"Clear." A platinum-blonde head appeared around the corner first, scanned the empty corridor outside the library, and withdrew. "Come on."
"You really don't need to do this every time," Hermione said, stepping out after him. "Statistically, the probability of encountering the basilisk specifically near the library—"
"We agreed that probability has nothing to do with this." Draco kept walking, not looking at her. "And please don't go to the library alone. Or at all, ideally, until—"
"What?" Hermione stopped walking. "I'm not abandoning the library because of a monster that may or may not appear at any time—"
"Then let me come with you. That's all I'm asking. Don't go alone." He turned around. His expression was as composed as ever, but the words had come out with more force than he had intended. "I don't think you should be walking these corridors by yourself. Shouldn't you be more careful than anyone else right now? More vigilant?"
Hermione looked at him steadily. "Should I thank you for the concern, or be offended that you're apparently certain I'm next? Why are you so fixated on me specifically? You're the one who invented this incredibly laborious corner-checking process—"
"Because you don't take it seriously enough," Draco said, falling back on the most plausible excuse he had. "I've seen you in this corridor a dozen times without using the mirror I suggested—"
"I always have the mirror. Here—" She pulled it from her pocket and held it up. "I just haven't needed to use it, because every time I come this way, you're already here, checking corners before I can."
He opened his mouth.
"It was a coincidence," he said, with slightly less conviction than he would have liked.
"I'd have to be extremely dim to believe that." She looked at him for a moment longer, then put the mirror away. Something about her expression had softened. "You're being absurd, you know."
"I'm being practical."
"You're being absurd," she said again, but quietly, and without heat.
She fell into step beside him. He didn't argue further.
She had thought about it, over recent weeks. The way he appeared whenever she was heading somewhere alone. The quick, casual glance he always managed to direct down the corridor first. The way he had positioned himself between her and the bookshelves that day at Flourish and Blotts, without her asking and without acknowledgement.
Harry and Ron never worried about whether she could manage the library by herself. They took it for granted—which she had always appreciated, because she prided herself on managing perfectly well.
And yet.
There was something in being looked after, even irritatingly, even when it was unnecessary. Something in the knowledge that someone had noticed her specifically—not as a useful study partner or a reliable source of answers, but as a person worth the trouble of following to a library.
She kept this thought to herself.
"I must say," she said, as they passed a stone statue in an alcove, "I'm not frightened. Not in the way you seem to think. I'm not some fragile—"
Something lunged from behind the statue.
Draco's hand shot out and pulled her sharply behind him. He turned on the boil-covered face of Fred Weasley with an expression of cold fury.
"For Merlin's sake," Draco said. "Must you do that to everyone you pass?"
"We were actually looking for you," Fred said cheerfully, entirely unbothered, throwing an arm around Draco's shoulders. "Hermione was incidental."
George had appeared from the other side of the statue, equally boil-ridden. Hermione, heart still hammering, emerged from behind Draco and turned on him.
"George—honestly—"
"Sorry," George said, grinning at her with the particular unrepentance of someone who has never once meant an apology. "You alright?"
"I wasn't scared," Hermione said immediately, and then, remembering she had just been pressed against Draco's back: "I just didn't react in time." She straightened her robes. "George, never mind me—have you thought about Ginny? She's been crying on and off for weeks. The last thing she needs is you two jumping out at her from behind statues."
George had the grace to look slightly abashed. "She actually seemed better last time—"
"She's thirteen and frightened, and she's not finding it funny." Hermione gave him a look. "Think about it."
Meanwhile, Draco had moved slightly apart from the group, and Fred had dropped his voice.
"The rat," Fred said, in the tone of someone delivering a disappointing progress report.
"Still no luck?"
"He takes it everywhere. We had the perfect moment last Tuesday and Ron had it stuffed in his front pocket the entire time." Fred shook his head. "He's completely devoted to that ugly thing."
Draco looked at the floor. Peter Pettigrew, living in a boy's front pocket and eating off the food trolley for twelve years, was not an image he could make peace with.
"Keep trying," he said quietly. "We just need one moment when Ron's attention is elsewhere."
"Obviously," Fred said. "We are the foremost authorities on exploiting moments of inattention."
He raised an eyebrow that said this went without saying.
They said goodbye to the twins, who retreated behind their statue with visible satisfaction, and continued down the corridor.
"Any progress on the translation?" Hermione asked, once they were safely around the next corner.
"Some." He held the door to the private study for her. "I've been looking at the section on hatching."
They settled into their usual places. The fire was going, and the room was warm. Hermione pulled the translated parchment toward her and read the relevant lines with an expression of deep displeasure.
"A cockerel's egg, hatched by a toad," she said. "That is genuinely revolting." She pushed the parchment slightly away from her. "I can't work out the biological logic of it at all."
"I don't think there's a Muggle equivalent." Draco looked at the relevant passage. "The conditions must be extraordinarily specific. Given that no one has managed to breed a basilisk in living memory, the method must fail far more often than it succeeds."
"Or succeed only once and then the basilisk lives for a thousand years," Hermione said. "Which would make controlled breeding beside the point."
Draco looked at her. "That's—yes. That's actually a reasonable explanation for why Herpo only ever needed to do it once."
Hermione made a quiet sound of satisfaction at having arrived at the correct answer, which she always did and which he had stopped finding annoying some time ago.
From the other side of the bookshelf, voices drifted in.
"—only Muggle-borns being attacked, and Justin is proof of that—"
Draco recognised the voice. Ernie Macmillan, who had the conversational instincts of a town crier and the discretion of a town noticeboard.
"Who's doing terrible things?" a girl's voice asked.
"Think about it, Hannah. Pure-bloods aren't being touched. The Slytherin students are the least—"
"That's right, I heard someone from Slytherin called Hermione Granger a Mudblood at the Duelling Club—"
"That's absolutely foul. No decent wizard would say that—"
Draco stopped looking at the parchment.
He heard, from just beside him, a small, very quiet sound—and then silence. He turned his head.
Hermione had sat back from the bookshelf. She was looking at her own hands, very still, in a way that had nothing to do with composure.
She collected herself quickly. It was only a moment. But he had seen it.
"Are you alright?" he asked, keeping his voice even.
"Fine." She picked up a book.
She wasn't. He could see it in the set of her shoulders, in the careful blankness of her expression. The kind of careful blankness that people wore when they were holding something down.
He had seen it before—in another life, when he had been the one putting it there.
The name had been his to give, the first time. He had chosen it with full knowledge of what it was, knowing exactly what it meant to be called that, knowing she would hear it in a corridor or at the dinner table or across the classroom, and knowing she could not answer back without making it worse. He had considered that calculation and made it anyway.
He had been twelve, and arrogant, and jealous of how easily she did everything, and he had had no better weapon.
He was not going to say any of that to her now. It would not help her; it would only be a confession that served his own conscience. She didn't need it.
What she needed was considerably harder to give.
"The people who use that word," he said carefully, "have been raised to see a distinction between magical heritage and ability. Slytherin families especially—it's in the founding philosophy of the House, and it's something children absorb before they're old enough to question it." He paused. "I was raised to believe it too."
Hermione looked at him.
"I don't anymore," he said.
A beat.
"You're exceptional," he said, flat and factual, because sentiment would make it easy to dismiss. "You brewed Polyjuice Potion in second year. That's not first-year Potions, or even third-year. You're ahead of people twice your age in Charms, in Transfiguration, in Arithmancy—" He stopped himself before the list became excessive. "The word has nothing to do with any of that. The people who use it say more about themselves than about the person they're directing it at."
Hermione's eyes had gone bright. She looked down at her hands.
"I know," she said, very quietly. "I know it shouldn't matter."
"It does matter," Draco said. "It would matter to anyone."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she pressed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, drew a breath, and straightened.
"I looked it up," she said, in a voice that was almost steady. "When I first heard it. Dirty blood. Inferior blood." She set down her book. "It means that regardless of anything I do, regardless of how hard I work or how much I know—to some people I'll always be less than."
"To some people," Draco said. "Not to—" He stopped.
She looked at him.
He looked away.
"Not to everyone," he finished.
She was still looking at him. That considering expression she got when she was working something out and not yet ready to put it into words.
He reached into his bag, set a pale grey handkerchief on the desk between them without comment, and looked back at the parchment.
After a moment, she picked it up.
He did not look at her while she collected herself. He pretended to read.
When she spoke again, her voice had steadied.
"I haven't congratulated you properly on the last match," she said. "Catching the Snitch despite everything that happened. Harry said even before the Bludger you'd been brilliant." She paused. "He meant it."
Draco absorbed this.
"The next match," he said, after a moment—and then hesitated, feeling suddenly uncertain in a way that didn't have much to do with Quidditch. "Slytherin versus Ravenclaw. Will you—" He stopped. "Would you come? The stands won't be particularly welcoming for anyone who cheers for Slytherin at the moment."
It was a more direct request than he had intended. He did not particularly want to examine why it mattered to him whether she was there.
"Of course," Hermione said immediately.
He looked up.
Her eyes were still bright—the kind of bright that came from recent tears, not current ones—and she was smiling at him, simply and without qualification, across the spread of translated parchment and borrowed dictionaries and Herpo's ancient cramped script.
"Of course I'll come," she said.