“Oh yeah...” with a tap of his umbrella that was oddly still clenched in his hand, he summoned up a tall glass of water and drank it down, waited a moment, and then repeated. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this thirsty... or this groggy. It took him a few minutes to remember what the hell exactly he had done the night before and when he did he was surprised he had made it home at all; especially in one piece. He could feel an empty rumbling in his stomach and realized he must have forcefully removed its contents the night before, hopefully over his toilet at home.
The struggle to get to his feet was a long one, but he managed in the end, throwing back his hood and tearing his cloak from his shoulders as he did so. After a moments careful thought he lifted his umbrella again and tapped it against his forward, muttering ‘Sobrarium’ under his breath and almost moaning in ecstasy as his headache faded away and his vision cleared.
“Hard to imagine how the Muggles handle it, eh Potter?” a voice cut through his relief and he spun around in shock, pointing his umbrella straight out. Or at least that’s what he would have done if the speaker was back a few feet, but instead he ended up smacking him right in the side of the stomach. As the man doubled over with a wince of pain, Harry realized it was just Draco.
“What the hell are you doing here?” He asked, eyeing the man warily. One drunken night of shooting pool did not fill the criteria to let someone randomly crash at your house by a long shot, and by the rumpled looks of Draco’s clothes he had done just that. After straightening back out, Draco shot him a dirty look and rubbed his side.
“I had to carry your bloody ass here!” he snapped, smacking away the tip of the umbrella as it raised to match the raising of his voice, “Because otherwise you’d have woken up robbed blind and a lot more sore, let me tell you that. I figured since it was 6 am at the time and Id basically saved you from a pain there’s no spell to cure that you wouldn’t grudge me a place to sleep for three hours!”
A pain that there’s no... oh. Draco kept saying things of that nature, as if he was trying to get Harry off his guard or something. He didn’t seem to realize that Harry wasn’t some skinny boy he could push around anymore, and that even using an umbrella he could hex Draco nine ways before he’d even have his wand out. “Fine.” he retorted, “now go home. As long as you didn’t see me, I didn’t see you, got it?”
Draco shook his head. “Oh but I did see you, and you did see me. Its an interesting situation, a living man who’s really dead and a dead man who’s really alive meet up in a bar. That has to be the start of a bad joke somewhere.”
Harry frowned. What exactly did Draco want? He had a lot more to risk from exposure than Harry did, the remaining forces of the Dark Lord would figure out what had happened as easily as Harry had and rip Draco to pieces for his treason. He gave Draco a blank look to single his ignorance on the topic, and shrugged. Draco sighed. “Were you drunk already at the BEGINNING of last night? I told you... I’m not going have been beaten down by some shut in who’s final achievement is kicking my ass before he goes into a retirement in a shack.” That seemed to remind him of something else. “What is it with this place anyway?”
Harry decided to ignore the rest and take on the shot about his home. “I like it. Its comfortable, and usually private,” he said, tacking the last part on meaningfully.
But once again, Draco just shook his head. “Potter... you have the ability to have a mansion even bigger then the one Iused to live in and you chose to reside in this shack. Id give anything to be back in a house with echoes but because of an unfortunate bet that didn’t pay off I’m stuck bouncing through flats. He paused here, and Harry saw bitterness flicker through his eyes for just a moment, but then it was gone and Draco was smirking at him. “So where are we going tonight?”