Chapter 7 - Tooth and Nail
In this war we're always moving,
Moving on.
~Andrew Barton Paterson
Ron Weasley was a simple man. He liked chess, firewhiskey with his blokes by the fire, and to lie next to his wife at night before he went to sleep, their shoulders just touching in their own gentle, silent way of reassuring one another that the other was real. At the moment at hand, however, as Hugo wailed that his sister had stolen his to-scale replica of the Hogwarts express locomotive car and Rose refused to eat the roasted potatoes he had spent an hour preparing, he contemplated giving up on simplicity and running away to the circus.
Before this idea developed into something all too alluring, Hermione burst through the door carrying a briefcase and clicking heels that taunted the ground to split in half wherever she stepped. Ron looked up at her, standing there with frazzled brown hair and worn-out makeup, like she held the universe together.
He got up and kissed her on the cheek. "Long day?" she questioned.
"I was beginning to wonder if the Earth managed to stop spinning," he choked out. Hugo began appealing to his mother concerning his toy train, turning a deep shade of red as his frustration grew.
"I'm sorry, Ron. Hugo, hush. I would have been home earlier. But -." Her eyes furrowed and her sentence lost its way out past her lips. She picked Hugo up and shushed him while bouncing him on her hip. She forked some of the roasted potatoes on the table into her mouth, starving for something to fill her stomach. Rosie suddenly found the potatoes fascinating, wishing in every way to imitate her elegant mother — even in the basic task of consuming unappetizing foods. Hugo grabbed onto one of Hermione's pearls from the necklace around her neck, finding them much more fascinating than his previous fixation on the missing train. His whining ceased, and Rosie was shoveling potatoes into her mouth.
Ron fell in love with her all over again, for what must have been at least the third time that day.
"But?" He asked innocuously.
"I stopped by Harry's again."
"Oh."
"Yeah. Oh."
Hugo looked from his mother to his father and then back to his mother again. "You were with Uncle Harry? Is he feeling better, mum?" Hugo's question was filled with childish innocence that Hermione couldn't help but smile at him. Ron had a concerned look on his face as he took his seat at the kitchen table. Hermione remained standing, Hugo still bouncing happily on his mother's hip.
But something was different. Ron noticed the way his wife's eyes seemed confused, rather than the typical flurry of sadness and pain that she garnered from a trip to their best friend's flat.
"Is everything alright? Malfoy hasn't gone and done anything….Malfoy-like has he?" he asked slowly. He grimaced as the name "Malfoy" came off his tongue. Hermione had gotten an earful from him when she had told him about the whole Malfoy-Harry fiasco, but he had consented when she remained adamant weeks after her decision. That didn't change the fact that it made him wholly uncomfortable. He hadn't terribly enjoyed visiting Harry's flat as of late; having Malfoy there made him avoid it like the plague had struck.
Hermione's logic didn't really make sense to him, but she turned out to be right pretty much every time she opened her mouth. Living with the beautiful woman standing across from him was a life-long exercise in humility that he had no intention of opting out of. The circus would have to wait.
"Ron, when was the last time you saw Harry laugh?"
_
Draco awoke to no air in his lungs. He gasped quickly to realize the air quickly found its way back into his body, the initial surprise caused by the dropping of a book onto his gut. With fear in his eyes, Draco sprung up from the couch to ward off his assailant. His rapidly darting eyes found their target standing directly across from him, a figure to behold.
"Well aren't you a tall drink of water," Draco hummed. Harry's hair was every which direction, his eyes bloodshot red. The black lines underneath the green forest in his irises and puffy shape to their home cued Draco that Harry hadn't gotten much — if any — sleep the night prior. The book Draco had been rudely awoken by slid to the ground. He glanced at it, recognizing it as the text he had handed Harry the night prior. The pages were curled and frilled where they were not the night before. Instead of staring at Harry's foot-away-from-death eyes, he eyed the book suspiciously.
"Why are you here?"
The question was simple, really. Draco had no right to be as confused as he was, but that certainly didn't stop him. He looked up at Harry with desperate but innocuous confusion.
Harry rolled his pained-looking eyes and stared him down before reiterating. "Why are you here?"
"Potter," Draco began in low, husky voice, "I have been in this bloody flat for a whole month and you are just now asking this question?"
"Now's as good as ever," Harry breathed. His expression did not change. It looked strained, but also tired. Not tired in the sense of a man who had gotten no sleep (even though that was clearly true), but tired in the sense of a man who had all but given up on the pleasure of being awake.
"Look, Potter. I just woke up and I don't think I'm ready to get into this just yet. Can't we wait until I eat something or —"
"No. Tell me right now." The immediacy in Harry's voice shocked Draco. Not because it was enraged in tone, as he would have expected, but rather because it sounded earnest. It was refreshing, truthfully; he had been beginning to suspect that Harry had no other emotions besides self-pity and fitful rage. He thought the better of his immediate reaction to scoff at Potter and roll over on the couch and find unconsciousness once more. Instead he inhaled deeply and caught Potter's eyes with his.
"Okay. But I'm starving. I think better while I'm working with my hands, anyway." Draco stood up and Harry followed him to the kitchen. He pulled out a skillet, eggs, bacon, and a slew of other breakfast foods from the cabinets one at a time as he spoke. Harry watched him dutifully, chewing the inside of his left thumb.
"I've been doing a lot of sitting and trying-not-to-think-about-it lately, so the timeline is a bit fuzzy. But I suppose I should start from the trial for any of this to make sense."
Draco took a glance back at Harry. His face was stoic as he stared at Draco getting together the kitchen for breakfast. He took one big breath before turning to face his supplies. He did not look back at Harry once as he began his tale.
"Immediately after the trial we were escorted back to the manor by two Aurors from the ministry. We were not to leave the grounds of the manor for the next two years according to the terms of prosecution. The Aurors traded rounds, but there were always two of them on the premises at all times (a horrible waste of money, if I do say so myself). My father and mother were inconsolable for the first month of our sentence. Mother remained in her bedroom, separated from my father. I barely saw her during those first few months at the manor. She refused to leave her room, and often I could hear her wailing and sobbing from her bedroom if I wandered too close to her room. I learned quickly to avoid those hallways in order to keep my sanity. My father….well I learned to avoid him, too. He was furious all the time. I could feel him walk into a room, because the temperature would — honestly — drop as soon as he entered it. There were many times that he would start cursing and yelling at nothing in particular, and it was then that I became very glad that none of us had wands to cause any real damage with. Not that it stopped him, however."
Draco raised lifted the back of his shirt. Several clear scars etched his back. Draco could not see Harry's expression, but he didn't really care what he wore on his face in that moment. These scars were his, and he'd be damned if he was going to allow them to turn him into a tragedy. They weren't a cry for help; they were evidence of his trial by fire. The were not indications of a weakness, but instead righteous poems of victory. They were his feathered headdress, his medal of honor, his living funeral pyre of a life gone by and left to ashes.
Draco dropped his shirt and continued. His eyes still did not wander behind him.
"By the sixth month, we had all found a routine. Mother would wander down like a ghost only once each day. She'd wave her hands at the elves and they would make her tea and biscuits. I think that's all she ate during that time. She grew gaunt and frail. I couldn't stand to look at her. My mother was withering away before my eyes. I think that's when I first decided that I would leave the manor the moment the two year sentence was up. My mother had resigned herself to a slow death, and I couldn't bear to watch it become her. Whenever I tried to talk to her she would only vaguely look as if she was listening. Speaking to her was like talking to a woman on her death bed who had already resigned to her fate. Maybe she had. We had nothing on the other end of the two year sentence. The outside world would simply be another encounter with an isolation of a different kind. Maybe she was just smarter than my father and me. Who knows?"
Draco had the pan sizzling at this point. He laid the strips of bacon meticulously one by one onto the pan.
"I spent most of my time writing. Mostly about nothing maybe about everything. I get the two confused nowadays. But there was no one to talk to in that horrible building that we called a home; it was my only real way of communicating, even if it was with no one in particular. My father spent his days in his study, plotting and scheming his return to the public. My mother and I were both hopeless on the matter. He seemed obsessed with it. I didn't tell him that, though. That is until he decided I would be his keystone piece in his little project."
The bacon sizzling was now the background noise of the kitchen as Draco cracked eggs, sliced bread loaves, and ground lemongrass inside a pestle and mortar. He ground his teeth through the remainder of his speech, straining not to bite off his own tongue.
"He decided the best way to return to the public was to marry his son off into a well-off family high in the ministry's cabinet. The idea was that if he couldn't save his own reputation, he could at least salvage something for the Malfoy name if I just hurried up and spawned children as soon as was obviously hopeless. Every request he sent for formal courting was either fiercely denied or adamantly ignored. At first I didn't want to participate in the madness on principle; I wasn't going to marry anyone that I didn't want to just so we could repay my father's sins."
Draco put the pestle down. He look heavenwards before continuing.
"And mine."
He flipped the bacon, a huge pause in his speech pervading the kitchen. It's funny, really, how the silence felt like the most palpable thing he had experienced that morning. Draco tried to gather his train of thought again, only barely finding his footing before speaking again.
"But after a while, I only disagreed with my father because I began to hate him with every fiber of my being. I didn't even really care about principles at that point. I was blinded by unadulterated hatred. Between the violence, his neglect of my mother's failing health, and his disgusting obsession with a surely fruitless task, I saw nothing but an empty man, grasping daily at his last straws of success and social status. I didn't care about any of that. After the trial, none of that seemed to matter. It was pathetic, I realized, to care about it at all. It was so fickle. We were so fickle. The only thing that mattered was survival. Whatever it took to stay afloat, I grasped at it. Except once—"
He stopped. Something seemed to cause his body to convulse forward, almost in a retching motion. He grabbed the tongs to remove the bacon from the pan, pulling his attention away from whatever direction his words were headed.
"I decided the best way through the mess of an existence I was living in was to appeal to my father's whimsical ideas. He couldn't make any action happen until after the sentence was up, so I decided to play along until then. It made my life a little easier, even if it made me want to vomit just speaking to him. The moment the Aurors left, however, I would be a leaf in the wind. My father wouldn't be any the wiser. He had this ludicrous idea of actually sneaking a love potion to some vile woman in the ministry's higher ups after a few disastrous attempts to court me off. I only pretended to pay attention to the intricacies of his plans; I was immediately put-off by the inelegance of it. My father had lost his touch. Not even his scheming was crafty anymore. Everyone loves a good downfall, though, I suppose."
Draco began divvying up the cooked meats and prepared eggs onto two plates. He finally turned around, a plate of hot food in each hand. To his surprise, it appeared as if Potter hadn't moved an inch. He sat stoically chewing at his thumb. Draco realized that his rapt attention was to invoke his continuance. He placed both plates down and went to grab forks.
"The second year was by far the worst of it all. Mother hardly came down at all. I only saw her once in my last six months at the manor. I think the elves must have been forcing her to stay alive, because she looked like she had a foot in the grave. I think she really died already though; the day of the trial that is. So much of who she was was about who she was connected to. All that fell apart the day our sentence begun. Yeah. I guess some people die twice."
He didn't notice Harry wince at the last sentence.
"I guess I should be more remorseful. But I'm just…numb to it now. When you watch someone let themselves waste away like that, it kills you inside. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt you, because each day only gets worse."
Draco realized what he said was laced with poison. Harry was not too dumb to realize that what he had just said wasn't just about Narcissa Malfoy's fate. Nonetheless, Draco plowed through the remainder of his speech as he sat down at the table.
"It was an eternity of a loathsome existence later that the sentence finally ended. The world around me didn't seem to change all that much. But it was done. Mother still boarded herself up, and father began bringing….some rather tasteless guests to forward his plans. But that would all be moot. The manor was rendered plottable at the beginning of the sentence. Some ministry nonsense about security, but it paid off in my favor. While my father had his guests the night after our sentence ended, I grabbed as much as I could in a bag, and ran for it. In all my father's wildest dreams, I don't think he could possibly imagine me giving up on him."
"The rest is not terribly interesting, unless you'd like to hear about my many misadventures of living in squalor. Eventually I ran out of supplies and I need asylum from my….er, circumstances. Who better than the Boy Wonder himself?"
Draco took a bite of his food, signaling the end of his speech.
Harry stared at him. His eyes were still red, but their intensity seemed to drop off. He appeared hollowed out by Draco's story, completely void of a response to divulge. They sat in silence for a while. Draco wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel. Nervous was the first choice. But fear seemed to win over.
He suddenly realized just how much he had given Potter to hold over his head. He was at his mercy for the time being, more so than ever.
Harry remained vigilant and silent as Draco spoke. He didn't make to speak until Draco suggested in some way that he was finished; restraining himself from interrupting proved to be harder than he expected. He had a hundred questions, and all of them started with "sorry."
When Draco began picking at his food finally, he realized it was his time to speak. He wondered what he should say. On one hand, he wasn't remotely concerned with offending Malfoy. He had no reason to be. On the other, Harry was blown away at Draco's vulnerability. He had just spilled himself onto that kitchen table, giving Harry all the ammunition in the world to make him feel like he was nothing.
To make him get up and leave — push the door open into the outside world that had been enemy to the both of them for years. An odd thought occurred to him, then.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
He eyed the food in front of him; he couldn't remember the last time he had eaten a real breakfast. And here it was in front of him. Molly had always gushed that the truest form of love we could show for our fellow man was to prepare them a meal. Appealing to the most basic of our human needs, food had the power to tie people together. Imagine, then, what it could do to the leftover husks of people.
Harry's words were croaking from his throat before he realized he had conjured them. "She must have fallen for the idea of 'Harry Potter,' I think," he found himself staying.
Draco stopped chewing his food and look up to him in confusion.
"Ginny, that is."
"Oh."
"Living with her was fine at first. I'd say we were happy, even. But then she started getting…. annoyed really easily. Everything bothered her. She got frustrated at me for every little thing I would do: putting the hot sauce on the wrong shelf, folding the towels improperly — anything. Did you know there was a right way to fold a fucking towel? I don't think she was actually angry about any of that though. I hadn't been that flawless war hero she had painted in her mind; I couldn't be that, and I didn't want to be that. I think in the end the fact that I 'didn't want to' was worse to her than 'couldn't be.' It was easier to get mad at the little things than to explode over the real problem. It didn't take long before we didn't even speak to each other just because we were terrified of getting the other angry somehow. She wasn't entirely to blame though. I was a horrible husband, really. I didn't work. I had tried the Auror job with Ron that I was offered, but I found it impossible to….focus. Everyone expects so much of you all the time when you've got "The Boy Who Lived" literally tattooed on your bloody forehead. Even then I guess I stopped leaving the apartment often. It must have driven Ginny crazy to see me just….existing every time she came home. I thought that if I did nothing, there could be no expectations to fail. I wanted to disappear. I still do, I guess."
"I thought things would be easier after the war. But they weren't. The looming tension gave me a reason to keep going — to keep fighting. When the dust settled I had to stare at what my life was, and I felt like it just stared back at me."
Harry moved food around on his plate.
"I think we're still in a staring contest today. Now it's a question of who's going to look away first."
Draco licked his lips and wiped his face with a napkin.
"You broke your own rule," he said slowly. Harry raised an eyebrow at him.
"'Rule number three: don't ask me about Ginevra ever again'," he mocked, pulling on one of three extended fingers with his other hand.
Harry stared at him before grinning. It was only for a small moment that the expression lasted on Harry's face, but Draco felt a spike of excitement in the pit of his chest at the sight of it.
What had Bradbury said in that short story? "Progress stops for no man"
Harry was chewing his food now, speeding his pace with each bite. He stopped mid-chew to speak: "I've never been a fan of following the rules."
Draco snorted. "You could try one rule on for size: chewing with your mouth closed," Draco gestured with his fork at Harry's lips. They snapped shut at the suggestion, causing Draco to exhale sharply out of his nose in mirthful surprise.
They ate the rest of their meal in silence, an appreciated emptiness that was louder than the grit of apology formed from tooth and nail.
