"Merlin's beard! What are you doing here?" Draco spun around and nearly lost his footing—his heart lurching in a way that felt decidedly un-wizard-like.
"That's my question! Why are you here?" Hermione crossed her arms, her expression sharp, as though she had caught him red-handed. She lifted her chin. "Where does this room lead? I've never seen it before."
"Can we at least step away from the corridor?" Draco glanced cautiously in both directions. Fortunately, no one else was passing by.
"No. Not until you explain yourself," she said firmly.
Moonlight poured through the window and fell across them both. In that pale, silvery light, Hermione's eyes shimmered with a warm, captivating brown—a shade that reminded Draco, oddly, of the tip of his wand.
"And if I told you I was just passing through?" he asked hopelessly, attempting a smile.
He didn't want to involve her in any of this. The more she knew about Horcruxes, the more danger she'd be in.
As it turned out, Hermione Granger was not easy to brush off.
"I don't believe a word of it! Sneaking away while everyone's celebrating…" She narrowed her eyes dangerously. "I know you're up to something. Need I remind you of the conversation we once had about honesty between friends, Draco Malfoy?"
His full name. She was angry.
Hermione had been watching him all evening. She'd caught that flash of platinum-blond hair slipping through the entrance hall and abandoned the celebrating crowd without a second thought, trailing him from a distance.
She hadn't even stopped to consider whether this broke school rules. She'd simply followed—and she wasn't proud of how little deliberation it had taken.
He had seemed preoccupied, distracted. So she'd kept her distance, slowing her pace, moving like a quietly curious cat shadowing its quarry through the castle corridors.
She'd observed him visit Ravenclaw Tower first, then double back to this corridor on the eighth floor—near the tapestry depicting Barnabas the Barmy attempting to teach trolls ballet.
Nothing about it made any sense. What was a Slytherin doing in these parts of the castle?
And then, in the space of a blink, he had simply vanished. She'd paced the corridor in confusion, certain he had nowhere else to go—he couldn't have doubled back toward the Great Hall without walking straight into her. Yet he had disappeared as thoroughly as though the moonlight had swallowed him whole.
She had been on the verge of giving up when a door appeared in the bare stone wall, and Draco stepped out of it.
"I'd heard rumours about you lurking around Ravenclaw Tower," Hermione said, recalling what Lavender Brown had passed along—via Parvati Patil's twin sister Padma, who was in Ravenclaw. She had dismissed it at the time. Now she wasn't so sure. "Open the door. I know she's in there."
"Who?" Draco asked, genuinely baffled.
She? The Grey Lady had drifted off ages ago.
"Your girlfriend," Hermione said stiffly. "I imagine you two were having a secret rendezvous. I really don't understand what there is to be ashamed of."
Draco stared at her. When, exactly, had he acquired a girlfriend? And why was he the last to know? Did all girls this age have such extravagant imaginations?
"You think I have a girlfriend in Ravenclaw?" He was very nearly fuming. Who on earth had been spreading this nonsense?
"Don't you? That friend on the list you gave me—the mutual friend of yours and Luna's—she's a girl, isn't she? Luna referred to her as 'she.'" Hermione held his gaze as though daring him to lie to her face.
"Absolutely not!" He stared at her—equal parts exasperated and amused—with a faint, incredulous wish that he could look inside her head and find whatever species of wrackspurt had taken up residence there.
"Then what is going on?" she asked sharply, though some part of her couldn't quite account for the heat behind her own words.
The two of them stood in the moonlit corridor, staring at one another, the conversation thoroughly at an impasse.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, Hermione noticed the strange door fading from the wall—stone slowly swallowing it whole, until the surface was as smooth and unmarked as if nothing had ever been there.
"What happened?" She lunged toward the wall and pressed her hands flat against it. Nothing. "Where did it go?" she demanded, barely trusting her own eyes.
"It disappears if you don't go in." His tiredness and low spirits—the weight he'd been carrying all evening—lifted slightly in the face of her bewilderment. A trace of smugness crept into his voice. "This is the Room of Requirement. You have to walk back and forth in front of that stretch of wall three times, concentrating on what you need. The door only appears when you do." He paused, a faint smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. "Try thinking of a date room. See if any Ravenclaw girls materialise."
Hermione shot him a withering look, but paced in front of the wall three times nonetheless. True to his word, the outline of a door shimmered back into existence.
Inwardly, Draco was quite pleased with himself. Whatever the room became now would not be that hidden storage chamber—it would respond to whoever was doing the wishing. He opened the door for her with entirely too much composure. "After you."
She glanced at him, something flickering briefly across her face, then straightened her expression and walked through.
The interior had transformed completely.
All trace of the cluttered storage room was gone. In its place stood tall shelves lined with rare books, antique reading tables arranged in careful rows, and the warm, familiar smell of old parchment and new ink mingling in the air. A fire crackled in the hearth. It was, in every regard, a library.
"This is incredible." Hermione turned slowly, taking it all in. "It's exactly as I imagined."
"So," Draco said, glancing around with measured interest, "you think a library is a good place for a date?"
"That's not—" She stopped short.
She appeared to have inadvertently revealed something about herself. This was not ideal.
Draco read her expression and, mercifully, let it go. "In any case," he said mildly, "have a look around. See if my girlfriend is hiding between the shelves."
It would be nothing short of miraculous if she found anyone.
Hermione moved through the room in silence. No one. Only books, firelight, and the two of them.
"It appears not," she said, when she'd satisfied herself.
"Are you quite certain?" His lips twitched.
"I think I may have...jumped to a conclusion." She looked down, sheepish, though somewhere beneath the embarrassment was a quieter, somewhat shameful relief. "People do that sometimes."
"I always took you for someone immune to gossip," Draco said, carefully not smiling as he turned toward the nearest bookshelf. He needed something to look at before his expression gave him away entirely.
If he laughed now, she'd never forgive him.
His fingers moved along a row of ancient spines until they found one he recognised—The Guide to Rare Potions. He settled into the sofa near the hearth and glanced up at her. "You're welcome to sit down. You've been on your feet for quite a while."
Hermione sat beside him without a word, staring into the fire.
She had come here fully intending to uncover one of his secrets. Instead, she was sitting in her ideal version of a comfortable evening, beside the very person she'd been investigating.
She felt both embarrassed and, quietly, rather pleased. The situation had gotten entirely away from her.
"Are you hungry?" Draco asked, breaking the silence.
"No. Dinner was more than enough," she said, though she couldn't honestly have said what she'd eaten—she'd spent most of the meal watching him.
"Tea, then." He tapped the table with his wand, and a steaming teapot appeared alongside two cups. He wasn't in the mood to fuss over a proper brew tonight; his mind was too occupied with other things.
Hermione took a sip and looked up in surprise. "Is this hawthorn berry tea?"
"It aids digestion." A faint smile. "My mother has a habit of experimenting with herbal infusions. I've picked up a few."
"It's good," she said honestly. She had a dozen questions queued up behind her teeth, and she wasn't sure which one to let through first.
"Why did you refuse the Special Contribution Award?" She'd already heard Harry and Ron's account of what happened in the Chamber of Secrets. He had more than earned it.
This was the second time tonight someone had asked him that. He was halfway through the same deflection he'd given the other two when she cut him off with a look. "Draco, I'm not dim. If you can't answer, just say you can't answer. It wouldn't be the first time, and I'd respect you more for it than for a story."
Last year, she had kept his secret in the Forbidden Forest without being asked. He had always done this—stepped in, done what needed doing, and then retreated as though none of it had anything to do with him. He was the strangest boy she had ever met.
"Then—I'm sorry. I can't answer," he said plainly.
She nodded, unsurprised, and shifted course. "How is it I've never heard of the Room of Requirement before?"
That one he could answer. With a quiet acknowledgment of the debt he owed her for not pushing further, Draco obliged: "It's one of Hogwarts' most closely kept secrets. The room only appears when someone genuinely needs it, and when it does, it arranges itself precisely around that need. The person seeking it must walk past that stretch of wall three times while concentrating clearly on what they require—and the door will come."
Hermione's eyes were bright. She looked around the room again with undisguised wonder.
Draco watched her for a moment—the way her expression moved so openly—then dropped his gaze to his book. "So there you have it," he said, a wry edge to his voice. "Nothing sinister. Just exploring Hogwarts' lesser-known corridors."
"And the daily visits to Ravenclaw Tower? Your mysterious female acquaintance—" she pressed, the undercurrent of her earlier irritation surfacing again.
"I have a connection with the Grey Lady," Draco said, turning a page. "Ravenclaw's house ghost. You may have glimpsed her this evening. She led me here."
Hermione's mouth fell open. She had seen the Grey Lady—had watched her drift close to Draco, exchange a few quiet words with him, and glide away. It had not once occurred to her that Draco's mysterious Ravenclaw connection might be a ghost.
"Now you understand how completely wrong your theory was," Draco murmured, raising the book just slightly to conceal the corner of his mouth.
"I...yes. I'm sorry." She looked at him. "I genuinely misjudged you."
Draco lowered the book an inch and looked at her in surprise.
A sincere apology from Hermione Granger. Entirely unexpected.
When she turned those wide, earnest eyes on you with a contrite expression, it was rather difficult to hold onto any frustration. He found he couldn't manage it at all. She looked so animated, so entirely herself—a vast improvement on the pale, motionless figure he had found petrified in the corridor. Even in temper she was endearing. In apology she was simply impossible to be cross with.
He felt, mostly, relief. That she was safe. That she was here and well, and arguing with him about ghosts over hawthorn tea.
He was also, he reminded himself, not entirely without fault in this conversation.
"Forget it," he said. "Though I am curious—how did you notice me slipping out? I thought I'd been rather discreet. Everyone was celebrating."
He needed to know. Had others seen him? She had only recently recovered from Petrification—why had she been watching the entrance hall instead of enjoying herself?
"I was coming to find you, actually," Hermione said, a faint colour rising in her cheeks. "To thank you for saving Ginny."
She could not admit the rest of it—that she had been tracking the movement of a certain platinum-blond head all evening with an attentiveness she refused to examine too closely. Since the Chamber, she'd developed an awareness of him she couldn't explain, a constant background sense of where he was. He had become, without her permission, something that felt like safety.
She denied it even to herself. One couldn't expect a girl to simply admit such things out loud.
The self-contradiction sat uneasily with her. She demanded honesty from him, and she couldn't even be honest with herself.
She reached for a different thread quickly. "And—I concede the bet. You were right about Lockhart. What he tried to do to you was despicable, and I have no patience for him anymore."
"It was only a matter of time," Draco said lazily. He glanced at her—she was staring at her teacup, somewhere distant. "He's not worth your grief. And there's no shame in having been taken in—half the wizarding world was at Flourish and Blotts buying his books."
He refilled her cup.
"Thank you. I know." She frowned slightly. "I'm fine. I just need a moment."
Lockhart wasn't the source of her mood, and they both knew it. She was caught in the uncomfortable space between what she felt and what she was willing to say, and the guilt of it pressed against her ribs.
She glanced sidelong at him, this boy she'd been so severe with, and felt the tight pull of remorse. She hunted for something to anchor herself to. "What are you reading?"
"Felix Felicis." Draco tilted the book so she could see the page. He'd picked it up almost at random—something to occupy his hands—but it had turned out to be a rather pleasant discovery.
The Room of Requirement had outdone itself.
"The luck potion!" Hermione leaned in at once. "It grants the drinker extraordinary good fortune for a period, doesn't it?"
"Precisely." The ends of her hair had spilled across his arm. It was a warm colour in the firelight.
"You're not actually thinking of brewing it?" She tilted her head to look up at him, a slow smile curving her mouth. "What would you even use it for?"
Her face was entirely open. Unguarded. She'd started showing him this side of herself more and more often, and Draco was aware—with the particular awareness of someone who knew exactly how differently things had once gone—that she never would have looked at him this way before. This was new. It was fragile in a way that made him want to be careful with it.
He tried, briefly, to reassemble his customary composure. It didn't hold. She only leaned slightly closer, paying no attention to his expression whatsoever, close enough that he could make out the particular shade of her eyes in the firelight—clear and warm and entirely unbothered by him.
He cleared his throat and made a concerted effort to look at the page. "Academic curiosity. I've heard it's extraordinarily difficult to brew."
That wasn't entirely untrue. In his previous life, he had never forgotten Professor Slughorn's small, gleaming bottle of Felix Felicis—the way it sat there, a single term's worth of extraordinary fortune, and the knowledge that even a mouthful could tip the balance in any situation.
If Hogwarts ever faced another siege—if the Death Eaters came again—he would want a dose in reserve.
Hermione didn't look convinced. She suspected, not without reason, that he was never merely doing something for its own sake.
"Consider your own luck," Draco said. "Out of every student in this school, you were the one who encountered the Basilisk. If anything else of that sort should happen—and I'm not saying it will—I'd strongly suggest you have a measure to hand."
"Oh, don't," she said, colour rising, though her eyes didn't leave the page.
"I'm not suggesting you take it daily," he continued mildly. "A single dose is for emergencies—when the odds are badly against you. Excessive consumption causes overconfidence, recklessness, and dangerously impaired judgment." He turned to a later section of the book and indicated it with a tilt of his chin. "There are quite a few contraindications."
Her light demeanour had settled into focus as she leaned in to read, brow furrowed, quietly memorising.
"The brewing process is extraordinarily complex," she murmured, working through the following pages. "A single misstep could be catastrophic." She scanned the ingredients list, her expression shifting from interest to something more cautious.
Belladonna extract. Fire salamander eggs. Occamy eggshell powder. Aconite tincture. Fresh petals of Amaranth. Unicorn horn and blood...
She exhaled. "These are nearly impossible to source. And even with the full set, the simmering process alone takes six months."
"Not immediately, no," Draco conceded. "But given time to gather the ingredients properly—it's at least worth attempting, don't you think?"
"We?" She turned sharply, hair sliding across his cheek, and pulled back. "I never said I was involved—"
Her eyes, however, told an entirely different story. From the way she'd been reading to the way she'd reacted to every ingredient on the list, she was practically vibrating with the urge to try.
She was a truly terrible liar.
Draco adjusted his approach. His voice dropped to something quieter, and his pale grey eyes were, for once, entirely without irony. "I need your help. Tracking down the ingredients—I can manage that. But brewing Felix Felicis is a different matter entirely. You brewed Polyjuice Potion in second year. Polyjuice. If you can't brew this, I genuinely don't know who could."
"You're a capable Potions student yourself," she said, wavering.
"And if I ruin the ingredients through some error in the brewing, that's six months of searching gone entirely. Two pairs of eyes are better than one." He yawned, apparently unbothered. "If it fails, the fault is mine. If it succeeds, we split the yield. Even terms."
Her eyes lit up. She was already in, and they both knew it.
"Do we have a deal?" She looked at him with that unguarded, eager brightness.
"Deal." He smiled—a real one, not the wry or guarded kind—and looked at her tucked there beside him, practically glowing. He raised his hand and pressed his palm lightly to hers.