We're What? [Ministry Trainee's with Malfoi]

[coreofaphoenix]

After the fall of Voldemort, Harry had spent the Summer helping out the rebuilding efforts at Hogwarts. Ensuring that the castle was in working order before the school year started that autumn. Although Ron was well ready (or so he insisted) to hop into the Auror's, Harry hadn't been nearly as sure. Was he ready to go back into fighting after everything they'd been through? It was after a particularly long conversation with Headmistress McGonagall who said that he would be bored stiff returning to classes that helped him in his decision. She only made him promise that he return and help teach a class (or two) on occasion for defense classes.

And maybe talk to someone about his "issues".

It was odd knowing he'd only see Ron daily during training and would only see Hermione on Hogsmeade weekends while she completed her seventh year. Ginny... was another subject all together. They'd talked after the War and although it hurt, they'd both agreed that now wasn't the proper time to resume a relationship.

So, after his meeting with McGonagall and returning to Grimmauld, he'd owled the Minister to accept the opportunity. Grimmauld was slowly but surely becoming less depressive (emphasis on slowly) but it was a place that he could call his own. He didn't have to return to the Dursley's or on the run.

Harry wasn't sure what to expect that first day walking into training. He briefly considered that he and Ron would likely be partnered up due to their history but otherwise, everything else was a toss-up. He'd been briefly surprised to see Draco Malfoy walk in and he could already hear Ron's impending rant about him being there. He nudged the other boy and gave Draco a little nod of acknowledgment. He wasn't exactly Draco's biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination however he appreciated Narcissa's assistance during the final battle with Voldemort.

"Well, now that we're all here," their trainer spoke up from the front of the room after a few other stragglers walked in. "We'll get started."

Comments

[malfoi]

That nod from Potter just led to a blank look from Malfoy in return, nonplussed at finding each other here.

People were staring. At all three of them. Veterans and survivors of the Battle of Hogwarts, participants in history.

Draco probably should have waited another year, gone in with a later crop of trainees. Not thrown himself into this task immediately. His mother and father had been telling him to stay home, to lick his metaphorical wounds at Malfoy manor; they didn't need the money, he didn't need something so plebeian as a job. He could stay at home literally forever, a man of leisure resting on his laurels and independently wealthy. But the prospect of rattling around in the manor by himself, like loose change in an empty vault, was even more intolerable. Their manor had held prisoners. People had been murdered inside his childhood home. Whenever Draco sat at the breakfast table with his parents, he kept looking at that grand dining table that had played host to Death Eater meetings, imagining he still saw a smudge of blood on the wood no matter how well it had been cleaned.

On the list of available careers that he could heave himself into, the Ministry had a variety and was respectable enough, so why not?

He looked at the available seats. The only open ones were in an arc around Potter; everybody else was apparently too intimidated to sit beside the Boy Who Lived (and then died, and lived again). He didn't particularly want to, either.

But Draco took the seat, curtly, hands folded in front of him as he stared rigidly forward as the trainer started speaking, going over the basics of the months-long training program. His shoulders were stiff, his gaze riveted forwards. Wondering if he had been imagining the muttering from other trainees that had rippled through the room upon his entrance, and knowing that he hadn't.