"We're out!" Hermione whispered as the moonlight shifted.
The boys turned at the sound. Their group emerged one by one from the gap between the Whomping Willow's roots — some nimbly, some stumbling — and moved together toward the castle.
A short while later, Pettigrew's tearful pleas drifted up from the grass.
Hermione's breathing quickened.
"Professor Lupin is going to transform," she said, voice unsteady.
She's frightening herself again, Draco thought.
He had a sudden impulse — she might need comfort, the same way she had after the werewolf. He wanted to reach out, but her expression had closed like a door.
His hand lifted and stopped mid-air. They had just had an argument. An unsuccessful one. He was not at all certain of his welcome.
But her face had gone pale.
He made his decision before he'd finished deliberating and patted her carefully on the shoulder.
She'll throw him off, he thought.
She didn't. If anything, she shifted fractionally closer to him — barely perceptible, but he noticed. Her back remained straight, her chin up, her gaze fixed intently on the grass. She didn't look at him. But the shaking in her shoulders eased, and her breathing slowed.
She was still angry with him. She was also still accepting his comfort. Draco felt something in his chest unknot by a degree.
He kept his hand steady, and waited.
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Hermione was having a terrible time of it, internally.
She felt like a compass with a broken needle — spinning, unable to settle. She wanted him close and resented him for being close. She had just decided to put a great deal of emotional distance between them, and now here he was with his hand on her shoulder, and she had not moved away, which said something extremely unflattering about her resolve.
He'd shielded her in front of the werewolf. That image was still too immediate to reason around.
She was still cross with him, she reminded herself. Genuinely cross, for good reasons she had not yet finished being cross about.
And yet she moved fractionally closer.
Hermione Granger, she thought with some feeling.
He wasn't even holding her properly — just that careful, steady hand on her shoulder, like he was afraid of startling a bird. It was infuriating that it was exactly the right amount.
She would sort out her feelings about all of this later. When they were not standing on the edge of a dark forest waiting for a werewolf to transform.
For Draco's part, every small movement she made toward him made it considerably harder to keep still. She was slender, trembling slightly in the night wind, and he wanted to put his arm around her properly and stop pretending the shoulder-pat was the extent of what he meant.
But it would need to be her decision. He had made enough unilateral ones tonight.
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"He's going to run," Harry said, sharp and sudden.
Through the moonlight, Draco saw Pettigrew's expression shift. In the space of a second — taking advantage of the chaos, seizing Lupin's wand from the grass — Pettigrew grinned with the specific, rat-like cunning of a man who had survived this long by never fighting when fleeing was available.
"No one can catch me," he said, and transformed.
The rat bolted for the Whomping Willow.
Draco raised his wand, and beside him he knew Harry and Hermione were doing the same — three wands tracking one small, fast-moving target through the dark grass.
It should have been easy. Statistically, by any reasonable measure, one of them should have hit.
From the nearest oak tree, a ball of ginger flame dropped like a stone, knocked the rat flat with one heavy paw, and bit down.
Crookshanks sat back, entirely satisfied, and picked up what remained of Peter Pettigrew in his mouth.
The three of them stared.
"Merlin," Draco said softly.
"Oh my—" Hermione said at exactly the same moment.
The cat strutted off into the bushes with the air of an animal that has completed something long overdue, and was gone.
Twelve years of hiding. Twelve years of Azkaban for Sirius Black, twelve years of living as a rat in someone else's pocket. And in the end, Crookshanks.
The silence held for several seconds.
"Stop staring," Harry said, snapping back first, his voice tight. "We need to move. The werewolf—"
"Hagrid's hut," Hermione said, already running. "He's still in the castle. No one's there!"
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The three of them ran, full tilt, and didn't stop until they were through Hagrid's door.
Draco shut it behind them. Inside, Fang was barking frantically from his basket. Harry went straight to the mantelpiece, found a piece of fudge, and began the diplomatic process of getting Fang to calm down.
"How did you know Hagrid wasn't here?" Draco asked.
"He told Harry — in the hospital wing, ages ago. He said he was the one who would search the castle if anything happened." Hermione didn't look at him. She was already scanning the room. "Some of us pay attention."
"Some of us don't have your memory," Draco said. He was looking at her with real admiration, no irony in it at all. "How do you hold that much detail?"
The corner of her mouth shifted. She didn't answer, but she was quietly pleased, and he could tell.
A glance through the window: Professor Snape crossing the grounds in the moonlight, face grim, heading toward the wolf's howl. Moving fast, despite everything.
"Professor Snape," Hermione said, appearing at the other end of the window. Her expression was thoughtful and complicated. "He's still trying to protect us. He's a responsible teacher, even if his methods leave a great deal to be desired."
Draco said nothing, but he was glad she'd said it.
A movement on the far side of the grounds caught his eye — another version of himself, running from the direction of the castle, following the ginger shape of Crookshanks through the darkness.
So that was the moment, he thought. That was when the other him had encountered Crookshanks returning from his work, and whatever Crookshanks had been carrying.
He made a private note never to look too closely at what Crookshanks had in his mouth.
He watched his other self disappear into the distance and felt, as he always did in these moments, the particular disorientation of knowing exactly what was about to happen from the outside while remembering what it had felt like from within.
"Hermione," he said, turning to look at her. "Have I told you lately that you're extraordinary? This Time-Turner has had me completely turned around in under an hour. You've been using it for a full year."
She finally turned to look at him. Something in her expression softened — the beginning of a real smile.
She opened her mouth to respond.
"The lake," Harry said, voice urgent. "Now. My parents — they'll be here soon. We need to go."
"Wait." Draco pointed to the Firebolt leaning against the door. "Take your broom. There's a werewolf loose, Dementors, and we're about to run toward the lake on foot."
Harry looked at it, then at Draco, then grabbed it.
"And you two?"
Draco pointed his wand toward the castle. "Accio Nimbus 2001!"
He trusted it would come. Fast, if it knew what was good for it.
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They ran from the hut toward the lake, squinting across the water. On the far bank, they could just make out figures on the high ground — themselves, from the first pass through the night.
Sirius, in his Animagus form, was fighting to protect them.
"He's rolling down the hill," Hermione whispered. "The Dementors—"
"Sirius!" Harry was already running to the water's edge.
Draco caught Hermione's sleeve without thinking. "With me — follow Harry."
She nodded and grabbed hold of his sleeve, and neither of them acknowledged that she had done it.
They ran along the uneven path, the lake on their left, following Harry's frantic pace through the trees. The full moon came clear of the clouds, and the figures on the far bank resolved — and there she was, the other Hermione, left alone on the hillside as the werewolf closed in.
And there was himself. Standing in front of her.
Draco stopped walking.
He stared at the scene across the lake — the werewolf bearing down on them, the other him with his wand out, not moving — and felt, cold and precise, the memory of how that had actually felt from the inside. The particular quality of that terror. The decision to stay anyway.
He was glad she was standing next to him now, unhurt. He was glad for that more than he could easily say.
A smile moved across his face without his permission.
Then Hermione, standing beside him, raised her hand to her mouth and let out a long, carrying wolf-howl.
Draco stared at her.
"What—"
"You said in the library that werewolves respond to howling," she said, not looking at him, watching the far bank with total concentration. She howled again. "If it works—"
On the other side of the lake, the werewolf's head came up. It turned away from the small figures on the hillside, confused and distracted, and bolted in another direction.
"Yes," Draco said, after a moment. "Yes, that's — thank you." He was genuinely astonished. "In the first run, I protected you. And now, from here, you've just protected both of us from that timeline."
The paradox settled into place. He let it sit there.
Then: "Hermione. The werewolf just heard a howl from this side of the lake."
She turned to look at him.
They both looked at the tree line.
The undergrowth erupted. The werewolf was circling the lake, and it was moving quickly.
"Oh," Hermione said.
His Nimbus arrived with a rush of displaced air. Draco snatched it from the air, pushed it toward her. "Get on. Front."
"I can't—I'm not good at flying—"
"Now would be ideal, Hermione."
She got on. He swung up behind her, arm already around her waist, just as the werewolf burst through the last line of trees.
The broom shot upward.
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The werewolf did not give up. It circled below them, kept pace, watched for a low pass.
"Draco, what do we do?" Hermione's hands were white on the handle, her voice fraying at the edges.
"We need to draw it away from Harry and the others by the lake." He cast three rapid jinxes downward, watching the werewolf dodge them with infuriating agility. "The forest. Head deeper."
"I can't—" The broom shuddered. "It won't listen to me—"
"You passed your flying exam. You learned to fly in this exact broom's shadow. You know how to do this." His voice was close to her ear, steady on purpose, the arm around her waist tightening. "I have you. Wherever the broom goes, I have you. Now fly."
She felt it, then — his hold, solid and real, his weight behind her like a wall she could lean back into. The fear didn't disappear. But it compressed into something manageable.
She gripped the broom. Thought about the angle, the balance. Stopped fighting and began to guide.
The Nimbus responded immediately.
She turned them away from the lake, away from Harry, banking through the canopy of the Forbidden Forest with the werewolf howling below them.
Draco kept casting. She kept flying.
She wasn't sure exactly when she stopped being afraid of the broom. The fear of the werewolf was still there — that was reasonable, the werewolf was real — but the flying itself, with him behind her and his voice calm in her ear — that fear had gone somewhere else.
Below them, the sounds of the werewolf changed pitch. There were other sounds now — shrieking, defensive — and the pursuit fell away.
"Hermione." She could hear something close to delight in his voice. "Where are we?"
She looked down through the branches. The hippogriff herd was below them, territorial and furious, and the werewolf was already entirely occupied with that problem.
"I knew we were heading this way," she said, with as much composure as she could manage given that she was still slightly shaking.
"Of course you did." She felt rather than saw him smile. "You complete genius."
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They had just pulled clear of the canopy when Hermione saw it — a blinding white light to the east, over the lake, flooding a patch of darkness with silver.
"Draco. A Patronus."
"Dementors." His voice was quiet. "That's Harry."
"We have to go."
He didn't answer immediately, and she knew why — he had been trying to conjure a complete Patronus for months. She also knew he hadn't managed it yet.
"I can cast it," she said. "If the Dementors get too close, I'll cast it. You don't have to."
"I know," he said. A beat. "Let's go."
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Harry had seen it all from the lakeshore.
He'd seen the Dementors descending in their dozens — a dark, spreading flock. He'd seen another version of himself raise a wand, seen a faint silver light sputter and die. And he'd watched Sirius lie motionless on the ground while a Dementor pulled back its hood.
He had waited for his father. He had been so certain — that stag, appearing from the other bank, driving the Dementors back — it had to be James. It had to be.
No one came.
He stopped waiting and ran to the water's edge, drew his wand, and shouted, "Expecto Patronum!"
He knew he could. He had already seen it happen. He had stood in this exact spot and watched a stag appear — that stag was him, from now, not from then. He had always been the one.
A silver stag burst from his wand, blazing and enormous, and charged across the black surface of the lake.
On the far bank, at almost the same moment, a second figure raised a wand. A silver doe appeared, moonlight-bright, and drove from the other direction into the cloud of Dementors. Between them — stag and doe — the Dementors scattered and were gone.
The far bank went still.
Harry mounted his Firebolt and rode across, landing beside the crumpled figure on the grass.
He crouched. Moonlight fell across the unconscious face.
Severus Snape.
Harry straightened up slowly, staring. He could hear voices coming down from the hill — Draco and Hermione, descending through the trees. He rode back across the lake before either of them could see his expression, and sat down heavily in the bushes.
He was still sitting there when they appeared in front of him, brooms in hand.
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"Harry." Hermione went straight to him, checking him over with the quick, practical efficiency she used when she was worried and didn't want to show it. "Are you hurt? Did you see it? Was it—"
"It was me." His voice was flat. "The stag — I did it. Not my dad. Me."
"Harry—"
"I thought they'd come. I was so certain they'd come." He pressed a hand over his face. "It was all in my head. I'm such an idiot."
"Harry." Draco sat down beside him in the damp grass. "You conjured that Patronus tonight because you were thinking of them."
Harry looked up. His eyes were bright.
"They were there," Draco said. "In your memory, in your blood — they were there, or you wouldn't have managed it. A Patronus comes from what matters most to you. They were what you needed, so they came." He paused. "They didn't leave, Harry. They're in everything you do. You are the continuation of their lives. They would be proud. They would be grateful."
Harry stared at him. His throat worked.
"As long as you live," Draco said quietly, "they live."
His mother had said the same to him, once. He'd been too young and too stubborn to understand what she meant. He understood it now.
The silence held for a moment.
Then Hermione asked, her voice careful: "The other Patronus. The doe. Who was it?"
Harry's mouth opened and closed. He exhaled. "Snape."
Draco and Hermione looked at each other.
They were both thinking of Slughorn's voice over dinner in Bath, offhand and certain: "Lily could be considered Severus's closest friend."
A Patronus is the shape of what a person holds most deeply. It doesn't imitate. It doesn't perform. It can't be forced into a form the caster hasn't earned.
A doe. After all these years.
All three of them sat with that for a moment, in the dark, by the still water of the lake.
"Come on," Harry said at last, scrubbing his face with his sleeve. "We need to get back."
They stood, picked up their brooms, and walked.