Around three in the morning, the famous giant squid of Hogwarts was floating drowsily on the surface of the Black Lake, preparing to settle in for the night over its favourite territory.
It found the semi-circular crystal dome of the Slytherin common room without difficulty and draped most of its considerable bulk across it, subsiding into contented stillness.
The rest of the lake's inhabitants followed suit. Even the bioluminescent plankton retreated, tucking themselves away among the dense aquatic weeds at the bottom.
Draco's private bedroom was perhaps the only exception—a dim candle still burned behind that crystal window, which was unusual at this hour.
"Then the centaur Firenze arrived. He was standing guard over Harry Potter and Hermione." Dobby's round eyes were wide with animation as he gestured for his master's benefit. "Dobby thinks he was protecting them."
"Tell me something I don't already know," Draco said, pushing himself out of the dark green leather chair and beginning to pace.
"Then Hagrid arrived, with Neville and that cowardly dog. Then many professors came—Professor McGonagall, Professor Snape, Professor Flitwick, and Professor Dumbledore." Dobby's voice was still bright with excitement. "They took Professor Quirrell—motionless as a statue—and placed him in the Hogwarts dungeons for the time being." He clasped his hands together. "Great little master! Brilliant spellwork!"
"You weren't spotted?" Draco asked.
"Dobby hid himself the moment the professors arrived!" the elf shrieked indignantly.
"Good. Where's Potter?"
"Professor McGonagall took him to the hospital wing! The great Harry Potter refused to be Levitated—he walked there himself, even though he was in terrible pain! He was so brave, so strong!" Dobby's eyes filled with admiring tears.
Draco shook his head and moved on. "And Hermione?"
"Her? That lovely girl? She helped Hagrid bury the unicorn and then went back to the Gryffindor common room. And she said 'thank you' to Dobby—even knowing Dobby is a house-elf!" Dobby looked enormously pleased with himself.
"Well done, Dobby," Draco said with satisfaction. "Flawlessly done."
"So, what's next—" he began.
"No!" Dobby shrieked. "Dobby hasn't spent all his wages yet! Dobby does not want another reward!"
"Then take a holiday. I've nothing for you at the moment." Draco rubbed his temples and waved a dismissive hand. "Go and visit your friends. Take some time for yourself."
"Dobby doesn't want—" Dobby protested miserably.
"That's an order," Draco said, yawning.
"Oh! Your noble and generous little master!" With a loud crack, Dobby vanished, tearful and overwrought.
Draco finally went to bed, and slept extremely well.
After nearly a year of planning, research, and careful manoeuvring, something had finally gone right.
The cold pressure around his chest had loosened, just slightly. Enough to breathe.
With the Dark Lord's soul now in Dumbledore's hands, half the battle was won. Dumbledore, with his formidable abilities, would be more than capable of keeping Voldemort contained. After that, once the mystery of the diadem was resolved and the last remaining danger neutralised, he could begin to shed the weight of his past life entirely—and simply be a young Malfoy again, with nothing more pressing to worry about than his end-of-year marks.
The next morning, Draco stood before his dressing mirror and, for the first time in a long while, allowed himself a faint smile at his own reflection.
Freedom felt almost within reach.
If only he could make some progress with the Grey Lady.
Try harder, he told himself, settling into his seat at the Slytherin table and directing a thoughtful look across the Great Hall at the back of a brown-haired head.
"Oh—look at the Gryffindor hourglass! It's gone up overnight!" Pansy Parkinson's voice rang out from the entrance hall.
"Professor Dumbledore added those!" Neville Longbottom called back from the far end of the hall, his voice swelling with pride. "Last night, in the Forbidden Forest, we caught Professor Quirrell!"
The students converged on him at once, clamouring for details.
Draco drifted out of the Great Hall at his own pace and paused long enough to catch a fragment of Longbottom's account: "—Professor Quirrell was harming a unicorn, and we were out searching for it during detention... and then Hermione caught him!"
"What were you and Potter even doing? How did you let a girl take all the credit?" a Gryffindor sixth-year named McLaggen demanded. "I assumed it was you two who'd earned the extra points."
"Don't say that, McLaggen—Harry and Neville helped too!" Weasley interjected. "They got twenty points each!"
"You weren't even there." McLaggen gave him a withering look, then turned back to Neville. "Longbottom. Tell me again—exactly how was it discovered? How was Quirrell detained?"
"Harry and Hermione were in one group. I was with Hagrid." Longbottom looked bewildered. "I couldn't tell you exactly what happened at first. We saw the signal flare and went over. Professor Quirrell was already... not moving."
"Then how does anyone know it was Granger who stopped him?" McLaggen asked dismissively.
"The centaur said so!" Longbottom said, his round face going red.
"A centaur?" two Gryffindor girls exclaimed simultaneously.
"Yes—Lavender, Parvati—there are quite a few centaurs in the Forbidden Forest," Longbottom said, with the air of someone not entirely sure this was helping his credibility.
Pansy watched this exchange from a short distance away, arms folded. "Unicorns? Centaurs? This is getting more outrageous by the minute." She fixed Longbottom with a narrow look. "You're not making this up, Longbottom? You, of all people?"
In the days that followed, rumour spread through Hogwarts with extraordinary efficiency. Students gathered in knots across every common room and corridor, each offering increasingly creative interpretations of what had happened in the Forbidden Forest. The principal parties, however, kept resolutely quiet—and without a reliable account to anchor it, the speculation grew wilder by the day.
Hermione Granger appeared only for lessons. The moment each class ended, she was gone—back to the Restricted Section, and then to a certain private study space that only one other student knew the location of.
"I had to disappear," she explained to Draco one afternoon, turning a thick book over in her hands. "Professor Dumbledore asked Harry and me not to speak about it. He said some of the details might cause panic."
Harry Potter remained in the hospital wing and refused all visitors. Madam Pomfrey stood sentry at the entrance, hands on her hips, turning away every student who approached.
Neville Longbottom was the only member of the group who could actually be cornered, being neither particularly evasive nor especially shrewd. He answered every question put to him with perfect willingness—but he genuinely knew very little, and his answers consisted mainly of the same few sentences he had already delivered in the entrance hall. Given his usual reputation for muddled recollection and nervous over-elaboration, most students treated his testimony as entertainment rather than evidence.
"Today the Hufflepuffs have started making things up based on Longbottom's version of events," Pansy announced in the Slytherin common room that evening, wrinkling her nose in the direction of Blaise Zabini, who was playing Wizard's Chess. "One story has Granger tying up Professor Quirrell and handing him over to the centaurs in exchange for a unicorn. Another has Potter defeating twelve centaurs barehanded, which is apparently why he's been in the hospital for days. And the best one yet claims that Longbottom and Hagrid stumbled across Professor Quirrell and a centaur on some sort of clandestine rendezvous."
Blaise moved his knight and said coldly, "They've turned it into a competition, haven't they? Whose imagination is the most unhinged."
"It wouldn't be happening if the people involved would simply say something." Pansy shrugged, picked up her copy of Witch Weekly, and flipped it open.
After a moment she peered over the top of it at Draco, who was engaged on the opposite side of the board. "Draco—isn't Granger your classmate? She always greets you. Couldn't you ask her, in Transfiguration?"
"Why make things difficult for him?" Blaise said, a trace of disdain in his voice. "You expect him to make conversation with a Muggle-born? He barely talks to anyone."
"Her blood status has nothing to do with it," Draco said, without looking up from the board. "And it's Professor McGonagall's class. It's not a suitable venue for gossip." He moved his Queen. "Checkmate."
Blaise stared at the board. His wizard chess piece raised its white flag with a dejected little wave.
Pansy folded the magazine noisily. "Well, someone needs to come forward and clear things up. The rumours are getting completely out of hand."
Draco's brow moved, almost imperceptibly.
She was right. Points had appeared overnight with no official explanation. Without a credible account, the stories would only keep escalating.
That evening, Professor Dumbledore rose at dinner to set the record straight. Hermione Granger had earned fifty points for Gryffindor for identifying and apprehending Professor Quirrell, who had been found harming a unicorn in the Forbidden Forest. Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom had each received twenty points for remaining steadfast in the face of danger and not abandoning their companions.
Dumbledore offered nothing further. Draco understood why—the matter of Quirrell's other face, and the reason for Potter's collapse, were both far too sensitive to disclose. The partial account was sufficient to explain Gryffindor's dramatic rise in points without giving the Death Eaters anything useful to work with.
In his previous life, Draco had known about the face on the back of Quirrell's head only because his father had told him—the summer after fourth year, shortly after the Dark Lord's resurrection.
Still. The old man was, objectively, being rather generous.
Potter had contributed precisely nothing, unless one counted rolling on the ground clutching his forehead. As for Longbottom—he hadn't even been present at the critical moment.
Every time Draco passed the House points hourglass and saw the fat cluster of rubies that had appeared on Gryffindor's side overnight, he was compelled to lodge a private complaint with himself.
But he let it go. The Dark Lord was safely contained; Dumbledore was competent; the situation had resolved better than he had dared to hope. He could afford to be generous about the attribution of credit.
Fifty points for Hermione, if anything, was too few.
He had seen her drop to the ground afterwards. He knew she hadn't been unafraid.
But in the moment, when it mattered, her wand had been steady.
A twelve-year-old witch, terrified, alone—and she hadn't flinched. Draco felt an entirely irrational surge of pride and made no attempt to examine it too closely.
In any case, the fifty points proved sufficient. The period of ridicule ended. Her Housemates' cold shoulders thawed with remarkable speed once Gryffindor's hourglass filled up, and the friendly smiles returned as though they had never been withdrawn.
Hermione went back to sitting in the front row. She answered questions with her old enthusiasm, her hand shooting up before the professor had finished speaking—back to being every inch the eager, relentless, unstoppable Hermione Granger.
This was a relief. Draco had found her recent muted, subdued version deeply unsettling—it suited her about as well as silence suits a bell. She had talent; she deserved to be seen. He watched her from the back row of Professor Binns' class as she gesticulated her way through an answer, and thought: yes. That's more like it.
The weeks that followed were given over to revision.
Draco spent most of his time with Crabbe and Goyle, a task he found only marginally more rewarding than banging his head against a dungeon wall.
"Goyle, you still have a rat tail stuck to your goblet," Draco said, in the particular tone of a man who has spent several hours maintaining calm in the face of catastrophic incompetence. "Focus. Have some conviction."
He was in an empty classroom, running Goyle through a Transfiguration exercise for what felt like the forty-seventh time, when a familiar bushy head appeared at the door.
Hermione peered in, caught his eye, and beckoned.
"What's happened?" He walked over and gave her a brief once-over. "Which Gryffindor has offended the school heroine this time?"
She said nothing—just grabbed his sleeve and towed him down the corridor until they reached a deserted stretch of hallway. Then she released him, stepped back, and looked at him with an expression of pointed assessment.
Draco Malfoy.
There he stood, regarding her with that easy, guileless expression, as though nothing remarkable had occurred within the past fortnight. As though he had not, in the course of a single night, cast a spell she'd never heard of and single-handedly prevented the Dark Lord from recovering his full strength.
"I want to know something," she said, looking up at him steadily. "How did you know there was a face on the back of Quirrell's head?"
She had been too overwhelmed that night to notice anything peculiar. It was only days later, once the shock had receded and her mind had resumed its usual operations, that she had begun to pick the evening apart with proper attention.
One night, lying awake under the wine-red curtains of her four-poster bed, she had found herself thinking about the way Draco had moved—how his timing had been flawless, how his predictions had been not approximately correct but precisely correct, with a certainty that went far beyond reasonable deduction.
She had agreed to take him to the Forbidden Forest on the basis of a vague suspicion that Quirrell might be a problem. She had not genuinely expected events to unfold exactly as Draco had described.
But they had. Exactly as he had described.
"And that second spell you cast," she continued, keeping her voice level. "I've never seen it in any of our textbooks. What was it?"
"I rather assumed," Draco said, "that after helping you subdue Quirrell and ensuring Potter's safety, the appropriate response would be 'thank you.'"
"Thank you," Hermione said immediately, her eyes remaining fixed on him with the analytical intensity of someone examining a particularly puzzling specimen. "Now answer the question."
He had momentarily forgotten what Hermione Granger's intelligence actually meant in practical terms: that she would not let anything go, that she was constitutionally incapable of ignoring an anomaly, and that being vague with her was only ever a temporary measure.
"Can't you simply let it be?" he said, with a long-suffering expression.
"I can't." Her brown eyes were relentless. "Draco, you cast a spell I've never encountered and then managed to contain Voldemort—"
"Don't use that name," Draco said sharply.
"That doesn't make any sense!" Hermione said, with a flash of exasperation. "You defeated him, and you won't even say his name? You're not a coward, Draco. You never have been."
He frowned. She had misunderstood him.
In point of fact, he had always been a coward. He had been a coward for most of his life. Draco Malfoy and the word "brave" had never belonged in the same sentence—not honestly. His talent lay in careful manoeuvring through shadows, in calculated caution, in never committing to a move until the outcome was as certain as he could make it.
"You left me alone in the Forbidden Forest!" The exasperation in her voice sharpened into something with more heat behind it. "I was terrified! You said you'd stay with me—"
"I stayed until Hagrid arrived," Draco said flatly. "I didn't leave you unprotected. I left Dobby with you. If anything had gone wrong, he would have taken you with him immediately."
Hermione blinked, her indignation momentarily displaced by curiosity. "He's that capable?"
"Dobby's concealment magic is more sophisticated than mine," Draco said. "And Professor Dumbledore can see through an Invisibility Cloak. Was I supposed to wait around to be caught?"
Hermione's eyes went wide. "Professor Dumbledore can see through—" She stopped. "He can actually do that?"
"There is a great deal you don't know," Draco said, not unkindly.
The words landed with a sting she hadn't expected.
"Then why didn't you tell me any of this beforehand?" Her voice had taken on a tight, injured quality. "Why must I extract every piece of information from you by force? You never simply trust me with things—you're always secretive about everything, always—" She stopped, reined herself in, and then continued more evenly. "Everyone thinks my spell was enough to stop him on its own. I know it wasn't. I covered for you with Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall. I told them nothing about you. I think I deserve an explanation."
"Alright, I concede the point." Draco looked at her flushed, indignant face and felt the force of it—she was genuinely angry, and genuinely right to be. He raised a hand, palm out. "I can't give you the full explanation now. But I can promise you this: if there are questions I'm in a position to answer, I will answer them. You have my word."
Hermione stared at him. It was not the answer she wanted. His promises were, by design, never quite enough—he gave them with one hand and withheld the context with the other.
She narrowed her eyes. "Why didn't you at least tell me about the face? Before we went in?"
"It was a theory." Draco chose his words with care. "A Malfoy does not present conjecture as fact until he's certain."
A pause. Then, reluctantly conceding that round: "And Dobby—where exactly did he come from?"
"He's our family's house-elf." The corner of Draco's mouth curved. "Didn't you spend all that time memorising the history of Goblin Rebellions? If the opportunity presents itself, I'll let you meet him properly. I think you'd find him interesting."
He remembered, from another life, her rather intense campaign on behalf of house-elf rights. She had spent an extraordinary amount of energy on what most of her contemporaries regarded as a completely eccentric cause.
A peculiar quality in her. But not, he supposed, an unpleasant one.
"And how did you know Quirrell would be there that specific night?" She pressed on, visibly determined not to be charmed out of her interrogation by a smile.
"Careful deduction," Draco said.
Hermione's mouth tightened.
"Listen." He met her eyes directly. "I have no ill intentions toward you or toward Potter. I need you to believe that, and to keep believing it."
"I know," she said, quietly. Some of the tension went out of her expression as she looked at him—those steady grey eyes, perfectly calm. "I know you didn't mean any harm."
The smile that crossed his face was brief and unguarded, and gone almost before it arrived.
It was, nonetheless, enough to cause a warmth to rise in Hermione's cheeks that she found entirely unreasonable.
Over her shoulder, he caught sight of Crabbe and Goyle at the far end of the corridor, craning their necks with expressions of bovine curiosity.
The hallway was not the place for this conversation.
"Go on," he said, giving her a gentle nudge in the direction of the stairs. "Go and enjoy your triumphant return to the favour of your Housemates."
"That's not important to me," Hermione said, her face still slightly warm. "I'd rather have loyal friends than any number of people who only like me when I'm useful to them..."
She had not forgotten what it felt like to be isolated. She had not forgotten, either, who had bothered to find her during that time—who had sat down uninvited beside her at breakfast and pushed a book across the desk, who had tracked her down by the Black Lake, who had opened up his private study to her without once making her feel like an imposition.
Not a Gryffindor. Not anyone who had any particular reason to be kind to her.
A Slytherin. The house legendarily hostile to hers.
And yet.
She had concluded, some time ago, that his coldness was largely a performance—a well-practised face he wore in public. Beneath it, in the quiet of the study or on the bank of the lake, there was something else. Something she had not expected to find in Draco Malfoy: a genuine, unselfconscious gentleness.
He was also, of course, deeply secretive, chronically evasive, and entirely too comfortable operating without explaining himself to anyone.
But she did not think he was a bad person. She thought he was a puzzle—and she had always found puzzles irresistible.
"I still want to know more," she said, before he could guide her any further down the corridor.
"Then place first in your year on the end-of-term examinations," Draco said, steering her by the elbow with an air of benign efficiency, "and I will consider answering further questions. The Goblin Rebellion probably won't come up, for what it's worth."
"That's a deal," Hermione said at once.
She turned and walked away with her head up—spine straight, chin forward, every inch the lion cub she was.
She was going to place first. She was going to make certain of it. And then she was going to collect on his promise, dismantle every careful evasion he had constructed, and find out exactly what he was hiding.
She had a feeling it would be worth it.