分卷阅读3（1 / 2）

“Still.” They’re time in the cubicle was winding down, when they would be forced to hand in their reports without anything to show for it. It was times like these where Harry misses Hermione the most, when he has to do homework on his own. “I still think you’ve lost your mind. War’s finally made you crack, mate.”

It’s a joke, but it isn’t wrong. He’d caught Draco at his late night obsessions, but that’s only because Harry has his own routine, where he wanders through the house with his wand stretched out in front of him, poking into each room and corner, checking the locks on ever door and window. With Draco there, he sleeps a little easier, and the weight on his chest when he’s caught off guard by something that reminds him of the war is a little less. He thinks it is improvement, even if they barely seem to be able to talk to each other, and even if they were once considered to be mortal enemies to each other.

(It is a mark of growing up, he thinks, that the two of them can look back and see how pure what they had really was, can see the simplicity that came from that one dimensional hatred, where there were no consequences to the actions. If things were better, they would have grown up and gotten over it in their own time, been able to forge a bond of friendship, but Voldemort washed the chance to that away.)

(Tom. Tom Riddle. That’s what he keeps trying to call him in his head, to remind him that he was only a man, after all of it. It’s not catching on.)

“I really don’t mind him. It’s kind of nice, actually.” He would not be telling Ron about those morning breakfasts, or the nights spent around the television, or how Draco manages to make the tea just how Harry likes it. He does not tell him how it is only a week but that Draco already has become a permanent fixture in his life, something that is not exactly good but also not bad, either, and he thinks he might be sad if the court would suddenly wave away his probation and turn Draco loose.

“Telling you, mate.” Ron has his opinions on this, everyone does, but he mostly keeps them quiet. “Bonkers.”

Draco

Friends.

That’s what he hears Harry call him, when he is on the phone with someone named Dudley. Actually, he calls them mates, as in, sorry Dudley, but I can’t talk to you for long tonight, my mate Malfoy has come over.

And Draco knows that that was probably just an excuse to hang up on someone who talks too much. He knows that it probably didn’t mean anything, a throw away comment that Harry used because he couldn’t think of anything to really explain this whole situation. He knows this, but then he thinks of how they worked together to cook dinner last night, and how Harry brought home a new DVD series called Sherlock just because he thought Draco would like it, and how he knows exactly how much milk to put in his tea. And suddenly it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to think that he was friends with the great Harry Potter.

(His father would be devastated.)

(What’s it matter? His father is rotting in a jail cell.)

(Shut up.)

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Harry hung the telephone back on its place on the wall. It had a curly wire that kept you standing right by it. Harry said that phones weren’t all like that, now, but that he decided to get an old fashioned one because he thought that he would lose it, otherwise. “Do I have something on my face?”

“No, it’s just…” He uses the word just a lot now, just and maybe and if you wouldn’t mind. He’s not sure when that started. “Maybe we should call each other by our first names. Since we’re living together and all.”

“Me call you by your first name? And you call me Harry?” For a moment, Draco thinks he has made a terrible mistake, that he miscalculated all of it. But then Harry’s face spits into a smile and he can feel the air being knocked back into his lungs. “Sure. Why not. Sounds like a plan, Draco.”

“Alright, Harry.” Draco smiles himself, and is surprised to find that it actually feels like it belongs there.

Friends. He could do that.

Chapter 3