Disclaimer: Hogwarts etc belongs to JKR
It's Christmas Eve.
She hasn't spent one in Hogwarts for years it seems. Years and years and her body aches at the change.
It looks much the same as it used to. The Great Hall is still as great as she remembers, the Entrance Hall just a tall. The lake is no less dark and the forest no less forbidding. In fact, just looking at it you would say that nothing had changed from that day last July, when time stopped and war began in earnest (for it felt then that there would never again be peace in the heart of Hogwarts).
She pulls a fur-lined cloak closer around her, stepping as quietly as possible onto the stairs to the dungeons. The slick tapping of her shoes echoes across stone and as she passes magical torches bust into life. Fire lights her way but the dungeons are cold as ever.
She keeps on walking, focussed hard on thoughts of London and Death Eater battles (she cannot allow herself to slip) (slip back to where she belongs, robed in black, red and gold with bushy hair loose and potions textbook in hand) (she can't afford to remember). She grips her wand and ignores the pang of memory as she passes the silent gateway to the kitchens (not that the fruit bowl was ever noisy, but the lack of sound seems to resonate from within the very stones of the building. A loneliness that doesn't seem to want to shift.)
She turns left then right before pushing through heavy oak doors and walking left again. Snape's potions store cupboard. She doesn't look behind her, around the classroom in which she spent so many hours over six years trying to prove herself. She doesn't run her fingers over age worn, potion stained desks. Doesn't look to where Malfoy would sit and smirk, self assured and proud before the Dark Lord broke him. Doesn't turn to the teacher's desk, still decked with jars and an hour glass, or where she herself would sit, full of answers he never let her give. She doesn't look to where Neville melted a paving slab with a forgotten potion-gone-wrong, or where Harry and Ron would bicker and laugh before being silenced by the Potion Master's glare. She doesn't. She just pushes aside empty cauldrons and grabs the bundle of scrolls lying hidden behind them.
A ghost of a smile on her lips she thinks of Remus and how shocked he'll be, or Tonk's smile when she sees the she got there first. She thinks of the delight of the Order and nothing else as she walks swiftly out of the domain of the Half Blood Prince (despite Slughorn's year in office the dungeons will always belong to Severus Snape).
In all honesty she expected company. With a flash of worry she opens a scroll but sees in relief it is exactly what they looked for, no booby traps, no red herrings. She runs up the steps, two at a time and in her relief almost slips to see school robed children flooding into the Great Hall for lunch. Almost, but not quite. She is thankful because the hurt would be too much.
She reaches the door, fingers clasped around the iron ring, but something stops her. Against her will her eyes drag themselves over the spectacle to the Entrance Hall, drinking in every painting, every stone and sweep of velvet as it hangs from the walls. She traces the lines of the great marble staircases, the patterns made as light dances in through high windows, she stares at the house point hour glasses and how Gryffindor's is lowest, all rubies spilt in another life. Her knuckles whiten around the door handle and she feels something welling behind her eyes, all of a sudden she's like herself back in first year, proud and confident on the outside but quaking with uncertainty within.
Just a little lost girl, she thinks and longs more than ever to run up those stairs, to sprint up the towers until her lungs protest her legs slow to an exhausted walk. She wants to climb to where the fat lady sits and speak the password that hasn't been spoken in almost half a year. She wants to sit before the fire in the common room and… and write an essay on transfiguration and then walk to the lesson with Ron and Harry after making sure Crookshanks has been fed. She wants more than anything to go back to how it was before.
Eyes hungrily take in everything and were it not for her fist around the door handle her legs would have taken her up the stairs. Her gaze roves and subconsciously she knows she's looking for a familiar face that isn't asleep in oil on canvas.
A familiar face to laugh and joke with, to pretend everything is alright and that Christmas means a thing with the great school closed.
Her heart almost stops when she finds one.
The school was cold.
It was the first thing he noticed as he pushed through the doors, magical wards greeted him like an old friend but something was off. It took him only a fraction of a moment to realise that his breath still made clouds and his fingers weren't thawing in the delicious warmth he'd experienced nowhere else on earth.
He'd never appreciated it before, ever boasting of his cold Manor with its riches and ancestry, but now he realised that Hogwarts wasn't home anymore and never would be again. It stung because until that precise moment he had never been fully aware of what the old castle really meant to him.
A frown graced his features as he realised the train of thought his mind was following, snapping shut the door he magicked the snow from his boots.
There were no decorations this year, nothing to proclaim: 'Albus Dumbledore was here!' in bright sprigs of holly and Christmas cheer. Almost against his will he made his way over to the doors of the Great Hall, peering in in the hopes of finding Flitwick's trees, each one a work of art in its own right. His heart fell upon realising that the room hadn't been touched since the last day of term, so much had happened since and he'd almost forgotten how he missed the final feast in favour of running with Snape and their Master.
The great house tables lay empty, colour and life drained from the room and replaced with the black hangings of mourning. Hands pushed deep in his pockets he stepped slowly over to his seat at the Slytherin table, worn bench no different to how it had always been, stained dark with the ages and bearing graffiti of generations. He looked up, the arches of the roof showing grey snow clouds and wintry sun. No owls though. (No life.)
The layer of dust that clung to anything and everything indicated that Filch had left with all the rest of the school, but confirmation for the building's disuse really wasn't necessary. Stepping up silently to the head table he pulled his wand from his pocket. Briefly he considered writing something crude and humiliating across the back of Dumbledore's old throne-like chair but the moment passed and he found himself using his fingers to write in the dust.
Blinking and snapping back to reality he stepped back, shaking his head and moving towards the door. He had a job to do and woe betide him if he failed (again).
She stares and cannot think of a thing to say or do to make this situation any less surreal.
The first thing that shoots through her numbing mind is not a name. Not an accusation with barbed words and deep, hating regret. No. It's something more anonymous, more uncertain and… less cold.
She hadn't though it possible for a person to look more of a shell than he had last year. She hadn't though it possible for a person to look more thin and haunted. She watches him and can't think of a thing to say or do but she sees the wariness on his sleep-deprived face and the fear that lies unmasked in his glacial eyes.
He's wearing black and she feels she should smile at the appropriateness of the colour. Death Eater robes and stereotypical connotations aside he looks like a funeral goer, and she thinks it would be nice if that was what he'd come for, to say good bye. She has to mentally shake herself, knowing full well what he is here for; nothing to do with final goodbyes to a man he never respected enough. All the same, he's wearing black. And while the colour used to make him almost glow, pale, dangerous and regal, now it leaves him ethereal, ghostly with shadows clinging to his cheekbones and eyes.
He looks like a shadow of a man and though there was little love lost between them she is saddened by the apparent deterioration. Strange as it may seem it is now certified in her mind that no good came of the death of Albus Dumbledore. It would seem the sacrifice could not even save the person that lost everything in making it happen.
Pale blond hair hangs limply over pale grey eyes. His face is less pointed (he's grown in the months he was missing) but more starved, no longer looking like a prince in a house of demons; he is a spectre, an echo of the former him she'd hated with such passion.
His robes hang loosely about his slender frame and the elegant stem of ebony clasped in his left hand seems to be the only natural thing about him. (This realisation feels as though it should bring some form of negative emotion, the fact that magic clings to him as naturally as life does to her, but it doesn't, instead it leaves her feeling something akin to pity and she hopes that he won't see it.) He is tense and she brings her eyes back to his face, meeting his eyes is like looking into a frozen lake, cold and hard and only barely alive within. He looks like he just swam back from Azkaban with the weight of the world crushing his diminished self.
She holds his gaze and decides silently that if regret had a face it would be that of Draco Malfoy.
He slipped around the door, elegant, poised and somehow hollow. He'd known from the start no good would come of this visit. He feels that something should have changed. That there should be some great gaping hole in the walls of the building, a bleeding wound in the heart of the fortress, but there's nothing. Hogwarts castle is yet to move on and, standing still as the gargoyle he leans against, he realises he is too.
He takes in the hall, the paintings and the stairs and the great lack of noise that rears up and threatens to consume him in a wave of guilt that would tell him "you did this" in words of ice. He swallows and moves to face the dungeons entrance and it is only then that he realises the torches are burning.
Someone else is here. His mind races, movements wary and controlled, like a spooked animal just before it bolts. Gut instinct and something else drag his gaze to the front doors.
Brown eyes. Wide with shock and shining with pity but looking not the least bit surprised.
Frozen. Coldness of the castle aside he can almost pinpoint the exact moment his pulse shudders and breathing slams to a halt.
Of all the people in the world he never would have expected her.
"Malfoy," she whispers and is surprised to see the word doesn't hurt. She's heard it spat by Harry and Ron too many times to count and she half expected it to break her lips like the ultimate insult, ripping a line of blood red fire and agony through her throat. Just two syllables, 'Mal-foy', so much like a word she's grown to hate, fear and resent with all her soul. So very close she's grown to expect the same pain from both.
'Mudblood'. The word hangs unsaid between them and it's all they can both do not to look away.
He doesn't say anything. Just stands by the door, alert and on the verge of flight. She watches his expression as his eyes drop from her own to look upon the scrolls she holds under her arm and is unable to tell whether she's surprised or not that nothing on his face changes. Blank and hollow. It's like he was never there at all.
"You found them." He says it quietly, a statement and nothing more. She expected his voice to be hoarse, disused and unnatural (the voice of a broken man) but it's not. It's clear and steady and bears the same aristocratic command she always disliked in him (disliked and envied), not a drawl, not the leering 'I'm better than you' swagger his voice took on when trying to impress, but the tone she heard use when he talked normally to people he trusted, one that people could respect.
She nods to him and knows that rasping voice or not, the fact that he spoke to her so plainly, no attempts at creating false expectations or fear, shows how wretched he truly is.
"You came to stop me?"
The gaze is broken. Eyes wandering over the hall once more he mutters, "I came so there'd be nothing for you to find."
"I don't want to fight." She is surprised by her outburst and by the look on his face he is too.
He shakes his head. "Me neither."
"Good," she whispers and knows she should be turning. Looking away from him and the memories that race back with the sight of the school. Looking to her feet her hand tightens on the door and with a heave she pulls it open.
Cold.
It rushes in, harsher and keener than he remembers it being on the walk from the village.
He's embarrassed to see his footprints on the snow outside as she swings the door open further. He'd never thought to charm the evidence of his presence away. Fool. Anyone could have followed.
He watches her step, notes how deliberately she doesn't turn back, how set her shoulders are and how her white knuckles cling to the ring on the door. He doesn't know where it came from or why it's there but he is suddenly very much aware that he doesn't want her to leave.
Nothing to do with the scrolls he's been ordered to return, notes of Snape's left undiscovered in the castle. No thoughts of the glory he'd gain were he to bring her back to his Master… There's almost a sense of pride in what he's feeling and as she steps through the arch he identifies it with the fact she's turned her back on him. The fact that she trusts him enough not to hex her. (No one has trusted him in months, even before then they didn't expect him to succeed.)
"Granger?" It slips out before he has a chance to stop it, to clamp his hands over his mouth and run in the opposite direction.
She pauses.
"What was the funeral like?"
The words whisper over to he like a feather on a breath of wind.
She turns slowly, not sure what she expects to find, severely doubting she heard the words at all (she's longed to hear something for so long, to have the excuse to stop blaming.)
He has stepped forward, standing now in the middle of the hall, around about where he was bounced in ferret form by the impostor Professor Moody. She can't help it, the memory makes her smile.
"It was… beautiful." She responds (although she knows he doesn't deserve an answer at all), glancing over to the tomb, almost lost in the blanket white of the snow. "Everyone came. Most students stayed and… the merpeople sang. And the centaurs watched. I…" she blinks, confusion creasing her brow as she looks back up at the castle. "He's greatly missed. Perhaps even as much as Hogwarts itself."
Silently he nods.
She turns again, ready to run for the apparation safe zone beyond the walls of the castle, but thinks better of it. "Malfoy?"
"Yes," he speaks quietly to her back.
"Did you ever get a chance to say good bye?"
There is no answer and she looks around, shoulders drooping as she sees the Entrance Hall lies empty. He's gone.
Hugging the precious scrolls to her chest she walks down the steps, out into the snow, noting dumbly that his footprints follow the same path as hers, just in the opposite direction.
Coming to a halt, up to her knees in the field of white, her wand is warm in her hand as she conjures up a wreath of holly, resting it gently on the top of the white tomb and just as she prepares to leave she spots something out of the corner of her eye.
"I'm Sorry."
Written in the snow. Childish and clumsy. She doesn't need to ask who put it there.
"I'm Sorry."
He stands in front of the high table in the Great Hall, staring blankly down at the words he's written there. He closes his eyes and breaths in deeply and can almost hear the noises of a school chattering happily over dinner. Almost, but not quite.
He thinks that's why he let her go. Why he didn't stun her or torture her as he's meant to. Why he didn't ambush her righteous little self and take back the scrolls that belonged rightfully to him. Because he wishes that he could take it back… Not what he did. Because in truth he did little that wouldn't have been done anyway, and some part of him still believes he's on the right side (the part of him that didn't see his mother beaten for his mistakes). He looks back around the hall with its black hangings and emptiness and after wishing he were somewhere else he changes his mind. I wish I were some time else.
He leaves the castle and sees her doing the same, following his previously made tracks towards the gates.
He'll let her keep the scrolls and tell the Dark Lord they'd clearly been moved when Hogwarts was emptied (lying to Lord Voldemort for the sake of a girl he never even liked? War changes many things, especially when you're not sure you want your side to win). He'll just have to hope she keeps quiet, but some part of him is already certain she will (even if she doesn't understand she tries to, he notes bitterly that in some ways she always has).
They reach the gates of Hogwarts at the same time. A boy and a girl. Each looking as uncertain as the other as they stand before each other in the snow.
First date, one would think, seeing the way she shies away at his tentative greeting. How she whispers "Merry Christmas" and hugs him briefly before spinning into apparation. How he touches his cheek and blushes at the spot where she kissed him.
It's a bittersweet parting you would think, seeing him kick the snow, looking back up to the castle almost in an attempt to turn back time. He shakes his head and tells her he hates her, still, and that nothing will change. But she is not there to hear it.
Perhaps they'll meet again. And maybe that time he'll try harder to reach out, and she might take his hand. Try to free him.
They could save each other in this war, an unlikely pair but all the same she could be the one pull him out of the darkness, offer him protection in a battle he thinks he fights alone, and in turn he could restore her trust. If he's not a lost cause then perhaps there's hope for the rest of the world, that is what she'll think, if they ever do meet again.
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