There are one hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts.
Draco knew them thoroughly after seven years: some broad and grand, some narrow and unsteady; some that moved erratically on Fridays, depositing students at entirely unintended destinations; some with a step that vanished midway and had to be jumped if you didn't want to end up wedged to the knee in ancient stone.
For a disoriented first-year, the staircases were considerably more threat than novelty.
Hermione Granger had not yet committed their full catalogue to memory.
On a Friday evening, after the library closed, she was making her way upstairs through a shortcut she'd recently discovered—a passage concealed behind a sliding panel, hung with curtains, used by almost nobody. She liked it for exactly that reason. Which was, tonight, proving to be a liability. Her foot sank through a disappearing step before she registered it was missing, and she was in it to the knee before she could catch herself.
"Bother," she said, under her breath. Then, more honestly: "Oh no."
She tried to pull free. The step held her neatly. She was well and truly stuck.
She called out, tentatively, then with more volume. The staircase offered nothing back but the hollow sound of her own voice and the distant flicker of torchlight on the wall. Most students were already back in their common rooms by now. This corridor was quiet on a good day.
She opened Hogwarts: A History and looked for anything useful. The book, apparently operating on the assumption that all students had friends willing to pull them out of architectural hazards, offered nothing.
After approximately half an hour of this, she heard footsteps.
Unhurried. Even-paced. Leather soles on stone.
"Hello—could you help me—" she looked up, relief already forming on her face, and then stopped.
Draco.
The universe, Hermione reflected with a surge of acute embarrassment, had an extremely developed sense of irony.
She had spent the better part of two days pointedly not looking at him. Now here he was, and she was stuck in a staircase holding a history book, and there was nothing to be done about it.
She lowered her eyes and returned, with great dignity, to her reading.
Draco had seen her before he reached the bottom of the flight. He had just come from the vicinity of Ravenclaw Tower, where the Grey Lady had, once again, retreated through a wall the moment she sensed him approaching, and his mood had been correspondingly flat. Then he had turned the corner and found Miss Know-It-All wedged into a disappearing step with a book held up to cover her face, and it had improved considerably.
He came down to her level and looked at her.
"Need help?"
"No," she said, not looking up.
"What are you doing, exactly?"
"Reading."
"On a staircase step."
"It's very quiet here."
He raised an eyebrow. "I can help. If you ask."
"I don't accept help from people who disregard school rules," she said, still studying her book, her face rather pink.
"Still holding that against me?" He sounded mildly amused. "Nobody was hurt. You need to be more flexible."
"I have nothing to say to you."
The staircase, which had clearly been listening to all of this, chose that moment to move.
It swung with the particular enthusiasm of something that has been waiting for its moment—the two of them lurched, grabbed whatever was nearest, and the entire section rotated with a grinding rumble that sent Hermione's book flying from her hands and tumbling down toward the second floor.
She would have followed it, if a hand hadn't caught her shoulder.
Everything stopped. Draco had pulled her back with the speed of someone with reflexes that had been sharpened by seven years of Quidditch and at least three serious attempts on his life. She clutched his robes without quite deciding to. The step had released her in the commotion, which was, she supposed, one way of solving the problem.
The staircase settled into its new position with a self-satisfied shudder.
They both looked at where they were. Then at the date.
"Friday," they said simultaneously.
The shared recognition did something to the tension between them. Hermione found, despite herself, a helpless smile forming. Draco's expression shifted—still guarded, but less so.
"These stairs aren't safe," he said, looking at the new configuration with a slight frown. He knew this route. The fourth-floor restricted corridor. Not somewhere to linger. "Let me help you."
"Yes. Please. If it's not too much trouble."
He studied the situation briefly. "Put your arms around my neck."
Hermione did so, somewhat at a loss, resting her head against his shoulder, and he pulled her cleanly free of the step and set her down on solid stone.
He looked her over with an expression of satisfied assessment. "Better?"
It was a very smug expression. She was preparing a response to it when a sound drifted up from below—the soft, resentful meow of a cat, followed immediately by the unmistakeable sound of Argus Filch muttering darkly to himself.
"—heard something, I know it—fourth floor—little devils think they can—"
Draco's expression changed. "We have to move. This comes out near the restricted corridor."
"My book—"
"Second floor. We'll get it later." He took hold of her sleeve and moved.
"Surely we should go down—" she tried.
"Down past Filch? Use your head." He was already pulling her along the fourth-floor corridor, which was narrow and very dark, toward the far end where a door stood closed. Hermione knew that door. She'd seen what was behind it once, entirely by accident, and had not gone near it again.
"We can't go in there," she said, stopping. "There's—Professor Dumbledore said—"
"I know," he said, which was strange, because most first-years didn't know anything about what was behind that door. He steered her sharply left—behind a large stone statue a few feet from the door—and pulled something from inside his robes.
The Invisibility Cloak unfolded in his hands, silver-grey in the torchlight, and he shook it open and dropped it over both of them.
Hermione put out her hand. It vanished.
"Oh," she said.
"Stay still," he murmured. "Come closer, you're showing at the bottom."
Below, she could hear Mrs. Norris's soft, persistent sniffing. Then Filch's footsteps on the stairs, slow and thorough—the tread of someone who had spent decades learning where students liked to hide.
She pressed closer, not allowing herself to think about the fact that she was pressed into the side of a Slytherin boy under a contraband magical cloak while Filch's cat investigated the statue three feet away. This was entirely the staircase's fault. And the universe's.
The candlelight caught his face from one side. His eyes were fixed on the cat, completely composed—watchful, calculating, with his wand gripped loosely in one hand, angled just so, as if he had already decided what to do if this went wrong.
She found, to her own annoyance, that this was somewhat reassuring.
Filch's pale, creased face appeared at the statue, close enough that she could see the suspicion in his eyes. He stared at the space that contained them. His cat stared at the same space. Nothing moved.
After a very long moment, he turned. "Come, Mrs. Norris. Let's try the other end."
Hermione drew breath to speak—
"Wait," Draco murmured, his fist resting quietly against her back.
She waited. Silence in the corridor. Then, distantly, Filch's footsteps again—coming back.
He really was thorough.
A second pass. Slower this time. Then quiet. Then, after a further interval, nothing.
Hermione's legs had stiffened from standing motionless for so long. Somewhere in the middle of waiting, she had stopped holding herself carefully apart and simply rested her head against his shoulder, because she was tired and there was nowhere else, and because—whatever else he was—he had not once in any of this seemed to doubt that he had the situation under control, which was more than she could say for the last time she'd been caught out of bounds.
Eventually he said, "All right," and lifted the edge of the cloak.
They emerged into a corridor that was entirely empty, and quietly made their way back along the fourth floor toward the stairs at the far end.
"Can you even bring an Invisibility Cloak to school?" Hermione asked, as they descended. Her mind had cleared considerably. "Is that—did you just have that? Do you go out at night regularly—"
"What did you think it was for?" Draco said, in the tone of someone who saw absolutely nothing worth discussing here.
"This is against school rules," she said, and knew how it sounded, and said it anyway. "It's dangerous. What happens when Filch does catch you? You can't just—you shouldn't use that thing to wander around whenever you like, and if you do I'll—"
"If it weren't for that thing," Draco said, stopping on the landing and turning to look at her, "we'd both be in Filch's office right now experiencing his thoughts on remedial detention. You're welcome."
"That isn't—there's a difference between tonight, which was an accident, and doing this deliberately, whenever you feel like it—"
He stopped. The smile on his face was not a kind one. "If you mention any of this to McGonagall, you'll be explaining what you were doing on the fourth-floor corridor at this hour. We're both in this now."
"You're threatening me," Hermione said.
"Yes," he said simply. He walked down to the second-floor landing, picked up Hogwarts: A History from where it had landed, dusted it off with an expression of mild distaste, and held it out to her.
She took it without thinking. He moved closer—not quite crowding her, but enough that she had to look up at him directly—and the candlelight caught the silver in his eyes, and his hair, and the absolutely infuriating certainty in his expression.
His eyes really were quite—
She stamped the thought out immediately.
"So," he said, with great precision, "don't say anything foolish to Professor McGonagall."
Hermione felt a wave of indignation so complete it almost lifted her off her feet. All the gratitude, all the strange warmth of the last hour—gone, replaced by something much more familiar and considerably more manageable.
"You ruthless Slytherin!" she said.
"Yes," he said, as though she'd identified something factual. "That's exactly what I am. You'd do well to remember it. Goodnight."
He turned and walked toward the dungeons without looking back.
She stood on the landing clutching her book and felt approximately six different things at once, none of them uncomplicated. Hogwarts: A History was warm from his hands.
She walked back to Gryffindor Tower in a state of considerable internal disorder.
The Fat Lady was beginning to drowse in her frame when a faint sound from behind her made her startle violently backward—who's there, show yourself, is that Peeves?—but the corridor was empty, and after a moment she settled herself again, still muttering.
Draco walked back to the Slytherin common room in a bad mood that had nothing to do with Hermione Granger, and which he was not going to examine.
He had looked back once, at the bottom of the stairs.
She'd been fine. Obviously she'd been fine. He had simply checked.
For the next several weeks, Hogwarts ran along its usual channels.
First-year curriculum continued to be, for Draco, a study in patience. He was ranked consistently in the top of every class; the professors who had been dismissive of Slytherin in his past life were now considerably more even-handed when faced with work they could not in good conscience mark down. McGonagall had given him an Outstanding on his last Transfiguration essay, which she had previously reserved for Hermione Granger. He accepted this without visible satisfaction.
His sleep had improved somewhat. Madam Pomfrey had provided a small supply of Dreamless Sleep Potion after he'd spent a week looking appropriately pale and exhausted, which had not required much performance. He was careful with it—magical potions taken habitually carried their own risks—and supplemented it with Occlumency, sealing the worst of his past-life memories behind barriers he reinforced each morning. It was not a cure. It was, as he acknowledged to his own reflection with a certain bleak humour, a reasonable workaround. It kept him functional. That was sufficient.
Slytherin social politics progressed in their usual fashion—the careful mapping of surnames and bloodlines, the testing of abilities, the initial veneer of courtesy giving way slowly to something more honest, or at least more openly calculating. Draco navigated it with the ease of someone who had done this before and found it neither threatening nor particularly interesting.
The real problem was the Astronomy Tower.
He went there regularly, in spite of everything.
The memories it carried were among the worst he had—the green flash, Dumbledore's fall, the specific sound of that night which he did not allow himself to reconstruct if he could help it. He would rather have stayed entirely away from it. He went anyway, because the Bloody Baron went there, and the Bloody Baron was currently the only viable route to anything useful.
Helena Ravenclaw was, in practice, almost entirely unapproachable.
Every time Draco appeared in the vicinity of Ravenclaw Tower, she vanished—through walls, around corners, into light she didn't illuminate. She had apparently been doing this to students for centuries and had refined it to an art form. She disappeared before he could speak, every time, without fail.
The Bloody Baron, at least, stayed put.
He was not exactly communicative. After the single exchange at the Sorting Feast, he had returned to his usual mode: standing on the tower, gaunt and silver-stained, staring at Ravenclaw Tower with the fixed, hollow attention of someone who had been doing this for eight hundred years and could not remember how to do anything else. He seemed to have accepted Draco's presence as ambient, the way one accepts a draught or a particular echo in a room—not welcomed, not objected to, simply accommodated.
He sometimes said Helena's name aloud. He didn't appear to be aware that he was doing it.
It was not comfortable to witness. Draco sat a few feet away and said nothing on those occasions, which felt like the appropriate response, and told himself that this was progress of a kind.
The smell of roasting pumpkin in the corridors meant Halloween was approaching.
Professor Flitwick announced the Levitation Charm in Charms, with the transparent delight of a man who genuinely loved his subject and had been waiting to teach this particular lesson. He demonstrated, his small figure briefly airborne above his stack of books, and set them to work.
Hermione had her feather floating within four minutes. Flitwick nearly fell off his books with excitement, and awarded five points with so much enthusiasm that several nearby students looked slightly injured on behalf of their own houses.
She was sitting across the open centre of the classroom from Draco, and she did not look at him, which had been her consistent policy since the staircase incident. He had been respecting this policy and finding it quietly irritating.
He raised his own feather.
"Very good, Mr. Malfoy," Professor Flitwick said cheerfully, moving on.
The feathers drifted in the air between them.
Draco's feather drifted slightly left.
Hermione's feather moved right.
Draco's feather moved right.
Hermione's feather climbed.
Draco's feather climbed.
She turned and looked directly at him for the first time in a week. He was studying the ceiling with scholarly interest.
The glare she directed at the back of his head could have curdled milk. He continued examining the ceiling. Her feather executed a sharp downward dodge. His followed.
He was not going to accomplish anything by prodding her—he knew this. She would simply dig in further. He also knew that he had been, in the incident on the stairs, genuinely unkind at the end, and that the threatening part had been unnecessary and he had done it anyway because she had accused him of being something he was trying not to be anymore and the impulse had gotten ahead of his judgement.
He brought his feather back to his own side of the room and left it there.
She didn't look at him again that lesson. But she didn't move her chair away, which she had done twice in Potions.
He noted this and kept working.
The Great Hall was transformed for Halloween—hundreds of real bats circling the enchanted ceiling, pumpkins the size of small boulders carved into lanterns, the smell of good food coming from the direction of the kitchens all afternoon.
Draco appeared on the Astronomy Tower before dinner, as he had been doing. The wind at the end of October had teeth in it; he cast a Warming Charm and cast it again, and it barely made a difference. He pulled his robes tighter.
The Bloody Baron was sitting against the tower wall with three empty bottles at his feet and an expression of concentrated misery. His hollow gaze was fixed, as it always was, on the windows of Ravenclaw Tower.
"The Grey Lady isn't in her tower tonight," Draco said, after a while. He said it carefully, keeping his voice easy, as if he were merely noting a fact about the weather.
The Baron made a sound in his throat.
"I saw a number of ghosts gathering for the feast. She wasn't among them."
"She will never invite me," the Baron said.
Draco kept his expression still.
"She will never forgive me." The Baron raised his hands—Draco saw the shackles, and the silver stains on the robes, and understood both with a cold and sudden clarity. "She hates me. I... I regret it so much."
"What happened?" Draco asked.
The Baron was silent for long enough that Draco thought he had retreated again. Then he said, in the voice of someone making a confession they had been carrying for eight centuries:
"I found her. In a forest. She was hiding—she was proud, and she would not come back with me. She refused." A pause. "So I killed her." He looked at his hands. "I regretted it. So I killed myself. I wanted to be near her, even if she hated me."
Draco said nothing.
"Her mother sent me," the Baron continued, quieter now. "She was ill. She wanted her daughter found—wanted her back, along with what Helena had taken. I found the forest, in Albania. But I didn't find what she had taken."
"Albania," Draco said softly.
"She hid it somewhere I couldn't reach. Her mother's magic couldn't reach that forest either." He stopped. "I couldn't find her daughter. I couldn't find the crown. I failed in everything."
Draco was very still.
There were things coming together in his mind very quickly, pieces he had carried separately for weeks suddenly adjacent to one another. A forest in Albania. A place powerful enough to obstruct even Rowena Ravenclaw's magic. A place remote and unfrequented enough to hide something—or someone—for decades.
Quirrell had encountered something in a forest, so the story went. Something that had changed him.
He did not believe in that many coincidences.
"Don't wait until it's too late to regret," the Baron said suddenly. His dull eyes turned toward Draco, and for a moment they were not empty at all. "Whatever it is you're waiting on."
He stood, passed through the tower wall, and was gone.
Draco remained on the platform in the dark and the cold, thinking.
Helena Ravenclaw had stolen her mother's diadem. She had hidden it in a forest in Albania—a forest so isolated that Rowena Ravenclaw herself, even at the height of her power, could not reach it.
The Dark Lord had spent time in Albania. Had, in fact, spent years there recovering after his first defeat.
And after he returned: the diadem was in the Room of Requirement.
He paced—two steps, turn, two steps, the cold wind cutting through the warming charms—and turned it over. The Dark Lord had found the diadem in that forest. He had brought it back. And he had done something to it.
That was why it mattered. That was why Potter had risked his life for it in seventh year. Not because it was Ravenclaw's. Because of what the Dark Lord had made it into.
Draco stood still, and the cold settled around him.
Next step: Helena herself. He needed her account of what had happened in that forest—what she had known, what she had seen, what she had understood of the Dark Lord's interest.
That was going to be considerably harder than the Baron.
But tonight had given him more than he'd had yesterday.
The feast was probably already underway. He turned and went downstairs, thinking.