The Promise of Tomorrow
Draco knows that Harry hasn’t really been paying attention. That he hasn’t noticed all the worrying little details that Draco has fervently been amassing at the forefront of his mind. That Harry, whose deepest desire is to be surrounded by those he loves, would be too caught up in the insanity of this fever dream to ask the right questions or see the bigger picture or confront the problem with this entire fantasy.
So Draco tells himself that it can wait. He watches the wide swipe of Harry’s grin and the easy way his bones shift, like all of his musculature has finally learned that war is over, and he tells himself that it can wait. He twists the ring around his finger, over and over and over. It can wait.
This is everything that Harry has ever deserved: the simplicity of this undevastated existence.
Draco watches the profile of Harry’s face, the tick of his smile and the softness of his eyes, and then Draco nudges closer into him.
He won’t take it away from him. He’s not yet brave enough.
Draco thinks of his parents, somewhere policing the state of the house, in a version of themselves that Draco has not quite grown up with. He thinks about the calm patch of skin where the pain used to linger on his forearm, and resists the urge to lift his sleeves and check. The war was shorter here, Draco suspects. Or maybe there hadn’t really been a war at all—maybe it had never come to that—and even if Slytherins and Gryffindors still heckle each other and stand on their own soap boxes, it hasn’t taken death for them to realize how much they have in common and how ridiculous all their bickering is.
He keeps glancing at Harry, at the wild but semi-tamed hair that still reveals the lightening scar. Your parents are still dead. He wants, inexplicably, to apologize for this injustice. He wonders about the Dursleys and what might have been and says nothing at all. Merely burrows himself deeper into Harry’s side.
“Hey,” Draco says. They haven’t gotten up from the settee in ages now, and some of the room has begun to bleed back out into the rest of the house. A Malfoy heir, Draco can sense the house’s energy, bolstered by the calamity of guests that only the combination of Pansy and Ginny’s friend circles in collision could bring.
Harry turns to him, wearing the soft grins that Draco always sees him wear with Teddy. “Hi,” he says, somehow breathless. Draco taps the corner of Harry’s lips, right where the edge of the soft smile falls into dimple, and aches. Harry reaches for the finger, the hand, the palm, and Draco suddenly wants to ask who are you who are you who are you and then thinks better of it.
“I want to show you something,” he says, instead of what he should really say, which is we should talk or we need to go back or we can’t have this because it isn’t ours. He tightens his hand, comforts himself with the warmth of Harry’s skin as the knowledge that the end of this happiness looms on the horizon. “Let’s go?”
Harry nods, obeisant as a satisfied puppy just fed. Draco unfurls his legs and Harry does so after him, standing first so he can tug Draco up too harshly to be within reason and watch him stumble forward, all the way, into his arms.
Ginny whistles, and Harry’s laughing, and Draco’s still finding his footing, unraveling himself from Harry limb’s and trying to urge them in the direction of the door.
Draco manages to pull both of them out without folding under the weight of all their friend’s suggestive looks. “Don’t forget protection,” Luna reminds gently on their way out. “You’re two young wizards after all,” she adds, and Draco and Harry turned half open jaws and raised eyebrows on one another as Draco sputters a thank you, but not necessary and Harry let’s out another of his full bellied laughs.
“No, but she’s right!” Hermione adds, in full mothering tone, and Blaise looks halfway to offering a condom, so that’s when Harry shuts the door on all of them and let’s Draco tug at his hand without looking at him, his ears as red as fire engines.
“Where are we going?”
“To the study.”
“The study?”
“My study.”
Draco knows that his tone is curt, that even if he’s holding Harry’s hand and it’s the same hand he used to fix Harry’s tie before the wedding and then muss it up afterwards, that it is a stolen gesture. That it’s not really his. None of this world is.
Harry understands, to some degree, even if he really doesn’t. Because Harry has always been one of the densest people he’s ever met when it comes to other people’s feelings, but Draco also knows that he’s always understood on some unspoken level the way in which Draco has ticked. Because Harry understands, but never in words, and because something about them has always been primitive to verbalization, so deeply ingrained and immutable that it arrives before consciousness.
So Harry doesn’t ask another question as Draco leads them up another floor and back to where they first apparated in. In the room where Draco was terrified the immortal boy who lived might have been dying right in front of him.
Because Draco saw what Harry didn’t. Because when Draco said, “you have a ring,” he’d only been shocked by catching sight of it again. He’d already known he was wearing one.
He’d already known what it meant.
Draco comes into the study, and at first Harry is too preoccupied watching him to understand that he should look up, look away, come back to his senses already. Harry’s hand hovers in the air when Draco’s lets go, as if waiting with the tacit understanding that Draco’s hand would return. When it drops—in an agonized moment a million years long—Harry’s smile drops with it, and Draco feels like he’s been torn open all over again.
He doesn’t say this, though. It wouldn’t do either of them any good. So he moves further back into the room, stalks through its space and stands near the mantle of the fireplace, right under where he needs Harry to look.
And then Harry sees.
All the pictures, their moving incandescence repeating moments of vibrant joy, immortalized for the Draco and Harry that exist here, in this Possible Dream and Possible Alternate Reality but which is certainly not their Real World. Harry’s eyes glance from the wedding pictures to his left hand and then rise again, trying to make sense of a memory that isn’t his and a world that isn’t theirs and—
That’s when Draco finally says, “This isn’t ours,” and watches Harry’s face, his thoughts splayed across every feature. He has been lulled by the past few hours already, lured and seduced and now sedated, so desperately wanting it to be real that the idea of its nonreality has already moved further away from his grasp of consciousness. “I think you took us somewhere else, Harry. This isn’t our life.”
Harry stutters, thoughts that form but don’t know how to arrive, strangled on the breaths that Harry is expending effort to take. He pauses, takes a breath so deep that his body shudders, and then combs a hand through his once partially tamed hair, now wild again. “I thought I splinched us at first. I thought that was the pain.”
“No,” Draco says, but even he isn’t really sure. “We came here whole.” If whole is what they ever were. “We just aren’t where we’re supposed to be.”
Harry’s eyes fall on him, two circles of immodest green that threaten to swallow Draco whole. He makes a sound of frustration, takes a step towards Draco and then two steps back. “I just—why not?”
Because a million different things, he’s thinking. Because Draco wants this too, whatever it is, and because being here, every minute slices into him, each cut sore with his wanting for a thing he has not earned and doesn’t get to have.
“Because the people we love will miss us,” Draco says instead. “If you really did apparate, we might be missing there. Or if we didn't apparate, then maybe our consciousness is somewhere else and our bodies are still there, without us.“
Harry’s eyes turn glassy, anguish covering them in a thick film. “But what if we aren’t?” He inquires, like a small child negotiating for something they’ve wanted for all their lives.
“What if we are?” Draco fires back. “Ron and Hermione will be worried. Your friends will worry. My mother will be worried, Harry. She doesn’t deserve that.”
Draco knows that he’s playing dirty. That Harry’s fatal flaw is his misconceived conviction that he exists for others’ whims and purposes. That the idea of his joy coming at the expense of others’ sorrow will inevitably make him turn back to a world that has forsaken him from the moment of his birth.
“Okay,” Harry says, a single world filled with a hundred acres of defeat, all carefully culminated and reaped. “But just—“ A moment’s hesitation, Harry’s mind racing beneath his furrowed brows. “Just… Tomorrow, alright? We’ll fix it tomorrow.”
Draco’s face screws up in uncertain consideration. The longer they’re here, the more that could go wrong. They have no idea what’s occurred to this Harry and Draco, and no idea if they’ve stolen something from them—this beautiful moment with one of their loved ones.
And the longer they’re here, the less they’ll want to go.
But Draco’s watching Harry’s face, and the way the agony returns to the line of his shoulders. He can guess at Harry’s approximate thoughts: vague concerns about selfishness and this intense and ingrained desire for a world where he no longer needs to play savior or martyr or the boy who lived. Harry, who is never selfish, but who wants to be, just for this night. Harry, who is asking for Draco, the person he’s hated for half of his life, to allow him to be.
Draco folds. “Tomorrow,” he says, softly. A compromise which is truly a surrender. “We can… fix this tomorrow.”
Draco is a selfish person. This is a quality that is one part intrinsic to Malfoys everywhere and one part the direct result of being an only child in a rich family.
So Draco let’s himself be selfish, continuing a life time streak of stupid decisions chasing his own indulgent ends and pretends that the night he spends with the people who he’s come to adore is a night like all others.
That they have traded a dinner for a dinner or a reality for a reality, thus means nothing. Or it at least does not mean more than Harry’s sunburst laughter and Pansy’s sly happiness and Blaise’s easygoing teasing and Theo’s quiet but affable conversing.
The night devolves, unspooling into tiny threads, a fabric of many people who both linger in the mansion and wear away from it. Draco and Harry never really adjust to seeing everyone, and each familiar face that is lost to them arrives as a jolt that sends their hands clutching at the other’s fingertips, searching for the only other person in the room who knows.
Remus and Sirius don’t leave before wishing their last congratulations towards the happy new couple and then laughing at the way Harry’s eyes threaten with tears at the sight of them. “How many drinks have you had, my boy?” Sirius rumbles, and Remus grins fondly at the both of them, a hand making a swiftly aborted attempt to soothe down Harry’s hair.
“Barely any,” Harry says, and Sirius barks a laugh that says I don’t believe you and Harry laughs too, though his laughter has a tinge of heartbreak in it, and when he lunges to hug Sirius, both of them nearly bowl over until Remus catches their arm.
“He’s old, Harry. You’ve got to give some warning,” Remus says, but then Harry’s got him wrangled in a hug, too, and the both of them are looking over Harry shoulder at Draco with eyes that say, should we be concerned?
Draco grins. “Harry loves a good wedding,” he explains, and Remus looks a little dubious but neither of them utter a word of disagreement.
“Oh yes,” Harry says, stepping back to take his arm around Draco’s shoulders, glue them against one another. Draco’s stomach flips and then performs even greater acrobatics. He is quickly becoming addicted. “Weddings are just so brilliant.”
Sirius and Remus accept this. Enough, anyways. When they leave, they turn on them the sort of looks that always suspect younger generations of promiscuity and general trouble making. It is only Remus' expression, though, which seems to hold a sliver of disapproval at the prospect.
They have spent the entire night as co-conspirators, two bodies in space shackled to another by gravity. Draco’s comfort with tactile excursions has been built by interactions both promiscuous and platonic in the Hogwarts dungeons, but he’s never touched Harry like this. Even without their animosity, Harry and Draco have always been knives pointed at the other.
The end of the night is mostly composed of Hogwarts alumni with bellies full of spirits and two bridal parties gearing up for unnecessary mischief. Draco feels like a child all over again, and then he feels even more Juvenile when his parents inform him they’ll be leaving for the villa in France and then instruct him which antiques must absolutely be abstained from (his mother’s directioning) with a kiss to each cheek and a gentle arm pat (his father nods his head at him).
Afterwards, the drinks somehow get stronger and the conversations get more raucous and the space between Draco and Harry diminishes to mere atoms and Draco is subconsciously terrified at how deliriously happy he is. Neville makes a quarter-genuine apology at his heavy hand in the drinks department and Pansy demands that he not be sorry at all, because everyone there should be less Hufflepuff about it and take their drinks like a man.
It’s the witching hour before they actually begin to wind down and bodies begin to drift into rooms and pyjamas begin to be distributed. Draco is sitting on the edge of his bed—in a tastefully adult version of his childhood bedroom—when the house finally begins to quiet.
He’s looking at his ring.
Watching the barely legible tan line left on his skin.
Reading at the words engraved on the inside
I turn inside myself
and wincing at their familiar ring.
Then Harry bursts in, as quiet as a monsoon, and collapses face first into the bed. “I could sleep for a century, I’m pretty sure.”
Draco considers for a moment asking Harry why he’s here, in Draco’s childhood bedroom and not some other guest room in the expansive multi-level mansion. His mouth purses, his tongue beginning the muscle movement of laceration. He thinks about a cold dinner and quiet friends and Harry screaming back at him. Something inside of Draco has always been hurting, and he’s never truly grown out of the misplaced childish desire to want Harry to hurt too.
Because hurting is always what they’ve been good at. Draco isn’t sure if the way they always manage to rip into the other's most tender spots or if, over the course of their carefully negotiated friendship, they’ve become those vulnerable places for each other. As if they’ve craved out their own specially shaped wounds in the other person.
Draco doesn’t say the words. Instead, he rolls the cool band of his wedding ring between his fingers and then slides it back on and hisses at Harry to move away from the dead center of the bed so that Draco can get under the covers.
Harry obeys but not without tching at him. They settle into the bed with a practiced ease that doesn’t belong to them, lamps going extinguished with Harry’s wordless magic (which Draco is always impressed by, but will never admit).
The day burrows into them. Curls and settles in. The possibility of an alternate reality taunts them, dangles in front of them like rabbits to a carrot on a stick.
Draco, staring at the adorned ceilings, turns to Harry. Finds him waiting for him.
Draco wants to remind Harry that he’s one who said tomorrow. He wants to argue that even if it technically is tomorrow, that it won’t count until the sun comes up. He doesn’t want to ask the important questions tonight. He’s not yet brave enough to.
Harry is.
“Do you think we’ll go back?” Harry asks, his voice raspy with the encroaching edges of sleep. His glasses are already off, his cheek sunken into the pillows.
You don’t want to go back, Draco considers accusing. Instead, he says, “We’ll ask Hermione. She’ll know what to do.”
“Do you think I really did it? Brought us here, I mean.”
Draco hums, looks back up at the ceiling because the weight of Harry's eyes have become too much. “I don’t think that it’s infeasible. You’ve always had a ludicrously overpowered magical reservoir, after all.”
“I feel vaguely insulted.”
“It’s my talent,” Draco says, voice as smug as their first year encounters. Harry’s answer is a small huff of a laugh, one that echoes into Draco’s ear.
“I think I’ve already starting mourning all of this,” Harry admits. “Is that insane of me?”
“It’s not insane. I mean you’re a bit insane, but these are two separate things.”
Harry swipes at him, lands him nearly square in the chest. Draco grabs his hand in rough surprise and their rings collide, a soft clink that echoes in just the right way for it to steal a bit of both their breath.
Their hands tangle, infinitesimally, the brushing of atoms and molecules and threads of magic. Draco thinks, this is torture, and doesn’t move a single inch away. Neither does Harry.
They settle like that, in a posture of tentative hope. Words escape them. Good nights never exchange. Sleep arrives, smooth and heavy as an avalanche.
And then the morning is here.