Chapter 6: Society Page Obsession
The cold seeped up from the marble floor, even through the thick Persian rug. Draco didn’t feel it. He was bent over the expanse of his mahogany desk, the low fire behind him doing little more than painting the room in shifting shades of orange and deep grey. Spread before him was today’s Daily Prophet. Not the front page, with its tedious articles about cauldron-bottom thickness regulations. The society pages.
He’d charmed the photograph to move in a slow loop.
Hermione Granger, caught leaving the Ministry, her head thrown back in a laugh, the enchanted stars on her dress now just a subtle, tasteful shimmer in the printed image. The caption read: War Heroine & Legal Eagle Hermione Granger continues to shine bright. Speculation mounts: who might capture the attention of the wizarding world’s most eligible witch? Sources suggest a certain Quidditch-star-tarted-up-department-head might be vying for a date…
His thumbprint smudged the ink over the word ‘eligible’. He’d been staring at it for twenty minutes. A dry, bitter taste coated his tongue. ‘Eligible.’ As if she were a piece of property waiting for the highest bidder. McLaggen’s stupid, grinning face floated in his memory, the feel of his hand on her arm. The rage was no longer a hot flash; it was a permanent chill in his bones, a companion to the manor’s drafts.
With his other hand, he smoothed the edge of a much simpler, thicker parchment. Ministry seal. Official wax. His release papers.
Final review in seventy-two hours. Then the trace on his wand would be lifted. The perimeter charms on the manor would deactivate. He would be, for all intents and purposes, free. Not forgiven. Never that. But permitted to walk among them again. To breathe the same air.
The two documents lay side-by-side: his future, and hers. They were now, irrevocably, linked in his mind.
A soft plink sounded from the wall to his right. He looked up. A section of the dark oak paneling had become a pool of liquid, shimmering quicksilver. It solidified into a mirror, but not one that showed his own gaunt reflection. It showed a corridor in the Ministry of Magic, Level Two, Magical Law Enforcement. Empty, save for a lone witch walking with purpose, a stack of files hovering beside her.
Hermione.
He watched the set of her shoulders. Tired, but determined. She’d tied her hair up, but curls were already escaping. She passed a window that looked out over the fake sky of the atrium, and for a moment, she paused. She wasn’t looking at the view. She was looking at her own faint reflection in the glass. Her fingers came up, almost unconsciously, and touched the spot on her upper arm—the same spot McLaggen had touched.
Draco’s breath hitched. She remembered.
Then her expression changed. The vulnerability vanished, replaced by sharp focus. She turned away from the window and strode on, the files whisking after her.
He willed the mirror to follow. It was a complex piece of magic, born from long, silent hours of experimentation. Not a true scrying pool—those were monitored—but something subtler. A sympathetic echo tied to the specific magical signature of the dress. Where it went, his mirror could follow. A loophole. His own invention.
He’d watched her sleep last night. Not in a creepy way, he told himself. He’d just… tuned the mirror to her bedroom window from the outside. She’d been reading in bed, a mug of something steaming on the nightstand. He saw her yawn, remove her glasses, rub her eyes. Saw her turn off the light. The normalcy of it was a physical ache. The trust. The lack of constant, gnawing vigilance.
She had no idea.
The mirror’s view shifted as she entered an office—her office. Nameplate on the door: H. Granger, Senior Undersecretary, Beings Division. It was chaos. Piles of books, rolls of parchment, a small, writhing Fanged Gerbil plant in a cage gnawing happily on what looked like a failed draft of a bill. She vanished behind a fortress of paperwork.
Draco leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. His eyes drifted from the living mirror to a large, leather-bound ledger open beside the Prophet. This was his true work. The notes.
In meticulous, slanting script, he recorded everything. Not just her movements. Her moods. Who she spoke to. How long. The cadence of her days.
October 23: Returned from gala 23:47. Lights out 00:19. No disturbances. Note: Subject exhibited pensive behavior on terrace post-McLaggen incident. Duration: 4 minutes. The memo intervention successful. No further contact from McLaggen observed.
October 24: Ministry arrival 07:58. Earl Grey tea, one sugar. Meeting with Dept. Head Babbling re: revised Merpeople treaty clauses. Argument over interpretive nuances of ‘gill-rights’ vs. ‘water-breathing sovereignty.’ Subject prevailing.
He dipped a sharp-nibbed quill into an inkwell not filled with ink, but with a drop of his own blood mixed with a preservation charm. It wrote in a dark, rust-red.
Subject’s magical aura remains bright, but shows strands of low-grade fatigue. Possibly due to heightened personal ward maintenance. The dress’s beacon charm (acid-green signature) remains active and untriggered. She is waiting.
He paused. Then wrote, the letters digging deep into the parchment:
Release imminent. Protocol must shift from observation to integration. The approach must be natural. Unforced. A shared interest. A common cause.
A common cause. His eyes flicked to a smaller, separate stack of parchments. His own research. Not into her, not this time. Into the laws she was fighting to change. The Creature Citizenship Act she was drafting. The historical precedent for House-elf representation. He knew her arguments better than some of her colleagues. He could quote her speeches verbatim.
He wasn't stupid. Walking up to her in the Ministry and offering an opinion would get him laughed at, or worse, reported. She’d see through it in a second. It had to be something else. Something that didn’t reek of calculation.
An idea, cold and sleek, began to form in the back of his mind. It was risky. It involved the one thing he had in embarrassing, tainted abundance: family history.
The Malfoy archives. Sealed by the Ministry after the war, but he’d had years to sift through what was left, to memorize the bits they’d deemed ‘non-essential.’ Correspondence. Estate records. Old, ugly contracts with beings his ancestors had exploited. Proof. Not of innocence, but of precedent. Of the systematic, bureaucratic machinery of oppression. The kind of concrete, historical evidence Hermione Granger would sell her soul for.
He could offer it. Not as a gift, but as a… transaction. A consultation. He had expertise in a field she needed to conquer.
The quicksilver mirror shimmered. She was leaving her office, heading for the archives. Of course she was.
He stood up, his joints stiff from sitting. He walked to the tall, narrow window that looked out over the manicured, lifeless grounds. The high, black iron gates were just visible in the distance, their magic a dull thrum in the air he’d learned to tune out. In three days, they would fall silent.
He would walk out. And he would not be the boy she remembered. Not the coward, not the bully. He would be something new. Something useful.
A tool she needed.
He turned back to the desk. The Prophet’s photo continued its loop: her laugh, her smile, the shifting stars on her dress—his stars. He placed his release parchment directly over McLaggen’s printed name, blotting it out.
Then he pulled a fresh sheet of parchment towards him. He didn’t write. He drew. A rough sketch. A building facade. Not the Ministry. Somewhere neutral. Public. A cafe on Diagon Alley, perhaps. A table for two. He drew a cup of coffee steaming. A folder of documents between them.
He added details with a disturbing care: the fold of the napkin, the shape of the sugar bowl. He drew her seated across from him, her head tilted in that way she had when she was listening intently. He drew himself, his posture not arrogant, but… attentive. Offering.
He stared at the drawing for a long time. Then, slowly, he folded it once, twice, until it was a small, thick square. He opened the top drawer of his desk, where a simple, unlit candle sat in a pool of its own wax. He placed the folded drawing underneath the candle.
A promise. A plan. The first real step out of the shadows.
From the mirror on the wall, he heard the faint, muffled sound of her voice from the archives, talking to a librarian. “I’m looking for the Malfoy Estate ledgers from the mid-1700s. The ones pertaining to land treaties with the centaur clans in Wiltshire. I was told a copy might exist in the non-cursed auxiliary files?”
Draco allowed himself a thin, private smile. She was already looking. She was already on the path.
He just needed to be waiting farther down it.