Chapter Text
Draco found them behind a suit of armour on the fourth floor, which was, in retrospect, a stupid place to hide, because the armour rattled every time somebody walked past and gave away exactly where they were. He heard the crying before he saw them. A thin, hiccupping sound, badly muffled, the kind of crying that somebody was trying very hard to stop and couldn't. He almost kept walking. It was past nine, he had a Prefect patrol to finish, and crying first-years were not, strictly speaking, his problem.
Then he heard the second voice, and that was what stopped him because it wasn't comforting the first one. It was crying too.
He stepped around the armour. Two of them. A girl in Gryffindor colours, red-eyed and her hand was pressed flat over the back of her other hand like she was holding something in. A boy in Slytherin green sitting against the wall next to her, knees drawn up, not touching her, not looking at her, just crying in that stiff, furious way boys his age cried when they'd been taught crying was shameful and hadn't yet learned that the lesson was wrong.
He recognised the boy. Vaguely. Jasper Vane, one of the new first-years, a name he had heard Pansy mention because the boy's mother did something minor at the Ministry. He didn't recognise the girl at all.
"What," he sighed, in the voice he used on people three years younger than him, which was flat and unimpressed and did not invite argument, "are you doing out of your dormitories?”
The girl flinched so hard she knocked her head against the wall. The boy looked up at him with the dread of a Slytherin first-year who had just been caught by an older Slytherin doing something that made his House look bad.
"Nothing," Vane said. "We're going back now."
"Clearly." Draco looked at the girl's hand. She had it curled against her chest, protective, and there was something wrong with the way she was holding it, something careful in a way that had nothing to do with comfort. "Show me your hand."
"It's nothing," she said, in the same reflexive way Vane had.
"I didn't ask if it was nothing. I asked to see it."
She looked at Vane, which told Draco everything he needed to know before he even saw the cut: that whatever had happened to her had also happened to Vane, that they were allies in this in some way that had formed in the last hour, a Gryffindor and a Slytherin who by all normal first-year logic should not have been sitting against the same wall crying the same kind of tears.
She held out her hand.
I must not tell lies, carved into the back of it in raised, red script, the letters still wet in places. Draco had heard about the quill. Everyone had heard about the quill by now, in the second-hand way that information moved through a school when nobody wanted to be the one who'd said it first. He hadn't seen it. He hadn't quite let himself believe it, not really, not until he was looking at the words cut into an eleven-year-old's hand by her own blood.
"She got a week," Vane said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it. "I got three days. We didn't even… we were just talking in the corridor after curfew, that's all, we weren't doing anything, and Professor Umbridge said talking to a Gryffindor after hours was… was fraternising, and she gave us detention, and then in the detention she made us—" He stopped and pressed his mouth into a line.
"I know what she made you do," Draco murmured, surprising himself a bit. He did not know his own voice could come out that quiet.
He should have felt nothing. That was the honest truth of it, and he made himself look at it directly, the way his father had taught him to look directly at anything unpleasant rather than flinch from it. He was Draco Lucius Malfoy, his father sat on the Hogwarts Board of Governors at the Ministry's pleasure, his family's entire political survival for the last year had depended on being seen to support exactly this kind of order, this kind of Ministry oversight, this exact toad-faced woman and her exact quill. He had worn the Inquisitorial Squad badge to breakfast that morning. He was, by any measure that mattered to the people whose approval his family needed, supposed to think this girl deserved worse for talking to a Slytherin after hours, and Vane deserved worse for letting her.
He felt sick instead. He felt sick, and furious, and he did not have anywhere to put either feeling that wouldn't get him disowned or get his mother hurt, and that combination… helpless fury with nowhere to go… was not a feeling Draco Malfoy had much practice sitting with.
"Go back to your common rooms," he said. "Both of you. Different ways. If a Prefect stops you, tell them Malfoy already gave you a warning, they won't check."
Vane got up first, then reached down and helped the girl up, which struck him as a very small thing and also, somehow, not a small thing at all.
"Wait," he said, before they'd gone three steps. "What's your name?"
"Ellie," the girl said. "Ellie Fenwick."
He looked at Vane, who straightened slightly, as if being asked his name by Draco was a kind of promotion he hadn't expected tonight. "Jasper Vane."
"Fenwick. Vane." He said the names like he was filing them somewhere, which he was. "Go."
He watched them go in opposite directions down the corridor, the way he'd told them to, and then he stood by the suit of armour for a long time after they were gone, doing absolutely nothing, which was not a thing Draco did either.
He completed the rest of his patrol on autopilot, noting nothing, seeing nothing, his mind circling back again and again to the exact shape of the letters cut into that girl's hand. It had the specific, deliberate cruelty of a punishment designed to leave a mark that would still be visible a week later, a month later, long after the words themselves had stopped meaning anything except someone did this to me and got away with it. He had grown up around casual cruelty. He knew what it looked like dressed up as discipline and had watched his own father wield a version of it more than once. But this had a different texture to it. It was smaller, more petty, and somehow worse for it, cruelty exercised not out of any larger purpose but simply because the woman doing it enjoyed having the power to do it, and because no one currently at Hogwarts had the standing to stop her.
By the time he reached the dungeons, he had already, without fully admitting it to himself yet, begun the process of deciding to do something about it.
Draco didn't sleep well. He lay in the dark of the Slytherin dormitory listening to Blaise's breathing and Theo's occasional mutter and turned the evening over and over. He was looking for the version of it where he'd done the sensible thing and kept walking, and couldn't find it satisfying no matter how many times he tried it on.
The problem, as he saw it around two in the morning, wasn't Dolores Umbridge exactly. Umbridge was a symptom. The Ministry had sent her, the Ministry would go on sending people like her for as long as it suited them, and there was nothing he could do about the Ministry, not at fifteen and not with his father's name currently worth exactly as much as the Ministry decided it was worth on any given week.
The problem was that he could not go to a teacher about it. McGonagall would believe him and be furious and be able to do precisely nothing, because Umbridge outranked her now, had outranked everyone the day she became High Inquisitor, and going to McGonagall would only put her in Umbridge's sights along with the first-years. Dumbledore was worse than useless at the moment. Half the school knew he was one wrong move from being hauled off by Aurors, and dragging him into a fight about detentions would be like reporting a paper cut to a man standing in a burning building. Snape would do nothing, because Snape's entire survival strategy this year was doing nothing, loudly, in front of witnesses. Flitwick, Trelawney, Pomfrey, and even Sprout were out of the question.
He could not go to the Inquisitorial Squad, obviously, since it was the Inquisitorial Squad's fault, at least by association, that this had a name and a badge and Draco's own signature on the roster. Although, he could definitely go to his friends: Blaise, Theo, and Pansy. They shared the same hatred for the pink-clothed toad after all.
Hell! He could not go to Potter, because Potter would either not listen to him or listen to him and get it catastrophically wrong. The git with the glasses would march into Umbridge's office with all the subtlety of a hippogriff and get himself expelled for the privilege. And also… and this was a thought Draco did not examine closely, not at two in the morning… because the idea of walking up to Potter and admitting he'd stood in a corridor feeling sick over a Gryffindor first-year's hand made something in his chest go tight in a way he did not have the patience to name right now.
Which left, when he ran out of everyone who should be able to do something, the two people at Hogwarts who Draco was fairly sure could do something and simply hadn't yet, for reasons that had nothing to do with permission and everything to do with not having heard about this particular girl and this particular cut.
The Weasley twins hated Umbridge already.
That part required no persuading. He'd watched them across the Great Hall enough times this term to know their opinion of her was somewhere south of loathing, sharpened, if anything, by the fact that they couldn't do anything large about it without risking their O.W.L. year. Not that either of them had ever struck Draco as particularly concerned about O.W.L.s, but their mother's opinion of expulsion was presumably a live consideration even for them.
They also, and this was the part he kept circling back to at two in the morning with something that was almost admiration and almost resentment, had resources Draco did not. They had reach into every House through sheer force of reputation, an established supply chain of chaos that had been running two years, and an audience that already expected things to catch fire around them and therefore never looked twice when things did.
What they didn't have was Draco's access. Nobody suspected the Slytherins of helping the Gryffindors. Nobody suspected Draco Malfoy, specifically, of anything except being exactly what he appeared to be, which was, currently, publicly, one of Umbridge's favourites.
That, Draco thought, staring at the black canopy of his bed, was actually rather useful.
He wrote the note three times before he was satisfied with it, which was three more drafts than Draco Malfoy typically gave anything. However, he wanted the wording exact. He wanted it enough to be taken seriously but not enough to be traced.
You know what she did to Fenwick and Vane. I can help you do something about it. I have access you don't: Slytherin, House connections, an information network that hears things before they happen, and a reputation clean enough that no one will ever look at me twice. I am not offering this out of loyalty to you. I am offering it because I want her to lose. Send your answer with the same owl if you're interested. Burn this either way.
No name. He thought about signing it with something, an initial, a flourish, or a joke, and decided against all of it. Anonymity was the only leverage he had until he knew how they'd react, and there was a version of this where the twins simply laughed and told everyone that someone had sent them a mysterious little note like a second-rate spy novel, and Draco intended that version to be survivable.
He did seal it, though, because he could not bring himself not to. Force of habit, or something more stubborn than habit: a small, private insistence that even his anonymous mischief be done properly. Green wax, no crest pressed into it, just a smooth blank circle that told anyone who looked at it that whoever had sent this cared enough to seal a letter and not enough to be identified by it. He told himself the wax meant nothing. He was fairly sure that was a lie even as he thought it.
He didn't have an owl of his own he trusted for this. His family's eagle owl was distinctive enough to be a liability. So he went down to the Owlery before breakfast and borrowed one of the school's brown barn owls, unremarkable, one of a hundred identical birds that ferried letters back and forth every day without anyone giving them a second glance. He tied the letter to its leg himself, gave it the simplest possible instruction… Fred and George Weasley… and watched it lift off into a grey morning sky. He then went down to breakfast and ate his eggs like a person whose stomach was not currently doing something complicated.
Draco watched, without watching, when the post owls came in twenty minutes later. Most of the Great Hall barely looked up. The twins did, because everyone in Gryffindor always looked up at the post, out of habit if nothing else. Draco saw the exact moment the unmarked brown owl found its way to them and dropped a small, wax-sealed letter between two plates of bacon.
Fred Weasley picked it up first, turning it over and over. He watched him say something to George without moving his mouth very much, watched George glance up and scan the Hall in a slow arc that was not looking for anything in particular and was also looking for absolutely everything. That made Draco look down at his own plate before that arc reached the Slytherin table.
He did not get a reply that day. Or the next.
By the third day he had convinced himself the whole plan had been a bad idea born of a bad night's sleep, and that the twins had simply thrown the letter in the fire the way he'd told them to and forgotten about it. He also told himself that he was going to have to think of something else, something slower and less satisfying, and possibly involving actually going to McGonagall after all and accepting that nothing would come of it.
On the fourth morning, an owl he didn't recognise, grey, one notched wing, definitely not a school bird, dropped a letter directly onto his plate in the middle of breakfast, in full view of the entire Slytherin table. It was either an accident or, knowing what he would come to know about the Weasley twins, absolutely not an accident at all.
Pansy raised an eyebrow at it. "Who's writing to you from a bird that ugly?"
"No idea," he answered, which was, technically, true of the bird if not the letter, and slid it into his bag before anyone could ask to see it.
He didn't open it until he was alone in an empty classroom on the second floor, door shut, wand out, checking twice that nobody was on the other side of it before he broke the seal. There was no wax this time, just a bit of Spellotape, which felt, somehow, exactly like the twins.
Interesting letter. We have some questions.
One: how do we know this isn't a trap? You lot aren't exactly known for your charitable instincts toward our House, present company very much included.
Two: what does "access we don't have" actually mean, specifically, in terms that don't sound like something out of a bad spy novel?
Three, and this is the one that matters. Why do you care? You and your friends got a badge that says you're on her side. We've watched you wear it. So either you're lying to us now, or you were lying to everyone else this whole term, and we'd quite like to know which before we write back anything more useful than this.
Same owl. He's called Bertram and he's not actually that ugly, he just has a face for it.
Draco read it twice, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he respected it. It was not the response of people who had thrown his letter in the fire. It was the response of people taking the offer seriously enough to be suspicious of it, which was, in his estimation, the only sane response available.
He wrote back that night.
One: you don't know. You'll have to decide if the risk is worth it. I'd think less of you if you didn't ask.
Two: Slytherin talks to Slytherin about things it wouldn't say in front of a Gryffindor. I hear about detentions before they're logged, about which professors are looking the other way, about which corridors the Inquisitorial Squad is patrolling on a given night, because I am, on paper, one of the people deciding that. I can move things through my House that you cannot move through yours, and no one will think to check whether it was me.
Three: I watched what she did to a first-year's hand four nights ago. I am not interested in explaining myself beyond that. If it isn't enough, don't write back.
The reply came the next morning, same ugly grey owl, and this time it wasn't a letter at all. It was a single scrap of parchment with a time, a place he recognised as a disused classroom on the fourth floor, and five words.
Come alone. We will too.