Say It Like You Mean It
**Draco**
It rained for two days straight.
He didn’t show up to breakfast. Or Potions. Or the tower.
He stayed in the Slytherin dorms with the curtains drawn and his wand abandoned on the floor. No letters. No sarcasm. No pretending.
Because pretending didn’t help anymore.
He let Harry in — and now he regretted it.
Worse, he missed him.
And that infuriated him.
So when Pansy knocked on the edge of his bed and said, “You can’t avoid him forever,” Draco just muttered, “Watch me.”
**Harry**
He found Draco by accident.
Late at night, near the abandoned Transfiguration wing — leaning against the wall like he’d run out of places to hide.
“Draco,” he said, cautious.
Draco didn’t look at him. “Lost, Potter?”
Harry stepped forward. “We need to talk.”
“No,” Draco said coldly. “You need to make a decision. I already did.”
Harry blinked. “What?”
Draco’s eyes finally met his.
And they were tired. Hollow. Guarded.
“I chose you,” Draco whispered. “And you hesitated.”
**Harry**
It hit him in the gut.
“I didn’t— I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t stop it either,” Draco said. “When she showed up. When she hugged you. When she looked at you like she still had a claim.”
“I didn’t kiss her. I didn’t want her.”
“But you didn’t want me enough to say that, did you?” Draco’s voice cracked, soft and sharp like breaking glass. “You just stood there and let me think—let me hope—”
“Draco, stop—”
“Why?” he snapped. “So you can soothe your guilt with another half-truth? Another maybe someday?”
**Draco**
He hated how his voice shook.
How his throat burned with things he shouldn’t feel.
He was angry. But he was also breaking.
Because this? This felt too familiar.
Hope. Then silence. Then loss.
He turned away. “Don’t come looking for me again, Potter.”
Harry reached out instinctively. “Draco—”
Draco flinched. “Don’t.”
His voice dropped, final. “If you don’t know by now… then maybe you never did.”
And then he was gone.
**Harry**
He didn’t cry.
Not right away.
He just stood there in the corridor with rain seeping through the cracked windows and Draco’s words still echoing in his head.
“If you don’t know by now… then maybe you never did.”
He had known.
But he’d let fear speak louder than feeling.
And now, he might have lost the one person who made him feel like himself again.
**Draco**
That night, he wrote Harry’s name on a scrap of parchment and burned it.
Watched the ashes curl and fade.
Watched the boy who’d held his heart slip into smoke.