firecracker ???

The week after Harry Potter's name emerged from the Goblet of Fire, the castle shifted. Not in the way the staircases did—twisting without warning—but in that quieter, more unsettling way that meant the mood of a place had turned. The walls felt colder. The halls more watchful. And Harry, once an ordinary boy with an extraordinary past, had become something else entirely.

He was no longer just The Boy Who Lived. He was the boy who cheated. The boy who lied. The boy who had somehow rigged the ancient Goblet of Fire to steal glory that didn't belong to him.

Or so the whispers said.

They spread like steam through the pipes of Hogwarts—rising in classrooms, twisting through common rooms, echoing off stone. Students gave him space in the corridors. Some gave him sneers. Others looked at him like he'd grown an extra head.

Even Ron.

Especially Ron.

The silence between them wasn't just heavy. It was sharp.

Lyra hadn't said anything to him. Not in the week since his name was called. But she saw the way he moved now—more cautious, like he expected something to strike him from behind. She saw it in the way he paused outside classrooms, how he no longer sat with the same careless sprawl, how his smiles were fewer and his silences longer.

And she also noticed that Draco, without fail, always seemed to appear just after Harry did.

She knew why. Lucius had begun sending daily owls again. Draco tried to pretend they were nothing, stuffing the letters away quickly, eyes flicking over the words as if they might catch fire. But she saw the phrases. Recognised the slanted urgency in their father's script.

Stay close to Potter.

It was strategy, of course. It always was. The Malfoys didn't make sentimental decisions. And whatever Lucius suspected—whatever whispers had reached his ear—he wanted proximity. He wanted insight.

Draco hated it.

But he did as he was told.

Still, it didn't stop him from complaining endlessly about Harry's existence. Or about the fact that the Goblet hadn't chosen someone from their house.

"He looks smug," Draco hissed one morning, stabbing his fork into a sausage like it had personally wronged him.

"He looks tired," Lyra replied, not glancing up from her tea.

"Same thing on him," Draco muttered.

Lyra didn't respond. Because it wasn't true. Not really.

-

She wasn't trying to find him that night.

She'd gone walking because the common room was too loud, because her thoughts were too full, because her fingers kept twitching like they wanted to write but her heart didn't know what for. The corridors were dark, lit only by scattered torchlight and the moon's pale spill through high windows.

She hadn't expected him to be there, sitting on the stone railing of the bridge that stretched over the Black Lake. The silhouette of him looked strange in the dark—longer somehow, older. A boy alone with too many thoughts and nowhere to put them.

He didn't look up when she stopped.

"Planning your dramatic fall?" she asked, voice soft.

His head tilted. "Only if I can land with a flourish."

She moved to lean against the far side of the railing, facing the same direction he did. Below them, the lake rippled silver under the moonlight.

"I didn't know anyone else came out here," he said.