tags: eighth year, drarry, fluff, swearing, drama, melodrama, angst, potion theory, magic theory, slow burn, sexual content, drinking, Harry’s horrible shitty childhood
suggested rating: 18+, for heavy themes and sexual content
Seven Steps on AO3 || Seven Steps on Wattpad
- Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24 - 25 - 26 - 27 - 28 - 29 - 30 - 31 - 32 - 33 - 34 - 35 - 36 - 37- 38 - 39 - 40 - 41 - 42 - 43 - 44 - 45 - 46 - 47 - 48 - 49 - 50 - 51 - 52 - 53 - 54- 55 - 56 - 57 - 58 - 59 - 60 - 61 - 62 - 63 - 64 -
Draco didn’t like memories of places. It was the stillness of them, like muggle photos but without even the silent staring people to ease at least some of the uncomfortable emptiness. It was far too much like being trapped in a nightmare for his liking.
Harry led the way up the tidy walk with its small front garden of neatly trimmed bushes and flowers, all leading to a rather unremarkable little house. The door swung open silently, and Harry stepped inside, holding it open for Draco to pass.
There was a small kitchen, a dining room and a ground floor bathroom. In the sitting room, Draco recognised one of the tele-visions Pansy had discribed to him. The house was all very tidy, but something about it all felt off. He looked around the rest of the ground floor, trying to pinpoint what it was, and at first he thought it might be the abundance of lacy frills and doilies. But it was more than that, and the feeling of unease was only growing.
“My room was upstairs,” Harry said, breaking through the silence.
Draco slowly made his way towards the stairs and stopped in front of a wall of photographs filled with people that might as well have been caricatures for their extreme proportions. There was a thin sharp, and unpleasant woman with blond hair and she was always standing with a rather large man whose overflowing features were embedded with all his past glowers and scowls so even when he smiled he looked angry. Most of the photos were of a blobby young boy who seemed to take after his father in all the worst ways. He reminded Draco of the worst of Vincent and Gregory all wrapped up into one greasy human being.
But… there were no pictures of Harry. Not even a small one, not even on the edges of other photos or in the background. That was what was so wrong with this place. There was no sign of Harry anywhere. It could’ve been a stranger’s house.
Draco shivered and did his very best not to think about it. He had promised himself he wasn’t going to fall apart here.
“Draco? You said we only have an hour,” Harry said.
Draco followed Harry up the stairs to the second floor and proceeded to stick his head into every room. The largest bedroom was likely the master with a king sized bed, the indents on the king-sized mattress indicating that the large man took up two third of it while his wife slept right on the edge. Draco wondered how she didn’t fall off every night. “How are they related to you again?” Draco asked.
“My aunt was my mother sister,” Harry said flatly.
“All muggles?” Draco asked as he went to the next room, also quite large and overflowing with stuff. There were shelves of things and a desk with a television-like thing and another television on the stand with all sort of other plastic muggle boxes and smaller plastic that seemed to go into the other plastic. There was hardly even room to breathe in the crowded room. “This was your cousin’s room?” Draco hazarded.
“Is all of this muggle plastic important?” Draco asked.
Harry sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair, “…it’s all just electronics.”
“I highly doubt they do the same thing, they all look different so they can’t all have the same name, Harry,” Draco said.
“Except those two,” Draco pointed to the two screens, “Why does the fat lump need two tele-visions?”
Harry looked surprised, “Since when do you know anything about tvs?”
Draco smirk proudly, “I learn quickly. Tv is a shortening of tele-vision?”
Harry nodded, “Yeah. As for the rest, um,” he pointed to the grey screen, “That’s a computer, not a tv, like it doesn’t have shows on it, you can use it to play games and write papers and make spreadsheets, I think. Dudley only played games though. This one,” he pointed to a long box with two mesh squares with a ton of buttons in between, “That’s a stereo, it plays music, and these are cassettes, which have music on them, uh, kinda like records, wizards have records.”
Draco rolled his eyes, “Very observant of you.”
“In my defence, the magic bit of wizards is a lot more interesting,” Harry said.
“What are those boxes, the ones that are attached to the tv by the black cords?” Draco asked.
“Game systems,” Harry said, “Those cartridges play different games, and you use the controllers to move your character around.”
“Why does he have so many?” Draco asked, “Surely you only need one.”
“There are lots of different companies, and they have their own system and make different games, and Dudley hated to be left out of things, so he had to have them all.”
“Are they fun?” Draco asked.
Harry shrugged, “They looked fun. I wasn’t allowed to play with them.”
Draco nodded, that added up with everything else he had seen so far.
“He got even more stuff the last few years I was here, but this is the last I remember it looking like,” Harry added, leading the way to the next room.
There was an appalling small bathroom, which apparently everyone had to share, followed by a smallish sized guest room, which left only one door unopened, in the back corner of the hall.
“This was mine,” Harry said stepping inside.
There was a bed and a dresser. No books, no posters, no toys, no clutter of any kind. Unlike the rest of the house, this was the only room that had a distinctly shabby second hand feel with scuffed paint and scores in the wood. It reminded Draco of a guest room, except the guest room had been nicer and bigger and decorated. It didn’t seem like a place someone had lived, even for a day.
Draco wrapped his arms around himself.
“I didn’t really get on with my relatives,” Harry said, “So yeah, it wasn’t great growing up here.”
“It’s like a prison cell,” Draco said.
“It was only during the summer and usually not the whole summer,” Harry said with a shrug.
Cold dread pooled in Draco’s stomach, “…And where did you stay before school?”
“It was only during the summer, you said. Where did you stay before then?” Draco said.
Harry half smiled, carefully avoiding his gaze, “I didn’t mean- This is my room.”
“No. It’s not.” Draco hazarded, watching Harry’s expression closely. He didn’t miss the flicker of something- Draco didn’t know what to call it, but it made his chest squeeze so painfully it hurt to breathe. “Show me.”
Harry seemed to curl in on himself, shoulders bowing, back arching as he stuffed his hands into his pockets until he looked a picture of his eleven-year old self.
“Please?” Draco asked softly.
Harry hardly blinked, turning on his heel and leaving the room. Draco followed silently behind as they walk down the hall, past every door and down the stairs. Harry swung round the bannister and took a few steps, leaning down and unlatching a small door on the side of the panelled stairs.
Draco reached his side as the door opened and saw a bare bulb hanging over a small thin mattress, the sheets going thin and grey from age, the blanket tatty and worn. Small broken toys sat on the exposed wood framework, faded crayon doodles were barely visible on the dark unfinished wood.
Draco stared for what felt like years before everything he was seeing finally sank in and filled his chest like molten lead. He jerked out of the memory with a gasp and backed away. Turning to hide the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Harry stood more slowly. He rubbed his face and nearly knocked his glasses off.
“How long?” Draco managed.
Harry sighed, “Til I was eleven.”
“Didn’t they know who you were?” Draco asked his voice shaking. He pressed his eyes closed to try and stop crying, he had so desperately not wanted to cry, “Didn’t they know how important you were?”
Harry let out a brittle angry bark of a laugh, “They knew my parents were magic and they hated everything to do with magic, me especially. Look. It doesn’t matter. It’s in- It’s…”
Draco took a deep breath and opened his eyes, finding Harry staring at him with all the composure of a trout. He glared at Harry, even as he sniffed to keep his nose from running, tears dripping off his chin.
“It really doesn’t matter,” Harry said, “Don’t cry.”
“I’ll cry if I like!” Draco snapped, squeezing out a few more tears out of spite.
Harry stepped closer, his hands reaching out rather uselessly in front of himself, not managing to cross the last few inches to touch Draco, “It’s just- doesn’t- Draco. You don’t need to-” he tripped over the words as if they were totally unknown to him, “-to cry for me. I’m not- I’m fine.”
“Of course I’m going to cry for the person I lo- I-” a sob ripped through Draco. -love. Pansy had been right. He had tried so hard not to.
Harry edged closer, frantically searching Draco’s face and managing nothing else like a great useless lump. “What do I do?” he asked weakly, “Tell me what to do.”
Draco took Harry’s hands and pressed them over his wet flushed cheeks, “Wipe my tears away. Tell me it will be okay. Tell me you’ll be here. Tell me- Tell me anything. Anything.”
Harry brushed his thumbs over Draco’s cheeks, and pressed a kiss to his forehead and then lightly, to his tear soaked eyelashes, the corner of his mouth before pulling Draco into a desperately tight hug.
Draco wanted to be annoyed, he really did. But he couldn’t. So he pressed his face into Harry’s awful jumper and cried until he ran out of tears.
- Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24 - 25 - 26 - 27 - 28 - 29 - 30 - 31 - 32 - 33 - 34 - 35 - 36 - 37- 38 - 39 - 40 - 41 - 42 - 43 - 44 - 45 - 46 - 47 - 48 - 49 - 50 - 51 - 52 - 53 - 54- 55 - 56 - 57 - 58 - 59 - 60 - 61 - 62 - 63 - 64 -
♡ Tags below ♡ (I don’t have a permanent tags list. All tags are of the wonderful people who left messages on the previous part.)
