Past Life, Part One: Granger's Conversation
Time: First year, after Easter holidays, during a break in Herbology.
The trio had gone to watch Hagrid secretly raising a dragon, only to be discovered by Draco, who had been following them.
Location: The Herbology greenhouses, after class.
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This was the first time Hermione Granger had properly spoken to him—if one didn't count the Hogwarts Express. Back then, she'd been tearing through the carriages looking for a toad on behalf of that whiny, pitiable Longbottom. That hardly counted as speaking to him; she'd been asking every single compartment in turn, which meant he'd only gotten a word from her by geographical accident.
He remembered giving her a lazy "No" and barely glancing up before she swept on to the next carriage like a gust of wind.
Pleasant voice, he'd noted idly. Insufferable manners.
He'd smirked at her retreating back and returned to his conversation with Crabbe and Goyle. "Not a Slytherin, clearly," he'd remarked to no one in particular. Crabbe and Goyle had smiled and continued eating, entirely untroubled.
Hermione Granger. A singular talent in Gryffindor, and the single most meddlesome person he had ever encountered.
In every class, she had her hand in the air before the question had finished being asked, claiming every correct answer for herself, angling for the exclusive admiration of every professor in the school. Her knowledge was staggering—a Muggle-born who had apparently read every textbook Flourish and Blotts had ever stocked, and probably memorised them backwards for good measure. For an entire year, the Slytherin common room had buzzed with unkind names for her: the show-off, the bookworm, Miss Know-It-All. The list was long and inventive.
How could a Muggle-born have that kind of command over magical theory? Didn't she have anything else to do? Didn't she have friends? What manner of strange, frizzy-haired creature spent all her time in the library while every other child was out enjoying the sunshine?
Next to her, the rest of the year looked as useful as dragon dung in a greenhouse bed.
In a fit of private frustration, Draco had even stopped practising the Levitation Charm for a week. Every time he attempted it, he pictured her smug expression as the feather rose before anyone else's. It was intolerable.
How could anyone learn it before him? How could anyone have the audacity to be more insufferably pleased with themselves than a Malfoy?
His grandfather had always said that the greatest contempt one could show a person was to simply ignore them. So Draco ignored her. He told himself she wasn't worth the energy of provocation. Did a Muggle-born girl deserve the attention of the young master of the Malfoy family? She did not.
The problem was Harry Potter.
Hermione had some inexplicable attachment to Potter, and wherever Potter was, there she was—and whenever Draco went to provoke Potter, he could feel her eyes lifting from her book to track him. Those watchful, hazel eyes.
He reminded himself, on these occasions, that the colour of her eyes resembled his favourite hazelnut chocolate, and that this was entirely irrelevant, and that she was still a show-off, self-important, meddlesome Muggle-born, and that the friend of his enemy was his enemy.
He would never speak to her first. He was quite certain of this.
And then, one afternoon after Herbology, standing alone in the corner of the greenhouse while the other students filed out, she spoke to him.
This was surprising. She had always been wary of him, keeping a careful distance.
"Malfoy." She stood alone in the corner, calling him by his surname for the first time.
"Granger." He was puzzled, and glanced at her briefly before continuing to pack away his Herbology tools at a deliberately unhurried pace.
The greenhouse was nearly empty now. Draco hadn't left with Crabbe and Goyle—he'd been glad of the excuse to send them ahead. During the break, he'd seen it through Hagrid's window: a dragon, just hatched. The sight had stopped the breath in his chest, and he'd wanted a moment alone with it.
How dare that gamekeeper raise a dragon without authorisation? Didn't he know the laws?
Oh, Draco knew every law concerning dragons. If the wizarding statutes hadn't forbidden it, he'd have had one at Malfoy Manor years ago. When your name literally meant dragon, it was rather difficult not to feel a pull toward the creatures. That tiny, extraordinary thing—its crumpled black body, its spiked wings, its long snout spitting sparks, the orange fire of its eyes—it was extraordinary. Far better than any of the dragon figurines in his cabinet at home.
And then this insufferable girl had come along to disrupt his private moment of appreciation.
"You saw it, didn't you?" Those hazel eyes fixed on him.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Granger." He put a deliberate edge on the words. But he lowered his gaze, uncomfortable—afraid she would read his fondness for the dragon, and afraid she would realise that fondness had made him forget his vow never to voluntarily address a Muggle.
"You saw it through Hagrid's window." She was choosing her words carefully. "You won't tell Professor Dumbledore, will you?"
"I can't say for certain." Draco reassembled his arrogance, drawing the words out slowly, watching the faint tension settle across her face. "Perhaps—if Potter ever particularly annoys me—I might have a very illuminating conversation with the professors."
"I don't think you will." She tilted her head, studying him with the unsettling air of someone reading a book they've already half-solved. She seemed entirely unbothered by the cold in his gaze. "Draco. Your name means dragon. You like them, don't you? You followed us because you heard us say the word—didn't you?"
She was far too perceptive. His eyes flickered. He changed tack. "Who gave you permission to use my given name?"
"Malfoy." She took a short breath and corrected herself immediately. Then pressed on: "You didn't deny that you like dragons."
He stared at her. She was perhaps the most difficult person he had ever encountered, and she was twelve years old.
Why couldn't she panic like Potter and Weasley? Why was she standing here watching him with calm, negotiating eyes, as though she'd taken his measure and found it manageable?
"Whether I like dragons is none of your concern," he said, shifting his attention to the Venus flytrap drooping from the greenhouse ceiling. "Raising a dragon is also illegal for good reason. You can't leave a fire-breeder with someone who can't handle it. That gamekeeper probably hasn't considered how fast a Norwegian Ridgeback grows—or that he lives in a wooden house." He let the implication hang in the air.
"You're rude," she said, frowning at him.
"Rude?" For a moment Draco genuinely couldn't believe what he'd heard. He felt deeply offended. "Nobody has ever called me rude. You know Hagrid, and you're calling me rude?"
"Because you never say anything plainly—it's always sarcasm and veiled insults!" She glanced at him sideways.
Slytherins called that wit. The Gryffindor and Slytherin temperaments were, it seemed, fundamentally incompatible.
"I don't know why I'm wasting my time." He gave her his most withering look and turned to leave.
"Wait." Her tone softened slightly. "Give us some time to sort this out ourselves."
"And why would I do that?" He stopped. Turned back. "Because of Potter? Weasley? Because you called me rude?" He let the edge back into his voice. "Weasley and I had a fight in the stands not a week ago. Why should I extend any courtesy to my enemies?"
She didn't answer. Instead, she laughed.
It was not the reaction he had expected, and it baffled him.
"Because you knew it was a Norwegian Ridgeback," she said, with a glint of satisfaction. "You identified the species in one glance. I don't believe for a moment that you don't care what happens to it."
He glared at her. She was, without question, the most irritating person he had ever met. And she was right.
"One week," he said, very quietly. "I'll give you one week. After that, I'll consider my options regarding that gamekeeper."
Something lit up in her eyes—a brief, bright flash—and it irritated him profoundly.
"Don't tell Potter and Weasley about this," he added sharply, "or the agreement is void." He picked up his copy of A Thousand Wonders of Herbs and Fungi and strode away before she could say anything else.
For a full week, he savoured the anxious looks on Potter and Weasley's faces with private delight.
He told himself this was the natural reward for his generous restraint. He was satisfied with this explanation.
The Muggle girl kept her word. She didn't breathe a syllable to Potter and Weasley.
However, keeping a secret and keeping the peace were apparently two entirely different things.
"I need two weeks," she told him in the library a week later, speaking quietly, appearing at his elbow with the matter-of-fact nerve of someone who had not spent several days calculating the risk.
"That's not part of our agreement. You've already broken it." He set down his copy of Curses and Counter-Curses and turned to look at her with a frown.
"Also," she said, glancing at the book, "could you please stop targeting Neville? The Leg-Locker Curse is not a joke. Do you know how he had to get back to Gryffindor Tower?"
"Did you see it? Wasn't it funny?" He shrugged.
"It was not funny!" she said sharply. "He had to hop up every single staircase. Dozens of steps."
Draco pressed his lips together. He had just discovered a previously unnoticed flaw in this know-it-all: a complete absence of humour. Oddly, this made her frizzy hair seem slightly less objectionable.
"What's so remarkable about Longbottom?" he said, with genuine puzzlement. "Is he worth all of you rushing to his defence? What sort of friends choose a snivelling crybaby as their standard-bearer?"
"Is that your justification for bullying him?" she said. "Are you jealous that he has people who stand up for him?"
"Nonsense!" He felt heat rise in his face, then immediately composed himself. "I showed considerable mercy by not using the Full Body-Bind. I could have cast Petrificus Totalus, and then he wouldn't have been able to go around telling tales at all."
She held his gaze for a long moment. "Haven't you any compassion at all?"
"Can you eat compassion? Can you drink it?" he said, drawling the words out. "I assumed you'd stopped me to ask for more time. Was that actually what you came to discuss?"
"I do need more time," she said, her irritation fading into something more measured. Her expression set.
"Is that a request?" He scrutinised her composed face with open suspicion. "And what exactly are you planning to do with it? Something involving Weasley's hand, I suppose."
"I can't tell you." A shadow of wariness crossed her face. "We're working on something. We just need a little more time."
"It's dangerous, you idiots," he said, his voice dropping. He wouldn't acknowledge, even to himself, that her wariness pricked at something—that she was putting up her guard against him, specifically. It was irritating.
He had no intention of doing anything to her, and yet there it was.
Perhaps she had no choice. Perhaps she was simply stalling.
A pang of something—he refused to name it regret—nudged at him. Maybe he should have reported it to the school outright. They clearly had no idea how to manage a fire-breeder; they didn't even understand that a dragon bite was categorically more dangerous than a dog bite.
"If you need more time," he said coldly, "perhaps you should Transfigure yourself into a pocket watch instead of coming to beg more of it from me. One more week, and I'll do exactly as I please."
"That's incredibly unkind," she said. "Can't you give us one more week? You won't see it again after that, I promise."
"No exceptions." He squinted at her, genuinely baffled by her nerve. "I'll report it whenever I choose. If I were you, I'd stay well away from that dragon."
He couldn't see her expression properly—her fringe was in the way—and for some reason this annoyed him. "Are you planning on getting bitten? Because if so, you'll be in the hospital wing, and you won't be raising your hand quite so enthusiastically in class."
With her intelligence, she should have been able to work out that dragon bites meant extended hospital stays.
His rare good-faith warning earned him a furious glare. Her face went red. "Fine. I thought you might be capable of reason, but apparently that was wishful thinking on my part."
She raised her chin, turned on her heel, and walked away.
Absolutely insufferable. Why had she left first? If anyone was going to make a dramatic exit, it ought to have been him. Who was she trying to impress? Draco fumed all the way up the stairs—and then, at midnight, the Marauder's Map revealed that Ron Weasley's bedside table had a note on it, and Hermione Granger had actually attempted to carry a Norwegian Ridgeback up to the Astronomy Tower.
After curfew. Carrying a fire-breathing dragon. Alone and unprotected. With no plan whatsoever beyond apparently hoping for the best.
This was the brilliant scheme that Hermione Granger's extraordinary brain had produced. It was catastrophic. It was the worst plan he had ever heard.
He had to follow them and see.
And so Draco Malfoy was caught. Ambushed by Professor McGonagall, stripped of fifty house points, marched through the Forbidden Forest as punishment, and publicly disgraced—all of it the direct result of trusting that girl for even a moment.
From the beginning, he should never have answered her. He should never have made any agreement at all.
She was like a Pandora's Box in Muggle mythology—the moment you engaged with her, all manner of misfortune came pouring out.
Never, Draco told himself, striding furiously toward the Forbidden Forest with Hermione's stumbling figure and wild hair ahead of him—never again. She was more dangerous than the Norwegian Ridgeback.
He would not speak to her again.
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Past Life, Part Two: The Ignored Granger
Time: Before the start of second year
Location: Diagon Alley, Flourish and Blotts
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Draco Malfoy had never, in his twelve years of existence, despised a girl the way he despised Hermione Granger.
At the end of first year, the examination results had come back. He was second. She was first.
Lucius had been icily unimpressed.
Draco had been devastated, though he'd sooner have endured another Leg-Locker Curse than shown it.
"A girl from a non-magical family has outperformed you in every subject," Lucius had said, in the cool, precise tone he used when deeply displeased, in the middle of Borgin and Burkes. "I would have thought you'd be ashamed."
Draco had felt the heat on his face for hours afterward.
After the dragon debacle, he had kept a careful and deliberate distance from Hermione Granger for the rest of the year. He'd said nothing to her, avoided her vicinity when possible, and was entirely certain this would be sufficient to prevent any further disasters. Draco Malfoy had never had to avoid anyone before in his life. It was a novel and thoroughly undignified experience.
Then summer came, and she beat him in the examinations without him anywhere near her. She'd done it from a distance. She'd attacked him from afar.
Standing on the upper floor of Flourish and Blotts, leaning against the railing, he found himself watching her move through the shop below—cheerful, oblivious, tracing the spines of books along the stairwell wall with her fingertips as though browsing her own personal collection. Not a flicker of the awe or uncertainty that a Muggle newcomer to the wizarding world ought to feel. She moved through it like someone perfectly at home, like she'd always been there.
It was maddening.
She was getting closer, ascending the stairs toward the upper floor where he was standing. "Ah—here it is," she said to herself happily, rising on her toes to reach a volume on a high shelf, entirely absorbed, without so much as glancing at him.
She hadn't noticed him.
This was unacceptable. Who, in the entirety of Diagon Alley, failed to notice Draco Malfoy?
He cleared his throat—deliberately, and not quietly—and leaned against the railing with an air of studied indifference, watching the crowd below. She would notice him now. And when she tried to speak to him, he would demonstrate the full force of Malfoy indifference and leave her in no doubt about what he thought of her.
Silence.
Then the sound of footsteps, retreating quietly down the stairs—as careful as someone not wishing to wake something dangerous.
He glanced over. She was gone.
She had walked away without saying a word.
Draco was absolutely furious.
Being top of the year was no excuse for simply ignoring him. Hermione Granger, that blind Muggle—she didn't even take him seriously!
His temper spiked further when he spotted Potter downstairs, grinning for a photograph with Lockhart, preening in front of the whole shop. The sight of it, and then the sight of Hermione laughing brightly at Potter's soot-covered face, so warm and unguarded and nothing at all like the wary look she'd given him on the stairs—it pushed him past the point of restraint.
He went downstairs and provoked Potter. It was petty, and he knew it, and he did it anyway.
And precisely as he'd expected, the moment the scene kicked off, Hermione appeared—books in her arms, pushing through the crowd, coming straight toward the commotion—and for a moment he had her full attention.
Then her father's voice. Then her expression shifted from indignation to something more careful.
Lucius had looked at her with his particular brand of cold authority and remarked that Draco had told him all about her. For some reason, this made Draco inexplicably tense. He hadn't—not the way those words implied. He hadn't sat at the dinner table going on about her. He had merely complained, extensively, about how annoying she was. There was a difference.
Lucius pressed on—her parents were Muggles, weren't they—and she went still.
Draco looked at her. The arrogance had dimmed. Through the crowd, he could make out a couple with brown hair, standing together, watching from a distance.
He had thought—distantly, meanly—that this would feel satisfying. That watching his father's cold glance subdue her would finally put this summer's humiliation to rest.
It didn't. He just felt empty.
And she was still watching Lucius with barely-suppressed defiance, chin up, jaw set. Even now—even after that look.
A reluctant, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Even he found Lucius's cold stare difficult to hold. She'd held it without flinching.
Then Mr. Weasley pushed past, the argument between the two fathers escalated with remarkable speed, and the entire shop dissolved into chaos. Books and dust and shouted hexes everywhere. Draco barely had time to register what he was doing before she stumbled toward him and he caught her—both arms, automatically, the same instinct that would catch something falling—
This was completely wrong. He'd been furious with her ten minutes ago. He was still furious with her.
But the books were coming down like a hailstorm and decades of dust were cascading off the top shelves, and his arms were apparently not consulting his principles, because they stayed where they were and he turned slightly, blocking the worst of it.
When it was over, she looked up at him. Her brown eyes were wide—startled, uncertain, something else he didn't have time to read. Then a heavy volume caught him squarely on the back of the head, and the room went bright and buzzing.
She reached up and tugged at his collar.
"Are you all right, Malfoy?"
"Shut up." He pulled free, rubbing the back of his head, vision swimming with stars. "I knew it. Every time I encounter you, something goes wrong."
He let her go, got to his feet amid the settling dust, and made himself walk away at a composed pace—pausing only to direct a suitably cutting remark at Potter, so that anyone watching would assume the whole scene had been deliberate—and then followed his father out of Flourish and Blotts at a dignified stride, without looking back.
He didn't look back.
A lump rose on the back of his head that evening. His mother was not pleased with Lucius. His ears rang until midnight. And somewhere in the ringing silence, very quietly and entirely without his permission, he could hear her voice.
Are you all right, Malfoy?
He was absolutely not thinking about her.
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Past Life, Part Three: The Sharp-Tongued Granger
Time: Start of second year onwards
Location: Hogwarts Express; the Quidditch pitch; the Slytherin common room
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Draco pushed open the door to the last compartment on the Hogwarts Express.
He found it occupied by exactly one person: Hermione Granger, sitting alone with a book.
"Harry and Ron aren't here," she said, without looking up. She had apparently been asked this enough times to have developed a reflexive answer.
"Where's Potter?" He'd wanted to find him—to show off the seven new Nimbus 2001s he'd arranged for the Slytherin team. He'd checked every compartment and found no trace of either of them, and had somehow ended up here.
"I don't know." She sighed, her gaze still on the page. "I'm worried, actually."
She was ignoring him. Still engrossed in that wretched Lockhart book.
"Did they finally get tired of you?" he said, drawing the words out. "Left you here on your own?"
He'd searched the whole train. Potter and Weasley had vanished entirely. As Potter's closest friend, she must know something—this was the only reason he continued standing in her doorway.
"Malfoy?" She glanced up at last, and a flicker of surprise crossed her face. "Did you need something?"
He chose to interpret the surprise as deference.
"They didn't miss the train, did they?" he said, after a moment's apparent consideration, letting a smug smile settle on his face. "If they're not at school on time, that's an expulsion."
"There's no rule like that—is there?" Her face went pale and she set down the book with a dull thud.
The sound nudged at something at the back of his memory. A bookshelf. A hailstorm of volumes. A bump on his head that had taken three days to go down.
His mother had applied a Soothing Charm and given Lucius a very cold look.
And in the ringing of his ears afterward—quietly, persistently—are you all right, Malfoy?
Of course he hadn't been all right. He'd been hit by an encyclopaedia. She had caused it. She caused everything.
He remembered his vow, standing in the corridor of the train with her confused face in front of him.
He left the compartment without another word.
He was extremely pleased with this handling of the situation.
After the start of term, she didn't speak to him at all—no glances, no attempts at conversation—and no peculiar rumour circulated Hogwarts regarding what had happened at Flourish and Blotts. Everything was fine. He'd handled it perfectly.
And then she appeared on the Quidditch pitch.
He had been showing off the new brooms—seven of them, gleaming in the morning light—and savouring the expressions on the Gryffindor team's faces. Then she spoke. In front of both teams. Loudly.
"At least no one on the Gryffindor team had to buy their way in. They were all selected on merit."
One sentence.
He retaliated with the worst word in his arsenal. He said it twice before the year was out—once on the pitch, once by Filch's petrified cat on the wall—and it worked, in the way that a blunt instrument works. It shocked. It wounded. Weasley's counter-jinx backfired magnificently and left him vomiting slugs on the grass, which was undeniably funny.
But she hadn't cried.
Both times, she'd looked at him with confusion and something that wasn't quite hurt—more like she was trying to work out what he'd actually meant—and then turned away. No tears. No visible devastation.
He'd wanted her to be devastated. He wasn't sure why it mattered so much.
That night, lying in his four-poster bed in the Slytherin dormitory, he couldn't sleep.
"At least no one on the Gryffindor team had to buy their way in. They were all selected on merit."
The words kept coming back—precise, cutting, infuriating.
She thought he was nothing but a Malfoy vault and a set of new brooms. She thought he had no ability of his own. She didn't think he deserved his place.
Eventually, in a state of agitation he would not have admitted to anyone, he got out of bed and went to the common room, where Goyle was still eating by the fire, methodically working through a bag of nut brittle.
"Tell me honestly—" He sat down. He would regret this conversation for some time afterward. "What did Granger mean by that? She was just jealous, wasn't she? It was just jealousy."
"Course," Goyle said, through a mouthful of brittle. "You're very talented. We all think so." He cracked open a new bag. "Doesn't bother you, does it?"
"Of course not! She's a—she doesn't deserve the attention." Draco said tightly.
Yes. His father had said it plainly. A Malfoy did not waste his energy on Mudbloods. That would be beneath him.
Back in bed, he repeated this to himself until he fell asleep.
From that night on, he told himself—daily, whenever necessary—that Hermione Granger was not worth thinking about. He believed it, mostly. He was very committed to it.
The Chamber of Secrets opened, and the months that followed were strange and grim. One morning he found her outside the library, petrified.
He had never told anyone that he was the one who found her.
He stood in the corridor and looked at her, and his legs stopped working properly. That face—always so animated, always moving, always holding some expression he was trying to decode—was completely still. Her colour was wrong. Her hair had no life in it. Her eyes, always so watchful and bright, were flat and empty.
This was not, in any way, the emotion he expected to feel.
It was not satisfaction.
It was panic, pure and cold—a tightening in his chest that spread outward and left him hollow and nauseous—and he turned and ran to find someone. Anyone.
So this is what Petrification looked like.
He had said those things—he hoped it was Granger, he'd said it to Goyle with a smug smile—and now he stood in the corridor and understood, quite suddenly and without any comfort at all, that he had never meant a word of it.
Some harsh words are simply weapons, used to wound without any real desire for the outcome they describe. He hadn't known the difference until the outcome became real.
He began visiting the greenhouses to check on the mandrakes. Several times a week. He watched them grow.
He occasionally went up on his broom at night and flew past the hospital wing window, which Madam Pomfrey kept shuttered to protect the Petrified patients. He told himself this was idle curiosity. He told himself many things.
He provoked Potter relentlessly. He needed somewhere to put the restlessness.
One day, word reached him that the mandrakes were nearly mature. He breathed out slowly, in the Slytherin common room, and nobody saw.
He didn't examine what the relief meant. He knew, but he didn't examine it.
Eventually, there was the Quidditch pitch. The training sessions. The accumulating weight of a single, merciless sentence that had apparently decided to live in his head permanently.
Flint had never been openly warm with him—had always been a little reserved, a little watchful, the way you were with someone who'd arrived with expensive equipment and no obvious need to earn anything. But Draco found himself training harder. Earlier. Longer. Not because anyone told him to—simply because he couldn't stand the thought that she might be right.
"I want you to know," Flint said, one evening after practice, dropping a hand on his shoulder, "that I put my neck out to get you on this team. And you've worked to earn it. I respect that." He paused. "You can call me Marcus."
Draco looked at him in surprise, and felt something he hadn't felt before—at least, not like this.
Not his father's approval, given freely because of his name. Not the deference of other Slytherin students, automatic and essentially meaningless.
This had been earned.
It was warm and uncomplicated, like sunlight on the Black Lake at the end of winter.
He understood her sentence now, at last. A little late.
Ironically, the thing that had driven him to genuinely work for his place on the team—the thing that had resulted in Marcus Flint calling him by his first name—was a single remark from a Muggle-born girl he'd called every unkind name he could think of, a girl who had probably forgotten saying it months ago.
He would never, ever admit this.
At the end of term, the mandrakes matured, the Petrified students were revived, and from across the entrance hall he watched her run to Harry, laughing. She looked warm and vivid and entirely herself, and she didn't glance in his direction once.
Of course she didn't. He had called her Mudblood in front of both Quidditch teams. They were, by every definition, enemies.
He told himself this was fine. He had always known this.
He turned away, and tried not to think about it, and succeeded imperfectly.
Absolutely not.