Happy Holidays to all! This for ShinigamiForever in particular, as it was another holiday request, but also to the fandom at large. H/D. I don't know if I'll ever write the pairing again, so. -.- Harry and Draco and old stories and a house and roses and wine. Post-war.
Many thank yous to Puck, for being so sweet and encouraging. One line blatantly stolen from Two Lost Souls #14, if anyone cares to guess.
it's the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
it's the dream afraid of waking
that never takes the chance
it's the one who won't be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live…
- The Rose
There is a story about the house; usually there is one, though it rarely survives word of mouth and becomes crushed between blank pages and layers of dust. This house, however: it has a story. Harry remembers hearing it, and the memory is tied with hands smoothing tears from his cheeks and sobs clutching his throat and Hermione's rose petal perfume that she saved for special occasions.
"Tell me a story," he had whispered, the night after Ron's funeral, and he had felt like such a child, sobbing into her shoulder and staining her blouse with tears. But Hermione had smoothed his hair and sat beside him in the dark; she lulled him to sleep with her calm words. Calm, yes; even then she had been, hadn't she? Only he had woken later and she had been crouched by the window, lace curtains brushing against her legs. "Some say love," she'd sung, "it is a river," only her voice had broken and she had cried until dawn broke apart the sky.
In any case, now Hermione is gone too, and the house belongs to Harry.
"I'm not sure why you want it," the former owner - who had never stepped foot inside - had warned Harry, as they stood in the blustering spring and stared up to where pale curtains licked out to taste the breeze. "It's a bit creepy, if you ask me. You know, they say an old headmaster-"
"Loved his wife so much he killed himself, I know the tale," Harry had replied softly, and had thought of Ron.
When Harry moves in, he does not bring with him an entourage of help. It is only he, standing in worn robes, clutching one suitcase, several books, and a bottle of wine. "You always drink to christen a new home," Fred had said, giving it to him: Fred the last one, Fred who never laughed anymore, Fred who paced circles around his family's graves until the grass wore away. Fred, who shook his head when Harry invited him along for a drink, and said, "You know where I'll be."
Harry sits the wine on the table, and decades of dust take flight.
"Abigaile, her name was." He can hear Hermione's even tone, the barest hint of sorrow staining her words. "He was in love with her, madly in love; with her beauty, her goodness, her spirit. He built the house with her every whim in mind. He wanted her as near as could be; some people say Hogsmeade was built around the house. He loved her," she had emphasized, quiet desperation in her voice.
Harry sighs, and leans against the wall. Behind his head, yellowing wallpaper crumbles.
"It wasn't her fault," Ginny had assured him days later, when he asked her for the end of the tale. It was their last conversation. "She was lonely. You would be, too, if you were trapped in a house and your husband was away being headmaster all the time."
Harry had but shrugged. He hadn't agreed. How could she be lonely, if her husband was near, if he was alive? Now, Ron. He was dead. And they were lonely. That was lonely.
"'S not happy," Harry had mumbled, when Hermione had spoken of the headmaster's rage, of his pain, his helplessness when Abigaile ran off.
"I don't know any happy stories," Hermione had replied, and rubbed his shoulder reassuringly. "Go to sleep."
Harry isn't sure why he bought the house, except that he could. He doesn't belong in London where people rush and clamor and point and whisper. He doesn't belong at the Ministry, where everyone bows to him at first sight, but no one meets his eyes. He doesn't belong at Hogwarts, where students stammer and call him "Professor Potter." So why not? Besides, it is a House of Sorrow, with its bony framework creaking in every gust of the wind.
Creak. Harry brushes dust from the sleeves of his robes, listening. "If you really listen, you can hear him call her name," Hermione had said.
"On quiet days," Ginny had added days later, "you can hear her crying."
Only he hears -
What?
"Hello?" he calls, warily, the high ceiling echoing back the syllables. "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello." He supposes it is possible that some village vagabond has hidden himself in this abandoned place. Perhaps the homeless sot has been living in his bedroom, skulking about Hogsmeade and hiding in the day. "Hello?" Harry calls once more, stairs squeaking beneath his shoes. To his left, curtains flutter pale over the windowsill.
Eerie stillness settles.
"Um," Harry says, shivering in the cold, "you can come o-"
There is a shadowy figure in the door at the end of the hall. When Harry takes an uncertain step forward, his mind whirling with thoughts of dead headmasters and their unfaithful wives and lovers who climb trellises to third story windows, the slim shadow melts backwards and then starts.
Harry's heart thuds; for a minute, he believes in spirits.
"Looking for ghosts, Potter?"
A dry, faint echo of old sneering: mocking tones too worn to be derisive. He is so very pale in the shadow painted hall. "You won't find any here," he continues softly. "I'm the only one who haunts this place."
Harry stares.
"Surprised?" Draco takes a step forward, bare feet creaking on the floorboards. With his hair light about his head, the pale shine illuminating his figure, he could be naught but a figment of an overactive imagination. "I wasn't exactly, ah, expecting you either."
"I-" Jerking forward, Harry grasps at the other. He half expects his hands to slip right through Draco, half expects to find Draco insubstantial and wraithlike. He thinks that maybe Draco is some ethereal ghost. But no, he is solid, and he smiles when Harry's fingers bruise his skin. He tilts his chin haughtily despite his ragged appearance.
"I'm not dreaming," Harry says uncertainly. "You - you - live - here?"
"No," Draco replies wryly, softly. "You do."
"I-" His mind tumbles, rebels, trips over itself. "Why didn't you owl me? Why - where have you been all this time? We thought you were dead, gone, lost, disappeared - even Fudge has a reward out for you, only everybody thinks Voldemort's the one who killed you, and your mum's in Azkaban. . ." He trails off, gradually, rush of words slimming down into one angry phrase. "Why didn't you owl me?"
Draco flinches. "I have no place in your life. I - after I left you, after I said that I wouldn't fight - after I ran away."
"Draco," Harry whispers, "everyone else I know is dead."
A nod, unwavering, no sympathy pooling in those grey eyes. "I know they are. I've read the paper."
"Don't you care?" The sight of pale flowers against stark stone looms large in Harry's uncertain vision, and he swallows with effort. "Damn you! You cold, unfeeling - you bastard -"
Draco shoves off his bruising grip, surprisingly strong. "Look," he hisses, voice low. "Do you want to know why I'm living in a ragged room covered in newspapers, sleeping in the same clothes? Do you want to know why I couldn't owl you, not then, not now? Do you want to know why I left you, why I couldn't stand it, why I couldn't-" His eyes are steel. Harry has never seen him this painfully unflinching.
"I used to think it was glamorous. Father would tell me all about the old tales, the duels, the great uprisings in sparks of magic and flashes of light. I wanted it so badly. He told me how important I would be, and it thrilled me. I grew up on that, Harry.
"And then there was you, so silly, so naïve, so destructive to my dreams. I knew someday I'd have to kill you, or watch you die. I knew it, because that was the way the stories went. But you twisted them. And I saw you die a thousand times when I shut my eyes. You and every other wizard in the bloody world, and it wasn't glamorous at all."
"Draco-"
"Shut up. I'm talking. Isn't that what you wanted, for me to talk to you? There's this thing called Spell Shock, see, that's what they call it at St. Mungo's. I've been there. I've seen them. And as much as I - as much as I know you, I know that you can't understand that. You're perfectly fine, you know? You're the bloody hero."
"I am not f-"
"Oh, you pretend you aren't fine. You wander around feeling sorry for yourself, buying huge lonely houses you can bury your grief in, skulking around the pubs in Diagon Alley looking lost and alone. You aren't the one who lies beneath fields of poppies. You aren't the one with memory loss - did you know that? Blaise is a wandering shell now. Wrong place, wrong time, aftershocks of a spell, and boom, she can't even remember her name."
"I am not feeling sorry for myself!" Harry hisses, taking a forceful step forward. "I'm mourning. Don't I deserve to mourn? Don't they deserve it? And how am I any different than you, locking yourself in a room you don't even own, hiding from everything you used to look for?"
Draco crosses his arms and Harry feels something clench in his throat. "You," Draco says, very quietly, "are so selfish."
And Harry doesn't have the heart to be angry. He hasn't really, really been angry since Draco left.
Just empty. And emptier. And emptier. And he thinks that Draco doesn't have the right to call him selfish, because he isn't holding onto anything at all.
"It was Father." Draco sits down - yes, right there on the creaking floor, and the way he takes Harry's hand and pulls him down with him until they are sitting across from each other in the cramped hallway with their knees side by side leaves Harry no choice but to stay silent. "He - when he died. I know it wasn't you, but it could have been and it would have been. You know that."
Harry looks away.
"That's what war's about, you know. Death. And it was just that, that alone. Your side. My side. Before that was all that mattered. And then I didn't want you dead, and I didn't know who I wanted dead."
"So you ran away."
"I'm not a bloody Gryffindor, Potter, I didn't grow up teething on the stories of heroes. I'm not brave." He looks up, hair falling into his face, eyes resolute. "I don't want to be."
"But-"
Draco is silent, and Harry subsides as well. Around them, they can almost hear the faint whisper of a young woman to her lover, leaning over a trellis to touch lips with him.
Harry swallows.
"I'm alone," he says, his voice the barest ragged breath scattering dust along the floor. "I'm alone, now. Please - please don't leave me again."
Draco lets Harry take his hand and even squeezes back with chilled fingers, though he does not meet the other's eyes. "I don't hate you for what you did," he whispers, his gaze dropping. "I don't even blame you. But I don't know how to love you anymore."
"Please."
And Draco says, softly, "All right," as the house creaks and mourns around them, because he has nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be.
Some say love, it is a razor, Hermione sings in a memory, far far away, and Harry silently agrees.
= = = = =
Draco knows he is different, the way Harry knows he is different, the way the both of them are different and the way they recognize it as they rustle the newspaper and split it in half in silence. Something about the hollow look in Draco's eyes, the unshaven stubble of Harry's jaw, the way the both of them read the Daily Prophet with something like fear gnawing at their lips.
War changes you, they know.
The furniture is Apparated in with Magical Movers, Inc., the following day. Harry directs them halfheartedly and Draco skulks in the kitchen, letting the tap drip slowly into a cup but never drinking the water. They have exchanged three words today, three measured words each:
"Good morning, Draco."
"Good morning, Harry."
And Harry thinks of the old headmaster, so estranged from his beautiful Abigaile that she could no longer love him and he could love only a memory of her, a faint wisp of her perfume and the ghost of her smile, no more. Maybe it wasn't her fault, Harry concedes to Ginny and thinks also of Fred's gaunt face and the way he always walks with his hands in his pockets and his head down. It is the same way he circles the plot of his family's graves: looking only at them and no one else.
Harry puts the bottle of wine carefully in the back of the pantry, pours Draco's untouched glass of water out in the sink, and tries not to think of anything except for the lonely birds on the lawn.
Draco goes outside in that still hour just between late afternoon and early dusk, walking beside the rotting fence with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. He makes a solitary picture, but Harry joins him anyway; perhaps it is the way he reminds Harry so much of Fred, and all the other Londoners who do not meet his eyes.
"The roses need trimming," Draco says very quietly, before Harry even reaches him.
Harry's memory is seized by Hermione's perfume and the strong circle of her arm as she held him. He steps forward and peers at the lonely faded roses, shaking his head.
"No? No, what?" There is a hint of old, petulant Draco in his voice and Harry's gaze flies up. He meets Draco's weary gaze, the same color as the background of sky. His gaze travels back to the roses.
"No, I - I don't like roses."
Draco says simply, "Neither do I," and walks on without looking back.
"Draco." When his voice has no effect upon the figure before him or the silent, brooding afternoon, Harry takes a few quick steps forward. "Draco," again. "I'm - I'm sorry."
He turns, slowly, until they are standing face to face under the cloud-cloaked sky, and he almost smiles. "For being who you are?" He reaches for Harry's cheek, cups it for one quiet second, and turns away. "No, you aren't. You never were."
Harry doesn't know how to respond. He used to be left stuttering at Draco's airy insults, and now he is equally stumped with Draco's dreary cynicism. Silence, he thinks, is the best answer.
He wonders if that was what the headmaster thought, frustrated at his love's lost affection, trying always to placate her, keep her happy. He wonders if the headmaster ever felt this cold, this empty.
But as he follows Draco back into the house, he realizes that everyone must have. At least once.
Even the far-off threat of a lump in his throat is not really a stranger to him; it is a comfort, almost, after such time. He says quietly, "I'm going to start a fire," and when he walks to the library with its recently shelved books, Draco trails him.
Harry doesn't notice the way Draco's hands shake until after he pockets his wand.
"What-"
"Don't touch me."
"I-"
"Don't touch me."
"Are you all-"
"I'm fine."
Harry says, very hesitantly, "Do you want some tea?" When Draco nods, he finds the kettle and busies himself so as not to think of Draco's pale fingers trembling against each other. It is only when he has the comfort of cracked china and a little sugar bowl that he reenters the library; he finds Draco perched on the arm of a chair, limbs uncannily graceful, a tiny black book in his fingers.
"'It is quiet for the first time in four days,'" Draco reads coolly as Harry sets the tray on the table. "'I could not sleep for the spells and explosions, and now I cannot sleep in the silence. We adapt so easily. I think human beings can wrap their minds around death, too, if they try, and trying is all we've been doing. When death comes for me tomorrow - for they attack again tomorrow, surely, everyone says, and we will fall - it will be a relief.'" Draco looks up and shuts the little book. "Her name was Elizabeth. She was twelve. She gave this to me when she knew I couldn't save her."
Hiding how shaken he feels, Harry moves to sit down. "So you ran from her, too. Did you ever not run away?"
"Your people didn't rape Pansy," Draco said, very casually. "She was too good for that. No, instead, they burned down her house and they took her engagement ring - diamonds, and so many spells it cost another fortune. Just think of some lonely widow out there, that loot her only memory of her husband."
"Don't call them my people. I never told them to do that."
"'A good leader takes responsibility for the actions of his men, and insures that they do nothing he would not do.' I think my father said that."
"I was seventeen."
"They were younger."
Harry grips his teacup so tightly that his knuckles pale and shake. Tea sloshes perilously close to the rim. "I did not start the war," he says tightly.
"That's why you're a hero. And no matter what you do, you'll always be the hero."
Harry says quietly, "When I lit the fire, you-"
"I don't want to talk about it. Is that all right with you, precious Master Potter? I don't want to talk about it."
Helplessly, "Then drink your tea."
So they sit, with bitter comfort in their mouths, to-be-exchanged words lying dormant beneath their tongues, each seeing their own demons leaping from the fire. After a long, long silence, Draco looks up. "There is a story about the house, you know."
"I know."
"About the headmaster, and his be-"
"When I said 'I know,' I meant that I know," Harry snaps. "Just because I wasn't raised in the magical world doesn't mean I'm ignorant."
Draco sips.
Looking at him, so diminutive in the leather chair, hair in light shadows around his face and eyes downcast into the clear liquid of his cup, Harry has to be afraid. He has to think of Abigaile and lovers that climb trellises and the way he fears fears fears that Draco will go away.
"Don't leave me," Harry says. "Don't run away with Death."
"I hate Death," Draco murmurs to his tea. "That's what the war did for me. I hate Death."
Harry looks into the fire, his empty teacup still in his hands. "Yes," he rejoins, "but you hated me."
He doesn't need to add, And you loved me, too.
= = = = =
They are in the produce aisle with signs offering loudly, "Try a tomato; they're terrific!" and "Gerda's Glorious Green Grapes!" when Draco crosses his arms and says resolutely, "We should get a house elf."
Harry frowns as he ignores a talking sign chattering animatedly about broccoli. "What?"
"A house elf. Are you deaf?"
"No, but you're an unscrupulous bastard."
Draco pauses at the carrots. "You call me unscrupulous? You?"
"You lecture about war and death and humanitarian principles like some saint," Harry points out sharply, weighty circles under his eyes signifying the late lack of sleep, "and then you want a - a house elf?"
"War has nothing to do with house elves."
"Wait until one happens for their emancipation."
Draco stares at him with that cold, silent gaze, a quiet pain taking flight in his eyes. After a moment he picks up an apple, inspects it, and sets it carefully back down. "That isn't funny," he tells Harry coolly, and walks on.
"I don't want a house elf," Harry insists, because Hermione's eyes are haunting him and the only picture he has of her anymore is a tearful one. He always hated it when Hermione cried - strong, capable Hermione. When she broke down, he had always felt the world would soon come to an end. "It's awful. Besides, they're creepy."
"Fine." Draco picks up a head of broccoli as if he has never seen one before, and the signs all screech at him to stop touching the merchandise. "If I want something, then, you can bloody get it for me."
They end up hiring a stout little woman named Marie who comes three days a week. She cooks, cleans, and gossips enough for three women her size. Her husband died in the war, or even she would not be working for them: Hogsmeade buzzes about the inhabitants of the house, and everyone fears the headmaster's ghost.
"You are possessed by the Headmaster, they say," she tells Draco when she brings them breakfast. They all call him that, 'the Headmaster,' as if he is but a legend. "Did not see you come. You never speak. Pale as a ghost. You see?"
Here to haunt me, Harry thinks, and remind me of what we have lost.
It is one late, late night when Harry wakes and is rejected by slumber's embrace, watching the curtains twist languidly around the open window. Outside, the moon gleams in a sickle curve, the color of french vanilla and old parchment. He eventually throws off his sheets and slips into yesterday's clothes, bare feet tiptoeing down the hall. Moonlight skips across the floorboards of Draco's room, but the bed is empty and unslept in.
"Draco?" he calls softly, as he steals downstairs.
"I'm in the library."
Draco's penchant for books has filled the shelves, the one mark that he lives here with Harry and is not simply a spirit. He will disappear some late afternoons and return with a crate of books under his arm; in storage from the manor, he'll explain, or just in from Flourish & Blotts.
Harry yawns in the doorway and thinks that Draco could be a ghost, pale and wraithlike, blurred by the light of candles and the moon. He stops with one hand on the doorframe, taking in the shadows on the library walls. "Hey," he says quietly. "You still awake?"
Drawling, "No, I'm sleeping. Bad dreams?"
"Not really."
"That's right. You wouldn't be haunted, would you."
Harry swallows and tries not to think of guilt and defensiveness and ghosts that keep him awake. Not everyone is haunted in his sleep, Harry thinks. He is afraid to breathe, afraid that if he makes sudden motions this ethereal picture will subside into the darkness and he will still be lying asleep.
"You should get some rest," he says eventually, shifting from his slouch against the doorway and moving hesitantly forward. "At least try."
Draco shrugs. "Why? I don't have to do anything, anymore. Neither do you; you live off that ridiculous sum of money the Ministry pays you to use your name and your face and never you, because you - the real you - scares the children you're supposed to be protecting."
Harry gives a wry quirk of the lips that isn't really a smile. "And you're living off that name, my name."
Rather than spitting back a bitter retort, as he used to be wont to do, Draco glances down and away.
"What are you reading?" Harry asks, instead of pursuing the subject. He doesn't live to get a rise out of Draco anymore. He isn't really sure what he is living for.
Draco shows him the book spine. Rowena Ravenclaw: Memoirs. Harry quirks an eyebrow.
"Interesting?"
"Most of it. Long-winded and lofty, but she was a very smart woman. She wrote a lot about war."
"Figures," Harry mutters, as he sinks into the opposing chair.
"What?"
"I said, it figures! I'm tired of worrying whether or not I'll offend you by making the slightest mention of - of anything! All right? That's all we talk about, war and war and death and war. You call this a relationship?"
"I don't. You do."
"Well, we might as well be dead like the rest of them, for all the living we're doing!"
Draco throws the book to the floor. It skitters towards Harry's feet and he stands up, kicking it forcefully across the library. "You hide in here," Harry hisses, "and you are like a bloody ghost, just like Marie says, you're like a ghost that haunts me with all these creepy stories that I don't want to hear, because you know what? I suffered too. I. Suffered. Too! You may not believe me, but I didn't want to kill anyone. I wanted to keep everyone safe. Safe! Not dead! All right? It was Voldemort!"
"What's the matter, Potter? Too scared to use a Memory Charm?"
"I don't want to forget," Harry says softly, though there is a steel edge to his tone. "But I don't want to think of nothing else for the rest of my life. I thought - I thought that after the war, we could be you and me, just that. I thought we wouldn't have to worry about your father and my loyalties and who wanted to kill whom."
Draco nods, as if he has expected as much. "So I wasn't the only one with glamorous dreams."
"I want something to live for, Draco. I wanted you to be that."
The library is silent.
"I don't want to exist. I want to live. I don't want to be a name in six thousand newspapers. I want to be more than Harry Potter the Hero, Who Also Happens To Be A Murderer."
Draco says, carefully, "You're right; I should go to bed."
Harry catches his arm and pulls him back, angry words hovering on the edges of his nervously-bitten lips, trying to avoid the way Draco's eyes are avoiding his. That is all they do, really, avoid and placate and ignore and pretend.
"Draco-"
"I'm tired."
In another time, in another place, Harry would pull Draco to him until Draco's resistance was broken and he collapsed in Harry's arms. Harry would make Draco looks at him, really look, and he would pull the other boy to his lips. And maybe, Harry thinks, in that time, he would have something to hold on to.
Here, ancient voices are settling in the curves of his ears. He cannot ignore them. That can be his excuse, maybe, for letting Draco slip out of his grasp and up the creaking stairs.
But really, he just wants to let go so that Draco never does.
= = = = =
Marie finds him the next morning, clucking her tongue like a mother hen. For a moment, her kindly smile reminds Harry of Mrs. Weasley, and he has to choke back a hopeful breath. Her hair is white and pinned as carefully as McGonagall's ever was; even so, he must peer closely to make sure he is not dreaming up a phantom of the past.
"I've brought you some porridge," she tells him, with a careful pat on his shoulder. As she settles the tray on the table, she pulls the book from his listless fingers. "Fall asleep, did you? It's usually Master Draco that I find here in the morning."
Harry shifts his shoulder, feeling the ache from sleeping too long in an awkward position. He has the sneaking feeling that he is getting old.
"Where - where is Draco?" he asks sleepily.
"In the bed you should be in, I'm sure," she says, fussing around his breakfast, and misses Harry's blush at her inadvertent innuendo. "Shall I wake him?"
Harry watches her set Rowena Ravenclaw: Memoirs on the table beside his tray, and he stands with a yawn. "I'll do it."
"I don't know about you," Marie clucks. "I fear for your health on the days I don't come. Reading into the morning, sleeping late in library chairs, missing meals - you'll fall ill one day, just wait."
"I have," Harry says, a yawn splitting his sentence, "an uncanny ability to skirt things like that. Death doesn't like me."
"And well that he doesn't! Don't you joke about things like that, Master Harry."
"Now you sound like Draco," he replies and climbs the stairs slowly to where the shadows still lurk. There are things to do, really: re-paper the hallway, fix that broken stair, magically mend the rattling window. He'll have to do it later. Draco hates when he uses his wand; well, really, Harry hates when he uses his wand, because he can see Draco shake.
The door creaks when he prods it open. Everything in the house seems to have a sound, whining and rattling and creaking beneath even the lightest footfall. He wonders idly if it helped Abigaile know when her husband was coming, when her lover needed to flee.
Harry knows how Draco used to sleep. In fact, when Harry was entranced by everything of Draco, he would watch Draco sleep - and wonder how the insufferable boy could manage to even sleep arrogantly.
Harry doesn't like watching Draco now, because he doesn't want to compare. He doesn't like to notice how Draco curls into himself, as if frightened.
So he stands at the window and watches the roses.
It is a quiet morning, a blanket sky of cotton swabs, bunching in shadows around the edges. From up here, the lawn seems far away, the roses less intimidating. Harry hums a quiet tune under his breath: some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need…
He hears Draco wake before he hears his name, sheets rustling and limbs unfolding.
"Sleep okay?" Harry asks, his eyes tracing what he knows is the figure of Draco on the canvas of sky, knowing the other without turning around. The clouds stride towards his invisible portrait, rumbling.
"More or less. Did you?" Draco is asking Harry's back, elbows propped and sinking into his pillow.
"Didn't get much." And Harry turns now. "I read your book. Rowena's journal? Some of it." Ruefully, "You're right, she is rather long-winded."
Draco raises an eyebrow. Somehow, his tousled hair isn't comical; it's almost depressing. "And?"
"I didn't know all of that about her. That Hogwarts was originally her idea, and that Salazar Slytherin wouldn't participate until she convinced him. Is that little dusty statue of her in the book shop really her, like the introduction says?"
"It's modeled after Wisdom," Draco replies, "but it has her features. C'mere, I have another book for you."
Harry sits with hesitation, his back against the curve of Draco's kneecaps. Draco pulls a little dusty book from his nightstand, its spine split from being left propped open. The pages rustle as he flips. "What is it?" Harry asks. "You're the one who reads books all the time, not me."
"Here," Draco says. His voice is strangely mellow, hushed beneath the strains of clouds outside. He has found the page, lost in the center of the book, the script faded. "Can I tell you the story?"
I don't know any happy stories. Tears in his eyes. In hers. Harry shrugs, his hands in his lap. "Sure."
Draco's smile is faint, a bit ghostly itself. He clears his throat before glancing down at the book; his fingers absently smooth the page. He meets Harry's eyes.
"Cyril Malfoy was the only Malfoy to ever become Headmaster of Hogwarts," he begins, softly, as if afraid someone will overhear. "I think my father resented that. He was my great grandfather's cousin, though they say he had all the same Malfoy features - pale, blonde, slight. He built this house."
Harry's picture of a man driven wild by grief, dark haired and wide eyed, swiftly morphs into an older version of Draco.
He shivers.
"I know you know the story. But it's all word of mouth. It's a legend in these parts, I suppose. He fell in love with Abigaile, a red-haired girl ten years his junior, and fancied her in love with him. The stories all agree there: he loved her. Loved her so madly that he couldn't imagine life another way." Somewhere between his words, Draco's hand finds Harry's. He never slows. "No one is ever sure if she loved him."
"But she must have, she-"
"Was of another old family, and arranged marriages weren't uncommon." Draco gives a slight tilt of his shoulder. "I don't know. He was an interesting person, Cyril. Passionate. He loved knowledge and he loved Abigaile even more. When he lost her, he went so mad that he lost his job, and had nothing whatsoever to live for."
Harry mutters something that might be, "Who does?" Draco does not hear or, perhaps, does not acknowledge.
"He built her this house. Put his life into it, I suppose. Bought her everything she could possibly desire, bringing in paintings from the manor, from Rome, all over the world. He wanted her to be happy. Would have given anything to make her happy. But he had Hogwarts, too."
"And she had?"
"No one knows who he was. No one really knows this story, Harry. The Malfoys aren't proud of being betrayed. The Malfoys aren't proud of anything in which they don't come out on top."
Harry says nothing at all.
"She loved roses, Abigaile. He brought them to her. Her lover brought them to her. She planted them here, and all the Hogsmeade residents would come by to see them bloom."
Gaze sliding to the window, Harry imagines the roses along the fence. He tightens his grip on Draco's hand, trying to press warmth into those chill fingers. "And then she left him," he says softly, not entirely sure whom he sympathizes with the most. Mad, passionate Cyril, with the same haunting gray eyes? Beautiful Abigaile who loved roses, loved anything but her absent, adoring husband? The anonymous lover?
He sees sorrow in all of their faces. He sees the echo of Draco's smile, or maybe Draco is only reflecting theirs.
"Yes," Draco says. "Then she left him. And he lost everything."
Harry asks, very calmly, their entwined hands motionless on the sheets, "Are you not proud of me, then? If you're a Malfoy?"
Draco has no response.
That is the way Marie finds them, bustling upstairs with Harry's cold porridge, tsk-tsk-ing as she finds both too tired to rise. In the flurry of Marie's words and bowls and spoons and quickly made beds, Draco manages to lean in towards Harry's ear and whisper, ever so quietly:
"Why do you think we hate the Weasleys? It's because of Abigaile."
And then Harry eats his breakfast as Marie insists, while Draco refuses and goes out to look at the roses.
= = = = =
Cornelius Fudge is old.
Harry is not sure quite how old, he has not bothered to check, and the cake has been cut so the frosting numbers have been divided among thousands of Ministry workers. He thinks it rather rude to ask someone, and so he keeps quiet.
In any case, the Minister has grown even more rotund and jovial over the years, his hair paling to a steel wool gray and his features mellowing into a sallow cheeked expression of absent approval. He presides over the gathering like a decaying emperor, pudgy fingers waving along to the orchestra.
"He's like a symbol of the wizarding world," Draco says in Harry's ear as they sip punch and contemplate the bright-eyed people swirling around them. "Old, obese, pretty much ridiculous. Sad."
"That's not true," Harry replies. He knows it is.
"More of a symbol than you are."
"Take out the obese, and we're not too far different."
Draco sips his punch. He sets it on the table. Little is said, their unspoken words brushed into the crowd before they can be held onto. Harry sits his punch down beside Draco's, not very thirsty or very entertained.
"Do you think it's safely polite to go now?" he asks, just as an eager voice chimes behind them.
"Harry? Harry Potter?"
A sandy-haired, beaming young man with a camera is beaming at them. Harry blinks, thrown off guard. "Yes?"
The man's face falls. His vibrant red robes look out of place on him, gold-embroidered silk too elaborate for his hopeful, foolish features. "You don't remember me, do you? It's Dennis. Dennis Creevey."
"Of course I remember you, Dennis," Harry lies, though now the boy is recognizable. "How are you doing? How's Colin?"
Dennis freezes. "Colin died," he tells Harry, eyes not even shifting to Draco. It's as if he is simply a ghost, seen only by Harry. "In the war. Don't you remember? He was a photographer for the Prophet, went to the front lines. He took the job because he wanted to help you in any way he could."
Harry swallows guiltily. "No, I - I don't remember. I'm sorry, Dennis."
Dennis shrugs. His expression is closed off, distant. "It wasn't your fault, was it? Anyway, I'm supposed to take your picture for the Prophet. Do you want to pose with Fudge?"
"Must I?"
"No," says Dennis, as there is a crowd of reporters clustered around Fudge at the moment. "Here, just - stand over there. Right."
And that is how a grainy picture of Harry and Draco ends up on the back page of the Daily Prophet, both of them smiling half-heartedly, shuffling their feet between the print. The caption does not even recognize this pale, quiet companion as Draco Malfoy; as far as they are concerned, he is but another guest speaking with Harry Potter.
Afterwards, Harry pulls Draco aside. "I didn't know about Colin," he says, fingers twining together as if he faults himself. "I didn't know."
"You can't know all of them." Even Draco's voice is not as harsh as Harry expects it to be. "No one expects you to know. You're - you. You did so much; how could you possibly know everyone you lost along the way?"
Harry doesn't remind Draco how Draco used to pin Colin against the wall and laugh, throwing his camera to the floor. Harry doesn't remind Draco at all, because Harry doesn't like to be reminded, himself.
He is not sure which Draco he likes better. How can you be in love with two versions of the same person? How can you, when they are so contrary?
And Harry is not sure if Draco can be in love at all.
"They like your name," Draco says, the next day, in the library. The fire crackles, reaching for the newspaper. Draco tosses it in and the pages curl, shrivel, dissipate. "I counted it seventeen times in that tiny article."
"Fudge made the front page," Harry shrugs. "I suppose news must be slow."
"Or they, like everyone else, hate being reminded of the war."
"Do I have to live and die as a symbol?" Harry demands, though his voice is quiet enough. Lately, he has not had the effort to demand anything. "The war is over, Draco. It's over! Why is it still between us? Why is it between me and the rest of the world?"
"You put it there," is the soft reply. "Or maybe it's just the way things are supposed to be."
"You believe in fate?"
Draco shakes his head, leaning forward to meet eyes with the fire. "I don't believe in anything."
"Why not?"
"Why not? Must you even-"
"That's what I said. Why not? So you lost your father and you saw the world suffer and you experienced the war. I'm not saying that you didn't. I'm not saying it wasn't important. But where do you think I was? Sitting in a nice tent, waiting for reports? I killed Voldemort! You never ask me about that, do you? You never ask me anything about the war."
"Maybe I've heard enough of it."
"Then why do you think of nothing else?"
"I didn't suffer more than you did, Draco; I didn't suffer more than anyone else in this bloody war. But I didn't suffer less."
"I don't want to-"
"You never want to talk about it, except when you want to talk about it!"
"You blame me for leaving you," Draco says.
"I blame you for never coming back."
And for an instant Draco's eyes soften and Harry can see the pain. He feels it as his own, feels the way Draco must have felt for all the time without him. "Harry," Draco says softly. The firelight illuminates his cheeks, paints his face a lurid shade. He reaches out, hesitantly, to Harry's knee; his hand falls short. "I -"
"You still haven't," Harry tells the fire. "Sometimes I don't think you ever will."
He stands up, leaving his own copy of the paper left behind in his chair, and crouches beside Draco. "You are a ghost," he says. "Maybe Cyril is haunting you; I don't know. You're haunting me. What is he making you afraid of?"
Draco does not answer.
"Sometimes I think it would have been better if I died killing Voldemort, that I should have. Then I could be a hero."
But Draco still has no response.
So Harry takes Draco's hand and pulls him closer and paints his breath on Draco's lips, just an instant away. "I love you," he says, and does not know if he is speaking for himself or for himself of five years ago or for Abigaile or for Cyril or for Hermione or for anyone, anyone else. But he knows that it is he who pulls back when Draco whispers, "Don't," and it is most certainly he who leaves Draco alone with the dying fire and a scrap of paper with Harry's picture fluttering unburned from the coals.
= = = = =
Harry is shivering; he feels the bite of autumn as he trudges through the leaves, watching the lake shiver in sympathy as the wind tousles its surface. The day is, like so many of late, a dreary one.
He strips off his shoes by the edge of the water, listening to its voice. "And you think," it seems to murmur, licking against the sand, that love is only for the lucky, and the strong…"
His socks are draped across his shoes, settled carefully to one side; the sand is cold, damp, frigid between his toes.
He shivers.
Behind him, Harry can make out the rooftops between the soon-to-be-barren branches, see the spirals of smoke drifting above the tree line. He swallows, turns around, and does not look back again. Somewhere, up that path and through the woods and past the shops and up a hill, there is the house standing imposing and imperious. Within its creaking frame sits Draco, probably bent over one book or another, oblivious.
It's a sad thing, really, Harry thinks. House of Sorrow. Cyril's hands probably cursed it, the way fate cursed him; he wonders why he bought it to begin with. Tempt fate, maybe. Or just succumb to it.
"How can you just stand there?" Ginny had screamed at him in the cemetery, after all the mourners had gone and it was only family. Family, and Harry and Hermione, who were close enough to be called family anyway.
Hermione had taken Ginny aside and tried to comfort her, but they had both ended up with tears streaming down their cheeks.
And Harry had stood there, the way he stands now, with goosebumps raised up and down his arms and an emptiness inside.
Draco was right, probably, Harry thinks as he steps into the water. He almost leaps back out, so cold is the water, but he clenches his teeth. Remember Voldemort, he wants to tell himself. Remember Tom Riddle. Remember everyone else.
So Harry walks forward, the hems of his pants becoming saturated and muddy with the lake shallows. Freezing mud squelches between his toes. Yes, he thinks, Draco is right: war is a tragedy. But then, so is life. So is love. Harry can't differentiate any longer, what is the most tragic, and so all he does is let everything go. He was barely holding on to begin with.
The water reaches his knees, and Harry thinks of Ron. Ron was the first, really: the first person in the world he ever loved, save for the vague shadowy shapes of his parents. Oh, he had loved Hagrid for saving him from the Dursleys, and he had loved Dumbledore for sending Hagrid, but Ron was Ron.
Everybody leaves me, he had thought as he scattered rose petals over Ron's grave with everyone else; by the time Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were laid beside Ron, Harry was used to it.
Harry lets the water numb his legs up to his thighs, and he thinks of Hermione. Strong, painfully brave Hermione, always so solid. She had looked so frail in her coffin, hands folded, eyes shut. It was a Muggle funeral and he had gone in a secondhand suit, quickly distributing his bouquet of roses before running off to an empty flat with no one there.
Another step, and it is Sirius. Another for Dumbledore, and yet another for Remus. The next ones are for his parents, though Harry does not stop to dwell on them: he has been since the moment he lost them.
Harry thinks about all the casualties that Draco has told him of, of Blaise with no memory, of Pansy with no engagement ring and eventually no sanity, of all the others so numerous he cannot even remember to match fate with name. It might have been Goyle that was attacked by the Muggles, but then it might have been Crabbe; he could never tell them apart. Perhaps it wasn't really Justin Finch-Fletchley who was trampled by the giants, but then again perhaps it was. Harry vaguely remembers hearing about it and spitting out that he deserved it for betraying them to Voldemort.
But right now Harry shivers, and part of it is for Justin.
When the water reaches his chest and Harry is fighting to not turn back, he thinks of Tom Riddle. This makes him keep walking, even when his feet are numb and cannot feel the sand beneath them. He wonders if Tom was ever in love. He wonders if Tom did not have it easier: he was hated by the world, yes, but he died. And he was great. And Harry is the hero who is floundering in the lake, ignored by the world he'd saved.
Not that he wants to be remembered. Not in the way he is, with a few ribbons and an occasional newspaper picture and loads of Galleons for his name.
He isn't sure what he wants, or wanted, except that it probably has to do with ash-pale hair and eyes that aren't quite malicious but aren't drowned in sorrow, with the taste of someone he's almost forgotten, with a dream he thinks, only thinks, that he once had.
And then he thinks of Draco. He thinks of midnight trysts and abandoned classrooms, of spitted words and shared passion, of the way Draco would laugh when Harry slipped on the hem of his invisibility cloak and had to steady himself with his arms around Draco. He thinks of pain and the bitter taste of alcohol when Draco left, without a word, without a note. He thinks of pale hair tinted a stronger gold with firelight, bent over yellow parchment and fading ink. He thinks of hands that shake and a voice that tells Harry, with only a trace of the old imperious tone, that he'd better light the fire and wash the dishes and do all of that.
Harry's first instinct is to swim. He thinks everyone's instinct is to live, really, but he forces himself to be still and watch the bubbles trickle from his nose. How long can he hold his breath? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. . .
The end of a hero, Harry thinks, eyes fluttering closed against the water, should not be so surprising. Not when the world is the way it is. Not when he has never thought of himself as one, and has never really settled easily into the mold he is supposed to settle into.
And he thinks that he has left Draco, after all, the way Abigaile left her Cyril, creeping out with her lover and out of the story forever. And perhaps it is Death that has been romancing him with whispers, through the curtains, under the crescent moon with the knife-sharp points, in between the snapping of the fire. Death, not the lamenting of Cyril, not the murmured love words of Abigaile, not the fancied quiet voices of years and years ago.
And I thought it would be you all the time, Harry thinks to Draco with red swimming before his eyes.
And then he doesn't think at all.
= = = = =
Maybe Harry dies.
And maybe Draco mourns for him, head bent the way Harry always saw him in the library, cutting all the roses to scatter on Harry's tomb. Maybe Draco finds the bottle of wine in the back of the pantry and drinks himself into a stupor, because fate is fate and loneliness is nothing more than having nothing to live for.
Or maybe Harry lives.
Maybe Harry shies from Death and finds himself gasping for air, arms floundering, or maybe he is washed up on the cold beach and almost freezes but doesn't, doesn't, because Death doesn't seem to like him. So he told Marie.
Or maybe -
"I thought you hated magic," Harry coughs weakly, though it is hard to speak at all with Draco's arms holding him so desperately that he thinks he sees stars when he closes his eyes. They are both dripping water when they Apparate to the house, Draco gripping his wand and Harry's arm equally hard. He has been spilling words the way Harry's lips spill lake water, haphazard, urgent.
"Why-" Harry stands in the center of their kitchen, lake water pooling around his feet. His voice is strained. "Why did you follow me?"
Draco comes back with blankets in his arms. "I don't know." A half smile. "Maybe it was fate."
"I thought you d-didn't believe in fate."
Draco says nothing at all. And then Harry doesn't speak either, because they are a bundle of arms and blankets and saturated clothes, and Draco's are about as soaked as Harry's are.
Later, they both sit by the fire, Harry's head on Draco's lap, Harry's fingers trying to still Draco's trembling ones. Harry's feet are bare and tingle with the heat of the flames. There are words fighting to rise from his lips, but his mouth won't cooperate: lassitude weighs down his eyelids, his limbs, his tongue. He would rather curl into the warmth of Draco and forget about the tang of lake water and Death in the back of his throat. Death's kisses leave marks.
Draco brushes a finger along his cheek to his jaw. "Why did you leave me? Why did you - why did you try to drown?"
"Everyone leaves me," Harry whispers. "Everyone. I just didn't want to be the last one."
"Isn't that what heroes are supposed to be?"
Harry says, softly, "I'm not a hero. You of all people should know that. There aren't any, really. There's just pain, and loneliness, and loss, and-" He trails off. "Bravery and ambition are closer than we think, you know. They're the things that make you who you are, but in the end it's the world that defines you. Not you."
"There's no world out there," Draco murmurs to him. "There's just this house: listen, hear it? That's the wind in the trees and the ocean's voice and the thunder and the rain. This is all."
"And you."
"And us."
Harry curls his fingers around Draco's and shuts his eyes. He is not thinking of lake water and the hands of Death around him. He is trying not to think at all, although there is red-gold hair blown against lace curtains, a smiling girl leaning out to smell the roses, quiet words and promises that try to separate this house from the rest of the world; all dance behind the backs of his eyelids.
"I did it because I didn't want to lose you," Harry whispers, hair still damp between the back of his head and Draco's thigh. "I couldn't bear it. I didn't want to be Cyril."
"So you would have made me into him, instead?"
Harry yawns. It is cozier here, warmer, the fire crackling between and over and under their words. The lake is so far away, the coldness, the trembling roses whose petals fall in the breeze. "I don't think," he says, and yawns again, "you were supposed to care."
Draco's hand tightens painfully around Harry's. "But I do. I do."
They are quiet, and the fire speaks for them.
"Wait," Harry says suddenly, and raises his head. Draco looks at him quizzically, but he throws off the blankets and twists out of Draco's arms. "Wait here. I'll just be a minute."
Draco slips back against the chair, blankets rumpled around his knees. He waits, though concern makes him gnaw at his lip and twist his fingers together. The fire hisses reassurance. Draco is about to rise and look for Harry when the door creaks back open and Harry pads barefoot across the floor.
"What are you doing?"
"Here." Harry settles two wineglasses on the table and tips the bottle into the light so that Draco can see. The liquid sparkles warmly in the firelight. "Fred gave it to me. A long time ago - well, it seems that long ago. Drink to christen in a new home, he said."
"And you're just remembering this now?" Draco quirks an eyebrow.
Harry ignores him and pours, watching the wine splash. The firelight reaches out thirstily.
Draco carefully takes the glass from him, pulls Harry back to his side, and says very softly, "I do love you, Harry. I - I do."
Maybe heroes are fated for Death, Harry thinks. Maybe that is all there is, really: will Death make you a hero? Or will being a hero make Death? Maybe it is both.
But Death is not between them. Death is not here. And they are: here in this house that creaks, whispers, tells lonely tales of old loves and old losses, of sorrows it has to share in order to keep standing. Harry, nestled against Draco's side, raises his glass. "To Cyril," he suggests softly.
"And to Abigaile."
They toast, not jubilantly but solemnly, and Draco curls his arm about Harry even more tightly. "Maybe they can rest happily now," he says.
"And the rest of the ghosts behind us."
"C'mere," Draco whispers, and pulls Harry close. Their lips meet in a dizzy jumble of firelight and wine and rose petal perfume.
Some say love, it is a flower, Hermione sings in a far away time, and you its only seed.
The house, this house with its stories and its sorrows, this house with its tangled roses and tragic whispers in the middle of the night, curtains that blow like a young wife's nightgown in the window, floorboards that creak in memory of older footsteps: it speaks to them, and murmurs contently.
Many thank yous to Puck, for being so sweet and encouraging. One line blatantly stolen from Two Lost Souls #14, if anyone cares to guess.
it's the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
it's the dream afraid of waking
that never takes the chance
it's the one who won't be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live…
- The Rose
There is a story about the house; usually there is one, though it rarely survives word of mouth and becomes crushed between blank pages and layers of dust. This house, however: it has a story. Harry remembers hearing it, and the memory is tied with hands smoothing tears from his cheeks and sobs clutching his throat and Hermione's rose petal perfume that she saved for special occasions.
"Tell me a story," he had whispered, the night after Ron's funeral, and he had felt like such a child, sobbing into her shoulder and staining her blouse with tears. But Hermione had smoothed his hair and sat beside him in the dark; she lulled him to sleep with her calm words. Calm, yes; even then she had been, hadn't she? Only he had woken later and she had been crouched by the window, lace curtains brushing against her legs. "Some say love," she'd sung, "it is a river," only her voice had broken and she had cried until dawn broke apart the sky.
In any case, now Hermione is gone too, and the house belongs to Harry.
"I'm not sure why you want it," the former owner - who had never stepped foot inside - had warned Harry, as they stood in the blustering spring and stared up to where pale curtains licked out to taste the breeze. "It's a bit creepy, if you ask me. You know, they say an old headmaster-"
"Loved his wife so much he killed himself, I know the tale," Harry had replied softly, and had thought of Ron.
When Harry moves in, he does not bring with him an entourage of help. It is only he, standing in worn robes, clutching one suitcase, several books, and a bottle of wine. "You always drink to christen a new home," Fred had said, giving it to him: Fred the last one, Fred who never laughed anymore, Fred who paced circles around his family's graves until the grass wore away. Fred, who shook his head when Harry invited him along for a drink, and said, "You know where I'll be."
Harry sits the wine on the table, and decades of dust take flight.
"Abigaile, her name was." He can hear Hermione's even tone, the barest hint of sorrow staining her words. "He was in love with her, madly in love; with her beauty, her goodness, her spirit. He built the house with her every whim in mind. He wanted her as near as could be; some people say Hogsmeade was built around the house. He loved her," she had emphasized, quiet desperation in her voice.
Harry sighs, and leans against the wall. Behind his head, yellowing wallpaper crumbles.
"It wasn't her fault," Ginny had assured him days later, when he asked her for the end of the tale. It was their last conversation. "She was lonely. You would be, too, if you were trapped in a house and your husband was away being headmaster all the time."
Harry had but shrugged. He hadn't agreed. How could she be lonely, if her husband was near, if he was alive? Now, Ron. He was dead. And they were lonely. That was lonely.
"'S not happy," Harry had mumbled, when Hermione had spoken of the headmaster's rage, of his pain, his helplessness when Abigaile ran off.
"I don't know any happy stories," Hermione had replied, and rubbed his shoulder reassuringly. "Go to sleep."
Harry isn't sure why he bought the house, except that he could. He doesn't belong in London where people rush and clamor and point and whisper. He doesn't belong at the Ministry, where everyone bows to him at first sight, but no one meets his eyes. He doesn't belong at Hogwarts, where students stammer and call him "Professor Potter." So why not? Besides, it is a House of Sorrow, with its bony framework creaking in every gust of the wind.
Creak. Harry brushes dust from the sleeves of his robes, listening. "If you really listen, you can hear him call her name," Hermione had said.
"On quiet days," Ginny had added days later, "you can hear her crying."
Only he hears -
What?
"Hello?" he calls, warily, the high ceiling echoing back the syllables. "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello." He supposes it is possible that some village vagabond has hidden himself in this abandoned place. Perhaps the homeless sot has been living in his bedroom, skulking about Hogsmeade and hiding in the day. "Hello?" Harry calls once more, stairs squeaking beneath his shoes. To his left, curtains flutter pale over the windowsill.
Eerie stillness settles.
"Um," Harry says, shivering in the cold, "you can come o-"
There is a shadowy figure in the door at the end of the hall. When Harry takes an uncertain step forward, his mind whirling with thoughts of dead headmasters and their unfaithful wives and lovers who climb trellises to third story windows, the slim shadow melts backwards and then starts.
Harry's heart thuds; for a minute, he believes in spirits.
"Looking for ghosts, Potter?"
A dry, faint echo of old sneering: mocking tones too worn to be derisive. He is so very pale in the shadow painted hall. "You won't find any here," he continues softly. "I'm the only one who haunts this place."
Harry stares.
"Surprised?" Draco takes a step forward, bare feet creaking on the floorboards. With his hair light about his head, the pale shine illuminating his figure, he could be naught but a figment of an overactive imagination. "I wasn't exactly, ah, expecting you either."
"I-" Jerking forward, Harry grasps at the other. He half expects his hands to slip right through Draco, half expects to find Draco insubstantial and wraithlike. He thinks that maybe Draco is some ethereal ghost. But no, he is solid, and he smiles when Harry's fingers bruise his skin. He tilts his chin haughtily despite his ragged appearance.
"I'm not dreaming," Harry says uncertainly. "You - you - live - here?"
"No," Draco replies wryly, softly. "You do."
"I-" His mind tumbles, rebels, trips over itself. "Why didn't you owl me? Why - where have you been all this time? We thought you were dead, gone, lost, disappeared - even Fudge has a reward out for you, only everybody thinks Voldemort's the one who killed you, and your mum's in Azkaban. . ." He trails off, gradually, rush of words slimming down into one angry phrase. "Why didn't you owl me?"
Draco flinches. "I have no place in your life. I - after I left you, after I said that I wouldn't fight - after I ran away."
"Draco," Harry whispers, "everyone else I know is dead."
A nod, unwavering, no sympathy pooling in those grey eyes. "I know they are. I've read the paper."
"Don't you care?" The sight of pale flowers against stark stone looms large in Harry's uncertain vision, and he swallows with effort. "Damn you! You cold, unfeeling - you bastard -"
Draco shoves off his bruising grip, surprisingly strong. "Look," he hisses, voice low. "Do you want to know why I'm living in a ragged room covered in newspapers, sleeping in the same clothes? Do you want to know why I couldn't owl you, not then, not now? Do you want to know why I left you, why I couldn't stand it, why I couldn't-" His eyes are steel. Harry has never seen him this painfully unflinching.
"I used to think it was glamorous. Father would tell me all about the old tales, the duels, the great uprisings in sparks of magic and flashes of light. I wanted it so badly. He told me how important I would be, and it thrilled me. I grew up on that, Harry.
"And then there was you, so silly, so naïve, so destructive to my dreams. I knew someday I'd have to kill you, or watch you die. I knew it, because that was the way the stories went. But you twisted them. And I saw you die a thousand times when I shut my eyes. You and every other wizard in the bloody world, and it wasn't glamorous at all."
"Draco-"
"Shut up. I'm talking. Isn't that what you wanted, for me to talk to you? There's this thing called Spell Shock, see, that's what they call it at St. Mungo's. I've been there. I've seen them. And as much as I - as much as I know you, I know that you can't understand that. You're perfectly fine, you know? You're the bloody hero."
"I am not f-"
"Oh, you pretend you aren't fine. You wander around feeling sorry for yourself, buying huge lonely houses you can bury your grief in, skulking around the pubs in Diagon Alley looking lost and alone. You aren't the one who lies beneath fields of poppies. You aren't the one with memory loss - did you know that? Blaise is a wandering shell now. Wrong place, wrong time, aftershocks of a spell, and boom, she can't even remember her name."
"I am not feeling sorry for myself!" Harry hisses, taking a forceful step forward. "I'm mourning. Don't I deserve to mourn? Don't they deserve it? And how am I any different than you, locking yourself in a room you don't even own, hiding from everything you used to look for?"
Draco crosses his arms and Harry feels something clench in his throat. "You," Draco says, very quietly, "are so selfish."
And Harry doesn't have the heart to be angry. He hasn't really, really been angry since Draco left.
Just empty. And emptier. And emptier. And he thinks that Draco doesn't have the right to call him selfish, because he isn't holding onto anything at all.
"It was Father." Draco sits down - yes, right there on the creaking floor, and the way he takes Harry's hand and pulls him down with him until they are sitting across from each other in the cramped hallway with their knees side by side leaves Harry no choice but to stay silent. "He - when he died. I know it wasn't you, but it could have been and it would have been. You know that."
Harry looks away.
"That's what war's about, you know. Death. And it was just that, that alone. Your side. My side. Before that was all that mattered. And then I didn't want you dead, and I didn't know who I wanted dead."
"So you ran away."
"I'm not a bloody Gryffindor, Potter, I didn't grow up teething on the stories of heroes. I'm not brave." He looks up, hair falling into his face, eyes resolute. "I don't want to be."
"But-"
Draco is silent, and Harry subsides as well. Around them, they can almost hear the faint whisper of a young woman to her lover, leaning over a trellis to touch lips with him.
Harry swallows.
"I'm alone," he says, his voice the barest ragged breath scattering dust along the floor. "I'm alone, now. Please - please don't leave me again."
Draco lets Harry take his hand and even squeezes back with chilled fingers, though he does not meet the other's eyes. "I don't hate you for what you did," he whispers, his gaze dropping. "I don't even blame you. But I don't know how to love you anymore."
"Please."
And Draco says, softly, "All right," as the house creaks and mourns around them, because he has nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be.
Some say love, it is a razor, Hermione sings in a memory, far far away, and Harry silently agrees.
Draco knows he is different, the way Harry knows he is different, the way the both of them are different and the way they recognize it as they rustle the newspaper and split it in half in silence. Something about the hollow look in Draco's eyes, the unshaven stubble of Harry's jaw, the way the both of them read the Daily Prophet with something like fear gnawing at their lips.
War changes you, they know.
The furniture is Apparated in with Magical Movers, Inc., the following day. Harry directs them halfheartedly and Draco skulks in the kitchen, letting the tap drip slowly into a cup but never drinking the water. They have exchanged three words today, three measured words each:
"Good morning, Draco."
"Good morning, Harry."
And Harry thinks of the old headmaster, so estranged from his beautiful Abigaile that she could no longer love him and he could love only a memory of her, a faint wisp of her perfume and the ghost of her smile, no more. Maybe it wasn't her fault, Harry concedes to Ginny and thinks also of Fred's gaunt face and the way he always walks with his hands in his pockets and his head down. It is the same way he circles the plot of his family's graves: looking only at them and no one else.
Harry puts the bottle of wine carefully in the back of the pantry, pours Draco's untouched glass of water out in the sink, and tries not to think of anything except for the lonely birds on the lawn.
Draco goes outside in that still hour just between late afternoon and early dusk, walking beside the rotting fence with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. He makes a solitary picture, but Harry joins him anyway; perhaps it is the way he reminds Harry so much of Fred, and all the other Londoners who do not meet his eyes.
"The roses need trimming," Draco says very quietly, before Harry even reaches him.
Harry's memory is seized by Hermione's perfume and the strong circle of her arm as she held him. He steps forward and peers at the lonely faded roses, shaking his head.
"No? No, what?" There is a hint of old, petulant Draco in his voice and Harry's gaze flies up. He meets Draco's weary gaze, the same color as the background of sky. His gaze travels back to the roses.
"No, I - I don't like roses."
Draco says simply, "Neither do I," and walks on without looking back.
"Draco." When his voice has no effect upon the figure before him or the silent, brooding afternoon, Harry takes a few quick steps forward. "Draco," again. "I'm - I'm sorry."
He turns, slowly, until they are standing face to face under the cloud-cloaked sky, and he almost smiles. "For being who you are?" He reaches for Harry's cheek, cups it for one quiet second, and turns away. "No, you aren't. You never were."
Harry doesn't know how to respond. He used to be left stuttering at Draco's airy insults, and now he is equally stumped with Draco's dreary cynicism. Silence, he thinks, is the best answer.
He wonders if that was what the headmaster thought, frustrated at his love's lost affection, trying always to placate her, keep her happy. He wonders if the headmaster ever felt this cold, this empty.
But as he follows Draco back into the house, he realizes that everyone must have. At least once.
Even the far-off threat of a lump in his throat is not really a stranger to him; it is a comfort, almost, after such time. He says quietly, "I'm going to start a fire," and when he walks to the library with its recently shelved books, Draco trails him.
Harry doesn't notice the way Draco's hands shake until after he pockets his wand.
"What-"
"Don't touch me."
"I-"
"Don't touch me."
"Are you all-"
"I'm fine."
Harry says, very hesitantly, "Do you want some tea?" When Draco nods, he finds the kettle and busies himself so as not to think of Draco's pale fingers trembling against each other. It is only when he has the comfort of cracked china and a little sugar bowl that he reenters the library; he finds Draco perched on the arm of a chair, limbs uncannily graceful, a tiny black book in his fingers.
"'It is quiet for the first time in four days,'" Draco reads coolly as Harry sets the tray on the table. "'I could not sleep for the spells and explosions, and now I cannot sleep in the silence. We adapt so easily. I think human beings can wrap their minds around death, too, if they try, and trying is all we've been doing. When death comes for me tomorrow - for they attack again tomorrow, surely, everyone says, and we will fall - it will be a relief.'" Draco looks up and shuts the little book. "Her name was Elizabeth. She was twelve. She gave this to me when she knew I couldn't save her."
Hiding how shaken he feels, Harry moves to sit down. "So you ran from her, too. Did you ever not run away?"
"Your people didn't rape Pansy," Draco said, very casually. "She was too good for that. No, instead, they burned down her house and they took her engagement ring - diamonds, and so many spells it cost another fortune. Just think of some lonely widow out there, that loot her only memory of her husband."
"Don't call them my people. I never told them to do that."
"'A good leader takes responsibility for the actions of his men, and insures that they do nothing he would not do.' I think my father said that."
"I was seventeen."
"They were younger."
Harry grips his teacup so tightly that his knuckles pale and shake. Tea sloshes perilously close to the rim. "I did not start the war," he says tightly.
"That's why you're a hero. And no matter what you do, you'll always be the hero."
Harry says quietly, "When I lit the fire, you-"
"I don't want to talk about it. Is that all right with you, precious Master Potter? I don't want to talk about it."
Helplessly, "Then drink your tea."
So they sit, with bitter comfort in their mouths, to-be-exchanged words lying dormant beneath their tongues, each seeing their own demons leaping from the fire. After a long, long silence, Draco looks up. "There is a story about the house, you know."
"I know."
"About the headmaster, and his be-"
"When I said 'I know,' I meant that I know," Harry snaps. "Just because I wasn't raised in the magical world doesn't mean I'm ignorant."
Draco sips.
Looking at him, so diminutive in the leather chair, hair in light shadows around his face and eyes downcast into the clear liquid of his cup, Harry has to be afraid. He has to think of Abigaile and lovers that climb trellises and the way he fears fears fears that Draco will go away.
"Don't leave me," Harry says. "Don't run away with Death."
"I hate Death," Draco murmurs to his tea. "That's what the war did for me. I hate Death."
Harry looks into the fire, his empty teacup still in his hands. "Yes," he rejoins, "but you hated me."
He doesn't need to add, And you loved me, too.
They are in the produce aisle with signs offering loudly, "Try a tomato; they're terrific!" and "Gerda's Glorious Green Grapes!" when Draco crosses his arms and says resolutely, "We should get a house elf."
Harry frowns as he ignores a talking sign chattering animatedly about broccoli. "What?"
"A house elf. Are you deaf?"
"No, but you're an unscrupulous bastard."
Draco pauses at the carrots. "You call me unscrupulous? You?"
"You lecture about war and death and humanitarian principles like some saint," Harry points out sharply, weighty circles under his eyes signifying the late lack of sleep, "and then you want a - a house elf?"
"War has nothing to do with house elves."
"Wait until one happens for their emancipation."
Draco stares at him with that cold, silent gaze, a quiet pain taking flight in his eyes. After a moment he picks up an apple, inspects it, and sets it carefully back down. "That isn't funny," he tells Harry coolly, and walks on.
"I don't want a house elf," Harry insists, because Hermione's eyes are haunting him and the only picture he has of her anymore is a tearful one. He always hated it when Hermione cried - strong, capable Hermione. When she broke down, he had always felt the world would soon come to an end. "It's awful. Besides, they're creepy."
"Fine." Draco picks up a head of broccoli as if he has never seen one before, and the signs all screech at him to stop touching the merchandise. "If I want something, then, you can bloody get it for me."
They end up hiring a stout little woman named Marie who comes three days a week. She cooks, cleans, and gossips enough for three women her size. Her husband died in the war, or even she would not be working for them: Hogsmeade buzzes about the inhabitants of the house, and everyone fears the headmaster's ghost.
"You are possessed by the Headmaster, they say," she tells Draco when she brings them breakfast. They all call him that, 'the Headmaster,' as if he is but a legend. "Did not see you come. You never speak. Pale as a ghost. You see?"
Here to haunt me, Harry thinks, and remind me of what we have lost.
It is one late, late night when Harry wakes and is rejected by slumber's embrace, watching the curtains twist languidly around the open window. Outside, the moon gleams in a sickle curve, the color of french vanilla and old parchment. He eventually throws off his sheets and slips into yesterday's clothes, bare feet tiptoeing down the hall. Moonlight skips across the floorboards of Draco's room, but the bed is empty and unslept in.
"Draco?" he calls softly, as he steals downstairs.
"I'm in the library."
Draco's penchant for books has filled the shelves, the one mark that he lives here with Harry and is not simply a spirit. He will disappear some late afternoons and return with a crate of books under his arm; in storage from the manor, he'll explain, or just in from Flourish & Blotts.
Harry yawns in the doorway and thinks that Draco could be a ghost, pale and wraithlike, blurred by the light of candles and the moon. He stops with one hand on the doorframe, taking in the shadows on the library walls. "Hey," he says quietly. "You still awake?"
Drawling, "No, I'm sleeping. Bad dreams?"
"Not really."
"That's right. You wouldn't be haunted, would you."
Harry swallows and tries not to think of guilt and defensiveness and ghosts that keep him awake. Not everyone is haunted in his sleep, Harry thinks. He is afraid to breathe, afraid that if he makes sudden motions this ethereal picture will subside into the darkness and he will still be lying asleep.
"You should get some rest," he says eventually, shifting from his slouch against the doorway and moving hesitantly forward. "At least try."
Draco shrugs. "Why? I don't have to do anything, anymore. Neither do you; you live off that ridiculous sum of money the Ministry pays you to use your name and your face and never you, because you - the real you - scares the children you're supposed to be protecting."
Harry gives a wry quirk of the lips that isn't really a smile. "And you're living off that name, my name."
Rather than spitting back a bitter retort, as he used to be wont to do, Draco glances down and away.
"What are you reading?" Harry asks, instead of pursuing the subject. He doesn't live to get a rise out of Draco anymore. He isn't really sure what he is living for.
Draco shows him the book spine. Rowena Ravenclaw: Memoirs. Harry quirks an eyebrow.
"Interesting?"
"Most of it. Long-winded and lofty, but she was a very smart woman. She wrote a lot about war."
"Figures," Harry mutters, as he sinks into the opposing chair.
"What?"
"I said, it figures! I'm tired of worrying whether or not I'll offend you by making the slightest mention of - of anything! All right? That's all we talk about, war and war and death and war. You call this a relationship?"
"I don't. You do."
"Well, we might as well be dead like the rest of them, for all the living we're doing!"
Draco throws the book to the floor. It skitters towards Harry's feet and he stands up, kicking it forcefully across the library. "You hide in here," Harry hisses, "and you are like a bloody ghost, just like Marie says, you're like a ghost that haunts me with all these creepy stories that I don't want to hear, because you know what? I suffered too. I. Suffered. Too! You may not believe me, but I didn't want to kill anyone. I wanted to keep everyone safe. Safe! Not dead! All right? It was Voldemort!"
"What's the matter, Potter? Too scared to use a Memory Charm?"
"I don't want to forget," Harry says softly, though there is a steel edge to his tone. "But I don't want to think of nothing else for the rest of my life. I thought - I thought that after the war, we could be you and me, just that. I thought we wouldn't have to worry about your father and my loyalties and who wanted to kill whom."
Draco nods, as if he has expected as much. "So I wasn't the only one with glamorous dreams."
"I want something to live for, Draco. I wanted you to be that."
The library is silent.
"I don't want to exist. I want to live. I don't want to be a name in six thousand newspapers. I want to be more than Harry Potter the Hero, Who Also Happens To Be A Murderer."
Draco says, carefully, "You're right; I should go to bed."
Harry catches his arm and pulls him back, angry words hovering on the edges of his nervously-bitten lips, trying to avoid the way Draco's eyes are avoiding his. That is all they do, really, avoid and placate and ignore and pretend.
"Draco-"
"I'm tired."
In another time, in another place, Harry would pull Draco to him until Draco's resistance was broken and he collapsed in Harry's arms. Harry would make Draco looks at him, really look, and he would pull the other boy to his lips. And maybe, Harry thinks, in that time, he would have something to hold on to.
Here, ancient voices are settling in the curves of his ears. He cannot ignore them. That can be his excuse, maybe, for letting Draco slip out of his grasp and up the creaking stairs.
But really, he just wants to let go so that Draco never does.
Marie finds him the next morning, clucking her tongue like a mother hen. For a moment, her kindly smile reminds Harry of Mrs. Weasley, and he has to choke back a hopeful breath. Her hair is white and pinned as carefully as McGonagall's ever was; even so, he must peer closely to make sure he is not dreaming up a phantom of the past.
"I've brought you some porridge," she tells him, with a careful pat on his shoulder. As she settles the tray on the table, she pulls the book from his listless fingers. "Fall asleep, did you? It's usually Master Draco that I find here in the morning."
Harry shifts his shoulder, feeling the ache from sleeping too long in an awkward position. He has the sneaking feeling that he is getting old.
"Where - where is Draco?" he asks sleepily.
"In the bed you should be in, I'm sure," she says, fussing around his breakfast, and misses Harry's blush at her inadvertent innuendo. "Shall I wake him?"
Harry watches her set Rowena Ravenclaw: Memoirs on the table beside his tray, and he stands with a yawn. "I'll do it."
"I don't know about you," Marie clucks. "I fear for your health on the days I don't come. Reading into the morning, sleeping late in library chairs, missing meals - you'll fall ill one day, just wait."
"I have," Harry says, a yawn splitting his sentence, "an uncanny ability to skirt things like that. Death doesn't like me."
"And well that he doesn't! Don't you joke about things like that, Master Harry."
"Now you sound like Draco," he replies and climbs the stairs slowly to where the shadows still lurk. There are things to do, really: re-paper the hallway, fix that broken stair, magically mend the rattling window. He'll have to do it later. Draco hates when he uses his wand; well, really, Harry hates when he uses his wand, because he can see Draco shake.
The door creaks when he prods it open. Everything in the house seems to have a sound, whining and rattling and creaking beneath even the lightest footfall. He wonders idly if it helped Abigaile know when her husband was coming, when her lover needed to flee.
Harry knows how Draco used to sleep. In fact, when Harry was entranced by everything of Draco, he would watch Draco sleep - and wonder how the insufferable boy could manage to even sleep arrogantly.
Harry doesn't like watching Draco now, because he doesn't want to compare. He doesn't like to notice how Draco curls into himself, as if frightened.
So he stands at the window and watches the roses.
It is a quiet morning, a blanket sky of cotton swabs, bunching in shadows around the edges. From up here, the lawn seems far away, the roses less intimidating. Harry hums a quiet tune under his breath: some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need…
He hears Draco wake before he hears his name, sheets rustling and limbs unfolding.
"Sleep okay?" Harry asks, his eyes tracing what he knows is the figure of Draco on the canvas of sky, knowing the other without turning around. The clouds stride towards his invisible portrait, rumbling.
"More or less. Did you?" Draco is asking Harry's back, elbows propped and sinking into his pillow.
"Didn't get much." And Harry turns now. "I read your book. Rowena's journal? Some of it." Ruefully, "You're right, she is rather long-winded."
Draco raises an eyebrow. Somehow, his tousled hair isn't comical; it's almost depressing. "And?"
"I didn't know all of that about her. That Hogwarts was originally her idea, and that Salazar Slytherin wouldn't participate until she convinced him. Is that little dusty statue of her in the book shop really her, like the introduction says?"
"It's modeled after Wisdom," Draco replies, "but it has her features. C'mere, I have another book for you."
Harry sits with hesitation, his back against the curve of Draco's kneecaps. Draco pulls a little dusty book from his nightstand, its spine split from being left propped open. The pages rustle as he flips. "What is it?" Harry asks. "You're the one who reads books all the time, not me."
"Here," Draco says. His voice is strangely mellow, hushed beneath the strains of clouds outside. He has found the page, lost in the center of the book, the script faded. "Can I tell you the story?"
I don't know any happy stories. Tears in his eyes. In hers. Harry shrugs, his hands in his lap. "Sure."
Draco's smile is faint, a bit ghostly itself. He clears his throat before glancing down at the book; his fingers absently smooth the page. He meets Harry's eyes.
"Cyril Malfoy was the only Malfoy to ever become Headmaster of Hogwarts," he begins, softly, as if afraid someone will overhear. "I think my father resented that. He was my great grandfather's cousin, though they say he had all the same Malfoy features - pale, blonde, slight. He built this house."
Harry's picture of a man driven wild by grief, dark haired and wide eyed, swiftly morphs into an older version of Draco.
He shivers.
"I know you know the story. But it's all word of mouth. It's a legend in these parts, I suppose. He fell in love with Abigaile, a red-haired girl ten years his junior, and fancied her in love with him. The stories all agree there: he loved her. Loved her so madly that he couldn't imagine life another way." Somewhere between his words, Draco's hand finds Harry's. He never slows. "No one is ever sure if she loved him."
"But she must have, she-"
"Was of another old family, and arranged marriages weren't uncommon." Draco gives a slight tilt of his shoulder. "I don't know. He was an interesting person, Cyril. Passionate. He loved knowledge and he loved Abigaile even more. When he lost her, he went so mad that he lost his job, and had nothing whatsoever to live for."
Harry mutters something that might be, "Who does?" Draco does not hear or, perhaps, does not acknowledge.
"He built her this house. Put his life into it, I suppose. Bought her everything she could possibly desire, bringing in paintings from the manor, from Rome, all over the world. He wanted her to be happy. Would have given anything to make her happy. But he had Hogwarts, too."
"And she had?"
"No one knows who he was. No one really knows this story, Harry. The Malfoys aren't proud of being betrayed. The Malfoys aren't proud of anything in which they don't come out on top."
Harry says nothing at all.
"She loved roses, Abigaile. He brought them to her. Her lover brought them to her. She planted them here, and all the Hogsmeade residents would come by to see them bloom."
Gaze sliding to the window, Harry imagines the roses along the fence. He tightens his grip on Draco's hand, trying to press warmth into those chill fingers. "And then she left him," he says softly, not entirely sure whom he sympathizes with the most. Mad, passionate Cyril, with the same haunting gray eyes? Beautiful Abigaile who loved roses, loved anything but her absent, adoring husband? The anonymous lover?
He sees sorrow in all of their faces. He sees the echo of Draco's smile, or maybe Draco is only reflecting theirs.
"Yes," Draco says. "Then she left him. And he lost everything."
Harry asks, very calmly, their entwined hands motionless on the sheets, "Are you not proud of me, then? If you're a Malfoy?"
Draco has no response.
That is the way Marie finds them, bustling upstairs with Harry's cold porridge, tsk-tsk-ing as she finds both too tired to rise. In the flurry of Marie's words and bowls and spoons and quickly made beds, Draco manages to lean in towards Harry's ear and whisper, ever so quietly:
"Why do you think we hate the Weasleys? It's because of Abigaile."
And then Harry eats his breakfast as Marie insists, while Draco refuses and goes out to look at the roses.
Cornelius Fudge is old.
Harry is not sure quite how old, he has not bothered to check, and the cake has been cut so the frosting numbers have been divided among thousands of Ministry workers. He thinks it rather rude to ask someone, and so he keeps quiet.
In any case, the Minister has grown even more rotund and jovial over the years, his hair paling to a steel wool gray and his features mellowing into a sallow cheeked expression of absent approval. He presides over the gathering like a decaying emperor, pudgy fingers waving along to the orchestra.
"He's like a symbol of the wizarding world," Draco says in Harry's ear as they sip punch and contemplate the bright-eyed people swirling around them. "Old, obese, pretty much ridiculous. Sad."
"That's not true," Harry replies. He knows it is.
"More of a symbol than you are."
"Take out the obese, and we're not too far different."
Draco sips his punch. He sets it on the table. Little is said, their unspoken words brushed into the crowd before they can be held onto. Harry sits his punch down beside Draco's, not very thirsty or very entertained.
"Do you think it's safely polite to go now?" he asks, just as an eager voice chimes behind them.
"Harry? Harry Potter?"
A sandy-haired, beaming young man with a camera is beaming at them. Harry blinks, thrown off guard. "Yes?"
The man's face falls. His vibrant red robes look out of place on him, gold-embroidered silk too elaborate for his hopeful, foolish features. "You don't remember me, do you? It's Dennis. Dennis Creevey."
"Of course I remember you, Dennis," Harry lies, though now the boy is recognizable. "How are you doing? How's Colin?"
Dennis freezes. "Colin died," he tells Harry, eyes not even shifting to Draco. It's as if he is simply a ghost, seen only by Harry. "In the war. Don't you remember? He was a photographer for the Prophet, went to the front lines. He took the job because he wanted to help you in any way he could."
Harry swallows guiltily. "No, I - I don't remember. I'm sorry, Dennis."
Dennis shrugs. His expression is closed off, distant. "It wasn't your fault, was it? Anyway, I'm supposed to take your picture for the Prophet. Do you want to pose with Fudge?"
"Must I?"
"No," says Dennis, as there is a crowd of reporters clustered around Fudge at the moment. "Here, just - stand over there. Right."
And that is how a grainy picture of Harry and Draco ends up on the back page of the Daily Prophet, both of them smiling half-heartedly, shuffling their feet between the print. The caption does not even recognize this pale, quiet companion as Draco Malfoy; as far as they are concerned, he is but another guest speaking with Harry Potter.
Afterwards, Harry pulls Draco aside. "I didn't know about Colin," he says, fingers twining together as if he faults himself. "I didn't know."
"You can't know all of them." Even Draco's voice is not as harsh as Harry expects it to be. "No one expects you to know. You're - you. You did so much; how could you possibly know everyone you lost along the way?"
Harry doesn't remind Draco how Draco used to pin Colin against the wall and laugh, throwing his camera to the floor. Harry doesn't remind Draco at all, because Harry doesn't like to be reminded, himself.
He is not sure which Draco he likes better. How can you be in love with two versions of the same person? How can you, when they are so contrary?
And Harry is not sure if Draco can be in love at all.
"They like your name," Draco says, the next day, in the library. The fire crackles, reaching for the newspaper. Draco tosses it in and the pages curl, shrivel, dissipate. "I counted it seventeen times in that tiny article."
"Fudge made the front page," Harry shrugs. "I suppose news must be slow."
"Or they, like everyone else, hate being reminded of the war."
"Do I have to live and die as a symbol?" Harry demands, though his voice is quiet enough. Lately, he has not had the effort to demand anything. "The war is over, Draco. It's over! Why is it still between us? Why is it between me and the rest of the world?"
"You put it there," is the soft reply. "Or maybe it's just the way things are supposed to be."
"You believe in fate?"
Draco shakes his head, leaning forward to meet eyes with the fire. "I don't believe in anything."
"Why not?"
"Why not? Must you even-"
"That's what I said. Why not? So you lost your father and you saw the world suffer and you experienced the war. I'm not saying that you didn't. I'm not saying it wasn't important. But where do you think I was? Sitting in a nice tent, waiting for reports? I killed Voldemort! You never ask me about that, do you? You never ask me anything about the war."
"Maybe I've heard enough of it."
"Then why do you think of nothing else?"
"I didn't suffer more than you did, Draco; I didn't suffer more than anyone else in this bloody war. But I didn't suffer less."
"I don't want to-"
"You never want to talk about it, except when you want to talk about it!"
"You blame me for leaving you," Draco says.
"I blame you for never coming back."
And for an instant Draco's eyes soften and Harry can see the pain. He feels it as his own, feels the way Draco must have felt for all the time without him. "Harry," Draco says softly. The firelight illuminates his cheeks, paints his face a lurid shade. He reaches out, hesitantly, to Harry's knee; his hand falls short. "I -"
"You still haven't," Harry tells the fire. "Sometimes I don't think you ever will."
He stands up, leaving his own copy of the paper left behind in his chair, and crouches beside Draco. "You are a ghost," he says. "Maybe Cyril is haunting you; I don't know. You're haunting me. What is he making you afraid of?"
Draco does not answer.
"Sometimes I think it would have been better if I died killing Voldemort, that I should have. Then I could be a hero."
But Draco still has no response.
So Harry takes Draco's hand and pulls him closer and paints his breath on Draco's lips, just an instant away. "I love you," he says, and does not know if he is speaking for himself or for himself of five years ago or for Abigaile or for Cyril or for Hermione or for anyone, anyone else. But he knows that it is he who pulls back when Draco whispers, "Don't," and it is most certainly he who leaves Draco alone with the dying fire and a scrap of paper with Harry's picture fluttering unburned from the coals.
Harry is shivering; he feels the bite of autumn as he trudges through the leaves, watching the lake shiver in sympathy as the wind tousles its surface. The day is, like so many of late, a dreary one.
He strips off his shoes by the edge of the water, listening to its voice. "And you think," it seems to murmur, licking against the sand, that love is only for the lucky, and the strong…"
His socks are draped across his shoes, settled carefully to one side; the sand is cold, damp, frigid between his toes.
He shivers.
Behind him, Harry can make out the rooftops between the soon-to-be-barren branches, see the spirals of smoke drifting above the tree line. He swallows, turns around, and does not look back again. Somewhere, up that path and through the woods and past the shops and up a hill, there is the house standing imposing and imperious. Within its creaking frame sits Draco, probably bent over one book or another, oblivious.
It's a sad thing, really, Harry thinks. House of Sorrow. Cyril's hands probably cursed it, the way fate cursed him; he wonders why he bought it to begin with. Tempt fate, maybe. Or just succumb to it.
"How can you just stand there?" Ginny had screamed at him in the cemetery, after all the mourners had gone and it was only family. Family, and Harry and Hermione, who were close enough to be called family anyway.
Hermione had taken Ginny aside and tried to comfort her, but they had both ended up with tears streaming down their cheeks.
And Harry had stood there, the way he stands now, with goosebumps raised up and down his arms and an emptiness inside.
Draco was right, probably, Harry thinks as he steps into the water. He almost leaps back out, so cold is the water, but he clenches his teeth. Remember Voldemort, he wants to tell himself. Remember Tom Riddle. Remember everyone else.
So Harry walks forward, the hems of his pants becoming saturated and muddy with the lake shallows. Freezing mud squelches between his toes. Yes, he thinks, Draco is right: war is a tragedy. But then, so is life. So is love. Harry can't differentiate any longer, what is the most tragic, and so all he does is let everything go. He was barely holding on to begin with.
The water reaches his knees, and Harry thinks of Ron. Ron was the first, really: the first person in the world he ever loved, save for the vague shadowy shapes of his parents. Oh, he had loved Hagrid for saving him from the Dursleys, and he had loved Dumbledore for sending Hagrid, but Ron was Ron.
Everybody leaves me, he had thought as he scattered rose petals over Ron's grave with everyone else; by the time Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were laid beside Ron, Harry was used to it.
Harry lets the water numb his legs up to his thighs, and he thinks of Hermione. Strong, painfully brave Hermione, always so solid. She had looked so frail in her coffin, hands folded, eyes shut. It was a Muggle funeral and he had gone in a secondhand suit, quickly distributing his bouquet of roses before running off to an empty flat with no one there.
Another step, and it is Sirius. Another for Dumbledore, and yet another for Remus. The next ones are for his parents, though Harry does not stop to dwell on them: he has been since the moment he lost them.
Harry thinks about all the casualties that Draco has told him of, of Blaise with no memory, of Pansy with no engagement ring and eventually no sanity, of all the others so numerous he cannot even remember to match fate with name. It might have been Goyle that was attacked by the Muggles, but then it might have been Crabbe; he could never tell them apart. Perhaps it wasn't really Justin Finch-Fletchley who was trampled by the giants, but then again perhaps it was. Harry vaguely remembers hearing about it and spitting out that he deserved it for betraying them to Voldemort.
But right now Harry shivers, and part of it is for Justin.
When the water reaches his chest and Harry is fighting to not turn back, he thinks of Tom Riddle. This makes him keep walking, even when his feet are numb and cannot feel the sand beneath them. He wonders if Tom was ever in love. He wonders if Tom did not have it easier: he was hated by the world, yes, but he died. And he was great. And Harry is the hero who is floundering in the lake, ignored by the world he'd saved.
Not that he wants to be remembered. Not in the way he is, with a few ribbons and an occasional newspaper picture and loads of Galleons for his name.
He isn't sure what he wants, or wanted, except that it probably has to do with ash-pale hair and eyes that aren't quite malicious but aren't drowned in sorrow, with the taste of someone he's almost forgotten, with a dream he thinks, only thinks, that he once had.
And then he thinks of Draco. He thinks of midnight trysts and abandoned classrooms, of spitted words and shared passion, of the way Draco would laugh when Harry slipped on the hem of his invisibility cloak and had to steady himself with his arms around Draco. He thinks of pain and the bitter taste of alcohol when Draco left, without a word, without a note. He thinks of pale hair tinted a stronger gold with firelight, bent over yellow parchment and fading ink. He thinks of hands that shake and a voice that tells Harry, with only a trace of the old imperious tone, that he'd better light the fire and wash the dishes and do all of that.
Harry's first instinct is to swim. He thinks everyone's instinct is to live, really, but he forces himself to be still and watch the bubbles trickle from his nose. How long can he hold his breath? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. . .
The end of a hero, Harry thinks, eyes fluttering closed against the water, should not be so surprising. Not when the world is the way it is. Not when he has never thought of himself as one, and has never really settled easily into the mold he is supposed to settle into.
And he thinks that he has left Draco, after all, the way Abigaile left her Cyril, creeping out with her lover and out of the story forever. And perhaps it is Death that has been romancing him with whispers, through the curtains, under the crescent moon with the knife-sharp points, in between the snapping of the fire. Death, not the lamenting of Cyril, not the murmured love words of Abigaile, not the fancied quiet voices of years and years ago.
And I thought it would be you all the time, Harry thinks to Draco with red swimming before his eyes.
And then he doesn't think at all.
Maybe Harry dies.
And maybe Draco mourns for him, head bent the way Harry always saw him in the library, cutting all the roses to scatter on Harry's tomb. Maybe Draco finds the bottle of wine in the back of the pantry and drinks himself into a stupor, because fate is fate and loneliness is nothing more than having nothing to live for.
Or maybe Harry lives.
Maybe Harry shies from Death and finds himself gasping for air, arms floundering, or maybe he is washed up on the cold beach and almost freezes but doesn't, doesn't, because Death doesn't seem to like him. So he told Marie.
Or maybe -
"I thought you hated magic," Harry coughs weakly, though it is hard to speak at all with Draco's arms holding him so desperately that he thinks he sees stars when he closes his eyes. They are both dripping water when they Apparate to the house, Draco gripping his wand and Harry's arm equally hard. He has been spilling words the way Harry's lips spill lake water, haphazard, urgent.
"Why-" Harry stands in the center of their kitchen, lake water pooling around his feet. His voice is strained. "Why did you follow me?"
Draco comes back with blankets in his arms. "I don't know." A half smile. "Maybe it was fate."
"I thought you d-didn't believe in fate."
Draco says nothing at all. And then Harry doesn't speak either, because they are a bundle of arms and blankets and saturated clothes, and Draco's are about as soaked as Harry's are.
Later, they both sit by the fire, Harry's head on Draco's lap, Harry's fingers trying to still Draco's trembling ones. Harry's feet are bare and tingle with the heat of the flames. There are words fighting to rise from his lips, but his mouth won't cooperate: lassitude weighs down his eyelids, his limbs, his tongue. He would rather curl into the warmth of Draco and forget about the tang of lake water and Death in the back of his throat. Death's kisses leave marks.
Draco brushes a finger along his cheek to his jaw. "Why did you leave me? Why did you - why did you try to drown?"
"Everyone leaves me," Harry whispers. "Everyone. I just didn't want to be the last one."
"Isn't that what heroes are supposed to be?"
Harry says, softly, "I'm not a hero. You of all people should know that. There aren't any, really. There's just pain, and loneliness, and loss, and-" He trails off. "Bravery and ambition are closer than we think, you know. They're the things that make you who you are, but in the end it's the world that defines you. Not you."
"There's no world out there," Draco murmurs to him. "There's just this house: listen, hear it? That's the wind in the trees and the ocean's voice and the thunder and the rain. This is all."
"And you."
"And us."
Harry curls his fingers around Draco's and shuts his eyes. He is not thinking of lake water and the hands of Death around him. He is trying not to think at all, although there is red-gold hair blown against lace curtains, a smiling girl leaning out to smell the roses, quiet words and promises that try to separate this house from the rest of the world; all dance behind the backs of his eyelids.
"I did it because I didn't want to lose you," Harry whispers, hair still damp between the back of his head and Draco's thigh. "I couldn't bear it. I didn't want to be Cyril."
"So you would have made me into him, instead?"
Harry yawns. It is cozier here, warmer, the fire crackling between and over and under their words. The lake is so far away, the coldness, the trembling roses whose petals fall in the breeze. "I don't think," he says, and yawns again, "you were supposed to care."
Draco's hand tightens painfully around Harry's. "But I do. I do."
They are quiet, and the fire speaks for them.
"Wait," Harry says suddenly, and raises his head. Draco looks at him quizzically, but he throws off the blankets and twists out of Draco's arms. "Wait here. I'll just be a minute."
Draco slips back against the chair, blankets rumpled around his knees. He waits, though concern makes him gnaw at his lip and twist his fingers together. The fire hisses reassurance. Draco is about to rise and look for Harry when the door creaks back open and Harry pads barefoot across the floor.
"What are you doing?"
"Here." Harry settles two wineglasses on the table and tips the bottle into the light so that Draco can see. The liquid sparkles warmly in the firelight. "Fred gave it to me. A long time ago - well, it seems that long ago. Drink to christen in a new home, he said."
"And you're just remembering this now?" Draco quirks an eyebrow.
Harry ignores him and pours, watching the wine splash. The firelight reaches out thirstily.
Draco carefully takes the glass from him, pulls Harry back to his side, and says very softly, "I do love you, Harry. I - I do."
Maybe heroes are fated for Death, Harry thinks. Maybe that is all there is, really: will Death make you a hero? Or will being a hero make Death? Maybe it is both.
But Death is not between them. Death is not here. And they are: here in this house that creaks, whispers, tells lonely tales of old loves and old losses, of sorrows it has to share in order to keep standing. Harry, nestled against Draco's side, raises his glass. "To Cyril," he suggests softly.
"And to Abigaile."
They toast, not jubilantly but solemnly, and Draco curls his arm about Harry even more tightly. "Maybe they can rest happily now," he says.
"And the rest of the ghosts behind us."
"C'mere," Draco whispers, and pulls Harry close. Their lips meet in a dizzy jumble of firelight and wine and rose petal perfume.
Some say love, it is a flower, Hermione sings in a far away time, and you its only seed.
The house, this house with its stories and its sorrows, this house with its tangled roses and tragic whispers in the middle of the night, curtains that blow like a young wife's nightgown in the window, floorboards that creak in memory of older footsteps: it speaks to them, and murmurs contently.