"What does your schedule look like these days?" he asked, mildly curious.
She replied, "Some childhood friends are coming to visit."
Draco raised an eyebrow, catching a faint undercurrent in what seemed like a perfectly ordinary piece of news.
He asked the ring, "Boys or girls?"
"Both," she said lightly.
Draco went quiet.
Why had she never mentioned these childhood friends before? Or that particular boy?
Seeing no response from him, Hermione asked, "Did your parents mention me today?"
She couldn't quite stop herself from wondering about it.
She knew perfectly well she was unlikely to receive a comforting answer — and yet she asked anyway.
"Today, they learned how clever you are," he said, in a tone that was decidedly positive.
Hermione exhaled with quiet relief. The terrible answer she had been bracing for hadn't come. The corners of her mouth curved upward.
"How did they find out?" she asked.
"You ranked first in the year," he reminded her.
He added, "That's rather hard to overlook."
"That was probably just luck," she said modestly.
Hermione's inner voice, however, was practically dancing — quietly, privately triumphant.
This was her breakthrough. She had finally outperformed Draco.
She wasn't entirely sure how he felt about it. A proud, competitive boy who loved to dominate the rankings — would he mind having his top spot taken? She raised an eyebrow, turning the thought over in her mind.
From the other end of the ring, Draco said, with quiet certainty, "No. You deserved it."
Hermione Granger deserved first place every time.
Including the three years before this one — she should have had it then too.
Today, Draco Malfoy could no longer pretend otherwise. He could admit it honestly.
He had sensed, for a while now, that she might surpass him eventually. He simply hadn't expected it to happen this soon.
In the fourth-year final examinations, their marks across most subjects had been closely matched. There was nothing remarkable about that — Draco was studying this material for the second time, with twice the preparation Hermione had. He ought to have done better. And yet he had only managed a draw.
In one subject alone had she clearly beaten him: Arithmancy.
And that one subject said everything.
Because in his previous life, Draco had never taken Arithmancy. Meaning that in that one class — and only that one — they had been competing from exactly the same starting point.
She had won easily.
Even accounting for the fact that Draco had spent a considerable portion of the term helping Harry practise defensive spells — all in preparation for the Triwizard Tournament — Hermione had still won.
With her face full of curiosity and hard work, with her limitless appetite for learning, Hermione Granger had won, and she had deserved to.
Merlin. There had never been a girl who chased excellence the way she did. Draco couldn't help smiling at the thought.
His Hermione was extraordinary.
She grew brighter by the day — more and more impossible to ignore.
In his past life, he had been furious when his father mocked him for failing to outperform her. He had let that wound fester into cruelty, provoking her at every opportunity to vent his wounded pride.
In this life, when Lucius mocked him again, he found — to his own surprise — that he felt nothing of the sort. He could acknowledge it plainly: Hermione Granger was better than him. He had made peace with his past arrogance.
And in that moment, there was no jealousy. Only something that felt very much like pride.
How could he not be proud?
His Hermione was clever and driven and relentless in her pursuit of excellence.
He didn't mind her name appearing above his.
He liked watching her claim her victories with that fierce, unapologetic ambition.
It was, in some ways, like how he liked having her above him, leaning down to kiss him with that particular intensity of hers — like the most determined, most splendid little queen in the world.
He had every intention of turning the tables eventually, of course. Malfoy didn't surrender territory easily. He rather looked forward to the challenge.
In everything.
In the Manor's potions laboratory, the boy — temporarily content to be second — was attempting to reconstruct the improved Dragonpox treatment formula Professor Snape had provided, all while smiling at thoughts of her in a way he couldn't quite suppress.
The smile actually startled Dobby.
The little elf stared at his young master — who had developed a rather dazed and faintly silly look about him — and quietly tiptoed closer to examine the teacup.
The colour of the brew confirmed it was fresh Keemun black tea. Genuine. Nothing unusual.
Dobby sniffed again. Nothing in it. No potion. No charm.
"All right, Dobby — stop sneaking about. Do you remember what I asked you to do?" Draco said. "Go and see what Hermione is doing at home. Who she's meeting. Everything in detail. Report back."
The little elf nodded eagerly and vanished from the potions room with a sharp crack.
"Dobby!" Hermione startled when the house-elf appeared in her room with a bang. "What are you doing here — and why are your hands over your eyes?"
"Master said Dobby can only lower his hands when Hermione gives permission," the elf said, in his high, earnest voice. "Master said that when Dobby is in Hermione's room, he must not open his eyes until she says it's all right."
"Oh — it's fine, Dobby. You can look," Hermione said gently. "I'm not doing anything exciting. Just sorting through some papers and photographs..."
Dobby lowered his hands, blinked, and looked around curiously. "Identity papers?"
"I'm going to France with my mum and dad shortly — this is my Muggle passport." Hermione held up the small booklet. "You need one to travel to other countries."
"Dobby has never been to another country..." The little elf's round eyes glimmered with undisguised longing.
"Those holiday days you never quite know what to do with could finally come in useful," Hermione said with a smile. "Why not save them up and visit somewhere entirely new? I'm sure Draco would support the idea."
"Would master really? If Dobby goes far away, master cannot summon Dobby easily." A flicker of hesitation crossed the elf's face, alongside a flicker of longing.
"He absolutely would — I'm very persuasive," Hermione said proudly. "Leave it with me."
Dobby looked at her with an expression of shining excitement and nodded vigorously.
"Oh — by the way," she added. "What did he actually send you here for?"
"Master asked Dobby to bring Hermione an important book." Dobby drew a large, antique-looking volume from his carrying bag, wearing an air of considerable mystery. "Master said not even the Hogwarts library has this one — it has advanced techniques on the Disillusionment Charm — Hermione will love it!"
"I already love it!" Hermione lit up immediately.
She took the book and began flipping through it at once, exclaiming, "Oh, thank you, Dobby — this is wonderful!"
Just then, the doorbell rang downstairs.
"Oh — that must be my friends, Dobby." Hermione looked up. "Could you wait here for me? I don't think it'll be long."
The little elf nodded, raised one finger to his lips, and said with great solemnity, "Dobby will not make a sound!"
That evening, Draco was settled in his library armchair, flipping through an issue of The Practical Potioneer, intending to read up on wandless magic. He asked, with studied casualness, "And then—"
"A boy and two girls — all children from the neighbourhood," Dobby reported happily. "The boy next door even brought Hermione flowers!"
"And that's something to look cheerful about?" Draco set down the magazine and reached for his copy of the Victoria Floriography Dictionary. "What was her reaction?"
"She accepted them happily and said 'thank you,'" Dobby said.
"What sort of flowers?" Draco opened the dictionary, his expression visibly darkening.
"Oh, tulips." The little elf gestured as it spoke. "Hermione said they looked like little white teacups. She said they were a very pure and elegant bouquet."
"I think not—" Draco ran his finger down the relevant page, his jaw tightening. "By Merlin, this dangerous situation requires immediate action."
Early the next morning, Draco issued Dobby his second serious standing instruction concerning Hermione Granger:
Select the most beautiful pink rose from the garden — the variety called "Gentle Hermione" — and bring it to her.
After which, Narcissa's immaculate garden began suffering a slow and merciless plundering.
For several days running, the house-elf in charge of the garden — a senior elf by the name of Frost — was baffled to discover that the pink roses were behaving in an extremely suspicious manner.
She had trimmed them carefully, just as the mistress required — arranged beautifully along the green hedgerow in perfect order — and yet the following morning, there were always bare patches, conspicuously and terribly out of place.
Frost was furious.
Was one of her underlings sabotaging her work to embarrass her before the mistress and take her position? The sheer naivety of it! She was the mistress's most indispensable servant. The greatest heroine of the bluebell mass-hysteria incident of 1895 and the rose worm crisis of 1992!
And then there was that recent business with the Hokrap infestation. If she hadn't acted decisively — securing chameleon snail venom and hiring a team of goblins on short notice — the consequences would have been unthinkable.
In short, this most beautiful garden in all of Britain could not function without her, Frost thought firmly, rubbing her temples.
This insufferable pillaging would not stand.
She concealed herself patiently within a hedge and waited.
Not long after, with a sharp crack, the culprit appeared — and it was Dobby.
That elf, with his perpetually appalling wardrobe — a sight that clashed spectacularly with the restrained elegance of Malfoy Manor — was humming cheerfully to himself and plucking the precious pink roses without a care in the world.
Of all the elves in the Manor, which one didn't find Dobby's fashion choices mortifying? Even Frost, who considered herself above such trivial concerns, found his clothes genuinely offensive.
But why was it him — Dobby, the one who dared to accept wages, the walking embarrassment to house-elf tradition? Frost was completely bewildered.
He had a perfectly respectable position working for the young master. Why would he come here to cause trouble?
"Stop!" she shrieked, launching herself from the hedge and advancing on the little elf — who was humming quite contentedly as he harvested the unfortunate roses. "Dobby! You shameless, miserable pest! I'm reporting you to the mistress!"
"Dobby has done nothing wrong! This is by order of the young master!" Dobby straightened proudly, clutching an enormous bunch of pink roses, and demonstrated his technique with expert fingers — the thorns rustled free and settled neatly into the gaps of the trimmed lawn.
"The young master?" Frost checked her temper somewhat, and demanded loudly, "That can't be right — I already send fresh arrangements to every room each day, including the young master's!"
"Ah — but my little master is sending these to a very special person." Dobby quickly tied a ribbon around the bouquet and said smugly, "My little master trusts Dobby with this important mission. I must be going!"
"Wait—" Frost reached out — but Dobby had already vanished, leaving her standing there, pale-faced, before an even more scandalously bare patch of hedge.
Hermione Granger stared at Dobby.
Each time she was confronted with that enormous bouquet of flowers, and Dobby's sincere, beaming face peering out from behind it, she felt both happy and faintly troubled.
"Dobby, Draco knows where I stand on cut flowers," she said carefully. "I actually—"
"But the other boy brought Hermione flowers, and Hermione didn't refuse those!" Dobby said, puffing out his chest.
"He's an old childhood friend," Hermione said. "We haven't seen each other in ages. I couldn't just turn him away outright—"
"My little master says: if Hermione can accept flowers from another boy, she cannot refuse flowers from her boyfriend!" Dobby announced, with the air of someone delivering a ruling. "Otherwise, little master will be very sad!"
Hermione hesitated, entertaining a brief mental image of the sort of dramatic, excessive thing Draco might do if he decided he was heartbroken.
She accepted the bouquet, rather red in the face. "Thank you, Dobby."
The little elf nodded with great satisfaction, then Disapparated with a crack to make his report.
"All the vases are occupied," Hermione said to the ring.
"Do you like them?" he asked, very casually, pulling a volume on the wandless magic theorist Andros the Invincible from the library shelf.
"Of course, but..." she said, with a sigh that was equal parts sweet and despairing, directed at the enormous bouquet.
Because the Granger household had been nearly overwhelmed by Draco's roses.
First, the roses had arrived with an air of shy innocence and taken up quiet residence in her bedroom — claiming the bedside table, the desk, the windowsills, every surface that could support a vase.
Then, when the bedroom could hold no more, the roses had simply expanded their territory. They appeared in droves in the downstairs sitting room, the dining room, the attic study — arriving with cheerful, relentless determination.
This development had surprised Hermione's visiting friends considerably.
"Hermione, is your dad considering a career change?" they asked, admiring the roses that seemed to occupy every corner of the house. "Is he thinking of opening a flower shop?"
"No — he has many dreams, but changing careers isn't one of them," Hermione said quickly.
Tom — the boy who had brought the tulips — asked, "Then who are all these flowers from?"
"They were a gift," Hermione said. "From a boy."
"Is he your—" Tom began.
"My boyfriend," she said quietly, a slight flush crossing her cheeks.
Her friends exchanged glances, and a brief silence fell.
Then, surrounded by the heady scent of roses, one of the girls asked with soft, dreamy curiosity, "Hermione — what school do you go to? Honestly — where on earth does one meet a boy like that?"
What could Hermione possibly say?
That she had met the most extraordinary boy in the world at a wizarding school? That he came from an ancient magical family and sent a house-elf to her door every few days bearing flowers — and that he had even given the elf a raise in recognition of the service?
She couldn't say any of that, of course. She could only mumble something vague and distract them with offers of tea.
"I was actually hoping to hear more about that teachers' strike you mentioned — Mary, is your father thinking of joining in?" she tried, with limited success.
"Oh, he wants a pay rise... it's the same old story, honestly." Mary waved a hand, then turned to gaze at the nearest tower of roses. "These flowers really are gorgeous, though."
Teenagers, it turned out, were far more interested in roses and romance than in the relative merits of union action.
"You know, when we were little, I always thought you were a bit of a bookworm — a little dull, always going on about serious things," said Jenny, smiling over her tea. "Look at you now. You're properly in a relationship. You seem more... human, somehow. You've even made us tea!"
"Tell us about him!" Mary said eagerly.
Hermione smiled at them, but her thoughts had already drifted — across all the distance between here and wherever he was — to the boy himself.
Draco. Draco.
He was like a creature marking its territory, stubbornly and quite deliberately staking his claim with this rich, sweet scent of roses — reminding her, and anyone near her, that she was his.
Even when he couldn't be beside her, he made his presence known in the most extravagant way imaginable.
She had a faint suspicion.
Was he being jealous because she'd mentioned "childhood friends" — boys and girls alike? Surely it couldn't be that straightforward?
She tried asking him why he kept sending so many flowers. He dodged the question every time.
Eventually, after being asked enough times, he gave a little ground.
"At the risk of sounding terribly unoriginal—" he said hesitantly, pausing.
"Go on," she said.
"I can't stop thinking about you," he said. His ears were faintly red.
"I'm very fond of unoriginal," she said warmly.
She let the matter go after that.
How could someone as impossibly guarded as him ever just say something straightforwardly? Hermione thought, fond and exasperated in equal measure.
Perhaps he simply missed her so enormously that it had expressed itself in extravagance — which was why Dobby appeared at her door so frequently, always leaving behind more roses.
These fragrant, ever-present pink roses kept reminding her that he was thinking of her.
It made it rather difficult to ignore his absence and focus on anything useful.
Surrounded by their scent, she kept thinking of him — and sometimes, with no particular warning, she would smile at nothing, which startled her parents whenever they happened to pass by the door.
This was really not like the old Hermione Granger.
He really had gone too far.
It left one feeling thoroughly unsettled and completely full of joy.
"Dad, do we have any more vases?" Hermione finally surfaced from the swirl of feelings and memories, and peered anxiously out of her bedroom door to call downstairs.
"I think... that might be all of them... Are there more flowers?" Mr. Granger looked up from the bottom of the stairs and attempted a composed smile, hoping that the expression on his face read as merely mildly surprised rather than genuinely staggered.
Where was that impeccably polite and well-behaved boy getting so many flowers?
At the rate things were going, the Granger family could open a small florist's.
And the delivery method! Before he had any chance to notice, his daughter would appear carrying yet another enormous bouquet, searching every cupboard and shelf for a suitable vase.
Mr. Granger had, with some effort, managed to come to terms with owls delivering letters. He could accept that.
But how were they managing to transport entire armfuls of fresh flowers through the air without anyone on the street noticing? He had a hundred questions and no idea where to begin.
At that moment, through the cheerful abundance of the new bouquet, Mr. Granger caught sight of his daughter — standing above him on the landing, cheeks flushed, face bright with happiness.
And Mr. Granger — who was, by his own admission, slow to arrive at emotional conclusions — finally understood what his wife had been smiling about in that complicated, knowing way for the past several days.
The boy's attentions were both passionate and a little alarming.
Mr. Granger himself had never sent his wife this many flowers consecutively in his entire life.
That didn't quite seem right, did it? A single thoughtfully timed bouquet, renewed when appropriate — that was the sensible approach to sustainable romance. That was what a responsible person did.
And yet, for some reason, he felt a quiet sense of inadequacy. Mr. Granger clicked his tongue to himself and darted a quick glance at his wife, who was absorbed in a news report about a combined rail, bus, and underground strike, entirely unaware of the conversation happening in the hall.
That wasn't the point.
The point was: he had originally assumed this was simply puppy love. A sweet, uncomplicated first crush between two young people.
But look at the flowers. This wasn't vague fondness — this was a full-scale, earnest pursuit.
That boy had, unmistakably, gone rather far.
Was his precious daughter going to be swept away by this charming, good-looking boy?
"Little Peanut — I think he might be a little... enthusiastic," Mr. Granger said, choosing his words with care.
"Oh, he always exaggerates a bit." His daughter shrugged, and there was a quiet smugness in her voice.
"Right," Mr. Granger said, without much conviction.
He looked at her — at the brightness in her eyes, the easy laughter in her expression — and found her more endearing than he had in a long time. More endearing than when she sat at her desk in the house's stuffiest corner, reading with that fixed, solemn expression of hers.
She looked like a rose herself, just now — one of those cheerful pink ones — blooming without reservation.
More like a teenage girl, and less like the serious, precocious, sometimes slightly bossy little scholar she tended to be.
For a long time, Mr. Granger had felt that Hermione was the most serious member of the family — more serious, at times, than either of her parents. As though she attracted gravity like a magnet, pulling all the weightiness of the household into herself.
Don't misunderstand — their daughter laughed readily, and she was lively and warm, and she genuinely tried to make friends.
But she had always found the incuriosity of her peers difficult to manage. She was, frankly, not always patient with it. And that had never made for easy friendships.
So rather than spending her time socialising, she had, from a young age, preferred to read, and explore, and think things through alone.
Mr. Granger was enormously proud of her for it. It also worried him, sometimes — was his daughter growing increasingly solitary?
That worry had only deepened once they discovered she wasn't an ordinary girl, but a witch.
As parents, how could they not worry?
She went to a boarding school whose address they didn't even know. They saw her for two months in summer, and once at Christmas.
The school apparently contained creatures that were supposed to be myths: Basilisks. Werewolves. Giants. Merpeople. It was genuinely difficult to believe these things existed and that their daughter walked among them.
Most unnerving of all — she was drifting further and further from the Muggle world they knew, out toward a magical world that lay entirely beyond their reach.
If she were ever in danger, what could they do? Her so-called "Muggle parents," with no magic of their own, would be powerless.
Take Hermione's account of the Black Lake — told with carefully rehearsed casualness — where she'd spent a full hour submerged with no protection whatsoever. The lake bottom was deep and cold and lightless. If that boy hadn't gone down after her, how frightened and alone she would have been.
Their daughter was undoubtedly brave. She'd grown too — she wasn't the small girl who had cried for several nights from homesickness during her first week at Hogwarts. But she was still only a teenager. Surely she felt afraid sometimes?
And the werewolf incident the year before — that boy had saved her then, too. Otherwise, would their daughter have—
Each time, Mr. Granger listened to these stories and kept his expression carefully neutral — the performance of an optimist. It cost him something each time.
He muttered inwardly that Hogwarts was a place strewn with genuine danger, and yet his beloved daughter treated it with such blithe unconcern.
For now, she was fortunate. She was alive and well and not, apparently, facing any of it alone.
Whatever small measure of good luck she carried seemed to be closely bound up with a boy named Draco.
It was, honestly, a little frustrating.
But she was safe. And she was happy.
That is all a father really asks for.
And so Mr. Granger — occasionally sentimental, perpetually devoted — tucked his old-father worries quietly away, shrugged in imitation of his daughter, and did his best to maintain the comfortable fiction of being a man entirely unbothered by any of it.
"You said you needed vases, didn't you, Peanut? I'll go and find some for you..."