Three Years Ago

It's over. The war is over.

I keep hearing myself saying it, but it doesn't feel real yet. Not to me. My war isn't over.

In the jostling and weeping and wailing after the final battle, through the haze of dust and smoke and tears, I see families embrace with relief and yet we, the three of us, we sit as though frozen in slow motion, slowly swallowed up in dread.

Mother wants to slip away. Father refuses. I guess I want to go, too, but where would we go? We are outcasts, now. Our accounts frozen. Our home, a crime scene.

I gaze over at the Weasleys, huddled around the lifeless body of one of the twins, I'm not sure which one.

The press of bodies shifts slightly, then, and I catch a glimpse of her kneeling beside the boy.

Ginny.

Her brown eyes glisten with tears. She sees me see her, and doesn't turn away from me. All of her sorrow, and wrath, and hate, and love, all of it, seems to pour out over me, even from across the room, and I accept it, all of it, because…

Because she sees me, and doesn't turn away.

It's actually hours before we finally leave that place. No one seems to think we belong, but no one wants to do anything without checking with Boy Who Lived Again, who, shortly after his great victory, is again no where to be found.

I know where he's gone, though, this time. And I find him. It takes the better part of an hour to trudge across the pock-marked, corpse-strewn battle field, and even under the cover of a pretty strong disillusionment charm, I feel the constant vigilance of the mourning masses.

The shack reeks of blood and bile. I've never actually set foot inside of this place before, but I know this is where Severus is. This is where he died. Father told me about those last harrowing hours in the early morning. And when I heard Potter use the past tense "Snape was"… I knew.

I trudge up the stairs, following the sound of sniffling and smell of death. I don't knock, but I don't have to, Potter hears me, and before I see him he's whipped around and drawn his wand. Which is, as it turns out, my wand.

I'm not sure I want it back now, anyway.

I look away from his blazing eyes and turn to the body of my godfather. And collapse.

I wanted it to be untrue.

Only now do I realize how desperately I'd hoped to be wrong.

But there is no hope. Severus is dead. I'm sitting on my knees in a pool of his blood and I can stop myself from reaching out to touch his cold, lifeless cheek.

And in a moment of weakness, I drawn my thumb across his bottom lip, under the pretext of wiping away a smear of blood, but I know I've lingered too long there, finger trembling, and when I look up I catch Potter's eye, and I know he knows.

But I refuse to look away.

And I can see him decide to share, in that moment right after our eyes meet. A hero's solitary task becomes an expression of generosity.

And I accept.

Then I watch him silently stand and begin siphoning the blood off of the moudly old wooden floors and walls, drawing it out into a floating bubble, where it hangs in mid air.

I take out my mother's wand and begin to repair the wounds. His hands, his face, and finally, the gaping gashes at his neck. Healing charm won't work on the dead, so I stitch him up with strings of magical thread – it won't hold for long, but long enough.

Potter pours his blood back in. It's an odd thing to watch, as it drains back into his body through his mouth. I imagine, for a split second, that this will bring him back. But of course it won't. Nothing will ever bring him back.

We cast cleaning charms over the body together, and levitate him, and bring him back the castle.

Potter doesn't speak, but he doesn't seem to mind having a second pallbearer.

People look at us curiously when we walk through the doors of the Great Hall. Well, they look at Potter with awe and admiration, as always, but they look at me curiously. Or rather, hatefully.

Someone tries to hex me, but Potter glares at him and he ducks away.

We carry the body to the place where the other Heroes of the Resistance are now laid out before the many, many mourners. The wailing has stopped, mostly, replaced by a tense silence as Golden Boy and Death Eater together carry the loyally disloyal Severus Snape to join all the others who died for the Light.

And when we set him down and finite the levitation spell in unison, the tension grows still greater, as people have now remembered who I am.

Potter looks up at catches my eye, and there is a fierceness in his gaze that makes me almost shrink away. But he is not angry. No. There is something else there. A promise, perhaps.

He nods.

I nod.

And then the silence turns to a wave of murmuring and talking and renewed weeping as the crowd embraces their Hero and I slip away again to find my parents, awkwardly displaced amid the weeping masses, sitting stiffly together on a bench at what was once the Slytherin table.

I don't see Potter again for another two weeks. We have been staying with the Barnabaal's in their summer estate in Wales, waiting for news and watching the trials. Some errant clans of Death Eaters are still on the loose, and so too are vigilante groups hunting them down with the blessing of Shacklebolt's cobbled-together Ministry.

We try to stay out of the way.

When the Aurors finally do come, no one is surprised. Except perhaps, surprised that it took them so long.

Mother struggles not to cry. Father stands and stiff and defiant. I suppose I'm somewhere in between.

The charges against me are much less egregious, but I hardly expect leniency.

We are brought to separate cells to await our pre-trial hearings. It's another three days before I see my parents again, and that is the last time I ever see them.

I'm standing across the courtroom listening to the Judge, flanked by members of the War and Reparations Council. They are to be held at Azkaban until their trials at the end of the summer.

Mother weaps. Father stares blankly.

And then they call me.

Only now, as I trudge, shackled and bound, to the horrifying spotlight of the witness chair, do I see him.

Potter.

He's sitting stiff-jawed, eyes blazing, beside Granger, Weasley, and… Ginny. Granger is shuffling a million papers of notes and I have no idea what they are doing here as the Judge begins to read out the charges against me and Granger begins scribbling them down.

The next hour or so is a blur of heated argument and hushed whispers.

It takes me a while to realize that they are here for me. Potter speaks about my mother, speaks about that night at the Manor, struggles to overcome his natural ineloquence, and when that fails, Granger takes over with a barrage of legal precedents from the first Wizarding War.

And when that, too, seems likely to fail, Ginny stands up and talks about life at Hogwarts during the war. About the times (had there really been so many?) that I had looked the other way, failed to report, failed to reprimand, refused to curse her, and her posse of student resistance.

Until now, I'd not realized she knew.

But when I catch her eye mid-sentence as she recalls the night I caught her sneaking through the ever shifting doorway to the Room and said nothing, I see that she remembers everything.

And then, finally, she appeals to the memory of Severus Snape.

Which prompts Potter to find his tongue again, as he explains that Severus, too, was mistrusted, but that he, Potter, would vouch for me just as Dumbledore had once vouched for Severus.

The court confers with itself, as the on-lookers hold a collective breath hovering in the air.

And then, "Draco Malfoy is released into the custody of Mr. Harry James Potter, pending his trial, scheduled for August 1st."

A stunned silence descends.

Released?

Into… custody?

But Potter seems relieved, as though this is what he'd hoped for. Or more than he'd hoped for. He hugs Granger and Weasley, and then takes Ginny's hand. But she isn't looking at him, she is looking at me, smiling faintly, and I try to smile back.

What have they done?

And what now?

Grimmauld Place.

I'd never seen the inside of that home, but I'd heard about it my whole life. Mother spoke about it with a fond fear – that ancestral seat of the Black Family.

I think I'm glad it's gone to Potter now.

Granger and Weasley have shacked up in a downstairs suite near the kitchen, apparently, but they spend most of the day at the Burrow, from what I gather.

I've been given a room on the second floor, across from Potter, and down the hall from Ginny.

He broods and sleeps. She smokes.

I join her.

The first night, I catch her stealing up the stairs to what was once Sirius Black's room, in little more than a t-shirt and panties. She sees me watching her, but doesn't stop.

So I follow her up, up, up to the attic bedroom. Her cold little feet pad softly across the smooth, worn wood floors until she reaches the window, and expertly flips the latch and climbs out onto the little ledge.

She sits with one knee pulled up to her chest, and the other leg dangling down over the roof of that anciet wreck.

I climb up and join her, because she doesn't seem to want me not to.

And that's when she pulls a worn pack of muggle cigarettes out of her bra puts one in her mouth, and offers me one, a quizzical, almost confessional look on her face.

I take the cigarette, though I've never smoked before.

She lights hers with her wand and then directs me to touch the tip of mine to the tip of hers in a strangely intimate gesture.

I inhale and immediately burst into a coughing fit.

A coughing fit that turns to laughter.

Not loud laughter. Quiet, hardly worthy of being called laughter, really, except that I haven't laughed in so, so, long, and I find I can't stop.

And now she's laughing, too. Giggling absurdly. And tears are streaming down my face, and I take a more dignified drag, and gaze at her warm brown eyes, and suddenly, neither of us is laughing anymore.

She doesn't kiss me that night. But she will, two or three nights later.

Her lips are softer than I'd imagined.

When she parts them, and my tongue touches hers for the first time, I feel the thrill of something unfamiliar and overpowering, but I can't help wondering what he would think, knowing we two were here together, without him.

And then I draw her tongue into my mouth and forget everything else but this.