"Draco—are you sure you want to come with me to the kitchens to visit Winky?" Hermione glanced up at the clock on the wall—just past eight—and blinked at him in surprise.
"I am," Draco said briefly. He began tidying the library cards and stack of books on the table with efficient movements, heading toward the restricted section shelves.
"But—" Hermione took a chained black volume from his hand, checked the reference number, and bent to shelve it, asking carefully, "Didn't you once say you had no interest whatsoever in the rights of house-elves?"
"My position hasn't changed. I still think you should focus your considerable talents on things that make better use of them." He was balancing a precarious stack of books as he spoke. He bent again and let her take a few more from the top, nodding toward the next bookshelf. "Those three go on the second and third shelf from the bottom, over there."
"The rights of house-elves are absolutely worth fighting for, and I'm not giving up," she said proudly, moving quickly to the adjacent shelves and slotting the books into place with a few neat motions.
"Hermione. If you're truly at a loose end, why not let me teach you the Disillusionment Charm properly?" Draco's face appeared between the shelves with an expression that Hermione privately found identical to the one she used when waving dried fish in front of Crookshanks. "Or the Silencing Charm—don't tell me you're not interested." His tone was shamelessly persuasive. "I've found a few useful shortcuts for both of them."
"Thank you for the generous offer, but I'd like to work it out myself first," she said, giving him a dignified look through the gap in the shelves. "Independence in learning is important. Besides, I think you're the one who's bored, and you're looking for an excuse to spend the evening lecturing me."
"You're worth the time," Draco said, with lazy sincerity, shoving a dark red volume onto the topmost shelf. He was both fond of and mildly exasperated by her stubborn streak. "I don't give just anyone my time."
Hermione was not listening to what he was refuting. Her eyes had suddenly gone bright. "Speaking of which—you also make time to tutor Crabbe and Goyle in Quidditch, and to help them with their homework. Draco. Do you actually enjoy helping people?"
"Those are—those are completely different situations," Draco said, visibly thrown by the pair of wide, earnest eyes that had appeared between the bookshelves and were studying him without blinking.
"I'm not sure they are," she said, smiling. "Draco Malfoy, you help people. Whether or not you admit it."
"I have reservations," he said, looking away, the way he always did when she said something that happened to be accurate and that he had no intention of acknowledging.
Sensing that she'd caught him, she pressed on. "Since you don't actually believe in SPEW's approach—why did you agree to come to the kitchens tonight?"
"I wanted to go with you," he muttered, with considerably less composure than usual.
"All books shelved!" called Madam Pince from somewhere behind them, her voice accompanied by the sound of a feather duster being wielded with intent. "No dawdling—it's closing time!"
"Right away!" Hermione said quickly.
Under Madam Pince's watchful eye, they silently reshelved the last of the books and slipped out into the quiet, empty corridor.
But Hermione had no intention of letting the thought go. As they walked toward the stairs, she kept watching him—the deliberate blankness of his expression, the careful set of his shoulders.
Draco's position was genuinely contradictory.
He never truly stopped contradicting her—he frequently encouraged her to abandon SPEW and redirect her energy, offered to teach her spells she hadn't learned yet, delivered earnest practical objections to every aspect of her campaign for house-elf rights. And yet here he was, walking alongside her to the kitchens at eight o'clock in the evening, more reliably present than any of her actual SPEW members.
What was his reasoning? She looked at him sideways.
The corridor was dim, lit only by a few wall torches and a bright full moon through the tall windows, and she could see his expression quite clearly. He had his lips pressed together in his usual noncommittal way—but she could see what was in his eyes.
Not mockery. Not indifference. Something more like a vague, quiet worry.
"Well?" she said. "Why exactly did you insist on coming?"
"I'm hungry," Draco said, tilting his chin up with dignity. "I wanted something from the kitchens."
He was not going to admit that the thought of her wandering through Hogwarts at night, alone, made him uneasy. He was not going to admit that ever since he had realised Krum was actively looking for opportunities to approach her, he had been seized by an unreasonable desire to simply never leave her unaccompanied.
He had given her the Invisibility Cloak partly for exactly this reason—for the moments when a cloak could help. But there were always situations where it couldn't, and a public corridor at eight o'clock was one of them.
The thought of Krum actually having a conversation with her produced a feeling in him that was neither comfortable nor elegant, and that he had absolutely no intention of describing as jealousy.
He would, however, die before saying any of this aloud, because she would laugh at him.
"You're welcome to come," Hermione said, studying his profile with the expression of someone who has drawn her own conclusions. "I just want to warn you: Winky isn't doing well at all lately. She's developed some worrying habits. Please don't say anything that would upset her, or look at her as though the state she's in is beneath you. All right?"
"All right. How are your SPEW membership numbers coming along, by the way?" he asked conversationally, following her up the stairs with his hands in his pockets.
"Draco Malfoy, don't you dare—" Hermione turned on him instantly, her eyes narrowing.
He suppressed a smile. He was fairly certain that if he asked a second time, she would aim her wand at him and produce a flock of very determined birds, which she was alarmingly good at.
"Different question," he said, raising one hand in surrender. "How often do you come down here?"
He had noticed, not for the first time, that she was navigating the route to the portrait with no hesitation at all—not even a moment's pause to check a turn.
"Once or twice a week," Hermione said, as though she were describing a study session.
Draco raised an eyebrow.
Higher than expected.
He had spent enough time with Hermione Granger to know one thing with absolute certainty: she worked harder and read more widely than anyone else at Hogwarts, to a degree that most people couldn't perceive because she made it look natural. For her to carve regular time out of that schedule—time she could have spent studying—to come here, twice a week, said something about her that he was still in the process of understanding.
"That's—remarkable," he said, in a tone that aimed for teasing and landed somewhere more genuine. "I can't say I fully understand it. But I respect the commitment."
He found himself thinking, briefly, of something she had said once in the card room—the way her eyes had looked when she talked about helping those children at the orphanage. The same light, probably, that was in her eyes when she talked about house-elves.
She never did small things halfheartedly.
Hermione hadn't noticed his expression. She had simply moved ahead and was now standing in front of the painting of the bowl of fruit, scratching the painted pear with one finger. The pear giggled and the door swung open.
The moment they stepped inside, a row of enthusiastic house-elves appeared, bowing so deeply their noses nearly touched the floor, radiating their usual passionate hospitality.
"Sir, what can we get for you this evening?" they asked in unison.
"Miss Granger!" came the shrill chorus of greetings for Hermione, accompanied by apparently genuine delight. "Miss Granger, may we offer you some Avalanche Strawberry Cake?" "Miss Granger, some Butterbeer, perhaps?" "Miss Granger—"
"No, no, please—please don't bow—I'm not hungry—please just take me to see Winky—please, thank you!" Hermione cried out, flushing with a combination of guilt and helpless affection, navigating the sea of bowing little figures as best she could.
Draco stood very still.
Wait.
This was not what he had expected.
Shouldn't they be quietly retreating from her whenever she arrived? Shouldn't they be protecting themselves from her "toxic" ideas about wages and working conditions? Shouldn't they be treating her visits with polite but unmistakable wariness?
Why were they herding her toward the back of the kitchen like a beloved guest?
He caught the sleeve of the nearest house-elf. "What's going on? Aren't you... concerned about her visits?"
"Oh, sir! Quite the contrary!" The elf gave a full-body shudder of theatrical horror. "Miss Granger comes every week to share her ideas and spread—yes, sir—those terrible notions. Every week. It's dreadful!" The shudder intensified. "Absolutely dreadful, sir."
"Then why," Draco said, "are you welcoming her like she's returning from a holiday?"
He remembered the last time he'd observed Hermione in the kitchens—the way the elves had quietly shuffled away whenever she mentioned wages or days off, treating her words like something contagious.
"Serving every witch and wizard in this castle is our duty, sir," the elf said, drawing itself up with something that looked like professional pride. "Welcoming Miss Granger does not mean we agree with Miss Granger. We are firmly opposed to her ideas!" The elf bowed very deeply to him.
"And yet, despite your firm opposition, you welcome her with great enthusiasm every single time," Draco said.
"Miss Granger is always very gentle and patient with us, sir," the elf said, in a tone that had become unexpectedly quiet. Then, as though it had said too much, it looked rapidly at the floor. "In the end—sir—after so many visits—everyone became... accustomed to Miss Granger's unusual habits. We became, perhaps, immune. Somewhat. Sir."
Draco's mouth twitched.
Some degree of Hermione Granger's tireless, cheerful persistence—enough to gradually wear down even the most deeply ingrained resistance—was a perfectly reasonable outcome.
Then something occurred to him.
"You know her name," he said, suddenly suspicious. "You called her 'Miss Granger.' Do you know my name?"
The little elf looked up sharply, caught Draco's expression, and immediately bowed so low that its fingers touched the floor, trembling. "I—sir—I am so very sorry, sir—"
So they hadn't the faintest idea who he was. Draco's expression underwent a brief, involuntary spasm.
He had been visiting these kitchens since his first year at Hogwarts. Four years of acquaintance. And Hermione, who had been coming for a matter of months, was "Miss Granger"—known by name, greeted with warmth, and apparently considered a regular.
"Draco, come here—" Hermione called from the back room, her voice sharpening with alarm. "Something's wrong. Winky—what happened to you?"
Draco abandoned his line of enquiry and crossed the kitchen quickly. "What is it?"
Hermione stepped aside to show him.
Winky was in a dreadful state—worse than Draco had imagined, and he had not imagined anything particularly comfortable. Empty Butterbeer bottles were scattered across the floor around her. Her clothes were filthy, stained with something that looked like soup, and charred at the edges. She was slumped on a low stool in front of the hearth, staring at nothing.
"House-elves drink Butterbeer?" Draco said, staring. "And get drunk?"
"Obviously," Hermione said, with a sadness that made the matter-of-fact word sound very gentle. "They feel grief, just like anyone else. And when it becomes too much, they do what people do."
"I didn't think any house-elf could end up in this condition outside of Dobby," Draco said. "What's she grieving about? I wouldn't have thought anyone disliked working at Hogwarts."
"I don't think it's Hogwarts. She's worrying herself into the ground over what happened with the Crouch family." Hermione's expression was pained. "I've tried so many times to tell her—that none of what happened was her fault. But she can't let it go. She always thinks she failed somehow."
"You refused to help her once, didn't you? In Dumbledore's office," Draco said, remembering. "Does she hold that against you?"
"She was very upset with me at the time, yes. It took a while to earn her forgiveness," Hermione said. "But she did forgive me, eventually. She understood that in that situation, there was nothing anyone could have done. It was her master who had made the terrible mistakes—not her."
"So she understands this," Draco said flatly, "and she's still determined to punish herself for it?"
"Yes," Hermione said quietly. She moved forward, crouching a little, trying to reach the dazed little elf. "Winky—you forgave me when I couldn't help you. Why can't you forgive yourself?"
Winky paid no attention. She let out a slow, mournful belch, slid sideways off the stool, and collapsed onto the hearth rug, immediately beginning to snore at a volume entirely disproportionate to her size. The empty Butterbeer bottles rolled and clattered across the stone floor around her.
"This is mortifying!" Wendy came rushing over, curtsying repeatedly in Draco and Hermione's direction, her face rigid with shame. "I'm so sorry, sir! Miss Granger! So very sorry—"
Seven or eight elves appeared at Wendy's direction, moving with impressive speed to collect the empty bottles and produce an enormous chequered tablecloth, which they shook out with the air of professionals who had done this before.
"Tuck in the corners properly," Wendy hissed, directing the operation with a pointed finger, "so that sir and Miss Granger can't see her!"
"Wendy—" Hermione said immediately, her brow creasing with distress. "She's unhappy. Why are you hiding her instead of helping her?"
"I'm so sorry, Miss Granger," Wendy said, bowing low, "but a house-elf has no right to be unhappy when there is work to be done and a household to serve. She has shamed us."
"She hasn't shamed anyone. She's grieving!" Hermione said, the colour rising in her face. She stepped toward the tablecloth with clear intentions—the elves who had just tucked it so carefully all froze, caught between the competing imperatives of obeying their usual routine and not actively standing in the way of this particular regular—
Draco caught her arm.
"Stop," he said, quietly. "Look at their faces."
Hermione stopped. The house-elves had gone rigid with alarm, their expressions cycling through something that looked very much like genuine terror—as though they had just remembered that this was the dangerous Miss Granger, the one whose ideas could infect an entire kitchen.
"You're frightening them," Draco said. "And moving the tablecloth isn't going to change anything. The moment we leave—the moment we look away—they'll put it straight back."
Hermione stared at him, her expression pulled between anger and the sinking recognition that he was right.
"So we just leave her like that?" she said.
"We're not solving anything by staying," Draco said, his voice a degree or two softer. He turned to Wendy. "Wendy—once we've gone, let her out from under that tablecloth. If there are no visitors, there's no question of losing face. Yes?"
Wendy said nothing. She bowed, and the elves around her bowed slightly with her.
"Let's go, Hermione." He took her hand—she was still stiff with indignation—and refused the cakes that two elves pressed forward hopefully, and led her back through the underground hall toward the portrait.
They walked in silence for a moment.
"You refused the food," Hermione said at last. "You said you were hungry."
"I'm not, particularly," he said.
Hermione wasn't interested in the food. She looked at him directly and said, "Draco. Does covering something up make it go away? Are we really just going to let them treat Winky this way?"
Draco considered. Then, rather than answering her question directly, he said, "I thought Winky was the sort of house-elf who was always tidy and composed—the traditional kind, a working creature. I never imagined one could fall apart like that."
"House-elves have feelings," Hermione said, something quieter in her voice now. "I know I've said it before. But I really believe it. They've been bound and suppressed for so long that they don't know how to express what they feel. But it's still there. Every elf has joys and sorrows, just like us."
Something shifted in Draco's expression.
He found, for the first time, that he actually wanted to agree with her.
He had just watched a kitchen full of house-elves flush with proprietary shame when Winky misbehaved, puff up with collective pride when they described their hospitality, and go rigid with fear and indignation when Hermione approached their tablecloth. Those were emotions. Real ones. Not mannerisms, not the surface performance of obedient creatures—actual emotional responses to a situation.
And Wendy's words: a house-elf has no right to be unhappy when there is work to be done.
What about when there was no work to be done? Did they have the right then? Did the right exist at all?
He thought of Dobby—whom he had always privately categorised as an aberration, an unusually unstable house-elf who happened to express things that normal elves kept interior. But perhaps Dobby hadn't been abnormal. Perhaps Dobby had simply been honest.
Perhaps all of them were Dobby, underneath.
He looked at Hermione, on the edge of saying so.
Hermione was not looking at him. She was staring at the floor, her shoulders dropping slowly under the weight of something.
"They have feelings," she said, "and they spend all their time suppressing them. They seem so numb. And I don't know how to reach them." She exhaled. "I feel useless, Draco. These visits are a joke. Maybe you've been right all along—I'm wasting my time. I've spent months coming here and I've achieved nothing. I might even have made things worse. If we hadn't come tonight, they wouldn't have covered poor Winky up in front of us—they only did it because they were embarrassed in front of visitors—"
Draco had expected, in some private part of himself, to feel a kind of satisfaction when she finally said this. He had spent weeks carefully and consistently expressing scepticism about SPEW. He should feel vindicated.
He did not feel vindicated at all.
He looked at her profile—the sad, downcast angle of it—and felt something sharp and tight in his chest.
Before he had fully decided to speak, he was already speaking.
"Don't be so pessimistic. At the very least—they know your name."
Hermione blinked. "That's... normal enough, isn't it?"
"They don't know my name," he said. "Four years I've been visiting that kitchen. Four years. They call me 'sir.' They know you as 'Hermione Granger.'"
"That's just a name."
"It's not just a name." He held her hand more firmly. "Your visits haven't been pointless. They know you. They know who you are and what you believe in. They greet you warmly even when they disagree with everything you say. That's not nothing, Hermione. You haven't changed their minds yet—but you exist in their minds. That's a beginning."
Hermione went quiet.
Then, slowly, a small light came back into her eyes. "Do you mean that? You think what I'm doing has some value?"
"I didn't say that," Draco said quickly, feeling himself caught again between what he actually thought and what he was comfortable admitting. "I'm just—noting facts."
Hermione looked at him for a long moment. Then she squeezed his hand.
He held it as they walked, saying nothing further, and tried to hurry them both away from the portrait door and back toward proper corridors where the world made more reliable sense.
---
If the painted pear—which had a notoriously low threshold for laughter—could speak, it might have warned them as they stepped out: this is not an ideal moment to emerge.
As Draco led Hermione through the portrait door, he caught a flash of movement at the far end of the corridor.
A small Hufflepuff boy, humming loudly and skipping along with complete contentment, was approaching from the other direction.
"Draco—that student—" Hermione said, going very still.
There was no time to calculate alternatives. The portrait door was standing wide open behind them; the warm light of the underground kitchen was spilling out into the corridor; and the boy was approaching fast, oblivious, his off-key humming getting louder by the second.
The kitchens were not supposed to be discovered by random students—not now, not with Winky in her current state—the poor elves had enough to be ashamed of—
Hermione was thinking all of this at once and doing absolutely nothing, frozen in place.
Draco acted on pure instinct. He stepped forward, braced his arm against the portrait frame, and pressed Hermione gently but firmly back against the fruit painting—which swung quietly shut—creating the convincing impression of two students who had been standing in this corridor the whole time.
Hermione, caught completely off guard, found herself with her back against the stone wall and a pair of very dark grey eyes suddenly much closer to hers than expected. She went warm in a very specific way. The air between them did something embarrassing to her ability to think clearly.
The humming stopped.
The Hufflepuff boy had noticed them. He had, in fact, stopped in the middle of the corridor and was watching with unconcealed and cheerful interest, apparently prepared to remain there indefinitely.
Draco turned his head and fixed the child with a look of such refined menace that the boy's face went from interested to crimson in under a second.
"What are you looking at?" Draco said, with the pleasant coolness of someone who is not shouting and therefore is far more alarming than if he were. "Have you never seen two people having a conversation? Look at us again, and I'll Transfigure you into a garden slug and release you into the Black Lake."
The boy's mouth made a shape that did not produce any sound. He then covered his face with both hands and fled down the corridor at speed.
"Draco—" Hermione said, from somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder, her voice caught between reproach and suppressed laughter. "You didn't have to threaten him. He's a child."
"You don't understand Hufflepuffs," Draco said, straightening up and steering her toward the stairs. He sounded faintly traumatised. "They're different from other houses. When they encounter anything that looks like a romantic situation, their first response is not to move away discreetly. It's to stop, watch, and remember everything. Blaise told me several stories."
"Stories?" Hermione's attention sharpened immediately.
"Blaise and Pansy were once seen holding hands near the Forbidden Forest." Draco's expression, as he recounted this, was the studied neutrality of someone who has watched a disaster from a very comfortable distance. "A few days later, a novel began circulating around the school. Based on the two of them."
"A novel?" Hermione stared at him.
"A romance novel," Draco said. "Imaginatively titled Spring in the Cherry Tree. No names used. But the physical descriptions were precise enough that every Slytherin recognised the subjects immediately."
"How detailed was it?"
"Sufficiently," Draco said. He glanced at her. "The author goes by a number. '339.' No one's identified them. They've also written wizarding adventure stories, apparently; some people find those more compelling than the romance."
They had reached the portrait of the Fat Lady. Draco brushed the tangled hair gently back from her face, then bent to kiss her forehead.
"Goodnight, Hermione," he said softly.
"Goodnight," she said. "And—thank you. For earlier."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded, once, with the quiet simplicity of someone who is not going to make it into anything it isn't, and turned to go.
---
Hermione stood in the Gryffindor common room for a moment after the portrait swung closed behind her.
His voice was still doing something slightly inconvenient to her ability to focus. It kept surfacing in the back of her mind, not letting the other sounds in the room settle properly.
The other sounds in the room were, unfortunately, persistent. From somewhere in the dormitory, Winky's muffled, self-pitying sobs reached her through the stairwell—no, wait. That was Lavender, who appeared to be having some kind of feelings about something, with considerable vocal expression.
Hermione climbed the stairs. On Lavender's bedside table, a small, brightly covered novel was lying with its face up.
She recognised the title. Spring in the Cherry Tree.
She hesitated.
Lavender looked up from her pillow. "You actually want to read it?"
"I was just—curious," Hermione said, with not quite enough conviction.
"We all started out curious," Lavender said, and tossed it across without further comment. "You're fifteen, you have a boyfriend, it's perfectly appropriate reading for your stage of life."
"That's not the—it's not—" Hermione started, gave up, and took the book.
She sat down on her bed, drew the curtain, and opened to the title page.
A line of text greeted her: "I want to do to you what spring does on the cherry tree."
She turned several more pages, reading carefully.
After a few minutes, she turned several more.
After another few minutes, she closed the book, put it face-down on the blanket, and pressed both hands to her cheeks.
This was not, as she had vaguely assumed, a sweetly romantic story about young love and hand-holding. It was an extraordinarily detailed and technical account of—
She could not complete the sentence, even internally.
"Rather descriptive, isn't it?" Lavender said conversationally from the other side of the curtain.
"Where does this kind of thing even come from?" Hermione demanded, slightly muffled. "It's not in the library."
"Of course it isn't in the library!" Lavender said, with the particular satisfaction of someone imparting urgent and overdue information to a bewildered friend. "Hermione, you have missed so many things by spending your entire existence in the restricted section. Hogwarts has a thriving literary underground. It's always existed. There are always one or two imaginative students who write things anonymously and circulate them for free. Some of it is adventure and mystery; some of it is this."
Hermione absorbed this information in silence.
"Have you kissed your Slytherin boyfriend?" Lavender asked, with genuine curiosity. "Is it anything like the chapter three description?"
"Kissing," Hermione murmured, in what was meant to be a tone of vague, academic disinterest. "I wouldn't... particularly... comment on that."
Every single time. Every single time it happened, her heart took approximately forty-five seconds to return to normal, and thinking about it made it worse. She absolutely could not discuss this with Lavender Brown.
There were, however, one or two techniques in chapter four that she had not previously considered—
"You're very quiet," Lavender observed, from the other side of the curtain.
"I'm thinking," Hermione said, with perfect truthfulness.
Lavender sighed. She had drawn her own conclusions—cold Slytherin boy, probably still at the hand-holding stage, probably terribly boring—and drifted back to her own thoughts about warm, freckled, good-natured Gryffindor boys who mentioned your name to their friends.
Between the curtains, Hermione turned very carefully back to chapter four.