Don’t we all, Draco thinks. The one thing we’re good at is loving too late.
It’s fast, after that.
Bill leaves first, then Charlie, and then the rest of the kids leave at the same time, pulling on their jackets and saying their good-byes so fast it didn’t hide how desperate they were to leave.
“Merlin.” Ron shakes his head, squinting up at the streetlights the way he always does when they reach a muggle town. “I love Percy, but he can be a drag sometimes.”
“I don’t know.” Hermione glanced over at him, but she hadn’t need to—they always seem to know each other, like the way they were caught in the other’s orbit means there was no possibility of falling out of step. “He wanted to make you guys proud.”
“We are proud. We’ve always been proud.” Ginny looks from her brother and Hermione, back to Harry. “He had to have known that, right?”
“Some people have a hard time believing what they can’t touch. What they can’t see.” Luna talks a bit more like them, now, less likely she was caught in a dream and more like someone had finally forced her to wipe the stardust that had gathered in her eyes. It was sad, because now she had to see life the way it really was. “You can’t do it all the time—even I have to wonder whether gnargles are around here.”
“Well, there is very little evidence they exist, Luna,” Hermione starts, and Draco gives her the benefit of the doubt by thinking she meant it to be comforting.
“Don’t be silly.” Luna fixes her with a glare. “There have been definite sightings in North America.”
There’s a shocked moment of silence, and then they burst out laughing, Ron first, and then all of them, right in the middle of the street where anyone could look down and see them. Ginny’s laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes, then she’s digging in her coat pocket, cursing under her breath. “Damn it. Damn it all to Hell, Luna, I was going to do this later, do it right, but—” she sinks down to one knee, even though there was mud on the pavement and it was soaking through the legs of her jeans. “I’m never going to love you more than I do right this second, I think.”
She’s holding up a ring. It’s small, and elegant, and simple, like it was built for Luna. “Luna Lovegood,” She says, and her voice is shaking with the effort of keeping herself contained. “Will you do me the honor of marrying me?”
Luna stares down at her, as unbothered by this as she had been by every other thing. For a heart stopping moment, Draco thinks she might say no, but then her face cracks open in a smile and she sinks to her knees. “I suppose.”
“She supposes.” Ron says, his voice that tone of unfathomable disbelief he always uses when Luna says something that he doesn’t understand. “You hear that everyone?” He has turned his face upward and screamed it to the skylights. “She supposes!”
“You ever think about that?” They are walking home, even though they could apparate, because this is one of those nights where you do not want to go home, that you want to prolong for as long as you can. “Marriage?”
“About as much as I think about the rest of the future.” It’s a cop out kind of answer, and Draco knows it, so he tries again. “I can never quite picture it. The future gets all fuzzy whenever I want to form a clear image, like maybe I’m still not used to the idea that I’m going to get to have it.”
“But if you were.” Harry insists. He is shorter than Draco now, because Draco is balancing on the curb like it is a tightrope, arms spread out in the air beside him. “What would it be like?”
“Terrifying, I think.” Draco does think about it, about a house and kids but none of the details come in clear, other than the fact that he would have a broken down old shed for his potions supplies and one of his kids should be named after his father, to do right where he had done wrong like some twisted form of redemption that his own father would not try to reach for, and whenever he thinks of the person he is going to spend his life with they have started to have Harry’s face, now, so different from the life he had thought of a few years ago, where he was thinking in terms of appearance and heirs and legacy. “To trust someone that much.”
“Wouldn’t it be worth it though?” Harry’s voice is quieter than it should be, like the words were being knocked loose from somewhere in his chest. “To have someone that you love so much?”
Draco doesn’t answer. He slips and stumbles but does not fall, because Harry is there, putting his hands on his waist and pulling him down to the solid ground at the same time he is pushing him upright, helping him standing again.
“I think so.” Draco whispers, giving him an answer without saying anything at all, even though he thinks now would be a perfect time to say I love you, I need you, please run away with me. “I’m still figuring that part out.”
Chapter 29
Draco
It upsets him, that he’s still good at this.
It’s like that no matter how much you try to fight against it, some part of you grows up to be the person that your parents were. That no matter how much you want your life to be different, destiny has a way of binding you by the wrists and dragging you to your fate anyways, like it doesn’t matter what choices you make or the things you try to feel. That even when you are working desperately towards becoming something more, you look in the mirror one day and find that the future you have been planning for is already here, and it looks nothing like you wanted it to.
Like one day, you get dressed up for a party that you friend invites you to and you happen to glance up in the mirror as you are doing up your tie and realize that somehow, despite your best efforts, you have turned into your father.
Draco wants to rip off the suit as soon as he notices, because he does not want to be the type of person who knows how to keep up appearances anymore, and he does not want to be the kind of guy who looks like he is always preparing for a photoshoot. He doesn’t want to spend tonight at the ministry, either, because he will inevitably fall back into the steps of a conversation he had learned long ago, a lesson that was bought by his parents’ money, back when everyone knew their names, even if this time, he would circle the room with Harry by his side. It is still too much of the same—the same place and the same people and the same conversation he had memorized back when he was a child and Draco himself, still the same.
“You look amazing.” Harry meets his eyes in the mirror. “Truly.” He bends in to press a kiss to a spot right below his ear, a spot that he had found last night and seemed overjoyed to have discovered. They still are not talking about it, when they do things like this, like they really have convinced themselves that this means they are only friends. Or maybe they shifted from friends to something more without Draco noticing, and he was the only one confused about the labels. “Amazing.”
He hands out compliments like they don’t cost him anything. At breakfast, out shopping, when they climb into bed. Harry loves easy. Draco wishes he could say the same.
“We don’t have to go.” Harry adds, after Draco had done nothing but stare at him for a few moments, long enough for Draco to redo Harry’s tie and cufflinks, because after eighteen years of wearing nothing fancier than a sweater, he seems to have refused to learn how to put those on properly. “We could stay home. Hide.”
It was tempting, except for the fact that Hermione was giving a speech and wanted Draco there to see it, and this was on personal invitation of Percy, who he was actually fond of him, and George would be there, and Ginny said that these things were easier for George to take with Draco by his side.
(Draco’s grown very fond of George. they’re actually friends now, honest to god, the ones that sit in a pub and talk even when they don’t feel like drinking themselves to death. Draco would like to think it’s his natural charm, but more likely, George was just grateful for someone who had never known him as an attachment of Fred.)
And also, he was a Malfoy. And Malfoy’s don’t run away, no matter how much they may want to.
“Of course we’re going.” He makes himself smile, but Harry just rolls his eyes and ducks down for one more kiss. “It’ll be fun.”
You really were the perfect son, when you went to these. Draco thought sourly, even as he leans further into the arm that Harry had put around his shoulders to guide him through the crowd. They had said hi to everyone and dodged all the waitstaff that were attempting to be the one to serve The Boy Who Lived, and now Harry was dragging them both in a beeline towards Ron and Hermione. The perfect heir, the perfect Malfoy, the creator of the perfect legacy. You could have been something great.
He trips, just a little stumble over the edge of someone’s dress robes, but Harry’s arm was around him and he did not fall, just felt the tightening of Harry’s fingers around his waist, a silent reminder that they were in this together.
“Draco!” Hermione wrapped him in a hug so tight that it knocked the air out of his lungs, and Draco found himself with a mouthful of bushy hair. He could see Ron from over her shoulder, shrugging at Harry exasperatedly while balancing a plate piled high with cookies. “I didn’t think you were coming!”
“Of course I came!” Draco pried herself off with some difficulty and passed her onto Harry, who was a bit more practiced at suffering through her hugs. “You think I would miss this?”
Beside them, Ron shrugs. “She’s been like this all day.” He has his voice lowered to mutter in Draco’s ear, apparently deciding that they’ve come to a momentary truce until Hermione gets a grip. “I just hope she doesn’t freak when she gets up there.”
“You kidding? She’ll be fine.” He snags one of the cookies off the plate just to test the boundaries and then considers it a good sign when Ron keeps the plate within his reach. “We just have to hope that she doesn’t sneak in something about spew.”
Ron laughed, and then clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t give her any ideas.”
Voldemort was great, Draco adds, slightly calmer, like this little piece of conversation was all it took to snap his skin back into place, to let him stop feel as if he was too big for his body. His father would not have been able to talk to people like that, as if they were friends. His father would never have known how great they were because he was blinded by his own bigotry. He was great and he did horrible things and he made people bow down to him because the only other option was to die and he never knew what it was to be loved, not really. Sometimes being great isn’t the best thing, if the only memories you leave behind are scars.
He’s sitting between George and Harry, two tables away from Hermione, so when she gets called up to the podium by Kingsley, he has to bend around George to reach out a hand to her. She pauses just long enough to hold on, long enough for three squeezes, their little sign that everything will be okay, that they will figure everything out.
(It had started back with the potions, when Hermione would get to frustrated with not knowing the answers that she seemed ready to throw it all out the window and let all her potions burn to nothing but a caustic heap. Draco hadn’t known what to say, but he had known enough to do this. It’s become their thing, ever since.)
“You’re going to be great.” Draco whispers, in the time it takes for those three pulses to travel from him to her, one, two, three, and then she lets go, climbing the stairs to stand beside the minister with a sense of grace Draco thought would be hard to miss, even though he had missed it for seven long years. It’s easy to see what you want, when you’re blinded by hate.
He’s not staring at her like everyone else is. They’re all watching her with rapt attention, but Draco is looking around at everyone else, all the other tables, so he can tell her who laughed when she made that joke in the opening (he helped her come up with it. It took them three hours. neither of them were that funny.) and if anyone cried when she talked about those she had lost. She had been at his house (Harry’s house? He can probably say it’s his house) until after midnight last night, practicing the way she enunciated every word and the dramatic effect held in each phrase, making sure she knew when to pause for eye contact. They had even made up a bunch of signals for Draco to give her, should he be watching and see people looking confused, for her to know if she is too loud or too quiet, too fast or too slow.
He’s listening, but he isn’t watching, which is why he sees it before anyone else does.
How the entire catering company had seemed to melt away into the shadows when the speech started, but there was still one man dressed in their uniform edging towards the front of the crowd. How his wand was dangling from his fingers, even though they had been made to check their wands at the door for what they claimed to be security measures. How even as Hermione was still speaking and the crowd was still watching, the chandelier above her started to sway, just a bit, enough to send scattering of light reflecting off the crystals and dancing over the faces of those watching.
One of the beams of light catches Hermione across the eyes, bright enough that she loses her focus and half raises her hand to block it. It’s the only reason that anyone notices it at all, and there is an awful sense of de ja vu, the way Draco can hear Ron screaming for Hermione to move out of the way and how the chandelier was falling, falling, falling down to her, and she would not get out of the way in time, and it was just like that night at the manor only there was no Dobby to save her now.
There was no one to save her, actually. Ron was too far away, and no one had their wands, and even Kingsley was not close enough to save her. Caught off guard, none of the others had even started to move yet.
But Draco had known. He had seen. And he had been the first to move, so by the time everyone else was just pushing back their chairs, he was lunging across those last few feet of space, shoving her so hard that he is half worried he might have hurt her, but he knew that it would not have hurt as bad as having an entire chandelier fall on top of you.
