a grave for flowers | drarry

chapter 3

chapter 3

This was a quaint town, Harry thought. It was the sort of place he would have liked to settle in, if it weren't for the protection Grimmauld Place offered him. 

Quaint, it was, but hardly the sort of place Draco Malfoy would have lowered himself to. Not that he had a choice. But he could have ended up in far worse. 

Harry checked the address again. He didn't really believe Malfoy would be there, not until he saw him with his own eyes. He hadn't seen him since the end of the war—only in pictures and in the paper, gray eyes hollow and back hunched. As Harry knew very well, Lucius was in Azkaban, and Narcissa narrowly avoided it.

Because of Harry. 

He hadn't planned on it. He really hadn't. He was at the hearing, and he was fully prepared for Narcissa to defend herself. For her to point at Harry dramatically, proclaiming that she had saved his life, and therefore should be granted immunity. She was a Slytherin, after all, and self-preservation was high on their list of priorities.

But she did no such thing. Her mouth was a hard line, and her chin, though lifted with the faint ghost of haughtiness, trembled. Her silver eyes were lowered, and she didn't say a single word except "Yes, Chief Warlock," and "No, Chief Warlock." Her face was just as stony as those on the Wizengamot, and it took Harry the full hearing to realize that she planned to say absolutely nothing in defense of herself.

And in spite of himself, in spite of her husband and the way he almost killed Ginny and in spite of her bratty son who just couldn't pick a side, Harry rose to his feet, feeling like something was pulling him up.

"I can vouch for Narcissa Malfoy," he said.

All eyes had turned to him. Harry wasn't prepared to make a speech, but it seemed like he would have to improvise. What was he supposed to call her? Malfoy? Mrs. Malfoy? 

"She lied to Voldemort himself. She lied to him so I could live," he had said. Which was a total lie, of course, they both knew that. Narcissa did not risk her life so that Harry could live. She risked her life for her son. But either way, Harry knew what a mother's love looked like. And he had been saved by it twice. He could not let this debt be left unpaid. 

Maybe it was the Slytherin in him, forcing him to balance out the scales. Slytherins liked to get even, too.

Ginny had come round to Grimmauld Place to scream at him, afterwards. "How could you," she had raged, pacing around the parlor. "That Slytherin bitch! She was just as bad as her husband, and her husband almost killed me.  And she's Draco Malfoy's mother!"

"Exactly," Harry had replied softly to that last part, not even bothering to tell Ginny that the Sorting Hat once wanted to put him in the very house she denounced. But Ginny did not listen.

"I can't believe you wouldn't want that woman to rot in a cell until she dies, and then rot in hell," she seethed. "I can't believe you."

Harry couldn't really believe himself, either. But Ginny's feverish wrath and her unquenchable thirst for revenge unnerved Harry. He knew how easily bitterness could swallow a person whole. So he asked her to leave. Ginny had stared at him, and Harry saw that familiar blaze in her eyes, the fire he had once loved so much. 

"Fuck you," Ginny had spat, and Harry didn't see her again. 

She had liked flowers. Such an iron-willed, immovable woman she was, harder than diamonds and hotter than an inferno. And yet she had a soft spot for flowers; she admired their attention-seeking bold colors in spite of their fragility, their tendency to always grow toward the light.