Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Draco went to the library and did what work he could, reading Potions for two hours. He kept thinking, somewhat childishly, about Pansy and Greg and Millicent and Blaise amusing themselves in Hogsmeade. The May weather was distractingly pleasant; a breeze from the open window in the library tickled his face as he bowed his head over his reading.

Returning to his rooms, he was not paying attention at all; to say that the attack took him by surprise was an understatement. When the first hex hit him, he doubled over, vomiting slugs; the next one buckled his legs out from under him. Someone grabbed his right wrist and twisted it until he dropped his wand. (They must have known, somehow, from the fact he didn't immediately retaliate.)

No Expelliarmus; they weren't duelists but a mob. Someone raked fingernails down his right arm as they tore the sleeve of his robe—with such force that the seam at the shoulder gave way and unexpectedly he was half naked.

Someone else pulled him backward and pinned his left wrist to the floor while yanking up the sleeve. And then, as expected: "A Death Eater, all right."

He found himself staring up into the face of a little girl. She couldn't be more than twelve, and her school robe had the insignia of Hufflepuff House. She had a Hufflepuff face, too, round cheeks and round eyes, sea-green like a cat's, and hair that wasn't red enough to call ginger. Thoroughly ordinary. A duffer's face. Huffleduffers, he used to call that House.

She smiled down at him. "Well, Malfoy, what are we going to do with you?" It made his gut go cold, that smile, and the way she pronounced his family name as if it were something disgusting. She dug the toe of her shoe into his ribs, experimentally, as if feeling for the place to plant the first kick.

And then the kick landed and knocked the wind out of him, and there was another flurry of hexes, that added more pain and nausea, and a blaze of further pain as someone grabbed him and dragged a knife across his nape to shear his long hair, and someone else shouted "Let's do it Muggle style!" and kicked him again. Something sharp hit his head—he still doesn't know what, but that started the blood running over his face, and the sight of it seemed to excite them even further. Instinctively he put up right hand to shield his face. The left hand was still pinioned.

"So what are we going to do with it?" asks one of the boys.

"Kick it some more," said another voice.

"Poke its eyes out!" Someone grabbed his right hand and dragged it away from his face. He started to tremble, in spite of himself, in sheer terror: his all-too-vivid imagination was drawing the picture for him: the pain, the blood, the plunge into eternal darkness…

"Stomp it to death!" someone else cried. A weirdly detached piece of his mind wondered why they were suggesting Muggle-style tactics, until another piece answered: it will take a long time to die that way. Multiple hands were tearing at his clothes, and he suddenly understood that they were meaning to strip him before they did any of the above, and he desperately pulled at the hands holding his wrists.

In the cacophony of suggestions that followed—they seemed to be arguing about what indignity to visit on him next—he heard things he didn't even want to think about: they can't be meaning to do that to me. No. Please no… and then nausea convulsed him again, and he vomited another handful of slugs, that slithered wetly down the side of his neck.

And then a carrying baritone voice cut across the noise of the mob, and a space opened, suddenly, between him and his attackers, which space was immediately occupied by a figure like a bulwark—ragged robes swirling behind legs in heavy trousers—legs like tree trunks. "The war is over!" the voice said. "And if you want it to stay over, you'll clear out."

A storm of protest broke out and drowned further remonstrance. A second voice, in a higher register, a woman's voice, cut in—"He's said it three times that I heard. Now clear out."

Someone was leaning over him, and though he flinched, there was no need. He was gathered up in large strong arms, and briefly before he lost consciousness, he thought it was his father carrying him upstairs to bed.

***

He drifted in and out of dream; he was in the Great Hall once more, clutching his mother's hand, and then the most offensive voice he knew broke into the dream. Granger. He turned to glare—what was she doing here?—and the air tightened in his lungs, the atmosphere suddenly freighted with magic about to strike. Not just magic, but—no mistaking its electricity crawling over his skin—the Killing Curse. Inexplicably, rather than emerging from the tip of a wand, it was condensing out of the air; green annihilation was hurtling toward him in slow motion from all directions in the last moment of his life.

Not here,he thought, clutching his mother's hand, not in the Great Hall, not Granger—

And then it was gone.

He put his mother's hand to his cheek and whimpered in gratitude at still being alive. After this, after all this, still to be alive was sweet enough to bring tears. That Power had passed over his head with its lightning and spared him. It couldn't have been Granger; she's only a student like him. It must have been Bella. But Bella loves him and never would try to kill him. It was much too confusing. It would be much easier to sleep—if only the delirium would drop him into the dark.

Someone lifted his shoulders off the pillow, tipped his head back, and momentarily his mouth was filled with something bitter and aromatic, with a piney finish like rosemary… Dreamless Sleep, his Potions brain said, before he slid into the abyss.

***

He doesn't tell his mother or father what happened. It would only worry them. He already knows that they're worried from the letters that they write him, the letters overwritten with the floating transparent sigil of the Azkaban censor.

His mother's letters are firm, directive, doting: Make sure you're getting enough sleep. Eat well, or as well as you can under the circumstances. Remember that things have changed and don't forget that Harry Potter owes me a life debt. If all else fails, you can call in that debt on my behalf. I don't think I'll be needing it. And don't eat too many sweets. He smiles bitterly at that last one. (As if there were any such thing for him, in this place.) Her handwriting is angled, swooping, and her name is signed with a spiraling flourish at the end—the signature of the mother he knows, silk and alabaster over a core of molten steel.

His father's letters belong to an ancient genre, The Statesman to His Son. They're full of advice, but it's abstract and valedictory. There are tides, and riptides, and the undertow that will sweep you out to sea. Remember what I told you in Normandy: the sea does not love you. It does not care what your plans are. There are powers and then there are Powers. Watch the weather, because it's changing. The hand is wobbly and there are smudges where the ink ran and the parchment cockled in fingertip-sized circles. Draco wonders how damp the walls are in Azkaban. He doesn't want to think that those smudges were made by his father's tears.

What Lucius had said to him, nearly his last words: "Learn from my example, and don't think you can play the Powers to your own purposes. Because the Powers will fuck you until you bleed and then leave you for dead." Draco was shocked by the vulgarity of the language, and it's taken him weeks to absorb the message. He's listening now, as he lies in a bed in the hospital wing pretending to sleep, as Longbottom and the Mudblood talk over him in hushed voices.

No, not the Mudblood. Granger. He has to lose that word. Longbottom is a Power now, and he gave Draco the glare of death the last time that word slipped out of his mouth. He's not sure when fat little Neville Longbottom turned into this warm wall of a man, this soft-spoken guerrilla chieftain, but he knows a Power when he sees one. He's heard the epic tale half a dozen times from as many mouths, and the image is indelible: Longbottom defied the Dark Lord to his face, told him he'd join him when hell froze over, and for his trouble was bound and set on fire (this part makes Draco shudder, from a fear four hundred years old) and then somehow produced the sword with which he smote the Dark Lord's familiar. Smote, not merely whacked or cut or decapitated.

What's impressive is not the heroic deed but the stark berserker courage that preceded it—the defiance flung at the gates of hell from an absolutely hopeless position. Halfway out of dream, he realizes where he's seen it before. That bronze-age warrior stared at him out of Longbottom's eyes two years ago, on the day that he made the mistake of alluding to the locked ward in St. Mungo's—and then leapt at him, as Longbottom went for his throat, lunged at him and didn't care if he were pummeled to a bloody pulp by Crabbe and Goyle. It was Potter and Weasley who were thinking of consequences and restrained him as best they could.

Draco thinks Longbottom might well have killed him if they hadn't.

The other reason to lose the M-word is that Granger herself is a Power. He's been thinking over what happened in the hospital wing after the attack. As far as he can piece it together from overheard whispers and his own fragmentary memory, it was Longbottom and Granger who rescued him from the mob. When he woke up and glared at Granger, a spontaneous, wandless Killing Curse began to take shape over his hapless head like lightning out of a storm cloud, and she herself stopped it. Because she could. Because she was the source.

Oh. Wandless Dark magic is nothing to fool with. It's the heart of the Old Ways, the magic so ancient that the spells are not in Latin, the power that you invoke with your body rather than channeling through a wand. The power that can save you if you're deprived of your wand and at the mercy of a Muggle mob. The power that families like the Malfoys and the Blacks have never stopped invoking, because they remember the Time of the Burning, and they're willing to gamble long-term damage against short-term safety. Dark Magicians die mad, but they die in their beds.

A Muggle-born invoked that power in his presence, and he damned well knows she didn't learn that out of a book, because that stuff is not written down.

And Longbottom, who is a Power, defers to her.

She's whispering back to Longbottom, "Yeah, the nightmares are worse at Grimmauld Place. That house hates me. As if post-traumatic stress weren't bad enough by itself."

She's sleeping at his Great-Aunt Walburga's house. Alone. The house that's somehow been deeded to bloody Potter. But that's another grievance, which he really can't afford just now. Watch the weather, because it's changing.

A shadow falls across his closed eyelids; he opens them a sliver to see Longbottom, outlined against the light, reach across the narrow bed to touch Granger on the shoulder. There's something shockingly intimate about it—not the gesture itself but the emotion that accompanies it—a blood-warm wave of feeling just washed over him. Only in the desperate days of the last year did he ever see gestures like that between his own parents, and he knows what they mean: I'm yours until death.

***

Days after the attack, it was Minerva McGonagall, in her capacity as Headmistress, who told him what happened to Pansy and Greg and Blaise. The same day he was attacked, they were cut down in the High Street in Hogsmeade. No one knows what happened to Millicent; she's vanished. In the next breath, she informed him that he was not leaving the hospital wing until the Ministry approved Aurors to guard him, because it is not known how to reverse the curse that killed them. Sectumsempra. The curse that almost killed him in sixth year when Potter threw it at him. (Snape told him later that the bloody fool hadn't even known what it did, and Draco understands now that Snape was the only one who knew how to reverse it.)

McGonagall spares him the details that unfortunately he already knows. She does tell him that Pansy was asking for him at the last.

He keeps his features in a stoic mask until she leaves, and then he hides his face in the pillow and cries, for his whole world wiped out, for the effort in hauling Greg Goyle to safety in the Room of Hidden Things, for the thought of Pansy asking for him with her last blood-choked breath, even for the loss of sardonic Blaise Zabini, who maddeningly refused to take him as seriously as he felt he deserved as Heir of the House of Malfoy. He had thought that Blaise would be looking at him with faint ridicule when they were both a hundred and twenty years old.

It's Longbottom who sits by the bed, and hands him a glass of water and a wet towel for his face. It's Longbottom who listens, when he finds himself improbably voluble, telling stories into the far reaches of the night: all the fun they had in Slytherin House before everything went bad in sixth year, the jokes that he and Pansy and Greg and Vince told each other, the giggling over the 'Potter stinks' badges and the composition of the song 'Weasley is our king.' He forgets that he's telling these stories to one of Potter's cronies, because Longbottom is nobody in particular, just a warm, breathing, listening presence by the bedside, as the summer light fades into darkness and the darkness deepens and whitens with moonlight, then darkens again until it begins to pale into dawn. And, he realizes, it doesn't matter, because his friends are dead and the jokes they told might as well be scrawled in Latin on a wall in Pompeii.

The next morning, Longbottom refuses the bribe he offers—three Galleons—to let him into Slytherin dorm to choose a keepsake from Pansy's belongings. Two hours later, McGonagall is standing by his bed and telling him to get up because they are going to Slytherin dorm so that he can choose what he likes by way of keepsakes for Pansy and Greg, before they pack up the belongings of the dead students. Pansy's parents are in Azkaban, and he doesn't know what happened to Greg's father—not even whether he's dead or alive. The dormitory is being turned over as housing for war orphans.

He chooses the double-stranded jet necklace that Pansy wore with her green dress robes, once she grew out of her ridiculous attachment to the pink and frills that really didn't suit her. Ironically, it's of Muggle manufacture; he knows because Pansy told him so. She loved Muggle things, fringed shawls from the 1920s and pointy-toed shoes with Cuban heels and Victorian funerary jewelry. (Her favorite bracelet, that she was wearing when she died, quite gave him the shivers: faceted jet beads with loops of silk that were actually the blond hair of a long-dead Muggle.)

***

Longbottom refuses the second bribe as well, the handful of Galleons that Draco offers him to go down to Hogsmeade and buy firewhiskey. It's not only that Draco can't sleep—it's that he's tempted by the other sleep, the long one, the one from which he won't wake.

Madam Zabini came to Hogwarts to collect her son's possessions. She came to the hospital wing and reproached Draco with her son's death. She told him that it was he who had destroyed the honor of Slytherin House and with it her family's honor and her only son. That she had no doubt that Draco felt as little remorse for that as did his rotten father, who had destroyed the collective honor of the Purebloods by throwing in his lot with Voldemort. That there had been Purebloods who were neutral in the conflict, and wanted no part of either side, but no one would believe that now. That it was his part in the assassination of Dumbledore that had marked the Slytherins as the Death Eater junior auxiliaries, and forced McGonagall's hand during the battle so that the seventh-year students were cast out to join Voldemort or to wander the perilous no-man's-land between.

He had known nothing of Madam Zabini before this, except for what the world knew: that she was beautiful and much-married. Beautiful she certainly was, but more she was archaically terrifying. She stood there in her black robes edged in Kente cloth, with her shimmering bronze arms raised in an invocation to the spirits of the air, and called down the Furies on his head and on the House of Malfoy, may it end in the darkness out of which it came. She told him that he was the bad son of a worse father and if he died without issue and in only a tenth the agony she felt, she would feel the debt repaid.

He knows that if you mix firewhiskey and Dreamless Sleep, you will drift gently downward into the dark and never rise again, and that sounds very inviting just now.

Longbottom is a complete duffer at Potions, but apparently he knows the interactions. Not only does he refuse the bribe, but he picks Draco up by the shoulders so that he's propped up against the wall and can't avoid Longbottom's eyes, which then proceed to drill into his as the erstwhile duffer-at-Potions recites all of Draco's life debts, the ones he thought no one else knew, and the ones he didn't know himself. He learns that Severus Snape took the Unbreakable Vow to protect him on his assassination mission, and that Dumbledore and Snape between them agreed that if it came to it, Snape would take the assassin's role. He learns that his mother lied to Voldemort in exchange for the reassurance of his safety. He hears again what he'd rather not think about, how Potter and Granger and Weasley rescued him and Greg Goyle from the Fiendfyre in the Room of Hidden Things.

And, Longbottom says, all of them, the whole bloody committee—himself and Potter and Weasley and Granger and Snape and Draco's mother—will hound him from both sides of the Veil if ever again he shows such disrespect for the effort expended in saving him. There are better ways to go than idiot's suicide.

Finally Longbottom asks what would help him to sleep—aside from Dreamless Sleep, which should not be taken every night because it suppresses REM sleep.

In a very small voice, Draco tells him that his mother used to stroke his hair until he fell asleep. And sometimes she would hold him, too, but of course he's too old for that now.

The hair-stroking works when Longbottom does it, too. He sleeps soundly for the first time in days.

***