GallaPlacidia

“I’ve just remembered that Finch-Fletchley

It was getting late. Draco yawned.

“You should go to bed,” said Harry.

Draco glanced at him.

“Let me sleep over,” he said.

“Okay,” said Harry, his heart flipping over.

“This is weird,” said Draco, at the same time as Harry said, “I’m gay.”

Draco laughed.

“I knew that,” he said.

“What?”

“Well. I speculated,” said Draco. “I’m bi. I fancied you, in school.”

Harry went bright red.

“Oh,” he said.

“Relax,” said Draco. “I don’t anymore.”

“Hang on,” said Draco. Harry was sucking up iced tea through a straw. “The first time you tell me you love me, you also decide I love you?”

“Well, you do, don’t you?” asked Harry, with such blinding confidence that Draco wondered if maybe he had been in love with Harry since he was eleven, without fully realising it.

“Have I been talking over you?” he asked, when people had stopped looking at them.

“No,” said Draco. Clarence kissed his nose. Clarence loved him. Draco had never felt sure of Harry, and it was wonderful, knowing, knowing that Clarence loved him.

“Maybe I’ll remember how to be in love with you,” said Harry.

Draco tidied some pens into an ivory pen cup.

“You weren’t ever in love with me,” he said.

This, realised Draco, was what he had wanted, all this time. A garden full of blowing flowers. Harry, on one knee, looking at him with all the forceful intensity of his nature. Telling him he loved him in permanent, endless ways.

“That can’t be legal. You’ve already served your time.”

Draco wrinkled his nose. Harry had sudden memory of him doing that when he was L, of catching sight of it and loving it and forgetting it.

It occurred to Harry that this whole friends thing wasn’t going to work, because all Harry wanted to do was climb into Draco’s lap and tell him to stop worrying.

Dear L,

Fact 5. I’ve never felt this way before. I think about you all the time. When we were together I felt as if I could finally breathe and get my head above the water, and when you left everything closed back in again.

Fact 6. I’m not trying to get you back. I’m not. I’m not.

Fact 7. Fact 6 was a lie.

Tell me to fuck off and I will. But God, we could be good together, Draco Malfoy.

Harry, Potter, K