The heavy oak door groaned as Draconia pushed it open, the sound scraping through the stillness of the corridor. Harry stepped inside the room, his boots clicking against the stone floor as he navigated the threshold. Dust motes danced in the dim light of his wand tip, settling on stacks of crates and forgotten furniture. It was a graveyard of objects, a collection of things the castle had decided to keep for itself. Draconia moved ahead of him, her robes sweeping over the floor with a soft, rhythmic hiss. She did not look back to see if he was following; she knew he was.
"You have been coming here for a long time," Harry said, his voice sounding too loud in the cavernous space. He watched the way she reached out to touch a stack of old, leather-bound books. Her fingers traced the spines with a delicate, practiced motion. The room felt stagnant, as if the air itself had forgotten how to move.
"Six years of keeping secrets is a full-time occupation, Potter," Draconia replied. She turned her head just enough for him to see the sharp line of her jaw. She looked tired, though her posture remained perfectly upright. "Most people find the simplicity of a single secret quite exhausting, but I prefer the complexity of a hoard."
"It is not a hoard if you are hiding from everyone," Harry said. He walked toward a table where a pile of silver trinkets lay discarded. He felt a strange sense of intrusion, as though he were walking through the inside of her mind. Every object seemed to possess a weight that had nothing to do with its physical mass.
Draconia pulled a small, velvet-lined box from a crate. She opened it, revealing a single, tarnished earring. "Hiding is a strong word. I prefer to think of it as curation. There is a difference between being lost and being intentionally placed."
"You could have told someone," Harry remarked. He watched her carefully. She was watching the way the light hit the silver, her expression unreadable.
"To whom? To the people who would use my possessions as leverage? Or to the people who would pity me for owning them?" She snapped the box shut. The sound echoed against the high, vaulted ceiling. "It is easier to keep things in a room that only you can find."
"Is that why you came to find me?" Harry asked. He stepped closer to her, his presence cutting through the stillness. He wanted to see if she would flinch, but she only tilted her chin up.
"I came to show you that you are not as observant as you pretend to be," she said. She began to walk deeper into the room, moving past a pile of discarded-looking-robes. "You think you know the shape of my life, but you only know the parts of it that are visible in the Great Hall."
"I know enough," Harry insisted. He felt a sudden urge to prove himself, to show her that he saw the cracks in her armour. "I know you are rarely where you say you are."
Draconia laughed, a short, dry sound that held no warmth. "That is a very shallow observation. You see the absence of a person, but you do not see the presence of the reason." She gestured toward a stack of parchment that lay scattered near a broken chair. "Everything in this room is a piece of a version of me that the rest of the world is not allowed to touch."
"Why not?" Harry asked. He reached out to steady himself against a wooden crate, the rough grain biting into his palm. "Why keep the best parts of yourself in a dusty room in the middle of a castle?"
"Because the best parts are the most fragile," she said. Her voice softened, just a fraction. "If you keep them in the light, they become common. If you keep them in the dark, they remain sacred."
He watched her move toward a small, wooden chest at the back of the room. She knelt beside it, her movements slow and deliberate. The way she handled the lid made him feel like he was watching a ritual. She was not just opening a box; she was unearthing a memory.
"You have a lot of things here," Harry said, his voice dropping an octave. "A lot of things that look like they belong to someone else."
"Perhaps they do," Draconia said. She reached into the chest and pulled out a small, rectangular piece of parchment. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, staring at it for a long moment. "Or perhaps they belong to the girl I was before the world decided who she had to be."
"You were always you," Harry said. He took a step toward her, closing the distance until he could see the way her breath hitched in her throat. "Even when you were being difficult. Even when you were being a prat."
"A compliment, Potter? Careful, you might ruin your reputation," she teased, though her eyes remained serious. She did not look up at him. Instead, she turned the parchment over in her hand. "Most of this is rubbish. Old trinkets, broken wand-wood, things that no longer hold a charge."
"It is not rubbish to you," Harry countered. He watched her profile, the way the shadows of the room clung to the curve of her cheek. "You look at these things like they are the only real things left in this castle."
"They are the only things that do not change their minds about me," she said. She finally looked up, her eyes bright and fierce in the gloom. "They do not require me to be a daughter, or a Slytherin, or a prize. They just exist."
"Tell me one thing," Harry said. He wanted to bridge the gap between them, to find a way into the silence she built around herself. "Tell me one thing in this room that is actually real."
Draconia looked back down at the parchment in her hand. A small, lopsque enough smile touched her lips, a rare break in her composure. She moved her hand, bringing the paper closer to the light of his wand.
"This," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of his own breathing.
Harry leaned in, his eyes following her gaze. The parchment was old, the edges yellowed and frayed by time. It was a simple drawing, a sketch of a lightning bolt, rendered in a shaky, unsteady hand. He saw the date at the bottom, written in the looping, unpracticed script of a child.
The last thing she shows him is a drawing of a lightning bolt, in her handwriting, dated Year One.