We’re Pretending
In one of the parlor rooms that Hermione has claimed for research, the floo call flickers in the fireplace, the found expert already in discussion with Hermione. The small cadre of friends they’ve agreed to tell and enlist in their efforts litter the room, too, waiting to hear what’s said.
“Boys,” she says to the both of them when they came in. “Come meet Dr. Ngono.”
Dr. Ngono is a man with salt and pepper hair and a lulling accent that makes Harry think him aptly suited for audio books and news casts. His specialty in some sort of magical theory that Harry would never know or remember has made him the person with just the right arsenal of knowledge to help them in their conundrum.
But even he doesn’t have all the answers.
“I believe that we have here is not just two forms of magic interacting with one another, but three.”
Harry watches Draco’s eyebrows furrow, coming to the conclusion before it’s even been said. “But I performed no magic. I didn’t even have my wand.”
The scholar nods, the look of a counselor who must show they’re listening even if they’ve already imagined how the conversation has played out. “While this is true, it’s prudent to remember that your magic is tied to your ancestral home, and while you might be able to sense and interact with the home, it’s capable of doing the same to you.”
Harry turns to watch Hermione’s furrowed brows and firm nod, as if confirming that, by having already listened to his conjecture, she has confidently vetted it for them. Harry grins at her, soothed to have her here, in whatever form of life that he’s fallen into. He watches Ron come up beside her, lets their gazes connect so Ron can make a positively puzzled face at the specific jargon that Dr. Ngono starts to fall into a tangent about. They grin at each other, a shared language that is so easy and engraved that Harry can’t remember when it wasn’t a part of them.
“Laymen’s terms please,” Draco says suddenly. The tone is still polite, but the words have a bite to them that means Draco is feeling much more stressed than he’s feeling amenable. Harry turns to him, sidles closer and feels more than thinks about his intense desire to reach out and comfort a boy he’s spent years at each other’s throat with. Maybe this, too, is a remnant of the Harry and Draco who exist here. Their love for each other, so intrinsic to who they are that Draco and Harry fall victim to it gravity.
Harry slides a hand across Draco’s back. Drags soothing circles up and down.
“You’re telling me that I, a grown man, performed accidental magic like a prepubescent child without a wand?”
Harry grins, tries to hide it in his shoulder. Pansy laughs, the sound unsubtle, and Ginny smacks at her arm even when she smiles, too.
“Not quite,” Dr. Ngono says, playing politic. If he’s annoyed by Draco’s shortness, it doesn’t at all come across in his tone. “A magical home holds the ability to become partially sentient—especially an ancestral home like the Malfoys’. It can perform base magics by itself, in same cases, but it’s not as honed as a wizard’s—not as direct. This isn’t a problem, given that a wizard is often tied to these homes, and their intention will guide any nascent magic. But without your wand and without clear intent, the house reacted to your subconscious intentions, and magic that typically feeds between owner and home can go awry.”
“So my house wanted to get rid of me.”
Dr. Ngono grins. The vision of a saint. “If you’d like to think of it as so, Mr. Malfoy.”
Draco sighs and Harry leans forward. “And you’re saying that it reacted with my magic and brought us across dimensions?”
“Precisely, Mr. Potter,” he says. “Something quite unique seems to have taken place due to the unique properties of the Malfoy home and your intrinsic strength as a wizard. It’s something we’d call—“
Harry tunes out when mention of theory makes another visitation. He turns to see that Hermione is nodding again, each word understood and filed away. He watches Draco’s concerned gaze be the way he worries his lip and lets his forehead drop to Draco’s shoulder, unable to help himself. Like instinct, Draco’s hand reaches out to squeeze Harry’s knee and stays there. Harry shifts to watch his profile; the way his lips move as he takes Dr. Ngono’s theory terms and plausible explanations in stride without sparing so much as a glimpse at Harry hanging off of him.
Like all of it is natural. Unquestionable. Inevitable.
“So how do we get back?”
“By recreating the circumstances, presumably.”
“Presumably?”
“Cases of dimensional travel are rare, Mr. Malfoy. And rarer indeed that you’ve assumed the bodies rather than traveled there bodily without a spell of charm to make it so. There is no concrete answer for you. You should, at your own risk, recreate the circumstances that first brought you there or foster a spell that can mimic those parameters for you.”
Draco’s fingers begin tapping a rhythm onto Harry’s knee, a spot so sensitive that Harry has to grit his teeth against the ticklish sensation until he can’t. He takes hold of Draco’s wrist even though he’s afraid it will make Draco draw away, but Draco allows his wrist to be held, his hand to be tamed, his fingers to be stilled.
“But you recommend the latter,” Draco reiterates for clarity.
“Yes,” says the Doctor. “The form which took you there runs the risk of splinching much greater than a spell. In fact, I am very surprised that you aren’t splinched at all.”
“Or maybe you are,” Blaise adds unhelpfully from one side. “Just not the yous that are here.”
“Brilliant,” Ron says in faux-optimism. “Not worrying at all.”
“You’re welcome to stay here with us, Harry,” Luna adds, earning a wary side eye from Neville, who whispers something Harry can’t hear. “Or maybe you can’t,” Luna amends.
“I know I shouldn’t, but I feel vaguely insulted,” Harry supplies and Neville makes an apologetic face as Ron laughs.
“We’ll do everything we can for you mate,” Neville offers, and Harry sends him a grin that comes across flatter than he meant.
“So what do you have to do for the charm, then?” This was Ginny, from where she leaned against a table with her arm slung around the shoulders of her newly minted wife.
“It would be a complicated process,” says Dr. Ngono, which immediately sets Harry groaning. “It would take at least several days to manage, and even then, there is little guarantee. The field is simply not advanced enough to deliver assured results to you right now, Mr. Malfoy and Mr. Potter.”
“Oh it will be lovely,” Luna says. Her hair is still spelled, and Harry turns to watch her blond strands twist into wings behind her head like some biblical angel promising safety in the face of danger. “We can make a minor event of it.” Neville nods in easy agreement.
“I’ll get the drinks,” Pansy says, striding out of the room with Ginny’s hand trapped in hers. Ginny stumbles at the unexpected escape but follows easily enough and with a grin on her face to boot.
Ron performs a stage whisper to Harry: “I’d help them but I’m a bit afraid to be the only one in a room with them.”
Hermione elbows him, gently but with intention. Ron turns an apologetic look on her. She moves forward to the floo, her head hovering over the shoulder of Draco that Harry has not set up camp on.
Then her voice, strong and trustworthy: “Tell us what we need to do.”
***
Harry comes to the conclusion that Draco is avidly avoiding him. Draco, who finally noticed the way they glued to each other and declared, frantically, a desperate desire for fresh air and nearly ran from the room. Draco, who woke up in his arms but wasn’t willing to come back to them. Draco, who’s wearing a ring that matches Harry’s, worn on a finger that means love and promise.
Harry corners him in the library, where a few of them have temporarily taken up post for what seems to be a decidedly lengthy endeavor. The day has mostly come and gone now, and friends have already been dipping in and out of the manor, aware that they have their own homes and lives outside of the problem that has arrived on the Malfoy doorstep.
Hermione was here, too. Blaise and Luna had been with them, Luna’s hair no longer spelled and Blaise’s clothes changed. It had become Hermione and Ron’s turn for a dip back at home, a quick run before everyone drew a final shift and retired for the night. Blaise and Luna had taken it as their cue for a break. Only Draco had stayed.
He startles at Harry when he appears beside him, curses softly. “Why is everyone cornering me in here today? Can’t we have a normal conversation at the—oh, I don’t know—dinner table or something?”
“You wouldn’t talk to me at the dinner table,” Harry shoots back. “You sat across from me, with Blaise and Pansy.” He can still see Ron’s half-aborted laughter at watching it happen; Hermione’s sympathetic stare as she brought a few cuts of meat to her mouth.
“They’re my friends.” His pale brow raises into his hair, left longer than he usually maintains. It is an expression that says, you’re being an idiot. But Harry has known him too long not to know when he’s trying to detour around the topic at hand.
“I’m your husband,” Harry says, knowing it’s not quite the right thing to say. Knowing that when the word catches on the shell of Draco’s ears, it will shatter some careful non-line that they’ve drawn regarding what is real and what is not and what they can have and what they can’t.
Draco’s speechless for a moment, his face suddenly ripped open with an emotion that Harry doesn’t understand. His hands white-knuckle the book he’s holding even as his eyebrows turn devastatingly vulnerable, almost a pleading act furrowed in the mark between his brows. “Harry,” he says, the name coming out on a breath, a wind, a prayer.
Harry shivers, Draco’s tone burrowing itself into his skin. “I figured we should talk.”
Draco’s expression turns impetulant, the aristocratic taste of being untouchable and domineering. Harry reads it easily. He has spent years being on the tale end of it. Years hating every bit of it. Which means he’s also learned to recognize it as a veneer. “About?”
Harry’s arms cross. “You know what about.”
“I do?”
Harry groans, agonized. He watches Draco’s lips quirk, perfectly pleased with himself to be acting as a menace and not a grown adult.
“There is nothing to speak about, Harry,” Draco says, turning away from him.
“I disagree.”
“You’re allowed to,” Draco says easily. “But a conversation typically requires two people, not just one.”
Harry scoffs, steps back into the edge of Draco’s periphery when he tries to turn away, his arms unraveling to lay on the shelves near Draco’s head, his upper body invading Draco’s space. “You can’t pretend this away.”
This stops Draco in his tracks, this soft accusation that Harry is wearing in his voice. His head turns, tilts to a slight degree as he trains storm grey eyes on green.
“Harry, we are pretending. That’s all that we’ve been doing since we got here, and I’m trying to stop. I’m trying…” his voice lingers, wanders off. “I’m just trying to save the both of us some grief.”
Grief, Harry thinks, has been delivered to them in spades. But this is something else, expecting to mourn before tragedy has even started approaching their doorstep.
Harry knows that some of his friends are doing better at the whole grieving thing. That they still miss loved ones and pick themselves up the next day knowing that the future isn’t as bleak as the events before it. Harry’s struggled, though. Hasn’t quite known how to put one foot in front of the other, trapped somewhere in that space without time or direction.
Now he’s looking at Draco, thinking that they’re the same about this, too.
“I’m tired of grieving,” Harry says. It comes out angrier than he meant it. Indignant. “My life is one long funeral, and I’ve come to accept that.” He throws a hand to the doors, in the direction of their meshed group of friends. “But they’re proof that we can be happy. Everything in this life is.”
Draco scoffs, a sound that might have raised Harry’s hackles three years ago, but is now nothing more than a sign that Harry knows leads to self deprecation, not hatred. “Did you forget the part where there was a war?” He finally turns to him, his face so close that Harry can see the way his pupils dilate to adapt to light. “Forget the part where I’m death eater?”
Draco spits the word like it’s venom. Like the handful of syllables is enough to send Harry away. Maybe it might have, back when the war had not quite become memory and the wounds had still been fresh. But years have passed and Harry is tired of trying to outrun the war; it is a race that never sees an end.
“That’s your problem, you know?” He gets a grim sort of satisfaction from the way it twists Draco’s expression. Pointing fingers, aiming knives—these are all things that they’ve been best at. Harry and Draco are antagonists, two creatures in the same ecosystem that haven’t learned to coexist. “You think your life ends and begins with that damn war, Draco.”He puts a hand out on the shelf near Draco’s head, leans somehow closer, pushing Draco slightly back. “But I’ve spent the past five years trying to forget it and every single thing about it. And this life? It’s exactly what I want.”Storm grey eyes. The soft putter of a withheld breath. “We can have this,” Harry says, unsure if it’s a lie.
“We can’t.”
“Yes, we can, Draco.”
Draco’s expression turns mutinous. “Which part, Harry? The part where I was never a death eater and there was never a war? The part where I’m not a bigot from the first moment you met me?”
“We can have this,” Harry spits, stubborn and desperate. “We can have a happiness that is hard-fought because of who we are and not because of what’s happened to us.”
“What’s happened to us is exactly who we are.”
“You of all people know that’s bullshit.”
Draco is stunned into momentary silence, his pupils so wide, his eyebrows so set into a line of concern that Harry realizes how he’s cornered him and immediately steps back. He watches the way Draco’s chest heaves, the way his jaw ticks as his eyes study him, somehow unbearing him without ever lifting a finger at all.
Harry doesn’t know why he does it, can’t really seem to think past the figure of Draco, breathing hard. He turns his back to him, suddenly aware that the hard breaths are mirrored in his own body, that his muscles are also just as tense.
And then he leaves him there, his would-be lover who is dead set on returning to a place where they are something short of love.
***
Harry doesn’t remember, but Draco kissed him, just once, on a night with shooting stars and too much booze. He can still see the way their fingertips were touching on the floor of the Malfoy greenhouse, the softly mussed look of a Harry Potter that had lost his glasses part way through the night and now squinted softly at every little thing.
Draco and Harry are always good friends after a few drinks. Draco has never quite known why this is, or what about them makes them compatible once inhibitions have dropped and consciousness has been softly dulled. It is their easy truce; the cheap man’s way out. It’s why they’ve always ended their fights with a drink and not a proper apology, aware to some unconscious level that what they are to each other is something that requires the dropping of a guard.
Draco has wanted to kiss Harry Potter for some time, now. Blaise and Pansy knew it before he did, of course. But Harry Potter is one of those subjects that must be tread with more care between the three of them, and this, he suspects, is because of whatever none-thing exists between the boy Malfoy and the Boy Who Lived.
So Draco remembers sitting next to Harry on the floor of the greenhouse, their backs propped against the ancient fountain. He remembers being too aware that they were alone. That their friends had gone outside to watch the falling stars with an unobstructed view and Draco and Harry had not gone, for no reason other than to exercise the ability of choice. He remembers watching Harry talk and being overwhelmed by the sensation that being with him was easy and unconscious. That they could sit arm against arm, hip against hip with a bottle passed between them, and never feel the need to escape.
He remembers Harry telling him about the book he’d just read and the snarky way that Draco had pretended surprise: “Wait a minute, Potter. You can read?”
He remembers Harry’s burst of laughter and the way he moved his arm to shove at Draco’s shoulder. The way his arm had stretched and stayed, lingering behind Draco’s back. The way his hand had come up into the back of Draco’s hair and the way Harry had leaned forward to analyze him. “Are you sure you don’t bleach your hair?” He had said, his voice filled with dubious wonder.
Draco had guffawed, a sharp ha! that he felt in his chest before he’d turned his head to launch something mildly insulting at the presumption. But when he turned, Harry was suddenly there, face an inch away from him, green eyes swallowing him whole. Draco could smell the liquor on the both of them. He knew that if he was asked to walk a straight line, he’d probably fall.
But nothing seemed more right in the world than the idea of kissing Harry Potter.
It was easy to do, he discovered. All he had to do was lean forward and suddenly Harry had, too; some unspoken language that they had built on something that was not quite friendship and yet was. He couldn’t remember who had kissed who, only that they had met in the middle and dissolved together, shoulders melting into shoulders and hands melting into clothes until suddenly there was only Harry and nothing else.
He remembered feeling indignant that Harry was not only the savior of the Wizarding world, but a good kisser on top of that. He remembered thinking about how he’d likely learned it from the girl Weasley and pressing harder against him, his fingers splaying against Harry’s neck and jaw, Harry’s fingers grappling onto Draco’s waist as Draco found himself on Harry’s lap. Space between them had become nonexistent. Oxygen was worth nothing.
He remembers undoing the first few buttons of Harry’s shirt, getting distracted half way through the task by Harry untucking his, spreading warm hands against his skin, his ribcage, the sensitive circle of his nipple. He remembers Harry grinning against Draco’s gasp, self-assured and pleased as his other hand returned to Draco’s hair, gripping just enough for Draco to feel it. Just enough for Draco to tilt his head back, panting as Harry made a trail of kisses down the slop of his neck, the tender skin of his collarbone.
And Draco recalls the muffled sound of voices from outside, their loud friends finally returning from the cold fall night. Draco remembers scrambling off of Harry’s lap, his breath heavy and his movements clumsy, Harry’s hands grabbing at him, trying to get him to stay.
He remembers sitting a foot away from him, his breath still coming in short pants, trying to adjust himself in a way that would hide how badly he wanted it. He remembers Harry grinning, pleased and soft as their friends voices began to filter into the space. He remembers Harry reach out again for Draco’s hair and the way he’d reach up to swat at him. The gentle laugh that followed. The way one of their friends had asked if they wanted more drinks and Draco’s rushed refusal as Harry watched him, too pleased that he had been flustered. The slow shift of muscles and clothes as Harry stood up, shirt still half unbuttoned, and accepted the offer for more booze, sending him a soft smile as he walked off.
Harry will remember none of it the next day. Will never remember it. The whole house will rouse in a hangover, and when Draco sits across from him at the table over breakfast, Harry will nod but say nothing, his countenance edged by his hangover but unchanged from the day before. There will be nothing of the soft smiles and the firm hands from the night before, and Draco, who has since made loss and unfulfillment his bedmates, will accept that this is how it should be and never speak a word of it.
***
Draco is thinking about it later that night, when he stumbles back into his room and finds Harry already in bed, his face half swallowed by the pillow. He is startled, at first, to see him there, sleeping in a space that is so wholly Draco’s. Different to the last night, when they’d had to keep a ruse. Different because he’d come here without Draco, and claimed this space as something of his, too.
Draco’s heart twists, and his breath catches somewhere in his ribs, pulsing tightly in his chest. There is a practical reason of course. In this world, where Sirius hasn’t died, Grimmauld Place may no longer be his. His friends, accustomed to his marriage, wouldn’t have given thought to lending him a place to stay. But something foolish blooms anyways. Because Harry could have chosen a different room and he hadn’t.
Draco despises that he no longer hates Harry Potter. Something integral to who he is has forgotten entirely what it was like to hate him at all, and Draco agonizes over it every time he lays his eyes on him.
I can’t do this, Draco thinks, but he climbs softly into bed beside him, freezing when the movement of it stirs Harry softly enough to murmur but not to rouse. Then Harry’s arm reaches, opening wide like an invitation as his body tilts from his stomach to his side. Draco is feeling a bit brave. He’s feeling a bit selfish. He thinks about how he told Harry that he’s trying to stop pretending about the two of them and how this has been a complete lie.
Draco allows himself to be folded into Harry’s arms.
Harry grumbles, pleased and sleepy and entirely unaware. Draco goes still as a statue and then relaxes, tired from a day of research and half answered questions.
I can pretend for another day, Draco thinks. Just one.