Ha, he thinks, even as he hears her scream. He has enough time to notice that she has cleared the wreckage and to curl up in a ball, enough time to cover his face with his arms and catch sight of George barreling towards him, leaping over Draco’s fallen chair, but he was not fast enough. Seems like I’ve done something great after all.
Chapter 30
Harry
After fighting off monsters for the past seven years, Harry had learned to never stop watching over his shoulder, but that doesn’t mean he always realizes what he’s seeing.
Like, he got asked for his wand just like everyone else, and instead of thinking about how strange it was that they were claiming it was for security when it had never been done before, he only thought about how everyone else was handing it over without a problem (everyone except Draco, who hesitated just for a fraction of a second, so fast you could blink and miss it) and how his lingering unease must have just been a product of the war, another way that he was scarred, so he hands it over and tries to push away how naked and vulnerable it made him feel.
Or how when Hermione got called to give her speech, everyone sat in their seats and cheered for her, all of the ministry people with stiff smiles on their face and all of her friends genuinely happy, except for one man in the back dressed in black like the waitstaff but not, because his clothes did not have their insignia on it, and also that same man was the one who crept from the back of the room down the side and finally edged his way up to the podium, close enough where he might have been distracting if he was not the kind of person who people looked right past.
Or the fact that the chandelier was swaying, just a bit of a tilt, like it was caught in a soft wind, and for once, the only time it would have been helpful, he was not comparing it to a moment from the war, was not thinking of dungeon doors and Hermione’s screams and a beautiful place to die with friends, he was thinking how it was sort of pretty, up until the moment where Hermione herself realized that it was happening, her expression changing from annoyed to panicked as she half raised her hand to block the light that had lit up across her face.
Harry sees it all, but he doesn’t understand what it means, not like Draco, who is up and moving before anyone else puts together what is happening, screaming at Hermione to move, get down, get out of the way with such desperation that despite everything, Harry is struck by the thought that he really must love her, to yell like that. Their table is in the very front row, so other than having to duck around George’s chair, there is nothing to block his path to the podium, so it’s a straight path from them to Hermione.
They all watch it happening. He sees it like it’s in slow motion, like he’s back in battle and his survival senses are trying to give him extra moments to figure out which way to dodge. This time, there is nothing to do, because he had been so confident in their own safety that he could not yet figure out that something bad was about to happen, and anyways, what was he supposed to do without a wand? There was nothing for him to do, except for watch.
He can hear Ron yelling, screaming for people to move, to help. He can see George understand what was going to happen at the same time that Harry had, how he moves to his side for a wand that is not there. He can see Kingsley, running, his mouth half open in a yell, but he could also see that he would not get there in time.
He can also see Draco, running, leaping, closing that last gap to throw himself at Hermione. She is knocked to the side and rolls down the few steps to George and Harry’s feet, and even though she is crying out in pain and clearly is having trouble breathing (they would find out later that she broke two ribs and bruised three more on her left side) he does not stop, just hurtles over her, trying to get to where Draco is lying in time.
There is not enough time. There’s no time for anything, just for Draco to curl in on himself and throw his hands over his face, and Harry just barely catches a glimpse of how relieved he looks, how proud before he’s covered up in the rubble.
Somewhere, someone is screaming, crying out for Draco to be alright. It’s only later, when all the sounds come rushing back and he becomes aware of the stinging pain in his hands that Harry realizes it was him.
“Come on.” He is digging through the rubble, pulling away twisted lengths of metal and sweeping away the scattered crystals. They crunch under his feet and grind into his skin when he drops to his knees, rip through his palms when he starts to dig through it all. For the first time in his life, he feels bad for the people who did not know what it is to be magic, who have to watch things like this happen and be helpless to stop them. “Come on, Draco, come on.”
Because he was helpless. He was helpless before it started and he was helpless as he watched it fall and he was helpless now, moving this mess away from where he thought Draco had been buried, when for all Harry knew he was three feet to his right and Harry was only burying him deeper.
Someone falls to their knees beside him, and without looking he knows it is Ron, because he knows those hands, those scars and those freckles and the one mole where his palm meets wrist, and he is filled with an overwhelming wave of gratitude to him, knowing that he must have passed by Hermione to come stand beside him, to help Harry find the one he loves even though the woman that Ron loves had just been attacked.
“Come on, Draco,” Harry says, and he is not sure what that means, if he is calling for him and really expecting an answer, if it is a plea or a prayer or something stuck between, if he actually thinks there is someone out there listening. “Be alright. Be alright.”
In his head, Harry is thinking that all he needs is to find him, to clear the dust and debris off Draco’s face and crush him to his chest, hold him and never let him go. But when he does find him, half pulling him out of the disaster before Ron grabs Harry underneath the arms and pulls him away, it does not help, because even though Harry had seen a lot of awful things, this might have to be the worst.
Penelope is trying to talk to him. Harry knows that, dimly, even recognizes her words, but he doesn’t really listen. “This is a job for a healer, Harry,” She is saying, and Percy has grabbed him by one arm and Ron by the other and they are pulling him away, but Harry isn’t cooperating, because all he is looking at is Draco, with the blood snaking down from his temple and the dust on his face and his breathing so harsh and loud that it might be better if he could not hear the breath at all, because at least it would not sound like he was in so much pain. “Let me do my job.”
He only stops fighting when George joins him. He can’t say why, really, except for the fact that if there is one person in the world who knows what is like to lose someone that is so unbelievably vital to your own well-being, it is George. Harry can’t imagine that he would ask him to step away if there was a way for Harry to help.
“She’s going to take care of him.” Percy tells him, his jaw set and his face smeared with blood. Later, Harry would learn that it was Percy’s own. He caught him with an elbow to the face when Percy first tried to pull Harry away. “She’s the best at her job”
For the first time, Harry can truly appreciate Percy and what he can do. Despite all his pomp, he really is one of the rare people in life who are able to walk into an emergency and control a room, who can look at a situation and see what needs to be done. And he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t have much patience for people he considers incompetent, so when he says that his girlfriend is the best at her job, it isn’t empty flattery, it’s the best words of comfort he can think of giving.
“Okay.” Harry says, and sinks down to the ground. There is a hand on his shoulder and he knows without turning that it is Hermione, because he can recognize the weight of it from so many years of her holding him back and holding him up. He raises his own hand up to meet her, and cannot find the energy to ask if she was alright, even though he hopes that she is. “Okay.”
“Hey.” Ginny throws herself down on the ground beside him. They’re back in some hallway in the ministry that Percy had led him to, promising to send someone when they have news. Draco was at St. Mungo’s in a magic induced coma, and was not likely to wake up anytime soon, so no one thought that it was important for him to head over there right away. “Thought you might want this.”
She’s holding his wand out to him. Harry hadn’t even thought to go after it. If someone wanted to hurt him, he would tear them apart with his bare hands, ruined as they were. “Yeah.” The weight of it makes him feel better.
“We’re going after them, if you want to come.” She is dressed in what George had named her battle armor—combat boots and an old jacket with a patch over the elbow, fingerless leather dueling gloves and her hair pulled up in a tight ponytail. “The people who did this, I mean.”
“You think we can get them?”
He wasn’t interested in it, if they couldn’t get them, if he couldn’t make one of them hurt like they hurt Draco.
“I think so. We got the one who dropped the chandelier. He told us a lot.” Ginny flexes her fingers, and for the first time, Harry notices the split skin on her knuckles. She is staring down at her hands, like even though she wasn’t sorry, she couldn’t quite believe that this was the person she had turned into. “I was very persuasive.”
Harry thought about it, and then thought some more. He could stay here, sitting in this empty hallway, and then switch to sitting in some uncomfortable chair in a slightly cleaner hallway in St. Mungo’s. Or he could go fight, make someone pay, make them hurt. He had his wand back, after all.
And he was done feeling helpless.
Chapter 31
Draco
Once, when Draco was seven years old, when he was small and scrawny and still hadn’t learned how to use the power sitting right beneath his skin, he had walked to the edge of his neighbor’s pond and walked right along the edge, toes skimming the surface of the mud and muck like it was some sort of game. His mother had told him not to go in it because it was dirty, and his father said that it was dangerous, just as derelict and infested as the neighbor’s house was, but Draco had thought that it would be fun to go to a forbidden place just once. And it was fun, until he stepped forward onto the bank just a bit too far, entranced by the wave of the otherwise still water that was only the beckoning of a grindylow and toppled in.
He could not swim.
It was strange, in that moment, because he was thinking of all the things that he could do, all the people that his father had paid to teach him—the lineage of old houses, violin, calligraphy, dancing—and yet now that he was in immediate danger, he could not figure out how to move his arms or kick out with his legs well enough to bring himself back to the surface. There was only darkness covering up all the light and weeds brushing at his heels and the desperation building up inside him, where he would kick up off the murky bottom of the pond and burst into the light just long enough for one lifegiving breath of air before the depths pulled him back down under again.
Trying to wake up was something like that.
But he does wake up, eventually, after what must have been hours of drifting in and out of consciousness, where he would open his eyes only to be blinded by the light and taken aback by the fire in his lungs. His entire body ached, and even though each time there were voices he recognized demanding his attention (Hermione, asking if he was okay, George holding tight to his hand, even a blurry figure that he thought might have been Pansy), he found it easier to slip back inside himself instead, until he finally told himself that enough was enough and forced himself to keep his eyes open.
“Hey. Mate.” There were hands on his shoulders, forcing him back down onto the pillows. “Take it slow, will you?”
For a moment, he does not understand why he is there, cannot remember why everything hurts, but then he does—hands moving to wands that were not there, a flash of light spreading across her face as the chandelier sways, the man melting back into the background, the way he was the only one who understood in time to get to her—and the panic makes him surge the person in front of them, grapple against their hands to grip onto their shoulders.
It was George who he found staring back at him, coaxing him to calm down, to lie back before he hurt himself. Not Harry. Draco would like to say that he didn’t care who was sitting guard by his bedside, but judging by the disappointed feeling in his stomach, that was a lie. If he had been given time to think who would be the first person to meet him upon his return, he would have been expecting to see Harry. Maybe he was here, a voice in his head was saying, much more reasonable now that it was clear that no one was in immediate danger. It’s been forever, you really would want him to sit here without eating or changing his clothes or running home for a nap? And don’t you have more important things to worry about?
“Where’s Hermione?” Draco fell back onto the pillows, wincing as he did so. “Is she alright?”
“Penelope healed her in half a second after the commotion was over. She’s just a little sore. You, on the other hand,” George gestured over the length of Draco’s body, and for the first time he really looked at himself, at the cuts and bruises and bandages. “Are going to be in here a while.”
“Couldn’t they fix these up?” Draco looked over his arms with some amount of concern, because if this was what he looked like after being in the hands of qualified healers for hours, how bad was he when he first came in? “It’s like, first level healing.”
“They got the bad things first. Put your body under a lot of stress to heal it, so they want to keep you under observation for a bit and let the rest heal naturally.” Draco must have made a face, because George’s hand is gripping tight to his, squeezing his fingers like he is keeping time with his pulse. It makes Draco look at him and see the worry in his eyes, the tightness in the skin around his mouth, like he is biting back the words of caution that he so desperately wants to say. “You were in a bad shape, Draco.”
It’s the name that makes Draco sober up and pay attention. They had spent so long addressing each other only by hurled curses and insults and a snarled, twisted version of their last names (Malfoy. Weasel.) that the sound of his name being spoken with that amount of fondness still makes him pause, and right now it’s long enough to realize that maybe, just maybe, watching one of his friends almost die was a pretty upsetting ordeal for George to have to go through. Enough that even though he had sworn off hospitals and guard duty for good, here he was, holding onto Draco’s hand and monitoring everyone that comes through the door until he had woken up.
“Hey.” Draco made sure his voice was gentler this time. Kinder. Less demanding. “I’m alright. I’m not going anywhere.”
George stared at him for a long moment, then let go of him, stalking back to the wooden chair by the door and throwing himself into it. He was still in his clothes from the gala the night before (was it the night before? he honestly doesn’t know) only now they are ripped and disheveled. That, combined with the ugly look on his face, was making him look like someone you would cross the street to avoid being near.
“Don’t I know it.” George’s words were teasing but his eyes were still worried, darting around the room, and Draco wonders how many of them have fallen back into their war time habits where they checked in corners for monsters that were really only shadows and would not believe it when people promised that they were safe. “You’re one tough bugger to kill, Malfoy.”
Draco smiles. It’s not the best welcoming crew he could imagine, but it was nice all the same.
