A/N:
Why hello there, everyone! I've uploaded quite a bit recently, but mass uploads will slow down from here on. On average, chapters are about 4k words, so yes—this fanfic is going to be a long one. I have a lot of chapters in reserve, though uploads might not be regular. Thank you for reading, and any comments, reviews, or Power Stones would be greatly appreciated!
**********
Hermione Granger had decided to brew Polyjuice Potion. Whether Harry and Ron supported the idea was beside the point.
"Someone in Slytherin must know something," she told them, standing in Myrtle's bathroom with her arms folded. "I need to get inside the common room."
She wanted to look for Herpo's notebook. She wanted to know what else was written in it.
Harry and Ron were sceptical of her theories about Draco. They were also sceptical of the wisdom of brewing a notoriously complicated restricted potion on the basis of a suspicion neither of them fully shared.
"Just ask him," Ron said, with the air of someone offering an obviously simpler solution. "He practically tells you everything anyway. Are you two still arguing?"
"He won't tell me. He never tells me the things that actually matter." Hermione paused. "And even if he had nothing to do with the Chamber, whoever opened it would hardly go around admitting it."
"If anyone's the Heir, it's Lucius Malfoy, not Draco," Ron said, with considerable conviction. "More his style."
Harry shrugged in reluctant agreement.
"Fine," Hermione said. "Then I suppose we'll find out."
She knew the plan was complicated and not without risk. She knew it anyway. She had read Moste Potente Potions cover to cover—it had been Draco who recommended it to her, which she was choosing not to think about too carefully—and she understood precisely what the brewing process involved.
She hoped she was wrong about all of it. She hoped more than she could say.
But she couldn't rest until she knew.
---
Myrtle's bathroom was quiet, which was the main thing.
"You're back again." Myrtle drifted through the door of her cubicle, brightening at the sight of Hermione arranging jars and bottles on the damp floor. "Are you brewing something?"
"Polyjuice Potion. I hope you don't mind. It's a bit of a long project—a few weeks at least."
"I don't mind at all." Myrtle settled onto the edge of a sink, looking pleased to have company. "What are those for?"
"Lacewing flies, leeches, Boomslang skin, Bicorn horn, fluxweed picked at the full moon..." Hermione ran her finger down the ingredient list. "The fluxweed has to be harvested properly, and the lacewings need twenty-one days of stewing. The Boomslang skin and Bicorn horn are going to be the difficult ones—I may have to look in Professor Snape's private stores."
Myrtle looked thrilled by this. Hermione chose not to examine what that said about Myrtle's idea of entertainment.
She lit the flame under the cauldron and set to work, and tried not to think about how much she hoped to be proved wrong.
---
The atmosphere in Transfiguration had become, in Harry's words, the kind that gave you frostbite if you sat too close.
Draco was aware of it. Hermione was determined not to look at him; she faced her desk with the focussed expression of someone who has appointed themselves entirely to their work and would thank anyone nearby not to disturb that arrangement. She did not initiate conversation. She did not look up when he spoke. She sat six inches further from him than she normally did.
"If you'd like to change partners, just say so," Draco said, quietly, at the beginning of one lesson. "I won't be offended."
"I don't know what you mean," Hermione said, to her wand.
"I mean that sitting next to 'evil Slytherin' students is presumably unpleasant. You don't have to do it out of obligation." His voice was even. "Say the word and I'll move."
She looked up at that, fast—almost caught him—but he was already looking away, reaching for his mouse.
"I haven't said anything about evil Slytherins," she said.
"You didn't have to." He turned the mouse into a goblet with a single, slightly impatient movement. The Slytherin serpent was etched into the stem. Professor McGonagall would admire it later.
Hermione looked at her own goblet—plain, technically correct, the result of careful and conscientious work—and said nothing.
She wanted to say: I don't think you're evil. She wanted to say: I'm doing this because I need to be sure, and I need to be sure because it matters to me what you are.
She said neither of these things.
"Fine," she said instead. "If it would be easier for you, I'll move."
"It wouldn't be easier," Draco said, and picked up his quill.
Neither of them moved. They sat six inches apart in perfect, chilly silence for the rest of the lesson, and Hermione told herself that this was fine, that she was handling this correctly, and did not entirely convince herself.
---
The Quidditch match between Slytherin and Gryffindor fell on a Saturday in early November, under a sky the colour of wet slate.
Draco had been to see Madam Hooch three times in the preceding week to verify the match balls. Madam Hooch had responded to these visits with diminishing patience.
"Mr. Malfoy, I assure you that the equipment has been inspected, re-inspected, and inspected again. The Bludgers are perfectly—"
"I'd like to request one final check before the match," Draco said.
Flint, standing beside him, adopted the expression of a man who considers this a reasonable precaution.
Madam Hooch took a long breath. "This is the last time," she said.
Good. Draco thought. He vividly remembered his first confrontation with Harry, and a Bludger that had behaved in ways Bludgers were not supposed to behave. He had no desire to repeat the experience.
With the cursed ball accounted for, the second part of the plan was straightforward: spot the Snitch before Harry did, and be faster once he had.
The whistle blew at eleven o'clock.
Slytherin rose into the grey, humid air. Thunder moved somewhere to the north. The pitch smelled of rain and damp grass.
Draco circled high, eyes scanning. Slytherin found their form quickly—the team was sharp this year, and the Gryffindor Chasers were struggling to keep pace. By the time the first drops of heavy rain began to fall, Slytherin were sixty points up.
Draco wiped his face and saw, in the stands, his father's pale hair. Lucius was seated with the school governors, watching the pitch with an expression Draco couldn't read from this distance.
He turned back to the sky.
There—a flash of gold near the far scaffolding, small and quick, wings blurring.
Draco angled toward it immediately, accelerating, and heard the sound of a broom picking up speed behind him. Harry had seen it too.
The Snitch dived toward the scaffolding beneath the stands, threading through the struts with the unhelpful agility of something that genuinely did not want to be caught. Draco followed it in, broom tipping sideways between the narrow supports, and heard Harry somewhere close behind—and then, less welcomingly, the low resonant thud of something large and fast.
A Bludger.
Not just any Bludger—the same Bludger he had checked. The one that had been behaving normally. He could already tell from the sound of it that it was not behaving normally.
"What is wrong with that thing?" he shouted at Harry, because Harry was right there and someone needed to shout at.
"It keeps coming after me!" Harry yelled back. "Can we—"
"No, that's a foul!"
"That's what Wood said!"
"The only way it stops is when the match ends!" Draco pulled up hard to avoid a support beam. "Which means we need to end the match—catch the Snitch—and then deal with that thing!"
The Snitch, apparently tired of the scaffolding, burst back out into open sky and shot upward. Draco went after it. Harry went after Draco. The Bludger went after Harry with an enthusiasm that suggested it had taken this personally.
Higher and higher—the rain was coming down in sheets now—the Snitch a small bright smear ahead of him, Harry half a broom-length behind—the Bludger somewhere to the left, close—
Draco reached out his hand.
His fingers closed around cold, slick, thrumming metal.
The Snitch's wings beat frantically against his palm.
He had it.
He registered dimly that Harry was shouting something behind him, that the tone had changed—and then the impact came, not to him but to his broom, the Bludger catching the tail end of it with a crack that he felt in his hands, and then there was nothing under him.
The ground arrived faster than seemed physically reasonable.
---
The hospital wing was dark and quiet when he opened his eyes. The curtains were drawn. A single lamp burned on the bedside table.
Flint—Marcus—was asleep in the chair beside the bed.
"Flint," Draco said, and then decided that speaking at full volume was inadvisable.
Marcus woke with a start. He looked at Draco for a moment in the way someone looks at a thing they weren't certain they'd see again, and then composed himself.
"Don't try to move," he said. "Thirty-four fractures."
"Did we win?"
Marcus nodded at the bedside table. A small glass case sat there. Inside it, the Snitch dozed, its wings folded, twitching occasionally in some golden dream.
"We won," Marcus said. "That was a beautiful catch, Draco." He said it in a straightforward way, without ceremony, and Draco found this more affecting than a great deal of praise ever had been.
"After you went down," Marcus continued, "your father and Professor Snape both cast Cushioning Charms from the stands. Slowed you enough. When you hit the ground, everyone—" He paused. "The Slytherins came down. The Gryffindors came down. Potter flew down himself before he'd even landed properly."
Draco absorbed this.
"The Bludger—" he began.
"Your Gryffindor girl dealt with it." A brief, appreciative expression crossed Marcus's face. "The one from the selection—Granger. She blasted it apart the moment the match ended. Didn't leave much."
Draco said nothing.
He thought about the six inches of deliberate distance in Transfiguration. He thought about her face, which he had stopped letting himself look at directly because it was easier not to.
She had still blown up the Bludger.
"Your father," Marcus continued carefully, "was not pleased with the management of the match. He made his feelings known. Professor Lockhart attempted to assist with your recovery, and—" Marcus appeared to struggle briefly with professional neutrality. "Mr. Malfoy removed him from the situation."
"Good," Draco said, with feeling.
Madam Pomfrey's Skele-Gro was somewhere in his immediate future. He knew what Skele-Gro felt like and was not looking forward to it.
He was still composing himself for this when the hospital wing door opened.
Marcus stood up with the expression of a man who has suddenly remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. Narcissa Malfoy had come through the door at something just below a run, which Draco had never seen her do, and the sight of him—bandaged, motionless—stopped her at the foot of the bed with her hand over her mouth.
"Mother," Draco said, before she could say anything. "I'm fine."
She sat down in the chair Marcus had vacated and took his hand very carefully in both of hers and said nothing at all for a moment, which was worse than anything she could have said.
"Thirty-four fractures," Lucius said from the doorway. He came in quietly, stood at Narcissa's shoulder. "Narcissa—"
"Don't." Her voice was not loud. It was very controlled, which somehow made it worse. "Don't say something sensible right now, Lucius."
Lucius said nothing sensible. He looked at Draco with an expression that he didn't try to arrange into anything other than what it was.
"Mother." Draco looked at the glass case on the bedside table. "Hand me that."
Narcissa reached for it, confused. She placed it in his free hand.
He held it for a moment—the Snitch warm through the glass, wings still twitching—and then held it out to her.
"It's the first thing I've won on my own," he said. "I'd like you to have it."
Narcissa looked at the case for a long time. Her grip on his hand tightened by degrees.
"I like it very much," she said, which was not enough words for what her face was doing.
Lucius cleared his throat. He looked at his son for a moment, working through something.
"I'm proud of you," he said, finally, in a voice that was slightly shorter of steady than he probably intended.
Narcissa shot him a look of considerable exasperation.
"He almost fell to his death, Lucius—"
"I know that."
"And you're—"
"He caught the Snitch, Narcissa." Lucius looked at Draco. "He caught it with thirty-four bones broken and then managed to fall correctly. Or nearly correctly." A pause. "Next time, stay on the broom."
"I'll do my best," Draco said.
Lucius glanced at the ruined broom on the bedside table, with the air of someone deciding something. "I'll see to the broom," he said. "Don't give it another thought."
Madam Pomfrey arrived shortly after with Skele-Gro, which was every bit as unpleasant as Draco remembered. He drank it without complaint, because his parents were watching and thirty-four fractures were not the moment to be undignified about it.
Under its influence—and Madam Pomfrey's carefully administered Dreamless Sleep—he drifted off with the sound of his mother's voice and the Snitch still warm on the table beside him.