Love Bites (Harry Potter: Official Dragon Tamer, Part One)

When the Compartments Fall Away

Saturday Afternoon
10 October 2009
Draco's POV

I kept Harry wrapped tightly in my arms even after we'd touched down safely in the entry of our flat.

I needed to hold on to him to keep me from Apparating right back to those foul monsters' home and razing it to the ground like they deserved.

I'd never quite understood the "seeing red" idiom until his cousin had opened that cupboard door, and I'd seen the miserable little mattress jammed into the irregularly shaped space beneath the stairway.

The carelessly constructed shelves held faded broken army men and a few battered race cars that had clearly been Harry's only companions for hours, sometimes days on end.

A bare lightbulb with its beady little pull-string only accentuated the dismal melancholy the minuscule space exuded.

Because places held onto memories, too.

Most people didn't realise, even though they could grasp the sense of a place easily enough, and I often chuckled to myself when people said things like:

"That place looks creepy."

"I just like it here; I get a good vibe from it."

"If only these walls could talk."

Because they did.

Not like people did, obviously.

Or maybe exactly like people did, because it was the people who inhabited these spaces who imprinted them with their own memories.

Imbued the very fabric of said walls with their histories until even the dimmest Muggle could get a vague ripple of the sentiment when entering a place.

Anyone opening that cupboard would have sensed the emptiness; that a child had been mistreated and left alone there.

A Legilimens looking in on that same desolated space has an entirely different experience, which was why any Legilimens with half a brain worked so hard at Occlumency and the ability to put up and take down those sorts of barriers at will.

Could you imagine walking around a place like London or Wiltshire, or fucking anywhere, really, and being besieged with all the memories each site holds?

To be clear, they weren't actual memories, like when you entered a human mind, but rather sentiments that washed over you in waves.

It was my fault, really, what had happened at Harry's relatives' home.

I had let my guard down as soon as I'd Apparated into that street.

I'd wanted to get a feel for the neighbourhood in which Harry had grown up and, to be entirely honest had regretted it almost immediately.

Never, in my entire life, could I have possibly imagined a more vapid, mundane community than this fucking shithole where Harry had spent the formative years of his life.

There were no initial waves of energy.

No feelings.

Nothing.

And then...

Jealousy.

Fear.

Hate.

Ambition.

All those same fucking emotions that had clouded my life as a child.

The same disgusting emotions that had flooded the manor.