Chapter Text
“Reparo.”
The two halves of Harry’s holly wand draw themselves together along the filament of phoenix feather, splintered ends fitting neatly into their places like two clasped hands. The seam where the break had been glows, the colour like the last sliver of sunset before it disappears below the horizon. It fades away like that, too, gone in a blink, leaving no sign of the damage behind. Red sparks shoot out from the tip. They had been red and gold a lifetime ago at Ollivanders.
It makes a certain kind of sense. The holly wand is different now. So is Harry.
He picks it up, and a familiar sudden warmth spreads through his palm, his fingers.
He hasn’t lost this, at least.
Hermione breathes out, her eyes on Harry’s wand, face emotionless. Ron rubs absently at her back. He’s looking in the direction of Harry’s wand, but not at it. After all those nights searching for Horcruxes, Harry knows when Ron’s mind is elsewhere.
That’s that, he supposes. War, over. Wand, fixed. There’s nothing left to do but put the Elder Wand back where it belongs, and then…
Then he lives.
Then he’s the Boy Who Lived, Again.
Harry rolls his wand in his fingers. They’re alone up here in the Headmaster’s office, besides the portraits. It might be nice to collapse into his friends and—
He doesn’t know. Have a cry, or something.
But there’s not much room between the two of them, on the other side of the desk. There’s not enough room for Harry.
Ron and Hermione would make room. He knows that. It’s only that his nerves feel frayed, held together by a final filament of purpose, like the holly wand before he fixed it.
Harry imagines the pressure of Ron’s arm slung across his shoulders and wants to scream.
That’s the wrong impulse. What’s the matter with him? Besides the war, and the constant stress of being hunted, and his miserable childhood. Besides all that. Winning the war was supposed to feel good.
It feels like nothing.
Like running off the edge of a high cliff. Like his feet meeting thin air. Nothing to catch him. Nothing to cling to. Nothing.
That nothing is in his head. Harry can feel it there. An empty space where something used to be. Where fucking Voldemort used to be. It doesn’t glow, golden and shining, like his wand knitting back together. It doesn’t even feel dark, like his four-poster with the curtains drawn, just before sleep. It’s colourless. Formless. Like a void.
He wants a shower.
Harry opens his mouth to say so, but the floor of the Headmaster’s office—Headmistress’s now, probably—rumbles.
It’s faint, as far as rumbling goes, and all three of them look down at their shoes. It could be them, making that happen. Harry doesn’t know. He’s not sure he cares.
“Harry.” Kingsley Shacklebolt appears at the top of the staircase. That was the rumble. The scrape of stone on stone. “I need you to come with me.”
“What?” Harry can’t explain the burst of irritation, like sparks across his eyes and the inside of his chest. He had a plan. Return the Elder Wand. “What for?”
A shout echoes from the hall below, and Kingsley’s eyes dart towards the sound. “Peace,” he says. “If you want a moment to breathe, it’s time to go. Otherwise they’ll put you on the war council.”
“The war’s over.” Harry ended it. He ended it. What more can they want from him?
“Plenty of fighting left to do.” Kingsley puts out his hand.
He’s right. They’d named him temporary Minister for Magic earlier today, and Harry had had a vote. He’s seventeen, and he’s missed an entire year of school. And, yeah, he defeated the Dark Lord, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything about politics or the Ministry. Kingsley will do fine, he thinks, but he mostly voted for him because they need a Minister and Kingsley is a good man and they’d wanted him to vote.
Harry doesn’t want to vote anymore. At least not now. He doesn’t want to sit in the Great Hall and let people touch him. That had been okay, for a while. He understood how much they needed it.
These few minutes in the Headmaster’s office, with nobody’s hands on him, have made it easier to breathe.
More shouting. Two people, maybe three.
“You should go, mate.” Ron pushes his hand through his hair. “You deserve a rest.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll stay.” Hermione’s head comes up, her eyes bright again. “We’ll stay here, and that way we’ll be represented. They don’t need all of us.”
Harry hears we don’t need you.
He’s gone mental, because Hermione’s only giving him what he wants, and the emptiness in his head turns it ugly and backhanded.
“Harry,” Kingsley says.
The hug he throws around his friends’ necks is bone on bone and knocks the breath out of him. He hands the Elder Wand to Ron.
“Could you—”
“’Course we can.” Ron squeezes his shoulder. Harry imagines screaming, but doesn’t. “Get going before they crown you king. And send us an owl when you’re rested up.”
One of the people at the foot of the stairs exclaims over the lopsided gargoyle. Hermione starts to lift her arm for one last hug.
“Harry." Kingsley throws a nervous glance at the stairwell. “It’s now or never.”
Harry flashes Hermione an apologetic look, his face feeling tight and worn, and takes Kingsley’s arm. He is inhaling the tang of magic that clings to his robes from the Battle when Apparition yanks them away.
They land in the sitting room of a cosy Muggle flat, with a rug on the floor and a dark green sofa and a painting on the wall of two boys standing at the seaside, both of them in navy shorts and white shirts that have never been touched by Dark magic or stained by battle wounds.
“Mother.” The voice comes from behind them, and it’s not Kingsley’s. “You can’t. I won’t allow—”
“Draco.” Harry knows the second voice. Won’t ever forget it. Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?
He lets go of Kingsley and turns, numb disbelief creeping over him.
Draco Malfoy stands in the kitchen with his mother, shoulders slumped towards her. His eyes flick to Harry and Kingsley, and his mouth becomes a thin, wavering line.
“I’m not doing this,” he says.
“You are,” Narcissa insists, and reaches up to stroke her knuckles over his cheek. “A few days. A week, perhaps, while things settle.”
“With him?” Malfoy’s voice is brittle around the words.
Harry looks at Kingsley. Peace? This is what Kingsley meant by peace?
“We’ll find another place in a day or two.” Kingsley lifts a hand and rubs at the back of his neck. “We had to ward it, and there was the Fidelius to think of, and—”
“Fine.” Harry just wants quiet. He has no kingdom, but he’d give it for a minute or two without anyone talking to him.
“Good man.” Kingsley claps Harry on the shoulder. His body tries to flinch away, and concern darts across Kingsley’s eyes. “I’d stay to make sure—”
“Go,” Harry says. “Thanks, Kingsley. Just—you can go.”
The crack of his Disapparition is double. Narcissa Malfoy Disapparates, too, leaving Malfoy alone in the kitchen.
Harry’s ears ring in the silence. It seems weighted, almost pressurised.
Malfoy doesn’t look at him.
Harry can’t help looking.
He’s taller than he was in sixth-year, and now that Harry’s not being dragged into a drawing room by Snatchers or fighting for his life, he can see how the war has hollowed Malfoy out. It’s given him a strange, sharp beauty, though Harry misses, in a fucked-up way, the colour he used to have in his cheeks during Quidditch matches or in the falling snow at Hogsmeade. His hair is like starlight, if the fallen streaks had come down to earth in a haphazard slide. Holes and scorch-marks decorate his robes.
What is he supposed to do, in this silence with Malfoy?
What is he supposed to say?
Nothing comes to mind. Nothing that would be worth saying. Harry’s body aches, head to toe. His clothes stick to him in places they shouldn’t, and he can’t take it. He hadn’t felt the blood or the dirt or the sweat. Now it’s all he can feel.
The flat is a one-bedroom—peace, he thinks, wanting to be bitter but too exhausted to muster it up. Harry kicks off his shoes and goes past the bed to the bathroom, ignoring the framed embroidery on the walls. Inspirational quotes or something. Nothing is going to inspire him right now. He tosses his wand onto the countertop, then picks it up and puts it down again, more carefully this time.
He has Malfoy’s wand, too, in the back pocket of his jeans.
That goes next to the sink with the holly wand.
Then Harry strips off his shirt. It used to be green, but it’s covered in dust and grime and, yeah, a little blood, and there’s not much green left. He has to peel the long sleeves from his arms. His jeans are stiff in patches and land on the floor of the bathroom with a muffled crumpling sound. He takes off his glasses and rubs at them with a towel he finds near the sink, then sets them aside, too.
He kneels down next to the bathtub, his spine protesting, a sharp ache across his shoulders, and reaches for the knob above the faucet.
“You tosser,” he says to himself, something in his chest catching. “You’re a wizard.”
Harry could have filled the tub with magic. He didn’t have to do this.
The knob creaks under his hand, and water rushes from the faucet. Harry’s a bit dizzy, now, what with having died and come back to life and all the running and hiding and fighting, so he crosses his arms, streaked with all the evidence from the battle, on the side of the tub and rests his forehead.
Through the circle of his arms, past one bruised knee and a set of battered, unkempt toes, he sees the bathmat.
It has a snowy owl on it.
The bird is perched on a branch, and in the distance there’s a house, or a cottage, its windows lit up. A Christmas scene. Snow on the rooftop. Red holly berries. Evergreens. Something they’d sell at Tesco. It would make Aunt Petunia turn up her nose.
And it just.
Kills him.
The first sob out of Harry’s mouth is so unfamiliar that he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, and only realises it’s him crying like that, all raw and strangled and terrible, when he feels his belly heaving along with his chest and his mind puts them together.
“Potter?” He’s too involved in crying his guts out to think much of the fact that Malfoy’s never sounded like this before. Like he might be worried about Harry. “Are you hurt?”
Harry shrieks out a laugh, but it’s so twisted up in a sob that he does sound hurt, and then there’s a hand on his shoulder.
The whole of Malfoy’s hand presses coolly against the plane of his shoulder blade, with no tickling, too-soft points of contact, and not digging in hard, either.
“Potter,” he says again. “Do you have an injury? I can’t let you die of it. The Minister knows I’m the only one here with you.”
“You—could,” Harry gasps. “Your wand is on the countertop.”
“Let you die?”
“Kill me. Do whatever you want.”
There is a stunned near-silence, filled with the rush of water and Harry’s embarrassing, choking sobs. Malfoy’s hand lifts off his shoulder. His robes brush Harry’s right ankle. It disrupts the pattern of his sobs enough that he can take a full breath.
And keep sobbing.
“Are you sure you haven’t been injured?” Malfoy says, as if Harry isn’t making the worst, most guttural sounds he’s ever made in his life.
“I was dead for a minute.”
A pause.
“You’re not dead now, I should hope.”
“Don’t think so.”
Robes brush the back of his ankle again, and Malfoy’s wand appears at the very top of Harry’s vision. He doesn’t hear an incantation, but bubbles pour out of it and down into the bath. The water stops running.
“It would be more comfortable in the bath,” Malfoy mentions. “What do you say?”
Harry hauls his head off his arms and pushes himself up. He’s so tired that there’s no way, there’s just no way that he climbs into the bath without slipping and cracking his skull. Also, he can’t stop crying, so he stands there, helpless, his stomach about to burst out of his throat, until that cool hand is on his arm, and—does Malfoy Vanish his pants?
Yes. He does.
And then he steadies Harry while he steps into the tub and sits, his face in his hands.
“Merlin,” Malfoy says, and clicks his tongue.
Robes swish, and something pops, and then there’s the scent of shampoo, clean and a bit floral, and warm water, along with Malfoy’s hands, in his hair.
He’s just.
Too.
Too everything to put up a fight. Harry follows Malfoy’s instructions to tip his head this way and that and close his eyes. He accepts a cloth and washes up as much as he can, which isn’t much. It’s about when Malfoy rubs it over Harry’s back that he hiccups, finding himself abruptly at the end of his sobs.
“I’m tired,” he says into his hands. “I’m so bloody tired.”
Too tired, really, to refuse Malfoy’s hand to get out of the tub, and too tired to cast his own Drying Charm, and too tired to say what the hell are these? when Malfoy presents him with a pair of flannel pyjama trousers Harry’s never seen and a T-shirt with a cartoon of one of the Royal Guards on it.
He should eat, but he doesn’t want to.
Harry drags himself from the bathroom to the bed and gets under the covers on one side.
It’s enough to close his eyes.
He doesn’t sleep. He just listens to the flat. It’s quiet. Far off, he can hear the faint impression of someone’s telly, and closer in, Malfoy’s footsteps. He moves around the bathroom. Soft thumps say he’s getting undressed. The shower runs, and Harry thinks of what he must look like in there, naked and wet and lovely.
And too thin. Too hollow.
Harry owes him. He should go in and wash Malfoy’s hair.
He can’t get up, though.
And he might be hallucinating. Why aren’t they fighting? They should be fighting.
The shower turns off.
Malfoy’s footsteps leave the room. His scent lingers behind—shampoo and clean skin and silvery magic.
Harry rolls over.
A little while later, or maybe several hours, the other side of the bed dips, and Harry opens his eyes.
“Oh, hello,” Malfoy says softly.
He’s stretched out next to Harry, his head on the other pillow, his grey eyes catching the very last of the sunset as it bleeds gold fire out onto the horizon.
He watches Harry.
Harry watches him back.
It’s the first time in months, maybe years, that his heart has settled to a normal rhythm.
“Why?” he asks, his mouth sluggish.
Malfoy lets out a soft breath. “It all seems so long ago, now.”
“Yeah.” It does. The way they hated each other. Did Harry hate him? Was it real, or was it just something to pass the time?
“I’m sorry,” Malfoy says. His mouth is a sweet shadow in the fading light.
“For what?”
“It can’t have been pleasant,” he answers, a bit tentative. “Dying.”
“It was okay.” Harry shrugs. “It didn’t hurt.”
“Something did.”
The ache in his chest returns like Harry never sobbed it out. “My wand was broken.”
Malfoy makes a sympathetic noise.
“I fixed it,” Harry continues. “Nothing else seems fixed, though. I’m still…” Aunt Petunia’s voice reappears in his mind. “A freak.”
“For the usual reasons, or are there new and exciting ones?”
Harry laughs. It feels good. Better than sobbing. “I couldn’t stand for anyone else to touch me. That’s why I’m here, and not being the king.”
“Whoever said you could be king?”
“Ron.”
“Oh, for Merlin’s sake. Don’t listen to him.”
Harry can’t take his eyes off Malfoy. His T-shirt is plain, and Malfoy is ethereal in it. “Do we still hate each other?”
Malfoy’s eyes search Harry’s. “I can’t quite summon the will, at the moment.”
“I can’t, either.”
In the quiet that follows, and the steady rhythm of Malfoy’s breathing, a soft glow, barely visible, threads through the empty space in Harry’s head. It’s tiny. Like a filament of phoenix feather, or starlight.
“Did it bother you?” Malfoy asks.
“Did what bother me?” Harry opens his eyes. When did he close them?
“That I touched you. You said you couldn’t stand it.”
“No.” The yawn that overtakes Harry is massive. “It didn’t bother me. I liked it.”
He just.
Can’t help saying it. It’s true, anyway, and what’s the point in lying?
“Good,” Malfoy says.
“I didn’t touch you.” Harry’s beginning to feel a bit drunk. Or over-exhausted. He closes his eyes again. “Didn’t—I mean. Wash your hair.”
“My mother likes to run her fingers through it.”
“Your hair?”
“Yes.”
“Want me to?” He’s so tired that all the syllables get jammed up together.
“If you don’t mind,” Malfoy says, very posh.
Harry inches himself over until his face is partway on Malfoy’s pillow and searches out his hair. He runs his fingers through it. Malfoy’s hair is damp at the ends.
“Oh, God, that’s soft.”
Malfoy laughs, but it’s more air than anything else. “So I’ve heard.”
Harry strokes Malfoy’s hair until his arm is tired. His arm was already tired, though, so it doesn’t make much difference, except that his hand lingers on Malfoy’s head. One time, it lands on his neck. His shoulder.
Malfoy’s shoulder shakes.
It shakes again.
“Are you injured?” Harry’s tongue doesn’t want to cooperate.
“No, I’m quite all right.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m sure I’m not.”
Harry finds Malfoy’s face with the pad of his thumb. He doesn’t acknowledge the tears out loud. Waste of energy. But he does wipe them away, one by one.
“Would you do something else for me?” Malfoy asks, somehow more posh than he was before.
“Mmm?” Harry says.
“Would you call me by my name?”
“What, Draco?”
“Yes. That.”
“Okay.” It’s weird, isn’t it? They haven’t come to blows. They haven’t hexed each other. And Draco’s name feels like it’s always belonged in Harry’s mouth. “Okay, Draco.”
He goes back to stroking Mal—Draco’s hair.
“Draco.” It’s been a long time, Harry thinks. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m not,” Draco answers.
Sleep is tugging at him now. It wraps Harry in its arms. Holds him close.
Harry finds that his arm is draped over Draco’s waist and can’t pick it up again.
“What do you think—tomorrow? Tomorrow to do?”
“Oh, tomorrow.” Draco sounds like he’s pulled out his fancy, posh-person diary. “We’ll get up and have tea. Toast, if you want it. We could walk down the street and see if there’s a flower shop.”
“Flowers?”
“A bit of colour couldn’t hurt.” Draco is teasing about it, as if Harry had scoffed at the idea of flowers. The spring flowers had come up in the Forest of Dean. He wouldn’t mind putting some in a vase. “Perhaps there’s a café, or a bookshop.”
He can see it. The café, with its little round tables. The bookshop, with its neat shelves. New, fresh sun over all of it. A cat might live at the bookshop, a black one with white markings on its face. It comes to Draco and curls around his shins, and Draco bends down to stroke its back. Harry chooses a book from the shelf. It has nothing to do with war, or fighting, or dying, and he buys it to take home with him. They sit in the window at the café, and sunlight touches Draco’s hair as gently as he touched Harry’s. They have the best sandwich Harry’s ever tasted. They laugh about how foolish it was to hate each other when they could have been at a bookshop instead, and Draco looks a little less hollow, and Harry feels a little less empty, and when Draco touches him, he leans into it, and not away. He leans into the arms that come around him from behind, and Draco rests his chin on Harry’s shoulder and breathes.
In and out.
In and out.
In and out.
Harry wakes in the morning to new, fresh sunlight, the kind that shone through the window at the café.
It shines down on the empty half of the bed, where Harry’s arm is draped over nothing. At the sight of his arm over rumpled blankets, there’s a twinge in Harry’s head, like the beginnings of pain.
Harry finds Draco’s wand tucked next to Harry’s on the bathroom counter.
The flat is empty.
Draco is gone.
