Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey

I've known that I was bisexual for quite a long time. It was a shock when I first found out. I had had crushes on girls, Cho Chang for example, so I assumed that I was straight. When I was 15 I developed a crush on my best friend. Bisexuality had always been a possibility, but it wasn’t expected. It was strange when I developed this crush on Ron. Every time I was around him I wanted to hold him, to kiss him. We started to drift apart slightly because of the great secret that I was keeping from him. I would dream about him telling me that he felt the same. When I thought about it consciously I realized that I would never really want to do anything with him. It would undoubtedly ruin our friendship, which was something that was very precious to me. I never told him about these feelings, and like any teenage crush, they faded with time. Although the feelings are entirely gone now and my friendship with Ron is back to what it once was, the memory of this crush stands out in my mind. This was the first time that I fell for another boy.

As strange, and terrible as it was having feelings for Ron, the second boy that I fell for was twenty times worse. This was like a strange kind of hell. First of all, these feelings were much stronger, instead of just wanting to kiss him and hold him I wanted to pin him against the wall and do unspeakable things to him, I wanted to tell him things about myself that I had never told anyone else. The second problem was who he was, who his father was, what house he was in. These might seem like separate problems, but they weren't. The second boy that I, Harry James Potter, ever had feelings for was Draco Lucius Malfoy, a Slytherin and the son of a Death Eater. I don't know how it happened, really. One day I was thinking up new ways to hurt him, the next my mind kept wandering to unbidden thoughts of how great he would look in leather. It wasn't all that sudden though, I suppose. I started feeling this rush every time I saw him. Like a chill, it was warm and cold. It was the most amazing thing I had ever felt in my life. It was so much more than those little crushes on Cho and Ron. It was this intense feeling of pain mixed with pleasure.

I suppose that it was fitting, in a way, that only he could evoke these intense feelings in me. He had always been able to get me to feel more than anyone else... even if the bulk of those feelings had been negative. Every night I would lie awake for hours, wishing for it to go away. I wanted to be able to control myself, but it seemed that the more I tried to fight my feelings, the stronger they became. Even once I gave in to my feelings there was nothing I could do. It wasn't as if I could just go up to him and say "Hey Malfoy, want to snog?" That would be ridiculous even if I said it any other way. Draco already hated me, so not much damage would be done in that regard, but he would undoubtedly tell the whole wizarding world. I would be known as Harry Potter : The Boy who Lived an Alternate Lifestyle. I would be shunned by the countless homophobes in this world. Although I'm sure many people would be accepting of me, I didn't want to disappoint them - no matter how much I hated my fame, I wanted to prove myself worthy of it. As the Sorting Hat had told me in my first year of Hogwarts, I had a thirst to prove myself. It was one of the things that almost put me in Slytherin, I suppose.

I can remember a thought that surfaced in my mind quite commonly around then. I remember thinking about how nothing was the way that it appeared. Everything had layers. That maybe everything wasn't black and white, good and evil. That maybe Draco wasn't so different from me in the first place. That we might share a common ground, away from the black and white. Among the shades of grey. Starting around the fifth year, Draco started changing. I didn't notice at first, but he started drawing into himself. He was still just as much of a git around my friends and I, but he started to become more reclusive around the Slytherins. As always, he was flanked by his lackeys, Crabbe and Goyle, but he seemed less interested in them than usual - not that he ever really seemed interested in them. I began to wonder what his life was really like. I wondered if he was really only the spoiled rich boy that I knew him as. I didn't understand anything I was going through then - I don't really now, either - but I wonder if my heart sensed his pain before my brain did, or if I was just trying to logically justify my feelings. Either way, I started to pay more attention to him. Which I suppose makes sense, considering I was falling in love with the slimy git. The more I noticed Draco Malfoy, the more I thought about how we weren't so different. I'm not sure exactly when accepted the fact that I was falling for Draco Malfoy, but it took a while.

At the time I thought nobody knew. I was too wrapped up in myself to notice the odd comment from Ron or Hermione that would have hinted otherwise. They both knew me too well not to figure it out. They weren't about to confront me though, they knew that I would tell them when I was ready. I did tell them, eventually. They told me later that they discussed it on their own, so as not to embarrass me.

One day, near the end of fifth year, I was walking around the school at night and I saw him. He was sitting on the railing of a balcony that I liked to visit occasionally, staring up at the moon. The light bounced off of his silver blond hair. It was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. I gasped. That small sound altered my life forever. I gasped, and Draco Malfoy turned around. His face was covered in tears. I then did something that I would never have expected myself to do. I pulled off my Invisibility Cloak, bridged the gap between us, and put my arms around him. Seeing him with tears on his face made me want to protect him. Everything after that is a blur, but shall I just say that we found our shades of grey.