On the eve of the Christmas holidays, a sudden and heavy snowfall blanketed Hogwarts Castle, and almost every student promptly lost all interest in their studies.
Even Hermione Granger — who was, by any measure, an anomaly at Hogwarts, a girl who lived in the library — had to admit that the castle under snow was so beautiful it sparked the imagination.
She found herself picturing it from above, as though someone were riding a broomstick high in the air, looking down at Hogwarts from the sky. From up there, it might look like a perfect, enormous gingerbread house dusted with icing sugar. Or perhaps like those Muggle snow globes — the ones filled with glitter and little blizzards when you shook them — with a tiny castle tucked inside, enchanting and complete.
Why would she imagine it from up high? From a bird's-eye view? Hermione paused, puzzling at herself.
It seemed that the five-minute flight initiated on a whim by a certain Slytherin boy had left a more lasting impression on her way of thinking than she'd realised.
Draco. That boy who was as gentle as snow, and as cold as snow.
Occasionally, in the corridors between classes or at the edges of the Great Hall, Hermione would catch snippets of Slytherin students murmuring to one another: "What do you expect from Malfoy? You can't expect warmth from him — his whole family's like that. They were born haughty."
Haughty? In private, he was perfectly approachable, Hermione thought, genuinely confused.
"I think there's something wrong with the part of his brain that controls smiling," Lavender had announced to Parvati during one of their late-night dormitory chats. "Honestly, I'd look elsewhere. Malfoy is far too cold, and he's a Slytherin on top of everything."
"I know, I've never liked Slytherins either — they always act as though they're above everyone," Parvati agreed dismissively. "But if you're just looking at them... Malfoy is rather good-looking, isn't he? It's hard not to notice."
"Oh, he's only handsome when he's scowling — who knows, maybe he goes ugly when he smiles!" Lavender laughed. "Perhaps that's why he doesn't dare try it."
Absolute nonsense! Hermione thought hotly from behind her bed curtains. He was perfectly handsome when he smiled. More than perfectly.
She had seen him smile. The day he took her flying — when they landed and climbed off the broom — he had smiled so brightly and openly, like a burst of sunlight breaking through cloud, with actual starlight in his eyes.
He never smiled like that anymore. He had retreated entirely behind that cool, distant mask of his.
Thinking about it now — when they were partnered in Transfiguration, he never smiled either. He always wore that stern, serious expression.
But stern didn't mean unfriendly. Not to her.
When they were face to face — studying side by side in the library, working together in class — he was always perfectly civil, always spoke to her with quiet courtesy, and there was something else, too. A kind of subtle, specific attentiveness that she had begun to notice more and more.
It was there in the small things, the sort of things only the person on the receiving end would ever pick up on.
In any class, if she walked toward the empty seat beside him and moved to sit down, he would glance at her — expressionless, as always — and pull out her chair without being asked. She had never seen any other study partner do that. She was fairly certain he didn't do it for anyone else.
In the library, when every seat was taken and she was prepared to stand and torture herself through the stacks, he would invariably materialise from somewhere behind a bookshelf and "happen to find her," then lead her to that cosy, impossible-to-locate private corner she could never have found alone. He would settle her into a plush armchair and, without fanfare, produce a cup of hot tea.
He was always willing to return her greeting anywhere on the castle grounds, regardless of whether there was a cluster of Slytherins nearby who might be watching. He almost never greeted her first — unless she happened to be staggering along a corridor under an unstable tower of books. On those particular occasions, something would shift in him; he would greet her first, and then relieve her of the books and carry the lot until she reached her destination.
Was this "special treatment"? Hermione wondered.
Or was she simply imagining it?
Sometimes she would feel, for no clear reason, as though his eyes had found her across a room. But whenever she turned to look, he was always gazing somewhere else.
A boy who was neither too close nor too distant.
She wasn't even sure whether what they had could be called friendship.
He never sought her out without reason. He only seemed to appear when she needed help, and the moment she was all right, he withdrew without hesitation, retreating behind that wall of cool indifference — sometimes even avoiding her gaze entirely.
As though he were determined not to be a bother.
And yet, whenever she came to him — regardless of the time, place, or occasion — he never showed the slightest flicker of annoyance. In fact, his expression invariably became more relaxed than usual.
She could sense the care in him. Something attentive, tucked just beneath the surface. When she got close enough, the coldness disappeared entirely, and she could feel, unmistakably, a quiet tenderness that he seemed determined not to show.
Their conversations were always pleasant. When he was genuinely engaged, he would give her a brief, small smile — rarely, and only for a moment — before wiping it away almost immediately, his expression hardening as though he had been caught doing something he oughtn't.
He was an enigma. There was a mystery to him, even a deliberate opacity, but somehow it never made him unpleasant. If anything, it only made her more curious.
She began to watch him.
He was reluctant to speak at length. If one word would serve, he never used three.
He rarely smiled and never laughed out loud. Toward everyone — professors included — he maintained the same quiet indifference: a calm demeanour and an expression that always looked faintly tired.
By comparison, he talked to her quite a lot. Relative to how he behaved with his peers, his manner toward her might honestly be described as "unprecedentedly warm," Hermione thought with a wry sort of satisfaction.
And yet, for all his "keep away" energy, the Slytherins clearly respected him. They didn't seem to find his aloofness off-putting in the slightest.
At the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, there were always students gathered around him — eating, chatting animatedly — cheerfully organised around him, perfectly accustomed to his cool silence.
That made no logical sense whatsoever. How could a cold, guarded boy like him win friends?
Was it possible that Slytherins operated on entirely different social principles — that the more aloof a person was, the more popular they became in that house? Hermione wondered, genuinely baffled.
In Gryffindor, it was precisely the opposite: the more cheerful, outgoing, and enthusiastic you were, the more people liked you. Her own roommate, Lavender Brown, had been on speaking terms with nearly every Gryffindor by her very first day at Hogwarts. Lavender had a particular talent for it — warm greetings, easy conversation, and within moments she was someone's friend.
Judging by Draco's manner, it seemed hard to imagine him doing anything of the sort — learning the preferences of every Slytherin student and working the room.
What was it about him, then, that made the Slytherins always want to gather around him?
And why did she, for that matter, always find herself wanting to be his partner — even knowing he never smiled?
Hermione Granger, she asked herself, why do you keep choosing him, again and again and again?
Ah. The Slytherin boy. Gentle as snow. Cold as snow.
The Gryffindor girl sighed — not with frustration, but with a kind of wistful wondering — and peeked out from the corridor into the open air. She tilted her face up toward the snowflakes drifting down through the pale sky, and on an impulse, stretched out her arm.
A few crystal snowflakes spiralled down, like small gifts from the smoky grey heavens, and fell with the wind, landing lightly on her palm.
The chill dissolved instantly in the warmth of her hand, leaving only faint traces of water.
Hermione shivered at the icy touch, shook the droplets from her fingers, breathed warm air on her palms, and felt something bright stir in her expression.
She smiled slightly, feeling — quite suddenly, and for no particular reason — a little happier. Shaking off her wandering thoughts along with the cold, she readjusted the books in her arms and continued on toward the library.
She was entirely unaware that a pair of pale grey eyes had been watching her — from the moment she turned her face up to catch the snowflakes.
Draco had seen her.
Against the pale light of the snowy corridor, she looked like something conjured by Merlin in a dream.
The fine hairs at her temples were visible in the brightness of the snow-light. She was like a cat that had wandered into a snowfall — curious from her head to her toes. A few flakes caught in her hair where it fluttered in the breeze; she seemed oblivious to them, her eyes bright as she gazed up at the sky.
The arm she had stretched out into the corridor was slender and smooth, without a mark.
The way she tried to gently catch the snowflakes — it was both fragile and endearing.
That particular quality: the kind that makes you reluctant to reach out and touch it, yet makes your chest ache with the wanting. Draco watched her, and felt a quiet, hollow sadness well up inside him.
This was a side of Hermione Granger he rarely got to see.
Innocent delight. Pure and unguarded. Something precious.
Don't think about it. Don't disturb her. As long as she can go on smiling like that, nothing else matters.
Let her read her books in peace.
She loves books most of all, doesn't she?
The snow was thickening, falling softly, and it covered his lonely face as he stood there, weighing down something already too still inside him.
Dragging himself back from the grey pull of old memories, Draco withdrew his gaze and turned toward the noisy, bustling courtyard below.
The students were shouting and laughing. The Weasley twins, clearly delighted with themselves, had bewitched several large snowballs to chase Professor Quirrell around the courtyard, targeting his turban with gleeful precision. Quirrell stumbled about, slapping at his head, while students erupted in laughter all around him.
At last, flushed with fury and humiliation, Quirrell pulled his turban tighter around his head and announced that the Weasley twins had earned themselves a detention.
"Hold on a moment," Draco said, moving quickly to intercept the twins as they ambled away. "Why not make the most of your talent?"
The Weasley twins stopped mid-conversation — they had been deep in discussion about Lee Jordan's prized giant spider — and turned to look at him in unison.
"Well, well," said the one on the left with interest. "If it isn't the Malfoy boy."
The one on the right grinned at him. "We heard all about it from Ron, you know..."
"...You were a great help during the last match!"
The two brothers stood with arms slung around each other's shoulders and asked, in stereo: "So what exactly do you mean by 'make the most of it'?"
Draco watched the snowball's parting shot replay satisfyingly in his mind and allowed himself a short, dry laugh.
"What I mean is — you clearly have a real gift for mischief. So why not channel it into something? Create products. Invent gadgets. Open a joke shop."
He still remembered the rather large and anonymous order of Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder he had placed from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes in his previous life.
Clever products. Genuinely useful, too — even if the uses hadn't exactly been noble.
"Something like — sweets that turn people into canaries. Trick wands. Nosebleed Nougat..." Draco racked his memory for every product the twins had developed the first time around, gesturing with his hands as he described them. He was dimly aware that he looked rather absurd doing this.
This was decidedly not how a Malfoy ought to conduct himself.
But it worked. The Weasley twins' casually amused expressions vanished at once, replaced by something sharp and speculative. They exchanged a rapid glance.
"We don't know what you're on about," said one of them, with poorly feigned nonchalance.
"A Slytherin's advice tends to come with hidden strings," said the other, watching Draco with the look of someone trying to see through a wall. "And — if we may — although you seem to have some connection with our brother..." They spoke the last part together: "the Malfoys and the Weasleys have never exactly been on the same side."
"I'm aware of that," Draco said calmly. "But I happen to admire your particular brand of creativity. This would be a personal investment, entirely separate from my father and his interests." He produced a folded square of parchment — preliminary terms, a rough agreement — and placed it in the nearest outstretched hand.
"Have a look. If you're interested, you know where to find me." He offered them a cool, careless smile, then turned and walked away.
"Has he lost his mind?" he could just barely hear them murmuring behind him.
"He really has..." — the rustle of unfolding parchment — "...Blimey."
Draco had always intended to put his Galleons to work, rather than leaving them to moulder in the goblins' vaults at Gringotts. The Malfoy family was far from poor, but even inherited wealth needed tending; a qualified Malfoy knew that money had to be made to earn money.
In the wizarding world, he had to move carefully. His parents could not find out what he was doing — especially in areas where the Malfoy family already had holdings. One wrong step and the ripple would reach Lucius before the week was out, and then there would be a great many uncomfortable questions.
Draco had no desire for his parents to know any of this. Sometimes, even with the people closest to you, discretion was the better part of wisdom.
The Weasley joke shop would be both lucrative and discreet. He had already watched the twins succeed once. And perhaps most usefully: no one would ever believe that a Malfoy had invested a single Knut in a Weasley enterprise.
He was also planning to use a portion of his own Galleons to quietly purchase several properties in Muggle England. In time, he intended to move into currency and stocks as well.
The Dark Lord had always despised Muggles — which meant that any investment in the Muggle world was, practically speaking, far safer than anything in the wizarding one.
For the properties, he planned to let some generate rental income and convert others into safe houses. Like a sensible fox with multiple earths, a few undisclosed addresses could provide temporary shelter if circumstances ever demanded it.
There was nothing surprising about this, to his mind. Contempt for Muggles among purebloods did not preclude an understanding of where the real opportunities lay. For the Malfoy family in particular, investment in the Muggle world was not a new idea.
Over the centuries, the Malfoy family had accumulated enormous holdings in Wiltshire and beyond — Muggle lands absorbed quietly over generations, connections with Muggle aristocracy stretching back further than most wizards cared to remember, and a house overflowing with paintings, gold, antique furniture, jewellery, and artefacts that would take three days to catalogue, just within England alone.
As for the rumours that the Malfoy family had long since made inroads into Muggle currency and asset markets — Draco knew perfectly well they were true, whatever the current Lord Malfoy chose to say publicly after the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy had made such things inconvenient. Wealth channels built over nearly seven centuries, from the eleventh century to 1692, did not simply vanish. They went underground.
To this day, the Malfoys held a substantial quantity of Muggle currency. When the principal was large enough, one could simply sit atop it and collect interest, and no one was the wiser. And it was entirely natural that the Malfoy fortune was indexed, in some portion, to the Muggle world — quietly riding the long, slow rise of Muggle inflation without anyone in polite wizarding society needing to know about it.
Anchoring. What a civilised concept. Draco thought that if those impoverished pureblood families had spent even a fraction of those three centuries of isolation observing the relentless climb of Muggle prices, they might not have declined so badly.
He had only pieced this together after his father went to Azkaban and he had been forced to take stock of the Malfoy family's affairs himself.
The most darkly comic irony of the pureblood wizarding world: that a significant portion of the fortune propping up any great pureblood family had almost certainly come, in the end, from the Muggles they claimed to despise.
But the clinking of gold in one's pocket was the most beautiful sound in the world, as far as any Malfoy was concerned. Making money was not shameful. It was a family tradition.
So Draco felt no great weight of embarrassment about any of it.
What he was less certain about was whether the Weasley twins would have the foresight to take him up on it.
What he was certain about was why the twins had been pelting Quirrell with enchanted snowballs in the first place: they felt Harry had been treated unfairly.
And they were not entirely wrong.
During their Transfiguration lesson, Hermione leaned close and whispered to him, her voice tight with barely contained fury: "We told Professor McGonagall exactly what happened — about Quirrell cursing Harry — and Professor McGonagall promised to inform Professor Dumbledore. But the school still hasn't punished Quirrell. Not once."
This outcome surprised even Draco, if he was being honest. It seemed Dumbledore had decided to use Quirrell as a whetstone — a deliberate obstacle in Potter's path to growth. But perhaps even a wizard of Dumbledore's calibre could misjudge things.
Quirrell was not simply a remnant of the Dark Lord's henchmen. If the soul behind him was left unchecked and allowed to regain its strength, the consequences would be immeasurable.
Draco remembered that in his previous life, Quirrell had been brought to justice — but the Dark Lord's soul had escaped. Later, with the help of Peter Pettigrew, Voldemort had regained his physical form, plunging the entire wizarding world back into darkness.
He thought of Malfoy Manor as it had been — magnificent once, then turned into a filthy, oppressive ruin, all at the Dark Lord's pleasure. And to think that someone had noticed the signs of danger long before it reached that point, and had let it run rampant anyway. Didn't he find that a little absurd?
Filled with a cold, simmering anger, he kicked a snowdrift by the roadside, getting his polished black leather shoes splattered with dirty slush.
In this protracted game of wizards and chaos, every player had their own calculations. No one was entirely selfless.
No one.
What was there to be angry about?
He tried to collect himself, then waved his wand lazily, vanishing the grime.
Exposing Voldemort wasn't actually that difficult, Draco thought as he walked. If someone were to remove Quirrell's turban in public, everyone would understand immediately.
The problem was that a soul this dangerous could not be underestimated. Once exposed, it would be nearly impossible to track — it might take advantage of the chaos to possess another person at Hogwarts, or slip away beyond the castle entirely.
How did one deal with a soul that left no footprints?
He was still turning the question over in his mind when he walked into the Potions classroom in the basement.
"Ron and I have been practising the Leg-Locking Curse," Hermione told him fiercely at their shared workbench, in a voice just above a whisper, slamming a lionfish spine down onto the surface with considerable force. Steam curled up from their cauldron in the dim candlelight of the underground classroom. "Next time Quirrell tries to curse Harry, we'll make sure he can't move a muscle."
This outburst finally dragged Draco's attention back from the thorny problem of what to do about Voldemort.
"Wait—" He caught her wrist before she could grab the spine again.
"What's wrong?" She turned to look at him, surprised.
He was holding her wrist.
His hand was cool — almost icy — but his grip was gentle. Like snow.
She found she couldn't think about Quirrell anymore. Hermione was dimly aware that her face felt slightly warm from the cauldron's steam.
Draco reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of dragonhide gloves, and pressed them into her palm, releasing her wrist — which looked as though it might snap at any moment — in the same movement. A faint sense of loss lingered at the edges of his composure as he said evenly, "Wear those before you start grinding. Lionfish spines are no jest — they can spit venom."
"Oh — right. Thank you." The anger drained slightly from her expression. She looked down at the gloves in her hand, and when she looked back up, her brown eyes held a small, reluctant smile.
"And goggles." He frowned at her as she pulled the gloves on, feeling strongly that those bright eyes of hers also warranted some protection.
"Is that really necessary?" She looked pained. "The gloves are already quite bulky, and goggles on top of that — couldn't we skip them—"
"Let me help you put them on." He reached for a pair of goggles and began fitting them over her head.
"This seems a bit much," she said, darting a self-conscious glance at their classmates, then back at the boy in front of her. "Look — no one else is wearing them."
"Their technique is irregular and unsafe," he said simply.
"Draco." Hermione lowered her voice, looking genuinely anguished. "I have to confess — I don't hate goggles because they're inconvenient to wear with gloves. It's because—" She paused, pulling a slight face. "Every time I wear them, the strap catches my hair, and it pulls, and it hurts horribly."
He paused.
"I understand," he said at last. "I'll be careful. All right?"
He raised his grey eyes and, for just a moment, actually met hers.
Hermione looked straight into them and found she could only nod.
So he bent forward, tilting his head slightly, and began to adjust the strap — steadily, carefully, working by the flickering candlelight of the dungeon classroom.
That Slytherin boy, she thought absently. He's doing it again.
He always seemed indifferent. He always used as few words as possible. And yet — at the same time — he was clearly taking care of her. Being attentive. Making rather a fuss, in his silent way, about whether she was safe.
He was focused entirely on the stubborn clasp of the strap, his lips pressed together in concentration, his chin very close to her profile. And in his usually guarded, pale grey eyes — something shifted. A hint of tenderness, there and then gone.
Hermione found herself staring at the colour of his eyes, oddly transfixed.
They were so lovely. Like pieces of glass — bright and soft at the same time.
"It's all right if a few hairs get caught," she said finally, blinking herself back to the present. She frowned slightly, bracing for the familiar sting, her voice taking on a tone of resigned acceptance. "I have so much of it, it's practically inevitable—"
"It's done," Draco said.
A small, barely-there smile touched the corner of his mouth — the side she couldn't see.
Hermione stared at him.
He had actually put them on.
Gently, precisely, without a single hair caught in the strap.
She couldn't have done it herself without catching something. How had he managed it? Hermione thought in astonishment.
"Thank you," she managed, slightly flustered.
He gave a short, satisfied nod, then turned back to stir the potion in their cauldron.
How could you refuse help from a boy like that? And why would you ever want anyone else as your partner?
Everyone else would seem clumsy by comparison.
Did it really matter whether he was a Slytherin?
Did it matter that he was cold, that he barely smiled — did any of that matter?
Lavender and Parvati were completely and utterly wrong. She had already seen him smile, and she might be the only person in the entire school who had — and his smile was absolutely, definitively the most handsome in Hogwarts. She was quite certain of it. Hermione ground the lionfish spine with rather more force than was strictly necessary, making considerable noise, feeling something thoroughly flustered stirring inside her.
Draco had no idea what she was wrestling with. He assumed her vigorous grinding was the result of still being furious about Quirrell — a reasonable interpretation, as it happened.
"In my opinion, you ought to be practising the Full Body-Bind and Langlock," he said, watching her aggressive technique with calm concern. He stirred their potion slowly and added, "When facing an adult wizard who outmatches you, your best strategy is to incapacitate them as swiftly as possible — prevent them from raising their wand at all."
"Langlock?" Hermione forgot her grinding and looked up with immediate interest. "I've never come across that one. It sounds advanced — what does it do?"
"The effect is to seal a person's tongue to the roof of their mouth, so they can't speak to cast a spell," Draco said, touching the bridge of his nose with an expression of mild guilt. "I'm not entirely sure where I read it."
That was because Langlock wasn't something he had read. It was something he had used — hurled at Potter, in another life, during one of their more heated confrontations.
"That said — since some wizards can cast non-verbal spells, the Tongue-Tying Curse alone carries risks," he added quickly. "I still think the Full Body-Bind should be your first choice."
Hermione was looking at him with undisguised admiration. Her expression was that of someone who had just watched a person pull something impossible out of a hat. "Draco, you know so much. It genuinely seems like there's no problem you can't think your way around. I've always wondered — how does a first-year student know as much magic as you do?"
"Perhaps I'm the same as you," Draco said with a slight shrug, glancing at her sidelong. "I enjoy reading ahead."
He let the words settle.
Hermione Granger looking at him like that — with actual admiration. That was rare. Rarer than people realised. He ought to make a note of it.
"What is all this for, by the way?" He nodded toward the large stack of books crowding her side of the workbench.
"Nicolas Flamel. I've been through The Development of Modern Wizarding, but I can't find a single mention of him anywhere." She frowned at the books with frustration. "We think he's connected to whatever Fluffy is guarding. Hagrid let it slip that the whole matter involves Nicolas Flamel and Dumbledore."
"If I were you, I'd look into older records," Draco said quietly, checking that Professor Snape was occupied elsewhere before he continued. "Think about it — how old is Dumbledore? If Nicolas Flamel was Dumbledore's associate, he might be even older. Some wizards have lifespans of several centuries."
The words hit her like a Lumos in a dark room.
Her eyes lit up all at once.
"You're right — of course you're right!" The ideas were clearly rushing through her faster than she could sort them. "I'll need to make at least a few more trips to the library — there'll be entire sections I haven't looked at yet—" A wide, beaming smile broke across her face. "Thank you, Draco."
He gave a slight shrug and, before that smile of hers could reach him, quickly lowered his eyes.
He had grown increasingly accustomed, lately, to offering the Potter trio a quiet nudge in the right direction.
He couldn't seem to stop himself. He could never forget the hand Potter had extended to him when he needed it — nor the fact that Potter might represent his best hope of defeating the Dark Lord in the end.
And beyond that — once you had exchanged genuine goodwill with Potter and his friends, it became very difficult to maintain any real animosity toward them.
Gryffindors could be as sharp as trolls when it came to strategy, and they were constitutionally incapable of thinking before they acted. But their sincerity, their warmth, and the unreserved completeness of their trust — that had exceeded every Slytherin expectation Draco had ever held.
In his previous life, his world had been entirely Slytherin. He had only known one way of building alliances: through hierarchy, deference, and mutual self-interest — the unspoken Slytherin code, "eternal interests" above all else. That code had never translated to other Houses, especially Gryffindor.
Returning to Hogwarts in this life, he had made a deliberate effort to be civil and reasonably courteous to Potter. Not because he had undergone some sudden change of heart and fallen in love with Gryffindor idealism — he remained, in general, rather indifferent toward people who had no immediate bearing on his plans — but because civility was, in this particular case, useful.
Potter and his friends, however, had clearly refused to read from the same script. They brought out something that felt uncomfortably genuine.
What was he supposed to do with that? Slytherins had no playbook for this kind of situation. No one had ever taught him how to respond to sincerity offered freely, with nothing expected in return.
He often felt completely at a loss around them. Uncertain, caught off-guard, almost... flustered.
The Gryffindor way of making friends was simply astonishing.
No cautious circling. No covert testing. No calculated strategy.
Just — directness. Enthusiasm. Initiative.
Especially Hermione Granger.
He had originally planned to keep things simple: colleagues, at most. He would have been content if they could manage not to dislike each other.
Instead, she had walked up to him. She had hugged him. She had smiled at him.
And now she was becoming more difficult to resist with every passing week.
Draco admitted it to himself, grudgingly, in the private space behind his composed expression: if she was struggling with something, he couldn't hold back the urge to offer a hint. He couldn't bear to watch her spin in circles, trapped in her own blind spot.
If she came to talk to him — to discuss a problem, to debate an idea — he couldn't refuse. There was no one her age who matched her mind, and no one who suited his taste better for conversation.
If she couldn't find a partner and stood hesitating in front of him, or couldn't find a seat in the library, or was struggling under a mountain of books — he couldn't stand by and watch her suffer such unnecessary inconvenience.
She was just a girl. And he couldn't help but want to look after her.
His instincts always ran ahead of his better judgement. His hand moved before his mind could stop it. His mouth formed words before he decided to speak them. That faint, unwilling warmth in him always outpaced his carefully maintained composure. Draco sighed quietly to himself.
Whenever he decided she was fine and didn't need anyone's help, he would try to put distance between them — return to that safe, sensible remove that had no connection to danger or attachment.
But then she would find him.
She would come to him unbothered by his cold expression, stand in front of him, look at him with that small, easy smile of hers, and ask him to be her partner.
Sometimes she would look at him with that particular shine in her eyes — as though he were someone she could trust without question.
How precious that look was. Who could withstand it?
She was innocently prying his frozen heart open, one thoughtless, generous gesture at a time, with no apparent awareness of the cost — to him, or perhaps to herself.
Hermione Granger. Do you know there is no light in my life?
I am the mire. The night dew. The hollow tree. I am heaviness, and grime, and utter fragility.
You are fire and freedom, radiance and brilliance. You deserve none of what I am.
My life is nothing but the coldness of snow. The desolate emptiness of ruin.
I am doing something extraordinarily dangerous. I am an extraordinarily dangerous person. I will not let you be drawn into any of it.
Given a second chance at life, I am all too aware of the weight of my sins. I dare not ask for more than I have.
All I ask is to watch you from a safe distance. All I ask is that you stay happy — that nothing in this world be allowed to hurt you. He felt a quiet bitterness settle in his chest. He lowered his head over the workbench, pretending to sort through the bottles and ingredients there.
"Draco—" she called him. His name in her voice, so naturally, so easily.
Don't come any closer, Hermione. I'll only bring harm. I'll only bring pain. Draco thought, not quite able to stop himself from glancing up at her.
She was frowning at the cauldron, standing on her toes to peer over the rim at the potion, eyes bright with concentration.
Hermione. What am I going to do with you? He sighed, the worry settling deep.
"Draco — come and look at the colour of this potion," she said, beckoning him over with a small note of uncertainty in her voice. "I'm not sure it's right."
She was in trouble.
He could no longer ignore her.
And so he could respond with a clear conscience: "I'm coming."
He only wanted to help her. To make things a little easier. Nothing more. Nothing beyond that. Draco told himself firmly — and walked toward her.