What Shakes The Elephant

What Shakes The Elephant

Chapter 20 – Life Taught Me To Die

There are times, when you have gone through hell and back again, fighting tooth and nail the whole way through and dealing in every possible nightmare you could ever have imagined but somehow managed to get out alive, when you feel like nothing, NOTHING, could possibly break you if you’ve survived all that. And then, something tiny and insignificant comes along and flicks that minute crack in your perfect exterior, sending everything that you’ve worked so hard to maintain through the onslaught of horrors crumbling into tiny pieces on the floor around you.

That was how Draco had felt in that moment. That moment that Potter proclaimed him a friend with no reservations, no suggestions that they were only acquaintances or that friendship could come. No, Potter thought Draco a friend. An actual friend to whom he could confess secrets and turn to for advice.

And the thought nearly destroyed Draco.

He did not want to be Potter’s friend. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t let it happen because he knew, already without a doubt, how much it would pain him to do so. Draco was familiar with that gorgeous agony of unrequited l-… friendship and he had no intention of venturing back down that path.

But it was far too late for that, and he knew it well.

He was already too far over the edge to go back now.

“I would have imagined,” Draco began slowly, trying to hide the contempt in his voice, but the contempt served only to mask the fear underlying every other emotion. “That you would have first turned to your precious sidekicks, rather than come see me.” He took a sip of his tea. “Have I really surpassed them in your hierarchy of friends?”

“At the moment,” Potter replied, his voice low and clearly hurt. “Yes.”

Draco froze and felt his breath come difficultly through his lungs as though he had several people sitting on his chest. He took another sip of his tea, for something to do, then placed the cup and saucer on the tray.

“What is this about, Potter?” Draco asked him, unable to control how his voice came out this time. He sounded concerned and he did not like it. Potter, however, responded well to it. He looked up at Draco through his spectacles and sighed heavily.

“Something… huge,” he said lamely, for lack of better words to explain it. “Things are happening and going to happen that are turning my family upside-down and tearing my life apart. I can’t deal with it all… do you know what it’s like to have everything you dreamed of ripped away from you in one fell swoop? To see everything you believed in falling to pieces while you’re helpless to affect any change at all? And worse, the one person I love, I’m married to, can’t even be honest about everything. I’m surrounded by lies and I didn’t even know it!”

Draco’s face drew itself into an expression of disdainful disbelief as he studied Potter in his rambling. He wanted to make some kind of sound or laugh but he found that he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him.

“Yes, I think I might know how that feels,” he said sarcastically. Potter looked up at him again, his eyes showing the slow recognition of what he had just said, precisely before he looked away again in shame.

“Sorry,” he whispered softly, his energy gone, his words hardly managing to make it from his mouth to Draco’s ear. “I know it’s been worse for you lately.” He sighed and looked into the fire, his teacup still in his hands but completely forgotten. “I just don’t know if you’ll understand what I’m facing…”

Draco pulled himself and leaned forward on his knees to look more intently at Potter. His hair fell in a fine curtain over one side of his face and parted in locks around his eyes. Potter turned to look at him but was obviously not expecting the change of positions and his lips parted slightly at the sight of Draco.

“Try me, Potter,” he said quietly, demanding further knowledge. His eyes were brighter than they had been in days.

Potter watched him for a few moments, weighing out his options and waging an inner battle with the ethics of divulging any very personal information to a Malfoy. He chewed on his lip for a moment and then turned back to Draco.

“Ginny is going to die,” he said dramatically and clearly hoping for some sharp intake of breath on Draco’s part to deal with the earth shattering knew he had just delivered. Intake of breath, there was not, but Draco did have to fight hard not to smile bemusedly.

“Let me tell you a little something about life, Potter,” he said solemnly. Draco brushed some hair from his eyes and gave Potter an understanding but caring expression. “It tends to end.”

Potter’s face fell in an instant as he had been looking so attentively at Draco, awaiting some deep philosophy of life and handed only a bittersweet and mocking grain of truth. He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

Clearly this was not the time for joking.

“No, you bloody prat,” Harry shot back, getting to his feet. Draco feared for a moment that he was going to leave. He twitched in a half-motion to take Potter’s hand and stop him, but pulled back when he realized that Potter simply wanted to pace the room. “Do you really have to be this way? Again?”

Draco’s face shifted to a serene look and he sat back in his chair. Looking up at Potter’s angry face made him relax, somehow. He nodded.

“You should have expected it,” he replied softly. “But you’re right. Go on.”

Potter studied Draco’s face, considering his motives and meanings but finally sighed heavily and decided to sit back down. He collapsed into the chair with a soft huff and looked back up at Draco.

“She’s dying, now, Draco,” he continued, hopelessly. “She’s been dying for at least a month now and she hasn’t mentioned it. She didn’t tell me a thing but she knew, she KNEW! She’s been lying this whole time, going on and on about how it’s just stress, it’s just exhaustion! She wouldn’t go see a Healer until a few weeks ago and she claimed they couldn’t do anything for her.”

Draco listened to the way Potter’s voice fluctuated as he spoke. The inflections changed and the pitch jumped as it cracked with the emotion he poured into the words. He was at his wit’s end and about to fall into that abyss that Draco knew better than anyone. He was about to give up and that pained Draco more than anything else. Harry Potter never gave up.

“She lied to you about being sick,” Draco murmured to make sure he understood what was going on. It was more in an effort to reassure Potter that he was listening, but also to buy himself some time to think.

“She lied to me, Ron lied to me,” he went on, his voice becoming more and more angry as he did. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. Draco had the urge to get up and try to soothe him but resisted the temptation. “My whole family has been fucking lying to me from day one! They all knew about this and haven’t done a thing! They claim they didn’t want to hurt me, didn’t want to make me worry but it’s a damn selfish thing to do if you ask me. If they really cared they WOULD have told me… because what would happen when she just randomly died one day and I had no explanation for it?? How are my children supposed to deal with that?”

Draco’s face fell slowly. Potter’s pain tore through him and yet pulled at his limbs, demanding something from him that he wasn’t willing to give.

“How did you find out that she was dying?” he asked cautiously, needing more information. He was desperate to throw insults around about how foolish and stupid these weasels were. He wanted Potter to know how treacherous these people were who lied to him so candidly. He wanted to spout derisive comments about the origins of their name and how he had made a terrible mistake in marrying beneath his own class, but he refrained in favour of a civil conversation and maintaining Potter’s friendship and respect.

Not that he wanted those things. No, Draco did not want to get hurt…

--Bloody hell, why do I need to keep defending my own actions to myself?—

“I was doing more research at work,” Potter explained quietly. “Into the pureblood curses and all. I researched the Weasley records and found that all Weasley girls die at birth or very young.” He paused, as though he had just been hit by the weight of his own comment and dropped his head to stare at the ground beneath his feet. “Those that survived into their adulthood died young anyway, especially for wizards. And they all exhibited the same symptoms,” he paused again, afraid of the words that were going to come out of his mouth. If he spoke them that meant he accepted them and if he accepted them then they were real. “The very same symptoms that Ginny has been showing since September.”

Draco wanted desperately to look away from the other man but he could not. He was entranced by the expressions and the brilliant sadness that he exuded. There was nothing left and everything had fallen. Watching Harry Potter look helpless was like witnessing the end of the world. His heart tensed and he pushed down the unease.

“And you are absolutely sure that she is dying?” he asked again. Potter nodded softly.

“Ginny told me so when I confronted her,” he spat as though the thought was a vile taste of which he needed to rid himself. “Ron admitted it too. Bloody fucking lied to me all this time. Twenty six years of being lied to. I still don’t fucking believe it.” He ran his fingers through his thick black hair and glared at the ground again. He was livid. “What’s worse than all that is that they never mentioned it at all and now I have a daughter! I have a nine year old daughter who might face the same problem! Ron has a daughter and Bill has a daughter! All of them are at risk of dying this way and none of them bloody cared enough to mention it!!”

He was shaking in fury and Draco wanted to grab him and hold him. He wanted, also, to go and find Potter’s wife and alleged family to knock some sense into their heads… with a few well placed curses.

But Draco knew he could not do that. He knew that would not help repair things with Potter. He knew that he would suffer a great deal more for those actions, no matter how good his intentions were.

Instead, he watched the man before him unravel and slowly be worn away by the torrent of hurt that surrounded him. He was still ranting.

“My daughter and nieces are at risk,” he went on, his voice becoming less and less angry but instead filled with misery and pain. “My wife, whom I have trusted all my life, is not only a liar but dying… she won’t let me close to her, she won’t let me help her… ‘I don’t need you to save me anymore, Harry’… fucking hell… she doesn’t need me at all…”

Draco paused, allowing the hurricane of rage inside of him to die down before he spoke and made his emotions painfully clear to Potter. He calmed himself, forcing the murderous hatred to dissipate and leave room for reason and rationale. He finally leaned forward once more and caught Potter’s attention. There were tiny tears streaming down his face now. Only a few, and hardly visible at all, but they were there.

“Potter, are you more angry because she’s dying and you don’t know how to help her,” he began with a controlled calm. “Or because she lied to you and doesn’t want your help?”

The dark-haired Saviour looked up at Draco with glassy eyes and a horrified expression. He did not say a word for a long time. He was thinking, considering, trying to identify the cause of his own feelings and when he finally did, his face shifted to one of revulsion and fear.

“I…” but he didn’t have to answer. Just the look on his face said it all and Draco knew which answer it was. He nodded softly. “What am I going to do, Draco?? I can’t save her!” he burst out suddenly, refusing to give in to the sobs but unable to control his emotions. “There is no way to save her! There was no way to save your mother and now Ginny is going to die too… she doesn’t want me to help her and I can’t. I can’t make this better… there’s no hope…”

Something broke inside of Draco. He wasn’t sure what it was but he had a sneaking suspicion that it was his heart. He could not, simply COULD NOT, watch Harry Potter, Saviour of the Wizarding World, fall to pieces and lose hope. The whole room became stark and hollow as the hope disappeared from the man in front of him and Draco felt himself sinking endlessly into a void. He wanted to scream and shake Potter senseless to make him wake up. He wanted to return him to the energetic and stubborn man he always was, not this simple human sitting in front of him.

Potter could not be a mere human. No one would believe it.

So in a moment that held an eternity, Draco finally gave in and knew what he must do, no matter how hard it pained him. No matter how destructive it would be… no matter if it ended up killing him. He needed to do it…

“Potter, do you know what the Malfoy curse is?” he asked calmly, holding back the floodgate of his own misery with everything he had. Potter looked up in confusion and shook his head.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked, his eyes about to overflow.

“Everything,” he answered. “The Malfoy curse is high blood pressure.” He stated this bluntly and with no reservations. There was no need. Potter looked more confused and Draco got to his feet.

“What does that mean?” Potter asked, his breathing rapid and uneven. “How does that relate?”

“My point is,” Draco went on, reminding himself that Potter was not good with these kinds of clues. “That not all pureblood curses are fatal. There are hundreds of potions and different ways of dealing with high blood pressure and living a very long time with it.” He paused to see if Potter followed him. His mildly less confused expression suggested that he did. “There is a potion to solve anything, I promise you.”

He got to his feet and went to kneel in front of Potter. He hesitated but placed a hand on his former rival’s hand, looking up into those pools of emerald green.

“The only reason that my mother died,” he said softly, still fighting to hold back the emotion in his voice. “Was because I was not good enough to find a cure on my own.” He had to force the next words out, fighting as hard as he could against his heart and better judgement that told him not to do it. Told him it was a bad idea. Told him it would kill him in the end. “But we can work together, Harry… and I will,” he paused, still pushing for the sentence to end. “Do everything in my power… to help you find a cure… and save your…wife.”

Potter’s eyes shone brightly as he looked into Draco’s silver ones. Their faces were less than an inch apart, their mouths so close that Draco could feel Potter’s warm breath ghost over his cheeks. They stood in some kind of trance for a time that neither could measure. Their hands still grasping one another, their eyes locked in agreement and possibilities. Draco never wanted to leave this moment, but Potter pulled his hand away.

And then he wrapped his arms around Draco and hugged him tightly, releasing all of his tension and pain in that one embrace. Draco gasped involuntarily before giving in and holding Potter the same way he was being held. Potter buried his face in Draco’s neck, allowing himself to be vulnerable in this one moment, to let it all go. Draco knew he would never see this again.

“Thank you, Draco,” Potter whispered. “You are such a good friend.”

Then, for the second time in one night, Draco’s heart shattered.

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A/N: This was hard to write and it hurts. I want to make clear, however, that Harry is shifting in his positions. He went to Draco because he had nowhere else to go, expecting to get turned down and thrown out... but he wasn't. This is both to show how Draco has grown over the years apart, what kind of person he is now and also how Harry has changed. If you would like further explanation as to my insanity, feel free to ask :) I will answer to the best of my ability (as much as I can without giving things away) every time.

Thanks so much for the support and all my love to those who review and give me their thoughts! Hope you enjoyed it!