Draco's eagle owl was probably the most frequent visitor to the entire Slytherin table.
Every few days, something arrived from his mother—sweets, chocolate, or some novelty Narcissa had decided her son couldn't do without. He accepted these packages with the equanimity of someone who had never had reason to expect otherwise, tucked them away, and thought nothing more of it.
Today was different.
When he unwrapped the small silver package, something he had not quite let himself look forward to was sitting inside.
The Invisibility Cloak.
He had forged Narcissa's handwriting to place the order after Diagon Alley, paying rather more than the listed price to ensure it arrived without questions. Commercial cloaks had their limitations—the materials required to make them were expensive and increasingly rare, and extended use degraded the enchantment gradually until the cloak became unremarkable wool and nothing more. But before he had fully mastered the Disillusionment Charm to a standard he trusted, this was considerably more reliable. The Disillusionment Charm had a time limit and required concentration he couldn't always spare.
There were places in this castle he needed to visit quietly. The seventh-floor corridor. The Astronomy Tower after dark. Neither of those errands was improved by being seen.
He folded the cloak carefully away into his bag with an expression that the boy beside him—Zabini—clocked and decided not to ask about.
Across the Hall, something was happening at the Gryffindor table.
Longbottom had received his Remembrall from his grandmother—a small glass ball that filled with red smoke when its owner had forgotten something, which in Longbottom's case appeared to be a more or less permanent condition. A crowd of Gryffindors had gathered to look at it. Draco watched without any particular interest, having long since lost the appetite for embarrassing Longbottom that his eleven-year-old self had apparently found so entertaining.
He had, apparently, not needed to do anything.
Even without provocation, when Longbottom's broom went haywire during the flight lesson and deposited both Longbottom and the Remembrall onto the castle roof, Potter had done exactly what Potter always did: ignored the instruction to stay grounded and gone after it himself, pulling out of a fifty-foot dive an arm's length from the grass.
Every first-year in the vicinity went silent. Then began talking at once.
Draco stood at the back of the crowd and watched Professor McGonagall appear from the castle entrance with the expression of a woman whose opinion of the morning had just changed, take Potter firmly by the shoulder, and steer him inside.
"Harry won't be expelled, will he?" Hermione appeared at his elbow, her voice low with genuine concern. She had been doing this since the flying lesson—instinctively gravitating toward him when she needed a reliable read on a situation. He had noticed it without remarking on it.
"No," Draco said. "Think about it from McGonagall's position. She's a Quidditch enthusiast, and Gryffindor's been without a decent Seeker for years."
Hermione gave him a look of profound scepticism. "That's impossible. You can't reward someone for breaking rules. He's a first-year—"
"I might be wrong," Draco said agreeably, and said nothing further.
By dinner, the news had spread to every table and at least three of the portraits. Harry Potter had been made Gryffindor's new Seeker—the youngest house player in a century.
He passed Hermione in the corridor as she was absorbing this information, her mouth slightly open.
"I told you," he said quietly, and kept walking.
She closed her mouth.
He did not let her see the smile.
The flight lessons continued.
Hermione had mastered the preparatory work completely—posture, grip, the exact angle of the mount. She could call her broom up on the first attempt now, reliable and clean. What she had not done was leave the ground, and the particular horror of watching Longbottom come off his broom at altitude had done nothing to help this.
On their second session, she stood beside her broom, hands on her hips, chin lifted, and announced: "I think flying is boring."
Draco looked at her.
She was pretending to prepare to mount. She was not going to mount. She had been doing this for eight minutes.
He considered several approaches and discarded them. Patient encouragement, on the evidence of the last quarter hour, was not going to move her. Explaining the mechanics further would give her something to engage with intellectually while her feet remained firmly on the grass. The only thing that had ever worked on Hermione Granger's particular brand of hesitation—he was beginning to understand—was removing the option to hesitate.
He stepped forward, mounted his broom, and shifted forward on it.
"Get on behind me."
"What are you—" She grabbed his robe reflexively.
The broom rose.
She made a sound he had never heard her make before—a genuine, unguarded sound of pure alarm, both hands fisting into his robes, feet swinging free above the training grounds. The wind came up immediately, cold and fast, pulling at her hair.
"You have to experience it!" he shouted over it, because this was true and because he was also, if he was being honest with himself, enjoying this considerably. "You can read about it forever—it doesn't matter. This is what it is!"
"Draco—" Her voice was muffled against his back.
He took them higher.
The Hogwarts grounds fell away beneath them—the gamekeeper's hut, the greenhouses, the Quidditch pitch, the dark fringe of the Forbidden Forest—and became a picture, detailed and still, the kind of view that could not be described from within it. The castle itself was suddenly something you could hold in your field of vision all at once, its towers and battlements laid out clear against the hills beyond.
Further out: the loch, the mountains, the wide open sky.
He felt her go still.
"Look down," he said, more quietly.
A pause. Then he felt the tension in her arms shift—not loosening exactly, but changing quality. She was looking.
"Oh," she said.
He said nothing. He gave her the five minutes he had promised himself.
They skimmed low over the Black Lake on the way back, the broom's shadow racing across the water beneath them, and he pulled up sharply once for the sheer pleasure of it—the stomach-dropping instant of weightlessness, the rush of air, her scream swallowed immediately by the wind—and then levelled out over the surface, slow and steady, the lake absolutely still around them.
"Don't—" she managed, from somewhere behind his left ear, pressed entirely against his back now. "Don't do that again."
"That's a dive," he said. "Every Seeker learns that."
"I am not a Seeker."
He brought them down to the grass.
Her legs were unsteady when she dismounted. He put out a hand and she took it without comment, which he interpreted as the highest possible compliment given the circumstances.
She was pink-cheeked, slightly windblown, hair in complete disarray. She looked at him with an expression that was attempting to be furious and not entirely succeeding.
"You are absolutely—" she started.
"Well?" he said.
"—mad—" she continued.
"It was five minutes."
"You didn't warn me—"
"You wouldn't have got on if I had."
She stopped. She knew this was true. He watched her work through the frustration of knowing it was true.
"That," she said finally, with great precision, "was the most irresponsible thing anyone has ever done to me."
"And?" he said.
"And it was—" She pressed her lips together. Looked away. Looked back. "It was the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen."
He said nothing, but the expression on his face must have done something, because she immediately straightened up and pointed at him.
"Don't you dare be smug about it."
"I'm not smug," he said, and was entirely smug.
She turned and walked back toward the castle at a pace that suggested she needed to be doing something productive before any further complicated feelings could develop, and Draco watched her go with a lightness in his chest that he hadn't been expecting.
He had not thought, for the past hour, about anything else at all.
For several days afterward, she didn't speak to him directly.
He had anticipated this—had even, in the moment, known it was likely—and had taken the flight anyway. That was worth examining. He had wanted her to experience it. He had also, less creditably, wanted to see her be something other than composed and certain for five minutes. The impulse had been real and he wasn't proud of how little he had weighed it against her comfort.
She deserved more patience than he'd shown. She was eleven years old, and brave in the ways that came naturally to her—books, arguments, defending people she cared about—and afraid in the ways that didn't. He should have been steadier.
He noted this and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say at present, and sat with Nott for Potions instead, which was adequate if uninspiring.
She was ignoring Potter and Weasley as well, he noticed. It seemed to be a general withdrawal rather than a specific one, which was marginally reassuring.
This changed when a package arrived at the Gryffindor table—a broomstick, clearly expensive, clearly not a standard school model, wrapped in plain paper and addressed to Potter. The timing was obvious to anyone paying attention: it had arrived the morning after he had been made Seeker.
Hermione saw it from across the Hall. Draco watched her expression move through several things in quick succession and arrive at something sharper and less comfortable than anger.
She passed the Gryffindor table on her way out, looked at the package, and said, with the controlled precision of someone who had decided to say what they thought: "I suppose this is the reward for breaking school rules, is it."
"We thought you weren't talking to us anymore," Harry said.
"Yeah," Ron said. "It's been quite peaceful."
The words landed visibly. Hermione's chin went up. She walked away without responding, and Draco, watching from the Slytherin table, felt something that might have been described—if he were being scrupulously honest—as protectiveness.
He turned back to his breakfast.
Don't, he told himself. Observe. Keep your distance. Don't get involved in things that don't concern you.
He ate his toast. He did not look across at the Gryffindor table again.