After his first midnight stroll, Draco had taken to wandering the corridors aimlessly at night. Of course, he suffered for it in the morning but he did not care anymore. He could not sleep anyway, so why bother trying? All he would see was another innocent life ending before his eyes. One man could only take so much before he cracked and Draco was determined to prolong it for as long as possible.

And so he roamed.

Secrets had always fascinated him, any kind of secret. He loved finding them out and then holding them over the owner's head. It gave him a sense of power that he could not find anywhere else. However, once he began to acquire some of his own, the feeling of pleasure from discovering them disappeared. Knowledge became a matter of survival. The more one knew when working under the Dark Lord, the longer one usually lived. But sometimes one could know too much, and then he became a liability. It was all about balance. Know enough to live, but not enough to be found out. It was a very thin line he had walked, but walk it he had.

That was one of the reasons Aunt Bellatrix had taught Draco Occlumency. He knew many secrets that Lord Voldemort would have killed him for if they were discovered. It turned out that Draco was something of a prodigy at it, much to Bellatrix's delight. He could turn off his emotions at will, enabling him to lock his mind from the inside out. No one, not even the Dark Lord, could delve into his head and drew out all of his secrets. Some Draco did not care if anyone found out, such as his resentment at his father for incurring the wrath of Lord Voldemort.

However there were others that could have painted a large red target on his back if anyone ever found out that he knew. On the outside he might appear to be the Dark Lord's personal servant, the perfect Death Eater ready to do whatever his master commands. But on the inside, he resented being used in such a way. He was a Malfoy, not a house elf to be kicked around. After a time, such thoughts became too dangerous to think even in the relative privacy of his mind.

So he shut them down.

It worked remarkably well for the brief time he needed it to. In that regard, he supposed he was similar to the Dark Lord. Both of them were capable of atrocities like no other once they were comfortable with not feeling anything inside. But at least Draco knew that there was such a thing as love, even if he had never experienced it himself from anyone other than his mother. And even then, a mother's affection only went so far. Perhaps that was what went wrong with Lord Voldemort—he never had a mother to love him. Oh yes, Draco knew all about young Tom Riddle, an example of the kind of secret that could have gotten him killed if his Lordship, as that sniveling idiot Wormtail had always called him, found out.

Absently rubbing his left arm, Draco peered down the hall stretching before him. All was silent. He held up his wand and waved it around his head carelessly before striding forward. Coldness rippled down over his skin, but he did not take notice of it for he was more than used to the feeling. The faint blue light produced by the charm slowly faded until all was dark once more. By now he had memorized the entire layout of this level of the castle and did not even have to cast the Lumos spell to see by. Hogwarts held no more secrets, at least for him.

He had no destination in mind, only the desire to see just how far he could roam before Filch caught him. It seemed a favorite pastime of his to court trouble. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush he felt when he walked past the caregiver's office without being noticed. Although now that he thinks of it, such a small victory was rather pathetic compared to what he had been through in his young life. Nothing he did now could ever surpass, or even hope to measure up to, his life as a Death Eater.

In later years he would look back on that moment and laugh at his utter naivety