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Draco Malfoy was tired and scared and on the verge of another nervous break down. He pressed his face against the cool wood of the cabinet he was trying to fix and took a deep breath. He would steady himself. He would make this work. He would stop the Dark Lord from killing his mother and father and then him. And he would do it all without letting Snape swoop in and claim all the glory, like his Aunt Bellatrix had warned he'd try to do. Draco liked Snape, but this was war and his parent's lives were in his hands.

He pushed himself back from the cabinet and opened it again, looking into the musty wooden interior. "Why won't you work?" he asked. His voice was muffled by the towers of forgotten things around him. Books and nick nacks, old junk stuffed into a ever-expanding room that hid away the garbage of hundreds of Hogwarts students and staff. Draco had spent four months in the room trying to make the cabinet work now, and nothing he did worked. He had been given instructions on how to get it running again, how to make it transport people from one place to another, but they hadn't worked. After the first month, he'd tossed them aside and begun doing his own research and experiments.

It was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. His grades were slipping. He'd quit the Quidditch team. Potter was bloody stalking him, and maybe breaking the git's nose had been a bad move, but he'd deserved it. Greg and Vince were going to start having gender identity crises if he didn't figure this out quickly so they could stop turning into girls for him.

Draco kicked the stupid fucking cabinet and tried another charm meant to fascilitate ease of transportation. Something deep within the wood of the cabinet clicked and hummed to life. Draco blinked at it, unable to believe what he was hearing, and then scrambled for his bag, pulling out the apple he'd brought along to keep his energy up.

He placed the apple in the cabinet and closed the door, holding his breath as he counted slowly to thirty and then opened it again.

There was no apple.

Draco laughed, wanting to hug the fucking cabinet. He felt dizzy with the joy of it. He'd made something work. For once, something had gone right. Draco closed the door again, and after another count of thirty yanked it open and reached down to pick the apple up. He shined it on his cloak, looking it over for any sign of a flaw, and then bit into it. In his relief, he sat in the empty space inside the fucking cabinet, careful to keep the door open, and closed his eyes as he savoured the tart flavour of the apple in his mouth.

Draco leaned back and then found himself suddenly, inexplicably, falling backwards. His eyes snapped open and he reached out to grab the edge of the cabinet, but there was nothing there, only darkness and the feeling of air rushing past him. He fell for a long time, wondering what he'd managed to fuck up this time, and then just as suddenly as the fall had started, it stopped, and Draco's back hit the door of a cabinet identical to the one he'd been trying to fix in the Room of Requirement and he tumbled out into the middle of a shop.

It took him a moment to recognize it as Borgin and Burke's. It was cleaner than he was used to and brighter somehow, although it was dark outside in Knockturn Alley, and instead of Borgin standing behind the shop counter, there was a very handsome young man not much older than Draco himself.

Draco blinked at the other boy, feeling a bit dazed, and then sat up and ran a hand through his ruffled blond hair, wishing he wasn't dressed in his rumpled Hogwarts uniform shirt and tie, with not even his robes or sweater on to give him some ounce of dignity after falling out of a cabinet. "Who are you?"