[ the boys try to clarify confusion. ⋆˚꩜｡⋆ | or: seventh year, on the run, & harry’s realizing that something about this scene doesn’t seem quite right. | for the @drarrymicrofic february prompt: fair ⋆˙⟡ ]
drarry | word count: 777 | rating: t
“Listen to me,” Draco seethes, pale fingers wrenching the collar of his shirt. The stitches protest, stretched along the seam, digging just above his shoulders, at the sinewy line of his spine.
“I don’t care about your sad, stupid Muggle childhood or the fact you’ve lost people you care about.”
His eyes are glinting, the grey of them sharpened to steel. He keeps talking, words spilling into the space between them, which has gone warbly in the way of a Pensieve memory.
“I couldn’t give a Hippogriff’s arse that you’re hungry or cold or lonely. You’re going to survive this because you have a job to do, Potter. So get up.”
“It isn’t fair,” Harry finds himself murmuring, in spite of careful months of obfuscation, of passive emotions that mask themselves as something more dutiful. Honor, valor, courage. He’ll grant permission for the slip— he’s half-dazed and far away from himself.
He reaches for Draco’s wrist, to pull it from the fabric at his throat, but his own arm is heavy. He glances at it and realizes, the scene tipping sideways, that he’s flat on the ground, realizes he’s covered in mud.
He can feel it now— sucking at the soles of his shoes, pinning denim to his thighs. The back of his head is cold and his hair coated, thick with the weight of it.
The world widens. Bare trees stretch up into the dark around them, and there’s little else to note.
Harry tries to remember why he’s here.
“Of course it isn’t fair,” Draco snaps, tugging at his shirt, his attention, making Harry’s vision double, then triple— kaleidoscope.
Without warning, there’s the feel of weight folding over his hips, of a persistent press sliding beneath his hem, something warm finding the ridge of his ribs. His skin sings with it.
Draco’s there, over him, on top of him— his body’s shifted, but little else. His knees sink into the ground, trousers an afterthought, a tithe.
The intensity of his gaze pins Harry more than the heft of him. His hands move over Harry’s sides, like he’s mapping him, manifest. Ambivalence brushes up against insistence, dares someone to question the contradiction.
“You think any of this is fair?” Draco asks, aimless, leaning in. His hips hitch, hardly— movement and its intent negligible.
He raises his arm, the weight of it relenting against direction, against the need to move toward.
“Don’t touch me,” Draco says.
If it’s a warning, it’s wasted. The command is noncommittal.
And too late, besides. Harry’s hand pulls forward with the inevitability of a sharply-slung curse, one he’s too tired, (too hungry, cold, lonely), to counter.
His fingers brush the ends of Draco’s hair, gone impossibly sterling in the dark.
“Stupid,” Draco hisses against his lips, and it’s a brush of breath more than a kiss.
Harry’s fingers sieve through his hair, ready to settle, to stay, tangled there in the soft of him.
The weight of Draco wavers, warps. Harry’s hand curls against nothing, the absence a feeling that rattles.
The image shifts like the space between the flash and the photograph. It splits.
Leaves of silver tumble suddenly over him, a slow scatter, the sky falling. They paint the forest floor like starlight, reflected up into the night, which has gone wide-wide and too bright for the ink of it.
Harry wakes with a strangled sound. He sits up, breath shaking through him, the leftover sense of loss, secondhand, sewing in, then out. He feels the seams pull. Embarrassment arrives.
“Everything alright?” Hermione says, quick even through sleep. She reaches for the torch, flicks it on, the light finding the floor between them.
“Fine,” he says, quiet, always quiet, (as often as possible quiet).
Her brow fixes, furrows, a frown tugging at her mouth. She bites back questions, plural— he can see them piling up.
“Just wish we hadn’t run out of Dreamless Sleep,” he offers, the rare complaint, delivered carefully— brown paper, string.
His fingers ache from where they’ve been curled around what would have been his wand, the lack its own kind of injury.
“Taking a walk,” he says, standing, something for the sake of sound more than an announcement proper.
Mud molds frigid fingers around his shoes, makes moving slow.
Outside the tent, the Forest is empty and still.
Moonlight casts shadows. Boasts through the leaves, fingers combing through silver.
If light could be unfair, it is.
Harry tugs at his collar.
