[There’s been too many cute and wholesome fics, so here’s some angst.] A few days before the match against Ravenclaw, Harry finds himself walking down to dinner alone. Ron had made it only halfway down the spiral staircase from the boys’ dormitory before turning and bolting for the nearest lavatory. Hermione had departed almost as abruptly, clutching her Arithmancy essay and explaining that Professor Vector had to see a correction before she marked it. She had asked whether he would go straight to the Great Hall. He had said he would, and at the time he had more or less meant it. Then the folded parchment in his pocket begins to occupy his thoughts before he reaches the first staircase. It will only take a minute to check. That’s what he generally tells himself, although a minute has a way of becoming twenty when Malfoy is involved. It has become a habit that Harry prefers to call it an investigation, though Hermione had pointedly referred to it as an obsession. Whatever it is, Harry finds his hand slipping beneath his robes almost as soon as he turns down the next corridor. He withdraws the Marauder’s Map, unfolding it as he does. He taps it with his wand and speaks the familiar words under his breath. His eyes are seeking one name in particular. Dracona Malfoy is not there. Crabbe and Goyle are easy enough to locate, lumbering together towards dinner, but Dracona’s name appears nowhere near them. There’s nothing particularly unusual about failing to find her and the map has been frustrating him for weeks. Nevertheless, the familiar irritation tightens under his ribs. Under that irritation, he can’t stop the small undercurrent of worry. Harry tells himself, as he always does, that this is because Malfoy is up to something. That is the only reason. It has nothing whatsoever to do with how he immediately notices whenever she’s absent from meals, or how easily he can pick her white-blond head out of the Slytherin table from halfway across the Great Hall. It certainly has nothing to do with the uncomfortable, inexplicable twist low in his stomach whenever he catches sight of her looking thinner than she had been at the beginning of the year, her once immaculate appearance increasingly frayed around the edges. Those are details relevant to the investigation and nothing more. Harry is just about to fold the map when his gaze finally catches upon a familiar name one floor below. Dracona Malfoy There she is. She is standing motionless inside a bathroom, and another name hovers near her, that of Moaning Myrtle. He descends the marble staircase two steps at a time, crosses the landing below, and makes his way along the passage toward the bathroom where he had seen Malfoy’s dot. Only then does he properly notice the sign on the door, and his hand stops short of the handle. Following Malfoy into the girls' bathroom is the sort of thing Hermione would have a great deal to say about, and none of it would be favourable. On top of that, Harry can already imagine how it would sound if Malfoy told the story first. For a moment he considers just waiting in the corridor, but first he leans forward, putting his ear almost against the door. Inside he can hear running water, faint but steady, followed by a sound that makes him stop thinking about explanations altogether. At first he mistook it for Myrtle. The ghost’s usual complaints often rise and fall in much the same way. This sound is lower, caught painfully behind someone’s teeth, and interrupted by a breath drawn too quickly to fill the lungs. He presses his ear completely to the wood and hears Myrtle speaking in a voice softer than any he’s heard from her before. “Don’t do that to yourself.” There’s a small, watery movement on the other side, and Myrtle continues, “Tell me what’s wrong. You can tell me, you know. I can help if you’ll only tell me.” Harry eases the handle down. He slips just far enough inside to see the sinks, and stops with his fingers still curled around the handle. Malfoy stands with her back to him, leaning so heavily over one basin that her shoulders seem to be holding up the rest of her body. Her robes hang crookedly from her shoulders. Beneath them her white shirt is creased and the green-and-silver knot of her tie is askew. Her hair, usually so carefully arranged, has come loose in tangled lengths. Her hands grip opposite edges of the sink with such force that the knuckles look almost as white as the porcelain. Water runs beneath her bowed head, washing past a stain near the plughole, and every few seconds her arms tremble. “I can’t do it,” she says. The words come out broken, barely louder than the tap, and she swallows before trying again. “I can’t. It won’t work. I’ve tried everything, and it still won’t-” Her breath catches, cutting the sentence apart, and Harry feels his fingers tighten on the door. Malfoy is crying. He takes one silent step farther into the room and finally sees her reflection. Tears stream down her pale cheeks and drip from her chin into the grimy basin. Black mascara has run beneath her eyes, streaking downward in thin, messy trails. Her silver eyes are swollen, and every few seconds she clenches her teeth as though desperately attempting to regain control. Myrtle drifts out from one of the cubicles, her translucent spectacles catching a dull reflection from the lamps. “Then don’t,” she offers, with the earnestness of someone who had discovered a perfectly simple solution. “Whatever it is, just don’t do it.” Malfoy gives a laugh so short and broken that Harry wishes she hadn't tried. “I don't want to do it.” She says it with a frightened emphasis, as if admitting that much is somehow worse than admitting failure. Her head bows lower, hiding her face from the mirror. “I don't want to, Myrtle. I don't want any of it.” “Then tell someone,” Myrtle says, “There must be somebody.” A single question bursts from Dracona with such bitterness that Myrtle recoils slightly. “Who?” Dracona lowers her head even further, and her hair spills forward over both shoulders. “Who am I supposed to tell?” she whispers. “My mother? She already knows enough to be terrified every time an owl arrives. My father?” Her fingers flex against the sink. “He’s in Azkaban because he failed. That’s the whole reason this is happening. I’m supposed to fix what he ruined.” Harry’s heartbeat changes and he stands perfectly still. Dracona continues before she can fully process what she had said. “I thought I could do it,” she whispers. “I thought I had to. Everyone kept looking at me like I should be proud, like this was some great honor, and I pretended it was because what else was I supposed to do?” Her voice cracks, and another sob escapes despite her effort to swallow it. “I thought there would be another way,” Dracona whispers. “I kept thinking if I could just make it work, nobody else would have to be involved. But it won’t work, and if I fail-” Her shoulders begin shaking again. Myrtle moves closer. “What happens if you fail?” Dracona stares down into the basin. Her reflection trembles across the thin layer of water beneath the tap. “He kills me.” Harry stops breathing. “He kills my mother,” she continues. “And maybe Father, if he ever gets out. He said he would.” Her mouth twists, fighting another sob. “He said this was my chance to prove that the Malfoy’s are still useful.” Harry knows who she means. She doesn’t need to say a name. A strange sensation spreads through his chest, part horror, part vindication, part something he has no name for. He had been right. Malfoy is involved with Voldemort. He should feel triumphant. Harry had spent months thinking of Malfoy as a willing conspirator, somebody delighted to prove herself worthy of joining the Death Eaters, and now he had proof. Yet the girl standing before him looks as though the weight of the task is crushing her piece by piece. Myrtle says something Harry doesn’t catch. Dracona shakes her head, her hair brushing the wet basin, and the movement seems to exhaust her. When she speaks next, the effort has gone out of her voice, leaving it small and horribly matter-of-fact. “I'm on my own. Whatever happens, I'm on my own.” Dracona draws a long, unsteady breath and lifts her head. Her gaze moves towards her own reflection, stops, and fixes on the dark-haired figure visible over her shoulder. In the faded mirror above the sink, silver meets green. Her eyes widen until the grey irises seem almost lost within them. The color drains from her already pale face, and her lips part soundlessly. Harry has never seen anyone look so utterly exposed. Black streaks from her ruined mascara mark both cheeks beneath those enormous, despairing eyes, her hair hung wild around her shoulders, and the haughty mask she had worn for as long as Harry has known her simply does not exist. For one suspended moment, they simply stare at one another. Harry does not see the girl who had mocked Ron’s family, laughed at Hermione’s blood status, sneered at Hagrid or spent six years making herself one of the most infuriating people Harry had ever met. He sees a terrified girl backed into a corner and believing she’s completely alone with no escape. And Harry, without understanding why, has the overwhelming urge to tell her that she’s wrong. Dracona’s expression empties with shock before something harsher rushes in to cover it, and he sees the moment she understands that he had heard her. “Malfoy,” he begins, lifting his free hand a little. “I wasn't-” She turns so sharply that her hair whips across her cheek, while her hand swiftly reaches into her robes. Harry knows that movement well enough for his own body to answer it before his mind catches up. His wand is in his fingers as she spins away from the mirror. Her wand is in her hand, black against her fingers, and the look she gives him makes the rest of his explanation die in his throat. Anger tightens her mouth, but it arrives too late to hide everything else. Behind it is the same naked alarm he had seen in the mirror, now directed entirely at him. “Get out!” Her voice cracks on the demand, and Harry sees her eyes flick to his raised wand. He has time to say, “Wait, just stop-” before the black wand in her hand snaps towards him and a jet of light strikes the lamp beside the door, which shatters in a spray of glass and sparks. Harry flings himself sideways as glass and metal scatter across the doorway, one hot fragment catching his sleeve before dropping away. He lands badly on his shoulder and rolls, bringing his wand up out of instinct. Levicorpus, he thinks, aiming at the shape of her through the sudden dimness. He just needs her to stop, he just needs a moment to speak with her. Dracona brings up a shield at the last possible instant, and the spell ricochets away into the ceiling, knocking loose a shower of dust and plaster. Harry scrambles behind the nearest bathroom stall just as another curse strikes where his head had been a moment earlier. The rubbish bin explodes. Metal clangs across the tiles as scraps of paper, damp rubbish, and shattered pieces of the container scatter through the room. The blast leaves Harry’s ears ringing, and before he can recover, Myrtle’s shrill voice rises over everything. “No! Stop it! Stop fighting!” She swoops between the stalls and sinks, hands pressed against the sides of her head. “Stop! STOP! You’ll destroy everything!” Dracona barely seems to hear her. Her face has transformed completely. The crying girl Harry had watched in the mirror has vanished beneath something wild and defensive. Harry knows Malfoy’s sneer. He knows the slow, superior smile she uses whenever she thinks she has found some new way to irritate him. He knows the gleam in her eyes when she is enjoying herself. None of that is present now. She looks hunted. “Expelliarmus!” Harry shouts. Dracona twists aside and the spell clips the edge of a sink, blowing a porcelain chunk from it. “Impedimenta!” Harry throws himself behind a cubicle partition just in time to dodge. “Malfoy!” He shouts, wiping his lenses with his sleeve as he crouches behind the partition. “Just listen to me!” “Why?” Dracona screams. “So you can run to Dumbledore? So you can tell Weasley and Granger?” Harry tries to reason with her. “I haven’t told anyone!” “You will!” She snaps back. “You don’t know that!” He says. “I know you!” The answer strikes Harry with surprising force. Dracona appears around the end of the cubicles. Her wand is raised, but her hand trembles so badly that its tip shakes. “You’ve spent six years hating me,” she says, her voice cracking. “You’ve spent this entire year following me. You wanted proof. Congratulations, Potter. You were right.” Harry pushes himself upright. “I didn’t know-” “You never know anything,” Dracona says through gritted teeth. Harry lowers his wand slightly motioning at the surroundings. “You think I wanted to find you like this?” Something changes in her face. “Don’t.” Harry stops. “Don’t what?” “Don’t look at me like that.” He stares at her, slight confusion leaking into his expression. “Like what?” Her face contorts with rage as she yells, “Like you pity me!” Harry opens his mouth to protest, but she cuts him off immediately. “Liar! Stupefy!” She screams with a force that scrapes her voice raw. Harry jerks his wand across his body, deflecting the spell with a motion that sends a painful jolt through his wrist. The red flash hurtles towards the stalls, passes through Myrtle’s drifting shoulder, and shatters a cistern behind her. Porcelain flies in every direction, and water bursts out in a rush that strikes the floor and spreads beneath the stalls. Harry staggers as water surged around his shoes, carrying shards of debris along with it. “STOP!” Myrtle screams. “STOP IT! STOP IT!” Dracona fires another spell, but Harry smoothly blocks it. Blue light flashes against red, rebounding into one of the mirrors and cracking it from corner to corner. Within seconds the bathroom becomes bedlam. “Expelliarmus!” Dracona blocks. “Impedimenta!” Harry twists away. “Petrificus Totalus!” “Protego!” Magic bursts across the bathroom in violent flashes, reflected a dozen times in the surviving mirrors. Harry ducks beneath a curse that carves a smoking mark through a cubicle door, then sends another disarming charm toward Dracona that she knocks aside with a frantic sweep of her wand. Their duel has none of the rhythm of practice. There are no measured attacks, no calculated counters. Water streams from the ruined cistern and broken plumbing. Broken glass glitters beneath the shallow flood. Myrtle flies overhead in frantic circles, wailing at both of them while Harry and Dracona exchange spells through the chaos. As Harry dodges around another spell, his heel lands on slick tile and his foot goes out from beneath him. Pain jolts through his back as he strikes the floor, and his wand nearly slips from his hand. He looks up and finds Dracona standing a few paces away, her wand raised, the broken cistern still pouring behind her. Her robes have been soaked, and a wet strand of hair lays across her mouth, but she seems unaware of either. There is none of her familiar satisfaction in having gained the advantage. Harry had seen Malfoy look pleased at his expense often enough to know the expression by heart, and this is something else entirely. Her silver eyes are wide, her breathing ragged, and terror has pulled every feature taut beneath the anger. “Cruci-” she begins. The syllables scrape out of her, driven by panic and the need to make him stop looking, stop asking, stop standing so close to everything she can’t bear to have discovered. Her grip tightens, and she sees him flinch beneath the wand she has pointed at him. For that fraction of a second, she can no longer pretend he’s merely Potter, merely the enemy whose name gave her permission to do what she’s about to do. What am I doing? The thought strikes with such sudden clarity that her breath stalls. Harry is on the floor, one hand braced in the water, looking up at her through glasses that have slipped crookedly across his face. A face she knows far better than she had ever allowed herself to explain. The final syllables catch in her throat, and her wand hand falters. Harry does not see the hesitation. He hears the beginning of the curse, and his body answers before fear can become anything as deliberate as a choice. There is no plan or conscious decision. Only the memory of cramped handwriting in the margin of an old Potions book. For enemies. “SECTUMSEMPRA!” he bellows. His arm sweeps upwards in a wild, desperate movement, the tip of his wand cutting across the space between them. Dracona’s body jerks as though something has struck her across the chest, and a scream tears out of her with a violence that makes Harry’s own breath stop. Sudden red lines begin to appear from under her white shirt. She jerks backwards, and blood strikes the sink behind her in a scattered spray. A cut appears beneath one silver eye, sharp enough that Harry sees it form before he understands what he was seeing. Her free hand flies towards her chest and the wand in her right hand dips towards the floor. Blood strikes the pale tiles beneath her, her knees give way, and she collapses into the water with an impossibly loud splash. The black wand falls from her hand and rolls away beneath a wash of pink, while her hair spreads around her head in pale, tangled lengths. For an instant her fingers still move, closing weakly against the floor, and then the water around her begins turning red. Harry can only stare. His own arm is still raised, his wand pointing at the place where she had stood, and some part of his mind remains stupidly fixed on the expectation that she will get up. Her mouth opens instead around a desperate breath, and blood runs from the wound beneath her eye into the hair beside her face. “No,” Harry says. It comes out as little more than air, and he pushes himself to his feet so quickly that he slips again, catching the edge of a basin before he falls. “No, Malfoy- I didn’t-” He lurches towards her, splashing through water and broken porcelain, and drops to his knees hard enough that the impact ought to have hurt. He feels nothing beyond the sickening shock of reaching her and finding the blood warm against his hands. It has soaked the front of her shirt, stained the loosened green-and-silver tie, and spread beneath the edge of her robe. He presses his palm against the worst of it, then shifts it because another place is bleeding, then realises there is no position in which his hands can cover everything. “I didn’t know,” he says. The words are too small, absurdly useless beside the wounds opening beneath them, but they are the only ones he can make himself say. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know that it would…” Dracona shudders under his hands. The movement brings a thin, broken sound from her throat, and Harry snatches his palms back for half a second, terrified that he had hurt her more, before the fresh rush of blood makes him press down again. Myrtle is screaming overhead. “Murder! Murder! There’s been a murder!” “She’s not dead!” Harry shouts. The desperation in his own voice frightens him. Harry bends closer to Dracona’s face, trying to see whether her eyes are still following him. They’re open, silver beneath lashes clumped with tears, but their focus slips past his shoulder before finding him again. “I'm sorry,” he says, his voice thick with desperation. He sweeps wet hair from her cheek with the back of his wrist, leaving a red smear across her skin. “I'm sorry, I know. Just- just hold on. Please.” Dracona trembles again. Harry slides an arm beneath her shoulders, meaning to lift her out of the cold water, and draw her awkwardly against him while trying to keep his other hand pressed to her chest. She is lighter than he expected. He had scarcely touched her except through the collisions and hostility that passed for contact between them, and some stupid part of him had assumed she would feel as immovable as she always tried to appear. Her eyes move towards his face. Harry bends over her at once, holding his breath so that he could hear whatever she is trying to say. He sees her lips part with a faint, painful effort. He expects an accusation, his surname spoken with the last of her anger, or perhaps a plea for him to stop pressing against a place that hurt. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. The words are quiet, yet he hears them with perfect clarity. Her gaze lingers on his for one brief moment after she says them, before slipping out of focus again. Harry shakes his head. It‘s a small movement at first, before panic makes it sharper. Why is she apologising to him? He is the one with her blood on his hands. “No, don’t say that. You haven’t- you don’t have to say that.” His fingers shift uselessly against the soaked cloth, and he looks from her mouth to her eyes, trying to find proof that she had heard him. “Dracona, please. Just stay awake.” Her eyes open a fraction wider. She manages one coherent thought before consciousness leaves her. He said my name. The door slams open hard enough to strike the wall. Harry looks up so sharply that the movement tugs at his arm, and he immediately looks down again to make sure he didn’t hurt her. Severus Snape stands in the doorway, his face rigid with fury, his black eyes taking in the shattered fixtures, red water, and the girl held against Harry’s blood-soaked chest. His wand is already drawn by the time he reaches them. “Put her down.” Snape says in a low voice. Harry blinks. “Professor, I-” Snape drops to one knee beside him and repeats, with a force that finally breaks through, “On the floor, Potter. Now.” Harry lowers Dracona onto the wet floor as carefully as he can, supporting her head until the back of it rests against her soaked robe. When he pulls his hands away, they leave bloody prints against her blouse. His bloody hands remain lifted before him. He numbly stares at them. Red has worked into every line of his palms, beneath his fingernails, across his cuffs. His robes are soaked in water and blood until the fabrics are almost indistinguishable. Dracona’s blood. Snape pushes Harry aside with one arm. His expression becomes intensely controlled, which somehow frightens Harry more than open anger would have. He begins murmuring an incantation. His wand follows the course of each wound with exact care. Harry watches the tip move, willing it to work with such force that his own chest hurts. At first there seems to be no change at all. On the second repetition, the edges of the wounds begin drawing together. Harry simply watches, a helpless frustration gnawing at him. Snape performs the countercurse a third time. His voice never wavers, and when he finally draws his wand away he remains bent over her for a moment, examining what is left. “Is she-” Harry begins. His gaze moves helplessly from her face to Snape’s. “Professor, is she going to be all right?” Snape slides one arm beneath Dracona’s knees and the other behind her back. “I was too slow to prevent scarring,” he says, in a voice so tightly controlled that Harry feels each word as an accusation. Snape lifts her from the floor, gathering her carefully against him, and the trailing edge of her robe sends a few red drops back into the water. “I am taking her to the hospital wing.” Harry feels cold. His eyes immediately fix on the thin mark crossing Dracona’s cheek. She will have a scar. The idea strikes with almost nauseating force. Harry knows what it meant to carry evidence of someone else’s violence across your face. He knows what it means to wake up every morning and see it in a mirror. Now Dracona would have one because of him. Snape stops in the doorway. He looks back, and the cold fury in his expression holds Harry where he stands more effectively than a hand against his chest. “And you, Potter,” he says, each word deliberate, “will wait here for me.” It does not occur to Harry to disobey. He remains beside the broken cubicle as Snape carries her out, listening to the footsteps until he can't separate them from the running water. Across the floor, crimson stains open and drift like flowers, their edges loosening as the water carries them around fragments of porcelain and the fallen black wand. Her apology won’t leave him. Harry stares at his hands, still shaking too badly to hold them still. What have I done? The question circles without finding anywhere to settle, while Harry watches the crimson flowers spreading over the tiles. He can’t make sense of her saying she was sorry, or of the terror that had seized him when her eyes began to close. But most of all, he can not understand why hurting Dracona Malfoy felt so much like reaching into his own chest and tearing out his heart. Fin