Chapter Text
Tuesdays at precisely four o'clock in the afternoon.
If one were to examine the painstakingly detailed, color-coded planner that ruled Hermione Granger’s life, Tuesdays at four o'clock were blocked out with a neat, unyielding stripe of periwinkle ink. The label simply read: Malfoy Manor – Potions Consultation.
It was, objectively, a professional engagement. As a Senior Researcher for the Wizengamot, Hermione frequently needed expert opinions on the intersection of arcane magical law and complex brewing regulations. Draco Malfoy, who had quietly built an empire as an independent Potions Consultant after realizing he had no desire to manage his family's sprawling estate full-time, was the best in the business.
That was the official story, anyway.
The unofficial story was that Tuesdays at four o'clock were the highlight of Hermione’s week, and she spent entirely too much time on Monday evenings agonizing over which robes looked "professionally effortless" rather than "trying too hard."
Hermione stepped out of the grand Floo in the Manor’s entrance hall, gracefully spelling the soot from her navy-blue robes with a flick of her wand. In this timeline, Malfoy Manor was not the shadowy, imposing fortress of whispered rumors. It was merely an obscenely wealthy family’s ancestral home. The entrance hall was bathed in warm, golden afternoon light filtering through massive stained-glass windows. The marble floors gleamed, and the portraits of past Malfoys looked down from the walls—snobby, certainly, but generally well-behaved ever since Hermione had threatened to catalog them by their most embarrassing historical blunders.
"Good afternoon, Lord Malfoy," Hermione said politely to a portrait of a sixteenth-century ancestor holding a suspiciously large ferret.
The portrait merely sniffed and adjusted his ruff.
Before Hermione could take more than three steps toward the library, the distinct, rapid-fire pat-pat-pat of tiny, socked feet echoed across the marble.
"M’ione!"
A small missile of pale blonde hair, slightly sticky hands, and untethered enthusiasm launched itself out of a side corridor and collided directly with Hermione’s knees. She stumbled slightly but caught her balance, laughing as she looked down at the three-year-old heir to the Malfoy fortune.
Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy was currently wearing a pair of extremely expensive silk trousers that were covered in what looked like purple chalk dust, and a tailored miniature button-down shirt that was missing two buttons.
"Hello, my favorite terror," Hermione cooed, dropping to her knees so she was eye-level with the boy.
Scorpius beamed, showing off a perfectly straight row of baby teeth. His silver-grey eyes—a direct inheritance from his father—sparkled with immense pride. He thrust a small, incredibly lumpy, vaguely terrifying blob of greyish-green clay toward her face.
"Look! Look what I maked!"
Hermione took the heavy blob in her hands, turning it over carefully. It had four vaguely cylindrical appendages that might have been legs, and something sticking out of the back that resembled a tail, or perhaps a tree branch. It was also covered in copious amounts of silver glitter.
"Oh, Scorpius," Hermione gasped, injecting her voice with the utmost reverence. "This is brilliant. Is it a crup?"
Scorpius gasped, looking profoundly offended. He planted his little hands on his hips, leaving purple chalk smudges on his shirt. "No, M’ione! Dat's a dargon! A big, scary dargon. He makes fire. Whoosh!" He threw his hands up in the air to demonstrate the fire.
"A dragon! Of course it is, how silly of me," Hermione said, tapping the tip of his nose with her finger. "I can see the scales right here. He's magnificent. The most terrifying dragon I’ve ever seen."
"He name is Bwuno," Scorpius informed her seriously. "He eats vegetables so I don't have to."
"A highly practical magical creature," a deep, smooth voice drawled from the doorway.
Hermione’s heart did the familiar, entirely unprofessional stutter it always did when Draco Malfoy entered a room.
Draco leaned against the heavy oak frame of the library door, looking like something out of a high-end wizarding men's catalogue. He wore dark grey trousers and a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing the lean muscle and the faint, elegant tracing of an ink stain near his wrist. His platinum hair was slightly ruffled, as if he’d been running his hands through it in frustration, and a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.
He was, Hermione thought with a distinct edge of despair, utterly devastating.
"Draco," Hermione said, standing up and brushing a stray speck of glitter from her knee. "Good afternoon."
Draco pushed off the doorframe and walked toward them, his eyes softening as he looked from Hermione to his son. "Granger. Prompt as always. I see you've already been waylaid by the resident artist."
"Bwuno is a dargon, Dadda," Scorpius insisted, holding the clay lump up as high as his little arms could reach.
Draco crouched down, his tall frame folding elegantly as he inspected the lump. "Ah, yes. I see the resemblance. Very fierce. But I believe we agreed that Bruno was going to stay in the playroom so he didn't accidentally breathe fire on the seventeenth-century tapestries?"
Scorpius looked at the floor, toeing the marble with his socked foot. "But I wanted M’ione to see him."
Draco’s gaze flicked up, meeting Hermione’s eyes over the top of Scorpius’s head. There was a warmth there that made Hermione’s breath hitch. "Well," Draco said softly, his voice dropping a fraction of an octave. "I suppose we can make exceptions for M'ione. She is a very important guest."
Hermione felt the heat rise to her cheeks. She was a Senior Researcher. She had argued cases in front of the entire Wizengamot. She had negotiated trade disputes with goblins. And yet, one soft look from Draco Malfoy and she was reduced to a flustered schoolgirl.
"Right, well," Hermione cleared her throat, gesturing toward the library. "Shall we get to work? I have the revised drafts for the Wolfsbane regulation amendments. The Ministry is trying to push through a new taxation bracket on the primary ingredients, and I need you to confirm my calculations on the yield ratios."
Draco sighed, the aristocratic mask slipping back into place, though the corners of his mouth remained tipped in a slight smile. "The Ministry is run by dunderheads who wouldn't know a boomslang skin from a garden hose. But yes, let us adjourn. Scorpius, go wash your hands. You have more purple on you than a plum."
"Can I come to the libwary?" Scorpius asked, his lower lip jutting out in a perfectly weaponized pout.
Draco looked at Hermione, raising an eyebrow in a silent question. Do you mind?
"He’s always welcome," Hermione said quickly. "As long as Bruno promises not to eat my parchment."
Scorpius cheered, a loud, joyful sound that echoed through the manor, and sprinted off toward the ground-floor washroom, his socks sliding dangerously on the marble.
Draco watched him go, a fond, slightly exasperated expression on his face. "He’s entirely too fast for his own good. I swear, Astoria feeds him pure sugar when she visits, just to punish me."
"How is Astoria?" Hermione asked as they walked side-by-side into the vast, cavernous library.
"In Egypt, supposedly unearthing a tomb that hasn't seen the light of day in three millennia," Draco replied, gesturing for Hermione to take her usual seat—a plush, velvet armchair near the massive marble fireplace. "She Flooed yesterday to say she'd found a cursed sarcophagus and sounded happier than she had on our wedding day. We are, undeniably, much better off as friends."
Hermione smiled, setting her leather briefcase on the mahogany table between them. She had always admired how seamlessly Draco and Astoria handled their divorce. They had realized early on that their arranged marriage was a polite, friendly mistake, and had parted amicably to co-parent Scorpius. It made Draco an incredibly devoted, if single, father.
A silver tea service was already waiting on the table, emitting thin wisps of fragrant steam. Draco poured, remembering—as he always did—exactly how she took it: a splash of milk, no sugar, Earl Grey.
"Thank you," Hermione said, accepting the delicate china cup. Their fingers brushed. The contact lasted barely a second, but Hermione felt a jolt of electricity shoot up her arm. She pulled her hand back quickly, focusing intently on the clasp of her briefcase.
Draco cleared his throat, suddenly finding the far wall of bookshelves fascinating. He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up further. "So. The Wolfsbane regulations."
"Yes," Hermione said, pulling out a thick stack of parchment covered in her neat, precise handwriting. "If you look at section four, subsection B..."
For the next hour, they were entirely in their element. This was where they shone together—a seamless dance of intellect. Hermione would present a legal barrier; Draco would counter with a practical potions workaround. They debated, they challenged each other, and they entirely forgot the world outside the library walls.
Draco leaned over the table to point at a specific clause on her parchment. He was so close she could smell his cologne—something crisp and clean, like cedar and rain.
"You see, Granger, if you increase the simmering time by precisely twelve minutes, the yield of the aconite extraction increases by four percent. That completely negates the Ministry’s proposed tax bracket, rendering subsection B entirely moot."
Hermione looked at the parchment, then up at him. His eyes were alight with the thrill of the intellectual chase. He looked brilliant. He looked beautiful.
"You're right," she breathed, entirely forgetting about the aconite extraction.
Draco’s gaze dropped to her lips. The air in the library suddenly felt very thick, the crackle of the fireplace the only sound in the room. He leaned in, just a fraction of an inch, his silver eyes dark and intense. Hermione’s heart hammered against her ribs. Is he going to—
"Dadda!"
The spell shattered instantly. Draco jerked back, nearly knocking over his teacup, a flush creeping up his pale neck. Hermione spun around, grabbing her quill and pretending to aggressively take notes on a blank piece of parchment.
Scorpius marched into the library, his hands mostly clean, dragging a large, overstuffed floor pillow behind him. He hauled it over to the space between Draco’s chair and Hermione’s chair, dropped it on the antique rug, and flopped down onto it belly-first.
He had brought a battered copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard and a box of Muggle crayons Hermione had gifted him for his last birthday.
"I'm weading," Scorpius announced loudly to the room.
Draco took a deep breath, adjusting his collar. He looked at Hermione, an apologetic, slightly strained smile on his face. "Apologies. The quiet never lasts long."
"It's quite alright," Hermione said, her voice entirely too high. She cleared her throat again. "I love having him here."
And she meant it. As she and Draco returned to their work, their voices lowered to a comfortable murmur, Hermione found her eyes drifting constantly to the little boy on the floor. Scorpius was humming under his breath, carefully drawing what looked like a green cat on the inside cover of the priceless wizarding book. Draco didn't even reprimand him; he just reached down absentmindedly and ruffled Scorpius’s hair while listening to Hermione read off Ministry statistics.
It felt... domestic. It felt like a family.
Hermione forcefully pushed the thought down. He is a Malfoy. He is your consultant. You are his friend. She could not let herself fall into the trap of wishing for something she couldn't have. Draco was polite, he was kind, and he clearly respected her mind. But a man like Draco Malfoy—heir to an ancient house, wealthy beyond measure—would eventually settle down with a proper witch. Someone who belonged in this grand manor, not a witch who tripped over the Floo grate half the time she arrived.
"Granger?" Draco’s voice broke through her internal scolding. He was looking at her closely, a slight frown marring his brow. "Are you quite alright? You’ve been staring at the word 'cauldron' for three minutes."
"Just... thinking," Hermione lied smoothly. "Processing the implications of the simmer time."
Draco didn't look entirely convinced, but he let it drop. "Well, take your time. I'm in no rush."
He leaned back in his chair, sipping his tea, his eyes resting warmly on her.
Down on the floor, Scorpius let out a small, contented sigh, his eyes drooping closed as the warmth of the fire and the low, soothing hum of his father and 'M’ione' debating law lulled him to sleep. The green crayon rolled out of his limp hand.
Hermione smiled softly, watching the boy breathe. She looked back up to find Draco already watching her, that same devastating, unreadable expression on his face.
Tuesday at four o'clock. It was dangerous, she thought. But she wouldn't miss it for the world.