Draco

By the time the healers declare him fit to go home, Draco had had enough of St Mungo’s. There was simply too many people there, all of them asking questions that he doesn’t know how to answer, like how he’s feeling after his near death experience and what it’s like to be a hero and what exactly he and Harry are, speaking in the terms of their relationship. He’d be good at ignoring whatever well-meaning nurse wandered in to look over his charts and make anxious small talk, but still, he was looking forward to finally being left alone.

Not that he was left alone when he got home, really, because even though they declared him fit to be discharged (the healers actual words were we don’t think you’re in any immediate danger of dying, but try not to do anything taxing, will you? You were an extraordinarily difficult person to fix) he was still having to ask for ridiculous amounts of help, starting from the moment where he almost fainted during his attempt to use floo powder and Hermione bullied him into taking the night bus instead, saying it just wouldn’t do to be lost up a chimney in his state, and he couldn’t even argue with her.

“You’ll just have to take it easy for a few days, that’s all,” She had said, trying to help him down the stairs and heave his bag over her shoulder at the same time, all under the stunned gaze of Stan Shunpike, who seemed to be struck dumb by the idea of having not one but two mildly famous people on his bus at the same time. “Think of it as a bit of a vacation, and you’ll be good as new in no time!”

Which was all good for Hermione to say, and easy to think of in theory, but it became quite a different matter when he had to spend all his hours sitting on the couch and watching the rest of the room revolve around him, never actually letting him join part in the real world, stating that you have to rest, Draco, remember?

So he rested. He let himself be buried by blankets and pillows that Hermione knitted him, and epted the butterbeers Ron brought him without ever drinking them and listened as Luna continued to read out the different articles in the Quibbler. He hobbled his way into Ge’s shop and sat at the back counter as the day went on without him, met Pansy for lunch in the Leaky Cauldron, had Mollye and cook breakfast three days in a row, all of it under the watchful eye of Harry.

“I just don’t want you to be hurt,” He had said, the one time that Draco had gotten fed up with everyone’s coddling and the feeling of being stuck, of suffocating, like if he didn’t get out the four walls were going to implode on him, but of course he couldn’t get out, he couldn’t even walk on his own. “I know you’re in pain.”

(Draco had apologizing immediately. They are both being so careful with one another, each of them too afraid to be the first one to test the strength of this new thing between them, where they don’t stop holding hands when their friendse over and stopped pretending that sleeping in the same bed was something that best friends do every night, and when one of them says that they’re the most important thing in the world, the other doesn’t question it. Loving each other—even if they hadn’t said so in so many words, yet, still as cautious with this as they are with everything else—was no longer a thing they had to worry about. It just was.)

Still, it’s almost a relief when Draco wakes up one morning to find a note stuck to the pillow beside him. It’s in Harry’s chicken scratch, the lines scribbled across the paper like he had already been walking away before the words were written down, telling him that he was going over to Hermione’s to help her move a couch up the stairs (says we can’t use magic until its actually in her apartment because of the muggles,pletely mental) and that he was to be back soon. The note ended with a little heart looped around the bottom corner.

Stupid, Draco thinks, tracing his thumb over the indent that the heart had made, wondering if Harry would find out if Draco were to shove this in the back of his sock drawer. Both of you are so bloody stupid.

He wants to stay in bed, maybe grab a few hours of sleep, but the sun was climbing in through the window and everything hurt too bad for that, anyways. Draco had never really had the asion to wonder what it was like to live in constant pain before, but he knows now, like he’s constantly working his way through the last shock waves of being cruciod, where you can still feel the ghost of the spell in your bones.

Every part of him is a mess of aching.

Draco doesn’t bother with getting dressed, just pulls himself to his feet and lurches from the bed to the table to the doorway, out into the landing. It’s hard to get down the stairs, but it gets easier with each step, like his limbs can only start to move once they have been reminded of what it means to be alive.

e on.” He talks to himself a lot now, when he gets left alone in this big house. Sometimes he wonders if it’s a bad thing, but Draco waves the worry away with the thought that there is always someone listening—Kreacher, the portraits, some random guest that he had not known was there. “Just one more. Just,” Pain, so much of it, like every part of him was being stripped away and put back together again, “one,” He places one foot in front of the other, looking at where he needs to be and not where he is going, which is why it doesn’t reallye as surprise when his foot slips and he is not strong enough to grab onto the railing for support, just tumbles, “More.”

When he falls, he falls hard, and he does not bother to get back up, just throws his head back and laughs. He’s still laughing by the time that Harry gets back, because even though he had hurt himself even more in the fall, part of him must have done this as some sick form of punishment, because he had known from the beginning that this was the only possible result.

“Jesus.” Harry swears often, but he doesn’t now, just drops the bag of yarn and books and cookies that he had been holding and sprints down the hallway to him, skidding the last three feet in his socks. “What the hell happened, Draco?”

He’s not good at being soft, Harry. He’s more wildfire than candle light, all hurricane without the gentle rainfall. When he’s being dramatic and melancholy, Draco likes to tell himself that it isn’t a bad way to go out, being burned up by someone else’s love for you.

“I wanted toe down here.” It sounded stupid when he says it out loud. All bad decisions sound stupid when you spend the better part of the hour laying on the cold floor. “Thought I could do it.”

“Did you?” Harry laughs, finding it funny now that it was clear that Draco had not hurt himself, and he seems to see Draco for the first time, and swears, softly, like it was more of an exhale than an exclamation. “Merlin, Draco.” He lets go of him and Draco has to lean onto the wall for support, hunching in on himself in order to hide, because he did not like the way that Harry was staring. “Your chest.”

“It’s nothing.” Draco crossed his arms over himself, trying to cover as much skin as he could. He knew what he looked like—had seen the bruises from the brief glances in the mirror, the scabs and the scraps and the bits of skin that he been ripped at awkward edges, how pale he was, the hollows underneath his ribs, the scars crossing his arms and stomach and curling over his shoulders—and knew that if he had the choice, Harry would not be seeing it. Now that he takes a moment to think about it, Draco thinks this is the first time that Harry had gotten the chance to look at him with enough light to really see, and even though Harry had known (must have known), you could not really prepare yourself for wreckage like this when a human being is concerned. “They said it would heal.”

(Heal, but not disappear. The potions will knit you back together but the scars will still be there.)

(He doesn’t care. I don’t care.)

(You do.)

“Draco.” Harry reaches out and pushes Draco’s hands away, gentle enough that if he really wanted to, Draco could have kept them in place, but he doesn’t, just lets them drift off to his sides. “God, Draco.”

Harry’s breath hitches like he had been caught off guard by the sight all over again, and Draco closes his eyes, tipping his head back to rest against the wall as Harry’s hands trace over his cuts and bruises and torn up skin, because he did not want to look at Harry looking at him, not when it’s like this. “This,” Harry says, a tremble in his voice, and his hands are following a specific set of scars now, old ones, ones that Draco had spent so many hours staring at that he could call up the image in his mind. “These are from me.”

He might be crying. Draco doesn’t look, just moves to catch at Harry’s wrists and keep his hands in place, because he knew without being told that Harry was thinking of running away. It’s what he always does, when he thinks that he has hurt someone.

“Merlin,” Harry says again, like it’s all he can think to say, and he is so close that Draco can feel the word breathed out against his shoulder. Harry’s hands are lying flat across his stomach now, fingers covering the silver scars that are crisscrossing over his chest, like he could make them melt away if he held on long enough, fingers almost disappearing in the dips between Draco’s ribs. “Look what I did to you.”

“To be fair,” Draco said, trying to sound normal even though this was the closest they had been to each other since that night at the hospital, “I was actively trying to kill you.”

“Yeah, well.” Harry had moved on to other places, other scars, other stories with unhappier endings, his touch so hesitant that it was barely more than a brushing of his skin against Draco’s. “You weren’t very good at it.”

“No.” Draco said, and together they seem toe to the understanding that they have had enough of the past and to deal with the future instead, or maybe it had only urred to Harry at that moment what a precarious position they are in, but whatever it was, Harry apparates them both the ten feet to the couch, catching Draco before he could stumble and meeting him halfway, moving down just as Draco was reaching up for him.

It’s only after, when things have calmed down between them, that Draco finally looks down at himself, at the skin and the ruin painted upon it, all the ways that this life had left its mark on him. “There’s so many.” He twisted to look at the part of his back that was reflected in the mirror, forcing Harry to move with him. “I didn’t realize there were so many.”

“I wish I could take them away,” Harry says, his hands still moving, like he is trying to map out an image of every mark in his head.

“They do look terrible.” Not terrible as in ugly, exactly, but terrible as in they are speaking of a pain that Draco would rather et, of a past that he cannot possibly hope to wipe away when it is written across his skin.

“That’s not what I meant.”

Draco pulled the blanket back overtop both

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