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PRESENT HARRY: And slowly the pieces begain to fall into place... What Dumbledore had meant when he said "The Dark Lord tore families apart"...

DRACO: I was five... we kept hearing the stories about the Dark Lord being killed, his Time-Twister destroyed... But for us, he was all too alive...

PRESENT HARRY: I had thought of Malfoy so long as an enemy, but now suddenly he was just a child like me... Alone and friendless... Abandoned by his followers... Suddenly he was someone I felt I had to protect. And I began to think in new ways.

Harry and Draco sit on opposite side of the page, facing away from each other. The drawing is very simple and stark; the background is black, without the vista of stars that recent pages have had. Past Harry's speech is now pale red. (Present Harry's speech is bright red, and past Harry's speech has been, until this point, grey.)

PAST HARRY: I'm sorry for kicking you.

DRACO: I'm sorry for... you know... everything...

PAST HARRY: Sometimes when I sleep, I am there again... in that cupboard...

DRACO: On that bed...

PAST HARRY: He has his hand in everything that happens to us...

DRACO: In everything we do...

PAST HARRY: We are truly Voldemort's children.

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Thus ends Chapter Five, “In The Houses Of His Fathers”.

I didn't write annotations on the last few pages because I thought too many words would spoil their emotional impact. (It's the same reason I didn't use many words on the pages themselves.) The annotations are back now (although I might do the same thing occasionally in the future).

If I had more time to dwell on the details, I would have shown Draco's reluctance to talk. In Draco's world, the most important thing is to be strong. If you show weakness, you're supposed to be punished for it, rather than to receive sympathy. So it would be a very awkward scene where Harry tries to communicate to Draco that ze feels sympathetic, while Draco tries to appear strong to compensate for the fact that Harry has just seen zir weakness (since ze assumes Harry will think less of zem for it).

Harry probably wouldn't feel the same way if Draco had just told zem about what we've just seen, but there's a certain unavoidability about directly experiencing another person's memories.

Approximate readability: 9.96 (820 characters, 181 words, 9 sentences, 4.53 characters per word, 20.11 words per sentence)