Here is what I know now
My salvation lies in your love
Harry opened his eyes.
He blinked and tried to focus. It was a cloudy grey morning, he saw through the infirmary windows. The sunlight did not even appear to be trying, and fell far short of his bed. He felt as if someone had been grinding his bones with a pestle and mortar.
Draco was sitting in a chair beside his bed, leaning forward and watching him with pale eyes. He reminded Harry a bit of a vulture, hunched over in a tree and waiting with intense patience for his intended meal to die.
Harry smiled at him as best he could, and the tension flowed out of Draco’s shoulders.
“Draco,” Harry said, testing his voice and finding it cracked but still working. “What happened?”
“Well, I don’t really know how to tell you this, Harry, but after you killed Voldemort Peter Pettigrew took the leadership and won the day. We were allowed to live to be his slave boys of evil.”
Harry laughed cautiously, even though he had a dire foreboding that it would re-break his ribs. Draco’s face softened further, smoothing out lines of bitterness and weariness until he looked almost normal, familiar and beloved.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, and in the absence of hostility or humour his tired drawl sounded almost sweet.
Harry levered himself up with great care, then relaxed into a sitting position against the pillows. “I’m… a bit surprised not to be dead,” he answered honestly. “Why do you think that is?”
“We think Voldemort saved you,” Draco said. “He fell on you, and the man was seven feet tall with an oversized head. His body protected you from the worst of it. Please don’t die of the irony, Harry.”
Harry only raised his eyebrows. He was still trying to test out all the bones in his body, which kept insisting they were broken and that being healed was a hollow illusion, liable to disappear if Harry made any sudden movements. If he had been protected from the worst of it, the worst must have…
Crushed someone to death.
Yes, Harry remembered. I did that.
Good. It had needed doing.
“Who—who else died?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“Weasley and Granger are all right,” Draco said at once. “So are Professor Black and Professor Lupin.”
Relief was all he felt for an instant before he remembered that this time it had not been a small group in danger: that this time, it had been war.
“Who died?”
“Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown,” Draco answered flatly. “Natalie McDonald—we think she and Malcolm Baddock were trying to protect each other. Neither of them succeeded. I don’t know which other Gryffindors you know.”
“Tell me all the names,” Harry said.
He sought cold comfort in the idea that this would be the last list of people he had not been able to save.
Draco complied, his voice toneless as if he had memorised the list already. Harry listened, catching names he did know among the strangers he had not saved. People from school. People from the Order of the Phoenix.
“Wait,” he said. “What? The Order of the Phoenix? How did they get there?”
“Oh, it was a miracle, they appeared in the nick of time, it is a sign from above,” Draco answered glibly. At Harry’s extremely sceptical look, he added: “And I Owled Snape from the Owlery when we split up. I… nobody was supposed to know where he’d gone, he cast spells so nobody would find him, but he gave me an address and I gave my word I would never tell anyone. So—I lied to you about the letter I was writing, and I lied to you about why I wanted to split up. It was stupid. You were right to doubt me.”
Harry did not ask how Draco had known Harry’d suspected about the letter. He suspected that Draco had been thinking over all the reasons Harry might have had to distrust him, as well as learning lists of the dead by heart.
“No, I wasn’t,” he said, and reached awkwardly for Draco’s hand.
Draco moved his hand away slightly, and returned to reading his invisible list. Harry let his hand fall.
Ernie McMillan. Nymphadora Tonks. Millicent Bulstrode.
“Is Pansy—?” he asked when Draco paused in the seemingly interminable list, and then did not end the sentence. If so many people could be dead, Harry felt like saying the words could make it true.
But Draco said, “She’s all right. She’ll be touched you care, though I’m afraid nothing is going to drop Weasley from the top of her Most Likely Gryffindors list at this point. She clearly took a blow to the head which has gone untreated.”
“Ron? Really?” Harry asked, blinking.
“Don’t fret. I don’t believe she’s planning to break up Granger and Weasley, especially considering the fact she was wondering whether she should let her bit of Hufflerough knock her up so she could get out of the NEWTs.”
“The NEWTs?” Harry repeated. “We’re still having the NEWTs?”
He was too tired to muster up any real indignation, but he felt it was a bit much all the same.
“Spending all summer in school to do it,” Draco confirmed. “Granger is disgustingly happy. I blame our new headmaster for everything.”
Harry’s head was starting to pound, as if all this new information was battering down a door in order to enter his mind.
“Who’s our new headmaster?”
Draco raised an eyebrow. “Professor Lupin.”
“Oh,” said Harry, and then with faint, gathering pleasure: “Oh. Good.”
“I thought you would be glad. Of course, I consider it a scandal. It should have been Professor Snape. At least he might get the Defence Against the Dark Arts job, now that Dumbledore’s dead.”
It was as if someone was opening and closing blinds in Harry’s mind. Open, he saw this mercifully still infirmary and closed, nothing but the memory of that night when Dumbledore…
“So you know,” he said slowly.
“I know he’s dead,” Draco answered. “I know the cleansing spell to lift the record of spells you’ve cast from your wand. Snape taught it to me. It comes in very handy.”
He took Harry’s wand out of the belt loop of his jeans and, after a moment, Harry accepted it.
“All the people taken were Confunded,” Draco went on. “Nobody’s quite sure of what they saw. Nobody would believe you. I didn’t suspect—and I never liked him, and I suspected everybody. He died in battle. That’s all we need to say.”
Harry cleared his throat and spoke the whole truth to Draco, because Draco would understand it completely.
“I killed him,” he said. “I had to.”
Draco nodded, in easy acceptance of the rage that would have made anyone else back away. Something disturbed the calm of his face, but the emotion passed too fast for Harry to identify it.
“I killed my father,” Draco returned. “I wanted to.”
Harry wanted to say something. That he was glad Lucius was dead didn’t seem appropriate, and the silence stretched on, drawing tight as a pulled string in a musical instrument until a broken noise must emerge.
Draco made it. “He killed Goyle,” he went on, and his voice broke. “He meant to kill me, and Goyle got in front of me, and I don’t know why he did it!”
“Your father?”
“Goyle! I can’t understand. He’s dead because of me and I still don’t understand why he did it!”
Harry didn’t know if he did. He certainly didn’t know how to say the right thing, not with Draco drawn with pain and confusion, and looking to him angrily for answers.
“He loved you,” he said.
Draco’s eyes were bleak.
“I loved my father,” he said. “I can’t… I never knew how to love anyone else. He watched me and trained me when I was young, and I thought that—I don’t know, I thought that he would love me if I could only make him proud enough! He was a bastard, and he was ready to crawl and kill to get what he wanted, and I understand killing now but I’m damned if I’ll ever understand crawling. He never could have loved me, and Goyle died for me, and I had it all wrong.”
Harry reached out, testing a sudden theory, and saw Draco move his hand away again.
“You understand more now.”
“I’m still who I am,” Draco said. He looked pinched and miserable, as if he was bullying himself and being extremely cruel about it, as if his father’s voice was still ringing in his ears. “I would have been a Death Eater if he hadn’t gone. I would have done it, to win some approval from him. I would have gone down that path, thinking he knew best, and by the time I learned otherwise it would have been far too late. I still don’t know how to do it right. I still don’t know any of the words.
“My friend died for me, because I told myself stupid, pathetic lies about my father and I didn’t kill him the moment I saw him, and I don’t even know why anyone would have done that for me!”
Draco avoided his eyes and tried to resume his calm. “Not to enact you a three-act drama when you’re still hospitalised,” he said after a moment. “I just wanted to tell you why… you know. It wouldn’t work.”
There was a silence. Harry waited until Draco gave him a cautious look, and then he glared at him.
“Why are you talking such total crap?” he demanded.
Hermione, on their hourly Harry check-up, opened the door and saw Harry and Draco in the middle of what looked like an intense conversation. Her first thought was that she was going to Stun Draco and put him in a corner somewhere to think about why harassing invalids was a terrible idea.
Her second thought was to close the door as tactfully as possible, and lean back against it.
Ron stared at her.
“Why aren’t we going inside?”
“What? Nothing! No reason. Let’s take a walk!” Hermione suggested brightly.
Ron eyed her dubiously. “I think I want to go inside,” he said, in a tone that indicated Mrs Weasley hadn’t raised a fool.
“You can’t! Er, I mean, Harry’s awake!”
“So?” Ron said. “That’s good news. We get on quite well when he’s conscious, remember?”
“All right, Ron, listen to me: you’re not to get upset.”
“Upset?” Ron exclaimed. “I’m not going to get upset. Why?” His voice was rising with each word. “What is there to get upset about?!”
Hermione took a deep breath. “Nothing,” she answered. “I didn’t like it myself—well, I’m still not sure I like it, but Harry’s serious about it, and it’s not as bad as I thought. They have a strange way of getting on that does seem to be working and at least now I’m sure that—”
“Hermione, if you’re trying to tell me that Harry’s having a personal moment in there, you only had to say.”
The corridor outside the infirmary was not large enough to contain all of Hermione’s surprise. Ron looked ever so slightly smug.
“I did figure it out. I’m not stupid, you know.”
Hermione could not seem to shut her mouth. It hung open uselessly. “You did?”
“Well, Harry said there was someone and after that I would’ve thought it was fairly obvious.”
“I—I suppose so…”
“And I think you’re right,” Ron continued blithely. “It could be worse.”
“You think so?” Hermione had the horrible thought that perhaps he was considering Snape.
“I’m not crazy about Slytherins, but, well, if you chose the right side I suppose it doesn’t matter which house you belong to. Anyway, Harry’s been camped in the Slytherin dungeons half the time for months.” He gave her a little, teasing smile. “It doesn’t take a genius to put the pieces together, you know.”
“Well… well, no, of course not,” Hermione answered, and was able to regain control of her facial muscles enough to give him an approving smile. “You’re being very sensible, Ron. I must say, I wouldn’t have expected it.”
He tugged down the frayed sleeves of his jumper, which she thought was the Ron Weasley equivalent of preening himself.
“I’m tolerant, that’s what I am,” he informed her. “Anyway, really, I quite like her. She needs to get new friends, of course, but Harry’s friends with Malfoy too, so it won’t bother him.”
It took an instant to sink in.
“Sorry?” Hermione said. “What did you say? She—who are you talking about?”
Ron blinked at her. “Pansy Parkinson, of course. She’s the only girl in the group of Slytherins Harry’s been hanging around, right?”
In the space of two minutes Hermione came up with a hundred sentences that began: That’s absolutely true, Ron, but…
“Are you taking my name in vain, Weasley?” asked a cheerful voice, and Hermione lifted horrified eyes from her intense contemplation of the floor to Pansy Parkinson, coming down the corridor.
Frankly, Hermione preferred Draco. At least Draco cracked a book once in a while, and didn’t wear those shocking skirts.
While Hermione fought off hideous visions of Draco Malfoy in a shocking skirt, she heard Pansy strike up what appeared to be a friendly chat with her boyfriend. One part of her mind noted that Ron had said he quite liked her. Hussy that she was.
“I’m bringing chocolates,” Pansy informed him. “I’ve hardly eaten any at all, too. I saw, um… girl Weasley and Patil carting their wounded around the lake in some sort of love fest for our war heroes, and I thought this would be a good time to feed the silly twit.”
“You know Harry’s awake?” Ron asked.
“Is he?” Pansy inquired. She paused thoughtfully. “I expect they’re busy in there, then. I shall just have to eat these myself.”
She flipped open the lid. Hermione noticed that Ron was looking even more confused than before.
So Seamus and Dean were both up and about again. They had been the last of the badly hurt, besides Harry. Seamus had been forced to re-grow the bones in both legs, and Dean had been in bed getting over Cruciatus for two days. Ginny had slept on her cloak beside his infirmary bed.
Perhaps Seamus could comfort Padma a little. She’d been so quiet, ever since…
Hermione wrenched her mind away from the thought of Parvati, and thought about Seamus and Dean again. They were walking, and Harry was awake. It was more than they could have hoped for less than a week ago.
They were healing. They were all going to recover.
She felt fond of everyone, even Pansy Parkinson, who now seemed to be taunting Ron with her chocolate box.
“He doesn’t want any,” she interposed firmly.
“That’s right,” Ron said, staring at them with a wistful air. “I don’t even want one.”
Pansy had caught the edge to Hermione’s tone. “Don’t worry,” she said, sounding maliciously amused and thus rather like Draco. “I’m quite happy with my Hufflepuff.”
“Zacharias Smith?”
Pansy selected another chocolate. “Sure, whatever.”
Ron’s mind, briefly distracted by chocolate, veered back to his original point. Hermione had known this was coming.
“Wait,” he said. “If you’re here—” Pansy smiled and toasted him with her box of chocolates—“Yes, but if you’re here… then who’s in there with Harry?”
Hermione precipitately spread-eagled herself against the door again.
“Don’t go in there!”
“Do,” Pansy urged him, and then seemed struck by a pang of conscience. She held out her box of chocolates. “You’d better take a chocolate first,” she added kindly. “Take one of the ones with alcohol inside. I think you’re going to need it.”
“Pardon me?” Draco said, with awful and icy politeness.
Harry looked at him, and had none of the right words. He was sure, all the same.
“You’re right, you are stupid,” he said.
“You’re a romantic, that’s your trouble,” Draco remarked dryly.
“So you loved your dad. Most people do, and he was a bastard, and you did the right thing. It doesn’t matter what you think you would have done if things were different. You did the right thing.”
Draco looked as if he had a reply already burning his lips, but he never got a chance to deliver it. Madam Pomfrey added the final touch to the charm of the grey infirmary by walking out of her supply room with a vat of stinking liquid.
“Where’s that Dean Thomas? He’s not skipping his Fortifying Syrup again,” he announced briskly. She gave Harry a scrutinising look, and delivered her medical opinion. “You’re awake.”
“Er, yes.”
“Good thing too,” Madam Pomfrey said severely. “Now perhaps Mr Malfoy will go to his own bed, and get some sleep. Excuse me.”
She left the room, intent on fortifying Dean by any means necessary. They heard her scolding some students for loitering around the infirmary, and the door shut with a bang.
Draco was a little bit pink.
“I merely dropped by briefly on my way somewhere else. This is my first visit, as a matter of fact,” he assured Harry. “The woman is mad. Stays in her supply room all day long mixing up her syrups and possets and suchlike… It’s the fumes,” he added peevishly. “They melt the brain. Stop smiling.”
Harry didn’t. It was only a small smile, all he could manage when the list of people he had not saved kept repeating in his mind, but he had just recaptured the feeling he’d had, just before that night full of death, that someday he was going to be ridiculously happy.
There was time now, all the time in the world. The lingering horror would not stay forever. He could work up to it.
He realised part of the reason the sky was dark was because there were huge stones being levitated in the air past the window. There was a noise, suddenly, like… someone playing bumper cars with enormous slabs of granite.
“Watch what you’re doing, Black!” Snape’s unmistakable voice snapped from below.
“Who said it was an accident?” Sirius crowed. “Got you again!”
Contentment rolled over Harry like a wave of warm water as he realised what they were doing.
Hogwarts would be restored. They were rebuilding.
“Anyway, someone had to stay here and prevent innocent children from accidentally seeing your pyjamas!” Draco announced, with the air of one producing his trump card. “I thought I’d burned all the things like that in your closet, but no, Granger comes up with that—that monstrosity, and claims it’s your favourite pair. I screamed and tried to rip it off, but Granger misinterpreted that completely.”
Harry looked down at his pyjamas, and remembered hiding them under a pillow to save them from their fiery fate. That had been—God, it felt like years ago.
Some things were still the same.
“You’re not taking it back,” he said abruptly. “I won’t let you. You’re bloody mine.”
Draco stared at him. “Tell me that I don’t have to explain to you that—what I said on the train wasn’t an actual proposal of marriage. Tell me that, Harry.”
“You didn’t really say anything on the train, you know.”
“I never do. I told you,” said Draco. “I don’t know the words.”
“Doesn’t matter. I understood what you meant,” Harry said. “And you did mean it. The only thing that’s different is that we’re not going to die. Are you scared?”
“You’ve seen me fail,” Draco told him, with his father’s mocking twist of a smile. “It’s one thing I do really well. My failures are spectacular.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Draco was eyeing him as if he was a wild animal escaped from a cage. “You’ll change your mind.”
Harry noticed that he did not say he would change his mind.
“Draco Malfoy, you stupid git. You’re so lucky that I’m even more stubborn than you are.”
He grabbed the bedpost and hauled himself up, his back giving a silent, prolonged scream of agony. Draco got off his chair, his voice suddenly sharp with concern.
“Harry, stop that! We had to re-grow almost every bone in your body—Harry, you’ll hurt yourself!”
Every bone in Harry’s body shouted vehement agreement with him. Harry winced as his feet hit the ground, and then he tried bearing his own weight. It worked, just about.
Draco was standing up, looking at him uncertainly. Harry imagined he was torn between the logic that said not to touch Harry and an irritated impulse to throw him back on the bed.
Unfortunately, Draco did not give way to his impulses. Harry took a step towards him, and then faltered from mingled pain and sudden, real doubt. He was sure, but… what if…?
“Where are my glasses?” he demanded. If he could see, he might be certain.
Certainty came over him, as warm and enveloping as contentment, when Draco suddenly spoke in a more decided tone.
“You don’t need glasses,” he said. “I’ll come closer.”
He stepped into Harry’s personal space, so close that Harry felt the hitch of breath in his chest. His hands were held up in a gesture of surrender, a fraction from Harry’s skin.
Harry put his hands on Draco’s hips and pulled him in that extra fraction. Standing up was sending a dull ache all through his body, but his palms were pressed against the hot line of skin between Draco’s jeans and his T-shirt, and Draco’s breath was against his cheek. It was sort of worth it.
“It wasn’t your fault about Goyle,” he said softly. “It’s—God, it’s bad, but it wasn’t your fault. I trusted someone too much as well, but I’m not going to stop trusting everyone. I can’t—you idiot, d’you think you’re the only one who’s bad at saying things? I was raised in a cupboard, I couldn’t—I don’t want anyone normal.”
He was sure Draco was raising his eyebrows at this oddly worded compliment, but even pain was fading to the back of his mind as Draco breathed in, slowly, and then suddenly had his hands gripping tightly at Harry’s shoulders. He held on too hard. Harry liked it.
Draco moved his face into alignment with Harry’s, slid his mouth over his for a sudden, slow kiss. Harry’s grasp of his hips turned possessive: he was sure now.
“There’s more,” Draco breathed into the kiss. “I’m disgusting. I’m embarrassed to know myself.”
“What else?” Harry pursued. His chest felt full and warm, somehow: his blood was thrumming with the urge to act, and yet he was happy to just stand there and watch Draco fumble for his words.
“I,” Draco said. “I, there’s something I should—I like the stupid way you dress. I even like the way your hair is always horrible. Harry, I’m a very sick man.”
Harry leaned back about half an inch as realisation of what Draco was actually saying dawned.
“You like me,” he said, and almost laughed.
Draco looked mortified. “It was fairly obvious.”
“Yeah, absolutely. How could I be so blind? It was so obvious that ‘don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, don’t look at me’ meant ‘Come to me, I want you.’”
Harry might have been snickering a bit. Draco was going more and more pink.
“Shut up. Go back to bed,” he muttered. “I thought you were mad about me. Where’s the adulation? Where’s the worship? I thought I was going to be your alabaster idol—”
Draco kissed him again, possibly to stop him laughing so much.
“No you didn’t, and don’t ever say those words again,” Harry instructed him.
Draco took shameless advantage of his weakened state by taking a firm hold of his shoulders and pushing him down onto the bed. Somehow Draco ended up on there too.
Harry was extremely grateful for the softness of the pillows beneath him, but a bit more grateful for Draco on top of him, giving him a very disappointed look and fiddling with the buttons on his pyjama top.
“By the way,” Draco remarked, “I’ve decided that since we’re having a new summer term and everything, any Quidditch matches are null and void. Which leaves Slytherin still in the running for House Cup. We’ll get it this year. Just you wait and see.”
Harry’s pyjama top was open now.
“You’re a dirty cheater, Draco Malfoy,” Harry said.
There was light in the infirmary now, because of the lack of flying stones in the sky. Lupin had probably called a halt to rebuilding in order to tell off Snape and Sirius. There was enough light to see something as plain as this.
He was already breathing hard, but he lifted his hand and pushed a strand of Draco’s hair back for the distracted, surprised look that came over Draco’s face. Over something as small as that.
Saying things deliberately was hard, but he did want to mark the moment.
“Draco,” Harry said. “I—”
“Shut up,” Draco told him, and at Harry’s quick frown he laughed and kissed him again, teeth lingering on his lower lip as if he did not want to let go of the kiss. He was laughing and breathless and caught in the kiss as he looked down at Harry, the light turning his hair gold.
“I meant, not now, Harry,” he murmured. “I want to learn the words.”