a grave for flowers | drarry

chapter 7

chapter 7
(tw: mentions of suicide)

Draco may have had his wand stripped away from him, but his magic was still there. Always there, curled somewhere at the base of his spine like a dormant snake. And it was when it shivered a little, just a little, that Draco knew something was wrong. 

Years and years of living at Malfoy Manor. Years of dinner parties and business meetings and afternoon tea in the parlor. Years of feeling the wards around the manor, knowing what it felt like when they were disturbed, when they were being breached, who it was that demanded entry. 

And Draco knew. Draco knew this wasn't Potter coming back to yell at him some more. There were dangerous people just a mere five meters from the thin, Muggle-made walls that did nothing more than keep Draco from freezing at night. The magic around him tensed and crackled, wove itself into taut, apprehensive lines. 

So Draco sat down at his kitchen table. He clasped his hands together and stared at them. He hadn't noticed how much less slender they had become, how much more calloused and work-weary. There was some dirt under his fingernails and he instinctively picked at it, almost flinching from the ghost of his father bellowing at him that he would not allow his son to play in filth only to have dirty fingernails like some impoverished commoner.

Draco didn't want to look out the window. He didn't want to know who was out there. He vaguely remembered that there were some pills under the cabinet, and vaguely wondered if it would be an easier way out than whatever torture was coming his way. He stumbled to the cabinet and snatched a bottle up at random as he sank to his knees, fumbled with its cap, breath rattling in time to the rattle of the pills—

And then they were inside with such a deafening blast that Draco thought they must have blown the entire house up. They wore their Death Eater masks, but even masks couldn't hide the insanity that lurked behind them, the bloodlust in the waves of angry magic that poured off them. They reminded him of Bellatrix, but Bellatrix was dead. 

One of them pointed a wand at Draco. He stared at it, wondering whether the light that shot out of it would be green. 

"Look at him, living in mudblood squalor," one of the others hissed. Draco didn't recognize the voice. "So quick to betray the Dark Lord, so quick to leave his side."

Voldemort is dead, Draco wanted to say. Don't you have anything better to do?

And then a light shot out of the end of the wand, and Draco had only a split second to appreciate that it wasn't green, but white. In the next second, he was on the floor, frozen, rigid, arms to his side. The bottle fell from his hand, and white pills scattered across the floor.

"I'll take him," one of them said. "Bring out the Portkey."

A depth-less, all-consuming dread filled Draco's unmoving body. How would anyone find him at a second location? 

So this is how I die, he thought, trying in vain to wiggle his toes. What a small freedom that would be, to wiggle his toes. 

What a small freedom it had been to be alive.

♢

Three crazy ex-Death Eaters. Harry could deal with them. He probably didn't even have to draw his wand, since his fingers were already crackling, but he needed the three to be in custody, not blown to bits.

No matter how much he wanted them to be blown to bits.

They put up quite a fight, right there in the kitchen. The potted plants on the counters smashed to the floor, roses flew into the air only to be beheaded, and petals of marigold flew around them as they got swept up by the violent currents of magic whipping around the room. And when the three were subdued, taken out by the team of Aurors that had arrived minutes earlier, the clearest thought in Harry's blurry mind was:

Malfoy will be sad about the flowers.

Harry walked further into the kitchen. Malfoy had been hidden from view by the cabinets, and Harry's stomach dropped for a second when he saw him lying on the floor. The eyes of someone in a Petrificus were eerily similar to the open eyes of the dead.

Looking over him, Harry wondered if Malfoy felt the same way Harry had on that train before their third year. Helpless. 

"Finite," Harry muttered, and dropped to one knee to avoid towering over Malfoy.

The tension left his body, and the first thing Malfoy did was take in a huge, shuddering breath before curling into the fetal position, ignoring Harry's outstretched hand to help him up. Slightly embarrassed and unsure of what to do, Harry looked away. For the first time, he realized that there were white pills scattered across the kitchen floor. He picked up the empty bottle.

"Malfoy..."

It was a thought that had crossed Harry's mind more than once or twice. Especially in the early days after the war, when he was just so fucking tired of being scared all the time, so tired of the nightmares, that he wanted to sleep. Forever. He kept going though, a part of him still fighting to live out of sheer spite. He had come all this way, and he had cheated Death. He would never again so willingly walk into its trap again. 

But he knew what it felt like. 

"I thought it would be better than torture," Malfoy said as he finally sat up, still breathing erratically. 

"Why did you have pills in your cabinet?" Harry asked.

Malfoy wouldn't meet his eyes. Harry was suddenly gripped by a violent urge to throw the bottle as hard and as far away as he could, but instead carefully placed it on the floor next to him. Crossing his legs, he started to pick up the pills, one by one, and dropped them into the bottle. Malfoy started to do the same, and as the clattering of pills took on a steady rhythm, so did his breathing.

And then it was done. Harry screwed the cap back on.

"I bought those months ago," Malfoy said. "At three in the morning, at the convenience store. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't breathe. I felt dead already, so I thought a bunch of pills wouldn't really make much of a difference."

Harry despised how he knew what that felt like.

"Why didn't—" Harry croaked, but it felt like the wrong question to ask, and he couldn't finish.

"Because I walked into my house and I tripped over a cactus. And I thought, well, when I'm gone, this cactus won't need me for a good month. It can take care of itself. But flowers..." Malfoy gritted his teeth together and looked away from Harry. "The flowers will start wilting the day I'm not around to water them. And I... I already made a promise to myself, that I'll never be the reason someone dies again."

Strange how Harry had made that same exact promise to himself. 

Malfoy swallowed hard. "You should have let the Death Eaters take me," he said. "I won't ever do a bit of good in my life."

"Evanesco," Harry said, a bit too loudly, a bit too aggressively as he jabbed his wand in the direction of the pills. They quietly popped out of existence.

And so they sat there, surrounded by the corpses of flowers and scattered soil, a graveyard instead of a garden. 

"Why do you hate cut flowers?" Harry asked. But he knew the answer already.

"I'll never be the reason someone dies again," Malfoy repeated. "But..."

He picked up a mangled rose in one hand and a jagged shard of a clay pot in the other.

"They all die," Malfoy said. "They all die in the end."

"Yeah," Harry said, knowing full well they weren't talking about flowers. "Yeah, they do."