In Shadows Found (Harry Potter, Snape/Draco/Harry)

Castle Atrexia sat on a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of swamp. There was a smell coming off of the swamp, a stench so foul and complex that Harry couldn’t identify the individual parts, though if he had to hazard a guess he’d say it was six parts rotting corpse and three parts sewer. It was horrid and he hated it. The rain only seemed to make the smell worse. It certainly did nothing for his mood. Harry hated the rain. It reminded him of far too many bad things – of people dying, the smell of blood, and the inevitable certainty that he will die. Bad things always happened in the rain.

The castle was old and crumbling. If Hermione were here, she would invariably tell him exactly how old the castle was and who had lived there and what it was used for now. All of that had likely been in the mission details, which he had, as usual, not read. He’d made an effort. He’d started to read it, got through the who and what and where, and then Ginny had come by and he’d spent the next hour hiding in a closet, waiting for her to go away, and then the next three hours after that trying to get Draco to stop making closet jokes.

Draco preceded him into the castle. If the smell bothered him, he didn’t let on, though Harry thought his sneer might be curled extra tight for the occasion. With Draco, it was hard to tell sometimes exactly what aspect of the world had garnered his disdain at any given moment. His robes billowed about him in a way Harry had never quite been able to manage. It reminded him far too much of Snape, which made Harry’s stomach twist in uncomfortable ways.

The castle had once been well-appointed but it had gone mostly to rot since then. Harry was displeased to find that the stench from the swamp was even stronger inside, as if the smell had permeated the very stone and clung there, festering over the ages. The remnants of tapestries hung limply on the walls. Whatever scenes had been portrayed had faded into senseless drips of color, predominately in shades of grey and brown and red. It was a very Gryffindor color scheme, which made him wonder if a wizard had once lived here.