Work Text:
Sometimes he cries.
He doesn’t let himself do it very often. Instead he channels it into his magic, into spells and hexes. Spells fly out from underneath his fingers, he feels like a prince with his wand in hand. He yells spell after spell, Ron and Hermione are stoked, and Dumbledore’s tentatively happy, but they just smile sympathetically and squeeze his shoulder when they hear the latest dream about Voldemort.
Ron tells him about his relationship with Hermione on a morning when it’s raining hard, and Harry’s sitting at the windowsill with a notebook and ink-stained fingers, six pages of new hexes he has to learn and a floor full of crumpled up pages. He’s surprised and kind of angry that they’d felt the need to hide something this big from him (granted he’d been kind of distracted), but secretly he’s suspected all along. He hugs Ron and he wishes them the best, but later he punches his pillow and screams into it a bit, pissed off at himself for being jealous of the simplicity of what they have.
Ron and Hermione don’t hate each other.
Ron and Hermione aren’t gay.
Ron and Hermione aren’t famous.
Ron and Hermione are in love.
Damn it!
Harry isn’t blind, he isn’t stupid. He’s sixteen, not six, and he isn’t as naïve as everyone seems to think he is. He knows what it means when Ginny looks at him with a hooded gaze when she thinks he’s not paying attention, he knows what it means Dumbledore looks at him with worry in his eyes. He knows what it means when everyone avoids him in the hallways, and the whispers start.
He knows, but he’s not supposed to.
Apparently, he’s supposed to be grown up enough to defeat Voldemort, to get O’s on his NEWTS, to handle the death of countless people, but he’s supposed to be young enough to be forbidden from hearing information from Dumbledore, to be unable to join the Order, to know what it’s like to feel (gasp, cover your ears,) lust. He’s not supposed to feel the heat that coils in the bottom of his stomach when his enemy touches his shoulder or arm. He’s not supposed to, but he does. Sometimes he wonders if all people are this stupid or just the people in his life.
After he cries (only the third time over Draco, he keeps track), Harry makes a decision to himself, he will get over him. Get. Over. Him. It’ll be easy, right? I mean, it’s not like he’s the love of his life, or anything. Just a crush. He calls him “Scarhead” too much, what’s up with that? And it so totally doesn’t give him chills when he does it, not every time. And what kind of name is Draco, anyway? He’s not that talented. Not that cute. Not with that silky blond hair and those silver-blue eyes and that damn hot smirk, not to mention his cheekbones and the way the light plays over his face… No! He’s a Death Eater! Focus on that!
He does not dream about him.
He does not dream about what it’d be like to be Pansy, to have blonde hair and pouty lips and the right moves to make him wild. To make it okay to feel like this, make it okay to pursue him and not feel guilty. He does not dream about what it’d be like to kiss him. He does not dream about what it’d be like for the war to be over, to know that if it was, that split second would’ve been over a long time ago, and that by now maybe he’d actually be happy, for once in his life.
He does not think about what it would feel like to have an actual relationship with him, with dates and stuff. He does not wonder what it’d be like. He does not care. Would Draco pull his chair out for him, open doors? Would he keep his arm around him in public, like a territorial sign saying ‘back off’ to the world? Would he hold his hand under the table or keep his arm on the back of his seat? Would he lay his head in his lap when he felt depressed or sad, would he let him lay his head in his? Would he give him a hug before a test for luck, and massage his shoulders after a long day in classes? Who knows, because he doesn’t think about it.
He does not think, “This hurts too much. Why does it hurt so much? Why can’t it be easy?” He doesn’t think like that, because he doesn’t have a reason. Draco Malfoy means nothing to him. Romantically, that is.
He’s different now, he knows. He’s changed since he won the Triwizard, and everyone knows it. No one talks about it, but they know about it. It’s why Ron tries so hard to outdo him now, why Hermione hugs him for a few seconds longer every morning. Before he was a Muggle, now he’s a wizard. Before he was Harry, now he’s Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived. Before he was young, now he’s in love. Time flies, it really does.
Sometimes he regrets ever going to Hogwarts. Not for long, though, only until he remembers that magic is the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely. Then he remembers that if he’d never came, he’d have never met Draco, and then he wouldn’t be feeling like this right now. Then he remembers that he wasn’t even really alive until he met him, and stops regretting it. Then he remembers Draco’s face when he pressed his forehead against his and told him how much he hated him and starts regretting it again. Damn vicious circles.
Then comes the point where he remembers that he doesn’t remember all that stuff because it never happened. Never. And he doesn’t care.
“Potter?” Speaking of…
He’s sitting in Quidditch field, fingering on the Snitch absently when ‘he’ finds him. “Malfoy.”
“Scarhead.” Damn, there’s that ‘Scarhead’ thing again. Annoying, irritating, cliché yet really kind of sweet when he thought about it…Death Eater! Death Eater!
“What?”
“Dumbledore needs to talk to you,” he says in that sultry drawl of his that Harry never thinks about. Because Harry doesn’t think about that kind of thing, like how his voice sounds or how hot he looks in those Quidditch robes he’s wearing. Nope, absolutely not.
“In a minute.” He sneers and leaves and Harry does not watch him walk away.
Sometimes he wishes that there were some kind of alternate universe he could travel to. Where things like the Dark Lord and Death Eaters and Dumbledore and the war just didn’t exist, where Harry could just be a boy, and Draco could just be a guy, and they could just be in love.
Sometimes he thinks about his voice, and sometimes he thinks about what a date with him would be like.
Sometimes he cries.
Sometimes he thinks about what will never happen.
Sometimes he dreams about him.
Sometimes he realizes how strong this is, and how he knows that however much he denies it, he’ll never really be able to get him out from underneath his skin.
Just sometimes, though.