A/N: Hello everyone! Thanks for reading. Please let me know if there's any way I can improve the writing. Don't forget to comment, leave a review, and give some Power Stones!
********
By the time Draco and Hermione emerged from Slughorn's rooms, the midday sun had softened into early evening. The light in the corridor had turned amber and low.
Hermione let out a long breath. "You're far too reckless, you know that. I follow the method in the book because it's been verified by countless Potions masters over decades—it's authoritative. You can't just change things arbitrarily and expect it to be acceptable."
"The result was good," he said. "Isn't that sufficient?"
"No, it isn't sufficient, that's exactly the point." She turned to look at him as they walked. "The steps in textbooks exist for a reason. You can't simply disregard them because something happens to work once."
She had gone along with him in the moment—for reasons she wasn't quite ready to examine—but that didn't mean she agreed with the principle.
They drifted toward a quieter corner of the courtyard, where carved stone benches sat half-hidden behind thick rose bushes, and the air was cooler and still.
"I do understand what you mean," Draco said, settling onto one of the benches beside her. He paused, reading her expression. "Potions requires precision and delicacy—any successful brew depends on maintaining the right balance. I won't argue with that."
She looked at him, somewhat appeased.
"But high-level Potions work is a different matter," he continued, "and I think you haven't considered why. The reason advanced potions are so rarely brewed successfully—why Potions masters command the reputations and prices they do—isn't simply because people fail to follow the steps. It's that the steps, as published, aren't complete."
Hermione's expression shifted. "You're saying the problem is in the instructions themselves? Then why hasn't anyone updated them?"
Draco smiled, slow and a little tired. He gestured to the rosebush beside them—dense with red blooms, and here and there, a white one.
"Which do you notice more? The dozens of red roses, or the two white ones?" He reached over, broke off one of the white blooms, and held it out to her.
She took it, frowning faintly at the petals.
"As far as I know," he said, "a great many advanced potion recipes in published textbooks are deliberately incomplete. The foundational method is sound—but there are gaps, intentional omissions in the critical details. What Potions masters actually know—the refinements that make the difference between a mediocre brew and a flawless one—they learn through their own talent or through direct transmission from their own masters. That knowledge is their livelihood. The secret to their income, their reputation, their continued relevance." He spread his hands. "Why would they give it away?"
"That's—" Hermione started.
"Look at the way Slughorn lives," Draco said, not unkindly. "He's retired, and he's still brewing specialist potions for apothecaries across the country. He commands that income because of what he knows that isn't in any textbook. If the books contained everything, there would be no market for him. If there were no market, there would be no income. It isn't a conspiracy—it's simply how the system sustains itself."
Hermione had gone very quiet. She was looking at the white rose in her hands.
"But that's not fair," she said at last.
Her voice was low, but there was something underneath it.
Draco raised an eyebrow.
"It's not fair." She looked up. Her voice had found its footing. "It's a monopoly on knowledge. A few people maintain their position by controlling what everyone else is allowed to know—by building walls between those who already have access and those who are only permitted to read the approved version." Her eyes were bright with something that wasn't quite anger. "That's not merit. That's a closed door with a sign on it that says 'work harder.'"
He looked at her, surprised. He hadn't expected quite that.
Hermione dropped her gaze to the rose. Her voice became quieter. "You grew up surrounded by it. I imagine your family library alone contains volumes that Hogwarts doesn't stock. You can seek out a Potions master and receive, in a single conversation, knowledge that other people will never encounter. For you—" she paused—"that's simply the ordinary way of things."
"That's not entirely—"
"And someone like me," she said, not interrupting him so much as continuing past him, "comes to the wizarding world with nothing except what's in the books. That's all I have. I thought—" She stopped. Her fingers tightened slightly around the rose stem. "I thought that if I read everything, if I worked hard enough and long enough, I could close the gap. That knowledge was the one thing that couldn't be taken from me."
She didn't finish the sentence. She curled forward slightly, drawing her knees toward her chest, her face disappearing behind her hair.
The slight trembling of her shoulders told him everything.
Draco sat very still.
He had wondered, across two years, what drove Hermione Granger to the lengths she went to. The early mornings, the stacks of books, the way she seemed to need to be first at everything. He had dismissed it as arrogance, or vanity, or simple competitiveness.
He understood it now.
She had been frightened from the beginning. Since the moment she stepped onto the Hogwarts Express, she had been trying to outrun the knowledge of how far behind she might already be. She hadn't known—couldn't have known—that she would become exceptional. She only knew she was starting late, and that the people around her had a ten-year head start on a world she was only now being allowed to enter.
Hermione Granger, the most formidable intellect of their generation, had been studying in a state of quiet, constant fear.
He thought of his past life. Of Malfoy Manor, and Bellatrix, and the floor. He thought of her wrists. He thought of the way she had looked at him from the ground with eyes that had nothing left in them.
She shouldn't have ever looked like that. She shouldn't be crying now.
He was also—this was the uncomfortable part—among the vested interests she was describing. He had grown up in exactly the abundance she was naming. He had never once thought there was anything wrong with it, because no one had ever suggested there might be.
He placed his hand, carefully, on her back. He patted it once, and then once more, and said, in the quietest voice he had, "I'm sorry, Hermione. You're right. It isn't fair—not to Muggle-born wizards, and especially not to someone who has worked as hard as you have."
She lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and she looked at him with an expression that was both raw and faintly bewildered. "I don't know why I'm reacting like this. I'm not angry at you—you've been nothing but good to me—I shouldn't have raised my voice—"
He was already on his feet. He took a pale grey silk handkerchief from his pocket, knelt in front of her—she was still curled small in his jacket, which she hadn't yet returned—and began, with careful hands, to wipe the tears from her face.
"You can be angry with me," he said quietly. "I should have been clearer with Slughorn before we arrived—about who you are and why we were coming. That was my oversight." He held her gaze. "Every student has the right to access knowledge without condition. Muggle-born or otherwise. I should have understood that sooner."
Hermione was staring at him. The sunset behind him had turned the light pink and gold. She tried to stop crying, partly because she didn't want to appear weak, and partly because he looked more distressed than she did, which only made her feel worse.
"Do you actually believe that?" she asked, hesitantly. "That knowledge should be—equally available?"
"Honestly, I didn't think about it clearly before." He held her gaze without deflecting. "It was watching you that changed my thinking. It would be a profound loss to the wizarding world if someone with your ability were held back by a system designed to serve people who already had everything." He paused. "I'm sorry it took me this long."
She let out a slow, shaking breath, and something in her face relaxed. "It's not your fault," she said, quietly. "You didn't design it."
He noticed—belatedly—that he was still holding her face. She reached up and took the handkerchief from him. "I can manage."
"Of course." He released her, turned slightly away, and found a bee investigating a nearby rose with great seriousness, which gave him something to look at while she composed herself.
He thought, quietly, about the textbook sitting on Slughorn's workbench.
Advanced Potion-Making. The same edition that had been in use at Hogwarts since at least Snape's own student days. The same edition his father had used. The same edition that would continue to be assigned to first-year Potions students for as long as no one thought to question it.
The notes Snape had shared with him were useful precisely because Snape had worked out, through his own exceptional instinct, where the published method was wrong. He had corrected it in the margins of his own copy. He had never published those corrections. Why would he? That knowledge was leverage. It was currency.
How many students, across how many years, had brewed the Draught of Living Death according to the printed instructions and come away thinking they simply weren't talented enough?
How many of them had been Hermione Granger—working twice as hard as everyone else, trusting completely in a method that had been quietly, deliberately left incomplete?
The thought sat in him like cold water.
He let himself look further—the longer pattern, the bigger picture. The wizarding world had extraordinary gifts. It should, by any logic, have produced extraordinary things. And yet it had stagnated. The old families had declined, new potions development had slowed to near silence, and the gap between the wizarding world and the Muggle one had only widened while wizards congratulated themselves on their superiority.
The Dark Lord had taken this stagnation and turned it into a cause. The purity of blood. The protection of tradition. A war fought to preserve a hierarchy that was already crumbling from within.
Promising wizards murdered. The population diminished. What knowledge hadn't been monopolised had been destroyed. What exchange might have been possible between the wizarding and Muggle worlds had been replaced with fear and contempt on one side and studied ignorance on the other.
Before Voldemort, there had at least been movement—slow, imperfect, but real—toward a wizarding world that made room for everyone. He had ended that. He had turned a slow, difficult progress into a battlefield, forced people to choose sides, and called the resulting catastrophe a purification.
He was not the guardian of any tradition worth preserving. He was a setback in the long arc of what the wizarding world might have been.
Draco had understood this in pieces, for some time. Watching Hermione cry on a bench in the fading light, still wearing his jacket, still clutching a white rose, he felt the pieces settle into something final and clear.
The Dark Lord could not bring this world to flourishing. He could only take from it.