There will be three (I admit, very small) parts. I meant to write only one scene (now part 3), but the rest kind of just grew? The whole story is POV Harry, warning for unhappy/ open ending.


Part 1

Narcissa Malfoy died from health complications due to "negligence" in the ministry holding cell. It was the day after her trial, the day after she was acquitted and hence released but couldn't leave. It was the day of her son's trial. Perhaps if things were different the outcome of his trial would also have been different, but Draco Malfoy was granted, by an embarrassed ministry, a freedom he could never have expected or known what to do with. So he disappeared— into the Muggle world, they heard.

Harry had gone up to him at the end of the trial, and held out the end of a hawthorn wand. Neither was quite looking the other in the eye. Instead, they both stared at the wand handle. "Thank you," his voice was impossibly neutral and undefined.

-o-

One year later, Ginny left Harry for Quidditch. In another year, he had quitted the aurors. He spent his time with Teddy and travelled the country on his broom. He felt too young to let life churn steadily away, burdened and tired in a world stained by a war and so much more— something so fundamentally revolting that even the war couldn't chip away. It was lonely on his broom, but at least he was alive.

And days went by like so, until one day at a noisy Muggle bar, his ears found a gravitating wild laugh, terrifyingly familiar and completely alien. It came with blond hair and a posh accent, and an outfit so expressive in the flashing lights it seemed he had somehow shed the war and his past like an old skin. Harry felt this man could barely be called Malfoy, the whole of his being so foreign. He seemed so careless, so completely comfortable talking and laughing among the handsome young men. And then somehow Harry found him standing right in front of himself, in a corner carved from all the noise.

"What are you doing here?" Harry asked, bewildered.

"Waiting," he dropped without a preamble into the seat beside Harry— gracefully, despite being clearly tipsy, "for the world to forget about me."

"Are you drunk?"

"No, I hardly ever am."

Harry huffed in disbelief, "sure, and Voldemort hardly ever wronged."

Harry watched the corner of this man's lips for even the slightest flinch. He didn't flinch.

Instead, that corner of his mouth drew itself up, "What's a Voldemort?"

Harry only stared in puzzled amusement. Sloshing his drink in his glass, he felt horribly out of pace with the night and its music, its scenes.

He smirked, "you're waiting too, aren't you Potter?"

"What do you mean?" their breaths are warm in the small space between them.

"For someone who's taken over your body to leave. For yourself to begin." At least, that's what Harry thought he heard, through an eyeful of blond hair on bare neck, "Let's not waste our lives waiting, shall we?"

"Right. Sure."

Harry found a hand on this thigh, a hand on his wrist, tugging him from the table. And then he found himself on the dance floor, jostled into the pace of the night, its music, its scenes, its breathless heat. Only then did he dare look straight into the grey eyes— and they were so full, so bright, that Harry thought he'd fall right through.

They fell into bed together that night. Something inevitable, perhaps. It was as passionate as intimate— scarily intimate for a first night. At some point they apologised and forgave through words of their bodies. Harry kissed a careful, tender line down the silvery scars on his chest. He gazed Harry in the eye as a finger traced the light crook in Harry's nose. By the morning, he was still there.

"Call me Draco." he'd said, that first morning, eyes twinkling over a cup of coffee. And there was nothing at all to catch Harry from falling.

-o-

The next few weeks were remembered as a string of dinners, long conversations, more nights together, and long walks through London streets— until Harry knew more about him than too many of his friends. And all too quickly Harry was looking forward to not much else— but the buzz of anticipation for each meeting that left him feverish, reeling, and utterly bedazzled afterwards. It made him blink and check his dizziness, swear and laugh at his helplessness.

He fell for that unfathomable wildness, the liveliness in his laughter, the way he casts all the world aside— except for Harry. And his eyes, Merlin, his eyes, almost always dancing with mirth, carrying schoolyard memories as if from another world, hushed and distilled by time. And even from their early days Harry saw something else— in the grey so like Sirius'— something almost always indecipherable, in the way his eyes confronted the world, staring it down, as if desperate to find answers, to demand explanations. They almost never looked down, almost never shed a tear, and were always chasing, always searching. And perhaps sometimes, just sometimes, in the way they soften upon meeting Harry's own, he would hope that Draco had found something with him.

Because only at hill tops and city roofs when they'd dismount their brooms and drink in the sun and sky and shifting clouds, only at those times would Draco stop running. Their half lidded eyes watched each other, intoxicated by the moment, giddy with light of a thousand shades.

But he had never really stopped running. Not since his trial. Not since before the war. Perhaps he was running after something, or just running away. It was as though he feared his spirit would die the moment it rested or settled, sunk into the quicksand of a rotten world.

Some days Harry thought a lot about Sirius, seeing his eyes in Draco's— or Draco's eyes in his photos. The way he used to laugh free as a child. The way he also ran, ran, ran from home.


Thank you for reading, I'd love to know what you think:)