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Draco is still talking. “But you can’t help me, can you?” The words cut Harry apart, because he never wants that to be the case, that Draco is hurting and Harry be left helpless. “You wouldn’t do a damn thing about it, even if you could.”
“He tried to kill me.” Harry tries to make his voice as gentle as he can, but he falters on the last word. He does not know how to make Draco understand the hate that was in his father without being cruel, or to tell him that he could not excuse that, even for him. “He might have been a good person, but he was wrong.”
“He was my dad.” Draco said, miserably, ripping at his nails now, and his hands were bleeding. Harry wanted to tell him sorry, sorry that life was like this, sorry his mother asked this of them, sorry that Draco’s father did what he did, just sorry, sorry for so many things that weren’t his fault and that he could never fix. He wanted to fix them, but couldn’t, just pulled Draco to him. “He was my father.”
There wasn’t much that could be said after that. They stay like that for a few minutes, then Draco pulls away, tears still staining his face and eyes red, his voice scratchy from the crying. Harry can still feel the tears on his shirt drying.
“Whatever, right?” Draco laughed, but it sounded wrong, because nothing about this could be less funny. “He did what he did, and now there’s nothing that anyone can say about it.”
“He tried to kill me.” Harry says again, dumbstruck, because this, this conversation right now, what Draco must be feeling, that was so much worse than anything that Harry had to deal with when it came to his parents. When they’re dead and you never knew them, they can never disappoint. “I’m sorry, Draco.”
He reaches out to him, to try and pull him back, but Draco just barks out a laugh that he cuts off before it really gets started. “Merlin, Harry.” Draco smiles at him, tired but almost fond in a way. “I know. It’s okay.”
Harry just nods, because there is nothing he can say to that. And what would he say anyways? Another rendition of how this is not Draco’s fault, how Harry doesn’t blame him, how they are friends?
Because they aren’t friends, not really. This is not how you feel about a friend, this is not what you do to comfort a friend when they are hurting and you are hopeless to help them. They stopped being just friends a long time ago, but none of that will help them with this.
Chapter 15
Harry
He hears screaming.
It only takes a second to realize that the sound he was hearing belonged to Hermione, and that shouldn’t be happening, it shouldn’t even be possible for her to be attacked here, in this home with all its many defensive spells. He is out of his seat and hurtling down the stairs, barreling into the kitchen with his wand out, only to see Draco hugging Hermione so tightly that he actually spins her around the kitchen.
(Like, spins. The kind from a muggle movie, where he takes her by the waist and her feet actually lift the ground because they are that level of happy.)
Harry stops short and collapses into the wall, weak at the knees, because the rush of adrenaline he had gotten when he thought something was wrong seems to be leaving him just as fast. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
“We did it!” Hermione turns to him, then, and her embrace hits him the chest with enough force to knock the wind out of them. “We made it!”
Harry didn’t know what they did, exactly. Draco and Hermione’s work had left practical and turned to theoretical almost immediately. It turns out that there was almost nothing hard about copying muggle medications for mental diseases, and the only reason the wizarding world did not have them was that no one had ever tried. Now, though, they were working on things that the ministry was handing down to them, a very experimental study that involves changing conditions right at the source, even if it’s in the DNA, like a sort of biological polyjuice potion.
“You did it?” Harry faltered, and then he looked over at Draco, who just looked mildly exciting, considering they just made history. “You found the correction for that genome, or whatever?”
They had found the cause of squibs, a chromosomal disorder stuck deep within the DNA, and now Draco and Hermione found the way to fix it. “Sort of.” Hermione was talking rapid fire again, the way she would when they were studying and she knew too much and tried to say it all in one breath. “It’s very experimental, and it’ll need to be tested, which Merlin even knows how we can ethically do that, it’s all up to chance, and we don’t know any of the symptoms, of course, so there’s really nothing, but…”
Draco put a hand on her shoulder, drawing her close to him, but Hermione just shook him off and went back to her notes.
“What’s that mean?”
Harry was desperate to know. It was Hermione’s idea in the first place, but it really all came back to Dumbledore, who had to hide his sister because her magic wouldn’t flow in the right way. And that had seemed something to do with the brain to Harry, and he had asked Hermione if she could find a way to fix it.
And since Hermione was Hermione, who never let anyone be discriminated against or withdrew a helping hand to someone in need, she said she’d try her best.
For the first time in this discussion, Draco smiled. “It means we found a bridge, Harry.” Then he laughs, clear and wild, and spins Harry around the room like he had done Hermione, because Hermione is apparently done celebrating. “And that’s enough.”
Draco
They have to celebrate. That’s decided from basically the moment that Harry bursts into the kitchen, because it had been a long few weeks neither Draco or Hermione thought they would ever make a break through, and here it was, puzzle solved.
(At least, they think its solved. Draco supposes that they won’t really know, until there’s someone to test it.)
Either way, it is further than any other healer or potions master had come before, if they had even tried to look, and Harry had deemed it worthy of a celebration. Ron had agreed, so now everyone was in Ron and Hermione’s flat, with more people arriving every minute.
Draco watches from the corner. Dean and Seamus are here, curled up together on the love seat, with Seamus not quite willing to leave the protection of Dean’s side. Ginny has set up camp beside Hermione, and Luna is off in the corner, apparently inspecting thin air. He recognizes other Gryffindors, and a few Ravenclaws who manage to be polite to him simply because they want to hear about the research. And Neville. He always can find Neville.
They are all Hermione’s friends. The thought saddens him, because he was instrumental to the process, it had really been his idea that had started it all, and now there was no one here to clap for him, except for Harry.
(Though Harry was very important. Maybe the most important.)
He’s almost getting full on melancholy when someone claps a hand down on his shoulder, the sudden contact making him jump. “Whoa, hey. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Someone looms ahead of him, and they grin, all teeth. It takes him a second to recognize George Weasley, who looks so much happier than he had the last time Draco saw him. “Just wanted to say congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Draco felt himself smile. “though you really should be telling that to Hermione.”
“Nonsense. She has enough admirers.” George holds up a bottle of wine and waves it in the air. “Where do you think I should put this?”
This is domestic. And familiar. Draco had played the host plenty of times before. “Kitchen, probably. Want me to show you?”
“Nah, I know the way.” Draco has just enough time to be disappointed before he pulls a bag out of the pocket of his trench coat. “But come anyways. You can help me dump my canary creams in with all Hermione’s fancy cookies.”
She would hate that, Draco knows, but everyone else would find it funny. So he goes.
Draco does not know how things got so bad, so fast.
It was a good party. The party wasn’t for him, and no one was ever going to pull him onto a table and demand a speech like they did for Hermione, but he was having fun, stuck between George and Luna, listening them to them carry on with their off key renditions of Celestina Warbeck songs. He feels like he is part of the group, and for once, Draco feels like he is finally at a place where he is willing to put the past behind them.
And then Ron gets angry.
Draco had noticed that he was a barely contained time bomb, ready to fight at the slightest provocation, but it still stung, because all he had done was make the mistake of taking his guard down, of trying to belong. Draco made a joke, and Hermione was laughing, and then Draco was leaning over her, about to start a story that began with remember when about one of their rare good moments from Hogwarts, but then Ron was between them, shoving him away from Hermione, spitting in his face.
The room gets quiet, and Draco does not move, just stares down at the way that Ron’s hand was fisted in his shirt, wondering why he keeps finding himself in this position. This is what it felt like, He thought, in a dull, detached sort of way. All those people who you pushed around, this is what it felt like.
Behind him, George makes a move to get to his feet, but Ginny holds him back with just a touch to the arm. Maybe they thought that this was something they shouldn’t get in the middle of.
Draco really disagreed. He wanted anyone, even if it was someone that would never speak to him again, to rise to their feet and stand up for him, because this is not fair, this is not right, he did not do anything wrong this time. He’s trying, damn it.
“We’re not friends,” Ron spits, and the words are worse than if he had punched them. His voice is quiet, a terribly controlled silence, but everyone could hear. “Look around you. None of these people are your friends.”
He would not be saying this if things were normally, if he was sober, if there weren’t this many people demanding his attention. It was stressful for him, and it had finally boiled over. Draco wanted it to stop, but Draco cannot speak, cannot move to defend himself or walk away, because he was caught off guard and was just so, so stupid.
“They may have forgotten, they may have forgiven you just because Harry has, but I didn’t, okay, I remember all the things you said, all the things you did to us back in school, and I remember when you stood there and let innocent people get killed. So don’t act like your friends, and don’t you touch her.” Draco can hear a sound that might have been a disagreement from Hermione, but Draco cannot focus, because everyone is staring at him, and no one is rising to his defense.
“Ron—”
It sounded pathetic, even to himself. A pathetic word from a pathetic boy who cannot control his own life. And Ron knows it, can see how pathetic he is, like a worm about to be crushed.
“Get out my house.” The words are much louder, and Draco flinches away.
