19 Years (HP - Drarry)

Chapter 49: Just Like Every Night Has Its Dawn

A/N: Sorry about that last cliffhanger!

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Thursday, February 22, 2018

Draco was drifting. Bobbing and floating in a sea of inky darkness. Then the darkness began to lighten, fade into gray. He was surrounded by mist, an impenetrable fog. All around him was a quiet susurration, gradually intensifying. The gray faded to white, and the murmurs became a roar, and then the light turned brilliant, blinding, and he began to perceive movement.

The blurry shapes slowly resolved; color bled back into the world. He began to distinguish voices within the roar. He faded in and out, sometimes floating, sometimes besieged by light, movement, sound. He wondered if he were dead, why death was beginning to seem disturbingly familiar, worryingly like life.

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Friday, February 23, 2018

Some time later, he realized that this must be life, after all, and that he could now add failing to kill himself to the string of failures that defined his miserable life.

Slowly, resignedly, he opened his eyes.

Harry slumped in a chair by his... he looked down. Hospital bed. Infirmary bed, he corrected, as he blinked slowly at his surroundings and his sluggish brain identified them as the Hogwarts infirmary.

So. Not dead, then.

Harry.

Harry, it seemed, was asleep, which explained the slumping. What it didn't explain was why he was here. With Draco. Why he looked like hell.

Draco frowned at him. Harry's face, though somewhat relaxed in sleep, was still drawn and pale. Dark shadows lurked under his eyes and stained his skin like bruises. His hair was lank, his clothing rumpled. His forehead was creased with wrinkles, and from the prominence of his cheekbones and the birdlike frailty of his wrist, flung across Draco's blanket in sleep, Draco was pretty sure he'd lost weight.

For that matter, he felt thinner himself. Draco plucked idly at the collar of his thin cotton hospital gown, worrying his lip between his teeth. How long had he been here?

He looked up, directly into green eyes that went from shadowed and sleep-fogged to blazing in an instant. Draco's breath caught, and he wondered if Harry had spent the past however-long-it-had-been waiting for Draco to wake simply so he could kill him himself.

He watched as Harry's eyes cleared, as the fog of sleep burned away, as shock and then anger trickled in to replace it.

He flinched and looked down. He deserved that, he supposed.

"Draco Lucius Abraxas Malfoy!" Harry hissed. Draco winced. "Do you have any idea what it would have done to me, if I hadn't found you in time?"

"How - how did you know to find me?" he asked, wondering why Harry had bothered.

Harry waved a familiar piece of folded parchment in front of his face. "With this, you blithering idiot! I went back for you - did you really think I wouldn't? To find you, after I'd sat by the lake for a while, thinking. You didn't answer your door, you weren't in your classroom; no one in Slytherin had seen you. It took me ages to think of checking the map, and then, when I saw your name flickering in and out on that frozen rooftop in a way I'd never seen before... What the hell were you thinking? How could you give me back my memories of what we were to each other - what we are to each other - and then take that away again?

Are? Draco's breath caught; the pain flared in his chest and his vision went dark around the edges.

"Draco! DRACO! Come back to me, dammit!"