I'm a runaway train, never looking back.

Got nothing to keep me on the straight and narrow track.

Everyone tried to stick me to the rails.

But I've decided I blaze my own trails.

Maybe someday, beyond the setting sun.

I can finally finish what I've barely begun.

Maybe past the endless wind and wave.

There'll be something left for you to save.

It was a bleak poem, full of windy hope - the sort you can't touch, but can feel ruffling your hair at twilight. Draco, though, liked it. It was... forward looking. And he had a feeling that he'd need hope, of all things, in the days ahead. Hope was one of the few things that he could truly protect from The Dark, after all. Candles lit in darkness glow ten times as bright.*

Draco didn't know many things - he preferred to see things in terms of possibilities, and so his table of options was crowded and teeming like a feast of maggots. But one thing he did know, was that Hermione Granger was wound too tight. She was spending too much of her time (that she, rather implausibly, had more of than the rest of mortal men) working, studying, crowding and cramming ideas into her head.

Draco knew he had to do something about it - he couldn't stand to see her like that. She was generally calmer, more curious, not like a vibrating violin string ready to snap. And for Merlin's sake! She was affecting his nerves too.

Had Harry Potter been the first into Potions, he would have wondered at Draco Malfoy's arrival, for Malfoy was unusually tense - the coiled alertness of a snake. Harry would have remembered seeing that look before - on the Quiddich fields.

As it was, Harry Potter was often late and nearly never early, so the next person to enter was Hermione Granger.

"Hey, do you think we could use Firepine cones?"

"And risk us setting the entire lab on fire?"

"It'd make the dousing potion more effective."

"If we were trying to quench a fire, and not simply Find Water." Hermione had her textbook out within seconds, "See! It's right here."

"So it is," Draco Malfoy said, "But was there ever a reason to make a potion only do one thing, when you can make it do more?"

"You can't make a poison and an antidote together, it doesn't work!" Hermione said.

"Yes, but imagine a flame finding potion, that would also douse the flames..." Draco smiled.

"And how is that going to find water?"

At this point Blaise and Harry walked in, mouths both dropping as they saw the two Class Brains inches away from each other, spitting... actual potions research at each other. As if that was normal.

"Enough!" Blaise said, "Let's get to work!"

Draco Malfoy couldn't relax until he saw Hermione Granger relax herself, diving deeper into a potion-making trance than he'd seen in weeks. It had worked!

[a/n: Potter's perfectly capable of using his Slytherin side. He just needs to be around to notice things.

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*literally true. Eyes adjust logarithmically.