So denied, so I lied, are you the now or never kind?
-- Eve 6, Here's to the Night

It starts in a bar. Not even a nice one, it's a seedy bar with sticky floors and only two kinds of beer on tap, cheap and cheaper. I say starts as if this is a long story, and it's not. I wish I had more to tell you, but this is all I can say.

It starts in a bar. I'm sitting by myself, which is unusual. Normally I'm surrounded by people I may or may not even like, but it doesn't bother me. I don't like silence, I don't like to be alone. So I'm not unhappy when someone sits down next to me and starts to talk. I'm relieved, really. Sometimes people say this is a sign that I don't like myself much, but I like to think of it as a social addiction rather than self-hatred. But on any given day I change my mind on that one, so I'll leave it to you to decide.

So it starts in a bar, with me, by myself, and this man sidling up next to me and striking up a conversation.

"Hello, Potter," he says. He's drinking beer out of a glass and doesn't look at me.

"My God," I say.

I'm shocked. It's Draco Malfoy, of all people. Draco Malfoy, in a bar, a seedy bar, at half ten on a Friday night. It might not seem strange if you don't know the story, but I know it very well. First I had to live it. After that I had to see it in a dozen headlines, I had to hear it whispered behind my back for years. I've even had to tell the story a few times aloud to groups of attentive and tearful audiences, and I've thought of it a lot more than that, even. I mean, wouldn't you? If you had killed someone like him, wouldn't you think about it a lot? Maybe it's just me. I can't stop thinking about people I've killed, though really it's just person and it's Draco Malfoy and here he is sitting beside me.

So I'm in a bar, right. I'm in a bar having a beer with a dead man. Unbelievable.

At first I think I'm seeing things. I stare at him hard, and blink a lot. He looks pretty much the same. I mean, given that he's been dead for twelve years or so, he looks pretty damn good. From the side, at least. I can only see the side of his face, and his hands. He's wearing a cloak, he didn't shrug it off at the door like most people do. Like I did. He's wearing a wet cloak, black, beaded with rainwater. He looks clean-shaven and there's a bit of a scar on his chin that I don't remember from before.

And I would remember, you know. If it had been there. I inspected him very thoroughly before I killed him. He was my lover at the time, after all. I knew him like the back of my hand, and that's a cliche for a reason. I could pick his shoulders out of a line up, the way they curve, the way his bones jut forward, his muscles, the line of his neck, the mole on his right shoulder blade. My eyesight is pretty piss poor, but it's not as bad as all that. I'd been too close to him too many times for that.

I knew him intimately, you might say. I knew him better than he knew himself, I'd said that a few dozen times. He just laughed. It was a lie, really, most of the time, and I didn't realize it until much later.

So I'm sitting in the bar, I'm half drunk, to be completely honest with you, and my former lover, the one I killed, pulls up a stool next to me. I mean, how often does something like that happen? Really. Dead people don't just appear out of nowhere, and I'm taking ghosts into account, here. They don't just appear five hundred miles and twelve years from the place they were killed.

It's like he just homed in on me. He walks in out of the rain, orders a drink and sit down next to me to say, "Hello, Potter." What am I supposed to do?

I put my hand on his shoulder and he's real, he's really there. He's solid and wet and even the wool of his cloak feels normal. Not a ghost, not a hallucination, unless he's a damn good one.

"My God," I say. I wish I could tell you that I was more articulate than that. I would have liked my first words to be something really witty, like, "Didn't I kill you already?" But that would have hurt me as well as him anyway, and you know I've never been all that great with words.

"My God."

He kind of laughs into his glass, a rueful sort of laugh. "Didn't expect to see me, I guess."

"Not really," I said. "What the hell!" Again, I'm sorry that I don't ask the important questions first. But I'm shocked, you know. Don't think you'd do better in my shoes, I mean, you don't know what it's like, running into someone you killed. Or you thought you killed.

"I haven't got much time," he says.

"I thought..." I start to ask an important question, but he interrupts me.

"I know. I'm sorry. Look, it's not your fault, okay? Can we pretend it didn't happen? Just for tonight?" He's still not looking at me.

"I.." I really am pretty drunk. I'm staring at his fingers now, his flat fingernails. They're very clean and short, just like I remember. I've missed his hands a lot, more than you might think. I mean, I've missed all of him, but I've thought about his hands more than is probably healthy. Sometimes when I wake up and someone else's hands are on me, you know, arms draped over my waist or my chest, or just pressed against my back, I imagine that it's him. I can do that as long as I don't look too hard and don't turn around. There are advantages to having such piss poor eyesight. I want to grab on to his hand now but suddenly I feel shy and out of my mind at the same time.

"I'm not dead, Harry." He's finished off his beer and he claps the glass down on the table. He always was a fast drinker.

"But..." I'm starting to get a little teary-eyed. Don't judge me harshly for that, that's not fair. I am more than half-drunk and am being confronted by my dead lover, it's really to be expected.

"I can't tell you more than that. I can't even tell you that, but I can't bear it much longer. It's just tonight, Harry. That's all I've got." He's looking at me now, and I'm really crying after that speech of his.

Again, you may not understand that unless you know Draco. He's not really one for emotional speeches and that was probably the equivalent of one of your lovers saying, "I love you madly and I always have." And keep in mind that I did kill him. Or at least I think I did.

"I miss you," I say. Because to me he's still dead, and I still miss him, even though he's sitting right in front of me. He's got his hand on my knee. Now that I'm really looking him straight in the face I can see that he's getting a little teary too, so you know it's going to go downhill from here.

"I know," he says. "I've kept an eye on you. Come on, Harry. Let's go somewhere else. I've only got tonight."

And he's not kidding, as it turns out. So I get my coat and put it on, it's still damp from the rain outside, and we tramp out and down the street to my flat. He seems to know exactly where it is, in spite of the fact that I've moved three times since I killed him.

He holds my hand really tight.

When we get inside he pulls off my clothes and attacks me. I'm okay with that, actually, because he was always like that, very enthusiastic. Some people are all talk and some people, like Draco, save it all for their fingers and their lips, for their skin to communicate with yours. And it's like riding a bike, that's another cliche that works. Being with an old lover, no matter how long it's been, it's like riding a bike. You never forget how it feels and you never forget how to do it just the right way.

Well, that's not entirely true. You always suspect that there is a right way, but you never quite get there. Either you're too tired or he is, or you're too excited or he is, or it's too late or the lady upstairs is banging on the floor with her broom handle to get you to shut up or the cat is walking across your legs, or something else. There's always something to get in the way of making everything just perfect, but this time there was nothing in the way. This time everything went exactly the way we had always hoped it would. We aren't eighteen anymore and we can't do all the jumping gymnastics we once enjoyed so much, but that doesn't matter anymore. He's a little thicker than he used to be, stronger, heavier, with a few more scars on his chest and his stomach and his legs, but it's just the same, really. He sounds the same, he feels the same. Hell, he even smells and tastes the same, which I didn't so much expect, not after he's been dead for twelve years.

I didn't stop loving him. I never understood what people said to me, about putting your love in the past tense as soon as someone dies. "I know you loved him," people said to me, afterward. After I killed him, after I pulled out my wand and killed him before he could do much worse and kill innocent people. My feelings for him are not in the past tense, even though he did go bad, even though he was rotten to the core, as they said. They said that in the papers afterward, you probably read that. "Rotten to the core," as if he were an old tree that had to be chopped down. I didn't stop loving him the moment he died. Or even the moment he turned around and threatened to kill all those people, when we were standing off. Like an old western, fingers twitching over our holsters, I drew first and I fired the first shot. Doesn't mean I stopped loving him. Doesn't mean I don't still love him, even though he's dead.

Or, even though he's not.

I don't know why he did what he did, and I don’t know why he's come back from the dead. We're not into conversation at this point, his skin is doing all the talking and I can't help but listen to him. And honestly I don't even wonder. It just feels good to have him back. Better than I can possibly explain. He reaches into me in ways no one else ever could. He was the first, you know. First lover, first love. They say those are always the ones you can't forget, and being with him again is like going back in time, it's like crawling onto a comfortable old couch and flicking on the tv to find your favourite movie on.

Eventually we exhaust ourselves and fall asleep; him first, and then me. I'm not going to tell you what I said to him once he was asleep, because that's between him and me.

In the morning he's gone. Like I said, it's not a long story. I don't know where he came from, or where he went. I'm not even sure he was really here. 

End