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It’s a harmless thing, really, the petal. It is soft against his palm as he inspects and examines his foretold undoing. White, symbolic of purity. It’s almost ironic, considering the splatters of blood surrounding it on his palm, soaking it in his misery. A whispered spell turns the fragile thing into fire and ash on his skin, and a forlorn sigh permeates the air.
Harry woke up drenched in cold sweat, his limbs trembling. His damp sheets were strewn about around his limbs, most likely from when he had kicked them away while running in his dream. Running, always running.
“Harry?” Ron called out from beyond the curtains of his bed. “You alright? I heard… screaming.”
Turning over, Harry buried his head into his pillow with a groan. Brilliant, now everyone was going to know that Harry Potter was having night terrors at the ripe age of eighteen.
“Harry? Are you okay?”
“I’m alright,” he called back, his voice hoarse from his alleged screaming.
“Well, that’s good,” Ron said, sounding hesitant. “Come and have breakfast.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes, you go on down,” Harry told him, barely able to lift his head up. He felt weak with fear, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. He heard Ron leave the boys’ dormitories and relaxed, turning over onto his back and staring up at the canopy of his bed.
The memory of being chased through the woods by Snatchers still replayed in his mind, his legs twitched as if rearing to go. The danger was gone, the war was over, yet Harry could not shake the constant feeling of impending doom, and it hung over him like a dark cloud on a sunny day. Willing the derelict thoughts from his mind, he swung his twitchy legs over the bed to begin to ready himself for the rest of the day.
“Have either of you noticed?” Hermione asked later, when they were all sat together at Gryffindor table, leaning in conspiratorially as if they were in first year again, wondering about Snape’s shifty behaviour and his bloody leg. Harry cast a glance at the High Table half expecting the hook – nosed man to be seated up there with the rest of the teachers. His absence felt like a black hole, and Harry could not explain why.
“What is it?” Ron questioned, trying to feign more interest in the conversation than on the breakfast he was currently scarfing down. Hermione did not spare him a glance, instead fixing her eyes on Harry, who she seemed to think was listening.
“Draco Malfoy,” she said, gesturing behind the pair of them with her head. “He looks, and I know this isn’t very nice, but he looks downright ghastly!”
Curiosity piqued, Harry and Ron swivelled around in their seats simultaneously to try and catch a glance of the blonde boy on the other side of the Hall. Harry saw him through the shoulders of two Hufflepuffs, and he was quietly satisfied to see that Hermione was right. The boy’s face was gaunt, cheekbones jutting a lot more than usual, eyes sunken and hollow. His hair was no longer glossy with gel, but hanging limp around those lifeless, grey eyes like prison bars.
Malfoy coughed into his hand, and Pansy Parkinson seemed to start to move in with worry, but the two Hufflepuffs Harry was spying at him through took that moment to lean closer to one another and start whispering about something. Shrugging, Harry and Ron turned back around to Hermione.
“He looks a little ill,” Harry noted. “We all look a little ill, don’t we?”
“Yes, but that’s to be expected, Harry,” Hermione stressed. “He looks like he’s ill. Like physically ill.”
Ron swallowed his mouthful before saying thoughtfully, “Maybe people are giving him a hard time for the whole Death Eater business.”
Hermione seemed to consider this for a bit, before frowning. “Well, that could be true, I suppose. But why would that give him a physical ailment?”
“A lot of those things transfer into physical stuff, don’t they?” Ron pointed out. “Like if you’re stressed about something, it gives you a headache. It transfers.”
“That is a good point, Ron,” Hermione said approvingly.
“For once,” Harry said under his breath, snickering. Ron and Hermione looked at him with confused glances. Harry tried to disguise the cruel words with a cough, face turning scarlet. “Sorry. I, er, don’t know why I said that.”
“That’s alright. Are you sure you’re alright, though, Harry?” Ron said. “I mean, with your nightmare and all?”
“You had a nightmare?” Hermione exclaimed, eyes widening. Several people turned their heads, but she did not seem to notice, all her attention fixed on Harry. Harry looked at Ron sideways and immediately knew that what he said was said out of a need to seek revenge, rather than brotherly concern.
“It was nothing,” Harry emphasised, sending an unimpressed look at Ron, who suddenly became interested in his food again. Harry had to refrain himself for the fifth time from taking a jab at Ron’s almost – gluttonous eating habits. “I’m fine, ‘Mione.”
“You don’t seem yourself these days,” she confessed, looking down glumly. “I want to be able to help you, Harry, but you don’t talk to us!”
“What did you expect, Hermione?” Harry whisper – yelled, leaning close to her over his untouched plate of sausages and eggs, very conscious of Seamus and Dean trying to move closer on the bench to eavesdrop on their conversation. “It’s barely been a few months since everything happened. I need time for everything to… transfer over.”
Desperately, she grabbed his hand on the table. This move also grabbed Ron’s attention, who stared at their conjoined hands with nothing short of disdain. Hermione blatantly ignored him, “Harry, I know it’s going to be difficult. For you, especially. I mean, you’ve lost so much – ”
“I’ve lost things, too – ”
Hermione turned to him tiredly, to say, “Ronald, please,” she met Harry’s eyes again and squeezed his hand. “It’s only normal for you to feel disoriented. For us all to feel disoriented. But the important thing is that you don’t lose yourself.”
Harry smiled at her, yet he still slipped his hand out of her grasp and slinked it underneath the table. “I know, Hermione. I’d come to you both with anything.”
He looked pointedly at Ron, but the other boy avoided his gaze. Harry felt something unnameable pierce through his heart. It felt like freezing cold water being poured down the back of his robes.
“Anyways, what do you think that new Defence professor’s going to be like?” he asked, willing himself to cease thinking about it. About Malfoy’s supposed illness, about his own, about Ron’s childishness, about his own. “Do you think the curse is off – the one that makes them have to hire a new one every year?”
“I suppose we’ll find out at the end of the year,” Hermione replied, reluctantly surrendering to the change in topic. “And the curse must have died with Voldemort; there’s no magical core tying it to existence now.”
At the sound of his name, people around them flinched, casting Hermione wary sidelong looks. Seamus and Dean froze in the middle of their attempt to listen in and exchange nervous glances.
Ron rolled his eyes. “Honestly, when are they going to learn?”
“Who’s talking, seriously?” Harry asked with a laugh, elbowing him playfully. It got a smile out of Ron, and Hermione smiled at them fondly. At the sight of Ron’s lips tugging up, a sight so rare these days, Harry felt something in him relax, felt his muscles unconsciously unwind.
Maybe everything would be alright.
“You idiot!”
The ward they’ve got him in St. Mungo’s is cold and dark, all the colours tinted with a deep blue hue which adds a certain element of sadness to the whole situation that he really does not appreciate.
“Why wouldn’t you tell someone – tell us?”
He sits in silence while they snivel. He supposes they’ll be snivelling an awful lot for the rest of his time here. At least he knows it is going to be a mercifully short time.
“There’s nothing to be done about it,” he says haughtily, turning his nose up at them a little. Really, he’s been doing so well at not getting emotional about it all this time, again, ironic, yet these lot come in and start crying of all things. It really does not do. “I don’t see why you should be getting all… choked up about it.”
“Choked up? Choked up?”
“I’ll choke the living daylights out of you!”
Oh, but he’s already choking, as hacking, stabbing coughs wrack his thin, lithe frame. He cups both his hands out in front of him and stares with some kind of morbid wonder at the bundle of flowers that have landed in them, with stems. He’s not had stems yet. He’d been told that they were a sign of escalation to the third stage.
There were only four stages.
“Oh, Merlin.”
“Don’t start getting all weepy again,” he snarls at them. “I can’t stand it. I can barely stand this place – ” he gesticulates wildly around the small room, the walls closing in on him. There aren’t even any bloody windows. “I can’t stand it. I’ll have you out for emotionally distressing me.”
Before he gets a reply, he tosses the result of his wretched affections into the bin beside his bed.
He stumbled upon Malfoy crying in the ruins of the Room of Requirement not a few weeks after the conversation with Ron and Hermione. He still looked as if he were about to keel over and die, only this time his eyes were rimmed with a pitiful red, and his nose was shiny with snot. Harry thought it was funny – that was what the git’s hair used to shine like.
“What is it, Potter?” he spat out. With a smile, Harry noted that even on the verge of death, Malfoy still managed to say his name as explosively as he did in first year. The familiarity of it made him want to break down and cry, because it seemed like it was one of the only things he had left to remind him of simpler times.
“Nothing,” Harry replied, quickly becoming disinterested in Malfoy. His gaze moved around the room, taking in the wreckage. Massive piles of old secrets, hidden artefacts, lay as a charred husk, forever to remain a mystery to all those that would stumble upon them years later. The floor was black with ash from the Fiendfyre – which had clearly incinerated everything in its path before consuming itself in fiery rage.
“What are you doing here, then?” Malfoy said, interrupting his observations. Harry rolled his eyes, he would have found it in himself to be annoyed, but something about Malfoy’s hopeless gaze gave him about enough satisfaction. He didn’t see the need to ruin what was already a perfect sight – a miserable Malfoy on his knees, hidden away from the world in a cloud of shame.
“Not looking for you,” Harry said. “Which I doubt anyone ever will, apart from your pathetic parents. Guess it runs in the family.”
Malfoy launched off the ground and in three strides was right in front of Harry, their noses inches from touching. “You take that back you disgusting – ”
“Or what?” Harry taunted. “What are you going to do, pull your wand out on me? Oh Merlin, I’m terrified! I’ve pissed myself with fear.”
Malfoy turned bright red, but he took his wand out anyway. Harry was quicker. Quite sad, really, he even gave the snobbish boy a heads up.
“I could slit your throat open in this room,” Harry hissed, feeling the Parseltongue simmer under his skin. For a moment he thought it had fully come out, but from the paling of Malfoy’s skin, he had a feeling he was being understood just fine. “No one would know.”
“It will be a great day when the world discovers what their Saviour is really like,” Malfoy snarled.
Something fractured inside Harry once again, but it was not his heart this time. “Their saviour. Never yours. Never your saviour.”
“You have never been my saviour, Potter,” Malfoy said, looking disgusted at the thought. “Never – we both owed each other a debt. That debt has been settled.”
“What are you talking about?” Harry asked. “What debt did I owe you?”
“You know!” Malfoy said, breaking away from their close contact stance to pace in front of him. “You asked me, that night, why I didn’t tell my Aunt Bella it was you. I did know it was you. I’ve been staring at your stupid face for years; do you think a Stinging Hex would really stop me from recognising you?”
Harry swallowed. He had forgotten (been trying to forget about) Malfoy Manor for weeks now. Hermione’s screams of torture still haunted the happiest of his dreams. “Well? Why didn’t you?”
Malfoy looked into his eyes, and Harry saw him for a second. Really Saw him. A spoilt, pampered young boy who had been looking to be welcomed into the folds of the famous and the bold. A scorned, brattish young child who had suffered the sting of rejection. A misguided son, helpless but to fall into step behind the rest of his family. A boy, barely a man, still unable to fight for what he thought was right.
Harry might’ve pitied him more than he did himself, if he had any pity left to spare.
“I don’t know,” Malfoy confessed. “Sometimes… most nights, I lie awake wondering if I made the wrong decision.”
And as he left the Room of Requirement, the next organ inside him to fracture again was most certainly his aching heart.
“Please, just send him an owl.”
He turns away stubbornly; despite the effort it takes for him to turn around on the bed. “I don’t want anyone’s pity. Especially his.”
He is still haunted by what he said all those years ago. By what he did all those years ago.
“It is not pity! He loves you. We’ve all seen the way he looks at you.”
“With hatred,” he scoffs.
“With love!”
In anguish, he sits upon the bed, breathing heavily. He knows he looks a sight. He knows there are daisies stuck to his cheeks and green stems lining his skin like discoloured veins. He’s caught a sight of himself in the mirror; he wishes he hadn’t.
“He doesn’t love me! He will never love me,” he cries. “He’s perfectly happy enough, gallivanting around with that… woman.”
And they love him enough not to correct him, not to lie to him, and that is what really makes him cry. In the end, he will die loved. He will die surrounded by the greatest people he has ever known. But the absence of one, the one, has chained him to a hospital bed and doomed him to a miserable, slow death, in which he must retch flowers for the rest of his days.
There are only a few days left.
They all know it.
Yet he still will not write an owl.
It was a few months later, just after Christmas, when Harry found himself sitting at Gryffindor table all alone. Ron was sitting on the other end, glaring mutinously at him, while Hermione gave him apologetic glances, all the meanwhile attempting to placate Ron’s rage. Harry tried to shrug it off. Perhaps he could have shrugged it off, if he was in fourth year and had bigger things to worry about other than Ron’s jealousy. But there was a deep guilt settling in his stomach – he knew he had had as much part to play as Ron did.
“What’d you to do my brother this time?” Ginny asked, sitting down across Harry.
“Hullo, Ginny,” Harry greeted her solemnly.
She ignored him, folding her arms over the table. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Harry denied petulantly.
“Well, that can’t be true,” Ginny disagreed. “You guys were just fine last week.”
“That’s the thing, Ginny,” Harry said. “We weren’t.”
"What do you mean, you weren't?" Ginny asked, raising an eyebrow.
Harry sighed forcefully, avoiding her gaze by looking down at his plate of dinner. His reflection stared back at him from the plate, unimpressed and disappointed.
"Harry, I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong," she implored.
Harry looked up at her, then. "You can't help, Ginny. That's not your job anymore."
Immediately, he regretted the words. Ginny Weasley's ire was not one he wanted to face again anytime soon, yet he saw it bubbling underneath the surface of her skin, her brows furrowing and those beautiful brown eyes narrowing and those perfect lips curling. She looked so eerily reminiscent of Malfoy like that, it scared him to what that said about him.
"My job?" she said lowly. "My job?"
"Look, I didn't mean it like that - "
"Yes, you did!" Ginny exclaimed, looking rightfully affronted. "You think just because I'm not your girlfriend anymore that I can't still be your friend? That I can't still care about you?"
Harry spluttered, mortified as everyone, once again, turned to stare. Why did all these conversations have to happen inside the Great Hall, of all places?
"I'll have you know, Harry Potter, I was your friend for six years before I was ever your girlfriend, alright?" she said fiercely. "And that's never going to change. Whether my brother's being a prat or you are."
Harry's face coloured with red. "Alright, alright."
"Good," she said, settled. "Now, tell me what happened."
He feels familiar, knobbly fingers take his own bony ones in their grasp.
"Ronald," Harry rasps, feeling peace settle inside him somewhere. "Ron."
"Never heard you call me Ronald before," Ron says, but his voice sounds thick with emotion. Harry can barely see him through the haze of tears, all that is legible is a bright red blob at the side of his bed.
"I'm - " Harry chokes. Instantly, Ron is there with a towel, wiping away the bouquet of flowers that spill out of his mouth. "I'm sorry."
"No, mate don't," Ron says, shaking his head.
"I wasn't kind to you," Harry admits, eyes squeezing shut in misery. "I wasted our last years together over a petty grudge."
"I did, too," Ron says, before sighing with forced humour. "I wish we had just made up when Ginny said."
Harry lets out a wet chortle. "I don't - don't even remember what it is we fought over."
"Me neither."
What a waste, it goes unsaid. What a waste of their remaining youth.
"I missed you, Harry," Ron says quietly. "You're my best friend. You're my brother."
Harry lets out a sob. Oh, what a waste, indeed.
"Send the Owl, Harry," Ron carries on in that gentle tone. "Don't leave me, please, mate. I can't lose you."
"I can't, Ron," Harry says. "I can't. He - Draco doesn't love me. He's made it perfectly clear."
"What are you talking about?"
But Harry's vision slowly fades to black, shouts erupting and loud noises penetrating his ear drums just before he is pulled into a thick, dark void.
They were sitting together on the Astronomy Tower, watching the sun dip below the horizon, thighs just shy of brushing against each other on the stone floor as their knees dangled off the edge. Harry hadn't felt peace like this in over a year, when he had sat here with Hedwig and stroked her feathers until dawn lit the sky. He was about to nudge closer to Draco and bridge the gap between them, when the blonde boy suddenly spoke.
"I - " his face was flushed red with embarrassment. Hope lit an inferno inside Harry's chest. "You remember my telling you about my... rather rushed engagement?"
Harry nodded, the hope burning brighter. Perhaps his parents had called it off?
"Well, Astoria Owled me to meet me a few days ago... and I went," Draco confessed, eyes glimmering as he looked at Harry with the look of a small child with a new boyish crush.
Oh no.
"She's actually quite nice."
Oh, no.
"Well, that's brilliant," Harry said, almost robotically. "And?"
"What do you mean 'and', Potter?" Draco laughed. "This is good news! Maybe my marriage won't be as miserable as I thought. Maybe there might even be room for affection to grow."
Harry really did try to plaster a smile onto his face for his friend, he really did.
Draco didn't seem to notice his difficulty in maintaining composure. "And you know, she really is as beautiful on the inside as she on the outside. She's not at all like what I thought!"
Smiling ruefully, Harry replied. "I'm not surprised: those things do tend to transfer, after all."
And when he saw them kissing by the large oak tree on the edge of the grounds only a few weeks later, he quietly slinked out of Draco's existence. Draco became Malfoy again, or at least it tried to. Tried to, for years.
It tried to, until the first petal lodged itself in Harry's throat.
"You idiot! You're all idiots!"
Shouting, again, once he wakes up. Wouldn't they ever stop with the shouting? If only to let a dying man finally die in peace?
"Potter! Wake up, Potter!"
"Mr. Malfoy, you cannot just walk in - "
Bright green eyes shot wide open for the first time in months.
Draco Malfoy is stood by his bed, not a hallucination this time, because Harry has never hallucinated him looking this furious before, has never seen his grey eyes shining with such vehemence. Draco Malfoy is angry, in a way Harry has never had the imagination to dream up in his sickness - addled fantasies.
"Harry," Draco says, and he looks heartbroken. It shatters Harry to know that he is the one who has made him this way.
"Who... who told you?" Harry asks, wondering which one of his friends he was going to die unimpressed with.
"Never mind that," Draco says, grasping Harry's gaunt face urgently between his hands. Harry can see him so clearly now, he's grown into himself so well, his blonde hair parted into healthy curtains that exaggerate the beautiful curves of his face. His lips are so soft, Harry longs to kiss them, but then he feels the indent of Draco's ring pressing into his cheek. His breath dissolves into another fit of coughing, one that physically lifts his back up from the bed and paints the hospital sheets red. Draco is helpless but to watch.
"Who is it?" Draco asks.
This time, it is Harry who looks into Draco's eyes and forces the other to See him, laying himself bare and vulnerable before the one man he has never been able to make up his mind about. Draco's breath catches in his throat.
Harry's breath is barely a whisper when he next speaks, and he knows it is coming. His Time. "Get yourself Obliviated, Draco. Be... be happy."
"Harry!"
"I... have never... held it... agai - against - "
He can feel his lungs crowding up his trachea, can practically feel their fleshy outline at the back of his throat.
"You imbecile, I love you!" Draco sobs, burying his head into his hands. "You - you idiot!"
His lungs recede.
He breathes.
"Hello, I - "
"Good afternoon, Mr. - "
The two stop in their tracks and helplessly stare at Malfoy, who sighs impatiently. "Astoria, Harry. Harry, Astoria."
They nod at each other awkwardly inside the foyer of Malfoy Manor. Harry is already antsy inside the house as it is; the years have not been kind to his memories. An imaginary cold bites at him like a blood - sucking parasite. Yet, Draco's arm around him tightens, and he wills himself to relax.
Dinner is not much better.
"I suppose I should abhor you," Astoria says conversationally to Harry. Underneath the table, Draco grips his thigh tightly with his hand, now devoid of his wedding ring. As of late, Draco's hands couldn't seem to be kept off Harry. Harry supposes that's what to be expected, when the love of your life nearly dies because he thinks that the love of his life does not love him back, which was very untrue. Apparently.
"After all, you stole my husband from our oh - so - happy marriage," she continues with a smirk, swirling her wine glass.
At this, Draco relaxes, smiling to himself.
"I think I'm missing a joke here," Harry says.
"Astoria and I married for mere convenience, Harry," Draco says. "To get our parents off our back with the most agreeable partner we could find. But that's all it ever was: agreeable."
"But... but I saw you both kiss," Harry says numbly, eyebrows furrowing. It's a ridiculous statement, and he distinctly feels like a harrowed child.
Draco and Astoria grimace in unison.
"A mistake..." Draco admits, giving Astoria an apologetic glance. "We thought we'd see if we were physically compatible."
"We were not," Astoria says bluntly. "Draco is decidedly a flaming homosexual."
Draco splutters next to Harry, who laughs and laughs.
What a waste, what a waste, what a waste.
"Harry, darling, what's making you cry?" Pale arms pull him into a strong chest in the middle of the night as Harry's breath heaves, tears slipping down his face in torrents.
"I've wasted so much time, Draco," he cries, turning around in his hold. "I've spent half my twenties alone in my bedroom hacking up flowers, for Merlin's sake. If only I had just... opened up. Been a bit less miserable, wallowed a bit less after the war. Maybe I might've been happier."
Draco sighs, wiping away his tears with warm fingers. "I know you mean well, Harry, but that's exactly what you're doing now."
Harry's breathing calms enough for him to look into Draco's eyes, shining with love and affection.
"Your years weren't wasted," Draco admonishes gently. "They were spent suffering, yes, but why should suffering be a waste?"
"Because it was so easily preventable," Harry says, voice breaking.
Draco smiles gently at him. "That's usually how most mistakes go, Harry."
He pulls him in for a gentle kiss, one filled with the promise of devotion and everlasting love that Harry has been waiting for nearly half his life.
"And you aren't completely at fault," Draco says, eyes flitting down with guilt once they pull away. "I should have inquired more into why you'd suddenly stopped responding to my correspondence. I should have confessed my own feelings. I should've - "
He is stopped by Harry's gentle kiss, and laughs.
"You jinx," Draco says with amusement. "Your foolish levels of guilt are incredibly contagious. I'd trust you to keep away."
"Sorry," Harry says, pressing a kiss to the underline of Draco's jaw. "But it seems I'll be here for quite the time to come."