‘I know baby, but you need to listen to me.’ She didn’t look the same as she had the last time he saw her. Before she died she’d been painfully thin, her cheeks sunken and her complexion yellowed.
The war had taken its toll on his mother, but the death of his father had really finished her off. She hadn’t been the same after they’d had the patronus telling them his father had been found dead in his cell in Azkaban. The Ministry made it sound like Lucius had taken his own life in shame, but Narcissa and Draco had known Lucius was far too proud a man to have died in such a way. It would have brought shame to the family, as if he hadn’t already brought enough of that. Still, they hadn’t been in a position to challenge the ruling at the time.
‘Listen to what, Mum?’
She gave him a sad smile.
‘You can’t stay here Draco. You can go backwards, or you can go forwards, but you can’t stay here.’ She told him quietly. He was confused.
‘Go back where? Where am I?’ How was he supposed to choose when he didn’t know what he was choosing?
‘I can’t tell you that Draco. What I can tell you that there’s a man out there who loves you more than he loves life itself, and a little boy who thinks you’re his world, and if you love them too all you have to do is let them in.’
Draco thought of Harry. How he’d felt that morning after their little get-together after Teddy went to school. He should’ve known when he hadn’t jumped straight out of the bed and left and proceeded to cry himself to sleep in Harry’s arms, that his decision had already been made.
‘It’s not that simple.’ He told her. It wasn’t; they’d both lied, they’d both been angry, they’d both made mistakes, they’d both come too far to pretend like they were good for each other.
‘Isn’t it? He loves you, you love him. What could be simpler than that?’
‘He lied to me Mum. He lied again and again and now I don’t know if I can trust him. What if I need to have my secrets? He doesn’t understand.’
‘He doesn’t understand because you never gave him the chance to. He’ll never prove you wrong if you don’t let him.’
Draco didn’t know. He trusted his mother more than anyone in the world but that didn’t mean she was always right. She’d made her own fair share of bad decisions. He didn’t understand why she was doing this. When he’d told his parents he was gay it had nearly started another war.
‘But you and father—’
‘I made peace with your choices a long time ago baby. Your father tried, but we can’t all be perfect.’ She smiled at him gently, and for the first time in a long time Draco craved the old times when she’d kiss his knees when he’d played too hard and fallen over, or she’d spend hours trying to tame the naturally wavy hair he’d inherited from the Blacks just because his father said, “it’s not becoming of a Malfoy”.
‘I’m not ready. When I saw father he—’
‘You’ve seen your father here too?’ She asked him, seeming surprised.
‘No not here.’ He told her, ‘I saw him before—’
‘We’ve all got both light and dark inside us, Draco. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.’
‘Who are you?’ He asked her. She gave him one last, tired smile.
‘I’m you.’
The real world was a nasty shock to Draco’s system. The smell of the hospital hit him first, although he daren’t open his eyes. He’d spent enough time in St Mungo’s over the years to know when he was in hospital. Harry had been there so often he even had his own bed. Funny that the tables had turned again. He had an odd kind of feeling that was like he was running through water—he assumed that must be potions in his bloodstream. Why did he always have to be on potions? He lay there for a long while, waiting for the feeling to return to his body.
Once it had, he was engulfed in a raging fire of pain. It sizzled through his nerve endings and fried his capacity for any deep thought. He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out as he felt like someone had set him on fire. What the hell happened? He didn’t remember a thing after Hermione had left.
After a few moments the pain receded enough for him to risk cracking an eye open. He was curious to know what the warm pressed against his left palm was since he couldn’t do more than twitch his fingertips. So much for running before he could walk.
‘You’ll feel like that for a while.’ Draco peeled his eyes open slowly to see a young healer standing next to his bed with a clipboard in her hands.
‘Bad one, huh.’ He said. She nodded and smiled at him kindly. She was pretty, if you were into that kind of thing. Long, dark hair and wide, unassuming eyes.
‘You’re a lucky man, Mr. Malfoy. For a while there we weren’t sure you were coming back to us.’ She finished taking whatever readings she was monitoring and put the clipboard back down at the end of his bed.
‘It’s Potter, actually.’
She gave him an even wider smile. ‘He hasn’t left your side the whole time you’ve been in. Slept in the chair and everything. The first week, I tried to send him home every night. By the second I realised that wasn’t going to happen.’
Draco looked to the other side, remembering the feeling against his hand.
Harry was asleep on a terribly uncomfortable looking hospital chair. His messy head of hair was resting against Draco’s side, which gave Draco a perfect view of the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
‘I’ll send my supervisor through now you’re awake, I expect he’ll have a few questions.’
He nodded and turned back to ask the healer how long he was out, but she’d already gone, and he hadn’t even noticed.
Draco was lying there watching Harry sleep and pointedly ignoring quite how disgustingly ill he really felt. Something big must have happened for Harry to be here. He was in St Mungo’s too, which means whatever it was he’d been brought back to England for treatment. Harry had been here the whole time, here for Draco. Draco’s chest swelled, despite the pain, and he realised that no matter what shit had gone on between them, this was what mattered. Harry would be there. Even if he thought Draco hated him. He loved Draco as much as Draco loved him. It was a nice realisation, it made him feel like the decisions he’d made up until this point had all been worth it. He’d gotten better and he’d understood how he really felt.
He was pulled from his thoughts when the door opened once again.
‘Mr. Potter! It’s a pleasure to see you awake.’ The new healer reminded Draco a little of Gilderoy Lockhart with his wavy blonde hair and too-white teeth. Draco’s stomach turned, and he wasn’t convinced it was whatever potions they must have him on.
‘It’s nice to be awake.’ His voice was croaky from lack of use and it caused him to cough quite loudly, only exacerbating his pain. It didn’t wake Harry though. Draco was unbelievably annoyed that he hadn’t escaped their awkward dalliance a few months ago, yet Harry could sleep through this.
‘Sorry, you should probably take it easy with the talking, you’ve been out for quite some time.’
Draco nodded.
‘There isn’t much we can do for you at the minute I’m afraid, your recovery will mainly be a lot of rest to restore your magic levels. I need to do a few tests now that you’re awake and once I’ve got the results through I can come back and discuss what happened. Is that ok?’
Draco nodded again, not in the mood for talking all that much. Lockhart-a-like gave him another blinding smile and started waving his wand in some quite ludicrous movements. Draco wasn’t sure if he really was that incompetent or whether he was just trying to show off to him.
He must’ve drifted back off the sleep after that, as when he resurfaced the healer was gone and the shadows in the room had shifted dramatically with the sun. He figured it was probably sometime in the late afternoon. Harry was gone too, which made Draco feel oddly bereft.
Chapter 12
‘You’re awake!’ He jumped as the door swung open and Hermione stepped in, looking an odd combination of surprised and ecstatic. Draco huffed a strangled laugh and was hit with a wave of pain which radiated out from his sternum through to his little toes. At least he knew he had toes again. ‘Yeah, you’ll be feeling like that for a while.’ She said when he groaned in pain.
‘How long have I been here?’ His voice sounded marginally better than it had before but it was still gravelly, a touch hoarse, and all too much like a grandfather who’d been smoking forty a day for the past three decades.
‘Three weeks. You’re lucky Harry has the temper he does. When he realised I’d told you about Gringotts he was determined to go after you and explain. If he hadn’t, well…’ She trailed off. She placed her outer robes on the back of the spare chair in the corner of the room and stood where the healer had been when she’d checked on him before.
‘You say that like it isn’t a long time.’ Draco didn’t want to think about what it meant that Harry had crossed the channel to explain himself to Draco. Instead he focused on the practical details.
‘It isn’t when you’ve had your magical core completely detached from your body.’
‘I—what?’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Honestly, Draco. What did you think happened? Only you could move 500 miles away from home and take your work with you.’
