Chapter two
"Hello?" Harry calls, his voice hoarse from silence. His right hand grips his wand nervously, his left clutching at the banister of the stairs. He swings open the door to the kitchen and…
"Hello?" he calls again. "Where are you? Who's there?"
"Over here," says an all-too-familiar voice. "Blind, Potter?"
Harry turns to look at the figure standing near the sink. The light filtering through the (dirty) gauzy curtains illuminates his blonde silky hair, but cannot disguise the look of disdain on his face. Harry's jaw drops.
"Really, Potter," Draco Malfoy says calmly. "You'd think you'd just seen the dead, or something."
"I thought you were dead," Harry retorts, gathering his jaw from the floor. He is still standing awkwardly in the doorway with his wand still raised. "What are you doing in my house?"
"Sit down," Malfoy says, moving to sit down himself. Harry edges into the kitchen, but still doesn't sit. "Suit yourself, then."
Harry glares at Malfoy. He did not appreciate being told to sit in his own house, nor did he appreciate Draco Malfoy – of all people, honestly! – bursting in on his own pity party.
"How did you get in here? You're not even supposed to know where this is," Harry says.
"Dumbledore told me," Malfoy says, choosing to ignore the look of surprise on Harry's face and gazing at his pale hands in a bored way instead.
"Is – Dumbledore – how?" Harry stammers.
"He told me before he died, stupid," Malfoy says. "Speaking of old friends, where's the weasel and the Mudblood?"
Harry sighs, "You never change, do you?"
Malfoy looks up at him sharply. "For your information, Potter, I have changed in ways that you wouldn't be able to understand. I take it that you've still not completed that Horcrux task that Dumbledore set you? Shameful – and you call yourself a Gryffindor?"
"How did you know about the Horcruxes?" Harry demands, finally taking a seat directly across from Malfoy.
"Professor Snape, obviously," Malfoy says, rolling his grey eyes at the ceiling.
"How did Snape know?" Harry snaps. "That traitor, if he…"
Harry can't even finish the sentence. He's still shocked about Malfoy's sudden appearance – or, rather, reappearance – in his home.
"Professor Snape wasn't a traitor, Potter," Malfoy says perfectly rationally, looking Harry in the eyes. "He was just a very good, albeit misunderstood, actor."
"Oh, really?" Harry snorts, not breaking eye contact. "Where's his alliance, then?"
"Professor Snape was neither working for the Light, nor for the Dark," Malfoy says, with the air of one explaining something to a five-year-old child. "He was the personification of the true meaning of a Slytherin. He served no master, and he cared for nothing but his own wellbeing. Or so he told me."
Harry looks at Malfoy quizzically. "You're speaking in past tense."
Malfoy finally broke their eye contact and looked down at the table.
"Well, Potter," he said softly. "That's because he's dead."
Harry stares incredulously at Malfoy.
"No way," he says.
"He is," Malfoy insists, apparently intrigued by the patterns in the wood grain and not meeting Harry's gaze. "I was there when it happened."
Harry's expression softens. "Malfoy, I –"
"Save it, Potter," Malfoy says quietly to the table. "I don't need your pity. Professor Snape was the closest thing to replacing that sad excuse of a father – don't agree with me, you prat – currently rotting in Azkaban. I had to watch him be killed by the people I thought were my own friends. I'm currently disowned and homeless, my mother is missing and I suspect she's been taken by Death Eaters, and my wand is broken so I can't fix my bruises properly, but if you think that I am going to let you feel sorry for me, then you have another think coming."
"Nice use of Muggle literature," Harry says, squinting at Malfoy. "But, honestly, Malfoy, I don't see any bruises on you."
"That's because I told my, um, attackers that if they bruised my face, I'd hex them into the next millennium," Malfoy says, with the tiniest hint of a smile on his downcast face.
Harry is saved the bother of a response by Kreacher ambling into the room, reluctantly bowing, and declaring in a bored way, "The half-breed's head is in the living room fire and is asking for Harry Potter. Kreacher wonders, is he here to talk to the half-blood soiling the family heirlooms of Black and intruding on Kreacher and his mistress?"
chainofhearts
"You have to understand that it's not your fault, Harry," Remus Lupin's head says from the fire, five minutes later.
"But it is," he protested. "I could've stopped her, I could've… It didn't have to be this way, Remus."
"If you'd stopped her," Lupin says calmly. "That means that Voldemort would've won."
"Ginny didn't have to die, Remus!" Harry shouts, tears beginning to fill his eyes. "There has to be some other way, but now it's too late! The entirety of the wizarding world is against me, and I can't even tell them why she had to die!"
Draco Malfoy, from the doorway of the living room, watched tears fall down Harry's cheeks, the firelight casting an eerie glow on both their faces. So we are united by loss, then. What an unlikely pairing.
"I'm sorry, Harry," Lupin says quietly. "But she did."