i can't call you a friend.

everyone everyone
harry/draco
notes: yes, it is a potterfic. yes, it does go on for far too long. yes, my harry and draco are fanon cliches. beta'd (sorta) by v_greyson, hugs and kisses to her.


Harry can count the things he really, really wants on one hand.

He wants to have known his parents.

He wants to not have let Sirius die.

He wants to know what has happened to the world since he went into hiding.

Mostly, more than anything else, he wants to not be living in a fucking hole in the ground.


*


Living in isolation isn’t so bad after the first few years. It’s much worse when you’ve just started out and everything reminds you of the people you used to know and all you want is a fucking human voice, any human, even if it’s Voldemort and he’s come to kill you and make your entrails into some expensive piece of abstract art.

After the first few months though, this handy little thing in your brain kicks in. This is called your Will to Survive.

This Will to Survive, well, it activates this other handy little thing that goes to work immediately on your exhausted brain and makes it so you don’t hear those voices or see those faces or dream of lips and mouths and eyes and names.

This second handy little thing, it’s called Forgetting.


*


Harry has been living underground in a sickly appropriation of a Hobbit hole for 5 years when Malfoy Apparates into his kitchen.

“Well, look what we have here,” says Malfoy, dusting himself off and looking, the rat bastard, more than a bit pleased with himself.

“Of all the fucking hallucinations to have,” Harry says crossly, cutting the crusts off his bread rather more savagely than usual, “Why’d you have to be the first one?”

“Luck of the game, mate,” Malfoy says cheerily, and claps him on the shoulder.


*


Malfoy kips on the sofa for three nights before Harry decides that if he really was hallucinating, he couldn’t possibly be so off his rocker as to hallucinate Malfoy in frog pajamas.

Harry storms into the kitchen to find Malfoy eating toast and drinking tea. The normality of this enrages him.

“Who sent you?” Harry shouts, brandishing his wand, a bit uselessly because it has, after all, been 5 years since he’s done anything but cleaning spells with it.

Malfoy puts down his toast. “No one sent me. I sent me. There’s no one to send me.”

Harry blinks. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means everyone’s dead but you and me, boyo,” Malfoy says. “Want some tea?”

“So what are you doing here?” (Harry resolutely refusing to lower his wand. Out of principle, you see.)

“Well, I’m here to kill you,” says Malfoy, finally standing and gently guiding Harry’s wand to the ground.

“Yeah?”

“Or rescue you. I really can’t decide.”

And Malfoy smiles.


*


Harry wakes Malfoy up in the middle of the night, Malfoy’s face a pale smear against the offensive paisley of Harry’s couch.

“Everyone’s really dead?” Harry asks urgently.

“Everyone.”

“Everyone everyone?”

“Everyone everyone.”

“Even your father? Even Voldemort?”

Silence. Then: “Everyone, Harry.”


*


Sometimes Harry sleeps, but most of the time he doesn’t. He’s learned that the longest he can go without sleep is about 5 days, and then he hasn’t tried after that, because at 5 days everything is so vivid and terrible that he feels like he can’t breathe, and he doesn’t want to know where it goes after that.

Malfoy wakes to find Harry up and wandering one night and instead of saying anything, takes him by the shoulders and leads him forcefully back to bed.

“What use are you to me,” Malfoy says, pushing Harry onto his bed, “if you are already dead by the time I decide I want to kill you?”

“You won’t kill me,” says Harry firmly, kicking aside the blankets Malfoy has just pulled over his legs. “If you killed me, you would be alone.”

Malfoy looks at him closely. “Think that’s all there is to it, do you?”

“Of course that’s all there is to it,” says Harry, getting off the bed and ignoring Malfoy’s dirty looks. “That’s all there’s ever been to it.”


*


“It’s odd that after five years of living in total isolation, you’ve only reached the level of say, peculiar.” This is Malfoy, lying on his stomach, shuffling a deck of cards.

“What?”

“Well, I just sort of expected to find you completely batshit insane. Foaming at the mouth, that sort of thing. At the very least you were supposed to attack me.”

Harry flops down beside Malfoy on the carpet. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Well, just try to do better next time, won’t you? Next time I go through all the effort of finding some bloke who’s been hiding God-knows-where for five years, they should at least have some sort of personality disorder.”

Harry turns to look at the deck in Malfoy’s hands. “How did you find me anyway?”

“I asked Dumbledore.”

Putting his hand over Malfoy’s to stop the motion: “I thought you said Dumbledore was dead.”

“Dumbledore is dead. I killed him." Malfoy picks up the deck and begins to shuffle again. "Well," he says as an afterthought, "I asked him where you were, and then I killed him.”

Harry gets wordlessly to his feet and walks to his room in what he hopes is a decent impression of someone so enraged and horrified they can’t even make noise.

“To be fair,” Malfoy calls after him, “He tried to kill me first.”


*


Malfoy has been living with Harry for 3 months when Harry wakes up to Malfoy’s wand at his throat.

“I’ve decided to kill you,” Malfoy says matter-of-factly. “It’s really the best for both of us.”

Harry looks up at the ceiling, half in annoyance and half because it would strain his neck to look at Malfoy. “If you kill me, you will be all alone in the world.”

“There’s always Muggles.”

“You hate Muggles.”

“I hate you, too.”

Harry finally gives in and turns to study Malfoy head on. “If you kill me, I will be dead,” he says softly, “I will be dead and I won’t come back in 5 years to save you. Or kill you.”

“You might,” says Malfoy pensively. “I mean, no one really knows. You just might, to be honest.”

“Have I really been imagining you this whole time?” Harry asks curiously, reaching out his fingers, brushing Malfoy’s knuckles where they have gone cold and white and strained. “Are you just some hallucination my mind has sent me to say, your time in Sanityland is well and truly up now?”

“I could ask you the same question,” says Malfoy. “Don’t let’s play mind games.”

Harry clutches harder at Malfoy’s knuckles. Not in a let-me-hold-your-hand sort of way. In some other sort of way that makes more sense given the fact that Malfoy has his wand to Harry’s throat and is seriously considering killing him.

“If I can’t save you, I should at least kill you,” says Malfoy diplomatically. “It’s actually a logical conclusion to come to. If you think about it.”

“I never asked you to save me,” Harry says, “I never thought you could, even. That was just some grand design you took upon yourself.”

Malfoy blinks. “Oh,” he says, and drops his wand. “Okay then.”

Harry rubs at his throat ruefully. “Is that all?”

Malfoy shrugs. “Yeah. I guess that’s pretty much all.”

“Well, do you want some tea then?” Harry asks, at a loss as to what else to say.

Malfoy cocks his head. “Tea would be grand,” he says, looking for all the world as if something very important has been decided.