A/N: Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well. I'm currently rewriting the chapters, so if you're an old reader and things seem a bit different, you're not crazy.
I hope you enjoy the updated version of the fanfic. Please feel free to comment, leave a review, and give a Power Stone if you like the story—it really helps and motivates me to keep writing!
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Draco's chance encounter with Hermione had been a brief, pleasant interruption to a long summer.
After that day, he returned to Malfoy Manor with his parents; she continued the Tour de France with hers. The warmth of that afternoon lingered, uninvited, and left a faint, inconvenient restlessness in its place.
In mid-August, Draco was reading a book called Encountering the Faceless Monster on a bench in the courtyard when Joan landed in front of him with her usual air of self-importance.
He flipped through the letters with a blank expression, forgetting entirely to offer her a treat. Joan squawked at him in pointed displeasure, flapped her wings, and departed over the rose hedge.
The letters read as follows.
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Draco,
Grimmauld Place has been completely transformed. I don't know what happened, but Kreacher seems like a different elf—the house is actually clean and liveable now. I suspect it might have something to do with what happened in the Headmaster's office.
In any case, Sirius says I've gained weight. Fair enough, because Kreacher's French onion soup and steak-and-kidney pie are extraordinary. You'll have to try them next time.
Sirius has been incredibly busy—he didn't even manage to watch the Quidditch World Cup, which seems criminal. On my birthday, though, he took me to visit Privet Drive to thank the Dursleys for "raising me." You should have seen Uncle Vernon's face. I'd bet a Galleon he nearly fainted.
One more thing. My scar started hurting recently. The last time that happened was in first year, when we ran into Quirrell in the Forbidden Forest. Ron wanted to ask his father about it, but I told him not to—I didn't want everyone making a fuss. Hermione's reaction was a bit much, if I'm honest. You don't think it means anything serious, do you?
P.S. Are you going to the World Cup? Ron's invited Hermione and me to the Burrow; his dad managed to get seats in the Top Box.
Harry
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Draco,
I've arrived at the Burrow, and Harry is here too. Have you heard about his scar? I've been through Common Magical Ailments cover to cover and can't find anything useful. This isn't an ordinary scar, is it? I think he should write to Professor Dumbledore.
My parents have gone on to Africa—they caught the start of the wildebeest migration and decided to extend their stay by a few days (I am devastated to have missed it). The Weasleys have been very welcoming and said I'm more than welcome to stay until the start of term. There's a particular advantage to being in a wizarding household: you can practise spells freely, which is entirely impossible at home. The twins have explained that the rule is "whatever you like, as long as Mrs Weasley doesn't find out." They prank Ron and Ginny at least three times daily—occasionally Harry too—but they've left me entirely alone, for which I am profoundly grateful.
Thank you for recommending Evaluation of Magical Education in Europe—I'd had no idea Hogwarts wasn't the only wizarding school. The European institutions are fascinating; I'm very curious about how they choose their locations.
Also, I found some genuinely interesting content in the book I bought in Èze this summer. I can't explain it properly by letter—I'll tell you when we're back at school.
Hermione
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A humble house? he thought. Is it really that interesting?
He had spent considerable effort on introductions and connections, and she was spending the last weeks of summer at the Burrow.
Despite this, he knew it was the sensible arrangement. He was perfectly aware of how Lucius and Narcissa viewed Muggle-born witches. If he had invited Hermione to the Manor, his father would have found some pointed way to make her feel unwelcome before she'd crossed the entrance hall. That was simply the reality.
It would still be a long time before Hermione Granger walked through the front door of Malfoy Manor as a welcome guest.
An uncontrollable sense of dissatisfaction stirred in him anyway, and he recognised it as irrational, which did not make it any less present.
Since his rebirth, Draco had unknowingly reached his fourth year at Hogwarts.
As time went on, his mindset was increasingly shaped by the present. He more and more frequently forgot his actual age. The three years at Hogwarts had changed him in ways he hadn't anticipated—there were whole stretches of time when he felt no different from any other fourteen-year-old, worrying about his studies and his friends and the girl he couldn't stop thinking about.
But whenever he woke at night from the old nightmares, the weight returned all at once.
Those memories were too heavy and too stubborn. They tore at him and made it difficult to breathe.
To him, the shadow of the Dark Lord was like the Sword of Damocles—suspended above him, invisible, liable to fall at any moment.
He had to stay vigilant. He had to work harder. He was racing against time, against fate, against an enemy who had spent decades weaving himself into the very fabric of the wizarding world.
At first, he had thought simply hindering the Dark Lord's return would be enough. Capture Quirrell, hand him over to Dumbledore, track down the diadem, and call it done. But then the diary had appeared. Then the golden cup and the locket. Horcrux after Horcrux, each one evidence of how deeply the Dark Lord's methods had embedded themselves. And the Death Eaters who had never truly laid down their loyalty, and Peter Pettigrew still at large, and the Triwizard Tournament drawing closer with everything it portended.
Hindering was not enough. It had never been enough.
He had to do more.
He sighed, put the letters in his pocket, and left the rose-scented courtyard. He followed the dark staircase down to his potions workroom and returned to his research with a troubled mind.
He was attempting to reconstruct an improved dragonpox restorative. Someone had developed a more effective formulation than the standard—he had studied the guide years ago, in his previous life, with no particular urgency, and now his memory of the precise dosages was frustratingly vague.
In his previous life, his grandfather Abraxas had died of dragonpox before Draco started sixth year. That time was drawing closer.
Only a young man with considerable resources and considerable stubbornness could approach the problem this way—a full row of cauldrons running the same brew at different concentrations, watching the colour shifts, comparing them against his remembered description, discarding every batch that didn't match. Starting again.
Today was another fruitless day. Not one of the cauldrons produced the right colour change.
He abandoned the worktop for the armchair by the fireplace and said to the room, "Dobby. Clear them up."
Dobby appeared immediately, dressed in a bright green outfit printed with vivid red roses—not unlike a small, enthusiastic topiary. He began moving through the cauldrons in unusual quiet, without his customary running commentary.
Something was wrong.
A sharp yelp. Dobby had caught his finger on a cauldron that hadn't fully cooled.
Draco summoned a glass of iced water. "Put your hand in."
Dobby obeyed, nursing the finger, staring at the floor.
"What's the matter with you today?" Draco watched him. "You've been out of sorts since you arrived. Tell me what happened—that's an order."
Dobby glanced up sideways, clearly wrestling with something. Then it came out in a rush.
"A few days ago, Dobby had a day off, and Dobby thought he would visit Winky—she is the Crouch family's house-elf, she has always been very kind to Dobby. Mr Bartemius Crouch had left for the Ministry, so Dobby thought it would be safe to visit. But when Dobby came to the window, Dobby heard Winky talking to someone inside. She called him 'little master.' Dobby went in to look, but there was nobody there. Only Winky. When Dobby asked her, she said Dobby had misheard—she was very upset—and she made Dobby leave." The small elf looked miserable. "Dobby is very worried about her."
Draco was still for a moment.
Bartemius Crouch.
He was a man in his fifties. Straight-backed, stiff in his movements, short black hair, a toothbrush moustache. He had the look of someone assembled from a template rather than born. Draco knew of him well enough—Lucius mentioned him at the dinner table regularly, and always with poorly disguised resentment.
"He and Ludo Bagman are organising the World Cup," Lucius had said that very evening, his fingers tight around his fork. "That humourless prig caused the Malfoys considerable inconvenience, back in the day."
Draco could fill in the rest. Bartemius Crouch Senior had been Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement during the war—the architect of the hardline prosecution of Death Eaters, the man who had authorised Aurors to use Unforgivable Curses and shown no mercy in the subsequent trials. He had not been the sort of man who could be bought.
"His son wasn't exactly old-fashioned either," Narcissa said, her lip curling with an expression that was not entirely displeasure.
"Twelve OWLs," Lucius said, the hiss in his voice unmistakeable. "Top of his year. Bright, loyal, brave—by his father's own account." A pause. "The look on Bartemius Crouch's face in that courtroom—"
Narcissa noticed her son listening and intervened smoothly. "In any case, Lucius, you can't make everyone like you. He has no real power over our affairs now. Maintaining Cornelius Fudge's goodwill is worth far more than worrying about him."
"Quite right," Lucius agreed, a glint of satisfaction in his grey eyes. "Fudge has already been very obliging—he secured us a Top Box seat for the Final."
Draco took a quiet sip of his soup and listened as his parents resumed their preferred dinner entertainment: assessing the Ministry's personnel and identifying where the leverage lay.
He turned the information over in his mind now.
Bartemius Crouch Junior. A Hogwarts top graduate. Convicted as a Death Eater, sentenced to Azkaban, reportedly dead within a year of imprisonment. His father had prosecuted him personally, without flinching.
He was supposed to be dead.
But Winky was calling someone 'little master.' And Winky had been frightened enough to throw Dobby out of the house.
In his previous life, after the Triwizard Tournament, Bartemius Crouch Senior had been found dead in the Forbidden Forest. The official explanation had been so vague as to be meaningless—and by then the entire wizarding world had been consumed by far larger news, and the death of one rigid, unpopular Ministry official had received almost no scrutiny.
What if the son hadn't died in Azkaban after all?
What if the father had—
Draco thought suddenly of the Invisibility Cloak. Of the snowball Harry had thrown at apparently nothing in Hogsmeade.
Perhaps there was someone in that house who had been hidden there for a very long time.
But Crouch Senior would never—the man who had sentenced his own son to Azkaban without flinching, in front of a packed courtroom?
The questions multiplied without resolving. He stared at the cold cauldrons and let them run.
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Extra Chapter 8 – The Malfoys' Hobbies
(Narcissa's Perspective)
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It was a bright summer morning when Narcissa, dressed in a white lace walking dress, returned from her stroll through the manor woodland.
Away from the world, without her careful makeup and formal armour, she looked rather different from the composed, distant mistress of the Malfoy family that most people encountered. Her house-elves could have told you this. Without the red lipstick and the performance of rank, she looked something like the daffodils that grew along the lower pond—pale and precise and rather lovely, and not remotely as fragile as the comparison might suggest.
She had managed this household since she was twenty-two. House-elves, Muggle estate managers, tenants, groundskeepers, suppliers, and an extensive network of people who all required careful handling. There was a particular composure required to hold it all in order, and Narcissa maintained that composure without complaint and without visible effort, and had done so for fifteen years.
It was simply how things were done.
On her way back to the Manor, she paused at the greenhouse and looked in.
Lucius was directing the house-elves through the latest phase of his Animagus preparation—the precise arrangement of vessels required for the ritual's dew-collection stage, being carefully carried to the darkroom. He had attempted the transformation three times already that summer. The first time, the mandrake leaf had slipped. The second, a cloudy sky had obscured the full moon at the critical moment. The third had foundered on the requirement for seven consecutive days of dew collection in complete isolation from human contact, which had proven genuinely incompatible with his schedule.
He turned when she came in, and smiled at her—the particular smile he kept for her alone.
"You look even more beautiful without the makeup," he said.
Narcissa allowed this. His tongue was merciless toward almost everyone else; she had never taken the exception for granted.
She stood beside him and watched the house-elves work. "Your dew collection records are accurate this time?"
"Entirely." He glanced at her. "Though I'd never have thought of the continuous-flow arrangement without your suggestion. I'd been doing the collection by hand."
She smiled slightly and said nothing.
She had, in fact, learned the method by writing to Sirius. This was a detail she intended to keep to herself indefinitely.
She hadn't expected him to be helpful. In her memory, Sirius Black had been a particular torment of her adolescence—all mockery and contempt, forever comparing her unfavourably to Andromeda, calling her vain and spineless and decorative. She had not liked him then. She liked him somewhat better now, in the abstract. Azkaban appeared to have made him less interested in proving things to people he'd already left behind.
She did not intend to tell him this either.
She stayed until the arrangement was complete, wished Lucius success, and went to find her son.
Draco had recently acquired a new hobby.
"If I'm disarmed," he had told her, very patiently, "or if I face something that isn't affected by magic, I need to be able to protect myself. No one can guarantee they'll always have their wand."
She had found this logic peculiar until she heard about Professor Lupin and the full moon—and about a certain night at the end of the school year, which her son had described, firmly and repeatedly, as merely passing by and lending a hand. The unusual focus on Muggle combat had continued after that, which suggested to Narcissa that his account of the evening had been somewhat abridged.
She had given in.
"Tell me which instructor you want," she'd said. "And I don't want to hear about it from the Board."
She looked into the dungeon now. The change was remarkable—Muggle electric lights along the ceiling, a large custom-made training mat covering the floor in Slytherin green, sections of the wall padded. If Arthur Weasley came snooping around again, he would be absolutely delighted.
The instructor—a compact, serious man named Gracie—was speaking to Draco, who stood in a white training gi, listening with close attention.
"Jiu-Jitsu is a ground art. Leverage, technique, patience. When the opponent goes down, the real work begins—you use their own weight and movement against them. Even a smaller practitioner can control a much larger opponent, if the technique is right—"
Narcissa decided she had absorbed enough for one morning. What could be more efficient than a wand? If you can't win, leave. She had no quarrel with practicality, but there were limits. She left them to it and walked to the east wing, where the perfumery had been set up in the rooms Lucius had cleared for her after the factory acquisition was finalised.
She sat down at the blending table and picked up her notes.
Perfumery was considerably more interesting. By layering rose absolute with cedarwood and a measured addition of vetiver and musk, you could construct something that evoked a very specific quality of morning—the scent of trees and damp bark and something floral but not sweet, the stillness just before the day began. She had been refining this particular accord for a week. It was nearly right.
She heard Draco's footsteps in the corridor about an hour later—he always came to find her after training, which she appreciated, even if he arrived slightly damp.
"Little Dragon." She looked up. "Come here. I need your opinion."
He appeared in the doorway with a towel over his shoulder, wearing the mild wariness of someone who has learned that his mother's creative projects can require opinions on short notice.
"There's likely to be a ball at Hogwarts this year," she said. "You'll need formal dress robes." She set two small bottles on the table in front of him. "And cologne. I've been experimenting. Tell me which direction appeals to you."
Draco hesitated. His expression went through something she couldn't immediately read before he said, "Do you have...something with watermelon in it?"
Narcissa looked at him.
"Watermelon," she repeated.
"Or something like it."
She pressed her lips together carefully. "Draco. No. I say this with love. A fruity cologne is charming on a twelve-year-old. On a young man of fourteen, it reads as sweet in entirely the wrong way—there's nothing interesting in it." She slid the first bottle toward him. "Cedarwood with an amber base. Warm, complex, understated. This is what I recommend."
He picked it up and turned it in his hands with the expression of someone who is not entirely persuaded but has the sense not to say so aloud.
"Really?" he said.
She studied her son—slightly flushed from training, regarding a cologne bottle with more gravity than she had ever seen him bring to an examination—and decided, with a private warmth she had absolutely no intention of showing, that whoever had inspired the watermelon question was likely to cause her considerable future inconvenience.
"Trust me," she said.
He uncapped the bottle and smelled it. He said nothing for a moment.
"Fine," he said, which from Draco meant yes.