"What are you reading?" a voice sneered, "That doesn't even look like a schoolbook."
"Perhaps that's because it isn't, Pansy." Draco Malfoy drew his own voice into the same kind of mocking tone everyone seemed to cast around the Slytherin dormitory.
"Then why are you reading it?" she whined. All year, Malfoy had been distracted and moody. She was sick of throwing herself at him with barely any response. There were other guys, Blaise perhaps, who would find her kind of attention most appealing.
"Because I thought it might be important, but it is turning into nothing but a lot of sad, pathetic rubbish." And indeed, Ginny Weasley's journal, instead of being some kind of record of the inner workings of Dumbledore or Dumbledore's Army, was just the scared scribbling of a girl who seemed to be out of her mind.
"Then can I read it?" Pansy sat herself as close to him as was humanly possible without them being conjoined twins, craning her head to get a look at the pages, while trying to hoist up her robes to show a little leg. The Hogwart's wooly kneesocks were gone, but something of a purple-spangled sort was clinging to the curve of her calf instead. Malfoy raised an intrigued eyebrow, but then shook his head.
"No!" Already he had heard (over and over, and in gloriously triumphant detail) what had happened at dinner, what the whole lot of them did to Ginny Weasley. And look what had happened after that. She nearly died, or looked like she came pretty close. You're not going to have another death on your conscience to deal with this year. After the Dark Lord is in power, the blood traitors will all get what is coming to them then, but it doesn't need to be by your hand.
Pansy drew her lips up into a pout, her preferred method to get what she wanted. "But why not?"
"It isn't your type of book."
Pansy's eyes transformed from doe-eyes to snake-like slits and her voice gathered up in a shrilly sibilant hiss. "Are you insinuating I'm stupid?"
"No," Malfoy sighed, "Merely that I'm bored with it as it is. It is material for the fire, really. Let me save you the trouble." With a stunning trick of sleight of hand, Draco managed to duplicate the diary and toss the copy into the fire. His twitched his wand deftly to turn the knob on the hearth and open the flue; with the sudden rush of oxygen – the diary was soon just another indiscernible charred lump of fuel for the fire.
"Well, at least you won't be distracted now…" Pansy purred, snuggling underneath Draco's arm.
"Yeah, but I'm really tired," he said, extricating himself from her arms and legs as if she were some kind of octopus on the hunt. "Think I'll just head up to bed."
Barely aware of where he was heading, and ignoring Pansy's sulking expression, he trod the familiar path to his dormitory. His mind was filled with the decision he knew he had to make. He could give the journal back to Ginny Weasley, but then, how to get it to her when surrounded by the Sainted Potter and his Dirty Blooded Crew? He certainly wasn't going to give it to Potter; he doubted he'd be believed that he hadn't hurt the girl. He'd be hexed as soon as looked at, and Malfoy doubted he could keep his wand-arm steady. It had felt too good to break Potter's nose beneath his fist, after all the trouble Harry had brought into his life. Had Potter never lived, Draco knew he'd be the one adored and revered. Heritage had to mean something in this world, didn't it?
This left The Weasel and the Mudblood. As it was the Weasel's sister, he was going to be just as quick on the draw as Potter would.
This left the reasoned and rule-bound Mudblood; the Mudblood who was often by herself nowadays, now that Violet Bronze or whoever was snogging the Weasel.
Why he was taking such trouble to work this out, he couldn't say for sure. One small part of him was aware the slippery slope of bad deeds and their cost. His parents had always chanted that, but for a few wrongly imprisoned, Azkaban was the place the scum of the earth dwelled, that if the Wizengamot managed to convict you, they had more than enough evidence. What did that say about his father now? Did his father ever murder anyone? Even if he hadn't, his actions made sure his son had to become a murderer. So, while Draco was still playing his part in the Dark Lord's plan, a tiny voice was crying out for all this to come to a halt. Perhaps, it was crying out for the chance to discover who he was – apart from what kind of blood he had, or who his parents allied themselves with, or even what House he was sorted into.
And so, by this tiny shred of conscience, his decision was made.
Hermione Granger sat in the library using her studies, as she often did, as a way to give more worrying matters their proper perspective so that she could look at them with a rational eye. There were a few things on her plate at the moment.
One of the most worrying was Ginny. Ginny, who had looked as pale as Sirius Black as he went through the Veil as she lay on that cold tile floor. She would have looked as still a Cedric Diggory coming back from the graveyard, had Hermione not noticed the almost imperceptible shudder of her chest as she breathed. Hermione had to try particularly hard not to think of how many long seconds it had seemed before she seen that small intake of air.
Close behind Ginny was Harry and his many troubles. The weight of their world was heaped on his shoulders. It showed every time she saw him after a meeting with Dumbledore. It showed, she thought, in his need to find a friend in this Half-Blood Prince character.
She supposed she didn't blame him for trying to amass as many allies as he could. It bothered her terribly, though, for many reasons. Oh, yes, there were all the boring reasons that Ron and Harry already knew. About learning being best straight from the teachers (when they were proper teachers mind you), and how it seemed like a cheat. And although she didn't like to admit it, they were right that it did bother her that she was made second best by some silly chicken-scratch in the margins. What secretly bothered her was that perhaps she wasn't enough. Her friendship, her knowledge seemed secondary to a book. This fact she felt she would not burden Harry with. They'd saved each other's skins more than enough times to know where loyalties lay. To ask him to prove it, however passive-aggressively, seemed ridiculous and quite the girlish thing Ron might accuse her of.
Ah, there was the third thing she was trying to rid her mind of. Ronald Weasley. Ronald Weasley, who she had also faced down outlandish odds with, yet seemed to regard saving the world a distant second to painted nails and a soppy smile.
These were the thoughts she was trying to put from her mind as she was working on her Charms essay. She barely had time to be suspicious when Draco Malfoy drew up the chair opposite her.
"…you, Granger" he drawled.
"Well, you're using my name" she said stiffly. "That's an improvement."
He rolled his eyes. "Depends who you ask."
"No one asked you to sit down." Hermione narrowed her eyes and waved him off. "Believe me, you are more than welcome to leave."
Draco Malfoy just sat there.
"If you're here to get a book, then do so. If you're here for any more Slytherin fun like you lot pulled the other night, please be kindly informed that Madam Pince roams these aisles every five minutes." Her voice sounded as unkind as she believed possible.
"About that…"
"Going to confess? Because not even I believe you didn't have a hand in what happened to Ginny." For the first time, Hermione looked thoroughly interested in what he had to say. She even put down her quill.
"I didn't even know about that until after that happened." Draco declared airily. It was the tone he used on teachers when he wanted to prove he was innocent, usually for something he was guilty of. It didn't seem to be working on the cleverest girl in school, who simply gave him an exasperated sigh as if to say, "Really?"
"You're not going to believe me anyway. Look," he said, tossing the journal so that it landed with a solid *thunk* on the mahogany table, "I just wanted to give this back to Weaselby's kid sister. I don't really care what you believe, just that it gets back to her. It's not worth anything to me."
As he got up and began to saunter away, he turned back once. "You should tell that girl to get her head on straight. With what's coming, she needs to put a brain in what's left of her body."
"How stupid does he think I am?" Hermione muttered. She spent a good fifteen minutes searching the book magically for curses and jinxes of all kinds, working back from the most obvious that Malfoy would choose, to the unfathomably complicated. She found nothing. Whatever Hermione had thought was going to happen when Draco Malfoy sat across from her, that was not it.
She open its leathery brown cover and read:
With firm thoughts on recovery
A journal to find the light again
She immediately shut it. It was not hers to read.
Despite her confidence that there was no curse inflicted upon the journal, Hermione had a sinking feeling.
Was Malfoy planning something?