Draco Malfoy climbed the steep spiral staircase of the Astronomy Tower on leaden feet.
If it weren't for the evening's lesson, he would not have come near this place at all. The tower cast a long shadow across a particular corner of his memory, and he had no wish to stand in it longer than necessary.
He was not in a good state today.
He had managed only a short, restless sleep in his dormitory, and the nightmares had found him almost immediately.
In the dream, Marvolo kept lunging at him with a snarling grin, screaming, hands closing around his throat, accusing him of being the thief who had stolen the Slytherin locket.
He had woken with a start, fled the four-poster bed, fled the dormitory at the bottom of the lake where the shadows seemed to breathe and whisper, and fled the memory of the dream itself — the way one flees something pursuing.
The soft thud of his shoes on stone, the cold night air filling his lungs — he took a slow, deliberate breath and felt the fog in his head begin to thin.
No moon tonight, but an abundance of stars. A perfect night for Astronomy, at least.
The Bloody Baron was drifting below the tower entrance, groaning softly to himself, swaying. As students began to arrive for class, the ghost always chose to drift away rather than endure their stares.
As Draco passed him, the Baron raised his dull, vacant eyes and murmured, without any particular expression, "You've come."
Draco gave a brief, silent nod, slightly puzzled by the acknowledgement.
"There is an evil smell about you," the Baron added, flatly, and then resumed his moaning and drifted away down the corridor.
Draco paused, lifted his sleeve, and sniffed. Nothing.
He probably should have thought harder about what that meant. But tonight he was genuinely exhausted — hollowed out and numb in a way that left very little room for analysis. He filed it away under the Bloody Baron's usual erratic behaviour and walked on into the classroom, where an enormous orrery hung suspended from the ceiling, its metallic rings perfectly still in the lamplight.
When Hermione reached the Astronomy Tower, this was the scene she found: a pale-faced boy standing at the tall iron-framed window, leaning against the railing, staring into the darkness beyond. The candlelight caught his platinum-blonde hair and made it look faintly wan. His brow was furrowed. He looked entirely somewhere else.
There was a fragility about him tonight that was difficult to look at directly — as though he might simply dissolve into the cold night air if not carefully watched. Hermione pushed the thought away firmly.
"Draco, are you alright?" She kept her voice low, as though loud sounds might startle something.
"Fine." He didn't turn around. His tone was as flat and colourless as still water.
"You don't look it." She studied the line of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, quietly hoping he would turn around rather than continue staring into the dark. "Something's on your mind."
"It's nothing serious," he said, and exhaled.
He made himself look at her. The candlelight gave her cheeks a soft, warm colour, and her hair was slightly damp at the ends, falling loose across her shoulders — she had apparently come fresh from washing. She was carrying nothing but a small pair of binoculars; for once, her arms and neck were entirely unencumbered by books.
Her expression had been serious a moment ago. When he turned, she gave him a small, quiet smile.
Something in Draco's chest eased, fractionally.
A faint scent reached him — green apples, unmistakable. He registered, belatedly, that his stomach was completely empty.
"Draco, why haven't you eaten dinner?" Hermione asked, watching him with obvious suspicion.
"I did eat," he said.
"You most certainly did not. You weren't at the table!" She glared at him. "I saw you in the corridor earlier. You went back to the Slytherin common room during dinner, didn't you?"
"I wasn't hungry," he said, turning his face away.
"That is completely untrue. Look at yourself — you're pale as a ghost." Hermione crossed her arms.
Draco touched his cheek, vaguely bewildered. "I've always had fair colouring —"
"That is not what I mean and you know it. In Muggle medicine, this is called hypoglycaemia. When you're actually well and you've eaten properly, there's colour in your face. Right now there is none." She was already moving toward him as she spoke, and he instinctively stepped back — she followed, undeterred. "You're always saying you're hungry, and then you do this to yourself — what exactly is your plan, Draco? To waste away out of spite?"
Her interruption had, he noticed, completely dislodged the nightmare from the front of his mind. There was no room for Marvolo's grinning face when Hermione Granger was glaring at him from two feet away.
"What's to be done? I've already missed dinner," he said, attempting an expression of innocence.
"Have you," she said, and fished inside her robe pocket.
What she produced was a brown paper bag, slightly bulging. From it she drew a green apple, a warm pumpkin pasty wrapped in paper, and a generous slice of chocolate cake.
Draco stared at it.
He couldn't immediately find words for the sensation that came over him — being perched alone at the top of a tower in the dark, hollowed out and half-lost in something ugly and cold, and then this girl appearing out of nowhere with a paper bag and warm food and the particular bright energy she always seemed to carry around with her, cutting straight through everything.
"I used a Warming Charm," Hermione said, with considerable self-satisfaction, pulling him by the sleeve toward the shadowed alcove beneath the observation deck. She pressed him down to sit on the floor without ceremony. "It's still warm — see, look at it. Eat before Professor Sinistra arrives."
For reasons he could not fully account for, the young Malfoy — who had opinions about floors, and dust, and the dignity appropriate to his upbringing — sat cross-legged on the flagstones beside her without a single word of objection.
Under her expectant gaze, he took a large bite of the pumpkin pasty. It was warm and sweet and rather wonderful.
"Thank you," he said, quietly. "It's very good."
Something had risen unexpectedly in his throat. He wasn't sure what to do with it.
Then Hermione produced, from her other pocket, a small cylindrical metal object, unscrewed the top of it, and poured hot tea into the lid.
Draco blinked at it. "What is that?"
"A Thermos flask. A Muggle invention — the principle is essentially a permanent Warming Charm on the inside lining." She held out the lid to him, her eyes bright. "It's your favourite — black tea. Drink it."
"Of course it is." He accepted it, wrapped his hands around the warmth of it, and looked at her. "My favourite."
She smiled at him, and his eyes were rather brighter than they had been when she'd found him at the window.
"Your Heart's Desire Number ought to be One as well, you know," Hermione told him, in the tone of someone delivering a well-reasoned verdict. "You're far more wilful than me. Skipping meals whenever you please — after all your talk about being hungry — are you planning to starve yourself entirely? Am I going to have to do this every day?"
Draco barely heard the scolding. With a father as distant and exacting as Lucius, Hermione's concern — barely concealed beneath the telling-off — was as readable as a first-year textbook.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I made you worry."
Hermione opened her mouth, apparently ready for a second round — and found she had nothing left to say. His admission had been so straightforward and so quiet that it took all the wind out of her.
Draco watched her flounder for a moment and laughed softly. Without entirely meaning to, he reached up and pressed a finger gently between her brows, smoothing the furrow there.
Then he said, for no particular reason: "The moon is beautiful tonight."
Hermione blinked at him.
For a brief, inexplicable moment, she felt as though he had touched rather more than her brow. She shook herself.
"Draco," she said, glancing pointedly at the black sky through the window, "are you lightheaded from not eating? There is no moon tonight. But the wind is nice."
He simply looked at her without answering, and smiled.
Around them, the classroom had been filling up. The warm food and the tea had done their work; Draco felt the cold weight in his chest begin to lift. Some of the dread the tower had stirred in him had loosened its grip, and he felt — if not entirely himself — at least considerably closer to it.
"How did you know about this spot?" He nodded toward the alcove. Very few students ever found the hidden nook beneath the observation deck.
"A happy accident," she said, with a mysterious smile.
"Another secret that cannot be spoken of?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Exactly. Now — class has started, we'd better get up quietly," Hermione said, eyes sparkling, and slipped out from the alcove.
They eased back into the group of students just as Professor Sinistra began setting out the year's objectives:
"…You have already mastered the names of individual stars and the basic movements of the planets. This year, you will learn to map galactic motion and produce star charts of your own." Professor Sinistra flicked her wand at the ceiling; the great suspended orrery shuddered to life, its metallic rings sweeping into motion overhead, demonstrating the slow, vast turning of galaxies. "Those of you also taking Divination or Arithmancy will find this knowledge useful — the stars form the foundation of both disciplines."
The classroom fell under a kind of spell. Shifting galaxies wheeled above them, each one uniquely patterned and alive with movement. Several students made involuntary sounds of amazement.
"They really are beautiful," Hermione said softly, her face tilted upward.
Draco looked up briefly and gave a noncommittal sound of agreement.
"I think I can see you," Hermione said suddenly, with a small smile. "There — Gamma Draconis and Beta Draconis. Very bright tonight, aren't they?"
Draco followed her pointing finger, found the stars after a moment, and confirmed: "I think you're right."
"What's your favourite star?" Hermione asked, watching his profile in the low light. She knew, vaguely, that it was perhaps a slightly fanciful question for someone who preferred mathematics to mysticism.
Under ordinary circumstances, Draco would probably have teased her for it. Tonight, warmed by food and tea, and finding it quite easy to look into those curious, attentive eyes, he had rather more patience than usual.
"When I was small, it was Vega — Alpha Lyrae. The brightest star in Lyra." He tilted his head slightly toward the sky. "Draco isn't always the easiest to find. The constellation can be dim on certain nights, and it sprawls across a large area. But Vega is unmistakeable."
"Hmm," Hermione said, with the air of someone storing this away.
"If you can't find your way to the constellation directly, find Vega first," Draco continued. "It sits just outside Draco's territory. Once you have Vega as your bearing, it becomes much easier to locate the four stars that form the dragon's head."
"An indirect approach," Hermione said, with interest.
"Standard Slytherin practice," Draco said, with a slight, lazy smile.
"Are you teaching a Gryffindor Slytherin navigation tactics?" Hermione looked partly amused and partly sceptical. She turned her binoculars to the sky and tried it, and after a short pause gave a small, surprised sound. "Oh — I've actually found it."
"Quicker than looking for it directly, wasn't it?" Draco looked at her profile — the small flash of reluctant delight on her face.
She refused, on principle, to say so aloud. Instead, she observed the Draco constellation in silence for a moment and then said, with the air of someone making a graceful lateral move, "I've been thinking, since we did the Arithmancy exercise — names really are a remarkable subject. Not just for Arithmancy, either. Some of the oldest wizarding families use stars for naming. Like the Blacks."
"They do," Draco agreed. He wasn't looking at the stars. He was watching her.
"Sirius," she said, sweeping her binoculars slowly across the sky. "Draco. Bellatrix — that's Gamma Orionis. And Regulus is Alpha Leonis."
"Regulus is the heart of the Lion," Draco said softly. "The name means as much. And Arcturus — Alpha Boötis, the brightest star in the northern sky outside of Sirius." He paused. "The Black family have always aimed high with their naming. Though the fate of the wizards who carried those names was not always equal to the brightness of the stars they were given."
Hermione lowered her binoculars slightly and was quiet.
Professor Sinistra continued her lecture somewhere above them.
Draco let the familiar words wash past him, half his attention on the stars and half on the particular thoughts the conversation had stirred.
The brighter the star, the sooner it falls. That had always seemed true of the Black family.
Regulus Arcturus Black. Two of the most luminous names in the wizarding night sky, pressed onto a single person, like the weight of every hope the family had ever carried.
Draco found the star now — it was faint and cold in the autumn sky, its brilliance diminished by the season.
Arcturus was the brightest star in the northern hemisphere. Draco could barely imagine what it meant to carry two such names — the full force of a family's ambition resting on one person's shoulders from the moment they were born.
That prodigy had died young. Disappeared at eighteen, more than a decade ago, and his body had never been recovered.
It had broken his mother, Walburga Black. According to Narcissa, Walburga had once been a composed and proud woman, admired in pure-blood circles for her bearing and her sharp mind. After Regulus vanished, she had hollowed out — shrivelling over the years into the screaming, bitter portrait that still hung in the hallway at Grimmauld Place.
"Regulus was a devoted follower of the Dark Lord," Narcissa had told Draco once, in one of her rare moments of openness about the Black family. "He had the Dark Lord's full confidence. Walburga was extraordinarily proud of it. And in the end, her beloved son's body was never found, and only her most despised, rebellious son Sirius inherited the house." A pause. "I have always thought that was rather cruel, in its way."
Sirius Black. Brilliant, reckless, self-willed — constitutionally incapable of considering the damage his choices left behind. Draco had spent most of his life finding him infuriating on his mother's behalf.
He made himself a quiet note: he should find a way to caution his mother, carefully, against any further contact with the Black family heir. Whatever Sirius's intentions, he was not someone who looked before he leapt, and the people closest to him had a way of finding themselves caught in the aftermath. His mother deserved better than that.
After midnight, the class broke up and students filed back down the tower in small, drowsy groups. Draco said good night to Hermione and made his way back to the Slytherin dormitory, the cold weight returning incrementally with each step away from her.
He dropped onto his bed and was pulled under almost immediately.
This time, he seemed to be standing at 12 Grimmauld Place, in the gloomy entrance hall. The portrait of Walburga Black screamed at him from the wall — "Traitor!" — and he ran, up the stairs, past the peeling wallpaper and the mounted heads, to the first-floor landing —
Kreacher leaped out from behind a door.
The old house-elf seized him by the throat with both hands, just as Marvolo had seized Bob Ogden in the Pensieve, and snarled into his face with a ferocity utterly disproportionate to its small body:
"You took the young master's things, you filthy thief! The young master was going to throw away the mistress and all her precious things — it would have broken her heart! Kreacher had to stop him, Kreacher had to protect the young master's things —"
Draco woke at two in the morning with a jolt, Kreacher's words still ringing clearly in his ears.
The young master was going to throw away the young master's things.
He lay in the dark, staring up at the canopy overhead, and turned the words over slowly.
The young master was going to throw away something. Something that had to do with the other young master. Kreacher was desperate to prevent it.
Kreacher served two masters by the end: Sirius, whom he despised, and Regulus, whom he had loved.
Regulus Arcturus Black. Of noble birth. Trusted completely by the Dark Lord.
Just as Bellatrix Lestrange had been trusted. Just as Lucius Malfoy had been trusted.
And a Dark Lord who trusted his most devoted followers might, perhaps, entrust to one of them the safekeeping of something precious. Something he wished to protect.
Regulus had disappeared.
Kreacher had hidden things, had fought against orders, had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect whatever Regulus had left behind. To protect what the young master had tried to cast away.
The scattered pieces had been sitting at the edges of Draco's mind for weeks. Now, in the darkness at two in the morning, they began very quietly to arrange themselves.
What was it that Kreacher had so desperately preserved? Whatever it was, it had mattered enormously.
He thought of Grimmauld Place — the cluttered rooms, the glass cases stuffed with heirlooms, the drawers of rings and amulets, the piles of gold and silver objects heaped in cupboards and on shelves.
Could there be something hidden among all of that?
Could there be something very particular, carefully concealed among the ordinary things?
The image surfaced again — a small gold locket, its clasp shaped into a serpentine S — and with it came that nagging, wordless sense of recognition he could not yet place.
He stared at the dark canopy above him, and said nothing, and thought.