Chapter 1
Harry wakes with tears in his eyes, to be met with Ron and Hermione, both with tears streaming down their faces. Hermione wraps her arms around the two boys and the three of them cling to each other, almost as if they will drift away in the ocean of sadness if they let go of each other. They stay like this for almost ten minutes; Ron crying over the death of his brother, Harry crying because it’s his fault and Hermione because, well, since the war she’s always crying. Until Harry apologises and stands, walking out of the room and leaving Ron and Hermione sitting of his bed, crying and hugging. But due to Harrys low tolerance to hugging and crying when he knows that it is his fault that said hugging and crying is happening, he can’t stand to be in the room with Hermione and Ron for too long at this time of night.
It’s become almost a routine for him; nightmare, waking up, crying, walking around the castle for hours until the sun comes up. Or more recently; walking around the castle all night while trying to put off sleep for days at a time, only giving in when he is literally too tired to even think about keeping himself awake. When he’s so tired that even his nightmares can’t penetrate the depth of his exhaustion, that’s the only time that Harry can really relax. And it can’t really pass off as relaxation either. Hermione suggests often that he should go and visit Madame Pomfrey, either to talk about what’s troubling him to hopefully get it off his conscience, or otherwise to ask to get a dreamless sleep potion. But he will not. He deserves to be kept up at night by the dreams, by the innocent people that died for him. That he killed.
The thing about walking, Harry thought to himself, is that it’s almost as if, if I walk far enough and fast enough, my nightmares can’t catch up.
Spoke too soon, thought Harry as a flash of pale skin, white-blonde hair and icy grey eyes rounded the corner and the two boys almost crashed into each other. And the demons that he had been trying so hard to outrun, suddenly slammed back into him with the force of a small dragon at the sight of none other than Draco Malfoy.
“What are you doing out of bed, Potter?” Draco sneered, his mouth twisted into his ever-present smirk, although it had been kind of subdued lately.
“Like it’s any of your business, Malfoy. Besides, I could ask you the same question” Harry bit back.
“Have you been...” Malfoy paused for a second, his head cocked to one side, looking, studying, evaluating, “… crying?” and for a moment the regular look of arrogant indifference and cruelty that Harry had found himself on the receiving end of for almost eight years seemed to dissolve and in its place was a look that he found unfamiliar and hard to decipher on this pinched, pale face. Was it concern? Worry? Sadness? Empathy? He looked almost as if he wanted to hug Harry or place a hand on his shoulder, something comforting. But within seconds that look in turn shifted back to his normal mask.
“Poor Potter, can’t even sleep at night without bursting into tears” he barked.
“Damnit, Malfoy!” Harry closed his eyes to steady himself “Just leave me alone, I can’t deal with your shit tonight!”
“Fine” the other boy bit out before spinning on his heel and stalking off to wherever he came from, most likely the Slytherin common rooms. Harry walking in the opposite direction moments after.
Harry had been walking for hours, he sunk to his knees outside the entrance to the Room of Requirement, and however he found it strange that he could see a door, when he hadn’t asked for anything. I don’t know what I want he thought. The door was still there, and curious as to what would lie behind it, he rose up and pushed the heavy oak thing in as quietly as he could manage. A room of which the likes of Harry had never seen before greeted him, it reminded him of something that had once been treasured but was now locked away, hidden away from prying eyes. It was hard to explain, more of a feeling than a visual appearance. A feeling of secrecy and urgency and sadness. In fact, when he ever tried to think about this room, all he could remember was the feeling, never the actual physicality. But it sounded like he wasn’t alone in the room. He could hear deep, ragged sobbing in between choking, gasping breaths, and then a pained whine that sounded so terrified, so broken that Harry was torn between wanting to help and thinking that he had fallen asleep and a new nightmare was here to greet him. His curiosity and overwhelming need to save people won out in the end, and maybe he hoped, just a little, that if he helped this person, he maybe wouldn’t be such a bad one.
He rounded a corner and found himself, for the second time that night, in the presence of Draco Malfoy. Except this time he was sitting on the cold, grey stone floor with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up tight to his chest and his head resting on his knees. His fingers were knotted in his hair and the heels of his palms were pressed into his eye sockets, attempting to staunch the flow of tears. He was shaking with now-silent sobs that racked his entire body with the force of an earthquake, pausing only to draw breath. Harry felt like such an intruder in this moment, this was private, off-limits to him. But somehow, he felt like he understood the other boy for the first time, at least a little better than he did before.
He finally understood that Draco Malfoy was human, a real human being that felt things and cried and laughed and made bad decisions, wrong decisions but probably also good ones too, and Harry worked out that he couldn’t say any less for himself. He wasn’t a saint, no matter how much everybody else believed he was. He wasn’t all good in the way that he now knew that Draco wasn’t all bad. And he remembered something that Sirius had told him once, something about there being not only good people and death-eaters, not only Angels and Devils. There is too much grey to divide people in that way. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons, and somehow he remembered something an old Muggle schoolteacher had asked him when he was young, “a man robs a store, is that a good or a bad thing to do? Should he go to jail?” Of course Harry had answered that yes it was a bad thing and yes he should go to jail.
“But what if he was stealing food to feed his sick wife and baby daughter? Should he still go to jail? Is he a bad person?” she had asked, and Harry had found himself stumped by that, no he wasn’t a bad person but should he go to jail, was it a bad thing to do? Of course he couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine at the time but it was still something that he considered often, even now.
And somehow, it had never occurred to Harry that maybe Draco was real- that he was not just another nameless, faceless death-eater to fight, another task to accomplish, another problem to solve, that he was real and alive and, well, hurting- until now. It wasn’t until he found him, weeping and crumpled like a discarded piece of used parchment in this strange room, that he realised that he was.
Harry still wanted to help somehow (Ron would have laughed and told him that he had a crazy saviour’s complex if he wasn’t reduced to tears every time he heard his brother’s name, if he wasn’t so shattered from the war), but thinking on the words the pair had exchanged earlier, and for almost eight years he decided that was a terrible idea. And for fear of being seen and hexed or yelled at or killed or worse, he spun silently and left the room of requirement and it’s occupant, spending the rest of the night mulling over what he saw. And thinking a lot about Draco.
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The next morning from the Gryffindor table, Harry found himself staring at Draco, not that it was an oddity or anything, he just thought that he had kicked the habit after sixth year. But he couldn’t help but notice that Draco’s hair was limper than it was before and his eyes seemed less cruel and more sad and the rings under his eyes told Harry of many sleepless nights and a fair bit of crying and he found himself hopeless to help. And hopelessness was a feeling that Harry no longer wanted to associate with.