Word Count: 842

Genre: Friendship, romance

Prompts: Secrets, colours

Summary: In which grey is now a kaleidoscope of colour.


It's funny to Harry Potter because Draco Malfoy is as cold as his stare. His eyes were, at first, incredibly boring to Harry — they were grey. That was all they were. Then he looked a bit harder, dreaming of the tinges of blue at the edges and counting the flecks of gold in his left eye, and suddenly there isn't a word to describe them. Grey does not do him justice. Grey is bland. He is not. They are not bland.

'What're you staring at, Potter?' The seven flames in your left eye and the way blue ice loops around your irises, Harry replies silently. He parts his lips to say these words, but thinks it strange to say that to his sworn enemy. Even though they aren't talking, Ron and Hermione are definitely asking the same question.

'Nothing.' Harry says, as though Malfoy is the weird one for asking. It's taking him all of his might to not lean in more and innocently watch the cold vapour disperse from his pupils as they dilate. But he can't.

Ron and Hermione don't know, but this is not the first time Harry is perusing Draco's every detail; he's done it whilst kissing his fingertips, memorising the feel of Draco's icy, smooth palm on his face, the way it subconsciously presses against his jaw when they kiss. He makes the frost of Draco's neck melt as he leaves shades of plum and violet and cherry in patches across his skin. They look like clusters autumn leaves spread unevenly over a blanket of snow.

Harry dies for the sound of Draco's breath catching as he chants his name like it's a hymn, moaning and screaming it so mercilessly loud that it could make a nun forget her pledge of abstinence. His fingernails dig so deep into Harry's skin every time he cries his name, a gust of oxygen brushing over his shoulders every time Draco whimpers.

When they pass every shop Harry shows interest in, Draco wastes all his money on gifts because he doesn't know much better. Harry teaches him that, although he loves his spontaneous presents, there is more to love than money. They teach each other a lot more than a teacher ever could, from pissing off a homophobic stranger to playing hide-and-seek when the Malfoy Manor is empty.

They teach themselves several different ways of sharing a kiss, whether it's a lazy kiss in which their lips scarcely touch, or Harry's lips peppering Draco's Dark Mark every time he catches his grey — no, not grey — eyes glossing over at the sight of his left forearm.

There are too many times where they spent nights in the library underneath the Invisibility Cloak, kissing under the warmth of the closed space and their sharp breaths overlapping each other's. They pore over Muggle authors like Austen and Shakespeare, reading to each other in the most ridiculous of voices that make them laugh so hard that their stomachs ache. Pince shushes them, never knowing where the noise stems from, which only makes them laugh harder.

'It has to be something.' Malfoy pushes. He wants them to know. He wants them to know all of it, if not most of it. He's tired of shifting between black and white. Harry cracks a half-smile, still shielded from his friends.

'No,' Harry shakes his head. 'I'm sure it's nothing.' But before he can walk away from the silent argument, Draco already dips his head and crushes his cold lips into Harry's, sending countless chills down his spine as Draco's smooth palm instinctively fits under his jaw. Suddenly, monochromic things don't exist — only a kaleidoscope of twilit kisses and jewel-green eyes and sunlit bodies and scarlet ties do.

They pull away, and Ron and Hermione's brains are brimming with questions, question marks spilling out of the ends of their hair. As soon as Harry says his goodbyes and wanders away, they explode with them, surprisingly neither furious nor upset. Well, Ron is, at first, outraged — he'd made a bet with Hermione in their fourth year that his first boyfriend was Cedric Diggory, and now owes her fifteen Galleons. Hermione is overjoyed that Harry is happy, even if it is the fucking ferret that he's happy with. She threatens to slap Draco again if he does any harm.

Soon, the whole common room knows with the slip of Ron's tongue, but Harry's certain that the Slytherin common room must be the same. After that, the classrooms are hardly quiet about the topic any more, and soon the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws know. Everybody knows. Even McGonagall is partially curious.

But when it all gets a bit too much with demeaning labels plastered on their heads like warning signs, Harry just remembers Draco's eyes and his hymns and his laughs, and suddenly nothing is grey any more.