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The Crowned Lion was packed, stuffy, and smelled of spilled butterbeer and pipe smoke. It was Friday night, which meant half the Ministry of Magic was there, trying to drown the week's bureaucracy in cheap alcohol.
In the furthest corner of the pub, squeezed into a worn leather booth designed for four people, sat five.
Ron and Hermione occupied one side of the table. On the other side, Pansy Parkinson sipped a perfectly translucent martini, pinning Draco Malfoy against the wooden wall. And Draco, in turn, was pinning Harry Potter.
The booth wasn't actually that small. If Pansy moved two inches toward the edge, there would be plenty of room. But Harry and Draco seemed to suffer from a chronic inability to register each other's personal space. Harry's knee was pressed firmly against Draco's thigh. The blond's arm was stretched along the back of the booth, resting casually mere millimeters from the nape of the Gryffindor's neck.
They were in the middle of a heated argument about the Chudley Cannons' defense tactics.
"It's statistically impossible, Potter," Draco drawled, rolling his eyes. He grabbed a peanut from the bowl in the center of the table and, without even looking, popped it into Harry's mouth right in the middle of his sentence. "Their Keeper has the reflexes of a dead slug. Accept it."
Harry chewed the peanut, swallowed it down with a gulp of firewhisky, and shot back, turning his face toward Draco. The distance between their noses was embarrassingly small.
"They have heart, Malfoy. It's something you wouldn't understand, being a soulless Slytherin and all."
Draco smiled, a small, sharp, and dangerously affectionate smile. He didn't pull back a single millimeter.
"My soul is perfectly fine, thank you. And it prefers winning teams."
Across the table, Ron sighed heavily, exchanging an exhausted look with Hermione. Pansy just rolled her eyes and ordered another martini. It was the same old dance. The impenetrable bubble of denial surrounding Harry and Draco was a running joke across three different departments. They shared meals, shared space, shared the bills at Grimmauld Place, and, rumor had it, even shared clothes. But if anyone dared to insinuate there was anything more than a "friendly rivalry" going on, they would both deny it to the grave.
What none of them noticed, in the midst of that exhausting choreography of denial, was the muffled thump coming from the floor above, where the Weasley brothers were testing new products for Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.
And no one noticed when a single, glowing golden drop of an Experimental Truth Serum—potent enough to make a troll confess its childhood fears—dripped through a crack in the wooden ceiling and fell, with an inaudible plop, straight into Harry Potter's nearly empty glass of firewhisky.
"Honestly, Harry," Ron said, laughing and shaking his head. "If you love suffering for the Cannons so much, what's the best part of your day nowadays? The moment they lose and you can finally go to sleep?"
Harry chuckled, picking up his glass.
"Very funny, Ron. The best part of my day..."
He tipped the glass back, swallowing the last mouthful of whisky—and the golden drop—in one gulp.
The instant the liquid slid down his throat, Harry's green eyes unfocused slightly. A strange, cozy warmth spread from his stomach to his brain. The potion didn't strip his motor control, nor did it make him dizzy. It simply obliterated, with hurricane force, the giant, heavy, fear-ridden filter that Harry had kept securely over his mouth for the past three years.
"...the best part of my day," Harry repeated, his voice suddenly losing all trace of irony. He blinked slowly.
Ron, expecting a joke about Auror work, grinned, taking a sip of his beer. Hermione frowned, noting the subtle shift in her friend's posture.
Harry didn't look at Ron. He turned his face with an almost hypnotic calmness toward the man squeezed in beside him.
The expression on Harry's face wasn't that of a proud Gryffindor ready for a Quidditch debate. It was soft, open, and of such devastating vulnerability that it made the air in the booth feel suddenly thin. He looked deeply into Draco Malfoy's grey eyes.
"It's the smell of Draco's neck," Harry said, his voice clear, fond, and in a perfectly casual conversational tone.
Ron choked on his beer so violently that it shot out of his nose.
Pansy froze with her martini glass halfway to her lips.
Hermione stopped breathing.
But Harry wasn't finished. The truth serum was relentless.
"Especially in the morning," Harry continued, raising his hand and, to the mute horror of the entire table, tracing the line of Draco's jaw with his thumb. "When we wake up together, and he steals my sheets, and hides his face in the crook of my shoulder because he doesn't like the sunlight. It's the only reason I still wake up smiling to go work at the Ministry. The rest of my day is just me waiting for it to be time to go back to the couch and let him put his feet in my lap again."
The silence that swallowed the booth was so thick that the sound of conversations in the rest of the pub seemed to vanish.
Draco was paralyzed. Gargoyle statues had more movement than he did in that moment. The touch of Harry's thumb burned his skin. His grey eyes were wide in pure shock, his mind racing a hundred miles an hour, trying to process if he had gone mad, if he was dreaming, or if the Savior of the Wizarding World had just declared his undying love in front of Granger, Weasley, and Parkinson.
Ron, who was still coughing and wiping his nose, bugged his eyes out.
"You... you guys... WHAT?!" Ron's voice came out in a shrill yelp that made heads turn at neighboring tables.
Hermione, the first to recover her senses and quick thinking, looked at the ceiling, noticed the damp spot and the residual golden glow. She cursed under her breath.
"Contact Veritaserum. From George. Harry, shut your mouth right now."
"But Ron asked," Harry argued, frowning slightly, seeming genuinely confused by the uproar. He looked back at Draco, who was now sporting a brick-red flush that spread from his neck right up to the roots of his blond hair. Harry smiled in an absolutely adorable way. "You're red, Draco. You look beautiful like this. Remember that time you got embarrassed because I caught you reading my reports while wearing my shirt? It was the most adorable day of my life."
Draco spontaneously combusted.
"Potter, stop talking!" Draco hissed, his voice cracking, trying to push Harry's face away with both hands in total panic.
But Harry, under the relaxing spell of the truth, didn't budge. He merely grabbed Draco's wrists with ease, bringing the blond's hands to his own chest.
"Why should I stop? I've spent the last three years terrified to tell you that I'm in love with you. I'm so stupid. I should have kissed you that day we painted the kitchen at Grimmauld Place and you got a spot of paint on the tip of your nose."
Pansy let out a sound like a boiling kettle and slammed her hand on the table.
"I told you! Ron, you owe me fifty galleons, right now! The betting pool is over!"
"Pansy, this isn't the time for bets!" Hermione hissed, drawing her wand. "We need to get Harry out of here before he confesses the security codes for the Auror vaults!"
"I don't care about the codes," Harry shot back, on a roll. He ignored everyone at the table, focusing exclusively on the puddle of blond despair that was Draco Malfoy. "I only care that you have this ridiculous habit of not admitting when you're cold just so I'll hold you. I know you do it on purpose, Draco. And I love it."
Draco hid his face in his hands, wishing deeply that the rotting wooden floor of the Crowned Lion would open up and swallow him straight down to the Earth's core.
"Please, Granger," Draco begged, his voice muffled. "Obliviate me. Now. Erase my memory. And Weasley's."
"No," Ron gasped, still in a state of absolute shock. "Let him speak. Harry, what's this about stealing shirts?! You guys sleep in the same bed?!"
"Only when it thunders," Harry answered promptly, smiling gently at Ron, as if explaining the weather. "Or when Draco says his mattress sank. Which happens about four times a week. He's a terrible liar. I know he just wants to cuddle, he's very needy, Ron."
"By Merlin's beard, just kill me now," Draco whimpered.
Hermione conjured a thick handkerchief and, unceremoniously, threw it at Harry's face. He just laughed, still holding Draco's hands.
"Get up, both of you," Hermione ordered with the voice of authority she used at the Ministry. "Draco, you're taking him home. He cannot be in public like this."
Draco didn't need to be told twice. He leaped out of the booth with the agility of a Seeker, grabbing Harry's arm and hauling him out of the booth.
"Let's go, Potter. You're going to drink a gallon of water and sleep for the next forty hours," Draco grumbled, his face still burning with humiliation, though he didn't let go of Harry's hand for a second.
Harry stumbled a bit getting away from the table, but let himself be dragged. Before Draco could steer him toward the exit, Harry stopped. He pulled his arm back just enough to make Draco halt and look at him.
The pub was still noisy around them. But for Harry, under the sharp, liberating clarity of the truth, there was only the man standing in front of him.
"I'm being serious, you know," Harry whispered, and this time, there was no humor or gossipy tone. Just an intensity that made Draco's knees weak. "I love you. I just didn't know how to break this stupid thing we invented about just being friends. I'm sorry it took me so long."
Draco froze mid-stride. The humiliation and panic melted instantly, replaced by a wave of relief and warmth so overwhelming that he almost forgot how to breathe. He looked at Harry's honest, glowing face.
Slowly, ignoring the jaw-dropped table of Ron, Hermione, and Pansy two steps away, Draco raised his hand. He returned the gesture from minutes ago, tracing the line of Harry's jaw with his thumb.
"You are the most insufferable, dense, and reckless Gryffindor to ever walk the Earth," Draco murmured, his voice husky and trembling with emotion. He took a step forward, closing the distance between them. "And I was going to tell you tomorrow morning, over coffee. You idiot, you ruined my surprise."
Harry's smile lit up the entire pub. And when Draco finally pulled him in by the collar of his shirt and crashed their lips together in a desperate, hungry, and completely public kiss, no one at the surrounding tables dared say a word.
Except for Pansy, in the background, holding her palm out to Ron.
"Fifty galleons, Weasley. No crying."