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“Sepultura” a familiar female voice said firmly. He heard the clicking of bricks and turned to see the tail end of green robes disappearing into the Slytherin doorway.
McGonagall.
Harry stood, frozen, waiting to hear the doorway open again, but it did not come. He waited ten minutes, then twenty, and still she did not exit. That settled it for him.
Whatever she was hiding in there, he was going to find out. Tonight. The animagus could wait.
“I don’t see what’s so hard about staying away from him,” McGonagall started again, pacing across the old Slytherin common room.
“He won’t let me!” Draco complained.
“Then disillusion yourself, Malfoy! He can hardly pester you if he doesn’t know you’re there!”
“I have been!”
“Then I don’t understand the problem!”
“I think it would be better if—”
“Mr. Malfoy. There is nowhere for me to send you. Apart from your parents, I am the only one that knows the truth. You know I can’t send you off of the grounds. You’ll surely be found out. As for Mr. Potter, the poor boy was withering away and I had Albus Dumbledore’s portrait in my ear telling me that I can’t let a boy with such potential waste it. I don’t care how much you dislike him, or whatever feelings of animosity you may still harbor, I won’t turn him away simply because you don’t want hi—”
“That’s not why!” Draco yelled, suddenly, startling even himself. It was the loudest he had been in years. He didn’t know he was capable of such a noise still.
McGonagall stilled. “Then why, Mr. Malfoy?” she asked stiffly.
“I can’t stand to see him like this,” Draco admitted, quietly.
“Well, in time, it will get better,” she assured him. “Once he starts teaching.”
“I don’t know that it will.”
“Don’t be so contrariwise,” she chastised.
“I found him, the first night, standing outside the Slytherin dungeons. Talking to dead people and crying. And by dead people I mean specifically me,” Draco started slowly. “And how he misses me.”
McGonagall opened her mouth to speak and then closed it, looking rather like a fish.
“I’ve already brought so much pain into his life,” Draco continued, “That I was never able to amend. I think it will ruin me to see him so torn up like this when I could so easily fix it, if only things were a little bit different. I think I can only hold up for so long before I ruin everything. It’s already almost more than I can bear.”
McGonagall was silent for a moment that stretched on for what felt like eternity. It was the closest Draco had ever been to admitting everything out loud.
“You never hated him, did you?” she asked gently.
Draco smiled back at her weakly.
“No, I suppose you didn’t. I suppose that was another act to please your father.”
“I suppose it was.”
He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see the sorry look on her face.
Finally she said, “Let me figure out what I can do. We’ll meet the same time tomorrow.”
Draco nodded.
When she left, he looked around at his room, feeling a bit of melancholy sink into his stomach. He reckoned they wouldn’t be his rooms for much longer. Not if he got his way.
Chapter 6
Harry supposed the only plus to not having grown since his school days was that his old Invisibility Cloak still covered him down to his feet, if he crouched.
He had been standing in the dungeon hallway for thirty minutes. He had heard the brick wall clicking closed as he turned the corner upon his arrival, but he hadn’t been sure if that meant someone had just gone in or come out. The hours between morning and nightfall had been treacherous, but those mere minutes in the hallway were utter agony. After half an hour, the curiosity at what was on the other side outweighed his fear of whomever he may encounter.
He closed the space between the door and himself, muttering the password.
“Sepultura.”
The bricks clicked open. Harry looked down to each end of the hallway, and upon seeing no one, entered the common rooms.
They were not in the state of disrepair that Harry had expected. In fact, they looked quite lived in. There was a dining table at one end, a desk covered in potions equipment towards the middle, and a desk at the very end. There were books strewn across most of the flat surfaces, as well as floor to ceiling shelves filled with more books, a lot of them Muggle by the looks of them.
Harry walked slowly towards where the boys’ dormitories had been, peeking his head inside. There was only one bed in there, big enough to fit about three Hagrids comfortably. Lying on the bed he saw the cat with the bifocal markings he had seen around the castle. She looked up at him, seeming to see him despite his cloak, sighed, and returned her head to her paws. Someone was living here.
That had been the last thing he suspected. He thought, perhaps, McGonagall was hiding some artifact from the war that she didn’t want the students fiddling with, or something that Dumbledore had entrusted her with upon his death. What he did not expect was apartments.
He stood quietly, listening for any sign of life, but determined apart from the cat, he was very much alone. He ventured back into the common room, walking slowly along the bookshelf and running his finger along the spines. He stopped when he came to a rather thick, tall book with an unmarked binding. He pulled it out and leafed through it briefly.
It appeared to be clippings from newspapers and magazines. Upon further study, he noticed most of them seemed to be about him. There were a few about Hermione and Ron, their wedding announcement, a bit about Ron becoming a partner at Wizard Wheezes, a bit about Hermione becoming an Auror. There were one or two clippings about Neville, some about Ginny, but those mostly concerned him. It seemed he was the star of this scrapbook. The only other person who came close in terms of being mentioned was Draco Malfoy. Intrigued, Harry carried the book over to the desk, sitting in the chair. He let his arms peek out from below the Invisibility Cloak, but remained covered, in case anyone should return.
He opened to the first page to find an article he had saved himself, the one written the day he had given Malfoy his wand back. On the page directly across from it, there was a page from a gossip magazine he didn’t subscribe to detailing the same meeting, but the photograph was taken while Harry and Malfoy were sat at the table. The pained look that Harry had memorized from the Prophet photo did not feature on Malfoy’s face here. Instead, it showed the blonde boy watching Harry as Harry stared fixedly at his own hands. So fixedly, in fact, that he had failed to notice the smile playing on Malfoy’s lips, and a touch of what Harry would call fondness, if he didn’t know better, in his eyes. He read the headline.
New Beginnings: Romeo and…Romeo?
Harry hurriedly skimmed the rest of the article.
It’s not hard to see that Draco Malfoy, 17 year old former Death Eater, only has eyes for his former nemesis, Harry Potter. But then again, who doesn’t? Potter is set up to be the most sought after man for the next decade, at least. But has Malfoy lucked out? Sources close to both say this meeting may have been more than a simple truce. The look on a certain blonde’s face seems to point that way. Is a forbidden love between two star crossed teens on the horizon? What of Potter’s current flame, Ginny Weasley? More as the story unfolds.
There was a bit of writing scrawled in the margin of the article in a slanted, clean script.
Was hardly making eyes at him. HARDLY.
Harry watched the photograph for a little while longer, watching Malfoy’s eyes skim across his face and the smile on his lips became more evident. How had he missed that? What about his hands had been more interesting? Why couldn’t he have looked up? More importantly, what did it mean? Clearly, the magazine was just looking for anything to publish about the two of them. But what was Malfoy really thinking? Surely, that Harry’s hair was a disaster or despite being a hero, his clothes were still cheap, something terrible like that which only he would find amusing.
The next page was Malfoy’s obituary. Harry could barely bring himself to look at it, turning the page quickly.
The next page was an article that was not unfamiliar to him, but was one that he certainly had avoided. It was the story Ginny had leaked on him to get back at him for breaking up with her. She had since apologized, and he had accepted it. They had only been kids at the time, hardly ready to handle their emotions, let alone the press coverage they received. But just because the article was water under the bridge didn’t mean it didn’t sting to look at. Mostly because there was some truth to it.
Potter Carrying a Torch for Former Nemesis?
