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“Common fucking sense, Potter,” she says. “The Wizarding World is small, and you’re probably going to be one of its influencers, even if you don’t make Minister of Magic one day. Why would I want to be your enemy?” She tosses her head a little, flicking a stray strand of hair off her cheek. “That doesn’t mean I want to be your friend, either. Disinterested but courteous acquaintances, that’s the sweet spot. I’m sure you agree.”
“Sure,” Harry says, entirely out of his depth. “Right. Glad that’s sorted, then.”
She nods once, sharply, and reaches for the door.
“I’m sorry about Malfoy,” he says in a rush, before she can open it. Her hand slides off the knob.
“Don’t be. He’s going to get better,” she says, in a tone that dares him to contradict her.
Harry bites the inside of his cheek. “Do you have any idea who…?”
“Yes.” She’s still facing the door.
“Well, who is it?” Harry asks, impatient and dropping all pretense of tact.
“That’s none of your business.”
“But—if it’s someone I know, maybe I can help. Bring them together, or something.” Harry cringes to hear himself. Is he offering to play matchmaker for Draco Malfoy? The thought sort of makes him want to throw up.
“No,” Pansy says.
“Why not?”
“Don’t you get it?” she shrills, whirling on him with her small, jeweled fists clenched. “You never speak the name of the victim’s beloved.”
“What? Why?” Harry stammers.
“It doesn’t do anyone any good,” she says, furiously. “You can’t make yourself love someone else, not even to save their life. Knowing would only make the beloved suffer. And if the victim finds out, having confirmation that their feelings aren’t returned makes their condition worse.”
“If he’s sick,” Harry argues, “then doesn’t he already know they’re not—”
“It’s the rejection, you dolt. Rejection makes death come faster.”
Harry’s hands ache to clench into fists, mimicking Pansy’s posture, but he shoves them into his pockets instead and affects a careless slouch.
“S’pose that makes sense,” he mumbles. “Sorry, okay? I’m not trying to make him sicker. I wouldn’t tell the person. I just—”
“For once, Potter,” Pansy says, “mind your own business.”
That weekend, Harry trudges into the library, expecting not to emerge for the next forty-eight hours. Though he’d never admit it to her face—that’s just asking for a lecture— Hermione wasn’t wrong about him falling behind on his studies. Now he’s got three separate papers due early next week, and between classes and his ongoing D.A. lessons, which are more popular than ever, his homework needs to get done now or not at all.
He rounds a bookshelf, finds the table he usually shares with Ron and Hermione, and stops dead in his tracks. Draco is leaning over the tabletop, scribbling something on a piece of parchment and nodding along while his companion rattles off what sounds like book titles. The companion in question is none other than Hermione.
She sees him before he can walk away. Draco follows the line of her sight to Harry, and grimaces. A flicker of his eyelashes and then his gaze drops as he shakes out his parchment to dry it. There are smudges of ink on his pale, spindly hands. Harry is close enough to make out the delicate ridges of his knuckles and the blue of the veins in his wrists.
He hasn’t been this close to Draco in weeks. Once it came out that Draco was dying, he’d stopped fighting with Harry. Stopped acknowledging him altogether. No more name- calling in the hallways; no more petty sabotage in potions class; no more sniping at one another when they crossed paths on their way to the Great Hall; and absolutely no more fistfights. This should have been a relief, but there is something alarming about this docile, faded version of Draco that leaves Harry feeling unbalanced, like he’d put his foot down expecting one more step on the staircase only to find he’d reached the top without noticing. Is this really how a seven-year rivalry ends? A fizzling out, and Draco nodding courteously and saying, “Potter,” with no inflection whatsoever as he sweeps past Harry on his way out of the library?
Draco is gone before Harry manages to get his jaw off the floor. He rounds on Hermione.
“When did you make friends with him?” he asks, trying and failing to sound offhand about it.
She rolls her eyes. “We’re hardly friends, Harry, but we’re civil. Our first week back at Hogwarts, he even apologized for calling me a Mudblood. Sometimes we trade Arithmancy notes.”
Harry slams his bag on the chair across from hers, but doesn’t sit. “What did he want?”
“He’s researching Hanahaki Disease. He’s done the basic reading but now he’s expanding his search, looking into other cases of physical deterioration linked to a wizard’s own magic turning on him, and he wanted to know if I’d read anything worth his time. I suggested a few titles.”
Hermione’s tone is light but her eyes watch Harry shrewdly.
“Is he looking for a cure?” he asks. He takes his time rummaging through his bag, pulling out some parchment and a quill and his books and then just standing there fiddling with the straps like a twit.
“He didn’t say so, but I think he must be,” she says. Well, that’s something; at least the git’s not just going to roll over and die.
“Right. Anyway,” Harry says, “I forgot something. Watch my things, will you?”
He doesn’t entirely know what he’s doing as he leaves Hermione sitting there. He clears the library’s doors and finds himself breaking into a run as soon as he’s out in the halls, racing down the route to the dungeons, skidding around a corner—
He almost collides with Draco, who leans against the wall with his back to Harry, a spray of lily petals at his feet and his hand squeezing his throat as he raggedly pants for breath.
“Er,” Harry says. “Alright there, Malfoy?”
“Fine, Potter,” Draco says tonelessly, wiping pink-tinged spittle off his lips with that pretentious monogrammed handkerchief and trying to keep his face turned away from Harry’s.
“Why, er, why are you bleeding, aren’t they just flowers—” Harry starts. Draco snorts and shoots him that disdainful look Harry knows all too well, and he feels the familiar hatred rearing up in his chest.
“Potter,” he says, somehow turning Harry’s own name into a weapon without even having to straighten up. “There are lilies blooming inside my lungs. There are roots wrapped around my heart and leaves rattling inside my ribcage and broken stems lining my throat and seeds in my bloodstream. I can taste the petals every time I swallow. The scent follows me into my dreams. Compared to that, is a little bit of internal bleeding really so shocking?”
Harry tears his gaze away from Draco’s lips, which are dry and cracked, and looks at his eyes, which are worse, haunted and desperate, a total betrayal of his coolly patronizing tone.
“The only shocking thing about this is that you’re capable of loving anything other than yourself,” Harry says, more instinct than anger.
Draco flinches, but he recovers fast. He puffs up, ready with a retort Harry can almost predict word-for-word; they lock eyes, glaring, feeding on each other’s fury. It flows back and forth between them like a living thing. One of Harry’s hands clenches on his wand; Draco’s lip curls into a sneer that sends a riff of triumph through Harry. Draco will say something awful, and Harry will shout at him, and all will be right in the world.
Except. Except something stops Draco. He sags back against the wall before the tension can boil over, breaking eye contact. A helpless little cough escapes his lips, followed by a stream of them. Harry gets to see up close how Draco’s chest heaves, and how he struggles to draw breath as his lungs expel the lilies—sometimes only the petals, like shreds of white silk, and sometimes entire flower heads, the soft filaments in their centers fluttering.
Draco gags around them but he can’t stop coughing, either, and Harry sees his silver- grey eyes well up with pained tears before he shuts them and turns away. A flash of panic hits Harry, suddenly; for all he knows, Draco could drop dead any second. Harry grabs on to him, supporting him with a hand on his shoulder and another one firm on the nape of his neck, and Draco shudders and gasps. After far too long, the flowers stop coming; he coughs a few more times, weakly, spraying drops of blood.
As soon as he’s able, he shakes Harry off, roughly.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he snaps, “I’d like to spend my final days doing something more pleasant than getting manhandled by a speccy Gryffindor brute.”
“Prat,” Harry says, automatically, and then he finishes processing the words. “Days?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I haven’t got long,” Draco says. “What’s wrong, Potter? Not got sick of playing Savior? Straining that tiny brain of yours for a way to be the hero one more time?”
“Far from it. This is the best thing that’s happened at Hogwarts in years,” Harry says, which of course is absurd, he flew through Fiendfyre to save this boy, of course he doesn’t want him dead—and somehow he’s still going. “If I knew who it was, I’d shake their hand.”
Draco smiles, then, but it’s an awful smile; it looks like it hurts more than the coughing did. Harry opens his mouth to apologize, to take it back—he’s finally gone too far, hasn’t he —but Draco says, “Not even you can have everything you want,” and walks away without a backward glance.
