Disclaimer: The HP series and relevant characters belong to JK Rowling. Harry and Draco do not belong to me.
Warnings: Angst. Melodrama. Plotlessness. Hints of Slash? Depends on your POV.
Notes: This is my first HP fic, so excuse possible OOC-ness and/or bad writing. If this fic needs some sort of chronological clarity, I would put it somewhere vaguely between Azkaban and Goblet, although I don't think it matters much, since it doesn't really have a plot to speak of. But I hope you enjoy it anyway. Constructive criticism would be more than welcome.
After much pondering, this is my take on the Harry/Draco relationship. Ambiguity and many, many shades of grey.
SHADES OF GREY
The darkness enveloped him, seeping slowly through the chill of his skin. A sliver of starlight pierced through the crack in the window beside him, illuminating the centre of the empty classroom. Loneliness drifted on the waves of the wind into the bleeding hole in his heart.
And as Harry sat, listening to the ephemeral sound of his breathing, he thought of everything he wished he could forget, he thought of the way nothing had changed.
And then, a voice.
"My, my…"
He whirled around.
"…If it isn't the famous Harry Potter."
Somewhere inside him, a storm began to stir. For a silhouette of an instant, he pondered running out the door behind him, jumping out the window beside him, hiding from everything that he hated and feared and didn't understand. But he glared the same glare of contempt and disdain, and life went on as it always did.
"All alone, without your chaperones?" the voice sneered, the footsteps moving closer, the face moving into the light. Tinged by the mist of the moon, Draco Malfoy looked almost ghostly, fleeting like the dust floating in the air between them, as if he would vanish, as if he had never existed.
"All alone, without your henchmen?" Harry retaliated.
Draco whistled, the shrillness of his mock-amazement circling the room.
"Where'd you learn that?" he jeered. "Out of a book?"
He paused for effect, forever the dramatist.
"Oh, sorry – I forgot – you don't read, your pathetic excuse of a mudblood girlfriend does all the reading for you."
Harry clenched his fists.
"What's the matter?" Draco continued. "Forgotten how to stand up for yourself? Or does your hopelessly financially-challenged sidekick do that for you?"
He shook his head and sighed.
"Honestly, Potter, can't you do anything yourself?"
Harry's jaw tightened, but his mind blanked. Perhaps it was the time of night, a lapse in his thinking, a faltering in his faith. Perhaps Draco was right.
"Leave me alone, Malfoy." he managed.
Draco seized at Harry's resignation and shone.
"And miss out on such fun?" he taunted. "Oh, don't deprive me of such riveting entertainment."
He snickered. Harry rolled his eyes, his final, futile attempt at revenge. He turned to walk away.
"Chicken, are we, Potter?" Draco called after him. "Is that what saved you from You Know Who – cowardice? Running away to mummy like the yellow-bellied, filthy, half-blood that you are?"
Harry stopped. Something exploded inside him, and as if by instinct, the words escaped, reminiscent of venom from a snake's tongue.
"Don't you dare talk about my mother." he growled, his eyes narrowed and ablaze. "Don't you dare."
Draco's smirk glinted in the moonlight.
"Awww…" he cooed. "someone has some issues."
His laughter rang like the discordant vibrations of an unwanted phone call.
"If you've got an issue, have a tissue."
He reached into his pocket and extended a handkerchief. Harry slapped it away.
"He should have finished you off, just like he did to your good-for-nothing parents." Draco spat. "You don't deserve to be alive."
Harry didn't know why he said the words. Perhaps he was tired, tired of waiting, anticipating things that would never come. Tired of hoping, of persisting, of believing. Tired of fearing the truth, of playing games where no one emerged as a winner.
"I'm alive, because my mother loved me." he began, his blood surging through his veins. "She loved me, more than her own life! She loved me!"
His shouts trembled with every breath, reverberating through the invisible barriers they had both built so skilfully around them.
"Love, Malfoy!"
He hung back on the word, its warning like a lamb to the slaughter, like the undying echoes of a funeral bell.
"Love! That's something you'll never understand!"
There was a silence. It was a silence like no other, deafening and still, stained like the colour red, like broken promises and shattered dreams. Somewhere in the distance, Harry could feel that something had been broken, a border had been crossed. The wind stopped, and something changed.
When Draco's arm wavered towards his wand, Harry pounced.
The surprise on Draco's face was unmistakable. He stared up from beneath Harry's shoulders, the alarm contained in the suspension of his breaths, the stiffness of his muscles held and screeching against the floor. He flinched visibly.
"Love is just a four letter word." he hissed, a manic whirlwind of anger, fear, jealousy, and something Harry couldn't identify.
And again, Harry noticed that something had changed.
He slammed Draco's shoulders against the floor.
"What do you know about love?" he screamed. "You're nothing but a spoilt, stuck-up, daddy's boy, whining about what you never got! You don't know the smallest thing about love--"
He trailed off. The world spun, his vision obscured, reality masked by torn shades of silver and grey. And once more, it seemed that the tables had turned.
Harry looked above him at the same glinting smirk, the same victorious and defiant glower. He looked below him, at the wand glimmering and shaking beneath his neck, braced and ready to strike. And he closed his eyes for a moment, preparing himself for the fall into the arms of death, the destiny to which he subconsciously knew he had always belonged.
Draco could kill him, he knew. Three years of loathing in the ecstatic chanting of one word, thirteen years of family legacy in a slight tap of trained fingers. Harry waited, his outer demeanor unfazed by the fear which was rattling and bursting inside him.
And then he saw it.
It flickered across Draco's face, an imperceptible struggle which distorted and lingered in the limitless shadows of his features. Harry saw the raw desire, the unrestrained thoughts of murder, the vindication and the revenge, the reality which he had expected and the Draco Malfoy he hated more than the unchangeable past and unpredictable future. And for an instant Harry thought he saw the Draco Malfoy who was suffocating, the Draco Malfoy trapped in quicksand, slipping away into the sands of time. The Draco Malfoy who believed in mercy over malice, light over dark, a smile over a smirk. The Draco Malfoy who believed that love was more than a four letter word.
Harry watched, motionless, soundless.
And when time reappeared, the moment ended as quickly the blush that had tinged the impenetrable paleness of Draco's skin on the fateful day of their first encounter, before their world had begun.
The wand lay snapped, weak and powerless, limp at the corner of Harry's eye. Draco stood, lost words choked in his throat, disjointed remnants of the Draco Malfoy who believed that love was more, much more, than a four letter word.
Harry waited, thinking nothing.
And again, the same voice.
"You wouldn't know love, Potter, if it hit you in the face."
And Harry couldn't help but notice the lack of malice, the indistinct quiet, of Draco's sneer, the unfamiliar meaning of his words. The way his footsteps hesitated undetectably as he disappeared in the darkness beyond the door, the way his silence brimmed with secrets and mysteries heavier and more insistent than ever before.
The wind caressed his cheek, and Harry knew that nothing had changed.
His fingers lingered over the broken wand, abandoned on the floor beside him, his thoughts shifting like a fan into the flames, an auburn leaf trapped in the autumn breeze. And abruptly, as if a siren had sounded inside him, he jerked his arm back, stood, and walked out through the opposite door.