Draco

It’s a strange thing, bing okay again.

At the time, Draco hadn’t noticed how much time and energy go into not being okay, where he puts all his energy into raging against monsters that only existed in his head and pushing past road blocks that were only in his way because he had been the one to place him there. For the past two years, right from the moment his father was sent to jail, all he had been thinking about was putting the pieces of his life back together, thinking only of what he had to do in order to get himself to the point where he could look in the mirror and feel like the person staring back at him actually seemed like they had turned out alright.

As a whole, the people who went through the war had spent a lot of time together trying to reach the point where Draco is currently at. The only thing was, no one ever thought to tell him how hard it would be, walking through life like you need someone’s permission to be healthy and whole again, always waiting for the moment where the ground might be pulled out from under your feet.

(It’s like, there were these holes, in his heart and his mind and his body, and Draco had spent these past months giving everything he had into filling them back up, and here he was, with all his metaphorical potholes patched over with brand new cement. In his head he knows it is a good thing, but it is also a strange thing, to have all this time, to keep expecting to fall back into old patterns and bad habits, to have to keep reminding himself it was okay to be okay.)

“You’re happier, right?” Harry had asked him, one of those nights where he caught Draco staring at himself in the mirror, poking at a smattering of scars and pockmarks that trail down his side. “Now? With me?”

“This is the happiest I’ve ever been,” Draco had said, and he didn’t even have to lie, and his smile was not covering up any old ghosts when he turned back to him. He’d be fine, really. All he had to do was keep moving, keep busy, just enough that the past doesn’t have the space to squeeze back into Draco’s life.

It’s this, more than anything else, that makes him volunteer when Ginny wasplaining about the overwhelming amount of work that had to be done before the wedding.

“I mean, it’s mental. Mental! Who thought up with this stuff?” They were at the Burrow, herbat boot covered feet thrown up on the coffee table and a steaming cup of tea in her hand. “You have to think about food, and the people, and the color scheme, and flowers, and where to put everyone, so I’m going to have to rent a place because I can’t have it here otherwise everyone will justpare it to Fleur and Bill’s, and Merlin’s beard, do you have any idea how much a wedding dress costs? And we have to buy two of them!”

“Well,” Hermione said tentatively, reasonably. “It’s your wedding, you don’t have to have all that if you don’t want it.”

“Oh, I want it.” Ginny’s eyes widened in alarm. “It’s just that it’s all so bloody hard to wrap my head around.”

Ginny was good at a lot of things. She was good at fighting, and at Quidditch, and calming Ge down. She was good at healing, even if her spells hurt more than Luna’s when they crept over your skin. She was a good cook and a good friend and good person, but she was not good atanizing an event like this. Lucky for her, Draco was.

“I could help.” Both girls looked over at her. From her seat in the arm chair, Luna smiled vaguely, like she recognized that he had said something nice but wasn’t following the conversation enough to know what. “I’ve had practice planning these type of things.”

“Oh.” Ginny looked surprised and for a moment he considers taking the offer back, but then she sort of just melts back into the cushions, a relieved smile on her face. “That’d be wonderful, Draco.” She reaches out a hand for him and lays it on his arm for a moment. “Thank you.”

He’s very good at this stuff, Draco.

Harry?

Not so much.

e on.” Draco reaches over and swats his hands away, folding the napkin up the right way. “It’s not that hard, Harry.”

“I don’t see why we’re doing this.” He was grumpy. He’s always grumpy when the subject of the wedding came up, because whenever Draco talked to him about the wedding, that invariably meant that either he was going to pull Harry into some long chore of helping to prepare for it or that the girls were going to take over his living room for the night again. “It’s not our wedding.”

They both pause over the word “our” as soon as it leaves his mouth. Draco is the one to push past it.

“Doesn’t matter.” They were making models, seeing which one was right. As soon as Draco got good at it, he was sure that he could do this specific fold on all the napkins in one go. It was very difficult, though. And also sort of messy, seeing as how he had upended the towel drawer on the kitchen floor and sat down beside them to practice, determined not to stop until he got it right. “They asked us to do this.”

“Only because you volunteered us!”

“Oh, like you have anything else to do.” The wordse out of his mouth before Draco really gets the chance to think about them. They were meant to be joking, but one look at Harry’s face and Draco knows that he has crossed a line.

“I did just save the world again,” Harry says, and even though he gives another jab of the wand and the napkin in front of his wiggles feeble into a tented position, his voice is icy. “Or maybe you didn’t notice?”

“I noticed.” Draco was horrified, wondering how he had spoken so blindly, without thinking about how his words might sound. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Just because I haven’t been making some big scientific breakthrough every week—”

“That’s not what—”

“I’m just taking some time,” Harry says, and it’s then that Draco understands that this is more about Harry’s issue with himself than what Draco had said. “I only want to figure out what to do. I’ve never had a choice before.”

“No one said that you couldn’t do that.” Draco scooted over to him so they were face to face, knees touching. “I never said that you were doing anything wrong. You’re doing what you have to do, and no one could ever think that you need to give more.” There’s a pause where Harry looks at the wall instead of him, and Draco pulls him back round to face him. “You’ve done enough.”

“I keep thinking that I shouldn’t stop.” Harry breathed the words out in one rush. “That I have to keep fighting.”

“The bad guys are gone.” Draco does not know how to tell him this, to express that the war is over, that there are no battles to be fought. He thinks that Harry knows this, but he still cannot shake the idea that there must be some dying light to rage against, some evil to resist. You cannot shake the war out of you when it has sunk its hooks in so deep. “You got them.”

“There are always more bad guys.”

“Not this time,” Draco said, holding him on this dingy kitchen floor, hoping he is telling the truth. “It’s over.”

“I’ve thought that so many times.” Harry was breaking underneath his hands, hisposure crumbling, and for the first time since Harry had known him, he looked tired, tired and young and small. “So many times, I think it’s done, that I’ve won, that we can all rest and be safe and no one has to hurt anymore, but then I turn the corner and there’s just another thing to fight. I am so tired of fighting.”

“Then don’t.” Draco was almost in tears. “Next time, don’t fight. Let someone else do it, anyone else, this isn’t your job anymore, Harry!”

“Then who’s going to?” His breathing was ragged, his eyes blurred with tears. “It’s only ever been me. Me and this fight, it’s all I’ve ever known, and if it’s gone—if it’s really, really gone Draco, for good—what am I then?” He spits the next word out. “Nothing. You can’t be a hero when there are no bad guys to fight.”

“You don’t have to be anything. You don’t have to be a hero. You just have to be Harry.” Draco had told him this before, had spent nights sitting with his back to the head board and Harry’s head in his lap, trying to convince him that it was okay to take this time to find himself, that it was alright if he spent the rest of his life doing nothing but trying to make himself happy, really, after all he had given and all he had lost. “That’s enough for me.”

Why can’t it be enough for you, he thinks, but then Harry is heaving in a great shuddering breath and shaking out his hair, straightening back up with a watery smile. “This is stupid,” he says, waving his hands around at the mess around them, perhaps talking about his break down or maybe just talking about his life in general. “I’m just tired.”

“Then let’s go to bed.” Draco stands up and towels fall down around him as he moves, holding out a hand to Harry.

Harry stares up at him. “But you said—the towels?”

“Bed, Harry.” He waves his hand at him again, insistent. “Things will look better in the morning.”

Draco keeps looking for a sign that another break down might be on the way, but for all intents and purposes, it was like Harry doesn’t remember what he had said on the night of the napkins. Actually, he seems to go out of his way to avoid it, throwing himself into the wedding planning with a ferocity to rival Mrs. Weasley. It’s intense enough that even Luna notices.

“It is very nice of him to do this. He always was such a nice friend.” She is watching Harry help Ginny’s measurements with a determined look on his face, laughing when she demands him to recheck it all for a third time, just in case. “But I didn’t ever think that he was that into parties.”

“To be fair, it isn’t a party.” If Draco was going to confide in anybody about the conversation, it would be Luna, but he didn’t feel right about it. “It’s a wedding.”

“Is there much difference?” Luna didn’t seem to be that bothered by the idea of the impending date, which was only weeks away, seeing as they both wanted it done before she headed back to Hogwarts in the fall for a repeat of her final year. Technically, she had graduated, but McGonagall had declared the option for repeat years available for anyone who thought that the last year or two of their education was unsatisfactory for their needs. Unlike Ginny, who was bing more frantic with each day, Luna simply stated what she wanted and then stuck with it, and Ginny inevitably agreed. “The clean up for both is extremely messy.”

Draco opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it, because really, sometimes conversations with her took more energy than he knew what to do with.

“Oi, Draco!” Ginny waved him over, and he came, dreading the new task that he and Hermione would be assigned with. Draco’s sort of a bridesmaid, though he’s hoping that Luna doesn’t demand that he wears a dress. “What do you think of the new color scheme? Luna picked it.”

It was blue and pink, both in terribly garish shades, and both would clash terribly with Ginny’s hair. Across the room from them, Fleur was looking very cross, because she had been trying to pawn off some of the previously ruined and now repaired d

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