Work Text:
The first night Harry flew over the pitch, the moon was a thin paring against a black sky and the air had teeth. October had come in cold and wet, and the Quidditch pitch held the damp the way old stone holds it — patient, indifferent.
He'd waited until two in the morning. McGonagall had said no with the kind of tired finality that meant she'd already lost the argument with the governors before she'd had it. Eighth years are guests at this school, Mr. Potter, not students. The provision is temporary. Temporary. As if any of them had been guests of anything but their own grief since September.
Ron had snorted and gone back to his eggs. Hermione had said something measured and reasonable. Harry had smiled and nodded and meant none of it, because by then he'd already decided.
He let the broom drop into a dive just to feel the air shift around him. The Snitch — his own, the one he'd bought himself from a shop in Diagon that summer because no one was going to give him a Hogwarts one — winked silver against the dark and was gone before he'd finished the thought of going after it.
He went after it anyway.
It was the first time in months that something inside his chest had stopped its low, constant grinding. Up here there was no Boy Who Lived Twice or Saviour of the Wizarding World or any of the other names the Prophet kept trying out like hats. Up here there was wind and a small gold thing and his own hands, which still worked, which still knew how to do this one thing.
He caught the Snitch over the Slytherin hoops and felt, for the first time since May, something almost like quiet.
⁂
He flew Mondays and Thursdays at first. Then Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. Then most nights, because most nights he couldn't sleep anyway, and a broom was better than the dorm ceiling.
He'd worked out a system. Out the dormitory window — the Fat Lady never knew. Down the slope past the greenhouses with his broom under his cloak. Onto the pitch, release the Snitch, give it ten seconds, then up.
It was the third week of October when someone was already there.
Harry saw the figure halfway across the pitch — a long pale shape against the dark grass, broom in hand, head tilted up at the goalposts like he was measuring them. Harry's first instinct was to drop flat behind a stand, and his second, when the figure turned and the moonlight caught the colour of his hair, was a long internal oh, of course.
Of course it was Malfoy.
Malfoy who'd kept his head down all term and sat at the end of the Slytherin table and answered when spoken to and not otherwise. Malfoy who had a permanent, watchful look about him now, like someone listening for a noise in the next room. Malfoy who was, apparently, also a person who couldn't sleep and who also missed flying.
Harry could have left. He thought about it for a clean second. Then Malfoy turned the rest of the way around, saw him, and said, quite distinctly across thirty feet of wet grass: "You."
"Me," Harry agreed.
"Get off my pitch, Potter."
"It's not your pitch."
"It's not yours either."
"I was here first."
"I was here tonight first."
This was so stupid that Harry actually laughed — one short, surprised sound that he hadn't made in a while. Malfoy's face did something complicated in the dark.
"I'll go in an hour," Harry said. "You can have it after."
"Generous."
"Take it or leave it."
Malfoy looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, in the flat affectless voice he'd been using all term, "Race you for it."
"What?"
"Seeker's match. One Snitch. Whoever catches it gets the pitch."
"For tonight."
"For the term."
Harry should have said no. Harry said, "Fine."
They were in the air thirty seconds later. Harry let the Snitch out of his palm and it shot upward, vanished, and he and Malfoy went after the empty space where it had been like a pair of hounds let off a leash. He'd forgotten — he'd actually forgotten — what it was like to fly against someone who could fly. Ginny was good. Ron was solid. Malfoy was something else; Malfoy in the air was the version of Malfoy that Harry had always, somewhere underneath everything, respected. Lean and economical and fast, and willing to do stupid things with his body to get half a length on you.
Harry caught the Snitch six minutes in, by inches, with Malfoy's shoulder pressed against his and Malfoy's breath sharp in his ear.
They hung there in the dark a moment, both panting.
"Best of three," said Malfoy.
"You said one."
"I lied."
Harry caught it again. And again. Three for three. Malfoy landed hard and said Tomorrow, Potter, same time, and don't be late, and stalked off the pitch without waiting for an answer, and Harry stood there holding the Snitch and feeling his face do something he hadn't given it permission to do.
⁂
Tomorrow, same time. And then the next night. And the next.
By the second week of November, Harry had stopped pretending he was going down to the pitch to fly. He was going down to the pitch to fly with Malfoy. The distinction had collapsed sometime around the fourth night, when Malfoy had finally won one — by a fingertip, with a feint that should not have worked — and had whooped, just once, before he remembered who he was and who he was with and shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.
Harry had grinned at him. Helplessly. Stupidly. And Malfoy had looked away.
They didn't talk much, at first. They flew. They counted score in their heads and disagreed about it on the ground. Malfoy was vicious about close calls and Harry, who had spent seven years being vicious back, found himself unwilling to give him the fight. He'd just shrug and say fine, yours, and watch Malfoy not know what to do with that.
Then one night in late November the Snitch went into the stands and they had to land and look for it, crawling around under the benches with their wands lit, and Malfoy said, without looking at him, "I thought you'd be insufferable about it. The war."
Harry sat back on his heels. "About what about it."
"Winning."
"I didn't win anything."
Malfoy made a noise.
"I didn't," Harry said. "Loads of people died. That's not winning."
Malfoy was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Lumos maxima," too loud, and the Snitch turned out to be three feet from his hand, and they got back in the air.
But after that they talked. Not about the war — never about the war, not really, not directly — but about other things. Stupid things. Malfoy had opinions about every professor and most of them were funny. Harry told him about the Dursleys' cupboard once, by accident, and Malfoy went so still on his broom that Harry thought he'd offended him, until Malfoy said in a strange voice, I didn't know that, Potter, and then changed the subject so hard it left a mark.
By December they had a routine. Harry brought a flask of tea. Malfoy brought, once, a small tin of biscuits from a hamper his mother had sent and put it down between them on the grass without comment, like a peace offering left for a feral cat. Harry ate three.
⁂
In the Great Hall, nothing changed.
This was the part Harry couldn't quite make sense of, even to himself. At breakfast Malfoy did not look at him. In Potions Malfoy did not look at him. Passing in the corridor Malfoy's eyes went over and through and past him with the same blank polite nothing he gave everyone else now, and Harry — Harry did the same back. He didn't know who'd started it. Maybe both of them at once, that first morning after the first night, some unspoken treaty signed in the second they made eye contact across the porridge and both flinched.
The pitch was the pitch. Everywhere else was everywhere else. It was understood.
Hermione noticed he was sleeping better. You look less haunted, she said, peering at him over her toast, and Harry made a noncommittal noise and stared very hard at the ceiling enchantment. Ron noticed that his Snitch reflexes in their lunchtime apple-tossing game had got sharper. You been practicing or something, mate? Harry shrugged.
He didn't know how to say I have been flying with Draco Malfoy four nights a week for two months and we are, I think, friends, and I do not want anyone to know because if anyone knows I will have to think about what it means and I can't think about what it means yet.
So he didn't say it.
⁂
The thing was — and this was the part that kept him up on the nights he wasn't flying — the thing was that Malfoy was funny. Malfoy was clever and quick and bitterly funny, and he had a way of saying something cutting and then glancing sideways to see if Harry had laughed, and Harry always had, and Malfoy would do this small private smile that he then tried to hide.
The thing was that Malfoy, in the dark, on a broom, was beautiful. There was no point pretending otherwise. He was all long lines and concentration and the wind did things to his hair that Harry had started looking forward to.
The thing was that one night in early February, after a particularly close match — Malfoy had won, and crowed about it, and Harry had laughed up at him from the grass where he'd thrown himself flat — Malfoy had landed and stood over him with his hands on his hips and his face flushed from the cold and the flying, and Harry had looked up at him from the ground and thought, with absolute and ruinous clarity: oh, I'm in trouble.
He didn't say anything. He got up and brushed grass off his jeans. They went back to the castle by their separate routes, as they always did, and the next morning at breakfast Malfoy did not look at him and Harry did not look at Malfoy, and Harry sat in History of Magic and thought I'm in trouble, I'm in trouble, I'm in trouble in time with Binns's droning until Hermione asked him if he was all right.
⁂
February became March. The nights got a little less bitter. The Snitch was harder to see against the lighter sky and they had to fly closer to catch it, which meant more collisions, which meant more of Malfoy's elbow in his ribs and Malfoy's knee against his thigh and once, memorably, Malfoy's hand on his forearm to shove him out of the way of a hoop, which had stayed there a beat too long, which Harry had thought about for the next three days.
He started to suspect — and he tried very hard not to suspect, because suspecting was worse than not knowing — that Malfoy might also be in trouble. The way Malfoy looked at him sometimes when he thought Harry wasn't looking. The way Malfoy had started touching down closer than he needed to. The way Malfoy, the last time they'd argued about a call, had stepped right into Harry's space and stayed there, breathing, until Harry had laughed and stepped back because he didn't know what else to do.
Or maybe he was making it up. Maybe he was lonely and inventing a thing because the real thing — the thing where he'd been pining quietly and steadily and increasingly desperately for Draco Malfoy since February — was easier to bear if he could pretend it might be mutual.
He didn't know. He couldn't ask. There were no words for what they were doing that wouldn't ruin it.
⁂
It was the second week of April when it happened.
The night was warm — properly warm for the first time all year — and there'd been rain that afternoon so the grass was soft and the air smelled green. Malfoy was in a strange mood. Sharp-edged. He'd lost the first two matches and won the third by cheating — he'd elbowed Harry, hard, on the way to the Snitch, and Harry had laughed so hard he'd nearly fallen off his broom, and Malfoy had said don't laugh at me, Potter, in a voice that sounded almost angry.
"Best of seven," Harry said.
"You only ever say best of when you're losing."
"I'm not losing. I'm one-two."
"That's losing, you cretin —"
The Snitch flickered fifty feet up and they both went, hard, no warning — Harry on the inside of the curve and Malfoy on the outside, and then Malfoy cutting across him because Malfoy always cut across him, and Harry leaning into it because that was the game. The Snitch dropped. They dropped after it. The pitch came up fast and green and Harry pulled up at the very last second and felt Malfoy not pull up quite fast enough and felt Malfoy's shoulder catch him in the side and then they were both off their brooms and rolling, and the Snitch was somewhere and Harry didn't care where it was anymore.
They came to a stop with Malfoy on top of him.
Malfoy's hair was in his eyes. Malfoy's hands were braced on the grass either side of Harry's head. Malfoy's chest was heaving against Harry's chest and Malfoy's mouth was open and Malfoy was looking down at him with an expression Harry had never seen on his face before and also — Harry realised with a kind of falling sensation — had been seeing every night for weeks and weeks and not letting himself name.
Neither of them moved.
The Snitch went past Harry's ear with a small whirring sound. Neither of them looked at it.
"Potter," said Malfoy, and his voice was wrecked, "get up."
"You're on top of me."
"I know I'm on top of you."
"So get off."
Malfoy didn't move.
Harry, very carefully, lifted one hand and put it on the side of Malfoy's neck. Malfoy made a small sound in the back of his throat — a sound Harry was going to hear in his head for about the next sixty years — and didn't move.
"Draco," Harry said.
"Don't —"
"Draco."
Malfoy closed his eyes. He'd gone very still. Harry could feel his pulse going, fast and hard, under his thumb.
"If you're going to do it," Malfoy said, eyes still shut, "do it. Don't make me — don't make me ask."
So Harry did it. He brought his other hand up and slid it into Malfoy's hair and pulled him down, and Malfoy came down like he'd been waiting since October, and his mouth was warm and a little chapped and he made a sound when Harry kissed him that Harry felt in his teeth.
They kissed badly, the first time. Too hard, all wrong angles, Malfoy's nose bumping his and Harry laughing into Malfoy's mouth and Malfoy saying shut up, shut up, Potter, shut up against his lips and kissing him again, better this time, slower, like they had time, like they had whole nights of time, like there were going to be more nights.
When they finally broke apart Malfoy stayed where he was, forehead pressed against Harry's forehead, and said, "How long."
"February," Harry said.
"February?"
"Around then. You?"
"December."
"Oh."
"Don't — oh, Potter, honestly —"
"Sorry. Sorry. I just — December?"
"Shut up."
Harry shut up. He was smiling so hard his face hurt. He could feel Malfoy smiling back against his cheek, reluctantly, like Malfoy was furious about it.
Above them, somewhere over the goalposts, the Snitch went on flickering through the dark, looking for someone to catch it.
Neither of them got up for a long time.
⁂
They didn't talk about it walking back. There wasn't a route through the grounds that allowed for talking — they went their separate ways at the edge of the pitch the way they always did, Malfoy off toward the dungeons and Harry up the slope toward the Tower, and the only thing different was that Malfoy turned around once, halfway across, and looked back at him. Harry couldn't see his face from that distance. He could see the shape of him, pale against the dark, standing very still. Then Malfoy turned again and kept walking, and Harry stood there a long minute with his broom in his hand and his mouth feeling bruised and his chest doing something complicated, and then he climbed the hill home.
He didn't sleep. He'd been sleeping better for months, Hermione had said so, and tonight he lay on his back and stared at the canopy and replayed every second of it on a loop until the grey started at the windows. December, he thought. December, December, December. Malfoy had been looking at him like that since December and Harry had been too thick to see it, and Malfoy had said nothing, had spent four months saying nothing, had spent four months landing too close on purpose and touching his arm on purpose and stepping into his space on purpose and saying nothing, because Malfoy was — Harry was working it out only now, in the dark, at four in the morning — Malfoy was terrified.
Of course he was. Of course. Malfoy didn't have anything left to lose except this, and this was a pitch at two in the morning and a flask of tea and a person who'd stopped looking at him like he was a problem to be solved. Of course he hadn't said a word.
Harry rolled over and put his face in the pillow and tried to work out whether he was going to make it through breakfast.
⁂
He did not make it through breakfast.
He made it as far as the eggs before he understood that the rules of the game had been broken last night and neither of them had agreed on new ones. Malfoy was at the Slytherin table with his head bent over a book and a piece of toast he wasn't eating, and the careful blank polite nothing he had been giving Harry across the Hall for six months was still in place — exactly in place, untouched, as if last night had been a dream — and Harry didn't know if that was the treaty holding or the treaty cracking. He didn't know if Malfoy was protecting it or pretending it away.
Then Malfoy looked up.
It was a flicker. A second, less than a second. Their eyes caught and Malfoy's face did one tiny private thing — a softening at the mouth, a — something — and then he looked back at his book and turned a page he hadn't read.
Harry felt it in his stomach like a Snitch.
Oh, he thought, all right. All right. He's still in.
"You all right, mate?" said Ron. "You've gone a bit funny."
"I'm fine."
"You haven't touched your eggs."
"I'm not hungry."
Ron looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at Harry. Harry looked at the eggs and willed his face not to do anything that anyone could read.
⁂
Potions was a lesson in keeping his hands still.
They'd had Potions together all year and it had never bothered him before. He'd been able to sit two benches behind Malfoy and look at the back of Malfoy's head and feel nothing more complicated than that's the back of Malfoy's head. Today the back of Malfoy's head was an entire territory. The line of his neck where the collar of his shirt sat. The bit of pale skin behind his ear that Harry had not, last night, kissed, but had now thought about kissing for an entire double period. The place where his hair was a little flat from sleeping on it.
Malfoy did not turn around once. Malfoy's shoulders, Harry noticed, were very straight. Malfoy was concentrating extremely hard on not turning around.
When the bell went, Malfoy packed his bag and walked out without looking, and Harry watched him go and felt absurdly, ridiculously fond.
⁂
He almost didn't go to the pitch that night. He thought — he sat on his bed at quarter to two with his broom across his knees and thought — what if he doesn't come. What if last night had used up whatever Malfoy had had to spend, and Malfoy had decided in the daylight that it was a mistake and the simplest thing was just to never come back. Malfoy was good at vanishing. Malfoy had been vanishing all year.
He went anyway. Of course he went anyway. He'd have gone if he'd been certain Malfoy wasn't coming, just to be there in case Malfoy changed his mind.
Malfoy was already on the pitch.
He was standing at the centre circle with his broom in his hand and his shoulders up around his ears, and when Harry came out of the dark into the lit grass he didn't move. He just stood there and watched Harry walk toward him with an expression Harry could only just see in the moonlight and could read perfectly anyway, because it was the same expression Malfoy had worn last night with his hands in the grass: if you're going to do it, do it. Don't make me ask.
Harry dropped his broom.
He didn't say hello. He walked the last six feet and put his hands on either side of Malfoy's face and kissed him, properly this time, careful and slow and not a question, and Malfoy's broom hit the grass somewhere behind him and Malfoy's arms came up around his neck and Malfoy made the same small sound he'd made last night, the one Harry was going to be hearing in his head for sixty years, and Harry thought oh good, oh thank god, oh, all right, here we are.
When they came apart Malfoy was the one who spoke first.
"I didn't think you'd come," he said.
"I didn't think you'd come."
"I came two hours ago."
"Draco."
"Don't."
"You've been standing out here for two hours?"
"I said don't."
"In the cold?"
"Potter, I will hex you."
"You won't."
Malfoy shut him up by kissing him again, which Harry decided was a perfectly acceptable way of winning an argument and resolved to lose more arguments in future.
They didn't fly. They sat on the grass with their backs against the bottom rail of the Slytherin stand and Harry's flask of tea between them and they didn't fly, for the first time in six months, and Harry thought he should feel guilty about it and didn't.
"What are we doing," Malfoy said eventually, into the dark. He wasn't looking at Harry. He was looking at his own hands in his lap.
"I don't know."
"Helpful."
"What do you want to be doing."
Malfoy was quiet a long time. Then he said, in a much smaller voice than Harry had ever heard him use: "I don't want to stop."
"Okay."
"Is that — okay?"
"Draco. I came down here in March one night when it was snowing."
"That's not the same."
"It's a bit the same."
Malfoy made a noise that wasn't quite a laugh. He put his head back against the rail and shut his eyes.
"I don't want anyone to know," he said.
Harry had known he was going to say it. He'd known it since breakfast, probably. He'd known it, in some dim animal way, since the moment they'd silently agreed six months ago that the pitch was the pitch and everywhere else was everywhere else.
"All right," Harry said.
"I mean it. Not — not yet. Not — Potter, I can't —"
"I know."
"You don't, you couldn't possibly —"
"Draco. I know."
Malfoy opened his eyes and looked at him. Whatever he saw on Harry's face seemed to settle something. He nodded, once, and shut his eyes again, and after a minute he tipped sideways until his shoulder was pressed against Harry's shoulder, and he stayed there.
They drank the tea. Harry's hand found Malfoy's hand in the grass between them and Malfoy laced their fingers together without comment and they sat like that for an hour, not talking, and Harry thought oh, this is what it is. This is what it's going to be.
⁂
It changed everything and nothing, after that.
In the Hall, in the corridors, in Potions and Transfiguration and Defence, they continued to not see each other. The treaty held. Harry had thought the treaty would feel unbearable now and it didn't, exactly — it felt like a private joke, a thing only the two of them knew, a small warm secret he carried in his pocket through every meal. He'd catch sight of Malfoy across the Hall and Malfoy would not look at him and Harry would feel a kind of fond exasperated affection so violent it nearly knocked him sideways.
On the pitch, everything was different. They still flew — most nights they still flew, because flying together had been the original shape of the thing and they didn't want to lose that — but the matches were sloppier now, more interrupted. They'd be chasing the Snitch and Malfoy would catch his eye and that would be the end of the match; they'd land and Malfoy would back him up against a goalpost and kiss him until Harry forgot what he was supposed to be doing. They'd sit on the grass and talk about nothing for an hour past when they should have gone in. Malfoy started telling him things. About his mother, mostly. About his father, more carefully, and only once or twice. About the Manor and what it had been like to live in it for a year with a certain houseguest. Harry listened and didn't say anything stupid and at the end Malfoy would always say, don't, Potter, don't look at me like that, and Harry would say I'm not looking at you like anything, and Malfoy would say yes you are.
Harry told him things back. The cupboard, again, properly this time. The Forest. The bit at King's Cross, which he hadn't told anyone — not Ron, not Hermione, not even McGonagall when she'd asked. Malfoy listened with his face very still and at the end he said, "You should tell Granger that."
"I can't."
"Why not."
"Because she'd —" Harry tried to find the word. "She'd be kind."
Malfoy considered this. Then he said, "Yes. I see."
Harry loved him for seeing.
⁂
Hermione worked it out in May.
He should have known she would. Hermione was Hermione and Harry, while he had become quite good at looking blank in the Great Hall, had not become any good at all at looking blank when Malfoy walked into a room. He'd thought he was managing. He hadn't been managing.
She cornered him in the library on a Tuesday afternoon. Ron was at Quidditch practice — the eighth-year ban did not, of course, prevent him going to watch the proper teams train — and Hermione sat down opposite Harry with two books and a look on her face and said, very quietly:
"Harry. How long."
"How long what."
"Don't."
He looked at her. She looked at him. He felt his face go hot.
"Since October," he said. "Sort of. Properly since April."
"Properly."
"Properly."
She closed her eyes briefly. He couldn't tell if she was angry or relieved or just tired. Then she opened them and said, "Are you happy?"
He had to think about it. Not because he didn't know — he knew, he'd known for months — but because nobody had asked him that question in a long time and he wanted to give it a real answer.
"Yes," he said.
"Is he happy?"
"I think so. I think — yes. Yeah. I think he is."
Hermione nodded slowly. "All right," she said. "All right. I won't — I won't say anything. To Ron or to anyone. But Harry —"
"I know."
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"You were going to say be careful."
"I was going to say that he has more to lose than you do and you need to remember that."
Harry stared at her.
"Oh," he said.
"Yes."
"I — yeah. I know. I do know that."
"Good."
She opened her book. Then she closed it again and looked at him and her face did something complicated and she said, "I'm glad, Harry. For what it's worth. I'm glad."
He couldn't answer that. He nodded. She went back to her book and he went back to his and after a while the burning in his eyes went down and he was able to read a sentence again.
That night on the pitch he told Malfoy.
Malfoy went absolutely white. For about three seconds Harry thought he was going to bolt — to get on his broom and go and not come back. Then Malfoy sat down hard on the grass and put his face in his hands.
"It's all right," Harry said. He sat down next to him. "It's all right. She won't say anything. She — Draco. She said she was glad."
"Granger said she was glad."
"Yes."
"That I'm —"
"That I am. I think she'd worked out the rest. Mostly."
Malfoy made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else. He didn't take his hands away from his face.
"It's all right," Harry said again, more quietly. He put a hand on the back of Malfoy's neck and Malfoy leaned into it without uncovering his face. "It's all right. It's just Hermione. It doesn't — nothing has to change."
"Everything changes."
"No. Just one person knows. That's all."
Malfoy was quiet a long time. Then he said, into his hands, "Does she hate me less, do you think."
"I think — yeah. I think she does."
"Hm."
"I think she has for a while."
"Hm."
He didn't say anything else. After a minute he took his hands down and looked out across the dark pitch and he looked very young and very tired, and Harry kissed him on the temple, and they sat like that until the sky started to grey.
⁂
The thing finally cracked open in the Hall on the last Friday of term.
It was nobody's fault. It was a stupid, small, accidental thing, the kind of thing that on any other day would have passed unnoticed. Harry was carrying a stack of books across the Entrance Hall after Charms — he'd been helping Flitwick reshelve, which was the kind of voluntary penance he'd taken to doing all year — and Malfoy was coming down the marble staircase, and someone shoved past Malfoy at the bottom step and Malfoy stumbled, badly, his bad knee giving the way it did sometimes since the war, and Harry — Harry didn't think. Harry dropped the books and lunged and caught him under the arm before he hit the floor.
It took half a second. It was the kind of thing anyone would have done for anyone. If it had been Neville, no one would have looked twice.
But Harry's hand stayed on Malfoy's arm a beat too long, and Malfoy's hand had come up and gripped the front of Harry's robes to steady himself, and they were standing very close and looking at each other, and Malfoy's face — Malfoy's face had gone open for one unguarded second, the way it went on the pitch, the way it went in the dark with no one watching, and Harry's face must have done the same, because in the periphery of his vision Harry could see Pansy Parkinson's mouth fall open and Ron stop dead halfway across the Hall and a third-year Ravenclaw drop a quill.
Malfoy went rigid. His hand let go of Harry's robes like Harry had burned him.
"Sorry," Harry said, much too loud, much too late. "Sorry — are you — "
"I'm fine," Malfoy snapped, and stepped back, and there was the polite blank nothing again, slammed back into place so hard you could practically hear it, and Malfoy was past him and out of the Hall and gone before Harry could get his mouth to move again.
The Hall did not, technically, fall silent. People kept talking. But Harry could feel — physically feel, like a temperature change — a dozen pairs of eyes on the back of his neck.
"Harry," said Ron, arriving at his elbow.
"Don't."
"Mate —"
"Ron. Don't."
Ron didn't. He bent and picked up Harry's books with him and they walked together out of the Hall and up the stairs, and Ron didn't say a word until they were halfway to the Tower, when he said, very mildly:
"Hermione knew, didn't she."
"Yeah."
"How long's she known."
"Couple of weeks."
"How long have you known."
"Since — a while. Months."
"Right," said Ron. He nodded. He looked at the floor as he walked. He didn't say anything else for a long minute. Then he said, "Is he — is he decent to you?"
"Ron —"
"I'm asking."
"He's — yes. Yes. He's — Ron, he's —" Harry tried to find a word for what Malfoy was, and couldn't, and gave up. "Yes. He's decent."
"Right," said Ron. "Right. Well. All right then."
They walked a bit further.
"I'm not going to pretend I get it," Ron said.
"I know."
"I'm not going to pretend I'm — okay with it, exactly, today —"
"I know."
"But you're my best mate."
"Yeah."
"So."
"Yeah."
That was as much as Ron could manage. It was, Harry thought, considerably more than he had any right to expect, and he was so grateful he couldn't speak for a second. He bumped his shoulder against Ron's. Ron bumped him back. They went up to the Tower.
⁂
Malfoy didn't come to the pitch that night.
Harry waited an hour. Two. He sat in the centre circle with his broom across his knees and he waited and the Snitch stayed in his pocket because there was no point letting it out, and at four in the morning he understood that Malfoy wasn't coming and got up and walked back to the castle feeling like something had been hollowed out of him with a spoon.
He didn't come the next night either.
On the third night Harry didn't go down. There seemed no point. He lay on his bed and stared at the canopy and worked out, in slow methodical detail, all the things he could have done differently in the Entrance Hall — let Malfoy fall, mostly — and did not sleep.
On the fourth night there was a piece of parchment under his pillow when he turned it over.
He had no idea how it had got there. He didn't recognise the handwriting at first — he'd never seen Malfoy's handwriting outside of a Potions essay — but he recognised it the second time he read it, and his hands were shaking by the third.
It said, in three lines:
I'm sorry.
Tonight. Usual time.
Please.
⁂
Malfoy was on the pitch when he got there. Standing, as he had been the night after the first kiss, at the centre circle with his broom in his hand. But this time when Harry came toward him out of the dark Malfoy didn't wait. Malfoy walked toward him, fast, and met him halfway, and kept walking until he was right in Harry's space and then past it, until his arms were around Harry's neck and his face was pressed into Harry's shoulder, hard.
"I'm sorry," he said into Harry's robes. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have —"
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's not all right. I left you here for two nights —"
"Draco. It's all right."
"I was a coward."
"You were frightened. It's not the same."
"It is the same."
"It's not." Harry got an arm around him, properly. Malfoy was shaking, very slightly. "It's not. I'd have been frightened too. I was frightened. I just had less to lose."
Malfoy made a small wrecked sound. "Granger said that."
"Hermione's usually right."
"Don't tell her I said that."
"I won't."
They stood like that a long time. Eventually Malfoy lifted his head and his face was a wreck — eyes red, mouth a hard line — and he looked at Harry and said, "I don't know how to do this in daylight."
"I know."
"I'm not — Potter, I'm not going to be ready for a long time."
"I know."
"I might never be ready."
"That's okay too."
"It's not —"
"Draco. Listen. I don't care." Harry put both hands on Malfoy's face and made him look at him. "I don't care. If we have to do this in the dark for the rest of our lives, I'll do it in the dark. If you want me to walk past you in the corridor for the next ten years and pretend I don't know you, I'll do it. I'll do whatever you need. I just need you to tell me what you need and not — not vanish on me. All right? That's the only thing. Don't vanish."
Malfoy stared at him.
"You'd do that," he said, slowly. Like he was working it out. "You'd actually do that."
"Yes."
"For — how long."
"Draco. I told you in February I was in trouble. I meant it."
Something in Malfoy's face shifted. Just a fraction. A tiny loosening, like a seam giving.
"All right," he said.
"All right?"
"Not the ten years bit. But — yes. All right. I'll —" he swallowed. "I'll try. To be — better. About it. In the daylight. I'll try."
"You don't have to try anything. I meant it."
"I know you meant it. That's why I'm going to try."
He kissed Harry then. Slow, this time, and very careful, like he was making a promise rather than asking a question, and Harry kissed him back the same way, and somewhere over their heads the Snitch — which Harry did not remember releasing — went whirring past in the dark, looking for someone to catch it.
Neither of them caught it. They went up on their brooms a little while later and chased it for an hour and Malfoy won, by a clean half-length, and crowed about it shamelessly, and Harry laughed up at the sky and thought all right. All right. We're all right. We're going to be all right.
The term ended a week later. They went home for the summer — Harry to Grosvenor Square, Malfoy to a Manor that was being slowly, painfully refurbished room by room — and they wrote letters, careful careful letters that said nothing important on the page and everything important between the lines, and in September they came back and there was no eighth year anymore but there was a flat in London that Harry had taken and a key that Malfoy had, by November, more or less stopped giving back.
It took him until the Christmas after that to hold Harry's hand in Diagon Alley in daylight. It took him until the spring to do it without flinching. It took him another two years after that before the Prophet found out and ran a headline and the world fell briefly in on itself and then, to everyone's surprise including their own, righted itself again.
But that was all later. That night, the night Malfoy came back, they flew until the sky started to grey, and then they sat on the grass at the centre circle with Harry's flask of tea between them and Malfoy's head on Harry's shoulder, and they watched the sun come up over the goalposts together for the first time, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing left that needed saying.