There’s a sharp intake of breath to Harry’s right; when he turns his head, Draco is looking at him. No, Harry thinks; Draco is watching him, eyes intent.
“Mate,” Ron says. “Don’t get all—how you get.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Harry says, looking between the three of them. “What are you saying, that Hermione was—”
It slams into him like a freight train: Hermione was attacked because of Harry. Hermione was attacked to keep Harry from answering the call from Grimmauld Place; there probably even had been a Floo call, like the woman said. It’s not as though his place is very heavily warded—he relies on his Muggle neighborhood for anonymity and has own trained combat skills in case of actual break-in, but. He’d Apparated straight out of bed. If there’d been a head in the fire in the living room, he wouldn’t have seen it. God, he’d probably just missed it, left Hermione nearly dying to—well, to go keep Draco from being murdered, but—
“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it,” Draco says, sounding furious, far away. He stalks across the room to stand in front of Harry, snaps his fingers in Harry’s face. “Potter! I swear to god, if you come over all Kreacher about this I am going to snap. I really am! I am underslept and badly in need of a long shower and I have done and said roughly seventeen embarrassing things in front of, apparently, every Weasley in the Western Hemisphere tonight. We are not doing this, too; I refuse! It’s not happening. It’s not your fault! No one is throwing you into the well!”
“I—wait, what?” Harry says, briefly distracted by Draco’s madness, before guilt engulfs him again. “God, I can't believe this. I should have—”
“Oh, what,” Draco says, eyes going suddenly cold. “Leave me to die, would you, to run off and—”
“Of course not, you stupid git,” Harry interrupts, horrified. Draco narrows his eyes at him, suspicious, but does at least stop saying that horrible sentence out loud. “I didn’t mean that at all. I just—I could have gotten some help, I could have done something—”
“Yes, well, your various regrets are noted and deeply helpful to the continuing discussion,” Draco says, bitingly sarcastic, and rolls his eyes. “Can we maybe, I don’t know, get on with it? You beating yourself up isn’t exactly a valuable or productive contribution, you know.”
“I,” Harry says, “you—oh, fine.” He crosses his arms over his chest, more to protect himself from Draco’s furious glare than anything else. “Jesus, Malfoy! I said fine.”
Draco gives him one more long, suspicious look, but then he snaps, “Good,” and looks away.
“Wow,” Hermione says, blinking at the both of them. Harry suddenly feels a little exposed; next to him, Draco is shifting uncomfortably.
“I know,” Ron says. “Wild, isn’t it?”
“Do they always do this?” Draco demands of Harry, sounding outraged. “Just have their—their own little conversation? Over there? In the corner?”
“Yeah,” Harry says, and shrugs. “You get used to it.”
Draco opens his mouth, and then, for some reason, pinks very slightly and shuts it again. After a second, he actually turns his back on Harry, because he’s a mystifying little freak who will never make sense and Harry really doesn’t know why he tries.
“Yeah, well,” Ron says, with an uncomfortable shrug. “Obviously we’ll be all over this at work, but we thought it’d be best to warn you both now. I’ll be telling everyone else to keep an eye out, too. Somebody’s really determined to get at something in that house, and, Harry, they know you’re their biggest obstacle. Whoever they are, you’re both in their crosshairs now.”
Harry’s eyes meet Draco’s. Draco raises both of his eyebrows, a question, and Harry shrugs one shoulder in answer. He doesn’t really care if someone’s gunning for him, though the idea of anyone else getting caught in the crossfire like Hermione sets his teeth on edge, makes him want to rage and shout. He’s staying until it’s done. They’ll figure something out.
Draco’s mouth twitches a little, but his voice is controlled when he says. “Well. That’s just wonderful, Weasley. Thanks for the heads up.”
They stay for a bit after that, and then Hermione asks for Rose, which opens the visitor floodgate. When everyone else is distracted by the inflow of many Weasleys into a tiny space, Harry notices Draco swaying alarmingly, bracing himself against a wall. He makes their excuses and takes them both back to Grimmauld Place, ignoring Draco’s protests that he can Apparate, really, and Harry doesn’t need to be such a great bloody ninny about it. He still crashes into bed like his strings have been cut when Harry steers him into a bedroom almost at random—he obviously can’t sleep in his own, not in its current state—and falls asleep almost instantly, his breathing going even, slow.
Harry stands there, in the doorway, staring at him, asleep across the covers in his black trousers and too-large sweater, the healing cut on his face still perfectly visible. His hair is falling in soft pieces across his eyes even as Harry watches, long fingers curling in sleep against the sheets, and the odd, swelling balloon of sensation Harry’s been pushing down all night finally bursts, all at once. It’s nothing like jumping off a cliff. It’s like jumping into cold water, coming up nearly frozen and halfway drowned, and gasping in huge lungfuls of air that hurt going down.
Harry doesn’t just care about Draco; doesn’t just want Draco to be safe; doesn’t just think Draco is interesting and funny and odd. Harry relies on Draco. Harry worries about Draco. Harry understands, truly and for the first time, the way Ron looks at Hermione, because it’s the way he looks at Draco. Harry trusts Draco with his worst secrets. Harry trusts Draco with his life.
Harry is in love with Draco. He’s just been doing his damndest not to notice.
“Oh, fuck,” Harry says, into the quiet of the room. Draco rolls over in his sleep, but doesn’t reply.
Chapter 9
Harry doesn’t sleep much that morning. He should—he knows he needs it—and he tries, for a while, after he calls in sick to work, first in a room right across from the one he stuck Draco in and then in the room he slept in back when this was his house. It looks nothing like it did when he was seventeen, and for the first time since he set foot in the museum Harry wishes, a little, for the dusty old halls of the place as she once was. He thinks it might actually be easier to fall asleep if everything around him was crushingly depressing, instead of bright and clean and reminding him of Draco.
God: he's in love with Draco. Harry’s so stupid, he can’t believe he’s let this happen, and without his even noticing—and that, Harry thinks, is the most horrifying part. At least twice a year since he was fourteen Harry’s had the same nightmare, where he’s tied to a flagpole in the middle of Privet Drive, trying frantically to dodge a basilisk wearing Voldemort’s face, as from the ground Mad-Eye Moody shrieks, “CONSTANT VIGILANCE, POTTER,” at the top of his lungs. Sometimes the flagpole is the statue at the Department of Mysteries; sometimes the basilisk is a lake full of Inferi; sometimes it’s not Mad-Eye but Sirius or Dumbledore, or little Teddy Lupin, one particularly rough time Harry doesn’t like to think about. But the message is always the same: constant vigilance, Potter. Constant vigilance or die.
Which is why, Harry thinks a little hysterically, it’s particularly mind-numbingly horrible that he’s found himself in this beast of a spot. He is supposed to be aware of his surroundings! He is supposed to be abreast of the situation! He is not supposed to be in love with Draco Malfoy, accidentally but irretrievably, and not notice it happening until it’s too late to do a damn thing about it.
He throws his hands a little in the air as he thinks this, and then recognizes he’s lying flat on his back in bed waving his hands around like a crazy person, and goes downstairs to pace.
In the end, he walks the whole house. He walks the storeroom, its endless soothing shelves; he walks the museum, reading the little placards next to the exhibits; he walks Draco’s private floors, careful to creep on light feet past Draco’s door. He even goes up to the attic to see Vicky, who seems to be snoozing and throws only one seedpod at him, and that one halfheartedly, before settling down into an innocent-looking pile of vines.
Harry goes back downstairs. He sits on the couch in the first floor parlor. He puts his head in his hands and tries to tell himself that it’ll be fine, that it’s just the pressure and intensity of the last twelve hours playing tricks on him, and he’s not in love with Draco at all. He even tries to tell himself that he’s a savior complex in ill-fitting trousers, and this is all nothing more than an outcropping of his twisted desire to save someone because Gryffindor children aren’t socialized properly, and then realizes he’s trying to talk himself out of being in love with Draco in Draco’s voice. He has a bit of a hysterical fit at this point, muffling his not-at-all pleasant laughter into a throw pillow, and he must fall asleep somewhere in the middle there, because he wakes up to the sound of knocking on the front door.
He blinks, heavy-lidded, sore-muscled exhaustion letting him know that he didn’t sleep nearly long enough, not more than an hour or two. Then he remembers that Draco is upstairs and needs the sleep a lot more than he does, and drags himself wearily off the couch to meet Kreacher at the door.
“Kreacher was not sure if Master Draco and Harry Potter would want him to answer it, in the circumstances,” he tells Harry in a nervous squeak. “Kreacher is sorry for making guests wait!”
“It’s okay, Kreacher, I’ve got it,” Harry says.
He’s assuming it’s just museum guests or something, that he’ll just tell them to come back tomorrow and go back to sleep, so it’s a nasty surprise to open the door to Blaise Zabini and a short Asian woman with close-cropped hair who Harry’s fairly certain is Pansy Parkinson.
“Er,” Harry says, and then—because what the hell else is he supposed to do?—adds, “Hello.”
“Oh my god it’s true,” Pansy says, and rounds on Blaise. “I thought you were having me on! Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t having me on?”
Blaise shrugs, his eyes dancing. “I did, Pans. You wouldn’t believe me. You never do.” To Harry, in a conspiratorial tone, he adds, “Draco and I played one trick too many on her as children, you see. She just wasn’t up to playing with the big boys, and it scarred her; she may never trust again. It’s all very tragic.”
“I want you to remember you said that,” Pansy tells him sweetly, “when I spell your eyebrows off again, Blaise. May the phrase ‘she just wasn’t up to playing with the big boys’ bring you comfort in their absence.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t,” Blaise says; he’s laughing, but he touches a fingertip to one of his eyebrows a little nervously anyway, and she smirks. Seeming to decide that he's through with her for the moment, Blaise turns to Harry. In a tone that Harry suspects means he is being mocked, he says, “So, what, are you Draco’s doorman now?”
“Er,” Harry says again, “no.” He tries to think of some way to explain his presence that isn’t, I volunteered to stay here indefinitely because as it turns out I’m desperately in love with Draco, whoops, sorry, bloody shocking for me too, and comes up with: “I’m…just keeping an eye on things.”
“I told you Draco was still in St. Mungo’s,” Pansy exclaims, and hits Blaise in the arm with her handbag. “I told you, you were all ‘Oh, my intel says he was treated and discharged, it’s perfectly fine to wait until nearly two in the afternoon to drop by and see how he’s doing.’ Men! We’ve dithered about all morning while he’s clinging to life alone in a hospital bed—”
“Er,” says Harry, for the third time in as many minutes. He’s having a lot of trouble stringing a thought together. “No, he’s—upstairs. Sleeping. It was,” Harry stops, yawns hugely, and finishes, “a really long night.”
“We heard,” Pansy says, fixing Harry with a murderous look.
“Well, I heard,” Blaise amends. “And then I made the horrific mistake of telling this one, thinking she could perhaps remain calm for long enough to—”
“Oh, I remained calm last time and look what good that did me,” Pansy snaps. She pushes past Harry into the house, apparently sharing Draco’s ‘I know the rules of etiquette and therefore it’s perfectly acceptable for me to break them’ attitude. “‘Stay in Cairo, Pansy,’ you said. ‘I’ve got this all perfectly handled, Pansy,’ you said. He was treated for internal bleeding last night!”
“No he wasn’t,” Harry says. “It was—bruising, I’m pretty sure. One of his kidneys, a couple of his ribs.” He crosses his arms over his chest, rubs them a little with his palms, and adds, more defensively than is probably wise, “He’s okay now.”
Blaise and Pansy turn identical incredulous looks on him. Harry sort of wants to die.
“Blaise, are you coming in or not?” Pansy demands, having apparently determined that Harry is obsolete to the whole entering-the-house process. “Because I’ll leave you down here with Potter if I have to, but I’m going up.”
“Er,” says Harry, who is starting to suspect that it's all he can say. “Sorry—no.”
