HP: Far Older Than Crazy

Title: Far Older Than Crazy
Author: Max-chan
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Summary:"No, Harry Potter, with his all-night conversations and his questions, wouldn’t know what it was like to be cruel at all." There's a visitor to St. Mungo's every other night.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and the characters belong to J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter is, in no way, owned by me. I simply write about it.
A/N: Written to Marrow by Ani DiFranco. To the non-songfic challenge. Not all lyrics were used and some tenses were changed here and there to fit the sentencing. Total time was approximately one hour and twenty minutes.


Harry came by after visiting hours.

He strode quickly down the paved walkway leading up to the door and if the temperature was too low, he would pull his dark green with red lining cloak (and wasn’t that just typical of Harry Potter) closer around himself. It had been fairly easy for him to convince one of the younger Healers to allow him to enter the dark hospital after everyone else was gone. The new boy had most likely been very smart to become a Healer that young, probably top of his class, but even he was in awe at the presence that was the Boy-Who-Lived-And-Continued-To-Live.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Potter,” he had said with his bright smile and glowing cheeks. “Of course, Mr. Potter.”

The boy hadn’t even asked why the extraordinary Harry Potter would wish to wander a hospital after hours. It was just accepted among Wizarding society that Harry Potter was above and beyond mere mortals and so his actions would seem incomprehensible to anybody who was not a hero.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true.

Draco Malfoy wasn’t a hero and he understood Harry perfectly.

That was why Harry kept coming back to St. Mungos. That was why he would climb the stairs up the fourth floor and stand outside the room for exactly four minutes and thirty-nine seconds before entering. That number meant something to him and if Harry sat down and thought about it long enough, he might remember what it meant.

Harry entered the room with four beds in it and only one occupant.

The one occupant with shoulder-length white hair tied back with ordinary string (and when had things come to a point where a Malfoy had to use string rather than ribbon?) that knew the answer to the only question Harry Potter could not answer.

“Are you going to tell me tonight?” Harry asked, all the while knowing that he didn’t even really want the answer. He just needed an excuse, just like so many of the wizards and witches still living after the war. They all needed an excuse for the things they did and the things they continued to do. Harry needed an excuse for why he spent every other night beside a hospital bed talking to a dying man and waiting for the first rays of the sun to stab the stone floor and force him to leave.

Draco Malfoy turned around from where he was standing by the window - his hand perched against the edges for support because his once strong Quidditch legs could do that no longer.

He gave a small laugh and said, “Possibly, Potter. You never know.”

“Yes,” agreed Harry. “I never know with you.”

“Bitter, are we? Full of tragic heroic memories that threaten to take you over?” inquired Draco with a slight twitch of the mouth.

He edged away from the window and stumbled slightly, his face scrunching up in a grimace of pain. Harry did not move to help him because they were passed that now. They had quite a few years under their belt, and if they didn’t, it sure felt that way, and the grand ideas of passion and grandeur were passed them. They were no longer tied to the tragedy of saving each other and being each other’s downfall.

Melodrama gathers a very sour taste after staying too long in the cupboard of someone’s life.

“Will you sit?” Harry questioned him slowly as he watched Draco move towards the bed.

“No, Potter,” Draco snapped. “I’m just going to keep this pain in my leg because it’s oh so pleasant.”

“I’m not the only one who’s bitter, Malfoy,” said Harry and the truth of the statement stopped the Malfoy heir for a few agonizing moments.

When he began to move again to settle onto the bed, Draco replied, “No, you’re not. But you’re the only one who comes here looking for that answer you’re so desperate for. I’m going to tell you what I told you all those times, Potter. The answer you’re looking for doesn’t matter. Everything’s all over and done with. It doesn’t matter in the end.”

As though he sensed that tonight was different somehow, Harry moved closer to the bed and the person lying there.

“Tell me,” he commanded softly.

Draco tried to give a small laugh to downplay the tension of the moment, but his laugh just turned into a vicious cough that forced Harry to come over and knock him a few times hard on t he back.

“You want to know something shocking, Potter?” Draco asked, his eyes glowing with dark intent. “You already know. The answer came like a shot in the back while you were running from your lesson - which, I guess, might explain why all these years later all you could remember was the terror of the question. The brave little Gryffindor frightened of something he doesn’t want to know, but somehow needs to. Do your little friends skirt around the issue too, Potter, or do they say, ‘I told you so,’ straight to your face? Do they tell you I was never any good and that I was doomed to betray you sooner or later, no matter how much affection you might have showered me with? Do they tell you it wasn’t your fault and that I was just plain bad? Do they?”

“Yes,” Harry murmured with a bent head.

Draco moved his thin, pale hand to force the scarred face to look at him.

“Why don’t you listen?”

When Harry refused to answer, Draco just let his hand go and stated confidently, “Because you know you were wrong too. You know that somewhere in there, you messed up and that’s why you’re here, Potter. If only you could figure out where you messed up along the way you might be able to stop it from happening again.”

“That’s not - ”

“Isn’t it though? How many times have you messed up and had somebody ruined because of you? Black, Dumbledore, and now me. Where was your conscience, Potter? Where was your consciousness? And where do you put all those letters that you wrote to yourself but could not address?”

Harry groaned, “What does that mean?”

Draco was all too happy to oblige.

“That means that you have no idea who the Boy-Who-Lives is. He’s somebody who passes you by in your nightmares - somebody who got there too late and who holds the love of everyone you care for, keeping it for himself and preventing you from having it. You think I know and you think that’s the answer - that that is the reason why I gave up. Ask me the question again, Potter. Ask me.”

The words were broken apart and sharp when they came out.

“Why didn’t you stay, Malfoy?”

Draco leaned back on his bed, his long white hair covering the pillow.

“I’m a good kisser and you’re a fast learner and that kind of thing could float us for a pretty long time. It could keep us together for as long as we didn’t want anything more than that. I always thought it would be you though - “

Harry stood up abruptly.

“Of course. It would be just like me, wouldn’t it, to want more? I thought you knew the answer, Malfoy. You liar. You don’t. I thought that after all this time, one day you’d realize you memorized my phone number and you’ll call it and find it’s a disconnected line. I’m not the boy you knew in school. That’s what everybody doesn’t get and I thought you would. Harry Potter isn’t stone. He will change and I have.”

The bed shifted and Harry looked down to see Draco’s face scrunch up again as his hand flew down to clutch his leg.

“Oh poor Potter,” he growled. “So melodramatic that he has to use Muggle references to confuse me. I know what a telephone is Potter. What are you going to tell me next? That you got tossed out the window of love’s el camino and that you shattered into a shower of sparks on the curb? I’m too old for your heartbreak and your open wounds. I just want it to end, dammit.”

The last sentence was emphasized roughly with a fist hitting the sheets of the bed. It must hurt very much to agree to be Voldemort’s lab rat. It must hurt so much that you and everyone else in the world knows that you could not possibly survive that long so why put you in Azkaban? Why be unnecessarily cruel?

Only Harry Potter wouldn’t know. No, Harry Potter, with his all-night conversations and his questions, wouldn’t know what it was like to be cruel at all.

“Malfoy,” Harry said hesitantly.

Draco closed his eyes and mumbled, “There’s a smorgasbord of unspoken poisons - a whole childhood of potions - that are bottled up and so one by I’m dusting off labels - “

“Malfoy,” Harry said again, louder and more fearful.

“I am uncorking bottles and filling up cups so go ahead and have a taste of your own medicine, Potter, and I’ll have a taste of mine, but first let’s toast to the lists that we hold in our fists - ”

“Draco!” Harry screamed and the sound jolted the other up quickly. Draco glared with thin, glittering, knife-eyes at the man inches away from him.

“Yes, Potter; let’s toast to the lists of things that we promise to do differently next time,” he declared.

Harry looked down and saw that a dark red stain was covering the area where Draco was clutching his leg. The nails had penetrated the skin and a profusion of blood was tainting the clean sheets.

It must hurt very much to be the last of the Malfoys - the one with the consequences of generations of bad decisions weighing on him.

“I’m not listening to you anymore,” Harry cried out. “We have to call a Healer.”

“No,” Draco commanded as his hands flew up to grab onto Harry’s arms, the blood leaving marks on the coat sleeves. “This has gone on long enough. I’m Draco Malfoy and I do not deserve to be punished this long. Let it end. My head is too sore and my heart’s perforated.”

The Malfoy heir looked down at the stain covering his leg and murmured, “I’m mired in the marrow of my, well, ain’t that, funny bone.”

He looked up again and this time, the smile on his face was pure Malfoy glee.

“You’ll just have to learn how to be alone and devastated after I’m gone. It shouldn’t be that difficult, Prometheus. Where was my conscience, Potter? Where was my consciousness?”

He lied down softly and closed his eyes.

“And what do I do with all these letters that I wrote to myself, but cannot address?”

Harry backed away slowly. He stopped and watched his former lover pay for his life and the lives of others.

“Don’t let them fool you. It never ends. Do you want to know why I didn’t stay? I didn’t stay because I knew we both have roles to play and if we didn’t play them, somebody else would have. You go be a hero, Harry, and I’ll be the traitor I was supposed to be. We won’t be happy, but the world will keep turning. You knew this all along. You told me, remember? When we were still seventeen and dying with the anguish of our illicit love. In the great hall, with everyone watching, you said, ‘Why don’t you do something surprising for once, Malfoy?’ You knew.”

All Harry said in reply to that was, “I’m going to get a Healer.”

He left the room with the sound of mingled groans and laughter following him.

He found the young Healer and told the boy what had happened with Draco.

“Oh, Mr. Potter,” the boy chirped like a little House Elf, “You shouldn’t have gone there. Malfoy’s crazy, sir, and he’s dying. There’s no reason to try and comfort him. His kind doesn’t deserve empathy. I told you, sir.”

“Yes,” Harry sneered brusquely. “You and everyone else kid. You all know everything about everyone so well.”

He turned around to leave and heard a voice say behind him, “Are you going to come back, sir?”

“Of course,” Harry answered as he walked out. “We all need our punishments and this is mine.”