Draco

There’s a moment where he almost turns around.

It’s only a moment, he justifies later, when Luna mentions it (and how did she even know, she was back in the Burrow and he was just on the edge of the garden) and Ginny fixes him with a glare, but it’s long enough for him to stand and watch the others call to each other, fall into lines that had been drawn before Draco had even wanted a place to stand between them, and the mark on his arm seems to burn, reminding him of how he does not belong, how they cannot want him, how he will only taint this, taint them, but then Harry turns to catch sight of him and Ron is raising an arm up in greeting and Hermione is racing across the grass, clipboard in hand, until she barrels into his chest.

“We did it!” The whole place looks wonderful. It’s draped in silver and gold and the lightest blue, colors that he would not have picked but Hermione had somehow made work, just as Luna promised them that they would. Despite Ginny’s reluctance, she had agreed to have it at the Burrow at Fleur’s insistence. Look at her. How could anyonepare our vedding to yours, vhen you are marrying a voman like zat? Luckily, everyone in the room had taken it as apliment and Ginny had agreed without any further issue. “I didn’t think we were going to, but we did! And it’s all on schedule!”

Ron came up behind her, Harry trailing at his heels, smiling softly. They’d been soft with each other all morning, mostly because of the words that Draco had blurted out last night, even though he had not planned to. Even though he had planned to say it over a candlelight dinner that he already arranged for next week, but Harry probably liked it better the idental way.

“Ah, schedules. The bane of my existence.” Ron grinned and held out a heaping plate of cookies towards Draco, who took one and wondered where he could possibly had gotten them, because they weren’t on the menu. Maybe Hermione had extended another purse and stuck a buffet in there, just for emergencies. “Thought we were done with them at Hogwarts.”

“Don’t be daft, Ron,” Hermione said, her voice sharper than normal, but when he tugs at the train of her dress she swats at him good naturedly, and Draco is reminded of how rare it is to see a love like that, one without any cracks, one thates as easy to them as breathing. He wants that. He thinks that he might have it, given time, if he and Harry let this thing between them grow. “There are always schedules.”

“And this one, Ms. Granger, says that if you don’t go now you’re going to get run over by the brides. And then eaten by the bride’s mother.” Ge appears between them, melting out of the corn. He had told Draco that he would be hiding on the outskirts of the party for as long as he could help it, but Draco hadn’t realized that he meant quite that far out.

Not, of course, that he blamed him. It would be hard, to have to walk around with people who only knew you as part of a package deal. Ge had told him once how he couldn’t stand it, how their every move just reminds him of how iplete he is, with their eyes automatically sliding to his right in search of someone that would not be there and constantly waiting for a punchline to a joke he cannot find the energy to make on his own. And that doesn’t even take into ount the missing ear.

“You good mate?” Ron and Hermione have moved on, and Harry is anxiously waiting a few steps away, but Draco hangs back. Ge seems just about at his breaking point. Draco can tell, when he takes the time to look—it’s a crease around the eyes, a tightening in the shoulders.

Ge forces a smile, which seems fake, but it seems to knock the breath back into him, a reminder that if he cannot do this for himself, he would at least have to do it for Ginny. “All good, brother,” and he throws an arm around Draco’s shoulder without seeming to realize or care what he had said, leaving Draco to wonder if he should be flattered or worried.

He decides to go with both.

Harry

The wedding is beautiful, just like he knew it would be. Honestly, Harry expected it to all be perfect just from thebined will power emanating from both Ginny and her mother, not to mention Draco and Hermione waiting anxiously in the wings to assist in any way they could.

(Not, of course, that it was entirely perfect. The baker made cupcakes instead of the five tiered cake they had ordered. The hem of Luna’s dress was stained with dirt from where she had wandered off a bit while Dean’s back was turned. And Hagrid sat in the wrong row again, breaking all the chairs, but that was to be expected.)

“I love you,” Ginny is saying at the front of them all, choking back tears, one of the few times that Draco had ever seen her cry. “I love you, I love you, I love you, and that, Luna Lovegood, is not something that I was going to have the ability to stand with these people and say. We spent so long fighting. So long running.” It’s like her words are reaching out to the crowd, addressing everyone, wrapping everyone into this circle of love that she has in her heart, Harry most of all. “And now it’s over. There are some days—a lot of days—where I wake up and look around and don’t know what to do with myself, because there are so many empty places where the people I love should be standing, so many things that I can do now that had seemed impossible only a few months ago—and I don’t know how to handle it. But then I look at you and I know that it’s okay, because I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to love you, Luna. For the rest of my life, I’m going to love you.”

Draco squeezes his hand again, and when Harry looks over, there are tears shining in his eyes.

“I love you, too.” Luna is not one for speeches, not like Ginny, but she looks radiant up there, the happiness pouring off of her in waves to infect the rest of the crowd. “I love you with everything in me. I have for as long as I can remember.”

There’s a moment where Harry thinks she is going to cry, but then she shakes her hair back from her face and smiles that beautiful, watery, radiant smile and pushes through it. Not that it would have mattered. Luna does what she wants, whenever she wants, and if she wants to cry during her vows, there was nothing wrong with that. Weddings are the one place where tears are always a good thing.

In his head, he can hear Draco answering him. Not always, he would have said, if Harry had mentioned the thought out loud, and then he would have some story about some family member or another and their twisted love affair and Harry would stop listening half way through just to watch him, to see the way he talks and looks at the world and the way that he looks back at him, like Harry is the best thing in his entire world.

It’s rude, to do this at a wedding, but considering all the time that Ginny had to waste listening to Harry pine, he thinks he’ll be iven.

“It’s okay if you have to stick with maybe’s.” Harry has leaned over to whisper right into Draco’s ear, and other than a raised eyebrow from Fleur, who seems to have appointed herself the guardian of etiquette, no one seems to notice. “If you can never say it. Because I know. I know that you love me, and I know that I love you with every aching inch of my soul, do you understand Draco Malfoy? For the rest of my life I’m going to love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

Draco doesn’t answer.

He doesn’t have to.

Like Harry had said—tears at a wedding are always a good thing.

Draco

After the whirlwind of celebrations, Draco finds himself sitting across from Ron’s Aunt Muriel.

Everyone had warned him about her. About how mean she was, how she does not care about people’s feelings, how there is noment (no matter how ufortable) that she will let go unsaid. Her one joy in life, ording to Ge, is ruining an otherwise pleasant asion by making people squirm.

“So you’re the Potter’s boyfriend?” She wrinkles up her nose. Draco can’t tell what about—him or Harry or the fact that they are together, or if she just didn’t like his cologne. So many things about him could be under attack in nothing more than a second and he wouldn’t even know what hit him. “I knew your father.”

This, at least, was not something that he would have seening. There aren’t many people here who would bring up a death eater at a wedding, especially when that death eater was a family member rotting away in Azkaban. But those people aren’t Aunt Muriel.

“And your mother. And your Aunt. I helped put her away the first time.” She’s taken over by a coughing fit then, one that makes her shoulders heave and bends her down to the table, clawed fingers curling around the table cloth to ease her through it. Draco is already on his feet with a glass of water when she waves him away, staring across the table again, her beady eyes steaming from the effort of catching her breath. “They had me on the Wizengamotmittee.”

Draco didn’t know what to say. It’s not like it was much of a feat, sending Bellatrix to Azkaban. No one ever doubted that she was guilty. “Are you still?”

Wrong question. He knows it from the way she holds herself, her posture tightening. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I got old. Got sick. Got useless.” Her voice raises to reach the table across from them, a heap of redheads all intend on ignoring her presence. “Got shut up in my house so this lot didn’t have to deal with me.”

It must be a bitter life that she leads. Draco would have almost thought that this war was a blessing for her, if only for the fact that it drove people into her house. Everyone, even the mean ones, starve for a little bit of human contact. It’s the one thing that draws them together.

“I’ve heard it was a large house,” he says fairly, mostly to draw the attention back into calmer waters and also because he felt bad for her, just a bit.

“Yes. Yes, it is. You used to have a large house, too.” Her wands is resting in her fist and she flicks it upward so a glass of champagne lifts from the hands of one of her many nephews and finds its way there, never mind that her nearly full glass was right in front of her. “And now you have a cottage.”

“I like it better there.”

“So I’ve been told.” She tilts her head. “You’re not like them, you know.”

He’s caught off guard. The entire conversation was giving him whip lash. “Who?”

“Your parents, your aunt, all the rest. They walk through a room like they’re carved from stone and expect everyone to pay homage. And a lot of people did. But not you.” She sticks her tongue between her teeth, biting down. “You’re softer.”

“Is that a good thing?” He didn’t know why he was looking for absolution with Aunt Muriel, of all places. “To be soft?”

“It’s better to bend than break, don’t you think? When they lost, that’s what your parents found out.” She drains the glass in one go, and out of the corner of his eye, Draco can see Ge at the edge of the row of table watching them, clearly weighing the benefit of saving Draco in return of bein

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