Draco and His Castle

Part 1

The boy looked into the window, peering through the sheer curtains and stretching onto his tiptoes in order to see. There was a flurry of movement and he briefly saw the egg, cracks shooting rapidly across its surface and surprised voices beginning to rise. With one final nudge from inside the egg, it split open, a small dragon flopping out onto the wooden table. The boy gasped, all the color draining from his face as the dragon sneezed, sending small sparks through its snout. He watched the giant reach out to pet it lovingly before he turned and ran back up to the school, fighting the urge to scream or vomit or both. Unknowingly to him, the cabin's curtains were ripped apart, with four angrily shocked faces watching him run back to the castle.

-X-

Draco lazily flicked his wand at the eraser on the table. The eraser gave a small wiggle before falling back onto the table with a dull thud.

"Still brooding, are we?" Blaise smirked as he threw himself into an armchair across from Draco.

"Aren't I always?" Draco replied angrily, his lip curling up into a sneer. "Bloody Potter, I swear to Merlin—"

"Oh not this again!" Blaise barked with annoyance. "I could fill several books with the amount of complaining you do!"

"Why do that when you could just steal Weasley's diary?" Draco shot back, surprising himself by laughing. A bit cheered up now, Draco pointed his wand at the eraser, muttering Locomotor! and watched it soar across the room. Blaise joined in, pointing his wand at random objects around the common room with abandon, such as Daphne Greengrass' reading glasses and Theodore Nott's quill, which earned him a few choice swears and a Charms textbook flying at his head.

Draco excused himself to the dormitory once a full blown battle had commenced in the common room, out of fear that a quill would impale him as it sailed across the room. Reaching his four-poster, he began dressing for bed, placing his wand on his night table. It wasn't until he was in bed for a solid, silent hour that Blaise tore in, sweating and panting while getting ready for bed. Draco pretended to be asleep until he heard Blaise's snoring and Crabbe's monotonous breathing before rising and quietly exiting the dormitory.

The castle was so alive at night, and Draco often reveled in this as he drifted through the corridors, sometimes hastily hiding behind a suit of armor to avoid Mrs. Norris or ducking into an empty classroom to hide from Peeves. This night reminded him of another night he had gone wandering, a strange, magical sort of night...

Draco was an avid reader, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, he would mentally tear through whatever he could get his hands on. This translated well into his schooling, as he was always well prepared for his lessons, and continuously ended up as the second in his class. The library was his first and favorite place to roam, despite Madam Pince's best efforts to deter him with her harpy-like glares. In the early stages of his nighttime strolls, he would often find himself headed to the library, and would end up reading for hours before realizing the time and then hurrying back to his dorm.

In this period, it had been a while since he had been to the library, as he had been exploring other areas of the castle, but on this fateful night, he felt a pull to the loyalty of the books, and found himself headed there just after midnight.

He had been shocked to realize that someone else was in the library when he arrived. Even more surprised because he had entered, grabbed a book off the shelves, and seated himself, before he realized there was another person sitting across from him in the dark, staring at him breathlessly with wide eyes.

"Granger?" he whisper-yelled, wondering what kind of twisted fate he had.

"Shh!" She whispered quickly, holding up her arms in a surrendered position, as if she thought he was going to arrest her or yell for someone.

"What the bloody hell—" he started at full volume, but quickly stopped at the echo of his voice rebounding back to him in the dark. "What are you doing here?" He whispered over the table in anger.

"What are you doing here, Malfoy? It's past midnight!" Granger admonished, still on her guard as if he were going to yell.

"If you haven't noticed, you're in the library too," Draco sneered. He stood up suddenly to leave and Granger jumped, reaching out a hand.

"Wait! Draco, please—" Granger started hurriedly, but he cut her off.

"I'm not going to tell anyone on you, if that's what you're afraid of," he stated briskly, inching away from her outstretched arm. To her look of confusion he added sarcastically "it's not like I would be implicated either or something." A flash of understanding at their equal predicament flooded her face, and she relaxed back into the chair.

"Well since we can't tell on each other without getting in trouble ourselves, there's no point in leaving now, is there?" Granger posited, reaching for her book and nodding towards his.

"Fine, but I'm going to study over there. Don't bother me. Unless you hear Filch, and then if you don't bother me, we're going to have problems," Draco rattled off, moving his book to sit in a quiet corner away from her.

And it was in this way that he had come to read in the library almost every night thereafter. Granger at her table, and him reading at his.