分卷阅读5（1 / 2）

They are still in the room, but now they are mostly quiet, calmer, working their way through apologies. It’s funnier than they should be, but when you peel away all the bigotry and what happened their sixth year, it really just was two kids being petty.

“Do you remember,” Draco choked out, wheezing, the laugh still going on after they recounted stories of Hagrid’s Care of Magical creatures class. “Those badges I made for the triwizard tournament? God, I spent ages working on finding the right spell, made them all myself, and you were so mad at Ron that you barely even seemed to care.”

“I cared,” Harry admitted, remembering the words flashing around the potions classroom. “But they were funny.”

Everything was funny, now, even the time that Ron cursed himself into belching up slugs, but it was also sort of sad, once they worked through their problems and got to the legacy of bigotry waiting underneath. “Do you remember when we met on the train?” Harry asked quietly. “With Crabbe and Goyle?”

“Yeah.” Draco sobered up and stopped laughing. “Ron’s rat bit one of them, didn’t it?”

God, he did, Harry thought, and then that was another awful thing, how many times Peter was brought up in Ron and Harry’s childhood. “And you offered to show me the right sort of wizards.”

“I was a git.” They’d lost track over how many times they’ve admitted that to each other over the past hour, but this time he said it fiercely. “You were right. You were the one who knew what he was doing. And I was the idiot that believed everything my father said.”

“So let me show you now.” Harry barely had any idea of what he was offering, but all he knew was that he had to offer, to help Draco pull himself out of his place he had found himself in. “Introduce you to the right kind of people.”

“Okay.” Draco held out his hand, and for once, Harry actually shook it without feeling like one of them would try to kill the other in the process. “I’m in.”

Chapter 5

Draco

He’s taken wandering around the house when Harry isn’t there.

Draco isn’t sure why he does it, other than the fact that without school or a job or any responsibilities he’s got hours’ worth of free time and nothing to fill it with, unless he actually wants to take Granger up on her offer of teaching him how to crochet. Kreacher had been the one to start it, showing him rooms that he couldn’t get around to cleaning because of his knees or the places that he won’t go anymore because they hold too many memories, and all of a sudden he was ripping down wallpaper in bathrooms and wiping away the dust that has piled up in the library, like he could scrub away the darkness if he only tried hard enough.

He finds remnants of the past whenever he least expects it. That’s part of it, too, one of the reasons that he wants to take these walks through the house and stick his nose in places that Harry flat out refused to put foot in. He’s gathered up knowledge like they’re treasure —a baby photo of his aunt, a letter from his father tucked into a drawer—but it’s not until he dares to pull himself up into the attic that he understands why Harry seems to want to fill this house up with noise so often.

It’s to chase away the ghosts.

All Draco had done was move a box, and all of a sudden photos were pouring out, flooding the floor, a hundred of the same faces flashing up at him, waving, screaming. There is a much younger Professor Lupin with his arm wrapped around a clean shaven Sirius Black, a man who looked like Harry with his arm wrapped around someone who had Harry’s eyes, Professor Moody when he still had both eyes. He thinks it is only the distant past, at first, but then he shifts through some more and finds other things—Nyphmadora Tonks holding out her hand with the smallest engagement ring he had ever seen on her finger, Ginny and Hermione leaning in to each other to pose for the picture, the Weasley family gathered around the table as someone who must be their mother yells at them. There are people he doesn’t recognize and people he does—Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Professors, Dumbledore, Hermione, and Harry, always Harry at the center of things, happy and laughing.

A lot of these people are dead, He thinks, and it is not for the first time that Draco begins to fully appreciate how young they all were, how much they had to lose just a year ago. All the things that they did lose. Much too young to be soldiers.

That’s how Harry finds him, sitting in the center of a sea of photographs, looking at all these faces that he knows he once knew but can no longer recognize. Draco looks up at him like he is lost and Harry is his light house, hands full of memories, photographs full of the current dead and dying.

“They didn’t know what was going to happen,” He says finally, after Harry has sat down across from him and reached for photographs of his own, so close that his knees were pressed up against Draco’s. They have gotten to a box that is just full of the twins—the twins together at dinner, the twins in their room, the twins holding out their hands to keep their picture from being taken, the twins playing exploding snap with Ron, the twins teaming up against Bill for a game of Exploding Snap, all the tiny moments that piled up while they were living here. When they were together, and safe, and whole. “They didn’t know how short it would all be.”