Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Light of the Life That Is	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3154 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Two—Meetings in the Ministry
            “Ready?”
            “No.”
            Draco turned from the mirror, but Potter had already grimaced and shaken his head. He was wearing a pair of Draco’s robes that Draco had shrunken down and turned green. Potter had given him a long look when he did that, but after his own primping before the mirror, seemed to accept it as the color that suited him best.
            Draco breathed a little sight of relief now. “You’re not ready because no one is ever ready for going back to the Ministry and explaining how he came back to life?”
            Potter’s eyes met his quizzically for a moment. “It’s almost scary how good you are at anticipating what I’m going to say,” he muttered. “What I’m thinking.”
            Draco smiled. He knew it was broader than the smile he would have given a year ago, a month ago, and he had Potter to thank for that. “When I was earning my Potions mastery, I had to study under people more inscrutable than Professor Snape. I gained a lot of experience in anticipating emotions and empathy, experience that I wouldn’t have gained without that.”
            Potter shivered and tucked his hands into his sleeves. Draco was about to spell the fire warmer when Potter said, “Bloody hell,” in what Draco thought was his best Weasley imitation. “There are people more inscrutable than Snape?”
            Draco laughed. Then he paused to consider the strangeness of the sound, the cool silvery sound of it. His mother had once told him, when he was a child, that he laughed like bells, but Draco had never believed her. Now, he could almost hear it.
            Potter looked at him in wonder. Draco smiled again, more naturally, he hoped, without second-guessing, and put his hand on Potter’s shoulder. “There are. And some of them are on the Wizengamot. We’ll speak the complete truth and hope that it’ll be enough. But dressing in nice robes won’t hurt.”
            “The truth is never enough with the Wizengamot,” Potter muttered.
            “Then we’ll take Veritaserum,” Draco said, unruffled. He saw no reason to remove his hand from Potter’s shoulder yet, since Potter still seemed to need the reassurance. “They can’t disbelieve it then. It’s not like I’m the one who’s going to brew it.”
            Potter paused, then reached up and covered Draco’s hand with his. “You’re even better at the comforting thing,” he whispered.
            Draco had the strange feeling—stranger than listening to his own laugh for the sound of bells—that he could have stood there forever, feeling his rooms spin around him and staring into Potter’s eyes.
            But he had to break the mood somehow, and that meant turning rather briskly around to cast the Floo powder into the fire. He did cough and say, “If you feel that it’s becoming too much or you need me to take over during your testimony, catch my eye and nod.”
            “All right,” Potter said. “But how are you going to tell the difference between that and just agreeing with what you say?”
            Draco had to turn his head back, whether or not he thought that was a good idea at the moment. “I’ll know. I’ll always know, with you.”
            Potter looked at him for one or two slow blinks, and then nodded. Draco smiled back and cast the Floo powder in at last, calling out, “Auror Department!”
*
            “Is that—you can’t be!”
            “I heard what Gerald said, but I didn’t believe it was true!”
            “They let him come back after all this time?”
            Harry heard that last question, and although he contented himself with keeping his eyes on the floor and moving swiftly along at Malfoy’s side as they worked through that gauntlet of gawkers, down to the courtroom where the Wizengamot would see them, he frowned. So some people had thought he wasn’t dead at all, but in exile or kept far away from ordinary society by the Ministry? That wasn’t the kind of problem Harry had thought he would have to handle.
            But it was exactly the kind of idiocy that people who took the Prophet seriously would believe.
            Malfoy’s hand touched his shoulder again, and Harry glanced at him without seeming to glance at him or move his head up. Malfoy’s lips formed a few quick words. You have nothing to feel guilty about.
            No shit, Harry thought irritably, but he knew what Malfoy meant. He had wanted to look humble by keeping his eyes lowered, but as the people around him had just forcefully proven, there was always someone who could attribute a guilty, hangdog look to anything. It was better to meet people’s eyes fearlessly.
            And what did he have to fear? Malfoy was right. He had spent six years in limbo to save all these people. There was no reason that he had to hesitate. There was no reason that he owed them anything, instead of the other way around.
            So Harry lifted his head, and saw a few Aurors scatter out of his direct line of sight as though he had the power to slay with his eyes like a basilisk. Harry half-wished he did. Or at least the power to shut up the whispers that flowed along with his steps.
            He had thought this would be easier. Instead, it was so much harder than meeting his friends, even with six years of history that he hadn’t been there before.
            But Malfoy’s hand brushed his side, along the line of his robes where his wand would be if Harry had his back right now, and Harry straightened up. The wand problem was one that he would have to get taken care of as soon as possible, he thought. Apparently the shattered halves of his holly wand had been buried in his tomb, but there was generally no way of repairing a wand, which was why they snapped most of them when someone went into Azkaban.
            I’ll visit Ollivander’s, then. I need a wand.
            “Mr. Potter, a word?”
            Harry turned his head a little, and saw a woman tracking him, her brown hair pulled back into a severe bun on her head and her eyes wide. That made her look official, but he noticed the quill and the sheaf of parchment she carried, some of it already covered by notes, and he sneered and turned to face forwards again.
            “Mr. Potter, you have to tell us what brought you back to life!” The reporter was jabbing her quill into the parchment now as though she thought it would flutter away from her if it didn’t.
            “Draco Malfoy,” said Harry, and kept marching.
            Of course, she wasn’t satisfied with that and kept fluttering, but Malfoy turned around and gave her one calm glance. It wasn’t even with any menace, Harry thought. Malfoy seemed to have trained that out of himself along with the coldness and childish anger he’d once been prey to. But his immense dignity made her shut her mouth, and finally nod, and creep away. Harry sighed with profound relief.
            “If someone else bothers you, then you tell me,” Malfoy said. He didn’t lower his voice, and he didn’t raise it. Nevertheless, the whole corridor seemed to fall silent to listen to what he said.
            Harry tugged at the front of his robes a little. It would probably be easy to intimidate people if he was taller. Stupid short body. It was time to accept that he would never grow taller, but it was still so bloody irritating. “Thank you,” he said, and kept walking. He would have to learn the air of dignity without the height.
            He had picked a good teacher, though. Although the current of gossip continued flowing around them like so much rubbish in a river, no one else came never enough to them to be vanquished like the first reporter had.
            They reached the Wizengamot courtroom at last, a different one than the one Harry had stood trial in during the summer before his fifth year. There was no huge gallery set back from the floor here, but a raised platform with three broad steps up to it, covered in thick red carpeting. It was also covered with seats, most of them armchairs, and the Wizengamot members were sitting on them. In front of the platform were a bunch of chairs for the witnesses.
            Malfoy walked to the large one that was in the center of the front row and sat down. It seemed to catch the Aurors by surprise, since they milled for a few seconds. While they were still trying to decide how to order around someone who obeyed the rules, Harry took the chair beside him.
            It was satisfying, the way both the Wizengamot members and the Aurors gawped in response. But Harry’s best reward was the flash of quick respect and approval in Malfoy’s eyes.
            That’s what makes him so different from anyone else, except Ron and Hermione, Harry decided. He respects me. The rest of them are just bewildered.
            Harry nodded to the woman he assumed led the Wizengamot, the one sitting in the central chair in the front row, so nearly directly opposite Malfoy’s as to make it seem as though they were sitting in judgment on the same court. “Madam—what is your name?”
            For a moment, she measured him with her eyes, about the color of Malfoy’s, but a little bluer, and colder. Then she smiled. Harry heard a whisper traveling among the Aurors, and hoped that meant he had managed to impress her. “Belinda Fairmore,” she said.
            “Good,” Harry said. “So, to avoid a long and lengthy trial, I think that we should have the Veritaserum right away.”
            Madam Fairmore sat up a little. “You are aware that if Professor Malfoy confesses to grave-robbing and necromancy, then he could be in serious trouble?”
            Harry smiled a little, with a confidence he didn’t really feel but knew he could fake. “That’s okay. When you give it to me, you’re going to hear how I couldn’t have come back without him. But it wasn’t necromancy, was it?” He had read some of the books in Malfoy’s office and thought about this long and hard, something he hadn’t discussed with Malfoy in detail because he didn’t want Malfoy to think that he needed to sacrifice himself. “Necromancy is when you call up someone dead. But I was only half-dead. I was trapped in a limbo between life and death.”
            “Necromancy is the art of calling up the dead, no matter what they are,” snapped a younger man to Madam Fairmore’s left.
            “But I’m not dead,” Harry said, and stretched out one arm in front of him so that everyone could see the color of his skin. “At least, if I was an Inferius, I think someone would have noticed by now.”
            There was a chuckle, and Madam Fairmore put a hand to her lips as though to conceal her part in it. The young man flushed and retreated a little.
            “This is an extraordinary case,” Harry said, pitching his voice low and catching Madam Fairmore’s eye. Malfoy had said something about how everyone would be impressed by Harry right now in a way that they never would again, and that he should use that to his advantage. He had also said something about how Harry could look at someone and make them feel like they were alone in a room with him, and Harry hoped that applied to Madam Fairmore as well as Malfoy. “No one else has come back from necromancy alive. No one else was the Master of the Deathly Hallows. I was.”
            “You were?” Madam Fairmore wasn’t smiling now. “You are not at the moment?”
            “Give me the Veritaserum, and I’ll tell you how it is,” Harry said, inclining his head. “And was.”
*
            Draco wanted to explode in pride, but someone might stare at him if he leaped to his feet and did a war whoop and a dance around his chair.
            So he managed to sit there and blandly smile, but he did wish that he could at least reach over and hug Potter.
            Potter was doing wonderfully. He was using his fame to protect himself—and Draco, but it was amazing how little Draco cared about that in comparison to Potter getting away with it—and insisting on telling the whole story once, not a thousand times. And he was revealing secrets that it didn’t matter if he told now, because the time when they could have hurt him was past.
            Potter had told him the tale about almost being Sorted into Slytherin. Draco wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told him instead of him seeing it in action for himself, but it did seem that six years of the most Gryffindor-like guard duty imaginable had managed to sharpen Potter’s Slytherin traits.
            Well, Draco had to admit, as he leaned back in his chair and gracefully crossed his legs, getting comfortable while everyone else watched Potter taking the Veritaserum, perhaps he had nothing else to think about. They do say that boredom concentrates the mind wonderfully, sometimes.
            Draco wouldn’t know. He hadn’t been bored in years. Intense, quiet work on the one hand, and desperate survival on the other, hadn’t given him the chance.
            Potter’s face smoothed out as the Veritaserum took effect, and Madam Fairmore nodded and asked, “What is your full name?”
            “Harry James Potter.”
            Madam Fairmore had to raise her voice over the sigh that traveled around the room, which was packed with far more people from the Ministry than would be there normally, even though they could get permission to attend at any time. Draco knew why. And he knew that the sigh came because there had still been people, until then, who weren’t completely sure. “What is your date of birth?”
            “July thirty-first, 1980.”
            Madam Fairmore used a few more questions to demonstrate the Veritaserum was working, then leaned forwards. “You said that you were the master of the Deathly Hallows. Explain why you aren’t now.”
            Even though the Veritsaerum mostly kept the muscles in his face from tightening the necessary amount, Draco thought he could see a smile flitting along the corners of Potter’s mouth anyway. “I became the master of the Elder Wand because it used to belong to Dumbledore. Draco Malfoy disarmed Dumbledore when he was killed on the Astronomy Tower, and then I stole Malfoy’s wand. That meant the Elder Wand saw him as conquered and transferred its allegiance to me.”
            Draco heard more muttering and whispering, but he wasn’t tempted to look elsewhere. He kept his gaze on Potter, on the way he spoke and the slender, upright body that seemed to scream defiance at everyone and everything, at the entire Ministry if that was what was needed.
            He never wanted to look anywhere else, not even to check the rest of the faces of the Wizengamot and see if they were really believing this. He wondered if that was going to be a problem.
            “I didn’t understand that until later,” Potter continued quietly, his eyes on the distance, although from the angle his head was turned, he would probably still seem to be looking at Madam Fairmore. “But the Resurrection Stone had been passed down through Voldemort’s family, and it belonged to Albus Dumbledore, who destroyed the artifact it was in, at the time of his death. He passed it down to me. And the Invisibility Cloak that was my father’s is the one that Death created.”
            Madam Fairmore frowned a little. “Where is the Elder Wand now?”
            “I snapped it,” said Potter.
            There was a sharp buzz of commentary, but Madam Fairmore had already asked about the Resurrection Stone, and Potter answered by saying he got rid of it. Draco had to shake his head a little and readjust his own angle so he could go on listening.
            “I still have the Cloak,” Potter finished. “But I don’t think I can be the Master of Death anymore without the Elder Wand.”
            “Most likely not,” said Madam Fairmore, her eyes grim. “Why do you believe Draco Malfoy is not guilty of tomb-robbing and necromancy?”

            “Because those are Dark Arts and performed for Dark motives,” Potter said promptly. “But Malfoy only went to the tomb to get my body back and have the Elder Wand enchant it to look like it did on the day I died, and he didn’t use necromancy to pull a dead person back to life. My shade was walking through the Forbidden Forest every day at sunset for years.” For the first time, his voice shook a little. “All the professors and the Headmistress at Hogwarts thought there was nothing they could do.”
            Draco half-closed his eyes, to keep anyone from seeing his reaction. The meeting between Potter and the Headmistress had been yesterday, and it had been painful to see how she reached out to him and then clasped her hands back against her mouth, shaking her head.
            “Malfoy was the only one who would take the risk.” Draco looked up at the change in Potter’s voice, and found his radiant face turned towards him. “If you go and look, there’s no shade in the Forbidden Forest anymore. And everyone knows that necromancy can’t make the dead come back to life. I’m alive.”
            “I would like some Healers from St. Mungo’s to investigate you and make sure,” Madam Fairmore murmured. “In the meantime, I would also like to dispatch Aurors to the Forbidden Forest and make sure that no shade marches there.” She looked around inquiringly at the rest of the Wizengamot.
            “It doesn’t happen until sunset,” someone volunteered.
            Madam Fairmore raised an eyebrow. “Then there’s plenty of time to get Aurors there and see if—Mr. Potter—is speaking the truth.”
            Some of the Aurors promptly peeled away from the group and made for the doors. Meanwhile, Madam Fairmore asked Potter a few more questions, but none of them ones that produced the reactions that had come so far, either in Draco or the rest of the chamber.
            Madam Fairmore finally leaned back. “Does anyone have any more questions?” None of the Wizengamot said anything. Draco could see why. Madam Fairmore was frighteningly good at this, and they might as well leave it up to her. “Very well. Then give Mr. Potter the antidote.”
            No one objected to that, either, and Draco watched as an Auror came forwards with it. He was glad to see that the antidote had been carefully measured out, and dropped onto Potter’s tongue with what looked like a proper reverence. At least some people in the Ministry were capable of feeling as they ought about what he had done.
            “Now we must present the Veritaserum to you,” Madam Fairmore told Draco.
            Draco bent his head, and swallowed the potion without protest. He had heard a few people whispering about how Potions masters knew how to defeat the potion, but that wasn’t true, and others had hushed them. Madam Fairmore asked him the preliminary questions, more quickly this time. He thought she probably knew how the mood of the room was changing, flitting about in quest of some place to settle, and was wise enough to press forwards before it found a place.
            “Did you rob the grave of Harry Potter?”
            “His tomb, yes,” said Draco. He met Madam Fairmore’s eyes, and smiled a little. He had been under Veritaserum many times over the years; he had been tested with it at every stage in the process of becoming a Potions master, since they wanted only qualified and passionate applicants, and he had been dosed with it over and over again during his trial. That didn’t mean he knew how to resist it, but he knew how to somewhat correct his answers.
            “What was your purpose in taking his body?”
            “To use the Elder Wand to revive him.” Draco was content to keep his answers short, and leave Potter with the elaborate explanations. He was the hero. He could get away with them. Draco was the one who had brought him back to life, but lesser, the instrument, the way Granger and Weasley themselves would have been if Potter had survived.
            He could see Potter watching him from the corner of his eye, but refused to worry about that. If Potter heard something that shocked him now, that only meant Draco hadn’t been clear enough before.
            “How did you know that would be possible?” Madam Fairmore’s face was stern.
            Shit. Well, I knew this would happen. “I had been reading books on necromancy since I’d seen his shade marching in the Forest. I thought there was a way I could either bring him back to life, or at least ensure that his shade received rest.”
            “He’s practicing necromancy!” someone called from the back of the room. “He admitted it!”
            Draco couldn’t say what he wanted to say; he didn’t have that much control over his responses that he could speak easily under Veritaserum about things he hadn’t been asked. But he had a partner who stood up now and looked at the speaker coolly and asked, “But is it illegal just to have necromancy books?”
            “Of course!” said the Wizengamot member, but he looked uncertain now.
            Draco would have liked to hug Potter, if it wouldn’t have looked too strange. There were indeed loopholes built into the laws that covered where books had been acquired, if they were heirlooms, if the Ministry had ordered them burned on sight, and whether they showed signs of ever having been read or practiced from. The Ministry could probably still arrest him, but not without knowing exactly what books he had and considering them on an individual basis. The laws had been passed by people seeking to protect other kinds of Dark artifacts by introducing as much confusion as possible. Right now, that was serving him well.
            “And I asked earlier whether what he practiced was really necromancy,” Potter said again, as patient and challenging as before. “If he brought someone back to life, indisputably back to life, that doesn’t match the legal definition.”
            “How would you know the legal definition?” asked a witch with an upturned nose. Draco knew that she was related to the Greengrass family somehow, with that nose, but not her name.
            “I know some things have changed in six years, but I looked things up.” There was a spark behind Potter’s eyes and in his words, although for the most part he kept the tone of his voice mild and pleasant. “I knew that I would find myself on trial when I came back, that the Ministry wouldn’t accept me the way it should.”
            “Did you think that no one would ask you any questions, Mr. Potter?” Madam Fairmore had her chin propped on one hand and was considering Potter as though he was a new book she had never read before.
            “I knew I would be asked,” Potter said. He hadn’t folded his arms. He didn’t need to. He could draw attention by the way he stood, by the way he shone. Draco hoped there wasn’t any Legilimens in the room at the moment focused on him. He would sound ridiculous. “You would have to know that I was the real person. And you would want to know what Malfoy had been doing.
            “But I also knew that you would probably dislike the fact that I came back to life.” He almost purred that word, which meant everyone in the room had to wonder about all the other ones he hadn’t used instead. “To say the least. Therefore, I prepared myself as well as I could for what I was going to undergo. And yes, I would use the word trial to describe this right now. From the way you’re looking at me and talking to us to the questions you keep asking.”
            “We have the right to question Professor Malfoy about his necromancy,” said Madam Fairmore.
            “You do,” Potter said. “But you haven’t said one word about whether he’s a hero for having raised me back up, or whether he’s just made himself bloody inconvenient.” There were more gasps and mutters over the use of the curse, which made Draco wonder again about how shallow the society was that they lived in. “After all, dead, I was your symbol. Alive again, I’m an inconvenience, aren’t I?”
            Madam Fairmore’s lips quivered, and she raised a hand, silencing the shouting that had begun without effort. Draco was beginning to sense how lucky they had been to come in on a day when she was the leading member of the Wizengamot, responsible for proposing most of the decisions and conducting the interrogation.
            “You’re saying things that most people leave to lie in the ashes,” said Madam Fairmore. “Making them burn real fire. That could be dangerous, you know.”
            Potter met her stare for stare. He seemed to have drawn in the calm around him again. Draco didn’t think he would swear now. “I know it could be. I’ll undergo whatever tests I need to prove that I’m me, and alive again. And I’d like a new wand, by the way. Could that be arranged?”
            “If you are who you say you are,” said Madam Fairmore, carefully adjusting her position in her chair, “then we would give you one, of course. Perhaps pay for it out of Ministry funds. We owe you a debt we can never repay.”
            “You can repay it,” Potter said, voice suddenly dulcet. “I’ll stay out of politics and say whatever you want in public about my return. I might leave the country after this. I don’t know how much I’ll like to be a spectacle in Britain instead of an ordinary person.”
            Madam Fairmore blinked, then inclined her head again. “I think I know what your price will be.”
            “Do you?” Potter stretched out one arm as if pointing the way towards the brighter future that he had just offered the Ministry. Draco found it hard to breathe, he was so caught up in the drama in front of him. “Then why don’t you say it? I find that I’m getting tired of saying things that immediately get protested against.”
            Madam Fairmore nodded, then turned back to the chairs around her as if she and not Potter was the one who had decided to make the announcement in the first place. “Mr. Potter wants Professor Malfoy cleared of all charges. Perhaps not cheered on, but to have it acknowledged that he committed no crimes of necromancy. Perhaps with the surrender of certain books,” she added, one eye on Draco, “it can be accomplished.”
            That was enough of a direct address to him that Draco found it nearly as easy to answer as it would be if she had asked him a question. He nodded. “I’m certainly agreeable to that. I’ll give you all of them and even give you the names of the places I acquired them.” Since he was still under Veritaserum, they could hardly doubt his word.
            Madam Fairmore watched him unblinking, nevertheless, as if not convinced of that, before leaning back and giving a nod that was probably meant to come across as gracious. But Draco could see her eyes, and also knew how unyielding it was.
            “Giving up the books will help greatly,” said Madam Fairmore, not taking her eyes from his face.
            Draco accepted the silent admonishment: And you were both lucky that I was here. It was true. He had already decided as much.
            Madam Fairmore turned back to Potter. “You’ll pose for the photographs? You’ll submit to the tests that I want the Healers to do, to confirm that you really are alive and who you say you are?” She ignored the snort that Draco heard bubble out of his own nose as the Veritaserum began to loosen its hold, a little. If Potter hadn’t been alive, could he have passed all those wards around the Ministry that were meant to detect the presence of the dead? They would fire up and glow even in the presence of a vampire.
            Potter smiled. “You’ll grant me a wand back? You’ll let Professor Malfoy alone for any crimes that he may have committed to assist in my resurrection?”
            Someone from the back of the Wizengamot began to protest. Madam Fairmore, who either had eyes in the back of her head or a long knowledge of her colleagues, said simply, “Do you want to come up here and take over the leadership position for today, Grampus? I remember that I’m only holding it today because you wanted next weekend off, but of course pleasure must yield to necessity.”
            The voice shut up. Madam Fairmore nodded to the Auror who had already administered the antidote to Potter. “Give it to Professor Malfoy.”
            Draco gasped aloud as he swallowed the antidote, and turned to Potter. He would have expected him to be studying Madam Fairmore, or talking over what his first public show on the matter would be, but instead Potter was watching him.
            “Are you all right?” he demanded, in a low voice.
            Draco swallowed again, and said, “I’m fine. The antidote always chokes me like that, a little.” He ignored the Auror who tried to say something about how that proved the Veritaserum hadn’t worked. “Thank you, Potter.”
            “I find it odd that you call each other by name without honorifics,” said someone in the crowd.
            But neither they nor their words might have existed, as far as Potter was concerned. He only met Draco’s eyes, and his smile was bright and shining and contented. “You’re welcome, Malfoy.”
            Draco didn’t understand exactly why he had become one of the people Potter would fight for, but he intended to enjoy it.
*
            He gave me everything back.
            Harry was thinking of that as he recited the lines he and Madam Fairmore had agreed on in front of a group of reporters, Aurors, Ministry officials, random wizards pulled in from Diagon Alley, and everyone else who had wanted to come and see him. It meant that people Harry considered friends and hadn’t told yet would learn about it first this way. He regretted that. But he hadn’t felt ready to go and see them at Ron and Hermione’s house yet, and he hadn’t wanted to answer all the questions.
            He only wanted to start getting the semblance of his life back together, and ensure that Malfoy wouldn’t be punished for helping him. That had been the goal for today. Tomorrow, he would think of Ginny and all the other people he had yet to meet.
            The Ministry’s official position was that Harry had managed to cling to life because he loved Hogwarts and the wizarding world so much. That was why his shade had stayed in the Forest, rather than because not all of him had been trapped with the Horcrux in the place beyond the world he had made to guard Voldemort. And the body they had laid to rest in his tomb was only a sham, a glamour, because the Ministry had been embarrassed to admit that it couldn’t find his real one. In reality, they insisted, Harry’s body had simply lain in a sheltered place deep in the Forest, for years, while he slowly recovered.
            Harry had wondered if most people would question why he hardly looked any older, but he saw no sign of it in the dazzled faces that lifted towards him. They wanted to believe the story. They thought, if their hero came back to them, of course he should look the way he had when he “died.”
            Soon the stories would spread that Harry Potter could conquer even death, that he had the mysterious Power the Dark Lord Knew Not, that he was back to life simply because he was better than Voldemort in every way.
            But in the meantime, while he mouthed his lines, Harry’s gaze drifted to Malfoy. He stood modestly back, mostly out of sight behind the shoulders of Aurors, and watched the crowd. Or Harry.
            He gave me everything back.
            The sunlight on his skin, the colors of the robes swirling around Harry, the hand of Madam Fairmore steady on his shoulder, the taste of breakfast still in his mouth from this morning, the stone beneath his feet, the way he breathed, the rustle of his hair against his neck…
            Malfoy had acted puzzled, a few times, when Harry did things, like staying with him instead of going to Ron and Hermione’s house. Or when he let Malfoy touch or look at him as if they had been friends before he—left.
            But Harry didn’t know how else to express it, to show what he felt. What he owed, kind of, but it was more than that. How did you repay someone who had not just saved your life but given you back life itself, sight and sound, the whole world?
            You didn’t. You couldn’t. Harry might not know a lot because of the six years he had been away, but he knew that.
            Which meant that he would, instead, do what he could to share that life with Malfoy, to protect Malfoy from the consequences of giving it to him, to help him deal with any questions he had about it. Harry was good at protecting people.
It was time to remember that he could protect more than the soul-shard of Voldemort that had obsessed him for so long.
He glanced at Malfoy again and saw that his head was lifted, his eyes locked on Harry’s face. Harry smiled back at him, and felt something warm and soft steal along the edges of his being, flickering like flame on the edge of a piece of paper.
Maybe he could remember other things that he was good at, too.
*
delia cerrano: Thanks! Although those meetings aren’t until the next chapter.
BAFan: Harry does want to take his NEWTs eventually, but it’s not a huge priority for him right now. It might or might not be part of the story.
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Light of the Life That Is