(no subject)

[shecrows]

IV.

"I know what you're doing."

Draco's hand in Harry’s hair goes motionless. Harry's mouth curves very slightly, without humor.

"Doing, I'm not doing anything," Draco says, heart thudding, every beat of it painful and heavy.

Harry opens his eyes. Draco's breath stills at the look in them.

He says, "You're doing what you do when you say goodbye."

"What is that," Draco manages, tight around a swallow, "exactly?"

Harry turns his head a little to look at him properly, even if it is sideways, cheek resting on his forearm. "Giving ground. Being kind." Draco's throat is so tight it's a wonder anything can get past. He doesn't think he can speak. "If I kissed you now, you'd let me."

Something lights in the center of Draco's chest and burns. He withdraws his hand, or starts to, fingers trembling like the shape of his mouth. Harry catches his wrist, pulls until Draco's knuckles brush against the hollow of his throat and rest there.

"Because it's the last time," Harry says, low. Something rough and dark scrapes in the cradle of his voice, a flint strike that fails to catch. He looks and looks at Draco, and Draco can't bring himself to look away, even though it feels as though that look is gently flaying him. "Isn't it?"

“Yes,” he says, quietly, on a breath.

The fingers around Draco's wrist flex and tighten.

Draco says, “I’ve been trying to tell you-”

“Don’t.”

Harry doesn’t look angry, exactly. He’s staring at Draco as though he’s some sort of bear trap Harry might like to fall into. Slowly, he sits up, not quite straightening his spine the whole way, shoulders slumped in a ripped gray t-shirt that seems slightly too big for him. The stretched out neck of it hangs loose over a collarbone, the sharp line of it, Draco’s fingers hovering just above, wrist still held in Harry’s grasp. A beat, and the draw of Harry’s mouth tightens. His other hand strays to Draco’s waist.

Draco swallows. “Harry.”

“Don’t,” he repeats, softer.

Harry tugs him forward without breaking eye contact, exerting a slow, insistent pressure on Draco’s hip. Reluctantly, Draco gives into it. Harry looks as though he might do - something. A bit like a cornered animal, or a captive one, straining against a too small cage, something at once wild and focused about the way he’s gazing up at Draco, calculating a strike.

But all Harry does is lean forward, resting his forehead against Draco’s ribs. He moves Draco’s captured hand gently to the back of his neck, and Draco makes a small sound, clenching his fingers into the short, unkempt hair there.

“I do want to kiss you,” Harry says, softly, after a moment.

“You can.”

The line of Harry’s shoulders rises and falls on a short, sharp breath.

“What if I don’t want it now? What if I want to kiss you three months from now instead?”

Draco’s heart twists and twists upon itself - at the hint of defiance, of challenge in Harry’s voice, the stubborn fold in it, as though he could bend the world into a different shape simply by throwing himself at it and refusing to back down. He manages, barely above a whisper, “It has to be now.”

Harry lifts his head, eyes bright behind the frames of his glasses.

The old safe house creaks audibly around them, boards of wood strewn thickly with all manner of enchantments to keep the outside world at bay. Draco imagines he can hear the crash of waves against the rocky Scottish coastline, but they’re too far inland for that, and he decides in a distant sort of way that it must be the sound of blood pounding in his arteries and veins, pushed forward by his violently beating heart. He scaled those cliffs only two days ago. They have been here, in this dire little house, only two days.

“Why did you kiss me, the first time?” Harry asks.

Draco blinks down at him. “The first time?”

It hadn’t been a very good kiss. In fact, it had been more or less a terrible one, compared to others in which Draco has played an active participant, clumsy and awkward and worsened by the fear that any moment Potter was going to haul off and punch Draco in the mouth. Draco had learned, not a week later, that it had been only the second kiss Harry had ever received, the horror of that admission mercifully mitigated by the fact that at the very least he hadn’t somehow managed, wildly and unimaginably, to become Harry Potter’s first kiss.

He doesn’t realize he’s smiling until the movement tears at the shallow little cut over his cheekbone, courtesy of a piece of crumbling Scottish cliffside. Instantly he arrests it, lessens it down to a rumor, the faintest curve of lips.

“Because I wanted you to trust me,” he says.

“Odd way to go about it,” Harry counters, in that flat, hard way Draco used to find intolerably arrogant.

“Because I was desperate,” Draco’s eyes move over Harry’s upturned face, lingering nowhere in particular, “and I couldn’t seem to get you to stop hating me.”

“I didn’t hate you.”

“Yes you did,” Draco corrects, not quite gently.

Harry’s mouth firms, a little. He doesn’t argue it. Instead, he turns his face into Draco’s forearm - his right one - braced against the side of his head, Draco’s fingers still curled into the hair at Harry’s nape. He brushes his lips softly over the inside of Draco’s wrist, barely a touch at all, and uncharacteristically careful, as though Draco might call it a kiss, were it anything more, and deny him the other one.

Draco touches his free hand to the side of Harry’s neck. The pulse flutters beneath his fingertips, wild and unsteady.

“Because I wanted to,” he says, and feels himself tremble at the confession.

Harry goes very still. Then he surges to his feet.

Both of Draco’s hands fall forcibly away, Harry gripping tight over either side of Draco’s waist before he flips them, hauling Draco bodily over until the backs of his thighs hit the edge of the table.

Draco shuts his eyes through it, breath like a wild bird scrabbling in his throat. His hands find the table’s edge, squeeze hard enough to imprint the pattern of the wood grain into his palms.

Harry’s breath is hot on the line of Draco’s jaw. For a moment neither of them speaks, both breathing so hard that they move with the force of it, swaying a little against each other.

“Why did you let me fuck you, the first time?” Harry asks, voice tight and chaotic.

Draco squeezes the table harder behind him.

“Stop.”

“No.” Harry pushes, bending the angle of Draco’s spine, holding onto Draco’s hips tightly, flush with Harry’s own so that Draco has to use his grip on the table to brace himself, the angle not a comfortable one. “Answer me.” His voice kicks up a little, hoarse. “You could have gotten me to trust you without doing that. Hell, by that point I was even starting to like you. I did like you.”

Draco keeps his eyes closed. His arms are trembling, and not from strain.

“What, did you whip up a love potion and think, maybe if I slather this over Harry Potter’s cock, the idiot will fall in-”

“Shut up.” It’s nearly a shout, bursting out of Draco’s mouth without warning. Gray eyes fly open, the look in them bright and eviscerating, appearing very much as though he’d like to rip out Harry’s throat. “Is that really all it took, Potter? Were you some lonely, pathetic virgin out of a bloody Victorian novel that all you needed was a good fuck to throw your heart away on?”

Harry makes an inarticulate sound of rage, a torn up thing that catches on the abruptly frenzied rhythm of his breaths. He slams Draco’s hips back against the table and follows, surging forward, pinning Draco to it, gasping into the vulnerable bend of Draco’s neck.

“You hate me a little bit now, don’t you?” Draco asks, breathless but eerily calm beneath that.

Harry lifts his head and exhales harshly, a searing burst against the shell of Draco’s ear. “Yes.”

“Good,” Draco replies, and there’s weight behind it.

Then he fists a hand into thick, black hair and pulls, grip ruthlessly tight enough that Harry makes a sound. He angles their mouths together and kisses him, hot and hard and nothing at all like the first time.

Harry groans like it’s being ripped out of him. He claws at Draco’s waist, lets Draco open him up with the sharp, insistent angle of his jaw, bearing the brunt of a kiss that he lets Draco control for all that their body language says different, painting Harry as the aggressor. He holds himself still for it, the flat, firm plane of his chest heaving wildly. Draco wonders at that for half a heartbeat, something in his gut aching furiously in protest at the curious sense of restraint, Harry’s arms held rigidly still on either side of Draco’s body. At the same time, he’s thankful. He doesn’t know if he could hold up against anything more.

He tears his mouth away from Harry’s with a punched out breath.

“There’s your kiss,” he says, an ugly, wretched note in his voice. “Let go of me.”

“Doesn’t count,” Harry rasps against the underside of Draco’s jaw, mouthing against the wildly hammering pulse there. “You kissed me.”

An exasperated noise. “Potter.”

It comes out a little hysterical, and Harry laughs, the sound a profoundly unhappy one. He presses his face into Draco’s neck, the metal frames of his glasses digging unpleasantly into Draco’s skin.

“Am I a joke to you?” he asks, low and muffled and fierce. “Is this funny?”

Draco tugs on his hair vindictively hard, heart in his throat. “Yes, I can’t breathe for laughing. What do you think of me.”

“I think you’re a vicious brat,” Harry says, nearly snarling. He leans hard into the long, tense line of Draco’s body, pressing him into the table with such force that Draco thinks he’ll have marks on the backs of his thighs. “I think… ” An audible swallow. Harry’s face nudges miserably into the side of Draco’s neck. “I think you touch me more gently than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Draco’s arm nearly buckles, either from the way Harry’s voice cracks a little on the admission or the physical strain of holding himself up. His other hand is still clenched in Harry’s hair, so tightly Draco wonders if Harry’s noticed it, that he could say something so diametrically opposed to the reality without stumbling.

“I think… ” Harry shudders against him. “I can’t think. I want you so much, I can’t think.”

Draco swallows, his heart an implacable drum, pounding and pounding.

“We’re pushing our luck as it is,” Draco says, unmoored, unsteady, unsure of himself in every way but the bounding beat of his pulse. “I’m leaving as soon as the sun hits the tree line.” Harry says nothing - doesn’t argue or throw himself against it, just stays right where he is, pressed up against Draco with his face hidden against Draco’s shoulder as though he has no intention of ever moving, or being moved. Draco turns his head slightly so that his mouth brushes Harry’s ear, and takes a deliberating breath. Very quietly, he says, “Until then, I’ll give you anything you want.”

For the second time that morning, Harry goes perfectly still.

Then he lets out a harsh, noisy breath like Draco has dealt him a blow to the stomach.

“That’s worse,” Harry says, so low and rough it’s almost animal. His palms are a sudden, hot slide over the skin beneath Draco’s shirt, as though they heard permission and couldn't do otherwise. “You know that’s worse.”

“I’m giving you the option,” Draco says, trying to speak past the heavy, possessive weight of Harry’s hands on his bare skin, the way all of his muscles clench in response.

Harry pulls back at last, looking Draco in the eye, face lightly flushed, gaze lit up and angry and so hungry Draco feels it like an ache in his own stomach.

He says, fierce and miserable, “No, you really aren’t,” and kisses him.

Harry doesn’t kiss with just with his mouth, but with his entire body. He slams up against Draco, so hard that Draco’s arm does buckle, and suddenly he’s lying flat on his back on the table, Harry braced over him, crushing Draco’s shoulderblades into the grain and branding himself into Draco’s mouth with lips and tongue and teeth. For a moment all Draco can do is withstand it, feeling himself flying apart and trying desperately not to, trying to hold on to - something, some lonely fucking piece of driftwood that might, by some miracle, keep him from drowning.

At last Draco manages to move his hands unsteadily to Harry’s waist, and this, apparently, is all it takes to draw Harry’s unshakeable focus away from trying to crawl inside of Draco through his mouth. Harry breaks the kiss, taking hold of both of Draco’s wrists and pinning them to the table on either side of Draco’s body. He stares down at him with a wild, hunted sort of look.

“For God’s sake,” Draco says, breathing hard, “you maniac. Are you planning to fuck me on this table?”

Harry doesn’t miss a beat. “Do you want me to?”

Draco’s pulse leaps at that, traitorously. He narrows his eyes, but it lacks his usual fervor; his gaze keeps going half-lidded, rather spoiling the effect.

“I’d prefer the bed.”

Harry draws back slowly. His gaze is watchful and dark, the faintest ring of green around blown pupils. It isn’t quite the response Draco expects. He’d been braced for something different, to be hauled off the table in a breathless rush, Harry’s hands a bold imperative. Harry’s fingers on Draco’s wrists flex and unflex, as though they, too, were expecting to be told to do something else, restless with dashed purpose.

“It doesn’t have to be anything I want,” Harry says. “Not just that.”

Draco slides his gaze up to the ceiling. “Harry.”

“I don’t want it to be just that,” Harry continues, firmly, as though Draco hadn’t spoken. His thumbs dig into the thin skin beneath which Draco’s pulse keeps leaping. He says nothing else.

It’s maddening.

“Can’t you just,” Draco says, grinding his teeth at how he sounds, the faint tremble in his voice, “take?”

“That’d be easier for you, wouldn't it,” Harry says after a moment. He doesn’t sound particularly happy.

Draco’s chest rises and falls shallowly. Yes.

“I don’t care.” Harry’s voice darkens. “I don’t want this to be easy for you.”

It hurts more and less than Draco expects. More, but there’s a relief to it, the almost pleasant rush before the cut starts to bleed.

“Fine. Alright. Once again and unsurprisingly, Harry Potter gets anything he wants, get off of me.”

“Are you insane? I don’t, ever, get anything I - ”

“I meant from me.”

“Especially not from you!”

Harry pushes off from the table at that precise moment - and, at that precise moment, Draco lifts himself up on his elbows, gaze bright and furious, locks a foot around Harry’s ankle and pushes with his entire body, hip crashing into Harry’s and propelling them both sideways. Harry catches himself on the table’s edge and Draco follows, chest pressing hard into the line of Harry’s spine, both hands on top of Harry’s where they’re clenched over the wood, squeezing ruthlessly. It occurs to him half a beat later that Harry isn’t fighting back - though every tensed up line of Harry’s body practically radiates with the intention. It isn’t, Draco notes, quite surrender. In a fair fight against Harry, he would lose.

Draco rests his forehead against the nape of Harry’s neck in defeat, breathing hard into the space between his shoulder blades. “I said anything you want.”

Harry shudders out a breath. “I want you to want it.”

He sounds miserable. It’s so infuriatingly stupid that Draco wants to kick him.

“Potter, you imbecile,” he says instead, a low, vehement curse, and releases him, turning on his heel and stalking into the other room.

It is, as it turns out, the room with the bed. Because Draco is practical, and not a savage, and his hands are shaking on the buttons of his shirt, and he is trying not to notice.

“What are you doing?”

Harry’s voice is soft from the doorway.

Draco clenches his jaw, turning his face in the other direction. His fingers keep fumbling. It’s only because Harry Potter makes him furious, turns him inside out and then has the gall to demand to be allowed to poke at every bleeding sore and weakness, demands an explicit invitation, as though the agony of it is something for which Draco should ask nicely.

“I’m moving this along,” Draco says tightly.

“Stop it.”

“If you’d rather waste time - ” Draco cuts himself off sharply, the unexpected urgency in it tightening his throat.

Across the room, Harry makes a soft noise. Draco freezes, his breath a wretched tangle, wondering if he’s given himself away. Very nearly hoping that he has.

“You said anything,” Harry says.

Draco grits his teeth. “I know what I said.”

“Then tell me.”

Draco drops his hands, half bared chest rising and falling unsteadily. From the corner of his eye he can see that Harry hasn’t moved away from the door, the stubborn lines of him perfectly still. Draco shakes out his sleeves, once, swallowing and staring at a single spot on the floor. The curve of his mouth flickers. Without thinking, he touches his left wrist, then his forearm, closing the fingers of his right hand around it.

“I want it,” he whispers, guilt splintering him, aimed in so many directions he can’t keep track. He shuts his eyes, fingers clenched tight over his arm, the sensitive marked skin underneath. On a ragged breath, he tears his hand away, eyes finding Harry like meathooks. “I want you to.”

The words scrape Draco’s throat, torn up and honest.

Harry stares at him, gaze focused and intense. Unchanged from before but for the way his eyes darken further still, pupil wholly eclipsing green. For a handful of moments, he's less a young man than a war wearing a young man’s clothing, soundless uprising in the tight, unhappy line of his mouth, silent battle in the shape of his hands, clenched at his sides into white-knuckled fists.

Draco waits, bruised and bloodied on his own battleground, and nowhere a victory.

“Fuck,” Harry says, quietly and with feeling.

Draco reads the surrender in it before Harry even moves. Thinks, as Harry’s mouth finds his, that perhaps the victory is happening to someone else.

After the rush, there is quiet. They lie side by side together, not quite touching, breathing slightly out of sync. Draco feels laid out, laid open, a bruised, tender ache where his heart is supposed to be. He is trying to rein it in. He is trying not to feel it, trying not to remember the times he has felt this before.

Harry breaks the silence first, voice rough from being foolhardy and determined enough to try to take Draco down his throat, but sounding as though, underneath that, it might be soft.

“What’s it like?”

Draco tries to look at him without turning his head, not quite managing to see anything and giving it up as a bad job. He blows out a breath, which catches unsteadily toward the end. Narrowly, he asks, “Are you fishing for compliments?”

“No.” A low note like amusement in it, or tenderness. Harry turns onto his side, facing Draco, a blur of hard lines in his periphery. “It was pretty obvious you enjoyed it.”

The bastard doesn’t even sound smug, just matter of fact. Also in a way Draco used to find intolerably arrogant.

Draco says, eloquently, “Hm.”

“I’m just asking.”

Draco deliberates a moment, the tread of his heart slowly returning to something within the realm of normal. It still aches. Every so often it flares hurt sharp enough to scatter his breathing.

“I don’t know,” Draco says. “I’ve never done it the other way.”

A pause. “Never?”

Draco shakes his head. Closes his eyes when Harry, after a beat, moves closer, laying a warm hand over the plane of Draco’s chest, still moving a little unsteadily with each breath. Harry rubs over the flushed skin with his palm, up and down, once, twice, as though Draco is some animal he’s gentling. Draco can’t stand it, throat fiercely tight, knowing with bone deep certainty that Harry learned that from Draco doing it to him.

Draco keeps still beneath the touch. He swallows several times before he speaks, voice calm and steady, if a little bit halting.

“It’s… too much at first. It always feels like… much more than I can take. But then it’s different.” He swallows again, eyes on the ceiling, rough stonework and broad wooden beams. “I feel it everywhere. And then it’s my body that feels too small, like I’ve… outgrown it. Because you’re part of it.” His cheeks heat a little. “And then it doesn’t feel like enough, because you aren’t.”

Another pause, lengthier. “That doesn’t sound entirely pleasant.”

Draco smiles a little, hearing the frown in it.

“It isn’t, entirely,” he says. He reaches for Harry’s wrist, arresting the slow, clumsy stroking. “What is it like for you?”

“You’re the only one I’ve been with.”

“I know that.”

“I have nothing to compare it to,” Harry says, a little protestingly.

Draco considers that before turning onto his side, mirroring Harry’s position. Harry’s glasses are missing, knocked clean off sometime during the heavy, frenzied push-pull of limbs and clothing and mouths seeking the sweet shock of skin wherever they could find it, hands everywhere and overwhelming with the task of getting closer. His eyes look smaller without them, his eyelashes longer. Draco is still holding on to Harry’s wrist, on the bed in the small space between them.

“Do you need something to compare it to, to tell me how it feels?”

Harry flushes. “I meant… I wouldn’t know how much of it is sex, and how much of it is just… you.”

The ache in Draco’s heart swells hugely for an instant - and then lessens. Like tide drawing in and out, dragging something new on its return, warm and nudging into the space, mixing with the rest of it. It pulls at the careful line of his mouth; he lets it happen.

“You can refuse to answer the question, you know,” Draco says. “It’s allowed.”

Harry looks at him, and licks his lips, that thoughtless habit. “I don’t know. It feels… powerful? But also like everything I do is up to you. The way you move.” His gaze moves over Draco’s face, darkening a fraction. “The sounds you make.”

“A bit like sucking cock, then,” Draco says.

Harry laughs softly. “No. I mean… I suppose, that part of it, yeah.”

Draco props himself up on one forearm, mouth tightening in faint rebuke. “You’re leaving things out.”

“I’m trying to figure out how to say them, Malfoy, you idiot.”

Draco casts his eyes over the length of Harry’s body - once, then again, slower, lingering on the dip of the thin, white sheet at his hip, the sharp, vulnerable divot there, flesh joined with muscle and leading down in a sharp diagonal. He lets go of Harry’s wrist, not looking him in the eye as he reaches and grabs hold of the sheet over Harry’s thigh between his fingers, tugs it down a fraction, and another.

“Figure it out faster,” Draco says, voice steady and twice as soft.

“What do you want?”

Draco’s eyes dart up to Harry’s, then swiftly away, heartbeat quickening. “I’m sure it will be obvious in a moment,” he says, pulling the sheet down far enough that his mouth goes dry, because Harry is already - Draco exhales noisily and glares up at him. “Keep talking.”

With that, Draco scoots closer, sideways toward Harry and then pointedly down, eyes level with the rough, dark line of hair on his abdomen. He sees more than hears Harry’s breath catch. There’s a faint taste of salt on Harry’s hipbone, over which Draco lingers, mouthing softly against it. He moves a hand up to hold Harry lightly in his fist, and Harry stops breathing then altogether.

Draco bites over his hip, hard. “Talk.”

“What - and say what, Draco, for fuck’s sake - ” He breaks off abruptly when Draco tightens his grip, makes a low, heavy sound in his throat.

Neither of them speak for several moments, Draco’s breaths tight as he works Harry with his hand, a relentlessly slow rhythm that has Harry’s hips seeking, or struggling to with Draco’s weight pinning them down on one side, one of Draco’s legs thrown over his.

“Tell me what it feels like,” Draco says, very clearly, “to fuck me.”

“It feels like - ” Harry touches a hand to the back of Draco’s head, not quite lingering. Touching, and falling away, and touching again as though he doesn’t quite know whether he's allowed to hold on.

Draco kisses his hip again, then lower.

“Like?”

He breathes the word out so close to his mark that Harry shudders, all the way down the length of his body. It matters, somehow, to wring this from him, this honest confession, to know it before he never has it again.

Harry sounds like he’s speaking through gritted teeth. “It feels like - fuck, Draco, I don’t know. Like I could tear the world down for you if you asked me. Because you asked me.”

“Even if I didn’t have a good reason?”

“Even then.”

Draco stops. Harry makes a quiet, punched out sound of protest but nothing else, holding biddably still as though unsure what will make Draco pull away and not wanting to find out.

“Pity you don’t feel that way all the time,” Draco says, managing to sound almost conversational through the ache and heave of his heart. He wants to turn his face into Harry’s stomach and breathe low against it until it passes, slams against the impulse. His voice rises a little, thinning. “It would save me a lot of trouble.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Shut up,” Draco says, “and keep still.”

Harry’s hand is a sudden tight fist in Draco’s hair, not painful but firm. “I’m not sure you should do that when you’re angry.”

The smile Draco levels up at him is not an entirely pleasant one. “I’m best at this when I’m angry,” he drawls and, wholly ignoring the pull on his hair, swallows Harry down to the root.

As far as blowjobs go, it’s ruthless. Draco works him with his mouth and the muscles of his throat, establishes a tight, unrelenting rhythm that brings Harry to the edge only to hold him there, backing off just enough at every telltale tremble while Harry shakes and swears in broken, bitten off syllables, sounding gut-punched and desperate and like he truly would do anything Draco asked. Draco feels overheated and desperate himself by the end, wringing Harry’s orgasm from him brutally and without warning, as though it belongs to him and not to Harry at all. He rides out the helpless movements of Harry’s hips until they stutter and stop, dwindling down to jerking, involuntary tremors. Harry makes a sound almost like pain, and at that, Draco finally lets him go, mouth swollen and obscenely wet, eyelashes damp and clinging.

“That’s how you deep throat someone,” Draco says, breathing hard against the inside of Harry’s thigh.

Harry gasps out an incredulous laugh. “Is everything a competition to you?”

“With you it is,” Draco says, and bites him softly.

Harry’s hand in Draco’s hair clenches. Draco had barely noticed it, during, couldn’t say whether Harry’s touch when he came down Draco’s throat had been violent or gentle.

“You sound like hell,” Harry says.

“You sound pleased,” Draco counters.

Harry doesn’t refute it. Instead, he strokes Draco’s hair, smoothing it clumsily away from his forehead. He says, “I think I want you to fuck me.”

Draco’s heart briefly stops, a swift, bruising pressure in his chest.

“I’ve never,” he starts, and can’t say anything more.

“I know,” Harry says, hand stilling.

Draco pushes himself up on his forearms, angling his face carefully away. The sweat drying on the back of his neck makes him feel, suddenly, very cold. He is aware of Harry watching him, aware of the air between them going taut with something very different from before. He is aware that he should say something else. He can’t. What he’s said feels like enough, and too much already. I’ve never.

Harry’s voice is soft, knowing. A touch bitter. “I can’t have that either, can I.”

Draco rolls off of him, lying on his back on the mattress, legs tangled in the sheets. Still tasting Harry in his mouth. Still feeling him. He turns his face toward the window, studying the light beyond the thin curtains.

“It’s nearly sundown,” he says.

The sun has all but disappeared behind the trees. Draco studies the tree line carefully, as though it might yield a different truth, a different telling. Harry is standing in the doorway to the safe house, shower damp and mostly dressed. He is looking at Draco. For the last hour or more, he has looked nowhere else.

“If you’re not here when they come, he’s dead,” Draco says, colorless and remote, needing to say it. Fearful of the answer, or the lie within the answer. Hating that a part of him refuses to trust it, whatever it is. Not with this.

“I know,” Harry says. “I’ll be here.”

A sharp, frustrated exhale. Draco glances at him, sidelong, and then away. “That also worries me.”

“You wouldn’t like the plan if I told it to you.”

Draco’s jaw tightens, but in the end he’s too tired to hold himself to it. Fury fades to exasperation and then not even that, the fight going out of him like a guttering candle. “I know that. You’re terrible at plans.” He swallows. His heart feels like a closed fist, clenching and unclenching. The sky is beginning to turn, light fading into bruised purple. “Don’t get yourself killed,” he says, nearly choking on it.

“I won’t,” Harry says.

The odd, low note in it makes Draco look, and keep looking. Harry is wearing the unreadable expression Draco hates, the one he’s learned in these last few months, only it seems more natural every time, less a mimicry and more a part of him.

Something locks tightly in Draco’s chest. “Harry.”

“Go,” Harry says roughly.

The expression flickers, showing Draco enough to know that it is taking considerable effort on Harry’s part to keep still. Draco doesn't want to find out what would happen if he didn't.

He goes.