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If Potter knew, he might not have even cared. It wouldn’t have made a difference to him. Draco was just as pale, just as liable to glare and gleam—just as irrelevant to Potter’s life as he'd been when his chest still hummed with a heartbeat. When he had a chest.
Nevermind—no bitterness, he’d promised himself. Eternity is doable, eternity wallowing in resentment, he knew he couldn’t handle. He’d find a way to crack up from the core, shred the porcelain, break himself into pieces like he had as a boy. And then it’d be eternity as actual rubbish. No, this is better. It has to be.
Draco ought to be grateful anyway, he knows. He isn’t alive but he certainly isn’t dead. They could have shoved him into one of those awful muggle contraptions, too, with a belly of electricity and those bulbs, the dead wicks lit through trapped lightning or something, however it works. And he must be handsome enough. Potter strolls past his dust-drenched shelf without a second glance the first time, and then stops short on his way toward the front door. Makes a stupid face, leaning in, like he was trying to read a plaque in a language he never learned by sheer force of will. He turns and takes one lurching step away, then he’s back again. Stroking Draco’s side without another second’s hesitation. No surprise he reaches for whatever he wants without asking.
Potter puts a damp palm to each of Draco’s sides. He’s careful, staring and staring, almost cradling on the walk to the front and then lofts him up into the air with enough force that Draco would be sick just then if he’d still had a stomach. “What’s this thing?” Potter asks.
The grizzled thing behind the counter frowns up at them. “Lamp.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I meant what sort of bird is this? Is it a swan?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be,” Nasty smile, nasty voice. What is Potter doing here, anyway? In his six months of helming parades and accepting awards from sob-shivered dignitaries, hasn’t he learned anything? This sort of place, the swamp-reek of old grudge magic and long-forgotten orphaned objects—nevermind. Draco saw it.
Potter frowns. “Um. Okay.”
“Except working. It don’t really work.”
“Oh,” Potter says, staring down at the dull disappointment held in his hands.
Draco stares right back, although he can’t really. It isn’t seeing so much as knowing—more than with eyes, which he appreciates. Light is surprisingly cool, a bright clean sharp sensation, like a soap bubble without the limiting brim. Potter looks the same as he used: eyes so vivid green it might have taken gouging to get into something that alive, slack mouth, concern for any declared-useless creature drenching his dumb face. Only he’s warm, too, warmer than anything else in the room. A sack of magma stuffed into the mundane air, like overlooking the simple miracle of a living breathing too-loud-snort-sort-of-laugh volcano is in any way possible. Draco can’t smell, though, and he’s sure Potter is racking up interest on a debt to a shower anyway.
“I’ll take it, I don’t care,” Potter says, and if Draco could do the magic himself, he’d be unabashedly glowing.
It’s nothing to do with the operator of the two palms holding him up and everything to do with the bleary century of a sentencing he’s already waited out on the shelf of this sour shop. Only two months in people-days, he’s aware, because the grease trap behind the counter blares news radio at all hours of the day. Draco likes to imagine she can’t read. Time passes differently stuck in this shape, closer to light, like a substance you can amass too much of or squint through a lack. Here, it’s been too much.
“Your loss,” the bitch snaps.
Then there’s the crunchy strangle of being suffocated in a clumsy newspaper, and when Draco wakes up, he’s home.
–
“Oh, Harry. Oh no.”
Draco could feel the roiling heat from their bodies—nothing as staggering as Potter’s but somewhat molten just the same—through the wall, but he doesn’t need any sense to recognize Granger's worry-dregged whine pouring into the room. “I thought you were supposed to be getting rid of things, not accruing more of them.”
She stands in a squat stack of knots at the doorway, face tangled, arms crossed. Weasley barges in behind her.
“What oh no? New lamp?”
“Yeah. Er, new to me, anyway,” Potter says. “It’s kind of old. Maybe. I think.”
“Kind of gay, too,” Weasley says, squinting down at Draco on his doily-drowned pedestal. He’s off. He’s been left off the whole time, furious aside from his commitment not to care. Potter doesn’t know how to fucking turn him on.
“Ron!” Granger squeaks.
“I like it,” The Weasley-ette offers. She’s the last one in the living area and already coating the corner of a very kind rug with crisp crumbs. “Swans are cool.”
“I don’t know if he is a swan. I dunno what he is,” Potter says, and makes a pleased sound like a mattress deflating when girl-Weasley plops down half on top of him.
There it is. Sometimes this happens; the sudden, hollow, huge ache. He just misses having legs that carry or cross rooms, folding and flopping on top of someone so warm without a single thought about it. An unplanned part of the punishment, Draco assumes: he knows how soft Potter’s hand is, now, only after the chance to sink into such a thing has been ripped away from him.
The optimistic take on it: Draco’s kidding himself to consider he would have ever had the chance to feel anything on Potter with his own hands, in his own, actual living body. Now, like this, Potter’s face is unshielded and unyielding, looking up at him from the sofa and really trying to see him. That’s never happened before.
“He?” Granger asks, eyebrows vanishing into the ongoing argument of her fringe.
“Oh,” Potter laughs. The sound squeezes out, not enough air. Forced. “I’ve been here alone for too long, maybe. Some stuff starts to feel…” he shrugs and Granger’s gaze doesn’t relent.
“Who cares,” Girl-Weasley says. “He, it, swan, duck. Whatever it is, why’s it off?”
“You hardly need a lamp, Harry,” Granger cuts in. She still hasn’t even chanced a single blink. “We’ll be living all together. The Burrow’s got plenty of lighting.”
Draco shudders, a ripple running through the inside of him while all his outsides remain unmoving.
“You can toss it in the shed with Dad’s junk,” Weasley says, snatching the snack bag from his ilk’s fist. Harry looks at Draco. “I can leave it here. It’s broken, anyway.”
“Have you tried it? It’s a touch lamp, right? Our great aunt had one, here, look.”
Potter wriggles out from under her slack thigh a little and Draco’s delighted, though not enough to have any reaction at all when Girl-Weasley reaches over with greasy fingers and smears crisp residue all over Draco’s face. She frowns, annoyed, and then aims the face at Potter.
“I said it was broken, Gin,” Potter shrugs, retrieving the rest of his leg from underneath hers and spilling over the arm of the sofa. She heaves a sigh and then changes course to steal back the crisp bag from her brother. Granger protests, the siblings shove at each other, and Potter turns back to Draco.
Some things are even nicer without the dragging anchor of flesh and blood. Without the rise and fall of a chest there’s a stronger current to time, minutes flooding or draining dry, depending. Swollen moments are easier thing to appreciate, a thicker thing to linger in. Draco does. Here, now, the seconds plump up, plusher and blushing when he can’t. Potter puts his palm to Draco’s cheek, the smooth pale slope that might as well be, and light pours out of him. They’re alone there, the feeling blots out the rest of the room.
Draco glows.
–
He is an only child—was an only child. So it stands that Draco prefers, generally, to be special, set apart, noticed above all else.
And he does for a while. The living area is where Potter sequesters through most of his days. Most nights, too. He falls asleep on the sofa under a slow-growing mound of blankets, winter whispering in through the poorly-kept panes even with the fireplace bright and churning. Glasses askew and begging to leave a permanent dent in the bridge of his nose, one arm slumped off the edge of a cushion, frowning through the whole thing. He looks miserable when he sleeps, every time, legs tucked up to his chest, gleaming with sweat through the chill, muttering and scratching at himself with a clawed, fitful grip.
Draco goes to shake him awake a humiliating amount of times. He can’t, of course. He can’t do anything until the mornings when Potter yawns, knuckles up his glasses. Slips off for a slash, shows back up with a dry, unwashed face and the wreck of hair. With one hand he’ll rub thoughtlessly at his stomach, flat but soft, the sort of thing with a little give if you had a tongue to run along it. Sunless, unlike the rest of him. And with the other he’ll reach for Draco.
A curled index finger, most days. He taps twice, like Draco’s a doorknock, like Draco’s a threshold he’s interested to enter but too courteous to do so without permission. None of this is true—entry, courtesy, but it’s nice just the same.
Though his palm is much better. Potter uses the uncalloused curve of his hand to stroke, to pet. He’s gentle. He doesn’t grope the way Draco thought he would, back when he thought about what Potter’s hands could do so much that occlumency was the only reasonable option for survival. He holds things lightly, like he’s unsure if he’s allowed even if it’s his own house. Even if it's Draco, who’s known since the thought knotted his stomach that everything in the world is a little bit grateful for even just the green grip of Potter’s eyes. Let alone his hands.
Nothing magnificent in the details. Blunt, wide nails, bitten short. Dry fingers, damp palm. There’s something in the holding, though, brittle reverence. Potter looks at the dumbest things sometimes like he can’t believe they’re really here. His friends. A meant-to-be-broken lamp. It’s a simple, tremendous act. Like him. Just like him.
So Draco is content next to the ugly sofa and the living area of unliving things for a bit, pleased to be the only appreciated object in the room, then Potter gets rid of the sofa and stops coming home. That lasts a long time; a few hours, maybe a year. Loneliness isn’t a thick enough word. Time gets a sticky, stringy texture. Thin but too much, stretching with gum in a wash of sunsets and rises. The window collects dirt and Draco reminds himself to appreciate what he has: a view of brick past the window and presumably the remnant scent of Potter, even though he can’t smell, and all he can remember is the stark sense of his body written in warmth.
Sometimes, in short bursts, Draco hears him stomping over the floorboards in his room, but often he doesn’t feel him in the house at all. Potter’s hot enough that he usually radiates from three floors above, a sun of sensation, impossible to ignore. No different than when Draco was breathing, either. But now it’s empty, cold. Winter washes through and gives way to a gray spring.
Eventually the days rot, hours growing syrupy and overripe. It’s humid enough that Draco thinks: July, maybe. Mid-August at the latest. Way past his birthday, which Draco celebrated by allowing himself to hate the entirety of the day and compile a thick list of everything he missed the most: flying, his mother’s perfume and the ancient mahogany exhale of his father’s study, that chest clench feeling of laughing really really hard, holding his arms up above his head and stretching his spine, wanking.
In the middle of a particularly lethargic velvet night, the fireplace crackles into sudden life and Potter tosses himself in through it, heaving a bag. And then another. Another. The light dwindles down to the last gasp, and for a while they sit together in the room. Potter’s collapsed onto the rugless floor, breathing hard. He lets out a bright laugh like he’s just completed another harrowing escape. He falls onto his back hard enough that his head hits the ground and he closes his eyes in the dark, hands splayed out and fingers curled in a stilled reach. He looks—well. The way he always looks. How he always looked, to Draco. Molten—mid-weld. Like the strike and dull flare of a sword taking shape.
“Hi,” he says, pushing himself up off the ground in a spill of limbs.
He stands at his full height and the empty space where Draco’s heart used to live aches—Potter’s an inch taller, maybe two. Draco will never grow or change again. That’s the idea. Archaic, rigid beliefs transferred from their ill-fitting bodies to vessels better at carrying such restricted values: obedient objects. That’s what they’d all so badly wanted to be. His father is a staircase.
Hi, Draco dreams of saying back. Maybe he’s owed a little longer of a wallow for his birthday. The ache in him echoes so steadily it’s almost the same as having a heartbeat again.
Potter’s face softens like he heard it, anyway. He’s showered but there are bruises pressed under his eyes. He looks handsome in the dark and, much worse, impossibly better in the light. Bright pours over Draco’s entire being, washing Potter in it too, an undeniable warmth they both linger in. His hand wades into the smooth at Draco’s side and he curls his fingers slowly.
“Well,” he laughs. “I’m home. And already talking to you. That can’t be a good sign, but. Fuck it.”
It’s a good thing, in a way. If Draco had a mouth he’d only curl it sour and sneering, fear of ruining the moment ensuring he will, squeezing out some safe venom. Like this, Draco can’t spoil anything. He blushes bright and Potter looks at him grateful for it.
iv.
They live together, then.
Potter starts sleeping better, in his own bed, and he brings Draco up next to it eventually, setting him carefully next to the pillow he dents with his head. Dust grows into a thick knit and then gets cleared off in a huffy frenzy on random sideways-sun afternoons, leaves growing heavy and green outside the window and then hunching over, frail and shivering, and then gone. One year wades into the next.
Potter doesn’t get much taller, but his face stays so handsome Draco eventually forgets feeling anything but relief to see him. He brings people into his bed, lays tangled into the late morning and laughs full-bellied enough to shake the thin sheets, stays up into the whisper-thin hours of night learning someone else. They never argue but he’s always done at some point, and then there’s another new set of shoulders to fall in love with him.
Once, a belly grows big next to him, and then there’s a baby, and then there’s no one else sharing his bed except for this tiny, loud thing. Just as mundane and miraculous as he is. Same hair, too.
Draco is there for every sleepless, groaning, lonely night. Whenever the baby wakes up wailing, Potter rolls over with his eyes closed and reaches first for Draco. A soft hand to his cheek. Like this they’re a family, all adoring, both watching the same little thing searching for stillness. If nothing else, they savor the same warmth and light. Beholden to each other for it.