Harry Potter couldn't sleep that night.

            It was three weeks into his seventh year and Harry was getting tired of all the hero worship he received from the school. During the summer after his sixth year Voldemort had successfully managed to capture the then sixteen year old Gryffindor and take him to his hideout somewhere in Scotland. He had endured three weeks of torture, torment, and pure, unadulterated pain. But then the night that Voldemort planned to put him out of his misery and kill him by making the boy choke on his own blood by slitting the Gryffindor's throat with the blade of his jewel bedecked dagger, Harry had been able to reach his small amount of strength to send the blade back into the body of the owner.

            Severus Snape, then a spy, had only just been able to reach the young savior and take back to Hogwarts with the help of surprising a Death Eater in training waiting for his seventeenth birthday, Draco Malfoy. It had taken the better part of two months to be able to heal his body scars but the scars of his soul remained.

            No one that was still living or had their souls still intact knew what all Harry had had to endure during his imprisonment. Harry rarely talked about anything after his ordeal (as the others called it) and everyone knew that the subject of his imprisonment was utter taboo and result with the former golden boy retreating further into himself.

            To Harry it seemed that everyone had taken for granted the peace that they were now living in. He just couldn't get himself to laugh and enjoy life as he used to—as everyone was now doing.

           He had seen and heard so much death during his captivity and the war that he almost had reached that point in his life, that he could no longer consider himself one with the light of day anymore. The day was too bright; the smiles of all the happy faces were too bright, and the light of the sun was just too bright.

            The faux cheerful expressions of those he once considered the closest of friends were what made him decide that he didn't belong at all except to the night.

            Girls and boys both tried to surround all day to praise him and try to get his attention in any way. But Harry ignored this. He didn't want hero worshippers; he wanted someone that needed and loved him because of who he was and could accept the fact that Harry had many ghosts in his past and skeletons in his closest/wardrobe. But no one seemed to notice this at all.

            Instead, people wanted to know who his new girlfriend was, or when he would get one. When Harry would answer that he wasn't interested in any girls the boys would ask if Harry was homosexual and would like to go out with them instead. But the Gryffindor would always just politely answer, in a practiced tone and voice, that he was not interested in either gender. That instead if and when the time came to pass he would fall in love and it wouldn't matter what sex his partner was. And so Harry lived his life, just a shell of his former self with no more laughter and dazzling, knee-weakening smiles that every magazine seemed to want for a center-fold.

            There were no more serious fights between houses that included him anymore. Everyone had lost or known someone from the war. House animosities seemed so petty and insignificant now to him but some of the more diehard people of the houses still kept their rivalries and hatreds. Draco Malfoy, one that had helped save Harry, rarely if at all talk to the Gryffindors. And Harry hardly ever talked to anybody at all.

            While his friends and just about everyone else lived happily after the year of war had ended despite their losses, Harry was one of the few that didn't. Every night after going to bed he would sleep peacefully for an hour or so before reliving some horrific experience. And although, Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Gryffindors had been very supportive, they did not understand in the slightest what he had had to experience and live through, however hard they tried, which wasn't much at all.

            So this night, like every other night, after Harry woke up from his nightmares he donned his invisibility cloak and went for a stroll. But that night, unlike other nights, he decided to do so outside.

*

            Draco Malfoy had lost both of his parents due to the war. His mother killed by his father for not being evil enough; and his father being killed by an Auror for being too evil. This seemed to be an ironic poetic justice to the Slytherin who had not planned to ever join the Dark Lord and now thanks to Harry Potter knew he would never have to worry about it.

            But still, every night he did have reoccurring flashbacks to the time of his life under the rule of his tyrannical father and the night of his beloved mother's murder five weeks before the fall of Voldemort.

            He was one of only three seventh year Slytherins remaining at Hogwarts. Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle had been killed in the war. And Pansy Parkinson had committed suicide the day when the dark fortress of the Death Eaters had been burned down like Atlanta when Sherman had gone marching through.

            Only he, Blaise Zabini, and Millicent Bulstrode remained. Blaise's parents had had no connections to Voldemort, being that his parents were both foreigners that had moved to England after the first fall of Voldemort from Italy that worked around the world doing broom designs. Millicent had only been able to escape because she had been staying with a cousin in the United States throughout the summer when she was to have been initiated as a Death Eater on her seventeenth birthday as was tradition for all the Death Eaters. She and her cousin were not able to be contacted due to some discrepancy in the owl and how all international owls went through a monitoring system that came after the first year of the war.

            Draco dressed in his robes and grabbed a dark cloak and stepped out of the Slytherin Common Room and headed outside. He planned to go on a promenade around the lake.

            The young Slytherin, of course, did not know that his former rival from his younger years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was also headed in that direction only about a hundred yards away, not being able the figure ahead of him wearing his dark cloak and blending into the shadows of trees, shrubs, and bushes.

            Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter were walking not a hundred yards from each other and towards the relatively same direction; both lost in their own thoughts and remembrances.

*

            Both the Slytherin and the Gryffindor remained oblivious to the creature watching them from another shadow, white fangs showing from inside the creature's mouth. It was waiting for one of the two humans to come closer, ready to change one of their lives forever.

            But even with that one life changed, none realized that so would the other.

TBC