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Chapter Text

Anaphora- Repetitive sentence openings occur often to build rhythm, mood, or emotional emphasis.

In Gryffindor's wagon quarters, it was louder yet no heavier than the rest of the enclosures, the compartment bore the typical, almost threadbare comfort of the Hogwarts Express: cushioned seats coated ina faint maroon fabric with the rare thread pulled loose from years of restless anxious students' hands. The narrow corridor just beyond their door was full of people, the glass rattling softly as the train curved along its route, a dim and flickering lantern above the compartment door casting uneven light mixing with the soft scent of musty velvet mingled with the cool draft from a slight crack in the window. The rain streaked against the glass in rigorous patterns, collecting in rivulets that carved temporary paths before vanishing into the blur. Somewhere distant, a trolley witch's cart squeaked over the metal tracks, its distant clatter swallowed by the steady thrumming of the train beneath them. Inside the compartment, voices rose and fell in waves—comfortable, familiar, threaded with the kind of restlessness that came with returning to Hogwarts after a long summer. 

Above them, the overhead racks held a few stray belongings—suitcase tucked neatly to the side, satchel near fall and rucksack haphazardly flopped open with quills poking out dangerously. 

Harry sat sprawled near the window, his cheek pressed slight against the chill glass of the window, fogged slightly from the warmth of his face, observing the  stark contrast to the pounding rain that blurred the hills and trees outside into soft watercolour smears as a gauche stillness had settled, stretching for at least an hour, punctuated only by the alien rattle of the train.

Hermione seated across from Harry had her fingers wriggling the worn rims of a book that lay open in her lap, regarding him with drowsy sights, while she periodically rolled her eyes on each word. 

Despite its ordinary spine and pages loaded with noteworthy yet vapid interjections, she couldn't crystallise the reflection of her thoughts making them cease to ponder —her mind undoubtedly was elsewhere, seized in a disquiet of reflections that swirled around her like the downpour on their externals. 

It was clear she wasn't truly interested in the text about the provincial variance in cauldron base viscosity, by Thomas Slinkhard, as her brain favored to just skim over the words, and bypass reading, going back and forth for the third time the same paragraph, with the same illustrations that show the discrepancy between the two discord in cauldron base thickness, with Northern cauldrons, mainly those from the Highlands, tend to have viscous bases to adapt primarily local metallurgical practice, magical density and, rune-infused brewing over open flame. 

That in contrast with the way Mediterranean cultures condone thinner bases to allow for faster which allows heating and brew volatility control, primarily ithis discrepancy has led to numerous cross-border debates about simmering consistency, magical infusion rates, and the legitimacy of "quick-steep" potioneering.

She dog-eared the page and denoted the spot with a fast flick of her finger, casting a subtle, wandless spell.

"You've barely said anything since we left King's Cross."

His voice was gentle yet unmistakably firm, cutting through the stillness that enveloped them.

Harry's gaze remained fixed on the drops racing down the glass. 

"Just tired Harry." 

She muttered, the utterances barely a whisper, as if speaking any louder would shatter the delicate fence he had built around himself, putting the book down. 

He didn't respond after her retort. She perceived that there was more beneath the quiet—she could feel the storm swirling within him. Bitterness and irritation knotted with disarray, like grief gnawed his heart, and shame and guilt covered over him like a hefty mantle of snow. Accountability over Cedric's loss, the mess at the Ministry, Sirius's haunting absence, and even the fraught relationship with the Dursleys. 

Nonetheless, Hermione kept an instinctive insight of her friends, often figuring out more about their drudgeries than they permitted themselves to confide. And so, with a feeble smile that simulated her serenity, she reached across the small table coffee table, to hold his hand in her own, her grasp steady and reassuring. Sealing her gaze onto his, she sought to convey the warmth and enable she hoped to provide, silently enabling him to stake the responsibility he so frequently dragged alone and never share it. 

"It's going to be alright Harry. I promise."

He snatched his hand back, and with a fatigued utterance, he sat deeper in the seat, hiding his visage with his hands for a moment before eyeing his confidante.

"Do you ever feel like...even when it's silent, it's never really harmony? Like you're just lingering for the next bad thing to happen?"

His voice was firm, his green eyes darkening.

Hermione's throat tightened. Her hand hovered for a moment, then settled gently sat back on his arm. Her answer came softer than a whisper.

"All the time."

There was a pause as the train shuddered gently on its tracks. The rhythmic rocking seemed to carry the weight of unspoken thoughts and unfulfilled promises. Somewhere down the corridor, a boisterous laugh echoed, an all-too-familiar sound that served as a poignant reminder of the carefree moments that had once defined their youthful days—moments that felt tantalizingly distant for some of them now.

Hermione leaned forward slightly, her keen eyes searching Harry's face for reassurance. 

Harry managed a small, grim smile in response, a bittersweet acknowledgment of her concern. He appreciated the attempt to bridge the chasm that had developed between them all, but the idea of being "together" felt more like a fleeting dream. The shadows of the Order loomed large over them, always watching, always waiting. Secrets lay hidden even from him, creating an invisible wall that was difficult to scale.

Just then, Ron barreled into their compartment, a broad grin plastered across his face. He held a handful of brightly wrapped sweets—chocolate frogs, colorful sugar quills, a crumpled packet of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, and lollipops—that seemed to radiate an innocent joy.

"But that doesn't dismiss our priority. We'll be ready. All of us. Together."

She declared, her enthusiasm infectious despite the gravity of the situation.

Harry nodded again, though his heart felt heavy. It wasn't reassurance he sought for Hermione's sake; rather, he yearned to believe in her words. Nevertheless, deep down, a nagging doubt persisted, gossiping with the rest of the voices in his head that it was a lie.

His scar ached, a sense of deep sorrow clouding over him. 

"What are you two on about? "

Ron chimed in curiously, his idiom shifting from elation to confusion.

"Nothing Ronald." 

Hermione replied dismissively glaring him with the "I'll tell you later" look, not bothering to wait for his reaction. In one swift motion, she reached out and snatched a sugar quill and chocolate frog from his hand, as she savoured the sugary treat, giving Harry the toffee bar chocolate, as if she could wish to erase  his sorrow. 

__

The train released a long, echoing hiss of steam as it glided into Hogsmeade Station, enveloping the platform in a swirling cloud of silvery mist. A lively stream of students erupted from the carriages in small, animated cliques, their laughter intertwining with the crisp bite of the evening air. Flickering "lumous" casted a warm, golden glow, swaying gently in the evening breeze, illuminating faces filled with excitement and anticipation.

Draco footed down onto the platform, his stance perfectly squared, the utterance on his face a sealed guise. The unequivocal badge of arrogance he once sported with pride was muffled, substituted by a more placid demeanour that alluded to the secret poundage he hauled over. Tension curved tightly within his spine, and his grey eyes glistened with shadows of calculation, betraying a mind racing through entwined in unspoken introspections. He had altered, though few would dare to comment on the nature or reason behind his gloomy visage. 

As he thrust through the throngs of trainees and students, he retained a smooth, deliberate distance, flanked by the familiar faces of Slytherins who continued to orbit around him like he is the Saturn and they were his rings. Yet, his focus was elsewhere—drawn to darker corners of his mind, a place that felt alive with an unsettling energy. Something ominous loomed on the horizon, an instinctual dread coursing through him, echoing in the depths of his magic.

Just then, a loud thud broke the din from the Gryffindor side of the platform, pulling Draco's attention. He turned to see Neville Longbottom, a look of shock plastered across his face as he helped one of the Weasel back to his feet, clearly on the receiving end of an unconsenting wreck. 

Despite the chaos, Draco moved as if he were untouched by the ruckus around him, navigating his way with an almost ethereal elegance. Most pupils instinctively footed aside as he enacted, a usual ritual that afforded him the space he had come to expect, though his mind remained locked in a storm of deeper thoughts.

___

The Great Hall sparkled under the glow of countless candles, their flickering light illuminating a ceiling enchanted to mimic the heavy, tumultuous clouds of the stormy sky beyond. A profound hush enveloped the room as the Sorting Hat was solemnly carried in, placed with great care upon the stool at the front, drawing the attention of every student present.

Draco sat among the Slytherins, still and observant, his posture relaxed yet poised his elbow and head resting on Theo, his face was a mask of composure, as he sensed the smell of weed and cologne, incomprehensible and devoid of the earlier mirth, from all these years, like a long lost ritual. 

No smug grins tarnished his features during the ceremony. No derisive glances were cast toward the Muggle-borns, and not a single nudge was given to Blaise as someone was sorted into Hufflepuff.

He simply watched.

Across the grand expanse of the Hall, Hermione occupied her usual seat at the Gryffindor table, maintaining a similarly straight-backed stance. Her eyes, sharp and intent, were fixed upon the cluster of new students, her expression far too solemn for the celebratory nature of the occasion. She leaned in to murmur something to Harry, then lapsed back into an intense silence.

As the Sorting Hat began its melodic theme, something shifted in the air—a palpable tension. This time, the Hat didn't descant of house virtues or dignified traits; rather, its lyrics dripped with a dreadful undertone.

It offered a caution sign.

The words were laden with shadow—hinting at division, underlying dangers, and the strength they would need, not only in loyalty but also entwined with courage, cunning, and unity. The final word hung in the air, causing several students to shift uncomfortably in their seats.

Draco remained unperturbed. He merely cast a brief glance at Dumbledore, seated at the head table.

The Headmaster's expression was tranquil. 

Too tranquil.

When the Hat's psalm finally came to an end and the Sorting commenced, the Great Hall buzzed with subdued applause and quiet whispers. Names were called, and children were chosen, yet even the first-years seemed to sense an unsettling undercurrent. It was as if they had stepped into a story already in motion—a narrative they struggled to comprehend.

Draco caught Snape looking toward the Gryffindor table once—just once—as her eyes flicked to him and then away.

When she turned, her gaze swept the Hall and brushed his. 

It didn't linger.

But neither of them looked with the long hatred as they used to.

They were home again, yet it felt like nothing had returned to the warmth and familiarity they once knew. Instead, an uneasy weight hung in the air, thick with memory and loss.

Chapter Text

Quandary - A state of confusion or uncertainty about what to do in a tough situation.

The antemeridian ray of glimmer shimmered and flowed through the spellbound awning of the Great Hall eliciting the enclosure into a deceptively buoyant atmosphere. A bright blue sky lengthened endlessly above, fleck with the occasional lazy yet drifting cloud. Sunbeams glinted off lustrous stained glass with every of the house flags flowing through the chamber in glare and potent hues, bouncing along the surfaces of the golden and porcelain plates amassed high with toast, eggs, roasted tomatoes, and pudgy sausages that gave off mouth-watering steam. 

Nevertheless, notwithstanding, the ordinary bustle of breakfast was whizzed with something taut and distasteful, similar to the scarce pulse of an approaching gale.

Fourth the Hufflepuff table, the golden-yellow heraldic flag above appeared to heckle the rancid looks beneath them. Susan Bones stabbed a sausage with unnecessary pressure, her fork clattering sharply against her plate. Her round countenance, usually lovely, was abraded in thought, her voice quieted down but urgent.

"I'm just saying," Susan mumbled, her green eyes flickering crosswise like she feared someone might eavesdrop, "no one saw You-Know-Who, did they? Just Potter, standing there... with Diggory's body."

Across from her, Ernie Macmillan bristled putting his buttered toast down, his shoulders squaring as his hand paused over the butter dish, fair locks falling momentarily into his eyes as in a stir movement, he impatiently shoved them back quick and with vex. "That's some dragon dung, Susan," he snarled, keeping his voice restrained yet firm. "Dumbledore believes Harry. And Cedric—Cedric was slaughtered. Everyone knows it."

Susan scowled, gripping her fork tighter. "But think about it, Ernie. No witnesses. Only Potter's word. And now The Prophet—"

"Oh shut it, Susan," Hannah Abbott cut in sharply, her normally delicate tone congeal as she jammed a knife into a crumpet, jam smudging unevenly. "Just because Skeeter prints something doesn't mean it's true."

Hannah's lips pressed into a thin line, but even she glanced around warily, almost remorseful, before Susan started again. "Still... they never found You-Know-Who. Just... Harry... babbling about wands and ghosts and—" she swallowed, her utensil slowing, "—and Cedric lying there... dead."

Ernie's face colored, ire fighting with agita.

A few seats over, at the Ravenclaw table, Anthony Goldstein bent forward, his oatmeal forgotten. He leaned his head toward Padma Patil, his dark eyes gleaming with something between nosiness and nervousness. "Told you," he whispered. "People are chattering. My Abba shipped me the Prophet—said Potter's erratic, said he was... unstable."

Padma, impeccably tidy even this early, didn't perk up, slicing her omelette into precise rectangles as she spoke. "The Prophet would publish Dumbledore has a goblin mistress if it marketed papers," she said dryly, popping a piece into her mouth. Regardless of her statement her brows yanked together ever so narrowly.

Anthony's grin stammered. "We don't know what it's from the inside, Padma. People want to believe it's over. Potter makes it sound like it's just commencing again."

"Doesn't mean I'm mistaken, Goldstein," Padma countered, "The Prophet would print anything just to

make money. 

Further down, Seamus Finnigan jabbed his kipper listlessly, the flesh flaking apart under his fork as he spoke to Ginny "Mam says another war will start."

Ginny looked up from her half-finished pudding, brown eyes narrowing slightly. "Your mam believes everything's she hears," she retorted, though there was no humor in her voice, only exhaustion. "Harry's not a murderer. He's simply Harry. And if you have a problem with that..."

Seamus shrugged, yet didn't argue.

Conversations bubbled, but under it all was a low murmur of tension, the feeling of something cracked and tilting. Forks scratched against plates, goblets clinked, and chairs scraped against stone. Heretofore everyone spoke just a little quieter, glanced just a little longer at the empty spot where golden trio usually sat.

Hereafter, like a sharp breath sucked out of the room, like a physical thing a figure appeared alike from smoke and mirrors. 

She was simply... there.

No footsteps had echoed, no porticoes had unlocked, no stools had veered. One juncture, there had stood a stretch of vacant wooden bench at the staff table, and the next—she sat at its centre like she had always belonged.

Her cardigan was a garish, stifling wraith that seemed to glow beneath the enchanted sky. Thick fabric clung awkwardly to her squat frame, decorated with knitted bows so perfectly symmetrical they appeared almost menacing. A matching velvet ribbon perched stiffly in her over-curled hair, unmoving, defying gravity.

Her tea cup hovered daintily in her stubby fingers—delicate porcelain adorned with prancing kittens, their painted paws frozen in perpetual playfulness. She took a long, slurping sip, pinky crooked, the sound slicing through the heavy quiet like nails on a blackboard.

Her smile was fixed and sickly sweet, lips stretched too wide, too toothy—an expression of false warmth that never reached her cold, calculating eyes. Beady, watery, and too sharp, they scanned the hall without affection, settling briefly on students with the practiced calculation of someone inspecting livestock before purchase.

Even at the staff table, the reaction was unmistakable. Professor McGonagall's spine seemed to stiffen further, her thin lips nearly disappearing altogether. Flitwick fidgeted with his napkin, his usual cheer replaced by wary glances. Professors Sinistra and Vector exchanged subtle, worried looks. The massive chair at the end—Hagrid's seat—stood empty, shadowed and forlorn.

The silence stretched on, thick as treacle. It wasn't like the silences they were used to—this was heavier, choking, the kind that settled in your bones and made every clatter of cutlery feel like a shouted accusation.

A first-year at the Ravenclaw table dropped her spoon, and the clatter seemed to ricochet across the hall like a gunshot. She flinched.

At the Gryffindor table, Neville Longbottom's hands trembled slightly as he set his water down, his throat working around a nervous swallow. He leaned towards Ginny, his voice no more than a hoarse whisper, "Who... who is that?"

Ginny didn't blink. Her gaze was locked on the woman, lips pressed in a tight line, voice barely audible. "That's...one of the women who was at Harry's hearing. My dad told me she is...was...Senior Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic."

Neville blinked rapidly, panic flickering across his features. "When...What is she doing here?"

Ginny didn't respond.

Because no one had witnessed her arrive.

No footsteps. 

No doors creaking. Just... there.

And, suddenly, everyone lost their appetite. 

____

The corridors outside the Great Hall were crammed with the routine sound of trudging footsteps, hitherto today there stood an eerie marker to the rhythm that set it apart from the rest of the days. The regular hum of chatter, a comforting backdrop of mingled voices, had diminished to a hushed murmur, the cachinnation—the kind that sparkled through the air—absent entirely. Somehow, students advanced with an odd sense of haste, lobbing cautious glances over their shoulders as if they could feel unseen eyes tracking their every step. The atmosphere was stagnant with apprehension, loaded with an undercurrent of uncertainty that made the air feel heavier, as if all were well cognizant that something momentous threatened just beyond the threshold.

By the juncture Harry reached the Transfiguration class, he already felt the bones of routine beginning to deform under imperceptible hands. The classroom looked the same, smelled the same—chalk dust and waxed wood —but the subcurrent was wrong, like a river who altered it course. 

Scrawled onto a advert board, that hadn't been there the previous week, was the new ordinances, fiddled with rows of bureaucratic jargon. 

"M.A.G.I. (Ministry Approved Guidelines Instruction) – Section 3B."

Hermione skimmed it, her eyes wide and tense as she read the lush language, brows knitting. "'Approved Topics Only,'" she read under her breath, "'Hexwork to be monitored and pre-approved. Defensive spells are limited to Ministry-listed charms. Dissuaded: Disruptive oration or subversive demeanour.'" Her jaw clenched. 

"What the fuck does that mean? Usage of unapproved sorcery during the circuit will result in academic assessment, wand seizure, and/or expulsion,'" she parroted, her voice flattening with each syllable. Her eyes flicked to the Ministry's insignia stamped underneath, the ink still fresh, its serpentine ribbon of hegemony mocking her from the panel.

Ron hovered behind her, peering over Hermione's shoulder, his frown deepening, before he took both to settle down. "Sounds like they're trying to muzzle the courses."

"Wands out," McGonagall announced with a sharp tone no bluntness in her voice. "Today, we review cross-species switching spells. Ministry guidelines or not, you'll need proper Transfiguration technique if you plan on passing your O.W.L.," but there was something there—a flicker of opposition tucked beneath every syllable.

Students exchanged quick glances. 

The new statute had obviously arrived, she thought, but she wasn't planning to teach them like novices.

Hermione's lips twitched, the faintest glimmer of mutiny blooming in her chest. She liked that. She liked knowing that for all the creeping bureaucracy, McGonagall still ran her classroom however she wanted. 

___

The heavy oak door creaked open mid-lecture, drawing every pair of eyes in the room toward the entrance. 

Malfoy arrived late.

The soft tap of polished dragon-hide boots echoed against the stone floors as he stepped inside. His robes hung perfectly from his shoulders, impeccably pressed and freshly laundered, the silver-green Slytherin crest glinting proudly against the black fabric. His white shirt underneath was pristine, the stiff collar folded with mechanical precision, a charcoal-gray vest tailored snugly over his chest, emphasizing his tall, lean frame. His emerald-and-silver tie was knotted perfectly at the base of his throat, as if tied by a tailor's hand rather than his own.

But it was his face that stood out most: clean, and flawless, almost uncomfortable like porcelain set in tension. 

However, his hair—Merlin, his hair—was a mess. Not the usual slicked-back, plastered egotism they'd grown used to, but something tousled and windswept, as though he'd walked through a storm and liked how it looked afterward. Platinum strands curled against his temple, soft waves catching the glow from the hovering candles. 

McGonagall's chalk faltered for a fraction of a second—barely perceptible, but Hermione caught it. The Transfiguration professor's harsh gaze followed Draco across the room, one eyebrow rising with suspicion rather than surprise. Her lips pursed into a disapproving line as her fingers twirled the wand between them before she gestured curtly toward the back.

"Mr. Malfoy," she said, voice so crisp it could snap ice, "How gracious of you to join us."

Draco simply dipped his head in an elegant, measured nod—neither sorry nor impolite. He moved through the rows of desks, his boots now soundless, robes whispering softly behind him, dropping into the empty seat behind Hermione, the sound of scraping against the wood intentional, making her turn her eyes instinctively, before skimming back at the teacher. 

McGonagall gave them one final piercing look, her lips pursing thinly before turning back to the board. Her wand moved in sharp, clean strokes, chalk dancing in midair to sketch diagrams of advanced transfiguration principles resuming at her lecture. 

____

The classroom air was hefty, the sort that adheres to your skin, percolating into your clothes until you felt like you'd been interred in gravel. The lights twinkled along the damp walls, soft light scarcely slicing through the gloom. Professor Binns' voice wafted aloft uniform and whir, like a ceiling leak, dribbling futile input about Goblin accords and vague insurgencies onto the half-asleep students below.

Harry sat hunkered over his desk, shoulders curled inward like a curl of wires stretched too thin, his chin dug into his palm, fingers pressed hard into his cheekbone until it ached, certain there'd be a red mark when he finally moved.

Not that it mattered. 

His eyes weren't even pretending to follow the transparent figure at the front of the room. They were locked on his desk, a splintered patch of wood worn smooth by decades of restless fingers and hidden frustration.

His thumb traced the rough gouges someone had carved deep into the grain. "Fuck Off, Peeves." The letters were irate, nicked, and some strings were choppy like the carver's hand had huddled too hard. 

Harry could almost imagine them sitting there, years ago, just as angry, just as trapped.

His other hand wouldn't stop moving, tapping against the desk in a restless rhythm, fingers drumming a quiet war beat while his knee bounced beneath the surface. He could feel the muscle twitching and tightening, the slight tremor running up his thigh like a physical itch he couldn't scratch. The hum of the classroom wrapped around him like fog, muting everything but the loud thud of his own pulse in his ears.

His jaw flexed, teeth grinding together behind tightly pressed lips, his scar itching intolerably again, wishing to scuff it until blood. Not that would be a first. 

Everything was wrong.

He could taste it, the way someone could smell the air before a storm rolled in—charged and sour, with something rotten underneath. Yet with more consciousness and consistentence. 

Voldemort was alive,  walking free in the world, and the Ministry named him a fibber yet with their eyes still on him, like they could peel him apart under scrutiny. Cedric was vacated, covered up in cold earth. His gore and his cries, still uttering and phantoming Harry's dreams so vividly he woke up choking on air some nights. The Daily Prophet spat his name like venom every week, Fudge's lackeys prowled the school with their sickly-sweet smiles and steel-cold eyes. Harry could feel them all breathing down his neck, waiting for him to snap, to make a mistake they could pounce on. The teachers pretended not to notice, but Harry saw it—Dumbledore's distant stare, the way McGonagall's mouth pinched when she passed him, how the other professors looked at him like they were reading a story written across his face, and even Hermione, bless her stubborn heart, looked at him now with something fragile carved around the edges of her resolve. 

And here he was, learning about the fiscal policies of dead goblins, trapped inside walls that suddenly felt like they were suffocating him. 

His fingernails scratched at the wood, tracing invisible scars left behind by ghosts of other students who had sat here, forgotten.

The heat in his chest bubbled up until it made his throat feel too narrow. His skin itched with frustration, with the unfairness of it all.

Whispers curled through the halls like smoke, conversations cut short the second he appeared.

Harry's fingers clenched tighter.

He wasn't sure if it was anger or fear making his chest feel like it was cracking apart from the inside.

"Mr. Potter," Binns' voice wheezed from the front of the room, flat and unaffected. "Perhaps you'd care to enlighten us on the long-term economic consequences of the 1612 Goblin Rebellion on wizarding banking policies?"

Harry flickered, slow and heavy, dragging his gaze up, the muscles in his neck feeling like it was made of lead and with his jaw ached from clenching too hard. His throat was dry. Something boiled up from his stomach—acid and frustration—and his words came out sharp and low. 

"Pretty sure the goblins got screwed over," he said, his voice void of effort, carrying just enough bite. "Like they always do."

A few heads turned. Someone near the back snorted quietly.

Binns didn't notice. He never noticed. He floated on, unbothered, continuing his monologue as though Harry hadn't spoken at all.

Harry leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms tight over his chest like he could hold himself together by sheer force of will. His scowl pulled at his mouth, deepening the shadows under his eyes. He felt the cold creeping up his spine, felt the static hum of something broken, something festering under the polished floors of Hogwarts.

____

The antecedent course Defence Against the Dark Arts was draped in stillness, the kind that appeared to huddle against the skin in an arduous and stffle manner, that lavish, arched windows not permitting light to enter as only a muted, grey glow illuminated the class, casting long shadows that crept like tendrils across the stone floor. The ancient clock in the corner marked time with a hollow, rhythmic tick, the sound echoing like a death knell through the suffocating quiet of the classroom, dust floating lazily in the fractured noon light filtering through the lead-glass windows, illuminating the faded grandeur of the room. 

The air reeked faintly of ink, damp parchment, and something colder—something sterile and cold, like the hospital wing. 

Desks, usually set in a welcoming semi-circle to facilitate a lively symposium, stood strictly aligned in unwavering rows. At the front, a large blackboard loomed, displaying a singular phrase in elegant cursive: "D.A.D.A.: A Theoretical Approach."

Hermione took her seat withouta utterance sitting with her back straight and calculated demeanour. 

To her right, Harry sat unusually still, his jaw was tense and his big emerald eyes were flickering periodically to the hefty wooden entrance as though anticipating it to unlock with a scream instead of a grind.

Ron arrived at last, the scraping of chair legs against stone was jarring in the silence, drawing a few wary glances. He exhaled loudly, dragging a hand through his hair before opening out a chocolate frog, fingers moving with restless irritation dropping into his chair like a man convicted.

"If she tells us to 'bond through vulnerability' I'm opening that door and leaving," he mumbled with a voice rough and a half-hearted scowl on his complexion.

Hermione didn't even looked at him yet she conveyed with a tone was low, clipped, like the crack of a whip if he opened that wrapper, he'll be in detention before he  gobbled the first bite."

Then the door groaned open—slow and reluctant—as though the castle itself protested his entrance. 

Draco crossed the threshold alone with no looming shadow at his back, no sycophantic entourage trailing after him. He scanned the rows of students briefly, his gaze pausing — but not lingering — somewhere near the front. He moved like a blade unsheathed, lacerating through the stagnant air, eyes narrowed in detached assessment sitting with his back to the ancient stone wall, pose straight, diverging a quiet hostility that warned of self-imposed exile rather than submission.

At the front, the new teacher perched like a grotesque porcelain doll, her pink cardigan and matching bow stood in stark contrast to the shadowy ambience that pervaded the room. A smile pierced her lips, but it didn't quite reach her eyes, which glistened with a disturbing assertiveness. Her hands rested demurely atop a neatly stacked pile of parchment.

"Good morning, class," she rang in a high-pitched, breathy voice more fitted for engaging with toddlers than conducting fifth year students. "I am Professor Dolores Umbridge, your new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher."

"Well," she continued, her cheerful demeanour almost jarring given the mood, "it is simply lovely to be back at Hogwarts, I must say!"

"And to see such happy faces looking up at me!" she exclaimed, her smile unwavering.

However, not a single student returned her smile. Not even Parvati, who usually radiated warmth and friendliness to everyone around her. From the back of the room, Draco raised an eyebrow slightly and leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms and adopting an expression that was purposely unreadable.

Ron let out a short groan, breaking the silence with its clear expression of displeasure. 

Hermione quickly elbowed him sharply, causing his ink bottle to teeter dangerously on the edge of his desk.

"Now, I understand that in previous years," she continued, her voice dripping with condescension, "this class may have embraced a more... practical approach." Her smile never faltered, even as she delivered the unsettling news. "However, the Ministry of Magic believes that a theoretical understanding of defensive spells is more than sufficient for your education."

She stood, smoothing her cardigan, and began to pace slowly in front of the class.

"The Ministry has always assessed the schooling of juvenile wizards to be of crucial importance," she recounted, her tone now more formal, as if furnishing a rehearsed sermon. "The rare gifts with which you were born may come to nothing if not nurtured and honed by careful instruction."

Hermione's hand shot up. Umbridge ignored her.

"The ancient skills unique to the wizarding community must be passed down the generations lest we lose them forever," she continued. "The treasure trove of magical knowledge amassed by our ancestors must be guarded, replenished, and polished by those who have been called to the noble profession of teaching."

She paused, casting a glance around the room. "Every headmaster and headmistress of Hogwarts has brought something new to the weighty task of governing this historic school, and that is as it should be. For without progress, there will be stagnation and decay."

Her smile widened, revealing very pointed teeth.

"There again, progress for progress's sake must be discouraged," she said, her tone taking on a sharper edge. "For our tried and tested traditions often require no tinkering. A balance, then, between old and new, between permanence and change, between tradition and innovation."

Harry felt his attentiveness ebbing—a slow, creeping dissonance threading through his veins, like his mind was unspooling, losing focus, slipping through the cracks. His eyelids grew heavier and his scar was itching, with every monotonous word spilling from the front of the room.

Around him, the uneasy shuffle of students became more pronounced, shoulders straightening, legs shifting beneath desks, all of them drowning together beneath the weight of tedium, yet on edge, like prey sensing the silent approach of a predator just beyond the door.

"Let us move forward, then, into a new era of openness, effectiveness, and accountability," Umbridge concluded. "Intent on preserving what ought to be preserved, perfecting what needs to be perfected, and pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited."

She returned to her desk and sat down, folding her hands once more. 

As Umbridge's speech droned on, Draco's gaze inadvertently met Hermione's for a fleeting moment. Her lips pressed into a fine line, light brown eyes shadowed with coolness, defiant in the way only those who had known survival could be.

"Now, open your textbooks to Chapter One," she instructed. "We will begin with a review of defensive theory."

Hermione's hand remained raised.

"Yes, Miss Granger?" Umbridge said, her voice saccharine.

"Professor, when will we be practicing the spells?" Hermione asked.

Umbridge's smile didn't falter, commencing to chuckle. "There will be no need for practical application in this class, Miss Granger. A theoretical understanding will suffice."

When Umbridge hurled into the quotation about "theoretical understanding will suffice,"

Draco's knuckles tightened around the edge of his desk.

That revision. There was something malicious in the way the term "suffice" plunged over the chamber, like mildew prowling along the pages of obsolete books. This wasn't mere pedagogy—this was an edict, it was perverted and it was a compulsory push down their throats. 

The room was gradually filled with the soft sound of pages turning as students complied, opening the textbook, *Defensive Magical Theory* by Wilbert Slinkhard. It looked untouched, its spine still unbroken, the pages practically rigid and white as if they were just out of the printing press. 

Hermione's gaze hovered above the parchment, suspended in uncertainty. She wasn't jotting down notes. Her jaw moved as her eyes scanned Chapter One: The Principles of Defensive Strategy in a Civilized Society. It felt more like a Ministry pamphlet—polished on the surface yet devoid of genuine substance.

Ron tilted closer to her, his voice scarcely above a whisper, frustration winding through his tone. "This isn't a textbook; it's a bloody brochure," he mumbled, his light eyes gleaming with hassle.

Harry remained silently engrossed in the pages before him, his gaze rectified as if the phrases might inexplicably scramble themselves into something that holds significance. He seized his wand tightly underneath the desk, his digits wriggling with a brazen energy, feeling the weight of the wand retort back to him.

Umbridge's voice incised again through the stout stillness like a knife through butter. "Mr. Weasley, if I hear another whisper, I will presume you're not taking your education seriously, sweetheart," she said, her sugary tone dripping with false sweetness.

With excessive care, Ron leaned back in his chair, his lips pressed into a thin line, trying to contain his irritation. He cast a sidelong glance at Harry, silently communicating their shared disbelief at the absurdity of the situation.

"Let's begin," Umbridge announced, her voice artificially sweet, as her hands clasped atop her desk like a spider preparing to ensnare her prey. "Miss Patil, would you kindly read the first paragraph aloud?" 

Parvati's voice droned on, lacklustre and barely audible, missing conviction. "Defensive spells should be deemed as a final resort, reserved for only the most necessary of situations. In most cases, a calm demeanor, respectful discourse, and Ministry-approved mediation will resolve conflicts without the need for violence." 

A moment of silence hung heavily in the air, and the class collectively inhaled the absurdity of it all, their expressions a mix of disbelief and exasperation. Then, a snort erupted from the back of the room, unmistakably breaking the tension.

Neville.

Laughter bubbled up like a wave around the room, drawing in a few students who couldn't contain their amusement. Even Draco blinked in surprise, his stillness momentarily shattered by the unexpected interruption.

"Is something amusing, Mr. Longbottom?" Umbridge's head snapped up, her eyes flashing with indignation as she turned her glare toward Neville.

He paled under her piercing gaze, stammering nervously. "No, Professor. Just... a sneeze," he managed to whisper, his cheeks flushing a bright crimson.

"See me after class," she replied, her voice crisp and unyielding, a threat hidden within her utterance. "Perhaps we can uncover a more effective way to clear your sinuses." 

Hermione felt her breath catch in her throat. Her hand dropped quietly to her side, her fingers curling tightly around her quill as if it were a lifeline in the stormy sea of tension.

The class droned on, Umbridge distributing reading, discussion and marking questions as by the end of the class they received a three-foot essay on The Importance of Order in Magical Defense. Not once did a wand leave a pocket.

As the clock ticked closer to the end of the period, students were already exchanging glances. 

And just before the bell rang, Umbridge spoke again, voice syrupy.

"Oh — and I'd like to remind you all," she said, her eyes landing on Hermione, then Harry, then Draco, "any divergence from the authorized curriculum, whether by word or wand, will be met with immediate disciplinary action. Don't forget, the Ministry is watching."

She smiled wider, like she'd just made them all tea.

The bell rang.

Chairs scraped. Parchment rustled. No one spoke.

Draco stood first not moving for a moment, just staying at his desk, staring forward, turning and walking out without a word, his cloak splintering behind him.

⸻

It commenced with the hour following the dawn, when the castle dozed like a dragon with its ancient bones, its passageways became hollow echoing with the soft remembrance of the soft footsteps long since the courses finished. The Slytherin common room was encircled in shadow and flickering torched green light, where gossip slithered along the fences; snakes and riddles hinging as the stale as the velvet drapes covering the glass. The blaze crackled low in the hearth, casting a sickly, wavering glow over the stone walls, its reflection shimmering off the polished emerald stones embedded in the mantle. Heavy Latin tomes were left loose on mahogany desks as translation was scribbled in refined handwriting, old ink bleeding into the new parchment. Some sixth year sat by the far nook, where the gravel arched tall and the lake bunched against the glass toying lazily with their vices and chess piecese. To their right, Theo leaned back in his armchair, legs crossed with colloquial refinement, his tie lax and collar loose, something amber swirling in his teacu, his gaze half in gloom, but in the sharp light, his jaw caught the flicker of firelight. 

Draco sat in his usual armchair, the high-backed leather creaking beneath him as he leaned back, one leg draped lazily over the armrest, fingers absentmindedly tapping against the spine of the heavy, worn book balanced on his lap skimming across the ancient, yellowed pages of Inferno, the lines of Dante's descent through hell pulling at something restless in his chest. The voices of his housemates drifted around him, muffled by the thick stone walls and the low, murmuring undertones of the lake just beyond the glass.

Behind him, the Slytherin common room hummed its regular lullaby of voices and crackling wood, the sound deformed by the low mumble of the lake huddling against the enchanted glass windows. Someone laughed—maybe Theo, maybe Pucey. 

Draco didn't move. He just let the words echo in his skull, words that had never quite stopped echoing since some summer ago.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

Lucius had said it once. Calmly. Casually. Like it was an the most normal thing.

Draco had been young, barely more than a child, listening in the drawing room of the Manor while his father leafed through some tome far older than the Ministry itself.

"Cowards rot in limbo," Lucius had said, turning a page with the same elegance he wielded his cane. "It is better to settle on a unit, even if it condemns you, than to stand for nothing and decay in weediness, "his father had declared, "for uncertainty is cowardice, and the world devours on cowards. Whatever path you choose in life, Draco, it will always be better than no path at all. Mark me."

His jaw clenched, muscles pulsing as he gazed deeper into the blaze.

His fingers twined into fists, huddling white-knuckled against the material of his tweeds.

Regardless of his words, he reflected back at their antithesis. That same summer. Same drawing room. A gloomier sundown, conceivably, when Draco inquired with doubt, yet curious and naive presuming that the family could remain out of things, his father had scoffed lower, sharper, slicing through the smoke and gilded scenery.

"Family treachery," Lucius had cautioned, "is earmarked for the deepest, coldest ring of hell-whatever the treachery is made by gore, by name, or commitment." His pale eyes had nailed Draco in place like a dissected specimen, his voice like silk strung too tightly over steel, ready to cut. "There is no redemption from that."

Draco swallowed thickly, the weight of those two conflicting sentences crushing against his ribs. Pick a side or rot in limbo. Stay loyal or burn in betrayal. Choice is something theoretical, erudite even. Something you could read in child books and forget before dinner.

As if summoned by his rising tension, a sudden, sharp rap at the glass door behind him made him turn.

The dark, hulking shadow quivered against, the outline of a bird with an all-too-familiar wingspan. His heart gave a slight, icky lurch as he pinpointed the owl, its feathers sleek and midnight-black, the Malfoy crest gleaming in green on the heavy, ivory parchment clutched in its talons.

He stood slowly, he back of his neck prickling as he moved toward.

His housemates had descended into stillness, their nosy eyes tracking his every motion, yet he dismissed them, his focus narrowing to the letter.

With a flick of his wand, the door squeaked open, and Athene swept in, plopping the letter onto the dark table before vanishing back into the night.

His hands quivered negligibly as he reached for it, digits skimming against the familiar texture of the parchment. For a long moment, he just stared at the letter, his pulse too low yet a steady thrum in his ears.

He didn't ought to open it to comprehend what it declared. He could sense the poundage of it, the peril woven into every line of his father's quill, the expectations, the warnings, the reminders of what was at stake, nonetheless, with a hasty, fierce stir, he slipped the letter into the fire watching how the greedy flames licked the parchment, twirling the rims, the wax seal melting and running like blood down the side of the log.

A pair of green eyes watched him fingers idly drumming against the armrest. His eyes kept straying, his attention caught by the figure sitting a few feet away, staring at the fire.

There was something different about Draco. It wasn't the usual, easy temerity or the carefully curated guise of blahs. 

Since Theo came back from France, he could tell the difference. 

Draco's gaze was still locked on the flames, unblinking, his entire posture was too still, as if he were holding something back with every fiber of his being to reach for the letter and touch the fire. 

He leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking softly under his weight, and narrowed his eyes, studying his pal. There had always been an edge to Draco, a blade hidden beneath layers of privilege and pureblood tradition, but this—this was something else. Something heavier, as if the boy he had grown up with was slowly being carved away, replaced by a boisterous varmint. 

The fire crackled soft again, a log splitting, and Draco's head jerked up, his body softened as if yanked from whatever dark reverie had seized him. Without a word, he stood, his movements fluid and precise, his robes sweeping behind him like a shadow.

He watched as Draco disappeared into the darkened corridor, his silhouette a fleeting shadow against the ancient stone walls letting out a slow breath, his fingers finally stilling. There it was again, that flicker of something more, something dangerous, and it made Theo's pulse quicken.

His lips curved into the faintest hint of a smile.

He didn't know what Draco was up to, not exactly, but he had a feeling it would be something worth watching. 

And if there was one thing Theodore Nott excelled at, it was watching.

⸻

The castle wailed beneath the weight of the storm lashing against ancient stone, thumping that echoed through corridors and filtered into the lofty spires like the tap of skeletal fingers. The sky outside was a graze of storm clouds, deep violet veined with jagged forks of silver, casting fleeting, fractured light across the Great Lake.

Up in Gryffindor Tower, the common room was a dim cocoon of flickering amber. Books lay half-forgotten on reclaimned wood desks, parchment meandering at the edges from the damp creeping through the walls. A few stragglers remained—Seamus nursed a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey, his foot tapping restlessly against the wood floor, his knee bouncing like the loaded spring of a mousetrap. Padma and Parvati sat in a corner, whispers rapid and fragmented in fast Hindi, clutching each other's hands too tightly, eyes darting toward Neville every few seconds.

The air was too quiet. Too dense. The walls felt closed tonight, the portraits unusually subdued their usual bickering silenced into furtive glances and grim expressions. Only the clock ticked steadily onward with its harsh sound, tepid slicing through the stillness.

The smelled like iron and candle wax was flickering warmth of the Gryffindor common room, yet a strange stillness had settled over them. Neville. For the past hour, his usual restless energy had been smothered beneath, covered in silence. He sat slumped on the armchair by the fire, his gaze fixed on nothing in particular, but his mind roiling with sharp, painful memories.

Neville, sitting quietly beside Harry, was an image of silent dread. His face was pale, lips pressed into a thin line, and his hands gripped a thick, worn book so tightly that his knuckles shone white in the dim firelight. The weight of the evening's events pressed down on him like a suffocating fog. At last, his voice broke the silence—a low, shaky murmur barely audible over the crackling fire.

"She's serious, you know," Neville said, eyes flickering nervously toward Harry. "About the punishments... she means it."

___

She wasn't sure what had propelled her to resign from the Gryffindor Tower after curfew for the fourth night in a row. 

Perhaps it was the way the walls appeared to hum beneath her fingertips, like they were remembering things best left bypassed. Perhaps it was the suffocating silence that had lived in the common room after curfew. 

Or perhaps it was the gnawing ache of the day, the simmering tension from another of Umbridge's class, that made something quite unjust at Hogwarts this year, like a puzzle with a missing piece. Whatever it was, she hadn't been able to sort it out, and her introspections tangled in a knot she couldn't unlace. And so, she had left the warmth of her dormitory and the soft discussion of her housemates, to wander the cold, silent halls.

By the time night blended into the day, she was already  skimming over the latest Educational Decree, and Educational Curriculum Reform, followed by the dissection of student rights, the mandated subjects, and the removal of 'undesirable' teachings, the ink still a brutal black against cream paper.

Her jaw tightened as she leafed through a Ministry-issued booklet on "Standardized Magical Conduct for Students," a sanitised set of impediments, cloaked under the illusion of order and conservation. Her quill glided, fidgeting with frustration, as she scribbled frantic notes in the margins.

"Grounds for appeal — 1762 Hogwarts Statute, clause 14B. Student Assembly rights — Council Provision of 1703. I found the Potential loophole — Disciplinary efforts must be examined by at least two honest parties...I slid through the Ministry-issued Educational Reform Mandate 346-A, which summarised the Board of Governors' capacity to execute curriculum shifts without initial student consent, but I also launch Article 18, Subsection B, describing the inherent rights of Hogwarts students to refuse participation in practices deemed 'psychologically or physically harmful. Article 7.4: Student Autonomy, no external political body could exercise absolute control over individual magical education without proper consent from the Hogwarts High Council, and if it's not available, then from the headmaster—something Dumbledore had once chaired, and McGonagall now partially upheld." 

They couldn't muzzle them completely—not legally. Not if they made Dolores...

The words on the page weren't enough. 

The knowledge that once steadied her now pressed like lead against her ribs.

There were whispers of disappearances. 

Of magic gone wrong. 

Of older families falling hushed. 

A likelihood of another wizarding war, they said, though never out loud—just in murmurs passed like contraband between clenched teeth.

No, this was bigger than just rumours. 

They would need more than just a few loopholes in the magical law—they would need to fight back.

But how? 

How could they prepare for the war ahead when they were being watched so closely?

Her fingers tightened around her quill, and she began making annotations—strategies, theories possible names for them to trust for what they would need. 

Just in case. 

⸻

Her shoulders slumped before her mind could catch up, muscles slackening in a manner she hadn't permitted them to all day. Everything felt heavier than it should—her books, her robes, even the air pressing down on her chest.

She adjusted the weight of her bag on her shoulder, spine toughening out of sheer routine, on the verge of collapse. 

She blinked once, twice, like it would dispel the headache curling behind her temples. She turned the corner, outside the library, her eyes catching a wink of movement—a figure lurching out of the shadows. Her hand instinctively went in front of her for a wandless spell, yet as the figure strode into the dim light, she recognised who it was.

Malfoy.

For a brief juncture, Hermione froze, breath caught, watching him with a mixture of wariness and something else she wasn't ready to name. His face was calm, but his eyes were sharp and unreliable, glinting with impassivity.

Swallowing hard, she took a prudent step forward, her thoughts racing. What was Draco Malfoy doing out here at this hour, unattended?

Before she could speak, his voice cut through the silence—low yet precise. 

"You."

His tone was neutral, almost cold, but the word hung between them like a challenge.

"What are you doing out here?" Her voice was steady but edged with caution, sharp enough to hide the flicker of wariness she felt.

Draco didn't answer right away. Rather, his harsh eyes flicked quickly down the empty corridor, scanning the shadows as if making sure no one was listening. 

Then, with a faint exhale, his stance aplomb just a juncture—though his gape wavered razor-sharp.

"I could ask you the same thing," he said, voice low, a hint of dry amusement threading through the tension. "But I presume it's none of my business."

She didn't let her guard slide. "So, what are you doing here?"

He shifted, just slightly, his eyes darting toward the heavy oak door of the library, then back to her. "I came from the astrology tower. I was just... sending a letter. Family business. Nothing important," he said mowed and terse, as if the utterances were too rudimentary to haul the importance of what lay beneath.

But Hermione knew better. 

She could see it—feel it—in the way his jaw clenched ever so tightly, in the barely noticeable tremor in his digits.

He was lying. 

But why risk sneaking around? Why risk discovery when everything was more dangerous than ever?

"Keep an eye on her," he said, his voice low, a soft, serrated whisper that held none of his usual drawling disdain. It felt like a warning, the kind that comes with unspoken risks. "Something's not right. And I don't think you ought me to tell you that."

Before she could muster a response, before the dozens of questions crowding her mind could form into words, he turned on his heel, his footsteps echoed briefly before the silence reclaimed the hallway, leaving Hermione alone once more, with her pulse thrumming in her ears.

She felt the weight of his words settle into her bones, a quiet, nagging itch at the back of her mind. He hadn't mocked her, hadn't sneered or tossed an insult her way. It felt... different.

As she made her way back to Gryffindor Tower, her footsteps muffled by the thick, faded lining the walls, the air around her seemed to grow heftier.

The common room was unusually quiet when she stepped through the portrait hole, the crackling fire casting flickering, dancing shadows on the red-and-gold walls. The usual bustle and chatter of her housemates had dimmed, reduced to hushed whispers and the occasional rustle of parchment detrimental for that time in the night. She paused for a moment, her gaze drifting over the familiar scene.

Ron and Harry seated by the tall, leaded windows, their profiles outlined in the silvery light of the half-moon. Harry's was set, his fingers drumming absently against his knee, while Ron leaned forward, his shoulders hunched in the way they always did when something troubled him.

Hermione lingered in the shadowed corner of the common room, her gaze flicking over the crackling fire, the soft rustle of pages turning, the quiet murmur of voices. She felt the weight of her own silence, the way it curled around her like a second skin, tight and stifling, but necessary. She had mastered this—this quiet observation, this art of blending in, of being present but unnoticed. It was a skill she had perfected over years of being the one who noticed everything.

"I don't know, mate," Ron was saying to Harry near the fire, his voice a low, agitated mutter, tinged with the familiar note of suspicion that had become second nature to him. 

Harry's response was flat, his green eyes shadowed behind his glasses, his jaw tight. "I know," the words seemed to sap something from the room, pulling the warmth from the fire and replacing it with something colder, sharper. "It's like she's waiting for something to fall apart."

"She doesn't sleep," Ron continued, shaking his head, red hair catching the gold light like dying embers. "I was up last night and I saw her coming from the library. This is the fourth night in a row. She just...looks for something there."

Hermione's lips twitched, a ghost of a smile, hidden by the cascade of her hair. 

Of course they were wary. 

She'd expected that. 

She had been counting on it, in fact. They were too thoughtful, too defensive of her to disregard the slight changes in her conduct. But that was good. They must learn to be sharper, to look past the appearances, to see the patterns in the ailment. She had spent too long squabbling alongside them not to learn their strengths and shortcomings, their tacit anxieties and untapped potential.

She allowed herself a moment, just a moment, to sit in the quiet and think.

Malfoy. 

His warning in the hall had been... unexpected.

His eyes had been guarded, his voice low and urgent, the faintest flicker of something almost like worry flashing across his pale features.

Hermione's fingers absently toyed with the hem of her sleeve, the fabric worn soft from countless restless nights spent pacing the enclosure, her mind always racing, and more important always calculating. She felt the faint tremor in her fingertips, the electric pulse of anxiety. She ought to be subtle. She had learned, painfully, that rash decisions cost more than just house points and detention.

It would be foolish to react openly, to make any sudden moves that would draw attention. If Umbridge had her way, everyone would be too distracted by pettiness and minor jokes. No, Hermione was much smarter than that.

She took a slow step toward the armchair by the fire. Ron looked up as she approached, his blue eyes bright, a slight frown creasing his freckled forehead.

"Everything alright, 'Mione?" his voice tinged with concern. He always was the more perceptive of the two, his instincts sharp in a way that Harry's blunt force approach often missed.

Hermione forced herself to smile, a small, tight-lipped curve of her mouth that she knew wouldn't quite reach her eyes. "Fine," she replied, her voice steady, each syllable perfectly measured. "Just thinking."

"About Umbridge?" Harry cut in, his tone edged with a mixture of frustration and suspicion, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, every muscle in his body tense, coiled like a spring.

Hermione hesitated, her gaze flicking to the flickering flames in the hearth, the shadows dancing across the walls, casting long, twisted shapes against the stone. "A bit," she admitted, letting the words slip from her lips slowly, deliberately. 

She sat down next to them, the conversation moving in a different direction as they spoke about classes and the latest bits of gossip. But Hermione's mind was elsewhere, her thoughts already turning over the pieces of the puzzle. She would need to be patient. Careful. Umbridge had her grip on the school, yes, but it was fragile. And Hermione had learned long ago that sometimes, the key to understanding a power struggle was knowing when to wait—and when to act.

____

A handful of weeks had passed since the tense encounter with Draco in the corridor, and though Hermione had thrown herself into her studies with renewed vigor, her mind remained restless.

It was more than just the gaudy pink walls and lace doilies that had invaded their hallowed halls. It was the tightening of the curriculum, the deliberate stripping away of practical knowledge, the constant surveillance. It was the Ministry's blind insistence that Voldemort had not returned, that all was well, that the whispers of darkness were merely the fantasies of frightened children. It was, in short, a lie—a dangerous, lie that spread through the student body like a plague.

Hermione felt it every day. She saw it in the haunted expressions of the younger students as they filed silently into Defense Against the Dark Arts, their eyes wide with fear, their hands clenching their textbooks as though the dry, lifeless pages might somehow protect them from the real threats that loomed beyond the castle walls. She saw it in the way the older students whispered to one another in shadowed corridors, their voices low, conspiratorial, as if the walls themselves had become the eyes and ears of the Ministry.

Umbridge gave a horrible little titter, high-pitched and shrill. "—You will, of course, be submitting to the latest Educational Decree." She produced a roll of parchment from her hideous pink cardigan, her stubby fingers flourishing it with mock grandeur. "All members of staff must now submit their intended movements to the Ministry of Magic."

McGonagall's eyebrows arched so high they practically vanished under her hat. "Submit my movements?" she repeated, her tone thunderous in its quietness.

"Yes," Umbridge chirped, her small eyes glittering. "You are, after all, subject to the Ministry's regulations, Professor. This is all part of ensuring proper—order." Her smile stretched wide and tight, like a noose.

A muscle twitched in McGonagall's jaw, closing her eyes momentarily, her voice remaining dangerously calm. "I have been at Hogwarts for thirty-nine years, Dolores. As many years as you've been living. In that time, I have seen dozens of Ministers for Magic, a half-dozen Headmasters, and more so-called reforms than I can count. But never have I been asked to request permission to walk within my own castle."

"The Ministry has a responsibility—" Umbridge began, voice shrill and smug.

"—To meddle in what it doesn't comprehend among a place they don't live among and haven't checked in years?" McGonagall snapped, her composure finally cracking like ice under pressure. "To undermine the administration of Albus Dumbledore? To poison the minds of children with your petty red-tape despotism?"

There were gasps from the students lingering nearby, watching with wide eyes. Umbridge's cheeks flushed a violent pink, her bow trembling. "You will watch your tone, Professor," she spat, the sweet veneer falling away, revealing the bitterness beneath. "You are speaking to the Senior Undersecretary."

McGonagall took a deliberate step forward, and somehow, though she was tall and spare, she seemed to tower over Umbridge like a wrathful stormcloud. "And you, Dolores, are speaking to the Deputy Headmistress of this school. A school that was flourishing long before you slithered your way in. I am not your subordinate. I am a Professor of Transfiguration, the Head of Gryffindor House, and you will not dictate my footsteps."

Umbridge's lips curled into a nasty little smile. "We shall see how long that lasts, Minerva."

McGonagall's stare was ice. "Indeed, we shall."

Without waiting for a response, Dolores turned on her heel, her pink dress swirling behind her like a battle standard. Umbridge's toad-like glare into her back, but Minerva didn't flinch and didn't falter from her position but looked over her students. 

___

Later in the evening, as the fire crackled softly in the Gryffindor common room, Hermione sat curled in her favorite armchair, the worn leather cool against her legs as she absentmindedly twisted a loose thread in her sleeve. Her open textbook lay in her lap, its dense pages filled with the empty platitudes of Defensive Magical Theory by Wilbert Slinkhard. She stared at the words, her eyes skimming over sentences she'd already memorized, but the meaning still feeling hollow, like an echo in an empty chamber.

She sighed, letting the book fall shut with a soft thud. The crackle of the fire crammed the stillness from her mind, casting flickering shadows against the stone walls, making the golden Gryffindor banners sway as if in a phantom breeze. She could hear the distant, muffled laughter of a few first years playing Exploding Snap near the portrait hole, their innocence a painful cue of just how extemporaneous they all were for the darkness creeping into their world.

The portrait swung open with a low, grumbling creak, Harry staggereding through, his shoulders slumped beneath the weight of another arduous day of detention. He dropped into the armchair opposite her with a tired groan, his glasses slipping down his nose, his hair an even wilder mess than usual. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then let his head fall back against the chair.

"Ugh," he muttered, his voice muffled against his palms. "I don't know how much more of this I can take, Hermione. It's all just theory. Pointless, useless theory. I'm not learning anything that'll actually keep me alive if—when—Voldemort comes for me."

Hermione watched him for a moment, her own frustration simmering beneath her carefully composed expression. She set the textbook aside, leaning forward slightly, her fingers curling into the soft, worn fabric of her armchair.

"This isn't about teaching us how to defend ourselves, Harry. It's about control," she said quietly, her voice low, almost a whisper. She glanced around the room, her sharp eyes sweeping over the students scattered around the common room. No one seemed to be paying attention to them, but still, she lowered her voice further. "I have a plan."

Harry blinked, lifting his head slightly, a flicker of interest breaking through his fatigue. "A plan?" he repeated, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. "What kind of plan?"

Before Hermione could answer, Ron clambered over the back of the couch, landing beside Harry with a loud, graceless thump. He stretched his long legs out in front of him, his freckled face twisted into a grimace. "What plan?" he asked, his eyes flicking between his two best friends, his tone suspicious. "You're not going to have us writing another bloody essays, are you, 'Mione? Because I've had enough of those to last a lifetime."

Hermione shot him a withering look, but there was a spark in her eyes now, something fierce and determined, a glint that sent a slight shiver down Harry's spine. He had seen that look before, in the moments before she'd helped them uncover the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone, in the flicker of her wand as she'd saved them from a fully-grown mountain troll, and when she'd unleashed on Malfoy in their third year.

"No, Ronald," she said, her voice gaining strength, each word precise, cutting through the firelit air like a blade. "I'm talking about something real. Something practical. If the Ministry won't let us learn how to defend ourselves, then we'll do it ourselves."

She paused, letting the weight of her words settle over them, watching as the meaning of what she was suggesting sank in. Harry straightened in his chair, his eyes brightening, the lines of exhaustion around his mouth softening. Ron, for once, was speechless, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide.

"You mean... like a club?" Ron whispered, his voice tinged with awe. "A secret club where we actually learn to fight? Like... like a secret army?"

Hermione's lips curved into a small, fierce smile. "Exactly," she said, her eyes sparkling with the firelight. "But not just any club. A group that actually prepares us for what's coming. For whatever Voldemort might throw at us."

Harry ran a hand through his hair, clearly deep in thought. "You really think we can pull it off? Without getting caught?"

"We'll have to be careful," Hermione replied. "But we're not the only ones who are frustrated with Umbridge. I'm sure there are other students who feel the same way. We just have to find them, make sure they understand what this is about. If we start small and keep it quiet, no one will know."

Ron looked skeptical but intrigued. "And how are we supposed to even teach each other?"

Hermione's smile was faint, but there was a glimmer of something fierce in her eyes. "We don't have to be professionals, Ronald. We just need to know how to help each other. We'll learn together. Everyone brings something to the table."

"But who's going to lead it?" Harry asked.

Hermione hesitated, her fingers curling around the spine of the book she clutched like a lifeline. She had always been the planner, the one with the maps and charts and carefully laid paths, but this... this was different. This was revolt. It was unstable. It felt like the kind of thing they would one day read about in dusty, forbidden history books. And yet, the fire in her chest, the one that had been smoldering since Umbridge's first saccharine smile, had finally ignited.

"We'll figure that out later," she said, her voice steady despite the rapid, nervous drum of her heartbeat. "First, we need to find the right people. Those who can be trusted. Who aren't afraid to do something about this. We can't just sit around and hope someone else will step up. If we don't do this now, no one will."

Harry met her gaze, his green eyes sharp, intense. For a moment, she saw the boy who had faced down a basilisk at twelve, who had rode a Hippogriff, who had crossed with the Dark Lord himself. She needed that version of Harry. The one who never backed down.

Ron, sitting on the arm of the worn armchair beside Harry, frowned, his freckled face tight with thought. He rubbed the back of his neck, glancing toward the common room entrance, as though expecting Umbridge to burst through at any moment, her awful pink cardigan practically glowing with malevolence.

"Alright," Harry said, his voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "But where do we even get started? We don't exactly have a safe place to meet. You know she's watching us..."

Hermione straightened, the flicker of a smile ghosting across her lips. This was the part she was good at—the planning, the strategy, the quiet work of pulling pieces together. "We'll find a place," she replied, her voice firmer now. "It needs to be somewhere no one else goes, somewhere private... and it needs to be flexible. We can't afford to be found out."

Ron snorted. "Right. Because that narrows it down. Might as well just set up shop in the Forbidden Forest while we're at it."

She shot him a look, the one she reserved for when he said something particularly dense. "We'll find somewhere," she repeated, a stubborn set to her jaw. "And we'll keep it simple. Just a group of students—friends—who want to be able to protect themselves. Who want to fight back. And once we have enough people, we'll start teaching them what we know."

Ron let out a slow, measured breath, his blue eyes searching Hermione's face for any hint of doubt. Finding none, he finally nodded, a faint, reluctant grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Alright. I'm in."

Hermione felt a rush of fierce pride, something bright and unyielding swelling in her chest. This was it. The first step. She reached for her parchment, the feathered edge of her quill brushing her knuckles as she began to scribble down names, ideas, the first seeds of their secret rebellion.

____

The first notices were nothing more than parchment curling slightly at the edges, Filch's grimy fingerprints smudging the ink, crooked lines of handwriting stamped with the Ministry's black seal. They were easy to ignore. Annoying, yes, but harmless.

Then they weren't.

By the time breakfast rolled around on a dull Thursday, the new decree had been pinned up like a death sentence—half-crumpled, crooked on the board outside the Great Hall. Hermione caught it out of the corner of her eye as she reached for her third cup of tea.

Educational Decree Number Thirty-Two.

"Any physical contact between students is hereby strictly prohibited."

The words were stark, slashing through the sleepy chatter of the morning like a blade. She felt her throat tighten. Her toast went cold on her plate.

By lunch, it wasn't just words.

Two second-years—tiny, awkward boys just coming out of Charms—had their arms looped together in that absentminded way friends do, their laughter spilling out, harmless and bright. Then the corridor fell silent like someone had sucked the air out of it, and there she was.

Umbridge.

Pink cardigan stretched across her chest, smile plastered so wide it looked painful, those glassy toad eyes blinking slow and sticky. Her syrupy voice slithered across the stones: "No touching, boys. Five nights' detention."

No warning. No hesitation. Just like that.

And the castle started to fold in on itself.

By the second day, Hermione couldn't walk to the library without feeling that something was crawling under her skin. She watched Finnigan elbow Thomas in the ribs after nearly sending their cauldron into flames. The boys froze. Everyone froze. And then there it was: a flash of pink by the door, a sugar-sweet "Tsk-tsk," and another detention scribbled down before their breaths could even hit the air.

By the third day, Hermione's stomach was in knots before she even stepped out of bed. Lavender, sitting two chairs over in the library, reached out—barely a brush of fingers, just an instinctive, gentle sweep of Parvati's hair out of her eyes. Hermione didn't even have to look up. She knew what would happen. The pause. The sharp inhale. The screech of quill on parchment.

Detention.

By the end of the week, Hermione felt a strange, choking sensation pressing against her ribs. Something old and dear was dying here, and everyone was pretending not to notice.

Until it happened. And it was so small. So stupidly, painfully small.

Great Hall. Saturday morning. Tension wound so tight in the room you could feel it humming in the air. Hermione sat with a textbook open but couldn't read a word. Across the room—near the Hufflepuff table—two girls, maybe fourth-years, maybe younger, were clutching each other's hands, their heads low, lips pressed tight like they'd both been crying after exams.

She saw them flinch as the doors creaked. As if expecting to be punished for needing comfort.

And something inside Hermione finnaly snapped.

⸻

The idea to start Dumbledore's Army (DA) began from Hermione's recognition that Hogwarts wasn't a school anymore—it wasa battlefield. While she had been prudent before, the case had escalated to the verge where she realised the students had to take matters into their own hands. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of secrecy, apprehension, and quick decision-making. They ought to make sure they weren't detected, which meant functioning entirely outside the limitations of the school's laws. Hermione was used to being equipped, but even she felt the weight of what they were about to do.

They had no resources. No training space. 

They barely had any adequate spells or potions between them, much less the experience or knowledge to teach others. And the risk of getting caught by Umbridge—let alone the Ministry itself—was too real. It wasn't a simple matter of sneaking around the school. 

But they had the purpose and essence that merited autonomy.

"We need to find old, privately-owned collections," Hermione whispered, her voice sharp and urgent as she leaned in over the scattered parchment and ancient tomes that littered their corner of the common room. The firelight flickered across her determined face, casting dancing shadows in the hollows of her cheeks. "Books from the market, from professors who have left or retired...We need access to everything the Ministry doesn't want us to know about." 

Ron, his eyes slightly glazed from the hours of late-night reading, raised his hand with exaggerated slowness, the crackle of the fire the only sound in the otherwise silent room. "You do know that the more books we might find, the more we risk getting caught, right?" His tone was a blend of weary sarcasm and genuine concern, his freckled face drawn and ire.

Hermione shot him a sharp, withering look, the kind that could wither mandrakes. "You're not exactly mistaken, Ronald, but if we don't act...we might as well be learning nothing." She leaned back, rubbing her tired eyes. "We can't just wait for someone to save us. We have to be ready, and for that, we need the right knowledge."

Over the next few nights, they moved like shadows through the castle, slipping through secret passages and moving under the cover of the Invisibility Cloak. The library had become their second home, a bastion of parchment and ink-stained fingers, where the faint fragrance of aged leather and musty paper clung to them like haze. They pored over obscure texts, the flickering light of their wands casting long, shifting shadows against the towering shelves.

Harry, whose patience for dusty tomes had always been thin, often found himself blinking rapidly to keep his eyes from glazing over. He traced the looping script of old spells with a furrowed brow, the words often slipping away from his tired mind.

Ron, for his part, was a fidgeting mess, muttering under his breath as he flipped through crumbling pages. "Merlin's beard, Hermione, some of these spells sound like they'd blow our own heads off before they did anything useful," he whispered one night, his voice tight with frustration as he scanned a particularly dense chapter on defensive wards. "How are you reading this stuff?"

Hermione didn't even glance up, her eyes darting rapidly across the pages of a heavy, iron-bound tome. Her quill scratched furiously against a piece of parchment as she took notes in her neat, looping handwriting. "It's important," she whispered back, her tone clipped, as if his question were a personal affront. "If we don't understand what we're up against, how will we defend ourselves?"

Harry, slumped beside her, nodded slowly, his glasses slipping down his nose. "If we even get our hands on enough books, that is."

And that was the problem. Despite their best efforts, they didn't have enough. The library, vast as it was, held only teachers allowed—books on general spellwork, basic charms, and the history of magic. But the deeper knowledge, spells and potions that could truly save their lives, were conspicuously coded. Hermione and Ron began checking out more general texts—books on magical law, on magical theory, and even on potions that might have defensive applications—but it felt like throwing pebbles at a dragon.

As the days passed, Hermione's frustration grew. "We can't keep going like this," she muttered one night, slamming a thick tome shut, the sound echoing through the quiet library. "We need a proper plan."

But their whispers and late-night ventures had not gone unnoticed. Hogwarts had a way of breathing secrets out, and soon the whispers started—students trading rumors in hushed voices, stolen glances exchanged across the Great Hall.

One afternoon, as Hermione scribbled furiously in the margins of an old Defense Against the Dark Arts text, Lavender Brown leaned over the back of her chair, her eyes wide, with a low voice and full of doubt. "You're mad," she whispered, glancing around to ensure no one else was listening. "You want us to teach ourselves how to defend ourselves? You know Umbridge would have a fit if she knew what you were planning."

Hermione looked up, her eyes fierce, her quill pausing mid-scratch. "We have no choice," she said, each word a cold, hard blade. "We can't let her control everything. If we just sit here, we'll be sitting ducks. We have to do something."

Lavender's brow furrowed, her perfectly curled hair bouncing as she shook her head in disbelief. "But we're just students. You think we can just learn on our own? You think we can do this without getting caught?"

Hermione's eyes narrowed, her grip tightening on the quill until her knuckles turned white. "Do you have a better idea?" she shot back, her voice sharp enough to cut. "Because I don't see any other way forward."

Across the common room, Seamus Finnigan leaned in, his freckled face skeptical, his tone tinged with the same uncertainty that had gripped so many others. "I'm not sure we're ready for something like that, Hermione. I mean—how do you even plan to teach everyone? We don't have the experience or even the right books."

"We'll make do," Hermione snapped, her cheeks flushed with the heat of her own conviction. "I'm not asking anyone to become an expert overnight. But we can start small. If we learn just a little bit at a time, we'll get there. We can teach each other what we know."

Across the common room, Parvati Patel and Seamus Finnigan exchanged looks. Seamus, always quick to express his opinions, chimed in. "I'm not sure we're ready for something like that, Hermione. I mean—how do you even plan to teach everyone? We don't have the experience or even the right books."

"We'll make do," Hermione said firmly, her resolve unwavering. "We can start small. If we learn just a little bit at a time, we'll get there." 

 "Hermione. We need resources, proper teachers, and proper training. It's not like we can just make spells up." said Lavander.

Hermione stopped pacing, staring at her friends. "I know it's not ideal. We're just a bunch of kids. But we're not nothing. We've got each other. And we've got a drive to make this work." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "If we don't do this, no one will. We'll just be stuck pretending everything's fine while the world falls apart."

Ron, who had been quietly listening to the conversation, piped up, his voice a rough whisper. "Hermione's right. If we wait around and do nothing, Umbridge is going to steamroll us all. I don't fancy having my wand snapped just because I was too scared to act."

There were doubts. As Harry and Ron knew, the situation was precarious. Not just because of the lack of resources, but because of the risk. If they were caught, the consequences could be severe.

Harry exchanged a look with Ron. They didn't exactly have a better idea. And while Hermione's vision was bold—almost reckless—it was the only way forward. It wasn't about trying to become experts in every spell. It was about showing up, making a stand. It was about fighting, and above all, it was about surviving. 

⸻

The corridors of Hogwarts felt colder, darker, more stifling as the days dragged on. Shadows stretched longer, whispers grew quieter, and the castle itself seemed to shudder under the weight of the times. The world outside was falling apart, and the students within its ancient walls could feel it, even if no one said it aloud.

After weeks of whispered conversations, hurried notes passed between classes, and late-night planning, the first real meeting of Dumbledore's Army had finally come together. They had searched every hidden nook and forgotten corner of the castle, and it was Neville Longbottom, of all people, who stumbled upon the Room of Requirement.

It had been accidental, of course. Neville, fleeing from a particularly nasty group of Slytherin bullies, had ducked into a corridor he hadn't meant to find. He'd paced, desperate for a hiding place, heart thundering in his chest, his mind repeating a single thought: I need a place to hide, a place where they can't find me.

And there, where a blank stone wall had always stood, a door appeared. It creaked open, revealing a space that felt like home and sanctuary all at once—a room filled with mismatched chairs, soft, worn cushions, and towering bookshelves. The air was thick with the scent of parchment and polished wood, the warmth of a crackling fire flickering in a distant corner. It was perfect, a place where they could gather, plan, and train without fear of interruption.

Now, gathered within the walls of this hidden room, the DA had its first real chance to stand together. The nervous energy in the air crackled like static, each face reflecting a different blend of hope, fear, and determination. Seamus nervously adjusted his tie, Luna tilted her head with an almost dreamlike curiosity, Ginny and Dean Thomas stood with his arms crossed, jaw set, like they were ready to leap into battle right then and there. Even the normally quiet Susan Bones had a fierce and determined light in her eyes. 

Hermione stood at the front, the firelight casting warm, flickering shadows across her face. She clutched her notes, the parchment creased and worn from her constant, anxious handling, but her gaze was steady. This was her idea, her fight, and she knew better than anyone that there was no turning back now.

"We don't have much," she said, her voice clear, cutting through the low murmur of whispers. "But we have each other. We have knowledge, and we have determination. If we keep at it—if we commit to this, if we fight for it—we'll be able to protect ourselves. We'll be able to stand up to the people who would see us broken, cowering, afraid."

She paused, her gaze sweeping the room, meeting each pair of eyes, challenging them to rise to the occasion. "The Ministry doesn't want us prepared. They don't want us ready. But we don't need their approval. We don't need their permission to learn to defend ourselves."

A few heads nodded. Neville, his face still bearing the faint bruise from his last encounter with the Carrows, straightened his spine. Ginny Weasley's eyes sparked, her fingers flexing around her wand as though she could already feel the spells crackling at her fingertips.

"We don't know what's coming," Hermione continued, her voice gaining strength with each word, "but if we stick together, if we keep learning, we can face it. We can fight back. That's what matters."

The room seemed to breathe in, the very walls leaning closer to catch her words, the firelight reflecting the glimmer of hope now sparking in each student's eyes. There was a shared silence, heavy with the unspoken fears and fierce resolve that bound them all.

In that moment, with the warmth of the fire flickering against ancient stone, the air buzzing with a thousand unspoken hopes and fears, Dumbledore's Army truly came to life.

___

Educational Reform Sweeps Hogwarts: Ministry Appoints New High Inquisitor

By Barnabas Cuffe, Editor-in-Chief

In an unprecedented move aimed at tightening Ministry oversight of educational standards within Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Department of Magical Education announced yesterday the appointment of Madam Dolores Jane Umbridge as the first-ever High Inquisitor of Hogwarts. According to Senior Undersecretary, Dolores Jane Umbridge, "There have been worrying signs that Hogwarts has become a breeding ground for reckless behavior and subversive attitudes. The Ministry will not stand by while the next generation is led astray."

This appointment follows months of growing concern within the Ministry regarding the competence of Hogwarts staff and the perceived lack of discipline within the venerable institution.

Sources within the Ministry confirm that Umbridge will be empowered to enact Educational Decrees without prior approval from Hogwarts' governing board. A confidential Ministry memo, obtained exclusively by the Daily Prophet, states:

"The High Inquisitor will act with full ministerial backing to ensure the educational direction of Hogwarts aligns with the interests of the wizarding community and upholds traditional values."

In a surprising twist, well-placed Ministry insiders have hinted at whispers circulating through the Department of Magical Education suggesting that Madam Umbridge could be positioned to assume full control of Hogwarts, should further "inadequacies" be discovered under the current leadership.

The appointment has already sparked varied reactions among Hogwarts alumni, with some expressing cautious optimism about improved standards, while others warn of a heavy-handed Ministry encroachment on educational freedoms.

Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: Hogwarts is about to experience a radical transformation, and the eyes of the wizarding world will be watching.

Chapter Text

Parallelism — When you use similar sentence structures or patterns to create balance, rhythm, or highlight connections between ideas.

Control your posture. 

Control your tone. 

Control your thoughts, because thoughts betray, and betrayal is weakness.

Draco had always been good at control.

He grew up moulded by it — it built him with dignity, and honour while also making him cunning, deferential, disciplined, and intelligent, possessing an unequivocal beauty, yet with a nature that was anything but gentle. Like the sea foam dissolving at the shores, divided were his inferences that lived in his youth. 

Notwithstanding, the first thing he saw was the ice scattering was fine, crystalline branches across the inside of the windowpane that mapped themselves outward, pulsing analogously with the blood in his veins like some quiet foray, seizing the pale morning light and refracting it in broken shards against the walls that onetime tight, had become a strangling maze. 

The castle's archaic dents were rumoured in the dead of night, the glooms seeming to lengthen and wrench with an ominous life of their own. The air felt heavier, and Draco couldn't shake the assumption that something was closing in around him, lying there for an instant, silent, watching how the chilliness huddled itself into the junctions of the chamber, untouched by the low fire perishing in the hearth, still recollecting the dream. 

It hadn't been a pleasant one—though none of them were anymore. There had been too much ash, too many faceless figures, and his voice whispered a name he hadn't uttered audibly in months.

Potter.

His breath didn't cloud in the air—it wasn't that cold—but the chill was enough to settle deep into their room. He sat up, straightening his spine before his feet touched the floor, the sheets falling away with a faded sigh.

He washed first—teeth, then his face, then a bracing body rinse of water that drove away the heftiness behind his spine with strokes that were deliberate and smooth, removing every trace of fatigue from his skin. He dried himself briskly with sharp movements in a regular gust starting his routine —bed was made in military corners before he turned to his side of the dormitory—spotless except for the small collection of magical law tomes stacked on his desk. He clasped his buttons, cuffs, layers of wool and tailored cloth covering around him, pressing each crease smooth, retied the silver-green tie twice until it rested with the precise dimple beneath his throat, and, with a simple hair charm tamed most of the ruffled mess, regardless of a few strands still refused to conduct, twirling stubbornly at his temples. He allows them to be.

His gaze glid sideways to Theo's side where mayhem reigned supreme with one pair socks draped over the footboard, textbooks that was charmed to stay half-open and slumped against a rocking chair with their typical smell of parchment and ink, shoes and shirts thrown in all sides as if he couldn't decide what to wear what, and his duvet tangled like a shipwreck smelling of sweat and weed. 

Still, Theo had left him breakfast on the edge of his desk—a plate of French toast, thick slices of sausage, crisp bacon, under a warming spell, two small green apples, and a croissant, under a charm to keep them fresh, wrapped imperfectly in a linen napkin that was already starting to unravel.

He ate quickly, without haste but without indulgence, brushing crumbs from his digits before moving to the desk where he clasped Defence Wards of Northern Europe by Thomas Slinkhard, its spine cracking from frequent use, combing through the legal distinctions of defensive wards—something he had no patience to debate with anyone about how tactically useful it was. 

Minutes passed. Pages turned. Notes were taken. 

Until a tickling discomfort lodged in the back of his mind. 

His first class had begun thirteen minutes ago.

He blinked once. Closed the book softly. Adjusted his cuffs. He didn't scuttle —there was no dignity in a stampede. A Malfoy arrived strictly when he intended to.

And with that, he left.

The Slytherin crest caught the candlelight as he swept from the dormitory with a composed expression, watching himself for the last time. 

____

The stillness continued. 

Not the vociferous type that draws attention, but the kind that fills in all the spaces where utterances and acts used to be. 

Their glances started to linger a beat too long on him. Their queries hung most of the time unanswered in their minds. 

The way they looked at him now—not with distrust, but something worse: waiting in quiet expectation, waiting for the harsh rim of his say, the scowl that once slivered through fright. Waiting for him to be a Malfoy. Their Draco.

His eyes always fell away, words refusing to leave his mouthpiece, his ancient reflexes stagnant, corroded with weariness.

When Blaise leaned in with that smirk like he knew something Draco didn't, Draco only looked away. When Pansy's gossip lit up the room with her munificent, gleaming exuberance, he felt unruffled by their mundanity. Even Theo, with his subtle adherence, felt too unfamiliar—too much a reflection of who Draco had been when he wasn't thinking, like his memory was erased and he rewatched his memory play into a pensieve, trying to feel something next to the people he knew for a lifetime. 

He endeavoured to repose with them.

To meld back into the cadence of old patterns. But the rhythm had changed. Or he had.

But he didn't feel like he wanted to know. 

One night, long after curfew, the common room nearly empty, when the blaze was casting spidery long shadows across the stone, he was reading another book next to a snoring Crabbe seated in a near armchair,  the mood fragile yet weighty, like a plate full of crystal glasses, of another day's stories on school's stringent punishments.

Blaise looked at Draco, in that low voice that always rang thrilled even when it wasn't, "Still playing the ghost, Draco?"

No malignancy. No travesty. Just a query. Straightforward. Nevertheless, an unavoidable one.

Draco didn't raise his eyes, but he felt it. The truth of it. The faint sword huddled against tender flesh. 

He then perked up, encountering Blaise's dark gaze—and something inside him shifted. Not split. 

Just... slid out of place, like a soft infringement, like a door easing shut on oiled hinges.

He stood, and without saying a word, he climbed the stairs outside the dungeons, without looking back, closing the entrance behind him.

Distance would be enough. Distance is what he can control.

 That's what would keep me sane.

He cloaked himself in silence and solitude, in dusty pages and forbidden texts. Knowledge means control. Theories of power and resistance, loopholes in ancient wizarding law, tactics and counter-tactics of wars long buried, volumes of obscure wartime strategy from Grindlewald's campaign, full of brutal efficiency and unromantic realities—these were things he could hold in his hands, grip tightly without worrying that they would shift or change or freeze based on his feelings.

He never borrowed them—he stole them, masking them in charms layered delicately and astutely, twisting wards until the books simply vanished into his bag, making sure their absence stayed disregarded. In the evenings, he'd vanish too, hidden in forgotten alcoves, memorising the machinery of power contents committed to his clever mind.

No more lingering by the Slytherin hearth, no more sunken laughter over irrational games.

He wanted to carve himself out of their lives the way rot is cut from flesh, with sharp incision and clean breaks, it was important to do that, until, without realising a full limb is taken out.

It worked, for a while. The world shrank to candlelight, parchment margins jammed with difficult inscriptions and arithmetical calculations.

Yet, despite his exactitude and withdrawal, the universe remained cruelly uncooperative and had a sick sense of humour.

Because no matter how early he asserted a seat, no matter how elusive the passageway or forgotten the cavity, the pest was already there—or she'd arrive soon after. Her hair would catch the flame of a lamp with her shoulders hunched over books with lips moving soundlessly as she devoured utterances with the identical ferocity she essayed everything else.

The first time, he thought it was a conjunction. The second, vexation. The third, a damn nuisance.

Now, it was a pattern. And it chafed.

Still—he never conceded her. He didn't have the verve for it, didn't have the will to engage, walking past, like a shadow among shadows, allowing her in her quiet devices to sit there, to dissect her arithmancy equations or memorise obscure magical theory, whichever she was doing. He didn't care, they had no interchange, and she wasn't a distraction. 

He adjusted the cuff of his sleeve walking with cadenced steps and shoulders squared turning the corner leading from the dungeons with a thin parchment already gone, spiralling out into the night skies toward Wiltshire—another carefully nothing-worded-lies-wrapped-in-civility, to his mother, full of courtesies and habits.

His hand brushed the edge of his wand beneath his robe, out of habit more than necessity, yet the instinct sharpened when he caught a flicker of motion ahead.

Someone was coming down from the library staircase.

Of course. Bloody, bloody typical.

He pressed his tongue against the top of his mouth huffing low in his chest like coals refusing to die out.

It was supposed to be a quick route. 

Quick. 

No diversions, no detours, no detestable Gryffindor roadblocks. Yet, here she was—know-it-all all—storming down the library staircase like some frizzy-haired erudite demon who just wouldn't let him respire.

He should've veered around on his heel and gone the long way 'round, maybe meandered through the passageways, but pride was a rotten bastard, and he was his father's son. 

Malfoys didn't yield in corridors—especially not to know-it-alls.

She clocked him, snapping rigid like a bloody statue. Merlin, she was still bristling, invariably ready to throw herself into the line of fire, like anyone cared enough to bother hexing her after hours.

Her hair was a mess, curls eluding the weak attempt at the command she always wished to make, skin freckled in the dim torchlight from probably spending the last four hours suffocating in dusty pages, and her mouth—tight and prim like it always was when she was gearing up for an argument—flattened in suspicion.. There was ink on her wrist, a faint smudge where her sleeve had pushed up. 

She didn't trust what she didn't know, obviously. She never did. Didn't mean she could make herself walk away. 

He stepped out of the shadows, letting the dull torchlight catch his pale face just enough. There was no point turning back. The library was where he needed to be. 

He'd keep walking. She'd keep glaring. And life would continue its slow crawl out of hell.

Except—his mouth moved.

"You," he bit out. Short. Flat. Unbiased. Like she was a nuisance, a crease in the evening's agenda, like an extrinsic blip on the radar.

She sprang on it immediately, like a hawk with a scrap of movement. "What are you doing out here?"

He should've kept striding and disregarded her. But something petty clawed from his ribs to his mouthpiece. He let his gaze sweep slowly, deliberate the empty corridor. No witnesses. Fine.

"I could ask you the same thing," he said, letting a shadow of amusement bleed in—enough to irritate her, to make her overthink it later. "But I presume it's none of my business."

Her mouth pressed into that adamant little line, eyes narrowing, refusing to be dismissed. 

"So, what are you doing here?" she pressed again, voice too steady for someone caught alone this late.

He shifted his stance, letting his expression flatten, lazily flicking his regard toward the library door before circling back to her face.

"Came from the Astronomy Tower," he said with a clipped tone. "Letter home. Family business."

Her brow furrowed, suspicion cranking up a notch, mouth pressing tighter like she smelled something claggy. She was reading him—cataloguing his twitch, his shift, scrutinising all his syllables. She knew he was lying. 

She was smart, he'd give her that. Smart enough to be a nuance.

Good. 

Let her choke in the ocean of her thoughts. 

Let her stew about it while he got what he needed.

He wasn't here to defend himself to her, as she held no authority over him.

He'd be back in the Slytherin dorms before she even finished piecing it together.

He moved past her, still staring at him like she could push something beneath his skin.

It scraped at him.

He clenched his jaw, eyes narrowing, tongue sharp before he could catch it: "Keep an eye on her," words fell sharp between them before he could halt them. She blinked in confusion flickering fast.  "Something's not right. And I don't think you ought me to tell you that."

He didn't give her time to press, didn't explain. His fingers were already tightening at his sides, straightening like he could force her out of his head if he walked fast enough. He spun, robes billowing behind him, bootsteps swallowed by a quiet silencing charm.

He felt her watching him until the shadows swallowed her whole.

⸻

The dormitory felt suffocating at night, the velvet curtains encumbering like storm clouds, his elbows digging into his knees, and his fingers threading through his hair, damp with sweat from the nightmare. 

His corner of the dormitory had been freezing — again— and when he closed his eyes, the horrible gleam of the chandelier twisted bones catching the dawning, swaying in slow rhythm it was again above him. 

He shifted, trailing across the dark room until his gaze landed on Theo's silhouette—breathing, peaceful, untouched by the tight spasm in Draco's chest. The resentment was dull now, more habit than feeling, but it pressed nonetheless, tightening his throat. Before the tart taste of frustration could settle, Draco kicked off the covers and slipped out of the chamber.

The common room was silent now, bathed in the faded glow from the lake above, staying tall in front of the arched windows, pressing his palm on the glass, the cool material under his palm grounding him, overseeing the glimmer stirred in the depths—something slow, dragging across the other side of the spellbound glass, its immense, pale eye capturing Draco's and grasping it, with a tightened jaw, his fingers curled tighter against the window pane, wondered, briefly, if it judged him too.

It terrified him.

But that wasn't what had truly scared him. No, the terror came from something within, something unspoken, a shadow that had curled around his heart, whispering perils, commitments, enigmas. He had seen things, things he couldn't unsee. And he knew, with a certainty that felt like a blade to his throat, that if he wanted to survive—if any of them wanted to survive—they needed to freeze in place or fly. There was no point in fighting what’s imminent. 

Footsteps padded into the room, stopping a few feet away. His throat worked, but he didn't turn. His reflection in the glass was pale, etched by jittery nights and fortes he didn't want to stipulate. The air shifted, and Draco felt the other boy watching him. "You'll go mad if you keep doing this."

The dark-haired boy moved a little closer, not demanding, just there. "You think being alone makes it quieter, but it doesn't," he said softly, gaze flickering to the moving shadows outside. "It just gets louder. Trust me...I tried."

The lake creature swam away, disappearing into the darkness, and for a second, his chest lessened, just a morsel. He still didn't veer around, but his hand fell from where it had kinked.

Theo's voice was softer now, but firmer too. "Just sit. You don't have to talk, but... don't stay out like this."

Draco's fingers dug into his knees, but his gaze stayed on the window. He hated how close the words came to striking something raw inside him. Hated even more how true they sounded.

Still, his voice came out sharper than he meant, splintering at the rims. "I didn't ask for your doctrine, Nott."

The dark-haired boy sighed softly, and settled in, like he was prepared to sit there as long as Draco allowed him to.

"Didn't need to. Just don't... stay stuck in your own head, yeah? Not when it's this loud in there."

Outside, a ripple of water brushed against the glass. Inside, for the first time in a long time, Draco's shoulders eased just a little.

____

It wasn't that he was avoiding anyone. No, surely not. He was not dodging Daphne's infinite inquiries, Blaise's egotism, Theo's unnervingly ballpark remarks, or Pansy's creaking fashion of twisting every corridor into a theatre scene. It was solely a sheltered pattern of strategic decampment. His mama would have named it striving for the betterment of the spirit. His father would have called it frailty, Draco himself didn't have a name for it. He merely mandated solitude, as it was the mark of genius. Newton had his apple orchard, Kafka had his night desk, Beethoven had his silent woods, and Draco had the Hogwarts plumbing system.

In verity, Draco was slinking into the lavatory to read and conceivably unwrap a stolen pasty without commentary. The bathroom, had tiles, tiles had acoustics; acoustics engulfed condemning sounds such as "unnecessary unnerving voices”. 

The lavatory also had Myrtle.

Myrtle had been depleted for decades, and when Myrtle was bored, she did what any rational ghoul did: she needled the living. 

From what he took notice, Potter had formerly acquired the full criterion of her unfiltered engagement, but his continuous whining and tragic lip-biting eye-watering story had made even Myrtle drowsy. 

Draco, though, barked back. He rolled his eyes. He muttered, "Hush, you watery banshee." He even scolded her for reeking of limescale and bleach. 

Myrtle found him intoxicating.

"Ohhh. Look who's continuing to hide from everyone in here."

"Wonderful," he drawled," The one restroom in this castle where it doesn't stink to high Shangri-la of dungbombs and I get scholia."

Draco didn't even look up from his book. "I'm not hiding. I'm sidestepping. Completely different. Hiding implies gutlessness, sidestepping implies wisdom. Words matter."

"You know," she spoke with her soft and vaguely damp voice from the corner like an Inferi, "you look even paler when you eat in here."

Draco didn't leap, because Malfoys don't leap. He did, nevertheless, snap his book so hard he nearly cracked the cover. "For the love of Salazar, is plaguing the bathroom really the fairest use of your afterlife?"

Myrtle hovered a little nigher with an expression caught between simpering and slighted. "Well, you're here, aren't you? And you're much prettier to look at than Potter. He just frowns. You smirk. I like smirking."

She glided, examining him with her bulging eyes. "And you're always so full of yourself. Just like Potter—"

"Excuse me, did you just approximate me to Saint Scarhead? Insult cited. Impairing, indeed. For future consideration, Warren, if you want anyone to keep chatting to you, don't direct with Potter. I imagine that's the highlight of your decade, isn't it? To speak about the golden boy while you reverberate it all back like a sweltering diary entry. Don't misconstrue his pity for fondness, Warren. It's terribly undignified."

She gasped, floated higher, and then—strangely—giggled. "You're nasty. Nasty! I like nastiness."

"Try the Slytherin common room if you enjoy nastiness," Draco mumbled. "It's basically an export commodity at this point."

"I like you." 

Draco blinked. "Oh, excellent. I've gained a spectral fangirl. How distinguished for me. Shall I sign your... plumbing?"

"You know, the last boy who hid in here was rather important."

"Yes, yes, Potter," Draco replied.

"No, before him." Myrtle lurched, looking rather like a shower curtain snagged in a draft. "The other boy. The one who came to talk to me before opening the screaming room."

Myrtle wafted closer, slanting her head with an oddly affectionate utterance. "He stood nearly exactly where you are, clever boy. He heeded. And then he looked."

Draco paused. "The screaming room?" His eyebrows performed a delicate ballet of scepticism.

"Yes," Myrtle cooed. " Whispered things while I was next to him. Ohhh, it echoed so beautifully..."

Draco stilled, his eyes twinkling to the tiled floor, to the cracked sink beneath him, almost hearing the drip-drip echo that was distinct, like the air was heavier. He arched a brow. "What a touching fairy tale, Warren. Very goosebumps, very pathetic. And you believe notifying me will—what? Make me swoon into the plumbing?"

She sniggered, ghostly and sharp. "You're paying attention more than you acknowledge."

He scowled, pivoting up with unnecessary roughness. "I'm paying attention because I enjoy cataloguing the deranged verbiage of Hogwarts' inhabitant plumbing poltergeist. Excellent material for later mockery."

And with that, she left. 

Regardless, when Myrtle Warren swooped off, whizzing tunelessly to herself, Draco found his eyes glancing sharper now around the lavatory. The echoes were awry. It wasn't just stone and dampness.

That night, back in his enclosure, he feigned to lire his text while Theo droned about something tedious in their chamber. Draco's mind was visibly elsewhere, feigning to annotate a page of Moste Potente Potions, but frankly, he was mapping the castle's lungs—the pleural sacs rooms, the murmuring pulmonary pipes, and the subterranean coughs of water. In truth, Draco's sense was buzzing—reckoning the acoustics, contemplating how water slanted sound. Belowground slots that were shut with magic. Areas where the echoes don't behave and the magical wards ended.

Warren was ludicrous, yes, but insanity, had a way of spilling truth like wine stains on linen. It wasn't that he accepted Myrtle babbling. Clearly. He just took pleasure in being clever enough to prove her insane.

But she had a point. 

The castle was aged, and old castles had bones, cavities, and echoes. Places that respire differently when you speak into them.

It startled him like an itch. Not a literal one—Merlin forbid, Malfoys didn't itch. But a cognitive whining sound that nestled someplace behind his temples after Myrtle's cooing hogwash.

He desired to disregard it as nonsense, yet the castle had always hummed, even when he never cared enough to follow. Now he couldn't unhear it.

So he began haunting.

That was the word for it. Haunting passageways at hours even the prefects didn't pester to patrol, haunting vaulted depository rooms where sound bent strangely against barrel-vaulted canopies, haunting overlooked cellars where the echoes appeared to subsist with him. It wasn't paranoia, even if it was, he was paranoid with the precision of an expert marksman: listening, cataloguing and testing.

He muttered a phrase in Latin one night in the scarcest chamber he located, wandlight glinting off sweltering gravel. 

His voice came back to him distorted, pulled thin like wire through the barriers, pressing his palm against the pipework, feeling the soft pulse. "Oldest part of the school..."

For a moment he hesitated—Lucius' agent unmistakable in his marbles: We do not dabble with gutter-spells, Draco. We are not tinkers. We are the bloodline.

But the gluttonous craving became louder than the voice.

His heart sprinted. He didn't understand why.

He whispered a few experimental ward-breakers, Charms dredged from an ancient Slytherin text he'd "borrowed" long enough to transcribe, the sort of hexwork his father would've had his head mounted on a spike for even pronouncing, nothing a fifth-year should know. 

One was a kissing cousin of patefacio, but older, its gravel syllables clanged against the teeth. Another was a charm that munched at edges the way rust eats iron.

The air trembled.

Not enough. His teeth bared, he threw in something else, half-remembered Slytherin passwords, tempi that tasted of copper and bile in his mouth, syllables that didn't sound right even as he hissed them.

His heart hammered.

And then—he found it. Something in the air clotted. As if the very stones had been holding their breath for centuries, waiting for a password not spoken since blood was still spilling to consecrate it.

For a fleeting moment, his lungs forgot to function.

His lips curled despite himself, a smirk slicing across his pale face as dust sifted from the shivering stone.

He straightened, brushing the dust from his sleeves with affected ease, even though his hands were shaking. His smirk returned, sharp and thin as a knife.

"Well," he drawled into the silence, though his pulse thundered, "looks like Myrtle wasn't full of—"

The echo swallowed the rest of his sentence. 

And for the first time in a long time, Draco felt something he didn't dare to name. 

Longing. 

Longing for an escape. 

___

He'd spend the following few weeks eyeing his companions. 

Zabini was the most manageable to read, though it took Draco some moments to comprehend his nuanced neutrality. 

He was an absurdist at core, competent, and vigilant. He didn't care much for the blood purist ideals his family clung to, but neither did he care for everyone

else, which attracted people to him. 

He wasn't the type to join anything that wasn't directly beneficial to him. Still, Draco knew that Blaise was a scholar at heart, and he was the key that kept their group together. 

Parkinson was a particular case. 

She was still in the know, constantly chattering to someone, always at the centre of fortes. 

Her vogue and her capacity to govern words made her integral to the Slytherin aids, but it also earned her a reputation. She had a proficiency for reading people, for figuring out what made them throb and what made them tick. She manipulated situations to her advantage, but in their group, she was more needed than she went beyond her social prowess.

Greengrass was pragmatic, and Draco admired that about her. She wasn't garish or noisy, but sleek and astute.

She knew to see things from a strategic angle, to understand the game being played. She wasn't easily swayed, and even if she wasn't clamorous, she knew how to mandate. 

Then there was Nott, subtle and sharp and ever high ultimately the hardest to extrapolate. 

He had learned prematurely how to retain his cards close to his chest, and how to helm both worlds without being noticed. Draco knew he couldn't put his trust in him cause Theo wasn't the type to follow anyone. No matter the person.

⸻

The enclosure where he owled them to encounter was cavernous, extended adequately to engulf their voices whole with a ceiling lost in darkness, faintly shimmering veins of rock like magic pulsing through its walls, and flickers of occult green fire torchlight jigging over cold rock. 

He couldn't show them the screaming room, not yet. 

He stood in the shadow, his pale hair catching the flicker of the flames, school robes hung open, tie loosened — not the crisp perfection he displayed in the halls. He looked less like the sneering boy they saw last year and more like someone figuring the contour of a future no one had requested.

The others had compiled in a loose semicircle. Blaise leaned against a carved pillar, arms folded, gaze opaque harsh and illegible. Theo sat cross-legged on the cold floor, rolling a coin absently, its metallic click breaking the stillness. Daphne stood beside Pansy, both of them clutching their cloaks tighter against the chill that crept up from the damp stone beneath.

Draco's gaze swept over them, the stone walls carrying their voice back to them in a ghostly echo. "...If you still believe this is about who sits at the best table or who gets the top mark in Potions, you haven't been paying attention"

Blaise's mouth quirked. "And here I thought you thrived on all that."

Draco didn't rise to the jab. "The Dark Lord is back," he said ostensibly. His tone was undressed of the mocking lilt they resorted to. "Every single one of you knows it — whether you'll say it out loud or not. Our parents... our families... they've been whispering about it all summer. Letters burned, owls dispatched at odd hours. There's no use hiding from it anymore."

 "And what do you want to do about that Draco?"

Theo ceased his coin mid-roll and perked up, coming across Draco's gaze. "Do we need to do something about it?"

"I'm saying we...." He stepped closer to the group, boots clicking softly on the stone. "...We're Slytherins. That means something. It's more than purpose or deceit that made our house thrive — it's allegiance to each other. Not to Dumbledore, not to the Ministry, and not even to the Dark Lord. To each other."

Daphne veered, her brows forming a crease between them. "That's a perilous thing to say."

"Good," Draco said sharply. "Because while Gryffindors are making speeches about bravery and Hufflepuffs are playing at unity, we'll have to do something. Comprehending everyone's next step. Knowing who's about to betray us before they even think about it."

Pansy's voice was softer than usual when she spoke, "And what happens when... when it's one of us?"

Draco paused, and for a moment the only sound was the faded lap of wetness in the evening. "Then we remember the first rule: we protect each other. That means finding the truth before anyone else does. It means deciding what's worth saving—and who."

Blaise shifted his weight. "So you want us to...what? Feed both sides until the war sorts itself out?"

Draco's jaw tightened. "I want us to survive. That implies knowing which way the wind's blowing before the rest of the school even feels the breeze. It means we don't let Gryffindors pull us into their heroics, or Ravenclaws trip us up with their clever little traps. If the Dark Lord succeeds, and you're seen assisting Dumbledore, you're over. If Dumbledore prevails and you've been too close to the other side, you're still dead."

Theo let out a quiet, humourless laugh. "Comforting."

"We are not here for comfort, we are here for the inevitable truth: we're on our own. The professors won't save us, the Ministry won't insulate us, and the Dark Lord won't spare us unless we make ourselves useful. We have each other. That's it."

The silence that followed was heavy, settling into the corners of the room like a living thing. Torchlight rippled across the giant stone face above them, Draco's gaze fixed eternally forward, then, Daphne spoke with a steady voice. "Then what's our first move?"

Draco glanced up, then back at the countenances around him. "We learn everything. Every whispered exchange, every mutation in the castle's air. We safeguard our own, even from themselves. And if one of us starts playing a dangerous game..." His eyes lingered on each of them in turn. "...we make sure the rest of us don't pay the price."

The others nodded slowly.

"We can't do this like the others. No speeches about glory or justice. This isn't about heroes or villains. This is about survival. About power—our power. We're not following orders. We're making them."

Their eyes met, flickering with uncertainty and determination. It was no plan yet—just a fragile promise—but it was a start. They weren't ready for revolution, but they were ready for something.

Their next move started fast and was their easiest. 

Two of them joined the Inquisitorial Squad.

To the school, it was exactly what they expected. Privileged Slytherins, keen to curry favour with Umbridge, assigning detentions and exhibiting their hegemony. The other pupils disparaged and gossiped and badmouthed them. 

Good. Let them. 

Because behind the lustrous mask of vanity and compliance, they were watching. Listening. Gathering every whispered secret, rumour and schedule.

"Don't overplay it," Draco had told Pansy the day they received the silver badges. "We're not here to show off. We're here to know everything before anyone else does."

Pansy smirked, twisting the badge on her chest. "And here I thought we were here to be petty."

"Be petty," he said, "but smart about it."

In the dayspring time, Draco and Pansy paced the halls with inflated authority, interrupting courses with deft ease—poking their heads into Transfiguration or Divination classes, recounting Umbridge's saccharine chestnuts with theatrical accuracy. "Order and discipline," they'd chant with blank faces and say leaking with pretend seriousness. To the other students, it was a performance, entitled Slytherins wallowing in petty authority, delighting in their functions as petty autocrats.

But behind the gloss, something far subtler was growing.

Blaise, counted in near to the Ravenclaws as they gathered by the library stairs, exchanging snippets of chatter that flew under Umbridge's radar, overhearing slivers of rumours.

Daphne, ever the picture of soft inquisitiveness, whispered to the prefects during corridor patrols, feigning harmless attraction as she asked about their routines and recent encounters. She never pressed too hard was never too obvious, but was always expressive.

Theo, the serenest among them, was something else entirely.

He said very little. But when he conversed, it was always the right query, plunged with relaxed nonchalance yet harsh as a serpent's fang. He had an aptitude for learning whom to approach—an upper-year in Charms, a nervous second-year with a penchant for secrets, a caretaker who knew the castle's confidential paths. Theo listened more than he uttered, but he recollected everything. Every blinking, drop of tongue, and look exchanged in hushed corners.

It wasn't long before they knew more than Umbridge ever intended them to.

They had no Phoenix-feather wands ingrained with ancient magic. No mentors whispering secrets from the shadows. No grand sermons stirring their souls to war. What they had was simpler—and more treacherous.

Parchment and quills. 

Books smuggled in from family libraries. 

Theories scraped together from the edges of their collective knowledge.

They were brilliant. 

Cunning even. But beneath the shell, they were also weary, lotus eaters, drifting in a sea of uncertainty—beautiful, dangerous, but unmoored. Wealthy kids who treated their commitments like a new joy ride.

"We'll build from what we know," Daphne said one evening, as she flipped through a restricted spellbook Theo had nicked from the Ravenclaw stacks two days prior. The book was old—its pages cracked and yellowed—but its knowledge was potent.

"Curse-breaking, warding and healing charms" she added, her fingers tracing arcane symbols with reverence. "It doesn't make any sense. Why would the Ravenclaw need a book about hiding and protecting?"

___

Ron was mid-bite into his orange marmalade toast when an elbow, sharp as a Bludger, collided into his ribs, the force nearly sent him sliding sideways off the polished wooden bench, the toast slipping from his clasp, landing butter-side down with a dull thud against the scarred surface of the table.

"Oy!" he spluttered. 

Ginny, posing beside him, scarcely camouflaged a grin, her eyes glistening with rascality as she jolted her chin toward them, where Angelina Johnson stood in all her confident glory. One boot sowed solidly on the bench, broom slung over her shoulder with casual ease, and back arched in his direction, like a knight readying for a charge.

Her dark eyes scanned the table inhabitants, shimmering with a mix of entertainment and authority.

"Weasley," Angelina's voice slivered through the low hum of chatter, crisp and clear, "put down the marmalade. You're Keeper."

Ron twinkled, mouth hung open in incredulity, as though her utterances had momentarily short-circuited his brain. His gaze flicked from Angelina to his fallen toast, back again proceeding —or rather refusing— to look back at her. 

"What?" he croaked with a hoarse voice, eyes like a stunned Crup caught in a trap.

Angelina only raised a single brow, laughing gutturally. With a theatrical flourish, she slung the broom from her shoulder. 

"Congratulations, Keeper. Practice tonight. Don't be late."

Fred and George, always in perfect sync, howled from the far end of the bench.

"Well, let's hope he doesn't let every Quaffle slip past this year!" Fred bellowed, knocking his fist against the wood.

"Otherwise, we'll have to invent something to help him catch!" said George with a grin.

"Quaffle-Repelling Pants?" Fred teased, eyes twinkling with absurd glee.

"Or an Auto-Blocking Charm?" George added, barely containing his laughter.

Ron's cheeks flamed crimson, the heat crawling up from his neck to his hairline. He barked, "Oi! Shut it!" but the tremor in his hands betrayed him.

Not nerves. Not embarrassment.

Something far deeper.

Disbelief.

Joy that burrowed beneath, like a sunrise breaking through a stubborn fog.

He sat frozen for a juncture, staring down at the scattered crumbs and the smudge of orange marmalade on the table, before lifting his gaze to Hermione, as if to anchor himself in the reality of it, her smile gentle but unavoidable, her eyes glinting with kindness, tinged with thrill as she leaned in, "You made the team, Ronald. Congratulations."

Ron's smile broke free, placing his arms around her, hugging her tightly. 

___

Draco hadn't gone to dinner. Again.

He'd fibbed.

Again.

Notified Parkinson he had a headache, Greengrass that the foyers were too cold for a walk, and Zabini that he was waiting on an owl. That he'd been assigned a late detention from McGonagall—any justification yanked from the void, that sounded harmless on the surface. But even he no longer believed them. 

The observations felt sunken in his mouth, like echoes from the screaming room.

No one questioned where he was these days. 

Not really. 

The dormitory was dim the shadows pooling in corners, lit only by the soft glow of charmed lanterns hanging gently overhead, twinkling like ghouls, and from the window, the hazy green of the lake dribbled through stained glass, launching shifting layouts over gravel walls that buzzed faintly with magic. The same magic that kept the dungeons dry and held back the pressure of the lake squeezing in like a ventricle. 

He didn't know what was wrong with him. 

No. That was a lie, too.

He'd felt it beneath his skin for weeks—a gnawing improperness, like footing into an enclosure and forgetting why you came there, like noticing your hands are dirtied only after they've shaken another's. Like a grief without a name, lurking around the corner,  yet just beyond reach.

His father's owl had arrived yet again. Another news, another edict, another reminder that the world outside waited with an indifferent agacement.

His head tottered scarcely as the door squeaked open behind him.

Theo.

Barefoot, bare-chested, wand tucked hastily behind his ear. His eyes were bloodshot looking blissful, like a man who had glimpsed some hideous truth beyond the world's noise and tolerated it. Ink-black moles dispersed across his pale collarbone like a map of forgotten stars. Muggle tattoos—strange and foreign—decorated his skin in whirls, a serpent curling lazily over his ribs, an infinity looping near his shoulder with an too small initial, and a French dirty phrase carved delicately in flowing script on his arm. Words Draco couldn't read out loud without reddening. 

Theo looked like a poem jotted down in handwritten cursive.

"You're chewing your tongue again."

Theo booted the door shut behind them, the sound echoing faintly against the hall's walls. "Might wanna stop that before you start bleeding logic."

Draco didn't change his position. Not really. His eyes flicked toward Theo, but the rest of him stayed suspended—half-floating, barely strung together like frayed yarns struggling to hold a shattered jumper.

Theo heaved something light and metallic onto the mattress beside him landing with a soft clink. A silver joint.

"Cendres d'Étoile. Means star ash. Got it from Mara, who considers I'm grievous and mournful. She's right, but in French it sounds lavish. It's luminous while it burns."

No reply.

Theo's eyes drifted up to the ceiling, tracing invisible constellations in the choppy stonework. "You're somewhere else, mate."

"I'm here."

"Nah. You're not." He delineated sluggish loops in the air with his fingertip, as if he could swirl Draco's reflections back into mania. "You're still in that room. Still hearing that sound you mumble in your sleep about."

Draco froze. 

Just for a breath time stretched thin.

Theo smiled then. 

Almost holy in its tenderness.

"I'm not high enough for this," he added with a drowsy shrug.

"You don't even know what happened."

"I don't have to."

There was a pause. A long one. Not contentious. Just postponing stoic.

Then—Draco stood, stepping loudly against the cold stone floor without grace and bare, like he yearned for something to shatter but couldn't choose what.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"You are talking about it," Theo's sight was half-lidded as he blew out the steam that curled and hovered over them like psalms. "That's why you can't pose still."

"I'm fine."

"That's not what your magic says."

He flickered hard, pointing toward the window. Frost had blossomed there the crystalline veins circulating fast and calculated. A whisper of cold crept over the stone, twirling like a living thing.

Draco's gaze lowered to his digits. His fingertips were pale—too pale. Cold, almost numb. The bedsheet that was beneath him seconds ago was damp with condensation. Even the mattress felt slimmer, as if some indistinguishable cord was yanking the very zeal from him, leaving sunken slots in its path.

Something inside him was leaking out like pipeline gas ready to make everything around him explode. 

"I used to know who I was," he said quietly, frail and soft.

Theo snickered quickly. "You used to lie better."

"I can't breathe in that fucking house."

"Then don't go back."

"You don't get it. That was my only home."

Theo's voice lowered to a whisper, "Try me. I know how it feels to not be able to go to the only house you considered a home."

Draco stared out at the lake, the seaweed shivering under the waves, splitting low and fast across the slate sky.

"I think I saw... something," he whispered. "At the Manor. Something no one else did. Or maybe no one else wanted to. It wasn't dark. It wasn't pain. It was worse."

Theo leaned in, "What was it?"

"Nothing."

But the frost lurking along the windowpane didn't wait quietly. It scattered like a virus, leaking through the cracks in his defences.

Theo's gaze flicked to the frost, then back to Draco.

"You know the first rule of surviving trauma?"

Draco grunted. "Enlighten me."

"Don't pretend it didn't happen."

Theo was quiet now.

Draco's hands were shaking.

"I can't breathe in that fucking house," he repeated. 

Theo stared up at him calm and heavy-lidded.

"That's because it's not a house anymore," he said softly. "It's a grave. And you keep walking through it like it owes you peace."

Draco swallowed hard. His throat scorched like he'd swallowed glass. He went and stood back down too fast, the bedframe creaking beneath him.

Theo stood no, reaching out. Plucked the joint from Draco's bed, sitting down beside him.

"You're allowed to be broken."

He let out a whiff he didn't know he'd been retaining, his jaw slackening, just slightly. The pressure behind his eyes didn't fade yet it softened. Shifted. Like it didn't have permission to stay for now.

Theo raised the now glistening joint in a sluggish regard. "You're not allowed to pretend you're not. I will simply not allow you, mate."

And then—just like that—Theo flopped back into his bed, as he muttered something in French, his voice turning lyrical and chant:

"Les étoiles mentent parfois, et les poètes... ils enjolivent trop. Peut-être est-ce là leur danger: les étoiles guident, mais pas toujours justement; les poètes parlent, mais pas toujours vrai.

Et pourtant, dans leur tromperie, il y a quelque chose de douloureusement sincère—

car même un mensonge dit avec beauté peut te mener vers une vérité."

He just nodded—a slow, knowing tilt of the head—like he'd been there too, like they all had, standing on the edge of something brittle and vast and ugly. 

"Smoke." 

He obliged. 

"I don't know where that leaves me."

He shrugged, casual, almost careless. "Nowhere. And everywhere. You've been orbiting a dead sun, mate. Time to slingshot out."

A pause hung between them, thick and heavy, then his voice softened, barely more than a whisper:

"Time to choose what kind of thing you want to be."

Draco's breath caught. His voice was barely audible, almost a confession: "I don't want to be a Bolshevik."

Theo said nothing.

"I just want to not be a puppet."

He sat up straighter, eyes bright now with a fierce light. "Then stop letting someone play with you."

"You've got friends," Theo said, voice steady. "Real ones. Blaise. Daphne. Pansy. Me."

____

The passageways were filmy surrounded by the scent of petrichor, illuminated only by the pale sheen of charmed torch flickering in their sconces. It had been a protracted everlasting day, replenished and clammed with classes and work that appeared to drag on for forevermore. But the redhead was diverted, his reason elsewhere, enmeshed in something that had been gnawing at him for the last days.

It wasn't likewise as when he'd had those anomalous senses before—like a state of déjà vu. It was clearer, like when he had known that Umbridge would be giving another one of her repugnant speeches in any corridor before she reached it, or the juncture before Malfoy had trekked into the room ominously like Ron had known he was coming. He hadn't informed Harry, as he didn't fairly comprehend what to make of it himself. There was something too specific about it.

And then there was the vision he'd had last evening.

In it, Ron had envisioned glints of a gravelly space that echoed with parables, faint at the beginning but increasing in intensity. He hadn't recognised the representatives, but they chimed urgently, their faces hidden in the shadows. And Malfoy had his face distorted, had been placed at the front, almost impossible to recognise him, but he had been saying something. Ron couldn't recall the words, but they had been sharp, like knives.

"You alright, Ron?" 

The redhead blinked and veered around to face his best friend.

"Yeah, just...you know," Ron muttered, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly. "I've been feeling... off. I mean, more off than usual."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Off how?"

Ron paused and wavered. There was no easy way to illustrate it. "Doesn't matter." 

He shivered, a chill running down his spine, that had nothing to do with the cool evening air creeping through the halls.

"You know," he commenced, "it's strange. I get these flashes sometimes. Like... I can see fortes before they happen. Not every time—just little bits. Moments that stick out, like a ripple before the wave. It's like I'm supposed to know something. Something important."

Harry looked at him with an expression caught between disbelief and concern, brow furrowed. "Like... you're a clairvoyant or something?"

Ron snorted, trying to laugh it off, but it came out hollow. "Yeah, right. Me? Sitting around telling fortunes? I'm more likely to trip over my own feet than read tea leaves."

Harry's face faltered. His eyes didn't mock; they searched the red-haired face, looking for validity. "You're serious though, aren't you? You really think something's happening?"

Ron nodded, his gaze dropping to the worn floor beneath them. "I do. I've felt it for weeks now. Like a storm brewing just out of sight. I can feel it like a crack in the air."

Harry hesitated, considering the words carefully. "And what if you're right? What if whatever's coming... we're not ready for it?"

Ron's eyes raised aloft, latching with Harry's in the flickering golden torchlight, his eyes, for a juncture, on the blemish bolt from between his brows, then back to his greens. "We never are, are we? No one ever is. But we deal with it. We always do."

The assertion hovered between them. 

Harry nibbled on the verity of it for a wink. "Maybe. But if you're right, Ron... maybe we need more than just guts and luck this time."

Ron wanted to argue. To say they'd gotten by on less before. But the cold knot in his stomach said otherwise. No response came. Only that deepening unease, of silence and pause. 

As they reached the Gryffindor common room, the warmth of the fire beckoning them, Ron's mind didn't settle. If anything, the sense of unease only deepened. And with it, the hope to be only paranoid. 

___

She knew she wasn't supposed to be here. But knowing had never stopped her. Especially not now.

Back in the common room, Ron shivered at the weight of a different kind of unease, telling Harry about the flashes—the premonitions—that had started to flicker in his mind.

Hermione had started keeping her notes in code again, transfiguring ink into invisible stains keyed to her wand, it wasn't paranoia, yet precision. She was paying attention. The Ravenclaws had lost the book and with that the annotations, which luckily, she had already copied beforehand. 

She snapped the book open and flipped past the warded preface, seeking the section on constructive magic, personal spellcraft theories, that were denoted and concealed after the Second Grindelwald Trials as risky and erratic, had found new life in her hands. Because it wasn't enough to merely read anymore.

She lifted her hand and cast another duplication charm.

___

It was Theo who talked first, commenting about Draco's equanimity orbit, while he sprawled upside down like a bored cat in their dorm room, legs resting carelessly over the backrest, his head slowly grazing the carpet like he was liquefying into the floor. 

His shirt hung loose at the neckband, unbuttoned more than necessary, a joint in one hand, shoes tossed around the room with the same mannerism, and mismatched socks— black with green kitten paws on one foot, plain grey on the other. He looked like a man adrift but perfectly at ease with the current yanking him under.

Draco was striding like a drunk man in a nervous dance.  

Three steps forward, pivot, three steps back.

"You're gonna burn a hole in your skull," the silver-haired boy muttered, eyes locked on the joint that dipped dangerously close to Theo's temple.

Theo winced up at him with a grin that was half-boyish mischief, half-knowing something too grave to say aloud. "Saw Granger, last night," he said unhurriedly, as if tasting the words was bitter wine. "Near the seventh floor. Past curfew. She was whispering to a bloody wall, then—poof. Gone. Like she swallowed her own shadow."

Draco rolled his eyes, the motion so sharp it almost blurred his vision. "You're paranoid from the weed."

"Am I?" Theo blew out smoke with deliberate stillness, marking the space between them. "Strange thing, isn't it? If I didn't know better, I'd assume your favourite Mudblood was hiding something," he said lightly, though his eyes never left Draco's.

Draco waved off the warning with a frustrated flick of his hand. "Probably just some secret passage. Hogwarts is full of those."

"Yeah," Theo replied, "except, that one wasn't there the day before."

Silence stretched between them. Draco's pacing slowed. The image Theo painted haunted the edges of his mind: the golden girl whispering to cold stone, vanishing with her human leeches into the air like a myth come to life.

That night, for the first time, Draco's dream changed. He saw visions of doors that breathed beneath his fingertips, walls that listened, and cracks in the world where people could step through to become more than themselves.

⸻

The first time Ron slipped into the bulky Keeper robes,  a surge of nervous electricity jolted through him. As he mounted his broomstick and rose above the Quidditch pitch, the cold wind sliced against his flushed freckled cheeks and knotted his wavy hair, whipping it into wild strands that danced in the sky. His heart thundered—loud enough, it seemed, to echo in his ears with a chaotic mix of excitement and dread.

Below him, the pitch stretched wide and green, the stadium's stands a blur of expectant faces. The sheer scale of it overwhelmed him for a moment; this was more than just a game, more than just a dream he'd nurtured in the unknown. This was real. This was now.

His fingers trembled as the Quaffle came hurtling toward him, a blazing red blur against the blue sky. At first, his saves were awkward—his grip slipping, fumbling, hands too slow to catch the spinning ball. One time, the Quaffle slipped right through his fingers, bouncing dangerously close to the goalposts before the Chasers scrambled to recover it. He felt a flush of embarrassment creep up his neck.

Then came Ginny's shot.

It was swift and ruthless slicing through the air with a sharp whistle. His stomach dropped. The moment pulled impossibly long as he lunged, heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal. Somehow, his hands found the Quaffle, catching it firmly with both palms. The crowd erupted in cheers, a warm wave of approval washing over him.

"Nice one, Weasley!" Angelina's voice rang out clear and true, filled with genuine respect.

Ron's head spun; his cheeks burned with a fierce, blooming pride. The rush was intoxicating, imperfect as he was, fumbling and all, he had done it. He had stood his ground.

A grin broke across his face, wide and triumphant. Not perfect—not yet—but definitely, undeniably, nice.

___

For three nights, Draco waited.

Not because he believed Theo outright. But doubt was corrosive, and even if Warren was right and there was something hidden behind his nose, hovering in silence, it was well deserved to be obscured in disillusionment charms, hiding like a boy hunting ghouls.

The first two nights were empty—just long stone hallways yawning out into gloom. Glinting torches threw uneven light, and a portrait of a young witch peeling apples glanced at him with mild irritation but said nothing. He nearly left, almost surrendering.

But on the third night—when the corridor began to twist and breathe, folding in like it was tugging itself tight—something shifted.

Where there had been only stone, now stood a door. Plain, and wooden, like a pantry door, or a long-forgotten cupboard hatch. It was neither grand nor magical-looking. And yet, it was profoundly wrong. Or perfectly right.

His breath hitched, his instinct screaming to stay out. Yet he prodded his ear against the grim wood, his heart thumping like a drum in his chest.

Voices dripped through, leaking intoxicatingly like hypnotic mist —laughter, sincere laughter, then shouts of triumph. 

Then silence.

And in that silence, the door vanished.

Not a slam. Not a fade. It simply disappeared, like a breath never drawn.

Draco stood frozen, palm still raised where the door had been. The cold stone beneath his fingers was insensible, mockingly so. He stayed long after the echoes died, long after the corridor snapped back to its dull silence. 

For the first time in a long time, his introspections aligned.

They had something.

Something outside the old stories—beyond bloodlines, beyond rules, beyond power.

Something raw.

Something dangerous.

They had each other.

They were building something.

And they hadn't even realised he was watching.

⸻

He didn't tell anyone right away.

Not Blaise, who would have raised an arched brow and smirked, conveying something like, "Isn't it cute how Gryffindors think organising counts as rebellion?" Nor  Pansy, who'd have gibe, slanted it into a gag harsh enough to slice, and then pivoting it into weaponised gossip by breakfast. And not Theo—Theo who figured out before everyone, and would have darted far too delighted with himself informing him "I told you so" with that smug glisten dancing in his eyes.

So Draco kept it tucked deep in his chest like a blister and returned. Night after night. Sometimes the door appeared, sometimes it did not. But slowly, he conceded its cadence. It wasn't sporadic or shoddy. It unfurled only with pursuit. Purpose—not his, but someone else's.

And that pricked worse than any curse.

He tried uttering gibberish to the wall. Recited fitful flakes of ancient spells, meaningless enchantments he remembered, even striding in anguish a phoney imitation of Potter's restless energy. The hall remained mute. The portraits watched silently, as if mocking him.

It took him a week longer to comprehend.

That door didn't open for the curious.

It opened for the committed.

He was not committed—to anything except the sharp, gnawing certainty that he was standing on the wrong side of something far bigger than himself.

He slumped against the stone wall of the library, the rough texture pressing into his back like a reminder of his own tangled thoughts. Beside him, a glass—charmed to keep the firewhisky chilled—sat half-empty, his hands trembled ever so slightly, restless, as they toyed absentmindedly with a scrap of parchment. Jagged, half-formed words and sentences sprawled across it, but his mind was far from the task, instead circling endlessly around one unyielding thought.

Her.

The memory of her standing there, the library's hushed silence folding around them, reverberated like a spell far more potent than any incantation. No wand was raised, no fire or lightning unleashed—only her voice, calm and measured, yet sharpened with a precision that cut deeper than any curse. It wasn't the volume or force of her words, but the weight they carried, like the inevitability of nightfall. She wielded knowledge like a weapon—never crude or brutish, but subtle, relentless, unstoppable.

Her eyes—the sharp, penetrating brown of ancient wood—locked onto his with an intensity that unsettled him. Those eyes held riddles, and if he could bottle her tears, her truths buried beneath layers of silence and steel would be robbed for his eyes to possess, but instead, they dismantled his carefully constructed defences, tearing apart every argument like fragile parchment ripped page by page. 

She was a storm disguised as calm.

He'd seen her countless times, perched at a narrow wooden table buried beneath towers of books, the warm flicker of a single candle casting dancing shadows over her face. To the world, she appeared absorbed in her studies, unbothered by anything beyond the sanctuary of ink and paper. But Draco knew better. She didn't just read books; she absorbed worlds. She consumed knowledge with a hunger that rivalled life itself, maybe even his gluttony. 

And when she thought no one watched, he watched her. What he saw was not mere intelligence—it was raw, potent power, unmoved yet unequivocal. Power wrapped in silence, held tightly beneath a veneer of studious calm. She cloaked it behind words and walls, behind the fortress of her mind, but it was there—always pulsing beneath the surface. When she spoke, the air thickened, as if the very atmosphere bent to her will.

His thoughts flickered. He remembered how she stood unwavering in the face of his sharpest barbs, how her measured words had cut through the bluster and left him exposed. She had unravelled parts of him he didn't know existed, showing him how feeble his own convictions sometimes were.

There was an elusive something she carried—an invisible tether pulling at him, gnawing at the edges of his thoughts, demanding his attention like a relentless whisper in the dark. He tried to decipher it, to understand the essence of the force that made her so invincible. How could someone so young, so often dismissed by their peers, carry such a crushing weight of insight? How could she move through the world with such certainty, bending its rules quietly but unrelentingly?

Yet every time he neared that understanding, she slipped away, just beyond his grasp, sealed tight behind a mask of reason and quiet defiance. No delight, no harsh word, no matter of manipulation could tether her wholly. And it unnerved him to his core. Her existence unnerved him. 

His eyes drifted toward the window, where the pale moonlight seeped through heavy curtains, draping the room in silver shadows. The cold night air pressed against the glass, a fragile barrier between him and the growing storm beyond. He wondered, darkly, what she would do when it finally came to this—the reckoning, the collapse, the battle for everything they all feared.

The final hour loomed, and he was painfully aware they were all standing on the edge of a precipice—helpless, waiting for the inevitable fall.

⸻

The faint scent of melted wax mingled with the cold, musty air, heavy with the weight of words neither dared speak. He sat across from Theo, both cloaked in silence heavy enough to weigh the room down, fingers worn on ink stains from scribbling, and the fresh constellation tattoo—an intricate lynx—etched the inside of his wrist. 

The delicate Lynx constellation tattooed along the inside of his wrist glimmered faintly in the candlelight. His gaze flicked toward Draco, searching, probing beneath the surface of his carefully guarded expression.

"You saw it, didn't you?" Theo's voice was calm, but charged, like the quiet before a storm.

Draco said nothing.

"You felt it," Theo pressed gently, voice dropping lower. "That hum—like magic waking up again, like the world remembered how to breathe."

Still no answer. Draco's silence was a fortress.

Theo's lips curled into a small, knowing smile. "Told you Granger knows how to swallow her own shadow."

The scowl that darkened Draco's face wasn't just irritation. It was the weight of all the secrets they carried. "It's not just her."

"No," Theo agreed, eyes steady and grave. "It never was."

___

The dungeons wrapped around them, the echo of distant footsteps the only sound beyond the crackle of dying embers. Yet in Draco's mind, chaos roared like a tempest, relentless and sharp-edged. The halls stretched before him like a labyrinth of cold stone. 

He knew Goyle was loyal—blunt, but loyal—but that loyalty had long outgrown usefulness. Goyle's mind, slow and dull, was like a boulder on a razor's edge, ready to topple the delicate balance Draco so desperately tried to hold. The man's increasing recklessness, the bullying, the loud bravado—it grated on Draco's nerves, nibbling at the edges of his patience like acid on stone.

As he neared the common room, Goyle's booming laughter tore through the silence. Draco's jaw clenched as the unmistakable sound of someone being shoved hard against the wall cut through the air. 

Goyle's broad shoulders twitched—a breath caught, a flicker of uncertainty behind the dullness. His thick fingers gripped his wand with unnatural tightness, knuckles blanching. But it wasn't the wand Draco feared.

Suddenly, the air snapped. The crackle of raw magic shattered the quiet, harsh and jagged like shattered glass.

Goyle's arm jerked upward, convulsing as if possessed, the wand twisting in his grasp with violent, uncontrolled force. The spell spilt from him like a wild tempest, dark and desperate, ripping through the air with reckless abandon. It wasn't mere magic—it was raw chaos, untrained and untethered, brimming with dangerous power that threatened to consume everything around it.

Draco's mind screamed a warning—his instincts flared like lightning—yet before he could move, the world shifted.

The invisible force flared with an intense heat, sizzling through the air. The pressure in the room mounted as it pressed against Draco's chest, suffocating him, as though the very walls were closing in.

"Protego!" Draco shouted instinctively, his voice breaking the air like a crack of thunder. A shield of blue light erupted from his wand, surrounding him, deflecting the barrage of erratic magic from Goyle's outstretched hand. It shattered the tension in the room, but barely.

The shouting had ceased, yet the corridor remained charged—electric and dense, as if the very stones had absorbed the violent collision of magic, leaving a lingering pulse in the air. It hung thick like cobwebs spun from smoke and tension, sticky and suffocating, blanketing every surface with the residue of conflict. The first-year girl from Slytherin, small and trembling, with freckles dusting her cheeks like scattered stars, had already fled—her desperate footsteps bouncing off the walls, fading like a frightened heartbeat swallowed by the castle's endless halls. Her wand, still quivering in her grasp, was a fragile remnant of the chaos she'd fled.

Near the far wall, Goyle lay sprawled and broken, a hulking mass of bruised flesh and stunned limbs. Four spells had shattered his defences in quick succession, and now he barely stirred—his hand twitched once, twice, a flicker of life in the stillness, but it was almost meaningless in the aftermath.

Hermione lowered her hand slowly, the firestorm inside her ebbing as adrenaline's flood retreated. Her braid had unravelled, loose strands clinging to her sweat-dampened skin, the edges of her cloak darkened and sodden from the snow and battle. Her fingers shook as the final sparks of spellfire fizzled into silence.

And then she spun sharply, her breath catching as she confronted the one presence she hadn't expected to find amidst the ruin.

Malfoy.

He stood half-immersed in shadow, his posture deceptively casual—arms folded, tie loosened, his robe hanging off one shoulder as though he'd been caught unprepared yet determined to appear unfazed. His eyes glinted with something unreadable: a chill calculation veiled beneath his usual mask of aristocratic indifference. His wand hung loosely at his side, the tip grazing the cold stone floor, as if the weapon were an extension of his very being rather than a tool in his hand. Hermione's gaze sharpened, noting the faint scorch mark on the floor nearby

"Why?" 

That question burned hotter than any spell.

"I could say the same," he said smoothly, belying the undercurrent of control—and menace—beneath his words. "But let's not pretend this was an accident for either of us."

His tone was too deliberate, too rehearsed, like a predator savouring the slow unravelling of his prey. The weight behind his words pressed into Hermione's chest, each syllable laced with a calculated purpose.

Her eyes narrowed, suspicion tightening her jaw. "Then why are you here?! Why are you always in the place where chaos unfurls? What are you, a bad omen?"

Draco took a slow, deliberate step forward, the faintest scrape of his boots against the stone punctuating the silence. His gaze was unwavering, dissecting her with the precision of a knife's edge. "I could ask you the same. But I already know."

His voice dropped, thickening with shadowed meaning, curling into something darker than mere curiosity. "I've been listening."

Time seemed to stutter as her heart slammed against her ribs—ice suddenly flooding her veins. Her face blanched, colour draining away until only the sharp outline of her features remained against the dim light.

"Listening to what?" she whispered, her breath catching in her throat.

Without hesitation, his answer came, quiet yet louder than any shout could ever be. "The door." The word was whispered like a curse heavy and coiled with menace. "Your little army. The one behind the Room that disappears. I've heard your chants. The sparring. Potter's speeches." He paused, lips curling into a bitter, almost mocking smile. "You've built yourselves quite the revolution, haven't you?"

Hermione's lips pressed into a thin line, fingers tightening around her fist, raising her arm. She didn't lower her arm, though a flicker of doubt and something darker—fear?—brushed the edges of her mind.

"Relax," Draco said, voice dry and laced with scorn, but beneath it lay something more—a hint of pity or perhaps warning. "If I wanted to betray you, I would have done it long ago. I'm not here for that."

"So why are you here, then?" Her voice cracked just slightly—sharp, laced with suspicion and a rising tide of unease.

Draco's eyes glimmered in the half-light, sharp and unblinking as a predator's. "Because you're not as hidden as you think."

He looked past her then, sights flickering toward the distant corridor where the girl had disappeared, and something in his expression shifted. The cold malignancy she had grown used to catching thawed away, superseded by something opaque, shadows dancing on his face. "Because the children of war always believe their allegiance flags will protect them. Until the fire reaches."

Hermione stared at him, stunned, as the weight of his words hit her. 

"You believe in so much," he said, words testing bitter. "but you trust so little." His gaze held hers like a knife's edge, blunt yet capable of cutting deeper than any blade. "And I get it. I wouldn't trust them either."

Hermione's fingers dug into her cloak—her grip tightening, not out of anger but desperation, an anchor to reality. She bit back the flood of retorts swirling in her mind.

He cocked his head just, almost pitying, but not quite. "But you're too smart to think you'll survive this alone."

Her heart thundered painfully in her chest, breath caught somewhere between defiance and uncertainty. "I'm not alone," she whispered, voice cracking despite herself. "Why would you think I need you?"

Draco's eyes locked on hers, and for a fleeting moment, the hard veneer cracked—exposing something unguarded. Something that wasn't Malfoy's usual cold arrogance but something uncanny human. It made her hesitate, breath hitching in a way that felt like betrayal.

"No," he said quietly, his voice firm but soft as stone. "I think you'll need to use me. Like I'll use you." He didn't sneer. He didn't challenge. He simply stated it—an unvarnished truth neither could deny. "That's what makes this interesting."

The silence that followed wrapped around them like a shroud. His words hovered in the stale air, heavy and undeniable, unsettling her more deeply than any curse ever could. There was no room for illusions here—only raw, jagged reality.

Then his voice dropped even lower, shadows deepening in his gaze. "I've started something too. Not like Potter's crusade — no speeches, no heroes. Just people who understand how the system works, how to slip through the cracks. We're planning to survive the ashes when the world burns."

Hermione didn't speak. Her pulse hammered, her mind racing. He wasn't wrong. The war wasn't about idealism or glory — it was about survival. But trusting Malfoy? That was a poison she wasn't sure she could swallow.

"I want you in it" he said, reluctant now, almost vulnerable beneath the menace. "Not because I trust you. But because you might be the only one here ready to do everything for those without power."

Her breath caught, vision swimming with a storm of conflicting emotions. Every instinct screamed to push him away, to call him a liar, a traitor — a Malfoy through and through. Yet something in the set of his jaw, in the quiet weight of his words, hinted at something deeper. Not lies. Not manipulation. But survival. And maybe... a flicker of truth.

"What do you want from me?" she whispered, disbelief lacing every syllable, masking a darker undercurrent. "Leave Malfoy!"

He didn't answer right away. Instead, he let the silence stretch, thick and suffocating, like the calm before a storm. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely audible—too low to catch on the edge of the heavy air.

"When this war eats everyone else alive," he said slowly, "you might be the only one left who still knows how to cast."

She wanted to argue, to rail against him, to send packing his words as the venomous tournaments of a Slytherin prince. 

But the words stuck in her throat, drowned by the cold certainty settling deep in her bones.

Chapter Text

Anadiplosis — When the last word or phrase of one sentence or clause is repeated at the beginning of the next to build momentum or emphasis.

Draco never liked the know-it-all. 

That was the fallacy he convinced himself every time she roamed past him with ink on her digits and half a dozen magical approaches flowering behind her regard. In verity, he never asserted in figuring her out, which was far more dissipate. Not being propelled by legacy or pride, Granger was moved by reasoning, by confidence, by something tougher to obliterate than heritage: belief. And Draco had grown up in a world where belief was purchased and peddled parallel to property. But hers? It wouldn't tilt. Not to savagery, not to fear, not even to war. 

He watched her in classes, thriving in ancient runes like she was deciphering the bones of the world, mixing potions with surgical precaution, latinise pronunciation in the transfiguration class. She was a magical prodigy, hence he surrendered her a place. 

The moment she walked away, Draco leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

Nonetheless, he told no falsehood. He did not trust her. And yet, he agnize something in her that his most intimate allies deficit. His circle was sharp, pragmatic and cagey of outsiders, propelled by legacy and pride, but disinterested in anything that didn't promise instantaneous gain or power.  What they lacked was the impetuous and untamable blaze the know-it-all all hauled. The sort of fire that torched not just to endure, but to deplete; that could convert nippy dread into impetuous action, that could bend an ideational supposition into a harpoon sharp enough to sever coalitions and topple cartels.

He sat there for a beat longer, allowing the stillness to reign, allowing the drifts to fester. And then, with a flick of his wand and a hiss of displaced air, he vanished.

___

Back in the dorm, the mist vanished with an obsolete stillness, shadows twinkling like ghostly serpents from the low-burning green sconces mounted on the hued stone walls. The windows overlooked the Black Lake, which was a hectic sea of dark glass rippling in slow, mournful waves that caught the faint moonlight and fractured it into shimmering shards. The odour of new parchment and vague hints of burnt lumber lingered, mingling with something colder—anticipation, or more conceivably aversion.

Theo lounged across the brown chaise longue, his frame draped like a shadow, one bare foot dangling carelessly over the carved armrest. His other leg was bent, knee raised, holding the book in his lap, a thick tome: Concealment theory and wards, its leather was splintered and worn, the gold script on the cover catching the firelight. He tapped his wand in an irregular tempo against his knee similar to a heartbeat caught out of sync.

"You told her?" His voice was colloquial, flat almost, but the query hung in the air. He didn't ought to look up; he already knew.

Draco donned his robes, the heavy fabric sliding on his shoulders pooling like spilt ink, fingers twitching slightly as if shaking off hidden chains. "I told her enough," he said, his eyes fixed on the crackling scones that threw dancing shadows across the floor.

Theo's smirk was understanding, thumbing through the book's pages, brushing over the arcane characters and faded ink, yet his gaze was sharp. "Enough for her to think you want her involved," he said with dry amusement, "or enough to let her think she doesn't want to be?"

The silver-haired boy said nothing. He loosened his tie a bit, the knot lessening scarcely as he gaped into the embers, the flickers reflecting in his storm-grey eyes.

Theo eventually propelled himself up, the chaise squeaking underneath him, sweeping a hand through his untamed dark hair. There was something electric in his verdant gaze, despite the lazy veneer he modelled like a shield. "You do realise," his voice dropped to a whisper, "this doesn't end with some shaky alliance scribbled in the corner of a library alcove, right? Granger's building something. Potter's brewing storms of his own. Weasel is sniffing like a hound on a scent. We're not merging coalitions Draco. We're orbiting planets, and everyone's got their own damn moon to serve."

"I know."

"So?" Theo pressed forward, the firelight casting harsh lines across his face looking almost ancient. "What then?"

"We need a centre of gravity," he said with finally, "I'd rather choose one than wait for the pull to drag me somewhere I can't follow."

Theo let out a breath—half chuckle, half sigh. "Merlin help us all. You're turning to the Mudblood." His grin bent with a blend of apprehension and disbelief. "I believed hell might freeze over first."

Draco's mouth twitched, having a bitter taste in his mouth, it looked relinquished, but intractable all the same. "I'm turning to someone who refuses to die like a fool."

The silence settled between, the glooms prolonging and twining as if listening in.

Theo watched him for a heartbeat longer, "Alright. Let's say you're serious. Let's say this isn't just a desperate act born from trauma and broken hope—though they are both." He paused, eyes sharp. "Let's say we're actually going to do something. But let's say she won't accept."

"We are," Draco said, his voice increasing an octave. "And she will."

Theo raised a sceptical brow. "Let me finish. If she won't... then we need more than clever ideas and bitter ambition. We require groundwork. We require cover. We need—" His gaze flicked toward the shadowy corners of the room, dark and unknowable like a secret. His fingers twitched, like reaching for something that wasn't there. 

A cigarette. 

A voice. 

A pair of dark eyes. 

His ribs hurt reflexively, but he came back.

"A reason," Draco finished, his voice a hard whisper, waking him from his short trance. "She's clever, Theo. She's also dangerous. Give her a reason, and she'll take us all apart. I'd rather hand her a blade and hope she cuts the right throat."

Theo nodded slowly, the weight of his words sinking in. "We're just arming ourselves for the sake of the fire. And fire doesn't always burn what you want."

Draco stepped closer to the hearth, the light catching sharply on his cheekbones, the frost at his cuffs still not melted from outside, "I want a choice..."

Theo exhaled. "That's worse."

"I know."

Then for a long moment, they just stared at the fire.

___

The fire faltered in low whirr, its last whiffs launching hectic glooms that clung to the rough-hewn stone walls, golden embers wafting downward soothing upon the jagged underpart strewn with scattered pages and ancient dust, a faint aroma of another burnt parchment lingering in the air. Around Hermione, the disarray lay sprawled in every direction: tomes on anterior ages Defence Against the Dark Arts closed, their dog-eared pages twirled and smudged with footnotes; blocking charms filled with feverish missives and Magical Theory books teetered precariously, porters dense with thorough annotations that appeared to thump with no needed power.

For ten minutes she hadn't looked over a single remark, the phrases on the page blurring into mist as an irk voice reverberated in her thoughts in a brittle resignation, like a man who had already succumbed to a destiny he abhorred yet could not withdraw from it.

She hated it. 

Abhorred how it tore through her own justifications, reverberating with the hushed fears she had endeavoured to keep concealed beneath layers of sense and willpower. 

So it was true. 

The war will reach them. 

Her gaze raised from the worn parchment, sweeping to the towering bookshelves that rose like ancient sentinels into the shadowed rafters mirroring on cracked leather bindings mottled with age and countless fingerprints. The enclosure buzzed the warding charms, droning like a heartbeat beneath the surface, the silence that followed was thorough; no stomps, no familiar voices to tether her to certainty or shadowed verity; only the hefty quietness of her mind. 

"You believe in so much, yet you trust so little," his words permeated in the means of her reason like a curse.

Maybe he was right.

Her digits hauled instinctively to her temple, huddling unwaveringly, shutting her gaze, as if to steady the hurricane seething next to her. When she blinked open her lids, the rims of her peripheral eyesight flickered with faint contortion, the light briefly tilting on its axis.

She didn't return to spell notes or lecture scribbles.

Instead, her atremble hand scribbled like into a silent invocation.

Draco Malfoy

Her fingers commenced to quiver as the ink constructed the vacant letters, satirising the disarray churning inside her, and with a hasty gesture, her quill's blade tip lacerated the characters with a thin line. 

D̶r̶a̶c̶o̶ ̶M̶a̶l̶f̶o̶y̶.

The blaze effulged, shadows lurched on the rafters in the library, conveying a narrow line of cold sweat curving around her, bringing her attention to a concealed place. Harry strode from his stashing, finally finding her, starting to speak. 

"You okay?"

"Just thinking." 

Her voice was calm, too calm. "Did you—did you find anything in the right wing?"

Harry shook his head. "Mostly Tory propaganda. Same theory‑only rubbish. I swear, if Umbridge sanitises one more book, I'll—" He broke off, noticing the crossed‑out. "What's that?"

Hermione's eyes flicked indistinctly to the parchment, "Nothing. Go look in the left wing."

Harry didn't push. He'd learned better than to poke the dragon. Instead, he bobbed his head once and left her to the firelight.

She watched him go, her body quivering ever so slightly as she slowly rose, as if compelled by the need to hold herself together, congregating her scattered books and papers with the efficiency of someone used to covering upheaval behind edict.

Tonight, his name was no more than ink on paper. 

___

The coolness of the night seeped through the cracks in the windows, curling its way beneath the floorboards and dancing playfully across the surfaces of the room. It brushed against the skin like a gentle caress, even finding its way under thick blankets, sending a shiver down the spine.

Abruptly, a piercing cry halted the ataraxy, reverberating in the lit chamber, breaking the silence like a glass smashing on the floor. The sound hung in the air, as glooms glinted jittery in the junctions, refuting the respite that had earlier enveloped the enclosure.

Ron heretofore came to be conscious from his rest, hauled from by something just off the edge of his REM. He blinked into the evening, bleary and disoriented—but he heard it.

A scream.

It didn't chime like affliction. Not exactly. It was worse—it sounded like an ache, like anguish. Like the last breath of someone who didn't wish for death.

"Harry!"

He shot upright so quick his sheets knotted around his legs, heart hammering in his chest as he squinted toward the bed next to his, the one shrouded in shadow, where he could just make out the fierce action beneath the coverings.

Harry was trouncing.

Not restless. Not quaver from a nightmare. His whole body was jerking in fluctuant, quaking movements, his fists grasping the cover so tight his knuckles were bone white. Sweat clung to his forehead, soaking into his hairline, murmuring—but it wasn't words. Not really. Just broken syllables, half-spoken names, curses, sobs, pleas.

"No—no, don't—please—stop—no—"

"Harry!" 

Ron dropped to his knees by the bedside and grabbed his friend's shoulder, shaking him hard. "Harry, mate, it's alright, you're dreaming, wake up, come on, wake up, you're safe—"

Harry's eyes snapped open.

And for a second, they weren't green.

They were black, so dilated it was like staring into a void. Like there was something else looking back through them. He stared straight through Ron, not seeing him. The whites of his eyes glistened red with tears.

He wheezed like the world blasted back into him all at once his hands unclenching slowly, fingers wiggling like he still felt something in them. Blood. A same cored wand. The cold kiss of death.

Ron didn't pull away. He kept a steady grip on Harry's shoulder, grounding him. "You're here," he said gently. "It was just a dream. You're alright. You're in the dormitory. No one's here but us."

Harry shook his head once in a jerking move like he was making an effort to strike the portrayals loose. His voice was scratchy when he conveyed, practically unrecognisable. "It wasn't just a dream," he croaked. "It was him again. Voldemort. And Lucius Malfoy. There was so much blood on the floor, I couldn't—"

He broke off in a cry, as if the words couldn't make it past his throat.

Ron's face was drawn, pale in the moonlight filtering through the window. "You don't have to explain it right now," he said. "You don't have to relive it again. Just breathe."

They reposed like that for a juncture—Harry still shaking, Ron crouched beside him like a silent anchor. The rest of the dormitory was dead quiet, watching them. 

"Do you want to sit by the fire for a bit?" Ron asked, in a careful voice. 

Harry hesitated then just nodded once.

Ron stood and pulled his blanket off the bed, draping it around Harry's shoulders as he helped him stand. Harry's legs were shaky, like whatever dream he'd been dragged through had worn him raw. Together, they padded out of the dormitory, down into the common room, where the last embers of the fire still glowed faintly.

Ron mend it back to life with a spout of his wand. The flames flashed, flinging flickering effulgence across Harry's complexion. He looked sunken and tormented. As if he hadn't returned fully to himself yet.

He just sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder, offering warmth and silence.

They didn't voice after that.

___

The vociferation of the throng adheres to the atmosphere long after Gryffindor's bruising victory over the amicable game with the Hufflepuff. The stands had emptied into the cool November afternoon, but the pitch buzzed with leftover tension—half joy, half resentment. 

Harry, still gripping his Firebolt, stood off to the side near the Gryffindor team as they chortled and clapped each other on the back, but his stomach wasn't light, wasn't soaring like in every game. 

His muscles hurt, his ribs screamed from the collision, and his head was still ringing from the blow, he needed Ron to be there to alleviate him. He hadn't even caught the Snitch—Ginny had, her triumphant grin still flashing in the distance, but all he could hear was the mocking echo of Cedric Diggory's name in his mind every time someone mentioned Hufflepuff.

It wasn't long before the Hufflepuffs filed off the pitch, yellow-and-black robes splashed with mud and bruises around the field. Some wore half-hearted smiles, but most carried looks sharper than any Bludger. At the head of them, broom in hand and grievance burning in his eyes, was Zacharias Smith. He walked with a swagger he hadn't earned, his voice already raised before he even stopped in front of Harry.

"Some Seeker you are, Harry," Zacharias sneered loudly enough for a knot of lingering students to hear. "You've got the people enraptured for you like you're Merlin reborn, but everyone knows you only win because the Snitch pities you. The Boy Who Lived—more like the Boy Who Gets Lucky."

"You want to say that again?" Harry's voice was soft, and uncaring.

Zacharias smirked, feeding off the attention, his voice dripping false innocence. "What? That you've got more glory than skill? That you stumble into victories and everyone acts like you planned it? Please, you're a circus trick, not a Seeker.

Harry had been stretched with nerves since the game began bottled up so tightly it burned every time he glanced toward Umbridge's toad-like smirk up in the stands. He was already playing on borrowed time—Umbridge eyeing him like a foe, deferring for an excuse to punish him. Ginny had whispered to him before he mounted his broom: "Keep your temper, Harry. Don't give her the chance."

Harry halted dead, grip tightening until his knuckles whitened. Ginny, still flushed from the match, mumbled being Neville, "Leave it, Harry," but Smith wasn't done.

"And that's not even counting the DA nonsense," Zacharias pressed on taunting. "Playing soldier it's dangerous. The same as you were with Cedric—"

A surge went through the crowd. Even those who'd never liked Harry flinched at the cruelty of it. Harry's face went ghostly, his jaw toiling soundlessly for a moment as though Zacharias had punched the breath from his lungs. Ginny's hand twitched toward her wand. Luna muttered under her breath, "Too far, Smith." But Zacharias stood smug, feeding off the silence he'd carved, as if daring anyone—Harry most of all—to strike first, knowing they couldn't do anything. 

"What? He can't stand hearing it? Can't stand knowing he's useless? We all saw what happened last June. Diggory was twice the wizard you'll ever be, and he's dead because of you."

Ernie Macmillan, came with his usual bluster stripped to steel. "There's a line Zacharias and you've crossed it."

Harry's jaw tightened, his knuckles white against the edge of the bench. For a heartbeat he looked as though he might explode, yet, he forced himself still. 

He leaned back on the bench, smug and self-satisfied, looking at Harry with that squint that felt like he was dissecting him under glass. "I mean, you all act like he was some kind of martyr, but maybe the truth is he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You were there, Potter. You were the only one who was there, weren't you? Maybe if you'd actually done something—"

Harry's skin felt too tight, his chest too small for the breath he needed. "Go. On," he said, his voice trembling with fury.

Zacharias smirked. "Maybe if you weren't too busy playing hero, Cedric wouldn't have died. But hey—why stop now? Why not start acquainting another little army to get themselves killed by or for you? Worked wonders the first time."

His fist adjoined with Zacharias' jaw before he'd even registered his own motion, the crack echoing like a spell discharged in the pitch. Gasps erupted. Zacharias stumbled back, clutching his face, but Harry didn't stop. Months of swallowed grief, of clenched teeth, of sleepless nights and Umbridge's venom—everything he'd buried clawed its way out of hell in one volcanic explosion. He drove him back, fists slamming again and again, each punch punctuating the name Zacharias had spat like poison.

Cedric's eyes. Cedric's hand slipping from his. Cedric's body landed. 

"Don't—" a blow to the ribs, "you—" a crack against the shoulder, "dare say his name like that!"

Chaos split instantly. Ginny shoved past Neville to grab Harry's arm, yelling, "Harry, stop it! STOP!" Her voice panicked, but he barely heard her. Zacharias sneered through the blood.

Harry was panting, blood spattered across his knuckles. He tried to rip his arm free of Ginny's hold, but she tightened her grip with a strength that surprised even him. "Enough, Harry!" she snapped, her eyes were fierce, cutting through his rage, "He's not worth it. Don't you dare give him that power."

Zacharias, still bleeding, muttered something under his breath, but didn't get another word out before Ginny whirled on him, wand drawn. 

"You think it's a joke? You think that's an excuse to pick him apart?" Her words were burning through the air. "You're pathetic, Smith. You'd be the first one dead out there, and you know it."

His frown faltered under her glare, but Umbridge's delighted clapping filled the silence. 

"Potter and Weasley!"

The honey-slick voice of Umbridge cut through the crowded place from a few feet away, toad-like face with a delighted smile. Her quill clutched like a dagger in her stubby hand. She was glowing, practically buzzing with glee.

"Oh, my, my," she cooed, waddling closer, her eyes shining with grotesque triumph. "Violence against another student? Mister Potter, did you launch yourself over a student? Miss Weasley—wand drawn, threatening language, oh dear, oh dear, this is most unbecoming."

Her voice was thick with false pity, as though she mourned their behaviour while secretly drinking it in like nectar. She clasped her plump hands together against her chest, eyes darting gleefully from Harry's bloodied fists to Ginny's shaking wand. "What a sight you make! Gryffindor's 'finest' resorting to Muggle thuggery and cheap intimidation. How very disappointing... and yet, how very predictable."

Gasps and whispers flared behind them—students pressing closer to watch, some wide-eyed with horror, others pale with dread. Harry's pulse hammered in his temples. Ginny's fingers jerked from Harry's arm, but she stood her ground, her wand still tight in her grip, her eyes darkened in burning with a fury that would have cowed anyone but Umbridge.

"Leave her out of it," Harry snapped, still shaking with the echoes of his own violence. He stepped forward. 

Umbridge's grin widened, showing her small, gleaming teeth. "Oh, how gallant," she crooned. "But I'm afraid yours and Miss Weasley's conduct speaks for itself. Wand raised in anger, such dreadful language—why, I might almost mistake her for a common duelist in Knockturn Alley instead of a sparkling student!" She tittered in a noise that sounded like nails dragging across glass.

"She was stopping me," Harry bit out. His voice shook but didn't waver. "I threw the punches. It's my fault."

"Harry—" Ginny's protest came sharp, furious, but he cut her a warning glance.

Ginny flushed scarlet rage across every line of her face. Her wand hand trembled—not with fear, but with the raw need to hex the smirk off Umbridge's face.

Harry's fists curled tighter, pain sparking fresh in his bloodied knuckles, but his voice was steady. "You said it yourself. I throw myself over another student. I attacked Smith. Ginny was trying to stop me. She doesn't deserve your discipline."

The crowd was so quiet now that Harry could hear the distant shuffling of shoes on stone as more students crowded to see.

"Well then," she purred, "if you insist on confessing, who am I to deny you? How very... heroic. How very foolish." Her eyes gleamed cruelly as they flicked between him and Ginny. "Don't worry, Miss Weasley. I shan't forget your... involvement. A note in your record will suffice—for now. But as for you, Mr. Potter..."

The proscription came swiftly. "Your house will lose all the points. You are also finished with Quidditch, permanently. And we'll have a very long... chat later. 

___

Later—the punishments were still handed out, and Harry had been marched off to detention. In the Gryffindor common room, Ginny sat with Hermione and Ron near the fire. "I tried to stop him," Ginny said in a tight voice. Her arms folded against her chest as though bracing herself. "I tried to drag him back, but he—he can't let it go, Hermione. He hears Cedric's and he falls apart. He'd rather fight until he's bloody than walk away."

The curly-haired girl sighed, her shoulders sagging under the weight of all of it. "That's exactly what they want, Ginny. To draw him out, to make him lose control. He knew exactly what he was doing."

"I should have been there," Ron said, tugging at his tangled red hair. "He's reckless. Always has been. He doesn't think—he just explodes. Zacharias knew exactly what buttons to push, and Harry walked straight into it."

"It's not your fault that you got detention." Hermione pressed her lips together, hugging her arms tight around herself.

A moment of stillness lingered between them.

"He's hurting," Hermione said finally.

She wanted to defend Harry, but all the words caught in her throat.

Ginny's gaze softened for a fraction of a second before hardening again. "We're all hurting. But the difference is the rest of us don't have the luxury of throwing punches every time someone opens their mouth and tells them something clever." 

___

"...but, you're clever, aren't you? I thought maybe you'd know what they do and tell Malfoy," he had muttered, scratching the back of his neck. 

Montague had always been... well, Montague. Not dim, but he wasn't the Slytherin House's brightest emerald in the crown. He had the kind of solid, broad-shouldered presence that made him useful for intimidation, and a kind of loyalty that came more from habit than conviction.

There was a certain simplicity to him, a relief with following orders rather than making them, which had earned him a peculiar spot in Slytherin's hierarchy—never quite at the centre of the web, but never excluded from it either. He was tolerated, occasionally mocked, but mostly used, more often than not, Montague natural habitat was to be found outside the library with that dazed look he always had, the one that suggested he was constantly trying to remember where he left his wand, perpetually catching up on a conversation that had ended minutes prior, and yet, for all his fogginess, he had an irritating way of stumbling into places of importance.

When Dolores Umbridge introduced him to the Inquisitorial Squad, Montague's chest swelled with pride.

And, naturally, the tremendous philosopher that he was, he brought most of the information to Nott.

"I've seen them," Montague sizzled, skimming over his shoulder. "They meet late, Potter, Granger, all the Weasleys. More of them too. They're organising something. Maybe a bloody rebellion."

Theo, slanting against the wall with the sluggishest sort of slump, swished imaginary lint off his vestments. He seemed like he'd only just awakened or was about to drift again. His red eyes barely focused on Montague, with a spark of amusement.

"A rebellion?" Theo reiterated, dry as parchment. "What's next, pitchforks, torches and "ça ira"? Or are they bouncing directly to guillotines?"

Montague scowled, clearly not in the mood for Theo's humour. "I'm serious. If Umbridge finds out—"

"—then Umbridge gets her pink knickers in a twist," Theo cut in smoothly, his lips quirking. "Congratulations, Montague. You've cracked the grand conspiracy of... kids doing homework together."

"They're planning something," he whispered, eyes darting around, like he was in espionage and not, well, Montague.

Theo licked his lips humming. "Mm. People are always planning something, Montague. Some of us plan which socks to wear in the morning. Big mystery."

He scowled. "No, I mean it. Potter and the lot. Some kind of secret club. I heard Diggory's girlfriend mutter about it. I'll bet it's dangerous."

Theo arched an eyebrow lazily. "Secret club? What, like Gobstones Anonymous?"

Montague flushed, ignoring the joke. "I'll find out. And when I do, Umbridge will reward me."

"Sure," Theo said, sitting alone in the dormitory. "You'll be the hero of the Ministry. They'll probably give you your own chocolate frog card."

___

Harry sat alone in the dormitory, the fire dying low, the others asleep or pretending to be. His wand hand ached with every throb of his blemish, the skin raw and scabbed from Umbridge's quill, the words carved into him. I must not hurt anyone. 

The gashes on his knuckles throbbed too, purple bruises swelling where Zacharias's face had met bone. He flexed his fingers, whispering to himself words he didn't even mean to say, the kind that tasted like he chewed glass. 

"Killer," he muttered in parseltongue his breath, "Killer."

The dormitory was silent around him, but Harry sat there, bent forward, whispering the word again and again until the sound broke into something else, shaking in the dark.

Cedric's eyes. Cedric's hand slipping from his. Cedric's body landed.

And still, in the back of his mind, his eyes stared at him every time he closed his own.

___

Sirius's eyes swam into focus staring into Harry's greens, lined in the blazing shadows, the grimy of Grimmauld Place flickering faintly behind him. His expression was harsh, skimming more like a caged animal than a man.  

"So," Sirius' voice was coarse, but entwined with something that tolled like entertainment, "you're out of the team. Permanently. Because you lost your temper and bloodied up Smith."

Harry opened his mouth to defend himself, but Sirius raised a hand, closing his eyes. "Don't bother. I know you, Harry. And I know you didn't do it inadvisely. Don't think I'm blind to the fact that a lot of them have been needling you behind your back. Still—" he leaned closer to the flames, his voice dropping "—I can't tell you how bloody furious it makes me that they threw you off. 

Harry's shoulders stiffened. "He was bad mouthing off about Cedric. I lost my temper."

"Good," Sirius said without hesitation, "If anyone deserved a punch, it was that little prat. Shame you got snagged. Still—bloody unfair they tossed you out. James would've hexed him for less."

Harry felt a ripple of both pride and agitation at the comparison. "Yeah, perhaps. But my dad didn't have Umbridge stare down his neck every second of the day. She's just waiting for me to slip. She wants me gone. She wants everyone to think I'm impetuous, and dangerous and capable of violence." His jaw tightened. "And I gave her exactly what she wanted."

Sirius's eyes burned brighter. "Don't let her win. Don't you dare let her twist this into something it's not."

Harry clenched his still-aching fists. "You make it sound so simple. But it's not. Every time I walk into class, every time I sit down in the Great Hall, half the school looks at me like I'm lying, like I'm mad. And now they'll look at me like I'm violent, too. Smith got what was coming, yeah, but I'm the one paying for it. And what's worse—" his voice caught, but he pressed on, sharper now, "—I keep thinking Cedric's family will hear about it. That they'll think I used his name as an excuse to throw a punch. Like I'm dragging him through the mud. And I can't—" Harry broke off, swallowing hard. "I can't stand that."

Sirius leaned in. "Harry. Listen to me. You don't answer them. Not to Smith. Not to the Ministry. Not even to bloody Umbridge. You answer yourself. And if you hit him because he spat on Cedric's memory, then you hit him for the right reason. Don't twist that into shame."

Harry's brow furrowed, "But what if they're right, Sirius?

"Then you learn," Sirius shot back immediately, his voice harsh but steady. "Harry—you're young. And sometimes the world doesn't know what to do with you."

Sirius's expression softened, just slightly, though his tone stayed edged with steel. "You're becoming who you were meant to be. A fighter. A leader. That frightens them. It frightens Umbridge, it frightens the Ministry, and Merlin knows it frightens Voldemort. You think he isn't watching you? He is. And every time you refuse to back down, every time you push forward despite what they throw at you—you scare him more."

Harry looked down at his hands, "I don't want to be someone who scares people."

Sirius's laugh was sharp, almost bitter. "Then you're already better than what we used to be at your age. But mark my words, Harry. There are worse things to be than feared. You can be feared and still be loved. James was. So was Lilly. Fear isn't the enemy. Wasting your life with it is."

Harry lifted his gaze, meeting Sirius's stormy eyes through the flames. "So what am I supposed to do now? If not Quidditch, if not anything normal, then what?"

"You know what? Maybe this is for the best."

Harry blinked confused. "The best? How—"

"Because," Sirius interrupted, "you've got more important things to do than chase after a Quaffle. You've got your army. That's your field. That's where you matter. Teaching them, equipping them, building something the rest of the world can't even begin to imagine—that's your Quidditch now. And you'll do more good in that dingy little room than Smith and the rest will ever do in a lifetime of winning trophies."

Harry frowned, though a flicker of reluctant pride stirred in his chest. "The DA is just a bunch of kids learning spells. It doesn't feel like enough. Half the time, I don't even know what I'm doing."

"You know more than they do. And that's enough. You're giving them a chance when no one else will. That's leadership, Harry. And don't underestimate what it means to people to have someone stand in front of them and say, 'I believe you can change the world.'"

Harry was quiet for a long moment. Then, his voice low: "Sometimes I wonder if they only follow me because they don't know what else to do."

Sirius's grin was sharp and wolfish. "That's leadership too. You think half the people who followed Dumbledore in the first war knew what the hell they were doing? No. They followed him because he gave them a light in the dark. You're a fighter, Harry. They can punish you, try to put you in a singular spot, but you know as well as I do, they'll come to rely on you. They'll need you. And when that time comes, you'll be ready, because you didn't waste your time chasing some bloody Quaffle while the world burned."

His voice cracked slightly on the last word, though he covered it with a laugh. He shook his head amusement flickering in his eyes. "Merlin, I sound just like Moody. But he's right. He's always been right. And you—you're already ten times the fighter I wish I was at your age."

Harry's eyes stung, though he didn't look away. "Sometimes I wish you were here. Not in the fire. Not trapped there. Just—here."

"I'd trade anything to stand by your side, Harry. But since I can't... you'll have to fight twice as hard for both of us."

Harry's voice, when it came, was quiet but steady. "I will."

Sirius's grin honed. "That's my boy."

____

The Room of Requirement was cloaked in the esoteric glow of charmed lanterns, abiding its alteration into a war room. Shadows danced on the walls, blazing with haver glow, tossing fragmented reflections of their complexions in half-light.

They disputed so quietly their hush speechlessness itself was wailing.

Harry stood stringent like a drawn bowstring, arms crossed tightly across his chest as if bracing himself against a tempest he couldn't influence. The lightning bolt scar half-hidden beneath is itching with an alerting pulse. 

His voice finally halted through the hefty hush, holding more indictment than inquiry. "Do you hear yourself, Hermione? You're saying we shouldn't depend on them."

Hermione clasped his regard with unwavering composure, tucking her arms across the worn stack of books and crumpled parchments. Her eyes were a steady mix of conviction and a numb clarity bred of countless sleepless nights spent piecing together. "I'm saying we're not like them," she responded.

Harry's jaw clenched so tightly the muscles twitched beneath his skin. "We are like them! The Order protects people. They're on our side."

She shuddered her head gently, but with an immovable certainty, like a mountain refusing to bow to the wind. "The Order will protect you, Harry. Because you're Harry Potter." Her voice softened, "But the rest of us?" She let the query hang for an instant. "They'll manage us. Sacrifice us without hesitation. War doesn't care about how many N.E.W.T.s you've passed, or how brave you are, or if your parents are Muggles who can barely spell Expelliarmus—let alone cast it."

Harry's eyes flashed. "That's not fair."

"No," Hermione agreed, voice barely above a whisper. "It's not."

She stepped forward, the soft glow of the lantern catching the thoughtful perseverance intaglio into her features, the set of her jaw, the unwavering focus in her eyes, and the tightness in her lips.

"Do you remember what Sirius told us last year? When he told us about Moody—about the real Moody, the one they said would lead reconnaissance for the Order." She paused. "But they sent someone else. A boy—fresh out of school, barely more than a child. And he died! They never told his parents where his body is."

Harry's breath caught. His jaw slackened as if the very air had been stolen from his lungs. His gaze shifted, falling to the rune-covered wall beside him.

Hermione's voice trembled then, barely perceptible, as if the truth she spoke. "They said it was for the greater good."

She swallowed hard, quelling the deluge of emotions clawing at her chest. "I want to believe in them. I really do." She pivoted her eyes to Harry's, searching for some shared hope in the depths of his pain. "But... I can't forget."

Harry's shoulders slumped.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. 

The only sounds were the soft hum of ancient shielding wards that flickered faintly around the room, and somewhere in the shadowed depths of the castle, the steady drip of water echoing like a metronome marking time in a war that showed no mercy.

Finally, Hermione veered around, progressing with deliberate composure. She compiled her quill and wand steadily despite the squall seething inside her. Watching the runes started lined with plans for their next covert lesson.

Light jinxes, defensive charms, anything that might offer even the smallest shield against the darkness closing in.

"We do this," she said, her voice resolute, echoing softly against the stone. "Because we can't rely on anyone else to keep us safe."

Harry's gaze lingered on her retreating, the golden glow from their war room flickering in his eyes like fragile embers. The shielding curl they had conjured now felt as fragile as glass, fragile as the fragile lives they had to protect.

As Hermione slipped out of the room and into the cold corridors beyond, her thoughts drifted back to Malfoy's haunting words: "Children are sold in wars that swear to protect them" and for the first time, the truth resonated in her bones. 

Behind her, Harry remained silent standing in the circle of light, alone, in a war that had never promised mercy.

She ascended the spiral stairs, her footsteps muffled by a charm against the stone, and by the time she propelled through the portrait hole, the Gryffindor common room was vacant, conserving the relinquished embers glistening faintly in the hearth. The taciturnity heeded her up into the dormitory, as if the castle itself insisted on steering after her forsaken quarrelled hunch into her chamber as she pulled the tomes and notations. Moonlight streamed through the towering windows, splintering into a delicate lattice of silver filigree that spilt across the worn flagstone floor, pooling in ghostly patches beneath the heavy wooden desks and threadbare rugs scattered, blazing on the sheets of parchment she'd pulled from the bottom of her bag. The edges were worn, the ink smudged in places from weeks past. At the meridian of the parchment, in neat penmanship, was one name cut. 

D̶r̶a̶c̶o̶ ̶M̶a̶l̶f̶o̶y̶. 

She yielded to the parchment, penning with a brisk direction of her quill his name besides. 

Draco Malfoy.

She did not strike it out. Rather, she drew a single streak. Then a second line, darker, as though to anchor it in place. 

D̳͞͞r̳͞͞a̳͞͞c̳͞͞o̳͞͞ ̳͞M̳͞͞a̳͞͞l̳͞͞f̳͞͞o̳͞͞y̳͞͞

___

Heyday tardily on the evening, her dormitory lay encircled,  the hour huddling deep into the dusk, far past curfew, when the castle's heartbeat slowed to a slumbering pulse, the kind that surrounded the obsolete gravel in a tranquil hush.

She progressed in a thorough fashion with light strides, instinctively detouring the creaky floorboards that might betray her presence. Her fingers brushed the carved canopy of her four-poster bed as she passed.

The same path had been drafted myriad stints before, in the restless hours when sleep refused her, when her thoughts spun wild and unyielding, searching desperately for something to cling to some fragment of certainty.

Her bag landed softly on the desk, the thud swallowed by the muffling charm. From within, she drew out a single sheet of parchment, its edges frayed and softened from endless folding and unfolding mottled and worn. This had once been a study sheet, however now, nearly everything had been meticulously crossed out. Jagged lines and scrawled question marks tangled over the page like a storm.

Only one name remained unblemished, stark and solitary against the chaos:

   ?        ??

?D̳͞͞r̳͞͞a̳͞͞c̳͞͞o̳͞͞ ̳͞M̳͞͞a̳͞͞l̳͞͞f̳͞͞o̳͞͞y̳͞͞?

             ?

She stared at it for a long time, composing an index of observation about him:

• He's cruel, and not just to Gryffindors. I've captured sight of how he idles his own house too—he'll cut down anyone if it makes him look stronger, half the time he doesn't even need to say anything—he can snigger and make you feel two inches tall, 

• Vain, 

• Spoiled,

• Arrogant, 

• Unbearably sure of his convictions,

• He likes getting under people's skin.

• But here's the thing: 

I don't think it's real. Not all of it. I've caught sight of him when he thinks no one is in the library, gathered in great tombs about legal jurisprudence whatever it was for him to be interested in historical multidisciplinary context or the relationship between law and morality. 

• When his friends aren't around to laugh at his quips or when a teacher doesn't care to give him the attention he thinks he deserves. He looks... different then. More loosen. 

• He's clever. I'll give him that,

• He's competitive, in a good and bad way, 

Nevertheless, that was a routine in solitary observation. 

Scrutinising the son of a notorious Death Eater for inklings of black magic.

And now? Now it was no longer a matter of scrutiny or suspicion.

Her fingers tauten their grip on the parchment's rims, her knuckles paling from the force. 

She hadn't uttered an assertion of it—not to Harry, not to Ron, and especially not to Ginny, whose searing devotion she both revere and jittered. Anyhow, what could she enunciate? That the bloke who formerly phoned her "mudblood", nowadays met her eyes with pleading, whilst he was beseeching for comprehension, and acquittal? That below the pointed rims of vanity, she caught the overtiredness of a man sunken out by contrition?

It wasn't leniency she felt—not yet. Nor was it simple pity.

It was something far deeper.

Commendation of the verging war and a collective foe. 

She sat cross-legged, wand alight beside her. 

Her eyes fell to the name again, contemplating if she should strike a line through it—severing the thread between them with one clean walkout. Then she did it. 

D̶̶̶̶̳͞͞r̶̶̶̶̳͞͞a̶̶̶̶̳͞͞c̶̶̶̶̳͞͞o̶̶̶̶̳͞͞ ̶̶̳͞M̶̶̶̶̳͞͞a̶̶̶̶̳͞͞l̶̶̶̶̳͞͞f̶̶̶̶̳͞͞o̶̶̶̶̳͞͞y̶̶̶̶̳͞͞

____

Torches glowed low and slashed into the darkness, their flames hooded under layers of charm, casting a dim, reverent light that flickered off the black iron gates and warped glass casings. Dust hung in the air like a memory, bewildering only when a shelf sighed under the weight of bypassed pages or the slow shifting of ancient bindings.

She moved between the rows like a ghost, her footsteps silenced by charm, her wand hovering beside her shoulder, emitting a thin silver gleam that touched each spine with spectral light. The shadows didn't flinch from her—they curled closer, drawn in as if recognising her now as one of their own.

It was colder tonight, not just in temperature, but in pressure. The kind of cold that settled beneath your skin and lived in your blood, that whispered of old magic and older silence. A year ago, this place had made her breath catch in wonder. Now, it felt like a mausoleum.

She halted beside a warped shelf lined with texts bound in cracked dragonhide and stitched sinew. Her hand hovered over the spines, each one illegal in a different decade. Once she would've hesitated. Now she simply reached.

The book she pulled was older than the Ministry itself.

Magi Obscuri: Renversements défensifs par l'interférence des ombres. 

The ink was uneven, percolated by time and condensation, the runes hemmed with silver that didn't glint, but palpitated incessantly, like a deer's heartbeat entangled beneath the page.

No guide. No friendly annotations from cautious professors. Just the dead weight of knowledge no one thought she should have.

Her thumb skimmed the rim of the page, and she felt the thrum of old enchantments, still half-alive.

Brilliant. But not trusted, she thought bitterly.

She put it on the table. 

She exhaled sharply through her nose and stepped back, hauling her bag off her shoulder, letting it slump onto the floor with the whisper of leather against stone. Her knees bent slowly as she sank down, cross-legged in the aisle between shadowed shelves—like a child at storytime, if the story were made of knives.

One book opened with reluctance. 

Another didn't respond until she whispered a forgotten dialect she barely remembered studying. 

And then she found it: Théorie de l'invocation dépourvue de baguette: Vol. II—the lost cornerstone of half the work she'd been trying to build.

She flipped through the yellowed pages in frenzy, the sigils were so dense they could've been meant for runesmiths, not students. And then she saw it.

Dual-casting ward structure. Opposing polarity channels. Energy dispersal lattice.

The exact point where her spells had always collapsed.

The diagram stared back at her like it had been waiting.

And something inside her cracked.

It wasn't relief. It was rage. 

Rage that things were kept away from her. 

Knowledge came with responsibility, as though ignorance hadn't killed more people than any spell ever had. 

Her hand curled around the edge of the page until the parchment wrinkled beneath her grip.

McGonagall's voice echoed, prim and gentle: "Some magics are not taught because they're not meant to be."

Then Snape's, in his sharper tone from a conversation never meant to resurface:

"'Meant to be,' Miss Granger, is the language of people who have the luxury of not bleeding."

And now she bled.

Not in peau. But in oversights. In Parvati's scorched arms. In Seamus's broken fingers. In all the people who went to detention for having to act stupid so they wouldn't get caught. Harry is being branded a murderer. In how close she had come to losing everything, and everyone, because she didn't have what was locked behind this gate.

Her eyes dropped to her bag, fingers brushing the leather strap as her mind shifted to him.

D̶̶̶̶̳͞͞r̶̶̶̶̳͞͞a̶̶̶̶̳͞͞c̶̶̶̶̳͞͞o̶̶̶̶̳͞͞ ̶̶̳͞M̶̶̶̶̳͞͞a̶̶̶̶̳͞͞l̶̶̶̶̳͞͞f̶̶̶̶̳͞͞o̶̶̶̶̳͞͞y̶̶̶̶̳͞͞

To the words he'd left with her like flares tossed into darkness:

"If I wanted to betray you, I would have done it long ago."

"I want you in it... not because I trust you. But because you might be the only one here ready to do everything for those without power."

"When this war eats everyone else alive," he had said, gaze too sharp for a boy his age, "you might be the only one left who still knows how to cast."

Her mouth twisted. Maybe it was manipulation. Maybe it wasn't.

But he wasn't wrong.

Hermione stared down at the book.

She closed the cover with reverence, binding it in a quiet stasis charm. Her wand flicked out, pulling it into the lining of her bag like contraband.

Then she stood with her spine straight, walking outside. 

⸻

The hall outside the Charms classroom was swathed in shades, with obsolete stone partitions slick from the moistness that clung to the walls. The faded twinkle of dampness seized the tinge of fire-setter, their conflagration toiling to push back the encroaching darkness, launching shadows that footed and lengthened across the ragged veneers.

She pressed her hand flat against the rough-hewn wall, the jagged texture biting faintly, wiping the sweat from her palm.

Her heart swatted loudly to deluge reason, reverberating in syncopated tides against her ribs, like a drum in her ears. 

She apprised herself that she was prepared; she had rehearsed the words and toughened herself during innumerable tranquil instants. But when the silhouette finally appeared at the far end, reality twisted the edges of her decisiveness into something smooth and uncertain.

Malfoy materialised like a statue carved from moonlight itself, his tall frame slipping through the gloom with an almost spectral grace. His cloak, pewter green, was trailing like smoke, the hem brushing the cold stone with a faint, secret sound. Pale strands of hair caught the dying torchlight, glinting like spun silver, haloed with an ethereal glow that softened his usually sharp features. There was a reluctant apprehension in his gestures too —as if he desired to evaporate, to become nothing more than a passing shadow, yet his eyes betrayed the knowledge that he could not escape her gaze.

When those storm-grey eyes met hers, the earlier apprehension dissipated, remaining there no flicker of surprise or trace of hesitation. Rather, something indistinct prompted in their depths like a squall tangled beneath glass.

They started to walk to a more hidden area. 

"You're early."

"I'm prepared," she answered, stepping away from the wall.

He stopped a few feet from her, eyeing her with a sharp gaze. "Then say what you need to say."

For a second, she hesitated—because this wasn't theoretical anymore. 

This was real. 

If she spoke, she would bind herself to this moment, to him, and to everything it meant.

"We do this," she said finally, "on my terms."

Draco tilted his head slightly. "Go on."

She looked him dead in the eye. "First: a vow of secrecy. No half-truths, no omissions. You don't lie to me—about the squad, the war, Dumbledore, or Voldemort. I don't care how small it seems. If you break that, we're done."

He didn't blink. "I understand."

"Second: access. I need ingredients and books—banned, obscure, expensive. I don't care how you get them. But I'm done working within limits."

His mouth twitched. "Even the ones you believe in?"

She didn't flinch. "Especially those."

A pause. He nodded.

"And third," she said, lifting her chin, "strawberries."

He blinked. "What?"

"Strawberries," she repeated. "Not magical. Real ones. The kind muggles grow—tart, red all the way through. Tangy, big and a little sour. Not perfect."

He stared at her for a beat too long. "Are you serious?"

"You want my help? And want something genuine."

There was languor. Then, for the first time in weeks—maybe longer—Draco really laughed. It wasn't sardonic or mean. It was real. The kind of laughter that was contagious. 

"You drive a hard bargain."

"I know," she said, letting the ghost of a smile flicker at her lips, as if she caught his laughter from him. "But you want my help. Don't forget that."

His expression shifted. The amusement faded, replaced by something quieter. "I haven't."

She observed how his shoulders were taut beneath his cloak and caught the manner his fingers were clenching and unclenching at his flanks. He wasn't as calm as he seemed to be. Perhaps that meant this occurrence wasn't just a strategic game for him either.

She stepped closer. "This isn't a partnership. This is a transaction. But it can become something more—if you prove to me you're not a coward."

That hit. He didn't move, but she saw his jaw tighten.

"I'm not," he said.

"Then don't give me reason to think otherwise."

Another pause.

"Do we have a deal?" she asked.

He studied her face for a long moment. "We do."

She extended her hand.

He took it.

His palm was really cold, like a cadaver's. 

Hers was warm and steady.

Draco's fingers slipped into her avant-bras as she pulled her wand from her sleeve. Hermione's voice, when she spoke, was firm, but quieter than before—more ceremonial.

She traced a circle in the air with her wand and whispered a spell, silver light glimmering in its wake. The glow drifted in place, adjourned between them, threads of runes beginning to weave themselves along its circumference. 

"Repeat after me."

Draco nodded once. 

She looked at his visage, from the grey that glowed like the bright side of the moon, to his tight jaw, to the rapid pulse in his throat, his Adam's apple bobbling up and down. 

His fingers curled like claws around his wand, the tendons in his forearm taut, straining against the skin as if he was holding the very weight of this moment within them.

She took a breath, steadying herself, feeling the crackling magic prickling at the fine hairs on her arm. 

"I, Draco Lucius Malfoy, do swear—" she began, her voice cutting through the heavy air.

He echoed her, "I, Draco Lucius Malfoy, do swear—"

They felt the magic tighten, the circle narrowing, drawing them closer. 

"—to speak no falsehood, offer secrets, and withhold no truth—" Her eyes never left his, trying to read the flicker of emotions there, the brief flare of something like defiance, quickly smothered.

His response was softer this time, the words rolling off his tongue with reluctance, "—to speak no falsehood, offer secrets, and withhold no truth—"

"—from Hermione Granger, on matters of what we will proceed to do, the Death Eaters, Dumbledore, and Voldemort."

His face twitched in the barest hint of a wince, as if the name itself was a hot coal pressed against his tongue, but he pushed through, his voice rumbling. "—from Hermione Granger, on matters of what we will proceed to do, the Death Eaters, Dumbledore, and Voldemort."

The magic sparked. A crackling sound like glass splintering around, the circle constricting tighter, vibrating with the force of silent admissions.

"—and to cause her no bodily harm, by action, or order—"

His gaze sharpened, a flash of something perilous sparking in his eyes, but the magic crackled, demanding his response.

"—and to cause her no bodily harm, by action, or order—"

"Should I violate this oath," she said, her voice, precise, "may my magic recoil, and my body will deteriorate."

Draco hesitated for the briefest of moments, a flicker of something like dread passing through his eyes before he mirrored her words. "Should I violate this oath, may my magic recoil, and my body will deteriorate."

"Should I betray it—" she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper, the words tasting like iron on her tongue, bitter and final.

"—Should I betray it—"

"—may my will be broken before my words are."

"—may my will be broken before my words are."

"Kreddīti."

He stopped, looking at her. 

"Kreddīti."

The circle snapped shut, the light collapsing inward, folding in on itself with a sound like the crack of a whip, the bitter scent of burnt ozone filling the air. For a moment, Draco's wand hand spasmed, an eerie shimmer racing down his arm, disappearing beneath the cuff of his shirt, his chest heaving as if he'd just surfaced from deep water.

It was done.

Hermione lowered her wand slowly, her arm tingling with the remnants of the binding spell. She looked up at him, her breathing shallow, and saw the way his eyes had gone dark, the grey swallowed by the storm within them.

"You'll feel it if you try to break it," she said, "Like the magic's closing in on you. Like it's loosening around your heart."

Draco flexed his hand, his fingers clenching and unclenching, while the muscles in his jaw worked. "I already do," he said, his voice sounded coarse, his eyes still searching for something—some indication of remorse, of frailty, or nervousness.

But she gave him none.

"Good," she replied flatly. "I'll owl you the list. Give me the details of where you want to meet later. Or where you meet with—"

He cut her off, his gaze narrowing. "I'll send you the details," he said, "But don't expect me to explain every step. Some things you need to figure out for yourself."

Hermione's jaw tightened, but she didn't argue, didn't press. She just watched him for a moment longer, the pale, sharp angles of his face, the faint tremor in his fingers, the pulse still hammering at his throat.

And then, without another word, Draco turned and disappeared into the shadows, his footsteps echoing down the empty corridor, the sound of them fading into the distance, until the silence was suffocating.

Hermione stood there for a digressive juncture, her wand still clutched tightly in her hand. 

Her hand that had bound him, her hand that had set something in motion she could no longer take back.

⸻

She could no longer take back the notion of time that ensued. A week had passed in near equanimity after the vow. Draco preserved himself, scarcely interacting with anyone in his circle—Pansy, Blaise, Daphne, and Theo. 

Hermione, too, kept to circumvent, crystallising on her own agenda and the complicatedness of the trances she had to weave together. 

Nevertheless, she couldn't shake the feeling that everything was diverting slowly.

Like the quiet before a storm. 

So she started to keep her regard on him: from his traces of absence, who he sits near, whispers that some of his housemates make him vacate the room.

She was beginning to wonder whether he'd already regretted their agreement. Whether he'd find a way to weasel out of it. But then again, he hadn't seemed like the type to back down once he made a vow, even if the consequences were severe.

At breakfast, she circumvented scrutinising Draco. He was quiet, but there was a stiffness to his posture. He looked like someone deep in thought, though whether it was from the vow or something else, Hermione wasn't sure. She didn't have conviction on him—couldn't— yet she couldn't deny the strange sense of something deeper behind the reason of Malfoy.

"Everything alright, 'Mione?"

She blinked, pulling herself back to reality. "Yeah, fine. Just a lot on my mind."

Later that evening, while sauntering through the hallways, she clocked him at the remote end of the passageway, speaking in hued tones with Pansy, eyes narrowing instinctively to his, nonetheless, she didn't loom. 

She wasn't sure whether to confront him or wait until he came to her

As if discerning her sight, Draco glanced up, encountering her regard over the hallway. For a beat, his eyes glistened with something illegible before he turned all his attention back to the wondrous witch. Hermione couldn't make out the words, but the interchange left her disturbed. It was like they were plotting something.

She continued sauntering, her thoughts veering around over his stillness. Why hadn't he dispatched her any pointers? Was he testing her forbearance? Or had he simply lost appeal? No, she wasn't going to let him play games with her.

That night, as the castle shivered under the creeping fog, an owl landed beside Hermione's parchment, its feathers rustling against the crisp pages of her Charms launch. She looked up, the firelight casting shadows over her tired eyes. She recognised the initial immediately.

I don't squander ink on formalities. If you're competent enough to heed, then listen. There's a location in this castle no map will ever show you, no portrait will ever concede its existence. It's named the Screaming Room. You'll comprehend when you see it. Water remembers what has been done inside it, and the fences never comprehend quietness. Don't flinch when you hear them, it upsets the stone. I'll bring what you said you needed. Don't ask how I got it, or from whom. If you're expecting an explanation, don't. Nothing I do is free. Remember that.

Meet me in the hallway on the first floor at midnight.

- D.

P.S. Don't be late. I will not wait.

⸻

Midnight came unhurriedly, the jiffies departing slowly against her nerves, as she tumbled out of the common room beneath the cover of the Invisibility Cloak, tracking him down, dawdling in the entrance near the vestibule to the first floor, until she clocked his profile against the dim torchlight.

"Malfoy," she whispered, pulling the cloak from her body. Her breath was fogging in the cold air, striking her arms against herself from the sudden chill. 

For an instant, he thoroughly darted her, his eyes flicking over her face, a faint furrow creasing between his brows, as if searching for something. He proceeded to turn on his heel and guide her down the darkened corridor, their footsteps hushed against the stone.

His jaw tightened, and for a moment, something almost like concern flickered in his gaze.

"Keep up," he murmured without glancing back. He hauled with a confidence that vexed her, as if he had ambled these illicit routes innumerable times before. 

They stood at a confluence where the divisions began to bend inward, the ceiling arching so low she had to duck. The air was more moist, with the vague smell of rust and old water. Her eyes flickered across the pipework banding the walls steering like hidden arteries through the school.

They docked at the quietest level, where the sconces scarcely surpassed, and water slopped in a constant cadence from the pipes. He lingered, subsisted, and nudged his palm flat against one of the rusted chutes. The metal shrieked beneath his tinge, vibrating under his hand as though speaking with him, shutting his eyes.

Her heart beat quicker, not from anxiety, but from the abnormal solemnity of the moment. It felt ancient, like the school itself had a pulse, and Malfoy had found where it beat strongest.

She shivered, wrapping her arms tighter around herself, biting the inside of her cheek to still the racing of her thoughts. 

What are we doing here? 

Why did I follow him? 

The sensible answer was simple: she shouldn't have. She should turn around, and vacate him in the shadows. Yet her heart battered, and her mind backstabbed her with trinkets, like a wave pulling in the middle of the ocean.

When Malfoy opened his eyes again, he looked at her. For a moment, she assumed he might speak to her, but he only nudged harder against the pipe, whispering something to the wall. 

"The Screaming Room," he said quietly, stepping inside.

Hermione hesitated at the threshold, the noise scraping her nerves. "What is this place?"

"Old Slytherin wing," Draco murmured, glancing back at her. "No one comes here. Not even the ghosts. It soaks up sound. Whatever you say here, stays here."

Draco moved ahead of her, casting a silvery beam of light that cut through the darkness. She finally followed him, casting with a wandless charm a lumos.

He appeared the objects, laying them on the table. 

First: a folded cloth pouch, tied with sinew. He untied it carefully, spreading it open to reveal a collection of twisted, shrivelled ingredients—powdered Doxy bile, pickled Occamy liver, newborn human blood, and two shattered vials of Ashwinder, next to some normal potion glasses. 

Second: a cracked, leather-bound tome that whizzed when touched. Its exterior was intaglio with peculiar, angular runes that seemed to shift and writhe beneath the dim light, until she whispered to them. "The Erilaʀ Runic Dissection of Spell Constructs: A grimoires of the Ancients" A text prohibited in most wizarding academies for "conjectural destabilisation." It was marked in half-faded quill, rasped by The Brothers Grimm's in handwriting too obsessed to sleep.

Third: a silver-laced box cold to the touch full of strawberries that still held the kiss of ice. They glowed like rubies, but she didn't touch them. Just glanced at them once and looked away.

She never asked where he got any of it.

She inhaled, fluttering open the pages and said, positively, "We begin now."

⸻

All her detentions begin with the same loquacity,  fluttering and recounting the pages of that fatuous leaflet. 

The dungeon classroom was scented of smut, coloured fluid used for portraits, and the vague sting of medicinal antiseptic potions left cooling in their beakers. Low, vaulted ceilings swallowed light; the torches along the walls threw a lazy, amber smear that did little to warm the stones or ease the cold that bit through robes and bones. 

Harry sat squatted over his parchment, quill scraping unhurriedly as he emulated ropes that blurred together. His wrist ached, his back throbbed from the coldness of the dungeon, and every word he scribbled felt like a nail being driven into his wrist joint. 

The hush of little engagement was wrecked when the heavy door allotted a soft click and swung inward.

Theodore Nott Jr.

He strolled inside appearing far too slack for someone that has been ploughed into detention. His tie hung loose, his garment skewed over like he hadn't even bothered to fix it, and with him the faint but unmistakable smell of weed. His utterance was impassive, but there was a glint in his eyes that Harry didn't like, the kind of glint that belonged to someone who was too proud. 

Without asking for clearance, he dipped into the seat beside Harry, lengthening his legs out under the desk with a languid alleviation, that even the wood cried under him.

Theo gave Umbridge a mock salute—too sluggish to be deferent, too pointed to be ousted as thoughtless. 

"Well," Theo murmured, his voice hauling just adequately to catch Harry, but soft enough that Umbridge wouldn't snarl. "This is cosy. Just me, the Boy Who Broods, and our beloved tyrant in pink."

Harry kept his eyes on his parchment. He had no appeal in Slytherin theatrics today.

"So," he said after a jiffy, purposefully, like someone tugging at a lax thread to see how remote it unravelled. "What are you in for? Writing rude things about kittens?"

Harry's quill paused for half a second, then scraped on. "None of your business."

Theo chortled under his breath. It wasn't cruel laughter. It was softer, like he'd just confirmed something he'd suspected.

"Fair enough. But, if I had to bet—" Theo bent his head, scanning Harry with an acidity that felt uncomfortably straightforward "—you mouthed off. You've been running on fumes for weeks, haven't you? I can tell. Your shoulders sag when you sit down, but you square them when anyone looks. And those circles under your eyes? You don't sleep, not properly. You toss. You pace. You dream about... something you'd rather not say out loud."

Harry's jaw tightened. He forced his focus back to the parchment, but the words swam in front of him.

For a long moment, silence reigned, just the scratch of Harry's quill objecting against. But then Theo leaned forward, arms folding over the desk, voice pitched and smooth.

"Also, you're terrible at pretending you're not in misery," he murmured. "It's almost sad to watch."

Harry blinked, caught off guard by the bluntness. "What?"

"Your hand." Theo jerked his chin, not even bothering to point with his fingers. "You're gripping the quill like it owes you money. Letters slope forward when you press too hard. Forward means impatience. Impatience means you're counting the minutes until you can leave. Add in the shadows under your eyes—heavier on the right side—that means you're lying on that side more often."

Harry felt his chest tighten, that same panic clawing at the back of his ribs whenever Voldemort seemed to do when he's in a foul mood. He didn't like being read like this, didn't like being seen. Not by Theo Nott, who until this moment had been little more than a shadow in the same corridors, and yet, sitting here, Theo seemed to know him in ways his closest friends never said out loud. 

Theo smirked faintly, as though that was all the confirmation he needed. "Told you."

Harry frowned. "What, are you suddenly a handwriting expert?"

"No." Theo's tone was too casual, almost bored, but his eyes were sharp. "Just... observant."

Harry tightened his eyes, scraped by the footpath this boy—this lad he'd ne'er uttered a sentence to—was anatomising him as if it was a levity. He shot back, "And what about you? What's your excuse for being here?"

Theo didn't reply sooner. Rather, he lifted something between his fingers, long and thin. Not a wand. A tightly rolled scrap of parchment, singed black at one end. He twirled it once before setting it down flat on Harry's desk, his mouth quirking into a grin.

"You're joking," Harry muttered under his breath. "Weed? She caught you smoking? And you're alive?"

Theo snorted pleased.

"Oh, she was delighted," he said, dropping into an imitation of Umbridge's syrupy drawl. "'Mr. Nott, is that a substance of dubious legitimacy?'" He lifted his brows, smirk sharpening. "I showed her the healer's note. She accused me of forging it. I asked if she thought I was clever enough to counterfeit medical signatures. She said yes." He leaned back again, still smiling. "'Apparently,'" he continued in that same sickly tone, "if it doesn't come in a Ministry-sealed vial, it's effete behaviour."

Harry shook his head, a reluctant huff of breath escaping him. "You really enjoy creeping people out, don't you?"

Theo tilted his head. "What can I say? Everyone's got a talent. Yours is breaking rules and nearly dying every year. Mine's... noticing."

Harry shifted, uncomfortable with the way Theo was looking at him. "So what, you're just... watching me?"

"'Noticing." Theo's voice dropped lower. He leaned in close enough that Harry could smell the smoke in his breath. "I see things. One thing lines up with another, and suddenly it's obvious. Like how you're hiding something. Something you shouldn't be doing, but you've convinced yourself it's worth it."

Harry stiffened, knuckles whitening around the quill. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Theo's grin widened, lazy and sharp all at once, watching his hand once more. "Sure you don't. Let's pretend it's schoolwork. Or better: arts and crafts. I always liked DIYs."

Harry told himself it was nothing, that this snake was bluffing, but the boy's expression carried no triumph, no satisfaction at being right. Just a quiet amusement, like someone who enjoyed pulling apart puzzles just to see how the pieces fit together. He looked at Harry, not with hostility, but like he was a sort of tchotchke.

"Why are you even talking to me?" Harry muttered, not looking up.

"Because you're interesting." Theo's answer came quickly, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. His smirk returned. "Do you have any idea how boring most people are? They wear their little masks, repeat the same lines, worry about grades and Quidditch scores. But you—" His eyes gleamed, leaning in just a fraction.

"You're never boring, Potter. You walk into a room, and it bends around you. People look. They follow. Even when they hate you, they can't stop circling. You don't have to try—it just happens."

Harry's stomach twisted. He wanted to laugh, to scoff, to say you don't know me.

"And the best part?" Theo murmured, eyes glinting. "You hate it. You wear it like a chain, but deep down..." He paused, lips curling into the ghost of a smile. "Deep down, I think you'd burn the whole castle down just to make it not stop."

Harry's grip on the quill tightened until it splintered, ink bleeding across his knuckles. He hissed a breath through his teeth. "You don't know a thing about me."

Theo tilted his head, studying him like a riddle he already solved. "Don't I?"

Harry finally snapped his gaze upward, meeting those sharp, too-steady green eyes. For a second the world went quiet: no Umbridge, no scratching quills, just Theo's infuriatingly calm face and that faint smell of smoke that clung to him like a shadow.

Theo smiled again, slow and deliberate. "See? That look. That's what I mean. Everyone else flinches, or fawns, or looks away. But you—" He tapped the table lightly with one finger. "You crack. Just enough to show what's underneath. And trust me, Potter..." His smile widened, but it didn't reach his eyes. "It's chaos. I can tell."

Harry's pulse hammered. He wanted to punch him, or hex him, or something, but his body wouldn't move. Instead, he forced the words out, low and steady. "Why are you really here?"

Theo leaned back finally, stretching lazily like a cat who'd just toyed with a mouse. "Detention," he said simply, smirk lingering. "Same as you."

Harry clenched his jaw. "That's not what I meant."

Theo's eyes glinted again, sharp as glass. "No. I suppose it's not."

Theo tilted his head, watching him, voice oddly kind. "Get some sleep, saint Potter. Whatever war you're planning to win—it won't work in your path if you're dead on your feet before it even starts."

____

Hermione's working path was always carved in patterns of obsession, paring edict out of disarray, moving with the precision of a clockwork heart, each preferring to disassemble the whole structure, before assembling another one, with stronger bones, sharper teeth, and better core. She never left room for reckoning, or accidents, from spells, theories, and tradition, she challenged the very nature of the craft.

To his eyes, the pages she scribbled always looked less like language and more like music. It wasn't something he was used to, but there was always a strange beauty to it.

"So you're telling me," Draco said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes never leaving the intricate web of symbols, "we're going to hex someone using stroke order and rhythmic couplets?"

Hermione's lips curved up at the corners, but she didn't look up from her work. Her hair fell around her face in a wild halo, launching curled shadows across her parchment. "No," her voice tinged with something that might have been amusement if he didn't know better. "We're going to unmake what we know. And rebuild it."

Unmake what we know.

The words stuck with Draco. 

He assumed she was skimming for a brisk fix, as it was ordinary for the short time they held. To quest after something ostentatious, instantaneous and outstanding. 

Yet, she was hounding for something fathomless, something rudimentary and Pre-Merlinian, something he had never heard about. 

That alone seemed insane. 

Still, she conducted him in rune anchoring. It was a procedure so fragile yet so thorough, it felt like it was on the verge of breaking the very laws of physics. The words, the symbols, the order—all of it had to be in harmony. Any slip, any mistake, and the whole thing would fall apart.

"Precision, Malfoy," she snapped one evening, her eyes blazing as the ink on his parchment dissolving again into a useless smear of black. "We're not scribbling love notes in the back of a textbook. One wrong stroke and you'll turn your own bones to glass. And I'm not taking you to Pomfrey."

In return, Draco taught her about wand weight and counterbalance, about the old-court wandmanship passed down through centuries of pureblood families. In turn, she forced him to exercise wandless magic —which he found insidious—with a sameness that bordered on cruel. She made him say easy spells again and again, until the spell threads bent just the way she wanted, and worked wandless. 

She cursed under her breath whenever an incantation sputtered out wrong.

He never smirked. 

Nevertheless, there was always a collision between them, it was something that never vanished. Hermione scorched with conviction, and Draco, in exchange, was iron to her flame, from whenever she preferred to went over matriarch wandless customs, in pre-Merlinan times where magic was shaped by breath, earth and body, to how the wand was from a "gift of progress" to a neat colonial artifact, etched into the hands of those who claimed authority by narrowing the definition of power to fit inside polished wood, and partway

him believing that the wand was a gift of advancement, where their society refined refractory power into artistry, and to forsake it was to plummet back into the wild, formlessness, or— something he dared not call —barbaric, but he dissipated them by the end of the day. 

___

At the end of the day, Montague dissipated. Literally. 

Nott knew something was awry in the instant the Slytherin table had one less jester eliciting jokes than usual. He'd clocked after at dinner, while the lot were paying attention to Pansy grumble and whine about her hair tincture being "vandalised" and Crabbe loudly inhaling food like the world was ending. 

Now, that in itself wasn't remarkable. Montague was, to put it generously, the sort of bloke who could vanish for hours at a time and reappear smelling like broom polish and bad decisions. But this? This was different. There was no swagger in the corridors. No muttering about Quidditch. No Montague friend shaped nuisance tripping over his own importance.

So, guilelessly, he went to locate the two ample jesters in the castle who might actually know about everything malicious around the place. 

He launched over the Weasley twins bending against the courtyard wall, whispering in that unnerving twin-speak of theirs, all sly grins and conspiratorial nudges. Theo approached them calmly, gathered, and was already bored with their existence.

"Look who I was looking for, the redheaded hydra. Cut off one head, and the other keeps talking."

Fred tilted his head, mock-offended. "That's slander."

George leaned in. "Also entirely accurate."

Theo gave them a thin smile, as if he were already bored but mildly amused enough to keep going. "So, which one of you saw him? I had to meet with Montague earlier, and then, poof, he vanished. Not a great loss, mind you, but still I need a clue."

George's eyes narrowed, but playfully. "We didn't see him, you seem kind of suspicious."

Bingo. He clocked them.

Theo raised a hand, lazily cutting through their energy like he was swatting away flies. "Suspicious is the wrong word, gentlemen. Morbidly entertained, more conceivably. I know quite a lot. For instance, I know Montague thought the height of espionage is whispering in corridors." 

"Funny, because the last we checked, knowing things in this castle usually gets people hexed—or worse."

"I know he tried to tell me something about you, shall we call them 'extra-curricular activities'?" His tone dipped with irony. "And I know I told him to mind his own little business, before he tickles a sleeping dragon."

The twins peeked at each other. 

Theo tilted his head, his lips twitching. "Tragic, isn't it? Slytherin always needs a mascot, so naturally, the Sorting Hat gave us Montague. Very loyal. Exceptional  house-elf energy."

George coughed into his hand, trying not to laugh. Fred nudged him, then narrowed his eyes at Theo. "He told you something, didn't he?"

Theo spread his hands. "The man's got the intellectual consistency of mashed peas. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check. Did you know he once asked if Polyjuice Potion worked on goldfish? A philosophical mind, that boy."

The twins froze.

Fred's smirk faltered. George's grin wilted just slightly, like parchment left too close to flame. They weren't afraid—no, fear wasn't their style—but Theo could read the flicker of unease in the way they leaned in toward each other, twin spines taut, like two magnets holding back a recoil. 

Fred clicked his tongue. "You really ought to stop poking into other people's affairs, Nott. Might give you wrinkles."

George nodded solemnly. "And trust us—wrinkles don't look half as clever as you think they would."

Theo let out a soft laugh, though his wand twirled tighter between his fingers, knuckles pale. "Ah, but see—I'm not poking. Poking implies effort. I protect my mind, you see. Like Occlumency, but for avoiding stupidity."

"Convenient," Fred muttered.

"Suspiciously convenient," George echoed.

He leaned closer, grinning conspiratorially. "So you're not going to squeal on us, then?"

Theo gave them a long, thoughtful look, his lips twitching into the faintest smirk. "Gentlemen, if I were going to squeal, you'd all be serving Umbridge tea right now instead of whatever delightful rule violation you want to commit. And between us, I would rather prefer watching you from afar."

George tilted his head, suspicious. "You're awfully calm about this."

"Calm?" Theo laughed, a low, amused sound. "I'm Slytherin. Calm is how we survive. That, and selective memory."

Fred leaned on the wall, grinning lazily. "So you're not going to go crying to Malfoy about it?"

Theo barked out a laugh, genuine this time. "Cry to Malfoy? Over Montague? Please. I'd sooner frame the scene, hang it above my bed, and toast to it nightly. Draco's got bigger delusions to coddle than worrying about Montague playing hide-and-you-will-not-seek."

Fred and George exchanged a look, then burst out laughing.

"You know," Fred said, clapping Theo on the shoulder, "you might actually be alright."

"Careful," Theo replied coolly, brushing his robes straight, "or people will think I fraternise with Gryffindors. That would ruin my entire reputation."

George wagged a finger at him. "Just remember, Nott. If you did happen to overhear something, keep that sharp tongue of yours pointed in the other direction."

As the twins turned to leave, still wearing their self-satisfied grins, Theo muttered dryly. 

___

Hermione muttered calculations under her breath, her brow furrowed in concentration, the firelight casting sharp, jagged shadows across her face. Draco, who had once prided himself on his skill in arithmancy, found himself servile by the intensity of her focus.

And as they stood there, her hands stained with ink and their eyes tired they became something else. 

The air up here felt frosty, almost sentient, for her, even with the tepid charm she conjugated. The Astronomy Tower loomed above the rest of the castle made of stone and spells faced like the spinal cord of the castle skeleton, adhering to the sky like a forgotten god's altar. It had seen generations arrive and leave, lovers inscribing initials into the stone, duelists clashing under blood moons, and the whispered promises of students drunk on dreams, youth and firewhisky. Now, it played silent witness to two unlikely figures balanced on the edge of something bigger than themselves. 

Draco tilted against the gravel, one boot dabbing a lazy tempo against the uneven surface, his long, pale fingers curled around a cigarette. He took a gust, the embers widening in the darkening light. Dew coiled from his lips, spiralling upwards before the wind caught it and pulled it apart. His platinum hair caught the last threads of daylight, casting a faint aureole around his hair and visage, making him seem both ethereal and stiff.

Adjacent to him, she posed cross-legged, back straight despite the perilous perch, a leather-bound tome spread across her lap, splintered from years of use, its corners soft and fraying like a beloved childhood blanket. The pages were coated in her spidery handwriting, memos scrawled in the margins in three different inks, each colour marking a different kind of thought— red for questions, blue for counter-arguments, and black for furious rebuttals. She nibbled absentmindedly on the junction of her lower lip, regarding the passage as though it owned her gallons.

A gust of wind swept across the tower, ruffling her wild curls, pulling them into the air like tendrils of ink swirling in water. She reached up to push a particularly stubborn strand behind her ear, leaving a faint smudge of ink against her jawline. 

Draco's eyes jerked to her hand, the way her digits seized the rim of the page, knuckles pale, the faint tremor of his freezing magic still visible in her movements. He took another drag of his cigarette, the taste bitter yet grounding. 

He received another owl from his father this morning. 

Another letter burned to ashes. 

"You're wrong," she said short not looking up, her gaze still fixed on the confined text in front of her, but her shoulders had gone stiff from the cold, murmuring under her breath, wandless, another warming charm.

Draco exhaled the smoke, the ghost of a chuckle caught in the back of his throat. He glanced sideways at her. "I haven't said anything yet."

"You were going to," she replied, her tone clipped, and precise, like a scalpel. "I saw your mouth twitch. You were about to contradict me."

His smirk exacerbated, a jagged pang of lips that might have been charming if not for the years of venom behind it. "You always assume you're right, Granger."

Her gaze flicked up then, just for a heartbeat, her eyes were dark in the low light. She looked back down just as quickly, flipping a page with a defiant snap, the sound of parchment against parchment louder than it should have been.

"That's because I usually am," she said, the vaguest rim of a smirk pulling at her lips, a phantom of the thing, there and gone in a blink.

For a moment, the only sound was the mournful cry of a crow, before the wind took its place flying with faster wings in the tower's crevices, as Draco took another drag.

His eyes drifted back to her, the way her curls caught the dying light, the lines in her freckled face, her ink-smugged jaw, the delicate curve of her throat as she closed her book. 

"Muggle societies," she said, her voice falling into lecture cadence, "evolve in cycles. Ten years, give or take. Not because they want to—because they're forced to. Wars. Recessions. Revolutions. All of it pressures culture to adapt. Economically, ideologically. Sometimes violently."

Draco leaned back on his hands, eyes scanning the edge of the sky where blue met steel. "And magic doesn't?"

"Not in the same way." She finally looked at him, dark eyes sharp in the half-light. "Magical culture stagnates. It preserves. We still use parchment, Malfoy. And Quills."

He gave a crooked smile. "Because they work."

"No," she said, voice harder. "Because we haven't been forced to change. Muggles aren't protected by magic. They adapt or they collapse."

"So you're saying we're...more ominous?" He said it like a joke, but there was no laugh behind it.

"I'm saying wizarding culture is the same as it was before the war. Even the clothing never really changed. And I think wizards—especially the ones in power—refuse to admit we've fallen behind. Not just in tech or knowledge. In thought. In ethics. Our institutions are archaic. Our power is hoarded, not questioned, and magic lets us pretend that's fine."

Draco's gaze sharpened—not with challenge, but with understanding. "Magic... is an inheritance. Not a decision. Not a tool. That's how it's treated, anyway."

"Exactly." Her voice lowered, almost dutiful. "We don't reform because we think magic is proof we're superior. But it's also a crutch. We don't ask how or why. We just accept that it works."

She leaned back on her elbows, spine arched toward the dark sky. Her silhouette was a sketch against the clouds. His "vow" arm ached. 

He took another cigarette. "What scares purebloods the most... isn't losing power. It's having to explain it. That's why so many turned to the Dark Lord before the first war."

That startled her. Just a little.

"Explain it to whom?" she asked.

"To themselves," he said. "To their children. To people who aren't afraid of them anymore."

The wind curled around them again, ghosting over stone and breath. Hermione shut her book softly, fingertips lingering on the cover like it was something living.

"You ever think magic's just...traditional?" she asked, voice distant. "A cultural inheritance like any other? And we've kept it gated, ritualised, ossified—so no one questions who wrote the rules?"

Draco looked at her for a long moment. And something passed between them. Not rivalry. Not camaraderie. Something older. 

It was fear.

"It was never meant to be static," he said slowly. "Magic, I mean. It's reactive. Temperamental. It doesn't bend until to intent. That's not tradition or revelation. That's alchemy."

She smiled faintly. The kind of smile you only give to someone who surprises you with their words. 

"So what happens when you teach it like it's religious doctrine?"

Draco gave a single, bitter laugh. "You get Hogwarts."

"You get Umbridge."

"You get war."

"You get the Dark Lord."

Silence again, but this time it was shaped.

She broke it, studying him. "We have so much power in our hands, yet we act like magic is just for the one with hegemony."

The words hung between them like frost suspended midair.

Then Hermione rose, brushing dust from her skirt, her book balanced against her hip like a sword in its sheath. She didn't speak at first. Just stared at the horizon as if trying to see past it.

"We'll need books," she said at last. "I want you to get Theory. Arithmancy. Comparative Linguistics. Practical Casting. Also..." She narrowed her eyes. "Something old. Wards. Foundations. Raw spellcraft—something before the Ministry got involved. Empedocles 4 BC if you find it."

Draco looked up at her, something unreadable in his expression. "You are a madwoman."

"Good,"

___

Good slumber was the very thing Harry could never seem to find these days. 

The dormitory was wrapped still in the velvet tranquillity of predawn when Harry sat properly on his bed, blinking into the dark, his eyes adjusting to the glooms of bedposts and discarded Quidditch gears, and the uneven breathing of the boys around him. Throwing his head on the other side of the chamber, Rom was stretched out across his mattress in his standard maladroit manner, maw half-open, half a body slumping off the side as though he had been pummeled mid-fall and would simply refuse never land.

Harry begrudged him, in a manner. Slumber reached easily Ron, even after the worst of days. 

But for Harry, rest was always a fragile thing, like a trance that could halt in a second. Tonight had been strange—no images, no squealing nightmares to yank him in a cold sweat—yet his scar charred lethargically, as if Voldemort's huddled against the edges of his sanity with his unwelcome hand.

He prodded the heel of his palm against his forehead, as if he might be able to stroke the ache away. It was no use. He had learned already: there would be no additional rest for him. With a sluggish sought, he pivoted his legs out of bed, the floorboards beneath his bare feet feeling cold, then he grabbed his wand, tugged on a jacket, and slipped out the door and down the stairs. 

The Gryffindor common room greeted him with a different kind of silence. It was the silence of books left half-open, of a fire that had burned down to embers, of parchment curls on tabletops and the faint smell of ink and wax.

And there she was. Hermione.

Twirled uncomfortably on the sofa, encompassed by skyscrapers of books and parchment. She had fallen asleep mid-sentence, quill still in her hand and part of her jaw. 

The sight of her—the weariness intaglio into her face—made something wrench in Harry's chest. He didn't merit her. He had unfailingly comprehended that, but the assurance lay before him in the silhouette of her twirling body, asleep from working herself too far past exhaustion on his behalf, a half-written lesson still clutched in her hand, her quill creasing awkwardly against her red palm as though she'd schemed to write just one more sentence, one more line, before sleep asserted her. 

Moving slowly, almost reverently, Harry tumbled out his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The fabric swallowed her, sliding down over the curve of her arm, grabbing the quill she held. She churned faintly, shifting deeper into the cushions, and a lock of hair tumbled across her face. For a moment, Harry reached out, wanting to brush it back, to tuck it gently behind her ear—but he pulled his hand away. Her lips parted in a soft exhale, her brow smoothed, and for once she looked peaceful. He knelt, convened the scattered parchments with careful hands, sliding them into her bag alongside the heavy tomes she had been devouring. His gaze caught on the familiar brown bottle resting inside: the tincture she had brewed for them. He had never inquired of where she had obtained the ingredients—it wasn't as if doxy bile was a things a fifth-year could simply steal or order—but she had handed it to him with that practical calm of hers that always convinced him, as though it were perfectly natural to heal scars with a potion she wasn't supposed to be able to brew.

Afterwards, with a flick of his wand, he enticed life back into the fireplace. Flames bloomed, bathing her in a glow so warm, it almost seemed to belong to her.

She looked peaceful in that glow, vulnerable, even. And Harry stood there, watching her, his scar aching dully, yet his concern was on the tangle of guilt and gratitude in his heart, feeling the tug of it, the poundage of all the alternatives they had decided that had fetched them here. Yes, she was asleep, but he knew: Hermione never rested for long. Tomorrow, she would be fighting again. And he didn't know how much longer his heart would allow her to keep fighting. 

He sank into the armchair opposite, tugging his knees close, his eyes never leaving the small rise and fall beneath his jacket.

Something in him—something neither fully cognizant nor entirely rational—told him that he had to get away. 

Pestered, he had left the common room without thought, no cloak, no wand, not even shoes on his feet. It was as though something had dragged him loose from himself, tugged him into a reverie that steered his body through the familiar arches of the tower, down the long corridors slick with torchlight, and out past the oak doors of the Great Hall into the daybreak.

The drizzle met him first, adhering to his hair, his lenses and the back of his neck. The ground was dark, but Harry didn't stop, his steps carrying him toward the treeline, the Forbidden Forest looming ahead like a warning. 

He should have turned back—he knew this, he told himself this—but he kept walking.

He felt half-aware, as though caught between dream and waking, his feet sinking into the damp earth, and then—through the motion veil of rain and branches—he saw her.

A pale figure, bright against the heavy curtain of the forest, like something born of moonlight. Her long hair caught the dim light like spun cotton, and her eyes—those strange, wide eyes—weren't quite human. For a puzzling moment, Harry thought of the Veelas he had seen last year, that same insight of unearthliness, as though the girl in front of him wasn't tethered by the same rules of gravity and soil and breath.

But it wasn't a veela.

"Luna?" His voice broke tentatively.

She tilted her head, as though his recognition delighted her. "Hello, Harry." Her voice was a song half-sung, threaded through the mist. "You came."

"I—what am I doing here?" He looked down at his feet, at the wet grass bending under him. He hadn't even noticed the cold until now. The forest gaped before him. "I shouldn't be—"

"Stay," she said, with such calm certainty that it rooted him to the spot. There was no plea in her tone, no urgency, just quiet pedagogy, as though the universe itself had tilted its axis to ensure he obeyed.

It was then he noticed it.

The thing.

At first, it seemed like the rain itself had thickened into shadow, condensing into a lean figure by her side. Harry's stomach lurched, his body tensing with the instinct to flee. It was a creature—or perhaps more than one—its outline shifting against the drizzle, The thing was alive. Watching. Breathing. And it was terrifying.

Harry staggered back a step, heart clawing against his ribs. Every instinct screamed at him to run. To leave Luna standing there with this shadow, this omen of death. Yet just as the terror rose to a peak, Luna's voice reached him.

 "Don't be afraid."

He froze. She hadn't even looked at him, and yet she'd seen him as clearly as if his panic had been painted on his forehead. He wanted to run. But instead, almost without understanding why, he stepped forward.

The figure solidified as he drew nearer. It wasn't a formless shadow after all, but something far worse: something skeletal, starved-looking, its long snout sharp and bony, eyes blind and piercing. Its skin clung to its body like charred parchment over brittle sticks. Its wings stretched once, catching the faint silver drizzle. It was monstrous, uncanny, and bogus. And yet Luna stood beside it with her hand resting gently against its flank, as though the creature were nothing more than a horse.

"It's called a Thestral," Luna said softly, her ethereal eyes finally sliding toward him. Rain collected in her lashes but she didn't blink it away. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

Harry's throat tightened. "Beautiful?" His voice was hoarse the word almost a fuss.

Her lips curved in the faintest smile. "Not in the usual sense, no. People don't like to see what reminds them of endings. They call them ugly because it's easier than calling them scary."

He shivered. The thing turned its skull-like head toward him, the sockets of its eyes blank, blind, but Harry swore it was looking straight through him—straight into the marrow of his bones, where grief still seemed not to move, like it lived in his bones. 

"Why—why can I see it?" His voice dropped to a whisper, as if speaking too loudly might summon some darker from the forest.

Luna's gaze softened. "Because you've seen what it means to lose," she said. "You've seen death. And it's seen you."

The words struck him like a spell. He wanted to look away, to deny it, to run back into the castle where everything was bright and warm and safe and not... this. But the drizzle still fell, the earth still breathed beneath his feet, and the Thestral still watched him with that merciful gaze. 

And he thought of Cedric, lying still and cold, his face empty of laughter and life. Cedric, who should have been walking beside them; not buried under them.

Harry's chest constricted, grief and fury and fear crashing into his heart.

Luna, still caressing the varmint, tilted her head, as though she were hearing to some far-off sound. "Most people will never see them. They'll go their whole lives pretending nothing ever ends. But you... You don't get that anymore. Neither do I."

Her voice was matter-of-fact, not heavy, not self-pitying. She said it like she was naming the weather, or the way the drizzle slid through the canopy above. Yet that made it cut sharper.

 "My mother..." Her voice trailed for a moment, a flicker of sadness passing across her face. "She liked to experiment with spells. One of them went wrong." A pause. Then, softly, "I saw her die."

The drizzle pattered louder in the silence between them. Harry had no words. For once, there were no easy retorts, no anger sharp enough to slice through what he was feeling. Just the heavy weight of loss, shared in quiet recognition.

Luna finally looked back at the Thestral, her fingers smoothing over its bony ridge. "They frighten people, but they shouldn't. They don't bring death. They only remind you that it happened, that it's real. That you survived to remember."

Something in Harry eased, just slightly, though his chest was still heavy. He stepped closer, his feet sinking into the wet leaves the Thestral flicked an ear, its wings shivering in the drizzle.

"Go on," Luna murmured. "Touch it."

He hesitated, hand hovering in the damp air. Fear clawed at him still, but beneath it was something else: magnetic certainty. Slowly, he reached forward, his digits skimming against the Thestral's side. It was warm—warmer than he'd expected, warmer than something that looked like death had any right to be.

"Warm," he murmured before he could stop himself, almost disbelieving.

Luna nodded, the corners of her mouth curving in the smallest of smiles. "Yes. Warm. Because death carries the heat of every life it's ever touched. That's why you can feel it."

The downpour hastened, spattering the leaves overhead, and for a fleeting moment, Harry thought he understood—just barely—that what he feared most wasn't death itself, but the cruel silence of carrying a long-lasting grief. 

Luna's voice was steady, her hand still smoothing the Thestral's bone-thin neck. "Don't fear it, Harry. Fear of forgetting. Fear not living enough to remember."

⸻

Draco's eyes narrowed as he leaned forward in the shadows of the library. He had spent the last few days making careful inquiries, following leads, and weaving himself into the intricate network of whispers that flowed through Hogwarts. But it wasn't until he had a conversation with Pansy that he began to realise just how much he needed to protect the DA from the inquisitorial squad's reach.

"I'll get close to her," Draco told Pansy after they had discussed it in low voices. "I'll feed her just enough to make sure she thinks she's in control.

Pansy smirked. "So, what's the plan?"

"The plan is simple," Draco replied, standing up from the table and moving toward the door. "We'll work the Squad from the inside, and when they slip up, we'll have a reason to act. I'll keep Umbridge busy with her own paranoia until we can stop her for good."

Within a week, the cracks began to show. Pansy started tossing sideways glances at Millicent Bulstrode, convinced that she had been undercutting in Umbridge's eyes. Zabini grew colder, more distant, refusing to share even the smallest scraps of information with Crabbe, Goyle and Warrington. The six of them snapping at each other in the hallways, swapped sharp words over the dinner table, splintering into factions. And through it all, Draco merely watched, his silvery eyes glittering with quiet satisfaction as he poured himself another glass of pumpkin juice, letting the chaos unfold, while he watched the know-it-all. 

With the seeds of mistrust planted, Draco was able to isolate the Inquisitorial Squad from the true depths of Umbridge's intentions. He gave them enough rope to tie themselves in knots, all while keeping the requirement room club, existence under the rug.

Theo watched from the sidelines, keeping his thoughts to himself but always observing. He had known Draco for too long to believe that this was about protecting others—it was about saving himself. But even if it wasn't entirely altruistic, Draco was doing something right. He was keeping the school from completely breaking under Umbridge's rule, even if it meant sacrificing a piece of himself in the process.

"Smoke," Theo said one evening as they sat together, staring at the fire. "That's what it takes, isn't it? Smoke and mirrors."

Draco glanced at him, his eyes cold but thoughtful. "Yeah. That's all it ever takes to vanish.”

Chapter Text

Chekhov's Gun — If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Human behaviour is relatively predictable, is part of a pattern, is changeable, can be observed, can be understood, is distinctive and is occasionally justifiable. But altogether, the captivating notion that one can start to learn was the realisation that simple behaviour can change our wishes, our destiny, and our brain chemistry. Wizardry, regardless of such a notion, flouts such hindrances while still reflecting them. It is at once a lever of edict and upheaval, something discernible yet immaterial; distinctive yet ubiquitous; forgivable yet erratic. The most diverting notion one can begin to uncover was not simply how magic functioned, — cause contemporary post-Merlinian magic was just drive, desire and assertions put into exercise—, but how it responded to how the fluctuations of will, introspection, and exhortation could veer its trajectory.

Witchcraft, when deemed past sheer wizardries, is a phenomenon of materialisation. 

Like the observer effect in physics, where the act of watching alters the behaviour of particles, so too does intention alter the shape and weight of spells. Magic is not only a tool wielded—it is a conduit, it is a living current that bends itself around the caster's inner state. 

Words are not enough; it is the knife-edge-like thought, the clarity of desire, and the exactitude of emotion that give language its power. 

It's the meaning of the words that made magic. 

Rim to the wave-like essence of fact, magic occupies liminal forms: probable until pitch on, static until affirmed, as conjuration may glint between oversight and brightness relying on nothing more than the resilience of the caster's conviction, the steadiness of their focus, or the purity of their purpose. Thus, magic can be neutral. 

It is a relational exchange between human consciousness and the unseen fabric of the world.

Within this framework, hunger is not merely a caprice but a leverage. Volition bleeds into conduct, conduct bleeds into rite, and rite bleeds into the consequence. Magic, then, is not independent from the self, it is the self, augmented outward, conveyed into the form. And in this imbroglio prone a resonant verity, spells are not calamities, nor are they fully our own to claim. 

They are collusions between will and word, between belief and matter, between what we demand and what reality allows.

To decompose magic, therefore, is to analyse the conscious self, not just alter the occurrences by word, but to remake it in reflection of our innermost selves. 

The only sound in the screaming room was the creak of their quill and the occasional scones huffing the fire made into their illumination path.

Tomes lay spread out over the floor in staggering heaps, some half-burnt from the inattention of past owners' misfires, others stuffed with lax morsels of Hermione's hectic memoranda. She sat curled on a chair, hair wild even when tied back, her quill ricocheting over a parchment already dense with ink—circles, lines, scribbles that appeared almost dishevelled if you didn't know better. But Draco did know better. He had been eyeing her for a juncture now, silent in his hub, feigning to graze a volume on hex transfigurations while his regards held to the sore rhythm of her writing. And for the first time in the last two hours, he spoke, the words crumpling out of his mouthpiece before he could catch them. 

"Why do your pages always look less like language and more like music?" he was motioning at the parchment littered with her looping symbols, lines cutting through words like staves on sheet music. 

Hermione halted mid-stroke. Her quill wafted in the air, a bubble of ink swelling at its tip before she set it down carefully. Gradually, she buckled up to him, withering as though she couldn't choose whether to be troubled or tugged that he'd caught sight of it.

"They're not music," she said firmly, but then her lips pursed, and her tone shifted, almost unwillingly. "Not exactly. They're... well, chants. Or the beginnings of them."

He raised an eyebrow. "Chants," he repeated flatly, like the word was some kind of foreign herb she was trying to slip into his Twinings.

 "Yes. Chants. Songs. Cadence and reverberation. I had documented myself on Celtic traditions since the first year. Before wands became widespread most rites weren't conducted with spoken spells, but with traditional tonal incantations. They assumed the universe itself responded to their reverberation, not the syllables. Magic is vibration, Malfoy. Chants are music. They knew that. Tonality has been as important as intent. It wasn't about the exact word spoken, but the vibration of it, the sound carried on breath. When you break it down—language itself is music. Like—."

He opened his mouth to interrupt, as this was always their way, but then the know-it-all halted, like she waited this time. He, in that instant, leaned in, finishing her thought.

"Like the old rosc chants of the Druids?" he said as if unsure of the term but asserting it. 

She blinked. "Yes—roscs. Exactly. How do you know that?"

He shrugged. "You wrote an essay on it in the third year. You could have talked more about the Celtic incantation, bardic, I mean, they echo rhythms, but they are more precise in nature; wind, fire, water, earth. You could also take the ancient Dionysian dithyrambs into consideration" 

"I could, but most of modern spellcraft strips it down into syllables. Latinised fragments meant to standardise what used to be improvisational in Greek, P-Celtic, et cetera. If you remember I wrote that bureaucracy took rites and spellwork and pressed it into the English enchanted grammar program."

She reached across the table, spinning the parchment toward him and running a finger along the set of looping lines she'd inked. The gesture was careless, but she tracked her finger like it were dangerous.

"Here," she said, voice softening, pulling him into her fascination. "See this motif? I was experimenting with a chant structure—alternating minor third and major sixth, stretched vowels. That spacing matters. For example—did you know magical Roman nursemaids sang in those intervals as a kind of protective charm? That's where the word lullaby comes from, from lull, and from nonsense syllables "lu lu" "la la". They are meant to subdue but also to ward the mind. That's how, later, we found that cadences became part of the merpeople songs in Mediterranean tradition. If you chant something for long enough, it could act as a shield to the mind — ward off thought. The tonal open spaces between the words do work; they let magic breathe."

He interrupted, voice quite sharp: "So the reason you write like music is because you're trying to encode the tonal structure directly—so it doesn't get lost in Latin translation? Not words, but vibration?"

She met his gaze, mildly surprised at how fast he caught up. "Yes. Because a spell becomes...brittle if it loses its tune. If the technique is wrong, the reverberation breaks. When you chant wrong, it becomes a curse."

For a moment, the scones popped, filling the silence.

"It sounds ridiculous. You sound ridiculous...You're erasing the body of magic. Reverberation, vibration—yes, they matter. But you forgot about the vessel. That's hollow magic, Granger. It floats, it wanders, it claws back at the one who shaped it. That's why ancient chants can split open a skull if spoken without ground or blood. Old magic isn't like the scholarly one. That's why we renounce it. You can literally make it only in the moon intervals or celebrations. You could chant until your voice breaks, but without the offering, it's nothing but air dressed as power."

Hermione arched an eyebrow, looking at him the way she sometimes did when she had sharpened her arguments like blades, and now he had wandered right into their edge.

"As if I don't know that everything in this world has a cost, Malfoy. A spell doesn't breathe without lungs, it doesn't echo without a chamber, it doesn't take root unless it drinks something dry. Do you think I don't know why necromantic circles rot their casters from the inside out when they cast? Why do seers go blind, why do fire-callers cough up soot until they choke on it? You think I don't know about the grain offerings in Eleusis, the honey and wine in Dionysian rites, the salt-blood in Celtic sacrifices? Or the Oseberg ship burial? I know why we forfeited ancient magic. I know why even the sorcerers use it. But I know the first law: nihil ex nihilo. Nothing from nothing. Magic is never made, it is only recycled."

He stared at her, storm-grey eyes cold but burning at the edges. For a second, his fingers dug into the edge of the table hard enough to blanch the knuckles, as though holding himself there stopped him from doing something else entirely.

"You're so sure," he murmured, his mouthpiece yet duller — not thoughtful, but perilous in a distinct way. "Always so sure. I hope your little cadences hold when someone finally answers you back."

And she smiled. "I've already been answered, Malfoy. That's why I know to whom to listen."

For a moment, the entire room seemed to withhold the sound. Then, almost lazily, Draco dragged his chair back, almost defeated, the wood screeching against the floor, and left the room. He leaned forward, as though he'd decided, she was not worth indulging with. 

Not now. Not today. Perhaps, not this century. 

___

The Gryffindor common room droned with its regular buzz of chitchat and the frequent flares of chortle. Admittedly the hub of the enclosure, a group of second-years clustered on the carpet on a match of wizarding chess, their pieces shrieking disdain at one another as a black rook cracked a white pawn to bits, howling with laughter, rowdy enough to taunt a few galled looks from the seventh years.

At another quarter under the windows, Dean, Lavender, Parvati and Seamus were bent over a heap of Exploding Snap cards. Every few moments the deck went off in a small crack of sparks, sending them into a fit of laughter as smoke curled lazily into the air. Tight the hearthrug, two second-years stood spread out on their abdomens, grilling each other on DADA homework, says ascending and declining in fervent whispers. Every so constantly, some black cats leapt lazily from chair to chair, sprinkling parchment and eliciting sharp cries of protest.

Above it all, the enchanted ceiling-high windows let in the muffled whoosh of wind outside, making the common room seem even cosier, a little pocket of warmth and noise against the November chill.

Hermione, though, sat curled up in one of the large couches near the fire, parchment spread across her lap. The flames flickered across her curls, catching in little copper highlights, making her hair look like an iconography-aged brown halo, as her countenance crumpled in concentration like a creased parchment. 

Adjacent to her, Ron sprawled his long legs negligently, half-slouched sideways where his scruff rested on the intersection where the acromion met her acromiclavicular joint as though it was the most meek thing in the world. His long digits trifled absentmindedly with the bizarre whatchamacallit she had brought at the start of term — a dazzlingly six-faced colored block with spinning squares. He twisted it with sluggish trinket, the tranquil click, click, click of plastic punctuating in unison the scratching of Hermione's quill.

His blue eyes flicked mollement en route to her parchment with sudden scintillating interest. "What are you writing?" he asked, the words muffled as his mental protuberance nudged closer to her deltoid.

Hermione paused, the quill hovering mid-stroke. She blinked once, then answered evenly, "A letter to Viktor."

Ron's head jerked a little, and he tilted it so he could peer sideways at her parchment. "Krum?"

"No, Ron. Frankenstein. Of course, Viktor Krum," Hermione replied patiently, as she dipped the quill back into the ink. 

"Oh," Ron said, drawing the word out, as though it tasted peculiar on his tongue. He went back to fiddling with the cube, twisting it once, twice, until a whole row matched the yellow colour. His ears had gone pink. "Tell him I said hi, yeah? And—" he rotated the cube again, the click-click-click oddly sharp in the quiet moment between them— "ask if he's coming back to Britain this January."

Hermione froze, quill suspended over the page. Her eyes flicker to him. 

Ron shrugged, but the faintest grin tugged at his mouth, his freckles crinkling. "What? You're the one writing him. Might as well get something useful out of it."

Hermione gaped at him for a moment before narrowing her eyes. He knew that look, yet, he simply grinned wider, still twisting the cube, feigning nonchalance while his ears burned bright red. "Don't look at me like that I'm just being polite. Wouldn't want your boyfriend to think I'm rude. Plus, he is Viktor Krum after all. Maybe he'll sign my Chudley Cannons kit if he comes back..."

Hermione made a strangled noise, half frustration, half something else entirely, and bent back over her letter, her quill scratching harder than necessary against the parchment, almost perforating it.

Ron tilted the cube one last time, satisfied as one side finally clicked into place, all yellow. He smirked, indulged, and leaned back, smug as though he'd just won something.

Hermione stared at him, waiting for the unavoidable: the sputtered complaint about Krum being famously known for his good mouth, older, or—Merlin forbid—her writing to him at all. But instead, Ron just kept working on the Rubik's Cube.

She softened, returning to her letter. The scratching of her quill mingled with the steady click-click of the puzzle.

When she dipped her quill again, she found herself adding at the bottom of the page:

Ron says hello, and wants to know if you are coming in January. 

___

The sky was sharp and scathing in the climate that made every breath taste of iron. The air was harsh and flaky with late autompne frostiness, the kind that scrapes outwit robes and aims every breath like an ice cutlass to sting your chest. The tribunes fluttered with says, red and blue flags bashing against the dreary atmosphere. Ginny was darting nearby, tracking the Golden Snitch with her customary fiery perseverance, but Ron knew the real test was his own: to keep the Quaffle from slipping past.

Ron drifted before the hoops, gloves damp with sweat despite the chill, heart hammering in his ribs like it wanted out.

He told himself he was ready. He'd practised until his hands cramped and callused, until his eyesight blurred from heeding the Quaffle under moonlight. But now—now the pressure pressed against his lungs, heavy as stone.

The Quaffle came fast. Too fast. Ron's broom twitched beneath him as he lunged, but his nerves slowed him by a breath. Just one. And in Quidditch, a breath was enough. The ball sailed past. The hoop rattled. Ravenclaw scored.

The bluster from the scaffolds jabbed into him—half gaieties, half wails, and his gut wrenched so hard he presumed he might go ill right there in the air. His hold on the broom slickened, regardless of the moment, his chest clenched. He wanted to disappear, to sink into the grass far below.

Heretofore, a blur of scarlet streaked up beside him. Angelica was blazing with that same fire that once pushed them all to the edge of collapse in practice from days prior. Her broom hovered steady, grin sharp and alive.

"Pick your bloody head up, Weasley," she snapped, her voice lancing through the roar of the crowd. "You think you're the first Keeper to miss? I let fifty slip through in a single season. You know what I did after? I took the next damn one. And the one after that. Because that's the job. You don't fold, you fight."

Ron swallowed hard, his throat raw. "I feel useless." The words cracked, barely louder than the wind.

Angelica leaned in, her glare scorching him. "Useless? Useless is lying flat on the ground. You're up here. You're fighting. You're a Weasley. And Weasleys don't vacate from anything."

The words seared through him, burned away the fog of shame. Something shifted in his chest—not confidence, not yet, but defiance. A spark.

The words hit harder than any Quaffle. Before Ron could answer, another streak of blue was already bearing down on him, Quaffle hurtling like fire toward the hoop. 

Ron's chest heaved, but something in him shifted—something solid, something fierce. When he looked across the pitch, Harry was watching him with a grin that didn't pity, didn't doubt. Just believe.

This time—this time he didn't hesitate. He didn't blink. He threw himself into the dive, arm outstretched, the air tearing at his robes as the ball slammed against his palms. The sting bit his skin, but he held it tight.

And Angelica, hovering near the hoops, gave the smallest of nods. 

___

The Room of Requirement had swerved again to accommodate their desideratum—its fences now lined with rough-hewn wooden benches, and brackets slumping under the avoirdupois of tomes on herbology and duelling manuals. The air contained a layered scent of mildew old parchment, mingled with the puissant tinge of molten resin from doused candles and wand magic, the charmed ceiling above them emulated a storm-tossed twilight sky with nuances of soft indigo diverting to near-black — releasing an empyrean glow that drove dims to dance and pound at the edges of vision. 

Hermione stood erect near the median, wand poised between her fingers like a conductor's baton.

"Alright, everyone! Tonight's session is about defence. Not attack. Protego when it's right, bends, absorbs, deflects. It's the difference between standing and falling."

Around her, the members of DA recede into duos.

"Pair up. Cast Protego on each other. Don't just shield feel the magic swell and curl."

Attacks glinted to life. Some protection careen like flimsy glass; others scintillate incessantly in nuances of blue, blazes dancing at points of contact the fences between duelling pairs.

The refrain of rowing spells filled the room in metallic clangs, and the steady hum of spells meeting resistance.

Hermione's heart swelled with pride. 

The DA was alive: raw, fierce, and focused beyond anything she'd seen before.

The flurry slowed, the room quieting just enough for her to catch her breath. "Good, good," she encouraged. "Let's try expanding a little—perhaps a few harder ones. Learn to counterattack, not just defend."

Her words barely left her lips before Harry's voice cut through, low and sharp, slicing the moment like a blade. "No."

The room froze. 

Every head turned eyes wide with surprise.

"No?" Hermione's brows knit in perplexity. There was an unmistakable edge of certainty in his tone, like a shielding assertion that dispatched a swell of strain through the group.

"We focus on Protego, momentarily" Harry's eyes locking onto Hermione's with a blaze that seemed to electrify the very air between them. "One perfect shield beats a dozen half-learned spells. If you can't defend, nothing else matters. Not transgression. Not tricks. Defence first."

Ron had been watching the exchange like a man stuck between two fires. 

Hermione's face got rubescent with the causticity of being cut short, her lips huddled into a delicate line, recognising that look—the one she got when she was counteracting her amour-propre with her reason. The same look she gave when she was prepared to argue but acknowledged the realities were against her.

Harry's eyes got dark, looking far too old for sixteen. His stare was incessant, as though daring her to contest him. Nevertheless, Ron longed to reach across the space and shake him like a rag doll. He knew that look, too. That brittle look Harry wore, the one that implied he wasn't really discoursing to them so much as to his own ghosts. 

Merlin, he knew they were about to go like this.

"Oi!,", his voice slicing through the silence. 

That finally seemed to snap the tension, if only a little. Hermione's eyes flicked to him, Harry's shoulders, and became taut as bowstrings.

The verity was, they must stop not because of the upheaval or the harsh words, but because of what spread beneath them. Hermione's need to equip, to discover, to prove that knowledge could shield them from the darkness, but Harry's certainty was nurtured not of anthologies but of battle scars. And Ron—stuck in the middle, always the middle—was the one who had to remind them they shouldn't be hostile, not here.

He blew out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Out loud, he said, "You're both right. What's the point of throwing curses if you're flat on your back before you can say one? We drill Protego until it feels like breathing, but after that we let Hermione show us her counters. That way, Harry gets his shield, and Hermione gets her fight. And maybe, just maybe, the rest of us won't end up as corpses or statues while you two argue strategy."

For a long heartbeat, nothing moved.

Then Harry's eyes softened, just barely, his shoulders dropping a fraction. Hermione's lips twitched, the hint of a reluctant smile breaking through her tension.

Ron caught that flicker of truce and let out a sigh. "There we go. Look at that—compromise. Didn't even need badges this time to manage it."

The murmurs of assent rose softly, the tension fading.

But Hermione's gaze lingered on Harry a moment longer. 

She still wasn't happy about it.

___

M.A.G.I. (Ministry Approved Guidelines Instruction) – Section 4H, Subclause vii

Decree on Services and Conveyance

Pursuant to the Ministry's enduring endeavours to provide safety, deposit, and concord within the scholarly and institutional spaces under its jurisdiction, the ensuing memo is issued:

1.No correspondence, acreages, or enchanted articles may be received from individuals or entities beyond the designated, Ministry-sanctioned channels.

2. Communication is restricted to Approved Internal Channels. All written, verbal, or enchanted correspondences must pass Ministry-approved screening wards.

3. Authorised Topics Only: Instruction and research are limited to Ministry-sanctioned material.

Hexwork to be Monitored and Pre-Approved.

Defensive Spells: strictly limited to charms listed on the Ministry's Authorised Defensive Register.

Dissuaded Practices: disruptive oration, subversive demeanour, or any action deemed "counterproductive to Ministry values."

By Order of the Ministry of Magic, Office of Educational Oversight.

Any endeavour to bypass this regulation through clandestine charmwork, or unauthorised magical conveyance will result in instantaneous mail seizure and formal disciplinary action.

Any deviation or attempt at unsanctioned communication constitutes a breach of M.A.G.I. statutes and shall be punished accordingly.

Failure to comply with the above is considered an infringement of M.A.G.I. statutes and will result in disciplinary recourse, including but not limited to: detentions, suspension of wand rights, and formal record notation with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

___

The scones flickered against the worn veneer of the Gryffindor common room table, casting protracted shadows across the pages of Ron's untouched essay. His quill lay forgotten beside it, the tip drained of ink. A thin wrinkle had formed between his brows, his lips slightly parted, his gaze not on the parchment before him but somewhere far beyond it, beyond the room, the castle... maybe even beyond himself.

Around him, the steady thrum of late-night revision buzzed on. Parvati and Lavender were whispering over a Pendulum chart in the corner, Dean and Seamus disputed quietly over who had misread the runes assignment, and Neville snored softly in a chair near the fireplace, with a Herbology book cradled against his chest.

But none of it registered with Ron.

They were getting louder.

He didn't understand it. But worse than that—he was starting to expect it.

Like now. There was a pull. A slow, steady drag, like a current beneath his thoughts, threatening to drown them entirely. It whispered at the edges of his awareness, not in words but in impressions: Look deeper. It's not what it seems. You already know what you shouldn't.

He wasn't supposed to know anything. That was Hermione's job. But here he was, stuck in a loop of half-understood instincts and fractured images.

"Ron," Hermione's voice cut in, firm but not unkind. He blinked, and the world snapped back into focus. She was watching him with a look he knew all too well—the frown, the tilt of her head, the way her hand hovered just slightly as if resisting the urge to poke him in the shoulder. "You're not listening. What do you think about Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration?"

Ron blinked. His stomach gave a little jolt.

"I—uh," he started, clearing his throat. "Sorry. I just... I spaced out, I guess."

Hermione didn't look satisfied. Her gaze flicked down to his parchment—blank—and back up to him. "You've been doing that a lot lately. You're not writing much. You're not getting enough sleep. Are you... Are you alright?"

He hesitated. Because he could lie—he should lie. But the words clung to his throat, thick and heavy, as if something in him wanted them to be known.

"I don't know, Hermione. I keep seeing things. Feeling things. Like... pieces of something bigger, but I can't make sense of it."

He laughed softly, bitterly, running a hand through his hair. "You probably think I'm cracked."

Hermione didn't respond right away. She didn't scoff. Didn't rush in with facts or theories. She just watched him for a beat longer, and for once, her eyes weren't filled with impatience or intellectual scrutiny. There was something else there. Something like... concern. Fear, even.

"I don't think you're cracked," she said finally, her voice quiet. "But I do think something's happening. And you need to talk about it. Maybe with McGonagall—"

"No," he cut in, sharper than he meant to. His eyes flashed. "No professors. No one else. Just you. And Harry."

Hermione looked at him, her expression unreadable for a long moment. Then, slowly, she reached out, placing her hand on his. Her touch was grounding. Warm.

"We'll figure it out," she said. "Whatever it is. I promise."

Ron opened his mouth to answer, but as he turned his head sharply toward the door, the back of his neck prickled like frost on skin. A shadow had passed just beyond the threshold—not Umbridge, not Filch, no one he recognised. Yet the presence had weight, like a storm pressing against glass, waiting to shatter its way inside. The walls seemed to lean in, the torches flickering unnaturally low. The floor beneath his shoes gave a faint vibration—almost imperceptible, but there.

There was a voice. Not a whisper exactly, but a sound threaded through the world like a warning plucked on invisible strings.

Then he saw it.

He blinked—and the vision broke like water rippling over sand. 

"Ron?"

Hermione's voice cut through the stillness like a blade. Soft, low, steady—but urgent. He turned to look at her. She was leaning forward across the desk, her quill forgotten, her eyes narrowed with alarm.

"I..." Ron's voice was uneven, brittle. He dragged a hand through his hair, still feeling the phantom presence in the room. "I don't know what just happened. I saw something. Not here, not exactly—but it felt real. Like it was happening right in front of me."

Hermione's expression shifted in an instant. Her brow furrowed; her hands came together, fingertips pressed to her lips. That look she got when solving something too complex for most minds to untangle. Her gaze flicked across his face—assessing. "What do you mean you saw something?"

Ron bit his lip, his eyes darting to Harry, who had finally stopped writing and was now looking at them both, confusion written across his face.

"Ron," Harry said, hesitantly, "are you ok?"

"It's happening again. It's like my mind just... pulls me into these moments. I see things I shouldn't see. Things that don't make sense until they happen. And it's not just that. Sometimes, I feel it—like something bad is going to happen, or someone's in danger. I—I don't know what it means."

Hermione leaned forward again, her voice hushed, controlled. "Ron... that sounds like a magical sensitivity. A strong one. Possibly precognitive. There are branches of Divination that describe that exact sensation—"

"You think I've turned into Trelawney?" Ron snapped, half a joke, half a plea for this all to be nothing.

"No," Hermione said instantly, and firmly. "Because she plays. What you're describing isn't performance."

Ron felt a flicker of relief. Hermione always knew how to make him feel better, but the truth was—he wasn't so sure this was something he could control anymore.

⸻

The walls droned in a low pulsing beneath the pebble, as if the very air could break apart with the wrong word, the wrong sound. The screaming room was never still, as she had learned, it lived up to its reputation, but not through the shallow sound one my think it posed, yet by the mental image it creates inside your mind, lengthening hues and shades and chimes where there were none, flinging you into an pattern of excessive state of repetitive thinking, seeing things where there are none. 

Her curls crumpled into her face as she murmured in the sheen, revising numbers, redrawing bonds, hunkered over littered notes, chemical equations tangled with mathematical and analytical direction, three vials of Ashwinder eggs gleaming faintly in the half-light.

It wasn't even endorsed. 

It was her trinket set lax, posing cross-legged, parchment unrolled in sprawling sheets, ink smudged on her fingers, and quill darting from time to time across the page. In front of her, neat rows of chemical equations and runes wove together, a blend of Muggle mathematics, chemistry and wizarding alchemy.

Her brows were knitted, lips moving silently as she balanced a particularly delicate equation. The air smelled faintly of sulfur and something acrid, like the aftermath of fireworks.

Exothermic reaction... Ashwinder eggs with sulphur derivative... temperature risk unstable at 312°C... controlled ignition possible, though catastrophic if—

The wall opened.

She didn't look up, just murmured, "You're late."

"Spare me," 

Draco's drawl filled the chamber before his figure appeared, sharp as ever in his pressed uniform robes, and pristine hair, though his tie was hanging loose, as if he hadn't cared enough to finish dressing properly. In his hand, rolled and already crumpled at the edges, was the Daily Prophet. He tossed it onto her parchment without preamble, scattering her carefully written equations and almost bestowing a vial.

Hermione gasped, grabbing a vial before it tipped. "For fuck's sake, Malfoy! Do you want to start an explosion?"

"Relax," Draco said, though his eyes flicked toward the glowing Ashwinder with the faintest flicker of unease. "If I wanted to blow us all to bits, I'd have done it years ago." His tone became commanding.

"Read it."

Hermione glared at him sharply enough to cut through steel, but let her eyes fall on the paper, forgetting why she was mad at him, the words printed on its pages reeked worse than any Ashwinder venom bubbling in her cauldrons, in bold print splashed across the front: 

Educational Decrees Expand: Minister and Senior Undersecretary Discipline at Hogwarts.

Her jaw clenched. Beneath it, Dolores Umbridge's sickly-sweet smile radiated like poison, alongside a column penned by none other than Cornelius Fudge himself. 

Hermione's eyes narrowed as she skimmed, her lips pressed into a thin line. "This—" she began.

"—is a fucking farce," Draco finished, pacing a slow circle around the room with his hands buried in his pockets.

Hermione leaned over the column, reading quietly "'Dangerous libertinism within Hogwarts... a culture of disobedience fostered by professors who overstep their roles... young witches and wizards encouraged to place power above loyalty. Common wizarding families mustn't be forced into the dangerous ideals of elitist educators...'" She slammed the paper down, an ink vial splattering across the parchment. "As if Umbridge isn't an elitist! As if stripping education of its rigour protects anyone." She flipped it more, and her eyes caught on Fudge's poisonous rhetoric, the lines dripping with contempt for anyone daring to think critically, to rebel, to even breathe outside the Ministry's leash. Libertinism. Radicalism. Danger of thought.

Her jaw clenched. She read faster the phrases preserving tradition and protecting impressionable minds from dangerous subversion. Then the smear—Dumbledore as a radical, Harry as unstable. The spin was blatant, crude even.

"Where did you get this?" she snapped, her words cutting across the humming silence of the room. "No owl deliveries from the outside are allowed anymore."

Draco smirked, but it wasn't amusement—it was a blade, quick and shallow. "Don't ask questions, Granger. It's none of your business."

Her nostrils flared. "None of my—? You barge in here, dump Tory drivel on my work—"

"Read it," he cut in smoothly. His eyes flicked over her parchment, the black scrawl of numbers, ink and formulae. "I don't care what Fudge prints. But you—" He jabbed a finger at her equations, then at the newspaper. "You wanted it, I brought it. That's the extent of our... arrangement."

Her hands curled into fists against the parchment, nails catching the fibres. "You don't just bring newspapers into Hogwarts and expect me not to ask questions."

"Then consider this practice," he cut back, his voice clipped, dangerous. "Questions don't always get you answers. You of all people should know that."

The scones hissed behind him, casting his profile into harsh solace, shadows dancing on his face. For a moment, Hermione thought she saw something flicker—bridle, perhaps ire—but it vanished as fast as it came.

His lips curved, but it wasn't a smile. It was something colder, a shadow of amusement twisted with warning.

Hermione opened her mouth to retort, to spit something back sharp enough to cut him, but before the words could form, he straightened, turned, and strode toward the door. His footsteps echoed in the suffocating silence.

Coward. 

Hermione's hand trembled slightly as she tucked the paper under her arm, smudged ink already staining her fingertips. The Prophet smelled of damp parchment and cheap press ink, but the words printed on its pages, reeked worse than any Ashwinder venom.

She couldn't breathe with it pressed against her chest, so she later found Ron.

He was in the common room, bent over his homework, quill scratching lazily across the parchment, not a word written. His head snapped up when she stormed in, eyes bright with the fire she couldn't extinguish. Without a word, she slapped the paper down on the table in front of him.

"Look." Her voice was tight, pitched low, dangerous with suppressed fury.

Ron blinked, frowning, then flipped the cover open, his freckles seeming to stand out more as his eyes skimmed the headlines. His jaw dropped.

"What the bloody hell—?" He looked up at her, incredulous. "Where did you get this? They don't even let these inside the castle anymore."

Hermione forced herself to breathe evenly, though her heart was still hammering against her ribs, too aware of the truth that clung to her tongue. 

Malfoy brought it. 

"I—" Her voice wavered once, but she steadied it, locking her eyes on Ron's. "I stole it. From Umbridge's office."

Ron's mouth fell open wider, his face split between awe and horror. "You what? Hermione—are you mad? If she catches you—"

"She won't." Hermione cut him off, sharper than she meant to, but she couldn't back down now. "I was careful. She'll never know it's missing."

Ron gaped at her a moment longer, then shook his head with a kind of reverent disbelief. "You're mental, you know that? But—blimey, this is brilliant. This... this is exactly what Harry's been saying. Look at the way they twist it—" He jabbed a finger at the lines condemning Dumbledore. "They're practically calling him a criminal."

Hermione nodded, her throat dry.

___

That night, alone in the darkness of Gryffindor Tower, Ron lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling. His thoughts spiralled. The vision he had experienced earlier was still fresh in his mind. That face. The tension.

He had these images before. 

Was one of the reasons he was so good at chess, or riddles, or could predict something from his dreams.

The dread sat on his chest like a boulder, pressing into his ribs with every breath.

And then, it came.

A strangled, raw cry, tearing through the silence like a blade. Ron flinched, heart lurching.

"Sirius."

It wasn't just a name. It was a cry—a sound Ron had heard before. The kind of scream that didn't belong in Hogwarts. That didn't belong in a dream. It was full of agony, yes, but worse than that, it was helpless. Human. The sort of sound someone made when they were trapped somewhere deep and dark inside themselves.

Ron sat up abruptly, the blanket falling to his lap. His eyes darted to Harry's bed. The boy was curled in on himself, knotted in his sheets like they were strangling him, his body slick with sweat even in the cold air. His hands twitched at his sides, clawing at something invisible.

But he didn't wake.

"Harry?" Ron whispered.

No answer. Not even a stir. Just another low sound, almost like a sob this time.

Ron didn't move from his bed. He'd rushed to wake him before. Too many times. And each time, Harry would jolt upright like he was surfacing from water, panting, wild-eyed, and hollow. As if whatever he saw in the dream still clung to him, even in the waking world.

Now Ron only watched. Watching because he didn't know how to help anymore. Watching because he was afraid something—someone—might be watching through Harry too.

The scream had stopped, but the silence that followed was worse.

In the moonlight filtering through the high windows, Harry's face was a pale silhouette. His scar glistened like an open wound.

Ron swallowed, dry. The feeling from earlier returned, like he was standing on the edge of something vast and terrible, and he couldn't see the bottom.

___

The mood in the classroom was rampant and moist, like the whiff of something ancient and malignant exhaled over every desk and student. It pressed against Hogwarts's ribs, clinging to its skin like wet wool.

Dolores paced at the front like a wind-up doll with rusting joints, all soft simpers and rigid menace, speaking in her soppy and shrill say, slashing the sounds over the space with clean cruelty, gurgling with scorn concealed.

Hermione sat rigidly in her chair gripping her quill so tightly it left marks on her writing hand, numbing it, even if the parchment in front of her was blank and her hands clean. Her mind itched to compose or even to doodle, to scrawl her pique, to do something, but Ron's absence beside her felt like a hole. Harry had said Rom had caught a fever. That his forehead was on fire, and one of the twins—Fred—wanted to stay with him. 

He refused it. 

Hermione's fingers dug into the wood of her desk. Dangerous. Harry was withering, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly as though resisting the urge to contend. She could practically feel the tension rolling off him, from the shadows under his eyes, the way his fingers constantly twitched towards his wand. It was like watching a storm gather over the horizon. 

It would only take one word, one spark, to set Harry off. She shot him a warning glance, silently pleading with him to hold his tongue.

Across the room, she caught sight of Theo Nott. He sat with the other Slytherins, his eyes narrowed slightly, gaze flicking between Harry and Hermione as if he could sense the unspoken tension. His posture was relaxed, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, but his eyes...there was a sharpness to them she didn't see until now. 

For a startling moment, his expression got unreadable, with lips pressed into a thin line, and a slight furrow between his brows. 

Hermione quickly looked away, her cheeks flushing slightly.

"Miss Granger."

Hermione's head snapped up, her heart skipping a beat as she realised Umbridge had fixed her with a stare.

"Yes, Professor?" Hermione replied, her voice sounded steady, betraying none of the anxiety constricting her chest.

Umbridge's smile widened, a predator's grin.

"I do hope you're paying attention. It would be a shame if you failed to grasp the importance of our new curriculum," she said, her tone dripping with false concern.

Hermione felt Harry stiffen beside her, his hand twitching on the desk. She placed a gentle, warning hand on his arm beneath the desk, feeling the tense muscles in his forearm.

"Of course, Professor," Hermione said smoothly, her gaze steady. "I'm always attentive in class."

Umbridge's eyes narrowed, as if she sensed the subtle challenge in Hermione's tone, but after a brief, tense moment, she moved on, her sickly sweet voice filling the room once more.

Hermione exhaled slowly, her heart hammering in her chest. She felt Harry's eyes on her in frustration. She gave his arm a light squeeze before returning her focus to her empty parchment.

Across the room, Theo Nott continued to watch her, his sharp eyes following every unspoken dialogue, his turning over the same perilous thoughts.

As the lesson dragged on, Hermione's mind wandered despite her best efforts. She couldn't shake the odd feeling that had settled over her that morning. Ron hadn't been sick. She knew him well enough to recognise real illness from the kind that crept into the mind and twisted itself into the pit of your stomach. He'd been restless for days, his usual jokes strained, his glances over his shoulder more frequent, like he was being watched or worse—hunted.

And then there was his journal.

Hermione had caught a glimpse of it once, half-hidden beneath his Chudley Cannons pillow. It wasn't like Ron to keep a diary—too much effort, too many words—but this was different. The leather-bound notebook had looked well-worn, corners fraying from frequent use.

She cast another sideways glance at Harry.

 She knew he felt Ron's absence, too, even if he hadn't said as much. The three of them had been through too much together to ignore the smallest shifts in each other's moods.

Across the room, Nott shifted in his seat, his sight flicking briefly in her path before settling back on his parchment. 

Umbridge's voice continued to drone on, each word a dagger against Hermione's patience. She clenched her jaw, forcing herself to focus, to remain calm, but her mind kept drifting back to Ron, to the notebook, to the uneasy feeling that had settled in her chest.

When the bell finally tolled, the sound was like a sudden gasp of air after being underwater too long. The students around her began to gather their things, scrape of chairs and shuffle of feet blending into a dishevelled mumble. Harry shot her a questioning glance as he stuffed his books into his bag, his brow furrowed.

She nodded, feeling the same tension winding through her.,

As they made their way toward the door, Hermione sensed Theo's regard on her further. She withstood the impulse to ricochet back and give him the satisfaction of meeting his gaze, and instead followed Harry into the crowded corridor.

___

Ron leaned over his battered dream journal, the pages smudged with ink and creased from countless nights spent scrawling in the dark. His dormitory was empty, the other boys long gone to class, leaving him alone with his swirling thoughts. Sunlight filtered through the cracks in the heavy curtains, casting thin, jagged lines across his bedspread. His head scorched. 

He flipped back to the last few entries, his fingers trembling slightly. The words he'd scrawled in a half-dazed state of confusion seemed more like a stranger's ramblings than his own. Disjointed phrases, sharp scratches of quill that cut through the parchment, each line more frantic than the last.

darkness creeping.

a figure in the mist with no a shadow. whispered names slipping 

through my mind like water 

through clenched fists. ?Luna? pale and strained shaking. 

Neville had a sunken look on his face, his mug was moving but no sound. fire. smoke. choking. a hand reaching out, ???my hand???

no.

Ron dragged a hand down his face. It was the feeling, the instinct that had been gnawing at him for months now. Like the world around him was tilting, just slightly, but enough to make him feel like he was about to fall off the edge.

He flipped to a fresh page, gripping his quill tightly as he forced himself to focus. He needed to piece this together, to make sense of the fragments before they slipped through his grasp again.

Harry shaking like a leaf, something clenched in his hand. Letter? No...w cant receive letters perhapsa. decision? no, a limitation. Ascream?mine or his? No, not a scream. The others, waking, shadows behind them, moving in the dark. A choice. A breaking point. 

Curly dark hair. Curly dark hair? Who's hair?dishevelled hair and brown eyes with blood around them?

Ron's quill hovered above the page, a blot of ink spreading as his hand trembled.

He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a pair of eyes staring back at him from the shadows. But the dormitory was empty and the only sound the faint rustle of the wind outside.

He slammed the journal shut, his heart hammering against his ribs. He needed to talk to someone. Maybe not Harry, not Hermione.

But not yet. He needed to make sense of this first.

He shoved the journal back under his pillow, his mind still whirling as he pulled his robes over his head.

___

The late afternoon sun filtered in through the tall, arched windows of the Arithmancy classroom, casting long, narrow shafts of golden light that sliced across the worn stone floor like blades. The dust in the air caught the beams, swirling in lazy eddies, caught suspended as if Hogwarts itself were holding its breath—waiting, watching, poised between stillness and movement, magic lingering on the edge of the mundane.

Professor Vector's Advanced Arithmantic Applications seminar had a reputation for sorting the merely clever from the truly obsessive. 

It wasn't just numbers and numeric spell matrices — Vector had a particular fondness for weeks when the curriculum blurred into arcane law, metaphysical ethics, and magical jurisprudence, giving Dolores a hand in the school. Those were the days when students walked in with parchment and left with migraines. She called it "practical application." 

Everyone else called it "pedagogical sadism."

This week's topic: Consent:

A Theoretical Inquiry into the Ethics of Charms. 

Professor Vector sat rigid behind her desk, statuesque and immovable like a carved gargoyle. Her pale eyes, sharp and unreadable behind round spectacles, glinted with an unspoken challenge. She said nothing, her silence the only signal needed to ignite the tension heavy in the air.

The moment Professor Vector tapped her wand against the chalkboard and announced the theme, a collective groan rippled through the room — except for Hermione, who straightened in her seat with bright, terrifying interest, and Draco, who leaned back, lips twitching like someone preparing for a duel and wondering what type of poison he should bring. 

"Debate teams," Vector said, eyes gleaming. "Granger, Malfoy — you're opposing leads."

The room went still. 

Several students exchanged oh no, glances.

Hermione stood at the edge of the raised dais from next to Harry, the fine parchment clenched tightly in her hand. Not because she needed the notes — her thoughts were sharpened and ordered well beyond ink and paper, but because the feel of the parchment gave her something tangible to grasp.

Across the room, Malfoy lounged with a deceptive casualness, his back pressed against the smooth marble column. Draco looked calm, collected, every inch the aristocrat bred for verbal warfare — but Vector, who'd seen him twitch when Hermione corrected him in the past, knew he was just as cold under the skin. There was a predator's patience in the slow blink of his storm-gray gaze, a quiet hunger that pulled taut the fragile threads between them.

"Begin," Vector said, and stepped back, arms crossed, enjoying the carnage.

"Consent in magic is not merely verbal — it is a metaphysical expression of intent. Magical contracts don't bind to words. They bind to will. And what poet — what thinker—better encapsulates the raw, erratic, deeply flawed but visceral nature of human will than Charles Baudelaire?"

A few students blinked. 

Blaise perked up, Theo looked weirdly at his friend, and Harry looked at Hermione confused. 

Draco paced like a barrister in full command of the floor.

"His poetry bleeds intent. Desire defies logic. 

Arrangements are made with full knowledge of danger, but are made anyway. That's magic."

A ripple of murmurs. His words were dangerous. Seductive, like honey on the tongue, might be sweet but it gets disgraceful fast. 

Hermione didn't flinch.

"Baudelaire is a poet, not a contract lawyer, Mr Malfoy. His work reflects despair, not structure. Magical contracts function not on chaos, but on clarity. On enforceable boundaries. Comparing magical oaths to emotional masochism dressed in verse is dangerous and deeply unserious."

"And with all due respect, you don't base magical ethics on the fever dreams of a man who once described lust as a dagger dipped in absinthe."

Laughter. Scattered and sharp. Theo smirked behind his quill. Professor Vector raised an eyebrow. Harry smiled at her, though he didn't keep up. 

Draco smiled wider.

She hated that smile, and the way he was leaning forward, voice low and confident.

"Ah, but that's exactly the point. Magic isn't bureaucracy Miss Granger. It's art infused in blood and instinct and genetic infusion. Magic responds to emotion. Baudelaire understands that consent isn't always clean. It's murky. Layered."

He let it linger.

"Take "The Flowers of Evil". The lovers in those poems — they choose destruction. That's a form of will. Even flawed will binds. "'You gave me your mud and I made gold out of it.'"

Hermione blinked once. 

He did not dare to quote that. 

Him from all people. 

The nerve. 

She met it with fire behind the calm.

"'The beauty that hurts is always an injury. And the wounds must not bind. Beauty has limits when it violates autonomy. And flawed will doesn't mean valid will. The law — magical or otherwise — must protect people from binding themselves into contracts they don't understand."

"YET, Real consent," Draco said, "isn't sterile. It's painful. It's full of doubt. That is a choice. Baudelaire saw that. Magic sees that."

"Consent must be protected, especially from desire. From misread longing. From a dangerous misinterpretation. A flawed will doesn't mean a valid will. Magical law…take example from the pre-Merlinian jurisprudence to modern Codices of Binding has been constructed precisely to safeguard people from contracts they don't understand."

"Pre-Merlinian jurisprudence," Draco snapped back, "explicitly accounts for affective states in contract emotional enforcement — is will over word. Even the 17th-century Covenstead Precedents and Pre-Hogwartonian refer to 'soul-signed pledges' that remain valid even if recanted, as long as the intention was present during the binding."

"And how many of those cases were annulled by the High Magical Court due to lack of informed clarity?" Hermione countered. "Three in January 1682 alone. Magical backlash itself is proof that consent isn't merely emotional. If it were, heartbreak would kill you."

"But it can," Draco said, almost too soft. "Sometimes it does."

Hermione's lips thinned. Her voice, however, stayed perfectly controlled.

"You're romanticising cognitive dissonance. You're confusing sovereign will with trauma. Sovereignty — even Baudelairean sovereignty — does not mean total abandonment of legal structure."

"But it challenges it," Draco pressed. "Baudelaire argued — in Mon Cœur Mis à Nu — that the will is sovereign even in ruin. And in magical law, especially during wartime or under coercion, willbinding becomes both perilous and powerful. It's not about 'should.' It's about done. Magic binds to power. Even power born of despair."

Professor Vector was now fully attentive. Her eyes gleamed with equal parts concern and curiosity.

Hermione's jaw set. "You're advocating for volatile magic to override protective intent. That's how people get hurt. That's how people end up bound to things they can't walk away from. That's not ethics, Mr Malfoy. That's manipulation."

Draco leaned forward again. Closer this time.

"Tell me, Granger. If consent must be unadulterated, uncoerced, rational, and unrestricted of emotional stain — then what of the vows made in grief? In dread? In love? Would you invalidate them all? Would you inform the witch who vowed herself to vengeance — or to love—that her will didn't matter?"

"I'd tell her she merits a safeguard," Hermione shot back. "That love and dread are not a guard against poor decisions. That grief is not clarity. That real consent — in magic — must be protected from being exploited. Even by herself."

She took a breath.

"Because if we do not safeguard consent, what we have is not willbinding — it's willbreaking."

Draco tilted his head amused. "Tell me, Miss Granger, where in the 1674 Durham Hearings on Coercive Binding does it say emotion invalidates consent?"

"Where in that ruling," she snapped back, "does it say conflicted consent is sufficient to prevent magical backlash? The entire Agrippa v. Paracelsus case was built on the premise that magical intent is mutable under duress. And wartime applications of willbinding were eventually banned because soldiers bound under grief and trauma turned volatile."

Hermione's gaze sharpened like a wand tip. 

He was grinning. 

"Magic doesn't bind to maybe. It binds to yes. Clearly. Loudly. Knowingly. Yes."

"You're mistaking idealism for reality," Draco shot back, voice rising. "You think every witch or wizard makes choices in some pristine vacuum. But emotions sway intent. Always. What happens when love is the spell's fuel and grief its anchor? When regret comes after the vow is made?"

He turned to the class again, drawing them into the circle of tension. "That's why wartime vows collapse or backfire — because they're made with fractured will. But romantic ones? They hold. Even when they're built on obsession, regret, or pain. Because they are chosen. Magic listens."

A pause. She didn't move.

"Feelings," Hermione said tightly, "do not make consent valid. They complicate it. They contaminate it. But they don't define it."

She paused, reading her parchment again. 

"Mr Malfoy, can you point to any functional legal precedent — magical or otherwise — that relies on 19th-century French poetry for its ethical structure?"

He grinned. "Can you cite one that accounts for magic's volatility without pretending humans are logic-driven machines, Miss Granger?" 

"Deflection," she snapped. "You know that's not an answer."

"Neither is pretending humans make decisions like arithmantic equations. Especially when drunk. Or enchanted. Or under the age of magical legal law. I think magic listens more to the heartbeat than the head. And you do too — you just hate how much you agree with me."

Gasps. 

The room was boiling, and only the two of them didn't notice.

She let go of her parchment and went closer. 

"Baudelairean thought might reflect emotional truth, but legal magical consent requires more than passion. It requires protection. The very existence of magical backlash when contracts are signed under duress proves my point: magic wants intention, yes — but clean, unambiguous intention."

"As I said, Granger. Real consent isn't sterile. It's painful. It's full of doubt. But it's chosen. Magic knows that. Baudelaire knew it. And maybe, somewhere beneath your sanctimonious footnotes and parchment — Granger — you know it too; you just hate how much you agree with me." he said it with a faint smile, like the drop of a lighted match in a dark room. 

"And that's exactly why we need boundaries," she said, eyes burning, voice deadly. "Not because magic is clean. But because we aren't."

She looked like she was ready to eviscerate him. 

He looked pleased with the result. 

Professor Vector rose like a storm cloud unfurling and stopped them.

"That was... spirited."

She removed her glasses, setting them down with a sigh.

"I'm calling it a tie. Technically, Miss Granger's framework held. But Mr Malfoy's emotional argument has merit — and disturbing surprising enticement. 

I'm calling it a draw."

A few Ravenclaws already scribbled notes for their dissertations. 

Theo murmured something about emotional enchantment theory.

Harry tried to understand what had just happened. 

Hermione turned without a word, gathering her parchment like armour.

As she stepped off the dais, Draco leaned in just close enough for her to feel his coldness.

"You argued well," he murmured, voice silk-threaded sin. "Shame your logic's allergic to heat."

Without looking, she jabbed an elbow into his ribs — hard and precise.

Draco winces. Yet grins anyway.

"You argue like you hit."

She smirked. "And you argue like you're losing, senseless."

He laughed. "You're assuming I was talking to win."

She didn't answer.

She didn't need to.

Bell rings.

The room doesn't exhale until both of them are gone.

⸻

Minerva,

I am writing to formally escalate a matter that now extends beyond the scope of classroom dynamics and into the realm of institutional risk management.

During today's Arithmancy debate — ostensibly centred on magical consent theory — Miss Granger and Mr Malfoy moved well beyond academic discourse. What unfolded was, by all reasonable observation, a collision of legal, ethical, and magical frameworks delivered with such strategic intensity that it resembled a diplomatic negotiation between two hostile states more than a student exercise.

Their discussion invoked, among other things: pre-Merlinian magical jurisprudence, obscure contract law precedents from the 17th century, arguments from Baudelaire on sovereign will, and speculative applications of willbinding in romantic vs. wartime contexts. I emphasise: these are sixteen-year-olds.

They did not argue. They constructed ideological infrastructures and then launched them at each other in waves.

While no spells were cast, several students required grounding charms, and one Hufflepuff left muttering about soul contracts and hexed love letters.

My concern is no longer disciplinary. It is structural.

If these two are permitted to either continuously oppose or, more concerning, collaborate, we may soon find ourselves confronting challenges to longstanding magical governance, curriculum authorship, and the Ministry's legal scaffolding. I am not exaggerating when I say they possess the intellectual arsenal and rhetorical force to rewire how magic is understood and regulated, even at their current age.

I therefore strongly recommend the following, effective immediately:

1. They are not to be placed on the same team, committee, research project, or inter-house panel without review and approval from a joint board of department heads.

2. Slughorn must be informed not to pair them for the Academic Symposium. The risk of escalation is non-theoretical.

3. Flitwick should consider adjusting seating rotation at meals and shared lectures.

4. The Faculty Override Clause of 1892 (originally instituted for the Elemental Containment Pairing Crisis) should be reviewed for possible preemptive invocation.

5. A confidential dossier on their collaborative potential — and the implications thereof — is being prepared and will be circulated before week's end.

I want to be clear: I do not oppose either student's growth, nor do I underestimate the brilliance of what they're attempting. But brilliance without structure is volatile. And the two of them, whether adversarial or aligned, are dangerously close to breaching boundaries of student inquiry and entering territory that affects institutional law and magical order.

Please advise on next steps, and whether the Board should be discreetly briefed.

Note: If these two ever do join forces, I recommend we preemptively draft Hogwarts' constitutional safeguards. Merlin help us all if they realise they'd make a terrifyingly effective alliance.

Sincerely,

Septima Vector

Professor of Arithmancy

(Acting Coordinator of Magical Ethics Compliance)

P.S. The transcript of the debate is attached, but I suggest tea. Or firewhisky.

P.P.S. Should these two students transcend the bounds of acceptable inquiry, I trust Professor Snape's reputation for ruthless pragmatism will serve as the last line of defence against institutional collapse. Whether he acts as judge, jury, or executioner remains to be seen.

___

Septima,

First and foremost, thank you for your measured, if alarming, assessment of today's proceedings. I read your report with the tea you suggested — and then reread it with the firewhisky you implied. It was entirely warranted.

Let me begin by acknowledging the gravity of your concerns. I am in full agreement: what transpired in your seminar was not a debate — it was, as you so aptly put it, a collision of legal-philosophical architectures, waged by two students who should not, by age or authority, have access to that degree of rhetorical ammunition.

And yet — here we are.

It is both a testament to their intellects and a potential liability of extraordinary proportions. Your concern is not misplaced. Hogwarts has, in its long and storied history, produced visionaries, iconoclasts, revolutionaries — and occasionally, disasters. Sometimes all in the same individual.

But two such figures, weaponised against each other in adolescence?

That is uncharted territory.

I hereby authorise the following:

Restricted Collaboration Mandate — Granger and Malfoy are not to be placed on the same team, panel, or project without express written consent from no fewer than three Heads of House and either you or me present.

Slughorn Notification — I will speak with Horace personally. He is enamoured with "potential," often to the point of reckless matchmaking. He must be reminded that academic brilliance is not inherently stabilising.

Modified Proximity Rotations — I've directed Professor Flitwick to quietly ensure Granger and Malfoy are not seated in direct proximity in joint lectures. Meals are harder to control, but I've taken steps (see P.S.).

1892 Override Clause — I've begun review. The fact that we're revisiting a statute originally drafted due to a couple of students accidentally summoning a hurricane elemental in a Charms practicum should give us all pause.

Dossier Approval — Please submit the preliminary version to me by Friday. I will review it before forwarding it to the Board in confidence. Use the Obscura Warding Seal. We do not need to have Ministry eyes — not until we know if we're looking at revolution, renaissance, or mutually assured destruction.

Hermione Granger's ability to synthesise magical law, ethical doctrine, and arithmantic precision is, quite frankly, decades beyond her peers. She does not argue — she legislates. I have often wondered whether she might wish to rewrite the legal structure of magical Britain before she graduates. Today confirms she might do it mid-semester.

As for Mr Malfoy: Lucius always played with institutions. Draco appears poised to rewrite the very soul of them. There is a danger in him — not the crude, brash kind his father wielded — but the elegant kind. The kind that tempts systems to collapse by pointing out their weaknesses and daring them to hold anyway. He possesses the same cogent charisma as Narcissa, effortlessly weaving words that draw you into his every suggestion, making even the most improbable ideas seem irresistibly appealing.

Their arguments were not about magical consent. They were about power — how it's constructed, how it's bound, how it deceives even the willing. That they could have that discussion in real time, unrehearsed, is staggering. And unnerving.

More unnerving: they understood each other's point of view. Deeply. Too deeply.

Let us not forget the Marauders, who fractured time and trust with talent and charm.

Nor the First Wizarding War, born in part from voices who believed themselves above the law, armed with rhetoric and ideology before they ever lifted a wand.

Let us not forget Tom Riddle, who was once just another clever boy in a polished uniform, quoting history in perfect Latin and Parseltongue and charming his professors to sleep.

The difference, I hope, is that these two still believe in something greater than themselves. Granger believes in structure. Malfoy believes in force. If we are lucky, that tension keeps them in balance. If not... well, let's hope it will keep them in distant proximity. 

I do not believe we should fear them. But we must not underestimate them.

They are not dangerous because they are unruly. They are dangerous because they are brilliant, disciplined, and increasingly aware of what they are capable of.

Should they ever realise how much more they could do together than apart — we will need every ounce of foresight and courage we possess to manage the results. 

Not stop them, mind you. 

At that point, stopping them would be a delusion. We will need to negotiate.

Merlin help us if they start drafting their own definitions of "consent," "justice," or "truth."

Because they'll win.

And the world will shift beneath our feet.

Warmly (and somewhat warily),

Minerva McGonagall

⸻

P.S. I have instructed the castle wardstones to subtly recalibrate. They will from now detect if any unapproved willbinding, soul-tagging, or covenant-level enchantments are to be cast in common areas — including corridors, study rooms, and the Arithmancy wing.

Just in case.

P.P.S. I agree with your final note. Should this become unmanageable, Severus will act. He always has. Though I must warn you: he may admire them more than he fears them. And that could be its own kind of danger.

___

The clinking of glassware echoed softly between them, fragile sounds swallowed by the cavernous chamber. The room felt like it was a world unto itself, underbelly of cold stone and oozing steam. The bitter tang of spilt tinctures and crushed herbs lingered in every corner, cutting through the deeper, mustier scents of ancient stone and old, rotting wood.

Twinkling scones cast elongated clouds along the rough-hewn walls, guttering and hissing as if gasping for breath against the ever-present chill. The narrow, ceilings overhead absorbed sound, swallowing every scrape of glass against stone, until the space felt too claustrophobic.

Hermione's station was a disorganised in open books, half-filled jars, and curling parchment edges already smudged with ink and powdered reagents. A small brass mortar and pestle in her hands grinding a tight bundle of asphodel roots into a fine, ivory-grey powder. The motion trembling loose thin trails of dust that clung to her sleeves. The thin, fibrous strands crackled beneath the pressure, releasing a bitter, earthy odour that clung to the back of her throat.

Beside her, Draco leaned over a tall, glass beaker, his pale fingers wrapped tightly around its neck as he slowly tilted a thin-necked vial, pouring a viscous, milky liquid in a slow, controlled stream. The substance hit the clear base of the beaker with a soft, sibilant hiss, thickening almost instantly, the surface rippling like congealing fat. Faint curls of steam rose from the mixture, swirled up into the chilled air before dissipating against the clammy stone ceiling.

Their eyes met briefly over the rim of their workstations, a fragile suspense shuddering between them in an unequivocal style. The air hung lazy, arrayed with something neither dared name aloud, yet impossible to ignore. Perhaps it was the lotus, or the magnesium rock that made her head dizzy, or the fact that she had been eating strawberries since noon, and nothing else. Draco's hand brushed against hers as they reached for the same vial, taking his hand fast. 

"Valence isn't aligning," Hermione muttered, her mind whirring even as her hands moved on autopilot, grinding the roots into an ever-finer consistency. She pushed a stray curl of hair behind her ear with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint smear of magnesium powder against her temple. Her eyes darted to the hastily scrawled notes in the corner of their shared parchment—a lattice of crossed-out calculations and half-finished equations. "We're missing something."

Draco's head snapped up, a crease appearing between his brows as he set the beaker down with a faint clink. The milky liquid sloshed within, casting thin, white streaks along the glass. "We stabilised the aconitine," he countered, eyes flicking to the neatly chopped pile of sharp, green leaves beside his elbow. The jagged edges gleamed faintly and the bitter scent cut through the metallic tang of the asphodel.

"It must be the diterpenoids from the lotus," she continued, reaching for the small brass bowl beside her elbow. The shavings within it clinked together as his fingers brushed the bowl's edge, the jagged, silvery fragments like brittle, broken bones. "It's pulling the whole solution out of equilibrium. We need to counterbalance, or the mixture will destabilise."

Hermione's gaze sharpened, her eyes narrowing as they fixed on the magnesium rock. It gleamed dully in the flickering torchlight, tiny shards that sparked faintly with every minor shift in the air. She frowned, setting the mortar aside with a muted thud. "But the asphodel should have buffered that," she argued, voice tinged with irritation, her mind already leaping several steps ahead, through layers of chemical reactions and arcane formulae. "Unless...did you calculate the lotus alone to see if it fully counteracts aconitine's potent effects without precise extraction?" 

She leaned closer to the parchment, quill snapping up in her ink-stained fingers, scratching out a quick series of numbers, arrows darting between ingredients, their interactions forming a latticework of possibilities. She murmured half-formed thoughts under her breath, the words almost lost in the clinking of glass and the low, crackling hiss of the nearby cauldrons.

Draco's eyes slid back to her, the corners of his mouth twitching into a faint, almost begrudging smirk as he watched her mind work, ink spattering faintly onto her sleeve, looking at her grey powdered temple. 

"I did it. You're just overthinking it," he said, one hand still braced against the surface of the worktable. His voice was low, almost teasing, but with an edge of genuine impatience. "You always do."

Hermione's head snapped up, her eyes sharp. "I'm thorough," she shot back, her chin lifting slightly, fingers tightening around the quill as if to punctuate her point.

"Pedantic."

"Methodical."

"Obsessive."

She stilled, her pulse skipping for a moment. His expression was carefully blank, but she could see the faintest glint of challenge beneath it, the same steely defiance she'd seen in him countless times across the Great Hall, in the heat of duels, in the silent standoffs that had defined their early years.

Before she could fire back, her mind caught on a different thread, something that had been bothering her since the first class of the morning. It was nagging and well-formed apprehension that had been scratching at the back of her mind, even as she ground the asphodel and calculated the potion's pH.

She set her quill down slowly, her fingers tightening around its shaft, the rough wood pressing into her palm.

"Did you notice Theo today?"

Draco's expression didn't change, but his eyes flicked to hers, a subtle, guarded shift in his posture. "What about him?"

"He was... different...Off. More... watchful. Like he knew something..."

Draco huffed a quiet laugh, tilting the beaker in his hand so the thin, translucent liquid within rippled faintly, catching the light like trapped ghosts. "Theo always knows something," he said, his tone tinged with a strange mix of affection and exasperation. "It's his curse."

Hermione frowned, leaning in slightly. "What do you mean?"

Draco glanced up, his grey eyes catching the dim torchlight, reflecting it in sharp, silvery flecks. "Theo's too attentive for his own good," 

Hermione's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

Draco paused, his head tilting just enough for the dim torchlight to catch the sharp, silver flecks in his grey eyes, like shards of broken glass. His fingers tightened imperceptibly around the smooth, cool glass of the beaker.

"Theo's too attentive for his own good," he said again, his voice dropping to a quieter, more guarded tone. The echo of it curled into the damp stone of the dungeon walls, clinging to the shadows. "He sees things the rest of us miss. The details, the shifts, the cracks. It's what makes him, well, him."

Hermione crossed her arms, leaning back slightly, her gaze fixed on the tense set of Draco's jaw, the way his fingers flexed around the beaker's slender neck. "But today felt... different," she pressed, her tone sharper, more insistent. "Like he was aware of something specific. Like he was watching me."

Draco's fingers tightened further, the glass in his grip creaking faintly, his jaw ticking as he looked away, eyes narrowing at the softly swirling contents of the beaker. He swirled it again, the liquid within thinning to a ghostly, translucent blue, catching the guttering torchlight in ghostly spirals.

"It's part of his charm."

She raised an eyebrow, her mind already spinning through dozens of possible explanations. "You mean it's part of his paranoia."

He set the beaker down carefully, the glass clicking against the cool, polished stone with a faint ring. "You'd be paranoid too if you were always half-strung on opiates and withdrawal. Makes you see connections where there are none."

Hermione's eyes sharpened, her pulse quickening as pieces she hadn't realised were part of the same puzzle began to click together. "Sevraj?"

"Theo's too smart for his own good," he said. "He knows when to hide it, how to mask it. But trust me, Granger, he's rarely sober. He just makes it part of his personality, blends it into his quirks so no one questions it."

"I thought he was just... eccentric," she said slowly, the words tasting strange as they left her mouth, this time it was the lingering remnants of powdered magnesium catching in her throat.

"Eccentric is when you talk to portraits in empty corridors or memorise entire star charts for fun. Theo is something else."

Hermione felt a cold, sharp chill race down her spine, her skin prickling beneath her robes. Her mind raced, recalling the way Theo's eyes had locked on hers that morning, the calculating gleam in his gaze, the strange, fleeting flicker of something dark and unreadable that had passed across his face before he'd turned away.

"What does he know?" she whispered, more to herself than to Draco, her fingers tightening around the edge of the worktable, the rough stone biting into her palms.

"More than he should," he said, his voice low, dangerous, barely more than a breath against the cold stone walls. "More than either of us should."

Hermione's jaw tightened, a flicker of frustration sparking in her eyes. She leaned in, the space between them shrinking, the rough edge of the worktable pressing into her side. "Then why are we still here, whispering like first years caught out of bounds?" she shot back, her voice sharper, cutting through the damp air. "If Theo knows something, if he's piecing things together—"

Draco's hand shot out, fingers wrapping around her wrist, firm but not cruel, the chill of his skin seeping through the thin fabric of her sleeve. He felt his arm, the one where he made the vow of secrecy—the phantom warmth of its grip. It pulsed now, a faint, spectral thrum beneath his skin. His grip stilled her, coercing her to meet his eyes, the shadows flickering across his features, casting him in drastic relief against the sputtering torchlight.

"Keep your voice down," he hissed, his tone edged with a sudden, fierce urgency that sent a cold shiver down her spine. His eyes darted to the arched way, as if expecting the shadows themselves to sprout ears. "Do you have any idea what you're suggesting? What kind of risk are you talking about?"

Hermione's heart stuttered, the pulse in her wrist thrumming against his tightening grip. She met his gaze, her own eyes flashing with a stubborn defiance, the kind that had seen her through darkened corridors and whispered oaths, that had pushed her into alliances she'd once sworn she'd never consider.

"I know exactly what I'm suggesting," she whispered back, her voice a low, dangerous murmur, the words slipping past her clenched teeth, sharp and unyielding. "If Theo's a liability, if he's watching us, if he's piecing together things he shouldn't—"

Draco's jaw tightened, the tendons in his neck standing out starkly, the sharp line of his collar casting a shadow across his throat.

"You don't touch Theo," he whispered. "Not unless you want everything we've built to come crashing down. He's not just a loose thread you can pull."

Hermione's eyes flared with a fierce intensity, the flickering torchlight casting sharp shadows that danced across her face, illuminating the sharp edge of her gaze. The rush of adrenaline flooded her veins, colouring her cheeks a vivid rose and tightening her jaw with resolute resolution.

She leaned in slowly, deliberately, the slight tilt of her chin narrowing the distance between them until her breath brushed softly against his icy cheek, it felt warm, and the faintly subtle scent of Muggle strawberries mixed with the comforting musk of inked parchment, made him swallow in dry. 

"I'm not afraid to pull at loose threads," 

The air between them was thick, charged, as if the shadows themselves leaned in closer to catch every word.

His jaw tightened and his facial muscles flexed. His eyes locked onto hers, pupils constricted into sharp pinpoints of focus—calculated, wary, yet unable to descend their colour by the scones' fire alone.

"Because if he's a threat," she continued, voice barely above a breath, "if he's already seen too much—."

"No," he bit out, his voice dropping to a harsh rasp, the words slipping past his clenched teeth. "You leave Theo to me. Whatever he's piecing together, whatever suspicions he's nursing, I'll handle it. You focus on your part, and use that know-it-all head of yours."

For a heartbeat, she contemplated contorting her arm from his clasp, striding back and allowing the space to stretch the ardency between them. But the scarcely impeded dread disguised in his sneer and the tinge of something more human beneath the ice, clasped her still, even if it was prickling the vexation that had steered her to draw her wand on him more than once.

"Don't mistake my caution for cowardice, Malfoy," she whispered, her breath brushing his cheek, "You're not the only one with something to lose."

Then, slowly, he released her wrist, his fingers slipping away, the stinging heat of his grip lingering against her skin like a brand.

"Just don't get yourself in a possible position you can't escape," he muttered, the words dropping into the air between them, rough and edged with a bitterness that tasted like regret.

He stepped back with his shoulders stiff, the faint rustle of his robes the only sound in the sudden, breathless silence. Hermione held his gaze for a second longer, her mind already whirring through a dozen possible outcomes, each one more dangerous than the last.

Hermione stood still for a moment, trying to shake the sensation, the pressure of his grasp, the ghost of his whispered warning clinging to her like smoke. 

His skin was cold. 

Impossibly cold. Like one of a cadaver's. 

And as the darkness closed around her, the torches flickering low, she felt the full, chilling weight of how impossibly cold his skin could be.

Thin, curling plume of smoke rose from the cauldron, its tendrils unfurling like ghostly limbs of some deep-sea creature, twisting and spiralling upward before dissipating into the cold stone-scented air of the enclosure. The potion beneath it began to ripple, like the skin of a breathing beast beneath a shallow pool, each pulse sending a fine, shivering vibration through the heavy iron base of the cauldron.

It wasn't supposed to do that.

Hermione's eyes narrowed, her breath catching as she leaned closer, her fingers tightening around the edge of the worktable. The potion's hue, now a dense, opalescent green streaked with thin veins had taken on a sickly sheen. The rising smoke thickened, spiralling tighter.

The lotus. It had to be the lotus.

Her mind raced, sifting through pages of notes, mental diagrams of molecular structures and binding spells. If the lotus wasn't crushed perfectly—if even a single fibrous strand remained, it would act like a splinter in the potion's volatile chemistry, forcing the mixture to rebel, to strain against the alchemical balance she'd so meticulously crafted.

She reached up, fingers tangling in her hair, nails digging sharply into her scalp as the harsh tang of the scorched lotus root reached her nose. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat. 

"Fuck."

She didn't see the slight curve of Draco's lips, the faint, fleeting glint in his eyes as he watched her from the other side of the worktable, his arms folded, his posture deceptively relaxed, all casual arrogance and idle observation.

But he said nothing, only watched, grey eyes sharp and unblinking, the corner of his mouth curled in a ghost of a smile. 

The potion gave another slow, unnatural pulse, its surface swelling with a ripple that sent thin, fractal cracks skittering across the thin layer of residue clinging to the sides of the cauldron.

He knew what he did, and he did it for petty vengeance. 

Hermione straightened, jaw set, fingers twitching as she snatched up her wand, her mind already leaping ahead, calculating the precise adjustments she would need to salvage the brew before it spiralled completely out of control, before the volatile mix tipped into the realm of the truly perilous.

And behind her, Draco's small, knowing smile faded into a ghost of itself, his eyes narrowing, his gaze sharpening as the bitter, too-sweet tang of the lotus twisted through the air like the whisper of an old, half-forgotten threat.

____

As they crossed paths outside the Great Hall, Theo's gaze met the Golden trio for a brief, charged moment. His eyes flicked over her, as if he knew everything, a quick, appraising glance that felt almost clinical, the hint of a challenge glinting in their depths before he tilted his head in a small, mocking nod, the ghost of a smirk pulling at his lips as he disappeared into the crowd.

Later that day, when she was alone in the corridor outside the library, bent over a mess of parchment, he appeared again, silent as breath, leaning against the wall like he'd always been there.

"Granger," he said softly, like it was a secret.

She didn't jump, but she looked up warily.

He tilted his head, his gaze roving over her like she was a puzzle half-solved. 

Hermione blinked. Slowly. Her head turned toward him, confusion flickering across her face. "What?"

He didn't elucidate. Just watched her, gaze unreadable but intent. His voice had softened, and yet there was something behind it—something unsettling in how casually he said it, like it wasn't just a passing observation, but a thread pulled deliberately.

"You smell like lotus. Scorched lotus root, specifically," he added, his eyes not leaving hers. 

Theo's voice came again, quieter now. "It's hard to wash out, you know. That scent. It clings. Even when you think it's gone, it stays."

"Draco didn't come to class today," Theo said, casually inspecting an nonexistent loose thread at the cuff of his sleeve before glancing back at her. "Did you notice?"

Hermione straightened slightly, fingers freezing above the parchment. "No," she lied.

Theo's eyes crinkled, almost fondly. He knew she had. Everyone noticed when Draco wasn't in class. They just pretended they didn't.

Theo went on, his voice light but laced with something far more deliberate. "Didn't miss breakfast. He didn't sleep through anything. He's just—" a beat, a shrug "—staying in."

Hermione said nothing, but the way her hand gripped her quill betrayed the tension running just beneath her skin.

Theo leaned a little closer, the shadows of the corridor catching in the hollows beneath his eyes. "Because he still smells like scorched lotus."