Darling, Come Over

“Darling, come over.” 

Harry stares into the fire—traces the lines of Draco’s face, the crease of his worried brow—it’s been so long. 

Someone walks by in the background and Harry looks sharply away, back down at his hands, the patterns in the floorboards. There’s a scorch mark there from the previous tenants—and then another scorch mark that was entirely him. He listens as Draco walks to the door of the study and closes it before walking back to the hearth.  

“Darling, please,” Draco says again, and he must not realise he’s doing that—calling Harry darling. Because it’s been months since he saw Hary last, and Harry only answered the firecall because he’d forgotten for a moment that he didn’t do that sort of thing anymore—that he didn’t talk to people or accept their calls. 

“It’s not so busy now,” Draco keeps talking as though Harry has been responding. “It’s just Hermione and Ronald left—” there’s a pang at that, a long lost joke that Harry used to find funny and now only finds painful. 

Because Draco used to say ‘over my dead body’ when Ron asked him to call him by his shortened name. And Ron would say ‘but, surely, we’re close enough by now’, and Draco would say, ‘It’s Ronald, until further notice’—even as they did become quite close—when they started playing chess together in the sitting room, and when they started going to Chudley Canon’s games during their winning streak three summers ago—

—when they found Harry’s stash of Calming Draught beneath the floorboard in the cupboard and ambushed him in the kitchen. 

“ —and Blaise and Pansy,” Draco continues to list. “Thomas and Longbottom. No one will say anything.” He pauses, bites his lip and Harry can imagine him wringing his fingers. “There’s treacle tart in the kitchen.” He doesn’t have to say it’s for Harry, because they both already know. And It hurts like Ronald, and like seeing Draco through a firecall and hearing his voice for the first time in months through the crackle of a flame. “It’s yours if you want it.” 

There are tears welling in Harry’s eyes the longer he stares at the floor, and he thinks about Draco’s treacle tart and the ice cream he serves with it—and how the last time Harry had it, he’d been propped up in a bed at St. Mungo’s while Draco pushed trembling fingers through his hair—and how it hadn’t tasted like anything at all, even as Harry shovelled spoonful after spoonful into his mouth, until Draco got alarmed, until he grabbed his hand to stop him and called for the healers when he started to shake, when the room started to spin.

“I’m glad you answered,” Draco says after a while and it breaks some sort of dam, rips a sob right from Harry’s throat. 

“Fuck,” he swears, the curse red and angry into the crook of his elbow where’s he tucked his face. 

Draco makes a sound, wounded; and there’s the skid of a chair as it scrapes against wood—Harry pictures the green one that Draco brought with him when he moved in, his smile when he stood back and admired it in Harry’s study. 

“Darling—”

“I didn’t mean to,” Harry says thickly, talking about the call, but meaning it about the snivelling. He shouldn’t have answered. No one had known where he was—he’d not told them. When the call came through, he thought it was his landlady, Stella, asking after her cat, whom Harry had promised to feed while she was away in the States. 

“I’m glad you did, anyway,” Draco says quickly—and then the next part, guilty but urgent, something he needs to say, something already wrapped in regret as it pushes past his lips. “We—I miss you so much.”

Harry stands up abruptly, wiping furiously at his face and turning away from the hearth, his throat constricting and aching. He reaches blindly for his wand to end the call, the world a blur on the other side of his misery. He hadn’t meant to answer. Six months was too long—or it was too short—maybe in another six months, or another six years—

“Don’t!” Draco exclaims, and there’s another skid of the chair, as though he’s stood up too. For a moment it doesn’t feel like there’s a flame between them at all, like Draco will reach right through and grab Harry by the hand.

“You know how I—” 

“How you feel about people missing you?” And suddenly Draco’s angry. His own well of emotion. His own dam, burst. “It’s not what you need to hear? Right? What if I need to say it? Doesn’t it matter what I need at all?” 

“Of course, it matters,” Harry says, even as he continues to search for his wand, swearing beneath his breath when he can’t find it. 

“If that were true you wouldn’t have fucking left me.” 

It takes the fight out of Harry and he sits back down, collapses more like, empty and wishing he could flee but too tired to move. He drops his face back into his hands, his elbows on his knees. 

“You won’t even look at me?” Draco asks and Harry doesn’t think Draco realises how much he’s asking of him, how much he’s ever asked of him. He doesn’t realise that I miss you is an ask, that his treacle tart and his green chair in the study and his morning teas in bed and his record player in the sitting room—that those things are asking as well, that they pull and they tug, and they’re sweet and they’re gentle and they ask. 

And Harry doesn’t know how to give. He doesn’t know what’s left to offer. 

He’d never meant to take as much as he had. 

“I didn’t leave you, I left everyone,” Harry tries to explain and Draco scoffs in front of him. An ember shoots out of the hearth. 

“I am everyone.” 

No, you’re not, Harry thinks—and maybe that doesn’t make sense out loud, or even in his head, but it’s just what he thinks. But then, that’s par for the course, isn’t it? Thoughts and memories that tangle up into nothing, that burrow deeper and deeper the harder he pulls at them, root deep and twisting until nothing makes sense at all, until he doesn’t make sense, or his life, or the people in it. 

Calming Draught helped. 

Dreamless Sleep helped. 

Draco helped. 

Harry’s fingers cramp up suddenly, jerking from a tremor, his magic jumps beneath his skin. 

“I’m not—I’m not the same as I was,” Harry says, and he’s not talking about the way he fucked up his magic, or his body, or his sleep, or his appetite, “I can’t be who you want me to be—” 

“I don’t want you to be anybody—” 

“You do.” 

“Who do I want you to be?” 

“I don’t know,” Harry finally looks up, and almost looks right back at the floor—because Draco’s face is wide open, every emotion like a word written on a page, there for Harry to read, wanting for Harry to read. And Draco was never like this before, in school or during the war—but he’s changed so much since then, beautifully, in all the ways a person should, in all the right and wonderful ways and Harry’s changed in the wrong ones, “someone real.” 

“You are someone real, what does that even mean?” 

“I don’t know,” Harry says again, frustrated, and an old fight comes back to him, like a sword in a hat, a last ditch advance at the wire. “I don’t know how to talk—right? I can’t use my words, or—”

“That’s not what I said—”

“—say how I feel, or—” Harry can feel the conversation slipping away, like all of his conversations do and he’s reminded of why he avoids them, and why it’s better not to have them. 

“Why are you fighting with me? I haven’t seen you in six months. You just left—and you want to argue about something I said over a year ago? Something I didn’t even mean?” 

“No—I don’t—I don’t want to talk about anything—”

“And what if I do? What if I want to delve into it—how it feels to be left, existing here in this house with all of your fucking clothes still in it—your stupid flying gear still cluttering up the—”

“My flying gear,” Harry repeats, suddenly thrown by a wave of deja vu, of Draco tripping over his broom in the hallway and shouting at Harry to move it, a dozen times before, two dozen. “This is about picking up my stuff?” 

Draco gapes at him.

“Of course it’s not about picking up your—are you genuinely asking me that?”   

Harry shrugs, which Draco hates, and in a life where Harry didn’t leave, the crackle that bursts from the fire at Draco’s scoff would make Harry laugh and Draco fond. 

In a life where Harry didn’t leave they wouldn’t be talking through a fire in the first place. 

“I can pick it up if you want.” 

“It’s your house!” Draco snaps, the fire snapping with him. 

“It’s both of our house—home—you and I’s—” Harry cuts himself off with a frustrated huff, tongue tying itself around grammar of all things, “whatever. You know when you moved in, that I put your—” 

“This isn’t about a bloody contract! It’s not about names on parchment!” 

“I—” Harry wishes he could understand people better, that he could understand Draco better. He feels stupid and lost. He doesn't like to be yelled at, but then thinks that people should have the right to yell at him, so what does it matter? “I—I don’t know what you mean.” 

Draco takes a deep breath, he presses the backs of his hands to his eyes, delicately—the way he did the day his probation ended and the ministry returned his wand; the way he did the first time Harry kissed the mark on his arm and the scars across his chest. When he speaks to Harry, his eyes are trained carefully elsewhere. 

“It’s yours,” he says, voice flattened and strained. “It was always yours and I’m just—it feels like—” he pulls in a wavering breath, “Like I’m just here waiting.” 

Harry doesn’t know what to say to that and Draco seems to have not been expecting him to. 

They sit in silence for a moment. Through the fireplace, Harry can hear the quiet, muffled sounds of people talking in the other room, the distant sound of Draco’s record player and the creak of the wood when people walk. He imagines the treacle tart in the kitchen, on the dish Draco bought during their weekend in Cornwall; the countertops he spent months picking out and the overflow from his library hidden beneath the tablecloth he’d ordered from Paris. 

Harry wonders how Draco could think the house was ever just Harry’s when it was so clearly Draco that made it a home.

“You know, if I thought it was just about the Calming Draught and the Dreamless Sleep, I would’ve come after you,” Draco says after a while, quiet and contemplative. “I wouldn’t have waited four months to track down your address and another two just gathering the nerve to call you. But—the way you left—it was—I couldn’t tell if you’d done it like that because you’d been planning it out for ages, or if you just woke up one day and thought—I’ll just leave. I couldn’t tell which one would be worse.” 

Harry remembers the day he left, every detail as though it were extraordinary—waking up as he always did, hours before Draco and staring at the ceiling. He remembers the tea they had at breakfast, and the story Draco recounted from the Prophet. He remembers going into the garden after lunch and Draco going into the study to talk to his mother. And it was a mild, spring day and it was normal and it was Tuesday. And before Draco was done talking to his mother, Harry found a bit of parchment and wrote I’m sorry, I have to go. Please, don’t worry.

He hadn’t planned it. He came in from the garden and just thought, I want to disappear. 

And as he sits here, in his shitty rented flat, in shitty, lonely Germany, remembering that Tuesday, and a hundred others like it, he thinks that if Draco were to ask him what it was about that particular Tuesday, Harry wouldn’t be able to tell him. 

Because maybe it wasn’t so much the Tuesday, as it was the month, and maybe not so much the month as it was the year, or the decade, or the one before that—some Tuesday that followed him all the way back from Little Whinging, from his cupboard under the stairs, from the patch of shade beneath Aunt Petunia’s hawthorn tree in the garden. 

“I thought it was me,” Draco continues quietly. “That I had been clinging to you for all these years, dragging you down without realising it, and you were just the sort of person to let it happen—because you were nice and kind. Because you’re Harry, and of course you’d say move in with me, even if you didn’t want me to—because it was so obvious that I did. And you give people what they want, because that’s what you do—and people like that don’t last, because it burns them out—and maybe I burned you out—” 

“You didn’t,” Harry says, voice cracking—because maybe he can’t talk right, or say how he feels, or figure out why he is the way he is, but he can tell when something is wrong and what Draco’s saying is wrong—

“—so I didn’t come after you,” Draco says, voice hurried as though being pushed forward in a queue. “And then a few weeks ago I couldn’t find my jumper—the green knitted one, the one that was all worn out, that I only ever wore around the house—” he pauses, eyes flicking directly back to Harry, down his chest, and Harry’s chest twists at the realisation, “ —and you’re sitting here in front of me, wearing it—and I knew back then that you didn’t take anything with you, because I looked, and I catalogued. And it was all still here—and I watched the memory of that bloody day over and over again and I knew you weren’t wearing it when you left—which meant that you took it on purpose—out of everything in this house, that was the thing you took. And I thought—that has to mean something.” 

Draco lays it out like a puzzle coming together, like clues to a mystery and Harry feels like just another piece, or just another clue—as though leaving was something someone else did and Harry was only a fingerprint they left behind. 

He burrows deeper into Draco’s jumper, which still smells like him and the garden out back, and he waits for Draco to solve the mystery, to tell Harry why he disappeared—to tell him how it ends. 

But Draco doesn’t say anything more and Harry doesn’t think he can wait any longer. 

“Aren’t you going to tell me what it means?” 

“I rather thought you would,” Draco says gently.   

And Harry wilts, unfairly disappointed that Draco hasn’t figured it all out after all. That it will be up to Harry, again—and of course that’s how it should be, because he’s the one that left, the one who ruined it all, who couldn’t cope with—with birthday parties at the Weasley’s and pub nights with his friends, with a house up on a hill and the perfect person to share it with. 

Because that’s what Draco was to Harry, perfect. Real. He had passions and hobbies, a sharp sense of humour and an easily offended temperament. He was the sort of person who had favourites in every category, who gave Harry twenty minute lectures on the importance of good tailoring and spent Saturday mornings going through porcelain catalogues from high end shops. 

And Harry thinks that if no one were around to watch him, if he existed like Le Petit Prince, on a planet all his own—he’d still be just the same, sitting at a kitchen table, circling bits in the paper he wanted to tell people about later, a cup of earl grey and his book next to him for when he finished The Prophet. 

He didn’t need Harry. Not the way Harry needed him. Because when Draco was around Harry sat with him at the table, and had his own cup of tea, and he listened to whatever Draco found interesting in The Prophet, and he worked on the ship-in-a-bottle set that George had gotten him for his birthday. He cleared the table when they were done and he thought about what they’d do next—and that feeling he got sometimes, that came out of nowhere and sat with him until it was done—it just stayed in the corner. 

When Draco was around, Harry was real, and when he wasn’t, Harry ceased to exist. 

He didn’t have breakfast at the table, or tea in the morning, he didn’t read The Prophet or work on his ship. He laid in bed instead, and he slept, or he stared—at walls and ceilings, at the patterns in the bedsheets or the dustmotes in the air. And time passed in weird ways and that feeling came out of its corner—and it settled on his chest. Hours would go by, just thinking about how nice it would be to go outside—and then days would pass without him ever doing it. 

When Draco moved in, Harry thought it would stop—that maybe that feeling would get so used to its corner, that it would forget how to come out. But instead it got worse—and he zoned out in conversations and at his desk at work, while cooking in the kitchen or halfway across the room on his way to turn off the light. 

He ignored dosage warnings on bottles of Calming Draught and took Dreamless Sleep in the middle of the afternoon—and it helped until it didn’t, until he’d taken so much he’d damaged his magic, until he woke up in St. Mungo’s with a tremor in his hands and a seventy-two hour hold. He hadn’t meant to scare anybody, he just wanted to enjoy his house on the hill and the person who lived in it with him. 

And then one day that feeling wasn’t just a feeling anymore, suddenly it was a sentence. And then it was all he could think. 

I want to disappear. 

And it haunted him like a horcrux, like a leech on his soul. And Draco was kind and patient, and he called Harry a scarhead sloth when he couldn’t get out of bed, and brought him tea when he stopped coming down to breakfast. And Harry just felt guilty and inadequate, like he was the leech on Draco’s soul. 

And the sentence compounded so many times in his head that eventually it started to change again. I want to disappear became I’m going to disappear—like an inevitability, like something he could already feel happening. 

“Have you always felt like this?” 

Harry is startled for a moment, because he hadn’t even realised he’d been saying any of that out loud. But that’s just how he talks sometimes, with no control or plan of action, with no idea what’s coming out. It’s just how his brain to mouth function seems to work, like some fucked up, reverse shredder. 

“What do you mean by always?” 

“Did this start after the war? After you quit your job? Were you—was it like this at Hogwarts?” Draco seems to be filled with questions and Harry actually thinks about his answers. 

He thinks about this feeling he didn’t have a name for, and how no, it hadn’t been like that in school. Because there’d been classes, and friends, and magic—usually someone was trying to kill him and it seems silly and oversimplified to think he didn’t have time to disappear, or to want to—but then as things got worse, when Sirius died, and as his sixth year came to a close—it was more so that he didn’t have the right to. 

And then something else comes back to him—something he hasn’t thought about in so long it almost seems like more of a dream than a memory. Dudley and his gang, chasing him after school and just knowing that he was going to get battered, and knowing that Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would still find a way to make it his fault, and he’d probably not get any dinner and he’d end up locked in his cupboard. And it all seemed so hopeless, and so unfair, and he wondered what the point was. What was the point of him? And he didn’t wish for his parents, or to live with a different family, or to be big, or strong—he just wished he wasn’t there. 

Please, he thought, let me disappear. 

It was his first burst of accidental magic. 

And he remembers opening his eyes on the roof of his primary school and wondering only vaguely how he got there, because mostly he was thinking, with crushing disappointment, that it wasn’t far enough.

Suddenly, there’s a gentle hand on his cheek and Harry jumps, startled from the onslaught of his thoughts and memories, from the feeling still clawing at his chest. When he looks up, Draco is blurry, but he’s there, kneeling in front of Harry on the ratty rental carpet and pulling him into his arms without a single word.

Harry falls into him and then abruptly apart. 

“It wasn’t because of you.” It’s hard to speak through his tears, but it’s something he needs to say, something he needs Draco to believe. 

“It wasn’t because of me,” Draco says, his jaw moving against Harry’s temple and his words whispering through Harry’s hair. 

“Darling, I—I’m so sorry.” 

Harry buries his face into Draco’s shoulder. 

“Please, don’t be sorry,” Harry says. “It wasn’t—you didn’t do—” 

“No,” Draco quiets him softly. “I’m just sorry, Harry.” 

Harry’s brow knits and Draco must feel it against his shoulder. He threads his fingers through Harry’s hair and Harry closes his eyes. He wishes desperately that he wasn’t the way he was. 

His tears feel endless and almost mechanical—a machine inside of him churning with no button to stop it, pulling from a repository that doesn’t seem to have an end. His guilt is its own machine, working even harder—industrious like his shame, reliable in its consistency.

He feels a vast emptiness inside of himself, a chasm opened wide, a void where earth and feeling should be—easy to peer into, easy to fall through. 

An easy place to disappear. 

It’s white and it’s glowing. Like his soul floating outside of him, pulled sweetly from his lips, easily. And pulling away further still. He watches it go even as he wishes he could swallow it back down, even as his hands ache to reach back out and cradle it. 

What kind of person should have a soul so eager to slip free of them? 

“Draco,” Harry says—because he doesn’t know what else to say, because this might be all he can manage. He wishes he could ask Draco to catch it for him—the wandering light drifting towards the door, like a firefly that accidentally found its way indoors. Don’t let it out! Harry wants to say, but his tongue is tied and his throat choked up. 

But then Draco is pulling him back gently by the shoulders, so that his hands can come up to Harry’s face, so that he may cradle his jaw and run smooth thumbs over the lakes on Harry’s cheeks. 

And he kisses it back into him—that white light that was getting away, that hope that was fleeing. Harry breathes in sharply as Draco’s lips slot gently against his own, falling into place like home. The feeling shudders through him, like a barrel of wind through a field of summer grass, he sways with the rush of it. Draco holds him steady. 

“I will not let you disappear,” Draco says when he pulls away, forcibly, voice wavering and wretched. His grip on Harry’s jaw tightens, he looks at him with glistening grey eyes, steel behind his tears; twin swords shining at the bottom of a lake. Harry’s breath catches in his throat. 

“What if I already have?” 

“You haven’t,” Draco insists, and he shakes him slightly. “Darling, you haven’t.” 

And with a rush that nearly bowls him over, Harry believes him.

*

“I don’t know what happens next,” Harry admits quietly, after his tears have finally calmed. “I don’t know how to go back.” And he thinks he means home—but it’s more than that and Draco knows it too. 

“Harry, I—” and Draco looks like there’s so many things he wants to say with no idea of how to say them. He pets Harry’s hair instead, smooths a thumb across his forehead and his other rubs gently behind his ear. Harry feels like a little kid if only because he feels so cared for—the sort of feeling most people have grown out of and Harry has had to grow into.

Finally, Draco seems to settle and he gives Harry a small smile. 

“There's still treacle tart in the kitchen,” he reminds him softly. “It’s yours, if you want it.”