On a Sunday in mid-September, Neville Longbottom was about to step out through the portrait of the Fat Lady when he opened the door and felt his stomach drop.
Draco Malfoy stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the corridor wall, looking at him sideways.
Merlin. Those eyes were exactly like Professor Snape's — like hailstones in the middle of a blizzard.
Neville pulled his foot back and was about to turn and flee when the terrible Slytherin spoke.
"Longbottom —" he said, with that familiar, lazy drawl. "Is Hermione in there?"
"Yes — yes, she is —" Neville said, his voice doing something unfortunate.
"Go and get her," Draco said, looking at him in a manner that suggested he was already regretting having to speak to him at all. "Unless you'd prefer I put a Leg-Locker Curse on you and leave you hopping down the corridor."
Neville's face went the colour of old chalk and disappeared behind the portrait.
"That was a little unkind, dear," the Fat Lady remarked, fanning herself. "In my experience, girls don't respond well to that tone."
"Has anyone asked your opinion?" the platinum-haired boy said, without looking up.
The Fat Lady gave a deeply offended sniff, turned her painted face away, and elected to pretend he didn't exist.
Draco waited.
After a short while, Hermione came through the portrait at considerable speed, caught her foot on the frame, stumbled — and was caught by a hand that appeared from nowhere before she could hit the flagstones.
"Reckless girl," he said softly, steadying her.
"Draco!" She straightened up at once, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. "Sorry for keeping you waiting — Harry and the others had a little celebration for me. You know, cake, candles, the usual —"
She glanced down at the item in her hands and breathed a small sigh of relief: it had survived the near-fall intact.
It was a delicate porcelain plate, bearing a generous slice of strawberry cake.
"I saved you the best piece," she said cheerfully. "A birthday offering — here."
Draco raised an eyebrow, took the plate, and fell into step beside her as they made their way down a quiet corridor.
Through the tall windows, the valley surrounding the castle stretched away in every direction, bathed in the last warmth of a low autumn sun. They settled onto a stone ledge along one side of the corridor, out of the wind — or mostly out of it — and the warmth lingered just enough to make it pleasant.
Hermione was wrestling with the birthday hat on her head. The wind had done terrible things to her hair, tangling it thoroughly into the hat's tinsel trim.
"Oh, honestly — every time," she complained, wrinkling her nose in a way that suggested she was simultaneously irritated and resigned.
"Here — let me." Draco set the porcelain plate carefully to one side and moved closer.
Hermione went very still.
He was closer than she had expected. The faint, clean scent of him reached her in the cold air. She found that she had absolutely nothing to say, and looked up at the slight curve of his mouth and said, quite quietly, "Thank you."
His fingers were careful and unhurried. He worked at the tangled strands with patience, a faint trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth, separating her hair gently from the tinsel trim.
It was going well — until one stubborn strand refused to cooperate. He tugged, very slightly; she made a small sound; and he immediately stopped.
"Sorry — sorry —" He leaned in quickly to examine the damage, his fingertips brushing accidentally against her cheek. "Where is it caught?"
"It's alright," Hermione said, in a voice that came out considerably softer than she had intended. She watched his ears go pink. She did not scratch her cheek, even though she could feel the exact spot where his fingers had touched it.
"It's caught in the decorations," he said, after a moment's examination.
He said nothing further, and set about untangling it in silence — slowly, carefully, his fingers working through the crimson and gold trim with quiet persistence. The only sounds were the rustle of hair and his soft, steady breathing close to her ear.
He didn't hurt her again.
Finally, with a quiet exhale of relief, he lifted the birthday hat free and said, with a trace of satisfaction, "Done."
"Thank you," she said again.
She seemed to have been thanking him all day. She couldn't seem to find any other words.
She let out a careful breath, glanced at him briefly, and turned her gaze to the valley before her cheeks could get any warmer. His eyes rested on her face with an attention that felt like fingertips, and she could feel it even when she wasn't looking at him.
Draco looked at the girl gazing at the valley. In the last of the sunset, her profile was tinted a warm, soft rose.
He tossed the birthday hat neatly over his shoulder — he really could not make peace with the combination of red and gold — and produced a small gift box from his robe pocket. It was wrapped in silver-green paper, about the size of his palm.
Hermione took it curiously and turned it over in her hands.
"Open it," he said.
She opened it.
Inside was a beaded evening bag — small and beautiful, each bead a faceted crystal that caught the light and shifted through a gradient of deep forest green to midnight blue.
"Happy birthday," Draco said. "I wasn't certain of your taste. It's actually a family piece — it belonged to my grandmother. But look —" He turned the bag slightly in her hands to show her. "It has an Undetectable Extension Charm on the inside lining. One of the largest I could find."
"Oh —" Hermione turned the bag over in her hands, eyes going wide with the particular delight she reserved for things that were both beautiful and functionally extraordinary. "I love it. I really love it. It's beautiful."
"I'm glad." He smiled, looking up at her, and felt something very quiet and settled in his chest.
She ran a finger along the silver chain and asked, inevitably, "How much can it hold?"
"I imagine a fairly substantial house," Draco said, taking a bite of cake. "Three hundred square metres, perhaps."
"Three hundred square metres and you call that a fairly substantial —" She shook her head, smiling despite herself. "How can the extension be so large? An ordinary bag couldn't hold this much even with a charm on it."
"The capacity of an extended bag depends mainly on the material," Draco said. "Crystal beads are beautiful, but decorative. The real work is done by the inner lining — the material is what limits or allows the expansion. This one is lined with a combination of Runespoor skin, lizard hide, and Swedish Short-Snout dragon leather." He paused. "It also has fire-retardant and anti-theft properties, but I'll let you discover those for yourself."
"This is extraordinary." Hermione held the bag carefully, wearing the expression of someone trying to be restrained about something they were extremely pleased by. "Thank you, Draco. But why did you think of this particular gift?"
"I'm not going to keep pressing you about your timetable," he said, with studied indifference. "I've given up on that. I simply thought that if you insist on carrying half the library with you everywhere, you might as well have somewhere decent to put it." He glanced sideways at her. "I can't follow you around carrying your books indefinitely."
He let that sentence end there. He did not add the rest of the thought.
As he looked away, his gaze drifted, almost involuntarily, to the base of her collar, where a thin gold chain had pressed a faint pink mark into her skin. He looked away quickly, fixing his eyes on the valley below.
He already knew what it was.
His grandfather had written to him in early September. Abraxas had mentioned, in his characteristically oblique way, that the Ministry kept a small reserve of Time-Turners. The conditions for obtaining one were exceptionally strict, but for a Hogwarts student with a compelling academic case, it was not impossible. "Want one?" he had written. "I can arrange it."
Draco had written back almost immediately to say that he had no interest in a Time-Turner.
He was considerably more interested in the person already wearing one.
Said person, entirely unaware that her secret had been quietly solved, was turning the beaded bag over in her hands with the gleaming eyes of someone entertaining specific plans.
"If — hypothetically — I were to rob the library," Hermione said, with a very particular kind of thoughtfulness, "how many books do you think I could fit in here?"
"You're aware that Summoning Charms don't work in libraries," Draco pointed out. "You'd have to load them in individually. The limiting factor isn't the size of the bag — it's how many books you can physically carry to the bag in the time available before someone notices."
Hermione considered this seriously for a moment, then put the bag away.
Draco watched her expression — the quick, calculating quality it took on as she worked through the logistics — and had to look at the valley to keep from laughing.
The sun vanished abruptly from the sky. Not as a slow evening shift, but in a sudden, violent darkening that had nothing to do with the time.
"That's strange," Hermione said, looking up. "Why has it gone so dark so quickly?"
"Look down," Draco said quietly.
In the valley below, moving slowly beneath the mist, a cluster of dark figures drifted like ink spreading through water. Dementors.
The brightness left Hermione's face. Draco watched it go.
He knew what she was afraid of. He understood it very specifically.
He chose his next words with some care.
"You once mentioned wanting to learn the Patronus Charm," he said. "Does that still interest you?"
She turned to look at him. Her eyes lit up.
---
At three o'clock on Monday afternoon, Draco Malfoy pushed open the door of an empty fourth-floor classroom and stopped.
The room was full of people.
Harry, Ron, Ginny Weasley. The Weasley twins. The Gryffindor boy who followed Harry everywhere with a camera. Seamus Finnigan, who had a longstanding and enthusiastic relationship with accidental explosions. Neville Longbottom, who apparently had the audacity to show up despite Draco's ongoing suspicion that he was attempting to steal his study partner. Several students in Gryffindor ties he didn't immediately recognise. Several students with Ravenclaw crests who he definitely didn't recognise. Susan Bones from Hufflepuff, who had once traded notes cheerfully with Hermione. Even Ernie Macmillan, who had at some point last year made an unfortunate comment about Draco's Seeker abilities.
They all turned to look at him with expressions of warm, unified welcome.
"Sorry," Draco said, backing out. "Wrong room."
He shut the door.
He stood in the corridor for a moment, reviewed the situation, and reopened it.
"This is — this is the right place?" He addressed the assembled group with what he felt was an appropriate level of scepticism.
"Draco, yes, this is it!" Hermione pushed through the crowd, arriving at his side with an expression of barely contained delight. "They all want to learn the Patronus Charm."
Draco's face arranged itself into an expression of absolute disbelief.
He looked at the group. They were all looking back at him with the particular benevolent attentiveness of people who had decided they were going to like something. It was deeply uncomfortable.
He leaned toward Hermione and said, in a very low voice, "I was expecting one person."
"I may have mentioned it in passing," Hermione said, with the serene satisfaction of someone who has pulled off something significant. "People were interested. More kept wanting to join..."
She raised her chin at him with the most self-satisfied expression he had ever seen on any person.
Hermione Granger would not be admitting, under any circumstances, that this had been entirely deliberate.
The truth was that spending a long, uninterrupted afternoon alone with him was something she had decided, firmly, was inadvisable. Not because she didn't want to — which was precisely the problem — but because alone with him, her heart did things she found profoundly inconvenient. The Patronus group had been an inspired solution: she wanted to learn the spell, she wanted to see him, and she wanted to be surrounded by enough other people to make embarrassing heartbeats a logistical impossibility.
"Why don't they go to Professor Lupin?" Draco asked, grasping at straws. "He'd be far better placed —"
"He hasn't been well," Hermione said. "He said the spell is too advanced for most students our age, anyway."
Of course Lupin had been unwell. The full moon had only just passed. Draco knew better than to say so.
Before he could formulate another line of retreat, the Weasley twins appeared on either side of him, each seizing an arm, and marched him into the centre of the room.
"You could have warned me," Draco said, in a voice of suppressed outrage. "I saw you both yesterday."
"We wanted it to be a surprise," said Fred cheerfully.
"We never get tired of that expression," said George, indicating Draco's face.
He was deposited in the middle of the circle. He thought, briefly, about all the ways he could remove himself from this situation. He thought about several hexes that would have been appropriate.
Then he saw Hermione standing at the edge of the group, watching him with wide, interested eyes and a look of very genuine hope.
He felt all of it drain away.
"Stop making faces, Draco," said Fred.
"We can't wait to see your Patronus," said George.
"We want to scare off the Dementors —" said Fred.
"Or study one up close," said George.
"See what's under the cloak —"
"Or in the mouth —"
"No," Draco said, cutting this off firmly. "Do not try to capture one. Do not investigate its mouth. A Dementor's Kiss leaves the body alive and the soul permanently gone. It is functionally equivalent to killing someone."
"Can they be destroyed at all?" Lee Jordan asked from the back. "Or just driven off with a Patronus?"
"Only driven off," Draco said. "Even a fully corporeal Patronus can only repel them. They cannot be destroyed or killed by any known means."
A ripple of unease moved through the room.
"Then what are we waiting for?" Ron said. "Let's start."
Draco opened his mouth. "I should be clear — I haven't fully mastered the spell myself. I can only manage a partial Patronus. I have limited knowledge of —"
He edged toward the door.
Hermione stepped in front of it, arms slightly out. "You've already been teaching us," she said, entirely matter-of-fact. "Everything you've told us about how Dementors work and how to defend against them — that's teaching. You conjured a Patronus on the train. You held the Dementor back at the compartment door."
"He did," Ron confirmed, to the group. "The thing just stood there in the doorway and wouldn't come in."
Draco turned and looked at Ron Weasley with an expression that conveyed everything he could not, at present, say aloud.
Ron Weasley, utter and chronic blabbermouth.
Around them, the students who had deflated slightly were reviving again, converging on Ron for more details.
Hermione stepped closer to him in the noise and said, more quietly, "Please. You promised."
He looked at her. She looked back at him with that expression — open and direct and just slightly pleading — and he was, once again, completely without resources.
He sighed.
"Right. Let me be clear about something before we begin." He raised his voice enough to reclaim the room. "Successfully casting the Patronus Charm is one of the most difficult feats in defensive magic. A fully corporeal Patronus — one that takes a specific animal form — requires exceptional talent and practice. If you can't manage it, that is not a failing; most trained adult wizards cannot produce one at all." He paused, and without quite meaning to, glanced at Longbottom. "We will start with the fundamentals."
Neville, who had not noticed the glance, was listening with an expression of genuine and determined hope.
"The incantation is Expecto Patronum," Draco continued, surprising himself slightly with how steady his voice was. "To cast it, you must concentrate entirely on your happiest memory — not the idea of a happy memory, but a specific moment. Fix it in your mind clearly and hold onto it. When you feel ready, cast." He reached for his wand. "Take out your wands and try with me. Don't worry if nothing happens the first time. Or the fifth time."
He hadn't expected them to listen so closely. He was used to the particular attention that came from fear or obligation or the calculation of advantage. This was different. They were simply listening, all of them, because they wanted to learn something and he appeared to be the person who could teach it.
Even Longbottom.
Somewhere in the middle of it, without entirely deciding to, he began moving through the group — pausing here to correct a grip, there to suggest a different memory, guiding the wand angle for someone who kept producing only a faint shimmer. He found himself stopping in front of Neville Longbottom, who had managed a small cloud of silver vapour and was staring at his wand as though it had done something miraculous.
"You got mist," Draco said, without expression. "That's the first stage. It won't come together all at once. Practise more."
Neville looked up at him with the expression of a rabbit who has just been addressed directly by a fox and isn't entirely sure what to make of the experience. He nodded quickly.
Later, Draco crossed the room to where Hermione was standing slightly apart from the group.
She was laughing quietly to herself.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said, with a smile that suggested it was quite specifically something. "I was only thinking — a certain Slytherin once told me that helping people without any benefit to yourself was not very good strategy."
"That advice stands," Draco said, immediately adjusting his expression to something more appropriately detached. "I still think you're too willing to help people in Potions. That's an observation, not a contradiction — take the advice of a study partner."
He had almost said something else. He'd caught himself at the last moment.
She looked at him with an expression of genuine amusement. "And what, precisely, is the benefit to you? In teaching us the Patronus Charm?"
He smiled — the first real one of the day — and walked away without answering, hands folded behind his back.
"Benefits, hmm —" His voice carried back down the corridor and dissolved into the quiet of the empty castle.
He did not bother to answer the question, even to himself. His mind was too full of the look on her face.
---
In early October, Draco's attention turned substantially to Quidditch.
One Thursday evening, Slytherin captain Marcus Flint called the team together in the draughty changing rooms to discuss tactics for the new season.
The single lamp threw uneven shadows across the benches and the hanging Quidditch robes. Marcus stood in the centre of it with the look of a man who had been thinking about this for months.
"This is my last year," he said, his voice lower than usual. "I am not leaving without the Cup. Last year it was cancelled — we don't get that back. This year, we take it."
"We're stronger than last year," Chaser Graham Montague said, with confidence. "We've got a better team across every position."
"Agreed," said Chaser Adrian Pucey, beside him.
"Bole, Derrick," Marcus said, looking at the two Beaters. "What do you say?"
"Long as I've got a bat, I'm not holding back," said Beater Bole, weighing his club in one hand.
"And if the bat slips," said Beater Derrick, grinning, "arms still work."
"Bletchley," Marcus said, turning to the Keeper. "Slytherin's goal stays shut. Every game. Can I count on you?"
Miles Bletchley gave a short, sharp nod, his face doing something pained. "You can count on it. Though I'll note that you don't have to put it quite that way —"
Marcus had already moved on. He clapped a hand on Draco's shoulder and looked at him squarely. "And Draco. Best Seeker Slytherin has had in years. Never lost a Snitch. Keep that going."
Draco gave him a slight shrug and a smile. Behind Marcus's back, Bole pulled a face at the group; the team suppressed laughter with great effort.
"Bole," Marcus said, without turning around. Bole snapped back to attention. "This is Slytherin's Cup. It's been ours for years. We're not losing it now."
That landed. The laughter died and something else took its place — competitive pride, the kind that needed very little encouragement to become something rather more serious. The team straightened up, stopped joking, and voted unanimously for three training sessions per week.
They trained through mud, gales, and the particular misery of October cold, and they did it without complaint.
The Patronus Charm sessions were rescheduled around Quidditch training without discussion.
"It's fine," Harry told him, the first time the conflict arose. "I've got Quidditch practice those days too."
Over the weeks that followed, most of the group had graduated from nothing at all to a creditable cloud of silver-white mist. Progress was slower for some than others, but it was real.
One afternoon, Luna Lovegood — a Ravenclaw girl in her third year, who wore earrings shaped like radishes and a butterbeer cork necklace and seemed entirely untroubled by the fact that no one else dressed like this — waved her wand and produced a fully corporeal Patronus. It was small and translucent, darting along the ceiling like a gleam of light through water. It appeared to be a hare.
Draco watched it with an expression that remained perfectly neutral.
"Well done," he said, with a fractional inclination of his head.
Luna looked mildly surprised, in a calm, dreamlike sort of way. She smiled at him.
"How did you manage a corporeal one?" Hermione asked, with the focused dissatisfaction of someone who had been producing excellent mist and felt that this was not enough. "I can't seem to get past —"
"It's about finding the right happiness," Luna said, in her soft, drifting voice. "Not just any happy memory. The happiest thing you know. I had to change mine a few times before it worked. And you have to believe in it completely — no hesitation."
Draco turned this over quietly.
He raised his wand and tried, and a solid silver-white shadow emerged from the tip — more defined than mist, less defined than form, hovering at the threshold between the two and refusing to commit.
Not yet.
He lowered his wand. That was as far as it went today, because Neville Longbottom had reappeared at his elbow with the expression of a person hoping to be helped again, and Draco, resigned to his inexplicable fate as someone who had apparently agreed to this, turned to deal with it.
---
On the Friday before Halloween, Professor Snape moved through the Potions dungeon with his usual expression of glacial disappointment. He had not, Draco observed, entirely recovered from the incident in Defence Against the Dark Arts when the third years had been invited to dress their Boggart as Professor Snape in something humiliating. He was still orbiting Longbottom's workstation with the attentiveness of a vulture.
The outcome was, in hindsight, entirely predictable.
Neville's hand trembled. His cauldron went off like a small firework. The contents sprayed outward in a wide radius — covering several nearby students, two desks, and most of Professor Snape's robes in a substance that was warm, sticky, and deeply unpleasant.
There was a silence of considerable weight.
Professor Snape stood completely still, his black robes dripping, his eyes doing something that suggested various scenarios were flashing through his mind.
Hermione came hurrying from the front of the classroom, looking horrified. "Neville, what happened? I only went to the sink for half a minute —"
You cannot watch him every second of every day. Draco thought, with the serenity of someone who had seen this coming.
Accept it, Hermione Granger.
"Miss Granger — consider yourself fortunate you were elsewhere," Professor Snape said, with a softness that was somehow more threatening than shouting. "Longbottom — you will stay and clean this room. Potter and Weasley —" He turned his gaze to them with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who has all the time in the world. "I can only assume you watched him add the wrong ingredient and chose to say nothing. Perhaps you felt that his failure would reflect well on you. Tomorrow — detention. The entire day."
"Tomorrow is the Hogsmeade visit, sir," Harry said.
"Yes," Professor Snape said, after a pause of precisely the right length to indicate that he was aware of this and found it quite satisfactory. "What a pity."
"There is truly no shame in that man," Ron said, watching Snape's robes sweep out of sight, in the voice of someone registering a profound injustice.
---
On the morning of the Hogsmeade visit, Harry and Ron came down to breakfast wearing the expressions of people attending something they would very much like to leave. Hermione spent a considerable amount of time attempting to cheer them up. It didn't take.
They walked her as far as the castle gates, where Mr Filch was posted with a clipboard and a grim sense of purpose.
"Students staying behind — stop here," he said.
"I'll bring you back something good from Honeydukes," Hermione said, feeling terrible about them.
"A lot of something good," Ron said, in a tone of noble suffering.
Harry produced a smile that looked like it required real effort.
"The main group has been gone ten minutes already!" Filch said to Hermione, jabbing his clipboard in the direction of the road. "Are you going or not? You'll get lost if you don't catch up."
Hermione looked back down the road. The other students had already dissolved into the morning mist, barely visible in the distance. She was anxious to follow — but Harry and Ron's expressions were genuinely awful, and she found herself lingering.
The castle door opened behind her.
Draco strolled out, hands in his pockets, looking precisely as he always did at this hour — as though full consciousness was still a work in progress.
Harry, as if something had been decided for him by the universe, grabbed Draco by the sleeve and pulled him aside.
"Do me a favour," he said.
"What sort of favour?" Draco said, looking at the hand on his sleeve with the expression of someone considering their options.
"Sirius —" Harry lowered his voice. "He's been in a bad way lately. I've written several times and he hasn't written back. I had arranged to meet him at the Three Broomsticks today, but now I obviously can't make it." He looked genuinely worried. "Could you go? Just — go and see how he is. Talk to him if you can."
Draco's expression suggested several things at once, none of them particularly welcoming.
He still had not entirely forgiven Sirius Black for the matter of the Hufflepuff Cup and his mother. He had made considerable effort, at their last meeting in Dumbledore's office, to avoid speaking to the man directly.
"What makes you think he'll talk to me? I've met him twice."
"Of all my friends, you're the one who's spent the most time with him. You know him better than you think," Harry said, glancing up at the clock tower. "Draco, I have to go — I'm supposed to be in the Headmaster's office —"
Draco opened his mouth.
Harry and Ron were already moving.
"I haven't said yes yet —" Draco called after them.
Harry, already halfway up the steps, turned and waved his hand vaguely in his direction without looking back, and kept going.
Mr Filch shut the iron gates with a sound of finality.
Draco stood outside the gates, staring after the space where Harry had been, with the expression of a man who has just watched a very specific trap close around him.
Beside him stood Hermione Granger, equally marooned, clutching her beaded bag.
Good heavens. They really were the only two left.
Hermione looked down the misty road, then sideways at the boy beside her, and felt a familiar and inconvenient tension rise up in her chest without any warning. She turned to study the stone pillars flanking the gate very attentively.
Draco stood quietly for a moment, until the last trace of Harry's retreating figure had vanished into the mist. He raked a hand through his hair with an expression of mild exasperation, sighed, and glanced over at the girl beside him.
He had been to Hogsmeade more times than he could count. He knew every alley, every shortcut, every secret. Whether he went today or spent the morning in the common room made no real difference to him.
Looking at her profile in the pale morning light, though, he found that it suddenly mattered slightly more than it had a moment ago.
"Shall we go?" He smoothed his expression out and looked at her.
"Yes — I mean —" She glanced at him furtively. "I don't actually know the way."
"That's alright." Draco smiled slightly, tucked his hands back into his pockets, and fell into step. "I know it very well."