Bree
2:37 am
I slipped out into the hall, careful to not let the door slam and to wake Kaycee. Cate and Pansy still weren't back from their dates with Diggory and Zabini, and I was only hoping that I wouldn't run into them. I closed my eyes, blinking back tears as I held the letter I'd received from Emmaline tightly in my palm, the parchment wrinkling under the pressure. In it, she begged me not to forget her, but told me that it was the only, and last, time that the family would let her write to me. Her last sentences repeated over and over in my head. I don't know where you are, but if we're even in the same world, look up at the stars for a minute tonight. We'll see the same ones, just like we did in Willow Meadow when we were kids. I'll be watching.
There was a map of the school right outside of the common room, so I moved quietly and quickly, trying not to let a sob escape my throat. Suddenly, my foot caught in a lump on the floor, and I slipped, the thud of my shoe sounding like a train rushing through the broken silence. My breath hitched in my throat as I saw a light flicker on and the shadow of someone appear at the end of the hallway. I quickly ducked around a corner and pressed myself against the wall, breathing heavily.
A hand snaked around my mouth and before I could scream, pulled me closer into darkness.
"What the hell are you doing, Barnes?"
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the brightness of Draco Malfoy's eyes met them, blazing with anger. "You know you could get yourself killed, slinking around here like you're a...dementor or something."
"Oh thank Merlin, it's just you." my shoulders heaved a sigh of relief. My nose twitched as I was hit with a wave of cologne that smelled vaguely of burnt wood and and bergamot. (AN: if you get this reference...ily...) "Merlin's beard, Malfoy, could you have anymore of that on?"
"Calm down, Barnes," he shook his head. "I believe I was in the middle of asking you a question before you so rudely interrupted."
He seemed like he was kidding. Again, a different Draco every minute. "Well with your ever-so-erratic mood swings," I shot back, "I'm not sure which Draco I'm answering."
"Consider this me in the mood to be forgiving," he shook his head. "I'm on my way somewhere. Just tell me you're going back to your room from wherever...as long you weren't pulling a Moaning Myrtle with some Gryffindor boy.."
"And if I was?" If looks could kill, I'd have been dead. "Jealous, Malfoy?" I raised an eyebrow.
"Hardly," he coughed as if repulsed by the idea. "Just would be a new low for our house."
"Lower than two of us being caught right here, right now?"
"You're with me," he said, almost quizzically. "Why would we get in trouble?"
"I forgot," I elbowed him, but no response. "My last name means nothing here."
He rolled his eyes. "So much for being a pureblood," he scoffed. "I have about one more minute to waste on this conversation."
"Fine," I shrugged, but only because he could help me and was a lot closer than risking my skin to get to that map. "I need somewhere that has a good view of the stars. If you can't help me, fine, if you want to go get Snape, fine, but I need to go-"He put up his hand to cut me off. He opened his mouth, and I braced myself for the sharpness that was going to come from his barb-ridden tongue, but instead, his shoulders released from his previous tension, and he closed his eyes as he exhaled slowly. "You won't find anywhere better than the astronomy tower."
"They have one of those here?" was the only sentence I could form. Was Draco Malfoy actually just...helpful?
"Yeah," he said absentmindedly, a distant look growing in his eyes. Then something seemed to shift, as he turned back to focus on me. "It's where I was going too, actually."
_____
Draco
She looked at me as if she didn't know how to react. "Oh," she said after a minute. "You weren't kidding."
"I have better things to do than lie when you seem perfectly capable of getting lost on your own," I said, my voice edged with annoyance. "Follow me or don't Barnes, I don't care."
As I turned around, I tried to ignore the fact that the whole hallway smelled overwhelmingly like peonies. I was growing lightheaded. "Draco," her voice cut in through the fog. "Draco."
"What?" I whirled around to face her, so frustrated that her presence had this effect on me. I wanted to hate her, curse her into the next lifetime for it, but something so deep inside me didn't want that, it actually wanted the opposite.
"I just...I'm coming," she said in a small voice, averting her eyes. I was hit with the rush of feeling stupid, and I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. Why couldn't I be anything other than a dick? "Fine," I turned my attention to my cuff links and straightening them. I realized that with her curiosity and noviceness when it came to Hogwarts navigation, we'd be caught in no time. And I had been only partially truthful when I told her she wouldn't be in trouble if she were caught with me. "Take my hand." I thrust it out to her limply, and prayed she couldn't see the tornado of thoughts whipping around ferociously in my head.
"Why?" She looked at if as if it would bite.
"Relax, Barnes, I'm not gonna kill you. So we can Apparate," I rolled my eyes. "We'll get there much faster."
She looked at me, and made the poor choice to trust me. "Close your eyes," I said, as I lifted my wand. "I don't need you hurling on me."
She gripped my wrist so tightly that it turned white.
**
"You can open your eyes now, Barnes." I tried to ignore how her eyes glittered in the moonlight as they widened to take in our surroundings. "Wow," her voice was barely above a whisper, tinged with amazement. "This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen."
"I guess," I shrugged. "Paris is nice too."
"You've been?" her jaw dropped in amazement. "I've never even been outside of England."
"Yeah, like ten times," I tilted my head. "Family business."
She was silent. "Wow. That's amazing."
"It's nice," I admitted, wanting to steer the conversation away from my family. "But here's nice too."
"I've got family business of my own," she said softly. "My parents were gone a long time ago. I lived with a bunch of different Muggle families, and the ones most recently have this great real daughter named Emmaline. They don't let her talk to me anymore, they don't want her to have anything to do with magic. She sent me one last letter, telling me to look at the stars. That no matter what, we'd be under the same ones."
Shit. "I'm sorry about your family," I moved so I could be sitting on the edge of the tower window. "Sometimes I think it'd be easier if I didn't have parents either."
She looked at the spot next to me, but made no move. "Don't you love them?"
"Sometimes," I didn't dare meet her eyes. "It's complicated."
"Love always is," her voice was rueful. I didn't want to tell her how much I knew that was true. "I wonder if I did the right thing, sometimes. Coming here, leaving her, leaving it all behind."
"Isn't this where you're destined to be, though?" I wondered if she knew her parents were Death Eaters. I got a twinge of excitement that we were more similar than I'd thought previously. "If you're a pureblood, it only makes sense that you're here now."
I sounded like my father.
"I guess," she eyed the seat again and was silent for a minute. I watched every muscle of her body seem to hold herself back from joining me.
"You can sit, you know." I was tired of the wall between us, too tired to fight it or anything else right now. "I'm not going to push you."
She still was silent.
"If I wanted to kill you, Barnes, I would have when we Apparated."
That got her. She padded slowly over and sat on the cobblestone, and dangled her legs over so we were only separated from a freefall from a thin slab of rock.
Little did she know, I was already falling.
"The view really is amazing. You weren't kidding."
"You can see a lot from over here," I nodded, pointing to the night sky. Her eyes followed my hands. "Those three in a line right there, that's Orion's Belt. He's the hunter, and then those right to the left make up the horns of Taurus, the bull he hunts. And see those stars, how they kind of look like a spoon? That's the Big Dipper."
"Is there a Little Dipper?" she joked.
"Actually," I moved my arm slightly to the right, "There is. Right there."
A warmth filled her eyes and her smile melted into a sleepy grin. "How do you know so much about stars, Malfoy? I didn't peg you as the astronomy type."
"It gets girls," I found myself cracking a joke. "I'm just kidding, just kidding," I put up my hands quickly as I saw a shadow crowd over her face. "My dad was really into them."
She nodded and we fell back into an awkward silence. "He knew her, you know." I was talking, desperate to breach the gap I felt appearing between us again. "Your mother."
"He did?" her face was pale and her eyes beseeched me. I saw emotions I hadn't seen on her before. Living with my father, I'd learned how to read people. To study them before I dared to ask anything. I learned that the slightest twitch of an eyebrow meant I was a disappointment, or the hardening of cheekbones meant unsaid praise. But Bree was so...vulnerable. On her face, there was one thing, and it was pain.
"Do you know anything about what happened to her?" she whispered, her voice caught by tears. I wanted to reach out to her, to hold her, to save her from the mental anguish she seemed to be dissipating into. I thought about what my father had told me earlier. Normally, I would've loved to rub that in someone's face, and inflict all the pain I could. The words blood traitor, disgrace, and filth were on my tongue, burning holes in my mouth as I forced them to dissolve. Something about her broke them down. Broke me down.
(A/N: if i were to recommend a song, i'd play only love by ben howard!! :)
"I don't know anything, but you can see her." She searched my face for answers, shaking her head in confusion. "Look." We'd settled into a position where we were sideways on the slab, looking out at the left side of the sky, her in between my legs and my arms hovering in the air, afraid to finalize anything and scare her by placing them around her. "See that cluster there, and it looks like it's surrounded by a little bit of red?" She nodded, looking up at me, and my breath tightened.
"That's Andromeda's galaxy."
__
Bree
My heart caught in my throat. I wondered if he could feel it pounding. Somehow, his arms had found their way to lightly hovering around my waist after he'd stopped pointing, and we'd shifted to where my back was pressed up against his chest, and his chin on the top of my head. His robes....they smelled like...
Peppermint. Apples. Cologne.
"You don't have to do that, you know," my voice was barely above a squeak.
"Do what?" his voice was just as faint as mine.
"This," I said, and with all the courage I never knew I had, I brought his hands to my skin. I felt his chest tighten. I felt intoxicated simply by the thought of him. Where his hands were left hot trails of butterflies spiraling down my skin. "I'm not scared of you, Malfoy."
"Bree..." his voice sounded pained. "You should be."
"I'm not," I said, a little more forcefully this time. "You don't scare me."
"I should," he said, his lips soft against my neck. I shivered. "Are you cold?" he murmured. "Here," he shook off his overcoat and draped it around my shoulders and rubbed his hands up and down my arms a few times, trying to generate heat.
"Why do you hate me?" I tried to steady my breathing, focusing on the red space he'd designated as my mother's space. It twinkled. I wondered if she was winking at me.
"I don't know what I feel about you, Bree," his arms tightened around me. "But I've never felt it with anyone else."
"So why do you act like such a jerk?" the words came out before I stopped myself. I expected him to be angry, and as I studied his face, an unreadable expression came across it.
"That's what I am," he said lowly, dipping his head as he inhaled sharply. "I've never been anything else."
As I watched this boy, a star burning in front of me, a complex enigma I was dying to figure out, I found my lips inching closer to his. "For the record," I said, as they brushed against each other. "I think there's so much more." His eyes opened in recognition, and his hand reached up to stroke my jaw as we collided fully for the first time.