Ginny Weasley lay motionless on the bed in the hospital wing.
Madam Pomfrey had just examined her and confirmed she was fine.
"Darling, I'll fetch you a Pepperup Potion. Drink it, get some sleep, and you'll be right as rain by morning," Madam Pomfrey said kindly, drawing the bed curtains around her.
Ginny heard the matron's footsteps retreating across the ward, followed by the low murmur of her voice beyond the door: "She's fine... she just needs to rest... please don't disturb her, the poor girl, having to go through all this at such a young age..."
She could hear her parents and brothers breathing sighs of relief. And Harry's voice, too.
Then all was silent.
A little while later, there came rustling sounds from the next bed—the soft noise of a girl yawning and stretching.
Ginny startled. She'd had no idea there were other patients in the ward.
Peeking through the gap in the curtains, she saw Hermione Granger stir to life in the neighbouring bed, her face flushed and her eyes sparkling. Ginny pulled the curtains shut too quickly, and they made a slight noise.
Hermione turned her head. She'd caught a glimpse of Ginny's eyes through the gap.
"Oh, Ginny—are you alright?" She hurried over and said excitedly from outside the curtains, "Thank goodness! They rescued you!"
"Hermione, I'm so sorry." Ginny's voice came from behind the curtains, quiet and wretched. "I'm the one who started all of this. I released the Basilisk. I opened the Chamber of Secrets."
"That's not your fault—it was the diary, wasn't it?" Hermione said briskly. "I know that wasn't your intention."
"No, but that's not what he said..." Ginny's voice broke. "He always said he was acting for me... that he was thinking my thoughts, worrying about what I worried about... And I did have feelings about those victims... maybe some part of it really was me—"
"Ginny!" Hermione pulled back the curtains and said sharply, "You can't think like that! We all have complicated feelings about certain people—that doesn't mean we want to harm them! You were crying for those victims the whole time, and I think you never wanted to hurt anyone. Don't let that diary twist your own thoughts against you."
"Really?" Ginny's eyes brimmed with tears. "You don't think I'm... evil?"
"I most certainly do not." Hermione sat on the edge of the bed and hugged her tightly. "I think you're one of the kindest people I know. You tried to throw the diary away, didn't you? You fought against it. When you saw Harry with it, you were frightened for him—so frightened you took it back. That's not the heart of someone evil."
"Yes..." Ginny sobbed. "I wrote such silly things in it... and he used all of it against me, turned my own feelings into something horrible... I knew something was wrong. That day, I wanted to tell you—but I was so afraid you'd hate me, that I'd shame Mum and Dad... and I Petrified you... Will you ever forgive me?"
"Oh, poor Ginny." Hermione stroked her hair. "Everyone knows you didn't mean any of it. No one will blame you. And as for me—" she drew back with a small smile—"I'm standing right here, perfectly fine."
Ginny's sobs quieted. She blinked, and then looked at Hermione properly for the first time.
"But how? He told me—when he was possessing me—he said he'd Petrified you. Because you were getting too close to the truth."
"I was Petrified," Hermione admitted, a shadow of lingering fear crossing her face before a smile replaced it. "It was absolutely ghastly. But someone saved me."
"Who?" Ginny asked. "How? That's supposed to be impossible."
"That's a secret," Hermione said, with a touch of the same mysterious air she'd noticed Draco so often wear. "Have a guess."
"Hermione!" Ginny groaned, though the distraction had already begun to chase the grief from her expression. "How am I supposed to guess something like that?"
"Try."
"Harry? One of my brothers—Ron? Fred? George?" Hermione shook her head at each name in turn, and Ginny grew more baffled. "Not Madam Pomfrey, or the other Petrified students would've been saved too..."
"Quite right," Hermione said, eyes bright. "Keep guessing."
---
Students attended Hogwarts' celebratory feast in their pyjamas—an event that stretched long into the night.
Draco sat watching the uproar from his seat, lost in thought, a strange distance between him and the scene unfolding before him. He'd lived through a night like this once before: the same food, the same cheers, the same beaming faces. Every detail was identical. Only he was different.
In his past life, he'd spent this very evening sulking in a corner, muttering complaints to the other Slytherins about the loss of the Chamber of Secrets and how unfairly everything had ended. He'd been twelve years old—stubborn, resentful, entirely without perspective.
Back then, he hadn't truly understood what death was. He'd thought it was something like a curse, like Petrification—dreadful, yes, but reversible. Something you recovered from. That comfortable ignorance had dulled his fear.
But now, at nineteen in his mind if not his body, Draco understood the finality of it. He understood the fragility of life with a clarity that made him uncomfortable. He had watched Hermione for an entire term and she'd still been Petrified in an instant—life and death separated by nothing more than a lucky glance into a mirror.
If she hadn't looked into that mirror, would she have been the next Myrtle?
He had seen the true Chamber of Secrets, deep in the bowels of Slytherin's foundations, and thought he'd feel something like awe—a pilgrimage fulfilled. Instead, what lingered most vividly was the passage leading to it: the debris, the wreckage, the bones.
He was simply grateful no one had died. Even Lockhart's memory loss seemed a small price.
As for Harry—Draco glanced across the hall at the dark-haired boy grinning in the candlelight, his lightning-bolt scar bright in the flickering glow. Harry had accomplished something no twelve-year-old wizard had any right to accomplish. He was brave, certainly, but it went beyond bravery.
It had taken the Dark Lord five years to locate the Chamber of Secrets. Harry had found it in under a year, at twelve years old—the only wizard ever to do so at that age. He'd drawn Godric Gryffindor's sword from the Sorting Hat. He'd slain a thousand-year-old Basilisk without losing his life.
Luck had played its part, of course—the phoenix tears, the Hat—but not every wizard would have seized those tools and used them. And Harry had destroyed the Horcrux with no idea of what it truly was, driving a Basilisk fang through the diary on pure instinct, without hesitation.
That, Draco thought with genuine respect, was something else entirely.
He couldn't understand how he had spent years refusing to see it. He had seen it, he suspected—and looked away, because admiring someone who had rejected you was simply too painful to bear.
---
At the staff table, Professor Dumbledore rose in his favourite purple robes and addressed the hall with great enthusiasm, announcing several pieces of good news: Ginny Weasley had been rescued from the Chamber of Secrets by Harry and Ron, for which both boys would receive Special Awards for Services to the School and Gryffindor would be awarded four hundred House points; the Chamber of Secrets had been permanently sealed, and the creature within utterly destroyed.
A roar of approval went up from the Gryffindor table. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff joined in readily.
The Slytherins were less enthusiastic. Professor Snape's expression was stony.
"It doesn't matter—we've been playing brilliantly this year," said Marcus Flint, jaw set. "If we can just beat Hufflepuff—"
He clearly hadn't reckoned with what came next.
Professor McGonagall rose and announced, with visible regret, that this year's Quidditch Cup had been cancelled due to the disruptions caused by the Chamber of Secrets. Marcus turned to stone on the spot, apparently having moved beyond the capacity for further expression.
She also cheerfully announced—to significantly greater enthusiasm—that end-of-year examinations had been cancelled.
The Great Hall erupted. Pansy, across from Draco, flung her pointed witch's hat into the air. Blaise, beside him, did the same. Even Crabbe and Goyle were beaming with an unguarded joy that Draco was certain was entirely genuine.
Marcus, standing nearby, snapped the silver handle clean off his goblet. Crabbe and Goyle, who had half-raised their own goblets in celebration, froze and stared at him in alarm.
"Next year," Draco said, after a pause, "we'll do better. We'll take back everything that belongs to Slytherin."
Marcus gave a single fierce nod, seized a chicken breast from the platter in front of him, and bit into it in silence. His anger was justified. He had one year left before he graduated—this had been his final chance at the Quidditch Cup.
Draco, for his part, found he couldn't summon the energy to be particularly angry about it. Yes, cancelling the Cup was unfair—Slytherin had been leading Gryffindor by a comfortable margin before those four hundred points were added. Dumbledore, for all his gifts, had never been subtle about his fondness for the house he himself had belonged to.
But more than that, Draco suspected Dumbledore was doing something deliberate—building something around Harry. An atmosphere. A story. For a boy who'd grown up overlooked and unwanted, being celebrated as a hero was intoxicating. Even Draco, who'd never lacked for admirers, could recognise the power of it.
He wasn't certain it was entirely healthy. But tonight, he decided, he could let it be.
Harry had earned this. He'd solved the problem of the diary. The Chamber was closed, the Malfoy family was temporarily safe, and no one had died. That was more than Draco had dared hope for.
He took a long drink of hot pumpkin juice and looked toward the Gryffindor table. Hermione sat quietly beside Harry and Ron, her face restored to its usual healthy colour. She'd returned from the hospital wing.
She noticed him looking—she always seemed to notice—and raised her goblet across the distance in a small, private toast.
The tight line of Draco's mouth relaxed. He raised his goblet in return.
---
The professors were visibly delighted. The news that a self-important Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher had, due to a Memory Charm gone catastrophically wrong, lost the entirety of his own memory and would be unable to return to teach—this announcement provoked a wave of barely-suppressed relief along the staff table. Even Professor Snape's expression lightened, almost imperceptibly, at the news.
As the night wore on, the rigid boundaries between house tables dissolved entirely. Students wandered freely, and the Weasley twins seized the occasion to produce an extraordinary display of magical fireworks that sent the younger students scrambling back in delighted terror. The professors, well into their elderflower wine, were in no state to intervene. Professor Flitwick actually rushed down from the staff table to applaud, his hat sliding sideways off his head.
Harry and Ron fought their way through the crowd to reach Draco.
"Why did you refuse the Special Award?" Harry asked, looking genuinely troubled. "You deserved it as much as we did—it's not fair. We spoke to Professor Dumbledore before the feast, and he said it was at your request."
"He wouldn't explain it," Ron added, "and told us to come to you directly."
Harry fixed him with those earnest green eyes. "We need to know this is really what you want."
"Yes... for personal reasons." Draco lowered his voice. "The Chamber of Secrets was in Slytherin's dungeon—Salazar Slytherin's own creature. If I accepted a public award for helping to destroy it, there are Slytherins who might consider that... a betrayal." He shrugged and added simply, "Please keep it between us."
"Alright," Harry and Ron agreed, exchanging a glance and looking, somewhat reluctantly, at the Slytherin students nearby.
The reasoning was thin, almost too simple—but Draco seemed certain, and pushing further would have been ungracious.
Ron hesitated a moment, then scratched the back of his neck.
"Fred and George told me about the owl. I wanted to say—I've named him Pigwidgeon, by the way—anyway." He pushed through the awkwardness. "Thank you. Really."
Draco gave him a lazy smirk, said nothing, and clapped him once on the shoulder.
A surge of Ravenclaw students swept in from the side and swallowed Harry and Ron whole, someone producing a cardboard crown and crowning Harry with great ceremony.
"Ravenclaws and their obsession with crowns," Draco thought idly.
His hand found the dragonhide pouch in his pocket—palm-sized and retractable, holding several fresh Basilisk fangs. A thought surfaced, quiet and sudden.
Why not now?
The Room of Requirement on the eighth floor was almost always occupied, and a Slytherin appearing on that corridor tended to draw attention. But tonight the castle was empty—students and ghosts alike had crowded into the Great Hall.
Draco rose and moved through the celebrating crowd with a deliberately unhurried air, as though he had nowhere in particular to be. He reached the great doors, opened them just far enough, and slipped through.
The noise continued behind him, uninterrupted. No one had noticed.
He closed the doors softly and walked quickly in the direction of Ravenclaw Tower.
---
"You've returned alive."
The Grey Lady had not joined the revelry. She floated precisely where she had been when Draco had left for the Chamber—she hadn't moved at all.
A faint smile touched her perpetually melancholy face. "Did you get it?"
"Of course," Draco said, a flicker of quiet pride in his voice.
The Grey Lady pursed her lips, then made up her mind with unusual swiftness.
"It's time to end this." She swept forward, passing through the wall like a gust of cold air. "Meet me on the eighth floor."
It was startling to see her move with such urgency. Draco watched the space where she'd been for a fraction of a second, then quickened his own pace.
When he reached the corridor on the eighth floor, she was already drifting anxiously before the blank wall, waiting.
"It falls to you to open it," she said softly, a trace of sadness in her voice. "This room answers only to the living."
Draco nodded. He closed his eyes, paced before the wall three times, and focused his intent: I need to find a place where hidden things are kept.
The door appeared. He opened it.
Inside was the familiar chaos of the Room of Hidden Things—towers of forgotten furniture, broken instruments, centuries of accumulated clutter. He had spent a significant portion of his sixteenth year in this room once, hunched over the Vanishing Cabinet. Being here again carried a particular unpleasantness he couldn't quite shake.
He followed the Grey Lady as she floated silently ahead of him, past overturned tables and broken chairs, past rows of confiscated broomsticks, until she stopped before a warped old cabinet with a bubbled, water-damaged surface.
Perched on top of the cabinet was a stone bust of a rather ugly male warlock, wearing a moth-eaten wig and, atop his stone head, a faded, dust-covered diadem.
"There," she said, very quietly, and her voice was not quite steady.
Draco recognised it immediately: Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem—the object Harry had unknowingly placed on that bust as a landmark in their sixth year, the thing that had nearly destroyed them all in the Fiendfyre.
He raised his wand.
The diadem didn't move.
"You'll have to take it with your hands," the Grey Lady said, a ghost of a smile crossing her face. "Accio will not work on a relic of that power."
Draco climbed the cabinet with some difficulty, the wood groaning beneath him, and lifted the diadem down. He landed with a thud and held it up to examine it properly.
Even beneath the dust, the craftsmanship was extraordinary—intricate patterns, small inset gems, and along the inner edge, a tiny inscription: *Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.*
The words seemed to breathe. They repeated, softly, at the edge of his thoughts—whispering that if he simply set the diadem on his head, all knowledge would be his, all problems resolved, all the tangled questions of Horcruxes and the Dark Lord made suddenly simple—
"Draco Malfoy—wake up!"
The Grey Lady's voice cracked through the fog like a slap. He blinked.
She was hovering directly before him, and even in her translucent silver form, there was nothing vague or gentle about her expression. Her eyes burned.
"Don't let it seduce you! Look at what it made of me!" she cried. "Destroy it—now!"
He snapped back to himself. The diadem dropped from his hands; he didn't want to touch it a moment longer. He seized a Basilisk fang from his dragonhide pouch and drove it into the centre of the diadem with all the force he had.
The diadem let out a sound—distant, layered, agonised—and then a black, viscous substance began to seep from the point of impact. The relic shuddered violently on the stone floor, fragmenting inch by inch until only charred pieces remained, still hissing softly.
Draco backed away, covering his ears until the last echo died.
"It's done," he said finally, breathing hard.
The Grey Lady did not respond. She floated in circles above the fragments, laughing—then weeping—then laughing again. It went on for some time.
At last she stilled, as if waking from a long dream.
"Thank you," she murmured, looking at the remains rather than at him. "Whatever you need of me—always. I owe you a debt I cannot repay." She drifted toward the door without another word, passing through the wall, and was gone.
Draco stared after her for a long moment.
Then he crouched down and carefully collected every fragment and the fang into his dragonhide pouch, sealed it, and let out a slow breath.
He had imagined, many times, how it would feel to destroy a Horcrux—had expected elation, triumph, some great cathartic surge. Instead, he felt remarkably little. Only a bone-deep exhaustion.
He supposed that was what happened when a single day contained both a descent into the Chamber of Secrets and the destruction of a Horcrux. Either event, in his previous life, would have been something he could have boasted about for years. Together, they had simply emptied him out.
He wanted nothing more than his dormitory beneath the Black Lake.
Under the cool moonlight falling through the corridor windows, he eased the door of the Room of Requirement open a crack, slipped out, and closed it silently behind him.
Then he turned around.
Hermione Granger was standing directly in front of him.