Stop All the Clocks (This Is the Last Time I'm Leaving Without You)

chapter 16

Normal isn't something Harry's ever known, and though it's something that he's mostly given up on by this point in his life, he sometimes can't help but wish for it. Times like now, because he's pretty sure that normal people don't have to leave their boyfriends in life-or-death situations, and normal people don't come back as soon as they can, but still too late, and find their boyfriends stretched out on the blood-slicked floor, cut open neck to navel. Normal people certainly don't think to themselves, "At least I didn't do it, this time."

They'd given Draco a private room at St Mungo's, as much in deference to his status as the Auror who'd rescued the daughter of a member of the Wizengamot as to his status as Harry Potter's boyfriend. He'd been cleaned up and patched up and propped up on a fluffy pillow, his complexion gone so pale that Harry could see the faint blue tracing of veins at his temples. He stared, watching the slow rise and fall of Draco's chest, the faint twitch of his eyelids, the steady pulse at his throat. He stared and stared because if he closed his eyes even for a moment all he could see was Draco sprawled across the tile floor of that kitchen, limp and still, his skin ashen, his blood shockingly red where it was splashed across the floor, the chest of his Auror uniform shredded beyond repair and soaked through.

Harry had thought he was dead at first. He'd stumbled into the kitchen and stopped short, gripped by shock and horror and a nauseating wave of déjà vu before he rushed across the room and dropped down beside Draco, the blood on the floor warm and sticky where it soaked into the knees of his trousers, his fingers smeared red as he groped for a pulse. If backup had arrived even one minute later... Harry shivered and couldn't bring himself to finish the thought. It hadn't. They'd been in time. Draco was alive. That was all that mattered.

Draco's parents would be here soon. They'd been in France and had to catch an emergency Portkey back. So Harry took this time to enjoy the silence and the solitude and the freedom to watch Draco and memorise every detail of what he'd come frighteningly close to losing. He knew Draco's mouth very well, along with his eyes and his hair and the exact way his eyebrows arched, so pale blond they were almost invisible. Harry had spent hours kissing his way up and down the slender column of Draco's throat, and knew the way Draco's hipbones fit perfectly into his palms. He'd spent hours with his hands curled and clutching at Draco's shoulders and biceps. He knew exactly how Draco's back felt beneath his fingers, the way his muscles tensed and shifted, and the shallow hill-valley-hills of his vertebrae.

But he'd never noticed how ridiculously perfect Draco's ears were, like the flawless line drawings in anatomy textbooks. Or the exact pattern his veins made over the backs of his hands, or how the tendons stretched up to the small knobs of his knuckles, or how neat and clean he kept his fingernails. Or how his skin stretched taut over the delicate bones of his wrist. Draco's wrists looked especially fragile. Harry had always known how breakable Draco was - he'd learned it years before with Draco's blood splashed over a different tiled floor - but he'd somehow managed to forget.

He'd never let himself forget again.

And just like that Harry knew he wanted Draco. Not just his body or occasional stretches of his time, but all the rest of him too. All the things that made him smile or scowl or laugh or sigh. Harry wanted each swallow, each breath, each blink of his eyes and each beat of his heart. Every word, every thought. Harry wanted everything. He'd been fine with their initial arrangement of casual sex, but now even boyfriends didn't feel like enough. He didn't think anything would ever be, but he could sure as hell try.

Sometimes Harry wondered what it'd be like to have a relationship that wasn't formed under duress, that wasn't accelerated and solidified by the threat of trolls or basilisks or Dark Lords or whatever arsehole was trying to kill him this week. He wondered what it would be like to grow close to someone slowly, naturally, like a vine twining through a trellis beneath the gentle encouragement of a long summer of warm sunshine, not slammed together and forged in the white-hot flames of mortal peril. Sometimes Harry wasn't sure he knew how to do anything else. And maybe Draco didn't know how, either.

All Harry knew was he had this now, and he couldn't let it go.

"Potter?"

Harry was out of his seat in an instant. "Draco." His voice caught on Draco's name, and he leaned over the bed. Draco's eyes were open but he hadn't moved, other than to turn his head slightly in Harry's direction.

Draco frowned at him. "Malfoy," he said, his voice rough and dry, then coughed. "You call me Malfoy." He coughed again.

Harry didn't answer as he helped him sit up, sliding one arm around his shoulders to support him, and helped him to take a drink from the glass of water a Mediwitch had left under a cooling charm on the bedside table. He coughed again, softer now, and Harry gently lowered him back to the bed.

"Emily?" Draco asked.

"She's fine," Harry said. "She's safe, she's with her family now."

Draco let out a sigh that turned into a small cough at the end. "Good. And the kidnappers?"

"Gone by the time we got there," Harry said. "We've caught two of them, and it's only a matter of time until we track down the others."

"Good," Draco said again. "That's good."

"Draco..." Harry began, but trailed off because he didn't know how to put what he felt into words.

"There it is again," Draco said, his mouth lifting into an exhausted smile. "You have no idea how bloody weird it is to hear you call me that."

Harry felt his mouth tug up in an answering smile. "You're my boyfriend. Shouldn't I call you by your first name?"

Draco closed his eyes. "I don't suppose I can stop you," he said. "Just don't expect me to call you Harry."

Harry slipped his hand under Draco's, palm up, and smiled when Draco laced their fingers together and gave a slight squeeze. "We'll see about that," he said. "I've got a lot of years to change your mind."

The smile lingered faintly at the corner of Draco's mouth, and he gave Harry's fingers another squeeze. "You're on, Potter."

They sat in silence for another minute or so until a Healer came in. Harry stood quietly aside as the Healer poked and prodded at Draco, and asked whether this or that hurt. He watched Draco respond to each question and smile when the Healer made a small joke, and he tried to figure out what to do with the sudden intensifying of his feelings for Draco. It felt so overwhelming, desperate and eager all at once, that it scared him a little, and his first instinct was to push it back down and pretend it never happened. But he refused to hide from it. Life was too short to waste any of it hiding from something just because it scared him.