All the Ghosts are Screaming

35

Draco

It's a strange thing, becoming okay again.

At the time, Draco hadn't noticed how much time and energy go into not being okay, where he puts all his energy into raging against monsters that only existed in his head and pushing past road blocks that were only in his way because he had been the one to place him there. For the past two years, right from the moment his father was sent to jail, all he had been thinking about was putting the pieces of his life back together, thinking only of what he had to do in order to get himself to the point where he could look in the mirror and feel like the person staring back at him actually seemed like they had turned out alright.

As a whole, the people who went through the war had spent a lot of time together trying to reach the point where Draco is currently at. The only thing was, no one ever thought to tell him how hard it would be, walking through life like you need someone's permission to be healthy and whole again, always waiting for the moment where the ground might be pulled out from under your feet.

(It's like, there were these holes, in his heart and his mind and his body, and Draco had spent these past months giving everything he had into filling them back up, and here he was, with all his metaphorical potholes patched over with brand new cement. In his head he knows it is a good thing, but it is also a strange thing, to have all this time, to keep expecting to fall back into old patterns and bad habits, to have to keep reminding himself it was okay to be okay.)

"You're happier, right?" Harry had asked him, one of those nights where he caught Draco staring at himself in the mirror, poking at a smattering of scars and pockmarks that trail down his side. "Now? With me?"

"This is the happiest I've ever been," Draco had said, and he didn't even have to lie, and his smile was not covering up any old ghosts when he turned back to him. He'd be fine, really. All he had to do was keep moving, keep busy, just enough that the past doesn't have the space to squeeze back into Draco's life.

It's this, more than anything else, that makes him volunteer when Ginny was complaining about the overwhelming amount of work that had to be done before the wedding.

"I mean, it's mental. Mental! Who thought up with this stuff?" They were at the Burrow, her combat boot covered feet thrown up on the coffee table and a steaming cup of tea in her hand. "You have to think about food, and the people, and the color scheme, and flowers, and where to put everyone, so I'm going to have to rent a place because I can't have it here otherwise everyone will just compare it to Fleur and Bill's, and Merlin's beard, do you have any idea how much a wedding dress costs? And we have to buy two of them!"

"Well," Hermione said tentatively, reasonably. "It's your wedding, you don't have to have all that if you don't want it."

"Oh, I want it." Ginny's eyes widened in alarm. "It's just that it's all so bloody hard to wrap my head around."

Ginny was good at a lot of things. She was good at fighting, and at quidditch, and calming George down. She was good at healing, even if her spells hurt more than Luna's when they crept over your skin. She was a good cook and a good friend and good person, but she was not good at organizing an event like this. Lucky for her, Draco was.

"I could help." Both girls looked over at her. From her seat in the arm chair, Luna smiled vaguely, like she recognized that he had said something nice but wasn't following the conversation enough to know what. "I've had practice planning these type of things."

"Oh." Ginny looked surprised and for a moment he considers taking the offer back, but then she sort of just melts back into the cushions, a relieved smile on his face. "That'd be wonderful, Draco." She reaches out a hand for him and lays it on his arm for a moment. "Thank you."