分卷阅读18（2 / 2）

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?”