I don't really know how I got to the point where I was entirely too drunk and alone in a Death Eater's flat with him, but there it is.

Well, that's not quite true. I got here because I lived through the Second Wizarding War. Nothing about the Second Wizarding War was easy, and I developed coping mechanisms accordingly. Those coping mechanisms weren't suited for the time of (relative) peace that followed it, but by that point, they'd become second nature, so it was hard to break away from them.

When Draco Malfoy had come upon me in the Three Broomsticks one evening and insisted on trying to talk to me, I hadn't been interested in anything he had to say until I learned that he'd come up to me because he'd just gotten out of a meeting with my brother. I'd decided to let him talk to me, and he'd told me that he was passing information to my brother about some of his "old contacts" from the war. Once I'd confirmed that, I'd decided to meet him at the Three Broomsticks the following week to do it again.

That second encounter had started in a cordial enough way, devolved into an argument when I called his father a Death Eater and his mother a blood purity lunatic, and ended with some wild-eyed witch trying to stab him in the neck with a knife for passing information to the Ministry of Magic.

I still didn't like Death Eaters, and I still found Draco Malfoy to be a little off-putting, but his being the target of assassination attempts was vaguely endearing, so when he'd asked whether I wanted to do it again next week, I'd said yes despite the rancor.

Our conversation that time had been largely shallow, which I didn't like. Shallow conversations make me feel uncomfortable, because they usually meant that someone was trying to hide something. On the other hand, he'd nearly been poisoned, which I did like. Witnessing multiple attempts on his life had definitely leant credence to the idea that he really had genuinely fucked over some of Voldemort's supporters, which meant that he probably wasn't that bad. When he'd said that he was planning to lay low for awhile, I'd offered to come to his flat for a drink the following Thursday instead.

I didn't get drunk the first time, obviously. I've grown to be somewhat self-destructive, not outright stupid. I might have the second time if I hadn't stormed out cursing Death Eaters before finishing my first drink.

(I can't curse Slytherins. I love my brother too much. Otherwise I might, though. Every house has its morally bankrupt assholes - I no longer spoke to one of the girls I'd shared my dormitory in Ravenclaw with because she was prided herself on being "above" emotions during the war - but Slytherin seems to have the most.)

When I knocked on Draco Malfoy's door the next Thursday, he answered it almost immediately. "Hey," he said, stepping back. "I wasn't sure you'd come. You were pretty pissed at me last week."

"If you don't want me to be pissed at you, don't be a dick." I slouched down the short hallway and threw myself onto his couch.

"I wasn't - oh, whatever." He leaned against the doorframe. "What do you want?" I shrugged and brushed past him into the flat, and after a moment, the door closed behind me. I turned into his living room, and he continued down the hallway to the kitchen.

The flat that Draco Malfoy was currently living in had seen better days. It had seen worse days, too - it wasn't dilapidated or anything - but the carpet was fraying just a little, and there were scuff marks on the door and by the single window on the far wall. He hadn't bothered to fix them - I doubted that he got enough company for anyone to notice, though I'd have thought he'd be vain enough to not want to live in such squalor.

His furniture was nice enough, though. Only the best, for Lucius Malfoy's little Death Eater son.

"Here." His footsteps had been quiet enough that I hadn't heard them, and I was always on high alert. That made me feel a little uneasy.

"Thanks." I took the bottle from him, popped off the top, and took a swig. "Any attempts on your life this week?"

"Not that you care, but yes. Some incompetent witch tried to shoot a killing curse at me. Thankfully, she had shit aim and probably couldn't have given me a nosebleed even if she'd hit me."

"I care." He gave me a skeptical look. "Not much, but I do. I'd probably go to your funeral." He snorted and took a sip of his beer. "It's good for you, you know."

"Having people trying to kill me is good for me?"

I shrugged. "You clearly need practice being brave. Now you're getting it. Congratulations. That's what happens when you're less of a scumbag than you used to be."

I half-expected him to get pissed at me, but he let out a loud snort instead. "You sound like a Gryffindor."

"Well, the Sorting Hat considered it." His eyes flickered over to me for a moment before going back to his beer. "My sorting took awhile."

"Yeah, I think I remember that." He shook his head and drained the rest of the bottle. It was fairly impressive, though I would never have admitted that to him. "The mighty really have fallen."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I snapped.

"I'm sitting here in my Fidelius-ed, untraceable flat in Muggle London getting drunk with a girl who was almost sorted into Gryffindor. This is kind of the definition of rock bottom."

"Better that than a girl who was sorted into Slytherin." Part of me regretted it; my brother was a Slytherin. Most of me didn't; my sister was a Slytherin, too.

He put his beer down on the table loudly enough that I jumped. "Okay, I need you to clear something up for me."

"I need you to not make loud sudden noises or stupid demands," I shot back. "I thought you were scarred by the war just like the rest of us, and didn't your mother ever teach you to ask nicely?"

For a moment, I thought he was going to start going on about my insulting his stupid blood purity asshole parents again - and, like, forgive me for not being a fan of cowards. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I took a swig of my cider while I watched him, curious to see whether he was about to pull the typical bullshit that he'd always pulled in school or if he really had changed.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "I didn't realize."

I shrugged and took another long drink.

"Can I ask you something?" He sounded much more measured now.

"Yes."

He hesitated. It was entertaining to see Draco Malfoy be tentative for once in his life - between that and the free alcohol, coming over tonight was worth it all on its own. "Why don't you like your sister?"

I studied him more closely. My sister was not a topic I liked to get into, not even with people I was close to - and while I didn't have very many close friends anymore, I wasn't desperate enough to consider a Death Eater a close friend, especially not someone who was as entitled as Draco Malfoy.

At least he'd stopped being quite so vain, though. His trousers were torn at one of the knees, and he needed a haircut; his blond hair hung over his eyes, and it looked messy. Not attractive, intentional messy - just hadn't been combed today messy.

"I need another drink," I said.

He sighed, reached over to grab my empty bottle, and plodded back down the hallway to his kitchen. It occurred to me that he was using a lot less magic than I'd have expected him to. I wasn't quite sure how to interpret that.

"Here," he said when he got back, thrusting the bottle in my face. I grabbed it and took the bottle opener from him, and my opinion of him went up just a little. I hated having people open bottles for me - you never knew what they might put in them - and he seemed to have picked up on that all on his own.

I glanced at his perpetual long sleeves when he turned around. That always helped center me every time I started thinking that Draco Malfoy might be a halfway decent human being.

He had a dark mark. Good people would die before they let someone give them a dark mark. I felt like I was qualified to say that, too; no one had ever tried to give me a dark mark, but I'd been through enough shit during that year that I could comment on the gist of the thing, especially since my brother had not been popular with Voldemort's supporters.

To put it mildly.

"Why don't you like your sister?" he repeated, sitting down on the other side of the couch.

"Because my sister is a terrible person."

"Well, yeah," he admitted. "But she's still your sister."

I waited for him to finish, and then realized that that was all he had. "So?"

He sighed and took a swig of his beer. "I don't know. I mean, family is family, isn't it? If they're looking out for you, you look out for them."

I had no idea how to respond to that. It was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever heard, and there was so much that was wrong with it that I had no idea where to start.

Looking out for people wasn't the default in the first place - doing the right thing was. And having the same blood didn't entitle you to a damn thing if you weren't a good person who did the right thing, and my sister was a bad person who had done awful things. But if he didn't understand that, even now, I didn't have a chance in hell at convincing him.

I still had to push back, of course. Sometimes it wasn't about convincing people that they were wrong - it was about making it clear that what they were saying wasn't okay.

"No," I said after a minute. "Family doesn't mean anything if you're not a good person, and you don't look out for other people if it gets in the way of doing the right thing."

"Maybe you don't. I do."

And this was why Draco Malfoy was not actually a decent human being, even if he was putting on a good show. "Why are you passing information to the Ministry, if you're so focused on family loyalty?"

He sighed and brushed his hair out of his eyes. "Because I did a lot of things I wish I hadn't had to do, and I owe it to the people who recognized that I didn't like them."

"But you don't regret them."

"I don't see that I had much choice. They were going to kill me. They were going to kill my parents."

I drained the rest of my cider and stood up. "You're disgusting," I spat at him. "I can't believe I'm listening to a Death Eater justify himself. The least you could do is feel bad about it. People died because of you."

When I tried to take a step, I realized that I'd had far too much to drink in far too short a time. My stomach was hurting, and my head was spinning.

"Sit down," Draco Malfoy said. His expression looked almost concerned. "Look, of course I feel bad about it - and whatever my reasons are, I've helped the Ministry put a lot of people away, and I've nearly died because of it. I'm not a coward."

"Anymore." I didn't sit down.

He sighed. "Anymore," he agreed, though it was only after a very long pause. "Look, I'm going to get you some water. Sit -" He stopped himself. "Please sit down. You can't really Apparate or walk in this shape, and I'd be a shit person to let you. After you have some water, I'll take you home if you want."

The addition of 'please' made it a request rather than an order, so I sat. When he returned with water, he collapsed on the couch again as I sipped it. I felt like I should probably thank him, but he was still a Death Eater underneath it all - our conversation had made that clear - so I didn't.

"If it makes you feel better, it's not like I got out of the war easy," he commented. He was staring at his half-empty bottle, which he'd left on the side table, but he didn't touch it. "I got cursed, too. I wouldn't ever cast those on someone else again, no matter what. For fuck's sake, I do have limits, Astoria."

"What, did some first years give you a nosebleed?" I took a sip of water. "My heart is bleeding for you, really."

"I didn't ask for sympathy - and you know that I'm not just talking about a nosebleed."

It took me a minute to process that. After my brain caught up with my ears, I frowned at him. "You're lying," I said after a minute.

"I'm not." I was too dizzy to really properly focus on his face, but his voice sounded serious. "Do you want me to take you home?"

I was irrationally irritated that he'd drop that kind of bombshell and then try to get out of elaborating. "Who?" I shot back, ignoring his question entirely. "Which ones?"

"The Dark Lord. My aunt. My father. The Cruciatus curse. The Imperius curse. That's probably part of why my mother betrayed them, there at the end." He glanced over at me. "I haven't told anyone that, and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep whatever snarky comments you're about to make to yourself. Let's get you home." He made to get up.

"That's why I hate my sister," I said in a rush.

That made him stop, and after a moment, he collapsed back onto the couch. "What do you mean?"

"She made me leave, before the battle. I didn't want to, so she used the Imperius curse on me. Brendon - my brother found me, and she was too much of a coward to maintain the spell in front of him. She knew he'd be able to tell. So she let it go and he brought me with him anyway, because he said I was old enough to decide what I cared about and competent enough to give them a fight."

Draco Malfoy closed his eyes and rubbed a hand across his face. "That explains more than it doesn't," he said slowly.

Apparently, once I started talk about this, I couldn't stop. "Then she made fun of me for not being able to throw it off when my brother could've. That's why I left home."

His eyebrows shot up. "Of course you couldn't." There was significantly more feeling in his voice than I'd have expected. "You were - what, fifteen?" I shrugged, and he took that for the yes it was intended to be. "Your brother was already in his twenties and he was specifically trained in defense against the dark arts." He shook his head. "All right, I take everything I said about family back. I don't hate my father, but I still don't like to see him. It's not a thing you forget. And I'm glad my aunt is dead." He reached out, very tentatively, to squeeze my upper arm gently. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Nobody knows," I said. "Nobody can know. I don't know why I told you."

"I can keep a secret." He looked at my mostly-empty glass of water. "Here, I'll get you some more water. Then we'll get you home."

I watched him retreat down the hall one more time. Having unforgivable curses used on you didn't make you a decent human being by any stretch, but like assassination attempts by blood purity assholes, it did seem like a good start.

Even for a Death Eater.

A/N: "Fools and Heroes" and "Unforgivable" both cover what Astoria is talking about re: Daphne. Reviews appreciated!