When he steps back, everyone is staring. No one is going to save him. And he is not willing to fight back, so he turns, ignoring Hermione’s cries and wrenches the door open, slams it behind him.
After that, it is easy, to stumble down the steps and out the door, into the cold night air and collapse against the brick for a moment before pushing away, down the street, towards the emptiness and the quiet and home, where no one would be able to make him feel like that again.
Harry
He needs to stop leaving Draco alone.
That’s the first thought he has, when he returns from the bathroom and finds everyone staring at Ron and Hermione, who were having a screaming match in the middle of the living room. He hears enough to know it is about Draco and that Draco has left, so he doesn’t bother to wait for an explanation from Ron, just grabs his coat and leaves, chasing down that figure in the darkness he was hoping was Draco.
“Hey.” When he gets closer, there is no mistaking him for anyone else. “Wait a minute, will you.”
He grabs him by the elbow and yanks him backward, the motion to hard, and it wrenches Draco around to face him. “What?”
Draco spits the word at him. And why shouldn’t he? It was Harry’s best friend who threw him out, after all. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be.” Draco stared at the sky, and Harry knew that the shaky way he was breathing meant he was trying not to cry. “He doesn’t have to forgive me. I did awful things.”
“But you did good things, too.” Harry didn’t know why this was so important to him. Maybe he just wants these two people to be as important to each other as they are to him. “You’re good.”
“Not good enough. And you shouldn’t…” A deep breath, one that was meant to force calm. “You shouldn’t be here, you should go inside.” It doesn’t look like he really means that. “They’ll miss you.”
“I don’t care what they think. I don’t care about him.” It was true, suddenly, and Harry knew it, that he could turn his back on the rest of them if they didn’t want Draco, he would be willing to make that trade. He was also standing close to him now, so close, close enough to be dangerous, but Harry cannot make himself step away. “I want this.” A pause, where he got even closer, his hands on Draco’s shoulders and his fingers twisting into the fabric of this shirt that was too thin for the cold weather. “I want you.”
Draco closes his eyes like it pains him, and then bows his head so his forehead is pressed against Harry’s. “We can’t.”
“We can.” Harry says. ‘We can do anything we want, and damn the rest of them.”
The exclamation felt so good, so perfect, that he realizes that it must be true and closes those last few inches until they are kissing. It’s really not even that, just a ghost of a touch against his skin, but it could be, it could be more, until Draco shoves them apart and starts to shake his head.
“No,” He steps away, and the moment vanishes into awkwardness and unease, the two of them staring at each other uncertainly. “We can’t.”
He shakes his head one last time, then aparates leaving Harry to turn back to the party alone.
Chapter 16
Draco
The silence between them is stifling.
Not that Draco thought that he and Hermione would be able to meet at their usual time and pretend that things are normal, after what Ron had said to him and Draco left her crying in the middle of her own apartment, but he didn’t really expect it to bother him all that much. A part of him really had fooled himself into thinking that this was just a sort of academic arrangement, that it would all evaporate once they had figured out how to make the potions work. Like this was a sort of we’re the only two people who can do it, so let’s call a truce while we work, and that the minute they were finished all the school yard taunting he had done would rise up between them.
Clearly, like so many other things, he was wrong, because now he couldn’t stand the way that they were talking strictly only about the potion gurgling in front of them (though it was a less like talking and more like mildly panicked screaming, because neither of them could figure out why it was brown and overflowing the onto the table) and pretending not to look at each other out of the corner of their eyes. It seemed that somewhere along the line of hard work and late nights, they had become friends.
And maybe that was inevitable, when all the random scraps of information they tell each other about their lives and their hopes start to pile up, or when he throws a blanket over her when she falls asleep on the couch, or when he finds out her favorite food and makes sure the kitchen is always stocked with it. And he’s glad of it, really, but it does make things supremely awkward, because if he’s not mistaken he has now become the best friend the boyfriend doesn’t like.
Draco decides to be the brave one. “Listen.” He takes a deep breath, and then a shaky one, and then vanishes the potion with one jerky motion of the hand. Hermione makes a small noise of protest in the back of her throat, but Draco was always much faster to recognize a lost cause than Hermione. Sometimes, there really is nothing left to do but start over. “About last night.”
“I wanted to talk to you, too.” She streamrolls ahead, everything coming out in a rush. “Ron had no right, absolutely none, and I tried to talk to him, but he just can’t seem to see sense, you know how stubborn he is—”
“Hermione—”
“And I told him that we were friends and behavior like that would not be tolerated in the future, I have no idea what came over him—”
“Hermione—”
“It was inexcusable, and I just want to say that I, for one, am sorry that you were treated like that when you were a guest in my house.”
“Hermione.” He reached out and caught her hands in his own, stopping them from flying around her head along with her words. “It’s fine. What he did, is fine. I wanted you to know that.”
“It’s not.” She was breathing heavily again, angry as she always is at any hint of injustice. “Completely—”
“Don’t. He loves you.” He squeezed her hands, and she laughed shakily, her eyes brimming over with tears. She was always extraordinarily easy to make cry, but he no longer saw it as a weakness. “He loves you, and I stood by while you were hurt when I could have stopped it, and I was cruel even when it was simpler to be kind. I’d hate me, too.”
“He doesn’t hate you.” It was a pathetic and see flimsy excuse, and she began to falter as soon as the words left her mouth. “He’s only stubborn. He’ll come around.”
“I would act the same way.” Ron, at least, was someone he could understand. Hatred, anger, pain—these are languages that he knows well. “If someone hurt somebody I love like I did to you.”
“We were children.” She wiped at her eyes, and then smiled, wickedly, in a way that was shockingly similar to Pansy. “And who have you loved, anyways, Draco?” She laughed when he reddened. “Don’t be shy, who’s the lucky girl?”
“Boys.” He didn’t really mean to say it, except that forgiveness was a bitter pill to swallow and sharing his secrets was his only way of repaying it, of showing that he trusted her, too. “One boy, actually.”
Draco had surprised her. “Oh?” And then, when there was an exceptionally loud burst of Harry’s laughter from the doorway, accompanied by Seamus’ Irish accent (they were hanging out together for the first time since the incident), something in her face softened and the confusion cleared. She always had seen more than he wanted to show, had always known more than any one person should be able to figure out, and some flicker of the truth must have spread across his face. “Oh, Draco.”
She felt bad for him.
(That’s fine. She’s not wrong. Draco feels bad for himself all the time. It really is a hopeless situation.)
“I know.” He makes himself smile, and then squeezes her hand, once, twice. There’s a lump in his throat and he swallows it down, because this is another one of those times that makes him acutely ashamed of his past actions, when he realized that they could have been this good of friends from the very beginning. Maybe, with someone as brave and good as her in his corner, the story wouldn’t have ended up the same. “So I know. I would have reacted the same way.”
She makes another tiny noise like that pained her, and then she set out to smooth his hair down in a way that he had seen her do to Harry. Draco shakes her off, and sets about cutting up the goose liver for the new potion.
“Don’t worry about me.” His smile feels a little crooked. “We’ll just get the potions done, yeah?”
Her answering is smile is just as wobbly, but when she takes the knife from his trembling fingers, her hands are steady.
Chapter 17
Harry
Two months ago, he had told Kingsley about the box that he and Draco had found.
About the pictures on the floor, and the effort it took to open it, how Hermione thought they deserved a chance to look at if before the ministry took it away About the journal inside, the maps, the notes, the letters between Mad-Eye and Dumbledore. How despite everything they went through, it seemed like it still might not be over.
Kingsley had sifted through all of it, the expression on his face never changing. Harry wanted to ask what he was thinking but bit down on his lip instead, hard enough that he knew there would be a mark left behind. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “So?”
Kingsley didn’t answer right away, just reached up and fiddled with the gold hoop earring he always wore. Harry tried to tell himself that was a sign of a leader who thinks before he speaks rather than a nervous tick. “Might be nothing.”
“But it might be something.” Harry didn’t want it to be anything, because this, those names staring up at him and the people Mad-Eye had said they killed, those were still his responsibility, his fight.
