Happy birthday, star_faerie!
You gave me license to write whatever I'd like as your birthday ficlet. Apparently, this is what my brain liked this evening.
Title: Surprised by Joy
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns all characters appearing in this story.
Rating: Call it a light PG for vague approximations of sex.
Warnings: Contains DH spoilers. Set before the epilogue.
Length: ~3450 words.
Notes: I know the title is the title of a C. S. Lewis book. But he stole it from Wordsworth first, so I feel quite comfortable stealing it from him.
Surprised by Joy
Someone nudged Harry in the shoulder. He rolled his eyes and refused to look around. Ron had put him in charge of fetching more drinks for his Aunt Muriel, since she had taken an inexplicable liking to Harry and he was the only one she didn’t chase off or threaten to hex when they approached her. And Ron couldn’t do it himself, since he was rather busy dancing with Hermione; it was their wedding, after all. Ron had told Harry the cure for Aunt Muriel, though. Give her enough drinks, and she would pass out, snore gently at her table, and cease to bother anyone.
As such, Harry wanted to make sure that he filled the tumblers as full as he could get them. He would step away from the barrels in just a moment, as soon as he’d topped off the eighth one.
“There,” he said, and moved carefully away, balancing the tray of drinks on his arm. “Sorry I was blocking that, but-“
And then his tongue dried to the roof of his mouth, because Draco Malfoy was standing behind him and regarding him with one upraised eyebrow, as much to ask why Harry thought he would be caught dead drinking the alcohol that the Weasley family had provided.
For Harry, the question was why Malfoy would be caught dead at the Burrow. “What are you doing here?” he blurted, staring in several directions to see what everyone else made of this remarkable occurrence. Quite oddly, everyone else went on dancing or chatting or eating or snoring or saying “Eh?”-that was Ron’s deaf Uncle Oswald-just as before.
Malfoy uttered a patient sigh, drawing Harry’s attention back to him. He looked much as he had on the day they’d left school after their reconstituted seventh year-self-satisfied. He seemed to have found some inner strength between the time Harry had seen him huddled with his parents in the Great Hall after the defeat of Voldemort and the time that he returned to Hogwarts along with every other student in their year, on McGonagall’s invitation, to resume their education under special terms and sit their NEWT’s. And that strength had gone on increasing, to Harry’s annoyance. Anyone else would have showed some sign of repentance or being changed by what they’d gone through. Malfoy had only acted as though the world had confirmed his good opinion of himself.
“This is a wedding, isn’t it?” Malfoy drawled. “Symbol of fecundity and good cheer and reconciliation and all that. And I’ve been trying to demonstrate that I want those things.” He plucked one of the tumblers from the tray before Harry could object, and then turned and stood as if he were waiting for Harry to proceed. “And right now, I’m accompanying you back to that horrid old woman.”
Harry shook his head several times, but he couldn’t deny that Aunt Muriel was a horrid old woman-at least, not if he wanted to be anything like truthful-and he still couldn’t overcome his surprise to manage a reasonable retort, either. “Why now?” he asked at last, starting to move. He could hear Muriel’s voice shouting already, and if he didn’t get to her soon, she would probably cause another family feud. Ron had told Harry that she’d been the direct cause of eight of them and the reason for the bitterness in sixty-four more, having a fondness for geometric progressions of bitterness. “It’s been three years since the war. Did it take you that long to get over yourself?”
Malfoy only smiled at him. His refusal to become enraged was quite as irritating as any of his taunts from school, Harry thought. “It took me that long to realize that you have a point,” he said. “Sometimes. And when you aren’t spouting about Gryffindor morals and goodness and how superior you are to everyone around you, you’re much more tolerable. So I thought I’d find the Gryffindor in his natural habitat-surrounded by others of his own kind, as it were-and observe him for a time before I attempted to tame him.”
Absurdly, Harry found his lips approaching a smile. He shook his head. Malfoy was not clever and not funny. If he were, then Harry would have admired him at some time during their school careers instead of thinking he was an idiotic wanker. Which he was. “Well, good luck,” he said, and ducked around a woman with flaming purple hair, who was either a liberated Weasley cousin or the victim of one of George’s new products. Muriel’s calls, from the table beyond her, were becoming more strident. “You won’t see me behaving like an epitome of nobility around her.”
“How fortunate that I don’t have your hang-ups,” said Malfoy lightly, and then stepped in front of Harry. Before Harry could say anything, he’d held out the tumbler he’d seized to Muriel, and murmured something complimentary and completely false in a voice that could have made angels smile. Harry stared at his back. Malfoy was acting strange, very strange, and Harry again had to wonder why he’d chosen Ron and Hermione’s wedding for a scene like this.
“I know you, young man,” said Muriel happily, seizing the tumbler and downing the drink in one gulp. “Your father’s Lucius Malfoy, isn’t he? Never met a Ministry official he didn’t want to corrupt. Now, I remember, though there’s not many that would, that time he was nearly arrested for the charm that that turned all the young women’s robes in Hogsmeade transparent, but only the young men could see through them-“
Her head dropped on the table suddenly, so hard that Harry winced in instinctive sympathy for her nose, and the tumbler escaped from her lax fingers, rolling under the table. Harry stared, and then stared around. Once again, no one seemed to notice, and Harry found himself almost missing the paranoia that had haunted the edges of Bill and Fleur’s wedding. At the very least, someone should have been on guard the moment they noticed the color of Malfoy’s distinctive hair.
“You wanted to settle a long-standing grudge with Ron’s auntie?” he asked at last, because any other question would have sounded even more stupid.
Malfoy faced him, and Harry had to stare again. There was a genuine smile on Malfoy’s face, which softened and transformed his features in a way that neither time nor traumatic experience had managed to do. He reached out and took the tray gently from Harry, setting it down on the table in front of Muriel.
“If you wanted her to stay awake, then you shouldn’t have let me enchant her drink like that,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know why someone didn’t think to do that hours ago. And she was your only responsibility, wasn’t she?”
“Now that I’ve made sure Ron didn’t lose the ring and that Viktor Krum and Luna’s father are separated,” said Harry dazedly, “yes.”
“I thought so.” Malfoy reached out and took hold of Harry’s wrist, in a gesture so easy and natural that Harry only thought how strange it was after he’d done it. “Now I can talk to you, and I know that you’re not abandoning anything important.”
Harry still half-wanted to argue, but the Malfoy he had known for years would not have cared whether Harry was in the middle of running interference on Muriel; he would simply have taken up Harry’s attention, loudly and obnoxiously. Enough had obviously changed that Harry thought he owed him a fair hearing. He blinked, the peculiar impulse to laugh whirling in the center of his head, and let Malfoy lead him.
*
“You asked me why now,” said Malfoy, and leaned back against the fence that surrounded the Burrow’s lawn. “The real answer is that it took me three years to work out what I wanted to say to you.”
Harry looked up at the sky to avoid answering. Ron and Hermione had chosen to get married on Midsummer Eve, which had also turned out to be a night of the full moon. It was brilliant, and the tiny lights shining from the village of Ottery St. Catchpole, along with the wedding lanterns, couldn’t outshine the silvery radiance from above. The sky was almost purple, and the dusk thick and warm with the sound of insects singing in full voice. Harry hadn’t thought evenings like this actually existed until now.
And instead of dancing with Ginny-who had already begun to make soft noises about her own wedding someday, and to look at Harry with misty eyes, even as she was apparently talking to Hermione-he was outside the fence altogether, staring out over the small woods with Malfoy at his side. Harry shook his head hard, hoping to get rid of the slight feeling of enchantment that had overtaken him. Had Malfoy used a spell?
Malfoy turned to face him. Harry mirrored the movement, hoping-expecting-some confession. When Malfoy drew his wand, he tensed.
But Malfoy only turned it around in his palm a few times, and then gazed at it moodily, as if it and not he were responsible for Harry vanishing from his best friends’ wedding. “You used this so well during the war,” he said softly. “And you shouldn’t have been able to.”
Harry snorted. The sound would break the mood between them, he assured himself. It would work like a splash of cold water to wake him up. That this did not happen was no reason that it wouldn’t happen in a moment or two. “Ollivander explained wandlore to me, Malfoy. I trust him a whole lot more than I trust you. And there was nothing mysterious about it. I overpowered you, so the wand served me.”
“But there’s still a difference between willing service and unwilling.” Malfoy’s eyes rose to capture his, and why in the world could he see the gray so well? Bright moonlight and stars or not, Harry still thought that he shouldn’t have been able to make out colors like that. “My wand served you willingly. Meanwhile, I never gave Voldemort my whole heart.”
Harry started to respond, but the notion that Malfoy could say Voldemort’s name and not flinch shocked him breathless. He was still staring when Malfoy leaned nearer to him and said softly, “That was what made me start thinking about the reasons that my wand-might have liked you. And when I sat down and admitted certain things to myself-
“I’m not going to pretend that I always wanted to be your friend during those years at Hogwarts. There were many emotions mixed up in that time, bitterness and loathing foremost among them. Quite a lot of envy, too. No one had ever beaten me as consistently and resoundingly as you did.”
Malfoy drew a deep breath, and a shadow of some dark emotion fluttered across his face, so quickly that Harry almost missed it. “And then I started wondering whether I’d beaten my friends fairly, when I competed against them. Or if they’d been warned to let me win. My father never wanted me to experience defeat, I knew that. And then I questioned Pansy and Blaise and the rest of them, and-yes. Only a little of the leadership I thought I’d achieved among the Slytherins at Hogwarts was actually earned. The rest they gave me, because of the rewards that I might give them in the future for being loyal. Malfoy money and protection and all the rest of it.” He bowed his head, and the dark emotion returned, lingering like a mask. Regret, Harry was sure, or more of the same bitterness he’d talked about.
“Malfoy-“
“Not yet,” Malfoy murmured, lifting a hand and laying it against Harry’s lips. Harry had to close his eyes. The fingertips burned with the taste of salt, as though Malfoy had dipped them in the sea. “I don’t want you to speak again until I’ve finished this story, and hopefully by then I’ll have you calling me by my first name.
“So I started thinking about-everything. And while I could excuse myself for some of what happened, because I was fifteen and everyone’s an idiot at fifteen-“
The familiar words made Harry swallow painfully. Malfoy’s fingertips slipped off his mouth and ended up in the hollow of his throat. Harry should have flinched at the thought of having his long-time rival’s hand so close to choking him, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t pull his eyes from Malfoy’s magnetic stare or his ears from his voice.
“Or I was sixteen and scared, I couldn’t excuse myself everything.” Malfoy closed his eyes, and the lines of his face drew tight. “I was worse than I had to be. And you weren’t the only one I was like that to, either. Remembering some of the things I called Granger took up several painful nights. And you probably never realized how many fights between the Slytherins and the Hufflepuffs I caused.”
Harry longed to say that he hadn’t known, because he’d been just as blind in school. He wanted to deflect Malfoy’s confession with a confession of his own, lessen the force of words that he already knew would draw a response from him, would demand it.
“I went through a period of self-loathing for a month.” Now the fugitive expression lurking around Malfoy’s mouth was rueful. “And then I realized that doesn’t do any good, either. Half the evil in the world is done by people who are too busy wallowing in their guilt to realize what the guilt costs. So I pulled myself out of that.
“I tried to notice everything around me, and when it cast the slightest shadow on my soul, or illuminated some corner of myself I never knew about. It wasn’t easy. It took about a year for me to realize that I was snapping at my mother when I wasn’t angry with her. And it took me that long to realize what your photograph on the front page of the Daily Prophet did to me.
“So I decided I’d come to your friends’ wedding and talk to you here. Stupid, maybe, but weddings are symbols of fruitfulness and peace. So I hoped it would work.” He inhaled, then released the breath again. The hand on Harry’s throat was shaking. Harry, mesmerized, thought it wasn’t from any fear, but simply because Draco was awed by the force of his own courage. “And I think it has. I know what I feel for you now. And I don’t ask that you feel the same way. I just wanted you to listen. Now you have. And if you reject this-well, I’ll get over it. Eventually.” Malfoy’s smile was thin and quick.
And then he lifted the hand from Harry’s throat to cup the back of his head, and leaned so near that Harry could make out faint flecks of blue around the edges of the gray in his eyes. Harry felt his own breath coming faster and faster. He tried to pretend that he didn’t know what was about to happen, but if hiding was possible here, he thought Malfoy-Draco-would have discovered a way into it. It wasn’t possible, because of the merciless light shining everywhere, outside and in.
Draco leaned nearer still, and touched his lips to Harry’s.
The night spun around him, purple and silver. Harry felt tears start to his eyes. The kiss rippled and rang in him like sheet lightning. The hand on the back of his head was not rough, but it pressed and pressed, as undeniably as the earth would have if he’d been lying on his back.
And his whole world rang in answer to the kiss.
When Draco made to pull back, Harry seized the nape of his neck in turn and wrestled him into another kiss. He knew his motions were too enthusiastic, and Draco yelped when Harry’s teeth cut into his lips. But he didn’t draw away. His hands were shaking again when he wound them around Harry, and Harry knew he was the cause of this awe.
Harry was laughing. His heart had turned over like a broken eggshell upended. Joy unfurled dragon wings in his chest and hooked claws into him. The music of the wedding had become a single voice singing in his ears, high and piercingly sweet.
He was laughing.
When he drew back at last, Draco stared at him. And Harry knew a flash of delight, irrational as all delight was, that he was still capable of surprising Draco Malfoy.
“How-“ Draco breathed. “How did you-“ He swallowed, and Harry thought he was about to ask how Harry could have done that, when the papers were reporting him practically engaged to Ginny already, but instead he whispered, “How did you know that that was exactly what I wanted?”
“I didn’t,” Harry said happily. He had no idea what would happen next or how this would work, and he didn’t care. George was letting fireworks off back in the Burrow’s garden. They had nothing on the bursts of colored light that Harry could see if he closed his eyes. He grabbed Draco’s hand and tugged hard, insistently, so that Draco stumbled after him. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to run away right now and tell everyone in the morning-or whenever we feel like it, which might not be for a few days. Depends on how much we want to shag.”
“I just-“ Draco was breathless, and Harry could hear the edge of worry in his tones. “I-you won’t wake up tomorrow and tell me that you were really drunk and didn’t mean it?”
“No, of course not,” said Harry, and he might have been irritated with Draco’s obtuseness if any irritation could have survived the onslaught of the happiness careening back and forth inside him. “I didn’t know I wanted this until now. You showed me. But while Slytherins might take three years to make up their minds, Gryffindors can tell immediately. Besides,” he added, a completely irreverent giggle bubbling up his throat, “I didn’t have anything to drink tonight.”
“I just-“ Draco repeated.
“You said that already,” Harry pointed out helpfully. And he laughed, because he could. The moon floated over a much brighter and bigger world now.
“I know.” Draco closed his eyes. “Things don’t happen like this.”
“Sometimes,” Harry said, “they do.” He tugged Draco again, and aimed his chin beyond the woods. “Let’s not go to my flat, or your Manor. Let’s go somewhere else, somewhere they’d never expect us to be. How do you feel about Wales?”
Draco’s eyes opened slowly. Harry wondered at the way the light in them seemed foreign, wary, uncertain of its welcome. For all Draco’s talk about coming to peace with his past faults, it did not look as though he had often allowed himself to be happy. “I love it, I think,” he said. “Or I’ll love it when we get there.”
Harry pulled him again, and they ran, laughing like children, towards the bottom of the hill and away to a place where they could Apparate in private. Or at least he laughed, and after a few moments Draco joined him.
Things don’t happen this way, Harry’s bossy Hermione-voiced conscience said, and tried to induce him to think of consequences, Ginny’s disappointment and his friends’ worry and the Weasleys’ reaction and the shock of the entire wizarding world and the fact that he hadn’t even realized he was gay or could be in love.
But sometimes, they do, Harry answered firmly back, and Hermione shut up. She was dancing with Ron anyway, she had other things to occupy her.
Grass rustled beneath their feet as they ran. Harry thought he could still see some traces of lighting sunshine on the horizon; this was the longest day of the year, after all. And because the moon and stars insisted on glowing overhead, they ran through three different kinds of light.
Joy made him run. Joy made him feel the hand in his as if it could lead him into eternal happiness. Joy blazed and sang and thrummed in him like a flight of hummingbirds. And beside him, Draco laughed, surprise and wonder and hunger for the future in his voice.
Sometimes, they do.
Title: Surprised by Joy
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns all characters appearing in this story.
Rating: Call it a light PG for vague approximations of sex.
Warnings: Contains DH spoilers. Set before the epilogue.
Length: ~3450 words.
Notes: I know the title is the title of a C. S. Lewis book. But he stole it from Wordsworth first, so I feel quite comfortable stealing it from him.
Surprised by Joy
Someone nudged Harry in the shoulder. He rolled his eyes and refused to look around. Ron had put him in charge of fetching more drinks for his Aunt Muriel, since she had taken an inexplicable liking to Harry and he was the only one she didn’t chase off or threaten to hex when they approached her. And Ron couldn’t do it himself, since he was rather busy dancing with Hermione; it was their wedding, after all. Ron had told Harry the cure for Aunt Muriel, though. Give her enough drinks, and she would pass out, snore gently at her table, and cease to bother anyone.
As such, Harry wanted to make sure that he filled the tumblers as full as he could get them. He would step away from the barrels in just a moment, as soon as he’d topped off the eighth one.
“There,” he said, and moved carefully away, balancing the tray of drinks on his arm. “Sorry I was blocking that, but-“
And then his tongue dried to the roof of his mouth, because Draco Malfoy was standing behind him and regarding him with one upraised eyebrow, as much to ask why Harry thought he would be caught dead drinking the alcohol that the Weasley family had provided.
For Harry, the question was why Malfoy would be caught dead at the Burrow. “What are you doing here?” he blurted, staring in several directions to see what everyone else made of this remarkable occurrence. Quite oddly, everyone else went on dancing or chatting or eating or snoring or saying “Eh?”-that was Ron’s deaf Uncle Oswald-just as before.
Malfoy uttered a patient sigh, drawing Harry’s attention back to him. He looked much as he had on the day they’d left school after their reconstituted seventh year-self-satisfied. He seemed to have found some inner strength between the time Harry had seen him huddled with his parents in the Great Hall after the defeat of Voldemort and the time that he returned to Hogwarts along with every other student in their year, on McGonagall’s invitation, to resume their education under special terms and sit their NEWT’s. And that strength had gone on increasing, to Harry’s annoyance. Anyone else would have showed some sign of repentance or being changed by what they’d gone through. Malfoy had only acted as though the world had confirmed his good opinion of himself.
“This is a wedding, isn’t it?” Malfoy drawled. “Symbol of fecundity and good cheer and reconciliation and all that. And I’ve been trying to demonstrate that I want those things.” He plucked one of the tumblers from the tray before Harry could object, and then turned and stood as if he were waiting for Harry to proceed. “And right now, I’m accompanying you back to that horrid old woman.”
Harry shook his head several times, but he couldn’t deny that Aunt Muriel was a horrid old woman-at least, not if he wanted to be anything like truthful-and he still couldn’t overcome his surprise to manage a reasonable retort, either. “Why now?” he asked at last, starting to move. He could hear Muriel’s voice shouting already, and if he didn’t get to her soon, she would probably cause another family feud. Ron had told Harry that she’d been the direct cause of eight of them and the reason for the bitterness in sixty-four more, having a fondness for geometric progressions of bitterness. “It’s been three years since the war. Did it take you that long to get over yourself?”
Malfoy only smiled at him. His refusal to become enraged was quite as irritating as any of his taunts from school, Harry thought. “It took me that long to realize that you have a point,” he said. “Sometimes. And when you aren’t spouting about Gryffindor morals and goodness and how superior you are to everyone around you, you’re much more tolerable. So I thought I’d find the Gryffindor in his natural habitat-surrounded by others of his own kind, as it were-and observe him for a time before I attempted to tame him.”
Absurdly, Harry found his lips approaching a smile. He shook his head. Malfoy was not clever and not funny. If he were, then Harry would have admired him at some time during their school careers instead of thinking he was an idiotic wanker. Which he was. “Well, good luck,” he said, and ducked around a woman with flaming purple hair, who was either a liberated Weasley cousin or the victim of one of George’s new products. Muriel’s calls, from the table beyond her, were becoming more strident. “You won’t see me behaving like an epitome of nobility around her.”
“How fortunate that I don’t have your hang-ups,” said Malfoy lightly, and then stepped in front of Harry. Before Harry could say anything, he’d held out the tumbler he’d seized to Muriel, and murmured something complimentary and completely false in a voice that could have made angels smile. Harry stared at his back. Malfoy was acting strange, very strange, and Harry again had to wonder why he’d chosen Ron and Hermione’s wedding for a scene like this.
“I know you, young man,” said Muriel happily, seizing the tumbler and downing the drink in one gulp. “Your father’s Lucius Malfoy, isn’t he? Never met a Ministry official he didn’t want to corrupt. Now, I remember, though there’s not many that would, that time he was nearly arrested for the charm that that turned all the young women’s robes in Hogsmeade transparent, but only the young men could see through them-“
Her head dropped on the table suddenly, so hard that Harry winced in instinctive sympathy for her nose, and the tumbler escaped from her lax fingers, rolling under the table. Harry stared, and then stared around. Once again, no one seemed to notice, and Harry found himself almost missing the paranoia that had haunted the edges of Bill and Fleur’s wedding. At the very least, someone should have been on guard the moment they noticed the color of Malfoy’s distinctive hair.
“You wanted to settle a long-standing grudge with Ron’s auntie?” he asked at last, because any other question would have sounded even more stupid.
Malfoy faced him, and Harry had to stare again. There was a genuine smile on Malfoy’s face, which softened and transformed his features in a way that neither time nor traumatic experience had managed to do. He reached out and took the tray gently from Harry, setting it down on the table in front of Muriel.
“If you wanted her to stay awake, then you shouldn’t have let me enchant her drink like that,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know why someone didn’t think to do that hours ago. And she was your only responsibility, wasn’t she?”
“Now that I’ve made sure Ron didn’t lose the ring and that Viktor Krum and Luna’s father are separated,” said Harry dazedly, “yes.”
“I thought so.” Malfoy reached out and took hold of Harry’s wrist, in a gesture so easy and natural that Harry only thought how strange it was after he’d done it. “Now I can talk to you, and I know that you’re not abandoning anything important.”
Harry still half-wanted to argue, but the Malfoy he had known for years would not have cared whether Harry was in the middle of running interference on Muriel; he would simply have taken up Harry’s attention, loudly and obnoxiously. Enough had obviously changed that Harry thought he owed him a fair hearing. He blinked, the peculiar impulse to laugh whirling in the center of his head, and let Malfoy lead him.
*
“You asked me why now,” said Malfoy, and leaned back against the fence that surrounded the Burrow’s lawn. “The real answer is that it took me three years to work out what I wanted to say to you.”
Harry looked up at the sky to avoid answering. Ron and Hermione had chosen to get married on Midsummer Eve, which had also turned out to be a night of the full moon. It was brilliant, and the tiny lights shining from the village of Ottery St. Catchpole, along with the wedding lanterns, couldn’t outshine the silvery radiance from above. The sky was almost purple, and the dusk thick and warm with the sound of insects singing in full voice. Harry hadn’t thought evenings like this actually existed until now.
And instead of dancing with Ginny-who had already begun to make soft noises about her own wedding someday, and to look at Harry with misty eyes, even as she was apparently talking to Hermione-he was outside the fence altogether, staring out over the small woods with Malfoy at his side. Harry shook his head hard, hoping to get rid of the slight feeling of enchantment that had overtaken him. Had Malfoy used a spell?
Malfoy turned to face him. Harry mirrored the movement, hoping-expecting-some confession. When Malfoy drew his wand, he tensed.
But Malfoy only turned it around in his palm a few times, and then gazed at it moodily, as if it and not he were responsible for Harry vanishing from his best friends’ wedding. “You used this so well during the war,” he said softly. “And you shouldn’t have been able to.”
Harry snorted. The sound would break the mood between them, he assured himself. It would work like a splash of cold water to wake him up. That this did not happen was no reason that it wouldn’t happen in a moment or two. “Ollivander explained wandlore to me, Malfoy. I trust him a whole lot more than I trust you. And there was nothing mysterious about it. I overpowered you, so the wand served me.”
“But there’s still a difference between willing service and unwilling.” Malfoy’s eyes rose to capture his, and why in the world could he see the gray so well? Bright moonlight and stars or not, Harry still thought that he shouldn’t have been able to make out colors like that. “My wand served you willingly. Meanwhile, I never gave Voldemort my whole heart.”
Harry started to respond, but the notion that Malfoy could say Voldemort’s name and not flinch shocked him breathless. He was still staring when Malfoy leaned nearer to him and said softly, “That was what made me start thinking about the reasons that my wand-might have liked you. And when I sat down and admitted certain things to myself-
“I’m not going to pretend that I always wanted to be your friend during those years at Hogwarts. There were many emotions mixed up in that time, bitterness and loathing foremost among them. Quite a lot of envy, too. No one had ever beaten me as consistently and resoundingly as you did.”
Malfoy drew a deep breath, and a shadow of some dark emotion fluttered across his face, so quickly that Harry almost missed it. “And then I started wondering whether I’d beaten my friends fairly, when I competed against them. Or if they’d been warned to let me win. My father never wanted me to experience defeat, I knew that. And then I questioned Pansy and Blaise and the rest of them, and-yes. Only a little of the leadership I thought I’d achieved among the Slytherins at Hogwarts was actually earned. The rest they gave me, because of the rewards that I might give them in the future for being loyal. Malfoy money and protection and all the rest of it.” He bowed his head, and the dark emotion returned, lingering like a mask. Regret, Harry was sure, or more of the same bitterness he’d talked about.
“Malfoy-“
“Not yet,” Malfoy murmured, lifting a hand and laying it against Harry’s lips. Harry had to close his eyes. The fingertips burned with the taste of salt, as though Malfoy had dipped them in the sea. “I don’t want you to speak again until I’ve finished this story, and hopefully by then I’ll have you calling me by my first name.
“So I started thinking about-everything. And while I could excuse myself for some of what happened, because I was fifteen and everyone’s an idiot at fifteen-“
The familiar words made Harry swallow painfully. Malfoy’s fingertips slipped off his mouth and ended up in the hollow of his throat. Harry should have flinched at the thought of having his long-time rival’s hand so close to choking him, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t pull his eyes from Malfoy’s magnetic stare or his ears from his voice.
“Or I was sixteen and scared, I couldn’t excuse myself everything.” Malfoy closed his eyes, and the lines of his face drew tight. “I was worse than I had to be. And you weren’t the only one I was like that to, either. Remembering some of the things I called Granger took up several painful nights. And you probably never realized how many fights between the Slytherins and the Hufflepuffs I caused.”
Harry longed to say that he hadn’t known, because he’d been just as blind in school. He wanted to deflect Malfoy’s confession with a confession of his own, lessen the force of words that he already knew would draw a response from him, would demand it.
“I went through a period of self-loathing for a month.” Now the fugitive expression lurking around Malfoy’s mouth was rueful. “And then I realized that doesn’t do any good, either. Half the evil in the world is done by people who are too busy wallowing in their guilt to realize what the guilt costs. So I pulled myself out of that.
“I tried to notice everything around me, and when it cast the slightest shadow on my soul, or illuminated some corner of myself I never knew about. It wasn’t easy. It took about a year for me to realize that I was snapping at my mother when I wasn’t angry with her. And it took me that long to realize what your photograph on the front page of the Daily Prophet did to me.
“So I decided I’d come to your friends’ wedding and talk to you here. Stupid, maybe, but weddings are symbols of fruitfulness and peace. So I hoped it would work.” He inhaled, then released the breath again. The hand on Harry’s throat was shaking. Harry, mesmerized, thought it wasn’t from any fear, but simply because Draco was awed by the force of his own courage. “And I think it has. I know what I feel for you now. And I don’t ask that you feel the same way. I just wanted you to listen. Now you have. And if you reject this-well, I’ll get over it. Eventually.” Malfoy’s smile was thin and quick.
And then he lifted the hand from Harry’s throat to cup the back of his head, and leaned so near that Harry could make out faint flecks of blue around the edges of the gray in his eyes. Harry felt his own breath coming faster and faster. He tried to pretend that he didn’t know what was about to happen, but if hiding was possible here, he thought Malfoy-Draco-would have discovered a way into it. It wasn’t possible, because of the merciless light shining everywhere, outside and in.
Draco leaned nearer still, and touched his lips to Harry’s.
The night spun around him, purple and silver. Harry felt tears start to his eyes. The kiss rippled and rang in him like sheet lightning. The hand on the back of his head was not rough, but it pressed and pressed, as undeniably as the earth would have if he’d been lying on his back.
And his whole world rang in answer to the kiss.
When Draco made to pull back, Harry seized the nape of his neck in turn and wrestled him into another kiss. He knew his motions were too enthusiastic, and Draco yelped when Harry’s teeth cut into his lips. But he didn’t draw away. His hands were shaking again when he wound them around Harry, and Harry knew he was the cause of this awe.
Harry was laughing. His heart had turned over like a broken eggshell upended. Joy unfurled dragon wings in his chest and hooked claws into him. The music of the wedding had become a single voice singing in his ears, high and piercingly sweet.
He was laughing.
When he drew back at last, Draco stared at him. And Harry knew a flash of delight, irrational as all delight was, that he was still capable of surprising Draco Malfoy.
“How-“ Draco breathed. “How did you-“ He swallowed, and Harry thought he was about to ask how Harry could have done that, when the papers were reporting him practically engaged to Ginny already, but instead he whispered, “How did you know that that was exactly what I wanted?”
“I didn’t,” Harry said happily. He had no idea what would happen next or how this would work, and he didn’t care. George was letting fireworks off back in the Burrow’s garden. They had nothing on the bursts of colored light that Harry could see if he closed his eyes. He grabbed Draco’s hand and tugged hard, insistently, so that Draco stumbled after him. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to run away right now and tell everyone in the morning-or whenever we feel like it, which might not be for a few days. Depends on how much we want to shag.”
“I just-“ Draco was breathless, and Harry could hear the edge of worry in his tones. “I-you won’t wake up tomorrow and tell me that you were really drunk and didn’t mean it?”
“No, of course not,” said Harry, and he might have been irritated with Draco’s obtuseness if any irritation could have survived the onslaught of the happiness careening back and forth inside him. “I didn’t know I wanted this until now. You showed me. But while Slytherins might take three years to make up their minds, Gryffindors can tell immediately. Besides,” he added, a completely irreverent giggle bubbling up his throat, “I didn’t have anything to drink tonight.”
“I just-“ Draco repeated.
“You said that already,” Harry pointed out helpfully. And he laughed, because he could. The moon floated over a much brighter and bigger world now.
“I know.” Draco closed his eyes. “Things don’t happen like this.”
“Sometimes,” Harry said, “they do.” He tugged Draco again, and aimed his chin beyond the woods. “Let’s not go to my flat, or your Manor. Let’s go somewhere else, somewhere they’d never expect us to be. How do you feel about Wales?”
Draco’s eyes opened slowly. Harry wondered at the way the light in them seemed foreign, wary, uncertain of its welcome. For all Draco’s talk about coming to peace with his past faults, it did not look as though he had often allowed himself to be happy. “I love it, I think,” he said. “Or I’ll love it when we get there.”
Harry pulled him again, and they ran, laughing like children, towards the bottom of the hill and away to a place where they could Apparate in private. Or at least he laughed, and after a few moments Draco joined him.
Things don’t happen this way, Harry’s bossy Hermione-voiced conscience said, and tried to induce him to think of consequences, Ginny’s disappointment and his friends’ worry and the Weasleys’ reaction and the shock of the entire wizarding world and the fact that he hadn’t even realized he was gay or could be in love.
But sometimes, they do, Harry answered firmly back, and Hermione shut up. She was dancing with Ron anyway, she had other things to occupy her.
Grass rustled beneath their feet as they ran. Harry thought he could still see some traces of lighting sunshine on the horizon; this was the longest day of the year, after all. And because the moon and stars insisted on glowing overhead, they ran through three different kinds of light.
Joy made him run. Joy made him feel the hand in his as if it could lead him into eternal happiness. Joy blazed and sang and thrummed in him like a flight of hummingbirds. And beside him, Draco laughed, surprise and wonder and hunger for the future in his voice.
Sometimes, they do.