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It had taken him a month, but Draco had memorised all of the ticklish parts on Harry’s body.The spot above his elbow, and the area on the outer edge of his knee. Under his chin, and centimetres above his waist. This lesson had been experiential in nature. Draco had played the eager student, and he had learned these spots with the tips of his fingers and with his lips, which often turned up in a smile upon hearing Harry’s laugh.
Harry had proven to be a slower learner, but Draco didn’t mind. With his words and hands, with his sighs and the way his eyes fell closed, he showed Harry where and how to kiss, when and how to move. Harry had been fumbling hands and sloppy tongue, rushed and feverish, and although Draco appreciated his enthusiasm to learn, Draco knew the value of a thorough education.
The body was only the first stage in their studies together.
Six months after their studies began, Draco finally understood the intricacies of Harry’s moods. At first, he had mistaken the distant gaze in Harry’s eyes for a departure, a rejection. He had readied himself for this outcome by preparing his own goodbye. But when Harry continued to pull him back in, his name tumbling from his lips, which he had placed against Draco’s in a way that could only be described as tender, Draco slowly learned: Harry wasn’t leaving him; perhaps he left for a moment, kidnapped by his thoughts, but it was to Draco he returned each time. The revelation floored him. As a Hogwarts student, he had been dutiful at best and petulant at worst. But, in his current course of study, he loved learning completely.
Harry had tried to talk about the past with Draco about two months into their education together, but his attempts to breach the topic had been clumsy. Harry’s anger didn’t reside with Draco, but how could he let it all go, when all he saw were the faces of the dead when he closed his eyes? He had wanted to put it behind him, and although his hands reached out to him, it had been too soon. His words made his outstretched hands look like fists. Draco’s walls, with their thorns and ivy, had risen. He responded with smashed lips, bruised necks. Their boyish fights had taken on a different form, and when they woke the next morning, neither of them mentioned the fight and the way their bodies had desperately tried to put the past behind them.
Harry hypothesised the different ways he could reconcile their past to their inexplicable present and the future he hoped they might have. He tried ignoring it, and although this test yielded positive results, they were short-lived. That nagging sense that there was an invisible ghost sharing their bed grew ever stronger. For Harry’s second experiment, he tried involving his friends. He reasoned that if Draco was forced to spend time with Ron or Hermione, a conversation would organically occur. This experiment only resulted in an awkward dinner, filled with too much wine and whisky.
Their course of study was fast approaching a full year before Harry broke from the pressure. As a child, he had liked school enough, but the pull of being the “Chosen One” had always distracted him from his full potential. He laughed until he cried about how badly he wanted this experiment to succeed. He could not understand why he wanted to master this course, when his Hogwarts studies- not even properly learning occlumency to defeat Tom- could hold his focus. Of all people he could have fallen in-
He found himself wrapping his arms around Draco one sleepless night. A new hypothesis had come to mind, and this time, he knew with the certainty of a mad scientist that the time to experiment had come.
It was at this point that he presented his dissertation. He laid out everything he knew to be true: that he was afraid to sleep sometimes because he couldn’t un-see his own mind, because sometimes he woke up with Tom’s cruel voice echoing in his ear, because he had nightmares where he looked up and Tom’s face morphed into Draco’s, and he couldn’t stop hearing Hermione’s screams, knowing that Draco was standing there.
He shook as he held Draco and continued to defend his dissertation.
He moved onto the second section of his lecture. He rambled on about the way he feels a peaceful stillness inside when they spend their afternoons beside each other, or when they’re walking and Draco grabs his hand as they cross the street. How he feels okay in his skin when Draco makes a dry retort as they bicker, only to grab his hand and smile. He felt his frustration grow because these things that he knew to be fact were incomprehensible. They contradicted everything he had thought to be true. But Harry knew that some phenomena could not yet be explained. Knowledge is fluid in its growth. For this, he persisted.
His studies had stalled, despite his best efforts to surge forward, and he could not continue growing in his knowledge without Draco’s help. His voice wavered on this last part of his lecture, and he shut his eyes in fear that he had failed once again.
When Draco held his face in his hands, he knew he had passed.
Draco had always known that his mistakes preceded him, that the darkness of his past would obscure any light that he tried to make for the remainder of his life. In typical Malfoy fashion, he had planned to proceed with no more than the occasional backwards glance. He had tried to hold his head high as if his past mistakes belonged only to those they had affected. He had tried to believe that they were no longer his. But he knew the truth, and he, like Harry, did not want to stop where he was. He had grown weary from pretending like he knew it all.
That night, Draco slowly processed this difficult lesson and accepted that his knowledge was incomplete. The words reverberated against Harry’s forehead, his lips, against the scar which had dictated his life. He practiced letting the words bubble up from his throat. The words were barely a whisper at first, foreign on his tongue, but he repeated them like lines of text across a paper.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorryI’m sorry I’msorry I’m sorryI’msorry I’m-
Harry kissed him, and they fell asleep with words upon their lips, like a quill paused mid-sentence on the parchment.
In the morning when they woke, the crisp air reminded Harry of the cold October mornings when he would sit with his books and parchment before him. Draco blinked his eyes open, and as they stared at each other, they held each other’s hands, their never-ceasing search for knowledge growing stronger with the rising sun.