Chapter Text
Dracona Malfoy had not slept properly in eleven days.
She knew this because she'd started counting, somewhere around day four, lying awake in the dark of her dormitory listening to the other girls breathe while she stared at the canopy above her bed and thought about Vanishing Cabinets and dead birds and the particular way her father's voice had gone flat and careful the last time he wrote to her. Eleven days. Her hands had developed a fine, near-invisible tremor that she disguised by keeping them busy twisting a quill, smoothing already-smooth parchment, wrapping her fingers around a cup of coffee she'd charmed to stay hot long after the Great Hall had emptied.
She was on her fourth cup by the time Potions rolled around.
"You didn't eat breakfast," Pansy said, not quite a question, watching Dracona spoon exactly nothing onto her plate before pushing back from the Slytherin table.
"I'm not hungry."
"You're never hungry anymore."
Dracona didn't answer that. She swept out of the Great Hall with her bag over one shoulder and a small leather diary tucked against her ribs beneath her robes, where it had lived for weeks now, filled with diagrams she erased and redrew, timelines that kept slipping out of her control, a running tally of ways a sixteen-year-old girl might be expected to commit murder and fail spectacularly at it.
She didn't notice Harry Potter watching her go.
He'd gotten good at watching her. It had started as suspicion, the vanishing at odd hours, the flinch whenever Snape's name came up, the way she'd gone from sharp-tongued and preening to hollow-eyed and jumpy somewhere between September and now and had curdled, slowly, into something he refused to examine too closely. He told himself it was simple. She was up to something. She had a diary. Diaries had plans in them, and plans were exactly the kind of evidence Dumbledore would want, and if Harry could just get a look inside it.
It wasn't about her, specifically. That was what he told himself.
Potions that day was a lesson in poor timing.
Snape, unbothered as ever by the concept of chemistry between teenagers, assigned partners the way he did everything: no patience for complaint. It was only luck or the universe's cruel sense of humour, that put Harry a row behind Dracona when Snape's list ran short a name and he waved a hand toward the back of the room without looking up. "Potter, Malfoy's partner is absent. Work with her instead of standing there."
Harry didn't need telling twice. He'd spent the better part of the last month failing to get anywhere near Dracona without her sneering at him or bolting in the opposite direction, and this, however accidental was exactly the opening he wanted.
Dracona's head snapped up from where she'd been staring at nothing. "What."
"You heard him," Harry said, already sliding into the seat beside her, feigning a nonchalance he did not feel, one eye on the strap of her bag where the corner of the diary peeked out.
She looked, for one unguarded second, like she might actually cry from sheer exhaustion at the thought of dealing with him for an entire lesson. Then the mask slid back into place that thin, brittle Malfoy composure and she turned pointedly toward the cauldron instead.
"Don't touch anything," she muttered. "You'll ruin it."
"I'm top of the class, actually."
"You're top of the class because you cheat off some book, Potter, everyone knows"
"Focus on your own cauldron, then, if you're so worried."
She didn't answer. Harry noticed something odd, her hands were shaking as she measured out lacewing flies, spilling a few over the side of the scale. She swore under her breath, more tired than vicious, and didn't seem to register when he leaned closer under the pretense of reading the recipe, his eyes flicking instead to the diary bag propped against her stool.
Just a look, he told himself. Just to see if there's anything
He wasn't watching what his own hands were doing. That was, in retrospect, the entire problem.
They'd been assigned separate potions and his, unfortunately, was a batch of Amortentia, brewed for demonstration and meant to be decanted into small vials for Slughorn's collection at the end of the lesson. It smelled like broom polish and parchment and, underneath it, rose and sandal wood perfume, something warm he'd never quite been able to name and had stopped trying to. He was so busy craning his neck toward the diary, so busy being single-mindedly focused on the wrong thing entirely, that when he went to pour the shimmering potion into its vial his hand overshot the rim.
A thin, pearlescent splash arced sideways. Into Dracona's cup of coffee.
Neither of them saw it happen. Harry was too busy startling backward, cursing under his breath, mopping at the counter with his sleeve. Dracona was too busy blinking hard against the burn of exhaustion behind her eyes, willing herself through one more hour, one more class, one more day of holding herself together with caffeine and sheer bloody will.
She picked up her cup. Drank.
"Oh no!" Harry's stomach dropped as he registered, half a second too late, exactly what he'd done. "Malfoy, don't—"
Too late.
The change wasn't dramatic, at first. Dracona set the cup down, blinked twice like she'd swallowed something oddly sweet, and turned her head, confused. “What?”
And her eyes landed on Harry, who was half out of his seat with one hand outstretched like he could physically snatch the last thirty seconds back out of the air.
Something in her face simply... rearranged itself.
The exhaustion didn't vanish so much as it stopped mattering, at least for the moment. Her shoulders loosened. Her eyes went soft and fixed, entirely, on him.
"Harry," she said, quiet, like she was testing the shape of his name in her mouth for the first time.
"Oh, no," Harry said, weaker this time.
She rose from her stool without seeming to decide to, drawn toward him the way iron filings are drawn toward a magnet, and slipped a hand around his arm before he could think to step back.
"Malfoy-" he started, low, urgent, aware of Snape somewhere at the front of the room and desperate to keep this contained to a whisper. "You need to sit back down."
"I don't want to sit down," she said, and there was something plaintive underneath the dreaminess now, a rawness that hadn't been there a minute ago. "I want to stay here."
Harry's mind was already three steps ahead, scared for his life, Snape noticing, Snape asking questions, Snape discovering exactly which potion had gone missing from Harry's cauldron and exactly whose cup it had ended up in.
He made a decision fast enough that he barely registered making it.
"Professor," he called, pitching his voice to carry the necessary amount of urgency without carrying the truth, "Malfoy's not well, I think she should go to the hospital wing."
Snape's dark eyes swept over the pair of them, over Dracona's flushed face and Harry's white-knuckled grip on his own composure, and narrowed with obvious suspicion but sixth-years feigning illness to skip class was hardly novel, and Snape looked, if anything, relieved not to have to deal with whatever this was in the middle of a lesson.
"Take her, then, Potter, before she contaminates something. Ten points from Gryffindor for the disruption."
Harry didn't argue. He got her out of that room so fast he nearly forgot his bag. Snape was going to kill him if he found out.
She followed him into the corridor without a fight, still gripping his arm, fingers curled into his sleeve like she thought he might disappear if she let go.
"Harry." She said it again once the dungeon door swung shut behind them, muffling the low murmur of the class they'd left in chaos. "Harry, I need to tell you something."
"Malfoy, please, just walk. We're getting you to Pomfrey."
"I love you." She said it plainly, simply, like she was reporting house points. "I think I've loved you for a long time and just didn't let myself know it. Doesn't that sound mad? But it's true. I can feel it so clearly now."
Harry kept walking, jaw tight, eyes ahead, not looking at her because looking made the guilt sit heavier in his chest. "You don't. It's not real. It's the potion. It'll wear off."
"Don't say that." Her grip tightened. "Don't you feel it too? Even a little?"
"No. I mean , Malfoy, listen to me, this isn't,"
He didn't get to finish. She stopped dead, forcing him to stop with her, and when he finally looked at her properly, her eyes had gone glassy in a different way now. Shimmering bright, horrified, almost, like some small distant part of her understood exactly how humiliating this was and couldn't do a thing to stop it.
"Why don't you love me?" Her voice cracked on the last word. A tear spilled over and she didn't wipe it away, too busy staring up at him like the answer might undo something in her chest. "Everyone loves you. Everyone. Why can't you just,"
"Dracona"
"I gave you everything I had just now and you won't even look at me properly." Her breath hitched, the words tumbling out faster, less composed, tears running down quickly. "What's wrong with me?"
Harry stood frozen in the corridor with a crying, love-potioned Draco Malfoy clinging to his sleeve and felt, maybe for the first time all year, completely out of his depth.
"Nothing's wrong with you," he said quietly, because it was the one true thing he had to offer. "This isn't you. I promise. We're going to fix it. Just come with me to the hospital wing, please." He sighed, slowly cupping her face. “You’re perfect, okay? Let’s just get to medical wing.”
She didn't answer. She just pressed closer, forehead nearly at his shoulder, crying quietly now instead of pleading, and let him lead her down the corridor, one hand still fisted in his sleeve like letting go was the one thing she couldn't make herself do