drarrywords

[drarrywords]

hi! I've written one chapter of a new fic. it's titled 'blood in the water' for now. here's the first chapter, I'd love your thoughts so I can continue with it!

He was not in chains when they brought him to the Ministry.

No iron bound his wrists. Yet there was a stillness to him, the kind that holds on to men who have been broken before, who understand the futility of resistance. The Aurors surrounded him like wraiths, silent and grim, moving in practiced synchrony, as if they weren’t with a man, but something more dangerous. A remnant of war. A curse that refused to die.

There was no need for restraints anymore. The Ministry had moved beyond them.

These days, it preferred the illusion of civility. It liked its executions clean and its dissidents obedient, even in death. No public trials, no spectacle. Just quiet disappearances and rewritten records. History was theirs now—scrubbed clean, retold in the Minister’s voice.

He looked up as they passed the atrium. The banners were everywhere—red and gold and black, the Minister’s face staring down like a monarch from old portraits, her smile thin and weaponised. She watched them all, always softly smiling. Always victorious. Worship wasn’t requested anymore. It was simply the way things were done.

He refused to bow. But the Aurors did, heads dipping just slightly, like leaves caught in wind—not in reverence, but in a silence carved out by fear. That was what respect looked like now: silence, stillness, compliance.

The war had ended, yes. But peace had not come. Not truly. It had only changed its shape, cloaked itself in new symbols and new slogans. The Ministry called it justice. Restoration. Cleansing. But it smelled too much like vengeance. The halls still reeked of it.

They called it progress. 

But it was rot.

The lift halted with a mechanical sigh, and the Aurors nudged him forward. He moved without protest, his boots echoing off polished marble that was too pristine, too sterile. As if the blood spilled during the war had been scrubbed from every corner and buried beneath coats of wax and silence.

They stopped before a heavy door. Dark mahogany, carved with an intricate gold crest. It gleamed in the pale light, ancient and officious, as though stolen from the house of some old pure-blood patriarch. Regal. Arrogant. Unashamed.

“How quaint,” he said quietly, a smirk brushing the corner of his mouth. “Into pure-blood decor now, is she?”

“There are no bloodlines,” one of the Aurors replied, tone flat. “We are all the same now.”

He turned slightly, eyes sharp. “Radical optimism is how the worst regimes begin.”

The Auror stiffened. “You dare insult the Minister?”

“Suits the likes of me, wouldn’t you say?”

No one laughed. The air between them grew still, like a held breath. Then the Auror reached into his cloak and produced a slip of parchment that was wrinkled, half-burnt, the edges curled like the petals of a dying flower.

“What suits you,” the Auror said, voice like cold iron, “is Azkaban. But the Minister, in her infinite mercy, has chosen something else.”

He took the parchment without hesitation. The Auror didn’t meet his eyes.

The paper was warm from the Auror’s hand. It smelled faintly of ash and old magic, the kind that clung to cursed objects and memories better left buried. He uncurled the brittle edge and read the message.

Two words. Scorched, faded, almost spectral in their presence:

Nimbus 2001.

His breath caught in the back of his throat not from sentiment, but from the cruel precision of it. Then, a sound escaped him—a low, hollow laugh, joyless and sharp, like a blade dragged over stone. She knew what it would mean to him. The broom. The boy. The war before the war. A name that once meant freedom. Now, it was just another leash.

He stepped toward the door. It had no keyhole, no visible latch. Just a circular indent in the centre, pulsing softly, waiting.

He held up the paper and whispered the name.

“Nimbus 2000.”

The door clicked. Almost reluctantly. As though it too resented being opened. The Aurors stepped back. What was beyond the door, it seemed, was not for them.

He pushed the door open.

Inside, the chamber was silent and warm. No grandeur, no throne. Just a vast room with a single desk, bathed in the soft golden light of enchanted lamps. Shelves lined the far walls with books, scrolls, legal volumes, time-worn parchments that pulsed with lingering spells.

And behind the desk stood Hermione Granger.

She didn’t wear robes, nor the hard mask of power. She wore something simpler, dark, professional, clean. But her eyes were not the eyes of the girl he once knew in war fields and the aftermath. They were colder now. Older. Like stone that had learned to speak.

He stood in the doorway, and for a moment, they stared at each other in perfect, suspended silence.

Then she spoke—calm, precise, and utterly without warmth, “Mr. Malfoy.” 

“No need for formalities, Granger.” Draco said, quashing the paper in his hand. He let it drop, the scrap of scorched paper drifting to the polished floor like an old memory. It skittered toward the far corner of the room. Hermione’s eyes followed the paper for a fraction too long. 

“We’re well past that, no?”

“Filthy little mud-blood,” Hermione said softly, mocking, with the faintest curl of her lip, “Nimbus 2001 isn’t much of an insult as that was, isn’t it, Mr. Malfoy?” 

“I’m well-versed with the symbolism, Granger,” He spat, “I don’t underestimate it.” 

“Great minds think alike.” 

“A great mind would arrest and detain a war-criminal, as would’ve been your fate, had the dark lord won the war,” He said. 

She took a slow breath and stepped around the desk, her boots silent on the stone. “But he didn’t win. I did.” 

There was something dangerous in the way she said it. No pride. Just fact. Just fire, long since cooled into steel.

“You think this makes you better than him?” Draco asked. “This theatre of order? This polished dictatorship?”

 “No.” She said, “Great minds do think alike, Draco. You wanted blood. I wanted peace. You had a name. I had a cause. But in the end, I built an order that is meant to survive us.”

He met her eyes. “You sound more like him than you think.”

She didn’t blink. “And you sound like a boy who still believes legacy means safety.”

She came to a stop in front of him now—close. Closer than comfort. “We are alike,” she said, voice low, steady, like the blade of a knife just before it cuts. “But only one of us survived the war with their mind intact and it wasn’t yours.”

For a moment, neither spoke. The weight of it — the memory, guilt, history — settled between them like ash. Then, Draco’s voice broke the silence like a crack in frostbitten glass, “What do your friends think of all this?”

“Your little golden trio,” he continued, voice low and laced with mockery. “Potter, Weasley. The ones who used to hang on your every word, the ones who fought beside you in the war? What would they say now? Watching you build this.”

Still, she said nothing.

“You really think they’d be proud of what you’ve done?”

At that, she moved—subtle, barely a shift in weight, but Draco caught it. A flicker behind her eyes, quickly buried. He turned toward her, pausing, pressing just enough.

“Or maybe,” he said, more gently now, “they aren’t proud at all.”

Hermione breathed slowly, deliberately.

“They understand what had to be done,” she said at last. Her tone was measured, almost tired.

Draco tilted his head. “That doesn’t sound like understanding. That sounds like justification.”

She met his gaze, still composed.

“This is the outcome of a war,” she said. “And in the aftermath of it all, someone had to stand in the ashes and decide what rose next.”

“Oh, how noble,” Draco sneered. “Still clinging to the idea that this is for the greater good. That all your little compromises don’t matter because it’s you making them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think I do,” he said, stepping closer. “I think you’ve become what you once fought.”

A beat. The room stilled.

Hermione’s voice, when it came, was soft. “They knew I was changing.”

“They?” he echoed. “You mean Potter and Weasley.”

She crossed to the window, her back to him now. The light carved her silhouette in gold and grey “Ron left,” she said quietly. “Went back to his family. Said he didn’t recognise the person I was becoming.”

“I wonder why that is.” 

He saw it then—the tension in her shoulders, the breath she didn’t quite take. The careful stillness that only came when one was holding something in, “Do you believe that this is a 

“No,” Draco said, and for once there was no venom in his voice. Just cold observation. “I believe you wanted to lead in good faith. You wanted an order so that no one would have to suffer and bear the cost that we did. But you went too far. And you mistook control for peace.”

That landed.

Hermione looked away. Her hand brushed the edge of the desk, fingers curling slightly against the wood. There was a long pause that lasted too long. Draco stepped toward her again, slower now.

Draco raised an eyebrow. “And Potter?”

A pause.

“Where is he, Hermione?”

Still silence.

“Don’t tell me you lost him too.”

Nothing.

He gave a soft, dry laugh. “You did.”

That’s when she turned. Slowly. Precisely. Her expression unreadable, but something colder had crept into her voice.

“I didn’t lose him,” she said. “He made a choice.”

“And?”

She hesitated.

Draco stepped into the silence, now circling her instead.

“What happened, Granger?”

Her eyes flashed then but not with rage. With something deeper. Something more human. A flicker of guilt, perhaps. Or grief so old it had turned hard and unrecognisable, “He told me this wasn’t what we fought for,” she said.

“Was he wrong?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where is he?” Draco asked, softly now. “Where’s Harry Potter?”

Hermione's jaw clenched. Her eyes dropped—just for a second—and that was answer enough.

“You didn’t,” Draco whispered, almost stunned. “You didn’t put the Harry Potter in Azkaban.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then where?” he pressed. “Where did you bury your conscience, Granger?”

She looked at him. Full in the face. 

“Three levels below this floor,” she said, voice steady now. “Behind a locked ward only I can open. No cell. No charges. No trial.”

Draco stared at her, words caught in his throat.

“He’s not dead,” she added, as if that was mercy. “But he’s quiet.”

Draco turned away, pressing his palm against the desk like he needed to steady himself.

“You locked him in the Ministry?” he asked, voice low. “Here?”

“He gave me no choice.”

Draco let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “There’s always a choice.”

“Not when the symbol threatens the order I fought to built,” she said. “Not when he wanted to tear it down. I tried to reason with him. I begged him to understand. But he couldn't let go of the war. He thought he could win it again.”

“And you thought locking him up would stop the war from coming back?”

“I did it to bring the order he resisted against because he couldn’t see beyond the past. I had to when he refused.” she said. 

Draco stepped back, still watching her.

“No one knows of this?”

“No,” she said. “Not even Ron. He thinks Harry left. That he couldn’t live with what we were becoming. I let him believe it.”

He was quiet.

Finally, he said, “You're more dangerous than the dark lord.”

Hermione smiled, “You still fear a dead man, Malfoy.”

“I do,” He said, “The fear runs far too deep. But what is worse, Granger, is that your own friends fear you so much that you had to lock one of them in your own house that you seem to have built alone.” 

“You think this is what I want to do to him?” she whispered, almost too soft to hear. “That I want to play god?”

“You don’t play god,” he said. 

That made her blink. Just once. 

He took another step, his tone turning colder, “You’re not just locking people away, Granger. Do you not see what you have done?”

A pause.

Her gaze flicked to him—sharp, calculating, tired. And then, finally, the mask cracked, just a little.

“I had to,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me build this unless the story made sense.”

“What story?” Draco snapped.

“That Harry was always meant to win. That his death would have meant chaos. That I — the Ministry — rebuilt itself after the war. But he wouldn’t let the lie settle. He kept digging. Kept remembering.”

“What did he remember?”

Her voice dropped. “Things that didn’t fit. Things that shouldn’t have happened. He kept asking about timelines, spells he swore we never learned, names that don’t exist. At least, not anymore. He said he could feel time wrapping itself around him. People forgetting. Whole events being wiped like chalk on a blackboard.”

Draco stared at her. “You’re rewriting history.”

“I’m preserving peace.”

“You’re manufacturing it,” he said, incredulous.

“Broke.” Hermione said simply. 

She crossed to the side table, picked up a thick file, and laid it in front of him. It looked old, but the parchment inside was crisp. Draco opened it. A series of charts, memory scans, time-maps. Words blurred and circled, names crossed out, loops indicated by red runes.

In the centre, a moving photograph of Harry Potter, asleep, twitching under a binding charm. His face was pale, lips parted, eyes twitching behind closed lids. Beneath it: Subject: Unknown.

“He’s in a loop,” Hermione said. “His mind knows something. But the more he tries to understand it, the more damaged he becomes.”

Draco looked up. “And no one’s been able to—”

“No one can enter his mind,” she said. “We tried. Legilimens. Memory-walkers. Even Unspeakables. Some came out mute. Other lost their minds.” 

“And me?” Draco asked, carefully.

Hermione turned to him, full now. Her voice was calm. Icy. Final.

“You’re the last gamble. You’re not just someone he knew, Malfoy. You’re someone who doesn’t belong.”

“What does that mean?”

“You weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “In that last battle. Not really. You’re an outlier. A flaw. You survive in every altered version of history we’ve tried to run. That makes your presence unique. Resistant. Stable.”

He stared at her, something cold settling in his stomach.

“And if I say no?”

Hermione shrugged slightly. “Then your mother remains where she is.”

His jaw clenched. “Azkaban.”

“No,” she said, almost gently. “Worse. She’s not in any records. Not anymore. As far as the world knows, Narcissa Malfoy was never born.”

Draco stepped back like she’d struck him. His breath hitched.

“You’re erasing people.”

“I’m erasing the rot,” she said. “The bloodlines. The hatred. The histories that keep birthing more war.”

“By purging them?”

“By forgetting them,” Hermione whispered.

Draco laughed bitterly. “You sound just like him. He wanted to erase people too. He used death. You use silence.”

Hermione’s face flickered. “You still don’t understand. I’m not him. I’m the one who won against him.”

“You did not win. He did. Harry did.”

“I did this,” She seethed, “Without me, he was nothing. He survived because of me. He won because of me. I won this war.” 

“Did you?” Draco asked. “Or are you just the dark lord’s successor?”

The air in the room turned thin.

Hermione looked at him—truly looked. No masks. No pretense.

“I brought you here,” she said, “because you can try this and survive it. You want your mother. I want Harry Potter to forget who he was. Not the boy who lived. Just a boy, who had nothing to do with the war.”

Draco looked back at the file, then at the door behind her. Heavy wood, steel-bound, sealed in runes.

Behind it: Harry Potter. Trapped in time. Screaming in silence.

“And what happens,” he asked, voice dry, “if I go in and don’t come back?”

Hermione didn’t blink. “Then we’ll find someone else.”

Silence.

Draco ran a hand through his hair, as if brushing away the weight settling on his shoulders. He stared at the photo of Harry again—haunted, flickering, looping, “And if I do come back?” he asked. “What then?”

Hermione smiled, just faintly.

“Then we’ll finally know how to kill the past.”

[drarrywords]

why have a forgotten the lyrics of this love all i hear now is “these hands had to let it go free and change the prophecy”😭😭😭

[drarrywords]

Ours. 💚💛💜❤️🩵🖤

[drarrywords]

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[drarrywords]

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[drarrywords]

Mine, still

Part 1

The day after Harry held Scorpius's hand, London rumbled on as usual, an indifferent grey sky, like a soot-smeared parchment, and rain loomed thickly in the clouds. The sort of day meant for silence, or regret.

Harry had intended to wait. He didn’t want to rush into it. But he'd spent most of the night pacing between the armchair and Teddy's bedroom, the dull ache in his chest only deepening each time he remembered the soft weight of Scorpius's fingers curling around his own. It felt less like a memory and more like a tether—one that pulled at something he didn’t know he still had inside him.

And yet, despite all plans of waiting for a while, by mid-afternoon, Harry found himself standing again in front of the apothecary. The windows glowed faintly, warm and yellow. A few flower boxes hung slightly crooked from the windowsill, their blooms faded from lack of sun. The bell over the door jingled when he stepped in, and it felt like stepping into a memory already fraying at the edges.

Draco looked up.

He was bent over a pewter cauldron, steam curling around his face like a veil. His eyes were bloodshot. There was no sarcasm today, no sharpness in his posture. Just exhaustion. As if the night had wrung him out.

“You're back,” he said, voice scratchy. A statement, not a greeting.

Harry nodded. “I said I wanted to try.”

“Try what, exactly? To fix fifteen years in fifteen minutes?” Draco’s voice was soft but brittle, like old glass. “You think holding his hand makes you his father?”

Harry stepped closer, slowly. “I think it means something.”

Draco's mouth twisted. “Everything means something to you. Justice. Redemption. Children with your eyes.”

The cauldron hissed behind him, and he ignored it. He set down the stirring rod with deliberate calm. “Tell me, Potter, what exactly is it you want? Custody? Or the consolation that your legacy won’t die with you.”

Harry flinched. “That’s not fair.”

“Fair?” Draco’s voice cracked as he stepped forward, suddenly close. “Do you think any of this is fair? I raised him. Named him. Sang to him when he wouldn’t sleep. Sat by his cot for nights on end, terrified I would ruin him.”

His hands were shaking now, fists clenched at his sides. “And now you show up, all torn conscience and big Gryffindor heart, and what? You want to be part of the story?”

“Yes!” Harry shouted before he could stop himself. “I want to be part of it. I have to be.”

Draco shoved him. It wasn't violent—it was desperate. A slap of palms to chest. “You don't get to want. You don’t get to have.”

Harry stumbled back but didn’t raise a hand in return. Draco had said that to him before. That he didn’t get to have, “I'm not here to take him from you. I wouldn’t. But I can’t just pretend I don’t know.”

“You should have stayed away. You should have let me keep him safe from you.”

That landed deeper than either of them expected. Harry went still, jaw tightening. “You really think I'm a danger to him?”

“No,” he whispered, unable to meet his gaze, “No, not like that. But you complicate things. You — for years, nothing was safe because of you. He is just a boy. He doesn’t know who Harry Potter is. He doesn’t know that there was a war. He doesn’t know, Harry.”

The room was suddenly too quiet. The cauldron behind them gave off a single bloop of protest before settling into silence. The shelves looked on, witnesses of decades of pain. Draco’s hands trembled again. This time, he didn’t hide it.

Harry watched, unsure, caught between anger and something much softer. He had never heard Draco say his name. And especially not like this. Desperate. Pleading. He wanted to close the distance. To reach for Draco’s shoulder or offer something resembling comfort. But he didn’t. Couldn’t.

So instead, he said, gently, “You look tired.”

Draco gave a broken laugh. “That’s because I am.”

Harry shifted. “Do you—do you want help? With him, I mean. Just for a little while. I can—look after him while you work. No strings.”

Draco stared at him.

“Please,” Harry added, quieter. “Let me try.”

A long pause. Then: “He’s in the back.”

The back room was small, sun-dappled through a tiny skylight. Scorpius sat on a thick rug shaped like a puffskein, babbling to a wooden Niffler. He looked up when Harry entered and blinked with those impossible green eyes.

“Hi,” Harry said, crouching slowly, “I’m Harry.” 

Scorpius considered him, then crawled over on steady hands and knees. When he reached Harry, he held up the Niffler like a prize.

Harry took it with exaggerated reverence. “Is this yours?”

Scorpius nodded solemnly. Then grinned.

It wasn’t much. Just a smile. But it carved through something in Harry’s chest like a firelight in frost. He sat with him, letting the boy clamber into his lap, curious hands tugging at the stitching of his robes.

They played like that for almost an hour. Just small, ordinary things. Building towers with potion tins, knocking them over, laughing. At one point, Scorpius bumped his head lightly and blinked as if betrayed by gravity. Harry kissed the spot gently, instinctively, before he could think better of it.

Draco stood in the doorway a moment later, arms crossed but face unreadable.

“He likes you,” he said quietly.

Harry looked up. “I don’t think he has the cognitive ability to do otherwise yet.”

Draco’s lips twitched. Not quite a smile. Not not a smile either.

Then something shifted.

Draco’s shoulders folded inward, as if an invisible weight had doubled. His arms came around himself. He stepped back into the room and sat heavily on a stool beside the changing table, head bowed.

“I thought I could do it all,” he said softly, not looking at Harry. “Be both parents. Keep him away from the war and everything that came with it. But he’s starting to ask. Starting to notice the way other kids have mums, or two parents who show up at the park. I didn’t think you were real to him.”

Harry didn’t interrupt.

“And then you walked in. And I saw his eyes. And I saw your eyes, and it all—” Draco’s voice cracked.

A silence stretched. Then the sound of stifled breath. Wet. Shaky.

Draco covered his face with his hands.

It wasn’t loud. He didn’t sob or keen. But Harry recognized the sound. A quiet, hollow sort of crying—the kind that had nowhere left to go.

Harry didn’t touch him.

He stayed seated on the rug, Scorpius in his lap, and waited. Waited until Draco composed himself, breathing uneven. Waited until he finally looked up, red-eyed, but no longer brittle.

“You want to be in his life,” Draco said, voice rough.

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to take it slow. With both of us.”

Harry nodded. “I’m not in a rush.”

Draco gave him a long look. Then, quietly: “Do you still hate me?”

Harry looked down at Scorpius, who had fallen asleep against his chest. “No. I did, when we were young. But after the war I — we did what we could in those circumstances. I didn’t know better then, nor did you.”

Draco blinked. Something passed through his expression—too complicated for just one emotion.

He stood. Pulled a blanket from the cot and handed it over.

Harry tucked it around the boy. Stood carefully.

Draco opened the door for him. No words passed as Harry stepped through.

Just before it closed behind him, Draco said softly, “Same time tomorrow?”

Harry paused. Then, with a small smile, “Yeah. Same time tomorrow.”

[drarrywords]

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[drarrywords]

Mine, still

The first time Harry Potter saw Draco Malfoy again, it wasn’t in a courtroom, or at some Ministry ball soaked in champagne and past-life grudges. No, it was in a cramped, pleasantly musty apothecary tucked between a Muggle tailor and a secondhand bookshop in Soho. The kind of place no one would think to find either of them—and yet, there they both were.

Harry was holding a sleeping Teddy Lupin on one hip, the boy's dark lashes fanned against flushed cheeks, breathing softly into Harry’s neck. His other hand clutched a scroll of potion prescriptions that Andromeda had insisted be filled today.

He stepped into the shop, bell jingling above the door, and glanced around at the warm, wood-paneled interior and neat shelves lined with everything from powdered bicorn horn to dried valerian roots.

Then he saw him.

Behind the counter, pale as frost and half-bent over an inventory scroll, was Draco Malfoy. His hair was longer now, tied at the nape in an effortless knot, and he wore a charcoal-grey robe rolled to the elbows, revealing elegant hands stained with ink and herb residue. There was a smudge of green along his cheekbone. He looked tired. Lean. Different, but unmistakably Draco.

For a long, stupid moment, neither of them spoke. The air between them felt immediately charged, electric with the weight of a thousand unsaid things.

Draco looked up slowly, his gaze flicking from Teddy to Harry. His mouth twitched, but not into anything resembling a smile, “Potter. 

“Malfoy,” Harry returned, cautious. “You’re here.”

Draco tilted his head, something unreadable in his eyes.

A long beat passed. Teddy stirred against Harry’s shoulder, soft and oblivious.

Harry cleared his throat. “I just need these filled.” He approached the counter and slid the scroll across.

Draco scanned it, fingers brushing the parchment. “Andromeda’s still using that old potion for his lungs? Surprised she hasn't updated it.”

“She trusts what works.”

“Hm.” There was a pause, like the eye of a storm. Then Draco added, “Must be nice, Potter. Ever the perfect Godfather”

Harry stiffened. “What's your problem, Malfoy?”

“Oh, forgive me,” Draco said, sarcasm beginning to curdle in his voice. “Didn’t realise I needed permission to speak to the Harry Potter.”

Harry frowned. “Is this what this is going to be? Your bitter commentary while pretending you’re above it all?”

Draco’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m pretending? You walk in here, still smelling like the Ministry’s moral superiority complex, and expect me to act like nothing ever happened between us in the past?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Harry said sharply. “But I didn’t come here for this.”

“No. You came to parade the perfect godfather image, I suppose. Or maybe to see what became of the boy you hated and saved in equal measure.”

“I didn’t hate you.”

Draco scoffed. “That’s a convenient rewrite.”

“Fine. I didn’t like you. But I never wanted—”

“To see me here?” Draco cut in. “Behind a counter, selling potions, raising a child I never thought I’d have alone?”

Harry’s voice dropped, quiet but firm. “That’s not what I meant.”

“You don’t know what you mean,” Draco muttered, turning away sharply. “You never did when it came to me.”

The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was taut with restraint, with all the fights they’d never had the chance to finish, with everything that had been simmering for years. Harry tried to take a breath. “Look, I didn’t walk in here expecting a reunion. I didn’t even know this was your shop. Can we—can we not do this right now?”

Draco gave him a long, unreadable look. Then his eyes flicked again to Teddy, who had nestled deeper into Harry’s shoulder.

“I’ll get your potions,” he said finally. His voice had cooled, but not softened. He turned, pulling ingredients with mechanical precision.

A long moment passed, filled only by the quiet clink of glass and soft grinding of herbs. Harry glanced around, then spotted a pale blue pram tucked behind a curtain in the corner. His chest tightened.

“You have a son?” he asked, tentatively.

Draco didn’t look up. “Scorpius. Ten months.”

“Are you doing it all on your own?”

Draco’s hands slowed slightly. “Yes.”

Something in Harry’s chest twisted. “That can’t be easy.”

“It’s not,” Draco said, and for a second, he sounded human again. Tired. Honest.

Their eyes met. And suddenly, they weren’t shouting. They were just two men, bruised by life in different ways, standing in the same small room.

Then, it broke. 

Draco handed him the bag and he left. 

Harry didn’t mean to see him again. That was the truth.

He’d tried to forget it—the way Draco’s voice had cracked just slightly when he said he was raising a child alone. The way his fingers trembled, almost imperceptibly, when their hands touched. The fact that Harry hadn’t looked away.

But that night, sleep had evaded him. Teddy had long since gone to bed, curled up under a blanket Andromeda had charmed to emit a faint lullaby, and Harry had stood for hours at the kitchen sink, staring into the darkness beyond the window.

Ten months old, Draco had said. Andromeda mentioned a baby recently, hadn’t she? Something in the Prophet about an anonymous donor, whispered in the background of some article Harry barely skimmed.

It could be a coincidence. Probably was. Except—

He’d donated once. Years ago. Anonymously. For a Muggle clinic, of all things. He’d been twenty-three and reeling after the war, desperate for some abstract hope, some idea that part of him might go on in the world even if he didn’t know how to be a part of it. He hadn’t thought of it in years.

He didn’t want to think about it now.

But then two weeks passed. Teddy needed another round of potions. And before Harry could stop himself, he found his feet turning again down the same little alley in Soho.

This time, Draco wasn’t behind the counter. Instead, a small boy with pale blond hair and shockingly green eyes stood near the herb racks, clutching a stuffed thestral and babbling nonsense to himself.

Harry froze. 

He would have recognized those eyes anywhere.

“Scorpius!” Draco’s voice echoed from the back. Then he appeared, hands dusted in asphodel, a towel thrown over one shoulder.

He saw Harry. Then, very slowly, his eyes flicked to the boy.

Harry looked at Draco. “He has my eyes.”

Draco didn’t blink. “Coincidence.”

Harry’s voice was quiet, almost gentle. “No, it’s not.”

Draco set the towel down. Walked forward. Each step, deliberate, “I didn’t know. It was anonymous. I didn’t know it was you.”

“I didn’t know it was you,” Harry repeated. “I never would’ve—”

“Wouldn’t have what? Donated? Existed in a world where you could’ve fathered a child and walked away?”

Harry flinched. “Don’t do that.”

Draco was shaking now, whether from fury or something else, Harry didn’t know. “You don’t get to come in here and make this complicated. I had a plan. I was fine.”

“He’s my son.”

“No, he’s mine.” Draco’s voice cracked. “You don’t get to swoop in with your sad eyes because you had a revelation and your moral high ground and lay claim to something you abandoned before you even knew it existed.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Would it have changed anything if you had?”

Silence.

The little boy looked between them, blinking wide green eyes, oblivious.

“I want to be part of his life,” Harry said. “I don’t know how yet. But I want to try.”

Draco’s jaw clenched. “You don’t get to want. Not without earning it.”

“I’ll earn it,” Harry said, and for once, his voice was steady. “Even if you hate me for it.”

Draco looked at him for a long, long time. Then, softly:

“I don’t hate you. That is the problem, believe me.”

Scorpius dropped his thestral and waddled forward, holding his arms out.

Harry reached out without thinking—and froze as the boy grasped his finger.

But Draco didn’t stop him.

Part 2

[drarrywords]

i don’t know what i want taylor to do. ts12? would love a brand new album. i think it’s about stars. do you like dem? yes taylor. is it karma? take my card. rep tv? been waiting for years, it’s a need. eras tour documentary? im begging. re release of eras movie with ttpd set? when do i book my tickets?

[drarrywords]

The Precision of Spite

Part 1 | Part 2

Draco’s art became disturbing. But the familiarity consoled him before it could derail him. Absence damaged him. Wanting, however, was a curse, no matter how futile.

Harry watched him in libraries. On a sunday, he dared to pose a question: “How are you?” Of course, he didn’t mean to pry. He asked because he cared. Draco knew this. But instead, he saw the stack of papers in Harry’s hands asked a question of his own.

“What are you researching?”

Harry spoke quietly, “Neural Representations of Infinity, Zero, and Negative Numbers.”

Draco knew he would conduct fMRI scans on his subjects and interpret the brain activity for his thesis. He would present his paper in a lecture and Draco would be in the back of the crowd like clockwork.

On the table, there was a script. Thick, annotated, and cruel. An authored play. It bore no credited writer, only a title scrawled across the cover in frantic graphite: “Our Performance: A Study in Neural Collapse and Romantic Evasion.”

Love as a neurological loop. Performance as punishment. Nothing deviates. Nothing heals. The lines always leads back to the same places: the storm outside the gallery; the night Harry didn’t run after Draco; the moment Draco stopped believing anyone ever would.

He didn’t speak. He stared at the script like it might detonate.

Harry moved, reaching for the script. His fingers hesitated above it, not from fear but fatigue. This wasn’t error anymore—it was exhaustion. The kind that sunk into your bones when you live the same heartbreak enough times to trace it blindfolded.

Draco finally spoke, “Don’t pick it up.”

Harry didn’t.

Draco stood up, and this time he met Harry’s gaze. There was something different in his expression—something less wounded, less afraid. He looked just as haunted, yes, but there was defiance in the haunting now. A refusal.

“I don’t want to do it again,” he said, voice low but unwavering. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life inside a thesis you won’t let die.”

Harry swallowed.

“I didn’t do what you did,” he said, and it came out quieter than intended. “I didn’t build science out of our misery.”

Draco tilted his head. “Didn’t you? Every time you refused to say what you felt. Every time you turned me into a hypothesis instead of a person. You built it.”

“And you?” Harry asked. “What did you build, Draco? A shrine of paintings you wouldn’t name? Sculptures no one could touch?”

“I built exits,” Draco said, voice shaking now. “You just never used them.”

Silence stretched.

Outside the library, a storm began. Harry stepped forward, one page of the script slipping loose and fluttering to the floor. Draco watched it fall but didn’t move to catch it.

“I thought,” Harry said slowly, “that if I could replay it enough times, I’d get it right. That I’d know what to say. What to change in my brain.”

“And did you?” Draco asked, the question laced with tenderness so raw it almost shattered the moment.

Harry closed his eyes. “No. I could only memorize the ache.”

A long pause. Then Draco stepped forward, and for the first time he didn’t reach for a brush, or the shield of metaphor. He reached for Harry, “Is that ache science? The grand design of the human body. Is that it?”

“I don’t know if I love you,” Harry said softly.

“What do you know?”

“That when you walk into a room, it undoes my entire world and i can’t chart it and build diagrams to understand it.”

They didn’t speak.

But for the first time, the silence was real.

Not rehearsed. Not weaponized.

Just two people, walking forward, not in circles.

[drarrywords]

hey!! so glad to see you back <3

so for the oneshot ask I was wondering if you could write a muggle college au?? like idk I've been imagining a stem student harry and arts student draco 😅 it makes so much sense in my mind. so yeah if you're up for it, and if you imagine a different path, you can do that too.

thanks!

hi! thank you for the request!

here it is: the precision of spite

[drarrywords]

The Precision of Spite

Part 1

They try—God, they try—to be normal.

They go for coffee like they’re not still trembling from the night before. Harry reads Draco’s newest sketchbook and says it’s “dangerously emotive,” which Draco thinks might be the highest compliment Harry’s capable of.

They begin work on a collaborative exhibition-slash-lecture: “The Aesthetic Brain”, a joint venture between the science and arts faculties. Draco proposes installations; Harry builds interactive modules mapping neural responses to each piece.

They don’t tell anyone what they are.

Because they don’t know.

Because sometimes Draco leans in and Harry pulls away.

Because sometimes Harry says too much, and Draco doesn’t say anything at all.

The first crack forms in the editing room.

Draco wants the final sequence to end in silence—a pure emotional climax with no explanation. No voiceover. No graph.

Harry disagrees.

“It’s meaningless without context,” he says. “People won’t get it.”

Draco's eyes narrow. “Or maybe you just can't stand letting someone feel something without dissecting it.”

Harry fires back, “And maybe you can’t make anything real unless someone is watching.”

They stand across the room like opposing theories.

Draco speaks again, but quietly. “Why do you do this? Every time we get close, you gut it. You look for a clean incision point.”

Harry’s jaw tightens. “Because I don’t trust it. Any of it.”

“Me?”

“Myself.”

And there it is—the ghost in the room. The thing neither of them will name.

Fear.

The second crack is louder.

A conference. A panel they both agreed to sit on, where the moderator opens with a simple question: Can neuroscience predict the aesthetics of love?

Harry responds clinically.

“Romantic attraction, as we understand it, is pattern recognition. Familiarity. Memory consolidation paired with neurochemical arousal. It’s not magic. It’s math.”

Draco watches him the way someone watches an approaching storm. When the mic passes to him, he doesn’t smile, “You can chart oxytocin and serotonin all you want,” he says. “But you can’t explain why someone walks into a room and undoes your entire world.”

The room holds its breath.

“Love is not a stimulus. It’s a consequence,” Draco finishes. “And some of us are still living inside it.”

He doesn’t look at Harry.

He doesn’t need to.

They don’t speak for two weeks.

The project stalls. Emails go unanswered. Gallery slots hang in limbo. Their names start becoming whispers in opposite corridors again—what happened, weren’t they working together, didn’t they used to hate each other?

Draco starts smoking again.

Harry stops sleeping.

They both keep creating in secret.

Harry builds a closed-loop simulation—a VR reconstruction of memory fragments from the last year. Visitors can walk through it, unaware that each frame is a filtered moment: Harry’s mind reliving Draco. Over and over. Like an algorithm trapped in longing.

Draco, meanwhile, sculpts something brutal: a large-scale installation of two figures back-to-back, joined by a thread pulled so taut it slices into their spines.

He calls it “The Anti-thesis.”

The final crack isn’t an explosion.

It’s quiet.

They meet in the gallery late one night, both there to finalize pieces for the opening. They stand before Draco’s sculpture, neither speaking.

Harry finally breaks. “Is this what we are?”

Draco doesn’t look at him. “You tell me. You're the one with the data.”

Harry steps closer. “I never wanted it to be like this.”

“And yet,” Draco whispers, “you always knew it would be.”

Harry's voice catches. “Do you really think we’re poisonous?”

“I think we’re flint and steel,” Draco says. “Beautiful until we burn the whole thing down.”

There’s no kiss this time.

Only a pause.

Only space.

And the slow, tragic decision to walk away before they ruin each other completely.

The exhibition opens without ceremony.

Draco arrives late, dressed like he’s attending a wake. He doesn’t glance toward the VR station where Harry’s installation is housed, and Harry—already seated behind the security-glass interface—pretends not to look when Draco passes.

They orbit each other like silent moons. Former collaborators. Former something else, too—but they’ve stopped naming it. 

Students call their work “brilliant.” Critics murmur phrases like “disquieting synergy” and “twin genius.” No one notices that the artists don’t speak to each other. That their eyes are never in the same place at the same time.

Draco stands in front of Harry’s simulation once. He watches a girl wander through it with the headset on, laughing softly as fragments of memory reconstruct around her. She pauses before a moment Harry labeled July, rain, red scarf, recognition—a half-recreated evening, where a pixelated version of Draco had turned his head just enough to smile.

The girl moves on. Draco doesn't.

Harry begins breaking by precision.

His lab is cold. Clean. Too clean. His whiteboards are full of equations that no longer resolve, models with flaws he pretends not to see. He publishes a paper on “Neural Refusal: Memory Suppression and Emotional Pruning.” It’s full of quiet desperation disguised as science. Buried in footnotes, he defines a term:

Cognitive ghosting — The mind's attempt to overwrite a recurring figure that no longer resides in one's present but dominates all reflective architecture.

He doesn’t name Draco.

But he doesn’t have to.

His colleagues begin to notice he doesn’t smile anymore. He avoids sunlight. His coffee is replaced with energy drinks, his patience with silence. When someone mentions the art department, Harry simply blinks and says, “I don’t engage in unstructured variables anymore.”

As if Draco had been an experiment that failed to replicate.

Draco breaks louder.

He paints obsessively—large, erratic canvases of faceless bodies. His colour palette degrades from crimson to grey. He begins using scalpels instead of brushes, slicing his work before stitching it back together with thread.

His professors whisper. One of them suggests a leave of absence. Another asks if he’s seeing someone.

Draco laughs bitterly. “I was.”

He writes a series of untitled pieces. They are not published. They are not submitted.

He keeps one of them folded in his coat pocket, where it wrinkles and fades:

You called it pattern recognition. I call it a haunting.I haven’t slept since you stopped imagining me.

They start seeing each other in everything.

Harry, walking home from a lecture, glances up and sees Draco’s profile lit in the window of the sculpture lab—and almost crosses the street before catching himself. Before reminding himself: We don’t speak.

Draco, returning a library book, finds one in the neuroscience section with Harry’s name scrawled on the title page. He stares at it like it’s a relic. Like it still belongs to someone warm.

They never speak. But the silence hurts now.

They could have hated each other forever and been fine.

But now they’ve tasted softness.

And nothing feels safe.

Weeks pass. Then a month. Two.

The university feels clinical now. Their names are still attached to greatness, but never to each other.

There is a winter showcase. Draco’s final piece is unveiled: an enormous suspended structure of broken glass and violin strings, wired to a sensor that makes it hum when anyone walks beneath it. The sound is low. Disoriented. Longing.

It’s titled: “Things That Break Before the Sound Comes.”

Harry doesn’t attend. But the next day, the gallery curator finds a note slipped under her door in a sealed envelope:

I don’t know what I heard, but it was mine. Please tell him I was there.

It is unsigned. But the ink is smudged like rain.

Part 3

[drarrywords]

The Precision of Spite

Draco Malfoy met Harry Potter under fluorescent lights, surrounded by synaptic diagrams and the low hum of a lab projector. Of course, he had not meant to attend the lecture. It was Blaise’s fault. 

“You’re too self-contained,” Blaise had said to him, when Draco had protested, “Inspire yourself. Observe the scientists in their natural habitat. Break your dull routine.”

Draco had been halfway through composing an essay on postmodern detachment and the language of surveillance cinema when Blaise physically removed him from the studio, which is how he ended up seated among biology majors and the odd psychology student, listening to Harry Potter, neuroscience wunderkind, deliver a talk on “Neuroplasticity, Memory, and the Architecture of the Self.”

He spoke plainly. With that rough, untrained eloquence of someone who understood more than he bothered to explain. His hair looked like it had been electrocuted by his own research. He wore a shirt half-buttoned and wire-rimmed glasses he kept pushing up his nose, distractedly, as if the body was a nuisance compared to the brain.

And the audience adored him.

Draco sat with his arms folded, jaw tight, wondering how the poster child for sleep-deprivation and coffee-stained sentences had become the intellectual darling of the university.

“I’m fairly certain he just explained consciousness using a metaphor about wet clay,” Draco hissed.

Blaise murmured, “He is a consciousness metaphor wet clay.”

Draco hated everything.

Especially the way Harry looked at him across the lecture hall, gaze sharp and knowing, as though he recognized a threat. 

Or worse: an equal.

Their enmity wasn’t declared so much as implied—like a centuries-old academic curse that neither had the power nor desire to lift. Potter was all fMRI scans and synaptic trails, fascinated by the brain's circuitry—the way memory lived in architecture, the way trauma rewrote the map. Draco was art and affect and post-structural theory, convinced that quantifying thought was the surest way to kill it. Art did not demand reason. It did not have to be dissected. 

They disagreed on panels, argued in cafes, and once got into a nearly metaphysical shouting match in the student union over whether dreams could ever be truly unconscious if they were later interpreted.

“You measure the fire, I paint it,” Draco snapped.

“You romanticize ignorance,” Potter had retorted. “Pretending subjectivity is too holy to touch.”

Draco's eyes narrowed. “You think because you can diagram grief, you understand it.”

The tension between them always hovered just beneath academics. The kind of animosity that tasted like attraction if you let it sit too long. And Draco often feared if that is what it would turn out to be. 

It escalated one cold November evening, in the hallway outside a joint symposium. Potter had just given a talk on the hippocampus and the illusion of free will. Draco caught him near the coat rack, fingers curled around a cigarette he wasn’t allowed to light indoors.

“You’re obsessed with the brain like it’s the whole of the soul,” Draco said. “But what if it’s nothing? What if you’re dissecting an organ that isn’t what you believe it to be?”

Potter stepped closer, green eyes glinting at him. “You sound jealous.”

“Of what? Data sets?”

“No. Of the fact that I can explain the thing you keep trying to make sacred with your art. It can’t decipher what science can.”

Draco took a drag of nothing—and exhaled frost. “You haven’t explained anything. You’ve mapped the ruins and declared yourself king of nothing.”

Potter's mouth twitched—something between a smirk and a provocation. “Is this foreplay for you?”

Draco’s pulse stuttered.

He turned, abruptly.

But Potter was already watching him walk away, like he’d won something.

And still, Draco couldn’t stop.

Couldn’t stop attending the lectures he pretended to despise. Couldn’t stop quoting Potter in critiques, only to dismantle his ideas with surgical precision. Couldn’t stop thinking about the line of Harry’s throat when he tilted his head to explain neural firing patterns, about the vein in his hand when he scribbled on whiteboards, about the bite in his voice when he said the word illusion.

He dreamed once that Harry was performing surgery on his skull—not with a blade, but with his words.

He woke up breathless.

One night, after an opening at the visual arts building, Draco stepped outside for air. The sky was a matte grey bruise, the clouds bloated with unshed snow. He lit a cigarette, half for the effect.

“You’re going to die tragically young,” said a voice.

Draco didn’t turn. “Let me guess. You’ve modeled it in MATLAB?”

Harry laughed softly behind him. “Only the statistical probability.”

Draco blew smoke toward the dark. “I didn’t invite you.”

“And yet,” Harry said, stepping beside him, “here we are.”

They stood like that for a moment—silence edged in frost.

“You know,” Harry said eventually, “you talk about art like it’s above being dissected. Like it’s immune to explanation.”

“It is,” Draco said. “Because explanation kills wonder.”

Harry turned toward him, eyes dark. “Then what is this? This thing between us? Is it a wonder? Or can I map it? Can science understand it? Or should this be left to the interpretation of the artist”

“What?”

Harry’s voice dropped, quiet and scalpel-sharp. “I could measure your pupils when you look at me. Track the dilation. Quantify desire. If I wanted to.”

“And if I said I wasn’t afraid of your data?” he asked as he turned to face him, voice low. “That you can measure my desire all you want, but it won’t make it yours.”

Harry stepped closer. “Then I’d have to prove you wrong.”

The kiss was inevitable.

Not sweet. Not gentle.

It was collision and combustion, a war fought without words for once. Harry tasted like a storm and theory. Draco’s hands curled into his coat, anchoring them both to something dangerously real. They pulled apart just enough to breathe.

Harry’s lips hovered by his ear. “Tell me again that this isn’t worth mapping.”

Draco’s breath hitched, “I’d rather paint it.”

Harry’s laugh was a low, gorgeous sound. 

And somewhere inside them both, something rewired.

There was no morning after. Not really. There was only the aftermath where the space between them hummed like a struck chord, vibrating with everything unsaid.

Harry left without speaking.

Draco let him.

Because to speak would make it real, and Draco had survived this long by convincing himself that nothing was.

In the weeks that followed, nothing changed—except everything.

They still argued on panels. Still found each other at departmental mixers like magnets pretending to repel. Harry presented a paper on the neural signature of heartbreak; Draco responded with a gallery exhibit titled “Dissection of a Feeling”, where a looping film displayed an anatomical heart melting slowly into white paint.

The critics called it haunting.

Harry called it transparent.

“Tell me,” he said one evening in the corner of a faculty party, “do you make art to understand, or to hide?”

Draco met his gaze with a glass of champagne raised halfway. “Isn’t your entire discipline just an elaborate way to avoid actually feeling anything?”

A smirk played at Harry’s lips, but his voice was low when he said, “I remember what you felt. That night. I can model it from memory.”

“Then do it,” Draco said. “Diagram my silence. Quantify the way I didn’t beg you to stay.”

The smirk vanished.

He walked away, defeated.

Draco tried to stop thinking about him. Tried to fill the silence with other people—sharp, beautiful distractions who knew better than to touch whatever wound he carried in his chest like a gallery piece titled ‘Unfinished’. But none of them fought like Harry. None of them made the world feel like an experiment in gravity, or stared at him like he was the only variable worth studying.

Meanwhile, Harry tried to solve himself like he was math. He fed their kiss through his neural models. Tried to understand what it meant that desire didn’t abate with distance—that proximity had never been the problem.

He reread old papers, wondering if the effect could be residual—if a single moment could lodge itself like shrapnel in the emotional brain.

He didn’t want Draco Malfoy like a desire that burnt him from within.

But sometimes, he did.

So he did what he always did when things terrified him.

He turned it into research.

Later, he sent Draco an invitation.

Not to dinner but to a lecture titled: “Emotive Recurrence in Memory Consolidation: The Case for Art in Neuroscience.”

Draco stared at the email like it had insulted his bloodline, but he went regardless. Because hatred was a kind of devotion. Because if Harry wanted a war in front of a crowd, Draco would wear his best suit.

He walked in five minutes late, purposefully, and sat in the front row like a blade sheathed in wool and Harry, for all his usual fidgeting, didn’t falter once. The lecture was about how memory clings to emotion. How experiences tied to aesthetic or affective states consolidate more deeply, more lastingly. How the brain carves cathedrals around feeling.

He used no slides.

Only images—frames from films Draco recognized. Soundless scenes from his own gallery pieces. A still of Draco himself, standing in profile under gallery light.

And finally—one image only Harry had ever seen: Draco’s hand, midair, in the moment before they kissed.

The hall was silent.

Harry looked at Draco and said, “We measure memory by activation patterns. But sometimes, it’s the absence that burns hotter. What wasn’t said. What wasn’t done.”

The room blurred.

Draco stood and left without a word.

Harry didn’t follow.

Not yet.

He found him later—three floors down, in a stairwell that smelled like metal and rain.

Draco sat on the steps, cigarette unlit in one hand.

“You think you’re clever,” Draco said quietly.

Harry leaned against the wall. “You always say that like it’s an insult.”

“It is.”

They sat in silence. The kind that hurts to touch.

Then Harry said, “I didn’t want to make it real.”

Draco didn’t look at him. “So you made it academic instead.”

“It’s the only language I know.”

Draco turned now, slowly, and looked up at him. “You think if you catalogue me, you won’t have to feel me. You think if you define it, you won’t drown in it. But that is where you fail. You understand science but that isn’t the sole interpretation. You will inevitably feel and science can’t decipher that.”

Harry sat beside him.

Close, not touching.

“I feel it,” he said. “Every second.”

Draco laughed, soft and exhausted. “Then say it. For once. Without chemicals. Without MRI scans.”

Harry’s throat worked. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“That’s a beginning,” Draco murmured.

And Harry—finally—leaned in again, not to map the moment, but to be in it.

At dawn, Draco woke before Harry, which was unusual. Normally, it was Harry’s breath that stirred the morning, his limbs stretching in unconscious reach across the tangled sheets, anchoring Draco in the liminal space between waking and sleep. But that morning, the sunlight spilled in crooked and indifferent, casting pale gold across Harry’s bare shoulder, and Draco was already awake to see it.

There was something violently tender about Harry in sleep. The way his mouth softened, the way the crease between his brows vanished, the way he looked almost too young to be the man who once dissected love on a podium and called it research. His hand is curled loosely against Draco’s ribs, a gesture that spoke less of possession and more of persistence. Even in unconsciousness, Harry clung—quietly, stubbornly, like he was still trying to hold onto something that kept slipping through the cracks.

Draco should move. He knew this. He should untangle himself from the weight of it all, from the unbearable intimacy of shared quiet. But he didn’t. Instead, he lay still, watching the slow rise and fall of Harry’s breath, wondering how something so simple can feel so excruciating.

Because this—whatever this was—wasn’t the resolution he thought it might be. It wasn’t soft focus and orchestral swell. It was raw. It was uncertain. It was the aftermath of years spent hurling words like weapons, only to discover that the sharpest ones were never spoken aloud.

He thought of the first time they kissed—how it felt like setting fire to theory. And then here they were, much later, burnt but not ruined, scarred but somehow still tethered by a thread neither of them knows how to name.

Harry stirred then, lashes fluttering as if the world was calling him back. His eyes opened slowly—green, as always, too much all at once—and he looked at Draco like he was a question Harry was still trying to solve.

“You’re awake,” Harry murmured, voice hoarse with sleep.

Draco didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t know how. So instead, he lifted a hand and traced the edge of Harry’s jaw, a gesture too intimate for the morning, too honest for them.

“You talk in your sleep,” he said at last.

Harry arched an eyebrow, just barely. “I do?”

“You said ‘architecture of the soul’ and then muttered something about coffee.”

Harry groaned, dragging a hand over his face. “Please tell me you’re lying.”

“I’m not. But I did consider recording it for posterity.”

There was a flicker of a smile, reluctant and real. “You’re cruel.”

“I’m precise,” Draco corrected. 

Draco let his fingers linger a moment longer, memorizing the subtle planes of Harry’s face—the slight shadow where a scar still faintly traced, the way his skin caught the sunlight and turned almost translucent. For all the distance they kept during the day, here, in the silence between waking and fully becoming themselves, there was a fragile kind of honesty.

Harry’s smile faded, replaced by a quieter expression, one that hovered somewhere between vulnerability and the burden of knowing too much.

“Architecture of the soul,” Harry repeated softly, as if tasting the phrase again, “I was dreaming about my thesis. You know, the part where I tried to map emotions to brain structures.”

Draco hummed, a hollow sound this time. “So love is a neural network? That explains why it’s so hard to disconnect.”

Harry’s eyes darkened, the light in them dimming. “Maybe it’s not about disconnecting but about knowing when you have to.”

For a long moment, neither spoke. The room was still except for their breath and the distant hum of the city waking. Finally, Harry shifted, his hand retreating from Draco’s waist. He pulled the sheets closer around himself like armor, leaving a chill in the space where he’d been.

“I never told you about how scared I was that all this” Harry murmured, voice cracking, gesturing vaguely between them, “was just some chemical accident. That I was fooling myself.”

Draco swallowed hard, the weight in his chest growing unbearable. “You weren’t.”

Harry’s eyes refused to meet his. “Maybe not. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. Sometimes it just isn’t. It doesn't suffice because the brain can’t love. It can’t.”

And that is where it breaks.

PART 2

[drarrywords]

I want to get back to writing drarry. so, if you have any oneshot requests, do send! I'd love to write around 25-50 oneshots or if I'm inspired, start a long fic altogether!

[drarrywords]

The Ultimate Dark Academia Book Recommendation Guide Ever

The title of this post is clickbait. I, unfortunately, have not read every book ever. Not all of these books are particularly “dark” either. However, these are my recommendations for your dark academia fix. The quality of each of these books varies. I have limited this list to books that are directly linked to the world of academia and/or which have a vaguely academic setting.

Dark Academia staples:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Dead Poets Society by Nancy H. Kleinbaum

Vita Nostra by Maryna Dyachenko

Dark academia litfic or contemporary:

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

White Ivy by Susie Yang

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates

Attribution by Linda Moore

Dark academia thrillers or horror:

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

Dark academia fantasy/sci-fi:

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The Betrayals by Bridget Collins

Dark academia romance:

Gothikana by RuNyx

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

Dark academia YA or MG:

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Crave by Tracy Wolff

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Dark academia miscellaneous:

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip

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ALL three and a half hours of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour (My Version), including “cardigan” and FOUR new acoustic songs, are now YOURS to stream anytime you want on Disney+! 

disneyplus.com/TSTheErasTourTaylorsVersion

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please

You have been visited by the twocumber. May you receive twofold luck in the coming days