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Harry first shows up on the day the German tourists with the accidental-magic-prone toddler manage to get stuck on a particularly inhospitable bit of mountainside on the way from La Fouly to Merlin knows where. It’s late July then, the height of tourist season in the Alps, and so, of course, you were off rescuing a couple of terrified hikers somewhere between the Tour Noir and the Pointe Kurz with Gros-Jean. And so, of course, Aurélie went alone.
When the door opens, the two of you are in the middle of a screaming match about it in the main room of the alpine chalet she’s supposed to work at, making beds and hot meals for the hikers and not going off onto the mountainside by herself without supplies or magic or proper training (I was born here, Draco, she yells back, jabbing an angry finger at the centre of your chest, people like you, you need to learn, but people like me, we know the mountain like we know how to breathe!).
One minute it’s just you and her and words loud with worry ringing around both your heads, but the next, it’s you and her and Harry bloody Potter.
Then, the air is sucked out of the room and out of your lungs and you can’t remember how to breathe.
You think maybe you started forgetting how to breathe on the day you first saw your father kill someone. It’s an easy story, one that makes sense. It lets you lay the blame for everything that is broken and cracked inside your chest squarely on events that didn’t have anything to do with you at all: you like this about this story. You like not having to wonder if it was your fault that you could never figure out how to be alive or how to enjoy it. You like letting yourself think if things had been different you’d be different too. (You’re not entirely certain it’s the truth.)
Still, it changed you, watching your father kill that Muggle girl in front of your eyes. You still dream about her sometimes, about the way her dirty blonde hair stuck to her forehead and her brown eyes shone with fear. About the way she couldn’t have been older than you were. About the way her school uniform jumper was wet with blood and slightly too large for her. (Some nights, you wake up with the thought she’d never grow into it now coursing in your veins like ice.)
That night, after you’d shaken and sobbed for hours in the dark, you realised there would be a before and an after. There was a sharp, deep cut carved right in the middle of your life now, and your childhood would forever be on the other side of it.
“Hi,” Potter says, standing in the doorway like an idiot, and not to you in particular.
“Hello,” Luna says because, of course, she is the one who brought him here.
“Luna!” Aurélie says as she immediately rushes to embrace her.
You wonder dimly how long you can get away with saying nothing at all because you’re not entirely certain you can remember how words work. And even if you did: what does anyone say to someone their father tried his very hardest to kill?
(I’m sorry about the bloodstains on your jumper flitters through your mind unbidden.)
Gros-Jean’s St Bernard Patronus saves you from having to decide if that sentence is a fitting greeting for an old school enemy you’ve tried your very hardest to forget for the past twenty years. You mumble something about needing to go. As soon as you’re out the door, you start running. You don’t stop until you’re under the open skies with the sharp slate shards of the path rolling under the soles of your shoes.
There is something about the mountain that grounds you. It’s the silence you think, it’s the austerity of those immense stone walls standing tall before you. It’s the magic, perhaps, the way it radiates from every crack and every stone until you’re quite certain the mountain itself is hollow and filled with magic the way a pine tree is filled with fragrant, sticky sap.
“It eats the magic, the mountain. Sucks it straight out of you if you’re not careful,” Gros-Jean told you the very first time he took you on a hike, before you started mountaineering proper. “Muggles, they break a leg up here, get stuck in a crevice and that’s dangerous enough, but for wizards, it’s a whole other beast. Cast the wrong spell, at the wrong time, in the wrong manner and the entire mountain turns into an echo chamber of magic that sucks you dry and leaves you mad.”
You respect this too, the way the mountain is infinitely larger than you will ever be and infinitely more dangerous than anything you’ve ever seen. You relish the way you are present in your body whenever you’re climbing up to one of the summits, the way you have to inhabit yourself and notice every movement of your hands and feet. There’s no place for self-doubt, no place for shame or anger or the past.
It grounds you, the mountain. You weren’t born here but it’s become part of your blood, too.
You find Gros-Jean halfway up the Grand Darray, silently casting intricate spells at the ochre-colour of the ridge above him. If you strain, you can see spots of bright colours on the stone. Climbers. Around you, the mountain echoes uncomfortably with wild magic.
You run up to the base of the mountain, start casting your own network of support charms. Instantly, you feel the mountain tugging at your core, trying to reach inside your chest with its greedy green tendrils, sharp as stones and hungry as wolves. This isn’t right, you realise, and a cold dread settles in the pit of your stomach. You might all die here. The climbers, they must not have known not to cast any spells this high up, or they must have done it all the same.
Focus, Draco. Focus.
The truth is that you could die every single time you go on a rescue mission. It’s beautiful, the mountain, and you know it so well by now, but it never stops being dangerous. There’s always a risk. It’s part of what drew you to it, in the beginning, when you carried your life around your neck like a heavy stone and never thought you’d live to see your thirtieth birthday. When you settled into a life you were more comfortable calling your own, the danger and the beauty both became inevitable parts of it.
You ground yourself. Halfway up the slope, Gros-Jean is casting still, his magic calm and measured and majestic, soothing down the tempestuous soul of the mountain. You feel his spells, like gusts of wind washing against the slopes, pushing the wild magic back into the soil and down, down, down, into the rock until you feel the hunger-vice in your chest loosen and disappear. The climbers are still there, small spots of blue and orange holding onto a green and yellow tent. You breathe. You reach your magic out to them, letting it envelop them for a beat before you start to float them gently down. It’s how you always do it, Gros-Jean and you. He tames the mountain and keeps it occupied; you rescue tourists and hikers. It’s a familiar and delicate dance of spells the two of you perform time and time again on these slopes, and you’ve learned every step of it by heart.
Still. There’s always a risk here.
You feel Gros-Jean’s spell wavering as wild magic bursts from all the crevices in the rock. You swallow hard; your war-drum heart beating a furious rhythm in your ears. Gros-Jean falls back onto the rock, and the wild magic swirls victoriously in the air and curls around your neck, choking you. Tears well in your eyes as you force yourself to keep breathing. You can’t stop, not now, not when the climbers are halfway down already. If you break the spell, you know the wild magic will rush inside your chest and steal all it finds there, leaving you little more than an empty shell. So you keep your magic focused and strong, you keep your spell steady and your lungs filled with air until you are able to deposit the climbers on a large rock, mere metres away from you. With your magic still curling in a protective sphere around them, you turn your head to where Gros-Jean was standing. Relief washes over you as you notice that he’s casting again, kneeling against the lichen-covered rock. His magic tastes of oak-wood smoke and first snow and when you feel it wrap around you like a blanket, you know it’s finally safe to end the spell.
You also know the mountain will not claim your lives today.
The pair of climbers are German. Experienced enough to know better. They tell you what happened in a strange mix of German and broken English. One of them slipped and fell and injured himself quite badly (a broken leg, you suspect.) He panicked, trying to heal himself without stopping to think first. Then his friend did his best to stop the mountain magic from killing him until they were trapped in a veritable storm of wild magic. They were lucky, you tell them. They nod. They know they could have died too. Gros-Jean calls the Rega on his mobile phone and you wait for the helicopter in silence, staring at the beautiful sharp edge of the golden ochre ridge against the clear blue sky.
You don’t think about Potter then. You don’t think about him as you walk down the mountain with Gros-Jean either. In fact, you don’t think about him until you push the door of the chalet and find him seated at a table, playing a loud game of cards with Luna and Aurélie.
(“Atout pique!” you hear Aurélie say, and you try not to be bitter that she didn’t teach you how to play Jass until you’d known each other for three years.)
When Luna knocks on your door later that night, you wish that “Why is he here?” wasn’t the first thing to come out of your mouth.
“Life,” she says softly, sitting on your bed and looking at you like she’s trying to pierce a hole in your chest with her eyes. “It has a way of never really going the way you think it will, you know?”
“Welcome to the burden of being alive, Saint Potter,” you answer stubbornly and keep staring at the book you’ve been pretending to read all evening. “I’m certain all the love and admiration of his adoring fans weigh heavy on his shoulders.”
Luna pauses. Her voice is quiet when she speaks again, almost a whisper.
“It’s not because you hurt that he doesn’t, Draco.”
You sigh, getting up from your armchair to stand in front of the window and stubbornly stare through the glass.
“It’s not that I—I was fine before he came here, Luna. And you of all people should know how hard I worked to be fine! You saw the sorry state I was in, after the war. You saw how fragile I still was, years later, when you first started studying mountain fauna and we met again.” Your voice sounds flat and empty. “But I found a place for myself, a place where I could grow and learn and become someone who didn’t spend his entire life trying to find a way to die and—I’m not ready for this, Luna. I’m not ready for him to walk into my life like he owns everything in it.”
You sit down next to her, burying your face in your hands. She rests her small head on your shoulders, and her soft hair cascades down your arms and pools on your lap.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But this place kept you so safe. I hoped it could do the same for him.”
What does he need safety? you think bitterly. He’s the crown prince of the wizarding world, the darling hero boy. Didn’t his world push people like you away so it could keep him safe? Didn’t his world make it very clear to you you weren’t welcome to be a part of it anymore after the war so he’d be comfortable living in it? And you understood it, you really did. You packed your bags and left everything you’d ever known. You accepted that the privilege of staying rooted in the soil that saw you grow up was reserved to those who weren’t tainted and rotten, to those who had made all the right choices, to those who killed and maimed and fought for all the right reasons. You accepted it, and you made a life for yourself here instead, and you learned how to be happy. Does he get to come swanning in now? Does he get to claim it all for himself, everything you worked so hard to build? And when he notices you, the Death Eater, in the corner, will you have to leave here again? Start anew someplace else and hope he doesn’t find you there?
“I wish I could tell you more,” Luna continues, her soft voice muffled by the cotton of your shirt. “But it’s his story to tell. You should ask him about it, sometimes. You might understand it better than any of us.”
That night, you admit to yourself you’re not afraid that Harry Potter will push you out of this life to take your place, not really.
You’re afraid of the person he sees when he looks at you.
You’re afraid of the person you become when he’s watching.
You’re afraid he’ll take all the layers of growth away from you until all that’s left is the selfish, bitter little boy you promised yourself you’d never be again.
You wake up the next day to loud voices in the kitchen.
“Mais c’est rien, je te dis !”
“Comment ça, c’est rien ? Tu peux plus marcher, Grand-papa !”
You recognise Aurélie’s voice, Gros-Jean’s too. You cast a Tempus Charm. It’s late; the hikers are already on their way up the mountains. They must be alone in the chalet.
“Et tu crois que c’est la première fois que ça m’arrive, de tomber ?”
You make your way through the corridor and push the door to the main room.
“Tell him he’s an idiot, Draco,” Aurélie commands as she barrels through the door. “He hurt his foot yesterday and he won’t even get it looked at by a Healer.”
“J’ai fait un sort diagnostique, j’ai la cheville foulée, c’est rien. J’ai eu bien pire, Aurélie,” grumbles Gros-Jean as he follows her, limping heavily.
“He’s 340!” Aurélie argues, gesturing wildly at you and clearly ignoring her grandfather. “His body doesn’t heal like it used to but he’s too bloody stubborn to admit it.”
You try to argue with Gros-Jean that a couple of professional Healing spells won’t hurt and that it’ll at least keep Aurélie happy. Aurélie tries to argue with him that an untreated injury at his age might very well have dramatic consequences and that he is an infuriating idiot.
In the end, all it takes is Maria, Gros-Jean’s wife, walking in from the garden and listening to both sides of the argument. Gros-Jean is Apparated to the hospital in Sion the very same morning.
Word comes in the middle of the afternoon that Gros-Jean will be staying in the valley for the following few weeks. His ankle’s fine, Maria explains, but his body can’t heal the way it should. His magical core is damaged—from the previous day’s rescue or from years of dealing with wild mountain magic, she doesn’t say.
As she Apparates back down to the valley, the main room is strangely silent. Aurélie looks like she’s about to cry and no one else dares say a word. You take her hand. You know how she worries for her grandfather, you know how she always dreads those rescue calls, knowing he’s up there in the mountain fighting forces so much larger than him. You know she lost more friends and family members to the mountain than anyone ever should and you hope she never has to lose him too.
“It’s just us, then,” she finally says in a voice that sounds brittle and dry as chalk.
“I can help,” Potter says before you can assure her things will be alright. “Around the chalet, I mean. I can help. Cook and stuff.”
Luna clasps her hands together.
“That’s a lovely idea, Harry,” she says.
(That’s a stupid idea, you think because it shouldn’t be a gift, helping. It should be a thing you do without thinking because if people are kind enough to put up with you, they deserve something in return—but of course, Potter’s used to being treated like royalty, and of course, he hasn’t stopped to consider that perhaps everyone else wasn’t put on this earth to serve him.
That’s a stupid idea, you think, but you don’t say it. What good would it do?)
Potter does help, and he’s good at it, and it infuriates you.
You hate that he’s a surprisingly skilled cook, and you hate that you can hear him laughing in the kitchen with Aurélie on the nights when the chalet is fully booked and there are many mouths to feed. You hate that he bakes cakes when the chalet is half empty and you hate that the door of your room is never enough to keep the scent out (because then, you remember his existence and everything’s a disaster).
You hate that he’s trying to learn French, you hate the way consonants come all mangled out of his mouth, the way vowels always stick to the roof of his mouth instead of falling precisely from his lips. You hate that Aurélie speaks slow, dumbed-down French to him when she refuses to speak anything but English to you, even though your mother made you practise and practise and practise until there was no trace of your native tongue in your mouth.
More than anything, you hate the way he fits seamlessly here, when it took you months and years to be fully accepted. You hate that even though he doesn’t try, even though he’ll never join you for the apéro or for the friendly glass of wine you have on Friday nights, even though he’s odd at best and he can’t stand anyone touching him, everyone seems to just have adopted him, when you had to prove yourself over and over again, back when you were only a rich English tourist and not Draco, not yet.
You hate it, because if he’s that much better at everything than you without even trying all that hard, then what does it say about you?
You tell yourself your parents loved you.
Sometimes, it feels like the truth. Sometimes, it feels like a bald-faced lie. Sometimes, you lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and try to untangle all the fine silk threads of the past as if you could somehow make it all make sense if only you thought about it long or hard enough.
Your parents loved you, you’re almost sure they did, but you’re old enough to know that love is never simple.
Your parents loved you, but you were never quite the son they were hoping for. You kept saying all the wrong words and doing all the wrong things, and they never quite knew what to do with you. Perhaps the thing that hurts most is the way your parents look at you like you’re the sun in old photographs, the kind you stole in family albums and kept under your bed to reassure yourself they did love you when it felt like they’d rather you were anyone else at all. Perhaps the thing that hurts the most is the way you had their love and lost it, the way they stopped loving you when they got to know the person you were, the way you never felt worthy of it.
You recall the harsh words of your mother about your posture and your language and your silly boyhood passions, you remember the tightness of her lips as she hissed “stand tall” and “don’t embarrass me” and the way it always made you feel like a Tibetan mastiff in a greyhound show, like something big and dumb and completely out of place.
Your father, well he stopped talking to you after you turned eleven. He took you to the library and for walks on the ground and flying brooms in the garden when you were little, he took your little hand in his and told you tales of the stars. Then, you started Hogwarts and weren’t the first in your class anymore, weren’t as popular or clever as he imagined you’d be, and you stopped existing.
Your parents, they loved you, but they loved you in a way that made you feel it was only because they were obligated to by blood ties and social mores. It’s okay, you tell yourself. You’re old enough now to see they perhaps weren’t people you would have loved either, had they not been your parents. You’re also old enough to know that, sometimes, love is not enough.
But no matter how much you think about it, how much you rationalise and how many pretty words you put on it, you can’t shake the feeling that deep in your core, there’s something rotten and wrong and completely unlovable.
Three weeks later, Aurélie announces that Gros-Jean will be returning to the chalet for the end of the summer season. It’s almost the end of August by then, the warmth of summer slowly bleeding down the slopes of the mountains and pooling in the valley below while the first leaves start turning russet and gold in those high places where cold starts creeping back early. You always feel like you’re standing on the edge of autumn, in late August, like standing at the edge of a cliff with all the same exhilaration for the fall. It’s always been your favourite season, but this year you’ve been too busy noticing Potter to notice all the minute changes in the leaves and the plants and, like everything else about Potter, it infuriates you.
You always have a party at the chalet in August. Partly because it’s the end of tourist season, partly because it’s Maria’s birthday and partly because it’s a good excuse to have friends from the village over. This year, Aurélie plans it for the day Gros-Jean comes back from Sion. It’s a beautiful sunny evening that turns into a beautiful starry night. You sit near the fire with Aurélie, admiring the way the light reflects in her blue eyes, having a little too much wine and laughing a little too loudly at all the jokes she tells.
Eventually, Luna comes to sit with you, and you have a little more wine as she tells you about the grant she’s obtained from the magical university in Geneva to study the local population of snow dwelling Demiguises (“We suspect they’re actually a different genus,” she tells you, her soft airy voice very serious all of a sudden, “but they’re quite hard to observe and no one’s been able to tell for sure one way or another.”) You ask her questions and you congratulate her, and you have more wine to celebrate.
All the wine eventually makes your bladder feel like a water balloon about to burst, so you make your way to the loo, your head pleasantly light and your vision swimming ever so slightly. That’s when you notice him.
Harry bloody Potter.
He looks drunker than hell, laughing raucously at a man you recognise from the village and who looks very intent on bedding Potter from the way he keeps touching him and refilling his wine glass.
You stop dead in your tracks.
It’s not your business, who Potter sleeps with, but something about the way he keeps pushing the man’s hand away, something about the way his laughter sounds fake once you pay attention to it, something about the way he’s holding himself feels very wrong. You close your eyes. This is not your problem, you are not Potter’s minder, you aren’t even his friend and you certainly aren’t responsible to stop him from making mistakes. You should go to the loo, get back to Aurélie and Luna and continue enjoying the evening. Still, there’s something that chafes in your chest at the sight of this scene. It doesn’t feel right, seeing him this drunk in the company of strangers.
Then, the man tries to top Potter’s glass up and you interfere.
“C’est bon, il a eu assez,” you tell the man as you place yourself between him and Potter.
Before you can think better of it, you take Potter’s arm.
“Come on, Potter,” you tell him, “you’re drunk. You’re going to bed.”
Potter lets you drag him away from the protesting man and you almost make it to the back entrance of the chalet before he stops dead in his tracks.
“Fuck you,” he hisses. It’s the first time he’s spoken to you since he arrived.
“I’d rather not if it’s all the same, though that man was certainly willing if you’re looking for a shag,” you answer because what else is there to say? You pry his wineglass out of his fingers.
“Come on, you’d have regretted that mistake in the morning, I promise,” you add in hopes it’ll soothe him.
It doesn’t.
“Fuck you,” he says again, only more viciously this time. “I’m not the one with a dreadful track record when it comes to mistakes and regrets, Malfoy, or have you forgotten the war already?”
You freeze.
“No,” you answer because you too have had too much to drink and the words are enough to set you alight with fury. “Fuck YOU, Potter. Fuck you for barging into my life, fuck you for ignoring me for an entire month. Fuck you for lashing out at me when I am just trying to help you, and most of all, fuck you for bringing the war into it.”
“What makes you think I need your help, Malfoy?” Potter is screaming at this point. You might have been too. There’s too much alcohol and grief between the both of you, and remembering the war set fire to the powder keg of your hearts. “You don’t know me, you’ve got no right to tell me what I can and can’t do!”
“Do you think I haven’t noticed, Potter, the way you’ve been refusing to drink even a single drop of alcohol ever since you arrived? Do you really think I’m stupid enough not to immediately know there’s something bloody wrong when you’re suddenly drunk and hanging out with the sleaziest guy you could find? Fuck you, Potter, I may not know you but I know a thing or two about self-hatred and making the choices that’ll hurt you most on purpose. And like it or not, you idiot, I know that’s exactly what you were doing. So go ahead, if that’s what you want! Go ahead, fuck this guy you don’t even like! Let him use you! I hope you’ll enjoy feeling dirty and worthless in the morning.”
There’s an odd, broken kind of silence after you’ve finished your tirade. You’re out of breath and you feel strangely empty. You distantly hear laughter and music but it’s just Potter and you, here, in the dark. The air feels cold suddenly. You shiver.
“What I want is to make other people happy,” Potter says, in a small voice that holds none of the bravado you think this sentence ought to hold. “You should try it sometimes,” he finishes. It sounds more like a sob than a taunt.
You take a deep breath. Potter infuriates you, of course, but there’s a part of you that wants to draw the sad, drunk boy in your arms and assure him everything’s going to be okay and it doesn’t make sense except you see yourself in him and what is there really at the core of each of us, but an innate desire to hold the person we were ten or twenty years ago and tell them everything will be alright, eventually?
You do not reach out to hold him. Instead, you bite the inside of your cheek before answering, as softly as you can manage:
“It’s not who you are, Potter. You’re insufferable and infuriating but, when push comes to shove, you always stand up for yourself. You always stand up for what is right, and it’s something I’ve always admired, you know? People love you for that, Potter. Everyone’s always loved you for that. Not because you made them happy but because you made things right.”
Potter collapses entirely at the words, falling to his knees and burying his face in his hands. You stand awkwardly beside him as soft sobs escape his trembling form.
“What if no one ever loves me again? What if no one can ever love me again?”
He’s drunk and pathetic. You sit down next to him.
“What the fuck happened to you, Potter?” you wonder in a whisper because this is not who he’s supposed to be, is it? This is not what the saviour of the wizarding world is supposed to say.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he cries and cries and cries, and you? You sit awkwardly next to him, not quite touching him but not daring to move away either, and you stare at the sky, trying not to think of all those times when it was you crying uncontrollably for the fear of never being loved.
“Come on, Potter,” you finally say when the sobs recede. “You’re drunk. Let me bring you home, yeah?”
He nods and you sling your arm around his back to pull him up. He lets his head hang heavy on your shoulder and you slowly walk to the door that leads into the chalet’s cellar and up the steps until you’re standing at the door of his room.
“Thanks,” he says, not quite meeting your eye. He turns to open the door, then stops with one hand on the handle.
“Ask Luna,” he says so softly you almost don’t hear, “if you want to know what the fuck happened to me. She’ll tell you.”
Then he steps into his room, closing the door behind him, and you find yourself alone in an empty corridor.
You stalk back to the party and immediately start looking for Luna. You find her easily enough, with her head in Aurélie’s lap, waxing poetic about the rabbits in the moon.
“Luna, can I have a word?” you ask because there are people all around you and whatever happened to Potter, you think it’s something best told in private.
She stands up in a fluid motion and smiles. You lead her a short distance away before you speak.
“Tell me what happened to Potter.”
“I told you, Draco…” she starts, but something in your face must make her reconsider her answer. She stops, then sighs. “I’m not the one you should ask if you really want to know. It’s not my story to tell.”
“He said I should ask you, so I am. I want to know what happened.”
You’re a little too forceful than you really need to be. Luna’s nothing if not honest, and she’s a good friend, refusing to tell secrets that aren’t hers, but you’re shaken to your core by the way Potter cried, by the way his voice sounded like a bottomless well full of sadness. (By his near-tangible fear of never being loved again.)
“He was in a relationship,” Luna starts, her usually soft voice filling with steel and knives, “with the world’s biggest fucking arsehole.”
Your shock must show on your face because she pauses.
“I’m sorry, Draco, but it’s true. At first, we all thought he was wonderful but the more time passed, the more Harry seemed to doubt himself. The more the stories he told didn’t sit right with us. And… We all tried to tell him, but he seemed so in love, and we all found that voicing our concerns only ended in a fight every time… I guess we just let it go, after a while, you know? We loved him and we wanted him to be happy, but we also wanted to let him make his own choices for himself, especially after the war and… it wasn’t a good time, not for him and not for any of us. We all had to heal ourselves and maybe we should have looked out for him a bit more, but we couldn’t really find the strength.”
There is more regret on Luna’s face than you’ve ever seen there, and you reach out for her hand. She smiles when your fingers curl around hers, a soft sad thing of a smile. And she continues:
“As time went by, it seemed Harry never had time for us anymore. We’d use the Floo and write, but his answers were vague and… Hermione and Ron kept at it, but I guess the rest of us sort of took a step back, you know? It hurt being rejected time and time again and at this point, we’d all had countless rows with him about his boyfriend. I’m ashamed to say it felt like he was choosing him over us.”
She sighs, shuts her eyes tight and bites her lip. You squeeze her fingers a little tighter.
“In the end, it was Ginny he went to when it all went to shit. He kind of just showed up at her door with nothing but an overnight bag and announced they’d broken up. Over the next few weeks, he told her what he went through. It was bad, Draco. It was really bad. It was bad in only the way people you truly love can mess you up, you know? We all hoped he’d get better quickly at first, but he didn’t because you don’t just get better after you’ve spent years getting every last dreg of self-worth sucked out of you. So I suggested he come here. Because I’d seen what this place had done for you, and because his ex wouldn’t readily find him here if nothing else.”
That night, in the darkness of your room, you think and think and think about Luna’s words.
It makes a sad sort of sense, in the way mundane tragedies always do, but it also makes none at all because how can you win a war and lose yourself in the same breath?
Potter thanks you the next morning. Or perhaps he apologises, you can’t really tell. It is awkward, you’re both stumbling over words and neither of you wants to look the other in the eyes.
“Would you like to learn mountaineering?” you ask instead of saying something normal and sensible like it’s okay or you’re welcome or think nothing of it. “I could teach you if you wanted.”
“Yeah,” he replies, finally meeting your eye. “I think I’d like that.”
(This is how it starts.)
The first time the two of you go up into the mountain, you’re accompanying Luna to investigate a Demiguise sighting up the Grande Pointe des Planereuses.
When you make it to the top, she immediately busies herself with investigating rocks and cooing melodiously at those she deems most interesting. You sit a little distance away. Sweat is pearling on Potter’s brow, he’s not used to fast hikes yet, not used to the altitude perhaps but for the first time since he first pushed the door of the chalet, he looks alive.
“Tell me about the mountain,” he asks, and so you do. You talk about the way the mountains are older and more magical than anything else on earth, about the way they’ll feed on your magic if you’re not careful.
“This is why we have to hike all the way up,” you tell Potter as Gros-Jean once told you, years ago. “The chalet is pretty much the highest place you can still Apparate without too much risk.”
You cast a small spell to show him, just a small Lumos at the tip of your wand, but the stones under you immediately start vibrating with wild magic. Potter’s eyes grow wide.
“Fuck,” he says as he runs his hands over his face. You notice the way damp hair sticks to his brow and the way even now, his voice sounds a little breathless still. “Isn’t it dangerous, though? What you do? Rescuing people up here? Aren’t you afraid?”
You laugh because there are no words that could possibly make him understand all the conflicting ways you feel about the mountain.
“I’ve accepted I might die up here one day,” you tell him instead of giving him a proper answer. “It’s okay. It’s a beautiful place to die.”
He doesn’t answer, and you sit in silence for a little while. When you turn your head to look at him, he’s staring at the sharp ridges all around him with wonder in his eyes. You can tell he feels the same about the mountain as you did, the first time you came up here, and it fills you with all kinds of complicated emotions. It’s not that it’s not beautiful, this high up, but it’s an austere kind of beauty, it’s a kind of beauty that’s grey and sharp and hard rather than the lush fields of the valley or the green forests adorning the slopes down below. It’s not a beauty everyone can see, and you realise that you half expected him to turn his nose up at it.
He’s not the same boy you once knew, you think in the hallowed silence of the altitude as you stare at the glacier stretching its cold white mantle in front of you. He’s not the same he once was, and you don’t know him like you once did.
(If you dared, you’d think it might be a beautiful place for new beginnings.)
Summer turns to autumn with the first falling leaves of September. Autumn, it comes early this high up, and the larch trees paint the entire mountain in broad strokes of gold.
You don’t stop going for hikes with Potter. Sometimes, you’ll check up on reports of lost campers or forgotten gear. A rescue team from Martigny is covering for the work you used to do with Gros-Jean, the dangerous cases, but you do the small stuff. You rescue a couple of escaped calves, mend a shed and bring supplies to a refuge near the glacier d’Argentières.
Sometimes, though, you’ll just head out and walk in silence for hours, just so you can sit together in the wilderness. Sometimes you tell him about the mountains. More often than not, neither of you speaks.
You think about it, sometimes. About the way you’re content to just be quiet when neither of you ever did well on your own before. About the way you both sought company at all costs, back in school. About the way you always needed to exist in the eyes of someone else, afraid you would disappear entirely if there were no witnesses to your actions. You wonder if he was as starved for love as you were. You wonder why. And as you walk in silence together, it becomes more and more apparent to you that you might share more than you ever thought.
You can only hope the mountain will heal him in the same way it healed you.
The golden hues of autumn slowly fade away and the crisp frost starts covering the ground more and more often. Winter is a slow season for tourism here. Skiers prefer the stations on the other side of the mountains, Nendaz and Zermatt, where the slopes are more accessible and the nightlife more exciting. Aurélie moves back to Fribourg, as she always does in late September, to study magical law at the university there. In October, Gros-Jean and Maria return to their house in Orsières to spend the winter and suddenly, it’s just you and Potter there, keeping the chalet open and warm for the occasional cross-country skier.
The first snow falls in early November, coating everything in a thick coat of silence. You don’t think Potter’s ever really seen snow before, certainly not that much. You catch him outside the chalet, stomping in it like a child. He freezes when he notices you standing at the door, and an emotion you can’t quite name flitters across his face (fear, perhaps, or embarrassment).
“I’d never seen that much snow before I came here,” you tell him because whatever that feeling is, it makes you sick to your stomach. “Don’t ever tell Aurélie but I rolled in it like a puppy, the first year,” you add with a wink.
He laughs, and it sounds like a bird coming out of a cage.
“Want to make snow angels?” you ask him. “Here, I’ll show you,” you add before he’s had a chance to answer, and lay down in the snow.
By the time you make it back inside, wet and cold and entirely delighted, his laughter is still ringing in your ears. You have hot showers and hot cups of tea and sit by the fire, reading in silence for most of the evening.
Outside, in the snow, a dozen silent angels stand guard. As you stare through the window at the velvet darkness of night, you think about them.
The thing about winter up here is that it’s quiet. Snow falls, and falls, and falls without a sound until nature’s fast asleep under the thick blanket of it. The silence stretches on for days if you let it.
You’re used to the silence, but you notice Potter growing uneasy.
So you speak. You tell him inconsequential things: things like how Luna asked Aurélie out and how it took Aurélie three whole weeks to understand that’s what she was doing. Things like the fact the chamois population has steadily been growing stronger since you’ve arrived or the way some days, the whole valley’s covered in fog while you’re basking in the bright sunlight.
He listens, Potter, with his bright green eyes fixed on you, with a smile at the corner of his mouth. He’d let you talk for days, and if you weren’t so careful about it, you could get completely drunk on the feeling of having his undivided attention. Sometimes, you think he knows you’re doing it for him.
Sometimes, you’re grateful that he lets you.
You always knew you were attracted to boys.
There was never this oh moment in your life. Never a sudden realisation at age fourteen that this was the last missing puzzle piece in the landscape of your identity. You remember being six years old and thinking one day, you’d have a husband just like Mother. You remember being eight and telling Pansy you were going to marry Blaise because he gave you his best marble and you thought it was a sign.
In retrospect and considering how certain of it you’d always been, it is a little odd you never told your parents. You were glad of this, later, when you discovered this was yet another aspect of you that they would never approve of. Now, it just makes you question if you ever really trusted them in the first place.
It makes you question what in your childhood was real and what you embellished because you needed something to hold on to.
Sometimes, the things you talk about aren’t inconsequential at all.
This particular time, it starts in front of a roaring fire on a cold Tuesday morning. You’ve brought firewood in from the shed and there’s not much to be done for the rest of the day, so you’re both sitting in silence and staring at the dancing flames.
“It’s funny, the way silence doesn’t feel like emptiness with you,” Potter says, à propos nothing “Silence with Andrew, it always used to send me into fits of panic. Like I’d done something wrong, you know? I used to hate it so much.”
“Your ex?” you ask. It’s the first time he’s spoken about him at all, in all the months he’s been here.
“Yeah. Bit of a bastard if I’m honest.” Potter laughs. It sounds hollow and dry. “Used to stop speaking to me if I did the wrong thing or happened to exist in a way that displeased him. I think he took a sort of twisted pleasure watching me fret, watching me wonder if I’d done something wrong or if he was just tired.”
You try to come up with something to say to that, with something that would be compassionate and kind, with something that could infuse sense in the senseless tragedy of loving someone who was never made to be loved, someone who didn’t know how to love back.
“He broke up with me, you know?” Potter continues before you can find any words worth pushing off your tongue. You turn your head. He’s still staring intently at the flames and not moving at all. “For all I’m well aware he was an arsehole, I’d never have left him on my own. I loved him, Malfoy. I loved him so much.”
“Did he love you?” you ask because that’s the crux of things, isn’t it? Because you’ve spent years and years loving people whose love for you was conditional at best and you know loving someone is not enough.
Potter laughs at that and it sounds like an earthquake rupturing his chest in half.
“Everyone else tiptoes around me so much, but you go straight for the throat, don’t you?”
For an instant, the fear you’ve gone and said the wrong thing pools like ice water in your chest, but before you can apologise, Potter continues:
“But you’re right, it’s a good question. And no, I don’t think he ever loved me at all. I would have said he did, you know? Even a few months back, I’d have said he did. I’m not so sure now. How can you love someone and make them suffer so much? How can you love someone and never make a single compromise? Maybe all he ever loved about me was how vulnerable I was, how desperate to be loved.”
“Vulnerable? Potter, you won an entire war all by yourself! Who the fuck would ever describe you as vulnerable?”
He smiles at you, and there is pain behind his eyes.
“Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? I was a mess when Andrew found me, Malfoy. A complete mess. I guess that happens when you watch everyone who ever loved you die before you’re even properly an adult.”
You stare at the ceiling. It leaves deep gauges inside your chest that never scar quite right, the war. You know that better than anyone.
“I thought he was the one, at first. I thought he saved me. I was so sad, and he made me laugh and it felt… real. In a world where everything had gone so wrong that it needed a fucking seventeen-year-old kid to give up his life to save everyone, he made me feel normal.”
“Nothing about the world we live in is normal,” you whisper. “Maybe it’ll be, for future generations, for the kids who were too young to really understand the shit we went through. But not for us.”
Potter nods.
“It’s so hard to accept, though. You never really think about the possibility your entire life will be completely ruined by trauma by the time you’re twenty. And Andrew made me feel like I’d imagined it all—the war, the fear, Voldemort. Like it wasn’t all that important. He made me feel like I could have a mundane, normal, boring life if I stopped overreacting for a second. Like I could be happy eventually.”
“You’re not overreacting,” you say because you were there and he’s not, he’s really not.
“I know, but I… wanted to feel normal. Then, the mind games started. He’d tell me I couldn’t trust my own emotions, that I was the one hurting him, that I was making things up. And I knew it was wrong, at the start, but I was chasing that high of feeling normal again, so I didn’t leave and then it was too late.”
Potter pauses to run a hand through his hair. You don’t dare say anything at all.
“I was so unhappy with him,” he continues. “That’s the fucked up thing, Malfoy. I was the most miserable I’d ever been in my life, and still, I stayed. Because I kept hoping he’d make me feel normal again. Because I kept hoping he’d make me happy. I kept hoping I’d stop being all wrong, that he would love me for who I was and that he’d make me happy.”
“Then, you forgot what was real in the first place,” you say because you’ve been there too, in a way. Because, you let yourself forget reality too, in the desperate hope that it might please your parents. “You forgot how to trust yourself.”
“Yeah,” Potter says after a little bit. “Yeah, it was exactly like that, actually. And that might be the hardest part of it all, learning how to trust myself again.”
A few days later, you find yourself telling Potter about the war. You don’t know what compels you to spill out every dark emotion you’ve always kept hidden inside your chest. Perhaps the way his face shone with pain when he told you about Andrew. Perhaps the fact he trusted you with it all.
Sitting down at the kitchen table with empty plates in front of you and a cup of hot coffee in your hands, you tell him about the fear, about the way Voldemort brought death and destruction to your doorstep, about how betrayed you felt by the fact your parents welcomed him in.
You talk and talk and talk. You tell him about the way you’d wake up with stress headaches every morning from grinding your teeth all night. You tell him about the way you were terrified your heart would stop from all the pressure, about all the times you thought it did and it turned out you were having panic attacks in the middle of the school day instead.
Then, you tell him all the things you’ve never told anyone. You tell him about all the times you laid in bed at night and wished for death. You tell him about the fact you were always too much of a coward to do anything about it.
You tell him about the Muggle girl in the too-large jumper, the one that was your age and that your father killed.
When you’re done talking, your coffee’s cold and half-filled with tears, and Potter hasn’t said a word. Silence fills the room.
“I’m glad you’re still here, Malfoy,” he says after a while. “There’s no right side to a war, and there’s no way of making it through unscathed and… I hated you for most of it because I thought you had everything I wanted. But I don’t hate you anymore. I’m glad we’re here together now. I’m glad we can learn how to be human together again.”
His words mend something or break something deep inside your chest.
Potter’s aunt dies on the third of December. It’s Potter’s old neighbour, Mrs Figg, who tells him the news and by the time the international owl network finds him, it’s two weeks later already.
You can tell that something bad happened as soon as he starts reading the letter. The brightness that lives in his face these days disappears entirely as he parses the handful of short lines and you find you want to hold him until it comes back.
“My aunt just died,” he announces before you get a proper chance to examine that last thought.
He’s holding a newspaper clipping between his fingers and you notice they’re trembling slightly. He’s looking at you, or at a point right behind you, and there’s an alarming sort of emptiness to his gaze.
“They locked me in a cupboard, you know?” he asks, still staring intently right through your chest.
“I’m sorry, what?” you answer because, surely, you must have heard wrong.
“My aunt and uncle. They used to lock me in a cupboard, back when I lived with them. There was a spare room, mind you, I could have slept there but they didn’t think I deserved a room of my own. They didn’t think I deserved to exist, to be honest.”
“Shit,” you say because you never knew. You knew Potter had been raised by his aunt and uncle, of course, that was common knowledge in the media frenzy around him during the war but you always imagined he’d grown up loved and adored. (You’ll wonder later, how much of that was jealousy and bitterness at the fact you didn’t, but in the moment, the shock of the revelation is all you can think about.)
“Yeah, it was a bit shit, to be honest. It was more than a bit shit. Hermione keeps telling me it was abusive, and I know that, intellectually. But I thought I deserved it at the time, and looking back, I keep thinking it wasn’t that bad. The thing is, it fucks you up, growing up like that. Growing up believing you’re worthless. Makes it really hard to ever really love yourself or to believe you might deserve to be loved.”
“Fuck, Potter, you’re worth so much,” your mouth utters before you can stop the treacherous thing. “You’re smart and you’re funny and you’re kind, even I can see that and I spent half my life hating you. Anyone would be lucky to catch your attention.”
You take a deep breath. Potter’s dark eyelashes flutter over his green eyes, his face turned towards you like he’s a sunflower and you’re the sun. You could kiss him. The thought crosses your mind unprompted. You could kiss him. There’s something deep inside your belly that churns at the idea.
“I’m still sad she’s dead, though. She hated everything I was, she never even once hugged me—and I’m still grieving her death like it matters to me.”
You don’t kiss him. You pull him into your arms instead, and you let him sob quietly.
“She was still part of your life. She was the person you were always told you had to love. It’s okay not to be entirely detached from that. It’s okay to grieve her,” you tell him softly. “It’s okay to grieve the possibility of ever reconnecting with her or having her apologise or having her love you. And even if there’s no world in which this would ever have happened, it’s still a loss. You still have to grieve for that and make your peace with a past that’s not what you wish it was.”
Potter sobs harder at that, and you stroke his hair softly. There is fog on the single-pane windows, turning the ink-black night outside a softer shade of grey. Thank Merlin for weather-proofing charms, you think dimly. Potter is a warm weight against your chest.
“I’m so ashamed of it, Draco,” he says into your jumper, in a muffled, wet voice. “Of the way I wasn’t loved. Of the way everyone else had a proper fucking childhood and I wasn’t good enough for even basic decency. Whenever I think about it, it always boils down to this, you know? It always boils down to had I been different, and had I been better, and had I been worth it.”
“Don’t,” you say. “Don’t. It’s not you. It was never you. You deserve everything, Potter. You deserve everything.”
He tells you then, with broken words, everything he went through. The plum-coloured bruises, the starvation, the cupboard under the stairs. It makes you want to scream, hearing about it. It makes you want to punch a wall or turn your skin inside out because it’s not right. It’s not right that he had to grow up like that, and it’s not right that he can’t see how lovable he is. But you can tell he needs to talk, and so you keep softly stroking his hair and telling him at every turn: “It was not you. You’re lovable. You deserve everything.”
“Stay,” he begs of you when all the words have been said and his body grows slack against yours. “I can’t be alone tonight.”
“Yes,” you promise.
(You don’t tell him that you would stay with him until the end of the world. You don’t even let yourself think it. It doesn’t make it any less true.)
That night, you fall asleep in the same bed, curled around each other like fawns.
After the war, you promised yourself you wouldn’t ever fall in love. It seemed like a good idea, at the time: you were afraid love might destroy you, with how much you craved it. You were afraid you would lose yourself entirely in the person your lover thought you were or wanted you to be.
Over the years, it was an easy promise to keep. There weren’t a lot of people for you to meet, up here, no one permanent anyway. You’d flirt with a tourist, now and then. Once or twice, you’d let them take you back to their room, you’d let them fuck you, but it was only ever a one-night kind of deal, and you never wanted anything more in the morning. You told yourself it was good enough. You told yourself it was the best you could ever hope for.
It was a hollow sort of life, of course. You couldn’t pretend it didn’t feel like there was a piece missing at the heart of you, right in the centre of your chest, but it didn’t hurt, not in the way rejection might. And you were entirely in control. There was comfort in that too.
The next morning, you’re woken up by cool light filtering through the windows and the sound of the front door opening. Behind you, on the bed, Potter is still sleeping soundly.
You stand up, as quietly as you can manage, and pull on your woollen jumper before making your way downstairs.
“Hello-o?” comes a familiar voice from the main room.
“Luna,” you exclaim as you pass the doorway. “We weren’t expecting you so soon!”
“Oh, I know, but I got reports that the Demiguise population had been more active than usual lately, and anyway Aurélie and I were planning to spend Christmas with you guys, so I thought I’d come in a little early.”
She gives you a tight hug, and you’re happy to see her, of course you are, but you can’t help but wonder what would have happened, had you and Potter woken up on that bed together, had you been alone in this lone chalet in the middle of winter for another day or another week.
With Luna here, the dynamics of you and Harry change. You have long, laughter-filled meals at the communal table all three of you, and Harry’s beautiful in all the ways Harry has always been beautiful, but he’s no longer entirely yours, or entirely soft. You swallow your disappointment down and tell yourself it’s for the best. In Luna’s presence, it’s easier to resist wanting to kiss him or thinking about kissing him or believing you could do it.
Almost immediately, you notice Harry’s more at ease with Luna than he was at the end of the summer. He teases her gently over her choice of earrings or over the fact the Quibbler’s most recent edition was printed entirely upside down, or over the fact she apparently gifted Hermione and Ron’s two-year-old daughter with a pet troll that the Ministry confiscated in less than two days.
“Sometimes, I think you’re worse than Hagrid,” he tells her one evening, laughing as he gently pushes her shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Maybe everyone who works with magical creatures turns a bit bonkers after a while. Maybe you need to interact with humans every so often to keep your brain cells intact!”
“Trolls are very sensitive creatures, I will have you know,” she defends herself between peals of laughter. “Besides, I figured her parents were plenty able to take all the steps to keep her safe in case of emergency, seeing the Ministry did its job so well we literally had a troll in our school when we were eleven!”
You watch them from your armchair near the fire with an open book in your lap. They’re not paying any attention to you, but it seems like you’re always watching Harry these days. It warms you to see him like that, comfortable in the knowledge his friends love him. He’s learning to be himself again.
And it’s a good thing, of course it is. It’s a step to him being happier and Merlin knows he deserves all the happiness in the world. The only problem with it, really, is that the more himself he is and the more you fear you might fall for him if you’re not careful.
You tell him about your parents almost by accident.
You’re in the middle of doing the dishes after supper, and in the space between drying plates and glasses and forks, you tell him:
“I don’t think my parents loved me either.”
You don’t know where the words come from. Perhaps they’d been niggling at the back of your mind ever since he told you about his own upbringing. Perhaps they’ve always been burning at your lips, waiting until you found someone you trusted enough to spill them out.
He stops, hands immersed in soapy water. You always do the dishes the Muggle way here. You’ve learned not to rely on your magic too much, and you think he enjoys the physicality of it. Soap and wet hands and feeling the smooth ceramic under his fingers.
“They didn’t abuse me,” you continue, cheeks ablaze with shame because you’ve never said that to anyone, not out loud, “I had a room and toys and nice clothes. But they didn’t love me. Not unless I was the person they wanted me to be.”
“That’s not right,” he says as he resumes scrubbing the salad dish.
“My father stopped speaking to me after I went to Hogwarts. I kept trying and trying and trying to be good enough for him, to be popular and clever, to make him happy. Then, I failed to kill Dumbledore and he wouldn’t even look at me. Whenever we were in the same room, it was like I wasn’t there.”
“Shit, Malfoy, I always thought…”
“Of course, we had to keep up appearances. That’s what hurt the most, the way whenever someone important was watching, he’d pretend he was proud of me. Like he was ashamed of the failure I was too and he didn’t want the whole world to know.”
Potter passes you the dish and wipes his hands on his jeans. You hold the dish in one hand, the dishrag in the other. You don’t dry it. Instead, you tell him about the way you were always told to be strong, to be resourceful, to be brave—and how that meant you weren’t ever allowed to be scared or weak and want cuddles because you had a nightmare. You tell him about the way everything in your entire life always felt like a test—what you liked, what you said, who you wanted to be friends with, how you interacted with others—and about the way you always seemed to fail. About the way you were never good enough.
He takes the dish from your hand, at some point in your diatribe, and dries it himself. Then, he listens, standing in the kitchen, for as long as you need to talk.
When you’re finally done, he cups your cheeks with his hands.
“I know it’s bloody hypocritical for me to be telling you this, with the breakdown I had the other day and how little I believe I can be loved myself but—Draco, Draco listen to me. You’re one of the best people I’ve ever met. I don’t care if they can't see it, because I can. And if there’s anyone in this world who deserves to be loved, Draco, if there’s anyone at all—it’s you.”
The words punch your breath clean out of your lungs. You could kiss him, you think again, and as you gaze into his eyes, you think he might be thinking it too. His hand is still on your cheek, and you think you might catch fire at the touch.
“Harry,” you say, because it seems useless calling the man Potter now, not when you’ve spilled your deepest darkest secrets to him. Not when you’ve been craving to hear him call you Draco again.
“Draco,” he answers in a breathy sort of voice, and you can feel desire radiating from him too.
“Harry,” Luna’s voice comes from the main room, “can I borrow your large backpack for the afternoon?”
And the moment is over.
Telling Harry about your parents, it opens all the floodgates of feelings in your chest. All you can think about afterwards is him. His soft skin. His lovely voice. The way he smells and moves.
The way he’d look naked in your bed. The way he’d move against you.
You pretend it’s any use resisting at all. You pretend you can escape it.
It lasts all of four days until you admit to yourself you’re in love with him.
It lasts another week until you admit that you want to see where those feelings lead you. You’d take all the risks for pain and rejection that come with a relationship in a heartbeat given the choice.
Everything’s a catastrophe after that, and you let yourself love him with reckless abandon, falling deeper and deeper in love like a cave diver, with all the trepidation of discovering something beautiful and all the disregard for how lethal this could very well prove.
You do not tell him you love him.
Instead, you take him out cross-country skiing and as you both make your way across the thick, glittering carpet of snow laid at your feet, you tell him about avalanches.
“They’re deadly,” you say. “Snow like this, it’ll fissure under its own weight given half a chance. Listen. Can you hear that? This ancient echo? The odd cracking sounds behind it? This entire slope is unstable and if you were to step on it, it’d come crashing down.”
You witness avalanches, sometimes, across the mountains. Small harmless ones. Bigger ones that you fear might stretch all the way down to the handful of chalets strewn in the alpine pastures below you, where grass still grows in summer and farmers bring their cows to spend the summer. When it happens, you point out all the avalanche-dwelling creatures to him.
“Can you feel this low, steady hum of magic?” you ask after you witness a particularly large slab of snow detach itself from the mountainside and come rolling down in a deadly cloud of white and cold. “That’s a sure sign there’s a healthy ice hare population here. They mate and give birth in burrows created by the tightly packed snow at the bottom of the avalanche. By the time the snow melts, in April, their young will be old enough to fend for themselves.”
You do not tell him you love him, but you whisper to him all the secrets of the mountain and hope he figures it out anyway.
Luna leaves on an observation trip right before Christmas. She knows the mountain well and she’s got the very best mountaineering gear Galleons can buy, thanks to that university funding of hers, but you still worry.
You worry that she’ll die up there, that she’ll do too much magic, cast too many Warming Charms and wake up the ancient force that sleeps at the heart of the mountains. You worry she’ll slip and fall into a crevice or break her neck.
(You worry that your life will be turned entirely upside down the minute you’re left alone with Harry, because you don’t think you’ll ever be able to refrain from kissing him if given half a chance.)
Harry’s ex shows up at your door the day after Luna leaves.
He’s charming and apologetic and just like that, your life is turned upside down for all the wrong reasons.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells Harry in a broad American accent, smooth as polished stone and sweet as honey. “You deserved so much better than the person I was, baby, but it was a bad time for both of us, and if you could just give me another chance, I swear it’d be different this time.”
(Despite the fact you’re widely experienced with hate, you hate him more than you thought you could ever hate anyone.)
“No,” Harry says, but you hear the yes hiding just behind his teeth by the way he holds himself and by the way he looks at the man and by the way he doesn’t slam the door in his face.
“Can I at least stay here for a bit?” Andrew asks. “That’s all I ask, Harry. You don’t need to take me back, you don’t need to listen to me. I came all this way for you, and all I ask is that you let me sleep here. Just one night, okay? Just one. And if you still want me gone in the morning, I’ll go.”
“Okay,” Harry says and your heart shatters into a million sharp splinters inside your chest.
You decided that it didn’t matter that your parents kept being disappointed in everything you were, once. You were sixteen then, filled with teenage rebellion and sick to your stomach of carrying the shame of never being good enough everywhere you went. It lasted for less than a month.
Your mother appeared in your Floo first, after you’d had no contact with her for over a week. “Don’t be childish, Draco,” she said. “You’re too old for tantrums, it’s embarrassing.”
When this failed to coax a reaction out of you, it was your father’s turn. “You’ve upset your mother terribly, Draco,” he said. “You’ve been very selfish don’t you think?”
When that didn’t work, he arranged for you to go home to the Manor for a weekend. Hogwarts didn’t give permission very often, and you knew he must have pulled some strings to have you there. He Apparated to the edge of the Hogwarts grounds himself to meet you, calling you “his boy” and asking you how you were.
You were allowed to sit in on your father’s business meetings, that weekend. “One day, you’ll be in charge of it all,” he told you, clasping you on the shoulder. “Everything I’m doing now, I’m doing for you, Draco. I hope you know that.” When you left, your anger had dissipated. They loved you, you decided. They just didn’t always know how to show it. You felt guilty for not having realised it before.
You took the mark less than a month later.
The next day, Andrew keeps his promise and doesn’t ask Harry to give him another chance. He also doesn’t leave.
You hate the way Harry is when he’s around: sitting pretty and silent as a doll, entirely lifeless. You hate the way his laughter doesn’t go all the way to his eyes anymore, you hate the way he won’t look at you. You hate the way you head out into the mountain alone that day, for the first time in months.
Still, Harry will not tell Andrew to leave. Still, Andrew sits at your table, touching Harry’s arms and hands and shoulders, telling you loudly about how great Harry is, how funny his jokes are, or how well he’s cooked dinner tonight.
(It’s not me who needs to realise that, you want to scream. I’m not the one who had the incredible good luck to have this wonderful man to myself and bollocksed it up by being a phenomenal arsehole.)
You don’t say anything. Harry doesn’t ask him to leave. One night turns into two, turns into three, turns into a week then another. Soon, it’s the day before Christmas Eve and that’s when Andrew starts begging Harry to come home with him.
They’re outside, in front of the chalet, and you’re quite certain Andrew thinks he can’t be heard, but the windows to your room are open, and so you hear them all the same.
“My parents will be so disappointed if they don’t see you,” Andrew says. “You know how they love you.”
“We’re not together, Andrew,” Harry’s answers, his beautiful voice lifeless and flat. “It’s been six months, surely you’ve told them.”
“Look, I couldn’t, okay? They love you, and I always knew we’d find our way back to each other, and it didn’t make sense for me to tell them.”
“You’re unbelievable, Andrew. You broke up with me, remember?”
The words are spoken through Harry’s teeth, but there’s no edge to them. No real anger. He’s a mouse, you think, caught in Andrew’s twisted cat game. Waiting to be devoured.
“I know baby, and that was a mistake, okay? But what else are you going to do? Stay here with him in the middle of nowhere? Darling, there’s nothing but snow here, you can’t possibly find it interesting. And I’ve seen his face before, wasn’t he a Death Eater or something during that war of yours? Do you really think it’s doing your mental health any good? Being with him all the time, remembering it all instead of moving on? Besides, are you sure he’s trustworthy? I don’t like him, and I certainly don’t like knowing you all alone with him.”
The words lodge themselves in your heart like a bullet.
You’d almost forgotten. Almost forgotten you’d never be good enough for Harry, almost forgotten you have to wear your sins around your neck like a stone, almost forgotten you’d never be entirely free of the past.
You close the window.
That evening, you don’t go down to the main room for supper.
(“It’s just a headache,” you tell Harry when he knocks on your door. You don’t tell him to come inside. You don’t think you could stomach seeing him.)
You don’t leave your bed until noon, the next day. Still, you hear the muffled sounds of their conversation.
“I can’t live without you, Harry,” Andrew whines. “You have no idea how hard those few months were for me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t come home.”
You can’t make out Harry’s answer. You half hope he leaves with him because then you’ll never have to look into his face again and remember that you’re desperately in love with him. You half hope they leave you here alone to nurse your broken heart and rebuild yourself from all the shattered pieces of wanting something you can never have.
“No one loves you like I love you, Harry. No one ever will. I love every part of you, I love all your flaws, everything. I’ll love you when you’re old and grey still, you know? I’ll love you despite everything.”
You’d want to punch the wall or Andrew’s face if you didn’t feel so entirely empty. You cover your ears instead, and everything is silent. You close your eyes and try very hard not to cry.
When you open your eyes again, you’re face to face with Luna’s hare Patronus, hopping wildly across your room. You jump to your feet.
“Are you okay?” you ask the hare. You know she’s not, not if she sent you a Patronus. You pull a jumper over your head and run down the stairs.
Harry and Andrew both stare at you.
“I’m going,” you say. “Luna’s in trouble. Harry, you know where the key is if you need to lock after yourself,” you tell them as you all but run through the room and pull on your hiking boots.
“I’m coming.”
Harry’s voice is firm. Loud. You look at him.
“But Harry...” Andrew starts.
“My friend’s in trouble, Andrew. And I’m not about to let Draco face all the dangers of the mountain alone, not with all the snow that’s been falling down these past few days. You’re welcome to wait for me here if you like, but I am going.”
You grab your skis and pack a makeshift bag while he gets dressed for the hike. The hare is hopping in circles around your feet, nudging the back of your legs with his head and beckoning you towards the door.
When you walk out, Harry follows without even as much as throwing a look behind him, and soon you’re making your way through the vast expanses of white.
The trek is gruelling, the snow is deep and the slope is steep, and even though you’re both out of breath, neither of you wants to slow down. You let Harry take the lead when you get too tired and follow in the traces left by his skis. He’s beautiful, in the midday sun, surrounded by nature. In your head, Andrew’s words keep echoing. No one loves you like I love you. No one ever will.
“I love you,” you tell Harry halfway up a particularly arduous slope. “I just want you to know. I’m in love with you, I’ve been for months.”
Your voice rings so loud in the silence that you fear the weight of your confession will trigger an avalanche and that you’ll both be swallowed whole by the snow.
“Draco...” Harry starts. He sounds breathless, and you can’t tell if it’s your words or the physical effort that knocked all the air out of him.
“Don’t,” you beg him. “Not now. Let’s save Luna, okay? Let’s save Luna first.”
“Yeah,” Harry answers. “Okay, yeah.”
And you continue your climb in silence.
You find Luna near the summit of the Mont Dolent. As soon as you spot her, the vice-grasp of fear eases on your heart. There’s no wild magic and she’s sitting up. She’s not dead, no matter how injured, she’s not dead.
Her Patronus runs to her and she lifts her head, waving with both her arms when she notices you.
“Quiet,” she tells you as you approach. “Take off your skis.”
She doesn’t look injured at all, though she keeps staring at the snow in front of her.
“Are you okay, Luna?” Harry asks. “Are you hurt? What happened?”
“Look,” she says and holds up a tiny white thing in the palm of her hand. “The Demiguise! They’ve given birth.”
Something flickers into visibility on her lap. “They’re friends,” she tells it. “Don’t worry, they’re friends. See? They’re coming to meet your babies.”
You sit in the snow and stare at the five tiny beings nested in the snow in front of her. The mother rubs herself against Luna’s leg and, for a while, neither of you moves.
Harry is the first to speak.
“We thought you were injured,” he tells Luna. “We were so worried.”
“Didn’t my Patronus tell you what was going on?” she asks, a serious look on her face.
“It didn’t speak,” you answer. “Must have gotten mangled by the magic of the mountain somehow. It’s okay. I’m just happy you’re okay, and I’m glad I got to witness that too. It’s quite incredible, isn’t it?”
“The first live birth ever observed,” Luna tells you proudly. “Oh, it is so exciting! It took me days to win their trust, but it’s been entirely worth it. There are so many things I can’t wait to share with the magizoological community!”
Harry asks about the birth. You ask if she can finally solve the mystery of whether these Demiguise are a different genus. Luna talks and talks and talks with light shining behind her eyes. Soon the sky grows dark and the Demiguise mother whisks all her babies back to her underground burrow.
You help Luna pack her tent and slowly make your way down the slope, all three of you, lighting the way with headlamps and torches. The night sky is beautiful and clear and dotted with stars, and for the first time since it happened, you let yourself think about the way you told Harry you loved him. You thought you’d be overwhelmed by shame or embarrassment; you’re filled with an odd kind of peace instead. You don’t really know what to make of it.
When you arrive in front of the chalet, Luna immediately Apparates to Geneva.
“Tell Aurélie I’ll be here tonight, I just need to put a few memories in my work Pensieve while they’re still fresh!” she tells you, and just like that, she’s gone with a crack.
Harry turns towards you.
“Draco,” he says, then stops.
“Look,” you tell him. “It’s okay if you don’t love me back. It’s okay. I understand. You’re allowed to make your own choices. It’s just… I couldn’t let you think no one would ever love you but him. Not when I’m so in love with you.”
Harry’s silent for a long time. You realise he’s crying when you notice his shoulders shake.
“Harry… Are you okay?”
He answers something muffled and wet that you can’t quite make out.
“Can I hug you?” you ask softly, fearing that he might not want to be touched by you but not quite knowing what else to do. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, I just really want to hold you right now.”
He throws his arms around you and buries his head in your neck. You hold him tight against you.
“It’s okay, Harry,” you soothe. “Whatever you’re thinking. It’s okay. I’m here if you need me.”
“I’m afraid,” he tells you in a voice broken by sobs. “I’m so afraid. I have no idea why you love me, Draco. You’re so wonderful and open and I think I might be in love with you too, but I have no idea why you love me.”
You feel something grow and bloom inside your chest at the words, like spring bringing the mountainside to life in April, like every flower at once dotting the pastures in soft whites and yellows and pinks. He loves you, that wonderful man. You’re holding him against you and he loves you.
“Harry,” you whisper. “Oh, Harry, Harry…”
“I know why Andrew loves me. I know I’m useful to him. I know I have to deserve his love but, Draco—I’ve done nothing to deserve yours. All you’ve done since I arrived here is give and give and give and there’s nothing of worth that I could possibly offer you in return.”
“You don’t need to deserve my love, Harry,” you assure him. “You’re enough, everything you are is enough. My love is yours, if you want it, for however long you want it.”
He holds you tighter. Whispers your name in your ear, and it takes all your strength to continue:
“All I ask of you is not to take it unless you’re certain it’s me you want. Please, Harry. It’s okay if you want to take your time. I just don’t think I could stand you going back to Andrew in two weeks or two months.”
Harry stands up straighter at the words, and pushes you away gently, still holding you by the shoulder.
“You’re right,” he says, his voice firm all of a sudden. “I’ve got to make this right.”
He turns around and walks through the door, leaving you alone outside to stare at the sky.
When you finally make it inside, he’s nowhere to be seen. Aurélie’s in the main room, a mug of hot chocolate in her hand and ridiculous deer antlers on her head.
You hear the muffled sound of someone yelling behind a closed door.
“He told Sergeant Arsewipe to follow him,” she tells you. “They’ve been yelling ever since.”
The look on your face must be something to behold because she giggles.
“Luna calls him that,” she continues. “Anyway, would you like hot chocolate while we wait for this mistake of a human to get the fuck out of our home?”
“Yeah.” You nod. “Yeah.”
She brings you a cup and sits with you, and you feel oddly at peace, knowing you’re not alone. No matter what happens next, you’re not alone. You’ll never be again. You’ve got her, and you’ve got Luna, and you’ve got all your friends here. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.
“You’d be good for him, you know,” she says after a while.
You almost choke.
“Oh please, everyone noticed. Well, Luna did and told me. But you’d be good for each other, I think. He’s changed so much since he started spending time with you. You did too, you know. He sparked a kind of joy I’ve never seen in you before.”
You sigh.
“I love him, Aurélie, but I will not force him to love me. This is a choice he’s got to make for himself.”
Eventually, Andrew slams the door open and stalks through the corridor. When he makes it into the main room, he Apparates without a word to you or to Aurélie.
You look at each other in silence. She gets up with a smile.
“I’ll go do the dishes or something,” she whispers and winks.
A few minutes later, Harry walks in.
“Come outside?” he asks you. You follow him with trembling hands and a trembling heart, your fingers fumbling as you try to put your boots on. You hardly dare look at him, hardly dare breathe or speak.
As soon as the door closes behind you, he takes your face in his hands. They’re warm and calloused and you think your heart might give out.
“Draco,” he whispers.
Then, his mouth is on yours, and he’s kissing you. It feels better than any sensation has a right to, this kiss, and you kiss back, passionately, feverishly.
“Harry,” you moan against his lips, “Harry.”
He deepens the kiss, holding you tighter, and in this instant, nothing else exists but you and him and this kiss. You forget about the cold December air. You forget about your fears, and your past, and the feeling of being entirely wrong that has stuck to you like a shadow for as long as you can remember. You only remember that you love him, that you want him, and that you can have this. You can have him. Finally, finally, you can have him because he chose you.
“I’m sorry I made you wait,” he tells you when you finally break apart. “I’m sorry I made you come outside. It’s just… It’s the first real choice I’ve made in forever, and I wanted the mountains to witness it. Our first kiss. I wanted them to know.”
“I love you,” you laugh against his lips. “I would have waited an entire lifetime if it meant getting to kiss you like this.”
“I love you too,” he answers.
And for the first time in your life, you do not doubt it is true.