分卷阅读51（2 / 2）

He hides it, because he does not want Harry to worry. It’s not something to worry about, just a side effect of the house looking like someplace completely new, with new smells and sounds and none of the old comforts it used to hold, and now not even the sound of Harry’s breathing and the old trick of counting the cracks spiraling over the ceiling s enough to lull him back to the calm, so even though Draco had promised himself that he would try to move away from it, he turns back to what he does best.

He cleans.

Today it’s the attic, the last thing to tackle just because he hadn’t intended to clean it. Who cleans the attic? But here he is, dusting and mopping and wiping the layer of grime off the windows, and it’s pathetic, he knows, to come back to this, but he can already feel the tension ebbing from his shoulders, feels the way his skin starts to fit him again.

This is okay, Draco kept telling himself, his thoughts coming in time with the strokes of the rag against the window, the one he kept cleaning even though it didn’t have a speck of dust left on it. This is fine, that you have to do this, that you need to have something to fall back on sometimes. It isn’t every night, just when things get bad. Everyone has stuff that they do to make life easier to take, when life gets back. He wrings the washrag out. Some people snort powdered dragon hide. All you do is clean.

He’s almost calm again, but when he sees Harry standing in the middle of the room, somehow having appeared without ever having made a noise, he still jumps.

“Harry.” He bunches the rag in his fist like he’s trying to hide it, but then relaxes, because it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong and how else could he explain this away, anyways? “Did I wake you up?”

“Did I wake you up?” Harry mimics, his voice cold and clear, his face screwed up. “Nice of you, to be considerate.”

Harry was angry, and Draco could not respond, because he was unable to shake the feeling that he had been slapped.

(If he were to compare this to something, he would say it’s like the time back in the final battle where a death eater had not believed that he had been on their side, and then someone —he never did learn who—had cursed him out of the way, but instead of letting Draco thank him, a fist had come flying out of nowhere and punched him in the face. He suspects it was Seamus.)

“That’s not the right question, anyways.” Harry didn’t look angry anymore, just a little bored, like he had better things to be doing than to calm down his nervous wreck of a boyfriend. “The better question would be what are you still doing here?”

“I’m cleaning.” Draco was almost relieved that this is what it was about. He had no idea that it upset Harry this much, was all.

“Not here as in the attic, you idiot.” Harry advanced on him, and for the first time in a long time, Draco felt afraid. “I meant here as in this house. I thought that you were leaving —I overheard the call with the realtor. You should have left the moment the ministry cleared you.”

Draco wanted to be tough. Wanted to yell, maybe, or fight back, or at least throw the rag down and stride right past Harry and out the door, to Luna’s or his mother’s or even Hermione’s, but he doesn’t. Instead he just stands there, not even bothering to brace for the impact of the conversation, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of him, unable to come up with a single cutting response. He misses being able to be mean.

“I thought—”

“That I wanted you? That I loved you? That you were finally getting that happy ever after, when the rest of your life had been so horrible?” He was laughing at him, Draco realized. Laughing in a way that was not laughing but a cold cruel mocking that, to be perfectly honest, Draco didn’t think Harry had the ability to be capable of. He was wrong. “I didn’t want you here. I was trying to do you a favor to keep you out of Azkaban, not have you stick around for the rest of my life, and really, Draco, how could someone like me love someone like you after everything you had done? Do you think that there’s forgiveness for things like that, or that it would come so easily? Whatever you thought—” He crouched down, at level with Draco, because by then Draco had attempted to flee and stumbled. “You were wrong.”

He kept going, saying all the awful things that Draco had been worrying about over these past few weeks, about how he was not worth this, worth anything, how Harry did not love him, that he could not love him, after everything he had done, and it didn’t make sense, really, but it also did, it also didn’t really even come as a surprise, because wasn’t he always expecting this moment, where Harry realizes what Draco has always known and decides that it was not possible for him to love Draco back? If Draco thought about it in the right light, he could almost trick himself into thinking that it didn’t hurt.

Except.

Except there was another Harry crouching beside him, shaking his arm, saying his name, over and over, looking from Draco to the mean Harry (who was much hotter than the Harry beside him, incidentally, both because the Harry beside him had rolled out of bed and because the mean Harry had all of Draco’s favorite aspects of him, only turned up to eleven), until he finally shoved his way in front of Draco and pointed a wand out at the mean Harry, his hand shaking.

“Ridiculous,” Is what he says, and for a second Draco thinks that he had fallen and hit his head, that it’s some strange dream, because really, is this new Harry about to argue with himself? But then it morphs into a dementor, and then Harry repeats the word and it whizzes back into a closet that Draco must have opened without meaning to, and his head become a little more clear.