#harry potter isn't a stepdad he's the dad that steps up !!!

[joonkorre]

likened to a deepsea diver

@drarrymicrofic prompt: travel

Harry spot Malfoy standing outside an H-E-B, watched him frown squinty-eyed and ruddy-cheeked under the mid-July sun as a little, equally-as-blond girl tried to climb into his shopping cart. That was 15 years after the war. But this isn't about that. This is about Willow City Loop. Or, a tentative love letter to Texas and the places there that I’ve never been. AO3

Draco sits with his feet up on the dashboard. It’s all kinds of dangerous and not something Lyra should see and learn from the backseat, but Harry only taps on the steering wheel, quiet. Just two years ago, Draco would never be caught dead like this, loose-limbed and soft in a cotton T-shirt. Harry’s cotton T-shirt. Lyra, too, would never let herself be in an enclosed space with another man who wasn’t her father. The both of them, pale and gaunt, were a sobering sight to witness. Unreachable in their posh accent and eccentric traditions and constellation names. But Lyra had let out a giddy “oooh” when Harry invited them to this weekend trip, and Draco had laid a gentle, callused hand on Harry’s shoulder, peeking at the worn map and the line of red marker to their destination. And so Harry signals right and merges into 87, hoping that the guidebook was right.

It was not.

“That’s a lot of people,” Draco says, craning his neck this way and that to look at the traffic ahead. “I thought we arrived early?”

“Guess everyone thinks so too,” Harry bites back a sigh. He’s not even holding the steering wheel at times, just tap-release-tap-releasing the brakes into a crawl.

“Do you reckon I can sit over there for a bit? By the big tree?” Lyra asks. Harry almost can’t hear her above the constant drone of engine and honking, but Draco does and whips around in his seat. In the back, she has rolled down the window and poked her head out.

“Sit down, Lyra, for Merlin’s sake,” he scolds. “You’re gonna get your head chopped off.”

Jesus, Harry thinks, a startled laugh almost escaping him as he watches them.

“That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?” the young girl says, now with her elbows on the window sill. “Like in that movie you didn’t let me watch.”

“Yeah, and you watched it anyway. No library trip for two weeks.”

“What the hell!” she shouts into the watercolour meadow. Probably because she can, and probably because it’s funny. Harry does laugh this time.

Draco’s head tilts toward him, light eyes almost transparent in the morning sun.

“Do you mind stopping the car? I have to go feed her to the bisons or—whatever it is that you raise in Texas.”

Harry shrugs. “The closest bison ranch I can think of is, like, 30 miles away. That’s a long walk.”

“Damn,” Draco frowns as though truly disappointed, then he shifts around again. “Lyra, sit back down. If you really get your head chopped off, I’m gonna sick up all over the dash and it’ll be disgusting. Save me from the indignity.”

One car honks, then another. Harry jolts, turning to see a swath of empty road in front of him. He lifts his foot off the brake, letting it move at a safe enough speed for a little girl with half her body hanging out of the window.

“Lyra,” he raises his voice. “Listen to your dad and get back inside. Now.”

A second of silence, then shuffling. Harry makes sure Lyra is pulling her torso back in using the rearview mirror, and she sits down with a thump. He lowers his gaze to the road, rolls up the window, and accelerates.

“The drivers are nicer today than usual,” he says after a minute or so. “They normally wouldn’t let people dawdle for that long.”

“I only listened ‘cause Dad likes you,” Lyra says at once, picking up her book. That’s Lyra Code for being done with her shenanigans for the day, and she’d like to sit daintily in her daydreams now, thank-you-very-much. A regular southern belle, her, and she was born in Ashford too.

Draco scoffs and looks out the window, face fully hidden from Harry’s angle. “Christ…”

It’s so childish, this ache in his chest. There’s an equally as intense ache on his face, stretched into a grin that feels instinctual, a base response etched in his genetics, like something he has to apologise for and stamp down. Harry reaches over and finds Draco’s hand, curled stiff into a fist on knobbly knees.

But at Harry’s touch, it unfurls. One blink, and Harry has already intertwined their fingers in the next. He keeps his eyes on the road, not really needing to look at the bluebonnet after all.

“I know, hon,” he says. The hand in his tightens for a brief moment, like a warning or a message or an agreement. The sun only gets brighter. When they get back home—their home (theirs, theirs, theirs) with an honest-to-God white picket fence that Lyra had too much fun painting and that the HOA detests, as well as a pie on the kitchen window, one of many culinary experiments Draco embarks upon—they’ll have a lot to discuss. “I know.”