The bar had fit him perfectly, of course. Dark, loud, and easy to blend into, because high profile anything was no longer a part of Draco’s life. He was an anomaly now, a shadow on the wall, and if he ever wanted to use them he’d have a new name, a new house, a new identity, and anything else new he needed, all wrapped up in a cute little package by the Ministry of Magic. But he didn’t want them, or anything to do with them, anything from the bloody Ministry. He should be ruling it, not taking favors from it. He should have been Minister, or at the very least next in line for the position, but instead he made his living by sapping the life, slowly, out of his parent’s Gringott account through patsy men he’d sent in with the key to avoid suspicion. It was enough to make him sick. Whiskey made him sick. Especially Whizzing Whisky.
Harry’s bright eyes were studying him intensely as he ordered four shots of bourbon, probably mistakenly assuming that half of them were for him. As if two could even start the buzz Draco needed right now. He turned back to Harry after he’d tossed his money down, face blank and expressionless, but eyes glinting with some unknown feeling. “What’s wrong, Potter? We had plenty of ghosts at Hogwarts.”
Apparently Harry didn’t buy that though, as he scooted his stool an inch closer to Draco’s and glared at him, and with his hand clenched so tightly around his drink his knuckles went wide he growled, “You’re supposed to be dead!”
Draco smiled. “Don’t you read the papers? I am dead.”
There was a long pause, in which Harry tilted his head back to let his drink down itself in a rush of foam and alcohol, before he spoke again. “Well you’re looking good for a dead man.”
Draco’s eyes flickered in the darkness of the room, and a hint of either a smile, frown, or smirk, something at least, twitched at the corners of his mouth. He proceeded to take half of the shots he had ordered and relished the instant feeling of disorientation of doing it on an empty stomach. “And to think, I was just about to say you’re looking bad for a living one. But I am dead, you know, a simple casualty of some bitch serial killer named Cause Unknown.”
Harry frowned and looked away, gazing intently at a spot on the wall for a few moments before turning back to the man who had been a pale boy and he was even paler now. “The Prophet said they found your body,” he whispered, barely making the sounds, “next to your mother and father....”
“And that they had been victims of the Avada Kervada curse,” Draco finished for him, and a slightly sick look twisted his features and Harry saw his hand drop down to his leg... at least he knew where Malfoy had his wand, now. “But I hadn’t. I think that’s how it went anyway, I didn’t take as much interest in it as you obviously did.” Three shots down, still one to go, and his vision was already beginning to dim around the edges. Good.
It all came to Harry, slowly at first, tripped up by the alcohol running through his system, but then it rushed in with the opening of the flood gates. Draco had been the traitor, the turn coat, the Pettigrew who was on our side instead of Voldemort’s. Or at least that’s what he’d pretended, when he had made the turn, after seeing all hope was lost. “I don’t have interest in anything, Malfoy.”
And in the fall of a stool and the sweeping of a cloak, he’d left the bar. Draco watched the door for a minute, before tossing back his final shot and sliding off his seat to follow. He wasn’t through with Potter, not yet. Not even for the night.