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Most times, divination made no sense whatsoever. At its core, it was a subject was about recognising patterns. But patterns were surprisingly difficult to discern, even the ones that made a person who they were. Especially those, in fact.
Draco's childhood was odd. Ever since he could remember, people always treated him coldly. He would blame his features for it. Icy blonde hair, cool grey eyes, pale white skin. A mouth that rarely smiled. But on the inside all he ever felt was raging heat. It felt ancient, like it had been conceived long before he had been and had been given to him as his special burden to bear in this lifetime. His mother had heard it in him from the very first wail. It was why she named him after a dragon.
Maybe if he could fly high above all his worries he might have seen the patterns sooner, but he didn't have the heart to leave his treasures. He wanted to protect the people he loved, so he stayed. Slowly, he had turned into this awful beast, known for his snarl and the way he gnashed his teeth. He was the sort of creature that burned anything that threatened him.
And so the pattern persisted, unbeknownst to him: a series of seven events that, looking back, had been tied together by the strings of Fate—a braided cord that even his fire could not sever.
The first event had been, initially, a night of great pride. Though at some point he had decided that that had been the start of the end. There were many patterns at play that night. For example, all the first years had filed into the Great Hall with the same sense of wonder. Wonder rapidly transformed into trepidation at the lift of an ugly, animate hat. All the young wizards from the most noble of families were placed into same great house, Slytherin. At that time he hadn't noticed any of that though.
All he had noticed was the endlessly repeating mass of coils right in front of his face. He had never seen so much hair in his entire life. He was inexplicably transfixed by it, and wanted so badly to reach out and touch it. But he had better manners than that. It had been so unexpectedly frustrating at the time. He had to fight the urge with everything in him. It didn't help that she smelled just like his library. It had been the strangest thing.
The second event had taken place in a bookstore. He had been so embarrassed to see her there. At first, he really had thought that he conjured her. An immediate panic had set in—he wasn't supposed to use magic outside of school. But he couldn't help it. He always thought about her in any place with lots of books. Those places always smelled like her. He didn't know many people who smelled like the thing they loved the most. What did he smell like? He wasn't even sure what it was that he loved most in this world.
That was they day his father had met her, another tragic event that should have never happened. He might have mentioned her a few times over the summer. He didn't know how not to. His father found it amusing at first, less so after he met her. He seemed to sense that she was different from them. Later that day, his father had told him why. Lucius had met another girl that day too. She had red hair and hand-me-down robes, just like her brother. He wished they had never met either.
The third event was when he had wished for her death. He had wanted the monster to eat her. Anything to get her out of sight and out of mind. She was beneath him. Her blood was supposed to be a muddy brown colour, tainted with mundanity. How dare she beat him in every subject. How dare she be better than him in any way. How dare she make him want to be like her. His blood was a sacred scarlet. The sooner she died, the sooner he would be able to prove it to himself, that her veins were filled with fraud.
The fourth event was when she hit him. It had hurt, but he liked it. It felt different from when his father hit him. His father used to hit him mostly because he was there. He never really looked at him when he did it. His eyes were always far away. When Hermione had hit him she looked right at him. Perhaps for the first time ever, she had given him all of her attention. That had been the most stunning part of the entire incident. He remembered his friend had described her as terrifying. But Draco knew true terror. This was nothing like that. She had been something else. He spent a long time trying to put his finger on it.
The fifth event had been a Divination lesson. Numerology. Apparently, certain strings of endless numbers could help you predict almost anything, but only if the pattern could be discovered. He was rubbish at it. The numbers all looked random to him. The only thing that made some sense was Pythagorean number reduction, though he hadn't found it very useful at the time. He had only taken the subject because she wasn't taking it. Without her around, he thought that maybe he would have been able to best the class. That hadn't worked out exactly to plan. Some other girl ended up with the top score, but he found that he actually didn't mind that. So long as it wasn't her.
Incidentally, the few tidbits he had taken away from his numerology classes helped him fix a pair of cabinets. If only he hadn't taken that class. The sixth event would have never happened.
The sixth event should be buried in the deep recesses of his brain, like the other events that were a bit too much to bear. He should have to struggle to remember what had actually occurred. But he remembers it very clearly. Hermione Granger's blood is the same colour as his. She has a fire inside of her, just like him, and when he sleeps he often dreams of her crackling screams echoing across his dining room floor. The roar of a thousand raging fires had erupted from her lungs and had refused to go out quietly.
She must be a fallen star. That's what he had thought afterward. A fallen star, burning bright through infinite darkness, never quite meeting its end. What a lovely thing to be. He had felt more monstrous than ever then, a dragon who deserved to be slain. He had simply stood there, guarding what he had been taught to treasure. All the while a star had almost winked out before him.
The seventh event fell into place under a sky full of shooting stars. Another seven years had passed by then. The strangest sense of deja vu overcame him as he waited in line to use the telescope. There were a million patterns in the sky that he had been waiting patiently to see. But he found himself transfixed by the pattern right in front of his face. It was the longest braid he had ever seen, thick hair woven into a cord that reached her lower waist. He wanted so badly to reach out and touch it. How ill-mannered would that be?
By then, he understood women a bit more. Or at least he thought he did. He knew he would have to take her out first. To dinner, or maybe to a bookstore. He generally preferred the latter. Taste in books told him a lot more than a shared meal ever would. If it went well, maybe she would let him touch it then. It was long enough to wrap around his fists several times over and—no. That was jumping way far ahead. And if she was the sort of girl his mother would approve of, she would probably hit him for trying that too soon. If she didn't, she might not be worth pursuing.
Twenty-five. That was the number of sections he counted in her braid. Coincidentally, it was his age as well. And it reduced to seven—the number of universal truths and magic itself. That was a good sign as far as numerology went. Recently he had come to rely on the practice quite a bit. After all, his first time truly using it had brought about the end of the end. He had an idea that maybe it could bring about a new beginning too.
He looked up at the sky. It was practically raining starlight—or rather, meteor-light. But that didn't stop him from wondering what happened when a star died. Or if stars ever died. His mother's family held a tradition of naming members after the cosmos. They were all very much under the impression that the cosmos would do its divine dance forever and, hopefully, their bloodline would too. He remembered how his Divination teacher would drone on and on about that forever. How they were all trapped in a cosmic pattern with clues all around. How the cosmos was constantly tempting us into finding them. He always wondered: to what end?
What exactly was the point of any of it? Most times, life made no sense whatsoever.
But sometimes, a special morning would come. There were specific mornings when the sun would shine a little brighter, feel a little warmer. There was a special type of hope that came with the dawn.
When the owner of the braid turned around to let him have his turn, it felt somewhat like that. Suddenly, his mind flashed back to seven moments over seven years that had somehow led him here, seven years later.
The pattern revealed itself to him slowly. It started with tentative smiles and shy hellos, leisurely building up to unraveled braids and loosed curls. Most times, it was incredibly overwhelming. Often he looked at her and felt as though he was staring directly at the sun. It was mystifying—that a person could actually make him feel like that. And she said the most incredulous things sometimes. She said that he smelled like books. She said that looking at him sometimes felt like looking at a thousand suns, or maybe even the seventeen stars that made up his constellation, up close and all at once. He always forgot that he had been named after the stars.
Maybe he wasn't a great beast after all. Maybe he was just cursed with the image of one. Or maybe his past regressions were really in the past. Maybe he could finally be the person he always wanted to be, not the person he was told he should be. He liked the idea of being a constellation, of being this entity comprised of pre-destined events, visible only to those who happened to be traversing the same part of the sky. And he liked the idea of being high up in the heavens, looking down at the world. He felt like that with her, like he was in a private dimension defined mainly by his light. The surrounding darkness was never quite able to touch him.
Maybe he understood divination after all. He could make out all of the shapes from his current vantage point. He could really see how the pattern formed now. Shapes of curls, of braids, of a fist, of numbers, of cabinets and the checkered pattern of his old dining room floor had in turn shaped him. It had left a mark on him, one shaped like an X, and her own life's pattern was the only map to finding it.
Which reminded him of an eighth event. They had been in the same runes class and he was late to it, just that once. He had been crying, but he couldn't remember why. He used to cry a lot without anyone knowing. He had been late because he was waiting for the redness to fade from his eyes. The professor had made a deal with him. If he knew what the name and meaning of the rune on the board was, she wouldn't take away any house points for his tardiness.
It was the shape of an X. He didn't know its name or meaning, so he lost the points. But he never forgot it after that day.
Gebo. It meant gift, but there was more to it than that. Granger had raised her hand and spouted off everything she knew about it, which was a considerable amount. It could also be translated into divine union, hence the shape: two perpendicular lines going in completely opposite directions, but they meet by chance. It also represented the Law of Equivalent Exchange in alchemy. In Divination, it was considered symbolic of another law, the Law of Compensation—receiving exactly what you deserved, for exactly what you've done.
He must have brought over good karma from his past life. Because he didn't think he had done anything so good as to deserve Hermione Granger in this one.
In numerology, the rune translated to the figure 8. The number of balance, stability, infinity. The number that his seventeen stars reduced to. It made a certain kind of sense. The sort of sense that magic made, which was some and none at the same time. There was some level of predictability to it, but at its core no one really knew what it was except that it was a feeling. A feeling of fire, a feeling of certainty, a feeling of hope and a feeling of faith. If you gripped a wand and uttered a spell, above anything else, you had to trust that it would happen.
In a similar way, he had to trust that he was capable of loving Hermione Granger in the way that she unquestionably deserved to be. He expected it to be challenging, but it wasn't at all. Loving her came to him as naturally as breathing. He thought there would a complex pattern to her, one that would take ages to discern. But there was no mystery to her at all. When he looked her, he found that he immediately understood what he saw. And when she looked at him, he felt fully seen—not just the image of him, but the totality of who he was.
There was nothing conditional about her gaze. There was no end to her understanding. What they shared was far from finite. It couldn't be hoarded or taken away. Hers was a fire that matched his own and it burned with certainty, hope and the very best of faith. It burned like only magic could.
And maybe that was what magic had been all along. The invisible force that bound all the patterns together, helping us understand our place in the world. His just happened to be with her.