Chapter Text
"Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner; there's a double meaning in that."
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2, Scene 3
HARRY
Madam Pomfrey released Harry at nine o'clock Sunday morning, delivering a short lecture about not doing anything stupid and pressing a tin of pills into his hands, the sort he was meant to take twice daily. Her expression suggested she fully expected him to ignore both the lecture and the pills. Harry pocketed the tin, thanked her, and left before she could add any further instructions.
The corridor was full of Sunday-morning students who had nowhere urgent to be, moving in loose clusters towards the Great Hall with the unhurried energy of people who had slept well and had no reason to think about anything in particular. Harry kept his eyes forward.
His gaze went straight to the Slytherin table. Draco was there. In his spot, between Pansy and Theo. He had a cup of tea in front of him and a plate he didn't appear to be touching. His posture was the same as always, back straight, hands loose around his cup, turned towards Pansy and Theo as though he had nothing better to attend to. Harry knew better.
Their eyes met across the Hall.
Harry offered Draco a small, uncertain smile, the kind you send across a room when you don't know if it'll land. Draco turned deliberately back to his tea.
Harry turned and made his way to the Gryffindor table. He sat down beside Hermione. His side was aching again, the ribs making themselves known; he hadn't noticed them until just now.
"Morning," Ron said through a mouthful of eggs. "You’re out, then. How are the…?" He waved his hands in Harry’s direction in an all-encompassing gesture.
"Fine." Harry reached for the toast rack. His hands were steady, which surprised him.
Hermione was watching him. "Did you sleep?"
"Bit." He'd slept in the way he sometimes did, in short stretches that left him more tired than he'd been before, surfacing each time to the same two or three thoughts waiting for him in the dark before he went under again. "Pomfrey said I'm fine to go back to normal schedule."
"That's good." Hermione poured him tea without asking. "Are you actually going to eat that toast or just wave it about?"
Harry looked down. He'd been holding the same piece for thirty seconds. He set it on his plate and didn't pick it up again.
Across the Hall, Draco wasn't looking at him. Wasn't even glancing this way. Was just sitting there drinking tea like Harry didn't exist.
"Mate." Ron put his fork down. "You alright?"
"Fine," Harry said again. The word was starting to sound hollow even to him.
He made it through breakfast without looking at the Slytherin table more than four times.
They ended up in the common room after breakfast, ostensibly to do homework. Harry had his books spread across the table and hadn't read a word.
"Right," Hermione said, setting down her quill. "What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Harry."
He looked up. Ron and Hermione were both watching him with identical expressions of patient concern.
"He wouldn't even look at me," Harry said. The words came out before he could stop them. "He stayed all night. In the hospital wing. You said he didn't sleep, just sat there. And then he left, and now he won't even look at me."
"Maybe he's just worried about you," Ron said.
"Then why won't he talk to me?" Harry's voice had risen slightly. He made himself lower it. "He never came back."
Ron looked at Hermione. She gave a small nod.
"Did something happen?" she asked. "While you were… under the influence?"
"I don't know." Harry pressed his palms against his eyes. "I remember waking up. Once, maybe twice. He was there. I might have… said something. I don't remember what."
"You were heavily sedated," Hermione said. "Whatever you said, I'm sure he understood you weren't yourself."
That's what Harry was afraid of. Not that he'd rambled or embarrassed himself, he could have lived with that, could have walked into the Great Hall this morning and weathered Draco's pointed non-reaction with reasonable dignity, but that he had said something true, some specific and particular truth that he would never have said conscious, and that Draco had heard it clearly enough to understand it, and had spent the subsequent eighteen hours deciding what to do about it, and had concluded, apparently, that the answer was nothing.
"What if I said something weird?"
"Like what?" Ron asked.
Harry didn't have an answer. Just fragments of memory. Their fingers intertwined… and then nothing.
"I don't know," he said. "But something made him leave. And now he won't even look at me, so it must have been bad."
Neither Ron nor Hermione had a good answer to that.
DRACO
Draco left breakfast early. Not obviously early, just early enough that he was gone before Potter could decide to approach him. If Potter had been planning to approach him. Which he probably hadn't been.
The castle was quieter on Sundays. Most students lingered over breakfast, took their time getting to the library or the common rooms. Draco walked past all of it and out through the main doors.
The grounds were cold. Snow from the previous week had frozen into a hard crust that crunched under his shoes. Draco headed for the lake and tried not to think about anything.
He failed spectacularly.
The lake stretched out grey and still. Draco found a flat rock near the water's edge and sat. The cold seeped through his trousers immediately but he didn't move.
Potter had looked at him in the Great Hall. Just for a moment. Their eyes had met and Potter had looked at him with an expression that didn't fit any category Draco kept. Draco had looked away because looking back felt impossible.
He'd held Potter's hand for hours. Had sat there in the dark watching him breathe and known, with absolute certainty, that he was in love with him. Then Potter had woken, drugged and disoriented, and said things that Draco couldn't afford to read meaning into.
I think about you. When you're not there. I notice.
Potter's hand squeezing his.
Draco pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. The position was undignified but there was no one here to see.
He'd thought about going back to the hospital wing yesterday, thought about it constantly, in fact, and had made it as far as the corridor outside three separate times before turning round. Because what would he say? What could he possibly say that wouldn't make everything worse?
I held your hand all night because I'm in love with you and I don't know what to do about it and everything you said while drugged is probably meaningless but I'm constantly replaying it anyway.
Brilliant. That would go well.
"Draco."
Draco's head snapped up. Pansy stood a few feet away, arms crossed against the cold.
"I'm thinking," Draco said.
"You're not, that's the problem." She came closer, not asking permission, and sat beside him on the rock. "You left breakfast early."
"Wasn't hungry."
"You saw him."
It wasn't a question. Draco looked back at the water.
"He looked for you," Pansy said. "First thing when he walked in. Found you, and then looked like someone had hexed him."
The information landed and sat there. He looked back at the lake, at the grey flat water that offered nothing useful. "He's fine. Pomfrey released him. That's what matters."
"You laid out your whole thesis yesterday," Pansy said. "He testified for you out of compulsion. He saves people by reflex. If you tell him that you love him, you become another thing he has to manage." She paused. "I've thought about it, and I think you're wrong."
"You're welcome to your opinion."
"People under potions don't manufacture feelings from nothing, Draco. They lose the ability to hide the ones they have."
"That's a very convenient theory."
"You already know it, Draco. You just won't let yourself believe." Pansy hesitated. "You know you're right about him. That's what's stopping you."
Draco stood. His legs had gone stiff from the cold. "I have things to do."
"You said that yesterday."
"Then you know not to argue." He started walking. "I'll see you later."
He didn't look back.
HARRY
The afternoon crawled past. Harry tried to focus on his essay. Wrote half a paragraph. Crossed it out. Started again.
The hospital wing kept returning to him. The fragments he couldn't quite piece together. Draco's face in the moonlight…
"Harry." He looked up at Hermione. "You've been staring at that sentence for ten minutes."
Harry looked down. He'd written the same line three times.
"Sorry." He set his quill down. "I can't focus."
Ron glanced up from his own essay. "Still thinking about Malfoy?"
"Can't stop thinking about him." The admission felt dangerous. He'd never said it like that before, not out loud, not in those words, and not in a way that committed him to it. Saying it now, to Ron of all people, made it real in a way it hadn't quite been at breakfast. "He won't talk to me, and I don't know why, and I keep replaying that night trying to work out what I said that made him leave."
"Maybe he didn't leave because of something you said," Hermione offered. "Maybe he left because he needed to sleep. Or because Pomfrey told him to go. Or because sitting in a hospital wing all night is uncomfortable and he'd done enough."
"Then why won't he look at me now?"
Neither of them had an answer.
Harry stood. "I'm going for a walk."
"Harry…"
"I just need fresh air. I'll see you later."
He left.
The castle felt too small. Harry walked without direction, turning down corridors at random, moving fast enough that the thinking had to wait. He ended up near the Astronomy Tower without meaning to. The stairs rose ahead of him.
He could go up there. Sit for a while. Try to sort through the mess in his head.
The memory of holding Draco's hand wouldn't leave. Or had Draco been the one holding his? Harry couldn't remember. Couldn't separate what was real from what might have been a dream.
He turned away from the stairs and kept walking.
DRACO
Draco's usual table in the back corner of the library was occupied by a group of fourth-years, so he had to settle for a spot near the windows instead.
He could still hear Pansy's voice. People under potions don't manufacture feelings from nothing. They lose the ability to hide the ones they have.
Draco knew she wasn't wrong. Of course he did. Draco was many things, but stupid wasn't one of them. He'd known it in the hospital wing, sitting in the dark with Potter's hand in his.
I think about you. When you're not there. I notice.
It hadn't felt meaningless, like a potion talking. That's what he couldn't get past.
He could set aside something meaningless. Something real, however, sat beyond his reach.
The difficulty was that when Draco tried to imagine the aftermath, he saw nothing.
I love you, Harry.
I love you too, Draco.
Then what?
He faced no disaster, merely blankness. The image refused to form. He didn't know whether its absence proved it was impossible, or whether he simply had never learned how to want something the world might actually allow him to keep.
You know you're right about him. That's what's stopping you.
"Mr Malfoy."
Draco looked up. Madam Pince stood beside his table, expression disapproving. "You've been staring into space for forty minutes. Study or leave."
"My apologies." He stood.
Outside the library, students moved to dinner. Draco walked against the current, back towards the dungeons, and tried to think clearly.
He could do this. It was a matter of arithmetic. Five months remained in the school year, less, if the Easter holidays were subtracted. Five months was a manageable period. He had survived considerably longer stretches of considerably worse. He could rearrange his schedule. Take his meals in the common room, or arrive at the Great Hall late and leave early. The library had multiple sections; Potter rarely ventured past the reference stacks. McGonagall could be petitioned to reassign him from the Room of Requirement on any number of plausible grounds. His probation, the distraction of working with someone he'd known since childhood, anything. She might even accept it without asking too many questions.
It was, he thought, a perfectly workable solution.
He reached the stairs to the dungeons and stopped.
Never. That was what the solution required. Never in the corridors. Never at dinner. Never in the Room of Requirement with plaster dust on Harry's robes and Harry's voice saying something that made Draco want to argue back just to keep him talking. He would leave Hogwarts in the summer and he would never speak to Harry Potter again. Problem resolved.
He stood very still. Just to see if the idea would hold.
It wouldn't. He thought about Harry's face across the Great Hall that morning. The moment their eyes had met, and how Harry had smiled at him, like he wasn't sure it would be welcome, and what it had cost Draco to look away. He thought about walking from Hogwarts with the problem neatly resolved, and Harry somewhere behind him not knowing, and a year passing without him, and another year after that identical to the first, and another after that, and a very long corridor stretching out ahead with no one in it and nothing at the end.
No.
The word arrived without ceremony. Just that. No.
He had faced the Dark Lord. Had stood in rooms where the wrong expression could end a person, had learned to keep his face still while the worst wizard of the age decided whether he was still useful. He was reasonably certain he could manage a conversation. One conversation, somewhere private, where if Harry looked at him with pity or obligation or worse there would at least be no audience.
Plausible deniability, if it went badly. Just people talking. It could be anything.
He went to his dormitory. Found parchment and a quill. Sat on his bed and stared at the blank page.
This was stupid and reckless, and exactly the kind of thing that ended badly.
He wrote anyway.
Harry.
His hand was shaking. He steadied it.
Astronomy Tower. Tonight, 8 o'clock. Please.
Draco
He waited a moment for the ink to dry.
Please.
He didn't know why he wrote it. It wasn't a word he used. But he left it, and folded the parchment before he could think better of it. Found a first-year heading towards dinner. Pressed a coin into the boy's hand.
"Gryffindor table," Draco said. "Harry Potter. Don't let anyone else see."
The boy nodded, eyes wide, and scurried off.
Draco stood alone in the corridor.
He'd done it. The note was sent. In three hours, he'd either have an answer or confirmation of every terrible thing he'd been thinking about himself.
HARRY
The note arrived halfway through dinner.
Harry was pushing a potato around his plate when a tiny Slytherin first-year appeared at his elbow. The boy looked terrified.
"Mr Potter?" He thrust a folded piece of parchment at Harry and fled.
He unfolded it.
Harry. Astronomy Tower. Tonight, 8 o'clock. Please. Draco.
He read it again.
"What is it?" Ron asked around a mouthful of pie.
He read the note a third time. The please felt significant. Draco Malfoy didn't say please.
The corridors were busy with students finishing dinner, heading back to common rooms. Harry moved through them without seeing anyone.
Maybe Draco wanted to address whatever had happened in the hospital wing. To clear the air. To make sure Harry understood that staying all night had been obligation. All the hand-holding had been… an accident?
Or maybe.
Maybe it was something else.
Harry took the stairs two at a time, heading for Gryffindor Tower. He needed to change his shirt, wash his face, and do something about his hair.
He made it three floors before Professor McGonagall's voice stopped him cold.
"Mr Potter. A word, if you please."
No. Not now. Not when he had forty-five minutes and needed every one of them.
"Professor, I really need to…"
"This won't take long." Her tone suggested it wasn't optional.
He closed his eyes and turned round.
DRACO
Draco arrived at the Astronomy Tower at seven fifty. Ten minutes early. The alternative was pacing the common room until Pansy hexed him.
The Tower was empty. Cold. The windows showed the grounds below, dark except for the lights from the castle.
This was a terrible idea. Potter wouldn't come. Or worse, Potter would come and Draco would have to actually speak, to put words to the things he'd been feeling, and Potter would look at him with pity.
Draco checked his watch. Seven fifty-five.
Five minutes.
He rehearsed opening lines. Thank you for coming. Too formal. We need to talk about the other night. Too direct. I held your hand for hours and I'm in love with you and I don't know what to do about it. Absolutely not.
Eight o'clock.
Draco listened. Footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming.
This was it. He was going to have to actually do this.
The footsteps stopped. Draco waited. Counted to ten. To twenty.
No one appeared.
The footsteps started again. Going down. Away.
He waited. Eight-oh-five. Eight-ten. The Tower stayed empty.
At eight-fifteen, Draco pulled out a slip of parchment. He wrote in his usual hand. That surprised him.
I waited.
—D
He left it on the windowsill where Potter would see it if he ever bothered to show up.
Then he walked down the stairs, through the corridors, back to the Slytherin common room. He was almost surprised to find himself there.
Pansy looked up when he entered. She put down whatever she'd been reading.
"Draco…"
"Don't," he said.
She didn't.
Draco went to his dormitory, closed the curtains around his bed, and lay on top of the covers. He'd been an idiot. Had hoped. Had written a note asking Potter to meet him and genuinely believed Potter might want to.
Of course Potter hadn't come. Why would he? Whatever he'd said in those early hours had been potions and confusion. Whatever Draco had felt holding his hand had been entirely one-sided.
He turned it over once, looking for a way it wasn't true, and didn't find one.
He'd wait until the pain dulled. Then he'd go back to being someone who could sit in the Great Hall without checking where Potter was sitting.
Tomorrow. He'd do it tomorrow.
Tonight, he'd just lie here in the dark and let himself feel it.
HARRY
Pixies. Someone had released pixies into one of the Charms classrooms.
The pixies took forty-seven minutes to contain.
Forty-seven minutes of stunning spells and chaos and Professor McGonagall's clipped instructions while Harry's mind screamed at him to move faster, work harder, finish this.
When they had the last pixie, McGonagall dismissed him. Harry ran.
Up the stairs. Down corridors. His side ached from the ribs that weren't fully healed, but he didn't slow down.
The Astronomy Tower stairs seemed endless. Harry took them two at a time.
He burst through the door at eight-twenty.
The Tower was empty.
Then he saw it. A slip of parchment on the windowsill.
He picked it up.
I waited.
—D
Two words.
Harry sat down. He didn't decide to, his knees just went and the stone was cold and hard under him.
He'd fucked this up completely. Draco had been brave enough to ask, to send that note with its devastating please, and Harry had failed to show up.
Harry stood. The Tower spun slightly but he ignored it. He had to find Draco. Had to explain. The pixies, McGonagall, the delay that hadn't been his fault.
He checked the corridors, the library, the Great Hall. Walked past the Slytherin common room entrance three times but couldn't get in.
By ten o'clock, Harry stood in the entrance hall, breathing hard, and accepted the truth.
He'd missed it. Whatever Draco had meant by sending the note, it was gone now.
Draco thought Harry hadn't come. Thought Harry had chosen not to show up. And Harry had no way to explain.
He walked back to Gryffindor Tower. Ron and Hermione looked up when he entered.
"What happened?" Hermione asked.
Harry told them everything: the note, McGonagall, the pixies, arriving at eight-twenty to find the Tower empty and I waited on the windowsill.
"Fucking hell," Ron said.
Harry sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. "He thinks I didn't want to come."
"Then tell him what happened," Hermione said.
"How?"
"Harry." Ron's voice was unusually serious. "If you care about this… about him… you'll find a way. You'll make him listen."
Harry lay awake long after Ron's breathing evened out and the room went quiet. The note sat on his bedside table and he kept not quite looking at it. He thought about Draco writing please and meaning it enough to leave it in. He thought about the Tower, and the slip of parchment on the windowsill. Two words and a dash. I waited. Not an accusation. Worse than that.
Tomorrow. He reached over and put the note in the drawer.
Tomorrow he'd fix this. He didn't know how he was going to manage it, but he wasn't going to leave it as a note on a windowsill.