femharry content for my sapphic drarry agenda (draco's next)
The Dursleys never cared for Harry's hair. Both unruly and thicker than Petunia's own, she never attempted brushing or untangling. She offered Harry an old coarse wooden hair brush the little girl had seen being used to brush garden tools before and let her figure out for herself.
She didn't, her small arms couldn't reach all the way into the back where the bad tangles grew and she didn't have enough strength to do all the front pieces she could reach. This eventually made Harry's hair a nightmare to deal with, and a source of embarrassment, fear and anger.
The teachers noticed, of course, it was hard not to, her hair was always a matted bird nest but most of them knew how decent and good the Dursleys were and pinned this all on Harry's lazy nature. The first teacher concerned enough to make an issue out of it was a young teacher assistant who was very kind and did not believe in 'child laziness' for caring for hygiene and well-being was a guardian's job. She called the Dursley's in after class and met two just-as-concerned uncle and aunt who worried about young Harry very much and were earnestly looking for ways of solving the issue of her natural disposition to anger and dirtyness.
Petunia cut Harry's long hair above the shoulders that night. When it grew to the same length over night they cut it just above the ears and gave her a good shake and a warning of what would happen if she tried 'being funny again'. The hair grew over night the next day too, unrepentant and angry — Harry could feel it somehow — but this time she climbed out of her bed and snuck into the kitchen to steal her aunt's scirrors before any of them woke and did it herself.
She didn't like it, exactly, it made her look even more owlish and odd than usual, but she didn't hated either and her hair wasn't so difficult to manage anymore (usually brushed with five or six strokes total) so she kept trimming it, every two days or so even after she left for Hogwarts, even on the run with Ron and Hermione.
She let her hair grow after war, not in an act of rebellion against her childhood or the need to be anyone else other than herself — though the thought was there all the time, in the back on her head — but because she didn't have enough strength in her to go to the motions.
She did have Hermione this time though and when hair hair started tangling again Hermione caught it before it got too bad and taught her a quick untangling spell that did wonders for her own (thinner strands but more voluminous) hair and taught her how to properly shampoo and condition to make her hair a little more agreeable and easier to manage.
She found she could hide the scar better with her hair longer and grew even a bit fond of the glossy shine of it.
When she met Draco again after war, a quiet, less humorous adult than she was as a teen she half expected to be teased about it — something about having a hair so feminine made her blush to herself sometimes, some part of her still thought she was faking it all, some part of her sure she wasn't allowed to want it — but Draco's reaction had been a beat too long stare then. Nothing. She kept taking in professional tones about potions and antidotes to an attentive Hermione and did not glance at Harry (a suspicious shadow in Hermione's bright kitchen) again for the rest of her short stay. This made Harry somehow even more angry and embarrassed than if she had laughed or made a mean comment about it, it wouldn't be the first time, Draco made quips about Harry's masculinity enough times to make the bruise no longer pokable, no, whatever Draco thought of her hair, probably ridiculous and presumptuous and like elephant attempting to pirouette and— and — she kept to herself. Probably to laugh about it later with her friends.
Harry considered cutting it all off that night, sure everyone was laughing about it now behind her back, but even with scissors in hand she couldn't bring herself to. She somehow found herself sad to imagine it all gone. To be back into the old familiar Harry.
After letting the scissors hang loosely on her hands for hours she dropped the pretenses of still wanting to go through with it and went to bed. It would be a bigger fuck you to Malfoy anyway. What if Harry wanted to have longer hair now as opposed to her pixie like cut as a kid? At least she didn't spend two years of her life in Azkaban for treason against the magical world and conspiracy and murder accessory— or whatever countless charges Harry helped her get out of anyway. The mean thought set her mind at ease. Maybe not everything had changed, her hatred towards Draco was still there. Trusty and inmutable.
They started to see each other more on the Child Welfare Center Malfoy was servicing in and Hermione was volunteering at after she convinced Harry the children would be more prone to take their vitamins and medicine if a real hero told them to — Hermione wasn't above any sort of manipulation — and she agree after a few weeks of puppy eyes and please, please Harry you'll love them I'm sure.
She was right as usual, Harry did love them and found difficult to leave after hours in some days, too anxious of leaving some kids in intensive care alone for the night and wishing she could do more every single day.
The first actual day had been awkward. The kids expected a legendary hero and received a blank faced twenty four years old with oversized clothes and nothing fun to say at all. It was a downer. The kids were even more rebellious on bath time that night, for the exhasperation of exhausted parents and nurses. The day after the fiasco Harry was determined to not leave her house, not even if Hermione begged her to. Her will lasted for about four seconds of the girl's disappointed look and after the promise Ron would be coming too she agreed to give another try.
It was better this time. Hermione had scattered drawing blocks, crayons and colorful hydrographic pens all over the room and Ron was sitting amongst the children, confused and slightly scared while some attempted to climb him and touch his hair and Harry drew them a colorful garden and a little girl over a bridge losing her handsome hat to the wind.
The children were ecstatic at the drawing, wooing and clapping and begging her to make another — a boy in losing his galoshes on the rain — and when one of them shyly asked if they could draw it too the whole class was on a mission. Harry tried telling them they could draw anything they liked but they wanted to draw Harry's drawing and that was final. The first boy to shout he would make a dragon steal the girl's hat instead on the wind set the classroom into a cacophony of brilliant ideas and furious drawing. One girl drew the boy losing his boot in the rain to reveal a lizard foot and another made the girl have wings to fly and get her hat back. Ron made a drawing too, a bit deformed and less colorful version of the girl in the bridge with a ribbon tied under her chin keeping her hat firmly in place. The children were not impressed.
Malfoy, who Harry didn't realized was leaning against the doors quietly handed her own quick sketch draw on simple black pen when they were leaving to a bemused Harry, something like shadow of a smirk she once had dancing in the corner of her mouth.
The girl in the bridge had long, messy hair, round spectacles and a lighting bold scar and as the drawing moved heavy rain started to fall and an actual lighting bolt hit her dead on, electrocuting her and leaving her hair even more messy.
Harry didn't stick this one in the wall besides the others, she folded it and shove it down her pocket and tidied the place up.
At home she wondered what she could do, feeling restless and jumpy and — if she was being honest with herself — giddy. What exactly had Malfoy meant with the teasing (was it teasing)? Is that something they did? Was it something they could do?
That night Harry drew a bright haired girl in the rain stepping on a deep puddle, losing one dragonhide stylish boot and screaming angrily 'damn you, potter!' over and over and the next day with a bit of digging she found malfoy's small table in an adjacent corner of a nursery where she checked children's paperwork as part of her probation and slipped the drawing in between the pages.
Malfoy sat on her table during her afternoon snack and stole her cup of apple slices. 'Very original, Potter. Had a real giggle over that one' she deadpanned but did not stand to leave Harry alone, instead she made herself right at home with Harry's apple slices and stole a furtive glance at Harry's hairstyle of the day, two braids tied on the crown of her head, braided all the way down to the tip.
'Well, you don't get points over originally either. You've made me that same drawing before.'
'You remember?'
'it was not that long ago, Malfoy.
Her face got somehow even more blank than it usually was. The woman's (they were that now, weren't they?) blank face and unresponsive lips reminded her of herself. Azkaban seemed to have sucked something vital out of Malfoy, a key piece of a puzzle she was. 'It feels like a lifetime for me.'
'Lucky you.' it came harsher than she intended and somehow backwards and wrong. Draco's eyes snapped up and they just stared at each other for a few seconds. She could feel whatever Draco had intended with the drawing and this conversation sizzling away and was helpless to stop it. Confused to why she wanted to stop it anyway. Malfoy was a bad person. Period. There was no ambiguity on that. Selfish, spineless. Everything Harry should hate and somehow reaching for it inside herself — for the endless well of hatred she harbored for years she found nothing but a gaping something that should have been.
Malfoy's nod was an acquiescence and parting at the time time. She left the apples half eaten and Harry feeling like she had missed something. A train on the trainstation, maybe. The next could come in a few minutes, sure, but it wouldn't be this one and it made her skin crawl a bit.
They avoided each other after that. Sometimes when they met off the awkward silences of the center — like in Hermione's living room now she had found a partner to be boring — they made their best to be surreptitious about glances at each other's direction and left the room on the slightest indication they would be left alone.
It was bad. Harry had Draco's drawing in a drawer of her bedside table and kept going over the conversation trying to pinpoint where it had gone wrong and trying to guess what subject they could've talked about that wouldn't bring them to that same point. None came to mind. In each conversation they somehow needed to face their past decisions and things went to shit. It was hard to admit but Harry couldn't be friends with someone like Draco, not truly, not without the ugly and bareness of their choices. Not without exposure. The conflict had to happen, one way or another. Or whatever friendship (she wouldn't go that far, really, civility would be more correct, or at least friendly acquaintance) they were trying to build would have a weak make-believe tinge to it.
It came down to her hair in the end. She had snoozed during nap time one day (the soft piano playing by itself lulling her to sllep quicker than any vial of dreamless sleep at home) woke up with loud giggles and shushing noises. One of the kids had glued chewed gum to her hair and it was now everywhere. She called one of the nurses to watch them and snuck into a bathroom down the room to inspect the damage.
It brought tears to her eyes. There was no way she would be able to take it out without cutting it.
Malfoy appeared not minutes after, a bit breathless without her usual white nursery coat. Harry had forgot how much of an elegant figure Malfoy cut under the unflattering coat, she had model proportions and everything seemed so well thought-out about her— perfect hight, flattering trousers and jewelry, unblemished skin, perfectly gummy-less hair Harry's eyes were filled with frustrated tears all over again.
'I'll have Michael singing rhymes for the rest of the week for this little joke.' Malfoy said and approached the sink all business, pushing Harry's hand away from the spot and inspecting it herself. 'damned kids.'
'He's ten. He didn't know it was going to be this bad, probably' she defended him, albeit weakly and more wet than she intended. Malfoy peeked her face in the mirror and her face got even more steeled when she caught the tears in Harry's eyes.
'I don't care. He'll be lucky if I don't jinx him to tap dance along the rhyming.' She took her wand out of her sleeve and Harry flinched touching the tips of her hair goodbye.
Malfoy made a soft noise, something so unlike her Harry had to look for her face in the mirror, than pressed her thumb on the crown of Harry's head gently, almost like a caress. 'I'm not going to cut it.' then mumbled 'i like it this way too.'
It was embarrassing, both the admission and how glady Harry was to hear it. Malfoy wet Harry's hair with a quick aguamenti and worked the gum out of each strand with careful fingers.
She lost a few strands in the process. 'Ouch, Malfoy, fuck! You're pulling all my hair out!' 'Its gum, Potter! I'm not a miracle worker, would you rather i tried vanishing the gum and risking leaving your scarred head bald like the baby you clearly are?' 'Well, fuck you too.'
Hermione found them sitting on the floor about an hour later, Harry between Draco's legs and Draco combing the last of the residue out of her hair with a conjured soft brush.
"You're alright, Harry?' She asked, ignoring the elephant in the room. Draco tensed but Harry just shrugged, eyes still closed. It was her first time having her hair brushed by someone else and the sensation had her feeling weightless. 'I heard about the prank, Michael must be properly sorry about it now Griselda called him in for a talk.' Griselda was the head nurse in the center. A kind, gifted woman but ruthless when she needed to be. Harry felt almost sorry for the kid.
'He'll be even more sorry." Draco promised and Harry poked her between the ribs. Hard.
'You won't do anything. He's sorry already.'
'Did he tell you that?'
'No but I know.'
'You don't Harry. You would be sorry after a prank like this because that's the kind of person you are. Kids can be dicks and I say this because this is the type of person I am. If Griselda's message doesn't get through his head like it surely wouldn't have got through mine when I was his age he'll keep testing limits.'
'its not your job to discipline bad behaved kids because you were one. You're not entitled to all the cruelty in the world Draco.'
'Then who is? Who's entitle to cruelty if not cruel people? Who's better than a class A dick to tell that kid he's being one?'
'He's not a dick. And neither are you. Griselda will talk to him and if that fails i will. If I find out you tried to do anything I swear to Merlin Malfoy you'll be the one sorry."
Malfoy mumbled and tugged merciless on Harry's hair with a brush but did not contradict any longer.
Hermione stifled a laugh. She couldn't wait to tell Ron all about this.
