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Harry pressed his cheek into the soft fabric of his chunky, rotund stuffed snake, with only the tiniest little tail and pink tongue to differentiate it from a green ball with buttons for eyes. He had bought it for himself years ago, before they moved into the cottage, before they had become “they”, because it had reminded him of Draco.
“Don’t wake me up,” he grumbled, hearing Draco’s sock feet on the hardwood, stifled further when they reached the plush rug before their bed.
Fingers sank into his hair, nails scratching on his scalp soothingly. Harry hummed a contented sound of encouragement.
“Tough session?” Draco asked. The crystalline vowels of his accent were gentled, his timbre deepened, by affection.
Harry breathed in deep, wriggling his face further into the plushie, pulling his blankets to himself. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
It felt like facing Voldemort again. It felt worse , because the monster he had to defeat wasn’t some creature completely other from him. He had plumbed the depths of his own soul, and it lived there, claws sank deep into his heart, bloody fangs dripping.
Harry stood before it, sword of Gryffindor dragging down his shaking arms, feeling far too small to do battle instead of just capitulate before it.
You deserved this, it hissed at him, batlike wings stretching, blackening the sky. You deserve worse.
Harry knew, no matter how he suffered, the creature clawing at his heart would never let him heal.
He didn’t want to feel broken. He didn’t want to live in the cupboard forever, denying himself small pleasures, like soft things and bright colors and good, delicious food, just because he had never known it before. Just because he had never known people who thought him worthy of it before.
And so he had stopped in a shop, five years ago in Muggle London after running into the blond at a coffee shop for the first time since Draco had opened his apothecary at the intersection of Diagon and Knockturn, and Harry had gotten himself the first plushie he had ever owned.
Draco’s shop was called Creature Comforts, and it had caused a riot when it was first opened. That first week, it would have been broken into and demolished, say nothing for the small attic apartment he kept above it, had Draco not had the foresight to hire a 24-hour security watch.
Harry had not been able to go through the warm doorway of the small shop, well-organized displays replete with small bottles of tinctures and potions and all sorts of clever inventions, dimming glasses for Veela whose sharp eyes were overwhelmed by the bright lights better suited to others’ lifestyles, earmuffs and headphones with comfort spells for newly-turned werewolves, clothing layered in warming charms and tinted cosmetic creams for fledgeling vampires who feared the cold and pallor they could no longer escape from.
He couldn’t bear to walk in through those jingling bells and look into the eyes, one silver-grey and one amber-gold, bisected by the scar that had changed him. He could not reckon with the knowledge that he envied Draco, who had gone through so much and made so many decisions, good and bad, and yet still seemed confident that he deserved redemption. It was a confidence Harry could never replicate. He knew with an understanding rooted within him, the one whose claws could but be extracted from his heart, that no matter how many good deeds Harry did and no matter how many people he saved, he would never deserve salvation. No matter how much he suffered or martyred himself, he could only ever hope for death, and even from that he awoke to himself once more.
Harry now knew how Draco struggled to be worthy of that belief, how he buckled under the weight of it some days and depended on Lavender and Parvati to coax him out of bed. How his anxious brain, fascinated by Muggles and ashamed of it, convinced that nothing good could last in his life, had called the Kneazle who had lived in the alley behind Creature Comforts and had adopted Draco rather than the other way around by the name of Schrödinger. Draco told Harry of his decision with the purring Kneazle already in his arms, explaining that if he was going to worry after his feline companion’s life every time he left the shop, he may as well remind himself that even in the worst case scenario, his cat was both dead and alive until proven definitively one or the other.
Draco had been in therapy long before Harry, convinced by a fretful and insistent Lavender. She had hummed over him with crystals and announced that his aura was bright but misaligned, and had plied him with hot, sweetened coffee and poorly knit scarves and mittens. She had tricked him outside and then shoved him through the door of Healer Dubois’ office, having known that a French mind healer would put Draco more at ease than any English one.
Draco’s monster was a sinking bog, clogging the gears of his brilliant mind, seething at him that he would never be smart enough or good enough. It took on Lucius’ voice, reprimanding him for his interest in science despite the knowledge that that very thing was what saved all three Malfoys in sixth year. It criticized his sexuality, his hairstyle, his false eye which glowed amber in the dark, the way he smiled with all his teeth, just a bit too pointy at the tips, the way he threw away his wolfsbane and developed a potion that helped him feel whole instead of diminished. It criticized his choice of friends, Pansy and Lavender and Parvati and Blaise, and howled at his choice of profession, screaming that his stature would never befit a Malfoy.
Draco had Ladon, though, ever since he developed Wolfsboon. Another being within him, like that sinking bog, but one who could manifest, who could take over and lead when Draco was too tired, who shone through their amber eye when they were in human form, and who allowed Draco to glitter through his silver one in the body of their wolf, who did not need the moon to contain them but only love and mutual respect.
It was easier for Harry to accept comfort through Ladon after his mind healing sessions. Never before Draco had Harry a fixture in his life from whom he could depend on nourishing human contact. He reveled in accepting and returning it usually, adored that Draco was a tactile creature all the more after his shift. But when Harry’s mind felt unmoored and his soul shaken to the core by the way the demon howled in his chest, it was one more unfamiliar thing amongst all the tightly packed feelings that were exploding within him.
Harry felt cold as Draco took his hand away from his curls. He felt the mattress dip almost immediately thereafter, Draco’s shift imperceptibly silent, as Ladon circled to curl up next to him. Harry flung an arm around him, his hand sinking into thick, wiry white fur. He curled the snake plushie into his stomach and pressed his face to Ladon’s side in its stead.
“Love you,” Harry mumbled, thinking of that first afternoon in the coffeeshop, the wintery blue light streaming through the windows, how that light had bounced off Draco’s pale hair, mostly hidden but for a few stray waves and his fringe left untucked from his knit cap. His cheeks and nose had been red from the cold, and his eyes had been wide, his mouth tight.
Harry thought of the way he had laughed that afternoon, talking about nothing with Harry and surprising them both with his joyful amusement. Surprised them both that they enjoyed each other’s company, rather than their antagonism. Surprised them both that they each wanted something different in its place.
“Beautiful,” Harry breathed, pressing his forehead to Ladon’s flank. The wolf breathed deeply, in and out.
The demon in his chest breathed with them. Not today, but perhaps one day, Harry could greet him as a friend rather than a foe.
Perhaps one day, he would learn to love even the parts of himself that he did not want.
Ladon, after all, had once been a curse rather than a gift.