"Of course — the Bubble-Head Charm solves everything!" Hermione said, sitting upright. "How did I not think of that? How did *he* think of it so quickly without consulting a single book — we shouldn't even know that spell at our age—"
"I don't know," Harry said.
"Where is he? Where did he go?"
"He said he had to run to his dormitory for something and asked me to wait." Harry exhaled. "Hermione, can we please stop with the — whatever this is. I need you to help me learn the Bubble-Head Charm. Right now."
"We are *not* — it's not like that," she said, and began flipping rapidly through the book in front of her. "And I'm looking! Harry, there isn't enough time to learn this properly in a single night. You'd be better off asking Professor Snape for Gillyweed."
"Snape." Harry said it as though she had suggested asking the squid.
"This isn't a Potions class, it's your life," she said. "Dumbledore trusts him. In your first year, Snape protected you — in your third year, he saved you. If he'd wanted you dead, he's had ample opportunity." Her fingers tracked down the page. "You have to see past the sarcasm, Harry."
"I'd rather see my way into Gryffindor common room and stay there," Harry said. "I've completely given up on Snape. I'm not going to go and ask him to raid his own private stores so I can—"
"Here." Ron cut in, with sudden decision. "Harry — go back to Gryffindor Tower and bring me your Invisibility Cloak. I'll handle Snape's stores."
"Ron, absolutely not—"
"You can't get caught, and you can't end up in detention the night before the Second Task," Ron said firmly. "I can. Go. Twenty-five minutes until Madam Pince closes the library."
Harry and Ron stared at each other. Harry got up and ran.
"Hurry up," Ron said after him, then glanced at the clock.
He had barely turned back to Hermione when a new figure appeared in the aisle.
"Miss Granger, Mr. Weasley." Professor McGonagall's voice was crisp, and her face was wearing its most unapologetically efficient expression. "Come with me, please."
"We're waiting for—"
"I'm aware. This won't take long. Mr. Longbottom," she added, to the round-faced figure attempting to disappear behind a Transfiguration textbook in the corner, "don't think I can't see you. Please keep what you've heard tonight to yourself until after the Task."
Neville gave a tiny, miserable nod.
When Harry returned to the library at a run, panting, the books were still open on the table. The seats were empty.
He stood there looking around, baffled, when a familiar voice came from the end of the nearest shelf.
"Looking for something?"
Draco strolled over and tossed him a small package.
Harry caught it, unwrapped it, and stared at the rubbery tangle of greyish-green matter in his hands. "Gillyweed. How did you get—"
"I have a working relationship with Professor Snape," Draco said, without elaborating. He didn't mention that he had arranged for this a month ago. "Where are the others?"
"I don't know." Harry looked at the empty seats. "They were here."
Draco and Harry exchanged a glance. Neither of them had an answer.
---
February the twenty-fourth arrived, steady and cold.
By half past eight, people were streaming along the paths that led to the Black Lake, breath misting, scarves wound tight. The stands above the water were already filling.
Harry stood at the water's edge — face pale, Gillyweed clenched in one fist — watching the procession of students board the flat-bottomed barges one by one.
"Don't be nervous." Draco clapped him on the shoulder. "Eat it when the whistle blows. And don't let go of your wand."
"Thanks." Harry's voice was a little hoarse. He scanned the crowd. "I still haven't seen Ron or Hermione—"
"They'll be there when you surface. Get on the boat."
Harry looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and stepped heavily onto the champions' vessel.
Draco watched it move out toward the centre of the lake.
He had told Harry they'd be there when he surfaced, and he believed it. Ron's disappearance made sense — it was traditional to use someone the champion cared about. As for Hermione — Krum's declared dance partner was Hermione. Krum had openly declared his interest in her. The organisers would have drawn the obvious conclusion.
He opened the Marauder's Map. Searched every inch of it.
She wasn't there.
He searched again. Nothing.
He folded it, pocketed it, and stood very still for a moment.
Then he began walking toward the stands, quickly, and did not stop.
He found Neville Longbottom in the third row of the Gryffindor section, staring blankly into the middle distance, lips moving faintly.
Draco stepped directly in front of him.
Neville looked up, and the colour drained from his face.
"Longbottom. Where is Hermione?"
"She — I — I can't — is the match starting—"
Ludo Bagman's amplified voice was already rolling across the lake like thunder.
"I suggest you tell me before I put you in the lake," Draco said, pleasantly.
"Professor McGonagall took her — and Ron — last night — Professor McGonagall said they were the champions' hostages—" Neville's words came in a rush, each one slightly faster than the last.
Draco went very still.
A hostage. Hermione, at the bottom of the Black Lake.
The anger that rose in him was cold and immediate and almost completely without direction. *What are the judges thinking?* Krum's declared partner was never her. She wasn't his. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
Neville was watching him with the expression of a man calculating the distance to the nearest exit.
"It wasn't my choice," he added desperately. "I asked to switch partners several times. I really did—"
Draco wasn't listening.
He was looking at the water.
A sharp whistle cut through the air. The champions entered the water to a roar from the stands. Then Bagman's voice, oddly subdued: "I have an urgent announcement — Durmstrang's champion, Viktor Krum, has had to withdraw from the Second Task due to health reasons—"
The stands erupted.
"What happened to Krum—?"
"Is he alright—?"
"What about his hostage?" Neville said, with unexpected clarity. "If he doesn't go in, will the hostage just stay down there—?"
He turned to ask Draco, and found the seat beside him empty.
He had time to register this before he heard the gasps from the edge of the stands.
Draco Malfoy was standing on the railing, shrugging off his robes in one swift motion. He crumpled the fabric into a ball and, without turning, dropped it. It landed on Neville's head.
By the time Neville pulled it off his face, there was nothing to see but a column of water where a platinum-haired boy had been.
"He jumped!" Neville stood up and grabbed the railing, looking wildly at the people around him. "He was so angry with me he — Draco Malfoy has jumped into the Black Lake!"
*(Draco, much later, upon reading this account: Please don't say that again.)*
---
He had cast the Bubble-Head Charm on himself in the half-second before he hit the water.
It was the only sensible thing he did for the next sixty minutes.
He didn't swim well. He was afraid of the water, had been afraid of it for as long as he could remember, and the long, violent weeks in the water tank that the false Moody had inflicted on him had made that fear something rather worse than a childhood phobia.
Merlin, he hated this.
He had learned the Bubble-Head Charm thoroughly — for Harry's sake, months ago — and he was grateful for it now, in the same way a man is grateful for an umbrella while walking through a monsoon. It kept him breathing. It did nothing about the particular, crawling dread of being submerged in all this cold dark water.
He suppressed it. He had to find her.
The lake bottom was a strange, hazy world — tangled water plants like a half-lit jungle, glittering pebbles on the flat silt, small silver fish darting in clusters. He had spent a year sleeping above all of this, looking out of his dormitory window into the dark. He had never come down here voluntarily.
He dealt with a pair of Grindylows lurking in the weeds with more competence than he'd expected — thanks, he thought grimly, to Lupin's third-year curriculum — and decided to swim higher, away from the growth where more of them might be hiding.
He lost his bearings almost immediately. The lake was enormous, and soundless in a way that felt less like peace and more like being buried.
The giant squid appeared.
It was vast and slow, and it circled him with what appeared to be curiosity.
"Do you know where the merpeople are?" Draco asked, aware that he was talking to a cephalopod through a bubble of air at the bottom of a lake. The squid's tentacle moved — a single, decisive gesture to the left.
*Well. This is my life now.*
He followed it.
The journey took a long time, and he was very cold by the end of it. Eventually the squid stopped before a large submerged rock carved with merpeople and squid figures in a style suggesting the squid had been depicted getting the worse of the encounter. The squid slapped the rock with what appeared to be personal grievance, then turned and departed with the air of a creature clocking off for the day.
"Thank you," Draco said to its retreating tentacles.
Then he heard the song.
It drifted through the water, haunting and strange, and he knew it was the right place. He swam forward through clusters of rough stone buildings, past faces peering from windows, past one or two chained Grindylows, and into the wide open space of the merpeople's square.
He found her immediately.
She was bound to the tail of a great stone statue — arms fastened behind her, head dropped to one shoulder, completely still. Her hair fanned out in the current, dark and weightless. She looked impossibly fragile.
For a fractional second, in the strange light, her pale face overlapped with a memory from another life, and the pain of it nearly stopped him entirely.
He pushed it down and swam.
Up close, he could see the faint bubble of air still escaping between her lips. She was alive.
He caught her face in his hands, briefly, just to be certain. Then he began pulling at the ropes.
They were thick and slick and perfectly, infuriatingly knotted.
"*Here.*"
Harry Potter's hand appeared at his shoulder, offering a jagged piece of rock.
Draco looked up. Harry was there — more fish than boy, his neck showing a row of gills, webbed hands, and the least surprised expression anyone had ever worn at finding a Slytherin at the bottom of a lake.
"Harry," Draco said, through the bubble.
Harry patted his shoulder approvingly and handed over the rock.
Draco began cutting. His hands were shaking slightly. He worked carefully, keeping the sharp edge away from her.
The merpeople gathered. They seemed to understand — or to object — that he was not a champion. Several of them pressed forward, gesturing at him, blocking his angle.
He stopped cutting.
He straightened up. He pulled his wand from his belt.
He looked at them.
He was not a warrior. He was not supposed to be here. He was afraid of the dark and he was afraid of the cold and he was particularly, presently afraid of the enormous amount of black water surrounding him on all sides. He was also nearly at the limit of the Bubble-Head Charm, and his lungs were beginning to register this fact.
He pointed his wand at the merpeople.
"Let us go," he said quietly. "Or I will personally see to it that you end up on the Hogwarts table."
The merpeople did not understand the words. But they understood the eyes.
There was a pause. They moved back.
Draco cut the last rope. He caught her as she came free, one arm around her waist, and she settled against him with that same unconscious trust — head on his shoulder — as if they were standing behind a tapestry in a lit corridor and everything was perfectly fine.
He looked up. The surface was very far away and very dark.
*Move.*
He thanked Harry with a look, got a nod and a webbed-hand wave in return, and began to swim upward.
She wasn't heavy. She was the sweetest weight he'd ever carried, and he wasn't going to let go.
The Bubble-Head Charm was failing. He could feel it thinning, feel the beginnings of the deep, irrational panic he had been suppressing since the moment he'd hit the water. His arms ached. His chest ached. He was moving slower than he had on the way down.
He could see the water growing lighter.
With what remained of his strength, he raised his arms and pushed her upward. Her hair disappeared through the surface. The bubble of air shattered.
The dark memories arrived in the instant after — the water tank, choking, helpless — and then there was no thought left at all, just the cold and the dark and the slow, irreversible heaviness of sinking.
He'd got her up. That was enough.
He let go.
---
Hermione opened her eyes.
One moment she had been standing in Professor McGonagall's office, following Dumbledore's calm voice down into a dreamless sleep. The next she was in cold water, gasping, the shock of it so complete she couldn't think.
Her head broke the surface. She heard cheering, distant. She heaved in a breath.
*Where is—*
A fractured memory surfaced: something pushing her upward. A pair of hands.
She looked down through the water. There was a shadow. It moved like a person, but it was too still, too slow, drifting in the wrong direction.
White shirt. Black trousers.
*No.*
She breathed in once, pinched her nose, and dived.
The cold hit her like a wall.
She saw him clearly. Pale face. Closed eyes. Platinum hair drifting in the current, moving with it, not against it, the way something moves when it's stopped fighting.
She reached him. She grabbed his shoulders. She shook him — no response. She pressed her mouth to his, forcing air between his lips, and felt the desperate, absurd hope that it would be enough.
*Breathe. Come on. Breathe.*
---
Draco was at the bottom of something. He was very cold, and very tired, and the thought occurred to him dimly that she had surfaced, which meant this was acceptable.
Then something warm touched his lips.
He opened his eyes.
She was right there. Her eyes — open, terrified, watching him with a fierce, desperate intensity that cut straight through the cold and the dark and everything else.
He breathed.
He reached for his wand.
She had been holding him. He wrapped his arm around her, cast a charm with the last coherent thought available to him, and they shot upward.
They broke the surface together, and the sunlight hit them, and the noise of the crowd was enormous.
Draco floated on his back and stared at the sky for a moment.
*That was extremely stupid.*
---
Sirius Black was already leaning over the platform edge when they surfaced, dripping wet himself from a recent rescue. He grabbed Hermione's arm first and pulled her up, then Draco, sodden and shaking and barely capable of standing.
"Where's Harry?" Sirius demanded.
"Coming up," Draco said, through chattering teeth. "He's right behind me."
Sirius released a long breath.
"You absolute Slytherin womaniser," he said, and whistled at the boy who was too cold to glare properly.
Madam Pomfrey arrived at speed and descended on them both with towels and a Warming Draught. She poured one into Draco without ceremony.
"Severus improved the formula," she announced, with proprietary satisfaction. "Only smokes once now. Ingenious man."
"Thrilled to hear it," Draco said.
He was still shaking. He became suddenly, vividly aware of how cold he had been, now that the cold was leaving. He couldn't quite seem to stop.
Hermione appeared at his other side. She pulled a dry towel from somewhere and wrapped it around his shoulders on top of the first one, then stood very close, and looked at his face.
"Why," she said, her voice unsteady. "Why would you do that? You can't even swim. You're terrified of water. What were you thinking?"
"I wasn't thinking very much," he admitted. "I just had to find you."
"You didn't need to find me! I was staying underwater temporarily — they weren't going to hurt us—"
"No." He stopped shaking long enough to look at her directly. "No. You are my treasure. Not his." His teeth were chattering again. "I promised you. The night of the Quidditch World Cup. I said I would never leave you behind. I meant it."
She stared at him.
"You're supposed to be careful," she said, and her voice broke slightly. "You're supposed to be selfish and calculating and — you're *not* supposed to be like this—"
"You're different," he said simply.
"You fool." She grabbed his face with both hands. "You absolute fool—"
She was crying. He saw the tears and panicked, which was not the reaction he expected of himself. He tried to find the words.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for the things I said. I should have been more careful. I'll do better. I'm not angry with you — I was never angry with you — please don't cry—"
"I'm not angry with *you*," she said, and laughed and cried at the same time, which was confusing. "I wasn't being fair. I was too proud to back down. I'm sorry too—"
She pulled him into a hug and buried her face against his shoulder, and he held her, still shaking, while she shook too — with cold or emotion, he couldn't tell, and it didn't particularly matter.
"Ah," said Madam Pomfrey, from somewhere nearby, with a dreamy, faraway expression. "Youth."
"By Merlin, look at that," came Ginny's voice, arriving at speed. "He *jumped in*. Hermione, the Slytherins were absolutely horrified. You should have seen their faces—"
"Don't point out that it was unnecessary," Ron said, from under his own towel. "I mean, it was. Nothing was going to happen to us. But — don't say it."
"Harry," Percy began urgently, "you can let go of me now—"
"Percy, one moment—"
---
The results were announced shortly after.
Harry had rescued two hostages — Ron and Fleur's sister Gabrielle — and tied with Cedric Diggory for first place. Fleur, who had been forced to surface by Grindylows, and Krum, who had not entered the water at all, both saw their scores fall significantly.
Draco was not a champion and had no official standing. He received fifty points for Slytherin from Dumbledore, on the grounds that his actions, like Harry's, embodied something Hogwarts was supposed to stand for.
A cheer erupted from the Slytherin section of the stands that could be heard from the far shore.
"Right," Ron said, flapping his arms in Percy's enthusiastic embrace, "so you weren't being idiots, you were performing moral demonstrations. Percy — I am *fine* — please let go of me—"
Hermione was not listening to any of it.
She was holding on to the pale, gradually-warming boy beside her, and she had no particular intention of stopping.
He was still a scoundrel. He was also an idiot. And she was hopelessly, irreversibly in love with both.