Draco had bought quite a large pile of schoolbooks with him.

It wasn't that he enjoyed studying. He was an intelligent individual and was able to soar effortlessly above the others which gave him some satisfaction and joy, but he didn't like it in his free time. Especially not now, being a student somewhere between second and third year, he still felt like he had plenty of time before his OWLs and it was uncharacteristic of him to worry about it too much. However, what he wanted to do was worry about the ghosts and the inferi in East Lothian, and any muggle or witching folk that could come across it even less, for he had never quite liked the feeling of all of these adventures - it was a bit too dark, even for him, and so the schoolbooks were the only thing he grabbed on a whim he could think of that distracted him from the reality around him a little. Mostly because he had quite large libraries of books in almost every little topic that might possibly be of interest to him at home and it was what came to mind at the thought 'grab something big and time consuming', even though he was regretting it a little now.

He would've grabbed his broomstick collection except for the fact that he didn't want to accidentally lose control and fly into East Lothian. The yew and potion barrier they were intending to build hadn't been built yet, plus, even if they had it was still very easy for a witch or wizard to wonder of inside, and so Draco wasn't very keen to test his brooms near this site anymore, nor his newfound ability to fly without a broom.

Although ordinarily he would've loved to fly around, he kept his feet firmly on the ground and walked everywhere for the entire duration of his stay there. Which he didn't even know for he didn't know when the others would get back, but at least he was comfortable.

He'd taken one of the biggest and most comfortable tents, that had invisibility abilities, as well as a proper bed, some appliances like a kettle, a bathtub and shower, really, the inside was like a luxuriously furnished hotel room and ensuite, and many more camping items that would truly come in handy if he ever needed to. Short of heading outside every morning and evening to check on the site and keeping the noise level low so that he could hear anyone approaching, he was fairly insulated inside his tent. There were of course the mandatory safety wards up so he didn't need to worry. He couldn't keep an eye on East Lothian when he was sleeping but he figured if anything happened he would find out soon enough since he was literally stationed on site, and that this was the best security Tom could've hoped for.

He spent a lot of time reading for lack of anything else to do, and trying to ignore the reality all around him.

He shivered.

He wanted to go on magical adventures - he'd always loved magic. Most wizarding children did and something like this was a daydream or heavenly summer for them, roaming around the countryside testing and learning new magic. He had deeper thoughts about the politics of the world due to his family's involvement which gave him appreciation for it and how it affected all people in society, and he'd a certain appreciation for Dark Arts which was untapped into at Hogwarts. He had several reasons for finding some initial enjoyment in the trip but...

His mouth felt like there was sawdust in it when he thought about everything that had happened so far, at night his dreams were laced with the faces of the people he'd killed, coming back to haunt him, even though they were fleeting and if he was lucid enough he could manage to get his brain to change it to more pleasant dreams; dreams of his family, places he wanted to travel to, careers he potentially wanted to have in magic, dreams of catching up with his friends in their favourite places, dreams of winning Quidditch cup matches, of playing with new items he'd wanted...

He was able to manage to be reasonably happy but even Draco thought everything that had occurred was a touch too dark for him. Something deep inside him throbbed and died at everything they'd done so far, and so it was mostly a matter of putting up pretenses, being tough and big on the outside and getting through it, because he believed in the political cause and had enough respect for the dark arts and magic they did, but truthfully Draco did not feel not broken from all of this.

He was in relative comfort every day however, and was able to put things out of his mind and was mostly peaceful. He thought he probably had one of the least dangerous and nicest jobs out of what everyone was doing right now and tried to be grateful for it.

"Hello...it's me, Astoria," said Astoria a little while later. She usually spent the days at Draco's tent and the nights at Daphne's, reporting everything that happened each time she passed from place to place. She flew through the thicket; taking advantage of her new flying powers and seemed braver than Draco guessed her to be about flying through the woods alone. Even though she'd done it before and she had her newfound powers of flying without a broom to give her some confidence so it was not the worst, and she was sandwiched between two people whom she trusted and knew they cared for her to an extent.

Draco hadn't much to do with Astoria before, she was simply the wallflower younger sister of Daphne, a girl in his year, that he knew the name of and not much more, but he hadn't disliked her or hadn't not extended general courtesy to her either.

"Come in," said Draco.

Astoria never came in uninvited and Draco was usually quite pleased to have her company again. He didn't like being alone in places like this. He felt eerie with all the ghosts and inferi less than fifty metres from him. He'd placed the tent so that one window was permanently open and facing East Lothian. Even though Tom assured him the ghosts just wanted to wreck havoc and retribution from within it, Draco still felt uneasy that he was going to get unwelcome visitors and he felt braver with a permanent eye on it.

"Nothing much has happened with Daphne. She says the yew forests feel much more quieter and peaceful now that the ghosts are gone. That it's simply just a forest," said Astoria.

Draco motioned to some cakes and biscuits and poured some tea for her. He often did slightly more festive things when she came around because they comforted him and he'd wanted as much comfort as possible in a time and place like this. He almost envied Daphne, he was the one permanently stationed closest to all the ghosts and inferi for this length of time.

"How is she not scared of living in the forest?" asked Draco, "I mean. It's an entire forest of yew. That's not exactly a friendly plant."

"She's a little creeped out for sure, I think we all are. But she's very glad it's not out in the open. She wouldn't want to be spotted by an airplane or muggles or witches and wizards crossing through this part of the countryside or anything," said Astoria, "besides. She's only in within about ten or so metres. She says the forest is warmer now, muggy and humid like how a dense forest should be during the summer. I think the ghosts made it cooler."

"It's cold here," said Draco, "it just feels colder than it should be for the summer. Can you feel the difference as you fly through the thicket?"

"A little," said Astoria, "I don't notice it until I stop flying though. I'm a little warmer when I am."

"I'll teach you the Hogwarts first year curriculum," said Draco, "because all of us aren't going back to Hogwarts next year and I think it'll be better if we tried to teach you it as well as whatever Tom's teaching you. Just a bit better."

Truthfully it was to get his mind of things as much as he wanted to teach Astoria something.

"That sounds good," said Astoria and so they spent their days doing so.

When Astoria wasn't learning with Draco (which was just as mundane and boring as you could possibly imagine it, it wasn't much different to learning at Hogwarts) she was doing the same with Daphne, who once she heard of it, decided it sounded good and also taught Astoria a little from the textbooks. Astoria had bought along her first year textbooks which were kept in Daphne's tent and they could go over it whenever she wanted. Daphne's tent was actually a very old one that her family used sometimes when they wanted to supervise fieldwork on the Greengrass Plantations overnight. She took it on a whim. It looked more rough and made for workers than it did a noble family, but it had all the useful utilities and functions, protective enchantments, and was comforting to live in but ugly to look at. She and Astoria took comfort in their tent and more or less enjoyed a happy time keeping an eye on the yew shoots which were shooting up fast.

It was a little unnerving to see them grow so fast but Daphne didn't have to look at it very much.

All she had to do was listen out to see if there were any footsteps or voices approaching the yew and try to dispell suspicion if there was any wizarding folk who were suspicious or muggle folk who came too close, but so far she had no such encounters with anyone.

Astoria picked up the magic easily, she had been practicing quite a lot of advanced spells all summer, but it was still mostly boring and mundane work, crawling through it all.

The three were relatively happy though.

"I want to be an investor when I grow up," said Theo, "I know some families just invest in their land but I think that's a little boring for me. I'd like to do more active investments, meet the people I'm doing business with head on, get their secrets and insights and then pick the best to invest, or give suggestions I know would help families profit so much more. I could make double or triple the amount of money this way. It's a dream job I would love."

They were seated on a first class flight. There was enough space between them and the other passenger's they couldn't be overheard easily though they still dropped their voices low. They left their wands on their luggage for they were so confident they were enjoying an indulgent muggle luxury there was no need for them whilst on the flight. Witches and wizards rarely used airplanes because they had appariation, portkeys and floo, so it was very unlikely to bump into anything magical and it wasn't as if they were currently being chased, wanted or anything. Besides, it seemed the ministry's resources were stretched on recapturing Sirius Black if anything this summer.

Tom, Theo and Blaise had booked tickets together. It might be suspicious if any one of them were travelling with the girls much so the three pretended to be friends on a trip together. The three of them chose to wear clothes in darker colours, styled their hair to age themselves and adopted a more serious demeanor getting on and of that was just about enough to fool others and make them seem older than they really were so they had no problems with it.

"I don't want to work or worry about anything much," said Blaise, "I just want to enjoy life. What's the point of money if you don't enjoy it? I won't do anything too stupid and lose my fortune, that's ridiculous, but I will have a good time for most of my days."

Theo had bought all three tickets. Blaise's family was fairly wealthy, though his birth father had passed away so it was just his birth mother and her current boyfriend at the time that he'd had most contact with. His mother was quite stingy unlike many other pureblood families and forbade him from passing their wealth to anyone outside of the family. Blaise was more stingier than most of the purebloods and didn't like spending money on anything. He had managed to wheedle a ticket out of Theo when Theo bought one for Tom and Theo knew how much effort it could be to fight with Blaise on that one so he did the intelligent thing and relented. Blaise was wealthy, but all of his wealth went to him and himself only.

"With your...other friends?" asked Theo. Blaise's mother never quite found a man she'd liked after her husband passed away so Blaise never had a father. He didn't mind. He didn't think anyone could ever replace his real father, and he'd stopped caring about his mother's boyfriend's after the second one. They were all the same to him. But more often than not his mother's boyfriend's were all wealthy types, they were all in wealthy aristocratic circles afterall, and Blaise had met some of his...would be step brothers and step sisters if his mother ever married her most recent boyfriend, and he'd found himself to have more in common with them than he'd expected at first.

He hung out with some of them again and generally had a good time outside of Hogwarts. He was one of the Slytherin boys who had friends outside of Hogwarts, though he didn't often talk about them much. Not everyone there could relate to their parents constantly changing due to divorce and marriages as Blaise had, and he didn't find it interesting to be the one to have to explain it all to the conservative pureblood families of Hogwarts. His mother used to go to the effort of marrying her boyfriends and Blaise remembered a long line of weddings he'd been to that made him thoroughly sick of weddings, but nowadays they just lived together in a de facto relationship and his mother still got some benefits after they'd split or her lover passed away.

None of it was intentional, just based on random luck, but sometimes luck was good, and that was a normal thing sometimes when luck was concerned.

"Maybe. Maybe not. If I still like them," said Blaise as he'd poured himself some wine and nibbled on some grapes. The boys decided they should enjoy themselves on this flight and had ordered a little bit of all the indulgences flights could come with. The view was beautiful outside of the window; they reclined on the most comfortable mattress-chairs, and had large tvs in front of them, multiple dvds, tablets and other items.

Theo and Blaise had understood just enough of how to use them to enjoy them and feel pampered. Luxury muggle products were designed to be very easy to use and even though they didn't understand a thing about how they worked, they were still able to get enjoyment out of them.

"You will. You are like peas in a pod," said Theo, "wine?" he offered Tom.

Technically they weren't allowed to drink but nearly all of the pureblood aristocratic boys had tasted alcohol before the legal age. There was a lot of it lying around and none of their parents had been truly particular about it. They didn't want either of their sons or daughters to grow up alcoholics and made it clear they weren't to abuse it in this way, but they cared little for arbitrary laws about what age one had to be before they drank and they all had had it before. They usually just didn't get in habit of drinking it regularly until after the legal age but none of them were strangers to it. Theo didn't see why they couldn't enjoy some alcohol on the trip.

If anyone tried to give them problems they could simply throw a small bribe at them anyway. Small rules meant nothing to them.

"Alright," said Tom, as he tested out his alcohol tolerance in this new body. It seemed his new body had modelled itself of his sixteen year old body almost to the T biologically and he'd kept his tolerance from then, which was to say, greater than average, but he had his limits. He stopped when he felt himself reaching the edge of them and declined anymore. He wasn't particularly interested in alcohol though he would drink it at formal occasions if everyone else was drinking it, but this flight had been interesting for realising where his tolerance was at. He was pleasantly glad it hadn't waned with age.

Tom, Theo realised, was not particularly talkative besides his fanatic ideas, and did not seem to truly enjoy smalltalk or had much of a fire for it. He gave very little interest in it, none of the usual smalltalk the upper wealthy classes made to each other seemed to be anything he truly took an interest in, or even felt obligated to entertain, and soon Theo was mostly just talking to Blaise.

Tom had this silence to him, Theo noted.

Tom meanwhile, was seething a little for the rest of the trip. He hadn't particularly been asked or needed to mention it but he'd never actually been on a plane before either. A part of him felt angry at all of this. Had his birth father not neglected him like so he might've had more luxuries in his life. He might've not had to live with the experiences of a poor person and actually possessed some of the sense of normalcy the other pureblood families had. His brain bought him back to the days in Slytherin at Hogwarts. Where he managed to fit in so well among the other pureblood aristocratic families of his time then, but yet he always sentenced the wealth gap between them.

His anger bubbled. It wasn't that he particularly liked money, he could be born in a wealthy family and still be attracted to a life of dark arts on the run, but rather he resented actually being rock bottom, like he just felt entitled to more, and he hated that all the wealthy things he hadn't experienced were just a reminder of his helplessness at being poor. He hated being helpless.

"I couldn't imagine anything less than first class," said Pansy on the flight she, Luna and Hermione were on. Pansy bought first class tickets for all of them because she didn't want to fly anything less. Only Hermione had a passport but they'd all agreed to use confounding to get past border control and purchase the tickets.

"Is it possible to make a stationary airplane? I would love to live at this level and see the clouds everyday," said Luna, looking outside the window eagerly.

They were all dressed up rather warmly in thick coats and clothing in preparation for Greenland. Hermione was wearing a splotchy brown one and Luna a silver one. Pansy of course, wore an expensive looking mint green one. She looked the best out of all of them but Luna looked less conspicuous than she normally did and on the whole they all looked fairly mature for the trip. They could just about pass as older people. Especially as all of them were average height or a little taller for their age.

It seemed when Luna wasn't dressing up to make a statement, her default colour was silver. She was big on symbolism and loved the connotations of her name, so anything silvery or moonlike seemed to be her colours for when she wasn't changing around her fashion to say something.

"No, I wish," said Hermione, "there's space stations you can purchase tickets to and they're pretty stationery. Like a space hotel."

"Space, the one field witches and wizards have done so little in," murmured Luna.

"And the ocean," said Hermione, "muggles haven't really explored the deep depths and neither have witches or wizards truly taken an interest in that."

"Are you going to say science next?" drawled Pansy.

"No since you evidently have some idea of what it is," said Hermione.

Pansy ordered some fruit and cake and wasted no time in having a good time. "Everyone thinks we're stupid or something, but we actually learn muggle science from our tutors before we start Hogwarts. We know the concepts and stuff. It's really technology and how science is applied to build technology we don't bother with..." she said.

"Wizarding families sometimes have licensed tutors come to their homes and teach their children before they start Hogwarts," said Luna, "they can get quite expensive so I suppose it's mostly a pureblood tradition. My father always said him taking me around on his travels counted as tutoring and it was even better than some of what the purebloods had-"

"We go on fieldtrips too in case you were wondering," said Pansy, "one tutor takes an entire class of witches and wizards around the same age. It's how some of us know each other as well as from balls and parties our parents throw before we start Hogwarts."

"What's the most interesting fieldtrip you've been on?" asked Luna.

The conversation was relatively light and happy as they flew to Greenland.

Author's Note: Hi, hope this chapter was enjoyable. I'm thinking of discontinuing the story though (but leaving this up). I accidentally made the beginning few weeks too long (too many chapters spent all on the same week), and I thought all the worldbuilding events they do that's 'dark' would be wrapped up shorter, with more Tomione infused. Except now that I'm writing it it sort of feels like 2 separate stories, one is the plot and them building a dark world story, and the other is a romance, which still won't appear for many chapters. (Before I wrote this story I thought I would get up to it by now and I definitely had ideas for their romance). I also felt like I wasn't good at pacing and planning the story (in hindsight I wish I extended all the things they did so it took up more time in the story, instead of cramming it all in a week, and having the first few weeks be super long), that way they could be aged up a lot, as well as have better flow/less events in a short amount of time, and I just realised that I screwed it up then. This is the first long deep-plot story I've tried writing so I've never plotted storylines before and didn't have a feel for them.

However, now I've sort of lost motivation for continuing to write all of the dark stuff, I was thinking of discontinuing the story and just leaving it up here as it is. I guess for people who might enjoy the descriptions of the dark things/advanced magic they did?

Let me know what you think, I'm curious about reader's opinions. If I don't get much of a response for this I think I might discontinue it, but I have other story ideas in mind I wanted to write that I might get around to...