A/N: Hi, everyone! I know I said this wouldn't be updated til late/mid-August, but this is my way of not-so-subtly begging for a beta. This story is taking so much planning and I just can't even- it's not my strong point.

THIS IS NOT THE NEXT CHAPTER- THIS IS A SNEAK-PEAK OF CHAPTER SIX (JUNE). Don't read if you don't like spoilers.

It was the sort of night little girls dreamed of when they imagined meeting their Prince Charming somewhere in the vaguely distant future- all velvet midnight blue with swirls of stardust and a warm breeze that smelled of the sea. The road ahead was unpaved, winding, lined on either side with sweet-scented berry bushes and flickering lightning bugs.

They had been walking for so long that the irritation of the evening had begun to fade into that sort of forever-quiet, the wonderful stillness that only occurred when two people were immersed in completely separate thoughts yet still walking side-by-side. It was fragile, and neither seemed to realize how comforting it was after the disaster of the earlier birthday dinner and subsequent Slytherin-Gryffindor shit storm.

They walked on, the silence covering them like a thin blanket, and everything was, though unnoticed, quite beautiful.

Long after the park and its electric lights had faded from view, Draco found the need to break the silence.

"Granger, I'd like to ask you something." His voice was quiet, yet it seemed to echo like a gunshot in the night.

Hermione snapped back from her wandering thoughts, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. The stars were quite bright indeed; she could see every contour of his face in the pale light. "Yes?"

The visible corner of his lips twisted downward, hard, and his gray eyes were focused on a point far ahead. "What… This sounds ridiculous…" He sniffed derisively, sounding suddenly much more like his old self. "What do you think happens- after someone dies? What's death like?"

The question was entirely unexpected, and it nearly jerked the breath from her lungs. "What?" she choked, tripping over her own feet and stumbling a few steps.

Malfoy didn't seem to notice her blundering; he was entirely focused on not looking in her direction. "I know you hate answering questions based on theories instead of fact, but I just…I just want to hear what you believe." Hermione righted herself, cheeks burning and head reeling. She had been wracking her brains for a way to dodge the question until- " Please."

She felt unsteady and shaken, but she tried to keep her voice level. "What are you thinking about? Why does it matter?"

A harsh barked laugh answered her. "It matters because, if there is a hell or purgatory or some fucking lava-pit in the center of the earth, I'm bound to end up there someday. Weasley was right about that, at least." Malfoy's voice, already strained and callous, had turned positively acidic. "We lived through a war- everyone did things they aren't proud of. I just… I believe I was a bit worse than others."

Hermione balked at this train of conversation. The war was not something she wanted to talk about- she had given up her wand and moved to Muggle London for a reason. "Malfoy, you never actually did anything too terribly during the war. When you had the chance, you didn't turn Harry in, or fight alongside Voldemort in the end," she reasoned, scrambling for anything to dispel his dismal mood.

Visiting your father's grave on your birthday probably was a bit of a downer, all things considered.

He finally looked at her, straight in the eye. "I never did anything right either. I didn't tell them it was Potter, but I didn't deny it. And you and Weasley… I did nothing. Isn't that damnable as well?"

Silence. Thoughtful silence. Hermione remembered all too clearly the Malfoy drawing room, Draco's voice through her panic- Could be.Two words as good as a death sentence.

"Nothing."

Draco blinked, visibly surprised and upset by her terse response. "Excuse me?"

"I believe there is nothing. We become nothing. We do not exist." It was Hermione's turn to avoid his eyes. She knew in her bones what he had been hoping for- words like peace, forgiveness, and hope.Unfortunately, he had asked the wrong person.

"That…that's terrible." Malfoy's voice was quiet- shaken.

She couldn't ignore that quaver in his voice- she forced herself to look at him long and hard, eyes grave and questioning. "Is it?"

Malfoy did not respond, instead watching their black shadows slide across the ground as they meandered along the road. Hermione was struck by how childish his face looked in that instant, how terrified and uncertain. She stopped abruptly, standing still in the middle of the lane.

"How much do you know about elements and human bodies?"

Draco turned on the spot, eyeing her warily as if waiting for her to deal another shattering blow to his reality. "Not much. That's only useful Healers and Necromancers."

Hermione's lips tugged down in distaste. "Look up, please, and listen."

Draco's wary expression turned to a flat, distrustful glare. "Why?"

Stepping forward a fraction of an inch, Hermione reached out and shoved his chin upward with one finger. "Just look and listen." She expected him to struggle, to close his eyes or turn his face away. He did not.

"Muggle scientists-" she was impressed when he did not scoff or snort, but continued to stare upward at the stars, "believe that the universe started with an explosion of energy called the Big Bang. It only took the universe three seconds to come into existence. All of the matter, ever, came to be in that amount of time. Galaxies and stars and everything."

His eyebrows were drawn together in the center, confused- he didn't understand what this had to do with dying. She fought back a smile.

"A supernova occurs when a star cools and implodes- sending masses of elemental stardust flying across the universe. Eventually, all of those remnants clump together with remnants from other stars and form a new star somewhere else."

Hermione was no longer watching his face- her eyes had slid up to watch the sky above as well. Amazing, beautiful, how everything came full circle. Maybe he would see.

"There are about ninety-four natural elements found on earth, and twelve of those are in the human body. Out of those twelve elements, only one does not occur in stars."

Here- she needed to see his face, see if he understood why she was telling him this. Maybe he thought she was just being a know-it-all. Maybe he wasn't even listening. She watched what she could see of his upturned face, pale frowning lips and narrowed silver eyes. Unreadable.

"The rest of our body- ninety-three percent of our body mass- is stardust. We are made of the stuff of stars- exploded somewhere billions of years away…yet here we are."

Her breath caught in her throat as she watched him, waiting for some sign of acceptance or dismissal. Eons seemed to pass, light years in which he simply stared up at the deep blue mass above them and breathed and existed. The earth was still and silent, and time stood perched and still, waiting for this man.

Then she saw it.

In the crease beneath his steel-grey eye, moisture had pooled, white-silver in the starlight. Even as she watched with bated breath, unsure, the weight of the liquid dragged itself down his cheek, leaving a long glistening streak down his pale face.

"Please," he whispered, voice shaking and cracked, "please keep talking."

Hermione did not even have to think- words spilled from her lips as if the stars themselves were pouring them into her blank and waiting mind- as if the universe pulsed and pulled around this one broken blonde man, crying in a deserted lane somewhere in the middle of the countryside.

"Carl Sagain was a genius. He said beautiful things about the universe…and humans as well. He said we are all star-stuff, and we are the universe's way of coming to know itself. I was terrified when the idea first came into my head- that we stop existing." Hermione couldn't take her eyes off him. He was so…so close to star-stuff; white-blonde hair and polished metal irises; even his skin seemed to echo the faint glow from the blazing heavenly bodies millennia away. A thought, irrational but worrying all the same, seized Hermione, and she stumbled forward as quickly as she could and took his hand.

A spasm rocked through his body, ending in the tiniest tremble in his fingertips where they were pressed to hers. He was anchored now. He would not go floating off to join the stars he so resembled.

"You don't have to believe what I do- I know it's a terrifying thought at first, an eternity of non-existence," Hermione told him, speaking upward to his chin as he was still staring at the sky. "It's just that, for me, an eternity of blowing across the earth and eventually the universe as stardust sounds much better than an eternity of anything else. An eternity is a long, long time after all. " She bit her lip, unnerved by his quiet and the trails of moisture tracking their way down his face.

Instead of responding, he gave her hand the lightest of squeezes, more like a twitch of his fingers, and that was more comforting than any words. It was his tiny, reassuring gesture- press on, Granger, please.

"And think about it," Hermione continued quietly, a small smile flickering across her face. "Someday after we've been dead a long, long time- eons, millenia, some measure of time that hasn't even been thought of because it's so vast, who knows- and the earth has disintegrated, either blown to bits by an asteroid or by humanity itself, everyone who has ever been on this earth will be there- floating across space and time."

In her mind, she saw it- the brilliantly complex dark blue universe with its splotches of neon pink gasses and intensely white stars, and there, somewhere in a small corner of the picture was a seemingly insignificant, nearly transparent cloud of dust.

"And just imagine, after we've been there for a million more years, one speck of stardust bumps into another- and they combine. It could be anyone- Cleopatra and Albus Dumbledore. Harry and his cousin Dudley." She paused, eyes drawn to their linked hands. "Even you and I. We combine, and gradually more stardust gathers around us, and someday- we're a star. All of us, the entirety of humanity, together again. No war, no hatred, just stardust shining in the sky."

His fingers were cool in her warm hand, but he seemed to be shining right back at the white-hot stars overhead. All the words of the past few moments faded away, leaving the two to stare up at the glittering canvas above them.

And it felt, though it was all utter speculation, it felt- with their hands linked and their minds tuned to the same ringing note- it felt as if they were destined to meet again somewhere high above themselves, millions of years in the future, one speck of stardust latching on to the other.