"Look at him blubber! Have you ever seen anything quite as pathetic? And he's supposed to be our teacher?"

Potter and Weasley both make furious moves towards Draco, but it's Granger who gets there first.

SMACK!

"Don't you dare call Hagrid pathetic, you foul - you evil -"

"Hermione!" exclaims Weasley, grabbing at her hand as she swings back, ready to strike a second time.

"Get off, Ron!"

She pulls out her wand, and Draco steps backward. Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, his lackeys since first year, look at him for instructions, thoroughly bewildered.

"C'mon," Draco mutters, and in a moment, the three Slytherins disappear into the passageway to the dungeons.

Arithmancy is Draco's next class, the only one he and Granger have together that they don't also have with Potter, Weasley, Crabbe, and Goyle. Part of him would like to skip, but his stomach's already in knots; he senses he'll have to apologize if he wants to make it to the end of the day without falling down a shame spiral, without risking doing something he'll regret even more than having to apologize.

This is so much worse than when he called her a Mudblood, Draco thinks.

Hastily, he exchanges some of his school books for others and climbs the staircases to the seventh floor, to Professor Vector's classroom. He hears nothing of that day's lecture, simply waits for the bell to ring. Then, as their classmates file out of the room, Draco catches Granger by her arm.

She jerks away instantaneously, opens her mouth to begin berating, but the apology has already begun.

"I need you to know that I'm sorry. What I said about Hagrid - I don't know why I say things like that. I don't even mean them most the time. Hagrid's - Well, he's not my favorite teacher, but I don't think he's pathetic. Honestly, I don't."

If looks could kill! Granger's still fuming. But Draco barrels on, hopeful.

"I'll ask Father to get the sentence revoked," he says. "I don't know if he'll agree to it, or if he'll be able to, but maybe he doesn't - the hippogriff, I mean, maybe he doesn't -"

"Have to die?" Granger shrieks. She's too angry to wait for a reply; she's out the door in a flash.

Everyone's heard about the slap by dinner that night, and everyone at the Slytherin table wants to know what Draco plans to do about it.
"I've got a few ideas," he tells them sinisterly.

But it's not enough to quell the commotion.

"I heard Hermione skipped Charms today," Tracey Davis gossips.

"I heard she caused a scene in Divination, called Trelawney a fraud and stormed out."

At that, the knots in his stomach tighten so much that Draco thinks they'll shatter, that their pieces will dispatch into the rest of his body and form an endless number of new knots. He doesn't know Hermione Granger well enough yet to consider her strange behavior could mean anything other than worst.