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For a moment, though he couldn’t say how long, he was back .
Dragged through time and memory, back to the worst moment of his life. Where the air had smelled of ash and blood. Where all he could hear were the screams of his name, the sobbing, the grief. And all he could see was the limp, lifeless body cradled in Hagrid’s shaking arms as he carried him into the courtyard.
The body of Harry Potter.
He had looked to small then. So terribly still. One hand dangling loosely, his head lolled to one side, hair matted with dirt and his face ghostly pale.
Dead.
“Draco!” A hand, firm and grounding, settled on his shoulder. Draco blinked and the memory vanished in a flurry of snowflakes. He was back in the snowy graveyard.
His lungs burned, he hadn’t realised he’d been holding his breath until the cold air rushed in, sharp and biting. It wasn’t enough. It hadn’t been in years. It was impossible to breathe properly around the aching hole in his chest. A wound not caused by a blade or a spell, but a grief that can’t be spoken. A wound that time had never quite managed to close.
For forty-seven years he’d learned to live with it, breathe around it, smile despite it.
But today, as it always did when he came back here, it ached as badly as it had the moment Harry’s heart had stopped beating.
Draco turned to find Blaise at his side, looking back steadily, composed, as he always was. But there was concern in his dark eyes, sorrow. “Draco... the war is over.”
Draco gazed back at him for a moment before his lips curled into something that only barely passed for a smile. “Ah...yes. Thank you, Blaise,” he murmured. “I’m okay,”
It was a lie, of course. But some lies were necessary. Some lies had become habit.
He looked down at his shoes, the black leather standing in stark contrast to the white ground. The snow was untouched here, silent and reverent.
He lifted his eyes back to what had sent him back in time all over again. The headstone.
Harry J. Potter
1980 – 1997
Adorned by only two simple crests: Gryffindor and Hogwarts. The only home he’d ever known. And at the very bottom an epitaph carved with aching care:
The one who didn’t want to be a hero.
But who was one until the end.
It was simple. Honest. Just like him.
Draco’s throat tightened. Harry wouldn’t have wanted anything grand. He’d loathed the spotlight they tried to shove him into and would have hated the grandeur they tried to heap upon his memory even more. The Ministry had wanted a statue. A mausoleum. Even a bloody national holiday.
But Harry wouldn't have wanted any of it. He’d just wanted peace.
He rested only two plots away from his parents. He would have liked that, Draco thought.
The snow crunched as Blaise stepped forward, resting a hand on the headstone. He briefly closed his eyes, a quiet offering of respect, before stepping back again.
“I’ll leave you to it,” He murmured, before leaving Draco to his grief. Blaise knew Draco never wanted company for what came next.
As Blaise’s footsteps faded into the distance, Draco drew closer to the grave.
“Good evening, Harry. How are you...?” he murmured softly.
He didn’t get an answer. He never did.
Draco sighed, his knees protesting as he gingerly lowered himself to the frozen earth, leaning back against the headstone like he had so many times before. One arm braced over a raised knee. The cold seeped through his coat and into his bones, but he didn’t flinch. He welcomed it.
He gazed up at the white sky. It had started snowing again, the white flakes drifting silently, like ash.
“Let me keep you company for a little while,” he whispered, closing his eyes.
For a time, he sat in stillness. Then, footsteps approached, crunching loudly in the fresh fallen snow and Draco thought Blaise might have returned to drag him from his melancholy.
“Leave me be,” he said quietly, not bothering to open his eyes. But the silence that followed wasn’t right.
There was no reply, no rustle of a coat. The sounds of the village beyond the graveyard, the birds, the wind, all had faded away. The only sound left was that of his own breathing.
Draco opened his eyes. It wasn’t Blaise.
He sat up with a start. There, in front of him, smiling gently, stood Harry.
Whole. Young. Radiant .
Not a day past seventeen and looking healthier, warmer than he ever had in life.
When he’d last seen Harry, in the middle of chaos and battle. There had been a quiet fear in his eyes that had haunted Draco for the rest of his days. Now he looked peaceful, the hollows beneath his eyes were gone, the shadows of war lifted.
Draco scrambled to his feet. His hip didn’t ache the way it should have at the sudden move, and for the first time in decades, his body felt light.
He stumbled forward, uncaring if it was a trick, a ghost, or something else.
Harry opened his arms, smiling with a warmth that melted the years off his bones. Draco fell into them without hesitation. He clung to him tightly, arms wrapped around shoulders that should have vanished but didn’t. He buried his face into the crook of Harry’s neck and breathed in something impossibly familiar. His breath hitched, chest aching with grief and elation.
And suddenly, Draco knew .
“You waited for me,” he whispered. “Even after all this time?”
Harry’s reply was soft, steady like the falling snow.
“Always.”
The next morning, Draco Malfoy was found beneath the snow. Leaning peacefully against Harry Potter’s grave, as if he’d simply dozed off.
The mediwizards said it was hypothermia. A quiet, painless end.
Some whispered that he surely hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Others said it had been planned.
Nobody would ever know.
But one thing was undeniable: For the first time in forty-seven years, Draco Malfoy looked at peace.