"Malfoy?"
The voice was unfamiliar enough to make him pause. Very few people addressed him that way — by surname alone, without the particular weight Hogwarts students put into it.
He turned.
A woman in her mid-thirties was walking toward him across the pavement — brown hair pinned up, Muggle clothes that were actually quite elegant, a heart-shaped face breaking into a smile the moment she saw him turn around.
"It really is you. I thought I might be imagining things."
"Mrs. Granger!" Draco said, genuinely surprised.
"Monica, please. That's what my friends call me." She fell into step beside him with an easy warmth, making no attempt to conceal her delight at the encounter. "I've been meaning to thank you properly for those Tooth-Flossing Stringmints you sent at Christmas. We all loved them. How on earth did you know we'd like them?"
"Hermione mentioned them once," Draco said.
He could have sworn Mrs. Granger's expression became even warmer at that.
"Is Hermione here?" he asked, scanning the street.
"Of course. We came to visit my father — he retired to Bath years ago. The hot springs are wonderful for his rheumatism." She beckoned him along with her, already heading back in the direction Draco had just come from. "Come on, she's in the square just back there. She wanted to learn to skateboard today, but no one's been with her, so she's been at it alone. I don't think she's made any friends here yet."
"I'll keep her company," Draco said, before he'd quite decided to.
He could see the square ahead, and could already make out a figure on one side of it — white sleeveless shirt, dark hair up in a bun, wobbling with determined concentration on a skateboard.
The bun was new. Without the familiar volume of her loose hair, he hadn't spotted her at all when he'd walked through earlier.
"Wonderful." Mrs. Granger beamed. "You two go and play. I need something cold to drink — this heat is something else. I'll bring back ice cream. Chocolate, yes?"
"Yes, thank you," Draco said.
And with that, Mrs. Granger turned cheerfully down a side street, leaving her daughter — who was at that moment making a second unsteady attempt at the skateboard — to her most frequently mentioned classmate from Hogwarts.
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Hermione was not going to be defeated by a skateboard.
There was absolutely no reason she should be. Other people managed it. Children younger than her managed it. It was a Muggle contraption that ran along flat ground — if she could stay on a broomstick, she could certainly manage this. She had decided.
She planted her foot, tried to shift her weight, and immediately grabbed at the air for balance.
Then a small pebble caught in the wheel, the board lurched to a dead stop, and she tipped backwards sharply — and was caught, from behind, by a pair of hands that hadn't been there a second ago.
"Are you trying to murder it?" said a voice she recognised immediately. "Or yourself? In a distinctly Muggle fashion?"
For a moment she was absolutely certain she was hallucinating from the heat.
She turned her head. Pale grey eyes looked back at her, lit with quiet amusement.
Draco. Here. In Bath. Of course he was.
"It was an accident," she said, with as much dignity as she could recover at short notice. She stepped off the board, stood up straight, and lifted her chin. "I was doing perfectly well before that pebble."
"Of course you were." He let her go, the half-smile still in place. "When did our finest academic mind take up skateboarding? If you want a flying sport, you could always consider Quidditch."
"You're so annoying," she said with feeling.
She was embarrassed — which she absolutely refused to show — picked up the skateboard, and sat herself down on the nearby steps with the air of someone who had chosen to be there and was not in the least flustered. She turned the board over and began digging the offending pebble out of the wheel with considerable focus.
Draco sat down beside her without being invited, which was typical.
He studied her for a moment — flushed from the sun, a bead of sweat at her temple, lips pressed together in the stubborn way he had catalogued long ago. Without particularly thinking about it, he pulled off his cap and set it on her head.
She stopped picking at the pebble.
"It suits you," he said, matter-of-factly.
She didn't answer. But the line of her shoulders eased slightly. She went back to the pebble, rescued it, and only then seemed to register the cap. It cast a clean shadow across her face. She did not take it off.
"Your letter said France," he said.
"France is next month." She looked up at him from under the cap's brim, brown eyes catching the afternoon light. "We're only here three or four days. My grandfather lives here. Why are you in Bath?"
"My grandfather is at the Wizarding Spa on the other side of town. He likes the hot springs."
Her expression shifted, as it always did when something new occurred to her. "There's a Wizarding spa in Bath?"
"Of course. The entrance looks like a crumbling old wall to Muggles. Same principle as the Leaky Cauldron." He shrugged. "If you like, I can take you to see it sometime. But first—" He looked at the skateboard in her hands. "Let me try."
She looked at him with open scepticism and handed it over.
He turned it over once in his hands, set it on the ground, and stepped on.
"Be careful," she said, already standing up. "It's not as easy as it looks."
"Don't underestimate a Malfoy's athletic ability." He glanced back at her and raised an eyebrow.
He wasn't wrong, exactly — he found his balance quickly enough. But the particular combination of balance and momentum that the board required was not quite like anything else, and there was something in the challenge of that which he found he genuinely liked. The Wizarding world and its particular set of life-or-death complications felt, for the space of a few minutes, very far away.
He had Hermione to thank for that. She had a gift for it — pulling his attention sideways into something immediate and small and entirely harmless — and he had long since stopped resisting it.
He smiled at her. Not the careful, performed smile he deployed in public, but the real one, which had a tendency to appear without permission around her.
The effect on Hermione was that she forgot momentarily which foot was supposed to go where.
He spent the next ten minutes demonstrating what he'd worked out, and then talked her through it step by step, with a patience that he would have been hard-pressed to explain to anyone. She was not a natural — she was cautious where she needed to be bold and bold where she needed to be cautious — but she was determined, and that counted for something.
By the time Mrs. Granger returned with her ice cream and a very cold ale, this was what she found: her daughter — wearing the boy's cap, now somehow upside-down — clinging to his back with one arm as they attempted to cross the square together on a single skateboard.
"Swing gently! Keep your feet still!" the boy was saying, laughing.
"My feet are still!" Hermione protested, resting her head against his shoulder and gripping the back of his shirt.
"They're absolutely not still — you're dancing on the board—"
"I'm not dancing—"
"Hold on—"
"I am holding on!"
Mrs. Granger watched this for a moment with great satisfaction, then called out, "I hate to interrupt, but the ice cream is melting."
The skateboard stopped. He helped her down, picked up the board, and the two of them walked back to Mrs. Granger side by side.
"I owe you an apology," Draco said to Hermione, looking perfectly composed except for the genuine amusement still in his eyes. "I may have underestimated the skateboard."
"I accept the apology," she said. Her eyes were bright from the exercise and the sun. "I had fun."
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They spent the remaining afternoon in the square, working through the ice cream and improving marginally at skating. The sun dropped toward the rooftops and the light turned amber, and the rose-scented breeze that moved through the streets of Bath was cool on faces that had been warm all day.
Even Draco had to concede, by the end of it, that skateboarding had genuine merit. It required balance, timing, nerve, and a willingness to commit to a direction without flinching — qualities he respected.
"First rule," he told Hermione, making one last pass: "Don't be afraid of falling. Second rule: be decisive. Commit."
"I know," she said confidently, stepping on.
She immediately grabbed his sleeve.
"You said commit," he pointed out.
"I'm committing to your sleeve," she said, without a trace of shame.
He sighed. But the skateboard kept moving, and she kept her balance, and the last of the afternoon light caught the pale gold of his hair and the dark brown of hers, and they looked, to anyone watching, exactly like two thirteen-year-olds enjoying a summer afternoon.
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When Mr. Granger arrived to collect them, he insisted on dinner. He would hear no objection — Draco had helped the family navigate Gringotts the previous year, and Wendell Granger was not a man who let a debt of gratitude go unacknowledged.
He chose a Spanish restaurant on one of Bath's quieter streets, a warm, slightly noisy place with long communal tables and small plates arriving in steady succession: fried cheese, garlic prawns, truffle mushrooms, rings of calamari, cured salmon over bread. The kind of meal that accumulated gradually and kept conversation going.
"You have to go to Spain itself one day," Mr. Granger said, passing bread around the table. "Nothing compares. We went two years ago, and I tell you, once you've had tapas in Madrid, nothing else quite—"
"Don't mind him," Mrs. Granger said to Draco, with the affectionate patience of long practice. "He becomes entirely unreasonable on the subject of places he loves."
"That is completely fair," Mr. Granger agreed, without any sign of chagrin. He looked at Draco with cheerful candor. "We have a little house in Provence as well. That place does something to me. I can't explain it. Do you know the south of France?"
"I've been," Draco said.
"Then you understand." Mr. Granger sat back with the expression of a man whose worldview has just been confirmed. "There's a market — completely overpriced, everything sourced from the wholesale market, they see you coming from fifty metres away — but the vendor asked me in this absolutely magnificent French whether I wanted a cow's head, and I nearly said yes simply because of how he asked—"
"You did say yes," Mrs. Granger said.
"I said I was thinking about it, which is not the same thing."
"He bought four peaches for what worked out to about four Galleons," Mrs. Granger told Draco gravely.
"The quantity was excellent," Mr. Granger said, touching his nose.
Hermione, beside Draco, was trying not to laugh and not quite succeeding. He glanced at her. Her shoulders were shaking.
Draco found, to his own mild surprise, that he was smiling.
The Malfoy dinner table was not like this. At the Malfoy table, meals accompanied strategy — conversations about alliances, influence, the careful management of social position. You swallowed your food alongside a full accounting of the political landscape. The children did not speak unless directly addressed, and Lucius considered consulting them largely a waste of the hour.
Here, everyone spoke. Everyone was listened to. There was no hierarchy operating in the room — or if there was, it expressed itself entirely through affection and mild teasing, and nobody seemed worse off for it.
It occurred to Draco that Hermione had grown up with this. Had sat at this table her whole life, being asked her opinion, being treated as a person whose thoughts were worth hearing. He thought it probably explained quite a lot about her.
"Mrs. Granger," he said at one point, during a lull in the Provence debate, "Hermione mentioned that you studied ancient Greek. I've had a question about the instrumental case for some time — I've never had anyone to ask."
Mrs. Granger turned to him with immediate, focused interest. "Ask away."
He did. She answered in four sentences, clearly and completely, and then looked at him with obvious pleasure. "It's genuinely unusual for someone your age to be working with classical languages. If you have more questions, please don't hesitate — Hermione can pass them along."
"Or," Mrs. Granger added, producing a pen and a paper coaster from her bag with the efficiency of a woman who was always prepared, "you could simply ring." She wrote two numbers down and held the coaster out to him. "The bottom one is our number here in Bath, for the next few days. The top one is our home number."
"Mum," Hermione said, with the particular tone of someone watching a minor catastrophe unfold.
"What? He's here for a few days, I thought he might want to go to the Roman Baths or the bookshop on Stall Street—"
"He's a wizard, they don't use—"
"I'll sort something out," Draco said, taking the coaster before the argument could develop. He looked at Mrs. Granger. "Thank you."
Mrs. Granger looked very pleased with herself. Hermione looked as though she would quite like to be somewhere else.
Draco put the coaster carefully in his pocket.
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The moon was already up when he returned to his suite at the Spa.
He changed, sat on the edge of the bed, and found that his mind, for once, had nothing particularly dark in it. No calculations about Horcruxes, no half-remembered brewing instructions, no cold inventory of threats and contingencies.
Instead, it gave him: the scratch of skateboard wheels on warm stone. The smell of roses in the evening air. The specific colour of afternoon light on the city's pale buildings. Hermione's voice behind him, indignant and laughing, insisting that her feet were completely still.
He lay back and let himself think about nothing else for once.
He was asleep before the candle went out.