2 Chapter (1)

Present Day

The house elves clambered around the kitchen in a sort ofanized chaos that Draco had grown ustomed to. He was sat at a dining table with the head elf, Tibsy, discussing the day ahead of them.

“Tibsy, remember we need a birthday cake at the Hufflepuff table tonight.”

“I remember, Mister Malfoy,” the elf reassured him.

“Chocolate? Or was it carrot cake?” Draco asked, skimming his notes.

“Chocolate, Mister Malfoy.”

“Right. Thank you, Tibsy.”

Draco smiled and looked back down to the list of foods he hadanized for today’s meals. He found himself asking questions just to have an excuse to speak. He had been less than enthusiastic when McGonagall had suggested he be in charge ofanizing menus for the Great Hall. He had never really thought about it beforehand, but someone had to decide what they would be eating every day. And it was something to do. He had done nothing but sit around in his quarters, since he had finally finished the long, tedious process of bing an Animagus.

He had agreed, simply because it meant he would be able to talk to someone, anyone, in his day to day life. He would see the headmaster for drinks asionally, but he could tell the meetings were always more of a welfare check than anything else. She was a nice enough woman, but she wasn’t his friend.

Spending all his time around house elves made him feel as though maybe he was going a bit funny, as well, but there was no one to check for him. He was terribly concerned that he would develop one of their strange speech patterns and be none the wiser because they were the only living things he spoke to.

He sighed, checking off the items he had gone over with Tibsy. He was done for the day. The job didn’t take long. He woulde to the kitchen around five each morning, eat and make sure that the house elves had gone over the list he had left for them the day before. They always sent a bit of what they had made to his room around meal times as well, which he appreciated. It wasn’t as though he could be walking back and forth across the castle all willy nilly throughout the day.

“I’ll be going then,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table.

“Will you be wanting to take a tea or a coffee, Mister Malfoy?” Tibsy asked, standing up in a hurry.

“Not today, thank you. Here’s tomorrow’s list, as well,” he added, pulling a piece of parchment from his bag.

The elf nodded and took the paper, tucking it into her pillowcase.

He walked over to the wall that lead to the hallway, glancing at the clock. It was only seven in the morning, and the number of people wandering around the halls would be few, the number wandering near the dungeons even fewer. Draco cast a disillusionment charm on himself and stepped out into the hallway. He hurried down the familiar path to his rooms, passing only five or six students in the process. They reacted to him about as much as they would have reacted to a breeze.

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Eventually, he reached the old Slytherin dungeons. The dorms had been moved above ground in an attempt to keep the Slytherins less secluded from the rest of the student body, although living in the dungeons had never seemed to condemn the Hufflepuffs in anyway. Still, he understood the sentiment, after the war. Now the old Slytherin dungeons were in a state of apparent disuse. Draco and McGonagall were the only ones to know the password.

Draco stopped in front of the stone wall and murmured, “Sepultura.”

The bricks began to shift, opening a hole in the wall, which he walked through, listening to the bricks click shut behind him. Themon room had changed quite a bit with Draco as its only inhabitant. There were fewer armchairs and many of the fixtures had followed the Slytherin dorms to their new home. Now the room was lined with books Draco had collected over the years. There was an area he had devoted to his potions equipment and on the opposite and of the room, a small dining table.

He made his way to the room that had always served as his bedroom, but now only housed one bed. He had taken the liberty of making his bed large,ically so, topensate for the abundance of space he now had. He collapsed onto the bed with a huff, feeling his eyelids grow heavy. He had developed a semi-nocturnal sleep schedule, as nighttime was the only time he was really free to leave the castle without risk of being spotted, and once he was outside, he was fine. No one looked twice at a white wolf pacing along the edges of the Forbidden Forest, except perhaps Hagrid. Anyway, students didn’t much bother with roaming the corridors late at night anymore. The children entering the school now had grown up with stories of Hogwarts as a war zone, which he supposed just didn’t breed troublemakers like Harry Potter.

Draco pushed the name out of his mind. He found it there more and more frequently as of late, if that was possible. Draco’s stomach tightened as he tried to et the article he had read in the Prophet the day before.

Potter Confirmed Bachelor? The headline rung through his mind again. He had broken up with the Weaselette shortly after Draco had “died.” Draco tried to tell himself that was a coincidence but a voice in somewhere in the deepest hollows of his heart whispered maybe it wasn’t. That voice apanied with claims made in the gossip rags he had unfortunately found himself reading for a lack of entertainment cemented his irrational hopes even further into his brain. He kept a scrapbook of articles and clippings that mentioned people he had gone to school with, as familiar names were the closest things he had to friends, but because Potter was the most frequently mentioned in the papers, it was quickly bing Harry Potter: A History. He looked at it so often now that he was certain he could recite most articles by heart. Particularly the ones about Potter, but he chose not to notice that correlation.

He lay on the bed, a particular article he had read nearly six months after he “died,” the one that planted the idea in his mind originally, which he wholeheartedly wished he had never read, running through his head.

Potter Carrying a Torch for Former Nemesis?

Sources close to the young wizard say a certain recent loss has much to do with the break up of Hogwarts sweethearts Harry Potter and Ginevra Weasley.

“I thought maybe the whole fixation he had on Malfoy in school would fade away as we got older,” the very, very close source says, “and certainly after he passed. Can’t do anything sneaky when he’s—well, when he’s not here.”

The source suspects there was something more to Potter and Malfoy’s rivalry in school, though perhaps only on Potter’s behalf.

“It would be different if he couldn’t get over the war. That I understand. I’m not over it myself, and don’t know that I ever will bepletely. But the war hardly seems to be what really got to him. It was Malfoy. He just can’t move past it. It’s a bit embarrassing, being jealous of corpse,” the redheaded source concluded.

The article had been apanied by a photograph of the two of them, the day they had exchanged wands at the muggle coffee shop. In it, Harry was holding Draco’s hand where it rest on his shoulder, the other boy looking up at Draco with an easy smile on his face. Draco couldn’t deny it looked particularly incriminating.

Draco remembered losing feeling in his hands the first time he had read it. It was heavily implied that the source was Ginny herself, but surely, magazines that report on subjects such as that were not to be trusted. He had leaked false information about Potter back in school himself, and he knew how easy it was to get something published if you wanted to ruin someone, especially someone who held as much public interest as Potter. What scared him most, however, was that he wanted it to be true. He knew Potter had been to his funeral, had been one of the last to leave, in fact, outstayed only by his mother and Minerva McGonagall. He also knew that Harry Potter, the boy who lost nearly everything but never shed a tear, was weeping rather openly at the event. It had crossed his mind, of course, that perhaps it was a culmination of events that lead to this display of emotion. He would have continued to think so if it weren’t for this article, apanied with the fact that nearly three years after the articles publication, Potter hadn’t dated anyone publically. Draco found it hard to believe that a man approaching twenty-two would not be caught once in a while in some sort of fling. But Potter never was, which either meant he was Polyjuicing heavily, or he just didn’t go out.

Draco was broken out of this oft visited train of thought by a sudden blow to his stomach.

“Omph, I was sleeping,” he groaned, opening his eyes to see the green eyes of his calico staring back at him. The look she gave him in return seemed to say she knew full well he hadn’t been. “I was,” he insisted, defensive to her silent judgement.

She mewed at him and he sighed.

“Alright, alright,” he said, scratching between her ears. She had been a gift from McGonagall, and he loved her dearly. He had been slightly wary of her being an animagus, as the markings around her eyes looked very much like glasses, but McGonagall insisted she was just a cat, she had made sure of it. He was onlypletely convinced when he became an Animagus himself, as her energy did not feel like McGonagall’s. When McGonagall had told him her name was Harriet, Draco was sure it was some cruel joke, but there was no hint of laughter in McGonagall’s eyes. She had given him a bespectacled cat named Harriet and seemingly thought nothing of it. Though he supposed most normal people would think nothing of it. All the same, he had taken to calling her Potter, as she was just as hard headed and rebellious.

“I’ll let you out, but please, don’t bring any mice back,” he pleaded with her, throwing his legs over the edge of the bed.

She hopped down in pursuit of him, following him to the hole in the wall that began to click open at his touch. She meowed again.

“I mean it, Potter, no mice or you’re grounded,” Draco replied, knowing that even if he didn’t let her out, she would find another way, bullying the house elves into letting her through when they came to gather his dishes.

She mewled again in response, sounding none too threatened, and dashed out into the hall. Draco closed the entrance again and dragged himself back to bed.

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamt of Potter, stumbling out of the Forbidden Forest, bloodied and in the same clothes he had been wearing in the last battle, while Draco was on one of his nightly walks of the grounds, only this time as a human. He collapsed several feet ahead of Draco, who broke into a sprint, falling to his knees at Potter’s side, his hands frantic as he searched for a source of the blood, but found none.

“I knew it,” Potter had muttered, lifting his hand to cup Draco’s cheek and stopping him in his tracks.

“Knew what?” Draco had asked, feeling cold all ove