Disclaimer: Harry and Draco do not belong to me. I just like to mash them together and make them kiss!
Harry had just experienced his next Greatest Revelation, that of wouldn't it be so excellent to perhaps get his hands inside Draco's pants, when Draco stilled and said, "There's someone at the door."
"Are they dismantling the wards?" Harry asked, instantly alert. He shifted Draco into the embrace of only one arm so that he could begin feeling around for his wand with the other. Why the fuck hadn't he kept his wand close? How many fucking times did Moody have to tell him this?
"It's okay, Harry," said Draco, uncurling from Harry's lap and getting to his feet, "They're just knocking."
"Good wards you've got. I can't hear a thing."
"Well," admitted Draco, "I added a Silencio for inside and out, just in case."
"Smart man."
Harry understood that clearly Draco wasn't worried, but nevertheless, when Draco opened his door, Harry had placed himself just behind him, within reach of Draco in case he needed to pull him back, but with plenty of wand-room for Defensive spells.
"See, Mad-Eye?" thought Harry. "I can be taught. Mostly."
But when Draco opened, the door, it was only Ron. A frantic Ron, but only Ron. "Dude," he said, "Is Harry—oh, wait. Hi, Harry. Whoah. Listen, Hermione's… she's not doing good, and I can't—I can't fucking calm her down. She needs you."
Immediately, Harry pushed past Draco, but snagged his hand on the way to drag him after him. Together, followed closely by Ron, they ran down the hallway and in through Hermione's open door, and where it became clear that Ron had also utilized a Two-Way Silencio ("Smart man," Harry thought again), because Hermione was screaming. She'd backed herself into a corner, with the debris all around her of possessions that she must have thrown around, and her screaming was hoarse, but it didn't stop for longer than it took for her to take a breath. Harry didn't understand what he was looking at, or why Hermione was screaming, until he saw the blood.
Hermione was cutting herself. Harry didn't really understand that, either—Hermione was brave, but he knew that she secretly dreaded pain, dreaded even the cramps that came with her period—but then he saw where the majority of her cuts—or scratches. Merlin, was she doing this with her fingernails?—were located, and of course he understood. The healers had tried so hard to smooth down the "Mudblood" written on her arm, but everyone knew that you couldn't heal curse scars.
Pretending a calmness that he absolutely did not feel, Harry said, "Dude, Hermione, what's up?"
Honestly, he didn't even expect her to be able to hear him over her own hoarse screaming, so he was shocked when she replied, "Harry, I have to get it off. I have to get. This. OFF!"
Harry walked all the way over to Hermione, took her arm in his hand, and batted away her viciously scratching nails. He held her arm safe while he wiped the sweaty, wild hair back from her face, then said quietly to her, "You know it's not coming off. You and I, we're lifetime members of the Words Carved into our Skin Club, yeah?"
Hermione gave up then, gave up into deep sobs against Harry's chest while he held her close, keeping her bloody arm extended away from the two of them. He led her over to a chair next to her fireplace (seriously, everyone had a fireplace! Harry wondered if the mind healers had specified that all combatants must have a fireplace in their room, on account of sitting and staring at it made you feel like you were doing something), sat in it himself, then pulled Hermione into his lap, where she curled up, her face pressed hard against his collarbone.
Harry looked up for Ron, then, to come and heal the wounds on Hermione's arm, but Ron had turned his back to them and was leaning his head against the farthest wall, one arm over his eyes, and so Harry looked toward Draco, and although Draco looked… very confused, and very unhappy—Harry was clearly going to have to do more talking about feelings later, sigh—he came immediately over when Harry caught his eye, examined Hermione's arm with a critical eye, then said, very gently, "I'm going to heal these scratches, Hermione. It won't hurt, but it will feel cold."
Harry held Hermione in his arms, speaking quietly to her of books they'd read together under the covers on freezing nights ("Remember the Nome King? What an asshole, right?"), and the games they'd played at meal times to encourage each other to eat enough of their tedious rice dinners to stay alive ("I'm pretty sure that you still owe me Five Favors of My Choosing for those five giant spoonfuls of rice that I ate. You not doing this again, Hermione, is going to be one of my Favors, okay?"), and the day that they'd just decided to fuck the fucking War and had spent the day at the movies in an anonymous little suburb in Wales ("Did YOU know that they'd have every movie dubbed into Welsh? Because I sure didn't! And the look on that guy's face when you bought all the hot dogs and then stuffed them all into your purse!"), while Draco very carefully and very precisely healed the deep scratches on Hermione's arm. Harry knew that the technical skill required for the spell that Draco had chosen was immense; was life in Malfoy Manor along with Voldemort the reason that Draco was so skilled in healing, and so calm in an emergency? Harry hoped he'd be forgiven for this, so that he could one day ask Draco to tell him.
When Hermione's arm was healed cleanly of everything except her "Mudblood" scars, and she lay calmly in Harry's arms, he said to her, in a voice so quiet that only she and Draco could hear it, "Ron's pretty upset, Hermione, but I'm about to fall asleep where I sit. If Draco and I go back to his room and pass out, do you think that you could take care of Ron for me?"
Hermione nodded, and so although she didn't make any move to get up and go to Ron, Harry gently shifted her off of his lap and rose from the chair. He took Draco's hand again, only then noticing that neither of them had remembered to put their shirts on before leaving Draco's room. In this light, Harry could see more of Draco's terrible scarring—he guessed that there'd been more than just Hermione tortured at Malfoy Manor during the War.
Before they left, Harry put his arm around Ron's shoulders, and said into his ear, "She really, really, really needs you to go over to her now. I hear from my mind healer that Sexual Release is Emotionally Healing, or something like that."
Ron snorted, but he did turn to face Harry then, and although his eyes were red and his cheeks were wet, he gave him a grin that was almost a shadow of his old self and said, "It's Okay to be Gay, Harry. Seriously. Go back to your room and make love to the Ferret—Sorry, Malfoy—since it looks like you were halfway there already."
Harry cuffed him on the back of the head and left, taking Draco with him.
When they got back to Draco's room the piles of blankets and pillows were gone—"Damn it!" Harry said out loud—but in their place was a table, and on the table was roast beef, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, and hot chocolate in a large, steaming pot. Harry and Draco filled their plates at the table, but when Draco went with his plate to his bed, and sat leaning against the headboard, Harry followed his lead.
As Harry took a bite ("Roast beef," he thought. "Perfect food to eat while you break the heart of the guy you love and he probably kicks you out of his life forever"), Draco simply said, "You and Hermione—tell me."
So, in between bites of roast beef and sips of comforting, rich hot chocolate, Harry did. He told of Dumbledore's mission ("This is what you were right about, Draco. It was hard—too hard for us. It should have been given to experienced Aurors, but by the time we realized that, Wizarding Britain was too far gone, and we'd been away from it too long. We didn't know who to trust, and we just… kept muddling"), and how they'd eventually run out of ideas, and then of resources ("We were exhausted, and we were cold. We were starving, too, definitely malnourished, but what the fuck were we supposed to do? We'd Apparate into grocery stores sometimes at night to steal supplies, but this Horcrux that we had to keep with us—I don't know, it's like it was trying to get us caught. It was dangerous to go outside our wards"), and of Ron leaving ("He just left us. Just… left. Like, we were doing so badly with him, but what the fuck were we supposed to do without him? He KNEW that if Voldemort won, Hermione would be executed as a Mudblood and I—well, you probably know better than I do all the things that Voldemort wanted to do to The Boy Who Lived. And still, he left us"), and, finally, to the best that he could explain it, what he and Hermione were to each other.
"So yes, we were lovers for a while, alone in that filthy tent with our rice and the radio and a Horcrux for company, but that's not what we are, really. And Ron knows that, too, it's just… just hard for him, because he's the one who left us. But, Hermione? She's never left me. When she thought that I was crazy? She stayed with me. When she thought that I was wrong? She stayed with me. She fucking Obliviated her own parents for me, Draco, just erased herself from their lives—for me. She would have starved with me, would have lived in the fucking Forest forever with me-she even volunteered to go with me when I sacrificed myself to Voldemort, did you know that? Fuck, I'm not explaining this right, but she's a friend, okay? Like, not a normal friend, and even best friend doesn't really explain it; there's not actually a word for the friendship that we have. She's like, my symbiotic friend, I guess, my unconditional friend, my friend who I can rely on absolutely, no matter what.
And I'm hers."
Harry sat for a minute, his empty plate in his hands, and waited for Draco to tell him to get out, or to tell him to choose, or to tell him that he couldn't accept this, but all Draco did was turn to him and say, "Okay."
Harry felt relieved suddenly, and also terribly exhausted—the weight of that unconscious worry over telling Draco about Hermione had been at least as heavy as his worry over Aurors coming to take him away earlier that day.
Fucking Merlin, it HAD been a long day!
Harry took Draco's plate from him, and carried it with his own back to the table. He returned to the bed, tugged Draco off of it, then pulled the covers down and fluffed the pillows. He let Draco climb into bed on the other side from him, but as soon as he was settled, he gathered Draco to him and snugged him in with his head on Harry's shoulder and Harry's arms around him. He idly stroked Draco's soft, short hair, feeling Draco's breaths slow down and even out as they puffed over his chest. Harry fell asleep that way, feeling exhausted, yes, sad, always, but also content.
