Of course Dumbledore had to come up with this.

“House Unity,” he said. “Interdisciplinary exploration,” he said. “Let the students learn from each other.”

And Binns, who barely noticed when someone’s quill caught on fire, actually listened. So now here you were, standing at the base of the North Tower, your arms crossed, eyebrows raised — and staring at Draco Malfoy.

He looked equally horrified.

It started like that. Every. Single. Day.

Snipes. Snaps. Sarcasm. He criticized your handwriting. You told him his tie was on crooked. He said your spellwork was sloppy. You said he needed to actually read the history instead of reciting his father’s version of it.

But somehow — somehow — you kept meeting up.

The project wasn’t just writing. Dumbledore wanted an exploration. A real history-of-magic presentation based on discoveries made around the castle. Secret corners. Forgotten artifacts. Talking to portraits. Following old ghost gossip.

And Draco Malfoy, for all his dramatics, was… annoyingly good at it.

He knew things. He noticed the way tapestries were misaligned, the way dust gathered around hidden passages, the old wizarding names carved faintly into wooden stair railings — histories you would’ve missed. He could recite spells in perfect Latin and sketch old sigils in the margins of your shared notes. And you — well, you were clever too. Sharper than he expected. You called out the holes in his logic and pieced together obscure facts from the back of books no one read.

You were normally rivals. But you were… compatible.

Cause something shifted. These meetings became your time. Together.

Draco couldn’t pinpoint when, exactly. Maybe it was the fourth time you dragged him across a winding staircase that tried to eat your shoes, and you laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was when you fell into a secret passage and landed on him—full-body impact— and froze like you realized for the first time how close you were (he definetly did).

Or maybe it was just the weird way your brain worked. The way you saw stories in stones. Asked questions even Binns hadn’t bothered to think of in a century. You made the castle feel alive in a way he never cared about before. Like history was magic, not just homework.

Draco started looking forward to your meetings.

He’d never say it out loud. Obviously. Merlin forbid. But you were… interesting. You challenged him. You didn’t cower. You didn’t even flinch when he snapped. You snapped back. But your insults were funny, not cruel. You

On the sixth day, you found a forgotten classroom behind a moving panel. Inside: an old blackboard, quills scattered, only one chair overturned and moss creeping up the stone.

You both just stood there for a second, breath caught.

“You think this was… abandoned?” you whispered.

Draco crouched beside an old desk, fingers brushing the carvings on the wood. He didn’t answer right away.

“They used to teach Dark Arts here,” he said after a moment, voice unusually quiet, before he sat on the chair. “Before it was banned. This is where it happened. My mother told me.”