Chapter 11

Harry stared down at his wand.

Eleven inches. Holly wood. The phoenix feather core unseen but felt. Harry knew the statistics of his wand like Ollivander had told him only yesterday, knew them as much as he knew the exact shade of the wood, the line of darker grain that threaded its length, the slight impression where his thumb and forefinger always sat.

Or used to sit. Harry so rarely picked up his wand with the intention of using it these days. For a moment, staring down at where it lay untouched before him, he couldn't quite remember when he'd last used it at all.

How scary, he thought, almost shivering at the foreboding that settled a little more heavily in his gut. To think that I hardly even properly practice magic anymore. It was a different kind of fear to any Harry had experienced before. A sort of listless, resigned horror, a helplessness that he couldn't change what was already happening.

Harry had never been helpless in such a way before. He'd never let himself stop, never lain down and taken the hand that was dealt for him rather than fight it to the brink. But things changed. And besides, this was different. Horribly different. Impossible to face with brute force.

Couple that with exam fever, and Harry was left suspended in a particularly sorry mood. The feeling was rife throughout the seventh and eighth years, building increasingly in the weeks approaching the NEWTs. That night, the night before the first of the examinations, the Dragon's Nest was humming with it. Even at nearly eleven o'clock when most of them had forced themselves to seek their beds, it was as though the walls still quivered with unease.

Harry had never experienced exam pressure before. Not like this. There had been the OWLs, but in the grand scheme of things, alongside everything else that had befallen him in his fifth year it had seemed comparatively negligible. Now, with no madman thirsting after his blood, no villainous toad peering over his shoulder for any slip in his step that she could abuse to throw him further off-balance, it hit him hard. Harder.

Or it could have been because the war.

Or that he had actually bothered to study this time.

Or that, on just the other side of the exams, exams that had such potential for being disastrous, there was… nothing. A whole world of nothing.

The future. After. Harry had never considered so far ahead before. Even in his fourth year, when Moody's imposter had first posed the idea of becoming an auror to him, it had only ever been a distant possibility. Something to come. Something to drift towards but not quite to actively pursue just yet.

Now was different, and even more different because Harry wouldn't become an auror. Not anymore. He didn't think he could.

Across from him, the cover of a book thunk-ed shut. Harry started, wrenched from his thoughts, and glanced up to see Hermione slump back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. At her side, Ron sprawled across the table with heavy-lidded eyes but his quill still clutched in his hand. Last-minute cramming had always been his and Harry's style, but there was a distinct flavour of urgency to Ron's commitment that hadn't been there before. Whether it was driven by Hermione's influence – or Ron's enhanced consideration for Hermione's influence – or a real fear for the future, Harry didn't know. He supposed it didn't really matter. Ron still mentioned his intentions for entering the aurorship program, and for all Harry knew he was more than capable of pursuing that path.

Not like Harry. Ron didn't practice quite as much magic anymore either, but he wasn't like Harry.

"We should go to bed," Hermione said, dropping her hands from her face with a sigh. "It's getting late."

Harry didn't reply, gaze falling back to his wand, but Ron grunted and pushed himself upright. Nodding heavily, he smothered a yawn as he began to flip his own books closed, stacking his parchment pages on top of them. "Yep. Right. Good thinking."

"Harry?"

Harry glanced up at Hermione again, blinked detachedly as he met her gaze and rifled for what she'd asked of him, and shook his head slightly. "I'm fine."

"Harry –"

"I might just stick around a little bit longer. I haven't really gotten anything done all night."

Hermione frowned, her forehead wrinkling along familiar lines, but it was Ron who replied. "You know, last minute cramming is good and all, helps you feel better, but it doesn't actually do anything. Right, Hermione?"

Hermione nodded, but Harry only shrugged. "Yeah, well. Whatever."

"Sleep would do the most good," Hermione said quietly. "For all of us."

Harry stared at her pointedly, and she sighed. They all knew that, at least in the dormitories, Harry rarely slept anymore. There were very few instances that he could sleep, for that matter, even if one in particular stood out as a sure-fire means of managing it.

Reaching for his wand, Harry hesitated for only a split second before picking it up. It felt strangely heavy in his hand, loaded with more than just the lightness of wood and feather. "It's fine," he said, heaving himself from his seat. "I'll study with Draco or something."

Hermione opened her mouth to reply but caught herself before she spoke. Like Ron, she had more than likely come to terms with Harry openly studying with Draco. Not quite frequently, but every so often in the common room at night after they'd been kicked out of the library, he found himself drifting to the table Draco set himself up at. They couldn't sit as they usually did, not in the company of their classmates and not with the temporary limitation Draco had set upon them, but there was comfort in proximity. Reassurance only added to by the bumping of knees, the murmured exchange in which Harry would pose a question or Draco would comment, to receive a like-minded muted reply.

Hermione had been quietly pleased at first. Quietly approving. With weeks of such recurrences, she didn't say a word about it anymore. Ron was a little harder to read, but he didn't complain. He didn't caution Harry to keep away from 'the Slytherins' anymore, or to watch his back, just in case. "He's actually alright to study with" was Harry's usual explanation, to which Hermione often repeated that he was "really quite smart, you know", but after a time Ron didn't seem to need even that.

When Harry picked up his discarded books, however, sparing a final glance and goodnight to his friends, he was met by the now-anticipated narrowing of Ron's eyes – not a glare, and not accusing, but considering. Harry was reminded, not for the first time, of their Witching Hour discussion on Christmas night; he didn't clarify, didn't comment, but he remembered. Sometimes, he had to wonder how much of that conversation Ron remembered, too.

Not that it really mattered. In the grand scheme of things, Ron wasn't annoyed anymore, and Hermione was only ever accepting. That was good enough for Harry, and with a final nod at each of them, he left them to seek their beds and crossed the almost empty common room to the desk where Draco sat.

Pansy had filled the seat across from him earlier that evening, but she'd already left for bed. There were only a pair of other students remaining in the common room, respectively staring blindly at nothing and attempting to pick through their notes and textbooks with more compulsive page-turning than actual reading. Draco was the only one who looked to be properly working. He was 'quite smart', just as Hermione always said, but it was more than that. He was studious. He was committed. Tenacious and resilient – at least with his studies.

Probably outside of it too, Harry had thought on more than one occasion, and he was only beginning to see evidence of that the more time they spent together. The more frequently they paused in their studies to talk in a quiet exchange about nothing in particular. Just to talk. Just to ask about what hadn't been asked before, what hadn't been realised, and what had been realised but not fully comprehended. Less often these days those exchanged were dotted with teasing and witty remarks. Less often they were about the act of the exchange itself. It became more than that, more than bantering and joking. More about learning and understanding, exploring what Harry had never before considered exploring.

"What's your favourite colour? And if you say green, I swear I'm going to hit you."

"If you could play anything but a seeker in quidditch, what would you play?"

"So, you actually like Potions? It's not just because it was taken by Snape?"

Trivialities that had never mattered before, but seemed so much more important when Harry sat with Draco. When he hauled himself from the dry parchment of textbooks and essays and turned to regard Draco sidelong where he worked with unrelenting studiousness, the small crease evident between his eyebrows, the line of his jaw held just a little tightly, his hand sweepingly fluidly as it crossed the page and left cursive handwriting in its wake.

Harry found, quite unexpectedly, that he could watch Draco unendingly and not grow tired of it. There were little things, little features and little twitches, that he'd never noticed before. Things that had never mattered but now felt utterly integral in compiling who Draco was.

How his lip curled in a shadowed impression of his old sneer when he came across a fact, an explanation, an error that didn't sit right.

The way he would always sit with such rigidly straight posture, but every so often would sag as though deflated, take a brief respite, before resetting himself as though an unspoken reminder nudged him to straighten once more.

He clicked his tongue when he was frustrated. He preferred black ink over blue. He made a habit of wearing a shirt beneath his shirt, because he hated being cold as much as Harry did. Cheese upset his stomach, but only sometimes, and he wasn't overly fond of sweets, and always had his tea without sugar and only a drip of milk. When he slept – if he managed to sleep – he would sometimes mutter unintelligible words, as though making up for his hours of silence during the day.

And in his sleep, when he had nightmares that didn't quite succeed in waking him, he would roll towards Harry, unconsciously wrap his arms around him, and bury his face into his shoulder. The nightmares didn't strike twice those nights.

"What do you dream about? Your worst dreams?"

"Do you think you'll ever visit your parents? If you're allowed to, would you?"

"If you could go back, what would you change? What would you do differently? Would you even want to?"

Those questions fell a little harder, and just as much because Draco more often than not asked all but identical ones in return. Harry hadn't spoken to Ron and Hermione, to Ginny or anyone else, about any of that. Not to the Ministry-appointed therapist that visited the school on regular occasions, either. He hardly let himself think of the answer to those questions – but in the dark depths of the library, alone but for Draco and comfortably at ease in the close contact of skin to skin, chest to chest, arms often embracing, it felt okay. It was alright. It wasn't so impossible, nor so heartbreaking, to voice aloud.

And it helped. As much as anything else, talking and being with Draco – it helped.

When Harry slipped silently into the chair at Draco's side, that helped, too. It became just a little less painful to hold his wand, because there was something else drawing his attention. The threat of the exams the next day was still looming, but it was momentarily smothered in the severity of its threat. Draco had questioned – weeks ago, months before – if Harry's liking might not be the same as his own, and that might be true. It could very well be different. But Harry liked Draco and the glow of comfort he radiated. He liked it more than simply 'liking' could describe.

As Harry set his textbooks on the desk at Draco's side, dropping into the spare seat, Draco paused in his writing. What he was writing – still writing, even the night before his Potions exam – would have once baffled Harry, but not anymore. He'd asked, and he'd looked, and he saw the lines repeating and reworking pages of studious notetaking to force facts into memory that Draco reinforced over and over again. It wasn't how Harry would have approached it, wasn't how he now did, but it worked for Draco. He had a perseverance that would have left Harry stunned years before.

Not anymore. It seemed perfectly suitable for him these days.

The line between Draco's eyebrows seemed to have become all but permanently settled. His jaw had been locked for so many hours that evening that it was probably aching. Disregarding that he might be seen, what Su Li at the table behind them might think if she happened to glance up, Harry reached for Draco's face and prodded his chin. As thought released like a clasp, Draco's lips parted around a sigh.

He sat back in his chair, posture still rigid but slightly less than it had been. The hand not still holding his quill rose to his face to knead the bridge of his nose, and the crease between his brows easing slightly.

"You've been going for four hours straight," Harry murmured, dropping his hand back to the table. His leg settled against Draco's, though, lightly and without demand. Draco adjusted his own immediately against him.

"It hasn't been four hours straight," Draco replied.

"Yeah, it has. Your two seconds to eat the dinner I brought you –"

"It wasn't only two seconds."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "Really? I think you could compete against a Vanishing Charm with how quickly you put it away. Did you actually get a stomach ache?"

Draco rolled his eyes, but a touch of a smile played across his lips. He opened his mouth to reply but paused as a shuffle of motion bespoke Su rising to her feet behind them. Harry didn't turn towards her, only half registering her suggested, "Mandy, I'm turning in. Are you coming?" Their mutual departure a moment later, however, was noteworthy for the emptiness it left in the dormitory behind them.

As soon as the sound of footsteps faded completely, Harry reached for Draco's hand. He eased the quill out from between his fingers and, as had become something of a habit, smoothed his fingers over Draco's fingertips. The impressions of the quill were so deeply inset that they could have been permanent, even though Harry knew from checking that they would fade overnight before being repressed again in the next bout of studying.

"We should probably go to bed," Harry said, though, as ever, he doubted how much that just occupying a bed would help to promote sleep.

"Maybe," Draco said, which translated to 'not yet'.

"Soon?"

"Soon."

Harry nodded. He wasn't going to study anymore. He knew he wouldn't, and not only because he was tired. For all that Draco's studiousness was motivation enough, Harry was neither a good nor an avid studier himself. Reading printed words simply didn't work for him in the same way that it did for people like Draco and Hermione.

Instead, he offered Draco's hand back to him, folded his arms on the desk before him, and dropped his head down on top of them. Facing his direction, he watched as Draco regarded him in return, frowning slightly, before slowly picking up his quill once more. He didn't start writing again, though.

"What's wrong?" Draco asked.

Harry blinked heavily. "What?"

"You're worried about something."

"Isn't it obvious?"

Draco's frown deepened. The feather twirled in agitated spins between his fingers. "I meant something else. Something in particular." His gaze flickered to where Harry knew he'd left his wand, abandoned before him and as melancholically useless as it had been for months. "Are you worrying about the spellwork?"

Harry closed his eyes, pressing his leg a little more firmly against Draco's. They'd discussed it before – Harry's magic, his reluctance, and that it mirrored but wasn't identical to Draco's own feelings on the matter. They weren't the same, not quite, because for all that Draco might commiserate with the feelings casting a spell could incite, he wouldn't stop using magic. Not even a little. It was and always had been a part of his life so completely that to stop would be akin to starving himself of water. Impossible, and inevitably fatal.

In a lot of ways, Harry wished he felt just a little of that same compulsion. In others, the possibility of such a necessity was terrifying.

"It's not like I can do anything about it," Harry murmured, his voice muffled a little by the crook of his arm. "It's just a little bit depressing that it basically means I've already failed my NEWTs."

"There's no assurance of that," Draco said.

"I'm pretty sure actually using magic is a pretty big part of the exams, Draco."

"Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if some considerations were made, given your circumstances. It wouldn't even surprise me if you weren't the only one to have this problem."

"You're being generous."

Draco snorted quietly. "Have you ever known me to be a generous person?"

Harry opened his eyes, staring up at him. "Yes," he said simply.

Draco didn't reply. Not with words. The line between his eyebrows eased further, however, almost disappearing entirely. Twisting in his seat, he nudged Harry's knee gently with his own, tipping his head in a beckoning gesture.

Harry didn't need words to comprehend what he said. He shook his head slightly, turning his face to bury it in his arms. "It's fine," he said. "You don't have to. These seats are heaps more uncomfortable than the library ones for doing that."

"Do you think I care?" Draco said.

"You should. It'll be distracting for you."

"Do you mean the fact that you're sitting in my lap or that the chair will be slightly more uncomfortable than it already is?" When Harry didn't reply, Draco nudged him with his knee again, more insistently this time. "Come on. You're sitting there quietly depressed, and it's making me even more stressed than I already am. Don't do this to my blood pressure, Harry."

Harry laughed into the fold of his arms, but it didn't last long, sighing into silence almost immediately. Maybe he was a feeling down that evening, but he wouldn't distract Draco to alleviate it a little. Priorities lay where they did, and since Harry had come to properly understand just what kind of distraction climbing into Draco's lap created – it wasn't fair. "Yeah, well, sitting in your way and distracting you won't make it any easier for you."

"Will it help you?" Draco asked. "Will it make you feel any better?"

"You already know it –"

"Well, it helps me too, believe it or not." When Harry peered up at him, he frowned. "Don't look at me like that. It actually does. Don't think you're the only one getting something other than sex out of all of this. I know what I said before, and I know you've been thinking about it, but that's not it. That's not only it. So get you're skinny arse over here, and we might both actually feel slightly better about everything."

When Draco loosely grasped his elbow, Harry lifted his head. He couldn't help but smile slightly. When they'd first had sex, Harry had properly realised for the first time just what kind of an effect their agreement had upon Draco. Realising hadn't quite changed things – as much because Draco said that nothing had really been changed in the first place – but it had been playing on Harry's mind. Even when his mind was stuffed to overflowing with every other concern, it had niggled at him.

Draco flicked aside the concern with a pointed comment and the arch of an eyebrow. When he tugged gently upon Harry's elbow, Harry's feeble resistance crumbled in quick compliance. Climbing into Draco's lap was so easy, so natural, that he felt the previously unnoticed tension tight in his body release almost immediately. It was enough that, dropping his chin to Draco's shoulder, his eyes slid closed within seconds.

The touching, the kisses, the sex – it was incredible. Better than good. But for Harry, those quiet moments in between that seemed to smother his nagging concerns were just as wonderful.

"Better?" Draco asked, his words a low murmur in Harry's ear.

Harry hummed in reply. He didn't have to speak. All he needed was to wrap his arms around Draco's waist, press himself as close to him as he could get without climbing into his robes, and breathe. Everything felt just a little better when he managed that.

And, for all that he was stressed himself, and exhausted, and likely made more uncomfortable by Harry's weight upon him in the rigid chairs, Draco wrapped his arms around him in return and held him back. Harry noticed that, despite the threat of an exam less than ten hours away, Draco didn't begin writing again for a long time after.