"Well?" As was his habit, Draco had his hands folded behind his head, lying on his back in the grass beneath the great oak by the Black Lake.
The dappled shade of the canopy fell across his face, but Hermione could read his expression perfectly well regardless. It was insufferably self-satisfied.
A week had passed since the end-of-year examinations, and today was the day results were posted.
Draco had extracted a promise from her, some months ago, that she would tell him how she'd done. She had agreed to it at the time, and she was now deeply regretting it.
"Well," she said, and stopped.
He waited, unhurried, peering up at her through half-closed eyes.
In the thick June sunlight, with her hair escaping in every direction and her expression somewhere between aggrieved and unwilling, she looked like a cat that had been woken from an extremely good nap and was still deciding whether to make someone pay for it. Draco observed this from behind his eyelashes with great composure.
"Don't look so pleased with yourself," Hermione said. She crouched down beside him, bringing herself to eye level, and levelled her best threatening look at his unfairly serene face. "The difference isn't that significant. And it won't last. You'll have to tell me eventually."
"You're welcome to try." The corner of his mouth curved upward — slowly, without any apparent effort — into a smile that was genuinely, fully his. "But never underestimate a Malfoy's ability to keep a secret."
Hermione found, to her own irritation, that she could not maintain the threatening look.
She had seen him smile perhaps three or four times across the entire year, not counting the polished social performance he put on for professors. This was not that. This was the real one — the rare, unguarded version that reached his eyes and did something complicated to his whole face. She had first seen it after the flying lesson, and she had not forgotten it.
It was very difficult to stay cross with someone who smiled like that.
She stood, straightened her robes with dignity, and turned to leave. Then stopped.
"Will you write to me over the holidays?" she asked, without turning around. Her tone made it clear this was a perfectly ordinary question and she was entirely indifferent to the answer.
The answer, in fact, mattered more to her than she was going to admit to anyone.
He sat up.
He considered her — the set of her shoulders, the studied neutrality she was projecting toward the middle distance, the way she was waiting without quite looking like she was waiting.
"When I have time," he said, with an easy yawn. "I'm a very busy person."
Hermione turned back just long enough to give him a look that conveyed the full depth of her opinion of him, and then she left, walking with great purpose toward the castle.
He lay back down.
After a moment, he smiled again — briefly, privately — at the underside of the oak leaves.
---
The smile didn't last.
His mind moved, as it always did when he let his guard down, back to the problem that had occupied him since Christmas.
The Grey Lady had been, at last, sufficiently persuaded to be useful. According to her, three things were capable of destroying a Horcrux: the sword of Godric Gryffindor, Fiendfyre, or basilisk venom. All three presented significant practical difficulties. The sword's current whereabouts were unclear — the Grey Lady believed it had not yet come into anyone's possession, which meant it had surfaced in recent years and Dumbledore had likely secured it, probably in his office. Fiendfyre was among the most dangerous dark fire curses known, nearly impossible to control and famously difficult to extinguish — if the counter-curse existed in written form, Draco hadn't found it. And basilisk venom required a basilisk, which brought him to the problem he was least prepared to think about.
The Chamber of Secrets would be opened next year. He was almost certain of it.
He remembered, from a life he had largely preferred not to revisit, the general outline of events: a Weasley girl taken into the Chamber, students and the castle cat Petrified, Potter and Weasley going in to retrieve her and coming back alive with a story no one entirely believed. He had not cared, at the time, about the details. He had been too occupied with other things, and the Chamber had been Slytherin business in a way that felt private.
He was paying attention now.
What he knew: the basilisk's gaze killed outright if met directly. Those who had been Petrified had survived only because they had encountered its reflection, or seen it indirectly. That was luck, not design, and he could not rely on the same luck applying twice.
And Hermione had been among those Petrified.
He closed his eyes briefly.
The scratches on Hermione Granger's arms, from something else entirely, in a different year, were already a memory he carried like a splinter he couldn't reach. He was not going to add to that catalogue if he could prevent it.
He should tell her something. He should find a way to warn her without explaining how he knew. He should also begin brewing Mandrake Restorative Draught in advance — Professor Sprout's Mandrakes were still juvenile, but they would be mature by next spring.
There was still far too little he actually knew. He needed to get into the Restricted Section again.
He sat up, brushed the grass from his robes with genuine reluctance, and went to the library.
---
The library in the week after examinations was almost peaceful. The upper-year students who had been living in it since April were gone — sleeping, celebrating, doing anything other than reading. Only Madam Pince remained, working her way along a far shelf with a feather duster and an air of proprietary satisfaction.
Draco went directly to the Restricted Section.
He spent some time with a dark-stained volume that whispered at him, decided against it, and then made the error of opening a large black-and-silver tome that immediately began to scream. He shut it, shoved it back, and stood for a moment pressing his fingers to his temples.
He moved further along the row and found what he was after: an old library volume, yellowed at the edges, that covered beasts and serpents in the kind of detail that suggested its author had spent considerable time in dangerous company.
He flipped through to the relevant section.
Basilisk. King of serpents. Capable of extraordinary size and age. Hatched from a toad-incubated egg. Lethal gaze — direct eye contact fatal. Spiders flee from it. The crowing of a rooster is enough to kill it.
Lethal gaze, lethal venom, centuries of accumulated size.
He read through the entry twice, then tucked the volume under his arm.
"Draco."
He turned.
Potter and Weasley were standing at the end of the row, wearing the expressions of people who had been moving stealthily and had nevertheless been caught.
"Potter. Weasley." He looked at them. "Why are you in the library? It's a fine day."
"You're in the library," Weasley pointed out, reasonably.
Draco had no adequate response to this.
"Hermione said you might be here," Potter said. He smiled — openly, a little awkwardly, as though he was about to say something he had rehearsed and was now finding more difficult than expected. "I wanted to say thank you. Properly. You've helped us a great deal this year. The troll, the Quidditch match, Quirrell — and before that, the diadem thing, and the Full Body-Bind practice, even though we ended up not needing it in the end—"
"You didn't need it because Hermione set a professor on fire," Draco said.
"Yes," Potter agreed. "She's remarkable. But you told her about Quirrell in the first place, and we might not have — well. The point is, I wanted to say thank you." He stuck out his hand. "And — look, would you just call me Harry? If you wanted to."
Draco looked at the extended hand. Then at Potter's — at Harry's — face.
In another life, this hand had never been extended. In another life, they had spent seven years treating each other as obstacles.
He shook it.
"Ron," Weasley said, beside him, slightly aggrieved at being overlooked.
"Ron," Draco said.
"Good." Harry looked visibly relieved to have the formality behind him. "Also — I've been playing Quidditch properly. Your advice about the trophy room actually helped. And we won the Cup."
The pleasant feeling of the exchange evaporated immediately.
"Gryffindor won the Quidditch Cup," Draco said flatly.
"They really did," Ron confirmed, with the face of someone who is trying not to look too happy about this while in Draco's company.
Draco thought briefly about Slytherin's captain Marcus Flint, who had destroyed three things in the common room upon receiving this news, and felt some sympathy.
"Well," Harry said, reading the situation, and beginning to back away. "We should probably—"
"Potter." Draco's composure held for approximately half a second longer, and then failed entirely. "Once I'm on the team, I am going to catch the Snitch before you every single time."
"Sure," Harry said, in a tone that was not entirely free of affection, and pulled Ron around the bookshelf at pace.
"No shouting in my library." Madam Pince materialised from somewhere nearby, feather duster raised like a wand, looking as though she had been waiting for an excuse.
Draco straightened his robes.
---
On the Hogwarts Express, somewhere between Hogwarts and London, the twins materialised in Draco's compartment with a look of shared purpose.
Fred — or George — produced a small paper bag and held it out. "Nosebleed Nougat. Still in development, but promising."
"For test purposes," the other added. "We were thinking Harry and Ron might be willing volunteers."
Draco considered the bag. "See that I'm not in the immediate vicinity when you administer it."
"Obviously," they said together.
"We're also developing a line of Skiving Snackboxes," Fred said. "Various symptoms — nosebleeds, fainting, fever, hives. Each one with an antidote built into the other half."
"So you eat the first half, present your symptoms to the teacher, and take the second half once you're out of the classroom," George finished. "Elegant."
Draco looked out of the window for a moment. "The student market for that particular product is essentially unlimited. Price it fairly and you'll have trouble keeping up with demand."
The twins exchanged a glance of appreciation.
The platform was coming into view. Through the window, Draco spotted his parents on the platform before the train had fully stopped — his father standing slightly apart from the crowd with his cane and his habitual expression of pained disdain toward everyone around him, his mother beside him, saying something with the particular quality of someone who has been waiting and has opinions about it.
Draco watched them for a moment.
Something settled quietly in his chest at the sight of them, unchanged, standing together, entirely themselves.
He gathered his trunk and made his way off the train.
"You took your time," Lucius said, by way of greeting, when Draco reached him. He reached out and took the trunk — automatically, without commentary — and transferred it to the grip of the waiting house-elf.
Narcissa took Draco's hand in both of hers and smiled the smile she reserved for him alone.
"Welcome home," she said. "We've missed you."
Draco let himself be led through the thinning crowd toward the barrier.
Outside, the summer was waiting.