分卷阅读52（1 / 2）

“It was a boggart,” Harry says, a bit redundantly, stowing his wand in the back pocket of his pants without looking Draco in the face. “That’s all it was, Draco. Just a boggart.”

“Oh.” Draco felt like crying. In fact, he was crying, both because all the worst things he had been thinking since he first came to say with Harry had been said out loud, by the one person that he did not expect to say them, and also because he had been caught at it, cowering on the floor like a child. And also because he wanted Harry to tell him that it was all okay, which he was not yet doing. “Right.”

“Do you really think that?” Harry’s head snapped up, and he was crying, too, hurt by this whole thing, and Draco just wants to melt into the floor and never come back. “That I want to say all those things?”

“I’m afraid of it,” Draco answers, because the boggart has left him no choice but to tell the truth. “I keep telling myself that it was silly, that you wouldn’t have said all those things if you didn’t mean them, and yet,” he shrugs. “Fears don’t always make sense.”

“Because I do.” Harry’s words were halted, like he was trying to reign himself in. “Care about you.”

“I know.”

“And I have forgiven you. For everything. Everything you’ve done, anything you might do.” Harry waves his hand in the air. “It’s like it’s nonexistent.”

“I know that, too.”

“And I know that this—what we’re doing—I’m not just screwing around. It’s,” He is searching for a word, clearly, something strong enough to express his feelings without scaring Draco away. “This is it for me. This is all I ever want, you and me and that cottage.”

That—those last six words—make Draco feel like he is able to breathe again. “I know.”

“Do you?”

Draco does not want to lie to him. Maybe he hasn’t been lying exactly, but he has been holding back, burying things that he should have laid out in the open. “I’m starting to,” He amends, which is not the whole truth but is closer than he had gotten before.

“Okay.” Harry nods his head, fastens the closet closed one more time, and sticks a hand out to help Draco to his feet. “So are we good here?”

“Yeah,” Draco says, and this time, it does not feel like a lie. “We’re all good.”

Harry

Harry had been surprised before, but there’s nothing quite like hearing your boyfriend talking to someone up in the attic and climbing that rickety staircase only to find that the person he’s talking to is…yourself.

A self that is hurling abuse, apparently, as Draco sits on the floor and just takes it, like all the fight goes away where Harry is concerned and he will take what may come flying from this person’s mouth as gospel, and Harry feels sick about it, and even more so when he remembers another time that he had stared at a duplicate of himself in this house, and realized that it was a boggart.

Which, when you think about it, is even worse than a doppleganger that runs around hurling venom at the people you care about.

“I just don’t understand,” He says later, when he has taken a shower and gotten dressed even though it is only five in the morning and came back out of the bathroom to find Draco curled up on the window seat, drawing pictures in the fog covered glass, “how you could have thought those horrible things about the two of us.”