THINGS THEY REGRET

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.

A/N: Spoilers, seventh year fic, not compatible with HBP or DH, but this chapter contains DH spoilers. Thanks to all my reviewers and especially to my previewers, Bellegeste and Cecelle.

Watching Harry pace around the dorm, Neville wondered how long they had before Dean and Seamus came in from kicking a football outside and Ron finished snogging Hannah in some deserted alcove.

"I don't trust him. I'll never trust him. His dad's a Death Eater and so are half his family and he's just like them. He wanted the Heir of Slytherin to kill Hermione in second year. He wanted to know who it was so he could help him do it," Harry growled.

Neville sighed. This might be useless, but he couldn't just give up.

"He was twelve. Twelve-year-olds say a lot of silly things they regret by the time they turn seventeen. And she'd humiliated him about his place on the team. He was angry. Haven't you ever wished someone would suffer or even die for no better reason than they hurt your feelings? He doesn't want that now."

"I suppose he told you so!" Harry sneered.

"He didn't have to. I've spent most of my time at Hogwarts in the shadows, watching other people. It felt safer that way. Some I watched because I admired." Neville picked up his pillow and fluffed it. This was a time for honesty. "You and Ron and Hermione, for instance. Some I watched because I was afraid. Like Draco." He shrugged. "I haven't been afraid of Draco for a while. I haven't had to be."

"You keep saying he's changed, but he hasn't. He tried to ambush me on the train at the end of fifth year!"

Neville sighed and felt in his pocket for Trevor. He wasn't there. Not again! He scanned the room and decided to start with looking under the beds. Once he had a clear view of Trevor's position, he could Accio him without risk of bashing him into obstacles on the way.

"Well, yeah. You put his dad in Azkaban. Did you expect him not to care? But maybe you hexed some sense into him that day, because he hasn't hexed you since. Hasn't tried to. Doesn't even really want to any more," he said, getting down on his knees.

"He punched me the other day," Harry said, looping up the curtains on Neville's bed out of the way.

"You'd have punched yourself the other day," Neville pointed out. It wasn't only Draco that said silly things he regretted or wished death on people who disliked him.

Harry had no answer to that. He moved to the next bed then the next, looping the curtains as he went.

"Look, you're great blokes, you and Ron, you really are," Neville said. It was easier to say these things while hunting a toad together. Trevor seemed to have an instinct when his absence was needed. "But you're as blind as bats about other people. I'm not saying Draco was worth having as a friend when we were first years. He wasn't. But a lot of that posing and taunting and trying to get you in trouble was hurt feelings because, according to him, you hated him on sight."

"He insulted Ron."

"Before then. In Madam Malkin's. He tried everything to impress you and you just froze him out."

Harry made a face and said, "He reminded me of Dudley. My cousin. A mean, spoilt bully."

Trevor was waiting under the fourth bed they checked. Neville put him in his pocket and stood up.

"Fair enough, when he was eleven. That's what I thought about him too. But are you sure it's Draco you're seeing when you look at him now? He's not your cousin and he's not that eleven-year-old brat you first met. Look again, Harry. That's all I'm saying."

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VAMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Hogwarts students watched in terror this week, writes Rita Skeeter, Feature Reporter, as apprentice-teacher Madam Hermione Snape, nee Granger, let slip her husband's dark secret. The eleven-year-olds cowered as Madam Snape revealed that her husband had risen from the dead to walk amongst them.

"Everyone warned us that Professor Snape was the Bat of the Dungeons," quavered one of the horrified witnesses, "But we didn't know they meant literally."

"He's always been the scariest teacher in the school," confirmed another. "His eyes are as black as empty tunnels and when he looks at you funny, your insides freeze. If I didn't chew garlic every morning before class, I wouldn't be alive to talk to you today."

Readers will recall that the plain but ambitious teen, who gained notoriety for her gold-digging grabs at Harry Potter and Bulgarian Quidditch star Viktor Krum, married Potions master and head of Slytherin Professor Severus Snape in a private ceremony shortly before her classmates began seventh year. Her eagerness is now explained. Vampiric powers of enthrallment are well documented in Dark Arts literature and Professor Snape's long-held wish to exchange his potionmongering for a deeper engagement with Dark Arts was doubtlessly the reason he turned his attention to the untalented teen.

When queried about the latest in a string of dangerously unstable appointments, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore refused comment…

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'Risen from the dead indeed! It was a Boggart, for goodness sake!'

Hermione didn't stop fuming until the Halloween Feast that night. Every lesson she gave was a distraction from wishing she could have the end of fourth year back in order to crush the beetle she'd foolishly kept alive in a jar.

Somehow, the students seemed rowdier than usual. She took points from all four houses with savage satisfaction, although Gryffindor didn't have enough points to lose and she had to switch to giving them detentions as a substitute.

Then she walked into the Great Hall and stood for a moment, surveying the thousands of bats swooping over pumpkin candle-holders and fluttering from walls and ceilings and, despite herself, a grin tugged at the corner of her mouth.

"What's one more bat in this crowd?" came a voice from just behind. She looked around and down at Filius and the grin won.

"Serve them right if he really did turn into a bat," she said, "and they wouldn't know which was which. I've half a mind to send these bats to all the dorms after the feast and see if any of the kids can sleep."

"Better not," said Filius placidly as they walked together to the head table. "A sleepy student is a cranky student, and a cranky student is an uncooperative wand-waver who's just as likely to set fire to his feather as to levitate it."

"I suppose you're right."

She was quite hungry. It wasn't till she looked up from two helpings of roasted pumpkin, one thick slice of beef covered in gravy, and three jacket potatoes that she noticed her husband's plate held nothing but two green peas that he was pushing around with his fork.

"Is everything all right?" she asked. He didn't even eat peas. He said they gave him indigestion.

He glanced up and dully down again.

"It's nothing," he said and mashed one pea with the back of his fork. "Nothing that concerns you."

"It's not about the article, is it?" she said quickly. "Will it cause you any trouble? They must know it's all rubbish."

"They do, of course. Don't coddle me, I'm just not hungry."

She kept an eye on him after that. When he didn't take even a slice of his favourite treacle tart, her jam roly-poly congealed in her mouth and her dinner sat like a lead weight in her gut.

"Was it something I did?" she asked, as soon as they were safely in their own rooms with the door shut behind them.

Severus walked over to the empty fireplace and stared down into the grate.

"Nothing to do with you," he said. "Nothing for you to worry about."

"I can't help worrying, when I see you like this. Please don't tell me nothing's wrong, when I know it is."

He sighed, still watching the empty grate.

"I did promise to be honest with you," he said at last. "Honest in everything of a personal nature. I cannot deny that this fits into that category, however much I might wish otherwise. Very well." He bowed his head. "This is an anniversary of sorts for me. The day that my sins came back to haunt me. The day that my best friend died."

She gasped and stumbled to his side, knocking two books off one of the stacks on the way. She reached out her hand to his arm, but didn't quite dare touch.

"Oh Severus," she breathed. "I'm so sorry."

He shrugged. "It was a long time ago."

"Not long enough to forget," she said softly.

"No, never that." His fists were clenched at his sides. "It was my fault. I was the wicked fool who gave the Dark Lord the information, never dreaming that it meant – someone I cared about. If not for me, they might not have died."

"You didn't know you were betraying your friend," Hermione said helplessly. They?

He whirled on her and put hands out as if to shake her, but instead he let them fall and strode past her to the table, where he stood fingering rolls of parchment essays.

"I knew I was betraying someone!" he said. "Don't try to excuse me. Nothing can ever excuse me."

"Oh Severus," she said again.

"Finding out was a wake-up call," he went on expressionlessly. "A reminder that what I was doing had consequences, real consequences for real people. Terrible consequences. That I was as responsible as the people who wielded the wands and sacked the houses. I turned myself in to Albus, but I couldn't undo the damage. I couldn't save her."

On her way to his side, Hermione stopped in her tracks. "Her?" she said. "Your best friend was a girl?"

He lifted his head and looked a very long way down his nose.

"Why should that surprise you? Are not your best friends male? Do you think yourselves the only ones ever able to find companionship in a person of the opposite sex?"

"It shouldn't surprise me," she admitted slowly, "but it did, all the same. I suppose I always assumed that Lucius Malfoy was your best friend. Or another of the Death Eaters." She took the last few steps in a rush and put her arms around his waist, resting her head in the centre of his back. He stiffened and then relaxed. "Was she one?"

She knew her mistake immediately by the tension in his arms.

"Never! Of all things, she loathed Dark Arts and their practitioners."

She nodded against his shoulder blade and prayed that her body was giving him the comfort her words could not. When he turned in her embrace and sank his face into her hair, she knew she was helping. They were silent for a long time.

"She loathed Dark Arts, but you became a Death Eater?" she mused, then started as she realised she'd said it aloud. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Don't tell me if you don't want to."

"She had not considered me a friend for a long time by then. I said something – unforgivable, when we were sixteen, and she never spoke to me again."

Her arms tightened around him.

"Oh Severus." It was such a useless thing to say, but she couldn't think of a better. "She never forgave you?"

"I told you, I said something unforgivable."

"Nothing's unforgivable between friends," she muttered under her breath, but he heard.

"I called her a filthy little Mudblood," he said, drawing a little back to watch her.

"Then she should have slapped your face," Hermione said. "But still have forgiven you, if you apologised."

The corner of his mouth drew in.

"That's what you'd have done," he said. "You've forgiven your friends everything."

She almost said, "Of course," but that would have been incredibly tactless, so she said nothing. After a while, he sighed and pulled away.

"Did you love her?" she said, feeling ridiculously bereft, then bit her lip. She hadn't meant to ask. Luckily, he didn't take offence.

"Yes," he said. "Desperately."

She gulped.

"Do you still?" she blurted out.

"For a long time, she was everything," he said frankly. "But not now."

"What was she like?"

He walked away to the far bookshelf.

"Not as loyal as you."

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Of course she couldn't leave it like that.

"A Muggleborn witch, the same age as you. And she died on Halloween, just like Harry's mother. I wonder if they were friends."

He grimaced and she knew.

"Oh." She gulped and stared and gulped again. "Then when you look at him…"

He closed his eyes. "I remember everything."

It was ridiculous how much she seemed to be crying this year. She scrubbed viciously at her nose and eyes.

"It isn't fair. It wasn't his fault."

He leaned his forehead against the edge of the bookshelf he'd been glaring at. "She died to save him! And he doesn't even care. Look at him! Lazy, sloppy, ignorant, and glorying in his ignorance! He hasn't even come back for his Occlumency lessons since his last ridiculous tantrum. He wasn't worth her death."

"Don't say that!" she told him, bending to pick up the books she'd earlier knocked off their stacks. Some of the other stacks were teetering a bit precariously too. She moved to straighten them. "You don't even know what he's like, you only think you do. But you never see past his parents when you look at him. He does care. He just doesn't show it to you."

"Does he care about Lily? Has he ever spent a moment to wonder about her? Or is it only his father he memorialises?"

Was his voice muffled because he was talking into a shelf or for another reason entirely? She bit her lip.

"Boys think more about their fathers at this age," she said. "If he was ten years younger or ten years older, perhaps." She took a deep breath. "He's been my best friend since he came to rescue me from a troll in first year, when he didn't even like me."

"You lied about seeking the troll." He glanced at her. A red pressure line marked his forehead from left brow to hairline.

"Yes, but not about the rescue. He's brave and loyal and self-sacrificing and he has this saving people thing that won't let him rest when he sees someone in danger. Look at him again, Severus. Please."

A/N Neville here presents Draco's perspective of his first interactions with Harry, which is, unsurprisingly, quite different from Harry's (PS, chs 5 and 6). Draco is unaware that his voice might strike a stranger "bored" and "drawling"; he knows Harry took him in immediate dislike, but has never understood why.

At Madam Malkin's, Draco opened the conversation and tried several topics that he expected to interest another wizard-bred child, but Harry responded with silence or monosyllables. When brooms, Quidditch and House-speculation had alike failed, Draco tried street-sights (Hagrid) and family, which elicited longer answers, but only of the conversation-stopper variety. On the Hogwarts train, Draco tried again with stronger interest (famous Harry Potter was a more enticing prospect than random fellow-student met in shop) and was again rebuffed. Subsequently, Draco kept bothering Harry because he preferred to receive negative attention than to be ignored.