A/N: This is for Rish, because she is my new wifey and she is lovely and she loves Drarry. I don't even know where this came from. Enjoy!
The line "You have to get burnt to know that you're here." is paraphrased from Andrea Gibson's poem Wasabi.
Pairing: Draco/Harry
Prompt: 43. Fortuitous (used in the "unexpected" sense because how the shit else can i use this prompt?)
He always gets caught in the rain.
His mother's hands are long and elegant, pale as the moon, shaky as a dark, stormy sky, and gentle as the glow of the stars, and he loves her, he does.
"We didn't mean to lose the war," she says sometimes, threading her fingers through his blond hair. "But we didn't mean to win either."
Her hands swirl like hurricanes on his scalp.
Harry Potter is a tornado. He doesn't mean to be, but he is.
He's all justice and mercy and vengeance and power that isn't supposed to be, an accident of nature, unforeseen circumstances that have come together to make this - this little boy with green eyes and no family, this tornado with all that passion and no hope.
Draco watches him. The stormclouds in his chest. The lightning behind his glasses. The thunder of his heartbeat.
He waits for it to end, for the inevitable natural disaster.
It never comes.
His mother's lips are soft and sweet, pink as a summer evening's sky, gentle as the drifting clouds. She presses them to his forehead and he feels the sun on his skin.
He wonders if he'll burn.
"Sometimes," she says. "You have to get burnt to know that you're here."
Her lips are like sunshine, rays of wisdom and truth that light up Draco's world, and he wonders how he ever heard his father's snowstorm, ice winds and flash frozen futures, over anything this right.
Harry Potter is a raincloud, heavy with the weight of death and destruction and one old man with a twisted heart and eyes red as blood, as bravery.
(And Draco always gets caught in the rain.)
His mother's eyes are like rain on dull pavements, like grey sheets of sleet, like sunshine beating off warm metal, like snow that's been stepped on by the dirtiest boots, and he loves her. He does.
She says, "Harry Potter's going to ruin you," but she says it with a smile, like /ruin/ means /fix/ and the only thing Potter could ever ruin is the monster Draco could've become and she looks at him with so much soul and so much sun and so much sorrow, and his heartbeat quickens.
He thinks she might throw him out in the rain, but she doesn't. She says goodnight and lets the silence ring through the Manor and he knows that she knows that he'll end up soaked to the bone anyway.
It's what he does.
Harry Potter is the be all and end all, the tsunami of nothing and the forest fire of everything, and Draco gets lost in the calm of him, the chaos of him, the heart of him.
"I don't think it was supposed to go like this," Harry says, but he's still holding tight to Draco's wrist, still raining hard on Draco's heart.
"My mother says nothing ever does." And he kisses him and bites him and wants to swallow him whole so his heart beats with the storm of Harry's love but he can't so he just swallows all the /I love you/s and tells himself that's enough.
"I think she knew," Draco says, placing lilies on his mother's grave, the marble grey as rainy days, warm as sunsets
"How?"
The clouds are grey and bland and heavy, ready to crack and burst and rain, for moments or minutes or months, who knows? And the drops hit Draco's skin softly, roll down his face like the tears he doesn't let himself cry, not anymore. "I don't know. She said things sometimes. About you."
Harry reaches for him, breathes soft against Draco's throat, desert breeze and winter winds all at once. "About me? Why?"
Above them, white clouds roll to grey, and thunder rumbles. There's a storm coming, but Draco thinks he's already right at the heart of it. He laces his fingers through Harry's, doesn't speak, and thinks of lightning, of this storm that is raging, that will never, ever stop.
Yes, right at the heart of it. Always has been.