On the eve of the Christmas holidays, a sudden heavy snowfall blanketed Hogwarts Castle, and nearly every student promptly forgot what studying was.
Even Hermione Granger — Hogwarts' most dedicated library fixture, an anomaly even among the keenest students — had to admit that Hogwarts under snow was beautiful enough to set the imagination loose.
She found herself picturing how the castle would look from above, from the saddle of a broomstick: an enormous, intricate gingerbread house dusted with icing sugar, or perhaps one of those Muggle snow globes, the kind that played a tinkling tune when you shook them. Hogwarts would be the little castle inside, suspended in a swirl of white.
She paused at that thought. A bird's-eye view. How naturally it came to her now.
It seemed that a five-minute flight — taken on a Slytherin boy's whim — had quietly changed the way she saw the world.
Draco. A boy as gentle as snow, and as cold as it.
She had overheard the Slytherins talking about him, in corridors and over meals: "Don't expect warmth from Malfoy. The family's always been that way. It's not personal — it's breeding."
Arrogant? Hermione thought, puzzled. He was perfectly approachable when they were alone.
"I think there's something wrong with the part of his brain that controls smiling," Lavender had declared during a recent dormitory discussion, her voice carrying easily through the curtains. "Honestly, Parvati, look elsewhere. Malfoy's far too aloof — and he's a Slytherin, of all things."
"I know, I've never liked Slytherins," Parvati agreed. "They always carry on as though everyone else is beneath them. Still — objectively speaking — Malfoy is very good-looking. It's difficult not to notice."
"He only looks good when he's being severe," Lavender said, with a laugh. "Maybe that's why he never smiles — he's afraid of ruining the effect."
Hermione, lying very still behind her bed curtains, felt a flare of indignation.
That was completely wrong. He was handsome when he smiled. Genuinely, startlingly handsome. She had seen it — the day he took her flying, when they landed and he turned to her with a grin so unguarded it had almost been blinding, bright as sunlight with something like starlight underneath.
He had never smiled like that again. Not in Transfiguration, where he was always composed and serious. Not in the corridors, where his expression was typically somewhere between neutral and remote.
But that didn't mean he was unfriendly. Not to her.
When they were face to face — working together in the library, sitting side by side in class — he was always courteous, always engaged, and quietly, almost invisibly attentive in ways she had only begun to catalogue.
In any classroom they shared, if she moved toward the empty seat beside him and was about to sit, he would glance at her — expressionlessly, as though it cost him nothing — and pull out the chair. She had never seen another student do that. She was fairly certain he didn't do it for anyone else.
In the library, when every seat was taken and she was resigning herself to the floor, he would materialise from behind a bookshelf, apparently by chance, and guide her to that warm, tucked-away corner she could never locate on her own, settle her into the armchair, and put the kettle on.
He would return her greetings anywhere, regardless of which Slytherins were watching — though he rarely greeted her first, except on the occasions when she was navigating the corridors with a precarious tower of books, at which point he would appear beside her and, without commentary, take the stack from her arms and carry it to wherever she was going.
Was this special treatment? Hermione wondered. Or was she simply imagining a pattern?
Sometimes she sensed his gaze on her, but when she turned, he was always looking somewhere else.
A boy who kept himself neither too close nor too far.
She wasn't even certain their relationship qualified as friendship, in any conventional sense. He never sought her out unless she was already in difficulty. The moment she was all right, he withdrew — smoothly, almost imperceptibly — and afterwards maintained a careful distance, rarely meeting her eyes first.
As though he preferred not to get entangled.
And yet, whenever she was the one who approached him — regardless of when or where or what she wanted — he never seemed annoyed. His expression would ease, almost unconsciously, and she could feel the attentiveness in him, the quiet, half-concealed care. He let her close in a way he didn't seem to let anyone else. When she was near enough, there was nothing cold about him at all.
Their conversations were always good. When he was genuinely engaged, a brief, slight smile would sometimes flicker across his face — and then be wiped away almost immediately, replaced by something more shuttered and careful.
The boy was an enigma. Cryptic in a way that wasn't unpleasant — it was, if anything, interesting. She had begun to observe him.
He had an economy with words that bordered on the extreme: if one word sufficed, he used one. He smiled at no one. His bearing was calm, his expression perennially tired-looking. With everyone else, he maintained the same level, indifferent composure.
With her, by comparison, he was practically chatty.
And yet the Slytherins respected him without reservation. They clustered around him at mealtimes, talked and laughed and orbited his silences without apparent discomfort, simply accustomed to his manner.
It made no logical sense. How could someone who radiated "keep your distance" inspire that kind of easy loyalty?
In Gryffindor, the most popular students were the warm ones — the Lavender Browns of the world, who could learn every name in the house within a week through sheer enthusiasm. That was the Gryffindor model of friendship: cheerful, outgoing, and energetically pursued.
Draco Malfoy, by every observable metric, was none of those things.
And yet.
Hermione Granger, she asked herself, why do you keep choosing him as a partner?
She sighed, turned her face toward the corridor window, and looked up.
The snow was falling properly now, fat soft flakes drifting sideways in the wind. Almost without thinking, she stretched her arm out into the open air.
A few snowflakes drifted down and landed on her palm — crystalline, weightless, like small deliberate gifts from the grey sky. The cold touched her skin and melted instantly, leaving only a faint damp trace.
Hermione shivered at the sting of it, shook the water from her fingers, breathed warm air into her cupped hands, and found herself smiling despite everything. Something lightened in her chest. She tucked the question of Draco away for later, adjusted the books under her arm, and continued toward the library.
She never noticed the pale grey eyes watching her from behind.
---
Draco had noticed her the moment she stepped into the corridor.
Against the white light, she looked like something conjured. Her hair caught the snow — a few flakes settling briefly on her fringe before the wind took them — and her eyes were wide and bright as she gazed upward. A small, curious creature who had wandered into the storm and found it delightful. The arm she stretched into the corridor was smooth and unmarked, the gesture tentative and wondering, as though she was trying not to startle the snowflakes.
That particular fragility. That particular, infuriating endearingness.
Draco looked at her and felt the ache of it settle behind his sternum, quiet and unwelcome.
This was a side of her he rarely saw. This uncomplicated, unselfconscious joy. He wanted to hold on to the image of it, and that wanting unsettled him.
Stop. Leave her be. As long as she can keep smiling like that, nothing else needs to matter.
She loved her books. Let her go read them.
He withdrew his gaze and turned back to the courtyard.
The Weasley twins were engaged in a piece of work that, under different circumstances, he might have admired: they had charmed several large snowballs to pursue Professor Quirrell around the courtyard, one after another striking him squarely on the back of the head — on the turban, specifically, which struck Draco as either inspired or, depending on your perspective, extraordinarily apt. The watching students were helpless with laughter.
Quirrell, scarlet-faced and spluttering, eventually wrenched his headwear straight and announced that the twins would be serving detention, with points deducted, effective immediately.
Draco watched the twins saunter away, entirely untroubled by this, and moved to intercept them.
"A moment," he said, falling into step beside them.
The twins glanced at each other, then at him — simultaneously, in that way they had, like a mirror that had learned to be amused.
"If it isn't the Malfoy heir," said the one on the left, with interest.
"We heard about the match from Ron," said the one on the right, grinning. "Good work, that."
"Yes, yes," they finished together, "a genuine help."
Draco allowed a thin smile.
"I only wanted to say — you're wasting yourselves on Quirrell." He glanced back at where the Professor had retreated, still adjusting his turban with wounded dignity. "You have a real gift. Have you ever thought about putting it to better use? Developing products? A proper shop, even."
He still remembered placing an anonymous order — a substantial one — with Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, in another lifetime. The Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder alone had been genuinely impressive. Certainly not used for anything its inventors would have been proud of, but the quality was undeniable.
"Things like Canary Creams," Draco said, feeling slightly absurd as he gestured and explained. "Trick wands. Nosebleed Nougats. That sort of range."
A Malfoy, standing in a snowy courtyard, pitching joke shop ideas to the Weasley twins. He was aware of exactly how this looked.
The effect, however, was immediate. The twins' expressions shifted — the studied nonchalance dropped for just a moment, and they exchanged a glance charged with something that was distinctly not indifference.
"Don't know what you mean by any of that," said one of them, in a careful tone.
"And we'd be cautious about taking investment advice from a Slytherin," said the other, studying Draco with frank appraisal. "Ulterior motives and all."
"Besides," they said together, "the Malfoys and the Weasleys have never exactly been on the same side."
"I'm aware." Draco produced a folded square of parchment from his inner pocket — a preliminary outline, terms of investment, the bones of a proposal — and held it out. "This is a personal matter. It has nothing to do with my father, or yours. Look it over. If you're interested, you know where to find me."
He left them with it and walked away.
"Has he gone round the bend?" he heard one of them murmur behind him.
"...He really might have," said the other, with a rustling of parchment and something that sounded suspiciously like reverence.
Draco had always intended to put his Galleons to work. Letting them moulder in Gringotts while the goblins charged for the privilege seemed like precisely the kind of waste a Malfoy should never permit.
The wizarding world offered limited options for discreet investment — anything too visible risked attracting his father's attention, and anything that overlapped with existing Malfoy interests would be discovered immediately. Lucius was thorough, if nothing else.
The Muggle world, by contrast, offered considerably more freedom. The Dark Lord's contempt for Muggles meant that no one was watching those markets. Draco planned to acquire several properties in England, convert some into rental income, and keep the remainder as undisclosed safe houses — the old principle of the three-burrowed rabbit, applied to real estate.
Currency and equities could wait. He would get there.
The Malfoy family's relationship with Muggle wealth was, in any case, a great deal more complicated than the family's public position suggested. After his father's imprisonment, when Draco had found himself managing portions of the estate, he had learned things about the Malfoy finances that he suspected very few people outside the family knew. A significant portion of their fortune — quietly, carefully, over centuries — was tied to Muggle assets. Land in Wiltshire. Currency holdings. Investments that predated the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy and had simply never been disentangled from it.
Nearly seven hundred years of accumulated wealth, from the Norman conquest to 1692, did not vanish because of a law. It relocated. From open to covert, from documented to merely understood.
Ironic, Draco had always thought, that the fortune sustaining one of wizarding Britain's most prominent pure-blood families owed a considerable debt to the Muggle economy. If those other self-proclaimed pure-blood families had paid half as much attention to Muggle markets during those three centuries of isolation, they might not have declined quite so catastrophically.
But that was their problem.
The Weasleys' joke shop was simply a sound investment: high potential returns, considerable plausible deniability, and the added advantage that no one would believe for a moment that a Malfoy had backed it.
Whether the twins had the sense to agree remained to be seen.
What was certain was that they were tormenting Quirrell out of loyalty to Potter, because the matter of the bewitched broom had been handled, as far as they were concerned, with insufficient consequence.
"We told Professor McGonagall everything — exactly what we saw Quirrell doing — and she promised to take it to Dumbledore," Hermione said in a low, furious voice during Transfiguration, leaning toward him over their shared work. She pressed a piece of chalk onto the bench with more force than was strictly necessary. "And nothing has happened to him. Nothing at all."
Draco thought about it, and found he was genuinely surprised. He had assumed Dumbledore would move more decisively.
Perhaps the Headmaster truly believed he could continue using Quirrell as a whetstone for Potter — another carefully positioned obstacle on the path to whatever Dumbledore had determined Potter needed to face. Perhaps, in his calculation of the long game, one incident at a Quidditch match seemed a manageable risk.
But even Dumbledore could miscalculate.
Quirrell was not merely a desperate follower angling for power. The Dark Lord occupying the back of his head was not a manageable risk. Every day that situation continued unchecked was a day the fragile, barely-contained fragment of Voldemort's soul had to act, to manoeuvre, to find another way forward. Draco remembered too well how the story had gone, even after Quirrell was stopped — the soul had fled, and everything that followed had flowed from that single escape.
He thought of Malfoy Manor as he had last known it. The cold. The smell. What it had become.
Someone, once, had seen the signs early and decided the risk was acceptable. Had let it run.
Draco kicked a snowdrift in passing, and immediately regretted it. His boots were black leather and now entirely sodden. He pointed his wand at them without enthusiasm and cast a cleaning charm.
He took a breath. There were things he could do and things he couldn't. Exposing Quirrell directly was, in theory, simple — remove the turban in a public place, and the evidence would explain itself. In practice, it was not simple at all. The Dark Lord was not a body. He was a soul, and souls were not easily cornered. Exposure would only scatter him, and a scattered Voldemort, free to possess someone else or flee the castle entirely, was in certain ways more dangerous than a contained one.
How did you fight something you couldn't touch?
He was still turning the question over when he pushed open the door to the Potions dungeon and settled into his seat.
"Ron and I have been practising the Full Body-Bind," Hermione announced, dropping a handful of lionfish spines onto the workbench with a crack. She had the look of someone prepared to hex the next dark wizard she encountered and feel very good about it. "Next time Quirrell tries anything, he won't be able to move."
Draco surfaced from his thoughts.
"Wait." He caught her wrist before she could reach for the spines again.
She turned, surprised. His hand was cold — he was always cold — but the grip was careful.
He reached into his pocket and produced a pair of dragonhide gloves, pressing them into her palm. He released her wrist, which looked as though it could be snapped with careless handling, and said, "Wear those before you start grinding. Lionfish spines are venomous. They can spit."
"Oh." She looked down at the gloves, the storm in her expression giving way to something softer. "Thank you."
"And goggles." He was already scanning the workbench. Her eyes were too bright and too unprotected for a Potions classroom.
"Isn't that a bit excessive?" She glanced around at their classmates. "Nobody else is—"
"Nobody else is following proper safety procedure," he said.
"Draco, I want to be honest with you." She lowered her voice, looking pained. "I don't mind the gloves. But the goggles — every single time I put them on, the strap catches in my hair. It's genuinely quite painful."
He picked up the goggles and turned them over in his hands. "I'll be careful. All right?"
She looked at him, and then, for reasons she didn't entirely understand, nodded.
He bent toward her, tilting his head slightly to see what he was doing, and began adjusting the strap with methodical patience — loosening the buckle, checking the length, threading it through the adjustment. He worked close to her profile, near enough that she could see the small line between his brows as he concentrated. His expression was focused, his lips pressed together, and there was something in his eyes — usually so level and self-contained — that was, for just a moment, not quite either of those things.
Hermione looked at the colour of his eyes and found herself thinking, distantly, that they were lovely. Like sea glass. Both sharp and soft at once.
"It'll catch in a second," she said faintly, bracing herself. "I have so much hair, it always—"
"Done," Draco said. A faint, private smile crossed the side of his face she couldn't see.
Hermione blinked. She reached up cautiously and touched the strap. It sat flat against her head. Not a single hair caught.
She couldn't do it that neatly herself. How had he managed it?
"Thank you," she said, somewhat stumbling over the word.
He gave a small, satisfied nod, and turned back to the cauldron.
Hermione ground the first spine, making considerably more noise than necessary, and privately admitted to herself that there was simply no good argument for finding a different Potions partner.
Anyone else would seem careless by comparison. Whether he smiled or not. Whether he was a Slytherin or not. What did any of that matter?
She had seen him smile. Once, properly, the way it reached his eyes. She might be the only person in the school who had, and she refused to let Lavender Brown say otherwise.
She ground harder. The noise was embarrassing. She didn't stop.
Draco, watching the cauldron, assumed she was still furious about Quirrell.
"If you're serious about stopping him," he said, after a moment, "Leg-Locker Curse is fine, but I'd recommend the Full Body-Bind alongside it, and look into Langlock."
"Langlock?" She forgot her grievances immediately, looking up. "I've never come across that. What does it do?"
"Sticks the target's tongue to the roof of their mouth," he said, touching his nose with a vague air of guilt. "Can't speak, can't cast verbal spells. Useful. Though against an adult wizard who can cast non-verbally, it's only partial — which is why the Full Body-Bind is the more reliable first choice."
The expression on her face had shifted into something he wasn't expecting: wide-eyed, open admiration. The kind of look a student gives a teacher who has just made something impossibly complicated seem obvious.
"Draco," she said, with feeling. "How do you know all of this? We're first years."
"I read a great deal," he said, glancing sideways at her. "Like you."
Hermione Granger, looking at him like he had all the answers.
He had better commit that look to memory. It was unusual enough to be worth preserving.
"What are all these for?" He nodded toward the stack of heavy volumes crowding her side of the workbench.
"Nicolas Flamel," she said, frowning. "I've searched The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century, I even went back to the beginners' library — nothing. Hagrid mentioned him by accident; we're fairly certain he's connected to what the three-headed dog is guarding."
"I'd try the older references," Draco said, pitching his voice below Professor Snape's detection threshold. "Consider Dumbledore's age for a moment. His contemporaries would be equally old. Some wizards live for centuries. The library has records going back that far, but they're not in the general catalogue."
The effect was instantaneous. Her eyes lit up.
"You're right — I've been searching the wrong period entirely—" She was already mentally reorganising her bibliography, he could tell from her expression. "I'll have to make several more trips, there must be at least a few rows of relevant—" She caught herself. The smile that broke across her face was unguarded and warm. "Thank you, Draco."
Draco shrugged and looked back at the cauldron before the smile could do anything to him.
He was becoming accustomed to this, he realised. The small, peripheral role he had settled into — offering a nudge here, a piece of information there — in the Potter trio's ongoing navigation of what was clearly Dumbledore's elaborately constructed trial.
He hadn't meant to. He had come back to Hogwarts with a clear objective and a clear boundary: protect his own position, support Potter at a distance, don't entangle yourself.
But it turned out that Potter's friends made entanglement unreasonably easy.
Gryffindors in general were a problem. They were too direct. Too unguarded. Too willing to trust on inadequate evidence and then simply get on with it. In Slytherin, friendship ran along lines of hierarchy and mutual benefit, with a careful eye to the long term; you always knew where you stood and why. Gryffindors seemed to operate on entirely different principles — something intuitive and immediate and fundamentally irrational — and the result was a quality of warmth that Draco found he didn't know how to deflect.
He had originally intended to be civil. Distantly civil. That was all.
But then she had hugged him at the Quidditch match. She came to find him in the library. She turned up beside him with a question, a book, a problem she wanted to think through aloud, and she looked at him as though that were an entirely natural thing to do, and as though his being there were something she had simply decided to count on.
He couldn't bear it when she was troubled. He couldn't refuse her when she brought him something that interested her. He couldn't watch her stand awkwardly in a full library and do nothing.
His instincts kept outrunning his intentions. His hands knew what to do before his head finished the argument. He had been telling himself for months that he was helping her from a safe distance, and he was becoming aware that the distance was shrinking.
She was going to get hurt. He was going to let something through that he shouldn't. He knew the shape of this, knew where it led.
He was the mire. The hollow place. He carried things that would frighten her if she knew them. He was involved, genuinely involved, in some of the darkest history this world had lived through, and she was eleven years old and had snowflakes in her hair and looked at him like he was worth trusting.
Whenever she was all right — whenever she had what she needed and no longer required anyone — he tried to go back. To the proper distance. To something manageable.
And then she came and found him again.
"Draco—" she said. The same tone she always used, and it always did the same thing.
He stole a glance at her.
She was on her toes, peering into the cauldron, her brow furrowed. Something had gone slightly wrong with the colour.
Hermione Granger. What am I supposed to do with you?
She beckoned without looking around. "Come look at this — I think it's gone a bit off."
She needs help. That was all. That was the whole of it.
He told himself that, and walked toward her.
"I'm here," he said.