“Did I tell you Mr. Potter will be returning to Hogwarts?” McGonagall asked casually, sipping her tea at her desk.

Draco choked on the mouthful of tea he had been swallowing.

“Excuse me?” he said, trying not to sound too shocked.

“I asked him to fill the Defense position,” McGonagall continued, seemingly oblivious to Draco’s shock.

“Right,” Draco nodded. The feeling began to leach from his hands, which seemed to be his body’s go to reaction to anything Potter. He set down his mug.

“I only warn you because, as you know, Potter has an affinity for snooping and sneaking about, and I am not sure he’s grown out of it. You must be careful at night. Disillusion yourself until you are out on the grounds, and maybe even while you’re walking about, unless you’ve changed,” she continued.

Draco nodded.

“You’ll likely have to stop your work in the kitchens. He likes to take his meals there asionally, if memory serves me right,” she added.

“Just tell him not toe between five and seven in the morning,” Draco asked, hoping it didn’t sound too desperate. He liked the kitchen, and he liked the elves. They were, afterall, the closest thing he had to friends.

“I can hardly make a rule that specific, Mr. Malfoy, especially since Mr. Potter seems to think rules are made to be broken,” McGonagall replied.

Draco snorted.

“He’s not been well, Malfoy,” she added.

“How do you mean?”

Not sick. Surely, he would have read it somewhere if he was sick. Even if they wanted to keep it under wraps, one of the less reliable gossip magazines would have gotten a hold of it and published it, and they would have been allowed to since so few actual think of them as a source of actual news. But there had been nothing.

“Not physically ill, so you can take that look off your face. You look as though you have seen a ghost,” McGonagall said. “He’s just not been himself. Not since y—well, since it all.”

“When are we expecting him?” Draco asked, swallowing around his heart, which had taken residence in his throat.

“He’ll arrive on the Hogwarts Express when ites to take the students home,” she said.

“So this week?” Draco asked. His airways felt as though they had constricted to the size of a penny whistle.

“Yes, this week.”

Draco smiled and nodded. “Wonderful,” he choked. “The prodigal son returns.”

“Mr. Malfoy,” McGonagall warned, though she looked a bit surprised to see a smile on his face when she looked up at him.

Later, when he returned to the dungeon, he vomited.

“The Slytherin dungeons were closed off and the dormitories relocated, as you know,” McGonagall said, walking with Harry down the corridor to her office.

“What do you use them for now?” Harry asked, knowing nothing in Hogwarts ever really was eliminated, only repurposed or left to rot. Part of him hoped it was the latter, thinking that perhaps if there was any trace of Malfoy left, it would be there.

“Storage,” McGonagall replied, smiling tightly.

“Oh,” Harry replied. He couldn’t help but feel as though she was hiding something, but he had been used of being overly suspicious since the war, and to be frank, who wouldn’t be?

“We don’t have many free offices,” she continued. “There was quite a bit of shuffling for the more desirable ones as teachers havee and…gone in the last few years, and I’m afraid the biggest space left is Severus’s old suite. I’ll have it cleared out and filled back in with some newer things, if you’d like to take it. It’s in the dungeons, so it’s near the kitchens.”

She remembered his tendencies to go to the kitchen for snacks, then. Harry couldn’t say he wouldn’t feel odd staying in Snape’s rooms, when there had been so many years with no love lost between them. He couldn’t imagine making a space that had belonged to Severus Snape for so long his own. Then again, without the Slytherinmon rooms in the dungeons anymore, there wouldn’t be as many students wandering around there once classes were over.

“I guess I’ll take it, then,” Harry answered, trying to push his hesitations aside. It was only a room. Whoever lived there had nothing to do with it. Snape’s offices were now just vacant rooms. The Slytherin dungeons were just vacant rooms now, too.

Harry was startled by a pressure on his legs, looking down to see a calico winding around his shins.

“Hello,” he said softly, bending to scratch her chin.

She meowed back to him rather intelligently, leaning into his hand.

“What’s your name? You’re much prettier than Mrs. Norris, unless my memory serves me wrong,” he said.

“No, she belongs to one of the students. Not sure which, as she’s always wondering on her own. And appears to have been abandoned here for the summer holiday.” McGonagall replied.

“Are you quite sure she isn’t a student?” he asked, motioning to his own glasses and looking back at the cat. Her markings looked remarkably like glasses, a trait he knew both McGonagall and Rita Skeeter shared in their animagus form.

“I’d know if she was,” she answered shortly.

“There were animagus in the castle before without you knowing,” Harry pointed out, referencing his father and his friends. He stood from his crouched position, the cat walking away at a leisurely pace.

“Fool me once, Potter,” McGonagall replied lightly, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Right,” Harry replied, though he couldn’t help the little whisper of doubt in his mind.

They arrived at Dumbledore’s office, now McGonagall’s. It made Harry want to laugh, how unchanged the castle looked while at the same time beingpletely different. Or maybe it made him want to cry.

He followed McGonagall into her office, where she continued to speak.

“Seeing as the castle is mostly empty this time of year, apart from Hagrid and myself, you’ll have to go to the kitchens to get your meals, but you’ll be so close, I doubt that will be a problem,” she carried on.

Harry sighed with relief. He knew the castle would be mostly empty for the beginning of his stay, but still, the idea of having to eat in the Great Hall, the idea of being in public, where people who thought they knew him could speculate, made him feel sick to his stomach.

“You’ll have until next term to get everything all ready for the students. You will, of course, have full use of the library and any leftover materials in the Defense room.”

Harry nodded.

“I expect you will want a day or two to settle in, but I would appreciate it if you began preparing for the next term by the end of the week,” McGonagall said firmly, eyeing him suspiciously. “I hope you will be a better professor than you were a student.”

“I hope so, too,” Harry chuckled darkly.

“Well, luckily for you, you don’t have to write any papers. Just read them,” McGonagall quipped. She glanced at the clock on the wall and back to him. “Your rooms should be ready in half an hour. I trust you can busy yourself until then? Visit Hagrid, perhaps, before hees after you with a scent dog?”

Harry walked back out into the hall, wandering through the castle for about ten minutes before finding himself walking out into the yard towards a familiar shack.

Like he suspected, being on the castle grounds didn’t feel quite as much likeing home as he would have hoped.

He was back.

Draco had seen him, had almost run into him, in the hall in front of the Slytherin dungeons. He stayed back, less than twenty feet away, in the shadows, though disillusioned, and watched the other man.

Potter ran his hand over the stone that made up the doorway for the dungeons, examining it. He took his wand and tapped the wall, but to no avail.

He paused, looking up and down the hall, before murmuring “Pure-blood.”

Draco winced.

“No, of course they’ve changed the password since then,” Harry said to himself quietly. He sighed, pressing his right hand flat against the stone. He clenched the hand to a fist, leaning his forehead against the wall. “Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he repeated, and Draco felt his chest tighten.

He wanted to step closer, the feeling only intensified by the knowledge that he couldn’t. What are you looking for, Potter? The question sat on his tongue, at the very tip of it, beating against the back of his teeth, but he didn’t let it escape. It would be so easy. It would be so easy to ask it, Potter would jump and turn to look at him and then…And then he would run, to tell McGonagall, and it would be over. He would be found out. So instead, he watched.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” Potter began, his voice still hushed just enough to be hard to hear, his forehead still pressed against the stone, “But I think I miss you. I think I miss you more than just about anyone. And I am almost glad you aren’t here to gloat about it. Almost.”

Draco froze. The feeling was back, or rather, it was leaving his hands at a rather rapid speed, forcing him to tuck his wand away in his coat pocket, lest he risk dropping it and making a noise. If he didn’t know any better, he would think Potter was addressing him. Who else would he miss that could have been behind that door? No one. He couldn’t think of a single soul, yet it still felt presumptuous to think it was himself.

“I can’t help but think, had things gone differently,” Harry rambled, his words trailing off. He stood up straighter, pushing himself off the wall. “You would have made a bloody good potions master, Malfoy. I think I would have rather liked that. It doesn’t feel right, being back here without you telling me what a twat I am.” Potter’s voice quavered as he finished.

Draco let himself slump against the wall. He clasped a hand over his mouth to keep any noise from escaping. He was dreaming, he had to be, because if what he was watching was the truth, he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear to know Harry Potter, the man at the center of almost every thought that orbited his mind, missed him. Missed him enough to talk to a locked door in a seemingly empty hallway, and he couldn’t do anything to help him.

Just when Draco thought he couldn’t take much more of it, Potter covered his eyes with his hand.

“Fuck,” Potter said, turning so his back was against the doorway, sliding down until he was sat on the ground. Draco could see even in the dim light the other man had tears running down his cheeks. “I don’t know how to get past you. I didn’t even know you were someone to get past.”

Potter fell silent, apart from his irregular breathing and asional sniffles. He sat there for what felt like an eternity but must have only been five minutes, then he began to collect himself, lifting his glasses to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. He stood quietly, looking at the entryway once more, shaking his head and began walking towards Draco.

There was nothing that way that anyone used anymore, unless he wanted a really round about way of getting to the kitchen, or the stairs next to the kitchen, or—that was it. Snape’s office. McGonagall had given him Snape’s office.

Draco stood still, barely breathing, until he couldn’t see or hear Potter walking away any more, and then waited a beat after that just

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