Who could successfully cast an Expelliarmus on Draco Malfoy?
The question had been debated across Hufflepuff House for years, the bounty going unclaimed, the mystery unsolved.
Until now.
On June the twenty-fifth, at four o'clock in the afternoon, in the attic of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, Draco Malfoy's hawthorn wand was disarmed by Hermione Granger.
"Hermione — what exactly is happening?" Draco stared at her, thrown by the sudden, completely unprovoked attack.
The girl was holding his wand, standing in the middle of the room with her arms folded and an expression of absolute authority.
She looked him up and down slowly, with the sharp, evaluating gaze of a Ministry inspector who has found exactly what she suspected.
"Come here, Draco," she said. "Walk slowly. Don't try anything."
The boy didn't even blink. He simply followed the instruction and walked, slowly, toward her.
Throughout this process, Hermione kept her eyes on him. There was no aggression in his expression — only a faint, puzzled tenderness.
"What's the matter?" He stopped in front of her, a slight furrow between his brows.
"You've been hiding something from me. Confess — I know everything." Hermione's face was slightly flushed, and her voice carried the unshakeable certainty of someone who has solved a problem. "A confession now will be treated with leniency. Continued resistance will not."
"What does that mean?" He looked down at her, wanting to touch her face. "What did I do that's made you look at me like that?"
"Don't come any closer!" she emphasised, pressing his wand lightly against his chest. Her tone was severe, entirely unaware that he knew at least a dozen ways to subdue a slightly tipsy girl and reclaim a wand, and was choosing not to use any of them.
"You're frowning — don't frown," Draco said gently, quietly entertained by her deeply unusual interrogation technique. "Shall we sit down and talk?"
"What?" Hermione's eyes narrowed. "Are you planning something?"
"What could I possibly plan?" Draco said, with complete innocence. "You've confiscated my wand. I am, as you can see, utterly defenceless."
Hermione considered this. It was, she had to admit, a reasonable point.
She stepped aside, watchful, and watched him settle onto the sofa with an unhurried elegance that was frankly unreasonable in someone being held at wandpoint. He sat the way a portrait sits — composed, and faintly aware of being observed.
She patted her warm face, irritated by her own momentary distraction.
"Come and sit as well," he said pleasantly, patting the cushion beside him.
She crossed the room, sat down with deliberate firmness, and arranged herself with her back straight and a careful gap between them.
"Tell me," she said.
"Tell you what?" he asked.
"Still pretending?" Hermione gave him a look that could have stripped the lacquer from a broomstick. "Draco Malfoy, you are something else entirely." She pressed on, holding his wand in both hands and running her thumb unconsciously along the handle — it was a nice wand, she noticed — and tried to recapture her expression of steely authority. "Admit it. You've been caught."
"Oh?" He narrowed those light grey eyes and tilted his head very slightly, trying to read her face. Underneath the startlement, his heart was hammering. "Caught doing what, exactly? Do tell me more."
"Keep your hands where I can see them. Don't hold my hand, don't touch my arm, and don't even think about trying to charm me with that face until you've confessed." She held up one warning finger. "I'm immune."
"I genuinely don't know what I'm supposed to be confessing to," Draco said, raising his hands in surrender, and deciding that the only useful thing he could do right now was play along and see where this went. "Nor do I understand why you're suddenly being so ruthless."
"Do I really have to spell it out?" Hermione said, with rising impatience.
"I'd appreciate that, yes," he said, keeping his voice very steady.
"You were present — in some way — in every single one of these events!" She stared at his perfectly composed face with real indignation. "The photograph of Bertha Jorkins. The Marauder's Map that Sirius took into the maze. Cedric's Apparition. The Sword of Gryffindor that destroyed the Gaunt ring. Can you honestly tell me you knew nothing about any of it beforehand?"
---
Hermione had caught the thread in a single, apparently careless remark from Sirius Black.
When she'd finally sat quietly and reviewed the events of June the twenty-fourth from start to finish — trying to connect the logic of what had happened — she kept arriving at the same place.
Her boyfriend.
He had obtained the photograph of Bertha Jorkins from Rita Skeeter. Without it, they would never have been able to confirm her identity from Harry's dream, or had a credible reason to put Bagman under suspicion, or discovered in time that the referee was a Death Eater in disguise. None of the subsequent warnings to Sirius and the Order would have followed.
He had produced the Marauder's Map at exactly the right moment and given it to Sirius before he entered the maze. Without it, Sirius might have spent far too long searching and missed the moment Harry disappeared entirely — and if Sirius and Dumbledore had reached the graveyard even a few minutes later, the Horcrux might have succeeded in draining Bagman completely and been reborn.
He had said something to Cedric — obliquely, pointedly, disguised as a taunt — that caused Cedric to have Apparition at the front of his mind when it mattered most. According to what Sirius had described of the scene — the crow killed by the Killing Curse, fallen directly in front of the tombstone where they had been standing — if they hadn't Disapparated when they did, one or both of them might not have survived.
He had told Sirius to bring the Sword of Gryffindor. Without which, even arriving at the graveyard in time would not have been enough. Bagman could not have testified. They would never have learned even half of what they now knew about Voldemort's plans.
Everyone gave credit where credit was visible. They praised Hermione for noticing the Bagman problem. They praised Sirius for going into the maze. They praised Cedric for his quick thinking and courage under pressure. They praised Dumbledore for destroying the Horcrux at precisely the right moment with precisely the right weapon.
But Sirius had said it, carelessly, without fanfare: "You'll have to ask Draco — he was the one who reminded me to bring the sword."
Draco was there in the architecture of all of it. Invisible, lateral, never touching the sharp end of anything.
Like someone playing Wizard's Chess who keeps accidentally nudging the board — except the nudges are precise, and nothing about them is an accident.
He was not a bystander. He was not a lucky coincidence. He was the quiet mechanism at the back of the clock.
On the surface, he appeared to be doing nothing. A fifteen-year-old boy, hovering at the edges, harmless, casual — a child skipping stones on a lake.
But could a child's carelessly thrown stone create those particular ripples? At those particular angles? Landing exactly where they needed to land?
He was not a child.
He was something else entirely.
Walking back through the warm streets, held comfortably in his arm, a part of Hermione had felt a sudden, unexpected chill — a flicker of the same unsettled feeling Cedric had described.
She'd understood it in that moment.
How does someone do this? No one can predict what other people will do. No one should be able to arrange a sequence of events like that, through nothing but oblique words and careful timing.
And yet.
She turned it over again and again, and always arrived at the same conclusion: he has a secret. A significant one. One he has been sitting on for a very long time.
At first, she'd intended to be rational about this. To take her time, ask careful questions, work toward the truth gradually.
But then he'd said he was always alert and guarded, and something in her had simply snapped.
If you trigger Hermione Granger's insecurity, the consequences are not always rational.
She'd cast the Expelliarmus before she'd entirely decided to.
And now, holding his wand, she looked at the boy sitting in front of her — hands empty, posture untroubled, grey eyes watching her with patience — and felt an uncomfortable wave of something that was almost regret.
He seemed completely unguarded with her. He didn't even appear irritated.
He was not behaving like a schemer caught in the act. He was behaving like someone waiting, patiently, for her to explain herself.
Hadn't Cedric said he had an innate aggressiveness, always ready for battle?
Draco Malfoy — if you are truly as unfathomable as Cedric claims, then in this one unguarded second, show me. Show me the vigilance beneath the surface.
But he hadn't. He'd simply let the wand go.
He was like a hedgehog showing her its soft underbelly, quietly accepting her every move.
It was as if he was saying: you can do whatever you like to me.
Hermione looked at the boy on the sofa with a complicated expression — hands empty, entirely at ease — and felt a wave of something that wasn't quite annoyance and wasn't quite guilt.
She felt less like a detective uncovering a mystery, and more like someone who had pounced on a wronged innocent.
But was that really true?
Did he genuinely not know what she wanted him to confess?
She quickly voiced her suspicions while her mind was still clear. He has a secret. She was certain of it.
He possessed a mysterious side. And he was cunning.
This was the first time she had truly felt it — not intellectually, but in her bones — that he was both of those things. This Slytherin. This particular snake.
Draco was like a small, crucial cog hidden inside a vast machine, connecting the visible parts through invisible, delicate chains, causing them to turn precisely as needed.
No one noticed. If one of those chains broke, the whole mechanism would falter — and the results would have been very different indeed.
Only Hermione Granger noticed, because she had been watching Draco Malfoy this closely for long enough.
However, even caught out, even disarmed, he remained perfectly composed.
He seemed quite certain she couldn't produce any hard evidence.
He looked at her intently, and finally spoke.
"Hermione, if we're talking about who isn't simple — it's you."
She stared at him, thrown by the reversal.
With a smile that belonged to someone who has absolutely nothing to feel guilty about, he began, quite earnestly and without any apparent shame:
"You were the one who first noticed something was wrong with Bagman. You were the one who prompted me to look for Bertha Jorkins's photograph. You reminded me to check the Marauder's Map — which led to everything that followed. If it weren't for your thinking, the consequences could have been unimaginable…"
He had taken the initiative and praised her.
Sincerely.
The girl felt a treacherous, involuntary warmth at having her contributions seen and named. Who wouldn't?
Her knees, which had been primly crossed, began, against her will, to turn slightly toward him.
Hermione caught herself. She was not won over. She was simply acknowledging that he was good at this.
"That being said," she said firmly, "explain the Marauder's Map. You carry it at all times precisely because you're afraid it'll be confiscated. But at the exact moment when everything was happening, you produced it within seconds of Professor McGonagall blocking us—"
"You were asking me for help," he said, simply. "Was I supposed to sit there and do nothing?"
"You can't just say that," Hermione said, more quietly. She looked down for a moment. "I was genuinely glad you did. I think it was extraordinary — finding a solution in that moment, getting Sirius into the maze as quickly as you did."
He smiled slightly.
"I happened to have it on me that day — that's all." He draped one arm along the back of the sofa, easy and relaxed. "And Sirius was one of the people who made it, after all. There's nothing particularly strange about letting him use it. You supported the decision yourself."
He was subtly, gently, encouraging her to put herself in his position. Making his choices sound obvious. Retrospectively inevitable.
She was not convinced.
"Coincidence," she said, with polite scepticism. "And was it also coincidence that you reminded Sirius to bring the Sword of Gryffindor — which then destroyed the Horcrux?"
"It was a coincidence," Draco said, and there was something in his eyes — brief, very brief — that she couldn't quite name.
"This was all a complete accident!" he was insisting to himself at the same time.
He'd wanted Sirius to bring the sword to deal with Nagini — Voldemort's serpent, the one that had given Harry such persistent nightmares. And perhaps to prevent another incident like the one that had haunted his memory from his previous life: Professor Charity Burbage, the Muggle Studies teacher, killed before she could cry out for help, while he stood by and did nothing.
That was all. A secondary thought. A precaution.
He had had no idea a Horcrux would be present at the graveyard. He hadn't even known Horcruxes were involved in any capacity.
Looking back on the previous day, Draco was quietly startled by how much seemed to have shifted — events deviating from the path he remembered, people landing in different places than expected.
Was that because of him?
Was it his intrusion into this life — a butterfly disturbing the air — that had begun to redirect the current?
He wasn't certain.
But he was increasingly certain that the great wheel of events, while broadly on course, had begun to throw unexpected splashes that hadn't existed in the life he remembered. Voldemort, for instance, had behaved differently. He had run. He had staged a false death and abandoned a Horcrux as the sacrifice.
That hadn't happened before.
"Don't put it so dramatically," Hermione said, her tone softening slightly at whatever she'd seen in his expression. "I'm not accusing you of conspiracy. I just feel — very strongly — that you must have known something, going back much further than yesterday." She looked at him steadily. "You told Cedric to use Apparition. Didn't you."
"That was a passing remark, mostly meant to needle him—"
"No it wasn't," she said, firmly and without room for argument. "That wasn't careless. That wasn't mockery. You already knew that the graveyard would be somewhere Apparition was possible — unlike Hogwarts, with its enchantments. But you said it with absolute certainty." She paused. "Voldemort chose that location deliberately. Something about that place was prepared in advance. And yet you had no doubts."
Draco said nothing immediately.
His memories from his previous life had told him the graveyard would be accessible. But he had no explanation he could give her.
So he raised an eyebrow and said, half-smiling, "I'd be interested to hear what else you've found."
"You were certain Cedric would be the one to end up there," Hermione pressed on, quietly. "Not Fleur. Not Viktor Krum. You didn't warn Harry. You didn't concern yourself with whether Harry had learned Apparition. You focused on Cedric — and you used provocation deliberately, because you were afraid someone would see your real intention." She held his gaze. "And when Cedric tried to thank you for it, you immediately tried to end the conversation."
"That was just my usual manner with him," Draco said quickly.
Hermione was not listening.
"You even told me," she said slowly, the chill still in her voice, "that the reason you did all of this was because of a dream you'd had. That a warrior was going to have an accident."
She'd thought it was a joke at the time. Dreams were unreliable even when you had a proper Seer reading them — and Professor Trelawney's crystal ball had never once produced anything useful.
Draco looked at her. His face was calm. His eyes were unreadable.
This is the danger, he thought, not for the first time, of caring about Hermione Granger.
She is sharp, and systematic, and she watches the details of everything around her with attention that most people reserve for things they consider important. To her, everything is important.
All your small inconsistencies and careful omissions, sitting quietly unnoticed for months, eventually become evidence.
"Cedric told me," Hermione went on, more quietly, "how close it was in that graveyard. He thought he was the obstacle — the one about to be removed. The Order knocked Bagman down immediately, but Bagman might have acted first. The Killing Curse landed right where they'd been standing." She looked at him steadily. "You knew that might happen, didn't you?"
Her eyes were too clear.
Draco touched his nose, rearranged his thinking, and said, "I'll remind you — meeting Diggory outside the Owlery that day was genuinely accidental. We wouldn't have been there at all if you hadn't needed to send a letter. How could I have predicted when he'd turn up with his girlfriend? That part, at least, was not arranged."
"That part," Hermione repeated.
"The whole thing," Draco said, with feeling. "The whole thing was a series of coincidences."
"And reminding Sirius to pay special attention to the possibility of the champions being Portkeyed somewhere?" Hermione asked. "And specifically making sure someone in the Order was prepared to respond to that situation?"
"There are a great many intelligent people in the Order of the Phoenix," Draco said. "They'd have worked it out eventually even without me saying anything. I just—"
"Said one more thing?" Hermione cut in. "Don't. When has Draco Malfoy ever said something pointless? He wouldn't glance twice at a situation he didn't have a reason to engage with."
Draco looked at her for a long moment.
"Should I be concerned," he said at last, with something very close to wonder, "that you apparently know me better than I know myself?"
"Of course I know you," she said, half exasperated and half satisfied. "That's precisely why I knew something was off — every word you said landed at exactly the right moment. Every single one. That is not coincidence, and you know perfectly well it isn't—"
"Hermione," he said, with gentle, patient sincerity, "I genuinely don't know how to account for the effect my offhand remarks seem to have had. I think it's quite far-fetched to—"
"Don't," she said.
Her temples were throbbing. He was sitting there looking faintly melancholy, which was his standard defence when he wanted her to stop pressing him on something uncomfortable — and for once, it wasn't working.
She sat with it for a moment longer. Then she said, without looking away from him: "Harry just disappeared as always."
Those grey eyes went very still.
There it was.
Hermione felt a small, sharp pulse of satisfaction.
"Why 'as always'?" she asked, leaning forward slightly, her eyes fixed on his. "When we were outside the maze and heard what Sirius's Patronus had reported, you said — Harry disappeared, as always. As if it had happened before. As if it were a pattern you recognised."
He opened his mouth.
"Not a slip of the tongue," she said, before he could reach for that.
"I might have—" he tried.
"You didn't," she said, with complete certainty. "You knew. You knew that Harry disappearing was not a complete surprise to you in that moment. You had — some expectation of it."
Draco was quiet for a long moment.
She was still holding his wand. Her other hand rested on her knee, and she was watching him with the expression of someone who has just found the last piece of a puzzle and is waiting, without impatience, for it to be confirmed.
He had misspoken. He knew he had, in the moment it left his mouth.
The question was how to address it without opening a door he wasn't ready to open.
"How about this," he said eventually, very softly. "You think I used a Time-Turner."
Hermione's eyes narrowed.
"Didn't you?" she said.
"I promise you," he said, "I did not use a Time-Turner yesterday."
"Prove it," she said.
"Think it through," he said calmly. "If I'd used a Time-Turner, I would have appeared on the Marauder's Map at two different times simultaneously. You would have seen two versions of my name."
Hermione's expression faltered.
She hadn't thought of that.
She had not thought of that.
The elaborate framework she had been constructing — carefully, logically, brick by brick — shuddered.
"It's possible," she said, rallying with some effort, "that you had some other device. Something that conceals your location. Some dark magic object from the family library that—"
"I swear on my wand," Draco said quietly, with complete seriousness, "that I did not use any dark magic object yesterday. Or a Time-Turner."
"Then dare you swear," she asked, trying very hard to sound steady, "that this is the first time you've ever... seen something like this coming?"
Draco could not, in good conscience, swear that.
But he could appear helpless.
"Is there really a difference?" He tried his best to sound bewildered and put-upon. "How many times must I say it before you believe me?"
Hermione pouted.
She simply could not believe she had made such a critical logical error.
She lowered her head, staring somewhat blankly at the open collar of his shirt, and attempted to restart her Butterbeer-fogged brain. She went back to the beginning. She re-examined the evidence.
The arguments were all still sound. The logic was all still consistent.
The conclusion, however, had no solid foundation underneath it.
The castle she had built from sand dissolved into the tide.
Hermione was profoundly dissatisfied.
She rubbed her groggy head, trying to rebuild the chain of reasoning, and in doing so completely failed to notice what her fingers were doing — absently tracing along the lines of the shirt fabric in front of her, following the faint, warm contours underneath.
Draco noticed.
He tried to be subtle about his reaction: "Hermione—"
Does she have any idea what she's doing?
If this continued, he was going to embarrass himself rather badly.
Her wandering, entirely oblivious fingers absolutely could not be allowed to continue doing that. He had his dignity to consider.
"Wait — let me think—" Hermione murmured, still staring at the abstract problem in front of her, still tracing.
Then the lines seemed to tense. There was the faintest shudder.
The next second, Hermione found herself horizontal on the sofa.
His sudden, decisive movement left her dizzy and completely wrong-footed, her thoughts scattered to the four winds.
How had he moved that fast? When exactly had he taken back the upper hand?
"Why?" she asked, dazed, her eyes finding his flushed face above her.
Hadn't he been cooperating with the investigation just a moment ago?
"Your accusations were somewhat hurtful," Draco said, his voice not entirely steady, his jaw set. He was very firmly pretending her fingers had not just nearly ended him. "And besides — after such a thorough search with no results, I think you'll find you don't have any real evidence."
"Maybe," Hermione said slowly, gazing up at those grey eyes and noticing that his pupils had grown rather large.
She blinked. She reached sideways, fumbling for the wands tucked into the sofa cushion — and her hand was caught.
"Hermione Granger, you've disarmed me." He brought his face close to hers, his warm breath brushing her cheek. "No one has ever managed that except you." A small pause. "But you didn't think that losing my wand means I can't do anything to you, did you?"
"At least," Hermione said, her face flushing from the heat of him, "you can't cast a spell on me."
"Good girl, remember this," Draco said quietly, his face pressed against her collarbone. "I would never cast a curse on you."
"You would never," Hermione repeated, softly. A small, involuntary smile.
She found herself distracted by his hair — platinum-blond, impossibly neat even now, impossibly bright.
"Of course. Never." He pressed his face gently against her, his eyes warm and rather wicked. "Now hold still. I'm counting your heartbeats."
"That is not how you count heartbeats," Hermione informed him, with the last scrap of her authority.
"I've developed my own method," he said, entirely unrepentant.
"I think you have ulterior motives," she said, her own heart thoroughly unhelpful.
"I didn't expect you to distrust me so completely," he said, in a voice like summer — unhurried, light, full of warmth that made it difficult to keep hold of any particular thought.
"Hermione, a Malfoy doesn't accept baseless suspicion." His voice held a faint, deliberate edge. "It means — consequences."
Hermione made a face. He actually wanted her to surrender.
She never surrendered. She was right, and she knew it.
Besides, without wands, they were technically evenly matched.
Except that, as she realised a moment later, he could hold both her wrists in one hand, and still had the other one entirely free.
Cunning, she thought. He and his hands are entirely too cunning.
A hand wandered — unhurriedly, methodically — upward from her ankle to her knee and continued upward, and her train of thought derailed completely.
"Draco—"
He paused.
"Do you admit you might have been a little hasty?" he said, very gently.
"I'm sorry," she managed, "I may have... jumped to conclusions." She tilted her head back despite herself — thoroughly against her will, and yet doing it anyway — and surrendered the argument if not the point.
She had, she reminded herself, calculated everything clearly.
Both wands were hers.
Both wands were completely out of reach.
She'd been outmanoeuvred by someone with no wand and a very unreasonable face.
"Well done," he said, with great satisfaction, his warm hands settling on the smooth inside of her wrists, his forehead resting briefly against hers. "Now, since you drew on my shirt — which was rude — I think a fair exchange requires that I have a look at yours."
"I didn't—" She started to argue, then remembered, with a hot wave of embarrassment, that she had in fact been doing exactly that. "I was thinking."
"You were using me as a blackboard," he said pleasantly. "Which I found quite interesting, if you want the truth."
"I probably don't have anything to draw," she said, trying to redirect the terms of engagement.
"Then I'll make do with your waist," he said, with the calm reasonableness of someone announcing a minor administrative decision. "And count ribs. And — I think a few kisses are included as well, it's only fair—"
"That's not a real rule," Hermione said, weakly.
"It is now. Draco Malfoy accountability guidelines, effective immediately." He tucked his face against her neck and said, against her skin, "Designed specifically to discourage a certain person from staging unlawful searches and making unfounded accusations against law-abiding citizens—"
"I haven't entirely given up," she said, her voice not cooperating properly.
"Collarbone area added," he announced, unmoved, and demonstrated.
She gasped.
"I will — continue to watch you closely," she managed, her voice rather less steady than she would have liked.
"Sternum," he added, with the air of someone recording a ledger entry.
"I—" she started.
He stopped her with his lips.
His hand resumed its very distracting circling, and he murmured against her, "Before you continue — consider the available territory carefully. I wouldn't mind claiming some new ground as well. Counting heartbeats with my fingers, for instance." A glint of interest, genuine and warm. "Shall I?"
That was not something she could reasonably answer yes to.
She assessed the situation, and said nothing at all.
Like a cat whose neck has been caught, Hermione Granger officially surrendered.
She wasn't entirely sure who had won what, and she was too comfortable to work it out.
Ginny's advice had been completely unreliable. She felt a distant, hazy resentment about this.
Casting an Expelliarmus on him had been a terrible idea. The consequence was yielding territory, paying penalties, and being temporarily deprived of both wands and freedom of movement.
Yes — he would never cast a curse on her. What he wanted was far more disarming than any curse. Draco thought, his face warm, that what he wanted was considerably more than that, and always had been.
She was his.
Entirely too sensitive, entirely too earnest, and impossibly, unreasonably sweet — and worth every ounce of patience he had.
He would take his time. He would heat the water slowly, let it rise degree by careful degree, and let her come to him willingly, fully, when she was ready — which she would be, because he could wait.
He would conquer the ground, and she would open the gates herself.
The prey had no idea she was already caught.
Hermione looked up at him.
His pupils reflected a girl's face. The girl's expression was one of helpless, brilliant infatuation — lips parted, eyes bright, anticipating — more intoxicating than anything she'd drunk today.
A silent argument passed between them, Butterbeer-scented and breathless.
Her: You have entirely too much confidence for someone with no wand.
Him: You gave me far too much credit for the Time-Turner, and not nearly enough credit for this.
Neither of them was willing to be the first to give ground.
She expressed her position deeply, intensely, stubbornly — the only kind of stubbornness Hermione Granger had left in her, at that particular moment.
It was, she would later reflect, quite a reasonable position to hold.