Draco hadn't expected to see Granger a second time quite so soon.
That was on the platform at King's Cross.
In his past life, he had been so caught up in the excitement of his first journey to Hogwarts—so fixated on finding the barrier to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and getting aboard as quickly as possible—that he had no memory of whether he'd passed her at all.
In this life, once a name had his attention, its owner seemed to appear everywhere.
He spotted her immediately. Who could miss that hair?
An impressive cloud of brown, its back to him, had been stationed on the platform for some time. Long enough that Draco had noticed it. Beside her stood two adults—Muggle clothing, anxious expressions—attempting to describe something to a platform attendant with visibly declining success.
Draco's expression settled into one of knowing recognition.
Freshmen who can't find the platform. It happened every year without fail—a handful of bewildered Muggle-born students and their equally bewildered families, managing to irritate the station staff and attract exactly the sort of attention the wizarding world preferred to avoid. As a prefect in fifth year, fielding those questions had been a reliable source of headaches.
He considered his options.
Walking over directly was out of the question. Lucius and Narcissa would assume he'd been Confunded.
However, an eleven-year-old who had been comprehensively spoiled by his parents did possess certain unsubtle advantages. Chief among them: the natural licence to be loud and mildly embarrassing in public without anyone finding it particularly surprising.
Right then. Draco steeled himself, maneuvered his trolley onto the path nearest the Grangers, glanced back at his mother with the expression of a boy who had just remembered something vitally important, and announced at carrying volume:
"Mum, it's Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, isn't it?"
In his peripheral vision, Granger's head turned immediately.
Good ears, Granger.
"Draco." Lucius's gaze found him with the precision of a man who had not raised his son to perform in public. "Mind yourself."
Narcissa, gentler as always, took his hand. "My dear, not so loud. Don't draw attention."
Draco nodded with perfect obedience, kept his eyes carefully forward, and followed his parents through the barrier at a brisk trot—though not before catching, in the last moment before the wall swallowed him, the expression on Granger's face: mouth open, eyes wide, entirely at a loss.
The corners of his mouth twitched upward before he could stop them.
She always acted as though she knew everything. It was, Draco privately admitted, a satisfying image.
Steam rose in great billowing clouds above the scarlet engine. The platform on the other side was all noise and motion—families, owls, trolleys, shouts of recognition across the crowd.
Draco located Crabbe without difficulty and met Goyle shortly thereafter, and the three of them settled into a compartment, much as they had in his past life.
The Crabbe family had always presented their connection to the Malfoys as a friendship between equals. The Malfoys had always understood it rather differently. The Goyle family was a more recent attachment still—Gregory hadn't even been a childhood acquaintance; Draco had simply encountered him on the train.
In truth, both families had originally been subordinate to his grandfather Abraxas—the "Shadow Minister," as some had called him, the man who had quietly shaped Ministry policy from behind a succession of more visible figures. Crabbe and Goyle senior had been Abraxas's men. Their sons had, by the logic of inheritance, become Draco's.
He had never once treated them as equals, and he could admit that now without particular pride.
They were not unintelligent in the way that pure cruelty sometimes masquerades as stupidity. They were simply unambitious—incurious, content, unbothered by the qualities that Slytherin nominally valued. This had always baffled and faintly disgusted him.
He thought of the Room of Requirement. Of Crabbe, ignoring his direct orders, casting Fiendfyre with the recklessness of someone who had decided that the Dark Lord's reward outweighed any other consideration—including the lives of everyone in the room, including his own. The fire had taken him. That memory still sat uneasily.
Who cares what you think? I'm never taking orders from you again, Draco. You and your father are finished.
Draco had told himself for a long time that he felt no grief over it. He was less certain of that now.
Looking back with some honesty: Crabbe had been with him for years. The betrayal, when it came, had been partly a consequence of the Malfoy family's fall from power—and partly a consequence of Draco's own contempt, which he had never bothered to conceal. He had been domineering. He had mocked their clumsiness openly, as though they were props rather than people.
He had never learned to be a normal, equal friend. By the time he had understood what that companionship actually meant, it was gone.
He wasn't prepared to make the same mistake twice. He had no intention of being dominated by sentiment either—he would not give anyone a second opportunity to betray him. But he could start, at least, by being less of a tyrant.
He glanced across at Crabbe and Goyle, who were working their way through the snack trolley's entire left half with focused dedication.
"Watch the luggage," Draco said. "I'm going to walk the train."
They agreed immediately, not looking up from their food.
He bought them extra from the trolley witch on his way out—every kind available, several of each—left a handful of Galleons, and slid the compartment door shut behind him.
Quiet.
He stood in the corridor at the rear of the carriage, watching the late-afternoon countryside stream past the window. The pastoral greens and golds of England in early September blurred together pleasantly. The rhythmic clatter of the wheels was almost soothing.
In his past life, this was the moment he would have been making his way to Potter's compartment—full of borrowed confidence and inherited prejudice, about to deliver a first impression he would spend years failing to recover from.
He had no interest in that particular errand this time around.
A month had passed since his rebirth. August had been spent quietly: adjusting to a young body that felt borrowed, observing his parents, performing the role of a properly enthusiastic eleven-year-old for an audience who expected it. He had managed it without incident and found it exhausting in ways he hadn't anticipated.
The mismatch was its own particular discomfort. His mind had lived through things this body had no memory of. At night, the memories came back in force—pain, shame, choices that couldn't be unmade—and he had spent many hours pressing them back behind Occlumency barriers, building walls in his mind that he reinforced each morning like a house constantly at risk of flooding.
During the day, he performed cheerfulness. Only he knew how hollow it was.
What kept him from sinking entirely was the one thing he had to do: protect the people who mattered to him. Use everything he knew to prevent the worst of what was coming. Tie the Dark Lord's hands before he could reach full strength. Keep Malfoy Manor clean, keep his father out of Azkaban, keep his mother from ever having to hand over her wand to save his life.
The specifics of how were considerably more complicated.
Quirrell, right now, was carrying a fragment of Voldemort's soul beneath his turban. No one in this school—except, presumably, Dumbledore, who had his own calculations about it—would believe that if told. The Philosopher's Stone was already somewhere in this castle, bait in an elaborate trap that Draco had never been entirely sure was as accidental as it appeared.
Next year: the Chamber of Secrets. The Basilisk. His father's idiotic plan with the diary.
That was something he might actually be able to prevent.
Then there were the Horcruxes—Ravenclaw's diadem in the Room of Requirement, the one Potter had risked his life to find in seventh year—and the Elder Wand, and whatever Florean Fortescue had known that had made him worth keeping alive and in agony—
The complexity of it settled on him like a physical weight. He pressed his temple against the cool glass of the window and exhaled.
He had to be systematic. He had to gather information carefully before showing his hand to anyone, especially Dumbledore. The Headmaster was formidable and not entirely predictable, and until Draco had enough leverage to negotiate the safety of his family, revealing everything he knew would be a very large risk for a very uncertain return.
He closed his eyes.
The setting sun reached through the glass and lay warm across his face.
"Hey." A careful, quiet voice. "Are you feeling alright?"
Draco opened his eyes.
A pair of brown eyes looked back at him—the colour of good dark chocolate, wide with genuine concern, and rather close.
Granger.
Of course it was.
She had changed into her Hogwarts robes. Without the context of the Muggle world around her, she looked exactly as she belonged—nothing about her said Muggle-born in the least. She looked, if anything, like she had always been here.
"It's nothing." Draco straightened up from the wall, feeling an embarrassing warmth creep into his face. "Just needed some air."
Hermione blinked, appeared to register that she had been staring, and took a step back. She tossed her hair with a faint haughtiness that Draco recognised as a cover for being caught off-guard. "I'm glad you're alright. I was going to say—there's a matron's carriage at the rear, if you needed it."
"No need. But—thank you."
The words felt strange in his mouth in this context. She had been about to help him. In his experience, their encounters had tended to go rather differently.
Hermione straightened, apparently satisfied, and then—with the businesslike pivot of someone who had already mentally moved on—said: "In that case, could you help me? A boy called Neville has lost his toad. I've already asked nearly every compartment."
There it was. The real Granger. The girl who, upon confirming a stranger was not dying, immediately redirected her concern to whoever was most in need of it on the nearest available train. He had never quite decided whether to find this admirable or exhausting. Both, probably.
"What's the toad's name?" Draco asked, already reaching for his wand.
"Trevor."
"Accio Trevor."
The toad came sailing through the connecting doors between carriages and landed precisely in his outstretched hand. He held it at arm's length, regarding it with mild distaste. Of all the pets one might choose to bring to school.
Hermione stared.
"That was—" She appeared to be recalibrating several assumptions simultaneously. "That was extraordinary. I've memorised every first-year spell in the textbooks, and none of them—how did you do that? Is that a first-year spell? I don't think that's a first-year spell—"
In another life, being praised like this by Hermione Granger—who had spent years being held over his head as a benchmark he consistently failed to exceed—would have sent his ego into full display. He was not that boy now.
"Keep it between us," he said quietly, handing her the squirming toad. "I'd rather not make a thing of it."
Hermione looked genuinely puzzled. "If it were me, I'd be telling everyone." She considered him for a moment, then shrugged. "Alright. I'll keep your secret." She tucked Trevor securely under one arm and extended her free hand. "Hermione Granger. You can call me Hermione."
Draco looked at her outstretched hand.
He hadn't expected this. He had thought they would exchange names and part. He hadn't expected her to simply offer.
He reached out—a little slowly, he would admit, like someone testing ice—and shook her hand. Her grip was warm and direct.
"Draco Malfoy."
"It's nice to meet you, Draco." She shook his hand with the same efficient cheerfulness she apparently applied to everything, then launched immediately back into speech: "I really don't understand why you'd want to keep something like that secret—if I could cast a spell like that, I'd be absolutely delighted. My parents would be delighted, they always love to hear about what I've been learning. And it is an advanced spell, isn't it? I was right—it's not in any of the first-year books—"
He had braced himself to be irritated.
He wasn't, particularly.
Her voice moved like quick water—cheerful and purposeful, one thought flowing into the next without pause—and to his mild astonishment, it worked. The weight that had been pressing on him for the last hour began to recede. The clutter of his thoughts—Quirrell, the Stone, the diary, the Chamber, the diadem, Dumbledore, Snape, his father, the Dark Lord—was pushed, incrementally, to the back of his mind.
"I've already memorised all the first-year textbooks," she was saying, "but it's become very obvious that the textbooks are only the beginning. I hope Hogwarts has a proper library—"
"It does," Draco said. "You'll like it."
She turned to him with an expression of pure delight, as though he had just confirmed something she had been very much hoping to hear.
Then the delight moderated, slightly, into something more careful. "You must be from a wizarding family," she said. "You know so much about Hogwarts already. I'm Muggle-born, and I keep worrying that I've already fallen behind without even knowing it."
Draco looked at her.
The girl who would spend the next seven years at the top of every class in this school was worried about falling behind.
"You won't," he said, with considerably more conviction than he'd intended to show. He caught himself and amended it to something more neutral: "Don't worry about it. You'll find your footing quickly enough."
The ones who ought to be worried, he thought privately, are the students from wizarding families who've been coasting on familiarity—because you're about to comprehensively dismantle their head start.
He said none of this aloud.
A Malfoy, after all, maintained some dignity.