*** Day 93 - Harry ***

"You're a good healer," Harry commented, staring blankly down at his arms. Thin white lines marked his skin like a grid, but they were fainter than they had any right to be, like old wounds long forgotten. They were hardly the kind of evidence he should be baring after dealing with Carrow's twisted mind. The things that man could do with a knife…a shiver ran down the length of Harry's spine. He couldn't let himself dwell on it. He couldn't let himself live only in that room that drank his screams. That person who spent Wednesdays with Carrow—that wasn't him. He couldn't afford for it to be.

"Why didn't you heal yourself like this?" Harry asked, desperate for a distraction. Sadly, Malfoy was the best distraction he could get. "Earlier, when…when they hurt you."

Malfoy shifted uncomfortably in his overlarge chair, his fingers tensing ever so slightly around the binding of his book. "Healing takes a lot of energy. I didn't have a lot of energy."

Nodding, Harry hummed. "Right." And there the silence was again, cold and aching to consume him. Harry felt sick with it. There were too many things the silence threatened to let in. He had to keep talking—he couldn't let his mind run back to that dark room soaked to the foundation with blood. "Well, um, how did you learn?"

"My mother taught me," Malfoy answered. Then his lips quirked, pulling down at the edges. Old leather creaked as he shifted his weight in his chair. "She…used to be quite sickly."

Used to be? "What changed?"

"So many questions this morning, Potter." Malfoy's eyes flashed silver in the afternoon sun. Gingerly he closed his book and set it down on a nearby table, sighing heavily. "Snape."

The name was enough to fully reign in Harry's attention. And suddenly everything beyond the bright, quiet room faded away, and it was just him and Malfoy and the space in between. "Snape?"

"That's what changed."

"Oh." There was a beat of silence, followed by, "Were you sleeping with him?"

Malfoy actually had the humility to blanch.

Well, that explained a lot. For someone who liked to run his mouth, Malfoy sure liked to avoid a lot of subjects, but none so avidly as Snape. The first time Harry had brought the Potion's Master up, Malfoy had mentioned that he loved him, but Harry had been too preoccupied at the time to realize what those words had really meant. But as the weeks had passed, Harry hadn't been able to get that conversation out of his mind. He'd always had his speculations about Malfoy's preferences—the boy color coordinated his cufflinks with his tie for Merlin's sake—but Snape was another matter entirely. Just the thought of Snape being with someone like that made Harry's stomach turn.

Preferences aside though, it was an odd pairing, especially considering the fact that Snape was so…oily, and Malfoy was so…Harry grimaced, not liking where that thought was headed.

"It," Malfoy's mouth opened and closed several times, "depends on your definition I guess. We were…" He seemed to struggle with finding the right word, "together a handful of times. Everything was so hectic back then—we rarely got to see each other, but…he visited me when he could."

Harry did his best to suppress the urge to gag. "But he was so old."

Instead of the brutal glare Harry expected, Malfoy just shrugged. "I suppose he was, if you notice that sort thing."

"How could you not notice that sort of thing?"

Malfoy looked at him, his pale face stretched with a grief he rarely let slip. "I noticed that he was brilliant. I noticed that he saved my mother's life just as he saved mine. I noticed how much he sacrificed for other people, and how little he allowed himself to have. He was one of the greatest men I have ever known—probably the greatest. Considering how I was…I was lucky that he cared for me at all."

Harry lingered on the edge of the wards, wishing for some reason that he could be closer to the other boy. He wanted to study Malfoy's expression more closely—memorize the way it softened the hard lines around his eyes. "It sounds like you and I knew two very different people."

"It sounds like you didn't know him at all."

Harry huffed, dregs of residual anger creeping into his veins. "I know that he claimed to be on our side and then murdered Dumbledore in cold blood."

Malfoy was on the border of the wards so fast that Harry was sure he must've apparated there. Grey eyes sparked like lightning in a stormy sky and Harry stepped back despite himself. "You shut your mouth!" Malfoy hissed darkly. "You have no idea what you're talking about!"

Surprise quickly contorted itself into a familiar, bitter anger as Harry growled deep in the back of his throat. "I watched Snape kill him! I was there! You were there!"

"Snape killed Dumbledore because Dumbledore wanted him to!"

For a moment, time stopped. Air caught in Harry's lungs, as if it couldn't escape. "What?"

Malfoy paused, his eyes moving haphazardly across Harry's face. He seemed somehow to look simultaneously both regretful and relieved. "Snape was a double agent—he was working for your lot the whole time."

"No," Harry shook his head. "No that's…that's not right. No, Snape betrayed the Order. We thought he was with us but he was actually—"

"No! He was deep undercover with us—deeper than anyone else could've gotten and he was trapped there. You think Dumbledore could've known all the things he did without someone on the inside? Snape told Dumbledore what the Dark Lord had asked me to do our sixth year, and Dumbledore made him promise to do whatever it took to protect his cover, because it was all your side fucking had on us! What happened up in the astronomy tower—they orchestrated the whole bloody thing! Dumbledore knew he was a dead man walking anyway! You saw his hand! He had months left—weeks even!"

"I saw—" Harry broke off, too many thoughts swirling in his head at once. "No, you're lying. Snape killed him—how do you even know any of this?"

A muscle in Malfoy's jaw tensed. For the first time he seemed to realize how close he was standing to the wards. "Snape told me."

"He…told you," Harry repeated, disbelief tinting his voice.

Malfoy's gaze fell to the rug, and Harry could see his robes trembling around his wrists and ankles. "The summer after Dumbledore died, he hid me away for a couple months," the words were slow and etched with a deep-seated pain that seemed to be seeping out of his bones. And more words just kept pouring out, hot and serrated from lack of oxygen. "I had failed my mission, but Snape…he protected me from the Dark Lord—told him it wasn't my fault. I was scared, and…I think he was scared too, but he protected me. And we found a sort of comfort in that—it made us trust each other in ways we couldn't trust anybody else. After Dumbledore died…it wrecked him, Potter. Dumbledore was the only man who knew what he really was. Who he really was. And in an instant that was gone, and he had no one except me. And some fucking replacement I turned out to be…" Malfoy's eyes jerked away, glistening wetly in the sunlight. "He died," Malfoy's voice cracked, "and there was nothing I could do to stop it."

"But why?" Harry pressed. "Why would he have been a double agent for our side? He hated me. I know he hated me—I saw it in his mind. And he hated the softness of Dumbledore's politics, and he hated muggles as much as any other Death Eater. What reason would he have had to help us?"

Malfoy looked at him. "Didn't you say he left you some memories?"

Harry's stomach went cold. And like the flick of the first domino, the pieces started to fall.

Look at me, Snape had said.

"There was only one person in this world," Malfoy said softly, "that Snape ever loved."