Thanksss I'm totally not about to break your heart with angst 😇❤️ and thanks to @dewitty1 for betaing!
Drarry | 900 words | Mature | Graphic depictions of violence, Self-harm, Blood, Angst, Unhappy/Ambiguous Ending, Mutual Pining | Read on AO3
“Malfoy, fuck, come on, wake up. You can’t be dead. You can’t—”
“Wha—” Draco tried to say, but his throat wasn’t working. What time was it? Shit. Had he fallen asleep at work?
“Oh, thank fuck,” Harry said with a sigh of relief. “What the fuck happened?!”
“I fell—’sleep,” Draco muttered, sitting up on his chair.
“Right. You fell asleep. In a pool of your own blood.”
That was when Draco saw it.
Coating his sleeve, his hand. Smudged over the desk, already dry. Probably on his face, too, judging by the fact he’d had his cheek pressed against his arm but a second ago.
“I—” He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Needed to think, to come up with an excuse believable enough that Harry wouldn’t go looking into it— “I think m-my wand slipped while I tried to open an envelope.”
“You think?” Harry carded his fingers through his hair, nervous. Desperate. “There isn’t even a single envelope on your—Malfoy, look. I-If someone hurt you, you know you can tell me. I’ll throw whoever did it into Azkaban for good. I don’t care if it was a colleague. Hell, if it was an anonymous cursed letter I’ll track them down to the end of the world—”
“No one hurt me, Potter,” Draco snarled. “I was sleepy and my grip unsteady. Now if you’re done catering to your own hero complex with unrealistic mental scenarios, I’m behind on my report and I still need to clean this mess.”
Harry huffed. Frowned, gestured around, opened his mouth as if to complain. Then, with a defeated sound, he said, “Fine. Whatever. I’ll—leave you to it, then.” And, after dragging his feet to the door and resting his hand on the doorknob, “I just…you gave me a scare and I got worried, okay? Besides, I thought we were past…” He sighed. “Nevermind.”
As soon as Harry was gone, Draco cursed under his breath. How could he have been so reckless? How could he have fucking dozed off, how could he have hurt himself badly enough to get dizzy at fucking work? What if Harry had seen? What if Harry didn’t let go of what he had seen and Draco was forced to push him away? To put an end to the one good thing he had left in his joke of a life?
He cast a cleaning spell on the mess on the table. Rolled up his sleeve.
Gasped, gazing at the most recent cut on his arm.
He hesitated for a moment, but pain—a pain very different from the one radiating from his arm—was already constricting his lungs with his every breath, and he decided to fuck it. He locked the door with a flick of his wand and, under his breath, murmured the incantation to remove the spell that made his skin look smooth—look normal. That hid the truth of what he had been doing to himself for longer than he cared to remember.
Slowly, he raked his fingers over the scars. Most of them were white; a few were more recent and still looked brownish, and two of them were still hidden under a scab.
Even though he had just opened a new wound close to his elbow, even though he knew doing this at work was a terrible idea, the desire to point his wand to his wrist and cast the spell again rushed through his veins, and he had to breathe through it for a few seconds.
They were never big enough. They were never deep enough, or painful enough, and even when they were, the satisfaction never lasted. No matter how many parts of his body he turned into labyrinths of scars, the uneven texture underneath his fingers never quenched his thirst for more.
He gritted his teeth, whined low in his throat. Clutched at his arm, watching as the waves of pain turned into tears of blood running down his elbow and dripping on the table, and thought of Harry. Of how he’d never be able to let him into his life—not truly, not how it was clear they both wanted—because he wouldn’t be able to explain. To explain that he was addicted to pain, to scars—to the feeling of hurting himself, of having the power to control the pain he experienced.
Harry could never see him without his skin-smoothing spell. Could never see him when he felt the control over his own life slip through his fingers and he was gasping for air, sinking his nails into his chest, and pointing his wand at whatever patch of clear skin he could find to make sure it hurt.
Harry deserved better than that. Better than him. And if Draco had ever doubted it, then the worry on Harry’s face just a few seconds ago had been a good reminder to never, ever let himself slip in front of the man he had so foolishly—so selfishly—fallen in love with. The man who, for some reason, clearly loved him back.
Draco sunk his nails on the skin around his open cut. Helped the blood keep flowing, watched as it did so, hoping, even though he knew it was useless, that it would be enough to drown his own miserable thoughts.
