Draco wasn't sure how much time had passed. He was still curled on the bathroom floor, but the sobbing had given way to paralyzed desolation. He stared blankly at the stalls in front of him, hugging his knees, fading in and out of conscious thought. From time to time he noticed where he was and would resolve to return to the Slytherin quarters, mentally berating himself for being so weak. But he didn't actually move. If he left the dark solitude of the lavatory, he would be faced with the fact that he would never again run into Cedric walking those familiar hallways. Hogwarts felt as empty as he did.

Suddenly, he heard a small "Pop!" and Tottie, the new Malfoy family houself, appeared in front of him. Draco raised his head slightly, but returned to his catatonic contemplation. She shuffled her feet nervously and stared at the ground, while picking at the edge of her dingy grey smock.

"Young Master Draco," the elf whispered, still fidgeting apprehensively. "My mistress..." The rest trailed off into inaudible mumbling, too quiet to make out, but the reference to his mother pulled Draco partway out of his trance.

"What? Tottie, I can't hear you."

Tottie let out a squeak. She dashed to the nearest stall door and began banging it forcefully against her head. "Tottie is so sorry. (Wham!) She is a bad elf. (Wham!) Always too quiet. (Wham!) So sorry for causing master trouble-"

"Tottie, stop!" Draco snapped tiredly. She let go of the door. "Don't apologize. Just speak louder."

"MY MISTRESS IS ASKING MASTER DRACO TO TALK WITH HER THROUGH HIS MIRROR. SHE IS WAITING FOR HIM AND IS WANTING TO KNOW WHY HE IS NOT RESPONDING BECAUSE SHE IS TRYING TO REACH HIM FOR A LONG TIME."

Draco belatedly covered his ears. No doubt the entire castle was awake now. He should have known she would interpret his words in the most literal way possible. It was rather remarkable elves had survived this long, given their limited cognitive capacities. When it was clear she had finished shouting, Draco removed his hands from his ears.

"Why does she want to talk to me, Tottie?" The elf took a big breath and opened her mouth wide, but Draco cut her off. "And don't yell, just talk."

She scuffed her feet and looked at him hesitantly. "I is not knowing, sir. My mistress is only saying that it is urgent, but that young master is not to worry about his father."

He furrowed his brows in confusion. "Why would I worry about my father? Has something happened to him?"

"Tottie is not sure. Mistress is not..." Tottie's voice trailed off again, but when she glanced at Draco's scowl, she hurriedly increased her volume. "Mistress is not telling her. Only that Master Draco is not to worry about his father in the graveyard."

Draco's eyes widened. "What graveyard?" he asked cautiously.

"Tottie does not know," she squeaked fearfully. "Just that young master's mother is needing to talk to him because his father is in the graveyard."

This had to be a nightmare. There couldn't possibly be this much random tragedy in one day. But if it was a dream, why did he feel so exhausted? And why were his hands throbbing? If it wasn't a dream, then that meant that his father was also-

Everything went completely still inside him. He stood up abruptly but the bathroom seemed to sway before him, so he grabbed the ledge of a sink to steady himself and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. When he opened them, the house-elf was staring at him with a worried expression.

"You can go home now," he said flatly. "I'm going to go talk to Mother." She nodded with relief and vanished with a snap of her finger. He stood leaning against the sink trying to think clearly, but everything was tangled. None of his thoughts made sense, and when he tried too hard to focus on any one of them, his entire mind would go blank. In fact, it was strange how completely blank he felt overall, as he had been drained of all emotions.

He strode out of the lavatory and found himself hurrying through the corridors toward the Slytherin dungeon. He paused in front of the hidden entrance to the common room.

"Glory!" he recited, but the door remained shut. He frowned in puzzled frustration before realizing that it was probably past midnight, so there would be a new password. He cast about for plausible choices.

"Cunning! Ambition! Cleverness!" Nothing changed. Anxiety flickered within him. He kicked the panel angrily. "Snakes!" Still nothing. In desperation, he pointed his wand at the place where the door should be.

"Listen, you know I live in Slytherin; I'm a bloody Malfoy! I need to get into this godforsaken tower right now, so if you don't let me in, I swear I'll blow a hole in you so big you'll look like a gateway for giants!"

Grinding noisily in protest, the door slid open and he dashed through it, across the common room, and down the hallway to his dormitory. Before entering his room, he paused to quiet his pounding heart, and then gently swung the door open. In the murky green shadows it was hard to make anything out clearly, but the sound of steady breathing accompanied by intermittent snores indicated that his roommates were all sound asleep. He tiptoed to the trunk beside the bunk-bed he shared with Crabbe. Draco always kept his belongings strictly neat and well-organized, a habit his housemates teased him for, but it served him well now. Within seconds he was able to locate the two-way mirror in one of the inner compartments, right where it was supposed to be.

It was emitting a steady hum, indicating a missed correspondence, so he wrapped it in a sweater to muffle the sound and quickly left the room, closing the door softly behind him. He hurried back down the hallway to the common room. He figured it was far enough away from the other sleeping quarters that nobody would hear him from there, and it was unlikely that anyone else was up at that hour to interrupt him.

Draco crossed to the far side of the room, dropped into an overstuffed leather chair, and unwrapped the mirror, staring at it. His own empty expression stared back at him. Now that he had the mirror in his hands, he didn't want to use it. If he never talked to his mother, then he could just go to bed and wake up in the morning to find that everything had been a hallucination. But if he had to say any of it out loud, then somehow it would be real. For several long moments Draco remained immobilized, but eventually the uncertainty got the best of him. He needed to know about his father.

He took a deep breath and firmly stated, "Narcissa Malfoy." The image of his drawn face became a blur. When the image refocused, the eyes looking back at him were no longer his own icy blue ones, but his mother's deep sapphire.

"Oh thank goodness Draco! I was so worried something had happened to you!" his mother gushed. "Why didn't you answer when I tried to reach you?"

Draco frowned and glanced away. "I couldn't hear it."

"I see, well I'd have thought you would be more responsible with your possessions than to have it buried at the bottom of your trunk. Were you asleep when the elf arrived?" He shook his head. "Draco, what in Merlin's name were you doing awake at this hour?"

"I... I was in the lavatory," he mumbled.

"Oh. Well in any case, I trust she relayed my message about your father?" Draco looked up abruptly. He nodded his head slowly, steeling himself for what was to follow. "You look concerned, but you needn't be. The elf was to tell you not to worry, but no doubt that slipped her feeble mind. No matter. In short, your father's long years of service have not gone unnoticed. The Dark Lord has welcomed him back."

Draco furrowed his brow in confusion. The Dark Lord? What was she on about? Maybe he really had fallen asleep because this night was making less and less sense. His mother was smiling proudly at him but he couldn't return her exultant expression. She appeared to sense the disconnect between them and cocked one eyebrow at him.

"You do know about the graveyard and the Dark Lord's return, of course? I imagine the entire school has been buzzing with it since that weasel Potter made his extremely unlikely escape." Draco continued to frown. Did this mean his father was alive after all? His mother seemed cavalierly cheerful about the whole thing, so he must be. The dread that had been holding his feelings at bay began to melt. His hands started shaking. Draco exhaled slowly and tried to think rationally in an effort push back the impending flood of emotions. It still didn't make any sense. All he could discern was that his father and some apparently undead version of Lord Voldemort had been doing something in a graveyard, something with Potter. But if he had been with Potter that meant he had been there when...

In the hours he spent on the cold stone floor of the lavatory, he hadn't bothered to speculate much about the cause of the Hufflepuff champion's death. But now that he thought about it, he realized it couldn't have just been a freak accident as he'd absently assumed. Cedric was too good for that.

"What happened to Cedric?" He hadn't meant to ask the question, but it poured out of him before he could stop it. Suddenly he felt a burning need to understand what had happened, to understand why he would never see his friend again.

His mother looked at him quizzically. "Who? Oh, you mean the Diggory boy. I agree that was unfortunate; he was from such an old wizarding family after all." Draco didn't care about Cedric's blood purity. He could have been from Hermione Granger's family for all the difference it made in the end.

"What happened to him?" he asked pointedly.

"There's no need to be sharp with me, dear," she scolded but Draco continued to stare at her coldly. She pursed her lips and continued. "We can't be entirely sure what happened to the boy since it was before your father was summoned, but he did speak with Peter Pettigrew about it. It appears that the tournament cup was secretly converted to a portkey to transport Potter to the cemetery, but the Diggory boy came along as well. When Peter walked toward them, they threatened him with raised wands but before he had a chance to disarm them, Potter ducked down, leaving the other boy standing alone. Your father wasn't clear on why exactly the other boy was killed. Peter has always been a jumpy fellow, thanks to his rodent instincts. He probably became alarmed by the sudden movement and fired the curse without thinking. A mistake, surely, but he did successfully carry out the more important tasks of the evening..."

His mother continued to talk. Something about a ceremony and the Dark Lord rising from a cauldron, but Draco barely heard her. He was absorbed in the scene she had just created. He could feel it all: The champions' confusion as they landed without warning in a graveyard. Their apprehension as they noticed Pettigrew's figure approaching through the cold night mist. He could see Cedric mutter words of encouragement to Potter as they raised their wands to defend themselves from the advancing stranger. As Pettigrew continued to draw closer though, Potter mentally calculated his odds and chose to create a distraction by dropping to the ground. Cedric misinterpreted the action and worried that Potter was injured, so he turned to ask if the other boy was all right, but Potter's sudden motion had also startled Pettigrew, who sent a curse flying at them. As Cedric bent over Potter, he had time enough to glimpse the green flash of dark magic hurtling his way, but not time enough to block it. In his final moment of terror, the last thing he saw was his own shock reflected in Potter's thoughtless eyes.

Draco closed his own eyes tightly. His hands were shaking even more forcefully now, but it was hard to tell because he had balled them into fists partway through his mother's tale. The change in his expression caught his mother's attention and she paused in her flow of narration.

"Draco, are you quite well?" she asked, concerned.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I'm fine. I'm just... tired."

"Of course, I was forgetting the time. You should be in bed. Just remember, you can share this with Vincent and Gregory because they'll want to know about their fathers' good fortune, but for now keep it at that. We aren't sure who else we can trust yet." Draco nodded numbly. "We'll see you in a few days. Sweet dreams, darling."

His mother's image faded from the mirror and he saw his own haunted expression looking back at him. Draco fervently hoped his sleep would be dreamless tonight, because he was willing to bet the dreams he'd have would be anything but sweet.