He’d been doing it all term, silently casting the Imperius Curse on whomever he could safely cast his mind. At first he’d done it just to amuse himself; little first years moving dramatically out of his way in the hall or holding doors for him with a slightly glazed look in their eyes. No one was any the wiser, as Unforgivable Curses had hardly been practiced on them since Moody’s days. After such trifles, he had become more daring, getting students studying in the library to fetch him books and take notes, even controlling fourth and fifth years, who should know better by now than to let a Malfoy near them with his wand out.

Draco was particularly proud of being able to control people directly under teachers’ noses - especially Gryffindors. Whenever Madam Pince was nearby in the library, another student suddenly had the urge to check his essays for errors or to find another book for him. Pince always looked at him suspiciously, but he just smoothed his white-blond hair and flashed a flippant ‘ah, popularity!’ smirk, and she had no grounds to bother him. He knew it was foolish to think they’d never catch on, but he needed something to be proud of… especially since he kept hitting dead ends when it came to his task for the Death Eaters.

It stopped being just fun and games the day of the Quidditch match against Gryffindor.

“Hide the scales in your bag, Goyle, you don’t want someone getting suspicious about the damn thing before I’ve gotten any work done, do you?” he scowled as he thrust the clanking instrument at the boy. They’d all begged off sick in order to get out of the match. “Not everyone’s made it to the pitch yet. You gits better start being smart about keeping watch or I’ll have Greyback after you about it.”

His last snarled whisper was dangerously quiet, as students were still passing them on the way out of the Great Hall. He brushed past one of the Gryffindors rushing by with her Quidditch robes in hand. He felt a sudden flood of frustration bubble through him. How could the idiots play at Quidditch when a war was on? Didn’t they understand that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meant nothing anymore, while the power that represented each side was everything? Always striving for useless triumphs… Out of spite for the pompous do-gooders on their way to becoming heroes yet again, this time on the field, he Imperiused the rushing Gryffindor into a pirouette, aiming her to leap squarely into the heavy oak entrance door.

What he wasn’t expecting was for the girl to catch herself before plonking into the door and turn to glance at him instead.

Draco turned back to his mates immediately and hurried them around the corner. They still looked stricken from the thought of being disciplined by Death Eaters and werewolves, but Draco’s mind had suddenly lurched into more uncomfortable territory. Ginny Weasley had just weakened his sense of power and security with a single, unreadable glance.

---

“Damn! If it’s not any kind of Concero Iunctum charm, how did they bloody well do it?” he spat as he kicked the broken door to the cabinet he was trying to make into an outside passageway. Draco’s concentration wasn’t entirely on the task at hand, but his frustration was nonetheless genuine. A Connector charm didn’t appear to have been used on the old hulking thing, and he had no clue what else to look for so he could repair it. Asking him to perform complex magical surgery on someone would be no less difficult a task, as he didn’t have a starting point for either endeavor… How do you fix a problem when you can’t even identify it? The other set of questions rapidly branching out in his head were distracting him, but they seemed to have a relatively reachable solution - as opposed to the cabinet issue.

Does she know I Imperiused her? Did she throw it off, or was my aim just wonky today? Could she see the direction it came from or did she know it was me specifically? Will she run off to the Boy Hero and sic him on me?

“Fuck!” he yelled, kicking the door again for good measure. According to his watch, the game would most likely be over soon and he needed to gather his minions and get back to looking ill in the Common Room.

“Don’t speak to me. You know, you’re an awful-looking girl, Crabbe,” he growled after opening the door to the Room of Requirement. He would have to fiddle with the cabinet later. He might try his hand at fiddling with a redhead as well… just to make sure his cover was safe.

--

Several weeks later, he still hadn’t managed to catch the Weasley in his sights for more than a moment at a time. She was always on her way out of the Great Hall at mealtimes once he’d arrived, and he didn’t want to risk cursing her in a corridor where she could call him out in front of half the students at Hogwarts. He was so strained between the broken cabinet, his last-minute orders for Borgin, and that damn redhead that he was beginning to look seriously ill.

“Ah, young Douglas,” Slughorn said to him one Thursday in a rare show of attention. “You look as if you could use a little Pepper-up Potion, am I right?”

“It’s Draco, Professor,” he replied with a tight smile. A thought struck him. “Would you mind terribly if I finished up here early and went to see Madam Pomfrey? Professor McGonagall told me not to come to class in poor health again, and I can’t very well miss Transfiguration.”

Slughorn peeked into the cauldron on Draco’s desk, where a fairly miserable Invisibility Elixir was bubbling. “Looks like you’re done for the day, anyway. Make sure to bottle a bit for testing, and don’t leave any mess.”

“Yes, sir,” Draco drawled at the tub of a man, but Slughorn had already turned to praise Harry for whatever he’d pulled out of his arse this time.

He gathered his things quickly and slid out of the room. Just as he passed Hermione’s cauldron, his incantation was covered by his own wheezing cough; the Mudblood was too busy glaring at Potter to notice a bit of her own perfectly passable Elixir had been siphoned away. It really was too easy, stealing from Gryffindors… like taking candy from babies. Whiny, annoying, do-gooder babies.

Draco’s heart thumped in his chest. He had an Invisibility Elixir that would last about four full hours and a resounding lack of moral fiber to make him feel guilty for skiving classes. Who needed lookouts when he could enter and exit the Room of Requirement unseen? If he couldn’t have an Invisibility Cloak, this was the next best thing.

-----

After one hour in the Room, he wanted to give up. After two, he wanted to kill himself. After three, he rather enjoyed being a dark and powerful wizard, or at least the son of one; the shadow of a connection between the two mysterious cabinets was slowly but definitely beginning to surface.

He thought it was high time to celebrate.

-----

Years of stepping quietly around Malfoy Manor, so as to go unnoticed and thus un-chided by his father, had trained Draco to slink. He’d slipped out of the Room of Requirement, out of the corridor, and had followed a group of chattering Gryffindors to their Common Room entrance, all using his sheer ability to slink about quietly. The Invisibility Elixir helped some, but he ignored that bit of sense for the time being. He was out hunting tonight and needed all the stealth and confidence he could conjure.

He debated entering the portrait hole with the Gryffindors he’d tracked, but figured it would look a bit odd if the Elixir wore off and Draco Malfoy appeared in the middle of Gryffindor territory. However, his luck of recent hours seemed to be holding, as within minutes he saw the girl Weasley and Dean Thomas returning from dinner. She paused as Draco implanted his suggestion:

You should go to the library to finish homework. You want to – McGonagall would be so surprised at a well-researched essay, and Dean will only distract you in the Common Room. Tell him to go on without you. The Library is a much better idea than the Common Room, the Library is a much-

“You know, Dean, I’ve really been worrying about my Transfiguration essay… I think I should go to the Library to finish it. I’ll see you tomorrow instead, okay?”

“Go on, Ginny, I can help you with it! I got an E in my OWLs and –"

“No, I think I really need to concentrate tonight. I’ll try and catch you before I get to bed, or at breakfast tomorrow.”

Dean looked put out, but climbed through the portrait hole nevertheless. Ginny turned immediately and walked with purpose back down the hallway. Draco, nearly forgetting that his directive had been to go elsewhere, had to jog to keep up with her. He had no plans to take her to the Library itself, but had in his mind an alcove just down the hall from it, where nearly … anything … could happen.

You would rather turn left just here. There appears to be something interesting in the alcove down the hall. You’d like to examine the wall behind the statue.

She turned the corner as if she’d meant to all along. He saw her scarlet hair whip gracefully under the arms of the wide statue depicting Frederic the Flatulent, and just before he followed her a single order sprang from his mind: Be still.

The gap behind the shielding statue was just large enough for two people. As Ginny stood in the center of the space, Draco nearly clipped her when he ducked under the statue’s arm. He straightened quickly and felt himself lean backward against the marble arm. Draco’s adrenaline rushed out of him, leaving only his unvoiced doubts. He had never spent a long amount of time with a girl not known to him since they both wore nappies, and it struck him very hard how strange this situation was.

He knew his father would have seen the girl as a ripe prize and thus ravished her in every way. Other Slytherins would have taken advantage and bragged about it later, mostly focusing on breast size since all other female parts still seemed taboo to them. Draco, however, had only the desire to feel. He felt his left hand stretch out, and clutched his right hand harder on his wand in response. There was a heartbeat of hesitation before he placed his hand on her arm and felt.

It was as if every nerve in his fingertips was turned to its highest setting. He was only touching the sleeve of her robes, but he imagined he could feel every fiber of the fabric as well as the layers of clothing below that and her heat and pulse below those. His fingers fairly sang with sensation as he ran them up her sleeve and rested them on her collar. Why did her white blouse seem so much softer than his uniform shirts? She probably had secondhand clothes that had been washed thousands of times… the state of her clothing fled his mind when he slid his hand up to splay his fingers on her neck.

For a moment, he thought a small explosion might have occurred nearby.

Her pulse radiated through his fingers and hammered at him slowly and deeply when it hit his chest. The knowledge was instantaneous, that he had never been so close to a creature of such warmth and vitality. She lived her life in a way that was fundamentally foreign to him. Draco dragged his eyes from where his fingers lightly touched the side of her neck to her face, trying to discern the origin of this disparity in a single glance. He saw that her eyes held a light despite the dimness of the alcove and the neutral expression on her face.

It appeared that a magnet drew his hand to replace his wand in his robe and gently pull her collar apart with both slender hands. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt and placed his right hand flat over the center of her chest, so that the tips of his fingers brushed her neck and his palm settled on her upper sternum. He spoke mentally to her, knowing the hold was still strong even after putting his wand away.

You want to feel, too.

She moved for the first time, allowing her fingers to dance over his sleeves while she reached for his collar. Her right hand rested over his clavicle as well, completing a pose of perfect symmetry between them. They breathed at the same slow rate. Draco would have sworn their hearts synchronized within seconds as well. He closed his eyes and felt warmth, heart, rhythm, spark, strength. There was nothing in the world he would rather be doing than experiencing this moment and this explosion of senses. Their breath and pulses created a rhythm like a song done in rounds, rebounding upon them until he felt like he was cocooned in their sounds. It felt like flying on a warm breeze.

The connection was shattered by stray students, giggling and chattering as they passed the seemingly lonely statue of Frederic the Flatulent. Draco jerked his hand back and Ginny let hers fall. He felt as if an artery had been severed. He shook his head as if to clear it and drew his wand, pure habit when he felt vulnerable.

You’d very much like to finish your homework in the Library and stay until it closes. You’d very much like to finish your homework-

And Ginny had ducked under the statue before Draco remembered to breathe again. It was only when he was halfway down to the dungeons that he realized the Elixir had worn off and that Ginny had left with her shirt still partially unbuttoned.