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Draco clenched his fist at his side, refraining from adjusting the strip of useless cloth Harry had wrapped around his neck. Over the years he’d developed an admiration for the more practical side of Muggle fashion, especially the lack of billowing cloth that draped unflatteringly, but Draco had yet to understand the function of Muggle neckties. He felt like he was being perpetually choked by a very weak enemy.
Normally he would gripe about it endlessly until Potter just shook his head in that frustratingly simple way and kissed him to shut him up, but Harry had been acting strangely blank ever since he got the message from his cousin on the telephone, which he gathered was some sort of voice-only Floo network.
Harry didn’t like talking about his muggle family, but he’d said enough for Draco to understand why. What Draco didn’t understand was what they were doing here. Here, in the house Harry grew up in, with an assortment of Muggles dressed in black mourning the loss of his aunt, when he didn’t even like her.
To be fair, Harry didn’t hate her either. He seemed to lack the conviction needed to hate people for very long, and the distance between him and his abusive aunt and uncle quelled most animosity between them. But Draco hated them. It wasn’t that they were Muggle, or even that they were different. No, they reminded him of himself, his past beliefs and their shared pretension over people who weren’t like them.
He looked over at Harry who was sitting with his cousin, a tall and stocky man who, if they were standing, would have shadowed Harry’s wiry frame. Everyone seemed to be ignoring Harry. No one seemed to recognize the nephew that once lived in this house for sixteen years. Only one couple approached them, stopping to shake his cousin’s hand with twin somber expressions and generic consolations.
His cousin’s eyes were red but he looked calm talking to Harry, and at that moment he cast a glance his way. Draco narrowed his eyes at the fear he caught in the Muggle’s expression, but Potter shortly followed his gaze and turned back, a small grin on his lips before saying something Draco couldn’t hear from across the room, but which made his cousin almost smile. After a few minutes, Harry stood up with a comforting hand on his cousin’s shoulder, and walked to the next room in the opposite direction, and his cousin stood up and approached Draco warily.
“Hey, Draco, is it?”
Draco simply nodded, trying not to show too much of his growing discomfort, but it made him feel better to see that Dudley was struggling with the same unease.
“Thanks for coming,” he finally said, holding out a thick hand. Draco stared at it for a few seconds, not expecting the gesture.
After a few beats, he shook his hand and nodded. “Sorry, er, for your loss,” he said unconvincingly.
Dudley gave him an appraising look and accepted it with a last shake. “Thanks,” he said, before nodding and walking away and approaching the nearest person who wasn’t Draco.
Immediately, Draco crossed into the other room to find Potter at the table laid out with food.
“What did you say to him?”
Potter’s lip twitched as he reached for a napkin. “Dudley’s a bit scared of wizards, and you looked like you were ready to hex the next person who spoke to you.”
Draco’s frown deepened. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
Potter shrugged as he stacks a few pastries in his napkin. “I told him that you’re actually terrified of Muggles, so you’re just trying to scare them away.”
Scowling, Draco stole a Jammie Dodger from his hand. “I am not.”
“Yeah, well would you have preferred me to say, ‘Oh, he’s just a miserable bastard’?”
Draco rolled his eyes and bit into the shortbread. Harry stood by him silently, munching on some sort of sausage wrapped in bread, his normally atrocious posture now unnaturally rigid. Ever since they came into view of the house, Draco observed Harry’s shoulders tensing involuntarily, and he suspects that tension won’t leave until they do. He considers asking him how long they’ll have to stay, but the hollowness in Harry’s eyes stop him.
Instead, he places a hand gently on the small of Potter’s back and leans into his side. Harry breathes slowly and turns his head fractionally to give Draco an appreciative glance. Finishing his last biscuit, Harry tosses the napkin in the bin, takes his hand and cocks his head toward the hallway.
“C’mon, I’ll show you around.”
To be honest, Draco doesn’t want to see where his horrid relatives locked him up and kept him from practicing magic, but there’s a spark in Harry’s eyes that Draco didn’t realized he missed. He follows him up the stairs, casting a wary look at the cupboard underneath which Harry seems intent on ignoring.
Harry leads them to a small room at the end of the hall. It’s smaller than Draco’s closet growing up, and he can’t imagine the hero of the wizarding world growing up here for half his childhood. There’s only a bed and an empty desk, and the room is dusty with the smell of disuse, and cardboard boxes stacked in the corner.
Harry leans on the wall and pointed to the bed. “That’s where Dobby showed up before my second year.”
Draco swallows at the memory of his old house elf and tries to ignore the guilty memory of his younger self ordering him to do impossible tasks to see if the elf would punish himself for being unable to complete them.
“He told me you used to talk about me a lot,” Harry said, throwing him a look in askance.
Draco’s eyebrows rose. “He did not.”
“Well, he didn’t say it in those exact words. But he did say he heard ‘a lot about my greatness,’ and I doubt your father had much to say about that.”
Draco felt his face grew warm. “If I was talking about you, I was talking about how annoying you and your friends were and how much I hated you. He must have misunderstood; house elves aren’t that smart.”
“Dobby wasn’t dumb,” Harry said calmly, looking up and meeting Draco’s embarrassed gaze. “He probably read between the lines.”
Knowing his face must be visibly red by now, Draco walked toward the window above the desk and looked out onto the yard behind the house. He felt rather than heard Harry follow him silently, looking over his shoulder.
“That’s where I blew up Aunt Marge,” Harry snorted. “She floated away just over those houses over there.”
Draco didn’t laugh. He could only think of the way that Aunt treated Harry. He’d seen it himself, during their Occlumency lessons. He watched her treat the the seven-year-old Harry worse than her dog, watched her sic her mutt on him when he was nine, listened to her verbally abuse him at thirteen which culminated into an admittedly hilarious goodbye, but he couldn’t laugh now.
“What are we doing here, Harry?” Draco said softly.
Harry’s smile withered away and he swallowed. “I dunno.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, looking like the moody teenager Draco remembered. “Aunt Petunia wasn’t completely horrible.”
Draco scoffed at that.
“Okay, well maybe she was. But she was still my mother’s sister, the last connection I had to her. I know if she were alive, I still would never want to talk to her or see her again, but it still feels like… I dunno. Like loss.”
With nothing to say to that, he leaned against Harry, resting his head on his shoulder.
“Can I take you somewhere?” Harry whispered against his ear.
Draco didn’t respond, but only wrapped his arm around Harry’s and waited for the pull of Disapparition.
They found themselves in front of a cottage, enveloped in ivy and front lawn overgrown with weeds. His parents never brought him here, as he was sure many wizarding parents did, but Draco immediately recognized the scorched roof from the books he read about the boy whose arm he was still holding onto.
“I haven’t been here since, well, y’know,” Harry said vaguely. Draco nodded, and turned to spot the cemetery, thinking of the winter night he and Granger walked through the cemetery and were subsequently lured and almost killed by the Dark Lord’s snake.
“Have you been inside?” Draco murmured.
“No,” he responded, but made no move to enter.
In all honesty, Draco was very curious about what the preserved state of the Potter household when Harry was one year old, but he was struck by the almost frightened look on Harry’s face.
“It’s probably best we don’t –”
“I want to,” Harry said, his voice nearly cracking. “I do,” he said more firmly, “I just...”
Draco looked at him, filled with the sadness and his inability to comprehend what must be going through Harry’s head right now. He only took his arm and pulled away enough for him to lace his fingers between Harry’s and grip it tightly with reassurance.
“Come on. I’m right with you.”
Harry’s eyes were shining now, but he looked at Draco as if he was all that he needed, and squeezed his hand in return before following him towards the entrance.
No one was there to oversee the grounds, evidenced by the small forest growing in the front yard, but Harry supposed everything was kept in their stationary state with preservation magic. The doors opened and the curtains responded to the breeze coming through, but everything felt as if was on a still loop, like entering a wizard photograph.
Harry’s hand tightened as they entered the foyer, the children’s toys scattered on the floor. Draco felt a pang of empathy, thinking of the life Harry nearly had and lost. He thought of his own life as a one year old, and thought it probably didn’t look much different than this. His family may have been wealthier, but his parents doted on him just as much, especially at that age when all that mattered was keeping their young wizard happy and healthy.
Harry was looking down the hallway, his face stricken with a deep sadness. Draco looked down the hallway, not knowing what he expected to see, but saw nothing, save for a few photographs hung on the walls.
“This was—this was where Vold—where my dad died,” Harry stammered out. “He’d been playing with me in the living room, and left his wand behind.” Tears were now streaming and Harry swallowed a sob. “He—told my mom to bring me upstairs. He was going to try to fight him off himself, but he’d forgot his wand.”
Draco wanted to do nothing but grab Harry and Apparate far, far away from here, but instead he wrapped his arms around Harry’s waist and let Harry cry into his chest. His wracking sobs beat against his sternum, and Draco felt his own face getting wet from the tears that silently cascaded down.
They stood like that for a long time, until Harry’s cries quieted down to less frequent sniffs. Draco pulled away to hold Harry’s face in his hands, softly rubbing Harry’s cheeks with his thumbs to catch the remnants of saltwater that gathered there.
“I wanna go upstairs.”
“Harry…” Draco started. Why was this man so determined to feel the pain he was too young to comprehend all those years ago?
“I know,” Harry snapped, but he repeated softer, “I know.”
Harry pulled away from Draco’s hold and looked toward the stairs. “I’m just torturing myself, I know. But if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it, and this is it, really. This is really my last connection to my parents. My aunt never even spoke about my mother, and as far as I know, my mother was nothing like her. This is all that’s left, and I want to see it, just once.”
Draco still felt uneasy, considering the scene they would find upstairs would be ten times as heartbreaking as the empty hallway they stood in. But he knew Harry’s stubbornness well enough to know that even if he dissuaded him now, Harry would only come again without him, and Draco couldn’t stomach the idea of him returning to the ruin alone, so he nodded numbly and took Harry’s hand again as they climbed the stairs together.
The breeze from the open roof reached them from halfway up the winding staircase, and the evidence of the scorched walls started right near the top. There was less, far less than what was downstairs, because three-quarters of the second floor were blackened and charred, with only a few sparse planks of wood angled overhead from what used to be the roof.
No pictures or children’s toys existed here, only the crib stood on the burned floor, the only thing untouched by the effects of the Dark Lord’s half-death, shielded by the love of Harry’s mother.
Harry didn’t dare move closer and Draco didn’t dare breathe. He looked over and saw that Harry’s eyes were closed, as if he was unable to continue looking at the scene. Fresh tears edged from beneath his eyelids, and he whispered, “Draco, take me home.”
And Draco did, squeezing his hand and thinking of home.
His parent’s manor wasn’t his home, not anymore, just as Grimmauld Place wasn’t Harry’s. Both held too many painful memories, and they couldn’t heal at the place where they once gathered fresh wounds. But here, in their flat in the muggle part of central London, they made their own home together, and it was here that he took Harry back in his arms.
Encircling his hands around Harry’s waist, he turned his head to kiss him gently, tasting the salt that dried on his skin. Harry gripped the lapels of Draco’s jacket, pulling him with more need, as if he’d drown if he let go. Pulling away, Harry still held onto his suit, and looked at him with his eyes blazing in a green darker than Draco remembered.
“Thank you. For coming with me today.”
Draco ignored the desire to roll his eyes and simply kissed away Harry’s stupid assumption that Draco might not have come, and held him in an embrace he wished he never had to let go of.
“I’ll go anywhere for you,” Draco said, whispered into the crook of Harry’s neck, knowing that was the truth of it. He would go anywhere for this man, who tore him apart and put him together and filled his life with more purpose than he ever dared imagine. “But you’re wrong. Those weren’t the last connections you had with your parents.”
He slid a hand up Harry’s chest, feeling his heart beating at a quickened but solid pace. “Your parents are more than the siblings who hated them and the house they last lived in. They’re here.”
Misted green eyes met Draco’s and he met his lips in turn, with cautious intent. But Harry wrapped his fingers around his tie and pulled him closer and deepened the kiss.
Leaning his forehead on Draco’s with his eyes still closed, Harry murmured, “You bloody sap.”
Draco groaned, but he smiled. “And if you tell anyone, I’ll hex you in two.” He loosened Harry’s tight grasp and started pulling them up the stairs while trying to loosen the noose around his neck. “Come on, we’ve been wearing these things for far too long.”