Author's note: Written for Capitu, for reaching her 1000th rec on her 'my drarry recs' LJ rec list (with underscores instead of spaces if you want to check it out), and for leaving great comments on everything she reads. I have also been musing on what love is all week, and this is the result. It is totally unbetaed and I have form for typos, so apologies in advance.
Love
Love defined Harry, according to Dumbledore. It saved him, more than once; it drove him to walk to his end. Because of love, Harry lived and evil was defeated.
When love came to Harry, it was wrapped in long red hair and soft freckled skin, and a laugh made of sunshine. A warm mouth was his reward, his resting place after a long journey and difficult storm.
The ins and outs of love, the day-to-day, were unlike anything Harry had experienced before. He learned that love was not about holding something precious at arm's length or keeping it safe. It was standing on the ground and watching your lover fly high in the air as Bludgers threatened to knock her from her broom. It was about doing the washing up, and waking up together, and arguments over wallpaper and whether to stay in bed all weekend or go out to see family.
The night before he married Ginny, Harry felt a moment of panic at the thought that love would end here, that he had fallen in love at a young age and that he would never again know the thrill, the dizzying fall like a Wronski feint of the heart. It had all happened in only a few years: surely people spent lifetimes seeking this out and falling in love, over and over again before settling down? But then Ginny moved in her sleep, a gentle murmur escaping her lips, and Harry knew that it didn't matter how love came; only that he embraced it with arms wide open.
Later he learned that love was the helplessness of witnessing the birth of new life, of cradling a little person, all hot flesh and tiny voice, with reverence and fear. How to ever keep this person safe? Love and fear and a blind panic settled deep into his soul. His heart made room three times over, as he learned that his chances to fall in love hadn't ended on his wedding day. Each baby's arrival brought with it the whirlwind of new love, of missed heartbeats and soft kisses. Only this time it was focused on milk-scented skin and soft burbles, wrapped around his mother's eyes, his father's hair, his wife's fierce colouring.
The first time James fell from a tree, or Al when nearly splinched himself in a burst of accidental magic, or Lily almost burned the house down with one of hers, Harry learned that even a life filled with love was not a safe road or gentle harbour. It was a sea, benign one moment and stormy the next. Every day held the potential for shipwreck.
With each step they took, his James, his Al, his Lily, Harry saw that they were leaving him. They were moving, with the force that gives rise to mountains and life to the world, into their own lives. One day Harry found himself standing alone in a room, with his children long gone. The fear he had felt with a newborn in his arms had grown into pride, warm and deep. Somehow it still felt like heartbreak.
oOo
The sounds of a door opening, somewhere in the house, and footsteps across the floor above were his only company. Harry sighed. It wasn't just the children who had grown up, grown away. When Ginny walked in, a towel wrapped around her head, she was the most familiar stranger he'd ever known. Their eyes met, and slid away rather than either acknowledging the emptiness there.
"Mum asked if we wanted to pop by later."
"Sounds good." It would be a relief, to have some company other than each other. "Do you know if Teddy will be there?"
"Didn't ask, and she didn't say."
Harry's attention turned back to sorting through his notes for work. Ginny wandered out of the room without saying anything else. Harry set down his work and sighed. His marriage felt empty, but surely that was just what happened once all the children had left? He and Ginny weren't the teenagers they once were, clinging to each other for a bit of normality. It was going to take time, but they would find each other again.
oOo
Love, it turned out, was knowing when to call it a day. As Harry looked up at Ginny, who had already signed the parchment that would end their marriage, she gave him a sad smile and all in a rush he knew that this was love too. It was another letting go.
"We had a good time together, didn't we?" he asked.
She reached out to pat his hand. "We did."
Maybe they would be friends. They had been friends, once, and he had loved her then, too. He signed his name. They left separately.
oOo
Molly Weasley's hug was so tight that Harry couldn't breathe, but he didn't care because it meant that she still loved him.
"You'll always be family," she whispered.
"Thank you," he whispered back.
"Dad!" Lily nearly bowled him over as she ran into the room. "You're here!"
Behind her, Harry could make out the lumbering shapes of his sons, too cool to run to greet him. And beyond them, the huge tree, bright with light and gaudy with the hand-made decorations of two generations. Somewhere in that room, Ginny was waiting too.
Harry took a deep breath, smiled, and stepped towards his family.
Love was feeling your heart swell and break all at once.
oOo
The long line of stucco terraces looked imposing, but Harry's flat only took up the first floor of one of the formerly-grand houses. However attractive the street or well-appointed the flat though, it didn't feel like home, not at first. Harry missed the marks on the doors caused by stray toys, the scorch marks from 'experiments'; the many layers of family history. His life felt a bit like the flat: blank, emptied of meaning.
Harry went through the various motions of his life. Going to work. Eating. Sleeping. He soon realised that it wasn't that different to his life before the divorce.
He still worried about his children, but the ache was softer now they were older. Life had lost its panicked edge, the twinges of guilt, the pull of regrets. Harry was relieved, for finally he could relax. Finally he could live a peaceful life.
And then Draco Malfoy moved into the second-floor flat. Pale, tight-lipped, recently divorced. When Harry saw him, it was a little like looking into a mirror.
They acknowledged each other's existence, but Harry was unsure about what else to do, how else to behave. At first, they exchanged no more than a nod when they passed on the stairs, a muttered greeting. The ignored each other's embarrassment at their sons' comments (such a poky place, why don't you have a telly? Aren't you lonely?), loud and obvious, on the days they visited.
Harry had never thought that he would have anything in common with Malfoy, but as he began to anticipate the sound of Malfoy – the thud of the neighbouring door shutting and then the shudder of footsteps as he climbed the stairs to the flat above – Harry realised that Malfoy was the nearest he had to someone to share his home with. This thought left him feeling… peculiar. He would lie in bed at night, and hear Malfoy padding around upstairs. He grew to recognise the sounds he made, and in his head he would narrate them: Malfoy is having a shower, Malfoy is sitting reading the paper, Malfoy is late for work.
oOo
Perhaps they would never have really talked, if it wasn't for the leak. One evening Harry was sitting in the armchair by his bedroom window, reading Luna's latest book about travelling in search of the lesser-spotted Tebo, when a drop of water splashed onto his nose. And then another. When Harry looked up, one plopped straight onto his glasses. He moved out of the way to examine the damp patch on the ceiling, through which water was slowly dripping. Malfoy. Harry had worked out that the configuration of the flat above was different: where Harry had his bedroom, Malfoy had an open plan living room or a large kitchen – Harry had heard a chair scraping back, the angry beep of the smoke alarm and the muffled sound of swearing when Malfoy burnt his dinner. Harry had also heard the shower running in the room over his own small kitchen, so presumed that it was Malfoy's bathroom.
The drips became a narrow stream, and the damp patch spread. Harry went into the hallway to knock on Malfoy's door. He knocked on the door several times before Malfoy appeared, his face pink on one side, the wrinkles of sheets clearly imprinted on his cheek. The corner of his mouth was still slick with drool. Malfoy had been napping.
"Something's leaking in your flat. There's water coming through your ceiling."
Malfoy looked startled. "Water?"
"I think your kitchen's flooding."
"I don't have a kitch—"
Harry decided that he didn't have the time to explain to a half-asleep Malfoy that there was indeed water leaking from one flat to the other. It would be easier to show him. He stepped forward, pushing past Malfoy and climbed the stairs into the flat.
Nothing looked like it did in Harry's flat. For one, there weren't any walls. It was all one large room, and Harry could see both sets of windows – those facing the street and those facing the garden. As he looked around, he also saw the cause of the dripping downstairs. The kitchen sink was slowly overflowing; a near-invisible cascade of water, silently running over the top and down the door of the cabinet below, and onto the floor.
Harry crossed the room and turned off the tap.
"Oh," said Malfoy. He joined Harry, and peered down into the sink. "Accio plug." The plug came out with a loud pop! and the water began to drain. The last of it was gurgling around the plughole when they both heard a crash from below.
"I think," Harry said, through gritted teeth, "that was my ceiling. Collapsing." Malfoy came down with him to inspect the damage. Plaster and dust were littered over the armchair, the end of Harry's bed, and the carpet, along with a sizeable puddle.
"Oh, relax, Potter," Malfoy said. "It'll be easy enough to fix. And besides, there wasn't much here to spoil, was there."
Harry stared at him. Apparently, a boring job and being a father and getting divorced had done little to tamper Malfoy's tongue. "I haven't lived here that long," he said, and then cringed at the defensiveness of his own words. Malfoy shrugged, and turned his attention back to the ceiling.
A few swishes of their wands and it was all repaired, but Harry still felt cheated of something. An apology, maybe.
oOo
A week later, Malfoy bought himself a Muggle bicycle and left it in the hallway. Harry knocked on the door again. This time Malfoy appeared almost immediately, and with not a single hair out of place.
"Do you have to leave this here? It takes up a lot of space."
"Why, how pleasant to see you again, Potter." Malfoy's eyes flicked over to the bicycle. "I thought you'd approve of me trying out a Muggle mode of transport."
"I don't mind you riding a bike," Harry said, and he bit back a smile at the image of Malfoy, perched on a bicycle as a stereotypical French man, for some reason. Wearing a stripy top, a beret, and a bunch of garlic around his neck. For all he knew, that was exactly how Malfoy thought Muggles rode their bikes – Harry was sure that he'd seen Martin the Muggle in that get-up. "I just don't see why you have to keep it here."
"I'm not leaving it outside! Someone might steal it. Or it would get rusty. And anyway, it would spoil the aesthetic of the railings."
"You could shrink it and keep it upstairs."
"That's a fine-tuned piece of machinery! I'm not tampering with it. Especially not with magic."
Harry began to get the impression that Malfoy wasn't going to change his mind. With a grumble about stupid bikes, he went back into his flat.
oOo
On his way back home from work a few nights later, Harry was almost run over by Malfoy, all stick thin and lycra-clad. The sight of Malfoy dressed head-to-toe in skin-tight black did something funny to Harry. There wasn't anything left to his imagination. Perhaps he stared at Malfoy's crotch a fraction too long, because an amused voice broke through his musings.
"Don't get too excited, Potter. Not to talk myself down, but it's mostly padding."
Harry's cheeks bloomed red as he looked up to see Malfoy smiling knowingly at him. "I- I wasn't—"
"Of course you weren't."
Malfoy clanked ahead of him, and Harry nearly knocked over the bicycle as he unlocked the door to his flat. Stupid bicycle.
oOo
It didn't seem to matter why they talked to each other – a misunderstanding about the recycling, or that time Harry came home drunk and singing at the top of his voice, or when Malfoy got window boxes and somehow managed to water Harry's curtains as well as the geraniums – but Harry left each conversation feeling that somehow he'd been bested. He would rush off to work, or back into his flat, and his pulse would be racing, his head would be spinning. Draco Malfoy was surely the most irritating man alive.
oOo
"…And then he said that I had always been a clumsy oaf. That's not true! How many times did I beat him at Quid ditch?" Harry was onto his second cup tea, but only warming up to his theme. "Malfoy has been such a prick lately and—"
"Do we have to talk about Malfoy? You talk about him all the bloody time." Ron grimaced. "It's like sixth year again."
"I do not."
"You do," chorused Hermione and Ron, who then exchanged delighted grins. They really had been married far too long.
"You were a man obsessed, back then," said Hermione.
"Was not."
"You know, Harry, you should probably have a proper conversation with him one of these days," said Hermione. She had a knack for turning the most light-hearted of conversations serious. "He is your neighbour, and leaving a bike in a hallway isn't exactly the same as practising Dark Arts, is it?"
Harry would have liked to come up with a clever retort, but instead he just opened and closed his mouth a few times. In the end, he settled for having a third cup of tea and a biscuit. Bloody Malfoy.
oOo
The idea of attempting to be civil ate away at him, until one evening Harry knocked on the door to Malfoy's flat (narrowly avoiding scraping his arm on the stupid bike again) and invited himself in with a bottle of wine.
Malfoy stared at him as if he had grown an extra head, but let him in. After they had finished the bottle, Malfoy produced another. Harry was pleasantly surprised to discover that with wine as a filter, Malfoy was… bearable to talk to. And for some reason, quite distracting every time he brushed his hair away from his face, or pursed his lips as he listened to Harry. It was all very strange, but not as horrible an experience as Harry had feared it might be.
oOo
Harry had thought that maybe now they had sat down and talked as two reasonable adults, they would get on better, but if anything it got worse. Malfoy seemed to delight in picking fights with him, and they went from the occasional row to daily mutterings, complaints and altercations.
Each time, Harry noticed something different about Malfoy. It was easy to blank out the words after a while, because Malfoy always said the same things. As did Harry: there was a comforting familiarity to this all, which Harry suspected did indeed have something to do with the years they'd spent dancing around each other at school. But what he noticed wasn't how annoying Malfoy was – because that went without saying – but how his eyes filled with light on sunny days, or how he was slim but his thighs were thickening up with the bike riding, or the way he blushed from the top of his hairline down to the collar of his shirt. How much further did the blushes extend? Harry would picture flushed skin. He wondered about how Malfoy's chest would look when he exerted himself.
His heart began to ache again, in a new way. It wasn't like when he watched Ginny fly above him, or the children take risks. This time it made his fingers tingle, and the breath squeeze out of him. It made the world silent except for the thudding of his heartbeat.
Why should he get this sick, fluttering feeling, when arguing with the man next door? He had found Draco Malfoy to be irritating on many occasions before, so why should the mere sight of him now make Harry's palms damp?
Harry was lost, and he didn't know what to do about it.
oOo
In the end, he decided to invite himself in with some wine again. It had worked last time, and Harry was the first to admit that he wasn't always the most original of thinkers.
Malfoy eyed the bottle warily, but didn't turn him away. This time, after they had drunk the first bottle, but before Malfoy could fetch a second, Harry decided it was time to be courageous. He put a hand on Malfoy's leg.
"Your hand is on my leg," Malfoy said, staring at Harry's hand.
"I know." Harry's head was swimming slightly. He didn't think it was the wine, though. "Move it if you don't want it there."
Malfoy didn't move it. He just kept on staring at it. And then he looked up at Harry, and he wasn't smiling, or sneering. His face was drawn up tight, and it took Harry a moment to realise that what he could see was fear. And then it changed as Malfoy bit his lip slightly, and Harry felt a soft, shaky pressure on top of his hand. He looked down at long pale fingers over his own. It was painful to breathe again, and Harry turned his hand over and squeezed, marvelling as Malfoy threaded his fingers through Harry's and squeezed back.
"I…" Malfoy didn't finish his sentence.
"Me too," whispered Harry. And then he leant forward, and did what he had never once thought possible, never once even imagined. He touched his lips to Malfoy's, and kissed. His heart missed a beat, or so it felt, when Malfoy kissed him back. The taste of sour wine became lost in the passion, surprisingly tender, they both seemed to pour into the kiss.
Something deep down in him clicked into place, and Harry understood that he had found something that had been missing. It had been so close for so long, but only now had he found it. He smiled, thrilling to see a soft smile of surprise in return, and reached forward for another kiss.
oOo
Love was being willing to risk it all, to see if there was any chance for happiness. Love was waking up and seeing cool grey eyes meet yours, and being pulled into a warm embrace. Love was fearing every day that this passion, this happiness, would never last. Love was not caring, but jumping in head-first, anyway. Because love, even for a day, was always worth it.