Once he found a reason, "catching up with her and saying a few words" became something Draco Malfoy did without any psychological burden.
"Are you alright? You seem a little angry." He asked her tentatively, walking alongside her slowly down the grassy slope towards the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
The rain had stopped, and the sky was a clear, light grey, which reminded Hermione of the boy's eyes beside her.
The grass underfoot was still a little damp. Hermione took a deep breath, and the fresh scent of grass after the rain filled her nostrils, lifting her spirits a little.
"Oh, it is nothing serious," she said, trying to sound casual. "I just realised that I am not good at everything."
She seemed particularly sensitive to those words, and Draco studied her expression intently, noticing that her lips twitched downward when she said them.
"No one can be good at everything. A person only has twenty-four hours a day time is extremely limited. It is already a great achievement to do well the things one is interested in," he tried to persuade her.
"But I think you can do everything," Hermione said, glancing at him with a frustrated expression.
"Oh, that is because you have not seen me in Care of Magical Creatures," Draco said to her seriously. "I cannot even control a textbook."
He dramatically shook the wildly writhing Monster Book of Monsters in his hand it was tightly bound by a rope and looked extremely dissatisfied.
"You need to stroke it down the spine." Hermione could not help but chuckle, and simply took his book, attempting to demonstrate for him.
In the rush, her fingers accidentally brushed against his, and it felt as if an electric current passed between their fingers.
She panicked and quickly pulled away from his hand, not daring to look at him, pretending to be completely absorbed in stroking the book.
Good heavens, is there an electrical fault somewhere? She was extremely puzzled.
Draco, of course, felt the electric current. It flowed down his fingers, through his arm, and straight to his heart. He looked up at her briefly, but said nothing.
She was demonstrating. Her beautiful, nimble fingers lightly stroked the spine of the book, making his heart flutter. The fuzzy, brown-green textbook trembled slightly, then opened and lay quietly in her palm.
"Dangerous creatures, insane textbooks. I shall have to rely entirely on Miss Hermione Granger to protect me in this class." He exclaimed loudly at the empty grass, as if reciting poetry.
Draco concealed his strange inner turmoil, not daring to linger his gaze on her fingers for too long.
Hermione was amused by him, but soon her smile faded.
She recalled her disastrous Divination session and the static electricity issue was it because she had too much hair and it was causing static?
She glanced at the boy with suspicion, only to be met by his grey eyes, which seemed to reflect the light of day and the shadows of clouds. She asked hastily, "Shall we go?"
"Let us go." He spoke calmly, as if the electric current only existed in her heart and had nothing to do with him.
Hermione breathed a sigh of relief and continued walking with him, exchanging cutting jokes about Divination and giving Professor Trelawney's theory a thorough dressing-down.
"In short, I believe that destiny should be in our own hands." She concluded firmly, maintaining a careful distance from him, wary of the electric current spreading again.
"That is right. You have always thought so," he said softly, keeping a tacit distance from her, just as she had hoped.
They arrived at Hagrid's cabin. There were already a few students waiting there, all seemingly at a loss with their textbooks.
Some people had tied them up tightly; some had stuffed them into narrow, tight bags, as if they had caught a disobedient hedgehog; and some had used a ridiculous large clip to hold the pages together.
"Let us help them out." Draco did not like seeing Hermione so preoccupied with Divination class and wanted to give her something to do.
He glanced around at the students, who were in a state of chaos with their books, and encouraged her, "You want Hagrid's first class to go smoothly, do you not?"
Hermione hesitated for about a second before nodding to him. He took the heavy backpack from Hermione's hand so she could travel light, but frowned the moment he held it how many books were inside?
However, judging from how enthusiastically she went to instruct the other students, her mood was indeed much improved.
Thanks the Merlin. Hermione had figured out how to deal with the textbook.
Draco, of course, knew how to quieten it down Narcissa had told him when she bought it; and he had taken Hagrid's class in his past life.
He simply did not want to draw attention to himself in this class.
Hagrid might accidentally make him demonstrate riding that great hippogriff, which would probably be another nightmare.
The lesson went fairly smoothly. This time, almost all the students although Neville Longbottom still struggled with the book managed to open the Monster Book of Monsters without difficulty. Hagrid looked very pleased.
Just like before, the newly appointed Care of Magical Creatures teacher, wearing his moleskin coat and accompanied by his large, fierce-looking but cowardly dog, excitedly led them to a small paddock at the edge of the Forbidden Forest to show them a dozen or so hippogriffs.
These beasts were hardly endearing!
They had the bodies, hind legs, and tails of horses, and the forelegs, wings, and heads of eagles. Even though he had encountered them before, Draco still found them ferocious and bizarre.
"Walk towards it, bow, and if it bows back, you may touch it. If it does not bow, back away from it quickly its claws can hurt you," Hagrid said enthusiastically to his students.
"Alright, who wants to go first?"
The students were completely silent.
Hermione looked at their menacing heads and half-foot-long eagle talons, and involuntarily took a step back alongside Draco.
She was not completely over it so much so that she stubbornly refused to stand with Harry and Ron. Instead, she stood next to Draco, separated from them by a large rock.
She wanted to stand beside him.
He was the only one who was willing to put in the effort to make her laugh and comfort her, instead of mocking her for not being good at something.
He never mocked her.
These were the thoughts of her.
Hagrid asked again, but still no student was willing to step forward. In the end, Harry was pushed forward by his mischievous friend Ron, becoming the first to approach in the class.
Harry was stiff and tense. However, Hagrid was already smiling at him with pride and expectation it would have been difficult for anyone to say no at that moment.