Between Us
by Silvia

"I don't think we," Harry said, and stopped, and sort of breathed a little.

It was so quiet, and it had never been quiet with them, but then it was like they'd said everything. The words dried up and pauses stretched out like blankets, each of their hands at a corner.

Three weeks of trying to not say it, and then he still couldn't say it, but Draco seemed to know anyway, and it was surprising how much that stung. No one was supposed to expect this.

They were going to make it, because everything and everyone and the universe were against them. That's what Harry did, that's who he was -- he fucked with the odds.

They were supposed to last longer than five months, but they didn't.

They faded, slowly, slipping away between his fingers.

They walked back to their doors and their passwords, still so silent, and then the next day came with the sun. The world didn't end.

The world didn't start back at the beginning.

"Do you have notes?" Draco said, tapping him on the shoulder, and Harry fell off his chair he was so scared, and waited for Draco to laugh.

Draco didn't. Draco helped him up, wrapping a hand around his wrist, and rifled through the stiff pages that were stacked next to Harry's textbook until he found the one he wanted.

"Just be a moment," he murmured, and it was like that, the next day and the day after. Polished sentences and sterling, aristocratic mouth.

Soft, spreading mouth, and it still smiled for Harry when he said certain things that he guessed could be funny or something. He didn't mean them that way.

Harry had thought: you're in or you're out.

He had thought: you do this and it's over -- the end, the credits roll still, even in a world without movies, and everything goes black.

He had thought: we can make this, we can, we have to, we can, because if not, if not, if, if, if.

If not, then nothing. Actually, honestly nothing.

No trips in the stairway, but something like living. Like walking to class and headaches and being told he'd die in some horrible way and then a headache again and lunch and Draco sat at his table and Harry sat at his and they ate what was put before them and nobody said a word except --

"Good riddance," Ron snorted, and Hermione said, "Ron!" and Harry looked up, like maybe Draco had heard them, but Draco wasn't there, of course.

"We're broken up," Harry said, out loud, and it sounded strange coming from his mouth, when he'd never said, "We're together, we're dating, we yell and he shoves at me and I shove at him and then we kiss for a while and it's nice."

"We know," Hermione said, gentle, and it was strange how that worked, when no one had seemed to know in the first place about the stupid fights and the way he could touch Draco sometimes and Draco would breathe so quick and the way Draco had said, "If anyone puts a stop to you, Potter, it'll be me," in the way that meant, "I would never let anyone hurt you".

They happened around corners and wide empty spaces, and didn't happen everywhere -- in the loo with a sink between them and Draco passing the soap politely, in the Great Hall as Harry picked up their books after their shoulders smacked and everything fell.

If not, then stilted conversation about conversation, like Harry asking, "So, are we talking?", the cold beneath his shoes spreading up to stiffen his ankles, and Draco drawling,

"About what?"

"Hypothetically," Harry said, and Draco said,

"Are we hypothetically talking?" a tight little smirk at his lips, and, "I would venture, since there are words at present leaving our mouths--"

"That's not what I meant, Malfoy, and you know it."

"Do I?" Draco said.

"Well, it's obvious we're not," Harry said, disgusted, then Draco caught his arm, and this is where they would have kissed, he realized, and he could feel sweat sticking a patch of his shirt to his collarbone. He was going to scream, he could feel it bunching up in his lungs.

If not, then no one screamed, though maybe they thought about it.

Harry ran laps across the Quidditch field and past the Whomping Willow before classes and called it extra practice, to stay fit. It was like picking up a pattern and he settled down into it, and he checked and checked (yes, every bush and tree and blade of grass was the same as ever) until he noticed he was checking, and stopped because it was silly. And then he stopped running, because it was silly, and then started again because maybe he didn't care. 

It worked, and you don't leave things that work, unless the thing is a person, a person and you, and you had only stayed, you thought, because you were afraid not to.

No one picked any more sides than there already were. Harry was wrong about the flashing buttons and banners.

He had been wrong, and he, it was so weird.

"The world didn't end," Harry said, and it still came out sounding like partly a question.

"Well, yes," said Draco, bemused and absentminded, haughty loud voice booming through the library, "but that was sixth year, and I don't remember you being especially concerned at the end, with Granger's spell and all, and of course yours truly on the side of the good, stalwart, and not-going-to-Azkaban."

The librarian hissed and Draco smiled sweetly, stretching out his legs beneath the table.

"I meant, after us, " Harry said.

"Was it supposed to?" Draco was almost laughing -- a twitch at the mouth.

"No, it's," Harry said, pulse whacking against the thin skin of his wrists, "I was thinking stupid things."

"Oh, that's a surprise--"

"Shut up," Harry said heatedly, and Draco (would he never fail to surprise him, never, not sixty years down the road with twinkling Dumbledore eyes and bearded, and that used to be Snape in his head as reference, Draco with piercing eyes and harsh straight line of a mouth, but then suddenly something was different, suddenly there was the thought: he let it go) had his jaw hang a moment first, loosely, but then close it he did.

And twilight hit the windows, tinting them purple as it always did, and Harry reached out with a hand and curled it around the back of Draco's neck and kissed him ever so soft, on the side of his mouth (right there, beside the goggling Hufflepuffs) because some things you can't erase-- 

they leave their mark on you 

--and you can leave, and say no, and say words that should rip the floor out from under the both of you and send you hurling through the past to the beginning of time, and have a million pointless, endless suppositions, suspicions, and predictions, predictions that kept you from even trying, but they happened, and there was no going back, even if he wanted to.

He didn't.