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There are four people enrolled in N.E.W.T. level Alchemy, in 1998.
There are four people enrolled in N.E.W.T. level Alchemy, in 1998, and one of them is Draco bloody Malfoy.
Hermione almost can’t believe it as they stand outside the classroom door. First they let him back — practically force him, the way the Prophet tells it — and now he’s the one who got Alchemy added back to the timetable? They’d had three, her, Ernie, and Luna, but McGonagall had insisted. It was the school board’s decision, and the school board said four.
Ernie Macmillan looks similarly aghast next to her. It’s not like they haven’t had classes together, but this is different, with only four of them. Close. Personal.
“Granger,” he says. “Macmillan. Lovegood.”
Luna recovers first, tilting her head towards him. “You look well, Draco,” she says. “Like you’ve been in the sun.”
Hermione lets out a sound that might be a cough. He looks as pale as ever, tall but less gaunt than last year, broad across the shoulders. He’s wearing the new eighth-year uniform, with their hideous new tie that has all eight house colours striped together.
Malfoy doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that.
He slides his first note to her after a week.
Do you understand this?
Normal. Simple. An absolutely acceptable question from anyone else.
Hermione stares at it, wide-eyed, for so long that Professor Pyrites turns to see what’s wrong with her, and she realises the Professor asked her a question. She vanishes it from her hand and tries to look innocent.
“Gold, sir,” she manages.
Professor Pyrites nods and turns back to his whiteboard. He’s obviously very… knowledgeable, but Hermione can admit that his lecturing style is drier than Professor Binns, who at least has the excuse of being dead for several decades.
Malfoy doesn’t look at her, but the side of his mouth turns up, and she suddenly has to tie her hair up before she overheats.
They saw him over the summer, is the thing.
He’d been arrested, after the Battle of Hogwarts, and only avoided a lifelong Azkaban sentence by being unbelievably and unexpectedly candid. He’d told the Ministry and the Prophet everything: Dumbledore’s offer; Voldemort’s stay at the Manor; his own crimes; and, most importantly, the crimes of all of the various Death Eaters, accomplices, corrupt ministry officials and school board members.
It caused absolute chaos.
It also meant that at every trial, he’d been there. She’d spent all summer trying to avoid him in the narrow hallways of the Ministry of Magic courtrooms, but she’d seen him.
Watched him, maybe.
He tries again, in the library.
Well, he sits down at her favourite table, even though she’s claimed it — the two chairs are just a suggestion, and she has a lot of parchment, which needs a table’s worth of space—
It’s not like there aren’t other, empty spaces.
She’d move if it was busy.
“Granger,” he says.
Hermione looks up at him and blinks. His pale blond hair has gotten longer, a little unruly.
“Malfoy?” she says, and it comes out as a question.
He holds his satchel in front of him like a shield.
“This Alchemy essay” —he pulls out the parchment with writing on it in tight, neat handwriting— “does it make any sense to you at all?”
Hermione frowns at him.
“What?” she asks. She shakes her head and tries to remember how to communicate like a normal person, someone who’s not taking nine N.E.W.T. courses when they were offered an honorary place in any Ministry Department they liked. “I mean— I haven’t read yours. I don’t know.”
Malfoy squints his eyes together like she might have gone insane. Maybe she has. Draco Malfoy is talking to her of his own free will, so something must have gone very wrong along the way.
“These are the instructions, Granger. I haven’t even started. I have no idea what the man is on about. Are you alright?”
Hermione looks down at her own pile of parchment. She hasn’t even started the bloody Alchemy essay, and if Malfoy can’t understand it…
She groans. “You’re clever,” she says.
Malfoy huffs out a laugh. “I have years of evidence to the contrary.”
Was that a joke? Was Draco Malfoy joking with her?
“I mean, you’ve always… gotten good marks,” she tries. “I haven’t started either, but if you’re finding it hard— Have you asked Ernie?”
Malfoy looks at her like he’s trying to solve a very difficult puzzle, his eyes squinting together a little bit. “Would you like me to ask Ernie?”
Oh, Merlin, of course. He couldn’t ask anyone else. Ernie had, quite publicly, declared his disdain for Malfoy the second they’d all gotten on the train. “No,” she says. She should be diplomatic. The war is over, after all, and they can’t have a unified wizarding world without… being united.
“No. No,” she says, and she can feel a blush rising over her cheeks at how idiotic she’s being. “Sorry.”
“If you haven’t started, we could… work on it together, perhaps?” His hold on his satchel has released a little. “Not now. When you’re free.”
Hermione nods. It’s not a bad idea, although if he turns out to be useless she doesn’t want to spend a whole year dragging him along the way she did with Harry and Ron. But it has been… quiet, with them at Auror training. “Alright. I planned to start tonight, after dinner. Is that— Are you free?”
His whole face seems to pull upwards a little, pleased. It suits him. “Seven?”
“Seven.”
He’s not useless.
She’s actually not sure why he needs her help — as soon as they sat down together he pulled out a set of notes so detailed that they rival Hermione’s own. They make an outline, and then start working side by side. It’s not horrible, actually, to have someone to do her work with — not many people from her year came back to Hogwarts, after last year, and Ginny’s always off on Head Girl business. He’s not asking for the answers, he’s not moaning about the workload, he’s just… getting on with it.
She gets to the end of her first paragraph before she looks up at him and finds him looking at her.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
He looks back down at his essay and pauses for a second.
“What do you think about this… ‘Zosimos viewed innerpsychic transformation as the final goal of Alchemy’?”
She looks down at her own essay, where she’s just written something similar. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s technically correct.”
“Technically correct?” He doesn’t sound pleased.
“Yes. You’re not wrong.”
“Not— Well, how would you put it, then?”
Hermione shows him her parchment, the ink still a little wet. He reads it with a sceptical expression.
“Hmm,” he says.
“Hmm?”
He looks at her again. “I’m not used to agreeing with you. Give me a minute.”
It takes several hours for Hermione to stop feeling pleased.
Somehow, he ends up sitting at her table in the library most days.
He comes to her after Charms with a question, and then they’re arguing about the right way to process a Fanwort. She doesn’t mind it.
If she’s honest, it’s nice: he’s clever, he only interrupts her very occasionally, and he’s—
He’s not bad looking. Fit, Ginny said.
Until one day, just after the Christmas holidays, she looks up and finds Ernie there instead.
“Ernie?” she says, and even in her head it sounds rude. “I— Are you—? Hi.”
He smiles at her, and behind him she can see Draco arriving.
She stands up without even thinking about it, and she realises, when Ernie stays seated, that every time she stands up near Draco, he stands up too. She waves at him with a little too much enthusiasm and he smiles at the back of Ernie’s head.
Ernie looks between them. “Sorry, are you two—?”
“Granger,” Draco says by way of greeting, and then, in an entirely different tone, “Macmillan.”
“Sorry, Ernie. Malfoy and I are— We study together.” Ernie and Draco’s eyebrows raise at exactly the same time. “We’re, like… study buddies.”
Draco nods and looks at Ernie smugly. “Study buddies.”
It sounds ridiculous coming from his mouth. He looks delighted.
“Right, sure. I’ll find another table then, I suppose,” Ernie says, picking up his things. He looks embarrassed, and Hermione does feel bad, she really does. But they really are— Christ.
They’re study buddies.
“Thanks, Ernie. Sorry. You know how cramped these tables get.”
Draco stands and watches Ernie leave, and doesn’t sit down until Hermione does. “Alright, study buddy,” he says, and his grin can only be described as shit-eating. “Don’t tell me you finished your Transfiguration project over Christmas?”
Hermione smiles right back despite herself. “Yes. And I got the scales right, too.”
He passes her another note, in Alchemy.
Are you going to Hogsmeade?
Hermione looks over and makes eye contact with him. Pyrites has been talking for seventeen minutes about an obscure use of silver that Hermione suspects is both irrelevant and of great personal interest to two people in the world, one of whom is Pyrites, and the other who exists solely in his unpublished manuscript of dialogues.
He raises a single, fine eyebrow at her.
She knows his face well, now. There’s a slight curve to his mouth that means to say ‘can you believe him?’ and also ‘Luna is definitely asleep.’ He’s leaning back on his chair, like he always does, insouciant and relaxed in that annoying high-brow sort of way.
Hermione raises her eyebrows once, her mouth stretching out. She might go. She might not.
Draco tilts his head up and shrugs quickly, his mouth flickering to a grin. He’ll stay with her whether she goes or not.
Luna snores herself awake next to her, and it seems to shock Pyrites out of his monologue for long enough that Hermione can put her hand up.
“Professor, what are your thoughts on the links between alchemical uses of silver and Lycanthropy?”
Pyrites huffs in delight.
Draco gives her a look of amused disbelief, and Hermione smiles, looking down at her notes.
They end up in Hogsmeade together, the eighth-years all with special privileges to stay out past curfew. They go to the new place, a pokey little not-quite-bar, not-quite-pub that popped up just before Christmas and has been fighting off underage students valiantly every night since then.
He buys her her very first cocktail, and laughs when her face curls up at the taste of something other than Butterbeer or Firewhisky. She laughs, then, when he takes a sip and makes the exact same face.
She drinks two, maybe. Or three? God. Four?
She’s absolutely sloshed.
They stumble out in the wee hours of the morning together, everyone else gone back to Hogwarts or out, to the clubs in Muggle London, with a pocket of Floo Powder and not nearly enough Muggle money to get by.
It’s been snowing, the ground wet and slushy underneath the streetlights, and Hermione thinks the pink tip of his nose might be the best thing in the world.
She laughs at something he says, and they stumble loudly across the empty street in the freezing cold until they reach the bench outside of the Three Broomsticks, their fireplace open all night for a Galleon if you manage to wake up the night doorman.
The snow is just starting up again, and Hermione hits her knee on the bloody bench, swearing loudly.
“The mouth on you, Granger,” he says, holding her elbow to keep her upright. His hand is so warm that she wants to curl up in it, and she shivers.
“Cold?” he asks.
Hermione looks up at him, and the world stops spinning. Snowflakes are floating down to catch in his hair, on his flushed cheeks. She watches one land on his eyelash, and then another on his lips, the same pink as the tip of his nose.
“No,” she says.
He catches her lips with his, and she doesn’t even manage to close her eyes. He pulls back after a second.
It’s hardly a kiss, really. More like a touch of his lips to hers, the barest brush.
Hermione stands with her mouth half-open, blinking. She’s fairly sure her knee is bleeding.
Draco watches her carefully. After a second his brow furrows, just the tiniest twitch down.
“Granger?” he asks.
He’s uncertain. She’s not used to seeing him uncertain.
Hermione moves to hold his robes with both hands.
“Do that again,” she says. He smiles at her properly, his face wide with delight and his cheeks rosy, and Hermione thinks back to what Luna said before their first class. Like he’s been in the sun.
The rest of their Alchemy classes are much harder to pay attention to.