To understand how Draco found Hermione in the dark of night, we need to return to the moment of the punch.
"Not a word to anyone," Draco said grimly, watching three small figures hurry across the grass slope in the distance. Crabbe and Goyle, still stunned by what they'd witnessed, nodded at once.
The punch had come without warning.
Draco hadn't seen it coming and hadn't been remotely prepared for it.
In three years together in this life, there had been no violence between them — not once. He had not imagined he would end up on the receiving end of a fist again.
Including his previous life, this made twice he had heard those particular words from her — *bastard, disgusting little cockroach* — and he covered his nose as a sharp, sour sting rushed from the bridge of it all the way to the back of his skull and settled, dully, somewhere in his chest.
He gave a helpless, bitter smile. The kind that looks worse than crying.
*Fate.* Given an entirely new chance, he had managed to earn the exact same words. He was apparently incapable of learning.
"Draco, your nose is bleeding—" Goyle stammered, and in his haste swallowed a toffee whole, choking.
A warm trickle seeped through his fingers.
"We'll come with you—" Crabbe offered.
"No. I'll go myself. Both of you, go." Draco turned away. "Three hundred Bludger runs today, three hundred each."
"But—" Goyle said.
"*Now.*" He was already moving toward the nearest bathroom. "Don't follow me."
They stared after him.
---
The bathroom was empty. Draco wrenched the tap on, let the cold water stop the bleeding, and shoved his bloodstained robe aside. He leaned on the sink and looked at himself in the mirror — white shirt, pale face, a crease between his brows — and tried to work out what had just happened.
*Had he kissed her? Had he actually kissed her? When?*
He searched his memory with increasing desperation, combing through everything, prying open the Occlumency-sealed boxes in his mind one by one. His face grew paler with the effort.
Nothing.
*There's nothing there.*
He pressed both hands to the edge of the sink.
She had punched him before — in another life, over Buckbeak. In this life he had kept a careful distance from that Hippogriff, and he had still ended up here.
Hermione Granger had a genuinely formidable right hook when she was angry.
Both the physical and the psychological pain were considerable. He smiled bitterly at himself in the mirror.
She had been clearly, deeply, genuinely angry. That kind of anger from her was rare.
And her words—
*After what you did to me, you actually said you treated me like a sister?*
Her eyes had been red. Swollen.
Whatever he had done to her, and whenever he had kissed her — those were things only Hermione could answer.
And her next sentence: she didn't *want* to be his sister.
He stared at the mirror.
*What does that mean? Is it what I think it means?*
Admit it, Draco Malfoy.
Hermione Granger has never been just a sister to you.
He had managed to deceive himself for a while, in the early days. In their first and second year, the self-deception had been almost convincing — she was a lively, brilliant, somewhat imperious girl who needed looking after and occasionally needed coaxing, and he had told himself that was all it was. A brotherly instinct. Nothing more.
But she had grown up. She had become not just endearing but impossible to look away from. She had shown him a version of Hermione Granger he had never been allowed to know in his other life.
She took care of him. She spread butter on his bread and handed it to him as though it were natural. She straightened his tie absently, as though tidying him up were something she simply did. She fed him medicine and wiped his mouth and once — in the library, in the afternoon sun — had stroked his hair while he slept, and he had woken to the most peaceful feeling he could remember having.
She defended him. She had argued with the Hufflepuffs in the library when they went after his pride as Slytherin's Seeker. She had fought with her own roommate over a predicted curse, despite not believing in predictions, because she would not allow anyone to say he was doomed. She had been the first in the Quidditch stands to cast a Patronus Charm, trying to shield him before anyone else moved.
She helped him. She had taken him — invisible, exhausted — into the Forbidden Forest. She had translated Herpo's archaic notes for him. She had spent an entire evening quietly working through the school's population, looking for whoever might have opened the Chamber.
She trusted him. She had kept every secret he'd asked her to keep, despite her suspicions, despite it conflicting with every instinct she had: the Forest, the Snitch, the Basilisk.
She gave him warmth when he had very little of it. She had reached a hand out to him on the Hogwarts Express, and he had taken it. Flying with her had made the grey sky feel inhabitable. She had brought food to the observatory when she noticed he hadn't come to dinner, setting it beside him without comment. She had made him laugh on a Muggle skateboard on a perfectly ordinary afternoon, which was something he hadn't thought himself capable of anymore.
She made his life sweeter without trying. She saved birthday cake for him. She pulled him around Muggle streets and refused to let him hole up alone indoors, confiscating his aspirin tablets with an air of absolute authority.
She was a natural at understanding — she connected details that he, even with all his memories of another timeline, had fumbled. Who else would have thought of the pipes? Who else would have worked out Lupin?
She was the best student he had ever known. Polyjuice Potion in second year. A dozen subjects tackled simultaneously. The kind of steady, meticulous, brilliant effort that Professor Flitwick praised in a voice of genuine admiration.
She always said he was her favourite study partner. But wasn't she his? Who wouldn't want to work alongside someone like that — the way a single glance between them was enough, the way they could work in a silence that wasn't empty because it was full of the same thought — and know it, and not have to say so?
She tried to understand him. She called him brave when he had never thought of himself that way. She took him to practise the Patronus Charm, and watched him with an expression that made him feel capable of it. She said he was kind. She said she could see something in his eyes that he himself wasn't sure was there.
She said she liked his smile. She said it was very handsome.
Hermione Granger had always seemed to be looking for something in Draco Malfoy that probably shouldn't have been there — some fragment of humanity in a soul that had been shaped by darkness — and what was most terrifying was that she always seemed to find some evidence to support her theory.
She understood him. No one else had ever managed it. No one else had ever come close.
*Merlin. He loved her.*
He loved everything she had ever done for him. He admired her intelligence and her pride and her ambition, and the entirely unapologetic way she held her head up when she answered a question correctly, because she had *earned* it and she knew it. He loved her naive idealism and her anger and her tenacity. He loved her unrealistic belief that she could break down every injustice, one careful argument at a time. He loved the tears she shed for the weak and the way she wiped them off and kept going, because she simply did not know how to give up.
He had wanted, more than anything else in this life, to protect her. To keep her from breaking again. To prevent her from becoming the girl in the nightmare he carried — white and trembling on the drawing room floor of Malfoy Manor, her arm carved open, screaming.
He had drawn closer anyway. He had become hopelessly, helplessly attached.
Her face had gradually come to replace the blurry, fractured memory of the other Hermione — the one he'd never deserved — and in doing so had become clearer than anything else he carried.
Those emotions from his previous life, locked away and never sorted through, had found the light again in this one. She had grown them, without knowing she was doing it.
---
In that other life, he had hidden his last remaining conscience, his last piece of human feeling, in a box in his mind that he labelled with her name and shoved under every heavy thing he could pile on top of it.
He had never dared to open it. Whenever he found it — even by accident, even just the shape of it in the corner of his mind — he would wind it up tighter with Occlumency and seal it under another lock.
His Occlumency had been self-taught, and in the beginning it was laughably inadequate.
That summer he became a Death Eater, Bellatrix came to teach him. She arrived with that particular smile of hers — the one that meant she had already decided to enjoy herself at someone else's expense — and it took her almost no time at all to find the box. She pried it open with visible satisfaction and looked inside.
He never knew exactly what she saw.
But it was enough. Enough for her to know that her nephew was a problem.
*"Draco, this won't do,"* she murmured, with great tenderness and total cruelty. *"The Dark Lord will not be pleased."*
He was terrified in a way that overrode everything else. He gritted his teeth, endured her systematic dismantling of his mental defences, and rebuilt them properly — the way a master builds them, layer by layer, until even Snape couldn't find the seams.
Bellatrix never had the chance to open the box a second time.
But she never forgot that it existed.
That was why, when Bellatrix took Harry and the others at the Manor, she chose to torture Hermione specifically.
To see if he would react.
To see if the box was still there, after all.
He couldn't fight her. He couldn't fight Greyback as well, and his parents were present, and Lucius had lost his wand, and Narcissa was doing everything she could to keep the house from collapsing around them. One wrong move from him and the Malfoys would be named traitors on the spot.
The only way to keep Hermione alive was to watch with a blank face and show nothing.
Because if he showed anything — if his expression shifted by a fraction, if he looked away or made a sound — Bellatrix would take it as confirmation, and Hermione would not survive the evening.
So he watched. He kept his face empty. He gave Bellatrix nothing.
He dragged his own soul into the abyss, and Hermione with it, and hoped that she would be alive at the end of it.
He would never forget the way she had looked at him.
He had told himself, for years afterward, that it was the only way. He still believed it was the only way. That did not make it easier to carry.
*I hurt her,* he thought now, staring at the mirror. *I have been the instrument of her pain more times than I can count. In both lives.*
He hadn't meant to. The person he least wanted to hurt in the entire world was her.
He reached up and loosened the knot of his tie.
In this life, she seemed to like him.
The thought arrived as it always did — tentatively, as though it might not survive being looked at directly.
She liked him.
Was it possible? Could she — could she actually fall for him?
It had started as a faint flutter, months ago. It was something considerably larger now.
*This got away from me from the very beginning.*
That day on the Hogwarts Express, when she had put out her hand in the darkness — he had taken it without thinking. She had introduced herself and asked him to use her first name. No *Granger*, no *Mudblood*, no history between them. Everything new.
A new Hermione. Unbroken by anyone.
He had told himself to keep a safe distance. To watch from a remove and lend a hand only when necessary. To make sure she didn't get hurt, and ask for nothing in return.
He had been a coward. That was the honest word for it.
He had used the word *sister* to deflate the tension, to give himself an exit, at the exact moment she had opened a door and looked through it at him.
He had hurt her again.
She had thrown the ring away. He felt the pain of it settle in his chest.
"Draco Malfoy," he said to the mirror, expressionless. "You really are the worst."
He looked at himself for a moment.
*Go find her. Apologise. Make sure she's alright first.*
She was probably still very angry.
Whether she would want to see him was another question entirely.
---
By dusk, he had checked the library, the Black Lake, and the Gryffindor common room — where the Fat Lady claimed not to have seen her, which he was inclined to disbelieve.
He made his way back to the large rock near the pitch. He crouched down in the mud, unconcerned with the state of his trousers, and began sweeping his wand close to the ground.
The ring wasn't there.
In desperation, he cast a Tracking Charm — a spell tied to the ring, which he'd enchanted with a locator hex at the start of term. Given that she'd thrown it away, he thought the chances of a useful result were slim.
The spell answered immediately.
The light pointed not toward the castle, not toward the lake or the village or any of the likely places, but toward the Forbidden Forest.
He stared at it.
Had she come back and retrieved it? That would mean she was inside the Forbidden Forest — on a full moon — right now.
*She knows better.* He had reminded her himself. He had been very specific about the full moon.
His eyes went to the sky. Dark clouds, and behind them, the pale edge of something that was not a crescent.
He thought of borrowing the Marauder's Map to narrow down her location — but it was with the twins, probably in the Hogsmeade workshop.
He looked at the treeline.
He looked at the moon.
He gripped his wand and ran.
---
As he passed Hagrid's pumpkin patch, the Tracking Charm began to behave strangely — its direction shifting and doubling back, as though the ring were in motion or something was interfering with the signal.
He slowed and looked around in the brightening moonlight.
Crookshanks came trotting out from the edge of the Forbidden Forest, chin up, tail aloft, a headless mouse hanging from his mouth with great satisfaction.
Draco looked at him.
"Crookshanks," he said carefully. "Have you seen Hermione?"
The cat raised his enormous yellow eyes, regarded Draco with calm assessment, and wagged his tail.
"Come here," Draco said, and opened his arms.
Crookshanks, against all previous behaviour patterns, spat out the mouse, strolled forward, and stepped neatly into his arms.
"I wish your owner were as reasonable as you," Draco murmured, pulling a willow leaf from the cat's matted fur. "Can you take me to her?"
Crookshanks seemed to understand perfectly. He dropped from Draco's arms, landed without sound, and began walking toward the forest with his tail held like a flag.
Draco followed him, past the first trees and into the dark, moving quickly, his wand raised, his eyes adjusting.
A wolf's howl split the night.
Draco's blood went cold.
The full moon had cleared the clouds.
He quickened his pace. Crookshanks quickened his.
*Please.* He had never been much for prayer, but he found himself doing it now with great sincerity. *Please don't let her be near it. Please.*
Then he came around a stand of trees, and he saw her.
Hermione. Standing alone at the forest's edge, her face white in the moonlight, her wand hand trembling, facing a werewolf that was moving toward her with its teeth bared.
His chest closed.
*Where are Harry and Ron?*
The rage came fast and hard and he shoved it down because there was no time for it. He ran.
He reached her before the werewolf did and stepped in front of her without slowing, putting himself between her and those gleaming teeth.
"Hermione Granger," he said, and his voice came out unsteady. "I've found you."
The werewolf's eyes were flat and yellow. No human recognition in them at all — only hunger and aggression. It was enormous. Far worse up close than it had looked at a distance.
He raised his wand and tried to calculate what might work against it, when Hermione's voice came from behind him, barely controlled: "Draco — it's no use, a wand won't work against it — Professor Snape already tried—"
The shock hit him like cold water.
Snape. *Snape* had been defeated.
He cast *Incarcerous* anyway, buying himself a second. The ropes held for exactly that — the werewolf tore through them with one swipe and knocked the wand clean from his hand with the same motion.
"Draco!" Hermione seized his arm.
He stood there without his wand, facing something he could not hex and could not outrun, and looked at the teeth.
*All those things I never said.* He thought it with a strange clarity. *All those things I didn't have time to fix.*
The werewolf raised one claw.
He did the only thing left to him.
He turned, pulled her in, and turned his back to it.
He held her tightly and closed his eyes and waited.
"I'm sorry," he said in her ear, his voice shaking badly. "Hermione, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me—"
He could feel her trembling. Her arms had come around his waist and her cheek was pressed against his jaw and she was crying — warm tears, running against his face — and she was saying his name in a voice that was breaking apart.
He had never felt anything so unbearable.
*My Hermione. She smells of green apple.*
*In my other life, I lost her so stupidly. In this one, I was getting there. I was so nearly there.*
The distant howl came again — another wolf, far off, calling across the dark.
The werewolf went still.
It turned. It looked toward the sound.
And it ran.
Draco stood very still, not quite believing in his own continued existence.
Then Hermione's legs gave out and he went down with her, and they were both on the ground — not quite collapsed, not quite sitting, somewhere in between — and she was still holding on and he was still holding on and neither of them could seem to manage anything else.
"It's gone," he said, when he found his voice. "Hermione, it's alright. It's gone."
"Draco—" She pressed her face into his shoulder, her teeth chattering. "It was so close — it was so—"
"I know." He was shaking. He could feel it in his hands. He pressed them carefully to her back anyway, trying to steady her. "I know. You're safe. It's gone."
She was clinging to him the way someone does when they are making absolutely certain the other person is real and present and alive. His ribs were taking some strain. He didn't care at all.
The fear was still working its way out of him — the particular species of terror that lives in a moment you think might be the last one — and underneath it, something completely different was becoming very clear.
She was alive and in his arms and shaking.
He was alive and holding her and also shaking.
Since she had come to him and not elsewhere.
Since an embrace, even here, in the cold dark at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, was enough to make the fear bearable.
*What exactly is Draco Malfoy still waiting for?*
He had spent three years telling himself to keep his distance. Keeping his distance. Retreating at the first sign that he might want more than he was entitled to. Convincing himself that she was safer without him, that his feelings were an imposition, that wanting her was just another way of hurting her.
For the first time, with clarity so complete it almost hurt, Draco Malfoy stopped retreating.
He held her closer. Properly. Without reservation and without apology.
She tucked in, her fingers curled in the back of his shirt, her breathing slowly evening out against his neck.
He closed his eyes and did not let go.