"If you were falling in love for the first time, what would your first reaction be?"
On the night of the Hogsmeade open day, a group of older girls were chattering about love in front of the Gryffindor common room fireplace. Their voices drifted to the ears of a girl hidden behind a thick book on the sofa.
"Confess?" Angelina Johnson asked.
"No," Katie Bell said, with the air of someone who knew. "Run."
"Run? Why? If you like someone, you go after them!"
"Oh, Angelina. You can't bring that attitude to a first crush," Katie said. "First love is sweet, but it's bittersweet too. It's all longing and uncertainty. Like a green apple—you want it desperately, but you're also afraid that when you finally bite into it, it won't taste the way you hoped."
Green apple.
He was always eating green apples. Always staring at her as he did it.
Hermione was hiding behind the upside-down *Book of Magical Runes*, the tops of her ears going quietly pink.
"Hermione!" A red-haired girl skipped over from across the room. "Did you get it? The potion?"
"Sorry, Ginny." Hermione kept her eyes on the page. "I couldn't this time. I'll definitely bring you one next visit, I promise."
"All right," Ginny said, disappointed. She looked more carefully at Hermione. "Something's wrong with you. What are you thinking about? You look completely elsewhere."
"I'm reading."
"You're holding it upside down." Ginny pressed the book down, revealing Hermione's very pink face. "Are you all right?"
"Perfectly."
"Is the love potion sold out?"
"No, there were plenty left."
"Did you smell it? Is it nice?" Ginny studied her with narrowed eyes, feeling that the expression on Hermione's face was strangely familiar.
"Very," Hermione said, in a slightly strangled voice, and raised the book again.
Ginny stared at the upside-down cover. Then she remembered. That expression—that flushed, complicated, panicked look—she had seen it on her own face in the mirror whenever she thought about Harry.
"Can you smell someone?" she asked, on a hunch.
"Yes…" Hermione was gazing fixedly at a diagram in the book, trying to redirect her thoughts toward academics rather than toward a certain person who was unreasonably fond of green apples.
She had not yet noticed the diagram was upside down.
"Who?" Ginny asked softly.
"Dr—" Hermione stopped. Her common sense sounded an alarm.
Ginny. Cunning, observant, patient Ginny—she was trying to get her to give something away.
"I can't smell anyone!" Hermione stood up, sending the book clattering to the floor.
"Don't go! Finish what you were saying—" Ginny perked up instantly. "Dr—what?"
"I'm going upstairs! I need a shower!" Hermione scooped up her books and bolted.
The common room felt like a very dangerous place at that moment—as if everyone in it could read her thoughts, see through her panic, and know exactly what she felt.
She took the stairs two at a time, shoved open the dormitory door, and flung herself onto her bed behind the curtains.
On the next bed, Lavender and Parvati looked up from their Tarot cards in surprise. The draught from the door had knocked one off the bed.
"Careful, Hermione!" Lavender said, irritated.
"Sorry!" Hermione yanked the curtains shut and buried her face in her pillow.
She was going to lose her mind. Simply thinking about him had reduced her to this.
*Calm down. You're Hermione Granger. Breathe.*
"Parvati, could you pick that up?" Lavender said.
"Of course—oh!" Parvati reached down and held it up with interest. "It's the Knight of Cups."
"What does it mean?"
Parvati rustled through her reference book. "Upright… represents a gentle and devoted partner. Wholehearted loyalty, unwavering affection. Often signifies the beginning of a closer connection between two people." A pause. "Reversed—both parties are at a crossroads. Whether to advance the relationship or remain as they are. Remaining as they are is more pronounced. Both are waiting for the other to move first. Strong indicators of mutual passivity."
"Useless," Lavender muttered. "Utterly unreliable. Shuffle again."
*Unreliable fortune-telling nonsense,* Hermione thought with disdain from behind her curtains.
But she lay very still, listening.
She remembered: the many times he had seemed about to say something and stopped. The times he had let go of her hand a moment too quickly. The morning in the Great Hall when she had woken to find the space beside her already empty—him already gone, without a word. The way they never discussed whether their entwined fingers in class were unusual, or whether sleeping in each other's arms in the hospital wing was perhaps a little much. As though they had both agreed, without saying so, to leave certain things alone.
He always emphasised that he was a Slytherin, not a Gryffindor. Almost insistently. As if he were drawing a line and placing her on the other side of it.
Sometimes, when he got close to her, he would pull back—like a snail retracting into its shell—and there would be something in his expression that looked almost pained. As if proximity cost him something.
Maybe that distance was what he needed. Maybe he had always meant to keep things exactly here.
If she didn't go further, she wouldn't risk losing what they already had. She could stay in the warmth of it and never have to know whether the apple tasted good.
She lay in the dark behind the curtains, turning this over, and found it deeply unsatisfying.
*Between upright and reversed,* Parvati was telling Lavender. *It's leaning—stuck between them.*
---
The Easter holiday arrived and was, in Draco's estimation, worse than no holiday at all. Everyone was scrambling to finish overdue work, and the castle felt listless and slightly desperate from one end to the other.
Especially Hermione.
He could feel the barely-contained collapse radiating from her from halfway down a corridor.
"Are you all right?" He stopped her one afternoon near the Charms classroom, his eyes going to the book she was carrying—*Numerology and Grammatica*.
"Fine." She kept her eyes down.
"I haven't done something wrong, have I? I feel like you've been avoiding me."
That made her look up—quickly, flustered, her face going pink. "Of course not. I just have too much work. You know how many courses I chose."
She was lying. He could see it clearly. She did have a great deal of work, but not so much that she couldn't manage a sentence.
She was avoiding him, and he didn't understand why, and it was making him quietly miserable.
In the Great Hall, she stole glances at him from the Gryffindor table, then looked away the instant he turned. In class, she kept her eyes down and answered his attempts at conversation in monosyllables. She stopped coming to their usual corner of the library entirely, even when he asked, with a cheerfulness he had to work at, whether she'd like to study together. "Maybe next time" was all she'd say.
He found himself watching for her at mealtimes and then finding the watching made him feel worse.
"Sorry—I have to go." She was already backing away from him in the corridor, her expression one of someone fighting a rising tide. She turned and walked very quickly in the other direction.
Harry told him later that she'd finally dropped Divination. It didn't appear to have helped.
---
The first Saturday after Easter: Slytherin versus Hufflepuff.
Up on his Nimbus 2001, Draco scanned the stands until he found her.
Brown hair, bright eyes, watching him. Not the quick, averted glance she'd been giving him recently. Actually watching.
He permitted himself a slight smile and turned back to hunting the Snitch.
The match was hard-fought. Cedric Diggory was an excellent Seeker—every time the Snitch flashed briefly into view, he was right there alongside Draco, neck and neck, until the small golden thing vanished again into the noise and movement of the crowd.
And Zacharias Smith was making an art of fouling him when Madam Hooch wasn't looking—blagging his broom tail, nudging him off course. Petty revenge for the door at the Great Hall entrance, evidently.
"He keeps grabbing Draco's broom—that's blagging, Madam Hooch isn't seeing it," Harry said indignantly from the stands, binoculars raised.
"Zacharias Smith!" Hermione had thrown her own binoculars down entirely. She was on her feet. "You despicable cheat!"
Draco heard her from the nearby stands.
She was angry *for* him. He could pick her voice out of the noise of the whole crowd.
Hermione Granger's fury was, without question, his best stimulant on the pitch.
"That all you've got?" He glanced back at Zacharias with a cold smile, and in one fluid movement reached across and plucked the Quaffle from the Hufflepuff's hands.
Zacharias gaped. "Let go, Malfoy—"
They were both moving fast, Zacharias tugging at his broom tail and trying to wrestle the Quaffle back, the two of them locked together on high-speed brooms. The iron ring of the Hufflepuff goal loomed ahead.
Draco bent forward, held his course until the last possible second, then released the Quaffle.
"Miles, clear!" he shouted, wrenched his broom handle into a ninety-degree turn, and dived straight down.
Zacharias, suddenly without his opponent's resistance, shot forward—directly into the hoop, Quaffle still in hand.
Madam Hooch was already flying over. The whistle came down hard: Haversacking. Penalty to Slytherin.
"Draco, you absolute genius!" Miles Bletchley roared from the goalpost.
Zacharias's face had gone the colour of old parchment.
"Smith!" Cedric shouted, dropping toward him. "Haversacking? How does that even happen?"
The stands erupted.
"That manoeuvre," Harry said admiringly beside Hermione, watching Draco bank back into the sky, "the ninety-degree dive from full speed—that is genuinely difficult."
"He turned a foul into a penalty against his own fouler," Ron said from Harry's other side. "That's brilliant."
Ginny Weasley sat on Hermione's right, listening to her brothers' praise with only a fraction of her attention.
The rest of it was fixed on Hermione's profile.
She had been cataloguing boys' names beginning with "Dr" for days. Every Gryffindor, first year through seventh, had been presented to Hermione for consideration and rejected with a quick, certain shake of the head.
Draven. Drew. Dreyfuss. Each one dismissed. That head-shake—quick, confident, as if Ginny couldn't possibly be warm.
"It can't be Dragot, can it?" she'd asked on the way to the pitch today.
"What's a Dragot?" Hermione asked, startled.
"Currency in the American wizarding community," Ginny said pleasantly. "Maybe you're attracted to money."
"Of course not!" Hermione had relaxed visibly.
"Merlin, just tell me," Ginny had sighed. "I've gone through every name I can think of."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Hermione had said, with an innocent, untroubled ease that sounded remarkably like someone else she knew.
She was getting worse at it, not better.
Now, watching Hermione's face as Draco climbed back toward the clouds—the way the distant, muted anxiety of the last few weeks had been replaced, entirely, by bright-eyed, intent attention—Ginny felt the long-dormant lion of her intuition get slowly to its feet.
*Oh.*
Of course.
Not a Gryffindor boy at all.
Not a single boy in Gryffindor House had ever made Hermione look like *that.*
Zacharias was still shouting at Draco, who had returned his gesture with a smile that made Zacharias shout louder. Then Cedric yelled, "The Snitch—!"
Draco was already gone. A platinum streak shot past Cedric's broom tail, close enough to rock him, and when it stopped he was thirty feet above the pitch with his fist closed.
The match was over.
*She came to watch,* Draco thought with private satisfaction, landing in a controlled slide beside Marcus, who was openly crying. *The least I could do was not waste her time.*
"Three hundred points clear of Gryffindor!" Marcus was shouting. "Draco—three hundred! The Cup—"
"Well done," Hermione said, amidst the rising noise from the distant Slytherin stands. She had found him immediately as he walked off the pitch, and she said it quietly, just to him, her eyes bright. "Really—very well done."
That was more like it. He grinned at her—about to say something—
Then the shutters came down. Her expression shifted to something strained, her cheeks flooded with colour, and she said, in the voice of someone who has just remembered a very urgent, overdue obligation: "I—I have to go—"
She was gone.
He stared after her.
*Time-Turner,* he reminded himself. *She's exhausted. It's the workload.*
It didn't help as much as he'd have liked.
"Malfoy." A voice behind him.
He turned, already tense, and found Cedric Diggory.
"Congratulations on the Snitch," Cedric said quickly. "I wanted to say—what Zacharias did, I had no idea beforehand. That's not how I play, and it's not how I told him to play—"
"I don't need the explanation," Draco said.
He kept his voice flat and his eyes away from Diggory's face. Something in the sight of that open, earnest expression—the dark hair, the easy friendliness, the complete lack of any awareness of what was coming for him—made his jaw tight.
He knew what Cedric Diggory's face looked like at seventeen. He knew what colour his robes were. He knew the specific quality of the silence that had fallen over the school that night.
He had no idea how to talk to him.
"Stop your apologies," he said, colder than he'd meant to be. "I don't care."
He walked away without looking back.
He didn't think about it. He'd learned not to.
*Don't overthink it,* he told himself, moving through the crowd, managing smiles for the students who called his name. *You can't save everyone. Keep your distance. Leave them to their lives.*
He never found a better way to finish that thought.
---
The weeks after the match passed in a steady rhythm of increasing inconvenience.
Hermione remained elusive. His training schedule—which no longer included match preparation but somehow contained more obligations than before—was full. Marcus kept appearing with tactical concerns. The fifth-years were in their O.W.L. revision spiral and kept asking him questions.
And there was the matter of Crabbe and Goyle.
It had started at the training ground, when Draco had caught them watching the house team practise from behind the stands, trying to look as though they happened to be standing there.
He had, on an impulse he didn't fully examine, walked over, picked up two Beater's bats, and dropped one in each of their laps.
"Have you considered," he said, "that someone with your build might be better suited to hitting things than to Seeking?"
The expressions on their faces suggested this had not previously been considered.
"Nobody will take us seriously," Goyle said, after a long pause.
"Respect is earned," Draco said. "Not given. Several Chasers and Beaters are graduating—the team will need new players. Blaise has already been practising in secret. This is an actual opportunity." He looked them over. "If you want to be taken seriously, you have to give people something to take seriously. Now get your brooms."
They had got their brooms.
They had come back the next day, and the day after, and the day after that—through mockery from Pansy and dismissal from Blaise, through sore arms and heavy legs, through the indignity of dropping the ball and falling off their brooms and having to start again.
Draco supervised. He confiscated toffee. He added laps when they slacked off and did not remove them when they complained. He did not explain why he was spending his evenings doing this, partly because he wasn't entirely sure himself.
"You think they can actually do it?" Blaise asked him one afternoon, watching Goyle determinedly chase a moving ball across the pitch.
"The point isn't whether I think so," Draco said. "It's whether they do."
Blaise gave him the look of someone humouring a persistent eccentricity, and went back to his own practice.
---
The Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff match fell on a mild afternoon in mid-May. It was long and close and finally went to Gryffindor, ending at exactly the same points total as Slytherin's cumulative score.
Not a single point more or less.
"So now what—McGonagall and Snape share custody of the trophy?" Blaise said, watching the scoreboard.
Draco shrugged. He had spent most of the match unable to see the Gryffindor stands properly, which had put him in a vaguely poor mood that he couldn't reasonably explain to anyone.
Afterward, he ate a steak in the Great Hall, allowed himself to be talked into a post-dinner walk by Crabbe and Goyle's exaggerated complaints about their digestion, and drifted down the hillside toward the grassy slope near the Forbidden Forest in the late evening light.
Neville Longbottom crossed their path going the other way, looking mournful. "Have any of you seen my wand? I had it at lunch—"
"No." Draco looked him over. "Have you considered drilling a hole through the handle, threading a cord through it, and wearing it round your neck?"
"My grandmother wouldn't allow it," Neville said sadly. "It was my father's." He wandered on.
Crabbe and Goyle started laughing.
"I'd hold off on that," Draco said, without turning. "You're not exactly in a position to laugh at anyone else for losing things." He glanced pointedly at Crabbe's robes. "Is that a toffee wrapper in your pocket?"
Crabbe's hand moved subtly toward his collar. Goyle became very interested in the middle distance.
"You've been training for weeks and you still look exactly the same," Draco said. "Shouldn't you both be eating less, not more?"
The toffee disappeared.
"Draco," Crabbe said, after a careful pause. "I've been meaning to ask you something."
"What."
Crabbe had lost a little of the softness in his face over the past weeks, and slightly more of the blankness behind his eyes. He was developing what might, generously, be described as a cautious critical faculty. "Your attitude toward Granger from Gryffindor has seemed a bit unusual lately. Pansy said the rings are a matching pair."
"Pansy gossips," Draco said. "Don't believe everything she says."
"And we saw you two at Honeydukes," Goyle said. "Hugging each other."
Draco's face felt warm. "There were too many people. It was accidental."
"Pansy says that only couples hug each other," Crabbe pressed. "And look after each other the way you do."
"She's not my girlfriend," Draco said, more quickly than he'd intended. "She's—I think of her as a little sister."
He said it to close the conversation, and it did.
But he walked on in a slightly heavier silence.
She was fourteen. Her soul was open and generous and had no idea what the world was actually like. He was carrying a second lifetime's worth of darkness, and secrets, and the ongoing project of dismantling a Dark Lord piece by piece, and a collection of memories he could never tell her about.
Maintaining the right distance was the correct choice. It protected her. It was better for both of them.
She had been so distant lately. She barely spoke to him anymore.
Why would he want to complicate things further?
He gazed at the long, warm light lying across the grass.
There was, somewhere in that thought, a small and persistent ache that he was becoming practiced at ignoring.
"Let's head back." He turned toward the castle.
And came around the large stone at the base of the slope to find Harry, Ron, and Hermione standing on the other side of it.
Harry had his Firebolt. They had apparently been coming from the pitch.
Hermione's face was white.
She crossed the distance between them in three strides, levelled her wand at his nose, and said, in a voice vibrating with a controlled fury that he had genuinely never heard from her before: "Draco Malfoy. You *bastard.*"
"Hermione—" Ron started.
"You *don't* understand!" she said, without looking at him.
"I—" Draco looked at her, bewildered. "Have I—what have I done?"
"You kissed me!" She said it like a verdict, her face going crimson, her wand tip not moving.
There was a collective and extremely undignified intake of breath from the surrounding four people.
"When did this—" Draco started.
"And then you forgot?" Her voice cracked. "You kissed me, and then you act as if it never happened, and I hear you telling them—" she gestured wildly behind him, presumably at Crabbe and Goyle, "—that you *think of me as a sister?*"
Draco stared at her.
The forehead kiss. In the morning light in the hospital wing. He had not forgotten it; he had simply never known how to raise it, and he had watched her not raise it either, and time had continued and both of them had apparently been carrying it in opposite directions.
He should not have smiled.
He knew immediately, from the way her expression changed, that he should absolutely not have smiled.
She drew back her fist and hit him squarely on the nose.
It was a solid, clean, furious punch, with the full weight of weeks of suppressed feeling behind it. Stars went off in his vision. He got his hand up too late.
"You shouldn't have teased me!" she said, and her voice broke on it—actual tears now, bright and angry in her eyes.
She pulled the silver ring off her finger, threw it at his chest, turned, and walked down the hill toward Hagrid's cabin, fast, not running but almost.
Harry and Ron cast him a look—equal parts shocked and sympathetic—and followed her into the purple-grey twilight.
"Don't tell anyone," Draco said, without turning round, his hand over his nose.
Behind him, Crabbe and Goyle made sounds of rapid agreement.
He stood alone on the grassy slope, watching three silhouettes move toward the orange square of Hagrid's lit window.
He had not expected that.
He pressed two fingers to his nose, checked them, found no blood.
He stood there for quite a long time.
---
Hermione had barely got through Hagrid's door before the sob came out of her, which she had not been expecting—it startled Hagrid so severely he knocked over a jar of something.
"What is it? What's happened?" He found her a chair with one vast hand and pushed it toward her.
Harry and Ron appeared behind her and explained quietly.
Hagrid sat back, shaking his enormous head slowly. "Draco Malfoy," he said, with great disapproval. "There are perfectly good Gryffindor boys to like, and you—"
Hermione made a noise that could not generously be interpreted as agreement.
"His whole family have been Dark wizards, ever since You-Know-Who was in power. His father was one of the most loyal." Hagrid set a mug of tea in front of her, very gently. "There's no good outcome there."
"He's *not* like that," Hermione said, wiping her face with the back of her hand.
"He made you cry like this, and you're still—" Hagrid shook his head, exasperated. "He's a coward and he's got terrible taste! He couldn't even manage Buckbeak, a perfectly lovely creature!"
Harry and Ron exchanged a very small glance.
"Hermione," Hagrid said, in a softer voice, "a smart, brilliant girl like you—there isn't a spell yet that you can't master. He doesn't deserve to be crying over."
Hermione stopped crying. She went pink, sniffled, and took a long drink of tea.
She still thought about him. She thought about him with the specific, helpless ache of someone who knows perfectly well that thinking about him is counterproductive and cannot stop.
"Oh—Hermione," Hagrid said, half-standing and peering out the window toward the darkened fields. "Is that your big ginger cat? It's been circling round all day—"
A pebble skipped off the windowsill and knocked over Hagrid's tea tin. It hit the floor and split open, scattering dried leaves across the table—and from inside, a small, bald-spotted creature squeaked and scrabbled out into the light.
Ron went rigid.
He grabbed the mouse before it could run, held it up to the last red light coming through the window, and looked at its front paw.
A missing toe.
"*Peter Pettigrew,*" Harry said, upending his chair.
The mouse bit down on Ron's hand. Ron shouted and let go by reflex, and in the same second they watched it hit the floor, roll, and squeeze through the gap at the bottom of the back door that Hagrid had left ajar.
"No!" Harry was already running. "Don't let it go—"
"Hagrid—find Dumbledore—now!" Hermione was on her feet, pointing her wand, all other feelings cleanly erased by the immediate and overriding urgency of what had just happened.
She followed Harry and Ron out into the darkening fields without looking back.
---
**[Goyle's Diary — Part 1]**
**1 May 1994 — Sunny**
Only got through ten packets of nut brittle before I lost my appetite. Vincent couldn't beat me today; his tenth packet was confiscated by Draco.
Speaking of which: when did Draco find out I'd been watching the house team train?
He didn't laugh at me like the others do. He said Vincent and I should try Quidditch.
**2 May 1994 — Sunny**
Is what Draco said yesterday about respect being earned actually true?
Someone as capable as him is probably right about most things.
I hit the ball fifty times today. My arms fell off.
**3 May 1994 — Cloudy**
I asked Draco today whether he genuinely thought I—Gregory Goyle—could do it.
He looked me over for a long time. Then he looked at my stomach.
Then he told me to go for a run.
I should not have asked that question.
**4 May 1994 — Light rain**
I really should not have asked that question.
Draco has decided that Vincent and I will run ten laps around the training field every day from now on.
No nut brittle.
After running: fifty hits with the moving ball.
**5 May 1994 — Forgot.**
We ran ten laps and hit fifty balls this morning.
We were just getting ready to rest when Draco arrived to check our Transfiguration homework.
Wait—did Professor McGonagall set homework? When did that happen?
I was up until midnight finishing it.
**6 May 1994 — Sunny**
Turned in the homework on time. Vincent and I celebrated in the Great Hall.
Draco found us. He said we had eaten too much.
Fifteen laps. One hundred hits.
Terrible luck.
**7 May 1994 — Rain**
It's the weekend. Vincent and I want a day off.
We decided to find Draco in the bathroom—fewer witnesses.
We pushed open the door and found him using his wand to hold a Gryffindor seventh-year's head in the toilet. Apparently the boy had said something offensive to him the day before.
Draco looked up at us. "What? Want a turn?"
His expression was genuinely alarming.
We closed the door very carefully and stood guard outside until he was finished.
Then, under his gaze, we ran fifteen laps and hit the ball one hundred times.
I ate the toffee I had hidden under my pillow to restore my nerves.
**8 May 1994 — Overcast**
Parkinson laughed at Vincent on her way past the training field today.
Vincent was so upset he ate two fewer bowls of rice at dinner.
Draco said, "Good."
Fifteen laps. One hundred hits.
Vincent regretted the missing bowls by the tenth lap.
"I should have eaten them," he said, with a devastated face.
I secretly passed him a toffee to suck on while running so he'd have something to think about.
**9 May 1994 — Overcast, sunny intervals**
Vincent refused to get off the common room sofa.
Zabini walked past and told us we were "completely hopeless and everyone knows it."
"So what if there's mud on me!" Vincent said, face in the cushions. "Even if you turned me into a slug I'm not moving. My arms and legs don't belong to me anymore!"
Draco waved his wand at three Slytherin students who tried to prod him, and they hit the wall.
As their friends peeled them off the stone, Draco turned to Vincent and asked, in a pleasant voice, "What was that you just said? Say it again."
Vincent didn't say it again.
He got up and followed us to the training ground.
Draco sat in the stands in the evening light, turning his wand in his fingers, while we ran below.
Vincent cried through all fifteen laps and still hit the ball one hundred times.
I had no tears left. I was too tired to cry.
**10 May 1994 — Sunny**
I think Vincent was so cooperative yesterday because of the wall.
He couldn't escape today.
Around noon, I think he was planning to jump out from around a corner and frighten me. He didn't check who was walking faster.
Trying to startle Draco Malfoy is not a survivable error.
Yes: wall. It took me a while to unstick him.
Draco looked at us. "Interesting. You had extra energy after all."
Twenty laps. Two hundred hits.
For the first time in my life I felt Vincent was even less sensible than me.
I am exhausted.
**11 May 1994 — Whatever the weather was**
Twenty laps. Two hundred hits.
Mockery from Slytherins on their way past. Gloating from Gryffindors on their way past.
We can't stop, because Draco has threatened to assign us supervised study sessions with the Dementors.
I'm not certain he's joking.
**12 May 1994 — Rain**
Even Zabini got knocked into the wall today.
Shocking. They're supposed to be good friends.
Parkinson was furious but didn't dare start anything with Draco. She jumped up and down cursing from the stands instead. Draco said something to her and she went quiet and left with a face like a thundercloud.
Twenty laps. One hundred and ninety-nine hits.
They were arguing when I got to the last one and I took the opportunity.
**13 May 1994 — Cloudy**
Twenty laps. Two hundred and one hits.
Draco noticed the gap. He made me make it up myself today.
"Last time," he said from the sofa in the common room, flipping through a book I couldn't read the title of. He gave me a cold smile. "I mean it."
I wish he wouldn't smile when he says things like that.
He also knocked Daphne Greengrass across the room today when she tried to ambush him, and was then surrounded by an angry group of Slytherin girls and thoroughly condemned.
I don't know exactly how he handled it.
When we came in from training, drenched, he was playing Wizard's Chess with Theodore Nott and looked completely untroubled. The girls nearby were not looking at him and were clearly going out of their way not to.
**14 May 1994 — Ordinary**
Twenty laps. Two hundred hits.
Tomorrow is Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff. The training pitch will be occupied.
Vincent and I will have a legitimate day off.
I am looking forward to this in a way I have not looked forward to anything in quite some time.
**15 May 1994 — Fairly good**
We had planned to talk to Draco about reducing the number of hits per session.
However, first thing in the morning we heard him telling Millicent Bulstrode, in a voice that left no room for discussion, to stop using the word "Mudblood" about Granger.
He seemed in a difficult mood. Not a good time.
We tried twice more on the way to the Quidditch pitch, but he was busy having words with Zacharias Smith, who turned increasingly red, and didn't seem to notice us.
During the match, Draco appeared to go temporarily deaf to all attempts at communication. He kept looking at the Gryffindor stands.
The Snitch was clearly somewhere in the sky. What was he looking at?
I asked Vincent. Vincent said, with an air of great mystery, that it was probably Granger.
His study partner from Gryffindor.
I didn't say anything else. The echo of Bulstrode's crying from this morning was still with me.
After the match, the pitch still needed clearing.
But Draco didn't seem to remember that there was still training to do today.
He dealt very efficiently with a Gryffindor student who tried to throw something unpleasant at him—very efficiently—and then said he would take us for a walk to digest our food.
We didn't argue. We followed him.
Then everything happened.
We had not finished processing "Draco kissed Granger" before we watched Granger pull back her fist.
And then Draco just—stood there.
He stood there and took it.
He didn't block it. He didn't step back. He didn't do anything.
This is the first time in the history of Gregory Goyle's observations that Draco Malfoy has allowed another person to hit him in the face without retaliating in any way.
Vincent and I exchanged a look.
Then Draco turned and glared at us with a look that has been burned permanently into my memory, and told us to hit three hundred moving balls.
Three hundred.
Each.
Granger did the right thing.
(We didn't have to run any laps today because he didn't say to. Hehe.)
**16 May 1994 — Sunny**
Twenty laps. Three hundred hits.
Draco didn't come to supervise.
We did it anyway.
Both of us.
All the way through.
Dinner tasted better than usual tonight. I don't know why.