Were the Soil Not So Unforgiving My Love
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Harry Potter › Slash - Male/Male › Harry/Draco
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Category:
Harry Potter › Slash - Male/Male › Harry/Draco
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
6
Views:
3,676
Reviews:
42
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
I Carry WIth Me all my Things, As they are Heavy
Were the Soil Not So Unforgiving My Love
Chapter 2 – I carry with me all my things, as they are heavy.
By: Lunatic With a Hero complex
Draco figured that even if he had a great memory, it would be best for both Potter and him if he chose to use a penseive to record the sessions. It would help him stay objective instead of letting his past with Potter color the memory. It was the first lesson in wizard psychology, stay objective. So he would keep a penseive record.
Session 1-A shifting of pride
Draco walked into the house, pausing to remove his jacket. Summer was coming up fast, finals had just ended, but it was still a little chilly outside. Call it English weather. He laid the jacket on the counter, noting that most of the debris that had been here when he came to visit the first time was now gone. Apparently he’d shamed Granger into doing it.
He stepped through the living room, picking his way through, even though there were no longer liquor bottles on the carpet. As he approached the study, his steps became slower. He knew he was both anticipating and fearing this first session. He would not have the safety crutch of Granger’s presence.
Potter had not moved it seemed since Draco’s last visit. Only the stack of empty bottles at his side appeared to have gotten larger. And for a brief mad moment, he had a manic curiosity as to where all of the alcohol was coming from. Maybe there was a stash under the desk.
He moved to the seat he had occupied last time, and sat down, once more moving books out of the way. Potter at least looked to have moved on to a different book. At least he was showing signs that he could move, even if he didn’t want to move. In another strange stab of curiosity, Draco wondered where the different books were coming from.
He seized the passing thought and wrangled it into the mainstream. He highly doubted that Potter was going to start this conversation by himself. So he would just have to start it, with whatever seemed interesting to the man at the time. At this time, his research was what appeared most interesting to him.
He picked up a wayward book, Harry Potter: The Science of the Ultimate Survival, and waved it in Potter’s general direction, “Where exactly do all of these books come from Mr. Potter. Your library doesn’t really seem that extensive.”
He patiently waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming, he swallowed his slight irritation, and muscled on, “Mr. Potter?”
Again, his head didn’t come up, but the voice underneath was quite coherent, “You have known me for approximately a decade, and never once have you used an honorific with my name Mr. Malfoy, it might make me even more ‘unstable’ if you started doing it now.”
Draco, to say the least, was put out. It did not best please him when his ‘patients’ walked around….or sat around, insulting what he believed was his most professional manner. The fact that it was Potter doing it, only made it sting more.
“Fine, Potter, where do these books come from, you always seem to have new ones.”
“When you save the Wizarding World, no matter how you do it, businesses are willing to go just a little farther to get you the products you want. Even if you were a Gryffindor, and not a pureblood.”
Draco was very sick of only performing the action of silently seething. It was getting old.
“Ahhh, I see.” A pause. “What exactly are you studying?”
Nothing.
“Potter?”
Nothing.
More seething.
“Harry?”
Potter looked up and Draco immediately wished he hadn’t. The face was thinner, the cheeks more gaunt, the bruises under his eyes more pronounced. The eyes themselves had taken on a more manic gleam than Draco had imagined. He unconsciously moved backwards in his chair, attempting to evade that gaze. It wasn’t working, so he consciously made himself just Stop It. “What are you studying, Harry?”
It was his figuring that when Potter went like this, he wasn’t his childhood rival, so he could comfortably call him by his first name.
Potter just looked slightly lost for a moment, “I have to get rid of the green, I just have to, can’t live with it on. It’ll only take a few more books, just a few pages, and then I can get it out, I’m sure of it.” His head was descending again, “I’ll find it, I have to.”
Draco was confused. Ultimately, he did not like the feeling. “Harry?”
No response.
“Potter?”
Nothing.
“Dark Lord Harry Potter?”
Absolute silence.
Draco leaned back in the chair, trying to formulate a further strategy. The only thing that came to him was the still unwashed odor of his patient. It was becoming slightly offensive.
“Honestly, Potter, if you can go to the loo, you should be able to bathe.”
He cast a Scourgify at him and decided that he’d done enough for one day. Slowly, hopefully, they would build to longer, more involved, interactive sections. But he’d made initial contact, and that would have to do for now. He rose from his seat and picked up his belongings, turning for the door. “Same time tomorrow Potter?”
Silence.
Draco seethed…
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“So he just studies? What’s wrong with that? I thought you’d be happy about it Hermione?” Ron was almost wholly focused on his dinner. He’d been out of the country for quite a while, dealing with that mad Russian woman, and he’d honestly missed English meals. He couldn’t understand why Hermione seemed so upset and restless about Harry. So he’d gone on a random research project. So what? He was probably just using it to get over his breakup with Ginny. It was to be expected.
“He destroyed his house.”
Well that wasn’t to be expected, Harry was rarely destructive. In fact, the only real times he’d seen him try actively to destroy things were when he was in the throes of grief or severe protectiveness, “How so?”
He’d paused in his dinner, not really lost his focus, just left the fork on the plate.
“Everything that could be torn apart was, even the dishes we gave him when he bought the house. Ron, I…”
He finally looked up at her and saw that she was near tears. He dropped the fork and rose to go around the table and put his arms around her, “Love, there are always going to be things that happened to Harry that we just don’t understand. Not because we don’t love him enough or because we’re less than he is, but because we weren’t there for all of it.” He leaned back and looked her in the eye, “He died, Hermione. We’ve been through some awful things together, but through that, he went alone.”
She wiped at the tears that had managed to escape off of her cheeks and moved back from him minutely. “I know that, but it just makes me so bloody angry when I can’t help him, that’s why I….”
Ron grew suspicious, and his gentle demeanor sharpened slightly, “Why you what?”
“Honestly Ronald, its nothing bad, I just got a psychiatrist for him.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you just say that then?” His suspicions weren’t completely soothed. Soothed even less by the guilty look that flitted across her features, “Well, you see, the psychiatrist was someone a little unorthodox for someone like Harry.”
“Who is it?”
A murmur.
Hermione never murmured.
“Who?”
“Draco Malfoy…”
Crickets.
“Who?!”
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Draco found a strange sense of enjoyment in his second visit to Potter, but he really did not want to know why.
Session 2: Resorting to Fisticuffs
He hadn’t worn a jacket today, the heat was finally catching up with the season, and he was able to roam the world unfettered by the bindings of wind protection. He walked more quickly this time through the living room and into the dim and ominous light of the study. It was beautiful outside, but in here it was a bubble of timelessness. Seasons, day and night, and weather did not exist past this doorjamb.
Potter was, as usual, sitting near a mountain of deceased alcohol, and reading with a near religious fervor. Draco sat in his usual chair, moving Understanding Death Volume II: Moving Under Water out of his way this time. Silence reigned. Hardly surprising, that, but still frustrating. With exams out of the way, and his mind left to its own devices, he had thought very hard about this next session and what he might do to snap Potter out of it. He’d come to no definite conclusion, but one was forming in his mind right now, probably fueled by his frustration and his feeling of just being a spectator in this mad situation. He was hardly going to accept becoming another Potter Watcher.
There was one thing he remembered that had always roused spirit in Harry Potter, never failing, not even in the final years before the end of the war. It may be cruel for someone who didn’t seem that capable of defending himself, but luckily, Draco was less than concerned for the cruel factor of his plans, making him the perfect candidate for this job.
He put his case on the floor and stood. He watched Potter silently for one long moment, and then he put his plan into action. “So Potter, it seems to me that people really don’t change do they. I had heard that you had slipped out of the public eye, had started living a quiet, peaceful life. But now I see that of course, you are just as attention seeking as you were when we were in Hogwarts, only your tactics seem to have become more drastic of course. Really, Potter, faking insanity just to get some sympathy. Honestly. You’re probably not even really reading those books are you? You never took anything seriously, definitely not studying.”
Potter’s head was still facing the book, but his eyes had stopped their feverish race back and forth, and he was still, oh so still. Draco felt a frisson of excitement shiver up his spine. By Merlin, he’d missed this. He shoved a few books off of the corner of the desk and continued, “You never understood the impact of anything you did. Always rushing off to get into danger, never thinking about what everyone had to do to get you out of it again.”
He kept disheveling things in the office. He turned back to Potter and got ready to loose his final strike. He grabbed the book Potter was reading, throwing it behind him to hit the wall, “And of course you never even consider all of the people killed trying to get you out of your stupid adventures.”
Potter’s head jerked up when he grabbed the book, burning like a funeral pyre, and ready to do some real damage to the thief, only to freeze solid when Draco’s statement sank in.
The eyes, ridiculously green, widened to an unheard of size and shot around in their sockets, looking for a place to escape what was behind them. Potter’s hands gripped the edge of his desk, the knuckles growing whiter with every moment. Draco watched with interest bordering on obscene. Oh, he’d definitely pushed the right button to get Harry Potter alive, and he just knew the resulting reaction was going to be fairly interesting.
Potter jerked, just once in his chair, like an aborted attempt at flying away. And then his face tilted towards Draco and Draco had just enough time to register the sheer incoherent grief and rage in those eyes before Potter’s magic helped him along and shoved the desk from in front of him, right into Draco’s solar plexus, propelling him across the room, to stumble into the wall. Miraculously, he kept his feet, but his breath was another matter altogether. He looked at Potter and was startled to see that despite his emaciated figure and tired face, he was just intimidating enough to give Draco pause before he continued. “Just like you Potter, can’t say anything worth hearing, so you just resort to violence. It explains a lot.”
Potter let out a hurt, and somewhat mad shout, and came at him, his magic helping him close the distance. Before he could think to move, Potter was on him. His head hit the wall and his vision brightened painfully. To keep himself from concussion, Draco pushed back against Potter, moving around so he wasn’t backed against a wall. Unfortunately, the changing location didn’t perturb Potter all that terribly and he followed, his mouth twisted in a permanent mindless snarl. He gripped the open collar of Draco’s button up shirt and yanked him sideways, causing Draco to stumble. With his footing already lost, he wasn’t prepared when he was pushed, and he fell to the ground.
This was exactly what he’d wanted; he just hadn’t thought it would be so painful for him. He had seen maybe more yelling, and less fisticuffs. However, he was smart enough to realize he had to go ahead and reap what he had sowed. So he let Potter descend on him, snarling. He’d expected a barrage of punches to come at him, so he’d prepared to fend off the most damaging of them, but Potter only sunk one hard punch to his mouth before the violence degenerated into a wordless sobs and a periodic jerking of Draco’s collar, lifting him and slamming him down, but not really causing any true harm.
Finally, the jerking stopped, and the black head rested on Draco’s chest. He felt himself tense slightly. This was definitely not something he’d planned on. To be deadly honest, he really hadn’t thought much past pissing Potter off. Then a voice drifted up to him, Potter was speaking. And it was Potter, the man, Draco realized, not Harry, the patient, “When will it be enough, Malfoy. When is the point when I finally can just stop worrying about what happened that day. I thought, when it was all over, and I’d stopped the bastard, and the rest of the world could just go do whatever they wanted that I could do that too. But, I’m still paying. Every day, every moment, its all I see. That ridiculous green color over everything I do.” Finally he looked up, and Draco could see the madness creeping back and he mourned it, “When will it go away?”
The head went back down, and when it tensed even further, Draco knew, without looking that he was back with Harry, the patient. When he’d rushed back over to the books, forsaking the desk against the wall and simply picking up the one Draco had thrown across the room and huddling on the floor against the wall, Draco brought his eyebrows together in confusion. There was something he was missing. Something he had not been told. Of course, everyone had seen the Dark Lord defeated. Potter had done it right there in the middle of the Great Hall. Despite the animosity he still felt towards Potter, he would admit, it was one of the most admirable things he’d ever witnessed. But even then there were things he hadn’t understood about Potter’s speech. He supposed that right now was the best time to find some things out.
He rose and left, shooting one last confused glare at the bowed head of oily hair.
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“Granger.” She jumped. Inside, he smirked. He’d come on her as she was in the library, earning himself a sense of beautiful retribution. He couldn’t understand why in the world she was in the library to begin with, it being the middle of Summer holidays, but he’d known despite that, it was where he was most likely to find her.
“Draco? What are you doing here? Is it Harry? Did something happen to him?”
She had an infuriating talent for speaking at ridiculously high speeds, so he broke in when she stopped to breathe, “No, nothing is wrong. Well, something is most definitely wrong, but nothing new that you haven’t already witnessed. She immediately calmed down, “Oh, well, then how can I help you?”
He settled more comfortably in the wooden chair and looked her straight in the eyes, his face going more deeply serious, “I have made some very small headway, I got him to react yesterday anyway, but it has come to my attention that perhaps there are some things about his history that I’m not aware of, some things that are predominate in his condition.”
He knew right away that he’d definitely hit on something. Her face went shadowed and her hand, restlessly flitting on the page of her textbook stilled. He just cocked an eyebrow at her, questioning with his eyes.
She turned slowly, as if injured, to face him, “There is something about the final battle. But no one really knows about it, except for Harry, Ron, and me. The only other people that knew about it are dead.” Her eyes hardened on him, “And there is a reason no one knows Malfoy, it is still a very difficult thing to talk about. Harry doesn't want anyone to know.”
Draco was most definitely interested. If it was that good, he just had to know. And it would help Potter, of course.
“I’m not going to go blabbing it to everyone I meet, Granger, but he’s been babbling at me and I don't understand most of it. If you want me to help, I need to know all I can about what might be causing this. Unless, of course, you would rather I not help him.”
He made to get up and knew the moment she changed her mind, “Wait! I just…well it’s difficult to talk about, like I said…just sit down, I’ll tell you.”
He smiled to himself and changed his expression to one of somber intent as he turned back to her, seating himself back in the chair, waiting politely.
Granger lifted her wand and cast a bubble of silence around them, blocking out the rest of the world. She stared at him for a moment before starting, as if considering something, and he just raised an eyebrow at her once more.
“You remember of course, the day that Voldemort fell, yes?”
He just looked at her.
“So of course you remember how the final battle started, what Voldemort came out of the Forbidden Forest with?”
He was getting impatient, “Yes, Granger.”
“Everyone has always assumed that Harry dodged Voldemort’s Adava, but that, unfortunately is not the truth.”
She had paused, and Draco felt a moment of fear, irrational fear, that he really didn’t want to know what she was going to tell him. But he held it in.
“We watched Snape die, you know? Voldemort killed him in the shrieking shack because he didn’t think anyone would know that the house wasn’t actually haunted. Unfortunately, we’d known about it since third year, when there was an unfortunate incident with a rat and a dog. So when Harry saw Voldemort there through his scar, we knew exactly where he was.”
Draco desperately wanted to ask about that ‘incident’, but he knew to keep his mouth shut.
“We watched him die, but not before he gave something to Harry, a set of memories. We took them and headed back to the castle, where Ron and I went into the Great Hall. Harry went to the headmaster’s office and used his pensieve. I’m not exactly sure of everything he saw, he told us ‘that a dead man’s darkest secrets were best left in the dark’ when we asked, and we’ve always felt it was best to accept that. However, what he did tell us was that ultimately Dumbledore’s plans for Harry were not to destroy Voldemort in a plain duel at all, but something completely different.”
She paused, and Draco, who was finding himself deeply interested for some reason, jerked back to himself. She seemed to be fighting back a batch of tears, which just unsettled him more. He wished he could find it in him to help soothe her, but he really had no idea what he would say to that purpose. But she gathered herself all on her own, and continued speaking, with only a small hitch in her speech.
“Because of the way that Voldemort’s original Killing Curse bounced off of Harry, he’d made Harry’s scar a horcrux,” thinking of the fact that Draco may not know what a horcrux was, she started a side note, “A horcrux is an object that contains a piece of a person’s soul put there when the person does something so horrible that it tears a piece of it out. Voldemort had seven. And the last two of those seven were Nagini, the Dark Lord’s snake, and Harry.”
“Dumbledore never meant for Harry to survive the war. The only way to win was to let Voldemort kill him, and that meant that he was not allowed to fight back. For this world to be safe, Dumbledore knew, Harry had to die willingly for it.”
Draco felt the blood run from his face and he felt a little dizzy. He’d always felt that maybe the war had ended slightly anticlimactically. He wasn’t complaining, most definitely not, but he’d thought there might be a bit of a longer battle, or more epic of an ending. Of course, the battle that had existed had been a plenty large enough challenge, but there was very little flashy spell work happening. It seemed now though, that all of the epic-ness had been there, but largely internalized and witnessed by only the enemy.
When he spoke, it came out as something he didn’t recognize, almost a whisper, “He had to do it willingly?”
Hermione nodded, and there were definitely tears in her eyes now, “The only way that he could save us all was by letting Voldemort destroy his own horcrux. He had to love the world enough to leave it.” She paused, then continued hesitantly, “He didn’t even tell us when he went to do it, he just left the castle, apparently the last person that saw him before he went to the forest was Neville, he said that Harry just told him that if he didn’t come back that Neville had to kill the snake.
"Neville said he never forgot that Harry gave him that job, and how honored he’d felt."
"Harry told us later that when he went in to the forest, that first step was the hardest he’d ever taken, and after that, everything else was like a walk through fog. And when he met Voldemort, in a clearing in the forest, he said he felt so awfully calm, so ridiculously docile. And then after, a brief tantrum, Voldemort sent one final Killing Curse at him.”
The tears were streaming down her face now, and Draco couldn’t really find it in himself to speak at all. When she spoke again, she only made it half way through the sentence before she had to pause to wipe her eyes.
“He never told Ron, but one night when we were out drinking, he told me, slurringly, that he’d never felt so damn peaceful or relieved as he had when he saw that green light coming at him.”
She wiped her face again and then she chuckled lightly.
“Somehow, the magic that connected Harry to Voldemort through his scar once more kept the spell from doing exactly what it was supposed to, and instead of killing him, or repeating and killing Voldemort, it destroyed the Horcrux in Harry. He could have chosen to die right there, he'd been given the option, but he felt responsible for making sure that Voldemort really got destroyed. So when he came back, he played dead.”
Here she paused and looked at him with a sudden curiosity, “You know, I’m kind of surprised that you’ve never known this part, it was you’re mother that lied to Voldemort when he asked if Harry was really dead. Harry told me that all she wanted was to know if you had lived. He said that that was the most respectable reason he’d ever heard for switching sides.”
Draco was slightly thunderstruck. Not only had he heard both a distinctly disturbing story, but his mother had known the truth of it for all of this time, and she hadn’t said a thing, “No, she never mentioned it, though I always did wonder why she and my father weren’t persecuted more than they were after the war.”
She nodded along, and then surprised him by chuckling, “The one thing Harry always respected above anything else was love, and you’re mother proved she valued the love of her family above everything else. You know it was an interesting side effect of the whole thing, one not even Dumbledore anticipated, that because Harry's death was willing, the curse had the same effect that the one that killed his mother had.”
Draco looked at her in slight confusion.
“Lily Potter's love for Harry in the face of death overpowered the will behind Voldemorts anger, and until the ritual in his fourth year, he couldn’t even physically touch Harry. After Harry took the killing curse in the forest, Voldemort wasn’t able to hurt anyone that he attacked. None of the hexes stuck, no matter how much force he put behind them.”
She snorted bitterly, “The love of one 17 year old boy saved the entire wizarding world, its ridiculous.”
Draco nodded silently. He was truly having trouble speaking. He’d thought perhaps, Potter had seen a bad bit of carnage or had a particularly bad spat with someone and his mind had just been unable to handle it. It never crossed his mind to suppose something like this. He died. Dead. On purpose. For love of a wizarding world that had been little but fickle about him. For love of everyone. Even Draco.
He sat for a moment, completely still, and Granger just watched him, like she wanted to witness it when he finally exploded or something. He nodded at nothing in particular and stood, shakily, to his feet. He braced his hand on the table, feeling like a newborn child, and spoke, his voice unsupported, “I will take all of this into consideration before our next session…thank you for your honesty.” He turned to walk out of the library, and was stopped by her hand on his arm, he looked down it into the stern face of Hermione Granger, the war hero, and waited, “If you use this information to hurt him, Draco, I will know exactly where it came from and I will make sure that you can’t tell anyone anything again.”
He was recovering his wits, slowly, but recovering, he just raised his brows at her, “Loud and clear.”
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Session 3: In which a fit of understanding becomes a garden party
Draco stood in the kitchen, he’d been there for about 15 minutes, but he couldn’t seem to get through the door into the living room. His palms were slightly sweaty. After what he’d heard from Granger, he didn’t know how he’d feel when he looked at Pot..Harry.
That was another thing, he felt this ridiculous and irritating budding of respect for Harry Potter. Whatever ire he was harboring for the man, seemed to be draining out through this worrisome hole in his arguments against the Man-Who-Lived.
Finally he forced his left leg to take the first step and moved for the door to the living room. He found it easier to move after that first step and soon he was at the door of the study. He came around the corner of the door frame, mouth opened, to say what he didn’t know, and froze. For one clear crystallized moment, he thought perhaps he was letting the truth about the end of the war get to him and imagining things, so he blinked, hard. However, when he opened his eyes again, the scene was still the same and in fact getting worse as he sat there.
The desk was still in its exiled place against the far wall, and the things that Draco had moved or thrown around were still in their landing zones. However, Harry was not where he’d last left him. Harry bloody Potter was in a completely different place altogether. He was sitting on the floor still, that was true, but he’d moved to the wall where his desk used to be, leaning against the rolling chair, which was in turn leaning against a book shelf.
All of that was just fine.
What really worried Draco, was the steak knife in Harry’s hand. A moment later, Draco’s eyes registered the lines that were carved on his skin. Less like lines and more like valleys, jagged dark things that were shapeless and aimless. The blood that came out of them ran steadily a painful looking red in all of these rich browns and dark colors.
His paralysis broke and he nearly ran over to the man, kneeling in front of him. The knife was moving steadily towards his leg again, yearning for another taste of Gryffindor blood, and Draco gently gripped the hand controlling it, moving the knife away, unable to get it out, but keeping it at bay, this was definitely Harry, the patient.
“Harry, what are you doing?” He asked it quietly, as though he were afraid of scaring off a wild animal.
The dark head came back up and Draco bit back a telling gasp at the pale face with blood spattered on it.
“I think I’ve figured it out. I couldn’t get rid of it because it was in me. Not just affecting me, but in my blood. All I have to do is get it out, and it’ll be fine, I can be normal again.”
He tried to bring the knife down again, but Draco continued to hold him off. Harry’s eyebrows furrowed, “Give me the knife Malfoy, you don’t understand, but that’s alright, I can’t expect you to, just give it to me." He was struggling more now, but he had been eating little to nothing for weeks with little but his magic to sustain him, and Draco was no doubt the physically stronger. And Harry’s magic was not about to help him kill himself.
Finally, Draco wrestled the knife free and vanished it with his wand. Harry let out a primal scream and made another one of those abortive jerks as if a part of himself had been vanished with it. Draco looked at him. Really looked at him for the first time since he’d visited Hermione and experienced that interesting story hour. More than just madness, he saw a kind of debilitating desperation. A raw need for something, anything to prove to himself he was alright, he was normal, he was alive.
As he sat there, holding the writhing limbs of the Savior of the Wizarding World, a sketchy outline of an idea began to form in his head. A strange inkling as to the ultimate cause of this whole mess. It would take more mental devotion than he had right now to completely work it out, but it was definitely close. He turned his attention back to Harry and watched him for a moment longer before he surprised himself and leaned forward to hug him.
Harry stilled instantly, unused to such full body contact with another human being after long absence. Finally, the stillness began to recede and sobbing broke out against his shoulder. Tentatively, Draco put a hand on Harry’s back and rubbed small circles.
He wasn’t exactly sure how long he sat there, hugging his arch nemesis as he cried his eyes out on his shoulder. All he knew was that at one point he looked down and the sobbing had stopped and wonders above and wonders never cease, Harry Potter was sleeping.
Draco blinked in astonishment.
Well…if his charge wasn’t bleeding all over the damn carpet, he would definitely call that progress.
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Potter’s body was light, way too light for a grown man. But he guessed if he didn’t eat for weeks then his body fat index would go down as well. He’d run the water relatively hot, sure that the lack of meat on Potter would make him more susceptible to chills. As he lowered the man into the tub, he felt a burning blush rush up his neck.
He had not thought that he would ever have the chance in his life to look upon a naked and emaciated Harry Potter while preparing to bathe him. Miraculously, Potter was still asleep. Draco supposed it made a lot of sense. The only thing that Potter had done less of in the past few weeks than eating was sleeping. He could probably set off a bomb and the man wouldn’t turn an eyelid.
He scrubbed him gently, taking care to clean him, but not rub him to harshly. When it came to cleaning his private parts, Draco felt the blush spread a little hotter, but reined it in. He shoved whatever inappropriate thoughts he was having into the back of his bedside manner and finished bathing him. With the help of a levitation and warming charm he maneuvered Harry into his pajamas and tucked him into the white and black bed in the master bedroom.
He sat down in the arm chair by the fireplace and pulled out his earlier thoughts. He’d begun to see something that could turn into a full blown explanation for this madness.
It had been a sudden recollection of some of Harry’s words versus a sentence of Hermione’s.
She’d said, “…he told me, slurringly, that he’d never felt so damn peaceful or relieved as he had when he saw that green light coming at him.”
And during the last session, Harry had mumbled something about making the green go away.
It could be of course coincidence, but in Draco’s experience, it was hardly ever the case.
It could be a fairly safe bet to say that it wasn’t just the color green that was bothering Harry so. It would more than likely be the connotations hidden behind the color. Green was the lively and poisonous color of the Killing Curse.
Draco had the distinct feeling that he’d walked into something that was a little out of his league, Harry Potter was under the lascivious courtship of Death.
Chapter 2 – I carry with me all my things, as they are heavy.
By: Lunatic With a Hero complex
Draco figured that even if he had a great memory, it would be best for both Potter and him if he chose to use a penseive to record the sessions. It would help him stay objective instead of letting his past with Potter color the memory. It was the first lesson in wizard psychology, stay objective. So he would keep a penseive record.
Session 1-A shifting of pride
Draco walked into the house, pausing to remove his jacket. Summer was coming up fast, finals had just ended, but it was still a little chilly outside. Call it English weather. He laid the jacket on the counter, noting that most of the debris that had been here when he came to visit the first time was now gone. Apparently he’d shamed Granger into doing it.
He stepped through the living room, picking his way through, even though there were no longer liquor bottles on the carpet. As he approached the study, his steps became slower. He knew he was both anticipating and fearing this first session. He would not have the safety crutch of Granger’s presence.
Potter had not moved it seemed since Draco’s last visit. Only the stack of empty bottles at his side appeared to have gotten larger. And for a brief mad moment, he had a manic curiosity as to where all of the alcohol was coming from. Maybe there was a stash under the desk.
He moved to the seat he had occupied last time, and sat down, once more moving books out of the way. Potter at least looked to have moved on to a different book. At least he was showing signs that he could move, even if he didn’t want to move. In another strange stab of curiosity, Draco wondered where the different books were coming from.
He seized the passing thought and wrangled it into the mainstream. He highly doubted that Potter was going to start this conversation by himself. So he would just have to start it, with whatever seemed interesting to the man at the time. At this time, his research was what appeared most interesting to him.
He picked up a wayward book, Harry Potter: The Science of the Ultimate Survival, and waved it in Potter’s general direction, “Where exactly do all of these books come from Mr. Potter. Your library doesn’t really seem that extensive.”
He patiently waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming, he swallowed his slight irritation, and muscled on, “Mr. Potter?”
Again, his head didn’t come up, but the voice underneath was quite coherent, “You have known me for approximately a decade, and never once have you used an honorific with my name Mr. Malfoy, it might make me even more ‘unstable’ if you started doing it now.”
Draco, to say the least, was put out. It did not best please him when his ‘patients’ walked around….or sat around, insulting what he believed was his most professional manner. The fact that it was Potter doing it, only made it sting more.
“Fine, Potter, where do these books come from, you always seem to have new ones.”
“When you save the Wizarding World, no matter how you do it, businesses are willing to go just a little farther to get you the products you want. Even if you were a Gryffindor, and not a pureblood.”
Draco was very sick of only performing the action of silently seething. It was getting old.
“Ahhh, I see.” A pause. “What exactly are you studying?”
Nothing.
“Potter?”
Nothing.
More seething.
“Harry?”
Potter looked up and Draco immediately wished he hadn’t. The face was thinner, the cheeks more gaunt, the bruises under his eyes more pronounced. The eyes themselves had taken on a more manic gleam than Draco had imagined. He unconsciously moved backwards in his chair, attempting to evade that gaze. It wasn’t working, so he consciously made himself just Stop It. “What are you studying, Harry?”
It was his figuring that when Potter went like this, he wasn’t his childhood rival, so he could comfortably call him by his first name.
Potter just looked slightly lost for a moment, “I have to get rid of the green, I just have to, can’t live with it on. It’ll only take a few more books, just a few pages, and then I can get it out, I’m sure of it.” His head was descending again, “I’ll find it, I have to.”
Draco was confused. Ultimately, he did not like the feeling. “Harry?”
No response.
“Potter?”
Nothing.
“Dark Lord Harry Potter?”
Absolute silence.
Draco leaned back in the chair, trying to formulate a further strategy. The only thing that came to him was the still unwashed odor of his patient. It was becoming slightly offensive.
“Honestly, Potter, if you can go to the loo, you should be able to bathe.”
He cast a Scourgify at him and decided that he’d done enough for one day. Slowly, hopefully, they would build to longer, more involved, interactive sections. But he’d made initial contact, and that would have to do for now. He rose from his seat and picked up his belongings, turning for the door. “Same time tomorrow Potter?”
Silence.
Draco seethed…
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“So he just studies? What’s wrong with that? I thought you’d be happy about it Hermione?” Ron was almost wholly focused on his dinner. He’d been out of the country for quite a while, dealing with that mad Russian woman, and he’d honestly missed English meals. He couldn’t understand why Hermione seemed so upset and restless about Harry. So he’d gone on a random research project. So what? He was probably just using it to get over his breakup with Ginny. It was to be expected.
“He destroyed his house.”
Well that wasn’t to be expected, Harry was rarely destructive. In fact, the only real times he’d seen him try actively to destroy things were when he was in the throes of grief or severe protectiveness, “How so?”
He’d paused in his dinner, not really lost his focus, just left the fork on the plate.
“Everything that could be torn apart was, even the dishes we gave him when he bought the house. Ron, I…”
He finally looked up at her and saw that she was near tears. He dropped the fork and rose to go around the table and put his arms around her, “Love, there are always going to be things that happened to Harry that we just don’t understand. Not because we don’t love him enough or because we’re less than he is, but because we weren’t there for all of it.” He leaned back and looked her in the eye, “He died, Hermione. We’ve been through some awful things together, but through that, he went alone.”
She wiped at the tears that had managed to escape off of her cheeks and moved back from him minutely. “I know that, but it just makes me so bloody angry when I can’t help him, that’s why I….”
Ron grew suspicious, and his gentle demeanor sharpened slightly, “Why you what?”
“Honestly Ronald, its nothing bad, I just got a psychiatrist for him.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you just say that then?” His suspicions weren’t completely soothed. Soothed even less by the guilty look that flitted across her features, “Well, you see, the psychiatrist was someone a little unorthodox for someone like Harry.”
“Who is it?”
A murmur.
Hermione never murmured.
“Who?”
“Draco Malfoy…”
Crickets.
“Who?!”
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Draco found a strange sense of enjoyment in his second visit to Potter, but he really did not want to know why.
Session 2: Resorting to Fisticuffs
He hadn’t worn a jacket today, the heat was finally catching up with the season, and he was able to roam the world unfettered by the bindings of wind protection. He walked more quickly this time through the living room and into the dim and ominous light of the study. It was beautiful outside, but in here it was a bubble of timelessness. Seasons, day and night, and weather did not exist past this doorjamb.
Potter was, as usual, sitting near a mountain of deceased alcohol, and reading with a near religious fervor. Draco sat in his usual chair, moving Understanding Death Volume II: Moving Under Water out of his way this time. Silence reigned. Hardly surprising, that, but still frustrating. With exams out of the way, and his mind left to its own devices, he had thought very hard about this next session and what he might do to snap Potter out of it. He’d come to no definite conclusion, but one was forming in his mind right now, probably fueled by his frustration and his feeling of just being a spectator in this mad situation. He was hardly going to accept becoming another Potter Watcher.
There was one thing he remembered that had always roused spirit in Harry Potter, never failing, not even in the final years before the end of the war. It may be cruel for someone who didn’t seem that capable of defending himself, but luckily, Draco was less than concerned for the cruel factor of his plans, making him the perfect candidate for this job.
He put his case on the floor and stood. He watched Potter silently for one long moment, and then he put his plan into action. “So Potter, it seems to me that people really don’t change do they. I had heard that you had slipped out of the public eye, had started living a quiet, peaceful life. But now I see that of course, you are just as attention seeking as you were when we were in Hogwarts, only your tactics seem to have become more drastic of course. Really, Potter, faking insanity just to get some sympathy. Honestly. You’re probably not even really reading those books are you? You never took anything seriously, definitely not studying.”
Potter’s head was still facing the book, but his eyes had stopped their feverish race back and forth, and he was still, oh so still. Draco felt a frisson of excitement shiver up his spine. By Merlin, he’d missed this. He shoved a few books off of the corner of the desk and continued, “You never understood the impact of anything you did. Always rushing off to get into danger, never thinking about what everyone had to do to get you out of it again.”
He kept disheveling things in the office. He turned back to Potter and got ready to loose his final strike. He grabbed the book Potter was reading, throwing it behind him to hit the wall, “And of course you never even consider all of the people killed trying to get you out of your stupid adventures.”
Potter’s head jerked up when he grabbed the book, burning like a funeral pyre, and ready to do some real damage to the thief, only to freeze solid when Draco’s statement sank in.
The eyes, ridiculously green, widened to an unheard of size and shot around in their sockets, looking for a place to escape what was behind them. Potter’s hands gripped the edge of his desk, the knuckles growing whiter with every moment. Draco watched with interest bordering on obscene. Oh, he’d definitely pushed the right button to get Harry Potter alive, and he just knew the resulting reaction was going to be fairly interesting.
Potter jerked, just once in his chair, like an aborted attempt at flying away. And then his face tilted towards Draco and Draco had just enough time to register the sheer incoherent grief and rage in those eyes before Potter’s magic helped him along and shoved the desk from in front of him, right into Draco’s solar plexus, propelling him across the room, to stumble into the wall. Miraculously, he kept his feet, but his breath was another matter altogether. He looked at Potter and was startled to see that despite his emaciated figure and tired face, he was just intimidating enough to give Draco pause before he continued. “Just like you Potter, can’t say anything worth hearing, so you just resort to violence. It explains a lot.”
Potter let out a hurt, and somewhat mad shout, and came at him, his magic helping him close the distance. Before he could think to move, Potter was on him. His head hit the wall and his vision brightened painfully. To keep himself from concussion, Draco pushed back against Potter, moving around so he wasn’t backed against a wall. Unfortunately, the changing location didn’t perturb Potter all that terribly and he followed, his mouth twisted in a permanent mindless snarl. He gripped the open collar of Draco’s button up shirt and yanked him sideways, causing Draco to stumble. With his footing already lost, he wasn’t prepared when he was pushed, and he fell to the ground.
This was exactly what he’d wanted; he just hadn’t thought it would be so painful for him. He had seen maybe more yelling, and less fisticuffs. However, he was smart enough to realize he had to go ahead and reap what he had sowed. So he let Potter descend on him, snarling. He’d expected a barrage of punches to come at him, so he’d prepared to fend off the most damaging of them, but Potter only sunk one hard punch to his mouth before the violence degenerated into a wordless sobs and a periodic jerking of Draco’s collar, lifting him and slamming him down, but not really causing any true harm.
Finally, the jerking stopped, and the black head rested on Draco’s chest. He felt himself tense slightly. This was definitely not something he’d planned on. To be deadly honest, he really hadn’t thought much past pissing Potter off. Then a voice drifted up to him, Potter was speaking. And it was Potter, the man, Draco realized, not Harry, the patient, “When will it be enough, Malfoy. When is the point when I finally can just stop worrying about what happened that day. I thought, when it was all over, and I’d stopped the bastard, and the rest of the world could just go do whatever they wanted that I could do that too. But, I’m still paying. Every day, every moment, its all I see. That ridiculous green color over everything I do.” Finally he looked up, and Draco could see the madness creeping back and he mourned it, “When will it go away?”
The head went back down, and when it tensed even further, Draco knew, without looking that he was back with Harry, the patient. When he’d rushed back over to the books, forsaking the desk against the wall and simply picking up the one Draco had thrown across the room and huddling on the floor against the wall, Draco brought his eyebrows together in confusion. There was something he was missing. Something he had not been told. Of course, everyone had seen the Dark Lord defeated. Potter had done it right there in the middle of the Great Hall. Despite the animosity he still felt towards Potter, he would admit, it was one of the most admirable things he’d ever witnessed. But even then there were things he hadn’t understood about Potter’s speech. He supposed that right now was the best time to find some things out.
He rose and left, shooting one last confused glare at the bowed head of oily hair.
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“Granger.” She jumped. Inside, he smirked. He’d come on her as she was in the library, earning himself a sense of beautiful retribution. He couldn’t understand why in the world she was in the library to begin with, it being the middle of Summer holidays, but he’d known despite that, it was where he was most likely to find her.
“Draco? What are you doing here? Is it Harry? Did something happen to him?”
She had an infuriating talent for speaking at ridiculously high speeds, so he broke in when she stopped to breathe, “No, nothing is wrong. Well, something is most definitely wrong, but nothing new that you haven’t already witnessed. She immediately calmed down, “Oh, well, then how can I help you?”
He settled more comfortably in the wooden chair and looked her straight in the eyes, his face going more deeply serious, “I have made some very small headway, I got him to react yesterday anyway, but it has come to my attention that perhaps there are some things about his history that I’m not aware of, some things that are predominate in his condition.”
He knew right away that he’d definitely hit on something. Her face went shadowed and her hand, restlessly flitting on the page of her textbook stilled. He just cocked an eyebrow at her, questioning with his eyes.
She turned slowly, as if injured, to face him, “There is something about the final battle. But no one really knows about it, except for Harry, Ron, and me. The only other people that knew about it are dead.” Her eyes hardened on him, “And there is a reason no one knows Malfoy, it is still a very difficult thing to talk about. Harry doesn't want anyone to know.”
Draco was most definitely interested. If it was that good, he just had to know. And it would help Potter, of course.
“I’m not going to go blabbing it to everyone I meet, Granger, but he’s been babbling at me and I don't understand most of it. If you want me to help, I need to know all I can about what might be causing this. Unless, of course, you would rather I not help him.”
He made to get up and knew the moment she changed her mind, “Wait! I just…well it’s difficult to talk about, like I said…just sit down, I’ll tell you.”
He smiled to himself and changed his expression to one of somber intent as he turned back to her, seating himself back in the chair, waiting politely.
Granger lifted her wand and cast a bubble of silence around them, blocking out the rest of the world. She stared at him for a moment before starting, as if considering something, and he just raised an eyebrow at her once more.
“You remember of course, the day that Voldemort fell, yes?”
He just looked at her.
“So of course you remember how the final battle started, what Voldemort came out of the Forbidden Forest with?”
He was getting impatient, “Yes, Granger.”
“Everyone has always assumed that Harry dodged Voldemort’s Adava, but that, unfortunately is not the truth.”
She had paused, and Draco felt a moment of fear, irrational fear, that he really didn’t want to know what she was going to tell him. But he held it in.
“We watched Snape die, you know? Voldemort killed him in the shrieking shack because he didn’t think anyone would know that the house wasn’t actually haunted. Unfortunately, we’d known about it since third year, when there was an unfortunate incident with a rat and a dog. So when Harry saw Voldemort there through his scar, we knew exactly where he was.”
Draco desperately wanted to ask about that ‘incident’, but he knew to keep his mouth shut.
“We watched him die, but not before he gave something to Harry, a set of memories. We took them and headed back to the castle, where Ron and I went into the Great Hall. Harry went to the headmaster’s office and used his pensieve. I’m not exactly sure of everything he saw, he told us ‘that a dead man’s darkest secrets were best left in the dark’ when we asked, and we’ve always felt it was best to accept that. However, what he did tell us was that ultimately Dumbledore’s plans for Harry were not to destroy Voldemort in a plain duel at all, but something completely different.”
She paused, and Draco, who was finding himself deeply interested for some reason, jerked back to himself. She seemed to be fighting back a batch of tears, which just unsettled him more. He wished he could find it in him to help soothe her, but he really had no idea what he would say to that purpose. But she gathered herself all on her own, and continued speaking, with only a small hitch in her speech.
“Because of the way that Voldemort’s original Killing Curse bounced off of Harry, he’d made Harry’s scar a horcrux,” thinking of the fact that Draco may not know what a horcrux was, she started a side note, “A horcrux is an object that contains a piece of a person’s soul put there when the person does something so horrible that it tears a piece of it out. Voldemort had seven. And the last two of those seven were Nagini, the Dark Lord’s snake, and Harry.”
“Dumbledore never meant for Harry to survive the war. The only way to win was to let Voldemort kill him, and that meant that he was not allowed to fight back. For this world to be safe, Dumbledore knew, Harry had to die willingly for it.”
Draco felt the blood run from his face and he felt a little dizzy. He’d always felt that maybe the war had ended slightly anticlimactically. He wasn’t complaining, most definitely not, but he’d thought there might be a bit of a longer battle, or more epic of an ending. Of course, the battle that had existed had been a plenty large enough challenge, but there was very little flashy spell work happening. It seemed now though, that all of the epic-ness had been there, but largely internalized and witnessed by only the enemy.
When he spoke, it came out as something he didn’t recognize, almost a whisper, “He had to do it willingly?”
Hermione nodded, and there were definitely tears in her eyes now, “The only way that he could save us all was by letting Voldemort destroy his own horcrux. He had to love the world enough to leave it.” She paused, then continued hesitantly, “He didn’t even tell us when he went to do it, he just left the castle, apparently the last person that saw him before he went to the forest was Neville, he said that Harry just told him that if he didn’t come back that Neville had to kill the snake.
"Neville said he never forgot that Harry gave him that job, and how honored he’d felt."
"Harry told us later that when he went in to the forest, that first step was the hardest he’d ever taken, and after that, everything else was like a walk through fog. And when he met Voldemort, in a clearing in the forest, he said he felt so awfully calm, so ridiculously docile. And then after, a brief tantrum, Voldemort sent one final Killing Curse at him.”
The tears were streaming down her face now, and Draco couldn’t really find it in himself to speak at all. When she spoke again, she only made it half way through the sentence before she had to pause to wipe her eyes.
“He never told Ron, but one night when we were out drinking, he told me, slurringly, that he’d never felt so damn peaceful or relieved as he had when he saw that green light coming at him.”
She wiped her face again and then she chuckled lightly.
“Somehow, the magic that connected Harry to Voldemort through his scar once more kept the spell from doing exactly what it was supposed to, and instead of killing him, or repeating and killing Voldemort, it destroyed the Horcrux in Harry. He could have chosen to die right there, he'd been given the option, but he felt responsible for making sure that Voldemort really got destroyed. So when he came back, he played dead.”
Here she paused and looked at him with a sudden curiosity, “You know, I’m kind of surprised that you’ve never known this part, it was you’re mother that lied to Voldemort when he asked if Harry was really dead. Harry told me that all she wanted was to know if you had lived. He said that that was the most respectable reason he’d ever heard for switching sides.”
Draco was slightly thunderstruck. Not only had he heard both a distinctly disturbing story, but his mother had known the truth of it for all of this time, and she hadn’t said a thing, “No, she never mentioned it, though I always did wonder why she and my father weren’t persecuted more than they were after the war.”
She nodded along, and then surprised him by chuckling, “The one thing Harry always respected above anything else was love, and you’re mother proved she valued the love of her family above everything else. You know it was an interesting side effect of the whole thing, one not even Dumbledore anticipated, that because Harry's death was willing, the curse had the same effect that the one that killed his mother had.”
Draco looked at her in slight confusion.
“Lily Potter's love for Harry in the face of death overpowered the will behind Voldemorts anger, and until the ritual in his fourth year, he couldn’t even physically touch Harry. After Harry took the killing curse in the forest, Voldemort wasn’t able to hurt anyone that he attacked. None of the hexes stuck, no matter how much force he put behind them.”
She snorted bitterly, “The love of one 17 year old boy saved the entire wizarding world, its ridiculous.”
Draco nodded silently. He was truly having trouble speaking. He’d thought perhaps, Potter had seen a bad bit of carnage or had a particularly bad spat with someone and his mind had just been unable to handle it. It never crossed his mind to suppose something like this. He died. Dead. On purpose. For love of a wizarding world that had been little but fickle about him. For love of everyone. Even Draco.
He sat for a moment, completely still, and Granger just watched him, like she wanted to witness it when he finally exploded or something. He nodded at nothing in particular and stood, shakily, to his feet. He braced his hand on the table, feeling like a newborn child, and spoke, his voice unsupported, “I will take all of this into consideration before our next session…thank you for your honesty.” He turned to walk out of the library, and was stopped by her hand on his arm, he looked down it into the stern face of Hermione Granger, the war hero, and waited, “If you use this information to hurt him, Draco, I will know exactly where it came from and I will make sure that you can’t tell anyone anything again.”
He was recovering his wits, slowly, but recovering, he just raised his brows at her, “Loud and clear.”
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Session 3: In which a fit of understanding becomes a garden party
Draco stood in the kitchen, he’d been there for about 15 minutes, but he couldn’t seem to get through the door into the living room. His palms were slightly sweaty. After what he’d heard from Granger, he didn’t know how he’d feel when he looked at Pot..Harry.
That was another thing, he felt this ridiculous and irritating budding of respect for Harry Potter. Whatever ire he was harboring for the man, seemed to be draining out through this worrisome hole in his arguments against the Man-Who-Lived.
Finally he forced his left leg to take the first step and moved for the door to the living room. He found it easier to move after that first step and soon he was at the door of the study. He came around the corner of the door frame, mouth opened, to say what he didn’t know, and froze. For one clear crystallized moment, he thought perhaps he was letting the truth about the end of the war get to him and imagining things, so he blinked, hard. However, when he opened his eyes again, the scene was still the same and in fact getting worse as he sat there.
The desk was still in its exiled place against the far wall, and the things that Draco had moved or thrown around were still in their landing zones. However, Harry was not where he’d last left him. Harry bloody Potter was in a completely different place altogether. He was sitting on the floor still, that was true, but he’d moved to the wall where his desk used to be, leaning against the rolling chair, which was in turn leaning against a book shelf.
All of that was just fine.
What really worried Draco, was the steak knife in Harry’s hand. A moment later, Draco’s eyes registered the lines that were carved on his skin. Less like lines and more like valleys, jagged dark things that were shapeless and aimless. The blood that came out of them ran steadily a painful looking red in all of these rich browns and dark colors.
His paralysis broke and he nearly ran over to the man, kneeling in front of him. The knife was moving steadily towards his leg again, yearning for another taste of Gryffindor blood, and Draco gently gripped the hand controlling it, moving the knife away, unable to get it out, but keeping it at bay, this was definitely Harry, the patient.
“Harry, what are you doing?” He asked it quietly, as though he were afraid of scaring off a wild animal.
The dark head came back up and Draco bit back a telling gasp at the pale face with blood spattered on it.
“I think I’ve figured it out. I couldn’t get rid of it because it was in me. Not just affecting me, but in my blood. All I have to do is get it out, and it’ll be fine, I can be normal again.”
He tried to bring the knife down again, but Draco continued to hold him off. Harry’s eyebrows furrowed, “Give me the knife Malfoy, you don’t understand, but that’s alright, I can’t expect you to, just give it to me." He was struggling more now, but he had been eating little to nothing for weeks with little but his magic to sustain him, and Draco was no doubt the physically stronger. And Harry’s magic was not about to help him kill himself.
Finally, Draco wrestled the knife free and vanished it with his wand. Harry let out a primal scream and made another one of those abortive jerks as if a part of himself had been vanished with it. Draco looked at him. Really looked at him for the first time since he’d visited Hermione and experienced that interesting story hour. More than just madness, he saw a kind of debilitating desperation. A raw need for something, anything to prove to himself he was alright, he was normal, he was alive.
As he sat there, holding the writhing limbs of the Savior of the Wizarding World, a sketchy outline of an idea began to form in his head. A strange inkling as to the ultimate cause of this whole mess. It would take more mental devotion than he had right now to completely work it out, but it was definitely close. He turned his attention back to Harry and watched him for a moment longer before he surprised himself and leaned forward to hug him.
Harry stilled instantly, unused to such full body contact with another human being after long absence. Finally, the stillness began to recede and sobbing broke out against his shoulder. Tentatively, Draco put a hand on Harry’s back and rubbed small circles.
He wasn’t exactly sure how long he sat there, hugging his arch nemesis as he cried his eyes out on his shoulder. All he knew was that at one point he looked down and the sobbing had stopped and wonders above and wonders never cease, Harry Potter was sleeping.
Draco blinked in astonishment.
Well…if his charge wasn’t bleeding all over the damn carpet, he would definitely call that progress.
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Potter’s body was light, way too light for a grown man. But he guessed if he didn’t eat for weeks then his body fat index would go down as well. He’d run the water relatively hot, sure that the lack of meat on Potter would make him more susceptible to chills. As he lowered the man into the tub, he felt a burning blush rush up his neck.
He had not thought that he would ever have the chance in his life to look upon a naked and emaciated Harry Potter while preparing to bathe him. Miraculously, Potter was still asleep. Draco supposed it made a lot of sense. The only thing that Potter had done less of in the past few weeks than eating was sleeping. He could probably set off a bomb and the man wouldn’t turn an eyelid.
He scrubbed him gently, taking care to clean him, but not rub him to harshly. When it came to cleaning his private parts, Draco felt the blush spread a little hotter, but reined it in. He shoved whatever inappropriate thoughts he was having into the back of his bedside manner and finished bathing him. With the help of a levitation and warming charm he maneuvered Harry into his pajamas and tucked him into the white and black bed in the master bedroom.
He sat down in the arm chair by the fireplace and pulled out his earlier thoughts. He’d begun to see something that could turn into a full blown explanation for this madness.
It had been a sudden recollection of some of Harry’s words versus a sentence of Hermione’s.
She’d said, “…he told me, slurringly, that he’d never felt so damn peaceful or relieved as he had when he saw that green light coming at him.”
And during the last session, Harry had mumbled something about making the green go away.
It could be of course coincidence, but in Draco’s experience, it was hardly ever the case.
It could be a fairly safe bet to say that it wasn’t just the color green that was bothering Harry so. It would more than likely be the connotations hidden behind the color. Green was the lively and poisonous color of the Killing Curse.
Draco had the distinct feeling that he’d walked into something that was a little out of his league, Harry Potter was under the lascivious courtship of Death.