分卷阅读35（2 / 2）

He tries to act like everything is normal. He climbs into bed, pulls up the covers, turns so he is lying with his head propped up on Draco’s shoulder. Tries to pretend that he is not staring at the shadow of it against Draco’s skin.

“I just.” There’s a frantic scramble where he tries to free himself from the covers and twists to grab the old jumped flung over the desk chair. It’s one of Harry’s, one Mrs. Weasley made him for the Christmas of his fourth year, the one with the dragon on it. The sleeves are fraying and the colors dull, but it’s gone through the wash so many times its worn and soft. It’s too small on Harry’s frame, but it hangs loose on Draco’s whenever he wears it. Normally, Harry would love to see him wearing it (Ginny always said that he had a thing about that, the people he care about being marked as his own, a possessive streak a mile wide, but he tries not to think about his ex-girlfriend in times like this) but today he stops him.

Draco drops the shirt on the floor, makes a sound in the back of his throat that is only audible because of how close Harry is standing.

“I never wanted you to see it.” He’s not staring at Harry. He’s looking at the ceiling, counting the cracks. “I tried to never let you remember that part of me.”

“But I know that part already.” Harry doesn’t know how to make him understand, if he didn’t already, about how none of that matters anymore. About how forgiveness comes easier for him than it does for other people and it comes free, without any thought of asking for repayment. “I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide everything from me.”

“I didn’t want to hide all of it.” Draco drops his eyes to Harry’s face and manages a smile. “Just this one thing.”

Harry steers him over the candlelight, pulls him down to sit on the bed. Draco follows like he had never thought he should protest, like any wish of Harry’s is something he wants. There’s not even an ounce of hesitation in him when Harry pulls his arm forward, the inside up to face him, like maybe he did want to show him this, after all. Like he’s tired of hiding.

“He never wanted us to forget.” Draco’s voice is bitter, and underneath his hands, Harry can feel him tense. “That even if he was gone, even if we ran, tried to put it behind us, he would always be there. A part of us.”

He’s a part of all of us. Harry thinks, tracing the edges of the skull with his finger. What would you say if I told you that I harbored part of his soul, took some of himself into me, was helping some parasitic piece of him live? That for years I could feel what he felt and see what he saw, that my destiny was waiting beneath the skin, right close to the heart, just because he was a coward trying to push away the inevitable?

It’s ugly. Harry wants to tell him that it isn’t noticeable, that it was just another part of him, something that was beautiful, in the right light, but he couldn’t.

He supposes it must have been pretty, once. That it looked a dignified amount of cruel, sitting there on his skin, black against the pale, when all the edges were defined and the glow of the snake eyes seemed to search you out in the darkness, but it seems that when the protean charm broke, so did the beauty. Now it’s a smoky grey, and the edges blur, and it seems to pull and twist the skin in on itself, so the area around it puckers in a scar. And it’s covered in scabs.

“You’re hurting yourself.” There’s old marks and new ones, little rips across the dark mark. Harry runs his hands across it and then looks to face Draco.

“Not on purpose,” Draco says, and then adds, “Not for that purpose.”

“What do you mean?” Harry had known what it’s like to hurt yourself because others hurt you, because here is pain in this world that you cannot fix and you want to control all of that, somehow. He’d seen that reflected at himself in the mirror and when Hermione works himself to death and when Ron gets so angry he punches a wall, seen it in all of them, raging at the injustices of life.

“I tried to get rid of it.” Miserable, defeated, humiliated. “And then I just kept trying.”

“I don’t want you to hurt.” Harry curls into Draco, into his shoulder, and then bends to press his lips on the cuts, like that might make it better. Like if he could want to fix this bad enough, everything would heal. “I don’t want you to have to hide.”

“I don’t want that either.” Draco says, and he is crying, sniffling through tears that are welling up over his eyes. “I just didn’t want you to be reminded of what I had done every time you looked at me.”

“You did nothing wrong.” Harry says, slipping to kneel on the floor at Draco’s feet. The words aren’t true but the feeling behind it is. He does not know how to express that everything that happened was done for a need to survive, because he was a boy, because he got brought up on one side and Harry had been brought up on the other. That the things they both did were decisions born from circumstance. “You did what you had to. That’s all any of us were doing.”

“I don’t want you to hate me.”