Scratchy.

Scratchy.

(Truth be told this is just a WIP of a bigger piece, but after staring at it for days I’ve decided on not finishing it after all, so here!)

Draco: oii potter !

Harry: yes

Draco: Are you Katniss? Cuz you are starting an uprise in my district

Harry: ....

Pansy: Harry would you slap Draco-

Harry: *slaps draco*

Draco: wow, I am very hurt right now

Today’s headcanon: Draco is a seer and has to keep being a twat for the good of the universe

- 11yo Draco has a series of visions showing an alternate timeline in which Harry Potter accepts his handshake in first year

- if that happens, then he and Harry will become best friends and possibly lovers, but Harry will end up joining Voldemort instead of stopping him and then Voldemort will kill Harry and Draco will be Horribly Sad (tm) and also the world will end or whatever, so that’s no good

- Draco tries to prevent the end of the world by being a total dick to Harry and Co, even though it means losing the best friend he would have had in the alternate timeline

- that’s why Draco’s always so mean to him in that weird “desperate for your attention” sort of way

- cut to after the war, Harry and Draco run into each other at a bar and for some reason decide to get a drink together instead of dueling in the alley

- Harry’s on whiskey number three and feeling Sappy and he looks over at Draco and asks “why couldn’t you have just been nice to me when we were kids? This is nice”

- Draco hitches one shoulder and goes “oh, because the world would have ended, of course” and keeps slurping his cocktail from a crazy straw

- fucking pardon you, Malfoy? “If you’d like to say something that makes sense, that’d be great.”

“The end of the world? As in, boom! Bang! Kablamo! Etc. I don’t— oh, stop looking at me like that.”

“Stop being crazy then.”

“Shan’t.”

Harry waited.

“It’s quite a tragic little tale,” Draco sighed eventually, swirling his straw through his melting drink. “You became a Slytherin, we were best friends, we kissed once, I think— that one was unclear and possibly a daydream. Anyway,” he continued before Harry could comment, “then you had to go and join Voldemort instead of stopping him like you were meant to and he murdered you and it was all very doom and gloom and so on from there. I don’t know, I stopped writing down the visions after that.”

“Right...” Harry said, head swimming. “So this has been a super weird prank or whatever, Malfoy, but I should—“

“No, wait!” Draco started, grabbing Harry’s wrist. He looked so serious, then. Harry swallowed. “I could, ah, I could show you?” He loosened his hold on Harry’s wrist, rested one thin finger along Harry’s pulse point. “If you’d like.”

Once the War is over, Harry dreams about his parents. Instead of waking up with tears on his face and his mother’s scream still ringing in his ears, he opens his eyes with the sudden knowledge that his dad snorted when he laughed - really laughed - or the feeling of holding a lock of his mum’s long hair as she rocked him to sleep in his nursery. He wakes touching his face where he knows his dad’s glasses pressed against his temple when he smacked a good morning kiss onto Harry’s soft baby cheek and he stays in bed with his eyes closed tightly for almost an hour one morning to try and hold on to the ghost of a memory of his mum’s apple-scented shampoo. Sometimes Harry thinks that maybe there’s a little place inside him that made room for happy memories when the horcrux was destroyed. It doesn’t happen often - twice a year at most - but Harry learns to keep a journal on his nightstand to write down as much as he can remember as quickly as possible when he wakes up before the memory slips away and is lost to the night the way dreams often are.

One night about two years after Harry and Draco get married, Harry jumps out of their bed, scrabbling for his journal and humming a few lines of a song with sleep-roughened desperation over and over. It’s second-nature for Draco to pay attention to Harry and he quietly watches his shoulders slump as he puts the small journal back on his nightstand. Harry feels smaller than usual when he curls up in Draco’s arms and whispers I can’t write it down. But Draco - well, Draco can - and as soon as Harry is asleep, he slides out of bed, walks downstairs, and casts a silencing spell over his piano. He doesn’t have much to go on - just a few lines of an unknown tune that Harry may or may not have half-remembered in a dream but he records it and sends it to every music expert he knows because Draco Malfoy never does anything halfway.

Less than a week later, a Eurasian eagle owl from Sweden brings an answer. On their third wedding anniversary, in the quiet darkness of their bedroom, Draco gives Harry a beautiful polished wood music box.