Hermione — what are you doing here?
Draco stared in disbelief at those eyes, which had gone suddenly and terribly sharp. For a moment he lost all control of his expression — and felt, inexplicably, as though Professor McGonagall had just caught him doing something he absolutely shouldn't.
He admitted he had been careless.
He should have checked the Marauder's Map before coming in.
He had used the girls' bathroom many times, and each time it had been empty; he had gradually grown complacent. He ought to have remembered that Hermione had brewed Polyjuice Potion in here during their second year — he had overheard Ron mention it. He had borrowed her brilliant idea and used the space for the same purpose: brewing Wolfsbane Potion. He should have anticipated she might still come back.
"I was about to ask you the same question," Hermione said, replacing her wand in her robes. She hopped down from the toilet in the adjacent cubicle with a stern expression, came around to face him, crossed her arms, and looked him up and down with sharp, appraising eyes.
"Oh my — you two know each other?" Moaning Myrtle drifted over from the mirror with an expression of delighted curiosity. Her eyes, magnified enormously behind thick glasses, swept over them both. "How do you know each other?"
"Of course I know him!" Hermione scoffed. "He's my boyfriend."
"Oh — this — that —" Myrtle's eyes went so wide her glasses nearly slipped off her nose. She clapped her hands over her face, let out a dramatic wail, and fled back to her cubicle. "A decent girl doesn't steal another girl's wizard! I — I've made my decision — I choose Harry!"
And with that she plunged headfirst into her toilet and vanished down the drainpipe with a tremendous splash.
Silence returned to the bathroom. The cauldron, which had been spinning erratically, seemed to realise its moment had passed and settled obediently onto the floor.
"Hermione —" Draco finally collected himself and walked toward her.
He did not look like a person emerging from a bathroom cubicle. He looked, as always, impossibly composed — as though he had just stepped off a fashionable Parisian street.
The slight hesitation in his expression, however, did considerable damage to that effect.
"Tell me about Myrtle's mysterious boy," Hermione said, her expression shifting as she fixed the rather unprofessional-looking male model with a withering glare.
Handsome, elegant, and noble — those were Myrtle's very words. Who else could it possibly be? Hermione thought, through gritted teeth.
She should have realised it sooner. Who else but Draco Malfoy would merit such adjectives?
He had been secretly brewing Wolfsbane Potion. He had never once mentioned it to her. And now, looking back, his irregular disappearances over the past several weeks suddenly had a perfectly logical explanation.
And here he was, strolling toward her with that insufferable calm — as if this were all perfectly ordinary. Hermione's temple throbbed.
Just when she thought she finally knew him, a new layer of mystery appeared. She still hadn't worked out the secret of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes; now there was this as well. Her cunning Slytherin boyfriend was such an impenetrable tangle of concealment that she didn't know which thread to pull first.
"No answer?" she asked bluntly. "Haven't found a suitable way to brush me off yet?"
Draco looked at her, genuinely troubled. He didn't know how to answer.
When someone has kept things private for so long, it is very difficult to simply open up without the right moment, the right words. Since his rebirth he had always held a little back from everyone — his parents included. Hermione was already the person he confided in most, yet even so, he had never quite developed the habit of telling her everything.
But now his girl was standing before him, visibly hurt and aggressively sharp — and it would be wrong to leave her without a proper explanation.
"Hermione, it's a long story —" He didn't quite dare meet her eyes directly. He paused, stepped past the hem of her robes, turned on the tap beside her, and began slowly washing his hands, buying himself time to think.
Over the soft sound of running water, he glanced at her tense reflection in the mirror, cleared his throat, and asked, "Are you sure you want to discuss this here?"
"What's the alternative? Walking away from the crime scene first and then pretending nothing happened?" Hermione kept her arms crossed, watching his guilty expression through the mirror like a magistrate. "As you often do?"
"Please, Hermione, don't speak to me like that. I haven't done anything wrong." He softened his tone, drying his hands slowly with a handkerchief while studying her face in the mirror — her expression, her posture, the tension in her arms — trying to read the full extent of her mood.
Those brown eyes were furious. Far more so than he'd expected. Though he still wasn't entirely sure why.
He looked again: her brows were drawn tighter and tighter, her arms crossed firmly, her fingers tapping a rapid rhythm against her forearm like the lashing tail of a very unhappy cat.
If he didn't act quickly, she would turn on her heel and walk out. He made up his mind, turned around, crossed to her in two strides, and wrapped his arm firmly around her.
Hermione made a sound of protest and attempted to dodge. She failed. So she raised her chin, stiffened her face, and gazed stonily in the opposite direction.
"What do you think you're doing?" she said. "I asked for an explanation, not a hug."
"Of course. But I have to hold on to you while I explain, or you'll storm off the moment you get angry." He looked down at her furrowed brow, adopting his most careful tone. "Such a beautiful face shouldn't be wasted on scowling, should it?"
"Stop grinning and talking nonsense!" Hermione glanced at that deeply infuriating face and came dangerously close to smiling despite herself.
Which only made her angrier. "Draco Malfoy, all you ever do is sweet-talk! Even the ghost has fallen for it!"
"Huh?" He looked genuinely confused. "What do you mean?"
"Myrtle — she's become thoroughly convinced you're in love with her! What on earth did you say to her?" Hermione pouted, agitation clear in her voice.
Rationally, she knew it was almost certainly Myrtle's overactive imagination at work — much like her inexplicable attachment to Harry. But somehow that didn't make the irritation any less sharp.
The thought of Myrtle entertaining romantic notions about Draco — notions which Hermione had perhaps inadvertently encouraged — produced a very specific, very uncomfortable feeling. Something along the lines of my precious treasure being coveted.
This was not what Draco had been bracing himself for.
He'd been expecting interrogation about the Wolfsbane Potion. Instead, she appeared to be far more concerned with Myrtle's delusions.
"By Merlin," he said, with a completely innocent expression, "I didn't say anything unnecessary. I asked her permission to use the bathroom — purely as a courtesy — and asked her to keep it to herself. She agreed readily, I thanked her, and that was the entirety of our conversation. Not a single word more."
"You're absolutely certain?" She studied him with deep suspicion.
"Completely." He accepted her scrutiny with perfect composure.
Hermione stared at him for a long moment. The rigidity in her expression began, very reluctantly, to thaw.
She looked into those steady grey eyes — sincere, patient, undefending — and finally said, quietly, "All right. I suppose you wouldn't dare lie to me."
His gaze was genuine. His tone was gentle, almost appealing. And he was holding her firmly around the waist, which made it very difficult to maintain the necessary level of outrage.
This was dangerous. He was capable of kissing her into a thoroughly confused state at any moment.
"What about the potion?" She lowered her arms but held her ground. Her hands rested against his white shirt — partly to maintain some distance — and she frowned as she pressed, "Wolfsbane Potion. You're rather bold about this. Who did you brew it for? Have you secretly been helping a werewolf without telling anyone? I'll wager Professor Dumbledore has no idea, otherwise you wouldn't be sneaking around."
What is Draco up to? He had always kept a dismissive attitude toward werewolves — yet here he is brewing them Wolfsbane Potion and telling no one. She thought darkly.
She wondered whether this werewolf was a witch — which would account for the lengths young Master Malfoy was apparently going to.
"I didn't intend to hide it," Draco said, his expression carrying a trace of genuine guilt as he looked at her pressed lips. "It's just — when the right moment never came, I didn't know how to bring it up."
This matter pulled too many threads at once: Remus Lupin, the Weasley twins, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes — explaining one thing meant explaining all the rest.
"There isn't a female werewolf involved, is there?" Hermione asked sharply.
"There are absolutely no female werewolves — what are you imagining?" He dismissed the idea with barely concealed amusement, and then immediately realised the implication.
This strange, slightly off-topic mood was nothing like Hermione Granger in full possession of her faculties.
He tilted his head and looked at her with dawning, delighted recognition. "Hermione. Are you jealous?"
"I am not," she said, dropping her gaze and studying the middle button of his shirt with great determination.
Of course she was jealous. Profoundly, absurdly, completely jealous.
While she had been carefully avoiding Krum on his behalf, he had apparently been slipping into the girls' bathroom every few days to charm a ghost into utter infatuation.
"You know, I'm not exactly in the habit of charming random witches —" He suppressed his laughter with some effort, watching the faint blush spreading across her face. "Wasn't it you who called me out for being jealous the other day? It seems you're not so different after all. Look up at me, Hermione —"
How impossibly endearing is an embarrassed Hermione Granger.
"No," she said flatly. "It's too mortifying." She sighed, hid her face against his arm, and refused to let him see her expression.
"There's nothing mortifying about it — I'm rather pleased, actually," he said warmly, pressing a kiss to her hair.
She was not in a position to argue, having just discovered she was jealous of a ghost.
"All right, to be fully honest with you: the werewolf does exist, and he is male. And you're correct that Dumbledore doesn't know — since the werewolf isn't at Hogwarts, there's no reason he needs to." Draco stroked her hair with easy cheerfulness. "Now. Would you like to stop being embarrassed long enough to come and meet him?"
Her muffled voice came from the vicinity of his sleeve. "You're going to deliver the potion now? By owl?"
"Less like posting it, more like a personal delivery." He drew his pocket watch from his jacket, a beautiful enamel-and-diamond piece, and checked the time. "Seeing is believing — if you're willing to break a school rule or two, you're welcome to come along."
Hermione's embarrassment evaporated entirely. She lifted her head from his arm and stared at him with her mouth slightly open.
Special delivery — where to?
"—After I kiss you." His lips curved, and before she could form a response, he kissed her — thoroughly, without the slightest apology, exactly as she should have known he would.
Hermione Granger, model Gryffindor student and staunch defender of school rules, found herself entirely unable to object.
Like a witch thoroughly turned about by a very good charm, she was led out of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom in a pleasant daze, and followed the handsome criminal she had apprehended directly to the fourth-floor corridor.
Before she had fully gathered her wits, she watched him approach the stone statue of the hump-backed, one-eyed witch and tap it silently with his wand — she registered faint surprise at the fluency of the nonverbal casting — and then his hand was around her wrist and he was pulling her into the passage behind it.
"Mind yourself, Hermione — it's dark in here," he said.
"Oh," she managed, still not entirely sure what was happening. Was this — a secret passage — leading to where?
She found out quickly enough what he had meant by dark. Stepping from a lit corridor into a sealed passage without a lamp produced a near-total blindness — a moment where the world simply ceased to exist.
"Draco, I can't see anything," she said, suddenly alarmed.
"It's all right. Hold onto my back. The ground gets a little slippery — we'll walk slowly," he said, patient and calm.
"All right." She reached out in the darkness until she found his back, and the panic receded a little. He was shielding her, staying close, setting a deliberate pace that kept the stone slide beneath their feet from being frightening.
She noticed his thoughtfulness. He always knew how to make the difficult seem less so.
"Now let go for a moment," he said, after they had walked for a while. "Two more steps and it drops off. I'll jump down first."
"Be careful," she said anxiously as she released him. "Don't hurt yourself."
"Nothing will happen," came the soft, amused reply from the darkness.
She heard the clean sound of him landing. Then the sound of him brushing dust from his robes. Then his voice, low and encouraging with an edge of unmistakeable excitement.
"Come forward slowly — two steps — and jump. Don't be afraid. I'll catch you."
"Are you sure?" she said hesitantly. "I'm not exactly light."
"Don't talk nonsense," he said, in the tone of someone who would not be argued with. "You're practically weightless. Forward, now —"
Hermione inched forward carefully, and then, with a small cry of surprise, dropped into the darkness. She expected cold, wet mud. She found instead the warm, cedar-scented solidity of him, his arms already there to meet her — arranged in advance, precisely so.
"There. Perfectly fine." His voice was close and amused, his arm steady against her back. In her fright she had wrapped herself around him like a vine, both hands locked behind his neck.
"Hermione," he said, his breath warm at her ear, voice deliciously wicked in the damp, enclosed air. "I didn't know you were so enthusiastic. This is a new position."
"Draco, this is not the time for jokes!" Her face was incandescent.
"I'm entirely serious," he said solemnly, not sounding it in the least. "Shall we try a kiss in this position? For research purposes?"
She was on fire. She felt — or imagined she felt — his lips brush her ear, and instinct made her cling harder, her body rigid. "You absolute menace — I didn't mean — put me down —"
"This really is quite a predicament," he said, in a tone of great contentment. He was holding her securely, acutely aware of her warmth and the curve of her — and took back everything he'd said about feathers. She was considerably more intoxicating than any word like feather could capture. He pressed his face briefly to her neck and inhaled.
"But I don't want to put you down," he said quietly, mouth brushing her ear again. "I like it."
Hermione was nearly in tears at how unfair all of this was.
Six months ago she had thought him reserved and perfectly well-behaved. Now she saw him clearly: an incorrigible, relentlessly opportunistic menace who was never satisfied and who treated her every boundary as something to politely and persistently ignore.
Not that she — she would never admit this aloud — entirely minded. But the position was extraordinarily embarrassing, his voice was both captivating and deeply unfair, and if she didn't do something soon her face would achieve a shade of red previously unknown to medical science.
"Draco," she said, with as much dignity as she could muster, "I'm going to get angry."
He chuckled quietly, said nothing, and gently lowered her legs from his waist, setting her safely down on the muddy ground.
"Thank you," she said, somewhat stiffly.
"You're welcome." She could hear the smile in it. He lit his wand.
By the thin beam of wandlight, Hermione saw they were standing in a low, narrow earthen tunnel that wound ahead of them unevenly, like the burrow of some enormous creature.
They fell into single file — both holding their wands aloft — and made their way through the winding dark.
"Where are we going?" She glanced about warily, braced against the possibility of a werewolf rounding the next corner. Then a memory surfaced — the Marauder's Map. She looked ahead at his back. "Hogsmeade Village?"
"Exactly right. Nothing escapes you." She could hear genuine admiration in his voice, low and warm in the tunnel.
"Of course," she said, and felt rather pleased with herself.
They walked in companionable silence for a time. Hermione knew where they were going now, yet the path — endlessly winding, dimly lit, stretching on further than she expected — produced an odd mixture of excitement and unease. She was moving further and further from Hogwarts. Without permission from any professor. Into an entirely uncharted situation.
This was not something Hermione Granger did. She was aware of her own breathing, quicker than usual in the enclosed space.
"Are you tired?" Draco asked.
"No," she said at once.
"Scared?"
"No," she said, slightly less convincingly.
A two-second pause. Then his hand found hers in the dark — warm and steady, his fingers firm around hers.
"Sorry," he said quietly. "I got ahead of myself and forgot. A boyfriend should hold his girlfriend's hand, tired or scared or neither." A beat. "Shouldn't he?"
"Perhaps," she said, and the word came out softly, a trace of happiness in it she couldn't quite keep back.
"Watch your step here — there's a dip. Stretch your stride."
"You must walk this route often," she said, stepping over the hollow. "You know every uneven bit."
"Once or twice a month. Sometimes more."
"I never realised you'd been gone so long," she said. "The passage must take a good while. How do you manage without anyone noticing?"
"I go at night, usually." A quiet laugh in the dark. "My nighttime wanderings have never been confined to Hogwarts Castle, you know."
"Draco! You've been breaking rules behind my back continuously!" Then a memory clicked. "That's how you knew I was watching the house-elves in the middle of the night — you spotted me on the Marauder's Map during one of your trips!"
"Perhaps," he said, successfully suppressing the laughter that threatened to give him away — and filing away the secret of his bedtime habit of checking the Map to see what she was doing.
"And that bleary, sleep-deprived look you get sometimes!" Hermione pieced it together rapidly. "That was always in the days leading up to the full moon. You'd been making deliveries in the middle of the night and not sleeping properly!"
"Hm," he said.
"And you said nothing! Not a word! And I was worried about your sleeping habits —"
"Are you really that worried about me?" A warm note of pleasure in his voice. "Mind the step."
"That's not the point!" she said vehemently, catching his steadying hand regardless.
"I think it might be the whole point," he replied quietly.
"Draco —" She hesitated. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Earlier — when you asked whether I was tired, whether I was scared." She kept her voice even. "Aren't you? You've walked this road alone so many times — it's long, and dark, and cold, and quite lonely." Her gentle voice carried oddly in the tunnel, and she felt him falter slightly in his step. "You asked me those questions because you've felt those things yourself, haven't you?"
He stopped.
For a moment he said nothing at all.
Why did she always do this? Why did she always see through him with such ease, cutting straight through his composure and finding the unguarded places he most wanted to protect?
She didn't press him. She simply waited in the dark, watching his silhouette, and tightened her fingers through his.
The warmth of it travelled up his arm and directly into somewhere he kept very carefully defended.
He stood still for a long moment, until his voice, when it came, was quieter than usual. "It's all right now. I'm not tired or scared today."
"Good," she said softly. "That's good. Let's keep going — together."
So they walked on. After a long while, the passage began to slope upward. Another ten minutes, and they reached the bottom of a crumbling stone staircase.
"Would you like a rest?" He looked back at her. "There are more than two hundred steps."
"I'm fine," she said, a little breathlessly. Her voice was slightly faint, but her grip on his hand was firm. "I can manage."
They climbed until a trapdoor appeared above them. He eased it open a crack.
Through the narrow gap came light, voices, and the warm, heavy smell of sugar.
"— all these boxes of Cockroach Clusters still unsold, aren't they? I said nobody would want them —" one voice said, plodding about.
"Are you joking? Those things practically fly out the door when the Hogwarts lot come through —" another replied, lifting a crate and heading upstairs.
"Draco," Hermione whispered, remembering the enormous, unopened bag of sweets on Dumbledore's desk. "Is that big customer at Hogwarts — surely not the Headmaster?"
He pressed a gentle finger to his lips. She immediately covered her own mouth and gave him an apologetic look. He listened carefully — all clear — and then scratched her palm lightly: everything's fine.
When the footsteps faded entirely, he pushed the trapdoor fully open, climbed out, and pulled her up after him.
Hermione stood and looked around.
The cellar of Honeydukes. Clearly. Crates stacked on all sides: Jelly Slugs, Fizzing Whizbees, Sugar Quills, Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. While she was reading labels, Draco lowered the trapdoor behind them and blended it back into the grey stone floor.
"Is this the end?" Hermione whispered, surprised. "The werewolf is here?"
"Just a stopping point," he said. "Still a bit further. Come — behind this crate."
She sidled in beside him, peering through the gaps toward the stairwell with growing curiosity. She didn't have to wait long. The moment the shop assistants came back down for another load, Draco pulled her along with him — and in one smooth, unhurried movement they slipped out from behind the crates, ran lightly up the stairs, and melted behind the Honeydukes counter into the rows of shelves.
The shop was busy. Even on a non-open day, Hogsmeade drew wizards from across Britain. As the only wholly wizarding village in the country, it offered something rare: the freedom to simply exist, unobserved. Wizards wandered the streets in their robes, chatted openly about magic, queued at Honeydukes for a bag of something sweet, stopped into the joke shop, took a Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks — without a Muggle glancing twice.
And in the thick sweetness of Honeydukes, Hermione finally understood, quite fully, that she was some considerable distance from Hogwarts Castle.
Without anyone's permission. Following a handsome criminal she had discovered in a girls' bathroom.
"You owe me a very satisfactory explanation for all of this," she whispered to Draco, tugging the hood of her robes over her head and tucking her hair hastily inside.
He nodded, hiding a smile, and pulled his own hood low over his platinum hair. They now looked, she reflected, like two slightly less threatening Dementors.
Leaving Honeydukes, Draco walked with complete purpose — not glancing at a single shop window — down the main street to the far end, turned into a familiar alley, passed the tea house and the robes shop, and stopped directly in front of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.
"We're here," he said, turning to her with a quiet smile. "This is the end of the line."
Hermione stood still for a moment.
The scattered pieces of thought that had been turning in her mind for weeks shifted, aligned, and clicked together.
All her questions, confusions, and suspicions — she had been circling the answer for far longer than she'd realised. And now it was finally, unmistakably, right in front of her.