Draco Malfoy waited listlessly at the Slytherin table, so hungry he could have eaten a whole Hippogriff.
Lightning cracked across the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall, and the thunder that followed made the hundreds of floating candles flicker uncertainly in the draught.
Through the gleaming, empty gold plates, Draco could see Harry emptying water from one of his shoes. Hermione was also visible at the Gryffindor table, soaking wet, her usually voluminous hair plastered miserably to her face. She looked as wretched as the rest of the first-years who had just come in from the rain.
He suspected Peeves was responsible. He had spotted the poltergeist brandishing a large red water balloon near the entrance before the feast began.
He found himself wondering how her hand was — whether the scratches had got wet.
How could such a clever witch forget a simple Drying Charm? Draco thought with vague unease, as he joined the applause welcoming the new Slytherins to their table: Malcolm Baddock, Graham Pritchard...
The ancient Sorting Hat was efficient, as ever. Before long, the new students were settled, and Dumbledore, magnificent in dark green robes, announced that the feast was served. Empty plates filled themselves, and the Great Hall dissolved into the cheerful noise of several hundred hungry students.
Draco chewed a piece of steak slowly and deliberately, maintaining the table manners Narcissa had drilled into him regardless of his appetite, and let his gaze drift.
Crabbe and Goyle were attacking a platter of roast chicken legs with the single-minded focus of wizards who had thought of nothing else since breakfast.
At the far end of the table, Blaise was leaning close to Pansy, saying something that made her laugh hard enough to clutch his arm for support.
Across the Hall, Hermione had caught the stem of a tall goblet and sent a stream of pumpkin juice spreading across the white linen. She was staring at the orange stain with an expression of put-upon gloom that he found, inexplicably, rather endearing.
Everything as it should be. The world at peace.
Hogwarts had a way of sealing out the dread and difficulty of the world beyond its walls, and in its warmth everyone was briefly permitted to be an uncomplicated fool.
Memories of his fourth year in his past life drifted through Draco's mind. That year, for him personally, had been comparatively untroubled — at least in its early weeks.
He wished he could stay in this moment indefinitely.
He knew he couldn't. There were troubles waiting.
For example: Mad-Eye Moody, who had just entered the Great Hall with a heavy, uneven tread, was the new Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts.
Draco had not forgotten Alastor Moody.
The man had humiliated him profoundly — transfigured him into a ferret and bounced him across the entrance hall in front of half the school. A Malfoy's dignity, ground into the flagstones by a one-legged former Auror with a magical eye and a grudge.
When Dumbledore announced the cancellation of the Quidditch Cup, Draco had been merely disappointed. But when that ravaged face, the mutilated nose, and that eerie, spinning blue eye appeared in the entrance to the Great Hall, he felt a distinct unpleasantness in his stomach.
Around him, his classmates erupted at the announcement of the Triwizard Tournament. Draco's mood did not share their enthusiasm.
---
"We don't get Moody until Thursday!" Ron said, with obvious disappointment, scanning his timetable during Care of Magical Creatures. "George and Fred said he's brilliant — that he actually knows how things work in the real world."
"What does that mean, exactly?" Hermione asked, attempting to bring a piece of liver near one of the pale, leathery, many-legged creatures Hagrid had apparently spent the summer breeding — they looked like some nightmarish cross between a crab and a deformed lobster, and their tails had a distinctly volatile look about them.
"I wouldn't get your hands near those tails," Draco said quickly, drawing her back a step. "I think they explode."
"How could you possibly know that? Hagrid only just hatched them —"
Dean Thomas screamed behind them. "Ow! Its tail — it just exploded!"
"Ah, yes," Hagrid's voice said, from somewhere further along the row, in a tone of mild acknowledgement. "That is what they do."
Hermione turned to stare at Draco. "How did you know?"
"It doesn't matter. What matters is that something with explosive tails and no discernible usefulness shouldn't exist," Draco said dismissively. "What were you saying about Moody, Ron?"
"I heard he actually demonstrates the Unforgivable Curses in class," Ron said, with the enthusiasm of someone who had not yet considered why this might be alarming. "George and Fred think he's brilliant — says he's daring. He used to be an Auror, caught loads of Death Eaters. He must know what he's doing."
Draco said nothing.
He knew exactly what Moody knew. Former Aurors like Moody had spent careers pursuing people like his father — and they brought those associations with them to every room they entered. Moody would look at him and see not Draco, but the Malfoy name, and Lucius's arm beneath the sleeve.
There was nothing Draco could do about that.
The Malfoy family had a principle he had always found quietly comforting: some things are beyond our control, so we govern ourselves. Since he could not control Moody's hatred, or the fact that the man would be standing at the front of a classroom he was required to attend, he could only control his own behaviour — act carefully, give the man no opening, leave nothing to criticise.
"I'll stay as far from Professor Moody as I possibly can," Draco decided.
Some problems, however, do not keep a respectful distance simply because one wishes them to.
---
Moody made his position clear from the very first roll call.
"Draco Malfoy." His magical eye swivelled and fixed on him, the real one following a half-second behind. "Ah, yes. I know your father, son. You tell him Moody's keeping a close eye on his boy. You tell him that from me."
"Yes, sir," Draco said evenly.
Moody held his gaze for a moment, then shook his grey hair back from his scarred face and moved on.
That was only the beginning.
In the lesson where Moody demonstrated the Imperius Curse, he produced a large spider, controlled it through a series of increasingly uncomfortable antics, and settled it — twitching and performing an involuntary tap-dance — directly on Draco's desk for an extended period. The class found it very entertaining.
"In its day, the Imperius Curse caused the Ministry no end of trouble," Moody said, idly directing the convulsing spider with his wand while the class laughed. "Plenty of wizards, when we came to round them up, claimed they'd been acting under it. Personally, I thought they were talking nonsense."
Draco maintained a perfectly neutral expression. It cost him something, though not because he shared Ron's visceral fear of spiders — simply because having an insect placed on one's face and controlled at someone else's amusement was unpleasant for anyone, and he refused to let Moody see it bother him.
"Complete control," Moody said, apparently losing interest in Draco's composure. He began directing the spider in tight circles. "I could make it jump from the window. Drown itself. Jump down the throat of one of your classmates..."
Ron, in the row ahead, went noticeably rigid. The laughter around the room faded. Draco made a point of not thinking about whether Moody was threatening him specifically.
Then Moody demonstrated the Cruciatus Curse.
This was considerably harder.
Moody took a long pull from the hip flask he carried, licked his lips with visible satisfaction, and addressed the enlarged spider on his desk with cold deliberation. "Crucio."
The spider's legs contracted violently, pressing tight against its body. It rolled. It convulsed.
If it could have screamed —
The sound arrived in Draco's mind before he could prevent it. Not the spider.
Hermione.
Bellatrix's voice, cool with pleasure, carving that word into her arm with a knife, using the Cruciatus between each letter while Hermione screamed the way no one should ever scream —
The way she had looked at him.
What had he been doing, at that moment?
His wand hand had trembled. He had stood there, rigid with cowardice, his chest splitting apart with a feeling he couldn't name —
And he had not moved.
"Stop!"
The word came from Hermione, sitting not far away. She was on her feet before she'd seemed to think about it.
She had seen his hands. Knuckles white, gripping the desk's edge. She had watched his face as the spider convulsed — the grey eyes that had remained composed throughout the Imperius Curse were now dark with something that had nothing to do with the classroom, or the spider, or anything in this room.
Whatever he was looking at, it wasn't here.
Something's wrong with him, she thought, with a cold certainty.
"...Extreme pain," Moody said, as though Hermione's interruption had been a minor inconvenience. He set the spider down, seemingly recovered, and surveyed the class with his mismatched eyes. "If you knew how to cast the Cruciatus Curse, you'd need neither thumbscrews nor a knife. Very popular spell, in its time."
His gaze settled on Draco with the satisfied precision of someone who had found what they were looking for.
"One more," Moody said. He reached into the jar and extracted the last spider, setting it on Hermione's desk — apparently in mild acknowledgement of her interruption — and raised his wand with the offhandedness of someone performing a routine demonstration. "Avada Kedavra."
A flash of green light. The spider toppled onto its back. No marks, no wound. Simply dead.
Like a lamp being switched off.
Like Professor Quirrell, face-down on the stone floor of the third-floor corridor, still and wrong in the way that only the truly dead are wrong.
Draco stared at the spider on the desk, his face the colour of ash, as a tide of memory he had been holding at arm's length came in all at once.
"The Killing Curse requires considerable magical power behind it — you could all draw your wands and point them at me and say the incantation, and I suspect the worst I'd suffer is a noseblash..." Moody's voice came and went, sometimes near, sometimes far. Around him, parchment rustled as students dutifully wrote it all down.
Hermione looked around the room. Harry was white-faced. Neville had gone paler still, and earlier than anyone else. Ron had nearly pushed back from his desk.
She felt ill herself — the cold proximity of death, the sudden awareness of how final and absolute it was.
But her eyes kept returning to Draco.
He hadn't moved at all. He was still gripping the desk's edge, and the look on his face was unlike anything she had seen him wear before — not the composed blankness, not the cold arrogance, not the wry detachment. Something beneath all of that, exposed.
The bell rang.
He was on his feet before it had finished, and out of the classroom door at a pace that Harry, who had seen some things, turned to watch with visible surprise.
"I'll see you at dinner," Hermione said quickly to Harry and Ron, grabbing her copy of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection and pushing through the departing students before Ron had finished whatever admiring thing he was beginning to say about Moody's teaching methods.
---
She found him at the Black Lake.
He was lying on his back in the grass beneath an oak tree, staring up at the enormous dark clouds banking overhead. The sky had the dense, loaded look of a sky that had decided to rain but hadn't quite committed to it yet.
"Draco." She crouched down beside him. "Why aren't you going to dinner? There's chocolate cake in the Great Hall tonight."
"Hermione." His voice was quiet. He looked up at her, and the expression on his face — something between grief and guilt — made her breath catch. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Sorry for what?" She frowned, studying his face. She reached out and pressed her fingers gently to the furrow between his brows, but it didn't ease. "What happened? Was it the Cruciatus Curse? The Killing Curse?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, with the sudden urgency of someone grabbing hold of a lifeline, he reached up and closed his hand around her wrist.
His eyes moved over her arm — her bare, unmarked arm — with a desperate, searching attention, as though looking for something he feared to find.
"Thank goodness," he breathed. His thumb moved across her skin, back and forth, in slow, uneven strokes. "Thank goodness."
Hermione's face went warm.
Draco was always precisely courteous with her. She had catalogued his touches — the way their fingertips met over a cauldron, the way his arm would occasionally brush hers over parchment in the library, the steadying hand at her waist on a crowded path. Every one of them had a clear, practical reason. He never reached for her without one.
This was different. He wasn't helping her, or steadying her, or preventing her from walking into something. He was simply holding her wrist and pressing his thumb to the inside of it, and it had nothing to do with any of the usual reasons.
He looked very vulnerable.
"Draco." Her voice was careful. "Are you alright?"
"No." A long pause. "Not at all."
Her chest tightened. "What can I do?"
He exhaled. His gaze moved from her wrist to her face, and the look in his eyes — fractured, unguarded — made her forget what she had been about to say.
Slowly, he lifted her wrist and pressed his cheek against it.
"Like this," he said softly. "This helps."
Hermione sat very still.
She didn't understand what had broken open in him, or what she was standing in for, or why her wrist specifically was the thing he needed. None of it made sense to her. It made her heart pound, and her face burn, and her mind run in small, confused circles.
But she didn't pull away.
She never seemed to be able to pull away from him. And he needed her now — that much was plain, whatever the reason.
So she stayed. She let him press her wrist to his cool cheek, let him keep his eyes on hers — that deep, unwavering sadness in them that she was frightened to look at too long and frightened to look away from. His lips barely brushed her pulse point. The warmth of his breath against her skin felt like it was travelling up her arm and all the way to her face.
She held herself very still, hardly daring to breathe. She had the irrational sense that any movement might startle him — startle that expression off his face and leave the grief deeper than before.
She waited. Her knees began to ache from crouching. She didn't shift.
She had entirely forgotten the stack of unfinished homework in her bag. She had forgotten the book on house-elf welfare she was halfway through. There was only this: the oak tree, the coming rain, the feel of his cheek against her wrist, and the look in his eyes that was asking her for something she couldn't name.
Plop. A raindrop landed on the grass beside them. Then another.
"Draco," she said gently. "It's starting to rain."
She brought her free hand up and curved it loosely above his face, shielding him from the first fat drops beginning to fall. She didn't want them in his eyes.
Through the gap between her fingers, she watched him blink. The unfocused quality slowly left his expression, and the familiar grey settled back into his pupils — still tired, still bruised around the edges, but present.
"I'm sorry, Hermione," he said quietly. His lips moved slightly against her wrist. "I won't let it happen. Not ever."
He was not speaking to her, quite, she thought. Or rather — he was speaking to her, but about something she wasn't privy to. His tone was not apologetic but resolute, as though he were making a promise to someone who couldn't hear him yet.
She looked down at him. She gave him the warmest smile she had.
"There's nothing to forgive. I don't know what you're apologising for." She tilted her head and looked at him carefully. "Please stop frightening me."
He blinked again, more fully awake now.
He sat up from the grass with the careful, deliberate movements of someone assembling themselves piece by piece. He brushed the grass from his robes. When he looked up again, the composure was back — not quite all the way, not yet, but nearly.
"Okay," he said.
The rain made up its mind all at once. It came down suddenly, properly, soaking the grass in seconds.
They looked at each other. His hair was already flattening against his forehead; she suspected she looked equally ridiculous.
Something loosened in both of them, and they laughed.
It was an easy, sudden, undignified laugh — the kind that comes from shared absurdity. The kind she had never quite expected from him.
He got to his feet, pulled her up alongside him, and looked at her with the expression she knew best — that particular mixture of arrogance and warmth, with the warmth winning slightly.
"Come on," he said, already beginning to smile. He took hold of her arm and pulled her into a run toward the castle, his grip firm and easy and entirely uncomplicated, as though he had no intention whatsoever of letting go.
Hermione ran alongside him through the downpour, laughing at his wet hair, feeling the cold rain on her face and the warmth of his hand on her arm, and the particular happiness of being here, in this moment, pulled somewhere by him.
She still didn't understand what had happened under the oak tree.
She only knew that wherever he had been, he was back now. And that the place where his hand gripped her arm was, inexplicably, the warmest spot in the rain.