Further convince me that Draco/Harry was a thing that could have/should have happened. I’m only dipping my toes into this in my old age.

dignifiedrice:

wildehacked:

So you’re fourteen and you have a nemesis. You hate him more than anyone in the world, and you are confident that he hates you just the same. 

You hate him for a variety of reasons: he’s stupid, with stupid hair, stupid glasses, a stupid scar, and a stupid face. Everybody loves him, but he’s not even that great. He’s very famous and important, and he keeps doing things that get him an absurd, extravagant, infuriating amount of attention. He’s good at things he shouldn’t be good at–he grew up with Muggles, and you’ve been training on a broom your whole life, and you’re good, and it’s not fair that he’s better than you, and it’s especially unfair that they made an exception for him and not for you. They’re always making exceptions for him–that’s another reason you hate him. You hate him because the headmaster’s on his side, just like all the teachers are on his side, just like the whole school is always on his side. You hate him because he hates you. You met him first. He decided to hate you after knowing you for thirty seconds, and you’re never going to forgive him for it. 

You spend a lot of time dwelling on your nemesis. You scowl at each other over every meal, you write lists and lists of things he likes, things he hates, ways you could embarrass him, hurt him, make him look at you. You talk about him so often to your friends that they groan whenever you bring up his name. You stay up for almost twenty-four hours painstakingly charming hundreds of individual “Potter Stinks” buttons and accidentally sleep through a History of Magic quiz. Every time his name glows green at you from a hundred badges scattered across the room, you feel a rush of vindication, a savage satisfaction: there’s his name in your hand. Potter glares bloody murder at you from across the Great Hall for weeks, and you feel warm and righteous. 

Sometimes when you’re about to fall asleep, for no reason at all, you’ll think about which shade of green, exactly, his eyes are–bottle green? brilliant green? Slytherin green?–and you’ll mutter something bitter to Vince lying four feet away from you that it’s unfair that Potter has to spoil even Slytherin green for you, and Vince will throw a pillow at your head and you’ll fall asleep thinking about the raven-black of Potter’s hair, the infuriating tangle of it on his head, doesn’t he own a comb, doesn’t he even run his fingers through it, and you’ll hate him and his maddening hair, his thin hands, his magic-green eyes. 

* 

You don’t have a nemesis when you’re sixteen. You can’t hate Harry Potter more than anyone else in the world–not when there’s a man in the world who wants to kill you, who told you in a calm, high voice that he’d kill your mother in front of you if you fail him. 

You hate the Dark Lord, and you hate Dumbledore, and you hate your father a little and feel miserable about it–and you hate Harry Potter for bringing the Dark Lord back, for putting your father in prison and leaving you and your mother all alone in a house with a madman and a man-eating snake and your terrible aunt and terrible things already happening in your cellar. 

Potter won’t leave you alone. He follows you everywhere, stares at you in class, at meals, in the hall. You hate him for that, too. Your task is hard enough without him looking at you, that infuriating expression on his face. The one that says you’re wrong, and in league with wrong, that you’re wrong down to the marrow, and he’ll be there to clap you in irons whenever you inevitably make the wrong choice. 

He finds you crying in a bathroom. You summon all the hate you have, every ounce you’ve gathered to you over the years, and hurl it in his direction, channeling it into a word you can’t take back: Crucio. The spell falters, malformed, and he slashes it to nothing.

He doesn’t have any trouble hurting you. 

* 

At seventeen, you hate Harry Potter for not being who everyone thought he was. You’ve known he was a fraud your whole life, and you need him to be real. You need to believe there’s someone who could save you. Who could save your Muggle Studies teacher, hanging silent and terrified over your dining room table, her red eyes locked with yours. 

But you know better than anyone that Harry Potter isn’t a savior. He’s just Potter. Just Potter who likes peas and curry and chewing on the end of his quills and dislikes carrots and Professor Snape and the smell of doxy eggs, Potter with tangled hair he never brushes, Potter with skinned knees and slim hands, who faints at the sight of dementors and hates Draco and once laughed so hard at something Weasley said that he shot butterbeer out of his nose. 

You can’t believe that Harry Potter will save you. 

Like always, he proves you wrong.

THIS IS WHAT I WANTED