firecracker ???

BEST MAN

But slowly — painfully — we stopped trying to win.

We started trying to understand."

The memory rose without effort.

Slughorn's Christmas party. 1996. The glittering canopy. The smell of cinnamon and egos. Harry had dragged Lyra inside, kissed her under enchanted mistletoe, and then said something so annoying she hexed him and walked off to touch up her makeup.

Which left him alone with Draco.

Draco hadn't insulted him.

He hadn't even raised a brow.

He'd looked... tired.

Like the weight of everything he wasn't allowed to say was pulling at his collar.

He'd just stood beside him and said, "She's not easy to love."

Harry had blinked.

And Draco, voice tight, had gone on. About her pride. Her distance. Her strength. About how he had prepared his whole life to carry her home if someone broke her. How he never thought anyone would be able to stay.

"But you never gave me a reason."

Harry hadn't spoken for a long time.

Now, he opened his mouth to continue.

"I learned that he wasn't cruel, just raised in sharpness. He learned that I wasn't noble, just raised in fire. We learned how to speak. How to listen. How to be — not as enemies, not as pawns in someone else's story — but as people."

"That was the night it changed," Harry said now, quietly. "That was the night I stopped seeing him as the boy I hated, and I offered him my hand this time."

Five years after that first handshake. After that moment in Madam Malkin's. After years of name-calling and duels and blood.

He had looked at Draco at the corner of Slughorn's party, hand outstretched. No words. No expectations.

Just hope, and the admittal that he wanted to be his friend too.

"This time," Harry said quietly, "he took it."

"That moment didn't make us brothers," Harry continued. "It made us possible. The rest came later."

It was just one of those nights.

Grimmauld Place had been quiet. The fire was burning low. Harry had sitting on the rug in the drawing room with a glass of Firewhisky, watching the flames stutter.

And Draco — calm, infuriating Draco — was lounging across from him on the couch, watching like he was cataloguing Harry's every thought before it left his mouth.

It had been weeks since Voldemort had been defeated, Lyra had gone back to the manor to spend time with her parents with Draco taking her spot to bond with his uncles and Harry (Narcissa's doing, of course).

That was the night Harry had realized Draco wasn't just Lyra's twin.

He was his, too.

Not by blood. Not by name.

But in all the ways that mattered.

He remembered how the silence had stretched between them — not uncomfortable, just long enough to notice.

Harry had murmured, "You ever wonder how it would've gone if we were friends from the start?"

Draco didn't even hesitate. "No."

"Rude," Harry had muttered.

"Realistic," Draco had said. "We would've been insufferable."

"We are currently insufferable."