talk tonight

Harry sat on the edge of the Astronomy Tower and bleakly wondered how long it would take if he jumped.  Wondered if it’d be like flying.

A familiar drawl emerged from the blackness behind him.  “Not thinking of jumping, are you Potter?”

Harry turned round.  He was too tired to even grin or make a crack in response, too empty to play the old game with the young man who stood a little way off, his silver-blonde hair glinting in the moonlight, his eyes dark.

“Perhaps”, he said morosely.  “It would certainly put an end to things.”

Draco snorted.  “Not the end anyone wants,” he offered, coming closer.  “And I certainly never figured you for a quitter.”

The remark brought the ghost of a smile to Harry’s lips; how ironic that of all the people in the world, it would be Draco who could make him feel something.

He sat there, shrouded in the darkness, and turned back to look out at the night.  His hands lay limply in his lap.  “There’s no point in going on if you can’t win.”

“Of course you can win Golden Boy!  It’s what you were born for, surely.”

Harry bit his lip, and didn’t speak.  He felt, rather than heard, Draco come closer.  He could hear the worry in his voice though.

“What’s…what’s wrong, Potter?”

Harry didn’t look at him.  “I was just told by Dumbledore,” he said, deadpan, “Ginny got taken last night.  They found her body about two hours ago.”

Following the commencement of War, most students at Hogwarts had been advised to go back to their families, and go into hiding.  The Weaselys, prominent through Arthur’s Ministry work, had been a case in point.  Always moving from city to city, packing up at a moment’s notice and heading to another Ministry-approved safehouse.  Never able to talk to anyone, or live normal lives; so many precautions and restrictions, that, in the end, hadn’t helped one jot.

“I’m…sorry.”  He heard Draco tentative, uncertain.  Perhaps even a little bit afraid.  He’d never heard that in the other boy’s tone before.

Harry gave a half-laugh: it didn’t sound pleasant.  “Really?”

Indignation returned to Draco’s voice.  Now that was familiar.  “Yes, of course I am.  I might not have made a meal of it, Potter, but I admired the girl’s spunk, standing her ground in a family of brothers like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harry assured him, levelly.  “None of it matters anymore.”

And leant forward.

To be prevented from leaning any further by the slender hand that was suddenly clamped onto his left shoulder.  “I really don’t think you need to acquaint yourself with the ground, Potter,” camethe familiar drawl.

“Why Draco,” said Harry faintly, “I didn’t know you cared.”

Harry could feel the grin, hovering somewhere behind him, breath hot and moist on his neck in the cold night air.  “Hardly, Golden Boy.  I just don’t want you plummeting to your death until after you defeat Voldemort and save us all from eternal servitude.  After all, could you imagine me slaving away?  It’d spoil my complexion something rotten.”

Harry’s smile grew wider.  “Of course.  I should have known your motivations were purely self-centred.”

Draco chuckled.  “Of course.”

There was a pause as both looked out at the landscape around them, the castle and grounds swathed in darkness.  Draco didn’t take his hand away.

“I’m sorry about what happened with your father,” Harry offered, feeling Draco’s fingers briefly tense.

“Don’t be”, he said somewhat curtly, before recovering his cool.  “My father and I…have never been what one would call ‘close.’  He’d always suspected I wouldn’t join the ranks of the Old-and-Fungal-One.”
”Then for someone who’d always suspected, his reaction was quite harsh!” retorted Harry, ruffled by Draco’s apparent casualness.  “You were found unconscious and bleeding in a disused classroom, and had to stay in the Hospital Wing for half a bloody week!  The man’s a monster!”

“Why Potter, I didn’t know you cared,” Draco proffered in response, rubbing Harry’s shoulder and sounding almost as if he was fit to purr.  Before Harry could response, the Slytherin continued.  “Lucius was merely put out by my reasoning, rather than the fact of my defection.”

“Oh.  I see.”  Actually, Harry didn’t see at all, but he didn’t know what else to say in response.

“You stopped going all postal on me Golden Boy?”  Harry jumped slightly at the sound of Draco’s voice.  He was right next to Harry’s right ear.

“Um.  Maybe.  Kind of.  I don’t know!” Harry finally admitted, in sheer frustration.  “Do you have any idea what it’s like, having everyone you care about taken from you, one by one?  Waking up each day and having to censor what you say just in case he’s listening somehow?  You can’t be nice to anyone, or be friends with anyone, or Merlin forbid, tell someone you love him because they’ll just get added to the list of potential targets, which is being whittled away piece by piece ev’ry time he strikes!”

Strong hands curled around Harry’s waist, and Harry felt a weight on his shoulder, and hair tickling in his ear.  Draco, it seemed, had decided to rest his head, and found Harry’s right shoulder an appropriate place to do it.  Harry, for his part, let out a small involuntary sigh, and leaned back into the embrace.

“I’m only doing this to stop you from jumping,” Draco assured him.  “Therefore it’s a purely selfish act and you can’t read anything else into it.”  Harry thought Draco sounded inordinately pleased with himself.  “What you need, Golden Boy, is something to live for.  Something to fight for.”

“Someone even?” Harry said softly, nuzzling against Draco’s neck, not wanting to disturb the glorious sensation of just being held.

“Oh, I suppose that could work,” Draco drawled nonchalantly.  “I guess in the interests of my own survival, I could fulfil that role.”  He gently pressed his lips against Harry’s cheek.  “That is, of course, if it’s all right with you.  I wouldn’t want to ruin your lifelong ambition to end up as a wizard pancake, obviously.”

Harry reached round with an arm, ruffling Draco’s luxuriant hair.  “I think it’s lost its appeal somewhat,” he admitted.

“Oh, good.”  Those same strong hands slid up and tugged at him slightly, so Harry had no choice but to stand up and turn around, stepping down from the ledge.  His hand was firmly clasped in Draco’s as the other boy (nearly a man, really) lead him towards the lighted stairwell.

“Just a minute.”  Harry let Draco’s hand go and swiftly crossed back to the ledge, thrusting himself into the night sky, a speck amongst the blackness.  He could have sworn he heard a muttered “if you jump this time, Harry, I’ll get the bloody spatula” behind him, but Harry only smiled.

He looked out at the view surrounding him.  There was so much, even in the dark.  How many people even knew what they were up against?, he wondered.  How many people would die tonight.

He thought of Seamus, the first to go, exterminated with his entire family in a raid on their family home in Cork.  Dean had sobbed for a week.  He’d thought of Cho, of Justin, or all the others who’d vanished or died or been declared missing, and all the ones they’d lost.

He thought of Cedric.  And Ginny.

Raising his fist into the night, Harry cried unto the world: “You hear me, Voldemort?  It ends now, you bastard!  You’ve taken and taken and taken, and now I’m going to get you, you hear me?  You’re history!”

Having said what needed to be said, he turned to find a Slytherin, eyebrow raised, standing not a few paces from him.  “That sent him quaking, I’m sure,” he remarked dryly.

Harry ignored him, and got down from the ledge.  Linking his arm in Draco’s, whisked towards the stairwell.  “Now, where were we going?” he asked breezily.

Draco smirked.  “If I asked ‘your dorm or mine’, Potter, would that make me a cliché?”

Harry considered this.  “No, I don’t think so.”

Draco wrapped an arm around Harry’s waist as they walked, and turned his head slightly to kiss Harry’s hair.  “That didn’t answer my question, you know.”

Harry didn’t say a word.