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His head bobs between sign posts and passerbyers, graceful and impatient and ethereal. Harry’s only caught a flash in his periphery-- silver-blond braid, a nervous hand smoothing it down, fidgety and translucent-- but he knows. He’d know anywhere. He presses his nose to the icy pane of the window, his glasses colliding with a stuttering ping. Harry hasn’t seen Draco since he left, except in warped and eerie dreams, in crumbling visions behind the wet, stinging lids of his eyes when he lets himself remember.
Right now though, Harry is right here, right now, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, because time doesn’t feel real. All Harry knows is that Draco is beautiful here, among cobblestones and towering Alps. He reflects the cool-toned alpine light, refracts it as he weaves through space. Up high in this mountain city, they are closer to the sun, closer to the nothingness of it all, and Draco looks like he belongs.
Harry forgets to grab his coat and sprints through the door.
“I’m not,” Ginny says.
“What?”
“Pregnant. I thought I might be. I picked up a test.”
“Oh,” Harry replies. “That’s--”
But he doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know how he feels, and he hasn’t been paying enough attention to know how Ginny feels either. His head is silent-- achingly so, startlingly so, and his fingers against the kitchen island feel far, far too still. The adrenaline-high he’s been feeding on-- bees buzzing in his brain and twitching knuckles and no past and no future-- stands still with the sound of falling sand. He wonders when it all got so fucked up. He wonders how he’s remembered to breathe.
He stands abruptly with the knowledge that his knees will collapse, but they don’t, and so he stumbles backwards.
“I have to go,” he mumbles. “I have to go!” Louder this time, in a voice that’s not his.
“It’s okay,” Ginny says. She steps towards him. In place of silence, panic floods his arteries. “We can try again. We can-- not try again, if that’s it?”
“No, no,” he whispers, “none of it. Nothing.”
It’s these moments-- the ones where he thinks he’ll cry, or scream, or laugh, or smile, just this once, or combust, or collapse-- that pull him out this door, back to Draco. He always wants Draco, but sometimes it’s unbearable.
But he’s already knocked on Draco’s door once today, and twice the day before. He caught a glimpse of him in the corner booth of a curry place on Tuesday. He felt him in their bed on Monday. None of it is ever enough.
But he’s never asked for all of Draco. Even he couldn’t be that selfish, because what has he ever given back? Harry has this life, with Ginny and cinnamon toothpaste and orange light filtering from the Burrow and up towards the stars, and Draco has his life, with rotten luck and slandering gossip spilled over his name in the Prophet and whatever else he chooses to do and not do, whoever else he chooses to fuck or not fuck. That last one, though-- Harry doesn’t know. He’s never asked. The hypocrisy of his poisoned anger makes him sick.
He summons his trunk and his dragonskin satchel, his Weasley sweater from 6th year and a book from Hermione, his cologne and his cloak. Ginny tries to wrench it from his arms the same moment it all shrinks to the size of a bottle cap. It bounces from tile to rug. Harry picks it up and apparates to a post office.
All he can think to say to Draco is ‘I love you’ so he writes ‘I’m sorry’.
The portkey lands him in China (in Italy, in Canada, in Iceland, in Fiji) by nightfall.
Draco is two arm’s lengths away, but Harry thinks that maybe if he reaches out the Earth will bend to bring them closer. The air in his lungs is thin and cold and fast. His feet on the pavement tingle from running. He wouldn’t have noticed if they’d fallen off all together.
It all happened so long ago-- five rotations around the sun and a dozen countries and a dozen names-- but it’s always been Draco. It’ll always be Draco. He stretches his hand. He wraps it around Draco's shoulder.
Draco spins, eyes startled and wide and thunder-storm ocean grey. “You-- I-- Have you been here all along?”
“No,” Harry says.
“I worried. I looked. I gave up.”
“Did you not--” get my letter? Then Harry remembers he never sent it. He wonders what else he’s chosen to forget. He wonders how much more unbearably he could miss it, even though it was too much, even though all that came with was excruciating.
“Stay.” Harry says. “Stay and I’ll tell you.” Stay and stay and stay and stay.