Hermione Asked Draco to the Ball | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

One sentence spoken in front of a thousand silent witnesses. Pride lit the match. Snow caught the flame. Between a Gryffindor's reckless courage and a Slytherin's careful cruelty, something neither of them named began to breathe. Listen closely. Our story begins in this moment. The great hall smelled of roast pheasant and beeswax that evening. The enchanted ceiling stre with the last bruised purple of a December dusk. Candles drifted overhead like small patient suns and the long tables ran the length of the room in four parallel rivers of noise. Hermayan sat with her back very straight, her plate barely touched. a copy of Advanced Rune Translation propped against the water jug because she had learned over six and a half years that a book at the dinner table discouraged the kinds of conversations she did not wish to have. It did not discourage poverty and lavender. They had been circling the subject of the ule ball. No, not the Ule ball that had been years ago. This was its successor, a mid-winter dance hastily organized by Professor McGonagal to lift the mood of a castle still bruised from the previous spring. They had been circling it for the better part of 20 minutes, with the sort of patient cruelty Hermione recognized as girlhood at its most refined. Honestly, Hermione, Lavender said, leaning forward, her chin propped on one bangled wrist. You can't possibly mean you haven't been asked. I haven't said I haven't been asked, Hermione answered without looking up. I've said I'm not interested in discussing it. Which is what people say, Poverty murmured when they haven't been asked. A small hot pulse moved through Hermione's jaw. She turned a page of her book that she had not finished reading. "Leave her alone," Jinny said from across the table. But there was a glitter of amusement in her eyes that did not quite match the words. Ron had gone the color of beetroot at the first mention of the dance and was now studiously dismembering a roast potato. Harry beside him was pretending to be invisible, a skill Hermione had never quite mastered and which she rather envied him for at this moment. It's only, Lavender went on, sliding her gaze sideways to poverty in the way they had, that conspiratorial flicker that you always say you would go alone or with Harry or with Crumb if he wrote, but you never actually do anything daring. You'd never ask anyone. Not really. I might. You wouldn't. Poverty smiled. It was a very pretty smile, and it had teeth. You're brave about books, Hermione. You're brave about marks. You're not brave about this. The words landed with more precision than they ought to have. Hermione closed her book carefully, finger marking the page, and set it down. I could ask anyone in this hall, she said, and her voice was quieter than she had meant it to be, which was somehow worse than if it had been loud. Anyone? Lavender's eyebrows climbed. Anyone at all? Anyone? Go on, then. Poverty's eyes glittered. Not Harry. Not Ron. Not someone safe. Someone Oh, I don't know. Her gaze swept the hall, lazy and theatrical, and stopped. Someone like Draco Malfoy. There was a beat. Then Lavender laughed, the kind of breathless, delighted laugh that meant she thought she had won. Hermione should have laughed, too. That was what was meant to happen. The proper response was a snort, a roll of the eyes, a dry remark about preferring to drown herself in the lake. Ron would have laughed, freed from his beetroot. Harry would have looked up and grinned. The whole little play would have ended, and Lavender and Parvati would have moved on to discussing the merits of curling charms versus straightening ones, and Hermayan would have gone back to her runes. Instead, something in her chest went very still. It was not anger exactly, though there was anger in it. It was the cold, narrow recognition that they had been watching her all term. watching her be sensible, be reliable, be the friend who carried the homework and did not complain, and had decided on the strength of all that visible competence, that she was a coward, that her steadiness was timidity in a more flattering coat, that she would do the bold thing in a library, and never the bold thing in a room full of people. She set down her napkin. "Hermayan," said Jinny sharply, as if she had felt the shift in the air. "Don't." But Hermione was already standing. The bench scraped against the flag stones with a small, mortifying sound, the kind of noise that in any other moment would have been swallowed up by the general clatter of cutlery. Tonight it seemed to travel. Heads at the Gryffindor table began almost lazily to turn. Sheamus paused with his goblet halfway to his mouth. Neville's fork hovered over his plate. Lavender's laughter snagged in her throat and stopped. Hermione stepped out from behind the table. She would think later that she had no idea what she was going to do until her feet had already begun to do it. Her body had decided ahead of her mind the way it sometimes did in duels, a clean, instinctive movement that her conscious self only caught up with halfway through. The flag stones were cold even through the soles of her shoes. The candles overhead were unbearably bright. She felt with a peculiar distant clarity the weight of her hair against her shoulder blades and the small pinch of her left sleeve where the cuff button had come loose that morning, and she had not had time to mend it. The great hall was beginning to notice. It was a quiet thing at first, a thinning of conversation, a fork set down, a Hufflepuff prefect turning her head. Then it spread, the way ripples spread on a still pond when a stone is dropped into the center. By the time Hermione had walked four paces past the end of the Gryffindor table, the Ravenclaws had stopped talking altogether. By the time she had walked six, a third of the hall had turned to watch. By the time she crossed the open space between Gryffindor and Slytherin, that small no man's stretch of stone that no one ever lingered on. There was no sound at all, but the soft hiss of candle wax and her own footsteps, which seemed to her in the swelling hush, absurdly, mortifyingly loud. She did not look at the staff table. She did not let herself. The Slytherin table was a long dark gleam of green and silver, and at its center, because of course at its center sat Draco Malfoy. He was holding a glass of pumpkin juice and saying something low to blaze Zabini, who was laughing into his sleeve. His hair caught the candle light like a coin. He had not seen her yet. The boy beside him, Theodore not, had and had gone very still, and Hermione watched the stillness travel along the bench, a small ripple of attention, until it reached Draco, and Draco, sensing it, turned his head. His eyes found her. For one strange, suspended fraction of a second, his face did nothing at all. It was the face he wore in lessons when he was about to be cruel and was choosing his weapon. the small considering arrangement of the mouth, the slight narrowing at the corners of the eyes. And then, because she had not stopped walking, because she was still coming toward him with her chin lifted and her hands at her sides and her stupid loose cuff brushing her wrist, the considering look slipped just a little and was replaced by something less practiced. something that might have been in a more honest light surprise. She stopped opposite him. The Slytherin table was between them. She put her fingertips very lightly on its edge. The silence in the great hall was now total. Even the candles seemed to be holding their breath. "Malfoy," she said. Her voice did not shake. She was glad of that, distantly, the way one is glad of a small mercy in a disaster. Her heart was doing something violent against her ribs, but her voice was even, almost cool, almost as if she had rehearsed it. "Granger," he set his glass down very precisely. The small clink of crystal on wood was the loudest thing in the world. "Did you take a wrong turning?" No. A muscle moved in his jaw. He glanced only briefly past her shoulder, taking in the angle of the hall, the staff table behind her. The fact that every face he could see was turned toward this small piece of stone. Pansy Parkinson, two seats down, had gone the color of old milk. Then I confess, he said slowly, to a certain curiosity. She drew a breath. It was not as deep as she would have liked. I came to ask you something. By all means. His voice was silk over a blade. Ask. She did not look at the Gryffindor table. She did not look at Harry. She did not look at Ron, whose silence she could feel behind her like a held breath. She looked only at Draco Malfoy, at the small careful arrangement of his face, at the candle light catching in the pale fall of his hair. And she said with the same even voice she had been using all year to recite arithmy theorems. Will you go to the midwinter ball with me? For perhaps three heartbeats, no one moved. She watched the words land. She watched them travel across his face. Disbelief first, a brief flash of it that he was not quick enough to hide, and then something else sharper, more calculating. A swift, narrow flicker of his eyes passed her again, taking in the hall, the staff, the row of Gryffindors behind her gone rigid as stone. She saw him assess. She saw him do the arithmetic of the moment with the same cold neatness he brought to everything. And she understood with a small sick lurch that he had already decided what his answer would be before she had finished asking. He stood up. He did it slowly, unhurried, with the deliberate elegance of someone who knew that the entire hall was watching and intended to make use of that fact. He braced his fingertips against the table as he rose. The candles caught the silver fastening at his throat. He was taller than she remembered. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten what it was like to stand opposite him without a desk between them. Granger," he said, and now his voice carried, not raised exactly, but pitched with a clean, deliberate clarity, that the hall's acoustics caught and lifted and threw to every corner of the room, so that the Hufflepuffs at the far end heard it as plainly as the Slytherins at his elbow. I would be delighted. A small, audible gasp went up somewhere behind her. lavender perhaps. She could not tell. His eyes had not left hers. There was something in them beneath the public performance, beneath the cold theater of the moment. Some narrow surprised glitter that he had not entirely meant to show, and her fingertips on the edge of the table had gone very suddenly numb. He inclined his head, the smallest courtly fraction of a bow, and said more quietly, "Only for her." "Saturday 8:00. Do try not to be late." And then, before she could find a single word to answer with, before her tongue had unstuck itself from the roof of her mouth, before the halls held breath had quite finished breaking into the roar she could already feel building behind her like a wave. He sat down, picked up his glass of pumpkin juice, and very calmly took a sip. The roar broke before she had taken three steps. It came in fragments at first, a single bark of laughter from somewhere down the slithering table, sharp and incredulous. The wet clatter of someone's goblet tipping over at Ravenclaw, a chair leg dragged sideways with a screech. Then the sound rose, the way wind rises in the eaves of an old house before a storm, gathering in pitch and volume until it filled the great vaulted room from flagstone to enchanted ceiling. Hermayan did not hear most of it. She heard very distinctly the sound of her own shoes on the stone as she walked back to the Gryffindor table. She heard the small, dry tick of a candle guttering overhead. She heard more loudly than anything else the steady, mortifying drum of her own pulse behind her ears. She did not sit down. She picked up her book. She picked up her satchel. She folded her napkin with the kind of precise, terrible care she usually reserved for examination scripts. And she set it down beside her untouched plate. And she did not look at Lavender or at Parvati or at Ron whose mouth had fallen open and remained that way like a door no one had thought to close. Hermione Jinny began. Not now. She walked out of the great hall. She did it at the same pace she had walked in, neither slow enough to seem cowed nor quick enough to seem to be fleeing, and she felt as she crossed the threshold, and the heavy oak doors closed behind her, the noise of the hall cut off cleanly, as if a curtain had fallen. The entrance hall was dim and cold, the torches burning low in their brackets. Her breath came out very fast and very quiet. She walked. She did not know for a little while where she was going. Her feet took her past the marble staircase, past the door to the dungeons, which she gave a wide birth on principle, on instinct, up the first flight of stairs, then the second, until the corridors thinned of people, and she was walking through the kind of silence one only found in the upper reaches of the castle after dark. She stopped at last in a narrow al cove behind a tapestry of three blindfolded sphinxes, pressed her back against the cold stone, and shut her eyes. What, she thought, have I done? It was not strictly speaking a question. It was more in the nature of a small interior cry, the kind one makes when one has dropped something fragile on a flagstone floor and is watching helplessly the slow scatter of pieces. She had asked Draco Malfoy to a ball. She had asked Draco Malfoy to a ball in front of the entire school. She had asked Draco Malfoy to a ball in front of the entire school. and he had said yes. The third fact was somehow by far the worst. She had been prepared, half prepared in the cold blur of the moment for him to laugh. She had been prepared even for him to be cruel. She had a hundred answers ready for cruelty sharpened over years of practice. What she had not been prepared for was the small, careful courtesy with which he had risen to his feet, or the unhurried elegance with which he had said delighted, or the fractional bow of his head, as he had told her very quietly. Do try not to be late. He had taken her dare, and he had turned it into a wound for Harry, for the Gryffindors, for Ron most of all. And yet in the doing of it, he had not been crude. He had not snarled. He had not sneered. He had been, of all impossible things, gallant, which was somehow worse than any of the alternatives, because gallantry could not be answered with a hex. She pressed her palms flat against the cold stone behind her and tried to breathe. The tapestry rustled. Footsteps. She stiffened. Hermione. Jinny. Hermione opened her eyes. Jinny stood at the edge of the al cove with her arms folded, her red hair loose over her shoulders, her expression a careful balance of concern and something rather closer to admiration than Hermione felt she deserved. "Are you out of your mind?" Jinny said. "Possibly. Possibly." "I don't know." Yes, probably. Hermione pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and took a breath that did not entirely succeed in being steady. Jinny, what have I done? You asked Draco Malfoy to a ball. Yes, thank you. I had noticed in front of the entire school. Jinny. And he said, Yes, Jinny. Jinny was quiet for a moment. Then she came into the alcove and sat down on the small stone bench beneath the tapestry, drawing her knees up under her skirt. The torch light caught the freckles across the bridge of her nose. Ron is going to combust, she said mildly. I should warn you. He's still sitting at the table. He hasn't moved. I think Sheamus is fanning him with a napkin. Oh god. Harry's pretending it didn't happen, which is what Harry does when he has no idea what to do. So that's normal. Lavender has gone the color of a beetroot and poverty looks as though she's swallowed a bludger. So in terms of immediate consequences, I'd say you've done quite well. Hermione made a small sound that was not technically a laugh. Jinny, he said yes. I noticed that, too. Why did he say yes? Jinny considered her for a long, careful moment, the way she sometimes did, the way that reminded her with a small, unpleasant lurch that Jinny Weasley was a great deal more observant than she allowed most people to know. To hurt Harry, she said finally. Obviously, obviously. And maybe Ron. Yes. And maybe Jinny tilted her head. Maybe because he didn't quite know how to say no in front of all those people without looking like he'd lost something. Hermione frowned. Lost what? "I don't know," Jinny said. "I'm not in his head," thanked Merlin. "But you walked over there, Hermione. You walked across the entire hall with everyone watching and you put your hand on his table and you looked him in the face and you asked. And I don't think Draco Malfoy has had very much practice at being asked anything by anyone who wasn't afraid of him. Hermayan did not have an answer to that. She looked down at her hands. The cuff button of her left sleeve had finally given up its slow allday surrender and was now hanging by a single pitiful thread of black cotton. She picked at it. I have to go to a ball with him. She said, "Yes, Saturday." "Yes, in 4 days." "Yes, Jinny. Yes, I haven't got anything to wear." Janine made a small choked sound that was not quite a laugh. "All right," she said, rising and dusting off her skirt with brisk practicality. "First things first. We're going to Madame Malcin's tomorrow. Don't argue. Second, you're going to bed because if you go back to the common room tonight, Ron will say something he can't take back, and you'll say something you can't take back, and the whole castle will be unbearable for a week. Third, for tonight, you do not have to know what to do. You only have to get through to morning. All right? Hermione nodded. She did not in that moment trust herself to speak. Jinny held out a hand. After a small hesitation, Hermayan took it and let herself be led out of the al cove and along the dim corridor toward the long way round to Gryffindor Tower, the way that did not pass the great hall or the entrance to the dungeons or any place where she might be required to be a person with answers. Far below them, in a stonewalled common room lit by the cold green glow of the lake, Draco Malfoy was not having an easier evening. He was sitting in the highbacked leather armchair he preferred, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, a book open on his lap that he had not turned a page of in 12 minutes. The fire muttered in the great. Across from him, Bla1 Zabini lay sprawled along the Chesterfield, a glass of something amber in one hand, and watched him with a patient faintly entertained attention of a cat watching a beetle decide which way to run. "You said yes," Blae observed, not for the first time. I am aware to Granger. I am also aware of that in front of everyone. Blaze Draco turned a page he had not read. If you intend to recite the events of the evening back to me at intervals all night, I shall be obliged to hex you. You won't hex me. Try me. You won't. Because if you do, Pansy will come over and want to know what I said to upset you, and then you'll have to talk to Pansy, and we both know you would rather have your teeth pulled." This was unfortunately true. "Draco shut the book with a small, precise snap and laid it on the side table." "It was a dare," Bla said more thoughtfully now, swirling his glass. You realize that, don't you? The whole walk across the hall, the way her friends were watching her, that was a dare. Yes. And you took it? Yes. To humiliate Potter. Draco did not answer. He was thinking instead of the moment her fingertips had left the edge of his table. She had said her peace, and he had said his, and she had turned to walk away, and he had, for some inexplicable idiotic reason, looked not at her face, at her hand. at the small, neat hand that had rested so lightly on the wood opposite him, and at the cuff above it, at the loose button hanging on its single thread of black cotton, at the small, ordinary, mortifyingly human detail of a girl who had crossed an entire silent hall to ask him a question, and had not had time that morning to mend her sleeve. It had done something to him. That button. Something inconvenient. Something he had no intention of examining. Draco, you're not listening to me. I am listening to you with every fiber of my being, Draco said. And finding it a profoundly enriching experience. Bla1 snorted. He set his glass down on the low table between them and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his dark eyes steady. "You did it to wound Potter," he said. "Fine, I understand that. Everyone in the hall understood that." But you have four days, my friend, between now and Saturday night, in which you are going to have to be in the company of Hermayan Granger for the better part of an evening in dress robes on a dance floor with the entire school still watching. And if you imagine that Potter is going to be the only person you wound by the end of it, he stopped. He looked at Draco's face. Something he saw there made him close his mouth. "What?" Draco said very evenly. "Nothing, Blae." "Nothing," I said. Bl picked up his glass again and tipped its contents back. Only try when the night comes not to be cleverer than you are." He rose, clapped Draco lightly on the shoulder with the easy carelessness of an old friendship that had survived a great deal and left him alone by the fire. Draco did not move for a long time after he had gone. The fire muttered. A log shifted in the great with a small soft collapse. Somewhere overhead in the cold green mirc of the lake beyond the windows, something pale and slow drifted past the glass. He stared into the flames and tried, with the steady discipline of someone who had spent his entire life mastering the art to think of absolutely nothing at all. He thought instead of a loose button hanging by a black thread. He thought of a steady voice that had not shaken when it ought to have shaken. He thought of Saturday 8:00. Do try not to be late. and with a small irritable movement he reached up and unfastened the silver clasp at his own throat which had been pressing against the hollow there all evening and which he had not until this moment had the presence of mind too. Morning came gray and uncertain. A thin sleet had fallen overnight, and the windows of Gryffindor Tower were veined with frost in patterns like the spread fingers of some delicate sleeping hand. Hermione woke before the others, as she always did, but for the first time in a great many mornings, she did not immediately reach for the book on her nightstand. She lay very still in the half dark, the curtains of her fore poster drawn close, and listened to the small, unfamiliar weight of her own dread. She had not, in the end, gone down to breakfast. She had asked Jinny to bring her a piece of toast and a cup of tea from the great hall, which Jinny had done without comment, and which Hermione had eaten in the dormatory with the curtains drawn and advanced room translation open across her knees. She had read the same paragraph four times. She had then closed the book, set it aside, and stared at the ceiling of her fore poster for a very long time. She could not, of course, hide forever. She had transfiguration at 9. She had to walk through corridors. She had to sit in classrooms. She had to be for the next several days a girl who had done what she had done in front of everyone who had seen her do it. And no amount of toast eaten in bed was going to alter that fact. She dressed with unusual care. Not, she told herself firmly, because of anything to do with anyone in particular, only because she felt obscurely that if her cuffs were straight, and her tie was properly knotted, and her hair was as tidy as her hair was ever capable of being, she might at least look less like a person who had recently set fire to her own life. She mended the loose button before she went down. The common room was full when she descended. It went quiet when she appeared on the stairs. Not entirely. There was no theatrical hush, no collective indrawn breath, but a small distinct dip in the volume of conversation the way a room dips when someone notable enters. and then a self-conscious resumption of noise at a slightly higher pitch than before. Hermione felt three dozen eyes flicker toward her and then very quickly away. Someone near the fire. Sheamus, she thought, coughed. Harry was sitting in his usual armchair by the window. He looked up. His face did the small, careful thing it did when he was trying not to make a situation worse. Beside him, Ron was bent over a piece of parchment that was, even from this distance, very obviously blank, and he did not lift his head when she came down the last step. "Hermione," Harry said. "Harry," she crossed to them. She would not. She had decided in the cold, gray hour before dawn, behave as though she had done anything wrong. She had not done anything wrong. She had made an extremely public and possibly catastrophic decision, but she had not done anything wrong, and she would not creep about the tower as if she had. Morning, she said. Ron did not look up. Ron, the quills scratched. It made on the blank parchment no marks at all. "Ron, please." He raised his head at last. His ears were the color of a winter sunset. His eyes, when they met hers, were not angry exactly. Ron's anger was a hot, simple weather, easily read. There was something more complicated. And Hermione understood with a small unpleasant pang that what she was looking at was hurt. Plain undefended hurt of the sort he was not yet quick enough to hide. You all right? She asked more quietly. Fine, Ron. I said I'm fine, Hermione. You're not. Well, you didn't ask before you did it, did you? he said, and the bitterness in his voice was not quite as well controlled as he had perhaps meant it to be. So, I don't see why I'd start being asked about anything now. She drew a slow breath. Ron, it wasn't Don't. He set the quill down. Don't tell me what it wasn't. I know what it wasn't. It wasn't about me. Fine. Brilliant. I just Malfoy Hermione. His ears went a shade darker. Malfoy, of all the I know. Do you, though? She did not answer. She was not at that moment entirely sure she did. Harry, with the small mercy he was capable of when he chose to exert it, stood up. Transfiguration, he said. Come on, we'll be late. Ron got up too, slowly, gathering his books with more force than was strictly necessary, and the three of them went out of the portrait hole in a silence that was, all things considered, only just bearable. The corridor outside was already filling. Hermione had braced herself for staring. She had not perhaps braced herself sufficiently. Heads turned all along the length of the gallery as they passed. A knot of fourthyear Hufflepuffs went abruptly silent, then erupted into whispers the moment her back was turned. A small brassy laugh from a Slytherin girl she did not know hit the back of her neck like a throne pebble. Ron walked with his shoulders up around his ears. Harry on her other side kept his eyes fixed steadily forward in the manner of a man crossing a battlefield. It was on the whole exactly as bad as she had feared, and the comfort of having precisely calibrated her own dread was not in the moment as much of a comfort as she might have hoped. They were almost at the transfiguration corridor when she saw him. He was leaning with apparent idleness against the stone arch of the doorway opposite McGonagal's classroom. His arms folded, his ankles crossed, his head tilted at the particular careless angle he assumed when he wished to suggest that he had been standing there for hours and could not frankly have been less interested in anything that was about to happen. Bla1 Zabini was not with him. Crab and Goyle were not with him. He was conspicuously and not by accident alone. He was watching the corridor. She knew the instant she saw him that he was watching for her. Her step did not falter. She had spent the last 12 hours preparing for the possibility of seeing him, and she had decided in the small gray hour of the morning that the only acceptable strategy was to behave as though nothing in the world had changed. She would walk past him. She would not meet his eye. She would file into the classroom and sit in her usual seat. and Professor McGonagal would set them all to work on some difficult thing, and the morning would proceed. This plan survived approximately four more paces. Granger, his voice was quiet. It was pitched with the same precision he had used the night before, to carry to exactly the distance he wished it to carry, and no further. Several heads in the corridor turned. Ron stiffened beside her. Hermione stopped. She turned her head. He pushed off the arch with the lazy economy of a cat dismounting a window sill and came toward her, not quickly, not in any way that could have been construed as eagerness. And the small crowd in the corridor parted for him as crowds had always parted for Draco Malfoy, half from deference and half from instinct. A word, he said. We have transfiguration. 3 minutes. His eyes flicked briefly to Ron. Surely your honor guard can spare you for three minutes. Ron made a sound at the back of his throat. Harry put a hand lightly on Ron's sleeve. It's fine, Hermione said without taking her eyes from Draco's. Go in. I'll be there. Hermione, go, Ron. Harry, with the same merciful tact he had shown in the common room, took Ron by the elbow and steered him through the classroom door. Ron went. He did not go gracefully, but he went. The corridor was not empty. Hermione was aware, in the way one is aware of weather, of perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes that had not gone into the classroom, and had no intention of going in until they had seen what happened next. "Not here," Draco said very quietly. She looked at him. There is an empty classroom, he said, three doors down. I am going to walk into it. You may follow me or not, as you prefer. If you do not, I will assume that last night's performance was a piece of theater you have already begun to regret, and I will arrange the remainder of the week accordingly." He did not wait for her answer. He turned and walked. She stood for the space of perhaps two heartbeats with her books pressed against her chest. Then, because her pride had not yet finished doing the thing it had begun the previous evening at dinner, she followed. The classroom was a disused one. An old astronomy supply room by the look of it. The high windows fogged with cold and a single sagging armillery sphere tilted in the corner under a sheet of gray dust. He shut the door behind her. The latch clicked. The sounds of the corridor dropped away to nothing. He turned. He did not at first speak. He looked at her for a long moment in the thin gray light from the high windows, and she had the distinct unsettling impression that he was reassessing her. that whatever conclusions he had drawn the previous evening about who she was and what she had been doing, he was now revising them in the light of the morning with the small frown of a craftsman who has found that his measurements were a fraction off. Why? He said, did you do it? That isn't your concern. It rather is, actually. No, she said it rather isn't. I asked you a question. You answered it. Whatever my reasons were for asking, they are mine. A muscle moved at the corner of his jaw. Granger. He took a small, deliberate step toward her. Not threatening. She had been threatened by him often enough to know what that looked like. And this was not it. Only closer. The gray light caught the silver fastening at his throat. If this is a prank, I should like to know it now, before Saturday. Before I walk into that hall in dress robes and find your entire house laughing into their sleeves. It isn't a prank. No. No. Then what is it? She opened her mouth. She closed it. She was for a moment alarmingly unsure of her answer. It was a dare, she said at last, because she had decided in the cold hour before dawn that she would not lie to him about this. Lying would have required a kind of energy she did not currently possess. Poverty and lavender said I wouldn't dare ask anyone but Harry or Crumb. They named you specifically. I reacted badly. He absorbed this in silence. His face did not change. "A dare," he repeated at length. "Yes, you crossed the entire great hall," he said slowly in front of a thousand people and asked Draco Malfoy to a ball on a dare. "Yes, Granger." "What that is," he said, and there was very faintly the ghost of something almost like amusement at the corner of his mouth. there and gone again so quickly she might have imagined it. The single most Gryffindor thing I have ever heard in my life. She did not know what to say to that. He took another small step. The dust moes turned slowly in the gray light between them. He was, she realized with a slight unsteadiness she did not care to name, standing rather close. And what? he said very quietly ow. Did you think I would say? I thought you would laugh. Ah, I thought you would say something cruel. I did not, she said, and she was annoyed to hear that her voice was not entirely steady. Think you would say yes. He was quiet for a long moment then. and she would think about this later in the dark, more often than she would have liked. He reached out slowly and with one gloved fingertip touched the cuff of her left sleeve, the mended cuff, the one she had stitched that morning by the cold window before going down. He did not say anything about it. He did not in any visible way acknowledge what he was doing. He only for the smallest fraction of a second let his finger rest against the new black thread of the button and then he let his hand drop. Saturday, he said 8:00, do not be late. He turned and walked out of the classroom. The latch clicked shut behind him, and Hermione Granger stood alone in the gray light, her cuff burning where he had not in any way that could be reasonably described. Actually, by Thursday, Diagon Alley wore the slow, pale hush of a town easing itself toward winter. Sleet had stopped falling some hour before noon, but the cobbles were still slick with it, and the windows of the shops along the curve of the street held a soft amber glow that did not quite reach the pavement. The crowds were thinner than they would be by the weekend. The Christmas wreaths above the doorways stirred only a little in the cold, damp air. Jinny had her arm linked firmly through Hermiones, less out of affection than out of strategic containment. She had been talking in a calm, practical, faintly bossy voice for the better part of three quarters of an hour, and Hermione had been letting the words pass over her the way one lets weather pass over a window. And if Madame Malcin tries to put you in anything that looks like a curtain we are leaving Hermayan, I mean it. We are walking straight out and going to Twilit and Tattings, even if it costs three times as much because you cannot you cannot be photographed in something that looks like it was salvaged from somebody's drawing room. Are you listening to me? Yes, you are not. I am curtains. No curtains. Jinny gave her a sidelong look, half exasperated, half something gentler than exasperation. You haven't slept properly, have you? I've slept perfectly well. Hermione, I have slept the precise amount one would expect a person to sleep given the circumstances, and I would consider it a very great kindness if you did not pursue the subject further. Jinny did not pursue the subject further. She did, however, tighten her grip on Hermione's elbow, and steer her with brisk decision through the belljangling door of Madame Malcin's robes for all occasions, and into a warm perfumed gloom that smelt faintly of camper and lavender water, and the particular dry floral hush of very old silk. The shop was almost empty. A witch in plum colored robes was at the counter being measured for what appeared to be a traveling cloak. An elderly wizard was examining a rack of waste coats with the slow attention of a man who has nowhere in particular to be. Madame Malin herself appeared from her back room at the chime of the bell, took one look at Jinn's face, and arrived at a correct assessment of the situation in approximately two and a half seconds. The Hogwarts Midwinter ball, I take it, she said briskly. Saturday. Yes, we have been preparing for the rush. This way, deers. This way. Hermayan allowed herself to be led to a small dis ringed with mirrors, where she was deposited like a particularly unwilling parcel. She closed her eyes briefly. Madame Malin's enchanted measuring tape sprang into the air and began to fly around her shoulders with the inquisitive enthusiasm of a small, persistent insect. Now, Madame Melin said, surveying her with the cool, dispassionate eye of a craftswoman. We have several options. Are we thinking pale? Are we thinking dark? What is the gentleman wearing? I Hermione blinked. I haven't the slightest idea. No, we have not, she said with considerable dignity, discussed it. Madame Malcin and Jinny exchanged a look that was even in Hermione's peripheral vision eloquent. "All right," Madame Malcin said briskly tactful. "We shall make a decision on aesthetic principle alone then, and the gentleman, whoever he is, shall simply have to harmonize." Geneva, fetch me the bolt of plum silk from the rear left rack, would you dear? And the dove gray velvet, and yes, the cream just to consider. We shall narrow it down. The fabrics arrived in Jinnie's arms in a soft shifting pile, and Madame Malin began to drape and pin with the absent-minded efficiency of someone who had been doing this since before either of them had been born. The plum silk was held against Hermione's collarbone, then dismissed. The dove gray velvet was tried, considered, set aside. The cream went nowhere at all. A length of midnight blue crepe was produced from somewhere, draped and rejected with a small, dissatisfied click of Madame Malin's tongue. Then she pulled down from a high shelf, a bolt of something that caught the lamp light in a slow secret shimmer. It was the color of a bruised plum at the moment before it darkens to black. A deep soft almost purple that held a glimmer of red where the light caught it and a hint of charcoal where the light did not. It was not quite a silk. It was not quite a velvet. It was something in between, and it moved when Madame Malcin shook it out like water poured very slowly over the back of her hand. Hermione's breath without her permission caught. "Yes," Madame Malcin said with satisfaction. "Yes, I rather thought so. Look at her coloring, Geneva. See how it lifts. This is the one, dear. This is the one. Stand still now and will." The bell over the door jangled. Hermione did not look up. She had no reason to look up. She was standing on a small velvet deis at the center of the shop, draped in an unfinished length of bruisecoled fabric, with her cuffs straight and her hair, despite all morning efforts, beginning to escape its pins, and she was concentrating very carefully on not catching her own eye in the three panel mirror in front of her, because she did not at that moment particularly wished to see her own face. She heard, however, the small, soft falter in Madame Malin's chatter. She heard the new voice, low, polite, perfectly bored, say something brief, and courteous about an appointment. She heard the gentle scuff of an expensive boot on the polished floor. And then, because she was a person who had been raised by parents who valued curiosity above almost every other human quality, and because her own treacherous body had already understood what her mind was refusing to confirm, she lifted her eyes to the mirror. Draco Malfoy was standing just inside the door of Madame Malkins in a dark winter coat with the collar still turned up against the cold and he had stopped. He had not perhaps meant to stop. The pause was very small, a hesitation of perhaps a second and a half at the threshold. The kind of pause that one might attribute to the natural slowing of a person taking in the warmth of an interior after the cold of the street. But his eyes in the long mirror that ran along the wall behind the deis had gone directly to her and they had stayed there. For one strange suspended moment the shop seemed to hold its breath. Madame Malin, with the unairring discretion of 40 years in the trade, rose smoothly from her crouch beside Hermione's hem and said in her brightest professional voice, "Mr. Malfoy, "Yes, of course. You're fitting." Eloise, dear, would you take Mr. Malfoy through to the back? His robes are quite ready for the final pinning. The shop assistant materialized. Draco's eyes did not move. He was looking, Hermione realized, with a small unsteadiness that traveled all the way down to her fingertips, not at her face. He was looking at the fabric, at the slow shift of the bruised plum silk, where it caught the light against her collarbone, and at the bare line of her throat above it, and at the cuff of her left sleeve, where the new black thread of the mended button was, for some reason, very plainly visible. He did not smile. He did not in any visible way react. He only very briefly, very deliberately, inclined his head. It was the same fractional bow he had given her in the great hall on Monday night, the same precise, courteous, almost imperceptible acknowledgement, and it was somehow in the lamplit hush of Madame Malcin's shop on a wet Thursday afternoon, with no audience but a measuring tape and an elderly wizard considering waste coats. far more disconcerting than it had been in front of a thousand people. Then he turned with the same unhurrieded elegance with which he did everything and followed the shop assistant through the curtain into the back room. The velvet drape fell behind him. He was gone. Hermione stood very still on the deis. Madame Malin resumed her pinning as though nothing whatever had happened. Jinny beside her said nothing at all for perhaps 30 seconds, a length of silence that in Geneva Weasley was the equivalent of a public declaration and then said in a voice pitched only for Hermione's ear, "Well, don't. I wasn't going to say anything, Jinny. I wasn't. But Jinn's mouth in the mirror was doing the small repressed thing it did when she was working very hard not to grin. and hermayan. Despite everything, despite the cold knot of dread that had taken up residence beneath her sternum since Monday night, despite the mourning in the corridor, despite the way her cuff still seemed days later to be warm where it had no business being warm, felt the corners of her own mouth do something traitorous. She looked down at the fabric. She looked at the slow bruised plum shimmer of it where it pulled across her collarbone and at the way Madame Malcin's deaf fingers were already pinning the line of the bodice with quick expert tucks. and she understood with a small clear pulse of something that was not quite fear that she was going to wear this dress on Saturday night and that he had seen it before it was finished and that he had not in any way she could possibly accuse him of in any way that could be pinned down and named done a single thing wrong. He had only looked. He had only nodded. He had only walked through to the back room of Madame Malcin's robes for all occasions with the same composure with which he walked through everything in his life. And yet she lifted her chin very slightly and met her own eyes in the mirror. At last she was, she discovered without entirely meaning to blushing behind the velvet curtain at the back of the shop in a small fitting room ringed with its own set of mirrors. Draco Malfoy was standing with his arms held out at shoulder height, while Madame Malcin's senior assistant, a very small witch called Eloise, made minute adjustments to the line of his sleeve with a mouthful of pins. He was looking at his own reflection. He was not seeing it. He was seeing instead the line of Hermione Granger's throat above a length of bruised plum silk. He had not been prepared for this. He had been prepared. He had been preparing himself, in fact, with considerable discipline all week for Saturday evening, for the descent of the marble staircase, for the small ceremonial business of offering an arm and exchanging the kind of distantly polite remarks that two people who detested one another might exchange in the company of others. He had not been prepared to walk into a robe shop on a wet Thursday afternoon and find her standing on a deis in an unfinished gown. The color was a problem. It was a problem because it was almost exactly the color of the lining of his own dress robes which had been chosen six weeks ago by his mother on the basis of nothing more than her own excellent taste and which would on Saturday night look when he extended his arm to her when she rested her gloved hand upon his sleeve when they walked together into the great all under the gaze of every pair of eyes in the school. As though they had planned it, as though they had coordinated, as though they were in some small and entirely accidental way a matched pair. Sir, said Eloise around her mouthful of pins, if you could just lower the left arm a fraction. He lowered the left arm a fraction. He did it without taking his eyes off the mirror. He thought with an irritable kind of clarity that he was going to have to send an owl to his mother that evening and ask her very casually whether the lining of the robes might not after all be. Sir, what? You've gone rather pale, sir. Have I? Yes, sir. Are you quite? I am perfectly well, Draco said very evenly and lifted his arm again to the precise angle she had asked for. Continue, Eloise continued. The pins clicked beyond the velvet curtain very faintly he could hear the soft murmur of Madame Malcin's voice and the small bright laugh of Jinny Weasley. And underneath both, almost too quiet to make out, but quite unmistakable to him, the low, careful voice of Hermione Granger saying something he could not catch. He stood very still in the mirror with his arms held out and watched a stranger in expensive black robes try and fail to keep his face from giving him. The library at midnight had its own particular weather. In daylight, it was a place of motion. Pages turning, quills scratching, the soft, heavy tread of Madame Pence patrolling her stacks like a thin blackclad heron. After hours, with the lamps burnt down to the lowest setting the castle would permit, it became something else entirely. a slow breathing thing of shadows and dust. Where the air smelt of old leather and tallow, and the faint secret green of the lake glass in the high windows, and where one's footsteps, however careful, was swallowed before they could become a sound. Hermione had not, strictly speaking, meant to come. She had gone up to the dormatory at the proper hour with the others, undressed, put on her night gown, drawn the curtains of her four poster, and laying there with her eyes open while poverty and lavender's breathing settled into the slow, even rhythm of sleep. She had counted to 100, then to 200. Then, with the small, precise annoyance of a person who knew herself well enough to know when she had been beaten, she had got up, put her dressing gown on over her night gown, slipped her wand into the pocket, taken her shoes in her hand, and gone. She had told herself she needed a book. This was technically true. She did need a book. She needed the compendium of pre-Imperial Goblin Diplomacies, volume 4, for a defense essay due on Monday, and it was a restricted section text, and she had a note from Professor Flitwick, and she could perfectly well have collected it tomorrow morning during a properly authorized library period, like a reasonable human being. She knew this. She acknowledged it. She went anyway. The truth she was unwilling to examine. The library was empty. Or appeared on a first slow pass through the main reading room to be empty. The long tables abandoned, the lamps dimmed to a low gold pulse, the high arched windows pulled with the cold green light of a winter moon caught on the lake. She slipped between the stacks, her bare feet making no sound on the cold flagstones, her wand held low against her thigh, with the smallest possible bead of light at its tip. The restricted section was at the rear, behind a heavy iron gate that she opened with a soft tap of the wand and a murmured word. The gate did not creek. She had charmed it not to. Small mercies. She found the compendium on the third shelf from the bottom, exactly where the catalog had promised. She drew it out. It was a heavy thing bound in dark calf with brass corners and turned, holding it against her chest to make her quiet way back through the stacks toward the gate. She did not, until she was almost upon him, see him. He was sitting at the small reading desk in the al cove between the history and theory shelves. the alcove Hermione herself had used so often that she had begun in some small proprietary corner of her mind to think of it as hers. A single lamp burnt low on the desk, its flame turned almost to nothing. He had a book open. He was not reading it. He had his chin propped on one hand and his eyes were on the dark beyond the window. And he looked for a fraction of a second before he sensed her and turned his head like a person she had never seen before in her life. He saw her. His face did the small, swift, practiced thing it did. Composure dropped over the other expression like a sheet thrown over furniture. Granger Malfoy. They regarded one another in the soft pulse of the lamp. The compendium was very heavy against her chest. She did not for a moment know what to do with her hands. You'll be caught, he said at last, very low. So will you. I have a prefect's pass. So do I. He absorbed this without visible reaction. He reached out slowly and pulled out the chair opposite his own, the small, polite gesture of a person who had been raised with absolute thoroughess in the manners of a particular kind of drawing room. She did not sit down. I came for a book, she said evidently. I am going to take it back to my dormatory now. Good night, Granger. It was so quiet she almost did not hear it. She had taken half a step toward the gate. She stopped. "Sit down," he said for a moment. She turned her head. The lamp caught the pale fall of his hair and the line of his cheekbone and the small, careful arrangement of his mouth, and she thought with a small, distant clarity that she was about to do something foolish. She sat down. She set the compendium on the desk between them. He did not move. He had closed his book very quietly at some point in the last few seconds, and his hands were folded loosely on its cover. He was wearing, she noticed, for the first time, no robe, only a fine dark jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt turned back a single fold at the wrist. He had taken off his signate ring. It lay beside the lamp, a small, heavy gleam of silver. The library breathed around them. "Why are you here?" she said at last, because the silence had begun to feel like a thing that had weight. I might ask you the same. I asked first. A small movement at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. I do not sleep well, he said. Oh, it is a recent development. How recent? Recent enough? He lifted his eyes from the cover of his book. They were in the low light very gray. And you? I came for a book. Yes, you have said so. I did come for a book. I am sure you did. She looked down at the brass corner of the compendium. She traced the small worn place at its edge with the tip of her finger. I have been thinking, she said carefully, about Saturday. As have I. I should perhaps say, she drew a breath. I should perhaps say that you are not in any way obliged. If you wished to find a reason to be ill, to be called away, I should not. I should not hold it against you. He did not answer for a long moment. Are you withdrawing your invitation, Granger? No. Ah, I am offering you a way out. I am aware of what you are offering me. He looked at her very steadily across the small pool of lamplight. I am declining it. Something in her chest did a small unwelcome thing. She kept her face still. Why? She said. He did not answer at once. He looked down at his hands. He looked at the signate ring beside the lamp. He looked at last up at her, and the careful composure was, for the briefest possible moment, not quite where he had left it. You crossed an entire hall, he said quietly, in front of a thousand people. You stood opposite me. You put your hand on the wood of my table. You asked me a question. I do not know, Granger. I do not know whether you understand what it cost you to do that, but I should be a particularly low sort of creature if, having seen it, I now permitted you to walk away from it because your courage failed you in the cold light of a Friday morning. She stared at him. That is not She found her voice. That is not the reason I offered. No, no. I offered because because the dare was mine. The mortification ought to be mine. I should not have dragged you into something that was never about you. His mouth did the small movement again. Granger. He leaned very slightly forward. The lamp caught the small hollow at the base of his throat. Do you imagine that I am the sort of person who is dragged into anything? No. Then perhaps you will allow me the credit of having made my own choice on Monday evening at considerable cost to myself and of not requiring you to apologize for it now. She was quiet. The lamp guttered briefly. The flames steadied outside the high arched windows. A small wind had risen, and she could hear it moving in the chimneys somewhere far above them. The thin, distant sigh that seemed to belong to a different castle entirely. "What cost," she said at last, "very low." He did not answer. She watched him not answer. She watched the small, careful muscle move at the corner of his jaw and the way his fingers tightened just perceptibly around the cover of his closed book. She watched him look down at the desk and then with what was very evidently an effort of will back up at her. That he said is also not your concern. Malfoy Granger, you cannot say a thing like that and then refuse to. I can, he said, and there was beneath the careful evenness of the voice the faintest possible thread of something raw. I can in fact do exactly that. And I am going to because if I say one more word about it in this room at this hour with you sitting opposite me in your dressing gown and your hair down your back, I shall say something I have no business saying, and you will have to walk out of here and pretend you have not heard it. And I do not I do not think I should care for that very much. The library was perfectly still. She felt the small careful pulse at the base of her own throat. She felt the cold of the flagstones through the thin soles of her shoes. She felt very distinctly the weight of her hair where it lay loose and uncomebed against the collar of her dressing gown. and the realization that he had noticed it, that he had noticed it precisely, that he had been noticing it the entire time he had been speaking, moved through her in a slow, unwelcome wave. She did not move. Then don't say it, she said quietly. I have no intention of saying it. Good. Good. Neither of them moved. The lamp had burned almost to its last quarter inch. Its flame was very small now and very steady, and it threw shadows that were softer than the ones it had thrown at the beginning of their conversation. His hand was on the desk near the signate ring. Her hand was on the desk near the brass corner of the compendium. There was between the tip of his middle finger and the tip of hers perhaps 4 in of bare polished oak. Neither hand moved. She watched with a small distant fascination his fingers. They were long and very pale with the faintest trace of ink along the side of the index finger. He had been writing something then before she came in, and the nails were cut very short and very neatly, and there was a small old scar across the second knuckle of the middle finger that she had never noticed before, and that she was now never going to be able to unnotice. He was, she realized with the same distant fascination, watching her hand, the four inches of polished oak between them was suddenly a country. she thought, and she would think about this for days afterwards, in odd moments, in the middle of a meal, in the cold space before sleep, that if either of them moved even a quarter of an inch, the other would also move. She thought she knew this with a clarity she had no business having. She thought he knew it, too. Neither of them moved. The lamps gutted again. She did not this time look at it. He did not this time look at it. The small steady flame fought for its life in the wax and lost and the al cove between the history and theory shelves went all at once very dark. For perhaps three seconds, there was no light in the library at all, but the faint green pulse of the moon through the high windows. In the dark, very quietly, very precisely, the back of his hand brushed the back of hers. Neither of them moved their hand away. Neither of them spoke. She could hear in the silence the small careful sound of his breath and the slow heavy beat of her own pulse in her ears. And somewhere very far away in another wing of the castle, a single clock chiming the half hour. She closed her eyes. She opened them again. The dark had not changed. The small warm weight against the back of her hand had not changed. She did not move. She did not move. And then with the same quiet precision with which it had come to rest against hers, his hand. Saturday came with snow. It began at first light in the soft uncertain way of December snow that was not yet sure of itself, a thin, pale dusting that whitened the parapets and the high slate roofs and the long sloping lawns down to the lake. By noon, it had thickened. By the time the early winter dusk began to gather behind the castle towers, it was falling in great slow flakes the size of moths, and the courtyards were silent under it, and the windows of the great hall were already being charmed with sprays of frosted holly and small, bright clusters of mistletoe by a cluster of giggling fifth years on ladders. Hermione spent the afternoon in a state of carefully controlled panic. She would not have called it panic. She would have called it preparation. She made a list in her small neat handwriting of the things that needed to be done. And she ticked them off in order. Bath, hair, dress, shoes, jewelry. A single pair of small pearl earrings borrowed from Jinny, who had been very firm about the point. Wand slipped into a thin sheath at the inside of her wrist beneath the sleeve, because Hermione Granger did not go anywhere, not even to a mid-winter ball without her wand. She read through the list twice. She ticked off all the items. She found that she still had 2 hours and 40 minutes to fill and that they stretched out in front of her with the appalling vacant amplitude of a desert. She read three chapters of advanced rune translation and absorbed not a single word. By 7:00 the dormatory had become a small perfumed riot. Lavender was painting her toenails. Pavati was attempting with a hot iron and a great deal of muttering to coax her hair into long shining waves. Jinny, who had been ready in 20 minutes flat with the brisk efficiency of someone who had three older brothers and no patience for unnecessary fuss, was sitting cross-legged on the end of Hermione's bed with her arms folded, supervising. Stand up, she said. Let me see you. Hermione stood up. The bruised plum silk fell around her in a slow shifting line from the small bare hollow at the base of her throat to the polished toes of her shoes. The bodice was fitted close. The skirt moved with the unhurried weight of something old and very wellmade. Madame Malcin had done something quietly clever at the waist, a thin band of darker stitching that held the eye for the space of a breath and then released it. Hermione's hair was pinned up at the back in a soft low twist with a single small curl loose at the nape of the neck. Because however carefully poverty had worked, there was no actual force in the natural world that would persuade Hermione Granger's hair to remain entirely where it had been put. Jinny was quiet for a long moment. "Well," Hermione said with what she hoped was a brisk, dismissive lightness. "Will it do?" Hermione, what it will do? "That isn't an answer, Jinny. It is an answer. Lavender, who had been pretending not to watch from the dressing table mirror, paused in the act of capping her nail varnish. "Oh," she said, and the word was very small. Hermione turned her head. Lavender Brown, who had spent the better part of a week pretending that Monday night had not happened, who had not addressed Hermione directly since, who had whispered with Parvati in their shared for poster and gone silent the moment Hermione drew her curtains, was looking at her with an expression Hermione could not at first place. It was not quite contrition. It was not quite envy. It was something more complicated than either a small, slightly stricken openness, as if she had been preparing to say something flippant, and had at the last moment found that the flippency had gone out of her. "Hermione," Lavender said. You look lavender, really beautiful. Hermione did not know what to do with this. She looked down at the silk of her own skirt and discovered that her fingers were curling very lightly in the fabric. "Thank you," she said after a small pause. Lavender nodded. She turned back to the mirror. The conversation by mutual unspoken consent was allowed to end there. It was a/4 to 8. Right, said Jinny. Down we go. I'll walk with you to the top of the stairs. After that, you're on your own. All right. All right. Hermione. What? Jinny stood up. She came to stand directly in front of Hermione. Very close. Her small freckled face quite serious in the warm yellow light of the dormatory lamp. Whatever happens tonight, she said quietly. You walked across that hall on Monday. You did the thing. You can do this, too. All right. Hermione swallowed. All right, she said. The Gryffindor common room had begun to thin as the dancers descended in their pairs and small chattering knots. Hermione's appearance at the top of the staircase nevertheless produced a small perceptible drop in the volume of conversation. The kind of drop she was beginning to grow accustomed to and had not yet learned to like. Harry was waiting at the foot of the stairs with Jinn's cloak over his arm. He looked up. He took her in. His face did the small, kind, faintly bewildered thing it did when he was trying to find words and finding none. "Hermione," he said. "Don't. I wasn't going to. Harry, you look lovely," he said simply. She softened against her will. "Thank you." Ron was not in the common room. Ron, she understood without having to ask, had gone down early with Sheamus and Dean, and would meet them in the great hall. Because Ron had decided, in the careful, private arithmetic of his pride, that the only way he could survive the evening with any dignity intact, was by refusing to participate in any part of it that involved watching her descend a staircase. Hermione absorbed this without comment. There would, she thought, be time later for Ron. There would, she thought, with a small, clear hope she did not entirely trust, be time later for a great many things. They went down together, Harry and Jinny in front, Hermione a pace behind, through the long galleries, and down the moving staircases, and at last out into the broad torchlit expanse of the entrance hall, which had been transformed during the afternoon into something Hermione almost did not recognize. Great branches of pine had been wound around the banisters of the marble staircase and pinned at intervals with clusters of small silver bells that chimed faintly when anyone passed. The torches in the wall brackets had been replaced with candles of a pale cool blue. The flag stones glittered with what looked on a first glance like a thin scatter of frost, and which proved on closer inspection to be a charmed dusting that lifted itself out of the way of every passing shoe, and resettled neatly behind it. Above the great oak doors of the great hall, the school crest had been wrethed in winter berries, and the air smelt of pine and beeswax, and the faint warm bite of mold wine being prepared somewhere out of sight. At the foot of the marble staircase, with his gloved hands clasped lightly behind his back, stood Draco Malfoy. He was alone. He stood very still in the precise, unhurrieded stillness that was characteristic of him, his weight a little forward on the balls of his feet, his eyes on the upper landings. He was in dress robes of a very deep soft black, not the harsh black of morning, but the warm livedin black of fine old wool, cut close at the shoulder and falling clean to the knee. The lining where it showed at the lapel and at the turn of the cuff was the same bruised plum as her gown. The small silver fastening at his throat caught the cold blue candle light. His hair, for once, had been not so much arranged as left alone, and it fell forward a little over his brow, in a way that Hermayan had not, until that moment realized she had been looking at in odd, unguarded seconds for the better part of 3 days. He saw her on the third landing. His face did this time exactly nothing. It went still. whatever had been moving in it, the small considering arrangements of expression he wore by habit settled, and there was for a long suspended moment no expression on it at all, only a great quiet attention, as if he were trying to fix something in his mind in such a way that he should not afterwards lose it. Then he stepped forward very slightly to the foot of the stair. She came down. She came down with her left hand light on the banister and her right hand at her side with her chin lifted with the slow shifting weight of the bruised plum silk moving against her ankles. And she did not, though it cost her something to do it, let her eyes drop from his face. Harry and Jinny, with the same merciful tact Harry had been demonstrating all week, slipped sideways at the bottom of the stair and melted into the gathering crowd by the doors. There was, by some unspoken agreement of the entire entrance hall, a small clear space at the foot of the marble staircase that no one was occupying. She reached the last step. She stopped. He inclined his head, the same small, precise fraction of a bow he had given her in the great hall on Monday, and in the corridor on Tuesday, and across the lamp floor of Madame Malkins on Thursday, and then he extended his arm, not as a less practiced person might have done with any flourish, only the quiet, formal offer of a forearm clad in fine black wool presented at the precise correct angle for a lady to lay her gloved hand upon. She laid her hand upon it. She felt beneath the wool the small warm steadiness of him. She felt beneath her own glove the small unsteady pulse of her own palm. "Granger," he said very quietly, "Malfoy, you are not late. I told you I would not be. So you did. He did not quite smile, but the corner of his mouth did the small private thing it had done in the library. The thing that was not quite a smile and was not quite anything else. And she felt it move through her like the first low note of a piece of music whose tune she had not until that moment known she had been waiting to hear. They walked together into the great hall. The doors opened to a great soft wash of light and sound. The long tables had been replaced by small round ones around the edges of the room, and the center of the hall was a polished, gleaming expanse of dancing floor, and the enchanted ceiling overhead was a slow, drifting fall of soft snow that vanished before it ever quite reached the heads of the dancers. A string quartet was playing somewhere at the far end. The first dancers were already turning in slow, careful circles in the center of the floor. Heads turned all along the room as they entered. She felt them turn. She did not look. He guided her with a small unhurried pressure of his forearm beneath her hand around the edge of the floor and into the slow turning of the dancers. He turned to her. He set one gloved hand at the small of her back. He took her other hand in his. He looked down at her in the slow drifting fall of charmed snow and said, "Very low. Try to keep up." And then before she could answer, before she could think of anything to answer with, the music shifted into the slow, long first phrase of the opening waltz, and his hand at the small of her back pressed very lightly, and she moved with him into the first turn. She had not in all her careful preparation of the past four days given any real thought to the question of whether Draco Malfoy could dance. She had assumed in some vague back of the mind way that he could. The assumption belonged to the same category as the assumption that he could ride or shoot or sit through a long formal dinner without disgracing himself. all of which were simply things a boy of his upbringing would have been taught before he was old enough to argue. She had not, however, anticipated what it would feel like to be danced by him. He did not lead exactly. He suggested the pressure of his palm at the small of her back was so light it was almost an imaginary thing. And yet she found with a small humiliating clarity that her body answered it before her mind had registered that an instruction had been given. He turned. She turned. He stepped. She stepped. The slow long phrase of the walts unfurled around them and the great soft drift of charmed snow from the enchanted ceiling fell and vanished above their heads. and she discovered somewhere in the third or fourth bar that she had stopped thinking about her feet entirely. She did not look at him. She looked with great concentration at the small silver fastening at his throat. This was on the whole a mistake. The fastening sat in the small hollow at the base of his neck, and the hollow itself was a thing she had never had any particular reason to consider before this evening. And now, with her face approximately level with his collarbone, and the slow turn of the walts moving her in, and away, and in again, she had been given a great deal of time to consider it. She lifted her eyes briefly in self-defense. She found him already watching her. "What?" he said very low. "Nothing, Granger." "Nothing," she said again more firmly and looked with renewed determination at his left ear. The corner of his mouth did the small private thing. "They turned. They turned again. Somewhere on the edge of her awareness, Hermione registered the fact that the other dancers, Harry and Jinny somewhere off to the left, Neville with Hannah Abbott near the musicians, a small swarm of younger pairs at the outer ring of the floor, had not in any visible way ceased to dance. The world had not stopped. The musicians had not laid down their instruments. The hall was full of motion and conversation, and the low, warm glow of candles. It was only that, in some small, precise circle around the two of them, the air had thickened, the way air thickens before a summer storm, and the noise of the hall had been pushed gently back from her ears, as though by an invisible hand. You are doing it very well, he said. What the dance? Oh, you are surprised. I Yes, I haven't. She drew a small careful breath. I haven't danced since the ule ball years with crumb. Yes, he led from the shoulders, Draco said with mild critical interest. I noticed it is a Bulgarian school of partnering, very firm, very His eyes glinted briefly. Uncompromising. It does not suit you. Oh, doesn't it? It does not. You are not a person to be steered. You are a person to be invited. She did not for a moment know what to do with the line of her own breath. Malfoy. Do not flirt with me on a dance floor. I am not flirting with you. You are Granger. He turned her into a slow open ark, his hand barely touching her waist, and brought her back smoothly to face him. If I were flirting with you, you would know. I You would very clearly know. She closed her mouth. The waltz turned into another. The musicians, with the unhurried competence of an evening that intended to be long, slid from the opening piece into something slower in a different key, and the dancers around them shifted with it, and Draco, without breaking the line of the hand at her back, without releasing her gloved hand, drew her a half step closer. It was a very small adjustment. It would not have been visible from the tables along the wall. It was the difference between dancing with a person at arms length and dancing with a person inside the arm circle and her breath did a small involuntary thing she was not quick enough to hide. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He did not mercifully mark it. Granger. Yes. Look at me. She looked at him. He was not in any visible way doing anything. He was only looking down at her in the cool blue candle light with a slow drifting charmed snow vanishing above the pale fall of his hair. And his face, for the second time that evening, had gone almost entirely still. The small considering arrangements were gone. The careful courtly composure had thinned somewhere in the last 16 bars of music into something less practiced. I am going to ask you something, he said very low. And I should like a true answer. Not a clever one. Not a Gryffindor one. A true one. All right. on Monday evening in the great hall when you cross the floor. Yes. At any point between standing up at your own table and putting your hand on the wood of mine. His eyes searched hers with a slow precise attention. She did not even in that moment fully understand. Did you even once want to be coming to me? and not only to win an argument with Brown and Patil. She did not answer at once. The slow, long second phrase of the waltz turned around them. His hand at her back was very steady. She felt beneath her glove the small steady pulse at his wrist where her fingers rested. She thought of Monday evening. She thought of the cold flag stones under her shoes and the loud foolish sound of her own footsteps in the silent hall. She thought of the moment her fingertips had touched the wood of the slytherin table and of the small disbelieving look that had crossed his face before he hid it. and of the way she had walked back to her seat with her plate untouched and her book under her arm and her heart doing something violent against her ribs. She thought of the cuff he had touched on Tuesday morning in the empty astronomy room. She thought of the back of his hand against the back of hers in the dark in the library two nights ago, and the small unbearable steadiness with which neither of them had moved. "Yes," she said. He was very still. "Even once," he said. "Yes, Granger." "Yes." He did not for a long moment say anything at all. He only continued to turn her slowly in the long, slow phrase of the music, his hand at her back, his eyes on hers, and she understood with a small, clear hush that ran all the way through her, that she had said something she could not now take back, and that he was not going to pretend that she had not said it. The waltz ended. There was a small ripple of applause. The musicians with the merciful instinct of professionals paused to retune. The dancers loosened, drifted toward the long tables along the wall, called for water, called for wine. Hermayan became aware with a slow returning of her senses, of the hall around them, of Pansy Parkinson at a small table near the door. watching her with eyes like green glass of Ron at the Gryffindor end of the room with his face turned very deliberately the other way of a dozen other small watching faces she did not in this moment have the resources to consider Draco did not release her hand ome 5 minutes Malfoy 5 minutes Granger please. It was the please that did it. She had not heard him use the word in all the years she had known him. She had not, she realized in the small clear pause that followed it, ever even imagined that the word was available to him in its sincere form. It startled her into stillness. He felt the stillness. He did not press. "All right," she said. He drew her hand very lightly into the crook of his arm and led her without hurry, without any visible secrecy, with a small, courteous bearing of a young man escorting a young lady to take the air. through the long room, past the small round tables, past the great archway of the doors, out into the entrance hall, and through a side door she had walked past a hundred times, and never noticed onto the long stone balcony that ran above the courtyard, under the high arched stained glass windows of the great hall. The cold hit her like a hand. The snow had not stopped. It was falling more thickly now in great slow flakes, and the balcony was already an inch deep, and the long stone ballastrade was furred with it, and the lanterns set at intervals along the wall through small, warm pools of gold light onto the white. The sounds of the ball came muffled through the leaded windows behind them, as though from a great distance, as though they belonged to a different country. He let go of her arm. He turned to face her, the cold caught at her bare collarbones. She felt the small, involuntary tightening of the skin at the base of her throat. He saw it. Without a word, without any visible thought, he reached up and unfastened the small silver clasp at his own throat, and shrugged his outer robe off his shoulders, and laid it with the same quiet courtesy with which he had offered her his arm at the foot of the stair around her own. The robe was worn from his body. The lining was the color of bruised plum, and it brushed briefly against the bare skin at the side of her neck. "Malfoy Granger, why did you bring me out here?" "Because there are 900 people in that hall," he said very quietly. "And I cannot do what I am about to do in front of any of them." Her breath went small. He did not move. He stood with his hands at his sides. He had not even now allowed himself to put them anywhere. And he looked down at her in the small, warm pool of lantern light, with the snow falling slowly around them, and his face had gone entirely open. On Monday evening, he said, I said yes for the wrong reasons. I know. I knew it at the time. Yes, I have not, Granger. I have not in the four days since been able to think of anything else. I have tried. I am by training and by inclination a person who is very good at not thinking of things. I have not been able to do it. I have not been able to do it for 4 days. He drew with visible effort a small careful breath. And I am telling you this, he said, because you asked me on Monday evening a question in front of a thousand people, and you put your hand on the wood of my table, and you did not flinch, and you deserve at the very least to be told the truth in return, whatever you decide to do with it afterwards." She could not for a moment find her voice. Malfoy Granger, is this are you saying? Yes, he said. I am saying. The snow fell. She lifted her hand slowly, carefully, with a small, clear sense that she was crossing a line which could not afterwards be uncrossed, and laid the gloved palm of it against the side of his face. He was very cold. He went the moment her hand touched him entirely still. The small involuntary stillness of a person who has been bracing himself for something and has just realized that the something is not going to be a blow. He closed his eyes. He turned his head the smallest fraction of an inch and pressed his cheek into the curve of her glove. The cold breath of the winter night moved between them. The snow fell on the slate of the balcony and the bruised plum lining of the robe around her shoulders and the pale fall of his hair. Behind the leaded windows, the muffled music of the ball lifted into a new phrase. Somewhere very far away, in the dark beyond the courtyard, a single owl called. He opened his eyes. He looked down at her. He lifted his own hand very slowly and laid it gloved, careful, not quite trusting itself against the side of her face, mirror to her own. His thumb moved once against the line of her cheekbone. Her breath caught. He lowered his head. He stopped a hands breath away no more and waited with a courtesy so old-fashioned it would have been comic if it had not in that moment undone her entirely. He waited for her to close the distance or not. She closed it. It was a very small movement. She lifted herself the smallest fraction of an inch onto the balls of her feet, and she set the soft, cold tip of her nose against his, and she drew with the steady, careful courage that had walked her across the great hall on Monday evening, one last small breath. He met her. His mouth was warm. It was the only warm thing in the world. The cold was on her shoulders, on the bare line of her collarbone, in the slow, steady fall of the snow against her hair. But his mouth was warm and very still and very careful, and he held her face in his gloved palm as if it were a thing he had been given to keep, and was not entirely sure he had been given permission to touch. She had thought in the small private hours of the past four nights that if this ever happened, if anything remotely resembling this ever happened, it would be a thing of heat and noise, all the years of friction between them combusting at once into something that could not afterwards be put out. She had thought it would be a small disaster. It was not a disaster. It was quiet. It was the slow, careful settling of two cold hands into a warm one. It was the small, soft sound of a snowflake landing on the leaded glass behind them. It was the steady, unhurried weight of his palm against her cheek, and the answering pressure of her gloved fingers against his, and the slow, private breath he drew when she did not pull away. He drew back after a moment, not far, only enough to look at her. His eyes were very gray in the lantern light, and the small careful arrangements of his face had not this time come back. They had been put down somewhere on the snowy slate of the balcony, and he had perhaps decided not to pick them up again. "Gringer," he said, the word was not quite steady. "Yes, I that was I know. I had not I had not entirely planned. I know. I had several speeches prepared, he said with a small surprised flicker that was not quite a laugh. And I do not appear to be able to recall any of them. Good. Granger, don't make any speeches, Malfoy. Don't. Please. Not tonight. He looked down at her for a long moment in the soft falling snow. Then he did very slowly the smallest fraction of a smile. A real one this time, not the careful, courtly fraction of the foot of the staircase, but a small lopsided private thing that pulled at the left corner of his mouth and made him look briefly and disconcertingly like a boy of 17. All right, he said no speeches. Thank you. There is, however, he drew with visible effort the small careful breath of a person reathering himself. There is one practical matter. Oh, it is approximately 10:00. We have been outside for He glanced at the lantern, then back at her. Rather longer than 5 minutes. There are 900 people in that hall, the majority of whom watched you cross a floor to me on Monday evening, and a not inconsiderable minority of whom are waiting to see what we do next. We have, as I see it, two options, which are one, we part on the threshold. You return to your friends. I return to mine. We behave for the remainder of the evening as if this conversation has not occurred. And tomorrow morning we quietly privately decide what is to be done about it. She considered him and two. His hand was still against her cheek. He did not move it. We walk back in together through the doors, across the hall, past every person who has been watching, and we make it perfectly clear by the simple fact of how we are walking, that whatever was begun on Monday evening is now. His mouth did the small private thing again, a thing we are doing on purpose. The snow fell. She felt very distinctly the small, slow, steady pulse of her own heart against her ribs. Malfoy Granger, what will it cost you? He did not at first answer. She watched the small, careful muscle move at the corner of his jaw, the muscle she had been watching in odd, unguarded seconds all week. and she understood that the question she had just asked him was the question he had not been willing to answer in the library on Thursday night and that he was now going to answer it a great deal he said quietly tell me my father will write yes my mother will write more kindly and more dangerously yes there are houses in which I shall after tonight no longer be welcome. There are men in this castle who will after tonight consider themselves entitled to a private word with me in a corridor. There is, he drew a small breath, a great deal of machinery which has been arranged over the course of my life on the assumption that I should behave in a particular way and which will now have to be his mouth twisted very slightly rearranged by you, by me, Malfoy. Yes, you do not have to. I know I do not have to, he said. Granger, I know I do not have to. I am telling you that I am going to. The snow fell. The lantern light flickered behind them dimly through the leaded glass. The musicians slid into the long, slow opening of another waltz. Then she said, "Let us go in by the second route." He looked down at her. He did not for a moment speak. He only lifted her gloved hand, the one that was still resting against the front of his shirt, and turned it over very carefully, and pressed his mouth briefly and quite seriously to the small inside curve of her wrist, where the seam of the glove met the skin. The sleeve of his coat brushed the bruised plum silk at the front of her gown. The lining of the robe she was wearing, his robe, she thought with a small, clear, private pulse, moved against her shoulders. "Right," he said. He offered her his arm. She laid her hand upon it. They walked back across the snow of the balcony, side by side in step. He pushed the side door open with his free hand. The warm wash of candle light and music came out to meet them. He paused on the threshold just for a second and looked down at her and she looked up at him and there was between them a small clear nod that no one else in the world would have seen and that they both very distinctly did. Then they walked into the great hall, heads turned, of course, heads turned. The walk was in some measurable way the second walk of the evening, the deliberate public twin of the walk Hermione had taken across the floor on Monday night, and the room sensed it before any single person in it could have said what they were sensing. Conversations dipped. A goblet was set down a beat early. Pansy Parkinson at her table near the door went very white and then very still. Ron at the Gryffindor table looked up. His eyes met Hermiones. He held them for perhaps two seconds, and then with a small careful dignity of a young man who had decided somewhere in the long hours of the evening that he was going to be the better version of himself, he gave her almost imperceptibly a single nod and turned back to Sheamus. Harry stood up at his table. He did not approach. He simply stood and looked at her across the room and lifted his glass once very small and sat back down. Jinny beside him was already grinning. Draco led her with the same unhurried courtesy he had shown her in the entrance hall onto the dance floor. The musicians who had been playing the opening of the new waltz for perhaps eight bars completed the phrase and began again from the beginning with the small generous instinct of musicians who knew what was being asked of them. He turned to her. He set his hand at the small of her back. He took her gloved hand in his. He looked down at her in the cool blue candle light with a slow drifting charmed snow falling and vanishing above them and he said very low and only for her. Try to keep up Granger. I shall manage Malfoy. The corner of his mouth did the small private thing. They danced. The hall went by slow and unspoken degrees back to its own business. The other couples joined them on the floor. Harry and Jinny passed once, very close, and Jinny, with a perfectly straight face, mouthed, "I told you so," over Draco's shoulder. Neville turned past with Hannah and went rather pink. Luna Loveg good, who was dancing with a Ravenclaw boy whose name Hermione did not know, gave them both a slow, serene smile as she went by, as if the whole arrangement was something she had foreseen weeks ago and was pleased to see coming along to plan. The musicians played the walts and then a slower piece and then something with a faster step that made her laugh properly laugh for the first time in seven days. And Draco, who had been preparing by the looks of it, to be sardonic about it, saw her laugh, and did not in the end say the thing he had been going to say. He only very briefly tightened his hand at the small of her back. Toward midnight the snow stopped. She did not at first notice. She was sitting at one of the small round tables near the musicians with a goblet of something warm and spiced in her hand and Draco beside her and Jinny opposite. Jinny had come over an hour earlier with the brisk inevitability of a small red-haired weather system, and Draco, to his credit, had risen and bowed, and offered her the third chair with such precise courtesy that even Jinny had been briefly disarmed, and they were arguing, the three of them, about a piece in the prophet from earlier in the week, with the sort of easy half irritable rhythm of people who had against all probability found that they could. It was Draco who saw the snow stop. He glanced toward the high windows and his face did a small still thing and he leaned very slightly toward Hermione's ear. "Come outside," he said. "One more time for a moment." She rose. Jinny, with a small private smile she did not bother to hide, waved them off. The balcony was empty. The snow laid deep and untouched along the ballastrade now, and the sky above the courtyard had cleared, and a thin pale moon hung low over the forbidden forest in a sky scattered with the first true bright stars of winter. The cold was this time less of a shock. She had been ready for it, and he, without comment, settled the dark, warm weight of his outer robe back around her shoulders. He stood at the ballastrade. She came to stand beside him. He did not speak for a long moment. "Granger," he said at last, very low. Yes. Whatever happens tomorrow, whatever is written, whatever is said in corridors, in the prophet, at my father's table, he did not look at her. He looked at the thin pale moon. I should like you to know now while it is quiet and before anyone else has had the chance to make it difficult that I should like to do this properly to call on you in the holidays to write to to be in some recognizable sense with you if you will have me. She did not answer at once. She lifted her gloved hand very slowly and laid it over his on the cold stone of the ballastrade. He turned his hand under hers and laced his fingers through hers very carefully as though the gesture was something he had been practicing in his head for some time and was anxious not to spoil in the execution. "Yes," she said. He closed his eyes briefly. Granger. Yes, thank you. She turned to face him. He turned to face her. He lowered his head. This time she did not wait for the courtly half paws. This time she rose to meet him at once. The kiss on the dark balcony under the thin pale moon with the first true stars of winter caught in the bare black branches of the trees beyond the courtyard was warm and steady and unhurried. And there was between them in the small clear hush that followed it the simple certainty of a thing that had begun on a dare on a Monday evening and had somewhere in the long slow turning of a single week become the truest thing either of them had. He drew back. He did not let go of her hand. Come, he said softly. There is still music. and he led her with the bruised plum lining of his robe warm around her shoulders and her gloved hand laced through his back through the side door into the candle light into the music into the rest of their lives. Spring came late that year to the high country north of London, and later still to the long greystone wing of the manor, where Hermione Granger sat at a small writing desk by a tall sash window, with a cup of tea cooling at her elbow, and a stack of unanswered correspondence at her left hand. It had been 3 years. 3 years since the bruised plum silk and the slow drifting charmed snow. 3 years since the dark balcony and the thin pale moon and the small clear yes spoken into the cold air above a courtyard. 3 years in fact almost to the day. She could feel the date in the slant of the spring light through the window. the particular weight of the season. And there were this morning three letters opened in front of her in three different hands that bore on the matter directly. The first was from Jinny. He proposed last night, it said in Jinn's brisk hand. Harry, finally I am not crying. You are crying. Lunch on Sunday. Bring de mother has been told to behave. There were three small ink blotss toward the bottom of the page that suggested Jinny had in fact been crying. The second was from Ron. It was shorter. Heard from Guin. Glad for her. Glad for him. We'll see you Sunday. Ah. And then in slightly smaller handwriting that he had clearly considered and committed to, tell Malfoy hello. This was in Ron's private grammar the equivalent of a state document. She had read it three times and folded it carefully and put it aside with a small steady warmth at the base of her throat. The third letter was from Narcissa Malfoy. It was on heavy cream paper of a particular weight Hermione had come over the past two years to recognize from across a room. And it was written in a hand of extraordinary almost architectural precision. And it began as Narcissa's letters always began now with the words, "My dear Hermione." She had not been my dear Hermione immediately. She had been for the first six months Miss Granger. She had then been for nearly a year heran unadorned. And then one morning a letter had arrived on the same heavy cream paper written in the same architectural hand that had begun my dear Hermione. and Hermione had stood at the breakfast table of the small flat she had then been renting in Bloomsbury and read it twice through before she had quite trusted that the words were on the page. And Draco, coming through from the kitchen with two cups of coffee in his hands, had taken one look at her face and said very quietly, "Ah, so she has decided." The relationship had not been in any of its early seasons easy. It had cost exactly as Draco had said on the balcony a great deal. There had been letters from Lucius she had never been shown and did not ask about. There had been a long bitter autumn in which Draco had not been welcome in his own father's house and had instead spent his Sundays in the small Bloomsbury flat sitting at her kitchen table in his shirt sleeves with his cuffs turned back reading the prophet and refusing with a quiet absolute steadiness to be drawn on the subject. There had been an article in which weekly that Hermione had thrown into the fire without finishing. There had been a corridor at the ministry three weeks into her first year of work in which a man whose name she would not afterwards remember had said something to her about her tasting company and had found himself half a heartbeat later on the floor with a slow rising welt of an extremely well- aimed silent hex coming up across his cheekbone. and Hermione, who had not drawn her wand, looking up to find Draco putting his back into his pocket with a perfectly composed face. He had not spoken of it. He had only at the end of the corridor taken her hand. The pattern of the first year had been the small clear pattern of two people choosing again and again in the face of a world that did not particularly wish them to. She had not made it easy for him. He had not made it easy for her. They had quarreled, properly quarreled, in the way that only two people of very firm opinions and very thin patience can quarrel over politics, over her hours, over his pride, over whose flat to spend Christmas in, over whether the small black cat that had wandered into the Bloomsbury kitchen one wet October evening was to be kept. It was. It had been. It was now asleep on the velvet Ottoman by Hermione's left foot and was called, with no irony whatever, Pence. They had also, in the slow, steady accumulation of small, ordinary days, learned one another. She knew now the small, careful arrangements of his face from the inside. She knew which of his silences were thinking, and which were brooding, and which were the older, harder silence of a thing remembered from childhood that he was not even now ready to set down. She knew the way his hand moved when he wrote, the small precise pressure of the thumb, the slight turn of the wrist, and she knew from across a crowded room the exact length of his stride. She knew that he took his coffee black in the morning and with milk in the evening, and that he could not bear to be read to from a newspaper, and that he had, since the autumn of their second year together, kept on the inside of his coat pocket a small folded handkerchief that was hers, that he had quietly appropriated one evening, and had never given back, and that she had eventually stopped pretending to look for. She knew also that he had been carrying a small velvet box in his coat pocket for the better part of the last fortnight. She had not, of course, said so. She had given no sign. She was, in matters of this kind, a person of considerable patience, and she had decided some weeks ago that he was to be permitted to do the thing in his own time and in his own way, and that the only proper response of a person of her sense was to wait and to behave normally, and to allow him the small, dignified privacy of choosing his moment. He was choosing it, she suspected this afternoon. He had said at breakfast, in an extremely casual voice that was not in any way casual, that the orchard at the back of the manor was particularly fine in the early afternoon light, and that he wondered whether she might care to walk through it with him after she had finished her correspondence. He had said it without looking at her. He had said it whilst buttering with absolute concentration a slice of toast he had no apparent intention of eating. Pence on the ottoman had lifted her head, looked at him and looked at her and gone slowly back to sleep with the expression of a small black cat who had seen this coming for some time and considered it overdue. Hermayan had said also without looking up from her own letter that she would be delighted. She finished Narcissa's letter now. She set it aside. She drank what was left of the cold tea. She rose from the desk, crossed to the long mirror by the door, and made the small precise adjustments to her hair and her cuffs that she still, 3 years on, made before she went to him. Not any longer, out of any nervous need to be presentable, but out of the small, clear pleasure of preparing herself with care to meet someone she loved. She paused for a moment at the door. She looked back at the room, at the desk, at the open letters, at the small black cat asleep on the velvet ottoman, at the spring light coming in at the long sash window. And she thought with a small steady clarity she had learned to trust that the girl who had stood up from the Gryffindor table on a December evening three and a half years ago and walked across a silent hall to a Slytherin table on a dare would not perhaps have entirely recognized this room or this morning or the woman standing in the doorway in her good gray dress with her cuffs straight and her hair pinned up at the nape of the neck. She thought the girl would have, however, recognized the small, careful warmth at the base of her throat. She went down. He was waiting for her at the foot of the great staircase in his shirt sleeves with the cuffs of the shirt turned back a single fold at the wrist and his hands clasped lightly behind his back. The same precise stance he had stood in at the foot of the marble staircase at Hogwarts on the night of the mid-inter ball 3 years and four months ago. When she had come down to him in bruised plum silk and laid her gloved hand on the sleeve of his black wool coat for the first time, he looked up. His face did the small still thing. Granger, he said. Malfoy, she said. He extended his arm. She laid her hand upon it. The spring light came through the long windows of the entrance hall in great warm bars across the flag stones. And somewhere out in the orchard, a blackbird was singing, and the small velvet box was, she could see now, making the faintest possible weight against the inside of his left coat pocket, where he had slipped the coat on over his shirt at some point in the last quarter of an hour. He did not yet speak of it. He would, in his own time, in the orchard beneath the small white blossom of an apple tree he had been keeping his eye on for some weeks, kneel on the soft turned earth at her feet, and ask her very quietly the one question he had been preparing the whole of his life to ask. And she, who had in some private corner of herself been preparing the whole of her own life to answer it, would say yes before he had finished the sentence. And he would laugh, properly laugh, the small, surprised laugh of a man who had not expected to be quite so happy. and she would kneel down in the grass with him and put her hands on either side of his face and kiss him under the white blossom with the blackbird singing somewhere overhead. But that was still half an hour away. For now, in the bar of warm spring sunlight at the foot of the great staircase, he only tucked her hand more securely into the crook of his arm and looked down at her and said, "Very low." "Shall we, my love?" and she with a small clear smile of a woman who had walked across one great hall once on a dare in the cold winter of her 17th year and had never in all the days since regretted a single step of it said yes let's I want to say something simple before our story ends thank Thank you for staying with me until the last word. When I started writing this, I kept thinking about one small moment. Not the ball, not the keys, the button, the little loose button on her sleeve, the one she did not have time to fix. For me, that was the heart of the whole story. Because love I think it is often like that. It is not the big moment. It is not the long beautiful speech. It is a small scene. The button, the cold hand, the cup of tea, the look across a room. Draco and are not easy people. They fight. They are proud. They are afraid. They hurt each other. and then they choose again and again to come back. That is not magic. That is a real work of love. I wanted to write a story about two people who were told their lives to hate each other. And the one evening they looked at at each other and choose to be brave instead. Not loud brave, wide brave. The kind of brave that does not need other people to see. If you are listening to this and you are waiting for your own small moment, your own loose button, your own hand in the dark. I hope you find it and I hope when you find it, you are brave enough to stay. Thank you for listening. until the next story.