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In his eighth year, Harry Potter starts coughing up lilies.
In his eighth year, without Ron and Hermione at his side, without Dumbledore’s firm and guiding hand on his shoulder, and without the threat of school-wide safety nipping at his heels, Harry Potter decides to shove the damning evidence in his left robe pocket and say, “Fuck it. I’m going to be late for Charms.”
The petals, when they come- expelled from Harry’s unwilling esophagus- are never red like he expects them to be. Never blood-tinged in his palms but, then again, Harry supposes he’s seen enough spilt blood for a lifetime and then some. Maybe this was the universe’s idea of a reprieve. Or a rotten joke. Who could tell the difference, really? But the flowers merely tickled the inside of his lungs like white noise static, most of the time. A dim weight that Harry carried from his solitary room in the 8th year dormitories to his classes and back again, day after day.
After a week, the odd pressure bearing down on his lungs began to feel more like a sacred duty than a shackle. The velvety, scraped-raw sensation as he keeled over to cough, a fitting penance. The slight pain is more than worth it when, after every hacking fit, Harry continues to walk in the land of the living while so many others lay buried beneath the tread of his shoe. It really feels like that, most days, when a trip to the Great Hall- trying it’s best to recall how to be bright and bustling- is full of ghosts only Harry can see no matter how hard he blinks or how much he reminds himself which cemeteries his fallen friends are really buried in. Which plot numbers, too.
Harry knows every headstone by heart but the knowledge never helps him shake the feeling that he’s actively trampling on limbs and lives as he walks through the school. Doesn’t help him believe that a curious gaze sent his way when his feet hesitate- curious or awe-filled or bordering on reverant- aren’t the same eyes that turned to him when Voldemort made the school choose between him and everybody else and Harry had stayed put and let others die in his name for a fight that only he was the focus of.
On those days, Harry leaves the Great Hall with a stomach full of lead and tries to remember the things Hermione’s told him about coping and stress and survivor’s guilt. Usually, he thinks about them on a broomstick so high above the quidditch pitch he’s completely out of sight and only sometimes does he think of letting himself slip to the ground.
But Harry decided to come back. To live. So he’ll stay.
On his way out of Charms, not having registered a single word of the lesson, lilies creep up his throat like paper spiders and he ducks into a narrow hallway to cough them out. Violently. Then he stares at his mother’s flowers in his palm while he catches his breath- thinks of all the funeral caskets he saw such pretty things perched on- and decides that he won’t fight if it’s truly his time to go.
He’s had enough fighting for a lifetime, too.
When Harry finally straightens, he’s caught in the gaze of a wide-eyed Draco Malfoy whose pale fingers tremble between clenching down and reaching out and all Harry can think to himself is that the petals perfectly match the shade of Malfoy’s hair.
Not his eyes, though. Those are silver and panic-stricken and locked on the evidence in Harry’s stable, world-saving hands.
Harry would ask what Malfoy’s doing here- in this little hallway that’s more of a crevice than a path, with no windows and no paintings and little light- except he knows. Where awe sticks like gum to Harry’s shoes, it’s spat with fury into Malfoy’s hair. Harry can’t find it in himself to hate this turn of events, really, just the same way he can’t ignore the courage it took for Malfoy to come back to Hogwarts at all, after everything.
Harry’s better at ignoring how his gaze still snaps to that gum-spat hair like Malfoy’s the only real, solid thing in this whole castle of ghosts and gratitude.
It’s harder to ignore, now, caught like a child with his hand on the television knob.
“What’s that?” Malfoy asks, and his voice is nowhere near as shrill or sharp as Aunt Petunia’s always was. Something in Harry’s chest settles at the cautious, concerned question, nestling right beside the funeral flowers Harry had planned on carrying around until they killed him.
Or until somebody noticed.
“I don’t know, really.”
A faint sneer starts to curl up Malfoy’s lips. Draco’s lips- teeth glistening in the lamplight. Can he call him Draco now? Is that allowed?
“You don’t know what a flower is?”
This is more cutting but not at all the same as when they were children. The taunt snips something free and Harry takes a tentative step forward, the movement easy without the weight of a hundred invisible hands trying to drag him beneath the Earth where he belongs.
Malfoy flinches, just barely, and Harry shakes loose the petals that have been sitting stupidly in his outstretched hand and dumps them into his right robe pocket, the left one already full. Nobody’s here to tell him not to so Harry smiles at Draco the way he’d wanted to when he testified on the boy’s behalf. Harry doesn’t think that his own teeth glisten- too many cavities for that- but he knows his gratitude, at least, is tempered by the fires of their burned down childhood and every hateful jab they ever tossed back and forth to make it burn brighter.
“I’m pretty sure I missed the lesson on human potted plants, actually,” he says. “And I definitely didn’t swallow a wet paper towel, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Draco’s lips purse in a way that screams you’re so stupid even though the words don’t dare jump ship.
“I’m certainly wondering something,” he says instead. Perfectly polite.
Harry fights down a grin at the hidden barb.
“Fancy sharing with the class?”
Finally (finally) Malfoy drops the startled creature act and scoffs, bony arms coming to a cross over his chest.
“Since when have you ever had any class, Potter?”
Ten years down the line, Harry will have painstakingly managed to meld Malfoy into Weasley family dinners. It will take a whole lot of apologies, even more heated arguments, and a great deal of begging that Harry prefers to rebrand as long, thoughtful conversation because friendships take root in the strangest places, sometimes, and Harry Potter who grew up in the dark in the cupboard under the stairs has never been one to let a friend go for anything less than death itself.
And when Draco figures out that Harry had simply inhaled the fumes of his own potion-gone-wrong and stays up for weeks on end brewing an antidote while also stealing all the sharp-edged things from Harry’s room and feigning ignorance, it feels a lot like rebirth.
That, and fresh air.