April 28th, 1999.

'Hey, Malfoy.' A foot jammed into his hip. The robes were lined yellow, and the knee was level with Draco's face: a tall Hufflepuff. 'Did you get lost? I'm sure mummy will come find you eventually if you just stay put, yeah?'

Draco told himself he was perfectly comfortable on the library steps. He didn't stand up.

He knew how this went: most of these cowards had never learnt to bite and would quickly get tired of his silence and scurry away to their dorms, unwilling to risk hanging around long enough for 'mummy' to come back.

Still, the muscles in his neck seized up. Most of them, yes, but his Christmas attacker was somewhere among the mass, and Draco never looked up to meet their eye not just out of pride, but also because he was busy watching out for the glint of a knife.

He couldn't even make himself walk down the few corridors to his own dorm. It had come to that.

Frustrated with Draco's apparent deafness, the Hufflepuff jogged off across the landing to join his friends, and just then, Hermione emerged from behind the corner, immediately throwing a suspicious glare their way. 'Curfew starts in two minutes,' she said, and like cowed children they ran, grins tucked into chins. Draco stood.

It had come to this: Stockholm syndrome. He'd been taken hostage by Gryffindor's resident Miss Better-Than-Thou and enlisted as a pet project, and now he couldn't even walk down to his own common room without her.

'And how does that make you feel?' his Mind Healer would have asked. Draco had seen her a few times now but still didn't remember her name, which surely proved some point about exactly how senseless the experiment had been. He'd only signed up for an excuse to get away from Hogwarts and sneak into Janus Thickey Ward to visit with Goyle. He had told her as much during his latest appointment, too. She had asked for honesty after all.

How did it make him feel to be Hermione Granger's charity case? Well, it made him feel like he was living a lie. He wasn't her friend. He didn't care about the things she cared about. He didn't give a toss about the bloody house elves or the History of Magic essay. But he still lived on as if he did.

'Why do you get involved in something that holds no interest for you, then?' his Mind Healer had asked. 'You could be expending that energy someplace else, on something you do care about.'

He didn't care about anything else either. So what did it matter?

'Good news,' Hermione said as she led him down the corridor. She had bags under her eyes yet radiated energy; Draco felt like a black hole. 'I've arranged to meet Rita Skeeter in Hogsmeade this Saturday. Since we've gathered so much intel ourselves, she thinks she could probably get the article out on Monday.'

Draco swallowed. This was thorny ground. 'Are you sure Skeeter's the right pick for this?' he asked. 'Have you considered she might print out some perversion of—'

Hermione snorted. 'Oh, I'm not worried about Rita Skeeter,' she announced with debilitating confidence. Draco thought it made her sound stupider than she actually was, but he pretended it hadn't annoyed him. 'I have leverage.'

'Leverage?'

Hermione glanced his way. She was doing some of her own balancing of sincerity and boundaries. He tried to ignore the pang of hurt.

'You remember the beetle she used to get her scoop from you, during the Triwizard Tournament?' she sounded tentative. Unsure whether or not to lie, Draco hesitated, and thus squarely missed the window for dishonesty. He nodded. 'Well, I don't know what she told you, but that was her. She's an unregistered Animagus and I'm magnanimously keeping it out of public knowledge.'

He supposed that made more sense than his Magical Beetle Messenger theory. 'Oh, right.'

'I figured it out in fourth year,' Hermione smirked, 'and I kept her in a jar for most of the summer. So, as I've said, you don't have to worry about Rita Skeeter.'

In a jar? Draco was now worried about an entirely new thing.

'I can't say I have much sympathy,' he allowed. 'Woman has always been the worst kind of half-blood.'

Immediately, her shackles rose. 'What is that supposed to mean?'

'Oh, you know how half-bloods are.'

'No, actually, I don't know how half-bloods are.'

'All I mean is, with Muggleborns, at least they start with nothing and they know it. They build themselves from the ground up, like you. I can respect that. Half-bloods want every biscuit off the plate and think they deserve it, too, without ever doing anything to earn it. They've no allegiance except to themselves.'

'You do realise how you sound?'

'It's true.'

'Harry is a half-blood, you know.'

'Well, I didn't say every half-blood was like that. It's a generalisation. And Potter's a Muggleborn more than half-blood, where it matters.'

Hermione huffed. 'I think if you took a moment to actually consider the weight of all these exceptions you're allowing, you'd find your generalisations don't hold water.'

'Did you not hear the part where my generalisations referred to you as a self-made woman? An inspiration to the entire wizarding community? A heroine—'

'Yes, well, I'd rather be all that because I'm Hermione, not because I'm a Muggleborn.'

'Muggleborn is part of Hermione. You can't pick and choose with identity.'

The chill of the dungeons seeped from the floors. They were approaching the Slytherin common room now, their footsteps echoing wetly in the silence. Draco drew a breath to smell the air, feeling his bones settle with the familiar notes of damp.

Hermione dallied before the final turn. 'I have rounds for another two hours tonight,' she told him, looking to the left of his head. 'Do you want to keep me company?'

'Sure, why not.' His Mind Healer would have said something about how you couldn't build a friendship on guilt – or pity – but sometimes, like now, Draco thought maybe that wasn't all there was to them.

They climbed stairways together and skulked across shapes of fluttering light, their shadows long and parchment-thin. Draco remembered these nightly patrols from the time he'd been a prefect himself: the initial exhilaration of power wearing off into long hours of exhausted boredom. But tonight, time spooled around itself, and though Draco was as tired as any day, he found he might have worn the night down with walking if he needed to, the quiet soothing yet thrumming with opportunity, every corner a tucked-away secret to be unravelled and every thought a possible seedling of a dispute to be waged.

'I wonder if I'm making a mistake,' Hermione stated suddenly. Something skittered in the nearest patch of black, but when Draco pointed his wand at it, it revealed itself as fancy. 'My name will be on that article. I am stirring a pot no one wants to touch, and that's the opposite of what I'm meant to be doing, isn't it? No amount of ingratiating myself to your rich friends is going to help. What if I'm killing my career before it's even begun, you know?'

'I know,' he lied. His future had been dead for months. 'But I'm not sure what else you expected from yourself.'

'Oh, thanks,' she huffed. Their voiced had dipped into whisper, odd in the deep quiet of the sleeping castle. It wasn't yet midnight, and Draco knew the common rooms and dorms still buzzed with conversation, but they were faraway islands, and in the ocean that awed between, it felt as though the two of them were the only people alive.

'You were always going to do something like this,' he explained, pleased at the thrill of putting into words thoughts only half-formed. 'And you were never going to play and win, because the game and you, you are—antithetical.'

He couldn't see her face but heard the rush of her exhale. 'Yeah,' she murmured. 'I think so, too. I only hope my way can still get me somewhere.'

'Weasley's doing alright for himself, isn't he? I suppose you can always be his housewife if it comes to it. You have about fifty house elves now, so it should be easy enough.'

She shoved at him. As he caught balance, he almost laughed. It halted halfway up his throat and snagged on some other emotion he didn't care to examine. It was one thing not to have laughed in months; another to ponder on what that said about you.

Hermione spoke more on house elves and the article and her theories of the fallout. Draco stayed silent. They caught two fifth-years snogging in an empty classroom and Hermione took points. Draco stood by and waited for her to be done, counting his breaths.

She was the perfect choice of friend, really, for someone like him: unable to undertake any action whatsoever, he let her pull him along, and she had too much momentum to mark the extra weight.

'Are you going to let McGonagall know in advance?' he asked softly as they lugged themselves up the steps to the Astronomy Tower. Their breaths left a trail of condensation in the thin air. 'The scrutiny will be on Hogwarts more than on any of the families who fired elves, you realise.'

'I know, though I'm not exactly happy about it,' she shrugged. 'This isn't Professor McGonagall's fault, it's the school board's. But I'm not giving anyone any warning. Why would I? Because it's fair play? Was it fair play to leave those elves out to starve? We want maximum impact and that means sometimes we have to choose sides. I'm siding with the victims.'

It was the authoritative tone of a revolutionary about to set fire to a government building, Draco thought. He didn't care about the house elves, he didn't care about McGonagall, his name wouldn't be anywhere on that article. Still, he felt, stupidly, a surge of power. He stomped it down.

At the top of the tower, they stopped and breathed in the night. Draco did his best to focus on the sky and not the influx of memories, but he was doing a rotten job.

'Oh, Merlin.'

When she said it, she sounded exactly like him, Draco realised.

'This is where Professor Dumbledore—isn't it? I'm sorry. Do you want to go?'

He didn't feel up to speaking, so he only nodded. On their way back down, he thought again about his own hypocrisy: his life destroyed, he had taken to pretending he was living this one, a life that belonged to someone else, to someone he wasn't.

He had explained it to his Mind Healer last week. She had looked at him for a good ten seconds, and he knew because he was counting his breaths as he stared down into his lap, and then she'd said,

'Why can't it be yours?'

He hadn't said anything back.

Thank you all for reading and commenting.

Big breakthrough chapter coming on Thursday - I'm excited to share it with you all!