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Take into the Air (My Quiet Breath)
GuardianMira
Summary：Draco is dying of Hanahaki Disease. Serves him right, Harry thinks.
He’s been sick since sixth year, if the rumor mill has it right, but only once the war is over does Draco get too sick to hide it anymore.
They’ve all returned to Hogwarts as the first-ever class of eighth years, Harry and most of the people he grew up with—the ones who survived and the ones who could face coming back, anyway. His circle is largely intact, and integrated seamlessly with the rest of the student body.
Somehow, though, the whispers don’t reach Harry’s ears. It’s not until he sees Draco cough the lily petals out of his lungs and onto his breakfast that it even occurs to him that something might be wrong with the git.
“Is it some kind of a curse?” Harry asks queasily. Draco primly dabs away the blood at the corner of his lips with a handkerchief—embroidered with his initials, Harry knows—and sweeps the petals off the table before picking up his fork as if nothing at all had happened.
A few others are staring at Draco, like Harry is, but mostly people avert their eyes with expressions ranging from pity to disgust.
Ron swallows hard around his mouthful of eggs, looking about as nauseated as Harry feels. “It’s bloody horrifying, is what it is.”
Harry’s face must betray his shock, because Ron flushes.
“What? My mum’s cousin had the same thing,” he mumbles. “We saw her at the hospital, and she looked…” He shudders a bit. “Gave me nightmares for weeks.”
“It’s not a curse,” says Hermione. “It’s a disease.”
“Oh,” Harry says. “I s’pose Madam Pomfrey will put him right, then.”
Ron and Hermione trade meaningful looks. Harry waits it out, all too accustomed to their silent exchanges by now, until Hermione comes out with: “There’s no cure.”
“No cure?” he says. “So, what, he vomits flowers for the rest of his life?”
“Yes, Harry,” says Hermione, as tentatively as if she were defusing a bomb. “But he won’t live very much longer. Hanahaki Disease is fatal.”
He hears that word, fatal, as if at a great distance. Is it possible Draco Malfoy survived a war only to die of disease? It seems so farfetched. So pedestrian. Harry is outraged, blindingly so, out of nowhere.
“That’s ridiculous,” he blusters, “that doesn’t make sense, how can there not be a cure—”
“There is a cure, sort of,” Ron interrupts. “He’s sick because he loves someone who doesn’t love him back. If he gets loved back, he gets better.”
Ron glances sidelong at Hermione, and his face goes from embarrassment to relief to something else, something Harry doesn’t feel right seeing, so he looks down at his untouched plate of food. Somehow he doesn’t think he’ll be finishing it.
“It’s quite sad, isn’t it,” Hermione says.
“No, it’s not,” Harry snaps. “This is his own bloody fault. If he wasn’t such a self- centered, bigoted prat, maybe someone other than his mum would love him.”
Even Ron looks shocked. The other Gryffindors, absolutely failing to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping, shift minutely away from him. Harry grabs a bread roll from a basket in the middle of the table and bites into it viciously, chewing like his NEWTs depend on it.
Ron launches into an impromptu Quidditch discussion a second later, and Neville jumps —as if a red-headed someone had kicked him under the table—and chimes in. Soon, half the table is overtaken by a rousing debate about who’ll win the next World Cup. Harry is an island of furious silence in the middle of it all. No one is fool enough to try and talk to him. Hermione gives him one of those injured looks of hers, the sort that doesn’t say you hurt me but rather seeing you hurt hurts me, which grates on him right now, because Harry is perfectly fine, and sometimes Hermione thinking he’s hurt is worse than actually being hurt.
His next mouthful of dry bread is painfully hard to swallow. He looks up, through the gap between Ron and Hermione’s shoulders. Draco chatters at his housemates, gesticulating passionately as he delivers a punchline, probably at someone else’s expense. It’s business as usual except that every so often he has to stop and turn away, gasping and sputtering as his mouth fills with petals so white even across the room it almost hurts Harry’s eyes to look at them. They fall into Draco’s lap like shards of frosted glass.
Dying of love? He thinks he’s never heard anything so pathetic; leave it to Malfoy to escalate a crush to such stunning heights of drama. He thinks, also, of what Dumbledore had always said about love being the most powerful magic of all. He keeps forgetting—or perhaps just doesn’t want to believe—that this particular magic can be destructive, too.
Most of all, though, Harry thinks: who is it?
You’d think Harry’s the one who’s sick, the way people are avoiding him. Like he’s catching and even eye contact will pass the symptoms on.
“It’s sixth year all over again,” Hermione chides him. “You’re obsessing.”
“I’m not obsessed,” he says, defensively. “I’m just interested, that’s all. I’ve never heard of this. Do Muggles get it?”
“No,” says Hermione, “and neither do Squibs. Unrequited love causes Hanahaki Disease, but it’s magic that makes the symptoms manifest the way they do. But listen, Harry, please,” she adds. She sounds impatient, which is unusual, because she never passes on a chance to impart knowledge, especially when Harry’s actually asking her for it. “You’re following Malfoy around. Brooding over the Marauder’s Map when you’re pretending to do homework. Eavesdropping on the Slytherins—don’t look so surprised, you’re no good at being sneaky, Harry, I don’t know why you think you are. There’s nothing you can do for Malfoy, and since we’ve been given an once-in-a-lifetime second chance to do our NEWTs, we should really focus on—”
“Who says I want to do anything for Malfoy?” Harry asks, incensed.
Hermione sighs.
He figures Hermione’s right about one thing, though, which is that he’s wasting his time eavesdropping on the Slytherins. He needs to actually talk to one, and it’s obvious which Slytherin he should start with.
The summer before they’d all returned for eighth year, Pansy Parkinson had owled him a very stilted letter congratulating him on his defeat of the Dark Lord, expressing her gratitude for his service to Wizardkind, and burying an apology under layers and layers of semantic posturing. Harry had rolled his eyes and responded with a note which read, in its entirety: “Thanks. -H”
On Fridays, Draco and Pansy fill their plates in the Hall and then take their lunch outside; he’s seen them in the courtyard. He knows that Draco and Pansy come from different classes—Draco from Astronomy; Harry doesn’t know what classes Pansy takes— and that Pansy always gets to the Great Hall before Draco.
Harry skulks outside the doors and waits for her. She doesn’t take a second look at him, almost passes him by, but he hisses her name and beckons her down the hallway.
“What’s this about, Potter?” she asks warily.
“I wanted to talk to you for a minute. It’ll be quick. Please,” he says. She looks around as if nervous to be seen with him and follows, just around a corner and into an empty classroom.
Pansy is one of those girls who hardly ever seem to look any older. Her sleek black hair is cut in a bob, the way she’s always worn it, with a green headband. Her thin lips are covered in a light pink gloss, which makes her look even younger, but she’s grown into her snub nose and doesn’t remind him so much of a pug anymore. She’s almost pretty.
Pretty enough for Draco? he wonders, and then banishes the thought. Pansy’s crush on Draco in third and fourth year had been common knowledge amongst the student body; even if she’d grown out of it, there was no way she wouldn’t give Draco a chance if he’d asked.
“Well?” she says, shutting the door behind her.
He has no idea what he wanted to say to her.
“Thank you for your letter,” he begins, awkwardly.
“You already said that,” she reminds him. He must look baffled, because she adds, “I got your note.”
Harry flushes, suddenly feeling very small and petty.
“Right, well, erm,” he says, “I wanted to say in person. That I appreciated it. And that I don’t…blame you.”
He doesn’t, either. He hasn’t thought much about Pansy either way in a long time, but he doesn’t hold it against her that she’d wanted to live.
“I wouldn’t care if you did,” she informs him. “That’s not why I wrote you.”
“Then why?”
