分卷阅读31（2 / 2）

Harry fumbled at it for a moment, and then Draco was there, pushing his hands away and putting everything back in place, smoothing out the wrinkles and folding the collar just the way that Draco liked it. “Better?”

He’s only two inches away. Two inches, and Harry could change everything, but he won’t, because he does not want Draco to push him away again. “Better.”

The party was almost as awful as Harry had thought it would be.

There’s a bunch of important people that Harry doesn’t know the names of, and they all want to thank him for his service, his sacrifice, his bravery. It’s a wave of introductions and stories and not-very-funny jokes that leaves his head spinning, and he finds himself turning to Draco for support more than he could imagine. Draco picks up the slack without missing a beat every time, asking about the person’s relatives or saying the thank you that Harry was sure he was supposed to be the one giving, sending them away so eloquently that they didn’t even know they were being dismissed, until every seemed to get over the shock of having THE BOY WHO LIVED in their presence and left him alone.

“Thanks.” Harry’s breathless with the effort of hanging on to the present. There were half moon circles where his nails had dug into the palms of his hands. It’s amazing how even the simplest phrase can send him back—back to the smell of soil in his mouth, to a mother’s whisper in his ear, the chill of the stone in his hands, Neville and his sword and Nagini’s head, thump, the cry McGonagall made, but wait, no, that’s not what he’s here to think about tonight. “I didn’t think it would be that bad.”

“That?” Draco grins around the rim of his wine glass. He seems to be enjoying himself, and for the first time, Harry began to realize how odd it was for this boy to let himself be shut in the house the whole day. He was meant to bask in the limelight. “It was nothing. You should have seen me when father was pushing for a bit of legislation to go through—I’d charm them better than any spell could.”

He’s bragging. Preening, really, coming more alive with each person he talked to, falling back into himself with every person that stops looking at him as an extension of his father and starts to see him as his own person. If nothing else, Harry is glad he came just to have that happen.

“Still.” Harry’s not as good at this as him. He cannot smile for the cameras and make it look natural, he cannot force laughs, and he cannot remember names of people he does not plan on ever seeing again. “Let’s find Ron and Hermione before they come back, alright?”

Draco pouts a bit, but then he sees the new wave of people coming and hastens to agree, cutting a line through the table until they find where Ron, Hermione, and the rest of the Weasleys were sitting.

“Oh, good.” Hermione’s a bit pink in the face, a little breathless, and Harry has to wonder if she had remembered to take her calming drought before she came. Maybe Ron hadn’t managed to talk her into. “They’re about to start the presentation.”

“Presentation?”

“Oh, you know.” Ron leans around Hermione. He seems to have decided to ignore Draco altogether, which Harry is grateful for, because it might be the only good solution they could agree on. Clearly, they aren’t ever going to become friends. “Where we all clap for Kingsley, and everyone thanks us and pretends that they were on our side the whole time.”

Harry snorts. It’s funny, but it’s also not, because it’s been hard to forget the days where everyone would sneer at him, where they all thought that he was crazy and heard voices just to cover up the truth, how so many of them hid while he was leading the fight.

“You just have to smile.” There’s a hand in his, peeling back his fingers, pads of his thumbs smoothing over where his nails had dug in, like Draco was trying to make his pain go away. “That’s all you have to do.”

He kept smiling.

He smiled when they said his name, and he smiled when he wove through the tables. He smiled when they reached out to touch him, their fingers brushing his robes, like they all wanted a piece of him, so they could go home and tell their neighbors and their kids and their relatives that they had laid a hand on his skin, like they have a claim to him. He smiled when he shook hands with Kingsley, even though he didn’t smile as his bravery was recounted and he was told he would be accepting this token of their gratitude on behalf of all those who had fought in the war, and he smiled all the way back to his seat.

“You did it.” Draco had only stood up to let Harry back into his seat, but for a moment, Harry was overwhelmed with the feeling of gratitude for him. He could not have done this without him. “You’re all done.”

Harry pulled him into a hug, even though everyone was watching, even though he could hear the pops of cameras going in the sidelines, even though he was aware of the rumors it would start. He didn’t care. He could pretend that it was a brotherly hug, even though it was nothing like the kind he would have with Ron. They would all just have to get over it.