The Fallout by EveryThursday (reposted)

Forty-Three

Day: 1556; Hour: 13

She feels odd walking out of the infirmary barefoot and wandering through familiar and confusing halls until she finds Draco's room. It's a little troubling, walking out of your hospital room, through a house, and to your bedroom. Well, his bedroom.

She contemplates the door in front of her for several minutes before deciding to knock. It's a door down the hall that opens first, and she glances over her shoulder to see Draco exiting the bathroom. Her stomach flips in that stupid way it's prone to do when she sees him, and her breath catches. It feels so good to see him there, standing and looking at her, alive. So beautifully alive. When she stops to contemplate life, she sometimes realizes that every breath and movement is an incredible, thrumming moment of existence.

They just stare at each other for a long moment before he sweeps his hand toward the door.

"Is it locked?"

"I don't know."

He gives her a strange look, and she rolls her eyes back to the door, the handle opening easily under her hand. He slides past her as soon as she takes a second step into the room, heading for the two chairs facing the fireplace as the door clicks shut behind her. The curving wooden frame and soft leather interior of the chairs give a regal air, but they are about as comfortable as a cheap beach chair to her. Draco, of course, looks like a king holding court as soon as he sits down. There's a snifter and a yellow notebook – which isn't his, or he didn't pick out – laying on the glass table between the chairs. The glass catches the dance of the low flames from the fireplace, and it almost looks like the table is on fire.

She fumbles with her hands before walking to the other chair, trying to get comfortable against the curved, rigid back. Draco is scowling at her, which isn't the reunion she had been wanting when the last time she really saw him, they were both chained up in a dungeon.

"You're not going to break down, are you?"

"No," she says slowly, drawing the letters out and betraying her apprehension.

It had been a bad situation, but she could hardly grasp it in her head enough to break down about it. They are all alive. There had been a lot of pain, but she doesn't even know where the majority of it came from. Her captivity had been terrifying, but it is not the worst she has faced. The two things that would haunt her had been within the same moment. Draco, screaming in agony, and Harry, in front of her. She had just spent hours talking through the latter, and then watching the Healer remove the evidence from her life. The former is what she is currently trying to get out of her head.

"I don't need, want, or expect an apology..." He leaves the rest of his sentence floating the moment her eyebrows draw down, and his own mirror it to share her confusion.

"Apology?" She tries to make him continue, running through a jumble of memories in search for something she might have done.

She wants to reach up to ease the lines from his forehead, but she holds back as he turns suspicious. His eyes are intense on hers, and his left cheek puffs out a fraction as he pokes his tongue against the tissue. She can see the moment he makes a decision, but he still looks bothered when he looks away from her.

"Tell me what you remember."

She looks back to the fire, a headache creeping between her temples. "I remember the spell, trying to move you. You got hit, and then I must have. Then I woke up to you shaking me, we were inside... I was in pain, and you said that thing about my back. Everything went black when we started going up the stairs. I was in the dungeon then, alone, on the ground. I passed back out. Then I woke up chained, when the Death Eater hit me in the mouth. That whole thing with Harry... I passed out when you lifted me. Woke up in a hospital bed."