分卷阅读4（2 / 2）

It was only another reason to hate Harry.

But maybe the contest between them wasn’t a contest at all, when Harry treated Dobby with kindness, when Dobby no longer had Lucius telling him to shut his ears in the oven. It didn’t matter, then, that Dobby had once cared for Draco. At some point, Harry, we all look out for ourselves and ourselves alone, no matter what we tell ourselves.

When comparing the two of them, Draco couldn’t see how different they were. They could have been friends, if only Draco hadn’t somehow screwed it up that first day, if Harry had been put in any house than Gryffindor, if he hadn’t thrown in his lot with Ron and Granger that first year. And maybe Draco really could have helped him, and then he would have had a reason not to turn towards the Dark side, would have had somewhere to turn instead of just being stuck there.

That’s what drives him mad, the what ifs.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how he got to where he did today. He can still look back on the years leading up and see all the things he did wrong, the times he made Granger cry, the times he insulted Ron’s family, the times he was hoping that Harry would fail. They stack up to be a mountain of bad things, but they were things that he could have just apologized for when they got a little older, if only Voldemort wouldn’t have come back into the mix.

A knock at the door makes him look up. It’s Harry, leaning against the wall and wearing a sheepish look on his face. “I’m sorry.” Harry speaks first. So far, it’s always been Harry speaking first, like he was determined to make the first move. “That was unfair of me. I shouldn’t have said anything about it.”

“You should have.” Draco shrugged, picked at the loose thread on the coverlet. “You should bring up a lot of things. The things I said about you and Ron. The names I called Hermione. That time I got you detention with Umbridge and had you kicked off the Quidditch team. The time Hermione had her teeth enlarged by a curse I aimed at you.” And as an afterthought, he adds, “The hippogriff.”

“You weren’t hurt by him at all, you git.” Harry sat down on the bed beside him. “Made me and Ron do your potions.”

“I wasn’t.”

“He didn’t end up being killed.”

Draco isn’t sure why the thought made him happy. “I really am sorry, for everything I did.” He bites down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, and unconsciously moves his hand to cover the dark mark on his arm. “Every last, stupid thing.”

“We were kids.” Harry wasn’t looking at him either. “Maybe it’s time to accept that that’s all we were. Kids who didn’t like each other because our parents didn’t like each other, and who would have gotten over it if we had just been given time. We just needed to grow up first.”

“Do you think we have?” Draco asked. “Grown up, I mean.”

“I think we have.” Harry threw himself backward with a sigh, making the mattress bounce. “All of us grew up too fast.”

There’s a long pause, with Draco picking at the skin around his nails and Harry just staring up at the ceiling, and then—“I could see into his mind, sometimes.” There is no need to ask who he is referring to. “And I saw you, what he made you do. And I hated it, so when you say that I don’t get it, or I don’t understand that you didn’t want to do it, or that the war was hard on you too…I know that you were just trying to make it through, and protect the people you care about. That’s all any of us were doing.”

“I didn’t want to.” Draco said, and his hands were shaking badly now, they always did when he thought of it, of the times he tortured other people and the occasional ones where he refused and the wand was turned on him instead, how the healer at St. Mungo’s said that the nerve damage was permanent, not that Draco cared when he thought he would be seeing life through the bars on his cell door. “You have to believe that I didn’t want to.”

“I know.” Harry sits up and puts his arm around him, an awkward attempt at comforting him that Draco really wished he hadn’t made. “I know you didn’t.”

Harry