A/N;; This chapter really turned into a "these kids took the reigns and didn't let me have control" kinda moment lmao.
Speedy, speedy update, because - as you will CLEARLY see - I was in my feels.
Good luck to you all LOL.

Love and appreciate you all so much!

Chapter 7: You Burn So Bright You Could Blind Somebody

"It's past curfew, Xavier."

I rolled my eyes at the sound of Pansy's unpleasant voice. "Is it, Parkinson? Didn't have a clue."

She didn't give a damn if I was sitting in the common room after what was meant to be bedtime. What she cared about was the fact that this was the third time in the last couple of weeks that I had been waiting up for Draco to come back from prefect patrols. It seemed to be the only time that we could find totally away from our friends or classes to talk about things that weren't just day to day stresses.

The first night it had been simpler; we talked about how this year felt different. It had stuck mostly with how heavy our workload was with O.W.L.'s impending, and both of us not being sure what to make of Umbridge just yet. I left out that she had spoken to me and intended to use me to some advantage. It didn't feel important to note considering it didn't involve him.

The second night, about a week after the first, we had stayed a good two hours past the time he'd come back to the common room, sitting on the black sofa by the fireplace. That night we'd talked about a few different things - how he was feeling about quidditch this year, if we knew what our dad's had been up to all summer, how we hoped this school year went by slowly because we were away from home.

It was small steps, these conversations, but they felt somehow like big leaps at the same time, given all the nothing we'd had for years. Sometimes they got deeper than others, and it had only been the couple of times that we'd had them at all. But it was something, and it was certainly more than I had gotten from Draco in a really long time. When I had presented him with the notion that he was going to have to make a conscious effort to prove that he did actually mean what he said when it came to fixing where we stood with one another, I hadn't been sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised - and definitely grateful - that so far he seemed to be holding to that for the time being.

I tried not to think about the potential of the other shoe dropping.

"She's fine, Pansy, relax." Draco muttered, coming into the common room a moment after the dark haired girl.

"If you keep covering for her you're going to get us both in trouble, you know." Pansy sneered in his direction.

Draco rolled his eyes with a dramatically annoyed expression and I rolled my lips together in order to prevent myself from snickering. "We'll deal with that when the time comes, yeah? Leave it alone."

I grinned faintly as the other girl huffed in irritation then stormed up to our dorm room. Whatever territorial move she had tried to make a couple weeks ago after Divination had clearly backfired, and she was aware of it. Draco and I sitting in the common room after curfew definitely wasn't the quiet tension and evasion of each other that typically lead to her having his attention. Despite previous thought that I didn't care what was or wasn't happening between the two of them, I found an odd satisfaction in knowing that even for this little while I had managed to change things.

"Make another Gryffindor first year cry?" I asked with a quirked brow as Draco came to sit with me.

The first time, we had sat on separate couches, looking across over the round coffee table at one another. The next I had laid on the left couch and he had sat on the center couch, slid as far over as he could manage to be close to where I was laying. Tonight, he sat down on the same black leather couch that I occupied and I set my History of Magic textbook aside on the table then tucked my legs up beside me to give him more room.

"Not me, no." Draco snorted with a faint smirk. His eyes flicked in the direction that Pansy had stormed off in and I caught his implication.

"She has been rather insufferable lately." I noted.

There was a brief moment of pause on Draco's behalf as a thoughtful look crossed his eyes. Before I could ask what was on his mind, he was speaking again. "She'll get over it."

I hummed out a short snicker but otherwise didn't comment. I hadn't yet asked him about what was going on there. A part of me didn't think I really wanted to hear his answer - especially knowing he had nearly lied to me about it the first time I'd baited him on the subject. Quite frankly, I knew it was also none of my business.

Draco had been known to flirt, to snog a random classmate for a short while before he got bored and moved onto the next one. Pansy had gotten roped into that position, I figured. He'd never referred to her as his girlfriend or anything, and honestly if they were together and he continued to act the way that he did toward her, I would have had something to say about it. Whether Pansy and I were always friends or not, and even with whatever lingering animosity lingered between us, I wouldn't excuse his behavior treating a girl that way.

He wasn't his father, no matter how much those lines had started to blur over the years.

"You excited for tomorrow?" Draco asked as he laid his arm out along the back of the couch. I watched his fingers smooth over the black leather where I leaned back against the couch's arm, facing him. When I looked back at his face there was an amused curiosity present.

"I know you know what's coming." I accused, but it was playful. Knowing Daphne, she had recruited as many of our inner circle as possible to help her out in planning whatever it was she had in mind for my birthday this year. I hoped that it wasn't anything too crazy. A dungeon party, at most. "Can you give me a hint?" I batted my eyelashes.

Draco scowled, but it was lacking as it warred with his amusement at my even asking such a thing. "Absolutely not. I'm not an idiot. Greengrass would kill me."

I laughed and shook my head at him with a teasing look. "Yeah, five foot, five inches of blonde haired absolute terror, that girl."

"You've never been hexed by her, you don't get to talk." He replied with a gentle huff. He still smirked faintly, however; that was the sign I typically took that he wasn't bothered by what we were talking about.

"I'm sorry," My brow lifted, tone going up an octave in surprised inflection as I leaned forward a little where I sat. "You've been hexed by Daphne? Since when? How did I miss that?"

"It was over the summer. We ran into each other at Gringotts back in mid July so we were catching up a bit. I made a comment about Astoria- a joking comment, don't look at me like that." He rolled his eyes when my own narrowed at him. "She sent me flying halfway up the alley. Threatened to give me bat bogeys if I said anything else."

For a moment I had to laugh - there was a reason we avoided setting Daphne off. There was no real black and white with her. If she was angry or annoyed enough to threaten to hex someone, it wasn't as simple as a disarm, it typically came with more than one punishment. Daphne Greengrass was either charming and social, or she was spiteful and violent. There wasn't a whole lot of in between.

"How did she not get kicked out of school?" I questioned.

Draco looked at me in disbelief, reminding me how ridiculous a question that was. As if any of our parents would stand for us getting kicked out of school for something as stupid as underage use of magic. There was a reason people like my father and Lucius Malfoy had jobs and close relations within the Ministry. It was to keep it under their thumb, to have a certain control on things that came through it. Even if such a case had come up for Daphne, it had probably been trashed the moment they'd read the last name Greengrass.

The subject of seeing one of our friends over the summer did bring something else to the forefront of my mind. These nighttime conversations of ours had been about the things we weren't really taking the time to talk about - though, given how little we had really had deep conversations over the last four years, that was a wide variety of things. Still, I felt that a chat like this was probably as good a time as any to potentially ask some of those haunting questions that I carried in the back of my mind, waiting for answers I'd likely never get.

Lips twisting to the side as my expression softened, my eyes shifted to his hand on the back of the couch again instead of staying locked with his. "Why'd you stop writing me in the summer?"

It had happened the summer between third and fourth year. I knew a lot was going on that summer, all things considered, but he hadn't written me a single letter. While I hadn't gone out of my way to write him, either, it had been more in retaliation than anything on my part. Even the summer between second and third years, he only wrote to me twice. This past summer before fifth year he hadn't written me at all, either. It was one of the things that seemed to go away between us, one of the many.

It was only skimming the surface of questions that I wanted to ask. It barely touched the collective subject of all of the things I missed about us being friends. It was a start, though, and we had to start somewhere.

Draco breathed in deeply and then released it again in a sigh. "I don't know." It wasn't a good answer, but I could tell that it was at least honest. When I glanced at him again, the sad sincerity in his tone was present in his frown, too. "I think I just didn't think about it, really. Or maybe I didn't know what to say."

"All you had to do was tell me how your summer was going. It would have been better than nothing." I pointed out as I shifted to bend my legs up toward my chest, dropping my chin onto one of my knees.

"I think I knew you were angry with me, even then." Draco shrugged subtly with one shoulder, his head tilting. I was surprised to hear he felt that way; even if I did happen to be mad at him for things, I never thought those circumstances affected him in the way that they often affected me. "Everything with us was different after second year."

My brow creased downward and I frowned thoughtfully, my gaze dropping down to the small bit of couch space between us now. When I thought back on mine and Draco's relationship, I typically labelled third year the year that everything really fell apart for us, in my mind. Sure, there had been a handful of things that had occurred during second year that I wasn't particularly thrilled with, but it was the year after that that tended to stand out for me, be more of that beginning of our end.

Draco seemed to notice the change in my expression because he breathed out a dry laugh at the vague confusion on my face. "You started walking out of the room whenever I would start talking about things going on with the chamber or the M-" My eyes narrowed pointedly and he caught himself. "Muggleborns."

"Well, you were being terrible about it all." I countered plainly.

"That's your opinion." Draco muttered. He seemed unbothered by the fact that we disagreed on that. It reminded me of a big contributing factor to the distance between us - my seeing an issue with his behavior, and his seeing nothing wrong with it.

"That's when you started to remind me of your father." I knew as soon as I'd spoken the low words that they were bound to have some sort of less than pleasant reaction. I had subconsciously braced for it, knowing it was coming. It was the truth, whether Draco liked to hear it or not.

His eyes darkened to that stormy steel they often did when he was on the defense and his fingers against the back of the couch curled up into his palm. "You don't know what it was like with him that year."

"You're right, I don't. Because you stopped telling me." The door had been opened to this sort of subject, I wasn't about to let it be slammed shut again just yet. We'd gone too long not acknowledging all of these piled up things between us. If we were really intending to work it out, get better, and move forward, they had to be talked about.

My admission of him being some level of right relaxed Draco just slightly, but a tension lingered. He wasn't good at talking about these sorts of things. When we were younger, we had each other to lean on and share our secrets with. The older we got, the more we pulled away from each other, and the more Draco kept things to himself. I was fortunate enough to have people like Lucy and Daphne on my side who I could share with, talk things out with if I needed to, if they were things that I didn't actively work to suppress. Draco was all suppression all the time. I don't think even Blaise knew much about what Draco's home life really looked like.

It was what had initially brought us together, was our home life, our parents. They had known each other in school, they had chosen the same side during the first war. When they had children, it was only natural, if not expected that those children also grew up closely together. I was born several months before Draco, but Narcissa's pregnancy overlapped with my birth, and she and my mother spoke often about raising their children together.

Draco and I were a set before we even knew what it meant to be friends. I was one of very few people who knew what his father could really be like, even in a home setting. Or, at least I had known for a long time. Lucius had proved to become even worse over the years, and it reflected just as much in his son, too.

"He wanted me to plant that diary, you know." He sighed after several quiet moments between us. It did come as a small surprise to me. Given the way that Draco had started to fully come into himself as the entitled bully he acted like that year, I would have likely maintained that it had solely been his dad's job all along to get Tom Riddle's diary back into Hogwarts. "I asked too many questions about it. He ended up doing it himself because he said I wasn't 'smart enough to take orders,' said I needed to learn if I ever wanted to be useful."

Lifting an arm from being curled loosely around my legs, I reached to rest my hand on top of his on the back of the couch. Confusion flashed in his eyes as they flicked toward the soft gesture and his hand flexed tightly beneath mine in immediate response. When we locked eyes again, that same confused tension lingered on his face.

Smoothing my thumb over the back of his hand, I breathed in slowly, knowing my following prompting could have a less calm reaction from him - because I knew that he wasn't telling me everything. "What else?"

Draco's jaw clenched and he went back to looking thoughtfully at our hands. "I made the quidditch team, and he was surprised." He laughed shortly, humorlessly. "He came to that first game and we lost, and he left without even seeing me. Wrote me later in the week telling me I'd embarrassed him. I was just thankful it wasn't a Howler."

I frowned, trying to recall a day that the owl post had dropped a letter to Draco and left him in an awful mood. The issue was that it was hard to tell when Draco was moody because something had actually happened or when he was moody just because he was being Draco.

"Every chance he could, he just-" Draco huffed shortly, shifting uncomfortably where he sat. Vulnerability was not his strong suit. "Nothing was good enough that year. Absolutely nothing. I could've opened the bloody chamber of secrets myself and he would've found something I'd done wrong about it."

The more I took in the explanation, the more sense it made. Lucius Malfoy was a powerful man that craved more power, that thrived on image, and that gained from the losses of others. He was a perfect example of what pureblood society was, personified. He and my own father were the same in that right. However, where my father didn't have a son to project his ideals onto, to expect to be a miniature copy of him, Lucius did. And Draco suffered because of it.

It also, unfortunately, made some sense of the way that Draco treated people at school. His acting better than everyone, belittling and tormenting others, it managed to be the influence of his father's attitude as much as it was a reach for feeling better about himself. If he could convince people at school to think highly of him, to be afraid of him, even, at least that was something. It was something he wasn't able to feel at home.

I could relate to needing something like that, too.

My eyes also shifted to look at where our hands rested as I took to gently dragging the tip of my middle finger in a slow up and down line along the back of his hand. It relaxed again to flatten against the leather as he let out an uneven sigh.

"I started using my father as a threat here, because I knew that people were afraid of him and what he could do. But-" He paused and I looked at him while he refused to look at me. His light brow was creased downward deeply, a pained expression scrunching the sharp lines of his face. He couldn't admit what he wanted to out loud, but I didn't think I needed him to.

I didn't need for him to say that his father scared him, too, to know that it was the truth.

"It's okay." I whispered as I flattened my hand against the back of his. Gray eyes met mine and while the look on his face had softened just slightly, there was an apology unspoken in his intent gaze. "I know."

He surprised me then, shifting his hand beneath mine. He heaved out a shaky sigh as his fingers began to softly toy with mine. It was an absent gesture, a distraction, really. We were both so familiar with needing those in our lives, I had just spent so much time focusing on my own instead of recognizing his need for them, too. Though, in fairness, up until this point I hadn't been fully aware he required them the same way.

Was I happy with the way that Draco chose to handle his problems by acting terribly? No. I would continue to disagree with and dislike that change in him, the attitude he displayed, the things that he said. But I had to be thankful to have more of an understanding as to where it came from. It somehow felt just slightly better than simply thinking he was slowly but surely becoming his father.

There was a lot left unspoken still. Just because we had covered one explanation didn't mean that there weren't many more to come. I still had a long list of questions to ask, to hope that he actually gave me answers to. This conversation gave me even more hope, however. It was just a little more proof that the effort really was there to mend things between us. If he could give me this, maybe he could give me more.

One thing at a time, Talia.

"Thank you for telling me." I watched the way that he gently wormed his pointer finger beneath every other one of my own fingers as the soft words left me. There was a subtle comfort in the way that his cooler fingers played with my own, a certain display of closeness that hadn't been felt in quite some time.

"Could've told you sooner." He mumbled.

I gave a tilted nod of my head, brows lifting. "Could've."

Draco let out a breath of a laugh and I glanced up toward his face again if only to catch a glimpse of that real smile that so seldom appeared there now.

The low chime of the black antique clock sounded, turning both of our attentions in its direction where it sat against the wall between the green velvet sofas on the opposite side of the common room. It was midnight, which meant it was officially the 31st. Draco's fingers had stilled against my own, two of them remaining half slotted between two of mine. As we looked at each other again, he had a faint grin curling at his lips.

"Happy Birthday, Talia." He murmured.

Unexpectedly, the sensation of butterflies erupted in my stomach, my breath wavering for a fleeting moment. They were words I'd heard from various people for years of my life, but they sounded so different coming from him, sitting in this private moment at midnight, following the most unguarded conversation we'd had with each other in years. It was a pleasant enough feeling, although confusing. It also reminded me of just how much more we still had to talk about, how much more there was to figure out.

One thing at a time, Talia.

"Wait here," Draco stood, pulling that cool touch of his lingering fingers away and my brow furrowed in question. "I have something for you."

I rolled my eyes despite the unstoppable smile on my face. I had told all of my friends that I didn't want them to get me anything. Of course, I wasn't an idiot, I knew that my saying that was going to stop exactly none of them. Daphne had received a package last week that she had quickly tucked beside her on the bench at the table and told me not to worry about. Lucy had mentioned writing to her parents to have something sent off to me. Even Blaise had slyly avoided telling me that he wasn't planning on getting me anything for my birthday.

Admittedly I did appreciate it. With my birthday falling during my time at Hogwarts, it actually got to be celebrated. The last time my parents had thrown me a birthday parent was when I had turned eight. For my eleventh birthday they'd been kind enough to actually get a cake - though they had regretted that choice later that evening after it ended up splattered all over our dining room.

Draco and I had received quite the verbal lashing after that playful war.

I shifted on the couch as Draco went into the boy's dormitory, facing forward. Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect. Given the fact that the two of us hadn't even been on the best of terms up until a couple weeks ago, he must have either had it planned even when I wasn't speaking to him or whatever his idea was must have come to him rather quickly in order to make sure he could get it to me on time. I toyed with the pearl earring I always wore as I waited, my teeth anxiously working at the inside of my lower lip.

Finally, he was coming back to join me with a small, square package. It was wrapped in a dark green wrapping paper with a black ribbon secured around it. He hesitated after he sat back down beside me but then let out a short huff and handed it over to me. I looked at him curiously instead of immediately opening it.

"When was the last time you got me a birthday gift that wasn't sweets?" I smirked faintly.

He returned that same amusement, eyes flashing that bright silver that I enjoyed as he looked back at me. "Not a lot of thought in getting you sweets."

Brows lifting, I inched the present in my hands up in gesture. "But there's thought in this?"

Draco shifted where he sat and rolled his eyes. One might venture to say that he was squirming, even, but I didn't think it smart for me to point that out to him. Not when we seemed to be doing so well at the moment. "Just open it."

Tearing carefully at the folded sides of the wrapping paper, I carefully extracted the small black box and dropped the discarded gift wrap between us. Lifting the lid off of the box, I inhaled sharply, my eyes widening just slightly.

Situated on gold tissue paper was a coiled silver serpent bracelet, glittering with tiny diamonds that could almost pass as just a dust of glitter all down the length of its body. It was wrapped three times, so that the head would sit right where my wrist and the back of my hand met, and the tail would be visible just an inch further up my wrist, like it wrapped itself around me. On the snake's head sat a silver, pear shaped jewel that I didn't recognize, but it was still beautiful. Not touching it, I looked up at Draco in question.

"Put it on." He nodded toward it but made the shift to pick it up himself. I watched as he carefully lifted it and turned it toward me so that I could slide my hand through and settle it onto my wrist.

That mysterious silver gem slowly faded from silver to a vibrant emerald green as it was put on over my right hand and my gaze only grew more awed as I watched.

"It's got a sort of protection charm I learned about," Draco murmured with a gentle shrug of his shoulders. Bewildered, I looked at him and waited for him to explain. "The jewel turns black if you're in some kind of danger, or like a warning, if something bad is coming."

The butterflies from before made a reappearance and I was aware of the fact that I held my breath for a couple of seconds. This was beyond a simple symbol of our house or a piece of jewelry that he knew I would wear regularly. He had thought to make it special, even more than that, special in a way that showed how much he really cared about me.

"What does the green mean?" I breathed, but instead of looking down at the changed jewel on my new bracelet, I watched for the change in Draco's face.

Draco glanced down at where my hand was now resting in his - having stayed there after sliding my bracelet on. It was similar enough to the way that he'd held my hand while reading my palm in Divination, but it felt different in this moment. He took a couple quiet seconds to take a slow, deep breath. The corner of his lips ticked upward just barely, but it was a phantom of the smile I remembered so well, not the arrogant smirk of every day.

"It means you feel safe."

Our eyes stayed locked with one another's and for a long several seconds, we said nothing. A rapid beating heart joined in with the butterflies in my stomach now as the few words he spoke looped a few times in my head. I tried not to get ahead of myself - this was still a process, there was still so much more for us to get through, to work on. But this felt levels upon levels better than what I had expected.

I had gone into this new promise between Draco and I with hope, yes, but with a low bar. My expectations for him had plummeted over the years, and perhaps that was partially why I felt like I couldn't get my bearings so well now. These late night chats of ours opening doors to areas of our life we had missed out on the truth of had been a sort of gift on their own, they had been pleasantly surprising. They were the bar.

This, however. This was way above the bar.

I swallowed hard, suddenly feeling embarrassed by how emotionally caught up I was beginning to feel. Sliding my hand off of Draco's, I gently touched the side of his face instead, my hand sliding down his jaw affectionately before dropping back to my lap. As his eyes searched mine in that unexplainable way that was becoming regular, I scrunched my nose faintly, diffusing any lingering overemotional tension.

"Yeah, I think a bit of thought went into it." I murmured with a small smile.

Draco's quiet laugh was airy, at ease. Beautiful. "A bit."