Wedding Bells
Harry has never really thought about Splinching beyond general precautions to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Don’t apparate when you’re wasted. Know where you’re going. Never apparate when you’re distracted.
But there had simply been Draco, coming at him with the fury of a thousand suns and Harry’s rotten words, strung like a noose between them. There had simply been Draco, who Harry always hurt but didn’t want to, not anymore, but who he always hurt best out of anyone he’d ever known.
Draco, who Harry could not quite face.
They crash gracelessly onto hardwood, two bodies colliding. Ribs into ribs and elbows into soft places and the entire weight of a person caught in your own gravity.
Harry was heaving. He felt the act of the Splinching somewhere inside his chest, a pressure and a weight that threatened to cave it in. Then hands, pale and elegant, seeping into his peripheral, his hair, the juncture of neck and shoulder. The hands that had been angry, now turned docile, a voice once acid now trying to coax him back into wholeness.
Draco came into focus, Harry’s eyes drinking him in through panic and not perusal. He checked for limbs, for flesh, for hair, for facial features. Harry thought about how he’d already torn Draco open once. He thought about how he was terrified that he’d done it again, after all this time, tracing his legacy into the scars of another person’s body over and over again.
Draco’s voice came into clarity last. Harry realized it was because his ears had been ringing. His breathing calmed, becoming accustomed to drowning rather than overcoming it, and by then he could make out Draco’s steady reassurances.
“You’re alright,” he said simply. “You’re whole.” And then Harry’s name, over and over, trying to call him out of the stupor, a steady, soothing staccato that was nearly prayer.
Harry reached a hand out, a raggedy movement caused by his chest still breaking in two, and it landed in Draco’s clothes, clenched there in a wordless question that he knew Draco would understand because Draco always understood everything. That’s why it was easiest to hurt each other.
“Yes,” Draco was answering. His voice still calm. Harry wanted him to never be angry. “I’m whole, I’m okay.” Harry nodded. Didn’t drop his hand.
The ache had dulled, and sense was returning to him in small increments. He was breathing more like a man who’d sprinted a mile and less like a man who couldn’t survive outside of an iron lung. He opened his mouth to say something but had nothing yet to say and could only take slow, heaving breaths and watch Draco’s anger return to him. Could only watch wordlessly as Draco’s arm seemed to realize it was performing an act of care and then dropped back down to his own lap.
Could only clench at Draco’s shirt once before letting go.
He can’t look at Draco, Harry thinks. He’s not yet brave enough to.
“We’re in the manor,” Draco says, his voice a soft lulling tone of confusion. “One of the parlor rooms.”
Harry’s staring down at the Persian, at the mere centimeters of space and matter between their knees. His ears are still ringing, his ribs feel like they’ve been broken and reformed. And so he doesn’t realize, at first glance, what they’re wearing.
Three-piece suits, finely pressed. “Merlin,” Harry says, clutching at the buttons of his jacket, the ridges of his vest, fingering a pair of golden cufflinks he’s never bought.
Draco’s watching him, his mouth a line. He dusts at his knees as he stands, straightens out his sleeves and readjusts the way his jacket has settled on his shoulders just beneath his robes. He's twisting at his hands. Harry scrambles upwards too, eyes flicking between their matching clothes and their deep plum ties.
He startles when the door opens, revealing a dress then a head of curls then Hermione herself, slightly out of breath. “For Merlin’s sake, there the both of you are!" Her eyes blaze, no-nonsense, then catch on the both of them, as lost as children without parents at the grocery. "Oh Harry you’ve rucked up your clothes again.” She’s holding a small bouquet in her hand that she uses to tap Draco harshly on the bicep three times in quick succession. “Fix it! And quickly—the wedding is almost started.”
Draco obeys, a dazed movement accompanied by wide eyes. “The wedding,” he mutters, his hands tightening the tie around Harry’s neck, fixing his button-up and shifting his robes.
Hermione stands there, watching the two of them with the impatient tapping of her heeled shoe. “Let’s go, you two,” she says, herding them out of the room. Confused and taken unawares, they allow themselves to be hustled through the building, at first with Hermione’s frantic figure at their back and then with her flaring dress in front of them as their pace picks up and all three of them begin a light jog, Draco and Harry’s body remembering an urgency the mind has not.
Draco and Harry are shocked when they come outside to sunlight, the sun high above them as they meander through the Malfoy Gardens. They turn to each other, silent questions exchanged through the lift of brows and the dropping of jaws and then laughter, so soft and stolen, only amplified by the way Hermione snaps at them to get on with their pace.
Draco and Harry fall into place, slotting themselves instinctively in either of the two lines of bridesmaids and groomsmen. A Slytherin and a Gryffindor are getting married, Harry thinks, studying each party’s occupants. He takes note of the faces, ticks them off in his head to discern who hasn’t yet made it to the alter, and finds himself a little surprised all over again.
Across the dais, his eyes find Draco, speaking softly to Blaise beside him, his pale blond hair nearly angelic in the sun, his aristocratic profile shifting to permit a small grin.
Look at me, Harry thinks. Please look at me.
Draco glances forward, and something in Harry heaves with warmth, eddying with it. His eyes say, isn’t all of this insane? and Draco’s say, all of this is absolutely mental and Harry knows that both of them are consumed by the spirit of it, by the happiness blanketing the open air, several hundred square meters of the people they love most.
We were just arguing, Harry thinks. We were just driving knives into the other in a dark house with a quiet dinner and a cold winter.
He looks at the manor behind them, so resplendent in the sun, as grand as all its ancestors have ever hoped for. He looks at all the white chairs and the floating chiffon and the way each person is standing, with spines that have not been worn away by a devastating war. Faces that he's missed and faces that have been missing and then faces that have come alive all over again.
Ron starts sniffling, just a little, and Harry laughs even as he slaps him on the back. “Fuck,” Ron says, wiping it away with a quick brusqueness that pretends a tear never once appeared. “It’s just—this is my baby sister, you know?”
On the other side of him, Hermione pats his forearm consolingly. She says, “This is the third time you’ve cried this morning, darling,” and Ron starts tearing up all over again.
Harry checks him with his shoulder, tucks his hands into his pockets coyly. “Pretty sure she hasn’t been a baby anything in awhile, mate. At least not since Pansy’s gotten her hands on her.”
Ron elbows him. “You’re a monster, you know that?” he says. “Like seriously, sick and twisted. That’s my baby sister. I practically birthed her myself.”
“That’s not how that works,” Hermione reminds, the same time Harry helpfully adds, “Oh, I’ll make sure Molly hears about that.”
Ron frowns at him, turning full-bodiedly to show his disappointment. But then he’s really looking at Harry and the way he’s smiling and the laugh that’s threatening to make itself known in the shake of his shoulders. And, suddenly, he’s laughing a little too, all resigned and fond, and then there’s nothing left to say, because the music has begun, and the wedding is underway.
Pansy and Ginny are beautiful brides who nearly shock an entire garden of the Wizarding world by the fire in their first official kiss as wife and wife. Blaise nearly rips the suit of the minister when he tugs him out of the way, three different cameras materializing to capture the women as they take turns dipping the other in designer dresses that their groomsmen and bridesmaids spell to flare dramatically like a fairytale.
Harry is smiling so hard that his cheeks could fall apart with the very force of it, and when the girls finally pull away, they surge back down the aisle under a rain of flower petals floating sparks in different colors that are surely the work of the twins, their parties flooding in behind them at their calling. Suddenly Draco is beside him, and they're grinning at each other in a way he can’t quite ever remember doing, and Harry throws an arm around him without thinking, so drawn in by some subconscious calling. And Draco might still be mad at him and the wounds they inflict on each other may still never heal, but then his arm is caught on Harry’s waist, and really, none of it could matter as much as this, whatever it is.
The reception is a casual affair with immense proportions. Guests flood into the manor, their bodies eating into the floors and different rooms as drinks appear and food is promised on silver platters that appear and disappear throughout the room. A cake is cut, and Ginny and Pansy both scale a ladder to take a ceremonial sliver off the very top of its twenty-two layers, and then someone throws a plate even though none of them are Greek, and Draco laughs when he catches sight of his father—because Lucius is here, of all realities—hunting down the plate-breaker as his wife tells one of the house elves to go searching for old, worthless plates that can continue to be smashed.
Harry ends up in one of the second-floor parlors, a room full of his closest friends as Pansy and Ginny take refuge from wedding well-wishers and celebratory drinks from expensive bottles get passed around. He’s sitting on the same antique settee that Draco is, both their body languages doused by the drinks so that their hips are fitted against one another’s and both of Draco’s bent legs are tilted in Harry’s direction, like a compass being pulled towards its true north.
It’s in this way—made soft by the festivities and their shock and this foreign reality overtaken by the flooding happiness—that they discover the rings.
Draco notices it first, a choked sound of shock that arrives when Harry pats his knee after poking fun at him. His slender fingers are reaching out, grabbing for him, and his cool touch wrapping around Harry’s tanned skin. Harry inhales sharply enough for the movement to rumble through his body, surprised that Draco doesn’t turn to make a comment or raise a brow. Instead, there are just Draco’s fingertips, sinking into Harry’s palm; Draco’s skin, meeting Harry’s over and over again.
“You have a ring,” Draco points out, and Harry’s gaze drops to see what he’s talking about, sinking into the engraved silver band seated comfortably around his fourth finger. “We both have rings,” Draco adds, almost like a correction. His left hand releases Harry so he can hold it out in front of them, side by side.
Harry sees the matching ring, the design so evidently made to be recognized as a pair. He hums to let Draco know he sees it because something about it makes him inexplicably speechless. He wonders if it’s maybe the shock—the surprise of an entirely foreign set of six hours—but knows that this isn’t what it is almost immediately. He stares at the two rings. At their two hands. At the difference in the shades of their skin and the build of their bones lurking beneath their skin and he’s thinking, of course we have rings. Of course of course of course.
“You two are always so sickening,” Ginny says, and both Draco and Harry know instinctually that it’s them she’s speaking to. Wherever they are—whatever this world is—their bodies remember a million things they haven’t learned yet.
Harry feels the way Draco rolls his eyes, and shifts so that when Draco drops his hand down, it slides from Harry’s bent knees to Harry’s thighs, a small experiment that Draco allows and doesn’t say anything about.
Pansy huffs beside her newly wedded wife, the both of them crammed into the same recliner. She says to Ginny, “I hope we’re worse. I hope that we make them sick.” Ginny nods, her face as committed as a soldier who thinks their country is worth dying for. She holds out her hand, and the two shake on it in agreement before a snogging takes place.
Somewhere in the corner, Ron makes a groan so loud it pierces through the small, gathered crowd, and voices clamber in hoots and laughs. Ginny perks up to grin at the room and Pansy leans back, as satisfied as a cat that got the cream.
Draco is chuckling, a soft sound that knocks his shoulder against Harry’s until Harry realizes that they’re pressed up against each other even when they started on different ends of the same couch.
“We’re sickening,” Harry says, leaning his mouth to Draco’s ear in a staged whisper that Ginny rolls her eyes at him for. “We’re a blight upon the people.” Draco’s laughing again, that polite aristocratic sound with just a little extra kick to it.
Harry noses at Draco’s hair, a barely legible movement of individual hairs that Draco inevitably notices and slaps Harry’s thigh in censure. But Draco’s hair has already been rucked up from its careful coiffing, and Harry’s getting comfortable, propping his chin as Draco leans—sinks—into his side, two humans cursed by the gods to be separate entities finally allowed to be unified once again.
Then Harry’s hands, settled on Draco’s knee, traveling through his blond hair, desperate attempts to affix him to his body in irrevocable ways. We’re never like this, he’s thinking. He can’t believe they’ve never had this, whatever it might be. “We’re sickening,” Harry says again, the syllables drifting on a quiet, half-hidden whisper.
Draco, his fingers messing with the ring on Harry’s hand, his voice dreamy and satisfied. “We always are.”