The Origami Swans (Drarry)
In third year Draco sends Harry an origami swan each day (after the first one in potions) and Harry just shoves them in his bag or under his bed and ignores them. At first they contain insults and mean drawings but eventually Draco runs out of these and just starts writing or drawing whatever comes into his head at the time. He asks Harry questions that he assumes he will never read (“can you really speak parceltongue?” “why is your patronus a stag? that’s such a random animal I always thought it would be a lion or something” “why aren’t you allowed to go to hogsmeade?” “did you actually live with muggles?”) He does little doodles, these include a suspicious number of stags. Magical drawings of sparkling green eyes. Loads of sketches of Harry (concentrating in class, laughing at a joke, flying, running his hands through his hair, thoughtfully biting his lip during defense against the dark arts, biting his thumb in concentration etc). He’s finds comfort in the strange one-sided correspondence he has developed with Harry. He even apologises for some of their run-ins, and soon he is simply addressing his thoughts to Harry each day.
Harry doesn’t think too much of it after opening the first one - it’s just Malfoy being Malfoy after all - but as the swans show no signs of going away he becomes curious. He doesn’t open them but he also doesn’t throw them away, he simply puts them under his bed and tries to forget about them. It gets to the point where he expects to receive the origami swan each day, he becomes irritated by the fact that he doesn’t know what Malfoy’s motives are and he wants to open them so badly but he can’t because then Malfoy wins and that can’t happen.
Eventually he decides that if he doesn’t open at least one he’ll go mad, imagine his surprise when he picked a random one from the pile under his bed and opened it to find a funny magic doodle of Neville waving his wand at Boggart Snape and forcing him into a dress (and when he sees himself laughing in the background). He stays up well into the night opening each and every one of them, surprised to find that Malfoy actually has feelings and finding that he isn’t actually evil and he doesn’t /really/ hate him, he just pretends to. He gets to the strange backhanded compliments from when Malfoy was running out of insults and finds them hilarious.
He finds out that Malfoy is terrified of the peacocks in the grounds of Malfoy manor (they’re unexpectedly aggressive, okay?), his friends are like a family to him and aren’t just brainless lackeys, he’s a total mummy’s boy, his father is actually quite nice despite almost definitely being a death eater (just not to Harry), he hates his aunt Bellatrix, he loves flying more than anything, he has a secret book of pressed flowers hidden under his pillow. By the time he gets through them all he feels almost friendly towards him.
He doesn’t confront Malfoy, but he begins to quietly open each swan. Soon he starts to write little replies to each note, stashing them in a box under his bed (charmed to have two compartments, one for Malfoy’s and one for his responses) which expands magically. Somewhere along the way he stops thinking of him as Malfoy, and starts thinking of him as Draco instead, suppressing a smile each time he receives the origami swan.
One time he mistakenly smiles at Draco in the corridor, and Draco is so caught off guard that he smiles back and his slytherin friends are all losing their shit grinning and winking at each other because of course they know about Draco’s little notes (they may have intercepted one or two before they got to Potter, they sent them on of course, but not before they read them themselves) and they absolutely know that Draco has an enormous crush on the boy who lived, even if he won’t admit it himself.
In fourth year Draco is legitimately terrified for Harry (though he refuses to admit why), especially knowing that there are ex death eaters at hogwarts that are possibly endangering him. He puts these things into his notes, saying he wished he could tell him to his face but he probably wouldn’t believe him so what’s the point.
Throughout the third challenge, he’s in such a state of terror that his friends are genuinely worried about him. When he sees that Harry is alive, he’s so fucking relieved that he suddenly realises his feelings towards Harry are more than just friendly. He wanders the castle trying to think things out and decides that the only way to organise his thoughts is to write them down, and so he pours out his feelings and without giving it a thought, deftly folds the paper into an origami swan and takes out his wand. He hesitates, his wand lingering over the swan before impulsively flicking his wand, sending the swan to Harry. He probably wouldn’t read it anyway.
Later that evening he is hunted down by a flustered Harry Potter, who stares at him strangely for a long moment before pulling him into a kiss without a word. After a confused ten minutes of mumbled explanations between kisses, each of them has what’s more or less the whole story. Moments later they are spotted by several confused students as they were walking through the grounds holding hands.
