There’s Crabbe, standing in front of him. He had not seen him since the war, since that moment with the fire and Goyle’s screams and the burns tearing at their hands like white hot needles. Draco hadn’t thought he would see him again. He hadn’t even wanted to. Last time he talked to Pansy, he heard that he was in Azkaban, anyways.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He cannot curse him. He knows that the moment he sees him, because the sight of him comes with so much guilt, the sense of knowing that even though they were bad people he had been the one who started them down that path, that the choices they made were in part because of him. He thinks about the first year on the train, about a rat’s teeth sinking into knuckles, about sulking along the walls at parties while their collars strangled them, and about stupider things, about the blinding moments of pure friendship, like the time where Crabbe was naming girls and Draco named a guy and neither of them skipped a beat, or when his father first went to jail and Crabbe beat up a third year to make him feel better, which was misguided, but it helped, because all Draco needed was to see someone made smaller than he was feeling.
“You like to show off,” Crabbe says, and there is no such hesitation in his movements, Draco can tell. He always was the brutal one, even if Draco planned it. He was the one who liked it just for the sake of hurting someone. Draco had his reasons, because he had been told to push others down in order to stay on top, but Crabbe never needed to ask why. “All flash and no power. But me?” He’s advancing on him, a hand reaching out, and Draco will not raise a hand to defend himself. He has debts to pay, and this one, this one little shred of guilt, will be one that he can wash away. “I’ve got nothing else.”
His hand is reaching out and grabbing Draco by the neck, and his wand is raising up, and Draco has just enough time to close his eyes and hope it does not hurt (he is still a coward, even if he is trying to stop) when another hand flashes out and hits Crabbe right in the head, sending Draco flying and Crabbe stumbling sideways.
Draco stares down at the now not-so-tough Crabbe, and then he stares up at Ron, who is panting and looking down at Crabbe with something like disgust.
“Jesus.” Ron stares at him, and Draco repeats himself, once, twice. “Do you ever remember that you have a wand?”
There’s a moment where they both stare at each other in disbelief, and then Ron laughs, then kicks out at Crabbe. “If I leave, can you handle this?” Draco doesn’t answer and Ron nods, kicks him again, and then sends silver ropes flying with a wave of his wand, making it impossible for Crabbe to move. “Come on.” He claps him on the back, and even though they are not friends, not even close, Draco can feel the truce that came about in all this magic and dust. “We’ve got others to fight.”
Don’t we always, Draco thinks, but he moves forward without a protest, because somewhere in there is Harry, and he will not stop fighting when there is someone like that to follow.
Harry
“Didn’t I tell you that I was done fighting?” George demands, but there’s no bite behind the words.
They’re all at St. Mungo’s, each of them nursing their wounds and waving away any actual medical help. He hadn’t wanted to come, and neither had anyone else, but Hermione had showed up when she saw the distress call and told the all that it was ministry protocol, and anyone who did not show up would be held in contempt of court, which Harry thought was a lie, but he can’t ever tell anymore.
(Whenever he thinks that she’s only bluffing, some small part of him that still remembers what it was like to be skinny and small and scared raises his head and reminds him of the time she kept a sadistic reporter in a jar just because she had crossed her, and then Harry decides to play it safe.)
“Sorry.” Harry’s got a cut over his eye, right through the eyebrow. The nurse could have healed it in a second, scar and all, but the stubborn part of him waited until he got home, where Luna could heal it from the safety of his bathroom. “We didn’t know they were going to explode your shop.”
“Yeah.” George is clearly upset about that, but they won’t talk about it now, not when there are so many other things that touches on. Like the idea that it was his home that they attacked, and that they were going after something that was just as much a part of Fred as it was a part of him. It had to hurt, to see the thing they created together torn down. “Not much point to it.”
“Of course there’s point.” Draco is leaning back against the window. The only one of them seriously hurt enough to warrant a bed was Ginny, who had broken her ankle in three places from where she apparently vaulted herself off a roof and had to wait for a specialist.
“And what’s that?” Ron wasn’t as awful towards him as normal, but there was still a certain snap to his voice whenever he spoke to him.
“Fear. Terror. The idea that nothing is safe.” Draco is staring at the ground, and he still looks beautiful, even if he’s covered in dirt and grime and blood. Harry remembers what he was going to tell him and is hit with a wave of gratitude that he didn’t, because he doesn’t think he could bear leaving him behind, ever, and not having the right to demand to know if he was okay.
(There was a moment, where Harry was fighting and he saw Draco get knocked down to the dirt, just one heart stopping moment where he thought he might not be getting back up. And in that moment, he realized how pointless it all was, to throw away what they have today for a tomorrow that wasn’t even theirs yet, to let something so perfect slip through his hands.)
(Besides, if the universe was ever going to send him a sign to tell him that he was making a momentous mistake, having a fight break out just before he could choke out the words was a pretty good one.)
“When nothing is sacred, no target to small, everything becomes a place of uncertainty.” Draco is still talking, still staring out the window. “Everything is something they can destroy, even the things that don’t seem to matter much, outside of what they mean to the people who care about it.”
“We should have known.” Ginny is white faced with the pain, and she has to speak through gritted teeth. Luna has not left her side since they got here, her hands fluttering from her shoulders to her hair to hovering over where the breaks were, but it wasn’t enough. “We should have known the fight wouldn’t end with him. There’s always something left over.”
How could we have known? Harry thinks, when they all nod, grim faced with their fear and the resignation of the battles yet to come. We’re kids playing at a war we don’t know how to fight.
“What’s coming will come,” He hears himself say, because he is the leader, always, always had that thrust upon him even when he did not want it, and he has to say something to ease the fear. “And we’ll meet it when it does.”
Chapter 27
Harry
Considering that Harry had lived in a dormitory with our other boys for most of his life, he had had his share of moments where he walked in on someone doing something they shouldn’t, or that they didn’t want others to know about. Like Neville writing in his diary that catalogues the well-being of his plants, or when he catches Ron reading the paperback romances that Hermione had originally bought for him as a joke birthday present or that one time when he walked in on Seamus and Dean kissing before they were ready for anyone to know about.
So he gets the protocol. About how sometimes people living together still want their space, and that the other person sometimes barges in on a private moment without meaning to. That there are things, sometimes not even bad things, just private things, that the other person does not shout to the world. How you have to fight past the embarrassment to make your excuses and exit the room, and a few hours later, you’ll both be over it.
It’s what Harry should be doing right now, only he couldn’t figure out what Draco would be doing that he’s embarrassed about.
“Hey.” It was late, which meant that he was already asleep. Harry hadn’t expected him to be awake—Harry had intended to stay the night at Ron’s house after going out to the pub, afraid that he would be too drunk to apparate safely, but by the time the night was over, he found that he was still just as sober as he had been when the day began, so he came home, anyways. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“No, you didn’t.” Draco said, and then smoothed wrinkles out of the sheets instead of looking him in the eye, mostly because they both knew that he was lying. The only reason Draco had woken up was because Harry had tripped over a pile of books when he walked in and sent them all tumbling to the floor, him along with them. The noise had scared Draco so bad Harry just counted himself lucky he hadn’t been hexed. “What are you doing home?”
“Wasn’t as late a night as I was expecting.” Harry tried to smile, but he couldn’t, because something was definitely wrong. It sort of felt like how Harry would have expected the tension to be if he had ever caught someone cheating on him, which is a weird comparison, because there was neither any agreed upon romantic attachment or another person in the room. “Thought I’d come up here.”
I meant to stay over but then I was stretched out on their couch with its lumpy cushions and realized that there was no way that I could fall asleep, not without the sound of your breathing to assure me that everything was okay, that we were safe. I thought that you felt the same way. I thought you’d be happy to have me back for the night. You told me that this helps you sleep, too, or was that just something to make me feel better?
“Yeah.” Draco still wasn’t moving over, not like he always did. He was just sitting there, staring. “Good. Great.”
It takes an embarrassingly long time for Harry to get it. Time where he thinks about how this was all about him, all from some fault he did not know he had, an offense that he had not meant. It takes him through changing his clothes and brushing his teeth and washing his hands twice just to feel the cold water run over his wrists until he turns back to the bed and realizes that something was different.
Draco was wearing a short sleeve shirt.
The fact alone shouldn’t have meant anything. It’s weird, now that Harry stops to think about it, that he had never seen his roommate in a short sleeve shirt before, now that it is approaching spring and the house gets unbearably stuffy. That he would choose to be completely covered when he wraps himself around Harry and gets buried underneath all the covers.
(This is one of those moments where he can hear Hermione’s voice in his head, moaning on about boys and how impossibly obtuse you are, Harry, I can’t believe it and you’ve got the emotional range of a tablespoon, Harry, which is better than Ron but not by much.)
It means that for the first time during their stay together, Harry can see the dark mark.
He tries to act like everything is normal. He climbs into bed, pulls up the covers, turns so he is lying with his head propped up on Draco’s shoulder. Tries to pretend that he is not staring at the shadow of it against Draco’s skin.
“I just.” There’s a frantic scramble where he tries to free himself from the covers and twists to grab the old jumped flung over the desk chair. It’s one of Harry’s, one Mrs. Weasley made him for the Christmas of his fourth year, the one with the dragon on it. The sleeves are fraying and the colors dull, but it’s gone through the wash so many times its worn and soft. It’s too small on Harry’s frame, but it hangs loose on Draco’s whenever he wears it. Normally, Harry would love to see him wearing it (Ginny always said that he had a thing about that, the people he care about being marked as his own, a possessive streak a mile wide, but he tries not to think about his ex-girlfriend in times like this) but today he stops him.
Draco drops the shirt on the floor, makes a sound in the back of his throat that is only audible because of how close Harry is standing.
“I never wanted you to see it.” He’s not staring at Harry. He’s looking at the ceiling, counting the cracks. “I tried to never let you remember that part of me.”
“But I know that part already.” Harry doesn’t know how to make him understand, if he didn’t already, about how none of that matters anymore. About how forgiveness comes easier for him than it does for other people and it comes free, without any thought of asking for repayment. “I don’t want you to feel like you need to hide everything from me.”
“I didn’t want to hide all of it.” Draco drops his eyes to Harry’s face and manages a smile. “Just this one thing.”
Harry steers him over the candlelight, pulls him down to sit on the bed. Draco follows like he had never thought he should protest, like any wish of Harry’s is something he wants. There’s not even an ounce of hesitation in him when Harry pulls his arm forward, the inside up to face him, like maybe he did want to show him this, after all. Like he’s tired of hiding.
“He never wanted us to forget.” Draco’s voice is bitter, and underneath his hands, Harry can feel him tense. “That even if he was gone, even if we ran, tried to put it behind us, he would always be there. A part of us.”
He’s a part of all of us. Harry thinks, tracing the edges of the skull with his finger. What would you say if I told you that I harbored part of his soul, took some of himself into me, was helping some parasitic piece of him live? That for years I could feel what he felt and see what he saw, that my destiny was waiting beneath the skin, right close to the heart, just because he was a coward trying to push away the inevitable?
It’s ugly. Harry wants to tell him that it isn’t noticeable, that it was just another part of him, something that was beautiful, in the right light, but he couldn’t.
He supposes it must have been pretty, once. That it looked a dignified amount of cruel, sitting there on his skin, black against the pale, when all the edges were defined and the glow of the snake eyes seemed to search you out in the darkness, but it seems that when the protean charm broke, so did the beauty. Now it’s a smoky grey, and the edges blur, and it seems to pull and twist the skin in on itself, so the area around it puckers in a scar. And it’s covered in scabs.
“You’re hurting yourself.” There’s old marks and new ones, little rips across the dark mark. Harry runs his hands across it and then looks to face Draco.
