...and they say creativity is dead 🥀

She hit him at an angle, shoulder to chest, hard enough that his hand shot out on reflex to catch the stone wall behind him rather than stumble like something out of a farce, and hers went the other way entirely — down, scrabbling, a book and a folded square of parchment and something small and pale all leaving her satchel in the same half-second, scattering across the flagstones with a series of small, unglamorous sounds.

"Oh — I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking, I didn't—"

She was already crouching before she'd finished the sentence, gathering her things with the particular flustered efficiency of someone whose day had been moving too fast around her and had just, briefly, caught up. A strand of dark hair had come loose from behind her ear. Her cheeks were flushed — from the run, presumably, though for one disorienting instant Draco's mind supplied from something else before he shut that thought down with the same reflexive discipline he applied to everything that didn't serve him.

He didn't crouch. He didn't offer a hand. He stood where he was, arms loosely crossed, and watched her retrieve her book, her quill, the ink bottle that had — mercifully, for her — not shattered.

It was the last item that stopped her.

It had landed nearest to him, close enough to his boot that she'd have to reach across the small distance between them to get it, and for a moment she simply looked at it instead — a paper crane, small enough to sit in a cupped palm, folded from parchment gone soft at the creases from handling. One wing had bent slightly in the fall. She reached for it the way a person reaches for something they'd rather no one had seen.

He got there first. Not out of courtesy. He told himself, even as his hand was already closing around it, that it was simply closer to him than to her — an accident of geometry, nothing more.

The paper was warm. That registered before anything else did, before he'd even properly looked at the thing — warm from her bag, from her body, from whatever pocket or corner it had been carried in all day, and it struck him with an intensity that was frankly stupid, that a scrap of folded parchment could hold heat like that and that he would be the one standing here noticing it.

He turned it once between his fingers before he could stop himself. The folds were precise — sharper and more deliberate than he'd have expected from something made in a rush between classes, each crease pressed flat with what must have been real attention, real patience, the kind of care that had nothing to do with impressing anyone because there was no one there to impress. He had seen these before. He knew, with the sudden unwelcome clarity of a fact he hadn't realized he'd catalogued, exactly where he had seen them — scattered across the low table in the Slytherin common room some nights, left on the arm of a chair, tucked half-visible into the pages of someone's textbook like a bookmark nobody had asked for. He'd never thought about it as a pattern before this exact moment. He was quite sure, standing here, that it was one. That she made these the way other people bit their nails or hummed under their breath — an idle habit, made for no one in particular, made simply because her hands wanted something to do and this was what they did.

It was such a small thing to know about a person. It felt, absurdly, like more than he had any right to.

"That's mine," she said, and held out her hand.

She wasn't looking at him the way most of the school looked at him — not with wariness, not with the careful blankness Gryffindors had perfected for dealing with Slytherins in the corridors, not even with active dislike, which would at least have made sense given whose son he was and whose daughter she was and the particular unspoken war the two of their surnames were supposed to be fighting on principle. She was looking at him the way she looked at nearly everyone, he'd noticed, though he'd never let himself think the word noticed about it until right now — open. Faintly apologetic for the collision. Waiting for him to simply hand the thing back so she could get to wherever she'd been running to, probably back to Potter, probably to whatever the two of them did with their evenings now that everyone had stopped pretending not to know they were together.

That thought did something ugly and efficient to his chest, and he let it.

It was easier, using it. Easier than standing in a corridor turning a paper crane over in his fingers like it meant something, like she meant something, when the arithmetic of who she was and who he was and who she'd chosen made the entire question academic before it had even properly formed.

He looked at the crane for one more second. Then he closed his fist around it — not gently — and when he held it back out to her, the careful folds had gone crushed and lopsided in his grip, one wing bent flat, the whole shape sagging into something no longer quite a bird.

"You ought to watch where you're going," he said, voice pitched with the exact flat contempt he'd have used on any first-year who'd blundered into him, "instead of scattering your rubbish across the corridor for people to trip over."

He pressed it into her palm harder than the handoff required — not a blow, nothing anyone watching could have called cruel outright, just a fraction more force than the moment needed, delivered with the particular precision of someone who had learned, a long time ago, exactly how much pressure it took to make a small unkindness land as an accident.

Something crossed her face. Not hurt, exactly — or not only hurt. Confusion, first, the particular confusion of someone trying to locate the provocation for a response and coming up empty, because from where she stood there hadn't been one. She'd apologized. She'd been perfectly, unremarkably civil, the way she seemed to default to being civil with nearly everyone, and he'd handed her back something crushed with a voice like a slap.

"Right," she said after a beat, and there was an edge under the word now, something quieter than what he'd have gotten from most people he baited this way — no rise, no retort, just a small recalibration, the sound of someone filing information away. "Noted."

She closed her hand around the ruined crane and didn't look at it again. She gathered the rest of her things — the book, the quill he hadn't bothered retrieving for her — and straightened, and didn't apologize a second time, and didn't wait for him to say anything further either. She simply went, the way she'd been going before he interrupted her trajectory, down the corridor toward the sound of voices near the stairs — toward, he had no doubt, Potter, and whatever waited for her there that made her run through corridors with her satchel spilling wide open behind her.

He watched her go for exactly as long as it took to be sure she wouldn't turn back. Then he stopped, because there was no reason to keep watching, because there was nothing left in the corridor worth the attention.

He bent, finally, and picked up the ink bottle she'd left behind — the one thing of hers still on the floor, forgotten in the small humiliation of the exchange. He turned it over once in his hand. It was nothing. A cheap bottle of common black ink, the kind sold in bulk in every stationer's stall in Diagon Alley, worth nothing, meaning nothing.

He put it in his pocket anyway, and told himself, the entire walk back to the dungeons, that he had simply forgotten to leave it.

——