Flatmates (drarry)

Chapter Six

 Hermione and Ron laced their fingers together beneath the table, staring expectantly across the cafe table at Harry and Draco.

"So," Hermione began curiously, already tired of the small talk she'd endured for fifteen minutes, "how's the flat-sharing situation?"

Harry turned to Draco, finding that the pair of cloud-grey eyes had already been trained on him. He noted the slight raise of Draco's brows, the soft curve of his pink lips, always waiting on the edge of a smirk. "Wonderfully," Harry muttered, more to himself than anyone else.

Draco smiled, the right side of his mouth arching higher than the left, before turning back to Hermione. "Except for his mess. Awfully sloppy, Potter is."

"I didn't break the wineglass last night!"

"You did leave it in the sink for two weeks, though. It was begging to be broken."

Draco shot Harry a challenging look, daring him to continue the tense banter. Harry rolled his eyes, unwilling to oblige.

Hermione's face was stuck in what could only be described as pleasant shock. Her question had been answered: the flat-sharing situation was going beyond well.

"Bloody hell," Ron said through a bite of croissant. "You two have done a real 180."

Harry felt the edges of a blush, red as Ron's hair, creeping against his cheekbones. Draco was white as porcelain. "After a month or so, the nightly fistfights did become tiresome."

"We've switched to dueling instead." Draco met this remark with another shining half-smile.

Harry smiled contentedly. The Golden Trio was back together, with a fourth guest: the Golden Boy. He couldn't ask for more; it felt like the family reunions he never had to attend.

"I," said Draco, "am going to get another coffee."

"I'm coming with you," Ron said before popping the last of his croissant into his mouth. "I want to try the breakfast sandwiches they had out there. Blimey, muggle food is weird!"

With the shriek of metal seats pushing back against cement, they were off. Hermione reached across the table and grabbed Harry's hands. "You, for lack of a better term, ain't slick."

The blush was making a reappearance across Harry's cheeks. "I don't know what you mean."

"Harry, I know love when I see it. I've been seeing it every day in Ron for God knows how many years. And I see it in you, and I see it in Draco."

Had he really been that obvious? If Hermione knew after, what, half an hour, how long had Draco known? "I don't- I'm not even gay!" She gave him a look, so he continued his front. "Even if I was, he isn't!"

"How do you know that? Has he specifically told you that he's straight?"

"No, but I..." He sighed, frustration building. "I can't just keep hoping for this forever. It's- he's so close, and if I do anything, if I ruin everything... My life was shit four months ago. Alright? Shit. Shitty apartment, shitty job, shitty life and reputation and loneliness. And Draco, he came in and he changed all of it and- he's a dream come true. He's a dream come true, and if that's the case, I don't want to wake up." He took a shaky breath. "I don't want to do something stupid and mess up and turn this into a nightmare."

Hermione looked at him with eyes of lifelong friendship, nothing but love and support. "Dreams aren't permanent, Harry. You can't keep living in one. You need to either make it a reality, or you need to wake up. You can't survive in a cycle of compressed affection and swallowed feelings. Tell him, give this a chance to work out, or... Move out." Her brows crinkled with concern. "It's for your own good."

--

When Harry apparated to Godric's Hollow, rain was pouring off of the slanted roofs of lined houses and pattering onto the stone-lined, empty streets. Harry pulled his hood up and hunched his body over the two bouquets in his arms in an effort to keep them somewhat presentable.

Not that the dead really cared for appearances.

He hurried down the eerily-quiet street and ducked under the wooden arch. Immediately, he was surrounded by slabs of concrete, engraved with names forgotten. Harry hated visiting the cemetery, really, but sometimes the questions piled up within him and he lost his path. At times like those, he needed a parent.

Despite this desire, he hardly lingered by the clean, square stone beneath which his parents were buried. He laid a dozen white carnations below the engravement. James Potter + Lily Potter. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Harry smiled sadly, filled with the regretful loss of a missing childhood that always enveloped him when he thought about his parents. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, voice lost under the thumps of large raindrops. He ran his hand over the soaked concrete top of the grave before continuing through the cemetery.

Behind the hardly-touched, countless concrete slabs was a statue that could easily be overlooked if one wasn't directly searching for it. A dog, well-groomed and sitting proudly, was sat upon a small pedestal. Etched onto the pedestal was the constellation Canis Major, the constellation Sirius Black had been named for.

This was the parent Harry had craved.

His few months with Siruis, the years he could count on one hand - those were his safe days. Hope had come in the form of a scraggly dog, only to dissipate behind a whispering curtain of darkness.

Harry laid a bouquet of white roses beneath the dog's stone figure, before tracing the engraved constellation with his fingertip.

"I don't know what to do," he murmured.

As Harry knelt before the pedestal, the statue looked over his head, as though keeping watch for the predators that had stolen Harry's childhood away from him. "You're the closest to a parent I ever really knew," Harry said, voice barely carrying over the splashing of the rain into the cemetery's muddying ground.

"And I never thought... I never thought I'd need advice of this kind, but..." Harry stared up at the dog, looking for answers in the grain of the stone. He smiled sadly. "Apparently fighting wars and taking on the Dark Lord doesn't make you any braver - not when it comes to boys."

The storm was picking up, drops smearing down the surface of the dog's face at alarming speeds. "But," Harry continued, voice dropping even further, "I think I've met - well, I've definitely met someone, I just don't know if he's-" He let out an exasperated sigh. "I just wish you could be here."

He was standing now, looking between Sirius's memorial and his parents' grave. "Any of you. God, why couldn't you have lived?" Sparks of anger, reminders of the unfairness of his early life, welled within him as Harry stood in the rain. He took in a deep breath, willing them to disappear. "It's not fair to any of us."

The cemetery was silent.

The dead were excellent listeners, but terrible at responding.