Nothing happened.
He has succeeded in reducing his sixth year at Hogwarts, in the main, into a blur of gently reflective memories, soft things, void of intimidation. Still, though, he shies away from it on principle, preferring, in his infrequent forays into the recesses of his own mind, to return to fifth year, the last year he remembers feeling entirely convinced of his own imperturbability. He tucks sixth year behind the more important thoughts coalescing in his head, thoughts about Pansy, her face nebulous behind the sharpness of lipstick and jewelry, going ever so slightly pudgy with advancing years, thoughts about Scorpius, with his cherubic smiles and deeper motivations. Like father, like son. He shook the proverb away from him. Not always.
He'd married Pansy. He has to force the sentence from himself. A mistake, but he won't tell her that. A permanent mistake. One does not divorce among the pureblood families. One does not divorce Pansy. She knows it too; she's never been a good liar, and lately she's turned vaguely passive-aggressive in the way she flaunts her secrets, not that he doesn't already know them—Blaise is hardly easy to conceal. He wishes she'd be less conspicuous about it; he abhors the knowing looks passed to him by his various acquaintances. Even now he can see Daphne Bones craning her neck to watch the pair of them. She looks him up and down and smiles that irksome smile of hers and he squelches the impulse to make a very nasty gesture at her over his son's head.
It was sixth year he'd been forced to step away from that persona, the charmingly devious Slytherin child. Still tripping over the hems of his robes trying to keep up with his father. It was noble then.
That was the year, as it appears in his mind, of Not Knowing What He Wanted. This, when applied in retrospect, fits neatly over the year's indiscretions like a blueprint. He is relieved at how nicely it goes together with the events overall, on the whole shifting all real blame elsewhere, or to his youth.
And in his Pensieve he looks young, he looks, in fact, so desperately naïve to his own eyes that he isn't quite able to believe that by sixteen he was sleeping with three girls regularly, blackmailing members of his House into attending meetings of that—cult—and carrying around the intent to murder his headmaster in that too-jaunty stride of his. Draco, watching his younger self expostulate wildly to a rather intimidated Goyle at breakfast, saw just how unimaginable it would be for him to actually engage in homicide. He might just as easily have turned his own hair pink by sheer force of will, like a Metamorphmagus. It was one part laughable and two parts not amusing in the least.
He saw when his younger self could not how inconstant he was that year, pulling Pansy to him, pushing her away again, whirling to snap out a Weasley-centered gibe and pulling his face straight as professors sallied past. It was an odd sort of dance, he thought, as Draco the Younger peeled an answer to a test from the back of Millicent's head, pried from between all the nauseating monologues to Smith—a Hufflepuff!—snarled at Snape, unwound a coil of Pansy's hair from his finger and caught it on a ring he remembers later flinging from his broomstick, high over the grounds, watching it pelt through wafts of air and disappear into the Forbidden Forest. He remembers that horrible next morning when it was back on his finger but there was mud on his loafers (loafers! In style then) and so it could not possibly have been a dream. He remembers thinking that if he could not get rid of a sodding ring he couldn't possibly tear the Mark from his forearm.
And there he sits again, working forever on that damned cabinet, straining his eyes behind detested lenses, twisting tiny silvery tools around with magic until the planes of the cabinet fell apart again and he had to start all over. Young and grown Draco simultaneously feel the impulse to smash it, and then—
Draco suddenly feels sick. He knows this memory. He feels sick, and still, he doesn't stop watching.
Draco the Younger tears away from his bench in frustration, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes. They come away wet, and he stares at them in surprise for a moment before jerking them angrily across his robes to dry them, and grabbing a fistful of cloth to clear his face of any trace dampness behind his glasses, forgotten on his face. Both Dracos are embarrassed. The younger's face is hectically red, twin spots of high color on his cheeks. He leans against the marble wall for a moment to compose himself, and then walks calmly from the room. The older Draco glances back, curious, and he is right: the polished door disappears the moment the younger is a few steps down the hallway.
He follows himself into the stairwell, where his younger self descends with a decent amount of dignity before his knees buckle and he sits down heavily on the last step. It's possible he might have done something embarrassing, but for—Draco bites his lip and closes his eyes, and hears the skid, the fumble and crash and sudden, surprised commingling of exclamations in the air, and then his own voice—
"What are you doing here, Potter?"
"Went for a walk," comes the reply, "—are those glasses, Malfoy?"
"I need them for reading. Not that you'd know anything about that," tries his younger self. "What was it you got in History of Magic, a D?"—but Draco can hear the humiliation and hopes that it wasn't so bare to Potter.
"I had a reason—"
"Sure, your little disfigurement. I suppose we can't let exams get in the way of vanity." God, surely he was cleverer than that at sixteen? But Potter always fell for the stupid lines. There it was, the huffing and puffing—
"I—that's—not the point!" A moment, and then, "Why are you here?"
And Draco watches himself lie, watches himself fuck Potter over with some drivel about a brothel, watches color rise in Potter's cheeks almost to match his own. He's not sure how much more he can watch.
"Will that be twenty-five or fifty?"
And those weren't even especially offensive words, he'd certainly uttered better, except that Potter just—attacked him, unreasonably, and they fought and fought and surely it was longer than that before that silence.
Neither Draco could breathe.
Draco turned his back on his memory and did not watch any more.
Nothing had happened, really, it was just—one of those little anomalies that came with being confined in a bloody mad castle. And Potter perhaps understood how responsibility could make one a bit—not oneself. Reasonable, he thought.
Draco watched him with his wife at the station. Ginny Potter retained none of the easy agility she'd had as an athlete. She looked exactly like her mother. He hadn't an inkling why Potter had married her. Potter looked just the same, if a bit less like an underfed kitten than he had when he was at school, but that could only be an improvement. Potter glanced at him and then looked away, and it was only proper—only polite—
Draco made his way across the station. There was a moment of uncomfortable expectation when he was still too far away to say anything and they just looked at him, as he pushed past Theodore Nott, standing with his hands in his pockets next to a man who'd been a Ravenclaw a year below them, pushing past the crowds and crowds, until he finally reached the Potters. Ginny suddenly gasped and rushed into the crowd, chasing the youngest of the brood. Harry half-chuckled, looked back at Draco, and swallowed it.
"Potter," he said, inclining his head.
"Malfoy," Harry replied, nodding in kind. Draco almost smiles for no particular reason.
Nothing happened, but standing in front of Potter at the station, he almost wishes something had.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the end of the series. Thanks so much for reading.