Disclaimer in 1st chapter
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"You stupid prat!" I yelled across the dinner table, shoving my hair out of my face with frustrated fingers.
"You are a wretched little girl! Who are you kidding, playing house in this crap little hovel in the country? You need to learn how to grow up!" he yelled back, banging his hand down on the table.
"I am NOT a little girl! And which of us is avoiding things again?" I dropped my voice to an angry, mocking whisper. "You're the one who can't even live in his own house."
He stood, staring at me, before bending over the table towards me.
"At least I'm not throwing my life away," he said coldly, turning and storming outside. I heard the sharp -crack- as he disapparated, going god-knows-where.
It had been a few weeks since I had come back. Although a year had passed, there was still something weird hanging in the air, so we didn't talk much and spent a lot of our time alone. I still prepared dinner some nights, but he didn't bring wine, and the meal was tense and short.
But we didn't usually fight. We treated one another with a formal, cordial courtesy, and generally managed to avoid each other well enough. I could feel how much he wanted to leave some nights, it thrummed in the air like a not-so-secret secret. But we both knew he had nowhere to go. He had finally sold Spinner's End, he told me, just after he had moved in that first summer. Because he had thought he had found somewhere he could be comfortable. And as he had said before, no one would hire him, so he had no other options.
That was the source of this argument. He had seen the check the Ministry sent to me every month, an absurd amount of money. He asked what I had been doing with the money, and I told him that most of the checks were stashed in a kitchen drawer. And he started to yell.
It made sense, now that I was feeling calmer. He had grown up with nothing, with less than nothing, and for all of his adult life had had nothing as well. He had spent his life living in the same school he attended as a child, the school he hated, being looked down upon by everyone both before and after the war. He had done so much more for our side than Harry had done, and certainly more than myself. So when he saw how much the Ministry was handing everyone but him for their efforts, while he had to cram up inside a little rundown cottage with his Muggleborn former student, unable to even pay rent, it made sense that his patience had snapped.
I sighed. I was tired, and everything was overwhelming lately. Although a chill had begun to pervade the late August air, I took a blanket and a torch and my copy of "Hogwarts, A History" out to my garden chair.