relocated Who | Harry and Hermione When | Monday Evening, 7 pm Where |Harry's House What | Some much needed company Rating | PG-13 Status | Closed. Complete.
It had not been so easy to simply remove Malfoy's presence from Harry's life. It had not been as easy as Harry had assumed it would be. There was no connection linking them together save a few fights and childish insults thrown back and forth. That was it. So why had it been so hard to simply return to himself after having left the blond in the Ministry bathroom. Harry had never realized how much the prat had seeped into his daily life or had influenced his emotions. Once the anger had cooled, he hadn't been able to release the rest of his emotions from where they'd been locked down. The moment he tried, he felt guilty or saddened or bloody well disappointed. None of which, he should be feeling. He'd done what he had to. Hell, he'd done what they had bloody well wanted. Malfoy had said he wanted Harry out of his life, so why was Harry now feeling less because of it? Such was his luck, it seemed.
To fend off these thoughts, Harry hadn't let his emotions back out. He instead kept it all buried as deeply within himself as he could manage. It was better to feel nothing than to deal with the confusion and constant frustration that his interactions (or lack there of) with Malfoy caused. The only problem with this, however, that in bottling everything, his persona shifted to something not entirely familiar. He did't smile. He didn't joke around with his fellow Aurors. He simply focused on his work and did everything by the book. He was strictly focused on doing his job. People noticed the difference. It was hard not to. This, of course, brought with it the questions of whether or not he was okay, fueled along by the bruise he had refused to heal. It served as a reminder ... of what, he wasn't sure.
This was part of the reason he'd invited Hermione to come over. She was one of his oldest friends and they'd been through a lot together. If anything could bring him back (or at least closer to) his normal self, it was her. Despite both working for the ministry, it wasn't very often that they managed to get together. They saw each other all the time, but hadn't really hung out. Part of that was Harry's fault, he knew. He had a tendency to become absorbed in whatever he was working on and often forgot to look up at the world around him. Needless to say, he was quite glad that Hermione had agreed to dinner.
Having not gone into work that day, Harry had stayed in his small apartment. This, of course, was not to say that he didn't have some files sitting on his desk with which he'd been occupying himself. Clearly you could take the Auror out of the office but you couldn't make the Auror stop working. Hermione had requested that he not attempt his hand at Spaghetti again, so instead he'd thrown a lasagna into the oven. It wasn't spaghetti, right?
Promptly at seven o'clock, Harry heard the knock at the door and for the first time in two days, actually smiled.