Draco did not reappear until Thursday morning.
Free of the Horcrux's influence, he had slept properly for the first time in over a month. The bone-deep fatigue that had been pressing on him since August had finally lifted.
It was a Potions lesson — a joint session for Gryffindor and Slytherin. Students had arrived early and were chattering around the workbenches in the underground classroom, sorting their ingredients for the lesson ahead. When Draco appeared in the doorway, the room went conspicuously quiet for about three seconds.
He looked calmly at the cluster of staring Gryffindors, who immediately looked elsewhere and resumed their conversations with great enthusiasm, and walked to an empty bench.
Hermione came toward him from the other end of the classroom as though she intended to hug him.
Draco waited with his hands at his sides, quite prepared for this. At the last moment, she stopped, hesitated, and extended a hand for him to shake instead.
He raised an eyebrow — he had no idea what had suddenly made her so formal — but shook it obligingly.
A faint current passed between their palms.
Hermione had decided a handshake would sidestep whatever strange feeling a hug produced. It did not. Her heart rate was misbehaving regardless.
Suppressing the turbulence, she managed a smile at the apparently oblivious cause of it. "Draco, you're back!"
Draco thought she was simply behaving oddly today. He was in a good mood — well-rested for once — and let it pass with a nod and a smile.
Hermione relaxed, tucked her inexplicably tingling hand behind her back, and said, "I'd better get back to my bench."
"Stay — there's no one beside me," he said cheerfully.
"I can't, I'm sorry. Neville's struggling with the last two lessons and he's terrified of being punished by Professor Snape." She glanced sideways and made her escape.
Draco watched her go. *Neville Longbottom.* He squinted across the room at the boy, who was already knocking ingredients off the bench, and felt something in his chest stir with mild irritation.
"Merlin's beard!" Ron appeared beside him, dropping onto the stool and clapping him on the shoulder with a wide grin. "I knew you'd be fine!"
"What exactly is going on?" Draco glanced at the surrounding Gryffindors and asked coolly, "Why are they looking at me as though I've come back from the dead?"
"You missed all of yesterday, and the rumours went absolutely wild. Some said Pettigrew had kidnapped you, some said the Dementors had got you — Fred and George even opened a betting pool in the Gryffindor common room. Odds of you coming back alive were five to one." Ron's voice drifted from excited to slightly careful as Draco's expression darkened. "Not — that I think it means anything—"
"Did you buy in?" Draco gave him a sharp look.
"Just a little. To show I wasn't worried," Ron said, blinking.
"Did you win?"
"Obviously," Ron said, grinning.
"You're welcome," Draco said, with cold sarcasm.
"Don't be angry. We were all worried, that's the thing — we only bought because we couldn't stand people spreading those rumours, so we put our Galleons where our mouths were." Ron paused. "And it wasn't only me doing something stupid. Hermione got into an argument with Lavender after Lavender said she thought you were the one Trelawney had been going on about — the one who'd 'leave us forever.'"
Draco stared at him. "What?"
He turned and found her through the crowd — standing at the next bench, helping Neville with a brass scale, her lips pressed together in concentration.
It was difficult to picture someone as even-tempered as Hermione arguing with anyone — anyone except perhaps him, in a different lifetime.
In that other life, she had always come to settle scores with him, cold and sharp, because he had made things difficult for the people she cared about. She had never once backed down. She kept everyone she loved safe under her wing — Potter, the Weasleys, Longbottom, Hagrid, house-elves, even hippogriffs — and she had fought him every time he stepped near any of them.
But that had been a different him.
Now she had fought someone else, for him.
Draco watched her reach up to pin back her hair with a spare hairpin, and felt, unexpectedly, a warm and slightly unreasonable happiness settle in his chest.
She had broken her own rule for him. She had got angry on his behalf.
*Reason* told him he should not find any pleasure in the fact that she'd been upset. He found it anyway.
"Is she alright?" he asked, still watching her.
"Oh, Lavender apologised quickly and they made up. She's fine — still up early and back late, though, I can't figure out what she's always busy with." Ron waved a hand dismissively.
Draco looked back at her. She had finished weighing the ingredients and was now absently touching a fine gold chain at her neck, running it back and forth between her fingers.
"Oi — come back," Ron said, waving a hand in front of his face.
Draco turned with mild annoyance. "What?"
"Business! Harry told us — quietly — about yesterday morning. Fawkes grabbed him by the collar of his pyjamas and dragged him to the Headmaster's office, then he had to speak Parseltongue to some locket..." Ron looked around and dropped his voice, freckles flushed with excitement.
"Yes — thanks to Harry," Draco said. "Where is he, anyway?"
"School hospital. Visiting Sirius again," Ron said.
Draco nodded. Sirius appeared to have been seriously hurt during the destruction of the locket. Harry had been going to see him at every opportunity.
"Do you know what that locket actually was?" Ron asked, leaning in.
"A Dark object from Grimmauld Place. They sorted through a great many similar things during the summer. I expect that's how Sirius was injured," Draco said easily, giving away nothing.
"That's exactly what Sirius said! I was hoping you'd give me something more interesting!" Ron clicked his tongue.
Draco was quietly surprised. Sirius Black had told precisely the same story, without revealing a single word more to his own godson. That required more restraint than Draco would have credited him with.
As the lesson was about to begin, more students streamed into the Potions classroom in waves of silver-green and scarlet-gold. Harry arrived just in time, sliding into place beside Draco.
"How's your godfather?" Draco asked, setting out his beakers and stirring rods.
"Not well," Harry said.
"He'll recover. Have some faith in Madam Pomfrey," Draco said.
They didn't have time for more. Professor Snape swept in with his usual thunderous presence, face dark, and informed the class that they would be brewing a Shrinking Solution today.
While Draco weighed out his armadillo bile and dandelion root, Snape descended on Longbottom. "Orange, Longbottom — tell me, what could possibly penetrate that thick skull of yours—"
*See?* Draco thought, peeling a fig with great precision. *No matter how much she hovers, that idiot will always find a way to draw Snape's attention.* He glanced sideways at Hermione without meaning to.
"Please, sir — I can help Neville correct it—" Her voice, clear and earnest.
"I don't recall asking you to demonstrate, Miss Granger," Snape said coldly.
Even from across the room, Draco could see the flush climb her face. Snape had never spoken to her that way when she brewed at his bench. He pressed his lips together and looked back at his own cauldron.
She wasn't going to be deterred, of course. The word *give up* had no entry in Hermione Granger's personal dictionary. She was already back at Neville's side, guiding him through the next step, the back of her head turned squarely toward Draco.
*Wake up, Hermione Granger.* He chopped his daisy roots with rather more force than necessary, listening with half an ear to what was happening on her side of the room.
From further along the benches came Seamus Finnigan's voice: "This morning's *Prophet* — someone spotted Pettigrew — a Muggle rang the hotline, out in Dufftown—"
"That's not far from here," a Gryffindor girl said, alarmed.
*Here we go.* A shadow crossed Draco's face. Another dubious sighting, another wave of whispers.
"If he comes, let him come." Harry hacked at a daisy root with considerably more aggression than required, reducing it to a crooked mess. "I'd rather duel him myself."
Draco was about to say something when he caught Professor Snape's expression from the corner of his eye and thought better of it. He turned back to his cauldron:
Peeled fig as the base — chopped daisy roots — thinly sliced caterpillar—
Snape was already moving toward their bench. He stopped in front of Harry and looked down at him along his long nose, a thin, unpleasant smile forming beneath the curtain of black hair.
"What I just overheard... a young, brave, hot-blooded fool, eager to throw his life away... how very stirring," he said, in a voice like slow poison.
Harry went very still and focused on his chopping.
*Best rat spleen — in along the edge of the cauldron — counter-clockwise—*
"Look at me when I am speaking to you, Potter." Snape's voice snapped like a whip. "Or has no one taught you the basic courtesy of making eye contact?"
Harry looked up, and found Snape staring into his eyes with fixed, searching intensity.
"You would do well to conduct yourself appropriately," Snape said after a moment, his voice dropping to something quietly threatening. "Otherwise, the Hogwarts Express will be sending you home before you have the chance to duel anyone."
*Leech juice — one small drop — watch the solution—*
Draco turned the flame to low and glanced at Harry from the corner of his eye. Harry was staring at Snape with barely leashed fury, jaw tight.
Then he looked down. "Yes, sir."
"Very good, Potter." Snape moved away. He passed Draco's bench and paused. "The potion is coming along well, Draco."
He swept on, robes billowing. As he passed, Draco caught the faint scent clinging to them — the sharp, particular smell of Wolfsbane Potion. He recognised it from Slughorn's workroom.
So Snape was still brewing it for Lupin, despite his open display of contempt at the opening feast. Draco turned this over. Setting aside the question of whether Snape felt any gratitude toward Lupin — which, given the evidence, he clearly did not — there was no one else in the castle capable of brewing Wolfsbane at that standard. Not counting himself and Hermione, who were years away from attempting it. Snape was doing it because it was necessary, and he would go on doing it, regardless of how he felt.
From across the room came a sharp spike of colour in Hermione's cheeks. Snape had just deducted five points from Gryffindor for what he described as "unsolicited interference" — and Neville's toad, which she had successfully restored from tadpole form, sat blinking on the bench in front of her.
"I told her," Draco said, more to himself than to Harry.
"Snape's so unfair to her," Harry muttered. "He always targets us — it makes no sense." He paused, then said, in a slightly different tone: "Although, I keep thinking about how he knew my mother. How he still tries to look into my eyes like that."
Draco glanced at him. "I know. He can't help it. Your eyes are your mother's eyes."
Snape, standing on the far side of the room with Longbottom's freshly-restored toad in one hand, turned sharply — sensing, apparently, that he was being watched, but unable to locate the source. He scanned the class, found nothing amiss, set the toad down with a small sound of displeasure, and moved on.
---
When Potions ended, Draco deliberately slowed his pace to let Hermione catch up.
Instead, she appeared from directly ahead of him, slightly out of breath, saying something to Harry and Ron. He caught a glimpse through the half-open flap of her bag: at least a dozen large books, crammed in with the rest of her things.
That was not leisure reading.
Hermione noticed him looking. She gave him a quick nod and walked briskly toward the Great Hall.
"Don't you think she's hiding something?" Ron murmured to Harry as the group moved off.
*Obviously.* Draco settled at the Slytherin table and watched her across the room. She was eating a strawberry with the focused contentment of someone whose mind was already elsewhere. He would bet anything it was connected to whatever timetabling secret McGonagall had told her.
After lunch, the students headed to Defence Against the Dark Arts.
Professor Lupin arrived looking exactly as he had on the train — tired, shabbily dressed, his old briefcase held together by hope alone. The Slytherin contingent were unimpressed, and a ripple of muttering moved through the group.
Crabbe and Goyle, however, said nothing.
Draco looked at them with genuine surprise.
"He drove off the Dementor, didn't he?" Crabbe said, with the careful respect of someone who has decided an assessment merits revision. "He's not useless."
"And he doesn't look like someone who drowns you in textbooks," Goyle added.
This turned out to be accurate. Lupin told the class to put their textbooks away.
"Today's lesson is practical. You'll only need your wands," he said pleasantly.
Practical lessons were something of a rarity — the last one had ended with Hermione Stunning a Cornish Pixie and the classroom looking like a small tornado had passed through. The students followed Lupin with a mixture of curiosity and caution, watching him neatly neutralise a troublesome Peeves on the way, and eventually filed into a staff lounge full of mismatched chairs and a particularly active wardrobe.
The lesson was on Boggarts.
Hermione was at her most luminous in this kind of class — giving a crisp, correct, complete answer about Boggarts before Lupin had quite finished the question — and earned his warm praise.
Draco watched her bouncing slightly on her toes with enthusiasm, and registered, with a faint flicker of irritation he couldn't entirely explain, that she had somehow got to Harry's side without him noticing.
What followed was predictable. Neville transformed the Boggart into a version of Professor Snape wearing his grandmother's clothes — towering hat, enormous handbag, moth-eaten lace — and the Gryffindors collapsed into laughter.
The Slytherins did not laugh.
Neither did Draco.
He looked at Lupin coldly. The man relied on Snape for his Wolfsbane Potion — relied on him entirely, month after month. And this was how he repaid it. Whether Lupin had designed this particular exercise to humiliate Snape or whether it had simply happened, Draco found he had no patience for it.
He watched the queue move forward, student by student, each facing their personal fear and dispatching it. When it was nearly his turn, he stepped behind Theodore Nott and let several students move ahead of him, placing himself last in line.
He had no intention of letting his Boggart appear in public. What he feared most was too private for a classroom exercise.
*What is Draco's Boggart?*
In his other life, it had been his father — Lucius, white with cold fury, his disappointment loud enough to fill a room. The discovery had been made during a third-year examination, and it had seemed entirely logical at the time. His father's anger had been the governing fact of his childhood.
That was no longer true. He had broken free of that fear along with everything else from that life. His father's opinion had ceased to be the thing he built himself around.
What he feared now was closer to losing them — not their disappointment, but their absence. That was different.
Was it Voldemort, then? Voldemort had brought suffering to his family and to the entire wizarding world, had tortured and killed in Malfoy Manor while Draco stood and watched. There was certainly something that lived in Draco when he thought about those memories — something that might be called fear, though it was tainted so thoroughly with disgust that it was difficult to name cleanly.
If he was honest with himself, the thing he feared most was—
He let the thought go. He wouldn't be called. According to what he remembered of this lesson, Lupin would stop the exercise when Harry stepped forward, and the Boggart would be banished to laughter and applause.
The Boggart had settled into the shape of a silvery full moon — Lupin's own fear — and was dismissed.
---
"He seems like a good teacher," Hermione said beside him, as the class gathered their things.
Draco started slightly. He had not heard her approach.
*This girl is getting quieter by the day.*
"When did you—" he began, then changed course. "Then your Boggart would become Professor McGonagall announcing that you'd failed all your exams."
"It would not!" Hermione turned pink, puffing her cheeks out. "And you? What does Draco Malfoy fear most?"
"Perhaps you," he said, with a deadpan expression and a shadow crossing his pale face. "In which case I'd rather never meet a Boggart."
She stared at him.
"Draco." Her voice went quiet and very serious. "I don't appreciate that kind of joke. It isn't funny."
She pushed the classroom door open and walked out as the bell rang, without looking back.
"Why is she angry with me?" Draco asked Crabbe and Goyle, watching her go with genuine bewilderment. "I wasn't lying."
Crabbe and Goyle offered him two identical blank grins and nothing useful whatsoever.
---
In the second practical lesson, Lupin led the class down into the castle dungeons to deal with a Red Cap infestation — ugly little creatures who haunted sites of bloodshed and were, as it turned out, both aggressive and highly inconvenienced by a well-aimed *Flipendo*.
"Stay alert — they could appear anywhere!" Lupin called cheerfully at the entrance, watching his students begin to scatter.
Draco spotted one lunging for Hermione from behind a pillar and sent it flying into the wall with a swish of his wand.
"Hermione. I take back what I said in Defence, alright?"
She looked at the stunned Red Cap on the floor, still slightly shaken. "Alright. I suppose you did just save my life."
He thought things were restored to normal. They weren't.
She was still cautious around him in a way she hadn't been before — warm when he was in front of her, but not quite seeking him out the way she used to. Given a choice of partners, she would gravitate toward someone who needed more help first. Longbottom was still her first instinct, the denser he was the better, as though she were deliberately choosing the option furthest from Draco.
He couldn't understand what he had done.
---
In the third Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson, Lupin took the class to the shallows beside the Black Lake to practise against Grindylows.
When Hermione's group was called forward, she waded in without hesitation. Draco glanced at Neville — hovering at the bank, face rigid with misgiving — and gave him a long, level stare.
"Go to the next group, Longbottom."
Neville blinked, stammered something in the affirmative, and retreated.
"Why did you come down here?" Hermione had walked several steps before she looked behind her and realised her partner had changed.
"Longbottom wouldn't go in," Draco said, wading in after her. "Is that a problem?"
"Of course not." She blinked, standing calf-deep in the lake, feeling oddly off-balance.
"How did you manage to fix Neville's Shrinking Solution last lesson?" he asked, watching her expression settle, and a Grindylow arrowed toward her through the water — he kicked it firmly sideways and caught her by the arm to pull her clear. "The one that was far too acidic."
"Oh—" She recovered, snatched a small cucumber from her pocket with her name scratched into the skin, and tossed it to the Grindylow, which immediately veered away to investigate it. "He'd simply added too much. I calculated the proportions to neutralise the acid and then diluted the whole thing — adjusted the other ingredients in equal measure to compensate—"
"From memory? Without parchment?" He pressed down firmly on the distracted Grindylow's head, which sank into the lake with a disgruntled writhing. "Those proportions have to be exact."
"Yes," she said, as if this were unremarkable.
He thought, not for the first time, that her talent for numerical precision was genuinely extraordinary, and that she had absolutely no idea how extraordinary it was.
"And you still had time to finish your own potion," he said, as he waded back toward the bank, pulling her up beside him. "And still earned an Outstanding."
She shrugged, already looking past him toward Professor Lupin, who was shouting congratulations from the opposite bank.
---
By mid-September, Professor Lupin's threadbare robes had ceased to be anyone's primary concern. The practical focus of his lessons had won over even the most sceptical students — though the lessons continued to have one consistent victim: Professor Snape.
The story of the Boggart-dressed-as-Snape had spread through the entirety of Hogwarts, reaching portraits and suits of armour in forgotten corridors. In apparent retaliation, Snape intensified his targeting of Neville in Potions class, and made Hermione — Neville's most visible supporter — his secondary target.
"You're making things worse, not better," Draco told her, when he managed to corner her in Care of Magical Creatures. He had installed Neville firmly behind Hagrid with one look, and drawn Hermione to his own workstation before she could object. "Every time you step in, you give Snape another reason to deduct points from you."
"Shouldn't we help students who struggle?" Hermione held the flowerpot steady as Draco worked the small hawthorn sapling free. They were in the sunny clearing at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, planting saplings for the Bowtruckles who had attached themselves to the trees. "You can't dismiss someone simply because they find things difficult—"
"It isn't about difficulty. It's carelessness and inattention," Draco said. "Adding an entire box of rat spleens — too much leech juice — the steps are written in the textbook. He doesn't need more patience, he needs to actually read the instructions."
"I think Professor Snape's harshness makes Neville freeze, which makes him make worse mistakes, which gives Snape more to be harsh about. It's a cycle." She paused, tilting her head slightly. "Though — Draco, sometimes I genuinely don't understand you. You keep telling me not to waste time helping people, but whenever I'm in difficulty, you help. You've always been patient with me. More patient than you are with anyone."
"I don't help just anyone," he said quietly, turning to watch a Bowtruckle peer out cautiously from between the branches of a nearby sapling.
"I'm sorry?" She hadn't caught it over the breeze.
"I said, hold on to the trunk." He nodded at the sapling. "And watch the Bowtruckle — it's coming down."
She turned and held the tree. The Bowtruckle descended with exaggerated caution, paused at the lowest branch, and then crept along the back of her hand and up her forearm.
"Draco!" She went very still with surprised delight. "It's climbed on me."
"Don't move." He leaned in, watching the creature's sharp fingers with a knot of concern he didn't entirely understand. "Is it — is it going to scratch you?"
"No, I don't think so." She smiled at it, and it paused and looked back at her with small, wary eyes. "I think it feels unsettled because the tree was moving."
She reached slowly for her wand with her free hand, trying to give the Bowtruckle something to hold onto in the meantime. The creature sniffed the tip of her wand with deep suspicion and stepped away.
"Here — use mine." Draco held it out.
She took it. The Bowtruckle registered the hawthorn almost immediately — it crept up the wand, wound its thin fingers around the wood, and went perfectly still with an air of profound satisfaction.
"It does love hawthorn," she said softly, smiling. "Thank you."
"You're welcome." He looked at her for a moment — just a moment — then picked up his shovel and turned to the pit.
The morning had grown warm. He draped his robe over a low branch, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and loosened his tie — Slytherin green, embroidered with a small serpent. He went to work without fanfare.
A perfectly ordinary gesture, and yet she felt heat rise in her face.
She was doing this more and more lately — finding perfectly ordinary things that he did entirely disarming. The tilt of his head. The way he looked at her sometimes, brief and careful, and then away. The memory of the morning in the corridor — the sunlight, the warm pressure of his lips on her forehead, the absolute ease of it.
*It was just a friendly gesture. He was half-asleep and not entirely coherent. It meant nothing.*
She kept telling herself this. It wasn't getting easier to believe.
Look at him — going back to Hagrid for a shovel as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn't spent the last week making her feel like she was coming down with something every time she stood near him. He was strolling back now, platinum hair glinting in the sun, lazily at ease in the world.
He stopped in front of her, gave her the vague, unhurried smile he sometimes gave instead of saying anything, and bent back to the work.
*Ordinary days. Ordinary partners. Ordinary classes.*
Except that nothing felt ordinary anymore. Strange feelings surfaced without warning — immense warmth one moment, an awful, breathless pang the next. They came and went without explanation, always in his vicinity, always intensifying. She tried to manage them with busyness, and mostly that worked; but in any unguarded moment, the tide came back.
She had tried avoiding him — genuinely tried. She had positioned herself at the furthest bench in the classroom, chosen Neville as her partner, told herself firmly to stay put.
It never held. Her feet seemed to operate independently. She was always drifting back.
He seemed to be everywhere. However crowded the room, she could always locate that particular shade of platinum in her peripheral vision without trying.
She returned her gaze to him now, against her better judgment.
She noticed that the morning's work had given colour to his usually pale face.
She noticed that he occasionally rolled his sleeve a little further to wipe the back of his forearm across his brow.
And that sometimes, through the pale fringe of his dropped hair, his eyes glanced across at her — and the moment she met them, they were already gone again.
She had taken to studying his wand, which the Bowtruckle was still clinging to, whenever she needed something neutral to look at.
He was doing the digging himself, insisting on it, despite the fact that his technique with a shovel was frankly amateur. When she had pointed this out and offered to take over, he had looked genuinely affronted.
"Holding the tree is more important," he had said, very seriously. "If you let go, it'll grow crooked."
*He will never just say the thing he means.*
"Something wrong?" He looked up, catching her silence, entirely unaware of the complexity he had created.
"Nothing." She felt the warmth in her cheeks and turned it into a smile — bright and quick and aimed squarely at his grey eyes. "Let's keep going."