分卷阅读44（1 / 2）

But now it was all different. Now, they were both in transition, with Draco being a free man who doesn’t need to report his whereabouts to the ministry and Harry looking to leave everything about the war behind, new career plan and new boyfriend and new house. It’s not a bad thing, except for the fact that twenty minutes before, Harry didn’t have to think about asking Draco if he was coming with him to the new house. There was never any need for discussion.

Now there was. Now, Draco was free to stay in this house or go buy himself a new one or go live with his mother or George or Luna, or even apparate to the other side of the world and never talk to any of them. Now, there was no safety net of the routine, no guarantees that Draco would want to go with him at all.

(And of course, that makes Harry consider the question of how much of this was by choice and how much was by obligation, like, yes, Harry, let’s look at a house to build our future in that meets all these specifics and I’m not protesting, but I’m not protesting because you’re the one who decides where we go and some little piece of paper the wizengamot judge filled out months ago insists that I have to follow, like it or not. Long distance dating gets harder when you’re doing it from a cell in Azkaban, after all.)

“I just talked to Hermione. She said she and Ron can be at the Leaky Cauldron at eight, which gives you and I at least an hour to celebrate, time that I can spend thanking you properly for all the work that you did to get me—” Draco pauses right in the middle of his sentence and the smile slips off his face at the sight of Harry. He doesn’t look upset, just confused, like he cannot imagine why Harry would not be jumping for joy and making his own round of announcements, though who Draco thought he would be calling when all was available was the muggle phone, he wouldn’t know. Maybe Dudley, but Harry never did tell him Draco was technically a criminal. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah.” There’s a voice in his head telling him that honesty is the best option. That communication is key in healthy relationships, and maybe they should sit down so Harry can talk about his feelings. It sounds a bit like Hermione. But there’s also a voice that sounds a bit like Seamus, of all people, echoing a sentiment from their sixth year, saying that now was not the time to worry about stupid things like that. “Everything’s perfect.”

Chapter 35

Draco

It’s a strange thing, becoming okay again.

At the time, Draco hadn’t noticed how much time and energy go into not being okay, where he puts all his energy into raging against monsters that only existed in his head and pushing past road blocks that were only in his way because he had been the one to place him there. For the past two years, right from the moment his father was sent to jail, all he had been thinking about was putting the pieces of his life back together, thinking only of what he had to do in order to get himself to the point where he could look in the mirror and feel like the person staring back at him actually seemed like they had turned out alright.

As a whole, the people who went through the war had spent a lot of time together trying to reach the point where Draco is currently at. The only thing was, no one ever thought to tell him how hard it would be, walking through life like you need someone’s permission to be healthy and whole again, always waiting for the moment where the ground might be pulled out from under your feet.

(It’s like, there were these holes, in his heart and his mind and his body, and Draco had spent these past months giving everything he had into filling them back up, and here he was, with all his metaphorical potholes patched over with brand new cement. In his head he knows it is a good thing, but it is also a strange thing, to have all this time, to keep expecting to fall back into old patterns and bad habits, to have to keep reminding himself it was okay to be okay.)

“You’re happier, right?” Harry had asked him, one of those nights where he caught Draco staring at himself in the mirror, poking at a smattering of scars and pockmarks that trail down his side. “Now? With me?”

“This is the happiest I’ve ever been,” Draco had said, and he didn’t even have to lie, and his smile was not covering up any old ghosts when he turned back to him. He’d be fine, really. All he had to do was keep moving, keep busy, just enough that the past doesn’t have the space to squeeze back into Draco’s life.

It’s this, more than anything else, that makes him volunteer when Ginny was complaining about the overwhelming amount of work that had to be done before the wedding.

“I mean, it’s mental. Mental! Who thought up with this stuff?” They were at the Burrow, her combat boot covered feet thrown up on the coffee table and a steaming cup of tea in her hand. “You have to think about food, and the people, and the color scheme, and flowers, and where to put everyone, so I’m going to have to rent a place because I can’t have it here otherwise everyone will just compare it to Fleur and Bill’s, and Merlin’s beard, do you have any idea how much a wedding dress costs? And we have to buy two of them!”

“Well,” Hermione said tentatively, reasonably. “It’s your wedding, you don’t have to have all that if you don’t want it.”

“Oh, I want it.” Ginny’s eyes widened in alarm. “It’s just that it’s all so bloody hard to wrap my head around.”

Ginny was good at a lot of things. She was good at fighting, and at Quidditch, and calming George down. She was good at healing, even if her spells hurt more than Luna’s when they crept over your skin. She was a good cook and a good friend and good person, but she was not good at organizing an event like this. Lucky for her, Draco was.

“I could help.” Both girls looked over at her. From her seat in the arm chair, Luna smiled vaguely, like she recognized that he had said something nice but wasn’t following the conversation enough to know what. “I’ve had practice planning these type of things.”