"What do you think it's guarding?" Ron asked the next morning at breakfast, ignoring the surprised looks that were being sent in the three Gryffindor boys' direction by Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini from across the Great Hall. The first year Slytherins had obviously thought that Harry, Ron, and Draco would have been thrown out of the school, or at least in serious trouble, after what they had done barely eight hours ago. However the trio was way happier than one would've expected given the fact that the night before they had almost died, not that anyone besides them, Hermione, and Neville knew this small detail, of course, but still.

"It could also be a who." Draco said a bit offhandedly as he reached across the table for a piece of toast, glancing over at his two friends. That's what they were now, actually friends, not just three people who hung around together because otherwise they had nobody else. The previous night's events seemed to have changed something between the three of them, bringing them closer together. Ron no longer looked at him with looks of barely concealed anger when he thought Draco wasn't looking, and said blond no longer felt the urge to hit the Weasley whenever he did or said something that was even mildly stupid or just annoying to hear for whatever reason. Harry no longer glanced at them uncertainly out of the corners of his eyes as if he were scared they would leave him, and the smile on his face that morning as they left the door wasn't even slightly forced.

"Why a who?" Harry asked, his emerald green eyes sparkling with confusion behind his glasses as he looked across the table at Draco. The food on his plate was practically untouched, his silverware lay unused beside his plate. A small frown tugged at the blond's lips at that realization, the raven-haired boy opposite him looked thin and small enough as it was, he really needed to eat more than a person his age would so he could at least grow a bit. Draco quickly cut off that train of thought, feeling a bit horrified as he noticed how much like a mother he had internally sounded.

"I… I don't know. When I was a kid my father told me about this three-headed dog whose job it was to keep particularly dangerous witches and wizards in the prison they were kept in, and to keep those trying to get in, out. He said that three-headed dogs, or cerberuses as he called them, are always trained to protect one specific thing, which was often some kind of holding cell. Of course, I don't know why the school would have someone dangerous locked up in it, Azkaban is made for that, but this school isn't exactly as I originally thought so who knows what could be locked up down there. For all I know it could be some ancient magic artifact that makes you immortal or something!" A small laugh escaped his lips at the idea of something like that needing so much protection, and Draco shook his head slightly. He took a small bite of his toast as he looked up at Harry, still grinning in slight amusement despite the fact that his relatively sarcastic suggestion wasn't technically funny at all.

The grin quickly froze and faded away when he saw the other boy's expression however. Harry's eyes were slightly wide, his face pale, and his mouth hung open a bit. He looked as if what Draco had said had triggered some kind of memory, or realization, in him and he was trying to process it. What's wrong? The young Gryffindor thought, about to speak but stopped short when green eyes met his own and became ever so slightly less clouded looking.

"You remember that break-in at Gringotts that I asked Hagrid about last week?" The raven-haired boy asked suddenly, looking briefly dazed as he looked at them. There was something strange in his gaze, some kind of confused glint that unsettled Draco in a way he couldn't explain. He had never seen someone with an expression like that before, so thoughtful and confused at the same time. The closest he had probably come across was the look on his mother's face when she had tried to understand how in the world he had managed to get all of his belongings to float up and flip upside down before sticking themselves to his ceiling long before he had started learning magic.

"Yeah?" Ron responded slowly, dragging out the e as he looked at his fellow Gryffindor with a curious eyebrow raised. He seemed just as confused about the other boy's behavior as Draco, though he didn't look half as concerned about the look in Harry's eyes as the blond was. Maybe I'm just overthinking it. His attempt at convincing himself of this was rather unsuccessful, but he still hoped it was the truth.

"Well, you know how I said that Hagrid and I might have been there at the same time as it happened?" When Draco and Ron both nodded, he quickly continued, seemingly wanting to explain just as desperately as they wanted to hear what he had to say. "Well, we didn't just go to my vault. We went to a different one too, one with only one single thing in it and that the goblins needed a special letter and everything to let us into it. The security for it was incredibly above what the rest of the place's seemed to be, all just for a single small little package. What if whatever Hagrid took that day, was what's being protected down there? What if the person who broke in was looking for it, and that's why they have something so dangerous here in the school guarding it?"

For a few seconds all Draco did was stare at the other boy, somewhat surprised at the sudden show of intelligence. Sure, he had known he wasn't an idiot by any means, but still, ever since he had met Harry, he had thought of him as just a typical, reckless, act-without-thinking Gryffindor, but in that moment it struck him that Harry wasn't that at all. Reckless, yes, that he definitely was. Who could dive with a broom twenty feet, only pulling up one or some above the ground, their first time on a broom at that, and not be considered reckless? Also, sneaking out in the middle of the night to steal something from the school the night after he had almost gotten expelled for flying when he had been told specifically not to counted as a pretty reckless thing to do as well.

This however, this relatively well thought-through theory showed how much Harry really did think about the things happening around him. Most people likely would have brushed off the whole packet, thief, and guard dog as a coincidence, maybe some would think the dog and packet might have been connected, but few would have thought about all three. Draco hated admitting it, but he himself hadn't even really thought about it, even though now that Harry had mentioned it, it made so much sense that the young Malfoy wanted to hit himself upside the head for his own stupidity.

"If the dog is guarding whatever Hagrid got that day, what do you think it could be?" Draco asked after a few moments of silence in their small group, partially just to end the quiet between them.

"It's either something really valuable, or really dangerous." Ron said, and even though he looked excited at the idea of going on some adventure, Draco couldn't help but notice the slight tremble in the redhead's voice.

"Or both." Harry said as he finally began to eat the food on his plate, though he did it slowly and as if he didn't particularly want to. His simple statement, those completely normal two words, caused a small shudder of fear to wrack Draco's body. There were plenty of ancient things that fit in the category of being valuable and dangerous at the same time, and none of them were ever used for good purposes. If someone got ahold of something that was being guarded so well, nothing good would come of it, Draco realized.

After that none of them spoke for a while. The trio ate in silence, not wanting to talk about what they had seen the night before, or suspected about it, anymore. We shouldn't have talked about it here in the first place. People already listened in on us once and almost got us caught out of bed, what would happen if they found out we were in the one forbidden corridor in the entire castle? Draco thought and sighed, looking down at his plate as he poked at his food with his fork.

When he had gotten his Hogwarts letter back in early June, he hadn't expected anything even remotely unusual to happen during his time at the wizarding school. He had expected he'd be in Slytherin, that he would go to classes every day with his friends, pass his exams every year with top marks, and then graduate so that he could go on to fulfill the plans his parents had for him. The fact that every single one of those things had seemingly been thrown out of the window barely twenty minutes after he had arrived at the castle terrified him. How could someone's life be turned completely upside down in such a short amount of time? How was someone expected to handle that, especially with strange, dangerous things going on around them?

Draco, as per usual, was abruptly ripped out of his thoughts when the post arrived. His shoulders briefly tensed up as he bit his lower lip nervously, but when after a few minutes he didn't catch sight of his father's owl, the tension left him completely again. A sigh of relief escaped the blond's lips, despite the fact that he hadn't gotten any letters from either of his parents since the Howler he still felt terrified that he would receive another one. It was a bit silly, he knew, they had explicitly told him that they didn't want to speak to him anymore, but still he almost hoped they didn't mean it.

Just as Draco was about to go back to eating his breakfast, a different owl caught his eye. Well, six owls actually, all of them barn owls like his father's, and they were carrying a long, narrow package between them. Draco watched as the owls descended from the ceiling, wondering briefly who could possibly be receiving such a large package so early in the year, only to seconds later realize that they were flying straight towards where he, Harry, and Ron were sitting at Gryffindor table. Instinctively Draco leaned back, away from the owls as they dropped the package right in front of Harry on the table, almost knocking down at least three glasses of pumpkin juice and flipping a plate over, which caused a piece of toast to fall down onto the floor beside the Gryffindor table. The package was quickly followed by a letter, which was carried over by another owl that Draco hadn't noticed before due to how ordinary it had seemed compared to the six owls carrying something together.

For a few moments all Harry did was stare at the huge package in front of him, obviously confused. During that time, Draco leaned forward and prodded at the brown paper wrapping, trying to figure out what it could possibly be. That didn't take him long to find out though, the shape of it was obvious enough and after having poked it a bit and having felt the wooden handle beneath the paper, he couldn't come up with any other plausible things it could be. It was a broom. Harry had received a broom. But he was a first year, they weren't allowed their own brooms, right? Who had sent it? Harry certainly seemed too shocked for him to have ordered it himself.

"Open the letter first. I think it's a broom." Draco said, lowering his voice so that nobody besides he, Ron, and Harry could hear him. His words seemed to pull the other boy out of his momentary trance and he quickly grabbed the envelope that was lying on top of the wrapped up broom, ripping it open and quickly skimming it. Barely fifteen seconds afterwards he handed the letter over to Ron, who was sitting beside Draco, so that the two of them could read it over as well. Harry's green eyes glinted excitedly behind his round glasses, though he looked slightly nervous as he glanced around at the other students who were looking at the package lying on the table in front of him with curiosity.

DO NOT OPEN THE PACKAGE AT THE TABLE.

Your new Nimbus Two-Thousand is inside it, but I don't want the others to find out about it, because then they'll want one as well. Oliver Wood will be expecting you for your first training session on the Quidditch Pitch at seven o'clock this evening.

Professor M. McGonagall

Draco's eyebrows rose up as he read the words written in neat, even handwriting on the small piece of parchment that had been inside the envelope. A Nimbus Two-Thousand?! Even he didn't have that new of a broom! Then again, his parents had refused to buy him a new one every time a new, better kind came out because a) it was a waste of money (Though he knew his parents really couldn't care less about that) and b) he seemed to break them after just a few months of owning them every single time. Eventually they had given up and had told him that if he broke his current broom, a Comet Two-Sixty, they wouldn't buy him a new one until his 13th birthday. Needles to say, he hadn't so much as bent the twigs on the back of it, despite the fact that he was so used to finding some way to break his brooms so he could get new ones that he almost purposefully flew through his bedroom window once, instead of opening it and flying in that way. If he had done that, it really wouldn't have been good for him. Not only would he have broken his broom, he also would have broken a window and made a huge mess of his room.

"A Nimbus Two-Thousand," Ron's voice beside him pulled Draco out of his thoughts and the blond looked up from the letter Harry had received from their Head of House. The redhead sounded incredibly jealous, but also awed at the same time. His blue eyes were wide, and looked like they were sparkling in the morning sunlight shining in through the ceiling-high windows, while a smile was spread across his face. "I've never even touched one."

Draco nodded along with what the redhead said, not really wanting to say anything because he knew whatever he would say would come off as stupid and probably selfish sounding. Ron had only just started acting like he actually thought of him as a friend, he really didn't want to make him hate him again, or for Harry to think he was unworthy of their friendship. Which, he was, in so many ways, even though Harry didn't seem to know it.

Before any of them said anything, or someone asked what the package was, Harry stood up from his place at Gryffindor table and grabbed the still wrapped up broom. He nodded towards the two of them to follow him and without actually looking to see if they followed him, he walked towards the doors of the Great Hall and left. Ron and Draco were quick to practically sprint after him when they finally got over the initial shock of what they would find once they opened the gift from their Transfiguration professor. Even though they knew what it was didn't make them want to see it any less.