3 A.M.

Draco was walking the grounds a few days later. It was late in the evening and he was alone as had become usual. He still couldn't stop thinking about the redhead. There was something wrong with her. She had retreated back into her shell, but this time it didn't seem like that was the way she wanted it to be. He could tell something was bothering her but he couldn't figure out what.

Neither could he figure out when he had started caring so much about the little sprite. That he had was no longer a question. He wanted to be part of her life, but he couldn't figure out how to become so and settled for watching her from a distance.

He was jarred out of his thoughts when he heard a scream. It wasn't a scream of someone in trouble. It wasn't a scream of fright. It was a scream of frustration, a scream of pain. It lasted through three breaths and faded rather than stopped. It sounded like the voice of whoever it was just couldn't keep it up anymore.

He had been walking in the direction from which the scream had come and wasn't surprised to find a small redhead kneeling in the grass. She wasn't crying. She looked like she hurt too much to cry.

He didn't know what to say or do so he just stood there.

After a few moments she spoke. He couldn't barely catch her words. Why was it that she always spoke so softly he was never sure what he heard her properly?

"I can't help but be scared of it all some times, but the rain's going to wash it all away."

He was confused. He wasn't sure what she was talking about. "The rain?" he asked.

She looked at him. "Something will happen and everyone will forget what has us all so tense right now. Something will happen that will reset everything. We will start over. We will end up back here with everything tearing us apart. It just cycles through, like the rain." Her eyes were unsettling.

"What are you afraid of?" it was a stupid question and he knew it, but he asked it anyway.

She gave a sad smile. "Everything. I'm afraid of what will happen to us through the war. I'm afraid of what will happen to us through life. I'm afraid of pretty much everything."

"But the rain will wash it all away." He stated absently.

She nodded.

He continued to stand there and she continued to kneel. She was caught up in a life she was tired of. He could see that. She needed someone to walk through it all with her, someone who understood. They locked eyes and just stared at each other. She had a little bit of something, and he knew that was better than nothing, but she deserved more.

She turned her eyes to darkening sky "The moon doesn't hang as high as it did when I was a kid." She turned back to look at him again. His eyes held confusion as well as curiosity. "You know, I only sleep well when it's raining, when things are changing."

He brought his hands up and rubbed his face. It had stopped raining. Things had stopped changing. Or maybe things were changing so fast and so steadily that they needed to be the same for a while in order to be different. He didn't really know. All he knew was that she needed something and he wasn't sure what.