Chapter Text
Despite hearing what should have been happy news, Harry was numb.
Sirius wasn’t dead.
No, Harry yanked him out from the veil moments before he could completely submerge into the white fog in the arch of the Department of Mysteries, but he thought his godfather to have died in that moment with how he crumpled to the ground immediately afterwards.
Sirius wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t awake either.
Harry wasn’t allowed to visit him where he was being monitored at St. Mungo’s. Every update of Sirius’ state provided by Dumbledore grew less and less comforting—Harry wasn’t blind to the fact that a magically-induced coma like Sirius’ was one that existed with the possibility of Sirius never waking up.
Sirius wasn’t dead, but that didn’t change the fact that it was Harry’s impulsiveness, Harry’s stupidity, Harry’s fault that Sirius was in such a situation in the first place.
It was in the hospital wing of Hogwarts that Harry had the most time to stew in his guilt. He thought that surrounding himself with his friends would distract him from it all, but every moment he spent sitting on the uncomfortable beds where Ron and Ginny rested, everyone else crowded together like they chose to be there, was a new sort of agony. He couldn’t bear to look at everyone injured and bandaged up and know it was his fault that they had gotten like that.
So, when Harry left the hospital wing that afternoon with the excuse of seeing Hagrid, he continued to feel as sullen as he looked. It was suffocating being in the same room as everyone he’d inadvertently hurt because of his plan, but his thoughts served as their own form of company when he was alone.
Harry had just descended the last marble step into the entrance hall when Draco Malfoy emerged from a door on the right that Harry knew led down to the Slytherin common room. Harry stopped dead, and so did Draco.
He was without his usual cronies, and if Harry hadn’t spent so much time staring at the bags under his eyes in the mirror, he wouldn’t have noticed that Draco looked almost as awful as he did. Harry knew why— Pictures of Draco and his mother at the trial had been plastered all over The Daily Prophet all week after Lucius had been sentenced to life in Azkaban.
Harry expected for an insult to be hurled at him, or a hex, or an Unforgivable, even. He wouldn’t have put it past Draco, not with how his grey eyes shifted around the hall, presumably searching for the presence of a teacher to stop him.
Then Draco’s face contorted into something Harry couldn’t quite place— Not anger, but something muddled and broken that pulled the first feeling out of Harry that wasn’t confusion for the first time in weeks: Pity.
Or, something like it, because Harry was too perplexed to do anything but stare until Draco’s face regained its blankness and he shoved Harry’s shoulder when hurrying away from him. Draco’s footsteps had long faded before Harry got it into his head to continue his original mission of finding Hagrid.
Harry left, and the incident left his mind as quickly as Draco had run off.
The hot sun outside had done well to direct his attention towards the lounging students by the lake, and the distant sound of laughter from students who were relieved that exams were over, even with the news of Voldemort’s return looming over the Wizarding World. But it was hardly a comfort that others were happy when Harry was so utterly not. He walked almost in a trance, the thoughts in his head spinning in a revolving door, vaguely frustrated that no one seemed to be as upset as he was.
☽ ¤ ☾
Harry wished that someone would have bothered to give the Dursleys “a chat” about their behavior years ago, though the look on Vernon’s face when the Order rounded up on him at the train station made up for it a little. It was better late than never, he supposed, especially with the additional promise from Tonks that he could write anyone from the Order if he was ever given too much grief from his relatives.
He picked his trunk up with little disappointment after properly having said goodbye to everyone. As much as he hated being at Privet Drive, he was told that the Order was going to try and get him out of there as soon as possible.
Before leaving the station, Harry turned a final time to wave at his friends when his eye got caught on a sparkle behind Hermione and Ron.
The crowd of the station had dispersed as Draco and his mother walked through it, but for a hair of a second, Harry could have sworn there was a glittering of midnight blue next to them, the very color that belonged to the robes Dumbledore wore before he bid all students adieu earlier that day.
But Harry blinked, and the sparkle was gone as quickly as it had appeared—He chalked it up to imagining things and followed the Dursleys out of Kings Cross.