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Harry and Draco were a disaster waiting to happen. The only thing that surprised people about their break-up was how undramatic it was. To the relief of their friends and the disappointment of the press, they parted on perfectly amicable terms. Harry helped Draco pack his stuff and after a couple of jumps through the floo, that was it. Draco had moved back to the manor and Harry’s life, just as his apartment, was a lot less messy though riddled with empty spaces he didn’t quite know what to do with.
“See you around, Potter” Draco had said, leaning against the fireplace before he stepped through the floo.”
“Yeah” Harry said. “See you.”
Although he didn’t, not for a long time.
Harry moved on with his life and did what everyone expected him to do, patched things up with Ginny, traded his two-room apartment for a picture-perfect stone cottage in the countryside and raised a family with three kids within it. Meanwhile, Draco fulfilled his parents’ wishes by marrying a wife of pure blooded descent and producing an heir. The little family moved to the continent just after Scorpius was born. Harry was happy to hear it, it made it a lot easier to focus on Ginny’s lips when he was kissing her.
None of his friends ever mentioned Draco around Harry after the break-up, assuming it had been nothing but a fling or, like the press put it, a confundus charm finally having worn off. “I think it was just something he needed to get out of his system” Harry overheard Hermione telling Ginny once.
The week before Al’s eleventh birthday the words sudden death and Malfoy covered the front page of the Prophet and Harry dropped the ancient teapot they had gotten for a wedding present. White and pink china scattered into a thousand pieces on the kitchen floor and black tea stained the walls.
“It’s Lucius, not Draco” Ginny said from behind the paper. “He’s had a heart attack and dropped dead at the manor last night.”
“Oh” Harry said, beginning to scourgify the room. Ginny cast a reparo and the teapot mended itself but the cracks were still visible.
When the words Malfoy and back stood out in black bold letters a few days later, Harry thought Lucius Malfoy had managed to return from the dead in some dark, Voldemort-like fashion but this time it really was about Draco. His face covered the Prophet together with a beautiful woman and a boy very much resembling the one Harry had run into at Madam Malkin’s years and years ago. According to the article, the family was returning to England in order to be closer to Narcissa and for Scorpius to attend Hogwarts.
“Who’s that?” Al asked, having caught Harry staring at the picture for far too long.
“Someone I used to know” he answered in what he thought was a neutral tone and put the paper away.
About a month after the battle of Hogwarts, Harry ran into Draco Malfoy at the ministry, literally. He’d been to a meeting with Kingsley about Greyback’s case and was eager to get the hell out of there when he knocked into Draco who was slouching against a wall in the most laid back posture Harry had seen him.
“Watch it, Potter” he said. It wasn’t the drawl Harry was used to but came out rather friendly.
“What are you doing here?” Harry asked, noticing his tone too was lighter than it’d ever been when uttering a word to Draco.
Surprisingly he wasn’t told to mind his own business. “My trial was today.”
And then it hit Harry, Draco looked happy, it was possibly the first time he’d seen it, unless one counted the many occasions when he’d been full of glee while watching Harry fuck something up.
“You got off” he said stupidly.
Draco grinned at him, eyes bright behind the blond fringe. “Believe it or not, but yes.”
“That’s great” Harry said, finding he meant it.
Draco laughed at that, but it wasn’t unkind and they remained standing in the ministry corridor, staring each other up and down. There were a thousand things that could have been said, questions to be asked and apologies to be made but he wasn’t up for either.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked instead. “For celebrating.”
A shadow fell over Draco’s face and he shrugged. “I doubt anyone in the wizarding world will find me being on the loose much cause for celebration.”
The hostile tone Harry had known throughout Hogwarts was back and the warm smile was gone. Somehow it seemed important to Harry that he’d get to see that smile again.
“Let’s go somewhere else then” he said and when Draco arched an eyebrow in challenge he didn’t think twice before he grabbed his arm and apparated them both into muggle London.
Not in a million years would Harry have imagined having a relationship with Draco Malfoy before he found himself in the middle of one. If he had, he would have expected it to be an endless array of vicious fights over petty things. It wasn’t. Spending time with Draco was fun. Everyday chores like cooking and cleaning became little adventures where they more often than not found themselves half naked on top of various furniture.
In many ways, Draco was different from at school, more carefree, happier, warmer, softer. In other ways he was very much the same, posh, witty, perceptive. He could make Harry laugh like no one else, he saw right through him.
He was all arrogance and sarcasm but in a way that inspired laughter and led to heated discussions ending with their limbs wrapped around each other in ways he didn’t know they could bend, rather than them hexing each other to pieces. There were however plenty of big issues to cloud their days and slowly tear them apart.
There was Harry constantly cheating on Draco, because the Prophet let everyone know Draco wasn’t in it out of love and part of him believed it, so he cheated to forestall Draco cheating on him. Draco never did and he always forgave which had Harry question his intentions even more.
There was Draco accusing Harry of being ashamed of him and those arguments never ended because he was at least part right.
There were Draco’s parents hoovering in the background, planning pure blood wedding rituals and thinking up suitable names for the next Malfoy heir and Draco not telling them to drop it.
“It shouldn’t be this hard” Harry said, staring up the ceiling from where he was lying on the kitchen table, his pants pulled down to his knees and the floor littered with scattered plates from another one of their many fights.
“No” Draco agreed. And then he buttoned his trousers and began to gather his belongings in an unspoken agreement that they were done.
Harry helped him. It wasn’t a heated thing of the moment, but carefully done. They searched the attic together for suitable boxes and spoke about where Draco would live and what he’d do now while folding shirts and gathering up stray socks. They talked of whether Harry should go into the aurors or not while splitting up the books and records they’d bought together and Draco advised against it because he didn’t think it’d make him happy, but it was of course up to Harry.
It could have been done a lot quicker by magic but it was like a ritual, slowly sealing the end to their relationship. When Draco was finally leaning against the fireplace, balancing the remaining boxes, Harry wished there had been more things to pack. He thought about going up there and kissing him one last time and perhaps Draco thought about it too because his eyes lingered on Harry’s lips for a moment but then he stepped into the fire and that was it.
Harry sank down on the couch and stared into the flames for the rest of the evening. In the morning he got up and moved on with his life.
It was easy enough, things more or less fell into place like they were meant to happen but he always regretted not getting that last kiss. He thought it would have given him closure. Now it was like he walked around with something unfinished nagging at the back of his brain. Like he had missed out on something.
Once Draco was back in England, he was suddenly everywhere, from the celebrity pages to the next line at Gringotts. On more than one occasion Harry spotted him in the ministry and he was often ordering an espresso in the coffee shop that Harry passed to work. Even when he wasn’t there, Harry saw him. Every blond he passed in Diagon Alley became a tall, sharp Slytherin with grey eyes, every tailored suit brought the memory of cool elegant fingers clasping the foot of a glass of red wine while sitting barefooted on the window sill. Not even the letters with the Hogwarts crest, bearing his son’s barely readable scribbles gave him a break.
With their fathers’ history repeated from just about every parent to the new generation of Hogwarts students, inspiring bold whispers in the corridors at the sight of them, Al and Scorpius were destined to either hate each other’s guts from the start or to be drawn together like magnets. It turned out to be the latter. With a large dose of nostalgia, Harry took in the words about Al’s recent adventures at school, noting that these more often than not included his new exotic friend from the continent. He returned the owls, encouraging the friendship but never inquired about said friend’s father.
When the papers filled with pictures of Draco and his much too good-looking wife attending various charities, he quickly turned the page. When he spotted Draco in Diagon Alley, he offered a friendly nod from across the street but didn’t approach him. When Ginny asked for a divorce because she would never be enough, he pretended not to know what she was talking about.
When the papers plastered with blurry images of Draco at gay clubs, he did however defend him, because unlike Harry, Draco had been gay through and through.
It was a stupid thing to do. The reporter took him by surprise and before he had a chance to retract his words, she was gone. He expected it to be front page news the next morning but instead there was a fierce looking Astoria covering the Prophet, saying the Malfoys were getting a divorce. While their arrangement had worked perfectly well in southern Europe, it was obviously too progressive for conservative bloody England. And then she told them to lay off her husband.
Harry found himself liking her a lot more after that. He also wondered if Narcissa Malfoy was tearing her hair at the manor at the very moment.
His own statement did make page two. The Prophet made the most of it, digging up nineteen year old press clippings of the two of them together, working his recent divorce into the report and sealing it with speculations of whether the former lovers would resume their brief but intense affair.
He groaned, hoping he wouldn’t see that blond head any time soon but of course his prayers went unheard as a few days later Draco stepped through his fireplace, brushing sooth of his robes.
“Potter” he said, a mischievous grin on his face.
Harry shouldn’t have been surprised, not given the fact that there was a miniature version of the man on the second floor, playing gobstones with James and Al but he was still unprepared for what coming face to face with Draco after all this time would do to him.
“Hey” he said helplessly. “Sorry about your divorce” he added and grabbed the back of a chair for support, his legs threatening to give way underneath him.
Draco shrugged. “I’m not.” He made a face. “I should thank you for stepping up to my defense, except that it has made getting laid a lot trickier, there isn’t a wizard willing to go down on me now that I seem to have been claimed by Harry Potter.”
“Sorry” Harry said again. “I didn’t mean to say anything, it just slipped out.”
Draco kept a stern expression but his eyes glittered in a way that told Harry he was really quite amused. “I assume it was noble of you. You really are at your best when you’re being spontaneous.”
Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t think he’d been spontaneous in a long time. Then Draco stepped into his living room, called for Scorpius and a minute later they were off, leaving him confused staring into an empty fireplace.
When he was alone in the dark, he reached into his pants and came hard as years of held back desire was released in his climax. He lay still in the aftermath, memories of an eighteen-year-old Draco dancing before his eyes.
The night after Draco’s trial, Harry had led them into a random bar which to his embarrassment turned out to be a gay club. Draco had smirked at him but he hadn’t minded and half an hour later his lips were on Harry’s and Harry found he didn’t mind at all. It was gentle, a question rather than a statement and Harry replied by putting his arms around him, not letting go until closing hour when he apparated them right into his bedroom and Draco didn’t leave his flat until three days later.
They found refuge in the muggle world, which was ironic considering Harry had grown up being constantly neglected and miserable there and Draco had learned to shun everything non magical from the day he was born, but it embraced them, soothed them and offered a rare freedom. At times Harry wished to melt into it until magic became but a distant fantasy. He believed Draco shared these thoughts at times. It didn’t happen of course. Magic boiled within their blood, perhaps stronger than in most wizards and was ever present in their daily lives, from the scourgify they threw on sticky stomachs to the apparitions they performed across the country to find new places to explore. It wasn’t magic he deterred from but what came with it, the unwanted attention whenever they were seen together, reminding them they would always be the hero and the death eater, too far apart on the scale of good and bad to ever be able to unite.
For the same reason, he was unable to integrate Draco in his life. Part of him wanted to but there was always something holding him back from bringing Draco to a pub night with his friends or a lunch with the Weasleys. It was the faint scar on Hermione’s arm sprouting the insult Draco had thrown at her for years. It was the empty chair at the Burrow that he simply couldn’t imagine offering to someone who’d fought on the opposite side of the war the day Fred died. It was even in the happily unknowing smile of Teddy Lupin who would one day learn how there had been light and dark and how the other side had fought for a world in which he would not have been allowed to exist, and how could Harry possibly explain to him why he’d chosen to pair up with someone bearing the mark of Voldemort?
He didn’t deny spending time with Draco when asked by his friends - how could he when they were plastered all over the Prophet whenever they were spotted together - but he didn’t reveal to what extent, or how deep his feelings went. Ron and Hermione were under the impression that he was sleeping with Draco in a combination of rebelling against the public’s expectations of the golden boy and dealing with his past in the most destructive way. More than once the mentioning of Draco was followed by a suggestion that he’d see a mind healer.
Just like Draco wasn’t let into Harry’s life, neither was Harry a part of Draco’s, nor did he want to be. With his parents isolated in house arrest and having developed an aversion for the Prophet, they were easily kept in the dark. He doubted the Malfoys even knew he and Draco were on speaking terms.
For obvious reasons Harry was more than happy not to sit through dinner with Lucius but he knew it wasn’t purely out of consideration Draco never brought him to the manor. They hardly ever talked about the war but he was certain Draco had changed his views about blood supremacy and at his more generous moments he liked to think that even his parents had if just a bit. What didn’t seem to have changed was their conviction that the Malfoy name should be continued and that an heir should come out of the union with someone from the sacred twenty eight.
Harry didn’t doubt Draco would give in one day because despite everything that had happened, he still wasn’t ready to disobey his father.
He supposed he wanted a family too and he had no idea how he could have that with Draco. The idea of the two of them raising a child together was laughable. So one way or the other, there was an end date to their relationship and every day Harry woke up with Draco curled around him, it was with the knowledge that it wouldn’t last.
Perhaps it was because he had known to treasure it at the time, that years later he could still recall a moment with Draco with perfect accuracy, summoning exactly how it had felt watching his eyelashes flutter as he slept or the warm feel underneath his fingertips while trailing a flat stomach.
Winter break passed without any more visits from Scorpius and with the kids back to Hogwarts, Harry threw himself into work and filled what little time he had outside it with seeing his friends, renovating his kitchen and even took up running for a hobby, anything to draw focus from that prickling feeling at the back of his head.
“I’m meeting with Draco Malfoy tomorrow” Hermione said, having Harry choke on his tea.
“What? Why?” he spluttered between coughs.
She summoned him a napkin. “I’ve been asked to look into his business.”
“Do you think he’s up to something?” Harry asked with watery eyes, knowing there really wasn’t any other reason for the Wizengamot to engage a legal counsellor.
Ron snorted. “Hello sixth grade obsession.” As if Harry hadn’t spent the last twenty years wondering about Draco.
Hermione shook her head. “I don’t think it’s exactly illegal, his paperwork seems to be in order, but the purpose of his business is rather unclear. It might be a bit…unethical.”
“Blood supremacist?” Ron asked.
She made a face. “Well, yes.”
Harry stared into his cup of tea, his throat gone dry. Even though Draco had seemed to be everywhere for the past months, he didn’t really have a clue of what the man was doing for a living, except that it seemed to involve going to a lot of balls, looking ridiculously handsome. Nineteen years had passed since he’d walked out of Harry’s life. For all he knew, Draco might have grown up to be the same muggle hating aristocrat his father had been.
When Harry stepped by Hermione’s office two days later, she had the decency to pretend she didn’t know exactly why he was there. They spent some ten minutes talking about their kids before she casually told him “by the way, Draco has been cleared.”
“Oh” Harry said, as if he hadn’t been dying to ask. “No blood supremacy then?”
She shook her head. “No, rather the opposite. It’s really quite interesting. You should ask him about it.”
“Why would I do that?” he said stiffly.
She tilted her head and eyed him carefully, when she spoke her voice was softer than usual. “I didn’t think things were serious between you two back then, you never introduced him to us.”
“I couldn’t do that. He was horrible to you for years.”
She shrugged. “I suppose, but we would have met him halfway if he’d have wanted to.”
Harry didn’t say anything, he wasn’t sure Draco would have. He’d been so keen to move on, not wanting anything remotely reminding him of the war weighing him down, apologies included.
After his talk with Hermione, something changed. For the first time ever, including their six months together, Draco started to feel possible.
There was of course nothing to suggest Draco would agree to that. He was the one who had chosen to walk away, leaving Harry, the country and his entire past behind, and he might not have looked back once. Yet here he was, in England, strolling the streets of Diagon Alley, even sending his son to Hogwarts but perhaps it was all possible to him because he had managed to turn his back on it all. Perhaps time had taken care of it, the years blurring the pain of the war as well as erasing whatever love had been lost between them when they parted.
Yet when they had stood face to face, the grey eyes had glittered exactly like he remembered. You really are at your best when you’re being spontaneous Draco had told him.
It took him two weeks to spontaneously send an owl, suggesting they catch up over a coffee and left him fretting for a whole evening before the bird returned with an affirmative.
“So what is it exactly that you do?” Harry asked. He was fiddling with the spoon, trying to appear relaxed at the sight of Draco sitting opposite him and failing miserably. “Hermione seemed quite impressed by you.”
Draco smirked, as if he knew Harry was there only because he’d gained her approval. He took his time sipping his tea before he answered. “She wasn’t initially, seemed to think I was running some anti-muggle society.”
Harry didn’t know what to say to that because he was pretty sure the fact that he had been thinking it too was written all over his face. For a moment it looked like Draco was going to walk out of there but then he sighed. “I don’t blame her. I don’t exactly have a clear record.”
“I don’t think it was Hermione who…” Harry began awkwardly but Draco interrupted him.
“She’s not totally wrong, it was in the beginning. It was my father’s idea for redemption, start a muggle friendly foundation, put a lot of money into it, slowly rebuild his reputation. It was of course a lost cause in England, people weren’t stupid enough to fall for it a second time, but France was a new market to him.” He fiddled with his spoon, the way he always did when being uncomfortable. Harry wanted to reach out and latch their fingers together but didn’t.
“He got me into the business. My role was representation. Appear at galas, shake a lot of hands, suck up to rich people to get them to make donations.”
“It doesn’t sound like you enjoyed it much” Harry said carefully.
“I did at first, I guess I was happy to be able to get into the saloons again without people looking at me with disgust. My father was pleased, I was happy to please him.” Draco met his eyes and Harry imagined there was a flicker of shame there.
“But..?”
“Then I found out the foundation was not so much about building muggle wizards relations as doing research on how non magical people were different than magical ones, and by extension inferior. Astoria was the one to realize actually.”
Harry made a face. “Why would he do that? I mean, if he wanted to rebuild his reputation?”
“Because he was stubborn, unable to change his opinions, too proud to admit he was wrong, still devoted to the idea of blood supremacy. Take your pick.” He snorted. “It was actually pretty clever on his part, appear to be muggle friendly but in reality work for the opposite cause until that got into fashion again.”
Well, that was probably Lucius Malfoy in a nutshell, Harry thought.
Draco let out a hollow laugh and stared out the window. “I’m really not much better” he said, holding up a hand to still the protest that had formed on Harry’s lips. “I should have known long before that, in fact I did suspect but I couldn’t be bothered to find out. The Malfoys were slowly working their way back to the top and that was all I cared about.”
There it was, the lingering darkness in Draco that neither of them had been able to face. The spoon twisted in his hand and Harry could tell how much saying this costed him.
“Even after Astoria pointed it out, I was tempted to ignore it.”
“So what made you change your mind?” Harry asked carefully.
“Scorpius.” As the name fell off his lips, Draco’s features softened. “He deserves a better chance than I got.”
Harry smiled a little at the fatherly affection, at the same time stung, knowing that he himself had not been reason enough for Draco to change.
They sipped their tea, silence falling heavy between them with the pain of the past digging its claws into them and then slowly easing its grip.
“So I take it it isn’t anymore, anti muggle I mean?” Harry dared to prod.
Draco grinned. “I sure hope not. Astoria and I were able to outmaneuver him. We did it in stages, started some new projects in countries where he didn’t have as many contacts, closed the old ones down. I split my assets with Astoria, made her co-owner, meaning we were now three people in charge. He had as much stock as we combined, but there were two votes against one in all the decision making.”
“I bet he was furious” Harry said, putting his hands in his pockets because Draco telling him how he’d stood up to his father had sent an urge through him to grab him and haul him across the table.
“Indeed. Yet I think part of him was proud of how scheming I’d become. We’ve always had a very complicated relationship.”
“I’m sorry he’s dead.”
“I don’t think you are” Draco said.
Harry smiled a little. “No, not personally. But I am sorry for your loss.”
There was a strained look over Draco’s face and Harry chose to change the subject.
“So what is it your foundation does these days? Hermione only told me it was interesting.”
It turned out to be the right thing to ask because Draco’s face lit up and he launched himself into the topic. “We generally work with trying to combine muggle medicine with healing to cure muggle diseases. One of our projects is about trying to find a potion to heal cancer, it’s still in a very early stage but we’ve had some promising results. And we have a branch in Malawi working with muggle doctors to come up with a cure for malaria.”
I love you, Harry thought. He didn’t say it of course but forced the words to the back of his mind. “You’re very committed about this” he offered instead.
Draco nodded and went on. “The most recent project we started is working with transgender organizations in Poland. You know how witches and wizards can simply change their bodies by magic to match their gender?”
“Sure” Harry said. “I mean, I’m no expert but I’ve heard about it.” Every now and then it would happen that a publicly known witch or wizard would appear with a new name and pronoun but apart from that he hadn’t given it much thought and it didn’t seem to be a big deal to anyone.
“It’s different for muggles, they can’t do that obviously, so to them it’s a tedious process with seeing mind healers, being questioned by society, to eventually have surgery if their healers find them suitable.” He made an apologetic shrug. “You probably already know all that.”
Harry nodded, although the only reason he did was because Hermione kept bringing him muggle magazines which was pretty much his only link to the muggle world these days. It was funny how Draco, the pure blood, had remained connected to it while Harry had turned away from it.
“Anyway, we’re looking for a spell that can work on muggles. It’d spare them years of medical procedures and a lifetime of taking hormones.”
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
Draco went on about it some more but Harry found it hard to focus, his eyes drifting to Draco’s lips.
“We didn’t kiss goodbye” he interrupted Draco who looked incredulously at him. “When we broke up, you just left. It seemed…unfinished. We didn’t get any closure.”
Draco studied him for a while before he leaned forward, pressing his lips against Harry’s.
“There you go” he said, getting up, gathering his belongings. “Closure.”
As he watched Draco leave, he knew he’d had it wrong all these years. It would not have been enough, there would never have been closure.
If merely seeing Draco in his house had caused him to jerk off the last time they met it was nothing to what that kiss did. He spent a whole night fisting himself raw to the lingering burn of lips pressed against his. Two decades ago, they’d kept fucking in Harry’s apartment, and in a numerous more or less public places, for a good six months but he could still recall each and every time and replayed them night after night until his cock and ass stung painfully.
Draco was a bossy bottom and a tentative top. He either pushed Harry down on the bed and rode him fiercely, having him climax within a minute or slowly rocked into him, stroking him gently, keeping him on the brink of orgasm for what felt like hours. Harry loved it both ways, he didn’t know if it was because Draco knew him well enough to understand what he’d like or if it just was that everything that Draco did felt bloody brilliant. He’d been with a number of other people and he’d gotten to know every millimeter of Ginny’s body over the years, but nothing had ever come close to what he’d felt with Draco.
It should technically be Draco’s turn to suggest another date but Harry knew that wouldn’t happen, Draco preferred to get chased. Though Harry did not want to ask him out twice in a row, coming off as pushy or risk being turned down so instead he sought him out, lingering outside his office in a pathetic replay of sixth year.
“Hey” he said in a halfhearted attempt at surprise when Draco entered the street, as if he had simply been walking by instead of standing in the same corner for the past half hour, freezing his balls off in the cold April air.
He got an arched eyebrow in return and could see Draco suppressing a smile. The bastard had probably been eyeing him from the window.
“Care for a walk?”
Draco shrugged and they headed down the street side by side.
“I’ve thought about you every day since you left” Harry said sometime later as they came to a halt on the millennium bridge.
Draco didn’t say anything but stared down the grey water of the Thames.
“Did you think of me?” he pushed.
“No” Draco said, his expression suddenly hard. It hit Harry like a punch in the gut. When their eyes met the hardness softened somewhat and turned into pain. “I’ve worked very hard to forget about you.”
Harry nodded. If he’d thought that was an option he might have tried it. “Were you successful?”
“Not always. But it helped to be out of the country. And I’ve kept busy.”
“With what?”
Draco shrugged. “Work, being a father, a series of torrid affairs with other married men.”
“Just the usual then” Harry said drily.
Draco raised an eyebrow. “Did you…?”
Harry shook his head. After Draco there’d only been Ginny. Before that, there’d been many. Men as well as women but none who’d mattered. “I’m sorry I cheated on you” he said. “I wasn’t really interested in anyone else, I just wanted to get a reaction from you. You never seemed to care much.”
Draco let out a soft, humorless laugh. “Oh, I cared all right. I knew I wasn’t good enough for you though so I didn’t bother fighting you on it.”
“That’s not true” Harry said but it came out lame, both of them knowing it was a lie. He looked away, following the river snaking through the city.
“Sometimes I thought you were with me to improve your reputation” he admitted.
“I was” Draco said next to him and although it’d been nearly twenty years and they’d reinvented themselves many times over so that there probably wasn’t a cell in their bodies that was the same, the words still stung enough for him to gasp.
“But not only.” Draco shifted a little so that their arms rested against each other while leaning against the railing. “Not even for most of it. I wanted you but I also wanted you to pull me up with you.”
They stared down the bridge, watching the reflection of themselves play in the water, imperfect and contorted.
“You wouldn’t have married me" Harry mumbled. "Not against your parents’ will.”
“Maybe” Draco said, but then his eyes turned to linger on the horizon. “Maybe not.”
Harry had never offered Draco the option of marriage. He’d proposed to Ginny instead, and he’d never regretted it.
With her, he’d felt safe, like he didn’t need to fear her taking off with his heart the very next day. She’d been balm for his soul and she’d fitted into his life easily, already being a part of it. The only difference being that she came to hold his hand at pub nights or trail her foot up his calf with a smug expression under the dinner table at the burrow. They were happy together. People were happy for them.
Even now, years later and with a recent divorce like a fresh wound between them, things were still easy with her the way they weren’t with anyone else.
“I’ve met Draco Malfoy a few times” he told her, sitting at the kitchen table in her new flat. It was a bright space on the fifth floor, facing the bustling city below them. It suited her.
“You never really got over him, did you?” Her tone was sad but it wasn’t accusing. “It’s just hard, finding out that all along you really wanted to be with him.”
“It wasn’t like that” he said, because it hadn’t been. He’d never stopped thinking about Draco but it’d always been the eighteen year old version of him that had come to mind. He’d never imagined Draco by his side instead of Ginny, even the very thought of it seemed an impossibility. He had loved her in the present and Draco in the past, that much had always been clear to him. Then Draco had returned and things had gotten mixed up.
Loosing Draco hadn’t been like loosing Sirius or Dobby or Fred. It hadn’t been dramatic or sudden but inevitable. The pain of it wasn’t close to what the war had caused him when people he’d loved had been ripped from life before his very eyes, leaving him hurting as if his limbs had been torn from his body. When Draco had walked away, he’d been left with a dull ache that bothered him occasionally, like a bad knee acting up. He’d expected time to take care of it the way time always did by smothering the edges to make things that should not have been possible to bear bearable. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that faded but ached the same through centuries.
Seeing Draco now, the one he’d become, opened up a dam of could-have-beens that he hadn’t allowed himself before. On a summer evening when Draco dropped by to pick up Scorpius, who was playing quidditch with Al and Lily in the back yard, he aired some of it.
Draco listened to him with a grave expression. “I would never have been happy in England back then, I needed to leave.”
“We could have left together.”
Draco shook his head. “You wouldn’t have been happy anywhere else.”
Harry didn’t say anything, because even if he thought he could have been, Draco was right, he belonged here.
“Don’t look so sad, Potter.” Draco puffed his arm. “I’ve had a much better life than I could ever have imagined at the end of the war.”
“I’m glad” Harry said truthfully, remembering a young Draco casually leaning against the wall at the ministry, his eyes warm and hopeful.
“You haven’t done so bad yourself from what I’ve heard.”
Harry smiled, he supposed it was true. He’d joined the aurors and it’d been alright for the first year or two but never more than alright and he’d heard Draco’s voice at the back of his head. You wouldn’t be happy there. Perhaps it was the echo of the words that made him question his happiness in the first place, perhaps it was the fact that Draco had always seemed to know him better than anyone else. Regardless, he had resigned and teamed up with George in the shop for lack of better things to do. It was definitely where the fun was but not where Harry’s talent lay and after a couple of other failed career attempts, he’d ended up a private investigator, sometimes working with the ministry but never for them. The significance seemed important.
“I guess” he said.
“And I wouldn’t have traded Scorpius for anything” Draco went on, his voice warm as he watched his son doing loops next to Al.
Harry followed his gaze. “We could have had kids” he said vaguely. “There are ways.”
“There are” Draco agreed. “It wouldn’t have been those kids though.”
Harry nodded in agreement. Draco was right, he wouldn’t have traded James, Al and Lily either. Or Ginny. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling of having lost something fundamental.
“Don’t dwell on it” Draco said in a low voice. “It wasn’t right then and you know it.”
Harry wanted to ask if it was now, but Draco had already gotten up to wave Scorpius down.
“You look good” Hermione said.
“Thanks” Harry mumbled, fidgeting with his tie to loosen the collar that was threatening to choke him. He already regretted the formal robes he had picked out two weeks ago when he’d decided on attending the ministry autumn dance with the sole purpose of accidentally running into Draco. His intentions were probably painfully obvious because Draco was smirking at him from across the ball room.
Harry turned to Hermione. “I…”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Just go.”
Since subtlety had never been his strong suit, he made his way over the dance floor, his eyes focused on Draco who lazed about, leaning against the wall with a champagne flute in hand, appearing to be in mid conversation with two very old, fancy looking witches, donors presumably. He nodded along and offered a comment that made them both laugh but his eyes were fixed on Harry’s.
“Dance with me” Harry said and to his surprise Draco made an excuse to the ladies and levitated the glass to a nearby serving tray.
There were a few curious glances their way as they stepped onto the dance floor but nothing close to the mayhem the two of them appearing together in Diagon Alley had caused two decades ago. Placing an arm around Draco’s slim waist wasn’t followed by whispers about love potions or imperios. No one looked at Draco with suspicion or disgust these days, in fact most people appeared charmed by him.
They’d be allowed to be together now, he thought and was instantly overcome by sadness for all the years they hadn’t been. It’s OK, he told himself, he had Draco in his arms now, if only for a moment, and the present was the only thing that anyone had, wasn’t it, fragile and temporary, to seize or to lose.
“I just lost you for a while” he mumbled and inhaled sharply against Draco’s neck, too in love to breath properly.
“What?” Draco asked, taking a step back to look at him, noticing Harry’s blank eyes. “Get it together Potter” he mumbled and when it became clear that Harry was going to manage no such thing, he pulled him close and there was a swirling feeling to his stomach as Draco apparated them away.
They hadn’t gone far, the music and laughter from the ballroom were still audible, but now a muffled buzz. Harry blinked confusedly at a series of black high-quality robes, apparently Draco had taken them to the cloak room.
They looked at each other, Harry vulnerable as he met Draco’s eyes, searching for an emotion there, finding it at last.
“What’s going on Potter?” he asked, his arms still around Harry’s waist after the apparition.
“I’ve missed you” Harry said, feeling stupid for the banality of the words.
Draco didn’t say anything for a long time and then he leaned forward and brushed his lips against Harry’s. It was a soft kiss, soothing but eager at the same time, making him wonder if he was going to get fucked slowly against the clothes rack. He moaned into Draco’s mouth. The kiss went on and he pressed against Draco, feeling electric, trying to get as much body contact out of the moment as possible and there were a few glorious seconds where he thought he was going to combust by the sheer feel of it before Draco took a step backwards and held him at arm’s length.
“What do you want, Potter?” He looked flustered, his hair a mess from Harry drawing his fingers through it.
“You” Harry said, pulling him back, grinding his crotch against Draco’s hip in case he wasn’t getting the message.
“For how long?”
“What?” Harry looked at him blankly, having some trouble getting his brain to function with all the blood going south. “If you’re asking me how long I’ll last, I can tell you not that fucking long Draco because I’m like five seconds away from coming in my pants.”
“I see” Draco said, taking another step backwards, his features hardening.
“It’s not all I want” Harry hurried to say, stepping forwards, pushing him against the clothes rack, his arms going around Draco’s waist. His lips found a mouth and then they were both going down.
Draco swore, though the landing was softened by the numerous cloaks beneath them.
“For fucks sake, Potter, you never were able to behave, were you?”
“You said you liked spontaneous.” Harry grinned and watched Draco roll his eyes underneath him. The only thing that stopped him from vanishing their clothes right then and there was the knowledge that Draco would hex him in the balls if he did. “What do you want?” he asked instead.
Draco took an annoyingly long time to answer, leaving Harry’s cock aching with throbbing need.“ It’s either a quick affair now or you’re in this for the long run” he finally said.
“I don’t see why it can’t be both” Harry mumbled, watching the pink, very kissable lips just a few inches from his.
“If we are doing it, we’re doing it the right way.”
“When did you become a bloody romantic?” Harry asked, trying hard to restrain himself from pushing his hips forwards.
“Well?” Draco raised an eyebrow managing to look surprisingly dignified considering he was sprawled across the floor.
Harry sighed and summoned all his willpower to get to his feet but he didn’t need to think it over even for a second. “I want you for life” he said as he held out his hand to Draco.