Disclaimer: Harry Potter and his beautiful world are all ownedby JK Rowling.

Waiting

By TheSecretCharacter

Harry Potter waited. Time was not an issue and he waited and he waited. Gray light was crawling through the closed plastic blinds of his apartment windows, misting the small living room with its gloomy morning color. Harry Potter waited for a person whom he had begged for months to come but whom he would beg no more. For months he had sent letter after letter, pleading with the person to please just come and let him see the face of the man he had loved more than life, hear the seductive as Chartreuse voice that used to whisper his name, and smell that soft vanilla scent, like ice-cream on a cinnamon sidewalk in the middle of August. So spicy, so hot….

He was in the center of the silent room with his chair beneath him and the dull yellow light of artificiality above him, waiting as he was accustomed to each time he sent out one of those letters. Waiting for the man to open the door and find him bathed in a reminder of what they once had. But it hadn't been dull; it hadn't been fake; it hadn't been painfully pathetic. Harry Potter waited, staring fixedly at the door with unblinking eyes. And there was no way for him to know if the doorknob would turn this time or if all his waiting would be in vain again. But he waited all the same, as he had for months. Only this time, on this final attempt, something was different in his waiting.

He had been waiting far too long.

Harry Potter had loved Draco Malfoy with the kind of Love that can't even be understood by those whose lives it poisons so perfectly and completely, so sweetly that they surrender to it like a drug that they have tried for so long to escape from. It was a drug that swam within his veins ceaselessly, plunging him in what seemed like an eternity of ecstasy all rolled up into a year, their year. And the drug had been so good to him for so long, that when there was none left, the withdrawals had eaten away his soul and vomited his heart out in bloody shreds.

Draco Malfoy had been his syringe, and had given him his Love so generously that he couldn't understand how the man had stayed as long as he had, when Harry knew that he couldn't possibly return such a gift. But there was no way that he could have possibly foreseen the hasty departure of his beloved. There was certainly no way that the unexplained flight from their sugar-glazed life together could have been expected. Harry had been given no warning so that he would be able to sew up the seams before something so valued escaped from them. He had been given to cause for worry, a reason to fill in the holes with plaster or quickly nail a slab of wood over them, to keep some foul draft from entering. But apparently, or so Harry could only be forced to believe, Draco had watched their Love seep out of the seams, and had watched Misery drift in through those abandoned holes.

But Harry had never been able to remember any misery. All he could remember was thinking, knowing that it had been his fault. He hadn't been able to ease enough of that drug into Draco's veins in return.

And so he waited. But it was different this time.

Aged wooden steps creaked heavily beneath stiff footfalls as the man of no more than nineteen years ascended them to the third floor of the dingy apartment building. The walls were stained with fingerprints of faded color and the ceiling was rotting with water spots. He entered from the stair-well to the hall, which was much the same and smelled of mold and Lucky Strike cigarettes, and he hugged his expensive, brown coat closer to him as his feet slowly carried him down an all to familiar path. He could feel the letter in his pocket crinkle under his fingers as he guarded himself from the coldness of the building.

Draco Malfoy, in all his dignity and glory, was not a coward. Perhaps more than three months had passed, perhaps he had almost ignored the letter again, perhaps he had nearly gotten back into his fancy car and gone back to his big stuffy house, and perhaps his stomach was aching and urging him to get sick. But Draco Malfoy was there, making his way with reluctant movement to the paint-chipped door, and he was not a coward.

He had known all along that Harry would never be able to give him what he had given to Harry: a drug so sweet and so abundant that it stained their lives wholly with passionate red fever. The brunette was too broken and bruised from a past of scarring torture to be able to wrap up such a present that Draco had offered him each second of every day. And he accepted that about him, and Draco loved to make up for the lifetime of sadness with a kind of happiness that Harry had never known. It was all Draco wanted, to see Harry beaming with those emerald eyes shining with tears of joy. And he had felt for the boy as he had felt for no other, in a way that he hadn't been able to comprehend because of the unfamiliarity. But it didn't feel right, being with him and feeding Harry such emotion when it snuffed out his others, leaving Harry to be such a one dimensional person that he didn't seem like a person at all. And Draco, who felt discomforted and plagued by his emotions, even with his darling Harry there to hold him through the anger and hatred and guilt and terror, couldn't be with someone who was clouded from life by a bliss that he had inflicted upon him, that he had injected into him.

So he left Harry. And he couldn't stand to break Harry's freedom, which Draco saw, was actually a prison built of dreams, so he let his absence do all the work. He let Harry suffer through dreams turned to nightmares alone. Denying that Harry's prison would feel so much worse without it's cottony features, it's desirable façade, he left him with hardly a word, and certainly no fleeting glance of scorn, dislike, pity, or what he really felt: Pain. He wasn't a coward, though.

Draco took his key from the well-tailored pocket of his coat, the key that Harry had given to him what seemed like centuries ago, rusted and coarse in his long, delicate fingers. The door, gray-blue with dull brown visible through the deeper of the chips on the door, was before him, seeming so much bigger than he recalled. It felt foreign, the stretch of painted wood and the filthy floor beneath his shiny black Prada shoes. He felt like an intruder on territory that should have rejected him but that wouldn't because it couldn't see through his polished exterior. Storm-filled gray eyes stared at the fraying carpet that stopped abruptly at the base of the door. With a deep breath and a final clutch at his churning stomach he unlocked and opened the door, slowly and as quietly as possible. And only once it had opened to the furthest extent and revealed the room in its entirety, did Draco dare to glance up into memories he had long wished to forget.

The blond started at who he saw, waiting in the center of the room, chair beneath him, dim light above. And he retched. He retched and he retched.

Harry did not move to help the man whom he had loved more than life. He didn't attempt to lessen the gurgled screams of the seductive as Chartreuse voice. And Draco retched again and again under the unblinking stare of his own painfully missed drug. Because Harry wasn't there.

It wasn't Harry with his skin so pale that his lightening-bolt scar blazed with boldness; it wasn't Harry with his eyes so dark that they were no longer emerald but a cold, lost jade; it wasn't Harry with the rope suspending him, the chair beneath him and the dull yellow light of artificiality above him. It wasn't.

Draco retched and screamed through his vomit and dry-heaves until he could retch and scream no more and he was only left with his steadily-falling tears, his gasped whimpering and whispering.

"Why? Don't you know? …I still love you, Harry Potter…"

But Harry Potter wasn't there and he would never be anywhere again.

A/N: I needed this. I hope no one is to upset with me for doing this to them, but I really needed to for this. I hope you liked it, despite everything, though. I like it a lot, and it takes a lot for me to say that about something I write. Thank you for reading and I do hope that you will review.