By October, it was clear that Harry's feelings toward Lockhart had curdled from mild discomfort into active avoidance. Whenever Lockhart appeared, Harry would press himself against the nearest wall and attempt to become invisible—an approach that worked with varying degrees of success.
Draco witnessed the failure of this approach on more than one occasion: Harry, caught in a corridor, being steered into a gleaming photo opportunity with a hand that brooked no argument. There was also the matter of Colin Creevey—an eager first-year who seemed to have appointed himself Harry's unofficial photographer and dogged his every move with a camera, documenting each increasingly desperate evasion for posterity.
Celebrity, apparently, had its drawbacks. Draco filed this away and left Harry to it.
He had enough to occupy him.
Draco was expected at Slytherin Quidditch practice three times a week as the team's new Seeker, which was, in the plainest terms, excellent.
He had no objection to tiredness, not when it came from flying. In another life he had spent years on training pitches considerably less forgiving than this one. Flight had always done something to him that nothing else could—the banking turns between goalposts, the diving and weaving at speed, the sheer sensation of it pressing back against him like proof that he was still alive.
"Malfoy, that dive was completely unreasonable!" Chaser Adrian Pucey shouted across the pitch, catching himself after a blast of wind from Draco's broom nearly knocked him sideways. "I thought you were a Bludger for a second!"
"Not intentional!" Draco called back, pulling the nose of his Nimbus up hard and climbing.
"New players," Beater Peregrine Derrick said sagely, grinning at his fellow Beater Lucian Bole. "Always like this. Excited. Full of themselves." He raised an eyebrow. "Let's see how his reflexes hold up."
"Malfoy!" he bellowed cheerfully. "Heads up!"
He swatted a loose Bludger directly at him.
That absolute madman—identical, Draco thought in the split second before reacting, to every memory he had of him—had not changed at all.
Draco curled backward over his broomstick in a Sloth Grip Roll, the Bludger screaming past his ear.
"Not funny, Derrick!" he shouted through the wind. "Beaters are meant to protect the Seeker!"
"Brilliant reflexes!" Derrick called back, delighted. "Again?"
Draco rolled his eyes at the sky.
The thing about Peregrine Derrick was that you could not show weakness. He was a dark-haired, physically intimidating sixth-year who respected precisely one thing: actual ability. His batting was extraordinary, which he considered a licence to be as disruptive as he liked. The players he genuinely rated, he left alone. Everyone else was fair game.
Draco knew this. He had the advantage of knowing it.
Before Derrick could line up for another run, Draco bore down on him from above, executing a sharp Transylvanian Tackle—pulling out at the last second and snatching the bat clean from his hand.
He hovered at a distance, turning the bat over thoughtfully.
Derrick stared at him for a moment. Then he threw his head back and laughed.
"Draco Malfoy!" he called across the pitch. "I'm starting to like you. They told me you bought your spot—they didn't know what they were talking about."
Good. Draco thought, and tossed the bat back to him. Derrick's respect was worth considerably more than his contempt. The rest of the team, none of whom could match him, would draw their own conclusions.
"Malfoy—over here." Flint's voice carried from the stands.
Draco landed lightly and took his position in front of the captain, who looked him over with the satisfied expression of a man who has made a good investment.
"You've surprised me," Flint said, which from Flint constituted high praise. He turned to face the pitch, arms folded. "See that stadium? Full of people in a few weeks. Could be cheering for you."
Several silver-green figures traced patterns against the grey sky, their Nimbus 2001s leaving brief streaks in the air. Draco watched them and felt something he couldn't quite name—simultaneously at home and startled to be here.
He had stood on a pitch before. He had not expected it to feel quite so different, doing it again.
"You're not as pampered as I was afraid of," Flint continued, squinting at the pitch. "Keep the pace up, and you'll surprise them on match day." He sounded confident in a way that suggested he had already decided Slytherin would win the Quidditch Cup, and was simply waiting for reality to catch up with his certainty.
Draco wanted to continue practising rather than stopping to talk about it. He could have trained every day, had his body allowed it—he had done so before, in another life, in more punishing conditions than this. But his twelve-year-old frame had its limits, and he had learned, with some frustration, to respect them.
It was a peculiar thing: his mind ran ahead of his body constantly. His instincts were those of an older player; the reflexes were still developing to match. He found the gap between what he knew he could do and what he could currently execute quietly maddening.
On the other hand, there was time. Enough time, provided the Horcrux situation was dealt with before matters became urgent again.
When he wasn't on the pitch, he was in the library—or more accurately, in the private study—working through an Ancient Greek grammar with one hand and Helpo's notes with the other. The little black book from Malfoy Manor had turned out to be significantly harder to read than anticipated. He made progress, but slowly, and sometimes he doubted whether the information inside was worth the effort of extracting it.
In a darker moment, he reflected that a basilisk fang would render the entire translation project unnecessary. He immediately thought better of this.
The news that Draco Malfoy had been made Slytherin Seeker had spread through the school with predictable speed, and the opinions that came with it were equally predictable.
He was examining a shelf in the library one afternoon when voices drifted through from the other side of the bookcase.
"—absolutely blatant. Making a second-year the Seeker."
Through the narrow gap between volumes, Draco could make out two figures: a broad-shouldered Hufflepuff boy with a prefect's badge and a smaller, curly-haired companion.
"So he genuinely just bought his way onto the team?" the curly-haired one asked. "A Malfoy?"
"Justin, it could not be more obvious." Ernie Macmillan—that was the prefect's name, Draco remembered—sounded indignant in the particular way of someone who considers himself the guardian of standards. "I heard Flint bragging to Oliver Wood. Seven Nimbus 2001s. Brand new. For the whole team."
Envious murmurs. Even in the act of mocking him, Draco noted, there was something unmistakably covetous underneath.
He reached for the dictionary, preparing to leave. Listening to this served no purpose. He had learned, in another life, to put these conversations at a distance; he had not always managed it.
"Oh, shut up—you don't know anything!"
He recognised the voice. His hand stilled on the spine of the dictionary.
He turned just enough to see, through the gap in the shelving: Hermione, who had apparently been working on the other side of the bookcase and had heard everything.
She was looking at Ernie with an expression he knew well—the one that appeared just before she thoroughly dismantled someone's argument.
"If I were you, I would be rather careful about repeating things as facts when you have absolutely no idea whether they're true," she said, in the clipped, precise tone of someone who has prepared for this kind of conversation and is not remotely nervous about it.
Ernie drew himself up to his full height—considerably greater than hers. "What's it to you?" he said. "This is a Slytherin matter. Why would a Gryffindor—"
"Because I was there," Hermione said, cutting across him. "I watched the Slytherin selection. He beat every other candidate fairly. The whole thing was decided on merit."
"Merit." Ernie said it as though it were a word he was examining for defects. "A second-year, against older students—"
"Yes." Hermione did not waver. "Are you going to keep repeating the same point, or do you have an actual argument?"
Ernie's companion—the girl beside him, who Draco recognised as Susan Bones—made a quiet, conciliatory gesture, which Ernie ignored.
"This is a question of principle," Ernie said. "Slytherin and principle aren't exactly well acquainted, but some of us still care about—"
"About what?" Hermione's face had gone quite pink. "About sorting people by their house and deciding you already know everything about them? Because that's not principle, that's just prejudice." She stopped, seemed to realise she had said rather more than she intended, and turned on her heel.
Draco was standing in the aisle on the other side of the bookcase.
She almost walked into him.
She drew up short, taking him in—and saw, in his expression, that he had heard all of it.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
"Thank you," Draco said quietly. "For that."
Hermione's face was still flushed. "Don't thank me. I was just—it wasn't—" She stopped. "I know what I saw at the selection. You were better than anyone else out there."
"I know it." He glanced down at the dictionary in his hand. The words had a tendency to blur, slightly, when he was doing his level best not to feel them too much. "But it's different, hearing someone else say it."
Being discussed this way was always unpleasant. He had known it would happen and had prepared for it, and he still found that preparation only went so far. In another life he had learned to ice it over—to walk away from these moments wearing nothing on his face. He was still capable of doing that.
But when someone defended him, the ice became harder to maintain.
He was surprised to find how much it mattered that the someone was Hermione Granger. In another life she had been among the sharpest critics of exactly this—Malfoy, the Seeker position he hadn't earned, the things that had been handed to him. Those words had stayed with him for a long time.
He thought about that version of events, and then set it aside.
"Draco," Hermione said, in a deliberately lighter tone, "I actually came to find you. I wanted to thank you properly for the birthday present."
He looked up.
"The Omnioculars," she said, and smiled at him. "They're brilliant. I had no idea they could do all that—the instant replay function alone—"
"Particularly useful for Quidditch matches," he said, something releasing in his chest. "The lenses are the latest model. Much clearer than standard Omnioculars." He found he was explaining it with genuine enthusiasm. "If you adjust the right dial, you can also—"
"Is that Ancient Greek?" Hermione interrupted, looking at the dictionary in his hand with sudden, total attention.
"It is."
"Hogwarts doesn't offer Ancient Greek."
"It's for extracurricular research," he said.
"What kind of research?" She fell into step beside him, apparently having decided to accompany him. He did not object.
"Translation work. I found some notes, and I'm trying to work out what they say."
"How far have you got?"
"Not as far as I'd like." He paused, glancing at her sideways. "You don't happen to read it?"
"A little." She said this with the studied casualness of someone who reads it rather well and is attempting not to seem smug about it. "My mother read Plato and Dante in the original as bedtime stories. It always seemed useful to follow along."
He looked at her. Mrs. Granger had clearly taken an interesting approach to childhood.
"Then perhaps," Draco said, steering them toward the private study, "you could take a look at something."
He produced a carefully selected page from the notes—nothing that touched on Horcruxes directly—and handed it to her.
Hermione read it twice, her lips moving slightly. Then she set the dictionary on the desk between them, and they leaned over it together—her brown hair and his pale head nearly touching over the page.
It took the better part of the afternoon. But when they finally assembled a coherent translation, Draco read it with a sharp, focussed attention.
"I was born on the Mediterranean coast, in a small village, and the people there called me Helpo. I was captivated by the wonder and complexity of magic, and I discovered many things others had not. They called it heresy. They called it evil. But what is wrong with magic? I take joy in exploration. If anyone finds my notes—if anyone sees what I have accomplished—carry it forward. Do not bury it. Remember: it is not magic itself that is wicked, but the people who turn it to wicked ends."
"I know this name," Hermione said, sitting up. Something had lit in her eyes. "Or close to it. This could be Herpo the Foul—a Dark wizard from around 100 AD. I read about him."
"Tell me."
She didn't need to be asked twice. "Herpo the Foul was one of the earliest known Dark wizards—one of the most significant, actually. Much of what we classify as Dark magic today traces back to his work. He was the first known wizard to breed a basilisk, which is why—" she paused, connecting threads visibly, "—and he is also recorded as the first wizard to successfully create a Horcrux."
The word landed between them.
"He was also a Parselmouth," she added.
Draco absorbed this in silence.
The author of the notes. The first Horcrux. The basilisk. All three converging in a single ancient Dark wizard whose name he had never once thought to look up in either of his lives.
The book in the Malfoy Manor restricted room. He had assumed it was one among many pieces of Dark arcana his father had quietly accumulated over decades. He had not imagined it might be a primary source.
"Hermione," he said, after a moment, "your knowledge continues to astonish me. I don't know how you manage to retain all of it."
She looked quietly pleased, in the way she always did when someone acknowledged that her reading had practical value.
"Where did you find this text?" she asked, her eyes still on the parchment.
"A notebook that came into my possession," Draco said.
"From where?"
"I'll show you the notebook itself sometime, if you're interested."
"Why would I be interested in notes by an ancient Dark wizard?" Hermione looked at him with frank suspicion. "And why are you?"
"Research," Draco said, in a tone designed to convey that the matter was settled.
"Research into evil Dark magic," Hermione said. "Draco—"
"I'm not practicing it. I'm trying to understand it." He met her eyes. "There is a difference."
"There is," she agreed, not entirely convinced. She watched him for a moment longer, then looked back at the parchment. "You mentioned a Horcrux. I've looked—there's almost nothing about them in the library. What are they?"
"Dark magic. Extremely Dark. The kind no sensible person would attempt." He chose his words carefully. "Which is why I need to understand them."
Hermione's expression told him she was filing all of this under subjects to return to.
"And Parselmouth," she said, deflecting into something safer. "That I do know. The ability to speak to serpents and understand their speech—a very rare gift. The last prominent Parselmouth on record was Salazar Slytherin himself."
This was, technically, accurate—as far as what was publicly documented in Hogwarts: A History.
Draco thought of a certain dark sitting room at Malfoy Manor, and the low, continuous hissing that had always made the hair on his arms stand up. He thought of Harry Potter, who did not yet know what he was capable of, and what that knowledge would cost him when it came out.
He should probably do something about that. The revelation, when it happened, would be worse if Harry had no context for it—and the school's reaction, without context, would be unkind.
Not today. But soon.
He made a quiet note of it and returned his attention to the parchment, and to Hermione beside him, still reading with that total absorption that she brought to everything, regardless of whether it was frightening.
She was going to ask more questions about Horcruxes. He could already see it forming behind her eyes.
He would have to think carefully about what to tell her.