On an ordinary Friday evening at the end of March, Hermione Granger finished the last page of *Domestic Life and Social Customs of British Muggles*, sighed with quiet satisfaction, and closed the book.
She leaned back on the sofa by the common room window, tilted her head, and looked at the layered rosy light the setting sun was casting across the grounds. The weather was finally warming up. The Gryffindor common room had been louder and more cheerful all week, and tonight Fred and George were juggling Butterbeer bottles near the fireplace to an appreciative audience, handing out flyers between catches.
She closed her eyes and turned over her Muggle electricity thesis in her mind for what felt like the thousandth time, looking for the weak point she couldn't quite locate.
"Can you order the Wonder Witch range anonymously by owl post?" Angelina Johnson was asking Fred, with an excitement she wasn't bothering to hide.
"Every product we make is available by post," Fred said cheerfully. "Love potions, Hiccough Sweets, you name it. I've got samples here if you want to try before you buy—"
"I want to see too!" Ginny's voice cut in from halfway across the room.
"This is not for girls your age!" George's voice came back, accompanied by the sounds of a brief struggle, before something landed on the sofa beside Hermione.
She opened her eyes. George had deposited his sister and a bag of Honeydukes Peppermint Toads on the cushion next to her. "Have some sweets, Gin. Sit here quietly. We can't sell to our own sister—Percy would tell Mum and then Mum would come after us." He glanced at Hermione. "All right, Hermione? Still nervous about the Dementors?"
"Not in the slightest," she said with a smile. "I can conjure an Otter now."
"We saw it that day—it was brilliant." George winked. "Thanks to some private instruction, I hear." He grinned and disappeared back into the crowd.
Ginny grumbled under her breath, glaring after her brother, then turned to Hermione with sudden brightness. "You've been to the shop, haven't you? You brought me back that miniature Puffskein last time—"
"Oh, is it well?"
"Couldn't be better—so lively!" Ginny beamed. "The one in the next dormitory is listless all the time; everyone says they didn't pick correctly. How did you know which one to choose? I used to think only people from wizarding families knew about Puffskeins—"
"I had a little help," Hermione said, slightly pink.
"Who from?" Ginny asked. "Not Ron—he doesn't pay attention to anything like that."
"No."
"Harry?"
"No."
"Fred and George?" Ginny pressed. "It was them, wasn't it—they asked you to bring it."
Hermione shook her head, a faint smile playing at her mouth. "Don't guess. You won't get it."
"Fine." Ginny gave up and steered herself toward what she was really after. "Tell me about the shop, then. Specifically the Wonder Witch range."
"There's a patented Daydream Charm," Hermione offered, "which puts you into a fully immersive thirty-minute daydream. Incredibly realistic, apparently. But they don't sell it to anyone under sixteen."
"That's hopeless for me, then." Ginny's face fell briefly, then brightened. "Anything else? I heard Fred say something about love potions over there. He never tells me about those in private." She lowered her voice conspiratorially. "You know what Mum said on the train at the start of term, about how she used to make her own when she was young? That she could still remember the smell? I've been thinking about it ever since."
"They do sell them," Hermione said. "I've seen older students buying them. There's quite a range."
"Have you ever smelled one?" Ginny leaned closer—and noticed, in doing so, the large ginger cat arranged on Hermione's other side, eyeing her with round yellow suspicion.
"Once," Hermione said, going faintly pink in a way that the sunset conveniently explained. "It's—quite something."
"You're so lucky." Ginny rubbed her hands together. "The girls in my dormitory have been talking about pooling money for a bottle. Purely out of curiosity, obviously. But I'm not sure they'll sell to me." A calculating look crossed her face. "Hermione, you could buy a bottle next time you go. Just one—"
"Sure," Hermione said absently, still stroking Crookshanks and thinking about the scent.
She registered Ginny's expression a moment too late.
"What?" She pointed at herself in horror. "You want *me* to buy it?"
"You already agreed!" Ginny said triumphantly. "You can't take it back now!"
---
On Saturday afternoon, Draco stood at the window of the Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes attic—his private office above the shop floor—and looked out at the packed streets of Hogsmeade below.
His eye drifted, inevitably, to the Shrieking Shack sitting alone on the wasteland in the distance. A faint light flickered again behind one of its windows.
A proper Slytherin did not meddle in other people's business. He reminded himself of this, and returned his attention to the room.
Dobby had done exceptional work with the space. Through a series of masterful Extension Charms and a sensible room plan, the attic had been divided into a sitting room, a small bedroom, a bathroom, and a compact kitchen. The sitting room was genuinely comfortable—a perpetually lit candle on the white mantelpiece, a black leather sofa of almost unreasonable quality, clean side tables, patient armchairs. The entire back wall was shelving. An antique writing desk stood at the window.
The desk was buried under correspondence: letters from the Ministry's Department for the Regulation of Magical Products; an administrative fee notice from the Hogsmeade Village Council; Dobby's meticulous renovation accounts; property brochures from Muggle estate agents in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, and Holyhead; stock and currency notes from Muggle investment managers.
In the corner of the sitting room stood a large black and gold cabinet.
The Vanishing Cabinet—purchased anonymously through Borgin and Burkes, at considerable trouble, and worth every bit of it.
He looked the room over, satisfied. Five Galleons a week for Dobby, he decided. The house-elf would almost certainly look stricken, then weep with gratitude, then accept it with the air of someone resigning themselves to a great injustice. He smiled at the thought, locked the attic door, cast several Silencing and Locking Charms on it, and descended the concealed staircase.
Fred, in his magenta shop robes, was arranging stock on the wall shelf. He looked up as Draco came down.
"You were right—we should have hired someone to help on the floor ages ago. To be honest, we do need to think about O.W.L.s at some point." Fred shuddered, which was the first time Draco had ever seen him do so. "If we don't get any certificates, Mum might—"
"Turn you into specimens and mount you on the wall?" Draco suggested, glancing at the taxidermy on display.
"New idea—I'll try it on Percy." Fred's eyes lit up. "Actually, I was going to say she'd have Percy sing at us. That shower-singing voice of his. All day."
"Speaking of Percy," Draco said, picking up a prototype defensive product and examining it, "he keeps confiscating your merchandise at school. Could we not try a different approach?"
"He's always been humourless—I think he came out of the womb like that—and the Head Boy badge made it about ten times worse," Fred said, shaking his head. "It's all right, though. We've been sending his girlfriend samples. He hasn't had much time to bother us since."
"What sort of samples?" Draco looked up, curious.
Fred's expression became deeply mischievous. "Oh, you know. Very effective ones."
"Mr. Weasley?" The young blonde shop assistant—Verity—appeared from behind the curtain in her matching magenta robes. "There's a customer asking about the Cauldron Cakes display."
"Right with you." Fred winked at Draco and went through.
Draco followed at a slight distance, hearing voices from downstairs.
"I'm going mad," Harry was saying. "Snape must have put a Tracking Charm on me—no matter where I go, he appears. He's been following me like a shadow for weeks."
Harry was scowling through the window at something across the street. Draco followed his gaze. A corner of a very recognisable black robe was just visible.
"There's no such thing as a Tracking Charm," Ron said, fiddling with a fake wand and squinting at the label.
"There is, actually," Draco said, wandering over. "But it doesn't work quite like—"
He stopped.
His eyes had found Hermione.
She was standing in front of the pink shelf at the far end of the shop—the one that always attracted the most female customers—holding something with an expression of such intense concentration that it looked almost reverent.
On her finger, the small silver ring caught the afternoon light.
As if she felt his eyes on her, she looked up, found him immediately through the crowd, and gave him a bright, contented smile.
Draco felt a prickle of guilt.
He gave her a small smile back and swallowed.
He had never actually used the Tracking Charm. Not once.
But the knowledge that it was there, quietly attached to the ring she wore every day, was a constant low-level source of discomfort—which was strange, for a Slytherin who had never been particularly troubled by doing what was necessary.
He felt, on some obscure level, rather like Crookshanks sneaking out to the Forbidden Forest. Always half-expecting her to find out. Dreading the specific nature of her anger when she did.
She would not like it. She had never responded well to being managed.
He had considered getting the ring back and removing the charm. He had not found the right moment, and she wore it every day, and he was running out of convincing reasons why that was acceptable.
He stood next to Ron and directed his attention to the story Ron was apparently halfway through telling.
"—so absent-minded! He said his wand fell somewhere in the Great Hall and he spent most of the night looking for it—"
Ron picked up another fake wand with the air of someone conducting a thorough audit. "—and when he found it, it was near the kitchens. We all suspected he'd been sneaking food, but he swore up and down he hadn't—and then he lost it *again*, and this time it turned up behind the Potions classroom door, and he still insisted he hadn't been anywhere near there—"
"Mm," Draco said.
Ron looked at him in genuine surprise. Draco Malfoy, attentive and agreeable. Remarkable.
Encouraged, Ron continued. "And he has to write down the password to the common room because he forgets it—on a *piece of parchment*, which he then also loses—"
"Mm." Draco was watching Hermione through the gaps in the crowd. She appeared to be opening a small bottle. She looked—flustered, suddenly.
What was she looking at?
---
Hermione Granger stood in front of the shelf marked *Advanced Love Potions* and, against her better judgement, uncapped the bottle she'd been holding for the past several minutes.
She had smelled it once before, at Professor Slughorn's. The memory was hazy—she'd been distracted—and Ginny's commission had given her a convenient excuse to revisit it.
She brought the vial close.
The moment it opened, the scent rose to meet her:
Freshly mown grass. New parchment.
And something else—faint, cool, unmistakably familiar.
Watermelon.
She breathed it in, feeling the same helpless, warm suffusion it had produced the first time—
*The library,* she thought. *After the afternoon nap. The smell of cut grass from outside the window. New parchment on the table. And the robe—*
She had been drowsy, and warm, and perfectly content, and when she'd finally woken properly she had noticed the DM embroidered on the inside of the collar.
*Draco Malfoy.*
She had given the robe back. She had barely thought about it since.
The scent of watermelon.
*Everyone smells it differently,* she remembered Slughorn saying. *It's connected to what attracts you. To someone you—*
The vial was still open in her hand.
Oh.
*Oh.*
The shop continued around her—voices, movement, the smell of sweets and something faintly sulphurous from a display near the door. None of it registered.
She turned her head. Across the shop, through the crowd, she found him immediately—platinum hair, black shirt, grey eyes already fixed on her with a quiet, private attentiveness that he offered no one else.
Her heart knocked once, very hard, against her ribs.
She had known something was wrong with her for months. She had catalogued the symptoms with the thoroughness she brought to everything: the racing pulse, the difficulty concentrating around him, the involuntary pleasure of being near him and the involuntary misery of not being. She had attributed it to sensitivity, to gratitude, to the disorientating experience of being treated with genuine consideration by someone she had never expected it from. She had filed it carefully under *unresolved, do not examine.*
She examined it now.
He had helped her when she was lost and frightened at Hogwarts. He had taught her to fly, carried her books, answered her questions at two in the morning. He had wrapped his scarf around her neck without being asked, and slipped her cold hands into his pocket, and stroked her hair in the dark of the Great Hall while she fell asleep. He had pulled her against him in the snow without a second's hesitation, his arm solid and certain, as if keeping her safe were simply the next obvious thing to do.
He had said, quietly, that he could not ignore her.
He had said, without any apparent effort, that the otter was beautiful.
He had looked at her—through crowds, across classrooms, over the heads of everyone else—with grey eyes that were cold to the world and warm only to her, and she had noticed, and noticed that she had noticed, and noticed that she noticed that, all the way down.
She had been falling for months without realising she was falling at all.
The vial was still in her hand.
She capped it carefully, placed it back on the shelf, and stood very still.
Reason, when it arrived, arrived loudly.
She did not know what he felt. That was the truth. He was warm with her—undeniably warm—but he was also, just as undeniably, calm. He had kissed her forehead in the morning light and gone back to being exactly the same as he always was, as if he'd simply done a small, unremarkable thing and moved on. He never seemed flustered. He never seemed to teeter on any particular edge.
Maybe these things were simply what he was like. Careful with people he considered worth caring for. No more than that.
The thought was not comfortable.
She looked back at him across the shop.
He was still watching her. A slight, nonchalant smile on his face, utterly composed, his eyes not moving.
She could not breathe.
She wanted to leave. But he was looking at her, and her feet declined to cooperate, and there was no way out that didn't pass directly through his line of sight.
On an ordinary Saturday afternoon at the end of March, in Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, Hermione Granger met Draco Malfoy's eyes across a crowded room and understood, with complete and terrifying clarity, exactly what had been wrong with her for months.
She liked him.
She liked him profoundly, irrationally, and with no idea at all what to do about it.