"We have to go," Harry said. There was nothing he wanted so much right now as to leave. But Draco still wouldn't go and Harry still didn't know how he was to make him.
They were sheltered under an outcropping in a hill, too shallow to be called a cave. The wind rattled through the branches of the trees nearby. The air was misty and the sky looked like rain.
"I won't leave him," Draco said. He rolled his wand between his palms, up and back, up and back, as the fire cast a blue light on his face. It was the only magic Harry had been able to persuade Draco to do. "I won't leave him."
"Draco, I'm here," Harry said, but Draco looked right through him. The cut on Draco's cheek was still crusted with blood and his hands were covered in dirt.
"I can't leave him."
Was Draco ever going to snap out of this? It had been three days. The food in their packs would run out soon. Harry didn't know what he would do. Draco had never been strong and the last year of skirmishes they could never win and hiding places that were always found had begun to unravel him, to fray the edges of his body and his mind. Now it seemed the threads were loose and tangling.
"Draco," Harry said and crouched in front of him. "Draco, we have to leave. I know where we can go. Our friends are there." Maybe. If they hadn't been hunted down already. "They'll heal your cut. You don't want your face to scar, do you?"
"I was cold," Draco said, "and he told me to come and get warm." He stood, stooping under the low ceiling. "I'm not cold anymore." He walked outside.
"Then you'll come with me?" Harry asked, though he knew where Draco was going.
"No," Draco said and this time he looked at Harry as he spoke. "I have to stay with him. You know that." And Draco turned and walked into the stand of trees.
Harry didn't want to follow. But he couldn't leave Draco alone. As he passed through the brush, the wind gusted and leaves swirled along the ground. And then it was in front of him, the thing he didn't want to see.
His body.
The first time he had seen it, he had wondered whose it was. It looked wrong somehow, not at all like him. The scar was on the wrong side, the vague parting in his hair on the left and not the right. His limbs seemed too long, his face too pale. And, of course, the hole in his gut had never been there when he looked in a mirror.
It had taken far too long to die. An hour at least, after Draco had dragged him into the copse. An hour of leaking pain and hazy vision and Draco swearing at him and begging him not to go, not to leave him there alone.
Harry wanted to stay with Draco but even more than that, he wanted it to stop. He wanted everything to stop: the pain, the running, the hiding, the fighting. Draco held Harry tightly, but at last Harry slipped free.
It was like taking off an overcoat heavy with mud and being clean and fresh beneath. It was like a film projector coming into focus. It was like the relief from intolerable pain.
Harry could feel them calling for him, his mother and father, Sirius, Ron, Ginny, Neville, all his dead. They were drawing him away and it was what he had been waiting for for so long. To go to them, to find them all again.
Then he looked down at Draco. Draco sitting in the muck with that dead thing hugged against him and a blank, frozen face. And as much as Harry wanted to go, he knew he had to stay.
Draco cradled the body in his arms. Harry could hardly bear to watch. There were charms to keep a corpse fresh, but Draco hadn't cast them. Its face was grey now and insects crawled out of the wound in its belly. A litter of leaves had drifted over it.
Harry had thought of trying to go for help. He could travel faster now that he didn't have to walk and he didn't get tired. But he knew -- somehow -- that once he was away from Draco, he wouldn't be able to stop himself from melting into the air and leaving forever.
"Harry," Draco said. "I'm here, I won't leave."
"That's not me," Harry said. "Draco, that's not me any more. If you come with me, you won't be leaving me."
Draco didn't look up. He rocked the body against him and pressed his face to its muddy hair. Harry worried that Draco's cut would become infected. And there was nothing he could do.
He could see, he could hear, but he couldn't feel, couldn't touch. All he could do was reason with Draco, but reason wasn't something Draco understood right now.
It began to rain. Draco didn't seem to notice. He pulled the body even closer and kissed its face again and again and then its mouth. Harry tried to remember the feel of Draco's kisses, the warmth of his body beside the fire at night. But it was like a word on the tip of his tongue that he couldn't quite say aloud.
Harry couldn't bear to see Draco with that thing. That wasn't him. It was nothing, a useless weight that bore down on Draco and pinned him to this spot.
Then Draco looked up. "Make him move," Draco said. "Please make him move. I know you can." The body was resting on his lap, he was stroking its hair and face.
"I can't," Harry said. He drifted closer. "I don't know how."
"Please," Draco said and if Harry had still had a heart, it would have turned over in his chest at the look on Draco's face.
"I wish I could," Harry said.
Draco's face was wet but it was just the rain. Harry had never seen him cry. "Don't you go too," Draco said. For a moment his eyes seemed to clear and Harry wondered if he understood. "Don't leave me."
A spider was crawling on Draco's cheek. Harry reached out to brush it away but his hand went right through it.
"I won't leave," Harry said. "I'll wait. Until we can go together."
FINIS
Yowza. I've seen the concept before, but not done as well as this. Beautiful.