Forgot to add the general disclaimers in my need to publish this story. I am not JKR, I am merely borrowing her characters for a while to feed my muse. Feedback welcome. Happy New Year.

His eyes melted into my soul.

Those were my only thoughts as I stared up at the red canopy that covered my bed, the sounds of my dorm mates slumbering in ignorance of my inner turmoil. It was like he reached down into the depths of my soul to get me to believe him. Now, as the hours ticked away I felt like time was slowing to a crawl, but whenever I closed my eyes all I could see were his.

Now I knew how Harry felt.

Glad that the approaching morning was a Saturday, I slipped out of bed and padded my way downstairs. I knew that sleep was lost on me, at least for now. I was surprised, but not completely, to find another person staring into the fire burning in the Gryffindor Common Room.

"Hermione" Harry spoke without even turning around.

"Yeah. It's me." I walked over to the couch that was facing the main fireplace, and Harry instantly moved over and lifted the corner of the blanket, providing me access.

"Couldn't sleep?" Harry spoke in a way that made me want to laugh, if the situation was not so, strange.

"Thinking about him again. Thinking about this whole situation…"

Harry sighed. "Who would have thought?"

I shook my head. "Not me. Not after last year."

Harry nodded. "Sirius has been so confused, but things are better now."

"Is he settling in alright?" I questioned.

"Yeah. He still has bad nights, according to the nurses, but for the most part things are getting better. They've called in all sorts of specialist to deal with the lingering effects of Azkaban."

I nodded and looked towards the male dorms, and Harry seemed to be on the same page with me.

"Weasley's sleeping. Last night Neville and Seamus set it up so that his bed is furthest away from mine. "

I paused slightly at the causal way Harry referred to Ron as just a Weasley. I knew that forgiveness between Harry and Ron was a long ways off, but the finality of switching to such a formal way of speaking about somebody who was supposedly Harry's other best friend left me without any type of response.

"Sirius is working on getting custody of me." Harry spoke into the silence that followed. "Being unjustly imprisoned without a trial has the Minister bending over backwards in order to prevent it from being more of a public spectacle than it already has been."

I turned to Harry. "Is that what's keeping you up tonight, or are you having nightmares?"

Harry looked at me quizzically for a moment and then shook his head. "No, that's not it. I want Sirius to have custody of me. I want to live with him and never have to go into that foul house on Privet drive ever again. I'm ok with what's been happening with Sirius and the Ministry. It's just that I've been invited away for the holidays."

I smiled. "Well that's nice you finally get to do something other than staying here for the Winter Holiday. Where?"

"Malfoy Manor."

Draco's POV

It was an Imperio. It had to have been a compulsion spell of some sort. Definitely.

Why else had I done it? Everything had been cemented; the path was easy to follow from here. Potter was being chased by a mass murderer, and his life was a living hell without me even having to lift a finger. But then Father told me there was no way that Sirius Black had done half of the things he was being accused of, no matter how foul he actually was. Sirius Black was not a muggle murderer, he was not a Death Eater, and he was certainly not the right hand man of the Dark Lord; but he was an idiotic Gryffindor who would fall easily into a trap.

But even having this knowledge, that Sirius Black could not have given up the location of the Potters to the Dark Lord, nor would he have blown up a street full of muggles shortly thereafter could have been satisfying to me. I could have slept quite soundly, secure in the knowledge that Potter was being panicked needlessly by reports of a mass murderer out to finish the job he started in 1981. Why I decided to do otherwise, is beyond my comprehension. Why also, I decided to corner the mu—Granger with my information will probably remain a mystery. Stupid Granger, punching me in the face and addling my brain.

"Granger!" I whispered, hidden at the border of the Restricted Section. I had gotten a pass for myself plus a 'study partner' and planned for that person to be Granger. Snape did not question my reasoning, but only implored that I not get into trouble.

"Malfoy!" I found a wand pointed at my nose. "What do you want?"

"Granger. I am not holding my wand, plus we are in the library and it is fairly full. If we do anything other than whisper we will be caught and it will be bad for both of us."

The angry girl looked at me for a moment, and then put her wand away, although I noticed that she merely tucked it up her sleeve, where she would have easy access to it at any moment. Smart girl. Wait! Did I just call Granger smart?

"I need to talk to you, but I don't want anybody else to hear what I have to say." I spoke, ignoring my traitorous brain.

Granger narrowed her eyes, but motioned for me to continue.

"Come with me. There is a table within the Restricted Section solely for this purpose."

Granger shook her head. "How do I know you won't try something once I've gone back here with you? Besides, I'm looking for somebody."

"Because there are detection spells, as well as anti damage spells. If we even fire one curse at each other the entire library would know within seconds. Come on, I don't have all day to stand here and fight with you about my intentions. I could not do anything at all and then where would Scarhead be?"

She paled. "This is about Harry?" She paused, biting her lip. She seemed to be weighing me with her deep brown eyes, measuring me to see if I was being sincere. She seemed to evaluate me like I was a specimen she was studying in Herbology. At the moment I was being sincere, and it pained me that a lowly mudblood could use that same calculating sweep on me as I was accustomed to using on those of lesser worth. Just as I was about to rescind my offer, however, she spoke. "Lead the way."

We walked to the table I indicated, which had a permanent privacy bubble, something some ingenious Slytherin had put into the table, burning runes into the table itself.

She sat down and motioned for me to begin speaking. I smirked.

"Don't you want to enjoy your time with me, Granger?"

She fixed me with a glare that could flay an elephant and scowled. "No, Malfoy, I do not. I have much more important things to do than play games in some God forsaken corner of the library obviously only frequented by Slytherins. And I am sure you should not get caught with a muggleborn Gryffindor in the same secluded obviously Slytherin section of the library."

I raised an eyebrow. "How did you come to the conclusion that this is a Slytherin area?"

Her scowl deepened. "Do you take me for an idiot? Here is the Slytherin crest, here are rune sets for silence and secrecy, and here is what I am reasonably sure is the Black Family Crest." She pointed at symbols on the desk. It impressed me, much to my chagrin, that she recognized correctly the Black Family Crest, as well as rune sets I was reasonably sure we had not covered yet in Ancient Runes. Damn her!

"Fine." I scowled, however, some portion of my brain would not just leave it at that and hold the information I had come to know as fact. "Sirius Black is innocent. If you think about what he is accused of doing, think about how much sense it makes, with the logic you like to show off to everyone."

She paused, deep in thought. "He's accused of betraying the Potters, and then killing Peter Pettigrew along with twelve muggles. That makes perfect sense."

I shook my head. "If the main goal of Sirius Black was to go after the Potters, he did that when he handed them over to the Dark Lord. If he wanted to kill Peter Pettigrew, why wait until after the deaths of the Potters? After the Dark Lord had been defeated?"

Granger paused. She opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

I continued. "Wouldn't it have made more sense to go after Pettigrew first, since he would have not been on high alert after the deaths of the Potters? Who was Pettigrew that he would have even been of notice to the Dark Lord, aside from a friend of the Potters?"

Here Granger spoke. "Well if Voldemort wanted the Potters and Pettigrew dead, and assigned that task to Black, maybe Black would have thought it his duty to confront Pettigrew even after the Potters had been killed and Voldemort vanquished."

Only intensive training by my father prevented me from shuddering about the use of the Dark Lord's name.

"Use your brain, Granger. What else is a possibility? Given that James Potter and Sirius Black were best friends, and Sirius Black had just lost a little brother to the Dark Lord…"

Granger interrupted. "But Sirius Black was the Secret-Keeper!"

I shook my head, wanting to bang it against the table. "Who said so? It's not a very good secret if everybody knows you're the Secret Keeper. Besides, with one party dead and the other party in Azkaban, whose really going around saying that Black was the Secret Keeper? And how do they know?

Granger paused. "I don't know much about the spell they used, but somebody has to cast it, likely somebody who was close to them. Maybe Peter Pettigrew cast the spell, and thus knew that Sirius had betrayed the Potters."

I sighed. "Why not the other way around?"

Granger looked up. "Peter Pettigrew was the Secret Keeper, and Sirius cast the spell? Well that would make sense, if Pettigrew betrayed the Potters, and because Sirius cast the spell he knew the instant the secret was betrayed. Well that makes sense for why Black would go after Pettigrew, but you said that Sirius was completely innocent."

"That I did. You don't think that a person who just betrayed his best friend to the Dark Lord would have just let himself be captured, do you?"

Granger shook her head. "No…"

"Figure it out, and tell Scarhead, and maybe Weasel, but don't tell them how you know."

She nodded, sitting there and pulling out a bit of parchment. I left her sitting there, my good deed for my life accomplished.

It snowballed. Granger told Potter and Weasel that she thought Sirius Black was innocent, and that they should send him a message. Apparently it only took reminding Potter that Black had been James Potter's best friend to get him to agree. In the end it was only Granger and Potter that met Black, talked to him and got the story. Granger and Potter then somehow plotted to capture Pettigrew, who was alive and actually in Hogwarts, and figured out a way to expose the lie. The way they did it made me wonder whether or not either one of the two should have been in Slytherin.

Granger learned the animangus-revealing spell, and made sure that Black was safely hidden away in the muggle world. Potter requested an interview, and took Pettigrew with him, stealing him from under Weasley's nose. Granger got delivered to her what looked like a clear box with holes. The interview occurred, and while Rita Skeeter thought she was getting a story about the Boy-Who-Lived vowing revenge against Sirius Black, she got Potter and Granger revealing that Pettigrew was an animagus and quite alive. It was a media sensation. Sirius was pardoned and Pettigrew was kissed by Dementors for his crimes, and all before the first Quiddich match of the year.

That was two months ago, and now Mother has invited Potter over for part of the holidays. Father still had not forgiven Potter for the loss of Dobby, but I wisely pointed out that if the house elf was treacherous enough to try and betray the family to a twelve year old boy, then what good was he to us? Mother agreed, and Father accepted the logic as sound. A house elf willing to betray his family to another, even if by subversion, is as useful as a cauldron made of cheese.

The fallout at Hogwarts from having Sirius Black declared innocent was immediate. Much to my delight the Golden Trio began to collapse, and there would be no long-term detrimental effects of my attempt to befriend Potter within my own house. Even if only half the rumors were true, Potter was a valuable ally, and hardly anybody in Slytherin could fault me for trying to turn him into one of mine.

I sat staring into the fire, the visage of a disappointed Dumbledore haunting my vision. I had a place to go visit for the holidays, and I actually wanted to go. Sirius would be there, and it would be my first Christmas with something resembling a real family and a real home. I spent the first two Christmases at Hogwarts, and while hanging out with Ron was nice enough, the cold, empty castle was not how normal people spent Holidays. I deserved to spend the Holidays with family, and I felt that there was nothing that anybody could do or say about it!

The disappointment likely stemmed from the fact that the 'big guns' had been called in. I had talked to Professor McGonagall about adding Sirius to the list of people approved to give me permission to go to Hogsmeade, and the situation had snowballed from there. Since Sirius had been proven innocent by the Ministry and given a full exoneration, I wondered if I could try and get Sirius to at least give me permission to go to Hogsmeade with my friends. Sirius agreed, and was horrified that not only had my relatives refused to sign my permission slip, but one of the people with the power to overrule that decision had not done so. So with his new liberty assured, Sirius petitioned to be a sponsor of sorts, especially in matters related to magic and my schooling. Everything was going along fine until Dumbledore moved to veto the appointment, claiming that it would undermine the wishes of my true guardians, the Dursleys. That led to a mélange of problems related to how I ended up with muggles when many of my father's distant relatives were still alive and well equipped to care for an infant, including a Ms. Andromeda Tonks.

It ended up being that there would be a full hearing before The Board of Governors on the matter of whether or not Dumbledore had overstepped his role as Headmaster by being go heavily involved in my life. The immediate effect was that the august board struck down Dumbledore's order that I be forced to remain at Hogwarts. They further ruled that Dumbledore could not unilaterally refuse to allow me to attend Hogsmeade weekends, and could not have any say about where I chose to spend the Winter Holidays. Nor did he have the ability to make decisions about who could apply to be an authorized temporary guardian: it was up to the Ministry and Underage Wizarding Services to determine whether or not a person had a valid claim to be a person's guardian, or whether or not a non-biological person should be allowed to become or remain a guardian. The vote had been unanimous, and thus undefeatable by the Wizengamot as a matter of law.

I suppose that more damming in Dumbledore's eyes than anything Sirius did was my signature on that one piece of parchment, the one that stated my desire to visit Sirius over the holidays. This year that obviously meant a trip to Malfoy Manor.

Sure, in the time I had been at Hogwarts I never imagined I would be going to Malfoy Manor for Christmas. Four months ago I would have laughed at the person who suggested it. Now…

Now, as I stared into the fire, wondering what had gone so wrong in such a short amount of time that I was going to visit Draco Malfoy for Christmas, and Ron Weasley was no longer speaking to me. Not that I was actually going to see Draco specifically, but he would be there, along with Sirius, Andi, Dora and the Malfoys.

Part of it did have to do with Ron saying that Sirius Black was 'an evil wanker', 'obviously a Death Eater' and 'from an evil family'. Even after the public exoneration and apology, he could not accept that I really wanted to get to know Sirius as the godfather he had never been allowed to be for me. Another part of it might have been that, despite the constant fighting between Malfoy and myself, I accepted something Draco Malfoy told me as true, and even worse to the youngest male Weasley, acted on that information.

'Perhaps he is jealous' a traitorous part of my brain suggested.

Jealous of what? Well I knew he was jealous of my Nimbus, jealous that I could order whatever supplies I needed from Prichard's Premium Parchment and Supplies while he had to settle for borrowing from McGonagall or owling home if he rand out of something, risking the wrath of his mother.

I mentally sighed. Maybe Ron was jealous. And now, here I was, set to become cared for by the rediscovered son of another rather well-off family, if the promised Firebolt was anything to go by.

'Maybe?' My traitor brain scoffed. 'You saw the look on his face when you lot went to Diagon Alley to get money out of your trust vault. And now they're saying that there's at least one more vault where that came from.'

Another sigh. Why were we even friends if Ron couldn't handle that, aside from my awful Muggle relatives, I was fairly well off? It was not something I flaunted like Draco, but if the media reaction was any indication, I could no longer be content to drown in Dudley's muggle castoffs in my spare time either. Merlin this was difficult! And I didn't even have my best mate to laugh about it with!

However, Because of my open-mindedness, even knowing how bad the blood was between Malfoy and myself, and doubting every step of the way that Malfoy was being sincere, Sirius was free, really free, and in the temporary joint care of Narcissa Malfoy and Andromeda Tonks. There was no mass murderer after me, the true culprit had been punished, and I was going to gain a proper family before the new year.

But the question that plagued me was this one: Why did Draco help? Why are the Malfoys continuing to help? When did Malfoy become Draco?