Chapter Text
The world was ending—and it was quieter than Draco Malfoy had imagined.
There were no battle cries, no clash of spellfire lighting up the heavens, no final words echoing off the stones. Just the whisper of wind, dry and slow, as it traced the curve of broken walls and stirred ash where roses used to bloom. There was the creaking groan of fractured marble and timber, the soft flutter of something scorched beyond recognition settling in the ruins of Malfoy Manor. And, farther off, the low, haunted sound of magic unraveling—like distant thunder rolling over the bones of a dying world.
Above the ruins, the sky bled in impossible colors, as though the heavens themselves had been torn open. Veins of poisonous green and blood-red laced the clouds, threading through bruised purples and sickly yellows. They didn’t drift—they churned, boiling like oil on fire, moving in great spirals that bent the shape of the horizon. Lightning split the sky sideways, jagged and silent, scarring the firmament in strokes of fire that never quite faded. Every few seconds, the clouds pulsed, as if the sky was drawing a last, gasping breath.
Draco Malfoy stood at the center of what had once been the grand courtyard. His boots—one scorched, the other slashed to the sole—stood among shattered cobblestones, bloodied peacock feathers, and scorched remnants of what might have once been fine tapestries or velvet robes. His black robes hung in tatters, silver trim smudged with soot and ash. One sleeve was entirely gone, exposing a long burn that ran from shoulder to wrist, crusted with blood. His platinum-blonde hair was tangled and darkened with dirt, stuck to his face and neck in damp clumps. The cut across his cheekbone had stopped bleeding hours ago, but the dried trail glistened faintly in the uncanny light.
In his right hand, he clutched the Elder Wand.
It pulsed against his palm—a rhythmic, insistent thrum, like a second heartbeat that wasn’t his. It vibrated in the silence, not with hunger, but with resistance. With warning.
The air tasted of magic gone wrong—charcoal, ozone, and something like rusted metal, bitter and dry. Heavy with the weight of spells that should never have been cast.
Everything had gone wrong.
The Dark Lord.
Dumbledore.
Potter.
Each name cracked like glass inside his skull, fragments of a future that had never been his to choose.
The Dark Lord.
Draco had only been sixteen when he pressed the brand into his own arm.
Sixteen, and already unraveling.
He told himself he wasn’t trembling. That the chill slicking his palms was just the draught in the stone corridor, not the terror pooling in his gut like lead. But the lie tasted thin. Bitter. It curdled on his tongue as he passed through the iron-banded doors and into the hollow dark.
Because he was there.
Voldemort. The Dark Lord.
The name alone throbbed in Draco’s head like a curse. His magic recoiled from it, like a candle guttering beneath a gust. And still—he stepped forward.
The chamber stretched wide and cold beneath the earth, lit only by flickering green-blue torches that cast shadows like claws across the walls. Hooded figures lined the edges, silent and watching—Death Eaters, all of them faceless behind silver masks. Their eyes glittered through the slits, judging.
Waiting.
But Draco didn’t look at them.
His gaze locked on the figure at the center of it all.
Him.
He stood utterly still, draped in robes that moved with a life of their own, oil-slick and liquid black, as though stitched from void. His form was tall but wrong, too fluid in its stillness, too precise—like something pretending to be human and nearly succeeding. The air warped around him. Magic bled from his pores like perfume and poison.
Draco’s breath hitched. He forced it steady.
And then Voldemort turned.
His eyes—red as fresh blood, slit like a serpent’s—met Draco’s and did not blink. There was no warmth in them, not even cruelty. Just endless calculation. Power without anchor. A void that saw everything and forgave nothing.
And yet—beneath the monstrous face, beneath the bone-white skin stretched too tight over a skull too sharp, Draco caught a glimmer of something else. A flicker. A ghost of the man he might have once been.
Not kind.
Not good.
But charming, maybe. Terribly clever. The sort of beauty that could talk you into drinking poison.
But that man was gone now. Devoured by what remained.
A god.
A monster.
A myth that walked and breathed and demanded everything.
Draco couldn’t look away.
“Your arm,” Voldemort said at last, and the words slithered through the silence—not spoken, but felt. They vibrated in Draco’s teeth, curled inside his spine, thin and sharp like threads drawn through bone.
He obeyed.
Hands shaking, he unfastened his cuff. The skin of his forearm looked pale in the torchlight, almost translucent.
Vulnerable.
Then the magic stirred.
It rose slowly—an unseen tide, ancient and suffocating. The chamber thickened with it. The torches flared. Somewhere deep inside him, Draco felt a pressure build, like something enormous pressing against the membrane of the world. Waiting to be let in.
The Dark Lord lifted a single hand.
No wand. No incantation.
Just will.
The moment it touched him, the world shattered.
Magic surged into his skin like wildfire and frost, like jagged lightning drawn inward. It wasn’t just pain—it was invasion, crashing through his blood, setting his bones alight, a cold fire scouring every inch of who he was. It felt like drowning in stars. Like being hollowed out and rewritten.
He wanted to scream.
He would have screamed.
But he bit down hard—teeth grinding against the inside of his cheek, tasting blood, tasting copper. He locked his jaw, shoulders spasming as the pain reached its crescendo. His knees trembled. Tears blurred his vision, but he held himself upright, if only barely.
The Mark unfurled in his flesh like a living thing—black ink etched by divine hands, shaped by sin and ancient pacts. Snake. Skull. Submission.
By the time it was over, he could no longer feel his fingers. He collapsed to one knee, gasping, barely aware of the smoke rising from his skin.
Voldemort watched him with something like interest. His mouth curled into a thin, bloodless smile that didn’t even pretend to be kind.
“So young,” he said softly. “And yet, you understand what it means to obey.”
Draco didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
His chest heaved. His teeth were stained red. His arm pulsed with the brand, the pain burrowed deep, like the magic had taken up residence somewhere beneath his heart.
He could feel it breathing there.
The silence returned, heavier than before.
Something in him had been carved out—scraped hollow—and in its place was this. A seal. A bond. A vow laced with poison and power.
As he stared at the Mark, still trembling, still tasting his own blood, a truth bloomed behind his ribs:
He would never be free again.
Not from this.
Not from him.
Not even from himself.
The corridor outside the chamber was colder than it should have been—airless, silent, as though the walls themselves had been bled dry of warmth. Draco leaned against the stone, one palm flat against it to steady himself. His arm still pulsed with the aftershock of the Mark, as if the magic had teeth and was gnawing its way down to bone.
He wanted to scream. Or vomit. Or vanish.
But instead, he swallowed it all down, like every Malfoy was taught to do.
Footsteps echoed—unsteady, too quick. Draco lifted his head just as a familiar figure rounded the corner.
Lucius.
For a heartbeat, Draco didn’t recognize him.
He was thinner—alarmingly so. His once-immaculate robes hung loose on his frame, the cuffs frayed, the fabric dulled. His long blond hair, always groomed with surgical precision, now clung to his temples in greasy strands, limp and matted. His eyes—once sharp, calculating—burned too brightly, pupils pinprick-small and ringed with feverish shadows.
There was a wildness in him now. A crack running straight through.
“Draco,” Lucius breathed, stopping short. His gaze flicked to the Mark, still raw and smoking on Draco’s arm, then up to his son’s face. And then—he smiled.
It was not a comforting smile.
It was the smile of a man who had lost everything but his delusions.
“Yes. Draco.” He reached forward, long fingers trembling slightly. “You have done well. A Malfoy does not scream.”
Draco stared at him.
His father’s hand hovered over his shoulder, but Draco didn’t lean in. Didn’t move.
Something inside him was unraveling—quietly, softly. No panic. No rage.
Just… realization.
This was what he’d bled himself for.
This man. This name.
Lucius looked so proud. But his pride was a hollow thing now, chipped and pitiful, like a polished mirror cracked down the center. He was supposed to be regal. Powerful. A pureblood prince.
Instead, he looked like a ghost of someone who used to matter.
Draco’s mouth was dry. His voice, when it came, was quiet. Almost gentle.
“I’d like to rest now.”
Lucius blinked, as if he hadn’t quite heard.
Draco stepped past him. He didn’t touch his father—just moved around him like he might a column of smoke. His legs felt like they didn’t belong to him. Every nerve still hummed with pain.
At the end of the corridor, he reached the door to the guest chambers—cold, impersonal, draped in dark velvet. He opened it. Paused.
Lucius had followed. His eyes were wide, lips parted, as though he wanted to speak. To share something. Pride, maybe. Or approval. Or madness.
Draco didn’t let him.
He turned, met his father’s gaze one last time, and then—shut the door in his face.
The latch clicked.
And the silence that followed was louder than anything.
Inside the room, Draco sank onto the edge of the bed, hands braced on his knees. The Mark still burned beneath his skin. His heart thudded like something trapped.
The curtains whispered as the wind moved behind them. Somewhere above, the manor groaned in its bones.
Draco lowered his head into his hands.
He had thought the Mark would make things clearer. Simpler.
But all it had done was show him how far he’d fallen into someone else’s dream.
Someone else’s ruin.
And no one—not Voldemort, not the Death Eaters, not even Lucius—had ever warned him that becoming powerful might mean becoming hollow.
He wasn’t sure if he’d ever sleep again.
But he was very, very tired.
The door shut out the world, but it couldn’t shut out the truth.
Draco sat in the dark.
No candles. No wandlight. Just the heavy velvet of shadow wrapped around him like mourning cloth. The faint moonlight leaking through the curtains touched the floor like spilled milk, ghostly and cold. His chest rose and fell—shallow, measured. He was still breathing. He hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t cried.
He had done what was expected.
His fingers curled into the mattress, knuckles pale. The Mark on his arm still throbbed—an ember beneath his skin, pulsing in time with something ancient and cruel. The room smelled of old velvet, iron, and the magic residue clinging to his flesh like a curse.
And then—
He laughed.
It started small. A sharp exhale through his nose, like the kind he gave in class when someone said something stupid.
But it didn’t stop.
The sound bubbled up, bitter and bright, echoing strangely in the silence. It built into something breathless, something unhinged. A laugh not of joy, but of disbelief. Hysterical. Hollow. Ugly.
His hands came up to his face as he doubled forward, laughter shaking his shoulders.
Superior.
That’s what they’d told him. What he’d been groomed to believe.
He was a Malfoy. He was better.
Not just above the Muggle-borns, but above the others, too. The Greengrasses. The Notts. Even the Blacks. The Malfoys were pure. Immaculate. Untouchable.
But how could a master be branded like cattle?
How could someone superior be reduced to this?
This.
A slave in silk.
A puppet carved from silver and shame.
His laughter broke—fractured in the middle—and became breath. Just breath. Harsh and hot. And then the tears came.
They didn’t wrench from his throat in sobs. They slid silently down his face, clean tracks over skin too pale, too perfect. Another lesson.
Malfoys do not cry.
Not when he was little, and his father’s hand struck out faster than thought because Draco couldn’t sit still. Because he had asked—just once—if he could go play with the other children at the party instead of memorizing ancestral bloodlines.
Not when he’d been given his first spellbook at five and told he’d read it or he’d regret it.
Not when he’d sat in silence while his mother applied healing salves and told him gently, “You must be strong, my dragon. You must learn to endure.”
So the tears came without a sound. As if even they had been taught to obey.
They streaked his beautiful face—too beautiful, too fragile. Built for display, not for choice.
And Draco finally saw it.
The lie.
Blood purity was a lie.
A story to control boys like him. Wrap them in silk and marble and tell them they were gods—while the leash was already tightening.
He wasn’t better.
He was malleable.
Obedient.
Crafted not to think, but to perform.
Potter was a half-blood. Raised without wealth, without prestige. He didn’t even know the rules, let alone follow them. But he had stood—fought—survived. Again and again. And the Dark Lord, the shadow that haunted their world, had failed because of him.
And Draco?
Draco had folded.
He looked down at the Mark on his arm. It glowed faintly in the dark, like something alive. A brand. A vow. A sentence.
It pulsed once.
And he knew.
There was no going back.
No more pretending.
No more childhood.
No more freedom.
He had made a choice—but it hadn’t really been his, had it?
And now—
He would become what they always wanted.
A puppet with pretty manners and perfect lineage.
And a string tied tight to a monster’s hand.
That should have been the end.
But things had only gotten worse.
There was a moment—a narrow, flickering sliver of calm—just days after the Mark had seared itself into his skin, when the burn stopped blistering and his arm no longer trembled from phantom pain. A moment when Draco allowed himself the lie that the worst was over. That the silence meant mercy.
He was wrong.
The summons came not as parchment nor owl, not even as a whisper in the dark—but as a pressure behind the eyes. A coiling heat that made his vision pulse. The echo of a snake’s hiss unfurling like a lullaby cracked by rust and rot. It slithered into his dreams, coiled around his ribs, tugged.
And he went.
He was led—dragged, really—through a manor that had become unfamiliar as though he had never been inside, but somehow already feared. The walls breathed cold. The stones underfoot were damp and uneven, slick with moss and something thicker. The air stank of mildew, rotting paper, and blood long since dried into the wood grain of the floors.
Portraits on the walls watched him pass. Silent. Blank-eyed. Disapproving.
He walked past cloaked figures, all familiar and unfamiliar. Men who now wore their masks even in daylight, as if their faces had rotted away. Past Crabbe’s father, who barely glanced at him. Past Nott’s father, who did. Past the gaunt, still forms of men whose eyes had seen death and wished it welcome.
And then—Bellatrix.
She was waiting in the corridor like a vulture in velvet, her eyes fever-bright and wide with something between joy and madness.
“You’ll be a man soon, nephew ,” she breathed, leaning too close, her voice a caress of knives. “A real one.”
Draco swallowed, but it stuck in his throat. He kept walking.
Then the doors opened, and he stood before him.
The Dark Lord.
Voldemort didn’t pace. Didn’t sit. He stood in the center of the chamber, impossibly still, as though even gravity had learned not to touch him. His presence swallowed light. Even the candles on the walls flickered as if uncertain they should burn.
His eyes—those inhuman slits—glinted like polished glass, reflecting nothing and everything all at once.
“You will do something for me, Draco,” he said.
Soft. Almost indulgent. Like he was bestowing a gift. A privilege.
Draco didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.
“You will find a way to let my faithful into Hogwarts,” Voldemort continued. “The school has stood untouched for too long.”
The words slithered across the cold floor like blades—gentle, deliberate, meant to bleed.
Draco’s blood turned to ice. His spine stiffened.
Hogwarts.
His home away from home.
His sanctuary. His prison.
He said nothing.
But Voldemort was not done.
His voice dipped—silk unraveling into steel.
“And you must kill Albus Dumbledore.”
Draco’s lungs collapsed inward. His heart stuttered like a bird slamming into glass.
Kill Dumbledore.
He was sixteen. He still had ink-stained knuckles and half-finished Transfiguration notes in his trunk. He still dreamed of winning the Cup. Still woke with a start from nightmares of the Ministry. Still wore a sweater his mother had pressed to her cheek before packing it, smelling of perfume and cedarwood.
He hadn’t even kissed someone he loved.
But none of that mattered now.
Voldemort stared at him—impassive, calculating. Not watching for signs of courage or resolve. No, he was watching for the fracture. For the crack.
Because Draco was never meant to succeed.
This was not an honor. This was punishment.
Retribution.
Lucius had failed at the Department of Mysteries. Had botched the prophecy. Had grovelled and begged for mercy like a dog at his master’s feet.
This was the cost.
Draco could feel it—cold and invisible—as though a noose had been conjured out of air and slipped over his neck. Tighter with every heartbeat.
He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t even a weapon.
He was an example.
Let the boy burn.
Let the world see what happens when a Malfoy disappoints their lord.
His fingers curled into fists at his side, nails biting skin. He stared at the stones beneath his shoes—patterned with cracks and rust-colored stains—and tried to still the shaking in his chest.
It wasn’t fear for himself that hollowed him out.
It was her.
His mother.
Narcissa. With her ice-glass voice and fierce, quiet love. With her hands that were always cold but always steady. The way she’d hum when she brushed his hair. The soft, urgent lullabies she sang when he was sick. The silence she kept when he cried as a child and didn’t want his father to know.
What would happen to her if he refused?
If he faltered?
If he failed?
He bowed his head. Slowly. Like kneeling at an altar. Like surrender.
His voice scraped from his throat, dry and wrong.
“It will be done.”
The lie sat heavy in his mouth. Iron and ash.
Voldemort smiled.
That terrible thing he did with his mouth, that wasn’t quite human.
All teeth. No warmth. No soul.
“Good boy.”
Amused.
That was what he was.
Not proud. Not impressed.
Amused.
As though it was a game. As though the task was nothing more than watching a moth drown in wax.
The laughter came next.
Not from Draco.
From the others.
Low, dry laughter. Cracked and brittle like dead leaves underfoot. Laughter that did not echo but lingered, crawling along the stone like smoke.
Even Bellatrix tilted her head, delighted. Her eyes glittered. She licked her teeth.
Draco stood still.
And said nothing.
Because he was already disappearing.
One string tighter.
One step closer to the edge.
Dumbledore.
Dumbledore stood framed by moonlight, pale and solemn, caught within the ruined grandeur of the Astronomy Tower like the final piece in a broken stained-glass window. The stone arches behind him yawned open to the sky, shattered by time and battle, their jagged edges biting into the night.
Above, clouds like torn silk whispered across the moon, casting flickering light over everything—too cold, too white, too unreal. Wind surged through the high spires and narrow slits in the stone, shrieking like ghosts denied rest, pulling at the hem of Draco’s robes with invisible fingers. Don’t, the wind seemed to hiss, over and over, in a chorus of a thousand forgotten voices.
Draco’s wand was slick in his palm.
Not from rain.
From sweat.
His pulse beat out a frantic rhythm in his ears, so loud he almost didn’t hear the creak of the floorboard beneath his shifting foot, or the quiet breath Dumbledore drew as he regarded him—still, calm, terribly mortal.
The headmaster didn’t raise his wand.
Didn’t reach for it.
Didn’t flinch.
He simply stood there, weathered and worn and bleeding slowly from the edges, as if he had long ago accepted what Draco had come here to do. His eyes, impossibly, were kind.
“Draco,” he said softly, each syllable dusted with grief. “I see you’ve been busy.”
Draco’s throat constricted around the words. He had rehearsed this moment again and again in his head—how he would say it, how he would own it. But now, all that resolve had curdled into something raw and panicked.
“I fixed it,” he rasped, barely louder than the wind. “The Vanishing Cabinet. The one in the Room of Requirement. I—I figured out how to link it to the one at Borgin and Burkes. I let them in.”
His voice trembled like a broken wire. So did his wand.
Dumbledore nodded slowly. His expression didn’t change, though there was something ancient behind his eyes, something infinitely tired.
“Ingenious work,” he murmured, as if they were in a classroom and this was a lesson. “I knew another boy, once—brilliant, like you. Terrified, like you. He made all the wrong choices.”
“Stop it,” Draco snapped. The words cracked like glass in the cold. “You don’t know me.”
“I do,” Dumbledore said, his voice gentler than ever. “You are not a killer.”
“You don’t understand.” The words exploded from him, high and sharp and desperate. “I have to. He’s going to kill me if I don’t. He’s going to kill her.”
His mother.
Her eyes the last soft place in his world.
Dumbledore took a single step forward. The movement was slow, deliberate, as if approaching a wounded animal. Draco flinched.
“Let me help you,” the old man whispered, and the offer hung in the air like a final spell.
But Draco’s head was already shaking, fast, frantic. “I have to do this,” he choked out.
Still, Dumbledore’s voice was maddeningly calm. “There are other ways, Draco.”
“I don’t have time for other ways,” Draco hissed, like a creature in a trap, bleeding at the edges. “They’re coming. Bellatrix. Greyback. If I don’t—if I don’t do it now—”
He didn’t finish.
Because the sound came then.
Boots. Laughter.
A cruel, cackling song echoing up the stairwell.
Shadows spilled into the tower like poison smoke.
Bellatrix Lestrange led the charge, her eyes feverish with delight, her grin feral. Her wand was already out, fingers twitching in anticipation.
“Well?” she purred, slinking behind him like a cat about to play with its prey. “Go on, nephew. Show us you’re not your father’s son.”
Draco didn’t turn. Didn’t breathe.
The smell of blood and wet fur filled the air—Greyback.
He slunk in beside her, taller, more monstrous, his grin full of teeth.
“Do it, boy,” he growled, voice rough and wet. “Let’s see if you’ve got any bite.”
Draco’s hand shook harder. His wand—still pointed at Dumbledore—felt heavier than it ever had before, as though something ancient had shifted inside it.
Draco screamed, “ Expelliarmus.” Dumbledore’s wand had soared through the air—so slow in that moment, tumbling end over end before landing, clattering on the cold stone.
The tower had gone still. Even the wind had seemed to hold its breath.
Draco picked the wand up.
It pulsed in time with his heartbeat. No… not his heartbeat. Something deeper. Older.
He had disarmed Dumbledore.
And the wand had chosen him.
It knew him.
But still—he couldn’t move.
His mother’s face flickered in his mind like a candle in a storm—her fingers brushing hair from his forehead, her voice humming lullabies he pretended not to remember. If he didn’t do this, she would die.
Bellatrix leaned in closer, breath hot and sickly against his ear.
“Do it,” she whispered, voice like broken silk. “Or I will.”
Draco’s jaw locked. Sweat slid down his neck in rivulets. Every muscle screamed for him to do something—anything.
But his wand hand was frozen.
He wanted to scream. To run. To undo everything.
Then—
A movement. Subtle. Soundless.
Like the air itself had turned inward.
A dark shape emerged from the stairwell, gliding into the scene like a shadow that had grown tired of hiding.
Severus Snape.
His black robes billowed in the wind. His face was a mask carved from stone.
His eyes—dark, fathomless—found Draco first. Then Dumbledore.
Something passed between the two men. Silent. Final.
Dumbledore’s voice broke the stillness.
“Severus,” he said, softer than breath. “Please.”
Draco blinked.
Snape didn’t speak.
Didn’t hesitate.
He raised his wand.
“No,” Draco whispered. “No—don’t—”
The green light ignited the tower like lightning.
Avada Kedavra.
The words rang like a bell struck by doom.
Dumbledore was lifted into the air—his body weightless, robes flaring like wings—and then he fell.
Over the edge.
Into the dark.
Gone.
The silence afterward was worse than the killing curse.
It pressed against Draco’s skull, against his ribs, thick and choking.
Bellatrix laughed—wild and manic and unhinged.
Greyback howled into the wind like a beast announcing blood.
But Draco?
Draco stood very still.
The wand in his hand was warm.
And cold.
And alive.
And dead.
He hadn’t done it.
But he hadn’t stopped it either.
Something in him had shattered. Irreparably. Quietly.
A part of him had gone over that edge too.
Potter
After Dumbledore died, potter ran away. Potter went on a chase for horcrux, hunting them down one by one. Until he showed up at the manor, the wards torn down and then madness.
The walls had fallen.
What once was carved of ancestral pride—marble veined with old magic, serpents etched into obsidian banisters, ancestral portraits that whispered of power and dominion—was now ash and rubble beneath Draco’s boots. The chandelier that had hung like a constellation of cruelty over the grand hall now lay shattered, glass scattered like frost across the blood-dark floor. Smoke curled upward from what remained of the east wing, sky bleeding red through the splintered roof. Somewhere under the weight of stone and spellfire, the Black family tapestry burned.
Draco stood in the heart of it all. Not untouched, but unbroken. Not victorious, but left behind.
Ash clung to the hem of his robes. His wand hung loosely at his side, its tip scorched and pulsing faintly with the last of some unspoken spell. His hands trembled, not from fear—but from the enormity of silence.
The silence of after.
He had seen Potter fall.
Not in a blaze of glory, not with some grand speech or final defiant curse—but in blood and mud, the light gone from his eyes before his body hit the ground. One moment he was there, burning with something greater than life. The next—
Extinguished.
And the Boy Who Lived… didn’t.
It had taken Draco a long time to move. Long enough to be certain it wasn’t some trick. Long enough to understand what it meant to see hope die.
Now, he stood alone in the ruins of Malfoy Manor, the last son of a fallen line, surrounded by the bones of gods and ghosts.
Bellatrix had told him once, in a moment of mad pride, of the Dark Lord’s greatest achievement.
“He conquered death, Draco,” she whispered, eyes wide with reverence and horror alike, cupping his chin with fingers that smelled of ash and blood. “Split his soul like a knife through silk. Seven shards. Seven anchors. Seven shadows.”
Draco had laughed. Laughed.
Until she kept speaking.
Until he understood.
And the laughter curdled in his throat.
He couldn’t forget the glint in her eyes. The way her voice trembled, not with awe—but with devotion. As if what the Dark Lord had done wasn’t an abomination, but a miracle. As if soul-mutilation were an act of divinity.
“No wonder,” Draco had muttered days later, sick to his stomach, pressing his forehead against the cold porcelain of his sink. “No wonder he looks like that. There’s nothing left of him.”
No wonder he couldn’t love. Couldn’t feel. No wonder he was nothing but smoke and screams and red eyes in the dark. He had carved himself into pieces and called it immortality.
Draco had thought it couldn’t get worse.
But then the war had come to his doorstep. Potter—mud-smeared, wild-eyed, cloaked in ruin and rage—had stormed the manor with the remnants of the Order. Weasley. Granger. Longbottom. Lupin. Tonks.
So many faces. Too many names.
The battle was a storm that split the world in two.
Wards shattered like glass under dragonfire. Curses howled through corridors that had once echoed with ballroom waltzes. Death Eaters fell screaming. So did the innocent.
And then Potter—
Potter, always at the center of the storm—
—fell.
No horcrux left to tether him to the world. No phoenix song. No mother’s love to shield him. Only blood, and the flicker of a green spell, and silence.
Now Draco stood over the place where Potter had died.
He didn’t cry.
He didn’t kneel.
He just stared.
A wind stirred the smoke, tugged at his hair, lifted the corner of his cloak. Somewhere beneath the rubble, something sizzled. A slow, final exhale of magic dying.
He felt sick.
Not just because Potter was dead.
But because Draco had wanted him dead once.
And now, looking down at the cracked stone and burned earth where a boy had laid down his life for a world that had never loved him enough—
He didn’t feel victory.
He felt hollow.
Because in the end, it wasn’t the Dark Lord who had become immortal.
It was Potter.
Not in the way the Dark Lord had carved himself into horcruxes and horror, but in the way he had given himself away—over and over—until there was nothing left but legend.
And Draco? Draco was the one still breathing.
The irony tasted like ash on his tongue.
All of it lead to now.
He drew in a shallow breath, and it scorched down his throat like fire. Still, he stood motionless. Silent.
He remembered this courtyard as it once was—glittering with fairy lights on the summer air, the sound of violins floating over the hedges, fireflies flickering in the rose vines. He remembered his mother’s voice calling him to stand straighter, his father’s cool praise when he did. He had once danced here, light-footed and proud, in polished shoes and pressed robes. Now, every step was pain, and the ghosts of those memories danced where the dead now lay.
Draco exhaled shakily. The silence wasn’t empty. It was waiting.
Somewhere, far above the shattered skyline, the last ward cracked. Not like glass, but like bone. A final, echoing shatter that signaled the death of the last protection woven by wizards long dead.
The end wasn’t coming.
It was here.
And yet, somehow, Draco still stood.
Behind him, Malfoy Manor rose like a corpse. The grand facade was collapsed in places, its elegant symmetry fractured by fire and spell damage. Ivy-choked statues lay broken, their white faces shattered into marble fragments. The gilded windows were gaping, jagged holes—many of them stained with blood. Some dried and rusted, others still fresh, gleaming like rubies.
He could still hear the last voice that had called his name.
“Draco!”
His spine stiffened.
But it wasn’t real.
It was memory.
“Run, Draco. Now!”
Lucius. Not barking an order. Not cold or calculating. Just urgent. Human.
Draco had seen the green light coming. Had seen it gather in the air like a storm. He remembered the blur of movement—his father shoving him aside with both hands, wand raised, eyes fierce with something Draco had never seen before.
Love.
The spell struck Lucius cleanly in the chest. He hadn’t even flinched.
There hadn’t been time for goodbye.
No time to scream.
Draco had fallen to his knees beside him, the Elder Wand burning cold in one hand, his own wand slack in the other. He remembered gripping his father’s shoulder, shaking him, willing his eyes to open. Willing him to be angry, to sneer, to lecture him—anything but this stillness.
Lucius had not died a hero.
But he had died a father.
And now, everything he had tried to protect was gone.
Draco took a step forward. The courtyard stones trembled beneath him. The silence deepened. Magic, raw and wounded, shimmered in the air like heat haze.
He limped toward the Manor. Each step was effort. The muscles in his legs screamed, and his ribs ached with every breath. His boots scraped over scorched debris. A shattered goblet, fused to stone. A piece of a tapestry, still smoldering. A child’s toy—a carved wooden dragon—its wings broken.
The Elder Wand pulsed again.
Not just a warning this time.
A call.
He passed beneath the once-grand archway, where the Malfoy crest had been carved in solemn stone. Now, the sword that wound through the serpent was split in two. The serpent’s head had been blasted away.
He moved through the ruined foyer. Smoke drifted through the cracked ceiling. Paintings lay in heaps, frames shattered. Portraits wept or raged in silence, trapped in a crumbling world they couldn’t escape.
Then came the tremor.
It rolled up through the floor, vibrating through the soles of his feet, rising into his bones.
And then, without warning, the earth cracked.
A fissure ripped through the central hall. Green fire erupted from below, molten and cold all at once. It wasn’t flame. It was something older. Deeper.
Draco turned, heart pounding.
No. Not here. Not again.
He knew where it was coming from.
The ritual chamber.
His father’s secret sanctum.
The place forbidden to everyone.
But now, its doors were open.
And something was waking.
Draco didn’t hesitate.
He moved.
Through the broken halls. Down staircases warped by heat and spellfire. Past collapsed walls and doorways where shadows still clung like cobwebs. He reached the old study—its shelves blackened, its books ashes—and found the concealed door.
It stood ajar.
Beyond, a staircase spiraled down into green light.
He descended, each step echoing.
The air changed. Denser. Thicker.
Runes glowed on the walls. Old ones. Older than Hogwarts. Older than Rome. Carved in blood and sealed in bone. Gaelic, Aramaic, languages he couldn’t name.
Some blinked.
Some bled.
He reached the bottom.
And stopped.
The ritual chamber was no longer a room.
It was a wound in the world.
The granite floor had cracked open. In its place hovered a disc of black stone—obsidian, etched with a seven-pointed star that bled molten silver. The disc floated above a chasm that hadn’t been there yesterday. It stretched endlessly downward. Draco could not see the bottom.
And at the center of the star, bound by chains of pure light, suspended like a crucified idol—was Voldemort.
Or what was left of him.
His body was barely human. Gaunt. Stretched. His robes writhed with a life of their own. His skin was waxy and nearly translucent, stretched over bones that looked too sharp, too long. His eyes were no longer eyes, but pits of white fire. Empty. Endless.
When he spoke, it was like metal dragged across stone.
“Draco.”
Draco froze.
The voice echoed everywhere. Inside his skull. In his bones.
“You survived,” Voldemort whispered.
Draco raised the Elder Wand.
Not to cast.
To steady his hand.
“You should have died,” the voice hissed. “And yet—here you are. A mistake. An echo that refused to fade.”
Draco stepped forward. “You always said I was weak.”
Voldemort’s head tilted. Bones cracked with the movement.
“You were,” he rasped. “Still are. Clinging to a power you do not understand.”
The Elder Wand pulsed.
Not with obedience. Not with fear. But with a low, seething resistance that seemed to reverberate through the marrow of Draco’s bones. It throbbed against his skin, vibrating with a will that did not belong to him, yet answered his defiance all the same.
Draco’s knuckles tightened around the wand. The chamber felt smaller, heavier—as though the air itself recoiled.
Then he saw it.
Something flickered in Voldemort’s face. Not rage. Not hatred.
Fear.
Just a flash—but real.
“Then why didn’t it choose you?” Draco asked, his voice hoarse, brittle.
Voldemort’s burning eyes narrowed, their light coiling inward like venomous serpents.
“I did choose it,” he hissed. “Through blood. Through death. Through destiny. I seized it.”
“No.” Draco took another step, his boots grinding against the silver-etched stone. “It never chose you. That’s why it betrayed you. That’s why it failed you at the end. It saw what you really were.”
“And what do you see, boy?”
The air chilled. The runes pulsing along the walls dimmed, waiting.
Draco stared at the being that had once been the terror of his childhood—the shadow that had haunted his family for generations, now reduced to a flickering remnant.
“I see a relic,” he said, voice steady. “A withered echo of a war that should never have been fought. Of a world you destroyed to prove a point no one cared about.”
The chains of light holding Voldemort did not tremble. But the star beneath him began to turn.
Slowly at first. Then faster.
The silver in the runes flared. The floating orbs blazed white.
And Draco felt it—a pulse in the magic. A deep, bone-hollow sound that wasn’t heard, but felt.
“What are you doing?” he whispered, throat dry.
Voldemort’s mouth curled into a grin that was all teeth and no joy.
“Rewriting fate,” he said.
The ceiling above them cracked open—not with stone, but with space. Gaping tears split the air, revealing a sky beyond sky, constellations long buried in myth bleeding through the fractures.
Reality buckled.
“I’ve unmade history,” Voldemort said, voice rising in exaltation. “The gods that shaped magic have fallen. The stones forget the old names. There will be no Potter. No prophecy. No me—as you know me.”
Draco staggered back a step. “What does that mean?”
“This form dies,” Voldemort said, his arms spreading, light splitting from his fingertips. “But I do not. I will be born again. In time. In magic. In divinity.”
“No,” Draco said.
“Yes,” Voldemort whispered, eyes blazing. “As a god.”
The ritual accelerated. The orbs spun faster, screaming in tongues no living thing should speak. The runes bled light. The air cracked like breaking ice, jagged fissures racing across the chamber.
Time itself groaned, stretching.
The past was collapsing—consumed, digested, unmade.
Draco looked down at the Elder Wand.
It wasn’t glowing.
It was burning.
Not with power.
With defiance.
It thrummed with fury. With rejection. With the will of every wizard it had ever known.
Draco raised it, his arm trembling from more than pain.
He didn’t cast.
He pleaded.
“Non sequitur aeternum!”
The words weren’t a spell. They were a surrender. A last, desperate invocation to the deepest roots of magic, to every law that still held the universe together.
Golden light burst from the wand.
Not in a beam—but in a wave. A shuddering, living wave that crashed into the ritual with the force of memory itself.
The ritual screamed.
The orbs shattered.
The silver lines melted.
Voldemort roared—not in pain, but in rage—as the chain-light binding him split apart.
The star cracked.
The chamber exploded with brilliance.
Reality fractured.
Draco was ripped from the world—not teleported, not moved. Unmade. Unraveled and thrown through the void.
He fell—not through space, but through moments.
Flashes.
A girl with a diary, weeping ink and shadows.
A locket in a forest, burning with dark echoes.
A boy in a mirror, reaching for a family he would never know.
Then darkness.
Then cold.
Then stone.
Rain.
Rain fell in a steady drizzle, soaking the cobblestone alleyway where Draco Malfoy lay sprawled. The world was eerily quiet, the chaos of the magical apocalypse replaced by the mundane sounds of a city morning. The Elder Wand, still clutched in his hand, pulsed faintly, as if acknowledging the change.
He sat up slowly, his body protesting every movement. His ribs ached. His robes were tattered and damp, clinging to his skin, and his breath came in shallow, uncertain gasps. The air smelled of wet stone and coal smoke, a stark contrast to the acrid scent of burning magic he had left behind.
A gust of wind sent a newspaper skittering across the ground. Draco reached out and caught it, his fingers trembling with cold and disbelief. He smoothed it flat against his knee. The headline, printed in bold black ink, read: Daily Prophet – September 1, 1942.
His breath caught in his throat.
“Merlin,” he whispered.
The past. Somehow, he had been cast back in time—a time when Gellert Grindelwald still loomed as a shadow over Europe. Before Voldemort. Before the war he had just lost. His hand tightened around the wand.
He stood slowly, testing his balance, then took a faltering step forward. His legs were unsteady. He leaned against the alley wall, slick with moisture, and surveyed the street beyond. Men in long coats bustled past. Women in tall hats. The sounds of Muggle vehicles—motorcars—grumbled in the distance. Yet the occasional pop of Apparition and swish of robes betrayed the undercurrent of magic hidden just beneath.
Draco’s thoughts swirled with urgent clarity, racing to piece together a plan. He couldn’t go by Malfoy—not here, not now. The name was a weighty mantle, heavy with power and expectation, and it would be recognized.
Not kindly.
His great-grandfather would not tolerate rumors of an illegitimate child tarnishing the family legacy. The whispers would spread like wildfire, poisoning everything. He couldn’t use his mother’s maiden name either. The Blacks were a storm all their own—unyielding, unforgiving.
The wand pulsed in his hand, alive with an almost sentient rhythm, as if granting him silent permission. Then the name came to him—Peverell. Unbidden, like a ghost drifting through his thoughts. Cloaked in ancient history and old magic, wrapped in the legend of the Deathly Hallows. Obscure enough to pass, with no living relatives to claim it, yet distinct enough to stand out.
Exactly what he needed.
A name sharp enough to catch the Dark Lord’s eye—whoever he was as a student, whoever he had been before.
Peverell.
A new identity forged in shadow and power. A gamble to carve his place in the dangerous game ahead.
“Draco Peverell,” he murmured to himself. It tasted strange on his tongue.
He moved slowly, slipping out of the alleyway and into the flow of foot traffic. A few witches glanced at him, eyeing his torn robes and disheveled hair, but he avoided eye contact and kept walking.
Shops lined the road, some familiar, others foreign in design. Owls hooted from behind a shop window. A silver cauldron gleamed in another. He passed an apothecary that smelled of thyme and dragon’s blood.
He stopped at a newsstand. The man behind the counter, an older wizard with thinning hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, was arranging a stack of Prophet copies.
“Excuse me,” Draco said, adjusting his posture. “Where might I find the Leaky Cauldron?”
The vendor looked up, frowning. “You’re not from around here.”
Draco forced a smile. “Visiting family.”
“It’s just down that way, past the apothecary. Big sign. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” Draco said with a nod, and turned in the direction indicated.
As he walked, he tried to piece together a plan. He needed to find his bearings, get to Hogwarts, figure out who he could trust—if anyone. Most importantly, he had to find the boy who would become the Dark Lord.
He entered the Leaky Cauldron, the bell above the door jingling softly. The pub smelled of old wood, damp robes, and roasted meat. A fire crackled in the hearth. Conversations halted for a brief moment as patrons turned to examine the newcomer.
Draco stepped to the bar, keeping his shoulders square, chin slightly lifted in the posture of someone who had always known his place in the world—even if that world had just collapsed. The Leaky Cauldron was dimly lit, with shadows clinging to the warped beams of the ceiling and the corners where soot and silence collected. The scent of damp stone, roasted onions, and stale beer clung to the air like a second skin.
The barkeep eyed him—a stout man with a heavy brow and sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms dusted with flour and ash. His wand poked out from behind one ear like a tucked-in pen. A smear of grease stained his apron.
“Room or drink?” he asked, voice gravelly from years of smoke and shouting over rowdy patrons.
“A room, please,” Draco replied, keeping his tone polite, clipped. He had learned from both Lucius and Snape that power didn’t always require volume—only precision.
“Name?”
Draco hesitated only briefly. A flicker of doubt crossed his pale features. “Draco Peverell.”
The barkeep paused, one thick brow twitching upward ever so slightly. The name meant something—it always did—but he said nothing, merely grunted. He ducked beneath the counter and returned with a rusted brass key, the number “3” etched into the metal in a shaky hand.
“Second floor, third door on the left. Seven Sickles a night.”
Draco reached instinctively for his inner pocket—and froze.
His fingers brushed nothing but frayed lining.
Money.
He had no money.
The realization hit him with a sickening weight. Draco Malfoy—whose family vault had once been deep enough to echo—was now penniless in a world not yet his. His ears flushed pink, the humiliation sharp and acidic.
“I… my apologies,” he began, straightening as if sheer posture might salvage the moment. “In my tiredness, I seem to have forgotten to stop by Gringotts.”
The barkeep’s eyes narrowed, suspicion blooming like mold.
“I’ll go first thing in the morning. Is it all right if I pay my tab after I visit the bank?”
The silence that followed stretched long and taut. A few nearby patrons glanced over from their drinks, sensing tension. Draco forced himself not to shift beneath the weight of the man’s scrutiny.
The barkeep leaned forward, hands braced on the counter. “You don’t look like someone who forgets to carry gold.”
Draco reached for the only thing of value left on him—one of the rings he always wore, a family heirloom he had never once removed, not even in battle. It slid from his finger with a reluctant twist. The silver band was coiled in the shape of a serpent, two small rubies for eyes gleaming like embers in the dim light. Diamond scales shimmered faintly along its length.
“For assurance,” Draco said quietly, placing it on the counter.
The barkeep looked at the ring, then at Draco, then back at the ring. He picked it up, tested the weight between his fingers, and held it up to the lantern light.
“Snake, eh?” he muttered. “Fitting.”
With a grunt, he turned, walked to a heavy iron box mounted to the wall behind him, and dropped the ring inside. The lock clicked with finality.
“Don’t disappear on me, Peverell,” the man said, returning to the bar.
“I won’t,” Draco said, with more gravity than the barkeep could have guessed. “Thank you.”
He took the key and nodded, then turned away, weaving through the pub’s clutter of chairs and quiet conversations. Each step toward the staircase felt heavier than the last.
The stairwell creaked with age, wood groaning under his boots like a weary sigh. He climbed slowly, one hand grazing the banister. He reached the second floor and found his door—third on the left, the number barely visible beneath a peeling layer of varnish.
Draco slipped inside, shut the door behind him, and leaned against it as if the world itself were pressing in from the other side.
He had made it.
He was alive.
But nothing was right.
The room was small and spare. A single bed with a thin wool blanket stood against one wall. A narrow writing desk, battered and ink-stained, stood by the rain-streaked window. Outside, Diagon Alley was dark, but lamplight shimmered faintly on the wet cobblestones below. Somewhere, a distant owl hooted.
Draco crossed the room and dropped the Elder Wand onto the bed. It rolled once, then lay still, humming faintly with a magic far older than the boards beneath it.
He peeled off his soaked robes. Underneath, his shirt was torn, and his skin bore the aftermath of war—faint burns traced across his ribs, pale scars winding along his collarbone and forearms like ghost-written names. Every ache whispered a memory he didn’t want to recall.
He exhaled shakily, running a hand through his hair. It was damp, tangled, and streaked with ash. A piece of his fringe stuck stubbornly to his temple.
He moved to the desk, pulled the chair out, and sat.
Then stood again.
Paced the room in slow circles, then leaned against the window, fogging the glass with his breath. The weight of exhaustion pressed against him, but his mind refused to quiet.
He needed to get to Hogwarts.
He needed answers.
Who was the Dark Lord in this time?Was there still time to change him—contain him—before the slaughter began?
“I have to stop it,” Draco whispered to the rain. “I have to.”
But what did he know of changing the past? Magic this deep came with rules—dangerous ones. Time itself felt like a stretched violin string: tense, fragile, and liable to snap at the wrong touch.
He sat on the bed’s edge, head in his hands.
“You’re not ready,” a voice said in his head. It sounded like Snape. Or maybe Dumbledore.
But who ever is? he thought bitterly.
He pulled off his boots slowly, one at a time, setting them by the door. The bed creaked beneath him as he stretched out on the lumpy mattress. He reached over, dragging the Elder Wand close, letting his fingers rest on the smooth wood like a child clinging to a familiar toy in the dark.
A flicker of warmth stirred at his touch, but the wand—like the night—offered no comfort.
The ceiling above him was cracked plaster. The silence wrapped around him like a winding sheet.
He stared upward.
“I’ll stop him,” he whispered, voice hoarse and low. “I swear it.”
But sleep crept in like a thief, and eventually, even his guilt couldn’t keep him upright.
His eyes slipped shut, and darkness took him—not the screaming kind he’d grown used to in battle, but the quiet sort, lined with rain and dust.
Tomorrow, he would go to Gringotts.
Tomorrow, he would go to Hogwarts.
Tomorrow, he would meet the boy who would become Voldemort.
But tonight, even Draco Malfoy could do nothing but dream.
Chapter Text
AN: Russian Translation by Miuk1_sun.
The rain deepened in tempo outside the window, tapping against the glass like ghostly fingers. Inside the small room, time seemed to still—just for a few precious hours—as Draco slipped into sleep, his body curled slightly toward the Elder Wand on the nightstand, like a dying man clutching a torch against the dark.
And in his dreams, the war found him.
Fire.
Everywhere, fire.
It licked the walls like a living thing—hungry, incandescent, alive. The sky above the Astronomy Tower had torn itself open, black with ash and streaked with magic. Spells flared like dying stars, but they came too late. The war had already taken everything.
Draco ran.
His boots skidded on stone slick with blood and soot. The air choked him—thick with the scent of burning parchment, melted glass, and scorched flesh. Magic—wild, raw, feral—crackled through the ruins, unraveling the very laws that once governed the castle.
The floor crumbled behind him with every step, but he didn’t look back. He couldn’t. The screaming was everywhere—some human, some not. A girl cried out in a voice he knew but couldn’t name, and then her scream was swallowed by the thunderclap of a collapsing wall.
Smoke clawed its way down his throat like a curse.
He stumbled through the skeletal remains of a once-proud corridor, now nothing but jagged teeth of stone and flame. From the wreckage rose shapes—half-seen, half-remembered: students with faces he almost knew, robes torn, eyes wide and wrong. A shattered statue of the moon, its marble face cracked like a broken promise. A tangle of limbs in green and silver.
And then—
Him.
Draco fell to his knees, skidding through soot and cinders. His hand reached out—hesitant, trembling—as if touch could rewrite reality. His fingers brushed a half-melted prefect badge on the chest of a boy with curly brown hair.
The boy had no face.
Just scorched skin where identity used to be. No eyes. No mouth. Just silence.
“No…” Draco breathed, heart stuttering. “Please—no—”
He rocked forward, forehead nearly touching the boy’s still chest. The scent of death was inescapable—too close, too familiar. He had once laughed with this boy. Had once, maybe, hated him. Now he couldn’t remember.
A whisper curled through the smoke, low and soft and dreadful.
“You’re too late, Draco.”
He turned.
The fire peeled back, as though afraid, drawing away in ripples—curtain-like. The world dimmed. The heat remained, pulsing in the bones of the dream, but the light died.
Where the flames had stood was a figure.
Not Voldemort.
Not yet.
This boy was younger—sixteen, maybe seventeen—but there was something ancient coiled behind his eyes. The shape of his face shifted, flickering through masks of beauty and familiarity: a sharp cheekbone here, a cruel mouth there. Glimpses of boys Draco had once known. Or might come to know.
His skin was smooth and almost luminous, and his eyes—oh, his eyes—were like burning coals in the hollows of a statue’s face.
Not red.
Not quite.
But becoming.
He held a wand of yew in one hand, casual, almost bored. At his feet—
Harry.
Dead.
Flat on the blackened stones.
Eyes open.
Still.
Too still.
Draco made a sound—a low, broken thing that wasn’t quite a scream. His legs refused to rise. His fingers curled into fists, shaking, but no spell came to mind.
No miracle.
No hope.
“I gave you a chance,” the boy said.
His voice was velvet, rich and indulgent, but beneath the softness was a blade, honed and gleaming. Every syllable was a slow cut.
“But you couldn’t save anyone,” he continued, stepping closer.
“Not Granger.
Not Theo.
Not Harry.” He paused, smiling faintly. “Not even yourself.”
Draco’s breath hitched. The Elder Wand— the myth in his grip—was in his hand, cold and heavy and useless. He tried to raise it.
His arm wouldn’t move.
The young Monster watched with eyes that never blinked. His expression was almost tender.
“You always thought power would be enough,” he murmured. “But power without will is just another kind of cage.”
He reached down—slowly—and brushed ash from Harry’s cheek.
A mockery.
Then, standing tall again, he tilted his head at Draco.
“I’m what’s left when your fear wins.”
Then he smiled.
And the world burned.
The stones melted. The sky caved in. The castle groaned and screamed and split apart. Everything Draco knew turned to ash in the wind, and in that final, breathless moment, even he could feel himself dissolving—bone by bone, memory by memory—into the fire.
Draco jerked awake with a hoarse gasp.
He sat upright, breath tearing from his throat like smoke, drenched in cold sweat that clung to his skin like a second, shivering layer. His heart slammed against his ribs, frantic and arrhythmic, the aftershock of some invisible blow.
For a moment, he didn’t move.
Couldn’t.
His hands clenched the rough wool blanket, white-knuckled, as though expecting the dream to drag him back under at any second.
The room around him was gray—muted, blurred—soaked in the bleary light of dawn filtered through a rain-fogged window. Everything looked pale and thin, as if the world itself had been washed in ghostwater. Shadows pooled in the corners like ash that hadn’t settled.
His breath steamed faintly in the chill air. The fire in the hearth had long since died.
For a long, suspended second, Draco didn’t know where he was.
He blinked once, slow and dry-eyed. The ruins of the Astronomy Tower still burned behind his eyelids, the echo of firelight dancing across the back of his skull. Somewhere in his chest, the memory of that faceless boy and the coal-eyed monster still lingered—watching.
Then—a sound.
The creak of footsteps below. The muted clang of crockery. A faint hum of voices from behind the tavern door. Mundane, human sounds. They dragged him back from the edge of that burning dream and set his feet, however shakily, in the present.
He wasn’t on the battlefield.
Not anymore.
His fingers loosened their grip. The room was spartan—bare floorboards, a crooked chair by the fireplace, a chipped basin on a nightstand that smelled faintly of soap and lavender. Rain whispered against the windowpane, soft and persistent, threading through the silence like a lullaby sung to ghosts.
It was just a dream.
A nightmare.
He let the thought settle, heavy and half-believed, into the space where his heart was still racing.
With shaking hands, he rubbed his face, then wiped them dry on the coarse blanket. His mouth tasted like ash and old magic. The dream clung to him like smoke, curling in his lungs, painting its fragments behind his eyes where waking could not erase them.
The flickering firelight caught the sharp angles of his face—cheekbones like cut glass, a jaw set too tightly, lips pale and drawn. His hair, once the color of polished platinum, hung damp and disheveled, curling faintly at the ends. He pushed it back with a trembling hand trying to maintain any semblance of composure.
His eyes—those silver, storm-lit eyes—were rimmed in red, bloodshot from restless sleep, but still impossibly bright. Eyes that had seen too much. That had watched friends die, watched a world collapse, watched time itself open its jaws and swallow him whole.
He looked too young to be so worn. Too beautiful to be so haunted.
Porcelain skin, pale and fine, clung too tightly to high bones and hollowed cheeks. There was no softness left in his expression—just a quiet, chiselled exhaustion. The kind of tired that sleep could never touch.
And yet, even broken, he was striking. Ethereal, like some marble statue of a fallen angel. Beautiful not in spite of the ruin, but because of it.
He stood slowly, his joints stiff from the cold. His robes were still damp where they hung on the back of the chair, but he tugged them on anyway, muttering a warming charm under his breath. The Elder Wand hummed faintly as he picked it up and tucked it carefully into the inner fold of his sleeve.
The mirror above the writing desk showed him a ghost.
His hair stuck in damp, silver clumps to his forehead, and there were shadows beneath his eyes that hadn’t been there even during the siege of Hogwarts. His face was thinner than it had any right to be—sharper, more haunted. Not the face of a seventeen-year-old boy, but of a man carved by grief and fire.
He turned away.
Time to move.
Downstairs, the Leaky Cauldron had come to life. The morning crowd was a strange mix—wizarding folk in cloaks and traveling coats, Ministry clerks, owls fluttering in with the Daily Prophet, and a young witch trying to calm a teething child with a jelly sloth tongue.
The barkeep looked up from the counter, where he was polishing mugs with a rag that might once have been white.
Draco approached, schooling his features into something close to confidence.
“Morning,” the barkeep grunted. “Off to Gringotts?”
Draco nodded. “As promised.”
The man eyed him, then jerked his chin toward the back door. “Alley’s clear. Mind the puddles. And don’t forget your tab.”
“I won’t,” Draco said softly. “Thank you again.”
He stepped out into the morning.
Diagon Alley was mist-drenched and strangely hushed in the early hour, as if the cobblestones themselves were still shaking off the remnants of sleep. The air smelled of wet stone, parchment, and the faintest trace of roasted chestnuts from a cart setting up down the lane.
Draco pulled his cloak tighter, every nerve prickling.
The Gringotts building loomed ahead, squat and arrogant as ever, its pale marble façade streaked silver with the light drizzle. Rain clung to the columns like melted ice, pooling in the dragon-carved grooves. The cobbled street was near silent at this early hour—only the low clink of enchanted lanterns and the echo of his own footsteps kept him company.
A goblin at the door shifted as he approached. Short, spindly, and adorned in dull bronze armor, the creature fixed him with a narrowed gaze that could curdle milk. Its clawed hand tightened slightly on the haft of a ceremonial spear—not as a threat, but as a statement. We remember everything.
Draco paused at the bottom of the steps. The wand at his side thrummed against his robes—an anxious, sentient murmur he had come to recognize. Not fear, exactly. Not excitement. Just… awareness. As if it too knew what lay inside.
He squared his shoulders.
This was the first test.
The first move in a long and dangerous game.
A gamble.
The Elder Wand pulsed once, hard enough to echo through his ribs.
He ascended the steps, each stride measured, deliberate. His boots clicked against the wet stone, reverberating in the quiet as though daring the building to reject him.
He was not a Peverell. Not in name. Not in any documented lineage. His father’s blood was pure, yes—old and cruel and cunning—but not the stuff of legends. Maybe, maybe, somewhere along the tangle of branches and broken branches in his ancestry, a drop of the Peverell legacy had bled through. But if so, it was so diluted by now as to be almost meaningless.
Still, the wand responded to him as though it had been waiting.
It sang in his grip. It listened. It chose.
And that, perhaps, would be enough.
The rain thickened as he approached the threshold.
He didn’t blink.
Didn’t falter.
Draco Malfoy, reborn under a name he had no right to wear, stepped into Gringotts with nothing but a stolen legacy and a wand that claimed him louder than any bloodline.
Let them test him.
Let them doubt.
If Death had chosen him, he would not flinch.
Not now.
Not again.
Inside, the bank was cool and echoing, the high ceiling arched like the ribcage of a sleeping beast. Dim chandeliers dangled from above, each flame flickering against ancient brass. The air smelled faintly of iron, ink, and the old magic that clung to Gringotts like mildew to stone.
Goblins perched behind their counters like carrion birds atop battlements, quills moving with sharp, mechanical precision. Each scratch against parchment sounded like bone on bone, tallying debts no one dared question. Their long fingers clinked against golden scales and ledger clasps, counting more than coin—counting bloodlines, secrets, oaths made in darker times.
A few early patrons moved cautiously through the marble cavern, cloaked in velvet and polish. Witches with sleek, knowing eyes. A nervous young wizard clutched his mother’s hand, his gaze darting between armored guards and rune-etched vault keys the size of daggers.
Draco stepped forward, his boots echoing like a verdict across the floor.
The nearest goblin—thin-faced and shrewd, with skin the color of tarnished silver—didn’t glance up from his ledger.
“Name?” the goblin rasped, voice like flint striking stone.
“Draco Peverell,” he replied smoothly.
Now the goblin looked up.
There was a flicker—brief, but unmistakable—in those obsidian eyes.
Recognition, perhaps.
Or something closer to interest. The name had teeth. And weight. It stirred old vaults and older rumors.
“Peverell?” the goblin echoed, testing the syllables like a wine gone sour. “That name is… old.”
“Yes,” Draco said, the word crisp and precise. “I’m here to inquire about vault access. I believe my family has holdings with Gringotts. I may need to verify a few… inheritances.”
The goblin’s lip twitched.
Not quite a smile—goblins didn’t smile, not without reason—but something sharpened in his expression.
Greed, perhaps. Or amusement.
“Follow me.”
With a flick of a clawed hand, the goblin pushed back his high stool and dropped down from the pedestal behind the counter. His robes were impeccably tailored, dark crimson with a filigree of golden thread curling along the cuffs like veins. He moved with surprising grace, beckoning Draco through a wrought-iron gate and into the interior corridors of the bank.
The deeper halls of Gringotts were colder.
Older.
Stone gave way to smoother rock, etched in sigils that pulsed faintly under torchlight. The silence here was different—thicker. It pressed against the ears like water beneath a great lake. There were no patrons here. No velvet-robed witches or skittish children. Only the scrape of the goblin’s boots and Draco’s footfalls trailing behind.
They passed sealed doors with burnished plaques, some marked in languages long forgotten. Draco caught sight of one—Family Tithe, sealed 1236—before it vanished behind him. Each door felt like an eye closing as they walked past, watching. Judging.
Eventually, they reached a tall, rune-marked arch set with a black iron door that breathed cold.
The goblin turned, examining Draco with fresh intensity.
“You’ll need to verify your claim to the Peverell name,” the goblin said over his shoulder, voice clipped and businesslike. “There are… protocols.”
“Of course,” Draco said, his own voice calm, rehearsed. He’d chosen the name Peverell not only for its significance to the Hallows but because it was ancient—deeply rooted in the wizarding world and surrounded by enough mystery to explain any inconsistencies.
The goblin made a guttural noise of assent. “Few come claiming it these days. Most who do are charlatans, trying to unlock long-closed vaults. And yet… you carry a scent of old magic. An inheritance.”
Draco tensed. “I was told it ran in the bloodline.” He was spewing whatever came to mind, he was good at thinking on his feet. He was still a malfoy, no matter what name he wore.
The goblin stopped before a set of wrought-iron doors. No handle, no hinges—just intricate carvings of runes and writhing branches, as though the metal itself were alive.
“Place your hand here,” the goblin instructed, gesturing toward the center rune. “We’ll test for blood-right first.”
Draco exhaled slowly, pressing his palm to the metal.
The runes ignited at once.
Gold light flared under his skin, threading between his fingers and illuminating the hallway in a radiant pulse. The iron door shuddered. A low chime echoed deep within the stone—as if something ancient had just stirred.
The goblin inhaled sharply.
“Well,” he muttered. “That is… unexpected.”
The door clicked open.
The chamber was carved of stone older than the goblins themselves, deep beneath Gringotts—so far below ground that even magic seemed to hesitate. A single artifact stood at the center: a basin of burnished silver, wide and shallow, its surface etched with runes that pulsed faintly like veins beneath skin. The air was cool and dry, deadened of echo, as if the walls themselves were listening.
The goblin led him forward with deliberate slowness, claws glinting as he gestured toward the ancient relic. His tone was clinical, but something behind his small, dark eyes flickered with caution. Perhaps even fear.
“The Verity Basin,” the goblin said, voice low. “It records blood, magical resonance, wand affinity. If you are who you claim… the basin will not reject you.”
Draco stared at the gleaming bowl, every muscle wound tight.
“And if I’m not?” he asked quietly.
The goblin’s lip curled, revealing a row of sharp, age-yellowed teeth.
“It will.”
That was all.
No elaboration. No details on what rejection entailed. Only that it would claim.
Draco swallowed, feeling the throb of the Elder Wand at his side. It had grown restless, as if sensing its moment had come. He stepped forward, boots scuffing against the stone floor, heart slamming behind his ribs like a snare drum.
His breath fogged faintly in the cold air.
He unsheathed the Elder Wand, drawing it slowly.
The effect was immediate.
The Verity Basin flared with light—its silver rim erupting in a sharp, almost blinding glow, white-gold and vibrating. A low, discordant hum filled the chamber, not like sound, but something deeper, older. A note of memory. Of recognition.
Even the goblin took half a step back, eyes narrowing.
Draco didn’t hesitate.
He held the wand over the basin and made a precise cut across the center of his palm with its sharpened tip. It stung—more than a simple wound should. The wand had tasted him.
Blood welled hot and dark. It fell in thick drops into the basin.
The moment the first drop struck the silver, it hissed like burning oil.
The hum grew louder.
Then silence.
Then—
CRACK.
A jagged fracture split across the surface of the Verity Basin like lightning striking glass. The luminous silver liquid flared violently—too bright to look at—then dimmed in an instant, snuffed out as though the basin had lost the will to shine. The low hum that had filled the chamber faltered mid-note and fell into a silence so complete, so thick, it pressed against the skin like water. It was the silence of held breath. Of something watching.
Draco didn’t move. Couldn’t.
He stood suspended in the stillness, one hand clenched at his side, the other extended over the basin, his palm freshly cut and slick with blood. Crimson drops fell in slow, glistening arcs, striking the stone floor with delicate, echoing sounds—like rain on tombstones. The last few drops trembled at the edge of his fingertips, reluctant to fall.
The goblin inhaled sharply.
It was not a sound of annoyance, or even alarm—it was fear. Real, naked fear.
His clawed hand flew instinctively to the hilt of the ceremonial dagger at his hip. Not drawn, not yet—but close. His eyes, usually so narrow and calculating, were stretched wide in stunned disbelief. And something else. Recognition. Awe. Dread.
Draco’s voice broke the stillness, but only just.
“What just happened?” he asked, low and taut, like a wire strung too tight. His breath came in controlled pulls, but his chest felt hollow, carved out. The air tasted metallic—like old magic and blood.
The goblin didn’t answer immediately. His gaze was still locked on the basin, on the web of cracks etched across its mirrored surface, now dull and dark as obsidian. The basin should not have broken. Not that way. Not under blood.
When he did speak, his voice was hushed and uneven, stripped of all its usual businesslike detachment.
“That wand…” he began, slowly, as if dragging the words up from somewhere buried. “That wand is not of this age.”
Draco felt something shift in his chest—something ancient and cold and coiled.
The goblin finally looked up at him, truly looked, and what Draco saw in those eyes made his stomach knot.
No longer just suspicion. Not just curiosity. But recognition—and fear of what he represented.
“And your blood…” the goblin whispered, reverently now. “It carries a resonance not felt since before the War with Herpo the Foul.”
For a breathless moment, the room seemed to darken around them.
Not dim in light—but dim in presence, as if time itself had leaned in closer to listen. The cracked basin trembled once more before falling still, the fractured lines glowing faintly with a light that pulsed in time with Draco’s heartbeat.
The goblin stepped back—not out of deference, but caution.
“You are not merely heir to a name,” he said, voice barely audible. “You are an echo of something older. A thread left uncut.”
And then, silence again.
A silence that knew his name—his real name—and waited to see what he would do next.
Draco closed his fist. More blood trickled between his fingers, pattering on the stone like slow rain. His heartbeat thudded in his ears, shoulders tensed, with only one thought echoing.
“Then does the vault accept me?” he asked.
There was a long pause.
Then, grudgingly, the goblin gave a single, stiff nod.
“It does. But understand this…”
He stepped back, no longer hiding his unease.
“You’ve awoken something ancient. Something that remembers power older than vaults. Older than blood oaths. Something that was not meant to wake.”
Draco stared down at the basin. The crack had stopped growing. But it hadn’t healed.
Neither had he.
A sound echoed in the distance—deep and metallic, like a thousand doors unlocking at once.
“Follow me,” the goblin said, voice low. “Your vault awaits.”
They boarded a cart—goblin-forged and dragon-propelled—then plunged into the depths of Gringotts.
The tunnels were a blur. Wind tore at Draco’s hair. The tracks bent and twisted like serpents. The magic in the walls shimmered with ancient enchantments. Deeper and deeper they went—past levels he didn’t know existed, past vaults so old their locks were sealed with bone and dragon tongue.
At last, the cart screeched to a halt before a vault door unlike any Draco had ever seen.
It was carved from obsidian, veins of emerald threading through it in the shape of a coiled serpent. Three concentric locks sealed its face—none of them mechanical.
The goblin gestured. “Vault 13. Peverell Line. Last opened… six hundred years ago.”
Draco stepped forward.
One by one, the locks responded to his presence.
The first lock, shaped like a serpent’s eye, turned with a hiss, revealing a black iris.
The second, a rune carved into a moon-shaped dial, spun rapidly before glowing gold.
The third, a circle of tiny bones, shattered into dust.
The vault creaked open.
Inside, the chamber was colder than ice and completely silent. No gold piles or gleaming artifacts. Just shadows. Pedestals rose from the stone floor, each bearing a single object: a black-bladed dagger, a rusted key, an hourglass filled with starlight, a sealed scroll covered in runes Draco didn’t recognize.
The air was thick with power.
He stepped in.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted. The shadows shifted.
“ Heir .”
The whisper echoed from nowhere and everywhere.
Draco’s wand flew to his hand, reflexively, prepared to strike down any enemy.
But there was none.
The goblin remained at the entrance, watching with wide, unblinking eyes. “You are now bound to this place,” he said. “Whatever was sealed in the Peverell Vault has accepted you.”
Draco stared at the objects, drawn inexorably toward the scroll.
It thrummed under his fingers.
A seal burned on the parchment—a triangle with a circle and a vertical line inside. The Deathly Hallows.
He looked back at the goblin. “I’ll take the scroll. And the key.”
The goblin gave a terse nod. “That is your right.”
Draco carefully wrapped the scroll in a cloth, pocketed the key, and turned back.
The vault sealed behind him with the sound of a tomb closing.
The sound echoed through Draco’s bones—a deep, resonant thud that carried the finality of something ancient and unchangeable. The obsidian vault door hissed shut, the emerald veins dimming, the magical locks reforming in reverse: eye, rune, bone. The corridor plunged into silence once more.
Draco turned from the sealed vault, the scroll now a solid weight in the crook of his arm, wrapped in black velvet conjured from a transfiguration spell. The rusted key lay heavy in his pocket, its jagged teeth still faintly warm from where it had sat undisturbed for centuries.
The goblin, waiting at the mouth of the tunnel, eyed him not with suspicion, but something colder: wariness.
“You have taken what was meant to sleep,” the goblin said quietly, gesturing toward the cart. “Mind the cost.”
Draco climbed in, gripping the side rail with one hand, the scroll pressed tight to his chest with the other. The cart jolted to life with a surge of magic and plunged forward, steel wheels screeching against the stone tracks. Wind howled through the tunnels. Water dripped from unseen caverns. Even now, the vault’s silence clung to him like soot.
He kept his eyes forward.
Whatever he’d awakened—it wasn’t just blood rights or inheritance. It was legacy. And legacy, Draco knew, never came without chains.
When the cart finally screeched to a halt near the upper levels of Gringotts, the goblin disembarked first, motioning for Draco to follow. He led him down a shorter passage and up a narrow flight of stone stairs. At the top was a small office lined with ancient ledgers and stacks of vault records bound in dragonhide. An enchanted ink quill scribbled something across a parchment roll behind the desk.
“Your name, for record,” the goblin said, pulling out a form.
“Draco Peverell,” he said firmly.
The goblin raised a thick brow ridge. “You speak it easily.”
“I’m used to claiming what’s mine,” Draco replied, more steel in his voice than he expected.
The goblin gave a quiet grunt, writing the name down. “Vault 13 is now active under your authority. Until proven otherwise by magical contest or bloodline claim, its contents and legacy are yours.”
“What of the scroll?” Draco asked. “You recognized it.”
“I recognized the seal,” the goblin said slowly. “But not the words within. Few vaults contain items marked by the Hallows themselves. That scroll is not meant for our eyes. Only yours.”
Draco nodded, heartbeat steady despite the thunder in his chest.
“Anything else?” he asked, stepping back toward the door.
The goblin looked up at him once more, a flicker of old knowledge burning in his eyes. “You walk old roads, Peverell. Those who carried that name once tried to cheat Death. Be sure you don’t invite Him to your table instead.”
Draco emerged into the Diagon Alley daylight like a diver breaking through water—squinting, blinking, disoriented. Rain had slowed, but the cobblestones were still slick under his boots. He tucked the scroll deeper under his arm and raised his hood.
His robes still smelled faintly of ash.
Across the street, a child chased an enchanted butterfly while their mother called them back toward a robe shop. The simplicity of it scraped like glass against the chaos that clung to Draco’s skin. These people didn’t know. Couldn’t know. That war would come. That this world—their world—was only an inch from unraveling.
And now he was the only one who could stop it.
He slipped down a side alley and Disillusioned himself with a flick of the wand. The spell took instantly, the Elder Wand drinking in his magic, sharpening it into something more precise than he remembered.
He apparated a moment later—not with a crack, but a fold, as if the air parted just for him.
He reappeared in the tiny upper room of the Leaky Cauldron.
The bed remained unmade. His boots were still wet from earlier, sitting beneath the window. The fire was long dead, but the scent of burnt wood lingered.
Draco dropped the Disillusionment Charm with a sigh and unwrapped the scroll slowly.
It pulsed faintly in his hands.
Not with light.
But with memory.
The seal of the Hallows had vanished—burned away the moment the vault accepted him. In its place, a rune he couldn’t quite decipher had emerged, crawling faintly across the parchment like ink under a spell. He laid it across the bed and hovered his wand.
“Revelo.”
The scroll shimmered.
Words surfaced, ancient and black. Not ink—shadow. They wavered like smoke on parchment.
And they were in a tongue he did not recognize.
But the last line—the last line was in English.
“He who bears the Hallows and the blood of the Dead shall command the Threshold and open the Pale Gate. Beyond it, the Serpent sleeps.”
Draco’s breath caught.
The Pale Gate.
The Serpent.
Command.
He stared at the text, the implication biting deeper than cold.
This wasn’t just a legacy scroll.
It was a prophecy.
And it tied the Hallows—not just to power—but to a door between worlds.
The Elder Wand thrummed in his grip, like a tuning fork struck by fate itself.
Draco sat down slowly on the bed, the scroll open before him, the light outside growing dim.
So be it.
If the threshold lay ahead—
Then he would walk through it first.
But not alone.
Tomorrow, he would go to Hogwarts.
Tomorrow, he would meet the student yet to be a monster.
And tomorrow, he would begin the long, dangerous unraveling of destiny itself.
The scroll lay open on the bed, the last line still whispering across Draco’s thoughts like wind through a crypt. “He who bears the Hallows and the blood of the Dead…”
He blinked, dragged a hand down his face, and sat back.
And then, rather suddenly, he cursed under his breath.
Money.
He hadn’t taken a single coin. He didn’t think he even saw any.
Draco groaned, standing abruptly. The day was slipping toward twilight, and he couldn’t very well stroll into Hogwarts tomorrow without a knut to his name. His stomach gave a hollow twist as if to emphasize the mistake. He needed gold—for robes, for books, for any kind of cover he could build as Draco Peverell.
Gringotts hadn’t closed yet. He grabbed the scroll, wrapped it again, tucked it into his inner cloak, and pocketed the key. With a thought and a sharp turn, he apparated.
Back in Gringotts, the marble hall was quieter now, the lines shorter, the torches dimmer. But a new goblin manned the podium: thinner, more severe, with spectacles perched low on his long nose. He squinted as Draco approached.
“Vault business?”
“Yes. I was here earlier. Vault 13.”
The goblin’s eyes narrowed at the number. “And your name?”
“Draco Peverell.”
The name made the goblin flinch almost imperceptibly, as if someone had blown cold air across his bones.
“One moment.”
He disappeared behind the side door. When he returned, he bowed his head shallowly. “Griphark will see you again. Follow me.”
Draco followed the goblin through the twisting tunnels once more, the same cart awaiting. As they plunged downward into the vault caverns again, he gripped the sides of the cart with pale knuckles, mind racing with everything he might find—or miss.
The cart skidded to a halt. Griphark stood waiting outside the great black door of Vault 13.
“You return swiftly, Peverell,” Griphark observed.
“I forgot something,” Draco muttered. “Money.”
Griphark chuckled—low and dry. “The dead rarely worry about coin.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Draco said coldly. “Just broke.”
The goblin tilted his head. “The vault does not respond to theft. If you were accepted once, it will yield again—so long as you do not demand too much too quickly.”
“I don’t intend to,” Draco said. “I need enough to live and not raise suspicion.”
Griphark drew his wand and pressed it once more to the door. The three layers of defense responded as they had earlier: bone, rune, eye.
With a heavy groan, the vault door opened once more.
Draco stepped into the same darkened chamber. The scroll’s pedestal now lay empty. Shelves and display cases filled with ancient artifacts surrounded him, dust-shrouded and quiet.
But now, he was looking with different eyes.
He passed a pair of ornate black gauntlets encrusted with moonstone. A mirror veiled in silver cloth. A box of dragonbone chess pieces—one of them twitching restlessly in place. All valuable, yes. But not gold.
Not what he needed.
He circled the room again.
Then he spotted it: another key.
It hung on the wall at the far end of the vault. Silver and black, shaped like a fang, it hovered midair within a glass case, protected by a dozen interlocking enchantments.
Draco approached cautiously. A faint hum of magic pulsed from the case.
Etched beneath it in a small plaque, ancient and half-faded:
“Key to the Hollow Vault – Master’s Chamber”
Hollow Vault?
Draco narrowed his eyes. Carefully, he drew the Elder Wand and whispered, “Finite.”
The protective spells resisted, pushing back with a shock of force, but the Elder Wand countered with ease, absorbing the impact like smoke into a bottle. The final enchantment snapped, and the glass case dissolved into ash.
The moment his fingers touched the key, the chamber shifted.
Literally.
The wall behind the key let out a groan like a beast awakening. Stones folded back with grinding precision, revealing a spiral staircase leading down—cut from black marble, rimmed in cold iron.
Griphark, still at the threshold, hissed in surprise. “No record of a sub-vault has ever existed under Thirteen…”
Draco didn’t answer.
He descended.
The Hollow Vault felt alive.
Cold air brushed his skin like breath from some long-sleeping entity. The walls shimmered with runes too old to name. And at the bottom—far below Gringotts’ public vaults—stood another door.
This one bore no runes, no numbers.
Only a sigil: a stylized serpent devouring its own tail, traced in mercury and ink.
Draco raised the second key.
The door responded immediately. It unfolded—not opening like a bank vault, but retreating like water parting, revealing what lay within.
Draco took a step in.
Then froze.
Gold.
Not piles. Not mounds.
Mountains.
The Hollow Vault was enormous, an underground cathedral of treasure. Galleons glimmered from floor to vaulted ceiling, stacked in towers like city spires. In one corner sat paintings and tapestries untouched by time, still enchanted to flicker and move. Dozens of artifacts floated lazily in protective stasis fields—goblets, scepters, weapons, gem-studded scrolls, even a flying carpet gently circling overhead.
Draco exhaled slowly.
This wasn’t a vault. It was a dynasty.
The Peverell legacy hadn’t merely survived.
It had grown.
Untouched for what could be centuries, investments made by dead hands had ripened into a fortune that rivaled the Malfoys’ at their peak—and likely surpassed it. Stocks in old alchemical firms. Property deeds from magical territories that no longer existed. Ownership contracts written in blood and magic. Some bore Ministry seals, others older—Goblin sigils, even a few hogwarts founder-era runes.
His eyes caught one ledger floating in the air beside a column of treasure. He opened it.
On the first page:
Peverell Holdings: Master Ledger, Updated Automatically
He scanned the columns.
- Gringotts Interest Yearly Reserve: 198,234 Galleons
- Shares in Nimbus Manufacturing: 12%
- Exclusive rights to Obscurus Ink Co.: Active
- Property: Twelve estates (England, Albania, Greece)
- Active Vault Balance: 300.1 million Galleons
Draco’s jaw went slack.
Three hundred-point-one million galleons.
In the 1940’s.
Draco swallowed hard. He roughly calculated what that amount would be worth in his present time, accounting for inflation, post-war reconstruction, and nearly a century of magical economic growth.
Roughly around three billion Galleons. It was an obscenely amount. He didn’t waste time.
He grabbed one of the bags of coins sitting at the base of a nearby pedestal, enchanted it for weight concealment, and quickly filled it with Galleons. Then two more.
Behind him, the door to the vault remained open, humming gently, as if satisfied.
Draco turned back toward the stairs, heart racing.
Griphark waited for him above, eyebrows raised.
“You found it,” the goblin said, half-disbelieving.
“I found more than money,” Draco replied.
Griphark gave a slow nod. “It is rare… very rare… for a vault to reveal a Hollow Vault. You must understand: this is no ordinary inheritance. You have awakened a bloodline that history thought extinct.”
“I intend to use it,” Draco said quietly. “Wisely.”
The goblin’s eyes glittered. “We will prepare proper documentation of new ownership. The bank will not resist a client of your… magnitude.”
Draco only nodded. “Have my identity registered. Draco Peverell. I’ll need to make purchases tomorrow—robes, books, and arrangements for Hogwarts.”
He turned to leave, the bag of gold light as air at his hip.
Behind him, Griphark called softly, “One last word of warning.”
Draco paused.
“The deeper the vault, the darker the blood that earned it.”
The words echoed after him long after the vault door had sealed, lingering like smoke in his lungs as Draco stepped out of Gringotts and into the waning light of Diagon Alley. The streetlamps had begun to flicker to life, painting golden halos over cobblestones slick with evening mist. Wizards and witches passed him in twos and threes, laughing, gossiping, floating parcels or children with idle flicks of their wands.
But Draco saw none of it.
His mind churned with ancient ledgers and impossible wealth—fortunes born not just of time and investment, but of conquest. The Hollow Vault had reeked of old power. Some of the runes etched on the ledgers were not wizarding at all—they were goblin-made, or worse, half-obscured runes that whispered of forgotten wars and the price of resurrection.
He clutched the gold-threaded pouch at his side tighter.
Power like that… it came with a cost. He knew that now.
But he would wield it all the same.
He had no choice.
The Leaky Cauldron had grown warm and shadowed by the time he pushed open its heavy door. The tavern was modestly busy, with the fire crackling and a few regulars murmuring over butterbeer or Firewhisky.
The same barkeep glanced up from behind the bar.
He blinked. “Back, are you?”
Draco nodded once and approached. He placed the enchanted money pouch on the counter with a soft clink and drew out a neat stack of galleons—more than enough for a month’s stay. Then, without flinching, he added three more stacks.
“For the full three weeks,” he said evenly. “In advance.”
The barkeep straightened slowly, gaze sharpening. “You rob Gringotts, boy?”
Draco’s lips lifted into a faint, wry smirk. “Just visited an old family vault.”
The barkeep’s eyebrows lifted so high they nearly disappeared into his forehead. “That’s… I mean, most folks just pay by the day, or maybe the week. Not often someone trusts us with this kind of gold.”
Draco slid the final coin forward with two fingers.
“Consider it a gesture of faith. I’ll be staying through the end of the month. Then, I’ll go to Hogwarts.”
The man blinked. “Hogwarts? You?”
Draco tilted his head, careful not to bristle. “Newly enrolled. Transferring in.”
A slow, surprised chuckle left the man’s throat. “Well then. You’ll be eating like a king. Sit yourself down, lad. I’ll have some roast and potatoes sent your way.”
Draco inclined his head. “Thank you.”
He found a seat by the fire and settled in, the pouch tucked safely beside him. His body ached in places battle had scorched and broken, but his stomach grumbled louder than any wound. For the first time in days—maybe weeks—he felt steady. Not safe. But planted.
The food arrived shortly: a heavy stew of beef and potatoes, a slice of buttered bread, and a glass of mulled cider. Draco hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he took the first bite. It filled him with a warmth that was more than physical—it was grounding.
Ordinary.
He almost forgot the broken world he’d left behind.
He ate in silence, the dull clink of cutlery against porcelain his only companion. Around him, the Leaky Cauldron buzzed with subdued conversation—low murmurs curling like smoke between pints of ale and plates of steaming stew. He didn’t lift his eyes from his food, but his ears strained to catch every word.
“...Ministry’s dragging its feet again, too afraid to name him outright—”
“—Grindelwald’s forces took another outpost in Austria, that’s the third this month—”
“—my niece’s letter says Hogwarts is opening as usual, but there’ll be patrols at Hogsmeade—”
“—course Dumbledore’s staying, he’s the only one that frightens Grindelwald even a little—”
A burly wizard near the hearth was whispering sharply to a woman in travelling robes. “They say he’s building something in Nurmengard. Not just a fortress—something worse.”
Draco’s spoon hovered just above his mouth.
A group of boys at the next table—barely older than fourteen—argued over house placements, their voices eager and oblivious. One of them, red-haired and freckled, was trying to sound confident. “Bet I’ll end up in Gryffindor like my uncle. Said I’ve got the heart for it.”
His friend scoffed. “Heart doesn’t mean anything when there’s war coming. My mum says the safest house is Slytherin. No one touches the old families.”
Draco’s lip curled slightly, but he said nothing. He had once thought the same, but he had been wrong.
Very wrong.
He let the noise wash over him—news, speculation, fear disguised as casual gossip—and chewed slowly, mechanically. The stew was tasteless. Everything was. His body ate out of habit, his mind elsewhere—cataloguing details, piecing together the shape of the world he had dropped into.
The world before the fall.
A world still pretending it had time.
Maybe it did, perhaps it was Draco that was pretending he had time.
Three more weeks.
That was how long he had before the Hogwarts Express would leave from King’s Cross. He’d need every hour.
Clothing—modern by 1942’s standards. He would need to study period-appropriate fashion and blend in without question.
Books—current editions, not the newer ones he remembered. His knowledge might give him an edge, but if he cited texts that hadn’t yet been written…
Wand inspection. He grimaced at the thought of hiding the Elder Wand. He’d have to carry a decoy. Or transfigure its appearance.
Potions ingredients—his stores were low, and many formulas hadn’t been invented yet. He could brew advanced mixtures no one here had ever heard of, but again… caution.
And perhaps most importantly: identity papers. If Hogwarts asked questions about his lineage, he would need false documentation. Preferably forged by someone good enough to fake a bloodline.And more than that, he needed knowledge.
Of this world.
This time.
Its people.
He’d pay for every lie in gold if he had to.
He would start with the basics tomorrow.
Draco Peverell. Transfer student. Heir to a forgotten name.
By the time school started, he would be fully prepared.
To build the mask of Draco Peverell. To disappear into his alias.
But tonight, he finished every bite on his plate, licked the last of the gravy from his fork, and leaned back in the creaking chair.
He watched the fire.
It flickered the way hope did: stubborn, fleeting, but there.
He would burn for this.
But he would not burn alone.
That night, he returned to his room. The window overlooked Diagon Alley, its lanterns glowing through the mist. He set the scroll from the vault on the desk and stared at it under candlelight.
He hadn’t dared open it fully in front of the goblins. Now, alone, he could study it in detail.
Unrolling it slowly, he revealed faded ink and delicate script. Names. Symbols. Three crests: the Deathly Hallows, the ouroboros serpent… and another—an eye in a flame.
His finger hovered over it.
The words at the top were in Latin.
Dominus Mortis: Hereditas et Damnatio.
Lord of Death: Inheritance and Curse.
He leaned back, heart slow and heavy.
Tomorrow, the plan began.
But tonight, he allowed himself stillness. Just for a moment.
His name was no longer Draco Malfoy.
It was Draco Peverell.
And the world would learn it soon enough.
The next morning Draco woke up feeling refreshed.
Today, Draco had to become someone else.
The morning light poured into Diagon Alley like liquid brass—thick, warm, and slow. Fog still clung to the cobblestones, curling around his boots as he stepped into the street with his collar turned up against the morning chill. He moved like a shadow among people who didn’t know his name.
Draco Peverell, not Malfoy. And no one questioned him yet.
He passed a pair of witches in broad-rimmed hats and sleek traveling cloaks, their parasols twirling despite the lack of sun. A group of young men in waistcoats and dragonhide boots laughed too loudly near Twilfitt and Tatting’s. The atmosphere of the 1940s was strange—elegant, proud, and trembling beneath the surface with unspoken tension. The war, though Muggle, had touched everything. Wizards were quieter here. There was a nervous civility in the way people nodded, never too familiar, never too aloof.
He tugged his cloak tighter around his shoulders and made for his first stop.
Draco crossed the narrow lane, boots echoing softly on the damp cobblestones, until he reached the wide glass window of Madam Florenza’s Robes for All Occasions. Behind the window stood mannequins draped in formal school attire—Hogwarts uniforms stitched with finer, older flourishes than he remembered—alongside tailored dress robes with velvet cuffs and silver fastenings.
A brass bell jingled delicately as he stepped inside.
The air smelled of lavender sachets and mothballs, and the warmth was a welcome reprieve from the misty morning. A tall witch with a rigid posture emerged from behind a partition, her robes a sweeping navy silk, her spectacles hanging by a delicate chain. Her eyes narrowed at him, assessing every inch.
“You must be new,” she said crisply, folding her hands in front of her. “Hogwarts?, what’s your name?”
“Yes,” Draco said, brushing the chill off his shoulders. “First year. Draco Peverell”
She tilted her head. “Bit old for a first year.”
“I was educated privately abroad,” he replied smoothly, voice touched with just enough disinterest to imply aristocracy. “War troubles.”
The woman’s demeanor softened at the mention of the war.
“Well, then,” she said, turning with a flourish. “Come. Stand here. Arms up.”
Draco obeyed, stepping onto the raised platform. Tape measures came to life around him, slithering across his limbs like sentient ribbons.
“We’ll need formal dress robes, school-standard cloaks, house-neutral winter gear, and two sets of everyday attire,” she murmured, ticking items off on a clipboard with quick, sharp strokes. “Do you prefer silver or brass detailing?”
“Silver,” Draco answered. “And lined cuffs. Subtle, but well-finished.”
Her eyes flicked to his boots, the cut of his jaw, the quiet confidence in his tone.
“You have the look of old money,” she said, half to herself. “Peverell, did you say?”
Draco met her eyes. “Yes.”
She gave a faint nod. “Of course.”
By the time he stepped out again, he carried several neatly packed parcels, each labeled and sealed with Florenza’s wax emblem. The robes were heavier than he was used to—denser materials, thicker embroidery—but undeniably fine. And they fit him like armor.
Next, he made his way down to the side street just past Flourish and Blotts, where the cobblestones narrowed and the lanterns hung a little lower, swaying gently in the breeze like watchful eyes.
Tucked between a used book stall and a shuttered apothecary was a faded green storefront with flaking gold lettering that read:
Burr & Bicker: Artisans of Paper.
To most passersby, it looked like nothing—just another antiquated shop selling parchment, quills, and inkpots. The display window featured thick rolls of vellum, a stack of ledger books tied in red ribbon, and a solitary silver quill suspended mid-air, endlessly writing the same looped signature.
But Draco knew better.
He knew because of his father.
Lucius Malfoy had done business here when he needed documents. The old man, Elric Burr, had done this since the 1920s, long before Draco was born. This was where documents were crafted when official channels wouldn’t do. Birth certificates, inheritance declarations, school records, Ministry permits, even bloodline histories—real enough to fool the Goblins, the Aurors, and even time itself.
They were skilled. Quiet. Reliable. And above all—discreet.
No one ever found out the truth.
Draco reached for the doorknob, its brass worn smooth by generations of clandestine clients. He paused for half a second, steadying himself. This was the next step. If he was going to walk through Hogwarts’s gates as someone else—someone who belonged in this world—he would need more than a wand and a vault key. He would need a name.
A past.
A paper trail no one could trace.
He stepped inside.
The door creaked open into a dim space filled with scroll racks and shelves of parchment scrolls stacked like wine bottles. A young man behind the counter, owl-eyed and wearing a monocle, looked up.
“Looking for something bespoke?” he asked in a low, hoarse voice.
“More than that,” Draco said quietly. “I need identity papers.”
There was a pause. The man set his quill down slowly.
“Ah. I see.”
He motioned for Draco to follow. They slipped through a back door, into a cramped workroom filled with stamping presses, shelves of wax seals, and old Ministry parchment watermarked with enchantments.
“You’ve come to the right place. Name?”
“Draco Peverell.”
“No such record.”
“Exactly.”
The forger studied him a moment. “You have a story?”
“Educated abroad. Returned due to the war. Family lives in seclusion in the north but died in a tragic fire.No known address, no Ministry records. Old blood, reclusive branch of the Peverell line. No questions.”
A long silence.
“Peverell,” the man murmured, almost reverently. “That’ll open some doors, if played right. That’s a name buried deep in the bones of wizardkind.”
Draco didn’t smile. “So I’ve heard.”
The man reached into a drawer and pulled out a blank student registration sheet. With a flick of his wand, ink bled onto the page, forming Hogwarts’ official crest. He held it toward Draco.
“Sign your name. That will bind it to your magical signature. I’ll finish the rest.”
Draco took the quill. His hand hovered for a breath longer than necessary.
Draco Peverell.
It was the first time he’d written it.
When he handed it back, the forger sealed it with an emerald green stamp and passed him a slim leather folder.
“You’ll find a full file in there. Student documentation. Background, Ministry stampings. Even a Gringotts registration scroll. Use this at the school gates and they’ll accept it without blinking. Three Galleons.”
Draco dropped five on the table.
The man blinked. “Overpaying is suspicious.”
“It’s also gratitude,” Draco said. “Burn the extras.”
The forger nodded. “Consider them ash.”
Back in the street, Draco adjusted his collar and breathed in the city.
He still had supplies to buy.
By mid-afternoon, his arms ached from the weight of bags—new cauldrons, potions kits filled with era-appropriate vials, quills sharpened to razors, a sleek black owl with intelligent yellow eyes in a cage slung over one arm. The books alone had nearly broken his back—textbooks with leather bindings and gold-foiled runes, each heavier and older than anything he’d seen in his own time. There was power in old print, and he could feel it humming against his fingertips when he brushed their spines.
He stopped once for a butterbeer in a tucked-away café—one that served everything in porcelain cups, not tankards. The waitress wore gloves. He thanked her with a crisp nod, noting how people spoke here—slower, more formal. No slang. No loud laughter.
Draco adapted quickly. His posture straightened. His words sharpened. Even the way he walked changed—measured, refined, like someone raised in manor halls and parlors lined with mahogany and bloodline portraits.
But there was one more place he had to go.
Knockturn Alley.
Notes:
Feel free to leave a comment, I love reading them. Hopefully the story is entertaining enough, since I’m constantly editing as I write I don’t know if it all makes sense. Crossing fingers. Its the classic time travel trope but hopefully with a twist, I try to make it different than others. P.s this is also my first time writing in the Harry potter fandom, so I’m hoping I’m doing it justice.
Chapter Text
The fog had thickened to a soupy hush by the time Draco emerged from Diagon Alley, curling around his boots like spectral fingers and clinging to the hem of his cloak in damp, silvery threads. It wasn’t just mist—it was memory, pressing in from all sides, muffling sound and muting color until the world behind him faded into a grey, whispering void.
Tucked tightly beneath one arm was the final piece of his forged identity—an envelope sealed in dragon-hide vellum, its seams stitched with spellwork so dense it hummed faintly. Water would bead off it. Fire would slither around it. No Ministry spell, no intrusive eye, no meddling archive clerk could unravel its contents. As far as the wizarding world was concerned, Draco Peverell had always existed. Gringotts vaults bore his crest. Ministry parchments held his signature. And, most importantly, the sentient logbook at Hogwarts—ancient, stubborn, and bound in flayed basilisk hide—now whispered his name among the living.
He paused where Knockturn Alley’s shadowed tendrils met the warmer, candle-gilded breath of Diagon Alley. The transition was jarring—like stepping from a crypt into a lullaby. Beyond him, gaslight shimmered against polished glass; enchanted window displays danced behind panes etched with frost; shopkeepers smiled, unaware of what the decades ahead would bring. Laughter lilted from Florean Fortescue’s. Flourish & Blotts glowed like a temple of learning. Everything was too clean. Too innocent.
A place suspended in amber.
But Knockturn’s rot still clung to him—like oil on skin, like a secret whispered too close to the ear. It reminded him of what he had left behind. Of what he had become.
He turned his back to the sunlight and disappeared into a narrower lane that snaked behind Winks and Hexes, a potion shop that reeked of burned sage and something coppery beneath. The fog thickened here, growing teeth. Every lamppost was crooked, every window a blind eye. This was where things went when they didn’t want to be found.
He needed a wand. Not the wand. Not his wand.
Not the Elder Wand, which pulsed in the bone-hollow of his memory like a buried scream.
No. Something quieter. Something that wouldn’t attract the kind of notice he couldn’t afford.
The alley swallowed him whole, buildings leaning in on either side like crones in a whispered argument. Their bricks wept with damp, their shutters sealed shut with layers of peeling paint and ancient suspicion. Somewhere above, a window creaked open and closed again. Watching. Or warning.
Draco walked on, hood drawn low, breath slow, eyes sharp.
The shop he sought bore no sign. No cheerful font. No chiming bell. Just a narrow, sagging door wedged between a derelict seamstress’s and a boarded-up apothecary, both shuttered like forgotten teeth in a mouth too tired to speak. Its threshold shimmered faintly, cloaked in a subtle repelling charm that suggested: not for you.
He stepped forward anyway.
The handle was shaped like a serpent’s spine—twisted, bone-pale, slick with age. When his fingers wrapped around it, the thing shuddered, faintly alive, the metal cold enough to bite. Old enchantments slept within the grain of the door, slow and reptilian. They stirred beneath his touch, recognizing something ancient in him.
Draco pressed his palm flat against the dark wood.
It pulsed once beneath his skin.
Then again.
A third time—stronger now. A rhythm. A heartbeat.
Or a memory rising from beneath the floorboards.
He did not flinch. He merely exhaled, a long, slow breath like one might release before crossing a threshold too long avoided.
And the door creaked open—not pushed, not pulled, but with the slinking, sighing motion of something old waking up.
Inside was darkness.
And waiting.
The interior breathed silence.
Not merely quiet—but a hush so complete it seemed woven into the stone itself. The air hung heavy, suspended in a slow exhale, thick with the scent of ancient ash, blood-warmed iron, and something cleaner, colder—polished bone or ivory, perhaps, steeped too long in ritual. Every breath Draco drew tasted of smoke and centuries.
Wands drifted in glass cylinders that glided soundlessly along the dark stone walls—not arranged, not labeled, simply moving. Each one spiraled lazily, suspended as if weightless, dreaming of the hands they’d once known—or might one day claim. Their passage stirred nothing. The glass didn’t reflect; it absorbed. Light itself bent here.
Illumination came from lanterns that bore no flame. Instead, they held coils of luminous vapor—phosphorescent, cold, and faintly alive. The glow they shed was both too little and too much, as if retreating from movement, hiding from touch. Shadows breathed between them. Always shifting.
The floor was uneven, paved with ancient slabs of stone so dark they drank the light. Scars marred their surface: deep gashes like claw marks, sinuous scorch lines that curled like lightning across a battlefield, and here and there the ghost of a footprint—not stamped, but burned. Impossibly deep. Impossibly old. The weight of magic pressed into every crack and crevice, clinging to the room like mist clings to the moors after a storm. It didn’t just feel old.
It felt aware.
From the far end of the room, a curtain parted—a veil of obsidian beads, matte and shifting, each bead no larger than a thumbnail, yet they whispered as they moved. A dry, rustling sound, like wind threading through brittle parchment. They clinked like bones knocked gently together.
A figure emerged.
Tall. Too tall.
Spindle-limbed and strangely boneless in the way he moved, as though gliding instead of walking. His robes whispered across the stone—layers of fabric that shimmered between textures that couldn’t coexist: the softness of feathers, the bite of thorns. They changed with the light. With thought.
His face was pale and long, framed by a high collar that hugged his neck like armor. His skin had the waxy translucence of something preserved in time. His eyes—gods, his eyes—were pale green, nearly opalescent. Not the brightness of youth, but the clouded gleam of something that had seen too much and forgotten nothing. They glowed faintly, just enough to reveal the hollows beneath them.
“Not many come here,” he said, voice like parchment held too close to a flame—fragile, rasping, edged with heat. “Even fewer... twice.”
Draco’s breath caught.
Twice?
His spine stiffened with instinct. Cold fingers curled around his ribs.
“I haven’t been before,” he replied, tone clipped, even. But something inside him had already recoiled—flinched, as if recognizing something it wasn’t ready to name. “I was told you craft bespoke wands.”
Lucius’s voice rose unbidden in his mind:
You’ll never see a sign. The wands find you if they must. During the war, some of the Inner Circle had wands made there. Not by a wandmaker. By something else.
The man tilted his head in that serpentine way of things that didn’t blink. His gaze flickered across Draco, not just looking, but scanning. Peeling back layers not of cloth, but of soul—of legacy, intent, shadow. He saw things Draco hadn’t spoken aloud in years.
“I do not craft,” he murmured. “I match. I listen. I draw what is dormant. The wands come to me.”
A pause.
“As you have.”
He stepped forward with the grace of water finding its level—silent, inevitable. No footsteps marked his passing. Only the hush of displaced magic, the subtle recoil of air itself.
His gaze flicked down Draco’s form—pausing on the cut of his cloak, the weave of charms stitched into its lining, the pulse of his magical signature. Then, he paused.
His pale eyes narrowed.
He had sensed it.
The ghost of the Elder Wand—woven into Draco’s magic like smoke laced through breath, invisible to most, but undeniable to those who knew how to listen. A phantom resonance, etched too deep to be scrubbed clean.
“You’ve bonded before,” the man said.
Draco didn’t blink. “I need a wand that won’t be recognized.”
His voice was deliberate now. Measured. “Something new. Discreet.”
The figure began to circle him.
Not hurried—studied. A falcon’s orbit before the stoop. Every step was precise, silent. His robes whispered as they moved, trailing behind him like shadow and silk. His fingers twitched subtly at his sides, as though tasting the magic in the air—feeling the frequency of Draco’s presence ripple through the space.
“You walk with power already,” the man said, voice deepening into something gravel-soft and old. “Ancient.”
Another step. Another circle.
“Resistant.”
His hand lifted, as if to touch—but didn’t. Instead, he simply watched the air ripple between them.
“Hungry.”
Each word fell with deliberate weight, striking the space between them like stones dropped into still water. And like water, something shifted. The atmosphere tightened. The temperature dropped. A hush swept through the floating wands behind the glass, as if they, too, were listening now.
Waiting.
Draco held himself still. Not rigid, not defensive—ready. The pulse in his throat was steady. His mind sharp.
He had come to leave the past behind.
But it had followed him inside.
His eyes flicked to Draco’s wand—just for a heartbeat, but it was enough. The glance left a shadow in its wake. “It stains you,” he said softly, voice like mothwings brushing parchment. “Like ink spilled on silk. Beautiful… irreversible.”
He moved then, with the drifting stillness of a man who had never once hurried in his life. A few paces brought him before a drawer low to the ground, forged from a single slab of obsidian so deeply black it seemed to consume the light around it. The stone’s surface shimmered with unnatural depth, like oil on water in the dark. Runes had been carved into it—not etched so much as burned in with something older than flame. They shimmered just beyond the edge of comprehension, flickering in and out of focus like lightning behind stormclouds.
Looking at them directly was a mistake.
Pain lanced behind Draco’s eyes. The runes writhed when he stared too long, slithering just beneath his sight like snakes behind frosted glass. He blinked hard, breath catching. His vision swam.
“Don’t look too long,” the man murmured, with a peculiar note of kindness in his voice. “The drawer remembers being sealed. And it remembers what it cost.”
He pressed one long, bone-pale hand against the stone. The runes pulsed under his touch—not with light, but with memory. A heartbeat. A shiver. The drawer shuddered, then slowly parted.
“Let us see what else answers,” he breathed.
From the dark hollow, he drew a long, narrow case, banded in silver so tarnished it looked bruised. His fingers cradled it reverently, like it held a relic pulled from the grave. The lid opened without a sound, not even a whisper, revealing a wand nestled within red velvet: redwood, polished to a coppery sheen. Light caught in its curves, and for a moment, it appeared lit from within—like embers under skin.
Warmth rose from it in gentle waves. Not heat. Not fire. Something older. Vital. A soft thrum that prickled against Draco’s skin, subtle as breath on glass.
He reached out.
The wand fit easily in his hand. Perfect in size and shape. It pulsed once—like a quiet sigh—but no more.
No current. No thrill. No flicker of that intimate awareness that meant connection.
Draco turned it in his grip, once. Twice. Waiting. Hoping for something. Even a spark. But the wand remained… still.
Beautiful. Silent.
Dead.
The wandmaker lifted it from his hand with practiced ease. His expression never shifted. No scowl. No sadness. As if the failure was not a surprise but a confirmation.
“Another,” he said, calm and unshaken, voice worn smooth by centuries of waiting.
And so Draco tried again.
And again.
Ash with a dragon heartstring core—sleek, swift, designed for fire and duel. It sat cold and motionless in his grasp, like a sword rusted in its sheath.
Sycamore threaded with unicorn hair—playful, restless, eager for novelty. It recoiled, in a way. Not visibly, but Draco felt it: a faint tension, like the tremble before a pull that never came.
Oak, sturdy and proud, a wand built for ancestral legacies and magic soaked in loyalty. It barely breathed in his grip.
Yew. Heavy with the perfume of ancient deaths. The same kind of wood as Voldemort’s wand. A whisper of malevolence coiled in its grain. But even that didn’t stir. It was like holding the bones of something long buried.
Ebony followed. Elegantly cruel. Sharp-edged, demanding. Born for ambition. Even that one gave nothing back.
Each wand was finely made, humming faintly in its own register—until it touched him. Then the hum died. Like songbirds falling silent at the approach of a storm.
They were all… inert. Unmoved.
Refusing him.
The silence grew thicker. Oppressive. A slow pressure behind his eyes bloomed into a dull ache, throbbing just beneath his skull. He grit his teeth against it. Magic, his magic, felt restless beneath his skin—coiled tight and growling. Something inside him strained with each rejection, like a chained beast rattling its collar.
The wandmaker paused, fingertips grazing the velvet edge of the table where yet another wand lay untouched. His brow furrowed—just slightly. A flicker of unease. The first crack in that serene, impenetrable calm.
When he spoke, his voice had changed. Roughened. Lower. As if the words themselves were reluctant.
“Your magic,” he said, “is bound. Possessive. It will not dance with strangers.”
Draco flinched. He didn’t mean to, but the words struck too close to truth. He opened his mouth—but the answer slipped past thought, raw and splintered:
“I don’t want it to be.”
Too fast. Too sharp. It cracked the quiet like glass under boot.
He swallowed hard, forcing his voice steady. “It’s… it’s not safe to use the wand I have.”
He didn’t say its name. He didn’t have to.
Even now, the Elder Wand slept in his cloak, tucked against his spine like a waiting predator. Its presence was weightless and crushing all at once—like a whisper echoing inside his bones.
Watching.
Wanting.
The wandmaker’s eyes, pale and ancient, did not blink.
“I see,” he said.
And for the first time, Draco felt it:
The room was no longer neutral.
It was listening.
A relic of conquest.
Not loyalty.
The wandmaker’s gaze sharpened, narrowing like a lens brought into focus. He said nothing. Just turned, quiet as breath.
He passed through another curtain—not of beads, but of bone. Slender vertebrae, worn smooth by time, hung strung together like morbid wind chimes. They clinked faintly with each step, whispering in fractured tongues as if remembering every death they’d once housed. Beyond, the back of the shop yawned open—a hollowed alcove where the shadows pressed tighter, as if gravity itself bent inward, drawn by the weight of something older than memory.
When he returned, the box in his hands was different.
Longer than the rest. Wrapped in silence. Unadorned save for a black iron clasp that shimmered with a sickly patina—green-gold like tarnished blood. There were no sigils etched into its surface, no flourishes of identity. Just wood the color of scorched bark, smoothed by silence, as though it had been handled by ghosts.
He placed it gently on the counter, splaying his fingers across the lid like a man laying his hand over a grave.
“This wand,” he said, voice threaded with quiet gravity, “was never meant for sale.”
His thumb brushed the clasp. It clicked open with a reluctant hiss.
“The materials alone are volatile. Their union… unnatural.”
The lid lifted slowly—almost unwillingly. It didn’t creak. It exhaled—a dry, papery whisper, like something breathing for the first time in centuries.
Inside, cushioned in a cradle of black velvet that devoured the light, lay the wand.
It was beautiful. And wrong.
Bloodwood and onyx, twisted in grain like sinew wound too tight, as if the wand itself had been forged under pressure so immense it warped the very nature of the wood. Its surface gleamed with a wet sheen, like oil over water—or lacquer over old scars. Beneath the grain, veins of dark green shimmered faintly, like veins pulsing under translucent skin. But the rhythm was uneven. Unnatural.
Not life.
Not light.
Something else.
“Basilisk fang core,” the wandmaker intoned, almost reverent. “Overlayed with Veela hair. Extremely rare. Nearly impossible to stabilize.”
Draco stared. His mouth had gone dry.
“Those shouldn’t even be compatible,” he said hoarsely. “They… contradict each other.”
“They do,” the wandmaker agreed softly. “That is what makes it so alive. The fang carries death. Hunger. An ancient, patient kind of terror. The hair—seduction, fire, beauty laced with madness. Wrath disguised as grace. It is not balance that binds them.”
A beat.
“It is opposition.”
He looked up then, eyes glass-pale, catching the glint of Draco’s hesitation.
“Just like you.”
Draco froze.
The man knew. Not guessed—knew. Too precise, too piercing. Not just the ingredients, not just the spellwork. Him. He saw him.
The realization settled like lead in his gut. A Seer, he thought, pulse tripping.
That’s what his father had meant, all those years ago: Not a wandmaker. Not really. But something older. Rarer. Something dangerous to ask favors from.
The man’s eyes—green, but pale, pressed-leaf and frostbitten—weren’t the eyes of a craftsman. They didn’t appraise. They pierced. As if looking past Draco’s skin and sinew and bone, straight into the tangled faultlines of his soul.
The silence tightened around them, stretched thin.
The wand lay waiting.
It pulsed softly. Not insistently—but knowingly. Like a beast that had already caught his scent. It did not tempt. It did not plead. It merely watched.
Draco didn’t move.
Something in him recoiled. Not in fear—but in recognition. This wand would not obey. It would judge. It already had. And it had not dismissed him.
It was curious.
“What happens if it doesn’t accept me?” he asked, barely more than breath.
The wandmaker tilted his head. Birdlike. Unnervingly still.
“It will accept you,” he said. “Or it will consume you.”
A beat of silence. It might have been a joke. It didn’t feel like one.
Draco reached.
His hand hovered, breath caught somewhere between ribs. Then, slowly, he extended his fingers.
He didn’t lift it.
Just touched it.
Skin to wood.
The wand breathed.
A single pulse—like a heartbeat in reverse. Then another—sharper. Faster.
And then it flared.
The connection hit like lightning.
A violent, crackling snap of contact tore through him, flinging heat down his spine. The shelves shuddered. Wand boxes rattled like bones in coffins. Lanterns flared and guttered. The bone curtain clacked wildly in panic. Outside, the fog peeled back from the glass in sheets, as though scorched by invisible fire.
Draco gasped.
The wand wrenched itself into his palm. His fingers curled instinctively around it, unable to let go. He dropped to one knee as the surge tore through his nerves like molten wire.
And then—images.
A serpent coiled around a throne of ancient bone. Marble walls slick with time and secrets.
A woman with hair like mercury-fire, her scream shattering the sky.
A tower crumbling into ruin, and hands—too many hands—reaching for him from beneath the rubble.
Time shattered.
Backward. Forward.
Shadow wrapped around him like shackles forged in blood and memory.
When he finally pulled in a breath, he was gasping, braced against the stone floor, the world around him ringing. His vision blurred at the edges. The wand still clung to his palm—hot, pulsing, alive.
The wandmaker had not moved. But his expression had changed.
For the first time, awe carved lines into the quiet of his face. And beneath it—something darker.
“…It accepts you,” he whispered. “Barely. But it does.”
Draco rose unsteadily, every nerve vibrating. His hand throbbed where the wand had branded him with its touch.
“Why…” His voice cracked. “Why does it hurt?”
The wandmaker stared at him as if reading a story written in ash and ruin.
“Because you are not whole,” he said. “Because the wand you truly own—that wand—still binds your core. This one must cut a place for itself. You are a house with two masters.”
Draco’s breath hitched.
The Elder Wand. He felt its weight even now, buried deep, like a curse pressed into marrow. It hadn’t released him. Not really. He had never been free of it.
But this wand… this wand hadn’t submitted.
It had bitten him.
And chosen him anyway.
“I’ll take it,” Draco said, voice raw.
The wandmaker inclined his head.
“You’ll need dragonbone oil,” he said. “It must be fed. And be warned—it will answer your rage faster than your reason.”
Draco handed over the necessary coin—more than he wanted, but less than he feared.
As he stepped back into the alley, the fog no longer clung to him. It parted instead, curling in a lazy spiral around his boots, like it recognized him now.
In his hand, the wand whispered against his palm.
Not forgiveness. Not redemption.
But perhaps—control.
He vanished into the mist.
He slipped through the narrow, twilight-drenched alley behind the crooked spine of the bookshop, shadows peeling off his cloak like leaves from a dying branch. The stones beneath his boots were slick with evening condensation, and somewhere behind the walls, a cat yowled—low and guttural, as if echoing an argument with the past.
The Leaky Cauldron loomed ahead, its soot-darkened windows aglow with molten amber, pulsing faintly like the heart of some great, sleeping beast. He stepped inside just as the last golden light of afternoon slanted through the smudged panes, carving long fingers across the wooden floorboards.
The pub breathed around him.
It was alive with the hush of conversation and the scent of spiced mead steeped in orange peel and clove. By the hearth, a trio of elderly witches in moth-eaten velvet clinked their sherry glasses with arthritic elegance, their laughter snapping like logs in flame—crackling, high, and a little wild. Their shawls shimmered with ancient protection charms that sparked faintly in the dim light, like ghosts refusing to be forgotten.
In the farthest booth, cloaked in shadow and suspicion, two grim-faced Hit Wizards leaned in close. Their voices stitched a taut seam between them, low and tense, as they passed a folded parchment across the scarred table. Something about the way they handled it—too careful, too reverent—marked it as more than a letter. Perhaps a list. Perhaps a death sentence.
A curl of smoke spiraled from the dragon-maw pipe of a gnarled old man perched at the bar. The pipe’s bowl, carved from obsidian and bone, growled softly with each exhale. The smoke unfurled not in clouds but in lullabies—melancholy notes that curled into the air as soft, ghostly tunes, whistling through the rafters like the remnants of a childhood lost to time.
Somewhere near the taps, an old gramophone rasped to life, its brass horn creaking as it spun a cracked waltz in a minor key. The record caught and looped once—twice—before sliding into mournful rhythm. The music floated, fragile and plaintive, threading itself between footsteps and murmured spells like a dream remembered wrong.
Behind the bar, Tom the barkeep looked up from polishing a row of pewter mugs that had long since lost their luster. His brow lifted beneath a tangle of wiry hair.
“You’re back earlier than I expected,” he said, voice worn smooth by decades of secrets.
“Finished my errands,” Draco replied, voice a velvet-edged knife. He drew a silver sickle from his pouch—gleaming, old-mint polished—and placed it on the bar with a soft chime. “Dinner again tonight. Same room. And perhaps a bottle of red this time.”
Tom grunted, drying the same mug with a threadbare rag. “No need to keep overpaying, son.”
Draco’s mouth twitched into something too calculated to be a smile. “I like to be remembered well. It might come in handy one day.”
The barkeep chuckled, a gravelly sound. “Wise lad. Dangerous ones usually are.”
Draco offered no reply. Just turned and climbed the narrow staircase toward the upper rooms.
The inn groaned beneath his weight, each step complaining in creaks and whispers. The air grew thicker as he ascended—steeped in old ale, damp wool, candlewax, and the long-stewed musk of forgotten guests. The wood-paneled walls narrowed as he climbed, skewed and bowed by time. It felt like walking through a house half-asleep, dreaming in its bones.
A wall sconce flickered as he passed, the flame sputtering violently—as if recognizing something in him it didn’t quite trust.
He didn’t blame it.
The hallway twisted at unnatural angles, lined with mismatched doors stitched together with half-faded charms. Behind one, a cat mewled. Behind another, a ghoul sobbed like a child in a nightmare, muffled and rhythmic. The carpet underfoot was frayed, threadbare in the middle like the spine of a well-read book.
He reached his door—third from the end, marked with a rune meant to mislead, keyed to a false name. His hand moved on instinct: one click for the mundane lock, then two murmured incantations for the wards he’d wound into the hinges like thread into flesh. Defensive. Concealed. Paranoid.
The door opened without sound. He’d designed it that way. Silence was safety.
Inside, the room was modest. Austere, almost. A narrow bed tucked beneath a slanted ceiling, a warped desk littered with worn quills and scraps of parchment, and a single crooked window that blinked out over the tangled rooftops of Diagon Alley—hazy with the fog that had become as permanent as memory. The fireplace yawned cold and empty. He didn’t light it. Fire unnerved him lately.
Too bright. Too hungry. To easy to loose control.
He crossed the room in three quiet strides and knelt beside the bed, his fingers finding the correct floorboard as though drawn by instinct. Second from the foot, marginally lighter in weight.
He tapped it once.
Twice.
Drew his wand and whispered the unlocking charm.
The wood loosened with a click—a quiet sigh of release.
Beneath it lay a velvet-lined cavity no bigger than a wandbox, precisely carved. Inside, he placed the slim folio of forged documents he had carried. Each page bore the meticulous craftsmanship of a master forger—illusion folded into truth, lies spun so tightly they held the weight of reality. Ministry documents. Hogwarts enrollment files. Falsified bloodline lineage and a Durmstrang aptitude report, complete with theoretical wandcraft scores and sealed Headmaster’s recommendation.
He paused, thumbing the edge of one parchment.
It looked real.
It felt real.
And that was what mattered.
He replaced the board, resealed it with a murmur, and cast a Disillusionment Charm over the seam, watching the magic ripple briefly before settling into stillness.
Only then did he sit.
The bed creaked beneath him, stiff and weary. His shoulders curled forward, gaze unfocused, hands slack between his knees.
Below, the inn lived on.
He could hear it—the clatter of cutlery, the muted shuffle of boots, the warm eruption of laughter, the low thrum of magic binding strangers into shared space. Tom’s limp dragged audibly past the stairwell. Someone ordered another pint. Someone else cursed their luck at cards.
The world moved, content in its noise and rhythm.
But for Draco, time slowed—tightened. The air felt thin. His thoughts folded inward like blades. Somewhere between the rising dusk and the smoke-thick rafters, something ancient stirred behind his eyes.
Like a lens narrowing.
Or a door closing.
Tomorrow, he would begin gathering what he needed. Not just about the school’s current structure, its defenses, the habits of its staff.
No—his real target was Dumbledore.
The man who had walked through fire and dared to pretend the smoke never touched him. The man who wore forgiveness like ceremonial robes—threadbare with use, heavy with implication. The man who had once looked at him—not through him, not past him, but into him—and then, with all that knowing, still turned away. Left him in the cold. Left him to drown.
Draco’s fingers twitched against the bedsheet, tightening until the linen crumpled like a throat under pressure.
Dumbledore still held too many threads—woven through history, through people, through Draco himself. Unanswered questions clawed at the corners of his mind: How much had the old man known? How closely had he watched, a silent witness to every stumble, every cracking breath? Had he waited for Draco to fall… or for him to become something else entirely?
And did it matter anymore?
He wasn’t Draco Malfoy now. Not really. That name belonged to another boy, another life—a brittle mask shattered under the weight of war and blood and shame.
He rose, the motion smooth but laced with tension, and crossed to the desk in two silent steps. From a drawer charmed shut with layered protections—mundane and magical—he withdrew a tightly wound scroll of parchment, its edges carefully singed and stained with age. It looked like it had slept for decades in some Ministry archive.
He unrolled it across the desk’s scarred surface. Then lit a single candle. No more than that. The flame guttered in the chill breath of the window’s draft, its flicker throwing warped shadows across the grain—shadows that danced like memories and scars.
Draco selected his quill and dipped it in ink. Black as spell-burned ash. It clung to the nib like it understood the weight of what it would write.
But he didn’t move, not yet.
The ink held, patient, as if it knew it was about to become something dangerous.
Because Dumbledore was not a man to underestimate.
He was courteous—deliberately so. Disarming in the way of ancient predators. A smile always at the ready, a twinkle behind those half-moon spectacles. But beneath the soft voice and the cinnamon-sweet nostalgia lingered something vast. Cold. Watching.
He wasn’t just powerful. He was old. Older than his years. Older, perhaps, than time knew how to measure.
A strategist of the worst kind—the kind who didn’t look like one.
Even Voldemort, for all his horror, all his serpentine cunning, had the decency to be straightforward. Brutal, terrifying, yes—but you knew where he stood. The moment he entered a room, the air changed. He made no secret of what you were to him: prey, a piece in a larger ritual, a vessel for ambition, or a stain beneath his boot. He didn’t pretend. He didn’t need to.
But Dumbledore?
He handed you hope like it was a gift. Let you believe in the illusion of choice. He gutted you with kindness, peeled back your defenses with the blade of trust. No chains. Just expectations.
And the worst part? You wanted to deserve it. His faith. His mercy. His gaze that said: You can be better, if only you try a little harder.
That was the trap. The cage built from light.
And it made him more dangerous than any Dark Lord.
Draco’s quill finally touched the parchment.
Observe from a distance. Note habitual patterns. Office hours. Staff meetings. Interpersonal circles. Absences. Anomalies.
He wrote in a layered cipher—half arithmantic notation, half family code, twined in a way only a Black or a Malfoy might even recognize as language. His mother, perhaps, could parse it. But even she would need time.
He watched the ink dry, curling slightly at the edges, ancient-seeming in the candlelight. A delicate illusion.
He sat back, but his posture remained alert. Coiled. His gaze skimmed the parchment one last time before continuing.
Target: Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.
Objective: Surveillance. Routine. Vulnerability. Leverage. Control.
Outside, the fog pressed its face to the window like a forgotten god—indifferent, ancient, and listening.
Inside, his wand pulsed gently against his hip. A slow, almost living thrum. Like breath beneath skin.
Was it approval? Caution? Agreement?
Hard to tell these days.
Draco didn’t sleep that night. Not truly.
He listened to the quiet. He listened to the silence beneath the quiet. He watched the candle burn low.
And beside him, the wand waited too.
The next day arrived with the hush of gray light spilling through drawn curtains—indifferent, efficient, unfeeling. Morning bled into the room like a blade drawn slow, and Draco rose before the final echo of sleep could cling to his thoughts.
He bathed in silence, water steaming against pale skin, washing away the traces of a night unspent in rest. When he dressed, it was with the meticulous care of someone building armor piece by piece. A crisp white shirt, starched to perfection. A tailored vest in deep charcoal, its buttons small and mother-of-pearl. Slate-gray wool trousers from Florenza’s, pressed razor-sharp down the leg. He fastened cufflinks—obsidian ovals with faint silver runes—and finally pulled on gleaming boots, their polish mirror-bright. When he stepped onto the stairs, each footfall landed with a precise, metallic click.
By the time he re-entered the pub below, he was no longer just a man. He was a statement.
A young aristocrat, carved from old magic and colder legacy. The kind of boy polished by privilege and shadowed by expectation. The sort of heir others noticed—if only because they’d been taught to.
An older wizard glanced up from behind his newspaper, the corners of his eyes narrowing with interest, a flicker of scrutiny behind half-moon spectacles. Across the room, a witch with wine-red lips and elbow-length velvet gloves caught sight of him, her gaze lingering just a heartbeat too long before she dipped her head in genteel acknowledgement.
Draco returned the gesture with the barest incline of his chin—respectful, distant. Perfectly measured.
He selected a small table near the hearth, where the fire snapped and hissed against the cold, and sat with the poise of someone used to claiming space. The chair creaked once under his weight. He unfolded The Daily Prophet with a practiced flick, scanning headlines under the guise of disinterest.
The paper was thinner than he remembered. Its pages smelled of ink and preservation charms, but they felt brittle—like truth diluted over time. Most of the articles were padded with cautious rhetoric and Ministry-approved vagueness. Grim but vague updates on Grindelwald’s advance across the continent. Terms like “strategic withdrawal,” “displacement camps,” and “containment efforts” littered the columns like ash.
So far, Britain remained untouched.
But for how long?
He traced the edge of the parchment absently, fingers drifting as the words blurred into smudges of grey.
Yes—Britain was still an island, in more ways than one. Guarded not just by ocean and ancient wards, but by the smug bulwark of bureaucracy. Ministry arrogance stacked higher than the wards at Dover. A slow, fatal kind of denial that dressed itself in official statements:
No confirmed incursions.
Auror presence increased at all ports.
There is no cause for alarm.
Draco had heard those words before. Different wars. Different faces. Always the same empty comfort, like a lullaby sung in a house already burning.
The Prophet crackled as he turned the page. The sound was louder than it should’ve been, like a crack of lightning through the muted morning.
There, beneath a bold headline, a grainy black-and-white photo bled across the page. A town square in northern France, reduced to craters and flame. Buildings toppled like toy blocks. Smoke curling from fractured stones. Fire paused mid-leap by the camera’s magic, caught in a moment of roaring stillness. In the lower corner, half-obscured by soot and shadow, a child’s doll lay collapsed—its limbs melted, eyes burned to blind white orbs.
No Muggle casualties reported, read the caption.
But beneath it, scrawled in shaking ink, someone had written a single word. Sharp. Furious.
Liar.
Draco exhaled slowly through his nose. Then folded the paper—too sharply, creasing the headline as though trying to tear it in half. The fire popped beside him, casting gold across the polished buckle of his boot.
The scent of woodsmoke and ink clung to the air.
He did not look up.
He did not need to.
The world was already burning. And Britain, as always, was pretending it didn’t smell the smoke.
The scent arrived before she did—rosemary, thyme, the dark comfort of slow-simmered beef, rich enough to conjure memories of winter kitchens and safer times. A waitress approached, her steps light on the old floorboards, the tray in her hands steaming in the low golden light. She was young, perhaps no older than twenty, with auburn curls neatly pinned behind her ears and a cluster of freckles like sun-dust across her cheeks. Her uniform was crisp, sleeves rolled just above her wrists, a charm stitched in silver thread at her collar to keep the tray from spilling.
She set down the bowl with quiet care—tender hunks of beef nestled beside glistening carrots and potatoes, steam coiling upward like breath. Beside it, a tall glass of pumpkin cider, beads of condensation sliding lazily down the glass.
“Your wine is being decanted, Mr. Peverell,” she said, voice low and practiced, the way one spoke to someone important but unfamiliar. Her eyes flicked up to meet his.
Draco glanced up, catching the faint flicker of curiosity just behind her composure. “Thank you,” he said evenly.
She lingered a second too long. Then:
“Peverell…” She tilted her head, voice dipping almost to a whisper. “You wouldn’t be related to the Peverell family of the old legends, would you?”
There it was.
Draco smiled—but only with his mouth. A tight, measured thing. “Distantly.”
The change in her was subtle but immediate. Her pupils dilated slightly. Her posture sharpened, like instinct was catching up to something her mind hadn’t yet named. She swallowed, gave a brisk nod, and all but vanished back toward the bar with a flurry of skirt and polished heels.
He watched her go, eyes narrowing.
His name was working.
Not as camouflage. As myth.
In this time, the Peverell name still carried weight. It clung to old bloodlines like moss on cryptstone—half-revered, half-feared, but never forgotten. Whispers of Death’s favor. Of gifts stolen from the Veil. Of a legacy not buried, but sleeping.
And now that name had walked in from the fog, pale-haired and sharp-eyed, wearing modern silence like armor.
Already, the room felt different.
They knew the echo of power when they heard it.
And he had spoken with its voice.
He ate in silence, slow and deliberate, eyes skimming the edges of the room even as his hands moved mechanically through the motions of knife, fork, bite, sip. The stew was hot, savory, and entirely unmemorable. What mattered wasn’t the food, but the view.
He watched the pub like a soldier behind enemy lines, cataloging every movement, every twitch of a cloak, every glance not quite followed through. He memorized faces—the ones half-lit by firelight, the ones cloaked in shadow, the ones that smiled too quickly or drank too slow. Every witch. Every wizard. Every loosened tongue or furtive whisper. Some were travelers with heavy boots and ink-stained fingers. Others, locals nursing the same pint they had yesterday.
He studied them all.
Wondering.
Which one would it be?
Which one might he be?
Voldemort.
He would come through here eventually—of that Draco was certain. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. But the path to Hogwarts passed through these doors, as it had for generations. All students did. All boys on the edge of something monstrous.
And when he came, Draco would be ready.
By the time the wine arrived, dusk had bled across the London skyline like ink spilled into water—deep violets and bruised indigo streaking the windows, shadows lengthening across the floorboards. The lamps overhead flickered one by one into life, their yellow glow catching in the glass panes, warping the light into soft, golden blurs.
Draco leaned back in his chair, the worn leather creaking softly beneath him. He swirled the red wine in its glass, watching the way it clung to the rim before slowly sliding down—thick, dark, elegant.
He took a sip. Smooth. A touch of spice at the end.
It tasted like resolve.
He turned his gaze inward.
He needed allies. Even false ones. Names and faces at school who could tether him to the ground—those who could vouch for his legitimacy, offer protection through proximity, distract the suspicious by simply existing near him. People who wouldn’t question his presence in the wrong corridor at the wrong hour. Students who could whisper the right passwords, slip him into the right rooms.
But he also needed invisibility. Anonymity. He couldn’t afford to shine too brightly under the watchful eyes of Hogwarts staff—not yet. Especially not under his eyes.
Not those glittering, amused, omniscient blue eyes.
Albus Dumbledore saw too much. Smiled too much.
Draco knew better than to trust kindness from old men.
No. He needed to be careful.
He needed information.
His fingers tapped once against the rim of his wineglass. Flourish and Blotts. He’d return there. There were books—older than most of the shelves they sat on—bound in cracked dragonhide, pages edged in silver runes. The restricted wing held knowledge Hogwarts rarely advertised: soul-binding rituals, memory excision methods, counter-warp stabilizers, chronomantic stabilizers.
He needed all of it. Anything that could explain or manipulate the impossible.
Anything that could prepare him for him.
Because even now—barely a boy—Voldemort was brilliant. Brilliant in a way that made the world lean toward him, like light toward gravity. His charisma wasn’t loud; it was structural. Foundational. The kind of charm that rewrote how people imagined power.
Draco had to be more than clever.
He had to be unbreakable.
That night, he returned to his rented room above the pub, locking the door with both spell and steel. He unpacked each item from his trunks methodically, fingers moving with a surgical precision honed by years of ritual—and the kind of trauma that turned routine into survival.
His books—some inherited, some stolen, some procured through channels no seventeen-year-old should know—were sorted alphabetically by author, cross-referenced by subject, then stacked into neat towers along the far wall. His robes hung in tiers by use: formal wear, school-issue, weatherproofed, emergency-imbued. His potions kit was unpacked and laid across the desk—ingredients labeled in Latin, French, and Aramaic, sealed in enchanted jars, each protected by a minor stasis charm.
His wand—still foreign in his grip, still heavy with someone else’s destiny—he set gently on the bedside table, the tip pointing north. Always north. Toward home. Toward war. Toward whatever came next.
Only when everything had been arranged, memorized, and silently blessed did he lower himself onto the narrow bed. The mattress gave under his weight, springs creaking like tired breath. He lay still, arms crossed over his chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
But sleep did not come.
Not easily.
Not anymore.
The silence of the room was thick, cloying—pressing down like damp wool. A second skin he couldn’t peel away. The kind of quiet that reminded him of basements, dungeons, and locked doors. The kind of quiet in which bad things were whispered and worse things were done.
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere outside, London murmured. A distant carriage rattled over cobblestones. A spell cracked in the alley like a whip. Somewhere, faintly, someone was singing—off-key, possibly drunk. And beneath it all, far deeper than the noise of men, there was the hum of magic—that ancient undercurrent that throbbed beneath the city like a hidden artery. He turned onto his side and let the night hold him in its crooked arms.
At dawn, a sound stirred him—a subtle rustling, softer than breath, the whisper of parchment gliding over wood. Draco’s eyes snapped open. No grogginess, no stretch of limbs. He was already halfway between sleep and sentience, alert in the way war survivors often were—trained to wake with the faintest deviation from silence.
The sheets were cool against his skin as he sat up, the pale light of morning spilling in through the narrow window and cutting soft lines across the room. The air held the chill of old stone and new beginnings. Barefoot and soundless, he crossed to the door.
There, resting neatly on the threshold like an offering, was a single envelope.
Thick cream parchment. Dark green ink, unmistakably formal. The wax seal gleamed gold where the light caught it—ornate and precise: the Hogwarts crest, quartered and proud, its lions and snakes and ravens and badgers still locked in their ancient war.
Draco stared at it.
His breath stilled, not from surprise, but recognition. Not memory, exactly—this wasn’t a moment he’d lived before. But it shimmered with the ache of déjà vu. He crouched, picked it up, and turned it in his hand. It was heavy for a letter. Magic threaded through the fibers like veins. The enchantments were old, conservative, and carefully cast—no suspicion, no tracking, no triggers. Just the elegant touch of legitimacy.
He broke the seal with his thumb.
Dear Mr. Peverell,
It is with great pleasure that I write to inform you that your request for transfer has been reviewed and formally approved by the Hogwarts Board of Admissions. You have been granted admittance into the seventh-year class at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the forthcoming term.
As you are arriving from a private institution renowned for its accelerated curriculum and rigorous magical training, your academic records have qualified you for direct placement into our advanced-level coursework. You will find our instruction both demanding and deeply rewarding, with opportunities for independent study and one-on-one tutelage from select faculty members.
Your house placement will be determined upon arrival, in keeping with school tradition.
Enclosed with this letter, you will find the following:
- A complete list of textbooks, potion ingredients, and standard equipment necessary for seventh-year students.
- Notes regarding uniform modifications for winter travel.
- Instructions for submitting wand documentation and familiar registration, should you be accompanied by a magical creature.
Students are required to present themselves at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, located at King’s Cross Station in London, no later than 10:45 a.m. on September 1st. The Hogwarts Express departs promptly at eleven o’clock.
You are advised to arrive early to allow time for any unexpected magical interference or station congestion. Should you require accommodations or have particular needs regarding your transfer, our Deputy Headmaster remains available to assist. Kindly respond via owl no later than August 20th if such arrangements are to be made.
We look forward to welcoming you into the halls of Hogwarts—an institution steeped in tradition, legacy, and magical excellence. May your time with us be marked by both personal growth and scholarly achievement.
Welcome to Hogwarts, Mr. Peverell.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Armando Dippet
Headmaster, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Draco read the letter once. Then again. A third time. Each word carved its weight into the air around him, sharp and irrevocable. This was it. The checkpoint passed. The illusion held. His forged documents, painstakingly spelled and subtly aged, had convinced the gatekeepers of the most powerful magical institution in Britain.
Draco Peverell existed now. Not just in paper and ink, but in the annals of Hogwarts history. Another name to file in the rollbooks, another ghost to haunt the halls.
He folded the letter carefully, edges aligned, the gesture as exacting as a ritual. Then he slipped it into the inner pocket of his charcoal overcoat—the lining lined with shielding runes, woven to repel tracking, dampen detection, and hide truth even from Legilimency.
He dressed quickly, movements efficient and practiced. Layered robes in muted tones—charcoal and ash, elegant but subdued, threaded with protective seams. His hair he left slightly tousled, not careless, but calculated. Too polished invited scrutiny. Too ragged invited pity.
He descended into the pub, the letter close to his chest, a mask of quiet civility already settling over his features. The day had begun, and with it, the first step into the lie that might just save him.
The Leaky Cauldron, in the hush of early morning, felt like a place suspended in time. Smoke curled lazily above the hearth, not yet stirred by the rush of patrons, and the scent of charred sausages, fried eggs, and the bitter tang of over-steeped tea clung to the walls like memory. Lamps flickered with a soft golden glow, illuminating dust motes that hung in the air, drifting slowly as if reluctant to settle.
Behind the bar, Tom was wiping down the counter with habitual care, long fingers moving over the dark wood like a priest tending an altar. His eyes flicked up the moment Draco entered, boots echoing softly on the floorboards.
“Morning, Mr. Peverell,” he said, voice hoarse with sleep and smoke. “Letter come, did it?”
Draco gave a brief, impassive nod and slid onto a worn leather stool near the end of the counter, where the mirror behind the bar gave him an unobstructed view of the entire room. “Yes. Seventh-year transfer. Hogwarts.”
Tom gave a low, appreciative whistle, the sound barely more than breath. “Not many get in that late. You must be something special.”
“Just… well-prepared,” Draco replied. He accepted a plate wordlessly—toast stacked with care, sausages still steaming—his gaze never straying from the mirror, where the reflections of cloaked strangers shifted behind him like phantoms.
Tom leaned in, his elbows braced on the counter, the flicker of the hearth casting long shadows across the hollows of his cheeks. “Strange times to be going back to school,” he muttered, voice low enough to vanish into the snap and crackle of firewood. “The Prophet’s been whispering Grindelwald’s name again—like a curse not quite said aloud. Like it’s waiting for the right breath to catch flame.”
Draco buttered his toast with slow, deliberate movements, the edge of the knife scraping against crust with the dull sound of steel on old bone. He didn’t look up. “You think he’s gaining ground here?”
Tom’s gaze slid toward the entrance, toward the dark alley beyond. He resumed polishing a silver tankard, his cloth moving with mechanical rhythm. “Some say Knockturn’s full of his sympathizers now—pureblood fanatics, dark-wand collectors, creatures that haven’t been seen in daylight for years. And worse. Others say he’s negotiating with goblins.” He paused, voice softening further. “That sort of diplomacy doesn’t end clean. Like playing chess with a dragon who doesn’t know the rules—and doesn’t care.”
Draco’s mouth quirked slightly, more muscle twitch than smile. “And Hogwarts? What of Dumbledore?”
At that, Tom leaned back, apron rustling as it caught the firelight. “Brilliant man. Knows spells most people only hear of in ghost stories. But secretive. Always has been. Keeps to his tower like a crow over a graveyard. Claims he avoids politics, but…”
Draco raised his teacup. The porcelain was thin, almost translucent, and steam curled from its surface in delicate spirals, drifting like breath from something long-buried. “Those who profess neutrality,” he said, voice quiet and silk-wrapped, “often have the most to hide.”
Tom paused mid-polish, the gleam in his eyes sharpening. He studied Draco over the rim of a chipped tankard, something unreadable coiling behind his stare. Behind them, the enchanted gramophone crackled softly as the old waltz slowed to a close, its final note hanging in the air before dissolving into silence. The pub seemed to hold its breath.
Draco set his teacup down with surgical precision. His gaze slid past the bar, over the crooked shelves lined with liquor bottles—dusty, many unlabeled, some whispering softly in tongues no one had spoken in centuries. He felt the magic here—low and listening, as though the walls themselves remembered things the living had tried to forget.
Tom turned away again, fingers absently polishing a brass tap already gleaming. “Best not to speak too loudly about the quiet ones,” he said, almost to himself. “They tend to notice.”
Draco’s lips curled faintly, the barest suggestion of amusement—or threat. “Let them.”
Outside, a gust of wind scraped down the alleyway, rattling the warped shutters like skeletal fingers. Somewhere behind the bar, the mirror rippled—just for an instant—and Draco caught a glimpse of something that wasn’t him. Taller. Paler. Eyes like silver fire.
He blinked.
Gone.
The toast sat half-eaten on his plate, its warmth already fading. The taste of ash lingered on his tongue. There were too many ears in this place. Too many eyes pretending not to watch. The war, he was beginning to understand, wouldn’t arrive in thunder or flame—it would creep in, quiet and cold, like water through cracked stone.
He pushed his plate away, the soft scrape of porcelain against wood oddly final. Then he stood, the stool shifting beneath him with a low groan.
“Off, then?” Tom asked without looking, his voice a thread drawn taut.
Draco tugged on his gloves, the supple leather molding to each finger, each knuckle. “For now.”
He turned and left without another word. The door swung closed behind him with a sound like the end of a chapter, soft and unassuming. Outside, the air was colder than it had been, sharp and clean as cut glass. The sky was no longer morning but something in between—washed in bruised lilac and storm-worn blue.
Far off, the city’s clock towers struck the hour—deep, sonorous bells that echoed as if tolling from underground. Draco moved down the alley without hurry, his shadow spilling long across the cobblestones. His breath fogged before him, and behind, the door to the Leaky Cauldron stood still, shuttered tight, as if it had never opened at all.
By midday, he had returned to Diagon Alley, the cobbled streets now humming with late-summer bustle. The shadows had shortened, and the sunlight filtering through the crooked awnings turned gold as it caught on brass shop signs and fluttering parchment notices. A warm breeze tugged at cloaks and ribboned smoke up from the chimneys, curling it into the sky like spilled ink.
Inside Flourish and Blotts, the world changed. The air thickened with the scent of ink-stained parchment, beeswax polish, and the faint, ever-present trace of sun-warmed dust that settled into the shelves like memory. The entire shop seemed to breathe quietly beneath it all. Bookshelves rose in precarious stacks, some towering nearly to the cracked ceiling beams, their spines tightly packed and whispering with residual magic. A faint sizzle now and then marked a book waking from slumber, or a reluctant text snapping shut with a disgruntled rustle.
It was less a shop than a reliquary—an ossuary of thought, where the bones of history and theory lay buried between bindings. Some books shifted subtly when passed, shying away from touch. Others hummed faintly, vibrating with knowledge too long confined.
A rustle of violet silk preceded Madam Scribner, who moved through the aisles like an elegant storm. Her long robes trailed behind her in layered pleats, and a wand—well-worn, and capped in ivory—was tucked behind her ear with the confidence of habit. Her pince-nez flashed as she swept up to him, gaze flicking to the list he offered with the air of someone perpetually unimpressed.
“Advanced Potion-Making by Borage, seventh-year edition,” she murmured, voice dry and precise, fingers already trailing over the spines as if they knew the shelf better than her own pulse. “Charms of the Ancients, Revised. And—yes—Waffling’s Final Theory. A demanding curriculum. Still, one must suffer for excellence.”
She drew the books out one by one, their covers stiff with age and etched in silverleaf runes. Some gleamed faintly, as if breathing. As she handed them over, the sigils flared briefly beneath Draco’s fingers—acknowledging their new bearer, perhaps, or testing his worth.
Draco balanced the weight in one arm, then let his gaze drift upward along a narrower shelf higher than eye level. There, nestled among volumes bound in cracked leather and faded twine, sat a familiar title. The edges of the cover had curled with time, and the letters of the spine had worn to ghost-marks.
“Do you still stock the pre-war editions of Temporal Thaumaturgy?” he asked, voice idle but precise, his gloved hand resting lightly on the wood.
Madam Scribner stilled. The air seemed to tighten slightly around them. Her eyes, sharp behind their lenses, studied him over the top of her pince-nez, as though re-evaluating what sort of young man stood before her.
“That text,” she said slowly, “is housed in the restricted archives. Faculty permissions only. Or Ministry researchers with the appropriate clearances. And even then… supervised.”
Her voice bore the crisp weight of finality, yet she didn’t look away.
Draco gave a quiet, knowing smile. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Perhaps I’ll return with one.”
The silence that followed was brief, but telling.
She did not return the smile.
Instead, she turned briskly on her heel, skirts whispering over the wooden floor, and disappeared behind a swinging curtain of bead-strung wards—leaving him with his books and the unmistakable sensation that he’d been weighed, measured, and filed under watch closely.
Outside the window, the street carried on as if time had never paused.
Next on his route was Slug & Jiggers Apothecary, wedged like a mossy tooth between the wand shop and a tobacconist’s window full of self-lighting pipes. The old green-painted door creaked inward on a hiss of cold, herb-sweet air. Inside, the shop was dim and narrow, its rafters hung with bundles of dried herbs, shriveled pods, and knotted strings of beetle carapaces that clicked faintly when stirred by passing footsteps.
The air was thick with a potioner’s bouquet—sharp oils, smoked resin, crushed mandrake root, and beneath it all, the faint metallic tang of dragon bile, like blood left too long on silver. It was a scent that clung to the lungs and the lining of the throat. Every breath tasted like something half-feral and alchemically alive.
Glass vials lined the shelves in meticulous rows, gleaming like captured starlight. Some pulsed faintly, glowing from within as if breathing. Others rattled ominously in their jars, wrapped in gauze or velvet to suppress their more violent tendencies. A vial of writhing silver threads hissed as Draco passed, tapping gently against its glass prison.
The counter sat beneath an iron rack of dangling scales and pestles, and the wood beneath Draco’s boots gave a protesting groan as he stepped forward.
The clerk behind the counter looked barely older than a fifth-year—lanky, awkward, with a constellation of angry red spots scattered across his chin and gloves permanently stained a murky green. He blinked at Draco like he wasn’t sure whether to offer a greeting or brace for an explosion.
Draco placed a folded slip of parchment on the counter and began listing ingredients without preamble:
“Moonstone dust. Salamander blood. Powdered silver. Three vials of common antidote base. A pouch of white hemlock root, if you’ve any left, and two stabilizing agents—no substitutions.”
The boy’s eyebrows lifted gradually as the pile grew—carefully measured sachets, sealed phials, and one heavy jar that sloshed with an iridescent blue syrup.
“That’s…” he said, voice wobbling somewhere between awe and concern, “ambitious. You’re not planning to brew Felix Felicis in your dormitory cauldron, are you?”
Draco paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make the question hang like a dripping potion. Then he said, voice cool and almost bored,
“Of course not. That would be highly unethical.”
His tone was dry as sun-baked bone, laced with the kind of irony that didn’t need to smirk.
The boy let out a brittle laugh, tugging at the hem of one glove and fumbling with a tall container marked volatile – do not jostle. It clinked ominously as he tried to settle it into the parcel box, nearly dropping it when the jar gave an unexpected pop.
“Right. Haha. Just… doing a project then. Yeah. Got it.”
Draco said nothing. He simply raised one pale brow and waited as the clerk scrambled to total the order, the till ringing up a quiet chime of Galleons, Sickles, and nerves.
Outside, the sun had started its slow descent, casting elongated shadows across the alley. Inside, the apothecary ticked on, bottles humming gently in their glass prisons as if aware a darker kind of alchemy was already stirring in the pockets of this particular young wizard.
At Twilfitt and Tatting’s, the quiet was not simply silence—it was curated hush, the kind reserved for ancestral libraries and private vaults. The air was perfumed with pressed velvet, lavender starch, and the faint whiff of scorched thread. Heavy curtains of midnight blue velvet swallowed the noise of Diagon Alley, and the flicker of candlelight danced across mirror-polished wood and gilded mannequins that stood like frozen nobles in the gloom.
Pins floated lazily through the air, glinting like silver fireflies, their motion somehow contemplative, almost orchestral. Bolts of fabric hovered nearby, sheets of silken shadow and iridescent gleam—spell-woven silks, goblin-threaded wool, and even dragonhide blends that shimmered like oil on water. Measuring tapes slithered through the air like snakes, hissing as they snapped taut around invisible forms, irritated at being kept idle.
Behind a raised platform, a tall, skeletal tailor moved with the slow, deliberate grace of someone accustomed to sculpting power in cloth. His robes whispered rather than swayed, and his skin was parchment-pale, stretched tight over long fingers and hollow cheeks. Half-moon spectacles perched on the bridge of his hooked nose, and when he looked up, his eyes were shrewd and glassy with centuries of taste.
“You’ve the look of old blood,” he remarked in a voice dry as powdered bone, wand flicking in a lazy arc. As he gestured, a robe floated toward Draco and began to adjust itself—sleeves shortening, seams tightening, folds drawing taut as if the garment were learning the body it would serve.
Draco didn’t flinch. He stood still as a statue, spine straight, chin lifted slightly—not out of pride, but bred poise.
“I’ve the lineage to match,” he said evenly, voice cool and clipped as starched linen.
“Mm,” the tailor hummed, a sound of agreement and calculation. He circled once, twice, inspecting the fit not just of cloth, but of character. “Thick wool for winter. A reinforced lining, naturally—duel-proofing, discretely embedded. We’ll stitch your initials into the seamwork—in tracing thread, visible only to those who know where to look. A mark of refinement, not vanity.”
Draco’s lips curved faintly. “I expect nothing less.”
With a final snap of his wand, the robes folded themselves into a sleek black box, the lid emblazoned with a silver monogram that gleamed only at certain angles. The tailor bowed slightly, long fingers ghosting over the box’s edge as he passed it forward.
Draco left the shop with the parcel charmed to float beside him, weightless and obedient, the box keeping perfect pace with each measured step. Behind him, the door clicked shut with a genteel chime, and the hush of Twilfitt and Tatting’sresumed—pristine, untouched, like a museum waiting for the next relic to walk in.
Near the mouth of Knockturn Alley, where light went to die and shadows clung like rot, the air grew colder, fouler—slick with soot and unseen eyes. The cobblestones sweated with moisture, damp and uneven beneath Draco’s boots, as if the stones themselves had been weeping. The stench of decay mingled with burnt herbs and something raw, metallic—the scent of old blood left too long in the sun.
A small knot of figures had gathered, cloaked shapes hunched close as if sharing warmth, though no warmth existed here. Faces flickered into view only by the grace of a single lantern: a wrought-iron cage overhead, hanging crookedly from a splintered post, its flame shivering like breath in the lungs of a dying man.
At the heart of the group stood a man draped in a foreign-cut cloak the color of dried blood—deep burgundy trimmed in sigil-stitched braid that shimmered faintly, as if resisting the light. His presence was sculpted, theatrical. When he spoke, his voice cracked the silence like a ceremonial blade, sharp, measured, calculated to provoke.
“The Muggle governments,” he proclaimed, holding aloft a parchment like a preacher with scripture, “do not seek our destruction out of malice—but out of fear. Out of ignorance. They will never understand us. Gellert Grindelwald does not preach war. He offers unity. He offers strength.”
The murmurs stilled. Even the flicker of the lantern seemed to pause.
A crone beside Draco gave a muffled grunt, disappearing deeper into her scarf. A boy—barely thirteen—stared raptly at the speaker, a crooked wand tucked behind his ear like a pencil. He took the pamphlet with shaking fingers, as if it were a relic instead of propaganda.
Draco drifted forward through the crowd, his face expressionless, every movement deliberate. He wore silence like armor. The man’s eyes met his, and without hesitation, a pamphlet was extended toward him—offered like a temptation.
The paper was still warm, unnaturally glossy, fresh from an enchanted press. The ink bled faintly at the edges, refusing to settle. At the top, stamped in silver foil that caught and fractured the lanternlight:
A STRONGER WORLD THROUGH MAGIC UNITED
—Visionaries for Magical Reformation
Beneath the slogan, a crest shimmered: an hourglass wreathed in thorned ivy, flanked by phoenix wings, the sand inside suspended mid-fall. The symbolism was blunt.Time was running out, and power waited only for those bold enough to seize it.
Draco’s gloved fingers folded the leaflet with surgical precision, crease by crease, as though dissecting it. His eyes never left the speaker’s face.
The man’s expression twitched—recognition, or calculation? It passed in a blink, replaced by the mask of zeal.
Draco offered a nod, curt and cool. A gesture that acknowledged nothing, yet observed everything. He turned and walked on, boots clicking softly over the damp, pitted stone. Behind him, voices resumed like a spell restarting mid-incantation.
“Magic belongs,” the man called after him, “to those with vision.”
The words pursued him, winding like smoke. But Draco didn’t look back. The wind, sharp with soot and frost, slipped beneath his cloak, snaking up his spine like a whispered warning. Signs swung overhead, their rusted chains creaking mournfully. Most bore no names now—just symbols burned into wood, or slashes made by time, or curses.
He walked with purpose, but not haste. He knew this script. The smell of ideology was too familiar—cloying, heavy, sweet with promises that turned to poison.
He let out a breath, half-laugh, half-sigh.
He had heard it all before. He had lived it. In Wiltshire, in drawing rooms where shadows clung to family crests and prophecy was whispered over firewhisky. He had seen men—clever, cultured men—devoured by visions of legacy, of purity, of destiny wrapped in black silk.
He had believed some of it.
Once.
His gloved hand drifted down, brushing against his left forearm—through fine wool, through woven protections. He felt it: the echo of the Dark Mark. Dormant now, dulled to a throb like a phantom limb. But there. Always.
That man in the burgundy cloak? He didn’t know what it meant to follow a vision to its bitter end. Didn’t know what it cost to kneel—to rise—and to survive.
Draco had watched the rise of a Dark Lord from inside the eye of the storm. He had seen what ideology looked like after the speeches ended—after the blood dried. It looked like ruined homes. Like broken sons. Like empty victories carved into tombstones.
Is this how it began for him, too? he wondered. The Dark Lord.
Was it conviction that lured him? The promise of a world reordered? Or had he simply seen what others wanted—the ache for purpose, the dread of change—and used it like a scalpel?
Draco’s mouth curled, wry and bitter. Of course he had.
The Dark Lord had never worshipped unity. He worshipped control. He didn’t want a better world—only one that bent to his name.
And yet, despite everything, Draco couldn’t help but feel a flicker of cold admiration. There had been clarity in that madness. Precision. Genius.
He was a true Slytherin, Draco thought. The kind whose portraits are always missing from the school walls, but whose legacy lingers in the bricks.
A serpent who learned to speak the language of kings and fools alike. The world hadn’t been ready for him. It still wasn’t.
Draco passed a boarded window, catching his reflection in the warped glass—tall, pale, sharp-eyed. Not a boy anymore.
He touched the satchel where the pamphlet lay like a dormant curse. Grindelwald, they called him now. Another name for the same old fire. Another man playing at godhood with borrowed myth and fresh ink.
Draco had been branded by one Dark Lord. He would not kneel to another.
He kept walking.
And behind him, the hourglass continued to pour its silver sand.
Through the bones of the alley, through the scent of singed parchment and damp stone, through memories that clung like cobwebs and promises long since burned.
The shadows stretched longer behind him—but his stride never faltered.
Back in his narrow room above the Leaky Cauldron, the world folded in on itself—quiet, close, cloaked in flickering gold and the hush of old secrets. The ceiling groaned faintly with the shifting weight of London overhead, but here, in this pocket of stillness, time stretched and slowed like warm wax.
The only sounds were the soft, rhythmic scratch of a quill moving across parchment, and the low, steady flutter of candlelight dancing inside its soot-smudged glass. Shadows clung to the corners like patient familiars, curling and retreating in the hearth’s dim glow. The fire had burned low, its embers breathing orange into the worn wooden floorboards—planks softened by a century of footsteps and stories, now bearing only one.
Draco sat cross-legged on the narrow bed, boots discarded, his cloak flung across the back of a crooked chair. Shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms smudged faintly with ink and the memory of long-healed scars. Around him lay a chaos of scrolls—yet not chaos at all, not to him. They unfurled with an almost religious precision across the bed, floor, and desk, a map of war drawn in words.
Each one bore a heading in his meticulous hand:
Hogwarts Faculty
Political Currents
Magical Theory: Contemporary Shifts
And the most perilous of all:
Albus Dumbledore—Behavior, Allies, Blind Spots
Layered beneath every inch of parchment were enchantments—anti-scrying glyphs woven into the margins like lace, spill-proof charms laced through every scroll, decoy sigils that would transform damning sentences into dull essays on thestral breeding if tampered with. A casual intruder might laugh at the eccentricity of it. But beneath the layers, beneath the runes and redirections, the true text whispered like a living thing.
His quill moved again, each stroke deliberate, almost reverent—runic more than linguistic. He wrote not just for himself, but as though the parchment might be read one day by someone who needed to understand. Someone who would fight the next war with the echoes of this one.
Grindelwald’s presence in Britain is subtle but growing. Language of purity and power echoing in lower Diagon and Knockturn. Whisper networks operational.
He paused, the tip of his quill hovering mid-air. Outside the window, the world slumbered fitfully beneath a sky thick with soot-colored clouds. London was a dragon in hibernation—great, ancient, and utterly unaware of the storm gathering in its veins.
Another stroke of ink followed.
Albus Dumbledore: currently teaching Transfiguration. Known ties to Nicholas Flamel. Publicly apolitical, privately watchful.
Primary concern: unpredictability. Potential empath. Sees beneath surface illusion. Dangerous, therefore vital to mislead.
The candle guttered then, once, sharply—as though startled by the truth spelled out in ink.
Draco’s eyes flicked toward it, unreadable. He had watched Dumbledore from afar for years now, tracked him through transcripts and quietly monitored glances passed in corridors. He remembered the man’s silence more than his words—a silence that drew things from people, like thread from cloth. Not forceful. Just inevitable.
There was power in that man, but worse—worse by far—there was compassion. And Draco, who had survived both cruelty and kindness, knew which cut deeper in the end.
He reached now for the last scroll—a different parchment altogether. It had the texture of old skin, the edges curled and bruised by time. From beneath the bed, he withdrew a small vial sealed in lead: red-tinged ink, thick and dark, metallic like rusted blood. It caught the candlelight and held it like a blade.
He uncorked it slowly.
When he wrote, the words looked like they might breathe if spoken aloud—like they might bite.
Dumbledore cannot be underestimated. Let him watch. Let him weigh. Let him misjudge.
The moment the final period struck the parchment, the candle flared high—sudden and bright—then shrank to a quivering nub, as though bowing before the weight of the words.
Draco leaned back, the quill falling from his fingers to the duvet in silence. He stared at the line for a long moment. Not because he doubted it, but because it was too true.
Let the old man play the game of wisdom and mercy.
Draco had learned long ago—there was a sharper game.
The Slytherin game.
And he had no intention of losing.
Moving with practiced care, he folded the final scroll into thirds and sealed it with black wax—pressed not with a family crest, but with a rune of concealment. He lifted a floorboard near the head of the bed, revealing a hollow space layered in charms: concealment, alarm, transfiguration. A thief might find nothing more than dust. A Ministry agent would see cleaning charms. But beneath it all—truth slept, waiting.
He slipped the scroll into its hiding place, pressed the board down again, and let silence fill the room once more.
Two and a half weeks.
The clock had started.
And Draco Malfoy would be ready.
The fog had lifted—but only barely. Its gauzy tendrils still clung to the corners of the alleyways and crooked chimneys, curling back like retreating ghosts reluctant to loosen their hold on the waking world. Moisture lacquered the cobblestones in a slick sheen, each glistening footprint a dark bruise upon the street. Somewhere down the lane, a cartwheel struck stone with a sharp clatter, followed by the slow groan of timber and the guttural breath of a thestral shifting in its harness.
The air hung heavy, thick with the scent of damp soot and wand-oil, sharp as iron filings on the tongue. Beneath that, something sweeter—roasted chestnuts, charred at the edges—lingered like a memory, drifting from a lone vendor hunched beneath a threadbare canopy, his eyes obscured by the shadow of his hat. No one quite looked at him. No one dared.
Diagon Alley in 1942 was not the place Draco remembered from the remnants of childhood tales. Whatever charm it had once possessed had tarnished, like silver left too long in the dark. The shopfronts stood the same in structure—winking windows and warped shutters—but their glass eyes had gone dull, and the signs that once swung merrily in the wind now hung limp, the lettering faded to ghosts. Gone were the peals of laughter and the flurry of school robes chasing peppermint toads. In their place had settled a slow, deliberate silence, broken only by the careful cadence of footsteps and the hush of whispered names.
People moved differently here now. Faces turned away too quickly. Coats were drawn close, not for warmth, but concealment. Even the air seemed to listen.
Names, Draco had come to learn, were no longer simply names. They were weapons. Warnings. Shields. Curses. Each one held weight, history, and the threat of consequence.
He moved through the street like smoke—quiet, ungraspable, unnoticed. A young man with winter-gray eyes and a stillness honed through years of watching from shadows. He had walked these cobbles for seven days, always with purpose but never with urgency. Taken tea in the cramped, perfumed parlor of the apothecary. Loitered beside the scriptorium at Flourish & Blotts, pretending to scan dusty folios while memorizing the clientele. Drifted through Knockturn Alley in silence, invisible among the cloaks stitched with secrets.
He learned their new customs quickly. The way they spoke not just with words, but with silences. Here, every mannerism was a language of its own. A tilt of the chin spoke of lineage; a narrowed gaze hinted at disdain. Even a breath between sentences was a calculated pause—an opening offered for plausible deniability.
The war—their war, the Muggle war—cast a long shadow overhead. Headlines screamed from yellowing Prophet papers, and ration lines twisted like serpents around wizarding outposts. But what haunted this place more profoundly was something deeper. Older. It pulsed beneath the brick and mortar like a latent curse waiting to surface.
Grindelwald.
The name wasn’t spoken outright. It didn’t need to be. It echoed in the guarded tones of shopkeepers, in the clipped politeness of witches with serpent-bone brooches, in pamphlets written in disappearing ink and pressed into gloved hands at twilight. It whispered through bloodlines and old houses and in the dangerous, seductive language of reform.
Draco had come here hunting. Not for a person—but for a moment. A fracture in time. The precise instant the world had begun to shift beneath its own weight.
But something else had found him first.
The note.
He had stumbled upon it not two days ago, hidden like a half-forgotten curse within the crumbling spine of a tome too ancient to be displayed. Arcane Structures of Pre-Cataclysmic Europe. Tucked among the uppermost stacks of Flourish & Blotts, where even dust dared not linger. The parchment had been yellowed to the color of old teeth, its ink faded to ochre and rust. The handwriting was a frantic scrawl—part Latin, part ciphered English, part Norse rune—etched in haste or fear, or both.
It felt alive in his hands. Like something that remembered.
The words had stopped his breath the first time he read them.
The Mark before the Mark.
The Veil that Shattered.
The Names not Spoken.
The phrasing wasn’t prophetic—it was primordial. A warning left in a dying tongue. It matched fragments he had seen only once before—in the scroll from the Peverell vault.
Nor had the feeling that some part of him—something buried far beneath blood and skin—recognized the truth those words were built to conceal.
He had translated half of it now. Enough to feel it creeping into his dreams.
Draco’s hand moved almost unconsciously to the satchel at his side, fingers brushing the layered runes that now shielded the note within. He had sealed it in warded velvet, soaked it in preserving tinctures, and placed it within a triple-locked sheath of dragon-hide. But none of that mattered.
It hummed.
It wanted to be read. To be heard. Ignored, it grew restless. Whispering beneath the wards like wind through stone cracks.
He clenched his jaw and looked forward, narrowing his eyes against the gray drizzle ahead. Somewhere in the borderlands between the present’s unease and the ancient magic that history had tried to bury, the truth awaited him.
A truth not meant to be known.
A truth that might unmake him, or remake him into something else entirely.
He wasn’t sure which outcome he feared more.
But he was done with fear.
He would find the crack in the world. The moment it split.
And if it could not be undone—
Then Draco would learn how to survive within it.
Or bend it into something new.
Something his.
Today, though, he had a purpose.
The final protections around the Elder Wand had to be sealed—no ordinary enchantments would do. Draco needed magic older than stone circles and burial mounds, spells forged before the Founders had ever set foot in Hogwarts. The wards had to be woven like chainmail and layered like skin, locking together in such a way that not even the cleverest, most serpentine of minds—not even the boy he now walked among—could unravel them.
The vault had to become a secret the world forgot how to ask about.
Gringotts loomed ahead like a fortress carved from bone and thunder. The façade, unmarred by time or the quiet encroachment of war, reared up into the wan morning light—a towering edifice of frost-pale marble veined with steel grey. Its colossal pillars coiled skyward like ancient titans turned to stone mid-ascent, and jagged runes shimmered faintly along the lintel: warnings etched in Gobbledegook and in tongues older than empire—languages forged in blood, barred by treaties long buried.
A sharp wind cut through the alleyway, snapping at Draco’s coat like invisible teeth. He moved with slow command, the kind of fluidity born not of arrogance, but of lineage sharpened into armor. His charcoal-grey coat flared with each step, its hems trimmed in faint silver thread that caught the light like moonlit threadwork. Gloves buttoned to the wrist, hair immaculate beneath a simple black hat, he ascended the steps without looking up.
He didn’t need to.
He wore his presence like a second cloak.
Inside, the goblin at the front desk glanced up. One eye was half-lidded by a scar, the other glittered like a shard of garnet. A single tusk was capped in gold, glinting beneath the thin curl of his lip as recognition settled.
“Mr. Peverell,” he rasped, voice like rust scraped across obsidian. “You are expected. Vault preparations are complete.”
Draco dipped his head once, precise and restrained. “The concealment enchantments—layered according to the exact specifications. No deviation?”
The goblin’s smile showed rows of teeth, sharp as razors and just as cold. “We pride ourselves on our precision. And our memory.”
He extended one long, clawed finger toward a shadowed corridor flanked by iron sconces.
“This way.”
Draco moved to follow—but had barely taken a step when a voice sliced through the hush of the atrium.
“Excuse me!” It was loud, imperious, entitled. “I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes. Who the hell does he think he is?”
Draco paused mid-step.
The words were unfamiliar. The tone was not.
That voice—sharp as frost etched on leaded glass—had once belonged to a dozen men in manor parlors, in committee chambers, in drawing rooms thick with old magic and older grudges. It was the voice of an upper crust so polished it cut.
He turned, just enough to place the speaker.
The wizard at the threshold stood tall and severe, his robes of black wool cut in the traditional style: high collar, structured shoulders, silver embroidery that spidered across his cuffs and collar like enchanted starlight. His face was aristocratic in that predatory way—long, narrow, all cheekbone and disdain. A hawk of a man, searching not for truth, but for fault.
He didn’t even glance at Draco as he snapped, “I’m speaking to you, clerk. Is this some kind of mistake?”
“No mistake,” the goblin said coolly, unbothered. “Mr. Peverell has a priority arrangement. Vault business.”
The man’s gaze swung to Draco, sharp as a dueling curse. He tasted the name like it had gone sour in his mouth. “Peverell?” he echoed. “And what branch of the family might you be from?”
Draco’s pulse stilled for one taut second. The name curled around the man’s tongue like a slow spell. And then, like a snake uncoiling from a dark corner, it struck him.
Rosier.
Not Evan, no—the name he remembered from firelit ambushes and the blood-slick marble of Malfoy Manor. This man was older. Sharper. A generation up, perhaps. His voice didn’t tremble with hatred—it calculated. Controlled. The kind of man who’d shake your hand at dinner and poison your brandy at dessert.
A man who, in less than twenty years, would pave the way for the rise of Voldemort.
Draco smoothed away the flicker of recognition. Let his expression fall to glass.
“My lineage,” he said evenly, “is not yours to question.”
Rosier’s gaze tightened, birdlike.
Draco stepped forward, voice low and iron-threaded. “The goblins do not mistake gold. Nor power.”
Rosier’s mouth thinned to a line. “And yet they grovel before every bastard with a heavy purse. Perhaps they’ve forgotten who truly governs wizarding Britain.”
“No,” Draco said softly, stepping closer still, his words curved like a drawn bow. “They haven’t forgotten. They’ve evolved. Goblins do not worship. They remember. They calculate.”
He tilted his head just slightly, letting the chill bleed into his smile.
“Gold does not lie.”
The goblin let out a low huff beside him. Not laughter, not exactly—but a jagged, amused exhale full of teeth and mockery. He turned to Rosier with eyes that glittered like molten steel.
“Gold,” the goblin said, each syllable steeped in contempt, “does not care for your bloodlines, Mr. Rosier.”
A flicker passed through Rosier’s posture—too brief for anyone untrained to catch. His fingers brushed the inside of his sleeve, a whisper of movement where a wand no doubt waited. But he didn’t draw it.
Not here. Not now.
His jaw clenched, and his voice dropped to a hiss. “This isn’t over.”
Draco met him with a calm so total it almost felt like apathy.
“I’d be disappointed if it were.”
The goblin bowed—exaggerated and sardonic, his black robes swishing like ink. His jagged teeth gleamed beneath a grin that had nothing to do with respect.
“A pleasant afternoon to you, Mr. Rosier,” he crooned, the sarcasm folded delicately into each vowel, like venom sheathed in silk.
Rosier said nothing.
His silence said everything.
With a turn sharp as a snapped wand, the goblin strode ahead.
Draco followed, never once looking back.
His coat whispered behind him like smoke, his boots echoing softly across the marble as they left the tension behind them—but not the awareness. He could feel Rosier’s gaze burning holes between his shoulder blades, brittle with fury and suspicion.
The vault awaited.
But even the cold, ancient stone beneath his feet could not fully quiet the storm beginning to gather behind his eyes.
As they descended into the ancient bowels of Gringotts, the air thickened—dense with chill and age, sour with the metallic tang of iron and the strange, stifled rot of old magic that had long gone to sleep but not forgotten how to wake. The stone corridors were vast and cathedral-like, carved by claw and spell, echoing with the clink of unseen chains and the low, grinding pulse of hidden gears. Somewhere deep in the earth, the bank’s heart turned with slow inevitability, the very rock vibrating beneath their feet like the breath of something immense and dreaming.
The goblin led him to the cart—a narrow, spidery thing of wrought iron perched on a rail no wider than a wand. It gleamed faintly under flickering torchlight, its surface rune-scored and oiled with enchantments that buzzed low like gnats in Draco’s ears. It looked too fragile to bear a man’s weight, and far too old to trust. But it was flawless—like all Gringotts constructs: dangerous and enduring.
Draco stepped in with the practiced confidence of someone who’d faced worse things than heights and goblin-made speed. His gloves creaked faintly as he gripped the side rail. The goblin climbed in beside him, muttered something in a tongue that scraped against the bones of understanding, and cracked the reins.
The world dropped.
Wind knifed against his face. His coat tore backward like wings unfurling in a storm, and strands of his hair lashed across his temples. The track plunged and twisted through the blackness like a serpent in convulsions, stone blurring past in jagged streaks of torchlight and shadow. The cart screamed on the rails, and still it gained speed.
His eyes watered. His thoughts scattered.
And then—something inside him split.
The walls of the tunnel fell away. The roar receded, replaced by a silence far more terrible.
The vision returned.
The garden at Malfoy Manor, once so pristine it looked painted, had become a ruin: the hedgerows blackened to spines, the fountain shattered and bleeding. Roses curled in on themselves, their petals scorched and crisped like funeral ashes. White marble paths were cracked through with scorch marks and gouges, blood darkening the roots of the ivy. The air had shimmered with residual spells, some still sizzling, others trapped in looping echoes of violence. The sky—if it had even been sky—was the color of dried blood, veined with lightning.
Bodies had moved in the smoke: Aurors, Death Eaters, strangers. A war with no center.
And in the middle of it, still upright through sheer force of will, had stood his father.
Lucius Malfoy’s robes were torn and stained, his cane snapped, one arm hanging useless at his side. Blood lined his teeth, but his posture was unbroken. He looked like a ghost of himself—pale and princely in the ruins, like a monarch ruling the dead.
Draco’s stomach twisted.
He’d never known whether Lucius even had a chance of survival in that final assault. In many ways, it no longer mattered. What had survived was the failure. The shame. The name scorched into history for the wrong reasons.
He exhaled, long and silent, the icy wind cutting the breath in his throat. His jaw tensed until it ached. One hand twitched toward his wand—not the Elder Wand, but the new one. It was heavier. Hungrier. Carved from ironwood and obsidian, with a thrum in its core like a war drum beneath his skin. It had no sentiment in it. Only purpose.
The Elder Wand was gone. Secured.
Two nights ago, he’d sealed it in his vault—this vault—buried in a runic lockbox choked with serpentine magic. Layer after layer of misdirection: phantom enchantments, anchor point decoys, mirrored curses. Some of the magic he’d used was older than the bank itself. The goblins had watched him work with a rare stillness—awed, perhaps, or merely cautious. Either way, it had been done.
But even that couldn’t scrub the images from his mind.
The wreckage. The fire. The garden that would never bloom again.
And that was as it should be.
He straightened in the cart as they rounded a final bend. Darkness swallowed them—and then the flickering gold of torchlight began to reappear, tracing the archway of his vault corridor. The taste of ash lingered at the back of his tongue.
When the cart screeched to a halt, Draco was already composed. Mask on. Spine straight. Gloved hand resting calmly at his side.
This was the moment everything began.
The goblin turned, voice sharp as a struck flint. “Vault 737.”
The vault door loomed before them—oval and ancient, crafted from blackened bronze inlaid with obsidian sigils that shimmered with dull heat. They pulsed like veins, alive with something far older than flame. A slow-moving clock of curses.
Draco stepped forward, lifting his hand.
The center rune glowed as his palm neared it—then flared when it made contact, drinking in his magical signature like blood into dry earth. The vault door responded with a low chime and began to creak open, heavy as a tomb lid.
Inside, the chamber was modest in size but thick with presence. The walls were etched with circular runes that glowed softly, moving in recursive patterns—a language of concealment and protection. In the center stood a single obsidian pedestal. Upon it rested the lockbox: black, sharp-edged, its corners humming with restrained power.
Around it, parchment scrolls were arranged in neat, geometric stacks—some written in his hand, others in ink so old it had turned rust-red. Notes. Diagrams. Runes. Theories of wand loyalty, magical resonance, soul-binding, bloodline occlusion. And beside them, rolled tightly and bound with black silk, the first draft of something darker.
A map. A future. A warning.
Draco stood in the doorway, silent.
This was more than a vault.
It was a burial chamber for the past.
A forge for the future.
And a reckoning.
Behind him, the goblin cleared his throat. “Rosier will talk.”
Draco didn’t turn.
“He always does,” he said simply, his voice even, almost bored.
The goblin gave a sharp, amused snort. “Your kind. You make messes with words. Ours? We clean with silence.”
Draco offered no reply, only a single nod as he placed his hand on the vault one last time. Its surface pulsed beneath his palm—a faint heartbeat—then fell utterly still. He whispered the final sealing word, a breath of language lost to most, and the runes shimmered once before vanishing entirely.
The vault became stone again.
Nothing more.
Sealed.
Final.
By the time they boarded the cart, silence had settled like dust—heavy, clinging, impossible to shake. The metal beneath them groaned as the ancient mechanism awakened, gears grinding with a hollow, age-old moan. It began its slow ascent, and with it, the cold returned—not just any cold, but something bone-deep, glacial, threaded with damp rot and the metallic bite of forgotten spells.
Draco exhaled slowly. A pale mist fanned from his lips and vanished into the dark like a secret escaping.
Above, the surface world waited. But it no longer felt like the one he’d left behind.
1942.
A year balanced on the knife-edge of a storm.
A world about to give birth to monsters.
His heart thudded, steady but forceful, like the ticking of a cursed clock. The rhythm synced with the pulse of the wand strapped beneath his coat—the wand that was truly his now. Ebony-dark, its surface worn smooth by fire and blood and war, it breathed with him like a second heartbeat.
His fingers ghosted over the handle, curling around it not just with habit, but with memory—of duels fought, lives spared, and choices made too late.
Draco Malfoy—no. Peverell—closed his eyes for a breath, just long enough to let the chill scrape through his ribs, to let the wind claw the last of the hesitation from his bones.
There was no going back now.
By the time the cart screeched to its halt and he stepped once more into the upper corridors of Gringotts, the fog outside had thickened—curling in tendrils across the marble steps like the breath of something ancient and watchful. Diagon Alley stretched beyond, dim and brittle beneath a cloud-choked sky. The morning had not warmed. If anything, it had withered further into itself. The air pressed against him with a stillness that felt funereal—like walking through the memory of a world that hadn’t realized it was dying yet.
Rosier was long gone, but his voice lingered in Draco’s skull like a dark enchantment unraveling too slowly.
“Peverell… and what branch of the family are you from, exactly?”
The name had hit like a flare in pitch-black—blinding and impossible to ignore. A name steeped in legend, too old to be common, too dangerous to be forgotten. If even Rosier had taken notice, the ripples had already begun to radiate. The web was tightening.
Every step Draco took now, every word he spoke, was setting myth in motion. And myths, he knew, were swords sharpened on the whetstone of belief—capable of slaying or saving, depending on who held the hilt.
He adjusted his coat, the thick wool brushing over the silver fastenings—each charm-etched, layered with shielding spells so subtly woven that even seasoned duelists might not sense them until too late. The Elder Wand, his most dangerous inheritance, was sealed beneath layers of goblin-iron, obsidian runes, and twisted protections—but wards could be broken. Legends could be hunted.
The scroll in his satchel—The Mark Before the Mark, the Shattered Veil—offered no sanctuary. Only questions. Symbols older than Hogwarts, language pulled from tomb walls and blood rites. A thread that wove through myth and memory and kept pulling him forward, no matter how tightly he tried to tie it off.
He moved through the alley’s quieter fringe, where the cobblestones grew rough and uneven beneath his boots and the architecture stooped low, leaning over the street like eavesdropping old men. Shadows pooled thick in the guttered corners. The fog here did not just drift—it lingered, curling around his ankles like a curse looking for purchase.
A sharp tang cut the air—the scent of powdered roots and dried bile. The Apothecary’s cracked wooden sign swung overhead, its rune-carved letters half-flayed by wind and time. The door creaked as a pair of witches emerged, cloaked and hooded, speaking in a tongue Draco didn’t recognize. Their fingers clutched steaming parcels that hissed faintly where moisture met cold.
Just beyond, a narrow kiosk crouched beneath a soot-black awning. A hunched wizard perched behind stacks of parchment, his eyes glazed like marbles left in riverbed silt. The newsstand’s ink-stained offerings flapped in the wind like wounded birds, their headlines smeared in urgency:
“ANOTHER MUGGLE BOMBING RAID IN COVENTRY — MINISTRY PROMISES SWIFT RESPONSE”
“GRINDELWALD’S FORCES MOVE EAST — THREATS TO WIZARDING COMMUNITIES INTENSIFY”
“AURORS DEPLOYED TO BORDERS — OFFICIALS ‘CLOSELY MONITORING’ THE SITUATION”
Draco’s eyes flicked over them, barely slowing. He’d read it all before. Different ink. Different voices. But the lie was always the same. The Ministry’s polished panic. The illusion of control.
The real fear didn’t live in ink. It whispered in side streets and smoldered behind eyes in backroom pubs. It hissed between teeth at antique counters and bloomed in velvet-draped booths at Borgin & Burkes.
They didn’t speak of revolution there.
They spoke of restoration.
Not to peace.
Not to balance.
But to blood.
To culling.
To purity.
He had heard it—in the cadence of old names, spoken like prayers laced with poison.
He had heard his name.
Not Malfoy. That house was a ruin.
But Peverell—a relic, resurrected.
A weapon disguised as a whisper.
And as the wind rose, tugging at the hem of his coat, and the bruised sky deepened into storm above him, Draco felt the world shiver. Not with cold, but with pressure.
A powder keg dressed in civility.
Waiting to ignite.
He passed a narrow alleyway—little more than a wound between leaning brick walls—and paused. A boy stood at the far end, caught in a shaft of weak morning light like some half-formed thought. Twelve, perhaps thirteen. Pale as wax, with hollow cheeks and wide, watchful eyes. His robes hung in tatters, threadbare at the seams, and a battered satchel—dragonhide, scorched and cracking—was clutched tightly against his chest as if it might bite or vanish.
Their eyes met.
Something flickered in the boy’s gaze—recognition, fear, defiance, or perhaps all three—but it was gone in an instant. He flinched, turned on his heel, and disappeared into the fog, swallowed whole by the crooked city.
Draco exhaled, slow and silent. His breath steamed faintly in the air.
Ghosts.
Or worse—reflections.
He crossed the cobbled street with practiced detachment and slipped into the first refuge that offered warmth: a narrow tearoom wedged between a hatter’s shop and a parchment binder, its sign painted in faded lavender script: Mrs. Nettlebane’s Tea & Tasseomancy.
Inside, the hush was immediate and comforting. Walls the color of steeped chamomile enclosed him like a dream. The scent of cloves, lemon balm, and warm bread mingled with the faint electric hiss of a wireless in the corner, from which soft jazz whispered like a memory half-remembered. Light filtered through lace curtains in fractured beams. A fire muttered quietly in the grate.
In one corner, a hunched old witch with a veil of translucent white hair bent over a china cup, whispering predictions to a red-eyed client. Her fingers trembled faintly as she traced symbols in the tea leaves—tiny circles, jagged spirals, signs meant for no one living.
Draco took the corner table, back to the wall, where shadows pooled deepest. He slid into the wooden chair like someone slipping on a second skin. The world outside shrank to a distant murmur.
“Something warm, sir?” asked the server—a lanky boy with ink on his cuffs and a smile that looked more like a scar.
Draco gave a faint nod. “Black tea. Strong. Lemon, if you have it.”
The boy inclined his head and vanished like a ghost behind the counter.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He let the silence settle over his shoulders like a cloak, let the heartbeat of the room sync with his own. His wand lay beside the napkin—twelve and three-quarter inches of night-black ebony, veela hair bound around a basilisk fang like a secret no one dared whisper. It was hidden beneath a crisply folded square of white linen, but concealment was a formality at best.
It thrummed beneath the cloth like a heartbeat. No, not a tool. Not anymore. A tether. A pact forged not through ceremony or shopfront selection, but in fire and blood and breathless, shattered choices. The wand had not merely chosen him.
It knew him.
His hand hovered over it, then drifted down, resting lightly on the linen—five fingers splayed like a warding charm or a prayer. Not clutching. Not claiming. Just… anchoring.
He closed his eyes.
The memory came like a knife wrapped in silk.
Blood.
A thin, sinuous stream crawling across marble—bright, red, impossible to ignore—mapping the cracks in the world with surgical precision. The floor had been pale. Too pale. And the blood had looked wrong against it. Too real.
Ash.
Thick in the air, falling like snow from a ruined heaven. It coated his tongue, his lungs, his eyes. It clogged every breath until he forgot what clean air tasted like. It whispered ruin.
And his father—
Lucius Malfoy.
Once pristine, powerful, poised. Now slumped like a marionette with the strings cut and the stage burned down. Dust in his hair,A tear at the seam of his robe revealed a glimpse of greyed flesh and a jagged wound like a second mouth torn open. His hand had scrabbled at Draco’s wrist—weak, cold, but there. His gaze, even then, had been lucid. Painfully lucid.
And his final breath, torn ragged from ruined lungs, had shaped one word.
“Run.”
Draco’s throat tightened.
Not with grief.
But guilt.
Because he hadn’t.
He had stayed.
And this wand—this living extension of his will, of that choice—was the only thing that had come out of that fire with him. Not heirloom, not inheritance. Not legend made flesh.
But weapon born from loss.
It belonged to him the way scars did.
The tea arrived—silent, steaming, fragrant. He wrapped his hands around the cup but didn’t drink. Just watched the fog outside press its damp fingers against the windowpane, drawing veils across the street.
He was already being hunted. Even if the shadows had yet to stir.
The vault lay secure beneath the deepest wards Gringotts could offer. The Elder Wand, imprisoned in silence and steel. His name—Peverell—recorded only in goblin script, whispered in vault ledgers bound in dragonhide and blood-ink.
But still.
Time hunted him.
Not with hounds, but with prophecy. With suspicion. With the terrible gravity of legend.
This world was a battlefield disguised as a marketplace. A masquerade of civility stretched thin over ancient, snarling hunger.
Every face was a mask.
Every handshake, a test.
Every corner, a blade.
Draco stood, dropped a few silver Sickles onto the tray, and left the tea cooling on the table.
He stepped into the fog with the weight of a thousand futures pressing against his spine.
Back in the Alley, the cold had deepened, settling into his bones like a curse too long worn. The fog had thickened into a low-hanging shroud, muffling sound and sight alike. Somewhere behind the mist, a bell tolled the hour—deep and resonant, as though the very city were marking time with a funeral dirge. A newsboy’s voice cut through the gloom, shrill and breathless: “Shipment of cursed relics seized at Dover! Banned Grimoires! Enchanted blades! Authorities suspect Dark covens—”
Then silence again.
Above, the sky brooded—low and colorless, the pallor of unburnt ash, of something long dead. Clouds coiled like smoke trails from a battlefield, bruised around the edges.
Draco ducked into a narrow side street veiled in shadow. The buildings leaned too close together here, their warped eaves almost touching above his head like skeletal fingers.
He slowed, glanced once behind him, then reached into his satchel with practiced precision. His fingers closed around the brittle scroll, and he drew it out beneath the protection of an overhang where the light didn’t reach.
Even through the layers of wool and dragonhide, his hands felt like stone—numb and unyielding. The tea had helped nothing. He unfurled the parchment with care; it crackled ominously, dry as leaves in winter.
There it was again. The glyph.
It curled across the page like smoke trapped in ink—fluid and living, its edges shifting faintly when touched by breath. Beneath it ran a spidery lattice of lesser sigils, complex and tangled, as if etched into the scroll by some fevered hand in the midst of prophecy or madness.
The Mark before the Mark.
The Shattered Veil.
Not language, not entirely. This was something older. Not written to be read, but remembered. Inhaled. Survived.
The ink shimmered faintly—not ink at all, really, but something alchemized. Draco had studied enough to guess: tinctures of ashroot, suspended mercury, powdered bone. Maybe blood. Maybe worse. He swore it responded to his breath, contracting slightly like a muscle remembering pain.
His eyes narrowed. There was power in the script—not latent, but barely-contained. Magic that breathed back. Magic that watched.
He traced a fingertip across one of the larger sigils, and the scroll twitched beneath his touch.
Yes. Volatile.
Not a relic.
A trigger.
Draco’s jaw tightened. He would have to be cautious. Whatever this was, it didn’t want to be known.
A sound behind him—softer than breath. The faintest scuff of shoes on wet stone.
He spun, wand already in hand. The movement was fluid, silent, the wand half-concealed beneath his coat sleeve but ready to strike.
A girl.
She stood at the mouth of the alley, frozen. Fourteen, maybe. Dark-haired. Her wide eyes blinked up at him, startled. She wore secondhand robes, too large at the sleeves, stained at the cuffs with ink and chalk dust. A stack of books trembled in her arms.
“I—I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said quickly, voice thin and nervous. Her gaze flicked to the wand. “I just… I saw you near Gringotts. With the goblins. You’re… Peverell, aren’t you?”
The name caught in the fog like flint striking steel.
His heart gave a single, hard thud.
Draco slipped the scroll back into the satchel with practiced ease, the motion precise, calculated. “Yes,” he said evenly.
The girl hesitated, adjusting the book at the top of her stack—Magical Theory: Volume I, its spine worn soft from use, corners curled like parchment kissed by flame.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” she blurted. “I just… overheard you. With Mr. Rosier. You weren’t afraid. Of him. That was…”
“Unusual?” he offered, voice cool as slate.
She flushed. “Yes. Most people don’t look the Rosiers in the eye.”
“I’m not most people.”
The silence that followed sharpened between them, edged and heavy. Her gaze flicked to his pale face, to the dark coat, the subtle way he seemed to dissolve into shadow when still.
She swallowed. “Are you really… from the original Peverell line?”
His eyes, pale as a snow-locked lake, met hers. He didn’t answer right away. Didn’t blink. The seconds stretched until she fidgeted, hugging her books tighter.
At last he spoke—softly, like a knife drawn beneath a whisper. “Aren’t we all descended from magic?”
The question, or the accusation, seemed to startle her. She tilted her head slightly, uncertain. “I… suppose so.”
Draco said nothing.
The girl took the hint. She dipped her head in awkward farewell and turned, her boots tapping hastily against the wet cobblestones, until the mist swallowed her shape entirely.
Draco exhaled slowly.
The fog had thickened again—curling around his legs like low tide reclaiming the land, silver-grey and full of memory. Above, the bell tolled once more, its echo threading through crooked chimneys and leaning shopfronts.
He didn’t move.
Not yet.
The scroll pulsed faintly in his satchel like something living.
And the alley around him felt tighter.
Like a throat about to close.
The world was shifting—not with thunder, but with a slow, seismic hush. Like the crack of distant ice across a frozen lake. Quiet. Irrevocable. Beneath the shouted headlines of Grindelwald’s latest conquest and the Ministry’s brittle denials, the true current surged in silence. Not politics, not warfare—but ideology. Bloodlines. Power. Rebirth masquerading as ruin.
Draco no longer felt like a piece on their chessboard. He wasn’t even a player.
He was something else now.
A shadow they hadn’t accounted for. A variable not etched into prophecy.
A future they had not foreseen.
His fingers brushed the wand hidden beneath his coat—Veela hair and basilisk fang. It pulsed against his touch like a heartbeat, a private storm sheathed in polished yew. It carried memory. It carried defiance. And, sometimes, on nights like this, it whispered.
He let his thoughts settle like ash on snow.
As he stepped from the narrow alley onto the cobbled street, fog brushed around his boots like ghostly fingers. Lanternlight sputtered above him, orange and sickly in the dense London mist. He drew in a breath—sharp, cold, metallic—and whispered to himself,
“Don’t become him.”
The wind, brittle and listening, gave no reply. But it heard.
He turned toward Knockturn. Toward answers.
The scroll from the Peverell vault had not left his thoughts. Not for a moment. Even now, back in the upper room he rented above a wandmaker’s abandoned workshop, the scroll pulsed faintly where it lay unrolled across his desk—not with heat or glow, but with a hush. A gravity. Memory bound in ink and silence.
It had not burned when the vault accepted him. Not truly. But the seal—the triple-circle sigil of the Hallows—had vanished the instant he touched it. Consumed in a flickering, spectral flame that left no smoke, only darkness. In its place, a new symbol had bled through the parchment: writhing, rainbow-sheened like oil, as if alive. As if watching him.
He laid his hands flat on the desk, steady but not still.
“Revelo,” he breathed.
The scroll shivered. Then shimmered.
And then it moved.
Not like charmed ink. Not like spellwork. This was deeper—older. Shadow poured across the parchment in looping script, coiling like vapor from a dying fire. The glyphs did not stay still. They flexed, twisted, refused to be fixed by the eye. A language that resisted being known.
But one line—one line held. In jagged, smoking English:
He who bears the Hallows and the blood of the Dead shall command the Threshold and open the Pale Gate. Beyond it, the Serpent sleeps.
Draco’s breath caught.
The Pale Gate.
The Serpent.
Command.
The words struck something cold and coiled inside him. A buried instinct. Something that twisted like a dream he hadn’t yet remembered.
This wasn’t just some ancestral relic, nor a testament of magical inheritance.
This was prophecy.
Not one of glory or triumph—but of gates unopened. Of veils between worlds. Of something ancient, sleeping beyond the reach of names.
He needed more.
The brittle scrap he’d found tucked into a forgotten tome days ago—stuffed behind cracked leather and rotting vellum—might hold a clue. Its language was fractured and strange, and he’d only managed to translate half of it. Yet even those fragments made his skin crawl.
Mentions of “the Mark before the Mark.” And something called “the Shattered Veil.”
He glanced down at his arm.
With a slow exhale, he rolled up his left sleeve.
There it was—faded, but still cruelly distinct. The Dark Mark. Voldemort’s brand. The once-vivid ink had dulled to the color of ash, but its shape had not softened. It hadn’t vanished. Just… slumbered. Like a thing waiting.
Just like the Serpent.
Was this what the scroll meant? Or was the Dark Mark merely a shadow of something far older?
Something Voldemort had tried to imitate, without understanding its source?
He stood abruptly. He needed answers. Not guesses. Not fragments.
Blackthorne’s Bookshop, Knockturn Alley
The bell above the door didn’t ring.
It hissed.
A low, metallic whisper like chains sliding across stone. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of scorched parchment and long-dead herbs. The light flickered from iron-caged lanterns, shadows twisting in ways that defied geometry. Shelves loomed like tombstones, groaning under the weight of forgotten knowledge. Some books seemed to breathe, faint pulses of magic thudding beneath cracked leather covers.
A thin man emerged from behind a curtain of hanging scrolls. His eyes, pale and round as moons, glinted behind half-moon spectacles.
“You’re early, Mr. Peverell.”
Draco inclined his head. “You said you had something.”
The man gave a brittle smile, like parchment crinkling.
“You asked for pre-Runic sources. Proto-Death cults. Forbidden lineage theory. Not easy to find. Most of it’s been erased by the Unspeakables. But some… some things survive. In corners too dark for even the Ministry to scour.”
He turned and vanished between the shelves, his voice drifting like smoke.
“The Pale Gate was never metaphor. Nor the Veil. Not to the Sable Pact. Before the Department of Mysteries, before Hogwarts, even—there were others. Dreamers. Necromancers. Gatekeepers.”
Draco followed, steps quiet against the stone. “The Sable Pact?”
“Ah.” The bookseller reached high, withdrawing a book bound in something too fleshy to be leather. “Obsessed with what lies beyond. They believed the soul was not a destination, but a direction. They wrote in blood and buried their dead in circles to protect the world from what listened.”
The book bore no title. Only a spiraling mark—like an eye split down the center.
“Some pages match your scroll. Some go farther. But a warning—don’t read aloud. Not even in thought.”
Draco laid the Peverell scroll beside it and opened the book carefully.
The similarities struck like a blow.
Not exact. But essence. Glyphs whispering of memory, of death, of inheritance passed not through blood—but shadow.
One symbol appeared again and again, anchoring every invocation:
𝕁𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕞 — Threshold.
Another page. More fragments. Phrases emerging from the dark like half-formed ghosts:
Blood of the first dead shall pass unseen.
The Veil is not a door but a promise.
Mark before the Mark shall call the Pale Gate forth.
And then:
He who opens the Gate shall wake what lies dreaming.
Draco stared.
It was all connected.
The Hallows. The Threshold. The Veil. The Mark before the Mark—it wasn’t a Dark Mark. Not Voldemort’s. This was older. More primal. Maybe even the inspiration for it. Voldemort had mimicked something he didn’t fully understand.
He closed the book carefully, the shadows of the runes still crawling behind his eyes.
“May I borrow this?”
The bookseller snorted. “If you can afford it.”
Draco produced a Gringotts medallion and tapped it to the table. “Gold doesn’t lie.”
The man’s eyes glittered, catching the light like obsidian. “Then the book is yours, Mr. Peverell. But remember—”
He leaned in, the shadows around him seeming to gather closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Some doors open both ways.”
Draco’s mouth curled into a faint, sardonic smile. “How ominous,” he drawled, tone dry as frost.
He turned on his heel, coat flaring behind him, and vanished into the rising mist of the Alley before the man could say another word.
The days had slipped past like smoke through fingers—until, at last, the day arrived.
The Leaky Cauldron – Room 3
Morning broke like a secret in the room above Knockturn Alley, seeping through gauzy, tea-stained curtains and painting the air with pale gold. Dust motes danced lazily in the light, swirling like faded memories—weightless, endless, unreachable. The room held its breath, thick with stillness.
Draco stood before the tarnished mirror, unmoving.
The glass was warped, its silvering flaking at the edges, the frame etched with a history of handprints and years gone cold. It made his reflection seem like something half-formed—slightly blurred, slightly wrong. A man caught in the space between who he had been and who he was pretending to be.
His hands were braced on the chipped dresser, white-knuckled. Beneath his skin, his pulse pounded—slow and steady, but far too loud, like the thud of a distant drum echoing across a battlefield. It knew. His heart knew what today was. What it would demand of him if he faltered.
He stared at his reflection. Pale skin. Shadowed eyes. And on his finger—that ring.
It glinted in the morning light, cold and cruelly beautiful. Silver, coiled tight in the shape of a serpent devouring its own tail. The snake’s scales were finely detailed, each one set with faintly shimmering diamonds like frost caught on a blade’s edge. And the eyes—those two unblinking rubies—glowed dully, like twin embers in dying coals.
The ring had weight beyond its metal. It pulled.
A gift from Lucius.
Draco could still remember the moment with painful clarity: a high-backed chair, the scent of cigar smoke, the hush that followed the declaration. Lucius hadn’t said anything sentimental, hadn’t clasped his son’s hand or called him beloved. Just a quiet nod. A pause heavy with unspoken expectation. And the words—
“You’re thirteen. You are the heir now. You’ll wear this always.”
And he had.
Through every trial, through every war-scarred night when he thought he might not survive until morning, the ring had remained. It was an anchor—a cold, unyielding chain tying him to a name that both damned and defined him. In moments when everything else fractured, when he fractured, the ring had whispered of lineage. Of duty. Of blood.
Tom had given it back to him three weeks ago.
The moment he’d secured the room above the alley, paid in full and signed under a false name, Tom had pressed it into his hand. No words, no questions. Just the return of a symbol that shouldn’t have meant anything—and yet meant everything.
Three weeks. Three weeks of waiting, planning, watching the hours fall like grains of glass through an hourglass you can’t turn back. Each day had passed with relentless softness, like a breath he was holding underwater.
And now—
Now it was time.
He looked down at the ring again. The ruby eyes caught the light and seemed to watch him, unblinking.
I almost wore it, he thought, a shiver curling low in his spine. Gods, I nearly walked into the past with it on.
Instinct. A careless flick of muscle memory. The sort of thoughtless act that could have torn the veil between timelines.
Because no one—no one—wore this ring unless they were the Malfoy heir.
And in 1942, that title did not belong to Draco Malfoy.
Not yet.
It belonged to someone else entirely. Someone who walked the same halls he would soon walk, who bore the same name in a voice that still rang with youth and arrogance. The heir was Abraxas Enceladus Malfoy.
If Abraxas saw it—saw this—he would know. He would ask. And Draco had no answer that wouldn’t unravel history at the seams.
No lie that didn’t reek of blood and broken time.
“Stupid,” Draco muttered under his breath, the word bitter on his tongue.
He slid the ring from his finger.
It resisted.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to feel like a warning—like something old and serpentine was reluctant to let him go. But it came free. Cold in his palm. Heavy as fate.
He stared down at it, letting the morning light dance across the ruby eyes one last time.
Then, with a flick of his wand, he summoned the sigil stone from the hidden pouch at his hip. The obsidian talisman pulsed faintly, responding to his touch.
“Vault transfer,” Draco said, voice low but steady. “Personal artifact. Draco Peverell. Secure.”
The ring vanished in a shimmer of pearly white light, whisked away into the locked sanctum of his Gringotts vault—sealed behind layers of wards, locked from questions.
From suspicion.
From memory.
He stared at the space where it had been. His hand felt… lighter.
But not free.
He flexed his now-bare fingers. The ghost of the serpent still lingered, a phantom weight curling tight around his knuckle. The absence stung more than the presence ever had.
Exposed.
Vulnerable.
But invisible.
And that, for now, was what he needed to be.
Draco raised his eyes to the mirror again—and this time, he did not look away.
He faced himself with the cool, unflinching gaze of someone who had seen too much and survived too narrowly. His scrutiny wasn’t born of vanity—it was the sharp-edged vigilance of someone who could afford no mistakes, not even in the quiet margins. The reflection staring back bore the unmistakable imprint of an ancient lineage. Malfoy blood clung to him like a spell woven in moonlight—elegant, imperious, and impossibly refined. High cheekbones carved like marble. A straight, patrician nose. The haughty beauty of old coin and colder ambition.
He looked like someone bred in the shadows of grand halls and stricter legacies—far too sculpted to vanish into anonymity, far too still to be mistaken for a boy.
But there were softer echoes beneath the sculpted mask.
His mother’s ghost lived in the curve of his lips, in the downward tilt of his lashes, in the unspoken sorrow tucked quietly at the corners of his eyes. A gentle, defiant grace lingered there—unbent by war, unextinguished by grief. It tempered the aristocratic chill of his father’s features with something human. Something remembered.
His hair, pale as spun frost, had been neatly parted to the side in the fashion of the era—slicked with subtle charm, styled with discipline rather than flourish. It framed his face like a portrait rendered in grayscale, lending an air of antiquity to a body that had bled in the modern world. Once dulled by fear and exhaustion, the contours of his face had sharpened with recovery. He had begun to wear strength again, not like armor, but like muscle regrown.
The shadows beneath his eyes had faded to a ghost of what they once were. That sickly blue pallor of sleepless nights and cursed dreams was gone, replaced by a porcelain clarity just shy of fragile. Color had crept back into his skin. Life—real, humming life—had returned to his bones. His shoulders no longer curled inward with the weight of dread; he stood straight, honed by training, tempered by pain.
He looked dangerous.
He looked inevitable.
His eyes—those uncanny, shifting eyes—were the color of storm-tossed silver, mercury tinged with distant starlight. Not quite blue, not quite grey. They shimmered with something deeper than mere pigment—something old. There were memories buried there, and magic, and things unsaid. A Malfoy’s eyes, yes—but deeper. Wilder. There was a tension behind them now, a kind of waiting, like a curse sealed behind glass.
The Black bloodline whispered through his veins too—through the sharp arch of his brows, the fine-boned tilt of his jaw, the subtle snarl in the way he held himself. It gave him the elegance of a villain from a forgotten fairytale, all cold poise and haunted grandeur. He wasn’t merely beautiful. He was storied. He was sculpted from myth and memory—distant, uncanny, inevitable.
People noticed.
They always did.
Witches glanced up, startled, and quickly looked away. Some flushed, their hands fluttering instinctively to their collars or pendants, as though warding off the chill that followed him like perfume. Wizards paused mid-step, their eyes narrowing, flicking to his hands, his posture, the faint gleam of a wand tip beneath his coat sleeve. Instinct made them defer before reason caught up. They stepped aside without knowing why.
Draco noticed. He always noticed.
He wore the shape of power with the quiet confidence of someone who had tasted its true weight and chosen to carry it anyway. And they felt it—whether or not they could name it.
He adjusted the collar of his coat with surgical precision. The wool was charcoal-dark, richly textured, cut in the sharp, utilitarian lines of wartime aristocracy. Beneath it, a navy waistcoat clung to his frame like a tailored vow, brass buttons glinting like tiny sigils. The wand holster stitched inside his sleeve was seamless, enchanted to be silent, invisible, undetectable even to goblins.
He looked exactly like what he needed them to see: a scion of an ancient house. A war-era pureblood. Impeccable. Untouchable.
But not his house.
Draco Malfoy did not exist in 1942.
Not officially. Not yet.
He stepped closer to the mirror, and its surface—mottled with age, blurred faintly by candle smoke and time—seemed to ripple faintly in response. The ghost in the glass stared back with cool certainty.
Draco leaned in, so close his breath fogged the glass in a brief silver cloud. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it rang with the finality of an oath.
“Draco Malfoy doesn’t exist here.”
The words hung there, frost-etched into the mirror like a gravestone epitaph.
And yet, the figure staring back shifted—not physically, but perceptibly. The set of its mouth curved into the faintest smirk, like a chessmaster recognizing a long-laid move. A secret passed from one version of himself to another.
“Not yet.”
He pulled back, straightening, the mirrored breath fading behind him. The illusion reasserted itself—the ghost replaced by the man.
A glance at the silver watch fastened to his wrist told him what he already knew. The hour had come.
Draco swept the room with a final, precise glance. No loose scrolls. No forgotten rings. No evidence that a future had ever walked through this place. He exhaled once, low and slow, and the air moved like a curtain being drawn.
Everything was in place.
No traces left behind.
Notes:
˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦ ˚ . ★⋆.
. ˚ ✭ * ✦ . . ✦ ˚ ˚ .˚ ✭ . . ˚ . ✦
૮꒰ྀི⸝⸝> . <⸝⸝꒱ྀིა Stay safe and have a great day!
Chapter Text
The Leaky Cauldron’s narrow staircase groaned beneath the measured cadence of Draco’s polished boots. Each step echoed faintly, swallowed by the hushed gloom of the early hour. Golden morning light seeped through the warped, soot-streaked windows, spilling across warped floorboards and catching in the haze of dust that danced lazily in the air. The pub, caught between night’s breath and day’s stirrings, wore the quiet of old secrets.
A handful of early drinkers lingered in the corners—shadows hunched over chipped tankards, their cloaks draped like sagging wings. Pipe smoke curled from cracked lips and long-stemmed stems, ghostly tendrils rising toward the smoke-darkened ceiling beams, where old charms slumbered in the wood.
Behind the bar stood Tom—taller now, spine unbent by the decades that would eventually warp him. His face was paler, not yet puckered with the folds of age, though there was something watchful in his pale blue eyes, something already accustomed to weighing stories left unspoken. He scrubbed a cloudy glass with a rag that looked as though it had once been white but had long since surrendered its dignity.
Tom’s eyes flicked up as Draco approached the bar. “Off already?” he rasped, voice gravelly with sleep, though not yet hoarse with the years to come.
Draco nodded, glancing toward the back door. “Train waits for no one.”
Tom’s gaze lingered—not long, but long enough. His eyes narrowed slightly, studying Draco beneath a furrowed brow, as though comparing him to a memory that refused to name itself. “You’ve got the look of old families,” he muttered, the words floating into the air like drifting ash. “You sure you’re not a Malfoy?”
For the briefest moment, Draco froze. Then his mouth curved into something just shy of a smile—more reflex than expression. “People say things,” he said lightly, letting the words fall like dust.
Tom grunted. “People always do.” He gestured with his chin toward the back corridor. “Best get moving. Don’t want to miss the train. Platform’s chaos this time of year. Too many green-trimmed cloaks and proud little fathers trying to look like they belong.”
Draco dipped his head in a gesture of thanks. “Appreciate the room,” he murmured, already turning, but the barkeep’s voice caught him before he could take another step.
“May fortune shine your way.”
Draco stilled.
The pub—its clinking glasses, its smoldering pipes, the low murmur of voices—seemed to go silent. Time hiccuped. That phrase did not belong to this place, not in this era. It was too private. Too sacred. Not a common well-wish, but a woven incantation. A whisper his mother used to press against his temple in the hush before dawn, her lips brushing his hairline, fingers ghosting his cheek. May fortune shine your way. A mother’s prayer disguised as parting words. A charm meant to carry you safely through blood and frost and war.
He hadn’t heard it in years.
Certainly not from a man like Tom, who barely knew his name. Who shouldn’t have known those words at all.
Draco turned back, slowly this time, his eyes narrowing as he truly looked at the innkeeper—saw the quiet lines of care beneath his eyes, the weight of something unspoken there. But Tom had already returned to his work, polishing glasses as if nothing had passed between them. The moment had folded itself shut.
A heat lodged behind Draco’s ribs. Sharp and warm. Memory wrapped in gratitude.
He inclined his head. “May it light your way,” he said quietly—soft enough that it could be mistaken for a breath, or a blessing.
And then he moved.
With a flick of his wand, the heavy back door swung open, hinges groaning against the frame. The scent of city smoke and wet cobblestone swept in, sharp and grounding. Draco stepped out into the twisting alley behind the pub—the narrow vein that pulsed behind Diagon Alley—his boots striking the worn stone as the door creaked shut behind him.
He didn’t look back.
But the echo of the blessing stayed with him, curling like incense behind his ribs.
Not protection, but recognition.
Something was watching. Something remembered.
And he—he walked on. Toward the morning. Toward the train. Toward the name he no longer bore, and the future he would carve with hands no longer trembling.
The walk to King’s Cross was a strange echo—familiar in shape, but foreign in scent and soul.
London breathed differently in this era. The air was thicker, laced with coal smoke and horse sweat, the ghost of chimney soot clinging to stone walls like a second skin. The acrid tang of tobacco curled beneath his nostrils, mingled with the sharp varnish of leather polish and the faint whiff of iron from train tracks that hadn’t yet learned the rhythm of war.
The city moved slower, more precise. Men in trim suits and stiff collars tapped their canes with mechanical elegance. Women in modest dresses held gloved hands just so. Their eyes—quicker, more calculating—flicked to him and away again like shutters snapping closed. Even the magical folk strode differently. With purpose. With pride. Straight backs and watchful faces. They wore their bloodlines like cloaks.
As he neared the hidden barrier between Platforms Nine and Ten, the world tilted into something more alive.
A hum filled the air beyond the arch—magic and metal mingling in the breathless charge of departure. The platform stretched ahead, cloaked in morning mist and the scent of steam. The Hogwarts Express towered over the crowd, red and gleaming, a serpentine beast of polished brass and rumbling power. Its breath hissed in thick gusts from beneath, as though the train itself were impatient.
Draco paused just beyond the barrier, a statue amid motion.
Around him, families clustered in tight circles—mothers adjusting lapels, fathers checking watches, younger siblings clinging to owl cages or the hems of cloaks. Trunks levitated gently to the train under watchful eyes. House crests glinted proudly from black robes—badges of heritage worn like armor.
He stood still, letting it wash over him: the flick of wands, the soft thrum of enchantments, the creak of ancient magic quietly guiding this yearly migration.
So orderly. So dignified.
So unscathed.
A world untouched by war. He hardly recognized it.
Then he stepped forward.
The moment the heel of his boot met the platform proper, he felt the change. A shift in current. The hush of attention.
Eyes turned.
Not all at once. Not loudly. But the effect rippled through the space like a spell woven into silence.
A cluster of fourth-year witches near a baggage trolley stilled mid-laughter. One adjusted the hem of her sleeves, pretending not to stare. Another twisted a silver ring with sudden interest. The tallest of them tilted her head, appraising him beneath thick lashes, gaze tracing the line of his cheek as though memorizing a secret. Then—inevitably—the laughter resumed. Softer now. Airier. Threaded with giggles not quite innocent.
Further down, two boys—older, broader-shouldered—lounged against a wrought iron pillar. Their cloaks were a deeper navy, the shade of seventh-years too close to freedom to care for rules. One nudged the other, nodding discreetly. “Who’s that?” he asked, just loud enough to be heard, as if curiosity were entitlement.
Draco didn’t turn his head.
He didn’t need to.
He moved through the platform like a slow ripple through still water. His steps were measured, deliberate. The soft swish of his robes whispered against the stone, charcoal fabric trimmed in silver thread catching the light just enough to draw the eye. He did not rush. He did not falter. Every line of his posture spoke fluency in power.
He could feel their stares—layered and restless—gathering behind him like weather. Some curious. Some envious. Others already wary. The sugar-buzz of attraction. The metallic twang of suspicion. The bitter smoke of ancestral recognition.
He wore them all like a second skin. Inhaled their attention like incense.
Let them watch.
Let them wonder.
They would learn his name soon enough.
He boarded the train without pause, slipping into the corridor with practiced ease, ignoring the parted lips and darting glances from students pressed against the windows. The scent inside was a familiar balm—polished wood, soot, old books, the faint tinge of peppermint from the trolley cart. Whispered words followed in his wake, as did glances cast through compartments half-drawn with velvet curtains.
Eventually, he found one untouched. Quiet. Empty.
Sliding the door shut behind him, he sank into the window seat with a slow, deliberate breath. The leather was cool against his back, firm and unfamiliar. Outside, the platform blurred—a watercolor of families and friends, of long hugs and last-minute warnings.
Then the train jolted forward—once, then again, harder—as if casting off its leash.
The whistle screamed overhead, a long, shrill cry that fractured the moment like glass. Steam bellowed past the windows, cloaking the world in white, and when it cleared, London was already receding—washed out by fog and speed and time.
Draco leaned into the motion, his hand drifting to the sleeve of his robe.
Beneath the thick fabric, the wand nestled against his skin—a quiet weight of basilisk bone and silver-threaded ash. It pulsed faintly beneath his touch. Steady. Sentient. Loyal.
And dangerous.
He had made it.
But survival was not guaranteed.
Somewhere aboard this train—hidden in laughter and naive ambition, in freckles and storm-slick hair—was a boy. A boy who did not yet carry the weight of fear. A name not yet cursed. A hunger not yet crowned.
The dark lord.
Draco’s jaw clenched.
Who was he?
He had to find him.
Not simply to watch, or follow.
But to earn his attention.
And somehow… to survive it.
Draco’s hand drifted to the inner lining of his sleeve, fingers brushing the wand hidden there. The wood was warm beneath his touch—warmer than it should’ve been. The basilisk-core throbbed faintly, a slow, sentient pulse like a sleeping heart. Loyal. Sensitive. Dangerous. A wand that remembered blood. A creature’s will forged into silence and strength.
He let his eyes fall half-closed, the rhythm of the train lulling him—until—
Click.
The sharp slide of the compartment door fractured the quiet.
Draco’s wand was in his hand before the sound had fully finished, drawn with the grace of a practiced duelist, tip steady, grip firm. His muscles were coiled before his mind caught up to instinct.
Two boys stood frozen in the doorway, faces gone slack with alarm. Younger. Pale. The taller one with a dusty mop of auburn hair clutched a satchel to his chest like a shield. His companion—smaller, darker—widened his eyes but didn’t move.
“S—sorry!” the auburn-haired one stammered, stumbling over the word. “Didn’t mean to—uh—barge in, sir.”
The other nodded in frantic agreement. “Everywhere else is full. Can we…?”
Draco didn’t speak. He didn’t lower his wand.
He looked.
Third-years, most likely. Their robes were crisp, newly pressed. Polished shoes. Cufflinks stamped with the coiled silver serpent of Slytherin. Voices clipped with the smooth cadence of old money and purist bloodlines. Their manners were drilled, but not yet sharpened. Still boys.
Draco gave a single nod, slow and measured. “Go ahead.”
They moved quickly, murmuring thanks as they sank into the seat across from him, as though entering a lion’s den and pretending it was just another garden.
The redhead, cheeks still flushed, cleared his throat after a moment. “I’m Edmund,” he offered, with a nervous smile that didn’t quite stick. “Edmund Avery.”
The other boy straightened his spine a little. “Felix Mulciber.”
Draco inclined his head slightly, as if weighing their names on a scale.
“Draco,” he said. Nothing more.
The silence stretched. The boys shifted, clearly expecting another word, a house, a surname. When none came, they exchanged glances and began a quiet, halting conversation of their own. Soft enough to pretend they weren’t being watched.
Snippets drifted across the compartment—summer at a villa in France, a new Comet broom, someone’s older brother who’d been invited to one of Slughorn’s fabled dinners. Names dropped like polished coins.
Draco tuned them out.
Their words became part of the train’s low chorus—the rhythmic clatter of iron wheels on track, the faint whistle of wind slicing through cracks in the frame, the hiss of steam curling along the windows. Further down the corridor, a burst of laughter spilled from another compartment. Lively. Unaware.
He turned his gaze to the rain-smudged glass, watching the landscape pass in gray-green blurs. His reflection stared back at him: pale, composed, a ghost in borrowed time.
Then—
Click.
Again, the compartment door slid open.
Not a sharp interruption this time, but a glide—deliberate, practiced, and laced with self-assurance. The door moved as though obeying not a hand, but a command.
And the presence that followed it… undeniable.
The boy didn’t simply enter the compartment—he arrived, like someone accustomed to being noticed, to being awaited. He moved with the poise of old portraits and ballroom ghosts: upright, fluid, born from bloodlines bred for power. His height lent him the illusion of age, his posture the certainty of command. His robes shimmered faintly with movement—deep forest green velvet, lined with silver thread, cut to precision like ceremonial armor. The Slytherin crest on his breast wasn’t stitched so much as engraved in magic.
His cheekbones, high and cruel, caught the passing light like knives unsheathed. His mouth, sculpted and smug, held a smirk that had never known humility. His hair—ink-dark and swept back with care—sat pristine, not a single defiant strand in sight.
But his face—
Handsome, yes.
And cold, in a way that suggested statues in graveyards and heirloom daggers passed down with whispered curses.
A face built for portraits in cursed manors. Or legends best left untold.
His eyes—icy grey, sharp as flint—swept the room not with curiosity, but with assessment. Quick. Exact. Clinical. They skimmed over Felix, paused briefly on Edmund—
“There you are,” he said, voice smooth as honey poured over bone. Warm, but hollow. “I thought you might’ve fallen off the platform like a tourist.”
Edmund’s expression lit like a lantern. “Cousin Lestrange! I told you I’d find a spot!”
Lestrange’s eyes cut to Felix. A shallow nod.
And then—finally—they settled on Draco.
He didn’t just look. He measured. Quietly, almost imperceptibly. As if calculating weight, worth, weakness.
Cassian Lestrange had the gaze of someone raised not to see people, but to sort them—into categories like bloodlines, assets, or threats. He looked at Draco the way an auctioneer might eye a cursed artifact: curious… cautious… a little hungry.
“You’re not a first year,” he said at last. Each word polished to clarity. “But I don’t recognize you. And I always recognize people.”
Draco did not rise. Did not blink. Did not offer a smile.
He remained where he was, radiating cool disinterest. He had learned long ago that stillness could be louder than speech.
Let Cassian move. Let him circle.
“Draco,” he said simply, tone languid. “And you are?”
The smirk that followed was slow, sharp-edged. Not so much an expression as the suggestion of a blade being unsheathed just enough to glint.
“Cassian Lestrange,” he replied, like the name itself should have consequences. “Fifth year. Prefect.”
Draco’s gaze flicked to the glint of silver and green on Cassian’s chest—the prefect badge gleaming like a medal won in bloodsport.
“I don’t care much for authority,” Draco said mildly, voice low, precise. “Especially when it introduces itself first.”
Cassian barked a laugh—short, sharp, and edged with something that might have been amusement… or warning.
“You’re either brave,” he said, “or stupid. Or both.”
“Or neither,” Draco returned, his voice silk wrapped over iron. “Just observant. And good at pretending.”
The air in the compartment shifted. Subtle, but undeniable. Like a storm cloud deciding whether to break.
Felix let out a soft, nervous cough. Edmund had gone completely rigid, his hands locked on the seat, eyes flicking between them like a bystander to a duel.
Cassian tilted his head slightly, expression sharpening. One hand brushed the compartment doorframe, but the rest of him was still—too still. Like a snake that had yet to decide whether to strike.
He watched Draco now not as a stranger, but as a variable. A complication. A piece not listed in the rulebook. His smile faded into something thinner, more thoughtful.
“You’ve got gall,” he murmured. “Most transfers wouldn’t come in swinging.”
“I’m not most transfers,” Draco said, every syllable deliberate.
That earned him a pause. Then a grin—smaller, but real this time. Not a smirk, not a mask. Something closer to genuine appreciation.
“That,” Cassian said, “is clear.”
Silence laced the room like a spell. Not awkward—but taut. Heavy with the tension of two apex predators circling, uncertain whether to bare teeth or bow.
Then, without further word, Cassian gave a slow, shallow nod. Some private verdict passed.
“Well, Draco,” he said, letting the name linger just a heartbeat longer. “Let’s see where you land. We’ll talk again.”
He turned and left in the same seamless motion he’d arrived with, cloak whispering behind him like smoke, like memory. The door slid shut with a click—quiet, final.
For a moment, silence held. Heavy. Suspended.
Then Felix exhaled a shaky breath like he’d been holding it the entire time. “Blimey,” he whispered, voice barely above a tremble. “You… you stood up to him.”
Edmund nodded, wide-eyed. “No one talks back to Cassian Lestrange. Not unless they want a detention or a duel.”
Draco said nothing.
He simply sat back, fingers resting loosely on his wand beneath his sleeve, and turned his gaze once more to the window—where the sky outside had darkened, as if it, too, had taken note.
His gaze tilted toward the glass, though his eyes were far from the scenery. And across his lips—so faint it might’ve been a trick of the light—a smile ghosted, cool and quiet.
Good. Let them talk.
Because now, the Slytherins were watching.
And somewhere among them… he was watching too.
Outside, the countryside streaked past in soft blurs of mossy green and golden wheat, sun-dappled fields stitched together like a lazy quilt beneath a pale blue sky. The Hogwarts Express surged forward, its rhythmic rumble a steady, hypnotic pulse beneath their feet, like the heart of something ancient and unrelenting. Inside the compartment, however, the atmosphere simmered—warm with breath and velvet and the faint scent of old wood polish, the brass fittings catching the afternoon light like gold trapped in shadow.
Draco sat motionless, spine straight but at ease, angled subtly toward the window. He wasn’t truly looking outward, though. His expression had grown distant, eyes dulled slightly with thought. Beneath the hum of the train, his mind wandered—until—
A chime rang out in the corridor, high and melodic. Bright as bells.
“Anything off the trolley, dears?”
The door slid open on its polished tracks with a gentle clatter.
There she stood.
The Trolley Witch. Timeless. Cheerful. Her face was round and ruddy, cheeks glowing as if dusted with rose quartz. A crisp white bonnet crowned her graying curls, tucked neatly behind ears that had likely heard every secret whispered in the narrow train corridors. Her cart—gleaming like an enchanted treasure chest—was a kaleidoscope of delights. Chocolate Frogs twitched in sealed boxes. Pumpkin Pasties steamed beneath delicate wrappings. Cauldron Cakes oozed syrupy trails of firewhiskey icing. Sugar Quills poked like plumage from crystalline jars, and Fizzing Whizbees buzzed faintly, as though impatient for the sky.
At the sight of her, both boys—Edmund and Felix, yes, that was right—lit up like gaslamps touched by spark.
“Oy, Felix, look!” Edmund was practically vibrating as he mashed his face to the glass. “They’ve got exploding bonbons! You said they were banned!”
“Only if you lob ‘em at a prefect,” Felix shot back, already out of his seat like a shot.
Draco didn’t move. Just watched—aloof and almost bored—as they surged toward the trolley like overeager kneazle kits chasing flutterbys. Coins clinked hastily into the Witch’s open palm, Felix too distracted to even count them.
“One of everything!” he cried with pride, his grin threatening to split his face in two.
Edmund groaned theatrically. “Merlin’s balls, my mum is going to kill me when she sees my Gringotts balance—but—hell with it. Same here!”
The Trolley Witch laughed, warm and lilting. “That’s the spirit, boys.”
Sweets were unceremoniously piled into their arms and dumped back onto the seats. Chocolate Frogs gave disgruntled ribbits as they were tossed. A bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans slipped from Edmund’s grip, spilling a rainbow of chaos across the floor. A Jelly Slug landed with a splat against the window and began slowly sliding down, leaving a sticky trail like a melting sigil.
Draco’s gaze lingered on the mess, on the chaos, on the sugar-strewn celebration that had seized the compartment.
And for just a moment—for the barest flicker—something beneath his ribs twisted.
Not jealousy. Not quite.
Something older. A worn ache pressed into his memory like fingerprints into wet wax.
Crabbe and Goyle.
They had been constants. Walking barricades. Shadows always flanking him, laughing too loud with mouths too full of sweets to say anything useful. One paid, the other grabbed. He’d never had to lift a finger. He remembered Crabbe stuffing five Cauldron Cakes into his robes with smug glee while Goyle licked icing from his knuckles like a dog who didn’t care who was watching.
Gone.
One lost to fire and fury in a Room of Requirement that had nearly swallowed them all whole. The other… well, the last time Draco had seen him, there’d been no words. Just distance. Just silence.
His fingers curled slightly where they rested.
The train moved on.
He blinked—once—and the memory fell away like dust brushed from a sleeve. He exhaled slowly through his nose, steadying himself, allowing the ghost of that familiar weight to evaporate in the warmth of the present.
He didn’t need them now.
Let them talk.
Let the sweets pile up and laughter fill the gaps. Let Felix beam and Edmund cheer and the train carry them toward something glittering and unknown.
Draco sat still, a blade in velvet, and let the ghosts pass.
He wasn’t here to relive the past.
He was here to rewrite it.
“Want anything?” Felix asked, glancing up from his sugary fortress, his mouth already full of nougat.
Draco didn’t look over. “No,” he replied coolly, his voice edged in that usual aristocratic chill. “I don’t care for sugar before dinner.”
Felix shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Edmund tore open a treacle tart with dramatic flair. Steam curled from its golden crust. “Gods, it’s still warm,” he moaned around a mouthful. “I love her. I’d marry her. She’s a national treasure.”
The Trolley Witch cackled softly, her cart squeaking merrily as it rolled away, vanishing down the corridor in a haze of cinnamon and steam.
Draco leaned back in his seat, one arm draped over the window ledge, fingers loosely curled, the other hand resting idle on his knee. The low sun bled across the glass beside him, and the fading light threw amber ribbons across his cheekbones, painting his profile in fractured gold. Shadows played across his face, slipping like silk across the curve of his jaw and down his neck, tracing the collar of his robes.
He let his eyes wander—not out the window, but to the glass itself, watching the murky reflection ripple faintly with each jostle of the train. In the blurred mirror of the pane, he saw the two boys—Felix and Edmund—squabbling over jelly slugs, mouths smudged with sugar, the bench now a chaotic battleground of empty wrappers and half-eaten sweets. One of them laughed, tipping backward as a Chocolate Frog escaped and leapt beneath the seat with a croak.
Draco didn’t flinch. He didn’t scowl or smirk. He just observed, detached.
Background noise.
Comfortable chaos.
For a fleeting second—a blink—he could almost pretend. Pretend that he was just another boy in another compartment. That he was seventeen and ordinary and untouched by the things he’d seen, the things he’d done.
Almost.
But the illusion cracked as swiftly as it formed. The silence beneath the laughter was too loud.
There it was again—that second heartbeat pounding against his ribs. Not of flesh or blood, but of knowing. Of memory. Of mission.
He wasn’t just any boy.
He was a spy among children.
And somewhere ahead, past the winding hills and the velvet-dark loch, was a face he had to find. A boy with too many names. A shadow taking form.
Voldemort.
Draco exhaled slowly, deliberately. His leg crossed over the other, spine straightening with purpose. He closed his eyes for a breath, not to rest but to focus—his mind a weapon sharpening behind his lids.
Let them laugh.
Let them gorge themselves on sweets and boyish dreams.
Soon, it would all turn to ash.
And he would be ready.
He would stop it.
Even if it meant becoming a ghost in his own skin.
Even if it meant being watched.
Because he was being watched. He could feel it like a thread tugging at the back of his neck—soft, persistent, unrelenting. A gaze not from Felix or Edmund, but from somewhere else. From someone else.
He opened his eyes.
The landscape had shifted. The green fields were gone, replaced now by craggy hills bathed in twilight. The sun dipped low behind the skeletal silhouette of the Highlands, and a dying blaze of gold slanted across the compartment floor, catching the edges of brass trim and dust motes dancing like sparks.
Outside, the train began to slow. The rhythmic clatter of the tracks softened to a metallic hum. The windows fogged at their edges as evening crept in, breathing cold against the glass.
The corridors filled quickly—students jostling to grab their trunks, pulling robes straight, chattering with excitement or nerves. Their voices blended into a low, indistinct swarm, broken only by the occasional bang of a compartment door or the screech of an owl in protest.
Draco moved among them like a knife through cloth.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t adjust his robes.
Didn’t blink at the way the younger ones parted instinctively around him.
He stood out—taller, older, wrong in all the quiet ways. Too poised. Too still. A statue slipped into a crowd of children. His boots made no sound against the floor. His eyes were too steady, his mouth too closed.
The train groaned to a halt.
A whistle screamed, sharp and final.
Steam hissed along the platform, curling in thick, white coils that swallowed the station whole. Mist clung to the edges of the carriages, diffusing the lantern light into a hazy glow. It smelled like coal smoke, iron, and damp stone.
“Firs’ years! Firs’ years, this way now!” a voice bellowed from the mist.
Not Hagrid. Not yet.
Ogg.
His voice was thunder over gravel, the kind that didn’t welcome questions. Students obeyed without hesitation, peeling off in clumps. Cloaks flapping. Shoes squeaking. Some clung to friends’ sleeves. Others moved stiffly, braving the fog like soldiers at their first battle line.
Draco stepped into their midst.
Deliberately.
Each footfall was placed with care. Measured. Intentional.
The children noticed. How could they not?
He was the wrong silhouette. The wrong energy.
One girl, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed with cold, tugged on the sleeve of her friend. “He’s not a first year… is he?”
Her voice was barely a breath, but Draco heard it like a bell rung inches from his ear.
“He’s too tall,” a boy muttered. “And look at him—he walks like…”
Like he owned the platform.
No one challenged him. Not directly. They simply shifted—nervous, uncertain—like woodland animals sensing a predator.
The lanterns at the lakeshore glimmered through the fog. The boats waited, bobbing gently in the water like leaves on a breathless pond. Beyond them, Hogwarts loomed—towering, dark, and magnificent, its windows glowing like amber eyes in the dusk.
Draco moved to the front of the line, cloak rippling with each step.
Ogg squinted at him, the furrow between his brows deepening. His voice cracked like a whip: “You. You’re not—”
“I was told to join the Sorting,” Draco cut in, calm and clipped, with just enough disdain to make it believable. “Is there a problem?”
Ogg looked him over.
Something in Draco’s face—his bearing, his certainty—gave the man pause. The pause stretched. Then Ogg grunted.
“Fine. In a boat, then. Four per.”
Draco stepped into the nearest vessel as though he’d done it a hundred times before. He took the bow seat, knees neatly together, back straight. The wood dipped beneath his weight, water lapping at the sides.
A boy clambered in after him, nearly tipping the boat in his haste. Two girls hesitated before sliding into the remaining spaces, casting wary glances at Draco before staring down at their shoes.
The silence thickened.
Then, as if on cue, the boats began to move.
No oars. No push. Just the slow, gliding pull of ancient magic guiding them forward across the still black lake.
Moonlight poured onto the surface, turning the water to silver and glass. Mist curled around the boats like breath. Somewhere in the distance, a loon cried once—haunting, lonely.
Draco kept his eyes on the castle, its towers rising like bones from a sleeping beast.
He was almost there.
The castle loomed closer with every ghost-silent glide of the boats, its ancient bones rising out of the mist like the silhouette of a slumbering colossus. Windows glimmered like watchful eyes, casting golden reflections that quivered on the lake’s obsidian surface. High above, crooked turrets pierced the bruised-purple sky like knuckled fingers caught mid-incantation, curled and trembling with centuries of magic.
Around him, the boats were crowded with wide-eyed children—squirming, breathless, giddy. The lake lapped softly against the wood, dark water swallowing their whispers. Lantern-light shimmered across their pale faces, casting them in flickers of gold and shadow.
Draco sat still in the bow, his back rigid, hands folded in his lap. The cold air kissed the nape of his neck, slid beneath the collar of his robes like a warning. He did not shiver.
The castle grew larger, impossibly so—majestic and terrible all at once. Every glowing window, every curling spire was both known and alien. It was the same Hogwarts that lived in his memories... and yet, not. This was Hogwarts before him, untouched by war, by corruption, by prophecy. Untouched by the boy he used to be.
And yet, here he was—an echo made flesh, rippling across the surface of time.
A slow, subtle curl twisted in his gut, the first trace of unease. Not fear exactly. Not yet. But something adjacent. The Sorting was near. And he did not yet know what this place—this time—would do with him.
—
Inside the castle, torchlight painted the stone corridors in amber and shadow. The first-years were corralled like sheep before the massive oak doors of the Great Hall, buzzing with nervous energy. Some clutched robes too large for their frames. Others whispered names, rehearsing answers they thought might impress the hat.
Draco lingered at the rear, his silhouette cutting a stark figure against the lesser shapes around him. He was taller, leaner, older by years if not by appearance—and unmistakably out of place. Whispers rippled through the crowd like wind through grass.
At the front, Professor Merrythought stood rigid and hawk-eyed, scroll in hand, lips pursed with a seasoned disinterest. Her voice—brisk, precise—echoed faintly as she read names from the parchment, each syllable a bell toll in the quiet corridor. Beyond the doors, the Sorting Hat’s warbling song rose and fell like a spell half-sung, strange and familiar all at once.
Draco stared straight ahead. He let none of it touch him. His expression was carved from marble, cool and unreadable.
The great oak doors swung open with a low groan.
A hush fell over the hall like snowfall—soft, instant, complete.
Light exploded from within. Hundreds of floating candles hovered in the vaulted ceiling like fiery stars, their flames steady despite the nonexistent wind. The four House banners hung proudly from the rafters—Gryffindor’s lion gleaming in crimson and gold, Slytherin’s serpent coiled in a sea of green silk.
Four long tables stretched the length of the hall, each packed with students in black robes and varying levels of polish. Heads turned, one by one, until the entire school seemed to be staring.
Draco moved with the first-years, his presence like a dropped stone in still water. Whispers swelled around him.
“Who is that—?”
“He doesn’t look eleven.”
“Bloody hell, is he a teacher?”
“No, no, he’s too pretty. Look at him. He has to be French.”
“He looks like royalty.”
“He looks like trouble.”
Draco ignored it all. He’d grown up under scrutiny, had learned how to carry silence like a shield. He walked with quiet grace, chin level, eyes forward, the sharp line of his jaw catching the candlelight with every step. His robes—perfectly tailored—shifted around him like liquid shadow. Each movement was calculated, almost regal.
He neither smiled nor scowled. He offered nothing.
He allowed himself only one glance—quick, effortless, razor-sharp—toward the Slytherin table.
There.
The fourth-years and above reclined along the Slytherin table like monarchs surveying a kingdom, each draped in entitlement and ancient name. Theirs was a silent dominion—an empire of glances, whispers, and carefully cultivated grace. The very air around them crackled with ambition. Unspoken hierarchies hung thick as velvet: who came from old magic, who bore the weight of legacy, who glittered just enough to be feared.
Laughter spilled along the table like fine crystal shattering—sharp, glittering, deliberate. It was never accidental. Every tilt of a head, every languid sip from a goblet, every measured smirk had the choreography of court politics. Slytherin didn’t breathe. It performed.
At the center of the display, sprawled like decadence given form, sat Cassian Lestrange.
He occupied the bench like it had been carved for him, slouched just so, one arm draped behind another boy’s shoulders in a pose too careless to be anything but calculated. His tie hung loose around his neck like a silken noose, and his collar—purposefully crooked—gave him the air of someone too important to bother with rules. His smile curved like a blade about to be unsheathed.
Cassian laughed with the ease of someone born into a world designed to applaud his every move. His fingers glinted with rings—silver serpents with emerald eyes, obsidian bands etched with runes, a family sigil cast in moonstone. His voice was low, amused, soaked in self-certainty. The kind of boy who hadn’t yet met consequence. And didn’t believe he ever would.
But Draco’s gaze slid past him.
To the one who didn’t laugh.
The boy sat just to Cassian’s right—close, but untouched. Unlike the rest, he did not sprawl or preen. He sat as though carved from stillness, back straight, limbs composed, every angle sharpened to precision. He looked untouched by time or temperature—unrumpled, unsmudged, untouchable.
His robes were immaculate, their drape unnaturally perfect. No Prefect badge gleamed from his chest. No rings. No monogrammed handkerchief or embroidered crest to announce him. And yet—everything around him bent subtly in his direction, like stars tilting toward gravity.
He didn’t dominate by presence. He didn’t need to.
The silence did it for him.
He was striking—but not in the careless, golden way of boys who knew they were beautiful. No. His beauty was colder, crueler. He was the stillness before a storm. The clean gleam of untouched snow on a battlefield.
Winter incarnate.
Dark curls crowned his head in soft, deliberate waves, a single lock curling near his temple like the final, deliberate stroke of a master painter. His lashes were long, casting faint shadows against cheekbones honed with eerie symmetry. His mouth—full, quiet, unyielding—rested in a state of unreadable calm. Not disinterest. Not disdain. Just… stillness.
And his skin—so pale it almost seemed translucent—caught the candlelight not with glow, but with a shimmer, like ice catching moonlight.
But it was the eyes that undid Draco.
Dark—not brown, not black, but a fathomless shade somewhere between the end of a night and the edge of a dream. They held no glint, no glimmer. They swallowed light. And they didn’t move—not to scan, not to flit, not even to acknowledge.
They looked. They saw. They measured.
And they dismissed.
Draco inhaled, slow and quiet, his breath catching against his ribs. Something in his chest shifted—an old instinct or a new fear, he couldn’t say. His heart stuttered, traitorous and small.
Is it him?
He stared.
Drinking in the boy as one might study a portrait too vivid to be still life—drawn by the angles of his face, the impossible precision of his bearing. That stillness, that poise—not the frozen kind born of nerves, but the intentional stillness of someone constructed rather than raised.
And still… the boy’s gaze did not shift. Not even a flicker.
He sat like a blade housed in its scabbard: silent, sheathed, but no less dangerous for it. Not disengaged. Not oblivious. Simply apart. He didn’t speak. Didn’t react. But he listened—or seemed to. As though the voices around him reached his ears through some invisible mesh, weighed and dismissed before ever touching thought. As though the world around him operated in a lower frequency—clumsy, loud, unnecessary.
As though he existed on a frequency only he could hear.
Draco’s pulse ticked in his throat. A dull, rhythmic beat. He turned his head away before he was caught watching.
A voice rang through the Hall:
“Cormac, Amelia.”
A tiny girl with trembling knees and tightly wound braids darted up to the stool, eyes wide as saucers. The Sorting Hat barely grazed her scalp before bellowing, “Ravenclaw!” in a crackling shout. She squeaked and hurried off to the table amid warm, scattered applause.
Draco didn’t join in.
They were going alphabetically. He’d be near the end.
Good.
It gave him time.
Time to watch. Time to listen.
Time to calculate.
His gaze slid to the High Table, where the professors perched like ravens on a ledge of onyx—robes pooling, candles flickering in their glasses and rings, expressions carved with barely restrained curiosity.
Headmaster Dippet, narrow as a stalk of parchment, sat in the center like a wizened owl, face still, but eyes bright with calculation. He blinked rarely. Assessed constantly. Next to him, Professor Merrythought read from her scroll with businesslike speed, her spectacles slipping down her nose as though they were trying to escape the weight of so many names.
Further along, Slughorn swelled in his seat like a plum too long on the vine, ruddy-cheeked and glistening, his smile syrupy with favor. He clapped a beat longer for each Slytherin, eyes narrowing with speculative interest when he noticed him.
Then McGonagall—far younger than Draco was used to, but already austere—sat upright like she’d been trained in discipline since the womb. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, hands folded, but her gaze was razor-sharp. Even then, her eyes gleamed like tempered steel. Like she could slice truth from silence.
None of them were subtle.
They leaned toward one another under the guise of etiquette, whispering behind gloved fingers, eyes flicking toward him—not the Sorting. Not the first-years.
Him.
The boy who stood too still. Who wore his robes too neatly. Who held himself not with childish nerves, but with a trained and silent restraint. Like someone meant to be obeyed. Like someone placed in this moment by fate itself.
Their murmurs slithered through the candlelit air, not quite loud enough to catch, but Draco heard them anyway.
Like threads stitched straight into his skull.
“Who is that?”
“Not a first-year.”
“He reeks of Pureblood breeding…”
“A transfer, surely—but from where?”
He didn’t react. Not even a blink.
His spine remained straight.
His chin perfectly level.
His expression unreadable.
But inside, something sharpened. A familiar hum curled in his blood.
He’d been seen.
Good.
Let them wonder. Let them whisper.
Let them try to unravel the enigma he had already become.
More names were called, the litany echoing through the vaulted hall like bells tolling down a long corridor of fate. One by one, children stumbled forward—some with wide eyes and white knuckles, others bouncing on the balls of their feet with jittery excitement. The Sorting Hat barked its verdicts like an old judge handing down sentences, and each declaration summoned a wave of reaction.
Hufflepuff erupted with warm cheers and the eager thumps of overzealous handclaps. Gryffindor whooped and whistled, all bravado and bright-eyed fire. Ravenclaw murmured approval, restrained and pleased. Slytherin, ever elegant, offered only the cool ripple of refined applause—precise, measured, sharp as silk-wrapped daggers.
Draco’s gaze wandered, but only in orbit around one center of gravity. His eyes found their way again and again to the Slytherin table—to him.
The boy hadn’t moved. Not a flicker, not a breath wasted. He sat as if carved from alabaster moonstone—still, flawless, poised beyond anything a first year had any right to be. Posture like a portrait. Attention like an empty mirror.
And yet—Draco felt it. That strange pressure at the back of his mind. A thread drawn taut between them. The eerie sensation of being seen from a place far beyond sight.
Not the gawking, murmuring stares of children or the appraising glances of professors.
Something else. Someone else.
The Sorting wore on. A mousy girl burst into tears when the Hat shouted “Gryffindor!” A lanky boy with too-large glasses nearly toppled the stool. For a moment, laughter echoed like wind through a cavern—bright, uncomfortable—and then vanished under a tide of decorum.
Draco didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He stood statue-still, spine straight, shoulders relaxed but precise. Waiting. Listening. Absorbing.
Each breath was measured. Each heartbeat a metronome. Every movement in the Hall cataloged, every gesture weighed for meaning.
Then—almost.
Their eyes nearly met.
Almost.
But just before they did, the boy turned his head—just slightly—and leaned toward Lestrange. His lips moved, shaping some dark joke or cold observation, and Lestrange’s smirk spread slow as oil on water.
Draco’s stomach turned.
He’s dangerous, Draco thought, throat dry. And nothing impresses him.
And then—
A yawn. Deep, ragged, theatrical.
The Sorting Hat’s mouth stretched wide, the creases of its leathery face deepening like fault lines in ancient earth. “Ahhh,” it groaned, voice scratchy with cobwebs. “One more, it seems…”
Professor Merrythought adjusted her scroll. It rustled like dry leaves in the hush. Her finger traced the final name.
A pause.
Her brow twitched. Eyes narrowed slightly behind her spectacles. She read the name once. Then again. Her lips parted—subtly, but unmistakably—as though something strange had snagged her throat.
“Draco,” she called, clear and precise.
A silence bloomed.
And then—another breath. A second, slower draw of air. Her voice dipped half an octave.
“…Peverell.”
The name didn’t echo.
It detonated.
The Great Hall jolted like a struck bell.
A single breath of stunned silence—sharp, crystalline.
Then came the rupture.
Gasps sucked in like a chorus of knives drawn. Chairs creaked as students leaned forward, mouths half-open. Even the portraits high above stirred, painted faces whispering behind gilded frames.
“Did she say Peverell?”
“No one has that name anymore.”
“You mean—like those Peverells?”
The name moved through the room like a scent in bloodied water. Whispers rose like storm winds. Jaws dropped. Eyes widened. Even the distracted were dragged back into attention as if a silken string had been threaded through their spines and pulled taut.
At the High Table, every head turned.
Slughorn leaned forward, his grin vanished, eyes narrowed with sudden, almost hungry interest—like a collector spotting a mythic artifact.
Headmaster Dippet, perched like an ascetic owl, froze mid-stroke as he tugged thoughtfully at his beard. His eyes, normally distant and misted, sharpened like frost forming across glass.
Professor Merrythought looked up from the scroll. Her glance flicked toward Dippet—uncertain, questioning, not entirely composed.
And at the far end of the table—
He looked up.
Draco’s breath caught hard in his lungs.
Young.
So young.
Not the withered, hollowed man Draco remembered. Not the tired, curse-marked warrior who stood against death with kindness held like a shield. No.
This man was still whole.
His auburn hair curled gently, thick and rich, with only the barest threads of silver glinting at his temples—like moonlight caught in the shadows of dusk. His beard was neatly cropped, his frame straight and composed. His burgundy robes shimmered with embroidery of gold so fine it looked like spun sunlight. Even seated, he radiated something other—as if the chair bent to hold him rather than the reverse.
But it was the eyes.
Those eyes.
Unchanged. Unflinching. Blue as searing ice. Blue as truth spoken gently but without mercy.
They locked on him.
Across the room, across the decades—Draco felt them find him.
And just like that, time fractured.
He was no longer in the Hall.
He was there—atop the Astronomy Tower, wind shrieking like mourning banshees. Rain lashed his robes. A wand—his wand—shook in his hand. Dumbledore stood before him, calm. Quiet. Open.
Please.
And then—green.
Always green.
Draco gasped. The past slammed back into him like a wave of bone-deep grief. His knees gave slightly. His vision tunneled. A soundless crack echoed in his ribs as if something inside him had torn—old and raw and never fully healed.
A hand shot out to catch his elbow.
Professor Merrythought. Her grip firm, her eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “Are you alright, Mr. Peverell?” she asked, voice softened just enough to sound human beneath the formality.
Draco blinked, pulse pounding like a wardrum. He forced the blood back into his face and nodded once, sharply. “Yes, Professor. Just a bit lightheaded.”
The murmurs hadn’t stopped.
If anything, they had deepened—turned molten and low, slithering through the Great Hall like smoke through stone corridors. It wasn’t chatter anymore. It was something older. Thicker. Something that crawled into the bones and curled behind the ears.
Even as the Sorting Hat sagged into stillness atop its three-legged stool, the name still clung to the air like ash after fire.
Peverell.
A whisper. A riddle. A resurrection.
Spoken as if it should have never been spoken again.
“Peverell…” Professor Slughorn muttered, almost reverently. His fingers twisted in his mustache, knuckles pale. His expression teetered between disbelief and something far less noble—wonder tinged with hunger. “Could it be? No, it can’t—surely not…”
His voice faded into a hush, as though even he feared the weight of the name.
But Dumbledore said nothing.
He didn’t crane forward like Slughorn. Didn’t murmur like the rest.
He simply sat, quiet as stone, his profile haloed by candlelight.
His hands lay loosely clasped on the table before him, fingers steepled, one thumb tapping—once, twice, again—in a slow, metronomic beat. His expression gave nothing away. Calm, yes. But beneath that calmness, there was a stillness so sharp it gleamed.
Not surprise. Not confusion.
Calculation.
Dumbledore wasn’t surprised.
He was measuring.
Draco could feel the weight of that gaze, like frost blooming across glass. Not cruel. Not kind. Just… total. All-seeing. Stripping.
Professor Merrythought cleared her throat softly, as if to banish the haze that had settled over the Hall. Her back was stiff, and her fingers trembled faintly as they rolled the parchment tighter in her hand.
Then, more firmly, her voice honed like a blade:
“Draco Peverell.”
It echoed.
Once.
Twice.
Then fell into silence.
No applause. No shifting. Not even the sound of cutlery or robes brushing wood.
Just silence.
Cold and pristine, like the breathless air before a snowfall.
Somewhere to Draco’s right, a first-year’s jaw hung open mid-gasp. Across the hall, a Hufflepuff girl had latched onto her friend’s sleeve, eyes wide as if she were watching a ghost step free of a grave. The Ravenclaw table was still as portraits—faces sharpened by questions they didn’t dare ask aloud.
And then there was Slytherin.
Cassian Lestrange had leaned forward now, one elegant hand cradling his chin, storm-colored eyes glittering with sudden interest. But Draco didn’t look at Lestrange.
He looked at him.
The boy beside him.
The beautiful boy who had not smiled.
The one who radiated stillness the way some people radiated heat.
The one whose presence warped the space around him like gravity.
He had not spoken. Had not moved.
Until now.
His head turned. Slowly. Precisely.
And his eyes met Draco’s across the room.
Grey met brown.
Ice met steel.
Two mirrors reflecting something neither understood—yet.
Not a flicker of warmth passed between them.
Not recognition. Not disdain.
Only the most dangerous thing of all:
Curiosity.
He stared. Draco stared back.
A single breath passed. Maybe two.
And then—Draco moved.
He stepped forward, each stride echoing like drumbeats in the silence.
The name still rang above him, woven into the rafters, clinging to the stone like a bell that had never stopped tolling.
He walked with precision, chin high, back unyielding. Every step carved into the moment with aristocratic exactness. But beneath the armor of his posture, beneath the perfectly timed gait and measured breath—his heart was a trapped creature, wild and wounded, slamming against the cage of his ribs.
He could feel the castle listening.
As if the stones of Hogwarts themselves had paused to watch.
The Sorting Hat waited.
The stool sat beneath it—ancient, worn, and carved with the dents of a hundred years of trembling children. It seemed smaller now. More intimate. As though it understood that this moment did not belong to just another student, but to something older—an echo of bloodlines, of fates tangled long before birth.
Draco reached it.
He turned, sat with grace—knees together, hands folded carefully in his lap.
Then—
The hat was lowered. The world disappeared.
And he was alone in darkness.
The brim fell, shadowing his vision in faded velvet and dust. The castle fell away. The whispers vanished. Time stilled.
And then, a voice curled into his mind like smoke.
“Oh my, oh my… What do we have here?”
A pause.
A low, amused chuckle.
“You’re not what you seem. Not at all. Layers and lies, masks over masks. And that name—Peverell.”
“A clever fiction… though such fictions come at a price. Dangerous. So very dangerous.”
Draco said nothing. He kept his mind still, like glass over a fire.
“Ah… not speaking, are we? Very good. But you’ve done this before.”
The Hat’s voice darkened, curious now, as if licking into the folds of memory.
“I can taste it… war clinging to your robes like ash. A shattered wand. A crumbling tower. Blood soaked into ancient stone. Betrayal—yes, and regret like iron around your heart. Oh, but ambition—so sharp. So bright. It hums in you like a sword still singing from the forge.”
Draco’s jaw locked. He refused to think of anything. Not Dumbledore. Not Potter. Not the green light.
“Ahh, yes… clever boy. But you can’t hide from me. I see what’s been buried. What’s been broken. I could place you in Ravenclaw, and you’d thrive—twist logic into magic like thread through a needle. Or Gryffindor, hmm? You’ve done braver things than many of them ever dared. But that would be…”
“…chaos.”
A beat of silence.
Then, almost gently:
“You want Slytherin.”
Draco inhaled slowly through his nose, his voice a whisper in thought alone:
“Slytherin.”
The Hat sighed, like a cat curling into a familiar seat.
“Ahhh… yes. That is where you’ve always belonged, isn’t it? No point delaying then. Let the serpents welcome home one of their own.”
And then—
With a roar that shattered the quiet:
“SLYTHERIN!”
The brim lifted. Light returned in a rush.
The Great Hall burst into motion, like a breath held too long finally exhaled.
At the Slytherin table, applause rose—but not in unison. It came in uneven patches: some clapping too loudly, eager to be seen applauding the infamous name; others only offering slow, tentative taps of their fingers against the wooden table, as if unsure whether to celebrate or be wary. The tension was palpable—curiosity humming through the air like static before a storm.
Cassian Lestrange was the first to react with any real weight. He didn’t clap with his hands, but struck the heel of his palm against the tabletop—once, twice, thrice. The sound was deliberate. Slow. Measured. His lip curled, not quite a smile.
Across the table, a cluster of older students leaned into one another, voices hushed and urgent. One boy narrowed his eyes. A girl with a silver-streaked braid mouthed Peverell? as though the word itself were cursed. Suspicion danced alongside fascination—some looked at Draco with wary admiration, others like he’d dragged in a ghost.
But it wasn’t them that held his attention.
It was him.
Halfway down the Slytherin table, flanked by green-and-silver robes and a flurry of hushed whispers, he sat like a figure untouched by time or noise. The commotion rippled around him—gasps, murmurs, craning necks—but he remained apart. Not excluded.
Separate.
He hadn’t applauded.
He hadn’t spoken.
He hadn’t so much as blinked when the Sorting Hat uttered the name Peverell.
He simply sat.
Hands folded with care before him, back straight, shoulders square. Not rigid like a boy afraid to move—but poised, sculpted, as if shaped from older stone than the rest. He looked like he had been carved into that seat by will alone, an unmoving axis around which the world rotated.
Dark hair. Darker eyes. A face built for secrets.
Angular, striking, cut with the kind of quiet cruelty that doesn’t need to speak to command attention.
He was staring.
Not in confusion. Not in awe.
In stillness.
With intention.
His gaze was not curious. It was clinical—calm as a scalpel held just above the skin, waiting to slice. And yet, there was no threat in it. No menace. Just a deep, unsettling attentiveness.
Draco felt it the moment their eyes locked.
The world blurred.
Silenced.
Froze.
The hall, the students, the endless babble of name and legacy—all of it dissolved into the space between two unblinking gazes.
Something passed between them.
Not warmth. Not recognition. Not even challenge.
Perhaps… a shimmer of amusement.
A breath of understanding.
The brief, electric awareness of being seen—truly seen—for what you are and what you might become.
Or maybe it was like two mirrors glimpsing one another for the first time: perfect reflections warped by time and fate, aware they are made of the same glass.
Draco looked away first.
Deliberately.
Not out of fear. Not submission.
Strategy.
He turned with elegant precision, the motion fluid, practiced, like a prince exiting court. A fourth-year Slytherin girl with ink-dark hair jumped to scoot aside, nearly upending her goblet in her haste. Wine-dark juice sloshed over the rim, unnoticed.
Her cheeks flushed crimson.
“Hi,” she whispered, breathless, eyes wide.
Draco didn’t answer. He gave a single, polished nod—just enough to be gracious, not enough to invite anything more—and lowered himself into the seat beside her.
He sat perfectly straight.
Hands folded.
Movements controlled down to the angle of his wrists, the breadth of his breath.
The name—Peverell—still lingered in the hall like smoke after a duel. Whispered through cupped hands and under breath. It floated above the rafters, coiling through candle flames and around suspended house banners like a phantom.
Even at the High Table, where ancient professors sat in worn robes and heavier thoughts, there was no escaping it.
Headmaster Dippet had risen, clearing his throat twice to speak—but his voice was thin, and his presence even thinner. Whatever welcome speech he attempted was devoured beneath the collective hum of curiosity. No one listened.
They were watching Draco.
Watching the boy who bore a name that belonged in fairy tales and funeral chants. Watching the newcomer who walked like a prince and wore the face of a question no one dared answer.
And still—he was watching too.
The boy with the cold eyes. The still stare.
The one who hadn’t flinched.
He hadn’t turned away.
Even now, as professors gathered themselves and students resumed hushed commentary, he watched.
Unblinking.
Unmoved.
Like a chess master evaluating the opening move of a very old game.
Draco didn’t look back again.
He didn’t need to.
The gaze was a pressure on the side of his face, a silent brand.
Inside, his thoughts were sharp, electric—an undercurrent of adrenaline and calculation, cold as iron in the blood.
He had done it.
He was in.
And now, he was closer than he had ever dared hope.
Somewhere in this hall—perhaps across from him, behind those unblinking eyes—was the boy who would become the Dark Lord.
Draco sat at the Slytherin table like something sculpted, not born—hewn from old marble, pale and unmoving, each angle of his body set with deliberate precision. His spine held the unwavering rigidity of tempered steel, drawn taut not by tension but by years of relentless training in grace. Shoulders squared with unconscious poise. Chin slightly elevated. He did not slouch, did not twitch. Even his silences had posture.
His hands lay atop each other, fingers lightly interlaced on the polished wood of the table—not tense, not relaxed, but suspended in that perfect stillness that suggested command without demand. He was still, not out of fear or self-consciousness, but out of mastery. Every movement was calculated, every breath paced like the ticking of a finely made watch. It was not arrogance that poured from him. It was intention.
He wore serenity like armor—crafted, custom-fitted, and immaculately maintained. His expression had been rehearsed until it became instinct: a careful blend of attentiveness and restraint. Interested, never eager. Composed, never cold. Present, yet just out of reach. The kind of face you remembered but could never quite name—both luminous and inscrutable.
The very air around him seemed to bend slightly—not with magic, not yet—but as though his presence had been inscribed into the room long before he ever walked into it. A place prepared. A role ordained.
His bearing was a masterwork of Pureblood etiquette—polished to a burnish, etched into bone and marrow by generations of ancestral pride. His every angle was symmetry. His every pause, curated. The art of stillness, the power of silence, the unsaid word that cut deeper than any shouted name—all of it had been woven into him since before he could speak.
His name might be false.
But the blood in his veins was not.
It whispered of old magic and older sins, of rules written in parchment and sealed in blood. The weight of legacy did not crush him—it balanced him, like an heirloom sword balanced in the palm.
Above him, the great banners of Slytherin stirred faintly in the enchanted breeze—green silk shifting like slow-moving serpents, their silver-threaded sigils glinting as candlelight caught the embroidered scales. Shadows coiled through the arched rafters like something alive. The ceiling above flickered with starlight and mist, a dreamscape veiled in illusion, cast over the stone-and-stained-glass bones of the hall.
To his left, a wiry fourth-year boy sat poised on the edge of a question. His dark curls flopped untidily over his brow, and his ink-stained fingertips hovered awkwardly near his mouth, as if he wasn’t sure whether to chew his nail or speak. His robes were a shade too short in the sleeves, cuffs frayed from worry or wear. A fresh smear of ink glistened on the side of his hand—an accidental brand of a mind too restless for neatness.
He kept sneaking glances at Draco.
Each time, his eyes flicked away just a heartbeat too late.
When Draco shifted—barely, just a turn of his chin—the boy flinched as if caught stealing something priceless and immediately ducked his head, flushing crimson.
Draco didn’t scowl.
He didn’t smile.
He simply looked through him, and then beyond.
Further down the Slytherin table, motion sharper than the rest rippled through the forest of emerald and silver. Cassian Lestrange was sprawled like royalty gone slightly to rot—a lounging panther in human form, elbow hooked over the bench back, every inch of him decadent with cultivated carelessness. His uniform was pristine but unbuttoned at the collar, green tie loose and askew. His dark hair tumbled across his forehead in that studied way that took effort to appear effortless.
He leaned in to speak to the fifth-year beside him—a tall boy with skin like bark and a pale scar slicing across his left cheek. The fifth-year looked only vaguely engaged, the picture of someone used to being impressed and rarely finding reason to be.
Cassian cupped his hand near his mouth, murmuring something low, lips barely moving.
But his eyes—his eyes were locked on Draco.
There was no pretense in the look.
No attempt to mask it.
Cassian’s gaze was a blade, drawn and gleaming, its edge honed not with hatred, but with interest. Dangerous interest. He was watching Draco like one watches a fire in a rival’s hearth—too warm to ignore, too dangerous to touch.
Draco didn’t blink.
He tilted his head, just enough to acknowledge it.
Just enough to let Cassian Lestrange know:
I see you.
And that—that was enough.
A flicker of a smirk tugged at the corner of Lestrange’s mouth, like he’d seen something in Draco that amused him—or threatened him. Or both.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He had stepped into their House like a whisper from a legend.
And he had no intention of fading quietly.
One of these students was the Dark Lord.
Young still.
Unshaped.
But the shadow curled around him already—like a second skin, like a promise. Somewhere in this sea of robes and candlelight and adolescent chatter, he sat. Breathing. Watching. Planning.
Draco didn’t know what name he went by.
Not yet.
But he would find it.
“Curious sort, aren’t you?”
The voice pulled him from his thoughts like a silk thread through the eye of a needle—soft, yet edged with a knowing amusement. Draco turned with all the elegance of a pivoted sculpture, each movement languid, deliberate, rehearsed.
It was the fourth-year again—the ink-stained boy with restless hands and an expression that never quite settled. He leaned forward now, elbows propped on the table, chin nestled in one palm, his ink-smudged fingers curling like question marks beneath his cheek.
“You don’t look nervous like the rest,” the boy went on, his lips tilted in a half-smirk that suggested mischief was his second language. “Even the first-years are squirming like they sat on a doxy nest.”
Draco stared at him for a moment too long. Just enough to create the pause—weighted, expectant. Silence used like a scalpel, clean and surgical. He finally inclined his chin, a gesture honed in marble halls and ancestral portraits—a nod that acknowledged but did not beckon.
“I’m not a first-year,” he said, voice low and smooth, like the slip of satin over bare stone.
“Well, obviously,” the boy chuckled, brushing a loose curl from his eyes. His fingers left a faint trail of ink across his temple. “But we don’t get transfers. Not to Hogwarts. It’s practically a myth. Name’s Gideon Foley.”
“Draco,” he returned, letting the name settle like incense in the air—smoky, suggestive, half-formed. He didn’t offer the rest. Let “Peverell” bloom on its own, whispered like spellwork behind other people’s backs, in the quiet space between belief and legend.
“I’ve… studied abroad for the last few years.”
Gideon’s eyebrows arched. “Abroad, eh? Durmstrang? You’ve got the posture for it. Like you were raised to duel at breakfast.”
“Private tutelage,” Draco replied, barely a breath of hesitation. “Though I did sit the Durmstrang assessments.”
The lie unfolded like a pressed rose—meticulously crafted, memorized to its syllables, and polished until it gleamed. He spoke it the way one might handle a family heirloom—delicately, but with practiced ownership.
Gideon let out a low whistle, impressed despite himself. “Must’ve been something, wherever it was. You’ve got the look of someone who knows a great deal more than he says.”
Draco said nothing. Just offered a smile so thin it was more gesture than expression—an etching of civility—and turned his gaze back toward the staff table.
Headmaster Dippet had risen. His presence was unassuming, but his voice, when it came, was buoyed by subtle magic—melodic, like wind passing through ancient wood.
“Welcome, one and all, to another year at Hogwarts,” he began, arms spread in a grandfatherly sweep. “I trust your journeys were safe and your appetites strong. Before we begin our feast, a few words—”
Draco tuned him out.
His eyes roamed again.
Ravenclaws sat upright and orderly, their hunger quiet, methodical. Hufflepuffs leaned into each other with easy warmth, laughter humming under their breath. Gryffindors threw back their heads, too loud, too golden, as if they’d already won something.
And then his gaze circled back to the Slytherin table—to the boy.
He sat near the far end, slightly apart, as if he’d drawn an invisible perimeter around himself. Fifth year, maybe sixth. His robes hung perfectly, draped with the casual exactitude of someone who did not dress, but was dressed. His hair, dark and thick, curled just slightly at the nape of his neck, framing a profile carved in severity—high cheekbones like blades, a jawline cut from granite.
He spoke to the girl beside him, not animatedly, but in low, exacting tones. His lips moved like he weighed each word, rolled it in his mouth first to test its shape.
No wasted syllables.
No unnecessary smiles.
He didn’t fidget. He didn’t preen. He watched.
And when his gaze lifted—cool, unhurried—it found Draco’s as if summoned.
Their eyes locked.
It was not a glance. It was not a mistake. It was an intention, as palpable as the static that clings to the air before lightning strikes.
Something sharp lanced through Draco’s chest. Not pain. Not fear. Something else—quicker, hotter. Recognition, perhaps. Or challenge.
The boy gave no nod, no smile of acknowledgment. His gaze was flat, unreadable, like a still pond with depths that refused to reflect. Then he turned back to his conversation, unbothered, unmoved.
Draco exhaled—quietly, carefully—and looked away, spine held straight as a drawn wand.
At the staff table, Dippet was still speaking, “…and so, let the feast—begin!”
A swell of magic rippled through the air, and the long tables bloomed with food—platters of roast chicken, tureens of steaming potatoes, glistening pies and overflowing goblets. The students cheered, chairs scraped, hands reached.
Draco did not move. Not yet.
He sat still amid the rising noise, gaze dipped low, pulse steadying. Across the room, the boy hadn’t glanced his way again.
But the silence between them had been enough to crack something open.
And he knew—unequivocally—that it wasn’t over.
With a rush of golden light, the platters lining the long tables shimmered into existence—groaning under the weight of roasted game hens lacquered in herb butter, bowls of glazed carrots and charred sprouts, honey-glossed parsnips, and braided loaves so fresh they still steamed in the candlelight. The scent that rose was decadent: clove and thyme, cinnamon and fat, and something faintly sweet that reminded Draco of Yule dinners he hadn’t attended in years. It swept through the Hall like an enchantment, scattering tension like frightened birds.
All around him, the feast ignited movement. Goblets filled themselves with pumpkin juice and wine. Silverware scraped against polished plates. Laughter bloomed like wildflowers—some nervous, some raucous, all eager.
Draco didn’t move.
The boy—that boy—still lingered in his mind. The tilt of his head, the way he spoke without smiling, the razor-edge of intelligence behind his eyes. A gaze that didn’t just see but evaluated.
Draco lifted his goblet at last, the metal cool against his fingers, and sipped. Not because he was thirsty, but because movement often disguised unease. He wouldn’t allow himself to be caught staring again.
Beside him, Gideon Foley had already made quick work of a chicken leg. He chewed with singular determination, blotting his mouth with a napkin more out of habit than grace. “I swear,” he mumbled, waving the stripped bone vaguely in Draco’s direction, “you Pureblood types are born with silver cutlery stuck in your mouths. Don’t you eat?”
The comment might have irritated someone else. But Draco merely considered him, head tilted, lips poised between interest and amusement.
Half-blood, he thought, not unkindly. The name Foley was vaguely familiar—wizarding, yes, but not one of the old pillars. Not in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Certainly not in the ledgers that had once been gospel in the Malfoy household.
Foley had ink-stained fingers, the kind that spoke of quills clutched too long. He slouched without shame. He spoke without calculation. He gestured—gods forbid—at a dinner table. He had the air of someone who had grown up dodging expectations rather than being crushed under them.
Possibly Muggle lineage on one side. Maybe took his mother’s name to avoid scandal, Draco mused. Entirely plausible. There were families that had splintered under the weight of blood purism, names buried under marriages and migrations, cloaked in anonymity for survival. Especially during the war.
Draco stored the details away. He wasn’t judging. Not exactly.
It was cataloguing. Strategy.
“I eat,” Draco said at last, voice a low drawl wrapped in silk and detachment. He selected a single roasted potato with the delicate precision of a surgeon and placed it deliberately on his plate. “Eventually.”
In Pureblood circles, etiquette wasn’t just a matter of manners — it was survival. To eat too quickly, especially at a feast, was a mark of desperation or poor breeding. It whispered hunger, weakness, or worse: poverty. Draco had been raised with the rules engraved deep into his bones. To take time, to savor, to hold back — that was how a pureblood ate. How he asserted control. How he declared belonging.
“You’re not gonna last if you don’t eat, mate,” called a voice further down the table—Felix, one of the boys from the train. His cheeks were pink from wine or nerves. “The dungeons are cold.”
Draco’s gaze flicked toward him, cool but not unkind. A single brow arched. “And you plan to warm them with sugar fumes from all those pasties you’ve devoured?”He picked up a small roasted potato, turning it slowly on his fork before setting it carefully on his plate.
Felix coughed a laugh, nearly choking on a bite of treacle tart. “Fair,” he said, swiping at his mouth with the sleeve of his jumper. “But you try resisting sweets when your nerves are screaming.”
Draco allowed the barest twitch of amusement to brush his lips, but before he could reply, a new voice — sharp, cold, and unmistakably aristocratic — cut through the easy warmth like a blade.
“Peverell?”
The voice cut through the warmth like ice across skin. Cold. Aristocratic. Drenched in disdain.
Draco turned with deliberate slowness.
The boy was older—sixth year, by the badge. He reclined with the indolent grace of a lounging predator. Raven-dark curls framed a face carved in sharp angles, and his green-and-silver robes hung with the heavy weight of affluence. There was no mistaking the blood in that bone structure. Lestrange. The resemblance to Cassian was unmistakable.
The boy’s smile was sharp, carnivorous. “Really? Peverell? Or are you just another pretender hoping a dead name might buy you prestige?”
The Slytherin table shifted like a living creature—spines straightening, hands freezing mid-bite, heads turning toward the source of tension. There was blood in the water now. And Slytherins had always been excellent sharks.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He remained as he was: still, composed, fingers loosely laced before his untouched meal. The flicker of candlelight caught the pale cut of his cheekbones, the silver of his cufflink. He radiated the kind of effortless calm that came not from confidence, but from calculation.
“If I were pretending,” he said softly, the syllables smooth as pouring wine, “I’d have chosen something less conspicuous. A name like ‘Peverell’ invites scrutiny. Unless, of course, that was the point.”
Lestrange’s sneer deepened. He leaned forward, voice dipped in contempt. “Exactly. The kind of name someone desperate might pick. Desperate for a legacy. For attention. For the kind of respect they couldn’t earn.”
The tension sharpened to a knife-edge. Across the table, even Felix had gone still. Foley watched with narrowed eyes, like someone unsure whether he was about to witness a duel or a public evisceration.
Draco tilted his head slightly—a movement as subtle as it was lethal.
“Desperation,” he said, voice low and lethal, “is loud. Clumsy. Transparent.”
His gaze dropped, slow and dismissive, then rose again to lock eyes with the Lestrange boy.
“Like you.”
There was a ripple of sound—gasp, chuckle, breath sucked through teeth—rising like wind through reeds. A few first-years exchanged wide-eyed glances. One of the girls choked on her pumpkin juice. Even Gideon Foley looked mildly impressed.
Lestrange’s jaw clenched. His hand slipped beneath the table—fingers twitching toward his wand—
And then, like a blade through fog:
“Enough.”
The word was barely a whisper. But it stopped everything.
The boy at the end of the table—him—had spoken.
Draco didn’t look, not yet. He didn’t need to.
He could feel it. The shift in the room. The way eyes turned toward the source like iron filings drawn to a lodestone. Even Lestrange stilled, though the fury still burned hot across his cheekbones.
There was a new gravity at the table now. Not just tension. Not just pride.
Power.
And Draco, eyes still fixed calmly on the boy across from him, smiled a fraction deeper.
The game had begun.
The boy who had spoken sat slightly apart from the loudest cluster at the Slytherin table, like a figure misplaced from another century. It was him — the one who had caught Draco’s attention with a single, lingering glance earlier. He hadn’t spoken during the feast. Hadn’t fidgeted. Hadn’t laughed. He simply existed, quiet and immutable, like some elegant constant beneath the chaos.
And now, as he lifted his head, every inch of him seemed to settle into focus — impossibly vivid, like the first drawing of breath after a dream.
Dark curls, sleek and slightly tousled, framed his face in a way that looked more painted than natural — not a strand out of place, yet not rigid either. His features were achingly symmetrical, the kind of perfection that felt almost unreal. High, aristocratic cheekbones cast delicate shadows down to a sculpted mouth, full and pale and finely cut, as if drawn with deliberate, loving cruelty. His skin was porcelain-pale, smooth as if untouched by weather or time, and glowing faintly under the golden torchlight.
Draco’s breath caught before he could stop it.
And his eyes — Merlin, his eyes — were bottomless. At first glance, they seemed black, hollow and consuming. But when the light struck just right, Draco caught a glimmer of something deeper: a maroon undertone, like old wine or dried blood. A secret hue, seen only if one dared to look too long. Lashes long enough to cast shadows curled dark against his cheeks. His expression was unreadable — not cold, precisely, but ancient. Like someone who had outgrown the need for pretense.
When he finally leaned forward — slow, deliberate — it was with the grace of a creature that had never stumbled in its life. One arm extended to the edge of the table, wrist draped like spilled ink across green velvet. He moved as though gravity bent around him, not the other way around. Possessing, without trying, the space between breath and sound.
And then he smiled.
A sliver of movement at the corner of his lips. Not friendly. Not mocking. A smile like a knife’s glint: beautiful, polished, and cruel.
“I rather like our new addition,” he said at last, voice smooth as silk dragged across a blade. There was something ancient in his cadence, something old and slow and knowing. “He doesn’t bark. Doesn’t bow. It’s refreshing.”
There was no applause. No agreement. Only silence — thick and brittle — curling around his words like smoke. The Lestrange boy, who had moments ago wielded the table’s attention like a knife, now sat stock-still, his lips drawn tight over whatever insult he had meant to hurl next. His gaze dropped, not submissively, but in retreat. The tension he’d conjured evaporated, the way a spell fizzles when met with truer magic.
Draco’s heartbeat quickened — not from fear. Not exactly. It was something else. A pull. An ache.
Recognition.
Something in him — some half-buried instinct — lit up in alarm. And awe. This boy… was different. Not just different — wrong. Or right, in a way the world had forgotten how to be.
The boy’s eyes flicked back to him — not in passing this time, but with full, deliberate intent. They pinned Draco in place like an insect beneath glass. Like something rare, perhaps dangerous. A curiosity to be dissected. A riddle already half-solved.
“And you are?” he asked, voice low and silken, as if spoken not aloud, but into the quiet place between their heartbeats.The boy hadn’t asked out of ignorance. He knew exactly who Draco was — he’d heard the name, felt its weight, measured it. But asking was tradition. A formality etched into the bones of pureblood custom, where power came dressed in courtesy and names were spoken like spells. It wasn’t about curiosity.
It was about control.
The noise of the Great Hall dulled around them — muffled and distant, as though the world had receded to a blurred backdrop.
Draco inclined his head in a poised, deliberate motion — every line of his body a lesson in control. Shoulders set. Chin slightly elevated. Eyes unwavering. He spoke with the carefully-measured cadence of someone who had been raised to command a room with nothing but the stillness of their presence.
“Draco Peverell.”
The name hung in the air like incense — old, strange, and unmistakably charged.
The boy — no, not a boy, not really — repeated it slowly, as if committing it to memory letter by letter.
“Peverell…”
He said it the way one might taste blood on the back of the tongue — savoring its texture, its power, its implications. The syllables unfurled with reverence, but something darker curled beneath them. A flicker behind those deep, wine-dark eyes. Ancient. A tremor not of surprise, but recognition.
A shadow passed across his lashes, faint but unmistakable — like something old stirring behind the smooth façade. When he smiled again, it wasn’t with amusement. It was intent made visible. Precision honed into elegance. A blade slipping from its sheath.
“A name rooted in myth and death,” he murmured, voice like crushed velvet — soft, textured, strangely intimate. “Quite the legacy.”
Draco didn’t so much as blink. His posture didn’t falter. His voice, when it came, was cool and cultivated, edged with the pride of old houses and older blood. “And yours?”
That smile deepened.
But it was no longer human.
It twisted — slowly, luxuriously — like a serpent coiling through silk sheets. The corners of his lips curved upward in a manner too precise, too perfect, too deliberate to be anything but performance. Candlelight kissed the angles of his face, throwing half of it into shadow — a chiaroscuro that made him look carved from marble, cold and holy, beautiful in a way that hurt.
He looked like a statue designed to be adored and feared in equal measure. The kind of face that demanded devotion — and punished the audacity of it.
Something unseen slithered through the air between them. A chill that had nothing to do with the torches or the dungeons.
“Tom,” he said simply, offering no hand. “Tom Riddle.”
The name landed like thunder in Draco’s mind.
Riddle.
The syllables echoed, jarring — wrong. So wrong. And yet… exactly right.
Voldemort.
The thought struck with the clarity of a spell. He hadn’t said it aloud, but every hair on Draco’s arms stood upright as if he had. That name — Riddle — it was his. It had to be. And for the first time, Draco understood why the Dark Lord had shed it like old skin.
Of course he had. It was obvious now.
Riddle wasn’t a Pureblood name.
And no Pureblood would ever deny their heritage — unless there was nothing to boast of. Unless it was a name born of shame. Of compromise. Of Muggle blood.
Draco had never questioned it before. No one had. The Dark Lord spoke Parseltongue — and everyone had taken that as proof. A descendant of Salazar Slytherin had to be a Pureblood, didn’t he?
But Slytherin’s magic wasn’t tied to blood. It was tied to lineage. And lineage, Draco now saw, didn’t always mean purity. Not in the way the Sacred Twenty-Eight measured it.
Perhaps Voldemort had once been Tom Riddle — a name that meant nothing. A name that begged to be erased. And now Draco was sitting across from that name, wrapped in alabaster skin and coiled power, too young and too beautiful to know the monster he would one day become.
He’s here.
He’s young. He’s beautiful. And he doesn’t know yet who he is.
The realization settled in Draco’s stomach like ice. It made his next breath shallow. His pulse thundered behind his ribs. But his face — his face did not betray him.
He blinked once, slowly. Composed himself. Made his breath even. His spine tall. His gaze level.
“Well, Tom,” he said, voice quiet but crisp as frost, “I suppose we’ll see if I live up to the name.”
Tom tilted his head, just slightly — like a predator considering a new sound. His eyes glittered with interest, deep and molten. Something flickered behind them: not joy, not yet, but curiosity.
A crack in the eternal stillness.
A flicker of something possessive.
Or hungry.
“We will,” he said simply.
The words hung in the air between them like an oath.
Slowly, the noise around them resumed — cautious conversations flickering to life again like candles after a storm. But the temperature at the Slytherin table had changed. There was something colder now. Sharper. A wire pulled taut between two names.
Draco Peverell.
Tom Riddle.
And the thread of fate — thin as spider-silk, bright as iron — had just begun to draw them closer.
Gideon nudged Draco beneath the table, his elbow brushing against Draco’s ribs with the gentlest pressure — a signal, a breath, barely there. His voice was hushed, reverent in a way usually reserved for ghosts or gods. “Sweet Merlin,” he whispered as if afraid the boy at the end of the table might hear it across the air itself. “That’s Tom Riddle. Top marks in every subject. Prefect in his fourth year. Brilliant. Terrifying. Everyone listens when he talks — even the professors.”
Draco didn’t respond.
He didn’t need to.
He knew exactly who Tom Riddle was — or rather, would be. The boy sitting down the table wasn’t just a prodigy. He was prophecy. He was nightmare. And yet… he wore the mask of a god.
Draco had heard stories whispered in corridors, behind the curtains of war rooms and Order camps, back when people still believed Voldemort had once been mortal. Tales of his youth — how the Dark Lord hadn’t always looked like the snake-eyed horror he would become. No, before that, he had been charming. Charismatic. Lethally intelligent. There had been something magnetic about him. Something that drew others in, like moths to flame — not because of fear, not yet — but because of how beautiful he had been. How devastatingly brilliant.
Now, seeing it with his own eyes, Draco understood.
It wasn’t just legend.
Tom Riddle’s beauty was unnatural.
Something caught halfway between art and nightmare. His skin held the stillness of marble beneath candlelight, pale and fine as porcelain. Dark curls fell with effortless grace across his brow, each one sculpted like ink in water, as if he were a painting someone had breathed life into. His lashes were too long, too dark — the kind you only saw on storybook illustrations, never real boys. His lips, even when still, looked on the edge of something — a smile, a threat, a promise. And his eyes…
Gods, his eyes.
At a glance, they seemed black. But when the light caught them — when you truly looked — there was burgundy, rich and glinting, like old blood drying on silk. They weren’t just eyes. They were doors. Deep, silent doors to a place that had never known light. You didn’t notice the danger until you were already falling. And that was the trick — that was the trap.
You wanted to fall.
Draco could see now how others had fallen. This was how it had happened.
How they’d followed him. Not out of fear — not at first — but out of longing. Because Tom Riddle didn’t need to demand loyalty. He inspired devotion. He made you want to be chosen. Made you crave the heat of his gaze like a blessing. And when it finally landed on you, you felt known.
Unmade.
Rewritten.
That was the true horror.
He made people feel seen.
Chosen.
Even now, even across this expanse of polished wood and empty plates and carefully folded hands, Draco felt it — the slow weight of Tom Riddle’s attention like a velvet noose. Just enough to tighten the air. Just enough to make it hard to breathe.
And beneath it all — that power.
Unspoken, unshowy, but undeniable. It radiated off him like heat from a dying star. You couldn’t see it. You didn’t have to. You just knew. Every inch of him was coiled with something waiting to be unleashed. Magic as sharp and silent as razors buried in snow.
His magical feats were the stuff of whispered awe, even decades later. Legends cloaked in silence. Professors in Draco’s time had dropped their voices when they spoke of Voldemort’s brilliance — not just out of fear, but reverence. Terrible… but great. A phrase murmured like a confession, as if genius could excuse monstrosity. Dumbledore had never spoken the name without a shadow passing through his eyes — as though he were remembering something too heavy to name.
And now Draco understood.
The boy across from him wasn’t merely talented. He wasn’t simply gifted or clever or precocious. No — Tom Riddle wore power like a second skin, effortless and unbearable all at once. It hummed around him like static before a storm.
Controlled.
Contained.
But there.
It was the kind of magic that bent around him like light — not obeying him, but recognizing him.
And that was the most terrifying part.
He didn’t force the world to notice him.
It already had.
He was terrifying.
And yet…
None of it surprised Draco.
He had expected brilliance. Expected power, control, beauty that veered into the uncanny. What no one else knew — could know — was what lay curled beneath that marble surface. The dark, coiling thing that would one day wear no mask at all.
Lord Voldemort.
Draco stared at him now — this boy with the calm gaze and cutting smile — and saw both. The past and the future. The student and the tyrant. The serpent, still in its skin.
And in that moment, Draco knew one simple truth.
He had just walked into the spider’s web.
Willingly.
Because he had to.
To dismantle the spider, one had to step into its lair.
And let it look you in the eye.
And smile.
As the ambient chatter returned to the Great Hall like the slow trickle of a reawakened stream, a sudden bark of laughter broke through it—sharp, bright, and unrepentant. The laughter cut through the lingering tension like a knife through silk.
Cassian Lestrange.
The younger Lestrange brother was folded in half a little farther down the Slytherin table, his wiry frame trembling with delight. One hand clutched his stomach while the other slapped the polished wood, sending silverware rattling. His dark curls bounced wildly with every snicker, a tangle of chaotic mirth. “Did you see his face?” he cackled, practically breathless as Elias stiffly sank back onto the bench, dignity dripping from him like blood from a fresh wound. “Merlin’s balls — I haven’t seen Elias that speechless since Mother caught him charming the family owl to sing Celestina Warbeck!”
Cassian collapsed into a fit of laughter again, the sound loud and feral. “Oh, sweet Salazar,” he gasped between hiccups of glee. “You called him transparent. That was bloody brilliant.”
A ripple spread down the Slytherin table — not a wave, not yet, but the first tremors of it. Smirks twisted otherwise composed mouths. Shoulders trembled with barely-contained chuckles. A few students leaned close to whisper behind goblets or let their laughter melt into coughs. The tension that had choked the air minutes before was lifting, fractured by the force of ridicule.
Tom Riddle’s shadow still stretched across the table like spilled ink, but the ice beneath it had cracked.
Elias sat rigid, his back straight but brittle, the muscles in his jaw flexing tight. His skin had gone a blotchy, humiliating shade of red — one of those full-bodied flushes that climbed from collarbone to cheekbone, betraying pride wounded beyond repair. His glare found his brother with all the venom of a viper freshly stepped on. “Shut up, Cassian,” he bit out, voice like a splinter under the nail.
Cassian only grinned wider — a grin too bright, too toothy, too shark-like for a boy of fourteen. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” he said, voice low and lazy as he leaned in. “You’ve been strutting around like a pureblood prince since last spring. About time someone chipped the polish off that statue head of yours.”
He jabbed an elbow into Felix’s side, urging agreement.
Felix jumped slightly, still staring down the table as if trying to piece together what had just happened. His eyes hadn’t left the other end of the table, where Draco sat — composed, unreadable, unknowable. Felix’s fingers toyed absently with the silver ring on his thumb, spinning it without thought, gaze distant and glassy.
“He really is something, isn’t he?” Felix murmured at last. His voice was soft, reverent even — the kind of tone people used when describing cathedrals or cursed things. “Like he just walked out of a storybook.”
Cassian snorted. “More like a cautionary tale,” he muttered — but the glint in his eye said he wasn’t sure whether that made Draco more dangerous… or more interesting.
Draco didn’t respond — he didn’t need to. The shift in power had already settled over the table like a fresh coat of frost. Elias might recover eventually, patch together his pride with the careful lies of hindsight, but for tonight, the sting of public humiliation would cling to him like oil. Thick. Unshakable. Slow to fade.
Draco’s gaze drifted back to Tom Riddle.
At first, he’d assumed the boy wasn’t wearing a prefect’s badge. It hadn’t caught the light — hadn’t made itself known. But now, beneath the flickering chandeliers and the heightened clarity that followed power’s scent like blood in water, he saw it: a silver glint at the lapel, half-concealed by the edge of Tom’s robes.
Not flaunted. Not offered.
Claimed.
It shimmered like something sharp tucked into a glove — not a decoration, but a weapon.
Riddle sat with the same flawless composure as before, as though the earlier exchange had been nothing more than a momentary breeze stirring the surface of a still lake. He didn’t gloat. He didn’t smirk.
Instead, he sliced into a roast potato with clinical precision, his silver fork gliding through the crisp skin as though performing delicate surgery. Even that small motion held intent — practiced, quiet, devastating.
And yet Draco could feel it.
The boy’s attention, still resting on him. Not openly. Not directly. But there, all the same — cold, exacting, and razor-honed, like a blade drawn behind smoke.
Thin as mist.
Impossible to escape.
He couldn’t keep his eyes from him. Fortunately, Draco had long since mastered the art of observation — of watching without being watched. A skill forged in drawing rooms and courtrooms, in Malfoy Manor’s echoing halls, beneath portraits that saw too much and spoke too little.
The feast wound toward its end. Golden platters shimmered briefly before clearing themselves, their bounty vanishing with the soft clink of enchanted silver. Voices dipped into murmurs. Benches scraped, robes rustled, and the energy in the room began to shift — the collective motion of a castle exhaling.
Then: a shadow passed over the table.
Tom Riddle stood.
He rose with the kind of elegance that made the rest of the world seem clumsy — each movement slow, unhurried, deliberate, like time itself bowed to let him pass. He adjusted the fall of his robe with a flick of his wrist, gaze sweeping down the length of the Slytherin table.
His expression was unreadable.
But absolute.
“First-years,” he said — and though the words weren’t barked, they cut cleanly through the din. “With me.”
Then, after a pause:
“And Peverell.”
No glance. No gesture.
Just the name. Spoken like invocation. A word with weight. With purpose.
Draco moved before thought had the chance to catch up to action, his legs obeying some deeper instinct. A hush followed his motion, subtle but sharp. Even Cassian fell quiet, the wild grin on his face erased in an instant — as though the air itself had turned to glass.
An older prefect, broad-shouldered and usually smug, rose quickly to fall into step behind Riddle — his obedience quiet, practiced. The kind of silence that spoke of long study, long reverence. The silence of someone who had learned how not to be noticed when standing too close to danger.
Draco’s pulse slowed. Not out of calm — but focus.
Every nerve sharpened. Every breath deliberate.
They descended into the dungeons.
The air grew denser, colder. The scent of stone thickened — wet and mineral-rich, tinged with the iron memory of time and things better left buried. The corridor narrowed, the ceiling dipping low enough to brush taller heads. Walls wept with moisture, and the torches lining them sputtered with pale green-gold flame, casting elongated shadows that danced like restless spirits along the ancient rock.
Their footsteps echoed together — a syncopated rhythm of control and nerves.
The first-years murmured among themselves in uncertain whispers, eyes darting. They didn’t yet know what to fear — but they felt it. Something older than rules, older than the castle itself, walked ahead of them. Something born not from authority, but from inevitability.
Tom never looked back.
He didn’t need to.
He led them down a final corridor, narrow and echoing, where two carved serpents wound together above an archway — their stone eyes set with green gems that flickered in the torchlight like watching things. They came to a halt before a blank expanse of wall, its surface worn smooth by time and secrets.
A lantern flickered nearby, casting an eerie, otherworldly green glow that limned Riddle’s face in spectral light.
Riddle turned at last, folding his hands neatly behind his back.
He gave the traditional Slytherin welcome with the calm assurance of someone who was the tradition. His voice was like black velvet — smooth, slow, dragging across skin.
“The password is Aquila venator,” he said. “You will memorize it. It changes weekly. Fail to remember it…”
A pause, delicate as a knife’s edge.
“…and you sleep in the corridor.”
His tone made it sound like a fact of nature, not a threat.
Several students nodded too quickly. One girl — small, bird-boned, with hair like static and eyes far too large — nodded so fiercely she nearly tipped forward. The boy next to her pulled her upright with a furtive tug.
Draco didn’t nod. Didn’t blink. He simply watched.
There was no anger in Tom’s face. No cruelty.
Just order.
And beneath it… something that pulsed in silence. A hunger not yet named.
Draco knew what that hunger would become.
He’d seen its future.
And now, here he was — walking willingly into the lair of the boy who would one day become the monster.
But for now, Tom was still a boy.
Young.
Beautiful.
And unknowing.
The wall groaned with a serpentine hiss, and stone began to ripple — not shatter or split, but melt, as if memory itself were being unspooled. The ancient rock folded back on itself in soft, fluid waves, revealing a yawning archway where there had been none. It was like watching the castle exhale.
Beyond it lay the Slytherin common room — a cavern of brooding majesty nestled beneath the black lake, as hushed and deep as the sea floor.
The space beyond unfurled with quiet opulence. Nestled beneath the black lake, the Slytherin common room welcomed them like the belly of a leviathan—dark, vast, ancient.Emerald light filtered in through towering, arched windows submerged beneath water, casting undulating shadows across the stone floor like silk veils rippling in a current. Moonlight fractured into silver scales across the furniture, broken and beautiful.
Columns of dark stone rose like petrified serpents, entwined and regal. Silver sconces—each one carved into the snarling mouths of open-mouthed vipers—burned with a pale, ghostly flame that never flickered. The fire didn’t warm. It illuminated. Cold and precise.
Tapestries lined the walls, their threads shifting in color with the shadows — jade melting into black, ink blooming into deep green. Coiled serpents stitched in charmed embroidery slithered just beneath the surface, never quite still. They watched with jeweled eyes.
Draco paused at the threshold.
He hadn’t seen it in years.
It felt like stepping into a memory that no longer belonged to him—a second skin worn by someone who no longer existed. The air was cooler here, damp and faintly metallic, filled with the scent of stone and time.
Tom’s voice broke the silence like a needle through velvet — smooth, precise, edged with command that didn’t need to declare itself.
It simply was.
“Dorms,” he said. “First-years down this hall. Six bunks — girls to the left, boys to the right.”
His voice was steady, clipped but unhurried — the kind that made you lean in, not out.
“Keep your things in order. Keep your mouths shut after lights-out. And don’t touch anything that looks older than you.”
A beat. His gaze swept the group, lingering just long enough to feel.
“Especially if it hums.”
There was an uneasy shuffle. One boy gripped the strap of his satchel like a lifeline. The girl with flyaway hair gave a start, eyes darting to a burnished mirror set into the stone — its glass fogged, frame carved into a gilded serpent’s grin.
But Tom was no longer watching them.
He was watching him.
Just as Draco stepped over the threshold, a hand closed around his forearm — firm but not forceful. The grip was slender, cool, precise as the snap of a wand into a palm.
“Not you,” Tom murmured.
The words weren’t loud, but they cracked through the chamber like a string pulled taut.
The others hesitated. They felt it — something in the timbre that laced beneath order. Older than authority. Older than rule.
Wordlessly, they obeyed.
One by one, they crossed the threshold. The wall sealed behind them with a sound like stone swallowing stone — a heavy, sinuous shudder. They were gone. And the two of them remained.
Alone.
They were alone now, the corridor lit only by flickering green torchlight, shadows licking up the walls like smoke made solid. Somewhere deeper in the dungeon, water dripped in slow, echoing intervals.
Tom’s hand lingered for a second too long before letting go.
Then he simply looked at Draco.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say he studied him.
The kind of gaze reserved for relics—dangerous, divine, half-lost to time.
His eyes moved like a slow incantation, tracing every detail as though committing it to memory. There was no hunger in the stare — not yet. Only reverence.
But it was the reverence of a collector.
A boy who knew he’d found something meant to belong to him.
And would find the name for it later.
Draco stood with the stillness of someone born to be watched—shoulders relaxed, yet spine unyieldingly straight, as if posture itself were a spell he’d mastered young. He carried himself like a wand drawn but not yet raised—composed, precise, perilous only to those who knew what to look for.
His hair—platinum, impossibly fine—gleamed like a sliver of moonlight carved from winter, parted neatly to the side and swept just above the delicate arches of his ears. Even under the cold green flicker of the torchlight, it looked soft, touchable, the way silk catches on skin. His complexion was ghost-pale, almost translucent in the underwater glow—porcelain over steel, snow that might never melt.
His face was a contradiction made flesh. All the sculpted purity of old blood—high, noble cheekbones, a blade-straight nose, the elegant jawline of someone bred for portraits—tempered by the gentler curve of his lips, too full for austerity. Lashes long enough to belong to someone else. And his eyes—those eyes—were silver-blue, sharp as a whetted edge, but cold, distant, the kind of eyes you didn’t meet by accident.
He was tall. Lithe rather than slight, his frame carried no excess, but the line of his shoulders and the length of his stride hinted at quiet strength—like a blade sheathed beneath silk. Every movement was deliberate, fluid. The kind of grace that couldn’t be learned, only inherited.
And Tom noticed everything.
His gaze moved slowly, deliberately, over Draco’s figure—studying, cataloging, dissecting. Not like a boy looking at another. Like a collector before a relic. Like a scholar before a forbidden script. Something flickered behind his eyes—recognition, curiosity, or perhaps the low ember of something far less nameable.
Then, without blinking, Tom asked,
“Why were you staring at me?”
The question hung in the air—It wasn’t an accusation.
It wasn’t even curiosity.
It was a statement masked as a question, spoken with the effortless detachment of someone who already knew the answer but wanted to hear how it would be shaped aloud. There was no visible tension in him—yet the air around his words was drawn tight, like the bowstring just before it sings.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He could feel the weight of the question pulling at the edge of silence, a fishing line cast into deep water, daring him to tug back.
He raised a single brow—imperceptibly. A gesture so slight it might have gone unnoticed if Tom weren’t watching him so closely.
“I wasn’t,” Draco said, voice low and precise, each syllable carved from frost.
“Not in the way you’re asking.”
Tom tilted his head just slightly, like a snake adjusting its angle before striking.
“Then how was I looking?” he asked. Not demanded—invited. Almost amused.
There was something near-amused in the words, as if he were paging through a riddle and savoring the slowness of its unfolding.
Draco’s expression remained unreadable, but there was something dangerous in his calm. He took a step forward, closing the distance between them by a hand’s width. The flickering green torchlight danced in the sharp planes of his face—reflected off the glacier blue of his irises.
“Like someone who sees too much,” Draco murmured.
“Like someone used to being watched. And knowing it.”
A pause. Sharp and quick. Not his.
Tom inhaled once—quiet, almost soundless—but Draco caught it anyway. And in that silence, something shifted. Not visibly. Not physically. But the atmosphere drew thinner, the shadows deeper, the distance between breath and meaning more brittle.Tom’s eyes narrowed faintly, not in anger but focus—like he was parsing an equation that had just become more interesting.
Draco continued before Tom could speak again, his voice still soft—drawling, almost lazy—but with the practiced edge of a scalpel. “You sat down tonight without a badge. And now you’re leading prefect patrol.”
His gaze flicked—not casually, but deliberately—to the glint of green and silver now gleaming like a serpent’s eye at Tom’s collarbone. “That tells me three things. One—you took it from someone. Two—someone gave it to you.”
He paused, his voice thinning to a blade’s whisper, threaded with amused insight.
“And three—the most likely—you hid it. Wore it tucked away, unseen, until the moment it suited you to be seen. Until you needed authority.”
The green firelight from the torches licked at his cheekbones as he spoke, casting shifting shadows across the pale sculpture of his face. His eyes shimmered like moonlight over moving water—quicksilver and sharp, never still.
Tom’s lips curved, a motion as subtle as the stir of wind before a storm. Almost a smirk—but not quite. It didn’t touch his eyes, which remained as flat and depthless as black ice.
“And what does that tell you?” he asked, voice low, measured.
Dangerous.
Draco leaned in—not enough to break the rules of propriety, but enough to suggest he knew them well enough to bend them without consequence. The air between them was sharp now, charged, like the breath before lightning.
“That you’re not half as interested in me staring,” Draco said, tone gliding just shy of a taunt, “as you are in why I did.”
His tone hovered just below a taunt, like a chess piece moved not out of necessity—but to provoke.
Tom stilled.
Not visibly, not to the untrained eye—but Draco noticed.
The quiet drawing in of breath, the slight drop of Tom’s lashes, the restraint coiling in his spine.
The shift in air.
The tension between them stretched—taut, humming—like the moment before a spell is cast.
Tom studied him again, this time slower.
Deliberate.
His eyes traced the contours of Draco’s face:
The platinum hair, soft as crushed silk, gleaming like starlight in the green torchglow.
A mouth too finely drawn for cruelty, but too knowing to be innocent.
And those eyes—impossibly ancient, as if they’d stared through lifetimes and come back colder for it.
A flicker passed through Tom’s expression.
Something dark.
Something curious.
His fingers twitched faintly at his side, as though suppressing the instinct to reach forward—to test the texture of truth on Draco’s skin.
“You’re not like the others,” Tom said at last, his voice a slow pour of dark velvet—smooth, rich, with a whisper of something lethal curled inside it.
It wasn’t a question.
Draco tilted his head, a fraction of a movement—measured, precise.
Calculated.
His face remained unreadable, sculpted in cool precision and quiet defiance.
“Neither are you.”
A flicker passed across Tom’s mouth. Not quite a smile—more like the ghost of one. The suggestion of teeth.
He stepped closer.
Not enough to threaten—but enough that the air shifted between them, drawn tight with static, charged like the space between a struck match and the moment it ignites. His presence didn’t announce itself so much as unfurl, coiling in silent precision. He moved like someone who had never tasted hesitation—each footfall placed with the slow inevitability of gravity, as though the very stones of the corridor reshaped themselves to suit his will.
Tom Riddle stopped just short of intimacy, the hem of his robe brushing the edge of Draco’s.
“You humiliated Elias Lestrange in front of half the table,” he said, voice low, coaxing, threaded with a curiosity too quiet to be casual. “And you did it without raising your voice. That’s not something most first-years could accomplish.”
The ghost of a smile flickered across Draco’s lips—not quite amusement, not quite warning. It curled there like smoke, vanishing before it fully took form.
“I don’t enjoy shouting,” he said coolly. A beat passed. “And I’m not a first-year.”
Tom inclined his head in faint acknowledgment, shadows shifting across his cheekbones like ink poured into water.
“No,” he murmured, his gaze holding Draco’s like a mirror might hold a reflection—unblinking, deliberate. “But you understand how to make yourself heard.”
It wasn’t praise.
Not truly.
The words had weight—an evaluation more than admiration, as though Tom were measuring him against some invisible ledger. The subtle drag of scales tipping.
Testing.
His eyes swept over Draco again, unflinching, dissecting. Not with the lust of a boy, but the slow, clinical scrutiny of a collector appraising something rare—and possibly cursed. A relic unearthed from beneath centuries of ash and silence.
“And your name,” Tom went on, voice dropping like velvet across a blade, “You wear it like armor.”
His gaze sharpened, gleamed.
“But armor,” he continued, “can become a coffin, if worn too tightly.”
Draco’s lashes lowered, half-lidding his eyes as something dark stirred beneath them.
A glimmer, silver and sharp.
“That sounds like something said by someone who tried to take theirs off,” he replied, voice like cracked porcelain—elegant, dangerous.
A breath of stillness passed. Tom’s head tilted, just enough to cast one side of his face in shadow.
“Perhaps,” he said.
Then he stepped back—not in retreat, but with the calculated grace of someone offering space only to observe what you’d do with it.
Yet the air between them didn’t loosen. The thread that had spun taut between their bodies held firm, invisible and thrumming, drawn between tension and temptation.
“You’re observant,” Tom said quietly, as if making a note for no one but himself. “Careful. Calculated. I admire that. Most students your age are still crawling toward identity.”
He studied Draco with the intensity of a blade being sharpened.
“You’ve already chosen yours.”
Draco didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
He had been choosing—surviving—his whole life.He had been molded by a world of bloodlines and expectations, shaped like a sword held too long over fire. Raised on whispered threats and cold praise, where love was synonymous with power, and silence meant safety. He’d learned to walk on glass floors made of secrets. To breathe underwater,to smile while swallowing blood.
Tom saw it. Recognized it. Admired it.
And then, softly—so softly it felt like a blade drawn behind velvet—Tom said,
“You’re not afraid of me.”
The words hung in the air like drifting ash. The torches sputtered slightly, casting liquid shadows along the walls.
A quiet breath escaped Draco’s lips.
“No,” he said, with the kind of certainty that doesn’t need volume to be lethal. His gaze was still, unshaken. “Should I be?”
That drew a real smile from Tom—cold, glinting, beautiful in its cruelty.
It didn’t reach his eyes.
It didn’t try to.
“Not yet.”
Then, without another word, he turned and glided into the common room.The stone slid open at his approach—not like a door obeying a student, but like a serpent parting for its master.
Draco remained for a breath.
Then another.
The corridor stretched out around him, empty but not quiet. The torchlight cast long, flickering shadows across his face—pale and fine-boned, carved in the soft cruelty of marble. His silvery-blue eyes caught the dim green glow and fractured it, like moonlight splintering over broken water. Hair like spun starlight brushed his temples, soft and disheveled. He looked less like a boy and more like something painted by a forgotten god—untouched, unbending, unknowable.
He had been seen.
He had been marked.
And that was exactly what he wanted.
To be close enough to touch the web without getting tangled in it. To know the shape of the spider’s hunger.
To know it. Understand it.
And perhaps—if he was clever enough—control it.
He stepped forward, through the stone threshold and into the beating heart of the serpent’s den.
The Slytherin common room unfurled before him like something living and ancient. It didn’t welcome him. It watched. The air shifted as he crossed the boundary, thick with enchantment and something older—darker. Magic clung to the walls like damp ivy, threading through the stone with the slow, patient pulse of a thing that remembered.
Green fire rippled in the hearth, casting eerie light across the black-glass floors that shimmered like still water. The flames moved oddly—too fluid, too silent—dancing in patterns that suggested purpose, intelligence. Shadows flared against the ceiling in ripples, as though the room were submerged beneath an invisible lake and they were merely guests, drowning in someone else’s memory.
The walls breathed—moisture slicking the stone, weeping slowly as if the dungeon itself mourned something long buried. The ceiling arched above like the inside of a beast’s ribcage, lit faintly by floating lanterns that flickered with greenish gold.
And the students—clustered in corners, draped over velvet divans and half-curled on window ledges—spoke in low tones or laughed with the sharpness of blades being unsheathed. Their eyes glinted in the firelight, quick and bright and cold.
Across the room, Gideon raised a hand, a grin slanting across his face. He gestured to an overstuffed divan surrounded by open books, murmured incantations, and the self-satisfied sprawl of old-blood students eager to be seen and feared.
Draco didn’t move.
He let the room wash over him—the laughter like distant thunder, the weight of expectation pressing down like a cold hand to the nape of his neck.
This was more than a common room.
This was a crucible.
A place where legacies were forged—or incinerated.
This was where power bred in silence and bloomed in whispers. Where every glance carried meaning, and every word could cost or crown you.
And there, at the center of it all—like the eye of a storm—sat Tom Riddle.
He was half-lit by firelight, shadows flickering across his sharp features in alternating warmth and menace.
His posture was calm, elegant, too still.
One hand draped over the curve of an armchair, fingers tapping once, then ceasing—like a conductor waiting for the orchestra to breathe.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to.
He was the room.
Draco inhaled.
The scent of damp stone, scorched parchment, and something metallic—blood or magic—filled his lungs. He tasted it on the back of his tongue like prophecy.
He had stepped into the labyrinth now.
The web shimmered all around him—silent, intricate, ancient.
And the spider had noticed.
But this was what he had prepared for. What he had trained for, in shadows and silence.
To walk into the Snake’s mouth and not flinch.
To stand beside the monster—not as victim, not as pawn, but as something else. Something worse. Something necessary.
He would learn the rules.
He would trace the pattern of every thread.
And if he was careful—if he was ruthless—he would find the flaw. The one hairline fracture in the glass that no one else saw.
He moved forward.
Each step was soundless, deliberate. Not hesitant. Not afraid. Like snowfall on a battlefield—quiet, deadly, inevitable.
Let the spider watch.
Draco was watching, too.
And he had teeth.
Notes:
We finally met Tom. What do you think about tom riddle? I’m not sure I’m getting his character right.
Also I did not realize only register users were allowed to comment, I have changed the setting. If you want to comment, you can now!
Chapter Text
Draco moved at last.
Not toward Tom, but at a diagonal—elegant and composed—crossing the floor with the quiet grace of someone accustomed to being observed. The room didn’t stop for him, not quite, but he felt its attention tilt. Heads turned, just slightly. Conversations shifted, recalibrating around his trajectory like the slow pull of tide around an approaching storm.
He came to a stop before the velvet divan where Gideon sat, one arm draped along the back, posture loose but eyes sharp. The boy looked up, smirk already curling at the corner of his mouth like smoke.
“Decided to come down from the mountain, have you?” Gideon said, gesturing languidly to the empty space beside him. “Welcome to the inner circle. Or, well—one of its many ugly heads.”
Draco lowered himself into the offered seat without comment. The cushions exhaled beneath him, and the surrounding conversation quieted—just enough for the space to feel aware of itself.
Gideon leaned in, voice pitched low. “Let me give you the lay of the land.”
He nodded toward a group across the room—centered around a boy sprawled like royalty grown bored of his own crown.
“That’s Cassian Lestrange. Second Eldest of the litter. Beautiful, venomous, and already marked by the rot that runs through his bloodline. He thinks cruelty is a mark of intelligence. Mostly it’s just noise.”
Draco’s gaze slipped past Cassian to the girl beside him—Her hair was obsidian-dark, coiled and combed into submission, gleaming like a polished threat beneath the light. Her features were sharp, patrician—high cheekbones and a mouth carved for commandments rather than conversation. She had a spine like tempered steel and a gaze that moved over people like a jeweler inspecting flawed gemstones—cold, meticulous, and laced with disdain. Her eyes didn’t just observe; they sliced, calculated, and weighed, as if deciding whether you were worth preserving in a family tapestry or burning out of it entirely.
“And that,” Gideon continued, voice touched with mock reverence, “is Walburga Black. Only fifteen, but the room bends a little when she turns her head. She’s already drafted her wedding vows and blood purging list. Don’t get too close unless you plan to become a holy relic or a cautionary tale.”
Draco’s lips twitched, but his eyes moved again, drawn to the blonde girl seated with poise just beside Walburga. Her hair fell like starlight down her back, pale and smooth as combed silk. Her features were elegant—almost delicate—but her expression was unreadable, carved into something finer than ice. There was a cold self-assurance about her, as though the room could be dismissed with a blink if it failed to please her.
“Next to her,” Gideon said, “is Druella Rosier. Picture-perfect. Curses like a symphony. I’m fairly certain her veins are lined with ice and ink. She’s betrothed to Cygnus Black—Walburga’s cousin. Already graduated though. It’s all very tidy, very dynastic.”
The name struck Draco like a blade held too close to the skin.
Cygnus Black. And her—Druella Rosier.
He blinked once.
A pause. Then:
My grandparents.
His gaze sharpened almost imperceptibly.He studied her more closely now. The tilt of her chin. The restraint in her posture. And that unmistakable shade of white-gold hair—so rare in a sea of dark bloodlines. That, he realized, was where Narcissa had gotten it. That silken blond, so at odds with the gloom and silver of the Blacks.
He watched Druella’s fingers trace something elegant in the air, perhaps idly rehearsing a charm or hex. Her expression was blank—but not empty. That kind of stillness only came from absolute certainty. She didn’t need attention to dominate a room. Her existence was architecture.
Cold.
Regal.
Calculated.
His mother had inherited that.
His mother’s beauty had always felt sculpted, almost mythic. But now, staring at Druella, he saw its seed—the cold edge beneath the grace. The kind of loveliness that could be wielded like a knife.
He let his thoughts settle in the space between recognition and distance. Watching her was like peering backward through time.
And yet… not quite.
Draco turned the thought over in his mind like a coin. He was watching her before she knew what she’d become—before bloodlines turned into marriage contracts and children. Before her name faded beneath someone else’s, even as her shadow grew longer.
His gaze lingered.
Draco had never known his grandparents on his mother’s side. Their names existed only in photographs—sepia-toned ghosts with stiff collars and distant eyes, frozen in brittle frames that lined the drawing room mantel at Malfoy Manor. They had died when Draco was just a year old, before memory had learned to anchor itself to faces or voices. To him, they were more myth than kin.
There had been a terrible accident—whispers of it clung like dust in the corridors of Black family history, never swept away but never spoken aloud. Not in full. Not with feeling. Just fragments: a fire, perhaps, or a spell gone wrong. Some claimed dark magic, others swore it was a tragedy of trust. Even the portraits kept their mouths shut.
All Draco had was silence, and the hollow outline of something that might have been love—had time allowed it. But it hadn’t. Their absence felt less like loss and more like omission, like a chapter torn from the book of his bloodline. He didn’t mourn them. He couldn’t. Grief requires memory, and Draco had none to give.
Hello, Grandmother.
Gideon hadn’t noticed Draco’s silence, nor the way his gaze lingered on Druella like a thread stretched taut between generations. He kept speaking, voice sliding back into its usual sardonic lilt, as if he were narrating a particularly wicked play.
“See that alcove near the fireplace?” he said, tipping his chin toward the stone-set corner half-sunk in shadow. The alcove near the fireplace looked like it had been carved out of shadow itself—a half-moon recess in the stone wall, just beyond the fire’s full reach. Ancient granite arched overhead, soot-darkened and veined with spiderweb cracks, as though the castle had once clenched its fist and forgotten to release it.
Three seats were arranged in a rough triangle around a squat, heavy table etched with old scorch marks and ink stains—scars from years of whispered dealings and half-played games. The chairs didn’t match, but they belonged together the way teeth do in a wolf’s mouth. One was a high-backed throne of cracked leather with silver-studded arms, worn smooth by restless fingers. Another was lower and wider, its green velvet faded to ash in places, the wood splintering along the edges like it had been chewed by time. The last was more delicate—a straight-backed chair with filigree carvings on the legs, deceptively elegant, as if it had been plucked from a drawing room and set down among the vipers.
Cushions were thin, sunken by use, and smelled faintly of ash and cold iron. The firelight barely touched them, only painting their edges in dull gold. It was a place meant for quiet dominance, not comfort. The kind of corner where alliances were forged over silence, and enemies named with a flick of a bishop.
The hearth flared unevenly, licking at the gloom with flickers of amber and gold, casting warped silhouettes across the alcove’s ancient stone. A trio of boys sat hunched around a chessboard on a low table, but the game was little more than camouflage. The carved pieces moved with idle wand-flicks—lazy, mechanical—but the boys’ eyes never followed the board. They watched each other instead, sharp and coiled like sprung traps, trading glances in lieu of moves, measuring threats not in pawns and bishops but in secrets and leverage.
One lounged like a prince in exile, limbs draped over the arm of a worn velvet chair, smirking as if he’d already won something no one else knew they were playing for. Another sat rigid, hands steepled beneath his chin, gaze narrowed to slits—a strategist more concerned with reputations than checkmates. The third flicked a knight forward with the ease of someone who knew how to bleed people dry without drawing a wand.
In that alcove, strategy wasn’t just a game—it was a language. And no one spoke it with mercy.
“The ones pretending to care about chess while eavesdropping on everyone? That’s Ignatius Prewett, Tiberius Mulciber, and Alphard Black.”
Draco followed the gesture.
Ignatius Prewett had a poet’s bones—fine, fidgety fingers and a mouth made for wit, currently curled in a smirk he wore like armor. His hair was rust-red, curled just above the collar, and his posture radiated disdainful amusement, like he found the whole room beneath his intellect but worth studying nonetheless.
Next to him lounged Tiberius Mulciber, broader, darker, more coiled. His smile was slow, reptilian, and didn’t reach his eyes—eyes that tracked movement like a cat watching prey. He tapped a pawn absently with his wand, brow lifted as if listening to two conversations at once and memorizing both. There was something greedy about him, like he was already imagining how the secrets he gathered could be turned into leverage.
“And Alphard,” Gideon said, lowering his voice just enough to signal something more delicate.
Alphard Black sat with effortless elegance, one leg crossed, back half-turned to the room like he was above the entire affair. His features were sharp, darkly handsome in that unmistakable Black family way—raven hair, high cheekbones, a gaze that glittered like a knife behind the mask of noble boredom. He leaned forward now and then, murmuring something dry and likely scandalous, before retreating behind a veneer of indifference.
“Don’t be fooled,” Gideon added, eyes narrowing with something that might’ve been respect. “Alphard plays the dutiful pureblood well enough. Says all the right things. Keeps the right company. But he dreams of scandal and fire. He doesn’t belong in this house—not truly.”
Draco looked again, and saw it: the restless flick of Alphard’s fingers against his sleeve, the subtle way his eyes wandered—not to Riddle or the Slytherin elite, but to the windows, the shadows, the places he could disappear into.
“He’ll run someday,” Gideon said softly. “And when he does, it’ll be a bloody mess.”
“And the ones with the map?” Draco asked, nodding subtly toward a trio of girls hunched over a wide piece of parchment inked with swirling, iridescent runes. The vellum shimmered faintly in the dim light, as though breathing—lines rippling and reshaping at the slightest brush of their fingers, glowing soft and secretive beneath their touch.
They were seated on the low stone ledge of a bay window carved deep into the outer wall, half-hidden behind a curtain of ivy that had forced its way in through the cracks. Moonlight filtered through the ancient glass panes above them, fractured by lead lines and frost bloom, casting shifting patterns across their bent heads and the living map between them. Pillows had been dragged into the alcove—flat cushions in house colors, some charmed to warm, others scuffed and singed at the corners from past misfires.
The girls sat close, knees touching, like priestesses at a sacred rite. One traced a path through the maze of runes with a silver-ringed finger, murmuring under her breath. Another leaned in, tapping a pulsing glyph that bloomed like a bruise across the parchment before vanishing again. The third barely moved, her gaze fixed and unblinking, lips pressed thin in concentration.
The air around them seemed thick with spellwork, soft and strange, humming with arcane currents. This wasn’t idle magic—it was older, deeper, the kind that made the hair rise on the back of your neck. Whatever they were looking for on that map, it wasn’t marked in ink alone.
Gideon followed Draco’s gaze and let out a low, knowing smirk.
“Ah. The Spinnet twins—Mara and Moriah—and their cousin, Calista Flint.”
The three girls formed a tableau of precision, as if posed by an unseen hand with a taste for symmetry and secrets. The twins, Mara and Moriah, were so identical they seemed less like sisters and more like mirrored spells—conjured from the same breath, the same wandstroke. Their hair fell in cascading curls the color of charred walnut, each twist bound with silver clasps engraved with ancestral sigils that pulsed faintly when the firelight caught them. Their eyes—sharp, owl-like—moved with mechanical grace, flicking over the glowing vellum as if decoding prophecy rather than mapwork. They sat shoulder to shoulder, never touching, yet moving in uncanny synchronicity: when one blinked, the other narrowed her gaze; when one adjusted a ring, the other stilled her breath.
On their right hands, matching bands of hematite gleamed dully, the surfaces etched with runes so old even the castle seemed to hum with recognition. The rings were tools, not ornaments—calibrated for magic, for memory, for the threading of bloodlines through parchment and ink.
“They’re pureblood cartographers,” Gideon said, voice edged with both admiration and caution. “Not in the Muggle sense, of course. They map blood, not land. Lineage, inheritance, affinity… even curses buried three generations deep. If it has a name, a scar, or a root, they’ll find it. And once they do—”
He snapped his fingers softly.
“They never forget.”
Draco’s eyes lingered as one of the twins—he couldn’t tell which—tapped her wand against a pulsing node on the map. A silver thread branched outward like a crack forming in ice, lightning-fast and jagged. The other twin’s eyes tracked the line, her expression a flicker of cold delight, as though she were watching a secret bleed free from the page.
“Family trees. Scandals. Unregistered marriages. Blood curses. Forgotten heirs. They don’t whisper in hallways or pass notes like the others,” Gideon murmured. “They document. And when they’re bored…” He leaned closer, mouth quirking into something darker. “They predict.”
The third girl—Calista Flint—sat slightly apart, her posture straighter, her stillness more deliberate. She looked older, perhaps sixteen, her features cut from finer, crueler stone. Ink-black hair was pulled into a severe braid that coiled like a whip down her back. Her high cheekbones and blade-straight nose gave her an almost sculptural quality—less a girl than an artifact. But it was her eyes that held Draco—deep-set, slate-gray, and still. Ancient eyes. The kind that didn’t just observe the room but calculated its meaning. She never spoke. She didn’t need to. When her pale finger extended—slow, precise, irrevocable—her cousins obeyed as if the command had been engraved into their bones.
“They’re dangerous in their own right,” Gideon said after a beat, his voice quieter now, the mischief gone. “Not for hexes. Not for curses. But for what they know. And what they record.”
The map before them shimmered softly, curling at the edges like something alive. It wasn’t just parchment—it was memory, prophecy, reckoning. And the girls weren’t studying it.
They were writing it.
Draco’s brow furrowed. There was something unnerving about girls who wrote the world down and remembered every stain.
“They’re why no one gets away with anything in here,” Gideon added, his voice low. “Not really.”
Draco let the names and faces settle into place, each one a burning star in a dark constellation of ambition, old magic, and quiet malice. There was a rhythm to it—ancestral power stitched to adolescent cruelty, alliances layered like curses. He could almost feel the threads stretching between them: fine as spider silk, tense as tripwire. Invisible cords of influence tugging, knotting, looping back through generations.
This common room wasn’t just a room—it was a web.
“And what about you, Gideon?” he asked, voice lower now, as if wary of disturbing something coiled too tightly.
Gideon’s grin sharpened, crooked and unapologetic. “I’m the bridge,” he said lightly, almost musical. “The friend you trust just enough to regret it later. The mouth that whispers while your reputation bleeds out like smoke.”
Draco arched a brow, dry. “You should print that on your calling card.”
“Oh, I do,” Gideon said, pressing a hand to his chest in mock sincerity. “Gold ink. Slightly cursed.”
Draco’s lips twitched—despite himself—but his gaze lingered. He was watching now, not just listening.
At first, he’d dismissed Gideon Foley as a jester: all loose limbs, clever barbs, and too-casual laughter. Someone who played at rebellion with ink-stained cuffs and an affected smirk. Someone who didn’t polish his shoes or bow his head. Unruly. Unrefined.
But no—he was something else entirely.
The performance was a screen. An illusion of carelessness that drew the eye away from the blade.
There was calculation in the cadence of his voice. Cunning in the deliberate way he revealed just enough, never more. A boy who laughed too easily but always noticed too much. Draco could see it now—in the flick of his gaze toward the alcove, in the exact precision of his pauses. Gideon wasn’t floating on the edges of this world. He was charting it. Scribing it down in ink and smirks.
He was watching everyone.
Draco adjusted his estimation accordingly. Not a fool. Not a clown.
A spy in the shape of a confidant.
And, perhaps, the most dangerous kind of Slytherin: the one who smiled while holding your secrets by the throat.
A pause.
“And Tom?” Draco asked, softer.
Gideon’s humor cooled, like a candlewick suddenly pinched. His eyes flicked toward the quiet center of the common room—toward the hearth where green flame licked the stones in serpentine motion, casting long, dancing shadows across the walls. There, half-swallowed by that flickering gloom, sat Tom Riddle.
He was still. Too still. A portrait carved from shadow and intention.
His dark hair, ink-slick and neatly parted, fell just shy of his eyes—those eyes, sharp and heavy-lidded, darker than onyx and colder than any mirror. He sat alone on the low, emerald-stitched divan with his long, elegant fingers steepled beneath his chin, elbows balanced precisely on his knees, as though caught mid-contemplation of something ancient and ruthless.
Even seated, he gave the impression of height—of lean, quiet tension, like a coil of rope pulled taut but not yet snapping. His features were sculptural: aristocratic cheekbones, a patrician mouth set in a line too serene to be trusted. He didn’t speak. He didn’t fidget. He simply watched—eyes drifting from face to face in slow, predatory sweeps, as though fitting puzzle pieces into place inside a mind none of them could read.
The green fire behind him made his silhouette shimmer faintly, not with warmth, but with something colder—like snake-light on water. The room, which moments ago had been filled with murmuring voices and low laughter, dimmed around him. Not from volume, but from weight. Everyone still spoke—but a little softer. Everyone still moved—but a little quicker. As though time, near him, dragged differently.
“He doesn’t belong to anyone,” Gideon said at last, voice low. “But somehow, everyone belongs to him. Even when they think they don’t.”
Draco watched in silence. He saw the subtle ripple of discomfort when someone’s gaze caught Tom’s for half a breath too long. Saw how they looked away, shoulders stiffening, as though they’d brushed a live wire.
“He watches everyone,” Draco murmured.
“And no one sees him,” Gideon replied, barely above a whisper. “Not really.”
Tom shifted then—barely. A tilt of the head. A blink too slow to be accidental. And for a heartbeat, Draco felt as if the boy’s gaze had turned inward and outward all at once—like he was staring through the walls, the castle, time itself.
Not observing.
Calculating.
Draco felt it again—that low, thrumming pull beneath the ribs, like a harp string drawn taut and humming between himself and the boy at the center of the storm. Not magic exactly. Not instinct either. Something older. A gravity threaded into the bones. A summons dressed in silence.
His gaze never wavered.
“I intend to,” he said, voice smooth as frost—and this time, he meant it. Every syllable anchored.
Gideon turned toward him fully now, his usual smirk absent. Instead, there was something older in his expression. A flicker of warning—wariness disguised as care.
“Then be careful,” he said, tone low and steady, like advice passed down over graves. “Getting close to Tom Riddle means letting him close to you. He doesn’t just look at people. He collects them. Hangs them like portraits in that mind of his. Studies them. Frames them. Files them away.”
Draco didn’t flinch.
He had lived among collectors. Grown up in a house where eyes were weighed like artifacts, and affections locked behind glass. He had been the heir, the showpiece, the carefully measured blend of breeding and ambition. He knew what it meant to be placed on a pedestal and studied like a spell component.
But this time, he wasn’t an heir or a trophy.
He wasn’t a prize.
He was a player. And more than that—he was a student of the chess board.
His eyes drifted back toward the green-lit hearth, where Tom sat like a secret written in a dead tongue, quiet and watchful, unknowable and precise.
Draco felt the hum again.
Not fear.
Something sharper. Purpose, maybe.
Hunger.
Ambition.
He would learn the rhythm of Tom’s silences, the shape of his cruelty, the architecture of his power.
He was learning the game.
And when the moment came, he fully intended to change the rules.
“And what about them?” Draco asked quietly, tipping his chin toward the darkened corner behind Tom’s chair.
There, half-cloaked in flickering green firelight and deeper shadow, lingered a knot of boys arranged with the deceptive casualness of soldiers at rest. They weren’t laughing. They didn’t lounge like the others. Instead, they hovered just out of reach—like blades left unsheathed on a velvet table, polished but deadly.
They didn’t need to speak to make their presence felt. Silence clung to them like a spell with no countercurse—dense, deliberate, and humming with the threat of violence barely restrained. Their stillness wasn’t absence. It was anticipation. As if each of them was waiting for a word from the center—one flick of a pale hand—to become something terrible.
Draco felt it immediately. That cold prickle at the nape of the neck. The way the air subtly shifted around them, as though the dungeon itself had drawn breath and was holding it.
Gideon followed his gaze and let out a low, bitter chuckle.
“Those,” he murmured, the sardonic edge in his voice worn thin by something closer to respect, “are the storm’s teeth.”
He leaned forward slightly, one hand lifting to gesture at each in turn—not with flamboyance, but the careful reverence of someone listing known poisons.
“Cassian Lestrange,” he began. “You’ve seen him already. Crown prince of cruelty.”
Cassian was perched with feline grace on the armrest of a stone-backed settee, one leg draped casually over the edge, the other anchored with a sort of poised nonchalance that made the whole posture look deliberate—like he was posing for a portrait he’d already burned. His robes were cut in deep evergreen velvet, sharp at the shoulders and clasped with polished jet.
They suited him, but didn’t define him. Nothing could.
His hair was dark—darker than black, the color of wine spilt on marble—falling in soft, careless waves that brushed his collar. And his face... his face was aristocracy distilled. Cheekbones like sculpted daggers, lips carved with cruel precision, and eyes like shattered garnets: dark, glinting, and full of unspoken judgment.
“ Looks like he belongs in a painted family tree, doesn’t he? With that wine-dark hair and cheekbones sharp enough to cut. But don’t be fooled. He’s less heir, more executioner. Follows Riddle not out of loyalty—no, Cassian’s addicted to power. Especially the kind that frightens people.”
Cassian’s long fingers toyed with a silver ring—turning it absently, like a habit practiced in battle-lull. The firelight caught its surface, gleaming green across his pale knuckles. Beside him, a pale-haired boy leaned in to listen, adorned with a silver serpent pin and a smile made of glass. Cassian said something in a voice too soft to catch, and the other boy laughed—quick and brittle, like someone trying to impress a blade.
Cassian did not laugh.
His expression was impossible to read—elegantly vacant, detached as a prince at war. He could’ve been murmuring poetry, or issuing a death sentence. His mouth barely moved. His gaze drifted across the room without settling. Not searching—surveying. Measuring.
And Draco, watching him, felt the hair lift at the back of his neck.
“He doesn’t laugh often,” Gideon said, voice tightening. “But when he does—”
He gave a sharp exhale through his nose, the sound humorless. “You’ll feel it in your bones. Like cold water poured down your spine.”
Cassian’s ring glinted again, a flick of sickly green firelight catching the sigil engraved there—something old, something unreadable.
“Watch him,” Gideon said. “That one’s a curse dressed in silk.”
Draco didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.
He was already watching.
And Cassian, without turning his head, tilted his gaze the slightest inch—meeting Draco’s eyes across the flickering dark.
He smiled.
It wasn’t a greeting.
It was a warning.
“Thorian Avery,” Gideon said next, his fingers flicking outward in a lazy, dismissive gesture, as though the boy in question were nothing more than ash to be brushed off velvet.
Draco followed the motion, his gaze settling on a tall figure lurking just behind Cassian—half swallowed by shadow, yet impossible to ignore. Avery stood like a sentinel carved from stone, broad-shouldered and rigid, his posture so unyielding it seemed welded in place. His uniform was immaculate, pressed to a sharp edge, every crease a statement of discipline. His dark hair was parted with surgical precision, each strand locked into order, but his face was plain—too plain to be memorable, almost deliberately forgettable.
There was something blunt about him—not in the sharp angles of his face or the crispness of his attire, but in the way he moved and held himself. Like a heavy mace wrapped in silk—quiet until it struck. His jaw was square, set like forged iron beneath pale skin, and his thick neck gave him the look of someone built for unrelenting endurance, not finesse.
“Not the brightest,” Gideon’s voice took on a dry amusement, as if evaluating a blunt weapon, “but dangerous in his devotion. Practically stitched to Riddle’s shadow. Doesn’t breathe unless he’s told.”
Avery’s eyes flicked toward Tom then, steady and unflinching—not with fear, but with a faith so absolute it bordered on instinct, as if his entire being was tethered to the boy at the center of the room.
Gideon’s lips curved into a sly half-smile. “He’s got a younger brother—Edmund, I think. Third year.” His tone dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Chattered at you on the train, didn’t he?”
Draco blinked.
Edmund.
The name clicked into place with sudden clarity—the freckled boy from the train with the nervous energy barely contained beneath an oversized sweater. Fingers fidgeting, voice too eager, eyes shining with a hopeful sort of reverence when he spoke of invitations to Slughorn’s gatherings and family connections that shimmered like trophies.
“He mentioned his brother got invited to Slughorn’s gatherings,” Draco murmured, the memory sharp and vivid—Edmund’s voice pitched high, laced with pride, as though recounting scripture.
“And he’ll mention it again,” Gideon said with a knowing coolness. “Social climbing’s in their blood. That’s how the Averys stay afloat. One boy makes himself indispensable to power. The other flatters everyone else, hoping no one notices the family vault’s growing thin.”
Draco said nothing.
But something coiled inside him—an uneasy knot tightening at the edges. Gideon wasn’t wrong. The Averys’ ambition clung to them like a stale perfume, thick and suffocating, desperate and loud. Too eager, too visible.
Still, Draco’s mind drifted to Edmund’s open smile—so different from Thorian’s glassy-eyed obedience. Yet both were brothers.
In a world like this, legacy was everything. But legacy, Draco thought, was a blade with many edges.
And some cut far deeper than others.
Draco’s eyes shifted again, landing on a lean, hawkish figure poised at the edge of the hearth—half swallowed by shadow, half illuminated by the flickering firelight. The flames cast sharp, jagged highlights across his face, carving out cheekbones that seemed too pronounced, too sharp—like blades honed to a fine edge. His skin was pale, almost translucent against the dark backdrop, and his dark brunette hair was cut short, meticulously neat, as if he wore discipline like armor.
His eyes, a deep, unsettling shade of auburn, gleamed with a quiet, predatory intensity—like a vulture waiting patiently to strike. There was something both youthful and ancient about his expression, a cruel stillness that made him seem less a boy and more a creature shaped by shadow and silence. He sat utterly motionless, as if every muscle was coiled and ready to snap—an elegance born of lethal precision.
“Antonin Dolohov,” Gideon’s voice dropped to a cautious whisper, as though the very walls might overhear. “Terrifying in duels. Never smiles. Has a thing for languages—five or six at least. Latin rolls off his tongue like it’s breathing. And poisons. He’s obsessed with them. Calls it an art. His mother breeds spiders, you know.”
Draco watched, mesmerized, as Dolohov’s slender fingers slipped inside his robe’s folds and flicked something small, bone-white into the fire. The object cracked with a hiss, sending blue sparks dancing upward. Not a flicker of reaction crossed his face. No flinch, no change in posture—only that cold, calculating gaze.
“You don’t want to know what he did to the last Hufflepuff who tried to hex him from behind,” Gideon added, voice low and edged with a mixture of awe and fear.
Draco didn’t ask. He didn’t need to.
There was a tautness to Dolohov’s frame, a coiled grace that spoke of practiced violence—not the raw, uncontrolled rage of a boy slighted, but the deliberate, studied brutality of someone who knew exactly where to strike to break bone and silence cries.
Though he looked barely older than the others, his eyes held something timeworn—an ancient awareness, as if he had glimpsed the inevitable darkness waiting at the end of all this, and either made peace with it.
Or worse, found it hauntingly beautiful.
A taller boy leaned nearby, arms crossed tight across a broad chest. His presence was not loud, but felt—like the press of a blade just beneath the skin. His eyes, narrow beneath a heavy brow, glinted like twin knives catching torchlight: cold, honed, and impossibly still. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t blink. He watched.
There was something feral about him—something that spoke of wild things forced into tailored robes and taught to bow, but never tamed.
“Balthazar Yaxley,” Gideon said under his breath, as if invoking something best left sleeping. “Son of an executioner. You can see it in him, can’t you? That appetite for endings. He prides himself on silence. On precision. Doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to.”
Draco followed the line of Yaxley’s jaw—a brutal angle that looked carved, not born. His knuckles were pale with old scars. A boy used to gripping something heavier than a wand.
“He doesn’t talk much,” Gideon continued, gaze fixed on the taller boy. “But when he does… someone usually bleeds.”
As if summoned by the words, Yaxley’s eyes flicked toward them. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough for Draco to feel it—a flash of scrutiny, impersonal and sharp, like being measured for a cut of cloth he’d never wear. Then the gaze moved on, dismissing him as one might a cloud on the horizon. Not yet a storm. But inevitable.
Next to Yaxley stood a boy broader than the rest—shouldered like a battering ram in waiting, with thick arms folded loosely across his chest, as though even stillness might split something open. His posture was deceptively relaxed, but the air around him felt tense, like it might snap with the wrong glance. His hair was dark and coarse, cut short, and his heavy-lidded eyes watched the room with a slow, smoldering kind of attention—less curiosity than calculation. A predator conserving energy.
There was something volcanic beneath the surface of Silas Macnair, something tightly leashed. Not quiet like Yaxley—sharp and poised—but slow, deliberate, like the swing of a rusted axe. And just as final.
“Bloodlust in a school uniform,” Gideon said flatly, with a trace of dark amusement curling at the edge of his voice. “I’m fairly certain he thinks of Azkaban as a career goal.”
Macnair shifted his weight slightly, the leather strap of his satchel creaking against the fabric of his robes, and for a moment, the firelight caught the fine edge of something metal half-hidden at his hip. Decorative, maybe. Or not.
Draco didn’t need to be told twice: this was not a boy who raised his wand out of necessity. This was someone who enjoyed the aftermath.
Macnair let out a low laugh at something one of the others muttered—deep, guttural, and entirely without mirth. It rumbled in his chest like a warning.
And Draco felt it. That pulse of danger. The quiet understanding that if Silas Macnair ever decided he disliked you, you’d never hear it in words.
Only in the echo of your name at the wrong end of a corridor.
Then—
“Mauris Mulciber. The elder brother.”
Draco’s gaze followed Gideon’s nod to where a boy lounged with deliberate arrogance, a picture of self-satisfaction draped in emerald silk and disdain. Mulciber wasn’t standing like the others. He didn’t need to. He’d claimed a high-backed chair of dark velvet near the edge of the hearth, not quite within the inner circle, but close enough that no one questioned his placement. His legs were crossed lazily, one arm slung over the back like a lounging cat that might slash if touched.
His robes were impossibly fine—bespoke tailoring threaded with silver at the cuffs, monogrammed in Slytherin green. They shimmered faintly in the firelight, and the rings on his fingers gleamed like polished lies. There was an effortless superiority to him, as though the castle itself should rearrange its stones to better suit his comfort.
But it was the way his fingers moved that drew Draco’s attention—twitching against his thigh every so often, as if responding to some unseen stimulus. Wand reflex, Draco thought instinctively. A duelist’s muscle memory. The kind of boy who didn’t just practice spells—he tested them.
“Half his spells aren’t taught here,” Gideon murmured, voice low with meaning. “The other half used to be. You know the type.”
Draco did. Every elite family had one: the prodigy with too much talent and too little conscience. A boy who’d been handed power before he’d been taught consequence. Someone who read the old grimoires by candlelight and didn’t flinch when the ink bled red.
Mulciber’s mouth curved faintly, as if he sensed himself being discussed—but his eyes, cool and pale green, never lifted. He remained reclined, sovereign in his own corner, wand hand ticking like a metronome of menace.
Draco felt a chill then, colder than the dungeon’s damp.
This one didn’t just study dark magic.
He wore it like cologne.
And then Gideon’s voice dipped—lower than before. Almost cautious now, as though naming the next boy summoned something ancient from the deep.
“Abraxas Malfoy.”
Draco’s breath caught.
The name hit him like frost in the lungs—sharp, invasive, impossible to ignore. His stomach twisted, the syllables echoing like a spell spoken into bone.
His name.
His blood.
His legacy.
And there he was.
Seated not beside Riddle, but close—just close enough to suggest a private understanding, a gravity shared in silence rather than show. Abraxas Malfoy was barely seventeen, but he carried himself like a prince of something older than the school, older than magic. Even seated, he exuded the sculpted poise of entitlement honed into art.
Platinum hair—that unmistakable shade, unique to the Malfoy bloodline, like moonlight poured through crystal—framed a face that was aristocracy carved in marble. His features were clean, imperious. The line of his jaw drawn sharp as if etched by the edge of a wand. That same gleam had hovered in every oil portrait back home, in every stern family photograph. But this—this was not a still image. This was Abraxas alive.
Animated by purpose. Leaning slightly, faintly amused, as Riddle murmured something under his breath.
And he was laughing.
Softly. Lazily. Like the world had amused him for a moment.
And then Abraxas turned his head slightly—just enough for Draco to see the eyes.
Not grey like Lucius. Not storm-silver like his own.
But a rare, deep shade of blue—the color of distant ocean trenches and frozen lakes, a cold, elegant hue that gave nothing away and saw everything. Those eyes were ancient in their stillness. Patient. Detached.
Ice that never cracked.
His spine was straight, his posture effortless—back held like it had never bent to anyone.A single hand toyed absently with the cuff of his robes, drawing attention to silver-thread embroidery as intricate as rune-script. The ring on his thumb—bearing the coiled serpent of House Malfoy—glinted as he moved. There was power in the gesture.
Casual.
Dangerous.
He was handsome in a classical way: a jawline like a sculptor’s stroke, brows sharp, lips drawn in permanent contemplation. There was Lucius in the tilt of his chin. The clear paleness of his skin. But more than anything, he looked like legacy made flesh—born with the kind of pride that didn’t need to be spoken, only worn.
Draco couldn’t look away. The boy he’d only known through secondhand accounts and ancestral reverence had risen off the parchment—breathing, moving, speaking with Tom Riddle like it cost him nothing. As if he were the gravity in the room.
“He’s one of Riddle’s oldest allies,” Gideon murmured, quieter now, and slower. “They say they met before Hogwarts. Some summer party in Wiltshire. Nobody’s ever confirmed it. But Abraxas doesn’t follow. He aligns. There’s a difference.”
Draco’s jaw tensed.
That couldn’t be true.
It shouldn’t be true.
Draco’s mind rebelled against the thought even as it rooted itself deeper, coiling cold and sharp around the softest parts of his certainty. There was no chance—none—that his grandfather would’ve crossed paths with someone like Riddle before Hogwarts. Before the name had weight. Before the boy had built himself into something that could be acknowledged. The Malfoys didn’t host half-bloods in their manor. Not then. Not ever.
Unless…
Unless Abraxas had seen something. Had looked at that quiet, strange orphan and recognized not poverty, but potential. Had chosen him.
Had chosen this.
The realization struck like an iron bar to the gut—sickening, metallic, inevitable.
Draco stood still, spine stiffening, as his breath caught high in his chest. His blood thrummed louder with every heartbeat, a thunderous rhythm pounding behind his ears, in his throat, beneath his skin. It wasn’t just disgust he felt—it was betrayal. The boy he had never met, the ghost whose name had been stitched into the linings of his life, had already bent a knee to this darkness.
Worse—he had belonged to it.
This den of shadows. These names whispered in fear and reverence alike. This firelit room that stank of ambition and blood and the perfume of legacy left to rot in its bottle.
His family had helped build it.
Draco’s heart thudded behind his ribs like a fist on old wood—urgent, searching for something solid.
This wasn’t just history anymore. It wasn’t something he could stand apart from, observe from behind glass. It was blood and bone. It was the name he carried, the coat of arms etched into ancient silver. It was him.
And now—here he stood. At the mouth of the labyrinth.
Inside the very web his ancestors had already twisted themselves into.
He swallowed hard, the motion dry, catching. Around him, the names moved like cold stars in a cruel constellation—familiar and terrible. Lestrange. Dolohov. Yaxley. Macnair. Mulciber. Avery. Malfoy. Black. Rosier. Flint.
And at the center, burning brighter and blacker than the rest—
Riddle.
It was no wonder the world had burned. With this many hands stoking the flame, how could it not?
Draco drew a slow, careful breath. His fingers curled at his sides. The knowledge pressed down on him—not with panic, but with clarity. With weight. With the heavy, freezing stillness of realization.
Because now he was here.
At the beginning of it all.
Watching. Listening. Learning.
And calculating how deep the rot went.
Across the room, as if tethered by an unseen thread, Tom Riddle shifted. Only slightly. A graceful tilt of the head. But his eyes—those inhumanly alert, gleaming eyes—slid toward Draco and found him through the crowd like a knife finds a seam in armor.
Not long.
Just a flicker.
But it was enough.
The spider had noticed the thread tug.
Draco inhaled slowly, spine straightening.
He would not look away.
Let the past try to swallow him whole.
He had come to crack the glass from the inside.
Draco was still deep in thought, the hum of voices around him dulled by the weight of connections he was threading together in his mind—until a subtle shift broke through.
A new rhythm.
A change in the air so slight it might’ve gone unnoticed by anyone else.
But Draco noticed.
The soft scrape of polished shoes against ancient stone echoed like punctuation in an old spell—deliberate, deliberate, deliberate. Each step landed not with haste, but ceremony, a performance in motion. The sound sliced through the murmured chatter and low-burning fire, clearing space for what followed.
A ripple of laughter—cool, brittle, and too rehearsed to be kind—slipped from the circle by the hearth. It danced like smoke from half-curled lips, eyes hooded with indulgence and cruelty passed down like heirlooms. Pureblood laughter. Weaponized charm.
“There he goes,” someone murmured. A drawl, half boredom, half thrill—Dolohov, maybe, or Macnair. Like someone watching a blade unsheathe itself.
Draco lifted his gaze.
Cassian Lestrange had peeled away from the rest of them with all the ease of something untouchable. He didn’t walk so much as unfold—an elegant inevitability. A predator in silk. His movement had the slow, knowing grace of a creature born under chandeliers and raised in rooms where even the shadows bowed.
His hair—dark as aged ink and loose past his shoulders—shimmered like oil-slick wine in the firelight, each step sending waves through it like whispered spells. There was no single feature that made him beautiful; rather, it was the sum of his symmetry, the artistry of angles too cruel to be soft, too perfect to be safe.
His robes clung like a second skin—black velvet sculpted to suggest, not restrain. Silver thread traced arcane sigils across the fabric like constellations half-forgotten, glinting as he moved. They made no noise, but Draco imagined they whispered to him anyway.
And then the smile.
It bloomed slowly, a thing cultivated for impact—languid, lethal. Less expression than provocation. The kind of smile a prince might wear after gutting his rivals in a ballroom and then asking for another glass of wine.
“Peverell,” Cassian murmured, his voice a velvet wound. Smooth, low, and laced with something too dangerous to be called flirtation. It slid around Draco’s name like it had tasted it before. “I thought I felt a change in the weather.”
Draco blinked. The words hit sideways, like perfume on old blood. “I… beg your pardon?”
Cassian’s grin widened—no teeth, just elegance honed into something serpentine. “The air shifts, darling,” he said, voice curling like smoke into velvet shadows. “Colder. Sharper. More dangerous.”
He tilted his head, gaze raking over Draco with the lazy appraisal of someone admiring a new blade.
“I rather like it when you enter a room.”
From the hearth, Thorian Avery gave a theatrical snort—sharp and derisive, like a blade dragged across stone. It cracked the tension just enough to draw a ripple of response. One of the Spinnet twins—Moriah, likely, with a penchant for drama—gasped with feigned shock, a gloved hand fluttering to her chest like a dowager at tea.
A slow, deliberate clink followed—glass to crystal, or wand to wood. Dolohov, most likely. A mock salute offered with eyes half-lidded, amused and predatory. The sound was both toast and threat. As if to say: Go on then. Bleed for our entertainment.
Even Tom stirred.
He didn’t move much—just a tilt of the head, a lazy shift of weight in the deep, green leather of the wingback, like a king lounging on his throne of smoke and secrets. But his gaze lifted.
Those eyes—darker than ink, darker than wine—found them. Cassian. Draco. The narrowing space between them. They glowed not with firelight, but something older, hungrier. Red wine eyes, slow and methodical, slicing through the moment like a scalpel.
He said nothing. Needed to say nothing.
But Draco felt it.
The weight of that stare sank into his ribs like a coin dropped into water—quiet, but heavy enough to change the depth of everything.
His chest tightened. Not from fear, not entirely. Something more complex. Older than instinct.
He straightened on reflex, shoulders drawing back, spine aligning like a sword being drawn to full length. Chin lifted just a degree—elegance forged into defiance.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he turned his gaze back to Cassian.
Their eyes met. Draco’s silver sharpened, narrowing by a sliver. Not retreating—matching. Holding.
His voice, when it came, was cool and poised, laced with razor-edged poise.
“Are you… flirting with me?”
Cassian leaned in with deliberate, feline ease—each movement unhurried, like silk slipping through ring-clasped fingers. Just close enough that Draco caught it: the scent curling off his collar like a whispered spell. Spiced bergamot laced with smoke, and beneath it, something wilder—green, bitter, ancient. The aroma of old wards and darker secrets. Privilege, yes, but the dangerous kind—blood-soaked and centuries steeped.
His breath was warm against Draco’s cheek, his voice a velvet murmur dipped in syrup and suggestion. “Would you like me to stop?”
Too soft. Too sweet. Like poisoned honey.
Draco didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. His pulse was steady, his gaze unyielding. “Would you?”
That earned him a flash of teeth—not the polished smirk of Cassian Lestrange, Pureblood Prodigy, but something raw and gleaming beneath. The wolfish glint of a boy who knew exactly how charming he was and how dangerous he could be if ever left unchecked.
“Touché,” Cassian breathed, amusement curling at the edge of his lips like smoke. He sounded genuinely delighted, like he’d discovered a rare book or a blade balanced perfectly in hand. “Most people stammer. Or swoon.”
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing with intent, studying Draco as one might a flame that hadn’t yet decided whether it would warm or burn.
“But you,” he purred, voice darkening to something silkier, slower. “You parry.”
A pause. A smile that cut at the edges.
“I do love a boy who bites back.”
Behind him, Gideon made a strangled sound—halfway between a laugh and a groan, as if the sheer ridiculousness of the moment had knocked the air from his lungs. “Careful, Draco,” he said, his voice a hushed rasp of warning and amusement. “He’s all charm until someone bleeds. Or worse—kisses back.”
Cassian didn’t even turn fully. Just glanced over his shoulder with lazy indifference, his smirk untouched, like it had been painted on in silver ink. “Don’t ruin the moment, Gideon,” he murmured, voice silk-stretched over steel. “You know how I hate foreplay being interrupted.”
Draco, though still reeling from the collision of arrogance and allure that was Cassian Lestrange, managed to force his features into the mask he’d worn since childhood: smooth, cool, unreadable. “Do you make a habit of this with every transfer student?” he asked, tone dry as bone dust.
Cassian’s gaze slid back to him, glittering like frost in moonlight. “Only the ones,” he said slowly, “who look like they were sculpted by warlocks… and cursed by poets.”
That earned a sharp wheeze from Gideon, who looked moments away from collapsing against the nearest pillar. “Merlin’s saggy arse, Cassian,” he choked. “Write a bloody sonnet and be done with it.”
Draco didn’t smile. He didn’t dare to. But something twisted low in his chest, unfamiliar and too alive. Not quite a blush—he never flushed—but a coiled heat blooming at the hollow of his throat. Like a spell that hadn’t yet decided whether to ignite or unravel.
He knew how to navigate derision, how to deflect suspicion with the flick of a syllable. He could command a room with the cold blade of his voice, wield admiration like a wand. But this?
This was neither scorn nor envy. It was something older. Trickier.
A game wrapped in silk and shadow.
A gaze that pinned, not praised.
A Lestrange’s attention—sharp as sunlight refracted through glass, meant not to warm, but to scorch.
It wasn’t a compliment.
It was a test.
“You wouldn’t be able to handle me,” Draco said, his voice clipped and cold, honed to a razor’s edge. There was no lilt of flirtation, no rise of challenge—just the clean, precise bite of steel drawn in silence. A statement, not a tease.
Cassian faltered—only for a breath, but it was enough. The effortless tilt of his smirk slipped, ever so slightly, like a crack spidering through enamel. His eyes flickered with something—surprise, interest, the briefest flicker of thrill—and then he laughed, low and disbelieving, the sound brushing against the edges of uncertainty.
But Draco didn’t let it settle.
He stepped in, slow and fluid as shadow, and in one seamless motion, his arm came up and looped around Cassian’s neck—firm, commanding, not quite threatening, but impossible to ignore. The movement was close, intimate. A touch that wasn’t soft. Possessive in a way that stole the breath.
Cassian stilled.
Draco leaned in, breath warm against the shell of his ear, lips barely brushing skin. His voice dropped into something dark and velvet, curling like smoke through silk.
“I don’t just bite back,” he whispered. “I’ll make you bleed.”
Cassian shivered. Visibly.
But Draco wasn’t looking at him anymore.
His eyes lifted, sharp and silver like moonlight on a blade, scanning the room—and found the others frozen mid-breath. Spinnet’s smirk had vanished. Gideon looked like he’d swallowed his own tongue. Even Dolohov had gone rigid, wand half-raised in some instinctive twitch of disbelief.
All of them were watching.
But Draco wasn’t performing for them.
His gaze locked across the room—straight into eyes the color of blood-dark wine.
Tom Riddle didn’t move. But his posture had shifted subtly, shadows stretching long and strange around the leather throne he lounged in. His jaw had tightened, mouth drawn taut, and though his face remained composed, something fierce flickered beneath it—jealousy, rage, or something far more ancient and possessive.
Draco stared back—unflinching, unreadable.
And then he pulled away from Cassian like a flame withdrawing from a wick, leaving only the smoke behind. Cassian stood motionless, a flush climbing his throat—humiliation and heat wrestling for control behind his well-bred composure. The usual elegance, the easy command of the room, had slipped like silk torn on thorns. His mouth opened slightly, but no clever retort came.
Draco didn’t wait for one.
Draco’s expression was glacial. Composed. Untouched.
But inside him, something smiled.
He stepped back with calculated grace, smoothing a non-existent crease in his sleeve. Each movement deliberate, practiced—the choreography of someone who knew how to survive in rooms like this. Rooms full of teeth disguised as boys, all wearing the same crest stitched over their hearts like a threat.
The silence stretched taut.
“Besides, you’re not my type,” Draco said, his voice crisp and cold, sharp as a finely honed blade cutting through the thick air.
Cassian faltered for the barest moment—an almost imperceptible hitch in his usual effortless poise. The corner of his mouth twitched, caught between surprise and amusement, before he threw back his head and laughed—light, incredulous, like someone who simply cannot believe what they’ve just heard. “Not your—? No, no, that can’t be right.” He stepped closer, closing the space with a predatory grace, his expression morphing into a theatrical mask of mock confusion. “You’re mistaken. I’m everyone’s type.”
Draco’s brows lifted ever so faintly, a subtle arch of challenge that barely disturbed the calm veneer of his face. “Well, I’m not just anyone.”
Cassian blinked, genuine curiosity flashing in his eyes. “Then… what is your type?”
The question held no teasing edge now. It was stripped bare—vanity pricked and raw beneath the layers of performance. For all his grand gestures and sharp wit, Cassian was accustomed to adoration, fear, or at the very least, reluctant acceptance wrapped in trembling curiosity.
Draco’s gaze wavered—but only for a heartbeat.
Unbidden, his eyes flicked sideways, a subtle, nearly invisible motion, toward the darkened corner of the room where Tom Riddle sat.
Tom hadn’t moved. Yet the air around him seemed to darken, thickening like the heavy dusk before a brewing storm. He sat utterly still, a pale hand curled loosely around the worn armrest of the leather chair, his face a mask of cool indifference—as if this charade bored him to no end. But beneath that calm exterior, Draco could feel it: a simmering heat, a presence so sharp and watchful it pressed against his skin like a serpent coiling, ready to strike.
He tore his gaze away.
Draco’s voice dropped low, steady and clear despite the tension. “Not you.” He shifted slightly, already angling his body toward the stairs. “If that’s all, I’m heading to bed.”
The dismissiveness landed with the force of a slap.
Cassian’s eyes sparked, shimmering with dark amusement. “I’ll join you,” he said smoothly, his bravado snapping back like a whip, thick with arrogance. “I make a great lover.”
Draco’s stare cut through him, icy and unyielding. “You honestly think that line works?”
Laughter erupted—louder now, sharp and biting, reverberating through the room like the crack of a whip. Someone muttered “Ouch” into their drink, a sound half-mocking, half-impressed.
Cassian’s smile remained, but his jaw tightened just a fraction, a brief flicker of irritation beneath the carefully crafted mask.
Draco turned, his cloak whispering softly as he pivoted to leave—only to freeze when fingers snapped around his wrist. The grip was firm, unyielding, nothing like a gentle touch.
His eyes flicked downward, meeting the pale hand that held him, then flicked back up.
Cassian’s smile lingered, but it had thinned, become tight and strained—like silk stretched too far over fragile glass. “You’re awfully proud for someone who just got here,” he murmured, voice low and smooth, the words sliding like smoke but edged with steel.
The laughter behind them died away, silence folding over the room.
Draco’s eyes darkened, icy and sharp, his voice cutting like a honed blade. “Let. Go.”
For a breathless moment, time seemed to hang suspended—whether Cassian would release him or not remained uncertain.
Instead, his grip only tightened.
The flickering firelight carved stark shadows across Cassian’s angular face—elegant and fierce, a hunger simmering just beneath the surface. He leaned in, barely an inch closer, his presence pressing in like a weight.
His voice came then, low and smooth as velvet over iron, too calm for something so charged: “And if I don’t?”
It wasn’t a question but a provocation, a dare wrapped in the secrecy of a whispered promise. Beneath it lay something unspoken—entitlement, fierce pride, and the quiet certainty that he was utterly, dangerously irresistible.
Draco’s silver-blue eyes lifted, locking with Cassian’s in a cold, clear stare that sliced through the heavy air like frost biting glass.
And then—
Without a word, without a flicker of a wand or whispered spell, the atmosphere twisted.
A silent force erupted—unseen but devastating—a tempest bursting forth from deep within Draco’s core. It surged outward with ruthless precision, bending the very magic around them to his iron will. Quiet. Absolute. Immaculate.
Cassian was thrown back violently, as if slammed by an invisible hammer forged of raw power.
His body lifted from the stone floor, limbs flailing in brief, weightless disbelief before crashing down with a thunderous impact. The sharp crack of flesh against ancient flagstones rang through the common room, shattering its usual murmur.
He skidded across the unforgiving stone, fabric tearing, skin scraping, elbows and palms scraping harshly.
Blood blossomed across his hands—bright, stark red against pale skin—oozing in slender rivulets between fingers, arcing delicately before dripping onto the cold floor.
Silence swallowed the room.
Time seemed to pause, the shock suspended in the heavy air, all eyes frozen on the fallen figure.
A collective breath caught and stuttered through the gathered students, a fragile wave of disbelief breaking the charged silence. Then came the hushed whispers, cracked and trembling at the edges, like dry leaves scraping over stone.
“Bloody hell—”
“Did he just—?”
“No wand. Merlin’s tits—”
Cassian lay still for a long moment, his dark hair spilling like a silk curtain over one shoulder, framing a face that was pale and stunned. Slowly, he lifted his head, eyes wide and glazed, as if trying to grasp the impossible.
Meanwhile, Draco remained statuesque—an unyielding figure carved from ice and shadow.
With a languid flick, he smoothed his sleeve where Cassian’s fingers had grazed him, the silver thread along the cuff catching the firelight like a gleaming, warded edge. His expression was unreadable—impassive as moonlight on glass—but his eyes spoke volumes. Cold. Relentless. Terrifying in their utter stillness.
“Or,” Draco said, his voice low and razor-sharp, cutting through the murmurs like a blade, “that happens.” He paused, letting the weight hang heavy in the air, “I did tell you I’d make you bleed.”
Then, with a deliberate calm that rippled with menace, he turned his back to Cassian.
It was a quiet, calculated insult—an unshakable display of confidence. The move was subtle, but in Slytherin, it was a declaration of dominance. You never turned your back to someone you might have to fight.
Unless you were so utterly certain of your power that the very idea of risk ceased to exist.
The silence shattered like glass.
Whispers unfurled in hushed constellations across the common room—awed, uneasy, electrified.
“Wandless magic—seriously?”
“He didn’t even look strained—”
“That wasn’t just power. That was control.”
“Where the hell did he come from?”
Draco moved away, untouched by the swirling murmurs, his footsteps a deliberate, steady cadence against the cold stone. His robes whispered behind him—dark fabric trailing like a shadow that refused to yield to light. The heavy door groaned shut with a final echo, sealing off the moment like a whispered secret.
Behind him, Cassian pushed himself up with a shaky, almost reverent grace. His palms left dark, glistening smears of blood across the flagstones, stark against the cold stone. His breath caught—sharp and shallow, laced with a raw, disbelieving wonder. One trembling hand lifted to his face, fingertips tracing the crimson streaks on his cheek, painting pale skin in chaotic strokes of red—uncertain if this was real, or some cruelly beautiful hallucination.
His lips parted slowly, splitting into a smile—soft, dazed, almost tender. A lover’s smile, fragile and raw.
He stared down at the blood on his fingers, the deep wine-red glinting like liquid fire in the low light. His eyes dilated wide with something untethered—wild, unhinged—an intoxicating mixture of awe, hunger, and obsession.
And then he laughed.
First, a low, fragile sound—like glass windchimes trembling in a rising breeze, a secret released in a breath. Then deeper, stranger—soft with wonder, thick with reverence, like a choirboy glimpsing divinity for the first time within a vaulted cathedral.
“I think I’m in love,” he whispered.
There was no smirk now. No crooked grin or practiced charm. No pretense left.
Just raw, naked fixation.
His gaze remained locked on the empty stairwell—like it held a promise both sacred and terrible, distant yet utterly magnetic.
The common room held its breath.
Even the fire seemed to dim in awe.
No one laughed.
No one dared move.
Because the madness woven through Cassian’s voice wasn’t performance.
It was obsession—bright, fevered, and blooming like a dark bruise beneath his skin.
From his throne of shadows, Tom watched—immobile, a statue carved from stillness itself. Movement was unnecessary; control lived in the quiet, in the careful restraint of breath held and released like a whispered secret. He exhaled slowly, the breath slipping through his parted lips as a ghost—silent, fleeting—dissolving into the heavy hush left by Draco’s storm. The firelight flickered across his angular cheekbones, casting long shadows that deepened the sharp planes of his face. It caught the glint in his eyes, transforming them into molten slits—dark, unreadable, unblinking, watching.
Cassian lay crumpled on the cold flagstones like a marionette with severed strings, limbs splayed in an awkward, defeated tableau. One hand braced against the stone, fingers stained crimson and curling loosely over his stomach, where blood welled and seeped slowly, staining the floor beneath him. His mouth hung slightly open, breaths uneven, as if trying to grasp for something lost in the shock. His expression was a raw mixture of awe and worship—like a zealot confronted with the living embodiment of his faith.
Yet that fierce devotion, that unraveling obsession, was not directed at Tom.
A subtle shift stirred within him—something faint and sharp, curling low beneath his ribs like a smoldering ember.
It was not jealousy. Such petty emotions were beneath him.
No, this was something else.
Curiosity first—always curiosity.
From the moment Draco had stepped into the common room, moving with the confident grace of one who owned the space between firelight and silence, Tom had been captivated. There was an undeniable defiance in Draco’s bearing—a silent rebellion that bristled beneath polished surfaces. Power clung to him not as a weapon but as a mantle, worn effortlessly, arrogantly, with a rare and brutal beauty.
That alone had drawn Tom in like a moth to flame.
But now, beneath that initial fascination, something deeper had taken root.
Hunger.
Not the crude hunger for dominance, for bending others to his will, for breaking and remaking power itself.
No.
This was a hunger for something unyielding. Something wild and fierce, something that might fight back.
Something worthy.
Draco’s spine stood rigid as a drawn blade—sleek, cold, poised to pierce. His voice had sliced the air moments before, low and razored with something lethal. He hadn’t needed incantations or theatrics. No wand, no gesture—just that searing silence and refusal. Just presence. And with it, he’d felled Cassian Lestrange like a thunderclap dropped into still water, left him bleeding and breathless on the common room floor.
Tom’s pupils dilated, the change minute but distinct—black swallowing amber, shadow consuming fire.
There was pleasure in watching Cassian collapse, limbs folded, breath unspooling in jagged threads. Not because Tom loathed him—he hadn’t spared Cassian enough feeling for hatred—but because Draco had been the one to unmake him.
Efficiently.
Elegantly.
Like a prince of glass razors. Like poetry rendered in blood.
Desire sparked in Tom—bright, sudden, unbidden. It wasn’t the soft warmth of attraction; it was violent, serrated, and cold. A blade unsheathed in the marrow. It landed in him like a cut: immediate. Undeniable.
And then—Cassian’s voice again, rupturing the quiet.
Soft. Threadbare. Touched with reverence, as if spoken before an altar.
“I think I’m in love.”
The words should’ve shattered the moment with absurdity.
But no one laughed. Not even Tom.
His jaw tightened. Just slightly. A phantom muscle flickered beneath his cheekbone—barely perceptible, but there.
The irritation slipped in like a knife slid under armor. Clean. Deliberate. Not loud—never loud—but piercing all the same. He recognized it immediately, though he would not speak its name.
Cassian’s eyes, still fixed on the empty stairwell, shimmered with a light that set Tom’s teeth on edge.
That look said, Mine.
And that—that was the wrongness blooming beneath Tom’s composure like spores on stone. That was the rot curling behind his teeth.
Mine.
Cassian, bloody and spellbound, gazing up as if he had seen the face of god and mistaken it for a gift.
But Draco Peverell was not his. Not Cassian’s. Not anyone’s.
No.
No.
The thought lanced through Tom so sharply it nearly bled out of him.
There was no mine. Not for Cassian. Not for any of them. Not when it came to him.
Draco was a cipher wrapped in antique power, bound in ancestral shadows, humming with quiet catastrophe. He moved through the world like someone who knew the end of the story but chose not to speak it aloud. A boy forged of riddles and flint. A storm held at bay by will alone.
To stake a claim on something like that was laughable.
Worse—it was offensive.
The possessiveness in Cassian’s gaze grated like broken glass beneath Tom’s skin. It scraped against something feral, something ancient, something his that had no name. A thing that slept curled in the pit of his soul, and woke only when challenged.
That creature stirred now.
A serpent’s shift beneath velvet.
Tom crushed it.
Deliberate. Dispassionate. Deadly.
Emotion was a weapon, and he would wield it with precision—not wear it like shackles. Possession was for fools without patience. Desire was a flame easily extinguished when it served no purpose.
And yet…
The silence thickened—viscous, electric, coiling in the corners of the room like smoke from an unseen fire. Even the hearth seemed muted, flames flickering too softly, as if wary of breaking the spell.
Tom leaned back slowly in his chair—his throne, he called it, high-backed and ancient, carved into the very bones of the castle. One hand draped over the armrest, long fingers tapping against the stone in a quiet, syncopated rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap. A private language. A countdown, perhaps. Or a ritual. Or a vow.
His lips twitched at the corners—something almost like a smile, if a smile could be cruel and aching and void.
Too sharp.
Too hungry.
“Interesting,” he murmured, not to Cassian, not even to the room—but to the fire, to the flicker of something growing beneath his skin.
Because this wasn’t finished.
Cassian Lestrange was bleeding, broken open in devotion. In love with a god who would never look back.
But Tom?
Tom was beginning to feel the first sharp edge of want—something stranger, darker, older than desire.
And unlike Cassian…
Tom never bled for what he wanted.
He took it.
The Slytherin common room, sunken deep beneath the black mirror of the lake and cloaked in perpetual twilight, had always been a kingdom of cold marble and colder ambition. Green fire flickered behind iron-grated hearths, casting eerie shadows on ancient stone. The columns were carved with serpents whose eyes glittered like glass, and the vaulted ceiling was strung with whispers no one dared trace.
But tonight, it pulsed with something new.
Not warmth. Never that. But heat—thin and taut and unspoken, the kind of heat that builds behind closed doors and under skin. It buzzed beneath the surface like trapped magic, too dangerous to name.
Draco Peverell had left.
His footsteps had long since vanished down the corridor, the echo swallowed by the wet stone halls. But he hadn’t truly gone. He’d left something behind—not a void, but a presence. A weight in the air. Like a spell unfinished, humming on the edge of becoming. The water beyond the windows pressed closer, as though the lake itself had crept forward, curious, alert.
A few bubbles rolled up the glass—then stilled.
Cassian Lestrange sat slumped in the corner, his mouth bloodied, pride splintered clean through like old bone. No one spoke to him. Not out of cruelty—but because he had become irrelevant. An afterimage of the real event. A warning more than a person.
They had all seen it.
Not just the duel. Not just the way Draco’s wand had risen slow and sure, and the way Cassian had fallen—sprawled like a broken marionette across the flagstones. No, what they had seen was something deeper. Something far more terrifying.
They had seen command.
Not the kind shouted to cow lesser minds, nor barked like an Auror’s order. This was quiet. Cold. Absolute. It did not ask for attention—it demanded obedience simply by existing. Every motion, every silence, had been measured to unnerve. And it had worked.
The common room felt smaller now.
Quieter.
Tighter.
They lingered in the thick hush, each one sitting, or leaning, or lounging with the practiced care of aristocrats who sensed that something seismic had shifted—but didn’t yet know whether they should chase it or brace against it.
Avery, ever the brute, leaned against a stone column near the back of the common room, half-swallowed by shadow. His thick arms were crossed over his chest like a shield, the fabric of his robes stretching taut across his biceps. The green-glass lanterns overhead cast a sickly sheen over everything, and in their flickering light, his face looked sculpted in shadow—broad-jawed and grim, with hollows beneath his eyes that made him seem older, more worn.
He chewed the inside of his cheek—hard—until he tasted copper. It kept him anchored. Gave him something to feel besides the gnawing thing clawing through his chest.
He didn’t like how Peverell made him feel.
Not at all.
He was used to knowing where he stood in the Slytherin order. Near the top. A brawler with bloodlines. Not clever, maybe, but strong. Feared. The kind of boy others didn’t look in the eye unless they wanted something broken. He’d carved out his place the hard way, tooth and nail, and no one had taken it from him.
Until tonight.
Peverell hadn’t even touched him.
Hadn’t needed to.
The bastard had walked into the room with a face like a statue and eyes like winter, and somehow—somehow—the entire floor had shifted beneath Avery’s boots. Like gravity had chosen someone new to follow. Someone who didn’t snarl or shove or boast.
No, Peverell had whispered with his silence.
And the room had listened.
Avery clenched his fists under his arms, thick knuckles popping one by one. He tried to tell himself the same things he always did when someone smarter or prettier or more polished tried to throw their weight around.
He’s not even that big, he thought, gritting his teeth. Not broad. Not loud. Not hard like me.
He repeated it again. And again. Like a spell. Like a curse.
But it didn’t hold.
Because the truth sat heavy in his gut like a lead weight: Draco Peverell didn’t need to be big.
He didn’t need fists or bulk or brute strength.
What he had was worse.
He had gravity.
Not the kind that pushed. The kind that pulled.
An invisible weight that bent the air toward him. Made others lean in without realizing. Made even the shadows seem to part for him, as if they, too, recognized some ancient right.
Avery hated it.
He hated that when Peverell passed, the room quieted. That when Peverell looked at you, it wasn’t with disdain or mockery—it was with assessment. Like a scholar examining a ruin. Cold. Distant. Curious.
And always, always judging.
Avery felt seen—but not in a way that fed his pride. Not like when he strode down the corridor and made first-years scatter. No. Peverell saw through him. As if he already knew Avery’s tricks. As if he’d weighed him with those pale, silver eyes and found him wanting.
It made Avery feel like he was thirteen again. Like he was back in the dungeon corridors, swinging his fists too fast and too wild, trying to make the older boys respect his name. His blood.
He hated that feeling.
He hated him.
But hatred wasn’t the whole of it.
Because buried beneath the pride and the anger—so deep he barely dared acknowledge it—was a colder, sharper truth.
If Draco Peverell turned on him the way he had on Lestrange…
He would lose.
Not just in a duel. Not just in reputation.
He would be undone.
Not by power. Not by cruelty. But by certainty.
Because Peverell wouldn’t need to fight him.
He would look at him.
And Avery would already know he’d lost.
There would be no contest. No mercy.
Just loss.
And Avery, for the first time in a long time, didn’t know if he had the spine to stand in the path of someone like that.
Walburga Black stood rigid by the great, arched window, her posture as unyielding as the ancient stones beneath her feet. Arms folded behind her back, fingers intertwined like woven serpents, she was a statue carved from frost and pride. The murky waters of the lake pressed against the glass, casting rippling shadows that danced like ghosts in the dim, filtered light. The greenish glow painted her high cheekbones and hollowed temples with an eerie grace, sharpening every angle of her pale face.
But Walburga’s eyes were not watching the sluggish fish or the tangled weeds drifting just beneath the surface.
No.
She was listening.
To the silence Draco Peverell had left behind.
That hollow, charged silence that thrummed like a barely heard incantation, still humming in the heavy air.
There was power in that boy—power that did not shout or break but folded itself quietly into the room, as inescapable as the tide. Not the obvious kind, not the raw brutality of muscle and menace. No, his was a power far more refined: aristocratic, measured, lethal in its subtlety. The kind of power born not from the strength of arms, but from the cold geometry of restraint. The unnerving stillness that makes others shift uncomfortably in their seats, the frost in the fire’s glow that chills without a word.
It was more than mere confidence.
Confidence was a mask anyone could wear.
What Draco carried was entitlement.
A deep, unshakeable conviction that the world, with all its crooked laws and tangled loyalties, was meant to bow, just so, before him.
And for all Walburga’s lifelong hunger for pureblood supremacy and ancient bloodlines, she found herself caught—entangled between the prickling sting of suspicion and an unexpected pulse of grudging admiration.
She should despise him.
This pale interloper, with his enigmatic name whispered in half-remembered rumors and secrets folded sharp as daggers beneath the heavy cloak he wore like armor.
But she didn’t.
No. Instead, she admired him.
Quietly, carefully.
Because there was something in Draco Peverell that reminded her of a legend long past—the kind of ruthless grace captured only in the portraits that lined the Black family hall.
Regulus the First.
The Black who had bled five Aurors dry with nothing but a smile and a glare.
That same elegance. That same chilling certainty.
Walburga’s lashes lowered as she fixed her gaze on the murky glass, her mind sharp as a knife.
He might be dangerous.
Yes. Dangerous enough to unravel alliances, to topple thrones.
But, for now—he’s ours.
Druella Rosier was perfection carved from ice: sleek, poised, every line of her figure as precise and deliberate as a master’s brushstroke. Her glossy, blond hair was arranged in flawless coiling waves, each strand wound tight like the spring of a trap—too exact, too polished to be anything but deliberate artifice. She reclined effortlessly on the plush velvet chaise, her back straight as a high priestess in a silent cathedral. Fingertips pressed together beneath her chin formed a sharp, delicate steeple, an unspoken signal of her poised calculation.
She did not speak. Not a word. Her silence was a shield and a weapon both.
But inside, her thoughts unfurled like poison petals, rich and deadly.
Peverell.
The name rolled through her mind like a taste on the tongue—dry, aged, complex. Noble, yes, but shadowed by mystery. She didn’t know the exact bloodline; that lack of clarity only sharpened the allure. Unlike some desperate bastard clinging to borrowed prestige, he hadn’t introduced himself with a whine or a plea. No, he carried the weight of some distant throne, a king in exile walking among lesser lords, too regal for the company he kept.
And that unnerved her.
He didn’t flinch when eyes lingered too long, nor did he seek validation or approval.
He simply was.
A slow-burning control radiated from him, subtle but absolute. The kind that bent the temperature of the room by degrees, making others sweat without realizing why until they were soaked through.
She caught Abraxas in her peripheral vision—the tight set of his jaw, the hard lines of tension around his eyes, the rare flare of unmasked fury flashing like lightning beneath his calm exterior.
Even Malfoy is rattled.
That thought curled deliciously in her mind.
A shift in the power balance. A new contender—not just in their house, but in their world.
And Druella Rosier, who had always thrived on chaos wrapped in silk, on revolutions whispered in shadow, felt the faint stirrings of excitement.
She liked this new game.
So long as she could bet on the winning side.
Yaxley sat low in the worn leather armchair, the deep green shadows of the common room cloaking him like a second skin. One ankle rested casually over the other, but the lazy spin of his wand between thumb and forefinger belied the sharp, restless calculation behind his eyes. His expression was carefully blank—bored, even—yet those eyes, cold and fractured like shards of broken glass, never wavered from the dark stairwell where Draco had vanished.
He hadn’t uttered a single word since the confrontation, and there was no need. His mind raced faster than any incantation.
Peverell doesn’t bluff. The thought cut through Yaxley’s usual cynicism like a scalpel. There was no posturing, no desperate swagger, no second warnings. Just a razor’s edge of quiet, controlled menace. Most pure-blood heirs were easy to read: prideful, impatient, too quick to lash out. But Draco… Draco was different. The kind of boy who could poison you with a smile, neat and polite, then leave your body folded with precision in a chair, as if he’d done you a favor.
Yaxley prized control. The predictable flow of power, the rigid hierarchies, the known players and their moves. He thrived on the certainty of the game. But this boy? He had arrived like a knife tossed carelessly but deliberately onto the board mid-match—disruptive, unpredictable, dangerous.
What’s your angle, Peverell? Yaxley mused, fingers tightening on the wand. Who do you truly serve? And what will you take from us when the masks fall away?
The question lingered in the stale air, sharp and unresolved.
And though he’d never admit it—perhaps not even to himself—part of Yaxley wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stop Draco Peverell… or help him.
Macnair sat hunched forward on the edge of the long, serpent-green leather settee, the weight of his broad frame bending the ancient cushions beneath him. His elbows dug into his knees, fingers steepled tightly beneath a brow creased not by contemplation, but by something older, rougher—instinct. Thought was Mulciber’s sport. Macnair, by contrast, was a man of blood and muscle. But he watched. He read the room in the way a beast reads the wind before a storm.
And Peverell?
That boy didn’t walk like the others. He didn’t pace or strut or stalk. He glided—like a falcon loosed into a cage full of doves, feathers folded in stillness, talons hidden but ready. Macnair knew predators, could smell them across a battlefield, taste them in the silence that thickened just before a killing blow. And Draco Peverell had that scent about him—steel under silk.
He doesn’t smile, Macnair noted, eyes narrowing. Not truly. Not the way others did to charm or deceive. No, he bared his teeth. A quiet snarl masquerading as civility. A calculated twitch of the mouth, precise and surgical. Meant not to soothe, but to make you flinch.
Macnair could respect that. He liked things clean. Direct. He liked a killer who didn’t lace his blades with verse or sentiment. And there was something pure in the boy’s chill. But there was also something that raised the hair on the back of his neck—that stillness. Too perfect. Too polished. It wasn’t just control. It was containment. Like something far more violent lay chained beneath the ice.
His knuckles twitched.
A still predator was the most dangerous kind.
Hard to anticipate. Harder to wound.
Macnair didn’t fear much. He feared chaos less than he feared weakness. But instinct, that old animal whisper, told him one thing very clearly:
Don’t turn your back on something with eyes like that.
Not ever.
Mulciber sat apart from the others, half-swallowed by the tall-backed chair near the cold hearth, where the green flames had long since flickered out. His posture was impeccable—too impeccable. One leg crossed precisely over the other, fingers laced atop a book whose pages hadn’t turned in over an hour. The cover bore gilded runes, but he wasn’t reading them. His gaze was fixed—narrow, calculating—on the stairwell that still pulsed faintly with the echo of footsteps long gone.
Draco Peverell had left.
But Mulciber could still feel him, like the taste of metal in the mouth after lightning splits the sky.
His lip curled, subtle and sour.
He didn’t trust him.
Not because Peverell had cowed Cassian—violence was pedestrian. Not because he radiated power—so did half the room, in different forms. What unsettled Mulciber was far worse: he couldn’t read him.
And that was intolerable.
Mulciber prided himself on his mind. He was the puppetmaster in a room of blades, a strategist, a scholar of psychology and bloodlines. He knew how to unmake a person quietly, how to peel back the layers and press precisely where it hurt. People were puzzles—organic, often crude, but solvable.
But Peverell?
Peverell was an elegant void.
An enigma sculpted in marble and dressed in silence. His eyes were too old. His voice too deliberate. His restraint too sharp. He didn’t show fear, or pride, or hunger—just intention, smoothed like glass over a blade.
And that’s what made Mulciber itch.
Who taught you to speak like that? To strike like that? he wondered, his eyes narrowed into slits. Where did you learn to hold a room without lifting a wand?
And more pressingly—why don’t I know your name?
Mulciber’s mind spun, gears clashing behind his calm face. He turned inward, clawing through mental archives: obscure lineages, dead houses, vanished vaults, bloodlines erased during the Great Famines and the Silent Wars. Names struck from the record, magic once outlawed, sigils that hadn’t graced Hogwarts in centuries.
Peverell. The name tasted familiar and foreign. Something out of myth and tombstone.
He would find out. He had to.
Because boys like that didn’t just appear. Not at Hogwarts. Not in Slytherin.
They were placed.
And every placement had a purpose.
Dolohov lounged like a serpent in sunlight, sprawled on the narrow ledge of the arched window, one boot pressed against the stone, the other dangling lazily into shadow. The torchlight burnished his dark features in gold and coal—sharp jawline, curling mouth, and eyes like polished obsidian: cold, bottomless, and always watching. He looked carved from something ancient and mischievous, half-statue, half-threat.
The flicker of flame caught the smirk riding the edge of his lips as he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees with the ease of someone who never feared a fall.
“I’m just saying…” he drawled, voice a lazy blade coated in silk. “Did you see him in the torchlight? That hair. That jaw. That way he looks down his nose like it’s a birthright.”
He gave a low, appreciative whistle—amused, intrigued, and just a touch disturbed.
“He looks like—”
“Don’t.”
The word cracked through the air like a snapped wand.
Abraxas.
He stood near the hearth like a marble effigy come to life, arms folded with rigid elegance across his chest. The flames behind him cast his pale features in blood-orange and gold, but nothing could warm the ice that sculpted his face. The Malfoy crest—silver thread on fine black wool—shimmered over his heart like a ward, but it was his eyes that silenced the room. They gleamed like stormlight refracted through crystal. Cold. Charged. Condemning.
Dolohov’s grin only grew wider. A dog, scenting blood, baring its teeth in delight.
“What?” he said innocently, tilting his head like a man about to lean into a kiss—or a curse. “I was going to say he looks like you.”
The temperature in the common room dropped, not with chill, but something tighter. Denser. Like a pressure front before a magical storm.
Abraxas’s jaw flexed, the pale line of his cheek sharpening as his teeth locked behind his lips. The silence that followed wasn’t peace—it was tension held aloft by a hair’s breadth. Even the air seemed to pull taut, waiting for the blow.
Dolohov leaned in further, his smile turned wicked, daring. “I mean, he does, doesn’t he? Same cheekbones. Same insufferable sneer. That Malfoy tilt of the head when he thinks he’s purer than your blood. Awkward, that. You sure your father hasn’t been… busy?”
Across the room, Flint barked a low, scandalized laugh from her place draped over the staircase banister. “A secret Malfoy?” She said, mockingly horrified. “Now that would make the Christmas newsletters.”
And then—like a string pulled too tight—the moment snapped.
There was no flash of spellwork. No shouted hex. Only a gleam of silver and the whisper-soft sound of a wand clearing velvet as Abraxas drew it, swift as a striking adder. The tip hovered, trembling ever so slightly, like it ached for violence.
“Keep talking,” he said softly. Too softly. His voice was razors wrapped in silk. “And I’ll rot your tongue from your skull.”
The fire behind him roared—not at his wand, but at him. Fury without incantation, fury without form. It spilled over the grate like dragon breath, casting monstrous shadows up the walls.
Dolohov didn’t move.
But he no longer smiled.
The silence that followed was not absence, but weight. Heavy. Suspended on the knife-edge of old blood and brittle pride.
Abraxas stepped forward once. The sound of his heel clicking on stone was thunder in the hush. When he spoke again, his voice was crystalline, every word carved like it had been rehearsed in ice.
“My father is faithful. And he loves my mother.”
A beat.
His eyes swept the room, dragging across the faces that had dared to watch.
“Which is more,” he added, voice poisoned with aristocratic scorn, “than can be said for half your poisoned bloodlines.”
That struck like a Crucio.
Dolohov’s jaw twitched—something ugly beneath the surface. His fingers curled once against the stone ledge. Not in defense. But calculation.
For a breathless heartbeat, no one dared move. The tension hummed beneath the surface like cursed runes etched too deep. Even the shadows seemed to still, curling back like prey in the face of something feral.
The room was no longer just Slytherin common ground.
It was a battlefield.
Tom watched.
He always watched. Not out of idle curiosity, but because knowledge was leverage—weight to be applied, strings to be pulled. He collected details the way others hoarded gold: hungrily, obsessively, with the cold patience of a spider weaving web after web.
And tonight, Slytherin’s common room was a pond, still and secretive—until someone dropped a stone into its depths.
Draco Peverell had been that stone.
Tom tracked the shift like a predator beneath the surface. The ripple. The fracture. The way unease bloomed beneath skin, behind eyes. Not loud. Not dramatic. No explosion, no duel. Just silence unraveling at the edges. Ripples that bent outward and inward at once, subtle as a hex laced in honey.
His gaze drifted first to Avery.
The brute had strutted for months now, heavy-footed and louder than his intellect could afford. All swollen pride and secondhand menace, knocking first-years aside as if dominion were his by sheer size alone. But now—now he leaned stiffly against a carved stone pillar, arms crossed so tight his biceps bulged beneath his robes. His mouth was drawn, his jaw grinding silent fury behind clenched teeth. He glared—not like a wolf guarding territory, but like a guard dog who’d just seen his leash shortened. Glowering, yes. But defensive. Contained.
His shoulders slumped slightly—not enough for most to notice, but Tom did. A subtle tilt inward. A muscle twitch beneath the collarbone. The posture of a dog who knows not to bare its throat, even if it wants to snap.
Peverell hadn’t touched him.
He hadn’t needed to.
Tom’s lips curled at the corners, the faintest echo of a smile—if it could be called that. It wasn’t mirth. It was something quieter. More intimate.
Fascinating.
He filed it away.
Peverell moved like a polished blade. Not drawn, not yet—but visible. Present. Gleaming just enough to make the hand hesitate before reaching. He didn’t posture. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply was—and in being, shifted the room’s gravity. Every gaze recalibrated. Every pecking order cracked. The old hierarchy—slippery and blood-soaked—had flinched at something it couldn’t categorize.
And Tom, perched in shadow like a crow above a battlefield, saw everything.
Walburga sat curled in the shadowed crook of the emerald-glass lamp, half-swallowed by the velvet upholstery, like a viper coiled in silk. Her knees were drawn up, posture deceptively casual, but her wand—still clutched loosely in her fingers—betrayed the lingering charge beneath her skin. The duel had ended, yes, but its echo still hummed through her bones. Her eyes—dark as spilled ink—gleamed not with awe or longing, but with something colder. Sharper.
Calculation.
She’d marked Peverell the way she marked unsolvable Arithmancy theorems: as a challenge. A puzzle of blood and power and precision. Something to decode. Something dangerous and brilliant and worth knowing. Every so often, her tongue darted out over her bottom lip, slow and reptilian—tasting the air, as if magic had left a new scent behind.
Beside her, Druella Rosier looked the picture of composed elegance—legs tucked beneath robes of starlight grey, hands folded like petals in her lap. Her smile was, as always, delicate and doll-like, sugared at the edges, but her laughter—light and practiced—had stuttered when Peverell turned his head mid-duel. If you could even call it that.
Just once. Just a glance.
And in that glance, Druella had choked on her breath.
It had been the briefest hitch, the faintest crack in her mask—but Tom had seen it. Of course Tom had seen it. His gaze missed nothing, and Druella’s silence was an event in itself.
She thought she’d hidden it.
She was wrong.
Across the room, Yaxley sat with his elbows on his knees, hunched forward in a pose he might have once mistaken for confidence. But his skin had taken on an unhealthy pallor, like milk left too long in the sun. Gone was the incessant chatter about his father’s Ministry ties, the endless preening about family lineage and influence. Now his mouth was a tight line. His fingers curled white-knuckled against his thighs. He stared not at Peverell, but at the floor—beneath him, as though expecting it to open and swallow him whole.
He looked like a boy who’d seen the map redrawn.
And found himself outside its new borders.
Tom leaned deeper into the shadows, amused. Intrigued.
One boy. One name. One spell-strike clean as a scalpel. And the room had reshaped itself around him like water in a shifting basin.
Peverell had arrived.
Then there was Mulciber.
Tom’s gaze flicked toward him with the quiet intent of a scalpel angled at soft flesh. Mulciber—ever the tactician, ever the coiled viper in a velvet sheath—sat upright in his chair like a man resisting the urge to pace. His fingers were clasped too tightly, knuckles gone white against the dark fabric of his robes. Not nervous. No, not Mulciber. But calculating in the way of something forced to rearrange its universe in real time.
Tom tilted his head, studying him the way a master thief might study a locked vault—knowing the value inside, measuring the trap.
Mulciber was always precise. Controlled. He did nothing without intent. He was the kind of boy who waited before drawing his blade, made certain the cut would be final before the steel ever gleamed. But tonight, he had stilled in a different register—like a watch forced to tick backward, mechanisms resisting. His eyes, sharp as cut obsidian, narrowed with a kind of strained focus Tom rarely saw in him. The kind born not from threat of pain—but from disruption.
Mulciber loathed what he couldn’t read. Couldn’t map. Couldn’t master.
And Draco Peverell had not entered their world as a pawn, nor even a knight in need of study—but as a rival player, sliding his own gameboard across theirs without so much as asking permission.
Mulciber’s lips parted, then shut again. A breath caught between dismay and fascination. His mind spun beneath that marble composure—Tom could see it. Hear it, almost. Cogs grinding, rerouting, scrambling to reconcile this anomaly with the order he understood. This wasn’t a boy who belonged to their rules.
He was a rule.
And further along the wall, even Macnair—Macnair, who bled instinct more than thought—looked off-kilter. The big brute was hunched, elbows on knees, hands twitching in his lap like wolves deciding between fight and flight. He didn’t speak. Didn’t joke. Not tonight. His shoulders were set too tightly, as though expecting violence to pour down the staircase like a second coming of war.
Tom watched his eyes. They kept flicking—once every few heartbeats—toward the stairwell where Peverell had vanished minutes before.
Not out of curiosity.
But out of preparation.
As if Macnair, creature of blood and bone and primal rhythm, was bracing for the soundless return of something older and hungrier than any of them knew how to name.
Tom’s lips twitched.
Yes, he thought.
Now the game begins.
Dolohov was the only one who grinned.
But it wasn’t his usual grin. Not quite. It was sharper, more serrated. The kind that masks tension with bravado. Tom had seen it before in boys who liked to laugh just before they set something on fire. Dolohov leaned into the discomfort, made himself its herald—but he, too, had changed. There was something gleaming behind his eyes now. Something hungry.
He smelled blood in the water, and he liked it.
And then there was Abraxas.
He hadn’t moved from his place—his throne, as Tom privately thought of it—positioned near the fireplace with the flickering crest of the Malfoy family sewn over his heart. Everything about him had been designed for poise: one leg crossed over the other, arms folded, chin lifted at an angle that dared anyone to question him. But the flame behind him had flared earlier—not from spellwork, but emotion. Rage, pride, fear—they all lived under Abraxas’s skin in molten seams.
Tom saw the way his fingers twitched once, as if they wanted to go for his wand again. The way his eyes refused to glance at Dolohov now, or at anyone at all. He stared into the fire like it owed him something.
He was cornered, Tom realized—not in body, but in narrative. A new player had entered the game, and the story no longer bent around Abraxas the way it used to.
He looks like you, Dolohov had said. And for one brief moment, every head in the room had tilted. Had looked. Had wondered.
And that, Tom thought, was more damaging than any curse.
He descended the stairs at last, silent as smoke, the room barely turning to register him—still caught in the tremor left behind by the boy who had already gone to bed.
Draco Peverell.
What a name. What a lie.
What a catalyst.
Tom’s mind raced in silence. Not with jealousy. No, he was past that childish thing. This was interest. Deep, curving interest. A fissure had opened in the foundation of their house tonight, and rather than be repelled, Tom was thrilled.
He moved them, Tom thought, stepping into the circle of firelight. Shifted their gravity. Rearranged the pecking order in under two days. Not even I did that.
A boy who hid his name, wore his bloodline like a weapon, and looked at Abraxas Malfoy like he knew something.
Tom’s smile was small. Private.
“Oh,” he murmured under his breath, the fire catching in his eyes like it knew the secret too.
“How very interesting, indeed.”
✨
Just wanted to show some love for this fanart—it’s seriously amazing! Huge thanks to Garlicbread_4951 for creating such a cool piece of Cassian!
and by Ridikas this amazing fanart of Draco and Cassian.
Notes:
໒꒰ྀིっ˕ -｡꒱ྀི১ "Hey! Just a heads up—I might not be able to update for a bit. I’ve been free-writing the story so far, but it’s starting to get more layered, so I need some time to plan things out properly. Thanks for sticking with me!"
P.S I love writing tom but have a hard time getting his character, what do you think about him? What do you think tom riddle is like?
Chapter Text
The dormitory door groaned shut behind him with the weary, sonorous sigh of old wood and older hinges—an echo that rolled through the stone chamber like the exhale of some slumbering, ancient beast disturbed in its lair.
Draco paused on the threshold. Still. Listening. Letting the weight of the room close around him.
The Slytherin seventh-year dormitory stretched before him like a cathedral sunken into the bones of the earth, all shadow and glimmers of sickly green light refracted from the depths of the Black Lake. The ceiling was low and vaulted, carved in elaborate arcs, frescoed with serpentine patterns that writhed in the flickering torchlight. Silver eyes glinted from the curves of those painted coils, as if watching. Always watching.
Along the far wall, narrow lancet windows of thick, bewitched glass peered out into the underwater dark. Shapes moved beyond them—massive, deliberate. The sweep of a translucent fin. A coil of tentacles vanishing into gloom. A pale gleam of too many eyes, blinking all at once.
The lake was never still.
The beds stood in a wide arc around the room like the thrones of a forgotten, half-remembered court—six in total, massive four-posters carved from black walnut and heavy with green velvet canopies that trailed like drapes in an old theatre. Silver serpents were embroidered along the edges, their eyes tiny chips of emerald that caught the torchlight and glowed faintly.
The air in the chamber was cold and damp, soaked through with the mineral tang of stone and the iron-rich taste of water too deep to breathe. Beneath that was something older: the lingering scent of spellcraft so ancient it had soaked into the very mortar, and a pressure that coiled in Draco’s lungs like unseen smoke. He could feel the magic here—old, weighty, cold as winter-buried bone. It clung to the walls.
It seeped into the floor.
It watched.
A voice cut through the silence. Smooth. Lazily amused.
“Peverell, right?”
Draco turned, spine straight.
A tall figure stepped out from behind one of the beds. He was wiry, broad-shouldered, and moved with the loose precision of someone who’d never once been challenged and had no intention of starting now. His auburn hair curled damply at his temples, and his face was all sharp lines and quiet disdain. He wore only a thin, collarless shirt and dark sleep trousers. The sleeves were rolled high to his elbows, revealing pale forearms inked with faded sigils—interlocking runes of lineage and legacy, the kind that were burned, not drawn.
The boy’s eyes flicked over Draco, assessing. Then, with a ghost of a smirk: “You’re in with us. Seventh-year dorm. You’ve got the corner. You snore, you’re getting hexed.”
Draco inclined his head in silent acknowledgment, his voice cool and even. “Understood.”
“I’m Leo Fenwick, by the way.” The boy gave him a lazy smirk and disappeared behind the curtain again.
As Draco made his way toward the empty bed nestled beneath the deepest arch of the dormitory, his gaze swept over the other occupants with the clinical detachment of someone cataloguing chess pieces mid-match. Two beds were already closed off, thick velvet curtains drawn tight as tomb doors, with only the occasional rustle of fabric or faint exhale betraying the presence of sleepers within.
A third boy lounged on his side, half-propped on one elbow, the golden light from his wand illuminating the battered spine of Advanced Hexes for the Discerning Wizard. His eyes tracked the words without urgency, as if he’d read them before—many times—and was simply reassuring himself they hadn’t changed.
On the opposite side of the room, another lay sprawled across his mattress like a sultan in exile, wand lazily raised in one hand. With each idle flick, a pillow shifted into a coiled serpent—slender and silver-eyed—then back again, the fabric ruffling with each transformation. The snake hissed softly once before unraveling into cotton stuffing. The boy didn’t react. He didn’t seem bored, exactly. More like he was restless.
Draco’s steps were near soundless against the thick woven rugs that linked bed to bed in a quiet constellation of passageways. The patterns were intricate—forest green tangled with tarnished gold, like sunlight through murky leaves—and dulled with age in the places where countless feet had tread.
Behind him, his trunk hovered obediently in the air at a slight tilt, its brass corners catching occasional glints of the enchanted torchlight. It drifted after him in dignified silence, tugged along by a deft, unspoken spell and the flick of his wand.
This wasn’t truly his time.
Not his year.
Not even his war.
The stones beneath his feet had belonged to boys long dead or yet unborn. But still—still—he belonged here. As if the castle recognized something in him.
He reached the bed assigned to him: the one set against the outer curve of the chamber, beneath a tall, arched window. The glass glowed with the watery green luminescence of the Black Lake, casting slow-moving shadows across the floor like the reflections of ghosts.
The bed itself was identical in design to the others—black walnut, sturdy, draped in green and silver—but time had left its mark. The carved serpent twined around the front bedpost was missing one of its emerald eyes, leaving a hollow socket where the gem had once gleamed. Draco rested his hand on it for a moment, thumb brushing the smooth gouge. There was something dignified about the imperfection.
A flaw that had endured. He rather liked it.
Setting his wand down on the bedside table with a quiet click, he unfastened his robes with the practiced elegance of someone raised to dress like ritual. The fabric was soft, thick wool, black as night and subtly charmed against water, weather, and wear. Tailored to fit him precisely—neither showy nor austere, but calculated. He shrugged them off, folded them once, and laid them with care over the foot of his bed.
His cufflinks came next—slender ovals of polished obsidian engraved with the Peverell symbol in faintly iridescent runes. A mark subtle enough to go unspoken, but unmistakable to those who knew. He placed them gently beside the stack of books he’d arranged earlier: Magics Most Ancient, Occlumency and the Self, and a worn green leather-bound journal with cracked edges and ink stains that told stories only he could read.
He dressed for sleep in silence, exchanging layers of civility for comfort—soft black cotton shirt, loose drawstring trousers. No embroidery. No enchantments. Just fabric against skin. Clean lines. Quiet intent.
Then, finally, he sat on the edge of the bed and exhaled. The breath fogged faintly in the cold air, vanishing into the shadows above. The lake murmured faintly through the glass behind him, as if remembering.
He didn’t look back. But he felt it: something watching. Something waiting.
He felt like he just stirred the snake pit, unsure of what the repercussions would be from pushing Cassian like that. But in Slytherin you either bared your fangs or get buried to the bottom of the hierarchy.
Draco sat motionless for a long moment, spine straight, hands resting lightly on his knees. A part of him—perhaps the rational one—was relieved. But another, deeper instinct curled with quiet tension.
Riddle’s absence was a gift with a jagged edge.
Sharing a dormitory with him would have been... charged. Inevitable friction beneath every breath. But at least Draco would have known where he slept. When he moved. How often he watched. It would have been easier to study him in plain sight, to predict the boy’s steps like moves on a chessboard.
Now, the board was shadowed. The pieces hidden.
Riddle’s absence meant unpredictability. It meant Draco would have to work harder—listen for footfalls that weren’t there, read signs left in books, track murmured conversations down the winding hallways of a time not his own. But it also meant freedom.
For now, at least, Riddle did not know his rhythms. He didn’t know how Draco slept. Or if he slept. He wouldn’t be watching him from across the room in the dark.
Not yet.
Draco let out a slow breath and reached for the curtain.
The heavy velvet parted with a whisper like unfolding wings, and the strange light of the Black Lake spilled in, washing over his face and hands. It was a cool, shifting green, like moonlight passed through moss and memory. Shadows of creatures moved lazily across the glass—unfamiliar, eldritch shapes with trailing fins and too many eyes. The water above them pressed like a second sky.
The silence here was not true silence. It was ancient.
He heard the deep wooden groan of a beam settling above, the distant creak of another bed shifting under weight, and—beneath it all—the low, resonant hum of magic pulsing through the walls like a heartbeat sealed in stone. Hogwarts was always alive, but in the Slytherin dormitory, its breath was cold and slow and strange.
Draco shifted back onto the mattress and lay down, his spine sinking into the familiar unfamiliarity of the bed. He laced his fingers behind his head and stared upward.
The canopy above him was ink-dark velvet, but faintly, almost invisibly, an old protective ward shimmered across the surface. Threads of silver-blue magic traced serpentine sigils and runes too faded to decipher. The enchantment felt old—very old. Older than him, older than most bloodlines.
Inherited.
A relic of a time when nightmares were not just dreams, but invaders.
Meant to keep things out.
He wondered absently if it would still work.
The lake-light drifted in waves across the ceiling as something passed overhead—something large. Draco didn’t flinch. He just watched.
And then, without really meaning to, he closed his eyes.
The chill in the air settled on his skin like a memory. His heartbeat slowed. The old ward pulsed once, faintly, like a hand brushing his brow.
And then… he slept.
But it wasn’t strong enough.
TW- Trigger warning! ( Slight depictions of graphic elements that veer into gore but not exactly. Don’t read if you are uncomfortable.)
The dream began in water.
Freezing.
Viscous.
Green-black and thick as oil. It churned slowly around Draco’s ankles like a living thing, clutching at him with sluggish, deliberate currents.
The air was gone.
The sky, the moon, the stars—absent.
Not merely hidden, but erased, swallowed whole by a suffocating darkness that pressed in on all sides. This was a place without time, without sound, without mercy. The world had become a submerged mausoleum of memory, bloated and brined. It felt like standing inside a buried memory, heavy and half-rotted.
The lake stretched forever, stagnant and endless, a sea of the mind —
Wrong.
So wrong.
Then came the whispers.
At first, they were barely more than a murmur, like water brushing stone. Then—soft, sinuous syllables, curling around his ears like smoke in a sealed room.
“Peverell…”
His name—claimed, not spoken. A hiss of silk dragged across bone.
Another voice followed. Then another. Until the very water trembled with breathless sound, a thousand mouths murmuring just beneath the surface, brushing against his skin like cobwebs soaked in breath.
He turned sharply.
Shapes floated beneath the thick glass of the lake—too pale, too slow. Some had arms.
Others… did not.
They drifted with loose, aimless grace, like puppets cut from their strings. Their skin was waxen, bloated. Their faces were smooth and slack, features melted away by time and decay. Yet their eyes—if eyes they were—stared up.
Wide. Empty. Luminous as drowned stars.
Accusing.
A chill skittered across his leg. Something touched him.
He flinched, sharply—and a wand floated past him. His wand?
No. Not his.
Its wood was rotted, its core leaking soft gold like marrow. It drifted like the last piece of a shipwreck.
Then—
A hand.
Severed at the wrist. Pale as candle fat. Bloated. Its fingers twitched once—an obscene, deliberate curl, as though beckoning him closer.
Draco stumbled back, but the water climbed higher now, curling around his calves like fingers.
Thick. Wanting.
And then, from the heart of the dark, it rose.
A mirror.
It surfaced without a sound—titanic, solemn, terrible. As if pulled from some forgotten place beneath the lake’s memory. Taller than any door, taller than any tombstone. The frame was a wrought cage of bone and gold, carved in runes that twitched as if in pain. Dark veins of script wound across it like arteries, and at the top of the arch burned a familiar sigil:
The Peverell mark.
Triangle. Circle. Line.
Etched not into wood, but into the dream itself.
But the glass—
The glass was broken. Fractured like lightning caught mid-strike. Shattered from within, not without—cracks like spiderwebs of agony, as though it had tried to reflect something the world should never see. Blood—thick, dark, too red—streaked across the surface.
Some fresh. Some dry. Some ancient.
Draco took a step closer.
Another.
The air here smelled like gravewater and wilted roses.
He looked.
And at first—
Only his own reflection.
Shattered eyes, made stranger by the fractures running through them.
A jaw bent too sharp. A cheek flickering in and out of alignment, as if uncertain of itself.
He raised a hand. The mirror stuttered.
Then—
Shift.
He blinked.
And there he was.
Not himself.
Tom.
Tom stood within the mirror, calm and perfectly composed, as if he’d been waiting there all along. His robes were blacker than shadow, draping like silk over pale skin untouched by warmth. The Elder Wand rested in one slender hand, held with casual power. His face was unblemished.
Beautiful.
Terrible.
As if divinity and decay had found equilibrium in his bones.
His lips curled.
That smile.
Not warm. Not cruel. Something deeper. Something inevitable.
“You wear death well,” the reflection said, voice like velvet dragged across broken glass.
Draco tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth, water came instead.
Icy.
Choking.
A rush of it surged up from inside him—dark and thick, gurgling past his teeth, flooding his lungs.
He collapsed forward, arms clutched around himself as his knees sank through the mirror’s reflected surface. The world folded inward.
The mirror throbbed—like a heart, like a warning.
Tom didn’t blink. Didn’t move.
Only watched.
His eyes—dark as dry blood—pierced through the cracks in the glass like blades. And within those cracks, Draco saw more:
Flashes.
Battlefields alight.
Burning halls.
A boy standing atop ash, wand raised like a torch.
His own face—
Merging with Tom’s.
The same line of the jaw.
The same mouth.
The same eyes.
Two shadows, colliding.
A prophecy unspoken.
Then—
The mirror shattered.
It burst in a silent storm of shards that did not fall but hung—weightless—like starlight frozen mid-scream. Each jagged piece reflected something different:
—His face, skull-pale, mouth twisted in horror.
—Tom, smiling in the dark.
—The Elder Wand, glowing like a brand.
—A woman’s hand, reaching.
—A baby crying underwater.
—A snake coiled in a ring of fire.
He couldn’t scream.
He couldn’t breathe.
He was falling—
Not through air but through time, through thought, through bloodlines that had never been his, through a grave dug long before he was born.
And then—
Darkness.
He jolted upright.
(TW- Trigger warning over!)
Air tore into his lungs like broken glass—ragged, desperate, as though he’d clawed his way up from the bottom of the lake. His chest rose and fell in great, shuddering heaves.
For a moment, Draco couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t place himself. Only the press of silence and the phantom weight of water clinging to his skin remained.
Then the world reassembled around him.
The Slytherin dormitory ceiling loomed overhead—vaulted stone laced with ancient moss, tinted green from the murky light filtering through the lake outside. The torch sconces flickered low on the walls, casting fractured shadows that stretched like fingers. The enchantment beyond the windows shifted, slow and sluggish, like something watching from the deep.
It was cold. But he was soaked in sweat.
The sheets tangled at his waist like something alive, clinging to him in damp, suffocating folds. His hair was plastered to his forehead.
His spine ached.
He could still feel the dream coiled tight around his limbs, like it hadn’t let him go so much as unspooled him into waking.
For several seconds, he didn’t know where—or when—he was.
The past pressed against him.
Then the silence settled. Heavy. Breathless.
Slytherin.
Hogwarts.
1942.
Draco forced a slow breath, grounding himself in those names, but they tasted brittle in his mind, like something spoken underwater. He sat motionless in the four-poster bed, heart still hammering against his ribs.
A memory of glass shattering lingered in his ears—a high, crystalline sound that didn’t belong to this world. Had it happened in the dream, or here, in this room?
He sat up slowly.
He reached for the wand beneath his pillow.
His hand shook.
“Lumos,” he rasped.
A faint, ghost-pale light bloomed from the tip—cool and blue as moonlit frost. It cast long shadows along the floor, drew shivering lines down the stone pillars, and caught on the brass footboard of his bed.
But it didn’t chase all the darkness away.
No matter how bright the charm, there were still corners where the light bent back in on itself, curling away from spaces it dared not touch.
Draco scanned the room.
The chamber was vast and old, filled with the somber opulence of Slytherin lineage. Heavy green velvet curtains swayed slightly in some unseen draft. The stone floor shimmered faintly with reflections from the lake above, dancing like ghostfish in shallow pools. Each bed was veiled, carved of dark wood older than memory. Trunks sat neatly at the foot of each one, spell-locked and silent.
Nothing stirred.
No sound but the soft, even breathing of boys who had not drowned in dreams.
Draco’s legs slid over the edge of the bed. His bare feet touched the cold flagstones, and a jolt of chill traveled up his spine.
It steadied him. Slightly.
He bent forward, elbows on his knees, wand in one hand, the other pressed to his forehead.
His skin was clammy.
His thoughts were fractured—fragments of the dream catching light like broken glass in his mind.
The mirror. The hand. The voice.
“You wear death well.”
The words echoed, not in his ears, but behind them, like an imprint burned into his bones.
Draco exhaled.
Not a dream.
Not in the usual sense.
He knew nightmares—they came with fear, yes, but also the dissonance of unreality. This had been more than fear. It had been summoning.
The feeling clung to him now—the sense of a message sent, a tether pulled tight between his sleeping mind and something deeper, older, watching.
This wasn’t the first time. But it was the worst.
The image of the mirror rose again—shattered, blood-streaked, the Peverell mark glowing like an open wound.
And inside it: Tom.
Cold, composed, divine and damned in equal measure.
Holding the Elder Wand like it belonged to him.
Smiling like he knew.
Draco swallowed hard.
There were many kinds of magic in the world. This dream hadn’t sprung from his own subconscious—he would stake his blood on it. No guilt, no fear, not even the dark tangle of his own secrets could conjure something so… exacting.
So intentional.
Someone had planted it.
Or worse—something far older was warning him.
And it had whispered his name.
Peverell.
He gripped his wand tighter, eyes scanning once more.
Still no movement. Still no Tom.
Still no sign of the mirror or its broken glass.
But the air felt changed.
Charged.
He didn’t know if he’d brought something back with him from that dream, or if it had simply never left.
Either way, he wasn’t alone. Not really. Not anymore.
A glint of movement caught his eye—sharp and sudden, like a blade unsheathing in the dark.
He froze.
There, in the carved bronze mirror mounted beside the fireplace, something shimmered. Just the flicker of wandlight playing tricks on polished metal, reflecting his own pale silhouette. But in that breathless instant, it looked like something else—a shape just beyond recognition.
Watching.
His heart stuttered. The illusion dissolved with a blink, but it was enough.
He stood.
The stone floor was cold beneath his feet, numbing, but Draco welcomed the sting. He moved quietly, gliding between beds like a shadow. The other seventh-years slept soundly, their green velvet curtains drawn shut against dreams. Someone snored softly—deep, contented, oblivious.
Draco envied them, briefly.
His thin undershirt clung damp to his back. The chill bit through the cotton and settled into his bones, but he didn’t flinch. He needed this movement, this slow procession through the dormitory, as though walking might burn the remnants of that dream from his skin. As though if he just reached the window, he might see something that made sense of it all.
The far end of the room opened into a semicircular alcove. There, framed by worn stone and arching serpentine columns, was the window.
He paused before it, placing a steadying hand on the cool stone frame.
Beyond the glass, the Great Lake stretched into infinite black—a world without sky or horizon. The light from his wand dimmed against the vast darkness outside. Kelp swayed in long, skeletal tendrils, moving like slow fingers through the water.
Occasionally, the hulking shape of something ancient drifted past—enormous, indistinct, barely visible through the murk. Not hostile. Not curious. Merely present, in the way that mountains and storms are.
Eternal. Unmoved by the flailing of human lives.
Draco leaned closer.
His breath fogged the glass in soft bursts, momentarily painting the surface with ephemeral frost.
He didn’t blink.
His reflection wavered there—pale face, disheveled blond hair, hollow eyes that looked older than they should.
And still, the feeling clung to him—that he’d been out there.
Not in body. But in spirit.
That he’d stood in the silted depths of some otherworldly reflection, in the dream-space behind the mirror. In that realm where time didn’t pass, and voices knew his name before he spoke it.
And Tom had been there, too.
He could still see the boy—serene and smiling, a god draped in human skin, holding the Elder Wand like a coronation sceptre. His voice curling like incense.
You wear death well.
Draco closed his eyes for a moment.
He wanted—needed—to believe it had all been a nightmare. The distorted mind of a man who’d seen too much, lost too much, buried too much. A trick of memory and magic colliding in his sleep.
But he knew better.
Some instinct deeper than reason whispered the truth: the dream had not shown him something. It had summoned him. Not a vision. Not a memory. A meeting.
And someone—or something—had noticed.
A presence older than Hogwarts itself. Colder than the lake. Vast and indifferent, but not unaware. And it had whispered the name he should not bear.
Peverell.
Not a name, but a sigil. A scar. A legacy carved into myth, sharpened into a weapon.
His eyes remained fixed on the abyss beyond the glass. Somewhere in that black vastness, he’d left a piece of himself behind. Or perhaps… something had followed him back.
Behind him, a bed creaked softly.
One of the boys stirred, muttering something broken and half-formed in his sleep. The voice was small, human. It pulled Draco back, just a little—anchored him to the here and now, to the stone and chill and slow rhythm of Hogwarts beneath the lake.
He turned away from the window.
The dream didn’t loosen its grip.
He didn’t sleep again that night.
He sat in stillness, wandlight flickering low beside him, casting long, wavering shadows up the stone wall. His eyes stayed fixed on the window, unblinking. The taste of lakewater lingered on his tongue—cold, brackish, unreal—and the ghost of Tom’s smile burned behind his eyes like the afterimage of lightning. Not even the dawn could erase it.
Draco didn’t move.
Not when the other boys rose, yawning and stretching, muttering sleep-drenched complaints about class or girls or the weather. Not when their soft morning chatter filtered out into the green-hued common room, curling up the spiral staircase in fragments and fading like smoke. The noise of life passed around him as if he weren’t even there.
He remained on the windowsill—stone biting into his thighs, his muscles stiff and numb. The enchanted glass at his back wept with condensation, beads of water sliding down its surface in slow rivulets. They gathered like tears refusing to fall. He didn’t wipe them away.
Outside, the Great Lake shimmered with the first blush of dawn. Pale gold spilled across its obsidian skin, fractured into prismatic glints by unseen currents below. Shafts of sunlight sliced through the murky water and pierced into the common room like silent spears. One found him.
It touched his face like a blessing.
Golden light brushed his features, softening the sharp lines of cheekbone and jaw, kindling his hair into something incandescent. For a breathless second, he looked unreal—less boy than apparition. Seraphic. Untouched. As if some ancient painter had carved him from light and regret and set him down to mourn a broken world.
But inside, his chest was a cathedral of ash.
Hollow. Blackened. Burnt clean through.
He stared past the glass, through the glinting surface of the lake, to nothing at all. The world was waking around him, and he didn’t feel it. Couldn’t reach it. The sunlight couldn’t warm what was already dead inside.
He stared through the window with empty eyes, watching the day begin, and tried to remember what hope had ever felt like.
This is what Potter must have felt, he thought bitterly, back when it was all on his shoulders. When everyone looked at him like he was salvation wrapped in skin.
But Draco wasn’t Harry Potter.
And Harry Potter was dead.
Draco had seen it—had felt it in his bones. The boy who lived, dying at last. Cursed down in the hollow heart of Malfoy manor. He could still see the way Potter stood—spine straight, defiant, stubborn hope burning in his eyes even as death came hurtling toward him. He’d thought he could save them. All of them.
And no one had deserved to fall more slowly.
The truth had come later, harsh and cruel: it wasn’t Potter who had failed the world. It was the world that had failed him. It had asked too much of a boy and paid him back in silence.
And now?
Now it was Draco’s turn.
Save the world, the thought came again, jagged and metallic in his mouth. It tasted like rust and old blood.
He laughed. A low, empty sound, the kind made in the cold silence after a funeral, when all the tears had dried and grief had curdled into disbelief. It cracked the quiet like splintered glass.
It sounded wrong coming from someone bathed in golden light. Someone who looked—on the surface—like salvation.
But Draco Malfoy carried damnation in his bones. It clung to him, stitched into his skin with every Dark Mark scar, every sin he hadn’t atoned for, every silence he had kept when screaming might have made a difference.
He looked down at his hands.
Long fingers. Clean. Controlled. Hands that could perform intricate charms, coax trembling magic from ancient runes… or cast Unforgivable Curses without flinching. Hands that had held the Elder Wand. Hands that had done harm.
He was the only one left with the knowledge. The only one who understood the fault lines beneath this new, fragile peace. The only one who remembered how easily it had all fallen apart.
Knowledge Voldemort didn’t have. Yet.
Knowledge paid for in blood—friends, enemies, innocence. Paid for in betrayal. In cowardice.
You’re not a hero, he told himself, the words echoing in his skull like a mantra. You never were.
He had been a coward. A boy who hid behind lineage and privilege. Who bowed his head when they branded his arm. Who had watched Dumbledore fall and done nothing.
He hadn’t been brave like Potter.
Not clever like Granger. Not loyal like the Weasley boy, who’d thrown himself between Harry and death more times than Draco could count.
No, Draco had swallowed every lie fed to him since birth. Pureblood supremacy. The sanctity of bloodlines. Strength through tradition. He had soaked in it like warm water—safe, familiar, poisonous.
He had belonged. That had been enough.
And to belong, you obeyed.
He had taken the Mark.
Willingly.
Had stood beside monsters, watched children scream, watched Hogwarts—his home—drown in fire and darkness. And done nothing. Because he had been afraid.
Afraid of losing his mother. Afraid of losing his name. Afraid to stand alone in the light.
But now… now there was no one left to hide behind.
The burden was his. A thread uncut, stretched tight through time, tugged into the past like bait. A lie named Peverell. A secret sealed in blood. A path that led back to a boy with a predator’s smile and the future curled inside his fist like a prophecy.
Draco pressed his forehead to the glass.
The coolness shocked him, grounded him—just barely. The silence stretched around him like a cloak, heavy and absolute.
There was no voice to reassure him. No phoenix song. No guiding hand.
Only the hollow echo of a world that still needed saving.
And the last boy left to try.
The silence was his only answer.
Beyond the frost-laced glass, the castle was stirring. A thin mist curled over the lake like a breath held too long, shivering beneath the touch of dawn. Owls wheeled across the pale-washed sky, their wings catching the first threads of sunlight, shadows slicing the water below. Somewhere above, a bell tolled—soft and distant—its sound unraveling across the stone corridors like a memory. The call to breakfast. The beginning of another day.
Still, he did not move.
The chill of the window seeped into his skin, but he welcomed it. The bite of it grounded him. Anchored him. His reflection lingered in the curve of the glass: a ghost prince caught between planes of light and shadow. Silver-blue eyes stared back, cool and hollow, rimmed with something sleep never touched. His hair caught the molten spill of sunrise, gilding each fine strand until he looked like he’d been haloed in firelight, a figure sculpted from some old, broken myth.
A prince, yes. But not the kind who slayed dragons or saved kingdoms.
The kind who burned with them.
But inside him, something darker coiled. In the hollow place beneath his ribs, where once a heart might’ve beat, there lived only ash and embers. Regret simmered like a toxin in his veins. Purpose sat cold and sharp in his chest, a blade honed by guilt. He wore the face of grace. He moved with the elegance of lineage. But his soul—
His soul was a ruin.
An angel, sculpted in alabaster and gold.
A devil, hollowed by war.
And yet, somehow, impossibly, the world still expected him to save it.
Draco closed his eyes.
Just for a breath.
Soon, he would rise. He would wrap himself in the lie. He would play the part of the quiet transfer, the mysterious heir, the Peverell boy with perfect manners and eyes that had seen too much. He would take his place beside Tom Riddle, match him step for step, word for word, while pretending he didn’t see the shadow coiling at the edges of the other boy’s smile. He would wear his mask with precision. He would survive.
But not yet.
In this sliver of stillness, this hush between dark and dawn, he allowed the boy he had once been to surface. He mourned him—not loudly, not with tears, but with the quiet reverence of someone who had learned how to grieve without making a sound. Not for Potter, who had died a hero’s death with hope burning behind his eyes—but for himself. For the boy before the war. Before the name Malfoy had become a brand. Before the Mark. Before the world turned him into a vessel for things no child should have known.
The golden light outside had shifted. It no longer caressed but cut—precise, blade-sharp, painting the stone floor in clean, unflinching truths. Morning had come. And with it, expectation.
Draco opened his eyes.
The light had changed. It was no longer warm and forgiving, but sharp—white-hot and clinical, like a scalpel in a surgeon’s hand. It carved away softness, left only what was real.
The day had begun. And with it, the demands of illusion.
He stood with practiced grace, each movement deliberate, each breath folded tight into his ribs. His thoughts he bound with the same careful precision he used for spells—neat, hidden, untraceable. Grief, doubt, the raw ache of memory—they were locked behind the clean lines of Draco Peverell.
His wand slid into his inner robes with the familiarity of instinct. Every motion that followed was a ritual, an armor. He straightened his collar with exacting grace. Smoothed the green and silver of his robes until the lines were crisp, immaculate. He coaxed wayward strands of pale hair back into place with a flick of his fingers—swept and styled like a crown of frost.
A mirror near the stairwell caught him in passing.
The boy it reflected looked like he belonged in a painting—too perfect to be real. Sharp cheekbones, a cut-glass jaw, lips like winter secrets. His hair shimmered with hints of white-gold, eyes like moonlight caught under ice.
He looked untouched. Unbothered.
Invincible.
Impeccable.
And yet—beneath the surface, old scars pulsed. The kind not written on skin, but in silence. In memory.
A prince of ghosts.
He left the common room without hesitation, steps measured and silent, as though each one had been choreographed. First-years parted around him, murmuring half-formed greetings, eyes wide with sleep and something else—curiosity, maybe.
Wariness.
The older students watched him too, voices pitched just low enough to suggest discretion, but not so low that he couldn’t feel the heat of their speculation prick at the back of his neck.
Behind him, the lake pressed close to the glass like a living presence—its depths still and deep, glimmering like an eye that had seen too much.
They’re watching already, he thought. And of course they were.
Peverell was not a name easily whispered. It rang like prophecy. It curled off tongues like a spell. It carried with it echoes—ancient and powerful. And it was doing exactly what he had intended.
They were watching.
And that meant he still had time.
Time to play the part.
Time to gather what he needed.
Time, before the future broke loose from its cage.
The Great Hall greeted him with clamor and the mouthwatering scent of roasted tomatoes, buttery eggs, and toast charmed never to cool. Sunlight poured through the enchanted ceiling in molten gold, mimicking a perfect spring morning—so flawless it felt unreal.
Overhead, owls swept in and out of rafters, wings scattering feathers and forgotten dreams across gleaming platters and murmuring heads.
Draco walked with effortless grace between the tables, his stride fluid, his robes whispering like silk. He didn’t seek attention—but it clung to him nonetheless. Dozens of eyes tracked his progress, some curious, some suspicious, others barely concealing their awe. He moved like something carved from another time, a storybook figure in flesh and breath, a ripple across the still waters of routine.
He slipped into a seat at the Slytherin table, unaffected by the hush that trailed him like smoke. Gideon waved from across the table, cheeks full of toast, his grin crooked and laced with the kind of boyish fondness that hadn’t yet learned restraint.
“Morning,” Gideon said, still slightly winded. “Did you, uh—sleep well?”
Draco reached for a cup of black tea, his fingers precise. “Well enough,” he said, though the truth trembled like glass beneath a storm.
At the staff table, a sudden rustle of movement caught the eye—Professor Slughorn, already ruddy-cheeked from too much buttered toast and social exertion, had spotted his newest jewel.
“Ah! Mr. Peverell!” he boomed, voice wobbling with syrupy delight as he rose to his feet in a wave of emerald velvet. His robes swished like curtains caught in a breeze, trailing crumbs and the faint scent of candied pineapple as he bustled toward Draco with alarming speed for a man of his girth.
A stack of parchment flapped in his hand like a victory banner. His moustache, waxed to perfection, twitched above his lip with excitement barely contained. His eyes gleamed with something too eager, too pleased—as if Draco’s arrival were not a scheduling inconvenience, but a personal triumph.
“Your schedule, my boy!” he sang, cheeks jiggling with every syllable. “Bit of a juggle, but we’ve slotted you in splendidly. Late transfers always need a delicate touch, of course, but no worries! You’ve landed in excellent company.”
He turned with a flourish toward the Slytherin table, where students had begun to murmur like a tide drawn to shore.
“If you need any help,” Slughorn added conspiratorially, lowering his voice just a touch, “talk to Mr. Riddle. He shares all your classes. Brilliant young lad—sharp as a basilisk fang. I daresay the two of you will get on famously.”
Draco inclined his head with a courtly sort of grace, the movement smooth and deliberate, as though his spine were forged from glass. He took the parchment with a care that made even the act of receiving feel like a ritual.
“Thank you, Professor,” he said, voice silk-wrapped steel.
Slughorn beamed, puffing up like a toad in spring. “You’ll shine, no doubt about it!” he crowed, clapping Draco on the shoulder with a meaty hand. “A Peverell—heavens, we haven’t had the like in generations. Caused quite the stir, you know. Quite the stir.”
Draco’s lips curled into an elegant, bloodless smile. “An honor, I’m sure,” he murmured, gaze flicking to the schedule in his hand. “Though the name casts more shadow than star, these days.”
“Pish-posh!” Slughorn laughed, waving the notion away with a pastry-crumbed hand. “Romantic nonsense! Prestige doesn’t tarnish, my dear boy—it glows.”
And with that, he ambled back toward the staff table, humming under his breath and already distracted by the lure of sugar-glazed éclairs and self-importance.
Draco stood still a moment longer, letting the silence settle back over him. Then he unfolded the parchment with a flick of his wrist, like revealing the next move in a game only he could see.
Potions. Defense Against the Dark Arts. Arithmancy. All seventh-year courses. All, of course, the domain of Tom Riddle. Despite him being being only a fifth year, his aptitude was higher.
Naturally.
As if conjured by the thought alone, he lifted his gaze—and met a stare already fixed upon him.
Tom sat at the far end of the Slytherin table like a crowned king at court, untouched by the ripple of voices that buzzed around him. He was reclined in his seat with the kind of coiled stillness that suggested either supreme control or imminent violence—perhaps both.
Speaking idly to that unhinged bastard—Cassian, but his eyes were fixed on Draco.
Not directly. Not crudely. Just steadily. As though he had always been watching. As though the moment Draco’s gaze finally collided with his was not coincidence, but inevitability. Like the gravity between them had always existed—silent, vast, waiting to be acknowledged.
Tom Riddle looked like poetry sharpened into a blade.
His beauty was the kind that unsettled, not because it faltered—but because it didn’t. Everything about him was too exact,too exquisitely made. High cheekbones caught in soft chiaroscuro, sharp as marble under firelight. A mouth that was almost too full for his otherwise knife-edged face—deceptively soft, like silk draped over steel. And those eyes—God,those eyes.
They were dark, almost black in the torchlight, but laced with something unnatural—a faint tinge of red bleeding at the edges, subtle and strange, like a bruise blooming outward from the soul.
Not human. Not really.
The kind of eyes that didn’t just look at you—but through you. As though weighing your worth against some secret scale only he could read.
His curls, raven-dark and neatly combed, caught thin ribbons of sunlight like coiled ink. When he moved—head tilting the slightest degree, like a cat scenting something new—it was with deliberate grace, fluid and predatory. A kind of stillness that hinted at speed, at control, at how easily he could shatter the moment if he so chose.
He didn’t move through the world.
He bent it.
And Draco—Draco, who had faced monsters in glass and gods in dreams—stood still. Not from fear.
But from recognition.
He moved without haste, yet the crowd parted for him as if compelled—drawn back not by gesture, but by something colder, deeper. Command threaded through his very presence.
His footfalls were near soundless, the kind of quiet that unsettled rather than soothed. Grace clung to him like a second skin, but it was a sharpened kind of beauty—too deliberate, too self-possessed. He didn’t walk so much as glide, like the floor welcomed him.
There was danger in that kind of ease.
Draco remained still. Composed. He didn’t retreat, didn’t blink. He held Tom’s gaze, level and unyielding, the space between them stretched thin—tight as piano wire, and twice as fragile.
“Mr. Peverell,” Tom said, voice low and intimate—pitched for no ears but Draco’s. It was silk wrapped around something cold. “Did you sleep well?”
Draco tilted his head, the motion subtle, curious. “Dreams are strange in a place like this.”
Tom’s lips curved—not into a smile, exactly, but something quieter.
Hungrier. “The lake tends to crawl into them.”
He didn’t say it like a joke. He said it like a man remembering. Like someone who had drowned before and brought the nightmare back with him.
Draco’s fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the delicate porcelain of his teacup.
Not enough to crack it.
But close.
Draco didn’t look away.
His gaze held—unblinking, unshaken—cool as morning frost beneath a heavy winter sky. There was no challenge in it, no flicker of flirtation or artifice. No upward tilt of the lips to suggest jest, nor the shadow of calculation in the corners of his eyes. Just stillness. Quiet, composed, deliberate.
And then—so softly it might have been imagined—he asked:
“And you? Did you sleep well?”
The words were light. Barely there.
They fell into the space between them like the first snow of the season—soundless, startling in their softness.
For a breath, Tom said nothing.
Not because he didn’t know how to answer. Tom Riddle always had answers—elegant, effortless, as if plucked from the air. He could lie with grace, mislead with charm. But this question… it wasn’t one he’d anticipated. It wasn’t a move on a chessboard. It wasn’t wrapped in sugar or venom.
It was… sincere.
Startlingly so.
Not tender, not intimate—not in the way others tried to be, lured by the gleam of him, by what they thought he was. This wasn’t someone trying to worm their way past his armor. It was just a question. Unarmed. Undemanding.
Real.
And somehow, that made it worse.
It slipped under his skin not because it was clever, but because it wasn’t.
There was no reason for it—no agenda tucked behind it like a blade.
Just concern.
Human.
Ordinary.
And for a moment—brief, but unmistakable—it struck something raw.
A wound he didn’t know he’d left exposed.
Something curled tight in his chest, then uncurled slowly, as if stirred awake. A quiet ache, shapeless and unwelcome.
But he recovered fast—he always did. The silence between them folded neatly, like the edge of a letter pressed closed.
He smiled.
A careful thing. Measured. Just enough to suggest something like warmth, though his eyes—dark and polished as obsidian—remained unchanged. Watching. Guarded.
“No,” he said at last, voice smooth as silk sliding over stone. “Prefect duties. We keep odd hours.”
A neat answer.
Uncomplicated.
True, technically. But not the truth.
Tom’s smile lingered, stretching just a fraction too long—shifting at the corners like something worn too often. It was beautiful, yes.
Almost mesmerizing. A face shaped to please, to disarm.
It shimmered like moonlight brushing the surface of a still lake—serene, silvered, flawless.
But beneath the shimmer…
The water ran deep. And dark.
“You seem to know the castle intimately,” Draco said then, his voice mild, the words tossed like a stone skipping across water—light, effortless. But Tom heard the weight beneath them.
Subtle. Deliberate.
He turned slightly, just enough for the firelight to catch on the fine bones of his face, cutting soft gold shadows along his cheekbones. He looked, for a moment, like a painting done in warm smoke—elegant, unfinished, flickering at the edges.
“I know what it chooses to show me,” he said at last.
The syllables fell slowly, draped in velvet. His voice, typically clipped and crystalline, dropped into something lower, smoother—silk dragged across stone.
“Hogwarts has moods. Secrets. It shifts for those who listen.”
There was something in the way he spoke—not performance. Devotion.
As though he weren’t describing a building, but a god.
A thing sacred. Sentient. Alive.
As if the castle whispered its secrets only to him.
The space between them pulsed—taut as a string, thin as a breath drawn and not yet exhaled.
Another silence followed, slow and curling, fragrant as incense. It coiled into the quiet like smoke curling around candlelight—soft, but hard to ignore.
And then Tom asked—lightly, carelessly, like flicking dust from his sleeve:
“Has it shown you anything… interesting?”
The question was dressed in nonchalance. Almost too much so.
Like a blade hidden in folds of silk.
Draco didn’t answer immediately.
He let the pause breathe. Let it settle between them like drifting ash.
And when he did speak, his voice was cool—untouched by the slow-blooming tension between them. His lips curved faintly, the ghost of a smile—elegant, precise, a little amused. A prince in his own right, giving nothing away.
“That depends,” he murmured, “on your definition of interesting.”
Tom’s gaze sharpened—but it wasn’t suspicion that stirred in those dark-ringed eyes.
He wasn’t watching Draco the way he might watch a threat, measuring distance and weakness. Nor did he look at him with the cold, acquisitive hunger he reserved for things he wanted to possess—power, secrets, allegiance.
No—this was different.
He regarded Draco as one might regard a puzzle box carved in the forgotten dialect of a fallen empire: intricate, veiled in silence, humming faintly with a kind of magic he could almost recognize but not yet name. Something ancient in its quietude.
Something that resisted being solved.
There was curiosity in him, certainly. That restless hunger for knowledge, for control, for understanding. Calculation, too—it lived behind his every blink, coiled and patient like a snake in warm stone.
But beneath all that—beneath the keen-edged intelligence and the perfect composure—there was something else.
Something quieter.
Something dangerous.
A flicker.
A thread of something personal.
Not desire, not yet.
Not emotion as others felt it.
But a thrum—a low, rhythmic ache—as if some half-formed idea had rooted itself deep in his chest and was beginning, slowly, to grow teeth.
It unsettled the air around them.
Charged it.
Like the breathless stillness before a thunderstorm breaks. Like lightning waiting inside a cloud.
And Draco—so pale in the firelight, so still he might have been carved from frost—held that gaze without flinching.
As if daring Tom to keep looking.
As if he knew exactly what he was inviting in.
At last, Tom inclined his head.
Barely a motion.
A ghost of acknowledgment, thin as the space between breaths.
Not surrender.
Not concession.
But something older.
Recognition.
Of a game begun.
Of a thread pulled taut between them.
“Well,” he said, voice velvet-draped, too smooth to grasp, “if it does—do let me know.”
And in the long hush that followed, the room seemed to hush with them.
As if even the castle was listening.
Then Tom turned—fluid as smoke—disappearing into the thinning crowd with that unnatural, spectral glide that didn’t so much suggest walking as slipping through the world untouched.
He didn’t rush. He never needed to.
Students parted for him instinctively, not out of recognition or respect, but as if their bodies understood something their minds refused to name.
A primal hush followed in his wake.
No footsteps.
No sound.
Only silence—the kind that settles after a spell is cast.
It was as though he’d never been there at all.
Only the echo remained—like the aftertaste of a beautiful lie.
Draco didn’t move.
His teacup sat cooling between his hands, untouched and forgotten, the steam now little more than a whisper curling toward the vaulted ceiling.
He watched Tom go—not with longing, not with fear, but with that peculiar stillness he wore like armor.
A nobleman’s calm.
Observant. Unreadable.
The game had begun.
And the board, quietly and invisibly, was already moving.
Behind him, the bustle of the Great Hall dulled to background noise—low, indistinct, like sound heard through a wall of glass. Students filtered out in twos and threes, their chatter thinning into the corridors beyond.
But not all left.
At the far end of the Slytherin table, Cassian Lestrange lingered longer than he needed to—his eyes trained on the place where Tom had stood. His lips were tight, jaw clenched beneath the immaculate cut of his cheekbone.
It wasn’t jealousy.
It was threat recognition.
Something inside him recoiled at the image of Tom speaking so closely, so calmly, to Draco—his Draco, in all but name. He didn’t understand the nature of their exchange, but he felt its weight.
The intimacy of it. The danger of it.
He masked it poorly.
Avery, watching from across the table, flicked a glance toward Mulciber, whose brows had drawn together in a faint frown.
A glance passed between them—small, sharp, telling.
Something was shifting.
Something had already shifted.
And none of them—not even Cassian—had been the one to make the first move.
Cassian waited until the last of the Gryffindors sitting behind them had filed out, their laughter echoing faintly through the corridor beyond. The remains of breakfast lay forgotten, crumbs and cooling porridge, the air tinged with the mingled scents of smoke and citrus tea.
He slid onto the bench across from Avery and Mulciber, his fingers tapping once—twice—against the wood. Not a fidget. A warning.
“I suppose I’m the only one,” he said coolly, “who found that… strange.”
Mulciber didn’t look up. “What?”
“That,” Cassian snapped, nodding toward the space where Tom Riddle had stood only moments ago. His tone was low, sharp around the edges. “Riddle. With Draco. Speaking like that. Close.”
Avery raised a brow, leaning back in the bench with infuriating ease. “Speaking like what?”
“Like he knew him,” Cassian said. “Or wanted to. And since when does Riddle want anything from anyone?”
There was a pause—brief, but tight with implication.
Mulciber finally looked up, his dark eyes flicking toward Cassian’s. “He’s Prefect. He speaks to people.”
“Not like that,” Cassian insisted. “Not to anyone. He doesn’t waste words. You’ve seen how he treats the others—cold, polite, distant. But with Draco—” he gestured with an annoyed twist of his wrist, “—he stood too close. He lingered. And he smiled.”
Avery snorted, but it lacked humor. “Gods forbid someone actually smiles at Peverell.”
Cassian’s eyes narrowed.
“You saw it too,” he said, quieter now. “That wasn’t a smile. Not a real one. It was… something else. Like he was testing him. Or…” His voice dipped. “Studying him.”
Mulciber folded his arms across his chest, brow furrowing. “You think he’s suspicious of Peverell ?”
“I don’t know what he is,” Cassian muttered. “That’s the problem. No one ever does.”
Avery finally leaned forward, suddenly more serious.
“You think he sees Peverell as a threat?”
Cassian gave a humorless laugh. “Riddle doesn’t get threatened. But he notices things. And if he’s noticed Draco—really noticed—then that means something.”
His fingers curled tightly against the edge of the bench.
Jealousy curled in Cassian’s gut like a serpent coiling tighter with every breath. It startled him—an alien thing, raw and biting—because he was used to causing that feeling in others, not drowning in it himself. He was the one who twisted hearts in his hands like ribbons, not the one gasping for air, watching something slip through his fingers.
Like that transfer student from Beauxbatons last year.
Cassian had made the boy fall for him so quickly it was laughable—one look, a whisper against his throat, a promise sweet as poison. He’d told him he’d hurt himself if he ever tried to leave.
Of course, the boy did leave.
And of course, Cassian hadn’t hurt himself. The fool had cursed himself instead, driven mad with guilt and longing, carted off to Saint Mungo’s drooling and broken. His parents pulled him out of Hogwarts in disgrace. Cassian had laughed until his ribs ached.
He’d felt irresistible. Untouchable. A god with a schoolboy’s smile.
But Draco had made him bleed.
That memory was still sharp—his lip split open, iron tang on his tongue, the glint of detachment in Draco’s eyes as if Cassian were no more than a smudge on his sleeve. He hadn’t stammered.
He hadn’t flushed.
He hadn’t looked at Cassian the way people were supposed to look at him.
No desperation, no hunger—just calm, cool dismissal.
And yet, something in Cassian lit at the sight of him. Something wild and unnameable.
It was like a sudden inhale of winter air, so crisp it stung his lungs and left him wide awake. That flicker—a fire he didn’t know he had—crackled to life behind his ribs.
It made his hands tremble.
“And I don’t like it.” His voice was just above a whisper.
Mulciber shrugged, slow and disinterested on the surface, but his eyes told a different story. He was watching Cassian now—not just looking, but studying, as if he’d caught the scent of something dangerous beginning to burn. “So,” he drawled, tone deceptively light, “what do you plan to do?”
Cassian didn’t reply right away.
His eyes were fixed on the door, unblinking.
The heavy oak had long since closed behind Riddle, but in Cassian’s mind, the path he’d taken was still there—a charged absence in the air, like the wake of a storm just passed. He could almost feel the disturbance in the magic around them, like invisible threads still trembling where Tom had walked.
Riddle wasn’t like the others.
He couldn’t be bent or baited. He didn’t orbit anyone—others orbited him. Cassian had always admired that, the raw, gravitational pull Tom wielded without effort. He was dangerous in a way that was beautiful, calculated, unreachable.
But now, that admiration had turned sour in Cassian’s mouth.
Because Riddle—untouchable, unbothered Riddle—had looked at someone. Had spoken to him, again and again. Not in passing, not as a manipulation, but as if he were interested.
Truly, actively, interested.
The way his eyes lingered. The quiet smiles. The way he leaned in a little too close.
Cassian’s skin crawled with unease. The kind of dread that came from seeing something you thought you understood—something solid and eternal—begin to shift beneath your feet.
What did it mean?
Was Riddle curious? Was it another game, another use? Or… was it something else? That flicker behind Tom’s eyes, the way his gaze lingered a moment too long—did he like him?
Cassian’s jaw clenched, the muscles ticking as tightly wound tension coiled along his spine.
“Nothing,” he said at last, his voice quiet and cold—like the snap of frozen branches under a hunter’s boot. “Not yet.”
He rose to his feet in one smooth motion, his posture precise, every line of his body composed like a blade sheathed too long. But his jaw—gods, his jaw—was locked so tightly it looked as though it might splinter.
He hesitated only a second.
“But I am going to find out what Riddle wants.”
And with that, he turned and walked off—each step measured, deliberate, echoing softly through the corridor. But beneath the surface, just beneath the crisp click of polished shoes and the graceful fall of his robes, something darker was stirring.
A storm he didn’t yet understand. A hunger he couldn’t name.
Mulciber watched him go, the ghost of a smirk touching his mouth.
Because jealousy—that was the first crack in any prince’s crown. And Cassian had just begun to fracture.
Avery squinted after Cassian’s retreating back, then turned to Mulciber with a puzzled frown, chewing absently on the edge of a piece of toast.
“Do you really think Peverell is a threat to Riddle?”
Mulciber didn’t even try to hide his scoff. He dropped his fork with a clatter and rubbed a hand down his face like he was wiping away the headache Avery had become.
“Avery,” he muttered, “use your brain—assuming it’s not pickled in pumpkin juice.”
Avery blinked, affronted. “What?”
“He’s not worried Riddle’s scared of Peverell,” Mulciber said, gesturing vaguely at the now-empty space where Draco had sat, tea cooling in his absence. “Cassian’s jealous.”
Avery wrinkled his nose. “Of Peverell?”
Mulciber groaned so hard it was practically operatic. He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if summoning strength from the gods of patience.
“Of Riddle, you fool. Jealous that Riddle is showing interest in Peverell.”
Avery’s mouth formed a small “o,” eyes widening with a flicker of delayed comprehension. He sat straighter, brows slowly climbing.
“Ohhh,” Avery breathed, dragging the syllable out like it tasted strange on his tongue. Then, after a beat, his brows lifted in slow, dawning mischief. “Do you think Riddle likes Peverell?”
Mulciber’s lips curved—not into a smile, but something sharper, colder.
Amused, yes, but also predatory. The kind of expression a snake might wear just before striking.
“Now that’s the question, isn’t it?”
He didn’t look at Avery when he said it.
Instead, he slouched back against the bench, his elbows resting lazily on the carved greenwood. His eyes drifted up toward the staff table, then flicked back toward the spot where Riddle had been sitting not moments ago. The place felt oddly hollow now, as if the absence of his presence created a void that others instinctively avoided filling.
“Normally, I’d say no. Riddle doesn’t like anyone. Doesn’t need to. He just…” Mulciber waved a hand, vague and dismissive, “uses them. Like stepping stones. One after the other until he gets what he wants.”
But then his fingers stilled, hovering midair as memory clawed back into shape.
“But that—” he gestured again, more precisely this time, to the place they’d stood, the conversation they’d overheard like eavesdropping on a spell unraveling—“that was different. He lingered. Stood too close. Watched too carefully. It wasn’t casual.”
Avery nodded solemnly, as if Mulciber had just decoded some ancient rune or cracked the enchantment on a cursed object. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “Peverell is pretty. For a boy.”
Mulciber turned his head slowly, as if Avery had just dropped an entire library of banned books into the lake. He stared at him, long and flat.
“That’s not the point.”
Avery shrugged, all adolescent indifference, already plucking at a thread on his cuff. “Still true.”
Mulciber rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue. Not because he agreed—but because, frustratingly, he didn’t disagree either. There was something about Peverell—something cold and self-contained, yet compelling. A beauty that wasn’t delicate, but dangerous. Like a blade with a jewel-encrusted hilt.
And the silence that fell between them then wasn’t a lazy, companionable quiet. It was heavy, charged—like the lull before a storm breaks. The kind of silence that knows it’s only the prologue to violence.
Because if Tom Riddle—calculating, untouchable Tom—had really looked at someone with more than his usual mask of interest, if even a sliver of his monstrous, serpentine mind had turned curious…
Or worse, fond—
Then the game had already shifted beneath their feet.
And someone was going to bleed for it.
Mulciber knew that much.
Because when Tom Riddle wanted something—or someone—he never let go.
And he suspected Cassian did, too.
Only a few stragglers remained, scattered across the long, enchanted tables like forgotten chess pieces. A pair of Hufflepuffs whispered over cold toast, their laughter subdued, swallowed by the high, vaulted ceiling. Two Ravenclaws hunched over a rolled-out scroll, quills scratching in hurried, last-minute revisions.
The Gryffindor table, usually so loud it bled into every other house’s peace, was unusually quiet. A few lingered behind—some with bleary eyes and half-finished pumpkin juice, dragging their feet through breakfast because they were late. Others sat with arms crossed, faces turned defiantly from the clock, as if refusing to be herded into the monotony of another class.
Everything felt muted.
The noise, the light, the color—all dimmed. Like someone had pulled a sheer curtain over the morning. Even the enchanted ceiling, usually bright with early summer skies, looked pale and overcast.
The hall had emptied, but not completely.
Gone was the low din that once filled the Great Hall like a living tide—the clatter of silverware against fine china, the soft clinks of goblets raised and replaced, the overlapping hum of morning conversations as students leaned close to share secrets, jokes, and suspicions beneath vaulted ceilings. Gone too was the warmth, the illusion of safety forged in numbers, in ritual, in routine.
In its place: silence.
A hollowed, echoing silence, too heavy to be peace.
Only the ghosts remained now—ghosts of glances that lingered too long, of voices cut short by a shifting air. The kind of silence that hung after betrayal, after revelation. Suspicion still clung to the air, delicate and poisonous as lace soaked in venom.
The remnants of breakfast lay abandoned, cooling on wide silver platters. Wisps of steam rose half-heartedly from untouched sausages, from toast grown limp and scones forgotten beside smears of marmalade. Porcelain cups sweated into lace doilies. The butter had begun to melt. Everything looked strangely theatrical, as if arranged for a scene long finished—except the actors had all fled, and the audience had stopped clapping.
Overhead, owls glided between the floating candles like smoke given wings. Their talons did not scratch, their feathers did not rustle. They moved with a reverence that felt unnatural, as if even they sensed the weight in the room and dared not disturb it.
The enchanted ceiling reflected a sky gone still and brooding. Clouds swirled in glacial spirals, thickening into charcoal banks above the flickering chandeliers. It looked like breath—held, waiting to be released. Or like ink pooling in water before it bursts. A sky not yet broken, but near to it.
And at the center of this hollow world sat Draco.
Unmoving. Unblinking.
He sat as if carved in ivory and ash—his spine straight, his shoulders unnaturally poised. One pale hand wrapped around the delicate rim of a porcelain teacup, fingers stiff with tension, twitching only slightly—just enough to betray the storm caged beneath his skin.
Around him, the Slytherin benches stretched long and empty, yawning like chasms. The polished wood gleamed darkly in the wan morning light, a mirror to his isolation. The table extended endlessly to either side, as though reality had bent around him, making space for something unnatural.
He sat, and time bent with him.
It felt like a dream.
Or the echo of one.
Or worse—a memory that did not belong to him. A haunting.
And still, the question circled in his head.
How should he act?
It was no idle thought. It was a blade. A hook. A wasp trapped behind his eyes, beating its wings against bone. Persistent. Sharp. Merciless.
Because nothing—nothing—about this moment was ordinary.
Not the silence. Not the sky. Not the way Tom Riddle had spoken to him in front of everyone like a secret wrapped in velvet. Not the way students had watched them. Not the way Dumbledore still did—from the high table like a sentinel cloaked in blue and shadow.
He was being watched.
Measured.
Every inch of this castle was a stage—arched corridors and echoing halls dressed in centuries of performance. The tapestries watched like silent witnesses. The portraits murmured in oil-slick voices when no one was listening. Even the stones beneath his feet had learned to whisper. There was no such thing as neutral ground in Hogwarts. Every corridor was a question. Every doorway, a trap. Every smile, a mask.
He had not simply slipped through time.
He had hurled himself into the quiet heart of a war not yet declared—into the breath before the scream, the hush before the charge. The darkness here was still coiled, sleeping in the roots, but he could already taste the iron in the air. It clung to the arches, sank into the flagstones, sang a low warning through the bones of the castle. A hum beneath the floorboards. A war-song waiting to rise.
The soil was unbroken.
But it would not stay that way.
He was seventeen—barely. A boy in a man’s suit of burdens. And already, he had stood at the edge of the world and watched it fall. Watched it die, inch by inch. Watched magic itself bleed dry. Watched hope break like glass.
And now, somehow, impossibly, he was here—before it all began.
Charged not with survival, but prevention.
The weight of it pressed against his ribs, a silent hand wrapped around his lungs. It would be so easy to collapse beneath it. To scream. To laugh like something cracking.
But instead, he sat still.
The question burned like a brand across his mind:
How should he act?
What mask would serve him best? What expression would earn just enough notice—without too much interest?
Should he wield his brilliance like a blade—gleaming, exact, impossible to ignore?
He could.
The blood in his veins did not forget what he was. Peverell. Malfoy. Names sharp as silver and heavy with expectation. He had been forged in legacy. Taught how to cut without lifting a wand. He knew how to enter a room and make it bow, how to stop a conversation with a glance.
Power was not about noise—it was presence. The slow tightening of air when you arrived. The echo left behind when you said nothing at all.
He could remind them.
He could burn.
But fire drew eyes.
And Tom Riddle’s eyes—those cold, crystalline flames—were already fixed on him.
Tom would see brilliance. Would scent it like blood on the wind. He would circle Draco as a predator circles heat in the dark, curious, hungering, waiting for the catch beneath the shine.
Because Tom did not love. He collected.
And if Draco was not careful, he would not be seen as an equal.
He would be seen as prey.
Or worse—possibility.
And that... was more dangerous than death.
But Tom’s attention was not a gift.
It was a trial.
A flame that did not merely warm—it tested. It licked at the edges of your composure, coaxing you forward, then scorched without warning.
It beckoned like a hearth in winter, and burned like a pyre.
To catch his eye was to step into the crucible. One misstep, one flicker of weakness, and you would not be observed—you would be obliterated.
And then... there was the other shadow.
Draco’s gaze slid, slow and unwilling, toward the High Table.
Toward him.
Albus Dumbledore.
He sat with a posture carved from calm—elegant, composed, the very image of stately benevolence. His robes shimmered faintly, dyed a twilight blue, rich as dusk over the sea. Silver thread stitched constellations into the folds, catching the morning light like starlight snared in silk.
His long fingers were steepled lightly beneath his chin, his profile turned toward Professor Vector. He was smiling—softly, serenely. Laughing, even, at some gentle jest she had offered.
But Draco was not fooled by smiles.
He had seen that look before. Had known it in another time, another war.
Behind those crescent-moon spectacles were not the eyes of a fool, nor a saint. They were sharp as frost.
Hawkish. Brilliant.
Always watching. Always weighing.
They did not miss. They did not forgive.
They remembered.
Dumbledore wore gentleness like a mask, pleasantry like perfume. He let the world believe he was a kindly grandfather, a whimsical sage in threadbare robes with a sweet tooth and a tolerant heart. But beneath the softness, he built his dominion out of shadows.
Out of secrets. He spun loyalty into leashes. Turned pity into weapons. He played the long game. He smiled as he sacrificed you.
He had slit throats with mercy before.
And he would again.
Dumbledore was no less dangerous than Riddle.
No less hungry for the world to bend.
They were storm and silence, mirror and echo.
Two ends of the same blade.
One ruled through love, twisted into obligation.
The other through fear, dressed as awe.
And Draco—Draco stood between them.
Balanced like a knife on the edge of their interest.
So then, what card to play?
To shine was to risk everything.
To stay small was to be forgotten.
He could become the perfect transfer: quiet, competent, deferent. Keep his answers brief, his robes neat, his smile well-measured. He could sit in back rows, take notes in perfect cursive, ask no questions, challenge no one.
Let Dumbledore’s gaze slip past him like rain off charmed glass. Let Tom’s curiosity move on to some other bright object.
He could fade.
And be safe.
But Tom did not chase ghosts.
He hunted sparks.
He craved tension.
He was drawn to those who might break him—or unmake him.
To play it safe was to be dismissed. To be discarded.
To burn was to be seen—and therefore, to be wanted.
And to be wanted by Tom was to be in danger.
But it might also mean power. Protection. Leverage.
A seat near the fire, if not inside it.
Draco’s thoughts spiraled like smoke, each one sharp-edged and unfinished.
Draco’s grip tightened slightly on the rim of his cup.
Porcelain whined under pressure.
He would not be the hunted.
Not again.
Not here.
Not by Tom.
Not by Dumbledore.
Not by anyone.
Draco drew in a breath.
Deep. Steady. Cut from iron and silence.
He tasted the air like a spell on the tongue—bitter, old, humming with ghosts. Every inch of him had to hold.
No trembling. No seams.
He was not allowed fragility, not here—not now. Not when he was about to step into the crucible with monsters cloaked as men.
He had to win this war of masks.
Even if it meant tearing off his own.
Even if it meant becoming something else entirely—something unrecognizable.
Doubt was a luxury.
He could not afford it.
Not in this cathedral of old magic and watching eyes.
Not when the world bent toward its reckoning like steel drawn to a magnet.
Not for the boy who would become a god.
Not for the man who would die trying to stop him.
Not for the future that might never rise from the ashes.
“I’m not here to survive,” he whispered, the words barely rising above the hush, dissolving into the stillness like smoke unraveling into night.
They tasted strange on his tongue—foreign, but true. A truth not spoken aloud until now.
It didn’t echo. It didn’t need to.
The weight of it lived in the space between heartbeats, settling in his chest like a blade driven home.
The realization struck him not like thunder—but like breath.
Sharp. Cold. Alive.
It opened something in him.
A stillness that had masqueraded as fear now burned with something else entirely.
Fury, yes. Purpose, sharper still. He could feel it threading through his ribs, coiling beneath his skin like a storm begging to be unshackled.
Draco had always chosen survival.
He wore it like a second skin, clung to it through every compromise, every betrayal. He had taken the Mark because it was safer to comply than to resist.
He had led Dumbledore to his death because it was the only way to keep his family alive. He had hurt people, lied, turned away—because surviving meant not looking too closely at the blood on his hands.
He had been a puppet with golden hair and trembling fingers, strings pulled by fear, by legacy, by men who had never once asked him what he wanted.
But something in him had cracked.
Maybe it had happened slowly—splinter by splinter—or maybe all at once.
Either way, he was done. Done with cowering in shadows, done with masking guilt as silence, done with being a weapon shaped by someone else’s hand.
He wasn’t a hero.
But he wasn’t a coward anymore, either.
He just didn’t want to hate himself every time he looked in a mirror.
No more masks. No more leashes. No more pretending survival was the same thing as living.
He wouldn’t be anyone’s pawn. Not Riddle’s. Not Dumbledore’s. Not even Fate’s.
He was here for one thing—and one thing only.
His eyes, pale as frostbitten steel, lifted toward the high, starless ceiling above. Toward the dark. His voice was quiet, but it carved through the stillness like a blade through silk.
“I’m here to destroy a god.”
And this time, it didn’t feel like a whisper at all. It felt like a vow.
And with that, he rose.
The movement was slow, deliberate—ritualistic.
A ceremony unto itself.
His robes fell into place with liquid precision, dark fabric whispering against itself like secrets exchanged in shadowed corridors. The parchment schedule disappeared into his inner pocket with a flick of the wrist, a motion that betrayed no urgency, no fear.
Only control. Only design.
He turned toward the towering entrance, the ancient doors yawning wide at the far end of the hall like the open jaws of fate.
Each step he took rang out like a note in a symphony only he could hear.
Measured. Cold. Perfect.
A requiem for a future not yet written.
He did not walk.
He arrived.
His shoulders were squared, his spine a rod of glass and fury.
His jaw—sharp, set—might have been carved from alabaster.
A statue brought to life by something sacred and cruel.
He radiated presence. Not loud. Not ostentatious.
But inevitable.
Like the weight of prophecy.
Like the first crack of thunder before the sky splits open.
A boy to be watched.
Admired.
Feared.
But never touched.
He would shine, yes. But not with warmth.
No hearthfire glow. No soft light of welcome.
He would burn like the flame behind glass.
Untouchable. Untamed. A brilliance you could only look upon and never hold.
Let Tom come closer. Let his curiosity coil tighter.
Let Dumbledore peer from behind his twinkling mask. Let the old man start to wonder.
Let them all.
He had been forged in a dying world.
Now he would burn through this one—
Until only truth remained.
And with that, Draco stepped out of the Great Hall, the weight of history pressed like a seal to his spine, and the eyes of fate beginning to turn their ancient gaze.
The corridor greeted him like a vault—cool, echoing, half-lit.
He moved downward.
The light dimmed by degrees with each step deeper into the belly of the castle, the air thickening like clotted breath.
The walls here had never known warmth.
The torches burned lower in these corridors—small, bitter flames that danced violently, casting long, quivering shadows on the moss-veined stone. The sconces hissed as he passed, disturbed by a draft that did not stir his robes.
The stone beneath his boots grew colder. Wetter. As if the castle itself were weeping through the cracks in its bones.
He descended deeper.
Here, the silence felt sentient—watchful, listening. There was no idle chatter, no scrape of student footsteps, only the faint susurration of flame and the slow drip of condensation from above.
The deeper levels did not welcome visitors; they tolerated them. Like a predator half-asleep, eyeing movement through a cracked lid.
The Potions classroom loomed at the corridor’s end.
The door was tall, ancient, iron-bound—its blackened wood warped with age, edges rimed with something white and crystalline. It looked less like an entrance and more like a mouth prepared to close. A final bell sounded behind him—a low, sonorous knell that rolled through the dungeon halls like smoke, like memory.
He slipped inside.
The cold struck immediately. It was not the chill of weather but of place—an elemental absence that clung to the stone and rose from the floor like fog. The air was a potion in itself, heavy with unspoken things. Every breath tasted of metal and rot, like the ghosts of ingredients long used and long since forgotten.
It was more than chill. It was invasion—a dampness that seeped upward through boots, through skin, until it settled in the marrow and whispered, you are not welcome here.
Shelves loomed along every wall, carved of dark wood gone slick with time. Glass jars lined them like sentinels—dozens, maybe hundreds—each suspended in still life. Some were pristine, others mottled with fog or smeared with fingerprints that had never faded. Inside, things floated.
A pale mandrake bulb, its mouth frozen mid-scream.
Clusters of leeches pulsing faintly as if dreaming.
A viper’s shed skin, wrapped around a preserved human heart that bobbed gently with every gust of breath.
Slivers of bark, iridescent beetle shells, slumped eyes staring from the bottom of cloudy brine.
The torchlight scattered itself across the glass in fragmented halos. Shadows multiplied, skewed—cast and recast across stone and bone. And in the trick of reflection, it sometimes seemed the specimens moved, twitching in their jars like things trying not to be seen.
Draco’s entrance did not go unnoticed.
The sound of his boots—polished but soft—was enough to stir the silence. Whispers dipped like birds diving into shadow. Heads turned. The rustle of robes, the faint scrape of chairs repositioned.
Eyes met him. Weighed him. Wondered.
He let them.
He said nothing.
He walked slowly to the third row, center-left—just close enough to command notice, just far enough to avoid vulnerability. He let his robe trail like spilled ink behind him. When he sat, it was with the stillness of something ritualized. He unfolded his schedule, tucked it back into his robes, and placed his gloved hands atop the desk—measured, still.
He did not need to speak to be heard.
Not here.
Let the classroom adjust to him.
Let the dungeon learn his temperature.
Let them wonder how a boy could look like the beginning of an ending.
He didn’t return the stares.
He’d learned not to. Let them wonder. Let the silence stretch. Let the name Peverell trail behind him like ash in the wind—a whisper, a warning, the first tremor of an omen too old to speak aloud. It passed through the castle like a shiver through bone, curling in corners, echoing behind closed doors.
He moved through it untouched.
His eyes swept the room—not with interest, but with calculation. Cold. Remote. He wasn’t here to belong. Belonging was for the naïve. This wasn’t a classroom; it was a crucible. The air stank of ambition and nerves, the acrid tang of oversteeped potions mingling with adolescent sweat and strained propriety.
And the students? Not peers. Not allies.
They were materials. Volatile. Crude.
Every one of them either a reagent to be used—or a threat to be eliminated.
And then—there, at the eye of the storm.
Tom Riddle.
Seated at the head of the room like a prince awaiting the moment to unsheathe his crown. He did not fidget. He did not move. Stillness clung to him like smoke to silk, every breath measured, every muscle at rest yet coiled, as if he were carved from dusk itself.
His hair, black as a raven’s wing, gleamed under the low torchlight. Not a strand out of place. His robes—charcoal edged with silver thread—fell from his shoulders in immaculate folds, unmarred by crease or tension. He looked like someone born for ceremony and sharpened for conquest.
His hands were folded atop the desk in front of him.
Pale. Precise.
The kind of hands that had never trembled, never blundered, never begged. They rested with the grace of a pianist and the promise of a surgeon—quiet, but never idle.
He did not look up.
But Draco felt it—that subtle shift in pressure, that infinitesimal hitch in the air.
Like a forest holding its breath when something ancient steps into the clearing.
Tom knew.
Of course he knew.
Draco could feel the weight of his awareness folding around him like a second cloak—soundless, formless, but inescapably there. A thread pulled taut between them, invisible and burning.
He chose his seat with the care of a duelist measuring distance.
Two rows behind. Centered. Far enough to avoid suspicion.
Close enough to hear tone, breath, hesitation. Closer still to strike, should the moment come.
The desk accepted his presence with a quiet groan of old wood. He sat without flourish, letting the space bend around him.
Not disrupting. Claiming.
His posture was composed, casual—but every inch of him was wired with restraint. A study in contrasts. Stillness that threatened motion.
And all the while, Tom remained still.
Not watching.
But seeing.
A silence stretched between them like drawn steel.
He had barely settled when the door burst open, scattering silence like glass.
A gust of heavy perfume—jasmine and pipe smoke and something richer, vaguely alchemical—swept in first. And then came the man himself, a rolling thundercloud of velvet, brocade, and booming laughter.
“Ahhh, my ambitious ones!” Professor Slughorn bellowed, his voice echoing like a feast hall toast. He strode into the dungeon as if it were a stage, robes swishing behind him like the train of a royal cloak. “You look particularly cunning today—must be the alignment of the moons! Or the scent of secrets in the air!”
He clapped his hands together, the sound sharp and oddly ceremonial.
“A particularly piquant lesson awaits us, my darlings—not for the faint of heart…” He twirled on the spot, one arm raised in theatrical flourish, “nor the faint of morals!”
Students sat up straighter, shifting in their seats, expressions ranging from delight to dread. Slughorn’s eyes twinkled like a merchant with a secret to sell.
“No, no,” he purred, prowling toward the central cauldron, “today, we conjure that most deliciously dangerous of draughts—”
He spun, his voice climbing in pitch and power.
“—Amortentia!”
The word struck the air like a spell.
It shimmered—literally, perceptibly—as though the syllables themselves held heat. A ripple moved through the classroom like an unseen breeze brushing over harp strings. A girl in the front row inhaled sharply.
Someone at the back stifled a nervous laugh. Another student leaned forward, eyes glazed, as if already caught in the potion’s invisible orbit.
From the wide iron cauldron in the center of the room, steam began to rise—slow, deliberate, opalescent. It curled like fingers through the dimness, unfurling in hypnotic, heart-shaped spirals that glimmered with mother-of-pearl light. The scent was already drifting, weaving through the air in invisible tendrils, impossibly complex and ever-changing.
It brushed across the skin like breath on the nape of the neck.
Subtle. Intimate. Dangerous.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t blink.
But something in him shifted.
A sensation unfurled in his chest—not warmth, but an itch. A kind of pressure behind the sternum, like a string pulled taut.
He recognized the feeling.
The ancient, uneasy tilt of something trying to reach inside. Not just scent—but memory. Not just memory—but desire.
He shut it down.
Slughorn, meanwhile, looked positively ecstatic. His round face glowed with pleasure, moustache twitching with amusement like a cat presented with cream.
“Ahh, Amortentia—the crown jewel of emotional alchemy!” he sang. “The most powerful love potion in existence. Though”—he raised a pudgy finger, wagging it with conspiratorial glee—“‘love,’ I’m afraid, is something of a misnomer.”
He turned slowly, addressing them all like a showman to his captivated crowd.
“This potion creates no true affection. No sincerity. No soul.” He leaned closer, voice dropping to a reverent hush. “What it creates is longing. Simulated. Heightened. Twisted. It latches onto memory, scent, and self. It rewrites hunger as destiny. Desire as doom.”
The room was utterly still.
“It is not love,” he whispered. “It is obsession.”
He straightened again, beaming.
“And in the wrong hands…” He let the pause expand, the silence weighted and sharp. “…it becomes a weapon. A poison with perfume. A cage that sings.”
A few students exchanged nervous glances. One Slytherin boy leaned away from the vapor, as if it might suddenly leap for his throat.
“Or perhaps,” Slughorn added, the gleam in his eye now unmistakably sly, “in the right hands… a masterpiece.”
He leaned over the cauldron and inhaled deeply, eyes fluttering closed. “Mmm! Pineapple tarts, my mother’s woolen shawl, and a fresh first edition of Magical Me—oh, delicious!”
Laughter rippled across the room—nervous, amused, disarmed. The tension slackened by a thread. But not in Draco.
No.
He wasn’t laughing.
He was watching the steam rise. Watching the way it curled. Watching the way one perfect plume drifted toward Tom—and dissolved before it could touch him.
“Now then!” Slughorn clapped his hands, his voice cutting cleanly through the thickening perfume in the air. “Let’s have a sniff or two, shall we? Miss Rosier?”
The name landed like a prompt in a play. Druella Rosier rose with reluctant grace, her features drawn tight with disdain barely veiled by propriety. She moved forward with the careful tread of someone approaching a precipice, each step hesitant, as if the steam might claw at her skin.
She bent toward the cauldron, blond curls swinging like silk, and inhaled delicately.
A flush bloomed almost instantly across her high cheekbones—vivid, mortified, and violently purple. Her lips parted in surprise before she schooled herself into composure.
“Um…” she murmured, eyes darting sideways, “lilac. Ink. And… old letters?”
There was a beat of silence before Slughorn burst into a delighted chuckle.
“Oho! A romantic soul, aren’t we?” he crowed, rocking back on his heels with glee. “Nothing to be ashamed of, my dear! Quite the opposite! Nostalgia—now there’s a potent thing in a potion like this. Mr. Flint?”
Marcus Flint lumbered up like a reluctant troll, broad-shouldered and red-eared. He sniffed, snorted, and blinked hard.
“Er… steel. Leather. And… cinnamon buns?”
A ripple of laughter swept through the class—suppressed giggles, whispered asides, a few knowing nudges.
“Now, now,” Slughorn said, chuckling indulgently, “desire takes many forms, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised what the heart hides in its pantry!”
Around the room, the steam was growing denser, more luminous. Iridescent ribbons coiled upward in increasingly intricate patterns—some shaped like petals, others like drifting veils.
It wasn’t just scent now. It was pressure, presence, a creeping touch that slid along the back of the neck, whispering things just out of reach.
Draco could feel it beginning to wrap around him.
Not physically—but intimately. As if invisible threads were being tugged from deep beneath the surface of thought. The smell wasn’t one thing, or three, or five. It was a shifting, haunted tapestry. It changed each breath, sharpening, clarifying, pulling.
Smoke from a ruined hallway. Ash on silk. The ozone crackle before a duel. Candle wax. A worn leather glove. Summer rain on parchment. The echo of a voice in a corridor too long forgotten.
Memories not yet named. Feelings he wasn’t sure were his.
And then—
“Mr. Peverell.”
The name cracked through the room like the snap of a wand breaking in half.
Conversation ceased. Even the laughter died mid-breath.
Slughorn didn’t need to raise his voice. He said it with that perfect, deliberate clarity that made it echo all the same.
Draco felt every pair of eyes tilt toward him like compass needles swinging true. The air went heavy again—not with scent, but with attention. Expectation. The weight of curiosity, suspicion, fascination.
But only one gaze mattered.
And it was burning.
He rose, slow and measured. No reluctance. No embarrassment.
Only precision.
He approached the cauldron like a ritualist to a shrine, the scent deepening with every step. The steam swirled around him, parting like veils, wrapping about his shoulders, brushing his cheek like a whisper. It curled tighter here, richer, coiling in anticipation like it, too, was waiting for him.
Waiting to be seen.
Waiting to be named.
He inhaled.
And the world shifted.
The first scent arrived like a whisper between pages:
Aged parchment and dragonhide-bound tomes, heavy with dust, ink faded by centuries, the musk of candle smoke long since extinguished.
It was the perfume of hidden libraries and knowledge guarded by wards older than memory. It smelled of silence honed to precision, of mastery earned not by birthright, but by obsession.
It curled around Draco’s mind like a ghost of something once craved, once feared.
It was the scent of study, of sacred ambition.
Then came the second —smoke.
But not ash, not ruin. No, this was richer. Darker.
Ember and clove.
A fireplace in a high tower. Something warm curling beneath something forbidden. Velvet draped over danger. It wasn’t merely seductive—it was unnerving in its allure, the kind of scent that made one’s pulse quicken while pretending it hadn’t.
It made Draco’s throat tighten.
Ozone. The scent of a sky seconds before lightning.
Cold steel and crushed starlight.
Magic—untamed and wild, older than wand or will. It smelled like a spell carved in blood and sealed in bone.
Like fate cracking open. Like prophecy spoken in a breathless hush.
It wasn’t learned—it was lived.
That scent filled Draco’s lungs like drowning in destiny.
Draco’s mind jolted—unbidden, unstoppable—as images of Voldemort surged forward: red eyes gleaming like coals in a skull too pale to be living, a face carved by cruelty, and a voice that hissed commands steeped in death. But even as the memory rose, it warped—the monstrous visage began to shift. The slitted eyes blinked into shadowed ones, dark and discerning. The cracked lips smoothed into something quiet, calculating. The creature twisted back into Tom—young, beautiful, too composed.
The two forms—monster and boy—overlaid each other like a mirrored nightmare, flickering in and out of sync. One hollowed by hate, the other alive with hunger. And at the center of it all, Draco stood—unsure which was worse: the thing that had destroyed the world, or the boy who still might.
And all three—every note, every thread—were him.
Tom.
There was no mistaking it. No misdirection. No mercy.
The potion had stripped away every pretense, laid bare the secret pressed against the marrow of Draco’s being.
His heart stuttered. A sharp, involuntary tremor ran through him. He stood motionless, as if stillness might stop what had already been revealed.
Amortentia did not lie.
It didn’t flatter. It didn’t negotiate. It simply showed the truth, cruel and crystalline.
It reached beneath bloodlines and masks, beneath reputation and reluctance. It bypassed everything Draco had tried to smother and left behind a truth so simple it was terrifying:
He desired Tom Riddle.
Not just for his looks—though anyone with eyes could see the perfection carved into every angle of his face, the way darkness clung to him like a second skin.
No—this was deeper. Stranger. Unforgivable.
This was a pull. A magnetic violence. Want braided with dread.
A fascination forged in shadow.
This was longing twisted into a shape Draco had never spoken aloud, never allowed to live beyond a glance or silence held too long.
It was need, and it had a name.
The scent lingered, impossibly vivid, as though it had etched itself into his bloodstream. Draco could still taste it—ink and clove and storm. He could feel it wrapping around his ribs like a whisper meant only for him.
He forced himself to speak, though every instinct screamed to remain silent—to lock the truth behind his teeth where it might still be denied.
“I smell…”
He swallowed hard.
“Old books. Smoke. And lightning.”
The words fell like stones into still water—measured, careful, but each one heavier than the last.
His voice held.
Just.
There was the faintest tremor, buried beneath layers of schooling and pride, but it was there. A shiver in the spine of the syllables. The quiet betrayal of breath.
He didn’t wait for Slughorn’s cheer, nor for the inevitable ripple of curiosity that would follow.
He turned—abruptly, almost too quickly. The hem of his robes snapped behind him as he made for the back of the circle, posture taut with the rigid grace of someone fleeing a battlefield no one else could see.
But the room erupted anyway.
“Excellent! Excellent!” Slughorn cried, clapping his hands together as though Draco hadn’t just named his undoing in front of a dozen watchful eyes. “How vivid, Mr. Peverell! The poetry of the senses, eh?”
Draco didn’t respond. He couldn’t.
He kept his face carved in marble, gaze fixed on nothing, lungs still clinging to the scent that had ruined him—
Books. Smoke. Lightning.
Tom.
He sat down slowly, deliberately, but his heartbeat was a drum in his ears, wild and traitorous.
Behind him, somewhere near the cauldron, he heard the soft rustle of movement.
And though he didn’t dare look—he felt it.
The weight of Tom’s stare settled over Draco like a physical force—no flicker of curiosity, no trace of confusion. It was something far more claiming, an unspoken command etched in shadow and intent. It pressed against Draco’s skin, threading through his bones, marking him.
Then, Slughorn’s hands came together in a sharp, bright clap.
“Now then, pair up, pair up! Time to brew your own batches of this most delightful poison! Rosier with Selwyn, Mulciber with Travers…” His voice danced with theatrical glee.
A pregnant pause hung in the air, thickening the charged silence that followed.
“…Mr. Peverell… with Mr. Riddle.”
The announcement fell like a thunderclap.
The classroom seemed to still, the usual murmurs strangled into nothingness as if the very air had congealed into a storm-cloud, heavy and waiting for the first crack of lightning to split the sky.
Draco rose, every movement deliberate, his heart drumming an uneven rhythm against his ribs.
Tom was already standing, unhurried, every inch composed—a statue carved from night and steel. His eyes locked onto Draco’s, unreadable, dark and sharp, like obsidian glinting in torchlight, holding secrets no one else could touch.
“Shall we?” Tom’s voice was low, smooth, the kind of steel that gleams coldly in shadow.
Draco swallowed, nodded. “Of course.”
Together, they stepped toward the cauldron, their footsteps echoing softly against the cold stone floor.
The dungeon walls seemed to close in around them, narrowing like the narrowing path of fate.
The scent of Amortentia curled in lazy, opalescent tendrils through the air—seductive, potent, and dangerous.
Two serpents, side by side.
Brewing obsession.
And somewhere in the flicker of torchlight and rising steam…
The future began to burn.
Their station gleamed like a dueling platform laid for royalty—marble slabbed in opalescent white, veined with threads of silver so fine they shimmered like starlight frozen mid-strike. Overhead, a wrought-iron lantern spilled molten gold across the table, gilding cheekbones and catching in the folds of their robes like flame trapped in fabric.
Glass vials stood arrayed like crystal armaments, lined with surgical precision—amber, sapphire, garnet, each stopper gleaming like a jewel. The cauldron at the center whispered with heat, its surface exhaling curls of steam the color of moonlit silk. The vapour twined upward—slow, deliberate, seductive—like scent rising from a lover’s throat.
Draco drew his wand.
No show. No twirl. Just focus—pure and brutal.
He reached for the rose stems beside him and began to work, blade-like magic glinting at the tip of his wand. Each thorn was sheared from its stalk with a surgeon’s grace, neat and unhurried, falling to the marble with the faintest click. Then the petals—almost luminous in the light—white dusted with red at the edges, like paper brushed with blood or kisses. He handled them with the same ruthless care, his movements so fluid they felt choreographed.
Detached. Elegant. Lethal.
Not a single word passed between them.
Not yet.
Tom watched.
Not idly. Not curiously. But with the alert, devouring attention of someone reading a forgotten language aloud for the first time—or appraising the lock on a sealed tomb. His eyes followed Draco’s fingers, the angle of his wrists, the quiet rhythm of dissection. Everything about him still except for the slow, measured rise of his chest.
Between them, the steam shimmered like illusion magic—bending the light in gentle ripples, the way heat blurs the shape of something burning.
“You’re competent,” Tom said at last. His voice was velvet wound around steel—unhurried, low, and smooth as if he were narrating a prophecy only he understood.
Draco didn’t look up. Didn’t flinch. The sharp edge of his wand slid along a petal’s curve, never wavering.
“I’m precise.”
A pause. Then a faint sound—Tom’s amusement, dry and soft as wine catching the rim of a crystal goblet.
“That’s rarer,” he said.
Draco tilted his wrist, and the petals—paper-thin, delicate as breath—fell into the potion with gentle kisses of contact. The mixture shivered, then began to blush, a slow-spreading tint like rosewater in milk. The color deepened into a pearlescent pink, glowing faintly, alive with promise and danger.
He stirred once, counter-clockwise. Then again. His grip firm, his motion fluid—the same practiced grace one might use to trace a lover’s jaw.
“I don’t like mistakes,” he murmured, eyes fixed on the transformation unfolding beneath his hand.
Tom’s gaze didn’t leave him.
“Neither do I.”
There was no compliment in it. Only agreement. Only understanding.
And between them, the potion pulsed once, like a heartbeat. Like recognition.
The steam unfurled again—stronger now. No longer just vapor, but something animate. A silken creature born of heat and longing. It traced along Draco’s throat like the trailing fingertips of a ghost, coiling sensuously around Tom’s hands where they hovered—hovered, not touched—near the flasks. It licked the charged space between them with the lazy grace of something alive, something ancient, something watching.
The room was heavy with it—heat, silence, magic.
Their potion shimmered, a mirror of their restraint.
Flawless.
Not a ripple out of place.
It glowed with soft iridescence, veined with molten threads of silver and pearl, as if it pulsed to the rhythm of their breath.
A seduction distilled. A secret in liquid form.
The silence between them tightened—taut, trembling like a bowstring drawn too long. Draco didn’t look at Tom, not directly, but the tilt of his lashes, the cut of his jaw, the stillness in his spine were aimed like a knife pressed flat against skin.
Ready.
Waiting.
“Are you going to stare at me the entire lesson,” he said quietly, each word cold-cut and precise, “or are you going to help me?”
The tone was not light. It was laced. Daring him.
Tom’s brow arched, slow and feline. His mouth curled into something too elegant to be called a smirk, too calculated to be called a smile. It was a curve made for worship or for warning—depending on how close you stood when it turned on you.
“You can’t fault me,” he said, voice low, sin-wrapped silk, “for staring at someone beautiful.”
Draco’s gaze flicked upward. Just a heartbeat. Wide. Sharp. A glint of ice catching flame.
It wasn’t the compliment that caught him.
It was the truth tucked beneath it.
Was Tom Riddle flirting?
Or was he hunting?
He turned back to the potion with practiced poise, but his fingers trembled once—barely. He didn’t speak for a moment. Let the moment steep.
Then, soft as breath, almost disinterested, he asked, “What do you smell, Riddle?”
The question slipped beneath the surface like a blade beneath silk. Gentle in tone. Lethal in intent. It wasn’t curiosity.
It was a game.
Tom turned his head slightly, and the way he breathed in was theatrical without being performative—intent made sensual. He closed his eyes. Inhaled. Let the steam curl over his lips, through his nose, into the space behind his ribs where he kept the things he didn’t name.
When he opened his eyes again, they were different.
Dimmed.
Focused.
Dangerous.
“Why so curious?” he murmured, and the timbre of his voice deepened, went dark. It moved beneath the skin like a hand not yet touching. Like the slow draw of silk across bare nerves.
Draco looked at him then. Really looked. And smiled.
It was not a smile of peace.
It was the smile of a serpent warming on stone. Of something venomous enjoying the sun.
“I want to know,” Draco said, voice a decadent hush, “what someone like you desires.”
The word landed between them with the weight of a spell.
Desire.
Not what do you want. Not what do you like.
What do you ache for?
Tom didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.
But something behind his gaze fractured—tightened, coiled inward like a spring under pressure.
The air grew denser.
Closer.
The kind of closeness that doesn’t touch, but surrounds.
He stepped nearer—not a movement so much as a shift in gravity. The space between them dissolved, drawn together by something older than want.
“Firewood,” he said finally, and his voice was smoke and warmth and winter. “Clean parchment. A flower that only blooms at night... datura, maybe.”
A pause. Measured.
“And something I haven’t tasted yet.”
Their eyes locked. The tension changed. No longer a threat.
A promise.
Draco held still, but his breath quickened in his chest. Barely enough to be seen—except Tom noticed. He always noticed.
“Maybe one day,” Draco whispered, velvet-wrapped danger in his tone, “you will.”
The steam danced like breath caught between mouths. The potion behind them pulsed with magic—thick, sweet, and golden as honeyed light. The scent was intoxicating now: hot parchment, bitter flowers, the ghost of something forbidden.
Tom moved.
Only a fraction.
But his breath ghosted across Draco’s skin as he leaned in, lips brushing just beside the shell of his ear. Not a kiss. Not quite.
A test.
“Yes,” Tom whispered, the word nearly lost in the steam. “Perhaps soon.”
Then he pulled away. Just enough. But the warmth he left behind clung to Draco like a bruise.
The potion between them shimmered, caught in some final exquisite balance—neither tipping nor spilling. A reflection of them: beautiful, controlled, trembling on the edge.
Draco watched it glow, but his pulse was too loud in his ears. Something wild and hot moved under his skin.
Because this wasn’t how Tom Riddle behaved.
Tom didn’t flirt.
He conquered.
Which meant whatever this was—it wasn’t a game.
It was the beginning of something far more dangerous.
And Draco wasn’t sure if he wanted to stop it.
Or let it consume him.
From the front of the classroom, Slughorn clapped his hands with a resounding smack, the sharp crack slicing through the dungeon’s perfumed air like a blade through silk. It startled a handful of students—quills jerked, ink splattered, a nearby cauldron hissed violently and belched a fresh puff of rose-colored steam into the heavy heat.
“Time’s up!” he announced, too brightly for the smothering closeness of the dungeon air. “Wands down, my dears. I’ll be making my rounds—Amortentia is a fickle mistress, and she punishes imprecision with cruelty!”
His voice rang out, cheery and oblivious, gilding the scent-drenched silence with unnecessary bravado. The dungeon shimmered with warmth, the candlelight bending slightly in the syrup-thick air. Every breath tasted of perfume, parchment, and the dangerous edge of something unnamed. Cauldrons hissed like sleeping serpents. Quills scratched, hesitant now, as if reluctant to disturb the strange hush settling across the room. Around them, students leaned closer to one another, lips flushed, eyes glassy with longing, caught in the dizzying bloom of scent and suggestion—spiced woodsmoke, rain-soaked linen, forbidden skin.
Slughorn moved between the worktables like a conductor lost in the music of his own symphony. His velvet robes whispered behind him, stirring the air with notes of old cologne and a faint medicinal bitterness. He sniffed one cauldron and winced, his face puckering in theatrical dismay.
“Oh dear, someone’s gone heavy on the vanilla—unless you’re hoping to lure a bakery into marriage!”
He chuckled, then clapped a shoulder elsewhere and offered a booming, “Well done!” to a startled Hufflepuff. His commentary trailed behind him in a trail of half-serious advice and florid metaphors—love as combustion, as alchemy, as illusion spun on the edge of a knife.
And then—he halted.
Mid-step. Mid-word. As if his feet had hit stone and the air had turned solid.
His eyes fixed on their table.
On them.
The hush deepened.
It wasn’t silence exactly—it was the silence that comes before something ruptures.
The space around their cauldron seemed separate from the room, haloed by a strange stillness. The potion within did not bubble, did not spit—it moved with a slow, hypnotic grace, as though stirred by breath alone. Liquid starlight spun within, laced with curling threads of molten silver and dusky rose-gold. Each movement was a caress, an echo, a promise. It pulsed faintly, not like a potion, but like a thing alive. Like a secret drawing breath.
Slughorn inhaled.
Then again—deeper.
His eyes fluttered shut, expression slackening into something close to reverence. A small, unbidden sound escaped him.
“Oh…” he murmured, voice trembling on the edge of awe. “Magnificent.”
He placed one hand to his chest as though to steady the thrum of his own heart. “Mr. Riddle. Mr. Peverell. This is—this is divine. Amortentia as it was meant to be. Flawless. Flawless. Like minds, clearly. You two—my word. A pairing to rival the greats!”
He beamed, all pink-cheeked and giddy, then drifted on in a daze, still basking in the scent memory, muttering something about genius and fate under his breath.
But neither Draco nor Tom responded.
They had not smiled.
Not flinched.
Not moved.
They stared at each other across the cauldron like two duellists frozen an instant before the strike.
Like minds?
No.
Never.
They were not kindred spirits.
They were elemental contradictions.
Flame and frost.
Silk and steel.
The quiet before thunder. The tremor beneath still water before it breaks open.
And the potion between them—that shimmering, seductive bloom—had not revealed unity.
It had unearthed desire.
Not something sweet. Not tender, nor tentative.
It was the kind of want that scorched.
That cut.
Something in it curled and writhed in the space between their bodies, invisible but near enough to feel. A magnetic pull, dark and ancient, spooled out in threads neither of them reached for—but neither could sever.
It was not love.
It was a collision waiting to happen.
Wordless.
Violent.
Undeniable.
And both of them, still staring, still silent, knew it.
The potion did not lie.
It simply exposed what had always been there.
Buried. Breathing. Burning.
The dungeons held their own kind of silence after class.
Not peace.
Pressure.
A silence that wasn’t stillness but tension—alive, breathing, coiled beneath the skin like a second pulse. The air hung thick, heavy with the ghost of magic recently wrought. Residual heat clung to the flagstones, and the walls, slick with the slow sweat of centuries, seemed to pulse faintly, as though the stones themselves remembered every whispered incantation and cried drop of blood.
Dripping water echoed in the distance—steady, deliberate, like a clock’s tick too far away to see but too loud to ignore. Each footfall, each rustle of fabric, folded into the stillness like a secret being swallowed. Even in emptiness, the corridor didn’t feel abandoned.
It felt watched.
The scent of the classroom clung to Draco’s robes—thick and intoxicating. Burnt lavender. Stewed valerian. The velvet sweetness of Amortentia, now faded but still present, curling at his throat like a phantom hand. He moved like a blade sheathed in silk—measured, upright, every step composed. But the scent—it teased him. Reminded him. Wrapped around his senses until the air felt too close to breathe.
He was halfway down the corridor when he felt it.
Not heard it.
Not saw it.
Felt it.
A ripple in the world, so subtle it might have been imagination if not for the way the hairs on his arms rose, how the breath stilled in his lungs. Like the forest falling silent before a predator steps into view. Like the moment before lightning strikes.
“Peverell.”
His name, breathed into the quiet like a spell.
Silk over steel. A caress with a knife’s edge. No anger. No affection. Just curiosity—cold, clinical, careful. The kind of voice that didn’t seek answers, but ownership.
Draco turned.
And there he was.
He stood like a secret made flesh, carved from darkness and old ambition. The torchlight wavered as if uncertain before him, casting bronze along the ridges of his cheekbones, gilding the sharp cut of his jaw in liquid gold. His skin bore the chill perfection of marble—too smooth, too still, kissed by firelight yet untouched by its warmth. Every line of his face obeyed some ancient symmetry, the kind found in sacred geometry or cursed relics. He looked as though he’d been carved not born—summoned, not raised.
His hair, as black as spilled ink and parted with surgical precision, framed his face like parentheses—an elegant trap for attention. It was too immaculate, too deliberate. Like the rest of him. As though he did not grow, he arranged.
And his eyes.
Dark wasn’t the right word. They weren’t shadowed—they were absent of light. Caverns without end. Deep enough to fall into and never climb out again. They did not glint or gleam; they consumed. Stars would die in eyes like those.
“Riddle,” Draco said, evenly.
His voice didn’t tremble—but it was honed, a thin, dangerous filament. Glass forged under pressure. It cut the space between them like a warding spell.
Tom’s gaze moved to him. Not in greeting. Not in recognition. But in study.
Not a boy looking at a boy—but a predator tracing the shape of a thought.
His eyes trailed the line of Draco’s jaw, his spine—too straight. Shoulders—too still. Every quiet breath that pressed against the seams of his robes. He saw him as one might observe a locked door: noting the hinges, the bolts, the best angle to break through.
“You’re not quite what I expected,” Tom murmured.
His voice was low and textured, like silk drawn across gravel. It sank under the skin.
Draco’s lips curved. Not a smile—something more precise. A twitch pulled taut like a thread.
“Good. I’d hate to be predictable.”
Tom stepped forward.
Not quickly. Not loudly. With the certainty of something that had never been refused.
He moved the way a storm gathers—slow, unstoppable, with the hush of inevitability. His robes whispered against the stone, pouring around him like poured ink. Shadows slid behind him, reluctant to let him go.
He stopped just short of touching distance. Close enough that Draco could smell him—parchment scorched at the edges, citrus peel twisted clean, firewood half-burned, and beneath it all, the warm ache of Amortentia’s last breath, clinging to Draco’s collar like a phantom kiss.
“You flinched,” Tom said, voice lowered now, soft enough that it dared intimacy.
“During the lesson,” he added. “Just for a moment. But I noticed.”
Draco’s breath didn’t hitch. He had more control than that.
“You watch everyone that closely?”
“No.” That awful, perfect smile again. “Just the ones I don’t understand.”
It wasn’t a smile made for comfort. It wasn’t even made for charm.
It was crafted—calculated—like a lie with perfect handwriting. It glided across his lips like water over ice, smooth and seamless. But beneath that surface was something else. Something cold. Watching. Wearing human skin like it had borrowed it from a mannequin.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t yield.
“I flinched,” he said quietly, “because I smelled something that felt like a memory.”
Tom’s head tilted. Slowly. The motion feline. But his eyes had sharpened, narrowing like the focus of a scalpel.
“A painful one?” he asked.
“No,” Draco said, and held his gaze like a blade between them. “A dangerous one.”
For the briefest second—less than a breath—something moved behind Tom’s eyes. A flicker.
Not fear.
Hunger.
Or maybe something darker: recognition.
“You think scent can be dangerous?” he asked, and the question curled around them like smoke.
“I think...” Draco’s voice dropped further, nearly a whisper now. “Want is dangerous. And memory’s a close second.”
Tom stared at him. Unmoving. Eyes sharp enough to pierce, but the line of his mouth softened, not in mockery—interest.
“Philosopher, are you?”
Draco’s mouth tilted, and something older than seventeen echoed in his voice.
“No. Just someone who’s lived long enough to regret it.”
A pause.
And then—just for a heartbeat—Tom faltered.
It wasn’t obvious. Not something most would catch.
But Draco caught it.
A break in rhythm. A breath drawn too shallow. A tiny hitch, like a thought stopped too close to feeling.
And for that fragile instant, Tom Riddle didn’t look untouchable.
He looked... human.
Only for a second.
And then the moment collapsed. The mask reassembled. The monster smiled again.
And—
“Mr. Riddle. Mr. Peverell.”
The voice slithered down the corridor, smooth and glacial.
They turned together.
Dumbledore stood in the archway, framed in torchlight that licked up the stone like restless flame. He looked almost elemental, as though he’d been carved from storm clouds and ancient candle smoke—his robes the deep, bleeding black of a night sky without stars, embroidered faintly with glimmering constellations that shimmered when he moved. His auburn beard fell in softened waves over his chest, strands catching the firelight in glints of old gold, like secrets too heavy to stay buried.
But it was his eyes that held the real weight.
Pale as moonstone. Penetrating as wandlight in a mirror maze. They didn’t merely look at you. They peeled you open. Saw not just who you were, but who you were desperately trying not to be.
“Professor,” Tom said, smooth as silk brushed against steel, dipping his head with the precise grace of someone who’d rehearsed this particular kind of politeness into a weapon.
Draco followed a heartbeat later, his own bow a touch more reserved, carefully measured. “Sir.”
Dumbledore smiled—or at least, he showed his teeth.
It wasn’t warmth, not really. It was the kind of smile found in old books and shadowed portraits, a scholar’s expression honed through years of subtle war. It hinted at amusement, but there was steel beneath it—something sharper, patient, and deadly.
His eyes, pale and gleaming like stormlight on water, held the tension of a wand drawn behind a cloak.
Watchful.
Measuring.
“You two seem well-acquainted,” he said lightly, each word brushed with civility, but curling at the edges with implication. It was a statement posed as observation, but it tested the air like a knife pressed flat against skin.
His gaze landed on Tom last—and lingered. Suspicion shimmered there, faint as mist, but unmistakable.
“Quite the pair,” he added. “I imagine your potion would be flawless.”
Of course he’d noticed their proximity to Slughorn’s classroom. Dumbledore missed nothing. His words were never just words—they were tools, probes, enchantments cast without wands.
Draco inclined his head with practiced poise. “We brewed it to precision,” he replied, voice smooth, controlled.
“Of course,” Dumbledore murmured, as if it were a foregone conclusion. Still, his eyes flicked between them—slow, deliberate.
Unblinking.
Then, with a faint tilt of his head, he asked, “What potion did you brew?”
Tom answered, his voice velvet over thorns. Smooth, rich—yet every syllable dripped with calculation. “Amortentia.” The name settled over them like perfume laced with poison.
Dumbledore’s gaze did not waver. “Curious, isn’t it?” he said at last.
“Amortentia doesn’t merely reveal what we desire. It tells us who we are beneath the polish—what haunts us. What drives us. What we’ve never dared name aloud.” There was something ancient in the way he said it. Not merely informative, but prophetic.
His words weren’t aimed at the room—they were aimed like arrows. And when his eyes fell on Tom again, steady as a lit wand-tip in darkness, the question behind them remained unspoken:
What did you smell, Tom? What truth did the potion drag from the shadows?
And why was Peverell standing so close?
Too close.
Dumbledore’s smile never faltered, but something in his posture had stiffened—a faint narrowing of the shoulders, the weight of his gaze shifting like an unseen hand reaching for a wand. He took in the angle of Tom’s stance, the way Draco Peverell stood near but not behind him, not subservient—parallel. Equal. A line had been crossed. Or perhaps never drawn in the first place.
Have they gotten close already?
The question flickered through Dumbledore’s mind like a warning charm.
And then—Peverell.
The name alone was enough to raise ghosts. He felt the echo of it like a cold wind down an unwatched corridor. An old name. Older than Hogwarts. Older than the crown of Britain. And far older than any boy who wore it with that kind of quiet power in his gaze.
Peverell meant legacy. Secrets. And above all… the Hallows.
A name that carried with it the rustle of legend and the weight of destiny. Dumbledore had spent decades trying to forget the shape of that name on Gellert’s lips, the way it had sounded like a promise.
Like power.
And now here it was again, reborn in the eyes of a boy who stood too calmly beside Tom Riddle—brilliant, monstrous Tom, with all his questions and hungers coiled beneath his skin.
It was not a good thing. No, it was the worst thing.
The two boys were like mirror images from the past—reflections cast in different eras, yet eerily alike.
Brilliant. Powerful.
Marked by a hunger for something greater. Dumbledore watched them with a heaviness in his chest, sensing the fragile edge they both walked. Two boys who had made—or were making—decisions that bent the path of history. He felt the tremors of fear stir deep within him, ancient and cold.
Not again, he thought.
He could not bear to see the past repeat itself
Dumbledore’s mind raced behind the stillness of his face.
Tom, drawn to him? That wasn’t affection. That was strategy—or worse, instinct. A predator recognizing another apex in the forest. Something ancient calling out to something buried.
Riddle didn’t just speak to anyone. He didn’t linger. He didn’t trust.
But he was watching Peverell now like he was studying a spell he couldn’t quite decode.
And Peverell—Draco—was letting him.
Dumbledore’s hands remained folded in front of him, still as stone. But his eyes…
His eyes were anything but.
Because if Riddle had truly been drawn to that boy—and if that boy truly was what his name suggested—then this was no longer a schoolyard concern.
This was the kind of convergence that changed everything. Shifted fate off its axis.
And someone—everyone—was going to feel the gravity of it.
Even gods could be destroyed, if one knew the right name to call.
And the right heart to twist.
Tom’s lips curved, slight and cool. “And what would you say mine is, Professor?”
Dumbledore’s smile widened—but only just. “Ah. But naming it might rob it of its power. Or perhaps… provoke it.”
His gaze drifted then, slowly, deliberately, until it landed on Draco. And this time it didn’t glide. It settled. Heavy. Ancient. As though it had stared down wars, and recognized ghosts in school robes before.
“And you, Mr. Peverell?” Dumbledore’s voice was soft now, threaded with something like warning. “What did you see?”
Draco’s throat tightened before he could stop it. The scent clung to him still—like ash on skin, like a bruise too deep to touch. That dark heat, that spiraling pull at the base of his spine—power twisted with longing. Red-tinged eyes watching him through smoke. A wand like bone. And a face that flickered between boy and monster—between Tom and something else.
Something worse.
Tom. Voldemort. One, and not.
“I saw…” Draco began, then faltered. He forced his voice to cool, to level out like the surface of black water. “Books. Smoke. Fire. Something I couldn’t quite name.”
Dumbledore’s eyes narrowed. Not suspicious. Just knowing. Like he’d heard a lie dressed too well to undress.
“Memory, perhaps,” he mused, “or forewarning.”
He turned, his robes catching a gust that wasn’t there, and moved down the corridor without sound—vanishing as if the darkness had simply opened and swallowed him whole.
Silence fell in his wake, thick and too still.
Tom stepped closer. His presence pressed in like heat from a hearth too close—dangerous not because it burned, but because you might not mind the burning.
“He doesn’t trust you,” he said, voice low, smooth as charmed velvet.
Draco let out a breath, slow and even. “He doesn’t trust anyone.”
“No,” Tom agreed. “But he’s curious. About you. And that’s… worse.”
Draco turned his head, their eyes locking again—storm meeting shadow.
“You sound concerned,” he said quietly.
“I am.” Tom didn’t look away. “You’re not what you appear to be. That makes you useful. Or dangerous. I haven’t decided which.”
“And if I’m both?”
Tom tilted his head—just slightly. Enough to make him look less like a boy, more like something sculpted in a church where prayers go unanswered.
“Then I suppose,” he said, almost gently, “we’ll have to find out… which part wins.”
With that, he stepped back, his silhouette retreating into the shadows like smoke retreating into the corners of a forgotten room.
And Draco stood alone—though not alone in thought.
Draco didn’t move. Couldn’t. His fingers curled loosely at his sides, twitching once, then stilling—like they were remembering the feel of a wand even when one wasn’t drawn. The air around him still shimmered faintly with the remnants of the potion, clinging to his skin like invisible ink. Books. Smoke. Blood. And beneath it all, that lingering, suffocating sweetness—Amortentia’s cruel perfume, binding memory to sensation.
And eyes.
Red as flame. Red as ruin.
He pressed his back to the cold stone wall, the rough texture biting through his robes. His eyes slid shut.
His heart pounded. Hard. Too hard. Loud enough he swore it echoed in the corridor, pulsing like a drum summoning something ancient and unkind.
He had survived war. He had stood before Death Eaters with trembling hands and fire in his lungs. He had walked through Hogwarts when it wore scars like open wounds and called it home anyway.
But Tom Riddle was something else entirely.
There was no battlefield for this. No clean enemy. No clear escape. Tom wasn’t a storm. He was the eye of one. All quiet promise, and the promise of quiet ending.
Amortentia had laid him bare. Had unspooled him, cell by cell.
And what it revealed… was unbearable.
He had wanted Tom.
Not just the way desire burns, but the way gravity claims falling stars. The way something broken reaches instinctively for the thing that will undo it more beautifully.
But he had feared him too.
Feared the way Tom looked at him—like he saw something precious, something sharp, something that could be his. Feared how easily that gaze sliced past his armor. Feared the voice that was never raised, yet made the world tilt when it spoke.
And in that tension—between longing and terror—was the knife’s edge.
This wasn’t a game of light and dark. There were no heroes here. No salvation.
This was a game of shadow. Of who could stand still the longest while the ground disappeared beneath them.
And the boy who had just walked away—with eyes like firelight reflected in oil, and power flickering just beneath his skin—
—wasn’t merely dangerous.
He was the one who might burn the world.
And Draco—gods help him—wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t let him.
He felt it in his bones—an ancient thrum, subtle but undeniable, like the echo of a spell whispered in a forgotten language. It wasn’t affection. It wasn’t desire. It was darker than that. Older. A recognition that crawled beneath his skin and settled like frost along his spine.
Something in him twisted.
He should not want Tom Riddle.
Everything about him was wrong—too composed, too precise, like a statue carved to resemble a boy but hollowed out inside. Dangerous, in that quiet, patient way that didn’t need to raise its voice to command obedience. He was the kind of boy your instincts warned you to run from, the kind who smiled and left ruin in his wake.
And yet.
Draco couldn’t look away.
There was something in Tom—beneath the charm, beneath the brilliance—that tugged at him like a splinter beneath the nail. A darkness, coiled and gleaming, too familiar to be foreign. It mirrored something inside Draco himself. That cold, survival-honed stillness. The buried fury. The ache of being shaped by forces too large, too cruel.
Draco had spent years pretending not to feel it—that black weight of legacy, of fear masquerading as loyalty. But Tom didn’t hide it. He wore his darkness like silk.
And Draco…
Draco couldn’t help but stare.
Not because he admired it. Not because he wanted it. But because he understood it.
Because some part of him—a part he’d tried to kill—recognized it.
And in that recognition, something dangerous stirred.
He could still feel the warmth of Tom’s breath near his cheek, though the boy had never leaned that close. Could still feel the weight of his gaze—silken, strangling—like a hand curled lightly around his throat, not squeezing, just… reminding him who was watching.
A part of him—the part honed by war, sharpened by grief—screamed to run. To sever this before it rooted. To tell Dumbledore. To vanish.
But another part… that part leaned in.
Because Tom Riddle didn’t pull people. He drew them. Like ink across parchment. Like flame toward oil. There was no choice. There was only proximity, and what it cost.
Draco opened his eyes slowly.
The corridor was empty now, torches flickering like held breaths. Shadows stretched long along the flagstone floor, but none quite reached him.
Not yet.
Not yet.
He exhaled—low, steady, trembling.
There was power in Tom. Yes. But not just the brute magic kind. Something older. Hungrier. The way he moved, the way he listened. Like he was collecting pieces of you with every conversation. Filing them away for later. Waiting to decide what they were worth.
Draco had seen men like that.
But not boys.
Never boys.
And never ones who wore charm like a weapon, and silence like a noose.
He should have hated him.
Should have feared him more than he already did.
But instead…
He felt seen.
Like Tom had peered straight through the practiced mask of Peverell, past the cultivated poise, the sarcasm, the lies worn like second skin—and glimpsed the hollow center beneath.
Not with pity.
But with recognition.
And maybe that was worse.
Because monsters always knew their own.
Draco pushed off the wall, steps slow, careful. Every movement felt weighted now, like something had shifted in the air—like the dungeon had watched that conversation and chosen not to breathe until it was over.
He would not look back.
He would not let his mind linger on the way Tom’s voice had softened—intimate, interested, dissecting. Or the way his lips curled just slightly when Draco challenged him. Or the way his presence turned the corridor colder and warmer all at once.
He would not think of the eyes behind the charm.
Or the boy behind the monster.
Or the monster behind the boy.
He wouldn’t think of any of it.
Not now.
Because the next time they crossed paths—
—and of course there would be a next time—
Draco needed to remember who he was.
What he was.
And more importantly—
What he was not.
But his fingers still tingled as he walked, like they’d touched something forbidden and the magic hadn’t quite left them.
And the scent still lingered.
Books. Smoke. Fire.
And something he couldn’t name.
Something that smelled like fate.
Or maybe—
Like the beginning of the end.
Notes:
Just wanted to post an update before I start second-guessing everything—hopefully it all makes sense! I have a feeling future updates are going to be a bit of a struggle. This was originally meant to be maybe 100k to 200k, but at the pace I’m going, it’s turning into a much longer fic. Also kinda wondering if the story’s getting too predictable.
Chapter 7
Notes:
TW- There is a TW tagged in the fic. If you do skip it’s basically death eater stuff. It’s not graphic to my standard but read with caution. Only you know what’s best for you.)
Chapter Text
Draco had felt off-kilter since Potions class—as if the world had shifted a fraction of an inch to the left, just enough that nothing aligned quite right anymore. The castle’s ancient stone corridors stretched on like endless shadows, the tapestries lining them seeming to ripple with a life of their own, their colors too vivid and yet strangely muted all at once. Light spilled through the high arched windows, but it was too sharp, almost cruel, slicing through the dusty air with a cold precision that made the warmth of the sun feel like a lie. The silence between footsteps was too heavy, as though the castle itself was holding its breath, waiting.
Time had stuttered then, caught on a jagged edge—and when it resumed, it left him behind. He moved through the halls like a man wading through a half-remembered dream, every sound and sight familiar yet somehow unreal. The usual rhythm of his heartbeat and breath felt jagged, out of sync, like a song played slightly off key. His own thoughts echoed strangely in his mind, fragmented and disjointed, as though the steady flow of reason had cracked just enough to let something darker and more uncertain seep through.
It had all started after that conversation.
With Riddle.
There was something about the way Tom had looked at him—those dark eyes unblinking, sharp as a scalpel, peeling back layers of Draco’s carefully constructed defenses with unsettling ease. The gaze held a strange, almost cruel amusement, like a predator studying a curious, fragile specimen—intriguing, but utterly indifferent to its suffering. It left a cold knot in Draco’s chest, a frost that no hearth or summer sun could thaw.
The words they’d exchanged weren’t barbed or cutting on their own—just measured, almost casual—but they clung to him like stubborn shadows at dusk. They echoed in the silence of his mind, wrapping around his thoughts like thick incense curling through the cold stone halls long after the flame had been snuffed out. A faint, lingering trace that blurred the edges of reality, refusing to dissipate. Draco hadn’t stopped feeling them since, as if the conversation had carved a hidden wound beneath his skin.
And then—Dumbledore.
The Headmaster had always held Draco at arm’s length, a cautious respect tempered with quiet reserve. But now there was something darker beneath those keen eyes, something sharpened by suspicion and quiet dread. It was like a spell cast in whispers, invisible but heavy, simmering beneath the surface of every glance. That look—so measured, so deliberate, so devastatingly still—cut deeper than any shouted accusation. It settled deep into Draco’s bones, branding itself with the silent weight of judgment: You are not who you pretend to be.
And maybe he wasn’t.
The fear came slow at first. Gentle, almost subtle—like the softest breath of frost whispering down the back of his throat, barely enough to notice, yet impossible to ignore. A quiet weight settled against his ribs, light but insistent, like the faint pressure of a shadow brushing over the edges of his consciousness. It was insidious, seeping in without a sound, threading its way through his veins like cold ink staining water.
But it didn’t stay gentle.
The chill deepened, curling and twisting inside him like a living thing. It grew teeth—sharp, restless, gnawing at the hollow places no shield could reach. Now it crawled beneath his skin, slithering through the dark caverns of his chest, pooling behind his eyes like thick, creeping fog. He could feel it writhing there—an unwelcome parasite beneath a surface that should be still, calm, untouched. It didn’t sting or burn like pain, but it itched relentlessly, a deep, raw ache that twisted nerves and rattled bones.
Fear.
Doubt.
So much doubt.
For years, Draco had been a master of himself—his posture rigid and precise, his voice steady and measured, his face a carefully crafted mask of indifference. He had learned early that stillness could be wielded like a blade, that emotion, when smothered hard enough, could be reshaped into armor.
Silence became his shield.
Control, his refuge.
But now—something was cracking.
Beneath the polished surface, the fractures spidered out, invisible but real. The armor was splintering, and the silence threatened to break. The doubt was no longer a whisper; it was a storm gathering behind his eyes, ready to tear through the careful façade he had spent a lifetime building.
He told himself he wasn’t falling apart. The words twisted like a desperate incantation on his tongue, a chant repeated over and over in the hollow chambers of his mind. His jaw clenched so tightly it ached, a dull throb radiating down his temples, grounding him in a fragile grip of control. His hands, pale and restless, folded tightly in his lap, fighting against the tremors that threatened to betray him.
You are in control.
You are not afraid.
This is not unraveling.
But it was.
Not in sweeping, catastrophic bursts or crashing ruin. No, it was slower—more intimate, like a secret unraveling in the quiet dark. It crept beneath the surface, a subtle unspooling thread by thread, a whispering fray at the edges of everything he had built himself to be. The sturdy mask, the polished exterior, the calculated grace—all softening, dissolving in a way so subtle it might have gone unnoticed, if only he weren’t watching so desperately for the cracks.
And deep inside that gradual collapse, a single, pulsing truth throbbed like a sickness in his blood—relentless and unforgiving:
He wasn’t lying well enough anymore.
Not to himself.
Not to the ghost in the mirror—the hollow reflection with Draco Malfoy’s face and Draco Peverell’s name, staring back at him with eyes that no longer believed the lies whispered in the dark.
The mask he wore—the calm, cold precision, the carefully measured tone, the faint, practiced smirk that passed for indifference—was starting to slip at the seams. For months it had held firm, forged in the crucible of necessity. Through the cold, cavernous vaults of Gringotts, through endless days tangled in shadows and whispered secrets, through the deceit spun around him by wary teachers and restless portraits, by watchful Ministry clerks and the unyielding vigilance of Goblin wards. Through the arrival at Hogwarts itself—still shimmering with the fragile light of a magic unscarred, untouched by the cruelty and bloodshed that loomed just beyond the horizon.
But now… the seams were fraying.
He hadn’t truly processed his grief.
Not really.
Instead, he had folded it into sharp, jagged corners—tucked it away into the darkest, most hidden recesses of his soul—pretending it wasn’t there. Pretending it hadn’t hollowed out a cavern inside him, a space so vast and aching it swallowed whole every attempt at filling it with something else.
How could he grieve when every second was survival?
He hadn’t just left a world behind.
He had buried it beneath layers of firelight and ash, a ruin scorched into his memory. A world where the sky above Hogwarts had turned black—choked with swirling curses and jagged spells that tore the air apart like lightning cleaving storm clouds. Where marble corridors, once gleaming with quiet grandeur, lay strewn with corpses, cold and unmoving, their faces frozen in final moments of terror and pain. Where the only sound louder than the desperate screams was the heavy, suffocating silence that swallowed every echo once the battle had passed.
He had watched friends die—brave, desperate souls torn away before their time. Enemies too, faceless shadows swallowed by darkness. Strangers caught in the crossfire of a war they never asked for. People he’d never had the chance to save, and others he hadn’t dared to try. Each loss a jagged wound etched deep beneath his skin, bleeding grief and guilt in equal measure.
He had seen what Voldemort became—a monstrous shadow of the boy he once was, twisted and remade by hatred and cruelty, a force that devoured hope and left ruin in its wake.
And then—by some cruel miracle, a bitter curse, a twist of fate he still couldn’t fully comprehend—he had been pulled backwards through time. Not to a better age, not to innocence or peace, but to the root of it all—the moment where everything began to unravel.
The year before it all began.
The year Tom Riddle still smiled like a boy and not a god. When his charm was still soft-edged, his laughter still human—almost. When the world remained intact on the surface, pristine in its polish, but already rusting underneath, the decay threaded into the seams like rot behind a painted wall. Magic hadn’t yet twisted itself into something monstrous—but the monster was already here.
Already walking these halls. Already watching, with eyes too ancient for his face, with a hunger too vast for his age.
Draco had landed in this time like a blade dropped in velvet—too sharp, too cold, too silent. Everything about him sliced against the softness of this era: the old weight in his gaze, the way he moved like a soldier in a place that hadn’t yet declared war, the knowledge curled in his spine like coiled wire. He did not belong—and the world around him knew it, even if it couldn’t yet name the reason.
He had told himself it was a second chance. Not for him—never for him.
But for the world. For the future he had watched burn.
If he could get close enough.
If he could shape Tom.
Distract him.
Deflect him.
Stop him.
Kill him, if he had to.
And yet—Tom was not what he expected.
Not quite. Not yet.
And that uncertainty was the most dangerous thing of all.
He had poured himself into that singular truth like it was salvation—a purpose sharp enough to cut through the ruin he’d left behind. He let it consume him, let it shape the hollow spaces grief had carved out of him.
Let it teach him how to breathe in a century that wasn’t his, in corridors that echoed with ghosts he hadn’t yet met. He read until ink blurred and pages wept under his fingers. Spoke Latin with a tongue sharpened by desperation, until it rolled off his lips like breath. Trained his wand hand to the dueling forms of this time, each motion a ritual of control. He wrapped the name Peverell around himself like armor spun of myth and menace, let it root into his spine, his smile, his silence. He became what he needed to be—a ghost in this era, yes, but a ghost that belonged. A shadow that did not invite suspicion.
But now… now he felt the weight of it all. A quiet, crushing pressure he could no longer outrun.
The grief.
The rage.
The relentless ache of loneliness.
They hadn’t vanished.
They’d merely retreated.
Curled into the hollows of him like sleeping beasts, biding their time.
Waiting.
Waiting for silence.
Waiting for stillness.
Waiting for him.
Because Tom wasn’t just the mission.
He was the reason.
The beginning.
The crack in time that had widened into a chasm. The epicenter of everything Draco had lost.
And standing in front of him now—in the soft, flickering candlelight of a world still whole—before Horcruxes, before the name Voldemort had ever been spoken like a curse—Draco didn’t feel powerful.
He didn’t feel clever.
Didn’t feel like the weapon he’d tried so hard to become.
He felt like a boy again.
Broken.
Bruised.
Threadbare in places no one could see.
Held together by silence and spite and sheer will—but bleeding, now, in quiet places. Bleeding truths he could no longer cauterize. Truths he couldn’t afford to admit.
Not here. Not now.
Because the worst part was—Tom saw it.
Not in the way others might.
Not through warmth or gentleness or even the hollow civility most people offered strangers. Tom Riddle didn’t feel for people—he read them. He dissected them like texts in a dead language, picked them apart with the meticulous hunger of someone who believed nothing was unknowable, only temporarily concealed. He didn’t offer comfort.
He offered precision.
Calculation.
A mirror polished so sharply it cut.
Tom didn’t traffic in empathy. He trafficked in insight.
His gaze was a scalpel—clinical, unflinching, absurdly calm.
Too sharp.
Too still.
Too knowing.
He watched Draco the way a serpent watches something that might, possibly, bleed interestingly when pierced. Like a puzzle missing one piece—one he was confident he could force into place if he pressed just hard enough, turned the edges just right.
And Draco felt it.
Still feels it now, in every shared corridor, every library silence, every moment when Tom’s presence brushes the air like static before a storm.
It wasn’t something loud. It was worse than that.
It was patient.
Like fingers ghosting along the frayed threads of his soul.
An unhurried unspooling.
Not a rip.
Not a rupture.
But an unraveling.
Tom didn’t tear.
He unwound.
And Draco hated how his body remembered it.
How his shoulders tensed before Tom even spoke. How his breath shortened the moment those eyes—cool and clever and incurably curious—found him across a room. How his fingers curled inward without command. How something coiled within him—tight, low, slow—not just with fear, but with something else.
Something quieter. More dangerous.
Fascination.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong.
He wasn’t supposed to feel anything for Tom Riddle.
Not awe at his brilliance.
Not curiosity at his hunger.
And certainly not this sick, fluttering pull behind his ribs, this bone-deep tremor of interest, of draw, when Tom stepped too close and said his name like it was a spell Draco had already obeyed.
He was supposed to remember.
The horror.
The war.
The things that had carved lines into his soul too deep to name. The nights he couldn’t sleep because the screams still echoed—blood-choked, desperate, familiar.
Fred Weasley’s body on the stone floor, eyes open to nothing.
The cracked, raw edge in Potter’s voice when they found Snape—folded like broken parchment in the Shrieking Shack, the air thick with death and secrets.
His mother’s hands, trembling when she touched his face like she thought he’d vanish—like he already had.
He was supposed to carry those memories like armor.
They were supposed to harden him. Warn him.
Anchor him.
But here—now—
In this untouched version of Hogwarts, where the walls smell like beeswax and parchment instead of charred stone.
Where the corridors echo with laughter and not screams.
Where the moonlight slips silver across the lake instead of flickering in the glow of dying spells—
He forgets.
Just for a second.
When Tom Riddle looks at him across a common room fire, lit in the throat with amusement and intent—when he tilts his head like Draco is a riddle worth solving and not a threat to unravel—
Draco forgets to be afraid.
And that… that was the most dangerous part of all.
Because if he faltered… even once…
If he let the illusion settle for too long, let this boy’s charm convince him—
If he forgot that this was the same soul who would one day split his own to grasp at godhood…
It would all be for nothing.
His mission. His suffering. The choice to leave behind what was left of his life and come here, to stop a war before it began.
But he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep pretending to be whole, to carry all the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The weight of the lie.
The mask of calm.
The ache of loneliness in a time that did not want him, and a role he never asked to play.
The lie was heavy in his chest, and it burned.
Bitter at the back of his throat.
Not a fire—but a smolder, slow and relentless.
The kind of pain that doesn’t scream.
It sings. Quiet. Constant. Unyielding.
And Draco wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold the note.
He hadn’t processed the grief.
Not truly.
Not the acrid sting of smoke clinging to his lungs long after the fires went out. Not the blackened stone that used to echo with laughter and footsteps and now cracked under the weight of memory. Not the faces—oh, the faces—half-remembered in dream and nightmare, flickering like dying spells behind his eyes.
He had not mourned the world.
Because the world had already ended once, for him.
And when it did, it didn’t go out with glory or meaning.
It went quiet.
It went cruel.
And it left him standing amidst the wreckage, unsure if he was meant to live or simply hadn’t died yet.
So he did what survivors do.
He performed.
He wore his role like a second skin: the smooth chill of a pureblood prince, the spine-straight poise, the languid, effortless drawl that said nothing ever touched him.
He became what was expected. What was necessary.
Draco Peverell.
The perfect shadow.
The artifact polished for this era, made sleek with restraint and distance.
But beneath it all—beneath the cut-glass articulation and the impeccable posture—there was a crack.
A hairline fracture, spidering slow and silent through his chest. A fault line wrapped around his ribs like a warning whispered in bone.
All it would take was one thing.
One word. One misstep. One look from Tom—
And he knew with a certainty that frightened him—that he could shatter.
Not gradually. Not with grace.
But all at once.
Like glass beneath pressure.
Like a truth finally breaking through the lie.
He feared the day would come when Riddle pushed just hard enough.
And worse still…
A part of him wanted it.
He wanted the pressure to be too much.
Wanted Tom to see through him.
Wanted the mask to fall—not because he failed to hold it, but because he chose not to anymore.
Because maybe if it cracked—
If it finally split open—
He could feel something that wasn’t numbness wrapped in discipline.
Something that wasn’t purpose recited like dogma.
Something real.
Not just the performance of poise.
Not the echo of purpose he clung to like a lifeline.
Not the cold rehearsal of who he was supposed to be.
But the wound.
The raw center.
The pulse beneath the ice that said, I am still alive. I am still broken.
The bleeding center of himself he hadn’t dared to face since the night he left everything behind.
And that frightened him more than anything Tom could ever do.
Because nothing Tom Riddle could do to him—not the mind games, not the probing questions, not the gaze that stripped him to silence—
None of it frightened him as much as what lay underneath.
The boy he used to be.
Draco Malfoy.
Because deep down, beneath the bruises of time travel, the memories of war, the faces buried in his heart like gravestones… Draco didn’t want to be Draco Malfoy anymore.
That boy had failed.
Had flinched.
Had survived, but only just.
And survival wasn’t enough anymore.
So he buried him.
Laid that boy to rest in the ruins of the world he left behind.
And in his place, he built Draco Peverell.
Measured. Detached. Precise.
A blade with no reflection.
A name with no past.
Unbreakable.
Or so he told himself.
But Tom saw the fault lines.
He always had.
From the very first moment their eyes met across the dim, potion-scented hush of Slughorn’s classroom—when Draco was still cloaked in careful detachment and Tom was still pretending to be human—it had begun.
Tom hadn’t needed Legilimency to sense it.
The lie inside Draco beat like a second pulse, thrumming just beneath the skin—too rhythmic, too hollow, too composed to be real.
And Tom liked it.
He was drawn to it the way a serpent is drawn to warmth.
He circled Draco with the eerie elegance of a creature that knew its own power. A predator not yet hungry—but curious.
Hovering.
Tasting the air.
He didn’t lunge.
He studied.
He tested.
He smiled too long, stood too close, asked questions with no right answers. He filled the space between them until it felt tilted, like gravity had shifted and Draco was suddenly moving toward him without ever stepping forward.
It wasn’t affection.
It wasn’t cruelty.
It was interest.
The most dangerous kind.
Tom wanted to pull him apart—slowly, reverently. Not to destroy him, but to understand him.
To peel back the layers like old parchment, piece by precise piece, until he could press his fingers into the heart of whatever Draco was hiding.
And Draco knew that game.
He’d played it with his father. With enemies. With himself.
He had once weaponized charm the way others wielded blades. Had used smiles like shields and silence like strategy. Had learned how to become what people wanted, what they feared, what they couldn’t quite reach.
But Tom Riddle didn’t follow those rules.
He didn’t wait for permission.
He didn’t flinch at boundaries.
He rewrote the script, every time they spoke.
No safe word. No clear lines.
Just that glint of knowing in his eyes and the steady, suffocating hum of inevitability.
Now, every step Draco took inside this castle felt weighted.
Haunted.
Not by ghosts—those were easy. Ghosts faded. Ghosts mourned.
This was worse.
He was haunted by possibility.
By what could happen if he made the wrong move.
By what was already happening.
Because he could feel it, couldn’t he?
The mission was slipping through his fingers, one glance at a time.
One word spoken too softly.
One moment spent watching Tom instead of preparing to stop him.
And he knew—he knew—this was how it began.
Not with betrayal.
But with recognition.
Not of what Tom would become—but of what Draco already was.
Because somewhere between fear and fascination, between history and myth, between the boy who was and the boy who would be—
They saw each other.
Not clearly. Not fully.
But enough.
Enough to know.
And Draco didn’t know what terrified him more—
That Tom was seeing through him.
Or that, for the first time since he arrived,
Draco was beginning to see himself.
Because what do you do when the very thing you came back to destroy starts to understand you? What happens when you don’t feel revulsion, but recognition? And not just of who he is—but who you are becoming.
Sometimes, late at night—when the Slytherin common room is reduced to little more than embers glowing dully in the hearth and shadows curling like cats in the corners—Draco finds himself thinking things he shouldn’t.
The water outside the windows ripples with moonlight, soft and silver and silent. The chairs are empty. The hour too deep for even whispers. And in that velvet hush, thought creeps in like a draft beneath a closed door.
What if I could change him?
The thought arrives unbidden, ridiculous, treacherous—but it lodges there, just beneath his breastbone, aching like a bruise he keeps pressing.
As if that’s how time works. As if that’s how Tom Riddle works.
As if Tom is not a force of nature dressed in school robes and civility.
Not a boy, but a breaking tide—always rising, always dragging something away.
Not a student, but a storm in the shape of a smile.
A quiet apocalypse biding its time.
Draco knows better.
Merlin, he knows better.
He’s seen what Tom becomes.
The temples burned to ash. The bodies unburied.
The world cracked in two.
And still.
The thought lingers.
Not because it’s smart. Not because it’s strategic.
But because it’s human.
Because somewhere beneath the bone-deep exhaustion and the ritual of deception, beneath the carefully layered identity of Peverell—Draco is still alive. Still cracked open by the war he fled and the people he couldn’t save.
He is still someone’s son.
Still someone’s friend.
Still a boy who once wanted to be good.
But that ache—for hope, for tenderness, for something other than ruin—it feels like both betrayal and benediction.
Like something holy trying to grow in scorched soil.
So he digs his fingernails into the soft flesh of his palm.
Hard.
Until he feels the sting. The bite. The realness of it.
Remember, he tells himself. You’re not here to feel. You’re here to finish it.
Because the fire in Tom’s eyes isn’t love.
It isn’t fascination.
It’s hunger.
And the closer Draco stands to him—
The more his memories slip.
The more the past starts to blur, to twist, to resemble the future.
Potter’s laughter.
Snape’s last breath.
His mother’s shaking hands—
They all begin to fade like dreams.
And in their place, he grows sharper.
Stranger.
More like someone Tom might trust.
Or worse—someone Tom might understand.
And Draco fears…
Fears that he didn’t just come back in time to stop a monster.
He came back to meet one.
And every night, as the shadows stretch long and the fire dies to nothing—
He wonders if that monster isn’t wearing Tom Riddle’s face…
But his own.
The thought clung to him like a damp cloak—sodden with unease, cold against his skin, impossible to shrug off.
It didn’t scream.
It didn’t even speak.
It whispered, in the quiet cracks between thoughts, in the long silences after Tom Riddle’s voice slipped back into shadow, in the way candlelight bent around corners like it was eavesdropping.
What if you’re not the hero in this story?
It wasn’t a question anymore. Not really. It was an echo now—an echo that had carved out a home inside his ribs, that waited for him each time the halls grew too quiet or Tom’s gaze lingered too long.
And that echo chilled him more than any hex ever could.
Because if it was true—if he wasn’t here to save the world but to become part of what ruined it—
Then what was all this suffering for?
He thought of the Elder Wand.
How it had pulsed in his hand that night beneath Gringotts, not like a weapon resisting a stranger—but like a beast waking up to the smell of home.
The way it had thrummed through his bones, ancient and eager and electric.
Not with rejection.
But with recognition.
The memory struck him like lightning even now—hairs standing on end, the phantom ache of power humming beneath his fingertips.
Mine, it had said. Not in words. In certainty.
Like the wand had been waiting.
And Draco—haunted, grieving, burning with purpose—had lied to himself.
He’d called it duty.
He’d called it sacrifice.
He’d told himself that he was the edge of the sword, not the hand that swung it. That he was Lucius Malfoy’s son, yes—but forged in defiance, not obedience. Made to unmake what his bloodline had built.
A final answer to a legacy soaked in rot.
He had clung to that belief like a dying man clutching driftwood.
But lately—
Lately it was slipping.
Because when Tom looked at him—truly looked—there was no fear. No disgust.
There was recognition.
Like a flame seeing another flicker in the dark.
Like something ancient remembering itself in the bones of a boy who thought he was made for more.
Tom looked at him as if they were cut from the same brutal cloth, woven not just from pain, but from potential.
And in Tom’s eyes, Draco didn’t see contempt.
He saw curiosity.
He saw invitation.
He saw a kind of terrible kinship that made his stomach knot and his throat go dry.
And worse—so much worse than all of it—
He felt the stirrings of temptation.
Not because he wanted to fall.
But because falling would be easy.
Easier than carrying this weight.
Easier than pretending to be whole.
Easier than burying the fractured boy who once knelt in the dust of a war-torn castle and swore he’d never become them.
But now, sometimes—when the torchlight flickers just so, when Tom Riddle steps too close and smiles like he’s already won—
Draco wonders if he already has.
Because maybe it isn’t the wand that recognized him.
Maybe it was the darkness.
And maybe—just maybe—
He recognized it back.
Tom didn’t fear the shadows. He wore them like a second skin—fluid, elegant, and unforgiving. Shadows didn’t just follow him; they answered to him.
Slithered at his heels.
Curled around his voice like smoke. He made them beautiful.
Worshipful.
Made darkness seem not like the absence of light, but the presence of something deeper.
Older.
More seductive.
And Draco—Draco had always been fluent in the dark. He’d grown up in candlelit corridors and whispered secrets, taught from birth to read silence like a second language. He knew how to move unseen, how to weaponize restraint. But he had always told himself that the darkness he walked through wasn’t his.
It belonged to his father.
His legacy.
His enemies.
Not him.
But when he closed his eyes now, the lie peeled away like old paint.
The images sharpened.
Tom’s voice—low and coaxing, velvet-wrapped poison.
The flick of his wand—precise, graceful, cruel.
The glint in his eyes—not just ambition, but certainty. Like he could already see the chessboard thirty moves ahead. Like he knew exactly how this story would end, and found its inevitability aesthetic.
A tragedy dressed in silk.
Draco had walked through hell to get here.
He had buried names, buried memories.
Carved out chunks of his soul and stitched them into something newer, colder, sharper.
He had become Peverell with the kind of precision that made pain into a blueprint.
He thought the hardest part would be fooling Tom.
Wearing the mask. Playing the part. Protecting the fragile thread of future that still existed somewhere far ahead.
But no.
The hardest part was this:
Standing inches from Tom Riddle, breathing the same air, and realizing—
He wasn’t sure who he was protecting anymore.
Or from what.
Because every time Riddle leaned in—every time his voice dipped into that careful curiosity, every time his presence folded into the room like a secret being told—something in Draco stirred.
Something old.
Something powerful.
Something that recognized the boy in front of him not as a threat, but as a mirror.
It wasn’t love.
It wasn’t trust.
It was worse.
Familiarity.
The kind that curled behind your ribs and whispered: We are the same.
Because monsters don’t always come with claws.
Sometimes they wear your smile.
Sometimes they speak softly, say your name like a promise.
Sometimes they don’t demand—they understand.
And that was the most dangerous part of all.
Draco’s fingers gripped his skin like an anchor, bone-white and trembling.
His breath came too shallow. Not from fear of the dungeon chill—it wasn’t the cold that unnerved him.
It was the internal frost.
The creeping, curling presence beneath his skin.
The memory of winter he couldn’t thaw.
The part of him that fit here—too well.
He couldn’t let this happen.
He couldn’t let himself happen.
Because he hadn’t come to this cursed decade to find Tom Riddle.
He hadn’t crossed time and grief and blood to feel seen by the very thing he meant to stop.
He came to win.
To end it before it began.
Even if that meant destroying not just a boy destined for tyranny—But the part of himself that didn’t recoil from the dark.
The part that understood power too intimately.
The part that, in another life—one where he hadn’t lost everything—might’ve reached out and taken Tom Riddle’s hand.
It was all too much.
The images rose in his mind like bile—acidic, stinging, impossible to swallow.
Unbidden.
Merciless.
They didn’t drift in with the soft blur of memory. No, they crashed down, vivid and brutal, dragging him under like a riptide. The world around him thinned, dissolved, until it was then again—there again. The air split open like torn fabric, and he was hauled bodily back through it, breath crushed from his lungs.
And the screams—Merlin, the screams.
They weren’t just sounds. They were wounds.
Ragged, raw, ripped straight from burning throats—so high, so sharp, they scraped the air into shreds.
They weren’t distant.
They weren’t muffled.
They were everywhere, vibrating through the stones, the smoke, the marrow of his bones. They dug in like claws and tore at the softest parts of him.
He couldn’t shut them out.
Couldn’t blink them away.
They were inside him now, howling where thought should be, peeling at the edges of his sanity.
( TW- Depictions of violence and death. Not too graphic but can still be triggering. Mention of panic attack)
And then—
There she was.
A girl.
A Muggle.
Barefoot—barely human anymore. A husk of childhood scorched into something brittle and trembling. Bones straining beneath soot-slick skin, held together by nothing but will. Maybe thirteen. Maybe younger. Maybe she’d had a name once, whispered from a mother’s lips or scribbled in a schoolbook. But here—now—she was only this.
This burning thing.
A child-shaped horror wrapped in fire.
Her legs were wrong—too thin, too soft, the skin bubbling like sap beneath a magnifying glass. Blood streaked down her shins in slow, syrupy trails, ash caking the open wounds where flesh had crisped and peeled away. Her dress—yellow once, or maybe pink, or some soft pastel shade that belonged to spring—was now just rags. Charred gauze clinging in tatters, edges curling like paper caught too close to a candle. It clung to her thighs, shrank up her hips, flames devouring with greedy hands.
And still she stood.
Her skin blistered in real time, popping and cracking like something alive, and Draco saw it—smelled it. The sour, thick scent of burning hair and cooked meat. Her arms trembled under the weight of her own body. Her fingers had curled inward like dying petals, nails gone, blackened stumps shaking. Her collarbones were slick with blood and burn, exposed where the fire had stripped the covering skin in long, angry ribbons.
She was unraveling.
And still—still—she didn’t scream.
Not anymore.
She had screamed before, surely. Once. Maybe more. But now she was past it, beyond the reach of pain or terror. She had gone inward, deeper—into that quiet place that exists beyond agony.
Her hair had caught fire long ago.
It clung to her scalp in burning ribbons, strands fused to blistered skin, and yet—somehow—still lifted with every breath she took. Each exhale stirred the blaze, fanning embers that danced upward in slow, mesmerizing spirals. They crackled softly, almost peacefully, like autumn leaves curling beneath a flame—delicate, inevitable.
Smoke wrapped around her in thick, writhing ropes, dense enough to blind, to smother. It rolled off her shoulders and clung to the air like ghosts. The world behind her was already gone—walls melted, sky turned to smoke—but she didn’t move.
Didn’t cry.
Didn’t collapse.
Didn’t even flinch.
Her feet were bare—blackened, broken things pressed into scorched earth. Blood seeped from where the skin had split, glistening dark against ash. Her toes curled slightly, involuntarily, in response to heat and pain and ruin—but they held. She held. Planted there, motionless in the ruin of it all, like a monument to something ancient and terrible.
She stood in the middle of a world that should have broken her—
—and refused to fall.
And in the middle of it, surrounded by death, she reached out.
Her hand rose—toward him. Not to shield herself. Not to block the flames.
But toward Draco.
Through the heat and smoke and death—her arm lifted, trembling,The skin was charred to the elbow, flaking in chunks that dropped and sizzled where they landed. Beneath the fire-eaten tissue, white gleamed—bone . Her hand extended not in panic, not in accusation—
But in faith.
As though he was the answer.
As though he was salvation.
Around her, the earth burned. The hallway behind was gone—swallowed by fire, reduced to a molten skeleton of what it once was. The air shimmered, distorted, thick with the stench of scorched life. It choked. It gagged. But she breathed through it. She stood in the middle of hell, and when her eyes met his—
There was no fear.
There should have been.
There should have been fury, hatred, horror.
But there wasn’t.
Just wide, smoke-rimmed eyes. Glassy. Dark. So young.
And inside them—hope.
Not defiance. Not innocence.
Hope.
Raw and trembling. Terrifying in its purity.
As if she truly believed he could save her.
As if he was still someone who might want to.
As if the blood on his hands wasn’t hers already.
As if there was still something in him worth believing in.
And her mouth moved.
Just a breath. Just a word. A shape in the smoke.
Please.
No cry. No shriek. No sob.
Just that. Just please.
Not for her. For him. A plea that didn’t ask for rescue—it offered it. A lifeline flung from the heart of the flames to the boy frozen on the edge, wand in hand, soul cracking like porcelain.
Draco didn’t move.
He couldn’t.
He could only answer.
And he did.
Green
The spell streaked through the smoke like lightning—
bright, cruel, final.
It carved a path through the fire-thick air, slicing past embers and ash, a single green bolt blazing against the furnace glow of red and orange. When it hit her, it did not explode. It snapped—sharp and surgical.
Her body convulsed once. Just once.
Her back arched like a bow drawn too tight, head thrown back, limbs seizing in sudden, violent spasms. Like a puppet whose strings had been yanked too far, too fast—then cut.
Her mouth was still open.
The word still there.
Unspoken. Unfinished.
And then—
she fell.
No scream. No sound. No final gasp of air or flutter of resistance. Just a child’s frame folding in on itself, the motion sickening in its simplicity.
She collapsed like something undone.
Extinguished like a match.
She hit the scorched earth in a hush of ash and bone, a sound too soft for what it meant. Her knees buckled first, then her shoulders crumpled, then her head. Her cheek touched the ground with strange gentleness, as though the fire itself mourned her.
And then the flames took her.
They curled around her like fingers, eager and hungry, folding over her small, broken body with something almost like reverence. They claimed her piece by piece, until even the faint outline of her shape blurred and faded, reduced to flickers, to smoke, to memory.
The hope went with her.
Draco felt it leave—like a light being snuffed out inside his chest.
And the world was silent again.
Except for the screaming inside him.
He didn’t hear it with his ears. It was deeper than that—deafening and shapeless, pouring through the cracks in his ribs and echoing in the marrow of his bones. A kind of inner collapse, noiseless and endless. A scream without breath.
Only smoke remained.
It swirled around his legs, sluggish and living. It crawled up his throat, sank into the lining of his robes, into his eyes, his lungs, his soul. It wasn’t just smoke—it was grief in particulate form, a poison brewed from burnt skin and crushed names and things no spell could fix.
It stung. It seared. It clung.
It didn’t smell like fire.
It smelled like endings.
Like burned hair. Like melting flesh. Like innocence flayed and left to rot.
It was acrid. Oily. Personal.
It smelled like guilt.
And the silence that followed—it wasn’t quiet.
It was total.
A silence so complete it drowned out the world.
Not peace. Not stillness.
Just the nothing that comes after too much.
A vacuum.
A void.
A soundless roar louder than any scream.
Deafening in its aftermath, louder still for what wasn’t there.
No more crying.
No more reaching.
No more pleading.
Just the heavy, unbearable weight of what hadn’t been done.
Draco stood in it like a statue carved from ash.
His heart thundered—a single, brutal rhythm pounding inside the mausoleum of his chest.
A drumbeat for the dead.
Hollow.
Slow.
Relentless.
He felt it echo through his ribs, against his teeth, in his skull.
He stared at the space where her eyes had been.
Not her body. Not the twisted heap the fire had left behind.
But the space—
That unholy space—
Where she had stood, reaching for him.
Where her eyes had met his.
He couldn’t look away.
As if she were still there.
As if she were still watching.
Not judging. Not accusing. Just—waiting.
He should’ve done something.
But he hadn’t.
He had stood there, rooted to the floor like a boy with no name, no past, no magic at all. A ghost in his own skin.
Spells shrieked past his ears—hot, furious things,alive with panic and bloodlust,lit not by light but by the raw, jagged pulse of fear.
They didn’t glide—they screamed,howled like wounded animals, each syllable flayed open by desperation,each casting less a spell than a last breath.
The air pulsed, thick with magic so dense it was nearly solid,
pressing against his skin like a second atmosphere.It buzzed through the floorstones,shivered up the walls,rattled deep inside his teeth.
It was vibrating.
Violent.
Vengeful.
Every charged particle thrummed with intent,with hunger,with the ancient, brutal truth of war.Hexes cracked like thunder,not a clean strike, but splitting thunder,the kind that shakes windows and rends trees in half.
The walls were blistering beneath them,great streaks of scorched black running like veins along stone older than memory.
Masonry peeled in layers,centuries bubbling off in seconds as if the very bones of the building were being flayed alive.
A portrait shrieked overhead—not the subject, but the canvas itself,its frame ripped from the wall by a slicing jinx that tore oil paint from fabric,faces melting into flame.
The world around him burned.
Screams bled through the smoke—real ones, human ones. Some cut off too soon, others dragged on in throat-tearing agony. Fire licked the ceiling, ran wild across tapestries, devoured wood and cloth with greedy, unstoppable hands. Stone cracked beneath the onslaught, vomiting dust and debris as rubble rained down like judgment.
And still he hadn’t moved.
Hadn’t raised his wand.
The hilt weighed heavy in his hand—a polished thing of carved ash, a loyal friend turned stranger. His fingers curled around it but never lifted. Not to defend. Not to retaliate. Not even to shield.
He just stood there.
Smoke curled around his ankles. Heat pressed against his chest like a hand, demanding action, begging for it. But his arms stayed slack at his sides. His heartbeat pounded in his ears louder than the detonations around him, louder than the shattering glass, the breaking bodies, the sobbing spells. It was the only thing tethering him to the moment, and even it felt foreign—like someone else’s fear, thudding inside his ribcage.
His robes clung to him, damp with sweat, singed at the hem, and yet he couldn’t feel the heat anymore.
He couldn’t feel anything.
The world raged—and he, Draco Malfoy, scion of ancient blood, stood at the eye of the storm, empty.
Not a soldier. Not a savior.
Just a boy who’d watched a child burn.
And done nothing.
Just stood.
Just watched.
Too horrified to move.
Too human to fight.
Too broken to run.
Somewhere, someone screamed. It was close. Terrifying. But it wasn’t her. Not anymore.
The sound twisted his stomach—wet, final, like flesh meeting flame, like innocence being torn in half. It struck something primal inside him, and before he could stop it, he doubled over, one arm bracing against the scorched wall.
His body convulsed once.
Twice.
A raw, stuttering gag tore up his throat. Bile rose, thick and acidic, but it never made it past his teeth. It caught there, bitter and burning, before sliding back down like shame.
But it wasn’t just his stomach revolting.
It was deeper than that.
The sickness was in his soul.
A festering, black thing—hot and howling, a wound too wide to close. It smoked inside him, curling into the hollows of his chest, sinking into every crevice that had once held certainty. A scar, fresh and already fatal, stitched into the fabric of who he was. No wand could reach it. No spell could clean it.
He tried to breathe—but the air turned hostile.
It scraped down his throat like broken glass. It tasted like smoke, like blood, like guilt—and he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. The lines had blurred, melted, merged. The battlefield, the fire, the screams—they lived inside him now. Pressed into his lungs like poison, threading through his pulse like a curse he’d never cast but would always carry.
This wasn’t the kind of sickness that passed with time.
It was a sickness that stayed.
It curled in the pit of his stomach, thick and alive, thrumming with every heartbeat. It moved, twitching under his skin like something sentient—shaped from panic, from revulsion, from the guilt he hadn’t earned and yet couldn’t escape. It thrived in his silence. It fed on what he hadn’t done.
And now it bloomed.
Ugly. Relentless. Sprawling like rot behind his ribs, like thorns blooming in reverse, digging inward.
That night hadn’t left a memory. It had left a mark.
Carved into him—not like a story, but like a brand. Into his spine. Into his marrow. Into the pieces of himself he could no longer name without tasting ash.
And still the smoke clung to him.
And still the screams echoed.
And still—
He had done nothing.
The sound of laughter clung to him like smoke—thick, choking, impossible to shake. Not just any laughter—that laughter.
Twisted.
Guttural.
Raw as a severed nerve.
It hadn’t rung so much as slithered—a wet, cracked thing, bubbling up from throats already fouled by blood and madness. It dripped down alleys, crawled through shattered windows, curled around lampposts like a living fog. It devoured everything else. Louder than the fire’s roar, sharper than the cries of the wounded, it flayed the silence between explosions with a feral glee that made Draco’s teeth ache.
It hadn’t sounded human.
It had sounded starved—ravenous and insatiable, gorging on the ruin it helped wreak.It was a sound drunk on flame and collapse, high on the smell of seared flesh and crumbling stone.
A sound that had no music, only madness.
Death Eaters spun through the smoke and shadow like grotesque jesters in a carnival of the damned, their silhouettes flickering against walls of flame, their madness etched into every movement. They waltzed through ruin as if the world’s end was a masquerade ball, cloaked in firelight and madness. Their laughter—shrill, broken, infectious—rippled across the burning streets like a disease, a poisoned melody threaded with glee and gore.
They moved with exaggerated grace, limbs slicing through smoke, feet dancing over the wreckage of lives undone. They twirled through blood-slick alleys, ducking and pirouetting through collapsing beams and flaming debris with the elegance of trained performers—except their stage was war, and their applause was the dying gasps of the innocent.
They danced.
Draco remembered that more than anything.
Not the screams. Not the fire. Not even the corpses.
But the way they danced—unbothered, elated, drunk on power and pain.
They danced over charred floorboards and broken bodies, their boots crunching bone like gravel. Cartilage like glass. Cloaks billowed behind them in jagged arcs, torn and fluttering like the wings of vultures descending upon a feast, circling a dying world. The air was thick with ash and magic and burning flesh, and still they moved as though gliding across a ballroom floor, grinning beneath masks of soot and blood.
They danced through the wreckage.
Smoke wrapped around them like silk, swallowing the moon, casting everything in a flickering, nightmarish glow. Sparks burst from their wands—not as attacks, but as decoration. Glittering arcs of red and green carved patterns through the sky, as if marking each kill with fireworks. Their spells weren’t just destructive; they were theatrical.
Each death, a performance.
Each scream, a note in their perverse symphony.
Celebrating carnage as if it were a festival instead of a slaughter.
As if the ash falling like confetti was a sign of triumph, tossed joyfully in gleeful abandon.
They leapt over shattered walls and spun past craters where homes had once stood, dragging their magic behind them like ribbons soaked in flame. They circled mothers kneeling over limp, cooling children—laughing, always laughing—as if grief were a melody they alone could understand.
The air stank of sulfur and blood, but they inhaled it like perfume.
The thick smoke that suffocated the stars swirled above them like enchanted glitter, and the falling ash—coating skin, hair, and earth—drifted down like blackened snow, celebratory and final. It clung to lashes and lips like it meant to crown them.
As if the destruction were something beautiful.
As if this wasn’t the end of a world, but the beginning of a kingdom born in fire.
They danced, and the world burned beneath their feet.
And through it all—gleeful, monstrous—came him.
Greyback.
He tore past Draco like a nightmare given flesh, all muscle and filth, his limbs swinging in a crooked, unnatural lurch.His shoulders rolled like a beast on the verge of shifting, bones straining under skin too taut, too wild.
He reeked—of wet earth, old sweat, and something worse. Something fresh.
His teeth—
oh Merlin, those teeth— were not the dull yellow of rot, but gleaming red, dripping with something thick and metallic. His mouth hung open, panting with delight, saliva stringing between jagged fangs like spider silk.
And his eyes—his eyes were coals in a dying fire, ember-bright and feral,blazing with a hunger that made the air around him tighten.
And then—
A sound.
Barely a sound.
A breath in glass.
A whimper split open.
Thin.
Sharp.
High.
Terror distilled.
A child.
Just ahead.
Small feet slapped the stone, a frantic rhythm out of time with the horror behind them.A blur of pale skin and threadbare clothing, too-large sleeves flapping like wings that wouldn’t lift.
The child ran, not toward hope, but away—from something they couldn’t outrun.
Greyback’s snarl curled into a grin.
Low, rumbling.
Eager.
He sprang after them, all bone and hunger, a living thing made for killing.
There was joy in it.
Joy in the way his muscles coiled, in the anticipation that stretched his grin wide enough to tear skin.
He chased not to eat. Not even to kill.
But because he could.
And Draco—
Draco, who had once imagined himself brave, or at least clever—
Did nothing.
He’d stood there.
Ankle-deep in rubble and ruin.
The air swelled with heat and noise, and his heart thrashed violently inside his chest, not beating—battering, like it was trying to claw its way out, to tear itself free from the cage of his ribs and vanish into the smoke. It didn’t feel like it belonged to him anymore.
Nothing did.
His wand hung from his fingers like a lead weight, slick with sweat, limp and useless. Useless, like his legs—rooted to the scorched earth, knees locked, muscles trembling but unyielding. Useless, like his voice—trapped somewhere behind his teeth, sealed behind a clenched jaw and a throat too tight to breathe through. His mind was screaming—do something, move, run, fight, help—but the message couldn’t get through. His body had turned to stone.
The world around him fractured.
The ground shuddered beneath his boots, coughing up dust and cinders with each tremor. Flames danced like serpents, snapping at the sky with hissing fury, twisting in the wind like they were hunting something. A sound—deep and sick with finality—shuddered through the air as a building behind him gave one long, groaning sigh… and collapsed. The impact sent a gust of ash and splinters howling past him, tugging at his robes like claws.
But he didn’t flinch.
He stood there.
Frozen.
Unmade.
There had been a moment—just a flicker, no more than a heartbeat—when he had wanted it to end.
Truly wanted it.
Wanted a curse to strike him down. A green flash, a stray hex, a collapse of stone—something, anything, to erase him. He didn’t care whose wand it came from—Auror or Death Eater, enemy or friend.
Light or dark.
Let it hit.
Let it burn through him.
Let it silence the fire, the screams, the sickly chorus of bones breaking and spells ricocheting through the smoke.
Let it stop him.
Because surviving this… this wasn’t survival.
It was punishment.
It was being left behind with the taste of ash in his mouth and the stench of death soaked into his skin. It was blood in his ears and silence in his soul. And always, always, that laughter—rattling through his skull like some obscene metronome, mocking him, haunting him.
But the curse had never come.
No spell had found him.
No fire had swallowed him whole.
He had survived.
And now—
Now he had to live with it.
With the memory burned into every breath.
With the weight of every life he hadn’t saved.
And even now—
Now, when the fires had long since died to smoke-stained memories, when the streets lay still and silent beneath layers of ash and overgrown ruin, when no screams echoed off scorched stone—
He was still there.
Not in flesh. Not in blood.
But in every way that mattered.
He was still standing in that town, locked in the moment it died. Knee-deep in soot and bone dust.Choking on the stench of melted brick and charred flesh.Drenched in the thick, cloying silence that followed the kind of horror that didn’t just end things—but unmade them.
He was not frozen by spellcraft or curse.
No.
This paralysis came from something older, colder, crueler—
Something earned.
A stillness that settled not in limbs, but in marrow.The kind of stillness that lived in bones long after death.That lay curled in the hollows of the ribs and waited in the teeth of dreams.The kind of stillness that spoke of guilt so deep it calcified.
He saw it every time he closed his eyes—
The red.
The way it stained the sky, the stones, the backs of his eyelids.He smelled it in phantom smoke, thick and tarry, that curled through corridors where there was no fire.He heard it in the pauses between footsteps, in the shallow hush between breaths.
The laughter—that jagged, rancid laughter—Still rang like iron chains dragged over stone.
Still clung like oil.
Still echoed like it had been etched into the hollows of his ears with acid.
The child’s scream—high, sharp, real—
Still cleaved through the fog of memory like a razor, impossibly vivid.
And always, just ahead, moving too fast to catch, Greyback,that silhouette, twisted and shambling, limbs wrong and feral—
Still ran. Still chased. Still hunted.
And Draco—
Draco was still there.
Still ankle-deep in rubble.
Still silent.
Still watching.
Still useless.
Still a coward.
He’d never cast a spell. Never lifted a hand.
No incantation—no power—could erase that.
No Obliviate could sever it.
No Legilimens could untangle it.
No Time-Turner could rewind it.
His body might walk now through the halls of Hogwarts—
1942, the castle ancient and cold beneath his boots, the torches casting familiar shadows along stone—but his soul?
His soul had never left that night.
The war had seeped into him, not just into his thoughts, not just into nightmares— But into the matter of him.
It slithered beneath his skin like maggots in meat, burrowing deeper with each shuddering breath,coiling in the hollows of his joints, gnawing at the tender tissue of his ribs, snarling just beneath the surface, waiting.
Waiting for silence to fall.
For peace to settle like dust.
For him to stop moving, stop pretending.
So it could rise again.
Every inhale dragged it further inside,ash and memory and a thousand unanswered screams clinging to the back of his throat.
Every heartbeat drove it deeper,like nails driven through flesh into bone, a pulse-fed rhythm of torment.
The chaos had become a parasite.
Not content to haunt his mind—
No.
It had nested in him.
Made a home of his body.
Wound itself around his spine like a serpent and whispered in the back of his thoughts with a voice that sounded almost like his own.
It spoke in quiet rooms.
It screamed behind his eyelids.
It laughed when he tried to sleep.
He could scrub until his skin turned raw.
Wrap himself in expensive robes—soft, perfumed, unbloodied.
Speak with the practiced elegance of a Malfoy heir,voice lined in silver, vowels like glass. He could tilt his chin just so,
arch a brow in polished disdain, smirk like someone who’d never flinched at a corpse.
He could perform the man he used to be.
But beneath it?
Beneath the silk and the sneers,beneath the cold pride and practiced control—
There was rot.
A hollowed-out thing, its insides eaten soft by guilt and time and the memory of burning children.
His smiles were masks, porcelain stretched too tight, hairline fractures spidering with every lie.His laughter when it came was brittle,a sound cracked at the edges,thin and splintered like ice underfoot.
His voice sharp, clean, composed was just mimicry.
Something he’d stitched together from old habits and fading lessons.Something he wore like a suit of armor over a corpse.
Because the truth—
The truth was festering.
It oozed beneath the surface.
Slick with guilt.
Swollen with shame.
Putrid with everything he hadn’t done.
Everything he’d watched.
Everything he’d let happen.
This—
This was what it meant to be a Death Eater.
Not dark glory in candlelit halls.
Not ancient power whispered in Latin.
Not robes and reverence and cold-eyed brotherhood.
No.
It was this.
This endless unraveling was not a scream, but a slow, suffocating collapse,a silent implosion, one breath at a time.Grief bloomed beneath his ribs, wild and unspoken, not the kind that could be wept out or shouted down,but the kind you weren’t allowed to name.
The kind you had to swallow,choke on,wear like a second skin.
It lingered in the stillness.
It hid behind your smile.
It curled in the back of your throat and waited for moments like this—quiet ones.
Lonely ones.
Ones that cracked open the door to remembering.
The silence screamed.
Not out loud, but inside,a white-hot pressure in the back of his skull,a shriek too high-pitched for sound,a presence that vibrated through his bones with every blink.
And the blinks—
Each one a reel of horror projected across the backs of his eyes.
Flashes of flame.
A hand too small, reaching.
A face caved in.
Ash that looked like snow, settling on a burnt doll’s lashes.
The crack of laughter. The shatter of glass. The silence after.
This was his legacy.
Not power.
Not family.
Not the lineage carved in marble and wealth.
This.
Nightmares etched behind his eyelids like a tattoo of ash and blood.The whisper of guilt—never screaming, never loud but always there,steady and quiet, like breath.
Insidious as poison.
Patient as rot.
A slow death that kept you walking.
The truth of it—the unbearable, unchangeable truth was never in the Dark Mark.
Not really.
That was just ink. Just symbol. Just a warning to others.
The real truth?
It lived in the after.
In the remembering.
In the not forgetting.
In the waking moments where your chest hurt for no reason,
and the world smelled faintly of smoke, and the air sounded like screams.
His heart pounded now just like it had that night—
that night with the kind of rhythm that had nothing to do with living and everything to do with not dying.
Each beat a hammer-blow.
A punishment.
A reminder that breath still came even when it shouldn’t.
Even when you didn’t deserve it.
Panic bloomed, hot and electric, racing through his veins like fire, like lightning, like the chaos he could never outrun.
His lungs clenched.
The air turned jagged.
Too shallow. Too tight.
Like trying to breathe through a keyhole underwater.
Each inhale scraped. Each exhale caught.
And the walls,Merlin, the walls, they weren’t walls anymore.
They pulsed.
They breathed with him, against him, around him.
The corridor shimmered, warped, alive with phantom motion.
The shadows whispered. The stones flexed.
The room was shrinking.
Or maybe it was just him, folding in on himself like paper on fire.
He had to get out.
Now.
Run
Before the corridor folded in on itself like a collapsing lung.
Before the stones split open like brittle bones and dragged him into the dark.Before the scream, raw and rising, ripped from his throat and shattered whatever thin, trembling thing he’d been using as a shield.
He turned on instinct.
No thought.
No plan.
Just movement.
His body took over, legs lurching into motion before his mind could form the command. He bolted, boots thudding against cold stone, the world around him a smear of torchlight and shadow.
The corridor blurred. Everything blurred.
Portraits flinched as he passed. Students turned, startled, their faces pale ovals he couldn’t place, couldn’t see. Their mouths moved, called things—his name, perhaps—but it was all a distant hum, drowned beneath the roar of blood in his ears. The castle twisted around him in a dizzying dance of gold and black, candlelight streaking like firelight, flickering like memory.
He couldn’t stop.
Wouldn’t.
Stopping meant remembering.
Stopping meant hearing it again—that sound.
The soft crackle before the scream.
The hiss of silk catching flame.
The hand reaching through smoke—grasping, grasping—
And the word on her lips, brittle as breath:
Please.
His breath came in ragged stabs, sharp and broken like glass in his throat. Every footfall was a fracture, a splintering in the fragile mask he wore over his grief. His ribs ached. His legs burned. But still he fled—without direction, without purpose, only the driving animal certainty that stillness was surrender, and silence was worse.
The castle felt wrong.
Too awake.
Too aware.
Stone that once felt steady now pulsed faintly beneath his feet, like a heart beating behind walls.
Like it saw him. Like it knew. Knew what he carried. Knew what he’d left behind.
Let it watch.
Let it bear witness to his unmaking.
Let the arches collapse, the tapestries catch flame, the ground open wide and devour him whole. Let him vanish into the bones of the castle like so many ghosts before him.
Better that than to stop.
Better that than to feel that heat licking at his heels again.
Better that than to face the echo of her scream—
Or the laughter that followed.
Thin.
Cruel.
Inhuman.
And the last thing he heard before it all shattered:
That word.
So he ran.
Ran like motion could erase memory.
Ran like he could outpace the guilt crawling up his spine.
Ran like if he was fast enough, furious enough it might not find him this time.
But it would.
It always did.
The walls were pressing in now—stone arching and crowding closer, too close, ancient and unyielding. They loomed like sentries, watching, judging, as if they knew what he carried in his bones. The air thinned with every breath, thinning into nothing, curling around his throat like smoke around a dying fire. His fingers skated the banister as he climbed, slick with sweat, trembling. His knees threatened to buckle with every step, and something bloomed hollow in his chest—a pressure, a weight, like drowning. Like his lungs were filling with water instead of air, heavy and cold and slow.
Second floor.
Girls’ bathroom.
He slammed through the door so hard it bounced back, clanging against the wall with a bang that echoed and echoed, bouncing off stone and tile until it chased him into the dimness like a phantom.
Empty.
Blessedly, mercifully empty.
The overhead light flickered, spasming weakly, casting fractured halos against the ceiling and slicing across the mirrors in strips of gold and shadow. They looked back at him, those mirrors—cracked and fogged, silver edges tarnished, as though they, too, had seen too much. As though they remembered. Reflections shimmered, warped, broken things in glass that couldn’t be trusted.
The tiles stretched out beneath him like bones—off-white, veined, fractured. Cold. Water plinked, somewhere in the back, every drop like a ticking clock in a mausoleum. Steady. Loud. Too loud.
No fire.
No screaming.
No bodies curled on the ground, faces scorched.
No laughter tearing through the air like a curse.
No Greyback.
No mother.
No child.
Just the stalls.
Just the dark.
Just the breath rasping in his throat like smoke, like punishment.
Draco staggered to the sink. His hands gripped the porcelain so tightly his knuckles went white. It was cold beneath his palms, grounding. Real. He leaned forward—head bowed, shoulders hunched, chest rising in frantic, uneven jerks. He felt like he was shaking apart from the inside.
His pulse throbbed in his ears. His stomach churned. His eyes burned with tears that refused to fall.
He couldn’t breathe. Not properly. Not yet.
But at least—here—
Here, the world was quiet.
Here, he was unseen.
Here, he was alone.
And in that fragile, terrible stillness, he could finally unravel.
Draco’s fingers gouged the porcelain basin like claws, nails creaking against the cracked surface, knuckles white and trembling. The sink groaned faintly beneath the force, but he didn’t let go—couldn’t. It was the only thing tethering him to the now, to the stone underfoot and the air in his lungs, thin and burning as it was. Without it, he’d float—spiral—collapse back into that night where the world ended in fire.
His breath came in ragged stabs—jagged, uneven, like glass dragging through his windpipe. Each inhale felt wrong, too shallow, too loud, like his own lungs were betraying him. The mirror above him shimmered, smeared with condensation and dust, but it wasn’t condensation that blurred it now. It was the sheen of tears—hot and sudden—that spilled before he could blink them back.
His reflection shattered into pieces.
Not a boy. Not anymore.
Just a trembling specter—skin waxen, eyes rimmed with red, jaw clenched so tightly it ached. A smear of panic. A shape hollowed out by guilt.
His chest convulsed, ribs pressing inward like they were being cinched by unseen ropes. His lungs clawed for breath, and for a moment, all he could do was gape at his own reflection, mute and wide-eyed, a scream caught under the wreckage of his heart. The world tilted. The tiles swam.
Then he fell.
Not forward, not backward—inward.
Memory dragged him down with cold, relentless hands.
The scent came first—ash, always ash—and then the screams, high and echoing, torn from small throats. The Death Eaters had come like a wave of darkness, cloaked and wild-eyed, their laughter cutting through the woods like sharpened steel. They hadn’t even tried to be quiet. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to be seen.
It was a village no map acknowledged—hidden deep within the northern forest, where the snow stayed long and the trees whispered old, protective magic. It had been a refuge. A whispered promise of safety for those who still believed in the Order’s cause. Families had fled there—mothers clutching infants to their chests, fathers casting wards with trembling hands, children chasing each other through firefly-lit paths, unaware.
But the Dark Lord had found them.
And he had whispered, almost gently, into Lucius Malfoy’s waiting ear:
Make an example of them.
And they had obeyed.
Draco had obeyed.
Or rather—he hadn’t stopped it.
He remembered the first house that burned. How the light from the window glowed soft and warm, almost like candlelight—until it roared outward in a sudden bloom of fire. The walls had exploded inwards. The screams had begun then.
The others followed like dominoes—fire chasing fire, laughter chasing screams, curses painting the snow red.
Draco had stood at the edge of the square, wand cold and limp in his fingers. His feet refused to move. His voice—gone. His instincts screamed to run. Or fight. Or something. But he had done none of it. He had watched a girl—no older than nine—trip on the frozen earth as her mother’s hand slipped from hers. She’d fallen in front of Greyback.
And Greyback had smiled.
Draco didn’t remember the sound the child made.
But he remembered the sound of bones breaking.
The sound of laughter.
He remembered the fire. The way the snow hissed when it melted. The smell of scorched wool. The way his robes fluttered around him like funeral cloth.
The silence afterward had been worse than the screams.
It had pressed into his ears, filled his lungs, made a home inside him. He could still hear it now—feel it, even here, hunched over the sink in a Hogwarts bathroom nearly fifty years in the past. Because it hadn’t stayed in that forest. It hadn’t ended with dawn.
It had followed him. Stitched into his skin. Coiled in his belly like a parasite that fed on memory and shame.
And he still heard the Dark Lord’s voice, smooth and venomous, echoing from the hollow place in his chest:
Make an example of them.
And Draco had. Even in silence, even in stillness, even in his refusal.
He had.
Draco stood behind the others that night—silent, still, and smothered in shadow. The black hood masked his face, but not the dread simmering beneath his skin. It clung to him like sweat, thick and unrelenting, as he watched the Death Eaters spread out through the forest’s edge, black shapes slipping like ink into the village’s heart. The hoods made them faceless. The darkness made them untouchable. And yet Draco felt exposed—naked beneath the weight of what he had come to witness. What he had come to become.
He hadn’t cast a single spell.
He hadn’t needed to.
The others moved like a tide of violence—methodical, merciless. The village fought back at first. Lights flared, raw and blinding. Wands were raised, voices hoarse with panic and defiance as spells crackled through the air—green and gold and red, streaking through the dark like dying stars. But it was a child’s resistance. Brave. Futile.
The Order’s safehouse wasn’t a fortress.
It was a grave waiting to be filled.
The Death Eaters overwhelmed them in moments. Screams ruptured the quiet. Smoke rose from burning doorframes. Shattered windows bled light into the street. Draco’s boots were rooted to the frozen earth, but every nerve in his body screamed to run—anywhere, just away from this. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Every detail etched itself into his vision: the father struck down trying to shield his son, the charmed toy spinning in the mud, still glowing faintly as blood pooled around it. The mother’s sob, too soft to be heard over the flames.
Then came the cry.
A child’s wail, thin and raw, spiraling up into the black sky.
Draco’s hands twitched at his sides. He wanted to reach up—clap them over his ears, block it out, shut it away—but he couldn’t move. His arms felt leaden, his body anchored in place by something deeper than fear. Shame. Horror. That slow, sinking understanding that he would never unhear that sound. That it would haunt every moment of silence to come.
And then she arrived.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
She strode into the chaos like a queen claiming her burning throne, her silhouette outlined in firelight—tall and whip-thin, black hair unraveling behind her in tangled waves, her wand drawn like a blade. Her eyes shone too bright, too wild, lit from within by some ecstatic madness. She didn’t walk. She danced, twirling through smoke and flame, shrieking with joy, her laughter high and unhinged.
She was beautiful, Draco thought with a kind of sick clarity—terrible and beautiful like lightning striking a tree in half.
She found her prize in the village square.
A Muggleborn witch—young, maybe twenty. Blood on her temple, soot streaked down her neck. Her robes were torn, clinging to a body that had already fought too hard and lost. She hovered above the stones, legs dangling, feet brushing the dirt. Suspended by some cruel spell—silent, invisible chains that bound her wrists and dragged her upward until her shoulders strained and her back arched in pain.
She didn’t scream when Bellatrix stepped close.
Her eyes followed every movement—defiant, empty, beyond tears.
Bellatrix smiled. It was slow, deliberate.
Then she lifted her wand.
Severus.
The charm was clean. Efficient. The woman’s finger sliced off like a brittle branch. It fell, soft and small, onto the stones below.
And then—the scream.
It didn’t sound human. It was something older, something primal, wrung from the deepest place a soul could shatter. It echoed off the broken walls, pierced the fog, made even the crows take flight. It was agony, not just pain. Grief. Rage. The unbearable humiliation of powerlessness. Her whole body convulsed once, twice.
Draco’s stomach turned. He could taste bile at the back of his throat.
Bellatrix clapped, delighted, her laughter chiming like shattered glass.
“Oh, listen to that!” she crooned, turning in a circle, arms flung wide like she was basking in applause. “Isn’t it divine? Like an aria. Like art. Aren’t we having fun?”
The woman trembled, blood cascading down her arm in dark, glistening ribbons.
But she did not beg.
Not even then.
Her mouth remained shut. Her jaw clenched. Her eyes locked on Bellatrix’s face, not pleading—but burning. If she could have spoken, Draco thought, she would’ve cursed her with her eyes alone.
Bellatrix’s grin faltered for the briefest second. Just a flicker. A stutter in the rhythm.
Then she struck again.
But Draco didn’t see the rest. His vision blurred. Something hot welled behind his eyes, but he didn’t dare cry—not here, not now. His feet finally moved. Just a step. Then another.
He turned away from the square.
He told himself it was to patrol the perimeter.
He told himself it was strategy.
But he was running. Running from the sound of that scream. From Bellatrix’s joy. From the blood on the cobblestones.
From himself.
Bellatrix giggled—a high, tinkling sound that might’ve belonged to a little girl skipping rope in a garden, if not for the blood dripping down her hands onto her wand and the gleam of lunacy in her eyes. She twirled in a lazy circle around the witch still hanging in the village square, her feet scraping the cobblestones, trailing ash. Each step Bellatrix took left behind a deeper horror in the air, like a stain that would never wash away.
“Your little family,” she sang sweetly, dragging her wand along the woman’s arm as though stroking a lover, “they died like cowards. Even your son, I think…” She leaned in, so close that her breath stirred the woman’s filthy hair. “Did he scream for you, darling? Did he cry for Mummy as they burned?”
Her tone was light, teasing—poison wrapped in sugar, a child playing butcher with a lullaby on her tongue.
Then—flick.
Another spell.
Another finger severed.
It dropped with a soft, wet thud into the dirt below, landing beside its twin, still twitching faintly like it hadn’t quite realized it was dead.
The woman jerked violently against the invisible restraints, a sharp gasp escaping her throat. But no scream followed. Only a thick, choked wheeze as her blood pattered onto the cobblestones.
Bellatrix turned, eyes gleaming, grin widened too far, too red.
“Dear nephew,” she purred, her voice sticky with affection, mockery dripping from every syllable. “Come here, Draco.” She beckoned with one finger, tilting her head like a cat toying with a bird. “You must learn, sweetheart. There’s no art in rushing. It’s not about the kill. It’s about the unraveling. That’s where the magic lives.”
Draco felt something pull inside him—tight and violent. His legs moved before he told them to, feet dragging through ash and blood, body slow and stiff like a marionette whose strings had been twisted into knots.
The witch’s head tilted toward him as he approached. Her face was nearly unrecognizable—swollen, blood-caked, her lips split open, her jaw trembling. She was a ruin. And yet her eyes… her eyes still saw.
And they saw him.
Not the mask. Not the name. Him.
Not the Death Eater’s robes, nor the wand shaking in his grip. They saw something buried deep beneath all of it. Something still human.
Her gaze didn’t burn with fury. Nor did it cower with fear.
There was something quieter in it. Something gentler. Recognition.
And a plea.
Not in words. Not in screams.
But in that steady, unbearable silence between them.
Please. Stop this. End it. Don’t let her touch me again.
His throat closed. His lungs tightened, refused air. The world spun on a sickening tilt, and he felt it all—his own horror, her pain, Bellatrix’s glee—crashing into each other inside his skull until he thought it would split open from the pressure.
His hand rose, trembling violently.
The wand felt heavier than it ever had before. Like it knew what was coming. Like it mourned it already.
Behind him, Bellatrix clapped again, delighted, her laughter bubbling up in manic spurts. “There’s a good boy,” she cooed. “Make her sing, won’t you?”
But the witch didn’t look at Bellatrix anymore.
Her swollen lids fluttered shut.
And then—she smiled.
It was faint. Fragile. Blood-soaked. But it was real.
And it wasn’t for Bellatrix.
It was for him.
Because she knew.
She knew what he was about to do.
And she welcomed it.
Mercy, that smile said. Please. Let me go.
Draco’s knees nearly buckled. He bit down on his cheek until he tasted iron, trying to keep from sobbing, from retching, from collapsing under the weight of it all.
He drew in a breath—deep, ragged, splintering through his chest.
And he cast the severing charm.
He poured it all in—every trembling breath, every ounce of stolen courage scraped from the marrow of his soul. He channeled every jagged fragment of fractured hope, every whispered forgive me he couldn’t say aloud, into the severing charm.
The magic surged down his arm like liquid fire, unsteady and wild, cracking through the air with a sound like splintering bone.
The spell struck her center with merciless precision.
A blinding flash—a silver scythe of light—and her body broke open midair.
Not slowly. Not gently.
It split, clean and sudden, a terrible finality in the way her spine snapped and the air filled with the wet, hollow sound of rending flesh.
Blood sprayed outward in a perfect arc, a bright and vivid crimson ribbon painting the smoke-choked sky, a streak of red across the dark like a dying star.
She didn’t cry out.
There was no scream. No gasp. Just silence—and that haunting smile still ghosting her lips as the two halves of her body hung weightless for a heartbeat, suspended in the stillness, before gravity reclaimed them.
They dropped like broken wings to the stone below. A thud, wet and soft.
Mercy.
And Draco stood there, wand lowered, chest heaving, swallowed by the quiet.
His vision blurred. His ears rang. His chest burned. His stomach lurched.But that moment—the arc of red, the shattering hush—it etched itself into him like a scar carved in magic.
A mercy, he told himself.
He’d set her free.
But it didn’t feel like mercy.
The blood on his hands said otherwise.
It felt like damnation.
The sterile chill of the bathroom snapped back into sharp focus as the nausea surged through him at last. Draco lurched forward, retching violently into the cold porcelain sink. The harsh sound of his vomiting reverberated off the cracked tiles, raw and jarring in the silence. His knees trembled like fragile twigs beneath him, trembling with the weight of everything he could no longer hold inside.
Hot tears carved silent rivers down his cheeks, unchecked and relentless. They burned, but he couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t stop the flood of grief and guilt crashing through his chest, drowning him.
His shoulders heaved, wracked by sobs that tore free from somewhere deep and broken—bitter, ragged gasps that echoed against the cramped walls. The cold, faded tiles seemed to close in, suffocating, as the ghosts of that night roared louder than ever inside his mind.
He clung to the basin like a lifeline, as if the cool porcelain could hold him afloat against the rising tide of despair.
He had killed someone.
He had done what was right.
The only thing he could do.
And still—it shattered him.
With a shuddering breath, his knees gave way. Draco sank down to the cold floor, curling inward as the weight of his soul crushed him beneath its merciless grip.
His knees hit tile with a hard thud, but he barely registered the pain. His back pressed against the stall, one hand still clutching the rim of the sink like a lifeline, the other curled into the fabric of his shirt, pressing against the sharp ache in his ribs. He couldn’t catch his breath—not fully. His chest stuttered, like his lungs forgot how to fill.
It wasn’t the first time he’d remembered that night.
But it had never hit him this hard.
Maybe it was because he wasn’t in the war anymore. Maybe it was because he was here, in the echoing quiet of 1942, where none of it had happened—yet. Maybe it was because he’d been pretending he could be someone else.
Draco Peverell.
He had almost believed it. But ghosts didn’t leave when you changed your name.
The scream from the witch echoed in his ears again—sharp, splintered. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, willing the sound to stop. He wanted silence. He wanted to undo it all. But memory was crueler than any curse.
He wasn’t supposed to be a killer.
He was supposed to be saving people.
Wasn’t that why he was here? Why he had crossed time itself?
But no matter how far back he went, the blood was still on his hands.
He looked down at them now—trembling, pale, clean.
But they weren’t. Not really.
A soft sob escaped his throat before he could choke it down. It was small, involuntary, like something wounded curling inward. And once it was out, more followed. Quiet, broken things. Like pieces of a dam finally cracking apart.
He wanted his mother.
Not to fix it—no one could fix it. But he wanted her voice again, that one soft thread in the storm. Your heart is stronger than anything. She used to say it to him when he had nightmares as a child, when he was too afraid to sleep in the dark alone. He had never told her that the nightmares had come true.
She didn’t know what he’d become.
Doesn’t she? A voice in him whispered. Wouldn’t she have guessed, just by looking at you?
His breath caught again.
And then another memory tugged at him, one not so distant.
Tom Riddle’s eyes—black, sharp, endless—watching him in the flickering candlelight of the Slytherin common room. The way Tom tilted his head, as though studying a riddle no one else could solve. There had been curiosity there. But something else too. Hunger.
Like Tom had seen something in him.
Something familiar.
What if Tom looked at him and didn’t just see a boy out of place?
What if Tom looked at him and saw himself?
Draco shuddered violently.
He couldn’t do this.
He couldn’t fall apart here, in this time, in this place.
But the terror wouldn’t let him go. The panic still gripped his lungs. His body shook with it—silent tremors through his spine, down to his fingers. He pressed his back harder into the cold stall wall, as though it might anchor him, drag him out of the memory.
He needed to breathe.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
He whispered it to himself.
He focused on the chill of the stone floor beneath his palms. On the sound of the flickering light above. On the drip, drip, drip of a faulty tap.
He was here. He was here.
The war was over—at least, that one. The woman was gone. Her smile would haunt him forever. But Bellatrix wasn’t here.
Yet.
He was in 1942.
He had a purpose.
He had a chance to stop this before it began.
He was not like them. He refused to be.
( TW- It’s over.)
A voice broke through the tangle of his thoughts, hesitant, but not unkind.
“A-are you alright?”
Draco startled, his spine going rigid as he spun toward the source of the voice. For a second, he forgot where he was. When he focused, he nearly lost his breath again—but not from panic this time.
A girl stood hesitantly at the threshold of the girls’ lavatory, clutching her books tightly against her chest as if they were a shield. Her knees bent slightly inward, her posture withdrawn and uncertain—like she expected reproach or ridicule simply for being there.
Her pigtails were uneven, stray wisps of hair escaping to frame a pale, freckled face. Large round glasses slipped precariously down the bridge of her nose, catching the dim light and magnifying the wide, owlish eyes behind them. Those eyes met his with cautious concern—blinking slowly, quietly searching for any sign of danger or distress.
Her robes were neat but stiff, the Ravenclaw crest pinned proudly to her chest, betraying the careful effort she’d made to appear composed despite the tremble in her hands.
Draco’s heart thudded so loud he was sure she could hear it.
Myrtle.
Alive.
Whole.
Not a ghost drifting through pipes. Not the weeping girl confined to her haunting place. Not moaning, not miserable.
Just Myrtle.
The name struck him like a fist pressed hard against his chest, knocking the breath from his lungs.
He stood in the same spot—the very stall, nearly identical—where, years from now, he would crumble again, breaking beneath the weight of everything, right there in that cramped space. Where she would drift beside him, half-seen and softly glowing, her strange, haunting kindness the only balm for his fractured soul. The only one who truly saw through the mask he wore. The only one who listened.
But now… now she was alive. Not yet trapped by death and bitterness, not yet bound to this room by the sharp sting of loneliness and mockery.
She didn’t recognize him—of course not. He was a stranger in green and silver, older, wearied, eyes heavy with things she could not yet know. Not yet tethered to her world, to her pain.
And still, as Draco looked at her, his heart ached with a sudden, impossible tenderness—as if he’d been handed a fragile, precious gift, one he wasn’t sure he deserved.
“You’re in the girls’ bathroom, by the way,” she said softly, tilting her head with a faint, curious smile—her voice small, almost amused, like she was sharing a secret rather than a warning. “You might get into trouble if someone else finds you here.”
She paused, eyes flickering with sudden shyness before she added, almost breathless, “I—I won’t tell, of course.”
Draco’s lips parted, but no words came.
There was a lump lodged deep in his throat, heavy and sudden, as if the air had thickened around him. Something fragile stirred behind his ribs—like a delicate bird fluttering free after a long, dark winter.
The raw panic that had clawed at his chest all day still pulsed beneath his skin, but now it softened, retreating like a shadow at dawn.
Like it was backing away, outshone by the strange glow of seeing her.
She was so alive.
So real.
“I’m… sorry,” Draco finally managed, his voice rough, brittle—like dry leaves crushed beneath a boot. He swallowed hard, fighting to steady the tremor in his throat. His fingers instinctively reached up to brush away the last stubborn tears clinging to his cheeks, as if wiping away his own brokenness could somehow make it less real. He straightened, painfully aware of the weight pressing down on his shoulders, trying to stand taller despite the heavy ache inside. “I—I didn’t mean to… I just needed… I needed a place.”
Her brows furrowed gently, not with judgment, but with quiet concern. They knitted together like the soft crease of a well-loved book, familiar and unthreatening.
“You looked upset,” she said simply, her voice a soft balm in the sterile stillness of the bathroom.
Draco let out a breath, slow and unsteady, as if exhaling might somehow lighten the crushing weight in his chest. Words crowded his throat, but none made it past his lips. What could he possibly say? How could he explain the aching twist in his gut, the impossible collision of memory and reality that had stolen the air from his lungs?
He couldn’t tell her the truth—that once, in a future that hadn’t yet happened, she had been the only person who’d seen through the cracks in his carefully polished façade. That she had looked past the Malfoy name, past the cold Slytherin sneer, past the blood on his hands and the ghosts in his eyes, and spoken to him like he was still worth saving. Like he was still a boy. Still human.
She had offered him something he hadn’t known how to ask for. Not absolution. Not even forgiveness.
Solace.
Her voice—soft and sorrowful, echoing faintly above a bathroom sink like a lullaby sung to no one—had once tethered him when he had felt completely hollowed out. When he had stood in this very room, trying to breathe through the storm, ready to do something irreversible. She had haunted him, yes—but never in the way the others did. Never in cruelty. She had been gentle. A ghost with kindness still blooming in her broken heart.
And now…
Now she stood before him. Solid. Flesh and bone and warmth. Her fingers curled protectively around her books. Her mouth pressed into an uncertain line. Her gaze careful but not cruel. She was still awkward, still shy, still so obviously the target of a hundred whispered jokes and sidelong glances in corridors.
But she was alive.
Still breathing.
Still uncertain.
Still kind.
And Draco felt something deep inside him unravel.
She edged forward slightly, the toes of her shoes nudging the threshold. “Do you want me to go?”
Draco’s head jerked up, too fast, too desperate. “No. Please don’t.”
His voice cracked on the last word, brittle with the remnants of grief and something else—something raw and open that he hadn’t meant to show. She blinked, startled by the urgency in his tone, eyes wide behind her smudged lenses.
“I mean…” He coughed, tried to smooth over the fracture. “It’s alright. You can stay.”
Myrtle lingered, her fingers tightening around her books as if bracing herself for a blow that didn’t come. Then, after a breath, she stepped inside. The soft click of her shoes echoed gently against the cold tile floor, a fragile sound in the quiet room.
“I come here sometimes too,” she said, voice hushed like a confession. Her eyes stayed low, focused somewhere near the floor. “When it’s all… too much.”
She shifted her grip on her books, the spine of one digging lightly into her arm. “People can be very loud,” she continued, more hesitant now. “Or very quiet. And both are sometimes awful.”
Draco’s lips curled faintly at the corners—not quite a smile, more a flicker of recognition. He exhaled through his nose, a sound soft and dry and tired.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “They can be.”
For a moment, silence settled between them. But it wasn’t the choking kind, not the suffocating weight that had crushed him only minutes ago. It felt… quieter. Easier.
Myrtle looked up, just briefly, and he caught the flicker of something delicate on her face. A smile—not big or showy, but small and startled, as if she wasn’t used to being agreed with. As if kindness was still a surprise.
And for the first time since he’d stepped into the room, Draco felt the panic recede just a little farther. Not gone. Not healed.
But quieter.
And for a while, they didn’t speak.
The silence settled between them like snowfall—soft, unhurried, muffling the ache without denying it. It wasn’t sharp anymore. It wasn’t the silence of grief or guilt or ghosts. It was the kind of quiet that let things breathe. That let wounds rest, just for a moment, without demanding they heal.
It stretched between them like something gently spun—gossamer and fragile, but warm. Human.
Draco sat still, the cold from the tiled floor seeping up through his robes, grounding him. His panic had receded further, like a tide drawn away by the moon. It hadn’t vanished—he could still feel the wreckage of it in the corners of his mind—but it had become something else. Something bearable. A weight, yes, but not one he had to carry alone.
He looked at her again.
Her pigtails were uneven, the left one slipping looser than the right. Her round glasses were fogging slightly as she looked down at her scuffed shoes. Her robes were pressed too sharply, like she’d ironed them herself, twice over. Everything about her screamed effort. Hope. A longing to belong.
She didn’t know it yet.
Didn’t know that soon—too soon—she would die here.
Alone.
Crying in one of these stalls as cruelty chased her down and fate ignored her pleas.
A ghost trapped in the place she’d tried to escape.
Unless he changed something.
Unless he could.
And maybe that’s why fate had brought him here first. Not to torment him. Not just to relive old pain. But to remind him. Of what mattered. Of who mattered. Of why every choice counted, even the ones that seemed small. Why he couldn’t just play along with history and expect it not to burn.
His throat tightened, but his voice found its way through, steadier than before.
“Thank you.”
She looked up, startled, blinking behind the glass of her fogged lenses. “For what?”
He gave her a faint smile. It wasn’t strong. It wasn’t bright. But it was real, worn in the way hope becomes after you’ve scraped it out from the dark.
“For being kind,” he said quietly. “For being you.”
She blinked again, as if unsure whether she’d heard him right. Her mouth parted slightly, and a flush crept up behind her ears. And then, slowly—timidly, uncertain—it came. A smile.
Not wide. Not confident.
But genuine.
And that made all the difference.
And for the first time in days, something warm flickered in the cold ruins of Draco’s chest. A fragile ember. Hope, maybe. Or the memory of it. It stirred beneath the soot and smoke of everything he’d done, everything he’d lost, everything he’d become. Small, but unmistakable.
She blushed, her cheeks blooming with shy color that had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with being seen. Her eyes darted away, behind thick lenses, like she was afraid to meet his gaze for too long. As if she might shatter the moment by acknowledging it.
But then—gently, bravely—she straightened her shoulders, pulling herself up from that inward hunch she wore like armor. The air around her shifted.
“I’m Myrtle Elizabeth Warren,” she said. Her voice was soft, but no longer uncertain. It rang with a quiet clarity, as though she’d gathered the courage from some place deep and long-neglected. “Second year… Ravenclaw.”
Then, she did something that nearly undid him.
She lifted her hand.
Small. Tentative. Fingers trembling just a little at the edges.
It hovered between them like a question—no, like a wish.
She offered it with a sort of cautious dignity, the kind that children develop only when the world has taught them not to expect kindness in return. The gesture was rehearsed, you could tell—polite, practiced, precise—like she’d done this before and been met with laughter or cruelty or indifference. The hesitation clung to her like a second skin, stitched into every motion, born of too many days spent invisible or ridiculed.
But still—
Still—
She offered it anyway.
Draco stared.
Her hand looked impossibly delicate. Her fingers were ink-stained at the tips, nails bitten short, knuckles a bit raw from too much nervous fidgeting. But the sincerity in the gesture struck him with the force of a spell.
Because he knew.
He knew what that hand would become—how cold it would be when it passed through his shoulder years later, translucent and weightless. How few people had taken it when it was warm. When it was real.
And once, in a different life, he had.
But by then, it had been too late.
She had been dead, and he had been breaking.
But not now.
Not here.
Now, he could do it right.
Draco reached out, slow and reverent, and took her hand. Not as a formality. Not because it was offered. But because it mattered. Because she mattered.
Her fingers curled into his like she couldn’t believe someone had accepted.
And for the first time in what felt like forever, he wasn’t drowning.
He reached out, gently clasping her hand in his—like it was something precious, something breakable. His fingers curled around hers with a feather’s pressure, tentative and steady, as if he feared that if he held on too tightly, she might vanish like smoke.
Her skin was cool, soft with the faint dryness of chalk-dust fingertips and long hours turning pages no one else would read. But she didn’t pull away. She didn’t flinch. Her breath caught instead, and her eyes widened behind those too-large glasses—round, astonished, and blinking as if seeing sunlight for the first time after a long stretch of shadow.
“I’m Draco,” he said, voice low and raw with something unspoken. “Draco Peverell.”
He didn’t mention Slytherin. Didn’t mention year or blood or the weight of old names and older expectations. He left out the layers of masks and titles and wounds.
Because none of it mattered here.
Not with her.
Not in this quiet, broken, beautiful place.
What mattered was this: a boy who had once stood on the edge of something unforgivable, and a girl the world had barely noticed—finding each other again, for the very first time.
She stared at him, lips parted just slightly, as if she was holding her breath. Then she nodded—just a small, delicate tilt of her head—and the ghost of a smile brushed her face. It was fragile, uncertain, and entirely real.
When she let go of his hand, it was slow. Her fingers lingered against his palm, the contact stretching a heartbeat longer than necessary. Like maybe—just maybe—she didn’t want to let go. Like maybe she’d never been held like that before, and didn’t want the warmth to leave her skin.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
But something had passed between them.
A thread spun. A bridge built.
Not loud. Not grand.
But strong enough to hold.
“I know,” she said softly, her voice like the hush before rain—gentle, but thick with unspoken weight. A trace of something older than her years wove through it: melancholy, yes, but also knowing. Weariness. “I think everyone knows who you are.”
She gave a small, almost self-deprecating smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, then dropped her gaze to the tips of her shoes, as if embarrassed for even acknowledging him. Her robes, neatly pressed, seemed suddenly too big for her frame.
“Everyone in Ravenclaw is curious about you,” she said after a moment, the words quiet and reluctant, as though they’d been pulled from her against her better judgment.
Then it hit her. Draco saw the flicker—a tightening around her eyes, the slight tremble of her lower lip before she bit it back. Her voice dipped, shaded now with something brittle and raw.
“Even… Olive Hornby.” The name left her lips like a splinter she’d been forced to swallow.
Her shoulders curled inward almost instinctively, like a girl used to flinching before the blow even came. She didn’t cry. Not yet. But her whole body spoke of someone well-practiced in absorbing quiet cruelties.
“She says I talk too much. That I’m weird. That I cry too easily.” Myrtle’s voice wavered, but she kept going—steadfast in her small, trembling honesty. “She calls me names when no one’s around. Or pretends to like me when people are watching.”
A beat.
A breath.
A thousand invisible cuts hidden under a composed expression.
“But she talks about you all the time.” Her fingers tightened around the spine of her book. “Says you’re ‘handsome in a dangerous way.’ Says she might ask you to Hogsmeade—if fourth years are allowed to go.”
Then she laughed—a thin, hollow thing. Not a real laugh, but the echo of one, sharp and resigned. The sound of someone already anticipating the rejection.
“Like someone like you would ever look at someone like me.”
The silence after was heavy. Not awkward, but wounded. Full of the truth she’d lived with every day—dismissal disguised as indifference. Mockery dressed in friendship. Her words weren’t bitter. They were tired. Tired of hoping. Tired of caring. Tired of being told that her kindness and oddness and too-much-ness were reasons to be laughed at instead of loved.
And Draco—
Draco felt it crack something in him.
Not just sympathy. Not even guilt.
But recognition.
Because her voice—soft and plain and brave—carried the same hollow tone his had, once, in another year, another version of this same tiled room. The sound of someone used to being seen only when convenient, only when it hurt.
He didn’t look away this time. He couldn’t.
Because this wasn’t just Myrtle.
It was a mirror.
A warning.
A second chance.
Draco’s fingers curled tight around the porcelain edge of the sink, the chill grounding him as his knuckles blanched white. It was the only way he knew to stay anchored, to stop himself from unraveling. Because her voice—thin, wounded, trembling with the weight of unshed years—was peeling back something inside him he hadn’t let surface. Not since the war. Not since the smoke-choked hush of the Room of Requirement, when she had hovered beside him as a ghost, her voice like mist in the ruins, a kindness that had asked for nothing in return. A voice he had once clung to like a lifeline.
And now she was here. Alive. Flesh and blood and sorrow.
Still hurting.
Still unseen.
Still so terribly alone.
“Myrtle,” he said, and her name caught in his throat—half breath, half memory. It fell from his lips like a prayer, reverent and aching.
She looked up at him, startled. Her eyes, huge behind fogged spectacles, blinked fast, as if she weren’t sure she’d heard him right. As if she hadn’t expected anyone to say her name at all, let alone like that—with gentleness. Without pity. Without sharp edges hidden beneath false smiles.
Her lips parted, but she said nothing.
“Olive Hornby doesn’t know anything,” Draco went on, voice hoarse and low, roughened by the emotion still coiled in his chest like smoke. His throat still stung from the tears he’d tried to scrub away. “You’re not weird for being sensitive. You just… you feel more than most people.”
He looked at her, steady and sure now.
“That’s not weakness.”
She flinched, not from the words, but from the rawness of hearing them. As if her heart didn’t know how to receive something soft. As if the part of her that still hoped had grown fragile from disuse.
Her breath hitched. Her shoulders hunched like she was trying to shrink—but her gaze stayed on him, searching his face as if she might find the trick in his expression.
Then—blinking fast, cheeks suddenly blooming with color—she sniffled, swiping at her nose with the sleeve of her robe. It was a small, awkward gesture. So unguarded. So human.
And it undid him.
Because she wasn’t a ghost. Not yet.
She was just a girl.
No older than he’d been, once—treading water in a school that didn’t see her, surrounded by peers who didn’t care to.
“No one’s ever said that to me,” she mumbled, voice cracking faintly, like something brittle finally giving way. “Not without… laughing after.”
Draco’s chest ached with the truth of it.
He swallowed, held her gaze, and said, firm but gentle, “Well… then maybe it’s time someone did.”
He looked at her then—really looked.
Not with the distant politeness he’d worn like a mask for years, not with the clinical gaze that weighed usefulness or threat. But with something stripped bare, something raw. His eyes followed the uneven braid she’d tried to tame, laced too tight in places and loose in others. The frayed sleeves of her robes drooped past her wrists, swallowing her small hands as if she hadn’t yet grown into them—or no one had bothered to hem them. She stood like she was always waiting for rejection, her weight shifting subtly back, head lowered just enough to be deferential without being invisible.
She wasn’t beautiful—not by the cruel, narrow standards of the world. Not in the way Olive Hornby was, with her curling lashes and sharpened laugh, or in the way girls learned to be so they wouldn’t be overlooked.
But Myrtle… Myrtle was real.
Unarmored. Honest.
Brave, in all the quiet, stubborn ways that rarely earned praise. The kind of courage that kept showing up even when no one cared.
And for Draco—for someone who had learned too late how empty charm could be, who had watched the world burn beneath the weight of polished lies—that meant more than beauty ever had.
She seemed to feel the change in him, though no words passed between them. Her lips parted, eyes searching his face for some unspoken answer. Then she blinked, as if startled by her own hope, and shook her head quickly.
“I should… probably go,” she murmured. “Before Olive comes back. She likes to hang around the prefect’s lavatory to pretend she’s older.”
There was no bitterness in her tone—just quiet weariness. A girl who’d learned to duck her head before the blow landed.
Draco stepped aside, giving her space. But something tugged at him, anchoring him to the moment. His voice followed her before she could cross the threshold.
“Thank you,” he said.
She paused mid-step, her hand on the doorframe. Confused, she turned slightly, brow knitting. “For what?”
“For asking if I was alright,” Draco said, his voice low but steady. “Not many people mean it when they do.”
For a breath, she said nothing. The silence was no longer heavy—it was something gentler now, something shared.
And then Myrtle smiled.
It wasn’t the small, tremulous smile she’d given before. It was hesitant, yes, but firmer. Braver. A flicker of light breaking through years of shadow.
She nodded once, the gesture full of something unspoken but understood.
Then, with the faintest whisper of robes, she slipped through the door.
Draco stood in the wake of her absence, watching the dust motes swirl in the slanted light. He let out a slow breath, deeper than he’d drawn in days. For the first time in a long time, the air didn’t feel quite so suffocating.
In this timeline, Myrtle still had a chance to live.
And maybe… just maybe, so did he.
Draco composed himself slowly, each movement deliberate—ritualistic. He cupped his hands under the tap and rinsed out the taste of regret still clinging bitter and metallic to the back of his throat. The water was cold, sharp against his tongue, as if trying to cleanse more than just his mouth.
He splashed his face next, the shock of it biting against his skin, chasing away the last remnants of tears that hadn’t quite fallen. Droplets clung to his lashes, his jaw, his collar, and still his hands trembled faintly—echoes of something deeper than fear.
He gripped the edge of the sink again, steadied himself, and looked up.
He looked composed. On the surface, at least. Only the faint flush around his eyes betrayed him—red-rimmed, raw at the edges from quiet crying. But the rest of him was put together with careful precision. His robes sat smooth across his shoulders, his collar fastened, his tie even. His hair, though slightly tousled, fell neatly across his brow, one lock slipping just low enough to soften the starkness of his expression. He looked good. Almost untouched. Like grief had knocked but hadn’t been let all the way in.
But his spine was straight now.
His breathing, steadier.
And for now, that had to be enough.
He slipped out of the bathroom with a quiet kind of grace, the door clicking softly shut behind him. The corridor was strangely still—too quiet for mid-afternoon, as if the castle itself was holding its breath. Sunlight streamed through the tall, arched windows in golden sheets, gilding the stone floor, warming the air with a hush that felt almost sacred.
Too soft. Too beautiful. Too golden for how wrong he felt inside.
But he stepped into it anyway.
Let it touch him. Let it press against the chill lingering beneath his skin. Let it fill the hollow ache behind his ribs with something faintly real. Warmth. Light. The illusion of normalcy.
And the world—merciless, indifferent, unstoppable—carried on.
As if he hadn’t just knelt in front of a sink with guilt burning behind his eyes. As if he hadn’t stood across from a girl long dead, now alive, who still wore her pain like armor.
Draco kept walking. Past the long shadows of suits of armor, past whispering portraits who tilted their heads but didn’t speak.
Because this was what survival looked like now.
Not strength. Not vengeance.
But quiet persistence. One step, then another.
Through golden light, and into whatever came next.
He left the bathroom quietly, the door clicking shut behind him with a whisper of finality. The corridor stretched before him, long and still, hushed in a way that felt almost reverent. It was too quiet for this hour—no distant chatter, no scuffling footsteps, only the occasional creak of ancient beams above and the muffled rustle of his own robes.
Sunlight poured through the tall, arched windows in honeyed shafts, staining the floor with patches of gold. It made everything look softer, more forgiving. As though the castle itself had chosen this moment to be kind. But to Draco, it felt unreal. Dissonant. The light was too warm, too gentle, for the rawness curled tight beneath his ribs. For the storm still receding behind his eyes.
Still, he walked through it.
Let it wash over him, soaking into the dark fabric of his robes, gilding the fine edges of his sleeves and collar. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. Just kept moving, as if his body knew the path even when his mind lagged behind.
The castle blurred around him—polished stone walls, drifting motes of dust, portraits that leaned out of their frames to watch with mild curiosity. Some of them whispered, voices hushed behind gloved hands or painted fans. He ignored them. Let the sound smear into the background like part of a dream he didn’t want to interpret.
He descended staircases, turned corners without thinking, until the halls narrowed and opened again—until the familiar classroom loomed before him like a threshold.
He was going to be late to his class.
Charms.
And even worse.
Today, Slytherins were paired with Gryffindors.
Draco paused outside the door for the barest second, jaw tightening.
Wonderful.
Draco stepped across the threshold of the Charms classroom, and for a moment, the world narrowed to the hush of parchment and the faint crackle of candlelight. The space always felt smaller than it was—long and narrow, with vaulted ceilings that should have given the illusion of grandeur, yet somehow pressed inward like a lung held tight in a ribcage.
The air smelled faintly of aged vellum and flickering spell residue—ozone laced with lavender, as though someone had once tried to mask the underlying scent of singed robes and failed enchantments. Dust floated lazily in sunbeams filtering through the arched windows, where the morning light spilled gold onto the flagstone floor, broken by the occasional flutter of a passing owl’s shadow.
At the very center of the room, slightly elevated on a circular stone platform, stood a polished wooden podium just tall enough for Professor Flitwick to peer over with dignity. The platform was ringed with soft copper inlays, embedded with tiny charm runes that pulsed faintly when spells were cast. The podium itself was covered in scratches and ink blotches, but its surface gleamed—enchanted, perhaps, to repel dust and mishandled wandwork. Behind it stood a short set of steps, which Flitwick ascended with practiced grace, his stature never an obstacle to his authority.
Rows of desks curved around the podium in a semi-circle, tiered slightly so every student had a clear view of Flitwick as he demonstrated wand movements with sharp precision. The desks themselves were carved from dark mahogany, worn smooth by years of restless hands and whispered Lumos charms. Most bore the occasional burn mark or etched signature—evidence of youthful impatience and misfired practice.
The chalkboard behind the podium was enormous, enchanted to erase itself and shift diagrams mid-lecture with a swish of Flitwick’s wand. At present, it displayed a complex pattern of wand movements in gleaming silver strokes, hovering just above the surface like ghostly trails of light.
Shelves lined the outer walls, packed with instructional spellbooks, rows of reference wands encased in glass, and an assortment of magical trinkets Flitwick often used in demonstrations—a levitating teacup perpetually swirling in the air, a brass kettle that whistled a B-sharp when tapped, a tiny stone gargoyle enchanted to mimic spells in real-time.
The room hummed quietly with magic, the very air charged with invisible threads of spellwork past and present.
The moment Draco stepped through the threshold, the low murmur of conversation dipped—just enough to notice. Heads turned with the subtle inevitability of a tide shifting toward a storm on the horizon. Eyes followed him, some with curiosity, some with envy, and a few with open distrust. Draco Peverell was always watched.
He had made certain of that.
His walk was deliberate, every step smooth and unhurried. The long sweep of his robes whispered against the stone floor, his posture crisp, chin slightly lifted. That cold, untouchable air—the one he wore like armor—slid back over him effortlessly, sealing away whatever cracks the morning might’ve left. His expression was unreadable, pale and polished like marble, and just as hard.
Professor Flitwick looked up from his perch of stacked books on the podium, bright-eyed and bustling. “Ah, Mr. Peverell. Right on time. Please, take a seat—ah yes, there, next to Mr. Potter.”
Of course.
Draco’s jaw twitched, just barely.
Of course.
There had to be a potter.
He turned, gaze slow and deliberate, and there he was.
Fleamont Potter.
Casually sprawled in his seat with the kind of ease Draco instinctively distrusted. His sleeves were rolled to the forearms, revealing long fingers and ink stains, and that ever-present smirk played on his lips like a line he never stopped toeing. His dark hair was swept back with careless perfection, and his eyes—Merlin, those eyes—held a gleam of something too knowing, too clever for comfort. He looked like he belonged in a war-era propaganda poster: noble, grinning, unbothered.
There was charm in every angle of him. And confidence—so much confidence it might have been arrogance if it weren’t worn so damn well.
How odd.
Draco sat beside him, each movement precise and self-contained, like coiling a spring behind glass.
Fleamont leaned in just a little, his voice velvet-dipped and sharp at the edges. “Well, well. The infamous Peverell. Slytherin’s crown jewel.”
Draco didn’t turn. Didn’t blink. His voice was smooth and ice-edged. “Potter.”
Fleamont chuckled low in his throat, leaning back lazily in his chair, one brow arching. “You’ve got quite the reputation, you know. I think half the Ravenclaws are writing poetry about you, and the other half are drafting murder plots.”
Draco didn’t look at him, but one corner of his mouth twitched—the ghost of a smile, maybe. Or a warning.
He really did look like potter. Just more arrogant.
No. More like confident.
Draco arched a brow, his expression all icy poise with a hint of dry amusement. “And where do you fall on that spectrum?”
Fleamont’s grin widened, lazy and knowing. “Undecided,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Thought I’d get to know you first. Then make my choice.”
Draco flicked his wand with a bored elegance, the feather in front of them rising smoothly into the air, gliding upward in a perfect, fluid arc. Not a single wobble. Not a tremor. Magic as natural as breath.
“I suppose that makes me your next project,” he murmured.
“Oh, definitely,” Fleamont said, his voice low and velvet-rich, all charm and teasing warmth. “You’re all mystery and stormclouds. You can’t expect people not to be curious.”
Draco gave an exaggerated sigh, tilting his head ever so slightly. The corner of his mouth twitched—small, reluctant, but unmistakably there. A crack in the mask. Just for a second.
At the front of the room, Professor Flitwick clapped his tiny hands together with enthusiastic precision. “Today, we’ll be refining the Levitation Charm. Not simply lifting, mind you—but learning to control direction and speed with finesse. Magic should feel like an extension of your intention, not brute force. It’s a delicate dance!”
Around them, a flurry of movement erupted. Students murmured incantations with mixed success, feathers jerking upward or spinning wildly before flopping back down.
Fleamont turned to Draco again, a glint of mischief in his dark eyes. “Show-off that you are, I assume you’ve mastered this already?”
“I don’t show off,” Draco replied coolly, never missing a beat. “I prepare.”
Fleamont leaned back, hand resting loosely on the edge of the desk. “And here I thought you were all brooding looks and silence.”
Draco didn’t even glance at him. “Shows how little you know.”
The laugh that escaped Fleamont was soft but real—surprised, genuine, a touch disarmed. It cut through the classroom noise like sunlight through fog.
“Well then,” he said, his tone light but his gaze lingering, thoughtful now. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me.”
Fleamont Potter really was similar and yet so very different from his Potter.
Draco couldn’t help but glance at him again, catching the glint of laughter in his dark eyes as he murmured something sardonic about Longbottom’s flicking technique. He wore his confidence like a tailored robe—perfectly fitted, effortless, expected. There was none of the quiet weight Harry carried, none of that world-weariness settled in the corners of his expression like ash.
Harry’s eyes had always betrayed him.
Haunted green. Like the echo of curses in a ruined hallway. Like fields that never grew back after battle. Like the past clinging to him no matter how fast he ran.
Fleamont’s eyes were dark. Curious. Unburdened by war. They held none of the grief that aged Harry before his time.
And his hair—while still unmistakably Potter—was tamed, slicked back with a kind of aristocratic charm that Harry would have scoffed at. No windswept chaos, no stubborn fringe that refused to lie flat no matter how much he tried. Draco remembered watching Harry rake his fingers through it in frustration during late night quidditch matches, under dim candlelight and silence thick with everything unspoken.
He’d hated Harry Potter.
Despised him. Envied him.
And admired him—deeply, bitterly, helplessly.
For his loyalty. His infuriating sense of right and wrong. The way he stood back up, over and over, even when he had every reason not to. For the way he’d looked at Draco once during the final months—not with hate, not with contempt, but with an ache of understanding.
And Draco hadn’t known what to do with that.
Now, sitting beside Fleamont, with his easy laughter and untouched soul, Draco felt a pang so sudden it took his breath for a second.
He missed him.
He clenched his jaw and masked it quickly with a movement of his wand, guiding the feather through a delicate pirouette in the air.
Fleamont nudged him lightly with his elbow. “You space out like that often, or am I just that distracting?”
Draco looked at him sideways, cool and unreadable. “You’re a Potter. You’re hard to ignore.”
Fleamont tilted his head, amused. “Is that a compliment?”
“It’s an observation.”
Fleamont smirked. “Well, at least I’ve made an impression.”
Draco didn’t reply. He didn’t need to.
He could still hear Harry’s voice, quiet and rough at the edges, whispering from memory: “We’re not so different, you and me.”
And now, facing a boy with the same bloodline, the same legacy—but none of the scars—Draco wondered which one of them time had stolen more from.
He turned back to his spellwork, forcing his thoughts into silence.
But the past—his Potter—lingered. Always just beneath the surface.
Flitwick weaved through the rows of students, his small stature hidden at times behind swishing robes and levitating feathers. He paused now and then, offering encouraging remarks or precise corrections in his crisp, lilting voice.
Eventually, the diminutive professor made his way toward the far right side of the room, where Draco and Fleamont stood side by side at their shared desk. The older boys stood out—not just because of their composed wand work, but because of the strange gravity they brought with them.
An aloofness.
A maturity that didn’t belong in a classroom filled with pubescent ambition.
“Need any help?” Flitwick chirped brightly, his gaze shifting between them, his eyes twinkling with polite interest behind his spectacles.
Draco straightened, his posture rigid out of old instinct. “No, sir,” he said smoothly, tucking his wand against his side. “We’re managing.”
Flitwick studied him a second longer than necessary, eyes narrowing—not suspiciously, but thoughtfully. As if he sensed something peculiar behind the cool exterior. Then his gaze flicked to Fleamont, whose wand still hovered over their feather, making it drift lazily in the air like a sleeping bird.
“Very elegant form, Mr. Potter,” Flitwick said, nodding. “But remember, control before flair. A precise charm doesn’t need flourish.”
Fleamont grinned. “But it’s more fun with a little style, Professor.”
Draco felt his lips twitch—but he didn’t smile. Flitwick chuckled, shaking his head with fond exasperation.
“I expect no less from a Potter,” he said with a wink. “But do mind the balance. Talent is no excuse for carelessness.”
Then he turned back to Draco, this time with a curious tilt of his head. “And you, Mr. Peverell, your incantation work is quite advanced for someone new to Hogwarts. I can’t quite place your prior schooling?”
Draco hesitated, just for a breath. “Private tutelage,” he replied smoothly. “My guardian believed in rigorous magical fundamentals.”
Flitwick hummed, clearly intrigued. “Well, they’ve done a fine job. I’d be curious to see more of your work—perhaps something more complex than feather levitation charm.”
Draco straightened in his seat, wand already balanced between his fingers with unconscious elegance. “Of course, Professor,” he said smoothly, almost too smoothly. “What did you have in mind?”
He flicked his own wand and conjured a delicate crystal orb onto the center of their shared desk. It hovered midair, spinning slowly with a soft hum, faint glyphs glowing beneath its surface.
“This,” Flitwick explained, “is the Suspensio Spiralis — a complex coordination charm that requires precise control to maintain a spiraling motion while keeping the orb aloft and filled with light. One misstep, and it shatters.”
Draco’s gaze sharpened. This was no ordinary task, but he welcomed the challenge. His grip tightened slightly as he prepared to focus all his magic on the delicate orb.
Flitwick nodded encouragingly. “Take your time, but remember—control and finesse matter more than brute force.”
Draco’s eyes narrowed, the faintest flicker of a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. The suspended orb pulsed gently, light twisting in delicate spirals as it hovered before him. The challenge was more than a test of skill — it was a test of patience, of precision, of control.
He took a slow, measured breath, tuning out the murmurs and shifting weight of his classmates. His wand felt like an extension of his very being, an instrument humming with potential. As the magic flowed through him, his fingers flexed, guiding the orb with an almost imperceptible tilt and flick of his wrist.
The crystal shimmered, spinning faster, the runes glowing brighter — yet it remained perfectly balanced, defying gravity with elegance. Around him, the classroom seemed to fall away, leaving only the fragile dance of light and motion.
Flitwick watched, his eyes alight with approval, but Draco’s focus never wavered. Then, something unexpected happened—Draco’s magic began to evolve beyond the original intent of the charm. The delicate orb didn’t just spiral in place; it began to twist faster and faster, until it resembled a miniature tornado, spinning with fierce energy. The glow intensified, radiating a brilliant cascade of greens and silvers that filled the entire room with an ethereal light.
The other students fell silent, their attempts forgotten as they watched in awe, captivated by the dazzling spectacle. The air seemed to hum with power, charged and alive, as if the very atmosphere bent to Draco’s will. Shadows flickered and danced along the walls, drawn into the vortex of light swirling above his palm.
Flitwick’s mouth opened slightly in surprise before a slow, genuine smile spread across his face. “Remarkable,” he breathed, voice barely above a whisper. “I’ve not seen such mastery in years. It’s as if the magic itself responds to your command, bending and twisting beyond the spell’s bounds.”
The classroom buzzed with murmurs and whispers, a ripple of awe spreading through the students. Some of the Slytherins exchanged glances, shocked at the display of such refined control and raw power, yet they maintained their usual poised, guarded expressions—pride and caution entwined. Draco could feel Tom’s gaze piercing him like a blade, intense and unblinking, but he stubbornly avoided meeting those eyes, unwilling to reveal any cracks in his composure.
Beside him, Fleamont’s eyes shone with genuine excitement. He bumped Draco’s arm with a grin, whistling low and impressed. “Bloody hell, that was amazing!”
Draco allowed himself a brief nod, the warmth of Fleamont’s praise grounding him in the midst of the swirling tension. Around them, the classroom buzzed—curiosity, envy, admiration—each student processing the unexpected feat they had just witnessed.
Flitwick, nearly vibrating with excitement, practically bounced back to his podium. His robes flared slightly with the movement, his face alight with the sort of enthusiasm only true magical discovery could bring.
“Class,” he announced, his voice projecting over the lingering murmurs, “as you have just witnessed—an outstanding display of control, precision, and magical nuance from Mr. Peverell—how about we shift gears for the day?”
He clapped his hands once, his eyes twinkling behind his spectacles. “Instead of our scheduled lesson, we shall attempt to learn the Suspensio Spiralis together. Now, I don’t expect you all to recreate the enhanced variation Mr. Peverell performed—merlin’s beard, that was something even I haven’t seen done quite like that—but we can begin with the foundational structure.”
There were excited murmurs and some nervous shifting among the students.
Draco kept his posture composed, though his fingers flexed ever so slightly around his wand, residual magic still thrumming faintly through his veins. He could still feel Tom’s gaze on him—cold, analytical, almost possessive—but he kept his attention firmly on the professor.
Flitwick grinned, already sketching a diagram in the air with a few flicks of his wand. “Now then! Wands at the ready, everyone. Let’s begin.”
Flitwick grinned, already sketching a glowing, spiraling diagram in the air with a few quick, fluid flicks of his wand. The shimmering illustration of the Suspensio Spiralis hovered above the classroom like a constellation caught mid-turn, each luminous line demonstrating the charm’s intricate motion—the spiral’s axis, the slow pulsing rhythm at its core, the precise wand arcs needed to sustain balance.
“Now then! Wands at the ready, everyone,” he chirped, eyes twinkling like he was leading an orchestra rather than a group of upper-year students. “Let’s begin.”
The students straightened in their seats, glancing between the glowing spiral and their wands with varying degrees of confidence and anxiety. Even the more aloof Slytherins looked intrigued now, murmuring among themselves as they mimicked the guiding motions in the air.
Beside Draco, Fleamont gave an exaggerated crack of his knuckles and grinned, turning to whisper, “I swear, if my wand explodes again, I’m blaming your brilliance for the distraction.”
Draco allowed himself a quiet, exhaled laugh, the edge of tension in his shoulders softening—just slightly.
But he didn’t respond.
His attention drifted back to the charm in the air, watching how it pulsed gently at the center. He could feel his own magic still responding, like a tuning fork still vibrating after the note has faded. The orb he’d conjured wasn’t just a spell. It had felt alive—like something inside him had slipped, evolved, or awakened.
And across the room, Tom Riddle hadn’t touched his wand since the demonstration.
He just watched Draco. Not clapping. Not speaking. Just watching—with a gaze like a snake coiled in the grass.
And yet, for the first time, Draco didn’t look away.
Draco held Tom’s gaze, his breath faltering for an imperceptible beat. Everything in the room—the muffled hum of student voices, the scattered crackle of magic as spells were cast and re-cast—dissolved into a distant murmur. The usual clatter of textbooks, the scrape of chairs against the stone floor, even Flitwick’s animated explanations on the intricacies of levitation charms, seemed to blur and fade, leaving nothing but the sharp intensity between them.
Tom’s eyes never wavered. They were dark—too dark. Unreadable. As though the blackness within them was not simply absence, but depth. It felt as though something ancient stirred behind those eyes, a force too old to be understood, too powerful to be ignored. It was the kind of look that made Draco wonder if Tom was seeing beyond him—into him, perhaps. Beyond the surface. Into everything he had tried so desperately to hide.
The world shifted as Tom tilted his head ever so slightly, the movement so subtle it could have been mistaken for an idle gesture, but Draco felt it like a slow-moving current beneath the surface. A silent acknowledgement passed between them—an exchange that was felt more than understood. There was no smile, no flicker of a frown. Tom’s face was a mask, as always, but in that single, infinitesimal shift of his head, Draco sensed something else: a recognition. An admission.
Power had been displayed.
And Tom Riddle had seen it.
Draco’s heart thudded in his chest, a violent reminder that his every movement, every hesitation, was scrutinized—not just by the eyes of his peers, but by Tom’s. There was no escaping it, no hiding from the weight of that gaze. His thoughts momentarily scattered, fragmented by the awareness that Tom knew. There was no pretending otherwise. Not now. Not after what had passed between them.
In the space between heartbeats, it was as if time itself had folded around them, isolating them in a bubble of quiet. The classroom, with its flickering candlelight and ever-turning pages, seemed miles away, a distant echo in the back of Draco’s mind. All that existed was the tension in the air, thick and taut, a fragile thread that connected him to Tom in ways he didn’t fully understand but couldn’t seem to resist.
Tom’s lips parted, but it wasn’t a gesture meant to speak—it was simply another infinitesimal shift in the quiet power that crackled around them. A slight exhale. A breath. A question with no answer.
Draco fought the urge to look away, the raw weight of that gaze threatening to pull him deeper. He had to maintain control. He couldn’t let himself unravel in front of him, not when Tom’s presence felt like a slow-burning fire that could easily consume him.
But it was already too late.
The acknowledgment lingered in the air like an invisible force, a silent promise that whatever had begun was far from over.
And Tom Riddle, with his unreadable eyes, knew it.
Draco’s fingers tightened around his wand before he finally broke the gaze, glancing back toward the spiraling charm Flitwick was now dissecting step-by-step for the class.
Flitwick, meanwhile, was practically vibrating with enthusiasm, a blur of motion and high-pitched cheer as he darted around the podium. His robes swirled around his tiny frame like a storm cloud trimmed in silver, and his wand carved elegant arcs through the air with the precision of a conductor orchestrating a very excitable symphony.
“Now remember!” he called out, voice buoyant, rising above the growing cacophony of sputtering charms and muttered incantations. With a flick of his wand, the hovering demonstration orb slowed in midair, its spiral rotation decelerating into a graceful, glowing helix. “It’s all about the precision of your rotation and—most importantly—your intent! The first mistake most students make is trying to force the spiral. No, no—magic must want to move. You guide it, not control it.”
The classroom was alive with motion, with tension, with the telltale crackle of young magic pushed too hard or not hard enough. Flickering lights and multicolored trails shimmered in the air, some elegant, others chaotic. It was like watching a roomful of fireflies being told to dance in perfect unison—beautiful, unpredictable, and on the verge of combustion.
Several students were already struggling. At the far side, a Gryffindor girl’s wand sparked as her charmed orb disintegrated into a puddle of gold mist on her sleeve. She gave a nervous laugh, patting out the shimmer with reddening cheeks. A Gryffindor boy near the front let out a loud “Suspensio Spi—oh, bugger,” just as his charm fizzled like a dying firework, spitting sparks in all directions before the orb twisted collapsing in a hiss. The tiny explosion startled the students nearby, one of whom instinctively ducked. He gave a sheepish grin, wand still smoking.
Two desks over, a composed Walburga Black traced a tight, glowing loop in the air, her wrist precise, lips barely moving. For a moment, her charm held—a perfect ribbon of light, orb twisting in midair like a living thread. Then, with a pitiful wheeze, it sagged and fell onto her parchment with a soft thump, sizzling out like a candle touched by rain. She stared at it, unmoved, and calmly cast another attempt.
Fleamont Potter was performing exactly as he had predicted—with flourish, optimism, and complete lack of success. His orb wobbled violently in midair, bloated and pulsing like it had swallowed too much light. “Easy now—don’t burst,” he muttered, clutching his wand like it might bite. It did, in a way—an instant later the charm exploded with a sharp pop, dissolving into a plume of harmless mist. Fleamont coughed through the cloud, waving a hand as if trying to dispel both the smoke and the embarrassment. “Well,” he wheezed, “at least it didn’t take out my eyebrows this time.”
A few students snorted. Flitwick clapped merrily, not at the failure, but at the effort. “Excellent! Keep going! Trial and error is the heart of charmwork!”
Draco said nothing.
He sat with his back straight, one hand resting loosely beside his wand, the other curled over the edge of the desk, knuckles pale. The light from the enchanted orbs flickered across his cheekbones, catching faintly in the pale strands of his hair. Around him, magic spun and danced and cracked apart, but Draco remained utterly still—watchful.
Detached.
His gaze wandered lazily across the room, taking in the failures, the half-successes, the practiced grins of students trying to save face. He wasn’t judging. Not exactly. He was measuring. Weighing. Calculating something beyond the exercise at hand.
Every now and then, his eyes would flicker—once toward Flitwick, darting like a shutter click towards the others, and then, inevitably, back to Tom.
Who hadn’t tried.
His own wand remained untouched.
Like he was waiting.
Or perhaps, already knew how the spiral ended.
Flitwick’s voice rose above the low thrum of scattered incantations and fizzing magic. “Mr. Peverell,” he chirped, turning mid-hover atop his stack of enchanted books, “if you’re feeling generous, would you mind assisting your classmates today? You seem to have a natural affinity for this form.”
The room stilled—just slightly. Not silence, but the kind of collective pause that lived in between breaths. Several heads turned toward Draco, their expressions a patchwork of curiosity, skepticism, and the grudging kind of admiration students reserved for those who made something difficult look effortless. A few Slytherins, their house pride at war with envy, eyed him with the sharp consideration of creatures not yet sure whether to bow or bare teeth.
Draco rose without hesitation, fluid as smoke. “As you wish, Professor,” he said, voice smooth, betraying nothing.
He moved through the classroom like a shadow slipping through firelight—measured, precise, untouchable. Where others stumbled and tripped over their magic, Draco threaded between them with a quiet, natural command, the trailing edge of his robe whispering against stone. He didn’t linger. He didn’t hover. He offered only what was needed—a tilt of the head, a subtle correction, a single word that cut through a student’s confusion like a whetted blade.
“Smaller rotation.”
“Ease your grip.”
“Let it breathe.”
His voice remained low, steady, utterly unhurried. On the surface, he was composed, every gesture elegant, detached. But beneath the porcelain stillness, something in him trembled—a current twisting behind his ribs like a storm bottled too tightly. The raw, frantic edge of the panic that had nearly undone him in the corridor had dulled, but not faded. It clung to him like soot, breathing through the cracks in his spine.
Bellatrix’s laughter still rang in his ears. The heat—unnatural and hungry—licked at the edge of his memory. The image of the girl’s hand reaching, the hem of her dress igniting, the single word stretched across time like an unfinished sentence:
Please.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, burying it. Not now. Not here.
He stopped beside a Gryffindor girl hunched over her desk, her wand trembling as a half-formed orb spiraled weakly in front of her—more a nervous shiver of light than any true charm. It flickered, uncertain, then blinked out with a sound like a sigh.
She looked up at him, startled by his sudden nearness. Her eyes were wide behind round spectacles, cheeks pink from frustration. “I—I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
“You’re trying to control the magic,” Draco said quietly, almost absently. His gaze lingered on the path her wand had traced in the air. “But it isn’t a thing to be owned. You guide it. Let it move through you, not from you. Your wrist—loosen it. You’re too rigid.”
She blinked at him. “Loosen it?”
He reached out—not touching, but close enough that she mirrored the motion—and demonstrated the sweep: graceful, almost lazy, with the kind of relaxed confidence born not from talent alone, but hard, deliberate mastery.
She tried again, wrist softened, grip eased.
This time, the orb spun. Just briefly—but enough to shimmer once, twice, before unraveling like a ribbon in the breeze.
She gasped. “It worked!”
Draco gave the barest nod. Not a smile. Not approval. Just acknowledgment. Then he turned, his robes trailing behind him as he moved on, already halfway to the next table before her exclamation had fully faded.
And though his hands were steady, the ache in his chest pulsed like a bruise with every step. He carried it with him in silence—the ghost of fire, the weight of memory, and the terrible, impossible grace of surviving what should have broken him.
Still, he walked.
Still, he guided.
Because movement was easier than stillness.
And silence was where the screams waited.
When Draco passed Tom’s desk again, something in the air around it felt colder—thinner, as though the space itself resisted being occupied. The other boy hadn’t moved. His wand lay untouched on the desk’s worn surface, a slender sliver of wood resting with all the studied disregard of someone who knew he didn’t need to use it to command attention.
He sat with the perfect, unnatural stillness of a statue carved too finely to be real—back straight, hands folded, as if the classroom were his court and the lesson a game he had already won. His face—strikingly beautiful—was a study in elegance turned eerie. High cheekbones cast delicate shadows beneath wide, dark eyes; his mouth, full and precisely shaped, held the ghost of a smile that never quite reached his eyes. Skin smooth and pale like marble left out under moonlight. Every feature finely drawn, symmetrical, and yet… wrong somehow. Not because of any flaw, but because there were none. His beauty felt sculpted, not born.
Too flawless.
Too intentional.
Like a mask—one carved by something that understood what humans found captivating, but not why.
His gaze locked on Draco—sharp, fathomless, and wholly unreadable. Those eyes didn’t simply watch; they consumed, dissected, judged. They weren’t curious. They were assessing.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t ask for help.
Didn’t need to.
But Draco paused.
“Do you need help, Riddle?” he asked, keeping his tone light.
Tom looked up at him then—just a tilt of the head, just enough to catch the torchlight on his cheekbone, and smiled.
It was slow. Purposeful. A smile that moved like the curve of a blade drawing free from velvet. It did not reach his eyes. It was not meant to.
“Help?” he echoed, voice soft, low, and glinting with false humility. “From you, Peverell?”
Still, he made no move for his wand. It remained untouched, abandoned like a king’s sword at rest. But behind the stillness of his fingers and the careful poise of his body, Draco could feel it—something vast and waiting. The sense that this boy—this impossibly lovely boy—was merely the surface layer of something ancient and monstrous beneath. Like ice over a lake. Or lace drawn across a predator’s grin.
Draco stood tall beside him, composed, jaw set—but tension coiled in his limbs like a spell not yet cast.His instincts whispered caution.
The warning was instinctive, primal: Be careful.
But another voice within him—quieter, colder, and far older than seventeen—whispered a different truth.
You don’t step back from creatures like this. You stare until they blink first.
So he leaned in—just slightly. Not physically, but with presence. The kind of lean that was in the jawline, the steadiness of gaze, the subtle shift of weight that said: I am not afraid of you.
Even if, somewhere in the marrow, he was.
“Yes,” Draco said coolly, his tone polished to diamond hardness. “Unless, of course, you’re worried you can’t replicate it.”
Around them, the classroom buzzed on—Flitwick’s high-pitched encouragement, the swoop and fizzle of charms gone awry, laughter from a cluster of Gryffindors in the corner. But all of it faded to nothing in the gravity well between them. Time seemed to hesitate, the moment folding in on itself like the breath before a spell was cast.
Tom tilted his head. The smile never faltered, but sharpened.
“Why would I replicate it,” he murmured, finally reaching for his wand—not with urgency, but the slow, deliberate grace of someone unwrapping something sacred, or perhaps lethal, “when I can… improve it?”
The wand slid into his hand like it had been waiting for him all along. His fingers were long, precise, almost delicate—but there was something in the motion, in the ease of it, that made Draco’s breath still in his lungs. A movement too elegant to be casual. Too calculated to be innocent.
Draco arched a brow, the ghost of a smirk playing at his mouth, though his shoulders remained rigid beneath his robes.
“Go on, then.”
And though neither boy had raised his voice, nor stepped closer, the room around them seemed to hush—to pull back just enough. Like the walls themselves wanted distance. Like the air, sensing what was coming, had gone still.
Flitwick, catching the sudden lull from the corner of the room, turned subtly—his small frame angling just enough to observe without intruding. His ears, always attuned to the tone of the room, had picked up on the shift. Not in volume, but in vibration. Like a tremor before thunder. He didn’t speak, didn’t intervene. He knew better than to step between two storms about to touch.
This wasn’t a duel, not openly. But in the language of prodigies, of raw talent sharpened by pain, ambition, and unspoken truths—it may as well have been.
Tom stood.
He did so without haste, without ceremony—just a fluid, seamless movement, as though gravity itself deferred to his will. The motion had the same haunting grace as his expression: calm, unbothered, veiling something immeasurably deep beneath its surface. He stepped out into the open space beside his desk, the hem of his robes whispering across the flagstones.
He didn’t need diagrams. Didn’t need help.
His wand lifted, and the air reacted before he even spoke. Like it recognized him.
“Suspensio Spiralis.”
The incantation slid from his lips like water over obsidian—soft, effortless, almost lazy. But the moment it left his mouth, the temperature in the room dropped. The spiral didn’t start with a flicker or a bloom. It ignited with a violent pulse.
It shot upward in a helix of ink-black brilliance, twisting so rapidly the edges blurred, the center glowing red like the heart of a dying star. The spiral spun with flawless precision, but its beauty was that of storms and deep-sea predators, not sunlight. It moved with a devouring grace, orbiting itself with hungry momentum. Shadows across the classroom thickened, stretching like they too had turned to look.
His orb didn’t glitter.
It pulsed—dark, iridescent, almost liquid in texture. A gravity well of magic. All light in the room seemed to bend subtly toward it, as if reluctant to leave.
Students gasped. A Gryffindor dropped her wand. Someone whispered, “Merlin…”
Even Flitwick, usually irrepressible, stood still for a beat too long. His hands twitched around his wand before he forced a bright—too bright—smile onto his face and began clapping.
“Excellent! Yes—very advanced manipulation, Mr. Riddle. Highly… original.”
But there was a tremor in his voice. Barely there. But there.
The spiral slowly collapsed inward on itself, folding with such precision that it seemed unnatural—like it hadn’t simply faded, but withdrawn. As though the spell itself had intelligence. And will.
Tom turned back to Draco, the soft glow from the final remnants of the charm catching the fine angles of his face. The high cheekbones. The hollowed, aristocratic grace. The mouth that was too still to be youthful. And those eyes—eyes that reflected nothing, absorbed everything.
“Replicate that,” he murmured.
His voice was low. Velvet-lined. But it cut through the distance between them with surgical precision.
Draco didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. His expression remained a careful mask, honed through years of expectation and performance. But beneath his skin, something moved. His magic stirred—not in challenge, but in answer. It did not rage. It rose. Cool and ancient. The kind of magic that didn’t need to be loud to be terrifying.
He could feel it in his fingertips. In the base of his throat. Like a violin string wound too tight, aching to sing.
He stepped forward.
Not to compete.
But to claim.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He stood like marble—composed, unmoving—his gaze fixed on the writhing spiral that twisted and shimmered in the air before him. Tom’s magic pulsed there, alive, coiled like a serpent suspended mid-strike. It flickered with an unnatural sheen, edges blurring between magic and something older—something feral. It hissed and spun, dark tendrils licking the air with silent menace.
The challenge wasn’t voiced.
It didn’t need to be.
Tom’s intent bled into the space between them like spilled ink across silk—quiet, inevitable, impossible to ignore. I am watching. I am waiting. Show me who you are.
The contrast between them was staggering. Like two forces carved from opposing truths.
Tom’s spiral: a dusk that devoured gold, all restraint and hunger, as if he’d bottled the dying gasp of a star and shaped it into motion.
Draco’s lips parted—not to speak, but to breathe in. Slowly. Steadily. The scent of magic had changed. The air now felt charged, thick like the moment before lightning strikes.
A curl of rebellion unfurled in him.
Not petty defiance. Not posturing.
But the quiet, bone-deep certainty of someone who had survived far worse than Tom Riddle’s stare. Who had walked through fire and grief and emerged not unburned—but reforged. His fingers tightened subtly around the handle of his wand.
Then he raised it.
No flourish. No whispered warning.
He cast.
“Suspensio Spiralis”
The word rolled off his tongue like the first bell of dawn, and the spell answered instantly.
Draco’s magic erupted not with violence, but with brilliance—a sudden, blinding flare of light that painted the room in gold and white. His spiral spun upward, elegant and fierce, like the arc of a phoenix wing slicing through shadow. Each ring of the helix glittered with internal fire, pulsing not with hunger, but with resolve.
Where Tom’s magic consumed, Draco’s revealed. It shimmered with clarity. Purpose. The kind of light that banished illusions and burned clean through darkness.
The two spirals now hung in the air—twins in motion, opposites in soul.
Tom’s: deep violet, ink-black at the edges, spinning tight and fast, drawing the light into itself like a whirlpool.
Draco’s: golden-white, luminous, wide-armed, pushing outward, casting everything in gentle luminescence.
And then—Draco moved.
He shifted his wand slightly, and his spiral answered like a creature tethered to his will. It tilted. Dipped. Slid across the invisible air currents.
And merged.
Draco guided his light into the heart of Tom’s vortex—deliberate, unhurried, impossible to ignore. The two spirals collided—but did not explode. Instead, they interwove.
The gold wrapped around the black like ivy around obsidian stone. Light sinking into shadow. Not to destroy it—but to hold it. To bind it. To illuminate its shape, its pattern, its secret nature.
Tom’s spiral flickered, for the first time faltering ever so slightly—just enough for the classroom to feel the shift.
A breath caught.
Then another.
A hush rippled outward. The other students froze, wands forgotten, mouths slightly open. Even Flitwick stilled entirely, his bright eyes wide, his body perfectly still—as though watching history write itself in real time.
Draco stood beneath the fusion of their charms, his face calm but his eyes alight. The twin spirals now spun together in one orbit—darkness encased in light, light pierced with shadow—hovering like a celestial symbol between war and truce.
The moment stretched, taut and reverent.
Tom’s gaze hadn’t left him. His expression was unreadable—but beneath the practiced stillness, something shimmered.
Not fury.
Not even envy.
But the closest to the feeling of Joy.
A flicker of it.
A grudging, dangerous kind of respect. The kind predators feel when they realize the prey they’ve been stalking has teeth.
And the classroom held its breath.
As if none dared exhale, lest the magic unravel.
What Draco had done wasn’t just skilled.
It was impossible.
Or—it should have been.
Magic like Suspensio Spiralis wasn’t designed to bend, let alone blend. It was delicate, volatile, a charm of extreme precision. Even advanced seventh-years hesitated to cast it without careful preparation. Two spells woven simultaneously was unheard of. Two opposing forces—light and dark—fused into one seamless, breathing entity?
That bordered on myth.
And yet there it was—hovering between them.
Tom Riddle’s spiral of obsidian magic, all flickering shadows and whispered menace, now entwined with Draco’s golden radiance. Not clashing. Not consuming. But circling each other like twin stars caught in perfect, impossible balance. A tether of harmony forged not by intention, but by something deeper. Older.
The helix spun in slow, mesmerizing rhythm—gold and violet coiling inward, threading together at the axis like a living equation. It didn’t simply pulse. It breathed. It whispered. It sang—a song in no human tongue, but one that stirred ancient echoes in every wand and soul in the room.
The magic spoke in a dialect older than Hogwarts.
Older, perhaps, than magic itself.
And for once, Tom Riddle was not impassive.
His brow furrowed—not in rage, not even in confusion, but in a rare flicker of unsettled realization. His eyes narrowed slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Draco saw it.
Felt it.
That fraction of a moment where Tom’s certainty faltered. Where something inside him whispered: This isn’t normal. This isn’t supposed to happen.
Because what Draco had done was not defiance.
It was transcendence.
Draco hadn’t challenged the darkness. He had understood it. Accepted it. And in doing so, he’d altered the rules Tom had written for this encounter—rewritten the equation beneath the duel without ever raising his voice or brandishing power.
He’d absorbed Tom’s shadow. Balanced it. Held it up to the light without diminishing its shape. And it had responded.
That was the true affront. Not being bested—but being seen.
Flitwick gasped, his voice breathless with awe. One hand hovered over his chest, as though afraid his heart might leap from it.
“By the Founders…” he whispered, almost reverently.
Somewhere behind Draco, a Gryffindor’s wand clattered to the floor. Another student gripped their friend’s sleeve, knuckles white. Even the Slytherins—proud, calculating, vicious Slytherins—leaned forward with naked wonder on their faces. Their usual smirks had vanished, peeled away by something that looked uncomfortably like respect.
And yet Draco remained still.
Wand arm extended, spine straight, expression schooled into the practiced serenity of a duelist—but beneath his skin, his blood was roaring. Magic pulsed through him like a song of starlight and bone-deep gravity, alive and thrumming at his fingertips. He felt everything—not just his own spellwork, but Tom’s presence braided through it.
It wasn’t resisting anymore.
It was turning back toward him.
It recognized him.
Not as a rival.
As a reflection.
He nearly let go—nearly whispered Finite then and there, allowed the spell to disperse and the classroom to breathe again. But something inside him clenched tight. Not fear. Not pride. Something older. More rooted.
A will forged in the cradle of war.
A voice inside him, colder and deeper than instinct, whispered: No. Not yet.
With a breath, Draco shifted his wrist—graceful, decisive.
The spiral compressed.
The tornado’s edges folded inward, collapsing with eerie precision as though obeying an invisible axis. The winds tightened. Sped. Spiraled faster. The twin forces—light and shadow—were pulled closer, closer, until they merged into a single, molten helix. Not two halves—but one entity, burning hotter and deeper with every beat.
The room darkened slightly as the power condensed.
Then Draco whispered, soft and final:
“Finite.”
The tornado didn’t explode. It dissolved.
A final pulse of gold.
Then amethyst.
Then—
Gone.
Just glowing particles floating in the air like dust from a dream, slowly falling, fading—until even they vanished into nothing.
And the room fell utterly, utterly silent.
No breath.
No sound.
Not even a shuffle of robes or the crackle of a misfired spell. Just wide eyes, parted lips, and the strange, sacred stillness that follows something extraordinary.
Tom Riddle hadn’t moved.
Not an inch.
But something in his face had shifted—minutely. As if he, too, had forgotten how to breathe.
And Draco?
Draco lowered his wand with silent poise, his chest rising slowly, pulse still pounding like drums behind a curtain.
Tom’s hand had lowered.
The wand, once poised like the final note in a symphony, now rested idly at his side—though “idle” was a lie. It gleamed under the classroom lights, innocent in its stillness, but there was a tension in the air that clung to it, as if it might leap to life again at the slightest provocation.
His expression, ever composed, remained unreadable. A porcelain mask of control. And yet, there was a crack—a minute shift so subtle it might have been imagined. His shoulders, always square, had drawn tighter. His chin lifted just slightly, not in defiance, but in calculation. And his mouth, parted by a fraction, hung like an unfinished question, or perhaps the breath before a spell.
A silence had settled over the classroom like ash after a fire.
Draco turned without a word.
His wand was still warm in his palm, thrumming faintly with the aftershock of the spell he had cast. The magic hadn’t left him yet—it curled along his spine like smoke, sharp and metallic on his tongue. He walked slowly, with practiced nonchalance, back to his seat. Not hurried. Not rattled. But alert. Each step sounded louder than it should have, as if echoing in a chamber of glass.
He didn’t look back.
He didn’t need to.
He could feel Tom’s eyes on him—hot and unblinking, like coals pressed to the back of his neck. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t surprise. It was something colder. Something older.
Interest.
Around them, the other students had returned to stillness, as if frozen mid-breath. A few made half-hearted gestures with their wands, pretending to practice, whispering incantations under their breath. But most watched from behind raised hands or parchment shields, their curiosity palpable.
The air was still humming with tension, thick with something unspoken. Something dangerous.
Fleamont leaned over, the rustle of his sleeve loud in the hush. He brought a scrap of parchment up between them like a curtain, shielding his lips as he whispered.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “What was that about?”
Draco’s jaw tensed, but he didn’t answer immediately. He dropped into his chair with fluid grace, the motion controlled, as if he were aware he was still being watched.
He gave a faint shrug, voice barely above a murmur. “A difference in style.”
Fleamont snorted softly, amusement curling at the edges of his words. “Looked like a magical pissing contest to me. You won, by the way.”
Draco’s lips twitched—just the barest hint of a smile. Dry. Measured. Almost reluctant.
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“Exactly,” Fleamont said, satisfied. “That’s why you did.”
Across the room, Professor Flitwick cleared his throat, a little too brightly, his voice an awkward burst of cheer trying to pierce the cloud still hanging in the air.
“Yes, well! Splendid, splendid displays from both of you. Now, let’s return to the core fundamentals of the Suspensio Spiralis! Step one—channeling magical momentum in a steady, spiraling stream—remember, consistency over power…”
The class resumed.
Or at least, it pretended to.
Wands were raised. Incantations murmured. Threads of magic floated lazily through the air like snowflakes that refused to melt.
But Draco didn’t move.
He sat very still, elbow on the desk, wand slack in his grip. His eyes had dropped to his hand, to the space between his fingers where the spell had flared to life. They still tingled faintly, the way fingers do after touching lightning. A low hum coursed through him—residual, electric. His jaw tightened.
Because Tom hadn’t been trying to compete.
He hadn’t tried to steal the spotlight, or overpower Draco’s performance. He hadn’t needed to.
He had been probing.
There had been no challenge in his stance. No defiance in his silence. Just… patience. Precision.
Tom had stood there like a clockmaker examining the gears of an unfamiliar device. Not to admire. Not to envy.
But to measure.
He hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched, not even when the spell Draco cast had drawn a hush over the room. He had absorbed it, dissected it, stored it away. His stillness hadn’t been passive. It had been predatory.
And the worst part was—Draco knew exactly what had passed behind those unreadable eyes.
Recognition.
Not the kind that suggested camaraderie. No. Not friendship.
Recognition like the click of a puzzle piece falling into place. Like a hunter finding prints in fresh snow and knowing the shape of what he was tracking. Tom had seen something in Draco—not simply power, but potential. An echo. A mirror.
He hadn’t looked at Draco like a rival.
He had looked at him like… a find.
And in that fleeting moment before turning away, something had gleamed in his eyes—brief and unmistakable.
Possessiveness.
The kind of possessiveness that didn’t stem from admiration, or even desire. It was colder than that. Older. Hungrier. The way wolves look at other wolves. Or fire looks at kindling.
Tom hadn’t been curious.
He had been deciding.
Not whether Draco was dangerous—but whether Draco was dangerous enough to be worth keeping… or eliminating.
And the realization hit Draco like a weight dropped into water, sinking fast into his chest:
This had been a trap.
Not a duel. Not a moment of ego. But a carefully laid snare.
The stage, the demonstration, the silence—all of it had been constructed. Curated. Offered.
Tom hadn’t risen to Draco’s challenge. He had crafted it. Invited it. Made space for it so he could watch.
Watch how Draco moved. How he commanded his magic. How he thrived under pressure. How far he could stretch before something inside him cracked.
Except… nothing had cracked.
And that, perhaps, was what made Tom’s eyes gleam.
He had wanted to see Draco burn—to flare, brilliantly, uncontrollably—and he had. Controlled. Terrifyingly so. Not reckless. Not desperate.
Lethal.
And now Tom knew exactly how bright Draco could burn.
Which meant, soon, he’d decide whether to snuff him out…
Or hold that fire in the palm of his hand.
Fleamont had clapped him on the back, called it a victory.
But Draco knew better now.
He hadn’t won anything.
He had revealed everything.
The realization settled in his chest like ice poured into hot steel—hissing, burning, reshaping him. There was no triumph in this. No pride to claim. Only the hollow ache of hindsight cracking open like a fault line beneath his feet.
The applause still echoed faintly in the corners of the classroom, caught between the rafters like trapped birds—beating their wings in vain. Fleamont’s grin glinted beside him, bright and easy, and Flitwick’s praise lingered like a warm draft after a storm.
But it all felt… wrong.
Unreal. Distant.
Like a play performed one beat too late, the audience clapping for a ghost.
Draco’s hand remained curled around his wand, the core still humming with recent release, a faint heat coiled in his palm. The magic hadn’t left him—it was still there, alive under his skin, aching with the echo of what he’d just done.
And yet, he felt cold.
Exposed.
He had danced for them—precise, effortless, composed. He had lit the room with brilliance, cast his power like silk over steel. The class had watched, awestruck. Flitwick had beamed. Fleamont had whispered admiration.
But Tom—
Tom had given him nothing.
Not awe. Not applause. Not even resistance.
Only that smile.
That smile, thin and sharp as a slit throat, had curved like a quiet promise—curved like a hook.
He hadn’t been impressed. He hadn’t even been surprised.
He had been satisfied.
And that was worse.
Draco’s stomach turned. Slowly, like a screw threading itself into something vital. Because now he understood. Now he felt the trap in every perfect step he had taken.
Tom hadn’t matched his spell because he hadn’t needed to.
This was never about performance. Not for him. This had been a study. An experiment. A test conducted in silence, with Draco as the subject, the stage, the spectacle. He had walked willingly into the center, thinking he was showing something—control, brilliance, command.
But Tom hadn’t wanted a rival to outshine.
He had wanted data.
Tom’s eyes—those cold, calculating depths—hadn’t watched Draco like a classmate.
They had watched him like a puzzle being solved. Like a blade being measured for weight, for balance, for how deep it might cut if turned in just the right hand.
Draco had offered light.
And Tom had offered a mirror.
Not to reflect him, not to flatter or challenge—but to observe. To study how the light refracted. How it warped. How it could be used.
And worst of all—how it could be broken.
He hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t blinked. Hadn’t even leaned forward. Because Tom hadn’t needed to respond to Draco’s magic.
He had needed to witness it.
To catalogue it.
And now, Draco felt the weight of every move he’d made. Every flick of his wrist. Every pulse of intention. It had all been recorded. Not in memory, but in strategy. Like Tom was building a map of him—his pressure points, his thresholds, his rhythm. Not because he feared him.
But because he planned to use him.
Or unmake him.
And the silence that followed—the shift in Tom’s stance, the slight easing of his wand hand—was not a retreat.
It was closure.
The experiment was over.
The subject had performed.
And the hunter now knew exactly what kind of flame he was dealing with.
Draco’s spine prickled. A slow crawl of awareness up his neck. His instincts screamed to move, to do something, to retake control—but it was far too late for that.
He had already given everything away.
Tom hadn’t needed to break him to win.
He had let Draco burn brilliantly… just long enough to see how much fuel the fire could consume before it turned to ash.
And the scariest part wasn’t just that it had been a trap.
It was that Tom had enjoyed it.
Enjoyed watching him step into the center of the room, bask in the glow, stretch his wings—believing he was untouchable.
And now those eyes—dark, fathomless, utterly still—were still watching him.
Not with malice. Not even with envy.
But with ownership.
As if the decision had already been made.
As if Tom had already reached into the flame… and decided it was his to hold.
Draco swallowed tightly, the motion rough against the dryness in his throat, like trying to force glass down a sealed pipe. His pulse echoed in his ears, a low, thrumming cadence of regret and realization. Moments ago, his magic had filled the room—alive, brilliant, commanding. The air had shimmered with its presence, thick with the afterglow of power, like lightning trapped in crystal.
But now?
Now it felt like a spotlight turned inward.
Too bright. Too revealing.
Like a lighthouse—yes, but not guiding ships to shore. No, he was the lighthouse in enemy territory, blazing against a dark sea, a beacon announcing exactly where he was… and how powerful he could be. An unmissable signal to something that should never have been watching in the first place.
He exhaled slowly, careful not to show how the edges of his composure frayed. Then, deliberately, he turned. Just slightly. A graceful half-shift of his spine. His wand lowered by inches—no longer a conductor of stormlight, but an afterthought, a whisper of what had just been.
The final glimmer of his magic hung for a heartbeat more, suspended like dew on spider silk, then dissipated—absorbed into the stale, chalk-scented air of the classroom, as though nothing extraordinary had happened at all.
Around him, life resumed. The spell was over. The illusion gone.
Chairs scraped. Quills scratched. Voices rose again like cautious birds returning after a predator’s shadow. Some students murmured excitedly to one another, mimicking the movements of the spell, their own attempts clumsy and pale. Others simply stared—half in awe, half in fear—unwilling to break the spell of Draco’s performance with their own mediocrity.
But one figure remained still.
Unmoving.
Tom Riddle hadn’t shifted a muscle.
He sat perfectly poised—hands folded on the desk, spine straight, wand untouched, expression carved from marble. A model student. A portrait of immaculate self-control. The very picture of civility.
But his eyes— Merlin, his eyes.
They didn’t blink. They didn’t soften. They didn’t even look impressed.
They looked through Draco.
Black and bottomless, fixed not on the surface of things but on the spaces beneath the skin. Eyes that saw patterns, equations, pressure points. Eyes that dissected instead of admired.
A boy with perfect posture and death behind his gaze.
A boy who had clapped politely, smiled kindly, bowed when spoken to—and carried the hunger of a god beneath his ribs.
And Draco—fool that he was—had stepped straight into it.
Had let himself be drawn in by Tom’s spell. Not a spell of words or wands, but of silence. Of attention. Of power held back like a tide, waiting for the shore to come to it.
He had performed for that gaze. Had burned brightly, had bared his teeth in artistry, had let himself shimmer and spiral like a falling star—and all the while, Tom hadn’t lifted a finger.
He hadn’t needed to.
Because the trap had already been laid.
And Draco had danced to its rhythm, proud and unknowing, not realizing until now—standing here in the aftermath, his pulse slowing and his mouth dry—that he hadn’t been casting magic.
He’d been displaying it.
Offering it.
Like a gift.
Like a sacrifice.
He had been completely in Tom’s spell.
And Tom—brilliant, cruel, patient Tom—had pretended.
Pretended to be provoked. Pretended the display had ruffled his pride, unsettled his ego, stirred some competitive instinct. He had played the part flawlessly—just enough tension in his jaw, just enough sharpness in his tone to make Draco believe he’d struck a nerve.
But it was a lie.
All of it.
There had never been a loss of control, never a moment of true challenge. The spark of rivalry was nothing more than bait, dangled with precision. The entire exchange—a performance not by Draco, but by Tom. Orchestrated. Directed. Executed with surgical precision.
Tom had never felt threatened.
And Tom had sat there, still and watching, like a spider nestled at the center of its web—every vibration deliberate, every reaction studied, every thread exactly where he wanted it to be.
Draco had thought he was dancing above the trap.
In truth, he’d been caught the moment he stepped onto the stage.
The magic, the mastery, the applause—none of it mattered. Because Tom had already wrapped the silk around him, strand by invisible strand. And now, in the quiet aftermath, Draco could feel it—how tightly he was bound, how little room he had left to move.
Tom had let Draco believe he was winning—let him bask in the illusion of control. But he was never anything more than a fly tangled in silk, thrashing on cue. And all the while, Tom had already closed his fingers around him, cool and deliberate, as if cradling something fragile he fully intended to keep all to himself.
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Chapter Text
The following day, Draco moved with the meticulous precision of ritual—each step, each breath measured and deliberate, almost sacred in its silence. He arrived early to every class, slipping into the empty room before even the most punctual Ravenclaws, his presence ghostlike and unobtrusive. He claimed seats nestled deep in shadowed corners, where the fading light hesitated to touch and where Tom’s piercing gaze—sharp as obsidian, twice as cold—could not breach the edges of his vision.
He buried himself in textbooks, their pages blurring into indecipherable lines of ink and spellwork. His eyes scanned the parchment without truly seeing, as if the delicate fibers might hold some secret absolution, some silent salvation to cleanse the weight pressing down on his chest. His fingers traced the ridges of his knuckles with obsessive focus, nails biting into skin, grounding himself in physical sensation to drown out the chaos in his mind.
Every muscle tensed, every nerve strained to avoid the one thing he could no longer face: the figure lingering just beyond his peripheral vision.
He did not sit near him.
He did not look at him.
He did not speak.
He simply couldn’t.
Not after what had happened, not after the slow unspooling of his control at the hands of a boy who played people the way a violinist played strings—every gesture a note, every silence a pause heavy with intention.
Draco had thought he was fencing, sparring in a game of intellect and veiled challenge. He had believed Tom’s attention—sharp, lingering, consuming—was the heat of rivalry, or perhaps the shimmer of a shared hunger to win.
But it hadn’t been that. Not even close.
Tom hadn’t merely manipulated the moment—he had composed it.
With the elegance of a maestro conducting his magnum opus, he had arranged every detail with surgical precision: the cadence of his voice, the silence stretched just long enough to stir tension, the slight tilt of his head like a question left unasked, and every glance—lingering, calculated, almost tender. All of it had been part of a symphony. And Draco... Draco had been the crescendo. The breaking point hidden in the harmony.
The final, shattering note.
Every pause had been a beat in that orchestration. Every restrained word, a deliberate rest in the melody. Each moment of eye contact, every brush of breath across distance, had been silk-thin threads in a web spun with such breathtaking finesse that Draco hadn’t even realized he was being wrapped in it—until he could no longer move without feeling the pull.
He had thought himself clever. Equal. A rival, matched in intellect and ambition. A fire refusing to gutter under Tom’s cold scrutiny.
But he had been wrong.
So utterly, unforgivably wrong.
He had not been the fire. He had been the spark—flickering foolishly in the palm of someone who watched flames not to warm himself, but to possess them. To test how brightly they could burn before closing his hand around them, not to extinguish, but to own.
Now, shame crawled under Draco’s skin like a fever, seething and molten. It moved like sickness, like punishment, pooling in his throat, catching in his lungs. His robes clung to him, suddenly too tight, too suffocating—as if they too had become part of the trap. His magic buzzed uncomfortably under his skin, louder than it had any right to be, as if it too had been fooled by the illusion.
Just moments earlier, he’d broken.
Not with a scream, not with shattering glass or fists through stone—he never unraveled that loudly. No, his undoing came in silence, in the aching clutch of his ribs as he struggled to breathe through the grief clawing its way out of him. It poured through the quiet cracks of his soul, grief long-suppressed, long-swallowed—grief he had no language for.
The mask he wore had slipped. That finely crafted thing of composure and elegance, of pureblood restraint and cold detachment—it had crumbled beneath the weight.
His chest had heaved once. Just once. And then it all spilled loose.
The tears. The guilt. The grief.
And in that moment, he wasn’t anything they had made him to be. Not a Malfoy. Not a soldier. Not a son carved from legacy. He was just a boy. A boy trying not to drown in everything he had lost and everything he had never been allowed to mourn.
His wound was still open—raw, wet, bleeding beneath the surface—when Tom twisted the knife.
He sat rigid, spine strung taut like a bow ready to snap. His posture was too straight, too rehearsed, as though slouching might unravel what little dignity he had left. Every breath was a calculation—carefully measured, deliberately contained, like even that might betray his thoughts if he dared to let go.
His wand rested at his side, untouched. It felt foreign now, like it belonged to someone else. Someone who had trusted their instincts. Someone who hadn’t been led, wide-eyed and willing, straight into a predator’s den.
Because he didn’t trust himself anymore.
Not his instincts.
Not his judgments.
Not the strange, betraying thrill that still pulsed traitorously beneath his shame whenever he remembered—the warmth of Tom’s nearness, the dark gleam of his eyes, the way it had felt to be seen so completely.
And worst of all—still—he could feel him.
Tom’s presence curled just behind him like smoke, intangible and suffocating. Even when he wasn’t looking, even when he knew there was no one standing there, the sensation lingered: a phantom weight against his back, a gaze sliding down his spine. Not imagined. Never imagined.
It was as if Tom had etched himself into the air around Draco. Into the corridors. Into the very rhythm of his heartbeat.
And there was no spell for that kind of haunting.
The sensation was maddening—a delicate, insistent hum at the base of his neck, like the whisper of phantom fingers barely brushing skin. A feeling too subtle to swat away, too persistent to ignore. It prickled just beneath the surface, threading down his spine with the quiet certainty of a presence unseen but deeply known.
He didn’t have to turn to recognize it. The air itself seemed to bend, ever so slightly, around the shape of Tom’s gaze.
Not predatory. Not cruel.
Worse.
It was understanding—complete, unnerving understanding—stripped of judgment, stripped even of desire.
He was not being hated. He was being read.
And that… that was infinitely more dangerous.
That smile still haunted the edges of Draco’s vision, soft and damning like the bloom of ink in water.
It hadn’t mocked. Hadn’t sneered.
It had been indulgent.
The kind of smile worn by someone who no longer needs to reach for what is already drawn to him. The kind of smile that doesn’t hunger—because it has already claimed. A god’s smile, serene and unbothered, not born of conquest but of inevitability. The quiet confidence of divinity, watching the world kneel with grace instead of command.
No violence.
No force.
Just… gravity. And Draco, caught in orbit.
It hadn’t been cruel.
It had been gentle.
But not the gentleness that soothes.
Not the kind meant to protect or console.
It was the kind of gentleness that deceives.
Gentle like silk drenched in rain—cool against the skin at first, until it tightens, clings, binds. Until you realize it’s not comfort at all, but restraint. The kind of gentleness that slips under your guard before you even know there was one. The kind of gentleness that asks nothing, but takes everything.
It was the gentleness of a hand resting too long on your back—steady, possessive, not quite affectionate. The gentleness of touch that doesn’t ask if it may linger, because it already has. The gentleness of lips brushing a wrist not to kiss, but to feel the pulse beneath.
The gentleness of a lover holding something fragile—not to protect it, but to test its breaking point. To tilt it in his palm and wonder what sound it would make if dropped.
Not out of cruelty.
Not even out of malice.
But out of curiosity.
Tom had touched nothing.
Not his sleeve.
Not his skin.
Not a single strand of Draco’s hair.
And yet—Draco felt touched all the same.
As if the air that moved across his skin remembered Tom’s shape. As if his very breath had been filtered through the echo of that voice. As if the space around him still held the imprint of a presence that had never needed to step close to be felt.
Every inhale was laced with him.
Every heartbeat echoed like footfall.
Tom was nowhere.
And still—he was everywhere.
As though Draco had been rewritten beneath the surface.
As though he had become a page Tom had already read—and annotated.
So Draco avoided Tom.
At least for now.
He slipped through corridors before the bell could toll, took seats near windows and shadows, always a few rows too far. His silence was armor, his gaze averted like the closing of a door.
He needed space.
Time to gather the shards of himself and fit them back into something sharp.
A mask, yes—but this time, forged from tempered steel, not polished glass.
He had miscalculated.
Underestimated the allure of Tom Riddle’s charm—not the obvious kind, not the kind worn with a smile and flashy words. No, Tom’s charm was quieter.
More insidious.
It didn’t seduce.
It unraveled.
It coiled around you like smoke, and by the time you noticed it, you were breathing it in.
Draco had thought himself immune. Too sharp, too guarded, too bitter to fall for anything so pretty. He had been raised on the games of men who lied with practiced tongues, who knew the weight of legacy and the seduction of power. He should have recognized the signs.
He’d thought he was smarter.
Smarter than to fall for anyone so clearly, so cunningly constructed.
After all, he was the one who wore masks.
He was the one who twisted perception, who knew how to shift a smile just so, to pull a thread here and unravel someone’s certainty without them ever knowing his hand was on it.
But with Tom—he hadn’t even realized he was playing a game.
And that stung more than anything.
So he avoided him.
Until he could look at that face again and not feel his composure tilt. Until he could meet those eyes and not feel like he was already sinking.
Until the next mask was ready.
Stronger. Sharper. Unbreakable this time.
He would be ready.
And next time, he would be the one falling for his charm.
But what Draco found odd was that Tom hadn’t confronted him.
No sharp words, no quiet insinuations. No lingering presence that forced a conversation. He had let Draco keep his distance, let him retreat into the cold edges of his solitude without protest. And that, perhaps, was the most unnerving part of all.
The absence of pursuit.
Because Tom Riddle didn’t need to chase what would eventually circle back. Patience was a weapon—one wielded with deadly precision—and Draco could feel its edge even in the stillness between them.
The other Slytherins quickly followed suit. Whether out of respect for Tom’s silent decree or a cautious wariness of the strange new seventh-year who arrived cloaked in elegance and mystery, they gave Draco a wide berth. They nodded politely in passing, spoke only when necessary, and otherwise treated him like a locked door at the end of a dimly lit corridor—one no one was foolish or brave enough to try to open.
All except two.
Gideon Foley and Cassian Lestrange.
Gideon didn’t share any of Draco’s classes, but he made a point of appearing in the Great Hall—especially at lunch and dinner—sliding effortlessly into the seat beside Draco as if it had been waiting just for him. Charismatic, loquacious, and utterly at ease, Gideon filled the silence with gossip and half-truths, tidbits that spread through the castle like wildfire.
“Did you hear Tamsin caught her boyfriend kissing one of the Ravenclaw chasers after practice?” he murmured one afternoon over pumpkin juice, a mischievous curl tugging at his lips. “Nearly hexed his eyebrows off.”
Or, “Professor Slughorn’s started giving private lessons to Rosier. Wonder what she bribed him with.”
It was familiar. Disarmingly so.
Gideon reminded Draco of Blaise Zabini—not in appearance, but in instinct. A collector of secrets, a connoisseur of scandal. He didn’t just keep up with the ever-churning rumor mill of Hogwarts; he curated it. Chose what to share, what to keep, and always watched Draco’s face for what landed.
He was easy to talk to. Maybe too easy.
Draco didn’t let himself trust it—but the familiarity of it was a comfort. A tether to something known. The smooth rhythm of social maneuvering, of listening without committing, of letting someone else speak while you carefully measured every word that left your own mouth.
So he let Gideon talk. Let him fill the gaps.
It was easier than thinking. Easier than watching for Tom in the corners of every room. Easier than wondering why the silence between them felt like a held breath, waiting to exhale.
Then there was Cassian Lestrange.
He got on Draco’s nerves.
Not because he was threatening—he wasn’t. Not truly. But because of the way he clung. Like ivy with nowhere else to grow. Persistent. Insistent. Always there. A shadow stitched in silk, too soft to shove away without creating a scene, too deliberate to be mistaken for coincidence.
Cassian was a leech wrapped in opulence—dripping in the kind of aristocratic arrogance that came from centuries of breeding and an unshakeable belief in his own magnetism.
He flirted with the ease of someone who had never been told no. Who wielded charm like a weapon, and attention like currency. It was a performance, and one he played well—voice like velvet, posture relaxed to the point of calculated sin.
Draco, ever the master of cool indifference, met him with frosted precision.
A flick of his eyes.
A single, arched brow.
The frigid steel of silence, honed to a blade and polished daily.
But Cassian didn’t retreat.
If anything, the lack of reaction only spurred him on—as if indifference was just another form of foreplay.
He hovered near Draco in the common room, always under the guise of something justifiable. A question about an Arithmancy assignment. A compliment about the cut of his robes. A casual, too-close lean against the armrest, murmuring, “You always smell like smoke and winter. It suits you.”
He never left without trying to earn a look, a word, a falter.
And the smiles.
Merlin, the smiles.
They stretched across his face like secrets unspooled—drawn, deliberate, heavy with insinuation. They weren’t sweet. They were expectant.
Hungry.
The kind that said, I already know how this ends.
And perhaps he had reason to believe so.
Cassian Lestrange was not unattractive.
Objectively, he was exquisite—like something painted by a doomed romantic who died before finishing the canvas. His hair fell in shoulder-length waves, the color of garnet wine under candlelight. His features were aristocratically sharp—cheekbones carved with cruel precision, a mouth that always curled with amusement too rich to be kind, and eyes the shade of old blood and embered coals.
He moved like he knew how the world would end and had already decided what to wear for the occasion.
Aesthetic, dramatic, intoxicating.
The kind of beauty meant to be admired from a distance, like a cursed portrait in a locked corridor.
But none of it appealed to Draco.
Not the grace.
Not the languid poise.
Not the smoldering stares like smoke curling toward a flame.
There was something off about Cassian—something coiled beneath the surface like a whisper never meant to be heard.
It wasn’t attraction. It was calculation.
The way he watched people wasn’t about curiosity or affection. It was strategy. He catalogued reactions like a player learning his opponent’s tells. His interest in Draco didn’t feel genuine.
It felt possessive.
Fixated.
Like a child obsessed with a toy, not because they wanted it—but because someone else had already touched it.
It wasn’t Cassian’s looks that repelled Draco.
It was his intent.
Cassian wanted things. Visibly. Hungrily.
And Draco had long since learned the danger of people like that—not the cunning ones who cloaked their desires in charm and patience, like Tom, but the ones who reached with open hands and fevered eyes. The ones who didn’t know when to stop.
Cassian didn’t wear interest like a mask; he brandished it like a dagger—blunt, gleaming, and waved too close to the throat.
He didn’t understand silence as a rejection.
No.
To Cassian, silence was a pause between verses. A cue to lean in further. Speak softer. Smile wider. He filled the empty spaces between Draco’s carefully measured words with noise—flattery and suggestion, a slow and steady pressure that never quite let up.
A hand brushing Draco’s sleeve.
A whispered remark about the angle of his jaw after a sleepless night.
A sigh at breakfast, low and lingering: “You really do scowl like a prince banished from his throne.”
It made Draco’s skin itch—an invisible crawling beneath the surface, as if something unwelcome were slithering just under the edges of his composure.
And yet, Cassian was always there.
A shadow at the periphery of his vision, slipping between people like smoke. In the common room, lounging just close enough to catch his eye but never quite touch him—like a storm cloud waiting to thunder. In the library, appearing across from him with a quiet, deliberate grace, sliding into the opposite chair uninvited, as though he belonged there—as though he belonged to Draco.
He hovered like a thought you couldn’t shake.
A footstep behind his own down the stone corridors, too perfectly paced to be coincidence. A brush of fabric against his shoulder in the Great Hall queues. Their paths never quite aligned, and yet Cassian walked with him as if they did.
He smelled of something foreign—amberwood and clove, laced with a whisper of smoke. The kind of scent that caught in your throat, sweet at first, almost luxurious, until it lingered too long and soured into something oppressive.
His presence clung like that. Too much. Too close.
Draco bore it with practiced stillness.
He told himself not to react. That Cassian was beneath his notice. That patience would win out.
There were greater concerns.
There were darker eyes watching him from behind older masks.
He couldn’t afford to be cruel—not now, not over something as petty as a classmate’s unwanted infatuation.
But still. It wore him down.
The accumulation of things.
The way Cassian would let his fingers trail across the edge of Draco’s desk as he passed, too slow to be accidental. The way he’d pause behind his chair, lean down as if to whisper something important, only to murmur something inane like “You hold your quill like it’s a weapon”, breath brushing against Draco’s skin.
Every look was a performance.
Every word a provocation.
And every smile—those unbearable, velvet-lined smiles—felt like a dare.
It wasn’t flattery. It wasn’t even desire.
It was theater.
Cassian didn’t see him.
He saw a shape. A legend in the making. The Peverell heir cloaked in ice and detachment.
He wanted the shell—wanted to crack it, shatter it, wear it.
Draco could feel it in the way Cassian stared. Not with affection. But with intent.
Not admiration.
Acquisition.
He didn’t want to know Draco. He wanted to undo him. To dig into the cold and drag out whatever burned underneath, just to say he’d touched it. Just to see if he could.
It wasn’t about wanting him.
It was about owning the mystery.
And Draco—
Draco had been owned before.
Not by someone like Cassian.
But by someone infinitely more dangerous.
A boy with dark eyes and darker thoughts. A boy who never needed to speak desire aloud, because it curled in every glance like smoke from a smoldering wand. A boy who claimed without touching, who haunted without presence.
Tom hadn’t needed to chase.
Draco had come to him.
And when you’ve been seen by someone like that—when you’ve stood vulnerable beneath a gaze sharp enough to strip the soul—you learn to shield every part of yourself that breathes.
Now, he locked his thoughts behind glacial walls.
He wore silence like a warding spell.
He measured every movement like a tactician on a battlefield.
There was no warmth left in his stillness.
Only calculation.
And still—Cassian circled.
Foolish and fluttering, like a moth too enamored with the flame to realize it was never meant to be held.
Like someone trying to pry open a vault without knowing the curse carved into the lock.
Draco would have thought—hoped, even—that Tom might have intervened. That he’d say something to Cassian. A word. A glance. A shift in tone sharp enough to draw blood. Anything that might have served as acknowledgment—confirmation—that what was happening wasn’t just in Draco’s mind.
Because there was no doubt that Tom knew.
He always knew.
Tom was too observant, too ruthlessly attuned to nuance, to miss the way Cassian lingered like damp fog at Draco’s heels. He noticed things most people never even saw—every sideways glance, every calculated graze of Cassian’s knuckles against Draco’s sleeve, every honey-slick compliment murmured when the room’s attention drifted elsewhere. Every inflection that clung to Draco’s name like it had been rolled in sugar and venom.
Tom saw.
He catalogued.
He knew.
And yet… he did nothing.
Not a word. Not a look. Not even the flicker of disapproval in those unnervingly still eyes. He didn’t bristle. He didn’t blink. He didn’t so much as glance their way in those moments, as though Cassian’s persistence and Draco’s discomfort existed in a pocket of reality too trivial to acknowledge.
Instead, Tom moved through each day cloaked in immaculate composure.
The model student.
Graceful, attentive, perpetually composed. He greeted professors with the sort of old-world courtesy that made them smile indulgently, spoke with a steady charm that never quite rang false—but never rang true, either. He was precise in his spellwork, unerringly elegant with a wand in hand, and patient—almost tender—when tutoring first-years who looked at him like he was something carved from marble and myth.
He was untouchable.
Controlled.
Unshakable.
And it was maddening.
Draco wanted to scream at him.
Say something. Look at him. Make it stop.
He wanted to grab Tom by the collar and force him to see, even though he knew—knew—that Tom already did. It wasn’t ignorance. It wasn’t oversight.
It was deliberate.
He was choosing not to act. Choosing not to intervene. And Draco didn’t know what was worse—that Cassian wouldn’t stop, or that Tom wouldn’t start.
Because that silence? That detachment?
It stung more than Cassian’s whispers ever could.
It made Draco feel… exposed. Unclaimed.
Like something left in the open. Unguarded. Unwanted.
Which was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Stupid.
Because he didn’t belong to Tom.
Not officially. Not publicly. Not even in the way Cassian likely imagined—one pretty Slytherin sinking claws into another for the sake of dominance or novelty.
But there had been something.
Moments. Exchanges. Glances held a fraction too long.
The ghost of heat curled into words never spoken aloud.
Draco remembered them with aching clarity.
The way Tom’s eyes darkened when he was amused.
The press of magic in the air when their hands brushed by accident—or when they didn’t.
There had been a promise, unspoken but real. A claim, not voiced, but felt.
And now… now that promise felt hollow.
Worse—absent.
As if Tom had taken a step back and left Draco to twist under Cassian’s gaze like a marionette with its strings pulled too tight.
Draco’s control—his poise—was fraying.
He could feel it in the taut set of his jaw.
The way his fingers curled into fists beneath the table when Cassian leaned too close.
The way his stomach turned whenever Tom walked past without looking.
And still, Tom said nothing.
Just smiled that careful, unreadable smile.
Just watched the world with eyes that missed nothing—
And refused, somehow, to see.
Draco hated the way it made him feel.
Not just irritated or cornered—but small. Stripped of the power he’d spent years cultivating in every glance, every stride, every precisely chosen silence. Tom’s inaction wasn’t neutral—it was a dismissal. A refusal. A subtle, punishing abandonment dressed up in politeness and political restraint.
And Cassian—Merlin, Cassian seemed to bask in it.
As if Tom’s silence gave him permission.
As if each non-reaction emboldened him further.
Like a parasite sensing weakness in the host, Cassian pressed closer, coiling around Draco’s personal space like he had a right to it. He’d lean across the common room table, his perfume—amber, musk, something too heady—seeping into Draco’s awareness like a gas. He’d tilt his head and ask meaningless questions in that faux-curious voice, eyes flicking to Draco’s lips as if he could taste a response.
Once, he’d gone so far as to brush an imaginary thread from Draco’s shoulder with the back of his knuckles. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t fond. It was a claim—mocking, deliberate, and unforgivable.
Draco had frozen like something cornered. Cold rage knotted in his throat, but he said nothing.
Because saying something would have meant acknowledging it.
Giving it weight.
Giving him weight.
And if Tom wouldn’t step in—not even with a look—then Draco sure as hell wasn’t going to give Cassian the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to him.
So he turned to ice. His voice became glass. Polished, clear, and sharp enough to bleed.
But even frost didn’t deter Cassian. If anything, he seemed delighted by it. Like Draco’s coldness was a new kind of game, a challenge he intended to unravel layer by careful layer.
It made Draco feel filthy—not from the touches themselves, but from the intent behind them. The entitlement. The knowledge that Cassian didn’t see a person when he looked at him.
He saw access.
Prestige.
Power.
All things Draco had worn like a mantle for years, and now wished—desperately—that he could shed, if only to make himself invisible to eyes like Cassian’s.
But he couldn’t.
And Tom—Tom—who could have said one word and ended it all, still said nothing.
He would walk into the common room, his robes perfectly pressed, his expression unreadable as parchment, and move through the space like a ghost untouched by petty mortal things.
Sometimes he’d glance Draco’s way.
But it wasn’t a look of jealousy.
Not of possession.
Not even of concern.
It was worse.
It was clinical. Detached.
Like watching a chessboard reset itself.
Like letting a piece get knocked over—because it didn’t matter until he decided it did.
Draco was used to being wanted. Desired. Envied. Feared.
He wasn’t used to being ignored.
And it hurt in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
Because he didn’t want Tom’s protection, not really. He didn’t need a knight, and he sure as hell wasn’t some simpering damsel in need of rescue.
But he had wanted Tom to care.
To react.
Just once.
Just enough to prove that the flicker of something between them hadn’t been a figment of Draco’s imagination. That those quiet, electric moments weren’t some cruel trick of candlelight and adolescent delusion. That when Tom’s hand had brushed against his—just a second too long—it had meant something.
But now?
Now all he had was silence.
And Cassian’s shadow stretching longer every day.
There were nights when Draco couldn’t sleep—when the dormitory was too still, too full of breath that didn’t belong to him. And in those moments, when the air grew thick and his thoughts turned cruel, he wondered…
Was this Tom’s way of teaching him a lesson?
Withholding. Watching. Waiting for Draco to break.
To come crawling. Begging. Needing him.
It would be so very like him, wouldn’t it?
To orchestrate the entire thing and never say a word.
But Draco wasn’t broken. Not yet.
And if Tom wanted him to beg…
He’d die biting his tongue before he gave him the pleasure.
Still, the question lodged like a splinter:
How long would Tom watch before he intervened?
And when he did—if he did—
Would it be out of care?
Or simply to reclaim what was already his?
Draco felt the coil of fire weave its way into his heart—slow, deliberate, and scalding.
It wasn’t anger, not exactly.
Not the sharp-edged fury he usually wielded when someone insulted him or invaded his space.
No, this was deeper.
Heavier.
It burned in his ribs and licked up his throat like molten pride finally remembering its name.
Because beneath the frustration, the ache, the maddening silence, something had begun to shift.
He felt like himself again—no, not just himself, but something more. Sharpened. Refined. Like a blade that had remembered its purpose.
It wasn’t submission that stirred in his chest now. It wasn’t longing, or some pitiful hope that Tom might one day turn and reach for him with softness.
It was power.
The realization settled over him like armor, and with it came clarity.
He wanted Tom to crawl.
Let him play his little game of apathy. Let him smile his empty smile and look away while others circled Draco like carrion birds. Let him pretend it didn’t matter. Pretend Draco didn’t matter.
He was wrong.
If this was a mind game, then Draco would win. He would rewrite the rules.
If Tom wanted to push, then Draco would pull—harder, deeper—until he dragged him down with him. Until the facade cracked, and those perfect eyes stopped pretending they didn’t see. Until Tom Riddle, golden boy and ghost-king of their common room, broke first.
Draco wanted to see it happen. Needed to.
He wanted to see that mask slip—just once. To watch it fracture under the weight of something real.
A spark of jealousy.
A flash of possessiveness.
A crack in that insufferable control.
He wanted to see Tom lose his grip.
Lose him.
And he wanted it to hurt.
Because if Tom had thought Draco would stay passive, trembling at the edges of his attention like some eager, pining fool, then he’d grossly underestimated what Malfoy blood was made of. He had mistaken composure for compliance.
Silence for surrender.
But Draco Malfoy was not a thing to be overlooked.
He was not a secret to be shelved or a prize to be delayed.
He was a storm held at bay by willpower alone.
And now—now—he had something to prove.
So he smiled, slow and venom-laced, the way a serpent might before sinking its teeth in soft flesh.
It wasn’t revenge.
Not exactly.
Revenge was too crude, too mortal a word for what burned beneath Draco’s skin now.
No, this was something older.
Something deeper.
Primal, even.
A quiet war of wills.
A slow, simmering reckoning cloaked in elegance and silence—a power struggle written in glances, in the spaces between words, in the way two people could look at each other and know that nothing was forgiven.
It was an unspoken duel of masks and mirrors.
Tom had slipped past his defenses once—ghosted in like smoke through a keyhole, uninvited and unstoppable.
And yes, Draco had faltered.
He’d danced to the rhythm of Tom’s symphony, been swept into the precise choreography of it, each note tailored to disarm. He had played the part he was cast for: foil, fascination, reluctant flame.
But he had not broken.
And that made all the difference.
Because now, in the chilled clarity that came after the burn, Draco was learning the steps of his own dance again. Not the one scripted for him by bloodlines or legacy. Not the careful balancing act of his father’s shadow. Not the aching pull of Tom Riddle’s gravity.
No—his.
Pure.
Untethered.
Furious in its grace.
The realization bloomed slowly, like frost melting from a locked windowpane, revealing the world again: He hadn’t lost.
Not his mind. Not his pride. Not the sharpness that had always been his greatest weapon.
He still had his edges—cut glass and quiet fury.
He still had his instincts—honed now, scarred and sleek, no longer naive to charm dressed as concern or cruelty masked by fascination. They had failed him once, yes, underestimating the abyss that lay behind Tom’s eyes. But Draco Malfoy had never been a fool for long. Not in his own time. Not even now.
He was remembering.
He was returning.
Because he had been the Prince of Slytherin once—effortlessly so. A crown without contest. A name that carried weight before he ever spoke it aloud. And while the castle around him had shifted with the years, and the players had changed their faces and their masks, the game was still the same.
And some thrones—
Some thrones could be claimed without announcement.
No coronation. No bloodshed. Just a glance.
A smile.
A silence that dared the room to speak first.
Draco didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.
He was the echo.
He was the flame.
And if Tom Riddle thought this would be easy—if he believed for even a moment that Draco would remain the elegant shadow trailing behind him, silent and burning—
He would be wrong.
Because the thing about fire is this:
You can light it.
You can shape it.
But once it learns how to breathe on its own—
You cannot contain it.
Draco woke with the weight of decision coiled like fire in his chest, a heat that spread through his ribs and into his spine, stiffening it with purpose.
No more waiting.
No more retreating.
He had slipped into the shadows long enough, worn silence like penance, caution like chains. If Tom Riddle thought this game would end with Draco’s surrender—with him crawling back, desperate for scraps of attention—he was sorely mistaken.
Draco Malfoy did not beg. He commanded.
The morning light bled through the tall, narrow dormitory windows, pale and cold as silver, but Draco burned with color.
With life.
With something dangerous and dazzling and his.
He dressed slowly, deliberately, each motion a silent proclamation. There was no rush—only ritual, the quiet ceremony of assembling himself piece by piece. He selected the sharpest uniform he owned, the one tailored with ruthless precision, as if stitched by a hand that knew the art of worship.
The fabric clung to him like a vow. It sculpted the breadth of his chest, tracing the subtle muscle beneath pale skin. The cut drew in at his waist with mathematical elegance, accentuating the lean, aristocratic lines of his figure—the kind of beauty that was not delicate, but dangerous. There was a grace to him, honed and deliberate, like a blade forged too finely to dull.
The trousers hugged his hips and molded to his thighs with quiet insistence, shifting just enough when he moved to hint at strength beneath restraint. Every step was fluid, feline, an echo of poise born from generations of breeding—and rebellion.
He was made of angles and grace, of cold fire and silk-thread tension. From the slope of his neck to the whisper of fabric against his calves, he looked like something carved from starlight and stone—too refined to be real, too striking to be ignored.
He didn’t just wear the uniform. He inhabited it.
And in it, he became not a boy playing soldier—but a vision.
Elegant. Untouchable. Beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful—something to be watched in awe, and feared in silence.
He let his platinum blond hair fall looser than etiquette allowed—softer, more unruly, laced with a defiance that no grooming charm dared touch. It curled faintly at the ends, not from neglect, but intention. Like the flick of a quill stilled mid-word, it hovered at the edge of refinement and ruin. Strands brushed messily against his brows, casting delicate shadows over his silver-blue eyes in a way that whispered of sleepless nights, of untamed thoughts, of rules remembered only to be broken.
Too soft, too wild, for any pureblood heir.
But never careless.
No—calculated.
He looked like a portrait smudged by the artist’s own desire, a flaw brushed deliberately across perfection to draw the eye and trap it there. A seductive imbalance, the kind of disarray that invited obsession. The kind of beauty that dared you to look closer, and promised you’d never look away.
His skin was pale marble veined with life—cool in its stillness, but warm where the candlelight touched. It shimmered with quiet radiance, like stone kept close to the heart, luminous and impossibly smooth. Yet beneath its flawlessness lay depth—something real, something aching. At the open notch of his cloak, his collarbones rose like the sweep of wings caught mid-breath: elegant, exposed, touchable. They spoke of fragility wrapped in steel, of a boy sculpted into something otherworldly but never untouchable.
He moved like a secret that knew its power.
Not quite inviting—but never denying.
A vision made flesh—beautiful, dangerous, and seduction written into the angles of his face.
And then there were his eyes.
Silver-blue—glacial at a glance, the kind of cold that once kept people at arm’s length without needing a word. They were the eyes of someone taught restraint, not tenderness. Sculpted into stillness. Polished like mirrors to reflect nothing but the proper mask. Eyes trained into distance, into composure, into silence so practiced it became a second skin. Eyes that had learned not to flinch even when the world tried to break him—especially then.
But now… now they gleamed like tempered gemstones.
Not the pristine frost of aristocracy, but something far older, far more dangerous. This was beauty forged, not inherited—hardened by pressure, darkened by grief, sharpened by betrayal. Icy, yes, but threaded through with fire. A glint just beneath the surface, subtle as breath on glass, alive beneath the cold like coals banked in snow.
Not dead stars—but falling ones.
Stars that chose when to fall, and what to burn on the way down.
They glittered with something unspoken, something electric. A tension that flickered like light on a knife’s edge—elegant, precise, and lethal if touched wrong. It wasn’t quite longing, but it wasn’t entirely cruelty either. It lived somewhere in between: challenge and invitation, hunger and restraint. A question asked with no words, sharp and glittering in the dark.
And beneath it all—something primal.
As if the boy behind those eyes had seen everything, and still chose to stand. As if he knew what it was to starve, and was only now remembering what it felt like to want.
A boy who had spent too long pretending not to want.
And now—now—with the subtlest narrowing of his gaze, he remembered.
That wanting was a weapon too.
He caught his reflection in the beveled mirror—and for once, he didn’t look away.
The candlelight fractured along the cut-glass edges, scattering in golden shards that clung to him like whispered secrets. It kissed the sharp lines of his face with a kind of reverence, gilding the high sweep of his cheekbones, catching in the pale arch of his brow, skimming the slope of his nose before dissolving into shadow. The hollows beneath his eyes—too deep for his age—softened, etched not by vanity but by sleeplessness, by the weight of thoughts carried too long in silence.
The mirror did not flatter. It did not lie. It revealed.
And still, he looked.
He let himself see it—see him. Not the heir. Not the name. But the boy beneath the centuries-old script of legacy and obedience. The boy twisted into posture, manners, elegance—all pressed too tightly into his bones. The boy who had learned to speak in the quiet tongue of control. Who had swallowed grief in exchange for grace. Who had worn perfection like armor, like penance.
But here, in the flicker and hush of the dark, the illusion loosened. The seams unraveled. What stared back at him was not the sculpted creation of a bloodline, but something else—someone else.
Raw.
Unvarnished.
Real.
He saw the tension in his jaw—not pride, but restraint worn thin. The subtle downturn of his lips, as though a truth sat bitter on his tongue and refused to be swallowed. His eyes—those silver-blue depths—held no artifice now. Just ache. Just the aftermath of wanting too long without permission.
He looked like someone who had nearly forgotten how to feel. And now that he did, didn’t know where to put it.
And in the fractured glass, in the echo of his own gaze, he found not shame.
Not fear.
But fire.
Not a blaze, not yet. But the ember of something long-buried and still alive. It smoldered behind his eyes, quiet and steady, like a secret held close to the ribs. A heat that had survived beneath ice, waiting for the moment it would be seen.
His hand stilled at his collar.
He tilted his head slightly.
Not to admire. Not really.
But to confirm.
To trace the sharp cut of his jaw, honed not by vanity but by the pressure of expectation. To catch the flicker—brief, raw—behind his gaze, something unrefined and utterly human. A truth he’d spent too long swallowing.
There was rebellion in the subtle downturn of his mouth, a defiance too elegant to shout. It didn’t need to. It lived in the quiet. In the poise too precise to be accidental, in the refusal to avert his gaze from his own reflection. It lived in the stillness, in the disciplined tension of someone who had learned to endure—but who now, finally, chose to see. Not the shape they had carved him into, but the shape he had survived to become.
The air shifted.
Colder. Heavier. As if the very room remembered what he had spent years trying to forget. As if the shadows gathered, not to obscure him, but to witness. To bear silent testimony to a thousand tiny betrayals he had once called growing up.
The silence around him thickened, full of ghosts: the weight of long-dead expectations, of words never spoken, of griefs pressed into pressed shirts and mirrored shoes. It smelled faintly of candle wax and old wood and something else beneath—something metallic, like memory drawn too sharp.
It was the scent of almosts.
Of what might’ve been, had frost not been etched into his bloodline like a birthright. Had every instinct to reach, to ache, to burn not been smothered beneath silver spoons and centuries of silence.
Yes.
This.
This was the truth buried under all that ice. Not a hollow heir. Not a polished puppet made for ceremony and sacrifice.
But a boy carved from silence—
—and never silence itself.
A boy who had once burned quietly behind glass.
And who, now, beneath the low gleam of candlelight and the cold hush of reckoning, had begun to burn again.
Not wildly.
Not yet.
But steadily.
Surely.
And this time, the flame would not go out.
He would walk into breakfast like a prince returned from exile—unchanged in stature, perhaps, but transformed in presence. There would be no smile gracing his mouth, no obvious declaration of triumph. But there would be something in the set of his shoulders, in the calm deliberation of his step. A stillness that rang louder than bravado. A clarity too sharp to be ignored.
Alive.
Present.
Intentional.
He would take his seat like he belonged there—not because of name or blood, but because he had chosen to. He would sip his tea without haste. Let himself laugh, if the moment called for it. Let his scowl linger when it didn’t. He would no longer flinch from Tom’s gaze like it held dominion over him. No longer bow to that quiet gravity across the room.
He would meet it.
Match it.
Outlast it.
Because this—all of this—was no longer about proving something to Tom Riddle. It never truly had been. Not beneath the surface.
This was about reclaiming something.
His body. His breath. The cadence of his own damn heartbeat.
The way he moved through a room—not as an ornament of legacy, but as a living, breathing thing.
The way he felt—unshackled from the chill that had once preserved him like glass.
The way he had always wanted to feel.
Untethered.
Not fearless, but no longer ruled by fear.
Not loud, but no longer muffled by his own restraint.
He wasn’t a Gryffindor, all flame and reckless truth.
Wasn’t a Hufflepuff, all gentled hands and heart-on-sleeve tenderness.
He was something colder.
Sharper.
Like frost turned blade.
But that didn’t mean he had to be empty.
Didn’t mean he had to ghost through his own life, beautiful and silent and aching.
He was done pretending.
Done shrinking.
Done swallowing every flicker of emotion just to keep the mask from cracking.
And if Tom—brilliant, cruel, infuriating Tom—wanted to play with fire, then so be it.
He would soon learn what it meant to reach for a boy who burned quietly—like the slow, relentless heat of the sun.
Draco straightened the collar of his robes with a deliberate flick of his fingers, the crisp fabric snapping into place like a silent declaration. He rolled his sleeves just high enough to reveal the pale blue veins tracing delicate rivers along his wrists and hands—barely enough to tease, a whisper of skin exposed, promising without surrendering. His posture eased, shifting from rigid aristocracy into something far more fluid—sleek, confident, a subtle defiance wrapped in polished grace.
A challenge embodied in every measured step, unyielding and magnetic.
Let Tom Riddle look.
Let him pretend he didn’t.
Draco no longer waited in the shadows for attention; he stepped forward,not just into the light but to command it.
Draco descended the stairs from the dungeons like a shadow slipping free from its gloom. Each step was deliberate, heels clicking softly against the worn stone, the hem of his robes brushing with quiet rebellion. The air hung heavy with the scent of damp earth and ancient magic, but beneath it all clung something sharper to his skin—vervain, bergamot, and the unmistakable chill of frost. Something alive. Something dangerous.
He didn’t hurry, nor did he cower in silence. He arrived—whole and deliberate—his shoulders squared, his head held high, the measured poise he had once learned walking beside his father into courtrooms. But this morning, the Malfoy mask was nowhere to be found. No sneer curled coldly on his lips. No practiced neutrality veiled his expression.
Only purpose.
And the moment he stepped into the broad corridor outside the Great Hall, he felt it—the subtle shift in the air, the electric pulse of change, as if the very castle held its breath to watch him claim the day.
A breath caught, fragile and sudden, like the first crack of ice on a frozen lake. Voices faltered—whispers hung suspended, words left unfinished. Two Ravenclaws paused mid-conversation, blinking too quickly, their eyes darting away as if caught in a forbidden glance. A sixth-year Slytherin girl nearly collided with a towering suit of armor, saved only by the sharp tug of her friend’s arm. Somewhere close by, a book slipped from trembling fingers, thudding softly against the cold flagstones—forgotten, abandoned.
Draco didn’t meet their eyes—not once—but he took it all in with effortless precision. Every stammered heartbeat, every sideways glance, every pair of eyes tracing the sharp cut of his robes, the rigid line of his jaw, the unapologetic ease woven into his every step. Today, the castle wasn’t humming with gossip or veiled whispers of scandal. No, not about disgraced bloodlines or whispered curses that crawled through generations.
It was something purer, more elemental.
They were looking at him.
Like a spell uttered in a language both ancient and strange—familiar, yet fractured in all the ways that made it dangerously magnetic.
But Draco’s gaze was not meant for them.
He was looking for him.
Tom Riddle.
He wanted to see it—the flicker of something dark and sharp—jealousy ignite behind those cold, dark eyes.
To watch Tom drown in it, slow and inevitable, like a tide pulling under everything he thought he controlled.
The Great Hall stretched wide and grand beneath its enchanted ceiling, a vast canvas of stone and magic. Tall stained-glass windows soared toward the vaulted arches, their vibrant panes catching the morning light and fracturing it into kaleidoscopes of ruby, sapphire, emerald, and gold.
The long wooden tables, polished to a deep gleam, stood like ancient sentinels, their surfaces reflecting shards of color that danced and shimmered with every flicker of the enchanted flames burning in the iron chandeliers above. The enchanted ceiling reflected a bright, cloudless sky—the pale blue of early summer stretched infinitely above, streaked with golden sunlight that poured down as if the heavens themselves had drawn closer. Wisps of high, feathered clouds drifted lazily overhead, their soft movement mirrored in the slow sway of the floating candles below, suspended like stars in daylight.
The buzz of early morning chatter hummed softly, a murmur of half-awake voices and clinking cutlery, but as Draco crossed the threshold, the sound seemed to recede—dampened, hushed—like a sudden cold draft slipping through the warmth of a crowded room. The air grew still, charged with something unseen but undeniable, as if the hall itself had paused to take notice.
Sunlight streamed through the stained glass in slanted beams, pooling at Draco’s feet like molten light. He moved through it as though born to belong in that prism of color and quiet shadow—each step deliberate, each breath measured—an unspoken challenge cast in gold and silence, as if the sky above had opened just to crown him in its glow.
He didn’t go to his usual seat.
He took his time—unhurried, unbothered—eyes sweeping lazily across the Great Hall, grazing over faces with practiced detachment. It was a performance of indifference, but every movement was precise. Calculated. Until his gaze reached the Slytherin table.
Until it landed on him.
Tom Riddle.
He sat where he always did—centered, poised, a still point in the chaos of adolescent ambition. There was an elegance to him that defied age: spine straight, shoulders relaxed, every angle deliberate. His robes, dark and immaculate, clung to him with the kind of ease one couldn’t fake. His hands were folded atop a book he hadn’t turned the page of in minutes. The meal beside him remained untouched—forgotten, irrelevant.
Because his eyes weren’t on the page.
They were already on Draco.
And gods, those eyes—dark as ink, and twice as dangerous. Deep-set beneath a sweep of shadowed lashes, they glittered in the morning light, sharp and fathomless, a storm barely held in check. There was no welcome in them. No curiosity. Only focus. Like a knife held steady. Like hunger learned to masquerade as stillness.
Draco met that stare—unflinching.
Across the table, the Slytherins felt the shift. Conversation dulled. A few turned, subtle as whispers, following Tom’s gaze, then Draco’s. A third-year boy dropped his toast. A sixth-year girl blinked too slowly, as though caught between admiration and dread. They felt it in their chests, even if they couldn’t name it—an electricity that didn’t belong in the mundane morning light. Something ancient. Territorial.
Two stars caught in each other’s gravity, cold and bright and doomed to collide.
Tom didn’t blink. Didn’t move.
But something had changed—a tension threaded beneath his otherwise flawless composure. A stillness that no longer felt passive. His beauty was the kind that demanded attention even at rest, but now—under the light of the enchanted ceiling, with Draco standing proud in fractured color—he looked almost otherworldly.
Not a boy. Not even a prince.
But a god contemplating worship. Or war.
He let the moment stretch. Let the silence between them sing louder than words ever could. That eye contact lingered just too long, just too boldly—measured, deliberate, a blade unsheathed without haste. There was no flicker of nervousness in Draco’s gaze. No stammer in his soul. His lips didn’t curl, but his eyes did the smirking for him: See me. You always do. So stop pretending you don’t.
Then, with a grace that felt like defiance, he turned—unhurried, unbothered—and chose his seat. Not across the hall, not too close. But close enough. A few places down the Slytherin table, where the light still touched him, and Tom’s peripheral vision couldn’t ignore him. The angle was perfect—designed not for confrontation, but intrusion. The kind that lingered in a corner of thought, impossible to blink away.
Draco poured himself a cup of tea with meticulous calm. No sugar. A single stir. The ceramic clinked softly against silver, each motion steeped in intention. His fingers moved with the elegance of habit, but underneath—beneath the smooth exterior—something sparked.
Alive.
Thrumming. Thriving. Burning.
Not with rage. Not with grief.
With clarity.
Let Tom try to decipher it. Let him feel that subtle tilt in the universe—the unspoken dissonance in a song he thought he’d orchestrated. Let him wrestle with the discomfort of something uncoiling, wild and sovereign, just beyond his reach.
Because this time, Draco wasn’t dancing to Tom’s rhythm.
He was rewriting the melody.
One breath at a time. One glance. One impossibly quiet rebellion.
And Tom Riddle—brilliant, beautiful, terrifying Tom—could either follow…
Or falter.
Because what stood before him now was not a pawn, not a curiosity, not a prize to win or a mirror to tilt.
It was a fire lit in silence.
And it would not beg to be seen.
It would blaze.
Gideon plopped down next to him, all elbows and long limbs, his mouth parted in open surprise as he gave Draco a once-over. “You look… different.”
Draco didn’t so much as blink. He reached for his tea with steady fingers and murmured, “Do I?”
Gideon, never one for subtlety, grabbed a piece of toast and bit into it like it owed him something. Crumbs flew. “Yeah,” he said thickly through the mouthful. “Something’s changed. You seem… not uptight.”
A soft chuckle escaped Draco before he could stop it—low and dry and undeniably real. It slipped past his lips like smoke, startling Gideon so thoroughly he nearly dropped his toast.
Across the table, a third-year blinked. A girl further down the bench actually leaned forward. Eyes turned, like the table had collectively realized something rare was unfolding. Draco Peverell—cool, poised, inscrutable Draco—had laughed.
Gideon stared at him. “Merlin’s arse,” he whispered, eyes wide. “Did you just—laugh? Are you ill? Is this a curse? Should I call—?”
“I’ve adjusted,” Draco interrupted simply, swirling the spoon in his tea once, then setting it down with quiet finality.
“Adjusted,” Gideon repeated, still staring like Draco had sprouted wings. “To what?”
Draco took a slow sip of his tea, the porcelain cool against his lips, eyes steady on the steam curling upward as if the answer might be written in vapor. He didn’t respond right away. Let the question hang. Let Gideon stew in it, because the truth wasn’t really for him—not entirely.
“To myself,” he said at last, voice low, velvet-edged. Not performative. Not defensive. Just...true.
Gideon blinked, chewing slowly now, like the weight of those words required something firmer than bread to process. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, almost reverently. “What happened last night? Did you get hexed with a personality?”
Draco didn’t dignify that with a reply. He didn’t have to.
Because the others were still watching. Pretending not to, but failing. A Hufflepuff from another table was whispering behind a palm. A Ravenclaw across the aisle stared too long before remembering his eggs. Even the Slytherins were restless—shoulders angling subtly toward him, conversations halting mid-sentence, like they’d sensed something elemental had shifted.
It wasn’t the way he looked—though he looked good, and knew it. It wasn’t the way he carried himself—though there was an undeniable newness in the looseness of his spine, the quiet pride in his chin.
It was energy.
Something in the air around him had changed frequencies.
And Tom could feel it too.
Draco knew because he hadn’t looked away. Not once. The book on the table before him remained open, but unread. His long fingers tapped once against the page, a measured rhythm that gave nothing away—except the fact that he was listening. Watching. Tracking.
Their seats were angled just wrong enough to make eye contact difficult without effort. And yet Draco felt Tom’s gaze like static against his skin. Measured. Invasive. Curious.
Good, Draco thought, lifting his tea again. Let him look. Let him wonder.
Gideon, oblivious to the subtler tension running under the surface like a live wire, leaned in with a conspiratorial whisper. “Is this about Riddle?” he asked, entirely too loud.
Draco set his cup down with a soft clink. His gaze slid sideways, ice and steel. “Gideon.”
“Right. Shutting up now.” Gideon took another savage bite of toast, muttering something unintelligible about “terrifying glowy eyes” and “manicured vengeance.”
Draco allowed himself the smallest tilt of his lips. Not quite a smile. Not quite not.
Then he glanced—just briefly—toward the head of the table, toward him.
And found Tom already watching again. Chin in hand, expression unreadable but utterly present.
The kind of gaze that didn’t just observe.
It dissected.
It marked.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He tilted his head ever so slightly, and held that stare.
No games this time.
No coyness.
Just heat, direct and dangerous, pulsing quietly beneath the surface.
Let Tom make of it what he would.
Let him burn, if he dared.
Gideon, entirely lacking in grace or timing, glanced back up with half a piece of toast stuffed in his mouth and an expression of dawning mischief. Crumbs clung to the corner of his lip like a warning sign. Draco clocked it a second too late.
“Ohhh,” Gideon breathed around the crust, eyes bouncing from Draco to Tom like he was watching a particularly salacious game of wizarding chess. “It is about Riddle.”
Draco gave him a long, withering look. “Do try not to aspirate on your own idiocy.”
Unbothered, Gideon grinned, chewing noisily as if toast alone could give him strength in the face of Draco’s disdain. “Can’t believe I didn’t see it before. You’ve got that—what do they call it—‘I’m gonna ruin a handsome prefect’s day’ look.”
“I’m going to ruin your morning if you keep speaking.”
Gideon held up a hand, palm-out in mock surrender, but his mouth kept moving. “Look, I’m not judging. He’s weirdly attractive in a terrifying, possibly-hexed-my-dog sort of way. All cheekbones and world domination. I get it.”
Draco stared at him.
“You do not get it.”
“I do! It’s the ‘he reads murder poetry in the bath’ vibe. Deadly and dreamy.”
“He’s a sociopath.”
“Sure,” Gideon said, nodding sagely. “But your sociopath.”
Draco groaned quietly, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Across the table, someone choked on pumpkin juice. Two fourth-years were now definitely listening. A fifth-year Prefect angled her mirror compact just enough to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping.
Gideon leaned closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “So what’s the plan? Seduce and destroy? Or destroy and then seduce? Because you’ve got the hair for both.”
Draco’s sigh was glacial. “The plan, Gideon, is for you to stop speaking before I transfigure your toast into a kneazle and let it claw its way through your digestive tract.”
Gideon took another defiant bite. “Still sounds like flirting to me.”
Draco turned deliberately back to his tea, but his lips—damn them—twitched. Just slightly. A ghost of a smirk. Enough to make Gideon beam in triumph.
And down the table, Tom Riddle watched them like he was learning a new language. One he intended to master.
One he wouldn’t allow to be spoken without him.
And then, of course— the other one.
The only other fool brave enough or daft enough to talk to him,
had to make his presence known.
Cassian Lestrange slid into the seat opposite Draco with the elegance of a cat who knew exactly how sharp its claws were—and how pretty. His robes were a deep emerald silk, creased just enough to look effortless, with his Slytherin tie knotted artfully loose, collar half-up like he’d run from something or someone and hadn’t cared to fix it. His presence was deliberate, rakish, and entirely too familiar.
He leaned forward, bracing his chin on the back of his fingers, and smiled—smug, slow, and shaded with mischief. “Morning, beautiful. You look… sinfully well-rested.”
Draco didn’t even blink. “You look like you dressed in the dark.”
Cassian’s grin widened, unfazed. “And yet here you are, looking me straight in the eye. I must be doing something right.”
Beside Draco, Gideon made a strangled sound around his tea. “Not this again. Someone hand me a fork. I’m gouging my ears out.”
Cassian shot him a glance like one might give a housefly: vaguely tolerant. “Relax, Gideon. I’m merely admiring the sunrise.”
Draco stirred his tea once, silver spoon clinking soft as a warning. “If I’m the sunrise, you’re a very unfortunate moth.”
“Mmm, burn me, then,” Cassian said smoothly, eyes dancing. “Tell me what’s changed, Peverell. You’re glowing. Positively radiant. Either you’ve discovered an elixir of youth or someone finally kissed the ice prince awake.”
“But if that’s true,” he murmured, the warmth draining from his voice until only silk and steel remained, smooth as sin and just as deadly, “I might have to go to Azkaban once I’m done with them.”
That earned him a look. Not annoyed—something cooler. Amused, maybe. Dangerous.
Draco’s lips curved faintly, but the words were velveted steel. “Careful, Lestrange. You’re beginning to sound desperate.”
Cassian leaned back, utterly delighted. “Ah. There’s the bite I’ve missed. Say what you will, but you’ve changed. You used to glide. Now you stalk.”
“I’m not looking at you.”
“Pity,” Cassian murmured, the word curling off his tongue like smoke—soft, but edged with something flammable. “Because he is.”
He didn’t mean for the jealousy to show. But it was there, rising in his throat like bile, bitter and burning. He clenched his jaw, but it did nothing to ease the sharp, twisting feeling behind his ribs.
Tom Riddle unsettled him. It was a quiet thing at first—like a draft beneath a locked door, or a shiver that didn’t quite belong. But it grew.
Tom wasn’t just clever—he was calculated, every word polished, every move deliberate. There was a gravity to him, an unnatural magnetism that pulled people in whether they meant to fall or not. He didn’t need to raise his voice or posture to command a room. He simply existed at its center, still and watchful, and the world folded around him.
And Cassian had seen it—the flicker. Barely a second, but unmistakable. The way Tom’s eyes lingered on Draco just a moment too long. The slight tilt of his head when Draco spoke, as if memorizing him. It wasn’t friendship. It wasn’t rivalry. It was interest.
Genuine, dangerous interest.
And that chilled Cassian more than he cared to admit.
Because Tom Riddle wasn’t someone who felt things like that. Not love. Not desire. Not attachment. He floated above it all, untouched, uncaring, unreachable. He’d never been interested in anyone—not once in all the years Cassian had known him.
And now he was.
Now he was—and it was Draco.
Cassian’s jaw ached from how tightly he clenched it. The bitter taste of jealousy coiled low in his gut. He didn’t like this new shift in the air. Didn’t like the way Draco seemed curious in return, eyes narrowing thoughtfully when Tom spoke, his usual guardedness softened by some invisible thread weaving between them.
No.
Cassian wouldn’t lose.
He never did.
That got Draco’s attention. Only a flicker, but enough.
Cassian’s eyes cut subtly toward Tom Riddle down the table, his voice dropping to a purr. “He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since you walked in. Not even pretending to read now. Tense, isn’t he? Gorgeous and rattled.”
Gideon coughed pointedly. “You two are going to get me expelled for proximity alone.”
Draco didn’t answer. Not aloud. But his gaze slid toward Tom—precise, slow, unbothered.
Let him look.
Let them all look.
Because Draco wasn’t here to be claimed.
Not anymore.
Cassian’s gaze sharpened like glass catching the sun—dangerously bright, glittering with something that danced between curiosity and cruelty. Predatory. Calculating. He leaned in across the Slytherin table, elbow settling with practiced ease, his voice a silken thread wound tight with amusement and something darker.
“Do you want to make him jealous?”
It wasn’t a real question, not really. More a challenge wrapped in velvet.
Draco didn’t respond right away. He took a measured sip of his tea, movements slow and deliberate, the porcelain cup barely whispering against his lips. Then he tilted his head—not fully, just enough to suggest consideration. A sliver of a smile played at the edge of his mouth, cold and knowing. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“Sure,” he said, voice cool as frostbite.
One heartbeat passed.
Then Cassian moved.
Quick. Smooth. Audacious.
His hand slid against the table for balance, and in the same breath, his other lifted to cradle Draco’s jaw—confident, possessive, the kind of touch that would have been intimate if it hadn’t been so performative. His fingers brushed the hinge of Draco’s jaw with casual reverence, but his eyes flicked past him, unmistakably targeting someone else in the hall.
And then—he kissed him.
It wasn’t soft.
It wasn’t sweet.
It was an act of war wrapped in silk: sharp, claiming, utterly calculated. A provocation disguised as affection. His lips pressed against Draco’s like a brand, unapologetically bold—meant to be seen, not felt.
But the contact lasted less than a second.
Because Draco reacted before thought could intervene.
His hand lashed out, fingers slicing through the air in a blur of motion. The slap cracked against Cassian’s cheek with a sound like lightning splitting stone—a firewhip’s kiss, violent and clean. The shock of it rang through the vaulted chamber of the Great Hall, ricocheting off stained glass and stone pillars and breathless silence.
Every table froze.
And for a moment—just one crystalline, suspended moment—the entire hall was silent. Utterly, absolutely silent.
Chatter died mid-sentence. The clatter of silverware stilled as if struck mute. A ripple of silence spread through the Great Hall like a shockwave, seizing every table in its grasp. Heads turned. Eyes narrowed. Forks hovered inches from plates, forgotten. It was as though the entire room had inhaled—and forgotten how to exhale.
All attention snapped to the Slytherin table.
Draco sat motionless, unblinking, the echo of the moment still crackling in the air around him. His hand hung half-raised in the space between fury and poise, the fingers just beginning to curl as though remembering the strike they’d delivered. His eyes—sharp, glacial—gleamed like cut ice beneath torchlight, unsoftened by regret, unreadable as frost etched across glass. He looked sculpted from stormlight and silver, the only movement in him the slow rise and fall of his chest.
Across from him, Cassian blinked once.
The red mark on his cheek had begun to bloom, a vivid stain against pale skin, spreading like a rose unfurling its petals—slow, deliberate, unapologetically bold. It flushed deeper with each second, not with shame, but heat. His jaw tensed beneath it, not from pain, but from something far more dangerous. The way his mouth parted ever so slightly hinted at astonishment—but more than that, pleasure. Satisfaction. Triumph.
He didn’t reach up to touch the mark.
He didn’t retreat.
He wore it like a medal. A flag. A promise.
A stunned hush settled like a spell cast over the crowd—thick, breathless, and unmoving. It wrapped itself around the Great Hall with the weight of enchantment, stilling limbs and tongues alike. A thousand eyes stared, but no one dared speak. It was the kind of silence that rang louder than noise, suspended on the knife-edge of disbelief.
The moment held—taut and trembling.
Then it broke.
A single breath, a muttered word—and suddenly the hall was alive with sound. Whispers burst forth like a flock of startled birds, low at first, then climbing into a frenzied crescendo. The noise was everywhere, slipping between seats and over tables, rising with the pulse of a collective heartbeat.
Murmurs flared,sharp and hungry, darting from mouth to mouth like wildfire tearing through dry summer grass.
Names became currency.
“Draco.”
“Cassian.”
“Slap.”
“Did you see—?”
“He kissed him—”
“On the mouth—”
Words like kiss and assault and deserved it tangled in the air, spiraling out of control. A dozen different stories took shape at once—none of them whole, all of them more thrilling than the last. Half-truths bloomed like poison flowers, spreading fast, twisting into rumors before they even touched the stone floor.
Scandal.
Fury.
Fascination.
No one knew exactly what had happened—only that something had. Something bold, something forbidden, something that could be whispered about for weeks. Everyone had seen it, but no two accounts would match. That only made it more powerful. It became legend in real time.
At the center of the chaos, Cassian remained perfectly, unnervingly still.
He blinked once—slow, deliberate—lashes lifting as though the world had shifted on its axis and he was savoring the moment. The sharp imprint of Draco’s hand flared across his cheek, a vivid bloom of red against pale skin, like fresh-spilled wine staining cold marble. But he didn’t flinch. He didn’t wince. His mouth parted—not in pain, not in surprise—but in something deeper. Darker.
Desire.
Something perilously close to devotion.
His eyes, gleaming with that same reckless, relentless glint, didn’t waver. They never left Draco. Not for an instant. Not to acknowledge the stunned silence still clinging to the walls, not even as whispers swelled like waves crashing around them. Cassian only looked at him, as though he were witnessing a god descending in fury. As if the sting on his face had sanctified him.
His heart hammered against his ribcage—fast, breathless, almost drunk on the moment. The echo of Draco’s touch still burned on his skin, and he craved it again. Not tenderness. Not affection. But impact. Presence. Power. The slap had not broken him—it had branded him. And he wore it like a badge: raw, bright, and unrepentantly intimate.
The way his jaw tensed, the way his teeth sank into the corner of his lip to keep himself grounded—it all said one thing:
This hadn’t discouraged him.
It had sealed something inside him.
That kiss, reckless and fleeting, had stirred something feral beneath his skin. A hunger. The pain that followed had confirmed it—Draco was real. Untouchable. And he’d touched him.
Across from him, Draco hadn’t moved. He sat with the composure of a prince carved from obsidian, still and elegant, posture untouched by the storm. Like a statue of something ancient and cold, meant to be worshipped from afar. But his eyes—those pale, glacial eyes—glinted with something colder than fury.
How dare he.
Draco’s fingers still tingled with the strike. Not from regret. From restraint. The slap hadn’t just been for Cassian. It had been for himself—to cut short the impulse that had let any of this happen. He hadn’t wanted a kiss.
He’d wanted Tom to react. To feel something. Anything. Jealousy. Rage. Something other than indifference.
And now Cassian had marked the moment with audacity—and Draco had marked him in return.
But not for love.
Not for longing.
For consequence.
And still, Cassian watched him.
Lit from within by obsession.
Marked by a single moment of contact and already begging for another.
Draco, cool as frost, wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve—an elegant gesture stripped of all warmth—and set down his teacup with a kind of deliberate finality, porcelain clicking softly against the saucer. Every motion was poised, precise, like he was conducting a symphony no one else could hear. He didn’t rush. He didn’t raise his voice.
“I didn’t say,” he said, voice like cut glass, smooth and lethal, “you could kiss me.”
The words cut cleaner than the slap had. Each syllable glittered with disdain, wrapped in icy elegance. His tone carried—effortless, controlled—rippling across the still-tense air of the Great Hall like the toll of a warning bell.
Across the table, Gideon froze, toast suspended halfway to his mouth, forgotten. He stared like he’d just witnessed a duel and survived only by sheer distance—like he wasn’t entirely certain whether he’d been a bystander or collateral damage. His mouth hung slightly open, a flicker of toast crumbs dusting his sleeve, as if language itself had momentarily abandoned him.
Cassian, however, looked anything but repentant. The pink bloom on his cheek had darkened to something richer, ruddier, stark against the sharp angles of his face. That damned smile clung stubbornly to the corner of his mouth—a half-smirk, half-provocation that seemed etched into him like a permanent mark. There was a wild, feverish glint in his eyes, as though the pain hadn’t punished him, but baptized him.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said, voice low and rough with thrill, unapologetic in the way fire is to the forest it devours. “You walked in like you owned gravity.”
It wasn’t a compliment. It was an accusation. A confession. A surrender. And Draco didn’t even blink.
He gave Cassian a long, level look—unmoving, unreadable. No fury burned in his gaze. No emotion bloomed across his face. It was colder than rage. More calculated than disdain. The kind of look that didn’t shout or sneer—it simply promised. A warning dressed in silk, the hiss of venom without a raised wand.
“Try it again,” Draco murmured, voice like velvet sheathing a blade, “and I’ll curse your lips to rot out of your mouth.”
The air seemed to still at his words. Somewhere down the table, a fork clinked nervously against a plate. No one laughed. No one dared.
Even the candles above flickered a little lower, as if the shadows themselves were leaning in to listen.
Cassian didn’t respond—not with words. His chest rose and fell in a rhythm just slightly too fast. He wasn’t afraid. He should have been. But no—he looked enthralled. Ruined. His smile faltered, just for a second, as if Draco’s promise had finally registered not as a threat, but as a certainty.
Draco leaned back, resettling in his seat with regal detachment, as though none of it had cost him anything at all. He reached again for his tea, lifted the cup with a grace honed by generations of legacy and war, and took a measured sip.
The silence around him was reverent. Awestruck. And just a little terrified.
As it should be.
He was dismissing him.
Cassian’s smile only deepened, wicked and self-satisfied, though he lifted his hands in a gesture of mock surrender—palms out, fingers loose, like he thought himself charming rather than reckless.
“All right. Noted,” he said smoothly, the heat still lingering on his cheek like a mark of honor. “Just saying… if you want to make him jealous”—his voice dropped, taunting, and he tilted his chin subtly down the length of the Slytherin table—“you’ve done it.”
He didn’t wait for a response.
Instead, he turned on his heel with theatrical ease, the tails of his robes flicking behind him, and sauntered away with a swagger carved from arrogance. There was a triumphant edge to the way he moved, like he believed he’d won something—believed he now had what Tom wanted. As if that kiss had crowned him with something rare and coveted. As if proximity to Draco Peverell meant ownership.
Draco didn’t watch him go. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even blink. But inwardly, he thought how foolish Cassian truly was.
That kiss—the one Cassian thought had drawn them closer—had done the opposite. It had shattered any fragile illusion of affection. It had sullied the air between them. It wasn’t the boldness that repelled Draco, nor the performance. It was the assumption. The belief that he, Draco Peverell , could be claimed like a prize on a battlefield someone else had marked.
No. What Cassian had earned wasn’t favor, but a place on the board.
A pawn.
Nothing more.
And across the hall—still and silent—Tom Riddle watched.
Draco didn’t look. He didn’t need to.
He could feel it. That gaze, that cold fire. Like a second sun pressed to the side of his face—too hot, too focused, too precise. Not warm, not welcome. Blistering. Watching not out of curiosity but ownership, obsession, calculation.
It clung to him.
It burned.
There was no fury in it, not yet. No explosion. But it was the kind of silence before a storm that left the air brittle, the kind that made hair rise at the back of one’s neck. The kind that held its breath only so it could exhale destruction.
Tom wouldn’t let it go. He wasn’t the type.
Draco knew that with the certainty of instinct—of experience. Tom Riddle, once stirred, did not simply move on. He calculated. He buried offense in layers of silence and let it ferment into something precise, controlled, and devastating. And what happened today—the kiss, the slap, the performance—wasn’t something he’d overlook. No, Tom would turn it over in his mind like a puzzle box, picking apart each angle until he found the lever that made it all collapse.
Draco could already feel the consequences circling. Quiet. Invisible. Like pressure building beneath glass, unseen until it shatters. The tension hummed through the air around him, a ripple pulled by a hidden moon—subtle but relentless. He didn’t have to look to know Tom’s eyes were still on him. He could feel them: watching, burning, claiming.
And yet—despite the chill crawling down his spine—there was a thrum in his veins. A spark that hadn’t been there before.
Because Tom had felt something.
He’d cracked. However slightly, however tightly masked—it had been there. A flicker beneath the surface. Not jealousy, not entirely. Something deeper. Something more possessive. More primal. That subtle unraveling of his indifference, the way his silence had sharpened into stillness so complete it trembled—that was the crack Draco had been waiting for.
And it thrilled him.
Dangerous, yes. Reckless, certainly. But real. Finally, real.
The performance with Cassian had cost him more than he liked to admit. The taste of it still lingered bitter on his tongue. But it had worked. Tom had reacted.
And now?
Now the board had changed.
The rules had shifted.
And Draco—cool and composed, but humming with a storm in his chest—sat with the quiet satisfaction of a boy who had thrown a match into dry grass… and was waiting to see how far the fire would spread.
Gideon clutched his imaginary pearls, eyes going wide with theatrical horror. “How scandalous,” he whispered, voice pitched high with glee as he wagged a finger like a disapproving matron.
Then—more serious—he leaned in, his tone dropping to a hushed murmur, thick with implication. “Do you really think it was a good idea—kissing Cassian—when you’re into…?” He trailed off, biting his lip, casting a wary glance around the Great Hall. A few students were already watching. He lowered his voice to a breath. “You-Know-Who.”
The words struck the air like flint.
Draco’s breath caught. Just for a moment. A flicker in his eyes, a pause at the corners of his lips. The name wasn’t even his anymore—not really—but hearing it said aloud, so boldly, so knowingly, sent a strange shiver through the world. The Great Hall felt as though it had blinked—gone still for a single, suspended heartbeat.
Then—unexpectedly—Draco laughed.
It escaped before he could stop it. A low, startled sound, as if disbelief had taken him by surprise. But it didn’t stop there. The laughter caught, rolled, grew into something warmer, lighter—genuine.
It spilled out of him in rippling waves, soft at first, then richer, like water finding its flow. The kind of laugh that didn’t belong to the boy he pretended to be—the cold one, the cruel one—but to something buried beneath it. Something freer. Something dangerously alive.
Gideon grinned, clearly satisfied, and gave him a smug nudge. “See? I knew you weren’t as cold as you pretend. There’s a person under all that frostbite.”
But the room noticed.
Draco could feel it—how the atmosphere shifted in his periphery. Heads turned, subtly or not. Forks froze midair. Whispers redoubled, quiet as moth wings but relentless.
Eyes followed him. Not just from the Slytherin table, though theirs were the sharpest—measuring, suspecting. The Ravenclaws looked up from their books, minds already calculating the implications like an equation. The Hufflepuffs watched with wide, speculative eyes, sensing something soft beneath all the edges. Even the Gryffindors—suspicious and always a little too loud—had begun to lean in, drawn despite themselves.
Because that laugh—it hadn’t been ordinary.
It had cut through the clatter and chatter of breakfast like a charm spell cast without a wand. Rare. Unexpected. Beautiful.
And worse—intentional or not—it had changed something.
There was a pull to it, a magnetism hidden behind the mask. His laughter had echoed with too many things—mystery, danger, maybe even joy—but sharpened, always, with the edge of something that dared to say: Look at me. Try to guess the truth.
And they did.
Gideon was still grinning, sharp and catlike, as if he’d just tossed a lit match into a powder keg for the thrill of it. “What do you think he thinks of that?” he asked, jerking his chin subtly down the length of the table.
Draco didn’t look.
He didn’t need to.
The weight of the stare on him was undeniable—searing, oppressive. Hotter than dragonfire and twice as consuming. Tom Riddle’s silence had its own gravity, its own violence. It didn’t need volume. It didn’t need teeth. It was still. Unrelenting. A blade pressed flat against the skin, waiting for the moment to bite.
That kind of attention didn’t just watch—it carved. Slowly. Precisely. As though it meant to shape him into something else entirely.
Draco, still wearing the faintest smile like a well-cut mask, lifted his teacup with careful grace. His hand didn’t tremble. Not even a twitch. But beneath the calm exterior, his blood thrummed like a ward under pressure, like a curse coiled too tightly to stay dormant for long.
Something had cracked open today. He could feel it—like a fault line splitting beneath his feet.
And whether it was Tom… or himself—he didn’t yet know.
He sat straighter now, spine aligned with effortless grace, posture neither rigid nor relaxed—just right, like a figure born to thrones but weary of ceremony. There was no need to demand attention; he was the center of it, the eye of an invisible storm, composed with the poise of someone who knew exactly what he was and exactly what others saw.
His chin was lifted—not arrogantly, but deliberately, tilted with the kind of subtle elevation that suggested he had risen above the room without ever needing to try. Not unreachable, no, but touched by distance. The high collar of his deep green robes framed his throat like a setting for something rare—noble lines, alabaster skin, a hint of pulse. The fabric moved with him, silent and fluid, every fold perfectly placed, as if even gravity deferred to his elegance.
Platinum strands of hair, usually sleeked back in immaculate control, now fell slightly loose, tousled in a way that looked like accident but spoke of intention. Morning light caught on each strand like it had been spun from moonlight and mirror shards, too bright to be natural, too beautiful to be ignored.
And his mouth—that cruel, sculpted line so often drawn in cold restraint—was curved now. Barely. The softest arc, subtle as a secret. It wasn’t a smile, not really. But there was something in it: the suggestion of something withheld, something dangerous and delicate. Not warmth, not quite. But invitation. Challenge. The promise of edges beneath silk.
Around him, the very air seemed to ripple—charged with that particular tension that follows lightning just before it strikes. A hum of unsaid things. An elegance laced with danger. People didn’t just see him. They felt him, like cold fingers grazing the back of the neck, like the drop in pressure before a storm. The kind of presence that made people straighten without knowing why. That made them watch.
And yet—there had been laughter. Real laughter. Not a smirk, not a sneer, but something bright and human that had slipped through the cracks. Unexpected. Vulnerable. Alive. Like a flame caught behind glass, flickering just long enough to prove it was real.
It made him something more than beautiful.
It made him fascinating.
A contradiction clothed in silk and shadow. A boy who could freeze with a glance… and yet, just then, had chosen not to.
Across the table, Gideon was still chewing, but more slowly now, movements dulled as if he’d forgotten the point of eating altogether. His fork hovered in midair, a lone soldier left behind in the wake of distraction. His gaze kept flickering—drawn inescapably back to Draco, pulled by some invisible current like a moth circling a flame that promised both warmth and ruin. He blinked, tried to look away, tried harder to act unaffected, but the pull was magnetic. Unavoidable.
He wasn’t alone.
Around the hall, students were faltering mid-bite, mid-word, mid-thought. Conversations drifted into silence. Glances—once cautious—became longer, bolder. Some tried to steal them with side-eyes and dropped napkins; others didn’t even pretend to hide it. There was a collective awareness pressing in, a shift in the air like the pressure drop before thunder cracks. Eyes lingered on Draco not because he demanded them—but because something about him refused to be ignored.
He radiated something different this morning. Not just beauty or elegance or poise—he’d always had those. This was something deeper. Sharper. Like the eye of a storm that had ceased its mercy. A calm, regal stillness that spoke of held-back violence, of decisions already made. Power, not announced, but present. Coiled behind every breath, beneath the tilt of his chin and the precision of his silence.
Like a prince no longer pretending to be anything else.
And everyone felt it.
Then—just past the clatter of a dropped spoon, just beyond the tangled murmurs and flickering candlelight—Draco’s gaze snagged on a figure at the far end of the hall. A flicker. A shadow trying too hard not to be seen.
She sat hunched near the edge of the Ravenclaw table, half-curled around her plate as if to make herself smaller. Her robes were too big, her pigtails slightly crooked, and her posture screamed invisibility. She was only a second-year. A Ravenclaw. No reason for him to notice her. No reason at all—except the feeling of being indebted to her for her kindness in another time.
If he could help her—shield her from whatever shadows had begun circling—then he would.
But just as he made that silent promise, his eyes shifted—and caught on a figure he had tried not to look for. Had tried, in vain, to ignore.
Tom.
There, seated in chilling stillness at the Slytherin table. Not eating. Not speaking. Just watching.
Not at Draco, but into him. Like he could strip away flesh and veneer with nothing but the weight of his gaze.
The noise of the Great Hall faded, dulled to a cotton-dampened murmur. Time seemed to stutter. The enchanted ceiling cast cold daylight in fractured patterns across the long tables, but Draco only felt heat—his heat. Not the warmth of fire, but the sunburn sting of too much attention focused on one small point. Like a magnifying glass pressed over his skin, burning slowly.
Tom hadn’t moved a muscle.
His posture was impeccable—shoulders loose, spine straight, hands laced in idle poise atop the table. To the untrained eye, he looked serene, unbothered, a portrait of aristocratic ease carved in stillness. But beneath that sculpted calm, Draco could feel it—the thrum of something far less placid. A tension wound tight as wire. Energy not spent, but stored. Measured. Calculated.
It pulsed around him like a silent wardrum—low, insistent, and growing louder with every heartbeat.
He was all control. All surface. The calm before something inevitable. But it was in his eyes—those eyes—that the truth leaked through.
Not fury. Not lust.
Hunger.
Not like Cassian’s—that clumsy, swelling thing made of pride and reckless heat.
Tom’s hunger was deeper. Older. A blade pressed behind the ribs.
There was no pretense in the way he looked at Draco. No veil of amusement, no lazy curiosity. There was only intention—cold and exquisite. Not desire offered, but promised. Not possession achieved, but possession planned.
It wasn’t the hunger of someone admiring beauty.
It was the hunger of someone already claiming it—quietly, ruthlessly, as if it had always belonged to him.
A promise, soft as a noose.
And Draco didn’t flinch.
He didn’t look away.
He merely let himself be seen, eyes meeting Tom’s with the quiet steel of someone who knew he was being hunted—and didn’t fear it.
A challenge dressed in calm.
And Tom—
Tom dismissed him.
Subtly. Artfully.
Turned his head, just slightly, toward Abraxas, the corner of his mouth curling in response to some jest too thin to matter. He lounged there in his court of snakes and flatterers, the High Serpent enthroned.
His expression was ease personified—
Half-laughing, mouth tilted with that signature blend of charm and menace.
Lashes lowered to veil his eyes, just enough to suggest boredom. Just enough to lie.
It stung. Of course it did. It burned sharp and fast beneath Draco’s ribs, a flare of heat that made his throat tighten. For a moment, he hated how well Tom played this game. How easily he wore indifference like armor, like silk, like skin.
But Draco had seen it.
He knew.
He knew what it had cost Tom to remain so still when Cassian’s lips had brushed Draco’s. He had felt the temperature shift across the hall—the air thicken, sharpen, coil tight.
Tom had felt it.
The burn of possession, of trespass, of something dangerously close to emotion.Tom’s fingers were too still on the table, curled like talons forced to rest. His shoulders were too relaxed, like marble under tension. And that smile—elegant, empty—was wielded like a scalpel.
And now he was pretending. Pretending it didn’t matter. Feigning disinterest. That he was above it all. Above him.
And that, more than anything, told Draco everything he needed to know.
Because only those who care—truly, deeply—go to such lengths to look like they don’t.
Fine.
Draco’s silver-blue gaze dragged over him —slow, assessing, indifferent. Two can play it that way. Like a nobleman glancing at an antique he’d already appraised and found wanting. Then he was the one who turned away.
He rose with the kind of grace that made silence follow. A deliberate uncurling of limbs, spine fluid and straight, like smoke choosing its own path. Draco’s chin lifted as he walked, spine straight, every step a rejection of that dismissal. He was petty—yes—but he was also clever. And what Tom didn’t understand yet was that this—this silence, this coldness, this unspoken challenge—wasn’t going to draw Draco closer.
It would make him retreat.
It would make Tom chase.
Because Draco wasn’t the boy who bowed. Not anymore.
He wouldn’t go crawling to be seen again.
Let Tom burn in his own silence. Let him fester in the space Draco would no longer fill.
He would make Tom seek him.
Not the other way around.
He adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves with an absent flick of his fingers, then ran one hand down the fall of his robe—flattening invisible creases, refining an already faultless silhouette. Polished. Composed. Regal.
He walked past Tom without pause, the scent of bergamot and clove lingering faintly behind him. He didn’t glance over. Didn’t smile. Didn’t stop. But he knew, without needing to look, that Tom had gone still mid-sentence.
He felt it.
The pull in the air. That subtle tension, like gravity had just shifted ever so slightly, like a star had slipped from orbit.
Yes.
Let him notice.
Let him wonder.
Let him burn.
Because Draco wasn’t playing defense anymore. He wasn’t the boy with the fragile walls and polite silence, waiting for Tom Riddle to notice he was bleeding behind the mask. No. He was done bleeding.
He was going to be beautiful.
He was going to be brilliant.
And if Tom Riddle thought he could shape him like clay—if he thought Draco would stay soft beneath his hands—then he was going to learn what it meant to be broken by the very thing he thought he owned.
Draco passed by them like a tide retreating from shore—silent, deliberate, untouchable.
His boots clicked lightly on the stone as he passed the Gryffindor table. There was the usual clash of voices, laughter too loud, elbows jostling over breakfast plates. Fleamont Potter sat near the end, eyebrows furrowed, probably scowling at something a red haired Weasley had said. A girl glanced up as Draco passed, her gaze catching briefly on the unusual looseness of his appearance—his shirt clinging close, hair a little unkempt, the proud rise of his chin. Her eyes narrowed slightly, not with suspicion but curiosity, as if wondering what had changed.
But Draco wasn’t here for them.
He crossed the Great Hall like a knife drawn across silk and stopped in front of the Ravenclaw table. The hum of conversation dulled as heads turned subtly—he was a striking presence, and rare among them.
A Slytherin amongst Ravenclaws?
Unheard of.
Eyes tracked his movement with a kind of quiet reverence, and others with open interest, admiration curling behind their glances.
He barely noticed.
Because she was there.
Myrtle.
She sat alone, tucked at the far end of the table where the morning light from the enchanted ceiling didn’t quite reach. Her porridge sat mostly untouched, spoon stirring absentminded circles as if she’d forgotten it was there. Round glasses slid slowly down her nose, and her dark hair was tied in the same slightly lopsided pigtails he remembered.
She looked small.
Unseen.
A flickering candle in a room full of roaring fireplaces.
But not to Draco.
The ripple of attention he drew was quiet but undeniable—like wind stirring the surface of a still lake. Conversations dimmed into murmurs. A spoon clinked against the edge of a goblet and was not lifted again. Eyes followed him not out of politeness or even curiosity, but something closer to awe.
He was unmistakable.
Too vivid to be unreal, too distant to be mundane. A contrast of impossibilities: cold, beautiful, alive. Each footfall was as silent as snowfall, his long cloak whispering at his heels like shadow trailing starlight. The scent of winter clung faintly to him—clean, crisp, edged in something sharper beneath, like ozone before a storm or old magic disturbed from slumber.
Even in 1942—amid the crisp lines of pressed wool robes, the polished gleam of shined boots, and the ever-present shadow of war creeping like a cold fog through both the Muggle and magical worlds—he stood apart, a whisper of myth woven seamlessly into the fabric of the present. His presence felt timeless, as if he had stepped from the pages of an ancient tale, born not merely of blood but of old spells whispered in forgotten tongues.
The pale, snowy blond of his hair caught the softened morning light filtering through the leaded glass windows, shimmering with an almost ethereal, silvery sheen. Each strand seemed to hold its own subtle glow, a delicate interplay of light and shadow that gave his hair an otherworldly luster. It fell in deliberate disarray, loose tendrils drifting with a careless elegance above his finely arched brows—a small act of defiance against the rigid expectations of his lineage.
This was a rebellion measured in whispers: too free, too fluid for a pure-blood scion bound tightly by ancient tradition. Yet, despite its seeming ease, every movement carried the weight of precision—too poised, too deliberate to ever be truly accidental. In this balance between wildness and control, he embodied both the restraint of his heritage and the restless spark of something beyond it.
His school uniform, while strictly adhering to Hogwarts regulations, bore the mark of a tailored precision that whispered of continental refinement—an elegance rarely seen in the rigid, utilitarian cuts favored by British tailoring. The jacket molded seamlessly to the broad planes of his shoulders, tapering sharply at the waist to emphasize a lithe, sculpted silhouette. From there, the fabric flowed smoothly into trousers cut with exacting lines, slim and perfectly fitted, disappearing neatly into gleaming dragonhide boots polished to a mirror shine.
The green-and-silver Slytherin trim adorned his collar and cuffs with subtle pride, catching the light just enough to announce his house allegiance without shouting it—a quiet but unyielding statement.
He did not stride forward with the clumsy assertion of youth. Instead, he glided—each step measured, fluid, as if carried by an unseen current, a silent command of space and presence that drew eyes without effort.
Peverell was a figure wrapped in distance, a presence no one dared—or managed—to draw near. He carried an air of untouchable poise, his every gesture measured and deliberate, as if he existed just beyond reach. Too reserved, too guarded, he seemed to glide through the world encased in an invisible barrier, one that discouraged familiarity and kept others perpetually at arm’s length.
And yet here he was—walking toward a girl no one else noticed.
Draco reached the end of the Ravenclaw table, his gaze unwavering—not on the clusters of students who had begun to whisper and steal curious glances, but on Myrtle. He caught the flicker of surprise in her wide eyes as they lifted from the dull swirl of porridge in her bowl. That fragile spark of uncertainty kindled briefly in her gaze, as if she had never quite expected anyone like him to look her way.
He did not smirk, nor did he offer a patronizing smile. Instead, he dipped his head in a subtle, courtly nod—an acknowledgment that felt deliberate and rare, as though she were someone truly worth his regard. There was no mockery or condescension here, only a quiet gravity.
“May I join you?” His voice was low and clear, every syllable precise and polished, as if carved from crystal. It held a surprising gentleness beneath its sharp clarity.
Whispers around the hall swelled, the sound rippling like a tide of gossip, but Draco seemed immune to it. His focus never wavered from Myrtle. He had come here for her alone.
For a fleeting moment, the world hushed, allowing him to kneel—not in submission, but in a gesture of kindness.
Myrtle blinked, stunned into silence, her spoon halting mid-stir, clinking softly against the edge of the chipped bowl. Her fingers trembled, hovering just above the rim, caught between disbelief and hope.
Draco waited, patient and unhurried. His posture remained impeccable, but stripped of the usual sneering hauteur that cloaked the pureblood elite. There was no pretense in his tone, no hollow charity in his presence—only intention, and perhaps the faintest trace of something rarer still: respect.
Her lips parted, fragile as a whisper. She adjusted her thick glasses with trembling fingers. “I—yes,” she murmured, voice barely more than a breath, “you… you may sit.”
Draco inclined his head again, more formally now, and slid into the vacant seat opposite her with effortless grace. Each movement was fluid, controlled—measured yet natural. He folded his hands neatly atop the scarred wooden table, giving her his undivided attention.
Myrtle sat stiffly, as though puzzling over a riddle woven into the very fabric of the tablecloth—a cryptic enigma meant only for her. Her spoon lay abandoned, the porridge beneath her elbow congealing slowly in the cold air. Her cheeks bloomed with a soft, mottled pink beneath pale, freckled skin, and she tugged nervously at the frayed hem of her worn sleeves. Her gaze flickered upward, then darted down again, unsure whether this moment was a gift or a trap.
Draco leaned forward just slightly, candlelight catching in the pale strands of his hair, lending them a halo-like glow. He regarded her not with pity or performance, but with a sincere, focused intent.
“How are you, Myrtle?” he asked, voice low and gentle.
Simple words. No enchantment necessary. Yet they landed with the weight of an ancient spell, stirring something deep and long forgotten.
Her eyes widened behind her thick, round glasses, the lenses catching the light and magnifying the raw, unguarded emotion that surged through her. She blinked—once, then again—slow and disbelieving, as though trying to clear a fog that had clung to her for years. Her mouth parted, slack with astonishment, words caught somewhere between breath and thought. The disbelief etched across her features was almost painful in its honesty.
It was clear: no one asked her that.
Not seriously.
Not kindly.
Not ever.
She looked like someone who had spent their whole life scribbled into the margins of a grand story, suddenly and without warning dragged into the center of the page. Exposed. Visible. Real.
“I—I don’t know,” she stammered, her voice thin and brittle, like glassware left too long in the cold. She gave a short, nervous laugh—sharp-edged and awkward—as though startled by the sound of her own response. “No one’s really asked me that before.”
Draco didn’t flinch. He only nodded, slow and steady, his composure untouched. But inside, he could feel it now—feel the air shift around him, heavy and electric. Piercing gazes pressed in from every corner of the Great Hall, silent and sharp, like tiny hooks dragging across skin.
They clung to him.
Curious. Confused. Calculating.
Students from every house had begun to take notice. Hushed murmurs skittered like mice between benches and across the stones beneath enchanted candlelight. It was the kind of attention that came with stakes. The kind that demanded answers.
The Ravenclaws, clustered in the middle of their table, had gone still, whispering behind cupped hands and sideways glances. Some looked toward Myrtle with wide, astonished eyes—others with narrowed brows, mouths tight with disdain. One girl’s lips curled in a sneer she didn’t bother to hide.
From the Gryffindor table, a few turned their heads, bold and unabashed in their gawking. One boy leaned over to mutter something to his friend, who barked a short laugh before both looked back with something between curiosity and incredulity in their eyes.
And Slytherin—
Draco didn’t need to look.
He could feel them.
The stillness. The sudden silence that came not from reverence, but calculation. He imagined the frozen faces, the stiffened postures, the quiet ripple of stunned disbelief threading through them like a spell cast without words.
Their expressions would be masks of confusion first, followed quickly by suspicion. And underneath it all—boiling just beneath the surface—was something darker.
Rage. Disgust.
The Slytherins were undoubtedly wondering why he was speaking to a second-year Mudblood—why Draco Peverell, of all people, born of the oldest, coldest bloodlines, carried by the weight of pedigree and expectation, would lower himself to address someone like Myrtle Warren.
It was written in their eyes—their confusion, their offense, their barely contained disdain. Some stared with parted lips, as if struggling to comprehend the visual before them. Others leaned in to whisper behind palms and silver rings, their voices hushed but venomous, like snakes coiled too tightly in their skins.
She was a nobody.
Worse—she was a Mudblood.
Worse still—she was Myrtle.
And yet he had crossed the hall, glided past prefects and pureblood scions and half-stifled gasps, and seated himself at her table like it was the most natural thing in the world. No sneer on his face. No condescension. Only intention.
To them, it wasn’t just a breach of decorum.
It was sacrilege.
He could almost hear the thoughts churning behind their narrowed eyes:
Why her? Why now? Has he lost his mind? Is this some kind of ploy?
But Draco didn’t move, didn’t waver, didn’t so much as glance toward his housemates. Let them squirm in their starched collars and inherited arrogance. Let them choke on their own disbelief.
He had learned long ago that power wasn’t just in blood or name or who one chose to be seen with.
Sometimes, it was in who one dared to see.
And he had dared.
There was also envy.
Yes. It was there. He could taste it in the air.
Envy in the sharp way a girl two tables away gripped her goblet, knuckles white, sneering over the rim as though she’d just swallowed something sour. Envy in the clenched jaws and narrowed eyes of both boys and girls who stared not at him, but at Myrtle—like she had dared to reach above her station and steal something sacred.
As if she had committed a crime by being seen.
As if kindness itself was treason.
Draco said nothing of it. He didn’t turn, didn’t bristle, didn’t break. Instead, he sat across from Myrtle with perfect stillness, meeting her gaze once more as though she were the only person in the castle worth hearing. And in that moment, under the thousand burning stares, he made no apology for it.
He had chosen her.
And the whole world was watching.
Draco didn’t flinch.
He held the moment in his hands like something sacred—delicate, untarnished—treating her hesitant confession not as something awkward or pitiful, but as if it held weight, worth. His stillness was striking, not frozen but composed, reverent, like a spell suspended in the air. The hush between them wasn’t uncomfortable—it was intentional. Protective.
His posture, always impeccable, remained a study in restraint: shoulders relaxed, chin held high, every movement imbued with that peculiar, aristocratic grace he wore like second skin. And yet, something in him shifted—so subtly it might have gone unnoticed to anyone but Myrtle, whose entire world had sharpened down to the boy seated across from her.
The faintest change ghosted across his features: the tight, imperious set of his mouth softened; the usual coolness in his eyes thinned into something quieter, almost human. The edge smoothed. The steel dulled—but only just. He looked not at her, but into her, as if recognizing not what she was, but who she could be, if only someone let her bloom.
Then, with the calm certainty of someone who never had to raise his voice to be heard, Draco leaned back slightly, giving her space—as if even her uncertainty deserved room to unfold. His voice was low, and crystalline with clarity, yet carried the unshakable weight of belief.
“That’s all right,” he said. “You’ll figure it out.”
Simple. Steady. As if her not knowing herself wasn’t a flaw, but a phase. A path she hadn’t yet walked, not a door closed to her forever.
Myrtle’s breath caught. She stared at him, the light from the floating candles catching in her glasses, glinting off the smudge on one of the lenses. Her lips parted slightly in awe, and her spoon, forgotten again, tipped gently into her untouched tea.
To her, he might as well have rewritten the laws of the universe with that one sentence. Not because he told her who to be—but because, for the first time in her life, someone had looked at her and believed she could become someone at all.
Around them, the Great Hall pulsed with life—forks scraping against plates, goblets clinking, low laughter weaving through conversations like smoke. Torchlight danced along the ancient stone walls, its glow flickering across tapestries and house banners in waves of gold and amber. Overhead, the enchanted ceiling mirrored the evening sky in dreamy hues of violet and ink, twilight clouds drifting lazily across a darkening expanse.
But all of it—the noise, the movement, the shimmer—faded to the edge of perception. Muted. Softened. Like a memory already slipping into the past. Because everyone was watching them.
She could feel it—like static in the air. The way conversations faltered. The way spoons paused mid-stir. From the Gryffindor table: bold, unfiltered stares. From the Slytherins: tense, narrowed eyes and furrowed brows. Ravenclaws whispered behind palms, confused and wary, while Hufflepuffs exchanged looks too wide-eyed to be discreet. Every glance struck her like a raindrop too cold—shocking, impossible to ignore.
They weren’t looking at her the way they usually did—not with mild disdain or practiced indifference. No, they were looking at her because of him.
Because Draco Peverell—aloof, elegant, unreadable—sat across from her like a prince from a half-forgotten tale. Because the boy who never stumbled, never stooped, never strayed from his unassailable grace… had chosen her table. Her company. Her.
And not to mock. Not to draw laughter or bets.
But to speak. To see her.
Kindly.
Gently.
As if she were not some pitiful footnote in Hogwarts’ great, cruel social narrative—but a person. As though her presence had value simply by being.
Her heart pounded hard against her ribs, as though it, too, didn’t know how to hold the moment. There was too much inside her chest now—joy so fierce it ached, dread so sharp it carved out shadows behind her ribs.
Because this—this—was dangerous.
Because now they’d talk. They’d sneer when she passed. They’d tear her apart with questions and comments and the worst kind of ridicule—the kind masked as disbelief.
He didn’t mean it.
You must’ve dreamed it.
Why would someone like him even look at you?
Her fingers, thin and pale, twisted into the hem of her robe, and her voice trembled as it rose—quiet and frayed, like parchment too often handled.
“I… I thought you wouldn’t want to speak to me again.”
Her eyes darted up to his face, hesitant, hopeful, haunted.
“As if it… it was just… once. Just something I imagined.”
Her words weren’t just about breakfast. They were about her. Her whole existence—always too much, always too invisible. And now, seen.
She didn’t dare believe it would last.
Her words sounded smaller this time—shriveled by the weight of fear, delicate as paper left out in the rain. But she said them anyway. She had to. Because some part of her, buried beneath layers of hurt and hollow laughter, didn’t believe this moment was real. And if it was—if by some impossible twist of fate this wasn’t a dream—then it might vanish with her next breath, like mist burned away by morning light.
She looked up at him again. Uncertain. Expectant. Bracing.
And still, Draco didn’t look away.
He didn’t shift. Didn’t sneer. His gaze remained steady, unwavering, as if she were the most natural thing to look at in the world.
But he could read her. Every flicker of doubt, every tremble of hesitation—he saw it in the way her shoulders curled inward, guarding something raw and easily broken. In the way her eyes kept darting—not toward him, but outward—toward the clusters of students watching, whispering, judging. Like she expected at any moment the illusion would crack, the spell would break, and someone would shout the punchline she didn’t know she was part of.
She was waiting for the laughter. For the cruelty. For the inevitable.
And truthfully, Draco couldn’t blame her.
Hogwarts was merciless to those who didn’t belong. To those who sat too far from the center, who spoke out of turn or didn’t speak at all. And Ravenclaw, for all its lofty ideals and keen intellect, could be as vicious as any serpent when it turned inward.
He remembered Luna Lovegood—how the teasing hadn’t begun with the Slytherins or even the Gryffindors. No, it had started with her own house. The ones who should’ve protected her. The students who prided themselves on reason and refinement, but who could not reconcile someone like her—odd, dreamy, radiant in her own strange rhythm—with the narrow definitions of brilliance they had carved into stone.
Myrtle, in many ways, reminded him of that. Not because she was strange—but because she didn’t fit. Because she existed outside the frame, in the corners of the painting others refused to look at. Not clever enough, not composed enough, not cool enough. Too teary, too eager, too much.
And here she was—huddled into herself, shrinking beneath the weight of what she had dared to say. Waiting for the cruelty she believed must follow.
He tilted his head slightly and smiled—not the sly, serpentine curve he wore like armor, not the practiced smirk that had graced Malfoy mouths for generations, but something real. Something soft. It unfolded slowly across his face, like morning sun slipping past frost-covered glass, delicate and startling in its sincerity.
And the sound it drew from the Great Hall was audible.
A hush fell like snowfall, blanketing every house table in stunned stillness. There was the clatter of a spoon dropped mid-air, the rustle of someone shifting in disbelief, a low gasp from somewhere near the Hufflepuffs. Whispers rose like mist from the enchanted stone floor, crackling with incredulous tension.
Because Draco Peverell—enigmatic, aloof, a seventh-year enigma sculpted from marble and myth—was smiling.
Freely.
Beautifully.
At her.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said, his voice quiet but certain, warm enough to cut through the chill that always clung to Hogwarts in early November. “You’re my friend.”
The word struck the air like a bell, its resonance felt more than heard.
Myrtle froze. Her eyes, already wide behind her thick, round glasses, somehow widened further—two magnified orbs of disbelief, wet with unspent tears and raw wonder. Her entire face scrunched in a burst of emotion too tangled to name, as if she’d just been handed a fragile, impossible gift and wasn’t sure whether to unwrap it or run away.
Her hair—thin and stringy, tangled in uneven clumps—hung limply around her cheeks, some strands still askew from where a passing fourth-year had likely tugged it in contempt. Her robe had ink stains on one cuff. Her shoes didn’t match. She looked like someone the world had long since decided to ignore.
And yet.
She raised a trembling hand to her chest, pointing to herself like she wasn’t sure she still existed. Her voice cracked on the edges of the words. “I—I am?”
Her fingers curled slightly, then dropped, as though she feared she might offend reality by asking too much.
She blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear smoke from her vision, peering at him as though searching for a catch, a loophole. “But why would you…?” she began, then faltered, struggling to wrap a sentence around something so foreign. “I mean—you’re a seventh year. And you’re—” She gestured toward him with both hands in helpless frustration, as if he were the contradiction, the impossible variable in an equation that refused to solve.
“You. Everyone wants to sit with you. Be near you. You could talk to anyone.”
Draco didn’t answer right away. He didn’t need to.
Because the questions she wasn’t asking were already there—etched into every twitch of her expression, every stammer and hesitation:
Why me?
What’s the game?
Am I the joke?
Are you going to laugh when I fall for this?
Is this pity dressed in charm?
She didn’t ask them aloud. She didn’t dare.
But Draco saw them. Every single one.
He leaned forward then, slow and deliberate, as though closing a delicate hinge. The space between them shrank by inches—measured, careful, not enough to overwhelm but enough to make her still, statue-like, her breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a whisper.
Myrtle’s fingers twitched where they clutched her robes. Her eyes widened, startled not by fear, but by the unfamiliar ache of being noticed.
And then, gently—so gently it felt more like a memory than a touch—Draco reached out and tousled her hair.
Not roughly. Not mockingly. Just a soft pass of fingers through tangled strands, like the absent affection of an older brother, of someone who had nothing to gain and no audience to impress.
“You remind me of an old friend,” he murmured, and the words settled into the space between them like dust on an untouched shelf—quiet, unshakable, and oddly sacred. His voice held the kind of tenderness that didn’t need to be proven, only given. “Like a little sister I never had.”
That did it.
Myrtle’s lower lip trembled like a leaf in wind. The tears she’d been furiously blinking back swelled all at once, breaching the rim of her lashes as her breath hitched audibly. Her shoulders curled in on themselves as a small, broken sob escaped—raw and exposed, but layered with something beyond sorrow.
Gratitude.
Relief.
A stunned, aching joy.
Because it was too much.
Too much kindness after years of sharp elbows and sharper words. Too much gentleness after being the butt of every whispered joke, every sneer in a corridor. Too much light, after so long in a place that only seemed to reflect her in shadows.
And the worst part—the best part—was that she could tell he meant it.
Not a show.
Not a dare.
Not a trick.
He had looked at her and seen someone worth calling family.
The tears came in earnest now, rolling fast and silent down her cheeks, vanishing into the stiff collar of her second-hand robes. Her glasses slipped slightly down her nose. She didn’t bother fixing them.
And still, even as she cried, Myrtle did not flee. She did not duck her head or wipe her face in shame. She didn’t bolt for the bathroom the way she usually did when the world pressed too hard.
She just looked at him.
Trembling.
Teary.
Glorious in her fragility.
And in her eyes—magnified, red-rimmed, stunned—was the raw, unfiltered expression of someone who had lived her whole life in the cold corners of rooms, and who had just, finally, been invited to sit in the sun.
And for once, no one laughed.
Not a single student.
Not a single whisper.
Because somehow—perhaps just for that moment—Draco Peverell had made it sacred.
Myrtle sniffled again, the sound small and uneven, and clumsily swiped at her face with the frayed end of her robe sleeve. The worn fabric did little good—only smearing saltwater across her cheeks and making her glasses even more fogged and askew. Her round lenses slid low on her nose, barely clinging to her ears, and for a moment she looked like a startled ghost of herself: blotchy-cheeked, teary-eyed, caught between wanting to vanish and needing to be seen.
“I-I’m sorry,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice scraped raw by emotion and shame. “I didn’t mean to cry. I know it’s—” her throat closed up, and she coughed into her sleeve, trying to force control back into her lungs, “it’s embarrassing. I just—”
Her apology dangled in the air, unfinished, half-swallowed by grief.
But Draco moved before the silence could suffocate her.
He reached out again, without hesitation. Without performance. Just a simple, fluid gesture as if this—this—was entirely normal. As though he had every right to touch her, to make this small adjustment without fear of mockery or scandal. His fingers, cool and precise, found the arms of her glasses and gently nudged them back into place.
The motion was careful. Tender in its quietness. His knuckles grazed her temple, feather-light, and lingered there for half a second—just long enough to anchor her before withdrawing.
“You don’t need to apologize,” he said, and the warmth in his voice was enough to undo her all over again. “Not to me.”
The words weren’t grand. They weren’t dramatic or coaxed into poetry. But they landed with weight. Not to me—as if he already knew what it meant to apologize for existing, for being too much or not enough. As if he’d lived it, too.
Myrtle breathed in sharply, the sound rattling in her chest, and though the tears didn’t stop—if anything, they fell faster now—something shifted. Her spine uncurled just a little. Her chin didn’t drop as far. Her hands, which had clenched in her lap like claws, loosened their grip on the fabric of her robes.
Something old and brittle inside her was beginning, impossibly, to relax.
Around them, the Ravenclaw table was paralyzed in a stunned tableau. Forks hovered inches from mouths. A half-bitten piece of toast sagged forgotten in someone’s hand. Butterbeer went cold, untouched. No one spoke. No one dared. The silence wasn’t empty—it was straining, thick with disbelief and unasked questions.
A few younger students stared outright, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as if witnessing a myth come to life. Some of the older Ravenclaws exchanged glances full of sharp confusion, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Trying to puzzle it into logic, into anything that would fit within the neat, brittle architecture of what they thought they understood.
And at the far end of the Slytherin table, eyes burned.
A flash of silver, a flicker of green—subtle, but electric with judgment. Suspicion. Maybe even jealousy. The Slytherins weren’t fools. They knew reputation was a currency more powerful than any spell. And here was Draco Peverell, hoarding his prestige like ancient treasure, choosing—choosing—to spend it on her.
Her.
Myrtle Warren.
The mousy little second-year with puffy eyes and limp hair and a name everyone laughed at when they thought she wasn’t listening.
And yet—there he sat. Darkly elegant. Effortlessly composed. As inscrutable as ever and just as powerful. But now, softened. Illuminated, almost, by the way he looked at her. As if none of the stares mattered. As if the world could press in as tightly as it wanted and he still wouldn’t blink.
Like she mattered.
Like she belonged.
All eyes stayed locked—spellbound—on the boy with the silver eyes and the girl with the tearstained cheeks.
The Great Hall, usually so full of clatter and chatter and morning clamor, held its breath. Even the portraits on the walls seemed to still, their painted inhabitants peering curiously toward the Ravenclaw table, where something fragile and strange and quietly beautiful was unfolding.
Draco leaned back ever so slightly in his seat, subtly angling his body between Myrtle and the watching world. It wasn’t a grand gesture, but it was enough. Enough to shield her from the sharpest edge of their stares. The atmosphere around him shifted like a change in barometric pressure—no longer open and gentle, but heavy with command.
Regal, without trying.
Cold only in the way a blade might be before it strikes.
His expression said everything he didn’t need to: Dare. Say something. I dare you.
No one did.
Even the bravest of the seventh-years stayed silent, sensing the balance of power had tilted, inexplicably, in favor of a girl most of them had never spared a second glance.
He turned his head then, not dramatically, just enough to casually sweep his gaze across the rows of faces.
Unfazed. Bored, even.
Then he glanced down at his untouched goblet of pumpkin juice. The silver of the cup caught the candlelight and flashed like a fang. He reached for it slowly, deliberately, and lifted it to his lips.
Without turning toward her, voice low and dry and just on the edge of a smirk, he murmured, “They’re not staring at you.”
Myrtle’s head jerked slightly. “They’re… they’re not?” she echoed, her voice threadbare.
Draco sipped his drink, then set it down with a quiet clink. A glint of mischief—or was it truth?—lit the corner of his mouth. “No,” he said softly. “They’re staring at me. Wondering why I’d sit here. Why I’d talk to someone I should have no connection to.”
A strangled sound escaped Myrtle’s throat—half-sob, half-laugh. She slapped both hands over her mouth, eyes wide, breath hitching. Her shoulders trembled like the last leaves of autumn trying to cling to a tree in wind.
She wasn’t used to this.
Not being seen with curiosity, rather than mockery.
Not being treated with kindness, rather than dismissal.
Not being protected, like someone whose feelings mattered.
And certainly not being chosen, not by someone like him.
For a long moment, they simply sat there.
Draco, effortlessly composed, sipping his drink as though he hadn’t just turned the hierarchy of the Great Hall on its head.
Myrtle, hands still over her mouth, trying to remember how to breathe around the tightness in her throat and the terrible hope that was beginning to bloom beneath it.
The silence around them no longer held awkwardness or tension—it had transformed into something reverent. Uneasy. Wary. As though even speaking too loud might shatter whatever spell had been cast between them.
And then, in a voice that wobbled but didn’t break, Myrtle spoke again. “Did your old friend… did she cry a lot too?”
Draco set the goblet down.
He didn’t smile this time.
His expression turned thoughtful, distant, tinged with something like pain.
“Yes,” Draco said, voice quiet but steady. The kind of answer that didn’t need embellishment.
That carried weight all on its own.
Myrtle watched him closely now, eyes magnified behind her fogged-up glasses, blinking too fast. Her breath caught.
He didn’t elaborate—not at first.
His gaze drifted toward the enchanted ceiling above, where clouds curled low, sunlight beaming.
“She cried where no one could see,” he added after a pause. “In locked bathrooms. In abandoned classrooms. In stairwells that moved so no one would find her.”
Myrtle’s throat worked around a lump she couldn’t swallow. “Was she a Ravenclaw too?”
He lied.
He had to, because no one could know the truth.
That he was describing her from a different time.
Draco shook his head slowly. “No. She was in a house that taught her to wear armor like skin.” He leaned forward again, elbows on the table, his fingers laced together. “But even armor rusts when it’s soaked in tears.”
Silence fell between them like a hush in a cathedral. Myrtle could feel it settle across the table, the weight of his words drawing her in, anchoring her even as her pulse fluttered in disbelief.
“At least she had someone like you” she stated, tentatively.
His lips parted. He faltered.
Then, softly: “Not soon enough.”
Myrtle’s eyes welled again, not just with sorrow now—but with something like understanding. Like recognition. This moment, this boy with a name wrapped in shadow and legacy, had seen through her like glass. And he had chosen not to look away.
Her voice cracked. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
Draco didn’t look away. Didn’t flinch. “Then don’t be.”
Just that.
As if it could be that simple.
As if, for her, he would make it so.
Draco reached for the silver cufflink at his wrist, unfastening it with a quiet, deliberate motion. The fabric of his dark green sleeve rippled as he turned the small metal piece in his palm. With a flick of his wandless fingers and the faintest shimmer of magic, the cufflink twisted, curled, and bloomed—its sharp lines unfurling into soft, velvet petals.
A rose.
Lush.
Red as fresh blood.
The flower shimmered faintly under the enchanted torches of the great hall, its petals full and delicate, as though dew still clung to them from some other world.
He turned, and without ceremony, offered the rose to her.
Myrtle’s breath caught. Her wide, thickly-glassed eyes grew rounder behind their foggy lenses, blinking once—then again—as if the world had tipped sideways. She stared at the rose. Then at him.
“W-what’s this?” she asked, voice small and breaking around the edges.
Draco met her gaze. His silver eyes were cool, clear, and utterly still.
“A promise.”
The word settled like frost over the hush that had fallen across the great hall.He didn’t flinch. He didn’t glance to either side where the students stood frozen—watching. Ravenclaws stared outright. Gryffindors whispered behind their hands. And the Slytherins—especially the Slytherins—looked scandalized, their expressions twisting into sneers of outrage.
But Draco didn’t waver. He never even turned his head.
His gaze was fixed solely on Myrtle.
“I’ll be there for you,” he said quietly, a vow wrapped in steel. “Whenever you need me. I’ll be a protective older brother.”
For a beat, Myrtle couldn’t move.
The rose was trembling between them, glowing faintly in the sunlight. She reached out with uncertain fingers, ink-stained and pale, and took it from his hand like it might vanish at the slightest pressure.
It was warm.
Real.
Impossibly gentle.
She looked down at it, clutched in her shaking hands. Then up at him.
“I…” Her throat worked. Her voice was barely audible. “I’m a Muggleborn.”
The words hung, fragile and raw.
Draco’s expression didn’t change. But his stillness shifted—sharpened.
“I know Slytherins don’t associate with people like me,” Myrtle went on, her voice too fast now, tumbling over itself. She didn’t dare meet his gaze. “I should’ve told you. I didn’t want to lie, I swear, I just—” Her breath hitched. “I didn’t want you to stop talking to me.”
The words unsaid rang louder than any spell.
I wanted a friend.
Her cheeks burned red as coals.
Her hands wavered.
Even though I don’t deserve it.
The thought curled like smoke through her chest—bitter, clinging. As if kindness was a coat too fine for her shoulders. As if friendship was a language meant for someone else.
The rose hovered between them once more—offered back, like an apology.
Like a resignation.
She waited for the blow.
The sneer.
The mockery.
The moment she was reminded that she didn’t belong.
But it never came.
Draco didn’t take the rose. He didn’t move to reclaim it. He didn’t even glance down.
He just looked at her.
And then, simply—softly—he said, “I know.”
The hush around them deepened. Not a breath stirred. It was as if even the walls were listening.
Myrtle blinked, startled.
His voice was low and unshakable.
“I don’t care for purity of the blood.”
It wasn’t a defense. It wasn’t a protest.
It was a truth.
Something final. Unyielding. Magic, spoken into being.
He hadn’t always known it. He’d had to unlearn it in silence, strip it from his skin like a second, rotting layer. Blood purity had never been pride to him—it had been a chain. A leash disguised as legacy. A noose knotted tightly by expectation, slipping tighter every time he’d tried to breathe on his own.
It had strangled more than it ever protected.
He had seen what it did—how it hollowed men like his father, turned tradition into poison, turned children into weapons.
And so he’d let it go.
Not in defiance, but in liberation.
And in that moment, beneath the weight of too many eyes, with the rose glowing faintly against her trembling palms, Myrtle felt something shift deep within her chest.
For once, she didn’t feel like a mistake.
She felt seen—truly seen, as if someone had peeled back the layers of shame and silence and looked directly at the girl beneath. Not the ghost of a laugh or a whisper behind glass. Just her.
And for the first time, it didn’t hurt.
A few students at the surrounding tables turned openly now, whispering, gawking—some scandalized, others curious. A first-year Hufflepuff gaped like she’d just seen the moon shatter.
But Draco didn’t seem to notice them. Or perhaps he did—and simply didn’t care.
He rose slowly to his feet, the motion fluid, practiced. His black robes caught the candlelight in ripples of silk, and his presence—cool, composed, aristocratic—suddenly felt as commanding as it did rebellious.
” They taught us lies,” Draco said, his voice low but carrying, pitched not just for Myrtle but for the room.
The words cracked through the corridor like a spell breaking. A few students gasped, audibly. Someone dropped a book.
Myrtle’s breath hitched. She looked up at him, wide-eyed, as if he’d pulled the floor out from under her—no, not out from under her, but from the world she’d assumed he came from. The world that never touched hers except to bruise it.
Draco’s silver gaze swept across the Ravenclaws nearby—their eyes sharp with quiet judgment, smirks perched like knives on their lips. Then, slowly, his gaze dropped to Myrtle.
She was still clutching the transfigured rose like it was a piece of herself—tender, breakable, bleeding red in her palms. Her shoulders hunched forward, as if trying to fold in on the hope blooming between her fingers.
“And I’m tired of pretending they weren’t.”
The silence that followed was jagged. No one moved. The lie had been too big, too old, and for once—someone had named it.
Draco turned without waiting for a reply. His cloak flared slightly as he moved, his boots clicking soft, certain notes against the ancient stone floor.
But just as he passed behind Myrtle—he stopped.
A breath caught in the air. A beat hung, taut and full of gravity.
“Keep the rose.”
The words slipped through the noise like silk, soft and deliberate. Myrtle turned in her seat, fingers trembling, heart a wild bird fluttering against the cage of her ribs.
“Why?” she asked, though it came out scarcely louder than breath. Her voice nearly drowned beneath the rising tide of disbelief and murmurs around them—whispers crackling like sparks in dry grass.
Draco didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he paused—half-turned, just enough for the flickering torchlight to brush across his features. His profile was sharp as a blade, but softened by something far rarer.
A smile.
Sad.
A real one.
“Because you’re not the one who should be ashamed.”
And with that, he walked on. No flourish. No final glance. Only the quiet rhythm of his retreating footsteps and a heavy hush that seemed to swallow the corridor whole.
Myrtle sat frozen.
The rose pressed tight to her chest, crumpled against the fabric of her robes as if she could anchor herself to its weight, to its meaning. The warmth of Draco’s words lingered longer than the echo of his footsteps. She felt them in her bones.
“You’re not the one who should be ashamed.”
No one had ever said that to her. Not a teacher. Not a classmate. Not even her own reflection.
Around her, voices surged—whispers spreading like fire through parchment.
“Did you hear what he said?”
“Peverell… defending her?”
“A Muggleborn—at our table?”
But Myrtle didn’t shrink.
Not this time.
She just sat there, hands trembling but steady around the rose—its shimmer catching in the candlelight, like a shield wrought of kindness. For the first time, she didn’t feel like a ghost in her own skin.
She looked up, spine slowly uncoiling as she drew in a shaking breath—thin and wobbly, but hers. Her thick glasses sat crooked on her nose, one lens fogged with the remnants of unshed tears. She didn’t reach up to fix them.
Let them look.
Her eyes, still rimmed with red and glossed with the sheen of emotion, tracked the lone figure moving across the great hall. Draco walked with his chin high, cloak trailing behind him like a banner, his every step deliberate. Daring. Defiant. The kind of walk that dared the world to question him—and promised no apology when they did.
She didn’t understand him. Not entirely. Maybe she never would.
But for the first time in her life, someone had looked at her and seen. Not as a whisper to mock. Not as the butt of a joke. Not as a mistake crouched in the margins of other people’s stories.
Seen—as a person.
As a friend.
A few seats down, one of the third-year Ravenclaw girls—Elaine, the one who’d hexed her quills to leak ink last term—was staring. Her mouth hung slightly open, brow furrowed in something between disbelief and confusion, like Myrtle had turned into someone she didn’t recognize.
Myrtle met her eyes.
Held them.
Didn’t flinch.
And it was Elaine who blinked first, turning quickly away as if the moment burned.
And Myrtle?
She smiled.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t wide. It trembled at the corners like it might vanish at any second.
But it stayed.
And for once, it was real.
She tucked the rose carefully into the fold of her sleeve, fingers gentle, reverent. Its shimmer caught the candlelight one last time before it vanished beneath the cuff of her robe—nestled close to her wrist like a secret promise, something delicate and defiant that belonged to her alone.
For once, the world hadn’t turned cruel.
Not completely.
Not while someone like him still walked its corridors, leaving warmth in his wake like a spell cast in silence.
She turned back to her plate. The food sat untouched, her appetite long forgotten—but she lifted her goblet with slow, deliberate care. Just like Draco had. She tilted it to her lips and took a sip, the metal cool against her mouth, the pumpkin juice sweet and oddly grounding.
Her hands still trembled.
But beneath the trembling was something steadier than fear.
Something stronger.
She mattered.
She could feel it now in her chest like a second heartbeat. And she would remember that—hold it close in the loneliest moments, when the mirrors whispered and the girls in the dormitories laughed behind cupped hands.
At the Slytherin table, the tension coiled like a living curse—smoke without fire, heat without sound. It simmered beneath polished silver goblets and monogrammed linen, threading through every subtle glance and swallowed breath. The air itself felt tight, compressed, like a spell on the verge of bursting.
It shimmered in narrowed eyes and white-knuckled grips. In the twitch of aristocratic mouths that had been trained never to tremble. In the imperceptible straightening of postures, as if centuries of doctrine had risen in protest inside their spines.
Whispers slithered behind pale hands, muffled but poisonous.
“Did you see—?”
“He touched her—”
“A Mudblood.”
Others didn’t bother with secrecy. They stared openly, eyes sharp with disbelief or burning with something colder—betrayal.
Draco’s words still echoed, whether spoken aloud or etched into memory: “Because you’re not the one who should be ashamed.”
And it had shaken something.
Shaken it hard enough that the cracks showed through—fine fractures in the marble mask of ancient bloodlines, in the echo chamber of entitlement.
None of them said his name. Not yet.
But his absence felt heavier than his presence had.
The silence he left behind was not peace. It was a warning. A ripple before the tidal wave.
At the Ravenclaw table, impossibly, unthinkably, he sat.
Draco Peverell—tall and pale, cut from moonlight and ice—had chosen to place himself among them. Among thinkers, among scholars. Among the not-quite-pure.
And beside him, like an ink stain on snow, was Myrtle Warren.
A second-year. Mousy. Barely visible, usually. Her ink-stained fingers clutched at the fold of her sleeve where the silver rose still shimmered faintly. Her glasses were crooked. Her shoulders hunched, as if waiting for laughter that hadn’t come.
But he leaned in.
Smiled.
Touched her hair with a tenderness that defied every rule of blood and house.
And acknowledged her.
Slytherins didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
They simply watched—their pride curdling like milk in moonlight. Their silence sharpening.
And beneath that silence, something ancient stirred. Something that did not understand mercy.
Abraxas Malfoy frowned—not with fury, but with the measured stillness of a boy taught to dissect before he reacted. His pale brows drew together, just enough to break the smooth porcelain of his expression. Not anger. Not yet. But a deep, unsettling puzzle.
It didn’t align.
Not with the Draco he knew.
Draco Peverell—the boy who moved like poetry written in control. The boy who measured his silences with more weight than most measured their words.
A boy born of legacy, wrapped in it like velvet and steel. Who bore his name like armor. Who calculated every glance, every gesture. Who played the long game.
And yet—this.
A public display. A rose transfigured from silver. A Mudblood touched like she was something sacred, something worthy.
Abraxas tapped a single, pale finger against his jaw, slow and rhythmic. The only motion in his otherwise statuesque frame.
It wasn’t a lapse.
It was deliberate.
A signal. A move on a board no one else seemed to know they were playing.
And that disturbed him more than any scandal ever could.
He watched as Draco moved—composed, fluid, utterly unbothered by the storm he’d just unleashed. He didn’t slouch beneath the scrutiny. He didn’t steal glances to gauge the fallout. No, Draco Peverell walked as if he’d always meant to walk this path. As if every step had already been carved into the stone beneath his boots long before today.
That disturbed Abraxas most of all.
Because it meant this wasn’t rebellion. It was strategy.
Calculated.
Who was Myrtle Warren to earn a move like that?
Not a pawn. Not if Draco had just offered her protection in front of every table in the Hall. Not if he’d chosen her—clearly, publicly—before witnesses who would carry the story like wildfire. Gryffindors were already muttering. Ravenclaws leaned in closer to whisper. Hufflepuffs cast furtive glances. The Slytherins had gone silent in that dangerous way, eyes sharp as glass. Watching. Assessing.
And he—Abraxas—felt the splintering underfoot. Like hairline cracks in the cold surface of ice.
Draco had declared something. More than affection. More than kindness. He had declared a position.
And he had done it in front of them.
The House that prided itself on discernment. On pride. On bloodlines untouched by stain.
He had smiled at a Muggleborn.
He had touched her hair.
Abraxas curled his fingers inward, nails lightly grazing his palm. The old rules were not merely bent. They were dismissed, cast aside like outworn skin. And Draco hadn’t flinched.
It was not emotion. It was not accident.
It was warfare.
Subtle. Precise. And terrifying in its implications.
What are you playing at, Peverell?
Abraxas narrowed his eyes, pulse steady despite the fire beginning to catch around them.
Because Draco Peverell had just made his first real move.
And the board was shifting.
Druella Rosier tilted her head, a curtain of blond hair falling over one shoulder as her lashes swept downward—slow, deliberate, like blades sliding back into their sheath. Her expression was composed, carved with elegance, but her crimson-painted mouth curled upward at one corner. It wasn’t a smile. It was a warning. A flicker of fire beneath ice.
Rebellion, she thought, her eyes tracking Draco’s retreating figure across the hall.
In plain sight.
And he hadn’t whispered it. He hadn’t buried it in the shadows, the way clever Slytherins were taught. No. He had lit it like a torch.
That intrigued her.
Druella Rosier, heiress of a bloodline that spoke in subtleties and silences, knew the power of performance. Of masks. Of when to shatter them. What Draco had done wasn’t a slip of sentiment—it was far too polished for that. His words, his stance, the way he offered the rose like a knight from some bloodstained fairy tale—it was all crafted. A disruption cloaked in grace.
He hadn’t denounced Slytherin. Hadn’t even spoken against its values.
Not truly.
But he’d broken a law older than the castle’s stone.
He had denounced Pureblood superiority.
He had acknowledged the girl. The Mudblood.
Worse—he’d defended her.
Not in a whisper. Not behind a charm. But in front of every house, every eye, every tradition snarling beneath green-and-silver silk.
And he had looked beautiful doing it. Untouchable. Pale and deliberate, with a gaze like silver fire and a spine that refused to bend.
No—this wasn’t weakness. This was theater. Strategy.
A statement.
And Druella Rosier always paid attention to statements.
Especially when they made the old guard shift in their seats.
Beside her, Walburga Black trembled with barely contained fury, her lips curling back like a snarling beast baring teeth. The sharpness in her voice was a venomous hiss, low enough to send a chill through the room. “Filthy Mudblood. Disgraceful. A Peverell—sitting with that thing—he should be—he should—”
“Should what?” Cassian Lestrange cut in smoothly, his tone soft but edged with steel. His eyes, dark and unwavering, burned with quiet admiration for Draco. He didn’t fully grasp the meaning behind Draco’s audacious move—but he trusted him implicitly. Draco was never careless. Every gesture, every choice, carried weight and purpose.
“He’s still the strongest of us,” Cassian said with calm conviction, voice steady as stone. “You think he doesn’t know what he’s doing?”
Walburga recoiled, the sting of his words slicing through her like a whip. She spoke up, voice sharp and edged with skepticism. “We don’t know that, do we?” Her words hung in the thick air like a challenge—quiet, but heavy with doubt. The room seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the next move in this silent duel of wills.Druella’s voice cut through the tension like a polished dagger, cool and commanding. “No fighting in the Great Hall. Have some decorum.”
Walburga’s glare burned into Cassian, dark and murderous, like she wanted to tear him apart with her eyes alone. But the sharpness in Druella’s tone held her tongue captive. She clenched her fists beneath the table, seething silently, but didn’t utter another word.
Mulciber, seated across from them, froze with his goblet suspended midair. The scoff he’d been ready to release caught in his throat as he hesitated, eyes narrowing as he studied the scene like a cryptic riddle whispered in Parseltongue.
Draco had shattered every expectation, brazenly flouted tradition—yet never once had he appeared foolish or desperate for approval. Instead, he had seized the room’s gaze by deliberately turning his back on it, commanding attention through sheer indifference.
Cunning, Mulciber mused, the word winding slowly through his thoughts like smoke curling in a silent room. Very cunning.
Still... beneath the admiration simmered a cold uncertainty. Was this boldness brilliance? Or the first tremors of madness?
At the far end of the table, Tom Riddle sat perfectly still, fingers curled around a goblet of pumpkin juice, untouched.
He had said nothing. His expression unreadable. But his eyes—
His eyes burned.
He observed everything: the way Myrtle had clutched the rose in her hand like it was a treasure, the way Draco had leaned in—not romantically, not intimately, but protectively—and smiled with something like gentleness.
It twisted something deep in Tom’s stomach.
It wasn’t jealousy. Not exactly. It was something rawer, darker—possessiveness without a name, an unwelcome shadow flickering beneath his carefully controlled calm.
He smiled at Myrtle once, a rare, almost imperceptible curl of his lips. That was the part that lingered in his mind—because he never smiled like that at him.
Tom had no illusions about blood purity in the ideological sense; his own parentage made him a walking contradiction to that doctrine. But he understood power. He understood the ripples Draco’s gesture had sent through the fragile social order—reaching out to someone everyone else ignored, someone who should have been invisible.
And yet, despite it all, the eyes of others still found Draco. They watched. They whispered. They noticed.
That was power. And it unsettled Tom.
But it also fascinated him.
You’re playing a longer game than I thought, he mused quietly, swirling the pumpkin juice in his goblet, its surface untouched and still. A dangerous game. But bold.
His fingers flexed beneath the table, tense and calculating.
He would have to watch Draco more closely now.
And, perhaps, make sure the little Ravenclaw girl didn’t become too important.
Too useful.
Or worse—too loved.
As for Cassian—
The kiss.
Tom’s breath caught like a hook behind his ribs at its reminder.
His fists curled again beneath the table, nails biting deep enough this time to draw a sharper thread of blood. He didn’t stop. He welcomed the sting.
Cassian Lestrange, with his devil-may-care smile and hands that never stayed where they belonged. Cassian, who treated affection like a game of possession, a string of conquests with no weight, no meaning. Tom had watched him for years—watched the way he touched people when he thought no one noticed. How he cornered, coaxed, claimed. Vulgar. That’s what it was. Vulgar, reckless, and base.
To see Cassian touch him—graze the surface of something sacred with such clumsy entitlement—
It made Tom sick with a fury too quiet to name.
He exhaled slowly, forcing his pulse to slow. His thoughts tightened into diamond clarity.
He doesn’t deserve to touch him.
The thought hissed through Tom’s mind like smoke through a crack in the glass—thin, seething, inescapable.
Cassian had been foolish, but not unique. Others had looked too long. Laughed too freely. Reached out with hands that had no right. He could deal with that. He would deal with it. Sooner or later, they’d learn. He had a gift for correction.
He could handle them all.
What unsettled him wasn’t them. It was himself.
Because lately—something had started to swirl beneath the surface. Something unnamed. Something strange.
He sat straight-backed at the end of the Slytherin table, untouched goblet still beneath his fingers, and felt the shift of it again. The tightening in his chest when Draco smiled—not a smirk, not his usual blade-thin performance, but something real. Warm. Unarmored.
Not for him.
The ache it left behind wasn’t sharp like envy. It was slower. Heavier. It coiled around his ribs and whispered questions he didn’t like. Questions he didn’t have answers to.
Why did it matter?
Why did he matter?
Draco Peverell was clever, yes. Powerful, yes. Beautiful in a way that disturbed the air around him. Tom had known all that from the start. Had chosen him, hadn’t he? Marked him as useful. As worthy.
But lately… usefulness didn’t explain the way his pulse stuttered when Draco turned his head.
Didn’t explain the way his mind refused to quiet after a glance, a word, a breath shared too close in an empty corridor.
The feelings were unfamiliar.
And Tom loathed the unfamiliar.
They weren’t just distractions—they were liabilities. Vulnerabilities.
But they were also… compelling. Addictive. Like standing too close to an edge just to see what falling might feel like.
No.
He would not fall.
He would understand it. Control it. Use it.
And if anyone else reached out again—
Well.
They would learn what happened to those who touched what did not belong to them.
💫
Ridikas made such an incredible fanart of Draco, Cassian, and Myrtle—it’s honestly perfect!Ugh, I’m so bummed I can’t upload the photo here—it’s not letting me. But I still wanted to share it so you can all appreciate it too, and show some love to Ridikas for creating such awesome pieces!
and
Notes:
Hey, sorry for the delay in updating. I wasn’t feeling great this past week, so it took a bit longer than expected. This chapter ended up being 25,478 words—I honestly don’t know why they keep getting so long. Anyway, I’m going to have to restructure the next chapter a bit—because the kiss wasn’t actually supposed to happen. At all. Cassian just... did that on his own. But honestly? I think it works.
I only mentioned the chapter length because I’ve officially hit around 150k words, and somehow, I still haven’t gotten into the main part of the story. This is just the beginning. (𖦹ᯅ𖦹)
Chapter Text
It had been a few days.
Just long enough for the silence to change its shape—honed now, like a blade left to cool too quickly, sharp and thin and cold enough to wound without drawing blood.
Draco hadn’t avoided Tom. Not consciously. But Tom—who had once studied him like a spell he meant to unravel, whose presence used to cling like fog to every corner Draco turned—now didn’t so much as glance his way.
He would enter the common room and there Tom would be, positioned near the green-glow hearth as if he’d been born from its flickering shadows. Always the same: back straight, one hand poised delicately at the corner of a book, head inclined with surgical attention. His face remained unreadable. Not indifferent—worse than that. Remote. As though Draco were a ghost passing through a story in which Tom no longer played a part.
Others gathered near, but they kept a respectful radius—as if standing too close might shatter something. Some rule. Some power. Like courtiers around a monarch who neither acknowledged nor dismissed them. Their eyes would flick to Draco, then away, uncertain.
And still, Tom did not look at him.
Not a twitch of those long, dark lashes. Not a single turn of the head. No flicker of tension in that pale throat. No recognition. No words.
It was a silence too precise to be accidental.
Deliberate.
And Draco, sharp from a lifetime of learning how to read punishment when it came masked in politeness, understood it for what it was.
He had crossed a line—unspoken, maybe—but real.
And this was the consequence.
The other Slytherins sensed it too, though none dared to speak of it. They gave Draco space, not out of kindness, but out of instinct—the same way one gives a bleeding animal room to die, or else to bare its teeth.
They weren’t fools. This was no ordinary rift.
There was something ritualistic about the quiet now, something ceremonial. The air between Draco and Tom felt like glass stretched taut. Like a warded door waiting for the right incantation to either unlock or explode.
And though no one said it, everyone watched.
Not obviously. Not openly.
But eyes lingered. Heads tilted. Conversations paused a second too long when Draco entered a room, when Tom passed too close. There was a weight to their silence, full of questions no one dared ask aloud. Not yet.
Slytherins, after all, were creatures of strategy, not impulse.
But Draco knew it wouldn’t last.
Curiosity, in this house, was never idle. It crept through cracks and keyholes like damp, slow rot. It slithered between shadows with the patience of something ancient—eyes half-lidded, tongue flicking at the air, hungry for the scent of a stumble. A mistake. Weakness.
It watched.
Waited.
Whispered behind velvet curtains and carved stone columns, pressing itself into the mortar of the dungeon walls until the very air felt saturated with it.
It fed on lineage and legacy, on ambition sharpened to a blade. It thrived on humiliation, on cracks in the armor, on the scent of blood in still water. And when it struck—it struck clean. Without remorse. Without hesitation.
Draco could feel it already.
The shift was subtle, but unmistakable. Like the sudden hush of a forest before a storm. Like a breath held too long.
A hesitation in conversation when he approached—a syllable left dangling in the air, unfinished. A glance that lingered just long enough to curdle the air. A whisper that clipped itself off the moment his footsteps crossed the threshold.
They were watching him.
Measuring him.
Weighing the damage.
Wondering—was this a fracture or a full collapse? A silent quarrel, or exile? Was Tom’s silence a leash or a noose?
And beneath the surface curiosity, something older and colder stirred. Older than Hogwarts. Older than Tom.
Scorn.
He saw it in the narrowing of Avery’s eyes, in the heavy-lidded disdain of his expression. In the sneer that always seemed half-swallowed on Mulciber’s lips, as though disgust were too crude to voice, but too sharp to hide. In the way the girls watched him now—like something spoiled. A prince fallen from favor, dirty at the knees, stripped of a title that had once glittered in every room.
They looked at him with polished cruelty, mouths curved in amusement that never touched their eyes. As if his fall were inevitable. As if the worst thing he’d done was not break a rule, but forget what he was.
How dare he.
How dare he speak to her.
How dare he defend her.
How dare he, a Peverell, allow his gaze to linger on a Mudblood as if she were anything but filth in borrowed robes.
Because here—blood was everything.
It was the thread that stitched names into history, the law etched deeper than parchment or stone. Blood didn’t ask. It demanded. It crowned kings and condemned traitors. It whispered in the bones of old houses, echoed in the creak of manor floorboards, thrummed in the silence before a curse was cast.
Here, blood mattered more than truth.
More than honor.
More than right or wrong.
It was not merely a legacy—it was a weapon, honed over generations, and a shield polished by centuries of fear and expectation. It built the corridors of power and patrolled them. It dictated how one stood, how one spoke, who one could love and who one must destroy. It was the ink in every unspoken oath, the seal pressed into every curse-bound vow.
Blood was currency.
Respect could be bought with it. Power could be hoarded through it. Survival could be earned by it—so long as one never spent it on the wrong cause.
And Draco had deviated.
Not with open defiance—he had not screamed, not declared. But deviation didn’t need sound. He had chosen, subtly and irrevocably. Chosen silence where there should have been fervor. Chosen hesitation where there should have been fire. Chosen—though perhaps even he had not realized it at the time—the wrong name, the wrong allegiance, the wrong kind of blood.
He had stepped, quietly but undeniably, onto ground that was not theirs.
And now, the ground beneath him had shifted.
Not crumbled.
Not yet.
But the tremors were there. The fractures invisible, but widening.
He felt it in the room like a pressure drop before a storm. The pause before someone said his name. The brittle curve of lips that once welcomed him. The way their eyes, always cold, now grew calculating.
They were watching.
Turning their heads slowly, deliberately. Their smiles stretched just a second too long. The air behind their laughter felt weighted, their greetings felt rehearsed. The warmth was gone—but then, maybe it had never been real.
The questions were never spoken aloud, but they didn’t need to be.
They hung behind every glance, sharp as a wand’s tip, as subtle and searing as Dark magic:
Is he still one of us?
Or has he already claimed something else?
They hadn’t bitten yet.
But Draco could feel their teeth behind every smile.
Polishing their fangs on tradition.
Sharpening them on his hesitation.
Waiting.
Because that was the other thing about Slytherins—scorn didn’t vanish. It calcified. It coiled in the quiet spaces between words, bred in glances, in silences stretched too tight. And when it struck, it didn’t flinch. It lunged.
The Slytherin common room breathed with its own slow menace.
Green light bled through the tall, arched windows, cast from the lake that pressed in on all sides like a second sky—dark, rippling, immense. That watery glow filtered through the glass like memory through fog, casting everything in shifting aquatic hues: deep jade, oxidized bronze, emerald stained with shadow. The walls, slick with old damp, glistened as though freshly carved from some submerged cavern. The light didn’t illuminate so much as haunt.
It was a room made to whisper in.
Above, the ceiling danced with shadows—ghosts of passing things. Kelp tendrils undulated like drowned hair. The silhouette of a merperson, half-seen, drifted by in silence, its long limbs moving with the rhythm of a dream half-remembered. The architecture itself curved inward, arched like cathedral ribs, giving the sense that this was not a common room at all, but a shrine. A sanctuary built beneath the sea. One devoted not to safety or comfort, but to power. To secrecy. To oaths spoken in blood and never undone.
At the far end, the hearth burned low, the fire reduced to a smoldering murmur. The embers glowed like dying stars, breathing faint pulses of red and gold into the gloom. But the warmth didn’t reach the rest of the room. It flickered against the high-backed furniture, kissed the edge of a rug worn thin by generations of silent feet, and then faded—swallowed by the cold that lived here like a permanent tenant.
Draco sat alone on one of the curved leather couches, spine straight, limbs draped with studied ease. The couch curled like a serpent mid-coil, high-backed and gleaming, polished to a slick darkness that reflected the green glow in flashes, like oil on water.
The book in his lap—The Theory and Practice of Occult Boundaries—remained stubbornly unopened. His fingers curled around its spine, elegant and still, but the pages hadn’t turned in nearly half an hour. It wasn’t for reading. It was armor. A shield held between him and the eyes that flicked toward him from behind curtain folds, from corners, from the depths of armchairs cloaked in shadow.
He didn’t look up. But he felt them.
Felt the shift when he walked in—the soft hush, the way the air thickened with questions not asked. He felt the stares slide off his skin like ice water. Not open hostility, not yet. Just the charged quiet of knives being weighed behind backs.
He was performing calm. Every breath measured. Every gesture deliberate.
But beneath the surface, something else coiled tight.
A storm behind glass.
And they were watching. Waiting.
Because in Slytherin, silence was never empty.
It was the coil before the strike.
He felt adrift—untethered, as though some essential thread had snapped and left him suspended in a world where nothing was fixed, where even gravity seemed a suggestion. The common room swam in shadows and smoke, light curling from the hearth in delicate tendrils that never touched him. Laughter rang out from across the room—too loud, too sharp.
Deliberate.
Like glass breaking behind a closed door. Like someone daring him to look up.
Somewhere behind him, the fire cracked and hissed, a lazy whisper of warmth. But none of it reached him. Not really. He felt apart from it all—like an echo of himself trapped in a room full of the living.
His thoughts circled, always returning to one axis.
He needed to kill Tom Riddle.
Not for revenge. Not for pride. Not even for his own survival.
To stop Voldemort.
To stop what Tom would become—that hollowed-out wraith crowned in blood and prophecy, the future tyrant who would slit the throat of the world and call it destiny. The one who would tear souls into confetti and raise empires from corpses. Draco could see it so clearly. He could trace the shadow from here to there, follow the line from this boy with his sharp eyes and unreadable silences to the monster who turned graves into anchors.
He told himself it was simple.
A strategy. A safeguard.
One moment. One clean act. A quick death in the right hour, and the world would never know the name Voldemort.
No war.
No graves.
No cursed marks burned into skin like brands of ownership.
He could do it.
He had to do it.
And if he let himself imagine it—just for a breath—it could even be gentle. A spell whispered like a lullaby, a knife slipped between the ribs where it would be quiet. No mess. No suffering. The kind of death that might almost feel like mercy.
Because Draco knew how to kill.
War had taught him.
Not with lessons in a classroom or lectures from old Aurors, but with silence and ash and blood that dried too quickly to matter. It had stripped the theory from violence, peeled away the luxury of conscience, and replaced it with instinct—sharp, cold, and absolute.
He had learned what it meant to hesitate.
Learned that mercy was a coin too costly to spend. That the pause—just a heartbeat too long—could mean the end of something irreplaceable. A friend. A home. A child with wide eyes who never saw the curse coming. War had shown him the shape of failure, and it wore the face of those he’d buried.
It had taught him the price.
The price of waiting. Of flinching. Of standing still when the world begged for action. There were no noble delays, no glory in second-guessing. Only graves for the ones who couldn’t decide in time.
And so the lesson took root.
Carved itself into his marrow.
Etched into the fine tremble of tendon and joint.
Violence didn’t shake him anymore.
It lived in his hands now, not as rage—but as readiness.
He didn’t need to want it.
He only needed to understand it.
And Draco did. Intimately.
Because war had been his crucible. And he had survived it by becoming what it required.
And what it required, in the end, was someone who knew how to kill.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
Tom hadn’t done it yet.
Not really.
Not completely.
He hadn’t killed anyone. Not outright. Not unmistakably. Not with that awful finality that made time split before and after. He hadn’t spoken the Killing Curse with a calm, deliberate breath—hadn’t felt the weightless recoil of green light slamming into flesh. He hadn’t watched the light leave someone’s eyes and known—really known—that he had taken something he could never give back. Hadn’t seen what came after: the stillness, the ruin, the echo.
He hadn’t held someone beneath Cruciatus until their body forgot itself, until pain rewrote their name. He hadn’t lingered in it, hadn’t tasted the pleasure some spoke of in hushed, horrified tones.
He hadn’t fractured his soul like glass.
Hadn’t gone looking for the cold and cursed, the profane vessels that could house pieces of his humanity. He hadn’t whispered the rituals, hadn’t bled for them, hadn’t sealed parts of himself into things that would never love him, only contain him.
He hadn’t become him.
Not yet.
He hadn’t become the monster that haunted Draco’s childhood.
Not the dark specter spoken of in whispers, not the name that made the air go still. Not Voldemort—the thing coiled behind curtains and shadows, who stalked the silence of the drawing room like smoke. Who tightened Lucius’s jaw into granite and hollowed Narcissa’s gaze until she looked through her son instead of at him.
Voldemort, who had turned his name into a curse. A graveyard.
A blight that clung to the walls of every home that dared speak of war.
Tom wasn’t that.
Not yet.
He was cruel, yes. Vicious beneath the varnish. Calculating in a way that made even professors tread lightly. He was brilliant—terrifyingly so—and far too conscious of his own mind, his own potential. There was something ancient in the way he moved, something too still, too sharp. But he was still a boy.
His shoulders were still narrow beneath those immaculate Slytherin robes, still too slight to carry the weight of slaughter. His eyes—those strange, clever eyes—were still too young to hold genocide. They shimmered with ambition, not ashes.
This was a boy who read dusty Latin texts by firelight, who underlined phrases with meticulous ink and reverence.
A boy who sat straight-backed in antique chairs, drank his tea like royalty displaced from his throne, and spoke with the poised venom of someone rehearsing for the world he meant to own.
A boy.
Brilliant. Arrogant. Manipulative.
But a boy nonetheless.
A boy with ambition in his mouth and hunger behind his ribs.
A hunger to matter. To rise. To rewrite the story that had made him small.
To be more than the unwanted orphan, more than the mud in wizardkind’s bloodlines, more than what the world had dared to assign him.
He hadn’t yet learned how to remake the world in his image.
Hadn’t yet broken it to prove that he could.
He hadn’t yet become the creature who would twist love into loyalty and loyalty into ruin.
Hadn’t murdered his past to build his myth.
Hadn’t yet cracked his soul like kindling and scattered it like secrets across the earth.
Not yet the monster.
And that—that—was what made it unbearable.
Because he could still be saved.
Because there was still time.
Because there was still something human left in him.
And because that human part would die screaming—
and Draco would hear it—
when the monster finally took its place.
It cracked something in Draco, clean down the middle.
Not a shatter—a split. A slow, irreversible fracture deep beneath the surface, in a place no one could see. Something old and private. Something forged through years of grief and silence, nights clawed raw with guilt and questions that never found answers. It split open without warning, like a fault line catching breath.
And there it was—bleeding quietly in the dark.
No outburst. No rage. No cathartic collapse. Just pain—low, steady, and seeping through him like a toxin. A splinter buried beneath the skin of his resolve, impossible to dig out without tearing something vital. He could feel it already beginning to fester. Feel it in his breath. In the pressure behind his eyes.
Because he knew what had to be done.
He knew. The arithmetic of it was cold and cruel and unyielding. One life in exchange for millions. One death to stop the storm before it ever formed. Voldemort before he was Voldemort. The stakes were too high for sentiment, too vast for mercy.
The world needed him to act.
But logic—no matter how flawless—always fractured when it struck against something human.
And Tom Riddle was still human.
Infuriatingly so.
It was there—in the blade-thin curve of his smile, too practiced for someone so young. In the razor precision of his questions, each one a scalpel meant to peel people open. In the way his fingers curled around porcelain teacups like they might bruise if he held them too tightly.
It was in his silences—the rich, dangerous kind that hinted at vast and unseen depths. The kind of silence that listened. That understood. That studied you not just for who you were, but for what you meant. For what you could be.
And Draco had looked into those eyes—those dark, incandescent eyes burning with hunger and brilliance and a thousand things not yet named—and he had faltered.
Because if he did it—if he raised his wand, if he ended it before it began—
if he cut the thread of this boy’s life before it could spin out into darkness—
what would that make him, if he did it?
What kind of man kills a boy not for what he is, but for what he might become?
What kind of justice demands the execution of a future, not a crime?
It wouldn’t be a clean kill.
Not in the soul.
Not where it counted.
There’d be no hero’s crown waiting at the end. No solemn nods of approval. No warm chorus of gratitude. Draco wouldn’t be the savior of the world.
He’d be something else entirely.
A blade in the dark.
A hand closing around a throat.
A boy who murdered another boy—not for what he had done, but for what he might become.
And maybe that was the worst kind of violence. The kind that killed potential. That cut off futures before they had a chance to form.
The world would never see it.
No one would know what had been averted—what darkness had been stilled.
They’d only see the blood.
A name scrawled into silence.
One life stolen, and no prophecy to mark it clean.
And the part that sickened him—truly sickened him—was the doubt.
That small, flickering ember of a thought he couldn’t extinguish.
The aching, relentless what if.
What if Tom could have been different?
What if someone—anyone—had reached out a hand when he was still small enough to take it?
What if someone had seen him—not the mask, not the cold brilliance, but him? The boy beneath the hunger. The child in the shadows of that grey, unloved orphanage. What if someone had loved him first, before the world taught him that power was the only way to matter?
Would it have changed everything?
Would there have been no Dark Lord?
No war?
No horcruxes and hollow eyes and cities burning under a name that meant ruin?
Just a boy.
Brilliant. Strange. Lonely.
Growing into something else.
That thought clung to Draco like rot beneath varnished wood.
Invisible at first. But always there.
Subtle. Slow. Destructive.
It warped him.
It curled inside his reasons like mold, eating through every vow, every justification, every merciless mantra he recited at night just to fall asleep.
He’ll become a monster. I have to stop him. I have to.
But still—
Tom lingered.
He was smoke in Draco’s mind.
Always there.
Curling through memory.
Seeping under doorways.
Staining the clean places with the scent of something burning—something ancient and aching, smoldering just beyond the reach of thought.
Draco found himself thinking of him more than he wanted to.
More than he could admit.
He thought of the way Tom tilted his head when intrigued.
The way he spoke—precise, poised, words dipped in honey and iron.
The way he watched people like a puzzle he’d one day master.
He thought of him, and wondered—
Was he still human enough to save?
Or already too far gone to mourn?
Tom, who always stood just slightly apart from the others—never quite within the circle, never quite outside of it either. A deliberate distance. Not born of shyness or awkwardness, but of calculation. Of instinct. As if the very air recognized something in him that resisted closeness. As if the world itself recoiled from making him a part of it.
He didn’t drift. He hovered—like a shadow, like a second thought. A figure too sharp for the softness of childhood. He moved through the halls like a visitor in borrowed skin, a ghost dressed in the crisp black of a Hogwarts uniform. Eyes too still. Too deep. Too knowing.
Everything about him was controlled.
Too controlled.
Each step placed with intention. Each gesture refined until it no longer resembled anything spontaneous. He spoke with a clarity that felt manufactured—too smooth, too perfect, like marble sculpted to resemble a boy. He listened not out of curiosity, but out of need. Out of strategy.
And his eyes—those dark, cold eyes—
They didn’t simply look at people. They dissected them. Peeled them open like pages in a book only he could read.
He saw motivations, angles, patterns. He measured people by how useful they were, how malleable, how easy to control. He catalogued every word, every mistake, every twitch of insecurity.
He didn’t see friends. He didn’t even see enemies.
He saw leverage.
And when he smiled—
Merlin, when he smiled, it was beautiful. Too beautiful.
The kind of smile that should have come from a prince in a storybook.
Except Draco knew better.
He saw it—that infinitesimal delay, that fraction of calculation. The way Tom’s mouth curved just so, how his gaze dimmed to a flattering softness, how his head tilted at the most endearing angle. It was crafted, every inch of it, like a performance honed through endless observation.
It wasn’t real.
It was never real.
Just another illusion. Another mask.
But there—beneath all that precision, beneath the crafted elegance and surgical intelligence—there was something else. Something Draco almost missed, had trained himself not to look for. But it was there. And when he saw it, it gutted him.
Fragility.
Not weakness. Never that. But a rawness—something brittle and unspoken.
The way Tom never relaxed. Never leaned back. Never let his guard slip, not even when he was alone. He moved like someone expecting the blow at every turn. He scanned a room like a soldier at war, always noting the exits, always preparing for betrayal.
He didn’t trust. Anyone.
Not really. Not even a little.
And that… that emptiness… it wasn’t power. It wasn’t strength.
It was loneliness.
A haunting, gnawing kind of loneliness.
The kind that roots deep and blooms in silence. The kind that turns hunger into ambition and fear into cruelty.
Draco saw it—not just the boy who might one day become Voldemort, but the child who never knew comfort. Never knew warmth. Never knew what it meant to be safe.
And when he let himself feel that—really feel it—it twisted something inside him.
Because how do you kill a ghost?
How do you raise a blade to someone already hollow?
How do you end a boy who’s never had a home?
Tom moved through the castle like someone who had memorized every echo. Every creak of the floorboards, every flicker of torchlight against stone. As though he expected betrayal at every turn—and was never wrong to do so. It clung to him, that vigilance, like a second skin. Not anxious. Not panicked. Just constant. Seamless. Woven into the rhythm of his breath.
He didn’t flinch. He anticipated.
Every glance was a scan. Every silence, a trap being set—or evaded. He walked with the precision of someone always bracing for the blade, shoulders squared not with pride but with preemptive defiance. Not if, but when—the betrayal, the attack, the moment someone proved themselves unworthy of his rare and guarded tolerance.
Because somewhere, long before Hogwarts and its polished corridors, long before robes and wands and books on power, someone had already taught him the lesson.
Trust was a liability.
Love was a lie.
Loyalty was temporary.
And safety was a thing other people had the luxury to believe in.
He had been betrayed—not once, not recently, but so young and so completely that the world never again looked the same.
He no longer needed evidence. No longer required the moment itself to justify the feeling. The betrayal didn’t need to arrive. He knew it would. And so he lived as though it had already happened. As though it was already behind him.
So he built himself into something betrayal couldn’t touch.
Stone where there should have been skin. Fire where there should have been warmth. Walls, endless and brutal, in place of longing.
He had crafted himself with ruthless precision—a fortress disguised as a boy.
Not whole.
Not healed.
Just… impossible to break any further.
Because the breaking had already happened, hadn’t it?
Long ago. Quietly.
Before he ever had the chance to be whole.
And Draco wondered—achingly, furiously—what if it didn’t have to be that way?
What if no one had ever tried? Really tried? What if every adult in Tom’s life had seen his brilliance and only reached for it with greed? What if every gesture of kindness had come with a price tag, with strings, with a hidden blade tucked just out of sight?
What if the monster hadn’t always been a monster?
What if the world had handed him the mask, handed him the knife, handed him the script and said this is who you must be to survive?
And what if Tom—too sharp, too proud, too alone—had simply… obeyed?
What if the villain everyone feared was never born, but made?
What if he could have been something else?
What if he still could?
That thought—that ache—left a bitterness in Draco’s mouth, as bitter as Wolfsbane, as sharp as regret honed to a razor’s edge. It settled behind his teeth like a secret he didn’t want to keep, metallic and sour, thick with the weight of things he didn’t want to admit. He could tasteit, the way guilt leaves a film on the tongue, the way it echoes in the throat like an unfinished confession.
Because in the quietest corners of his heart—those dim, unguarded places where the lies he told himself hadn’t fully taken root—Draco saw too much of himself in Tom Riddle.
Too much recognition in the cut of that stare. Too much familiarity in the way Tom held himself like a blade—sharp, poised, ready to strike before anyone else could.
Both of them born into legacies soaked in pride and expectation. Both shaped by bloodlines that whispered their worth like prophecy, that carved futures into their skin before they could form their own desires. Neither of them had been asked what they wanted to become—they were told.
Tom, with his grim orphanage and his uncanny brilliance, had never stood a chance at being ordinary. The world had named him other before he even knew what the word meant—half-blood, unwanted, wrong. Strange in ways no child should have to explain.
The walls of Wool’s Orphanage had been no home, only a holding cell for something the world didn’t understand and didn’t want to. And so Tom had learned early: if you were feared, you were left alone. If you were clever enough, sharp enough, inhuman enough, they couldn’t touch you.
He learned to hide what hurt.
To polish what frightened.
To bury softness so deep it rotted.
His gifts—wild, uncanny, electric—were not blessings in that place. They were reasons to keep him at arm’s length. Reasons to watch him through cracks in the door. So he cloaked them in silence, in icy brilliance, in masks made of superiority and cold disdain. He built his walls not from fear, but from necessity—each brick a choice to survive.
There had been no cradle of warmth for him. No lullabies, no gentle hands.
Vulnerability wasn’t a flaw in Tom’s world.
It was bait.
And he refused to be prey.
Draco… Draco understood that far more than he ever wished to admit.
No orphanage, no Muggle nuns—but a different kind of hunger had shaped him. He had grown up in a manor made of marble and shadows, where affection came in the form of expectations. Where love was a transaction dressed in silk. Every compliment had a price. Every touch was weighed against legacy. There had been lessons in posture before there were lessons in kindness. He had been taught to speak like a diplomat and think like a strategist. To present perfection and bleed privately.
He’d been told he was special—noble, chosen, a Malfoy. But the crown was heavy, and the love conditional. When he failed, it was silence. When he cried, it was shame.
So he, too, learned to mask it.
To hold his tongue.
To meet pressure with poise.
To shape his face into something lovely and unreadable.
They were different, yes. Tom, the unwanted boy with too much magic and nowhere to put it. Draco, the heir with too much legacy and no room to breathe beneath it.
But the bones of them? The marrow?
They were boys who had been told what they were before they had any say in it.
One, a curse.
The other, a crown.
And both had turned that declaration into armor.
Not because they were brave.
But because no one had ever let them be anything else.
He looked at Tom and saw the fragile outlines of what might have been—what could have bloomed if the muggle war hadn’t shattered him so completely, if the weight of rejection hadn’t hollowed his soul and carved out space for something else to grow. If someone—anyone—had reached through the darkness before it swallowed him whole. If love, or mercy, or simply understanding had found its way into that cold, restless heart.
And that—that unbearable possibility—gnawed at Draco with relentless cruelty.
Because if their lives were not so impossibly divided, if the fork in the road could have sent either of them down a different path, then this was no simple act of justice or war.
No, killing Tom wouldn’t be the slaying of a monster.
It would be the murder of a mirror—shattering the reflection of himself he barely recognized, breaking apart the boy who might have been his other half, his shadow, his lost possibility.
Draco clenched the book tighter in his hands, fingers whitening at the knuckles, the corners of the cover biting into his palms like small, deliberate punishments. The volume was elegant, stitched in green so dark it was nearly black, with Slytherin’s silver filigree glinting faintly in the low candlelight. It was the sort of thing he might have admired once. Collected. Protected. But now it sat inert in his grasp, unopened and unwanted.
Because he wasn’t looking at it. Not really.
His eyes were fixed somewhere else entirely—far beyond the curve of leather and gold leaf. As if the spine might split open and spill some secret he hadn’t yet found within himself. As if the answers he craved might be inked between lines he hadn’t dared to read.
But the book remained silent. Still. Utterly indifferent.
Just like the world had been to Tom.
Just like the world had been to him—in the moments that mattered most.
And Draco wondered—truly wondered—not with calculation, not with the icy precision he’d been taught to wear like armor, but with something more dangerous. Something perilous and fragile and soft, that curled at the edges of hope and ached where no one could see:
What if someone had reached out to the boy before?
Before the name Voldemort hardened around him like a curse. Before the world taught him that power was safer than love. Before cruelty became defense. Before he began carving masks into his own face to keep the world from cutting deeper.
Would it have changed anything?
Would he have looked less like a blade waiting to be drawn and more like a boy, desperate not to break?
Could it have altered the path?
Could it still?
And if the answer was yes…
If—somehow, impossibly—beneath all that cold ambition and composed, inhuman grace, there still flickered a spark of something raw and salvageable, some thin thread of humanity clinging stubbornly to the bone—
Then how could Draco bear to be the one to destroy it?
How could he stand to be the one who snuffed it out?
To silence not the tyrant history would come to know, but the boy he sat beside now. The boy who hadn’t yet committed the sins Draco knew he would. Who hadn’t yet drowned the world in blood and fear. A boy who still listened. Who still watched Draco like he was a puzzle worth untangling. Who tilted his head in that silent, serpentine way—not out of threat, but curiosity.
A boy who, in rare, flickering moments, let the mask slip just enough for Draco to see the truth hiding underneath.
Loneliness.
So deep it echoed. So sharp it could flay.
Draco’s grip slackened, the book sagging lifelessly in his lap, its weight suddenly immense—like a verdict he wasn’t ready to give. It rested there, cool and dead, while he leaned back into the couch, the high arch of it curving behind his head like a serpent’s spine, polished wood pressing against the vulnerable nape of his neck.
He closed his eyes—not to sleep, but to stop seeing.
To stop seeing him—Tom, just Tom, only Tom—standing on the edge of a future still untouched by fire. A boy not yet turned into myth. Not yet gone to madness.
Still mortal.
Still shaped more by longing than hatred. Still just a boy with hunger in his gaze and too much silence in his past. A boy who met Draco’s eyes like they might hold something sacred. A boy who hadn’t yet learned that monsters are what people make of boys they never loved properly.
Draco had seen him.
Not the Dark Lord. Not the shadow cast by history.
Just a boy.
A boy named Tom.
He opened his eyes again, jaw set hard, the muscle ticking beneath pale skin like a clock wound too tightly.
The truth loomed, monstrous and merciless.
To kill Tom now would not be justice. It would be erasure.
It would be the execution of possibility—of what if. Of the boy who might still be coaxed back from the precipice, if only someone reached for him first. If only someone reminded him that there were paths other than power. Roads that didn’t end in ruin, or blood, or that terrible crown of serpents he would one day wear like it had always belonged to him.
And Draco—who had once teetered on the very same ledge—understood the ache of that fall. The brutal gravity of prophecy. The poison of legacy. The way fear could wrap itself around the heart until all that was left was coldness masquerading as control.
He had stood in those shadows once, hadn’t he? Felt them creep under his nails, behind his eyes, whispering that it was easier to destroy than to be destroyed.
That’s what haunted him the most.
Not the act of killing.
He could kill.
He had killed.
He knew what death felt like in his lungs. Knew the smell of it—iron and ash—how it settled into your skin like smoke and refused to leave, even after the bodies cooled. He knew how silence could echo louder than screams.
But killing Tom—this Tom, now—would be something else entirely.
It would be killing a reflection.
And not just any reflection, but his—the version of himself he’d fought to bury under years of silence and shame. The boy he might’ve become, if no one had cared enough to reach in and pull him out.
Dumbledore had seen that fracture once, hadn’t he? Looked at Draco—not as a threat, but as a child—a child in pain—and offered him a chance. Potter too, in his loud, infuriating, too-honest way. He had looked past the sneer, past the name, and still tried. Still tried.
And now, Draco found himself wondering: What if I could do the same?
What if he could be the one to see through Tom’s perfect, cruel mask? To find the boy beneath the myth and offer him something real—not power, not obedience, but understanding?
The thought coiled in his chest like a serpent awakening—warm and slow and dangerous. It wrapped around his ribs with something close to hunger. Not for power. Not for control.
But for hope.
The hope that maybe, just maybe, there was something left inside Tom worth saving.
And if there was—even the smallest flicker, barely more than ash—
How could Draco destroy it?
How could he strike before offering Tom the very thing Draco himself had once needed so desperately?
He looked down.
The book still sat in his hands, heavy and unopened, its spine catching the candlelight like the edge of a blade. Occult Boundaries. The title gleamed in silver script, no longer simply decorative.
It meant something now.
Boundaries between life and death. Between past and future. Between monster and man. Between who they were told to become—and who they might have been, if someone had chosen mercy.
If someone had chosen them.
Draco had made his choice.
And just as the thought settled in his chest, the air shifted—sharp and sudden, like a predator drawing breath behind him. Like a thread pulled taut across a snare.
Every instinct in him went still.
His posture was immaculate—too immaculate. The kind of posture that didn’t come from comfort, but from discipline honed under scrutiny. He sat with his spine straight, shoulders relaxed in appearance only, every line of his body measured, neutral, precise. But the stillness was a lie.
Because Draco was listening.
Watching.
His gaze, though fixed straight ahead, danced in subtle shifts—small, calculated movements, sweeping the Slytherin common room like a pendulum in reverse. Not idle. Never idle. It was the gaze of someone taking stock. Mapping exits. Weighing threats.
A chessboard of glances.
And he knew—he knew—he was being watched in return.
Not openly, of course. Not here. Slytherins did not stare; they studied. They wielded silence like a blade, observation like a curse. They dissected you with glances and reshaped you in whispers.
To his right, a second-year sat rigid under Draco’s gaze, their neck flushing red as they quickly looked away. Near the hearth, a trio of sixth-years lounged with the calculated carelessness of those who know power rests not in strength but in perception. Their murmurs were low, the glint in their eyes anything but casual. One boy—tall, hook-nosed, his prefect badge gleaming like a threat—met Draco’s gaze and smiled.
Not the kind of smile that meant welcome.
The kind that meant we’re not finished with you yet.
Not a greeting.
A promise.
They were weighing him. Judging whether he was worthy of wariness—or conquest. Whether he might one day lead them, or whether he needed to be carved into pieces first.
And deeper still—beneath the surface tension of house politics and adolescent cruelty—there was something else.
A pressure that didn’t speak in words, only sensation. Ancient. Intimate. Inevitable.
The kind of thing that lived in the marrow and never asked permission.
It came every time he was near.
Tom.
Draco hadn’t spoken it aloud. Not even in thought, not fully. To name it would be to give it power, and it had enough already.
But he felt it. Always.
The moment before Riddle entered a room was never quiet. It was anticipatory—electric, precise. The air didn’t get heavier, it got sharper. Focused. Like everything else had receded, leaving only the breath before an executioner swings.
He wasn’t here now. Not physically.
And yet…
His absence had mass. Shape. Texture.
It draped across the common room like a second cloak, subtle and intimate. The shadows clung tighter. The torchlight, already dim, flickered as though aware of a greater presence watching from just outside reach. The green-glass glimmer of the lake through the windows took on a hue just a shade too dark, like it, too, remembered him.
The books on the shelf held their spines stiff as though already under his hand. The carpet beneath Draco’s boots seemed to hush. Even the serpentine engraving curling around the mantelpiece looked more alive, more alert, like it was waiting to move.
And Draco—damn him—felt it all.
Felt the outline of Tom Riddle in the room’s memory. Felt him in the air, in the space between thoughts, in the fragile rhythm of his own breath.
It wasn’t just presence. It was pull.
That impossible, magnetic thread that wove between them, thin as a whisper and cruel as a curse. He hated it. Hated how instinctively his body recognized it. How his skin prickled like it was longing. How his pulse changed—not racing, not yet, but listening.
It wasn’t affection.
Not desire, at least not in any way that the word usually claimed—soft, warm, uncomplicated. This was something older, more jagged. Darker.
A recognition deeper than words, as if some buried part of him instinctively knew something buried in Tom—and longed, desperately, to bridge the yawning abyss between them.
And he hated that waiting. Hated how his chest tightened every time the door creaked open, every footstep echoed down the corridor.
He braced himself, muscles coiled and ready—not visibly, of course. Years of practice had trained his face into a mask of impassivity, his posture into something cold and unreadable. But his pulse betrayed him. It leapt without permission, wild and reckless beneath his calm skin. His throat constricted, just for a heartbeat, a breath.
And then—nothing.
No glance, no glance that cut sharper than any blade. No cruel, knowing smirk—the one that said I see you, and I am not done with you yet.
Only absence.
So Draco sat straighter. The leather armchair groaned softly beneath him as he adjusted, spine aligning vertebra by vertebra like a finely honed dagger sliding free. His fingers settled on the closed book in his lap, still as stone.
His chin lifted just enough to say aloofness without arrogance. Pride, not fragility.
His robes fell in perfect, deliberate lines—armor forged of etiquette and noble breeding.
He would not slouch.
He would not bend first.
Not here. Not yet.
Slytherin was a den of silver-tongued predators, a nest of whispers and shadows that accepted no outsiders.
Not truly.
Only those sharp enough, cold enough, valuable enough could carve their place among the vipers.
It was a world ruled by unspoken hierarchies—enforced with every glance, every silence, every carefully measured word.
Especially for someone like him.
Someone who had shattered the unwritten rules from the start.
Who dared speak with the ease of familiarity to a mudblood like Warren, sliding through ancient halls with a name no one recognized, a pedigree they couldn’t trace, and a gaze too bold to be cautious.
They watched him.
All of them.
He felt it in the way the dormitory quieted when he entered, conversations twisting away like frightened snakes.
The silence wasn’t emptiness. It was calculation.
Watching.
Waiting.
Judging.
Slytherin did not bleed for its own.
It bled its own.
It tested them.
Pressed them to the breaking point—not out of cruelty, but by design.
Slytherin’s crucible wasn’t forged in fire, but in silence, in watching eyes and unseen knives. It sifted the weak from the cunning with quiet efficiency. And if you failed—if you flinched, if your voice wavered, if you revealed the soft, bleeding parts of yourself too easily—
You weren’t offered help.
You were offered to the wolves.
The hush in the common room stretched thinner than glass, taut as a drawn bowstring. Shadows pooled in corners like secrets, and even the fire—usually bold in its crackle and spit—had dimmed to a low, suspicious murmur. Its warmth no longer comforted; it pressed against the skin like an accusation.
Then—quiet.
A door near the boys’ dormitory eased open with the reluctant sigh of old hinges. The sound was soft, deliberate. As if the door itself had been persuaded, not pushed.
Footsteps followed.
Measured. Precise. Each one placed with a calm so complete it seemed louder than chaos. No careless heel drag. No rustle of robes. Just the clean rhythm of certainty—each step a statement, not a question. Like a conductor raising a baton before a descent into silence.
It wasn’t the kind of tread that demanded attention.
It was the kind that assumed it.
Draco, seated by the fire with a book he hadn’t turned a page in for fifteen minutes, felt it before he heard it. The air changed. Thickened. The kind of shift you don’t see but feel, like pressure before a storm.
He didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe—at least, not properly. His lungs drew in a thin, reluctant thread of air, barely enough. Just enough to betray him. A single tremor, subtle and shameful, bloomed low in his chest.
Recognition. Dread. Something older than both.
Something inside him had already whispered it, low and certain as a spell cast in blood.
It’s him.
He didn’t look up immediately.
Didn’t need to.
The air in the Slytherin common room shifted—subtly, but unmistakably.
Not colder. Not louder.
Just different.
The kind of shift that didn’t announce itself, but settled deep in the marrow. Like pressure building in a stormcloud. Like breath held by an entire room without knowing why. It was the hush of instinct—the body recognizing danger before the mind could name it.
You couldn’t see it.
But you could feel it.
A tingling awareness under the skin, as though the castle stones themselves had tensed. The walls, always so dark and unbothered, suddenly watched. The green-glass lake light thrown across the floor dimmed in hue—not by flame or water, but presence.
Conversations by the hearth faltered, words fraying mid-sentence.
Not because of interruption.
Because of atmosphere.
The sound of parchment being turned paused, suspended in mid-motion like the rustle had lost its courage. A chair leg, half-scraped against the stone, froze. Even the fire seemed to hesitate, its flames burning lower, more carefully.
And then—movement.
A younger student stood. First Year, by the uncertain curve of his shoulders, by the hesitancy in his step. Still too green to master pretense. He didn’t flee—Slytherins never fled—but he shifted, subtly, edging out of the room’s center as if unconsciously obeying a more ancient law. The law of survival. The kind that made deer freeze at the snap of a twig.
Not fast.
But not slow, either.
The way prey might sidle out of reach before the predator could turn its head.
No one told him to move.
No one had to.
The pressure that crept into the room—quiet as breath, sharp as flint—made such decisions for you.
A presence approached.
And it didn’t need to announce itself with sound or spectacle.
Its arrival was felt in the stillness it left behind.
Then Draco saw them—the shoes first.
Polished black leather, the kind that didn’t just shine but reflected, as if even the dim, aquatic light that filtered through the enchanted windows bent itself in reverence. Not a speck of dust dared cling to them. No crease, no wear at the toe. Shoes that had never hurried, never stumbled. Shoes that did not chase power, but walked like they owned it.
They appeared at the edge of Draco’s vision like an omen—silent, inevitable.
Then came the robes, trailing behind in a whisper of shadow. They moved like water, like smoke, like thought—fluid and unknowable. Black so deep it swallowed light, trimmed in a line of silver so fine, it looked drawn by the point of a needle. It caught the flicker of the nearest torchlight with an eerie sharpness—too pale, too precise. It didn’t gleam. It warned.
The silver shimmered like a blade unsheathed.
And then—Tom Riddle.
He emerged not so much from behind the doorway as through it, like something conjured from the air itself. Impossibly still. Devastatingly composed. His presence altered the temperature of the room—too sudden, too complete.
He didn’t just enter. He arrived.
And Draco—who had faced Death Eaters, who had felt the crucible of war heat and harden his bones—felt his hands tighten against the arms of his chair.
Because Tom wasn’t a storm.
He was the silence before it.
He emerged fully into view like something summoned. The motion too seamless to be entirely human, too precise to be chance. There was a theatrical elegance in it—but unintentional, or perhaps so practiced it no longer needed effort. He didn’t move so much as manifest, like a figure stepping from the wrong side of a mirror.
His face was all angles and stillness, an architecture of restraint and design—too perfect to be accidental, too poised to be young. Not passive. Not blank. But contained—in the way that caged magic is contained, humming just beneath the surface, waiting for permission to burn.
The skin was pale, almost luminescent in the lowlight, as though it had never known sun, nor kindness. Not the warmth of a hand held too long, nor the careless affection of summer. It was smooth in the way porcelain might be smooth—unblemished, yes, but brittle. Meant more for display than touch.
His cheekbones swept high and sharp, aristocratic in a way that didn’t suggest nobility, but challenge. Like a blade held to the throat of legacy itself, demanding acknowledgment. Dare to compare, that bone structure seemed to whisper. Dare to find me wanting.
And the mouth—Merlin, that mouth—looked sculpted from cruelty’s imagination. The upper lip too refined, the lower too full, as if evolution hadn’t agreed on whether it belonged to a scholar or a sinner. It was a mouth made for secrets. For spells. For lies spoken low enough to feel like truths. Capable of folding into a dozen dangerous shapes: a smirk that gutted, a smile that seduced, a silence that condemned.
But the eyes—the eyes were worse.
Dark, yes, but not merely in hue. They were deep in the way wells are deep—impossible to see the bottom, and not because it wasn’t there, but because you weren’t meant to survive the descent. They didn’t look at you. They assessed you. Measured your use, your threat, your ache. And behind them shimmered something ancient and unsparing.
Not madness.
Not yet.
But knowledge, edged like knives. And a hunger that could outlive empires.
He didn’t walk. He glided—each step too smooth, too measured, as if friction itself dared not resist him. The floor seemed to accept his weight in silence, unwilling to mark his passage. And with his entrance, the common room changed.
Not loudly. Not even noticeably, to the untrained eye.
But a ripple moved through the space, as subtle as breath held between two heartbeats. Conversations faltered mid-sentence. Shoulders squared unconsciously. Spines found their alignment. It wasn’t discipline—it was instinct. Like animals sensing a shift in weather. A predator entering the field.
No one greeted him. No one dared. His arrival was not a moment but a phenomenon. He didn’t require acknowledgment to be known. He wasthe acknowledgment. His presence settled over the room like a pressure drop—something primal and old, announcing itself with silence, with stillness, with inevitability.
Students parted for him without meeting his eyes. They made way with the fluidity of nature: like reeds bending to current, like shadows shifting to make space for flame. It wasn’t fear. Not exactly. It was awe sharpened by the knowledge that awe alone might not save you.
Draco didn’t move.
He sat very still, spine drawn taut like a blade unsheathed, posture composed, deliberate. The book in his lap was no longer a source of distraction but a shield. Its pages remained closed, his fingers unmoving atop the leather binding. A decoy. A lie he wore like all the others.
He didn’t lift his head. Not fully. That would be too revealing. Too telling. Too eager. And Slytherins—true Slytherins—never showed their hunger. Not where it could be seen. Not where it could be used.
But every inch of him was attuned.
He felt it. Felt him.
Tom’s gravity wrapped around the room like a current beneath still waters—undeniable and unseen. It bent the air, bent Draco, drew his awareness with the pull of moons and oceans. Every tendon strained against stillness, every breath fought not to sharpen.
And Tom… Tom didn’t even look at him.
He passed with the detachment of a storm cloud that grazes a coastline but spills no rain. Unmoved. Unmoving. Unmoved by him.
And yet Draco felt it—the thread stretched tight between them, stitched through fate or folly or something far crueler. He felt it drag, thin and precise, across the bones of his chest like piano wire. It didn’t bleed. Not yet.
But it sang.
Riddle drifted toward a velvet chair near the hearth, each step a statement written in silence. The shadows near the fireplace didn’t resist him—they rearranged for him, folding inward with reverence, not like things chased away by light, but like acolytes bowing before a higher force. They didn’t collapse. They cleared a path.
He lowered himself into the chair with a stillness so precise it bordered on ceremonial. His back remained unbent, a line of defiance carved into posture. Limbs draped with deliberate grace, the kind born not of ease but of command. Hands folded over one another—neither idle nor tense, but perfectly arranged. Like a crown placed just so on the head of a boy-prince sculpted from ash and ambition. Regal, but not alive in the way boys were meant to be.
The firelight reached for him, foolish and soft, and failed.
It brushed his features like a hesitant hand, hoping to find warmth or youth, and found only angles. Not harsh, but impenetrable. Stone that remembered every chisel. Marble that had never wept. The light flickered against him, diminished, as if even it knew it had no power here.
Then—his gaze moved.
Slowly. Methodically. A sweep of the room not meant to see but to assess. To claim. Like a blade drawn across a field, deciding which stalks would fall first. His eyes moved with that same cruel patience—unhurried, inevitable.
And still… he didn’t look at Draco.
Not once.
Not a flicker of recognition. Not the brush of a glance caught by accident. Not even a shift in breath or focus that might suggest he had noticed the pale boy with the closed book and coiled spine just across the room.
Nothing.
The prick.
His fingers curled slightly against the closed book in his lap, the pages crinkling beneath his grip. Knuckles gone pale. He could feel the pressure ghosting up his arm, like he was holding onto something sharp without realizing it. His nails bit into the leather binding—focus, hold, don’t show it—but it was already there, gnawing at the edge of his composure.
That sharp.
That swift.
The disappointment.
It cleaved through his chest like a blade dulled by repetition—by hope raised too often and dashed again. Not clean. Not merciful. But ragged. And familiar. So damn familiar it made his teeth ache.
He hated how much it stung. Hated the way it bloomed behind his ribs like bruised fruit, heavy and bitter. Hated him—for having this power over him. For using it so casually. For not even having to try.
And then—
As if summoned by the silent, seething curse unraveling in his mind—
Tom looked at him.
Not a flinch. Not a startled glance. But something far worse.
Deliberate.
The movement was smooth as silk drawn over glass, as slow and precise as a snake uncurling from the warmth of a stone. It held no urgency, no apology. Just cold intention.
Their eyes met.
And Draco—Draco felt it like a spell brushed along his skin, light and slow and devastating. A flicker of something that wasn’t quite touch but left the same mark. His breath hitched, caught sideways in his throat. Then his heart gave a single, treacherous thud—offbeat, loud, like a knock on a sealed door.
He could feel it—the heat blooming up his neck, pooling traitorously at the tips of his ears. A flush that burned too fast, too open. A warning flare. A goddamn confession.
Idiot, he told himself. Stupid. Obvious.
But Merlin, the look.
There was nothing overt in it. Nothing a professor could call out. Nothing a peer could point to and say, there, that meant something. But Draco knew. He felt the weight behind it. The slight tilt of Tom’s head. The way his gaze didn’t just land—but unlocked. Peeled him apart with silent ease.
For half a breath—half in dread, half in ridiculous hope—Draco wondered:
Had he read his mind?
The thought slithered down his spine like icewater.
It wouldn’t be impossible. Not for him. Even now—even this young—Tom Riddle had always been gifted at Legilimency. Slipping past people’s defenses the way a wraith slips through walls. Effortless. Soundless. Elegant.
A whisper under the door.
But Draco wasn’t a novice. Not in this. He had learned Occlumency before he could name what he was hiding. Before he even understood what it meant to have something worth shielding. His mind was a fortress built in shadows—cold, beautiful, cruel. He had trained under pressure. Under threat. Under the watchful eye of a man who had taught him that privacy was the last thing you ever gave freely.
He knew how to close the door.
He knew how to lock it.
He refused to believe Riddle had slipped inside without him noticing.
Still… why now?
Why, after days of silence?
Why, after pretending Draco didn’t exist—didn’t matter—was just another name in the ledger of those beneath him?
Why this one look?
Draco held his gaze. Cool. Detached. He schooled every line of his face into stillness, every muscle into composure. As if this was nothing. As if it didn’t matter. As if they were only passing glances in a crowded room and not playing a game so razor-edged it could cut open the sky.
Because that’s what it was. A game.
A slow-burning, silent war where attention was currency, and absence—a blade. One they both wielded with exquisite precision.
Was that it, then?
Had Tom returned his gaze now only because Draco had stopped chasing it? Because he’d turned his face away first? Deprived him of the one thing he hadn’t asked for—want?
The thought twisted, sharp and smug, and Draco let it live.
His lips twitched.
Not quite a smirk.
Not quite a sneer.
But something in between—cold, self-possessed, the expression of someone who’d been underestimated one too many times and had grown to savor the taste of it.
He didn’t look away.
Their eyes locked like swords meeting mid-swing, each holding just shy of the killing blow. A duel without wands. A staring contest between kings. One wrong move, one twitch of the mouth, one blink too soon—and it would all shift.
Draco wouldn’t blink. He never blinked first.
And Tom—Tom didn’t blink at all.
But something flickered in those dark, fathomless eyes. A glint, like light skimming the edge of a dagger. Not warmth, never warmth—but amusement. Real. Unmistakable.
A ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth—brief, calculated, satisfied. Like this had been a move he’d long predicted. A beat in the rhythm of a song only he could hear. And now it had played just as he wanted.
Bastard.
He moved forward—not walking so much as arriving, like dusk settling over a quiet field. Quiet. Inevitable. The room responded to him the way the tide responds to the moon. Every footstep drew the shadows tighter, the air more tense, as if the castle itself leaned inward to listen.
And still, his eyes never wavered.
Twin pools of obsidian, catching no light, but gleaming all the same—bottomless, ancient, impossible. They held Draco fast, not as a peer, but as something claimed. Marked. Understood. It wasn’t just a look. It was a hold. A command. As if he were already reaching inside him, touching the pressure points of his spine and soul.
Draco felt it.
Merlin, he felt it.
It was like the first breath of thunder before the sky decides to break. That subtle, electric moment when nature holds itself taut, and though nothing has yet happened—everything knows it will.
The change came gradually, then all at once.
The fire dulled, as if the hearth itself had forgotten how to burn in his presence. The amber light drew inward, shrinking from its surroundings like it, too, feared to be noticed. Shadows lengthened along the stone walls, stretching like fingers unsure whether to grasp or retreat.
Across the room, conversations splintered. Laughter curdled into quiet. Words hovered mid-syllable, suspended and then dropped, forgotten. The hush wasn’t demanded—it was drawn, coaxed from the bones of the room like air from lungs. Even the torches on the walls seemed to flicker slower, dimmer. As though flame, too, answered to him.
The air shifted. Grew dense. Brittle. Saturated with the pressure of something vast and unseen, like the second before lightning splits the world in two. Breath became harder. Time moved differently.
And then—
He stopped.
Right before the couch.
Right before him.
And the hush that followed was cathedral-deep. Reverent. The kind of silence that didn’t ask for permission. The kind that arrived only when power walked into a room and demanded to be known.
Tom tilted his head the smallest degree—an elegant, feline motion. Controlled. Deadly.
His voice, when it came, was low and smooth. Velvet stretched over steel.
“Peverell.”
The name rolled from Tom’s lips with deliberate softness. No edge. No bite. Just quiet recognition—intimate in its neutrality. It did not echo like a challenge, nor snap like a threat. It hung between them, poised and precise, curling around Draco’s ribs like a ribbon drawn through ice water. Silken. Inevitable. There was something unmistakably possessive about the way he said it. As if, in speaking the name aloud, Tom was not addressing Draco, but claiming him. Marking the air with ownership.
Draco looked up slowly—no haste, no heat. Every movement deliberate, distilled into elegance. The kind of stillness that wasn’t born of fear, but command. Control, carved deep into the bones.
The light that spilled through the cathedral-sized windows washed him in shades of shifting green and silver, the hues of the lake playing across his skin like silk. His blond hair caught the watery luminescence, gleaming like burnished gold beneath the surface of an enchanted sea. Each strand shimmered faintly, soft but precise, framing the fine-cut lines of his face.
His features—Merlin, his face—were marble and moonlight. High cheekbones. A patrician nose. Lips that rarely betrayed more than intention. Beautiful, yes—but not soft. There was nothing soft about him. The sharpness had been bred in, trained in, pressed into him by a thousand expectations and the weight of a name.
His eyes lifted last.
Silver-blue. Glacial. Dazzling. They caught the dim light like gemstones—diamond-bright, faceted with something unreadable. Not cold exactly, but distant in the way stars are distant: too far to touch, too dangerous to wish upon.
Behind him, the giant squid drifted near the windows, its shadow enormous and fleeting, darkening the floor beneath them like an eclipse. It passed just as quickly, vanishing into the deep, and the light returned, refracted in soft ripples over Draco’s pale skin.
He did not flinch. Did not blink.
He was stillness made beautiful. Composure made flesh.
His gaze rose like a drawn blade—cool, silvery, and unflinching.
It did not dart, did not flicker. It ascended with precision, the way a sword might be lifted from velvet, gleaming in the low green light. There was no tremor in it. No uncertainty. Only steel beneath starlight.
He met Tom’s eyes head-on, without the smallest flinch. As if he had been forged for this moment. As if looking into that abyss—those bottomless, burning-dark eyes—was not something to fear, but to measure.
The silence between them stretched long, taut as the breath before a duel. Time held still. Even the shadows seemed to pause, unwilling to interrupt.
And then—he broke it.
Not with a tremor, not with a whisper, but with a word:
cold, clipped, sharp as a snapped wand.
“Riddle.”
The name cracked through the stillness like a shard of ice driven deep into stone. Sharp. Cold. Irrevocable.
It wasn’t defiance.
It was declaration.
A mirror, offered back without polish or pretense. A reflection he refused to distort.
Their eyes locked again—two storms meeting above the same sea. No lightning yet. No thunder. Just the unbearable, electric weight of potential. The air between them pulsed with unspoken things. Not hatred. Not friendship. Something older. Deeper. Elemental. A magnetic tension that hummed low in Draco’s chest, vibrating just beneath his ribs like a second heartbeat. Quiet, relentless. Inevitable.
Behind them, the fire gave a sudden pop.
A small thing—wood splitting under heat—but in the taut, breathless silence, it sounded like a spell igniting. Like the world clearing its throat. Like permission.
Tom’s gaze dipped—slow, deliberate—to the book lying untouched in Draco’s lap.
His expression didn’t shift. Not fully. But something flickered. Not emotion, exactly. More the ghost of a thought taking shape. The quiet gleam of calculation moving behind a flawless mask. Interest. Curiosity. Recognition.
“Still pretending to read,” he murmured, voice low and velvet-dark, the kind of softness that concealed its teeth. “You’ll give yourself away.”
The words slipped into the space between them like smoke under a door. Invasive. Unstoppable. Already inside. Not quite mockery. Not quite concern. A warning disguised as an indulgence. Intimate in its precision.
Draco’s fingers curled, just slightly, against the leather cover. The movement was small. Almost nothing. But its weight—seismic. Like pulling a pin from a grenade.
Then—his reply.
“Finally done giving me the silent treatment?”
The tone was dry. Razor-sharp. Polished to the point of cruelty. He didn’t need to raise his voice. The calm was the cut. The stillness was the threat.
There was acid in it—measured, precise, and far more dangerous than fire.
Tom’s dark wine eyes flicked back to him—catching, holding. They didn’t just look; they consumed. In the low, lake-filtered light of the Slytherin common room, his pupils dilated—just slightly. Just enough. But it was enough to feel. Enough to know something in him had shifted.
That ghost of a smile returned, curling at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t warm. It was pleased. Deeply satisfied. As if some unseen game had finally moved to the next square, exactly as he’d hoped.
“You were the one who avoided me first,” Tom said, his voice like velvet steeped in honey—dark, indulgent, dangerous. Each word was sculpted, delivered with the weight of inevitability, as though anything less than perfection would have offended him. His brow lifted in a slow, deliberate arch—elegant, infuriating. A challenge offered not in anger, but in art.
“I was simply giving you space. Was I wrong?”
He tilted his head slightly, and the soft sheen of his dark hair moved with the motion—liquid silk in shadow. The gesture was effortless, practiced, almost feline in its grace.
The question floated in the narrow space between them—light as air, sharp as glass. All feigned innocence and soft menace. A silk ribbon tied into a noose.
Draco’s breath slowed. Measured. His lungs remembered the rhythm of battle—of pacing yourself before the blow lands.
Draco didn’t lift his eyes from the book sprawled across his lap—half-open, unread, a prop in a performance he didn’t care to disguise. He didn’t need to look. His stillness was its own language. A poised refusal. He lounged like a crowned boy on a battered green throne, slouched but sovereign, regal in his disdain. Yet beneath the lazy posture was a tension that pulsed—subtle, unmistakable. His spine straightened imperceptibly. Shoulder blades angled back. Like wings furling, like steel winding itself into form. He was a sword—half-drawn, gleaming just enough to warn of blood.
“Oh, how noble of you,” Draco said, his voice laced with something acidic, each syllable curling like smoke rising off scorched parchment. His fingers turned a page with slow, deliberate precision—never once lowering his gaze to the book. The gesture was dismissive, a quiet dismissal wrapped in casual cruelty. “The ever-considerate Tom Riddle, offering space. What’s next? Handwritten apologies? Flowers?”
A smile touched Tom’s lips—barely a thing. Pale, dangerous. The kind of smile knives might share when no one is watching.
Like moonlight kissing a blade just before it’s drawn.
He advanced with measured grace, each movement a thread woven into the thickening tension between them. His arms folded loosely behind his back, a posture that spoke of ease yet concealed sharp calculation. Tom moved with the effortless elegance of old aristocracy—predatory and untouched by the mundane world he chose to haunt. There was poetry in his motion, and poison.
“I thought you’d like orchids,” he murmured, voice soft and trailing like smoke curling in cold air. His eyes glinted—dark, unreadable. “Or was that just another affectation?”
Draco scoffed—a quiet, derisive sound as sharp as splintered glass. His lashes lifted slowly, looking up,revealing eyes that caught the firelight and turned translucent, brittle like ice ready to crack. “I prefer things that don’t rot in silence,” he said, his tone cool, glassy, precise.
Tom tilted his head, a few strands of dark hair slipping over his brow, casting shadows across his gaze. “Interesting,” he said, his words a slow pour of ink across cold marble. “Because you seem quite practiced at withering all on your own.”
For a fraction of a breath, Draco’s composure wavered—barely. The skin around his eyes tightened. His jaw flexed. Then the moment passed, smoothed over like a fault line gilded in gold—polished and hidden.
And then, Draco smiled.
It was the kind of smile one might wear while walking away from a fire they’d deliberately set—quiet, beautiful, and laced with danger. It lingered on Draco’s lips like a whispered threat, delicate and lethal all at once.
“You know,” Draco said, his voice wrapped in silk and glass, smooth yet brittle, “I’ve met Dementors more emotionally available than you.”
Tom didn’t blink. Instead, a low hum escaped him—velvety, indulgent, like smoke curling through cracks in old stone. It seeped into the space between them, thickening the air, folding around the tension like a living thing.
“And yet you still crave my company.”
“Crave?” Draco’s laugh was soft and brittle, like glass chimes fractured by frost, hollowed out by restraint. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, the edge of his voice sharpened by detachment, a blade honed by years of careful control. “You’re a puzzle, Riddle. Nothing more.”
Tom’s expression remained unreadable, an unyielding mask. But he moved—closer. Step by deliberate step, Tom came to a stop just before the couch—until the hearth behind him dimmed, the firelight faltering, bending around his silhouette as if even flame dared not touch him. His shadow spilled forward in slow, deliberate conquest, cloaking the stone floor, the folds of Draco’s robes, the spine of the untouched book like dusk laying its claim over a flickering, fragile flame.
It reached the threshold Draco had drawn with quiet ritual—an invisible perimeter forged from posture and pride, angles too perfect to invite intrusion. A ward made not with wands but with spine-straight stillness and sharp, sculpted silence.
And Tom crossed it.
Without hesitation. Without apology.
His presence moved like an eclipse—weightless, soundless, and yet devastating in its gravity. Not oppressive. Inevitable.
Draco did not shift. Did not flinch. His fingers remained poised atop the open book, unmoved. But inside, his pulse stirred—quickened—not from fear.
From recognition.
From the deep, thrumming knowledge that something irreversible had just stepped into his space. Not a person. A force. A storm dressed in skin.
And Draco—who knew the danger of want, the ruin of attention—let it happen.
Because he knew, too, that there are some tides you do not resist.
You ride them. Or you drown.
“A puzzle?” Tom echoed, his voice a low murmur—thoughtful, unhurried, as if tasting the syllables to see what they might yield. There was no mockery in it. That would have been easier to ignore. No, this was worse. This was interest—quiet, genuine interest—the kind a cat has in the flick of a dying bird’s wing.
Amused.
Measured.
Dangerous.
He stepped closer.
Just enough that Draco could feel it—the heat between them changing, bending, the way air curves before a storm. It wasn’t physical contact, not yet. But presence. Weight. The kind of nearness that draws breath to the surface and leaves the skin hyper-aware of every unclaimed inch.
“You treat me more like a compulsion,” Tom murmured, each word spun from silk and strung with iron. “Something you return to. Unwilling. Obsessive. The shape of me traced again and again in the dark.”
The silence between them tensed like a bowstring.
“Afraid of what you’ll find,” he said, voice velvet-edged and slow, “and more afraid of not knowing.”
Draco didn’t flinch. But the space around his stillness trembled. His breath, once effortless, now moved like something conscious—deep, deliberate, measured like the pull of a man caught beneath a rising tide who refuses, stubbornly, to drown.
He turned a page.
Not for the words.
Not for meaning.
Only to move.
The parchment whispered beneath his fingers, a fragile sound in the thick quiet—more fragile still because it tried to sound ordinary. The gesture was precise, elegant. But it was camouflage, nothing more. A small deflection in the face of something vast.
The silence between them groaned like frost underfoot—beautiful and brittle, too thin to bear their weight. It cracked, not with sound, but with pressure. With the hum of two forces circling something unsaid, unwilling to name it, unable to sever it.
And in that fracture of quiet, everything hovered—unspoken truths, unshed glances, the dangerous weight of attention.
It would take only one word to break it.
Only one breath too sharp.
Only one misstep.
But Draco held his ground.
Still. Composed.
Not untouched—no, never that.
Only unreadable.
Tom tilted his head slightly, and the motion—graceful, feline, curious—cast a sweep of shadow across his cheekbone. His eyes, dark as split garnets in candlelight, never left Draco’s face. He studied him the way one might study a half-finished spell or an unsolved cipher—intent, quiet, with the kind of patience that was its own form of pressure.
As if, by watching the way Draco’s fingers held the page, the way his lashes didn’t flicker, the way his pulse betrayed itself in the hollow of his throat—he might learn the shape of Draco’s soul.
“You speak like you hate me,” Tom said, his voice dropping into something intimate and low, like the hush of nightfall just before the world begins to dream.
His tone wasn’t accusing. It wasn’t sharp. It was soft. Measured. Laced with something close to wonder.
“You stare like you don’t.”
He leaned forward—not enough to bridge the distance, but enough to tilt the world between them. The space trembled, filled with heat and gravity and the ache of restraint.
“…And yet,” Tom breathed, his words brushing the air like fingertips grazing silk, “here you are.”
The sentence lingered, barely above a whisper, but it struck like a spell cast without wand or word.
It wasn’t a question.
It was certainty.
A mirror turned outward.
An invitation drawn in ash and silk.
And Draco—silent, sculpted, still—did not move.
But his throat bobbed once, a swallow sharp as glass.
Tom’s eyes didn’t waver. They drank Draco in—every tight line of posture, every breath measured too carefully. The kind of scrutiny that unraveled a man thread by thread, until nothing remained hidden but the trembling of the spool.
He smiled then, faint and fatal, like frost blooming across a blade. It wasn’t triumph. It wasn’t even satisfaction. It was inevitability. Something ancient stirring beneath the polished surface of his skin.
“I wonder,” he murmured, the words coiling in the space between them like incense smoke, sweet and suffocating, “how much of you is pretending.”
His hand lifted—slow, deliberate—not to touch, but to hover. Just above the armrest, just above the leather-bound book still cradled in Draco’s lap. His fingers never made contact. But the air itself bent toward the gesture, drawn to it like iron to lodestone.
“Is it easier,” Tom said, his voice a velvet knife, “to wear disdain than admit you’re intrigued?”
Draco’s gaze flicked upward, sharp and gleaming like shrapnel. Ice over water. Fire beneath.
“You mistake attention for interest,” he said, quiet and clipped, like the strike of a well-honed rapier. “Not everything that watches you wants to keep you.”
A breath passed between them, slow and electric. Tom’s smile deepened—but only slightly. Like a crack spreading through marble, elegant and inevitable.
“No,” he agreed softly. “Some things just want to understand what makes me dangerous.”
A pause, thick and humming.
“And some…” His voice dipped lower. “…want to know what makes me bleed.”
That landed. Draco’s spine stiffened by a fraction. His eyes held steady, but something in them flickered—uncertain, unreadable. Not fear. Not fascination. A place where both lived, stitched too closely together to separate.
Tom’s gaze lingered, heavy and unblinking. There was no cruelty in it—no overt triumph. Just something colder. Older. A knowing that sank its teeth into silence and held.
Draco’s throat worked again. He shifted minutely—an adjustment of posture, a flick of a breath—but it was enough to fracture the illusion of indifference he wore like armor. The firelight kissed the side of his face, pale and fine-boned, casting long shadows beneath the sweep of his lashes. His hands, still resting on the book, had curled slightly, knuckles taut beneath skin.
Tom watched it all.
He took another step.
Soft. Certain. Soundless.
The hem of his robes whispered against the stone, and Draco felt it like a gust beneath the skin. The air between them tightened—compressed with the weight of words not spoken, the shape of things neither of them dared name. And yet they were there. Built into the tilt of Tom’s head. The stillness of Draco’s shoulders. The distance closing inch by inch.
“You’ve always been here,” Tom said, quieter now. “Even when you were avoiding me. Even when your eyes wandered the room as if I didn’t exist.”
He knelt then.
Not fully. Just enough to lower himself to Draco’s height. Just enough to break the line between power and poise and drag it into something far more intimate.
His voice was a murmur between them, low and smooth and terrifying in how gently it fell.
“Tell me… what are you waiting for, Draco?”
He said the name like a spell, like it meant more in his mouth than it had ever meant in anyone else’s. Not an accusation. Not a demand.
A provocation.
Draco looked at him at last—truly looked. His eyes, pale and sharp, caught the firelight and held it, turned it cold. His lips parted, but no sound emerged.
Because what could he say?
That he didn’t know?
That he knew too much?
That every time Tom looked at him like that, it felt like falling in slow motion?
Tom tilted his head, patient. A strand of hair slipped forward over his brow.
Still, he waited.
Draco’s voice, when it came, was quiet. Brittle. Beautiful.
“I’m waiting to see if you give in first.”
A beat. A breath.
And Tom—of course—smiled.
The smile bloomed slow and serpentine across Tom’s lips—not wide, not showy, but precise. Like a blade eased from its sheath. It didn’t reach his eyes. Or perhaps it did, just not in any way that comforted. There was too much in that smile: amusement, admiration, something deeper and more dangerous—something that flickered just behind his gaze like lightning caught behind glass.
“Give in?” he repeated, voice curling like dark ribbon through smoke. “Is that what this is?”
He rose—not abruptly, not with force. He unfurled like something ancient roused from stillness. And yet, even standing, he felt no taller than he had knelt. The intimacy hadn’t faded. It had shifted—grown teeth.
He circled, slow, letting his fingers trail along the back of the couch as he passed behind Draco’s shoulder. The sound of fabric brushing stone. The faint catch of breath. The silence that rose and curled like mist between two shores.
“You mistake me,” Tom said at last, just behind Draco’s ear. “I don’t surrender. I don’t loose. I wait.”
The whisper fell like a breath against the shell of Draco’s ear. Not quite touch. But close. So close.
“I watch.”
His fingers didn’t graze him—but they passed near enough that Draco could feel the heat of them ghosting over the nape of his neck.
“I study.”
The air around him had gone thinner. Denser. The fire, barely more than embers now, cast long, uncertain shadows up the stone walls. Everything felt as if it were holding its breath.
“And when the moment comes,” Tom continued, stepping back into view—just in front of him now, eyes fathomless—“I don’t give in.”
A pause.
“I strike.”
Draco’s eyes didn’t lower. He met that gaze like a drawn blade meeting another. Pale and pointed. Icy and alive. There was something electric behind his stillness now. Not fear. Something stranger. Something steadier.
“You think I don’t know that?” he said, his voice soft, clipped. “You think I haven’t seen the way you set your traps? Light your fires? Wait for something to burn just long enough before you decide to care?”
Tom blinked—once, slowly. No shift in expression, but something in the air altered around him, like the intake of breath before thunder.
“And yet,” he said again, softer now. “Still. You. Stay.”
The silence between them returned, not empty but dense—charged, humming like a wand drawn but not yet raised. The question hung unspoken in the air: Why?
Draco’s voice barely lifted above the crackle of the fire. “Maybe I want to see if you’d break your own rules… for me.”
Something flickered. Not on Tom’s face—it remained smooth, composed—but behind his eyes, there was movement. A shift. Like something ancient turning in deep water.
Then came a sound—small, unhurried—a laugh, but not boyish. Low and velvet-dark, warm as candlewax and just as dangerous. It curved in the air between them, unexpected. Unsettling. A sound too old for someone with hands still growing into strength.
Tom moved. Just a step. Just enough.
The edge of his robes ghosted across Draco’s knee—barely a touch, but it landed like a mark.
A heartbeat passed. Then another.
Then Tom leaned down.
Not much. Not enough to close the space—but enough to let his presence spill over. His shadow pooled across Draco’s lap, a living thing, dark and thick as spellwork. And when he spoke again, his breath stirred the fine strands at Draco’s temple.
“Then you’ve succeeded.”
Draco’s throat tightened. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away. He held Tom’s gaze like a blade between them—sharp, defiant, trembling only at the edges.
A beat passed.
“Have I?” he asked, voice hushed. “Or are you just using me… to punish Cassian?”
“You have,” Tom replied, breath so close it ghosted over Draco’s skin, “ Don’t speak another man’s name when I’m right in front of you.”
The space between them crackled—tight and electric. A silence coiled there, heavy as storm clouds on the verge of breaking. It lasted just long enough to feel dangerous.
Then Tom straightened.
Graceful. Controlled. As if he hadn’t just stolen the breath from Draco’s lungs and shaped it into something raw and bleeding.
He stepped back—not retreating, not releasing—but recalibrating. A predator adjusting his posture, not abandoning the hunt. His gaze remained fixed, steady, almost too steady. Unblinking, it dragged over Draco like the edge of a scalpel, peeling past layers with terrifying patience.
The fire behind them had dulled to coals, casting slow-moving light through the common room. It painted the stone in arterial reds and golds, threw restless flickers across the green velvet drapes like breath across skin. Shadows slid long over the flagstones, warping with every twitch of flame. The room felt suspended in a dream too vivid to be safe—too quiet to be benign.
And the air—it had changed. Drawn in around them. Dense. Expectant. Like the castle itself was holding its breath to hear what came next.
Tom’s face remained composed, flawless in that inhuman way that made it impossible to trust. But his eyes… always the eyes. They betrayed him. Ancient, watching things they should not yet know. Too old. Too alive. And now, they shimmered with something uncontained. Something volatile. Something frighteningly human.
“You make it very difficult,” he murmured, low and even, every word perfectly placed. They fell like drops of ink into water—bleeding, staining, irreversible. “To decide whether I should admire you… or ruin you.”
Draco didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.
His expression was immaculate—cool, unimpressed, that cultivated disinterest worn like armor. But the set of his jaw, the subtle tension in his shoulders, gave him away. He was wary. Poised. Ready for impact.
“I’d be flattered,” he said at last, voice like mercury poured into a mold—sleek, gleaming, fatal. “If you hadn’t already made that decision.”
A flicker ghosted across Tom’s face—barely there, like the trace of a shadow behind glass. Surprise, maybe. Or a kind of amusement, thin and razor-edged, twisted just slightly out of shape. The expression didn’t last—it never did with him—but something in the air shifted with it, as if the room had leaned closer to listen.
He moved forward.
One step.
Then another.
No rush, no sound beyond the soft susurration of his robes skimming the floor. Closer now. Close enough that the fringe of his cloak brushed against the couch where Draco sat. Close enough that the heat of him—quiet, seething, impossible to ignore—rippled into the space between them. He carried a tension like a storm held behind a glass pane, pressure building with nowhere to go.
Draco could feel it. The hum of Tom, the strange, static thrum that clung to him like the echo of ancient magic. As if the air around him remembered things it had no right to. The shadows at his feet shifted, alive, curling toward him like loyal things—devoted and indecent in their intimacy. They moved as if drawn not by light or shape, but by him alone.
“Perhaps,” Tom said, and the word landed softer than expected, thoughtful. “I’ve changed my mind.”
Draco’s breath caught—just for a moment—but he didn’t let it show. Instead, he leaned back slightly into the couch, lazy, poised, all deliberate elegance. The firelight reached for him, casting molten gold across the clean blade of his jaw. His smile, when it came, was slow and knowing—a glinting thing, all teeth and velvet.
“Do you do that often?” he asked, voice featherlight, edged with idle challenge. “Change your mind? I imagined you more the… resolute type.”
That did something.
Tom’s eyes sparked like flint meeting stone—brief, bright, deadly. The look he gave Draco then was not quite hunger, not quite calculation. It was something caught in between. Something sharper. As if he saw not just Draco’s face but every intention, every weakness, every temptation layered beneath it—and worshipped the architecture of it all.
“Only,” Tom said, voice soft as silk but iron underneath, “when the subject demands it.”
And his gaze didn’t waver.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t retreat.
He was watching Draco the way a scholar studies scripture—curious, reverent, prepared to burn it all for a truth buried just beneath the skin.
The silence that followed curled around them like smoke—warm, suffocating, intimate.
Draco’s throat felt dry, his pulse a steady throb beneath his skin. He knew that look. Had seen it directed at others from a distance. Tom didn’t look at people like that. Not truly. He dissected. Measured. Plucked them apart like petals from a flower to see what wilted first. But this—this was not distance.
This was attention.
Weighted. Devouring.
Draco could feel it scraping down to his bones.
And yet… he didn’t look away. Wouldn’t. That was part of the unspoken game between them: who would retreat first. Who would blink. Who would fall.
A brush of heat licked across his cheek as Tom moved again—closer now, until the hem of his cloak trapped Draco’s knee in the folds of shadow. He could smell him, faintly: old parchment, ash, something darker beneath. Something that smelled like the underside of a spell.
Tom’s hand lifted—slowly, as though testing the tension in the room like a harp string. His fingers hovered near Draco’s jaw, not quite touching, just tracing the heat his skin gave off. Every nerve along Draco’s face lit up in anticipation, his breath stalling in his throat.
Touch me, or don’t, he thought, but stop pretending you’re not going to.
He could feel the pull of Tom’s magic now, quiet but undeniable, like the tug of a tide under the surface. It wasn’t cast. It wasn’t spoken. It simply was—woven into the air around him, invisible and inescapable.
Tom’s fingers drifted lower, brushing the curve of Draco’s jaw. The touch was featherlight, maddening in its precision. Draco’s breath hitched, his gaze still locked with Tom’s.
Don’t flinch.
Don’t lean in.
Don’t show him he’s winning.
But the electricity under his skin betrayed him. Every inch of him felt exposed, as though his skin had gone translucent, nerves trembling just beneath the surface.
Tom tilted his head, studying him. “You’re holding very still.”
“So are you,” Draco whispered back.
The corner of Tom’s mouth lifted—just slightly. Not a smile. A reveal.
“You’re wondering what I’ll do next,” he murmured. “Whether I’ll touch you again… or tear this all down instead.”
Draco swallowed. “You always do enjoy your dramatics.”
“And you,” Tom breathed, “enjoy being close to the fire.”
His thumb brushed the hollow beneath Draco’s lip—too gentle, too knowing. Draco’s heart gave a traitorous leap. He wanted to speak, to mock, to regain even a sliver of control, but the words snagged in his throat.
Because Tom Riddle was leaning in again.
Not rushed. Not uncertain. Just enough for his breath to warm the space between their mouths.
Just enough to make Draco wonder whether this was a game after all—or something far more dangerous wearing the skin of one.
Tom’s breath was right there—warm, quiet, a phantom against Draco’s cheek. It grazed his skin like a whispered promise not yet broken, threading through the fine strands of his hair. The moment hung, stretched thin as spun glass, delicate and dangerous. Everything held still. The fire, the air, even the shadows seemed to wait.
And then—
He pulled away.
Not with reluctance. Not with apology. But with the smooth, unhurried grace of someone entirely in control. Each movement was deliberate, too perfect to be instinct. The space he left behind felt colder, emptied, like breath stolen from a glass.
The tension didn’t vanish. It thickened, darkened. Bitter as ashes and almost sweet, like something that had nearly become real.
Tom didn’t look away. His stillness was unnerving—too precise, like a spell wound too tightly. His expression remained unreadable: a porcelain mask over a furnace. But his eyes… his eyes lingered.
There was a cut to them now, a glint too sharp for curiosity. Something that glimmered like the edge of a knife before it draws blood.
“Tell me,” he said at last, his voice velvet-soft but unyielding. “Do you feel disappointed?”
The question lanced through Draco before he could shield himself.
His heart jolted, traitorous.
He hated it. Hated the way his stomach dropped, hated the raw, quiet ache curling up beneath his ribs. That fluttering, furious yes that bloomed in his chest like a bruise.
But he didn’t flinch.
Instead, he straightened just slightly—enough to lift his chin. He caught Tom’s gaze and held it with all the poise he’d been bred for, spine straight, mouth curling at the corners in practiced disdain.
“I can’t be disappointed in something that isn’t real,” he said, voice polished, languid, a blade disguised as silk. “You don’t like me… not like that.”
He let the words hang there, precise and damning.
It was a wall. A retreat. And yet, somehow, a dare.
Tom said nothing. He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.
So Draco kept talking.
His smile sharpened, a slow, feline thing—beautiful, cold, cruel.
“You are very charming,” he added with a lazy flick of his gaze. “Do you do that often?”
And then came the soft, decisive click—
His book snapping shut, the sound like a final stroke in a duel.
He set it aside with care, movements precise as clockwork, and reclined into the sofa as though the conversation bored him. As though he weren’t half-choking on the heat still thrumming beneath his skin.
He sprawled like royalty—ankle crossing knee, one arm flung over the back of the couch, every line of his posture drawn in confidence and disdain. He looked, in that moment, less like a boy and more like an heir to something ruthless.
But his voice—when it returned—was lower. A little slower. And laced with something more dangerous.
“If you don’t like me,” Draco said softly, the firelight catching in his pale lashes, “but planned on seducing me…”
He paused, letting the words hang like smoke.
“What am I, then?” he murmured. “A subject? A curiosity?”
He turned his head then, slowly, meeting Tom’s gaze with something sharpened behind the calm.
“A toy?” he asked, voice dipping.
A breath, just short of a whisper.
“A threat?”
That last word rippled the air between them. It was too quiet to echo, but it stayed. Coiled there. Waiting.
And behind the chill in his voice, beneath the perfect posture and expensive disdain, something flickered—raw, reluctant, real. Something bruised and wary, desperate to matter, and terrified that he already did.
Tom didn’t speak. But he didn’t look away either.
Because the answer, perhaps, was all but one. And worse—something he hadn’t yet dared to name.
Tom said nothing—but the silence was louder than speech.
It hung between them like a blade suspended mid-drop, gleaming and intimate. The fire behind him gave a low, jealous hiss, as though resenting the tension it could never burn through. His gaze stayed fixed on Draco, not roaming, not devouring—simply seeing, in that unnerving, total way of his. Like he was mapping each flicker of breath, each shift of muscle beneath skin, and filing it away in some vault behind his too-quiet mind.
And still he did not blink.
His gaze stayed locked on Draco—direct, devastating. It wasn’t hunger. Not exactly. Nor was it want, or need. It was attention in its rawest form. The kind that stripped you bare. The kind that catalogued every tremble of breath, every twitch beneath your skin, and tucked it away with precision so absolute it bordered on reverence.
Draco could feel it now. The pull.
Not magic—not quite. But gravity. Ancient. Primal.
The kind of gravity that drew you to cliff edges just to see the sky unravel beneath you. The kind that whispered lean in, look down, fall.
And oh, how easily he might have.
Then—
“I wonder,” Tom said finally, his voice like silk laid over razors, “if you want to be a threat.”
The words fell between them like a lit match.
Draco’s smile changed—subtly. The corners lifted, slow and sly, but his eyes gleamed, sharp with something too alive to be entirely safe.
“And if I do?” he asked, voice like a challenge wrapped in velvet.
Tom moved again—just one step.
But it was enough.
The firelight caught the angle of his cheekbone, the hollow beneath his eyes, the sharp, unyielding architecture of him. He looked like something carved from obsidian and ancient cold—beautiful, but in the way storms are beautiful. Meant to be admired from a distance. Meant to destroy.
“Then I’d be a fool to underestimate you,” he said.
And the way he said it—soft, careful, like a secret being placed in Draco’s hands—made it sound far more like a promise than a warning.
Draco rose.
Not abruptly—no. He moved like smoke winding upward, like silk unfurling in slow motion. Each inch of him spoke not of haste, but of intent, precision, control. It was not a boy standing. It was the unsheathing of something long-forged and waiting. A silent spell without wand or word, just will—and the weight of being seen.
He didn’t break eye contact.
Didn’t need to.
When he came to his full height, they stood close—too close. Chest to chest. Breath to breath. The narrow space between them vibrated with a quiet violence, the kind that didn’t need shouting to be lethal.
Tom’s body radiated a subtle heat—but it was the wrong kind of warmth. Not the comfort of a hearth, but the dry, electric hum of something tightly wound and dangerous. And beneath it all, still, that peculiar coldness—like moonlight on black water, beautiful but bottomless. A surface that promised reflection, and drowned.
“I don’t think you underestimate anyone,” Draco murmured, his voice pitched low, but cutting. “That’s not your vice.”
Tom’s head tilted—just a fraction. Precise. Birdlike. The kind of movement that suggested observation, not reaction. Curiosity sharpened into something far more clinical.
“No?” he murmured.
The word wasn’t skeptical. It was soft, tasting the shape of possibility.
Draco’s lips curved. Barely. A slow unsheathing—thin as a blade’s edge, no wider than a sin.
“No,” he said again, the syllable darkened by certainty. “You don’t underestimate. You claim. You dissect. You conquer.”
Each word landed like a stone dropped into still water—measured, but deliberate. Rippling outward.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty.
It buzzed.
Tight. Electric. As though the space between them had narrowed to a single, trembling thread—one breath, one mistake, one surrender away from snapping.
Tom’s voice—when it came—was little more than a breath against glass.
“And what,” he whispered, “should I do with something I can’t conquer?”
It wasn’t a question.
It was an admission wrapped in threat, bound in silk. A soft place where something sharper lay hidden underneath. Not desperation—need. As though the idea itself was unthinkable, and yet suddenly, dangerously real.
Draco didn’t waver.
He held Tom’s gaze as if it were a blade pressed to his throat—and he’d grown used to the kiss of steel. His mouth curved again, slower this time. Not cruel. Not kind. Something older. Something complicit. As if he, too, had considered the possibility.
As if he’d already answered it.
“Perhaps,” Draco said, voice low and velvet-dark, “you should stop trying.”
The effect was immediate—but not visible.
Not yet.
Tom didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But something behind his eyes flared—like a match struck in the hollow of a ribcage. A sudden awareness. Not of defeat, but of equilibrium. As if the world had tilted a fraction, and he’d only just felt it.
A pause.
Not hesitation.
A reckoning.
And then—he smiled.
Not the sharp, performative curl he wore like armor in classrooms and corridors. Not the smug, curling sneer that reduced others to pawns before they knew the game had begun.
No—this smile was quieter. Slower. Drawn from some deeper place, reverent and dark. It spread like ink in water—smoky and consuming, dangerous in its softness.
Something in it looked at Draco and saw.
“I see,” Tom said at last.
And though the words were simple, they were weighted—like the closing of a circle. Like the striking of a seal.
As though something had just begun.
Or ended.
Or both.
Neither of them moved.
Not yet.
The air between them vibrated with a pressure that felt too vast for the narrow room to contain. Behind Tom, the fire cracked and hissed, flaring with sudden bursts of orange and gold. It threw restless, flickering shadows across his face—shadows that split him into halves. One moment, he was a boy: fine-boned and handsome, all alabaster angles and aristocratic calm. The next, something darker surfaced beneath his skin—something old, something carved out of ambition and rot. A phantom shape flickering beneath human illusion.
He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.
He waited.
Not out of uncertainty.
But out of calculation.
And Draco saw it clearly now—felt it like a hand pressed flat against the center of his chest. Tom wasn’t waiting for permission. He was waiting for the moment he could stop pretending he needed it.
The stare he leveled at Draco wasn’t just intense—it was ritualistic. It unspooled like a summoning, a silent invocation that curled its way beneath Draco’s ribs. The weight of it settled deep, unsettling and reverent all at once, as if Tom wasn’t merely looking at him, but throughhim. Worship and warning, tangled into one gaze.
It was almost holy.
Or unholy.
There wasn’t much difference anymore.
The pull between them thickened. Became something sentient. The kind of tension that didn’t just hum in the air—it distorted it. Warped it. Time slowed. The edges of the room fell away. All that remained was the charge—the stillness before the shattering. That fragile, electric hush before something divine touches down. Or before the blade falls.
Draco didn’t retreat. Didn’t speak. He simply stood, spine straight, chin lifted—offering the pale line of his throat with deliberate grace. Not yielding. Daring.
The silence deepened.
Tom’s voice emerged at last, scarcely more than breath—low and sinuous, like something coaxed from the coals.
“You do know,” he said, “what that makes you… don’t you?”
He wasn’t asking. Not really. It came out like a prophecy already fulfilled. Or a name already written in the bones of the world.
Draco didn’t reply.
He didn’t have to.
The small tilt of his chin, the glint in his storm-grey eyes—that was his answer.
Yes, the gesture whispered.
I know exactly what I am.
Tom’s expression shifted. Not dramatically—he was too disciplined for that. But there was a deepening, a subtle loosening in the corners of his mouth, in the set of his jaw. Like something ancient had just turned over inside him. Like a door, long closed, had creaked open an inch.
His smile wasn’t sweet.
It wasn’t cruel.
It was real.
“Unconquered,” he murmured, voice laced with something closer to awe than he’d ever admit. “Unclaimed.”
Tom moved like a secret—silent, inevitable. The kind of closeness that didn’t come with footsteps but with intention, a shift in atmosphere that made Draco’s skin prickle beneath his collar. It wasn’t the cold. It was him.
His presence slid in, slow and serpentine, until the distance between them became a suggestion rather than a fact. Close enough to smell the faint remnants of something sharp and metallic on Tom’s breath—ink, ash, blood magic. Close enough that every breath Draco drew tasted slightly of him.
“Like me,” Tom spoke again, the word soft, almost reverent—like it had teeth behind it.
His fingers hovered just shy of contact, suspended in air beside Draco’s jaw, never quite touching—never needing to. That restraint was worse than any brush of skin. It was deliberate. Intimate. A threat dressed as a promise.
Behind them, the fire cracked and hissed like it too was holding its breath. The room swam in its glow, shadows jerking and flinching along the walls—twisting into grotesque shapes, then snapping back. The light played across Tom’s face in slivers, shifting him moment by moment: now a golden boy with a philosopher’s eyes, now a silhouette carved from darkness, raw and unknowable. Two truths warred in the hollow of his cheekbones—beauty and dread, creation and ruin.
And Draco—
Draco didn’t flinch.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t yield.
His breath misted faintly between them, curling into the narrowing space like smoke from a forbidden altar. Everything outside this moment ceased to matter. There was only now. Only this. Only the boy before him, whose gaze scorched without heat, whose stillness felt like the edge of some forgotten rite.
“So what are you, then?” Tom asked, voice so thin it barely stirred the air. “A temptation?”
His tone was not mocking.
It was searching.
It was wondering what kind of god would dare burn brighter than him.
Draco’s breath drew slow, deliberate. He felt the question coil through him, then fall away like ash. His voice didn’t waver.
“No,” he said. “I’m the cost.”
The words didn’t land—they settled. Heavy. Final. Like the tolling of a bell that had always been waiting.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty.
It was hallowed.
Tom didn’t speak. Didn’t react. But something inside him buckled—subtle and seismic. The space around him seemed to contract, bowstring-tight, as if even the air recognized the shift. A static charge ghosted across Draco’s skin, hair prickling at the nape of his neck. Not magic. Not exactly. Something older. The moment before a seal breaks. The inhale before a world ends.
Tom’s hand rose again—unhurried, deliberate. Fingers cutting the air with the precision of a curse. He brought them just close enough that Draco could feel the heat of him, the cold that clung just beneath it. They hovered like invocation, a ghost of touch that demanded more than surrender. It demanded recognition.
And still—he did not touch.
He could have.
Gods, he could have shattered the space between them like glass.
But he didn’t.
He only looked at Draco—no smile, no smirk, just that blade-thin calm—and said, so softly it barely rippled the charged air between them:
“Then I hope you’re worth the price.”
Draco’s mouth curved again, the motion slow and exact, like the drawing of a sigil.
“Only the one paying it will know.”
And that—
That was the moment everything shifted.
Not with motion.
But with meaning.
The distance between them didn’t close so much as vanish, rewritten by something deeper than proximity. Like ink spilled across a spell circle—permanent, binding. Something elemental had turned in the ether, like the last note of a summoning being spoken aloud. The line they had danced along wasn’t there anymore. Only the crossing of it.
The room hadn’t changed.
But it had become something else.
The fire gave a low, sudden pop, casting molten flashes across bookshelves and stone. Their shadows leapt and tangled—Draco’s drawn sharp and high against the velvet-backed chair behind him, an elegant cut of silver and shadow. Tom’s, by contrast, moved like it had slipped free of its owner. It crawled along the stone wall like a second self: long-fingered, serpentine, waiting.
And in that waiting, there was no longer any pretense.
Whatever this was—it was no longer a game.
And neither of them dared to pretend otherwise.
The air between them had grown heavy, alchemical. A crucible of breath and charged stillness, thick with power that hadn’t been spoken aloud but had been known. It wasn’t just magic. It was potential. It was promise. It was a spark lingering at the edge of a powder keg.
Tom’s gaze didn’t waver, but narrowed, just faintly, as if seeing something clearer in the distortion.
“You’re not afraid of me,” he said at last, his voice an incision in the quiet.
Not a challenge.
Not a hope.
Just a truth, spoken into the space like a law waiting to be tested.
Draco’s brow arched slowly—precise, deliberate. Like the draw of a blade from a sheath, gleaming and inevitable. “Should I be?” he asked, voice a study in lazy confidence, the syllables crisp as falling ice.
Tom’s mouth curved at one corner, the barest hint of a smile pulling taut over something much darker beneath. “Everyone else is.”
The silence that followed wasn’t absence—it was presence. Thick with meaning. Draco didn’t rush to fill it. He let it breathe, let it press between them like a held breath before a plunge.
“Then I suppose,” Draco said at last, each word steady as steps on stone, “you should be asking yourself… why I’m not.”
It hit like a clean strike. Not loud, but resonant. It didn’t ripple across Tom’s face—he was still a masterwork of composure, that finely-carved façade—but in his eyes, something flared. A flicker. Like the twitch of a curtain behind glass. A thought he hadn’t invited.
“I have,” Tom murmured, so quiet it felt like a confession passed between worlds. “Many times.”
He moved forward, silent as gravity. Another step—casual, but calculated—and now the air between them was less than breath. Close enough for Draco to see the flicker of candlelight reflecting in the hollow of Tom’s throat, the precise tremor in his jaw, the tension held like the wire of a sprung trap. Not fear. Something keener. Something focused entirely on him.
“It keeps me up,” Tom said, voice stripped of its usual varnish, bare and biting in its sincerity. “Trying to decipher you. What you want. What you are.”
Draco tilted his head just slightly—like a predator inspecting prey, or a prince surveying a supplicant. “I could tell you,” he said, the syllables sinuous, edged with smoke. “But where’s the fun in that?”
Tom exhaled—low, amused, almost a laugh. But it wasn’t soft. It cut. It was the sound of a scalpel glancing off bone.
“You want me to chase it. The truth,” Tom said, eyes narrowing slightly. Hungry. Hunting.
Draco’s voice didn’t rise, didn’t waver. “I want you to work for it.”
Their gazes met again, and this time it held with the weight of inevitability. Like gravity choosing sides.
To stare down Tom Riddle was to look into a storm with skin—lightning wound tight behind bone, thunder threaded through every breath. And Draco didn’t flinch. He stood as if the chaos were made for him. As if he’d been born of it.
Not the eye of the storm.
Its architect.
Tom’s expression didn’t falter, but something in him stilled—some mechanism interrupted. The way his breath caught, just slightly. The way his gaze sharpened with surgical precision, as if dissecting Draco not to hurt, but to understand. To claim through knowing.
“You speak like someone who’s already seen the ending,” Tom said, voice dipped in silk and smoke. “And doesn’t fear it.”
Draco’s eyes glinted. Not with defiance—but with something cooler. Older. A kind of knowing that didn’t need to be spoken aloud. “Maybe I have.”
A beat.
The fire behind them guttered, then flared again, casting their shadows like duelists frozen mid-strike. The air was thick now—full of meaning, full of pressure. The kind of weight that came before decisions that couldn’t be undone.
Tom’s gaze dropped—briefly—to Draco’s mouth. Then rose again. “You’re dangerous.”
Draco’s smirk returned, finer this time. A sliver of steel wrapped in silk. “Only to those who misread me.”
“And what am I doing now?” Tom asked, quiet.
Draco didn’t answer immediately. He let the moment stretch again, knowing Tom hated the space between questions and truths—but couldn’t look away from it either.
Finally, he said, “You’re getting closer.”
And it wasn’t a warning.
It was a fact.
Tom stepped even nearer, slow and deliberate—so close now the heat between their bodies might as well have been flame. His voice, when it came, was low enough to be mistaken for thought.
“I don’t like mysteries I can’t solve.”
Draco met him without blinking. “Then don’t solve me.”
Tom’s breath hitched—just for a heartbeat.
And Draco smiled again.
Not triumphantly.
But like someone who had already laid the final piece on the board… and was only waiting for the rest of the world to notice the checkmate.“Then tell me this,” Tom said, his voice no more than a breath pressed between them, soft and silken with something lethal beneath. “If I catch it… if I find whatever it is you’re hiding—will it change anything?”
Draco’s lips parted, the faintest motion—as though the question stirred the air itself. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t startle. He regarded Tom with the same dispassionate elegance he’d show a delicate artifact: fragile, yes, but laced with meaning. His stillness was not uncertainty, but calculation. Measured. Precise.
He turned the question over in his mind, dissected its anatomy. And when he answered, his voice was low—almost gentle, like a scalpel sliding clean through silk.
“That depends,” Draco said, eyes never leaving Tom’s, “on what you do with it.”
Tom regarded him again, but the sharpness in his gaze had shifted. No longer the cold, cutting scrutiny of a predator appraising a prize. It was quieter now. Slower. Less like he was examining Draco… and more like he was seeing himself reflected back. His posture lost some of its coiled edge, the threat coiled in his shoulders loosening—just slightly. Like a blade set down, but still within reach.
“I won’t break you,” he murmured at last, the words strange and soft, shaped like something sacred and uncertain. “Even if I could.”
Draco’s eyes narrowed, pale and unrelenting. But his voice stayed cool, lacquered with a poise that could shatter glass. “Even if you wanted to,” he said smoothly, a faint lilt of warning beneath the calm, “you wouldn’t break me.”
He didn’t wait for rebuttal. Instead, with the elegance of someone born to command, Draco shifted—sinking back into the green velvet couch like it was a throne carved for him. The fire cast him in opulent shadow, all pale skin and silver-blond hair, a prince composed in smirk and silence.
His fingers moved—just a tap against the cushion beside him, deceptively casual. An invitation cloaked in arrogance. Or perhaps the other way around.
“Sit,” he murmured, each syllable dipped in sardonic sweetness. “Be a good boy.”
Tom’s eyes flickered. Something passed through them like smoke chased by flame—irritation, maybe. Or temptation. That spark of something too wild to be named, caught behind the sculpted hollows of his face. The firelight reached for him and found edges—sharp cheekbones, a jaw set with restraint, eyes that burned too brightly for something so young.
He didn’t move.
Not yet.
The silence between them curled tighter, a thread pulled taut—tension tangled with challenge, each second thick with unspoken dare. Tom stood in the balance of it, watching Draco with the reverence one gives to something both divine and dangerous.
And in the flicker of light, the moment tilted—like a spell choosing which name to answer.
He sank into the seat with a kind of silent, imperial gravity—no flourish, no fanfare. Just presence. As though that sliver of velvet, that corner of the world, had always been carved for him. The cushion dipped almost imperceptibly beneath his lean frame, the movement so subtle it felt like the air rearranged itself to make room. A shadow folding neatly into the shape fate had preordained.
Close.
Too close.
The distance between them collapsed, compressed into something perilous and obscene. No room remained—none at all. Not for caution, not for modesty, not even for breath. The space between their shoulders was thinner than smoke, their sleeves nearly brushing, and every shared inhale came laced with the threat of contact. The velvet beneath them was no longer soft—it was a battlefield, lush and treacherous.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. His spine remained perfectly aligned, his hands still and languid where they rested, a study in immaculate control. But inside, he burned. He could feel it—Gods, he could feel it—the torrential heat of proximity, the electric hum pouring off Tom like a live wire. It soaked the air. Saturated it. Coiled itself around Draco’s ribs and refused to let go.
It wasn’t touch. But it felt like it.
And then the scent hit him.
Draco’s nostrils flared—slightly, involuntarily—as the aroma curled into his senses like an enchantment he hadn’t been given the chance to resist. Old leather—scuffed, lived-in, stained by time and ink. Bergamot, bright and biting, threaded with something older, something imperial, like the echo of some ancestral memory. And below it, colder still: a sharp metallic tang, like iron in blood or steel beneath velvet, the scent of ozone on the verge of a thunderclap.
It smelled like power before it strikes.
The fragrance didn’t drift. It invaded. Coiled tight around Draco’s lungs, dragged itself across the back of his throat, embedded into his skin like a secret brand. It was unwanted. It was inescapable. It was drowning—not in water, but in something thicker, deeper. The way quicksand might drown a prince.
The couch itself—broad, curved, always too ornate for the stone austerity of the Slytherin common room—had once felt indulgent. Comfortable. Roomy enough to fit three, if one sat with care.
Now it felt like a cage. Padded. Luxurious. And inescapably small.
As if the room had shrunk to the exact width of Tom Riddle’s reach.
Now, it felt suffocating.
Tom’s presence didn’t merely fill the room—it devoured it. The air thickened, the shadows deepened, and even the cold stone walls of the Slytherin common room seemed to lean inward, conspiratorial and silent, as if the castle itself wished to listen. Space shrank around them, compressed into a charged cocoon where only heat and silence lived, crackling like a storm about to break.
He moved then—not abruptly, but with the kind of slow, sinuous grace that drew the eye whether one wanted to watch or not. A slight shift of his shoulders, the languid drape of one leg crossing the other—it should have read as casual, but it wasn’t. It was calculated. Possessive. A motion designed to occupy, to encroach, to make himself felt without ever needing to reach.
Tom radiated intent.
His voice, when it came, was low and coaxing, a velvet promise coiled around something metallic. Warm on the surface, but with the unmistakable shimmer of threat just beneath—like the gleam of a blade in the dark.
“Why did you avoid me?” he asked, the words barely above a murmur, as though the truth were a secret meant to be unwrapped only at knifepoint. He leaned in then—not much, but just enough. Just enough to erase the last fragile breath of distance between them, to let the question slither past his lips and straight into the skin of Draco’s neck. “Did I do something to upset you?”
The answer struck before it was spoken.
Draco’s glare lifted like a flame behind frosted glass—controlled, bright, and edged in restraint. But his body betrayed him. A faint flush bloomed at the high ridges of his cheekbones, pale skin touched by a breath of rose, too slight to be noticed by most.
But Tom noticed.
Of course he noticed.
The corner of his mouth curved, not into a smile so much as a weapon—something cruel wearing the mask of affection, or perhaps affection sharpened into cruelty. It lingered on his lips like a dare.
Draco held his gaze without flinching, his voice threading through the silence like silk drawn taut. No tremor. No hesitation. Only truth, sharp and gleaming as a ceremonial dagger.
“Ego,” he said, quiet but firm. “I avoided you because I’m the one who sees through people. I read them like text on a page—clear, clumsy, easy. But you...” His eyes didn’t waver. “You read me. I walked into your trap, and I didn’t even realize it until the door shut behind me. And that made me feel—”
He paused, just long enough to let the word hang between them, bitter and bold.
“Foolish.”
It hit like a blow that didn’t bruise. Tom’s breath caught, imperceptible unless one knew to look. The elegant rhythm of his mind—always so precise, so ruthlessly controlled—staggered for half a beat, tripped by the blunt, bright honesty of it. No pretense. No careful misdirection.
Just a confession, offered not in defeat, but as a kind of challenge.
Tom’s gaze raked across Draco’s face with startling intensity, as though searching for the fissure where that truth had slipped free—some crack in the façade, some fault line in all that aristocratic detachment. But there was no fear. No apology. Draco’s eyes held only the weight of a truth too heavy to deny and too self-assured to regret.
It disarmed Tom more than any wand ever had.
Because it wasn’t a plea.
It was power.
And it was maddening.
Merlin, it was magnetic.
Tom leaned back—not with indifference, but with the controlled grace of someone re-evaluating a chessboard mid-game. His fingers curled over the armrest, slow and deliberate, knuckles pale against the rich velvet, as if anchoring himself in the moment. Firelight played across his face in ripples of gold and shadow, catching in the fine lines of thought furrowed between his brows. For once, he didn’t speak. The silence wasn’t hesitation—it was recalibration.
He watched Draco, not with the hunger of conquest, but the startled reverence of a scholar realizing the manuscript he’d taken for parchment was something far rarer—something that breathed, and burned, and refused to be catalogued.
The firelight flickered in Draco’s eyes, turning them into molten silver edged with steel. Beautiful and sharp. Distant and unyielding. Tom stared, absorbing it, recalculating every assumption he’d made. Perhaps Draco wasn’t the cold moon to his sun. Perhaps he was a star in his own right—distant, fierce, and unwilling to orbit anything but his own gravity.
“That,” Tom said finally, voice pitched low and thoughtful, “was not the answer I expected.”
Draco’s mouth tilted—an almost-smile, the kind that held no warmth, only dry amusement, brittle as ash and just as likely to scatter in the wrong breeze. “Good,” he replied. “You don’t deserve easy answers.”
Tom exhaled sharply—half a laugh, half a sigh. His fingers tapped once against the velvet, then stilled, clenched lightly. A pause stretched, taut and full, before his voice returned, softer now, uncharacteristically sincere.
“You say you felt foolish,” he murmured. “But you weren’t. You were brilliant.” A breath. “You are.”
There was no blade beneath the words. No mockery, no honey-laced poison. Just truth—clear, unadorned, and all the more jarring for it.
Draco blinked once, slowly. The compliment landed like a thrown stone—unwelcome, unanticipated, and sinking deeper than it should have. His shoulders went stiff, a subtle defense, as if preparing for the weight of something dangerous. “That’s not your style,” he said, voice careful, guarded. “Flattery.”
“It isn’t,” Tom agreed, tilting his head slightly. “Which is why you should believe me.”
Behind them, the fire cracked—loud and sudden. Sparks leapt, brief and bright. But the silence that followed was heavier. The kind that presses down. The kind that waits for something to tip.
Tom studied Draco with narrowed eyes, not in suspicion, but in focus—like a spellcaster measuring out the final line of a rune, knowing the shape it takes will change everything. “Do you think,” he said slowly, like he was tasting each word, “that I would bother tricking someone who didn’t matter to me?”
Draco’s breath hitched. Just barely. Then it steadied, smooth as silk over stone.
“You don’t bother with anyone unless they’re useful,” he said.
A pause followed. Not long. Just one heartbeat. But it echoed.
Tom’s gaze didn’t falter. If anything, it sharpened. The firelight caught in his pupils, and for a moment he looked carved from shadow and flame.
“Exactly,” he said.
The word landed between them with the weight of something sacred and dangerous.
Exactly.
Not denial.
Not contradiction.
Not reassurance.
Just confirmation.
Useful.
Important.
Chosen.
Seen.
And Draco didn’t look away.
Couldn’t.
Because to look away would be to relinquish something neither of them was ready to name.
Draco’s voice came low, precise—a blade wrapped in velvet. “Then what am I to you?” he asked, each word weighted with challenge. “A chess piece? A project?” He leaned in slightly, enough that the question became something more than words. A presence. A pressure. “A prize?”
Tom’s lips parted. No answer came.
And that silence—brief, but telling—was louder than any denial could have been.
Tom Riddle was never speechless. Never cornered. Never unarmed.
Yet here he was, momentarily adrift in the space between expectation and truth.
“You,” Tom said at last, and the single word landed with a subtle fracture in his voice. It had dropped an octave—low and uneven, threaded with something raw. Something almost vulnerable. But only for a breath. He blinked once, and the mask reformed, the cool veneer of control sliding back into place.
“You’re the only one who doesn’t play by the rules I’ve set,” he said, gaze steady. “That makes you dangerous.”
Draco arched an elegant brow, eyes glinting with silver amusement. “And you like dangerous.”
Tom’s smile returned, thinner now, curved like a dagger’s edge. It was not meant to charm—it was meant to cut. “I am dangerous,” he said softly. “But I’m not accustomed to enjoying it when it turns against me.”
Then he moved—not slowly, not abruptly, but with the finality of a predator choosing not to pounce but to close the distance regardless. He leaned in fully, erasing the careful inches between them until the air itself had to retreat. Their knees brushed. The fabric of their sleeves whispered together, barely touching. Yet it was enough to set the space alight.
“And yet,” Tom murmured, the words coiled with a quiet intensity, “I find myself… drawn.”
The syllables lingered between them, warm and dark, a half-confession disguised as threat.
Draco didn’t flinch. He didn’t step back. He let the silence soak it in like oil to flame. And when he spoke again, his voice was dry as bone, almost amused—almost cruel.
“Careful, Riddle,” he said. “You’re starting to sound like a boy with a heart.”
Tom’s smile stuttered. Just for a heartbeat. A flicker.
The mask slipped.
Then, as if scalded, he caught it and slipped it back on. His voice cooled like steel quenched in water.
“I said drawn, not weak.”
Draco’s eyes didn’t waver. His tone softened, but it lost none of its precision.
“But the line is thin, isn’t it?” he murmured. “Between wanting to win someone… and wanting them.”
That did it.
That undid something in Tom—minute, invisible, but real. A thread pulled too tight in the chest. A breath that didn’t fully leave. His pupils dilated just slightly. His hand curled against the velvet, as if to stop it from reaching for something it had no right to touch.
He didn’t answer.
Because there was no game left to hide behind.
A flicker—sharp, brief, unmistakable—passed over Tom’s face. Desire. Frustration. Recognition. It flared like a spark behind his eyes, burning too fast to contain. His fingers twitched against the cushion, a subtle, involuntary motion—as if his body warred with itself between the urge to reach, to claim, and to destroy.
“You speak,” he said, voice barely audible, “as though you understand.”
Draco didn’t blink. “I do,” he replied, steady and calm. “I understand you.”
The words settled between them like a declaration of war or a vow whispered before a fall. The fire crackled in the grate behind them, casting the world in violent golds and soft ambers. Shadows and light licked across their faces, carving their expressions into something old and unknowable. For a single breathless moment, it wasn’t clear who held the advantage anymore. Only this: the game had shifted. And neither of them—neither predator nor prey—was ready to walk away from the board.
Tom’s eyes—deep red wine laced with something feral—met Draco’s with unnerving steadiness. They were eyes steeped in riddles, the color of velvet left too long in a locked room.
“I wonder how true that is,” he murmured, voice deep, trailing like smoke. “No one in this world knows me.”
He tilted his head slightly, the gesture slow and deliberate, aristocratic in its grace. A strand of dark hair slipped across his brow, catching firelight like spilled ink in water. His gaze drifted, almost lazily, toward the flames—not in dismissal, but detachment. As though the moment no longer required his full attention, even as he wound himself tighter into its core.
“The others,” he said, tone light, distracted, “are curious about you.”
But Draco knew better. Knew that with Tom, every idle syllable was carved with intention. There was nothing careless in him, nothing soft. The calm surface was always a calculated lie, a predator’s stillness before the strike.
Tom’s eyes didn’t return to him. They remained fixed on the far side of the common room, where a cluster of older Slytherins sat like coiled vipers in expensive robes. They weren’t whispering. They didn’t need to. Their stillness was signal enough. Their glances were not glances—they were incisions.
“They’re wondering who you are,” Tom continued, his voice a whisper pressed into velvet, “and what you want.”
His hand moved again. Barely. A slow, ghostlike drag of fingers along the edge of the velvet seam beside him. He didn’t reach toward Draco. He didn’t have to. The mere motion, suggestive and controlled, was enough to bend the space between them. It warped the air. Thickened it.
Presence. Implication. Heat.
The breath between them felt like an intrusion. The distance thinner than skin.
Tom’s hand hovered, never touching—just existing. Threatening. Inviting.
“What you want,” he said again, lower this time. The phrase folded in on itself like a secret kept too long. It wasn’t a question. It was a mirror. And it reflected back every hidden hunger.
A pause followed. Not long. But long enough to fracture the air.
It was a pause filled with precision—like the moment after a door has closed but before it’s locked.
He didn’t need to ask the real questions. They pulsed underneath every syllable.
Are you a blood traitor? What do you value? Why are you deviating from the script?
Those questions didn’t need to be voiced. They breathed through the silence. They echoed in the stillness of the Slytherins watching from the corner, in the way shadows twisted behind the flames, in the sharp scent of old wood and ambition.
Draco felt them tightening around him like a noose made of silk and lineage.
The net was woven of expectations—old, pureblooded, unrelenting. Every stare from across the room a knot in the web. Every silence, a judgment. Every whispered word not spoken, a blade against his spine.
It was a trap, ancient and invisible, strung with gold threads of bloodlines and tradition. The weight of legacy. The cost of deviance.
And Draco, spine straight, eyes silver, didn’t move.
Because he had already stepped into the center of the web.
And he was daring it to hold.
Tom finally turned to face him fully, the movement unhurried, almost theatrical in its restraint.The firelight kissed greedily across his features, gilding the fine bones of his face in molten gold. It lingered on the cut-glass edge of his cheekbones, the sweep of long, dark lashes that cast shadows like veils across wine-red eyes. Eyes that never gave away more than they meant to.
His expression remained unreadable—neither warm nor cold. Just still. Watching. Intent. Like a flame that hadn’t yet decided whether to consume or retreat.
“You’ve unsettled the patterns, broke the rules” he said at last, his voice soft, measured, touched with a curious blend of reverence and calculation. There was a trace—just a trace—of something like admiration hidden beneath the velvet edge. “And Slytherins… don’t take well to uncertainty.”
His words unfurled like silk sliding from a blade—smooth, quiet, and impossibly sharp. There was something beneath them too. A note so subtle it barely clung to sound: reverence, maybe. Or something close enough to mimic it.
“And Slytherins,” he added, a whisper of dry amusement brushing the edges of his tone, “don’t take well to uncertainty.”
The words hung in the air between them, gossamer-fine and nearly invisible. And yet they stitched themselves into the silence, threading it with something tight and humming. The room hadn’t changed—not truly—but the air had thickened. Drawn in. Compressed.
It felt smaller. As though the very walls of the common room had leaned in to listen.
One breath passed. Just one.
But it was full of static.
The kind of breath that stretches between two people on the verge of something irreversible—not quite touch, not quite confession. Just tension, curled like a sleeping serpent beneath the skin.
Draco didn’t look away.
His voice came low, steady, fine as thread drawn taut between two blades. It had the quality of something fragile—glass under pressure—but also something inevitable. A question he already knew would cut.
“And you?” he asked, tilting his head just slightly, like a challenge masked as curiosity. “Do you take well to uncertainty?”
Tom’s mouth curved—not quickly, and not kindly. It was the kind of smile that took its time arriving, the kind that knew it could afford to wait. A slow unsheathing, like a knife being drawn from velvet.
“I don’t follow,” he said, tone rich and quiet as dusk. “I make the rules. Therefore, I’m never uncertain.”
The silence that followed Tom’s words did not merely fill the room—it altered it. Dense, alive, gravitational. As though the air itself had grown heavier, drawn inward to listen.
The fire still flickered in the hearth, casting long shadows against the stone walls. The mutterings of nearby students continued in theory, but in truth, they no longer mattered. Their presence dimmed to a blur—background noise fading like a painting washed in water. It was as if the entire room had exhaled and forgotten how to breathe again.
Only Tom remained.
Tom—and the weight of that slow, razor-fine smile. And the truth braided into it like wire:
He didn’t fear chaos.
He cultivated it.
Draco’s throat tightened, though he held himself with poise. His back was straight, shoulders squared, his chin lifted just enough to suggest practiced defiance. But inside, something was coiling tighter and tighter—something knotted and alive. Not fear. Not exactly.
It was the sensation of standing on a ledge too narrow to turn back from. A high wire stretched between towers, with no safety net below—just the cold thrill of knowing any step could become a fall, and yet moving forward anyway.
Tom watched him with unblinking precision, the corners of his mouth still curved in that uncanny smile—quiet now, deeper. A smile that didn’t seek amusement but confirmation.
As though Draco’s silence said more than any clever retort ever could.
“You walk into a den,” Tom said at last, voice lowered to something barely above a breath, “speaking in a dialect the snakes haven’t heard before.”
His words were silk wrapping steel.
“And yet they listen.”
His gaze slid across Draco’s face—not lazily, not affectionately, but like an invocation. A careful reading. “Not because they understand you,” he continued, “but because they wonder if you’re a new kind of predator.”
The fire cracked just then. A soft pop. A glowing log split apart with a low sigh, sending a brief flurry of sparks dancing up the chimney like startled fireflies.
Draco didn’t blink.
“And what do you think I am?” he asked, and though his voice was even, it carried the edge of something sharper underneath.
Tom tilted his head at the question, his expression unreadable save for the faintest gleam in his eyes—something cool and almost amused, as if surprised Draco had the nerve to ask, and pleased that he did.
His fingers moved again, brushing the velvet cushion between them. A phantom gesture. Just short of contact. But close enough that Draco felt it in his skin, a presence like static just before lightning.
“I think,” Tom murmured, voice soft enough to be mistaken for gentleness, “you’re dangerous.”
He said it like a revelation. Like prophecy.
“Not because you’re trying to be,” he went on, his words curling through the air like smoke, “but because you exist in a way that disturbs the order.”
His hand hovered now, close—so close—above Draco’s sleeve. It didn’t touch. But the space between them pulsed like it mattered. Like that fraction of an inch was a veil between thought and act, between restraint and surrender.
“You don’t fit,” Tom said, almost thoughtfully. But his eyes—those uncanny wine-dark eyes—burned with something more primal. Curiosity, perhaps. Hunger, more likely. Something that flickered too fast to pin down.
“You’re shaped like something the rest of us forgot how to name.”
Draco felt the air leave his lungs—not in shock, but in recognition.
Tom saw him.
Not the name. Not the family. Not the mask.
Him.
And for one fractured second—no longer, no shorter—Draco felt seen. Not watched, not assessed, not admired or scorned, but truly seen. The kind of gaze that slipped under skin and bone, that peeled back the practiced expressions and perfect posture to touch something raw and real underneath.
It was more terrifying than invisibility.
Because to be invisible was to be safe.
But to be seen meant to be known.
And to be known was to be vulnerable.
“I don’t belong to your order,” Draco said, carefully. Deliberately. His voice low, steady, sculpted from restraint. “Or to anyone else’s.”
A subtle shift crossed Tom’s features. Barely a flicker—like a ripple over still water. Not quite surprise. Not quite respect. It was something subtler, quieter. A satisfaction that settled behind his eyes like ink dispersing in wine.
“No,” Tom agreed, voice soft. “You don’t.”
And just like that, the space between them ceased to be mere distance. It became a question. A decision. A fulcrum upon which something ancient and fragile now balanced.
The air itself had changed. Not in temperature, not in scent—but in texture. Charged. Electric. Like something unseen had begun to stitch them together, thread by invisible thread, pulling taut between breastbones with a kind of magnetic inevitability.
Outside, the castle sighed in its sleep. Stone and shadow whispering secrets through winding corridors, echoing in forgotten chambers. But here—here in the quiet cradle of the Slytherin common room, between Tom Riddle and Draco Peverell—something older stirred.
Not rivalry.
Not allegiance.
Recognition.
Tom leaned in—not obviously, not dramatically, but with the smallest shift. A movement so subtle it might’ve been mistaken for the settling of breath, for the natural tilt of a thought turning inward. But Draco felt it. The change. The breath of heat ghosting his cheek, warm and deliberate. Tom’s exhale, soft as silk soaked in embers.
“They’re wondering,” Tom murmured, voice pitched low, wrapped in velvet and veiled threat, “why I’m watching you now, after ignoring you.”
The words brushed against Draco’s skin more than they filled the air—spoken only for him. Too quiet to carry. Too intimate not to feel.
Draco didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. His stillness was carved, practiced, immaculate. But the air around him felt thin—razor-fine. A breath away from rupture.
And when he spoke, his voice had shifted. Lower than before. Sleek and cold. A knife polished to gleam rather than cut. Quiet as moonlight over a frozen pond.
“Why are you?” he asked. Each word precise, dropped like stones across ice already starting to crack. “If you stayed away to give me space…”
He let the sentence trail off. A line left unfinished on purpose—either an opening or a warning, depending on how it was received.
Then, slowly, Draco turned. Just enough. Not for deference. Not for retreat. Just enough to meet Tom’s eyes head-on.
His own gaze caught the firelight. Those silver-blue irises sparked like sharpened glass, chilled but radiant, emotion carefully sheathed behind elegance and control. He didn’t challenge. Not overtly. But the angle of his head, the measured lift of a brow, whispered: I see your game. Will you play mine?
“What changed?” he asked, soft as dusk.
And then—because something reckless stirred beneath his composure, or perhaps because he wanted to see what would happen—Draco let his brow arch higher. Let his lips curl just slightly. A smile that was not a smile. A glint of teeth behind silk.
“Are you feeling… unsettled?” he murmured, the word smoothed into velvet and wrapped in thorns.
He watched Tom closely. Every blink. Every breath. Watching for the twitch of reaction, the crack of mask. And in Draco’s eyes now—under the refined stillness—gleamed a quiet amusement. Sharp. Measured. Dangerous.
“Like they are,” he added, the edges of his mouth curving upward by the smallest degree. “Did you miss me?”
And there it was. A provocation. Polished. Elegant. Dangerous.
Not flirtation—something colder.
A scalpel rather than a blade.
Not meant to wound, but to uncover. To test.
To see how deep this thing between them ran.
The words lingered, suspended in the space between inhale and reply. A dare, dressed in silk.
And behind it—coiled and waiting in the quiet—was something even more perilous than seduction or threat.
Truth.
Tom didn’t answer—
Not immediately.
He stood as if carved from the shadows themselves, still and poised, his figure outlined by the flickering hearth behind him. The only movements were infinitesimal: the narrowing of his eyes, the soft recalibration of his breath. Nothing obvious. Nothing human. But unmistakable all the same.
It wasn’t surprise.
Nor irritation.
It was attention. Pure. Singular. Predatory.
The kind of stillness worn not by men, but by creatures who waited in tall grass for the moment a heartbeat faltered. The kind of stillness kings adopted before passing a decree.
The fire at their side crackled and flared—flames rising in jagged sways like serpents dancing for a forgotten god. Golden light slashed across Tom’s face, catching on the sharp angles of his cheekbones, igniting the shadowed hollows beneath his eyes. The illumination moved between them like it had a will of its own, hesitant and flickering, as if uncertain which boy it should belong to.
Unsettled.
The word lingered.
Tom’s lips curved, but it wasn’t quite a smile. It was something thinner. Sharper. Like a wire stretched between two points, humming with tension.
“Miss you?” he echoed, almost thoughtfully. The words tasted foreign on his tongue, as if he were trying them out for the first time.
He leaned in again, this time deliberate.
His voice dropped—richer now, darker, edged in something dangerous and soft all at once. Draco didn’t so much hear it as he felt it, a warmth against the curve of his ear, a silken coil of syllables wrapping around his spine.
“I don’t miss things,” Tom whispered. “I watch them. I learn them. I decide what they are to me.”
Each word slid into place with the weight of a vow, spoken low and lethal. His breath was a phantom touch, heat and intention pressed so near that Draco could feel the shape of every vowel against his skin.
Tom pulled back just enough—no more than a sliver of space between them—but his gaze had changed. The mask had dropped, or perhaps it had shifted. What looked out at Draco now wasn’t blankness or calculation.
It was something far more dangerous.
Fascination.
Hunger.
The patient, coiled curiosity of someone dissecting a riddle they didn’t yet want to solve.
“I stayed away,” Tom murmured, voice like silk sheathing a dagger, “because I needed to see what you’d become without gravity pulling at you.”
He tilted his head, not unkindly—like a scholar admiring the first crack in a flawless surface.
“And now I know.”
A muscle in Draco’s throat tightened. His pulse beat once—twice—too fast. He didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t betray himself with a step backward. But the air around him felt thinner suddenly. The kind of thin that came before a storm.
Still, he kept his face still. Immaculate. But that one breath—a fraction deeper than the rest—betrayed him.
Tom saw it. Of course he did.
And for the second time, that not-smile curled again across his lips. Slower this time. Controlled, yes, but tinged with something approaching amusement. Almost indulgent.
“It’s not that I missed you,” he said quietly, as if replying to a confession Draco hadn’t actually made. “It’s that I noticed when you were gone.”
He paused. Let it breathe. Then:
“And I hated the quiet you left behind.”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was thick. Dense with something unnamed. The fire snapped beside them, and somewhere far off, the castle shifted—a corridor moving, a door locking itself. As if the very stones were leaning in to listen.
Draco didn’t look away.
“Careful,” he murmured. His voice was soft, precise—like shards of glass under silk. “You’re starting to sound human.”
Tom’s eyes flashed.
Not in anger. Not even offense.
In amusement. In something stranger.
Something warmer.
Something more dangerous.
“No,” he said, and the word rang with finality, as if correcting the very air between them. “You’re starting to sound like something worth believing in.”
And there, between firelight and breath, between the weight of silences and the edge of something unspoken—they stood, not as student and shadow, but as something else entirely.
Recognition, still.
But now—
Attraction.
Dangerously close to reverence.
They were so close that the space between them seemed to shimmer—a fragile thread of air that could snap with the slightest movement. Draco’s gaze drank in Tom’s face—too close now to be anything but consumed by it. Every detail stood out in excruciating clarity: the fall of ink-dark hair, slightly mussed as if some invisible hand had dared to touch what no one else would; the elegant slant of his brows, casting shadow over eyes that gleamed like polished obsidian; the proud line of his cheekbones, knife-sharp in the firelight.
Tom’s beauty wasn’t soft. It wasn’t safe.
It was dangerous—the kind that lured, then devoured.
A face carved by secrets, by silence, by power honed into precision.
There was no warmth in it.
But there was gravity.
And Draco couldn’t look away.
His breath caught as his eyes traveled lower—along the cut of Tom’s jaw, clean and ruthless as a drawn blade, then to his mouth. Those lips…
Soft in shape, but in no way yielding.
They held command the way a throne did—not by asking, but by existing.
In that suspended moment, where the air between them was too thin to breathe and too thick to cross, Draco found himself wondering—
What would that face look like when it cracked?
Not in pain.
In pleasure.
What would it be like to watch all that control—meticulously constructed, exquisitely cruel—splinter under touch and want and surrender?
To see Tom Riddle undone?
The thought hit like heat blooming in his core, slow and deliberate, coiling through his stomach like smoke poured from a furnace.
It spread—tightened—
Not gentle. Not soft.
A fierce, pulsing ache.
A desperate kind of hunger.
It wasn’t just want.
It was the ache of a storm waiting to be swallowed.
And Draco, trembling on the edge, felt like lightning trying to remember how not to fall.
Tom’s eyes—dark, fathomless, unblinking—held Draco’s like a vice, like a curse spoken in silence. There was no mercy in them, no hesitance. Just raw intensity, stripped of artifice. A dare passed without breath. A challenge lit like a match in the space between them.
And Draco felt it—all of it.
The air, heavy as velvet, pressed against his skin like invisible hands. The silence rang louder than a scream, saturated with things neither of them could name yet both understood.
It wasn’t a question of if.
Only when.
In the half-light, where fire met shadow and breath tangled with silence, they teetered on the cusp of something inevitable—fragile and thunderous all at once. The space between them thinned, drawn tight like a thread spun from heat and want, trembling with the weight of what hadn’t yet happened.
The air grew heavy, suffused with the ache of anticipation, as if the room itself were holding its breath. Time slowed to a crawl, viscous and deliberate, every second stretching wide and taut like the hush before a storm breaks. The world beyond them dimmed to a distant murmur—irrelevant, insubstantial—leaving only the crackling fire, the pulse in Draco’s throat, and the burning question suspended like a blade between them:
Who would be the first to surrender?
And what ruin or revelation would follow when they did?
Each flicker of flame painted shifting light across their faces—Tom’s carved in shadow and gold, Draco’s pale and flushed beneath the rising tide of tension. It wasn’t just a moment. It was a precipice.
And they were already falling.
The firelight danced, wild and alive, painting molten gold across Tom’s angular features. Shadows clung to the hollows of his cheeks and the curve of his jaw, softening the edges just enough to blur the line between menace and intimacy. He looked less like a boy and more like something conjured—sharp and luminous, forged in secrets and silk-tongued danger.
Draco’s heart pounded like a war drum, its rhythm fierce and frenzied beneath his ribs. The soft murmurs of the common room dulled into nothingness, drowned beneath the rush of blood in his ears. Every nerve was pulled taut, every muscle wound tight—caught between the instinct to run and the deeper, darker urge to step closer, to fall.
Tom’s eyes dipped, a slow and deliberate descent, tracing the elegant slope of Draco’s throat as though memorizing it. His gaze lingered at the place where pulse met skin, where a blush was blooming like fire beneath porcelain. And then—his eyes lifted, dark and knowing, catching Draco’s in a hold that burned.
When he spoke, his voice was barely a breath, a caress wrapped in a dare.
“Do you think you could handle losing control, Draco?”
The words curled around Draco like a whisper-wrought enchantment, subtle as fog and no less consuming. They sank beneath his skin, threading through him with a quiet, thrumming urgency. And before he could think—before he could summon logic or pride—he leaned in.
The space between them dissolved.
Their breaths met first, soft and searing, ghosting over parted lips. The air hummed with a tension so fine it felt sacred—each inhale a promise, each exhale a surrender. Warmth pooled between them, not from the hearth but from something far more primal. Desire coiled tight and silent, unspoken yet undeniable, a slow burn aching just beneath the surface.
For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to just the two of them.No war, no bloodlines, no lies. Only this: the gravity of another soul pressed so close it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. Tom’s eyes were half-lidded, heavy with something not quite hunger and not quite reverence. And Draco—heart stuttering, lungs burning—felt himself slipping into it, into him.
Then, just as their lips were about to meet, a voice interrupted them.
“Oi, Peverell.”
The voice cut through the quiet like a blade drawn slow across silk—lazy, drawling, and unmistakably intentional.
It drifted across the Slytherin common room like smoke curling from a dying candle, and in its wake, everything changed. The crackle of burning logs sharpened. The velvet hush of murmured conversations stilled. Shadows shifted, no longer soft but jagged, edged with awareness. Heads turned—not fully, not rudely, but just enough.
The moment shattered, brittle as glass.
Draco exhaled sharply, the spell broken. Tom did not move—his gaze lingered, lips still parted, but the magic between them had fractured, and what was left in its place was raw air and the ghost of what could have been.
Notes:
This chapter ended up being around 65k words—definitely longer than I planned! Took me a bit more time too because my cat decided to make a break for it out the door, and I couldn’t focus until she came back (thankfully, she did).
Huge thanks to everyone who voted and helped me figure out how to upload this beast.
So—was this chapter fun? Stressful? A little unhinged? Let me know! I love hearing your thoughts. And stick around, because the next round of emotional damage is already brewing ✨
P.S. I might be taking a small hiatus—anywhere from two weeks to a month—just to recharge and avoid burnout. Thanks for understanding!
Chapter 10
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Draco’s head turned with slow precision, his spine straightening into perfect posture, every movement deliberate and controlled. His heart pounded—whether from the stolen moment just broken or the simmering irritation of interruption, he couldn’t tell. His pale silver-blue eyes found the new speaker with surgical calm, narrowing—not from alarm, but a measured, calculating caution. He subtly shifted, putting deliberate space between himself and Tom, feeling suddenly off balance, as if the fragile tension had snapped and left him exposed.
From a shadowed recess where the flickering torchlight barely dared to touch, Elias Lestrange stepped forward with the smooth menace of a waking nightmare wrapped in velvet. He reclined across the green-leather arm of a chaise longue as if the world owed him its weight in comfort, his posture lazy yet charged with latent power. One long leg draped casually over the other, his fingers—adorned with rings that caught the firelight like jagged, jeweled teeth—rested lightly on his knee.
Tall, broad-shouldered, every inch the predator conserving energy before a strike. His black hair fell in careless waves just brushing the collar of his finely tailored robes—hair that might belong to a poet, but his face was sculpted from something far colder. Sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw, his features cut with precision, giving the impression of a marble statue carved by a master whose hand had never trembled.
His eyes, however, were the fiercest contradiction: burning auburn, sharp and fractured like broken glass, holding a quiet violence passed down through generations of Lestranges. They pierced the room, resting finally on Draco with an intensity that made the air hum.
And then Elias smiled.
It was a smile of polished courtesy, empty but exquisite—a mask of civility stretched thin over something far more venomous. The kind of smile that might offer poison in a crystal glass and leave you drinking it willingly.
“We’ve been wondering,” Elias began, his voice smooth and sweet with a hidden barb, laced with a subtle amusement that twisted around something darker—curiosity? A challenge? Malice? The question hung in the air, sharp and waiting.
The silence that followed was anything but empty. It listened. The room seemed to hold its breath, the gathering students stiffening as if trapped within a chalk-drawn circle charged with ancient magic.
Draco didn’t bother to return the smile. Instead, he tilted his head—slow, deliberate, feline. The gesture was laced with practiced elegance, a hint of disdain cloaked in velvet softness.
“That sounds ominous,” he replied softly.
His tone was smooth, but beneath the polished surface glinted something harder—steel beneath silk, enough edge to suggest he could not only play this game but master it.
A ripple of laughter cut through the quiet—a sudden, sharp sound that felt too eager, too knowing. Too many teeth flashed in sly smiles; too many eyes gleamed with hungry calculation, like jackals circling a wounded prey. The atmosphere thickened, coiled tight with unspoken threats and veiled intentions, as the players in this dark dance prepared to make their next move.
From the hearth’s flickering glow, another boy shifted forward with deliberate grace—slow, smooth, like a panther unfurling from slumber. The firelight clung to him greedily, casting molten shadows that danced and flickered across his high cheekbones and sharp, angular jaw. The planes of his face softened and warped under the flames’ sway, transforming into something almost liquid—like molten metal forged and cooling beneath a dark enchantment.
His eyes—amber, heavy-lidded, and hooded—gleamed with a cruel curiosity. There was a predator’s amusement there, as if watching fragile wings torn from flies just to see how they fluttered, helpless and broken, before falling to the ground.
When he spoke, his voice slithered through the charged silence like a knife slipping through silk—smooth, sharp, and barbed beneath its polished surface.
“Is it true then?” he purred, each word drawn out with slow, deliberate tease, his tone low enough that the question felt less a query and more a veiled challenge. “That Grindelwald’s your father?”
The common room seemed to contract inward, as if the very walls drew breath—and then held it. The silence thickened into something tangible: a barely audible catch of breath, the sharp click of a pocket watch snapping shut too hastily, the faintest rustle of robes brushing against the cold stone floor. Time itself seemed to slow, folding inward with a weight so heavy it pressed down on every chest.
Even the fire in the hearth—usually a warm beacon of life—dimmed, its flames flickering lower, as if it too leaned closer, straining to catch every word.
Every pair of eyes shifted, drawn magnetically to Draco.
He stood just a pace away, half-swallowed by shadows and torchlight, the burnished green hues of the Slytherin common room wrapping him in an eerie, otherworldly glow—like something carved from moonstone and venom, ancient, beautiful, and deadly. His posture was statuesque, poised with the sculpted grace of noble bloodlines, or perhaps some older, darker lineage altogether.
At first, his face was unreadable—still, pale, a flawless mask of porcelain calm, forged by generations of cold breeding or something far older than blood itself.
Then, almost imperceptibly, as if peeling away a thin layer of frost, his lips curved. Not a smile—but something colder, sharper. The faintest glint of a blade caught just so in candlelight.
“I suppose,” he murmured, voice smooth and dark like the surface of a lake just before it freezes over, “that depends on whether you’re asking out of curiosity…”
He stepped forward, boots soundless on stone, his movement measured and deliberate.
“Or fear.”
The words curled in the air like tendrils of smoke—weightless yet suffocating.
No one laughed.
Not now.
Because beneath Draco’s polished calm, something fundamental had shifted. It was palpable: the tense stillness before the first thunderclap of a storm, the charged pause just before power stops pretending to be polite.
Draco did not move.
He let the silence stretch—thin as spun glass, taut as a bowstring drawn tight beneath the strain of breathless anticipation. It sliced through the common room like a razor, cutting cleanly through whispered doubts and stolen glances, daring anyone to break it first. No one dared.
He stood at the center of it all, still and statuesque, as if carved by the old gods themselves—beings who understood that beauty and fear were woven from the same thread. His gaze drifted slowly across the sea of faces, detached and measured, the look of a creature intimately acquainted with power, and with the hunter’s cold shadow that often follows it.
His expression held the cold elegance of someone who had never needed to raise his voice to be heard. His pale eyes, implacable and sharp, scanned them like paintings in a forgotten gallery—measuring their worth, their flaws, their loyalty, or lack thereof.
Grindelwald.
The name hung heavy in the charged stillness, unspoken yet everywhere—already burrowed deep into the stone walls like a whispered curse, echoing down spiraling staircases and slipping beneath half-closed doors. It was spoken in hushed tones behind emerald curtains drawn tight against prying eyes, scrawled in jagged script along the margins of letters that would never see the light of day.
Peverell. Grindelwald. Words that clung to him like frost on a crypt window—beautiful, fragile, and impossible to scrape away.
The heir.
The bastard.
The weapon.
The boy who had stepped into Slytherin wrapped in shadows and silence, who wielded magic that thrummed with the cold weight of legend—older than the castle itself, older perhaps than the very bones of the founders buried beneath its ancient foundations.
Draco could feel the rumors crawling over his skin—like tendrils of smoke, thin and winding, slipping through the cracks of his defenses. They coiled around his throat and wrists, some soft and reverent, like the hush before a miracle unfolds in a cathedral’s shadowed nave. That quiet awe wrapped around him like a cloak, warm and suffocating all at once.
But others bit harder—razor-sharp and cruel—seeping with envy and heavy dread. Those whispers sank in like poisoned fangs, sinking deeper with every sideways glance, every hushed conversation that abruptly stopped when he entered the room.
They clung to him like hexes, invisible but no less real—trailing him in the echo of footsteps, woven into the quick flicker of eyes that darted away, too fast to be innocent.
He had heard them all, felt each one settle in the charged air around him. The way the atmosphere shifted, heavy and brittle, when he crossed a threshold. The silence that pressed in, pointed and accusing. The smiles stretched thin, like fragile masks ready to crack.
And beneath it all, Draco wondered—who had lit the match? Who had set these rumors blazing, igniting the wildfire of suspicion that now threatened to consume everything?
Perhaps it had been Mulciber—restless and sharp-edged, always prowling just a step too close, eyes glittering with want. The kind of boy who mistook obsession for insight, who believed that if he stared long enough, he could peel people open. Always nosing at what didn’t belong to him, fingers twitching like he meant to steal secrets straight from your skin.
Or the Flint girl— Calista, with her velvet voice and iron spine, who wore danger like perfume and never blinked when she lied. Her laughter curled like smoke in the corners of the common room, sweet and low and laced with arsenic. Every sentence she spoke was a test, every gaze an invitation to step just a little closer to the edge.
Then there was Nott. Always in the periphery, too still, too quiet. Watching like a gargoyle perched atop a dying cathedral—grim, knowing. His lips dark with secrets he never paid for, smirking like a boy who believed in nothing, not even his own shadow.
Or maybe—maybe it had been Tom.
Tom, who moved like a song composed in a key no one else could hear. With his precise stillness, that uncanny poise that felt just slightly inhuman, as though some ancient machinery thrummed beneath his skin. Tom, whose gaze peeled people down to the quick, not out of cruelty—but curiosity. As if he were always wondering what they would do if he twisted the right gear, pulled the right thread.
Tom, who made silence feel like a blade.
Tom, who hoarded information the way dragons hoarded gold.
Tom, who never wasted ammunition.
No. Not yet.
Tom wouldn’t speak until the moment mattered. He would hold the rumor like a dagger behind his back—hidden, gleaming, waiting for the moment it would cut deepest. Not before the stage had been set, not before the audience was forced to look.
And yet.
Draco could feel it. That stare. Somewhere behind him—unseen, but undeniable. Watching. Calculating. Measuring not just what he was, but what he might become.
Still, in the end, did it matter who had struck the spark?
The myth had already caught. It no longer needed a hand.
It moved on its own now—breathing, growing, feeding.
It had become something larger than rumor.
A flame that remembered its own birth and wanted more.
He could almost list the versions, each a twisted thread in the tapestry being woven without his permission. He had heard them. He had dreamt some of them, unwilling and fevered.
Grindelwald’s son, born beneath a sky split by lightning, mother unknown, name whispered into storm winds. Conceived in the shadow of Vienna’s last revolt, baptized in blood-ink circles older than language. A child bartered for in a ritual no one dared name—a lover carved out of time, sacrificed for knowledge no human should carry.
Others said he had been smuggled from Nurmengard itself, wrapped in runes and silence, the last relic of a broken god. Raised in the Alps by wolves that bowed to no wand, a prince of frost and bone who spoke to mirrors and dreamed of conquest.
One tale swore he had no heartbeat. Another claimed his blood shimmered silver when spilled. Some said he could walk through walls, but only if you weren’t looking. One whispered he carried Death beneath his ribs like a caged star—fluttering and furious, burning his lungs whenever he lied.
And perhaps the cruelest story of all: that he had no story. That he was a boy stitched from the remains of a dozen, bearing everyone’s legend but his own.
He walked the halls like a figure slipped sideways through time. Too poised, too quiet, too composed. Like something waiting for a command no one could give.
Slytherin had always harbored ghosts—but now they had something worse.
A myth that breathed.
A boy with a legend no one could verify, and no one dared ignore.
And no one—not even the cleverest among them—knew what side of the story he’d come to fulfill.
Draco exhaled through his nose, the sound almost imperceptible. Like a kettle just before the whistle. A warning, not yet heard.
Let them speak.
Let them weave their tales, build their paper monsters from half-glimpsed truths. Let them chase shadows in the name of clarity.
It was safer that way.
Because so long as they were busy naming him, they wouldn’t see what he was actually becoming.
The truth—his truth—wasn’t meant for dormitory whispers or scribbled notes in the margins of books. It wasn’t a tale to be traded between goblets and glances.
The truth had fangs.
The truth smiled in the dark.
The truth waited.
And when it came, it would not knock.
It would break the door down.
His gaze returned to the boy by the hearth—the one who hadn’t blinked, hadn’t flinched.
That, in itself, was telling. And telling was dangerous.
Especially in Slytherin.
Eye contact wasn’t just a matter of courtesy here. It was a wager. A weapon. A chess move made with the eyes, where the stakes were reputation, safety—sometimes blood. Holding it too long could mean many things: defiance, challenge, stupidity.
This one hadn’t looked away.
The firelight painted his cheekbones in gold, carved hollows beneath his eyes, sharpened the cut of his jaw. Shadow and brilliance fought over the angles of his face, casting him half into myth and half into menace. And still, that smirk—that infuriating smirk—lingered like the aftertaste of spoiled wine. The kind of smile that didn’t belong to the cautious.
A mistake.
Draco’s voice, when it came, broke the silence with the elegance of a scalpel. “I’m not in the habit of correcting myths,” he said, light and clipped, every syllable clear and cold. “They tend to outlive the truth. And besides…”
He stepped forward—just one pace, but precise. Calculated. Enough.
The smirk faltered. Just slightly. Enough to show the hairline fracture forming behind the boy’s mask. A single tick in the tension. Victory, not total, but tasted.
“…sometimes it’s more useful to let people wonder what kind of monster you might be.”
The common room seemed to shift around him, like a snake coiling subtly in the dark. Someone shifted in their seat. A breath caught. Fabric whispered against stone.
The hearth crackled. Sharp. Splintered. Like the crack of bone under velvet soles.
And then—
A sound.
Soft, deliberate, unmistakably feminine: a snort, coiled with amusement and contempt, as finely aimed as a curse. It curled through the air like perfume laced with poison.
Calista Flint.
Every head turned, instinctively.
She was not seated, not merely lounging—no, she was enthroned. Draped across the far settee like some ancestral deity no one dared displace, her presence anchoring the room as surely as gravity. It was as if the furniture had been carved centuries ago with her silhouette in mind, and had been waiting ever since.
The fire adored her. Clung to her. It limned every inch of her with greedy hands, casting her in ribbons of light and shadow that moved like they feared her displeasure. Her robe was pure indulgence: black silk that spilled across the cushions like oil, threaded with curling emerald runes that caught the light and twisted, serpent-like, with each motion she deigned to make. It didn’t drape—it ruled.
One arm lay arched over the backrest, boneless in its grace. The other curled beneath her collarbone, fingers toying with the edge of a pendant—a serpent mid-strike, wrought from onyx and silver, its fangs perpetually poised, its coil frozen in an eternal decision between seduction and death.
Her braid was a weapon in itself—thick and impossibly smooth, a dark river of ink coiled over one shoulder, gleaming like obsidian. Not a single strand out of place. Not a single detail left to chance.
Even her stillness had teeth.
But it was her eyes that hollowed the silence.
Too dark, too knowing. Not simply watchful—omnivorous. The kind of gaze that had outlived kingdoms, that had watched bloodlines break under their own weight and smiled while doing so. They glinted not with warmth, but with recognition. As if she already knew how the story ended, and was simply waiting to see if you’d notice too.
They were slitted.
Barely.
A whisper of something ancient, something other, sleeping just beneath her skin. Enough to make even the most arrogant pure-blood blink and wonder what she really was.
“You look more like a Malfoy,” she said at last, voice as smooth as silk left in poison. She dragged the name across the room like a blade wrapped in honey, each syllable weighted with implication. “Too much polish. Too much frost. Blood like that doesn’t hide well.”
It wasn’t a compliment.
It was a warning dressed as flattery. A threat in satin gloves.
And Draco—Draco didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. He only smiled. A subtle thing. Cold. Unbothered.
Because monsters, after all, recognize their own.
She was a pureblood cartographer. Not the kind who sketched borders or traced coastlines, but the older kind—arcane and dangerous. The kind who charted bloodlines instead of countries, tracing lineage like ley lines, searching for fractures, power, forbidden unions buried in the folds of family trees like rot beneath gold leaf.
Alongside her cousins—Mara and Moriah Spinnet, the twins, mirror-eyed and sharp as bloodied needles—they formed a triad of old magic and older gossip, pureblood archivists in satin gloves. Together, they spoke of ancestry the way others spoke of currency: as something to be flaunted, gambled, weaponized. The Spinnet twins whispered in tandem, moved in tandem, and smiled like they already knew who your great-grandmother had really married and what she’d hexed to hide it.
Draco had seen them watching him.
Not just watching—studying. The way one might examine an artifact of uncertain origin. With too much interest. With too little blinking. He’d felt it like a chill at the base of his skull: that quiet certainty that somewhere, behind one of their closed doors and parchment-drowned desks, a version of him already existed on paper—pinned, parsed, and annotated.
So he asked directly.
He turned toward Calista now, letting the silence linger like a knife unsheathed. Her dark eyes flicked to him, glinting.
“Tell me,” Draco said, his voice as smooth as frost across glass, “did you and your cousins try to map me?”
A pause. Then a smile—not kind. Not cruel, either. Just… interested. Like a cat watching a mouse that hadn’t run yet.
“Of course we did,” she murmured, her tone breezy, her fingers idly tracing the outline of her serpent pendant. “You’re the most interesting question mark we’ve had in years.”
Moriah’s laugh—soft, echoing from somewhere behind—floated through the common room like a music box turned one note off-key.
“We started with the obvious,” Calista went on, like she were reciting poetry or a crime. “Malfoy blood. Ancient, though a bit thinned in places. Greengrass on one side, or so we thought. But the threads didn’t hold. Too many gaps. Too many denials that didn’t make sense.”
Mara’s voice this time, low and lilting: “Too many names that disappeared when they should’ve screamed.”
“We checked Black,” Calista continued, as though she hadn’t been interrupted. “We checked Rosier. We even checked Lestrange, just for sport. But nothing quite fit.”
Draco tilted his head. “And your conclusion?”
Calista’s smile sharpened, not a blade now—but a scalpel.
“There wasn’t one.”
She leaned forward, as if sharing a secret with teeth.
“You don’t trace. You spiral. Your blood folds back on itself in ways it shouldn’t. Loops. Repeats. There’s something—singular—about it. Something tangled in a way that doesn’t feel like nature.” Her eyes glinted. “It feels like design.”
Draco’s silence was a shield. He offered her nothing.
But inside, something twisted—because she was too close. Far too close.
“And what,” he asked finally, low and careful, “does a cartographer do with a map that doesn’t obey its own geometry?”
Calista’s laugh was soft, lovely, and entirely devoid of warmth.
“We redraw the world around it.”
Calista’s words hung in the air like incense smoke—sweet, cloying, and laced with poison.
We redraw the world around it.
A declaration, a warning, a promise.
Draco didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. He wouldn’t give her that satisfaction—not when her voice wrapped around the common room like a spell cast sideways, all misdirection and menace.
The fire crackled. Someone exhaled. Moriah’s eyes glittered in the dark like small, polished coins; Mara tilted her head, her mouth curling like she knew exactly what that kind of blood was worth in the right war.
“Maps lie,” Draco said finally, evenly. “Or haven’t they taught you that yet?”
“Of course they lie,” Calista replied, tone amused. “But so do people. At least a map shows you where the lies begin.”
A rustle of movement. Mara unfolded from her perch near the bookshelf, all silk and shadow, her voice light as thread slipping through a needle. “We weren’t going to tell anyone. Not yet.”
“Not until we understood it,” Moriah added from the opposite side of the room, as if continuing a single thought split across two mouths.
Draco turned his gaze to them, to the twin mirrors of something dangerous born not of brute force, but of pure, practiced observation. The Spinnets didn’t need wands to cut—they needed parchment, ink, and silence.
He imagined them unrolling scrolls laced with veined enchantments, tracing the shapes of names that should’ve been extinct. A bloodline that twisted not forward, but back. That bled in circles.
Spiral.
That word again.
“And what did you find,” he asked, “at the center?”
They didn’t answer. But the silence did.
Because if they had seen what he suspected—what Lucius had never dared say aloud, what Narcissa had tried so hard to bury in lullabies and winter roses—then they knew. Or they were close enough.
A myth walking on two legs, in polished boots and a school uniform. A curse inherited not by sin but by design.
Calista stood. The firelight licked the hem of her robe, green flame dancing over the stitched serpents. She walked toward him slowly, not with challenge, but with inevitability.
“There are names,” she said, low, “that are older than the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Names that don’t appear on lists because they were never meant to be shared.”
Her fingers brushed his sleeve. Not possessively. Curiously. Like he was parchment warmed by breath, waiting to reveal something when touched just right.
“I think you’re carrying one of them.”
Draco’s breath came quiet and steady.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said.
Calista smiled. “I don’t.”
Then she stepped back, and the spell—the moment—broke.
A murmuring began to return to the common room, slow and cautious, as if even the shadows needed permission to move again. The Spinnet twins vanished into their corner like mist curling into stone, observing.
And then—
A voice, low and smooth, slipped through the hush like a blade drawn from velvet. Refined. Unhurried. Rich with the cruelty of old money and older expectations. There was amusement in it, yes—but not the kind meant to invite laughter. This was colder. Sharper. The amusement of someone who had long since learned how to smile without ever softening.
“Well,” it drawled, voice lacquered in inherited arrogance, “hate to admit it, but it’s true.”
He stepped forward from the shadows with the ease of something that had never once questioned its right to exist in the center of every room. He didn’t walk—he arrived, as if the darkness itself had merely been a stagehand, holding the wings open until his entrance was ready. The firelight greeted him with the reverence of an old friend.
Abraxas Malfoy.
The name entered the space like a scent—clove and cold steel, fine parchment and bloodline.
Light caught in his hair, that perfectly arranged sheath of pale gold, each strand slicked into place with surgical precision, gleaming like sovereigns hoarded in a Gringotts vault. His robes were dark velvet, green so deep it could have passed for black, trimmed in silver thread that shimmered like frost over the edge of a dagger. Power didn’t just cling to him—it had been tailored into the seams of his garments, stitched into his skin.
He was tall, built not for kindness but for display. Effortless in the way only a certain kind of man can be when born into centuries of curated cruelty. Beautiful, yes—but it was the beauty of a serpent raised beneath chandelier light. Every feature refined. Every movement deliberate. A prince of a dying empire who’d never noticed the rot at its roots because he’d never had to kneel.
His smile curved like a sickle. Lazy. Lovely. Lethal. The kind of smile that would press a kiss to your cheek just before slipping a dagger between your ribs. That smile had conquered drawing rooms and schoolyards alike. It had history behind it. Weight. Reputation.
“Abraxas,” he said, and extended his hand—not in greeting, but in performance. Palm up, smooth and ringless, a practiced gesture of invitation cloaked as courtesy. “And I must say—” he paused, letting the pause gleam like a coin, “—you bear an uncanny resemblance to my own family. You could be my brother. Or a cousin, at the very least.”
The room tilted, ever so slightly. A held breath. The quiet tightened. Even the fire seemed to still, listening.
The common room leaned in—not physically, but collectively, unconsciously. Like spectators at a duel dressed up as diplomacy. The stage had been set, the spotlight found its mark. And Draco—
Draco was expected to play his part.
He stared at the offered hand. That was all. Just stared.
A beat.
Then another.
Too long.
The silence cracked—not aloud, but within the finely tuned Slytherin instincts shared by everyone present. Someone shifted. A finger twitched on a book spine. Calista’s lips quirked with feline interest, the slow smile of someone watching a flame choose its next victim.
The irony might’ve made Draco laugh, had it not tasted like dust in the back of his throat. Brother, Abraxas had said. He almost choked on it. His grandfather didn’t know he was shaking hands with his Grandson. For Salazar sake. This was looney.
At last, he moved.
Slow. Controlled. A study in refusal disguised as courtesy. He reached out and took the hand—but not with warmth. His fingers were like frost. Not from fear. From discipline. From the tension coiled beneath his skin, the sheer force of will it took not to recoil from the ghost of his own name.
“I don’t tend to collect brothers,” Draco said. His voice was soft, but cut with the gleam of something honed. A dagger laid gently across the wrist. “They get in the way.”
Something shifted in Abraxas then. Subtle. A minute tilt of the head. His smile did not falter, but something behind his eyes loosened. The stiffness in his spine eased. A breath escaped him—too shallow, too careful.
As if he’d only now allowed himself to breathe.
Draco had answered, not with blood, but with scorn. Not by denying the resemblance, but by denying kinship. And to someone like Abraxas, that mattered. It meant safety. It meant Draco wasn’t a threat to his inheritance, his hierarchy, his throne.
Not a brother.
Something else.
Something separate.
Something he wouldn’t have to kill.
And yet—Draco knew that line could be crossed at any moment. All it would take was a glance, a word, a whisper into the wrong ear. The danger hadn’t passed. It had only… shifted.
A subtle shift rippled through the common room—palpable yet unspoken. The audience, such as it was, exhaled as if from the close of an opera act. Curtain drawn, tension released.
But the performance wasn’t over. Not yet.
Abraxas’s smile remained, but it no longer touched the eyes. It perched there on his face like something ornamental, something inherited. He withdrew his hand without hurry, as if it had never mattered whether Draco took it or not. But his gaze lingered—too long, too careful.
He was studying something. Not just the face. Not just the posture.
The defiance. The restraint. The command.
The echoes of something older.
“Pity,” Abraxas murmured, brushing an invisible speck from his sleeve with the languid flick of someone accustomed to being watched. “But I suppose you’re right. Brothers have such a tiresome tendency to need… protecting.”
He let the word linger, soft and barbed, like a thorn pressed into velvet.
From the corner, one of the Spinnet twins—Mara, or was it Moriah?—breathed a sound that might’ve been amusement or warning. Calista’s braid glinted in the firelight like coiled shadow, her lips parted just slightly, the smile sharpened into something far too knowing.
Draco didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
He stepped back—just half a pace. But it was deliberate. Controlled. The unspoken equivalent of drawing a boundary not with words but with presence. You may orbit. You may observe. But you do not touch.
And Abraxas, to his credit, recognized it.
He inclined his head—just so. Regal. Resigned. Respectful in the way predators are when sizing up something that bites.
A ripple went through the room—laughter, thin and gleaming, brittle as cracked crystal. It skated across marble floors and velvet-tufted lounges like a blade brushing silk: cold, precise, impersonal. The kind of laughter that didn’t warm, didn’t welcome—it relieved. The sound of pressure easing just enough to breathe, not enough to relax. It rolled through the Slytherin common room like the trailing breath of a storm that had passed too near. The sort of reaction born not of amusement, but survival.
The tension fractured—subtly. No great sighs, no dramatic collapses. Just the delicate realignments of posture: a shoulder sinking, a jaw unclenching, fingers releasing the edge of an armrest. The way a flock of birds might settle after a hawk has passed overhead. Calista’s smile widened, uncoiled—slow, indulgent, and self-satisfied. Her teeth flashed like a secret. Her gaze swept the room, feral and pleased. She looked like a cat watching a mouse escape—not disappointed, merely entertained by the spectacle.
Around her, the others moved in kind. Masks slipped back into place—fluid and elegant. The tilt of a chin here, the curve of a lip there. They wore their expressions like jewelry: precious, curated, sharp enough to cut. Nothing vulnerable was left behind. Only performance. And they performed exquisitely.
The scene had ended. The audience approved.
Except Abraxas.
He didn’t smile. Didn’t clap. He studied Draco with a kind of stillness that made silence feel like tension rather than rest. His head tilted slightly—just a fraction—like a cobra listening. He looked not amused, not angry. Simply… interested. Appraising. Like a collector examining a curio too finely made to be dismissed, yet too unfamiliar to be claimed.
“Fair enough,” he said softly, silk against steel. “But blood always remembers itself. Even if the names get lost.”
He didn’t wait for a reaction. Didn’t try to own the moment. He simply turned—graceful, weightless, deliberate. Each step was a brushstroke of control. His robes whispered with silver-threaded softness as he moved, and the crowd received him again like tidewater folding over something it had momentarily exposed. He was gone, absorbed, but never unnoticed. Never truly away.
His words, though, remained.
They hung in the air like drifting ash—soft, silent, stinging. Not loud enough to echo. Just quiet enough to haunt. A phrase that didn’t sting outright, but slid beneath the skin and settled there, like the seed of a bruise. Velvet-voiced and surgical, the kind of wound that looked beautiful until you bled.
Draco didn’t react.
Couldn’t.
To flinch would be to admit something had struck him.
But somewhere, deep behind the marble polish of his poise, something clenched. His spine stayed straight. His hands, calm. But in his chest—something twisted. Something pulled. Something… remembered.
The common room felt too ornate now. The fireplace roared too hot. The emeralds gleamed too bright. The laughter too rehearsed. Every candle flickered like it burned for someone else. The silver accents on the walls seemed less like decoration and more like veins in some grand, cold-blooded creature swallowing him whole.
Draco stood still as a portrait. Beautiful. Remote. Unreachable.
And just as hollow.
Blood always remembers itself.
The words curled behind his ribs, coiling like smoke that knew its way home.
How many times had he tried to forget?
To scrub it from his skin like ash, to bleach it from the back of his throat until even the echo of it burned away. To scrape it from the hollow beneath his ribs where it lived like a second heart—one that beat too cold, too loud, too much like home.
He had practiced silence until it hardened into a shield. Worn stillness like a second skin. Built an identity from borrowed syllables, each one a stone in the armor of his new name. He had buried himself beneath careful words, curated habits, different tastes. Spoken with another voice. Looked through another face in the mirror.
But the past had a gravity. A pull.
Older than wandwood. Darker than spells. Deeper than blood.
And still—it clung.
Malfoy.
A name like a frostbite kiss. Beautiful. Damning. Unforgiving.
A name shaped by centuries of weight and war. Etched into bone and gold, into the silver-threaded walls of this very room. It dripped with legacy and rot, expectation and power. A name passed from father to son like a crown—sharp-edged, blood-tarnished, and worn whether you wanted it or not.
He’d thrown it away. Cast it off like a shackle, like a dying star falling out of orbit.
And still—Abraxas had spoken it. Of all people.
Abraxas, who wore it like silk and steel and scripture. Abraxas, whose blood sang with it, who had never once questioned the taste of power in his mouth because he was raised on it like wine. A boy molded from the same silver and venom that had once forged Draco himself.
The floor didn’t tilt.
Not in the literal sense.
But power had shifted—subtle as a breath between words, unmistakable as a blade pressing just below the collar. Something in the air leaned. Moved. The board had changed, and Draco hadn’t seen the piece being played.
He didn’t need to look to know the room hadn’t moved on.
They hadn’t gone back to their games, to their laughter or languid disdain. No, the moment had sunk deeper, settled like sediment at the bottom of a glass. The fire still crackled. The green flame still cast long shadows against the arching stone. But the temperature had changed. The texture of the air had changed.
And the eyes—they lingered.
They didn’t stare outright. Slytherins never did. But they watched, from beneath lashes and over goblets. They listened.Weighing. Measuring. Marking. The way predators did when something unfamiliar entered the territory.
Even in silence, the truth pulsed.
Like a second heartbeat under the skin. A whisper beneath a spell.
He didn’t belong here.
Not truly.
But they thought he did.
And somehow—that was worse.
Draco turned.
Slowly. Carefully. Like stone pulled from the earth.
Each movement calculated, calm. A performance perfected. His expression smoothed itself into porcelain: cool, unmoved, unbothered. The kind of mask that cracked only in dreams. But behind it—inside—something was scraping. Clawing. Tearing splinters from the old architecture of who he’d tried so hard to become.
Because Abraxas was right.
Blood remembers.
It didn’t matter how many names you wore. How far you ran. How many layers of charm or lie you wrapped yourself in. It would find you. Seep up through the cracks like roots through stone. Pull you back with hands made of memory and guilt.
The shift in the room didn’t come with words. It came with absence.
A stillness too purposeful to be peace. Too deep to be dismissed.
Gone was the easy sprawl of youth and power. The stretch of limbs across brocade, the casual arc of laughter flicked like a wand. Gone were the games, the sharp-tongued flirtation, the mirthless jokes passed like poisoned sweets.
In their place: stillness.
A breath that refused to be taken.
A pause that stretched.
A quiet in which something ancient had just blinked open its eyes.
Because legacy had been summoned—not declared, not argued, but summoned. And in Slytherin, legacy was sacred. Not just identity. Not just power.
It was threat.
And now—they were watching.
Not the way children watch. The way heirs do.
The kind of watching that measured weight. Worth. Weakness.
Draco stood in the eye of it, unmoving. A statue carved from secrets and spellwork. A relic of something older than any of them knew how to name.
They had begun to watch.
Not with idle eyes. Not with the shallow intrigue of schoolchildren. But with the keenness of predators who had scented something wounded—something bleeding—in the current. The students—no, heirs—no longer lounged with aristocratic nonchalance. Their bodies remained in place, but their intent had shifted. Stillness now was a posture. Spines stiffened by degrees. Hands tucked themselves away. Voices dulled to murmurs, then vanished. They sat not as boys and girls at leisure—but as creatures lying in wait.
Their gaze, when it came, was not direct. It slithered. Measured.
As though seeing him was not the point at all—but rather what moved behind him. What echoed through his blood like a tolling bell in ancestral dark: Malfoy. Black. Peverell. Names older than reason. Legacies that moved like tectonic plates beneath the polished floor. The weight of those names pressed into the space around him, refracting everything he was through generations of power.
No one met his eyes.
They mapped him instead.
Their stares skated across his body like fingertips testing for fractures—along the aristocratic line of his jaw, the sculpted drape of his robes, the deliberate angle of his chin. They did not study the boy. They hunted the symbol. They were not curious about who he was.
They were calculating what he would cost.
And what he would inherit.
Which houses did he carry in his blood.
He stood at the heart of the common room like a needle on a compass, pivoting the atmosphere around him. Not for anything he had said. Not yet.
But because of what might be written in invisible ink across his skin.
Because of whose sigil might be branded into his magic.
Because of what kingdom might rise or fall in the shadow of his inheritance.
Rumor, in this place, was not a thing whispered.
It was a thing sharpened.
And his name had entered the room with a knife in its smile.
Draco felt it. All of it. The chill that spread from the walls. The strain that built beneath their silence. The way the moment stretched like wire drawn taut between suspicion and revelation. He let it tighten. He let it sing. The watching became a pressure. The pressure became a question.
And just before it could snap—he answered.
Not with words. Not with magic. With a single, deliberate motion.
His hand rose. Slowly. Elegantly. Fingers weaving through the pale silk of his hair. He swept it back—not fully, just enough to disturb the immaculate line. The effect was subtle, but not thoughtless. The kind of imperfection that invited interpretation.
It was not exhaustion. It was design.
An imperfection he allowed them to see.
A crack he offered them on purpose.
The gesture whispered: I have lived things I will not speak of.
But underneath the illusion of weariness was something far colder: control.
This was not softness.
It was strategy.
A knife wrapped in velvet. A mask worn inside the mask.
See—I am not so polished as you think.
See—I am flawed. Human.
See—I bleed. But beware what happens when I do.
It was bait, strung on a silver thread. And some of them bit. Eyes flicked toward the movement like magpies to a glint of steel in the grass. Watching. Interpreting. Drawing conclusions he wanted them to draw.
Misreading him, if he was lucky.
Because if they saw clearly—if they truly understood what stirred beneath the surface—they might run. Or worse, they might bow.
Because beneath the surface was no boy.
There was only edge.
The room didn’t stir.
It waited.
At his hip, the wand stirred too.
It did not hum. It pulsed.
Not softly. Not gently. With the dark rhythm of something ancient waking from long slumber. A second heartbeat—heavy, molten, coiling behind his ribs. The Bloodwood rested like a limb against his robes, but it felt more like a limb of him. It did not glow. It didn’t need to.
Its presence was a pressure—hot, alive, serpentine.
It unspooled against his skin like a whisper passed over a fevered throat. It curled heat through him like a question asked too close to the mouth. The wand was no passive servant.
It listened.
It tasted.
It wanted.
Draco could feel the magic inside it turning toward him, aligning not with his will—but with his ache. It did not seek orders. It sought to merge. There was a wrongness to it. An intimacy too precise, too probing. The wand didn’t merely respond.
It recognized.
And worse—it remembered.
Draco still heard the wandmaker’s warning, low and sharp, spoken in the sallow light of a backroom too old for its bones:
“It will answer your rage faster than your reason, boy. Be wary of what you feed it.”
He had not forgotten.
He remembered the first time the wand had twitched in his grasp—not like a dog scenting home, but like a predator catching the tremble of prey.
It hadn’t chosen him out of nobility.
It had hungered for him.
For his name.
For his wound.
For the hollow in him where something sacred had been carved out and never healed. Not a boy. Not a prodigy. Not a Malfoy.
But a vessel.
And now—it wanted more.
The wand pulsed again.
Deeper this time. Less like a heartbeat, more like a bruise blooming beneath the skin. A warning, perhaps. Or a protest.
He shifted slightly—barely a breath—and felt it: the recoil.
Not from him.
From it.
The wand had never been tame. It did not warm to loyalty, or lean toward obedience like pliant wood beneath steady hands. It had teeth. It judged. And it remembered.
Its core was an abomination of purpose. A contradiction sealed in polished Bloodwood: a sliver of basilisk fang—lethal, ancient, and silent—twisted with a strand of Veela hair, volatile as beauty set on fire.
Predator. Seducer. The cruel and the divine, braided together.
The fang gave it venom, quiet and absolute. Death not as punishment, but as birthright. The Veela strand gave it allure, heat, emotion sharpened into instinct. It could charm. It could rend. It could whisper temptation into your grip and then bite down when your hand grew too familiar.
And Draco—Draco was not its first choice.
He was claimed, and it resented that.
Even now, it felt the other. The Elder Wand. The whispering weight of its magic bond buried inside the velvet sheath at the small of his back, the ancient thrum of that older power—so still, so silent, yet impossibly vast. The Elder Wand did not pulse. It did not sting. It watched from within, coiled and quiet, like a god awaiting tribute.
His wand felt it.
And hated it.
It had no love for divided allegiance. It could sense the hollow where Draco’s magic bent, however carefully, toward the deeper wand. Could feel the gravity of that bond forming—a bond it could not override.
And so—it burned.
Not in flames. In stings. Tiny lances of fire beneath his skin whenever he called its magic too sharply. The punishment of a jealous thing.
It wasn’t rage.
It was retaliation.
Every time he used it, it reminded him: You are not free. You are not whole. You are already chosen—and it was not me.
He remembered the first time he felt it bite him, not in battle, but in hesitation. When he’d reached for it with his mind clouded by another wand’s silent pull. It had sparked—flared. The spell had twisted in his hand. Not wrong. But unclean.
Veela hair was loyal—but never patient. It did not tolerate second place.
And the basilisk? It simply waited. Uncoiling beneath the surface of the wood. Waiting for him to make a mistake worth killing over.
Now, in the hush of the Slytherin common room, with a dozen bloodlines watching and weighing him, the wand at his hip tasted the tension and drew itself tighter.
A lover scorned.
A blade unwilling to sheath.
Draco did not flinch.
He let the sting bloom like a thorn pressing into flesh. Let the heat lick up his side like candle flame near parchment. He knew how to suffer. Quietly. Elegantly.
That, too, was inherited.
He lifted his chin just slightly—enough for the light to catch the ridge of his cheekbone, to glint off the cool grey of his eyes, unreadable as frost-covered mirrors.
Let them see what they wanted to see.
Let them guess wrong.
But beneath his robes, near the curve of his spine, the Elder Wands magic stilled.
And that stillness was not comfort.
It was claim.
One wand burned him.
The other marked him.
And he—Draco Malfoy—stood between them, the boy with two ghosts stitched into his grip, one seething and the other silent, each more ancient than the blood in his veins.
He would have to choose. One day.
But not yet.
Tonight, he let the fire flicker beneath his skin and the silence thicken like snowfall.
His spine aligned, not in the rigid snap of a soldier, but in the slow, serpentine grace of something awakening—ancient, coiled, and dangerous. Vertebra by vertebra, he straightened, the motion too deliberate for mere posture. There was no salute. No surrender. Only a silent, slow uncoiling—as if some ancestral echo had stirred within his marrow and decided to rise.
His shoulders eased back, sculpting the silhouette of someone honed, not delicate.
Not fragile.
Balanced.
Each inch of him was tension held in restraint, like a bowstring drawn tight beneath a silken veneer. Silence itself seemed to gather at the corners of his figure, taut with implication.
Magic shifted under his skin—not soft, not sweet. It moved with the force of a tide beneath frozen ice, a pressure that built behind his ribs and breathed through his eyes. Not dormant. Not docile. It was alert, coiled around the steady rhythm of his breath. Watching. Listening.
Something in him—perhaps not even wholly him anymore—stepped forward.
Not merely a boy.
Not only an heir.
But a specter of lineage, cloaked in something older than name.
A shadow borne in blood.
“I’m not here to amuse you,” he said finally, his voice dragging softly across the air like velvet over shattered crystal.
Refined. Measured. Menacing.
Each word settled into the room like drops of quicksilver—gleaming, fluid, fatal. And the silence that followed was not absence. It was presence. Dense and echoing. It rang in the bones, as if the room itself had inhaled and forgotten how to breathe.
The older students reacted first. They didn’t flinch—Slytherins never flinched—but they moved. Subtly. Spines stretched tall, knees uncrossed, the faint scrape of fabric as backs lifted from chairs by the breadth of a breath. No words. No acknowledgment. But it was there—something had shifted.
A line had been drawn in the dark.
Not fear.
Not yet.
But caution tinged with deference. The kind that passes between predators when another enters the den—when it’s still unclear whether he’s wolf or lamb.
Or something worse.
By the fire, Elias Lestrange moved.
Just slightly.
He leaned into the glow, letting it carve hollows beneath his cheekbones and catch the cold angles of his face. His lips curved, that same practiced, knowing smirk—but it stopped before reaching his eyes. Those pale, glacial eyes that studied Draco like a puzzle he wasn’t sure he wanted to solve or break.
He tilted his head with calculated slowness, the motion theatrical, deliberate. Amusement curled in his tone like smoke from an ember that never quite dies.
“Oh?” he murmured, low and indulgent. The syllables dripped like melted silk. “And what are you here for, then, Peverell?”
The name fell from his lips like an incantation meant to sting—equal parts bait and blade.
Draco didn’t respond. Not yet.
Some battles are waged in silence, where words are traps and the air between two wands hums with unspoken violence.
He drew breath to answer—
—but the air shifted first.
Not a tremor. Not a flicker.
A full turn of the tide.
Tom Riddle rose.
No words announced it. No grand gesture. Just movement—fluid, effortless, and absolute. He stood with the calm inevitability of dusk swallowing daylight, quiet and complete. The kind of grace that wasn’t practiced, but born. The kind that made you forget to blink, lest the stillness broke into something lethal.
His presence bled into the room like ink into water—smooth, slow, and irreversible. It didn’t crash. It claimed. Thickening the air, darkening the hearthlight. Not menace. Not awe. Something colder. More complete. Command without need for volume.
With every breath he took, the room pressed tighter.
Conversations didn’t trail off—they vanished. Snuffed out in silence like candles beneath a closing lid. The only sound left was the quiet weight of inevitability.
And then—he spoke.
Only once. Low. Precise. Laced with a shadow older than his years.
“He doesn’t owe you answers.”
It wasn’t defense.
It wasn’t protection.
It was law.
A decree carved from something older than stone.
The words didn’t ring. They settled—a quiet snowfall of command that landed on the room’s shoulders like a shroud. No rise in tone. No dramatics. But it coated everything. The sort of authority that didn’t need to announce itself, because it assumed obedience. It expected silence.
And it got it.
Elias Lestrange’s smirk didn’t falter—but it paused. Froze. A flicker in the muscles at his jaw betrayed him—subtle, almost imperceptible—but to those watching, it was enough. The flicker of calculation. The sudden awareness that another presence had stepped into the chessboard—and had just seized the center file.
Tom stood tall, not with arrogance, but with possession. His spine straight, his hands at his sides, every angle of him a study in restraint too perfect to be natural. He didn’t fidget. Didn’t blink. Just looked. And it was that—the looking—that set nerves on edge.
His gaze landed on Lestrange like a surgeon’s scalpel—cool, steady, exact. Not cruel. Just utterly unafraid to cut.
In the crackle of firelight, his shadow stretched across the floor like a blade. Long. Certain.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t turn. But he felt the shift behind him like pressure changing before a storm. He felt it in his bones, in the subtle tightening of the air as Tom Riddle’s magic unfurled.
It was not violent.
It was worse than violent.
It was curious.
Not the kind of curiosity that asked questions. The kind that dissected answers. The kind that pinned butterflies and called it science. A dangerous, quiet thing that asked nothing, because it already knew too much.
For a moment—just a breath—Draco thought he felt it brush against his magic.
A whisper.
A tether.
Not a bond. Not yet.
But a recognition. The way two swords might glance against each other in the dark—neither drawn, but neither sheathed.
He didn’t shiver.
But his wand sparked faintly at his side. A flicker of resistance. Of awareness. It didn’t like Tom.
Good, Draco thought distantly.
Neither do I.
Tom moved then—just a single step forward. And that was all it took to reset the room. The Slytherins, sharp and silver-eyed, adjusted in kind. Like birds realigning mid-flight, each of them shifted just enough to acknowledge the new axis of power.
Elias Lestrange leaned back in his chair with the ease of someone who’d never known consequence. The firelight caught him at a cruel angle—highlighting the hollow under his cheekbones, the gleam in his narrowed eyes, the mocking curl of his mouth. His exhale was long, audible, like smoke sliding from a predator’s lungs. The kind of breath you take before choosing where to strike.
Amusement didn’t brighten his face. It uncoiled—slow, decadent, predatory. Like a cat stretching out its limbs just before the kill. A sound rumbled low in his throat, not quite a laugh. Something darker. A dare disguised as a purr.
“Oh, Riddle,” he murmured, voice drawn out like a ribbon between fingers, velvet-slick and dipped in venom. “Always so eager to collect strays. Should we start calling you Mother Serpent?”
His hand drifted downward in a lazy arc, brushing the front of his robes as if dislodging a speck of invisible dust. The motion was meaningless—purposefully so. A performance. Every gesture an echo of privilege sharpened to cruelty. The sort of disdain that didn’t need to raise its voice to wound.
A few of the others smirked. Tight, unsure things—like masks not yet secured. Laughter caught behind teeth, flickering on the edge of danger. They didn’t dare let it bloom. Not fully.
Because Tom Riddle hadn’t moved.
And whatever Riddle was, he was not amused.
Draco didn’t flinch.
Didn’t twitch.
Didn’t so much as breathe wrong.
But his eyes—they changed.
Not with fear. Not outrage.
Something cleaner. Colder.
Like glass, right before it breaks—beautiful in its clarity, perilous in its silence. He stared at Elias, unblinking. And beneath that stillness, something stirred. A storm without wind. A tide without waves. The kind of fury that didn’t scream—it waited.
Not a boy.
A blade waiting to be unsheathed.
He didn’t glance at Tom. Didn’t need to. His mind was already there, tracing the shape of the move beneath the silence.
What are you doing, Riddle?
Tom’s earlier words had been a whisper in the dark—soft, nearly careless. But in Slytherin, the quietest words cut deepest. No flourish. No raised voice. Just a shift in the balance of power. It hadn’t been a rebuke, not truly. Hadn’t embarrassed Elias. Which meant it wasn’t meant to provoke.
No. It had been something else entirely.
A claim.
Sharp. Subtle. Absolute.
A public gesture drawn with private intention. One that made the older Slytherins shift ever so slightly in their seats, like wolves circling something they hadn’t decided whether to hunt or follow.
Allegiance? Possession?
A signal in a war no one else realized had begun?
Draco’s jaw moved just slightly. Not a clench—something deeper. An ancient instinct stirring in his bones. He knew what this meant. Knew the language of power spoken through stillness. Of loyalties weighed in silence, of hierarchies carved from glances.
In Slytherin, you didn’t defend someone from a blow.
You watched them bleed.
Measured the spill of it.
Counted the heartbeats it took them to rise again.
You only intervened when a name belonged to you—
or when you intended to make it yours.
And Tom Riddle had spoken for his.
Not with heat. Not with pride. But with the cool finality of a chessmaster claiming a piece no one realized was already in play.
It echoed. Everyone felt it.
But Draco Peverell would not be claimed like some rescued thing-
be mistaken for weak.
Not by Elias. Not by the watching serpents in their velvet shadows. And not—not—by Tom Riddle.
His voice slipped into the silence like a knife slid between ribs. Silken. Steady. Deadly precise.
“I’m no one’s stray.”
The words landed softly—but the room tilted.
Not physically. Not magically. Just perceptibly enough that every listener felt the shift, like gravity had quietly changed its allegiance. Draco’s tone hadn’t risen. He hadn’t snarled or spat. But his voice held an edge honed not on rage—but restraint. A blade drawn an inch, glinting with promise.
Elias’s smile faltered. Barely. A fractional twitch at the corner of his mouth. His eyes, however, sharpened—like ice under pressure, cracking outward in invisible veins.
He didn’t speak. Not yet. Because Elias Lestrange was many things—vain, cruel, theatrically poisonous—but he wasn’t stupid. And whatever he’d meant to provoke had just stared back at him and refused to play the part.
Behind Draco, the hearth crackled, casting his shadow long across the stone floor. But it wasn’t just the fire that made it stretch.
It was presence.
Something deeper. Older. The sense of a boundary redrawn not with chalk, but with blood.
Tom Riddle, still standing, said nothing.
But he was watching.
Not like the others—hungry for a show, eager for dominance. No, Tom watched the way a reader watches a riddle unfold. Delighted. Possessive. Curious.
So he chooses defiance over gratitude. How perfectly...
His fingers twitched at his side, as if he’d nearly raised a hand and thought better of it. The flicker of an instinct reined in.
He was learning Draco in real time—moment by moment, shard by careful shard. And what he saw tonight would be remembered. Catalogued.
Filed under mine—or threat.
Draco stepped forward once. Not to advance. Not to retreat. Just to take the space that had already bent around him.
He met Elias’s stare without blinking, letting the silence stretch just long enough to become discomfort.
“You can call him whatever you like,” he said, cool and deliberate, his gaze never leaving Lestrange. “But if you mistake amusement for invitation, if you keep talking, you’ll find out how quickly a serpent can bite through bone.”
The fire cracked—a sharp, crystalline snap that sliced through the hush like a femur under pressure. Leather groaned beneath a shifting body. Somewhere, a breath hitched too quickly, too loud. The room didn’t stir.
It recoiled.
Drew in tight, like lungs beneath a drowning weight.
Elias didn’t laugh this time.
He smiled.
But it was the sort of smile carved in ancestral halls soaked in old magic and older blood. A smile born of cold nurseries and colder mothers, who wore emeralds like sigils and taught their sons the art of cruelty wrapped in charm.
A Lestrange smile.
Measured. Slender. Surgical.
“And if I don’t?” Elias murmured, his voice too smooth, too gilded. Sugar coating something that smelled faintly of rot. His words floated like incense laced with arsenic—slow, curling, poisonous. Not loud. But everywhere.
Like a curse cast in a dead tongue.
It wasn’t a question.
It was bait.
Draco moved.
Not swiftly. Not startled.
But with the unhurried precision of a noose tightening, or a black tide drawing back from the shore before ruin. When he turned to face Elias, something in the room dropped. Like temperature. Like pretense.
The glass in his gaze had vanished.
What remained was blade.
The smile that touched his lips was devastating in its poise—still as prayer, as if shaped in cathedral light and reverence. The kind of expression painted in Renaissance frescoes or etched into the death masks of kings. Sacred, somehow. Untouched.
But the eyes—
They were godless.
Pale, glinting silver-blue, they gleamed like morning frost over a killing field. Cold and unflinching. The kind of cold that remembers blood. Remembers betrayal. Remembers names carved into gravestones by hand.
They held Elias.
Held him like a knife to the jugular—close enough to feel the press, the promise. Held him like judgment passed down from something ancient and without mercy.
“If you don’t?”
Draco’s voice was cool, almost lazy. Not defiance. Something worse.
Indifference.
It fell into the air like embers—soft, weightless, and scorched black at the edges. Ash from something already burned.
Then he stepped forward.
One step. Nothing more. No rush, no flourish. Just the whisper of shoe against worn stone.
But in the crucible of the Slytherin common room, it was enough.
Enough to send a tremor through the quiet.
Enough to detonate silence.
The sound echoed—leather sole on flagstone—like the first crack in a crypt door.
Elias flinched.
Barely. A breath’s flinch. A brief, involuntary retraction, spine straightening, chin twitching like a faltering mask. His throat bobbed—a flicker of instinct he couldn’t smooth fast enough. And in Slytherin, weakness was always observed. Always recorded.
Draco noticed.
They all did.
His mouth curved again—but softer now, and stripped of all gentleness. What remained was elegant and lethal. A smile honed for courtrooms and culling fields. Polished. Beautiful.
And sharp enough to bleed through silk.
“Then,” he said, voice like polished marble laced with frost, “you’ll find out whether I’m truly a Peverell.”
He didn’t need to raise his voice. The name did all the work.
It fell into the room like a relic dropped from a great height—weighty, echoing, terrible in its truth.
Silence coiled tighter.
Draco let it breathe. Let it stretch thin across the moment like parchment drawn too taut. And then, with the calm grace of someone peeling wings from a fly, he added:
“Since you’re all so desperate... for answers.”
The hush didn’t fracture.
It ruptured.
A sharp inhale across the room—too sudden. Another figure sank back into a green leather chair, the frame groaning beneath them like splintered bone.
Not fear.
Not yet.
Something worse.
Awe. The kind that kneels. The kind that kills.
Draco turned his back.
Not quickly.
Not cautiously.
It was effortless. A gesture shaped in old blood and older memory. Regal in the way a guillotine’s fall is regal—final, practiced, beyond plea or protest. Like the curtain closing on a scene too exquisite and too harrowing to bear a sequel.
It should have ended there.
But Slytherins never learned from fire unless their flesh wore the lesson. They mistook the sleeping for docile. They mistook the divine for something that could be defied. They poked at quiet like children at the edge of a frozen lake—curious, arrogant, unknowing of depth.
And sometimes, they bled for it.
A sound slithered out from the gloom—not speech, not spell, not entirely human. The breath of a curse. Spoiled. Thick with rot and venom. Uttered not in defense, but in hatred that had curdled in a mouth too young to wield it. It came in a hush, serrated and cruel, aimed squarely between Draco’s shoulders.
The incantation barely kissed the air before it was loosed—half-formed, desperate.
A thorn flung from the darkness.
A coward’s spell.
Draco did not turn.
He didn’t raise his wand.
He didn’t blink.
Only his right hand moved—flicked, almost idly, as if brushing ash from silk. Detached. Bored. Impossibly elegant.
No chant followed. No show of light or might.
But the magic moved.
The air buckled—folded inward like lungs struck breathless. The spell trembled mid-flight, slowed, bent as though caught in an undertow. Then—
—it cracked.
A soft, brittle snap, like ice fracturing beneath pressure or a neck beneath rope.
The curse collapsed inward on itself, crumpling like a dying star.
Its power—mean, spiteful, juvenile—was drawn downward, siphoned into something older, colder, unhurried.
Something that fed not on rage, but on inevitability.
A smell rose—ozone and scorched copper.
Like lightning kissed iron.
Like blood steaming on a sword that should not have been drawn.
Then—silence.
But not absence.
A presence.
Heavy. Total. Drenched in it.
The stillness wrapped the Slytherin common room like a shroud soaked in storm. It silenced not only voice, but thought. No word dared rise to break it. Even breath became a liability.
Even the fire cowered.
Where once it had danced, it now lay flat—dim, low, the embers curled in upon themselves as if wishing to hide in their own ashes. The shadows held their breath, terrified of what they might reveal.
Draco exhaled.
The breath was soft, but it bore the weight of judgment. It unfurled from his lips like incense through cathedral ruins—sacred, slow, and final. It wound through the air like smoke from something long buried but never dead.
Then he turned.
Not in fury.
Not in haste.
But with the gravity of prophecy and tide.
His gaze swept across the room—not cutting, not scorching. Just stripping.
Every face laid bare beneath the weight of indifference sharpened into something glacial. It was the gaze of a marble statue stepping from its pedestal—not to speak, but to punish.
And it found Elias.
The Lestrange heir had not moved.
Could not move.
His wand remained half-raised, suspended between intent and regret. His fingers locked around it, bloodless and white. His jaw clenched like a man resisting the scream clawing its way up his throat. The ever-present sneer—the hallmark of a boy who’d never been told “no” and meant it—was gone. In its place: silence. And the stutter of dignity unraveling.
Draco said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
Elias stood pinned beneath that gaze, as if caught by something far older than magic. Like prey staring into the eyes of something that had forgotten what hunger was, because it had never gone unsated.
No one moved.
Not because they respected him.
Because they remembered, too late, what they’d invited.
It was the silence of the woods when the apex predator walks through.
The kind that makes the birds forget their own songs.
The kind that makes you realize you’re not at the top of anything.
The air thickened—heavy with unspent magic and shame, with fear pressed so tightly into every ribcage it became marrow.
Draco stepped forward.
Behind him, the windows of the Slytherin common room loomed like ancient cathedral glass—tall, pointed, and solemn. Iron tracery laced the panes in delicate, rusting filigree, etched with the weight of centuries and the hush of lake-rot. Beyond the glass, the Black Lake stretched vast and lightless, pressing against the walls like a dark mirror, its currents curling in silence. Tendrils of moonlight pierced the murk from above, catching on drifting silt and reed-shadow, then splintering through the warped glass into the room.
What entered was not light as the world knew it.
It was half-dream, half-drowning—an underwater dusk that settled across the stones in bruised hues of green and violet, ink and pearl. Sacred, wrong, unclean in its purity. A cathedral submerged. A chapel to something forgotten.
That light found Draco.
It fell around him like consecration, refracted and restless, catching on the edges of his figure in slow, shivering bands. His silhouette cut clean and cruel against it—still, sharp, waiting. Silver clung to his shoulders in broken ripples, like moonlight scattered across frozen glass. His hair, bone-pale and smooth as bleached silk, caught the shimmer and turned incandescent—every strand a thread of winter flame, glinting with cold brilliance.
His skin—too pale for blood to seem real beneath—drank in the light without yielding warmth. It made marble of him. Or something older than marble. A statue carved from salt or bone, preserved too long beneath a skyless sea. High cheekbones shaped the planes of his face into something severe; his mouth, unmoving, was drawn with the stillness of ancient promises. His lashes—so light they seemed forged from ash—cast fine, tremulous shadows that softened nothing.
The rest of him was darkness.
He wore it like inheritance.
His robes were cut like an heirloom—black velvet edged in deep green silk, their lines clean as scripture and weighted like mourning. They hung from his frame like robes of state, moving only when he did—slow and heavy and sure. Silver fastenings marked the line of his chest, catching the fractured light and scattering it in gleams like fractured runes or cursed starlight. Where the fabric brushed stone, it whispered—not like cloth, but like water retreating over bones.
He looked not alive, but preserved. Not real, but remembered.
Myth in human form.
Like a prince entombed in ice on the eve of his coronation—slain before he could kneel, buried not with rites but with wrath. Crowned in grief, veiled in ruin. A revenant clad in velvet and judgment.
Or worse still—something once divine, twisted holy only through desecration. A relic risen from the depths. Ivory and fury made flesh. Veneration warped into vengeance.
Beautiful. Terribly so.
But not with the beauty of youth or warmth or longing. No softness lingered in him. No invitation. His beauty was the kind sung in dirges, feared in paintings, recorded in sacred texts only to be locked away. The kind that ruins temples. The kind that survives fires.
He did not belong to the living.
And still—he moved.
Not like a boy. Not like a student. Not like any creature with breath.
He moved like prophecy unfurling.
Like ruin on the cusp of remembering its name.
Gravity did not pull him. The air did not resist him. Instead, it yielded—parting like veils before the altar, folding around each step in reverence or fear. The floor made no sound beneath him. Even the stones seemed reluctant to disturb him with echo.
Each motion was deliberate. Spare.
A procession, not a walk.
The return of something ancient to a world that had dared forget it.
And the room watched.
Not with awe.
With silence.
With that same held-breath stillness a chapel knows when the god finally arrives—
—and does not smile.
And in the flickering light, it was easy to believe Draco had not stepped forward at all.
He had risen.
Not with mortal grace, not from temper or pride, but with the terrible stillness of something called—summoned. As if the black waters beneath the lake had stirred, and from their depths had come not a boy, but a reckoning. A whisper older than language, murmuring from the silt-laced bones of drowned gods: come forth.
And Draco had answered.
Not a boy.
A curse, unwrapped and set loose.
A blade honed too fine for human hands.
Judgment in a velvet sheath.
And not a soul dared breathe.
The fire stuttered, and in that moment of silence, his voice uncoiled like smoke from an altar—low, cool, inevitable.
“If you strike,” he said,
“then you’d best be prepared to deal with the poison.”
The words floated into the still air, each one slow, precise—knives tucked inside silk, their edges glinting beneath the calm. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Every syllable dropped heavy with authority, sinking into the space between them like iron dragged through blood-warm water.
There was no drama to it.
No flourish.
Only truth spoken with a quiet cruelty more dangerous than any scream.
And the room did not shatter.
It knelt.
Fell into a silence so profound it felt holy—an echoing hush stretched thin between awe and terror. That sacred stillness, known only to tombs and throne rooms. The aftermath of thunder. The breathless reverence that follows when power reveals its fangs.
No one laughed.
No one moved.
Elias Lestrange stood frozen, the smirk half-formed on his lips dying before it could finish. His mouth opened—as if to retort, to protest, to save face—but the sound caught. Drowned. Something in him recoiled, and the mask of superiority he wore so easily cracked along its edges, revealing something softer, shaken beneath.
And worse still—he stood alone.
No hand reached for him. No voice rose in support. His lineage, ancient and arrogant, held its silence like a blade to the throat. Even blood refused to rise for him.
Cassian Lestrange leaned against the cold marble column by the hearth with a languid grace that belied the coiled tension in every line of his body. The posture was deliberate—crafted for nonchalance—but betrayed by the smallest tells: the tight set of his jaw, the way his fingers flexed once against his crossed arms, the braced boot behind him digging into the floor like an anchor, as though it alone kept him from moving forward, from unraveling.
He was still, yes—but not idle.
His presence thrummed with a barely leashed current, something crackling just beneath the surface like a blade vibrating in its sheath. Stillness not born of ease, but of control. A simmer before the boil.
His hair, shoulder-length and unruly in a way that seemed artful rather than careless, cascaded like spilled wine over his shoulders. Deep burgundy-dark in the firelight, it caught the low flicker of flames in gleams of garnet and blood, strands curling around the fine edge of his jaw and temple. Each lock fell with intentional disarray, framing his face like brushstrokes drawn by a fevered hand.
That face—Merlin, it could have been carved.
His cheekbones rose high and sharp, catching light in cruel slashes that cut across the lean angles of his face, casting half of him in smoldering shadow. His features were a study in severity: lips too thin to be soft, too precise to be kind; nose long, straight, patrician; brows arched just slightly, like the suggestion of amusement that never reached his eyes.
And his skin—pale, smooth, almost spectral in the hearthlight—held the ghost-glow of cold marble, as if he’d been sculpted from the very pillar he leaned against. But even that eerie luminescence could not pierce the shadows coiling across his expression. The darkness gathered there not by accident, but as if it belonged to him—as if it had chosen him as its bearer.
He hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t drawn his wand. He had made no move toward defense or interference.
Yet the air around Cassian Lestrange crackled with a silent intensity, as though his very gaze were casting a spell too ancient for incantation. His eyes—dark as obsidian, rimmed in shadow and smoke—glowed with a feverish light, like coals stoked from within by something primal and inexhaustible. There was no fear in them. No rage.
What smoldered there was something far more perilous.
Fascination.
A hunger that glowed like embers banked beneath ash.
Draco’s fury had not exploded. It had not torn through the room in a storm of fire and wrath. It had simply... coalesced. Dense, controlled, cold. Coiled like a serpent asleep with one eye open. It whispered instead of screamed—and that, to Cassian, was its most intoxicating quality. It wasn’t the threat that enthralled Cassian, nor the promise of violence.
It was the elegance of it.
The control.
The artistry.
Draco’s wrath didn’t scream. It whispered. Poised, exacting, dressed in velvet and wrought from ice. And Cassian, who had always known the taste of violence—who had kissed it, craved it, courted it—now stared with rapt reverence at something rarer:
A masterpiece.
He watched as if seeing a cathedral burn.
As if witnessing divinity corrupted—and loving it more for the fall.
He watched with a fixed intensity, unmoving, devout—his pupils dilated, his breath shallow, as if even the smallest exhale might break the spell Draco had unknowingly cast. Every flicker of light across Draco’s cheekbone, every imperceptible shift in his spine, every shadow that carved itself against the pale slash of his jaw—Cassian absorbed them all. Memorized them. Worshipped them.
Because that’s what this was.
Not respect.
Not even reverence.
It was devotion of the darkest kind—twisted, hungry, rapt. A worship laced with want, not for gentleness or favor, but for the sharp edge of something divine and cruel.
His lips parted, not in a smile, but in a tremor—an involuntary twitch, the ghost of a grin left broken by awe. It was the expression of a predator recognizing a force greater than itself, bowing not in submission, but in ecstasy.
It was worship.
Wounded. Wanting. Twisted.
A predator recognizing its king.
Because Cassian knew violence.
He had grown up on it. Been fed it with silver spoons and sharpened truths. It was the lullaby sung to him by a family of wolves and madmen. He courted it, adored it, craved it like the richest vintage wine.
But this—
This was art.
The sadism nestled deep inside him thrilled at the sight. Every unspoken cruelty he had ever nurtured leaned forward, eager to listen. It thrilled him, fed him, gave him form.
But this—
Draco—
Draco was not violence.
He was its sculptor.
The way his wrath didn’t erupt, but bled through the room like an incantation uttered through clenched teeth. The way he carried it—elegant, terrible, silent—like a crown made of glass and fire. Cassian felt every word Draco had spoken burn behind his eyes. Not because they were loud. But because they didn’t need to be.
Because Cassian Lestrange had known cruelty. He had worn it like silk. Had taken pleasure in the sharp edge of silence and the way pain sang when played just right.
But this…
This was revelation.
Every dark thing inside him stood still—breathless—listening.
And Draco?
Draco didn’t spare him so much as a glance.
He passed by as if Cassian didn’t exist—like a god dismissing an insect already found unworthy of notice. His gaze never wavered. He did not grant Cassian so much as a flicker of recognition.
As if he already knew.
As if Cassian was beneath notice. Or beyond forgiveness.
A king refusing even to speak the name of the dog at his heels.
As though he were beneath even disdain.
And Cassian—who had broken bones for less, who had burned cities in his dreams for the sin of being ignored—shivered.
Not from fear. Not from the damp chill curling through the lake-lit room.
But from delight.
Pure. Electric. Addictive.
Because in that moment, as the flames danced weakly and the others stood mute and stricken in the wake of a storm given form—
Cassian Lestrange understood.
He had just watched a king rise from the depths.
A crown of thorns forged from silence. A kingdom stitched from the dark. A god draped in vengeance, kissed by moonlight.
And he wanted more.
Draco’s eyes met Elias Lestrange’s with a stillness so profound it seemed to halt time itself. Those eyes—argent and unyielding, like shards of enchanted moonstone chiseled from a cursed sky—glittered with a glacial calm that belied the lethal storm beneath. There was no flicker of emotion, no rush of breath, no falter in his stance. Just an unnatural stillness, the kind that cloaked graveyards before a storm—deep, suffocating, and absolute. It pressed against the chamber like a living thing, as if the dungeon itself held its breath in dread.
“If you want to fight,” Draco said softly, his voice smooth as silk yet laced with venom, each syllable sliding out like a razor blade dipped in poison, “then get ready.”
There was no roar, no shout, no thunderous challenge in his tone—just a lazy, measured drawl that belied the lethal finality buried beneath. And yet, the weight of his words fell on the chamber like the swift, inexorable blade of a guillotine—silent, precise, and devastating in its inevitability.
The room responded with silence, thick and oppressive. Not dead silence—expectant silence, heavy with magic and memory and blood. It hovered like fog, wrapping around the bones of old stone, listening.
Elias hesitated—only for the briefest flicker of a heartbeat.
But in that sliver of stillness, the truth bloomed: fear. Stark, raw, and undeniable. It pulsed beneath his skin like a second heartbeat, visible in the slight tremble of his wand hand, in the way his weight shifted—too fast, too uncertain. His breath snagged in his throat. Beads of sweat gathered along his brow, catching the meager light and gleaming like cold mercury. He stood there draped in Lestrange pride, that old, snarling thing born of bloodlines and madness, but it sagged now—creased and fraying under the pressure.
Retreat would have been wisdom. But pride had a different appetite. It fed on illusion, on bluster, on the desperate hunger not to be seen as prey. And Elias, foolish in the way only the inherited damned could be, chose pride over survival.
“Think I’m afraid of you?” he snarled, voice cracking like brittle glass, sharp with false courage. The insult spat itself into the air like a curse hurled in a crumbling temple, echoing off stone with a desperation too loud to be brave. “Coward.”
The word hung there—ugly, brittle, breaking even as it left his mouth.
His wand jerked upward. Sparks stuttered from its tip, silver and fever-bright, betraying the chaos thrumming in his pulse. The air between them drew taut, humming with a charged unease, like the stillness before a wire snaps or the air splits in lightning.
“Hiding behind tricks—”
The sentence unraveled.
Fury took him.
No, not fury—panic wearing fury’s mask. The thin veil of control tore. With a ragged cry, Elias flung the curse. A savage burst of silver magic erupted from his wand, wild and uncontrolled, screaming through the shadows like a beast unchained. It was not meant to subdue—it was meant to break, to punish, to draw blood.
The spell slashed through the dungeon’s gloom in a blazing arc, its light casting monstrous shapes against the stone walls, reflections of fear in motion.
And Draco—
Draco did not blink.
He did not lift his chin.
He stepped forward.
Measured. Intentional. Like gravity itself had shifted around him and he had only to walk toward its pull. His eyes remained fixed on Elias, silver and unblinking, not with arrogance—but certainty. The kind that made the world hush in reverence. The kind that had no need for threats.
His wand lifted once.
No theatrics. No dramatics.
A single flick. Clean. Surgical.
The air warped. The curse collided with something invisible—unyielding—and splintered with a crystalline snap. It broke apart like fragile bone beneath steel. Silver fragments scattered in the air, shimmering like snowfall made of dying stars. The light dimmed. The silence returned, deeper now, as if even the dungeon held its breath.
Elias reeled.
His face twisted in disbelief, the sneer faltering as shock surged into its place. Anger boiled beneath his skin, but it was directionless now, unmoored. His superiority shattered with the spell. What remained was raw and trembling—a boy in a man’s name, caught between fury and the sudden awareness of what he could never match.
But he didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
So he raised his wand again—not with the precision of a duelist, but the violence of a cornered animal. Magic surged through him recklessly, dangerously, seeking escape. A roar of light tore from his wand—jagged, molten yellow, shrieking across the room like divine punishment flung from the hand of a vengeful god.
The air convulsed. Heat exploded outward. The stench of ozone burned in the nostrils, thick and sharp, a storm trapped in stone. The dungeon lit up in flashes, shadows stretching and fleeing across the walls. The stones groaned beneath the weight of the spell, and the very room seemed to recoil as the magic carved its way forward.
But Draco was already in motion.
His wand rose with austere precision, the gesture stripped to its core—angular, deliberate, each line of motion carved from discipline rather than dramatics. It was the stillness of mastery, the kind that whispered danger without ever needing to shout. Like the draw of a dagger before it strikes true. Like the breath before the kill.
No flourish. No indulgence.
Only inevitability.
The spell bent.
Not deflected. Not shielded.
Bent.
As though the very world shifted to obey him.
The jagged bolt, seething with rage and light, twisted mid-flight—warped by an unseen force, unnaturally reoriented as if Draco’s will had reached into its trajectory and rewritten its path. Magic, ancient and furious, screamed past his left shoulder, missing him by the barest whisper of air—close enough to lift the hem of his cloak. Behind him, a stone pillar bore the brunt of the retribution.
It exploded in a cascade of light and ruin.
The impact shattered the silence, an ear-splitting crack of ancient stone giving way under magical force. Sparks flew. Shards of rock erupted outward, ricocheting off the walls like shrapnel. Dust bloomed in a choking cloud, the dungeon groaning as age-old mortar split open, skeletal and wounded.
Draco didn’t move.
Not a flicker of acknowledgement.
Not a glance spared for the destruction at his back.
His focus was total, inescapable.
Locked on Elias with the force of judgment itself.
Silver eyes fixed and unblinking, their gleam colder than steel left out in winter—void of compassion, void of mercy. The look was surgical. Predatory. Final.
Elias faltered.
The fury on his face fractured, the mask slipping—crumbling into something ragged and real. Panic bloomed behind his eyes, uncoiling like smoke. A wild animal backed into a corner, confused by its own diminishing roar.
“Confringo!”
The spell tore from Elias’s throat, hoarse and cracked, a last-ditch invocation fired through clenched teeth and pure desperation. The wand convulsed in his grip as the curse surged out—no finesse, only fire.
The detonation was immediate.
It didn’t merely erupt—it detonated, ripping forward in a thunderous wave of raw flame. The air ignited. Roaring fire burst outward, a snarling storm of orange and gold, incandescent and merciless. It raced across the space between them like a living beast unshackled, tongues of flame clawing toward their target with vengeful hunger.
The heat alone was a force—oppressive, searing, so intense it made the very air ripple and bend. Shadows twisted. Walls buckled under the onslaught of light. Everything blurred beneath the breath of the inferno.
This wasn’t spellwork.
It was violence given form.
It was chaos wrapped in fire.
And it was coming for him.
The flames roared toward Draco like a living beast unchained—howling, relentless, primal. They weren’t merely fire. They were hunger made manifest. They tore through the air with talons of searing heat, claws of gold and orange curling in upon themselves, devouring everything in their path. The oxygen screamed as it vanished. Light fractured. The very fabric of the world wavered in the furnace’s breath, and still—Draco did not move.
Not when his cloak snapped and twisted around his legs like wings stitched from ash and smoke.
Not when the heat kissed his cheek with blistering affection, leaving phantom welts of memory behind.
Not even when the fire reached for his throat, shaping itself into a molten noose, radiant with the promise of death.
His body remained rooted. Silent. Braced like the last standing pillar in a crumbling temple.
But his mind—
His mind slipped.
Not forward. Not away.
Back.
Back—through the shuddering veil of time, through smoke coiled with memory. Through the shrieks no spell had silenced, the chaos no wand had quelled.
Back to the reek of burning stone and parchment, of hair singed to ash, the air thick with the acrid tang of war. The halls had breathed in the blood and fire, exhaled only ruin.
To corridors that remembered every footstep of the dead, the cold imprint of the fallen.
Back to a time when fire meant death.
When fire didn’t warm—it devoured. When smoke didn’t rise in warning—it smothered, curling around broken bodies,choking the stars from the sky.
To silence—monolithic and absolute. Not peace, but a void carved with precision. A silence so sharp it sang, slicing through the bones of the castle and leaving its music in the hollows of his ears, long after the screams had gone still.
He remembered the Dark Mark.
How it had burned into his arm like a sentence passed down by a god that never listened. Inked into his skin not as a symbol of power—but as surrender. As guilt. As fear masquerading as purpose.
He had opened the path that night.
Draco Malfoy—just sixteen, barely more than a boy—had stood trembling beneath a Death Eater’s mask that didn’t fit. Not just in size, but in soul. The blackened metal chafed against skin too young to bear it, pressing down like a verdict. He had become the crack in the castle walls. The flaw in the foundation. The traitor stitched into the seams of home.
He had opened the door for monsters.
Let terror spill like smoke into sacred halls, let shadows slip past portraits and wards and whispered prayers. Let nightmares walk upright in black robes, wands drawn like blades. Each footstep they took echoed in Draco’s bones.Let nightmares crawl through the cracks of childhood and turn every hallway into a tomb.
He’d held the Vanishing Cabinet open like a gate to hell.A chasm between innocence and atrocity. Between who he had been and what he was becoming.
And then—the tower.
He had climbed it one slow step at a time, the stairwell spiraling like a noose. His wand felt like ice in his grip. Each step was a surrender. Each heartbeat, a verdict. Dread pressed against his throat until he could hardly breathe, yet still he climbed—because he had to. Because they told him to. Because he no longer knew how to say no.
And Dumbledore had waited.
Kind-eyed. Quiet. Frail in the way only someone ancient and wise can be, as if the world had worn him down but never broken him. He looked at Draco as if he already knew. Not just the plan. Not just the task. But the boy beneath it all. The shaking boy. The unwilling boy. The boy holding a wand like it might explode in his hand.
Draco hadn’t killed him.
Even with the world watching. Even with Voldemort breathing down his neck like winter. Even with the promise of survival whispering in his ear.
He couldn’t do it.
Because beneath the mask, beneath the fear, beneath the war—Draco Malfoy was still a boy. A boy who had been asked to become a monster before he’d even figured out who he was.
He hadn’t killed him.
No.
But he had raised the blade.
He had lifted his wand with trembling fingers and pointed it like a compass to death. He had cleared the path, opened the door, ushered in the darkness like a host welcoming ruin into his home.
He had led Dumbledore to the top of the tower—step by step, breath by breath—each footfall heavy with dread, each stair a silent scream. And then he had stood there, frozen, as the world tilted. As betrayal echoed louder than thunder.
He hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t moved.
Only watched.
Watched the old man’s body fracture the night sky—silver hair streaming like smoke—watched him crumple through the darkness and vanish into stone, as if the earth itself had opened to swallow what remained. The impact hadn’t made a sound, but it had torn something primal inside Draco, something sacred and fragile.
They had called it war.
But it hadn’t felt like war.
It had felt like slaughter.
Like something ancient and godless had split open in the heart of the castle and spilled horror into every shadow, into every breath.
It had felt like a quiet undoing—of hope, of childhood, of the illusion that any of them were safe.
Innocence hadn’t been lost that night.
It had been butchered.
Gutted and hollowed out, left bleeding in the snow outside the Astronomy Tower, staring up at a sky that no longer looked back.
He had been just a boy.
But war doesn’t care for boys.
Only for monsters.
And the ones who fed them.
After that night, the world did not shatter all at once.
It fractured slowly—along hairline cracks that widened with every mission. Every command barked through a mask. Every whispered order sealed with the Dark Lord’s hissed approval. There was no time to mourn, no space to breathe. Only the blur of black robes and blood, the chill of apparition winds, the scent of ash and iron clinging to his skin.
The missions came like clockwork.
Target. Infiltrate. Destroy.
There were no names. Just addresses. Coordinates scrawled in ink that bled through parchment, soaked in magic that made his spine ache. Raids that began in silence and ended with no one left to scream. The wards on those houses—if they had them—were torn down in seconds. The wards on their side were worse. Designed to muffle sound, to swallow every cry and every plea, until not even the walls could bear witness.
He remembered one raid in winter.
How the snow outside had looked blue under the moonlight. How the inside smelled like warm milk and lavender—like a home that hadn’t expected to die that night. A father had reached for his wand too slowly. Draco hadn’t cast the curse, but he’d watched Bellatrix do it—Crucio—until the man writhed like a broken marionette in front of his screaming sons.
Another time, a girl not much younger than him had backed into a corner with her hands raised, eyes wide and mouth open in a scream the wards drank like wine. She had her mother’s eyes, someone whispered. Her mother had once defied the Dark Lord. That was enough.
The girl didn’t leave that room.
Neither did her brother.
Draco had wanted to close his eyes. To turn away.
But he didn’t.
Because Bellatrix was always there.
And he had stood beside her through it all—her laugh a fractured thing, wild and sharp, echoing louder in his skull than any scream ever could. She moved like a blade through those nights, manic and magnificent, carving their names into the darkness.
And Draco—sixteen, seventeen, hands cold and stomach twisting—had followed.
Not because he believed. Not because he wanted to.
But because there was no place left to run.
Because to stop moving was to be devoured.
And he had seen what happened to those who stumbled.
Draco learned quickly that hesitation had a scent—sharp and metallic, like fear sweat under silk. Bellatrix could smell it. So could the others. The Carrows. Mulciber. Thick with glee and violence, their eyes always watching, waiting to see if he would break. If the polished little prince of Malfoy Manor would flinch when the baby cried, when the mother begged, when the blood ran too fast to clean.
He didn’t.
He couldn’t.
He stood with his jaw locked and his breath held until the world stopped shaking. Until the worst had passed. Until the air no longer stank of burning flesh, only of smoke and magic and the sickening sweetness of things gone too quiet.
They gave him medals. Praise. Dark nods of approval. A place at the long table where the Death Eaters dined. A seat beside his father, who looked at him with pride—real pride—for the first time in years. And something else, too. Something colder. Like Lucius had seen the boy in him die, and found the corpse... acceptable.
But it was never just Draco that returned from those missions.
It was all of them.
The screams he hadn’t heard, echoing in his chest. The faces of the dead clinging to the folds of his cloak. The blood that wasn’t his but might as well have been, because his hands had held the door open. Held the map. Held the silence.
Sometimes, he would wake in the middle of the night, the Dark Mark burning faintly under his skin—not flaring, just reminding. A low, constant thrum. Like a leash humming in the bone. Like a whisper he couldn’t block out.
You chose this.
But he hadn’t. Not really. Not when the choice was between death and damnation. Between a family ruined or a soul scorched. Between the edge of a wand and the edge of a cliff.
And still—some nights—he wondered what was worse: the guilt that bled through every breath, or the numbness that followed it.
Because there came a point when even shame grew quiet.
When he stopped flinching. When he no longer saw faces—only targets. When he could walk through ruins and feel nothing but the weight of his own heartbeat, dull and distant.
That was when he realized: he was becoming one of them.
And Bellatrix noticed. She smiled more often at him now. Called him darling boy in that sing-song lilt, her voice a blade wrapped in silk. She said he was learning.
And maybe he was.
Maybe that was the worst part.
Bellatrix had taken him under her wing, if such a thing could be called mercy. Not out of duty, not out of care—never that—but out of some twisted fondness only madness could cultivate. To her, Draco was a blank parchment just waiting to be written in curses. A little dragon with clipped wings, ripe for reshaping in the crucible of her delightfully deranged design.
She didn’t train him. Training suggested structure, discipline, even safety. No—Bellatrix unmade him. She shattered the boy he had been with deliberate, gleeful violence, and rebuilt what remained with blood, fear, and laughter that skittered like broken glass. Her lessons were sermons whispered in screams. Each spell was a sacrament. Each scream, a hymn.
Her voice still slithered through the back of his mind like an echo burned into the nerves.
“Do you want to live, little dragon? Then kill before they kill you.”
She taught him the way predators teach prey: through terror. Through cruelty. Through repetition. Through pain.
He learned.
She taught him not with lectures, but with demonstrations. She showed him how to maim and how to mean it. How to curse so thoroughly the soul screamed long after the mouth went silent. She taught him pain as language, pain as weapon, pain as inevitability.
It was terror that taught him fastest. The kind that arrived without warning—the whip of a hex too close to his ear when he faltered, the sharp snap of her fingers when he hesitated mid-incantation. The kind that lived in her eyes when she smiled, wide and vacant, before slashing a man’s throat just to “see if he’d gurgle like the last one.”
He learned.
He learned how to strip the truth from someone’s lips without ever touching them. How to crack open a mind and leave it twitching on the floor, babbling secrets through bloodied teeth. How to turn a flick of his wrist into a prayer denied.
But he also learned the shape of death when it begged.
He learned the frantic flutter of a mother’s hands as she tried to shield her child with her body alone. Learned how people didn’t plead with words, not really—they pleaded with memories. With their wedding rings, their family photos, their trembling offers of anything, please, anything, just not my son—
He learned the precise weight of a silence that followed a Killing Curse. That peculiar, too-still stillness. The way blood soaked into wood slower than it did into stone. The way it spread wider.
He learned how the human body stayed warm—hauntingly warm—for minutes after the soul had fled. How the dead didn’t always look dead right away. How sometimes they looked surprised. Or peaceful. Or, worst of all, like they had more to say.
He learned all of it. And none of it made him stronger. Only sharper.
Bellatrix would clap delightedly when he didn’t flinch. When his voice stayed even as he whispered an Unforgivable. When he watched a life end without looking away.
“Good boy,” she would coo, stroking his hair with bloodied fingers. “You’re learning. You’re becoming worthy.”
But Draco never felt worthy.
Only lost. And colder. Each lesson another brick in the wall between who he had been and who he was becoming.
Because Bellatrix hadn’t given him power.
She’d given him survival.
At the cost of everything else.
Because cowardice had a price. Because turning away was a choice—and it had cost too much already. To pretend ignorance was to build a throne atop bones. And Draco had lied enough. To others. To himself.
The guilt never left him.
It festered in silence, invisible but unbearable, lodged like splinters between his ribs—too deep to remove, too small to kill him outright. Every breath rubbed against them. Every heartbeat a reminder.
He carried them.
The ones he didn’t save.
The girl who hadn’t run fast enough. The boy who looked at him with eyes the same gray as his own, just before the curse took him. The screams that tore through the air and then… stopped. Too soon. Too sudden. The lullaby of slaughter. He hadn’t cast every spell—but he’d stood there. He’d watched.
And so he bore them like ghosts.
Not behind him, but within. A legion beneath his skin. They pressed behind his eyes, filled the hollows of his bones, curled like smoke in his lungs. He wore them not like armor, but like chains.
When sleep came, it came with knives.
Dreams were never soft. They came like judgments. Like retribution. Like memory dressed in fire and blood. The scent of singed parchment, of scorched hair, of skin blistering beneath green light—familiar, personal. He woke drenched, always, breath strangled in his throat, ribs aching from where he’d clenched around silent screams.
But he didn’t cry.
He wouldn’t cry.
Grief was a luxury for those who hadn’t helped tear the world apart. He didn’t deserve it. So he swallowed it down, let it rot quietly in his chest. Buried it beneath layers of quiet, of calculation, of control.
Each morning, he stood. However hollow.
He gathered the wreckage of himself—meticulously. As though reassembling bones from ruins. He composed the collapse of his soul into something that looked passably human. Face blank. Collar straight. Hands clean, even if the blood beneath his fingernails never quite seemed to wash out.
And he walked.
Always—to the library.
That was his sanctuary. Not because it was safe. But because it expected things of him. Order. Focus. Precision. It didn’t ask questions. It offered silence thick enough to drown in and ink black enough to match the shadows beneath his eyes.
It was his penance.
Where others knelt before altars, whispering pleas into the void, Draco sought absolution in the crisp crackle of parchment and the steady rhythm of a quill scratching across vellum. Not in prayer, but in precision. Not in hope, but in knowledge.
He lost himself in the labyrinth of books and scrolls—tomes so old their spines crumbled beneath his fingertips, their pages yellowed and brittle, steeped in the scent of time. Dust, ink, ancient magic. The perfume of salvation.
He didn’t read—he devoured.
He didn’t study—he excavated.
Ancient runic diagrams littered his notes, entire systems of spellwork dissected with a surgeon’s care. He chased forgotten incantations through marginalia, through half-translated footnotes, through grimoires that whispered in languages dead before Hogwarts had stones.
Not because he wanted to be the best. That ambition had long since curdled.
But because he could not—would not—be helpless again.
Helpless like on the tower.
Helpless like in the corridor.
Helpless like when the screams began and his wand stayed heavy and useless at his side.
So he turned his guilt into ritual.
Hexes, curses, defensive charms, blood magic, healing theory. He learned the anatomy of spells the way others studied human hearts. He stripped magic bare—down to syllables and silence, to breath and intention. He carved through illusion to find the pulse beneath it. Every spell was a creature: living, shifting, vulnerable if you knew where to look.
And Draco knew.
He memorized the Killing Curse’s theory, yes—but not to use it. He hunted the rare, forbidden counter-measures. Not to undo murder, but to render it harder to commit. For every curse that mangled limbs, he memorized three that knit flesh and steadied bones. For every scream he hadn’t stopped, he etched a spell into memory—something new, something sharp, something protective.
He created a language of penance. A lexicon of reparations.
Because he couldn’t bring them back. But maybe—maybe—he could stop the next ones from dying.
Magic became his anchor.
When memory threatened to drag him beneath, when guilt coiled too tight around his ribs to breathe, he turned to the only thing that didn’t flinch at what he had done. Magic didn’t care about blood on your hands or nightmares in your throat. It didn’t whisper judgment behind your back. It simply was. Ancient. Elemental. Unforgiving.
Like him.
It demanded precision. Control. It punished weakness but rewarded obsession. It was brutal in its fairness, beautiful in its cruelty. The same spell that could tear someone apart could just as easily be rewritten to bind wounds, or shield a child.
Draco understood that.
Because he, too, had once been written for destruction.
And now he was learning how to rewrite himself.
One spell at a time.
Bellatrix had been his first teacher—a tempest in human form, all snarling laughter and blood-soaked lace, eyes wild with the kind of madness that left scorch marks on the soul. She taught through torment, through screams that curdled in the throat and spells that sliced thought from bone. There was no curriculum, only carnage. No lessons—only survival.
And yet, from that chaos, Draco had built something else.
Where she raged, he refined.
Where she tore, he tempered.
He took her violence and folded it into silence. Molded her madness into method. He stripped her brutality down to its bones and reassembled it with clean lines and sharp edges. No excess. No theatrics. Just discipline. Just control.
He didn’t become what she wanted—a beast foaming with fanaticism.
He became something quieter. Harder. Sharper.
Not a savior. He’d long since given up the fantasy of innocence.
Not a hero. That word tasted like ash.
He became something colder.
Something that did not beg, or weep, or waver.
He became exactitude.
Steel honed to a whisper-thin edge.
A man forged not in fire, but in what fire left behind.
In the ruin. The ash. The marrow of old bones turned to cinders.
He was the aftermath. The blade pulled from the forge.
No longer soft. No longer afraid.
And now—here, at the edge of another inferno—he stood again.
Smoke curled around his boots like serpents. Flames leapt and howled, starving and furious, reaching for him with greedy hands.
But Draco Malfoy did not flinch.
Because he had already burned.
Had already been consumed—flesh and fear and youth—all turned to smoke.
And what rose from those flames was no longer a boy.
It was the weapon he made from everything left.
And it wielded the fire.
Draco shifted.
Barely more than a breath’s worth of movement—so slight it seemed the air itself might have imagined it. A subtle adjustment of weight, the twitch of a shoulder beneath layers of black wool, a faint tightening of fingers curled around polished bloodwood. Yet in that fractional motion, there was purpose. Intention. Power held taut beneath restraint.
His wand lifted—not abruptly, not with force, but with the liquid grace of moonlight sliding across glass.
Control didn’t radiate from him; it poured like silk, cool and unwavering, from every measured movement. Each breath he took was calibrated. Each step, a syllable in a spell never spoken aloud.
From his fingertips unfurled magic—not a scream but a whisper, not thunderous or wild but honed. Tempered. Ancient. It did not lunge; it listened. It coiled, sleek and waiting, obedient as a falcon on the glove. It was not the magic of showmanship or chaos. It was the quiet, brutal efficiency of someone who had bled for every ounce of it. The precision of a man who had seen what happened when spells went wrong.
And the flames obeyed.
The inferno—just seconds ago a monstrous roar with teeth—cracked like glass beneath invisible pressure. The fire split down the middle, clean and sudden, sheared by unseen hands guided with surgical finesse. Not extinguished. Not quenched. Merely… redirected. Controlled.
The twin streams of flame peeled away from Draco like supplicants denied, twisting as they fled. They slammed into the stone walls with smoldering groans, molten fingers scrabbling uselessly for purchase. The room lit up in violent flickers—red and orange claws scratching across every surface—before vanishing into steam and silence. Ash hissed in the wake, and sparks rained like dying stars.
The ground shook. Low and deep. A tremor that rolled up through the soles of his boots and into the marrow of the room itself. The dungeon floor moaned beneath the redirected force, seams in the ancient flagstone glowing faintly from the heat. The air snapped cold in the wake, pulled inward like the inhalation before a curse.
But Draco?
He did not hurry.
He advanced like a man walking through memory. Every footstep deliberate, every movement a quiet defiance of chaos. His robes swept behind him in long, heavy folds, dark as spilled ink on wet parchment. Shadows clung to him like old debts. They trailed after his heels, drawn to the silence he carried like a weapon.
Boots struck stone in a slow, even cadence—each step a toll of warning, a heartbeat counted backward. The echoes curled around the chamber like the last notes of a requiem. Funereal. Final.
He did not falter.
He walked through the remnants of fire like a man born of it—like someone who had been broken, reforged, and now moved only with purpose.
And behind his pale, expressionless face, something watched.
Not rage. Not even triumph.
Only clarity.
A sharpened stillness.
The kind that came after survival.
After surrender had burned away.
And only choice remained.
Elias cast again.
The incantation cracked from his throat with a tremble, the edges fraying into panic. His voice was no longer steady—it wavered, thinned, then splintered entirely into a high, desperate pitch. It sliced through the silence like a child’s scream in a cathedral, fragile and echoing. From the tip of his wand surged a bolt of sickly, acid-green magic. It wasn’t clean. It squirmed—writhing like something alive and angry, coils twisting midair as if the spell itself were resisting its birth.
The curse hissed—a sibilant, searing sound that filled the space with the stench of ozone and venom. It slithered forward like a serpent caught in fire, its body flickering with pulses of greasy light, each throb like a heartbeat turned wrong. Shadows twisted in its wake, drawn to the toxic shimmer of it. It burned toward Draco’s shoulder, fast, erratic, mean.
But Draco didn’t flinch.
His wand moved—once.
A downward flick so swift it barely registered. No spell spoken. No flare of theatrics. Just a clean, precise motion—like a blade slicing through silk, elegant and final.
And the curse broke.
Midair, the green light trembled—then split apart with a brittle whine. The magic seemed to rot from the inside, unraveling into threads of dying luminescence. It frayed at the seams, each strand dissolving like spider silk caught in acid rain. No explosion. No burst. Just a soft, sorrowful disintegration. Firefly-bright fragments blinked once—twice—then vanished. Gone before they could land. Before they could even scream.
Elias staggered.
He gasped, stumbling back a half-step as if struck in the gut. His breath came in wet, heaving drags. Sweat stood out on his brow, cold and glassy, like dew caught before dawn. His wand-hand shook—more a twitch than control—fingers clenched white around the wood like it might fly from him. He looked down at it as if it no longer obeyed him. As if it belonged to someone else. Something else.
But Draco?
He advanced without haste.
His face remained carved from calm—no tension, no triumph, not even amusement. Just stillness, porcelain-pale and untouched. His expression didn’t shift. Didn’t need to. His eyes stayed fixed on Elias, pale as frost-glazed glass, eyes that saw through skin and blood to the soft, frantic tissue beneath. There was no malice in them. No heat.
Only study.
A cold, clinical curiosity, as though Elias were a misbehaving experiment. Something twitching on a table under glass. Draco’s gaze stripped away pretense, peeled back dignity, laid bare the fear.
Not rage.
Not vengeance.
Observation.
And beneath it all, the quiet, ruthless certainty of someone who no longer saw magic as a weapon—
—but as an extension of his breath.
Desperation broke loose.
Elias lost control of finesse, of strategy, of anything but raw, frantic need.
He cast recklessly—wild and fast—driven by a terror that hollowed out precision and filled it with violence. A steel-blue lance of energy tore from his wand, narrow as a needle, sharp enough to flay through bone and sinew in one merciless line. It sang through the air with a surgeon’s cruelty, humming with the promise of ruin.
Before it struck, he followed it with a deluge of spells. Micro-hexes spilled from his wand in a jagged, chaotic spray—crimson bolts that shattered the air like broken glass flung at full force. Silver-edged bursts of raw force followed, thin and fast as daggers, each one cold as a blade just pulled from ice. Then came the bronze whips—ropes of heat and rage that lashed outward, cracking with electric violence, loud as gunfire in the stone chamber.
Chaos didn’t just bloom—it exploded.
The dungeon lit in pulses of red, blue, gold. Shadows reeled and twisted, torches guttered. The magic whirled together into a storm meant to shred, to scatter, to obliterate.
But Draco—
Draco moved like still water remembering how to dance.
His feet never stumbled. His spine never bent. He shifted like a shadow cast by candlelight—graceful, uninterrupted. The flick of his wrist was poetry written in silence, and his wand moved like a conductor’s baton at the climax of a requiem.
One sweeping arc—too elegant to be hurried—redirected the bone-cutter spell. It hissed past him and embedded into the far wall with a fizz and a dull pop, steam curling off stone like breath in winter.
Then, a twist—not strained, but deft—swept the crimson hexes into a spiraling current of wind, scattering them like bloodstained autumn leaves in a sudden gale. They struck nothing.
Another flick—light, almost absent-minded—and the bronze whips unraveled before they could find purchase. They hissed apart midair, splitting into fine threads of gold that drifted harmlessly upward like fading sparks from a dying fire.
It was not defense.
It was art.
Magic moved through Draco the way sound moves through strings—resonant, seamless, inevitable. Each countermove struck like a perfect chord, balanced in its violence and restraint. The space around him pulsed with low, humming pressure. Static shivered in the air. The ancient stones of the dungeon felt alive, as if the structure itself bowed slightly toward him, held in tension between awe and fear.
He spoke no spells. He uttered no command.
His silence was louder than any battle cry.
Behind him, the dust lifted in long, slow spirals—soft tendrils of ghostly white trailing in his wake like incense curling in the nave of a ruined temple. He looked almost ethereal there, bathed in the faint, muted glow of his wand—not a flame, but a steady thrum, the pale light of something refined past the need for spectacle.
Draco did not wield magic like a soldier.
He embodied it—
An extension of focus so absolute, so mercilessly pure, that the world seemed to curve around it.
As if power was not something he called upon—
—but something that answered him before he ever asked.
And Elias—
Elias was unraveling.
Not in a grand, explosive collapse, but in visible, pitiful fractures—hairline cracks splitting wide beneath pressure too cold, too silent to name. His magic, once sharp and cruel in its discipline, now tore from his wand in crooked, misshapen spurts—raw, frantic, splintered things. Each spell landed wrong, some skewing off-course midair, others fizzling out with a wheeze of dying energy. The precision was gone, hollowed out and left to rot.
His incantations spilled from his mouth like water through broken teeth—clipped, stammering bursts, muttered more in fear than fury. The syllables tangled on his tongue, caught in his throat, delivered not with command but with a drowned man’s gasp. The magic he managed to cast pulsed erratically, twitching in the air like exposed nerves, blind and lashing in every direction.
His breath came sharp—each inhale a hiss of glass against glass, thin and slicing, as though the air itself punished him for taking it. His chest heaved under his robes, rising too fast, too shallow. Sweat broke and streamed down his face, collecting in shining trails along his temples and jaw—like mercury bleeding from a cracked statue. His hand, the hand that had always held a wand with proud certainty, now trembled with open betrayal. First subtly. Then violently. Each spell forced his fingers to clench like a man holding onto something already broken.
His jaw clenched. His teeth bared. The snarl that curled from him was animal—guttural, wounded. No longer the heir to an ancient bloodline, no longer a Lestrange in anything but name. He was a creature cornered, panicked, stripped of superiority and snarling because it was all that remained.
His eyes flicked in every direction—Draco, the stone floor, the spectators, the distant ceiling—as if some unseen door might reveal itself, some last-second escape from the collapse consuming him. But there was none.
Draco had already sealed every path.
Draco didn’t chase. He didn’t advance. He didn’t need to.
He stood at the eye of the storm—utterly still.
And yet it was he who moved everything.
Each time Elias struck, Draco answered with cold precision: a turn of the wrist, a lazy deflection, a spell cast not in force but in intent. He pivoted like a dancer at the center of a celestial spiral, every movement fluid, deliberate, impossibly calm. His wand carved silver air into art. There was no bracing for impact—he anticipated every blow long before it formed. The duel wasn’t being fought. It was being orchestrated.
The dungeon had fallen silent—thick, reverent silence, broken only by the occasional snap of failed spells and the strained rhythm of Elias’s faltering breaths. Around the duel, the other Slytherins had drawn back, instinctively forming a wide circle against the cold stone walls. Upper years. First-years. None dared speak. None dared intervene.
The air shimmered faintly with residual magic—old, self-healing wards gently repairing scorched stone and cracked flooring, restoring order as fast as chaos could wreck it. Still, none moved. They pressed themselves into the edges of the room, cloaked in flickering torchlight, their faces pale and unmoving. Watching. Witnessing.
Not a battle.
A dismantling.
They watched the tide turn—not in a sweeping, cinematic blaze, but with the slow, irreversible certainty of a dam cracking beneath constant pressure.
Spell by spell. Step by step.
They saw it: Elias unraveling.
His footwork—once sharp and sure—now dragged across the stone in uneven, panicked stumbles. His balance faltered. He slipped on broken debris, nearly went down. His stance collapsed in on itself, no longer grounded in training but kept upright only by sheer instinct. The fine lines of a well-bred duelist had eroded. All that remained was noise and fear.
And Draco—
Draco had not once raised his voice. Had not once clenched his jaw.
He did not lash out. He did not dominate with brute strength.
He moved like water.
Not yielding, but impossibly fluid—sharp in his stillness, vast in his silence.
His wand spun through the air with weightless grace, not dragging power into the room but simply reminding it who it belonged to. Each countermove was gentle. Effortless. A breath rather than a shout. The tempo of the duel belonged entirely to him, as if the air, the floor, the torches themselves obeyed some silent rhythm only he could hear.
It was not that Draco was more powerful.
It was that he was more precise.
More inevitable.
Every movement he made told a story, and that story was this:
He did not need to overpower Elias.
He only needed to outlast him.
He already had.
Elias had not landed a single blow.
Not a spark.
Not a scar.
He had thrown everything—bloodline, anger, pride—
And Draco had made it look like nothing at all.
And Draco—Merlin help him—Draco looked almost bored.
Not weary. Not arrogant.
Playful.
As though this were a ballet he’d danced before, centuries ago, and now performed it again not for victory, but amusement. There was a rhythm to the way he moved—an unhurried, devastating grace. His feet whispered across the stone as if gravity bowed to him, not the other way around. Each step was fluid, gliding. Not a duelist—no, a wraith in silver, all calm limbs and calculating ease.
His wand moved like a conductor’s baton in a symphony only he understood, carving precise sigils in the air with such casual elegance that even the raw force behind the magic seemed to pause, reverent. Spells slipped from him like silk unraveling in water—quiet, luminous, deadly.
It wasn’t that Elias lacked power.
No. His power had always been formidable, shaped by bloodlines steeped in cruelty and brilliance.
But Draco—
Draco had become something else.
Untouchable.
Inscrutable.
A shadow made of starlight and silence.
When Elias threw another hex—wild, ugly, desperate—it was a streak of copper-blue light, sharp-edged and howling with venom. A spell meant to knot every nerve in Draco’s wand arm, to render him frozen, useless. It roared through the air—
And Draco didn’t even blink.
A flick of his wrist. Barely that. A suggestion of movement.
And the hex died.
It didn’t shatter. It withered—crumpling mid-flight, folding inward like a moth burnt to dust in a flame that never needed to burn. The copper-blue light stuttered, blinked out like a dying ember gasping in the dark.
A murmur broke through the watching crowd.
Low. Involuntary.
Someone breathed a stunned curse under their breath, only for Walburga Black to lash out with a hissed “Shut up.” The boy recoiled, cowed.
And still, every eye snapped back to the center.
Back to him.
Back to Draco Malfoy.
Advancing.
One step.
Then another.
Not aggressive. Not threatening.
Inevitable.
He moved with the calm of a tide returning to shore—an ancient, cyclical force. Elias stumbled back as if on instinct alone, as if some animal part of him—buried in marrow and memory—understood before he did. Understood that this wasn’t a duel anymore.
This was a revelation.
That he had not been fighting an opponent.
He’d been flailing at something colder.
Older.
Something that didn’t seek blood or domination.
Only silence.
Ruin.
Draco’s wand lifted again—light as breath, as if requesting wine, or dismissing a servant. Not a spell, not even a threat. Just a motion, and yet the air itself seemed to hum in response. A shimmer of translucent magic blinked to life around him—an idle shield—and then, as if deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, it vanished again. Discarded.
He tilted his head.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
And studied Elias the way one might study something trapped—a fragile, dying thing pinned beneath glass. A specimen. A curiosity. Nothing more.
And in that silence, the final truth dropped like a guillotine:
Draco Peverell wasn’t trying.
He was toying with him.
Uncoiling, spell by spell.
Peeling away Elias Lestrange’s composure apart like layers of rotted silk—first the fury, then the pride, and now the last, trembling shreds of composure. Layer by layer, until all that remained was the echo of fear—and the watching crowd that would never forget the sight of a boy who thought himself a monster and met something worse.
Draco stood like something conjured from moonlight and myth, unreal in the most devastating way—too polished to be merely human, too distant to be anything else.
The light that found him was not kind. It was reverent. It filtered down through the tall cathedral windows that loomed along the dungeon walls—windows crusted with centuries of lake-silt and memory, their stained glass so faded it gave no color anymore, only ghostlight. That light slanted across the flagstones in trembling bars, pale and flickering like the last breath of a dying flame, and in that breathless hush, it painted him in chiaroscuro: half-glow, half-shadow, entirely other.
The water pressed behind the glass with slow, rhythmic weight, and each movement sent soft ripples across the room. That motion found him too—the ripple sliding like a caress over the sharp architecture of his face, the fine cut of his cheekbones, the high sweep of his brow. The line of his jaw, precise as a wandstroke, gleamed faintly beneath the moving light. His hair, nearly white in the dungeon’s gloom, caught each glint and scattered it—an argent crown framing eyes that did not blink, did not waver, only watched.
The robes he wore didn’t cling or flap or flutter. They drifted.
Every step he took unfurled them like a veil drawn through ink, smooth and slow and silent. They didn’t touch the ground so much as hover above it, trailing just behind him in that same impossible stillness that made the room seem to hold its breath. Smoke might move like that—if smoke had weight, and will, and knew how to judge you.
There was nothing accidental in his posture. No hitch of breath, no flex of wrist, no readiness in his stance. He wasn’t poised for violence.
He didn’t need to be.
The wreckage around him—charred stone, cracked tile, shattered sigils still smoldering—had happened before he ever raised a hand. The aftermath whispered of chaos. But he stood untouched, unmoved, untouched by the carnage as though it had bowed around him on purpose.
And then—his eyes.
Merlin.
His eyes weren’t merely silver. They weren’t reflective or glazed or hollow—they were alive. Glinting with something so cold, so diamond-hard, it wasn’t cruelty. It was clarity. Like a knife so clean it hadn’t yet realized it had drawn blood. Like the shimmer of hoarfrost before a blizzard.
There was no threat in his expression. That would imply intention.
This was something worse.
It was inevitability.
He looked not like someone preparing to win a duel, but like someone for whom victory had already occurred—quietly, elegantly, with all the ceremony of dust settling. He could have been stepping into a museum. Or a mausoleum. Or some sacred ruin where the last gods once knelt before vanishing into stone.
He wasn’t triumphant.
He wasn’t smug.
He was still.
Elias stumbled back, boots skidding against the scorched flagstones, the slap of his steps frantic and uneven. Every breath rasped through clenched teeth, shallow and ragged, as though the very air had turned traitor—too thick, too hot, too sharp to swallow. Sweat slicked his brow and clung to the hollow of his throat, soaking through the linen of his shirt until it clung like a second skin, mottled with the dark shapes of desperation. His chest rose and fell in erratic bursts, the rhythm of panic overtaking that of strategy.
His wand hand trembled.
Not subtly, not with the polite twitch of exhaustion, but with the raw, visible quake of a body nearing collapse—every tendon overtaxed, every nerve lit like a wire fraying at both ends. The tip of his wand danced with unchanneled magic, too chaotic to hold steady. A duelist’s worst tell.
“Stop dodging and fight me!” he snapped, voice cracking mid-shout. The sound rang out across the dueling circle, not as a challenge but a plea—brittle, hoarse, utterly breakable. It echoed once, then died, swallowed by the watching dark.
Draco didn’t answer right away.
He tilted his head.
Not curiously, not kindly—calculatingly. Like a predator indulging the final flailing of something already caught in its claws. His gaze—pale, polished silver—settled on Elias with a terrible stillness. Not fury. Not even contempt. Just clarity. As if he were reading the last few lines of a book he already knew by heart.
And then—gods, then—he smiled.
No grin. No teeth. Just the faintest suggestion of a curve at the edge of his mouth. Cold. Elegant. Cruel. A patrician’s smirk, the kind worn at funerals by men who never doubted who would bury whom.
“I’m doing you a favor,” he said at last, the words sliding from his mouth like smoke curling from the lip of a censer. His tone was low, unhurried, intimate in the worst possible way—like something whispered to a corpse.
“You can’t even keep up.”
He stepped forward once. Lightly. Like the thought of moving required no more effort than blinking.
“If I were to seriously fight you…”
A pause.
A silence stretched thin and sharp as wire. The crowd didn’t dare breathe. Even the torches seemed to shrink back, their flames flickering low.
“…You’d end up in a casket.”
The words landed with weight—not loud, but heavy, final. They dropped like the tolling of a bell or the click of a lock. Finality without flourish. Inevitable.
Around them, the watchers stood frozen—caught between awe and dread. The kind of hush that comes before a storm, or a massacre, or the truth no one wants to say aloud.
Elias Lestrange blinked once.
And for the first time in his life, he looked afraid.
From the shadows at the edge of the room, Cassian Lestrange stood utterly still—shoulders squared, hands folded before him with unnatural calm—but his eyes burned. Not with anger. Not with fear. With fascination. A hunger that gleamed like a blade half-drawn in the dark. His face gave away nothing, schooled into noble neutrality, but the light caught in his gaze betrayed him, lit something wolfish behind the mask.
He looked like a man who had wandered into a cathedral only to find that the god inside was not stone or scripture—but alive. Terrifyingly real. And breathtakingly beautiful.
There was reverence in the way he stared. Yes, reverence. But it was reverence built atop something far older, more primal. Desire. Ambition. Awe. The kind of look one gives not to a saint—but to a myth returned from the grave in full, unrelenting glory.
Because Draco wasn’t casting magic. He was becoming it.
He stood in the center of the ruined dueling circle as if the shattered stones and scorched walls had been placed there for him. As if the dungeon bent around him, shaped by the gravity of his presence alone. He hadn’t lifted a hand in violence—and yet the air still trembled, taut and trembling like harp strings stretched to the edge of silence. He was too still. Too composed. Too controlled.
This wasn’t talent learned in a classroom. It wasn’t pedigree or privilege.
It was blood.
Old blood. Ancient magic that whispered in marrow and echoed in the bones of the castle itself. Power, naked and unashamed, standing in full view of those who thought they understood it.
And beside Cassian—his older brother, Elias—looked small. Small and shrinking. His chest heaved, and his body swayed like a candle guttering in a sudden gust. He tried to lift his chin, but the motion faltered. His wand—trembling, useless—hung limp in his fingers like a dead weight.
Then—clatter.
It fell. A dull, hollow sound that seemed far too loud in the silence that followed, like the toll of a cracked bell.
Elias’s wand hit the floor and rolled once, twice—then stopped at Draco’s feet.
A breath was held. Not just by Elias. By everyone.
The silence that followed was not empty. It was dense. Heavy with unspoken fear, laced with awe. Charged with the kind of stillness that precedes thunder or collapse.
Draco didn’t move.
Didn’t smirk. Didn’t gloat. He simply stood—silver-haired and shadow-edged—like a statue that had decided to breathe. An unmoving monument to control, to restraint, to a storm refused. He looked less like a boy and more like a reckoning. As if he could destroy them, but chose not to out of nothing more than… disinterest.
And then—only then—he raised his wand.
Slowly. Deliberately. As though lifting a crown from an altar.
Elias flinched.
It was instinctual, brutal. His body seized tight, spine curling in on itself, arms twitching as if expecting the strike that would fell him. His eyes screwed shut. Shoulders tensed to receive pain, to welcome humiliation, to absorb whatever final curse would be flung to finish this.
But nothing came.
Instead, something unfamiliar uncoiled within Elias—a warmth, yes, but not the kind that soothed. This was not comfort. It did not cradle or console. It stripped. Cold and brilliant, it moved through him like a thread of molten silver pulled through the hollows of his ribs, distant and immaculate. It wasn’t healing in the human sense. It wasn’t born of kindness or intention. It was clinical. Dispassionate. A kind of divine correction.
It was the warmth of a scalpel sterilized in flame.
His pain—sharp and biting only seconds before—vanished with eerie precision. The bruises beneath his skin dulled and dissolved like ink in water. The gash on his cheek closed without ceremony, smooth as if it had never existed. The raw tremble in his limbs faded, nerves hushed and subdued. It felt not like healing, but like erasure. The air around Draco had simply decided that Elias’s injuries were unacceptable—and so, they were undone.
Not out of empathy.
But because they disrupted something.
Elias’s lashes fluttered, heavy with disbelief. He opened his eyes.
Draco stood before him.
Wand still raised—not in threat, but in cold execution. His face was devoid of triumph. There was no gloating, no softening, no flicker of humanity. Just that same elegant, unwavering stillness. His features carved in high relief, sharp as if chiseled from moonstone. He looked less like a boy and more like the high priest of some forgotten ritual—detached, exacting, inexorable.
He was healing Elias.
But not because Elias deserved it.
He was healing him because the wounds were unsightly.
Because they marred the symmetry Draco had imposed on the room. They were an error in the structure of the moment. A flaw in the aesthetic of domination. A blemish that had to be smoothed away—not because it hurt, but because it offended.
Elias felt it in the flicks of Draco’s wrist. Each movement was deliberate, surgical. Like a master calligrapher correcting a smear of ink. A restorer cleaning grime from a painting, not for the subject—but for the art. Draco didn’t see him. Not truly. Not as a person. He saw the outline of something broken. Something inferior. Something that needed to be tidied.
And somehow—that stung worse than any curse.
Because it was not cruelty. It was indifference.
Because it said: You never mattered enough to truly become a threat.
Because it said: Even now, I am above you.
There was no humiliation in the words—because there were no words. Just the facts, laid bare like a body on a slab. Elias had been overpowered. Stripped. Rendered irrelevant. And now… dismissed.
Draco stood untouched, immaculate.
The dust of magic still shimmered faintly in the air around him, suspended like pollen in sunlit silence. His robes—charcoal black with silver trim—flowed around him without a wrinkle, catching no ash, no blood. Not a hair on his head was displaced. His wand, still aloft, had ceased to be a dueling tool. It had become a symbol. A scepter. A seal. The declaration of a truth none dared refute.
His eyes—glinting with that strange metallic stillness, all ice and steel—were already looking past Elias. Not in cruelty. In closure.
As if Elias had already slipped from relevance. A chapter ended. A failed equation solved and swept aside.
He had been weighed. Measured. Found lacking.
And left.
No thunder. No sneer. No final blow.
Just Draco, statuesque and distant, a monarch encircled by silence, wrapped in the hush of awe and aftermath. Around him, the dungeon held its breath. The air felt hollowed. Reverent. Like something sacred had passed through and left the space behind it echoing.
And in that echo, Elias understood:
The worst part was not the pain.
The worst part was being dismissed so thoroughly that even his defeat was beneath notice.
And the dungeon knew it.
There was something reverent in the hush that followed—not stunned silence, but something older, weightier. A pause in the rhythm of the world itself, as if even time was unwilling to intrude on the stillness that Draco Malfoy commanded.
The crowd didn’t whisper. They didn’t dare.
Breath became a fragile thing here—too loud, too mortal. Every student stood trapped in that moment, spine-strung and brittle, suspended in the aftermath of a reckoning. The air tasted of iron and magic, thrumming faintly with residual power. It clung to their skin like frost.
They watched the slow, dignified death of a legacy unravel like silk from a broken loom.
Elias’s shoulders quivered. Not with pain—but the ache of something far worse. Shame. Raw and bright as an open wound. He swallowed hard against the heat building in his throat, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles went bloodless. As if he could hold the humiliation inside—trap the howl before it tore from his ribs.
Then—
The silence cracked.
“Why are you healing me?”
His voice came out raw, a sound scraped from the inside of a burn. Rasping. Brittle. Scorched by humiliation.
“I don’t need your pity.”
A brittle defiance. But the cracks ran deep.
Draco turned.
He didn’t look down at Elias.
He looked through him.
And in that still moment, Elias felt it—felt the cold press of something ancient and surgical peeling him open. Not his body. His self. As if those silver eyes saw not the shape of his face but the weak points of his spirit, the hairline fractures in everything he believed made him worthy.
There was no pity in Draco’s gaze.
Only a glinting, glacial stillness.
Silver.
Sharp. Distant. Tireless. As if he’d seen this exact performance before—too many times to be moved by it again.
“Pity?” Draco’s voice was silk soaked in venom—soft, clean, and merciless. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
He lowered his wand with a finality that did not require force. It was not a threat. It was a dismissal. As elegant as a curtain falling after the end of a play no one had enjoyed. His wrist relaxed with the poise of someone who had never learned to fumble. Even that small movement—restrained, detached—held more violence than a dozen duels.
And then, for a single heartbeat, his gaze lingered.
Not cold. Not cruel.
Remembering.
( TW-Trigger warning. Character death.( Not Draco but if it does trigger, avoid.)
A flicker passed behind his eyes, too swift to name. It was not feeling. Not tenderness. But memory—
And the memory was a blade.
Screams.
Smoke.
A sky torn wide with light and fury—veins of crimson and molten gold crackling through the heavens, shattering cloudbanks like ribs beneath a blade. Thunder rolled, not from the weather, but from magic—ancient and wild—ripping the night open. The ground beneath his boots quaked with aftershocks, scorched black by wayward curses, littered with bodies curled in their final, frozen echoes of life.
The air was thick—suffocating. Reeking of ash, burned flesh, and the sharp, metallic sting of blood. Magic hung there too, heavy and feral, an old god breathing through the carnage. Its scent curled into his lungs, settled in his skin. It knew him. Welcomed him.
Draco moved through it like a shadow unbound—untouched, sharp-eyed, composed. A specter cloaked in black, his wand not a tool but a limb, a relic of something deeper, older than his own flesh. The battlefield did not unsettle him. Not anymore.
It recognized him.
Because war had not unmade him—it had refined him.
It had stripped away hesitation. Taught him how to move in silence, to kill with precision and leave nothing behind but fading warmth and breathless dark. He had learned to step over corpses the way others crossed thresholds. To erase lives as easily as ink on parchment. To obey commands without question, to disappear beneath the weight of a legacy stitched in blood and bound by oath.
He was not a soldier. He was a scalpel. Sharp. Controlled. Indispensable.
But her death—
Her death was not calculated.
Not planned.
Not written into the script of conquest and consequence.
He hadn’t known she would be there.
None of them had.
And suddenly, the battlefield—the one that welcomed him, that had shaped him—turned unfamiliar. Disjointed. Wrong.
Because in all the equations of war, in all the probabilities he had learned to trace through spellwork and silence—
He had never prepared to see her fall.
It was meant to be a sweep—sterile, sharp. A “cleansing,” Lucius had called it. Nothing personal. Just a house, long abandoned. A cell of sympathizers to be extinguished. Quick. Clinical.
But then she ame.
She came like a prayer broken on the wind—wild and unbidden, crashing into the fire not to fight, but to find. Her presence warped the battlefield like heat above flame.
She was not a soldier.
She was a mother.
No armor. No plan.
Just breathless, bare-faced determination. Her robes were ash-stained and wind-snatched. Her hair clung to her face, wild and damp from sweat and fog. One trembling hand clutched her wand like a lifeline, but it wasn’t fear that shook her—it was grief, hot and hollow, burning ahead of the pain. Her eyes, wide and cracked open, scoured the smoke like they could force it to part. Like they could unravel the world until it yielded what it had stolen.
She had known.
Not through orders. Not through parchment.
But through instinct. Something deeper.
A weight in her lungs. A pressure behind her ribs.
She felt it—deep in the marrow of her bones, in the echo of an empty room, in the phantom weight of a child’s goodbye that had never been said.
Something had wrenched inside her. Some invisible tether snapping.
And without thinking—without warning—she had run.
She hadn’t stopped to tell anyone. Hadn’t armored herself. Hadn’t summoned allies or cloaked herself in protection. She came as she was: pale as bone, wrapped in wind and the scent of old lilies, eyes full of storms, fists curled tight around two things—the wand in her right, and in her left, something more ancient than spellcraft:
A memory.
Of a little boy with mussed blond hair, chubby soft cheeks and stubborn eyes, standing in a doorway, trying not to cry.
The memory of his little hand in hers. His voice, so small, saying “I won’t say goodbye.”
And Draco—
Draco saw her.
Through the whirlwind. Through the smoke and spelllight and ruin.
He saw her as the sky above them fractured—a scream of gold and lightning.
And the world stopped breathing.
For a moment, the battlefield vanished.
No cries, no curses, no ruin clawing at the edge of the world. Just her—silhouetted in the shattered light, framed by the flicker of burning rafters and the aching weight of recognition.
Mother.
The word didn’t pass his lips.
It lived in the silence between heartbeats.
It thundered in the marrow of his bones.
She didn’t see him—not yet. Her gaze was locked on the wreckage ahead, on a collapsed stairwell half-choked with flame, on the still limbs curled beneath shattered beams. She moved with reckless grace, like a soul already torn from its body, reaching for something she wasn’t sure she could still save.
Saw her surge through the chaos, a streak of movement cutting through the ruin—torn velvet whipping around her legs, hair tumbling wild down her back like ink unraveling in water. She surged forward with the ferocity of a gale, heedless of the inferno that howled around her. Her eyes—wide, bright, unblinking—were twin stars of unyielding resolve, fixed not on the broken, the burning, or the bleeding… but on him.
The smoke coiled at her ankles like serpents. Bodies crumpled in her wake, collapsing like marionettes with severed strings, but she did not falter. She didn’t crouch to check for a pulse. Didn’t lift a wand to return fire. She moved through the chaos like a blade through silk—cutting a line straight to him.
She wasn’t searching for survivors.
She wasn’t searching for redemption.
She was searching for her son.
Even as spells detonated around her—red streaks screaming overhead, the sky cracking open with green light, stone splitting and shrieking beneath the assault of war—he knew.
She hadn’t come to win the battle.
She had come to find him.
And in that moment, Draco forgot the war.
The clash of wands, the acrid reek of blood and ash, the thunder of collapsing walls—none of it reached him. Sound folded in on itself. Movement blurred. The world narrowed to the figure tearing through ruin to get to him, and to the hollow in his chest that cracked wide at the sight.
He took a step forward.
Then another.
The noise came rushing back in a wave—a Death Eater’s shout behind him, the shatter of something ancient crumbling to dust, the dull impact of bodies hitting ground. But it felt distant. Muted. Like he was moving through water.
No—through time.
Every step toward her unraveled him.
Not just the man he had become—the soldier, the survivor, the weapon—but the layers beneath. The years peeled back like old wallpaper, revealing softer, more fragile versions of himself that he had buried deep.
Sixteen:
Blood stiffening at his collar, the metallic scent clinging to his skin like guilt. The Astronomy Tower stretching out beneath him like a grave, Dumbledore’s gaze not accusing, but unbearably kind. That pity had seared more than any curse. He had wanted to scream, to vanish, to be someone else. And still, even then, all he’d wanted was to go home. To fall into her arms and be forgiven.
Thirteen:
The steam from the Hogwarts Express curling around his boots as she adjusted the scarf she had knitted herself—silver and green, her fingers lingering at the knot a moment too long. “Write me,” she’d whispered, smoothing a strand of hair from his forehead, trying to smile while her eyes shimmered with worry she couldn’t name. He hadn’t understood it then, the weight in her voice. He did now.
Seven:
The sting of gravel embedded in his knees, hot tears blurring the sky, the world too loud, too sharp, too much. And then—her. Kneeling beside him with robes that smelled like rosewater and ink, scooping him into arms that made the chaos fall away. Her fingers had been cool on his face, her voice a lullaby he hadn’t needed to understand. With her, the vastness shrank. The sky calmed. He could breathe.
And now—
Now she stood in the heart of ruin.
Alone.
The battlefield howled around her—a tempest of fire and death and smoke—but she didn’t bow beneath it. Her form was slight, almost swallowed by the chaos, and yet she stood taller than anything else he could see. As if the storm parted around her. As if hell itself dared not touch her.
But she was still just one woman.
Flesh and bone. Breath and blood.
His mother.
And she should never have had to face this alone.
He tried to call her name—tried to tear it from his throat—but the smoke strangled it halfway, turning it to ash on his tongue. His wand quivered in his grip, slick with sweat and something colder: fear.
And then she saw him.
Her head jerked toward him as if pulled by a tether spun from blood and fate. Their eyes collided across the chaos, and the world—roaring seconds before—held its breath.
Ash spiraled between them like grey snow, soft and falling, absurd in its stillness. Firelight painted her in flickering gold and deep-cut shadow, casting her face in molten bronze, a statue forged of anguish and aching hope. Her lips parted, trembling with a word she couldn’t yet speak. His name—just the shape of it—hung there, unspoken and sacred.
And in her eyes—
A storm.
Disbelief.
Terror.
And a love so fierce, so raw, it stripped the air bare.
The kind of love that only exists when all other hope has been burned away.
And then—
A jet of green light tore across the air.
Not at him.
At her.
Draco’s body moved before thought could catch up.Instinct cracked through his spine like lightning. His wand whipped the air—a violent arc of desperate precision.
“Protego Maxima!”
The shield burst forth like a summoned god—white-hot, ringing with fury, woven from instinct and love and a scream he could not shape. The Killing Curse slammed into it, not with silence, but with a sound that shook the marrow—like metal shrieking against stone, like a bell tolling deep beneath the earth.
The force of it cracked the ground.
Flames shrieked sideways.
Sparks sprayed the air like shattered stars.
She staggered, thrown back a step. Her eyes were wide, not with fear—but with recognition.
He was beside her before the dust settled.
His hand found her arm—tight, grounding—his body shielding hers as he pulled her down behind what was left of a crumbling wall. It wasn’t cover. It wasn’t safety. It was instinct clawing for inches.
Shouting surged.
Bellatrix’s laugh sliced through the smoke—high, unhinged, delighted. He could feel Lucius’s presence in the storm, rigid and distant, too far to stop what had already begun.
All he could hear was her breath—shallow, alive—and the thunder of his own heart refusing to stop.
“What are you doing here?” His voice rasped, dry and cracked like splintered wood dragged across stone.“Why did you come?”
She didn’t answer at first. Just reached up—her hand ghosting against his cheek, the backs of her fingers cool and trembling, smelling faintly of lilacs and ash. A touch like winter. Like memory.
Then, softly—three words.
“You’re my son.”
That was all.
No spell. No grand declaration. No plea for safety or forgiveness.
Just truth, simple and unmovable. A truth so vast it defied reason, defied war, defied death.
And Draco—who had once held open the gates of hell, who had watched innocence die and made himself into something steel and shadow—shattered.
Not outwardly. Not in his face, still set like carved stone. Not in the line of his shoulders, held taut like bowstrings. But somewhere beneath the surface, in the locked vaults of himself, something ancient cracked. The tectonic fault of his soul—who he had become—shifted.
He remembered the feel of her elbow beneath his grip, sharp and slight beneath the elegant fall of her sleeve. His hands clutched her like a lifeline, fingers shaking, desperate—as though he could hold her back through sheer force of will.
Around them, the world burned.
Smoke curled thick as wool. Screams cut through the airlike shattered crystal. The sky split with the thunderclap of spells colliding midair. And yet his voice cut through it, ragged and raw:
“Mother—”
A broken cry, voice hoarse, cracking—once, twice, again. Not even the Dark Lord had ever twisted his voice like that.
But she—
Narcissa Malfoy, the woman who walked through trials like holy ground, who stared down tyrants with the elegance of an executioner, who wrapped cruelty in silk and grace and still made room for love—
She shoved him.
Not gently. Not with a whisper of doubt. It was a brutal, desperate push—born not of anger, but of instinct older than magic. The force of a mother standing between her child and the abyss. Her hands, elegant and bloodied, struck his chest like lightning cleaving through stone.
He stumbled back. Caught his breath mid-gasp.
And in that instant, the world broke open.
Time faltered. The shriek of spells, the crackle of flame, the ruin of bodies—blurred into silence. The war became a painting smeared in ash and flame. The blood on his hands, the weight of every choice he’d made, fell away.
All that remained was her.
Narcissa. Tall. Terrible. Radiant.
Her shoulders square. Her breath ragged. Her spine held straight as a wand.
She turned to face what he could not see, the storm behind him—and smiled.
It was not triumph.
It was not surrender.
It was a flicker of something achingly human, achingly rare. A smile that didn’t belong in battle—a mother’s smile, soft as silk thread, frayed by fear and fierce love. A smile that said I’ve already won, because you’re still breathing.
And then—
Blood.
It didn’t come with thunder or scream.
It came like a secret.
A single line of red slipped down from the corner of her mouth, delicate and horrifying in its stillness. Like ink drawn by an invisible quill across her chin. He didn’t see the spell. Only the way her body jolted.Her breath caught. Her eyes opened too wide—then softened, dimmed.
Too calm.
Then it bloomed.
Violent. Final.
A burst of crimson ruptured across her chest, too bright against her pale robes. A flower not meant to grow—a terrible blossom unfolding beneath her collarbone, staining everything it touched.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
The world convulsed around him. Sounds stretched and warped, as if echoing through water. The battlefield, once searing with light and fury, dissolved into shadow and silence.
His knees hit the ground before he realized he’d moved.
His wand fell from his fingers, forgotten.
And all he could do was watch—helpless—as the only true constant in his life crumpled, the firelight casting gold through her falling hair, the blood blooming beneath her like a shattered rose.
There was nothing else.
Only her.
Her weight in his arms was wrong.
Too heavy.
Too cold.
The kind of cold that seeps beneath skin and bone, the kind that doesn’t leave.
Her breath came in shallow, splintered gasps—each one quieter than the last, like the wind dying inside a ruined cathedral. He could feel her heartbeat beneath his palm, once elegant and steady as a waltz, now slowing, stumbling. Fading.
Still—she looked at him.
Those storm-blue eyes, dulled with pain but impossibly clear, found his.
And in them—he saw everything.
Sun-dappled summers on the Manor lawn, her laughter echoing like birdsong through the hedgerows. The hum of lullabies behind closed nursery doors, half-magic, half-memory. The quiet, unseen wars she’d waged for him—against his father, against the Dark Lord, against the world itself. All without ever asking for thanks.
And then she spoke.
“I love you.”
Just three words—no grandeur, no trembling orchestration.
No final bow.
Just the soft, naked truth, given freely. Spoken like a secret she never wanted to keep but had only now found the courage to say aloud.
Her voice broke as she spoke—cracked down the middle like porcelain under strain.
“I had this feeling…” she whispered, eyes unfocused, voice barely more than breath. “Like a shadow I couldn’t shake. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was coming. This… this nightmare.”
Her fingers curled weakly against his sleeve, as if to anchor herself—or him—to something real. Her gaze, though glassy, burned with something deeper than fear.
“A mother knows,” she said, and now her voice trembled—not from pain, but from knowing. “We feel it before it happens. The moment the world shifts. The second something precious slips toward danger.”
She swallowed hard, and the motion looked wrong—like her body was already leaving her behind.
“I knew something terrible would happen. I woke up with it in my bones. In my blood. I could taste it in the air. And still, I sent you away. Still, I watched you walk into the fire.”
Her breath hitched. Tears welled, but didn’t fall. Her pride was too deep, even now.
“A mother always knows,” she murmured again. “We carry our children long after they’re born. In the heart. In the marrow. In the dark.”
And then softer, more broken—
“I just didn’t think it would end like this.”
Her lips parted again, trembling.
“My dragon…” she whispered.
The name cracked something inside him.
He hadn’t heard it in years—her name for him, from the days when scraped knees were the end of the world and her arms were all the salvation he’d ever needed.
“Don’t let them…” Her voice fractured, brittle as glass. “Don’t let them make you into something you’re not.”
Her hand rose—barely. Blood clung to her fingers, slick and shaking. She touched his cheek like a whisper, her thumb brushing a streak of red along his skin. A blessing. A warning.
“Your heart…” she breathed, voice faltering with the weight of it. “It’s stronger than anything.”
And then—
Nothing.
One last breath. One last blink.
Gone.
Her hand fell, weightless, lifeless. Her eyes—once burning bright with love and fury—flickered out, dark as stars at dawn.
She didn’t collapse like a body. She collapsed like a world ending.
And he caught her, cradled her, the way a child might cradle broken glass—too fragile, too sacred to let go.
Around them, the war continued to scream. The sky split. The earth bled.
But he heard none of it.
She was gone.
And nothing else mattered.
He sat there, unmoving, cradling her body as if stillness alone could reverse time—could anchor her soul to the husk she’d left behind.
Around him, spells thundered like gods in fury. Stone cracked. Air burned. The battlefield surged with life and death locked in violent rhythm. But to him, it was distant—like noise underwater. Like someone else’s war.
Narcissa’s hair spilled over his arms, silver and dus-blonde and streaked now with ash. Her lashes, long and damp, brushed her cheeks. That trace of a smile still lingered on her lips, fragile as frost. He couldn’t look away. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t breathe.
( TW- It’s over.)
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
He didn’t flinch.
Another voice—low, sharp, trying to drag him back to the present. “Draco. We need to move. Now.”
His name felt foreign. Like it belonged to someone else. Someone untouched. Someone whole.
The hand gripped tighter, shaking him once, twice. “Draco!”
He turned slowly—not because he’d heard the footsteps or sensed the movement—but because her blood was beginning to soak through his sleeves, warm and wet and real in a way nothing else was.
Behind him, a shadow loomed tall, cutting clean through the smoke. Blaise Zabini.
Broad-shouldered and imposing, he looked every inch the soldier the war had demanded he become. The black of his Death Eater robes clung to his muscular frame, torn at the shoulder, scorched at the hem. His skin—deep, dark as polished obsidian—gleamed with sweat, streaked with soot and smeared blood that wasn’t his. A gash ran just beneath one high cheekbone, and ash clung to his lashes. But even now, even in ruin, there was something arresting about him. Handsome in the way statues were—elegant, severe, timeless.
His wand was drawn, gripped low at his side in a posture of brutal readiness, his knuckles pale against the worn wood. The air around him seemed to pulse, tense with the promise of violence barely leashed.
But his face—his face was not made for war.
Drawn and darkened by smoke, it shifted the moment he saw her.
He stopped cold. Eyes widened, lips parted, and the battlefield vanished for a heartbeat. His gaze dropped to the woman cradled in Draco’s arms, and something in him cracked. He flinched—not in fear, but in reverence, like he’d stumbled upon a sacred ruin.
“Merlin,” he breathed.
The word left him raw, ragged, more like a prayer than an oath. As if her presence—her body lying broken in her son’s arms—was too impossible to be anything but divine.
“She came for you,” he said, voice low and disbelieving.
And Draco, still kneeling in the ash, still wrapped in the last warmth of her fading body, didn’t answer. He only bowed his head lower, blood running from her into the crook of his elbows like some terrible baptism.
Draco didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
He looked down at her once more, desperate, searching—his eyes flicking over her face for any sign of breath, any twitch of fingers, any miracle he could pretend not to beg for. But there was nothing. No spark. No warmth. Just the echo of what had been.
Her features, once so poised with quiet strength, were soft now. Too still. A sculpture carved in the image of love and ruin. Blood soaked the front of her robes, dark and spreading, and it had already begun to cool against his arms. The silence between his heartbeat and hers was a canyon he could not cross.
Blaise dropped to his knees beside him, movements swift and tense, stained fingers reaching—but not touching. Not yet. His breath came fast, harsh with smoke and adrenaline, chest rising and falling like a man on the edge of a cliff.
“Draco,” he said, voice raw, edged with panic. “She didn’t die for you to stay here. We have to go. Do you hear me?”
There was urgency in the words, yes—but something else too. Something quieter. Frantic. Frayed. Blaise’s heart was hammering in his chest. Not just from the spells still flashing across the horizon. Not just from the stench of burning robes, of blood, of death. But from something far closer. More fragile.
Fear.
He hadn’t asked for this war. Hadn’t wanted the blood, the oaths, the impossible choices. The Zabinis had danced along the edge for as long as they could—silver-tongued and unreadable, slipping through the cracks in the crumbling world like smoke. Neutral, untouchable, clever enough to survive.
But even smoke gets caught in fire eventually.
Even Blaise had bowed his head. Had taken the Mark. Had whispered his soul away on blood-stained parchment. Not for power. Not for glory.
To protect his mother.
And now here he was—kneeling in the blasted wreckage of what used to be a field, surrounded by corpses and flame and ash that stung the lungs—watching the only person who had ever truly seen him spiral into a silence deeper than death.
The only one who had called him by his name like it meant something more than bloodlines and expectation.
Draco didn’t move. Didn’t speak. The weight of Narcissa in his arms anchored him, as if gravity had rewritten its laws for this moment alone. As if the world had narrowed to a single unbearable truth:
She was gone.
Blaise’s hands curled into fists, knuckles white, eyes darting through the smoke. He wasn’t the type to panic—but something trembled beneath his voice.
“Draco,” he said again, softer now. Urgent. Human. “They’ll see the body. They’ll know. You stay, and they’ll kill you too.”
He glanced around, reading the chaos like a gambler counts cards. Calculating. Cruel. Kind.
“If you go now—maybe she didn’t die for nothing.”
Those words didn’t strike like a slap. They cracked open something worse.
Draco blinked. Once. Twice. Slow, disbelieving, like coming up from deep water. And then, with hands that had once cast spells sharp as razors, he shifted her.
She felt smaller than she ever had. Diminished not by death, but by the enormity of it. He cradled her like something holy, like something that had been both sword and shield for too long.
But he had to let go.
The motion came like a prayer, a surrender. He lowered her to the scorched earth with reverence, every movement a ritual. As if laying her down gently could undo it. As if the ruined ground might remember who she was and cradle her softer than the war ever had.
His hand trembled as it swept a blood-matted curl from her forehead. He paused there, fingers at her temple, memorizing the shape of her. The warmth that was already fading. The quiet that didn’t belong.
His throat ached. His eyes burned.
“Goodbye, Mother.”
It was barely a whisper—just breath cracked and hollow—but in it lived the weight of everything: gratitude, grief, guilt. Reverence.
And when he stood, he stood like a man broken open and stitched shut by the fire of love and loss.Changed in a way that would never be undone.
He didn’t feel his legs obey. Didn’t remember bending to retrieve his wand from the blood-slick, ash-choked ground, or how his fingers curled around the familiar wood despite the tremors that racked his joints. One moment, he was kneeling in a grief-struck stillness, the next—he was walking.
No, not walking.
Pulled forward.
Each step landed like it belonged to someone else, feet dragging through soot and shattered stone, the air thick with smoke and screams. Around him, the world was splitting apart at the seams—magic exploded in bursts of searing light, red and green streaks lashing through the gloom like vengeful stars. Bodies fell. Cries rose. Nothing held its shape.
And still, Draco pressed on.
Through the inferno. Through the static scream of silence in his head. Through the weight of something broken and sacred clutched inside his ribs. Blaise flanked him like a shadow stitched to his heels—eyes darting, wand clenched, his breath sharp with readiness.
The battlefield bled chaos.
But Draco moved like a ghost—untouched, unshakable, bound to something deeper than rage or reason. There was no strategy left in him. No allegiance. Just a path carved through ruin, and a need sharper than vengeance to keep going.
Then—a figure emerged.
Half-limping, wand raised, mask long discarded. A Death Eater. One of theirs. Tall, robed in torn black, eyes sunken with frenzy. His mouth twisted, lips parting to spit a curse—one Draco didn’t wait to hear.
He didn’t pause.
Didn’t weigh name or cause or mark.
Didn’t care.
His wand snapped up—faster than thought, driven by muscle memory and grief-stripped instinct. The spell he cast wasn’t clean. It wasn’t elegant. It tore from his throat like a sob—raw, burning, unshaped by words but sculpted by intent. The magic surged, wild and jagged, a lance of pure, violent energy—something primal, something furious, something that did not ask permission.
The Death Eater collapsed in a blink, body thrown backward with a sickening crunch. Smoke swallowed him whole.
Draco didn’t stop to look.
He didn’t know who had killed her.
He didn’t know if she had fallen by the hand of an Order member or a Death Eater.
He only knew that it didn’t matter anymore.
They were all executioners now. Every side. Every mark. Every name.
And he was done pretending otherwise.
The Death Eater flew backward like a ragdoll caught in a storm, slammed into the jagged base of a shattered stone pillar with bone-cracking violence. The scream that ripped from his throat was high, sharp—then snapped off mid-note, turning guttural as something ruptured deep inside. Blood burst from his mouth in a fine, glistening spray, hanging in the air like mist clinging to cold stone. His body crumpled, limp and slack, sliding down the pillar’s base in a grotesque sprawl. He didn’t rise again.
Draco didn’t look.
Didn’t pause.
He moved with the cold precision of a blade drawn too many times, edge honed by grief and stripped of all uncertainty. There was no noise now, not really—only the distant, distorted echoes of war, as if the world had slipped underwater. Screams came muffled. Magic bloomed in the air like dying stars. Nothing cut through the fog except the sound of her voice in his skull, looping soft and sharp all at once:
My dragon…
Each step carved through ash and ruin, his robes catching on rubble, boots slick with something he didn’t dare identify. The battlefield was a painting smeared in fire and shadow, a world unraveling at the seams. And still he moved, because to stop would be to shatter.
They reached the remnants of a courtyard wall—its spine snapped and half-sunken, jutting out of the earth like the ribs of some ancient beast. Behind it, the air was quieter. Not safe, not calm—just less. Smoke dragged low and heavy, curling around their feet like the breath of something dying. Light flared on the other side, spells colliding with screams, casting fractured shadows that danced across the stone like haunted silhouettes.
Here, at last, Draco paused.
Blaise was at his side, silent until now, gaze sharp with concern that never needed voicing. He reached out—slow, deliberate—and set a hand on Draco’s shoulder. Then, without a word, he pulled him back into a firm back embrace. Arms looped tight across Draco’s chest, anchoring him, shielding him. A barrier not of stone or magic, but of something far older. A promise. A lifeline.
Draco didn’t resist.
His spine stayed straight, breath caught, but his weight shifted—just enough. Just enough to lean. Just enough to be held. The heat of Blaise’s body pressed into his back, steady and human in a world that had forgotten how to be either.
For a moment, he let the war fade. Let the ache settle. Let the silence hold.
“She’s gone,” Blaise whispered, the words scraped raw from his throat, barely carried over the echoing shrieks of distant magic. “But you’re not. You hear me?”
His heart still hammered from the fight—each beat a leftover tremor from the edge of disaster—but it was slowing now, shifting into something heavier, something more dangerous. A fear too deep for battle. The kind that wrapped itself around love. The kind born not from dying, but from almost—from almost losing the only person who mattered.
Draco didn’t answer.
He stood frozen in the smoke-veiled ruin, the crumbling bones of the manor courtyard stretching out in front of him like a graveyard. His eyes—rimmed red, lashes damp with unshed grief—glinted glassy in the flickering light of distant spells. His jaw clenched like iron under a forge, unrelenting. His lips parted, barely a breath shaping words almost too soft to be heard.
“She said…” he murmured, voice cracked, frayed at the edges like scorched silk. “Not to become a monster.”
His voice was hoarse, almost childlike in its vulnerability.
The ache in those words bent the air around them. They weren’t defiant. They weren’t proud. They were a confession whispered through ruin, small and scorched and aching with the helplessness of a child.
His hands lifted—unsteady, smeared with ash and dried blood—and clutched at Blaise’s arms where they circled him like a lifeline. The grip was desperate, trembling, not seeking strength but presence. Something real. Something living. Anything that might keep him tethered to the world that hadn’t yet crumbled entirely beneath his feet.
Blaise didn’t speak. Not at first.
He looked at him—looked, really looked—and in the depth of his gaze, the silence filled with something fierce and full of fire. Something unsaid and unshakable.
Then, slowly, he tightened his arms around Draco. Not gentle. Not soft. But solid. Steady. A quiet shield against the storm. For a heartbeat longer.
“And will you?” he asked at last, voice like iron pulled through velvet.
Draco turned.
It wasn’t sudden. It was deliberate, like dragging himself through deep water. But when he faced Blaise, truly faced him, the difference was unmistakable.
This wasn’t the same boy who’d fought beside him through countless skirmishes. Wasn’t the son of a dynasty scrambling to outpace his inheritance. Wasn’t the friend who once sought refuge in cunning and pretense.
What looked back at Blaise now was someone else. Someone newly born in the ash of all that had been lost.
There was grief there, yes. It painted every line of his face, clung to him like the smoke in his lungs. But beneath it—beneath it—was something sharper. He wasn’t hollow.
He was tempered.
The memory of her last breath still clung to him like a shroud, like a coronation. He carried it not as a wound—but as a commandment.
“No,” Draco said.
It was quiet.
But it rang with finality, with weight. Not shouted. Not broken. Just true.
A vow spoken into ruin.
A promise etched into blood.
“No. I won’t.”
And somewhere—faint, but unmistakable—the war shifted.
Not with the thunder of victory. Not with the hush of peace.
But with the first breath of something new.
Something sharp. And bright. And unyielding as iron drawn from flame.
It wasn’t triumph, but it endured like it could be.
It wasn’t hope, not yet—but it pulsed beneath the wreckage like a heartbeat that refused to stop.
A beginning, carved from the cinders.
Born from ash.
Draco stood in that silence, his mother’s last breath still ghosting his skin, and realized that for all his knowledge—for all the precision he’d honed like a scalpel meant to cut the world open—he had never learned the one magic that mattered most.
He had memorized curses that could peel a soul from its shell.
He could disarm a man mid-incantation, sever a killing blow before it formed.
He had traced the edges of magic so ancient and grotesque it pulsed like rot, had listened to what Bellatrix had hissed into his ears—devout as a sermon, deranged as a fever dream—had proved hollow in the face of death’s quiet finality. All of it, all the dark arts he’d mastered under marble ceilings and moonless skies, had turned to ash in his hands.
But none of it had saved her.
All that power, and he had watched her die with blood in her throat and love in her eyes.
Because he had spent too long perfecting the art of destruction.
To summon fire from his fingertips, to twist the world into obedience, to wield his grief like a weapon sharper than any blade. He had learned fury with frightening ease—blood-soaked incantations, combat spells meant to devastate, rituals meant to terrify. He had told himself it was strength. That power meant protection.
That if he was feared, he would never be helpless again.
But in the end, no curse could stop a heart from ceasing its rhythm.
No incantation could rewind a breath already exhaled.
And no amount of fear—his own, or anyone else’s—could hold back death when it came to collect what it was owed.
So, in the smoke-laced silence after her final breath, something inside him cracked.
Not cleanly. Not loudly.
But like the slow, deep fracture of ice giving way beneath too much weight.
And in that break, something new took shape.
While Bellatrix continued her sermons in the dark arts—obsessed with legacy, hungry for domination, eyes alight with madness—Draco chose a different path.
While she whispered of power, he began a different study. One not rooted in fear, but in defiance.
Not out of weakness. But out of cruelty.
He began, in the sleepless aftermath of grief, to teach himself what no one had ever thought to show him.
He learned healing.
Not in daylight. Not in classrooms.
Not in the clean sterility of a library warmed by firelight and the hum of whispered theory.
He learned it in the marrow of shadows—hunched in the forgotten, frozen corners of the Malfoy Manor, where even ghosts refused to linger.
In alcoves choked by the dust of a thousand regrets, beneath shattered archways that had once echoed with the steps of better men, beside portraits smothered in cobwebs—faces that used to whisper, blink, judge. Now, they simply watched. Still. Empty.
The stone itself seemed to pulse with old agony, steeped in a history of pain. It wept cold through the walls, and sometimes, in the silence between spells, he thought he could hear screams.
Not echoes.
Memories.
His only light came from wax-choked candles, their flames shivering as if afraid, or from the pale flicker of his wand—unsteady, uncertain. A spark. A flare. Then darkness again.
And his hands.
Merlin, his hands.
They betrayed him at first.
Trembled like winter branches beneath too much snow—thin, cold, breakable.
They remembered how tightly he had clutched her.
How late he’d been.
The way her skin had cooled beneath his grip, and how he’d begged with magic too violent, too desperate to ever work.
And so they shook.
But he forced them still.
Again. And again.
Until the tremors became drills, until the ache in his knuckles dulled into discipline.
Until memory became method.
Until his fingers stopped clinging to ghosts and started carving clarity.
Not grace.
Precision.
He didn’t learn healing out of mercy.
It wasn’t gentleness that guided him.
He learned it like a soldier learns to reload with blood on his hands.
He learned it like vengeance.
Not as penance for the hexes he’d cast in his father’s name.
Not for the screams he’d ignored, or the broken bodies he’d stepped over with dry eyes.
Not even for the cowardice of neutrality—that lie he’d told himself for years: that standing still meant staying safe.
He learned it because grief is a blade with no hilt—one you carry inside your ribs, pressing deeper every day.
And doing nothing…
Doing nothing would have gutted him slower than any curse ever could.
So he trained.
Not gently.
Not nobly.
But with ruthless intent.
Every cut sealed, every fracture knit, every life steadied beneath his hands was a blow struck against the thing that had taken her.
Against the silence.
Against death.
Against himself.
He didn’t heal because he believed the world deserved saving.
He healed because someone had to survive it.
So he trained.
Alone. Mercilessly.
He taught his magic to listen—not to obey, not just to strike, but to feel.
To move like breath, like blood, like instinct.
He whispered incantations until the syllables etched themselves into the marrow of his bones—until they slipped from his tongue faster than thought, smoother than pulse.
He shaped spells the way others shaped weapons—delicately, relentlessly, until they were no longer words but reflexes.
Until healing wasn’t conjured, but summoned—a command, intimate and inexorable.
He learned how to draw torn skin back together as though weaving silk from raw flesh, to align fractured bones with the brutal grace of a conductor demanding obedience from a chaotic orchestra.
He traced diagrams of the human body into his memory until they burned behind his eyelids—tendons, arteries, ligaments—each one cataloged like precious weaponry.
He didn’t study pain to escape it.
He studied pain to know it.
To track its rhythm, its signatures, its habits—until he could interrupt it mid-step.
Until he could dismantle suffering like a lock, one careful movement at a time.
He trained until healing was no longer a skill.
It was muscle memory.
Pressure points became as familiar to him as spell components.
A bleeding artery was no longer an emergency—it was a pattern, a puzzle, a test he could pass.
His hands moved before thought—steady, ruthless, divine—sealing torn muscle, stitching life back together with quiet incantations that defied death itself.
It stopped being hope.
It became certainty.
Not kindness. Not grace.
Control.
Dominion.
The kind of power he had always been taught to wield outwardly—to conquer, to destroy.
But this was inward.
This was rebellion.
Because yes—he had power. The war had carved that into him, bone-deep and irreversible.
But survival had never been the goal.
Not since the moment he cradled his mother’s fading body in the half-light, felt her heart slow under his blood-soaked hands, and realized:
All his training, all his fury, all his fire—had prepared him to kill.
Not to save.
And in the days that followed—those endless, sleepless nights where her voice still echoed in his ears and her blood still stained the beds of his nails—he made himself a vow.
Never again.
He had killed.
He could kill again.
But to heal—to choose healing—was something else entirely.
Cruelty was easy.
Destruction was instinct.
He had mastered both before he was sixteen.
But compassion?
Compassion was a blade that cut both ways.
A decision made in the quiet aftermath, when no one was watching.
A defiance more dangerous than any curse Bellatrix had ever whispered.
Anyone could burn down a world and call it strength.
But to reach into the fire, pull someone back, and hold them there?
To fight not just to survive, but to preserve—that took more than power.
That took will.
And in the world that had taught him to conquer, in a name that had once meant dominion and fear, Draco Malfoy learned the sharpest weapon he’d ever wielded was mercy.
Not the soft kind.
The merciless kind.
The kind that refused to let death win.
Draco blinked.
Once.
And the memory slipped back beneath the surface—quiet and cold, like a knife sliding into velvet.
Before him, Elias stood trembling.
Spine curved beneath the invisible but crushing weight of humiliation. Wand slack in his grip, as if it no longer belonged to him. The fight had gone out of him—bled away with each parried spell, each counterstrike that had left him raw and exposed. His robes, once a testament to some carefully cultivated pride, now hung uneven, their hem torn, scorched in places. Ash clung to the dark wool like spite, sweat carving lines through soot on his temple. A split lip had already knit itself closed. The bruises blossoming across his ribs—gone. Quietly erased under Draco’s wandwork. But none of that mattered.
Because the shame remained.
It lived in his posture, in the way his shoulders curled inward, protecting nothing. It glistened in his eyes, not as tears, but as hollowness. A void where defiance had once burned. It pooled at his feet, thick and inescapable, like a shadow too heavy to lift. He stood in it. Drenched in it. And still sinking.
But Draco’s voice didn’t rise.
It didn’t need to.
“Compassion is not a weakness,” he said, the words carved from stone rather than spoken.
He stepped forward—measured, unhurried. There was no cruelty in the movement, no threat. Just inevitability. Each step echoed faintly against the dungeon floor, boots brushing against ancient dust. The sound wasn’t loud. It was worse—final. The kind of sound that divided moments in two: before and after.
And his voice… it was quiet. Almost gentle. But like a scalpel—not because it lacked force, but because it didn’t need any.
“Nor an insult.”
Then, he extended a hand.
No hesitation.
The gesture was simple—arm outstretched, fingers open. It was not warm. It was not offered with a smile, or with comfort. But it was steady. Clean. Empty of pity, and just as empty of contempt. A lifeline, not a leash.
Those fingers—long, pale, unshaking—told their own story. Not of privilege, though he had that in spades. Not even of power. But of discipline. Of control honed like a weapon. No tremor. No twitch. No falter. Just the brutal stillness of someone who had taught his magic to heal by force, who had earned mercy through suffering, and wore it not as virtue, but as armor.
“I don’t enjoy hurting others,” Draco said, his voice a thread of silk sliding across broken glass. Low. Smooth. Unapologetic.
“But don’t mistake that for softness.”
His eyes, the color of storm-lit steel, locked on Elias’s. They didn’t blaze—they burned. Slow. Contained. Like the glowing coal at the heart of a dying fire: not flickering, not frantic—ready.
There was no anger in them.
No hatred.
Only conviction.
The kind forged not by ideology, but by survival.
“I won’t show mercy,” Draco said, “to someone who only wants it when they’re bleeding.”
And there it was.
Not arrogance. Not posturing. Truth, raw and unpolished. A blade without ornament.
His hand stayed outstretched—not a command, not a comfort.
A choice.
A door with no handle, no key. The kind you opened with nothing but pride you hadn’t yet swallowed, and pain you hadn’t yet named. It hung in the space between them—terrible in its simplicity.
“Stand up, Elias,” Draco said, each word clipped with precision, honed to hurt. “And learn from this.”
A pause.
“Or stay down. And be forgotten.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was expectant.
Even the dungeon seemed to hold its breath. The stones, cold and ancient, listened. The torches—burning low—did not flicker. The air itself had stilled, thick with something heavier than magic.
The shadows watched.
Waiting.
Elias stared at the offered hand.
Just skin. Just bone.
Just a gesture.
It shouldn’t have mattered.
Purebloods had made a culture of such things—bows that were threats, handshakes that bound like contracts, smiles sharper than daggers. This should have been another. A ritual. A performance in the aftermath of dominance.
But it wasn’t.
This didn’t feel like condescension. It didn’t even feel like forgiveness.
It felt like mercy.
And worse—far worse—
It felt like grace.
His breath caught—snagged in his throat like splintered glass—sharp, jagged, and merciless. It wasn’t just pain. It was the kind of rupture that felt cellular. Something deep inside him tilted—not with a scream, not with a crash, but with a slow, sickening lurch, as though the world had slipped off its axis and forgotten to warn him. Gravity betrayed him. The air turned wrong.
It wasn’t collapse.
It wasn’t clarity.
It was dislocation—a psychic stagger, the quiet horror of realizing the foundation beneath your feet had never truly been steady at all.
He had grown up in a mausoleum dressed as a mansion—a house of polished marble and inherited silence. A home built on ritual and reputation, where the corridors swallowed sound and the portraits watched like judges behind frames of gilded ice. Every footstep muffled by centuries of reverence, by lineage sharpened into expectation.
Words were weapons.
Love was a rumor.
And power? Power was passed down like a bloodstained blade, handed from father to son with fingers still wet from the last command obeyed too well.
There was no room for mercy in Lestrange.
Mercy was a bedtime myth, a fable spoken once and never repeated. It didn’t sit beside you at supper. It didn’t echo in the halls or hide behind locked doors. It was the name of a cousin long dead, a story that ended in madness. Mercy had no lineage. It left no portrait behind.
Vulnerability was not just unwelcome—it was dissected.
Named.
Shamed.
Filed away like a disease to be cured. You learned young not to cry, not to tremble, not to want. Wanting was weakness. Feeling was flaw. And anything soft—anything tender—was hunted down before it could take root.
No one in his family had ever offered him a hand.
They offered instructions, commands laced with expectation.
They offered silence—but not the comforting kind. The kind that had teeth. That came with obligations and debts you dared not name aloud.
Pride was bartered, earned only through performance so flawless it bordered on self-erasure.
Love, if it existed at all, was a transaction measured in obedience and usefulness.
And failure?
Failure was exile—living exile. A quiet erasure that stripped your name from the walls without ever touching a single frame. You remained physically present, but spiritually vanished. A ghost haunting a house still breathing. A story that ended mid-sentence.
But Draco…
Draco hadn’t walked away.
He stayed.
Not out of loyalty. Not out of fear.
He stayed like a faultline, hidden beneath the stone.
He stayed like a storm gathering behind still eyes.
Because someone had to remember that softness once lived here, even if it had been strangled in its cradle.
Someone had to name what had never been named.
And he would not be the silence they handed him.
He would not be the blade they forged.
He would be the fracture.
The defiance.
The start of something that did not flinch when it reached for light.
But Draco…
Draco hadn’t walked away.
He could have.
He should have.
That would have been the cleanest cruelty.
To leave Elias there, crumpled,the aftermath of a duel already forgotten.Discarded like a pawn that had stumbled too close to the edge of the board.The kind of dismissal only kings could afford, cold, impersonal, and absolute.
And that—that would have been worse than losing.
Because losing meant you had mattered for a moment.
Being ignored meant you never had.
But Draco hadn’t walked away.
He stood still.
Composed.
As if the storm had passed through him without stirring a hair out of place.
Wand lowered.
Hand out.
Those silver eyes piercing, unflickering like stars caught mid-collapse.
Burning so slowly they looked cold.
And Elias, still trembling, still reeling beneath the invisible pressure of the room’s watching silence couldn’t look away.
His hand rose.
Slow. Awkward. Uncertain.
Like the motion belonged to someone else.
Someone braver.
Someone not raised on the brittle bones of old pride.
The distance between them vanished in a breath.
Palms met. Skin to skin.
Draco’s grip was firm.
No hesitation. No performance.
His hand was smooth, and oddly— warm.
Not soft.
Not safe.
But warm in the way steel holds heat after fire.
The kind of heat that wasn’t meant to soothe,but to remind you—
you were alive.
That this could still burn.
It was the warmth of control.
Of power that chose to still itself.
Not because it couldn’t destroy, but because it had learned when not to.
And Elias—
He let himself be pulled upward.
Not gracefully.
Not with defiance.
But without resistance.
The motion jarred something loose.
Not just pain.
Not just pride.
But the tectonic shift of a truth too large to name.
A strange stillness settled over him, not surrender.
Not yet.
But something close.
Something deeper.
Disorientation that came not from fear, but from the absence of it.
Like standing at the edge of a tide that hadn’t yet decided whether it would drown him or deliver him.
What… was this?
His breath trembled in his chest.
He stood, but the ground felt foreign.
The bruises had vanished.
The pain, gone.
But balance—
true balance—
was still out of reach.
Something had been shaken loose.
Not just within him.
But around him.
And the dungeon…
the dungeon remained silent.
Not dead.
Waiting.
Not quiet.
Not really.
The air still trembled with what had been. Magic clung to the stone like breath caught in a dying chest—faint, but pulsing. A residual thrum reverberated through the walls, through the very bones of the dungeon, ancient and unwilling to forget. The duel had ended, but its echo endured—a bruise in the ether, invisible yet palpable, like a spell cast too deep into the marrow of things to ever be undone.
The Slytherins hadn’t moved.
They stood like statues in a cathedral of ruin, ringed around the two boys as if witnessing something sacred. A myth in motion. A tableau suspended between violence and revelation. Their faces flickered in the firelight—wide-eyed, slack-jawed, expressions caught somewhere between reverence and dread.
It hadn’t been just a duel.
Not to them.
They had seen something older than magic and more dangerous than blood.
As if a god had descended not with fury, but with an outstretched hand. Not to conquer—but to recognize.
As if mercy had, in that moment, revealed itself to be the sharpest kind of power. And power—true power—had worn mercy like a crown.
Then—
“Interesting,” came a voice from the edge of the circle, a single word soft as silk and twice as cutting.
Cassian Lestrange stepped forward.
The crowd yielded before him without thought, parting like tidewater around a jagged rock. His footsteps were slow, intentional, not so much walking as claiming the ground with every measured beat. Power clung to him—not loud, not shouted, but innate. Carved into the curve of his spine, the set of his shoulders, the lethal stillness of his hands.
His face was beautiful in the way glaciers were—sharp, distant, merciless. Not unfeeling, but curated. Every flicker of emotion beneath his surface felt like a crack in carefully maintained ice. There, in the flickering light, something twisted. Something wild pulsed behind his irises—a quicksilver glint that flared like instinct.
A spark not of rage, but of hunger.
His jaw tightened as he drew closer, and when the torchlight caught his eyes, they gleamed not with anger, but with something more dangerous: fascination.
The look of a predator not ready to pounce, but to understand its prey.
To study it. To savor it.
Like a hunter catching the first glimpse of a myth bleeding truth.
Like someone watching prophecy crack open at the seams.
His gaze flicked—once to Elias, then to Draco.
His lip twitched. A smirk barely born.
Not cruel. Not kind.
Something else.
Something bitter and entertained.
Cassian’s steps carried him within arm’s reach now, his attention sliding to Draco like a caress that cut.
One brow arched. His mouth tilted into something too refined to be a smirk, too cruel to be a smile. And still, his voice, when it came again, was soft.
Teasing. Almost tender.
“You didn’t have to help him, you know,” Cassian said, voice like velvet drawn across a blade. “That’s the sort of thing that gets… misinterpreted.”
The words weren’t barbed. Not overtly.
But the poison laced beneath them was unmistakable.
Dripping in insinuation.
Weakness.
Favoritism.
Affection.
And affection, in the Lestrange family, was just another weapon.
Too soft to be safe.
Too sharp to be forgiven.
Cassian felt it twisting under his ribs—the throb of something raw, tender and hideous.
Jealousy.
Because Draco had offered mercy to Elias.
His brother.
The older brother.
And that mercy… that small, blinding gesture...
was dangerous.
It would be whispered about.
Twisted into meaning.
Rewritten into gossip.
That Draco had chosen Elias.
That he preferred the broken blade to the gleaming one.
That Cassian—unforgiving, ambitious, sharp was less in his eyes.
And that was unforgivable.
Because Draco belonged to Cassian.
In name, in rumor, in the threads of unspoken promises tangled between them. Cassian would not allow Elias—no matter how undeserving to steal even a sliver of what he considered his.
His gaze darkened, and in that look was a possessiveness so fierce,
so scorching,it bordered on violence.
But Draco met it head-on.
Not with fear.
Not even with anger.
But with clarity, cold and bladed.
He saw Cassian.
Not The mask. Not The performance.
He saw the rot beneath the polish. The desperate pride. The petty cruelty. The way Cassian’s words always curved like barbed wire—elegant, but made to wound.
This wasn’t just about power. It never was.
He knew this was messy—just another thread tangled in the brutal tapestry of Lestrange family politics. Power games played in shadows. Alliances forged and shattered with whispered promises. And most of all, a battle for dominance—who would be named heir, who would carry the legacy forward.
Two brothers, locked in a silent war not of swords or spells, but of influence and control.
Power balanced on the edge of a knife, and every glance, every gesture, every breath was a move on the board.
Cassian’s smile stretched wider—sharp and cold, like a serpent’s flickering tongue tasting the air before a strike. It carried a slow, deliberate cunning, ancient as the shadows that curled in forgotten corners of the wizarding world. There was a dark satisfaction gleaming in his eyes, something both pleased and perilous, far too potent for a boy still draped in youth’s fragile guise.
“Oh,” he purred, his voice sliding out smooth as velvet, yet stretched tight over a core of unyielding steel. Each word dripped with a lethal certainty.
“He will learn.”
It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t a promise.
It was a verdict already cast, heavy and inevitable, like the weight of a serpent coiling before the final strike.
Heavy as blood.
Final as fate.
Elias stood there, chest heaving, the sound of his own breath loud in his ears. His body felt locked in place, sculpted from dread and disbelief, as though he were carved into the moment— a monument to hesitation.
Caught between two opposing gravities. Draco’s quiet departure, trailing silence like silk. And Cassian’s coiled presence, drawing all warmth inward like a black star.
The air was thick around him, pressing in on his ribs, his lungs. It felt like standing in a collapsing cathedral—one where all the stained-glass saints had turned their eyes away, and the ceiling groaned above, waiting to fall.
He felt it,not just around him, but inside him.
The shift.
The unraveling.
The awful recognition.
He was no longer a contender. Perhaps he never had been.
Had he truly believed he stood as an equal in this brutal, glimmering dance? That he could reclaim something once his—status, place, pride?
Now, he saw the truth not as a blow, but as a quiet, devastating unveiling.
He had always been the outline, never the subject.
A crack in the perfect floor.
A flaw to contrast their beauty.
A murmur in a house that spoke only in thunder.
And in this suspended stillness, where even time seemed to hold its breath—he was seen.
But not with reverence.
Not with awe.
No, this was a different kind of seeing.
A baring. A peeling back of every defense.
Seen not as he pretended to be— confident, composed, worthy.
But as he was.
Small.
Fractured.
Forgettable.
And something in him gave way. Not loudly. Not visibly.
Just a crack—deep, final, irrevocable.
A shattering that made no sound, yet echoed endlessly inside.
Then—
Cassian’s voice.
Smooth, slow, and sweet as poisoned honey.
It curled into the silence like a blade unsheathed in the dark.
“Honestly,” he drawled, with the lazy charm of someone who always knew the room belonged to him, “I’ll start getting jealous if you only give that sort of attention to my dear older brother.”
The words hung there, playful in tone, but barbed beneath the silk.
Mockery cloaked in affection.
Affection barbed like a trap.
There was something surgical in Cassian’s cruelty,flirtation as incision, slicing where it hurt most.
His gaze settled on Draco like frost settling on glass.
Bright.
Predatory.
Patient.
It was the look of someone who could wait years to make the perfect move,who saw beneath armor, through masks, and into marrow.
But Draco—He didn’t give Cassian the satisfaction of a reaction.
Didn’t rise. Didn’t fall.
He turned.
Simply, fluidly, like a shadow unsticking itself from the wall.
Already leaving.
Already gone.
His robes trailed behind him in a hush of black and silver, the trim catching the low light like the edge of a blade catching the moon.
A phantom’s exit.
A monarch’s dismissal.
His silence was not passive, it was chosen.
Sharper than any retort.
He didn’t reject Cassian.
He rendered him irrelevant.
No smirk.
No glance.
Not even a breath spared.
And in that absence, in that space where Cassian’s words went to die.
Elias stood,still frozen, and finally understood:
This had never been his story.
Draco simply… vanished, gliding away toward the dormitories, away from the murmurs, away from the hungry eyes.
He had nothing left to prove. Not to Elias, whose pride now lay shattered in the dust like the remnants of a broken wand. Not to Cassian, whose smirking silence rang louder than applause. And certainly not to the twisted, coiling game of power and desire that pulsed like a dark heartbeat beneath the stone walls of the Slytherin dungeons—ancient, unyielding, and always watching.
The duel was over, but its aftermath lingered like smoke—sour and electric. The hush that followed was not peace, but tension coiled tight beneath the skin, the kind that made magic itch at the fingertips and breath catch in the throat.
Cassian watched him go.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Didn’t chase after the boy who had just rewritten the hierarchy with a flick of his wand and a voice cold as moonlight. He remained exactly where he was, shoulders relaxed as if untouched by the spectacle, but his stillness betrayed him. There was something coiled behind that casual posture, something sharpened and hungry. His arms folded loosely across his chest, head tilted like a cat watching a candle gutter in the dark—mildly amused, morbidly curious.
That smile—his smile—was the only thing that moved. A sly, carved thing that glinted like a blade under candlelight. It didn’t fade. It didn’t soften. It remained etched across his mouth like frost on glass, impossible to ignore and just as dangerous to touch. It was a smile that invited ruin and reveled in it.
Around him, the other Slytherins began to stir. Slowly. Warily. Like animals unsure if the storm had passed or was merely circling back. Shoes scraped faintly against stone. Cloaks rustled. Conversations sparked like flint against stone—quick, hushed, barely daring.
“Did you see—?”
“No incantation—he just—”
“Elias looked like he was going to vomit—”
“I thought Draco was going to finish him off—”
Their voices darted through the air like startled birds, sharp with awe, heavy with something colder. Respect? Fear? Worship? The line between them had blurred the moment Draco’s magic had risen, quiet and lethal, like black ice beneath a still surface.
And Elias—poor, furious, broken Elias—sat crumpled near the dueling circle, his face drained of blood, pride leaking out of him like ink from a split vial. There were no curses left on his skin, no blood visible, but something deeper than bruises clung to him. Something unseen and far more permanent. The kind of wound you didn’t heal from. The kind that rewrote your name in whispers.
Glances flicked to him, then away like they feared catching the same fate by accident. More eyes shifted toward Cassian—assessing, wondering—and then finally, almost reverently, they turned to the hallway where Draco had vanished.
It stood quiet now. The corridor swallowed sound and breath alike. No footsteps echoed. No shadow flickered. But still, it felt alive—like the stones themselves remembered how power had just passed through them and were reluctant to return to silence.
Cassian’s gaze didn’t move.
Not once.
He stared down that hall as if Draco might reappear at any moment, striding back in silver-light and malice, radiating the kind of control that made you forget how to breathe. He stared like someone who had just seen the shape of something divine, and wasn’t sure if it was god or devil.
In his mind, he could still see the way Draco moved—effortless, fluid, commanding. Not a boy. Not a student. Something else entirely. Smoke made flesh. Ice with a heartbeat. His magic had tasted old. Older than him. Older than this school. It had hung in the air like perfume and poison, both a warning and a temptation.
Draco hadn’t just walked away from that duel.
He’d ascended from it.
And Cassian—bright, brilliant, vicious Cassian—was still rooted to the floor, replaying every moment. Every gesture. Every breathless pause. His thoughts moved behind his eyes like serpents in tall grass, too fast to name, too silent to trace.
Because it wasn’t just the duel.
It wasn’t even the win.
It was the restraint.
Draco could’ve destroyed Elias. Could’ve crushed him like a beetle beneath his heel. The magic had been there—boiling beneath his skin, humming in his bones, more ancient and ruthless than anything taught in textbooks.
But he hadn’t.
He’d held back.
And that, Cassian realized, was the most terrifying part of it all.
Because mercy was power, too. And Draco had wielded it like a blade.
He had chosen not to end Elias. Not out of pity. Not even out of strategy.
But because it hadn’t mattered.
Elias hadn’t mattered.
Cassian felt the realization bloom in his chest like fire catching dry parchment.
That duel—it had never truly been about Elias.
It had been a performance. A message.
And whoever it was meant for…
His gaze slid, slow and surgical, to the back of the dungeon. His eyes, unreadable no longer, locked on a figure half-draped in flame and shadow.
Tom Riddle.
Perfectly still. Perfectly composed. As though not a single moment had touched him, and yet—something had. Something had brushed the edge of his awareness and lingered. His hands were steepled before his mouth like a priest before confession, or a king considering war. And his eyes—those fathomless eyes—gleamed with a brightness too cold to be fire. There was no heat in them. No humanity. Just the polished gleam of intellect sharpened into cruelty, and curiosity honed into possession.
He sat with one leg crossed over the other, reclined in a high-backed chair like a prince carved from shadow, draped in velvet the color of old secrets. The flames at the hearth struggled against his stillness, casting him in flickers of gold and ruin. Light licked at his cheekbones and jaw, painting his face in shifting contrast—warm one second, void the next. It was like watching something caught between two worlds. Something not quite mortal.
And his eyes—oh, his eyes.
They did not reflect fire like mirrors. They absorbed it. Reflected it like oil slicks, dark and rippling, a sheen of colorless hunger stretched across fathomless depth. Beautiful, in the way a sinkhole might be. Or a sacrificial altar.
He wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t surprised.
He was happy.
The kind of quiet, private happiness that didn’t bloom but burned. The kind a predator wears when it knows the scent of blood is near, when it has already chosen which part of the kill to sink its teeth into first.
Cassian’s breath caught.
His smile—once carved with effortless charm, once fixed and feline and full of coiled superiority—faltered. Not in a crash, but a slow, inward collapse. Like a rose folding itself into thorns. Like ice melting beneath its own coldness. It folded in on itself, and left nothing but silence behind.
Because there it was.
The burn.
The slow, sick twist in his chest. The heat that pooled low in his stomach, molten and unforgiving. Jealousy—hotter than any spell, crueler than any wound. It slithered through him like black smoke in the lungs, leaving ash on his tongue.
He had seen it.
How close Riddle had stood to Draco. Too close. Their shadows had merged beneath the torchlight like something fated. Had leaned in, Tom’s head tilted just enough to speak low—too low—so only Draco could hear. Lips brushing too near the shell of his ear, breath curling against skin that should not have welcomed it.
And worse.
He had seen Tom’s fingers graze Draco’s wrist.
Light. Lingering. Intentional.
A touch with no spell, but with every intention. A whisper made flesh.
Cassian had wanted to hex him. Right there. To tear the stillness off Tom’s face like ripping silk. To ruin him. To crack the marble calm and watch something raw spill out. Curse him until his tongue shriveled like an old root and dropped, useless, from his mouth—just to stop him from speaking to Draco again.
He had welcomed the interruption—his brother’s stupid, accidental timing—because for a moment, it had looked like they were going to kiss. And if they had, Cassian would’ve had no choice.
He would’ve crossed the line.
To make him bleed.
To make him kneel.
He would’ve carved the word mine into the bones of Tom Riddle’s hand just to remind him who not to touch.
But he hadn’t.
Not yet.
And now, Riddle sat in the flickering quiet, unmoved. Unbothered.
As if the chaos that had unfolded—the duel’s sharp crescendo, the breathless hush of the crowd, the smear of blood glistening on Elias’s split lip—was nothing more than theatre. A drama stitched together with sweat and spellfire, performed solely for his dark amusement.
He hadn’t applauded. Hadn’t so much as blinked. But something in the angle of his head, in the precise stillness of his posture, betrayed the truth:
He had enjoyed it.
Not in the way others might—cheering, gasping, murmuring in wonder—but deeper. Quieter. Like a conductor listening to the first perfect chord of a symphony only he could truly hear. His gaze, obsidian and bottomless, drank in the aftermath like wine aged on cruelty and control. And in that firelit silence, with shadows licking at his collarbones and flamelight dancing along his cheek, Riddle looked not like a boy, or a student, or even a victor.
He looked like a god in waiting.
As if this—all of this—had been nothing but the prologue.
Not an ending.
A beginning.
The lull before the storm’s throat clears. The breath before the blade sinks in.
And the only thing left now—
the only thing that ever mattered—
was the final act.
The one no one saw coming.
The one that would leave no one untouched.
The one written in silence and sealed in blood.
And Tom Riddle—
perfectly still, perfectly poised was already rehearsing his lines.
And everyone else were just puppets.
Strings wrapped tight around their spines, tugged by invisible fingers. They danced, they fought, they bled—thinking themselves fierce, thinking themselves free—never once realizing the stage had already been set, the script already written, the ending already chosen.
Elias, broken and breathless.
Cassian, trembling with a fury he couldn’t name.
The crowd, wide-eyed and murmuring like cattle too stupid to recognize the butcher.
Even Draco.
Especially Draco.
Though… no.
Riddle’s gaze darkened infinitesimally, a crack in the mirror of his calm.
Not a puppet. Not quite.
A rival piece on the board.
A king disguised as a knight.
A fire that had not yet decided what it wanted to burn.
There had been something in the way Draco moved—aloof but honed, cold but crackling with some untamed spark Riddle hadn’t accounted for. Something maddeningly deliberate. And when their eyes had met across the torchlit floor, time itself had seemed to stagger.
For a moment. Just a moment.
Riddle had felt something pull.
Not fear. Never that. But interest. Hunger, maybe.
The kind that came before possession.
Before ruin.
And now he sat, still cloaked in silence, the corner of his mouth lifting ever so slightly—less a smile, more a promise.
He would let them play their parts a little longer. Let them twist and struggle in the illusion of choice. Let Cassian stew in his jealous little fury. Let Draco keep his secrets and spin his web.
But soon the curtain would rise.
And when it did, Tom Riddle would no longer be the audience.
He would be the playwright.
The actor.
The hand on every string.
The god in the machine.
And not a soul—not Cassian, not Elias, not even Draco Peverell—would escape the final act unmarked.
Cassian felt the fury fade like a tide—slow, reluctant, but inevitable. It ebbed from his veins with a strange chill, leaving behind something colder, something quieter. A decision, not a feeling. Not rage. Not pain. Resolve.
If they were all puppets in Riddle’s grand little theatre, then he would be the one to take up the blade and cut his own strings—no matter the cost.
Even if it carved him open.
Even if it soaked the stage in blood.
Because he would not be made to dance.
Not for Riddle.
Not for anyone.
He would not be a piece.
He would be the player.
Cassian’s breath came slow and steady now, the fire in his chest no longer wild but forged—compressed into something sharper than before. He would take the strings. All of them. Wrap them around his fingers until they sang. Until Dracosang.
He would become the one pulling Draco’s motions from the shadows, the one making him feel—twist, falter, burn.
The one to own Draco’s heart.
And if he couldn’t hold it gently—if it slipped, if it belonged to Riddle instead, if it beat for someone else—then so be it.
He’d hold it anyway.
Crush it, if he had to.
Better a shattered heart in his hands than a whole one in Riddle’s.
Because if that snake dared to take the prettiest, most powerful doll for himself, if he believed for even a second that Draco would stay on a leash knotted by charm and shadows—he was a fool.
He should have made sure the strings were tightly wrapped. Should have sewn the threads into Draco’s bones. Should have chained the heart to his own before anyone else noticed it could beat for another.
Too late.
Let the curtain rise.
Let the spotlights blind.
Let the audience hush with bated breath.
Cassian’s smirk returned—colder now. Not charming. Not venomous. Something darker.
Let’s see the show.
Let’s see who ends up dangling.
Let’s see who bleeds when the strings snap.
Let’s see who is the puppet—
and who is the puppeteer.
On with the show.
The moment the door shut behind Peverell, silence cracked open like a wound.
It wasn’t the calm kind. It was the kind that rang—brittle and raw—in the hollow just after impact. Like the echo of a shattered glass still hanging in the air. The stillness didn’t soothe. It stung.
The room held its breath. The air still thrummed with leftover magic, sharp and metallic on the tongue. It clung to the walls, soaked into the stone, coiled in the dark spaces behind furniture and under tapestries like a living thing. The torches flickered uneasily, throwing distorted shadows that stretched far too long—like the dungeon itself was recoiling, or remembering.
Then, slowly—like a ripple breaking the surface of still water—the Slytherin common room exhaled.
“Did you see that?” someone whispered, voice paper-thin, like if they spoke too loud, Peverell might return.
Across the room, a tall sixth-year girl stood near the fire, her silhouette painted in flickering amber.
Lestrange,” she muttered, almost to herself. “Dropped like a first-year. Pathetic.”
Her voice was smooth, but the curl of her lip had too much tension, too much calculation, to be true disdain. It was armor. The kind made of breeding and pride.
Nearby, a cluster of boys shifted in their seats. One adjusted his collar. Another scratched at his sleeve as though brushing off something invisible. Their eyes didn’t meet for long. The glances they exchanged were quiet sparks—wariness, recognition, the fragile edge of respect born of fear. Some spoke in low, speculative tones, dissecting the duel like it had been a riddle they’d failed to solve. They named spells in hushed voices, attempted to chart the sequence of Draco’s movements like scholars at a crime scene. But even they knew: the true threat hadn’t been in the incantations.
It had been in the silences between them.
Others remained mute altogether, their silence louder than speech. Not because they didn’t understand what had happened—but because they didn’t understand how.
There was awe in the room—thick, electric, almost reverent. But it was twisted awe. The kind reserved not for saints, but for monsters in beautiful skin. The kind that left you staring too long, knowing you shouldn’t, unable to look away.
Because this hadn’t been about skill. Or training.
It had been about dominion.
Power had been displayed—but not the polished, theoretical power they practiced in dueling club or whispered about over tea. This was something older. Colder. Like Peverell had opened a door and let something ancient crawl into him—something that didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate, didn’t care who watched.
“He didn’t even raise his voice,” breathed a younger student from the stairs, her robes too long for her frame, eyes blown wide like Galleons. Her voice was a feather’s touch on the air. “He didn’t even look angry.”
And that, somehow, was the most terrifying part.
Because if that was him merciful—if that was him holding back—
then what would he look like when he truly wanted someone broken?
There was a beat of silence. Heavy. Thick. Like the air had been stitched shut.
Then Mulciber spoke.
Seated with his back to the fire, the orange light carving hollows beneath his cheekbones, he looked more sculpture than student—something too old, too carved by shadows. His long fingers were steepled beneath his chin, the gesture precise, deliberate. His voice, when it came, was calm. Too calm. But threaded through it was something sour and brittle, like rust on the edge of a blade.
“Some of it was wandless magic,” he said flatly. “Or close enough. He cast through a shield with almost no incantation.”
The words landed with a muted thud, drawing eyes to him like moths to a slow-burning flame. Several heads turned, a quiet shiver of movement—seeking confirmation, clarity, reassurance. Anything to convince themselves that what they had just witnessed was still within the realm of the explainable.
Mulciber didn’t offer it. He didn’t look up. He stared into the fire like it owed him answers it refused to give.
Across the room, a fifth-year boy leaned in, the collar of his robes bunched around his throat. “But Lestrange is good,” he said uncertainly, voice barely above a whisper. “He’s top of—”
“Was,” corrected the girl with the goblet, cutting across him with the cold finality of a closing door. Her smile didn’t return. She hadn’t stopped watching the door. “He was top.”
That silence came again, this one even colder. Tighter. Like frost creeping through bone.
Because they’d all felt it—what had just moved through that room was something too precise, too poised, too terrible in its ease. The common room hadn’t been this quiet since the days when a boy named Tom Riddle had ruled these same stones, gliding through shadows like a knife sheathed in silk.
And now it was happening again.
But this time, it hadn’t come from within.
This time, it had entered through the door.
A hush swept through the room like a tide drawing back—unspoken, unnatural. Then—
Giggling.
Soft at first. Sharp and sudden like the cracking of ice before a thaw. Nervous, breathless, the sound of tension giving way to something else—something exhilarated, and vaguely unhinged.
“Did you see the way he walked off?” a witch whispered, eyes bright, her grin barely hidden behind the rim of her goblet as she leaned toward her friend. Her voice shimmered with the thrill of spectacle. “Like he owned the room. Like the rest of us weren’t even real.”
“Oh, he’s cold,” another girl breathed. Her cheeks were crimson, her voice dreamy, drunk on the memory. She tucked a fall of sleek black hair behind one ear and stared toward the door like she could summon him back through it. “I’ve neverseen anyone take Lestrange apart like that. And the way he looked—did you see his eyes?”
“That wasn’t anger,” the first girl said again, slower now, the words unfolding like silk in her mouth. “That was mercy.”
A pause followed, almost reverent. And then, softer still—like the whisper of a confession torn from a diary’s spine—
“He’s… handsome.”
The word felt too small. Too human. It landed with a hush and sat there, oddly fragile amid the wreckage of the duel. Handsome didn’t capture the danger, the stillness, the way Draco Peverell had looked like a weapon carved from something colder than bone.
“In that dangerous, don’t-touch-or-you’ll-bleed sort of way,” the girl added, her voice a breath, a tremble.
The giggles returned, higher now, curling at the edges into something more uncertain. More afraid. A few girls glanced toward the fireplace, as though expecting to see his silhouette there still—etched in soot and flame, a ghost refusing to leave.
But across the room, half-shadowed and forgotten, another figure sat still.
Tom Riddle.
Unmoving. Listening.
His hands were folded neatly in his lap. His face an exquisite mask of boredom. But his eyes—
His eyes glowed faintly, like candlelight behind glass. Still. Cold. Calculating.
He had said nothing during the duel. Had not flinched, nor leaned forward, nor asked the name Peverell aloud.
But he was listening now.
To the giggles. To the awe. To the fear.
His gaze remained fixed on the door Draco had vanished through, unmoving, unblinking—dark eyes burning low beneath the flicker of firelight like embers banked too long. He didn’t speak. Didn’t stir. The shadows clung to him as if reluctant to let go.
Around him, the others began to shift.
Restless.
Uncertain.
Avery muttered something—useless words, shallow and trembling, drowned by the soft buzz of whispers that rolled through the common room like static. Elias poured himself a drink with hands that shook just a fraction too much. The bottle clinked against the rim of the goblet, betraying him. He didn’t look at Tom. None of them did.
The younger students barely breathed.
No one wanted to speak too loudly around Riddle. Not now.
Not when he’d remained so terribly, deafeningly silent.
No quip.
No smirk.
Not even a single word.
Because Tom was thinking.
He was watching.
He was replaying the scene behind his eyes like a curse, each frame dragged slow and sharp across his mind, dissected with surgical precision. Every movement. Every syllable. Every flick of Draco’s wrist and every calculated pause between steps.
The duel hadn’t been a performance. It had been a revelation.
And worst of all—he had tried to stop it.
The realization struck like ice cracking along his spine: he had stepped in. Spoken up. Intervened. An act born of instinct, not strategy. A rare lapse in the mask. A fracture.
He had tried to protect Draco.
Not as a tactic. Not as a trap. But something raw, something irrational and possessive.
And Draco had refused him.
He had risen alone. Cast alone. Dismantled Lestrange without hesitation, without spectacle, without even breaking pace. No theatrics. No cruelty. Just control.
Power in its purest, most unadorned form.
He hadn’t simply won—he had made it clear the duel had never truly been a threat.
Tom’s fingers twitched once at his side.
Because it wasn’t just power. It wasn’t just bloodline. It was something older. Something deeper.
Draco had stood in the firelight like a figure out of prophecy—wrought from stormcloud and silence, every inch of him carved in restraint. His voice had fallen like a blade through velvet—quiet, decisive, utterly unimpressed by the boy who’d challenged him.
Not defiance.
Not arrogance.
Inheritance.
But not the kind written in a Gringotts ledger.
The kind forged in ruin. Shaped by war. Passed from those who had survived.
A weapon—sheathed in silk.
Tom wanted to be angry.
He should have been angry.
He had set the board. Lined up the pieces. Lestrange was meant to humiliate him, to fracture that cool exterior and reveal something real beneath. Desperation, fear, anything.
Something Tom could grasp. Use. Control.
Instead—he had watched Draco disassemble Lestrange with the ease of a man flicking dust from his coat. He had made mercy look like dominance. Had offered Lestrange his hand not with pity, not with scorn—but with quiet dignity.
An act so foreign, so infuriatingly pure, it sizzled like acid behind Tom’s teeth.
Redemption.
The word tasted foul.
Tom didn’t understand it. Didn’t want to. Because kindness was a façade. Mercy a liability. Compassion was weakness polished to look like virtue.
And yet—Draco had offered it anyway.
With the same calm he had used to win the duel.
And somehow, that small gesture—the steady hand, the unspoken offer—it haunted him.
Not because it threatened him. Not even because it challenged him.
But because it made his chest ache.
Not with fury.
Not with envy.
With something far worse.
Yearning.
Because for the briefest moment, Draco had looked at Lestrange the way no one had ever looked at Tom Riddle.
As if he still believed someone could be saved.
The thought made Tom’s jaw clench. His breath drew sharp and quiet through his nose. His rage was there—yes, sharp and molten, coiled just beneath the surface like a curse waiting for a name.
But layered over it, wrapped so tightly around it he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began—
Was longing.
And that—
That was unforgivable.
It was unbearable—the way their eyes still followed the path Draco had taken, as if the very air shimmered in his wake. Like something sacred had brushed past them, and they were desperate to hold onto the heat of it, to preserve the moment like pressed flowers between pages. Something eternal. Something divine.
The girls giggled in pairs, eyes bright, hiding smiles behind hands, breathless with the aftertaste of something they couldn’t name. They murmured Peverell like it was a spell, like saying his name again might summon him back—might grant them another glimpse of that poised, silver-edged elegance. Not the cold, sharp beauty of knives, but the unbearable allure of something unknowable. Something untouchable.
And the boys—boys who had called him a fraud, a pretty face, an impostor draped in borrowed silk—now leaned forward with hushed reverence. Their voices trembled with the echo of awe. One compared him to a warlock of old. Another whispered of duels past, of bloodlines traced in myth. Someone had already conjured a headline: The Second Coming of the Peverell Line.
Tom could hear them all.
His nails bit crescents into his palms.
Not because Draco had taken the spotlight.
But because they had so little mind to give.
They adored what they didn’t understand. Idolized what they’d feared not an hour before. Fickle. Thoughtless. Pavlovian in their worship—clinging to strength when it was beautiful and safe, and discarding it the moment it made them uncomfortable. They were no different than the children at Wool’s—cruel when the moment called for it, groveling when it didn’t. They had watched Draco bleed restraint, wield mercy like it was a blade, and now they claimed him.
As if they had earned the right.
Tom’s fury pulsed behind his eyes, quiet and venomous.
They had mocked Draco. Whispered about him. Spread lies they didn’t understand—parroting things they’d heard from older students or bitter prefects who felt outshined. They didn’t know him. Hadn’t tried.
And yet now, after that duel—after a few minutes of brilliance and control and mercy—they acted as if they’d known all along. As if they’d always admired him. As if they had earned the right to want him.
Tom felt sick.
It was laughable. Pitiful, really.
But what was worse—what was intolerable—was the way it affected him.
The way their laughter prickled under his skin. The way their adoration made something tighten in his chest, ugly and human. The way his jealousy wasn’t aimed at Draco, but at them.
Because they were free to feel it.
Free to admire. To swoon. To follow.
He wasn’t.
He wasn’t allowed to feel anything but control.
And yet—
That quiet, crawling emotion had stirred in him like a snake uncurling. Not hatred. Not disdain. But something closer to longing.
He hated that.
He hated the way Draco made him feel soft—like there was something fragile inside him that could still be reached. As if he were mortal. As if he still belonged to the race of men who could be moved by a single outstretched hand.
That wasn’t power. That wasn’t strength.
It was weakness. Emotion. A relic of a boy he had long since buried.
And yet—
He stood there, jaw tight, hands curled at his sides, and listened to their foolish admiration echo off the stones. He breathed it in like smoke, and with every inhale, something in him cracked.
Not because Draco had power.
But because, for the first time in memory, Tom longed to be the one looking at him like that—like yearning wasn’t weakness, like desire could bloom without punishment. Like he was allowed to feel, and not be flayed for it.
And he didn’t know what to do with a want that felt less like hunger and more like a prayer whispered into the dark—too fragile, too real, too human.
Something he was never meant to be.
He was built of colder things—marble and smoke, ambition sharpened into knives. Not softness. Not mercy. Not the ache that curled in his ribs like a secret begging to be kept.
He wanted to burn the feeling out of himself. Or bottle it. Or press it into Draco’s skin like a spell no one else could cast.
Instead, he stood still. Silent. Watching the door.
Because if he moved, he wasn’t sure what part of himself might shatter.
If he’d survive the sound.
Notes:
This isn’t a new chapter, I just split the chapter into two parts because although people voted for one long chapter I feel it’s way too long. Also check out Ridikas tumblr, such an amazing artist. https://www.tumblr.com/ridikas/788354793699753984/yay-the-wip-is-done-overall-this-took-like-16-and?source=share
Chapter 11: I’m sorry and thank you
Chapter Text
Sorry,this is not an update.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while now but kept pushing myself to keep going,which is one of the reasons I needed a break in the first place. The truth is, I’ve hit burnout and honestly lost interest. Not just in writing, but in the Harry Potter fandom overall.
It’s gotten to the point I haven’t worked on the story at all. Just for refrence I have 30k words written for the next chapter. There is still so much I need to write and restructure, so I won’t be posting the chapter yet, maybe not for months. Or at all.
Unfortunately I can’t force things because it’s not the level I want the chapter or the story to be so the only option I have is to give myself time to get back into the fandom, and get inspired again.
I think a big part of the reason was that I wasn’t reading anything from the fandom at all because I was too focused on writing, which didn’t leave me much time. And the other I think it’s like when a cook makes food, by the end of it they don’t want to eat their own cooking. It feels like I was too focused on my own fic that I got bored or sick of it. It sucks. But that’s why I haven’t uploaded or been active.
I really hope I do get back into this story because when I came up with this idea, it was different than what it turned out to be, because that’s how I work as a writer. I kinda frankstein my ideas, which I have wayyy to many. This story is really interesting to me not just plot wise but because I ended up loving the characters more than I thought I would. I think many of you really love Cassian which was surprising and yet not so because although unhinged he has his own charms. He was never designed to be unhinged, in fact he was originally supposed to be Draco’s friend and confidant but instead he just evolved, took life on his own. Same with Myrtle, she initially was supposed to have a minor appearance and be a background character but as I wrote her she just was endearing to me. She became more important. Gideon was also not meant to be an important character just a minor role but he’s become Draco’s friend and confidant, what was initially cassians original role. There’s so many other characters that changed with the story, and it made it fun for me. I don’t know when I’ll update or get back into the fandom but I just wanted to thank you all for reading and loving the characters as much I do. Please leave down below some of your favorite fics. Especially if you have any James potter/ Sirius black recs. I got interested in them just yesterday after watching a video about them, and I don’t know where to start. Crossing fingers this gets me back into writing. Again thank you so much for reading! It really does mean a lot to know which characters you like, theories, small comments. It encourages me to know someone likes the fic, and makes it worthwhile to share it. I won’t say this is a goodbye or an end but a pause. Love you so much and stay safe!
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