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The last few days of October brought a sharp chill to Hogwarts. Climbing out of the warm bed in the morning became an ordeal, and the wind that swept through the corridors carried a biting cold.
More than half a month into the term, life as an eleven-year-old was not proving as easy as Draco Malfoy had expected. Or rather, the burdens of a forty-year-old soul were far too heavy for this young body to bear.
The relentless mental strain, day and night, finally found its outlet in the deepening cold. Draco fell ill with a low fever, and Madam Pomfrey advised him to stay in bed.
In the Slytherin dormitory, with its greenish lake light playing across the ceiling, the forced stillness gave him plenty of time to think.
Draco thought back to those quiet experiments he had attempted before school began, back at Malfoy Manor, trying to change small, insignificant things. Saving an antique vase that was destined to shatter. Warning a house-elf away from the corner of a table it was fated to collide with.
Every single attempt had failed. It was as if an invisible hand was forcing everything back onto its original track.
But matters involving Harry Potter seemed different.
Before the flying lesson, Draco had made a point of loudly telling Harry how dangerous it was to ride a broomstick for the first time. He was sure Longbottom nearby had heard him too. But when the lesson began, Longbottom still shot into the air on his broom, then crashed down hard, the sickening crack of bone echoing clearly as his arm broke.
When Draco picked up the Remembrall that had rolled out of Longbottom's pocket, glowing with its stupid red light, he was still struggling with whether to taunt the boy as he had in his previous life or simply ignore it, when Harry stepped forward and took the glass ball from his hand.
"Give it to me, Draco," Harry had said, his tone calm. "I'll give it back to Neville."
And Harry did exactly that.
No conflict. No sudden appearance of Professor McGonagall afterwards. No special selection for the Quidditch team. Everything passed as quietly as if nothing had happened.
In the end, it was Draco who wrote to Lucius, praising the extraordinary broom control Harry had shown during an after-class flying practice, the kind that had even impressed Madam Hooch, and begging his father to get them both onto the team. Only then was Harry brought onto the Quidditch team, just as he had been in his previous life with Gryffindor... well, now it was Slytherin.
All these fragments pieced together pointed to a conclusion that made Draco's chest tighten: only events surrounding Harry Potter could create ripples in the future, like a stone cast into a still lake.
But Draco himself, his family, and everything else seemed locked onto a fixed track by some invisible force, impossible to break free from.
Perhaps no matter how he struggled, Malfoy Manor would still become that man's dark, terrifying lair in a few years, reeking of decay and despair. The thought filled Draco with gloom.
He pushed up the sleeve of his silk pyjamas and stared blankly at the pale blue veins visible beneath his almost translucent skin. They would still be branded with that ugly, burning mark that would follow him for the rest of his life, no matter how he resisted it in his heart.
Draco buried his face wearily in the soft pillow that smelled faintly of citrus.
Creak.
The dormitory door was pushed open gently. Draco caught a whiff of... smoke?
He lifted his heavy eyelids and turned his head on the pillow.
Harry Potter stood in the doorway, looking quite a sight.
There was a large smudge of soot on one cheek, as if he had accidentally pressed his face into a fireplace. A small lock of his black hair near his ear was clearly singed, curling pathetically and giving off a faint smell of burnt feathers.
The hem of his school robes was also dusted with ash. He looked as though he had just had an unpleasant close encounter with a batch of particularly aggressive Blast-Ended Skrewts.
The state Harry was in cheered Draco somewhat. Even though his voice was muffled by the fever and by lying face down, it still carried the teasing tone he always had, the one that even illness could not quite erase. "I thought your timetable said Charms, Potter, not helping Hagrid clear out Blast-Ended Skrewts. Or has Professor Flitwick finally decided to update the curriculum?"
Harry blinked, then glanced at the ornate silver-framed mirror on the wall and noticed the smudges on his face. He tried to wipe them with his sleeve, which only smeared the black further across his pale skin.
"It was the Gryffindor sitting next to me," he explained, sounding a little helpless. "When he tried the Levitation Charm... well... it had quite a lot of, er, force behind it."
As he spoke, Harry shrugged off his dirty outer robe and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he did something that made Draco's eyelid twitch.
He walked over to Draco's bed with complete naturalness, and without any hesitation, sat down on the edge, right next to where Draco was lying. The mattress dipped slightly under his weight.
"Are you feeling any better?" Harry turned to look at him, his green eyes full of open concern as he studied Draco's still-pale face. "You still don't look well. Did Madam Pomfrey's Pepperup Potion not work?"
Draco stared at Harry's trousers, which were at least relatively clean compared to the rest of him, and forced himself to tolerate it.
"Not just unwell..." He was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. Worrying about the Saviour's life and the fate of the wizarding world every day, while also dealing with first-year coursework and social dynamics, was nothing short of torture.
Wait. Had he just said... the Levitation Charm?
That was a key piece of information.
In his previous life, around this time, on Halloween night, Potter and Weasley had saved Granger from a troll in the dungeons. After that, the three of them had been stuck together as if by glue.
He could not remember the exact details. In his previous life, terrified, he had followed the prefects back to the dormitory early. He had only learned of what happened when Dumbledore awarded points to Gryffindor in front of the whole school afterwards.
This was an opportunity.
Draco pushed down the flutter in his chest and lifted his head, trying to make his grey eyes look casually curious. "Today's Charms lesson, wasn't it with Gryffindor? Did you run into Weasley?"
Harry's mood dropped, like the sky outside the castle suddenly clouding over.
"Him?" Harry's voice was hard. "Same as always. We passed each other in the corridor and he acted like I wasn't there. But..."
Harry paused, frowning. "On the way back, I heard him talking about Granger with Dean Thomas and Seamus, the one who made the feather explode. Later I saw Granger run past them with her hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking."
Harry's face showed clear disapproval. But then he turned to Draco, a hint of inquiry in his green eyes. "You seem... especially concerned about Ron. You're always asking about him."
Draco's heart lurched. But forty years of experience and the Malfoy family's innate talent for concealment helped him steady himself quickly. "I just think it's a shame. You two seemed like you could have been friends, back in Diagon Alley. If my presence caused a rift between you, that's not something I would want."
Harry seemed to accept the explanation, or at least chose to believe it. He was quiet for a moment, his grey-green eyes fixed on the dark green canopy above, as if thinking about something.
Then he did something that made Draco's pupils contract even more. Without any warning, he tipped backwards and lay down, right next to Draco, only a few inches between them, close enough to feel the faint warmth radiating from the other's body.
Draco's peripheral vision locked onto Harry's shirt, which, while free of the outer robe, still had ash on the cuffs and might well have been brushing against his clean sheets. The vein at his temple pulsed with irritation.
But just as he opened his mouth to deliver a proper Malfoy-style reprimand about manners and personal space, Harry spoke in a strangely calm voice.
"I know."
That stopped Draco cold. He looked up in confusion.
Harry turned his head, his nose nearly touching Draco's hair. His green eyes, deep and dark in the dim light, stared unblinkingly at Draco's face from close range. He said slowly, "Draco, you know what? I can actually see that Ron and I should have become great friends."
Draco's heart stopped for a second, then started pounding again like a startled rabbit. Blood rushed to his head, making him dizzy. Could Harry also be... reborn? How much did he know?
"See... what do you mean?" he forced himself to keep his voice level, dry and careful. "You have a way of knowing what will happen in the future?"
Harry shook his head, his black hair rustling against the pillow. "No, I can't control it at all. It's like... a sudden gust of wind, or a flash of lightning."
He searched for the right comparison. "Very fragmented images. They burst into my head without any warning. And the frightening thing is, every single one has happened exactly as I saw it.
At first I thought it was some kind of protective ability, something that could help me avoid Dudley and his gang's tricks, or Uncle Vernon's temper."
He paused, his gaze growing more focused, as if trying to see into the deepest secrets of Draco's grey eyes. "Until... until I met you for the first time at Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions. That was the only time my 'foresight' was ever wrong."
Draco held his breath.
"In the image that flashed through my mind, you were supposed to be haughty, with that... sort of... drawling tone, arrogantly sneering at Hagrid and making condescending remarks about my glasses. But in reality..."
Harry paused, as if recalling every detail of that moment. "You reached out your hand to me. You looked... tired, with dark circles under your eyes, and it made me feel like you were... a little fragile. Completely different from how you were 'supposed' to be."
"I've always remembered that." Harry's voice carried a seriousness that seemed almost strange coming from an eleven-year-old boy, yet somehow entirely convincing.
"It made me start thinking. If I keep relying on these sudden 'prophecies' and stop trusting what my own eyes see and what my own heart feels, then wouldn't I be like a puppet on strings? Just numbly walking a path someone else had already laid out for me? Even though Ron has told me a lot of... well... not very nice things about you."
"But I want to trust my own eyes and what I feel." Harry concluded, his voice firm. "You're different from the Malfoy I 'saw'. You care about whether I catch cold, you help me tie my tie, and... well, even though you always say unpleasant things, I think... you're a good person."
Draco was completely speechless, as if hit by a Body-Bind Curse.
His mind was in turmoil. Potter was not reborn. He had some kind of... flashback-like precognition? He saw the "original" timeline. And he, the biggest variable of all, had become the first error in his visions.
What on earth... what was this? He, Draco Malfoy, a reborn man carrying a lifetime of sin and despair, thinking only of how to use others to ensure his family's survival, had become the reason Harry Potter, the Saviour, chose to break free from the so-called "prophecy" and trust his own judgement?
A surge of complicated emotions flooded through him. Relief, absurdity, and a sliver of... guilt, which he refused to acknowledge even to himself.
He looked into Harry's clear, searching green eyes and, for the first time, found himself at a loss for words.
Eleven-year-old Harry was showing him a kind of almost reckless sincerity, while he, from start to finish, had been wearing the masks of an adult with clear intentions, careful calculations, and layer upon layer of pretence. They were lying on the same bed, sharing the same close air, yet felt separated by an unbridgeable chasm of time.
At that moment, there was a soft click as the silver snake-shaped door handle turned. Theodore Nott slipped silently into the room.
His gaze landed first on Draco's bed. Then his eyes, always veiled in that cool haze, took in the soot-covered Harry lying beside Draco, and the fact that the ash might well be getting on Draco's clean sheets.
His gaze lingered for a full two seconds before sliding away to Draco. His voice was as even and unreadable as ever. "The Halloween feast is tonight. The menu in the Great Hall should be much richer than usual."
He paused, his eyes seeming to drift over Harry again, then added, "If you're still unwell and don't want to be around crowds, I can bring something back for you."
Draco thought of the upcoming troll incident, and of how he needed to make sure Harry, Weasley, and Granger ended up in the same place, just as the "script" required. He could not miss it.
"Thank you, Theodore. I think I'll go to the feast after all. It only happens once a year."
He needed that chaos.
Theodore gave an almost imperceptible nod and said nothing more. He turned to his desk and began sorting through his parchment scrolls, his back a silent presence.
When Draco and Harry entered the Great Hall a little later, it was already buzzing with noise and filled with a lively, eerie festive atmosphere.
The enchanted ceiling was dark with swirling clouds, and occasional lightning flashed across it. Dozens of carved pumpkins, each grinning from ear to ear, floated in mid-air, bright candle flames dancing in their hollow eyes.
The air was thick with the rich sweetness of roasted pumpkin and the tempting scent of sweets from Honeydukes. The four house tables were laden with gleaming golden platters piled high with mountains of food, from sizzling sausages to syrup-drenched treacle tarts. The sight made Draco's stomach turn. He had little appetite and found it all rather greasy.
After taking their seats at the Slytherin table, with its silver and green runners, the first years around them were clearly still buzzing about the incident in Charms class.
"...and then, bang!" A Slytherin boy was re-enacting the moment with dramatic gestures, a gleeful grin on his face. "That Gryffindor kid was completely covered in black smoke! His hair went all bushy!"
"I bet Professor Flitwick won't let him try anything on his own next time!" a girl added with a shrill laugh.
Pansy Parkinson came clicking along the table, her black hair newly cut in a sharp, boyish style. She slid neatly into the empty seat on Draco's other side and immediately joined the conversation.
"Oh, come on, that's not even the best part," she said, lifting her pointed chin, her voice loud and cutting enough for the small circle around her to hear. "I just came back from the girls' lavatory, and you will not believe what was going on in there."
She had everyone's attention. She looked around smugly, then lowered her voice a little, creating an air of shared gossip.
"That Gryffindor, you know the one I mean, the Mudblood girl, is in the last stall crying her eyes out! Just sobbing away. Honestly, it's unbearable to listen to! Peg told me she's been in there since Charms ended this afternoon. Crying for hours! Merlin, I hope she doesn't do something stupid and become a second Moaning Myrtle. That would be a real blight on Hogwarts."
"What's a 'Mudblood'?" Harry turned at once, his clear green eyes full of genuine confusion, and asked Draco, who was sitting beside him. He had clearly caught the nasty word in Pansy's speech.
Draco felt an embarrassed flush rise to his cheeks. He opened his mouth, trying to fob Harry off with a vague definition or change the subject, but Pansy, as if finally finding the perfect chance to show off her pure-blood superiority, jumped in first. With a malicious tone, as if explaining something filthy, she began, "A Mudblood is..."
"Ah, Pansy means Granger?" Draco cut her off hastily, his voice a little louder than intended. Pansy shot him an annoyed glare.
Draco turned to Harry at once, his grey eyes blinking rapidly as he tried to steer the conversation somewhere safer. "Didn't you say this afternoon that Ron Weasley had said something nasty about her? What exactly did he say that could make her hide in a toilet and cry all afternoon?" He tried hard to make his expression look merely curious rather than calculating.
Harry's expression was not good. His gaze moved past the noisy crowd to the Gryffindor table across the hall. Ron Weasley was sitting with his brothers, a huge glistening chicken leg in his hand, eating with obvious enjoyment, his face split in a wide grin at some joke the twins had just told.
The frustration with Ron's stubborn prejudice, the helplessness over the house divisions, and the sympathy for Hermione all seemed to have been building inside Harry, and now they reached a tipping point.
Without any hesitation, Harry swung himself off the Slytherin bench and walked over to the Gryffindor table.
Draco's heart leapt into his throat. He leaned forward instinctively, watching closely.
He saw Harry stop in front of Ron, blocking his view of the twins. The smile on Ron's face froze, replaced first by shock, then slowly hardening into a stubborn, complicated expression.
Harry seemed to be speaking seriously, his words fast, occasionally pointing toward the direction of the castle lavatories. Ron's face went red first, almost as red as his hair, then slowly drained of colour, turning rather pale. His lips moved as if trying to defend himself, but his eyes darted away, unable to meet Harry's intense green gaze.
Fred and George stopped joking and watched the scene with open curiosity.
Just as the tense atmosphere seemed about to freeze solid...
BANG.
The doors of the Great Hall were flung open with a tremendous crash, drawing every eye in the room.
Professor Quirrell came stumbling in, his turban askew, his face twisted with genuine, absolute terror. He staggered to the staff table and shrieked in a voice so shaky it barely held together:
"Troll... troll in the dungeons! I thought... thought you ought to know..."
And with that broken, halting sentence, he rolled his eyes and collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
For one second, the entire hall was dead silent, as if time itself had stopped. Then...
"AHHH!"
The piercing screams, mostly from the younger students, erupted with enough force to lift the roof. The older students were more excited than frightened, shouting, whistling, and loudly discussing the news.
Draco saw the Weasley twins making the most noise. They had even jumped onto the bench, wearing bright, gleeful smiles, utterly unafraid.
"SILENCE!"
Professor Dumbledore stood up. He had not even used his wand, but his booming, commanding voice rolled over the hall like thunder, instantly drowning out the noise and chaos. The room fell quiet at once.
"Prefects, lead your houses back to your common rooms immediately!" Dumbledore's sharp blue eyes swept over the hall, his voice steady and firm. "Professors, follow me."
The teachers rose quickly, their faces grave, and followed Dumbledore out of the hall.
Pansy immediately latched onto Draco's arm like a startled squid, her cold fingers digging into his skin. "Let's get out of here, Draco!"
Although he had once shared some vague, half-formed adolescent feelings with Pansy in his previous life, right now Draco had no patience for comforting a frightened eleven-year-old girl. Not while Harry, separated from Weasley now, stood across the hall looking lost and worried as he watched the professors leave.
One by one, Draco pried Pansy's fingers from his sleeve.
"You go with the prefects."
He spoke in a low voice, his eyes still locked on Harry and that redheaded Weasley as they were jostled through the chaos, slipping out of the Great Hall like two eels. "I'll... I'll be along in a minute. I think I've... left something behind."
Pansy tried to say something more, but she was already being pulled along by the other Slytherin girls, swept into the stream of students leaving the hall.
A single troll. Draco Malfoy could certainly handle one. But for three first-year students, without a bit of luck, it would be deadly.
He could not let the Saviour die in his very first year, taken out by a troll and its filthy, stinking club, especially not after Harry had just confessed something that sounded so much like a declaration of trust.