Harry

In the end, things really only start to fall into place because they start yelling about Dobby.

Harry’s not sure whose fault it is. He had intended to let everything in the past stay in the past, to never bring up the times that Draco taunted him over his family or called Hermione a mudblood, or any other shitty thing, because he’s sure that Draco would have plenty to throw back at him. But maybe that wasn’t the best, because it all just sort of stayed boiling right under the surface, and then all it took was an offhandment aboutparing Kreacher to his own house elf to have Harry standing up and screaming.

“He told me he used to shut his ears in the oven.” Harry said, gripping his spoon so tight that his knuckles were turning white, seething. Draco looked like he had just been slapped in the face he had been caught so off guard, and maybe he had, because he had spent all day preparing dinner and Harry just walked in here and ruined it. He knew that, knew that he was being an arse, that he was burning bridges more than he was mending them, but cake all over the kitchen and scrubbing for hours to clean it up, you shall not hurt Harry Potter, wrestling with Draco for his wand while Dobby got them out, such a beautiful place to be with friends and he just couldn’t stop himself. “I used to have to stop him from punishing himself, yank the lamp out of his hands or force him away from the fire because it was so ingrained in him.”

“That wasn’t because of how we treated him.” Draco said, desperately. “That’s just a house elf, any house elf, even Kreacher, he does it too.”

“I asked him if you would notice he was gone.” Harry said, and now he really was angry, and he was upset all over again, because in the confusion of the war and all the other people that had died, he had sort of just locked this part of his pain up inside him, because despite all of McGonagall’s talk that they died for the cause and not for him, Harry knew that this one, this one innocent being, died only because of him. He couldn’t stand that, so it was much easier to blame Draco for his past mistakes. “He told me you wouldn’t, because you encourage him to do extra punishments and wouldn’t notice a few extra bandages.”

“That wasn’t me.” Draco said, and now he was angry, too. Harry could almost cry at that, because it looked like they were finally going to stop walking on eggshells around each other. “That wasn’t my father, I would never have told him that, I liked Dobby! He was my friend!”

“A friend you let slam his head in the oven twice a week?”

“I was a kid!” Draco yelled, and this was the whole heart of the matter, wasn’t it, that they were both children made to grow up too fast, and then they ended up standing on different sides of the same awful divider? “What was I supposed to do, let him take it out on me?”

“I was a kid, too!” He’s gotten tired of having people use that as an excuse for their mistakes, like Harry wasn’t a kid that should have grown up to be awful, like he didn’t wake up screaming because of what he was forced to do. Like he hadn’t seen too much, too fast, and still made the right choices. “Only I was fighting for people like Dobby! I actually saw them as people worth fighting for! What did you fight for, Draco? Your own skin.”

“It wasn’t just me.” Draco was up in an instant, now, hands shaking, and Harry is very, very grateful they had left their wands on the counter. “It wasn’t just me and you know it, you said that you were there that night, it was do what they asked or watch my mother be tortured. Call yourself a savior, sure, but you’ve never had to choose between the people you love and the right thing. Because trust me, it gets a whole lot harder after she’s been threatened by Greyback.”

He was spitting, that’s how mad he was, actually trembling. We said we were friends, Harry thought, watching Draco’s fingers tremble against the table. But we aren’t, really. Maybe it’s not possible, after everything we’ve been through.

Draco was the first to move away, standing up so fast his chair falls to the floor with a bang, leaving Harry alone in the kitchen with Kreacher, feeling sickeningly like he had been the one to do something wrong.

Draco

He had been my friend.

That was the truth, about Dobby. In a house where his mother was always out entertaining and his father had little patience for him, Dobby was the one who had played with him when he was little, was the one who taught him to tie his shoes and ride a broom, the one that Draco went to when he had nightmares and he knew his father wouldn’t approve of his crying. But then one day he came home and Dobby wasn’t there, leaving Draco even more alone than he had been, and the only explanation he had been given was that he chose Potter over them.

It was only another reason to hate Harry.

But maybe the contest between them wasn’t a contest at all, when Harry treated Dobby with kindness, when Dobby no longer had Lucius telling him to shut his ears in the oven. It didn’t matter, then, that Dobby had once cared for Draco. At some point, Harry, we all look out for ourselves and ourselves alone, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Whenparing the two of them, Draco couldn’t see how different they were. They could have been friends, if only Draco hadn’t somehow screwed it up that first day, if Harry had been put in any house than Gryffindor, if he hadn’t thrown in his lot with Ron and Granger that first year. And maybe Draco really could have helped him, and then he would have had a reason not to turn towards the Dark side, would have had somewhere to turn instead of just being stuck there.

That’s what drives him mad, the what ifs.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how he got to where he did today. He can still look back on the years leading up and see all the things he did wrong, the times he made Granger cry, the times he insulted Ron’s family, the times he was hoping that Harry would fail. They stack up to be a mountain of bad things, but they were things that he could have just apologized for when they got a little older, if only Voldemort wouldn’t havee back into the mix.

A knock at the door makes him look up. It’s Harry, leaning against the wall and wearing a sheepish look on his face. “I’m sorry.” Harry speaks first. So far, it’s always been Harry speaking first, like he was determined to make the first move. “That was unfair of me. I shouldn’t have said anything about it.”

“You should have.” Draco shrugged, picked at the loose thread on the coverlet. “You should bring up a lot of things. The things I said about you and Ron. The names I called Hermione. That time I got you detention with Umbridge and had you kicked off the Quidditch team. The time Hermione had her teeth enlarged by a curse I aimed at you.” And as an afterthought, he adds, “The hippogriff.”

“You weren’t hurt by him at all, you git.” Harry sat down on the bed beside him. “Made me and Ron do your potions.”

“I wasn’t.”

“He didn’t end up being killed.”

Draco isn’t sure why the thought made him happy. “I really am sorry, for everything I did.” He bites down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, and unconsciously moves his hand to cover the dark mark on his arm. “Every last, stupid thing.”

“We were kids.” Harry wasn’t looking at him either. “Maybe it’s time to ept that that’s all we were. Kids who didn’t like each other because our parents didn’t like each other, and who would have gotten over it if we had just been given time. We just needed to grow up first.”

“Do you think we have?” Draco asked. “Grown up, I mean.”

“I think we have.” Harry threw himself backward with a sigh, making the mattress bounce. “All of us grew up too fast.”

There’s a long pause, with Draco picking at the skin around his nails and Harry just staring up at the ceiling, and then—“I could see into his mind, sometimes.” There is no need to ask who he is referring to. “And I saw you, what he made you do. And I hated it, so when you say that I don’t get it, or I don’t understand that you didn’t want to do it, or that the war was hard on you too…I know that you were just trying to make it through, and protect the people you care about. That’s all any of us were doing.”

“I didn’t want to.” Draco said, and his hands were shaking badly now, they always did when he thought of it, of the times he tortured other people and the asional ones where he refused and the wand was turned on him instead, how the healer at St. Mungo’s said that the nerve damage was permanent, not that Draco cared when he thought he would be seeing life through the bars on his cell door. “You have to believe that I didn’t want to.”

“I know.” Harry sits up and puts his arm around him, an awkward attempt atforting him that Draco really wished he hadn’t made. “I know you didn’t.”

Harry

They are still in the room, but now they are mostly quiet, calmer, working their way through apologies. It’s funnier than they should be, but when you peel away all the bigotry and what happened their sixth year, it really just was two kids being petty.

“Do you remember,” Draco choked out, wheezing, the laugh still going on after they recounted stories of Hagrid’s Care of Magical creatures class. “Those badges I made for the triwizard tournament? God, I spent ages working on finding the right spell, made them all myself, and you were so mad at Ron that you barely even seemed to care.”

“I cared,” Harry admitted, remembering the words flashing around the potions classroom. “But they were funny.”

Everything was funny, now, even the time that Ron cursed himself into belching up slugs, but it was also sort of sad, once they worked through their problems and got to the legacy of bigotry waiting underneath. “Do you remember when we met on the train?” Harry asked quietly. “With Crabbe and Goyle?”

“Yeah.” Draco sobered up and stopped laughing. “Ron’s rat bit one of them, didn’t it?”

God, he did, Harry thought, and then that was another awful thing, how many times Peter was brought up in Ron and Harry’s childhood. “And you offered to show me the right sort of wizards.”

“I was a git.” They’d lost track over how many times they’ve admitted that to each other over the past hour, but this time he said it fiercely. “You were right. You were the one who knew what he was doing. And I was the idiot that believed everything my father said.”

“So let me show you now.” Harry barely had any idea of what he was offering, but all he knew was that he had to offer, to help Draco pull himself out of his place he had found himself in. “Introduce you to the right kind of people.”

“Okay.” Draco held out his hand, and for once, Harry actually shook it without feeling like one of them would try to kill the other in the process. “I’m in.”

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