Hello all! I have tried to make the fic great, so let's hope it's great, and let's hope you think it's great, and let's hope whoever else reads it thinks it's great...
Really though, I hope you like it. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own any of the Harry Potter characters and I don't own the franchise, so all hail queen Rowling. Or something.
Harry had taken an interest in art back at Hogwarts, before the war and everything else had fully distracted him from exploring who he was. He'd been jealous that Dean could do it so much and so well, while Harry himself was stuck saving the world and trying to live up to the masses' expectations, but he'd pushed it away as was necessary at the time. After the war, he'd finally realized that he could pursue what he wanted, and had moved to a town that had a liberal arts college in it on a whim. After reacquainting himself with muggle culture for a year, Harry had applied to the college in town and gotten in, deciding within the first trimester that he wanted to major in something art-related.
Now, he's been at the school for most of his first year, and he hasn't been disappointed. Making things and being creative brings him so much joy, and art especially holds him up in the town isolated from anything at all Wizard related. He hasn't picked a specific major, and he hasn't decided what type of art he enjoys the most, but all of his classes have treated him well.
Harry's had fun exploring himself as an artist, and he's found that he draws with absolute objectivity. When he's drawing a person or something that he's looking at, he has a specific and methodical way of drawing then to a tee.
Well, trying to draw them to a tee.
Today, Harry gets to his realism class early. To get into the mood, he sketches a faceless silhouette. He like the way that silhouettes look, leaving so much up to the imagination of the viewer, so there are a lot of doodles in his sketchbooks of grey, shadowy silhouettes. Plus, they're a good warm up for drawing a model, as they often do in this class.
Lo and behold, when Harry finishes the silhouette and belatedly tunes in to his professor giving instructions, she's telling them to sketch the model as they normally do, and Harry turns the analytical and logical parts of his brain off in favor of looking and drawing alone. He takes in the blond hair and slim figure. He takes in the pale skin and grey eyes. Through it all, he draws the model in the middle of the room just like he would any other.
His drawing is satisfactory less than halfway through the period, but he doesn't stop then, of course. Everyone should be working until "I push you out of the room myself," in the words of Ms. Taney. Once he finishes, he walks out of the room with a friend named Raphael, and they joke and bump each other on the way to his abstract class.
They sit next to each other there, and Harry has fun interpreting verbal descriptions into drawings for a warm up. After that, they part ways, and he spends his time in the rest of his classes with various other friends.
When he gets back to his dorm, he plops down in bed and prepares to relax for about five minutes. He knows that after those five minutes, the sort-of-friends that he's made since arriving here will text him and force him to go out and club with them just like they do every night. He doesn't exactly love it, but it's something to do and he knows that lying in bed for too long isn't good for him.
When Harry does that, he always ends up thinking about everything that used to be a part of his life that isn't anymore. No one in the town knows that he's a Wizard, which, while freeing, is also just another thing he has to suppress. He loves his life, but he also misses Ron and Hermione, Luna, Neville, everyone who he made it through Hogwarts with. He's fallen out of contact with them. He'd be lying if he said there aren't times when he just wants to go back to all of them and give up on everything he's built here, but that would be too much like quitting, so he never does.
His phone beeps with a text, as expected, and Harry heads out to the indicated bar. The walk is short, but his melancholy, which shines brightest when he's alone, manages to slow him down, and he walks reluctantly towards normalcy.
The normalcy isn't all bad though. Most of the reason he moved to the Muggle town was that he wanted less life-and-death level drama in his life.
Yet there are parts of his life that he resents for their normalcy. His friends and their excessive drinking and partying, for instance. He has no problem with either, but when done as regularly as they are, they begin to lose any value they might've had and blur together into years wasted getting nothing done.
Part of that, he thinks, has to do with the fact that no one has had the sense of purpose in their life that Harry had for the longest time. Maybe he doesn't anymore, but when he was actually doing things to further Wizard-kind, he didn't have time to stop and think about if his life mattered. Now, he craves that sense of purpose, but not all of his friends- not many, in fact- have had that taste of it to alert them of its existence.
It seems like he arrives at the club and leaves almost minutes later. The whole thing passes in a cloud of nothing, and it makes him sad as usual.
Harry finds that nowadays he looks forward to school more than anything else. That in itself is a little sad, sure, but school and art bring him happiness, and at least that's one thing that does so.
It's more than there was two years ago.
Days pass. Art classes, laughter, and dim lit clubs with too-loud music blend together.
They draw the same model in his realism class twice more, and the grey eyes and blond hair stick out ever so slightly. Not enough to make him think, though. They do more short activities in his abstract class, which he enjoys.
Every once in awhile, Harry likes to look through all of the art he makes. Some people look at everything and analyse it right after they draw it, he's sure, but that's never been pleasant for him. The memory of making it is always too powerful and distorts what he sees. He likes to give it time. He looks at it while he draws, but once he's done, he puts it away for the time being.
So, Saturday night before he goes to sleep, Harry pulls out the last month's worth of art and settles on his bed to look through them all. He leaves out the past week for the next viewing session to give the memory of making them some time to fade.
He laughs some and smiles more at the feelings that lie just beneath the papers' surface. Sometimes he feels sad too, but that's almost always interwoven with rueful happiness.
Harry puts the pieces he wants to keep in his saving box once he's done and leaves the past week's on the floor. As he walks past them, he glances down and realizes that he hasn't covered them as he often does. He lays the large portfolio from the beginning of the year on top of them and gets ready for bed.
Brushing his teeth, he feels a little bit off. Washing his face, the feeling grows and he wonders if he's missed something important recently. Changing out of his jeans and into sweat pants, he tries to ignore the feeling so that he can sleep. His subconscious will figure it out if need be. As he gets into bed, Harry feels restless. Although it takes him a while to relax to the point of sleep, soon enough he sinks into a deep slumber.
It's him!
Harry sits up in bed with a gasp of air at the thought. He tries not to jump to conclusions, but his brain concludes anyways. It whirs at the thought that the pale skin, blond hair, grey eyes, and pointy face that he know so well belong to who they always have. It whirs at the thought that Draco Malfoy has been modeling at a muggle college for the past week. His brain gets tired of whirring, and realizes- if he even needs confirmation- that the drawings could at least settle the issue.
So Harry fumbles his way out of bed and to the pile of art on the floor. He pulls off the top sheet- presumably the portfolio if he hasn't gone insane quite yet- and looks down at black.
He turns on the light so he can see.
And staring eerily at him from the floor is an almost perfect replica of Malfoy's face.
It's alarming.
Almost completely by reflex, Harry turns off the light and stumbles back into his bed.
As the late-night/early-morning escapade draws to its close, Harry's brain shuts off and he falls back to sleep the most confused he's been in a while.
Harry gets to school the next day, having forgotten about who the model is. A couple of minutes after he sits down, Malfoy walks into the room, looking like he thinks he's so superior as always. Harry is so surprised that it takes him a long time to even pick up his pencil. When he makes up his mind to pretend that Malfoy is just any model, he clenches his jaw but gets on with it. At the moment he makes that decision, class ends, and while it does seem short, Harry thinks nothing of it.
He walks out of the classroom still feeling tense from his encounter with Malfoy, and heads to a drinking fountain. All the jaw clenching has made him thirsty, for some reason. When he gets there, however, Malfoy has beaten him and is drinking away. He drinks and drinks for what seems like minutes, until finally Harry is ready to leave and get a drink later. When he turns to leave, he feels an arm on his sleeve.
" Don't leave," pleads Malfoy.
Harry doesn't exactly feel the need to comply with Malfoy's unreasonable demands, so he just keeps on walking away.
Or trying. For some reason, Malfoy is unusually strong and won't let him leave.
Harry jerks at his arm, and says, "Let go of me, Malfoy! Leave me alone. After all this time, that's the least you could do."
Malfoy looks angry for a second, but it quickly melts into tears.
" I need help," he murmurs sadly as Harry manages to escape his grip and walks quickly away, "I need you."
If Harry feels a little bit queasy at ignoring Malfoy, he certainly doesn't acknowledge it.
The first thing that Harry does as soon as he wakes up is lie in bed and think about what he should do about Malfoy. It seems like there isn't much that he can do. He could confront Malfoy about it and risk coming off to all of his classmates and his teacher as a dick, but he doesn't want to take that risk. On the other hand, he could wait for Malfoy to say something or to stop modeling- whichever comes first. That option seems much more attractive.
That problem no longer weighing on his conscience, Harry gets ready briefly and heads off to his first class.
The class breezes by him as his traitor brain bombards him with questions about Malfoy and he's forced to think about every one without even the possibility of an answer.
In his realism class, he's grateful that they don't work with a model. If that had, he probably would've been so concentrated on Malfoy (or if it wasn't him, comparing the model to Malfoy) that he wouldn't have been able to work on anything at all. At least this way, he can pretend to stay on task. Plus, with the lesson and his current state of mind combined, it kind of feels like the information being "taught" is instead being forced down his throat. Unpleasant as that sounds, Harry finds it easier to stay on task that way.
Throughout the day, Harry goes through stages of openly thinking about Malfoy and actively not thinking about him, which inevitable leads to thinking about Malfoy again.
More days pass and he thinks and thinks while still nothing manages to happen.
He's almost comes to a level of peace with drawing other models throughout the next few weeks, despite the nervous feeling he still gets in his stomach.
When there's just a month left of school, his professor announces that they'll be drawing a model again and Harry is mostly fine with it. After all this time, he knows it isn't going to be Malfoy.
So, of course, the model who walks in at that point is none but Draco Malfoy himself.
"Now some of the more perceptive of you will have noticed that this model, Draco Malfoy, has come in several times. Since this doesn't happen often, I really hope you took note. However," and she starts to mumble to herself as she sometimes does, "I very much doubt that many of you have managed to achieve that level of awareness." She sighs quietly but with passion. "He is, in fact, going to be out model for the rest of the year on a project. We'll be starting the project today. The end of the year, for the more forgetful of you, is about a month away. I very much hope you've kept your previous drawings of Mr. Malfoy."
Most people nod while some try to hide the panic in their eyes with tight smiles to no avail.
"I'm passing out a rough outline for the project," she says, passing a stack of papers down each row as she walks and talks. "If you read it, you'll find that we're going to experiment with how our intent and the emotion we put behind a drawing can influence how it turns out, even if the model is very similar every time. I expect you to be prepared to do so, and I hope that you'll all start saving your drawings of Mr. Malfoy, at least now that I've brought this to your attention. I'll have you turn in all of this drawing to be evaluated near the end of the school year.
"Now that I've explained the project, I'll tell you what today's assignment is. You'll all be drawing Mr. Malfoy with realistic intent, as you have before, but I want you to make the drawing sad. You could tell a story, imagine a sad backstory or something. You could merely think of sad things. The only thing I ask is that you don't alter his body's position too much. Now, I expect you all to try very hard, even if Malfoy's natural expression does make it easier than it could be, and please make me sad about your art rather than about your level of dedication and success. I'm done talking now, so you can draw if you'd like," and she turns to walk back to her desk.
Harry looks over to see if Malfoy was offended by the comment about his "natural expression" like he surely would've been if it had happened back at Hogwarts, but to his surprise, Malfoy's face is still entirely free of indignation. In fact, the overly neutral face Malfoy seems to fall back to does make it easier to imagine him in a sad scenario, or just being sad. His natural face definitely isn't as condescending as it had been in Hogwarts as well. Harry reflects on how much Malfoy has changed as he begins the drawing.
First Harry thinks he'll think of sad things and draw Malfoy, but after he's a few minutes in he realizes that he blames too much of his sadness on Malfoy, and the drawing has accidentally turned angry rather than sad.
He crumples up the drawing and shoves it in his bag before getting a new paper and starting over. This time, Harry tries to make up a convincingly sad backstory.
Unsurprisingly, considering that he already knows much of Malfoy's backstory, this doesn't work at all.
Getting frustrated and needing to start the final drawing for fear of running out of time, Harry just takes the sad elements of Malfoy's childhood that he knows and runs with them. There are surprisingly many, and before long Harry takes a break to analyse if it's going well. He looks down at his paper to see a vulnerable- almost young looking- and clearly sad Malfoy staring from his paper.
The drawing tugs at his heart, and while it makes him uncomfortable, it also assures him that he's fulfilling the professor's requirements.
He goes back to drawing, and finds that without having to worry about what's happening on his paper, drawing Malfoy is intoxicating. He takes in every minute detail about Malfoy, easily forgetting exactly who Malfoy is supposed to be, and starts to draw him perfectly, glancing briefly down at his paper whenever he needs to make sure his pencil hasn't gone rogue or something.
Strangely enough, Harry doesn't feel strange about his reaction to Malfoy. Part of this is due to the fact that other people are clearly paying rapt attention to Malfoy's every feature, cataloging as many details as they can.
So this, like many things, is Malfoy's fault.
This thought comes with a dangerously low amount of hostility and a more teasing tone, which makes him more uncomfortable than his enjoyment of drawing Malfoy did.
Not in any strange way, mind you. It's like he's an insanely pure person who is innocently loving of something that makes them happy.
Weird analogy, alright.
But really, Harry immensely enjoys drawing Malfoy. He draws with urgency and precision at the same time, and he feels like he's on fire in the best way. He feels alive.
As class nears its end, he draws with more and more urgency until, when class is dismissed, he can barely stop himself from cursing loudly.
Instead, he does so under his breath.
He looks at his drawing, expecting it to be better than normal, but definitely not expecting what he sees. He could never have expected this. The drawing looks so sad, and Malfoy is unmistakably him .
Harry is almost unsure that he drew it; it's on a much higher level than his work has ever been.
He finds that the weirdest part is how easy it was. Sure, it took loads of concentration and energy, but it wasn't exactly challenging. Nor was it painful in any way, like he was forcing himself to do it. Rather, he enjoyed it more than he cares to admit.
It was really fun. Harry almost wants to talk to Malfoy and ask him to model for Harry over the summer. It would be nice to carry the enjoyment past this class.
But it's Malfoy. Sure, it's clear he's changed somewhat, but the fact that he's Malfoy is one that Harry is having a hard time getting over. Plus, how would he approach him?
Hi Malfoy, I know we hate each other and you supported a monster who killed a lot of my friends but I'd like to put that all aside because I like drawing you.
No.
And even if he figured that out, how likely is it that Malfoy would actually agree?
Very unlikely.
So Harry gives up on that idea, and continues on with his life and his project. Every time that he draws Malfoy, he feels more and more dismayed at the prospect of the experience dropping out of his life after the school year ends.
After two weeks of a strange mixture of great and torturous classes, depending on whether he's thinking about now or later, Harry finally can't take it anymore, and can't stop himself from walking up to Malfoy after class.
"Malfoy? Will you model for me?"
Malfoy flinches turns around slowly.
"Potter?" he says in a strange tone.
Harry pauses, trying to think of how not to scare Malfoy off with his name.
"Well, yes, but if you could just maybe forget that? That would be nice."
In an even stranger tone, Malfoy says, "You want me to forget that you're you? How do you propose I do that, exactly? I've been trying for a long time but it hasn't exactly worked." Suddenly, his eyebrows furrow and his face becomes guarded. "What do you want, anyways?"
"I just told you," Harry realizes that his response sounded snappish and tries to be nice, "Sorry. I want you to model for me- over the summer probably. If you'd be okay with that. I mean, drawing you is just kind of amazing and I really don't want to lose the opportunity to do so after this class ends."
A light blush forces its way through Malfoy's cold exterior, and Harry finds it strangely adorable.
"Oh. Well unfortunately for you I have no interest in such a thing. Goodbye, Potter."
"Wait," Malfoy turns back with distaste for Harry written all over his face. "Malfoy," and Malfoy flinches again, " please, would you model for me? It would be completely professional, of course, and you could back out at any point if you wanted to. I just really, and I mean really, want to continue drawing you."
"I told you Potter I'm not interes-"
" Please, Malfoy," he says the name again out of curiosity, and indeed, Malfoy flinches. "I mean," Harry doesn't like the fact that he's basically pleading at this point, but he figures if he's gone this far he might as well go all the way, "I've changed since school, as have you, so please just give me a chance. Let me draw you once, and you can never do it again if you'd like. Hell, I'll actively avoid you if that'd make you happy."
Malfoy rolls his eyes, which feels like an improvement.
He pauses for a moment and then finally nods.
"Fine, Potter, fine. I'll model for you once, and then you can bet you won't see me again after that."
"Yes! Thank you so much!" Harry realizes how loud he had said that and tries to calm his excitement.
"So," Malfoy says, "Do you need my phone number? Email maybe? Or," he continues as his eyes widen, rushing through Harry's astonished silence, "were you just kidding?" He starts muttering to himself, looking vaguely sick and seemingly under the impression that Harry can't hear him. "Oh, I knew it. He was joking. I'm such an idiot. A gullible idiot."
"No!" Harry says as soon as his brain starts working again, after recovering from the shock of Malfoy offering his phone number to him. He feels a bit giddy about it. "Your phone number would be great. To have. For drawing." Harry stops himself at this point, suddenly aware of how ridiculous he must sound.
"But I'm-" Harry continues, hesitantly trusting himself to not scare Malfoy off, "Do you really think I'm the type of person who'd play a mean trick like that?"
"Well," Malfoy laughs bitterly, "we did kind of live to harass each other back at Hogwarts. It wouldn't be so surprising if that was still what you wanted."
"Oh. I didn't realize that you thought-" thinking back, Harry remembers what kind of person he was around Malfoy, and finds he would've expected the same if he was in Malfoy's position. "I guess I need to apologize, then. I really did do some pretty terrible stuff. And while we were both young, it still wasn't right."
Malfoy looks awkwardly away for a second. "I should also apologize," he says, still stubbornly avoiding eye contact. "I did some terrible things to you too, although I still think everything unrelated to Voldemort is excusable. I mean, you refused my hand in friendship for the weasel , who, by the way, was actually quite mean to me that first day."
Harry hesitantly smiles at the blond because everything he said sounded more like Malfoy was pouting than anything else, and Harry finds that he's alright with that. In fact, it was kind of… cute.
Malfoy smiles back, an apologetic sort of smile that Harry takes to mean that Malfoy's supposed denial was really an apology in disguise.
Considering the characteristics of Malfoy that Harry is already growing to like, Harry wonders why they weren't friends before.
Alright, so that might've been courtesy of the war, but Harry thinks that they can get past that now.
"So," Malfoy says, adopting his former business-like tone. "My phone number."
"Oh. Yeah," Harry gets his phone out and types in Malfoy's name and phone number. It feels weird to write Draco.
After that's done, Malfoy gets his stuff and goes to leave.
It kind of just pops out.
"Bye! See you, Draco. Er, Malfoy, sorry."
To Harry's surprise, Malfoy just smiles, kind of like he's amused.
"Draco is fine, Harry. See you."
Harry stands still and silent, dumbfounded, as Draco leaves the room.
Draco.
