“Kreacher is wounded,” Harry reminds him gently, because Draco looks pale and ill and vaguely panicked again, and there’s not really any reason for him to have to deal with this, since Harry can. He holds up his wand, wiggles it a little. “What about this? You let me fix you up—hold on, don’t yell yet—and then you can go get Master Draco’s spare wand for him, because that would be a big help. And I’m sure, after that, that the house would probably really like it if you…talked? To it? Or, er. Communed…with it? Or—look, whatever, I don’t really know the right words for, er. All of that. But I’m sure it would like it,” Harry adds, his voice having grown very uncertain by now. He’d been sort of going on the theory that people experiencing heartache need something to do—it’s one of Hermione’s, and it’s turned out to be pretty true over the years, actually a number of times—but he’s not sure it’s going to work after such a weak finish.
There’s a beat of silence, and then, croakily—but not sobbing anymore—Kreacher says, “Okay, Harry Potter.” He submits without argument to Harry’s healing spells, and vanishes with his customary crack the minute Harry’s done.
“Commune with it, hmm?” Draco says, clearly entertained.
“Oh, piss off,” Harry mutters, a little embarrassed, even if it is kind of worth it to see some light in Draco’s eyes. “It’s not like I know what they get up to. I just figured—”
“No, it was good,” Draco says. “I mean. Funny, don’t get me wrong, but—I usually can’t get him to let one of those guilt spirals go that quickly.”
Harry shrugs. “Kreacher and I go back a long time,” he says, and winces. “Not…totally in a good way. Sirius was kind of—and then I was kind of—well, and then he was kind of— but it wasn’t his fault, really. I think I might’ve done what he did, too, now that I know what I know.”
“Was any of that supposed to make sense to me?” Draco says, exasperated now. “Or are you just talking to yourself?”
“I guess I was just saying,” Harry says, a little pointedly, “that sometimes, when you’ve got a lot of history with someone, they hear things a bit differently from you than they might from other people.”
Draco’s eyes widen slightly, but before he can reply, Kreacher cracks back into the room holding…
Holding Draco’s hawthorn wand.
“Thank you, Kreacher,” Draco says. He is, Harry notes, very pointedly not looking at Harry; Harry does not blame him. He wouldn’t be looking at himself, either, if he were in Draco’s position. “Please let me know if there’s anything you need, all right?”
Kreacher makes a little wailing sound, but then he nods and vanishes again, leaving Harry and Draco to sit in silence for a long moment.
“So,” Harry says at last. “You did get it.”
It was maybe two years after the war when Harry found the wand—it was in a trunk of things he’d packed away six days after the Battle of Hogwarts, all the books and mementos and tools he’d associated, back then, with fighting Voldemort. He hadn’t wanted to look at them, hadn’t wanted to touch or see them, hadn’t felt like he even deserved to use them, when so many were dead and he was alive. It had helped, weirdly, for a while, keeping those things locked away; it felt like a small penance that made the act of walking around, of breathing, ever-so-slightly more manageable. Then he’d kind of…well, he’d forgotten about them, not to put too fine a point on it. They were out of sight and out of mind, and when he did eventually stumble across the trunk, shrunk down and hidden in the very back of his spice cupboard, it didn’t hurt so much to look at all of it.
He felt a bit guilty, though, when he pulled out the hawthorn wand and remembered who it belonged too. They weren’t anything back then, Harry and Draco, except what they’d always been—childhood rivals, and people who inexplicably kept saving each other from horrible deaths, and the only two living witnesses to the time Harry nearly accidentally committed murder in a bathroom, which was another thing he felt guilty about. He’d spoken for Draco at his trial, because it was the right thing to do and because Draco really had played a part, however small, in turning the tide of the war—and, a little, because the idea of Draco locked away in Azkaban made Harry feel…something. Unsettled; discomfited; unbalanced; something. They’d seen each other in the hallway that day, after Draco was acquitted, their eyes locking for a second through the crowd that poured out of the courtroom. Harry’d thought about walking over, saying something, but in the end he hadn’t been able to figure out what.
Anyway, that was the last time Harry had even seen Draco when he found the wand, and by that point he and Ginny were right in the middle of breaking up. That was why he was cleaning out the spice cabinets in the first place; she kept insisting he’d taken all his cooking shit back from hers already and Harry didn’t want to believe it, wanted to be petty and stupid and insist that he’d gone through everything and determined she was holding on to his paprika, or something. It was stupid, and he felt stupid about it, and then he found the wand and he felt stupid about that too, and he just…didn’t have it in him to track Draco down and give it back properly. It was kind of selfish and shitty of Harry, because he knew the wand probably wouldn’t work right unless they did the whole—whatever—the allegiances thing, but, well. He figured it had been two years, and Draco had almost certainly found another wand, and it wasn’t Harry’s job to make sure this one performed for him the way it once did. He figured just giving it back would have to be enough.
He chucked it in a box, and then, because he did still feel a little guilty, because he couldn’t help himself, he wrote a little note that said, “Here. Sorry. If you have any issues please contact me. -HP” with his address scrawled at the bottom. Then he gave the box to the Auror mailroom, because they could find anybody, and went on with his bloody life.
Draco never got back to him. He never Flooed or owled, not even to say that the wand wasn’t working right anymore, which had to be the case, Harry knew. It drove him quietly mad for about six months, wondering if Draco was just going to—pop up, one day; wondering why he hadn’t. Then he decided not to think about it anymore, and he pretty much hasn’t, since.
It’s becoming very clear to him now, though, that what he long since decided was the most likely option—to wit, that Draco had simply not gotten his package, and has thought all this time that Harry had maybe dropped the wand in the Thames or something—is not what happened at all.
Draco doesn’t say anything for several long moments, just turns the wand over and over between his fingers. It’s strange to see—Harry’s gotten so used to the dogwood one he carries now that he’d forgotten the way the slightly darker wood looks in Draco’s hand. For a second Harry almost expects him to…oh, he doesn’t know. Cast a Jelly Legs at him, or something.
Then Draco clears his throat and looks at Harry, something wry and almost apologetic in his twisted little smile, and Harry is too consumed with trying to figure out the man he is now to dwell on the child he once was.
“I did think about writing, you know,” Draco says. He rolls the wand between the palms of his hands and sighs. “I started to, even, a couple of times. But I couldn’t—I didn’t know what I would even say. After the trial, and…”
He trails off, and Harry takes pity on him after a second and nods; he knows what Draco means. He means after the trial, and the Fiendfyre, and the incident at the Manor, and the incident in the bathroom, and Dumbledore, and Narcissa, and Snape, and all the other stuff they don’t ever really talk about. He means after the war, and Harry doesn’t need him to drag all that up, especially not tonight. It’s long over. It won’t change anything now.
“I think maybe I would have, if it wasn’t for the house,” Draco admits. “Blasted wand never did cast quite the same, and I always rather wanted to ask you about that, but…I figured you didn’t know it was me that bought this place. I kind of…did my best to make sure you wouldn’t find out, while I was buying it. And then, after—I mean, it would have been easy enough for you to figure it out if you wanted to, and when I got the wand I just kind of assumed you hadn’t.” He shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “I thought…Pandora’s box, you know?”
For a second, Harry wants to say that he doesn’t. For a second, Harry wants to snap, “No, Malfoy, I’ve actually got no idea, but thanks for assuming I would’ve been reflexively horrible to you, it’s great to hear that your opinion of me was so high.” For a second Harry wants to stand up and walk out of the house and just—take a couple of fucking breaths, or something, because sometimes Draco is so frustrating that it’s all Harry can do not to tear all his own hair out. Harry can’t believe he hasn’t mentioned it over this month and change they’ve spent getting to know each other, and if he’s honest it hurts, a little—not that Draco hadn’t said anything when they were nineteen and idiots, but that he hasn’t said anything now, when they’re twenty-five and…well. And still idiots, probably, but older ones.
But then Harry looks at Draco, the unhappy slant to his mouth, the way his eyes are looking anywhere but at Harry, and realizes: Draco is telling him, right now. This is Harry’s opportunity not to do what Draco was afraid of in the first place.
“I get it,” Harry says. Draco whips his head up to glare at him at once, and Harry even laughs a little, shaking his head. “God, you suspicious little freak, I’m not—mollycoddling you, or whatever. Stop looking at me like that; I mean it. I get it. I almost didn’t send it to you, and I definitely wouldn’t have if I’d, I don’t know, bought Malfoy Manor and turned it into a restaurant, or something.”
Draco rolls his eyes, but he looks relieved. “Malfoy Manor would make a terrible restaurant, Potter. The layout’s all wrong, and it’s far too large, and it wasn’t for sale, anyway.”
Harry shrugs a shoulder. “Still. It’s fine; it was a long time ago.” He pauses, and then, a little awkward, adds, “I do, er, probably know why it never worked the same way again, though.”
Draco raises one eyebrow, the corner of his mouth. “Do tell.”
Harry figures it’ll be a lot easier to just show him, so he offers Draco his own wand, hold his other hand out, palm up. “Trade me for a second?”
After a long, wary look, Draco complies. The hawthorn wand feels good in Harry’s hand, an old, familiar friend; it still thinks of him as its master, not Draco, and Harry enjoys the feeling just for a moment, knowing that it will be the last time.
“Disarm me,” Harry says.
“One of your eyes is very slightly larger than the other one,” says Draco.
Harry blinks. It takes him a second to recognize the self-satisfied expression on Draco’s face, and then a second more to actually get the joke. When he does he groans, rolls his eyes, and waves the hawthorn wand in the air a little despairingly. “For fuck’s sake, Malfoy, I meant—”
“Expelliarmus,” Draco says, eyes glittering, because he’s never missed an opportunity in his life to be an annoying little git and Harry shouldn’t have expected him to start now. The wand flies through the air, and Harry can almost feel its allegiance tug loose from his fingertips with it, over to Draco, where it belongs.
Draco snatches it out of the air like a Snitch. He tosses Harry back his own wand without even looking at him, says, as if to himself, “Could it really be that simple?” and throws a fire into the grate with a curious-sounding, “Incendio.” Flames burst merrily into life, and Draco bursts into laughter, the first genuine laugh Harry’s heard from him all night.
“I’m sorry,” Draco says, “I just—the sensation is just so strange. It’s like being fifteen again.” Then he looks at Harry, and, quieter, his smile going small and a little wry, adds, “Well. Not quite.”
Harry grins back at him, broad and easy, and laces his fingers behind his head, settles back in his chair. “What’re you saying there, Malfoy? I mean, what, did you not like me when we were teenagers or something? That’s hurtful, you know. I had nothing but kind and wholesome things to say about you.”
“I don’t like you now, Potter,” Draco says, clearly trying for obnoxiously earnest, but laughing on it a little. “I find you appalling in every respect. Your manners; your personality; your living conditions; your hair. The whole operation is tits-up, and I can’t believe I socialize with you. In short: egads. Alas. Etcetera.”
“Did fifteen year old you say ‘egads’ a lot?” Harry wonders aloud. “I mean, 1500 year old you, sure, that would make sense—”
“You genuinely and without reservation are such a complete horror,” Draco tells him, but he doesn’t bother to hide his smile when he says it, and doesn’t look away for a hanging second when Harry meets his eyes.
They sit in silence for a good while after that, just kind of…decompressing, Harry thinks, from the whole night. It’s nice. Usually Harry starts to feel a little antsy if a period of quiet goes on too long, sure he’s supposed to be doing something, saying something; sure he’s messing the whole thing up, somehow, by missing some cue everyone but him knows. With Draco, just now, it’s…like sitting in a room alone, but better. It’s a bit like sitting in the Gryffindor Common Room, actually, late at night when no one who was still around was actually trying to talk. Harry used to sit and watch the fire for hours on nights when he couldn’t sleep, listening to the sounds of his classmates sneaking to and from each other’s dormitories, or the scratches of their quills on last minute homework.
He looks at Draco, whose legs are stretched out long in front of him, his head tipped back against his chair and his eyes on the dance of the flames. He doesn’t look panicked or resigned or affectless or sorrowful or anything else horrible, just now. He looks comfortable, calm—maybe the calmest Harry’s seen him look this whole month. Maybe the calmest Harry’s ever seen him look. Harry thinks about being fifteen and hating Malfoy more than almost anything, hating Malfoy so much it burned and hissed beneath his skin, and wonders if maybe Draco wasn’t doing this too, back then, down in the Slytherin dungeons. If some nights it hadn’t just been the two of them, at opposite ends of the castle, sitting up alone with the fire.
It’s a ridiculous thought, a silly one. He doesn’t ask Draco about it, because he doesn’t want to find out that he’s wrong.
“We should call the Aurors,” Draco says eventually. “To report, you know. All of these unpleasant happenings. Criminals on the loose, and such.”
“Yeah,” Harry says, and sighs. “And you still need St. Mungo’s. Are you sure you’re—”
“Oh, just call your bloody Aurors, Potter,” Draco snaps, before Harry can get the word ‘ready’ out of his mouth, so Harry shrugs and sends a Patronus.
It’s only about 20 seconds before another one swoops back in, and Harry blinks at it a second, frankly astonished at the response time, before he realizes that it’s a Jack Russell terrier, and Ron’s.
“Harry,” it says, sounding furious, “where in the bloody fuck are you? Hermione’s been attacked. Come to St. Mungo’s the minute you get this.”
