Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Two chairs are across from each other, in the middle of the small (but perfectly sized), gray-walled (but the color seemed fitting), empty (but with a few rare exceptions) room; and when he enters, she’s the only other person there—proud and rich and fitted in her white coat under the harsh, blinding, fluorescent lights—the kinds you see in horror movies—or asylums—he supposes. A flicker or two, and it might as well have been one.

The blistered walls have begun to wear and peel long before he started coming here, long before Hermione and Ron thought that this was what he needed—long before breathing became work. 

He lets out a long breath and scrunches his nose when his next inhale holds tinges of cigarettes and yesterday’s patients. 

He turns right to her collection and wonders if anything had been added or removed—or replaced.

The shelves are filled with them; three or so rows of thick textbooks—the kind no one likes reading—arranged in a way that made sense only to her. He squints one more time: The Ethics of Mind Healing. 

Oh, how he hates coming here. 

The heater is deafening and there’s a stickiness in the air and he’s already irritated at that, but she makes sure he can hear her. He parrots back her squeak of a greeting and beelines to his seat—assigned and spotless and centered.

She’s staring at him now—with that expecting look of hers. 

I can fix you, it says. 

Blink. Blink, blink. 

The overhead lights dim, then flicker.

“So how’s your day been, Potter?”

“Fine.”

“Anything fun happening?” She asks.

“No, not really.”

“Any friends you’re seeing?” She pursues. 

“Nope, just the usual mandatory weekly dinners.”

“Any plans on making new ones?” She’s stubborn. 

“No, I don’t need them.”

“Potter…” she doesn’t give up. 

And really, what the hell is the point of this, even? This back and forth is fucking stupid. She’s trying—he can tell—to fix him. He thinks she’s going off of some chapter from that stupid book on that stupid shelf of hers.

She has a savior complex like no one else, he knows this. 

And he wants to laugh out loud at that: at the fact that she thinks she’s doing some good in the world that’s so much beyond her, that she’s on the same level as prime Dumbledore. 

He imagines himself standing up, interrupting her tangent on the good of the world and her mantras and promises of how it’ll get better if he would just give it some time. He imagines himself telling her to stop trying with him and trying with everyone else as if she’s some goddamn saint. 

He imagines himself leaving through the door and leaving her hanging, stunned and confused and eyes so wide that green becomes tainted with a subtle hint of red. 

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t and stays glued to his chair like all the other times. 

Because no matter how much he’s hated—still hates—it, he knows that it’s a lot better than killing himself. 

“Yeah?” Even with all his imagined possibilities, he doesn’t have the heart to leave her hanging;

Because she’s the only one still trying for him.  Never mind it’s artificiality and the fact that she’s only caring because she has to—because it’s her job to. 

She’s already known all of his deepest, darkest secrets and everything wrong (and right) about him, but she still takes her time reading him.

He never felt more like an open book. 

“What you need Potter,” she starts like she’s the almighty. “Is on the other side of this feeling.”

And she almost convinces him she’s one too. Almost. “Well no shit, Dr. Parkinson.”

She gives him a look; a look disapproving of his language and the way he speaks to her. But she ultimately pushes the rims of her glasses up higher on her nose and sighs. “What do you want for yourself, Potter? What are you looking to be, what is one thing you want right now?”

His eyes narrow and his lips thin. “You know what I want, Doctor. You’ve known it since the beginning.”

“Potter, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then what the hell else did you mean? You asked me what I wanted,” He was starting to lose himself and he wasn’t quite sure whose fault it was; hers for being so all knowing and vague with him, or his for being so uncooperative and impatient with her. “And I answered. I fucking answered. What the fuck else do you want from me?”

She stares at him like he’s lost it.

“Or was I too vague for you?” Then, “I’m sorry, let me be more clear.” He enunciates the word ‘clear’ so well that he is sure no one had done it better. 

“Well, Parkinson,” he leans forward, getting as close to her as he can and stares her dead in the eyes.

Green on green. 

“The thing I want most in the world is to go back in time and make sure I never got this stupid scar to begin with.”

He expects her usual: a stare and sigh and some wise mumbo jumbo nonsense she probably has saved at the back of that smart head of hers to recycle on her patients who were all going through the same damn thing as him. 

Despite being the chosen one, he knows he’s far from special. 

No witch or wizard at Hogwarts—or even Britain—came out of the war unscathed. Everyone lost something, no matter what side you were on—war didn’t discriminate like that. 

But as the chosen one—as the goddamn hero of the story—wasn’t it his right to be the exception? 

The war was supposed to end with Voldemort’s death. He was supposed to get married to Ginny and they were supposed to live their happy ending, with Ron and Hermione at his side for the rest of their lives.

That’s how it was supposed to be.

Not whatever this is. 

But as it turns out, jumping into marriage at nineteen wasn’t the best decision, especially right after a war. 

Even though he’s fulfilled the prophecy he never had a choice in, even though he lived beyond Dumbledore’s expectations, even though he almost died for a world that tossed a helpless kid into the deep end, and even though the world celebrated and moved on, they never apologized for what they did to him.

And he never quite got over it. 

It didn’t take Hermione or even a licensed mind healer like Parkinson to tell him that the resentment he carried would eventually catch up to him. 

In the middle of a sunny warm day, under a bright blue sky. 

And then it all went downhill from there, at a very steep, very rapid, accelerating pace. 

Now, he’s so fucked up that the only person who tries to help him is the girl who tried to give him up to Voldemort on a silver platter.

The irony. Never mind that she’s getting paid to. 

So really, it was well very much within reason for Harry to expect some wise quote to be recycled on him. 

But nothing could have prepared him for when a snort escapes her. Then a chuckle.

And then, a display of hysteria. 

The next time he sees her is Wednesday.

They were back in her small, gray office. But instead of two chairs across from each other, it was five arranged in a circle. 

Harry is the first to arrive. 

“How’s your day, Potter?” She asks as if their Monday session didn’t happen at all. 

He sucks in his cheeks and searches his brain for a response. “It’s been… good.”

She opens her mouth and laughs a little, “For some reason, I’m not convinced.” 

He returns a small smile, “Well Doctor, it could’ve been better I guess.”

“I see.”

And before she can find something else to talk about or he can reply or before the awkwardness fully engulfs the both of them, the others trickle in; one by one by one. 

Parkinson had introduced this novel concept of group therapy sessions to the wizarding world three years ago. Hermione thought it was a crazy and intrusive idea at first—but when a war had just ended and no one’s problem is ever really special anymore—that had proved to be the most efficient way to fix a whole generation of survivors. 

Real problems yes, but not special, Parkinson had told Malfoy who told Hermione who told him many months ago. 

Harry never thought he’d be one of them though. Thought he was above it all. 

You’re not special, Potter.

He hates to admit it, but she’s right. 

“So how’s everyone been since last week?” she asks, tone laced with a little too much enthusiasm and made-up excitement and—dare he say—boredom and tiredness. 

Sometimes he thinks she just doesn’t care at all—about any of them or—quite frankly—anything. 

But he convinced himself he was making stuff up some time ago. 

She’s a wannabe saint after all, trying to make up for her wrongs, so why would she pretend?

Carlson usually starts. “Actually life’s been looking up, Pansy.”

This ticks Harry. 

“That’s amazing, Carlson!” She ushers for him to go on.

Harry leans back into his chair and drowns it out.

. . .

“Potter?” A light tapping brings him back to her cold office.

“Is Mr. Potter alright?” A girl’s voice inquires. He assumes it’s Su—who had been a first year at Hogwarts when the war happened. 

A hand snakes up his shoulder, “Potter, are you alright?”

He opens his eyes to her green ones and perfect upturned nose in his face. Beyond her, their entire therapy group looks on at him, pity painted across all their faces. 

Maybe because they were all getting better but him. 

His heart aches; he doesn’t want their pity. 

Sensing his unrest, Parkinson turns to the group, “We’re going to end this session early, you guys are free to go.”

Harry sees the protest in Mandy’s golden eyes, but Parkinson does too.

“That’s final.”

It gives him hope that she’s concerned for him—but then he remembers it was her job to be.

When they leave, she asks him again, “Are you alright, Potter?” She assumes the seat across from him. 

He sucks in the air and holds onto his next breath. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He clasps his hands together and hopes she doesn’t notice them glistening with sweat. 

He wonders if his face still holds signs of sweat too.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I see.” She smiles a dull smile and accepts his proclamation. “At the end of the day, you know yourself best after all.”

He thins his lips and, “Yep. Thanks for the concern though Parkinson.”

She bites hers. “No problem.”

He walks out the door and notices it was five past seven—five minutes since their session ended.

No wonder she doesn’t give a shit about him. 

Chapter Text

“Pansy tells me you’re not getting better,” Hermione chips in his ears before taking a sip of her expensive wine. 

He’s at Malfoy Manor, sitting across the dinner table from Hermione and Malfoy. He gives them an unimpressed look because when did they become this boring? Lately, they can’t make it through any conversation without her bringing up his declining mental state. 

“I thought it was against confidentiality or whatever to be talking about patients?”

“It’s not like that, Harry…” Hermione tries to defend herself. “I just want what’s best for you.”

“What’s best for me? You should’ve considered that before sending me to bloody Parkinson of everyone!”

“She’s changed Harry—and I thought you two were amicable with each other. We’ve all been friends for almost a decade now. And after the night of the Ministry party, I thought—”

Harry’s tongue slides around inside his mouth, “She’s assumed the role of my mind healer now, Hermione. She’s refused to be anything but for some time now!”

“I just thought that you two were—“

“What? Into each other? Good for each other? Or maybe you thought we could’ve been fucked up together?”

“What are you talking about? Pansy helped Draco! She has credibility as a mind healer, Harry.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Hermione, we all know you played a bigger part in healing him than Parkinson ever did.” 

“Don’t talk to my wife like that, Potter.” Malfoy sneers at him, grey eyes daring him to say anything else to offend his wife.

“See?” 

Hermione gives him a cold look—but he sees a layer of pity under all the spite. That’s his last straw. 

“Thank you for dinner,” he stands up abruptly and returns the napkin formerly on his lap.

Before either host can protect, he addresses them first, “I’ll see you both some other night.” 

“Harry—“

He doesn’t bother walking two steps to the fireplace and apparates away on the spot.

“Kreacher!”

A crack later, and the old creature appears at his feet, “Yes, Master Harry?”

“Bring me a bottle of firewhiskey to my room.” He tosses his coat onto the nearest chair and strides to his bedroom, almost tripping over the house elf on his way. “Actually—make that three.”

“As you wish.” Kreacher apparates away to do his bidding. 

Harry pretends he didn’t see his momentary hesitation.

The next time he sees her is at a muggle establishment—a sushi bar just on the outskirts of London’s Chinatown—a most unsuspecting place for either of them, especially for someone like her.

She’s sitting alone at the bar, with her head planted against the table, a hand sloppily circling the tiny umbrella in her drink. She doesn’t notice him, and he makes sure it stays that way, moving behind a wall to hide himself.  Still near the register, he starts tapping his left foot impatiently.

What the bloody hell is taking them so long?

“Harry?” The waitress comes back from the kitchen. “Sorry for the wait. That’ll be forty-three pounds.”

He takes his time paying.

When he’s done, some otherworldly force compels him to look back; she’s in the same compromising position, unmoving. 

The waitress follows his gaze. “Do you know her?”

He wants to shake his head but shrugs instead, “Yeah… sorta.”

She’s my mind healer. He finishes in his head. 

The waitress lets out a relieved sigh and beckons him to come closer. He obliges. 

“She’s been like that for the last two hours,” the waitress starts explaining. “We’re closing soon, and she’s not in any condition to go home, or even to converse with. We can always call her a cab but… if you know her—that’ll definitely help a lot.”

He wonders what about him made her think he gave two shits about Parkinson. But he bites his lips and swallows back a groan and curls his toes in his shoes and into the ground to prevent himself from walking away with his only meal of the day. 

“Is it okay if she goes home with you?”

He blinks in disbelief at her request. “I’m sorry, but I don’t—“ he stops midway to look over at her, who’s still slumped over. 

He wonders if she’s conscious. 

He sucks down an incoming hiss, “She’s not with anyone—anyone at all?”

“Well,” The waitress ponders for a bit before replying, “There was a man.”

He forces a smile. “Maybe ask him instead, then, yeah?”

She bites her lips. “Well…”

He’s starting to lose his patience with her tippy-toeing around their conversation. “Well?”

“He left her here… with us.”

“Oh…”

Harry doesn’t know how he feels—or quite frankly—how he should feel; a part of him feels terrible for her, but another part doesn’t really care.

And another feels like she deserved it. 

But that was just his spite speaking. She had tried everything she could to fix him—even ended their friendship or whatever they had going on for the sake of being only his mind healer—it was his fault for believing she could.

“…Okay, sure.” Looking at her motionless figure, he agrees. 

“Thank you!” The waitress takes out a notepad and pen and starts writing something down, “Your next meal will be on us.”

Takeout in one hand, he stalks over to Parkinson.

Hesitantly, his free hand taps her on the shoulder. “Parkinson?”

She doesn’t budge. 

“Parkinson,” he shakes her. “Doctor Parkinson.”

She groans this time but doesn’t move.

“This isn’t going to work, is it?” He grumbles.

He looks at the waitress for approval before setting his takeout down and snaking an arm under her. She laughs when he has no other choice but to get close to her face, and her breath tickles the side of his neck. His arm hair stands on edge. 

Lifting her up was the easy part—during their walk to the front, she had kept swaying back and forth, compromising the balance he had worked so hard to set for them.

The waitress helps him with his takeout until they reach the door. 

“Would you like a cab, Harry?”

Parkinson laughs, and they both pretend it didn’t happen. 

He shakes his head, “That’s okay.”

“Alright,” there’s doubt in her eyes, but she secures the strap of the plastic bag around his middle finger anyway. 

Harry takes them to the Leaky Cauldron, conveniently two blocks away from the restaurant. It’s a little empty for a Friday night, but then again, any more onlookers and it’ll be a one-way trip to the headlines of the Daily Prophet for both of them. 

He shivers when a possible headline flashes across his mind: Enemies to Lovers? A shocking sighting of Potter and Parkinson. 

He drags them to the Cauldron’s floo. 

“Parkinson?” He watches as her face wakes with light and color from the green flames.

“Hm?” Eyes lidded, she has the audacity to smile in this situation, and to his growing displeasure, proceeds to dig her face deeper into his robes.

He can tell she’s still not all here and groans when, instead of roasted meats and butterbeer, his next inhale is a whiff of musky violet. 

She was ingraining her scent all over him. 

“Hello? Parkinson?” He tries again because it’s about time she comes to. “Parkinson!”

She has to.

“Merlin, how much have you had to drink?”

As expected, she doesn’t respond—at least not coherently, and just giggles instead. 

At a growing loss for what to do, he thinks about calling Hermione—or Malfoy—but calling one of them meant calling the other, so his two choices were actually one. 

He looks at the clock on top of the fireplace. 

It’s already half past midnight. 

He reconsiders his only option because he didn’t want Malfoy berating him at their next get-together for interrupting his pregnant wife’s beauty sleep.

He looks at the side of Parkinson’s face again, her head resting against his shoulder. Her body rises up and down calmly against his. 

“Parkinson?” He nudges her. 

She’s unmoving. 

One last time, he tells himself and taps her again. “Hello, Parkinson?” 

Nothing

Looking into the green flames, Harry decides there’s only one thing he can do.

Preparing himself for the physical repercussions of flooing into a fireplace he may no longer have access to, he whispers:

“Parkinson’s Flat.”

They don’t speak of that night again.

At least not at the next group session.

He wonders if she even knew what happened—that it was her patient who brought her home. Stepping into her office, he thinks, probably not. 

Well, he’s wrong.

But nothing’s new. 

“What do you think of this list?”

She hands him a clipboard with several papers attached to it. At the top, in big bolded Times New Roman font, he sees: Wizarding London’s Top Mind Healers.

He’s at his biweekly one-on-one with her. With no one else around and no other soul to judge, she finally brings that night up. 

Because of course she does. 

As he takes her in and sinks into his chair, he quickly realizes that Doctor Pansy A. Parkinson is predictable. 

He suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Well, hello to you too, Doc.” He doesn’t even have the chance to settle into his seat before she attacks him with the clipboard. 

“Hi, Potter.” She responds dryly and insists he take a look at the clipboard in his hands. 

He does, pretends he’s reading the headline for the first time, and then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t jest.”

It was two years after Hogwarts that lying to her became impossible. 

“Hermione told me.”

His lips thin, he knew he shouldn’t have said anything to Malfoy. “Is this perhaps about what happened last week?”

Her hands are clasped unusually tight, but he chooses not to comment on it.  “Yes.” 

A pause, and then her mouth opens up again. 

I’m sorry. 

“I’m thankful for your help, but I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”

“Close.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing,” he proceeds to read the names near the top of the list.

She jumps on the chance. “These are my most trusted and exceptional peers.” 

He chuckles, “So why is it watermarked with the St. Mungo’s logo at the bottom?”

Harry doesn’t know who’s the better bullshitter. He thought he was hard to beat—always doing the bare minimum after the war and saying what needs to be said and doing what needs to be done to simply make it through another day. 

But the woman across from him might have him beat. So much so that she sashays in tall heels and a white coat with her degree and family name and title stitched onto it—all to convince people she’s sane, when he knows she isn’t really either. 

They’ve been dancing around each other long enough for him to tell. And also because it takes one to know one.

If she has felt shame of being caught lying, she doesn’t show it.  

“I verified the list myself,” she smiles primly, shoulders rolled back and back unnaturally straight. 

“I see,” he says, eyeing the rest of the list. 

She thinks he’s considering it. 

“You see, I know them all personally—and if you’re interested in any of them, I can put you in touch.”

She takes his silence as a sign to continue. 

“Maybe for a discounted rate even.”

He hands the clipboard back to her as civil as possible, even when he wants to very much Confrigo it. “You really think money is an issue?”

Her eyes widen, “N-No, not at all, Potter. I just thought that—“

He takes advantage of her slight falter. “That what? That you should get rid of me as your patient before I open my mouth and bring up that night? Some sort of PR control or precaution or something?” 

Her eyes are those of a deer caught in front of his headlights. 

“If I’m just some patient to you, then I understand, Parkinson. You can afford to at least be frank with me, you know. I deserve that much at least, don’t you think?”

He waits for a response, but he doesn’t try to read her movements. Not that she gave him much to work off of, she’s still and unmoving on that special chair of hers. He wonders if it’s different from the other ones, slightly bigger and grander, to convince people she’s not like them. 

Too bad he knows better. 

“You are my patient, Potter.”

Her confirmation stings more than it really should have. 

“And that’s why you need to find another Mind Healer, because this…” she pauses for a split second, but Harry doesn’t miss it. “What happened between us isn’t professional.”

“You were stranded and needed help, and I happened to chance upon you!” He says, simply. “That’s all there is to it, don’t you understand? So what if Mungo’s HR or whatever has an opinion on it—I’m the patient, I don’t care! Do you?” 

Tired, he runs a hand through his hair, making it undoubtedly messier than it already was—he had stopped caring about his hair and appearance some years ago. He already knows the answer, why did he even bother asking—

“I do.” Her tone is strict and aristocratic—evidence of her pure blood upbringing. “And you should too.” 

“Why?” 

“Because you need help. Professional help that I can’t give you anymore.” Then, in a more definitive and final tone, “We crossed a line that should’ve never been crossed.” 

Sitting in her chair in the middle of her dreary office, Harry Potter decides that Pansy Parkinson is a hypocrite. 

He could have argued that she needed a lot more help than he did—he could tell her that being a mind healer to fix people’s problems in place of yours had historically worked for no one ever. He wants to tell her that it’ll one day catch up to her, in the middle of a sunny, beautiful day.

Looking into her ocean green eyes, he wonders when it’ll reach her. Noticing the death grip she has on that clipboard, he wonders if it already had. 

“Pansy…”

She gives him an incriminating look, picking him apart for the simple action of just calling her name.

“Pick one. ” It was more of a demand than anything, from healer to patient.

“Fine,” He takes the clipboard, sighs, and glances at the top of the list. “Bartleby.”

She looks a lot more pleased than he’d like. He looks for a reason not to lose his mind. 

Chapter Text

Pansy Parkinson didn’t know how it had come to this. 

One night, she was wrapped warmly against a sleeping Harry Potter, memorizing the canopy of his four-poster bed. The next, she was sitting across from Hermione, Draco, and somehow Weasley, who were all congregating around her, asking the impossible. 

“So will you help him, Pansy?” Hermione asks calmly, hands wrapping around her mug of coffee.

There are bags under her eyes, and Pansy can tell that she’s not calm—that, and she hasn’t slept. 

“I don’t understand what you want me to do for him,” her thin, straight eyebrows knot together. “I don’t think I’m qualified.”

“But you’re the most qualified person we know, Pans,” Draco butts in, because of course he does—whenever Hermione’s involved—

“So will you at least try?” Weasley cuts in, and Draco growls. 

The chair squeaks when she leans into it, “I don’t even think Potter tolerates me.”

“Please, mate, after that Ministry Party—where you two were all over each other, I think Harry does a lot more than tolerate you.”

“But that was months ago,” Pansy continues her act. “People change, we’ve changed.” She crosses her arms to show off her indifference. “Now we can’t stand each other.”

No one knows about their rendezvous. Neither had put a label on it; they were in some sort of friends with benefits situation, as the muggles had coined it. Neither felt they were in the proper headspace to pursue a relationship—not when Harry had just become Wizarding Britain’s most eligible bachelor, and not when Pansy’s mother joined her father six feet under, leaving her to deal with the rest of the sins the Parkinson family had yet to pay for.

It was the only time they had both agreed on something. That alone had been an indication of how terrible they were for each other. 

“Please, you two do just fine during our get-togethers,” Draco points out.

“That’s because we’re good bullshitters.”

“Please, Pansy, he’s gotten worse,” Hermione chirps in. 

She scoffs, “The Boy Who Lived has post-war trauma, who would have thought?”

“It’s been six years since the war ended, two since he and Ginny got divorced,” Weasley opens his mouth. “He should’ve been better by now.”

His words trigger a feeling she thought she got rid of ages ago. “Are you bloody fucking serious, Weasley?! Have you no idea what Potter’s been through? Or maybe you were just a mere bystander while Dumbledore raised him like livestock to fulfill that stupid prophecy!”

She’s charting into degeneracy, she can tell from the shock on their faces—but she’s angry at Weasley—at all of them—for trying to fix Harry like he was some broken object, for thinking that she could fix him. 

“You don’t put a time limit on stuff like that.” 

The quietness that gets force-fed down their throats tells her she’s right.

But after the fourth minute, Hermione speaks up, “Whenever he’s with anyone, he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, a place we can’t reach. I don't want him to keep living like this. The rest of us are moved on… we can’t leave him behind.”

Pansy swallows, because for the first time ever, Hermione Granger is wrong—Harry’s the only one who got caught.

Unlike her, who tries and tries to right her wrongs to move on, he relives it—not to change the ending, but maybe one day get over it. But unlike her, who’ll never reach her quota, he’ll probably succeed.

He’s Harry Potter after all, so how can he not? 

“He just needs someone to talk to,” Draco says. “That’s all.” Then he clasps his hands together and leans forward, as if this is a business meeting. “So, if you can find it in your heart to be amicable with him and become his Mind Healer, we will be indebted to you greatly.”

Pansy looks into his gray eyes; she’d never seen him like this, never felt the weight of his worry so acutely.

She swallows. Being the subject of all their hopeful gazes, she hates it because it was perfectly useless to hope unless it was to hope for nothing. 

“Please, Pansy,” Hermione tries again. “Please save him.”

Isn’t this crazy? If Potter is that far gone—to the point that even Weasley can tell—then it would take a Saint to fix him. And do they know who she is? What she did? Is she the only one who sees the irony?

But then something clicks in her head. Her vision becomes clear, and an ineffable emotion starts in her heart. 

“I’ll do it.” She breathes, quiet but unfaltering, because she isn’t even sure what she’s getting herself into.  

She just knows that if she succeeds, then all her wrongs will be righted.

And isn't that reason enough?

the day before,

Pansy sits, a Muggle book open across her lap, serving as a distraction. She hears the faint click of his apparition in the hall anyway.

“Oh, you’re here,” he wraps around the couch, green eyes not surprised at seeing her sprawled across his property, but not fully expecting her either. 

She doesn’t mind. 

After all, this isn’t a daily occurrence between them, nor is it her home—despite her name being the very few who can bypass his intricate Auror wards. 

“Hey,” she doesn't bother to check the page she left off on and closes her book.  

“How are you?” Standing behind the couch, he leans in for a domestic kiss on the cheek. 

She leans back and away from him. 

Under his frames, his eyes dim for a second, like he’s been betrayed, but then he blinks, and Pansy thinks she’s too full of herself.

“We need to talk.” She straightens herself against the couch’s arm and nods at the armchair opposite her.

“Sure,” Harry plays along, plopping himself down, Auror robe hanging over one arm because he didn’t even make it to the coatrack before she made a fool of him. “What is it, Pans?”

“I had tea with Hermione, Draco, and Weasley earlier today.”

Harry doesn’t say anything, just sits there and starts tapping his left leg, like all the other times. She tries her best not to look; very few know about the habits he developed after the war—he’s probably not fully aware of them himself. 

“What did you guys talk about?” He tries for nonchalance, but he’s fooling no one. 

“They had asked me to be your mind healer.” Pansy straightens herself even more. 

“And, what do you think?”

“I think I should.” There’s a newfound weight in her chest from physicalizing it.

He doesn’t say anything. She knows he’s displeased, but she doesn’t care about his opinion and wordlessly slides her business card over his coffee table. 

 He looks at it. She looks at him. 

There’s a long pause, and she’s okay with that—prepared for it even—until a mean chuckle leaves his lips.

“You’re heartless, Pans.”

She ignores this—ignores the pang of guilt that settles in her heart and the hurt in his tone—and just smiles primly.

It takes an awfully long time for either of them to say anything.

“Can you at least tell me why?”

“Because…” she pauses, and licks her lips to make up for the hoarseness of her throat. “Because we think you should get better.”

His eyes narrow at her accusatorily, “Better how? And you don’t think I am?”

She understands—out of everyone in the entire world, she’s probably the one who would understand him best—that closure doesn’t just happen with time, nor does forgetting.

She shrugs, “It’s what Hermione, Weasley, and Draco think.”

“I don’t care about what they think, what about you, Pansy?” He reaches an arm out to her, to which she pulls her body away. 

It hovers over the table, unsettled. 

“I agree with them. That you should seek professional help—or at least give it a try.” 

“And you think you’re the person?”

She regurgitates what Hermione had told her,” I’m the most qualified in the entirety of the Wizarding World! I saved Draco Malfoy.”

“Hermione,” he corrects with what they already know. “It was Hermione who saved him, not you.” Then, “Not solely you.”

“I never claimed to be a Saint, Potter.”

“Then why are you doing this? Why did you agree to it?”

She blinks the dryness in her eyes away, appalled that he can even ask that question.

Isn’t it obvious? How could he not know?

He’s unfair for making her say it.

“Because I… because they care about you.” She brings a hand to her temple, done with this and done with him. “Why won’t you let them care for you?”

He stares into her eyes.

“Because that’d mean losing you. I’m not resisting help, but I’m saying it doesn’t have to be you.” 

“Because you can’t stand me?” she laughs, because she knows—

“That’s not why. You know that’s not why. Stop playing dumb, Pansy,” he chokes on his next words, and it looks like he’s about to ask—

“No—it’s you who doesn’t get it. We’re not anything Potter.” She cuts him off and answers for him. 

His eyes cloud over, and the hurt in them is something she’d never seen before, even though she worked with broken people like him.

Swallowing any doubt she might have had, she folds her fists and gives him a stern look; she had made the right decision, because that look scared her.

Chapter Text

the first day,

He’s three minutes late, but important people are always late, so Pansy doesn’t comment on his rudeness this time. Except it also looks like he’s just gotten out of bed; not even ready to leave his room, much less go to his first session with her.

Still, she keeps her mouth shut.

Because she knows better.

“Hello,” she smiles at him, polite and professional and fake.

He leaves her hanging. But at least he takes the seat across from hers.

The rest of the session went by the same way it did the first five minutes: her, trying for some sort of small talk or response between interweaving information on what their individual and group sessions would look like and what to expect from them, and him, ignoring and staring blankly at her, beyond her.

She doesn’t comment on this either.

Because at least he’s here.

Some days in the future, both near and far, Pansy would look back to this specific day and think: How in the world had Potter agreed to this? 

***

“Are you okay, Pansy?” Daphne looks across to her from their small round table, hidden in a corner of a London Muggle bar.

The lightbulb dangling overhead is warm and dim, but it does little to hide the lines on her face.

“You look like you’ve aged ten years into the future.”

Pansy’s thin lips turn into an even finer line, the crease between her brows deeper. “Shut up, you don’t even know half of what I’m going through right now.” Almost as quickly, she grabs onto the stem of her wine glass and chugs.

Daphne leans back into the cushion of her chair and follows, a lot more proper and prim, she twirls the glass in her hands before taking a single sip, “Word has it that you’re Potter’s mind healer now, aren’t you?”

Pansy’s lack of a response was a response in itself. 

“Honestly,” the blonde continues. “It’s about time he gets some real help, and from the best amongst them, too! So what’s the matter, Pans?”

“Today was our first session together.”

“That’s great!”

Pansy’s tired of hearing the same thing from everyone; they all think they’re right, but only if they knew what it cost her.

Another bout of silence follows, and Daphne finally senses something is wrong, “What’s wrong?”

The glass is empty; Pansy doesn’t have anything to distract herself with anymore. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, by helping Harry Potter, I mean. He doesn’t want the help, Daph. Is it even in my right to do so?”

Daphne’s muted blue eyes clear in understanding, “It was Hermione, Draco, and Weasley who got you to agree, right?”

Pansy nods.

“They’re the three people in the whole world who know him best; I would believe them.”

She’s wrong, like they all are, but Pansy just smiles and nods.

“You’re only doing what your friends have asked you to—you’re only doing your job. I wouldn’t think much more about it.”

“Yeah, but…”

Under the hanging lightbulb, Daphne waits for Pansy to finish her sentence. One, two, five minutes pass by in silence until she starts again, “Why do you care so much? I thought you couldn’t stand him.”

Pansy bites her lips; she tastes wine and lipstick.

“Don’t tell me you’re still sleeping with him?”

It was no secret within their very big, extended friend group that they had something going on in the past. But that was shut down just as quickly, as the timeline was close to his divorce, scarily close to suspicious.

No one knew of the things that would happen between them behind closed doors. Except Theo, who had walked in on Pansy’s flat one time when Harry was lying next to her with nothing on but a blanket over himself. And Daphne, who Pansy couldn’t keep most things from even though she tried so hard to. 

But she told them it was a one time thing.

But that was it, that was a lie; and now it’s really over.

She doesn’t know why there’s a heaviness in her heart.

“Pansy!” Somehow Daphne’s voice became louder, attracting muggle onlookers from the tables around them.

Pansy wants nothing more than to apparate away—and she would’ve, except she doesn’t want yet another thing to deal with on her already overflowing plate. Any more and she might have thrown up right then and there.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

“Well? What was I supposed to say?” A feeling starts somewhere at the deepest part of her heart. It isn’t anger; she spent the majority of her life being angry, it had always been straightforward, but this—this was a lot more complicated. “You would have probably thought of me a homewrecker!”

Daphne’s eyes round in insult. “No! I would’ve tried to understand and help.”

“Help? Help me with what, exactly?!”

Pansy doesn’t need help. How dare she think that Pansy needs help? What about her made her think that? It was her job to help others; she didn’t need help. Because needing help meant something is innately wrong with you. 

And nothing is wrong with her.

Daphne’s eyes search her entire face. Her mouth opens, and Pansy sees the white of her teeth under the lack of light, until it closes again, without a single word spoken. 

Pansy leans back into the cushion of her chair, arms crossed and one knee on top of the other.

That’s what she thought.

present day,

He’s standing in front of a dull blue door, eyeing the silver nameplate to the right of it: Dr. Arthur Bartleby. 

Harry runs a hand through his face; it hits his glasses, but he doesn’t care. He’s long stopped caring about small things like this. 

How in the world did it come to this? 

And more importantly, why in the world is he still listening to Pansy Parkinson? It isn’t the first time anyone’s told him he needs to get his shit together—the only difference was, he listened to her. He let her talk him into letting her become his mind healer; he attended her sessions diligently for the last four months, and now he let her set him up with another. 

Staring at the dull blue door, Harry decides to leave. He’s in the middle of turning around when the door opens.

And of course, with the unexplainable, magical way the world works, she appears from the other side.

Why the hell is she here with Arthur fucking Bartleby behind closed doors? 

“H-Hello, Mr. Potter,” her voice is leveled, but her eyes betray her.

He gives her a grim look and says nothing to her.

“Ah, that must be Mr. Harry Potter!” A lean, built man walks up behind her, opens the door wider, and beams at him. His teeth are white and straight and his golden blonde hair is combed over to the side, styled and put-together and nothing like his. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here ten minutes early, but please, come in.”

Pansy, who’s a head and a half shorter than both of them and sandwiched between the two men, attempts to slide between them.

“If you’ll excuse me—”

Harry side steps to his left, blocking her way out. He’s always been a little petty and unreasonable.

“Mr. Potter, please—” she tries for a polite look, but he can see the irritation brewing behind her familiar eyes. 

“I think it’d be a good idea if you joined us, Dr. Parkinson,” he tells her behind a faux smile that no one can get away from; he had perfected them over the years. 

“That’s a wonderful idea, Mr. Potter!” Bartleby chimes in.

 The doctor ushers Pansy to come back inside by placing an unassuming hand on her shoulder. Harry’s eyes burn at the contact.

“Can I offer you anything to drink, Mr. Potter?” 

Bartleby, as Harry finds, is a friendly, jovial wizard. And after introductions, Harry learned that he had moved from Britain to America when he was thirteen—suddenly, everything made a lot more sense. His more American than English accent, and the fact that he wasn't here when the war happened.

Harry doesn’t blame them.

“But that was a long time ago, and now I’m back!” Bartleby finishes. “And then I met Ms. Pansy three years ago when we were undergoing residency at St. Mungos. We’ve been great friends ever since, so I was very happy when she approached me about your case, Mr. Potter.”

When the man mentions Pansy, Harry looks up from the packet in his hands and at her, just in time to witness her choking on her water. He cracks a satisfied smirk, serves her right for pulling him into this fucking mess.

“What about you, Mr. Potter? Pansy already told me the gist of it, but I want to hear from you.”

“What else is there to say?”

A deathly silence follows until Pansy stands up, “I should get going now, I have some work to catch up on before the day ends.” 

He knows she’s lying.

“Thank you for staying a little longer with us, Pansy!”

But it turns out that fool, Bartleby, is gullible.

He watches her the entire time it takes her to leave the room, until the door clicks, leaving both of them alone.

***

His first session with Bartleby lasted fifty-three minutes, seven more than his first time with Pansy. The only difference is that this would also be the last one.

It’s about time he stopped listening to whatever Pansy Parkinson asks of him, about time he escaped her influence over him.

He lights a cigarette right as he steps outside into the winter air. Harry Potter was never a smoker, at least not until he became intimate with Pansy. She’s influenced his entire life at this point; everywhere he looks, everything he does, she has her name scrawled over it.

She was the one who also taught him how to light a Muggle lighter. 

“How was your first session?” 

He turns up to find Malfoy leaning against a lamppost, poised and cool against the gray world around them.

Being depressed and sad was one thing, but being depressed and sad in one of the grayest cities in the world was something entirely else. 

London is ruthless to broken people like him. 

Harry’s face falls. “Why are you here?”

“That’s a stupid question, Potter. You knew the minute you saw me here.” His friend walks over to his side. “Though I didn’t know you were a smoker.” 

Harry groans, crushes the cigarette in between his bare hands—the sting does little to make him feel better. It feels like the entire world is plotting against him.

“Leave.”

Malfoy only smirks, “Don’t be so broody, Potter. It’s not a good look for the savior of the wizarding world.”

“Don’t call me that.” 

A low whistle sounds through Malfoy’s smooth lips , followed by a chuckle and shoulder shrug when he notices Harry’s glare when he fell into step with him. 

“What are you doing here? Did Hermione send you?”

Had Pansy also conveniently told her about the date and time of his first (and last) appointment with Bartleby?

Malfoy shakes his head. “I had come around to the news by pure happenstance. I’m only here because work just happened to be around the corner.” Then, “Not that you’d know anything about adulting and work.”

Harry gives him another glare at the pass at his circumstance. After the war ended, he tried, so so hard, to blend into wizarding society—he even had an Auror job waiting for him after his final year of Hogwarts.

Merlin knows he tried. 

And after nearly two years on the field, he was destined to become the youngest Head of Aurors in wizarding history. Greatness, it seemed, followed him like a shadow. 

Until the sun left the skies, and suddenly there was no shadow or greatness or anything, really, left of him. 

His divorce was the catalyst—the little shove—the prelude to his fall.

Or perhaps it was a catharsis. 

Sighing, a light cloud escapes his open lips and he takes this as a sign to bring his scarf higher up on his face.

Draco gives him a look, before insensitively declaring, “We’re going to the pub tonight, Potter.”

A fine white powder falls on his nose, shy of his glasses.

Picking his heart up, he surrenders, “Whatever you say, Malfoy.”

Chapter Text

the first snowfall,

Parties, Pansy surmises, are a great pain. And then just as quickly as the unbecoming thought forms, she leans over the stone balcony, and laughs.

First year Pansy would disagree—her face would fold into itself in betrayal if she ever found out that this is what a twenty-three year old Pansy thinks of parties and banquets and everything flashy and grand. 

The cigarette, long forgotten between her delicate fingers, fizzles out when a particularly strong gust of air blows. It whisks strands of  her shoulder length bob along with it, exposing her collarbones. 

Cold is all she feels. 

“What’s so funny?”

In her thoughts, she didn’t hear the door click open but this voice… She knows this voice. 

“Why if it isn’t the man of the hour.” She turns around and faces her walking mistake—the boy she had once tried to sacrifice to the Dark Lord. 

Except he’s very much a man now. Somehow during their eighth year at Hogwarts, he had grown into the broad shoulders and the long face. Even the mop of messy dark hair had come to suit him—a rugged look that somehow fit the auror legacy he was in the middle of building for himself.

She scoffs in her head.

As if The Savior of the Wizarding World needed any more medals. 

It annoys her when he doesn't say anything.

“I called this balcony first.”

“I’m unaware that we’re claiming Hogwarts balconies now.”

“But can’t you see it’s taken? Or can you not go a day without picking a fight with me, Potter?”

After Hermione and Draco had gotten together, their Gryffindor and Slytherin friend groups had somehow come together too. Not in a smooth and inevitable way, but two puzzle pieces that were forced to fit for the sake of the world around them—or in this case, for the sake of their friends. 

It’s been nearly three years since then and Pansy thinks it’s a miracle that the puzzle pieces somehow still fit.

And amongst their disjointed extended friend group, she’d see Potter more than she’d like. That fact alone, along with the guilt, made her apologize to him about the Great Hall Incident the third time she saw him. 

But this was the first time she saw him without the accompaniment of any of their friends. 

“I know you’re not one to share but,” he starts like how he usually does, voice so smooth and sure of himself with a teasing tug of his lips, “Can you make do for my sake tonight?”

She doesn’t say anything as he steps towards her, just takes a single step to the side and he knows her answer. 

He places his drink on the ledge and turns back to the window and throws his head back. 

The winter wind doesn’t miss the opportunity to rustle his hair, its strands always somehow had a knack for being misplaced.

Pansy rolls her eyes and takes another sip of her expensive wine. 

“I thought you weren’t going to come today?”

“Blaise and Daphne convinced me to. Said that for as long as I’m known as the scared helpless girl who tried to sacrifice Harry Potter to the Dark Lord, I should come to the annual Ministry’s Battle of Hogwarts Remembrance banquets.” She twirls the stem and watches as the blood red wine becomes a whirlpool. “For the rest of my life, I’m stuck coming here to make amends to people who my actions had nothing to do with.”

A beat of silence and then a chuckle, “So we’re the same, then.”

Looking into his side profile, she wants to say, not really, or that they’d all listen to you if you would just have the balls to say something, but the night was too cold to pick yet another headless fight. 

Settling down with the thought of not tonight, she just sighs.

And changes the topic, “Don’t you have a speech or something to give soon?”

“When you’re the man of the hour, the party waits for you.”

“But what are you doing out here?” She’s starting to lose her patience. Even though he doesn’t really deserve it.

“Just… thinking.”

Except maybe he kind of does, for coming out here despite her being here and already claiming this balcony as hers. For Merlin’s sake, he even knows Pansy Parkinson doesn’t share. 

So she knows she’s being heartless when she says, “Does it have to do with what’s happening between you and… “ she cringes as quickly as the words leave her. But she’s already started this so she must stick it through to the end, “Weaslet—Weasley?”

“You must think I’m pathetic. ” He’s laughing but neither thinks it’s funny. “I escorted her… tonight.” 

“Well what did you expect? You guys haven't signed the divorce papers yet.”

“We did.” 

That shuts her up. 

“Just yesterday though.”

“Who else knows?”

His silence answers for him. 

With the walking prestige that is Harry Boy Who Lived, Wizarding World Savior Potter, his life was a spectacle for the world to watch—and praise and judge.

During their Hogwarts years, she would be jealous of his celebrity status—but now, she’s glad she isn’t remotely as famous as Harry Potter. 

Because these last few years, she’s had enough to deal with just simply being a Parkinson, a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and being known as the Girl who tried to kill Harry Potter. 

So she wasn’t surprised that she would sometimes find out things about him from the morning papers her owl delivers to her window than from their group’s  monthly get togethers. 

Such was the life of a war hero.

And now his relationship troubles, turned into ongoing divorce is bared for the world to see and criticize.

Burning a hole into his melancholic side profile, she finds it in her mean heart to pity him.

“I’m… sorry.” She was never good at consolation, but tries anyway. 

And then he looks at her, golden light through the window casting a soft glow against the right side of his subtly tanned face. 

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Our relationship ended a while ago. Our marriage was bound to follow too.”

It’s hard looking into his green eyes, so she chooses to look forward into the water and world instead. “Do you love her, still?”

She expects hesitancy, maybe even regret, but surprise overtakes her as he shakes his head and says, “No. I’m afraid we both mistook relief and affection from winning a long war for something… more.” He joins her in looking out at the dark world he saved. 

“I don’t blame you,” she shrugs. “You both were young and nearly missed death. Nothing else in the world can come close to helping achieve a high as great as that.” 

“I agree.” His eyes faze over. “But it’s still a shame. This isn’t what I had in mind for myself after the war ended.”

“Well… for what it’s worth. Better to realize it sooner than later.” She offers words from deep inside her heart. Words she had come to know but never voiced—she was too afraid to. “Most people go the rest of their lives not realizing it at all, you know? That perhaps the life they thought they wanted isn’t the one for them. And that sticking their mistake through is better than starting over.”

Because doing so would make it real.

She pretends she doesn’t notice his tightened grip around the stem of his glass. “But what if I never come to know what I want? What if I’d rather settle?”

She sighs, “Well,” She chugs the rest of her wine, ignores the sting in her throat, and slams her glass atop the balcony ledge. “You’re not special Potter. I guess that makes two of us.”

Harry Potter mirrors her actions and chugs his wine, winces when the sting and bitterness and whiplash travels down his throat as his cup had been more full than hers.

So perhaps it was the desire for something sweeter than the taste of expensive century-old wine and the bitterness of their past mistakes swallowing their taste buds that explained their next moments.

Pansy couldn’t say who started it or whose hand it was that pulled the other in, but the distance between them somehow closed and when their lips crashed, she tasted cherry wine and something unexplainably sweeter.

White powder delicately descends onto them.  

This, she thought, must be how the mismatched puzzle pieces of their friend groups came together: messy yet desperate and willing, oh so willing, to overlook the edges and sides that don’t match and make it work. 

But perhaps even this was too much:

Harry, boy who lived, Potter was kissing Pansy, girl who tried to kill him, Parkinson, no one but the first snowfall their witness. 

Chapter Text

“What is the meaning of this, Harry?!”

For the long time he’s known Hermione Granger, Harry has also learned to distinguish her moods from the tones she reserves exclusively for him and Ron—and now maybe even Malfoy. 

This time, it was a high pitched one, bordering a scream that had the potential to crack glass. Yet there is also a deep, guttural growl under all that anger. 

But Harry supposes it doesn’t take a childhood friend of Hermione’s or her husband to come to the obvious conclusion that she’s angry. 

Very, very, angry. 

He gets up from his lazy and compromising sprawl across his armchair and discards that morning’s paper just as she stomps into his living room. 

“‘Mione!” He forces a smile, ignoring her temper altogether. “What brings you here this morning?”

“You can’t just quit seeing the mind healer!” Her hair is a wild mess—even wilder than his—that lovely London morning, a sign she had apparated straight to Grimmauld place right after opening her eyes. 

Harry bites the inside of his cheek, wondering who it was that told her now. Except there were only two names to debate.  

“All that screaming and anger can’t be good for your child.” He beckons for her to take a seat. 

She does. “I’m still in the early stages. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” And then she points a finger accusatorily at him. “But I’m not the one we should worry about. Just what has gotten into you lately, Harry?”

“There’s nothing about me that should warrant your concern.” His lips thin in anger at her for being such a know-it-all but he swallows the thought and feels guilty for ever thinking that about one of his dearest friends. 

But can’t they tell he’s tired of everyone’s bullshite?

“Why did you stop therapy?”

He could say a lot of terrible things to answer her. But doing so would compromise her incoming baby and birth, so he doesn’t. “Because it wasn’t working. And I didn’t want to waste my time with something that clearly isn’t effective.”

She scoffs. “So you waste your health and time on alcohol and drugs instead?”

He winces when she doesn’t sugarcoat her (accurate) accusations with their medical names. 

“I’m none of your concern, Hermione.” Is all he can manage. 

“What are you talking about?” Hurt writes itself all over her clear brown eyes. “You’re my best friend, Harry. I care so much about you.”

“Well you shouldn’t.” His eyes flicker to her growing stomach. “Not when you have a family to take care of.”

His eyes lid over—maybe it was because he didn’t sleep at all last night, maybe it’s from the way he can feel himself shrivel up under his best friend’s pitiful gaze, or maybe it’s because everyone’s moving on with their lives and he’s the one being left behind. A combination of all of those tragic things, really. 

“I thought Pansy was helping,” Hermione weakly manages. “Is it about her moving you to another healer? I don’t know what happened but maybe I can convince her to take you back…”

He laughs meekly. Because wouldn’t that be nice? But he knows Hermione’s unaware of the true implications of her words. 

“It’s too late now, Hermione. Parkinson had a good reason and I think you should respect it.”

“But what about you?”

“What about me? I’ll manage, like I always do.”

Hermione’s eyes begin to glaze all over again at his words. Perhaps she’s realized that he’s no longer asking for—accepting—help, and that the time frame for that has been long gone.

When all his friends were too busy building a life for themselves and hopefully looking ahead, they forgot to look back.

“You should get going. Malfoy might miss you if he wakes up to an empty bed.” In the middle of the turmoil and mess, he still manages to smile. 

It’s thanks to years of lies and pretenses that the world thinks he’s okay.

“Harry…”

When she shows signs of resistance, he probes, “Was it Malfoy or Parkinson that told you about Mind Healer Bartleby?”

Hesitation fills her eyes but she relinquishes, “It was Pansy. She wouldn’t tell me what happened between you two but… she wants the best for you, you know.”

And Harry Potter dares to hope. 

So then why did she leave me? 

“Did she tell you anything else?”

Hermione thinks for a moment, until she shakes her head. “Just that I should check up on you.”

Now? He thinks. 

It’s been a month since he stopped showing up to his mandatory weekly sessions. Somewhere along the way, he supposes Bartleby had reported to Pansy who reported to Hermione or Draco. 

He clenched his fists on his thighs. “Like I said, Hermione. I’m fine.”

There’s doubt all over her face. “When are you going to return to the Auror department?”

Right when he got the promotion offer, he had quit. He didn’t know why he waited so long to—maybe he stuck around to prove to the watching world that he could achieve greatness.

But when he got the offer and all it took was his signature over the document, he felt nothing, except a big weight at the bottom of his stomach. That was the final sign.

He shrugs, wordlessly. 

“It’s been over a year Harry! You can’t afford to be slouching around for the rest of your life!”

“Can’t I?” He sounded a lot more spiteful than he intended. “Last I checked my Gringott’s vault, I can spend the rest of my life how I please, ten times over.”

“You know I don’t mean money, Harry.”

“Then your worries are for naught, Hermione!” She is starting to lose it and he is too.  “There’s nothing wrong with me—at least nothing worth worrying over. Please just—just leave me alone.”

He doesn’t know why he’s pushing her away like this—why he’s so adamant and hell bent on not getting his shit together and continues living his life almost pathetically.

She’s hurt when she floos away. Says nothing besides ‘Malfoy Manor’ and he knows Malfoy would wake up or walk into a crying Hermione. Knows he’ll get a howler or a direct visit from an angry husband, soon. 

His body falls limply into the old couch and he runs his hands over his face, feeling the three day old stubble and tastes the lingering firewhiskey mixed with morning breath. 

This isn’t the life he imagined. A sad, lonely life in Grimmauld. Sure he has his friends, but they’re growing older and growing further apart and growing their own families.

At least when he signed his marriage away and ended things with Ginny, he thought he at least had his Auror job to nurture and devote his life to—until that blew over and he woke up one day with no more desire to continue fighting darkness. 

He’s had enough of it to last ten lifetimes.

As Harry falls back into the arms of sleep, he thinks that—if he can’t die yet—this must be second best. 

Chapter Text

They were only meant to sleep together. 

Was what Pansy had initially thought stepping into their silly and childish arrangement of going under their dear friends' unknowing noses, stealing glances at each other under ambient lights, sipping each others’ drinks and snaking their arms together when their friends were too drunk or rowdy to notice, or sneaking off or going home together, ending in the same bed for the night.

They both knew it was fleeting and temporary—that even though there was no official expiry date on this arrangement, it would end one day. 

They knew and yet they still tested the limits of the unsaid boundaries.

The single boundary they shouldn't have crossed was staying there for the other when it was a particularly rough night only survivors of war could have, consolations after nightmares and cold sweats and screams. 

It was done anyway. 

After that, Harry had developed a bad habit of sticking around the next morning and joining her for breakfast and giving her goodbye kisses and promises of I’ll be back. 

Pansy’s hands were also bloodied. 

She had started leaving her things at his place, like skincare and clothes and toiletries, and setting the table for two and sighing into his kisses with butterfly hums of see you soon. 

With the way they were going, it was inevitable that one day, they’d wake up in each other's arms with nothing to do and nowhere to be. In other words, the perfect setup for a date. 

So she can’t entirely blame him when one morning he asks: “Want to spend the day in Muggle London?”

King’s Cross station, as it turns out, during muggle rush hour on a weekday, was the equivalent of hell on earth. 

Their schedule aligns on a Monday.

Stepping onto platform number three, Pansy looks down again to her phone, a muggle device that muggles can’t seem to go a day without, she makes sure they’re on track to take the Overground train.

“It’s your fifth time checking already,” Harry says beside her, before going to her other side and lacing his fingers around her free hand. “The platform wouldn’t change within two minutes. And the train wouldn’t come sooner if you keep your head down and tap the glass, Pans.” 

Somewhere along their arrangement, he started calling her that dear nickname reserved for close childhood friends and hypothetical lovers—hypothetical because she’s never been in a relationship with anyone other than Draco with whom she let call her that endearing nickname. 

And now Draco is only the former.

Even though Harry isn’t her lover, he’s the closest she’s ever gotten to one—so she supposes she’ll allow him the liberty. After all, it is simply just a childhood nickname.

She gives him an unamused glare, a sign she was displeased with his relentless teasing that morning. “We’re already an hour later than planned—I wonder whose fault that was.”

“Only yours for being so alluring.” He clutches her hand tighter in his as he says this and she pretends he says this to all his other girlfriends. 

Except she’s aware that he has no one else. 

They’ve been in each other’s orbit for almost three months already—how their friends, especially Hermione, hadn’t found out yet is a mystery Pansy doesn’t have the headspace to figure out. 

Their first stop was a Vietnamese restaurant for brunch in New Cross, an area in southeast London. It was Pansy's favorite spot. 

Harry’s eyes widen in surprise when the waiter addresses her by name and she orders her usual. 

He tells her he didn’t expect her to be into muggle London and be into any other cuisine besides posh French or English and she tells him to shut the bloody hell up. 

Brunch was pleasant.

And when the same waiter who knew her by name mistakes him for her boyfriend, neither corrects the woman.

Too much to explain, she tells herself. 

They go to Big Ben and then Paddington and then SoHo and by the time it is evening, they’re holding hands under the red lanterns of London’s Chinatown, fighting crowds of tourists and locals.

Harry introduces her to his muggle spot, a sushi bar at the very edge of Chinatown, except the hostess doesn’t address him by name and he takes his time skimming through the menu and deciding his order. 

They settle on a special platter for two and when the sashimi and nigiri comes out on a wooden boat, Pansy gives him an unimpressed look at the overpriced spectacle and he just smiles and shrugs.

She tries raw whale meat for the first time that night—decides she doesn’t like it and gives the rest of her bite to him. He doesn’t complain or judge even though he has every right to—witness to her disgusting stunt and all—instead, he takes it with his chopsticks, whose skills are inferior to hers, and puts it into his mouth. 

He makes a face when he swallows and she laughs at him for this but at least the meat makes it down his throat. 

“Whose toilet am I seeing tonight? Yours or mine?”

Pansy makes a face and pretends to ponder, until, “Obviously, yours.”

He doesn’t contest and they finish their meal, heart happy and smiles genuine.

And when it rains, as it inevitably does in London, they share an umbrella and hold hands, letting everyone around them think of them as a couple.

There are moments when Pansy forgets they’re in muggle London and so she doesn’t look twice before crossing the streets but Harry pulls her into him and that’s when her cheeks are the warmest.

It’s nine at night when they decide to end their date. 

After agreeing to meet at Grimmauld place half an hour from now, they decide to use different means to get back to Wizarding London because they were too good a secret to let the rest of the world in on.

The rain’s slowed to a drizzle and most locals don’t really need an umbrella but Harry’s still holding her clear one over them. He looks around before leaning in, and whispering into her ear yet another promise of see you soon.

And then he invaded her space; they kiss on the sly at a muggle bus stop. 

Chapter Text

“You quit being an auror?”

Harry makes the mistake of telling Pansy this after he poured himself inside of her. 

They’re both a little sweaty and her blanket is covering only some parts of them but his mind had somehow concluded that this was the time to tell her. 

Obviously, she's the first person to find out; has been for almost as long as they’re in this together. 

He should fear it, knows he should—the fact that they’re becoming scarily domestic, but he can't find it in his heart to, even when his mind is screaming.  

In the darkness with the only light coming from half a moon peeking through her thin curtains, he feels her weight shift. 

And then she’s laying on her side, green eyes staring a hole into him. 

Drawn in by her, he turns too.

“Why?”

He comes undone with the single word said with a curious lilt in her crystalline voice. 

She has a way of doing that to him. 

“It was…” honesty comes easy when it’s her. “Draining me.” Then, “The promotion, it… it scared me. And it made me realize that it isn’t the life I wanted for myself.” 

She nods, so faint and subtle that if he didn’t have his focus entirely on her, he would’ve definitely missed it, but he pays too much attention to her to miss clear things like that. 

Her delicate lips curve into a small smile and with it, all his doubts for turning down Kingsley that afternoon are washed away.  

“What are you going to do now?” 

He faces skyward, and comes face to face with her attempt at mimicking the spell in the Great Hall that brings the night sky to them. Although faulty, a shooting star flies by nonetheless. 

He just shrugs and she clasps her hand around his. 

“You’ll figure it out,” she reassures him. “You have all the time in this now peaceful world to figure it out. You’re allowed to take time to decide. You’re the person most deserving of it.”   

He smiles. “Thanks.”

Pansy has a way of making him feel better. Even though she’s been around to witness all of his bad habits, how he comes home passed out drunk from too much firewhiskey and sometimes—even though less often nowadays—muggle drugs. She gets woken up by his screams every time he dreams of first year at Hogwarts or fighting the basilisk or losing Dobby or Sirius or when he lost a year of his life camping and hiding out in the woods or his stand off against the Dark Lord where he thought he had to die.

He never dreams of the moment she pointed a trembling finger at him offering him up though. 

Not anymore. 

Perhaps it is natural, how solace drips from her very being—she was, after all, on her way to becoming the Wizarding World’s best mind healer. 

And he admires her so much. In a word that hates her, she still somehow made it. Unlike him, whose destiny and future was determined when he was only a baby, she had to fight for the world’s attention.

And against the odds, here she is: a reputable mind healer for war survivors. Even though people like Rita Skeeter would question her and doubt her, the majority had—at the very least—acknowledged her merit.

He doesn’t let it bother him too much though, how even her future seemed brighter than his at the moment. He doesn’t let jealousy consume him. 

Because he knows she’s just like him. 

Ever since that night on the balcony—or maybe even before that, when he noticed how she was there at their monthly get-togethers but not actually there.

Harry Potter notices Pansy Parkinson.

If one day physics or magic fails and the world turns upside down, that fact, at least, would remain undeniable. 

She draws him in because she’s the only other person in the world who’s like him.

But looking at her now, he gets the feeling that she, too, is moving forward. But for the moment, she’s still here.

“You know you can talk to me, Harry,” she places a hand on his chin and slides it up and down. “You’ll always have me.” 

No, not always. 

He hums a tired response. 

“What’s on your mind?”

Do you think we’ll ever really be together? Like in the way I want us to be? 

He asks second best, “How long do you think it’ll take for me to figure my shit out?”

Even though she’s not all-knowing like their friend Hermione, she may as well be Slytherin’s version of his book-worm friend. But his question stumps even her.

“Are you in a rush to figure yourself out?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Feels like I should be.”

“Why? Is it because the world’s watching?”

“…It feels like I should just know. Because I did know what I wanted. Once.”

She hums, “And look where that got you.”

“Inside you?” He chuckles and brushes his left foot against her right one. 

She doesn’t find it funny and returns the gesture harder.

“I just didn’t imagine it’d be like this. You know?”

“Well, the future has a way of doing that to everyone. Surprising us.”

“Yeah but… it just felt like I should know.” He’s going in circles, but nothing's new. 

“Because you’re the boy who lived?”

“Sorta.”

“Harry, you've lived your entire life predetermined. It only makes sense that now you’re no longer bound to destiny or fate or whatever bullshit Dumbledore was on that you’re lost.”

He winces at the word she uses to describe him. 

Perhaps she notices.  

Perhaps she doesn’t. 

She continues nonetheless, "You're allowed to be unsure after everything’s over. Relax, take a breather, not—Not go look for and fight the next evil thing.” Then, “Take some time to figure yourself out.” 

“But—“

She gives him a disapproving look but lets him talk back. “Everyone fought in the same war I did. Yet they’re all moving on so much better.”

Even you. 

She turns to lie on her back. Another faux shooting star passes. “Who knows. They could also just be pretending to know. Or making amends for being on the wrong side of the war. Some people don’t have the liberty of choice, enjoy it Harry.”

He shuts up at her confession. 

When Hermione and Draco announce their marriage, he loses it.

But not in an immediate, sudden, train wreck-y way. Rather, it was a gradual, but faster rate of, descension. He knew it was coming—that one day, Malfoy would finally be mentally well enough to pop the question everyone knew he would eventually. 

It was just a matter of time, especially with Pansy’s help. 

He knew and yet he wasn’t prepared for it. Of what seeing the worst of them move on meant for him.

She comes to Grimmauld place expecting a good time only to end up beside him in his washroom, tending wounds on his wrists, two nights after Draco and Hermione’s wedding.

Red, he thinks, is a good color on her. 

But not like this,

Not like this. 

Chapter Text

Harry Potter was not attractive in a grand and flashy way—not the kind that stills a room and slightly drunk partygoers would notice when he enters. No, Harry Potter wasn’t attractive in a way that matched his celebrity status. To Pansy Parkinson, Harry Potter was attractive in the kind of way that made her adjust her posture and round in a stray strand of hair without realizing it. 

Growing up and going to school with him meant she wouldn’t notice the way he changes year to year. Sticking by Draco Malfoy and bullying him and his goody Gryffindor friends meant she would never, ever, entertain the idea that Harry was an attractive boy.

But when she saw him again for the first time in eighth year, walking through the Great Hall’s open doors with the kind of confidence only being a war hero and defeater of Volde-fucking-mort himself could have, the idea that Harry Potter was an attractive young man flashed across her conscience before she realized what the weight of that thought really meant.

Not when just short of a year ago, she pointed her ugly finger at him, inviting the Dark Lord to take him and end this terrible, costly war the only way she knew how to. 

So yes, sue her, maybe Pansy Parkinson did harbor a small, fruitless, one-sided, never-spoken crush on Harry Potter during their eighth year. But in the interest of reality, she killed her feelings when he proposed to Ginevra Weasley the day before their graduation.

And it makes perfect sense, really, that the brave girl who stood in front of him when it was her that tried to sacrifice him would be the one to wed him. 

But that was then and this is now. Now Gryffindor’s golden couple are divorced and now—well now, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise, when she starts sleeping with him.

Now, when they’re nine months deep into this unnamed arrangement, the desire for something more has never been felt more strongly.

But she is Pansy Parkinson and he is Harry Potter.

Still, it surprises her when he asks one day, over Chinese takeout for dinner:

“Do you think we should start… seeing each other? Really see each other?”

“What do you mean?” Even though she knew very well what he meant. 

“Date. And not sneak around. Tell our friends… maybe go public eventually.”

“Is this not enough for you?” She’s aware that’s not what he means and she’s deflecting, she knows—but she has to know.

He shakes his head. And it scares her.

“It’s too soon.” She eventually says. 

“Nine months is too soon?”

“Do you even like me?” She sets her chopsticks down. 

“Is that even a question? Of course I—“

“Did you forget what I did?”

“If you’re talking about the great hall—you already apologized—three years ago. And I forgave you!”

“That doesn’t mean it still didn’t happen! Everyone saw!”

“So? We’re the only people it concerns.”

She laughs pitifully. “How can you say that when the whole world watches you?” 

She shouldn’t have brought it up, it’s a sour spot for him, with everyone breathing down his neck and whatnot but she can’t help it. 

“Do you really care about what people think that much?” He tries. “Hermione and Draco made it…”

“That’s different.”

“Not really.”

“Well they’re not Harry fucking Potter, are they?”

“Ex-death eater Draco Malfoy and Golden Girl Hermione Granger sure come damn close though.” He’s fighting, so hard. 

“Hermione didn’t try to kill Draco. And everyone now knows they were keeping his mother hostage! That he was a scared boy who didn’t know any better.”

“Then aren’t you the same?!” His voice raises. “Weren’t you also lost and scared then too?!”

Cornered by that question—she has a hard time answering him. Because after all these years and all those nightmares, she knows how she felt then. 

“Scared, yes. I was terrified. But lost?” She gives him a solemn look. “Lost? No. I knew what I was doing.”

She expects hurt at her confession but instead he just keeps trying.

“It was the quickest way to end the war. I would've done the same if the world didn’t expect me to save them.”

He just keeps making excuses for her.

“That’s not true—you’re just saying that—“

“But it is, Pans!” He runs a hand through his hair. “Everyone thinks I’m the most virtuous person to ever walk this stupid world but I’m not! If only the world knew what goes on inside my head they’d stop thinking of me as the damn savior of the wizarding world!”

She goes quiet. Doesn’t know what to say—or think to be honest. 

Although she knows—just didn’t expect him to outright say it. 

She isn’t good for him. 

“Is it really what you want?”

“Are you kidding me? Even after all this, you still have to ask?”

She shifts in her spot, soup dumpling in her bowl gone cold. 

“Forget about what everyone else thinks, Pans. What do you want?” He asks.

After a long moment, “It’s too soon. I—I have things to do, things I still need to prove to the world.”

He’s quieter this time, “How many more people do you have to save to make up for something you’ve already made up for?”

She wants to ask how? 

“I—I don’t know. But it’s not enough, not yet.”

“How long are you going to waste your time hitting an imaginary quota?”

She crosses her arms and scowls. “It’s not imaginary nor is it a waste of my time, Harry.” His name comes out in a way that was harsher than she had meant to.

He sighs and says nothing. 

And she has a suspicion that labels and officiality and a certain future together didn’t matter all that much. As long as they were still in each others’ lives.

The death of her mother comes soon and unexpectedly. It was the perfect excuse for them to stop discussing what they are to each other. When he consoles her, he tells her he loves her but she pretends it was the noise inside her head when she drowns in a bottle of her estate’s dusty collection. 

It’s unfair to both of them, she knows, but isn’t this what she deserves? Could she handle being labeled a man stealer or a slut or a whore when the public inevitably finds out? How can she stand by him when she has once tried to kill him? How can she compare to Ginevra?

All the bad things she’s said and done and he still somehow doesn’t look away. 

How could she ever deserve someone like him?

So she forgets what she once wanted to be and drowns herself in her work in hopes of making up for her past and works for the world’s forgiveness in hopes that, maybe one day, she’d have healed enough people and they decide she’s worthy of their hero. 

All the while, they continue stealing kisses and intimate moments of each others’ lives behind the world's back. 

Until the excuse comes to really end things between them, while still being able to keep him close and especially, make up for her sins, she takes it. 

She’d be a fucking fool not to. 

Chapter Text

the same day,

Malfoy comes—storms—to Grimmauld like Harry knew he would. 

Unlike Hermione’s visit earlier that morning, Draco doesn’t care to apparate in the corridor. Instead, he does it right in front of Harry’s armchair, as if the blonde man knew Harry would be right there.

The commotion makes him spill his firewhiskey, it makes a trail down his stubble, tracing his chin, his neck, until it disappears under two day old pajamas he never bothered changing out of.

Victim to his stunt and looking up at his ice cold eyes as Draco looms over him, Harry regrets ever making his name an exception to his wards. 

“Both Malfoys in one day.” Harry wipes the whiskey from his chin and sits up. He doesn’t let Malfoy have the first word. “I’m honored.”

“Potter,” Malfoy digs a lanky finger into his chest as he spits fire. “I know you’re unbelievably fucked up beyond anyone’s help now but if you fucking dare make my wife cry one more time—“

Harry rolls his eyes. “Please Malfoy, as if my count comes anywhere close to yours.”

Smack. 

Silence. And then a ringing he is sure isn’t in the room with them is all he hears. Followed by a delayed sting across his left cheek. 

He’s looking right, face moved by the merciless slap.

But he doesn’t have to be looking straight to know who’s here now. 

Doesn’t need to guess the person who would dare slap Harry Wizarding World Savior Potter when he knows the scent of neroli and grapefruit and ‘two-percent citrus’.

It’s a scent he’s been dreaming of. Only he’s too distracted and hungover and over it to realize she came in from the corridor. 

“Pansy—“ he stands up. 

“Potter, that’s enough.”

He slumps back into his armchair, slapped again by the reality of what they are to each other now. His tone adapts venom of its own. “What are you both doing here?”

Malfoy keeps his icy glare on him—and even though they were once enemies during their school years, he’d never been under this particular gaze before. 

It hurts him more than he’d like to let on. 

Over the years, Malfoy had weaseled his way into becoming one of his closest friends, along with Hermione, who’s busy with a family now and Ron, who he doesn’t see much often anymore after he stopped showing up to the Burrow post-Ginny and after he quit being an Auror. 

He’s happy for them though.

When they don’t answer, he laughs at them, at this situation: that two of the meanest Slytherins are caring for him. “Did Hermione send you?”

“No, not this time.” Malfoy says between clenched fists. 

“Then get the hell out.”

Harry makes a mental note to remove everyone's names from his wards. Didn’t even know why he bothered keeping Pansy’s after she walked out of his life to become his mind healer instead. 

Perhaps it’s because he still has things he wants to say to her. That he still dares to hope.

When they say nothing again, Harry laughs harder this time. They’re pathetic.

“What are you doing here?”

“We just want to know how you’re doing.” Malfoy says, forgetting he’s in front of the person who sent his wife home crying.

But Harry had a suspicion that all he sees is a man who gave the world too much. 

“Again with the shallow concerns!”

Isn’t it obvious?

“We want to help you.”

“Parkinson already tried.” He steals a glance at her, curious to see her expression at what he’s about to say. “And the wizarding world’s best mind healer failed spectacularly.”

He’s not disappointed. 

“Then what about Dr. Bartleby?”

While he stunned Pansy into silence—not that she really said anything since raising her hand at him—Malfoy keeps prying. 

“What about him?”

“Why did you stop seeing him too?”

“Because he wasn’t helping?” 

Is Malfoy an idiot? What kinds of questions are these? 

“Because I never really wanted to go to a mind healer in the first place?”

“Potter, but you need help.” 

Ah, so she finally speaks.

He knows he’s charting into degeneracy and perhaps it’s a little bit of liquid truth and cannabis high that makes him take this further. 

But he stopped regretting anything long ago. 

“Have you looked at yourself, Parkinson?!” He stands up. 

His heart begs his mouth to stop. This isn’t what he wants to say the first time he sees her again in his home.

“Did you really think becoming the best mind-healer and healing all those war survivors could ever clean your hands of what you did? Of everything you said and did back then?” 

Looking at her scared, round ocean-green eyes, he thinks that, no, this is the last thing he wants to say to her. 

“And did you really think becoming my mind healer would erase the fact that you once tried to kill me?”

He asks even though he knows her answer. 

Beyond that, he knows she tried to help him because he needed it. She’s seen the worst of him and when the opportunity came to possibly try to heal him from everything then of course she’d take it.

But she underestimated how much he really loves her. 

Because even when the world's best pays him the most attention and care and patience, he still cuts himself at home and drinks himself to death over yet another loss in his life.

For her sake, he let her think she’s helping though.

“I—“ her mouth opens but she’s speechless. 

Malfoy looks between them, also shocked, but in the way when one’s theories finally come to make sense.

“No,” she’s looking down and her voice is so quiet but he doesn’t miss it. “I know more than anyone that everything—and anything—I do for the rest of my life won’t make up for what I’ve done.” Then, her voice raises higher, “I know better than anyone that the world will never forgive me!”

His hands, settled at his sides, flinch. And he resists the urge to reach out and pull her in and touch her. She’s trembling and he’s the last person who has the right to do anything about it. 

He looks at Malfoy. Pleads.

And he understands. “Pansy… I think it’s time to go.”

They leave. 

Thank Merlin they leave. 

Malfoy comes back twenty-six minutes later. This time though, it’s through the fireplace. 

This time, Harry’s no longer sporting an overgrown stubble and morning breath and wearing two-day old pajamas.

Harry’s on the armchair again but he’s sitting straight and Malfoy sits across from him and Kreacher takes his coat and leaves them be. They sip tea like civil gentlemen do on Sundays at noon. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry apologizes. “About this morning, earlier today… Hermione. She’s—you guys are—going through a lot already. And I’m making things harder.”

“I understand.” 

Does he? 

As if reading his mind, Malfoy continues, “I was once scarily similar to you. Nightmares, addiction, and everything.”

“But you made it.”

Tell me how. 

“Hermione helped. But also Pansy. Her sessions helped a lot. She helped me… figure out my emotions, what I wanted, what I was still suffering from, what I needed to let go of to move onwards.” Draco explains. “And of course, Hermione helped too… greatly—she’s the light of my life. But Pansy… well Pansy was trained for things like this.” Then almost accusatorily, “She’s the best for things like this.”

“I see.” 

He doesn’t ask how one can make do if the light of their life is also the professional, but Draco knows him too well—so much that second year Harry would throw up if he knew just how much.

“Does she know?” He asks. “How much she means to you?”

“I… I’d be surprised if she didn’t by now.”

“Did you tell her?”

He has. Except it was over her grief and rawest moments and most vulnerable.

Harry swallows the doubt and nods, because technically, he has. 

“Pansy’s someone who wouldn’t even get it even if you went ahead and told her. Even if the truth was standing right in front of her.”

“So then how—“

“Keep being there for her.”

“I don’t know if I should.”

Draco thinks for a moment. “Do you want her to be your mind healer again?”

He shakes his head almost immediately.

“Why?”

“Because she’s already seen everything wrong about me. How can I keep showing her that side of myself?”

He’s probably already worse than all of her troubled patients. Combined. 

The fear that one day his darkness will become even too much for her to handle and that she’ll leave him sits heavy in his heart.

Or worse, what if he ruins her? 

Draco sets his teacup down and rolls his eyes, “Typical Harry Potter, you do know that you’re not special, right?”

He smiles, even though this isn’t the time or place and even though he didn’t even mean to. 

“She’s told me that once. Or twice.”

The first time was at the ministry banquet. 

the second time,

It was under different circumstances.

It’s his third time—tenth if you count the times he’s been in here before becoming her patient—in her suffocating office.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to her sitting across from him, in her white lab coat with her sacred title and name etched across the plaque over her coat.  

“Do you take your meds diligently?”

He nods. And doesn't think he’ll ever get used to her looking down on him with detachment and pity in her once beautiful eyes.

It’s the immense loss he feels that compels his next words:

“Pansy—“

“Dr. Parkinson.” He ignores the sting when she immediately corrects him. 

“I think it’s time we—I—stop coming here.”

She raises an eyebrow, doesn’t ask why. 

He supplies a reason anyway, “Let’s just forget any of this and go back to how we were. Before any of this.”

“Is it that bad?”

Finally, she stops with the pretenses. 

He shakes his head, and he means it. Speaking to—being here with her—even when he knows he’s just a patient and that this is what she’s trained for, paid, to do.  He hates to admit it, wishes it was otherwise, but she’s been effective in making him feel better.

It’s too bad he knows something better. Too bad he’s tasted her lips on his and smiles at their promises of seeing each other again soon and feels utter bliss when he’s inside her and they reach somewhere their names don’t matter.

“So then why?”

“Why must we continue?”

Does he have the right to tell her that she’s all he needs?

“Do you still have nightmares?”

He nods. Even when he doesn’t want to. 

“Do you still wake up with cold sweats and think of the war? Do you still daze off when you’re with others?”

Even though he could lie, he nods to all of them.

“Do you still wish you were somewhere else?”

And in it, he hears do you still cut yourself?

He doesn’t nod at this, but the hesitation on his face and the flinch of his sweaty hands answer for him. 

She shakes her head. “Then no. I can’t force you to continue your sessions with me but there’s no going back either.”

“But I was—“ he chokes on the next word. Happy. 

His hesitation opens the waterworks and all at once, the self-doubt creeps in. 

Was he?

Was he really happy when he still had nightmares of the war and the woods and the deaths—all the deaths—he outlived? When he's jobless and afraid of showing himself in public and flinches in front of the cameras? When he still sometimes prefers death over living on particularly bad nights?

Could he really be happy when his biggest fear, instead of Voldemort coming back, is ruining Pansy with his bad days and bad habits and, even when his bright future was set in stone for him, a prospectless future? 

Does she deserve this? To be his anchor forever? 

He looks at her through a gap in his fingers; his hands had somehow found their way to his face. 

Did she only sleep with and entertain him to make up for what she did to him? 

Either way, does he deserve her?

She keeps looking at him, doesn’t take her gaze away when he’s breaking down in front of her. There’s no judgment behind them—she’s seen the start of so many crash outs after all—but she doesn’t come to him either. 

“You were…?”

The indifference hurts his heart. 

“Nothing.”

She sighs. And then she says it again. The phrase that he had once clung so hard onto because she understood him. “You’re not special Potter.”

Except the same phrase has an entirely different meaning behind it now. 

She leans forward. “Sure you’re a hero and I’m sure you lost the most in the war but—well, you weren’t the only one. So many people lost so many things, on both sides. War isn’t beautiful.” 

He knows this. But when his life and freedom could only start after, he hoped he would be an exception. 

“I’ve worked with many, many, hurt and broken people over the years. And… and even though I’m regarded as the best, there’s only so much I can do.” She pauses. “I owe much of my merits to the brave individuals who are able to look ahead… instead of back.”

“There’s nothing for me to look forward to.” His hands are now folded together and he rests his forehead on them. He looks down to avoid the disappointment in her eyes he knows she has.

He’s Harry Potter. He fought Voldemort. He should be able to fight this darkness too. 

“Your problems aren’t special.” She chooses to finish. “But that doesn’t mean they’re any less real. Although I can’t give you a time frame, I suggest you take time thinking about what you want for yourself in the future. Close your eyes and imagine where you are five years from now. Ten. Twenty.”

She hands him a notebook and fountain pen, both with watermarks of her name and office. 

“You can write them here if you want to. You don’t have to show them to me of course. But a guided thought activity might serve you well. There is no perfect future for any single individual but there should at least be some things we all look forward to, right?”

What if my perfect future includes you in it? 

“Okay.” He takes it from her, decides that’s enough for today and gets up, preparing to leave. 

“And for what it’s worth, Ha-Potter.”

 He turns around, the speed in which he does so definitely betrays the hope in his heart. 

“I’m glad you’re trying.”

Glad you’re still here, he hears. 

He gives her a faux smile, nods, bids her farewell, grips the notebook tighter in his hand and decides that: perhaps someone broken like him shouldn’t be around someone as delicate and beautiful as her.  

Chapter Text

“Pansy isn’t as healed and perfect as you think she is, either, you know,” Malfoy tells him what he already knows. 

“But she’s trying,” Harry replies. “And who am I to get in the way of that? Who am I to hinder her progress?”

“She’s a fool for trying for the world’s forgiveness when she knows people like us will never get it.” 

When Harry sips his tea, he wishes it was laced with something more. “At least she has something going on for her.”

“It’s not what she wants. You know it’s not what she wants.” Draco sneers. “Do you think she enjoys working with broken people who can’t get over the same war she has so much trauma over?!”

Harry’s finished his tea. He’s looking down at the bottom now, making sense of tea leaves that he never believed in, searching for something that isn’t there. 

The irony of everything. 

“I’m the worst of them, you know.” His voice cracks, “Of people who can’t move on.”

Thinking it’s foolish, he sets down his empty cup.  Kreacher appeared and poured a refill and Harry missed his chance to reach for something more potent. It flashed his mind that the old house elf might know what he was doing. 

“I’m not good for her.”

“You’re a fool too, Potter.” Draco throws his head back, tired of going in circles.

Harry goes in circles because it’s what he knows. 

“What am I supposed to do about it then?” He laughs self-depracatingly. “Confess my love to her? Sweep her off her feet and date her?” 

Draco doesn’t say anything. 

“I can’t bring her into this mess of my life!” 

“She was a part of it once already, no?”

That shut him up. 

“And how did that go? Were you happy?”

There it is again. A question Harry doesn’t know the answer to. 

He runs a hand through his hair, messing up the little effort he put into it earlier. “I don’t know.”

Draco murmurs some expletives Harry knew Hermione wouldn’t approve of under his breath. But she isn’t here, and he isn’t her so it doesn’t matter. “Well, either way, you’re miserable like this. Is it that hard to find help?”

“I don't know how, Malfoy.” Harry feels himself losing his patience. Growing older, he finds himself having less of it, even when the opposite should be true. “Wizard medicine didn’t work. Muggle medicine didn’t work. Mind healing didn’t work. Time with you guys didn’t work. Time away didn’t work. I don’t know what to do with my life.” 

“Pansy—?” Malfoy doesn’t let the gap Harry made in his words slip. “Did seeing her work?”

Harry looks him in the eyes and laughs, “In what way?”

His friend shrugs, thinks they both know the answer.

Harry begrudgingly nods, “She deserves the title of the best. She’s a great mindhealer.” He admits. “But she was an even better lover.”

“And knowing her as the latter got in the way of her work as the former.”

Harry nods grimly, the truth he held so close to his heart open. 

“But even when she’s with me, the nightmares still happen. Aside from being with her I don’t know what else I want. I still want to die sometimes. I still think of the war. I still resent the world for what it did to me.” His voice cracks. “Will I ever move on? I don't think I ever will, Malfoy.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

  Malfoy doesn’t speak for a long time after his admittance. His truth. The truth they both sort of already knew. The truth that would kill her. 

Pansy’s no Gryffindor, but she has a savior complex like she was one. 

“So what? You’re just going to keep living like this?”

Harry shrugs. “As I said, I don’t know what I want.”

His friend scoffs. “How very chosen one of you, lost without a predetermined fate stuffed down your throat.” 

“It’s pathetic, I know.”

“The Harry Potter I knew wouldn’t let his self-conscious thoughts stop him.”

“From what?”

Malfoy looks at him like he’s stupid, “From talking to her. And getting your shit together. Even when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

Pansy went to sleep with an open, finished bottle of firewhiskey that night. The day when Harry Potter said out loud the pathetic truth she tried so hard to turn away from, the sad, unheroic reason she’s doing all of this for. 

And then when he said it, what she’s always been so afraid of after her apology to him four years ago, she died a little. 

He had never really forgiven her for what happened. 

But then again, can she blame him? 

She sleeps knowing her answer. 

The next week, she does what she knows best. Work.

Work, work, and more work. 

She buries herself in fixing other people so she doesn’t have to come face to face with what’s broken with her.

She’s so buried she forgets to send a letter with an apology she doesn’t mean and a fake excuse for skipping their monthly get-togethers to Hermione. 

She nearly jumps out of her skin when the fireplace in her office, which has never been used except once when she was running late from a late night with Harry, turns green and enormous. 

Hermione Granger Malfoy steps out.

“Merlin, Granger. That scared the shit out of me.”

“You missed our monthly get-togethers last night.” The brunette with curly hair says with a frown. 

Pansy’s surprise leaves her, and she straightens her face and gestures for Hermione to sit.

“I’m sorry I forgot to write.” She motions over her stack of paperwork. “I’ve been swamped, you see.”

Hermione’s brown eyes glaze over the pretense, perhaps buying it. Perhaps not.

“You usually go anyway, even if it’s with complaints.” 

“What doesn’t the Golden Girl understand? I’ve been busy.” And then she realizes her tone and calms down. “Sorry, I’ve been… dealing with a lot.”

“I know.” 

Does she? 

“Draco told me what happened.” 

“Did he now?” 

She resists asking how much does she know?

“I’m sorry Harry said all that.” 

“Don’t be.” Pansy finds anger from that day returning all over again to her. “They were Potter’s words, not yours.” And then, “You shouldn’t be here. Getting in between Potter and I shouldn’t be something you or Draco should do.” Then she looks at her friend's growing bump. “It’ll harm the baby.”

Hermione brings a hand over her stomach. “Harry said the same thing.”

“Yet here you are.” 

She shrugs. “I’m sorry for dragging you into his mess.”

  And once upon a time, Pansy would’ve agreed and accepted her apology. After the first session and going home to an empty flat and no one waiting at home, she grew to regret agreeing to Hermione, Draco, and Weasley’s request.

After all, they had ruined her peace. 

But then, she slaps her face with cold water, and finds her rationality again. Because it was temporary and bound to end, and if this was the reason the world gave, then so be it. 

After all, none of them knew.

Pansy looks at Hermione. 

So how could it be their fault? 

“It’s not your fault. His degeneracy was going to affect the rest of us eventually anyway. If it hasn’t already.” Then, “I should be the one to apologize. I couldn’t help him. And for my own selfish reasons, I decided to move his case over to another mind healer. Because I couldn’t stand not being able to help.” She offers the lie to seal it. 

“You tried.”

Under the table, Pansy clenches her fist until her nails dig through the first layer of skin. 

She has no more right to inquire about him, but then again, she doesn't have the right to do many of the things she’s done. “Was he there last night?”

She knows he usually opts to skip.

Hermione nods. “He was looking for you.”

She’s not surprised. Because sometimes, her owl would deliver letters from the man himself. Out of fear, she never opens them. Out of selfishness, she never tosses them.

“I see.” Then, “To apologize probably.”

Hermione shrugs again. “Working like this can’t be healthy for you.” 

Pansy manages a teasing smirk, “I’ll start taking your advice when you take mine. I’m the one with a medical degree.”

“Still…” Hermione doesn’t let it faze her. “Let me know if you ever need anything. Your patient list just keeps growing.” 

“It’s proportional to my reputation.”

“You know you’re not responsible for a whole generation of broken war survivors, right?”

“Well, that doesn’t matter when you’re the best.”

Hermione sighs as she looks into Pany. “What are you doing all of this for, Pansy?”

Isn’t it obvious? 

Pansy’s green eyes dig into Hermione’s face, searching for any signs of deceit or joke—because this must be what it is—a big fat joke. How could the brightest witch of their generation not know?

“This is all I have now.”

“Your work?” The accompanied look tears her apart.

Pansy gets insulted when Hermione chalks everything she’s been doing down to simply work.

Because how dare she? This is a lot more than woe. Pansy Parkinson didn’t just wake up one day and flip a coin to determine she would go through all those years and trouble to become a mindhealer simply just because. 

No. 

Insult is within her god-given right. 

She had poured dozens of sleepless nights wondering, racking her head, scrutinizing her mind to determine what she could do to right her wrongs. And the stigma—she had gone through hundreds of hurdles to get where she is now, just because of what she did. 

Even when she only committed one crime—the bullying doesn’t count, her prefrontal hadn’t developed yet.

But it was a crime against Harry Potter, the savior of the wizarding world, the very best of them. And perhaps that single crime might have been fine to carry alone—but pair that with the rest of the buried sins her dead parents and family committed, then well—well here she is: filling out paperwork to add her four-hundred and thirty sixth patient.

She’s fixed four hundred and two of them already—her practice has only existed just short of two years.

You’re filling an imaginary quota. 

His voice echoes in her mind and she grips her fountain pen tighter. 

Hermione notices the growing blot of ink on the parchment and Pansy stops her before she could say anything.

“Well, Granger. Not everyone gets love confessions and marriage proposals and happy endings at the end of a war.” Pansy regrets saying that—but she’s not pathetic so she doesn’t take it back.

“I’m sorry,” is all her friend manages. 

“Hermione, for your mental wellbeing and health—and consequently, Draco’s—you should stop meddling.” She doesn’t make it a suggestion or a thought. Pansy says it with a tone that could be Dumbledore’s dying will itself. 

And when the golden girl, who could capture an entire room’s attention with her confidence and self-assuredness, shrinks into herself, Pansy knows she did the right thing. 

Or maybe she fucked things up even more. Isn’t that what she does best after all? 

When she’s alone again, she takes her wand out from her coat pocket and casts a few spells to automate the paperwork process—it wasn’t a complete lie that she was busy, but the stack of papers had only needed her signature. 

Her back hurts and so she rests her entire weight on her chair and she looks up to the ceiling. It’s a boorish sight, and the white light blinds her. Squinting, she thinks she even sees a stain behind the pane of lights.

She closes her eyes and thinks, isn’t this the worst type of irony? That their dear savior is fucked up and that their best mind healer is fucked up.

A hysteric laugh escapes her.

Why, it’s almost cinematic; a real life tragedy. 

Chapter Text

when she was thirteen,

Pansy Parkinson wanted to be a herbologist.

Every time they walked to the greenhouse for Madame Pomfrey’s class, there would always be a spring in her steps. The third time, Millicent noticed, and had asked if she had a crush on a classmate, but Pansy just shook her head instead.

And like most thirteen year olds, her dream profession changed the next year. 

When she was fifteen, she dreamt of being a reporter. She dreamt of traveling to France and Switzerland and Ibiza to interview famous wizards and witches. 

This started because Draco had said in passing how she talked too much for her own good—she wanted to prove otherwise, that even though she may speak a lot, everything that left her mouth was important.

She devoted fourth and fifth year to the pursuit of being the greatest reporter in the wizarding world—and of course, to prove Draco, now her ex, wrong.

Pansy was seventeen when Harry Potter killed Voldemort. She had just turned eighteen when Hogwarts brought them all back for their eighth year.

And suddenly, nothing she had wanted to become before the war mattered. 

Nothing she was before mattered either, because she was now known across the castle (and world) as the girl who tried to give their hero up. 

She was always a bully during school, I’m not surprised she tried to kill Harry. 

That was a quote from some no-named Gryffindor who was a third year when the battle of Hogwarts happened.

She knew for a fact they never crossed paths. 

As the autumn months of her final year dragged on, Pansy became used to lies about her from people who didn’t know anything about her. 

And with a father who died shortly later in Azkaban, an absent mother, and a family name that was more trouble than it was worth to carry, Pansy didn’t have a lot of options when it came to chasing her hopes and dreams and the future after graduation.

She knew that if she wanted to lead a somewhat normal life, she had to pick up the pieces of her fallen reputation.

She had to become someone who people knew the history of, but would ignore. 

When Pansy Parkinson was eighteen, she decided to become a mindhealer—the best in the wizarding world. 

For someone desperate like her, who was looking for an out of living life where she would be forever ostracized if she did anything less than, this conclusion was inevitable. 

She went to school with war survivors after all. 

All of her fellow classmates had something fucked up going on with them, most were on something to cope—whether it was potions or alcohol or muggle drugs, (the worst kind).

Realizing that mind healing had the very real potential to get her pardoned in everyone’s mind, she forgot everything else and sprinted at it.

It’s all she’s been working towards ever since.

At first, Pansy didn’t mind the fact that her freedom of choice was stripped from her, because at least she wasn’t sentenced to Azkaban, right?

At least she wasn’t surveilled and was free to go wherever she wanted and roam under the sun.

She considered herself lucky, to be honest.

When she heard down the grapevine that Ginevra Weasley had received an offer to play quidditch from the Holyhead Harpies before she even graduated, Pansy admitted to herself that she was perhaps a good player. 

But she no longer had a default response when any wizard asked her what her favorite quidditch team was. 

When Daphne told her that she was going to marry a pureblood boy she met and fell in love with in France three summers ago, Pansy held her judgment and congratulated her with a half-genuine smile. She suppressed her jealousy well as she held hands with one of her closest friends. 

When Draco went to trial and got pardoned after they found out that Narcissa—and the role she played in lying to Voldemort—was taken hostage, he was able to reintegrate back into society.

He became an Auror, his dream job since they were children. And then he became Hermione’s boyfriend in the spring of their eighth year. 

Pansy told herself that it was okay, because it was Draco, and Draco is her best friend. 

When Theo broke the news to her, just two days before their graduation, that he was going to move to America, she didn’t cry or curse the friend who was so, so similar to her. Instead, she made him promise to write. Inside her head though, she considered it too—running away from the consequences of being on the wrong side of a war. But when she got her acceptance letter to a muggle university, Oxford, for clinical Psychology, muggle mind healing, she told herself that this was her form of running away. 

Her plan was to first become acquainted with the way muggles did mind healing before coming back to the wizarding world to start her apprenticeship and practice. It was an unconventional approach, but she had to be unconventional to become the best as soon as possible. And from what she found from research, the methods in Psychology were much more effective than that of the wizarding world.

Still, when she got drunk and high with Theo for the last time, she bit her tongue to stop herself from calling him a coward. 

When Harry Potter made a grand spectacle on their graduation day and made it about himself, by getting down on one knee and proposing to Ginevra Weasley at the end of his long, torturous speech about bravery and healing and forgiveness and love, she was sitting in the third row. Unwilling witness to the stunt he pulled, under the sweltering summer heat, she bit her lip until her mouth tasted metallic.

When Ginevra nodded enthusiastically and said yes while crying, there were whoops and cheers everywhere but she wanted to curse and scream. 

Not because the boy she had an indisposed crush on was marrying and passionately declaring his love for another—she wasn’t a petty teenager anymore. Rather, she was so, so so so so so fucking bloody fed up with the world.

Seeing everyone ignore or run away or move on or heal from what happened last May—fed up was the only relationship she had with the world for the last year.

The resentment she had spent the last few months burying from seeing the freedom and future everyone had come back, like vomit she tried so hard to fruitlessly swallow.

Why was she giving up on her dreams to survive? 

Why was she losing sleep and devoting and killing herself to be something she doesn’t want to be?

Why was she the only one paying for her sins?

Slouched over on the fourth chair in the third row of her Hogwarts graduation, with her face in her hands to drown out her chokes of sobs and voiceless curses, Pansy Parkinson wondered how to live in a world that had long turned its back on her.

No one seemed to notice, not when it was the Golden couple on stage, not when everyone around her was too busy looking forward to their bright futures, not when she was the girl who had once held a finger at Harry Potter. 

Chapter Text

eighth year, again,

In truth, Harry still has nightmares of the battles and the voice in his head and the losses—Merlin, all those losses.

He can’t control his dreams but what he can control, he does; he makes an effort to reign in his straying thoughts. 

After the final battle, he took the summer months away from the Burrow, away from England and the wizarding world.

He traveled Southeast Asia—couldn’t afford to backpack though, because it reminded him too much of his time camping all over Britain. He even studied Buddhism and mindfulness a bit when the nightmares don't get better after the first month.

A muggle monk taught him meditation—promised it would help him with his darkness.

And it did. 

Except he would still spiral when he was doing anything else. 

When he was called back to Hogwarts for eighth year, he couldn’t meditate all that much anymore.  

At school, he hides it. He rarely takes his glasses off when he’s in the presence of others to cover his bags, he surrounds himself with people all the time to distract himself from thoughts he shouldn’t be thinking, he smiles when students come to congratulate and compliment him for a job well done last May, and he laughs like he’s okay.

Because if everyone around him could be, then he could be too. 

He has to be.

After everything that’s happened to him, his life had just started. Dumbledore was no longer around to use him as a pawn or fodder or whatever anymore. There’s no boy from the prophecy anymore. 

No, what remained at the end of the dark, gray day was freedom to do whatever the bloody hell he wanted to. 

There’s no fate or prophecy or chains binding down a helpless boy to fight evil anymore.

So why does he feel this way?

He tries to talk about it one night. 

“Hermione?”

The fire crackles in the background, as his best friend looks up from her book. “Yes, Harry?”

They’re still in September, school’s barely started, so he figures he still has the right to these feelings.

“Do you… do you ever think about our time… camping in the woods?” 

Her nose scrunches and he knows he’s made a mistake. 

“Sometimes,” she admits. “But I think about what would have happened if we didn’t and I don’t regret it.”

He gives her a confused look, until he catches his mistake and forces a smile. “That’s true, it was a lot of work though.”

“Oh, Harry, it was downright dreadful. Camping every day and fearing for your life every bloody day!” She says. “I’m glad it was worth it though.”

He had meant to ask if she had nightmares of those times. 

“Yeah, I'm glad that’s over and we won.”

(It’s not over for him, not really.)

He tries again with Ron. 

They’re on break from the first quidditch practice of the year, still September, still within his right.

“Do you think about the war sometimes? About the people we lost?” 

Ron doesn’t say anything for a long time. Harry regrets bringing it up, when it was his best  friend’s own brother who had lost his life. 

But after a long while, he says something that he’s taken away by, “Sometimes.” His friend admits.  “I’d be a bloody cruel bastard if I never thought about them actually.” 

Harry laughs at this and agrees. 

“But mum said it’s okay to grieve but you have to keep looking forward. So that’s what I try to do, y’know?” Then, “It’s the last thing the dead want. To see the living stuck in the past.”

Harry bites the inside of his cheek. “I see.”

When concern comes to Ron’s eyes, Harry says, “I’m jealous. Your mum’s so wise.” 

Ronald laughs, “She could be your mum soon too, mate.”

(He feels pressure to think about marrying Ginny.) 

He almost tries with Hermione, again. 

“Hermione?” 

“Yes, Harry?”

They knock on Hagrid’s hut and he chooses to wait until later to ask. 

Hagrid opens his door to them and they both step in to carve pumpkins; it’s no longer September but they’re only halfway into October.

“What is it that you wanted to ask me again?” Hermione reminds him as she prepares to carve a cat into her pumpkin.

“Nothing,” he swallows.  “Just wanted to know what you’re going to be for Halloween.”

He looks down at her arms, sees that she had pulled up the sleeves of her sweater to carve the pumpkins. 

He hates himself for looking but he’s relieved to see that the slur on her right arm is now healed. It hasn’t faded, and it will most likely be there forever, but it’s healed.

He figures the only reason she’s still wearing long sleeves now is because of the weather.

(He wishes he could hide his scar.)

And again. 

This time, with the person he’s supposed to spend the rest of his life with. 

“Ginny?” 

“Hm?” She hums as she leans closer to him. They’re sitting side by side in the great hall. It’s the end of lunch and they're the only ones at the end of the Gryffindor table.

“Do you think about your sixth year?” 

He sometimes hears about how the Carrows treated the students, especially those not of pure blood descent and blood traitors. 

They especially hated blood traitors. 

Against his right side, his girlfriend flinches. He’s a bad boyfriend for bringing this up, especially in November. 

“Yes, sometimes. But I’m glad I was strong for the sake of the resistance. And now I think I have to be strong again too. To move towards the future.”

He smiles, “You’re so brave.”

She pokes him, “Says the one who defeated Voldemort.”

(He’d rather face the Carrows). 

He stops asking after that. 

Instead, he pays extra attention in the Great Hall and common room when the other Gryffindors (those who still could afford to be publicly broken) talk about the different ways to cope.  

Harry Potter can’t ask them to share, so he finds roundabout ways to procure the goods. 

Sometimes, when he is desperate, he smuggles the ingredients and brews it himself.

He makes excuses and hides from his friends to slip into dreamland.

In the spring, Hermione announces she’s seeing Draco Malfoy.

Ron faints and Harry scrutinizes her. 

“Why?” He simply asks. 

His question seems to have flipped a switch inside of her and she starts an hour long tangent. She explains how they got closer, how their unlikely friendship had progressed into something more, up until their first kiss and her doubts and everything in between. 

He listens to her, until the very end of the hour. When she’s done, he doesn’t have the heart to tell her he understands. 

(Because he doesn’t.)

It was a betrayal, that’s what it was. 

When Malfoy starts showing up in (invading) his space and routine with his friends, he doesn’t say anything, even though it bothers him a lot and even though the nightmares become more frequent. 

No one else seems to mind it, not even Ron, who, at this point, had managed to move on from his failed relationship with Hermione. 

And when his best friend doesn’t say anything about how weird everything is, Harry knows he has no right to, especially when just last May, he gave a speech about the importance of forgiveness or something. 

He doesn’t really accept Draco Malfoy until much, much later.

At graduation, he proposes to Ginny.

He rushes marriage because maybe then he can actually start to feel something pleasant for once in his life and begin to live.

And if it’s going to come eventually, he figures he’d rather get it over with sooner than later.

He’s aware it’s kind of shitty to make their graduation ceremony about himself, even if he was the boy who lived.

But their hero’s always been a little selfish so he decides he doesn’t really care and doesn’t let the conscience occupy his thoughts anymore when he reads the morning prophet’s headline:

Harry Potter’s happy ending.

Because he did it, he fooled the world.

(Marriage doesn’t fix anything.)