"I still don't understand how you could protect them when they treated you the way they did," Draco huffs irritatedly.
He looks exceptionally flushed this evening, all thanks to Harry, who decided to spend their dinner hour in the courtyard. Summer wasn't exactly brutal in Scotland, but Draco Malfoy was particularly susceptible to heat, more specifically, the sun. And despite the amount of reflective charms he set around himself to bend the light around him, his skin always managed to catch every other stray sunbeam.
Harry regularly told him he wasn't getting dark spots, but Draco refused to use the muggle sun cream Hermione had gifted him when he complained about the solar system's greatest asset. He only shook his head fondly when Draco asked if he looked too sunburnt yet.
"I know it sounds weird, but," Harry shakes his head while playing around with the peas on his plate. "Muggles don't...know. They don't know anything. And muggles like my relatives, that get the opportunity to know, they're afraid. And they're afraid because they don't understand it. Yeah, they were terrible to me, but it's because they were afraid, they didn't understand what I could do.
"And I'm not validating their neglect and abuse. I'm not. It was wrong and terrible and I still have problems coming to term with the fact that I can eat, and I can sleep, and wake up late if I want to. But if I was in their shoes, I don't guarantee I'd be completely okay with something near me I didn't understand."
"How do you do that?"
The boy is shaken from his stupor when Draco comes into his personal space, all pink cheeks and big eyes. "Do what?"
"You take your time to break problems down. To explore every option and not come up with the worst viable explanation. You put yourself before everyone until the very end. Doesn't it get exhausting?"
Draco smells of grass and wind--they'd gone flying earlier that day--and tea and parchment, and Harry just feels completely at ease with his place in the world at the moment. Everything's okay.
He thinks everything will be okay as long as Draco's there to ask him questions.
"I guess I've been needed my whole life," he shrugs, conspicuously leaning closer to Draco as he does it. "With my old life, I was needed out of hatred. When I came here, I was needed as a last resort. I had to finish cleaning everybody else's mess."
"But don't you ever feel like just doing things for yourself? To break free of the mold that society has built for you?"
Harry takes a little extra time staring at Draco's lips before moving to his eyes. "I don't think I've ever let society be a deciding factor. I would have put people before me even if some old smelly fart wouldn't have told me to because it's the right thing to do. I didn't have much to lose then."
"And now?"
Draco is watching Harry intently, his eyes jumping over the entirety of his face. He's leaning so close but Harry doesn't seem to mind, just looking at Draco with an easy nonchalance.
"Now?" Harry asks quietly into the wind, his eyes never once straying from his companion. "Now, I'm not sure I'd sacrifice things so easily."
* * * * * * *
"You do know there are better things to be doing than this," Harry flops the corner of a page from his book boringly. "Right?"
Draco hums from his spot standing next to a shelf adjacent to Harry. "And what would that be?"
"We could go flying," he says passively, adds a disinterested shrug as if he doesn't know Draco loves to fly. He lifts his eyes to Draco when he doesn't hear the tell-tale sound of Draco's finger running behind a page when he's about to turn it.
