Chapter Text
They spent most of the morning in bed, and the afternoon, and it began to seem riotously funny that they weren’t shagging each other. Draco listened to Harry talk about how becoming an Auror had been his dream up until the first day he reported to training. That was when he knew it was a mistake.
“But what were you going to do?” Draco said.
“What was I going to do?”
They both laughed.
Harry told him about the first time a dark wizard had cast a hex at him in the field, and what had he done? He’d frozen! All his training had deserted him, and he’d watched it whirl toward his chest until Blaise pushed him out of the way.
“I could have died!”
“You could have died,” Draco said, quite seriously.
Harry told him how he spent every weekend dreading Monday and trying to pretend even harder that he loved what he did.
“The worst part is, I’m very good at it.”
“What do you mean?” Draco laughed. “You said you nearly got hit with a hex.”
“Yes, but I got better! So I don’t get hit with hexes. But it’s all I think about. When the next one’s going to come. Who I’m going to be looking at when I die. And then I think of Sirius, and that damned veil, and how much I wanted to—”
There were long stretches of silence. More cups of tea.
“And all this crying!” Harry said.
“All the crying!” Draco agreed. “Hopefully we’ll both bloody stop!”
“It looks so pretty on you!”
“Merlin, Potter, it does not.”
“Yes, it does. You look like art. I look like a snotty mess.”
“You are a snotty mess.”
Harry sniffed. Draco charmed his face clean.
“Do we do it now, then?” Harry joked. “Get the shagging over with? It has to be romantic to quit your job and spend all day in bed crying.”
“I can’t believe—!” Draco rolled out of the bed and flipped back the covers, hauling Harry bodily out of it. “No. I will not have this. I will not have us getting the shagging over with. What a wit you have, Potter. What charm. Unbelievable.”
“Where are you dragging us?”
“To the shower.” Draco threw up a hand, and the water turned on. “I am not shagging you in this bed. Not now. We are having a wash, and then we have something to attend downstairs.”
“Stars?” Harry asked, hope rising in his chest, a friendly burst of magic.
“Potter.” Draco’s grey eyes had gone deadly serious. “You know we can look at those stars every night. Don’t you? We can always go see them.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Tonight is something different. And then afterward, we can go look at the stars.”
“I might’ve—I might’ve changed my mind.”
Draco rolled his eyes.
“I might rather look at you.”
He turned a deep red and dragged Harry into the shower with more enthusiasm. This, too, became a hilarious exercise in not shagging each other. Draco kept his eyes glued to Harry’s face as he shed his clothes. “It’s possible I didn’t think this through,” he said, sounding strangled.
“Too late.” Harry turned on the water and got in. He closed his eyes under the hot stream. He could guess well enough how it would go. Draco would refuse to shag him in the shower on the grounds that it was too early, and aside from that, unsafe.
The curtain rustled, and then snicked shut, and Harry opened his eyes.
All his breath rushed out of him.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t like them,” Draco said, looking as if he wanted to put his hands in his pockets. He had no pockets, of course. What he had was a tall, gorgeous body, beginning to glisten in the steam, and a torso cross-crossed with white scars, slightly raised.
Harry stepped toward him, his hand coming up to touch.
And then—
He paused, meeting Draco’s eyes.
“It doesn’t hurt. It’s—it’s fine.” He put his fingers on Harry’s wrist and pulled his hand closer, so that his fingertips brushed over the scars.
“I’m sorry.”
“I deserved it.”
“No,” Harry said. “You didn’t.” He traced one of the scars with a fingertip, then leaned in and kissed it. Draco shivered, stifling a sound, and Harry felt consumed with the idea that it was incomplete, this act. One of the scars, when there were many? No. He wouldn’t leave this unfinished. He repeated the process all over Draco’s torso, and by the time he finished, Draco’s eyes were half-closed. His fingers had tightened on Harry’s wrist.
Harry kissed his collarbone.
“We’re not shagging in the shower,” Draco said, his eyes still closed.
“I thought you’d say that.” Harry backed him against the shower wall and Draco went, a sigh escaping when his spine met tile, and Harry leaned in close, then closer, until their cocks were caught between their bodies.
Merlin. He could pass out from the sheer anticipation. His blood rushed through his veins, superheated somehow, and it seemed to him that the only way to fix it was to kiss Draco, so he did.
Draco came alive under Harry’s mouth, his teeth and tongue engaging, nipping, searching, and Harry took the opportunity to wrap his fist around both of them. Draco gasped.
“I thought—” he began.
“I’ve never shagged,” Harry said into his mouth. “I’ve done other things.”
“You’ve done—this?”
“No,” Harry admitted. “Just imagined it.”
The questions ended when he started moving his hand.
Maybe it wasn’t the most graceful jerk of all time. Harry kept losing his breath. Draco’s hips became so wild that he had to pin him against the wall. And as much as Harry wanted to come, he had a moment of sheer terror just before it happened—this? In front of another person? This?—and Draco noticed. He pulled Harry’s face to his neck just in time for him to lose all sense of everything except for the hot pull of pleasure between them.
Draco followed, and the hum he made lodged somewhere in Harry’s brain. Again, he thought. I want to make him do that again.
He had no idea how long they spent leaning against the wall. Harry didn’t particularly care. His mind turned through a pleasure-loop, which was mainly just an endless repetition of Draco Draco Draco.
“What if we just go back to bed?” he mumbled against Draco’s neck.
“Do not,” Draco said. “Tempt me.”
“I am tempting you, Malfoy. For Merlin’s sake.”
“Things to do,” he insisted. “Come on. Come on. I’ll wash your hair.”
That turned out to be one of the most pleasant things Harry had ever experienced in his life. It felt so good that Draco teased him. “This is quite the performance, Potter.”
“Not a performance,” Harry gasped. “Will you do it again tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to. It’s clear you can’t care for your hair properly.”
Harry flicked water at him, and the shower ended in soap bubbles and Draco pretending to be offended about such childish games.
When they went down, it was full evening, and Harry was not surprised to be led into the sitting room. He followed Draco to the Christmas village.
Draco waited, a small smile on his face, and Harry peered into it.
“Oh! They’re decorating!”
The townspeople, which were mostly charmed shadows, he thought, had come out. A tree was being levitated down the centre of the street. Strings of lights appeared, one by one, on the buildings. People went in and out of a shop, carrying minuscule packages.”
“Something’s not right,” Harry murmured.
He felt Draco tense. “What?”
Harry found Draco’s hand and pulled him close, an arm around his waist, his head on his shoulder. “There. That’s better.”