Nightmares (HP) (Drarry)

twenty seven: pity, reprise

Draco's love, loathe he is to admit it, started with pity. It continues with a letter sent to his father. It continues with a lawsuit. With Dolores Umbridge awaiting trial.

Harry plans, because he made an oath to a girl who knew much more than he, to overthrow the government. "It'll be useful," Luna had said, "in the future. The government can't choose to organize against us, if there is no government. It can't be corrupt if there is no it." So Harry plans to overthrow the government, and Draco plans to join him.

They have plans to destroy the Ravenclaw diadem. But when they ask for what Luna called, "the room that keeps things lost and found," it refused to open. They cannot destroy a horcrux they cannot get their hands on.

A setback, sure. But they have time, and lots of it. There are other plans to be made, so they make them.

Hermione and Ron, who had been receiving letters about the situation by owl for some time now, work to figure out how to bring Harry back from death. Harry appreciates them more than words can say.

They are a lovely little team. Hogwart Hooligans. They have the upper hand, knowing that Voldemort will retrieve a prophecy they already have memory of. Knowing where his little soul slivers are scattered, even if the ways Luna says to obtain them are impractical and are being rethought.

A lovely little team who have all grown and are growing.

One day Draco Malfoy, the silver boy of their golden three, visits the Room of Requirement on his own. He thinks about how if not for those Three Differences, he would've used it to bring Death Eaters into Hogwarts. He is disgusted with himself for a reality that will not come to be.

He paces the hallway in which the Room is to appear. I want a room that keeps things lost and found, things lost and found, things lost and found...

It doesn't open. Draco doesn't get why. And he wants to leave, because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, and Draco Malfoy wishes to remove that word from his legacy.

But then something appears. Not the door. Not a person. But a nine-foot, see-through figure that is somewhere between women and genderless.  

Ze sits on what seems to be a flat surface that Draco's eyes cannot perceive. But if he's learned anything from Luna Lovegood, it's that things real to only one person are not inherently fake.

Legs crossed and body draped in a red dress crafted of animal bones and colored with blood, ze eyes him over the smoke of a menthol cigarette. Draco gives no outward signs of fear, because he was raised better than that, damn it, and says, "Greetings."

Ze seems to ignore him. "Meddlesome," ze says. "Terribly meddlesome. The future set in stone is not to be subject to change. I cannot believe I let you get this far. But, whatever," ze takes another puff of their cigarette and releases it with a huff, "It doesn't really matter, after all. It's time to set things back where they need be." Ze grasps the cigarette with the tip of two fingers and makes as if ze's to put it out by crushing it against their arm--

"Wait!" Draco calls. He has a bad feeling about this. This figure is no ghost. Something is terribly off here. "Please, wait."

Zer head swings toward Draco, something reminiscent of anger flashing in zer eyes. "And you! Doing this for the high, for the rebellion. Born of pity and forced to live it. Incomprehensible."

Pity...? Is ze talking about..? "I don't pity Harry," Draco says. "Not anymore." This person does not feel human. Ze knows things ze should not. 

"And yet you fall to his beck and call," ze says, twirling the cigarette in zer hand. "Why, I ask, if not for ever misplaced sympathy?"

"I..." Draco starts and he is loathe to admit it, loathe to voice it. But he does. "I love him."

The figure laughs. It sounds sad. "Of course you do," ze says, obviously unbelieving. But ze doesn't put out the cigarette on zer arm. Ze drops it, and crushes it with zer bare feet.

The figure dissipates, and behind zer is the door to the Room of Requirement. 

Draco thinks, as he enters the room of things lost and found, that there are more than three things different about the world that Luna saw.