While Sirius Black was greatly troubled by Fleur Delacour's little scheme, his distant nephew was occupied with something else entirely—sifting through a vast collection of library index cards.
In the library's card room, Draco sat back on the sofa and flicked old cards unrelated to Tom Riddle aside with the practised ease of a dealer at a card table, letting them flutter to the carpet.
Hermione was somewhere out of sight; only her voice drifted from beside a bookshelf, slightly muffled by the stacks. "Once you've narrowed down his age, it isn't so difficult... search by year..."
"Limit the search to the seven years after September 1938—" Draco called towards the shelves. "That's when he would have first enrolled."
"Right..." A small, strained sound followed—the noise of someone stretching onto their toes, reaching for something just beyond their grasp.
Then came the familiar scrape of the library ladder against wood. He sighed inwardly. She was going to climb it again.
"I'll help. Don't go up there." He set down the last useless card in his hand, pushed to his feet, and went to find her. The sounds grew clearer as he rounded the shelves.
"I don't need help, Draco, I can manage." Her voice was perfectly relaxed. "It's not as though this is my first time on a library ladder."
When he came around from behind the bookshelf, she was already stepping onto the bottom rung with a series of confident thumps, each one doing something unpleasant to his heart rate.
Hermione Granger was not a particularly athletic girl. She was slender and light on her feet, certainly—not unlike a dancer, in his estimation—but he always felt uneasy watching her climb anything.
As he discovered a moment later, for good reason.
She stood at the top of the ladder with her back to him, muttering with great excitement, "I'd wager he made this quite young. The timing of the diary's creation is suspicious... it could have been the very first..."
"What makes you think the diary was the first?" he asked, genuinely interested.
"He wasn't particular about rare objects at that stage, but he became increasingly selective as time went on..." Hermione said airily.
"That's consistent with what I've been thinking." Draco allowed himself a small smile. "We're drawing the same conclusions."
"Exactly! We should focus on the period around that year—" She glanced at the dates on a stack of index cards, then asked eagerly, "When was the Chamber of Secrets last opened before Harry's second year?"
"1943. He was sixteen. I confirmed it in the trophy room—that's the year he received the Special Services to the School Award." Draco looked up at her.
She was loading her arms with bundles of index cards, balanced at the top of the ladder in a way that made his stomach drop.
"Hermione, you can take fewer—" he began.
"We have a lot from 1943!" she said brightly, not hearing a word, and picked up even more.
Her focus, when she was locked onto something, was extraordinary to watch. There was no puzzle in the world, Draco thought, that Hermione Granger could not eventually unpick.
The trouble was that the more absorbed she became, the less she remembered she was balanced several feet off the ground. He quietly moved into position beneath her and spread his arms.
Hermione was entirely unaware of this precaution.
She reached for as many cards as she could carry, then began stepping backwards down the ladder, still talking to herself. "We should also consider the order in which the Horcruxes were created—the known ones, at least—" Two rungs from the bottom, her foot slipped.
A short, sharp gasp. Then she was falling.
The index cards scattered like a snowstorm, reaching the floor well before she did.
Hermione did not reach the floor at all. She landed in his arms—solidly, safely—as though that had always been the plan.
A warm breath grazed the back of her neck, and then came his voice, unhurried and deliberate: "I warned you—long ago—and you never listen to me, do you?"
Her heart, which had lurched with her fall, now hammered for an entirely different reason. A relieved smile spread across her face. "Draco—"
He set her down with extraordinary care—as though she were a Yuan dynasty vase he had borrowed from the Malfoy Manor library and had every intention of returning undamaged—and then exhaled a long, slow breath.
Hermione turned to say "thank you" and found the card she'd been holding snatched from her hand by a very stern-faced boy who then turned and walked away without a word.
She felt a pang of guilt watching him go.
With a quick Summoning Charm, she gathered the fallen cards from the floor and carried them back to the sofa.
He was already seated and working. His entire attention appeared to be fixed on the new stack of cards. Long legs in dark trousers stretched out on the carpet, black brogue shoes crossed at the ankle—even doing something as mechanical as sorting index cards, his posture remained infuriatingly composed.
Was he angry? She hesitated as she approached him. Her gaze drifted from the white of his shirt upward to the sharp line of his jaw.
Probably angry, yes. His lips were pressed into a flat, unreadable line. She knew what those lips were capable of—had experienced firsthand how easily one kiss from him could reduce her to someone who needed a moment to remember what breathing was for.
She forced her attention upward.
His grey eyes were fixed on the cards in front of him with unusual intensity—none of his characteristic sideways glances in her direction, which, on an ordinary day, could send her thoughts scattering for a good five seconds.
What to do? He really was sulking. A strand of platinum hair had fallen across his dark brows, the contrast giving him an air of brooding and melancholy that was—she was forced to admit—unreasonably appealing. He almost looked aggrieved, as though it were he who had nearly tumbled off the ladder.
Hermione edged closer. She told herself she was studying his expression to gauge how angry he actually was.
Then she stopped pretending.
I was a little interested in you the moment I saw you—wasn't I, Draco Malfoy?
In a hall full of noisy, dishevelled first-years, he had stood apart like something from a different world entirely: the fine-featured face, the immaculate hair, the uncanny self-possession of someone far older. It had been impossible not to notice him.
If he were a Muggle, she thought, he'd probably do rather well. Fashion magazines would fall over themselves to put him on a cover. Even that insufferably sour expression would find its audience—her mother had any number of aloof, ascetic-looking faces in her pile of magazines.
Hermione gave up on these distractions and tried to concentrate on her research, pretending she was not infatuated and that she didn't know he was cross with her.
She could not concentrate. The cool, unhappy air radiating from the boy beside her was growing.
She understood exactly why he was angry—she hadn't listened, and she'd nearly hurt herself. This particular feeling was familiar to her. She herself grew irritated when Harry and Ron ignored her warnings and charged headfirst into trouble.
Now the control-freak Hermione Granger had met the control-freak Draco Malfoy.
They had always been like this—testing each other's limits, pushing and retreating in a fairly evenly matched tug-of-war. He wanted her to listen to him, just as she wanted him to be honest with her.
This time, though, she was simply in the wrong. Hermione sighed softly. Of all the times she'd climbed that ladder without incident, he'd had to witness the one time she'd slipped.
She would have to coax him. Her index and middle fingers walked slowly across the sofa cushion toward him, up the back of his shirt, along his collar, across the line of his neck, and came to rest against his cheek.
She gave it a gentle poke. "Don't be cross. I know I was wrong."
The boy's expression did not change. He snorted quietly, didn't look at her, and flicked another card aside.
Hermione leaned in and pressed her nose lightly against his cheek—just as he often did to her—and said, "I get carried away when inspiration strikes. I'm sorry. You have to understand—I'm desperate to find something useful, and sometimes my urgency gets the better of my sense."
"All right, I understand," Draco said, with the tone of someone for whom this was categorically not a resolved matter.
Hermione was not foolish enough to take him at his word. She softened her approach.
"I promise I won't do it again. I'll be far more careful." She stroked his hair lightly. "It's because you're here that I've grown careless. I always feel that you'll catch me—that you won't let me get hurt. Isn't that right?"
His expression finally shifted. He remained perfectly still, but his grey eyes cut sideways to look at her, and something in them—satisfied, grudgingly—eased.
"You'd better mean that," he said, intending to let the matter drop.
"Of course," she said, feeling rather pleased with herself for having navigated that.
She kissed his cheek and steered the conversation back to safer ground. "Draco—these last few days, you've told me quite a lot about Voldemort. About your research with Professor Dumbledore. Could we examine him from a different angle today?"
"Oh?" A glance. "What angle?"
"I want to analyse him through the lens of Muggle psychology," Hermione said. "To understand what kind of person he truly is."
Draco raised an eyebrow. He was briefly certain that Tom Riddle—wherever he was—would be absolutely furious at being analysed using Muggle academic theory. The sheer indignity of it, for a wizard who despised Muggles. The morbid entertainment value alone was enough to make Draco settle in and listen.
"Go on," he said.
"I sometimes try to understand the people who deserve our sympathy," Hermione said, with a flicker of self-consciousness. "From that perspective, I want to try to understand Tom Riddle."
Typical Hermione Granger.
"To defeat your enemy, you must first understand him." Draco's tone was equal parts agreement and scepticism. "But how do you look at him and see someone deserving of sympathy?"
"Think about it, Draco. His existence was considered a mistake from the very beginning—however unfair that word is, it's the truth. He was born into lies, torment, betrayal, and abandonment," she said. "His life began with a profound cruelty: his witch mother used a love potion to ensnare his Muggle father."
"Don't ask me to feel sorry for that Muggle," Draco said, frowning as he worked through a badly faded index card. "Riddle's father was obviously strong and lived a long life. It was Merope who was weak—she died not long after giving birth."
"You can't look at it that way. If we consider the power imbalance, Merope—as a witch—is more like a physically dominant aggressor, while Riddle—as a Muggle with no magical ability—is more like a helpless victim. In Muggle society, what she did to him would be considered a very serious crime." Hermione's eyes clouded with unease.
"I'll grant you that," he said, pressing his lips together. "He did suffer a genuine misfortune because of her. By all accounts, his life was permanently altered—he never married, even though he had a respectable match before Merope's intervention."
Hermione looked at his profile for a moment, then said suddenly, "Draco—be careful about food safety."
"I beg your pardon?" He turned to look at her. "What does that have to do with any of this?"
"Don't accept food from strangers," she said, thinking with vague alarm of certain suspiciously pink potions in the joke section of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. "Chocolate, sweets—especially if the packaging has already been opened."
If some witch took leave of her senses and decided to bewitch him and carry him off, Hermione would be absolutely furious.
"I see," Draco said, and actually laughed—a small, quiet sound—as he ruffled her hair. "I'll keep your boyfriend safe. In return, I expect you to keep my girlfriend safe for me."
Hermione cleared her throat, feeling warm, and continued, "Anyway. The point is: regardless of what kind of man Riddle's father was, he was the one being coerced in that situation. He had no say in the matter."
"That's a perspective I hadn't considered before," Draco said thoughtfully. "I had always taken for granted that he simply abandoned his wife and child. But you're right—he wasn't leaving. He was escaping. For him, the child born from that wasn't the fruit of love. It was a testament to what had been done to him."
"Exactly. And then Merope gave up her life after giving birth. She was a witch—perfectly capable of saving herself—but she chose not to. She simply stopped holding on." Hermione shook her head. "A child who never knew his father's love and immediately lost his mother. His life began with loss and abandonment, before he was old enough to understand what either word meant."
"A terrible beginning," Draco said. "His parents were each too consumed by their own disasters to give him anything at all. That would have left its mark."
"It led directly to his growing up in a Muggle orphanage. He hated it, clearly. According to Harry's account of the diary, he was deeply distressed when Hogwarts nearly shut down after the Chamber was opened." Hermione frowned, her voice softening with a sympathy that surprised even her. "I imagine he was ostracised in the orphanage—friendless, perhaps mistreated, certainly not cared for."
"Hermione, I need to warn you about something." Draco set down a card and turned to look at her directly. "Your sympathy for the vulnerable is admirable, but you should be careful not to let it blind you. Some people are born without normal emotional capacity. It may simply be part of who they are, regardless of their upbringing."
Hermione looked surprised. "What do you mean?"
"The Gaunt family had been inbreeding for generations—to a truly extreme degree. His grandfather, his uncle, his mother—all of them showed signs of serious instability." Draco's voice carried a faint edge of genuine unease. "Tom Riddle likely inherited a number of the Gaunt family's more dangerous traits: deep paranoia, sudden fits of cruelty, a fundamental indifference to life and death."
The Malfoy family had, through every generation, been careful to avoid consanguineous marriages. It was a foundational principle—no head of the family would willingly produce sickly, unstable heirs. Not every ancient wizarding family shared this foresight.
"You're right that he has personality flaws," Hermione said. "They're most likely partly inherited from Merope's line. In Muggle medicine, people with these tendencies are sometimes diagnosed with what's called antisocial personality disorder—their pattern of thinking is genuinely different from most people's. But you can't discount the environment either. Not everyone with that disorder commits atrocities. Some people, with love and guidance, manage to find a way to live in the world—even if they struggle to be understood. Tom Riddle was denied that possibility entirely."
Draco had put the index cards down. He was looking at her fully now.
"He still turned out perfectly capable in the end, didn't he?" he said, with a mixture of curiosity and scepticism. "There are arguments that too much care and softness can produce its own problems."
"Draco, you grew up in a wealthy family. Your parents gave you every comfort, and—whatever their methods—they loved you completely. They would never have allowed you to be bullied or ignored." She met his eyes. "Isn't that true?"
"Yes."
"The children in those orphanages have a completely different experience." Her voice became quieter. "I attended a charity visit to an orphanage with my parents once. On the surface, all the children were dressed neatly, looking perfectly ordinary. But when I slipped into the back courtyard, I found several children in tattered clothing doing heavy work—their arms bruised. They told me the director didn't like them. Wouldn't let them eat properly. Wouldn't let them come out to meet guests." She shivered. "The person responsible for their welfare was treating them differently based purely on personal preference."
Draco's hand found hers and held it quietly.
"And then?" he said.
"I went to my father and begged him to go and confront the director. Make him apologise. Change things." She gave a small, rueful smile. "My father told me gently that he couldn't—that it wouldn't truly help the children. I didn't speak to him for a week."
"I think I understand his reasoning," Draco said. "You can intervene once, but you can't guarantee their safety after you've gone home. They might even face worse treatment in retaliation. From that angle, it might seem safer not to act."
"That's what he explained later," Hermione said. "I didn't understand it at the time. I asked him why there was so much injustice in the world. Why children were treated this way. He said he couldn't answer that."
"Because life is unfair from the very start," Draco said matter-of-factly. "It's unfair from birth."
"Maybe so—but that doesn't make it acceptable!" Hermione fixed him with a sharp look. "The world shouldn't be this way."
"Don't look at me like I'm the one responsible," Draco said, wisely raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. "I respect your opinion entirely."
"You'd better—Draco Malfoy." She gave him a firm look, then exhaled. "That day was the first time I truly understood what 'unfair' meant. You're right—people live such profoundly different lives. It can feel as though fate is already written before you're born." She paused. "I felt completely powerless. As though I could see every unfair thing happening and could do absolutely nothing. I could almost hear those children crying. Do you understand that feeling?"
"Yes," Draco said softly. "I do."
He had felt it more than once in his past life. He felt it in this life too, sometimes.
"But how did you get from that to becoming..." He gestured at her vaguely. "Well, this?"
"My mother is a force of nature. She doesn't believe in being powerless." Hermione laughed. "Do you know what we did? We went to the body that oversees orphanages and reported the director. He was removed. When we went back to check, the children were no longer being mistreated—at least as far as we could see."
"That's why you once said—" Draco recalled, "—that the plucked flower still cares. Because you actually helped. You changed something."
"You remember that." Her face lit up. "Yes. That's where it began—my wanting to do something. To change outcomes, even small ones. Even a little change is better than nothing."
He stared at her. For one disorienting moment, he found her hopeful, slightly ridiculous idealism genuinely charming. It might have been the light in her eyes—some mixture of determination and earnest wanting.
"How old were you when you did all this?" he asked, watching her carefully.
"Seven," she said, with evident pride. "My mother was with me every step of the way. She always said: if you believe something is right, hold to it and don't give up easily. And if you can't stand the state of the world but can't yet change it, remember that feeling of helplessness—and use it. Let it make you stronger. And then try."
"Mrs Granger," Draco said slowly, "I find I admire her quite a bit."
A proud, warm smile spread across Hermione's face. "I love her more than I can say. She's my best friend. My father too, in his own way. I'm very lucky."
"Yes," Draco said quietly, absently turning her fingers over in his. "One has to admit—sometimes, love does actually make a difference."
He thought, briefly, of Lucius and Narcissa. They had loved him too, without question. And yet—
"Can we agree, then? Tom Riddle grew up without love," Hermione said.
"Agreed," he said lazily.
"He despised the name Tom Riddle, tried to shed it entirely, and eventually abandoned it for a new one. Beyond his resentment toward his Muggle father who shared it, it's possible that simply being Tom Riddle was painful—that the name itself carried a weight he couldn't bear. In psychology, this kind of repudiation is called denial: an unconscious defence mechanism, and not a healthy one." She laced her fingers through his. "I don't think he ever truly escaped the shadow of his childhood. Not even now."
"I'll admit," Draco said, "given everything he became, it's difficult to picture him as a bullied child in an orphanage. But someone as consumed by pride as he is—even a casual dismissal, even a contemptuous look, would have been enough to cause lasting damage."
In his past life, the Dark Lord's pride had been enormous enough to fill a room and make the air feel thin.
"He was obsessed with power itself, wasn't he?" Hermione said, leaning against his shoulder and breathing in the faint cedar scent of his shirt. "Could it be because he was entirely powerless in his earliest years—a small child in an institution where everything depended on the whim of adults—and that the resulting fear of helplessness never truly left him? The more you lack something as a child, the more desperately you pursue it as an adult. It's compensatory psychology."
"You're saying his pursuit of power isn't about any lofty ideology," Draco said, sharpening to the point. "It's simply about the demonstration of power—the feeling of having it." Hermione nodded.
This struck something. Draco had sensed for a long time that the Dark Lord's interest in reviving pure-blood wizarding culture was, at its core, a pretence. He showed remarkably little actual care for the wizarding families who followed him—some of his actions actively undermined the very bloodlines he claimed to be protecting.
Pure-blood wizards argued bitterly with one another, certainly. Lucius and Arthur Weasley disagreed on virtually everything. But Lucius had never wanted to storm into the Burrow and slaughter the entire Weasley family. Ideology was one thing. Demanding death was another. That was not the conduct of a man with a coherent political vision—it was the conduct of someone for whom destruction itself was the point.
Hermione was very likely right. The pure-blood families who had thrown in their lot with the Dark Lord had been deceived. Led step by step, with great patience and great cleverness, toward an extremism they had not fully intended—until they were too deep in to climb out.
"I don't entirely understand," Hermione said, looking puzzled, "why pure-blood wizards were so easily swayed by him in the first place. He isn't even a pure-blood. Doesn't that matter to them? Where did their confidence in him come from?"
"Very few wizards know his true origins," Draco said. "They assume he comes from old wizarding nobility. Look at the things he did, the slogans he used, the house he was Sorted into—everything about him reads as the product of a prominent wizarding family."
"If we made his real background public—would it change anything? Would pure-blood supporters withdraw?"
"It's not that simple." Draco thought of the Death Eaters in his past life, shaking with fear even in the Dark Lord's absence. "By that point, they had already seen his power firsthand. Faith and terror together create an inertia that's very difficult to break."
"I still don't understand," Hermione pressed, "why they trusted him before they had seen his power. Why would wizards who care so deeply about lineage simply take his word for who he was?"
"He was extraordinary, even as a young man. I suspect he was enormously compelling in person—and that face didn't hurt." Draco thought of his father's description of the young Dark Lord: the nostalgic, almost reverent tone Lucius had used, and the way Hepzibah Smith had practically pressed her most treasured possessions into Tom Riddle's hands without being asked. "The professors were bewitched by him. The students were no different—only more so."
He continued, "Those who first followed him believed they were witnessing the rise of the next Gellert Grindelwald—the great dark wizard Dumbledore defeated—who had nearly succeeded."
"I know who Grindelwald is," Hermione said, expression neutral. "His motto was: For the Greater Good. He wanted wizards to come out of hiding and rule Muggles through force."
Draco noted that she kept her tone admirably even, and continued. "Grindelwald didn't care much about blood status. Pure-blood, half-blood, Muggle-born—it didn't matter to him, so long as you were willing to fight for his vision. I suspect that his ideology left a certain impression on wizard culture—a romantic idea of what a powerful, principled dark wizard looked like. Young Tom Riddle arrived and fitted that image perfectly: compelling, powerful, and utterly convincing."
"But he's not the same as Grindelwald, is he?" Hermione settled comfortably into the curve of his arm, looking up at him. "Grindelwald was relatively tolerant of magical people regardless of origin. Voldemort kills wizards without distinction."
"You can find the answers to everything in books, can't you," the boy above her said with a small, fond smile. "Go on."
He was looking at her with open admiration—the particular gaze she loved most, the one that said he found her thoughts genuinely worth following. His approval felt more like a gift than any compliment could be.
"I think he exploited the sympathies that already existed for Grindelwald's ideals—the regret that they were never realised—and used them to draw in followers. He's a masterful deceiver. If he could fool almost every professor at Hogwarts for years with a perfectly constructed performance of diligence and good manners, deceiving adults outside the school who already wanted to believe in him is hardly mysterious."
"It isn't entirely deception, though." Draco felt a chill move through him as he absently stroked her hair, his eyes on her face—intelligent, earnest, and entirely unguarded. "His hatred of Muggles is genuine. He killed his own Muggle father with his own hands. Everything connected to Muggles he treats with a specific, particular cruelty."
"Yes. But there's an important distinction to be made." Hermione straightened slightly. "Grindelwald sought to dominate Muggles. Voldemort seeks to destroy them. Domination and destruction are not the same thing. One implies a future; the other doesn't. I don't agree with either ideology—I want equality—but those are fundamentally different visions. Do the Death Eaters understand the difference? Do they want domination, or destruction?"
"I don't know," Draco said quietly, and found—to his own surprise—that he meant it.
Hermione's words had shaken something loose. He had spent most of his energy since his rebirth on preventing the Dark Lord's return, not on examining what the Dark Lord's return would actually mean in terms of what he intended to do with it. He had questioned the methods. He had not systematically questioned the ideology.
Could the Dark Lord's ultimate purpose be fundamentally incompatible with what the Death Eaters themselves wanted?
Bellatrix craved the Dark Lord's favour—that was everything to her. Barty Crouch sought a father's approval from a man who offered it in the form of purpose and validation. Young Regulus had wanted his family's respect and the promise of glory.
As for the Malfoy family—they wanted power and influence and the advancement of the family's position. Which was what most pure-blood families genuinely wanted.
Very few of them actually wanted to exterminate Muggles, or Muggle-born wizards, for its own sake. What self-respecting wizard would voluntarily dirty his hands with something so brutish, for no personal gain? Unless, of course, persisting in that brutal business opened doors to something greater—a seat closer to the centre of power.
For men like Lucius, harming Muggles was a means. Not an end.
But if the Dark Lord was using "pure-blood interests" as a means to gather support, and using that support toward ends that the Death Eaters themselves had never truly signed up for—toward something closer to indiscriminate destruction—how many of those families would continue to follow him willingly, if they understood it clearly?
"This might be an entirely different approach," Draco murmured.
"Compared to Voldemort, I think Gellert Grindelwald had more of a coherent programme," Hermione continued. "He's rather like certain eccentric radical reformers in Muggle history—his ideas were deeply wrong, but he had goals, a philosophy, an army. He genuinely wanted to change something specific. Voldemort has no plan. He's cast himself as something beyond human, surrounded himself with fanatical followers, and uses violence and terror to assert control. There's no actual vision for what comes after."
Draco raised an eyebrow, reached over, and pinched her cheek lightly. "Hermione Granger—are you actually fifteen years old?"
For a single bewildered moment, he wondered if she too had lived another life. It was impossible—if she had memories of a past life, she could never look at him with such uncomplicated affection. She was, clearly, simply herself: sharp and genuine and entirely unguarded.
How did she do it? How did she keep surprising him?
"Is it so strange?" Hermione said, rubbing her cheek. "The Muggle world has just as many books as the wizarding one, you know. And my parents love to talk—philosophy, politics, history, social change. Late-night discussions on weekends with their friends, all of it."
"Including—" he searched for the word, "—Muggle psychology?"
"As dentists, they need to understand basic psychology. I grew up flipping through those books, and one interest led to another." She grinned at him. "I went through a phase of studying human micro-expressions. There are so many hidden codes in a single face."
"Oh?" He tilted his head, amused. "And is there some hidden code in mine?"
"To be honest," Hermione said, studying him with a trace of regret, "I often can't read you. Your expression and your actual state don't always match. I don't think I'm skilled enough yet to see through you completely."
Draco's composure shifted, very slightly. She was right. A person accustomed to Occlumency—unless in a rare moment of complete trust and ease—will instinctively maintain a certain guardedness. Expression and emotion fall out of step.
"I can see that you're slightly nervous right now," she said softly. "Your pupils are dilated."
"Dilated pupils—and the only explanation is nerves?" He blinked at her, smiling.
"Not the only one. Fear, tension, surprise, curiosity, excitement, anticipation." Hermione murmured, watching the particular quality of light in those grey eyes. "And there's one more: when you find the other person—"
Draco lowered his head and kissed her.
She always smelled the same—something warm and indefinable. She blushed without noticing it. She was soft and lovely in his arms.
Her pupils dilated, just before she shivered and closed her eyes. He noticed.
Fifteen minutes later, he released a very pink, rather breathless girl and surveyed his handiwork with quiet satisfaction. "Practice has proven your theory correct. I can now confirm that you find me attractive."
"I don't see why you had to verify it experimentally," she mumbled, pressing her burning face into his shirt. "I never said you weren't—"
"You don't say it often," Draco said, with an exaggerated look at the ceiling. "You're considerably more enthusiastic about complimenting other people. Krum, for instance. Even Cedric."
"Draco, are you jealous? Are you fishing for praise?" Hermione surfaced from his shirt and burst out laughing. "I thought you were so terribly mature! And now look at you—sulking like a very well-dressed child waiting for a sweet."
He snorted.
"Of course I think you're attractive. You should be more confident about your looks," she said warmly, her fingers tracing the line of his face. "But your ideas, Draco—they're even more attractive to me than how you look. You can discuss anything with me—wizarding history, Muggle theory, any of it—and we always arrive somewhere genuinely interesting. Do you have any idea how rare that is?"
"At Hogwarts, there isn't a single person I can talk to the way I talk to you. People want to discuss Quidditch, or gossip, or whatever happened in the corridors this morning. The things that actually interest me—no one here finds them worth thinking about."
"They don't know what they're passing up," Draco said, with complete sincerity. "Your mind is something quite extraordinary, Hermione. I find our conversations genuinely remarkable." He touched her cheek gently. "Keep thinking about the things that interest you. Don't give that up to fit in. I mean it."
"I won't," she said softly, cheeks warm. She blinked. "Now, where had I got to?"
"Tom Riddle believes he is a god. He leads a group of devoted followers and rules through violence and terror..." Draco murmured, and bent to straighten her slightly dishevelled collar. His gaze lingered on the curve of her neck—
He made a determined effort to concentrate.
"Right." Hermione pretended not to see his expression, or to notice that he had just audibly swallowed. "He maintained his performance almost perfectly—the diligent, charming student—with one exception: Professor Dumbledore. He never bothered to conceal his true nature from Dumbledore at all. Why?"
Draco considered. "Perhaps because Dumbledore's visit to the orphanage to bring him to Hogwarts revealed too much of what Riddle had tried to hide. At that point, the pretence may have felt pointless."
"Do you remember what was in the wardrobe when Dumbledore visited? The one that was on fire?" Hermione asked suddenly.
She was still thinking about the Horcruxes. Draco could tell—she was worried there were more yet to be found.
If a young Tom Riddle could create a Horcrux from an ordinary Muggle-made diary, he was equally capable of choosing any number of ordinary objects—even things from his own childhood.
"Nothing remarkable. A yo-yo, a thimble, a broken harmonica," Draco said, with an air of dismissal. "All of it stolen from other children. Nothing special or rare." In his estimation, the odds of any of those objects becoming a Horcrux were very low.
"I'd really like to see that memory myself. It's hard to evaluate details from a description alone." Hermione sighed. "There may be something in there that hasn't been recognised yet."
"Why not, then?" Draco said, brightening. He tried to pull her to her feet. "Come on—let's go to Dumbledore and ask him to show you."
"Draco, absolutely not!" Hermione refused to stand. "That would be terribly rude. A person's memories aren't something you simply demand to see on a whim. I've only spoken to Professor Dumbledore a handful of times—we're nowhere near that kind of familiarity—"
"It doesn't matter. You're qualified. The value of your perspective far outweighs the inconvenience of sharing one memory." Draco ruffled her hair, unhurried. "He'll say yes. I can be very persuasive."