The calm lasts until they are back at the house, working their way through dessert. The house was a bit dingier than Harry could remember it being, but he supposes they should just be lucky that it survived the war without it being blown up.
“Well.” Uncle Vernon slapped his hand across his knee. “I got to say, boy, I wasn’t sure about you coming tonight, or about meeting another one of those wizard folks—” A brief pause, in which they all remembered Dudley’s pig tail and the blasted apart fireplace. “But it seems that you turned out okay, in spite of everything.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Draco’s smile seemed to become fixed to his face. Harry felt like he had been slapped, even though he really should have been expecting this all along.
“I mean to say,” Vernon went on, like he knew he had made a mistake and was going to fix it. “We must have done something right, raising you, if you turned out to be some sort of war hero.”
Draco’s hand found its way into Harry’s leg, fingers pressing down into his thigh, keeping him still.
“Dad.” Dudley looked pained. “Don’t.”
“Well, we did!” Even Aunt Petunia looked afraid, now. “We fed him, and we clothed him, and we brought him up as one of our own—”
Harry couldn’t take it anymore. It felt like that night with Aunt Marge, where it became one thing too many. And he wasn’t going to pretend that this hurt more than he thought it would, because after all those nights with Dudley and how well dinner had went, he had actually convinced himself that they might start to like him. He was wrong.
“How you raised me?” His voice was low, but everyone could hear it. “You didn’t raise me. Him—” He jerked his head towards Dudley, who was clinging to his wine glass and looking like he wanted to sink through the floor. “Him you raised. He’s the one you fed. He’s the one you bought all the presents for, and threw birthdays for, and gave him a real bedroom. The one you cared for. He was your son. And what was I?”
No answer.
He wanted an answer, and he was going to get one. “What was I, Vernon?” If he was younger, this level of anger would send his magic spiraling out of control, but as it was he could just feel himself shaking with the injustice of it all. “Say what I was.” Nothing. “I was the thing that showed up on your doorstep that you wanted to send out with the week’s garbage, wasn’t I? A stain on your perfect family image. I wasn’t the one you raised. I was the one you starved. I was the one you hated. I was the one you locked in the closet and lied to, for years.” No one moved. Only Draco tried to make it better, reaching out to grab at Harry’s hand, but he flung him off. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”
Mechanically, Harry sat down the wine glass. “You want to know something? After all these years, all the horrible things I’ve seen, all the people I watched die, I still find myself thinking that what happened in this house was what ruined me.” He was saying everything he had never had been able to say before, but suddenly, he didn’t want to be there anymore, so he left, yanking on his jacket and turning to go.
“Wait just one minute!”
Uncle Vernon seized him by the wrist, and Harry was done, was going to turn and hit him and never stop, but he didn’t have to, because Draco was there, the threat clear even without the wand. Vernon let go and Draco moved between them.
“Don’t touch him. You don’t deserve to lay a hand on him, you understand?” He was speaking softly, but in the way that made it clear he was used to being listened to. “You said he was a war hero, but he’s not, he was the war. He saved this whole damn world ten times over, and not even one of your filthy fingers should come close to him again or I’ll personally see to it that you lose a hand.”
Draco lets him go. Uncle Vernon staggers back, leaving Aunt Petunia and Dudley staring at him. Harry thinks he would rather die than deal with the fall out of this.
“Thank you for dinner, Mrs. Dursley.” Draco said, back to perfectly polite, buttoning up his coat and smoothing out the wrinkles. “It was lovely.”
The looks on their faces almost made it all worth it.
Draco
He could hear Harry talking on the phone, carrying on a conversation with Dudley.
“Listen, no, I’m sorry.” Pause. “I should never have come, I knew I was going to lose my cool, it was my bad.” Pause. “I just feel horrible, I ruined your birthday.”
A long pause, and then Harry made a sound that Draco thought was a sob but was actually just a strangled laugh.
“She did what?” Uncontrollable laughter. “Lucky bastard. Should tell her it’s your birthday every night.”
Probably the girlfriend. Do guys always discuss their girlfriends? Draco wouldn’t know.
“I mean, yeah, we can get together and celebrate, just let me get a piece of paper. You want to go where?” The sounds of him rummaging through drawers for a pen. “You know that’s a strip club?” Pause, more laughter, this time muffled. “Does Alice know you’re going there?”
They really are friends, now. “Okay. And I’m sorry, again, about today, I didn’t mean…” Longer pause, a sniff. “Yeah. You too, Dudley.”
There was a bang, and then something smacked against the wall. Probably the pad of paper he had been writing on, but maybe the phone. Draco didn’t want to go find out yet.
People suck, he thought, straining to hear when Harry was approaching him. But no one can hurt you quite like family.
Draco gives him an hour or so, long enough for him to get a shower and settle down in the living room and listening to Lee and George’s nightly radio show.
(Lee’s nightly radio show. George is a very sporadic guest.)
“I didn’t know.” Draco stayed by the doorway, letting Harry decide if he wanted to talk or not. Company wasn’t always helpful. “How bad it was.”
“I didn’t tell you.” Harry accepted the gift of hot chocolate, and Draco took that as an invitation to sit down beside him. “I didn’t tell a lot of people, outside the Weasleys and Hermione. McGonagall, once.”
Draco nodded, letting the information wash over him. He didn’t want to pry, but part of him thought that Harry needed to talk about it. Or maybe that was just the selfish part of himself that wanted to compare scars. “How old were you the first time?”
“Five.” Harry took a drink and held it in his mouth, even though Draco had warned him it was still much too hot for that. “I had drawn a picture of a magician. You know, the muggle kind—big wand with the sparks that flew out, pointy hat, the long beard. They locked me in the closet for a week, only let me eat once a day. Like they could starve the magic out of me.”
It was a wonder that they hadn’t killed him. Draco wants to say something, but sorry doesn’t quite cut it when you learn something like that.
(He has a horrible flash of back in their first year, when he mocked Harry about not being welcome at home for the holidays, but he had never suspected it to be really true, just thought of it as a stupid thing to say to get under his skin.)
“I meant what I said, back at the house. About how you saved all of us, and how he doesn’t deserve to even come near you.” Draco felt like it was important for Harry to know how much better than them they were, how he rose above all that to become something better, something good and brave who fought for everyone, even if they don’t deserve saving. “You did more when you were eleven than those two have done with their whole miserable suburban lives.”
Harry choked out a laugh, and then leaned against Draco, lying in his lap. Draco didn’t say anything else—he really didn’t have any other comforts tucked up his sleeve, if he was being honest—so he stuck with running his hands through Harry’s hair until he was sure he had fallen asleep.
Chapter 20
Draco
He wants to tell him not to do it.
When Harry first mentioned that he was going to throw himself back into his fight the bad guys routine, Draco didn’t think it would bother him this much. He had just shrugged his shoulders and asked if he would be home for dinner, because in his head, he was thinking that going out to play the hero was just something that Harry did. He could no more stop putting himself in dangerous situations in the name of doing the right thing than he could rip out his own DNA.
(Though after that disaster of the dinner with the Dursleys, Draco’s pretty sure he would if he could.)
Turns out, though, that Draco did mind, enough that when the people from the old DA start showing up in his living room (Ron, Ginny, Hermione, Dean ushered in through the door, how are you, can I take your coats, try not to let him die tonight), he has to bite his lip to keep his concerns to himself. In theory, it wasn’t anything that Harry hadn’t done a million times before, but in practice this was him going to face down some pretty bloodthirsty people with no back up and no official training. They were still just all kids, vigilantes trying to take down people who weren’t going to pull their punches.
“You’re cool if Luna crashes here with you, right?” Ginny shouts the question at him from out in the hallway, poking her head around the doorway, and Draco jumps. He’d been too busy watching Harry to notice.
“Yeah.” Not that it sounded like it was actually a question. He’s pretty sure that if he said no Ginny would give him a black eye and Luna would end up waiting out the night here, anyways. “That’s fine. Company’ll be nice.”
And it will be. He knows from the war that he doesn’t take well to being left behind, and when Harry had shrugged off his half-hearted offer of help, Draco had resigned himself to one long, lonely night pacing the hallways for Harry’s return.
“I told you it would be fine.” Harry comes up from behind him out of nowhere, and Draco leans into the hand he had placed on his shoulder. “Draco will keep an eye on her.”
“I’d rather keep an eye on you.” He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do it, because Harry does not owe him anything, he does not belong to him, and anyways, saving the day is as much a part of Harry as his lightning bolt scar. Self sacrificing tendencies are just one of those things you have to put up with if you plan on caring for him. “Can’t you let someone else do it?”
He doesn’t say haven’t you done enough, which is what he’d been thinking since Harry first announced that he was going to be going after these people. Finish what Dumbledore had started, and all that.
