On Sunday, when Hermione quietly relayed Professor Dumbledore's news about Quirrell's escape to Draco beneath the great oak tree by the Black Lake, she watched something cross his face that she had never seen there before.
"When did Quirrell escape?" The faint smile vanished. His face went pale.
"Professor Dumbledore said it happened during the Quidditch match yesterday at noon," Hermione said, watching him carefully.
Draco's expression shifted.
His eyes went, almost involuntarily, to the thin gold chain at her collar. A flicker of desperate hope appeared in them.
"Hermione, could we —"
"I know what you're thinking," she said, and sighed. "I'm afraid it won't work. The Time-Turner has strict limitations — five hours at most. Yesterday noon is far too long ago."
Draco's face went the colour of new parchment.
And just like that, it was done.
Pettigrew had given his life to free the Dark Lord.
He should have known better. Even a lion uses its full strength to take a rabbit — he had made the mistake of underestimating a desperate, cornered man.
Pettigrew had been hiding in plain sight beside Harry for two years. Of course he knew that the Dark Lord's soul was still anchored to Hogwarts. He would have overheard everything.
"Harry and Ron must have talked about Quirrell in front of that rat," Draco said, his voice flat.
"I think so," Hermione said quietly. "But they didn't know. No one knew. When they needed to speak privately, they avoided their roommates and their families — but why would they ever think to watch what they said in front of a rat?"
"No," Draco said. "It's my fault."
The rage he felt was directed inward entirely. He had assumed that Quirrell, under Dumbledore's close watch, was safely contained. He had assumed the Dark Lord could not escape. He had been so focused on hunting down Horcruxes that he had failed to account for people working just as hard in the opposite direction.
It had only taken a Finite Incantatem. A simple counter-curse, first year level, and Pettigrew had spent months creeping through the castle to find the right moment to cast it.
All those nights when the Marauder's Map had shown a suspicious figure near the third-floor corridor — he had told himself it was none of his business. He had told himself to keep his head down. He had looked away, every time, because it didn't involve him.
Slytherin principle: don't meddle.
His hands were shaking faintly.
He was not limited by ability. He had been limited by choice. And he had chosen wrong, again and again, out of a habit of self-preservation that had cost him everything.
He got to his feet too quickly. His vision greyed at the edges. He caught himself against the oak tree, stood there for a moment in silence, and then walked away — past Hermione's voice calling after him, past the students scattered across the lawns, away from the laughter and the light.
---
He climbed the Astronomy Tower the way a man walks in his sleep.
He knew this place too well. It held too many things.
In his past life, lightning had cracked across this tower and Dumbledore had fallen, and Draco had stood there and done nothing and the moment had passed and never come back.
He had spent this life trying to change what he carried from the last one. He had been careful and clever and thorough, and it had not been enough, because fate was not something you outmanoeuvred with cleverness. You could shift the threads, perhaps. You could give them a slight new direction. But the shape of things, underneath — perhaps that never changed at all.
The Dark Lord was free.
He could become a Death Eater again. Or the Dark Lord might simply kill him, if any of his secret work came to light.
He did not know which prospect frightened him more.
He folded himself into the shadowed alcove beneath the observatory, pulled his knees to his chest, and stared at nothing.
---
"He's not in the common room," Pansy Parkinson said, looking at Hermione with the particular expression she reserved for people she considered beneath acknowledgement. "A Gryffindor. Coming to the entrance of the Slytherin common room. Merlin."
She would not have given this bushy-haired Muggle-born the time of day under any ordinary circumstances. But the girl had said it was important, and involving Draco, and that had been enough to make Pansy stop.
She ran a hand over her neat bob and found it deeply irritating that she was having this conversation.
"It's nothing — I mean, it's to do with studies —" Hermione's eyes were moving quickly around the corridor in a way that suggested she was already calculating her exit.
"Oh, not so fast." Pansy's voice sharpened. "I've been wanting to ask you something. That snake ring on your hand — why would a Gryffindor be wearing something like that? Did Draco give it to you? What exactly is the nature of this study partnership, because it does not look like —"
"It's a gift, that's all. I'm sorry, I really do have to —"
"Hey! I haven't finished —"
But Hermione Granger, apparently, had finished. She was gone around the corner before Pansy could say another word, moving at the speed of someone with somewhere considerably more urgent to be.
Pansy stared after her, deeply dissatisfied.
---
The night had grown late by the time Hermione found him.
She had checked every place she could think of — the library, the courtyard, his usual seat in the Arithmancy classroom, twice around the lake. She had, in a moment she was not proud of, even considered sneaking into Snape's office to look for Polyjuice Potion. She had broken curfew. She was going to lose the house at least fifty points when this was over.
She had been furious at him, somewhere in the middle of it all, for disappearing like that. She was still furious.
Then she saw him.
He was tucked into the alcove beneath the observatory — the same spot where she had brought him birthday cake in September, what felt like a very long time ago. His long legs were folded up, arms wrapped around his knees, head bowed. He looked much younger than fourteen, and much older. He looked like something had been taken out of him.
She had seen him tired, and sardonic, and frightened, and elated. She had never seen him like this. There was nothing left on his face.
All the annoyance went out of her at once.
"Draco." She crossed the alcove and knelt in front of him. "Draco, what's wrong? Don't do this — talk to me."
He looked up. Something in his expression shifted when he saw her — some small, reluctant relief.
"Hermione," he said, very quietly.
"I'm here." She reached out and touched the back of his hand, and found it stone cold despite the warmth of the June night. "Hey. I'm right here."
He was quiet for a moment. Then:
"Have you ever had the feeling that no matter what you do — no matter how much you plan, or try, or work — things keep moving along a path that has already been decided? As if none of it matters at all?"
"What makes you say that?" she asked, carefully. She had begun trying to warm his hand between both of hers.
He didn't answer directly. He pressed his forehead down against his knees, and she watched his shoulders rise and fall with a slow, unsteady breath.
She reached up, without really deciding to, and laid her hand gently on his hair.
He stiffened slightly. She didn't move her hand.
"Draco," she said, softly. "Whatever it is, tell me. Please."
A long pause.
"The Dark Lord has escaped," he said, muffled.
"I know. I told you that." She kept her voice even. "What does that have to do with you specifically?"
"It means everything I've been working toward has come to nothing." He raised his head. His eyes were wet, and he made no effort to hide it — which frightened her, because she had never seen him not hide it. "He'll kill me. When he finds out what I've done."
"Why would he target you?" She searched his face. "You're pure-blood. Your family —"
"My father was a Death Eater. And I have betrayed the Dark Lord." The words came out steady and flat, which somehow made them worse. "He does not forgive betrayal. He especially does not forgive it from the families who were supposed to be his most devoted. He will not spare me because of blood."
Hermione sat with this for a moment. She thought of all the small things she had noticed over three years and could not explain — the things he knew that he shouldn't, the way he moved through danger with a kind of grim familiarity, the nights he hadn't slept, the look on his face sometimes when he thought no one was watching.
Her throat felt tight.
"Don't cry," she said, and then immediately felt it was the wrong thing to say, because he wasn't crying yet, not quite, and she had clearly made it worse. She fumbled in her pocket and found the handkerchief she had been carrying since the autumn — his handkerchief, the grey one he had given her — and held it out.
He looked at it. Then he took her hand, the one holding the handkerchief, and held on.
"Hermione," he said.
Just her name. As if it meant several things at once.
"I'm here," she said again.
He looked at her for a long time. And then something painful moved across his face, and he let her hand go.
"While there's still time," he said, slowly and with difficulty, "you should — please — keep your distance from me. Don't — don't stay near me."
Hermione stared at him.
He was asking her to leave with his words. He was asking her to stay with his eyes.
She was not leaving.
"That," she said, "is the most ridiculous thing you have ever said to me, and you've said quite a few ridiculous things." She glared at him. "Do you think I'm the kind of person who runs away when a friend is in trouble? After everything? Is that actually what you think of me?"
He looked down. He didn't answer.
"Look at me." She cupped his face in both hands and made him. "Listen to me. I don't know what you've done. But whatever it is, I am ready to face it alongside you. That is not a question."
"I don't want you to," he said, and his voice broke slightly on it. "I don't want you in danger. I don't want you hurt. I don't want you —" He stopped.
"I know," Hermione said, fiercely. "And have you considered that I don't want those things for you either? Have you ever once thought about that?" Her eyes were bright with something that was anger and something else. "Draco Malfoy, what makes you think you have the right to protect everyone else and accept nothing in return? What kind of arrogance is that?"
He blinked at her.
"Gryffindors," she said, her voice rising with indignation, "do not hide in corners letting people they care about carry everything alone. If you are frightened, I will stand next to you while you're frightened. If you are in danger, I will be there. That is not up for discussion."
His face was very still.
Very slowly, the water that had been gathering in his eyes ran over.
Hermione watched it happen and felt something break open quietly inside her own chest.
She didn't say anything. She moved to sit beside him instead of in front of him, their shoulders touching, and looked out at the dark grounds far below. After a moment, he let his head drop slightly, and she felt the faint warmth of him against her temple.
"You said it was your fault that Pettigrew escaped," she said, eventually, in a much quieter voice. "I don't understand that. You're hiding something from me. You've been hiding things from me since first year, and I have been patient" — she said the word with a certain emphasis — "but not indefinitely. You have to tell me now. All of it."
He made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
"Do you know what you're asking?" He lifted his head and looked at her sideways. His voice had steadied, a little. "If you know all of this, there's no going back. It isn't something you can unknow."
She met his gaze without flinching. "Tell me. I want to know everything."
She gripped his hand tightly. Her fingers were warm and completely certain.
He looked at her for a long time — this girl who had spent three years slowly, stubbornly dismantling every wall he put up, who had brought him cake and scolded him about meals and held his hand in the dark and refused, in every possible way, to be kept safely at a distance.
She might be frightened, once she knew. She might pull away.
She did not look frightened now.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then he said, very quietly, "All right. As you wish."
And in the wind-scoured dark of the Astronomy Tower, Draco Malfoy opened the door.
He told her how they had first found the word Horcrux — in that small black book, with her help translating the Latin, in the library in second year.
He told her what Horcruxes were: what they required to make, what they did, what it meant that Voldemort had created them.
He told her that the diary Harry had destroyed in the Chamber of Secrets had been a Horcrux.
He told her that Sirius Black and Kreacher had recently destroyed two more — Hufflepuff's Cup and the Slytherin locket.
He told her how he had gone alone into the Chamber of Secrets and taken a Basilisk fang, and how he had used it to destroy the Ravenclaw Diadem in the Room of Requirement — a story no one else knew.
He told her that he had been working quietly alongside Dumbledore, and that he and Sirius were now searching for the Gaunt ring, Slytherin's last known relic.
He told her that he had been trying, all this time, to trap the Dark Lord's soul before it could reattach itself to a body — and that he had failed.
He chose his words carefully. He left out the things that were not his to share — his mother's unwitting part in it, the Grey Lady's grief, the details that would expose others to danger they hadn't chosen. He left out the one secret he could not yet speak, the one that was too enormous and too strange and too his.
But everything else, he gave her.
When he finished speaking, the silence stretched.
He watched her face. He waited for the fear to come in — for the eyes to go distant, for the warmth to drain away.
Her eyes weren't distant. They were brighter than he had ever seen them.
"Draco," she said. "Why didn't you tell me sooner? I could have helped you destroy the Horcruxes."
He stared at her. "What?"
"I want to help." She looked at him with the expression he associated with her discovering something extraordinary in a book — that particular incandescent focus. "I can help you. We can face this together. That's what I'm saying."
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
She was smiling at him. She looked as though a great many things she had been trying to figure out had just snapped into place, and she was glad of them.
"For three years," she said, "I had no idea what to make of you. I knew you weren't what everyone said — you've never been what everyone said. But I couldn't understand what you were. Now I do." She squeezed his hand. "You've been carrying something enormous entirely alone, because you thought the people you cared about were safer if they didn't know. Didn't you?"
He didn't answer. Which was, itself, an answer.
"You complete fool," she said, warmly. "You brave, secretive, exhausting fool." She leaned her head briefly against his shoulder. "You're not alone any more. I mean it — no buts, no going quiet, no trying to protect me from it. I'm doing this with you."
Draco looked at her. The cold that had been living in his chest all day had not gone — he did not think it would go quickly — but something underneath it had shifted, just slightly. Like a door that had been shut for a long time and now stood open a crack.
She was still holding his hand.
He thought: I have been so careful not to pull her in.
He thought: she walked in anyway.
He thought, with something that was perilously close to joy despite everything: these were the most extraordinary words anyone had ever said to him.
He looked at her — at the complete certainty in her warm brown eyes, the wind pulling loose strands of hair across her face, the absolute unshakeability of her — and could not find a single thing to say.
So he said nothing, and held on to her hand in the dark of the Astronomy Tower, and let himself, for the first time in a very long time, simply not be alone.