Just as Draco returned to the Slytherin dormitory—chocolate muffin in hand, quietly relieved that Mr. Filch and his wretched cat had not caught him out of bounds—Potter and his friends were getting themselves into serious trouble.
The following morning, Draco had little appetite. He helped himself to a small bowl of porridge and settled into his usual seat.
Blaise Zabini dropped down beside him, barely concealing his delight. "Look at the Gryffindor hourglass! They've lost a full hundred and fifty points."
He reached across and gave Pansy Parkinson a gleeful high five. "Courtesy of Hero Potter, Granger the show-off, and that dopey-looking Longbottom."
Pansy laughed. "I heard they ran into Mrs. Norris near the Astronomy Tower last night. Filch caught them red-handed."
The Astronomy Tower.
Of course. They must have been sending Hagrid's illegal dragon up to one of the Weasley brothers from the battlements.
He had suspected as much weeks ago. When he noticed Hagrid—who almost never visited the library—lurking in the Restricted Section, something had clearly been afoot. One glance at the title tucked under the gamekeeper's enormous arm—Raising Dragons for Pleasure and Profit—and the rest had been easy enough to deduce.
If there was a single point of common ground between the rough-and-tumble gamekeeper and Draco Malfoy, it was an undeniable weakness for dragons. Which young wizard hadn't dreamed of owning one?
He could understand Hagrid, to a degree.
But keeping a fire-breathing dragon in a small wooden cabin was never going to end well. One overly enthusiastic burst of flame and there would be nothing left of Hagrid but a char mark beside the pumpkin patch.
An indefinite arrangement was out of the question.
Under the circumstances—and given his current, cautiously civil relationship with Potter—Draco had no particular desire to inform on anyone. His plan had been to feign ignorance and wait for them to move the creature on of their own accord.
He simply hadn't anticipated they would manage to get caught without any help from him at all. Mrs. Norris had done the job perfectly well on her own.
Which raised an obvious question: didn't Potter have an Invisibility Cloak?
Priceless, irreplaceable, a family heirloom—and the boy apparently had no idea how to use it properly.
Draco's mood, already somewhat flat, soured further.
Had he been anywhere near the Astronomy Tower, he might have considered intervening. But he hadn't been near the Astronomy Tower in weeks. He had been spending his evenings pacing the corridors around Ravenclaw Tower, making fruitless attempts to engage the Grey Lady in conversation, only to watch her glide serenely away each time.
His investigation into the diadem had stalled completely, and it was making him irritable.
Even the sight of Slytherin's hourglass—comfortably full compared to the other three—did nothing to lift his spirits.
He was still moodily working through his porridge when a chorus of clapping and whistling broke out near the entrance to the Great Hall. Several Slytherin students were calling across cheerfully: "Thank you, Potter! You've done us a magnificent favour!"
Potter was being shunned by Gryffindor.
Draco noted, over the following days, that Potter sat hunched and dejected at his table with only Weasley for company, the other students keeping a pointed distance. Longbottom fared no better—Draco occasionally spotted him hovering outside the Gryffindor common room, apparently having forgotten the password again, with no one coming to let him in.
Hermione had retreated into herself entirely. Whatever brightness her personality once had was thoroughly suppressed. She stopped volunteering answers in class, stopped offering anyone a smile. Even her characteristic eagerness had gone quiet.
Before Transfiguration one morning, Draco pushed through the crowd, walked directly to where she sat alone with her head down, and took the seat beside her.
He slid a book across the desk toward her. "Here. The one you mentioned wanting to read."
"Thank you," she said quickly and softly. She took it without looking up.
Draco studied her profile and found, to his own mild irritation, that his usual detachment was failing him.
She looked genuinely wretched. Like the most pitiable kitten in the world—the sweetest one, abandoned, without any idea it deserved better.
"Aren't you going to smile?" he asked. "After all the trouble I went to finding that."
Hermione finally looked up, visibly surprised that he had said anything. Under normal circumstances she might have responded with considerably more warmth, but at the moment all she could manage was a miserable expression. "I'm not in the mood."
"Smile anyway," Draco said, perfectly serious.
She couldn't. The corners of her mouth turned downward almost of their own accord.
He regarded her for a moment. "Fine," he said, with the air of someone making a formal ledger entry. "Hermione Granger owes Draco Malfoy one smile."
She made a dutiful attempt—a brief, tight upward twitch of the lips. Draco saw immediately that her eyes hadn't changed at all.
"A grimace doesn't count," he said.
Hermione sighed and dropped her gaze back to her book. Around her, whispers had started up.
Draco swept a cold look around the room. The staring stopped.
Hermione didn't see any of it. She had buried herself in the pages.
---
"Elizabeth, I think I understand how you feel—perhaps more than you'd expect," Hermione said one afternoon, addressing the closed door of the second-floor girls' bathroom. "They're not just mocking me. They're treating me like an enemy. It's a horrible feeling."
"Yes..." Moaning Myrtle said from behind the door. "Like being abandoned by the entire school, isn't it?"
She peered through the crack, studying Hermione's face—the same face that had seemed so bright and lively the last time she'd seen it, now drawn with frustration and misery.
In that moment, Myrtle found she could not keep lying to her.
"I have to tell you something," she said. "I actually have another name."
"I know—it's Myrtle, isn't it?" Hermione said, without heat. She was sitting on the floor, staring at the damp stone and the dim flicker of candlelight reflected in the puddles. "I asked around when I came back. There's no student named Elizabeth in Ravenclaw, and no record of an Olive Hornby. But there is a ghost in the abandoned girls' bathroom on the second floor." She paused. "I assumed that was you."
"You guessed right." Myrtle drifted through the door, her translucent form circling Hermione once with an expression of anxious pleading. "You don't want to be friends with me anymore, do you? Nobody wants to spend time with a crybaby like Myrtle..."
"You're my friend," Hermione said firmly. "What does it matter? Are living people really so much friendlier than ghosts? Look at what my own Housemates are doing to me." She forced a small smile up at the ghost. "Besides, I'd rather call you Elizabeth. It sounds like a queen."
Myrtle's entire manner changed at once. She preened shamelessly in front of the cracked, spotted mirror, her expression radiant.
Then her gaze landed on her own spectacles and the pimples on her chin, and she dissolved into a fresh wail of misery.
"Don't be sad, Hermione—you're ever so much luckier than me! You're still alive, you can wear pretty clothes, you haven't got glasses, and you haven't got spots..." She gave one last gulping sob, then plunged headfirst into the nearest toilet and vanished.
Hermione sighed, murmured "See you later" in the general direction of the cistern, and let herself out into the cold, unwelcoming corridor beyond.
The library window seat had lost its appeal—too many Gryffindors drifting past with critical eyes, and she was too raw to bear their looks. She had taken to arriving early each morning when the shelves were still quiet, collecting whatever she needed, and carrying it out to a large oak tree at the edge of the Black Lake.
The thick foliage there could easily conceal one sad, out-of-favour girl.
---
It was a day in May when Draco, taking a solitary walk along the lake's edge, came across Hermione sitting beneath the oak tree alone.
"Hermione Granger," he said, stopping a few feet away. "That smile you owe me—when do you intend to make good on it?"
She was sitting in the grass with a textbook open in her lap, looking thoroughly unenthusiastic about all of it.
"Oh, leave me alone, Draco." She shut the book with a snap. "I genuinely cannot laugh right now."
He crouched down in front of her and picked up the notebook lying beside her. "The Werewolf Code of Conduct of 1637? The history of the Elf Rebellion?" He clicked his tongue. "Aren't you overcomplicating things? I suspect even Professor Binns would concede that this is beyond first-year scope."
"Put it down and go away," Hermione said irritably. She sounded like a hedgehog whose quills had been accidentally prodded—small, sharp, and entirely on the defensive. "This has nothing to do with you."
Why was this Slytherin boy always lurking nearby like an unpaid creditor? Why did he keep trying to make her smile?
Perhaps this was the moment the mask finally slipped. Perhaps he intended to mock her after all—reckless, impulsive Gryffindor that she was.
"All right," Draco said easily. He set the notebook down. But he didn't leave. He simply settled himself into the grass beside her, stretched out, and folded his hands behind his head.
"No one in this world is perfect," he said, addressing the sky above. "You don't have to be so hard on yourself."
Hermione turned to look at him. In the full spring sunlight his face was very pale, almost luminous, and the long shadow of his eyelashes lay across his cheekbone, trembling faintly—like something that might lift and vanish at any moment.
He looked entirely at ease. Unthreatening.
He had never, she realised, actually been unkind to her. He had sought her out even when she was miserable company, had tried—clumsily, with great seriousness—to make her laugh. And he appeared to mean it.
The thought that she had just snapped at him settled unpleasantly.
"I'm sorry, Draco." She lowered her head and pressed her fingers to her eyes. "I shouldn't have spoken to you like that. You've never been anything but kind to me."
"It's fine," he said. "I understand how it feels. I was just as sensitive once. When the people around you turn on you, there's a very particular kind of pain to it."
"Yes," Hermione whispered. "It hurts. I hate the shame of it."
"Feeling it isn't shameful. Pain is natural. Only someone with a heart of ice doesn't feel it." There was something very quiet in his voice—the tone of someone who had learned that particular lesson the hard way.
Draco had long considered himself the person with a heart of ice. In his past life, when the Malfoy name crumbled and cold stares became a constant, he had simply frozen himself shut and learned to be numb. There had been no other way to survive.
He wondered, sometimes, how much warmth it would take to reach whatever had frozen in him.
"You're a year younger than me," Hermione said, her voice thick. "And you sound like my grandfather."
She was perceptive. He shifted his gaze to the shimmering surface of the lake.
"People forget quickly," he said. "Give it time—something else will happen, someone else will do something foolish, and the whole school will move on. It'll be easier."
Hermione was quiet for a moment. Then she lay back beside him, staring up through the canopy of leaves, wet-eyed.
"I lost fifty points," she said softly. "No one loses fifty points at once."
Draco could feel the weight of it—the particular misery of a first-year who had arrived at Hogwarts eager and earnest, only to be mocked by her own House and watched gleefully by the other three. She hadn't yet learned to mask it. That was perhaps the most painful thing about her.
"You've earned far more than fifty points for Gryffindor this year," he said. "Nearly every professor has awarded you House points for outstanding work—some more than once. If you want those fifty back, earn them back. Work harder than ever and make up the difference before term ends." He paused. "And tell Potter that wallowing won't do him any favours. He'd be better served sharpening his Quidditch. A Golden Snitch is worth a hundred and fifty points."
Hermione stared at him. He had just said more in one breath than she had heard him say in an entire afternoon.
Perhaps it was the slant of the light, but she noticed, as she looked at him, that his grey eyes seemed unusually clear today—like a stretch of still water, quiet and cool, drawing some of the sadness out of her without her quite knowing how.
A grey squirrel moved overhead and dislodged something—a pine cone came tumbling down and caught her squarely on the nose. She gasped and looked up, only to find that it was no longer a pine cone at all, but a pale pink flower, spinning slowly down to rest soft as breath across her face.
She held it up, turning it in the filtered light. It was a beautiful thing—shallow-cupped, open, the petals a very soft pink. She lifted it to her nose. The fragrance was richer and deeper than an ordinary rose, with something almost like myrrh beneath it.
She turned to the boy beside her, a smile already on her face before she had decided to smile. The curiosity was back in her eyes—that bright, particular light that had been absent for weeks.
"What is it?"
Draco slipped his wand back into his sleeve with a quiet satisfaction. "A rose variety from the gardens at Malfoy Manor. The groundskeepers call it 'Gentle Hermione.' I thought it might suit you."
"Oh—" She looked at the flower, then back at him, half-laughing despite herself. "Of course I like it. Though it isn't fair, Draco—your Transfiguration is extraordinary and you know it. I read the theory, but you simply do it. That wandwork, so fluid and natural... I envy it tremendously."
"That's only because I grew up around magic," he said, getting to his feet and brushing grass from his robes. "You've had less than a year of formal instruction and you're already ahead of most of your year. You'll surpass me soon enough."
He gazed out over the Black Lake, still and dark in the afternoon light, and his expression grew distant.
He knew what he knew because he had lived through things she could not imagine—dark, suffocating, airless things. He would have given a great deal to be an oblivious first-year with no knowledge of any of it.
"Hermione," he said, turning. "I need to ask you something."
"All right." She was already getting to her feet. Before she had quite found her balance, he extended a hand.
She took it without hesitation. He pulled her upright—she stumbled slightly and nearly pitched forward—and then he let go at once, as though the contact had startled him, and clasped his hands behind his back.
It had startled him. He had acted before thinking, again. He was doing that more often lately.
In another life, she would never have taken his hand. She certainly would not have looked at him the way she had just looked at him.
But in this life, without his quite noticing when it had happened, he had grown accustomed to reaching out to her. And she had grown accustomed to letting him.
"You can refuse," he said, his voice carefully even. "Whatever I'm about to ask—you're under no obligation."
"Refuse what?" She looked confused.
"The favour. You can say no," he said.
"I already said yes," Hermione replied, studying him with faint exasperation. "Do you actually want me to agree or not?"
"I do. But I have to warn you—there is some risk involved." He hesitated. He didn't want to draw her into this. She ought to be somewhere safe and comfortable, free to do as she pleased.
But he had no one else he could trust, and the task required two. Potter, Longbottom, or Hermione—those were his options. Of the three, Hermione Granger, with her precision and natural talent for spellwork, was the obvious choice.
"Will you be there with me?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Then I agree." A flicker of curiosity crossed her face. "Tell me what it is, exactly."
"The body-binding curse I mentioned before—Petrificus Totalus," Draco said. "You need to have it fully mastered before we go. That's not negotiable."
Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it. Her expression shifted from curious to determined.
He had expected that.