It was a dark and stormy night, and any sensible person would be curled up in front of a fire with the curtains drawn and a mug of hot tea.
It certainly wasn’t a night for visiting the most notorious graveyard of Wizarding Britain and yet here he was.
He still couldn’t believe he had agreed to meet here at this hour on this night of all nights.
Even Muggles knew this night to be special, a night when the veil between the living and the dead was supposedly very thin.
He glanced around him. The place looked deserted, like a ghost town. He had not been back here since that fateful day the Triwizard cup had transported him and Cedric here many years ago.
Cedric, thinking of him still brought on that old pang of guilt. No amount of therapy sessions could make that go away.
Harry shivered. This truly was a cold and miserable night.
He cast Tempus and saw that it was nearly midnight. Harry felt himself becoming slightly irritated. He was cold and the person he was supposed to meet was late. No real surprise there, of course. He had always liked to make an entrance, even when they were young.
Harry was more annoyed with himself for having agreed to this insane meeting place in the first place, at this hour on this Merlin forsaken night.
‘Potter, glad you could make it,’ a familiar voice shouted over the sound of the wind and rain.
When he reached Harry, he stopped and looked around him curiously. ‘So this is where it all happened?’ Draco asked after a while.
It had never occurred to Harry that Draco had never been here before.
Not that there would have been any reason for him to have visited this cemetery, of course.
Then an unwelcome thought emerged from the recesses of his brain. No, surely not, not after all this time?
‘Draco, why are we here? You are not going to try to bring back V….’
‘Oh Sweet Merlin, NO!’ Draco interrupted him aghast, ‘How could you even think that?’
An unbidden image came to Harry of Voldemort hugging Draco as he welcomed him back into the fold.
As if reading his mind, Draco said: ‘That creepy hug still haunts my dreams. And you were there. You saw what our life was like when He had commandeered our Mansion. No, resurrecting the Dark Lord is the last thing on my mind.’
Slightly more at ease, Harry asked Draco why then were they here.
‘I want to speak to my Faaaaather,’ Draco said.
There was a sadness to his voice that Harry had not heard before.
The need to speak to one’s father was not new to Harry. Had he himself not spent hours in front of the Mirror of Erised, just to see his parents and had he not thrice turned the resurrection stone, just to have them with him in his darkest hour.
‘But why now?’ Harry couldn’t help asking.
‘Yeeh, Harry, let me think, because this is All Hallows Eve, the most auspicious night to convene with spirits?’
‘I know what today is and the significance, but why now, why not last year, or the year before, and… why here?’
Draco took a deep breath.
‘Astoria is expecting.’
‘Congratulations!’ Harry said and meant it.
He still couldn’t understand what that had to do with anything, so he waited for Draco to continue.
‘I want my Dad to know that I forgive him, but that I will not bring my son up, the way I was brought up. No more Malfoy traditions, or at least none of the old ones. I am selling the mansion and am destroying all the dark magic stuff that no doubt still lurks around the place. I have asked Luna and her bunch of Moon worshippers to cleanse the house thoroughly before I put it on the market.’
‘That answers the why,’ Harry said, ‘but you could have done that at a séance anywhere, why here?’
‘I…,’ Draco paused and looked at Harry miserably, ‘I sort of hoped that maybe your Dad and Cedric would be here too, so that I could apologise to them for what my Faaaaather and his cronies did.’
‘Oh, Draco,’ Harry said and he pulled the man standing in front of him into a tight hug, ‘None of that is on you. No one blames you for what your father did and you certainly aren’t responsible for things Voldemort did when we were babies. As for anything else, you were just a boy and you have already paid the price for all the things you were made to do.’
Harry had never said this to Draco before and it had taken him many hours of Muggle therapy to accept that, by any sensible human standards he, Ron and Hermione, but also Draco and his friends, were put in an impossible position at too young an age by a bunch of adults who were supposed to be their teachers and guardians. Wars shouldn't have to be fought by kids. Kids shouldn't be asked to assassinate their headmaster or sacrifice their life for the greater good.
Telling a total stranger about everything that had happened had helped. His therapist had of course thought that Harry's stories were metaphors for something else.
Harry had been fully prepared to wipe his therapist's mind after each session, but the man seemed to have some Freudian explanation for everything Harry told him and with the whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing, the statute of secrecy seemed to have been safe enough, given that his therapist had thought it was all in his mind.
He patted the blonde man's back reassuringly, before letting go of him.
'Well, as long as we are here…' Harry said, '… lets go talk to Daddy dearest and maybe with a bit of luck Cedric will be there and we can have a little seeker conclave about the good old Hogwarts Quidditch days. Your Father wasn’t by any chance a seeker as well, was he? That would make for a nice all seeker séance. ‘The night of the seeker seeking seekers’, wouldn’t that be some story to tell your son someday,’ Harry said, as he led a slightly less miserable looking Draco to the place where it had all begun.