Past Life Story, Part Four: The Indifferent Granger
Time: Third Year, Care of Magical Creatures class
Location: The Forbidden Forest; the hospital wing
After beginning his third year, Draco Malfoy had become aware that something was wrong with him.
He was growing rapidly and always seemed to be hungry.
A strange mixture of weakness and anger surfaced in him at unpredictable intervals, and it was almost always triggered by Hermione Granger.
Her sharp words from the previous year had left a mark that had taken a long time to settle into something resembling calm. The anger had not gone away entirely; it had simply become habitual. Whenever he thought of her, the resentment stirred.
Hermione Granger.
The girl he had called Mudblood for a full year. The girl who had gradually gone cold and hostile in response.
He could feel the change in her. When he went to antagonise Potter, she no longer looked up from her book to watch him. She didn't even lift her eyes. He had become, as far as she was concerned, simply not worth the effort of a reaction.
This had initially annoyed him, and then, for a brief period, produced something that felt uncomfortably like relief.
Now it made him angry again.
Several times he had tried to speak to her directly, only to be stopped by the sheer wall of her indifference before he could get a word out.
In the classroom, the library, the corridors — whenever he crossed her path, she wore the same composed, unbothered expression. She moved past him as though he were a piece of furniture she had learned to navigate around.
Sometimes, out of sheer frustration, he would jostle or shove his way past her just to force some kind of response — even annoyance would have been something.
But she would only frown slightly, step to one side, and proceed. She didn't snap at him. She didn't tell him he was rude. She simply continued as though he hadn't happened.
She had stopped speaking to him entirely — which was, he had to acknowledge with grim irony, precisely what he had wanted.
Having got what he wanted, he found it hollow.
Draco Malfoy would never admit that he had made a mistake. He would certainly never admit that his words had been sharp enough to damage something real in a girl who had once, very briefly, looked at him without hostility.
She didn't look injured, anyway.
Injured people cried — like Longbottom, who could be reduced to sniffling by a Potions lesson. Or like any of the other girls whom a well-aimed comment could send running down the corridor with their hands over their faces.
She walked past him with her chin up. She was the only girl in the entire year who looked at him as though she found him slightly beneath her notice.
Even the Slytherins had taken note of it.
"Draco, are you really going to let her be this disrespectful?" Pansy said to him one afternoon, with the air of someone who had finally run out of patience. "You need to put her in her place. Everyone who disrespects you needs to understand the price. If you can't even keep a Mudblood from looking down at you, people are going to think you've gone soft."
They, meaning the Slytherin students.
"I have no interest in speaking to her," Draco said, adopting an air of detachment while inwardly finding Pansy quite intrusive. He added, somewhat unnecessarily, "There is absolutely no point."
Pansy looked at him with suspicious eyes. "Draco, are you afraid of her?"
"Of course not. I can speak to her whenever I choose," he said, with perhaps more heat than intended.
The truth was, he had no experience whatsoever of initiating a conversation with Granger. He had always been the one to respond or to antagonise — never the one to begin. Beginning, he felt, was a position of weakness.
To prove to himself that he was not, in fact, afraid of speaking to Granger, he took to drifting close to her, Potter, and Weasley during Care of Magical Creatures, following them at a slight distance and waiting for an opening.
"These are really something," the brown-haired girl was saying to Potter, her back to Draco as she set the writhing Monster Book of Monsters down on a large rock.
"They really are." Draco inserted himself into the moment with his best sarcastic drawl — the manner of any self-important boy in the world trying to get a girl's attention — and finally, finally, got Granger to turn around.
She looked at him directly. Her eyes, bright and cat-like, didn't dart away. An expression flashed across her face that he couldn't immediately name.
"This whole setup is a disaster," Draco said, maintaining eye contact and falling back on a reliable strategy. "If my father knew Dumbledore had allowed someone like this to teach us —"
She looked away. Back to the book.
What is so interesting about a book that bites people? Draco stood in mild confusion, listening to Crabbe and Goyle's mechanical chuckles, watching the line of her profile with a feeling that he had somehow missed the target entirely.
"Shut it, Malfoy," Potter said, stepping forward with his usual reflexive protectiveness.
Predictable. Saint Potter, always assuming everything was about him.
Draco cast a casual Dementor impression in Potter's direction — mostly to make him back up and stop blocking his line of sight — and caught a glimpse, past Potter's shoulder, of Granger startling at the words. She turned to check the bushes, quickly, like a cat reacting to a sound.
Then she seemed to realise he was performing.
She stepped past him, pulled Potter away with an expression of weary contempt, and gave Draco a look that lasted approximately half a second but conveyed an entire paragraph of opinion.
Disdain. She was looking at him with disdain. As though she could see straight through whatever impression he was trying to give.
His heart did something peculiar.
Then he noticed, somewhat against his will, that her furrowed brows were a dark, clean shape and rather striking.
At least it wasn't the blank expression. She could still register him. That was something.
In the lesson that followed, Draco found himself unaccountably energised. He had apparently identified the means of stirring a reaction from her — which led him to show off, make noise, and give Hagrid a great deal of difficulty in class, purely in the hope of seeing her eyebrows do that thing again.
The outcome, which in hindsight had been entirely foreseeable, was that he spent too long performing for an audience and not enough time watching the Hippogriff.
It attacked him.
His first sensation was not pain. It was the sight of her face — upside-down from the ground — going completely white in an instant.
Then the pain arrived.
It was deep and burning and unlike anything he had experienced before. Draco, who had been very carefully shielded from discomfort for the first twelve years of his life, found it catastrophic. When blood soaked through his sleeve, the full reality of it landed, and he was not dignified about it.
Through the noise and the shouting, through Hagrid's enormous anxious presence, he heard her voice cut across everything else with sudden, clear authority: "You have to get him to the hospital wing immediately!"
As Hagrid carried him toward the castle, he turned his head and caught one last glimpse of her over Hagrid's shoulder. She was hurrying to hold the door. Their eyes met for a brief moment.
He thought she asked, silently, are you alright?
Maybe he was imagining it. His arm hurt a great deal.
What followed was hazy. Madam Pomfrey bandaged him and applied Dittany and said everything would be fine, and he lay in the hospital wing feeling sorry for himself in a way he had not expected to find quite so difficult to manage alone.
His pride had been demolished in front of the entire class. He had embarrassed himself. He had lost face in front of her specifically.
And she hadn't laughed. That was the part he kept returning to. The worried expression lingered in his mind like an inconvenient splinter, making him feel more fragile, not less.
For the first time in recent memory, he felt small. His behaviour today, his words, his flailing attempts at provocation — none of it was the version of himself his father had raised him to be.
His Slytherin housemates came to visit, offering dubious sympathy and casual curiosity. The room was full of people.
She wasn't there.
Of course she wasn't. She was Gryffindor. She was Potter's friend. To her, he was probably nothing at all.
And then, precisely when the ward had emptied for lessons, a small head appeared around the edge of the door.
She peered in through the gap.
Draco stopped whimpering immediately. He felt his face go warm. He arranged his expression into something he hoped conveyed bored superiority and said, in a drawl he hadn't quite managed to make sound natural, "What a surprise. Did you get scratched too? I wasn't aware that creature had anything against Muggle-borns."
"It's called a Hippogriff," she said, stepping properly into the ward. Her face was slightly flushed.
"Whatever it's called, it made a serious error in judgement," Draco said, struggling to sit up with as much dignity as the situation allowed. "I am not someone who is attacked without consequences."
"You deserved it," she said, and her voice had the quality of someone stating an established fact. She moved a few steps closer, apparently emboldened by his current horizontal position. "I saw the whole thing. You were rude to it first. Every student there will say the same."
"Feel free to go to the school governors," Draco said.
He had expected her to soften when she found him injured. Some part of him had, embarrassingly, anticipated at least a trace of the concern he'd seen on her face outside. She had come all the way to the hospital wing. That meant something, didn't it?
It apparently meant she had come to deliver a verdict.
She hadn't come out of concern for him. She had come to ensure Hagrid kept his job.
"Let's see whether they listen to you or my father," he said, with great coldness, and felt his arm throb.
She frowned and glanced at his arm. Something in her face changed slightly, as though she had registered the pain he was trying to conceal.
"I heard you've been in considerable discomfort," she said, more slowly, her eyes moving across his face. "I thought your injury was serious. I was even a little — " She stopped. "Actually, you seem perfectly capable of arguing with me, which suggests you're not at death's door. Malfoy, are you exaggerating your injuries to use against Hagrid?"
He stared at her.
He had thought she had seen through him — seen through the bravado to the real pain underneath. He had braced for her to say something about that.
She had instead reached the conclusion that he was fabricating the whole thing.
The small, tentative thing that had been starting to grow in his chest died before it could become anything.
"If that's what you've decided," he said, and gave her a smile that he hoped was poisonous. "Then yes. Exactly that."
"Can you not manage to do a single decent thing?" She looked at him with the expression of someone who had invested a certain amount of hope in a disappointing result. Like a slug in a flower pot.
Why should he have to endure this when he was lying in a hospital bed? He wasn't the one who had come to the hospital wing uninvited.
"Madam Pomfrey," he called out, loud enough to carry to the door. "Would you please show Miss Granger out?"
He had resolved, as of that moment, never again to harbour the slightest expectation of Hermione Granger showing him any warmth. She was cold. That was the whole of her, as far as he was concerned. He had imagined the rest.
"I don't need your visits," he said to her, directly. "I don't need your criticism. I don't need you here at all. You mean nothing to me. Get out."
Her expression went still.
She said nothing. She didn't look at him again. She walked out.
He lay back on his pillows and closed his eyes, and felt something he had no word for — a thick, uncomfortable feeling, directed mostly at himself.
---
Past Life Story, Part Five: The Lonely Granger
Time: Third Year, after Buckbeak's complaint; during Hermione's falling-out with Harry and Ron over the Firebolt and Scabbers
Locations: The oak trees by the Black Lake; the library; the Forbidden Forest; the oak trees by the forest
Draco found that he was still angry.
The anger was mostly of his own construction, and he knew that, but it changed nothing. You still shouldn't come to someone's hospital bed and accuse them of faking their injuries.
After waking up in the hospital wing, he spent the first day cataloguing her wrongs and planning responses. Her cold face was like fine porcelain; he had always found it a particular provocation, the kind he wanted to crack.
He made noise at the Slytherin table to show off his bandages. She remained indifferent. He created a disturbance in Defence Against the Dark Arts to draw her out. She remained indifferent. Finally, he exercised his trump card — he went through his father to pursue the case against Buckbeak — and that, at last, produced something.
Merlin. She actually came to find him.
There she was, beneath the great oak tree by the Black Lake, hands on her hips, head tilted up to where he was sitting in the branches, eyes narrowed in the sun: "Malfoy! You can't do this to it! It's innocent!"
"I thought you might thank me," he said, dropping down from the branch — she took two rapid steps back, which he found satisfying — and giving her his best smug smile. "After all, I stopped short of going after Hagrid directly. As for the creature — it made its choices."
He had spent considerable effort persuading his father to leave Hagrid out of it entirely. She should, objectively, be grateful. Without his involvement, the Ministry would have come for Hagrid too; they had been looking for exactly this kind of excuse to make an example of Hogwarts.
He had been remarkably magnanimous. Especially given that she had come to his hospital bed to call him a fraud.
As for Buckbeak — dangerous creatures needed to be dealt with definitively. If you left unpunished a creature that had attacked a student, you sent a signal that such things could be done without consequence. Draco Malfoy was not a person to whom things were done without consequence. This was non-negotiable.
His father had told him as much, and his father was right.
"There is nothing resembling remorse on your face," she said, in that tone — the perplexed one, the one that always implied she had expected better from him and could not quite understand why she kept being surprised.
Her lashes were thick and dark, catching the light when she blinked. Like brown wings, making the tree seem full one moment and the plain empty the next.
"You were there," she said, in a strange, slightly hurt register that he hadn't anticipated. "I thought after Flourish and Blotts, you might have at least — some small amount of —"
"This matter is already at the Ministry of Magic," he cut across her, abruptly, because he did not want to hear where that sentence was going. He did not want her to pull off some layer he had carefully kept in place. "My father will not drop the case. The execution is all but settled. Save your energy."
She was frowning.
She appeared to be genuinely grieving for the Hippogriff.
He could not understand it. He had been the one lying on the ground. He was the one with the injury. She had shown up at his bedside expressly to call him a liar. And now she was standing here looking devastated on behalf of a Hippogriff.
"Don't call me that!" she said, apparently responding to something he'd muttered. "Is your head entirely empty? You look like a spoilt child who has never once considered whether his behaviour has consequences for other people."
Spoilt child. Hurt. He was the one who had been hurt. She was the one who had been hurting him, continuously, for over a year. From the very first moment he'd noticed her she had been an irritant, a provocation, something that got under his skin.
He avoided her, and she unsettled him; he didn't avoid her, and she still unsettled him; even when she did absolutely nothing, he felt the approach of some undefined damage.
"I'll be watching," he said, with a deliberate smile, taking a green apple from his pocket. He bit into it slowly, maintaining eye contact. "See how it goes."
---
Granger was clearly invested in saving the Hippogriff.
He could always see her in the library — staggering under stacks of books taller than herself, moving through the corridors with the determination of someone who had a purpose and would not be deterred from it.
She made no noise. She was perfectly quiet in the library. And yet her presence somehow made it feel louder to him. He couldn't concentrate properly when she was there.
It was the hair, probably. He was fairly certain the hair was mocking him.
What actually occupied him was something he would not have admitted to noticing: she was doing it alone.
He had assumed Potter and Weasley would help her. Of course they would; that was how it worked with those three, they were permanently attached at the hip, forming opinions in unison and acting on them together.
But no. They had no interest in the Hippogriff. Only she kept returning to the shelves, carrying her impossible towers of books, doing the research alone, for no reason, with no benefit to herself.
Draco had been raised in a household where actions were taken for reasons, where reasons connected to outcomes, where the Malfoy family interest was always somewhere in the picture. He genuinely could not map her behaviour onto any framework he possessed.
What was she after?
And where were those two idiots, who hadn't sat with her in weeks?
She was alone. He kept noticing this. She was always alone.
Perhaps she had finally grown tired of their limitations, he thought — and then caught himself thinking it and was annoyed.
After Christmas, the pattern became clearer. During Care of Magical Creatures, Potter and Weasley said nothing to her. Not a word.
So, Draco thought, with contempt that felt slightly hollow — Gryffindors with their talk of equality, and here they were, giving their friend the silence.
He stood in the cold January wind and watched her. Watched how she walked alone to the far edge of the lesson area. Watched how she knelt by herself to tend to the fire — feeding it, adjusting the wood, alone — while a Salamander leaped and spun in the flames at her feet.
Her profile, lit by the fire, looked sad.
What would a girl like her know about sadness? That was an absurd thought.
Crabbe and Goyle had wandered off somewhere irrelevant. Finding himself without witnesses, Draco drifted after her.
He discovered her in the undergrowth, wrestling a long dead branch out of a bush. She was pulling with considerable force and no technique whatsoever, as though she was venting something, and had apparently not noticed that the other end was tangled.
He watched. He expected her to fall.
She was about to fall — there was a muddy puddle directly behind her — and then, for reasons he chose not to examine closely, he caught her. Both hands, solid, against her back.
She spun around and found him standing there.
"What are you doing?" Her face cycled rapidly from alarm to shock.
"Preventing you from sitting in a puddle, obviously," he said, stepping back and affecting boredom. "I wasn't aware you'd taken up mud as a hobby."
"Don't call me that! And get away from me!" She hopped aside like a startled rabbit, placing a careful distance between them.
"You might try saying thank you," he said, with a slight edge. "It's a basic convention."
"I didn't ask for help. I never ask you for help. I know what you're actually here for — you're here to insult me, you're always here to insult me." Her chin came up. "And the Buckbeak case isn't over. I haven't given up."
"Who is Buckbeak?" he asked, on reflex.
"Malfoy —" She went red. "You nearly had it executed and you can't even remember its name?"
"The Hippogriff that attacked me? How long ago was that?" He shifted his weight, adopting a tone of breezy helpfulness. "Potter and Weasley have moved on. You're the only one still tilting at this particular windmill." He paused. "Don't you have anything better to occupy yourself with? Gryffindor will run out of patience with you sooner or later, you know."
Why was he giving her advice? She had no friends, she was working herself to exhaustion over a Hippogriff, and she looked tired — and he was standing here offering her strategic counsel.
"You have absolutely no conscience," she said, with a disappointment so specific it felt personal. "I have nothing further to say to you."
"As if anyone wanted to talk to you anyway," he said, stung.
The cold air sharpened around him. He turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he said, "You're entirely alone, Granger. Nobody wants to talk to you!"
"Shut up, Malfoy!" She sounded genuinely stung, which was what he wanted, and he raised his arms and turned to look back at her, wearing something he hoped was a smug expression, and which he strongly suspected was not.
"Very effective reaction, Granger," he said, and walked away before either of them could continue.
---
He worked out the reason for her isolation fairly quickly.
The Firebolt.
Potter had received a Firebolt — an anonymous gift at Christmas, top-of-the-range racing broom — and Granger had reported it to Professor McGonagall on the grounds that it might have been tampered with. McGonagall had confiscated it. The Gryffindor Quidditch team's captain, Oliver Wood, had been vocal and operatic in his outrage.
Hence: Potter and Weasley were giving Granger the full silent treatment.
Well done, Granger. If the Firebolt stayed confiscated through the Gryffindor-Ravenclaw match, that was nothing but good news for Slytherin.
He settled into his usual chair at the Slytherin table, fixing his eyes across the hall on the girl buried in her book, and thought to himself: a Firebolt was genuinely impressive. But a Firebolt with an Impediment Jinx on it, recreating the state of that runaway broom from first year, would be even more impressive. He smiled at the thought.
Honestly — Potter had people sending him anonymous top-of-the-range racing brooms, while Draco had to earn everything through talent. Potter really was inconveniently lucky.
He felt the urge to go and pick a fight, and pushed through the crowd — and she still didn't look up. Her head stayed down, completely absorbed in something that had nothing to do with him.
A typical Hermione Granger. Pathologically immune to spectacle. Draco rolled his eyes and returned to his table. Marcus Flint was muttering something about Potter's cockiness.
"Agreed," Draco said, eyes still on her. "Captain, I have a few thoughts."
Marcus's idea, in the end, was not a good one. After the Gryffindor-Ravenclaw match, Draco lost fifty House points for impersonating a Dementor in the stands. The Slytherins were cooler with him for several days afterward — not because they disapproved of winding up Potter, but because the method had been clumsy, had failed to achieve anything, and had handed Gryffindor points.
They were right, and Draco knew it.
He retreated to the big oak tree at the edge of the Forbidden Forest. He climbed high enough to be invisible in the canopy, leaned against the trunk, and closed his eyes. He thought about Wiltshire — the particular quality of morning light on the grounds there, so different from the harsh afternoon sun at Hogwarts — and was drifting toward something like peace when a voice below broke through.
He looked down through the gaps in the leaves.
The messy brown hair.
Of course. Who else could it be?
She was beneath his tree. She bent down and picked something up from the grass, turning it carefully in her hands. She sighed softly. It was a sound he had no framework for — it didn't fit any version of her he had filed away.
She stood, holding what turned out to be a small egg — mint green, with a faint blue cast, the unmistakeable colour of a robin's egg. The nest was not far away, in a branch above his head: two or three identical eggs resting inside it.
He had seen eggs like these before. He was eleven, before Hogwarts, and there had been a robin nesting in one of the oaks at the Manor. He had looked at those eggs once, through a gap in the bark, and thought: small things. Easily lost.
When the Dementors had come years later, for the first time since his past life had ended, he had thought about those eggs — he did not know why.
He had pressed his eyes shut and let her voice continue below.
She had stopped, it seemed, and sat down against the tree roots, and was crying.
Draco had come up here to be alone. He had come here to be unobserved and to restore his mood to its customary sardonic equilibrium. Hermione Granger crying at the base of his tree was not part of this plan.
He stared down at her.
He thought of several things to say. None of them came.
Beside him, without warning, something stirred among the leaves. He turned his head. A cat was sitting on the branch beside the trunk, watching him with large yellow eyes: flat-faced, turmeric-coloured, extraordinarily ugly. It had acquired, in its travels through the tree, an impressive assortment of twigs and dead leaves in its fur.
He stared at it.
It stared at him.
"Crookshanks? Crookshanks, where are you?" her voice called up from below. "Did you eat Scabbers? Come here right now —"
The cat glanced downward, then tucked itself deeper into the foliage with a guilty expression.
Draco understood. This was Granger's cat.
Of course it was. Obviously. Of all the cats at Hogwarts, this one belonged to her.
He regarded the cat for a moment, thinking about the situation.
"She's looking for you," he said to the cat, quietly.
The cat gave him an unimpressed look.
"If you go down now, she'll stop crying," he said. "And I can have some peace and quiet."
This was entirely his motivation. He pointed his wand at it and made clear, in a low voice, that he would assist it down the tree if it declined to go on its own.
Crookshanks appeared to find this persuasion compelling. It turned, climbed carefully down the trunk, and dropped to the ground below with a thump.
Draco watched through the leaves.
She was startled, then she laughed — a wet, sudden laugh, through her tears. She wasn't angry with it at all. She just complained to it in a voice he had never heard her use before, soft and mildly reproachful, while she carefully removed every twig and leaf from its fur. When she was done, she picked it up, tucked it against her arm, and walked back toward the castle.
The tree was quiet.
Draco had achieved the peace and quiet he had wanted.
He sat in it for a while, looking at the empty grass below, and found that it felt less like what he had been hoping for.
---
Past Life Story, Part Six: The Angry Granger
Time: Third Year, before and after Buckbeak's death sentence
Locations: Professor Trelawney's Divination classroom; outside the castle gates
Professor Trelawney was, of all Draco's teachers, the one he understood least.
She was eccentric in an elaborate and expensive way — draped in shawls and bangles, surrounded by incense — and her lessons required him to fabricate a reliable stream of omens, catastrophes, and near-death experiences in order to receive the high marks her marking scheme seemed to demand. She rewarded invention. He found this both convenient and intellectually offensive.
On this particular afternoon, he was slower than usual to pack up, due to his injured arm. Crabbe and Goyle had, as increasingly happened, forgotten to attend.
By the time he drifted to the front of the classroom to return his cup, the room had emptied.
Professor Trelawney turned from her crystal ball, and her eyes went unfocused.
Then, in the sharp, altered voice she occasionally produced in these moments — piercing enough to raise the hairs on his arms:
"Your destiny will strike you first. You will lose her — until you meet her again."
Draco looked at her.
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"Oh, dear, is something wrong?" She blinked at him with the mild, confused expression she defaulted to when she surfaced from these episodes.
He stared at her for a moment, then left without speaking.
He walked down the steep steps from the North Tower and stood in the corridor below, thinking.
He had been in a stuffy room full of incense for an hour. He had probably been half-asleep. He had misheard something, or she had said something else entirely and his tired brain had rearranged it.
There was no prophecy. Trelawney was a fraud. He had fabricated most of his O-grade Divination work, and so, he suspected, had everyone else.
She couldn't even predict something as simple as which girl — if any — would give him any trouble in his life, because the answer was clearly nobody. No girl at Hogwarts had ever given him a moment's serious concern.
He put it out of his mind.
---
The execution date for Buckbeak was approaching.
Draco had learned through the usual channels that Potter and Weasley had made several trips to the library — apparently having finally decided to contribute to Granger's research. The timing was, he noted, somewhat late.
He found their sudden involvement irritating for reasons he could not entirely explain, and took to exercising his most reliable outlet: provoking them with pointed comments about Buckbeak's fate, delivered with the calm certainty of someone who knew the outcome.
It worked. Potter went red. Weasley looked furious. Draco was enjoying himself.
And then Hermione Granger walked straight up to him, wound back her arm, and punched him.
"You absolute —" she said, and her voice was shaking. "You despicable, petty, disgusting —"
She had her wand out.
Everyone present — Potter, Weasley, Crabbe, Goyle — went absolutely still.
Draco himself had gone still.
He took one step back.
The prophecy surfaced from wherever he had buried it, with the abruptness of a stone thrown up by a plough: Your destiny will strike you first.
For a moment, he couldn't move.
She was standing in front of him with her wand raised and her eyes blazing, and she had just hit him, and it had been exactly — exactly — what those words had described.
He felt seventeen things at once, none of them appropriate.
"Let's go," he said to Crabbe and Goyle, in a voice that came out considerably less steady than he intended, and walked away from the scene quickly, one hand pressed to his face.
"Don't tell anyone," he said to them, as they moved down the corridor.
"Get away from me," he said, when they kept following him, and pushed into the nearest lavatory and bolted the door.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
Trelawney was a fraud.
This was a coincidence. An extraordinary, specific, physically jarring coincidence, but a coincidence.
He was not going to stand in a lavatory at Hogwarts and take a Divination prophecy seriously. He was not that person.
He splashed water on his face and breathed.
Your destined one will strike you. You will lose her until you meet her again.
Granger. Hermione Granger — the girl he had called Mudblood for a year, whose cold shoulder had occupied more of his mental energy than he was willing to admit, who made him furious every time she looked at him and more furious every time she didn't — was his destined person?
Absolutely not.
Completely, utterly, categorically impossible.
Trelawney was mad. She had predicted Harry Potter would die young in the first week of term. Potter was standing outside in perfect health, looking smug, because he always looked smug.
She was a charlatan.
Draco unbolted the door and walked out.
She was standing there.
Of course she was.
Her gaze dropped to his robe. He was still bleeding slightly. Her eyes changed — a brief, complicated flash of something, covered quickly by a return to the cool, contemptuous expression.
"I don't regret it," she said. "You deserved every part of that. Your father helped sentence Buckbeak to death." A pause, and then, quietly but with absolute conviction: "I meant every word."
"Whatever," he said.
He looked at her eyes, and felt something he could not classify. Not anger. Something closer to fear, which made even less sense.
He didn't want to argue. He was tired. He felt, for the first time in recent memory, actually, genuinely tired.
"Granger," he said, very carefully, "you know nothing about any of this." He looked slightly to the left of her face. "Leave me alone. Please."
She was never his destined person. Trelawney was wrong.
He stepped around her very deliberately, not touching even the hem of her robes, and walked toward the dungeons with the prophecy circling in the back of his mind like a persistent, unwelcome owl.
Lose her? What does that mean — lose someone you've never had?
He didn't want her. He gritted his teeth.
He didn't want any part of this. He met her every single day. In the Great Hall, in every classroom, in the library, on the grounds, in the corridors. She was everywhere, all the time. The prophecy was logically incoherent.
He would think about it no further.
He thought about it for several days.
---
Past Life Story, Part Seven: The Shaking Granger
Time: Third Year; after Buckbeak and Sirius's escape; during exam week
Location: The oak trees by the Black Lake
Draco Malfoy peered down through the gap in the branches and wondered who, on Hogsmeade Open Day, chose to stay behind.
This was supposed to be a day when the entire student population streamed out toward the village. He had come up here precisely to have the grounds to himself.
Below him, Potter was sitting against the oak's roots, apparently talking to himself — or, on inspection, to the two people sitting with him. They chatted for a while in a patch of sun, while Draco sat above them in the canopy, invisible, waiting with excellent patience for them to leave.
Potter left. Weasley left shortly after.
Granger stayed.
She moved through the grass, and stopped. Bent down. Picked something up with great care and stood for a moment, looking at it in her palm. She exhaled softly.
Draco looked.
It was an egg. Small, oval, a distinctive mint-green with pale blue undertones. A robin's egg.
Above him, not far along the same branch he was sitting on, was the nest. Two or three identical eggs inside it.
He had seen eggs exactly like these before. He had been eleven, standing in the grounds at the Manor before his first year at Hogwarts, and there had been a robin in one of the old oaks, and he had looked at the eggs through a gap in the bark and thought: they are small and they will probably break.
Later, he had thought about that again. He did not know why he kept returning to it.
He watched her from the branches.
She was looking up at the tree, then back at the egg, working something out. Clearly she intended to return it. Clearly she had decided this was solvable, despite the height of the nest, the density of the branches, and the considerable fragility of what she was holding.
She did not call for help. She did not, apparently, consider not trying.
She took out her wand and cast the Levitation Charm.
Oh, Draco thought. Of course.
He was immediately irritated with himself for not having thought of it. He had learned the Levitation Charm in first year, same as everyone. Wingardium Leviosa. A basic spell. And yet it hadn't occurred to him, because he had already concluded the problem wasn't solvable and had moved on.
He watched her work.
It was harder than it looked. The egg had weight — not much, but enough — and manoeuvring something fragile and heavy through a dense network of branches required the kind of sustained focus that most students couldn't maintain. The shell could crack on contact with anything. There were no second attempts.
Most people would have given up by now. Draco could see a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her wand hand was absolutely steady.
He held his breath.
She was bringing it up through the last layer of branches. She was almost — she was nearly —
The nest came into view. She hesitated, hovering the egg above it, trying to work out the safest angle of approach. She chose the left edge. Clever — sliding the egg down the side would reduce the impact on the other eggs. He had worked that out simultaneously, watching her.
Except.
He could see from his angle what she couldn't see from hers. There was a gap at the base of that particular edge. A small gap, where the nest's weaving had come loose. That was, almost certainly, where the egg had fallen from originally.
He watched the egg begin its careful descent.
He did not move.
He was still not going to move.
The egg reached the gap. Fell through it.
He caught it.
Both hands, clean, fast. Pure Seeker's instinct.
He sat there for a moment, holding the egg in his cupped palms.
Below him, Granger made a startled sound, craning upward.
He leaned slightly over the branch, looking back down at her. "Before you ask," he said, "yes, I have been up here the entire time."
Her mouth was open.
He looked at the egg, then at the nest. He reached up carefully and set it in a different spot, away from the gap, settled among the others.
He looked back down at her. Her expression was extraordinary.
"Well?" he said.
"Malfoy," she said, slowly. "What are you doing in that tree?"
"Minding my own business, until you arrived and made that impossible." He climbed down several feet and dropped to the ground, dusting off his hands. He tilted his head at her. "Close your mouth."
She closed it. Then opened it again. "You've been up there this whole time? While I was —"
"Struggling with the egg. Yes."
A long pause.
"I know what you're about to say," he said, preemptively. "You're going to tell me that I tampered with Buckbeak somehow and I should know that it won't do me any good to —"
"Did you?" she asked, looking at him with sudden intensity.
He met her eyes. He said nothing.
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she looked up at the nest, and then back at him, and something shifted in her face.
She straightened. She looked him directly in the eye and said, "I'm glad Buckbeak is alive. Whatever you did or didn't do, I'm glad. And I still think you and your father behaved despicably." A short pause. "But thank you. For the egg."
He had been prepared for an interrogation. He had not been prepared for a thank you.
"I didn't do anything," he said, carefully.
"Malfoy." She put on the expression she always wore when she had identified something and was deciding whether to say it aloud — that slight, infuriating smile. "You saved the egg. Whether you admit it or not."
He was quiet.
"You still have some compassion in you," she said. "Even if it's just a trace. You're not entirely hopeless."
He stood very still. He felt the words doing something he couldn't prevent.
"Granger," he said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended. "Do you believe in fate?"
She blinked. "What?"
"Prophecy. Divination. All of it." He held her gaze. "Do you believe in any of it?"
She considered him for a moment — the question, apparently, was unexpected enough to merit actual thought.
"No," she said, finally. "I think destiny ought to be in our own hands. I've never put any stock in Professor Trelawney. She's a fraud."
Good. He didn't believe in it either. Nobody sensible did.
"Agreed," he said, shortly. "She talks absolute nonsense."
She looked at him with visible surprise. "I didn't expect us to agree on anything."
"There is no 'us,'" he said, turning his face away.
He felt, against his will, the corner of his mouth do something.
She didn't see it. She had already looked back toward the oak tree, her voice going cooler. "I know you don't like me. I don't like you either. But at least try to behave like a decent person — like you did just now. That's all I'm asking."
She turned and walked toward the castle.
The breeze moved through the oak above him, stirring the leaves with a long, dry rustling sound.
He watched her go — watched the wind pull at her hair, that impossible, undisciplined mass of it, swaying with her as she walked — and did not look away until the distance made her a small shape against the stone.