I was very tired when I wrote this.
The dream starts with screaming, like it usually did.
Harry screws his eyes up; he’s on his back in the Forest, bleeding out slowly from the huge gash on his chest. The air smells like smoke and dirt and the bitter edge of magic, like gunpowder on a freezing cold day. He gasps - he can’t get enough air in his lungs, every breath making his chest ache.
He’s been through this dream so many times before but terror still flood his body as he grits his teeth. “Get up,” he whispers, hands clenched at his side. “Get up, they’re coming - “
Every time he thinks he’s prepared for the noises, the visions. Every time he’s wrong.
It starts off with screaming - Sirius, Remus, Fred, the ones who died and the ones who were burried. Harry closes his eyes, as if that could somehow block out the sound, every muscle in his body straining as he fought to pull himself off the ground, before -
It’s a chorus of people - Hermione and Ron, Ginny, the walls of Teddy and the sound of his parents, his parents who he couldn’t remember and yet still dreamt about anyways. He’s panicking now, thrashing around wildly as another voice enters the fray and God it hurts, hurts so much as Draco’s voice fills his head.
He didn’t scream - Harry’s never once heard Draco scream, but it’s the sound of his voice that gets him, breathless and desperate, spoken through gritted teeth. “Harry, please, I don’t know how much longer I can bear this, please Harry - “
“I’m trying,” Harry yells, the pain redoubling as he fights to pull himself free. “I’m trying goddamn it - “
The sound of Draco’s pained moans fill the air and Harry’s thrashing again, pulling himself desperately even as that small bit inside of him hates himself for how easily Draco Malfoy lead him astray, how easily he would follow him.
Harry jolts upright, his arms flailing, the air freezing against his bare skin. He looks around wildly - he’s in the 8th year dorms at Hogwarts. Not in the forest. Not surrounded by the ghosts of all the people he had lost.
“You’re fine,” Draco whispers. He looks almost ethereal in the moonlight, lit up in shades of silver and grey, the shadows turning his hair into a solid curtain of white. “You’re okay.”
“No,” Draco says, and a small part inside of Harry twinges at how well Draco knows him. Knew him. “You’re fine, Harry.”
Harry stares at his hands. They’re trembling, tremors forcing its way up and down his arms. He balls his hands into fists, places them carefully on his lap where he can see them.
“You came,” he whispers flatly.
Draco blinks. He’s perched on the end of the bed like a bird about to take flight, like some wisp of Harry’s imagination. He looks colder now, something done in thin sheets of metal and glass, like the distant light of a lonely star.
Harry remembers Draco back in fifth year; all life and burning fire, the desperate air of someone clawing their way back from a cliff. He wonders what had happened in all those years they were apart.
“Of course I did,” Draco finally says, his voice as calm as always. “I’m the only one who knows your dreams.”
Harry scoffs, his hands knotting into the sheets. “Right. That’s the only reason then. Convenience.”
“Don’t. Don’t pretend you care.”
Draco closes his eyes. Harry traces the lines of his face, the high arch of Draco’s cheekbones and the delicate curve of his eye. He remembers pressing fluttering kisses to Draco’s eyelids, the feeling of his palms underneath Harry’s lips, the flush of colour that stained his skin as they moved against each other.
With a curse he tears his gaze away, dropping it back down to the pale fabric on his bed. He used to have a crimson blanket at the beginning of the year, before he one night woke up and thought the sheets were covered in blood.
Draco takes a deep breath. “I do care about you, Harry,” he says slowly, each word falling from his mouth like a piece of marble. “I still do. I will always care about you.”
Harry laughs bitterly. “We really going to go into this again?”
“You’re the one who brought it up,” Draco says softly. He appeared calm, his face impassive but Harry knew better. He can see the fraying edges in Draco’s calm composure - the whiteness of his fingers where they gripped the edge of the bed, the tenseness in his shoulders and the flat look in his eyes. Harry knows Draco Malfoy better than anyone else in his life, the fragile cracks in the seams.
“No. You’re the one who’s going off on your whole bullshit tangent again.”
The moonlight glints off of the silver ring on Draco’s hand as he roughly rakes a hand through his hair. “It’s not bullshit.”
“Really?” Harry spits, his temper flaring. “Because it seems like bullshit to me. Who does that, Draco? Who dates a guy for two years and then fucks off to join a man who’s trying to kill him?”
“You don’t understand - “
“Understand?” Harry snorts. “What more is there to understand? You took the Mark! You took the fucking Mark; you stood there in front of Voldemort, the man who killed my parents and you promised that you would try and kill me.”
Draco went still. The blood had drained from his face, turning him even paler, a marble statue draped in cloth. Harry tracks his body with his eyes: the shape of his shoulders, the curve of his collarbone, the faintest edge of a shadow underneath the white shirt he wore, the barest hint of the Dark Mark.
“Harry, I said I was sorry - “
“Sorry doesn’t mean shit, Draco. We were doomed - we always were doomed. And I thought...I thought I meant enough for you to - to at least try - “
Draco lets out a low laugh, the sound like a knife through Harry’s skin. “You think I didn’t try?”
“You definitely didn’t fight.”
Draco’s face looked like it had been carved out of stone, his eyes haunted and dark as he stared out of the open window. Harry took a deep breath, fingers clenched so hard he knew that he had cut through the skin.
“You don’t know,” Draco says quietly, “What happened. You don’t know what they did to me. You don’t know how long I fought, how hard I fought. You don’t know anything and you never asked.”
“Why should I have asked?” Harry says mockingly. “You practically sighed a contract to kill me and my friends. We were done.”
The faintest edge of a smile crosses Draco’s face. It looked like a chasm, Harry thought, a crack in his facade, something ripped and torn and broken. “The Boy Who Lived,” he murmurs, and it had always sounded like praise from other people but it sounded like pain in Draco’s mouth. “It was in the summer. Between fifth and sixth year. My father told me to take the Mark. I told him to go to hell.”
Harry snorts. “How hard you fought,” he mocks. “That was barely anything.”
Draco shakes his head. His eyes gleamed in the light; Harry realizes they were unshed tears. “I didn’t know. My father was given a week to convince me to take the Mark. After that...”
Unease rippled through Harry’s body as a single tear slid down Draco’s cheek. “After that my father was to turn me over to the Death Eaters. And Grayback. They...”
“Draco,” Harry breathes. He reaches out - to hold Draco, wrap their hands together - but Draco flinches back. It’s the smallest of motions but Harry immediately drops his hands, the smallest things of pain echoing in his chest.
“I still said no,” Draco breathes, the pulse at his throat fluttering. “So they told me. I could either take it, or...or...”
Draco shakes his head. “Pansy. Blaise. Theo. Vince and Greg. Not all of us have support like you do, Harry.”
It’s like ice had been injected into his veins. Harry gasps, chokes on air, his heart pounding and the world spinning. “Why,” he breathes. “Why didn’t you tell me.”
“Because,” Draco says softly. “We were done. You had given up. You were so quick to believe that - that I would have turned on you, betrayed you - “
“What was I supposed to think?” Harry grits out, anger flaring inside of his chest. “You got the Mark, Draco! How could I have known - “
“No,” Draco says, and it’s the closest Harry’s ever seen Draco to breaking. His voice was raw and empty, tears running down his face as he got off the bed. “No. You said I didn’t fight? I did. I fought - so fucking hard and you didn’t. You didn’t even try.”
“That’s not fair,” Harry says, his voice breaking. “That’s not fair to say that - “
“I don’t care.” Draco tosses the words out with careless grace. “I don’t fucking care. We’re done anyways - you made that pretty damn clear.”
“No.” Draco gets to his feet, eyes blazing, and it’s like the boy Harry fell in love with, the emotions that burned through him and made him light up like the sun. He couldn’t look away - not as it seared him, stripped the skin from his bones, the guilt tearing him up inside. “No. We’re done. We’ve been done for a long time now.”
Draco shakes his head. “And the worst part is that I still love you, Harry. I loved you - even through everything, even through the war. I still love you, now. But I’m done. We’re done.”
Harry takes a deep breath, fingers clenched so tightly it hurt. “Draco, please - “
“No,” Draco says, and then he turns away.