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In first year, Harry Potter turns down Draco Malfoy’s hand in friendship and starts a rivalry.
In second, he wears the skin of Draco’s best friend to find out secrets he is sure he already knows the answer to.
In third year, he watches Hermione slap him and is filled with a confusing and consuming possessiveness. He casts his Patronus and thinks it’s the exact same shade as Draco’s eyes.
In 4th, he nicks one of the Potter Stinks badges and marvels at the charms' work, then laughs in the quiet of his dorm. Months later, he watches Draco enter the Yule Ball and never thinks about Cho Chang again.
In fifth, he admires his white blonde hair from afar, then pushes himself in Draco’s way just to see his smug little smile while he abuses his position as a prefect to take points away from Harry. And Harry wants and wants and wants.
In sixth year, Harry follows Draco on the train, because he’s a Death Eater, because he’s marked, because he’s up to something and because he is paler than usual, gaunt, slumped. He fires a spell meant for enemies and watches Draco bleeding out on a bathroom floor, and thinks he looks like a fallen angel, haloed in red, even as Harry is gripped by the terror of almost ending Draco’s life.
Less than a year later, Harry sees Draco through swollen eyes and hears him lie for him. He wrenches Draco’s wand out of his hand and feels power spark between their fingertips. He saves him from an inferno and almost crashes from the feeling of his chest tight against his back.
After, after everything, Harry sees him at the Ministry and almost loses his mind from how defeated he looks, how limp his hair, how dead his eyes.
Harry wishes to cocoon him in blankets and pillows, feed him soup under soft light.
So he asks, as he hands over his wand, and their fingers touch on the hawthorn wood which killed a monster. ‘Let me take care of you, please.’
Draco’s eyes go wide, and they are all silver, surely made of starlight. He looks around as if Harry could be talking to anyone else, as if Harry could look at anyone else.
Draco nods, and so Harry takes his hand, as gently as he knows how, which isn’t very. Harry has never known gentleness, never learnt it, but for Draco, he’ll try.
They apparate to Grimmauld Place. Kreacher has done much to clean it, but it is still too dark, too cold. Harry summons the fluffiest blanket he owns and wraps it around Draco’s shaking form.
He leads him upstairs, the same light hold on his hand that he refused to give up.
Harry takes him to his own bedroom, the nicest room in the house- though that’s not saying much. Still, the bed is huge, the carpet on the floor is thick, and the windows are large.
Harry piles him into his bed, calls Kreacher and asks for tea. If the house elf is confused by the stranger shivering in his bed, he doesn’t say anything.
Harry prepares Draco’s tea, milk first, and then honey. Leave it for a minute before stirring. Draco watches the ritual, dumbstruck. Before he can ask, Harry whispers, ‘I’ve watched you very intently for six years; you pick up a few things.’ He isn’t sure, but he thinks Draco's lips lift in a shadow of a smile.
Later, when the tea is finished, and Draco is falling asleep in the bed, Harry tucks him in, duplicates the pillows until there is a mountain of them, he steps back, to give him privacy, more peace, but Draco tugs on his sleeve, says his first word since the battle: “stay”.
Harry lies next to him, watches him breathe, counts his lashes, traces the outline of his lips. It’s the calmest he’s felt in, well, in years. He falls asleep without trying.
They both, finally, rest.