Chapter 1: Prologue | The beginning of the end

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In the beginning, there was darkness.

The wizarding world, as they knew it, was embroiled in a war with no front lines.

It crept through the cobblestones of Diagon Alley, through the shuttered windows of Flourish and Blotts, through the silence that fell over the Leaky Cauldron.

Shops closed early. Owls went missing. The Daily Prophet printed names every morning, a column on page three that grew longer each week. Witches and wizards alike learnt to check it before anything else. Families packed trunks in the middle of the night. Some went to France, some to relatives in the countryside, some simply vanished with no one asking where.

Asking questions, as it turns out, was its own kind of danger.

It was truly the darkest of days.

The Floo Network clogged with traffic at odd hours. Ministry workers arrived at their desks to find colleagues' chairs empty, personal effects cleared. No note or explanation would be needed. The empty chair said enough.

At Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore stood, looking out a window, the trees and branches of the Forbidden forest swaying in the October wind. Behind him, the silver instruments on his desk clicked and whirred, measuring things that had no names in any textbook.

He had not slept in two days.

The lines around his eyes had deepened over the summer, and his half-moon spectacles sat lower on his nose now, as though the weight of what he knew pressed even those down.

He was a man, wise beyond his years. Still, even now, the looming shadow of the one who called himself "Voldermort" hung above him.

For once in his life, he knew this was a threat the wizarding world could not face.

A piece of parchment lay on his desk, freshly delivered, the ink still wet. He had read it once, and that was enough. The tapestry of fate had woven a new path for itself. He knew, and Tom Riddle now knew.

He turned from the window, pulling his cloak from the back of his chair.

There was very little time.

The night was quiet. The stars were out.

It would not last.

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A figure moved through it the way smoke moves through a crack in a window, fluid, without resistance, as though the air itself recoiled and made room.

His robes dragged across the garden path, black fabric over wet stone, and the sound was the only thing that marked his passage. Not his footsteps, for there was none for any creature to hear.

The grass where he walked did not bend.

Pushing on the door knob, the figure sneered. The front door was locked.

No matter.

This resistance, just like all resistance, was futile in his eyes. He was inevitable. He was Voldermort.

He raised his wand, pale fingers wrapped around dark yew, and the lock clicked open. The hinges swung inward without a sound, letting him in.

Inside, the hallway stretched ahead, narrow and warm, coats hanging on hooks by the door, a pair of women's shoes beneath them, a framed photograph on the wall where two figures waved and laughed in an endless, silent loop. The light came from the sitting room to the left, and with it the sound of a man's voice, mid-sentence, something about Bathilda and a pudding that had gone wrong.

James Potter came around the corner with his wand in his back pocket and a cup of tea in his hand.

He saw the figure in his hallway and the cup hit the floor. Tea splashed across the hardwood, soaking into the rug's edge, and the ceramic split into three clean pieces. His hand went to his back pocket. His fingers found the wand.

"Lily." His voice cracked down the middle. "Lily, take Harry and go. It's him. Go. Run. I'll hold him off."

He did not wait for an answer. He stepped forward, wand raised, and the first spell left his mouth before his feet had finished moving, a streak of red light that cut the hallway air and struck the wall behind where the figure had been standing a half-second before.

The killing curse came back the other way.

It was green. The colour of new leaves, of glass bottles held up to sunlight, of the eyes his son had inherited from his wife.

It struck James Potter in the chest, and his body folded backward, knees buckling. The tea continued to spread across the hardwood. His glasses had come off. They lay three inches from his open hand, one lens cracked, the wire frame bent where it had struck the baseboard.

His face was still turned toward the stairs.

Upstairs, Lily Potter had Harry in her arms, scooped from his crib where he'd been standing, small hands gripping the wooden railing. She held him against her chest with one arm and pulled her wand with the other, pointing it at the nursery door.

Her body shook, but her wand hand was steady. She would face the dark lord, or die trying.

Her son would live at any cost.

Footsteps, now audible, came up the stairs. Slow, deliberate, each one placed with the precision of someone who had nowhere to rush to. And why should it? After all, there was no escape. Whoever was walking up the stairs knew it just as well as she did.

The fourth stair creaked. The seventh did too. She knew those sounds. She had memorized every noise this house made, every groan of old timber, every rattle of the kitchen window in wind. She had made this place a home, and painted the nursery herself, the walls a pale yellow. The memory of her and James not agreeing on blue or green came into her mind, with them agreeing that yellow was the compromise.

The paint can was still in the cupboard under the stairs.

Not now. Not now. That fleeting memory seemed like a world away as she steadied her grip, heart pounding.

Somehow, she was calm despite everything.

The door opened.

He filled the frame, tall, thin, his face wrong in the way a mask is wrong, features present but emptied of everything that makes a face human.

His eyes were red, the colour of fresh blood.

She had heard rumors, but had not believed it until now.

"Stand aside." His voice was thin and high, like nails scraped against metal. "Stand aside, girl."

"No." She put herself between Harry and the door. Her back pressed against the crib, and she could feel her son's hand gripping the collar of her shirt, twisting the fabric into a knot. "No, please. Take me. Kill me instead."

"Stand aside. I won't ask again."

"Please. Have mercy. He's just a baby, he's just..." She stopped. Pleading was useless.

In that moment, she made a choice. "You'll have to kill me if you want him."

In her final moments, she stared defiantly into those red eyes. They almost looked bored and unamused.

Green light filled the room.

The child remained standing in his crib.

He did not cry.

He looked down at his mother's hand, still gripping the rail near his feet, and then up at the figure in the doorway.

"Mama?"

The wand rose.

"Avada Kedavra."

Green light came a third time, but this time the room exploded.

As if hitting an invisible barrier, the curse folded back on itself like a wave striking a seawall. The crib splintered. The ceiling cracked. Plaster rained down in sheets, and the mobile above the crib tore free of its hook and shattered against the far wall. The window blew outward, glass spraying into the October night, and a piece of the roof sagged inward, wooden beams groaning and splitting.

Where the dark figure had stood, a robe lay empty on the floor. Smoke rose from it, thin and black, curling toward the broken ceiling.

Something else rose with it, something shapeless and shrieking, a sound too high for the ear to process properly, more vibration than noise. It tore through the gap in the roof and out into the sky, gone in the blink of an eye.

What it left behind for people to find was a chilling scene.

A child sat in the wreckage of his crib. A cut had opened on his forehead, jagged, shaped like a bolt of lightning, and blood ran down the bridge of his nose and into the collar of his pajamas. He looked at the empty robe on the floor. He looked at his mother's hand, still gripping the rail.

He began to cry.

The sound carried out through the broken window, over the low stone wall, over the garden with its muddy boots still sitting by the ruined door, and into the village of Godric's Hollow, where lights were already clicking on in windows, one by one, light beams shining through the stark black night.

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The room smelled of lavender and fresh blood.

Narcissa Malfoy lay in the centre of a four-poster bed that could have held four of her, propped up on pillows embroidered with the Malfoy family crest, her hair plastered to her temples with sweat. A house-elf dabbed her forehead with a cloth that it wrung into a porcelain basin on the nightstand, the water turning pink each time. The midwife, a stout woman from St Mungo's with thick forearms and an expression that suggested she had seen worse, straightened up from between Narcissa's knees and held the child out.

"A girl, Mrs Malfoy."

Narcissa reached for her daughter. The baby was small, red-faced, squalling, fists clenched and shaking, and when Narcissa took her and brought her against her chest the crying did not stop but the fists unclenched. One tiny hand found the lace at her mother's collar and gripped it.

The door opened.

Lucius Malfoy entered the way he entered every room, chin lifted, shoulders squared, silver-topped cane in his right hand. His boots were clean. His robes were pressed.

He had not been pacing the corridor.

He had been in his study, three floors down, and the house-elf that fetched him had found him standing at his desk, sorting correspondence, as though the birth of his first child were an appointment that would come to him when it was ready.

He looked at the bundle against Narcissa's chest. His wife looked back at him, her expression stoney as though she were assembling the correct look from a limited set of options.

"A daughter," she said.

Lucius stopped walking. His gloved fingers tightened around the head of his cane, the silver serpent digging into his palm through the leather.

"A daughter," he repeated, his voice cool. His eyes, however, betrayed his true emotion.

The midwife busied herself with the basin. The house-elf vanished with a crack.

Lucius crossed the remaining distance to the bed and looked down at the child. She had stopped crying. Her eyes were open, the grey of the Malfoy line, and they moved without focus, drifting across the canopy above her, the bedpost, the pale curtain that shifted in a draft from somewhere. Her hair, what little there was, was so blonde it was almost white.

"The healers said-" Narcissa began, then paused. Clearing her throat lightly, she started again. "There were complications. They said it would be... unwise, to attempt another."

The silence that followed had weight to it.

Lucius looked at his daughter. He looked at his wife. He looked at the crest embroidered on the pillow behind her head, the serpent and the shield and the motto stitched in silver thread that had been there since his great-grandfather's time.

"Then she will have to do," he said.

He turned and walked to the window. Outside, the Malfoy grounds stretched into the dark, manicured hedgerows and gravel paths. White peacocks roosting in the ornamental garden, pale shapes hunched against the November cold. His reflection stared back at him from the glass, and beyond it, nothing but his land, his name and the future that had narrowed, tonight, to a single point.

Behind him, Narcissa pressed her lips to her daughter's forehead. The baby's hand was still gripping the lace of her collar, and she covered it with her own, her thumb stroking the tiny fingers, so small they barely wrapped around one of hers.

"Dracona," she whispered. The name was an old one. Constellation-born, as all Blacks were named, because even in marriage Narcissa carried her own family's traditions like stones in her pockets. "Dracona Aurelia."

Lucius did not turn from the window.

"As you like," he said.

Narcissa held her daughter closer, and the baby's grip tightened on the lace, pulling it taut between them.

Chapter 2: Act I | The day dawn came again

Humans, no matter muggles, wizards or witches, are curious creatures.

It should come as no surprise then that the news of the dark lord’s defeat spread like wildfire.

The owls were the first heralds of this new age.

Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. They filled the skies over Britain in the hours after it happened, barn owls, tawnies and great horned ones, cutting across the daylight in waves that blotted out the November sun. They carried letters, parcels and newspapers, all containing the joyous news.

He who must not be named is dead.

In a few curious cases, they carried nothing at all, just flying for the joy of it, swooping low over Muggle towns and sending cats scrambling under hedges and postmen looking up from their rounds with their mouths hanging open.

The wizarding world, it appears, was in quite the jubilant mood.

In Kent, a screech owl dropped a letter into a chimney pot. In Aberdeen, three long-eared owls sat on a telephone wire in broad daylight and hooted for twenty minutes while a bus stop full of commuters stared. In London, a Ministry official had to be dispatched to Trafalgar Square to deal with a Eurasian eagle-owl that had landed on Nelson's Column and refused to move, its amber eyes fixed on the tourists below.

The Muggles noticed. In fairness, given time, they eventually noticed when the wizarding world was too active to be careful.

They noticed the owls, the dozens of shooting stars and especially the odd people in cloaks who kept appearing in high streets, shaking hands and crying. A newsreader on the BBC commented on the unusual behaviour of owls across the country. Another meteorologist blamed the shooting stars on an early Leonid shower. 

Nobody could explain the cloaked people.

Of course, nobody tried very hard to.

This, however, was nothing compared to what was happening behind close doors.

The Leaky Cauldron had ran out of Firewhisky by noon. Tom, the barman, had to roll a second barrel up from the cellar, and then a third, and then a fourth. By two o'clock, the pub was packed wall to wall with witches and wizards who'd come in off the street, tears on their faces and laughter in their throats. Strangers embraced. A group of warlocks in the corner had started singing ‘A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love’ for the fifth time in a row. An old witch by the fireplace kept raising her glass and saying, "To the boy! To the boy!" Everyone within earshot raised theirs back without knowing who she meant, only that she was right, and that whatever had happened last night was worth drinking to. In Hogsmeade, Madam Rosmerta opened the Three Broomsticks at dawn. It didn't close for thirty-six hours. Dedalus Diggle set off shooting stars over the south of England. He'd get a formal reprimand from the Ministry for it, but that was the least of his concerns for now.

Yet, not everyone experienced the same joy.

In the halls of the Ministry, the trials began.

One by one, the Death Eaters were brought before the Wizengamot. Chains coiled around their wrists in the chair at the centre of the courtroom. Evidence was presented, testimonies given. Some confessed, others denied. A few sat in the chair and said nothing at all, staring straight ahead while the chains clinked and the gallery debated their fate.

Lucius Malfoy was one of those on trial before the Wizengamot. His lasted four hours.

He’d sat in the chair with his back straight and his gloved hands resting on his knees, the chains loose around his wrists, a grave expression donned on his face as he slipped out convenient half-truths when they benefitted him. He’d surrendered his wand, and his connections had done most of the heavy lifting to clear the Malfoy name. His hair was combed. His robes were pressed. His face gave away absolutely nothing.

The Wizengamot deliberated for forty minutes. 

The vote was close.

Ultimately, Lucius Malfoy returned to Malfoy Manor a free man.

Narcissa met him in the drawing room. She was standing by the window, holding their daughter. 

Dracona was three months old, small and pale, wrapped in a blanket of white cashmere, sleeping with one fist curled against her chin.

They looked at each other, husband and wife, across the length of the room. The distance between them was twelve feet of polished floor, and an invisible chasm that had opened up in the weeks since the Dark Lord's fall.

"It's done," Lucius said.

Narcissa nodded once.

She did not ask what he'd said, nor did she ask what he'd traded to be here. Those questions were not ones she should concern herself with.

Lucius crossed the room. He looked down at his daughter. 

Dracona, as if sensing his gaze, shifted in her sleep. Her fist uncurled and then curled again.

"She needs to be strong," he said. "Everything we have, everything we've built. It hangs on her now."

"She's three months old, Lucius."

"And she is the only heir to the Malfoy name." His voice dropped. "The world has changed, Narcissa. The Dark Lord is gone. Our allies are in Azkaban or grovelling for pardons. The families that once stood with us are scrambling to distance themselves, to pretend they were never part of it. We are... exposed."

He looked at the window. Beyond the glass, the grounds lay dark and cold. The white peacocks had roosted for the night. The hedgerows were black shapes against a blacker sky.

"She will need to be more than strong," he said. "She will need to be perfect. Every inch a Malfoy. Every word, every gesture, every alliance she makes. There is no margin now. There is no room for..." He searched for the word. "Softness."

Narcissa looked down at her daughter's face. Her thumb moved across the baby's cheek, tracing the line of her jaw.

"She's a baby," she said again.

"Not forever, Narcissa."

He turned and left the room. His footsteps receded down the corridor, cane striking marble, a rhythm that Dracona would grow up hearing in her sleep.

Narcissa stood by the window, holding her daughter.

Outside, an owl crossed the grounds, its silhouette cutting across the moon. Somewhere in the manor, a clock chimed. The sound was deep and old and it vibrated through the walls, through the floor, through the bones of the house itself.

She held Dracona closer.

"You're going to be all right," she whispered. "I promise. Whatever he says, whatever he wants you to be. I promise you, you're going to be all right."

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Miles away, on a doorstep in Surrey, another child slept as two people watched

A man stood beneath a streetlamp, tall and still in his long purple cloak, his silver beard tucked into his belt. Beside him, a tabby cat sat on a brick wall. The cat was watching him with a particular intensity that suggested it was not, in any meaningful sense, a cat.

"Professor McGonagall," Dumbledore said mildly. "Good evening."

The cat became a woman. She was tall, stern, wearing square spectacles and an emerald cloak, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her mouth was a thin, pressed line.

"You can't be serious, Albus. These people. I've been watching them all day. The boy- their son, he was kicking his mother up the street, screaming for sweets! And the father! Bullying, ignorant, the absolute worst sort of-"

"They are his family, Minerva."

"They are Muggles! The worst sort of them all!" She hissed, barely able to hide her rage.

"They are his only living relatives." Dumbledore's voice was gentle, but it carried finality, a door closing softly. "The protection the blood bond offers-"

"Damn the blood bond!" McGonagall's voice cracked. She took off her spectacles and polished them on her cloak, pressing too hard, the cloth squeaking against the glass. "He's... he's just lost his parents, Albus. Lily and James are dead. And you want to leave him on their doorstep?"

"Yes."

The word sat between them.

Dumbledore looked at the house. Number Four, Privet Drive. Neat lawn. Trimmed hedge. Identical to the houses on either side, and the ones after that, a whole street of them, boxes of brick and respectability stretching into the dark. The windows were black. The people inside were sleeping, unknowing, uncaring.

"He will be safe here," Dumbledore said. "Safer than anywhere else in the wizarding world."

"Safe." McGonagall said the word like it tasted sour. "And loved? Will he be loved, Albus?"

Dumbledore did not answer immediately.

The pair watched as the door opened. A thin woman in a dressing gown looked down and yelped in shock, before she choked it off almost immediately.

The neighbours might hear. 

She snatched the letter placed next to the child. She read it, and then read it again.

Tears in her eyes, she picked up the child.

Harry Potter entered Number Four, Privet Drive for the first time, carried at arm's length, held like a beast that Petunia Evans found in the garden and wasn't entirely certain it was dead.

The door closed behind him.

"Good luck, Harry," he said. “You will be needed once again. Farewell, and godspeed.”

He turned and walked back to the street. Behind him, McGonagall was pressing her spectacles against her face with both hands, the lenses fogging.

And just as soon as they had appeared, the woman turned into a cat and vanished. The tall man in the purple cloak disappeared with a quiet crack that disturbed nothing. 

In two houses, miles and worlds apart, two children slept peacefully.

One in a crib of white cashmere, in a manor built on old money and older secrets, held by a mother who loved her fiercely and quietly and was already afraid of what that love would cost.

One in a cupboard under the stairs, on a thin mattress that smelled of dust and cleaning fluid, with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead and a blanket that was too small for him.

In time, they would find each other.

But that was later.

For now, they slept.

And the wizarding world celebrated.

Chapter 3: A tale of two cages

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Harry woke to the sound of knuckles on wood, three sharp raps followed by a voice that cut through the thin panel of the cupboard door like it always did.

"Get up. Now!"

He opened his eyes to the underside of the staircase. A spider had built a web in the corner overnight, stretching from the lowest step's support beam to the sloped ceiling where the wood met plaster. He watched it for a moment, the way the silk caught the thin line of light leaking through the gap beneath the door.

The peaceful moment broke when Aunt Petunia knocked again.

"I won't ask twice. Out!"

He sat up too fast and hit his head on the ceiling. It was happening with increasing regularity now. Harry sighed as he pressed his palm against the bump forming on his scalp. Something had to be done about that soon.

Swinging his legs off the narrow cot, he pulled on Dudley's old jumper, the one with the stretched neck that hung past his knuckles. His glasses were on the shelf beside the door, next to a broken toy soldier missing its left arm. He put them on, the crack in the left lens splitting the hallway light into two when he pushed the cupboard open. The kitchen was bright.

He couldn’t help but squint as he took in the oh-so familiar surroundings.

Aunt Petunia stood at the stove with her back to him, flipping bacon in a pan that popped and hissed with grease and fat. Uncle Vernon sat at the table behind his newspaper, the chair groaning under him each time he shifted. Dudley was already eating, a plate loaded with sausages and eggs and toast, his fork moving between them like it was a competition.

Harry's plate was on the counter by the sink. Two pieces of toast, no butter.

The usual, then.

He took it to the table and sat in the chair closest to the door, the one with the wobbly leg. He ate quickly, small bites, one hand on the table near his plate and the other in his lap. He chewed with his mouth closed. Aunt Petunia had hit him with a wooden spoon the one time he hadn't, and he kept his eyes on his food because Uncle Vernon didn't like being looked at during breakfast.

Lessons learnt through pain and suffering. But hey, at least he had food and a place to sleep. What more could he ask for?

"Post's come," Aunt Petunia said.

"Boy! Get it." Uncle Vernon growled. 

Without another word, Harry pushed his chair back and went to the hallway. The mail was scattered across the doormat, three envelopes and a catalogue for power drills, and he gathered them up and shuffled through on his way back.

He stopped.

The third envelope was thick, made of yellowish parchment, heavy in a way that normal paper wasn't. His name was written on the front in emerald green ink, and beneath it, an address so specific it made the back of his neck prickle.

Mr. H. Potter
The Cupboard Under the Stairs
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

He turned it over. A wax seal held the flap shut, purple, stamped with a coat of arms, a lion, an eagle, a badger and a snake surrounding a large letter H.

"What are you doing? Bring it here." His uncle grunted out.

Harry walked back to the kitchen. He held the letters out to Uncle Vernon, but something in his hand didn't want to let go. "There's one for me."

“Harry’s got a letter? From whom!” Dudley shouted excitedly, ready to pounce, but stopped as Uncle Vernon looked up from his paper with his brow furrowed. “Quiet, Dudley. Boy, hand it over.”

Harry watched as his eyes scanned through the mail and found the envelope. He grew nervous as he watched his uncle read the letters inked in green, and fidgeted as the colour left his face. 

It was like watching someone pull a plug. 

A shrill tearing sound snapped his focus back at Uncle Vernon. “No!” He cried out in horror as his uncle tore it in half, then in quarters. Glaring at Harry, he shoved the pieces into the pocket of his dressing gown and returned to his newspaper as though nothing had happened.

"There is no letter," he said. "Go to your cupboard."

"But-"

"Now."

Harry went.

More came the next day. Three of them, stuffed through the mail slot in a cluster, all addressed in the same green ink, all bearing the same seal. Uncle Vernon tore those up too, his fingers working faster, bits of parchment falling on the hallway carpet like confetti.

Six arrived the day after that.

Uncle Vernon nailed the mail slot shut.

By Friday, twelve letters shot out of the fireplace during breakfast, spinning across the kitchen in a flurry of parchment and green ink. One landed in Aunt Petunia's tea. Another stuck to the marmalade jar. Dudley picked one up and Uncle Vernon slapped it out of his hand hard enough that Dudley stood there for a full three seconds with his mouth open before the wailing started, low at first like a siren winding up, then loud enough to rattle the cabinet glass.

"That’s it! We're leaving," Uncle Vernon announced, pretending the protests of Aunt Petunia and Dudley did not matter.

They drove for hours. Harry sat in the back seat with Dudley, who took up two-thirds of it. He smelled like the crisps he was eating from a bag wedged between his thighs. The countryside blurred past, green fields and hedgerows and signposts for towns Harry had never heard of, and couldn’t help but notice Uncle Vernon's knuckles were white on the steering wheel the entire time.

They ended up at the coast.

The cottage sat on a rock out in the water, connected to the mainland by a strip of wet stone that the waves lapped over every few seconds. It was small, smelling of seaweed and old fish. The wind came through the walls, and when Harry lay on the floor that night, the thin blanket Aunt Petunia had thrown at him pulled up to his chin, he could feel the spray through the cracks in the floorboards.

Dudley slept on the couch. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia took the bedroom. Harry lay on the floor and drew a birthday cake in the dust with his finger. Fourteen candles. He'd miscounted. Sighing, he rubbed one out with his thumb, watching Dudley's watch count down the minutes, the one with the glow-in-the-dark hands that ticked loud enough to hear from six feet away.

11:58.

11:59.

12:00.

"Happy birthday," he whispered to himself.

Something hit the door with a bang.

The whole cottage shook. Dust fell from the rafters and Dudley jerked upright on the couch. The explosion of noise came again, a deep booming impact like someone swinging a battering ram, and then a third time. The hinges screamed and the door fell inward, ripping free of the frame and crashing flat on the floor with a bang that rattled the windows in their warped frames.

The man that appeared in the doorway had to duck to fit through it.

He was enormous. Twice as tall as a normal man and three times as wide, with a face mostly hidden behind a wild tangle of dark hair and a beard that covered his chest. His hands were the size of dustbin lids. His boots left wet prints on the fallen door as he stepped inside, tracking mud and rain across the wood, and his long coat, some kind of animal skin, dripped water onto the floor in a steady patter.

"Sorry 'bout that," he said gruffly, and picked the door up with one hand. Harry watched, amused, as he shoved it back into the frame. It didn't fit anymore, but he leaned it on it and it mostly stayed.

Mostly.

Uncle Vernon appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding the shotgun he'd bought at a shop in the last village, double-barrelled. His hands shook badly enough that the barrel swung in small circles in the air.

"I- I demand that you leave! At once- Yes, at once!" he said. His voice cracked on the last word. "You are breaking, and- and entering!"

The enormous man crossed the room in two strides, took the shotgun by the barrel, and bent it. The metal folded like a drinking straw, both barrels curving upward until they pointed at the ceiling. Two shots rang out with a BOOM that made Harry cover his ears, but the giant man simply tossed it into the corner where it clattered against the wall and lay still.

Did gunshots not wound this man?

"Dry up, Dursley, yeh great prune."

He turned, and his eyes, small and dark, almost lost in the mass of hair and beard, found Harry on the floor.

"There yeh are." His whole face changed. His mouth stretched into a wide smile beneath all that beard, and he crossed to where Harry was sitting and crouched down, which still put him a full head taller. "Las' time I saw youse, ye was only a baby! Yeh look a lo’ like yer dad, but yeh've got yer mum's eyes."

Harry pressed his back against the wall. His blanket was bunched in his fists.

"I'm-" He had to clear his throat. "Who are you?"

"Rubeus Hagrid. Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts. 'Course, you'll know all about Hogwarts!"

"I... don't?"

Hagrid's smile dropped. He looked at the Dursleys, who had pressed themselves against the far wall, Petunia behind Vernon, Dudley behind both of them.

"You never told him?" Hagrid's voice went low. "You never told him anything?"

What followed was the most confusing forty minutes of Harry's life.

He was a wizard. His parents were wizards. They hadn't died in a car crash, they had been murdered by another wizard, a dark one, the worst one according to Hagrid, a name he refused to say out loud. Something happened, Harry had survived, the dark wizard had vanished, and the whole of the wizarding world knew his name.

Harry sat on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them. He had said nothing for most of it. When Hagrid mentioned his parents' death, Harry's fingernails dug into his shins, hard enough to leave marks through his trousers.

"Yeh're famous, Harry," Hagrid said, his voice soft. "Everyone in our world knows yer name."

"That's...mental." Harry said quietly.

"Aye. But, it's true!"

Hagrid reached down and ruffled his hair, a big hand sweeping toward the top of his head. Harry flinched so hard his shoulders hit the wall behind him. He ducked sideways, arms coming up, elbows tucked against his ribs, and for a long second he held that position, curled and rigid, eyes squeezed shut.

The room went very quiet.

Hagrid's hand hung in the air where Harry's head had been. His fingers curled slowly into his palm, and he withdrew it and rested it on his knee.

"I, ah..." Hagrid's voice had gone rough. He swallowed. "'M not gonna hurt yeh, Harry."

Harry opened his eyes. He looked at Hagrid's hand, then at his face. Slowly, one muscle at a time, he uncurled.

"Sorry." Harry said sheepishly.

"Don' be sorry." Hagrid's jaw worked beneath his beard, the muscles bunching and releasing. He turned his head toward the Dursleys, and something in his expression made Vernon Dursley take a full step backward, bumping his wife into the wall. "Don'. Be. Sorry."

The rest of the night blurred. Hagrid made a fire in the grate and pulled a squashed box from one of his many pockets. Inside it was a cake with pink icing and the words Happee Birthdae Harry written in green. It was lopsided, the icing had smeared on one side from being sat on, but Harry held it in both hands as if it were treasure. He stared at it for so long that Hagrid asked if something was wrong with it.

"No," Harry said. His voice was thin. "No, it's... no one's ever made me a cake before."

Hagrid cleared his throat and looked at the fire for a while after that.

They left in the morning for Diagon Alley.

Hagrid's motorbike should not have been able to carry both of them, but it did, rumbling through the grey coastal air and then through countryside and then through London, where Hagrid parked it in an alley behind a pub. Surprisingly, no one on the street seemed to notice.

The Leaky Cauldron was dark inside, and it smelled like pipe smoke, old ale and something earthy Harry couldn't name. Hagrid walked him through with one enormous hand on his shoulder, and the barman looked up. "The usual, Hagrid?"

"Can't, Tom. On ‘fficial Hogwarts business. Got young Harry here."

"Good Lord." The barman squinted. "Is this- can this be-?"

The pub went still.

Every face turned. Chairs scraped. Someone dropped a glass and didn't look down at the sound of it breaking.

"Bless my soul. Harry Potter."

And then they were on him.

People stood from their seats and came at him with outstretched hands, and Harry shrank back against Hagrid's leg like a cat pressed into a corner. A woman in a green cloak shook his hand and wouldn't let go. An old man in a purple top hat bowed so low his hat fell off. A young witch with a stammer told him it was an honour, such an honour, and her eyes were wet when she said it.

They knew him. All of them! They knew his name, his parents' names and the story of what happened to him before he could even remember it. Their faces held something that made Harry's stomach twist, a kind of reverence that didn't match up with anything he understood about himself.

He was a boy who slept in a cupboard. He wore clothes that didn't fit. He was nothing, and had always been nothing, yet these people were looking at him like he was everything.

He kept his head down and let Hagrid steer him through.

The brick wall behind the pub opened at Hagrid's touch, a complicated tap with the tip of a pink umbrella, and the bricks rearranged themselves into an archway and behind it...

"Welcome, Harry, to Diagon Alley!"

Harry stopped walking.

The street stretched ahead, cobbled and crooked and packed with people in robes of every colour. Shop windows displayed things that shouldn't exist, cauldrons stacked in towers outside an apothecary, broomsticks mounted in a display with a sign that read Nimbus 2000, the fastest yet, an owl emporium where dozens of birds sat on perches and watched the crowd with rotating heads. The air smelled like cinnamon, gunpowder and something sweet he couldn't place. And of course, the noise, the noise. It was a wall of voices, laughter, the screech of owls, the low rumble of a cart being pushed over cobblestones.

Harry didn't like it one bit at first, but the sights he saw were mindbogglingly... awesome. Somehow, that took his mind off the noise.

A stack of books in a shop window rearranged themselves as he watched, crawling over one another like crabs and settling into a new pyramid formation.

"All righ' there, Harry?"

Harry realized his mouth was open and quickly closed it.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

They went to the bank first.

Gringotts was a white marble building at the end of the alley, crooked and tall, with bronze doors and a goblin in a scarlet-and-gold uniform standing guard outside. The goblin was shorter than Harry, with long fingers, a pointed face and small dark eyes that tracked them both as they approached.

Inside was a vast hall of polished floors and high counters, behind which more goblins sat on tall stools, weighing coins, examining gemstones and writing in ledgers with quills that moved fast enough to blur. The sound of the place was strange, a kind of industrious quiet, hundreds of small yet precise sounds layered over one another.

Hagrid presented a small gold key, and a goblin led them down a series of tunnels in a cart. It moved on tracks, deeper and deeper, the air getting colder, the stone walls slick with moisture. Harry couldn't help but wonder why on earth would these magical folk not use…well, magic, to set up a better system of storage rather than use these rickety tracks to travel around, before realizing the tracks were floating on nothing but thin air.

Maybe magic wasn’t as outlandish as he found it to be.

Moments later, they arrived at a platform. With some work and incantations from the goblin, the vault door opened, and Harry found himself unable to close his mouth.

Inside, piled in mounds that reached his head and even to Hagrid's shoulders, were coins. Gold ones, silver ones, bronze ones, heaped and scattered across the stone floor of the vault as if buckets of them had been upended. The gold caught the torchlight and threw it back in fragments that danced across the ceiling.

"All yours," Hagrid said, gently, as though he understood what Harry was seeing and what it had cost.

Harry stood in the doorway of a vault full of gold that belonged to his dead parents. Not one word was uttered.

He was simply speechless.

Hagrid helped him fill a bag. Harry's hands moved almost mechanically, scooping coins, and when the bag was heavy enough Hagrid tied it shut and tucked it into Harry's jacket pocket. In the cart on the way back up, Harry kept his hand over the pocket, palm flat against the weight of it, and stared at the stone walls rushing past.

They made their way through the alley after that, shop by shop. A cauldron from the cauldron shop, pewter, standard size. Scales and phials from the apothecary, where the smell was thick enough to be tasted on his tongue, animal parts in jars and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling in bunches. Parchment, quills, ink. Each purchase was a small bewildering transaction where Harry held out coins he didn't understand the value of, shopkeepers taking what was owed and then handing back change.

One thing remained consistent though. People kept looking at him.

He noticed it in the way you notice a sound that won't stop, peripheral at first, then grating. A woman whispered to her companion while pointing in his direction outside Flourish and Blotts. A group of boys his age who had pressed their faces to the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies, turned when he walked past, their eyes going to his forehead. He pulled his fringe down with his fingers and walked closer to Hagrid.

"Hagrid, why do they keep staring?"

"I told yeh. Yer famous, Harry."

"But I haven't- well, done anything."

Hagrid looked down at him. The expression on his face was hard to read, as if he wanted to say something but knew the truth of it would do more harm than good.

"Yeh did more than yeh know," he said finally. "Come’n. Robes next."

'Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions' had a plum-coloured front and mannequins in the window that turned slowly on their pedestals, displaying Hogwarts robes, dress robes with elaborate clasps and what appeared to be a set of robes made entirely of feathers.

Hagrid left him at the door.

"Yeh'll be fine in there on yer own, won' yeh? I could use a pick-me-up after Gringotts. Hate them carts."

Harry opened his mouth to ask him to stay, then closed it. He nodded.

I’ll manage on my own. Hopefully.

Inside, the shop was cool and smelled like new fabric and something faintly floral. Bolts of cloth lined the walls in stacks, black and grey and navy and even colours he couldn't name. A measuring tape floated in the air near the counter, coiling and uncoiling like a lazy snake.

"Hogwarts, dear?" A squat witch in mauve robes bustled over, smiling. "Got the lot here. Another young one being fitted, right now, in fact! Here you go, hop up!"

She led him to a stool near the back of the shop and had him stand on it, arms out, while the measuring tape went to work on its own, stretching from shoulder to wrist, neck to knee, looping around his waist and pulling snug before a quill on the counter scratched down numbers by itself.

It was the person who stood on the stool next to him that he noticed next.

‿̩͙⊱༒︎━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona sat with her spine three inches from the back of the chair, because if it touched, Mother would notice, and if Mother noticed, she would correct.

The correction was always worse than the discomfort, she had found out much to her displeasure.

The dining room at Malfoy Manor could seat forty. This morning, it seated three. Her father at the head, her mother at his right, and Dracona at his left, the three of them spaced along one end of a table long enough that the far chairs disappeared into shadow. The chandelier above them held two hundred candles that never dripped, enchanted to burn clean, and their light made the silverware gleam against linen white enough to hurt.

Breakfast was poached eggs, smoked salmon, toast cut into triangles with the crusts removed, and a pot of tea that poured itself when your cup was empty. Dracona ate, managing the fork and knife in the continental style, blade angled inward, and she cut each piece of salmon into portions small enough that chewing was nearly unnecessary.

"Elbows, Dracona." her mother said.

Dracona's left elbow had drifted half an inch above the table's edge. She pulled it back down.

"Your correspondence tutor sends a favorable report," her father said without looking up from his own plate. He ate the way he did everything, with precise economy, as though the act of nourishing himself was a task to be completed efficiently. "Your penmanship has improved."

"Thank you, Father."

"She notes, however, that your wax seals remain inconsistent. The Malfoy crest must be centered and pressed at a seventeen-degree angle. I will have Dobby set up a practice station in the east study."

"Yes, Father."

The tea poured itself into her cup. She lifted it, sipped, set it down. The handle pointed to the right at a forty-five degree angle, as it was supposed to.

After breakfast, there was deportment.

The east corridor of the manor had been cleared for this purpose, a long stretch of marble floor with mirrors on both sides so that she could see herself from every angle. Narcissa walked behind her while Dracona moved the length of it with a book balanced on her head, ‘Hogwarts, A History’, seven hundred and forty-six pages, heavy enough that her neck ached after the first pass.

"Chin up. Shoulders back! Smaller steps, Dracona, you are not marching."

Dracona adjusted. The book wobbled. She steadied it with a micro-correction of her neck, so small it was invisible unless someone was watching for it. Unfortunately for her, her mother always was.

"Again, Dracona."

She walked the corridor eight times. On the sixth pass, her foot caught the hem of her dress robe and the book slid forward. She grabbed it before it fell, fingers closing around the spine, and pressed it back onto her head.

"If you must catch it," her mother said disapprovingly, "you have already failed. A Malfoy does not stumble."

"Yes, Mother."

"Again."

She walked it two more times. Fortunately, the book stayed atop her head.

After deportment, there was French. After French, there was tea etiquette, where she once again learnt the difference between a formal pour and an informal pour, the correct angle of the wrist, the appropriate duration of a stir, the politics of who pours first and what it signals. After tea etiquette, there was an hour of free time.

It was not, in any meaningful sense, free.

Dracona spent it in the library.

The manor's library occupied the entire west wing of the second floor, floor-to-ceiling shelves of dark wood holding books that had been in the family for centuries. Some of them moved. Some of them whispered. One, in the restricted section her father had warded, screamed if you got within three feet of it.

She sat in the window seat with her legs tucked beneath her and read a chapter on basic Transfiguration theory. Outside, the white peacocks her father kept moved across the lawn, spreading their tails for no one.

At eleven, Dobby brought a tray.

The house-elf set it on the side table with hands that trembled, the china rattling faintly against the silver tray. On it were cucumber sandwiches, a small pot of Darjeeling, and a single chocolate biscuit.

Dracona looked at the biscuit.

She picked up a sandwich instead.

Chocolate was for celebrations, her father said, and only in moderation. "Sugar dulled the mind." A Malfoy's palate should be refined, trained for subtlety, not sweetness.

She had been told this at age four when she'd reached for a treacle tart at a Ministry function, and her father's hand had closed around her wrist under the table, squeezing once. She had pulled her arm back and folded both hands in her lap, sitting through the remaining two hours of dinner without eating another bite.

That night, she was punished for her behaviour.

She was ten now. Still, the lesson stuck with her still today.

The biscuit sat on the tray. She drank her tea and read about the theory of object-to-object transfiguration, sparing no glance towards the cookie that tempted her to touch it.

Dobby took the tray away twenty minutes later. The biscuit was still on it.

"Is Miss Malfoy not wanting the biscuit?" the elf asked, large eyes blinking up at her. Something in his eyes screamed at her, take the biscuit!

A light sigh escaped her lips.

"No, Dobby."

"Dobby could bring Miss Malfoy something else. Dobby could-"

"That will be all."

The elf bowed so low his nose touched the carpet and vanished with a crack.

Dracona turned the page and continued reading.

The trip to Diagon Alley came in the afternoon.

Her father Apparated them, his gloved hand on her shoulder and her mother's arm linked through his. She felt the world compress and twist. Then, just like that, they were standing in the alley outside Gringotts.

Dracona smoothed her robes and swallowed the nausea the way she'd been taught to, jaw tight, one controlled breath through the nose. People notice, her father had said. You must be on your best behaviour at all times.

It was just as he predicted.

Eyes turned when they walked past. Lucius Malfoy's cane struck the cobblestones in a rhythm that announced him before his face could. His hair, pale blond and worn long, moved behind him like a second cloak. Narcissa walked at his side with her hand resting on his arm, her posture a mirror of the deportment she drilled into their daughter every morning.

Dracona walked two steps behind and one to the right. The position of the heir.

"Lucius!" A man in expensive robes detached from a cluster outside Flourish and Blotts and approached with his hand out. "Didn't expect to see you here today. Ministry business keeping you busy, I hear!"

"Avery." Her father said curtly, shaking the hand with a firm grip that lasted exactly two seconds. "Shopping for the boy?"

"Theodore's got his letter. Nervous about the sorting, but I told him there's only one real option." Avery laughed politely. His eyes shifted to Dracona. "And this must be the young Miss Malfoy. Goodness, she's the split picture of Narcissa with your hair and eyes."

Dracona performed a small curtsey, right foot behind left, knees bent to a thirty-degree angle, chin dipped for exactly one second. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr Avery."

"Well-mannered!" Avery said to her father, the way one compliments a well-trained dog.

"She, Avery, is a Malfoy." Lucius said curtly, as though that explained everything. In his world, it did.

They moved through the alley at her father's pace, which was unhurried and deliberate, stopping at each shop for precisely as long as necessary, nothing more, nothing less. At Gringotts, a goblin escorted them personally to the family vault, which was larger than Dracona's bedroom and filled with gold stacked in columns along the walls, interspersed with objects, a jeweled goblet, a set of ancient scrolls, a tiara in a glass case that hummed when they walked past it.

Her father withdrew what was needed. Her mother examined a set of emerald earrings from a velvet-lined drawer and then put them back. Dracona stood with her hands clasped, looking at the gold like she would any other object.

She thought about the chocolate biscuit she hadn't eaten. A slight lament drifted into her thoughts.

All the gold in the world, and I can't have a chocolate biscuit.

You are a MALFOY. Restrain yourself, Dracona.

The thought vanished from her mind.

Back on the street, people stepped aside.

Not all of them, but enough. Shopkeepers straightened when Lucius entered. Customers who recognized her father moved out of the way with small nods or averted their eyes entirely. A woman pulled her child to the side of the pavement as they passed while he stared up at Dracona with round eyes.

Dracona kept her chin up and her expression in place. People were watching. Act like a Malfoy.

At the apothecary, her father ordered ingredients for the school year while Narcissa examined a display of self-stirring cauldrons. Dracona stood by the window. A group of children pressed against the glass outside, three boys and a girl, pointing at the display of dragon liver in the window and daring each other to go in.

One of the boys caught Dracona's eye through the glass. She looked at him. He looked at her.

The pair started, before he pulled a face, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue. The girl beside him laughed and elbowed his ribs. Dracona simply stared at them coldly, giving no sign of being entertained. Only when the boy uncrossed his face, his smile dropping, and hurriedly ushering his companions away with frightened loks, did she allow a light smile to grace her lips.

She turned back to the shop's interior. Her father was still speaking to the proprietor about the quality of this season's lacewing flies.

"Come, Dracona." Her mother appeared beside her, close enough that Dracona could smell her perfume, jasmine and something colder beneath it. "We must fetch you some robes."

They crossed the alley to Madam Malkin's. Her father did not come, stating he had business at Borgin and Burkes. He left them at the door with a nod to Narcissa and a look at Dracona that said, in the language she had spent ten years learning to read, behave.

Inside, the shop was quiet and smelled of sizing and pressed fabric. Madam Malkin, hustling about, straighened quickly. "Miss malfoy! A- uh, a pleasure!"

"Indeed, Madam Malkin. Good day?"

"Y-yes, Miss-Miss Malfoy. I hope you are having the most splendid day as well!" The woman stammered out, before descending upon Dracona. "Your daughter, Miss Malfoy? She looks absolutely wonderful!"

"Indeed, Madam Malkin. Dracona, say hello." Narcissa shot her a glare. Where are your manners?

"Hello, Madam Malkin. I apologize for forgetting my manners." She curtsied, but the woman simply laughed and brushed away any apologies. "No worries, my dear! All in good faith, all in good faith!"

Nearby, she heard her mother clear her throat lightly.

"Ah- yes, where was I! Robes, yes, yes! Come, my dear! We must get you fitted!" Almost scurrying, she led Dracona to a fitting stool near the back, where she climbed up and held her arms out and let the measuring tape do its work.

Her mother sat in a chair by the window, examining a catalogue of dress robes, turning pages with one finger.

Dracona stood still and straight and watched herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. A girl with her mother's face and her father's colouring looked back at her. Pale hair, pale skin, grey eyes, smooth jaw, narrow and defined even at thirteen. Her robes were being pinned by Madam Malkin's assistant, an older witch with a pincushion strapped to her wrist, and the black fabric hung on Dracona's thin frame like a tent on a pole.

She heard the bell over the door.

The squat witch in mauve bustled past her toward the front. "Hogwarts, dear? Got the lot here. Another young one being fitted, right now, in fact! Here you go, hop up!"

Footsteps. The scrape of shoes on wood. Someone climbed onto the stool beside her.

Dracona didn't turn right away. She let the measuring tape finish with her left sleeve, waited for the assistant to pin the shoulder seam, and then, with the practiced casualness of someone who has been trained never to appear too eager, she turned her head.

The first thing she noticed was that the boy on the next stool was... small.

He was shorter than her by at least two inches, and thin in a way that went past slim and into territory that made her think of the house-elves at the manor, sharp joints and visible tendons in his neck, wrists that stuck out past his sleeves like broomsticks wrapped in skin. His clothes were wrong. The jumper was three sizes too large and fraying at the cuffs, the trousers were held up with what might have been a piece of rope, and his shoes had newspaper sticking out at the heels.

His hair was black and it went in every direction, sticking up at the crown, falling across his forehead in pieces that looked like they'd been cut with kitchen scissors. His glasses were held together with tape. Through them, his eyes were green, the kind of green that was startling against the rest of him, vivid and out of place, like finding a gemstone in a pile of rocks.

To her shock, he wasn't looking at her. In fact, he gave no hint he noticed her at all. He was looking at everything else. The measuring tape. The far wall. His own shoes.

Dracona studied him the way her father studied people across a negotiating table. Poor, obviously. Muggle-born, probably, given the clothes. No family ring, no sigil pin, no house colours anywhere.

She smirked. A nobody.

She was ready to open her mouth to chide him for occupying the very space she was, before turning back to her own fitting and forget he existed. That was what her father would do. That was what she had been trained to do with people who were beneath her station, which, in Lucius Malfoy's estimation, was nearly everyone.

But she noticed one thing. The boy's hand was gripping the edge of the stool so hard his knuckles had gone white. The more she noticed, the worse her inner conscience felt. He was standing very, very still, with his shoulders drawn up near his ears, the way Dobby stood when he knew he was about to be punished.

Why would he be so afraid?

Maybe he knows he's standing in the presence of a Malfoy. She mused, but couldn't shake the guilty feeling of seeing someone in trouble that she should help.

Dracona looked at him for one second longer than she should have. Then she turned her head, straightened her spine and stared at the mirror.

In the reflection, the boy's green eyes flickered toward her, briefly, then dropped back to the floor.

"You're- uh, going to Hogwarts too?" A timid voice sounded next to her. It took her a moment to realise the boy had spoken.

Dracona glanced sideways.

The boy was looking at her now, or trying to. His eyes kept darting between her face and the floor, like a moth bouncing between a lamp and a wall, unable to commit to either. His mouth was slightly open, the question still hanging in the air between them, and she noticed he looked as if he was already regretting his choice to speak.

"Obviously," she said coldly.

He flinched. A small one, barely visible, just a tightening around his eyes and a pull of his shoulders inward. As if the single word had been a slap.

Dracona frowned.

She hadn't meant it cruelly. Well, she had, because that was how she spoke to people she didn't know, clipped and dismissive, proverbially shutting the door in their face. But the flinch bothered her.

People she spoke to in that manner usually bristled, looked away or muttered something under their breath. They didn't flinch.

The measuring tape looped around her waist and tightened. She held still for it.

"First year as well, then?" she asked, and she wasn't sure why she was continuing the conversation. Curiosity, perhaps. She pushed the thought away as he replied.

"Yeah." He nodded once, quick, like a bird pecking at something. "First year."

"Do you know what house you'll be in?"

He blinked. "House?"

Muggle-born, then. Confirmed. She almost left it there. Almost turned back to the mirror and let the conversation die the way conversations with people beneath her station were supposed to die, quick and unmourned.

For reasons not even she knew, she replied.

"There are four houses at Hogwarts," she said instead, keeping her voice level. "Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. You're sorted when you arrive."

"Oh, those" He shifted on his stool. The wood creaked. "Hagrid-uhhh, he told me."

"Hagrid?" She asked incredulously. "Rubeus Hagrid, the oaf? What business has he got to do with you?"

"I-" He stammered, before she saw something flash in his eyes. "He isn't an oaf. He's pretty nice. Better than...some people."

An idiot too, then. She thought to herself. Hagrid is nothing but a BRUTE. This scrawny kid associating himself with brutes isn't someone I should concern myself with.

"An-and to answer your question." His quiet voice brought him out of her thoughts, "he...came and gave me a cake on my birthday. Told me things, that I'm a wizard, that my parents were wizards."

Not a mudblood then, maybe.

"Which, uh, house then? Which one are you going to be in? Or do you not pick?" His question snapped her out of her thoughts.

"Slytherin." No hesitation. "My family has been in Slytherin for generations. It's the house for the... ambitious."

She almost said best. Her father would have said best. She wasn't sure why she bothered to change the word.

"What about you?" she added. "Any family in a particular house?"

He made a funny expression, and quickly looked down at his hands where they gripped the stool's edge.

"I don't... I don't really know much about my family," he said. "They died. When I was a baby."

The assistant pinned Dracona's right sleeve. The needle pricked through fabric close to her wrist, and she held still.

"I see," she said.

The words came out softer than she intended. She corrected her tone immediately, sharpening the edges back into place. "Well. Hogwarts will sort you where you belong, I expect."

He nodded again, that quick motion, and a strand of black hair fell across his forehead. He pushed it back with his fingers, and for a half-second she saw a mark on his skin, something reddish and jagged, before the hair fell back over it.

She looked away.

"I'm Dracona, by the way." She paused, then added, because her father would have wanted her to, "Dracona Malfoy."

She watched him from the corner of her eye when she said it, waiting for the recognition to set in, the slight widening of the eyes, the shift in posture that people always showed when they heard the name.

The Malfoy name carried weight. Even Muggle-borns who'd been in the wizarding world for five minutes usually knew it by the time they reached Diagon Alley. Someone would have told them. Someone always did.

But as the seconds ticked by, she saw nothing.

The boy just looked up at her and said timidly, "Nice to meet you."

Nice to meet you.

Four words, delivered with the same uncertain half-mumble he'd used for everything else, as though "Malfoy" was just another collection of syllables with no more meaning than "Smith" or "Jones." He didn't straighten up, didn't look impressed, and worst of all didn't even look nervous, which was the bare minimum response her surname usually commanded.

Her fingers curled in the fabric of her half-pinned sleeve. Who was he? Not respecting the Malfoy name?

"And you are?" The question came out sharper than she planned.

"Harry," he said. Then, after a pause that lasted a beat too long, as though he was still getting used to the full shape of it, "Harry Potter."

The measuring tape pulled tight across her shoulders. She barely felt it. Something cold had dropped through her chest and settled in her stomach. She turned her head slowly, properly this time, and looked at him. Really looked at him.

Harry Potter.

The boy who lived. 

The boy her father had talked about at dinner when he thought she wasn't listening, disguising bitterness and contempt with admiration and gratefulness, wine glass turning between his fingers. The boy whose name Aunt Bellatrix had screamed at the walls of Azkaban, according to the stories her mother told when Father was away. The boy who had destroyed the Dark Lord as an infant, who had single-handedly ended the war, who was the reason half of her father's associates had spent a decade scrambling to prove their innocence before the Wizengamot.

This boy.

This scrawny, underfed, badly dressed boy in taped-together glasses who didn't know what was what, and judging by his reactions, who was who.

She stared at him.

He must have felt it, because he looked up from his shoes and met her eyes for the first time. Green met grey, as they stared at each other for what felt like an eternity.

"Potter?" she repeated incredulously. "Potter? As in-"

"Yeah." He swallowed. "Is that... do you know-?"

"All done, dear!" Madam Malkin's assistant stepped back from Dracona's stool with a satisfied clap of her hands, the sudden interruption making her scrunch her nose lightly. "Lovely fit, if I do say so myself. We'll have them owled to the Manor by tomorrow morning."

Dracona didn't move. She was still looking at Harry. He was still looking at her.

The air was thick with tension, so thick she felt like she could cut it with a knife.

"Dracona." Her mother's voice came from the chair by the window. Narcissa had closed the catalogue and was standing, smoothing the front of her robes with one hand. "Come."

Dracona stepped down from the stool. Her shoes clicked against the shop floor, and she straightened her half-fitted robes and tucked a strand of pale hair behind her ear.

She looked back at him once more.

He was watching her go with those green eyes, too big for his thin face, the broken glasses sitting crooked on his nose. His hand had come up to grip the opposite arm, fingers wrapped around his own elbow, holding himself the way people would hold something that might fall apart.

And there, she saw it.

It was in the way he stood, pulled tight and small, shoulders rounded inward like a shield. The way his eyes tracked her mother's movements, watchful, measuring the distance between himself and the nearest adult as if he was eyeing an exit to bolt through. The way he sat on that stool like he was trying to take up as little space as possible, as if being noticed was something he didn't want happening.

She knew that look.

She wore a different version of it every evening at the dinner table, sitting with her spine three inches from the chair, chewing without sound, answering when spoken to and never before.

Different houses, different clothes, different everything. But that look was something she shared with him.

Am I not so different from the rabble-

No. He was the boy who lived. The legend that echoed through the wizarding world. The only person ever to survive a killing curse.

He was not common rabble.

But he might as well be.

She suddenly felt like something invisible was pressing against her chest. Forcing herself to take a deep breath, she blinked, and the feeling was gone, shoved down into the same place she kept every other inconvenient thing.

"Dracona." Her mother's voice, firmer now. "We're leaving."

"Coming, Mother."

She turned away from Harry Potter and walked to the door. Her stride was measured, her chin was up, her hands were clasped at her waist. She did not look back again.

The bell chimed overhead as the door swung shut behind her.

Outside, the alley was still bright and crowded. Her mother's hand found her shoulder, guiding her left, toward Flourish and Blotts, and the grip was light but specific, the way all of Narcissa's touches were, full of direction.

"Who was that boy?" her mother asked, seemingly casual. Still, she had learnt to distinguish the tones her mother spoke in, how her mother phrased questions to appear harmless and curious.

"No one," Dracona said after a moment. "Just a lowly boy who doesn't know anything at all."

She hoped that answer sufficed.

Chapter 4: Of old blood and new legends

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona could smell the train before she saw it.

Coal smoke and hot iron, drifting through the brick archway of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters in a haze that caught the late morning light and turned it amber. The Hogwarts Express sat on the tracks, scarlet and gleaming, its engine already breathing steam in slow, rhythmic plumes that rolled across the platform and curled around the ankles of the crowd.

And what a crowd it was.

Families packed the platform shoulder to shoulder, parents in robes and Muggle clothes alike, children dragging trunks, owls screeching from cages stacked on trolleys. A boy chased a toad between the legs of passersby while a round-faced woman, presumably his grandmother, shouted after him. Two red-haired twins were levitating someone's hat above its owner's head, cackling while their mother, a stout woman with the same red hair, swatted at them with a rolled-up copy of the Daily Prophet.

The noise was a physical force that hurt. It pressed against Dracona's ears and made her scrunch up her nose in disgust.

"Chin up." Narcissa's hand found the small of her back. The touch was brief, corrective, gone before anyone could see it. "You are arriving, Dracona. Remember what you're taught."

Dracona straightened. She had been slouching. Half an inch, maybe less, but still her mother had caught it from a sideways glance.

Her father walked ahead of them, cane striking the platform stones in that metronome rhythm she'd grown up to. People moved aside for him. A few nodded. Most simply looked away and found somewhere else to stand, shuffling their children behind them or suddenly needing to check something in their trunks.

Lucius stopped near the front of the train, where the crowd thinned and the compartments were less trafficked. He turned and looked down at his daughter.

"You have your letter?"

"Yes, Father."

"Your books?"

"Yes, Father."

"The supplementary reading I assigned?"

"Yes, Father."

He studied her face with the detached precision of someone appraising an investment. His eyes moved from her hair, which Narcissa had braided that morning in a single plait that hung between her shoulder blades, to her robes, to her shoes, to her posture.

Checking for flaws.

She held still and let him look. She had not many choices in the matter.

"The Potter boy will be here," he said.

The name landed between them with a weight that didn't match its two syllables. Dracona kept her face blank.

"I expect he will be, Father."

"He is... a curiosity." Lucius turned the cane between his fingers, the silver serpent head rotating. "The wizarding world has placed him on a pedestal. An infant who survived the Dark Lord's curse through luck." The word dripped with something acidic that he didn't bother to conceal. "They've built a legend around him that neither of his parents could have dreamed of."

He paused. The cane stopped turning.

"He is also, at present, useful."

"How so?" Dracona asked, before she could stop herself.

Her father's eyes narrowed. The question had been too quick, too curious. "I've never seen him myself, father," she added hastily. "Surely he would not be any different than other...children."

She wasn't entirely sure he was convinced of her added act.

"The boy carries political weight whether he deserves it or not," Lucius said dismissively, yet his voice dropped below the noise of the platform. "Half the Ministry would crawl over broken glass to be seen standing beside him. Every family with aspirations will be trying to place their children in his orbit. The boy won't even know it, of course, because he's been raised by Muggles."

The last word carried a venom her father reserved for things he found beneath contempt.

"The Malfoy name," he continued, "does not chase. We do not position ourselves as suitors grovelling for scraps at the table. However." His gloved hand settled on her shoulder with a heavy thud, "It would be... imprudent to make an enemy of him. Not yet. Not while the political landscape remains... fluid."

"Your father is saying," Narcissa interrupted smoothly, stepping forward, "that you should be civil. Courteous. Nothing more. If the opportunity arises to build a relationship, you may take it. But you do not go to him. If he comes to you, then we speak of alliances."

Lucius frowned. He had wanted to deliver this instruction himself, in his own words, and his wife had softened it. But he said nothing. A silent negotiation between them, a lifetime of these exchanges, played out in the space of a glance.

"Be mindful," was all he added.

"Yes, Father."

Narcissa crouched, which was unusual. She did it in one fluid motion, her robes pooling around her on the platform, and she took Dracona's hands in hers. Her fingers were cold, Dracona noticed, as her slender fingers found their way around Dracona's hand with a firm but gentle grasp.

"Write to me," she said. "Every week."

"Yes, Mother."

"And eat properly. I will know if you don't. I have my ways."

"Yes, Mother."

Narcissa looked at her daughter's face. Her thumb moved across Dracona's knuckles, back and forth. Dracona could see the carefully crafted persona slipping, her mother's love and care trying to reach out under all that stiff etiquette and mannerism.

Before that could happen, she stood, released her hands, and stepped back beside her husband.

"Off you go, then," Lucius said, his voice gruff and indifferent. Her mother’s eyes held a bit of pride.

Dracona bowed lightly and picked up her trunk. She took three steps toward the train before the noise hit a different pitch, a ripple of excitement running through the crowd like wind through wheat. Heads turned. Voices dropped, then rose. She heard it in fragments. Broken words, an electrified murmur traveling mouth to mouth.

"-is that-"

"-Harry Potter-"

"-it's him! It's really-"

She turned.

He was forty feet away, near the middle of the platform, being herded toward the train by the enormous shape of Hagrid, who stood a full three heads above the crowd and was using his body as a kind of living windbreak, clearing a path through the crush. Harry walked in his shadow, and even from this distance Dracona could see it, the hunched shoulders, the ducked head, the way he moved through the crowd like he wanted to dissolve.

People were staring. Pointing. A woman grabbed her husband's arm and whispered urgently while gesturing. A cluster of older students near the middle carriages craned their necks. A girl with bushy brown hair and large front teeth was watching him from a compartment window, her face pressed close enough to fog the glass.

Harry climbed onto the train.

Dracona watched him disappear inside, the door swinging shut behind him, cutting off the last glimpse of messy black hair and oversized jumper.

She turned back to her parents. Her father was watching the spot where Harry had been, his expression unreadable, that carefully constructed mask of composure that gave nothing away. Her mother was watching her father.

"Well," Lucius said. "There he is."

His words came out in a tone suggesting he was commenting on the weather, instead of a person.

"Go," he said to Dracona, with a tilt of his chin toward the train. "Remember what I told you."

Dracona boarded without looking back.

She found a compartment near the front of the train, empty except for a trunk that someone had left on the overhead rack. She sat by the window and folded her hands in her lap. The platform was thinning now, parents stepping back from the train, waving, a few mothers dabbing their eyes. She saw her own parents standing exactly where she'd left them. Her father was speaking to someone, another man in dark robes, their heads tilted together in quiet conversation, paying no heed to her. Her mother stood apart, and her eyes were fixed on Dracona's window.

Narcissa raised one hand. A small wave, and in truth, barely a wave at all, just her fingers lifting and curling once.

Dracona pressed her palm flat against the glass.

The train lurched. Steam billowed past the window, and the platform began to slide sideways, slowly at first, then faster. Her mother's face shrank. Her hand lowered as steam swallowed her.

Dracona dropped her hand from the glass and placed it back in her lap with the other.

Her fingernails left four small crescents in her palm where she'd been pressing them.

She smoothed her robes, tucked the braid over her shoulder, and sat with her spine three inches from the back of the seat.

This is the beginning, she told herself.

The countryside opened up outside the window, green and wide, as the train carried her north.

Towards her new home for the remainder of the year.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry sat with his forehead against the cool glass of the compartment window, watching the last edges of London thin into suburbs, then fields. The vibration of the train traveled through the glass and into his skull, a low persistent hum that settled behind his eyes like white noise.

Ron Weasley was eating.

This was, Harry had gathered in the forty minutes since Ron had appeared in the compartment doorway, having asked if anyone was sitting there and then welcoming himself in without Harry ever replying, something Ron did with commitment and consistency. The pile of sweets between them on the seat, purchased from a trolley witch whose cart had rattled past twenty minutes ago, was significant. Chocolate Frogs, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes. Harry had bought all of it on impulse, emptying a handful of gold onto the trolley. The look on Ron's face, the open-mouthed disbelief followed by a grin so wide it pushed his ears back, had been worth every Sickle.

Harry picked up a Chocolate Frog and turned the box over in his hands.

"Curfu'!" Ron said through a mouthful of Pumpkin Pasty. "Teh jumm!"

Harry opened the box. The frog leaped, hit the window, and stuck to the glass for a second before sliding down and going still. He peeled it off and bit its head.

"De cur-" Ron swallowed audibly before continuing, "The card's the good bit. See who you've got!"

Harry pulled out the card. An old man with a long silver beard and half-moon spectacles looked up at him from the frame, then wandered off the edge.

"Dumbledore," Harry read. "I've got Dumbledore."

"No biggie! I've got about six of him." Ron bit into another pasty. "Wan' a bean? Watch out for the grey ones. Fred told me he got a bogey-flavoured one once."

Harry took a bean. It was orange. He chewed carefully and tasted marmalade, which was fine. Better than bogey, at least.

The door opened without a knock.

A girl stood in the frame, already in her school robes, her hair a cloud of brown curls that framed her face and fell past her shoulders. She had a bossy sort of expression, lips pressed together, chin slightly raised, looking like she had read the rulebook and was checking if everyone else had too.

"Has anyone seen a toad?" she asked. "A boy named Neville's lost one."

"Nope!" Ron said cheerily. "No toads around here."

She didn't leave. Her eyes moved across the compartment, taking inventory, the sweets, the wrappers, Ron's rat sleeping in his lap, Harry's trunk on the rack above. Then her gaze lingered on Harry, and he saw the glance at his forehead where his fringe covered the scar.

Already? Can’t get peace around these parts, really.

"Are you Harry Potter?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Oh! I've read about you, of course. In Modern Magical History and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century!"

Harry looked at Ron, who in turn looked at Harry. His eyebrows raised quizzically.

"Uh, right," Harry said with a cough. "Nice to meet you-?"

"I'm Hermione Granger." She said it quickly, declarative and complete. "And you are?"

This was directed at Ron, who had paused mid-chew.

"Ron Weasley," he managed.

"Pleasure." She did not look particularly pleased. "You've got something on your nose, by the way."

Ron wiped his nose with his sleeve. A smear of chocolate came off on the cuff. His ears went red.

"You should both change into your robes," Hermione said, already backing into the corridor. "I expect we'll be arriving soon. And if you see a toad..."

"Uh, we'll let you know." Harry said.

She left. Her footsteps moved down the corridor, and they heard her knock on the next compartment. "Has anyone seen a toad?"

"Mental," Ron muttered, and went back to his pasty. "Didn't even close the door!"

Harry, after moving to close it, leaned against the window again. The countryside was wilder now, the fields giving way to rolling hills and patches of forest. The sky had gone overcast, thick clouds pressing low and grey, and the light in the compartment had dimmed to the colour of dishwater.

He was reaching for another Chocolate Frog when the door opened a second time.

She stood in the doorway, and he recognized her immediately.

The girl from the robe shop.

She looked different on the train, or rather, the same, but more. At Madam Malkin's, she'd been a girl on a stool in a half-fitted robe. Here, she looked almost regal. Her school robes were already on, pressed and fitted in a way that his, stuffed in his trunk, certainly were not. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a single braid that hung over one shoulder, neat and precise, every strand in place. Her back was straight, her hands clasped in front of her, and her chin was tilted at an angle that he was beginning to suspect was permanent.

Two boys stood behind her, thick-set and heavy-jawed, one slightly taller than the other but otherwise almost interchangeable. They flanked her like bookends.

"Potter."

She said his surname curtly, as if studying medical terminology.

Harry shifted in his seat. His hand went to his opposite elbow, gripping it. "Uh. Hi. Draco, right?"

"Dracona Malfoy. Of the House of Malfoy." She delivered it with practised formality, the words clipped and measured, not forgetting to emphasize her family name. He half wondered if she had rehearsed the line in a mirror a few dozen times before speaking to anyone. "This is Crabbe. And Goyle."

Neither Crabbe nor Goyle said anything.

Ron had stopped chewing. He was looking at Dracona the way he might look at a wasp that had flown in through an open window.

Well, this is going great already. He sighed lightly, not enough for anyone to notice. Dracona, however, apparently did.

He watched as she stepped into the compartment. One step, precise, enough to establish presence without crowding. Her eyes moved across the scene, the sweet wrappers, Ron's rat, the crumbs on the seat, and Harry saw something shift in her expression, a flicker of calculation behind the striking silvery grey.

"I wanted to speak with you," she said. "Properly, I mean. We were... interrupted at Madam Malkin's."

"Oh. Yeah." Harry loosened his grip on his elbow. "Yeah, you- your mum called you away."

"Indeed." She paused, and he couldn't help but notice she spoke like she was performing a speech. Master at oratory arts, he thought to himself as she resumed. "I wanted to welcome you to the wizarding world, Potter. Officially. On behalf of my family."

"Thanks," Harry said. "That's... nice of you."

"The wizarding world can be... difficult to navigate," she continued, and her voice had shifted into a register that sounded older than she was, polished and careful. "Particularly for someone in your position. You've been away from it for a long time, and there are things you won't learn from books." A brief glance toward the corridor, where Hermione's voice could still be heard two compartments down, asking about a toad. "Or from just anyone."

Ron made a noise, almost like a snort. Dracona's eyes were on him in an instant.

"Something funny, Weasley?"

Ron's ears went a deeper shade of red. "How'd you know my name?"

"Red hair, freckles, hand-me-down robes." Her gaze dropped to Scabbers, asleep and matted in Ron's lap. "A family rat. It wasn't a difficult deduction."

Ron grimaced. His hand closed over Scabbers, as if she was about to devour the rat.

Dracona turned back to Harry. She took a breath, and he distinctly noticed her posture changing, the formal mask settling more firmly into place.

"There are certain families in the wizarding world, Potter, that carry... weight. History, influence, connections that go back centuries. And there are others..." She let the sentence trail, her eyes drifting to Ron and then back.

The implication hung in the air, an unfinished painting leaving the viewer to paint the rest.

"I can help you understand the difference. Help you make the right sort of friends."

She extended her hand.

Her fingers were pale and clean and steady. Her nails were trimmed to uniform length. The hand hung in the space between them, open, waiting.

Harry looked at it.

He looked at Ron, who was staring at the floor with his jaw clenched and his ears red. He looked at the mess of sweet wrappers between them, the shared feast, the easy laughter that had echoed minutes ago. 

He had been kind to him. Ron had sat down and talked to him like he was normal for once. Hermione, terrible as she was in conversation, had spoken to him like he was a person and not a headline. Well, compared to other people she hadn’t, instead treating him like some artifact or a piece of information instead.

And now, this girl. Careful, composed, sharp-edged, offering him something that felt less like friendship and more like a transaction. In the process, she apparently didn't miss the opportunity to insult the first friend he'd ever made.

He looked at Dracona's hand.

"I..." He swallowed. The word stuck in his throat like a fish bone. "I think I'm okay, actually. Thanks, though."

He didn't take her hand.

The silence that followed could not have been more than three seconds long. It felt like thirty.

Dracona's hand hung in the air. Her fingers stayed extended, steady, not trembling, held in place by what must have been sheer force of will. Then, slowly, she withdrew it. Her fingers curled into her palm, and her hand returned to its place at her side, clasped with the other.

Her face didn't change.

"I see," she said.

Two words. Flat. Clipped.

If words could kill, he was pretty sure he would not have lived despite his reported miraculous survival more than a decade ago.

She looked at him for one more second. Then she turned, her braid swinging with the motion, and walked out of the compartment. Crabbe and Goyle followed, two heavy shadows, and the door slid shut behind them.

Ron exhaled.

"Bloody hell," he said. "That's the Malfoys. My dad talks about them all the time. Bad lot, the whole family. Up to their necks in dark magic, everyone knows it."

Harry was still looking at the door.

She feels...different. What's gone into her? She was pretty alright at the robe shop.

"Yeah," he said. "Maybe."

He picked up a Chocolate Frog and turned the box in his hands.

He did not open it.

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona sat in the compartment she'd claimed, staring at the countryside moving past the window.

Crabbe and Goyle were eating. She could hear them, the wet sounds of chewing and the rustle of wrappers, yet she did not turn around.

Her hand was in her lap. She could still feel the air where his palm should have been, the absence of contact, like a phantom limb in reverse.

He said no.

She turned the fact over in her mind, examining it from each angle like she was reading a contract, looking for the clause she'd missed, the error in her approach. She replayed the exchange. 

The delivery had been correct. Formal introduction, establishment of credentials, clear articulation of value. She had followed the script her father had spent years teaching her. When you meet someone of importance, you present the Malfoy name as an asset, and you make them understand that association with us is a privilege.

She had done all of this, just for him to turn her down with a polite no.

It wasn't the no that bothered her, or so she told herself.

It was the way he'd turned her down. Gentle. Almost apologetic, as though he were turning down a second helping of pudding, something offered in good faith that he simply didn't want. He hadn't weighed the Malfoy name against the Weasley name and chosen strategically. He'd looked at the red-haired boy with the rat and the chocolate on his nose, and he'd chosen that.

Why?

The wizarding world’s golden boy chose someone with some of the poorest reputations in the wizarding world over a clearly advantageous friendship with a Malfoy.

The concept was so foreign to Dracona's upbringing that she couldn't process it.

He's an idiot, she told herself. A sentimental, ill-informed idiot who has been in the wizarding world for less than a month and doesn't understand the first thing about how it works.

The thought was loud and clear, yet it didn't help at all.

She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, hard, until the skin went white.

"Oi." A voice came from the doorway.

Dracona turned her head. A girl stood there, dark-haired, pug-nosed, compact and sharp-eyed, already in her school robes.

Pansy Parkinson.

Dracona knew her from the handful of pureblood social functions her parents had dragged her to over the years, garden parties and Ministry galas and the interminable Christmas gathering at the Greengrass estate where the children were expected to sit quietly while the adults drank and talked about bloodlines and politics.

"Heard you went and talked to Potter," Pansy said, stepping inside and dropping onto the seat across from Dracona. She sat the way she did everything, decisively, legs crossed, one foot bouncing. "How'd that go?"

"Fine." She spat, as if the word was poisonous.

"That bad?" Pansy grinned. "What'd he do, tell you to sod off?"

"He chose a Weasly over me, and was polite about it."

"Ooooh. That's worse, honestly!"

Dracona said nothing, opting to turn back to the window.

Pansy, to her credit, did not push. She dug into a bag of Bertie Bott's and began sorting them by colour on the seat beside her, making a small pile of the suspicious grey ones. After a minute, she held one out to Dracona.

"Bean?"

"No."

"It's toffee. Probably."

"I said no."

Pansy shrugged, popped the bean into her own mouth, chewed and then made a face. "Earwax. Lovely."

Despite herself, Dracona's mouth twitched. She pulled it straight immediately, but Pansy had seen it, and the grin returned, wider.

"Come on, Malfoy. One train ride and you're already brooding? Save it for classes."

A boy appeared in the doorway. Tall for his age, dark-skinned, with high cheekbones and an expression of cultivated disinterest that Dracona recognized, having been taught to present herself that way like donning a mask.

Blaise Zabini.

He leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms. "Compartment's full everywhere else," he said. "Mind if I-"

"Sit down, Zabini," Pansy said, kicking the seat beside her.

He sat. He looked at Dracona, then at the window, then back at Dracona.

"You look like someone pissed in your pumpkin juice," he observed mildly.

"Charming," Dracona said.

"I try."

They rode in something that resembled silence for a while. Crabbe and Goyle finished eating and fell asleep, one of them snoring in a low, rumbling drone that vibrated the armrest. Pansy sorted beans. Blaise pulled a book from his trunk and opened it across one knee. Dracona sat with her hands in her lap and watched Scotland emerge outside the window, darker and wilder, hills giving way to mountains, the sky bruising with dusk.

He said no.

She pushed the thought down again. It kept floating back up.

Her father would hear about this. Not from her, of course not, she wouldn't write it in her weekly letter, but she bet someone would mention it. Someone always did. Avery's boy, or Nott's, or one of the dozen other children of her father's associates who were probably on this train right now, ready to report.

Father will be disappointed.

The thought sat in her stomach like a stone.

She pressed her thumbnail into her finger again, harder this time, until the crescent mark turned red.

Not long after, the train slowed. The mountains were close now, dark shapes against a sky that had gone deep purple, and ahead, through the mist, she saw lights. Warm, yellow, scattered across a hillside, and above them, rising from the rock like it had grown there, a castle.

Hogwarts.

The sight temporarily lifted her thoughts away from being a disappointment, and she allowed herself to have a moment of awe.

It was enormous. Towers and turrets rose in clusters, some round, some square, some ending in points that disappeared into low clouds. Windows glowed in rows and arches, hundreds of them, and the whole structure reflected in a lake below that was black and still as glass. The train was crossing a viaduct now, and the castle filled the window, closer, larger, close enough that she could see the stonework, the ivy, the heavy oak of the main doors.

She exhaled slowly.

This is my new proving ground now, she thought. This is where I establish what I am.

They disembarked in a rush of noise and cold air. "Firs' years! Firs' years over here!" Hagrid's voice boomed across the platform. Dracona pulled her robes tighter and followed the crowd to a fleet of small boats at the water's edge. She climbed into one with Pansy, Blaise and a girl she didn't know, and the boats pushed off on their own, gliding across the lake toward the castle.

The water was black beneath them. Something moved in it, a shadow, long and slow. Pansy gripped the side of the boat.

"Was that a-"

"Giant squid," Blaise said, without looking up from the water. "Supposedly harmless."

"Supposedly?"

Dracona sat in the prow and watched Hogwarts grow closer. The stone was grey and old and solid, centuries of magic sunk into every block.

They climbed steps, passed through doors and finally gathered in a chamber off the Great Hall, fifty-odd thirteen-year-olds packed together in a shifting, whispering mass. At the head, Professor McGonagall, tall and severe in emerald robes, explained the Sorting.

"When I call your name, you will sit on the stool and place the Hat on your head."

Dracona smoothed her robes, checked her braid and clasped her hands.

Deep breaths. In, out. In, out.

The doors to the Great Hall opened.

Four long tables stretched the length of the room, packed with students, hundreds of faces turned toward the first-years. Candles floated above in clusters, and the ceiling, if there was one, showed the night sky, stars scattered across a dark canvas. At the far end, a head table held the teachers, and in the centre, a tall figure with a long silver beard caught her eye.

Dumbledore.

He was watching the procession with an expression that could have been amusement, or sadness, or both.

A stool sat in front of the head table. On it, a hat. 

The hat was old, patched, frayed at the brim, and it sat on the stool like a sleeping animal. 

Then it opened a tear near the brim and began to sing.

Dracona didn't listen to the song. She was scanning the crowd of first-years, looking for black hair and round glasses.

She found him near the back, standing between the Weasley boy and the bushy-haired girl from the corridor. He looked pale. His hands were shoved into his pockets, and he was staring at the Hat with an expression she couldn't quite read from this distance.

McGonagall unrolled a scroll.

"Abbott, Hannah!"

The sorting had began.

A pink-faced girl stumbled forward and sat on the stool. The Hat dropped over her eyes.

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

The table on the right erupted. The girl pulled the Hat off and ran toward the cheering.

Names came and went. Bones, Boot, Brocklehurst. Each one walked to the stool, sat down, and the Hat shouted a house. Some took seconds, some took longer. A boy named Finch-Fletchley sat for almost a full minute before the Hat sent him to Hufflepuff.

"Granger, Hermione!"

The bushy-haired girl hurried forward, practically running, and jammed the Hat on her head with an eagerness that made several people exchange looks.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

Dracona's lips twisted. Of course, she would go to Gryffindor.

"Malfoy, Dracona!"

Her name. Spoken in McGonagall's crisp voice, carrying across the hall, and suddenly every face was turned toward her.

She walked to the stool. Her stride was measured, her chin was up, her hands were clasped at her waist. The same walk her mother had drilled into her across a hundred lengths of marble corridor.

She sat. McGonagall lowered the Hat onto her head.

Darkness. The brim fell past her eyes, and the Great Hall vanished. The sounds went muffled, distant, and in the darkness a voice spoke, close and dry and amused.

Ah. A Malfoy.

She gripped the edges of the stool.

Plenty of ambition, I see. Intelligence too, a fine mind, very organized. And underneath all of that... Well, well. Interesting. More to you than meets the eye, isn't there?

Slytherin, Dracona thought firmly. Put me in Slytherin.

Oh, you'd do well there, no doubt. But I wonder if-

Slytherin.

Very well. If you're certain.

"SLYTHERIN!"

The table on the far left roared. Dracona pulled the Hat off and handed it back to McGonagall. Her face was composed, but beneath it her pulse hammered in her throat

She walked to the Slytherin table and sat beside Pansy, who grabbed her arm and squeezed. Across from her, Blaise nodded once. Crabbe and Goyle dropped onto the bench nearby with twin thuds that rattled the cutlery.

The sorting continued. Nott. Parkinson. Patil, then the other Patil.

She sat with her hands clasped in her lap and watched the stool.

"Potter, Harry!"

The hall erupted in whispers. 

Potter? 

Did she say Potter? 

THE Harry Potter?

Harry walked to the stool.

He walked the way he did everything, small, contained, shoulders drawn up, feet shuffling. He sat on the stool and McGonagall placed the Hat on his head, and it dropped over his eyes the same way it had dropped over Dracona's, swallowing him in its shadow.

The hall went silent.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry sat on the stool as the world went dark.

The brim of the Hat dropped past his glasses and covered his eyes, and the Great Hall disappeared. The whispers, the candles, the hundreds of faces, gone. In their place was fabric, darkness and the smell of something very old, combining dust, leather and centuries of others that had sat where his was sitting now.

Then the voice.

Difficult. Very difficult indeed.

Harry's fingers tightened on the stool's edge. The wood was smooth and warm under his palms, worn by decades of nervous thirteen-year-olds.

Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind, either. There's talent, oh my goodness, yes. And a thirst to prove yourself, now that's interesting...

Harry didn't say anything. He didn't know he was supposed to.

So where shall I put you?

"Somewhere good," Harry whispered to himself. The words came out before he could think about them. He wasn't even sure what "good" meant. He thought about Ron, already sorted, sitting at the Gryffindor table with his brothers. Hermione, who'd practically sprinted to the same table five minutes ago. Hagrid, who'd told him on the motorbike that his parents had been Gryffindors.

Then, he found his thoughts drifting towards the blonde girl who'd walked to the Slytherin table with her chin up and her back straight, applause ringing in her wake.

The sorting hat seemingly sensed his inner turmoil.

Slytherin could help you, you know. It's all here, in your head. Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that.

Harry's stomach clenched.

The girl from the train. Slytherin was her house. Her family's house. 

Ron's voice echoed in his head. Bad lot, the whole family.

Not Slytherin, Harry thought. He wasn't sure if that was right, if it was fair, if he was making a choice based on the wrong reasons. But the thought was clear and firm and it was his.

Not Slytherin? Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness...

Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin. Please.

The Hat was quiet for three heartbeats. Harry counted them in the darkness, each one thumping in the base of his throat.

Well, if you're sure. Better be...

"GRYFFINDOR!"

The Hat came off his head and the world came back, light and noise and colour flooding in so fast he squinted. McGonagall lifted the Hat away, and Harry sat blinking on the stool for a second, the Great Hall swimming into focus around him.

Then the Gryffindor table exploded. 

People were on their feet, clapping, stamping, shouting. The Weasley twins were chanting "We got Potter! We got Potter!" and banging their fists on the table so hard the goblets jumped. Ron was clapping with both hands above his head, his face split wide open with a smile that went from ear to ear. Hermione was bouncing in her seat. A prefect Harry didn't know stood and waved him over with both arms, like he was guiding a ship into harbour.

Harry climbed off the stool. His legs felt strange, loose at the knee, and he walked toward the Gryffindor table through a wall of sound that pressed against him from every side. Hands reached out and clapped his back, grabbed his shoulders, ruffled his hair, and he flinched at the first few before he realized they were trying to welcome him.

He sat down beside Ron. Someone shoved a goblet of pumpkin juice into his hand. His grip wasn’t steady, and it sloshed over his fingers, spilling down a little

"Well done, mate," Ron said, grinning. "Well done."

Harry looked at the pumpkin juice in his hand, then at the table, the gold plates, the goblets, the faces turned toward him with something he didn't have a name for. Belonging, maybe, if he'd known the word.

He glanced across the hall.

At the Slytherin table, a girl with pale blonde hair sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was looking at him. Their eyes met across the length of the Great Hall, green and grey, and for a second neither of them moved.

Then the girl next to her said something in her ear, and Dracona Malfoy turned away.

Harry took a sip of pumpkin juice.

It was the sweetest thing he'd ever tasted.

Chapter 5: Rivalries and revelations

⊱༒︎⋅─━━⊱༺ ₊ ༻⊰━━─⋅༒︎⊰

The tranquility didn’t last. 

Honestly, neither side had expected it to. 

At the start of the third week of term, things finally boiled over.

In respect, the issue started small. Dracona Malfoy walked past Ron Weasley's desk on her way to the front. Whether intentionally, or perhaps Ron simply put his quill too close to the edge, the result was the same. Her bag swung wide and knocked his quill to the floor. She didn't stop or look down, but just kept walking, her hair swinging between her shoulders. Ron's ears went red as he bent to pick it up, the tip now broken, ink smeared across the stone.

“That bloody Malfoy girl! She did it on purpose, I swear.” he muttered, but it was loud enough for the Slytherins to hear. 

"Unfortunate accident," Pansy Parkinson said from two rows behind, unable to hide her smile.

Ron broke three quills that week thanks to Dracona.

By the fourth week, they'd developed a clear pattern. In Potions, where the Gryffindors and Slytherins shared a dungeon classroom, with Snape's favouritism hanging over the room like a permanent fog, the Slytherins basically had full immunity to do as they pleased, while even the tiniest of mistakes caused Gryffindor to drop in points.

Dracona made it all worse by working at the bench directly behind Harry's.

Her cauldron never bubbled over. Her ingredients were pre-measured in glass phials she brought from the Manor, lined up in rows like little soldiers. When Harry's potion went wrong, which was often, she would look up from her own work and watch the mess with her chin propped on her hand. Pansy would then lean over and whisper something that made both of them smirk.

It was infuriating.

"Reckon she sleeps in that position," Ron muttered one morning, watching Dracona correct Goyle's technique with a flick of her wrist. "Back straight, nose up, stick lodged firmly in her-"

"Ron," Hermione said sharply.

"What? I'm just saying."

It escalated in the corridors. Dracona had a talent for the kind of insult that left no trace, phrased and delivered in a tone that was polite yet vicious, almost as if she simply stated her observations in a manner intended to poke fun at others. She never raised her voice, and never used slurs. 

At least, not in the first month, after which she seemingly got pressured into calling Hermione a ‘mudblood’.

It was almost like the insults were conveniently placed words which just happened to harm Harry's circle and elevate herself with the intention to provide comedy relief, and unintentionally hurting those she was using for said comedy relief.

Harry found it increasingly infuriating.

"Weasley, is that a new robe or did your mother just turn the old one inside out? I genuinely can't tell."

"Granger, I noticed you raised your hand seven times in Transfiguration. Is it a compulsion, or do you just need everyone to know you've read the book?"

Ron chose to retaliate with volume.

"Shove off, Malfoy!" became his standard response, delivered at quite the decibel level that turned heads three corridors away.

Hermione retaliated with precision. 

"Funny, Malfoy, I'd have thought someone with your resources could afford better marks than third in the class. Who's first? Oh, that's right. I am." That one landed like a slap. For once, Dracona could only grow pink and huff in anger, before she walked away without a word. 

The next morning, Hermione's copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi had been hexed to snap shut on her fingers every time she opened it. No one could prove who did it, although they did have their suspicions.

As for Harry, he opted to stay on the edges of it for the first few weeks.

He didn't have the instinct for it, neither the verbal sparring nor social positioning. When Dracona directed something at him, he tended to stare at her for a beat too long, struggling momentarily for a response that often came out flat. 

"Yeah, well... at least I don't need bodyguards to walk to class." was one of them. It wasn't sharp nor clever, but it got the point across. Crabbe cracked his knuckles and Dracona tilted her head at him like a hawk sizing up its target.

"Bodyguards?" She looked at Crabbe and Goyle, then back at Harry. "They're my friends, Potter. I know the concept might be new to you, given that you had to buy yours with a trolley full of sweets."

Ron stood up so fast his chair fell backward.

Harry grabbed his arm.

The Gryffindor common room became a debriefing room after these encounters. Ron would pace in front of the fire, inventing increasingly creative insults he planned to deploy the next day, most of which involved Dracona's hair, her father, or her general existence. Hermione sat in the armchair with a book open on her lap, turning pages with more force than necessary. Harry sat on the floor with his back against the couch and said very little.

Today, Ron was pacing back and forth as he moaned and grumbled about Dracona in an incredulous tone. "She called my mum's jumper a tablecloth, Harry! A tablecloth. My mum made that jumper!"

"I know, Ron." Harry said, exasperated. He wondered why for the sake of Merlin's beard they could not get along.

"I'm going to hex her!"

"Ron, you don't know any hexes yet." He resisted the urge to plant his face in his hands.

"I'll learn one! Hermione, teach me a hex!"

"I'm not teaching you a hex." Hermione sighed audibly.

"Some friend you are." Ron grumbled unhappily, thinking of better counters to Dracona's insults instead of attempting magical counters.

But no matter what they did, the exchanges kept coming, and seemed to extend to those around them even. In Herbology, when Dracona's Venomous Tentacula snapped at Neville, she said, without even looking up from her own plant, "Perhaps Longbottom should stick to subjects where incompetence isn't life-threatening." In History of Magic, she passed Harry a note that read, in perfect cursive, Your glasses are crooked. Perhaps your vault can afford a new pair? Or does fame only pay in sympathy?

Something about the handwriting bothered him. Only while studying it did he notice how careful it was, or how each letter sat perfectly on an invisible line. 

It almost appeared as if it was the penmanship of someone who'd been made to practice until their hand cramped, with how perfect it was.

The following week, during a Quidditch argument outside the Great Hall, Dracona told Ron that his family "bred like gnomes and had about as much to show for it.” Ron retaliated by calling her "Daddy's little pet Death Eater.” 

The corridor went very quiet. 

Hermione pulled Ron backward by the collar of his robes as Crabbe stepped forward, thick fists clenching. Dracona's face went blank, that perfect empty mask, and she looked at Ron like he was a stain on the carpet.

"How dare you," she said, and for the first time her voice shook, her composure gone. "You know nothing about my family."

"Everyone knows about your family," Ron spat. "Death Eaters, the lot of them. Your dad probably still has his mask in a drawer somewhere."

Dracona's hand went to her wand. Harry saw her fingers close around it inside her robes, knuckles whitening against the fabric.

"Dracona." Blaise Zabini's voice, calm and level, came from behind her. He put one hand on her shoulder. "Leave it. He's not worth the detention."

Hermione had to physically reign Ron in to prevent him from doing anything else. As for Dracona, she held Ron's glare for three more seconds before she turned and walked away, Blaise's hand still on her shoulder. Pansy fell into step on her other side, Daphne beside her, while Crabbe and Goyle closed ranks behind them. Their footsteps echoed down the stone corridor, six sets, synchronized, a small army in retreat.

Harry watched them go.

"Git," Ron said, but his voice had lost some of its heat. He was rubbing his arm where Hermione's fingers had dug in.

The weeks rolled on. The insults continued, sharpened, and became just another routine. Both sides learned the other's pressure points, weaknesses, and aimed for them with increasing accuracy. Dracona went after Ron's poverty, Hermione's blood status, Harry's fame. Ron and Hermione went after Dracona's family, her father's reputation, the Death Eater rumours. Harry, still new to all this wizarding feud business, mostly shot back with half hearted attempts at hurting. His efforts were mostly focused on just trying to keep Ron from getting hexed and Hermione from doing something she'd regret.

Both sides wondered, for their own sake, how long this would last.

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona had been looking forward to the flying lesson all week.

Flying was the one thing her father had taught her himself. Lucius had taken her out to the grounds behind the Manor on a Saturday morning when she was seven, put a Comet 260 in her hands and told her to fly. "Malfoys do not fall."

That was one of the few times he gave her approval.

The lesson was on the grounds south of the castle, a flat stretch of grass where twenty broomsticks lay in two neat rows, ten on each side. The Gryffindors lined up on the left, the Slytherins on the right. Madam Hooch stood between them, with her hawk-yellow eyes and her short grey hair sticking up at angles.

"Step up to the left side of your broom!" Hooch barked. "Stick your right hand over it and say 'Up!'"

"Up!" Dracona said, and the broom smacked into her palm on the first try. She allowed herself a small, private smile before forcing her expression to remain collected and uninterested.

Down the line, Potter's broom had jumped up on his first try. She watched it happen from the corner of her eye, the way the handle snapped into his hand like it had been waiting for him, and his expression showed surprise, then a flash of recognition.

Maybe flying is in his blood. She thought, but paid no heed as her eyes saw another target.

Longbottom's broom had rolled over on the grass and didn't move.

"Up! Up! Up!" Neville's voice cracked on each attempt. His face was red, his round cheeks puffed with effort, and the broom twitched feebly before lying still again. 

Several Slytherins snickered. Dracona didn't. Laughing at Longbottom was too low for her now, with how frequently he’d mess up and give more fuel to fan the flames.

Hooch moved down the line, correcting grips. When she reached Dracona, she paused, looked at the position of her hands, and moved on without comment.

Good. A moment of self satisfaction swept over her, and she awaited their next step, to mount and hover a few feet above the ground. 

Of course, Longbottom panicked.

His feet left the ground too fast, his grip too tight, his body rigid with fear. The broom lurched upward and he yelped, legs swinging. Uncommanded, the broom shot higher. Ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty. Hooch shouted at him to lean forward, to come down, but she could tell it was not happening. Neville's hands were locked on the handle and his eyes were squeezed shut. The broom corkscrewed sideways, bucking like a spooked horse.

He fell.

She grimaced as he hit the ground with a thick, meaty thud, followed almost immediately by a crack. He rolled onto his side, clutching his wrist to his chest, whimpering. Snickers and groans echoed up and down the line.

Hooch was on him in seconds, pulling him upright. "Broken wrist," she muttered, examining it with practiced fingers. "Come on, boy, up you get. Hospital wing."

She hauled Neville to his feet and turned to the class. "Nobody moves. You leave those brooms where they are or you'll be out of Hogwarts before you can say Quidditch."

With that, she marched Neville toward the castle. His sniffling faded across the grass.

Dracona saw it on the ground before anyone else did.

The Remembrall. Neville's grandmother had sent it that morning at breakfast, a glass sphere the size of a large marble. Neville had clutched it all day like a talisman. 

It must have fallen from his pocket when he hit the ground, for the sphere simply sat in the grass, catching the light, the smoke inside it swirling red.

She picked it up.

She didn't plan what happened next. It would simply be "reinforcing the hierarchy" in her father’s words. A demonstration. Harmless, in the grand scheme of things.

"Did you see his face?" she said, holding the Remembrall up between two fingers. The glass caught the sunlight and threw rainbow fragments across her palm. "Maybe if the fat lump had given this a squeeze, he'd have remembered to fall on something soft!"

The Slytherins laughed. Crabbe's laugh was a low rumble. Goyle's was an echo of it. Pansy's was sharp and bright.

"Give it here, Malfoy." A voice ran out, and heads turned to gaze at who it belonged to. She rolled her eyes as a scrawny kid with messy dark hair stepped forth.

Potter. Of course it was Potter.

He'd stepped out of the Gryffindor line, broom in his hand, a stupid, stubborn look set in his features. His eyes were on the Remembrall, then on her face. She noted the anger in his eyes. 

Why does he have to involve himself here? She scoffed to herself as her thoughts flew

He was angry, on behalf of Neville Longbottom of all people. A boy he'd known for two months, because she had picked up his toy.

Idiot.

"I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find," she said with a smirk. She mounted her broom in one smooth motion, pushed off the grass, and rose. The air hit her face, cold and sharp, and the ground dropped away. She climbed to twenty feet, thirty, the broom responding to her like an extension of her own body. "How about the roof?” She hollered down, “Think he'll manage the climb?"

"Give it here!"

She looked down.

Potter was mounting his broom. Hermione Granger grabbed his arm. "Harry, no! You heard what Madam Hooch said, if you get caught you'll be-"

He shook her off and kicked off the ground.

Dracona watched, astonished, as he rose like he'd been doing it his whole life.

The smirk on her face flickered. He came up fast, faster than she expected, the broom responding to him with an eagerness that only seasoned fliers had. 

Beginner's luck, she thought. That did not magically cause Potter to fall off his broom, nor did it bring any comfort to herself. She could only watch, shocked, as his body moved with the broom, leaning into the climb, shifting his weight and compensating for the crosswind, like he’d done this thousands of times. By the time he reached her altitude, his hair was whipping back from his forehead, and the scar was visible, the lightning bolt livid against his skin.

She realized that she’d allowed her expression to slip into one of dumbfounded shock. Internally scolding herself, she shut her mouth and pressed her lips tight into a thin line.

He pulled up five feet from her, hovering. The broom barely wobbled.

"Give it here, Malfoy. Or I'll knock you off your broom."

She stared at him, incredulous. He meant it. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, the forward tilt of his body, as if he was prepared to fight.

He'd actually do it.

A sickening, cold feeling sank deep in her stomach.

“Really?” She tried to muster up a confident smirk, hoping her eyes didn’t betray her. "Catch it, then, if you want to help your little pal." 

With a nasty grin on her face, she threw the Remembrall as hard as she could.

Oh, she was savouring this.

It arced through the air, glass flashing in the sun, climbing and then falling, spinning toward the castle wall where a window jutted out from the stone.

See, Potter, you-

Her thoughts came to a screeching halt as she noticed the empty space where Harry occupied just a second ago.

Where the fu-

Her eyes caught Harry in a dive.

He had pointed the broom straight down and dropped, gravity, broomstick and sheer, mindless nerve pulling him toward the ground at speed.

For the second time, her expression betrayed her as she started in horror. 

He's going to crash.

The thought hit her like a fist to the sternum.

He's going to hit the wall. He's going to break his neck! He's going to die and it will be my fault-

At the last second, he pulled up.

One-handed, his body arching backward on the broom, free hand closing around the Remembrall. The glass disappeared into his fist as he swept out of the dive less than three feet from the ground, close enough that his shoes skimmed the grass.

The Gryffindors erupted. Screaming, stamping, running toward him in a mob. Ron Weasley got there first, grabbing Potter by the shoulders and shaking him while yelling something incoherent. The Patil twins were clapping. Seamus Finnigan was doing a jig.

Dracona hovered above it all, forty feet up, alone. The wind pulled at her hair.

Her hands were shaking on the broomstick.

She descended slowly, landing on the far side of the pitch where the Slytherins had clustered. Dismounting, she held the broom at her side, her grip tight enough to hurt.

"What. An. Idiot," she said. The word came out thin and reedy. She swallowed and tried again. "Stupid, reckless idiot."

"He's going to get expelled," Pansy said gleefully, appearing at her shoulder. "Hooch said anyone who flew would be out. He's done, Dracona."

“I also flew, Pansy. That’s not much relief.”

Dracona watched as Professor McGonagall crossed the grass toward Potter, her strides long, her expression unreadable. She spoke to him, and while she couldn’t hear, she saw the colour drain from his face. 

Good, she thought. He deserves it. He broke the rules. Rules exist for a reason.

He could have died.

He BROKE the RULES.

He followed her toward the castle, shoulders hunched. Her gaze followed him till he disappeared under an archway.

Unfortunately for her, the news came at dinner.

Theodore Nott brought it to the Slytherin table, breathless, having heard it from a Ravenclaw, who'd heard it from a Hufflepuff, who'd heard it from one of the Weasley twins.

Information sure travels weird.

"He made the team."

Silence at the table.

"He- what?" Pansy said.

"Potter. He's the new Gryffindor Seeker. McGonagall put him on the team. First year to make a house team in a century, they're saying."

The silence was deafening.

"That's- that's rubbish!" Pansy slammed her palm on the table, jolting everyone and causing Daphne to jump slightly. "He flew when he wasn't supposed to! He should've been expelled!"

"Rules for thee, not for me." Blaise said dryly, spearing a potato with his fork.

"First-years can't even have brooms," Nott added. "They're bending every rule in the book for him. The Golden Boy gets whatever he wants."

Dracona sat at the centre of the outrage and said nothing. She cut her chicken into precise pieces. She chewed, swallowed, reached for her goblet and drank, trying to keep calm and stay cool.

"Dracona?" Pansy nudged her arm. "You're quiet."

"Rules are bent for his sake," she said. The words came out flat and measured. "They always will be. He's Harry Potter. The normal rules of the world don't apply to him."

She put her fork down, picked it back up and repeated this several times, before she forcefully stopped herself and gingerly set the fork down for good..

"He can fly, though.” her voice dropped to a whisper, almost too quiet to hear, and she wasn't sure who she was talking to. "He can really fly."

Under the table, her thumb traced the crescent scar on her index finger, back and forth, pressing into the ridge of hardened skin.

He'd broken every rule, risked his neck, and been rewarded for it. Meanwhile, she followed every rule perfectly, maintained perfect form, flew well enough that Madam Hooch hadn't needed to correct her grip, and no one had noticed. 

No one ever noticed the one who did things right. They noticed the one who did things spectacularly wrong and survived.

She picked up her fork and finished her dinner, every bite the correct size.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry couldn't sleep.

The dormitory was too quiet and too loud at the same time. He hated the silence at number 4 Privet drive, but this wasn’t something he was used to either. Seamus mumbling in his sleep in the bed nearest the door. Ron's snoring coming in long, rattling pulls that vibrated the curtains around his four-poster. Neville's toad croaked somewhere in the dark, a low, wet sound that came at irregular intervals.

Harry lay on his back and stared at the canopy of his bed. The fabric was dark red, almost black in the absence of candlelight, and he could see the faint outline of the stitching if he squinted. The mattress was soft. Too soft. After ten years on a thin cot in a cupboard, the Hogwarts beds felt like sinking into warm mud, and some part of him, the part that had been conditioned to wake at the slightest creak of a floorboard, couldn't settle into it.

He reached under his pillow and pulled out the cloak.

The fabric slid through his fingers like water, cool and weightless. He'd had it for three weeks now, since Christmas morning when he'd found it folded at the foot of his bed with a note in handwriting he didn't recognize. Your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. The stone was cold through his socks. He pulled the cloak around his shoulders and watched his body disappear, first his chest, then his arms, then his legs, until only his head floated in the dark like a pale balloon.

With the hood up, he'd vanished into thin air.

The Fat Lady's portrait swung open and shut. She mumbled something about "students and their midnight wanderings" without waking up properly. 

Just like that, he was free.

Harry stepped into the corridor and started walking.

He didn't have a destination. He rarely did on these nights. He walked, listening to the steady rhythm of footstep after footstep on cold stone as he went, admiring how the castle unfolding around him in its dark, sleeping grandeur. The corridors were empty. Torches burned low in their brackets, casting pools of orange light that he moved through like a ghost. Once, a  suit of armour turned its head as he passed, the visor creaking, as if it could sense him but not see him.

He climbed stairs. Up past the third floor, past the fifth, past the landing where Peeves the poltergeist was usually lurking. Luckily for Harry, he was absent tonight. The staircase shifted beneath him, the whole structure groaning and swinging to the left, attaching itself to a different landing. He went with it, mostly because there was nothing else to do.

The Astronomy Tower was the highest point in the castle. The stairs to it were narrow and spiralled tightly, and by the time he reached the top his calves ached and his breathing had picked up. The door at the top was ajar, a thin sliver of cold night air leaking through the gap.

He slipped through it and froze, stopping dead in the doorway.

It was none other than Dracona Malfoy.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them.

He almost didn't recognize her. Every time he'd seen her, in class, in the corridors, at meals, she held herself like a rod of iron, spine straight, chin up, shoulders squared. Now her shoulders were rounded, pulled forward, curved inward around the space her arms made. Her carefully braided hair had come loose, strands of pale hair falling around her face and catching the moonlight. Her school robes were bunched around her, too big for the small shape she'd made of herself against the stone.

She was talking.

Not to anyone. To herself. Low, barely audible, a mutter that rose and fell with each breath.

"...doesn't matter what I do, it's never... never enough, is it? Top marks in everything except Charms and it's still, 'Why not every subject, Dracona? A Malfoy does not accept mediocrity in any discipline, Dracona.' Stupid. Stupid."

Her voice cracked on the last word.

She lifted one hand from her knees and swiped at her face, dragging the heel of her palm across her eye, hard, the way a child does it, rough and graceless, pressing the moisture away with force. The gesture was so raw, so completely unlike the girl who'd sneered at Ron's robes that morning, that Harry felt something lurch in his chest.

I should leave. I should NOT be seeing this.

He took a step backward, but his heel caught the edge of the door.

The hinge groaned.

Dracona's head snapped up. Her eyes, red-rimmed and wet, scanned the darkness of the doorway. Her hand went to her wand.

"Who's there?"

Harry stood perfectly still. The cloak covered him. She couldn't see him.

He could leave.

He could back down the stairs and she'd never know, and tomorrow they'd go back to sniping at each other across the Potions dungeon. This would stay her private business, and he'd never have to think about Dracona Malfoy sitting on a cold floor in the middle of the night, crying.

"I can hear you breathing," she said. "If that's you, Peeves, I swear I will-"

"It's not Peeves."

He pulled the hood down.

His head appeared in the doorway, floating, and Dracona scrambled to her feet so fast her back hit the wall behind her. Her wand came up. He watched as the Dracona Malfoy he knew all too well reassembled itself in real time, the crumpled, private grief snapping shut like a book slammed closed, the mask pulling itself back into place.

"Potter?" She stared at his disembodied head. "What... what the hell is- is that an Invisibility Cloak?"

He pulled the cloak off entirely. It pooled over his arm, shimmering faintly.

"Yeah."

"Where did you- how do you have- those are incredibly rare, Potter, do you have any idea what-" She stopped. "You're spying on me?"

"What? No! I was just- I couldn't sleep, I was walking around, and-"

"And you just happened to walk to the top of the Astronomy Tower at one in the morning?"

"Yeah, actually. I did."

They stared at each other. The wind moved between them, cold and thin, pulling at her loose hair and pressing his pyjamas flat against his skinny frame.

Her wand was still up. He noticed her hand was steady, even now.

"You look terrible," he said.

It came out wrong, like an insult, blunt and artless. He cringed lightly, hating the blunt way he said anything when he was nervous.

Dracona's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"I didn't- I mean- you've been- " He threw up his hands, exasperated. "Look, are you okay?"

"Am I okay?" She let out a short laugh, sharp and brittle. "I'm fine, Potter. I'm fantastic. I'm sitting on a freezing tower at one in the morning because I love the night air. It's invigorating, really."

"Right."

"Mhm."

"So you're fine."

"I just said I'm fine."

"Okay." Harry shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The stone was freezing through his socks. "You- erm, you don't look fine."

"And you look like you got dressed in the dark, which you probably did, so perhaps we're both having an off night." She scowled, finally lowering her wand and folded her arms across her chest.

The posture was defensive, but the carefully crafted composure she always kept on was slipping. He could see it. Her eyes were bright in the moonlight.

He took a step onto the platform.

"Don't," she said testily.

He stopped.

"Don't what?"

"I know what you people like doing.” She sneered. “You’re gonna march over here with your stupid concerned face and your stupid cloak and try to be... nice to me." She spat the word out like it was poison. "We're not friends, Potter. Go back to your dormitory and forget you saw this."

"I wasn't going to-"

"Yes, you were. You were going to come over here, sit down and ask me what's wrong, being all... noble about it. That's what you Gryffindors do. You can't bloody help yourselves, always trying to be the heroes in other people’s lives." Her voice had risen, each word pushed through clenched teeth, and her arms tightened around herself. "Well, I don't need it. I don't need your pity, or anyone's pity."

Harry looked at her for a long moment.

Then he sat down, right there on the flagstones, just some distance away from her, with his back against the door frame and the cloak bundled in his lap. His pyjama bottoms were thin, but he forced the shivers down. The stone soaked cold through them immediately.

"I'm not pitying you," he said. "My feet are cold."

"Your lies are terrible."

"I’m not! Stone floors, and no shoes." He held one foot up and wiggled his toes through the sock, showing a hole in the big toe. "See?"

Dracona stared, confusion and mirth flashing across her features. Her mouth twitched, and he swore she had smiled just that little bit. Before he could comment on it, she forcefully pressed her lips into a flat line. Still, that ghost of a smile had surfaced despite her best efforts.

"You are..." She searched for a word. "Unbelievable."

"Cheers."

They sat in silence. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of the lake up from below, wet stone, cold water. An owl crossed the face of the moon, its silhouette sliding across the silver disk and vanishing into the dark.

"It was a letter," Dracona said suddenly, breaking the silence.

She said it quietly, aimed at her knees more than at him. Harry noticed her fingers were picking at a loose thread on her sleeve, winding it around her index finger and unwinding it.

"A letter?"

"Father. He writes every week. I write back. It's all very proper, something I don’t think you know. How are your studies, Dracona. I trust you are maintaining appropriate associations, Dracona. Your marks in Charms are unacceptable, Dracona."

She wound the thread tighter. The tip of her finger went white.

"This week he also included a reminder that the Malfoy name 'carries certain expectations that cannot be fulfilled by anything less than excellence in every measurable dimension.'" She delivered the quote in a flat, toneless voice, a perfect mimicry that had the rhythm of something heard many times. "And that my failure to establish a... productive relationship with you was 'noted.'"

Harry blinked. "A relationship? With me? What-"

She stared at him like he was insane.

"You're Harry Potter. You're the most famous child in the wizarding world, dare I say its golden child, surpassing legacies like no other. My father wanted me to... align with you because he thinks you’re useful. I failed, and he's disappointed. Is that too hard to understand?"

She pulled the thread so hard it snapped. Annoyance flashed across her face as she flicked it away, watching it drift across the stone in silence.

Harry didn't say anything for a while.

"My uncle locks me in a cupboard," he said.

The words fell out of him, simple and unplanned. He hadn't meant to say them.

Dracona turned her head.

"What?"

"Under the stairs. There's a cupboard. That's my room. Or- it was. Before Hogwarts." He pulled at a thread on the cloak, mirroring her without realizing it. "They don't... they're not nice. The Dursleys. My aunt and uncle. They, uh. They don't really like me much."

Silence followed, as if everything held its breath and awaited Dracona's response.

"That's..." She started, then stopped. She looked away, toward the mountains. Her mind raced. "That's awful."

"Yeah."

"Hang on a second-” Dracona paused, a look of genuine confusion crossing her face. “Your relatives are muggles, Potter."

"I- yeah."

"So the great Harry Potter, the boy who lived, the saviour of the wizarding world, grew up in a cupboard under the stairs?" Her voice carried a genuine disbelief.

"Yeah. Pretty much."

She was quiet for a beat.

"Well." She pulled her knees tighter to her chest. "I suppose we're both having a rubbish year, then."

Harry laughed. It was short and caught both of them off guard. The sound of it bounced off the tower walls, coming back to him weirdly strange, quite out of place in the cold darkness of the tower.

Dracona looked at him, her expression one he couldn't read, and then she looked away again. The pair settled into comfortable silence for a while, but Harry swore she always glanced at him and then away again.

"Don't tell anyone about this," she said finally after a while.

"About what?"

"About... this. Me being up here. Any of it."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Potter. If Pansy finds out, if anyone finds out-"

"I won't tell anyone."

She looked at him again, searching for some sign that he was lying, that this would show up as gossip in the Gryffindor common room by tomorrow morning.

He met her eyes and held them.

Whatever she found there made her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.

"Fine," she said. “I shouldn’t trust you, but I don’t have a choice.”

It felt like it should have an edge to it, but Harry only felt sadness and resignation in her voice.

“Well, if it makes you feel better, you can go and babble to people about the oh-so-great Harry Potter growing up in a cupboard if any rumors about Dracona Malfoy crying on the astronomy tower reach you.” 

Dracona once again stared at him incredulously. He could have sworn he saw a tiny smile grace the corners of her mouth again.

“I don’t- uh, I hope that didn’t overste-”

The castle clock chimed somewhere below them, interrupting his words, two deep tones that vibrated through the stone.

"We should go back," Harry muttered, swallowing the unsaid words. "Filch patrols the corridors."

"I know when Filch patrols, Potter. I have his schedule memorized."

"Of course you do." Rolling his eyes, he stood and pulled the cloak around his shoulders, faintly aware Dracona was intently watching as he did so.

"You know, that cloak is wasted on you," she said as he stepped away, ready to pull the hood over his head. "Do you have any idea what a Slytherin could do with that?"

"Good thing I'm not a Slytherin, then."

"Yes." She stood, brushing dust from her robes, and pulled the loose strands of hair back behind her ears. Her spine straightened, her chin lifted, the mask of the calm, collected heir of House Malfoy was in place again, quick and complete. "Good thing."

She walked past him to the door, but paused in the frame.

"Potter."

"Yeah?"

"Your socks are wretched."

That got a chuckle out of him.

"Good night to you too, Malfoy."

She left without another word. Her footsteps echoed down the spiral staircase, growing fainter, and then they were gone.

Harry stood on the platform for another minute, looking at the spot where she'd been sitting. The thread she'd pulled from her sleeve was still on the stone, a tiny curl of black against grey.

He pulled the hood up and went back to bed.

Continued in the next chapter:

Chapter 6: A seemingly deepening rift

Continuing from the last chapter:

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Harry knew it was going to be a bad class the moment Neville's cauldron started hissing.

The Potions dungeon was cold, lit by torches that gave off more smoke than light. The air hung thick with steam and the smell of things boiling that probably shouldn't be boiled. 

Snape stood at the front with his arms folded across his chest, black robes hanging still as curtains, moving between the workbenches with slow, predatory patience that made Harry think of a cat watching mice from a ledge.

Neville's Cure for Boils had gone wrong around the third step. Harry could see it from two benches away, the potion turning a thick, putrid green instead of the pale blue described in the textbook. Neville was staring at it with both hands gripping the edge of the bench, his round face damp with sweat. He knew what was coming.

Sure enough, Snape arrived at Neville's bench. He took one look into the cauldron, then glared at Neville with an expression that made Harry’s skin crawl. 

His upper lip curled.

"Tell me, Longbottom. Can you read?"

Neville's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"The instructions say, quite clearly, to remove the cauldron from the flame before adding the porcupine quills." Snape's voice was quiet, which was worse than loud. It meant he was enjoying himself. "Did you remove the cauldron from the flame?"

"I... I thought I-"

"You thought." Snape leaned closer. "Mr. Longbottom, I have been teaching Potions for ten years. In that time, I have encountered a great many students who thought. They are, without exception, the ones responsible for the most spectacular failures." He straightened. "Vanish this. Start again. And if you cannot manage a potion that most first-years complete in their first attempt, perhaps you should consider whether you belong in this classroom at all."

Neville's chin trembled. His hands were shaking against the bench.

"Right, that's enough."

The words were out of Harry's mouth before he could think about them. He was standing. He didn't remember doing that.

Every head in the dungeon turned.

Snape's eyes, black and flat, shifted to Harry. "I beg your pardon?"

"He made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. You don't have to-" Harry's voice was louder than he intended, pushed out by something hot and tight in his chest. Anger. "You don't have to humiliate him for it."

The dungeon went absolutely silent.

Ron, beside him, had gone pale. Hermione's hand was frozen over her own cauldron, her mouth hanging slightly open. At the Slytherin benches, Dracona had looked up from her work, her expression amused but her eyes betraying concern.

Snape moved toward Harry's bench, taking deliberate, measured steps, as if he was the personification of impending doom. He stopped close enough that Harry could smell the potions ingredients on his robes, bitter and chemical.

"Ten points from Gryffindor," Snape said softly. "And a detention, Potter. Tonight. My office. Eight o'clock."

He turned away, his cloak swishing behind him.

Harry sat down. His hands were trembling in his lap. Ron leaned over and whispered, "Bloody hell, mate. You've lost it."

Behind them, the Slytherin side of the room erupted in muffled laughter. Pansy Parkinson whispered something to Dracona, who smiled, a thinly veiled expression aimed at Harry and Neville. Crabbe and Goyle were grinning widely.

The class ended twenty minutes later.

Harry shoved his books into his bag and walked out without waiting for Ron or Hermione, his expression stoney, his strides long. He turned the corner past the dungeon stairs, heading for the ground floor, and nearly walked into someone coming the other way.

Dracona Malfoy.

Great, just who I need, RIGHT NOW.

They both stopped. The corridor was empty, the stone walls close on either side, torchlight flickering between them. She was alone, no Crabbe, no Goyle, no Pansy, just her and her pressed robes and her braid and those grey eyes that were looking at him with something he couldn't decipher.

"Move, Malfoy." He practically spat. He wasn’t in the mood to hear any more jests and jeers at his expense.

She didn't move. Instead, she sighed.

"That was stupid," she said, her tone one of regret and annoyance. He blinked, but quickly recovered.

"Thanks for educating me, Malfoy. He was being a prick."

"He's a teacher, Potter. He can be whatever he likes. That's how it works."

"That's a bloody terrible way for things to go! That isn’t fair-"

"I didn't say it was good, did I? I said that's how it works." She held his gaze. Her voice dropped, low enough that it wouldn't carry past the two of them, low enough that anyone rounding the corner would hear nothing. "Stop picking fights you're baited into. He wanted you to react. You gave him exactly what he wanted. It isn’t fair, but nothing is. Stop trying to be the noble hero and learn to shut up when you need to."

Harry stared at her.

"Is that... advice?"

"It's common sense. Something, it appears, you seem to be critically short on." She stepped around him, her shoulder passing within an inch of his. "Enjoy your detention, Potter."

Her robes snapped behind her as she rounded the corner, and then she was gone.

Harry stood in the corridor. The torch on the wall popped and hissed, a bead of molten tallow running down the bracket.

He was still standing there when Ron found him.

"Mate?" Ron waved a hand in front of his face. "You all right? You look like someone hit you with a Confundus Charm."

"Yeah," Harry said slowly. "Yeah, I'm... fine."

He picked up his bag and started walking.

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Dracona heard the doors to the Great Hall bang open. Next thing she knew, Professor Quirrell came sprinting up the aisle between the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw tables, his turban unwinding behind him in a long purple streak.

"TROLL!" he screamed. "TROLL IN THE DUNGEONS!"

He stopped in front of the head table, swaying. His face was the colour of old porridge.

"Thought you ought to know," he said, and then he fainted.

His body hit the floor with a dull thud that echoed off the stone walls. For two full second,  the Great Hall was perfectly, completely still.

Then the screaming started.

Students surged to their feet. Benches scraped backward, goblets toppled, plates shattered on the floor. The noise hit a pitch that made Dracona's ears ring, hundreds of voices climbing over each other. A second-year Hufflepuff bolted for the doors and collided with a sixth-year Ravenclaw, both of them going down in a tangle of robes and limbs.

"SILENCE!"

Dumbledore's voice cut through the panic like a blade, amplified, filling every corner. The room stilled, students freezing mid-step, mid-shout, mid-sob.

"Prefects," he said, his voice calm and absolute, "will lead their houses back to the dormitories immediately. Teachers, follow me to the dungeons."

The Slytherin prefect, a fifth-year named Gemma Farley, was already on her feet. "Slytherins! This way, now! First-years in front, stay together!"

Dracona stood from the bench and her hand found Pansy's wrist before she'd consciously decided to reach for it. Pansy's pulse was hammering against her fingers.

"Come on," Dracona said. Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that, the outward steadiness, because underneath it, her stomach had dropped to somewhere around her knees, all the while her skin felt too tight for her body. "Pansy. Come on."

She pulled Pansy into the stream of Slytherins moving toward the exit and turned to check behind her. Crabbe and Goyle were following, their thick faces set in expressions of confused alarm. Blaise fell into step beside her, his mouth pressed into a thin line. She saw Daphne’s blonde head darting in and out of her line of sight, next to a face she recognized as Theodore Nott.

"Keep moving," Gemma Farley called from the front. "Dumbledore and the teachers are handling it. The troll's in the lower levels, we're on the upper dungeon corridor!"

"Brilliant plan," Blaise muttered. She silently agreed.

They moved through the corridors in a tight column, Gemma at the front with her wand lit, the first-years bunched together in the middle. Dracona kept one hand on Pansy's wrist and the other inside her robes, her fingers closed around her wand. The corridors were dim, the torches guttering in a draft that smelled like wet stone, like something large had recently pushed through the air.

She was counting heads.

She didn't know when she'd started doing it, but she was. Slytherins first, working through the faces. Crabbe, Goyle, Blaise, Pansy, Millicent Bulstrode, Theodore Nott, Daphne Greengrass, Tracy Davis. All present. She counted them twice to be sure.

Then, without understanding why, she started on the Gryffindors filing down a parallel corridor fifteen feet to their left.

The Weasley twins, visible by their hair. The tall one, Wood, the Quidditch captain. Longbottom, stumbling along at the back, clutching his toad to his chest. The older girl, Katie Bell. The Weasley boy, Ron, walking with his hands balled into fists and his jaw set.

Potter.

Where was Potter?

She scanned the Gryffindor column again, her eyes moving fast. Red hair, brown hair, blonde, dark. No messy black hair, emerald green eyes or round glasses.

"Drac?" Pansy tugged at her wrist. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing." She turned back to the Slytherin column and kept walking. Her grip on her wand tightened.

Where was he?

Why do you care?

She didn't have an answer.

They reached the common room without incident, the stone wall sliding open at Gemma's password, and the Slytherins poured in. The common room was green and cold, the lake pressing against the windows. Fortunately, someone had already lit the fire. First-years collapsed onto the leather couches. A third-year girl was crying quietly on her friend's shoulder.

Dracona stood by the window. The lake water distorted the light from inside, making everything ripple. She watched the shapes moving beyond the glass, shadows of things that lived in the deep water, and waited.

She didn't sit down.

At some point, Pansy brought her tea from the table where a house-elf had set up a tray. Dracona took it and held it without drinking.

Hours later, when the prefects announced the all-clear and the story started trickling through, she heard it in pieces.

"Harry Potter and Ron Weasley-"

"-went after the troll-"

"-it was in the girls' bathroom, and Granger was in there-"

"-knocked it out. First-years! Can you believe it?"

"-Potter jumped on it-"

"-stuck his wand up its nose-"

Dracona set her tea down on the windowsill. The surface trembled. She lifted her fingers away from the cup and looked at them.

They were shaking.

"He did what?" Pansy said from the couch, her eyes wide.

"Jumped on its back," Theodore Nott repeated, relishing the telling. "A full-grown mountain troll! Twelve feet tall. And Potter, the mad bastard, jumped on it!"

"That's..." Blaise paused, searching for the appropriate word. "Extremely stupid."

"He saved Granger's life, apparently," Nott continued. "Her and Weasley. McGonagall gave them five points each."

"Five points?" Pansy scoffed. "For nearly getting themselves killed? Gryffindors really are-"

Dracona stopped listening.

A twelve-foot mountain troll, and he jumped on its back.

She picked up her tea and drank it. It had gone cold.

Two days later, she found him outside the library.

He was alone for once, the Weasley boy and Granger presumably inside. He had a stack of books gathered in his arms that was definitely too tall for his frame, his chin resting on the top one to keep the pile steady, and he was walking with a careful, shuffling gait, afraid that one wrong step would bring the whole thing down.

She stepped into his path.

He stopped so fast the top book began sliding. He caught it with his chin, pressing down, eyes wide.

"Malfoy." He managed, and she shot back a curt greeting.

"Potter."

The corridor was empty. Late afternoon light came through a window at the far end, long and golden, cutting across the stone floor between them. Dust moved in the beam, disturbed by the footsteps of the pair.

She stared at him. Skinny, underfed, swimming in his school robes, glasses still held together with tape. He looked like a strong wind would snap him in half. 

This boy jumped on a bloody troll.

She had been thinking about it for two days, trying to look for the logic, motivation or rational calculation that must have been underneath it. There had to be one. People didn't just... run toward twelve-foot monsters. People ran away. That wasn’t just the smart thing to do, it was the sensible thing to do. It was how a Slytherin would approach it.

But he'd run toward it for the sake of a girl he'd known for two months.

“You okay?” She must have zoned out, because he was looking at her with a funny look on his face.

"Yea- you fought a troll," she said, stumbling over her words slightly. Inwardly, she grimaced lightly, but he seemed to not have noticed.

"Yep." He said, as if it was a regular occurrence.

"You jumped on its back. How in Salazar did you even manage that?"

"It- uh, seemed like a good idea at the time, and I don’t rem-"

"It was the worst idea!" She huffed, cutting his response off. She felt like she could have hit him then and there, but held back and opted to glare daggers at him so hard he flinched.

"I mean... it worked?"

"Because you got lucky, Potter!" The words came out harder than she meant them to, sharper, and she saw him blink. She sighed, pulling her volume back down. "You can't just... you can't run at things like that. You're thirteen. You know about six spells, two of which are useless, and you decided to fight a creature that fully grown wizards struggle with?"

"Hermione was in there-"

"So you should have gotten a teacher!"

"There wasn't time!"

"There's always time if you're clever enough to-" She stopped, exasperated. The argument was pointless. He wasn't going to agree with her, because he didn't think the way she thought. He didn't calculate, weigh risks, or run the numbers. He just... went.

To her, he was a puzzle which had taken a piece out of it.

"You're going to get yourself killed," she said quietly, and cringed. The words came out low and close and stripped of the edge she usually put into her voice when she spoke to him. No bite, no spite, just simple, plain and bare. It felt too honest.

No, too concerned.

She felt heat crawling up the back of her neck.

"I'll be fine, Malfoy." He shrugged, before struggling to balance the books again, apparently unaware of the inner turmoil within her.

"You'll be dead."

"Hasn't happened yet." He shrugged carelessly.

"Yet." Oh, how she longed to just grab him by the collars and shake him till he came to his senses.

Unable to bear the anger and confusion rising within her, she turned and walked away. Fast. Her robes audibly snapped behind her, but she didn't look back even as she heard an exasperated sigh come from behind her.

As soon as she was out of sight of Harry, she stopped, pressing her back flat against the wall and stared at the opposite stonework. Her lips were twitching at the corners, unsure if they should smile or frown.

Stop it. Stop. It.

She pressed her lips together hard until they went white as she replayed the exchange in her head.

I sounded like I cared. I don't.

I do NOT care about Harry Potter.

She pushed off the wall and walked to the dungeons, composing herself with a measured stride, her chin up and hands clasped at her waist. Her fingernails left four painful indents in each palm.

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Dracona couldn’t care less about Quidditch. She convinced herself watching the match was important, because Slytherin played Gryffindor next month. It was strategically important to observe the opposition.

She still hadn’t convinced herself it wasn’t because she wanted to see her biggest rival on a broom.

He’ll crash too, and I’m so going to laugh and jeer about it. That’s why I’m going. 

Yep. 

It would be suuuuuch the story to gloat about in his face when he faceplants on the grass.

A tiny, nagging thought in the back of her mind told her that she was here to admire skill, and worried if he was going to fall and hurt himself. 

She pushed it away. 

I’m only here for the humiliation. NOTHING else. 

The pitch opened below them, a vast oval of grass ringed by stands that rose on all four sides, draped in house colours. The November air was sharp and smelled of cold earth, chimney smoke and fresh rain. Clouds sat low and grey above the towers, close enough that a broomstick at full climb might scrape them.

"Gryffindor is going to get flattened!" Pansy declared gleefully, pulling on thick wool gloves that had the Slytherin crest stitched into the backs. "Hufflepuff's Seeker is a fifth-year. Potter's new and weighs about as much as a broom handle!"

"Hufflepuff's Seeker is consistent," Blaise corrected. "Doesn't mean he won’t make mistakes."

"Exactly! Potter's going to choke." Pansy retorted. Clearly, she was still selectively hearing information that she wanted.

Blaise rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath.

Dracona said nothing, instead choosing to fold her hands in her lap.

The teams emerged from opposite ends of the pitch and the stands exploded. Gryffindor's section, directly across from Slytherin, was a wall of red and gold, scarves waving, voices merging into a single, sustained roar. Dracona could pick out the Weasley twins in the lineup, their red hair catching the grey light. The older students, Wood, the Chasers, the Keeper. And at the end, the smallest figure on the pitch by a significant margin.

Potter.

He looked ridiculous.

His Quidditch robes were new, the scarlet and gold still bright and uncreased, hanging on his thin frame like someone had fitted them for a boy two sizes larger. His shin guards were laced wrong. Even from the stands she could tell that the left one was sitting lower than the right. His broom, however... 

A Nimbus 2000.

Brand new, from the look of it. The handle gleamed, the tail twigs straight and uniform. She'd begged her father for one before term. He'd told her first-years didn't need racing brooms, and he’d bought her a set of supplementary Potions texts instead.

Potter had one. Of course he did.

"Someone has to have bought it for him," Nott muttered from behind her, having followed her gaze. "McGonagall, probably. School funds. Bloody joke."

The whistle blew.

Fourteen brooms launched into the air. The match started with a burst of colour and speed that Dracona tracked with practised eyes. The Chasers wove through each other, the Quaffle passing hand to hand, red to yellow and back. A Bludger screamed across the pitch, but one of the Weasley twins cracked it sideways with a backhand that sent it spinning toward the Hufflepuff Keeper.

Potter rose above it all.

He climbed until he was higher than anyone else on the pitch, a small red-and-gold figure against the bruised sky, and he hovered there. Scanning. His head moved in slow sweeps, left to right, almost methodical. His body was still on the broom, perfectly balanced.

Dracona watched him.

He looks comfortable.

The thought arrived uninvited. She tried to push it aside, but it stubbornly stayed put. On the ground, Potter was a mess. He slouched, shuffled, shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and made himself small. Every room he entered, he seemed to be looking for the fastest route to the exit.

But up there...

He sat straight on the broom. His shoulders were open, relaxed, his weight settled low and centered. The wind pressed his robes flat against his back, and his hair streamed behind him.

For the first time since she'd met him, he looked like he fit.

The Quaffle changed hands. Gryffindor scored. The red-and-gold section erupted while Lee Jordan's commentary boomed across the pitch, enthusiastic and biased in equal measure. Dracona didn't register any of it.

She was looking at Potter's face.

For once, he was smiling wide.

She had seen Harry Potter smile exactly twice before. Once in the Great Hall, probably that jokester Ron making some stupid joke, the other in the corridor when Hagrid had passed by and waved at him.

Both times had been small, quick and sheepish, as if he was afraid to show joy.

This was different.

His whole face was bright with joy. His mouth was in a wide grin, his eyes were crinkled. The wind had to be hitting him full in the face, but it appeared as if he didn't care. He banked left, leaning into the turn, and the broom responded nimbly, sweeping in a long arc above the stands. A Bludger came at him and he barrel-rolled under it without losing speed. The crowd gasped and cheered.

He was happy.

The thought stayed in Dracona's mind, heavy and wrong.

He's happy.

She gripped the edge of the wooden bench. 

She knew happiness. The satisfaction of a test passed, a lesson learned, a standard met. The nod from her father. The brief press of her mother's lips to her forehead when no one was watching.That was happiness. 

Not what Potter had on that broom, wild, thoughtless and free. 

It poured off him like light off a lamp, visible from a hundred feet away, yet she couldn't look away from it.

I want that.

The thought surfaced before she could stop it, raw, childish, honest to the point it made her sick.

I want to feel like that. I want to be somewhere where I don't have to do things the way they have to. I want to sit on a broom, grin like an idiot and not care who's watching.

I want to be free.

She dug her fingernails into the bench.

"Dracona?" Pansy peered at her. "You alright? You've gone all... rigid."

"Fine." She mustered through clenched teeth.

"You sure? You look like you're trying to strangle the bench."

"I said I'm fine, Pansy.” She huffed, thinking of an excuse. “I just can’t bear to watch Potter’s team win.”

Pansy held her hands up and turned back to the match.

Dracona’s brow furrowed. Loosened your grip. She flexed her fingers, and could already guess that when she takes off her gloves, she’d see four red marks run across each palm where the wood grain had pressed in.

A roar brought her attention back on the pitch. Potter had gone into a dive.

The crowd surged to its feet. Dracona stood with them, pulled upright by reflex, her eyes locked on the red-and-gold figure plummeting toward the grass. He was chasing something, a flash of gold near the base of the Hufflepuff goalposts, the Snitch, tiny and quick and darting sideways.

The Hufflepuff Seeker was coming from the other direction, but Dracona could tell he was too far, too slow. Potter had the angle and the speed. Potter was committed, his body flat against the broom handle, one hand stretched forward.

Then the broom jerked.

Potter lurched sideways. The broom bucked under him, shuddering, and he grabbed the handle with both hands, the Snitch forgotten. The broom jerked again, harder, and his feet slipped off the footholds. He was hanging on with his hands, legs dangling, sixty feet above the pitch.

The stands went quiet as a hushed whisper rose. People sat down, some pointing, expressions of shock on their faces.

Dracona's hand went to her throat.

The broom was shaking violently now, spinning and bucking, as if it was trying to throw him off. He clung to it, his arms straining, his knuckles white against the wood. His glasses had gone crooked on his face. She watched as he swung a leg up, trying to hook over the handle, and missed.

"What's happening?" Pansy said, gripping Dracona's arm. "Is the broom cursed?"

Dracona didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on the small figure dangling in the sky.

Hold on.

Hold ON, you stupid...

Something happened in the teachers' stand. A commotion, and then she noticed Professor Snape's robes catching fire. He stumbled into Professor Quirrel, flames licking up his black cloak as he waved his want in an attempt to extinguish the flames, breaking eye contact with... whatever he'd been looking at. 

Funnily enough, the two of them seemed to have been staring at the same thing.

The broom stopped shaking.

She watched as Potter swung his leg up and over, caught the handle and pulled himself back on. He was breathing hard. Even from the stands, she could see his chest heaving, his arms trembling. He sat there for a second, clutching the broom, and she was sure he’d be dissuaded from playing ever again. 

Serves you right, she thought silently as the crowd exhaled. Golden boy, realizing your privileges come with a cost now.

That thought sat wrong in her mind.

Before she could think of better insults to tell Pansy and Blaise, he dove again.

“What the…?” Even she couldn’t hide her shock as gasps rang out in the crowd. Is he crazy?

"He's... he's going after the Snitch again?" Blaise said slowly, equally as astonished. "He nearly fell to his death thirty seconds ago and he's going after the Snitch?"

She could only watch as Potter pulled out of the dive mere feet from the ground. Her heart leaped into her throat as he tumbled off his broom, hit the grass and rolled. Had he been wounded? Before she could think further, he came up on his hands and knees, coughing, and his cheeks bulged.

Something gold dropped out of his mouth and into his hand.

The Snitch.

He caught it in his bloody mouth.

Lee Jordan's voice cracked across the pitch like thunder. "HE'S GOT THE SNITCH! HARRY POTTER HAS CAUGHT THE SNITCH! GRYFFINDOR WINS!"

The explosion of noise that resulted was simply tremendous. It came from everywhere, a wall of sound that pressed against Dracona from all sides. The Gryffindor section was a frenzy of red and gold, people hugging, jumping, screaming. On the pitch, Potter was being mobbed by his teammates, lifted onto their shoulders, and even from across the stadium she could see that stupid, wide, open grin.

An inner silence drowned all of it out as she sat down, shocked.

Around her, the Slytherins were groaning, swearing and throwing their scarves down in disgust. Nott kicked the bench in front of him. Pansy launched into a rant about unfair refereeing. Crabbe and Goyle sat with their arms crossed and their faces pulled into matching scowls.

Dracona sat with her hands in her lap, eyes locked onto the pitch.

He was still smiling down there, hoisted above his team, the Snitch glinting in his raised fist. Wind caught his robes and whipped them sideways, red and gold streaming behind him like a banner.

I want that.

The thought came back, stronger this time. She let it sit for half a second before she crushed it.

No.

I don't WANT that. What I want is to win when the rules are apply equally, for talent and discipline to be recognized the same way reckless, brainless luck is recognized. 

What I want is for my father to look at me the way the entire Gryffindor house is looking at Harry Potter right now.

She let out a sigh.

He never will.

Because I'm not the boy who lived. I'm just the girl doing everything right but getting nothing for it.

She clenched her teeth until they ached.

I hate him.

She glared down at Harry, an ugly sensation surging through every fibre of her body. She was angry that it wasn’t her who experienced the attention. Her, who just existed as a “Malfoy”. Her, who was passed over for everything until she made a mistake.

I hate him because he gets what I can't have. He doesn't even know what he has.

I hate him because he can smile like that while I NEVER will.

She stood up from the bench, brushed some light dust and wood from her robes, pulling her scarf tight around her neck. Her chin lifted. Her shoulders squared. The mask slid into place, just like it always had.

"Let's go," she said coldly to Pansy, already moving toward the stairs. "It's cold. I have studying to do."

She didn't look at the pitch again.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry left the mirror at half past one.

His parents had waved at him for two hours. Despite having won and seeing his parents, he was feeling emptier than ever.

They stood in the glass, James with his arm around Lily, both of them smiling. His father looked like an older version of him, the same messy hair, the same lean frame, the same glasses. His mother had red hair that fell past her shoulders and green eyes, his eyes, bright, warm and crinkled at the corners. They waved and he waved back, but even as he spoke to them in a whisper, recounting the tales of his classes, his friends, how he was treated and his life at Hogwarts, he knew they couldn't hear him.

Just reflections.

He sat in front of the mirror until his legs went numb, the cold of the floor soaking through his pyjamas and into his bones. When he finally stood, it took three tries, his knees locked and creaking. With difficulty, he pulled the cloak around himself, hastily departing the room with the taste of dust in his mouth.

Of course he had to take the wrong staircase.

The castle rearranged itself at night, stairs shifting, corridors connecting to places they hadn't connected to before. Harry, who still hadn't mastered the layout in daylight, was hopelessly lost within minutes. He walked down a corridor he didn't recognize, turned left at a tapestry of a man being clubbed by trolls, and found himself in a stretch of the castle that was empty and unused, doors closed, dust thick on the floor.

One door was open. A crack was there, warm light leaking from inside.

He stopped.

He should keep walking. He knew this. He should find the nearest staircase and work his way back to Gryffindor Tower, crawl into bed and try to sleep. 

He looked through the crack out of pure curiosity.

An old classroom greeted his eyes. Old desks pushed against the walls, chairs stacked, a blackboard covered in chalk dust. A single candle burned on the floor near the window, casting a small circle of warm light against the cold.

And there again, she was. Dracona Malfoy sat on the stone floor with her knees pulled to her chest.

It was as if they were being pulled together by some invisible force at her lowest moments.

In her hand was a letter. The parchment was crumpled, squeezed and twisted, the way you'd wring out a wet cloth. From the door, he could almost make out the sharp, angular letters inked on the creased paper.

She was not crying this time, instead sitting very still.

Her knees were up, arms wrapped tight, chin resting on her kneecaps, staring at the candle flame like it held an answer she desperately sought. The letter was balled in her right fist, and every few seconds her fingers would tighten around it, crushing it smaller, then relaxing again.

Her hair was down. He'd never seen it down before. It was always in a perfect braid or a neatly tied pony tail, as precise and cold as she appeared to be, but now it hung loose around her face and shoulders, straight and pale in the candlelight. Her school robes were gone. She wore a nightgown, white, high-collared, and over it a dressing gown of dark green silk with little cartoon animals that was too large for her, the sleeves falling past her wrists.

She looked small.

That was the thing that hit him hardest. Every version of Dracona he'd encountered until now had been large, larger than life, taking up space with her voice, posture and her sharp, demeaning presence. But this girl on the floor, barefoot on the cold stone, clutching a crumpled letter... she was just small.

He watched through the crack in the door, his chest aching with pantomime pain.

Why do I feel so strongly for her?

Then, Dracona moved.

It started with her spine. She straightened it, seemingly one vertebra at a time, like stacking blocks, the curve leaving her back as if she replaced her spine with a rod. Her shoulders pulled back. Her chin lifted off her knees. She unwound her arms and placed both hands on the floor beside her, palms down, before pushing herself to stand up in one clean motion.

The letter was still in her hand. She looked at it, before her eyes returned to the candle on the floor.

For a moment, he thought she was going to burn it.

Instead, she folded it. He watched as she pressed each crease flat with her thumbnail, until it was a small, neat square, before slipping it into the pocket of her dressing gown.

With that, the girl on the floor was gone. Packed away, locked up and shoved into whatever space she kept within her. In her place, the all too familiar Dracona Malfoy, calm, composed and a cold glint in her eye.

She walked to the candle and pinched the flame out between two fingers. The room went dark.

Harry stepped back from the door. This time, he was careful to not make a sound.

In the dark classroom, he heard her footsteps move toward the door, and he pressed himself against the wall, the cloak covering every inch of him. Unaware of his presence, she stepped into the corridor, her silhouette thin against the far torchlight. She looked left, then right, before walking away toward the dungeons, her bare feet barely making a sound against the cold floor.

Harry stood against the wall for a long time after she left.

I know that trick. 

He did it every morning at the Dursleys. Lying in the cupboard, listening to the sounds of the house waking up, hearing each footstep above him like a countdown to his doom. And then, when the knock came, he'd sit up and pull on his mask,wearing it all day until he could take it off when the cupboard door closed behind him at night.

Same trick, different approach.

She built herself up before she walked out the door. He made himself disappear.

Just two sides of the same coin.

It’s as if we’re not that different after all.

⊱༒︎⋅─━━⊱༺ ₊ ༻⊰━━─⋅༒︎⊰

During the weeks that followed, things changed.

In public, it was no different. The war continued. Dracona called Ron a "charity case" in Herbology and Ron called her a "blonde nightmare" in the corridor. Hermione tried to tell both of them to grow up

Like usual, Harry said nothing. Dracona said nothing back to him specifically. In between the two, there were moments that almost resembled peace.

In the library, Dracona reached for the same copy of A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration that Harry was reaching for. They both pulled back, as if that near miss was 

"Take it," she said, “You probably need it more than me with how insignificant your knowledge is.” 

She walked away before he could respond. Somehow, it felt less aimed at him as a personal insult and seemed to be a statement out of pity.

In the corridor outside Charms, she shouldered past him, her hand brushing against his arm accidentally. She muttered "Watch it, Potter" without turning around. 

"Yeah, you too", he grumbled to her retreating back.

Neither of them sounded like they meant it.

Then there was a dropped quill outside Defence Against the Dark Arts. Dracona's, rolling across the floor toward Harry's foot. He picked it up and held it out. She took it. 

"Thanks," she said, the word sounding foreign in her mouth.

Malfoys do not show gratitude to those beneath them.

"I-Sure," he said in return. “You’re welcome.”

Despite the hostility from the Slytherin bunch, Harry noticed he was becoming more and more comfortable. He’d stopped flinching when people raised their voices in the common room. The jolt that used to snap through his whole body shrank to a twitch, and then the twitch shrank to a blink, and then the blink sometimes didn't come at all. He started eating differently too, slower, without the urgency that had marked his first months, though he still couldn't leave food on his plate without a pang of guilt telling him that waste was dangerous.

He didn't know why the change was happening. He might have guessed that it was Ron's easy, undemanding company, or Hermione's fierce loyalty, or the fact that Hogwarts was the first place that had ever felt like a home.

He didn't think about Dracona Malfoy. That was what he told himself. She was a Slytherin, she was mean to his friends and spoke to everyone like they were furniture. 

No, he didn't think about her.

But when he passed her in the corridor with her haughty and high attitude, he couldn't help but let his mind drift back to the girl on the floor. Barefoot on cold stone, folding another cruel letter into a neat square and putting it away, as if it was a treasure instead of something that had deeply hurt.

He looked away when she looked at him. He looked back when she turned.

Dracona, too, noticed things about Potter that she wished she hadn't.

She noticed that he ate fast, shovelling food with the efficiency of someone who'd had meals taken from him. She scoffed lightly as she ate slowly, cutting each bite to regulation size.

Both habits came from the same place, a table where disobeying rules meant cruel punishments.

She noticed that he sat in the chair closest to the door in every classroom. Exit strategy. She did the same, except she sat in the chair with the best sightlines, the one that let her see everyone and every entrance without turning her head.

She noticed that he didn't know how to accept compliments. When McGonagall praised his Transfiguration work, he ducked his head and mumbled something, his hand immediately going to the back of his neck, rubbing it sheepishly as he tried to go back to whatever he was doing..

She didn't think about Potter. That was what she told herself, sitting in the Slytherin common room at midnight with her Charms textbook open, a piece of parchment covering some practice questions. Granger had beaten her by two marks on the last exam, and that couldn't stand. It couldn't, because if it did, word would reach her father and the next letter would be worse than the last.

But when she closed her eyes and tried to focus, she was reminded of him on the astronomy tower floor with his quiet, stupid, infuriating honesty.

My uncle locks me in a cupboard.

Nobody had ever told her something like that before.

Not because she didn't know people with secrets. The pureblood families were full of secrets, locked doors and hushed conversations. Children learned to read a room before they could read a book. But nobody had ever just... said it. Out loud. Especially to her face, without leverage or expectation of return.

He'd told her because he wanted her to feel less alone.

The concept was so alien to everything she'd been raised to understand that it confounded her.

People don't do that, she thought. People trade, bargain or offer information as currency and expect something back.

That was the problem in her understanding. He hadn't.

No matter how mean she was to his friends, or him, he always seemed to be a league apart, always trying to mediate and stay out of trouble. No matter who did what, he was there to try and stand up for those who didn’t. And he did all of this without any expectation of gratitude or benefits.

He's going to get himself killed, she thought again. Not with a troll this time, but with his own stupid, reckless, beautiful inability to look at someone in pain and walk away.

She crossed out the word "beautiful" in her mind and replaced it with "idiotic."

It didn't stick.

She flipped the page of her Charms textbook, re-reading the same paragraph three times. 

She hadn’t absorbed a single word.

Chapter 7: With courage and honour

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona noticed the pattern before anyone else even bothered to look. Noticing patterns was what she'd been trained to do.

She just didn’t really understand why she paid such close attention to Potter and his strays.

During her library visits, she’d come to the conclusion that Potter, Weasley and Granger had taken to commandeering the same table near the Restricted Section every evening after dinner, heads bent together, voices low. That alone wasn't exactly unusual. Granger practically lived in the library, while Weasley went wherever Potter went, pulled along like a cart behind a horse. 

What was unusual was the books.

Dracona kept a running inventory of what Granger checked out each week. “Purely academic and for the sake of competitiveness” was her excuse. She needed to stay ahead of the Muggle-born in marks, therefore knowing what supplementary reading she was consuming was helping. 

That excuse had held up for the first two months. By March, it was tissue-thin and she knew it.

Granger had stopped checking out Charms theory. She'd moved on to alchemical history, transmutation texts, books on medieval wizarding figures. One afternoon, Dracona watched her pull Nicolas Flamel and the Art of Chrysopoeia from the shelf, tuck it under her arm and walk to the table where Potter was waiting, as well as a piece of parchment with what looked like a hand-drawn map.

Nicolas Flamel.

She knew the name, of course. Her father's library held books that mentioned him. She'd read two of them during the summer she turned eight. 

The Philosopher's Stone. Immortality. The only known alchemist to successfully produce the Elixir of Life. His partnership with Dumbledore was covered in every serious history of modern wizardry.

Why would Granger be reading about Flamel?

Maybe they were just…looking far too ahead, planning on being the greatest wizards and witches of all time. 

With that lousy excuse, she decided to give it a rest. After all, this hadn’t helped, and she was leading in the marks anyways.

Over the next weeks however, the pieces accumulated. 

Potter kept disappearing after curfew. She heard rumors, and twice during her nighttime excursions, she saw the Fat Lady's portrait swing open and shut with no one visible in the corridor. The first time, she assumed it was a ghost. The second time, she remembered the Invisibility Cloak.

Idiot. He's not even being careful. She quietly scoffed. After all, only a Gryffindor would be as careless to wander around so brazenly without any planning or scouting, unlike her.

She watched them whispering in the corridors between classes. Potter's hand gestures grew more agitated as the weeks passed. Weasley's face held a permanent flush of excitement that he couldn't seem to hide even if his life depended on it. Granger was the only one who maintained any semblance of discretion, but even she had started biting her lip in class, losing focus, her hand sometimes forgetting to shoot up when a question was asked.

Something was happening. Something big, or stupid. Or both. Dracona told herself she didn't care.

Then came the dragon.

Dracona found out when she passed a window that overlooked Hagrid's hut. She noticed smoke that was decidedly not chimney smoke pouring from the windows at odd intervals.

She put it together in under a day.

The trips to Hagrid's hut. The burns on Weasley's hand, those he tried poorly to hide by keeping it in his pocket. The frantic whispered conferences. Potter and his little band of heroes were helping Hagrid with an illegal dragon. An actual, living, fire-breathing Norwegian Ridgeback, smuggled into the castle in an egg won from a stranger in a pub if the hushed and poorly kept secrets were to be believed. Only Hagrid would do something that catastrophically stupid. 

Fury and annoyance stewed in her chest that night as she lay in the dark, her mind racing.

Of course they are. Because why follow rules when you can simply ignore them and get rewarded for it?

The bitterness was all too familiar, and it helped her make her choice.

Filch was easy to find. The caretaker prowled the corridors at night with Mrs Norris trotting ahead like a furry surveillance system. All Dracona had to do was intercept him near the trophy room on the second floor.

"Mr Filch."

He turned, lamp swinging. Mrs Norris' eyes caught the light.

"Out of bed, Miss Malfoy?" His voice was eager, hopeful. A student to punish.

"Reporting a concern, actually." She kept her voice even and polite. "I have reason to believe several students are planning to leave their dormitories tonight. The Astronomy Tower."

Filch's eyes gleamed with glee and joy.

She walked back to the dungeons, sat on her bed and waited for the usual smugness and satisfaction to come. I got Potter and his little group of strays in trouble! Oh, how generously shall I be rewarded for this, she thought gleefully.

Hours passed, but it refused to come. Instead, her stomach twisted worse and worse every time she thought about it. Guilt and regret consumed her thoughts. Father told me to befriend him, yet here I am sending Filch on their sorry arses. Would he be disappointed to hear..?

No, he doesn't like Potter. He’ll be delighted to hear this news, indeed he will. 

I have not made a catastrophic mistake.

She pulled out her Charms textbook and tried to study. Twenty minutes later, she closed the book, huffing at the futile attempt to distract herself.

They're going to get caught, lose points and maybe get expelled. It will serve them right for thinking the rules don't apply to them.

So why, exactly, did she feel bad about this?

She picked at the edge of her pillowcase.

Potter will lose his stupid grin, his stupid Quidditch spot, and he'll have to go back to his cupboard under the stairs.

Her hand stopped.

She stared at the wall.

Oh no.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she was pulling on her dressing gown and shoving her feet into her slippers. Luckily for her, the common room was empty as she deftly darted through it. The lake pressed dark against the windows, faint green light rippling across the ceiling. She slipped through the entrance and into the dungeon corridor, moving fast, her heart slamming against her ribs.

I'm not going to HELP them. I'm only going to... confirm things. To make sure Filch actually catches them so there's no ambiguity.

The lies got thinner the faster she walked.

She made it to the Entrance Hall before McGonagall found her.

The professor appeared around a corner with Filch in tow. Behind them, looking variously furious, tearful and resigned, were Potter, Weasley and Longbottom. Granger was nowhere to be seen. She must have already been caught, Dracona figured.

McGonagall's eyes landed on Dracona. Her mouth, already pressed in a frown, became a thin white line.

"Miss Malfoy. What, exactly, are you doing out of bed?"

Dracona opened her mouth. Her heart pounded in her chest. The excuse she'd prepared died on her tongue.

McGonagall waited.

"I..." Dracona's fingers curled into her dressing gown pockets. "I was..."

"Fifty points from Slytherin."

She felt like the whomping willow had rained hell on her. Unconsciously, she took a step backwards, before righting herself again.

Salazar. I am screwed.

"And detention. All four of you. My office, tomorrow evening, where you'll receive your instructions."

Potter was looking at her. She could feel his gaze from ten feet away, a steady pressure on the side of her face. She chose to pretend he didn’t exist.

"Return to your dormitories. Now."

Dracona turned and walked away again, in her confident, measured strides, chin up and proud.

Her fingernails had left indents so deep they drew blood.

The aftermath was immediate and quite brutal. Slytherin turned on her overnight.

Fifty points. Fifty. The hourglass in the Entrance Hall told the story every time anyone walked past. The lead they'd held over Gryffindor, over Ravenclaw? Gone in one stroke. They were now in third.

All because Dracona Malfoy had been caught out of bed.

"Nice going, Malfoy." A fourth-year spat at her in the common room the next morning. "What were you even doing up there?"

She didn't answer. Truthfully, she didn’t.

Pansy tried to defend her. "She was probably trying to get Potter in trouble. It's not her fault McGonagall caught her too."

"Well, she failed, didn't she?" Nott said from the armchair, his voice flat. "And now we're behind them by forty one points."

Dracona sat in her usual spot by the window and opened her Transfiguration textbook. It was useless. The words blurred.

Father is going to find out.

The thought pressed down on her like a stone slab.

As expected, the letter arrived two days later. She didn't cry. She was getting better at that.

The detention notice came that afternoon. Handwritten, McGonagall's sharp script on cream parchment.

Miss Malfoy. Your detention will take place tonight at eleven o'clock. Meet Mr Filch in the Entrance Hall. You will be serving your detention with Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, Miss Granger and Mr Longbottom.

Of course, she thought, the trouble trio and Longbottom to boot. Just exactly what I needed on this dreaded day.

That night, the five of them gathered outside the Forbidden Forest and followed after Hagrid. She tried to distract herself from the fear she felt creeping up her neck by insulting the brute under her breath.

There was light, even if it was just a few slivers. The moon was three-quarters full, and it filtered through the canopy in patches, silver shimmers scattered across the leaf litter. The darkness between those patches, however, was thick, deep, pressing against the eyes as if miniature voids opened up in between the trees. Speaking of the trees, they were enormous and ancient looking, their trunks wider than the span of Dracona's arms. Their branches wove together overhead in a lattice, blocking out the moonlight, creaking and groaning with every gust of wind.

The ground was soft. Her shoes sank into it with each step, mud and rotting leaves that left a squelching sound every step she took.

She hated every second of it.

"Ri’ then!" Hagrid said cheerily, his enormous silhouette blocking out the moonlight ahead of them. He had his crossbow in one hand and a lantern in the other. Fang, his boarhound, pressed against his legs and whimpered. "We're lookin' for a unicorn. Injured one, been bleedin'. Found teh blood two nights ago."

"Blood?" Dracona said, nervousness creeping into her voice. "Something's attacking unicorns?"

"Aye." Hagrid's voice was low and grim. "Somethin' in this forest is killin' 'em. We need t’ find the poor creature, and fast. Now then!" He lifted the lantern and looked at the five of them. "We'll split into two groups. Ron, yer with Hermione an’ me. Harry, yeh’ll go with Fang and..." His eyes moved across the group and landed on Dracona. She could have sworn she saw a flicker of amusement. "...Miss Malfoy. Oh, and I nearly forgot! Neville, yeh’ll be with Harry an’ Fang too."

"What?" Dracona nearly yelled out loud. “Something’s out there attacking unicorns, and you expect three-” she gestured wildly around her, “-children and a dog to beat it back? Salazar, are you out of your mind, you massive lump-”

“Yer mouth is as blimmin’ bad as your pops.” Hagrid rumbled, stunning her into silence as heat rose in her cheeks. Before she could retort, Hagrid continued on. “Right! Yeh lot heard me. Harry, take teh left path. Follow teh blood. If yeh find anything, send up red sparks. If yer in trouble, send up green."

"I am not going into this forest with-"

"Yeh are, or yeh can go back to the castle. I'll tell McGonagall yeh refused yer detention!" Hagrid looked down at her, and for the first time she saw something in his eyes that was harder than his usual bumbling warmth. "Choice is yers."

Dracona pressed her lips together in a frown.

"Fine."

They split.

The left path was narrow and winding, in truth barely a path at all. It was more of a gap between the undergrowth where something had pushed through before them. On the ground, shimmering silver-reddish liquid glistened on the leaves at irregular intervals, catching the moonlight. It looked wrong. Too bright, too luminous, like someone had spilled liquid starlight on the forest floor.

Unicorn blood.

Dracona walked behind Potter and ahead of Neville. Fang walked beside her, pressed so close against her leg that she kept tripping over him. The dog was shaking. She wanted to push him away, but honestly the warm weight of him against her calf was the only thing keeping her from bolting.

The sound of Hagrid lumbering through the trees and parting the undergrowth with his massive body had long faded. Potter walked ahead with his wand out. The tip was dark, unlit. Even now the idiot hasn’t learnt to use Lumos, she scoffed. And he’s still trying to be the brave hero, leading the way for that airhead Longbottom dolt and this salazar forsaken beast of a dog. 

In the dark, stripped of his school robes and Gryffindor colours, she couldn’t help but feel like he looked thinner than ever, a stick figure with messy hair picking its way through the roots of ancient trees.

Behind her, Neville fumbled through the growth. He was breathing way too loud.

"Longbottom," she hissed. "Breathe through your nose. You’re letting the whole forest know we exist."

"I'm t-trying-"

"Try harder."

"Malfoy," Potter muttered without turning around. "Leave him alone."

“Potter!” She hissed, “Now is not the time for lectures on how I’m wrong and you're right!”

“Then quit bullying him!” He snapped back, his voice just above a whisper.

"Fuck you and your hero complex! I'm trying to keep us from getting heard by whatever's killing unicorns, Potter! Forgive me for prioritizing survival." She snapped, her voice rising, instantly regretting her choice of words as she received a venomous look from the scrawny stick figure in front of her.

The silence was oppressing as they trekked through the dense growth. Then after a while, he broke the silence. "Fair point. Sorry." His voice was so quiet she nearly swore she imagined it, if not for fang snapping its head to look at him, seemingly startled, before looking around again.

Did he just agree with me?

They walked for another twenty minutes. The trail thickened. Where there had been drops and smears, it became pools, wide patches of silver soaking into the earth, so bright they cast their own light. The smell changed too, metallic overlaid with a sweetness that made her stomach turn.

Neville grabbed her arm and shook violently.

She spun, ready to snap at him, before seeing his face. He was stark white. His mouth was open, and his hand on her arm was squeezing hard enough to bruise.

"What-" she hissed, the pain in her arm fueling her anger.

He pointed.

Ahead, in a clearing where the moonlight fell unbroken through a gap in the canopy, the unicorn lay on its side, too still for comfort. It was white, its coat brilliant, its mane spread across the leaves like spun silk. Its legs were folded beneath it, and its neck was twisted at an angle that made Dracona look away. 

It was dead, no doubt. 

Blood pooled around it in a wide, luminous circle, soaking into the earth. Above, something was crouched over it.

A figure. Hooded and cloaked, hunched low over the unicorn's flank. Its face was pressed to the wound in the creature's neck, and Dracona could hear a wet, rhythmic sound that she immediately understood with a sickening lurch.

It was drinking the blood from the unicorn.

Potter stepped forward. His foot snapped a twig, the sound echoing in the deafening oppressive silence. Dracona went rigid, and she could feel Neville stiffen up just behind her.

The figure's head came up, the hood falling back.

In the moonlight, Dracona saw what was underneath. A face that was wrong, ruined, as if it was moulded from candle wax left too close to a flame. Silver blood dripped from its mouth and ran down its chin, catching the light.

The scream that tore through the clearing shockingly came from Harry.

He dropped to his knees, both hands pressed to his forehead, the sound coming from him high and shredded. He doubled over on the forest floor, his body curling in on itself, the pained sound bouncing off the trees and echoing up through the canopy.

The cloaked figure turned toward him.

Fang bolted. The dog was gone in an instant, crashing through the undergrowth with yelps that faded into the dark. Behind her, Neville stumbled backward and fell, sending up green sparks from a wand she barely registered him pulling out, before he too was gone, stumbling backwards and yelling in terror.

Dracona stood alone in the clearing, ten feet from the figure and fifteen from Harry.

Run.

Every instinct she had, every lesson, every cold instruction her father had ever drilled into her screamed the same word.

RUN. You are a Malfoy. You survive. You put yourself first. You ALWAYS put yourself first.

Her legs wouldn't move.

The figure rose from the unicorn's body and glided toward Harry, its appearance incorporeal and inhuman. If it had feet, they were hidden beneath the cloak, the sound it made was a whisper of fabric over leaves. Not one footfall could even be heard.

Harry was still on the ground. He wasn't screaming anymore, but he was shaking, his whole body trembling. Both hands covered his scar. His glasses had fallen off and lay in the dirt beside his knee.

MOVE.

Her legs moved. She ran toward him.

Later, she would not be able to explain it. She would try, lying in her bed that night, staring at the green-lit ceiling of the Slytherin dormitory. She would search for the logic and question her own rationale. 

In truth, there was none. 

She took four steps before the smell hit her.

Death. Old and decayed, thick as mud. The metallic sweetness of the unicorn blood mixed with something rotten, an unwelcome scent that crawled into her nose and down her throat, flowing into her lungs like tar.

Her vision went white at the edges as her knees buckled. The forest floor came up to meet her, cold and soft.

The last thing she registered before the world folded in on itself was the sound of hooves, heavy and fast, crashing through the undergrowth toward them.

She came to with her face in the dirt and the taste of soil in her mouth.

"Easy." A voice above her. Deep, resonant, layered with a calm that didn't belong in a dark forest. "You are safe."

She rolled onto her back and blinked. Above her, blocking out the moon, was a figure that was half man and half horse, chestnut hair framing features that were angular and sharp. His torso rose from the body of a palomino horse, and his hooves, one of them inches from her shoulder, were planted in the leaf litter.

A centaur.

"I am Firenze," he said smoothly, ignoring her inner shock and horror. "You fainted."

"I didn’t," she said automatically, before tensing sheepishly.

Firenze looked at her with an expression that might have been amusement. "As you say."

She sat up. Her head swam, the clearing tilting sideways before it steadied. The cloaked figure was gone. The unicorn still lay in its pool of silver, and standing beside Firenze, looking down at her with his broken glasses shoved crookedly back on his face, was Harry Potter.

His face was pale, but his scar was red and inflamed, standing out against his pale skin like a fresh brand. She noticed his hands were shaking, and she could see the dirt in the creases of his knuckles from where he'd clawed at the ground.

He was looking at her with an expression she found hard to decipher.

Get up. NOW.

She stood, brushing dirt from her robes, straightening her posture and tucked her hair behind her ears with fingers that trembled. She balled them into fists and stared at him.

"C-can't even handle a walk in the woods, can you, Potter?" she said meekly.

The words came out with no bite, a performance so transparent she almost winced at herself. Harry, for his part, simply stared at her dumbfounded. His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, looking at the spot where she'd fallen, then at her.

“You have dirt on your cheek.” He finally mustered, and that sent her on a furious wiping regime to ensure she didn’t.

Firenze carried them back to the edge of the forest, Harry on his back and Dracona walking beside them. She refused, absolutely refused, to ride a centaur. Her legs wobbled the entire way, but she eventually made it out.

Hagrid met them at the tree line, crossbow up, face white beneath his beard.

"Wha' happened? I saw the sparks, I-"

"There's something in the forest," Harry said. His voice was hoarse. "It was drinking unicorn blood."

Hagrid's face went grey.

Dracona said nothing, choosing to stand apart from the group while Hagrid fussed over Harry, Neville and even Fang, who had reappeared from wherever he'd bolted to, tail between his legs. She stood with her arms folded, chin up and confident. When they walked back to the castle, she walked behind everyone else. Her hand was still shaking, but she’d rather no one notice.

At the Entrance Hall, the group split. Gryffindors left, Slytherin right.

Harry paused at the bottom of the staircase.

"Malfoy."

She stopped but didn’t turn.

"Thanks," he said quietly.

"I-” her voice seized, before she coughed and resumed. “I don't know what you're talking about, Potter." Pausing momentarily, she turned and stared at him. "For the record, I tripped."

Without waiting for a response, she turned and continued back to the dungeons.

In the days that followed, she noticed an increasing frenzy in activity between the trio. They were planning something.

She overheard fragments. A snatch of conversation outside the Charms classroom, Weasley's voice carrying because it always did. "...tonight. It has to be tonight. Dumbledore's gone, Snape's going to-"

Granger shushed him as Potter pulled them both around a corner, out of earshot.

Dumbledore's gone.

She had seen the ministry howler sent to Dumbledore that very day, its voice booming across the courtyard as people turned to stare. Someone had summoned Dumbledore away. The timing was too convenient to be coincidence.

The third-floor corridor. The one Dumbledore had warned them away from at the start-of-year feast, the one with the door that was always locked. Weeks ago, she’d finally learned that there was some sort of monster in there, or at least she had assumed, with the many rumors and whispers of hearing something growling within. She had put together enough of the fragments to know it was something Dumbledore wanted protected badly enough to put a beast in front of it. 

Thanks to a few careless whispers that came from Potter and his strays, she could make an educated guess on what it was.

The Philosopher's Stone.

Still, why would they be discussing it? And why-

They're going after the Philosopher's Stone.

The realization settled in her chest like a block of ice.

They're going to get themselves killed.

She sat in the Slytherin common room with her Potions essay spread across the table, her quill motionless, ink drying on the nib. The fire crackled. 

Quickly, she stole a glance around her. Pansy was asleep on the couch. Blaise had gone to bed an hour ago. The clock on the mantelpiece showed half past eleven.

It's not your problem. They're Gryffindors. Let them be Gryffindors. Let them run headfirst into danger. That's what they DO, and it has nothing to do with you.

She dipped her quill in the ink.

Potter's an idiot. He'll run down that corridor with Weasley and Granger. They'll either come back heroes or they won't come back at all, and either way it is NOT. YOUR. PROBLEM.

She wrote three words of her essay. The letters were crooked, vastly different to her normally stellar writing. She crossed them out, before nervously glancing around as she put down her quill.

Don't.

She stood up from the table.

DON'T.

She pulled on her shoes.

You are a MALFOY. Malfoys do not stick their necks out for other people. Malfoys do not run toward danger. You survive. That is the first and only rule.

She walked to the common room exit.

Father would be furious. Father would be DISGUSTED. This is everything he taught me not to do! This is sentiment! This is- this is weakness! This is the thing he spent ten years burning out of me-

She shook her head firmly. Yes, and I'm doing it ANYWAY.

The voice that was screaming at her silenced itself. Her hand hovered over the wall that served as the entrance.

She stopped.

The common room was silent behind her. The fire had burned low, coals glowing orange, casting long shadows across the leather furniture and the stone floor. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark windows, a pale girl in a half tidy school robe, one hand just above cold stone.

Why?

The question was simple. It deserved a simple answer.

She thought about Harry Potter on the floor of a clearing, hands over his scar, screaming. She thought about the way he'd looked at her afterward, that unreadable expression. Her thoughts drifted back to the Astronomy Tower, where he had helped her even if there was no reason to.

Even if he had every reason to hate her and mock her, he didn’t.

Her inner voice spoke up again, this time loud and confident. If he dies down there and I could have done something, I won't be able to forgive myself.

She pressed the stone and stepped through.

The corridor was dark and cold. She moved through it quickly, her footsteps light on the flagstones, and headed for the third floor.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry woke up in the hospital wing in cold sweat. The taste of ash was strong in his mouth, and an unwelcome headache pounded in his head. He could have sworn someone drove a railroad spike into his skull.

The ceiling swam into focus above him. White stone, arched, candlelight coming from somewhere to his left. He blinked. His glasses were off. Everything was soft-edged and blurred, shapes dissolving into one another.

He reached for the bedside table. Fortunately, his hand found the wire frames. Peering at them closely, he noticed one lens was cracked, even after Hermione had repaired it. He put them on anyway, breathing a sigh of relief as the room sharpened.

He was in Madam Pomfrey's infirmary once again. White beds in rows, white curtains, a window showing blue sky and sunshine that hurt to look at. Only when he tried moving did he realise his body ached everywhere. His right hand was bandaged. His left arm had a bruise that ran from the elbow to the wrist, a purplish band that hurt when he flexed his fingers.

It was then he remembered the mirror and the room.

Quirrell's face, then the other face on the back of his head, pressed flat against the skull like something growing out of it. Red eyes. A voice that was thin, high and horrible. His hands on Quirrell's skin and the burning, the horrid smell of it, and then nothing.

"Ah. You're awake." A warm, old voice sounded, and he would have jumped out of bed if his body wasn’t so sore.

Dumbledore lowered himself into a chair beside the bed and crossed his legs, hands folded over one knee. He wore robes of deep blue, and his half-moon spectacles caught the light as he tilted his head. A small pile of sweets sat on the bedside table. Bertie Bott's, Chocolate Frogs, a box of something that sparkled.

"From your admirers," Dumbledore said warmly, following Harry's gaze. "Mr Weasley and Miss Granger have been by several times! I believe young Mr Weasley ate three of your Chocolate Frogs before Miss Granger stopped him."

Harry tried to laugh. It came out as a cough.

"How long have I been here?"

"Three days."

"Three-" He tried to sit up. His arms shook. He got halfway and stopped, propping himself on his elbows. "The Stone. Quirrell, he was trying to-"

"The Stone has been destroyed."

Harry stared at him.

"Nicolas and I had a little chat. He agreed it was for the best." Dumbledore's voice was light, but his eyes were sad and firm behind the spectacles. 

“But- the Elixir! Don’t they need it to stay alive? Won’t they-”

Dumbledore cut him off with a sigh. "The Stone was quite the remarkable achievement, I would say. Even then, it has caused too much pain and suffering to the world to justify its existence.”

“Professor, they still need the Elixir or Life to live, no? Won’t the destruction of the stone mean-”

“Smart observation, Harry. Indeed, the Elixir of Life will cease to be produced. Nicolas and Perenelle have enough stored to set their affairs in order. And then, yes, they will die."

Harry's mouth opened, his mind scrambling for words.

"Professor... Quirrell... Sir, Voldemort was on the back of his head."

"Yes."

"And I touched him, and he... he burned. Why did he burn?"

Dumbledore looked at him for a long moment. The twinkle in his eyes had fully dissipated, replaced by sadness and regret.

"Your mother died to save you, Harry. That kind of sacrifice leaves a mark. It lives in your very skin." He paused. "Quirrell, sharing his body with Voldemort, whose soul is so consumed by hatred that he cannot understand love, let alone withstand it... he could not touch you. The protection your mother gave you is stronger than any magic he could bring to bear."

Harry looked at his bandaged hand.

"She saved me," he said quietly.

"She did. And she continues to."

They sat in silence. The candles flickered. Outside, a bird sang from somewhere on the castle grounds, a bright tune that floated through the open window and lifted his spirits just that little bit.

"There is one other matter," Dumbledore said after a while, and his voice shifted, lighter, almost casual. "During the events of that evening, assistance came from a rather unexpected quarter."

Harry looked up. "What do you mean?"

Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles with a light chuckle. "While you, Mr Weasley and Miss Granger were making your way through the protections beneath the trapdoor, someone else was in the third-floor corridor. Someone who, when the protections were triggered and the corridor's defences activated, sent word to Professor McGonagall. The message reached her in time for her to contact me. My return to the castle was... expedited considerably as a result."

Harry's mind raced. "Who?"

"That," Dumbledore said, and the twinkle was back, "is perhaps a conversation better had in my office. Once you're on your feet."

"Professor-"

"Rest, Harry." Dumbledore stood. His robes rustled as he smoothed them. "There will be time."

He picked up a Bertie Bott's Bean from the pile on the table, examined it, popped it in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

"Alas. Earwax." He sighed, and walked out.

Harry lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling.

Assistance from an unexpected quarter.

His mind began to race.

Soon enough, he was released from the hospital wing two days later, still stiff and sore. For moments, he’d stood in the daylight of the corridors, blinking like a mole dragged from its hole. Ron and Hermione were waiting outside the doors, and Ron nearly tackled him before Hermione grabbed Ron's collar, reminding him that Harry had been unconscious for three days. 

“Perhaps a gentler approach is appropriate?”

"Sorry, sorry." Ron let go. He was grinning. "You look terrible, mate."

"I feel terrible too. Thanks for noticing." he grumbled, but there wasn’t any bad feelings behind his words

"You were brilliant," Hermione said, her eyes bright with tears she was pretending weren't there. "We were so worried. When McGonagall told us Dumbledore had come back, and then they brought you up from the corridor, and you were just... you weren't moving, and..."

"I'm okay," Harry said. "I'm okay."

They walked him to the common room, one on each side, and filled him in on everything he'd missed. Exams were over. Slytherin was ahead in the House Cup standings, which meant Snape had been insufferable. Neville had been telling everyone who'd listen about the Forbidden Forest, which had grown with each telling until the version circulating among the second-years involved Harry single-handedly wrestling a werewolf while Neville fought a bowtruckle.

Harry listened, nodded and laughed in the right places, but his mind kept circling back to Dumbledore’s words.

An unexpected quarter.

That afternoon, a neatly folded note had appeared on his pillow. It looked familiar, written with small, precise handwriting, unsigned.

The headmaster requests your presence in his office this evening at seven o'clock. The password is "Sherbet Lemon."

Below it, in the same hand, a postscript.

You are not the only one summoned.

The gargoyle at the entrance to Dumbledore's office sprang aside at the password, and the spiral staircase carried him up to the oak door. He knocked.

"Enter." Dumbledore’s wise voice ran out, muffled lightly through the thick oak.

The office was the same as the last time he'd seen it, round and cluttered, silver instruments clicking and whirring on spindly tables, portraits of former headmasters dozing in their frames. Fawkes sat on his perch, feathers gleaming scarlet and gold, and turned one bright eye toward Harry as he entered.

Dumbledore was behind his desk. He gestured to the chairs in front of it, two of them, pulled out and angled slightly toward each other.

In the right chair, sitting with her spine straight, her hands clasped in her lap and her chin at its customary angle, sat Dracona Malfoy.

She didn't look at him.

Harry sat down in the left chair. He gripped the armrests and studied the desk. A bowl of sherbet lemons sat between two stacks of parchment. Fawkes ruffled his feathers.

"Thank you both for coming," Dumbledore said, as though they'd had a choice. "I trust you're recovering well, Harry?"

"Yes, sir."

"Splendid. And Miss Malfoy, your studies?"

"Fine, Professor." Her voice was clipped. She was sitting very still.

"Good. Good." Dumbledore steepled his fingers. "I asked you here together because I believe there is a matter that deserves acknowledgment, and I find that acknowledgment, like most things, works best when given directly."

Silence from both chairs.

"Miss Malfoy," Dumbledore continued, "on the night that Professor Quirrell attempted to steal the Philosopher's Stone, you left your dormitory. You made your way to the third-floor corridor. Granted, you were unable to pass the protections, but you did something equally valuable. You found a way to alert Professor McGonagall to what was happening. Your message reached her, and through her, reached me. My arrival at the castle was accelerated by approximately forty minutes as a result."

Harry turned his head.

Dracona was looking straight ahead, stone-faced, at a point somewhere above Dumbledore's left shoulder. 

"I believe," Dumbledore said gently, "that those forty minutes may well have made the difference."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Professor." Her voice was flat and emotionless. "I was out of bed because I heard a noise. I ran into Professor McGonagall on the third floor and told her what I saw. That's all."

"Of course," Dumbledore said. He looked at her over his spectacles, but Harry noticed a twinkle in his eyes as he spoke.

"Miss Malfoy, I have been headmaster of this school for a great many years. In that time, I have seen courage take many forms. The sort that charges into danger, certainly. That is courage, and Mr Potter has demonstrated it admirably." He glanced at Harry, then back at Dracona. "But the most difficult kind, I have found, is the sort that no one else will ever recognize. The kind that goes against everything you have been taught, everything you believe about yourself, and requires you to act anyway. Knowing that there will be no applause, no points, nor any reward."

Dracona's clasped hands tightened in her lap. Her knuckles went white.

"I don't need a lecture on courage, Professor. I'm a Slytherin."

"You are," Dumbledore agreed. "And I have always thought Slytherin produced some of the bravest people I have ever known. They simply express it…differently."

The room was very quiet. Fawkes shifted on his perch. One of the silver instruments clicked twice and went still.

Dracona stood up. "Is that all, Professor?"

"That is all. Thank you, Miss Malfoy."

She turned and walked toward the door. Harry stood too.

"Malfoy."

She stopped. She didn't turn around.

"It was you," he said. "In the corridor. You went up there because you figured out what we were doing."

"I already told you, Potter. I heard a noise."

"You went up there because you were worried about us-"

She turned then, and her glare hit him like a slap. Grey, bright and furious.

"I was not worried about you, merely doing what any sensible person would do when they suspect three idiots are about to get themselves killed in a schoo-” Her eyes widened at the words, before coughing lightly and resuming. “I mean, suspect a disturbance. I notified a teacher. That's what’s written in the rules." She said, with an extra emphasis on ‘rules’.

"You hate the third-floor corridor! I heard you tell Pansy it gives you the creeps in Potions."

"You were eavesdropping?" She said, incredulously, her eyes narrowing as her usual calm demeanor gave way to a furrowed brow and bared teeth.

He raised his hands in surrender. "You were loud, not-" 

"I am never loud." She loudly interrupted, and he couldn't help but let out a grin at the ironic statement.

"You were that time. Dare I say, you were just now."

They stared at each other. Behind them, Dumbledore had picked up a sherbet lemon and was examining it with focused attention, very deliberately not watching two students argue in his office.

"I didn't do it for you, Potter." Her voice dropped, lacking the usual edge she spat his name out with. "Don't flatter yourself."

"Then why?"

She held his eyes. One second. Two. Her mouth twitched, wordlessly opening and closing. He could see the war behind her face, fighting to reign in the thing she wanted to say.

"Because it was the right thing to do," she said finally, and the words came out like they'd been dragged from her by force, clumsy, rough and raw. "And if you ever tell anyone I said that, I will hex you so hard your fucking grandchildren will feel it."

She turned and walked through the door briskly. It closed behind her with a calm, soft click, totally betraying her intention to slam it. Harry couldn’t help but grin at that. Now the sole person standing in Dumbledore's office, he stared at the closed door with curiosity.

You indeed are something, Dracona Malfoy.

Behind him, Dumbledore unwrapped the sherbet lemon and popped it in his mouth.

"A remarkable young woman," Dumbledore said, seemingly to no one.

Harry turned and found the headmaster smiling at him, that gentle, knowing smile that held a thousand things he wasn't saying.

"Yes, sir," Harry said quietly. "She is."

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry walked into the Great Hall for the end-of-year feast. 

The hall, much to his dismay, was green.

Slytherin banners hung from the ceiling, emerald silk with the silver serpent, draped across every wall. The hall was packed, every bench full, the noise a constant roar of conversation and clattering plates. The Slytherin table was the loudest, Pansy Parkinson leading a chant that Crabbe and Goyle were hammering out on the table with their fists.

Harry sat down between Ron and Hermione. Ron was staring at the green banners with an expression of deep personal offense.

"Seven years," he muttered. "Seven bloody years Slytherin's won the Cup. You'd think someone would do something about it."

"It's just a cup, Ron."

"It's not ‘just a cup’, Hermione." He sighed, exasperated.

Harry looked across the hall. The Slytherin table glittered with triumph. Nott was leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed and a smirk that could cut glass. Blaise was reading, indifferent as always. Pansy was whispering to the girl beside her, both of them grinning.

Dracona sat in the middle of the bench, hands clasped in her lap. She was smiling, but Harry had spent enough months watching her to know the difference between her real smile, which he'd seen exactly once, a half-second twitch in Madam Malkin's, and the one she performed for an audience. 

This was the second kind. Polished and hollow.

She caught him looking, and the smile dropped. Her eyes held his for a beat, then she looked away.

Dumbledore stood.

The hall went quiet, the noise dying in waves from front to back, until only the crackle of candles remained.

"Another year gone," he said, and his voice carried without effort, filling every corner. "And what a year it has been!”

He let the words settle in, before continuing, his words carrying across the hall, flowing forth with ease. “But alas! Before we lose ourselves entirely in this excellent feast, I believe the House Cup needs awarding. The points stand thus! In fourth place, Gryffindor, with three hundred and sixty-two points."

A muted response from the red-and-gold table. Ron's jaw clenched.

"In third place, Hufflepuff, with three hundred and seventy-five. In second place, Ravenclaw, with four hundred and twenty-six. And in first place, Slytherin, with four hundred and seventy-two."

The Slytherin table erupted. Stamping, cheering, Pansy banging her goblet on the wood so hard pumpkin juice sloshed over the rim. Dracona clapped with measured pace, three claps, each one placed like a note in a metronome.

He couldn’t help but feel like it was all a little too ridiculous.

"Yes, yes, well done, Slytherin," Dumbledore said. "Well done indeed. However, recent events must be taken into account."

The hall went still.

Harry watched Dumbledore's face. The old man's eyes were bright behind his spectacles, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that Harry had come to recognize as Dumbledore at his most dangerous.

"I have a few, ah, last-minute points to award."

At the Slytherin table, several smiles faltered.

"First, to Miss Dracona Malfoy, for the unsung courage and brave actions that arrived just in time, perhaps changing history as we know it…fifty points.” 

Hoots and cheers could be heard from the Slytherin table. Dracona, for her part, looked truly shocked as she received pats on the back and congratulatory applause. Dumbledore merely smiled and waited for the noise to die down before continuing.

“Second, Mr Ronald Weasley, for the will to self-sacrifice, to place faith into the unknown, and for the best-played game of chess Hogwarts has seen in many years... fifty points."

The Gryffindor table exploded. Ron's ears went scarlet. Percy Weasley was telling everyone within earshot that Ron was his brother, as though this was news.

"Third, to Miss Hermione Granger, for staying calm during times of peril and the use of cool logic in the face of fire... fifty points."

Hermione buried her face in her arms on the table. Her shoulders were shaking.

"Fourth, to Mr Harry Potter, for pure nerve, outstanding courage and immeasurable bravery in the face of danger... Sixty points."

Looks and glances came his way, and shouts of “We owe you one, Potter!” rand up and down the table. He could feel his ears heat up as hushed whispers spread.

“We’re tied for the cup-”

“Tied!”

“It’s a tie? This is-”

The din was deafening. Those who could add up while yelling themselves hoarse knew that Gryffindor now had four hundred and seventy-two points, exactly the same as Slytherin. They had drawn for the House Cup… if only Dumbledore had given Harry just one more point.

Dumbledore raised his hand. The room gradually fell silent.

“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. ‘It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr Neville Longbottom.’

Someone standing outside the Great Hall might well have thought some sort of explosion had taken place, so loud was the noise that erupted from the Gryffindor table. Harry gripped the edge of the table. People were doing sums, shouting numbers at each other, and the realization was spreading like a wave.

"Which means," Dumbledore said, "that we need a change of decoration."

He clapped his hands. The green banners shifted, rippling, and the silver serpents dissolved. Red bled across the silk, gold replacing silver, lions appearing where snakes had been.

The Gryffindor table lost its collective mind.

Ron was on his feet, both arms in the air, screaming. Hermione was crying openly. The Weasley twins were doing something that might have been a war dance. Neville, who Harry realized belatedly had been awarded ten points somewhere in the chaos for standing up to his friends, was being hugged by three people at once and looked like he might pass out.

Harry sat in the middle of it and let the noise wash over him. Hands clapped his back. Someone threw a scarf around his neck. A goblet was shoved into his hand, overflowing with pumpkin juice that ran between his fingers and dripped onto the table.

He looked across the hall.

The Slytherin table was silent. The green hangings were gone, replaced, their victory stripped away in the space of two minutes. Some students looked angry. Some looked stunned. Nott had his arms crossed and his face was dark. Pansy's mouth was open.

Dracona sat in the centre of her bench, perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap. The composed mask was firmly in place, chin lifted, shoulders back. She looked at the red-and-gold banners above her head, then at the cheering Gryffindor table, before returning to the empty space where the Slytherin victory banners had been. Her eyes, which had been fixed on a point above the Gryffindor table, dropped to her lap.

Around her, the Slytherin table sat in the wreckage of their stolen victory, muttering, scowling, pushing food around their plates. Pansy appeared to be ranting to anyone who'd listen. Blaise had closed his book and was looking at Dumbledore with narrowed eyes. Crabbe and Goyle stared at their plates like confused oxen.

Harry watched her from across the hall, the celebration pressing in on every side, Ron's elbow in his ribs, Hermione's hand squeezing his arm. Still, the sense of victory was…empty. He watched the girl with pale blonde hair and grey eyes sit in perfect posture at a table draped in someone else's colours, and the pumpkin juice in his mouth turned sour.

She had done the right thing. She had gone against everything she was, ran to McGonagall and sent Dumbledore a message. She probably saved his life. Now she sat at the Slytherin table, alone in a crowd, watching everything she'd worked for dissolve into red and gold despite having contributed last minute.

He put down his goblet.

It isn’t fair.

The thought was clear, sharp, and with a jolt he realized those were the exact words she’d said to him midway through the year.

She did the right thing yet she got nothing. That's not right.

Pumpkin juice dripping off his fingers, he stared at her. She wasn't looking at him, rather at her empty plate and the fork she kept repositioning.

The ugly feeling remained in Harry's chest.

The feast carried on. Food appeared on the plates, mountains of it, roast chicken and potatoes and puddings. Gryffindor celebrated. Slytherin stewed. The other houses ate, talked and moved on with the easy indifference of people for whom the outcome didn't matter much either way.

Harry, for his part, ate. He laughed when Ron said something funny and let Hermione refill his goblet. He was there, present for part of it.

But his eyes kept drifting across the hall.

He saw Dracona Malfoy pick up her fork, cut a piece of chicken into a tiny bite, and chewed on it, her expression unreadable. He could almost feel like there were spikes in the back of the bench as she sat there, her back straight and stiff. Her shoulders were square. Her chin was lifted.

Everything was correct and perfect.

Yet, it felt wrong.

She reached for her goblet, and for one second, her hand hovered over it, fingers spread, and just for a moment Harry thought he saw them trembling faintly in the candlelight. Then she closed her grip, lifted the goblet and drank.

He looked away.

The taste of ash was back in his mouth, and no amount of pumpkin juice could wash it out.

⊱༒︎⋅─━━⊱༺ ₊ ༻⊰━━─⋅༒︎⊰

The train left Hogwarts the next morning.

Students packed the corridors, trunks banging against walls, owls screeching from cages, the air a chaos of noise and motion as the castle emptied itself for summer. The Hogwarts Express sat on the tracks, scarlet and gleaming, steam rising in slow plumes, the platform thick with last-minute farewells and promises to write as students split off in groups.

Harry walked through the crowd with Ron and Hermione, his trunk rattling behind him. He felt strange. Light and heavy at the same time, like something had been taken from him and something else left in its place. The castle rose behind them, towers catching the morning sun, and he turned to look at it one last time.

It was the first place that had ever felt like home.

He climbed onto the train. They found a compartment near the middle, and Ron immediately spread across the seat with a Chocolate Frog in hand. Hermione pulled out a book and began to read. Before long, they fell into the easy, comfortable routine that Harry learnt to trust.

The train pulled away from the station. Harry watched as the countryside opened up, green and wide, hills rolling into the distance under a sky that was clear and bright, the colour of cornflowers. He leaned his forehead against the window.

The glass was cool.

In a compartment near the front of the train, a girl with pale blonde hair sat with her spine three inches from the back of her seat. Her hands were clasped in her lap. Her face was turned toward the window, watching Scotland give way to England, the hills flattening, the sky greying.

In her pocket, folded into a neat square, was a letter she had written to her father that morning. It reported her marks, her conduct, the House Cup outcome and Dumbledore's last-minute intervention. It mentioned nothing about the third-floor corridor, nor anything about Harry Potter. It did not mention the word "courage," or the way the headmaster had said those words to her, gentle yet firm.

The letter would be sent from the Manor's owlery tonight if he wasn’t home.

The truth would stay in the back of her mind.

Some things, she learnt, didn't need to be put away. Some things just needed to be carried.

The train moved south, carrying them home. The grand castle of Hogwarts shrank behind them until it was a smudge against the mountains, vanishing into the backdrop of the beautiful Scottish highlands.

Chapter 8: ACT TWO | Last rays of the setting sun

⊱༒︎⋅─━━⊱༺ ₊ ༻⊰━━─⋅༒︎⊰

The train hissed into King's Cross at half past five, steam rolling across the platform in thick sheets.

Harry stepped down onto the concrete with his trunk rattling behind him, Hedwig's cage swinging in his other hand. 

The first thing that hit him was the noise of Muggle London bleeding through the station walls. Trains. Tannoy announcements. A busker somewhere playing guitar badly. Oddly, after ten months of moving staircases and talking portraits, it all sounded flat and boring, like the world had been turned down.

Vernon Dursley stood by the barrier in a grey suit, sweating through the armpits despite the mild June weather. He had spotted Harry before Harry had spotted him. His uncle’s face was already purple at the edges.

"Out of the way, boy. People are watching." He hissed, steering Harry away with a hand that clamped down on his shoulder.

Harry looked around. A warlock in a bottle-green robe was trying to wrestle a cello case onto a luggage trolley while his wife argued with a self-folding map. A girl with a dormouse on her shoulder was crying and hugging a boy with the same nose. And, just out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a head of pale blonde. 

Nobody was watching him. 

Frankly, nobody cared. 

Still, wordlessly, he lifted the trunk into the boot of the car, taking the weight on his thighs. Asking for help earned him a week of sneers, and he was not about to immediately be scolded on his first day back.

The drive home took three hours. Harry watched the city thin into suburbs through the window, terrace houses giving way to detached ones, and then giving way to Privet Drive's identical boxes. The whole way, his mind stayed on the platform. Ron's face. Hermione's wet eyes. The promise to write, made twice, once by each of them, both swearing they'd send letters weekly.

Ron had already written one. Harry could see it in his trunk, tucked between his Quidditch book and the folded jumper Mrs Weasley had pressed on him at the barrier, a hand-knitted, maroon piece of clothing. 

His first piece of clothing that had ever been made for him specifically, outside of school robes.

Aunt Petunia had given him a letter too. She could not have spoken more plainly in the single letter she'd sent all year, merely three lines on a piece of notepaper torn from a pad by the telephone, informing him that his cupboard had been converted into storage for Dudley's second television set.

The car pulled into the drive.

"Rules," Vernon said, turning off the engine. "Same as before. None of that- that nonsense, at my house. None of your... school talk in front of the neighbours.” 

As if he had anyone to talk to.

“Uncle-” His question about the letters was interrupted by a loud cough as Uncle Vernon rambled on.

“The bedroom. You sleep in the bedroom now, Dudley's second room, so don't you dare complain about cupboard this or cupboard that. You ought to be bloody grateful."

"I know the rules," Harry said, an air of annoyance leaking through.

Uncle Vernon’s face only grew more purple after that.

Some distance away, the gravel drive of Malfoy Manor crunched under the wheels of a black carriage while white peacocks scattered from its path with offended cries.

Dracona stepped down, her trunk gently hovered up and trailing behind her by several house elves who’d marched out to assist her disembarkation.  

The front doors opened before she reached them. Her mother stood in the frame, looking up and down her with a thin smile plastered across her face.

"You've grown," Narcissa said, yet her tone was indifferent and flat. Her hand settled on Dracona's shoulder, thumb pressing once through the fabric of her travelling robes. "Come inside. The wind has turned."

Her father was in the drawing room.

As usual, he did not rise. Her eyes were drawn to the figure in the high-backed chair by the cold fireplace, a decanter at his elbow and a folded newspaper on his knee. Lucius looked at his daughter over the top of it for a long moment before setting it aside.

"Dracona." A curt and short greeting, not all that unexpected from her father.

"Father."

"Your marks came by owl on Thursday." He picked up his glass and turned it slowly. "Charms exceeded expectations. Everything else, acceptable. We will discuss the Charms over dinner." His eyes moved past her as he spoke, but she distinctly felt his father was not simply admiring the view. "You will not be joining the Wizengamot gallery this summer. I have decided against it."

Dracona's stomach dropped. The gallery visits were the one summer event she had ever been permitted to enjoy. Watching the proceedings from the public seating, learning the faces, the loyalties, the rhythm of political argument was boring, sure, but it distracted her from the monotony of her routine.

"May I ask why, father?" She asked quizzically, but her question was quickly answered with a stern and angry glare.

"You may not." He drank. "Your mother has arranged your schedule. Deportment twice weekly now, you will thank me for it later. French on Thursdays. Harrowfield will continue your Potion theory by correspondence." He picked the newspaper back up. "That will be all."

I…wow. Maybe dealing with Potter and his strays was actually better than this.

Narcissa appeared at her shoulder and steered her toward the stairs before she could form a reply, her grip firm. She didn’t notice it at first, but as they walked, she noticed her mother’s hand felt colder than usual.

“Mother, do you require hand warmers?” she asked, her voice small and timid. “Daphne-”

“Daphne Greengrass?” Her mother replied sharply, cutting Dracona’s sentence off. “She is a most wonderful witch. I’m glad your friendship has gone better than I could have expected, Dracona.”

She felt her mother’s grip on her shoulder firm up even more as she turned questioningly to face her mother, and quickly closed her mouth. Some rules in the Malfoy Manor were unspoken, and this was one of them.

Speaking of the manor, it smelled the same. Old stone, polish and the faint sweetness of the peacock feed. Her room was the same too, her bed made to the same precision, the same books on the same shelves.

The house, however, seemed to transform into something different at night.

She noticed it that first night, lying awake in the dark, unable to sleep. The clock in the east hall chimed one, and under its echo, floors below, there were footsteps. More than one set. And the low, carrying murmur of men's voices in a room that, as far as she had known for eleven years, was used for nothing but storing her great-grandmother's portrait.

I’ll need some tea from Dobby to help me sleep better.

A sense of sadness washed over her as she recalled how her father used to bring her tea every night before she slept.

 ༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺ 

Harry counted the days on the back of a cereal packet with a biro, one tally mark per morning.

He kept it in his trunk, under the loose floorboard of the second bedroom that Dudley had never found. After all, it couldn’t be taken away if it couldn’t be found. Sixty-two tally marks to September the first. He had done the arithmetic twice on the train home with Hermione’s help. Sixty-two days between being plain old Harry and being "the boy who lived".

Last summer, Privet Drive had been the whole world. Miserable, cramped and loveless, but the whole world nonetheless. He hadn't known what he was missing because there was nothing to miss.

But now he knew. 

He reminisced about what it felt like to sit at a table surrounded by people who wanted him there. He could faintly feel the weight of a Chocolate Frog box in his palm, bought with his own gold, then sharing it with a friend who grinned at him like he mattered. He longed for the sound of the common room fire, the smell of parchment and ink, and even the way the castle corridors echoed at night when he walked them alone with impunity and freedom.

He learnt what belonging tasted like, and it had been taken from him, replaced with cold toast and silence.

The resentment built slowly, filling like water rising in a corked tub.

Harry still did his chores. He mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, painted the fence and scrubbed the kitchen floor on his hands and knees. Dudley remained planted on the couch three feet away, eating crisps and watching cartoons at a volume that made the windows rattle.

His resentment showed in small ways at first. A dropped plate that he didn't apologize for. A look held half a second too long when Uncle Vernon barked an order. The way he stopped flinching when Dudley shoved past him in the hallway, planting his feet instead. Often, he’d still be knocked aside, but Dudley did notice. 

He tried again three days later, a shoulder aimed at Harry in the upstairs corridor. Harry simply turned sideways and let him stumble past. With nothing to block his uncontrolled momentum, Dudley hit the wall, his elbow cracking against the plaster. He howled, more from shock than pain while Harry watched him with an expression that was perfectly, dangerously blank.

Being around a certain person who felt like she had a literal second skin seemed to have rubbed off him a little.

"You tripped me!" Dudley wailed, bringing him back to the moment.

"You tripped yourself." He’d retorted, before going back into his room.

Uncle Vernon's face was once again purple at dinner. Harry sat in his chair, quietly eating his single helping of stew. He said nothing while his uncle lectured him about respect, gratitude and the many ways in which Harry was a burden on the household budget. 

The words washed over him. 

Something had shifted in Harry Potter over the course of one year at Hogwarts. The Dursleys caught on soon enough. The boy who had arrived at King's Cross twelve months ago, small for his age, flinching at every loud noise and grateful for scraps, had been replaced by someone who knew his own name carried weight.

Maybe, just maybe, letting him go with the giant was a bad idea.

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona began noticing visitors at odd hours.

The summer was different this year, and she noticed it almost immediately. In a way, she had her father to thank for this, having inherited his observation skills and refined them under his tutelage. 

Lucius was distracted.

The signs were subtle. He spent more time in his study. The door, usually left ajar when he worked, was closed now. Locked, sometimes. She tested it once, pressing her ear to the wood, and heard the low murmur of conversation, her father's voice and another, deeper one she didn't recognize.

The Floo flared at odd hours. She woke one night to the green glow leaking under her bedroom door, the clock on her nightstand told her it was three in the morning. Footsteps in the corridor. Voices, hushed, moving toward the drawing room.

I must not look.

She crept to her door and opened it, just enough for her to see out of. The corridor was dark except for the thin strip of green light from the drawing room at the far end. She couldn't make out the words. Just the cadence. Her father's voice, clipped and controlled. The other voice, rougher, lower. A third, barely audible.

"Dracona."

She flinched.

Her mother stood behind her. Narcissa was in pressed robes, hair loose around her shoulders, face stern.

"Go back to bed."

"Who's Father talking to?" She asked curiously.

"Bed. Now."

Narcissa's hand found her shoulder and steered her away from the door, back into her room. The grip was firmer than usual.

"Mother, I-"

"It's nothing that concerns you, dear. Your father has business associates. They keep… unusual hours." Narcissa's voice was smooth and practiced, but she’d learnt to distinguish the manner her mother spoke with her years ago. Her mother was not telling her things, and she didn’t like that. "You need your sleep."

She closed the door. Dracona heard her mother's footsteps retreating down the corridor, not toward the master bedroom, but toward the drawing room.

Soon enough, her father's instruction came through her mother as always. Dracona would remain in the east wing on certain evenings. Dracona would be visiting Great-Aunt Cassiopeia in Wiltshire for a full week in August. Dracona would not use the Manor owlery after sundown.

"Mother? I would like to know what I’m being protected from," she said, one evening in her mother's sitting room as she watched her sew, her hands folded in her lap, her voice level and her expression innocent.

"You are not being protected from anything." Narcissa did not look up from her needlepoint. The silk pulled through, tightened, and settled. "Instead, you have been given a schedule. A young lady of your standing requires it."

"Father never cared about that before." She said, watching her mother's hands. The needle stopped. "Something's happening, mother. There are more people in this house I'm not allowed to see. There are meetings I'm not allowed to know about. I'm not a child, Mother. I'm the heir. If there's something that threatens this family, I have a right to..."

"You have a right to," Narcissa said, and now she did look up. Unusually, she appeared…tired. Almost concerned for her, as she reached a hand over.  "But you also have a right to be a child for one more summer."

The needlepoint went into the basket. That went onto the shelf. The conversation was over, and both of them knew it without exchanging any more words.

Dracona retreated to the library and read spellbooks with her knees drawn up in the window seat. Past the warded shelf, one of the restricted books muttered to itself in a low, wet voice. She did her best to ignore it.

The letters she wrote to her father were immaculate. Perfect penmanship, the seal centred and pressed at exactly seventeen degrees, content reviewed three times before Dobby carried it to the owlery. They reported deportment progress, Potion theory and a vocabulary she was building for the next school year.

On the ninth of August, she sat at her writing desk and took out a fresh sheet of parchment. She stared at it for a long time. Then, at the bottom, in the smallest possible hand, she wrote a single line.

Dear Potter.

For half an hour, she started at it. Why do I want to write to Potter? What’s the use in all this? 

Finally, she huffed, and blotted the line out with ink. Looking around, as if hiding something, she placed the parchment at the bottom of her drawer.

I do hope he is enjoying summer, she thought, before reprimanding herself for thinking about irrelevant people.

I have better things to focus on. 

Chapter 9: Locked in without a key

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona learned when and where the meetings were happening after July.

Tuesdays and Fridays, after eleven. The Floo flared green in the drawing room, and the portraits in the east hall went quiet. Even the peacocks stopped screaming, as though the birds themselves had been instructed to stop. 

Visitors arrived in ones and twos, cloaked, faces unfamiliar to her. Some of them she recognized from the photographs in her father's newspaper archive, or tiny photos that her father kept. 

They looked…sinister.

She never saw them arrive. She was always in the east wing by then, since her mother always found a reason to keep her away.

"Dracona, your Aunt Cassiopeia requires a letter before bed." "Dracona, the arthritis in my hands is wretched tonight, come read to me." Her mother invented errands with the fluency of a woman who had been improvising for her entire life. Dracona went along with every one of them, but secretly kept an eye out for detail, keeping them in her mind as she pondered over them at night.

Because Dracona had her father's cunning. Fortunately for her and unfortunately for him, it did not require direct observation.

The house-elves knew everything. Every fire lit, every meal cooked, every room cleaned, every glass of elf-made wine carried up the back stairs. And house-elves, Dracona had discovered early, could be bought. Not with threats, of course. She had watched her father punish elves since she could walk, and punishment only welded their mouths shut. 

What worked was small things that got them her favour. 

She began taking biscuits from the tea tray in the library. One per visit, never two, tucked into the pocket of her dressing gown, saved until night. Then delivered, quietly, to the kitchen, to whichever elf was scrubbing the great copper pots alone at midnight.

She sometimes felt bad for using them purely to gather information. Seeing their happy faces and gracious reception of her, she made a mental note to do this more often.

Not out of favour, or because she wanted an exchange. No, no. She would do it out of sheer kindness.

Why? She did not have an answer for it. It was not the Malfoy way…but then again, she wasn’t really sure her father was up to any good with what she was hearing.

"Master is very busy these days," she said to Nessa, the kitchen elf, on the second such night, sliding the biscuit across the scrubbing stone.

Nessa's enormous eyes fixed on the biscuit for a long moment. "Master has many friends come calling, Miss."

"Friends from where, Nessa?"

"Friends from before the war, Miss." The elf's scrubbing had stopped entirely. "Nessa should not say. Nessa will have to punish herself." One thin hand rose toward its own ear, and Dracona caught it.

"Don't. I asked badly. Let me ask better." She folded her hands in her lap, spine upright and three inches off the stool’s imagined back just like she was taught. "Has Master been to Borgin and Burkes recently?"

The elf's silence was its own answer.

The picture assembled itself in fragments over weeks. A visit to Knockturn Alley in June, alone, Dobby carrying the purchases. A crate from the cellar moved into Master's study, locked. A conversation, overheard by an elf cleaning the corridor, fragments only. The artefact. Innocent hands. Cannot be traced to us. 

Her father possessed something. Something dangerous enough to lock away, yet specific enough to need.

On the last night of July, Dracona came down for water at two in the morning, finding the kitchen lit by a single candle.

Dobby sat on the floor between the stove and the scrubbing stone, crying.

She had heard Dobby crying before. Every house in her life contained weeping somewhere behind its walls, and she had been trained to walk past it the way she would walk past furniture. It did not concern the heir of House Malfoy, at least, that’s what she told herself.

She stood in the doorway with her water glass, and something about his posture stopped her. He was folded up small, knees to his chest, hands pressed over his mouth like he was holding his own voice prisoner.

"Dobby."

He shot upright. His head whipped toward her. His whole body went rigid, and she watched the fear appear in his enormous eyes.

For a moment, she could almost feel the guilt and pity threaten to spill over.

"Miss Malfoy! Dobby is sorry, Dobby was not sleeping, Dobby was- Dobby must do as Master says-"

"Stop." The word came out of her before she had thought of it. "Stop, Dobby. I'm not going to punish you." I would never. She wanted to add, but she didn’t want to make promises she couldn’t keep.

"Miss is kind." The tears kept coming anyway, running off the end of his nose and dripping onto the flagstones. "Miss is too kind, Miss must not be kind to Dobby, it is not safe for Miss to be kind."

"Why are you crying?"

"Master's plans," Dobby whispered. Then his face seized up, his hand flying to his own mouth. She looked on, grimacing, as he began beating his head against the stone floor. She hurriedly crossed the room and gripped his arms.

"Dobby. Stop." She held him steady. He was shaking so hard her own arms shook with it. "You can't tell me. I know. It's fine. You don't have to tell me anything."

"Miss Dracona should not be in this house when autumn comes," Dobby whispered. His eyes were streaming. His voice was as thin as a thread. "Good wizards and witches will be hurt, and Miss Dracona is a good- Dobby means, Miss Dracona asks questions, Miss Dracona leaves biscuits, and Dobby has watched Miss Dracona be unhappy for years, and Miss must not be here when it happens, Miss must-"

The rest of it vanished behind his clenched teeth. He trembled in her grip, unable to finish, or rather forbidden to finish. Dracona stood in her father's kitchen at two in the morning, holding the family elf by the arms, and understanding, with a chill down the back of her neck, that her parents were involving themselves in something dark and dangerous.

"Go to bed, Dobby," she said quietly. "You're not in trouble. I was never here."

She walked back to the east wing, glass of water untouched, and sat down at her writing desk. The drawer opened. At the bottom, under the parchment, was the sheet with the blotted-out line. Dear Potter.

She pulled it out, took a fresh nib, dipped it, and her hand hovered over the paper for a full minute, the ink gathering into a heavy drop at the tip.

Warn him. If Dobby can't speak it, you can. You know enough. A letter, unsigned. You know three ways to get an owl out of the Manor without the owlery ledger recording it.

And then? The voice in her head had her father's cadence. Then the trail would lead to the manor, you stupid girl, and to the daughter who left it. And what happens to the elf who carried it? What happens to your mother, who is spending her whole summer steering you away from these rooms, precisely so you wouldn’t know of ANY of this?

She set the nib down, stuffing the blotted parchment back into the drawer. She desperately wanted to warn someone, but…how?

Sighing lightly, she shook her head. I’ll figure it out another day.

Behind her, in the dark of the kitchen corridor, a small shape watched her door close. It stood there a long moment, wringing its hands, its enormous eyes fixed on the thin strip of candlelight under the wood.

Seemingly having made up his mind, Dobby nodded once to himself, padded back past the kitchen, past the sleeping portraits, and Disapparated with a crack that nobody in Malfoy Manor heard.

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. The tally marks on the cereal packet told him it had been eleven days, and no letters had come.

Ron had promised. Hermione had promised. Both of them, standing on the platform, sworn up and down. Every week, Ron said. Twice a week, Hermione said. And Harry had written first, three days after arriving, a long rambling thing about Dudley's diet and the flowerbeds and how the second bedroom still smelled of Dudley's old gym socks no matter how wide he opened the window.

Nothing.

He'd written again. Nothing again. This time, Hedwig had taken the letter and disappeared. She came back in three weeks with her wing bent and her feathers ruffled, the original letter still on her leg. Of course, no reply was attached.

She'd refused to let him send a third, even bitten him when he tried. She sat on top of his wardrobe now with her back half turned, and Harry had a sickening feeling in his stomach that something was wrong with the world.

Maybe it’s just some…issue, with the owl posts. He thought to himself, but his gut said otherwise.

It was half past ten at night when the crack came.

Harry sat up straight, his wand already in his hand, one of the only times he'd ever moved faster before his own fear caught up.

There was a creature standing on his desk.

It was small, maybe three feet, with skin like old paper and enormous green eyes the size of tennis balls, ears hanging down past its shoulders. It wore what looked like a filthy pillowcase, and its fingers were gripping the edge of the desk so hard he was afraid it would snap it clean off. Those eyes were fixed on Harry, wide, wet and trembling. It wasn't just the eyes though, for the whole creature was shaking, the ears swaying with it.

"Harry Potter," it squeaked. "Such an honour it is."

"Who- who are you?" Harry's wand stayed up. He didn't lower it. "How do you know my name?"

"Dobby is a house elf! Dobby knows Harry Potter's name because Harry Potter is a great wizard, and Dobby has heard Harry Potter's name spoken in Dobby's house for years and years, sir." The ears drooped further. "Dobby has come to warn Harry Potter. Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts."

The words took a second to land.

"Must not- what? Of course I'm going back! I have to go back, term starts in September, I-"

"Harry Potter must not go back!" The elf's voice sounded shrill and painful in his ears. It climbed off the desk and stood on the bed, wringing its long fingers together. "There is a plot, sir. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year! Harry Potter is in danger. Terrible danger!"

"What plot? Who's plotting? Look, if there's something happening you should tell Dumbledore, he-"

"Dobby cannot say!" 

And then the elf did something Harry would spend months trying to forget. It turned, wound back, and slammed its own head into the wardrobe door. 

The bang rattled the room. The voices downstairs stopped.

Uncle Vernon is rightfully going to be PISSED.

"Bad Dobby! Bad!"

"Stop! Stop doing that! We have guests!" Harry grabbed the creature by the arm and hauled it back, and it hung limp in his grip, tears spilling down its nose. "You can't say. Fine. Fine, I get it. But why come to me? Why warn me at all? Is someone sending you?"

The elf's eyes flicked up at him, huge and streaming, and its mouth seemed to speak but words didn’t come out. Finally, after what felt like aeons, it spoke. "Dobby- Dobby comes because Dobby has heard things, sir. Dobby hears many things, being where Dobby is. And because..." The ears drooped, and the elf's voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "Because there is a young miss where Dobby serves. She is clever, sir, cleverer than she should be, and she asks questions she shouldn't ask, and Dobby is afraid for her, sir. Dobby thought, if Harry Potter is warned, then perhaps... perhaps the young miss will also be kept safe, sir, when the terrible thing does not happen."

"A young miss? Who-"

"Dobby has said too much already!" The elf clapped its hands over its own ears. "Harry Potter must promise. Promise Dobby he will not go back!"

"I can't promise that. Hogwarts is my home. It's the only place I- look, I'm going back, all right? Nothing you say will stop me."

The elf stared at him. The big eyes seemed to fold in on themselves, the hope draining out of them. Slowly, then the elf straightened, and Harry l;ooked on in horror as determination set into its soggy little face.

"Then Dobby is sorry, sir. Dobby had no choice."

"Sorry? What do you-"

The elf snapped its fingers and vanished.

Harry stood alone in the middle of his bedroom with his wand still raised. Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

The rest of the night unspooled like a car crash. The Masons, Uncle Vernon's biggest deal of the year, dinner party, Petunia's pudding floating in the air above the table while eight adults watched it hover. Harry, standing in the doorway of the dining room, watching the meringue rise past the chandelier.

The pudding dropped, detonating on the carpet in a spray of cream and fruit.

And as if things could not have been worse, an owl, one single owl, swooped through the dining room window at that exact moment, dropping a letter in Mrs Mason's lap.

The scream she made probably cleared the neighbourhood's cats off their fences.

Harry read the Ministry letter on the stairs while Uncle Vernon roared behind the closed dining room door. Improper use of magic. Notice of first warning. Section 13 of the Improper Use of Magic Office. Any further behaviour of this nature may result in your expulsion.

Expulsion.

The word sat in his chest like a stone. He read the letter three times under the dim stair bulb, and the same thought kept circling. But I didn't do it! I never raised my wand! Somebody did this to me on purpose!

Downstairs, through the door, he heard Uncle Vernon's voice climb another octave, and then go strangely, horribly quiet.

That was worse.

The bars went up three days later.

Two of them, iron, screwed into the tiny window frame while Harry stood in the corner of his own bedroom with his fists clenched. Mr Mason's drill screamed through the wall. 

Uncle Vernon had installed them himself, sweating and humming, actually humming, a man at leisure. A cat flap was cut into the bottom of the bedroom door. Twice a day, a hand pushed through it with a tin of cold soup, three spoonfuls, no more, no less.

"Sixty years I've waited," Vernon said breathlessly on the fourth morning, his face pressed to the flap, close enough that Harry could smell his coffee breath. "Sixty years of you lot flaunting it. Shooting stars. Owls at breakfast. And now I find out the school can't even stomach you. You're not allowed, boy! Not allowed to so much as wave that stick!" The flap rattled as he laughed. "Who's the freak now?"

Harry sat with his back against the door and didn't answer, hearing the booming laughter retreat down the corridor. 

He chose counted the tally marks on the cereal packet instead. 

Thirty-one done. Thirty-one to go. Was it his imagination, or was the soup was getting smaller, and Hedwig was getting thinner?

Sixty-two days. I only have to last sixty-two days.

He had no idea what he’d do on day sixty two. Luckily for him, the car came on night thirty-three.

Harry woke to a sound outside the bars, a soft mechanical purr, and then a face at the window. Round, freckled, grinning, and attached to it, a hand waving.

"Ron?" he muttered incredulously, “Am I dreaming?”

"Harry! Mate, you look awful. Stand back!"Ron said cheerfully.

Fred and George Weasley were already out on the bonnet, and one of the iron bars was being wrenched from its screws by hand while the car hovered fifty feet. Below it, a flowerbed full of prize begonias. Having just enough room, Ron pulled him through the window frame. The trunk came after, forced through the window by two sets of hands, and Hedwig's cage came last, swinging from George's fist.

Harry had one foot in the passenger seat when the lights came on.

Uncle Vernon blasted through the door in his nightshirt.

"POTTER! YOU COME BACK HERE! YOU PUT THAT CAR BACK-"

"Bye, Uncle Vernon!" Harry shouted it out the window, his voice cracking on it. "See you next summer!"

The Anglia rose into the night sky. Below them, Privet Drive shrank to a grid of orange streetlights, Vernon Dursley's fists shaking through the window as his angry bellows faded away. Harry watched the whole street go until it was swallowed by cloud.

He was free.

He turned around in his seat to face a jubilant Fred and George.

"Right," said Fred, or possibly George. "Out of the way, we're riding shotgun."

"Well, actually-"

"Shut up and watch the sign, Ron."

The Burrow appeared out of the dark like something from a dream he'd never dared to have. A lopsided stack of storeys held up by magic and stubbornness, smoke curling from a crooked chimney, chickens in the yard, and a witch in a dressing gown standing in the doorway with light spilling around her.

"Where have you BEEN?" Mrs Weasley's voice cracked across the yard like a whip as soon as they stepped out. "Bed, EMPTY! Letter, NO NOTE! Car, GONE! You could have died, you could have been SEEN, you-"

Then she saw Harry hanging back by the gate with his trunk, thin and pale and swaying slightly on his feet. Her whole demeanour immediately changed, a warm smile somehow finding its way through her furious expression moments ago as she patted him down like he was a family cat. "Harry, oh my! Have you had breakfast, dear?"

Harry blinked. "Er. Soup. Mostly."

The word mostly made her do a funny expression that Harry wouldn’t forget. "Ron, take his trunk upstairs. Harry, you come inside right this minute. We can’t have you not eating now!"

The kitchen was warm, cluttered, smelling of bacon and burnt toast. A self-stirring pot lazily rested on the stove. A wireless muttered in the corner. Harry noticed gnome bites on the garden fork by the door. Nothing in the room matched, everything looked like it was mended twice, yet it was the most beautiful room Harry had ever stood in.

He stayed for the rest of the summer, degnoming the garden like it was the funniest activity he’d partook in in his life. He got bit twice, but it felt like a small tradeoff compared to plain soup and harsh words. He learned how the ghoul in the attic fit into the family, which was to say it was simply one more thing, like the clock with nine hands. He ate meals at a table where elbows stuck out and people talked over each other. For once, nobody watched his hands while he chewed, and by the second week he'd stopped trying to look for exits.

At night, in Ron's room, under the Chudley Cannons posters, he lay in the dark and listened to Ron snore. He thought about how different his life might have been if he'd been born into this. 

Maybe life wouldn’t be bad after all.

Of course, the good thought train had to drift towards the bad. He thought about a small creature with tennis-ball eyes, and a plot he couldn't see, not to mention a young miss he'd never met who ‘liked to ask questions’.

Did she send the house elf?

"Ron," he asked once, just before they slept. "Do you know anything about house-elves?"

"Hngh? Bit, yeah. Mum uses them at Christmas, they come with the tree. Why?"

"No reason."

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona smelled the Burrow before she saw it.

Second-hand books seemed to give off a very peculiar fragrance, and so did the Weasleys. She had three seconds to arrange her face before the collision happened.

Flourish and Blotts was packed wall to wall, a queue stretching out the door. At the front of it, a wizard in forget-me-not-blue robes was signing books with his teeth flashing like a lighthouse. 

Gilderoy Lockhart. 

The whole shop had come down with him. And there, pressed against a bookcase near the front, was a family of red hair and mended robes. At the centre of them, unmistakable, in glasses still held together with tape.

Potter.

He was surrounded. Lockhart had him by the shoulder, posing, flashbulbs popping, and Dracona watched Potter trying  to escape the spotlight and failing to. She knew that look. She had looked like that at a hundred functions she got forced to come along to.

"Bit of a zoo there, isn't it?"

She hadn't intended to speak. She was walking past the Weasley family toward the Arithmancy section, a booklist in her hand, unintentionally directing her words at the red-haired girl nearest her, the small one, gripping her cauldron of books with both arms.

Almost immediately, she stiffened. Why am I talking to a Weasley?

The girl’s appearance made her harsh thoughts soften. She had round brown eyes and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Comparing her to those two jokesters, that insufferable Granger girl or even that prat Ron, she seemed almost…innocent, undeserving of hatred and old feuds. "Uhm-yeah. We only came for Lockhart's books. Well, my books," the girl corrected herself, "I’m starting Hogwarts."

"First year." Dracona looked at the small girl. She had the cauldron hugged to her chest like a shield while staring up at Dracona with a mixture of wariness, alongside an air of helpless frankness. "Better know what house you’re going in, then. Slytherin will make you work for your marks. Ravenclaw will make you enjoy it. The rest barely matters."

“But- but H-harrry is…in Gryffindor…” The girl’s voice grew smaller as she continued, and she swore the girl averted her haze as she mentioned Potter.

Oh, great. Another Potter fan?

"Dracona!" Her father's voice cut across the shop before she could respond. "Come."

Looking back at him, she was surprised to find the room seemingly fired up for a duel.

Her father had seen the Weasleys. Likewise, Arthur Weasley had seen her father. The air between the two men was tense, and the crowd around them thinned. Witches and wizards alike instinctively drifted toward the walls or the exit, just like how water retreats from rising heat.

"Lucius." Weasley said it flatly.

"Weasley." Her father spat.

Dracona watched it happen with her booklist forgotten in her hand. Her father drifted along the book display, gloved fingers trailing a shelf of shrinking texts, insulting them by proximity. 

"Busy time at the Ministry, I hear. All those raids. I do hope they're paying you overtime." A pause, thin as a blade. "Though judging by this, they're not." His eyes had landed on the Weasleys' books. On the robes. Then his eyes panned over to her and the girl she was speaking to, and lingered on the girl's cauldron. She noticed now that it was dented at the rim, field with second-hand books from the look of the solder.

"We have a very different idea of what disgraces the term wizard, Malfoy," Mr Weasley said, and the crowd went properly quiet now.

"Clearly."

"The company you keep-"

"Now, now, Arthur. Don't start. Imagine the influence on your children." And there it was, the glance that swept the Weasley children and then, deliberately, landed on Harry Potter. "And the famous Harry Potter. Brightest of his age, they say, mixing with the wrong sort. There are some very big fists in this shop, I hear. Anointed by the Daily Prophet."

Arthur Weasley lunged, and the duel ceased being fought with words.

Dracona was eleven feet away, frozen beside the herbology display, and she had a clear line on the entire scuffle. She had never seen her father fight before. The two men went into the bookcase, topping it as a hundred copies of Break with a Banshee avalanched onto the floor. Momentarily, she caught Harry’s gaze, looking bewildered, unsure what he had wound up in. Somebody screamed. 

Her father was in the middle of it, surprisingly, calm.

That was the thing nobody else in the shop could see. Lucius Malfoy, mid-brawl, remained as calm and collected as he was while striding through the streets. She noticed his hand slipping into her robes, and pulling out something rectangular, old and shabby.

Was this it?

It took less than two seconds. His arm swept back as if steadying himself against the falling shelf, and with a sleight of hand, his wrist turned once over the nearest cauldron. The book vanished.

Then, the moment closed over itself like water. She watched Hagrid shouldering his way through the crowd, handing a hand in each man's collar. Just as soon as it started, it was over. The shop dissolved into a mob of shouting, shoving bodies and falling books.

"Break it up, gents, break it up!" Hagrid's voice boomed. "Rotten lot, both of yeh, ‘tis a bookshop!"

Her father straightened his robes, smoothing his hair with a gloved hand, unhurried, appearing as though it was a mild inconvenience. Dracona stood beside the herbology display with her heart going hard against her ribs.

Whatever the artefact is. Whatever Dobby was crying about. It's a book, and it's in that girl's cauldron.

She looked across the wreckage of the shop. The girl was crying into her mother's shoulder, Molly Weasley by the looks of it. Potter was hauling books off the floor with his ears going red. He just so happened to glance up once, catching Dracona's eye over the chaos. Your lot started this, he stared accusingly.

She elected to turn her head and pretend she didn’t see him at all.

Her father was at the door, her mother at his side. A wordless nod was all it took for her to step deftly past the wreckage and move to the door.

In the carriage, her father said nothing about the scuffle. He read the Prophet while her mother watched the streets. Dracona sat with her hands clasped in her lap, her mind racing at speed.

A warning would have to come from inside this house. Someone who has seen it. 

Someone like an elf.

A thought came to mind. Some whispers had come about an intrusion in the Potter household, which had warranted an expulsion threat.

Was it Dobby who went to Potter this summer?

She stared out at the shop fronts sliding past. Her father turned a page.

I will keep this to myself until I know what it is and what it can do.

And until I know for sure that poor elf is not going to hang himself for it.

Chapter 10: A flight into trouble and turmoil

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry knew he was in trouble as he saw the departure board clock.

Ten to eleven. They’d be late.

“Mrs Weasley, Mr Weasley! I, uh, hate to interrupt, but we have to go.” He said urgently, pointing to the clock.

“Oh- right you are, Harry! Ron! Percy, Fred, George, Ginny, come on!” 

Behind him, the Weasley procession unspooled across the concourse like a parade without a permit. Ron wrestled two trunks onto one trolley while Fred and George shoved a second Ginny's cauldron was balanced precariously on top of her trunk as she hurriedly helped push a trolley. Hedwig's cage was accidentally clipped to Harry's handle and she made sure to complain about it at volume. Percy's prefect badge caught the strip lights with every stride. Somewhere at the back, Arthur Weasley was thanking a machine.

"It gave me a receipt," he called, jogging to catch up, delighted. "A prediction! About the roads! For nothing!"

"Arthur, not now." Molly Weasley sighed, exasperated. "Ginny, sweetest, stay with Fred. Percy, the barrier. Let’s go."

In the midst of the crowd, Harry thought he saw a familiar head of brown bob in and out. Could it be?

A second later, his mouth fell open as Hermione came out of the crowd at a half-run.

"Harry! Ron!" 

"Hermione!"

"I thought we’d missed it!" Hermione had deep lines of stress under her eyes. Her hair was messier than usual, trolley rattling, two adults in Muggle coats hurrying in her wake. "There was an accident on the M25, we sat for forty minutes!"

“Ron took his sweet time too,” Harry muttered, and Ron sputtered indignantly nearby. “HEY! I heard that, you git.”

Harry laughed as Hermione rolled her eyes, before she seemed to remember her parents were in tow.

"Oh, right! Mum, Dad, this is Ron, this is Harry," she said, breathless. "I've told you about them."

Mr Granger shook hands cautiously, as if his hand would fall off from prolonged contact. Mr Weasley's handshakes meanwhile lasted much longer and came with plenty of questions.

"Grangers! Arthur Weasley, how d'you do! Now, I wonder, this amazing machine of yours, the car, how do they normally run? Oh, and I mean the ones that don’t fly, of course, the ministry has a way of making them work on their own. And the things…ah yes, electrical toothbrushes! Do you use them on teeth? What’s the difference between normal ones and electrical ones? And the rubber ducks, is there a function, I've been told there's a function-"

Hermione’s parents were looking at him like he was an alien from outer space as they tried explaining to him that rubber duckies were just little plastic toys and electrical toothbrushes helped brush their teeth faster, to which Mr Weasley questioned why they would need to brush their teeth faster when they could simply use Thompson’s Teeth Gums if they didn’t have the time to brush their teeth.

"Arthur," Mrs Weasley said impatiently, tapping her wrist, seemingly not very far from contemplating murder. 

"Right! But, Molly, one question about parking meters-"

"Dad's obsessed with parking meters," Ron leaned close and muttered to Harry. "He bought one at a car boot sale in July. Mum made him return it."

"The machine that took your money in the car park. It knows when the car leaves? Is it Seer-run? And Hermione writes that your drills spin. What spins them, exactly..."

The look Mr and Mrs Granger had on their faces was priceless.

Right then, the crowd ahead seemingly thinned. Harry was reminded of the tales of a very powerful wizard parting the seas. A cane struck the tiles in a slow, steady rhythm, and people suddenly found other directions to walk or things they needed to tend to. 

Lucius Malfoy. Next to him, Narcissa Malfoy drifted at his shoulder with her hand on his arm. Behind them, Dracona pushed her own trolley, robes pressed, her hair in a high ponytail, trunk polished to a dull gleam. She looked at the pile of Weasleys and Grangers, before wrinkling her nose at the second-hand cauldrons and glaring at the shrieking owl. Harry found her to be more irritable than he’d remembered already.

"Weasley." Lucius said, a veiled sneer on his stern features. “We meet again. How... wonderful. Do transport the whole menagerie through, Arthur. Give the Muggles a show."

"Malfoy." Mr Weasley nodded curtly, annoyance replacing his usual warmth and prior curiosity. “I see your tongue is as devilishly sharp as usual.”

"Molly." Narcissa said, a light sigh escaping her mouth as if she pitied the rabble in front of her, to which Mrs Weasley merely replied “Narcissa.” in a tired manner.

Lucius's eyes found Harry and stopped there. "Ah. The famous Harry Potter. Still collecting strays, I see." He glanced along the trolleys. "It's like feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square. One comes and the whole flock follows."

"Funny," Harry said. "I was going to say the same about your opinions, Mr Malfoy. Where did you find them all?"

Narcissa's eyebrow climbed a fraction. Lucius looked at Harry for a long seco[nd, shock crossing his face before he laughed lightly. "Ha, delightful! It appears I have underestimated you, Potter. I ought to let you know though, boy, manners cost nothing.” His sneer returned as he looked at the Weasleys. “They merely look expensive on those who can afford nothing else." 

Curtly, he turned. "Dracona. Greet Potter and his collection of strays, or must I remind you of your manners?”

Dracona appeared shocked, before performing a small curtsey, right foot behind left, knees bent, chin dipping for exactly one second. “Potter, Weasleys. Greetings.”

Harry couldn’t help but feel like he could use her knees to measure out angles. It all felt incredibly…rehearsed.

“Let’s not miss the train!” Mrs Weasley shouted, yelling at the gaggle and sorted itself out quickly. “Percy, Fred, George, show Ginny how it’s done!”

The barrier swallowed Percy first, then the twins, then Ginny, who ran with her cauldron hugged to her chest, quickly followed shortly by Hermione. Mrs Weasley went through with Mrs Granger, Mr Weasley after them with a last loving look at the ticket machines, his hand on Mr Granger’s shoulder, the man looking visibly nervous. Ron stepped up beside Harry

"Come on, I bet you Hermione’s saved us a compartment!" He pushed his trolley at the wall and vanished mid-sentence.

"Follow directly, Dracona," Lucius said, and the barrier took him like smoke, cane first, Narcissa faithfully by his side.

Now, it was Harry's turn. Dracona lined up behind him, but of course his trolley's front wheel just had to catch the lip between two tiles. The jolt sent Hedwig's cage sliding. He watched in horror, reaching out as it tipped, rolled off the handlebars and bounced away down the concourse, screeching every inch, only stopping once it was fetched up against a porter's luggage stack thirty feet back.

The clock rolled over to eleven while Harry ran for it.

By the time he had the cage, apologised to a porter, dodged a woman with a tea trolley and hastily stuck the cage atop his trolley, all the while apologizing profusely to Hedwig, Dracona was holding position at the barrier with her foot tapping, her knuckles white on the trolley bar.

“You’re- what are you doing, Malfoy?” Irritation crossed his face. “If you’re here to insult me, forget it. I’ve had a bad enough start to the summer as is, and I want it to end on a good note.”

Dracona raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m here to insult you? My words are better used elsewhere than be wasted on you. I must say, however, it is quite the entertainment watching you fumble.” 

“You-” Harry growled, before sighing. “No, nevermind. I don’t have time for this. As a matter of fact, you don’t either, little miss perfect. We’ll be late.” He said, stealing a glance at the clock. One minute past eleven.

"I am aware of the time, Potter."

"I know. Sorry. Right." He set his shoulders. "So, we’re doing this together?"

She shrugged. "I don’t see why not."

Nodding, he ran at the wall, hearing Dracona follow after him.

Unexpectedly, it was actually there this time.

The impact was like hitting a glass door at full sprint. He rebounded, arms flailing before crashing backward into Dracona, who had been one stride behind him, nowhere to go. 

Her trolley upended spectacularly. 

Her trunk slammed down on its corner, the eagle owl's cage skidding and spinning on the tiled floor with horrible screeches. Dracona herself went onto the floor, her elbow taking her whole weight. A dull thud accompanied her fall. Harry, still on the ground, sucked in a sharp breath while half the concourse turned to stare at them

"Ow," she said, very quietly. Harry could see she was biting her inner cheek. Somehow, that was worse than her howling in pain, which was what any sensible person would do.

A guard was already approaching, along with a few concerned passers-by. "You all right, miss? Been a few of you lot charging about..."

"Perfectly fine. Thank you." She said stiffly as she struggled to her feet, glaring at Harry as he offered a hand to help. Rightening her trolley, one of the muggles held her eagle owl cage out for her. “Quite a spectacular pet you have here, young lady! Where-”

“Thank you, but I’d rather not say. Family tradition.” She said coldly, her face displaying a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Seemingly getting the hint, the little crowd dissipated, one muggle helping Harry lift his trunk back before hurriedly walking away under Dracona’s cold glare. 

Once the muggles had walked away, Harry saw her eyes snap to the wall. "Potter. The barrier." She hissed urgently.

"I know." Harry was already backing up. "It's never done that."

"Perhaps it needs to be hit harder," she mused, and the sarcasm had a wobble in it. "Do go again. Really commit this time."

"Keep shouting about, Malfoy, that's helping." He rolled his eyes but ran again. Just as he expected, the barrier threw him off. This time, he staggered into a luggage rack and hung there, seeing double, while a suitcase decided his foot was a good place to land. This again attracted a few muggles. The guard who returned was not all pleased as he grumbled about “Kids these days” while gruffly hauling Harry to his feet. “Whatever you’re doing, young lad, I really hope you will stop. It’s causing a scene.”

“Sorry, sir. I’m just bored-”

“Go back to your parents, kid. Next time I catch you, I'm hauling you straight at them and telling them what you did.”

Behind him, very softly, Dracona started to laugh. He shook his head clear, backed up ten feet and set his shoulders.

"Potter," she said, alarm filling her voice. "Potter, wait! You'll-”

He ran.

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona watched the fourth attempt end with him sitting on the floor.

He had come off the wall, clipped a recycling bin with his hip before going down in a tangle of limbs. Now, he sat there with his glasses hanging off one ear and a furious line of red across his forehead, blinking at the concourse lights. Two guards were conferring at a distance of fifteen feet, seemingly impatient and annoyed. A woman in a raincoat had stopped to watch, worry etched into her expression. Somewhere overhead, a loud tannoy announced the eleven fifteen train to Doncaster. 

Salazar, these muggle inventions are deafeningly loud. Dracona hated it.

As Harry stood up again and prepared for a fifth try, she finally had enough. It was no longer funny, and there was no point in his effort.

"Stop it," she snapped, a growl of frustration escaping her lips. 

Harry still attempted to rise to his feet and charge the barriers regardless.

"Stop. Stop standing up!" She snarled, throwing up her hands in frustration. It wasn’t exactly ladylike, but she had enough of muggles staring at this airheaded idiot running into a wall over and over again. “Your head is going to crack open like an egg before you ever get into nine and three quarters! Plus, you’re making the muggles look!” She added unconvincingly, realizing she was fussing over Potter again.

He peeled himself off the floor using the bin. "Got a better idea?" He replied snarkily.

"As a matter of fact, no, which is the first genuinely new situation of my life, so thank you for that." she huffed, blowing a pale strand of her hair that had come untucked from behind her ear. 

"Oh, good. Insults! Very useful. Shall I run at the wall again or would you like to shout at me through it?"

"If you concuss yourself in front of those guards, they will call a Muggle healing wagon, and there will be photographs, which by extension will involve me in it, and then I’ll be yelled at by father for Salazar knows how long because I can't cross a measly little barrier!" Her voice climbed with every pause. "So, you will sit down, you will think, and if thinking is that difficult for you, I will do it, slowly, using small words so your Jobberknoll-sized brain can understand!"

Deafening silence followed as Harry stared at her. She realized she was breathing heavily, and she huffed before attempting miserably to regulate her breathing.

"Right," Harry said at last, flat. "Right. You do that."

She turned away from him, and that was when she made the mistake of looking up.

The clock hung above the departure boards. White face, black hands, completely serene. She fixed her eyes on it as she attempted to decipher it. The little hand rested just past the letter XI. The big hand was... huh, weird. There were…twelve, yes, twelve big letters, from letter I through to XII. Then, there were the little indents...

"You can't read it." Potter piped up next to her annoyingly.

"I can." She huffed indignantly. “ I’m just used to asking the house elves for the time.”

"Big hand's minutes. Little hand's hours. Muggle basics, Malfoy." He said with a light grin on his face, all the while hobbling over to stand next to her. She could tell he was breathing hard. "Ah, Merlin’s beard. Six minutes past eleven. The train has to have left."

She kept looking at the clock as her head pounded with this unwelcome news. Somewhere on the far side of that wall, a scarlet engine was pulling out with her trunk-mates in it, with Pansy, Theodore, Blaise, Daphne, Crabbe and Goyle in it- Salazar, with her whole year in it, and her mother would probably still be standing on a platform scanning carriages for pale hair. Then, by nightfall there would be an owl sending a letter to her father to read at breakfast.

Miss Dracona Malfoy failed to board the Hogwarts Express.

With a pained hiss, she realized she was pushing her thumb into her index finger again.

The Leaky Cauldron was ten minutes' walk. They could Floo… and then what? Hogwarts took no student fires. It would be two full days in Diagon Alley with adults sending notes about her as if she was a mislaid parcel. 

Her wand hand drifted toward her pocket and stopped. 

The Knight Bus!

No. She shook her head firmly, pushing the thought out as fast as it came in. It, with its twenty passengers and its driver who talked, would result in every one of them selling the story at every stop. That would beat her to the gates.

Across the road, the multi-storey car park sat in the sun. She noticed Harry was staring at it.

“Are you planning to drive one of those…things? Carriages, chairs, whatever you call them-”

“Cars, Malfoy. For being educated, you sure lack a few brain cells when it comes to muggles.” That had her steaming red as she glared daggers at him. “I have no need to learn all of this…muggle information till I get older. Besides-”

“Okay, okay, I get your point. Can we focus on the problem we have?” Harry said, sighing exasperatedly. “We need to get to Hogwarts. Mol- sorry, Mrs and Mr Weasley haven’t come out yet, which means…”

“Means what?” She said impatiently, storming up to him and grabbing him by the collar. She couldn’t help but notice he was slightly more level to her now, although she still stood nearly half a head taller. “Whatever you have to say, for Salazar’s sake, spit it out. We don’t have all day!”

Harry glanced at her nervously, his expression unreadable as his eyes darted between her face and her hands, before he sighed. “Can you at least…you know,” he gestured, “unhand me? It’s a bit inconvenient-”

She let go. He landed on his rear, a look of astonishment on his face before he sputtered and turned red, annoyance and anger evident on his face. She had to stifle a giggle as he stood, dusting himself off. “Nice one, Potter.” 

“Yeah, yeah. Wipe that grin off your face before I tell everyone you fainted in the forest- sorry, tripped over a measly little tree root because your eyes don’t work in the dark.” She shot a glare at him so fierce he paled, raising his hands in surrender, clearly nervous. “Right- uh, can we get back to the issue at hand?”

Horror filled her chest. “Oh- right. What were you gonna say?” She said, putting on a neutral expression to hide her internal panic.

“Well, we came in a flying Ford Anglia. If we-”

"No," she said, unable to hide her shock. “Absolutely not.”

"It flies." He shrugged.

"It's illegal, you idiot-"

"We can’t do anything else, can we?” He snapped back, and she had to begrudgingly agree in her mind. “The barrier's sealed, train's gone too. Like it or not, that's my idea right there."

"It belongs to the Weasleys. If you are caught, that man loses his job, his car, and probably his house." She said calmly.

"Ron would say yes. Besides, when have you come to care for the Weasleys?"

"Ron Weasley would say yes to a hippogriff with a saddle!" The volume of her own voice shocked her back a step.

Compose yourself, Dracona.

She looked at the bruise spreading down her forearm, purple now, the colour of a sleeping draught. Without thinking, she pressed it once, hard, to sharpen herself, but ended up wincing at the pain.  

Right, whatever is coming this year, I would rather be inside it than reading about it over my father's shoulder.

"Which-" she said, momentarily pausing to push away the sheer absurdity of it, "which floor did you say it was?"

He stared. "You'll come?"

"Someone has to keep you from dying. You have a demonstrated inability to notice when things are trying to kill you." She picked up her trunk end, cringing at her own words, and hastily continued. "Also, if we are caught, I can blame you for dragging me along against my will. Now, walk faster before we’re even more late."

The lift, she’d read before, was just a box that rose and fell, held up by metal ropes. Nothing major, she'd believed. No amount of reading about lifts had prepared her for standing in one while it functioned as its namesake, and elevated. She gripped the rail tightly while her stomach attempted to escape her bowels, watching the numbers go up like a doomsday countdown. 

Harry stared at her, amused.

"There's stairs," he offered.

"There are also dragons. We make choices all day long. Besides, we’re late, and I don’t feel like hauling this-” she gestured at her trunk and her eagle owl cage “-up four flights of stairs.”

The Anglia sat between two concrete pillars on the fourth floor, faded turquoise, one wing proud of an old dent, the boot not quite shut. It looked like something a seagull had fought against. Her father would have had someone prosecuted if they gave him this car with a hundred thousand galleons. 

She put her trunk in the boot anyway.

The keys were under the driver's seat. Locks, apparently, “insulted it”, and they got in easily enough.

Either that, or the Weasleys were too stupid to lock their own…muggle wagons? No, cars. She made a mental note to read up on muggle knowledge sometime soon.

"Mr Weasley’s words," Harry said cheerily, snapping her back to the present. "He's brilliant."

"He's a lunatic." She scoffed.

"In that case, he’s a brilliant lunatic."

The eagle owl went in the back beside Hedwig. Dracona noticed it was attempting to stare down the white owl. Hedwig ignored it with apparent dignity. 

Ha, looks like Potter’s bloody bird is more mannered than he is.

Dracona took the passenger seat. When Harry reached for the wheel, she pulled the owner's manual from the door pocket and opened it across her knees like a barrister.

"Left pedal is the clutch. Turn the key, depress the clutch, do not touch anything painted red. Proceed."

"You read the whole thing?"

"Well, I assume you don’t know how to operate this lump of metal either!" she snapped back at him.

“Fine, you have a point there, now stop yelling at me or else we’re not going anywhere for this. You're buckled in?"

"No. What is buckled?"

"The belt! Pull the belt across and click it!" He jabbed a finger. "Oh, Merlin! You don't even know what a seatbelt is! Hands off!” She stammered indignantly as he pulled the belt down and strapped it over her, letting go when a satisfying click sounded from that little back box. “There, buckled in. Thank me later, Malfoy.”

“You’re dreaming if you think I’m ever thanking you, Potter.” She shot back, and he moaned. “Oh godric, I liked it better when you’re reading instructions and not throwing jabs at me.”

She seethed at him and he quickly turned away, inserting the key and giving it a twist. The engine coughed.

"Potter."

"I know."

He tried again. Nothing. The clock above the dash read 11:14 in blocky numbers.

"POTTER."

"I KNOW! Come on, come on, please, car, Ron's dad loves you, please-"

The engine caught on the third try, shuddering and shaking like a wet dog. Before she could find something to hold on to, something under the chassis took a long mechanical breath, and the car simply rose off the concrete. Dracona's fingers closed around the dashboard, her knuckles white as she suppressed a yelp. London tilted below the windscreen, whole, lit and slightly curved, falling away beneath them.

“Woah.” She said, momentarily forgetting Harry’s ‘miserable’ existence next to her.

It was only a few moments later that she noticed people were staring.

“Potter…are they supposed to see us?”

The car banked and jerked back, pushing her into her seat as the windshield filled the sky. “POTTER! WHAT THE- You’re trying to kill us?” She yelled in a very unladylike manner.

“NO, BUT THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE!” He yelled back, face pale. “FIND-”

“STOP YELLING!”

“YOU TOO! Now can you find the damn invisibility function?”

Grinding her teeth together so hard she thought they might crack, she flipped through the manual quickly. “Invisibility, invisibility...Salazar! Where is the damn- Aha! Found it!”

“Which one!” 

She grimaced at his volume, vaguely pointing at the dashboard as she replied. “The silver one there! Let me savour my mome-”

The car lurched forwards as she was pressed into her seat again, this time fortunately with the skyline level. “WHA- POTTER! Are you sure you know what you’re doing!”

“YES! Totally!” He yelled back, “Are you?”

“IT SAYS IT RIGHT HERE!” She screamed at him. “SILVER!”

“Theres- Godric, there's SIX of those in here you stuck up pretentious-”

“OKAY SHUT UP! Just-” She took a deep breath, “Okay. Press the big silver button, right side of the steering wheel. It should be next to two long bat like things, and between another button and a red boxy thing.”

“Found it!” There was a soft pop. In the blink of an eye, the city spread out underneath them, a sprawling mess of blocks, spires and little lines running through all of it, while the Thames parted the city. Dracona forgot to be angry and terrified for a full ten seconds.

"It's beautiful," she said, before remembering to be furious at Harry. Huffing, she turned away and stared at the view that was away from him.

"It's..." Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Harry looking too, seemingly forgetting what he was going to say.

Bloody airhead. Can't even say a sentence. She scoffed, but she couldn't deny that the sprawling view beneath them was majestic in its own right. 

The invisibility flickered, spat, and died somewhere over a river. Fortunately, they were in the countryside now. She suggested they simply fly through the clouds.

Soon, the novelty of that wore off as the cold and humid environment made them shiver. Dracona, against her better judgement, once again took jabs at Harry, to which he tried and sometimes failed to come up with retorts. Still, as the ride went on, even those ceased as they shivered in the cold. 

They flew through grey for an hour, following the line of the country by the shape of its shadows. At her suggestion and with much protests, Harry dropped them below the deck of clouds periodically, allowing them to get a sliver of warmth, before shooting up into the cold dense clumps of moisture again. On the eighth drop, they found a long, winding track that stretched through the countryside. 

Then, as if a spell was cast, there it was. A red thread stitching through the green, smoke dragging off it sideways in the wind.

"Found it! Malfoy, found it!" Harry shouted excitingly, and she didn't need much effort to feign irritation towards him.

"Then follow it and stop shouting! This is not one of you stupid Quidditch matches!"

Before he could retort, a cloud engulfed them again. 

“Oh, great, look what you did, Malfoy.”

“I'm not the one who can't handle words, Potter.” she snapped back, and the back and fourth resumed, albeit with less bite this time. 

Finally, after what felt like an excruciatingly long wait, the clouds around them vanished. Below, they could see a track that stretched onto a familiar bridge. 

“There!” She exclaimed, “I remember that bridge! We are actually on course!”

Harry merely sighed beside her. “If you had shut up earlier-”

“Oh, stuff it, Potter. I'm trying to give you a compliment here for once.” She huffed, but noticed a very shocked looking Potter out of the corner of her eye. 

Well, at least that shut him up. 

Fling just feet above the tracks, they zoomed towards the bridge. Still, something didn't sit right with her. 

“Potter…where do you reckon the train is?”

“I don't know. I sure as heck don't see steam in front of us-”

“It doesn't feel like we’d be here yet. It feels like it's too early to be at this part of the track…” A look of horror dawned on her. 

“What?”

You clueless idiot-

“Don't you realize?” she snapped at him, a strange whistling noise ringing light in her ear. “If the train is not in front of us, it's…”

The whistling noise was getting louder and deeper. 

“Uh. Potter, do you…Hear that?”

“I do, why?”

“I think the train is behind us.”

A very pale Harry slowly turned his head, and she copied his move. There, barreling down the back window of the car, was the familiar head of the Hogwarts express. 

And- oh Salazar, it was approaching fast. 

“POTTER-”

“I KNOW!”

She let out a very unladylike shriek for the second time that day as the car tilted hard to the right and rose, before dipping down, level with the train. 

“Oh blimey-” He smacked the wheel, “It's not turning!”

To her absolute horror, she could see the windows of the carriages chugging past at a slightly faster speed, and every window she could see had a face pressed to it. Two red-haired faces, hanging out and cheering. That Granger girl, on her feet, looking scandalised beyond the reach of language.

And, framed in glass like a portrait of doom, Pansy Parkinson.

“Got it! Hang on!” The car finally veered off right, and Harry slowed it to let the train pass first, before turning and following its tracks. She, however, was in an absolutely mortified state. 

Dracona slid down the seat until her knees hit the dash, bemoaning. "She saw me. She saw me, Potter. Oh Salazar, by breakfast, the common room will have a version where I eloped with you in a stolen Muggle carriage."

"Wouldn't that be a story." He grinned. “Guess you're gonna achieve that ‘productive relationship’ with me after all.”

"I will open the door at this height and toss you out of it." She hissed. “That was NOT funny, you absolute baboon. Never in a million years will you catch me doing that with you.” She sneered at him, aware that her composure had fully up and vanished into thin air. “As if my father will not pick someone for me anyways.” 

She couldn't help but notice she had let a sore, jealous tone slip out, and hastily shot a glare at him. Hopefully he didn't notice that. 

They levelled off above the clouds and the anger drained out of the cabin by degrees. For a moment, she felt like she was on top of the world as she watched the fluffy pillows of white float by underneath, the golden rays of the sun shining atop the clouds in a lazy afternoon glare.

Basking in the moment, she could feel her worries and expectations all drop away, left behind somewhere behind them. She let the wind blow stray strands of her hair out from behind her ears, and for once felt a smile on her face as she gazed at the great expanse of clouds with occasional patches of land, decorating the golden white like patchwork.

Is this what freedom feels like?

Potter can never see this, a tiny voice thought, but she shrugged it off. Who cares? Let him see. For once, I really couldn’t care more if he did. 

The car droned on as the owls slept peacefully. At some point, Harry leaned back and rummaged one-handed in a compartment, coming up with a greaseproof package, warm from sitting in the sun.

"Mrs Weasley. She packs like she's feeding a delegation." He held out half a sandwich. "Cheese and pickle sandwich. Want one?"

"I'm not hungry."

His silence was polite and total. Unfortunately, her stomach begged to differ, and it’s response could even be heard over the engine’s loud monotonous droning.

Embarrassed, she begrudgingly took the sandwich. Slowly, she ate it in small, correct bites, looking straight ahead, then she took the second half without asking, devouring it in bigger bites as she tried not to stuff her mouth. He very visibly did not look at her doing it.

The sandwich tasted like absolute heaven to her. 

"This food is…edible," she said to no one in particular, attempting to pick up her mannerisms again as she ate the last few bites.

"I'll pass on your review to Mrs Weasley.” He said, seemingly bemused. 

Slowly, the sun dipped over the horizon, turning the cloud tops to hammered copper. A comfortable silence had surprisingly settled between her and Harry. 

She heard herself ask the question before she had cleared it with herself.

"Why did the barrier do that? " A pause. "All of them, even those two muggles, passed through it just fine. Why…?” 

Harry looked at her, drumming his fingers on the wheel for a bit before answering. "Maybe this is related. A month ago, there was an elf," he said, slowly. "It turned up in my bedroom at the Dursleys'. Called itself Dobby.”

She shot up in her seat. What does Dobby have to do with this? 

Seemingly oblivious, he continued. “It had my letters. All of them, Ron's, Hermione's, a whole stack of them, it'd been stopping them all summer." His hands moved on the wheel, remembering. "It said I mustn't come back to Hogwarts. Said there was a plot. It wouldn't say whose. Every time it got close, it..." he knocked his knuckles against the steering wheel, twice, softly. “Tried cracking its head open in my room, if that makes sense. That thing got me in a lot of trouble.” 

“What did Dobby do to you?” She said, and he grimaced. “It didn't really do anything except scare the living daylights out of me. What did happen though- well, I think it was that thing's doing at least, but it sent my aunt's pudding flying into the ceiling when we had guests over, which sent an owl into our house with a letter threatening to expel me if I did magic outside of Hogwarts. Had to live off one little can of soup per day after that, two if I'm lucky, and Uncle Vernon stuck bars over my windows-”

He stopped abruptly. “Hang on. Why in Godric's name am I telling you this?”

She shrugged harmlessly and put on a smirk. “Well, well, well. The great Harry Potter, nearly expelled from Hogwarts. I'm sure this will make a good story.” Inside though, she felt a little sense of guilt eating at her smug smirk. 

Harry sighed. “If this gets out-”

“I won't.” She cut in, and Harry looked at her incredulously. “Well, I won't if you continue to keep your mouth shut.”

An audible groan came from the seat next to her. “I have no idea if I can even trust you, but fine. If I hear a whiff about this though, I'm telling everyone you fainted in the forbidden forest and cried in the astronomy tower.”

She glared daggers at him so fiercely she thought he might actually start bleeding. “Don't you dare-” taking a deep breath, she recomposed herself, coughing lightly before resuming. “Well, if you do, I don't suppose anyone will believe the fibs you spread anyways.”

Another exasperated sigh escaped his lips. “I’m doomed.”

Dracona looked out of the window very quickly. “I'm– sorry. That was out of line. I shouldn't make fun of you for what Dobby caused. ”

A Diricawl must have appeared out the window, for his face was full of wonder and astonishment for a second. “I- did I just hear that correctly?”

A light sigh escaped her lips, even though internally she wanted to laugh at his dumbstruck look. “Hearing things again I presume, Potter. You really need to get that fixed. And for the record, I apologise on Dobby’s behalf.”

"You know that thing?" Harry said, his brow furrowing as his eyes narrowed. 

"It's got a name!” She glared at him, before hastily looking away, adding, ‘And that's a common name. For elves." She hoped her voice was level. Her hand had found her sleeve, and she needed conscious effort to force them to be still. "What you're describing is a binding. Bound elves cannot name their houses. Not one word. If it warned you anyway, and paid for it in bruises every time it tried..." She turned and looked at him properly. "Then take it seriously, Potter. That is information from a house with something in it worth biting through iron for."

"Whose?"

The pause felt uncomfortably long. Her stomach did a somersault and she tried to keep an uninterested look plastered on her face.

"If I knew," she said, turning to stare him directly in the eyes, "I'd tell you."

He looked at her for what felt like an eternity. She desperately prayed her eyes didn't show the guilt and sympathy she suddenly felt in her chest. Luckily, he didn't seem to, and they fell into a tense but mutually needed silence after that. 

"For a Muggle-raised lunatic," she said, some time later, "you fly well."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Don't let it go to your head. It's crowded in there already."

The engine coughed lightly, but she didn't pay heed to it. Neither did Harry, who was now staring at the view as they flew.

Neither of them said anything. She watched the horizon fly by, letting the wonder sink in again, the day's events too exhausting for her to try and pay heed to random noises the car made. 

The engine coughed again, louder this time.

"Is it meant to do that?" she asked, her voice betraying her as a hint of concern surfaced. 

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Harry kept the pedal flat to the floor.

He’d been doing it for the past ten minutes now, but it didn’t feel like anything was happening. Nearly all of the needles had been dropping while the pedal sat uselessly there, all the while the car juddered and shuddered like that one time he got locked in the freezer by Dudley. The occasional banter had been reduced to an uncomfortable silence, and he noticed Dracona was glancing around a lot more now, gripping the dash with white knuckles as she shot a nervous glance at him.

Out of nowhere, the headlights flickered on all by themselves. Both of them looked at the dash.

"Did you touch that?"

"No."

"Well, switch them off! We’re shining out here like a christmas tree!"

"There's no time!" He shoved the pedal again, and the engine answered with a noise like a fat man running upstairs. "Come on. Come on, please tell me we're nearly there..."

They broke through the clouds, and Harry pumped his fist while relief washed over him. “Yes!”

The loch yawed wide open below them, black glass glinting with the last hints of the evening sky lingering on top of it. Just above it, there was the castle on its crag, windows lit up like gold, shimmering and shining against the darkening night sky. He could imagine the fluttering banners in the warm halls, and the faint scent of the feast wafted into his nostrils. He wasn’t entirely sure he was imagining it. Up in the night sky, Venus hung over the towers like a tiny lamp as the half-cresent moon glowed silver.

"Oh, Salazar, we’re half an hour late." Dracona said, not even attempting to hide the worry in her voice as she glanced at the clock. "The sorting is done, the feast has started. If we land before it ends, we might still walk in with the stragglers and no one will..." She stopped as the engine gave a loud groan.. "Potter-"

The engine died.

Silence filled the cab for a moment, a heavy carpet draping over the two of them, suffocating and pressing down on him from all sides. Next to him, Dracona had gone pale as he felt the car drop like a big, heavy brick. Wind scrubbed over the windscreen as the nose went down steeply. The trees of the forest came up at them like an open maw, wide and hungry, looming larger and larger in the windscreen.

Next to him, Dracona shrieked. “POTTER! Get- pull back! We’re going to crash in to ”

"I can't pull it! It won't take- I can't-" The wheel fought him, having gone heavy in his hands. "Godric, this fucking thing!"

"The lake! Aim for the-"

“Are you insane? We’d drown!” He yelled back over the wind.

“YOU DOLT- Just- GO THERE!” Lunging over, she grasped onto the steering wheel and began tugging against him.

“Malfoy- get off-”

“Get your grubby paws off, Potter! We’ll at least not die hitting water rather than ground!”

He could only yell in frustration as the view swung left and right in the windshield. There was the sky, then the castle and the lake, before swinging down towards the forest again, growing closer and closer every second.

“MALFOY!” He yelled, “WE’RE GOING TO-”

The hood smashed into the first branches, and a horrible crackling sound drummed and blasted against his ears. As if sensing the ground approaching, the front of the car suddenly lifted up, pointing into the sky before wobbling and yo-yoing up and down. The canopy cracked around them like fireworks exploding, twigs raining off the windscreen. Two pairs of horrified shrieking joined the unholy cacophony of noise as the car plummeted down into the forest, shooting towards the edge.

Then, all of a sudden, they were through, falling into a clearing. Harry could feel the relief rising up before he saw the tree.

It stood in the middle of the grass like a fist. Thick-trunked, ancient, gnarled, and they were barreling right at it.

“POTTER TURN TH-”

The front of the hood crumpled as everything that wasn’t tied down came flying forwards.

The impact snapped his teeth together. The windscreen dented inwards, shattering into a thousand fragments that was barely holding together. The car rebounded off to the left, smashing driver-side first into the ground before rolling once, finally coming to a rest on its wheels among the roots. For a moment, everything was still, interrupted only by the rapid and unsteady breathing of the pair in the cab as they stared at each other with a mixture of relief and horror on their faces.

"Uh…Potter," Dracona said as she broke the silence, "is it just me or is the tree creaking?"

Before he could respond, the roof practically split in the middle as the tree shook and groaned.

The pair screamed in absolute horror as branches rained down upon them. A branch like a telegraph pole came across the roof and the car rocked up onto two wheels. More assaulted the door, the bonnet, the front, the hood and just about anywhere the branches could hit. The tree itself was twisting and shuddering, the creaks and groans coming together as if the tree itself was howling in anger at them. 

Inside, the noise was unbelievable. Harry felt like he was being beaten with cymbals bashing against his ears, Dracona’s high pitched and very unladylike screaming mixed with his own frightened shouts. In the back, the two owls were equally wailing at volume, Hedwig’s screeches of alarm mixed in with the frantic ones from the eagle owl, both birds flapping around uselessly as their cages rolled and toppled. 

Just as he thought things couldn’t get any worse, the doors flung themselves open and the car simply threw them out. Harry landed on hands and knees on a root hard enough to bark his palms. His trunk came after him, narrowly missing his head, then Hedwig's cage. On the other side,Dracona came flying out, her ponytail undone and pale blonde strands flying everywhere, accompanied by her trunks and her eagle owl. The car shook itself violently, shedding its cargo like a horse shedding flies, before it righted itself with a grinding of metal in front of their eyes. Before he could react, it reversed away across the grass into the dark of the forest, narrowly missing Harry as it spun around, taillights rapidly vanishing as it sped into the forbidden forest.

"COME BACK!" Harry was on his feet, screaming after it. "You coward! You absolute metal JUNK!"

A branch took him across the shoulder blade mid-sentence, tossing him into the air like a ball before another whacked him across the chest and spun him at high speed. Another smashed him face first into the ground. Splinters and branches were raining down on him already before he could react.

"MOVE!" Out of nowhere, Dracona had his sleeve, hauling him up. Another branch came down where he'd been mere moments ago with a crack like a cricket bat on concrete. Scrambling and scrabbling at ever foothold they could get, desperately fleeing from the tree, Harry could see that she had her wand in her hand. “Cast something!” He yelled over the din of the tree’s angry beating, now sending a flurry of blows down on the rolling owl cages and the trunks, but she merely shook her head. “What in Salazar's name am I going to cast!” 

“I DON’T KNOW MALFOY! You’re a smart-arse, anything!” He yelled back, before noticing a swing lining up on her. Without thinking, he grabbed her by the collar and threw them both into a dip in the ground, just behind a root. Wood exploded above their heads before it seemingly recoiled in pain. Sap sprayed  the two of them. Her shoulder was jammed into his ribs and both of them were breathing heavily.

"Thank you," she managed a yell through gritted teeth, "for this excellent transport!"

"You got in!" He retorted back as another branch exploded atop their heads, narrowly missing him.

"Under duress!"

A branch the size of a rowboat swept low over their heads and they both ducked into each other. Before he could react, he saw a branch the thickness of a literal chimney soaring towards them.

Uh oh.

He closed his eyes and ducked, pulling Dracona into the ground as he prepared for the impact.

A moment past. Then a second, then two. Strangely, the angry roar and the relentless pounding seemed to have…stopped.

Gingerly, he opened his eyes as Draona scrambled up, covered in leaves, sap and a few smudges of dirt, glaring daggers at him. 

The branch he’d seen was frozen mid-swing, hanging threateningly there as if time had frozen. Were they saved? “Malfoy, Malfoy!” He shouted, hurting over to his trunk

“What!” an angry and agitated voice snapped back, following close behind. 

“It’s stopped! We should-” he froze as he heard footsteps come across the grass, slow and unhurried. Before he could react, he heard an all too familiar and nasty voice utter a single incantation.

“Lumos.” 

He squinted into the light, before taking in the features of the imposing figure in front of him.

Black robes. Sallow face. Wand out, a scowl fixed in his features, anger shining through in his eyes. 

"Enough," snarled Professor Snape.

He walked the wreck of the clearing slowly, taking in the skid marks on the lawn, glass fragments and scattered cages, as well as the trunks that were miraculously intact. Finally, his eyes locked onto the two of them, filthy, bleeding, and a menacing grin spread across his face. 

"Well, well." Snape drew a folded newspaper from inside his robes and opened it with one hand, slowly, before turning it so the wand light fell across the headline. FLYING FORD ANGLIA MYSTIFIES MUGGLES. "Seven sightings. Filed with the Improper Use of Magic Office before luncheon. I was asked this very morning to keep an eye out for the vehicle." He let the paper drop as the grin grew wider. "Imagine my joy to find you here, Mr Potter.."

"Professor, the barrier was sealed, we had no-"

"Silence." Snape said it quietly, drawing out the word as his glare intensified. He stepped closer, and up close Harry could almost feel like he was enjoying this moment, savouring it, saving it for later. "Fifty points from Gryffindor, Potter. Fifty. And detentions, every evening this week, until the Headmaster has decided whether this school should keep you at all." 

His mind raced. He can’t, he- how would that even be possible, Gryffindor in negative points before the term even starts?

The obsidian black eyes left his emerald green and slid sideways. "Miss Malfoy." Harry could almost feel like Snape’s voice had softened, losing the harsh, toxic edge he’d spoken with him.

Dracona straightened her posture and acted every bit like the highborn witch she was, feigning a look of distress and unwittingness as she looked at Snape.

"I trust you are uninjured." His voice was definitely softer now, almost caring, if this monster of a man was capable of such emotions at all. "I trust this... creature did not imperil you by coercing you into this squalid escapade."

Her eyes flicked to Harry. Once. Her fingers were curled around her sleeve, and she could almost see her holding back words as she carefully spoke. "Thank you, professor, I am unharmed. Unfortunately, I did not have a choice in the matter," she continued, not meeting his accusatory gaze. "The barrier on King’s Cross was sealed prior to Potter’s entry attempt. I had the misfortune of being behind Potter, awaiting his entry into the station, and also could not enter myself.” She appeared ashamed now, her words more resigned. “I, as a result of this…unintended consequence, could not board the Hogwarts Express. Potter offered transport." 

A beat. 

"He did not inform me what form it would take."

"That's a lie!" Harry heard his own voice shout out before he could take in a deep breath to try and explain himself. "I did not force you to get in the car, did I, Malfoy, you lying blonde-haired weasel? We had no other choice! You said so yourself that-"

"SILENCE." The word cracked across the clearing. Snape bent down, seemingly towering over Harry. He shrunk back a little bit, his bravado against Dracona dissipating as the cold, harsh words of Snape bit into him. "Another twenty points from Gryffindor. Reckless. Arrogant. Attention-seeking beyond anything I have seen in twenty years of teaching. Your father at least had the decency to be talented.” 

“Don’t bring up-”

“You flew a car over London, Mr Potter. You have made the front page of the Daily Prophet doing something that would see any other student expelled before breakfast." He straightened, and the pleasure in his face was immensely evident. "Pray the headmaster is as sentimental about you as he is foolish in general. My office. Now. Both of you."

He turned and swept toward the castle, robes snapping behind him. Harry hauled himself up out of the roots with his shoulder screaming, his glasses hanging sideways, bent on the sides and the tape repair coming loose. He gathered Hedwig's dented cage. Somewhere behind them, the Whomping Willow settled with a groan, as if it was going back to sleep.

"Potter." Dracona's voice was low and hurried, sounding almost apologetic. "I had to say what I said. You don't understand-"

"Don't." Harry picked up the second cage and shoved it at her, all the while glaring at her vehemently. She purposely averted her gaze, choosing to look at anything but him. "Just don't. I did this today, and I'll take the punishment. But you had a choice there, so don’t lie to save your stuck-up arse then come after me begging for forgiveness. You could have at least helped, but you didn’t."

“Potter, no! You don’t understand-”

"You stood there and handed me to him with your polished little speech, leaving me out to dry while you get away scot free. Pray tell, what am I not understanding?"

She took the cage. “I am telling you, Potter. I couldn’t. I don’t have a choice-”

He rounded on her in an instant. The rage that was welling in him must have shown, for her words died in her throat as he spoke.

“Malfoy, can you just shut up?” It took all his self restraint to not scream at her right then and there. “You do. Everyone does. I thought you were a good person, Malfoy, I thought you had the spine to stand up for what is right and help. Evidently, you don’t, and it’s just a rod up your bloody arse.”

She gasped, opening her mouth as guilt and anger flashed across her features, but he continued, fury filling his words. “I hope you know that you disappoint me, Malfoy. I never want to talk to you again.”

The handle slipped from her grip, but this time he didn’t help her with it. Above them, the castle windows blazed. Snape continued marching towards the lit doorway, the black silhouetted against the blazing light.

Harry fixed his eyes on Snape's back and marched after him, letting the anger have all the room it wanted. Behind him, all the way across the lawn, Dracona stood still, speechless. 

He much preferred her silence over her words.

Chapter 11: To drive a wedge between

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Harry had never seen Snape's office before. Just a minute in, he already despised it.

It was a damp and cold dungeon room with thick stone walls and no windows. The walls were lined with shelves of glass jars. Things floated inside them, preserved in murky fluid. Pickled animals. Plants. Some of them, Harry was fairly sure, had eyes,which seemed to follow the black-robed figure as Snape swept past him to his desk, a thin finger pointing at the two chairs in front of it with a single pale finger.

"Sit."

Harry sat with an annoyed mutter. Dracona sat meekly beside him, still covered in leaves and sap, her hair hanging loose around her face. She sat with her spine straight anyway, three inches from the back of the chair, hands folded in her lap. Harry looked at her, scoffing at how ridiculous she appeared to be, before returning his gaze straight ahead. On the shelf he stared at, a jar containing something that looked like a drowned cat sat ominously in the dim light. 

He averted his eyes lightly, still determined to  not look at her at all.

Snape lowered himself into the chair behind the desk and laced his fingers together.

"Explain yourselves." He said cooly, an edge of menacing viciousness faintly felt as he stared straight at Harry.

"The barrier-" he began, but was immediately cut off.

"Did I give you leave to speak, Potter?" Snape's voice was soft. Harry’s skin crawled as he stared defiantly into his eyes, the words rolling over him in a tone that Harry had learned to dread over a full year. "Let us establish the facts first, Potter, since it appears those have never troubled you before.”

Snape stood and began pacing. “Fact. A flying car carried your signature across the sky above half of Britain in flagrant breach of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Act. Fact. At least seven Muggles were confirmed to see you fly over the sky. Fact. The Improper Use of Magic Office received the file before luncheon, and the Ministry's patience, already stretched thin on your account, has now been spent twice over. Fact." Snape leaned forward slightly over his laced fingers. "A second-year student flew a car to this very school, and the first thing the Board of Governors did was to attempt and expel the student who dared to do such a brazen act of incompetence and stupidity."

Silence fell over the room as Snape took his seat, the chair lightly scraping on the floor. Harry flinched at the scratching sound that felt like holes were being torn in his eardrums.

"Professor, the barrier sealed-"

"It is not an excuse." Snape snapped. "You expect me to believe that a barrier, enchanted by the founders themselves, maintained for centuries, chose this morning to close for you?"

"It did! Both of us hit it, you can ask her, she-"

"I have no interest in the testimony of your accomplice, Potter."

"But we were both stuck-"

"Then let us discuss what you did when you were not stuck." Snape rose from behind the desk again and rounded the desk slowly, stopping in front of Harry. His robes whispered against the stone. "You flew a ministry-issued vehicle over a Muggle capital. In broad daylight. In front of witnesses, no less. You brought the Ministry, the Board, and the Daily Prophet down upon this school before the first-years had even been sorted." He stopped behind Harry's chair. Harry could feel the man's presence there like cold water dripping down his collar. "Tell me, Potter. Was it not enough, being famous? Did you need more?"

Harry's hands closed on his knees as he tried to keep his anger and frustration in check.

"No," he said. "No, that's not- I didn't want any of this!"

"No. You never do. And yet, it happens to you, does it not? Day after day, month after month, incident after incident, each one grander. Than. The. Last." Snape came around the chair, into view, and crouched so his face was level with Harry's, sallow and sharp in the faint light. "I know what this is, boy. I went to school with a boy exactly like you.” 

Harry breathed a sigh of relief as Snape’s horrible, looming presence slowly moved away from him. “He had everything. Talent, privilege, an audience. Do you know what he excelled at, Potter? He excelled at breaking every rule he touched, believing that rules were beneath him. His world applauded when he showed off, while no one ever once told him no." His eyes were flat black, staring through Harry’s and deep inside him. "Look where his audience is now. Look where he is now."

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“The boy was your father, Potter, unless you forgot who your parents are. Flagrant breaking of rules, disrespecting anyone he could because-”

"Don't talk about my dad like that." He could see Dracona staring at him with alarm, but a burst of anger rose within him, white-hot fury burning his innards, dulling his senses and egging him on.

"Brave, entitled, careless of everyone around him-"

"I said don't!" Harry was on his feet before he knew it, and the chair legs screeched across the flagstones, toppling over with a loud crash. "You don't know anything about him! You don't know anything about me! You weren't even there, you stuck up potion freak! The barrier sealed itself, we nearly died in that tree, and you're standing there going on about showing off because- because what? Because you like this? Because it's the only thing that makes you happy?"

The silence afterwards was deafening. Harry could hear his own breathing, rough and unsteady, while a dull bounding thudded in his ear. Opposite him, Snape had gone very still, his face drained of all colour. His eyes however were burning with rage and hatred. Behind him, Dracona sat frozen with her hands gripping each other as she tried her best to not make a sound.

"Sit. Down." Each word fell separately, like stones into a well. With a flick of his wand, the chair flew back up and smashed into the back of Harry, his legs folding out from underneath him as his glasses were knocked askew. Harry thudded down on the chair, and a pained grunt escaped his lip.

"Professor." Dracona's voice, quiet and careful, cut into the thick silence. "If I may?

“Speak, Miss Malfoy.” The fury in Snape’s eyes had not subsided.

“Potter's conduct toward you was entirely inexcusable." She said carefully, pausing to take a breath before continuing. “I would not insult your intelligence, Professor, by attempting to defend it. However, the barrier did close. I touched it myself and was similarly unable to pass through.”

Snape looked at her for a long moment. Harry stewed as he watched Snape’s anger subside slightly.

"It appears," he said slowly. "There is some truth to your fabricated tales." 

FABRICATED?

Harry opened his mouth to speak, but two glares shot at him made him think twice. He shut his mouth, gritting his teeth together until they hurt. Snape moved back around the desk and sat, silence filling the room once more. When he spoke again, his voice was steady, but the hint of cold fury beneath remained. "The Headmaster will decide the disposition of this affair. Until he does, you will both consider yourselves under notice. Potter. Detention, every evening this week. Your Head of House will arrange the particulars.”

And she-what? Why am I being punished but not her? Did he not hear-

“Now." He opened a drawer, and Harry momentarily snapped out of his rage. "You have not eaten. It would be a poor show of hospitality if either of you fainted in my corridor."

He set a plate on the desk. Two sandwiches were quickly followed by a jug of pumpkin juice and two goblets, which poured themselves.

"Eat. You will not leave this office until you have done so."

Harry looked at the sandwiches. They were chicken accompanied with some sort of thinly sliced meat, green vegetables, tomatoes and cheese. Despite being famished, he didn’t feel like he could stomach any of it. His chest was a tight furious knot, and he was so angry at the unfairness of it all, him getting all the blame while Dracona could just waltz off like nothing happened.Snape had bent him like a reed while allowing his favouritism to blind him. He fumed at the way she had handed him over in the clearing with that rehearsed little speech, acting all innocent and guilty of being roped into his ‘devilish plans’.

You should have known, Harry. She was never a good person, and you were fooled by her acts.

He silently agreed with his inner thoughts.

What made it worse was how she was now sitting here, eating, calm as anything. The absolute gall of her, that lying sack of-

He heard her push a goblet of juice toward him across the desk.

"You should eat," she said quietly. "You look half dead."

"I wonder whose fault that is." He spat, and the anger seemed to take her by surprise.

"Potter-"

"No, go on!" He stood with a rush of adrenaline, rounding on her as he did, his voice rising up an octave. "Go on, Malfoy! Tell me again how I coerced you! Tell him! Oh wait, you already did, out on the lawn. Bloody terrific performance, honestly, I thought you were going to curtsy!"

Her face went white, then red. "I told you out there, I had to say-"

"You had to lie, is what you had to do! Fifty points, Malfoy! Fifty! From my house, because you-"

The next words escaped her before she could properly articulate them with manners.

“Do you think I enjoyed it, or do you lack intelligence to such a degree?” She was on her feet now too, any semblance of her controlled demeanour gone, her features twisted by fury while somehow still appearing close to tears. “I understood the situation, and importantly you do not!”

Her voice was a venomous hiss as she launched her own tirade against him. “Do you not realize? He could have used all of that to dismantle you in front of the headmaster, Potter! You would have handed him every shred of evidence he required!”

He opened his mouth to retort, but she shot him a glare so fierce he balked and slowly shut his mouth. “I said what I had to, because that is the only way to get both of us out of this office, with our wands intact, and still have our places at Hogwarts! Not to mention whatever remains of our dignity, though I suppose you don’t have much of that anyways.”

His anger flared as she adjusted her sleeve and continued. “I told you, Potter, unless your intelligence is so unfathomably low you cannot even remember. This,” she gestured, “this is what survival is. And if you would-”

“So you first insult me with your petty insults, then you think you can tell me what to or not to do?” He retorted with a snarl, and her eyes narrowed as she stared down at him. “That’s the truth, Potter! I'm sorry it doesn't come with a hero's badge!"

"I don't want a hero's badge, I wanted you to just tell the truth-" He began, but she cut his words short by shouting over him, rage prominent on her face.

"Oh really? Would you like a list of everything your truth would have cost me? Because it's a long list-"

"Enough." The door had opened. Neither of them had heard it.

McGonagall stood in the frame, square spectacles catching the light, her mouth pressed into a line so thin it could have cut glass. Behind her, Snape had quietly entered, going back to his desk and withdrawing something before swiftly exiting, as though the two of them were a kettle he'd left boiling.

"Professor Snape informs me there has been an incident." McGonagall stepped inside and let the door swing shut. "Sit. Both of you."

They sat. Harry's heart was slamming against his ribs. He picked up his goblet, gripping it so tightly he could feel it shaking.

"I will hear from each of you in turn. Miss Malfoy. From the beginning. Calmly, completely, and truthfully." Her eyes moved to Harry for one moment. "And I will remind you both that I have spent thirty years listening to children. I know the difference between the truth and a fib."

Dracona folded her hands in her lap. When she spoke, her voice was level, but there was no polish on it, nor any part where she made Harry shoulder the blame. She told it plainly without excusing herself, and at no point did she look at Harry at all.

McGonagall listened intently. When Dracona finished, the professor was quiet for a moment, worry creasing her face, making her appear even older than she was for a moment, before she deftly thanked Dracona. Turning to Harry, she cleared her throat.

“Right, your turn, Mr Potter.”

A similar explanation followed. Still angry, his voice rose at points, glaring at Dracona, but Professor McGonagall raised her brows every time, forcing it to it simmer down ever so slightly, just enough for him to reign it in and force it down his throat. 

He finished his explanation soon enough. Silence filled the room for what felt like an eternity, broken only when Dracona audibly plonked down her goblet. Professor McGonagall sighed, her expression grave as she stared at the pair. 

"The Headmaster will hear this account himself," she said. "You will both be escorted to your houses. Food will be brought. We will speak further in the morning."

Harry stood. The taste of pumpkin juice felt soured on his tongue. 

"So, the truth. " His voice was quiet, but he could still sense his own rage behind the words. "You can do it. You just needed him out of the room first."

Dracona stood up in a flash. For the second time that day, a chair topped over with a loud crash that split the silence like thunder. 

"Do you think I enjoy it? Do you think I stood there and gloated?" Her voice climbed and cracked. Harry blinked once, shocked at the outburst. She was very nearly shouting as she continued in a rage. "You have no idea what my father is, what that house is, what gets sent to me when I embarrass him, so yes, fine, YES, I lied! I lied to my father's acquaintance to keep a letter off my own back, and if you'd spent one single night in my house you would have done exactly the same thing and you know it! I apologized! I tried to explain and you told me to shut up, so congratulations, Potter, you win in your petty crusade to be brave and truthful! I hope you're fucking happy!"

She was breathing hard. A tear had gotten loose and she swiped it away with the heel of her hand, hard, before it could slide down her cheek.

"Miss Malfoy-" McGonagall had stepped forward.

"I know the way to the dungeons, Professor." Dracona said coldly, picking up her owl cage and nearly running into a returning Snape. The pair seemed to exchange glances that spoke unsaid sentences. Before another word could be uttered, the door shut behind her with a loud click that echoed in the room. Cooly, Snape resumed his seat behind the table, sparing a sharp glance at Harry as he did so

The office was quiet. McGonagall was looking at Harry over her spectacles in a way that made his ears go hot. Snape's quill resumed its monotone scratching.

“Her temper has really gotten the better of her this time, hasn't it Severus?” Professor McGonagall muttered, breaking the silence. “And you, Mr Potter. You ought to learn when and where you should speak. Even when my squad had hell rained down upon them in Vietnam, they still didn't have a go at each other like you two.”

He stared dumbly at her, astonished at the comparison. But-

“Mr Potter, there is a saying that goes unspoken amongst all of us, muggles or wizard kind.” Snape finally looked up from his parchment, onyx eyes like two tiny voids peering into his soul. “Manners maketh man. Then again, you do not appear to have learned anything during my classes, so perhaps my words are better suited to fall on anything other than your deaf ears.”

Before he could muster an angered retort at how he had no use for manners for someone who didn't respect his fundamentals, Professor McGonagall was there, gently steering him towards the door. “Come, Mr Potter. I am quite aware that Mr Ronald Wesley and Miss Granger have been anxiously wondering where you were for the past few hours.”

The door closed quietly behind them with a woosh. 

‿̩͙⊱༒︎ ━━━━⊱ δ ⊰━━━━ ༒︎⊰‿̩͙

Dracona had to read the letter four times before her hands stopped shaking with rage.

It had come at breakfast, delivered by an owl from the Malfoy Manor. Having dropped it in front of her plate, it fixed her with a look of indifference before helping himself to bacon. She was hoping it was a soft scolding from her mother, judging by the handwriting on the outside, however her heart sank as she opened the letter.

It was her father's stern script.

Dracona Aurelia Malfoy.

It has reached me, by no fewer than three channels, that you arrived at Hogwarts. I am glad you have arrived. However, you have done so in a manner that has made the headlines.

I will not enumerate the ways in which this is a catastrophe for this family. You will deduce them yourself, because you have, evidently, inherited enough wit to arrange such an escapade but not enough to avoid being seen doing it. The word "disappointment" would be an act of charity toward your conduct.

Cease all unnecessary association with the boy. He has a knack for trouble, and it appears you cannot effectively use any of House Malfoy’s lessons to procure his goodwill without embroiling yourself in it. You will conduct yourself, from this day on, in a manner that gives no one cause to speak ill of you at all. Your conduct is not merely a matter of your own. It is mine, and that of House Malfoy.

You will confirm receipt of this letter in your next correspondence and not attempt to explain yourself. There is no explanation that does not shame us both.

With regards,

Lucius A. Malfoy

Dracona folded it along its original creases, her thoughts disconnected while her mind raced. Her fingers were perfectly steady, her motions practiced and automatic. She realized this a moment later with a perfectly folded letter already halfway back into its envelope. 

Two days later, the letter was public knowledge.

Maybe she forgot to put it somewhere secure, or put it in the wrong pile having forgotten to toss it into the common room fire. Whatever the case, she absentmindedly watched Pansy flip through Dracona's Charms notes for a quiz, before picking out the letter from between two pages. 

“Oh? A love letter, Drac?” Dracona snapped out of her own thoughts, seeing a light grin on Pansy’s face. 

“What-” She began, confusion filling her voice, before her eyes landed on the flat side of the envelope, where the Address was written clearly in her mother's handwriting. 

Her eyes widened into the size of dinner plates. 

Oh, no.

“Pansy- no! Give it back, give it back!” 

“Nope! Let's see who you're secretly courti- oh.” Pansy had read exactly three lines before Dracona snatched it back. Pansy stood there for what seemed like an eternity, before she turned to look at her and laughed out loud. "Oh, Dracona, your father-" 

“Not one word.” She hissed with such venom Pansy’s smile disappeared in the blink of an eye. “I- sorry, Drac. I just thought it was-”

“No, forget it. It's fine.” She muttered, before grabbing the letter and storming out. Pansy called after her, but she ignored her as she briskly walked to the common room. 

That was until she ran into Peeves. 

After an intense hollering and chasing that turned many heads, she not only had failed to get her letter back, Ronald Weasley had somehow gotten a hold of the letter. 

By suppertime, it was everywhere.

"Malfoy's dad told her off!" Weasley had crowed it gleefully across half of the Gryffindor table, drunk on the sheer joy of it. "Apparently flying with Harry shamed the whole family! There's a whole letter! It says she's a disappointment!"

She had attempted to avoid it all. You’re a Malfoy. Act like one. Handle this like one, courteously and gracefully.

That plan immediately fell apart after Potions. As she walked away, keeping her head down, she noticed he was doing it again amidst a crowd of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, this time with a piece of very wrinkled parchment in hand. 

Her wand was out before she realized it.

The hex caught him square in the chest and knocked him into the wall. Startled yells echoed and heads turned towards her. Ron barely had his wand out before she cast a second hex, sending it into his legs and snapping them together mid stride. She watched as he topped like a statue, yelling as he braced himself with his hands. 

The snap, a quiet noise on its own, was immediately followed by a burst of light, a blast wave rattling her eardrums and tiny fragments that sent nearly the entire corridor flying, including herself. 

She could hear Weasley howling as she struggled to stand. “You insolent prat! You have no right involving yourse-”

It was only then she noticed his wand wood had broken in half, both ends barely connected by the core material within it.

The corridor went dead silent.

"Malfoy broke his wand!" Someone from the Hufflepuff crowd yelled, scandalized, furious.

"He was asking for it!" She shouted back in an angry retort. 

"You can’t just break someone’s wand, that's-"

“He fell over himself! It’s not my fault that the blood traitor has jelly for legs!”

“I AM NOT A BLOOD TRAITOR, YOU-”

The hallway dissolved into yelling and shouting, mostly directed against her while she screamed insults back at anyone who tried.

Percy Weasley arrived like a righteous wind and marched her to Snape's office by the sleeve. To her relief, Snape took points from Gryffindor for the provocation, before also docking twenty points from Slytherin for the wand.

“Stop involving yourself with such unpleasant characters, Miss Malfoy.”

She sighed.

How can I when they just want to pick fights?

The year had started off just like last year. She had chosen her moments, picking the right time to slide a sly insult veiled as comedic relief. They retaliated, sometimes loud, sometimes unable to retaliate at all, but neither side had played dirty or escalated things. 

That era was over. 

Now, hexes were traded in corridors every time they met. Dungbombs, jinxed book bags, anything the trio could use to their advantage was gladly unleashed on her. Potter himself had sent a Jelly-Legs Jinx at her that day, which she'd had to deflect into a suit of armour. The resulting explosion of metal against marble was absolutely deafening, while pieces of armor nearly impaled a few passing Slytherins and Hufflepuffs. Twenty points disappeared from Gryffindor, courtesy of Professor Snape. The next day, she responded with a Bat-Bogey Hex that caught him outside the library. That put him in the hospital wing for an afternoon, and her fellow Slytherins would soon realize they were fourteen points down compared to the beginning of that day.

News of the fights spread quickly. Whenever one of the trio was even seen near her, people immediately scattered. Some brave souls ran past the fighting, but a few would unfortunately receive peculiar hexes, either falling flat on their face, being unable to speak for the day while their tongue was tired, get sent flying and crashing down a short distance away, or turn green for half a day before Madam Pomfrey could remove the hex. 

“Why are they going at each other?” “Heard one of the Weasleys, Ron, got on Malfoy’s nerves!” “Over that? Isn’t she meant to be the best of the Slytheryns…”

“Did you hear? His wand split in half-” “No way!” 

“...his wand sort of exploded apparently, and everyone there got really bad injuries from being blown into walls or down stairs!” “Oh, wicked. I am lucky I wasn’t there though…”

“... heard his wand got taped back together a while back. I don’t really know…”

Soon enough, the whole school had begun picking sides over the conflict. A few sympathized with her, with expressions of annoyance at how Harry and his friends were stirring the pot while airing her dirty laundry openly, putting people in harm’s way and blaming her for a pure accident.

Most of the school, however, along with her fellow housemates, did not.

That was the part she hadn't foreseen. She was Dracona Aurelia Malfoy, heiress to House Malfoy, one of the most brilliant Slytherins they had, yet she was losing them. 

The older students had started it. Many once would worship the very ground her father walked on, but they now began to look at her with veiled contempt or annoyance. Some had even begun to openly send insults her way. ‘You’re just as bad as the Gryffindor lot’ was beginning to catch on amongst those who met her. As the count for the green emeralds in the hourglass stagnated and even dropped on occasion, usually accompanied after intense yelling and shouting or rumors of “Ron’s got hexed again!”, more and more of the green-clad students began shooting sideways glances at her.

“So this is what it means to be the heiress of House Malfoy. Losing points for the great House of Salazar Slytherin himself.” She elected to simply march past the speaker, even sending Goyle into him for good measure, but she knew deep down she couldn’t hide the hurt veiled behind her stony expression forever. Even more veiled insults came her way, “Every bit the pureblood, acting just like a mudblood” was one that made her flinch. “Look, Malfoy’s wrestling with the pigs in the pigsty!” Came with laughter and jeers as she brawled with two of the Weasleys in the corridor with hexes and items before Professor McGonagall dragged the three of them to her office and gave them detention.

She was outright fuming. She had never been given detention for so long, Two whole weeks of detentions! She was lucky that it would end right before the Slytherin team tryouts. On the other hand, the two identical Weasleys, apparently named Fred and George, had simply laughed it off. They even had the gall to her on the back as she sat, stewing, while they were let go early by McGonagall after the dressing down to the three of them. “Enjoy detention, Smellfoy! You’re a puny little blonde rat, even scabbers is better!”

Her rage simmered down slightly when McGonagall dished out more days of detention for the pair, who didn’t seem to pay heed to it at all.

Then, there were her friends, beginning with Nott. It all went down in the common room, his voice carrying just enough to draw the attention of those present. "That's sixty points since term started. For what, Malfoy? A feud with a Gryffindor you can't even win clean?" 

Pansy still sat with her at meals, but she too had gone quiet and careful, barely speaking to her and always scurrying off whenever there was an opportunity. Blaise had retreated into his books, only occasionally telling her things like "Both of you are idiots" with a weary air of a man at a bad play. Daphne was frosty, which for the normally collected and composed girl who was a friend to everyone was just entirely uncharacteristic. 

Only Crabbe and Goyle remained. They still flanked her in public, even eating a few of the hexes for her, whether on purpose or accident. Somehow, the two, whom she had dismissed as bull-headed dolts who were nothing better than extra hands she could simply summon, were her only remaining ‘friends’ that still existed.

She tried to fight it by excelling above all of them. Her Charms work was flawless. Her essays came back with marks that made Granger's eyes narrow. She answered every question in History of Magic confidently and elaborately, earning her high praise from Professor Cuthbert Binns. Once, she even saw him say to McGonagall that she was “the best student he had ever taught” in a slightly higher pitch that resembled excitement

She never even thought he was capable of emotions.

The Gryffindors elected to call her “Wannabe Granger” for this. The Slytherins, after having caught wind of it, came up with something even worse. “Following in the footsteps of a mudblood, I see,” one of the older students had sneered at her as he went.

Then, there were the letters. Dracona, your actions bring great shame to this house. Dracona, learn to reign in your tempter. This is unacceptable, your behaviour is quite frankly admonishing to the Malfoy name. Dracona, how many times do I have to tell you that you are a Malfoy? Dracona, you have been educated to be better than the common rabble, yet I hear you have been acting worse than those beneath you…

She was on the brink of collapse.

Sleeping was her only refuge, as well as flying when she had the time to. She felt free, better than ever, as she soared over the quidditch pitches on an old broom, hoping that the one her father promised to buy her would even arrive. 

Waking up or landings were always rude awakenings. She tried desperately to drown herself in work and not let her emotions get the better of her, but even her lifelong conditioning couldn’t suppress the whirlwind of feelings she had within her. Fury, hate, anger, anguish, loneliness. She sometimes laid in bed, listening to the girls around her falling asleep while she laid there, tears streaming down her face. Increasingly, her appearance was a wreck, but she didn’t feel like cleaning it up. For once in her life, she was slouching lightly as she walked. A few nights, she stayed up in the astronomy tower, crying herself to sleep in her school robes amidst the cold and damp.

Crabbe, Goyle and a little ball of fur that bounced around on her shoulders was all that kept her going.

She had woken up sometime one night, cold and shivering, tear tracks stiff on her face, having slept again in the astronomy tower. Next to her hand, a note, poorly scrawled and definitely not in Dumbledore’s handwriting despite its contents saying otherwise. 

A gift for you.

-Dumbledore

Before she could question what it was, she felt something nuzzle her cheek as little soft squeals of delight nearly scared her out of her mind. It took all her willpower to not scream out loud, given it was still dark out. Eyes wide, with her heart practically escaping from her throat,  she slowly looked to the left, where a subtle weight rested on her shoulder.

There, she was greeted by a tiny ball of fluffy white and grey. In the middle of that fur was a face that had two tiny eyes, as well as four little stubby protrusions that she could barely make out underneath all that fur. A tiny squeak was accompanied quickly by more nuzzling to her cheek.

Strangely, she felt her fear melt away, even as she stared at this unknown creature that was sitting on her shoulder.

It looks really cute.

It let out a tiny squeak again, bouncing down to nuzzle her hand. She suddenly realized she was smiling lightly, and tried to put a frown on her face. 

I cannot. 

The soft ball of fur nuzzling her once again made her emotions go away. 

It is not cute. 

It scurried back up her sleeve, it's stout stumps that she deduced where legs were moving frantically beneath a mountain of fur. On her shoulder again, it looked at her with those adorable-

It is NOT cute. 

It nuzzled her nose, and her heart melted as tears welled up in her eyes. Before she knew it, she was holding it tightly in her arms as she sobbed, wracked noises coming out of her mouth as tears ran down her face, finally unbottling her emotions fully. She cried for the loss of her friends, for the expectations she had, for being unable to do the very thing she had told Potter just a few months back, for bringing shame to her fellow Slytherins and her father, lamenting how she alone had caused all this and now she was suffering the consequences. The little furry ball seemed to understand, nuzzling her hand and letting out comforting squeals. Occasionally, it scurried up to her shoulders or around her back and tried to rub her tears away. 

She cried even harder after that. 

Through the tears, overwhelmed with her emotions that had spilled over like a tsunami, she swore to the little fur ball between sobs to be better, to live up to her name and to be the best she could. She wouldn't pick fights anymore, she would reign in her anger, and accept the hand she had dealt to herself. 

It was a long road ahead, but she was determined to make things right and not hurt anyone else by being selfish and egoistic. 

She would do her father proud. 

Eventually, after what felt like hours, she woke to a jolt.  Sunlight streamed down from the heavens onto her face. She realized that she had dozed off again, and as she hurriedly stood, an alien fluffy sensation rubbed against her cheek. She looked at a pair of little eyes that looked back up at her, before remembering why it was there. 

“Thank you.” she said, the words still sounding weird to her, as she lifted  the little fur ball from her shoulder and put it on her palm. It was just barely bigger, fitting snugly on her hand. 

She sniffed lightly. “You're…okay. Maybe a little adorable.” A tiny squeak came from the furry white ball as it rubbed itself against her hand, eliciting a tiny giggle from her. 

“Okay, fine. You're adorable. Don't let anyone hear what I said to you.”

Putting it back on her shoulder, she stood up straight, took a deep breath and allowed the innumerable lessons at Malfoy Manor to surface again. She stood taller, chin up, spine straight, expression neutral. 

“I'll name you later, I promise.” She whispered to the Ball of für, and it squeaked as if it understood what she meant. 

A bell rang somewhere in the castle. The day had begun. 

She stepped out of the astronomy tower, walking back to the Slytherin Common Rooms at a steady pace, head held high. Somehow, she felt lighter than ever, as if a massive weight had been lifted from her chest, allowing her to breathe again. The morning rays of the sun seemed to reflect this, showering everything in a shimmering gold, casting light shadows that seemed to emit a warmth of their own. 

In the weeks that followed, the fights still happened, and were still equally as explosive when Ron was involved. She would be a fool to expect Potter and Co. to know what had happened, but having stopped actively seeking out fights with Potter, Ron or Hermione at every opportunity, with her head clearer and her thoughts no longer clouded by emotions, she started to notice moments in the storm that seemed to indicate the storm could subside. That seemed to reaffirm her oath to the fluffy furball. 

She had named it Capella. 

A Thursday, outside Arithmancy, when the corridor emptied as usual, she walked past Potter on the ground, grabbing a few quills that had scattered on the floor. He had dropped his quill case. She had bent down to pick it up initially, but elected to kick it back toward him. "Geez, Herm-"  He began, but froze as his eyes caught on the green in place of the usual red.

He slowly looked up, the words he was about to say dying in his throat. Their eyes met. Neither of them did anything for a second, simply frozen, before she noticed his eyes flick over to her shoulder. It might have been a figment of her imagination, but she thought his cold emerald green eyes seemed to soften just a bit. 

“Harry? Ron’s over here prancing like a horse. You done yet?” She could hear Hermione’s voice echo down the hall, irritated and high-pitched. He glared at her as if to say “That’s your fault”. She glared back, having simply tossed an insult earlier to Ron’s tirade and Hermione’s incessant pestering before disengaging herself with another quick and effective retort that shut both of them up.

“Uh- yeah, everything's fine. Just needed to pick them all up, coming!” She heard him shout back, hastily shoving the quills into the case and gathering it all up in his arms, sparing another look at her as he got up and backed away. This time, she could swear she wasn't imagining the hard, cold glare she usually got softened just a little. Her eyes tracked him as he walked off without another word.

A rainy Wednesday in the library, at opposite ends of the same table, both of them encountered each other yet again, this time stumbling upon the same reference shelf. After staring at each other for what felt like an eternity, they’d each went about their separate business, even ending up sitting at the same table. The library had emptied out quickly, but without the usual shouting, yelling and explosions, the rest of the library goers were treated to two hours of miraculous silence. Neither of them had insulted the other, yet neither had left despite the abnormally close proximity they now existed at. Madam Pince had watched them both with open suspicion, but even she too soon went back to her own duties. Incoming library users sometimes stared at the two with amazed and relieved glances.

Was she being soft? No, she shook her head. I’m just avoiding the fights I know I can’t win. But I know what I can win at.

Her grades climbed ever higher, if that was a possibility. Ron’s had slid into the gutter with a wand that had turned into a hazard for wizardkind. Hermione’s too had uncharacteristically lowered, spending more time insulting her than actually studying. Harry’s had taken a nosedive, but seemingly miraculously recovered to his former levels, even climbing a little.

That’s right, Potter. If I can’t win by force, I’ll win with wits. I am STILL better than you three, and I’m not going to let you forget that.

The very next day in the entrance hall, Weasley was yet again imitating her father's letter in a mincing falsetto. "Disappointment!" He moaned out loud, the Gryffindors all howling in laughter. Surprisingly, she noticed that Potter wasn’t laughing this time around, having simply nudged Hermione and slowly walked off, looking back to see if they followed. Ron had quickly excused himself, jumped down and sprinted over to catch up. 

She quietly slipped past the crowd, finding Crabbe and Goyle already waiting at the next class, giving deathly stares at Ron as he stared back unconvincingly.

“You have mistaken repetition for wit, Weasley. A common error among people with very little of either. Crabbe, Goyle. Come on. No need to associate ourselves with filth.” She stared at him, feigning disinterest, as she watched him grow red and stammer out words.

“You foul-mouth toad-faced-”

“Says the one with the rat.” She adjusted the cuff of her sleeve. “Now, if you would kindly return to your friends so that you may continue your painfully uncomedic routine of imitating my father for an audience less discerning than I, all the while acting like a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy riddled ginger hag?”

She deftly swept past him, Goyle pushing a very red and sputtering Ron aside, before taking their seats in the furthest one possible from where the trouble trio usually sat.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. She was getting better and better at not showing how those insults got under her skin, retaliating with well-placed lines that got her out of situations where she would already be openly fighting with them, and absolutely trumping over them with her grades. She had been taught that anger was a private failure, and she would not allow her behaviour to get out of control again.

The letters she got from home were still as harsh and dismissive as ever, Dracona this and Dracona that, but at least she felt like progress was being made. She made sure to read the letters, commit them to memory, then burn it in the fires of the Slytherin common room.

Her replies were similarly courteous and well-mannered, revised many times before she carefully penned it down on parchment.

Father,

I acknowledge the seriousness of my conduct and regret the embarrassment it has caused House Malfoy. I will exercise greater discretion in future. You have my word that no further incident will arise from my association with Potter.

Your obedient daughter,

Dracona Aurelia Malfoy

The days dragged on. Her nose was constantly buried in a book if she had the chance. She did her best work alone now, avoiding any contact even with her fellow Slytherins. Her grades were impossibly high, and on occasions, even Daphne, usually just a little behind her, had to sheepishly seek her out and ask for help with potions. Of course, it didn't change much. The pair still barely spoke aside from exchanging polite greetings.

On one grey evening in the empty library, she momentarily paused her reading as she glanced around. 

Alone again. 

She could feel the loneliness gnawing at the edges. She was always alone in the library, alone at the far end of the Slytherin table, where the first-years gave her a wide, superstitious berth, and save for Crabbe and Goyle, she was alone in every class, though she would argue they were more like two grizzly bears that loyally stuck by her side instead of people.

A sharp hiss of pain escaped her lips as she looked down at her hand. Oh, you stupid girl, she thought as she stared at a thin trickle of blood running down her index finger. The scar on her hand was reopening into a bloody wound again.

She really needed to stop doing it.

Her mind drifted, no longer focused on the book open in front of her. Somehow, they drifted to Harry.

I caused all of this. I should…apologize.

You are a MALFOY. A voice snapped back at her thought, sounding suspiciously like her father. Malfoys do not apologize. He said he never wanted to speak to you again, so keep it that way, or must I add being deaf to the list of your incompetencies?

No, father, she thought.

Besides, it’s one less person to perform for, she told herself unconvincingly.

That thought didn’t bring her any comfort.

Chapter 12: To know your enemy

༻⋅──━━━⊱༺ η ༻⊰━━━──⋅༺

Harry was getting tired.

Dracona had hexed Seamus's book bag to bite him after he and Ron had apparently swapped the ingredients to her potions. He’d watched, groaning internally, as the pair ran out of the dungeons, closely followed by a book bag that leapt through the air, a pair of newly formed jaws snapping menacingly. Judging by the shrieking at a volume loud enough to make him grimace, he deduced Seamus must have been caught by his bag.

Sure enough, he pushed through a growing crowd to find Seamus shaking it at arm's length while it snapped at him. Drawing his wand, he stepped forth and attempted to at least make it stop. It took effort, but Seamus finally dropped the bag with an annoyed grunt as cheers went up around them, a few even patting Harry’s back for good measure. “That Malfoy rat is some dose, aye Harry?” He said, breathlessly, his accent thicker than usual as he tried to balance all the contents of his bag in his hand.

What are we even doing? The thought popped into his head. Haven’t we gotten everything we wanted?

And indeed they had. She was alone now, utterly humiliated. He'd watched it happen from across the Great Hall and across the corridors. The Parkinson girl had stopped sitting next to her. Zabini read instead of talking. The Slytherin table had rearranged itself around her like water around a stone. Dracona herself, who had once strolled everywhere flanked by Slytherins like a royal procession, now walked everywhere by herself with her chin at her customary angle, sometimes with Crabbe and Goyle in tow when they weren’t off middling somewhere.

A stab of guilt rested in his heart. He tried pushing it away, but it always came back. Despite her cool, uninterested looks at Ron and Hermione when they found the opportunity to insult her again and again, he could tell that something had obviously gotten under her skin. Her eyes seemed to grow sadder and sadder by day, and shockingly, he realised that he understood that look.

You looked like that just a year ago. Alone, bullied everywhere you go, burdened by chores and thankless effort, sleeping in a cupboard that felt like a prison.

He shook his head. I am not sympathizing with Malfoy of all people. She throws people under the bus, is a selfish prat and lies if it means she can save her own hide while others burn.

The memory surfaced. I never want to talk to you again, he had told her. The irony almost made him laugh as he realized he’d spent three weeks doing absolutely nothing but.

The war had escalated and he was as deep in it as she was. Worse, probably. He had hexed her book bag so all her books sang when opened a few days after Ron's wand got repaired by Hermione. She'd had to sit through an entire History of Magic class while her copy of A History of Magic yodelled. He'd felt great for about an hour, before the guilt came back in full force as he saw her sitting, alone, nibbling on her food while her housemates moved their conversations down the bench away from her. 

The satisfaction had only grown less and less after that, replaced with an increasing sense of emptiness and frustration.

What am I even doing this for?

Revenge, for Ron! That was beginning to feel like a white lie.

Speaking of Ron, he was no help. Ron had a broken wand held together by Spellotape with a grudge to match it. Whenever Harry went quiet mid-rant, Ron supplied his own momentum instead of stopping. Hermione was worse, in the opposite direction. "You do realize," she had said one evening over her Charms essay, not looking up, "that you've spent more time this term thinking about Dracona Malfoy than about anything on your OWL syllabus."

"That's not- I don't-" He spluttered, unsure whether to be offended or embarrassed. “You make me sound like I’m in love with that prick!”

"It’s not just you, Harry. Ron’s had Malfoy on his lips as well, always bemoaning about being jinxed.” Ron stared incredulously at her as she continued. “I have to say though, that rumor from that Parkinson girl about you snogging Malfoy in the flying car was funny though." She giggled, and Harry groaned. “As if! I’d have my body parts stolen and sold in Knockturn Alley the next day!”

Ron chimed in. “Yeah, sounds like something she’d do! That no good, lying, pointy-nosed prick…”

He tuned it out again as he planted his face in his hands, a shrill ringing in his ears. A tiny migraine was building, and had been building for a while. He’d chalked it up to thinking too hard about methods to hex Malfoy, but lately he was beginning to think otherwise.

Then, just to complicate things, there was Dumbledore and the Astronomy tower.

He’d been summoned to the headmaster’s office one day, and Dumbledore had given him a little ball of fur. “A Puffskein!” The old wizard had said mirthfully. “Or, well, something like a Puffskein. It’s more of a…relative, I’d say. Much more emotionally in tune with its owner, and even friendlier and fluffier than you’d expect.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Sir?” He said, an air of exasperated confusion hanging around him.

“I do find that young ladies much prefer pets that are cute and fluffy. Sometimes, those pets end up helping them in more ways than they can realize.”

“...but sir, I’m not a young lady.” He replied, to which the headmaster let out a hearty chuckle. “Of course not, Harry! Though, I suppose with your, ah, infrequent excursions,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his eye, “it is my firm belief that you might find it coming in handy sooner rather than later.”

“I-”

“Don’t worry, Harry. Your secret is safe with me, for now.” He watched as the headmaster stood, slowly beginning to pace around the office as he reached a hand out to inspect some trinkets. “You know, may associate the colour white with truce, or peace. White flags, white doves. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but this little Puffskein is also white. Of course, this might all just be the ramblings of an old man who has seen far too much, but I am certain some wrongs can be righted with just the right tool.” 

Harry’s eyes met the headmaster’s, gazing at him gently over the half-moon spectacles. “Wouldn’t you say so, Harry?”

“I…think so, sir.”

A light smile grazed the corners of the wizen headmaster’s mouth. “Well then, off you go, Harry. And remember, love conquers all. Show your enemies love, just as you do to your friends. It takes great courage and trust to do so, but I have found that Gryffindors always particularly appear to be capable of such grace and dignity.”

Dumbledore’s cryptic words stayed on his mind. He was confused, or at least he wanted to be. 

The furball that he kept in his pocket would come to show its purpose just a day later.

As usual, he wandered the empty halls of the school. He’d come to accept this as a poor habit of his, but he also couldn’t deny it helped ease his mind off things. Without realizing it, he had ascended to the top of the astronomy tower.

Of course, Dracona just happened to be there.

Still, he noticed something was off about her this time. She was still, her head resting on a covered object, and her breathing came in slow huffs. Is she okay? Harry thought, creeping closer before noticing light reflecting off two shimmering trails that trailed down from the corner of her eyes.

With a jolt, he realized she’d cried herself to sleep.

He stood there for a long time.

The wind came up through the tower in gusts that pulled at his pyjama legs, pressing the cloak flat against his shins. Dracona was curled against the far wall with her knees drawn up, her head resting on a folded school robe she'd bunched into a makeshift pillow. Her hair was messy and loose, strands of it all over the place, fanning across the dark fabric and catching the moonlight in thin silver lines. One hand was tucked under her cheek, the other lay open beside her, palm up, fingers slightly curled. He could see marks on her index finger even from here. 

How’d she would herself? He thought, before mentally scowling at himself. None of your business. Besides, she probably deserved it anyways.

Her breathing came in those slow, shuddering pulls, occasionally broken by a small hiccup, her shoulders twitching lightly before settling again. The front of her robe had damp splotches, as did its sleeve and her sweater underneath. Gingerly, Harry tiptoed closer. The stone was freezing through his socks.

You look like hell, Malfoy.

The Puffskein stirred in his pocket, causing him to nearly jump with fright, barely able to suppress a shout of fright. He spun around, looking for anything that could have touched him, before remembering it existed. 

He'd almost forgotten about it. It had been sleeping against his hip for the better part of an hour, a warm lump that simply sat there with a comfortable weight. Now it wriggled, pushing against the fabric, seemingly wanting to climb out.

“Wh-okay, fine, wait!” He hissed, struggling to reach into his pocket to bring out the wriggling furball. With difficulty, he finally got it out, and gazed at it under his robes.

It sat still on his palm, barely bigger than a snitch. It was fully covered in thick, fine white fur. It reminded him of dandelion floss. In the midst of the ball, a little face that possessed two tiny dark eyes blinking up at him innocently. It let out a tiny squeak, and he hurriedly glanced up at Dracona’s still form, placing a finger to his lips as he stared at the furball.

"Shh." He whispered, cupping his other hand over it. "Quiet. I need you to be quiet."

It squeaked again, softer, and nuzzled into his thumb.

He looked at the furball, then at Dracona, before glancing down at the furball again.

This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done.

He shuffled forward on his knees, attempting to be as quiet as possible, one inch at a time, the cloak dragging behind him with a light, rough sound of fabric over stone. He continued to move, the stone scraping under his kneecaps. Three feet from her. Two now. He was close enough to see the individual lashes on her closed eyes, the faint blue bruise of exhaustion under each one. A faint smell of soap and something faintly herbal wafted into his nostrils, and he resisted the urge to sneeze. Pleasant as it was, the scent tickled his nostrils.

Attempting to find something else to focus on, his eyes landed on her lips. They were cracked and dry, he remarked to himself, as if she hadn’t had enough water.

Why do I notice that? Why do I notice any of this?

Slowly, he set the Puffskein down on the stone beside her open hand. It wobbled once, somehow finding its footing on those ridiculous stubby legs, before immediately waddling three steps across the cold flagstone. Without another moment of hesitation, it pressed itself against her fingers, its whole body fitting neatly into the curl of her palm, seemingly forgetting that Harry was even there.

A small sigh escaped her lips. Harry tensed, ready to try and flee. Fortunately, she appeared to still be sleeping, her fingers slowly closing around the furball on reflex. The Puffskein let out a tiny, contented trill as it snuggled up against her fingers.

Harry reached into his back pocket, pulling out a strip of blank parchment. But what do I write-hang on. I don’t even have an inkwell or quill…

Glancing around, he noticed one, sat atop a shelf. Hurriedly, he ran over to it, scrawling a hasty note on the parchment.

A gift for you.

He hesitated, before quickly adding something beneath.

-Dumbledore

The writing could have passed as Dumbledore’s if the headmaster was hit by gale force winds while writing it. He set it beside her hand, weighing the corner down with a chip of loose stone so the wind wouldn't take it. Slowly walking back, he paused and looked at her one more time.

She was still, the furball tucked against her fingers, her breathing even. The hiccups seemed to have stopped. Whatever the creature was doing, it seemed to be working. 

He was ready to leave, but something stopped him. Turning around, he couldn’t help but finally feel like she appeared her age for once. The thought caught him off guard, but he couldn’t help but think about it as he stared. 

During the day, with her chin up, her spine like a flagpole and her words sharp like a blade, she could pass for someone much older, albeit a little shorter than the seniors. But here, curled up on a cold floor in a dressing gown with cartoon animals on it, tear tracks drying on her face, she looked exactly like what she was.

A twelve-year-old kid who had nobody to talk to.

I know what that's like.

Her fingers twitched around the Puffskein. It squeaked lightly as she shifted, her head rolling on the makeshift pillow.

Harry's stomach dropped, frozen in place as her eyelids fluttered.

He pulled the hood up so fast the fabric snagged on his glasses, nearly yanking them off his face. Fumbling, he scrambled backward across the flagstones, shoving his glasses back on with one hand. His heel caught a raised edge and he nearly fell backwards, only just barely keeping his balance as he hauled himself upright. The copper taste of blood filled his mouth. He’d bitten his inner cheek so hard to try not to yell he had torn open a wound.

She stirred again. A groggy noise came from her as her hand lifted to her face, rubbing her eye with the heel of her palm, pressing hard enough to leave a red mark on her cheekbone. Her other hand was still curled around the furball.

He didn't dare stay to watch the rest.

He backed through the doorway, silent as he could manage, taking the spiral stairs two at a time. His socks slipped on the worn stone, nearly sending him down in a tumbling heap. He flung a hand out, barely catching himself on the wall, his palm scraping against rough brick, the skin stinging. If there were no bloody wounds on his hands after this, he’d be very lucky. Hurriedly, he moved as fast as he could, down past the landing and the fifth floor corridor, the cloak billowing around his ankles. He could hear his own breathing loud in his own ears.

Still moving as fast as he could, he did not stop until he reached the Fat Lady's portrait.

"Wattlebird," he gasped. She swung open with a grumble about the hour.

Inside, the common room was dark and warm, the fire having burned down to a low orange glow. He stood in the middle of the room, his hands on his knees, breathing hard. His heart was practically leaping out of his throat as he gasped for air, throwing the cloak aside.

What did I just do?

He straightened up, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. He could feel his hair sticking up worse as he ran a sweaty hand through it.

I gave Dracona Malfoy a pet, didn’t I?

He sat down on the couch. The cushion sagged under him as he let out a shaky breath.

She's going to find out it was me, and then she's probably gonna try and hex me so hard my teeth come out of my ears.

He pulled off his glasses and pressed his palms against his eyes.

I would probably deserve it for keeping this miserable war going.

The fire popped once in the grate, echoing in the quiet silence. He sat in the dark for a long time, staring at the embers.

Surprisingly, the hostility seemed to have ebbed the days after. 

She ran into him picking up quills once. Granted, she did kick his case, but she had kicked it towards him instead of away, and hadn’t thrown any of her usual insults as an extra. Another time, they ran into each other in the library. He’d expected the worst, but the two hours he spent there was somehow more peaceful than anything he had experienced during the year. Even Ron and Hermione had less hexes and insults thrown their way, Dracona seeming to slip past them instead of attempt to knock them down. 

He also noticed the furball 'Dumbledore' gave her seemed to be permanently fixed to her shoulder.

They ran into each other again a week later. He was leaning on a windowsill halfway through a Chocolate Frog, enjoying the silence of the third floor corridor while looking up at the cloudy sky when the door across the landing opened. To his horror, Dracona marched out of the old classroom, an armful of library books carefully balanced atop one another, clearly having ventured to the quiet corridor for the same reason.

Their eyes caught each other standing there, and Dracona immediately froze in her tracks as a flurry of emotions flashed across both their faces. The corridor was empty in both directions, the only witness being a portrait of a very old wizard who appeared to be asleep.

Her eyes narrowed. His features turned stoney. Both sides prepared for the first insult to arrive as the silence stretched on

He had plenty of things to say on the tip of his tongue. How ridiculous she looked today, how she was copying Hermione again, or the fact that her mannerisms were not saving her from the wrath of half the school.

An abrupt thought came into his head. I can’t be bothered to say any of it.

His eyes drifted to a familiar white furball perched atop her shoulder.

“I heard your books are still singing,” he said. “Nice pet.”

For the briefest moment, surprise broke through her expression. She recovered quickly, though one of the books tilted in her arms before she corrected it.

“Dumbledore gifted her to me,” she replied. “Though I confess, I have begun to suspect the old man has been overindulging in Sherbet Lemons.” Her fingers adjusted the book on top of the pile. “His penmanship has…detireorated significantly.”

She paused, before hesitantly continuing after a few moments. “Though, I suppose I ought to thank you for the singing books,” she smirked, “they harmonise rather better than the Weasley family.” 

Her words lacked the usual bite her insults possessed. Harry simply elected to stare at her.

Silence resumed between them for moments before she coughed uncomfortably. "I heard Weasley’s hex backfired on him in Charms."

"Glad to hear your ears still work. Wish they didn’t though." He muttered, and that got a smirk out of her.

“How reassuring. I would hate to disappoint you, Potter.” Her mouth curved faintly. “It would be a shame to know that I have been passing on perfectly good opportunities to insult you three.”

“Y- Watch yourself, Malfoy.” His warning carried none of the edge their previous exchanges carried.

“I am always watching myself, Potter. Someone in this castle must maintain standards.” He scoffed at her words, before backing up in alarm as she strided over. “You better sta-”

“Relax, Potter, unless you are less confident without your strays backing you up.” She shot him a smirk, planting her books down on the windowsill before staring incredulously at Harry, now some distance away. “You do realize I have no intention of hexing you here, right? That effort would be wasted on you.”

“Gee, thanks, Malfoy. Very comforting to know when you’ve been hounding our arses just a week ago.” That got an exasperated sigh from her. “And whose fault is that exactly?”

“Yours.” He stated plainly, and she glared at him.

“Not my fault you three have a remarkable talent for behaving like goblins reclaiming stolen property. I must admit, however, that appears to be an admirably concise assessment.” She folded her hands over the nearest book. “Entirely wrong, naturally.”

An uneasy silence settled between them as they sat there, Draco opening a book while Harry finished off the chocolate frog. The old wizard in the portrait snored gently.

"Weasley has your letter memorized, you know," Harry said eventually. "He does it at dinner. The 'disappointment' bit especially." He picked at the Frog wrapper. "It’s almost like listening to him read a poem about your dad being disappointed at you."

"I am perfectly aware. I, as a matter of fact, am able to hear him. Unless you’ve had a reduction in intelligence, I do recall you not sounding all too pleased that my ears work." Her voice stayed level, but his eyes noticed her fingers dig it into the spine of the top book, rubbing it back and forth, wearing a pale groove in the leather. "I've considered the Bat-Bogey Hex at range. Granger would be a problem though, I’m not too sure if she'd take the hit for him or not."

"Hermione would absolutely body-block a hex for Ron. That’s just her trying to be protective." He shrugged.

"I've noticed. It's her one redeeming quality." She sighed, flipping a page a little too loudly.

"Don't let her hear you say that, she'd take it as a compliment and revise for you." He replied cheekily. He noticed the corners of her mouth point ever so slightly upwards as the silence resumed, occasionally broken by a flip of a page or a shuffle of fabric.

“You know, the weather is-” He began, before Dracona cut her off.

“It’s dreadful, I know.” She snapped her book shut, rolling her eyes. “You are remarkably poor at beginning conversations.” 

"I, uh-" He coughed out, feeling his ears turn hot. Quickly excusing himself with clearing his throat, he resumed. "The singing books were a bit, you know. Out of line. It also…"

He trailed off, unsure of what to say. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“...it may have caused a bit of a scene.” He finished, annoyed how Dracona had read him like a book.

“That does sound awfully like an apology.”

“It isn’t.” He protested

“Obviously.” She rolled her eyes as she spoke.

“I didn’t mean for them to cause that much trouble.” He replied sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck as he shot a nervous glance at her.

“No, I imagine you meant for them to cause precisely enough trouble to amuse yourself.”

Harry opened his mouth, then closed it.

Dracona smirked. “A devastating defence indeed. You must've thought the fizzing pop hex hilarious, didn't you, Potter?" She stared at him expectantly.

"I didn't cast that!" He protested, before quietly adding, “at least it wasn't what I intended to.”

"Must've been a very funny accident then, seeing how your pals kept blowing raspberries at me for days!" she said, glaring daggers at him, before letting out a long sigh. He noticed a stray strand of hair being blown away from her lips. "This is exhausting, Potter."

"What is?" He feigned confusion, and she scoffed.

"This.” she gestured wildly. “The...whatever you unleashed between us. I have a Potions essay, a star chart overdue, and a reputation to rebuild, and on top of that I'm spending all my waking hours composing insults about your hair."

"It's very nice hair!" He retorted, ears pink.

"Your hair is an insult to any hairdresser alive. It-" 

"See, you're good at this! bloody shame you're on the wrong side of it-" He began, shoving off the windowsill as he rounded on her, but he was shut down by her slamming a book down onto the windowsill with such force he nearly leapt backwards.

"I am on the correct side of it, you're the one who-" She was off the windowsill now too, bearing down on him as she hissed.

“No, you-”

“Okay, enough!” Dracona snapped, and he looked at her with narrowed eyes. They stared at each other for what felt like ages, before Harry sighed and relented.

“Yeah, it’s enough.”

The Puffskein shifted on her shoulder, its little body settling against the fold of her robe. Dracona reached up and steadied it with one finger.

“It was humiliating.” She said finally. Her tone remained steady, though she no longer sounded amused. “All of it.”

Silence blanketed the corridor momentarily, before she took a deep breath and spoke. 

“I have spent the past month being reminded that I am a disappointment to my family, a liability to my house, and an embarrassment to my friends. I hardly required assistance from Gryffindor.”

Harry swallowed. “To be fair, Ron shouldn’t have read the letter.”

“No. That was my private affairs."

“And I shouldn’t have joined in.”

Dracona turned her head, staring directly into his eyes. “You sound dangerously sincere.” 

“I’n not apologizing, if that’s what you mean.” He replied, but he couldn’t help but let the apologetic tone slip out. “You also did…things.”

"If you’re expecting something similar from me as well, you will be sorely disappointed." Dracona huffed, picking the book up as she resumed reading. “My words have a better purpose than to be used on you.”

“Malfoy, I’m tired of this constant back and forth-” He began, before she looked up from her book and cut him off.

“Then we have reached our first point of agreement, it appears.” She replied curtly. Neither of them moved for a few moments, Dracona returning to her book while he glanced around uncomfortably.

Unable to stand the silence, Harry gestured toward the Puffskein. “What’s its name?”

Dracona looked down at the creature, and he swore her features softened a bit as she looked at it. “She’s named Capella.”

“That’s a strange name.”

“What did you expect? Trevor? I am certainly not naming this…creature based on muggle standards, no matter how insufferable it is.”

He gave her a funny look. She returned it with a glare, and for a moment Harry was afraid that she would hurl another insult at him. Fortunately, she glanced toward the staircase instead.

“I have decided I will not hex you today.” She said, closing her book for good as she began gathering the stack in her arms again.

“Bloody generous.” He muttered.

“Do try to appreciate the occasion.” She replied dryly, lifting the armful of books carefully. Before leaving, she paused next to him.

“I suggest you keep Weasley away from my correspondence. I’d hate for any unfortunate incidents to befall him.”

Harry nodded, his tone serious. “I’ll try.”

She sent him a firm glare. “Succeed, or Weasley experiences my wrath. There is no ‘try’.”

He had to actively suppress his smile at the serious look she had on her face. “All right.”

Dracona stared at him for another moment, then inclined her head with the faintest trace of formality. “Good evening, Potter.”

“Good evening, Malfoy.”