Chapter Text
It hadn't stopped raining since September.
Hermione sat on the edge of her mattress in the Eighth-Year dorm, the room pitch-black except for the gray blur of the window. Somewhere outside, someone laughed in the corridor. It stopped quickly. Her thumb kept digging into her forearm, picking at the edge of the scar until she tasted copper in her mouth from chewing her lip.
They’d rebuilt the castle—new mortar, fresh plaster, clean stone—but the smell of it just made her sick. It smelled like lime and dust— like the rebuilding had scraped something raw instead of fixing it.
Trying to sleep was pointless. The second she shut her eyes, her brain dragged her right back down to the cellar.
You learn a house differently when you can’t see it. She’d mapped Malfoy Manor by the floorboards. She knew the heavy, dull thud-clack of Lucius’s cane overhead. She knew Bellatrix’s wet, breathless laugh right before the heavy door creaked open. But there was another sound she never talked about. A weird, wet gasp— someone choking back a noise because they were too proud to scream. Draco, getting sorted out because he’d hesitated, or because he’d looked sick at dinner. They were separated by six inches of oak, just listening to each other breathe through the walls. She kept looking for him at breakfast. It was stupid, but she couldn’t stop.
He sat at the absolute dead-end of the Slytherin table, practically in the aisle. Nobody sat within three feet of him; the third-years looked at him like he was covered in dragon pox. He wasn't even pretending to eat. He just stared at his plate, his hand wrapped around a fork so tight his fingers looked like chalk. His robes were done up to his chin, completely stiff.
When he finally looked up, he caught her dead-on. Across the whole miserable, noisy hall— past the kids yelling about Quidditch trials and the clatter of heavy steel spoons— his gray eyes hit hers. There was no sneer. He just looked like a ghost that had spent a month listening to a girl get taken apart downstairs.
When the curfew bell went off, she didn’t go back to Gryffindor. She went up. The wind in the Astronomy Tower was brutal, biting right into her cheeks, but the freezing air felt real. It meant she was out. Malfoy was already there, leaning over the stone wall, his hair looking almost white in the dark. He didn't even jump when her boots scraped the floor. He just closed his eyes and let his head drop an inch, like he’d been waiting for a hit. Hermione didn’t want to say anything. The silence was just loud.
"I counted them," she said. He didn't ask what. Her voice sounded thin, cracked by the wind. "Your father's cane. On the ceiling. I could hear it through the wood."
Malfoy’s hands twitched on the stone. His knuckles went white, the skin stretching tight over the bone. For a second, she thought he was going to bolt. He didn’t look at her.
"I was right above the cage," he said. His voice was completely flat, dry as old paper. "Most nights... I had my ear right against the gaps in the timber. Just trying to figure out if you were still making noise."