In November, Hogwarts began its Quidditch season.
The news that "Potter is about to play as Gryffindor's Seeker" fell like a stone into a calm black lake, sending ripples of discussion and waves of predictions throughout the school — some thought he would play brilliantly, while others thought he would fall hard.
As for how Potter himself viewed the matter, Draco wasn't entirely sure. On one occasion, however, he spotted Potter sitting at the Gryffindor table, hunched over the copy of Quidditch Through the Ages that Hermione had once lent him, searching its pages for a confidence he clearly hadn't yet found.
The sight was oddly novel.
Draco found himself hesitant to gloat. His once self-assured opponent — who had bested him more than once on the pitch — was now openly displaying his anxiety, and somehow that felt less satisfying than expected.
"You have absolutely nothing to worry about." One day, he finally couldn't help but stop beside Potter.
Potter looked up at Draco — and behind him, Crabbe and Goyle, grimly working their way through slabs of chocolate cake — with a puzzled expression.
"If I were you, I'd visit the trophy room on the fourth floor," Draco said. "James Potter's name is on more than a few of those trophies." He left it at that.
If family bloodline couldn't shore up Potter's confidence, Draco didn't know what would.
---
Students who had only to watch from the stands had more time for their studies.
Once the excitement of term's beginning had faded, nearly every student was drowning in homework, and the library had never been so crowded. Yet Hermione Granger's reasons for haunting its stacks were never quite the same as everyone else's — it was never merely to finish an assignment.
Sometimes she would seize Potter and Weasley by the backs of their robes and firmly command them to finish their work, or declare their parchments an embarrassment and order rewrites without a second thought.
At other times, after the two of them had fled with their meagre scrolls, she would settle alone at a table by the window, absorbed in reading behind a pale, misty curtain, surrounded by towers of yellowed books that had nothing to do with any current lesson.
This piqued Draco's curiosity.
Occasionally, to satisfy it, he would contrive to pass close enough to steal a glance at her reading material. He was surprised to find that the books were consistently far beyond first-year level, and entirely unrelated to coursework.
When it came to ambition, one could only admire Hermione Granger.
Draco idly turned a page of an old volume concerning the dark wizard Emeric, and found himself doing exactly that.
Why does she push herself so hard? he wondered. Could the experience of being helpless against the troll have ignited something in her?
He understood that particular helplessness. He had felt it himself when his father, Lucius, had been sent to Azkaban — that hollow, suffocating sensation of being powerless, of events moving around you like water around stone.
He had been all but forced into becoming a Death Eater. He had never admitted, even to himself, how the moment of being branded with the Dark Mark had truly felt. Instead, he had boasted of it to the other Slytherins, over and over, until the boasting became a kind of armour — until he had nearly convinced himself it was an honour, a mark of distinction for the House of Malfoy.
And it had served its purpose. The Dark Mark commanded a particular reverence from the Slytherins. Sometimes he would roll up his sleeve deliberately, just enough, just long enough. It kept the opportunists at bay while his father was imprisoned. It made his life, if not easy, at least manageable.
In public, he wore arrogance like a second skin. In private, he studied ferociously — pouring over Restricted texts, forbidden magic, obscure branches of alchemy — desperate to prove to the Dark Lord that he was capable, that he was worth cultivating, that Lucius Malfoy deserved to be freed from Azkaban's torment.
Those memories surfaced again, toxic and relentless. Draco pressed his fingers to his temples and forced them back down, redirecting his attention to the book and the densely written parchment before him.
Like Hermione, Draco spent long hours in the library — sometimes perfecting work he had already completed, sometimes researching anything he could find about Ravenclaw's diadem.
Persuading the Grey Lady to open up was no simple task. She was a ghost; material concerns meant nothing to her any longer. Draco could only search for the key to her trust in the books.
---
That particular afternoon, the library was packed to the rafters. It seemed the entire school had simultaneously realised their assignments were overdue, likely because Professor Binns had recently reminded his students — in his own dreary, half-conscious fashion — that parchment length requirements were non-negotiable.
When Hermione Granger arrived, there was not a single free seat to be found. Clutching several books to her chest, she circled the room twice, wandering as far as the edge of the Restricted Section, and still found nothing.
She sighed, frowned, and simply sank down onto the floor in front of the nearest bookshelf, cracking open the topmost book with the resigned air of someone making do. She was entirely unaware of the pale grey eyes watching her from the other side of the shelf.
"What are you doing?" The owner of those eyes appeared, stepping slowly around the bookcase to stand beside her and look down.
"Reading." She turned a page, barely glancing up. "There aren't any seats. I'll manage here."
"I have a spare chair," Draco said, with a slight hesitation. "You're welcome to use it."
"Really? Are you sure?" She looked up at him, and her eyes brightened at once — like lamps being lit.
"Quite sure." He bent down and collected her stack of books from the floor, then offered his free hand to help her up. "Come with me."
Draco led her to his corner of the library.
---
Draco Malfoy did not, as a rule, help anyone without good reason.
And yet, strangely, he always seemed to make an exception for Hermione Granger.
Perhaps it was simply the mutual regard of two students who both took their work seriously. Or perhaps — and this was a thought he only half-permitted himself — he needed some of her particular energy, her infectious, unguarded vitality. It made him feel present. Not like a piece of rotting wood being slowly hollowed out by memory.
Hermione made him feel the meaning of the word alive.
Lively joy, lively worry, even lively irritation — she stirred all of it in him. Since his rebirth, almost every strong emotion he had felt could be traced back to her in some way.
The girl from his memories had been sharp-tongued, rigid, and wary of him to the point of hostility. This girl was all of that — clever, principled, and hopelessly decent — but she was also bright and mischievous and, occasionally, surprisingly disarming. He had not expected it. He had assumed she would despise him, as she had in his past life. Instead, she seemed to hold neither dislike nor suspicion toward him, and he still wasn't entirely sure what to do with that.
"Would you like some tea?" he asked, attending to his tea set with practised ease.
"Yes, please." She settled happily into the extra chair, books piled in her lap, legs swinging, watching him with perfectly comfortable patience.
"Better than the floor?" he asked, as he poured.
"Infinitely! There's no finer seat in the library," she declared, with complete conviction.
He set the cup before her and smiled, saying nothing.
"I can never find this place on my own," Hermione said, pouting. "It seems I can only get here if you show me the way."
Draco settled back into his chair and returned to the essay he was polishing — a study of the medieval dark wizard Emeric the Evil — filling in the gaps between documented history and the more colourful legends with careful precision. After so many years of teaching, Professor Binns was bound to appreciate something that went beyond the textbook. So long as one noted in parentheses that certain details remained unverified legend, Binns seemed to derive a quiet, genuine pleasure from the discovery, and would reward the student's initiative with an Outstanding without hesitation.
"The Hogwarts library has many wonders," Draco told her, as he made a small correction to a sentence. "You'll have to discover them for yourself."
Hermione wrinkled her nose at this, half-persuaded and half-sceptical. She sipped her tea and studied his profile through the rising steam, fairly certain he was fobbing her off.
After a stretch of comfortable silence, Draco set down his quill. "This may be rather forward of me, but — were you crying in the bathroom on Hallowe'en? Before dinner?" He had been wondering since. He wasn't sure why it still occupied his thoughts.
He simply hadn't liked hearing it.
"I was being a bit foolish, honestly," Hermione said, colouring slightly. "It wasn't a serious matter."
"I'd like to know, all the same." He looked at her steadily, no pretence in it.
"All right, but you're not allowed to laugh." She glanced at him. "Ron said I was like a nightmare. That nobody could stand me."
The quill snapped in his hand.
"Oh goodness!" Hermione was on her feet in an instant, reaching across to pull the ruined parchment clear of the spreading ink. "Quick — move that before it bleeds through — what happened to your quill? It's completely useless—"
Draco had not moved.
He sat perfectly still, looking at her, his expression darkening rapidly.
Hermione assumed he was dazed by the accident. She plucked the broken quill from his hand, dropped it into the waste bin, and seized a cloth from the table to blot the ink from his fingers. "You'll have to do this yourself, I can't reach — are you all right? You've gone very quiet—"
"You are not a nightmare." His hand closed firmly around hers through the cloth, stopping her. His voice was low but unhurried, each word placed with care. "You are not a nightmare, Hermione. You are the best kind of person there is."
Hermione went still. The puzzlement on her face shifted — first to comprehension, then to something softer, a warmth she made no attempt to conceal.
"Is that genuinely what you think?" she said, smiling.
He gave a single, quiet nod.
She studied him for a moment. His grey eyes were clear and direct, not flickering away. He meant it. Her smile widened.
"Shall I have a word with Weasley?" Draco said, his voice dropping a degree, jaw tight.
He didn't know why he'd said it. He simply couldn't seem to stop himself.
"There's absolutely no need," Hermione said cheerfully. "He apologised. It was a misunderstanding, really — I was showing off dreadfully during Charms, and he was probably fed up. I don't blame him."
"Very well," Draco said, closing his eyes briefly and drawing a measured breath. Then he registered the state of his hands and the ruined parchment, and grimaced.
Hermione had already drawn the damaged scroll toward her and was examining it with interest. "Where did you find all of this? It's far more detailed than anything I turned up. I didn't know that Emeric's rival, Egbert the Egregious, had won the Elder Wand from him in a duel—"
"Supplementary historical sources," Draco said.
He was still annoyed on her behalf, grieving his parchment, and she was absorbed in the footnotes. He couldn't decide whether to laugh or despair.
"I'm all right now, Draco." She had noticed his expression and seemed to understand the source of it. The shadow that had lingered around her since Hallowe'en was gone entirely. "It wasn't only because of what Ron said — I think I'd convinced myself that I had no friends, that no one could really like me. But I was wrong." She paused, then looked up at him directly, her expression open and certain. "My friends were there for me in the most dangerous moment I've ever faced. They risked themselves to save me. And I'd been cross with them for not following the rules." A small, self-deprecating laugh. "If you lot had followed the rules that day, I might not be sitting here."
Draco, having composed himself, was refilling her cup. He glanced up at that, a slow, easy smirk crossing his face. "I'm glad you see it that way."
He had always respected someone who could tell the difference between the letter of a rule and its spirit.
"Draco." Hermione's tone shifted, becoming deliberate. "You saved me twice that day. I think I can trust you." She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter, the picture of someone about to make a formal announcement. "Harry wanted me to tell you as well — we found his father's name in the trophy room. He's been training brilliantly since."
She set her teacup down. "The three of us talked it over and agreed you should know something important."
What followed surprised him considerably.
Speaking on behalf of Potter and Weasley both, Hermione told him everything: that Hagrid had been sent by Dumbledore to retrieve something from a vault at Gringotts; that the three of them had stumbled onto the third-floor corridor and seen the three-headed dog; that there was a trapdoor beneath it. She even relayed Harry's account of discovering that Professor Snape had been injured, her voice careful and measured throughout.
"Harry and Ron think Professor Snape is trying to steal whatever the dog is guarding," she finished, watching Draco's face. "They even think he might have let the troll in."
Draco pressed his fingertips to his temple. "Why are you telling me all of this?"
Are they really this trusting? Have you truly come to know me this well? Shouldn't this be going to Professor McGonagall? To Dumbledore himself?
"Because we trust you," Hermione said simply. "You've been helping us since the beginning." There was no performance in her eyes. Just honesty, and the quiet certainty of someone who had thought it through.
Draco exhaled slowly.
Merlin's beard. With logic like that and trust given this freely, it was a small miracle Harry Potter had survived to see November.
He knew, of course, that in another sense it was a good thing — that Harry and the others regarded him with something warmer than neutrality. In his past life they had never trusted him. This felt strange. Fragile, almost.
He also knew, from memories he wished he didn't carry, exactly what was actually happening beneath Hogwarts. It was Professor Quirrell, not Snape, who had released the troll. It was Quirrell who wanted what the three-headed dog was guarding. Quirrell, with the Dark Lord clinging to the back of his turban like a parasite, was hunting the Philosopher's Stone — the key to brewing the Elixir of Life and restoring Voldemort to a body.
But Draco couldn't simply tell them that. Not yet, and not directly.
Beyond that, as he turned the events of first year over in his mind, a suspicion that had been forming for some time began to solidify: this whole sequence of events had the feeling of a deliberate trial. Something Dumbledore had arranged — or allowed — to give Potter the experience he would one day need. Removing the obstacle prematurely would solve nothing. It might even do harm.
Hermione had been stirring her tea, and now she looked up again, choosing her words with care. "I don't actually believe any professor at Hogwarts would deliberately endanger a student," she said. "But you know Professor Snape far better than we do — you're in his House. If you happened to notice anything, or had any thoughts... we thought perhaps you might be willing to keep an eye out."
So it wasn't only trust. There was a practical purpose as well. Draco regarded her with a carefully neutral expression.
"You want me to spy for you," he said.
"Not spy," Hermione said firmly. "Observe. There's a difference." She tilted her head. "And surely you're curious about the Head of your own House."
This was Hermione's idea. Potter and Weasley would never have framed it so neatly. Draco studied her as she calmly reached for her refilled cup, meeting his look with a composed, faintly expectant smile.
Quick-minded, decisive, and — when she chose to be — quietly clever. He could appreciate that.
He could understand the suspicion of Snape. He did not share it, but he understood it.
Professor Snape had a vile temper and a tongue like a blade; he seemed to take particular pleasure in making the lives of non-Slytherin students miserable, docking points with an enthusiasm that bordered on the artistic. But Draco trusted, without reservation, that Snape's professional ethics would never extend to actual harm against a student. In all the years Draco carried in his memory, Snape had never crossed that line — he had merely made very certain everyone knew exactly where it was. And the Philosopher's Stone held no interest for him whatsoever. If it had been a cache of rare Potions ingredients — perhaps Chimaera scale, or the skin of an African Boomslang — then possibly. But the Stone? The means to immortality? Snape cared nothing for that.
Poor Professor Snape. His sinister manner and unsociable habits made him the ideal suspect for anything.
Out of a certain sympathy, Draco said, "Has it occurred to you that Professor Quirrell might be the more suspicious candidate?"
Hermione froze. She set down her empty cup and stared.
"Professor Quirrell?" she said.
"You weren't in the Great Hall when it all started," Draco said, reaching to refill her cup once more. "I went back to the Slytherin common room that night and spoke to several students who had seen everything. It was Professor Quirrell who first announced the troll's presence. He ran into the Great Hall, shouted his warning, and immediately caused a panic."
Hermione's expression shifted. She hadn't considered this at all — that much was plain.
She took an incautious gulp of tea, burned herself, fanned her mouth with one hand, and then squinted with unmistakable pleasure at the flavour anyway.
Draco glanced at her — caught between wanting to burn her mouth and evidently enjoying it too much to stop — and almost laughed. He schooled his expression before she noticed and pressed on: "Under normal circumstances, a professor encountering evidence of a troll in the castle should have found Dumbledore quietly. A whispered word and a swift search. Instead, Quirrell charged into a room full of students and announced it at full volume. The predictable result was hysteria."
Hermione opened her mouth, but Draco continued: "More interesting still — no one can account for his whereabouts. I mean in the interval between the students being sent back to their dormitories and us hiding in that classroom and overhearing him arrive to deal with the troll."
"Didn't he faint?" Hermione interjected.
"He appeared to faint," Draco said carefully, "which meant that when Dumbledore led the staff to search the dungeons, Quirrell was the one teacher excused from participating — on account of being incapacitated. And once the students had been cleared out, no one remained in the Great Hall who could account for where he'd actually been." He tapped a fingertip on the table. "There is a difference between a professor who is unconscious and a professor who appears to be."
He rested his chin on his folded hands and regarded Hermione steadily — her brow furrowed, her eyes working through it, her whole face a picture of concentrated rethinking.
"I do agree with you on one thing," he said. "I don't believe any Hogwarts professor would willingly endanger a student." He paused. "But if we must suspect someone — should we not at least ask whether the stammering Professor Quirrell is quite as harmless as he seems?"