The entire time his mother was questioning him on the day's previous events, Draco answered in monosyllables. She was being gentler than usual with her spellwork on him, but he couldn't even find it in himself to be appreciative. While he'd been dangling in midair, he'd thought of his mother's love for him and wondered if he'd ever see her again, but now those thoughts had been taken over by other, more self-centred thoughts.

Chief among those thoughts was the reverberating refrain of Granger saying "it's been awful," and then earlier when she'd immediately launched herself into her friends' arms to say she'd had the most dreadfully—

What?

Dreadfully horrid time?

She never finished her sentence, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that she'd been about to say something derogative, which fucking hurt.

It occurred to him that he didn't know exactly what happened for Granger to come to his rescue. He'd been too elated to see her, not to mention relieved, although what had crossed his mind then was that he'd known she would come for him. How was that for sheer idiocy? He'd been so filled with gratitude and—some other emotion that he didn't really know how to describe—that he could have leapt on her and kissed her back there. Only the fact that he was naked stopped him. No one wanted a naked man leaping on them out of the blue—that was grounds for an Unforgivable in some places.

There was also the fact that they were in that nebulous region smudgily labeled friends. One definitely didn't leap on a female friend when naked, not if one still wanted to remain friends, and Draco found that he did. He really, really did.

Draco didn't have that many female friends or, to be frank, that many friends in general. There was Pansy, of course, though they tended to annoy each other if contact was prolonged. Pansy, though, was miles away from Granger, being not the sort of do-gooder that he could always rely on in a pinch.

Over the course of this ill-begotten trip he'd been struck with the realisation that if he were friends with Hermione Granger that he possibly, probably, definitely could always count on her if she were conscious and breathing. That was a strange thought to have, to be honest. It should have creeped him out a little, but he found himself liking it.

Back in the sacrificial chamber, he hadn't even had the chance to talk to her or question her on how she came to know he was in trouble. They'd had to rescue his father and escape the waterhole. They were safe. They could make a getaway in Blaise's yacht, provided someone else did the steering, which fortunately someone was.

Then to his everlasting disgust and horror, right on the precipice of salvation and solace, he'd come up against his second? third? surprise of the evening.

Weasley and Potter were here.

With his mum.

He should have been ecstatic to see her, but a grown man did not want his mother to see him without clothing—ever.

So there was that twin horror that he was still in the process of recovering from.

Draco was unexpectedly thrown back to school days with the appearance of those two now newly minted Aurors. While he'd been surrounded by his fussing parents, he'd glanced over to find Granger, as always, sandwiched between his two enemies in school.

Though to be fair, he'd held quite a grudge against Granger back at school himself, but that was before he'd come to know her better and realise she was actually fun.

It didn't mean that Potter and Weasley were included in this epiphany, and the fact that they'd been accepted into the Auror training program without completing their N.E.W.T.s was something that continued to rankle. Special treatment, anyone?

Even if he could now admit to himself that he'd been immature and a horror at school, that didn't mean he planned on talking about it or, heaven forbid, apologise for it. As for Weasley and Potter, they were equally as big of shits right back to him, so really, if any apologies were to be had, he planned on being the receiving end of them.

The point was, the appearance of those two idiots wasn't filling him with lightness and joy as it seemed to be doing for Granger, and the sight of them hugging it out as though they'd personally been involved in life-risking adventures was as annoying as it was laughable. Granger should be hugging him (or vice versa, whatever) for not having died on her, except she was too busy having other, less attractive male friends hang off her arm like she was a clothes hanger.

Honestly, it was still difficult to look at Potter and Weasley and not want to smash their faces into a pulp. Now they were cooing over Granger as though she were a baby bird in need of rescuing, and he could feel his face rearranging itself into the familiar set of his normal scowl.

A small voice told him to go over there and join them, and he was surprised by how much he wanted to, but she was barely looking in his direction. Old habits took over, and he turned his back on the room. Granger belonged with them, and he was perfectly happy with where he was.

Draco wasn't going to lie to himself. He'd had a fairly coddled life. With the exception of those few years in school when terror surrounded him on all sides, he'd had a minimal amount of stress economically and socially. Especially set against the company of Granger, Draco was beginning to find that he was overly sheltered, and it shamed him a little (not that he'd ever admit it out loud). That was the delightful thing about Granger—or so he'd thought—she didn't make a fuss over such things or she hadn't once they'd become allies and friends.

But maybe that'd all been a lie, since she wasn't paying him one iota drop of attention, and that currently seemed hugely unfair to him. Who had been the one who'd been tortured (maybe not to the extent of Voldemort torture, but that excessively thorough stripping and strung up in the air should count) and sentenced to die? She should be fussing over him as well. His arm still hurt from the bleeding, and nobody (and no Granger, but who was naming names?) was bothering to check on him.

He felt vaguely like pouting.

It felt as though lines were being drawn in the sand again, and he was firmly standing on this side with his parents, and there Granger was, surrounded by friends instead of adults, having a fine time while he looked like a pampered arse with his parents riding to the rescue.

Perhaps the brainwashing from his father hadn't completely dissipated, because Draco felt that old tug of familial honour and duty yanking on him again. Smashing job he was doing upholding the family name, wasn't he? Not only that, he was just coming off like a bloody idiot.

His cheeks flushed, and he had to hold himself in check hard to prevent from throwing a fit with just how much of an arse he'd appeared this entire time. He'd been so elated by her reappearance that he hadn't even considered that she was rescuing him, again, for the however many times in a row as though he were the little baby bird.

She'd probably tell her friends what an idiot he'd been, and they'd all have a laugh.

Draco couldn't even console himself with the thought that he looked better than those two losers. As loath as he was to admit it, their grey uniforms were really very dashing, while he was completely unarmoured with his usual sartorial elegance. He'd essentially been mugged, again, for the third time since he'd set foot in Egypt, except now he was as bare-arsed as the day he was born.

His mother was instantly there to prevent his brain from spiralling. "Goodness, you're an utter mess," she said briskly, brandishing her wand in a businesslike manner that rivaled Madam Pomfrey's when the old Healer had clearly wanted to turn him out of the hospital wing for brawling. Obviously his mother was speaking in euphemisms and avoiding how her grown son was naked as the day he was born and bleeding from one shoulder to boot. "Come this way."

Narcissa Malfoy was immediately taking over the room as though it were her house, and he could smell the reassuring curl of her perfume leaving a lasting impression on the room.

He gladly followed his mother below the deck, his father plodding after him.

Narcissa Malfoy didn't say a single word as she proceeded to clean them up.

He stared down the top of her head as she frowned over the wound in his arm. "Aren't you going to ask what's happened to us?"

She gave a regal sniff. "This is hardly the time and place for discussions, Draco. I would have thought you'd know that."

Right. Family discussions were sacrosanct and took place only under lock and key.

Draco could feel the shackles of tradition and duty tighten around him. Already he no longer felt as though he were away from home. Buck up, she seemed to be saying silently to him. Stiff upper lip and all that.

He'd never been particularly good at that trick.

The effects of the healing spell made him grimace, and he let out a breath of relief and turned away when his mother turned a gimlet eye on his father.

As she cast diagnostic spells on Lucius, Draco fingered the fabric of Blaise's robes with unaccustomed appreciation for its fineness. He hadn't worn one in a week, and now he would never take clean clothes for granted ever again. His mother was attempting to resize a pair of Blaise's shoes for him, huffing with annoyance as she failed. Dragonskin was stupendously unyielding to magic, thus their desirability in armor.

"We'll just have to—make do until we find a suitable replacement," his father said finally, with stern displeasure as though he'd discovered he'd been locked out of his vaults.

Draco grunted and replaced Blaise's shoes on the shelf. "Well, I want to know why you were with those two cunts," he said petulantly.

Narcissa tsked, floating a pair of slippers over to him, managing to smack him on the back of the head with them as she did so. "Language, Draco! Those two...men, as you've just so vulgarly put it, were the reason I was able to expedite a process for an emergency overseas Portkey, only to my horror to find that the two of you have been cavorting around—like this." She sounded as tetchy as if she'd found them bathing in the blood of virgins in her drawing room.

"Well, I agree with Draco," Lucius said. He'd managed to nimbly avoid being smacked by the levitated slippers. "Why have you brought Aurors with you, of all things? It's excessive and irresponsible, given that the Aurory has never been on our side ever since...well, you know."

"From what Blaise informed me just before you arrived so precipitously, it was a superb idea. The Potter boy could not simply reject an outright request from me—"

Lucius wasn't finished. He continued to dig his own grave as he caught the hair brush Narcissa brought out and began to tidy his mane, speaking to his wife through the mirror that covered an entire wall of the room. "So you simply squandered a life debt? Foolish, quite foolish of you—"

Narcissa cut him off. "And since he'd received an equally alarming message from that little friend of his, he was quite eager to accompany me, all without mention of the debt. It was, I'm certain you'll agree, an inspired tactical maneuver." She lifted a glacial brow at Lucius in the mirror. "And if you don't, then you're free to make your own way back to England."

Draco winced inwardly. No child liked to see his parents fighting, and he didn't think he was an exception, no matter how old he was. Excessive arguments around him made his brain hurt, and it wasn't even as though he benefited from their discussions. Mainly during a fight, his parents would talk to each other, passive-aggressively, through Draco. It was brutal. He still recalled the days after the war when the manor was gradually cleared of Death Eater debris. As one or another former associate of Lucius's went on the run for his life, his mother would say, rather pointedly, "I never liked him. He broke two of my good china."

The Good China had been part of Narcissa's dowry, and she demonstrated her approval or disdain of her guests by setting out either them or the lesser version. No one outside their family would know of the significance of such an action, and the Malfoys were in possession of several sets of extremely costly china for everyday use, but it was always a tacit signal that Narcissa Malfoy Did Not Approve of so-and-so.

The fact that Antonin Dolohov was pushy enough to grab for the porcelain cup set in front of Bella and then had the effrontery to knock it to the ground immediately afterwards almost had Narcissa brave enough to speak out of turn in front of the Dark Lord.

In any event, post-war days had been filled with endless recriminations from Narcissa, and Lucius had taken it on the chin for the most part. He'd responded only once—to say that Narcissa oughtn't act so high-and-mighty when her own sister had been one of the most fanatic followers of Voldemort.

That had set off the argument that had kept Draco in his room for most of the day and part of the following morning as well. Apparently Lucy should have been better at protecting her sister, as he'd previously promised as part of his marital vows, and kept her from prison so that Bella wouldn't have turned completely mental.

Since Lucy had been Aunt Bella's nickname for Lucius when she was at her most playful, which in turn Narcissa knew he hated with a passion, it was only a matter of time before mud started being thrown around the drawing room.

As Draco silently edged out of the room back then, he'd caught names that he'd never heard before, like Eileen Prince and Nobby Leach. The voice of his mother had turned excessively saccharine and cooing, which was never a good sign. Narcissa Malfoy never cooed. Needless to say, the many mistakes of Lucius Malfoy, father and husband, would not be endured in silence by the matriarch of the manor. The endless indignities she suffered while he'd been safely locked away from Voldemort's ire was taken out like a weapon and hurled like darts at his father.

Not that any of that was here or there; it was just that Draco didn't benefit in the least from his parents fighting.

Especially now when he was so anxious to return to the salon on the deck to find out what was happening. The urge to go back upstairs to see if anything had been said derogatorily or otherwise about him was so strong he felt as though he had ants under his skin. He should have been tired and dragging his feet after the time he'd had, but instead he felt as hyped up as it were New Year's Eve and he had to personally stay up to help the world ring in the new year.

"Speaking of going back, when do we go back? Mother, do you have a Portkey?" Draco decided to forestall any more unwise comments from his father.

"Naturally," she said with a sniff. "I, at least, came prepared."

Draco exchanged a sidelong glance with his father, who bore the dig with surprising equanimity. "Right," Draco said. "Then...when doesl it activate?" It'd be a supreme sacrifice to have to make the journey with Potter and Weasley, but at the very least he'd be able to finally talk to Granger.

"We need to be on land," Narcissa said. "We'll simply bid farewell to your little friends and go our separate ways."

Well. That didn't turn out at all like he planned.

Above stairs, Draco was greeted with the sight of Granger sitting in between Weasley and Potter as he'd seen them so often before, like they were all connected at the hip and you'd need a severing charm to separate them. He paused at the landing and almost bumped into Blaise circling around the stairs from the direction of the bridge.

"Where were you this entire time?" Draco asked, his tone more sour than it should have been, considering that he was wearing Blaise's clothes and standing on Blaise's yacht.

"I was helping you escape," Blaise said. "Ergo, why I'm still around and allowing everyone the use of my boat as though it were a hotel." His pointed glance indicated the clothes currently on Draco. Draco had taken the best everyday set of robes from the wardrobe.

"You'll be compensated," Draco said, but it was more of a mutter under his breath, because even he knew how paltry something like that sounded.

Blaise seemed to know it too because his eyes narrowed and his head tilted back as he sought to stare Draco down.

Fully well aware he was on the wrong, Draco didn't engage. He simply sank his hands into his pockets, wishing hard that he had a wand. It looked as though his mother was going to punish and torture them for a while before deigning to help them restore their wands.

"These robes are well-made." As a suitable compliment-in-lieu-of-an-apology, it was a bit lacking, but it would have to do. Draco's talent for words had apparently run dry.

Blaise seemed to accept Draco's discomfiture as an adequate response, and he unbent sufficiently to give Draco some tidbits of information. "Granger rescued me from the cage while you were tied up. She had Nadi under an Imperius while we tried to figure out how to get back to you."

"I still don't understand why she couldn't just come back immediately." Draco was still feeling bad tempered by the whole thing, since Granger hadn't yet run after him to inquire after his well-being. It was like she didn't care at all, and he was feeling the loss of her presence like a missing limb after all their prolonged togetherness.

The mention of her wielding an Imperius charm didn't make him bat an eye. Almost all the women he'd ever known had cast it like it was going out of style. No, he didn't understand why Granger had managed to rescue Blaise first and not him.

He was also aware he was acting like a first class prat, but he chalked it up to how he was finally rescued and out of Egypt and yet nothing was happening as he'd like.

Blaise shrugged prosaically. "Probably because it's Granger. She had to figure it out like it's an assignment. Tried to convince Nadi that the prophecy never meant for them to kill you—mind you, it was a complete waste of time, but I needed a breather after that bloody scare."

Clearly nobody cared that while they'd been chilling and having some of Blaise's very good wine, Draco had been suspended in the air like a puppet.

Blaise was still talking. "Imagine all that fitness being completely looney. What a waste." He shook his head and transferred the blank parchment in his hand to the other hand. "You know when Granger took off the binding spell, Nadi started to pull up her shirt." Blaise was starting to snort in laughter. "Part of me considered that it might be a trick, but still I managed to see a bit of her tit—"

Since this sort of talk was normal for Blaise, Draco didn't even blink. His own imagination was starting to go places. "Nadi pulled up Granger's shirt? You saw Granger's tit?"

Back in the days of school, Draco would've sworn that Granger didn't possess any tits worth mentioning. Since then, however, he'd had the chance to see her dunked in water, then drenched in water, and she was generally dressed in less than the frumpy jumpers she seemed to favour back in England. Back at Hogwarts, they'd served to make her look like an extremely fuzzy lump of dough.

She certainly did not resemble a lump of dough anymore. Even in the rashguard she'd worn that he'd made fun of, she had most definitely not resembled anything doughy. His mouth grew slightly dry.

He couldn't even imagine what Blaise had seen, but he wanted to. Would it be too strange if he asked Blaise for a memory? Or a sketch from memory?

"Not Granger." Blaise gave him a funny look. "Nadi, you twat. How in any world could you look at Granger when someone as fit as that little assistant was around?"

Draco opened his mouth to protest and then snapped it shut a second later. Right. There was no need to let Blaise know anything about what he'd seen. No point in Blaise trying to charm the knickers off Granger. "How did she work out that we were in trouble?" Draco asked instead.

Blaise shrugged. "Didn't ask. Ask her yourself, yeah? I need to speak to Federico."

Blaise disappeared through the double glass doors leading outside without another word. Draco was about to step forward to join the trio next to the windows when he heard Granger burst into laughter, with Weasley quickly joining in, even though the expression on Weasley's face indicated he had no idea what was so amusing. Typical. Draco still had no idea why Granger was friends with him. It just made no sense.

Then they all hugged—or rather Potter and Weasley both jostled to hug her. Instead of moving forward, Draco froze in the shadows.

The scene confirmed all the things Draco had mentioned to Granger at the start of the trip. There had been multiple signs throughout their school day that linked Granger with Potter, and he'd always been slightly taken aback when he'd heard the news from Pansy at the time of their final year that Potter was with Ginny Weasley instead. Then Granger with Weasley? Had they been so dim that they'd messed up the right pairing amongst themselves? He'd never been fully convinced of those two couples.

Now this tableau convinced him that Potter fully returned Granger's feelings. Potter was glaring a bit at Weasley, wasn't he, as though he wanted Weasley to unhand Granger. With both of their arms around Granger, Potter was the one scowling at Weasley as he spoke.

And Potter had leapt to come to her rescue, hadn't he?

Draco didn't move from where he stood.

He hadn't thought he'd ever be jealous of Potter for—well, this. Not that this was jealousy. Granger could pick and choose who she wanted to befriend. She'd just had extremely lousy taste early in life. And he wasn't really jealous. Annoyed, possibly, because the least she could do was inquire after his welfare. He'd been hit by a fast-moving hex and sliced across the upper arm. Hadn't she remembered that? It looked not.

"What are you doing huddled here, Draco?" his father said from behind him. There was a prod on the small of Draco's back that felt irritatingly like the top of Lucius's signature cane.

Draco moved reluctantly away from the stairs. His parents followed behind, the slightly mollified expression on Narcissa's face showing him just who'd won. His father looked even more stoned than he'd been on Priya's Imperius.

"Remember," came Narcissa's voice from lower on the stairs. "Let me do the talking. I don't want any brawling from the pair of you. I've been through enough tonight."

Both Draco and his father were sullenly silent until he felt a painful tug on his ear that he recognised from his childhood years as his mother's charm. A wince from Lucius made Draco suspect that he wasn't the only one to experience his mother's show of power.

"Yes, mother," Draco muttered at the same time his father yelped, "Yes, yes!"

Draco was propelled into the room at the same time Blaise returned from the bridge. This time, the parchment in Blaise's hand was alive with activity as it hadn't been a moment ago; a map crawling with all the seafaring activity of the area.

The first thing that happened when the group of them emerged in the salon was that Granger glanced Draco's way and then away again, as though embarrassed to see him.

She'd done it earlier too, completely avoided looking his way as her friends had commenced to talk about his family as though they weren't even there; horribly ill-mannered of them, but what else could he have expected?

Now it was starting to seem like a concerted effort to distance herself from him, and the knowledge sank into him like a knife in the ribs.

That was when Blaise told all of them where they were. Greece, not Italy.

And the Gryffindor trio had completely made themselves at home with Blaise's drink and amenities, and Draco suddenly felt like the odd man out.

All of a sudden he couldn't wait to leave.

Returning back to England was anticlimactic.

Maybe it was the weather that had fallen over southern England. Wiltshire in November was dismal; that in-between frightfully wet transition from temperate, sunny skies to snowy winter, but awkwardly, like all the grossness of puberty sandwiched between the cuteness of children and the confidence of adulthood.

Draco was feeling rather pubescent these days as well. The last time he'd moped this much was definitely while he'd been at Hogwarts. Since then, he'd grown up a lot and done a lot of things, such as…well, he'd walked around a bit, and, er...

His mind blanked. He wasn't certain what exactly he'd done since school days. He was in line to inherit loads of wealth, so it wasn't as though he needed to work for a living, and he simply didn't. He visited with friends while they were in town, but he wasn't much of a traveler, and it wasn't like he needed to initiate those visits by himself.

In short, he was finding out that his old life was extraordinarily dull after the excitement of Egypt. He'd done things there. He'd seen things. Horrifying things, he'd thought at the time, but now he could afford a chuckle or two at how amused he'd been through it all. How could he now just wander around the halls of the manor, reading books from the library and marking it as a day well spent, or going over household accounts like an old woman (sorry, mumsy)?

Life was meant to be lived at his age, but he was behaving as though he were in his sixties—his parents' age, for the love of Slytherin. He was a certifiable old man before he even was one.

He was realising that the most exciting thing he told Granger about his life at the beginning of his adventures with her was the fact that he'd rebelled against his parents and dated a Muggle girl he'd met walking on the streets of London—just as though he weren't a wizard and had to walk to get places. And that had been a lie.

His life was so drab that the most exciting thing about him was that he could spin an exciting tale.

What was wrong with him?

Even though he'd barely lived aside from those terrifying years in close proximity with Voldemort, his life was also about to be over, because his parents had picked right up where they left off when he went to visit Blaise: his future marriage. Talking about weddings and parties and social events calmed Narcissa down considerably, and so Draco's impending nuptials (their words, not his) were frequently brought up in conversation.

"I'm not getting married," he'd tell his mother with gritted teeth for the fifteenth time since this morning.

"Oh I know, dear," his mother would say with an airy wave of her hand, "but you liked Catherine Ross, didn't you?"

"Just because I spoke to her doesn't mean I liked her," Draco said, knowing before it began that he was arguing with a wall.

Narcissa gave a wave of her hand as though what he said didn't matter—and maybe it didn't. "Well, do look at this schedule for the Cercle d'Amour. It's simply the only place to do the bonding ceremony, and only full moons are left! All the lunar eclipse dates have been taken for the next decade, and that's not to speak of any of the passably good stars coming into view. You really have to consider this for the photographs, darling. Your father and I had an absolutely incompetent astromancier arranging our nuptials, but I suppose you couldn't really blame her—we were in a hurry to be married." Here Narcissa would share a surprisingly coy look with Lucius, the implication of which wasn't lost on Draco, who wanted to vomit in his mouth at the thought of his parents young and in love.

"So really, it pays to plan ahead. Far, far ahead. Otherwise all the truly auspicious locations will be taken, and you'd have to be married here at the manor, or worse, at the Ministry." Narcissa let a delicate shudder escape.

Draco then had no choice but to retreat to where his mother couldn't immediately track him down. So he went flying out around the grounds.

The manor was sizeable, and that was not to speak of the grounds, which included the formal gardens, the stables, the man-made folly in the middle of a small pond, the dowager house, and a small church that had existed long before England broke with Rome and had remained dormant after the Statute of Secrecy was enacted. It'd since been taken over by sprites that kept watch over the land and estate. Outdoors, it was easy to be lost for several hours.

The estate was very picturesque, and there were a great number and variety of wildlife to be seen. Once he even saw a unicorn. When he caught sight of it, he stopped and stared for a long time, and the unicorn stared back. There was an intelligent gleam in the animal's eyes as it regarded him, its tail smooth and sinuous, like a cat's. After a moment, it disappeared so suddenly that it was there one second and gone the next.

Draco let out a pent-up breath of air. The last time he'd seen a unicorn had been in class at Hogwarts, but it'd been a baby, born and bred in captivity. The one he'd just seen was undoubtedly grown in the wild. He'd just had a moment with a unicorn, and he had nobody to share the news with.

Granger would be interested. If she still remembered him after her friends descended on them out of the blue like that.

He resolutely shook his head and went back into the main house. For the first time in his life, he realised that he had a lot of possessions, but most of them were expensive things that one couldn't cart around normally. For example, he had a Tyrant's Crown given him on his thirteenth birthday, which was meant to imbue him with such heavenly radiance that no one could see anything else. Grand, but not exactly practical for everyday wear.

He had a collection of goblets that his close friends contributed to on his birthday. There was the Cup of Plentiful, which meant that it never went empty of the very first drink he poured in it. Unfortunately he'd poured pumpkin juice in it when he was young, and how much of that could you drink, honestly?

There was the Cup of Nevermore, which meant that he could fill it up with water and pour it over anything at all and watch the object disintegrate into nothingness before his eyes. All very well and fun until he was caught pouring it over his mother's Never-Wilting Roses on a lark. She'd cultivated those plants for eight years and had been about to be featured with them in Witch Weekly, so what happened to Draco after that was not fun.

He had a cup for the Water of Eternal Youth that a shaman had warned him never to drink. It'd proven to be worthless when the Dark Lord had demanded to see it and well, Voldemort hadn't gone out looking all that youthful, had he?

The point was, Draco had a great many things, but none of them had been absolutely essential when he'd been stranded in Egypt. Perhaps this was what people had been telling him for years—that you didn't need things to be happy, and wasn't that a particularly depressing thought when one had so many things?

He hadn't even needed a wand to have had a much more exciting time in Egypt. Granger had been exciting. She made things happen.

That thought made him mope even more.

Even when Pansy came to visit, his mood didn't pick up. Pansy talked endlessly of her fashion "wylog," whatever that was. Apparently she'd spoken on the Wizarding Wireless a few times and now considered herself extremely en vogue. Draco's attempt to gently set her straight on the general undesirability of the word "wylog" spun from "wireless log" was met with huffiness and annoyance.

"Well," Pansy said with a sniff of a nose that was suspiciously much less pug-ish than when they were kids, "if you're going to be like that, then there's really no reason for me to tell you the latest news."

"Pansy, I really couldn't care less that you complimented the head warlock's daughter's scarf and that she started to wear it every single day since." He couldn't quite help the slight way his eyes rolled up to the ceiling in complete skepticism of the tale. Like every other Slytherin he knew, Pansy had the habit of vastly overstating her own importance.

"She did!" Pansy screeched in indignation at a volume that made him wince. "But it's not even that. It's Hermione Granger. She's been sacked from her job at the ministry."

"What?"

Pansy sniffed again, this time with obvious satisfaction that she'd gotten a reaction from him for the first time since she'd swept in through the Floo. She rose with all the loftiness of a Pureblood woman about to flounce from the room. "I thought that would fetch you. Anyway, you've been horrid to me this visit, and the tea was lukewarm. Goodbye, Draco. You should think about how you treat your friends if you want people coming round more."

Draco continued to sit there gape-jawed and possibly unattractive as Pansy left. Then he felt a niggling twinge in his conscience. Could he have been slightly nicer to Pansy? Of course he could have. He hadn't been, because Pansy's conversation was so dull and filled with things he didn't care about at all.

Except for the part about Granger being fired. What was that about? Well, first of all, he'd known—he'd just known her boss was a massive git. Granger was a genius on the verge of taking over the world. He'd always known it, and now he had additional examples to make his case, in case he was ever called on to write a full report complete with citations. Who would ever fire someone who could make an international Portkey on the spot? Though the jury was still out on that one—they still had no idea if the Portkey worked. He supposed they'd find out once some poor Egyptian Muggle had to be Obliviated for coming into contact with a strange abandoned sock.

Maybe Pansy was right. Maybe he could have been nicer to her—at the very least, he'd know more about Granger's mysterious situation. What was she doing? If he knew her, he thought she'd possibly be wigging out at her current state of affairs when really, unemployment at the hands of such bumbling idiots was a good thing. She could do much better than that inferior job she had.

Why had he never contacted her after Egypt? He really should have. He'd been hiding out instead, trying to avoid thinking about how she'd snubbed him when her friends turned up. Now that he was back home, the last encounter with her took on another slant. Maybe she'd thought Draco was snubbing her when his parents were there, and the thought made him squirm uncomfortably.

Granger hadn't contacted him either, but in hindsight, that made more sense than his initial pique would have it. After all, Draco was the one who owed her money. He probably owed her a huge life debt as well, alongside one beholden Lucius Malfoy.

Draco couldn't help a grin that came to his lips at that. Wouldn't his father be angry if he ever brought that up.

At any rate, enough was enough. She'd been fired by complete incompetents. Surely anyone would offer commiserations at this point without seeming like a loser. And possibly he'd been overdramatising everything that had happened in those last few hours back in Egypt. He'd been needlessly moping about, thinking that she thought he was a helpless loser who always needed saving, but it was surely not that outrageous to need saving as much as he did, when one considered that he didn't have a wand the entire time.

Draco headed for the owlery next to the stables, skirting an Abraxan horse being exercised by a house-elf. He was composing the note in his head when he noticed at a break through the trees that he could see his father speaking to someone in the front hall.

He would recognise that bushy head of hair anywhere, even a field away and with the glare on the mullioned window panes.

Hermione Granger had come to the manor.