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He wants it to be over. He wants to be done feeling afraid. He wants to be done with hospitals and guard duty and feeling that each good bye you have with the people you love is your last one, done with the feeling that this world is a terrible place. He wants someone to tell him that he finally gets to be at peace.

“It’s over.” Harry said, and he raises his own hands to trace over Draco—at the bandages on his chest, the flowers that Luna had drew, the cuts curling up his neck and behind the back of his ear from the awkward way he had been laying on the ground. “It’s really the end this time.”

“You’re done leaving me?” Over the past few days, Draco hadn’t wanted to think too closely about what his continued absence meant, but the possibilities spun around his mind now—that he might not want Draco after all, that Harry was never going to be able to see him again, that something had happened to Harry, that while everyone was busy saving Draco Harry had went and got hurt saving someone else. “Because I don’t want to wake up without you ever again.”

“Done leaving,” Harry promises, and this time Draco really does fall into him, pain in his ribs be damned, and when he kisses him, he is not thinking of all the reasons they shouldn’t, he is only thinking of the reasons they should—about how all their good-byes seem like they are the last good byes, about how there is all kinds of pain in this world and they don’t need to give more to themselves when it is not needed, about how he has sat here in this room alone and only thought of the what ifs, and Draco is so, so done with what ifs. He is done dancing around this thing between them, even if it means one of those terrible what-ifs come true. Draco has decided he needs to stop avoiding his chance at a happy ending when everyone in his life is so desperately trying to give him one.

Chapter 32

Draco

By the time the healers declare him fit to go home, Draco had had enough of St Mungo’s. There was simply too many people there, all of them asking questions that he doesn’t know how to answer, like how he’s feeling after his near death experience and what it’s like to be a hero and what exactly he and Harry are, speaking in the terms of their relationship. He’d become good at ignoring whatever well-meaning nurse wandered in to look over his charts and make anxious small talk, but still, he was looking forward to finally being left alone.

Not that he was left alone when he got home, really, because even though they declared him fit to be discharged (the healers actual words were we don’t think you’re in any immediate danger of dying, but try not to do anything taxing, will you? You were an extraordinarily difficult person to fix) he was still having to ask for ridiculous amounts of help, starting from the moment where he almost fainted during his attempt to use floo powder and Hermione bullied him into taking the night bus instead, saying it just wouldn’t do to be lost up a chimney in his state, and he couldn’t even argue with her.

“You’ll just have to take it easy for a few days, that’s all,” She had said, trying to help him down the stairs and heave his bag over her shoulder at the same time, all under the stunned gaze of Stan Shunpike, who seemed to be struck dumb by the idea of having not one but two mildly famous people on his bus at the same time. “Think of it as a bit of a vacation, and you’ll be good as new in no time!”

Which was all good for Hermione to say, and easy to think of in theory, but it became quite a different matter when he had to spend all his hours sitting on the couch and watching the rest of the room revolve around him, never actually letting him join part in the real world, stating that you have to rest, Draco, remember?

So he rested. He let himself be buried by blankets and pillows that Hermione knitted him, and accepted the butterbeers Ron brought him without ever drinking them and listened as Luna continued to read out the different articles in the Quibbler. He hobbled his way into George’s shop and sat at the back counter as the day went on without him, met Pansy for lunch in the Leaky Cauldron, had Molly come and cook breakfast three days in a row, all of it under the watchful eye of Harry.

“I just don’t want you to be hurt,” He had said, the one time that Draco had gotten fed up with everyone’s coddling and the feeling of being stuck, of suffocating, like if he didn’t get out the four walls were going to implode on him, but of course he couldn’t get out, he couldn’t even walk on his own. “I know you’re in pain.”

(Draco had apologizing immediately. They are both being so careful with one another, each of them too afraid to be the first one to test the strength of this new thing between them, where they don’t stop holding hands when their friends come over and stopped pretending that sleeping in the same bed was something that best friends do every night, and when one of them says that they’re the most important thing in the world, the other doesn’t question it. Loving each other—even if they hadn’t said so in so many words, yet, still as cautious with this as they are with everything else—was no longer a thing they had to worry about. It just was.)

Still, it’s almost a relief when Draco wakes up one morning to find a note stuck to the pillow beside him. It’s in Harry’s chicken scratch, the lines scribbled across the paper like he had already been walking away before the words were written down, telling him that he was going over to Hermione’s to help her move a couch up the stairs (says we can’t use magic until its actually in her apartment because of the muggles, completely mental) and that he was to be back soon. The note ended with a little heart looped around the bottom corner.

Stupid, Draco thinks, tracing his thumb over the indent that the heart had made, wondering if Harry would find out if Draco were to shove this in the back of his sock drawer. Both of you are so bloody stupid.

He wants to stay in bed, maybe grab a few hours of sleep, but the sun was climbing in through the window and everything hurt too bad for that, anyways. Draco had never really had the occasion to wonder what it was like to live in constant pain before, but he knows now, like he’s constantly working his way through the last shock waves of being cruciod, where you can still feel the ghost of the spell in your bones.

Every part of him is a mess of aching.

Draco doesn’t bother with getting dressed, just pulls himself to his feet and lurches from the bed to the table to the doorway, out into the landing. It’s hard to get down the stairs, but it gets easier with each step, like his limbs can only start to move once they have been reminded of what it means to be alive.

“Come on.” He talks to himself a lot now, when he gets left alone in this big house. Sometimes he wonders if it’s a bad thing, but Draco waves the worry away with the thought that there is always someone listening—Kreacher, the portraits, some random guest that he had not known was there. “Just one more. Just,” Pain, so much of it, like every part of him was being stripped away and put back together again, “one,” He places one foot in front of the other, looking at where he needs to be and not where he is going, which is why it doesn’t really come as surprise when his foot slips and he is not strong enough to grab onto the railing for support, just tumbles, “More.”