The Scent Of Malice | drarry

forty eight | when you're ready

As Harry dressed to go back to the Burrow, Draco asked if he'd stay the night, and Harry looked at him, considering.

"No, I think I should go," he said, "I know you mean it innocently enough but my heart will take this more seriously than yours will. I don't want to rush this now we have a chance to do it right. I have to protect myself."

"I'm not going to hurt you again," Draco said awkwardly. "I ...I want you, Harry."

"I know you won't," Harry replied. "And I know you do. But it isn't enough."

"Can't you just stay one night?" Draco asked. A pleading tone slipped into his voice and he coughed to force it out, but it was no use. "Harry, I have nightmares."

"I know," Harry smiled sadly at him. "I do too."

"I need you." His voice cracked and tore a little piece off Harry's heart. "Harry, please."

"You need to learn to be strong on your own, Draco," Harry said, as firmly as he could manage. "I can't save you forever. Don't you see? This is what's fucked us up all along. You need somebody to save you, and that can't be me any more."

"You're - you're leaving me?" Draco asked, panicked. It sounded ridiculous, he knew, but he was really dependent on the other boy.

"Yeah," Harry said, surprising himself as much as Draco. "I am. For a while."

He allowed himself to look fully into the hurt on Draco's face, feel the other boy's emotions mixed in with his own.

"Where are you going? Will you come back?" Draco asked.

He was a vision, that boy. A blonde-headed angel in the afternoon light that poured through his windows and soaked his skin.

"It's more about whether you'll come back," Harry said, lacing up his shoes. "I'm giving you this time as a gift. Get better with it."

Draco frowned, confused.

"Listen, Draco, I love you, alright?" Harry sighed. "And I'll always love you. That's a constant. I know it the way I know the sun will rise, the way I know the tide will come in after it goes out, and the way I know you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"But?"

"But now isn't our time," Harry conceded. "But one day it will be, and we can do things the right way for once."

"How will I know when it's time?" Draco faltered. "I thought this was just getting good again!"

"It is," Harry reassured him. "And you'll know. It'll be the day that hurting me hurts you more. Or the day you can say you love me and mean it. The day you find out what normal people do when they care about each other."

"What will I do without you?" Draco whispered. It was more of a question to himself than to Harry, but Harry answered him anyway. Gently, kindly.

"You'll do your art," he said. "Go away for a bit if you like, focus on yourself in some new surroundings. You should go to therapy, retake your classes, get a job that means something to you. Fall in love again, if you'd like to, though it'll hurt. Make better friends, eat good food, sleep well, dream lots."

He took a deep, shaky breath.

"And know that while we're apart, I'll be spending my time looking for someone like you until I see you again, and I won't find anyone. There's no one quite like you. But I think you're worth the wait."

***

A few days later, Harry got an Owl from Blaise. Draco was gone.

He's your bloody boyfriend, isn't he? The letter berated Harry angrily. You're meant to be keeping tabs on him!

"Not exactly," Harry muttered, but he read on.

Neither Pansy nor Theo nor I have seen him since Monday and he didn't tell anyone where he was going. I'm assuming you know something about this - anything to do with him is usually also to do with you by definition.

"So it's begun," Harry whispered, and a small proud smile spread over his face. "He's really doing it."

I don't know where he is, Blaise, he wrote back quickly. But I expect he's taken my advice. I suggested he should go away and find himself for a bit, get better on his own. I told him I'd be waiting for him whenever he's back.

He closed his eyes, and pictured Draco running away to live his life for a while. Where would he have gone? Not the Manor, of course, that wasn't home to him any more. Not with his parents in Azkaban.

And if he wasn't at the new place he'd been renting then that meant he'd found somewhere else - London, perhaps? Draco always loved the anonymity of a big city. Maybe he'd found an apartment in Camden where he could do his art, and wander up Primrose Hill in the evening to watch the sunset when the light was soft.

Or perhaps he'd gone further south to the beaches of Devon, got himself a little waterfront place in the way Victorians used to go down to the sea to get well. Harry couldn't picture Draco properly swimming, but maybe he liked a coastal walk, and skimming flat blue pebbles on the waves.

Maybe he'd gone even further afield, and was living in some tucked-away town in the Alps, or a remote Italian village in the countryside surrounded by wildflower meadows.

Wherever he was, Harry hoped he was happy. Most of all, he hoped he came back.

Now and again over the following weeks, he allowed himself to consider the other possibility: that maybe Draco would find himself and learn to live too well without Harry, and he'd get a letter someday in years to come, saying "I've found someone else, stop waiting for me."

It was always a possibility, but a painful one.

The thought gave Harry chills, picturing himself having to tell the story, as he'd often thought he would, of how he dedicated his life to searching for another person to make him feel alive the way Draco Malfoy did.

And how he never found another like him.

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a/n: so this is the end! epilogue is coming, but this is technically the end of the story .... hopefully youve enjoyed this journey as much as i have, i'll give proper thanks and credits in my next note, but for now thanks to everyone who reads, votes, and comments, i love you all!!

~ paradisedraco