certain he’s forgotten how to breathe. He’s absolutely forgotten how to say anything even remotely intelligent.
“You spend too much time with eleven-year-olds,” he tells Harry and Harry laughs —if nothing else, then at least Draco will come out of this encounter with a plethora of memories of Harry laughing which could then be removed from their context and stitched into daydreams of his choosing.
“Gosh, I do,” Harry agrees and leans against the doorway. He’s so close Draco can hear him breathe now, but it’s not like he minds. He lets Harry come closer and closer—how and why would he deny himself such pleasure? “I need to talk to Flitwick about lowering the frequency of the Duelling club meetings.”
“Three times a week’s always been too many times a week,” Draco replies and sparks a vague hope that if he latches onto this banal topic, derails the conversation as successfully as the conversation in Harry’s office was derailed—but this time in the opposite direction—Harry might be caught in some rare fatigue-based amnesia and forget that Draco has done something as ridiculous as confessing his love to him.
“It seemed fun at the time,” Harry says. “And it’s better to work in batches.”
“You did not just call groups of students batches.”
“Give me a break,” Harry groans and chuckles at the same time. “It’s four in the morning, my brain is not working properly.”
“Obviously.”
Harry frowns. “Wait, what do you mean ‘ obviously’?”
“I mean, obviously your brain is not working properly—you told me you loved me.” Draco’s brain is like a crup with a bone but instead of slobber, there is complete and utter embarrassment staining Draco’s very soul. Before he can redirect the conversation—or slam the door in Harry’s face again—Harry’s already speaking.
“I do love you.”
“What?”
Harry laughs and rolls his eyes and he looks as if he really does love Draco. His eyes are crinkled in such a particular way and his smile is so wobbly and smitten and when he speaks you can hear that wobbliness and the smitteness in every word.
“You’re so stubborn,” Harry says.
“We established that,” Draco replies.
“I will outstubborn you on this one though.” Harry catches Draco’s hand before Draco can even react and pulls him closer so they’re chest to chest. Their noses bump against each other. Harry’s eyes move to look at Draco’s lips. And Draco swears he can feel Harry’s heartbeat between their intertwined fingers—or maybe that’s his own: rapid and uncontrollable.
“Your secret crush on me is actually reciprocated, Malfoy,” Harry whispers against Harry’s cheek. “You did all that worrying for nothing. Horrible, right?”
Harry pulls back just enough to look Draco in the eye and they look at each other and even though he feels sort of lightheaded, Draco still finds it within himself to smile back at Harry’s stupid fond wobbly smitten smile. His knees are going weak as the realisation of what’s happening catches on in his slow tired brain tissue.
“Dreadful.”
“So…” Harry raises his eyebrows “ Will you come to the Burrow with me then?”
“What?”
“Well, we do have to work on the wards thing and—”
Draco takes a step back but Harry, still gripping his hand, follows him. The door of Draco’s office closes behind them. “Harry, you can’t just bring random people to family gatherings.”
Harry hums. His hold on Draco’s hand tightens, once, twice, until Draco squeezes back. Harry shoots him a cocky—dazzling—smile. “I assumed I would be bringing my boyfriend?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, isn’t that… reasonable?”
“I… I never got this far,” Draco admits before he can stop himself.
“What?”
“I had all these scenarios, all these scripts of how this conversation would go and then you kept messing it up and I had to keep redoing it but I never—”
“You never thought I’d just say okay and wait until the first opportune moment to kiss you?”
“No,” Draco says honestly. “Hasn’t crossed my mind.”
“You are… I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“Don’t say anything. It… It’s better left unacknowledged.” Draco rubs his eyes to give himself ten seconds of not having to look at Harry laughing at him, but as soon as he drops his hand, Harry takes it into his own and brings both of them to his face. He kisses his left knuckles and then his right, and Draco shivers at the contact.
“It’s sweet, though,” Harry says, “that you planned your confession so many times. I was so sure you were barely tolerating me to even begin planning anything.”
“I planned it five times,” Draco clarifies because if he’s already embarrassing himself at least every single detail Harry might have a chance of weaselling out of him at a later date and using as extortion material can be revealed at once. Like skinning a newt.
“Five?”
“In a day.”
“ Today ?”
“Technically yesterday, but yes.”
“Why yesterday?”
“I… I wanted…” Draco sighs. He tugs on their joined hands and Harry lets go, but only to wrap his arms around Draco’s waist. He does it so casually—show affection—that it hardly feels like every movement is new and exciting and a step up. It feels like it’s only natural they’re holding hands, only natural that Harry kissed his knuckles, only natural that they are now hugging. So Draco lets himself bask in it unapologetically.
He lays his head onto Harry’s shoulder and only then, away from awkward eye contact, does he speak. “After I left your office… You said you enjoyed my company. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“After you left my office?”
“Yes, after our warding talk. The tea, the brandy? You have not forgotten that—”
“But… Draco, that was only a couple of hours ago?” Harry looks at him. “You… I saw you three times before that, every time acting so bloody weird.”
“Oh, fuck , I forgot to mention it again—Deerheart found a time turner in the Room of Hidden Things.”
“Draco—”
“I know but the conversation ran away from me and then you got out the brandy—”
“It’s not strong brandy!”
“I’m in love with you! That’s brandy enough!” He doesn’t shout it but it’s a close thing. It’s made better though, he bets, by him smiling through it.
Harry takes a shaky breath and even though he looks like he could start laughing again, he just stares and stares. Draco can feel the way his cheeks are flaming but for once he doesn’t care at all because Harry is blushing too. And he’s smiling at him. And staring. And he can’t take his eyes off him. It’s incredibly flattering. And a dream come true.
“Can I…” Harry murmurs suddenly. “Is this an opportune moment to kiss you?”
“Any moment is an opportune moment to kiss me.”
“Eh, I don’t know about—”
“Merlin, Potter, just— mhm !”
Harry kisses him. It’s unbelievable. It’s… It’s barely a kiss at first—they stand there in the middle of Draco’s office, lips pressed together, unmoving. Draco feels too stunned to move, too unable to believe that it’s Harry’s lips against his. Harry’s cupping his face and Draco is holding Harry’s and they’re just standing there pressed together for so long that Draco can feel a sob building in his chest and his eyes stinging with the overwhelming sense of relief at this finally resolving itself.
And to stop himself from crying he hums and brushes his thumb against Harry’s cheek and opens his mouth and then they’re kissing and pulling at each other, trying to get closer and closer. And then they’re stumbling backwards for purchase and somehow between moans, Draco’s bed materialises behind him and hits his calves and Draco falls backwards onto the mattress with Harry following.
They gasp in unison and it breaks the kiss. Harry pushes himself up on his elbows so he’s just barely hovering above Draco’s chest, so they can look at each other.
“How presumptuous, Potter,” Draco whispers, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry, I—” Harry props himself up immediately, but before he can roll over, Draco hooks one of his feet against Harry’s thigh. To keep him in pace. To press him closer.
“I was joking,” Draco says and pats Harry’s hip. He presses up to steal a kiss and then lays back down. “Didn’t I say I don’t care about presumptions?”
“Who’s talking Mr. Reciprocation-Didn’t-Even-Cross-My-Mind?”
“Yes, well…” Draco clears his throat and looks away from Harry’s glinting eyes. “Maybe I just like it when you say it out loud.” He tries shrugging but all it accomplishes is jostling them against each other so both of their breaths hitch.
“What?” Harry mutters and kisses the corner of Draco’s mouth. “That I’m utterly and hopelessly in love with your annoying arse?”
“My annoyingly wonderful arse, you mean?”
“Now, we wouldn’t want your head to explode.”
“You talk too much.”
Harry laughs again—and Draco feels delighted all at once at the realisation that his days will from now on be so filled with Harry’s laughter that it might cease to be a special occurrence—and then indulges him with a kiss. And definitely stops talking. For a long while anyway.