分卷阅读6（2 / 2）

He hadn’t had time to prepare himself for the impact, so when he crumpled down to the floor, it was with every bone in his body screaming out to try and protect himself. But he still didn’t, just fell, his arm folding awkwardly underneath him and his ribs bending, one of them snapping.

“Bloody hell.” Ron’s face swam above him, pale and freckled, red hair falling down over his face. “Don’t move, mate.”

Don’t move, mate. Harry wished he could block everything out, the whispers and stares. He didn’t want to imagine how fast the news must have spread, how the great Harry Potter had been bested in a duel by some random auror in training, how he must have been losing his touch. But it must have spread, because soon Hermione was there beside him, Ginny running hard at her heels, both of them shoving through the crowd to kneel on the ground beside him.

There were times, really, where he was fully struck by what it means to have a friend like Hermione. This, as she let him pillow his head in her lap and ran her hands down his broken arm, smoothing his hair back from his forehead and wiping away blood he didn’t even know was there, was one of them. “Don’t you worry Harry.” She would have made a good healer, he thought, but then threw the thought out the window, because she had tears welling up in her eyes even as he thought it, slipping down over her cheeks and splashing down onto his face. “You’re going to be just fine.”

“Does it hurt?” Ron asked, his voice louder. Ginny still hadn’t said anything, just watched him with her jaw set and shoved people back when they tried to get closer to look at him. He was grateful for that, for her, for the three of them, trying to spare him from the impact of this.

“It must.” Hermione answered, and then her wand was out, and her tears were still coming, and when she turned to look at Ron her voice was cracking, the words wobbling. “But it won’t for long. Just close your eyes, Harry, alright?”

He didn’t want to, because that was the opposite of what his instincts were screaming for him to do when he was hurt in a strange place, but he trusted her. He could always trust Hermione so he closed his eyes, let himself sink farther down into her, and when she finally managed to calm her shaking hands, he didn’t feel anything at all.

Draco

There’s yelling.

There’s yelling, coming from a lot of people, all of them right underneath him, which didn’t make sense because Harry wasn’t due home for another three hours and there was no way anyone can walk into the house without him being here. It would have been alarming, except for the fact that he could clearly pick out Hermione’s voice rising up above the din, so it was mostly just annoying, considering that he had a pounding head ache and he really just wanted to sleep.

“Just shut it,” He pleaded, wondering if he would be able to put a silencing spell on the door without getting up. But then there was a particularly large crash from downstairs, like someone had just thrown one of their dishes to the floor, and the yells picked up at a rapid pace with a lot more voices than he was expecting, so he decides to go investigate instead, and finds himself in a room of screaming Weasleys.

And Granger. She’s there, too.

“What the bloody fuck,” He said, louder than he intended, without thinking about the words that were coming out of his mouth, because, honestly, what the actual hell, he was only trying to sleep, this was his house, he had the right to take a nap if he wanted to, and why were they here, anyways? And then he panicked, because what right did he have to say that to him, he had no right, he shouldn’t even have come down here, this was a private thing, Harry’s thing, he should not be here, but—“is going on here?”

Harry was the only one to look at him, staring up at him with his busted lip and the plastic bracelet on his wrist that meant he had been to St. Mungo’s, shadows deep under his eyes and clearly wishing that the ground would swallow him up. Everyone else froze, which gave Draco a good opportunity to take stock of the situation—Granger and Ginny and Ron clearly all taking turns arguing, Luna stretched out across the couch, Seamus (who was here, for some reason) glowering across the room at him, and George coming back from the kitchen with a glass of pumpkin juice in his hand.

It was Ginny who answered, glaring at Harry, like this, whatever this was, was all his fault. “Harry had a bit of an incident at training today.” Her voice was dripping with thinly concealed anger. “Seems as if he was so tired he couldn’t even raise his wand to defend himself, and got himself thrown fifty feet into the air during a duel.”

“You what?”

Draco staggered fully into the room, squinting into the light, and when he got closer Harry looked even worse.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Harry assured him, only he was wincing and didn’t seem to be able to take deep breaths.