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Until the Solstice Rises	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5147 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 9
- 10
- 11
Title: Shadows Stay in the Corners

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Mild angst

Wordcount: 1900

Summary: Waking up in Harry Potter's flat was nothing Draco would have expected, and nothing like he would have expected.

Author's Notes: This is another of my Advent fics, for <lj user="helenadax">. She gave me the prompt: Harry/Draco. Their first morning after is awkward, but cute. This is for you, sweetie.

Shadows Stay in the Corners

Draco opened his eyes, and promptly closed them again.

            He wasn't stupid. He could hear the shower running, and that meant he knew someone was in the other room showering. And it had to be a different bathroom than his, because he never allowed people to come home with him. He knew there were people who thought him snobbish for it, but it was just a point of etiquette he wanted to maintain. A wizard's home was where he could be private. Draco had started dating people that could admit that.

            Except, now...

`           He had come home with someone who didn't.

            Draco rolled over slowly. He was looking at a plain bedroom, or so it seemed at first. Only when he looked around did he see the deep, rich colors in the wood, and the books stacked thickly on the shelves, and the robes that hung in the cupboard off to the side in neat, ordered rows. The robes on the floor, which were stained with--things--had rather commanded his attention at first.

            A well-lit room, with a Muggle electric light overhead as well as a window that admitted bright sunlight onto the bed. Draco wasn't sure whether he wanted the window to be enchanted or not. If it was real, he'd spent way too much time here, but on the other hand, it was vulgar to have an enchanted window in a private room like this.

            The shower shut off.

            Draco sat up, rubbing his hands down his cheeks and swallowing. He wondered for a moment why he couldn't remember last night. He hadn't been drunk, he knew that. He never was when Blaise took him to some new place. He wanted to remain alert and aware, to judge the level of the talent that was attempting to seduce him.

            Then the other man stepped from the shower into the bedroom, wrapped in a towel around the waist and wiping his hair with a second one as if he hated it, and Draco's memory barrier broke. His brain had been trying to protect him from the trauma, he knew then, but it was too late when the symbol of said trauma was standing right in front of him.

            "Oh, no," he moaned. "Anyone but you."

            Harry Potter lowered his head towel and blinked at Draco for a moment. His green eyes were wide, but not as blank as Draco would have assumed. He could see without his glasses now, then. "Well, it nearly was," he said mildly. "There were other applicants to climb into your bed, I know that."

            "I would never have chosen anyone who was that persistent." Draco folded his arms and glared at him. But he could feel that his cheeks were on fire, and Potter, his smile deep and amused and deepening even further as he looked at Draco, knew exactly what it meant.

            "Oh, but you did," Potter said, and left Draco to remember the several dances they'd shared while he turned around to take a set of robes from the neat row in the cupboard.

            Draco kept on staring at his back. Potter bent down to drop the towel, and that left Draco staring at his arse. His fine, fine arse. Draco licked his lips as other memories came back, not all of them bad.

            Then he shook his head. Regardless of whether he had had fun or not, he was here with Potter, and that wasn't something that was meant to happen in any incarnation of the world.

            "You're welcome to stay here," Potter added over his shoulder, raking his hair back behind his ears and studying the effect in a mirror underneath the window. Then he snorted and cast a spell that dried his hair. "I don't know why I bother. It always looks like a mess anyway."

            "What time is it?" Draco demanded.

            Potter turned to stare at him. "About ten in the morning. What, you can't tell from the angle of the light?"

            Draco folded his arms and sat upright, aware that he would look a little silly naked in the middle of Potter's bed (and since when did he sleep naked?) but determined to have a try at preserving his dignity anyway. "Where are you going at ten in the morning? Either it's Saturday and you should sleep in more than that, or you should be at work already."

            Potter had a ringing, merry laugh when he wanted to, which irritated Draco all to hell. "It's Saturday, sure, but we were back here by midnight." He gave Draco that deep smile again; this time, it made Draco flush all down his chest. "And we had an athletic session. That means we were asleep by one. Well, you were. I kept waking up during the night and reaching over to touch you and make sure you were real."

            Draco shook his head frantically. "Listen to yourself, Potter. Don't you realize someone must have drugged us?"

            "Ron was watching," Potter said calmly. "He would have cursed anyone who tried. And I'm on my way for lunch with him and Hermione, which is a tradition we've done every Saturday for years. Like I said, you can stay here. Or you can come with me, although I can't promise that they'll be thrilled."

            "Thrilled? Thrilled?" Draco was trying to work up the right kind of outrage, but it was hard to when he could see the scars on Potter's torso, and remember touching them, too. "You realize that this changes everything, Potter?"

            Potter shook his head. "I really don't see why. You've talked to me a few times about 'having' me, and it got more pointed and sexual since Hogwarts. You think I haven't noticed that? Last night, I just decided I was tired of all the teasing, and I wanted to see how serious you were. And you're more serious than I ever imagined." He closed one eye in a wink as deep as that smile.

            Draco was so red he had to take the covers off his chest. At least Potter's eyes dipped down most satisfactorily to his navel before he blinked and glanced away. "I remember teasing you," Draco said. "I thought the world would have to end before you'd take me up on it."

            "But last night, you did." Potter leaned forwards and planted his hands in the middle of the blankets, between Draco's spread legs, not far from Draco's groin. Draco swallowed, and found little air and less spit in his throat. "And I'm grateful," Potter added quietly. "If you choose not to stay, fine. But I'm grateful to have had this one night."

            His gaze seemed to burn through Draco, who fumbled for the covers again. "When did you get this confident?" he mumbled.

            Potter grinned and stepped back. "When the war ended. There's the ending of the world for you, if you like. It was my world at the time, and at first I thought that there was nothing I could do, nothing that would ever live up to the experience of defeating You-Know-Who." Draco stared at him with narrowed eyes, and Potter added without missing a beat, "I noticed you flinched last night when I said his name.

            "But I decided in the end that I owed myself more than that, to collapse and deflate like a balloon when my 'purpose' was gone. I'm an Auror, and I'm a friend, and I'm someone who sleeps with men he finds attractive. You can be part of that if you want. You don't have to." He turned away and tugged on the robes firmly.

            Draco scowled at Potter's back. It was ridiculous, but what he really wanted to say was, I'm trying to have a typical morning after here, and you're fucking it all up.

            "You know."

            Draco started and looked up at Potter, who had paused by the bed and was gazing down at him, his head tilted to the side, his finger resting on his chin. Draco had the feeling he was imitating someone, but no matter how he rifled his memory, he couldn't decide who or what it was.

            "You don't have to make up your mind right now," Potter whispered. "You can think about it, and about the memories, and--stay here in my bed and sleep, how about that? I'm always back from lunch about one. That's enough time for you to decide if you want to touch me again."

            Draco spluttered. This time, he managed to say, "That's the thing you're most concerned about, whether we can have sex again. Don't you realize that's fucked up? Don't you realize that--"

            Potter's hand came down and covered Draco's mouth. Draco stifled the impulse to lick it. Yes, he could remember the taste of Potter's skin, and it was tempting, but that didn't mean he could do this when it was the very thing he was arguing against.

            "It's not the thing I'm most concerned about," Potter said quietly. "But I do think it might help you make up your mind. Think about it. Remember it. You haven't let yourself really remember it yet, have you?"

            Draco shuddered. He hadn't. And not because it was unpleasant. When he could remember legs and arms wrapped around him as if he was the prize Potter had always wanted, it was doubly something he thought he could imagine, taste, want.

            "Yes, exactly," Potter said, as if he had spoken aloud, and pulled his hand back. He was smiling. "I think you need some time to meditate on it, and so do I. And in the meantime, I'm going to lunch with my friends, and you can make up your mind about whether or not you want this to change your life."

            Draco just looked at him and blinked. He would have shaken his head, but he couldn't find the strength. Was it really this simple? Was Potter really banishing the shadows with this simple statement?

            It seemed he was. He bent down and kissed Draco, and although Draco spared a thought to the unbrushed state of his own teeth and the ragged clumps of his hair hanging down beside his cheeks, it seemed Potter didn't. He kissed with as much enthusiasm as the memories suggested, and went his way, smiling.

            Draco sprawled back on the pillow and stared around. Potter had some thick books on Potions theory on the top shelf, he noted absently. He'd flung the towel on the floor beside the clothes from yesterday. But Draco's clothes were folded neatly on top of a chair with a scuffed seat that looked as if Potter used it more to reach high shelves than for sitting.

            Draco looked again at the enchanted window, no, the real one, if it was shedding light like that, and then at the corners of the room where shadows crouched.

            Potter wouldn't let them come out and overcome him. If Draco wouldn't.

            It was his choice.

            Possibly terrifying, but he had a few hours to think about it.

            Draco curled up in the bed, and began to remember.

            The End.
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Until the Solstice Rises