When Harry and Ron escaped, exhausted, from Professor Snape's day-long "Potions Classroom Volunteer Marathon," dusk had already fallen over the spires of Hogwarts.
They spread themselves across the armchairs in the common room like limp rags, and soon Hermione returned from Hogsmeade—she showered them with sweets like rain.
"Draco bought these for you; he picked up a little of everything," she said with a smile, her cheeks flushed from the cold wind.
"Merlin's stinky socks! You call this a little?" Ron exclaimed, mouth agape. He was buried in sweets, looking rather like a display in Honeydukes' shop window.
"Thank him for me," Harry said from beside him, his mouth already stuffed with several Pepper Imps. He looked half-starved.
"I already did," Hermione said with a smile. "How was your day?"
"Couldn't have been worse. That greasy bat, Snape!" Ron said angrily, gnashing his teeth as he grabbed an Ice Mice and crunched it loudly. "Manual labour all day—washing dozens of cauldrons, scrubbing off every sort of sticky slug residue and animal entrail you can imagine. Harry even got docked five points for daydreaming."
Harry didn't seem keen on revisiting the subject. He held a square of fudge and asked Hermione instead, "Did you go round with Draco? How was it?"
"Brilliant," Hermione said cheerfully. "I had a wonderful time."
Draco had been the most considerate guide in all of Hogsmeade. He had noticed her unease early on and quietly eased her nerves about her first visit; he introduced her, with patience, to the fascinating shops she'd never known existed, each one more dazzling than the last. He kept careful watch over her, steering her well clear of the patrolling Dementors, until she had let go of her awkwardness entirely and thrown herself into the lively atmosphere of the village.
Ron picked up a liquorice wand and examined it, then asked, "So what's Hogsmeade actually like?"
"Oh, apart from those patrolling Dementors being a real nuisance, it's wonderful. Honeydukes has a spectacular range of sweets—you absolutely must go… Zonko's Joke Shop was packed with people buying rotten egg bombs, Belch Powder, and dungbombs… The Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks is exceptional… And the most worthwhile place by far is Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes." Hermione said enthusiastically, counting on her fingers.
"Sorry—what?" Ron gasped, dropping his liquorice wand mid-swipe—he and Harry had been wielding them like swords. "Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes? Fred and George actually opened it?"
"You knew about this?" Hermione asked, surprised.
"Over the summer, they were always whispering about it—patents, funding, all sorts… I'd catch a word here and there. But I didn't think it would happen this fast." Ron shook his head, then peeled a jelly slug off his collar and popped it into his mouth. "The real question is, where did they get the Galleons to set up a shop? Mum and Dad definitely don't know. They'd never have agreed."
"I haven't a clue either. But they've made quite a spectacle of it—you really ought to go see." Hermione shrugged.
She turned, glanced around the common room, and caught the red-haired girl rushing down from the girls' dormitory. "Oh, Ginny, perfect timing. This is a miniature Puffskein Fred asked me to bring you—"
"Thank you!" Ginny said delightedly, taking the two small creatures from Hermione's hands.
Then she glanced at the two boys happily wallowing in the sweet pile by the fireplace and asked, "Aren't you going to the feast? It starts in five minutes."
Harry and Ron immediately scrambled upright, scattering sweets across the floor, then hurried to crouch down and gather them.
"Are you two really wizards?" Hermione shook her head and gave the sweets on the floor a sharp "Pack!"
The sweets leapt back into their wrappers and stacked themselves neatly.
"Hermione, that was a beautiful spell!" Ginny exclaimed admiringly, stepping through the portrait hole of the Fat Lady after her. "The last time I saw a tidying charm that neat was when my mother cast it… You can never count on boys for that sort of thing."
"You really can't…" Hermione repeated softly, a distant look in her eye.
She thought, briefly, of Draco using that same charm to arrange the wizard chess pieces back in first year—and how it was his tips and their practice sessions together that had made her so fluent with it.
But there was no time to think on that now. Students were streaming in from every corner of the castle, excitedly and noisily funnelling through the entrance to the Great Hall, which had been transformed with hundreds of lit pumpkins.
One of Hermione's persistent weaknesses was that she could never quite manage to hold her place in a crowd. There were always two or three people who squeezed in ahead of her, and her manners simply wouldn't allow her to shove back.
Complaints drifted up from behind—"What are the people in front doing? Why aren't they moving?"—but she was powerless.
Her face had gone red with anxiety by the time the boy coming toward her shot out an arm to hold back the queue beside her, raised his pointed chin in her direction, and said simply, "Go in."
"What do you think you're doing?" Zacharias Smith, stopped beside him, snapped, glaring at Draco.
"Smith," Draco said coolly, "if I were you, I'd ask whether my manners had been Kissed away by a Dementor. Has no one taught you 'ladies first'?"
Zacharias watched, fuming, as the brown-haired girl gave the interfering Slytherin a small smile and led a red-haired girl through the doorway. He tried to follow, but Malfoy got there first and shouldered him aside, making him stumble.
"You just wait," Zacharias threatened. "Until Quidditch—"
"I'll be there," Draco said lazily, giving him a thin, amused smile.
Hermione had a good appetite that night. She sampled a little of everything, even though Draco had already pressed quite a few sweets on her in Hogsmeade.
Sipping her warm pumpkin juice, she looked up happily to find a flock of live bats wheeling overhead as if conjuring a storm, while a bright orange banner blazed with enchanted flames, writhing and twisting like a vivid serpent.
"Hermione, I genuinely didn't expect it," Ginny said. "Are you close with Malfoy, then? He actually let you go first."
"Oh," Hermione said, "he's my study partner."
"You're studying with a Slytherin?" Ginny exclaimed, nearly upsetting the pumpkin pie in front of her.
Hermione shrugged, took another sip of pumpkin juice, and glanced across to the Slytherin table—her gaze settling, for a moment, on the boy with the quietly indifferent expression.
"Relax, Ginny." Ron seized a slice of pumpkin pie and addressed his sister in a breezy tone. "Face it—no Gryffindor with any self-respect wants to partner with her. She'll correct every last thing you do. Spell intonation, wand movement, essay length, even your handwriting. You'll either end up ashamed or furious."
"Oh, so you sent her to torment the Slytherins?" Ginny said, feigning sudden enlightenment. Picturing Hermione bossing the arrogant Malfoy around, she couldn't help but laugh. "Won't Malfoy lose his mind? Doesn't he want to hex her every other day?"
"That's the strange thing—they don't seem to have had a single row," Ron said, puzzled, turning to Harry. "Draco has a temper, hasn't he? But he's been almost… patient with her."
"That's because he's flawless!" Hermione said haughtily, snapping out of her reverie. "I haven't managed to find fault with him once!"
"Is that why you haven't enjoyed being his study partner?" Harry asked, intrigued. "Because you can't find anything to correct?"
"No!" Hermione said, her face colouring slightly. "I only changed partners because of Neville—"
She simply had to change study partners for entirely reasonable, sensible reasons.
Even so, her favourite partner was still him. It had always been him.
She met his gaze across the Hall and gave him a small, quiet smile.
---
It was a pleasant evening, or so Draco thought.
The weight on his shoulders had eased considerably today. Sirius Black was no longer a threat—if anything, a potential ally. His investment in the Weasley twins' joke shop had opened to strong prospects. And with two Horcruxes destroyed in quick succession, his plan to dismantle the Dark Lord was proceeding, piece by careful piece.
He glanced toward the front of the Great Hall, where the Hogwarts ghosts were delivering the grand finale of the evening's entertainment.
He didn't watch Nearly Headless Nick's reenactment of his own botched beheading. He kept his gaze on the Gryffindor table—full of laughter, full of noise.
Hermione said something to Harry and Ron, then looked across the crowd and smiled at him.
He felt, for once, that things were moving in the right direction.
But fate has always loved to play tricks.
When Draco returned to the Slytherin common room, exchanged a few words with some rather loud students, and was preparing for a proper night's sleep, word came down from the Headmaster: all students were to return to the Great Hall.
"Hurry up, Draco—" Blaise called, pulling a yawning Pansy toward the door. "Someone's broken into the castle!"
A cold feeling settled in his stomach.
Draco followed Blaise and Pansy into the Great Hall with the rest of the Slytherins. The long tables had been cleared to the walls, and hundreds of purple sleeping bags lay spread across the stone floor. Students from Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw were already there, mingling with the Gryffindors in low, urgent voices.
"The portrait of the Fat Lady's been slashed open—" shouted Colin Creevey, beaming and clutching his camera at the centre of the crowd. "I just got a photograph of her."
"Colin, that is not funny in the slightest!" Ginny Weasley snapped back. "Someone tried to force their way into Gryffindor Tower!"
"Who?" asked Susan Bones, a round-faced Hufflepuff girl at the edge of the crowd.
"Peter Pettigrew." Neville Longbottom, standing nearby, said in a frightened voice. "The Fat Lady said so herself." He then patted his robes frantically. "Has anyone seen my wand?"
"Neville, have you left it in the common room again…" Seamus Finnigan said with sympathy.
"This is outrageous," Draco said quietly, to no one in particular.
"How did he even get in?" Goyle's face was pale with horror. Crabbe beside him had gone similarly ashen, clutching a piece of nut brittle, unable to speak.
Draco paused. Then he turned and walked away from the group, continuing no further.
What he had really wanted to say was: why had the portrait of the Fat Lady been slashed on this same night, even though Sirius Black had never appeared?
The hand of fate was stirring. It was trying to keep certain things on their predetermined course.
His alarm bells rang again. Perhaps the recent weeks had been too comfortable, and he had let the vigilance of his early rebirth slip.
How could he have believed the world had been entirely changed?
He had altered many things, yes—but fate seemed to operate by a kind of inertia regardless.
The escaped prisoner. The slashed portrait. Both had their echo in a past life he had already lived.
Were all the changes he had made meaningless? Were some things simply immovable—impervious to his interference?
The thought horrified him, and he forced himself not to follow it further.
---
The candles had gone out. The only light left was the starlight on the enchanted ceiling. Beside him, Crabbe was snoring loudly; the nut brittle in his hand had clattered to the floor. Goyle was grinding his teeth. Further away, Blaise and Pansy were whispering to each other.
The Great Hall, in every sense, was not a good place to sleep.
Draco frowned, quietly dragged his sleeping bag away from the huddle, and made his way in the dark toward the far wall.
"Who's there?" As he drew closer, he heard a familiar voice ask, with a thread of nervousness in it.
"It's me," he said softly.
"Draco—over here." The tension in her voice dissolved at once.
By the faint glow of a Victorian-era ghost drifting nearby, he made out the shadow of Hermione's hand waving at him.
He felt a knot in his chest loosen. He settled his sleeping bag on a small open patch beside her and crawled inside, still fully dressed.
It was quiet here. Most of the students had clustered in the centre of the hall; very few had chosen to sleep near the walls.
"How did you end up all the way over here by yourself?" he asked, turning his head, able to make out only the vague shape of her in the dark.
"I wanted some quiet. I couldn't sleep," she whispered, staring up at the ceiling of stars.
"I understand. I'm not quite settled either." He couldn't see her clearly, but his hand brushed a loose strand of her hair where it lay on the floor beside him.
Curly. A little coarse, a little smooth. He ran his fingers lightly over it, and found he didn't want to stop.
Unaware of this, she said quietly, "That was too close today. Who knows when Pettigrew slipped into the castle—maybe he'd been lying in wait for hours, maybe even in the dormitory. If you hadn't given them all those sweets and kept them in the common room, Harry and Ron would've gone straight up to bed. Thank goodness no one was hurt…"
"…except for the Fat Lady," Draco said.
"Yes. Except for the Fat Lady," she echoed softly.
He was quiet for a moment, turning over the thought of her predetermined misfortune.
"Draco, I don't think I've properly thanked you for today. Coming with me to Hogsmeade, showing me everything… I didn't know half of it before, not the way you all do—" she broke the silence, her voice a little hesitant.
He smiled in the dark. "I was glad to."
Hermione smiled too, though he couldn't see it.
After a whole day of noise and motion in Hogsmeade, they'd had no chance to simply talk, and the quiet between them now felt like something worth keeping.
"And thank you for letting me through the door," she said.
"What else was I going to do—make you wait outside?" There was a warmth of amusement in his voice.
"You could've ignored me. Like they do."
"I can't ignore you," he said simply.
"Oh," Hermione said, feeling quietly pleased.
Somehow, when she couldn't see his face and could only hear his voice, her defences came down. The breathless, relentless flutter she'd been managing all day settled to something calm and steady.
"Draco—are you afraid? Of Pettigrew, I mean." She tried to turn her head toward him.
"No."
"He's dangerous, though, isn't he?" Worry edged her voice.
"He's a coward."
"Do you think he'll try again?"
"No," he said quietly. "He won't."
"I still don't understand how he got in. Or how he escaped in the first place." She frowned. "Are Dementors really so useless?"
"Against the right magic? Yes," he said. He knew the truth—that the Dementor cordon was no barrier at all to an Animagus—but he left it there.
"And the Dementors themselves—" she said softly, her voice trailing off as she remembered the encounter during the day. "They were dreadful…"
"Don't be afraid. They're far from you now." His voice was low and careful, as though the hush between them were something fragile.
Hermione yawned.
She was surprised to find the tension draining from her, as if some tightly wound thing had finally been released. A few minutes ago she had been rigid and wide awake.
"Draco… aren't you tired either…" she murmured, sleep pulling at her voice.
"Are you finally getting there?" His voice was steady, like water over smooth stone.
She reached out in the dark and found his hand, curling her fingers around it.
When her mind was blurred and her guard was down, she stopped deliberating and simply followed what felt right.
Warm hands. Soft. Draco stayed still, and let her hold them.
"There," she murmured, satisfied. "When I was little, if I couldn't sleep or was frightened, my mum would hold my hand and stroke my hair."
He let out a quiet laugh.
He shifted slightly toward her and, with his free hand, began to stroke her hair—gently, as though she were something small and easily startled.
He wasn't sure the method was medically sound.
But he found he wasn't in such a bad mood anymore. Perhaps that counted for something.
"Sleep now," he whispered, his hand moving slowly through her curls.
Hermione tried to say something—she had meant to suggest he sleep too—but it came out as only a soft murmur.
The exhausted girl held the boy's hand tightly, her breathing slowing by degrees, until she slipped away into a quiet dream.
---
At dawn, Draco woke, disoriented.
He had not expected to sleep at all on that cold stone floor, let alone without a single nightmare.
He lay still for a moment, trying to find his way back to the thread of thought that had troubled him the night before—the Fat Lady, and fate, and inertia—but was immediately ambushed by the scent of green apples.
He opened his eyes.
The girl was asleep in his arms.
More precisely: he had, at some point in the night, gathered her entire sleeping bag—with her inside it—against his chest. Just as he had idly imagined in Honeydukes. He held her closely, and there was a smile on his face that he hadn't put there consciously.
Hermione. Blissfully unaware of her situation. Her face was tucked into the crook of his neck, her fingers bunched in his collar, her wild hair spread across him, the corners of her mouth turned faintly upward as if she were in the middle of a pleasant dream.
How had this happened? Draco swallowed, glancing around guiltily. The rest of the students were still asleep. The occasional cough, the soft footfall of a prefect on night patrol, the drift of a ghost through a far wall.
He had just decided it was safe when the Grey Lady glided past, glanced down at him with an expression of serene understanding, and floated away with the ghost of a smile.
Draco felt a flush creep up his neck. He felt, for a mortifying moment, like a student caught out.
He worked quickly and carefully, easing Hermione's fingers loose from his collar one by one—pausing when she made a small, protesting sound, and soothing it with a brief stroke of her hair—before tucking her sleeping bag snugly around her.
She was entirely cocooned. Not a scrap of that soft expression visible to anyone.
Good, he thought. Far safer that way.
He slipped out of the Great Hall as quietly as he could, following the Grey Lady into the cool dimness of an empty corridor beyond.
She glanced back at him. "Are you following me?"
"I have something I want to tell you," he said.
"Oh?" she asked, cautious.
"Two more pieces of his soul have been destroyed," he said. "I thought you might want to know."
The Grey Lady's composure broke instantly. She rushed toward him, her usually serene face contorted, her voice rising sharply: "Two more pieces?"
"Yes." He stood his ground, though the sudden change startled him.
"Oh, by Merlin—he's a fool as well as a monster—" She deflated slowly, muttering, "A spectacular fool."
"What do you mean?"
"Splitting the soul—" She turned to look out at the distant grounds through a high window. "It is not something one does with any precision. You cannot divide the soul into equal halves. With each split, everything you are at that moment is reflected in what is severed—as though a second self is being made." She paused. "What remains behind is always less than what was."
Draco looked at her, a cold thought beginning to stir.
"Each split is a process of one becoming two," the Grey Lady said quietly.
A long silence followed.
Somewhere in the castle, a cricket—not yet frozen out by autumn—chirped on in the dark, incongruously steady.
"You mean—" Draco began.
"The first time, he halved his soul. The second split left him with a quarter. The third, an eighth." She closed her eyes, as though she could not quite believe the magnitude of the man's hubris. "And on, and on."
"But he made a third, a fourth, more—" Draco's eyes widened, the last of his drowsiness dissolving in a wave of cold clarity. "How much of his soul is actually left in his body?"
"I don't know," the Grey Lady said, her expression returning to its customary calm. "That depends on how many times he's split."
"How many times…" The words came out as barely a murmur.
"Ha." She gave a short, bleak laugh. "Now I understand why a baby defeated him." She drifted away, leaving her final words to hang in the cold air behind her: "His soul is so fragmented it can barely sustain a body. He must exist in constant, wordless agony—every moment a fresh rupture."
Draco stood motionless, the cold seeping through him.
His grandfather Abraxas had told him once: *The rupture of the soul brings irreversible, permanent loss—erratic judgement, violent swings of temper, and a growing estrangement from human form.*
If the Grey Lady was right…
Then the Dark Lord's increasingly erratic behaviour, his deteriorating appearance, his ever-sharper cruelties in those final years—it all finally made terrible sense.
With a soul so shattered, he could no longer be called a man at all. He was something broken and hideous, sustained by fragments, perpetually in agony.
And what could a monster like that—soaked in pain and nothing else—possibly want, but ruin?
Draco stood on the cold, wind-swept corridor, and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn air.