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The silence that followed the explosion of water was more deafening than the noise itself. It was broken only by the wet, slapping sound of Draco Malfoy hitting the waterlogged floor, and the high-pitched, terrified screaming of Moaning Myrtle.Harry stood frozen, his wand hand trembling, the words Sectumsempra still echoing in his mind like a curse upon himself.
Draco was not moving, save for the violent trembling that shook his thin frame. Harry scrambled forward, slipping on the slick tiles, dropping to his knees beside the boy he had considered his nemesis for six years. The sight broke something inside Harry. It wasn't a simple stunning spell. It was butchery.
Blood was spurting from Draco’s face and chest, spraying across the white porcelain and swirling into the pooling water, turning it a dark, vivid pink. It looked as though he had been slashed with an invisible sword.
"No," Harry gasped, his hands hovering, terrified to touch, terrified not to. "No - Draco, I didn't - I didn't know."
Harry grabbed Draco’s robes, trying to pull them together to staunch the flow, but the gashes were deep, weeping crimson faster than Harry could press against them. He took Draco’s face in one hand, trying to keep his head above the rising bloody water, and gripped Draco’s hand with the other, squeezing tight as if he could anchor him to life by force of will alone.
Draco’s grey eyes were wide, staring up at the ceiling, but then they drifted, locking onto Harry’s panic-stricken face. He coughed, a bubble of red forming at his lips. He didn't look angry. He looked... relieved.
"You did it," Draco whispered, the sound wet and gurgling.
"Shut up," Harry sobbed, pressing harder against the chest wound. "Shut up, I’m getting help. Don't talk."
"Thank you," Draco choked out, a faint, ghastly smile touching his lips. "Thank you, Potter."
"Stop it!" Harry yelled, tears hot and blinding against the cold air of the bathroom. "Why are you thanking me?"
"Because..." Draco’s breath hitched, his body convulsing with a shiver. "Because you hated me enough to do it. You saved me from doing it... from Him." Draco’s eyes lost a fraction of their focus. "Better you than Him. At least now... I'm free. I don't have to choose."
"Draco, please," Harry begged, the name feeling foreign and heavy on his tongue.
Draco’s gaze drifted down to where Harry was gripping his pale, blood-slicked hand. The ghost of a laugh rattled in his chest.
"Funny, isn't it?" Draco murmured, his voice growing faint. "First year... on the train. I offered you my hand. You wouldn't take it then." He looked back up at Harry, his expression softening into something painfully young. "And now... after everything... you’re holding it while I die. Full circle."
"You're not dying!" Harry shouted, though the creeping cold in Draco’s fingers told him otherwise.
"Tell them," Draco whispered, urgency entering his voice as his eyelids fluttered. "Tell Mother and Father... tell them I tried. Tell them I loved them. Truly."
"Tell them yourself!"
The door to the bathroom banged open with a violence that shook the walls. Severus Snape stood there, his face a mask of white fury. He swept into the room, the water splashing around his ankles.
"Get out of the way, Potter!" Snape roared, shoving Harry aside with a force that sent him skidding across the wet floor.
Snape fell to his knees, his wand tracing complex patterns over Draco’s ruined chest. He began to chant a song-like incantation, his voice trembling with a desperation Harry had never heard before. The blood slowed, appearing to knit together, but then the flow burst forth again, stronger than before. The cut was too deep; the dark magic had taken hold too firmly.
Harry watched, paralyzed, as Snape tried again, and again. Vulnera Sanentur. The spell sounded like a plea.
But Draco’s chest had stopped heaving. The trembling had ceased.
Madam Pomfrey burst in moments later, her usually stern face crumbling into horror. She didn't need diagnostic spells. She didn't need to check a pulse. The stillness of the boy in Snape’s arms was absolute.
The water in the bathroom was entirely red now.
Snape stopped chanting. He lowered his wand, his black eyes hollow as he looked down at the boy he had sworn an Unbreakable Vow to protect.
Madam Pomfrey stepped forward, her shoes splashing softly. She knelt, placing a gentle hand on Draco’s forehead, then looked up at Harry, who was still huddled against the wall, shaking.
"He is gone, Potter," she said, her voice cracking in the damp echo of the room.
Harry looked at his own hand, still sticky with warm blood, and felt the crushing weight of a freedom he hadn't offered, and a handshake he had accepted six years too late.
The days that followed were a blur of grey fog and the phantom sensation of warm, sticky liquid coating Harry’s fingers. He scrubbed his hands until the skin was raw and red, scrubbing until they stung under the hot water of the dormitory taps, but the feeling remained. It was stained into his soul.
People tried to speak to him. They tried to frame it as a casualty of war, or an accident, or even, sickeningly, justice.
"He was going to use an Unforgivable on you, Harry," Ron said, his voice low and uncertain, sitting on the edge of Harry's four-poster bed. "You saw him. He was a Death Eater. He spewed hatred since we were eleven."
"He was a bully, Harry," Hermione added, though her eyes were rimmed with tears. She reached out to touch his shoulder, but Harry flinched away. "He made everyone’s lives miserable."
He was sixteen, Harry thought, the words screaming in his head but dying in his throat. He was terrified. And I butchered him.
Harry lay back on his pillow, staring at the canopy. His mind drifted back to Third Year. He remembered the Potions classes, the storms, the Dementors. He remembered the little origami cranes Draco used to fold, enchanted to fly over to Harry’s desk during Binns’s lectures or Snape’s interrogations.
They had been cruel little things then. Drawings of Harry getting struck by lightning, or falling off his broom, or being chased by Dementors. Harry had crushed them, burned them, flicked them away with a sneer.
Now, a heavy, suffocating regret pressed down on his chest. He wished he had kept them. He wished for the simplicity of paper birds and childish insults. He missed the sneers. He missed the jostling in the corridors. He missed the rivalry that felt so vital then and seemed so painfully trivial now. It was a tether to a normal childhood that he had severed with a single curse.
Draco hadn't been a monster in that bathroom. He had been a boy crying over a sink, trembling under the weight of a task he couldn't complete.
The summons came on the morning of the service. It wasn't an invitation.
Severus Snape appeared at the portrait hole, his presence sucking the warmth from the Gryffindor common room. The students fell silent, scrambling away from the black-clad figure. Snape didn't look at them. His eyes, black tunnels of absolute loathing, were fixed on Harry.
"Come," Snape said. It was a command.
Harry stood up, his legs feeling like lead. He didn't argue. He felt he deserved whatever punishment Snape had in mind.
They walked in silence to the edge of the apparition point, but the air around Snape crackled with suppressed violence. When they finally stopped, Snape turned, grabbing Harry by the front of his robes and slamming him back against the stone wall of the castle.
"You will stand there," Snape hissed, spittle flying from his mouth, his face inches from Harry’s. "You will look at what you have done. You will not look away."
"I didn't mean-"
"Don't lie to me!" Snape roared, the mask of the stoic professor shattering to reveal a grieving, furious man. "You used a spell you did not understand, with the intent to cause pain. You are arrogant. You are reckless. You are exactly like your father."
The comparison usually made Harry angry. Today, it just made him feel sick.
"James Potter strutted about the school, hexing people for the amusement of it," Snape spat, his hand tightening on Harry's throat before shoving him away. "But even he stopped short of slaughter. You have surpassed him, Potter. Congratulations."
The service was held at the Manor. It was a closed casket, which Harry knew was a mercy; no amount of magic could have hidden the violence of Sectumsempra.
Harry stood in the back, hidden in the shadows where Snape had shoved him. The room was cold, filled with people in expensive black robes who whispered in hushed, terrified tones. But Harry only saw two people.
Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy stood by the altar.
They looked less like human beings and more like ghosts haunting their own home. Lucius, usually so poised and arrogant, looked shrunken inside his robes. His skin was grey, his eyes vacant. He looked like a man whose pride had been stripped away, leaving only a hollow shell.
But it was Narcissa who broke Harry.
She was holding onto the edge of the casket as if it were the only thing keeping her upright. Her blonde hair, usually immaculate, hung limp around her face. Her cheekbones protruded sharply; she looked as though she hadn’t eaten or slept in days. She wasn't the haughty woman from the Quidditch World Cup. She was simply a ruin.
Harry looked down at his hands. In the dim light of the Manor, the lines on his palms looked dark, like dried blood.
I loved them. Truly.
The echo of Draco’s dying voice rang in Harry’s ears. He wanted to step forward. He wanted to tell Narcissa what Draco had said. He wanted to offer her that small, final piece of her son.
But he couldn't move. The weight of the hand he had refused in First Year, and the hand he had held while the life drained out of it, pinned him to the floor. He wasn't the hero here. He was the villain in their story, standing in the back of the room, breathing the air that Draco Malfoy no longer could.