#fluff is my spirit animal

I wish I had the brain to do all the @hdcandyheartsfest prompts but alas, we do what we can ☺️ (Shoutout to all of you who are doing them every day, I love reading all your entries, you’re amazing!)

Anyway, here’s some fluff and domesticity for today’s prompt Love Confession under the cut (rated T | 800 words). Biggest thank you to @curlyy-hair-dont-care for betaing and being wonderful.

“Do you remember your first Sunday dinner at the Burrow?”

It’s not said like a question, just a low hum into the pillow, into the small space between them. Draco grunts, doesn’t open his eyes. He wasn’t asleep but he was drifting and it’s too early for a two-sided conversation.

He remembers, all right. Molly had invited him, out of pity he thinks, and via Granger. He didn’t want to go but Hermione can be very convincing. And scary.

“You played chess with Ron by the fire.” Harry’s voice sounds too awake for this hour.

Draco had almost forgotten that part, but they did sit by the fire for a while and it felt like home and family and safety, even though Draco didn’t belong and was a little bit lost. Now the warmth of the memory spreads in his abdomen like molten gold and he buries himself deeper into the sheets.

“You were so concentrated and kept frowning because Gin and I were testing George’s new products.”

“You were making such a ruckus with those things, like a pack of excitable racoons. It was hard to think,” Draco murmurs, and it comes out muffled, swallowed by his pillow. “Then there was the one that exploded on the coffee table.”

“And you nonchalantly threw a shield charm at us without looking up from the chessboard and then did a checkmate in the next second. I had no idea you were even paying attention.”

“Healer training instinct.”

“Ron was not impressed.”

“But you were.”

Harry doesn’t answer for a while, so Draco finally opens his eyes. Harry is looking at him and maybe Draco needs a shield charm now for the intensity of his gaze. His eyes don’t look green in the dawn light but they’re no less bright and fierce.

“I was. It’s also when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

It’s a strange thing how quickly Draco’s heart can start beating just because Harry’s voice suddenly sounded a bit small even in the few inches of space between them. Draco holds his breath and thinks that nothing good can come out of a five-a.m. talk. His thoughts spill into all the ugly corners of his mind where his insecurity lives, where there is proof that all this is not real, can’t be and Harry will tell him now that he’s changed his mind, that he had been right about Draco all along.

Harry can probably tell he is panicking, it’s hard to keep your composure when it’s the middle of the night and they are so close and still naked, because he reaches out to brush his thumb across Draco’s cheek and says, “Knew that I was in love with you.”

Maybe Harry did some wandless magic along with his words because Draco can’t feel his heart at all now.

“But that was…ages ago, years ago!” Eight years to be precise, when they were just starting to talk properly, when Harry was still in Auror training, before he had decided to leave, both the training and England, to find out what he wanted to do with his life.

“I know. I realised I was in love with you and I, er… didn’t want to be.” His smile is a little sheepish, but Draco doesn’t blame him. Still doesn’t believe that Harry came back after deciding that what he wanted was, in fact, Draco.

“But I wanted to tell you now. That I love you. And that I’m not going to disappear again.”

Draco feels a bit like he did at the Burrow back then – home, safe, warm – and no longer lost. These past few weeks since they’d started this – this thing that doesn’t have a name yet – seemed like something fragile, something precious. A bit lopsided, Draco thinks, on his side at least. For him, it has always been Harry, always, and there were times when he hated that. But nobody has ever even come close, so Draco had made peace with hoping that perhaps Harry might catch up one day. He wouldn’t have even dared to imagine that maybe it hasn’t been so uneven after all.

Draco closes his eyes so that Harry can’t see him properly, all of him, the unedited version that’s feeling like a broom has been pulled out from under him – but in a good way. Like a freefall. He can’t help the smile that’s stubbornly pulling at his mouth though, so he lets it happen.

“You impossible prat. This couldn’t wait until breakfast?”

Harry laughs, deep and happy and knowing, because Draco can’t hide from his voice how much he’s in love too, and Harry can see all the way through him anyway.