#maybe it does

Howdy

she was delicious

HHHEEELP MEEE!

Eddie spent his Thursday day off with a pair of hands gently tilting his chin and smoothing over his skin. They were significantly smaller and softer than the last pair of hands that had held his face, and they belonged to a bedroom that was very much all kinds of pink.

Chrissy was leaning in close, the tip of her tongue poking out in concentration as she carefully tested a new eyeliner on him.

"Ohhh, I actually think this aqua green looks so cute on you!" she whispered excitedly, pulling back just a fraction to admire her work. "I think it’s the best colored liner we’ve tried so far, Eddie!"

Eddie blindly reached a hand out, patting the mattress to find the hand mirror she had discarded. "Alright, lemme see—"

"No, no, not yet!" Chrissy scolded lightly, swatting his hand away. "I need to see how the eyeshadow looks on the other side first, ‘cause I think silver is going to pop way better than the yellow on your eyes."

Eddie let his head fall back against her fluffy pillows with a dramatic groan. "Woman, for the love of God."

"I'm serious, hold still! It’s gonna be super quick," she promised, already digging into a glittery palette.

Eddie just sighed and let her poke at his eyelid again. It felt entirely impossible to say no to anything Christina Cunningham asked of him. She was an unpredictable well of freakiness and crazy ideas, all wrapped up in a genuinely sweet, most caring heart. Eddie loved the friendship they had managed to rekindle now that they were adults navigating a whole different city together. Back in middle school, he’d genuinely thought the overwhelming affection he felt for her was a romantic crush. A theory that was entirely debunked after their first and only awkward, toothy kiss in the seventh grade. It wasn’t long after that when he realized that no, he was just gay as fuck, and she was his lesbian bestie.

A few people at the bar or around campus always assumed they were together and they never really bothered to deny it, but the only thing they actually shared was an unshakeable complicity, and, apparently, Eddie’s face, which Chrissy had claimed as her personal canvas for testing out new makeup combinations. “You just have the face for it, Eddie, I swear” she’d argued once, and this had become part of their routine. 

Sometimes, Jeff and Ronnie would join them, crowding into the small pink bedroom, though Ronnie usually ended up ignoring the makeup in favor of playing with Satan Margareth, Chrissy’s cat, ancient, massive, fluffy and lazy Ragdoll. She was currently sprawled out at the foot of the bed, in one of her diva poses. 

let's all ignore that this is triple the length I planned it to be... enjoy!

Later, there will be words about the how's and the why's. About the creaks and echoes haunting the halls of the Malfoy Manor. About Narcissa's overbearing tendencies, overindulgence in too-old elven wine, and thinning temper. About people who packed their suitcases as soon as the borders opened and left with scarcely a goodbye.

Later, Harry will be in the mood for interrogations.

But now, there's only Draco Malfoy in creased slacks, an unbuttoned silk pyjama top and a too-short travelling cloak standing in the middle of Harry Potter's kitchen at four in the morning. There's only Harry Potter, bleary-eyed, in nothing but boxers, woken up only five minutes ago by a breach in his wards that was unfamiliar but, somehow, not quite hostile. There's only the crack in Malfoy's voice when he says that he just… had to leave, that he "didn't know where else to go".

Later, after Malfoy will already have collapsed in the only guest-friendly guest room Grimmauld has to offer, Harry will curse the War for leaving all of them so adrift, and Voldemort for marking kids, and Lucius for not running away before his stupid son got involved in the whole thing. He'll curse the press for forcing him to hide behind ancient wards instead of moving to someplace normal, and the wards for being Black wards and not kicking Malfoy off his property before he even got the chance to knock—because now he had another mess to deal with. He'll curse his saving-people-thing for stopping him from refusing to deal with it. He'll curse Malfoy's unbuttoned silk pyjama top for letting Harry see the criss-crossed pattern of scars on his chest—left there by yours truly.

Later, Harry will have to force himself to consider the logistics of this.

But now, even though he knows it's probably not one of his better ideas, Harry summons an old quidditch sweater with a flick of his hand, tosses it at the tosser in front of him — Draco puts it on without complaint even though it's red and garish and so very Gryffindor — and goes about making some coffee, because neither of them are going back to sleep.

Later, they'll talk.

But now, morning breaks cold over Grimmauld in a compromise of a silence.