When Hermione came into the living room, Draco was on the sofa, absorbed in The Complete Guide to Asian Antidotes.
It was mid-July, and the afternoon was brilliantly clear. He had shown no sign of going outside. His long legs were crossed on a footstool, his left hand holding the book open against his chest, his right hand raised to his temple where two fingers moved in slow, absent circles—the particular gesture of someone working through a problem that won't cooperate.
Hermione coughed softly.
He stopped. He lowered the book, resting it against his chest, and looked up at her through the pale fringe falling across his forehead with an expression of mild puzzlement. "I thought there were no lessons today."
"There aren't," she said, smiling at him.
"How did you get in?"
"Dobby let me in." She looked pleased with herself.
Draco shook his head slightly. Hermione Granger, tireless champion of house-elves, had apparently made another devoted friend from a species he had never quite managed to understand. He tilted his chin toward the empty seat beside him. "Sit down."
Under normal circumstances, anyone who addressed Hermione Granger in the imperative would have received an immediate lecture on the subject. Today, she had barely frowned before her legs made the decision independently, and she settled beside him on the sofa, close enough that the hem of her white skirt was near his trousers.
She was wearing a light lilac T-shirt and a white mini-skirt, white ankle socks and Mary Jane shoes. Without the concealing drape of school robes, the effect was entirely different.
Draco's gaze moved over her legs for a moment. He looked back at his book.
Hermione, unaware of this, had tilted her head against the sofa back and was staring at his profile with a faintly puzzled expression, turning something over in her mind.
Her new headphones. She'd taken them to a repair shop, where the mechanic had inspected them and found nothing wrong. She'd used them again at home without incident. The strange current she'd felt that one afternoon—the peculiar warmth, the brief shock—had never repeated itself.
What exactly had that been?
Her gaze drifted over the clean lines of his face. His eyelashes were thick and a pale, warm gold, like something a painter had applied with excessive care. His jaw was well-defined. His nose was straight. And his mouth—it was genuinely unusual, she thought, for a boy to have lips so precisely shaped, and yet on his face it looked completely natural, even right.
She had been studying his appearance for some time before she realised she had forgotten what she was originally thinking about.
Draco, for his part, was making no progress whatsoever with the book.
She was staring at him—he could feel it—with those wide, direct eyes, and her legs were swaying gently beside him. He kept his position exactly as it was, but his attention had migrated, entirely without his permission, to the narrow strip of Achilles tendon visible above the top of her sock.
The line of it was clean and precise—calf tapering to ankle, two small hollows on either side of the joint. He had been looking at this for an unreasonable amount of time. He had not turned a page. His free hand had made itself into a fist on his knee.
He felt like the strangest person alive.
He made himself look away. He did not dare look at her.
"Would you like some tea?" he asked, turning a page with deliberate composure.
"Actually, I wanted to try something different." She surfaced from her reverie with evident enthusiasm. "My mother keeps telling me about a spring water coffee place here in Bath. I wanted to ask if you'd like to come."
"Really," he said. A careful sense of relief moved through him. She didn't appear to have noticed anything.
He looked at the first line of the page he had just turned to. He read it three times. He understood each word individually.
"Draco." Her tone had acquired a slight edge. "Stop staring at a book you're clearly not reading, and come with me. I have never in my life met a boy more bookish than I am. You've been inside for days—Quidditch training before dawn, then books until dark. Don't you ever get tired?"
Quidditch training. She wasn't wrong that he'd been pushing himself hard. The summer had felt necessary for it—the early mornings on the pitch while the air was still cool, the afternoons spent working through materials that had nothing to do with his coursework. He had things to catch up on, and the Horcrux business, now in Dumbledore's hands, had not entirely quieted the unease in the back of his mind. Dumbledore had found the Horcruxes in his previous life, eventually—but when? Had he missed anything? Was there something only Draco knew to look for?
He had homework, Slughorn's sessions, and a private research project into dragonpox treatment that was giving him regular headaches.
Still. He hadn't slept particularly well last night, and the book had been doing him no good for the last hour. And Mrs Granger had mentioned, almost in passing, that Hermione didn't have many friends in Bath.
He looked at her. She was watching him with the concentrated attention of a cat who has identified something it wants.
He put the book down. "Spring water coffee. Very well."
"Yes!" Her voice brightened immediately. "We can buy some proper food for Harry on the way as well. Apparently those Muggles have been rationing him to one small meal a day—he's half-starved."
"Right. Let's go."
There was something clarifying about walking the Muggle streets with her—the stone paths, the old bridges, the ordinary noise of a city that knew nothing about him or what he carried. It put things at a useful distance.
He breathed in the open air as they crossed the three-arched bridge, and the pressure behind his temples eased somewhat.
"This is a good place," Hermione said, pleased with herself, when they had settled by the window of the coffee shop. The room was light and high-ceilinged, and someone was playing a piano in the centre of the hall.
"The music is nice," Draco said, picking up the menu.
"That's the Well-Tempered Clavier," she said. "Bach. I learned piano as a child—only for a few years, and I was never very good, but I still know the pieces." She glanced at the white upright piano with a faint expression of longing. "There's no way to continue at Hogwarts, of course. Boarding school."
Draco followed her gaze. There was a piano in the Malfoy Manor library—a good instrument, kept under a dust cover for as long as he could remember, because no one in the family had ever learned to play it.
"It doesn't matter," Hermione said, recovering quickly. "I still get to listen." She turned to the menu. "What would you like? My treat today."
"Iced Americano," he said. "Or a straight espresso. Either is fine."
She lowered the menu and gave him a look. "That's genuinely the bitterest thing on here."
"Yes."
"I've been meaning to ask. I see you drinking it at breakfast at Hogwarts sometimes. You must actually like it." She paused. "But I also saw you eating chocolate cake once, quietly, when you thought no one was watching. You had the most private smile about it."
He looked at her. "You noticed that?"
"I just noticed it."
"From across the Great Hall? Through a full table of students?"
"That's—that's not the point." Slight colour in her face. "The point is that you obviously like sweet things."
"You're not wrong," he said, without embarrassment. "I do."
"Then why the Americano?"
He was quiet for a moment. "I don't think Americano or espresso is actually the best coffee."
"What is, then?"
"Iced latte. Whipped cream, chocolate sauce." He said it with the faint wistfulness of someone recalling something they haven't had in a long time. "In my opinion, that's the best."
"Then I'll order that." She gave him a look that was briefly, privately satisfied. "And try it."
Their coffees arrived. She examined the iced latte for a moment, then took a careful sip. Her eyes widened. "That's wonderful. Is this really what you like most?"
"Yes," he said, and took a sip of his Americano. The cold bitterness settled on his tongue exactly as it always did.
"Then why do you keep ordering this?" She gestured at his glass, genuinely baffled.
"Because it's bitter enough." He looked down at the glass, rather than at her. "It reminds me that the comfortable moments I'm living through are on borrowed time. That the real work hasn't changed. Bitterness is useful—it keeps me from forgetting."
She stared at him for a moment. Then she said, in the tone of someone who has made a decision: "Drink this."
She pushed the iced latte across the table toward him.
"Hermione—"
"You're torturing yourself for no reason." Before he could respond, she picked up his Americano and moved it to her side of the table. "You're not allowed to have it today."
"You always say wasting food is shameful—"
She lifted the glass and drank the entire Americano in one decisive swallow. She set it down with a clunk. Her expression was one of resolute suffering. "Merlin. You drink that every morning. Voluntarily."
Draco stared at her.
She had already finished it. Without hesitation, she had simply drunk his coffee.
"Good." She folded her hands. "Now you have to finish the latte."
He picked up the glass. He took a sip.
It was extraordinary. Better than memory—cool and sweet and perfectly balanced, and the warmth working its way up from somewhere in his chest had nothing at all to do with the temperature of the drink.
He smiled. A real one—unhurried, reaching his eyes, the first of the day.
"You planned this," he said. "From when you ordered."
"I don't know what you're talking about." She turned to look at the pianist with the air of someone engaged in something entirely unrelated, and smiled at the window.
He had been frowning all morning, she was thinking. Something had been weighing on him. He needed something better than bitterness today.
It seemed she'd been right.
This became a habit—or perhaps it always had been, and they simply stopped pretending otherwise. Hermione pulled him into Bath again and again over the course of July: concerts on the lawn, a hidden chocolate shop down a back alley where she made him taste every variety on the shelf with great seriousness, a museum dedicated to a Muggle novelist she loved—"just walk around with me for an hour, and then I'll take you for afternoon tea, I promise"—and he found, each time, that the irritation he expected to feel didn't come.
On the days he refused to go out, she stayed.
She brought cassette tapes for the Walkman, and they would lie on the grass in the garden in the afternoon while the heat built—Draco with his earphones in, half-reading the Daily Prophet or the latest Transfiguration Today, Hermione beside him with her legs crossed and her notes in her lap, reciting history of magic passages under her breath with absolute focus.
Sometimes he took the earphones out and simply listened to her voice instead. It was, he'd decided privately, better than most music—clear and unhurried and precise, like water moving in a fountain.
"Am I disturbing you?" she would ask occasionally, catching him watching her.
"Can't hear a thing," he would say, gesturing at the earphones, and she would look satisfied and return to her notes.
July with Hermione Granger was bright and unexpectedly full. Before either of them properly registered the passing of time, the month was nearly over, and the Felix Felicis was approaching its final stage.
Under Slughorn's direction, they had learned to filter the residue through a cloth woven from unicorn hair, and how to re-add the filtered potion three times to the preheated cauldron at a precise angle.
"This is not unlike certain traditional Chinese tea preparation techniques," Hermione remarked.
Slughorn agreed with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting for someone to notice. "Eastern magical traditions have always developed along parallel lines—the underlying logic is the same."
Hermione filed this away with the expression she wore when something slotted neatly into a larger framework. Her attention drifted for a moment to Draco, who was concentrating on adding a single drop of unicorn blood to the steaming surface of the potion, his pale eyes steady and intent, one strand of platinum hair falling forward across his brow.
She wasn't sure when she had started losing track of what she was thinking when she looked at him. Three, perhaps five seconds at a time—his profile, the grey of his eyes, the particular stillness he had when he was focused on something. Then she would look away, slightly puzzled with herself, and get back to work.
They still had the stirring to finish. And then Slughorn was demonstrating the pour.
"Slow, continuous, even—like honey." He tilted the cauldron with a practised steadiness, his stout fingers moving with surprising delicacy. "Keep the cauldron warm throughout, so nothing clings to the sides."
Both apprentices watched in attentive silence. The golden liquid moved in a single, unbroken thread.
Slughorn set the unicorn horn gently into the potion. It floated, rising and dipping slightly, tiny bubbles forming at its tip. He stepped back.
"Magnificent. Now: six months, away from all light, undisturbed." His smile settled into something calmer and more serious. "Many students consider themselves finished at this stage, and they are wrong. Felix Felicis is extraordinarily sensitive. A single moment of direct sunlight, or a sharp impact, and the entire brew is lost." He glanced at Hermione, who was already writing, and looked gratified.
He appeared to drift briefly into memory. "I once knew a Japanese Potions master—exceptional talent. Never once managed a successful batch."
"The earthquakes?" Draco said.
Slughorn nodded, with the resigned sadness of someone for whom this was a genuine grief.
The following afternoon, Draco went to his grandfather's garden for tea, bringing along a paper on the fourteenth-century witch trials—he had woken that morning with a new angle on it and wanted to finish the revisions before the thought escaped him.
Abraxas sat across from him, observing him over the rim of his teacup with the unhurried attention of someone in no particular hurry. "I hear you've been spending time with a Muggle-born girl."
Draco's pen paused for half a second. "That's Slughorn's doing, I assume."
"He speaks highly of her." Abraxas made a small sound that was not quite a snort. "That collector of other people's students. I see considerably less of you since you started attending his sessions."
"Grandfather, you know my first loyalty is here. I'm after his Potions knowledge—when I've learned it, it belongs to the Malfoy family, doesn't it?" Draco returned to his corrections without breaking rhythm.
Abraxas was satisfied by this, in the way he always was when things were framed as family advantage. He cleared his throat and settled back. "I'm not here to manage your friendships. Talent is worth cultivating, in whoever carries it—I've always believed that. But your father has views, and those views have a way of narrowing his judgment. Just be aware."
"Understood. Thank you, Grandfather." Draco set down his pen, reviewed the last line, and stood. He poured fresh tea into Abraxas's cup. "I have to get back—the Felix Felicis is at a delicate stage today."
"Off with you, then," Abraxas said, making a dismissive gesture. "And let an old man read his paper in peace." He reached for the newly arrived Daily Prophet with the comfortable authority of someone who has earned the right to be undisturbed.
He had barely opened it before his expression changed entirely.
"Merlin's beard!" He was already calling after the boy, who had nearly reached the door. "Come back—you need to see this."
The headline read:
PETER PETTIGREW ESCAPES FROM AZKABAN
The Ministry of Magic has confirmed that Peter Pettigrew recently escaped from Azkaban prison. There is currently no evidence that he received assistance. Azkaban officials report no irregularities, but representatives from the International Confederation of Wizards have raised questions about potential vulnerabilities in the prison's security...
Draco looked at the photograph. Pettigrew—small, pale, frightened-looking—stared back from the page.
History had a particular sense of rhythm.
In his previous life, Sirius Black had escaped Azkaban around this same time. Sirius was already free and cleared in this version of events, but Pettigrew—the coward who had spent two years as a rat in the Weasley household before Draco had caught him—was apparently more resourceful than anticipated.
"Draco." Abraxas had set down the paper. There was a line between his brows that hadn't been there a moment ago. "I think you should return to Malfoy Manor."
Draco understood immediately. Malfoy Manor was considerably more defensible than the spa. He was also the person directly responsible for Pettigrew's capture and imprisonment. If the man harboured any desire for revenge—which Draco personally doubted, cowardice being Pettigrew's defining characteristic—he would be the most logical target.
Abraxas pushed back from the table and stood up straight. The comfortable, unhurried grandfather was gone; in his place was the head of the Malfoy family, with all the weight of that posture. "Lucius and Narcissa are in Peru. I'll come with you. One hour to pack—then we leave."
Draco returned to his room, snapped open his leather trunk, and packed it with a series of quick wand movements. He pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward him and wrote quickly, folded it, and sent his owl off toward Hermione's side of the building.
Then he went to Slughorn's door and knocked.
"Sir—I'm so sorry. I have to leave with my grandfather today. I can't continue the sessions." He was slightly out of breath. "I'm genuinely grateful for everything you've taught me this summer."
Slughorn was holding a copy of the Daily Prophet. He didn't look surprised.
"Of course—I understand completely. It has been my very great pleasure." He set down the paper with an expression of genuine regret. "The only thing I'm sorry about is that we never got to the Wolfsbane Potion." He paused for a moment, then appeared to make a decision. He moved closer and lowered his voice. "Draco. I want you to be careful. A former student of mine—Barnabas Cuffe, the editor at the Prophet—wrote to me this morning. He says Pettigrew was talking in his sleep for weeks before the escape. The same words, repeatedly." He held Draco's gaze. "'He's at Hogwarts. He's at Hogwarts.'"
Draco was still.
He's at Hogwarts. Who? Harry? Himself? Both?
"Tell your grandfather," Slughorn said. He had sat down without noticing that he'd chosen the stiff, uncomfortable wooden sofa he usually avoided. "I think early precautions are warranted."
"I will. Thank you." Draco hesitated. "There's one more thing I'd like to ask. I don't know if it's presumptuous."
"Anything within my power."
"A copy of that photograph of Lily Evans," Draco said. "If that's possible."
Slughorn was very still for a moment. He looked at Draco with an expression that was briefly, unexpectedly raw. Then he got up slowly, went to the desk, and found the photograph at the back of the collection.
He showed it to Draco. It was a wedding photograph—Lily Evans and James Potter, radiant and unhurried, entirely unaware of what was coming.
"She sent this to me after the wedding. Said it was the best photograph she'd ever taken." Slughorn's thick fingers rested on the frame for a moment before he slipped the photograph out and handed it over.
"Thank you," Draco said. He placed it carefully in the inner pocket of his jacket.
"I think I know who it's for," Slughorn said quietly, turning away. His voice was slightly unsteady. "Give him my regards."
Draco nodded. He thought: you'll meet him yourself, in a couple of years, at Hogwarts. He smiled faintly, said his final goodbye, and went out.
You had to give Slughorn credit, he thought as he walked back down the corridor. Beneath the networking and the name-collecting, there was something genuine where Lily Evans was concerned. It showed in moments like this—when he forgot about his own comfort, when the cleverness gave way to something simpler and more real.
Back in his room, his luggage was ready. Draco looked around at the space for a moment, taking in the month that had been lived here—the late evenings talking in the living room, the afternoon tea in the garden, the books spread out on every available surface, the shared study sessions that had stretched past midnight and ended with both of them half-asleep over their notes.
He had learned the shape of her childhood here—a small house full of light, with picture-book shelves and a grassy garden and parents who were quietly and entirely devoted to her. She had arrived at Hogwarts already certain that knowledge was the most reliable thing in the world, and she had brought a Muggle's unassuming confidence to a place that expected her to feel inferior, and she had simply—not.
In return, she had pulled details out of him that he'd never voluntarily offered anyone. He had started to understand things about himself in the telling—that the arrogance had always been a kind of armour, and that no one had ever thought to question whether he needed it, including himself.
He was still thinking about this when the door opened and a tangle of brown hair collided with his chest.
"Draco!" Her voice was muffled against his collar.
He put his arms around her without deciding to. She was warm from outside, and she smelled like sunlight and green apple, and he felt something in him settle very slightly, in the particular way it only did in her company.
"Why are you here?" he asked. He was smiling.
"I was worried about you." She made a small, indignant sound and held on tighter. "You sent a note saying you were leaving in an hour—"
"I'm fine," he said. He rested his hand on her head. "Pettigrew is a coward before anything else. He won't come near me. My grandfather is being sensible, that's all."
She was quiet for a moment, then lifted her face to look at him. Her eyes were bright and slightly wet.
He took out his handkerchief—the pale grey silk one—and held it out to her. "This is the third one you've had from me. I'm beginning to think you engineered all of this specifically for the handkerchiefs."
She laughed despite herself, took it, and pressed it briefly to the corner of her eye. "I didn't mean to cry. I don't know why I—"
"The handkerchief clearly prefers you," he said seriously. "I'm leaving it voluntarily. Don't feel guilty."
Hermione clutched the handkerchief, half-laughing, half-still trying to compose herself. After a moment, her eyes steadied on his, earnest and direct. "We'll look after you. All of us. We'll find a way."
"I know," he said. He looked at her—her anxious, warm, completely unguarded face—and he meant it. "I believe you. One day you'll be exactly the kind of witch who does."