Disclaimer: Not mine.

AN: Please note that this fic contains mature themes that some might find triggering or controversial. I really don't think it'll be all that graphic, but I'll make sure to include relevant warnings before every chapter. I think it's important for writers to acknowledge difficult subjects like this one, and when I had this idea, I couldn't pass it up.

Devil's Dance

Harry had always thought that if someone wrote the story of his life, he'd tell everyone he knew not to read it. Or at least, he'd tell the people that he liked not to read it.

When he and Draco got together, he grew even more convinced that his story was not one that any sane person would consider reading, much less writing. It seemed even standing in someone else's proximity was damaging to their mental health, as though madness radiated off of him like an airborne illness. When he had these melodramatic and admittedly theatrical thoughts, Harry generally laughed at himself. Then something would happen. Something like Draco ending up in prison for a crime he knew nothing about, and he'd start taking himself seriously again.

The circumstances surrounding his prison sentence were kept under wraps to everyone except those who had worked on the case directly, and Harry had not been one of those people. All he knew was that Draco had pled down from a felony to a misdemeanor, but he wasn't sure what either of those charges had been.

Well. He wasn't positive, because clearly, significant others were insignificant enough to be kept out of the loop. He had a fairly good idea, however, based on three things. One, Draco's mother had been murdered on May 15th. Two, Draco had been arrested (in the home they shared, no less) on May 16th. Three, people who had as much history together as they did usually had a fairly good idea of when one of them was lying to the other, and on May 15th, Draco had lied to Harry.

On May 15th, he had seemed distracted, which Draco never was. Draco was always painfully alert about everything from Harry's whereabouts to Harry's outfits, but Harry had shown up to the kitchen table that morning wearing mismatching socks, and Draco hadn't noticed. That in itself was not proof of anything other than perhaps a bad night, but Harry knew personally that Draco most certainly had not had a bad night at all. He had had a very good night, and by extension, so had Harry. They'd fallen asleep together tangled up in each other's limbs as they usually did, and when they woke up, their bare skin had stuck together awkwardly, in a way in which Harry was certain he'd come away with a thin layer of Draco's skin when they'd pulled apart.

The lie hadn't come until late that afternoon. He'd been getting ready to go out and Harry had asked him where he was going. His answer: "I have to run down to the store to get some milk." Ordinarily, this wouldn't make Harry think twice, but the fact that he'd not noticed his socks that morning made him wonder (because indeed, he had worn them on purpose just so Draco would notice). He knew before he opened the refrigerator door that there was a full carton of milk sitting on the shelf inside, still unopened and well before its expiration date. Once he thought about it a little more, he remembered that Draco was lactose intolerant (which should have been his first clue).

And while, yes, Draco did love him, he didn't think their love was really the practical kind in which he would worry over whether or not Harry had milk to put in his coffee in the morning. It was a nice thought, honestly, but entirely unrealistic.

Draco hadn't come home until the next morning, and Harry hadn't had a chance to ask him where he'd really gone because Harry's co-workers were standing at his front door five minutes later, putting his boyfriend in handcuffs. May 15th had been a fairly bad day, but all things considered, he thought May 16th was probably the worst.

He hadn't seen Draco in a year; the length of his prison sentence.

It had been a very long year, as far as years went. He had gone over the details (the few that he knew) over and over with Ron and Hermione until he was certain he had driven them to distraction. Not even Hermione's patience had withstood his almost incessant musings and she'd finally had to tell him that he wasn't allowed to talk about it with them anymore, not a word, until Draco had been released from prison. As it happened, that was today, and Harry was waiting for Draco on the dock upon which he would be released from Azkaban in – he checked his watch – fifteen minutes.

While he waited, he was simply standing on the rickety wooden dock doing not much of anything in the same place a thousand others had stood waiting for their loved ones to be returned to them. Once returned, their loved ones were probably a little… less than what they had been when they'd been taken. The thought made Harry pale a little, but he stared at the water resolutely and waited as thousands of others before him had managed to do without keening over or sicking up or the ten other negative reactions he wanted to have at that moment.

Finally, a boat floated out of the mist (for dramatic effect, he supposed) with one of the prison guards at the stern with his back turned to Harry, rowing toward the dock. Facing him was his boyfriend, or, the man who had been his boyfriend a year before. He was thinner now, and looked a little sickly, but he was more or less the same, except for the small fact that he was now a murderer. Probably.

Harry walked to the edge of the dock and held out his hand so Draco could pull himself up on the dock. No one else was waiting for him, simply because there was no one else who would have any reason to. His father had killed himself a few years before, which Harry thought might have been a good decision in case Draco had decided to off him too. The two men stared at each other for a while (it seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds) but Harry was content to take in his grey eyes and his silver hair for the first time in 365 days. He'd tried to recreate them from his memories for 365 days, but he'd succeeded a grand total of 2 days, and they had been the ones immediately following Draco's arrest.

363 days was a long time to go without. There were a hundred things Harry could think of to tell him. In fact, he had told him all of them at least once when he'd thought about how this conversation ought to go. He could say 'I still love you' or 'You're still beautiful'. Both of those things were true, but so was:

"A year's a long time to be gone on a milk run."