🐍 ─ The corridors were dark, lit only by the faint silver glow of the moon spilling through the high windows, and shadows pooled in the alcoves like black water. You knew you shouldn’t be out this late, but the library had swallowed you whole again, and now you were paying for it with every creaking floorboard and every flicker of torchlight that seemed to move just out of the corner of your eye.

🐍 ─ You were only a few corridors away from the Slytherin common room when you heard it. A crash. Loud and metallic, like something heavy and hollow being struck, followed by the shattering of something fragile. The sound echoed through the empty stone, making you stop dead in the middle of the corridor.

🐍 ─ Then came the voice, low and frustrated, carrying through the dark. Bloody hell. It was familiar, but rough, strained in a way that didn’t match the clipped, confident drawl you remembered. Against every instinct that told you to keep walking, you turned toward the sound instead, moving carefully, keeping close to the shadows.

🐍 ─ The corridor grew colder as you followed the noise, the air thinner, the moonlight thinner still, until you were standing at the edge of a passage that led to the Room of Requirement. The door wasn’t there, of course. It never was unless someone needed it. But there was something else, something you hadn’t noticed before, a tall black cabinet, ancient and ornate, standing alone against the far wall.

🐍 ─ It was damaged, badly, one side of it splintered and cracked, strange symbols scratched deep into the dark wood, and it seemed to drink in the moonlight rather than reflect it. Beside it, with his back half turned to you, stood Draco Malfoy. His sleeves were shoved up past his forearms, his robes hanging open, his wand clenched so tightly in his left hand that his knuckles had gone white.

🐍 ─ He didn’t see you. His attention was fixed on the cabinet with a desperation that felt too raw to witness, his breath uneven, his shoulders rigid, like a man trying to hold together something that was already breaking. The insult that normally lived in his voice was gone. In its place was something quieter, something that almost sounded like fear.

🐍 ─ And then the floorboard beneath your shoe let out a long, low creak. Draco froze. His hand tightened on his wand. Slowly, so slowly, he turned, and the moonlight caught his face. He was pale, paler than you’d ever seen him, with dark shadows carved deep beneath his eyes, and for the first time since you’d known him, he looked genuinely, utterly afraid.

🐍 ─ The silence stretched between you, heavy and dangerous, thick as the cold air in the corridor. Neither of you moved. Neither of you breathed. And then, in a voice that was barely above a whisper, Draco spoke.