The next time she saw him was the very next morning. She realized her mistake the moment she saw the door to his room. She made to turn around and find another route to the Great Hall for breakfast, but it was too late. He just had to walk out of his room and look straight at her before she had the chance. She decided to continue by as if his presence was nothing to her.
"Malfoy," she said as she passed, not making eye contact with him.
He didn't respond, and she was relieved. Then she realized he must be heading to the Great Hall too. They walked down the hallway together for an awkward minute with him trailing her by a few feet when she couldn't take it anymore.
She abruptly turned around, intent on going back to her room and waiting until lunch to eat.
He said nothing as he watched her go and continued towards the Great Hall.
Once she turned the corner out of his sight, she stopped and leaned against the wall. She was hungry. She was a grown woman. She was being a coward. Why should she miss breakfast just because he happened to be in the same hallway as her?
She straightened her back and with her head high, she turned back around the corner only to run smack into him.
"Watch where you're going, woman!" he snapped.
"Don't call me that like it's a dirty word!" she snapped back.
"Any other words you'd like to add to the list of things I shouldn't call you?"
She glared at him with an intensity that almost caused him to take a step back. "Are you following me?" she asked.
To her surprise, he looked away awkwardly, but a split second later, his arrogant posture returned.
"Of course I wasn't following you. Why would I willingly put myself in your presence?" he bit out.
She rolled eyes at where this banter was likely going. "You know what, Malfoy, we're adults. How about we just agree to ignore one another, and if we must speak, we'll say as little as possible and at least attempt to be polite about it."
"Fine," he agreed with a sneer.
"Fine," she spit back at him. "Where were you going, anyway? There's nothing in this hall except mine and few other professor's rooms."
"I thought we were going to say as little as possible, Granger," he replied before storming off back around the corner.
She huffed indignantly at him. How could anyone stand to be so rude all of the time? But she was content to ignore him as they walked down the hallway towards the Great Hall once again. She felt more comfortable being the one in back.
When she entered the Great Hall, the comforting chatter of hundreds of happy students greeted her. She made her way to the front of Gryffindor table where the other students tended to avoided. She imagined they didn't want to risk the professors hearing whatever they were discussing, but she didn't mind. She didn't much want to talk to anyone anyway.
After breakfast, she made her way to the dungeons where she would continue her experiments with the various ingredients in veritaserum. As part of her research the various day, she'd designed a trial to determine whether the theoretical evidence concerning powdered moonstone's greater stability when combined with Jaberknoll feathers in a cauldron of silver aligned with actual practice.
Not for the first time since beginning her endeavor to create a potion that could restore her parent's memories, she felt regret at what had happened to Professor Snape. Then she felt remorse that she mostly felt regret because she wished she could ask him questions.
She shook head and started laying the necessary equipment out on the table in front of her. She placed a small piece of moonstone into her granite mortar and placed the pestle on top but stopped short of grinding it as a thought occurred to her. If a silver cauldron is likely to yield greater stability, should she use a silver mortar and pestle? Perhaps she should use silver shears to remove the Jaberknoll feathers? Or was the overdoing it with the silver? How much of a difference could the equipment used to prepare the materials really make? Of course, that was a question that would've lost her points for Gryffindor if Snape had heard her ask it.
She sighed in frustration as she realized once again how complicated this task was shaping up to be. On day at a time, one experiment at a time, she told herself.
She prepared the powdered moonstone and Jaberknoll feathers as she normally would and added them to the simmering silver cauldron in front of her. Turning back to her book, she read a note in the margins she'd written about the properties of lavender, and since the potion seemed to be brewing nice, she decided to go ahead and add some lavender since this was the next piece of the formula she was considering.
Powdered moonstone for it's properties in revealing the truth, Jaberknoll feather's for their ability to give the person consuming them clarity and lavender to provide a sense of calm acceptance.
She pressed the lavender with the side of knife to release some of the sweet liquid inside and gathered them up, counting out exactly how many she was going to add so that she could reference the results later.
Right before she opened her hand to add the lavender, another hand grabbed her wrist roughly and pulled it away.
"Are you trying to kill yourself?" the voice attached to the other hand asked.
She whipped around to find Draco standing there, her wrist painfully stuck in his fist and a look of disbelief on his face.
"I take it back, you're not the brightest witch of our time. Although I never actually said I agreed with whoever decided that," he said.
"Let go of me!" she interrupted, yanking her wrist away from his grasp.
"Not until you let go of the sage," he replied, squeezing her wrist that much harder against her struggle to pull away.
"What! Sage, lavender looks nothing like…" she trailed off in embarrassment as she glanced at the pile of lavender, well not lavender, on the table. She felt the heat rise in her face. In her hand was 10 petals of Russian sage, which true looked rather more like lavender than sage but behaved nothing like it. Russian sage and Jaberknoll feather…she gasped and opened her hand, letting the sage fall to the floor.
Draco finally released her wrist. He looked at her with a kind of smug satisfaction.
She glared at him in response. "Well, since you're such the potions expert, I'll let you clean this up then."
She practically ran across the room, berating herself for being so stupid. What had she been thinking? That was a mistake a third year should know better than to make. And if Malfoy hadn't been there…
"You're welcome," she heard him call from across the room before the door shut between them.
He looked at the cauldron simmering in front of him with interest. Powdered moonstone, Jaberknoll feather and, he assumed she'd meant to add, lavender. Not a combination he was familiar with. And in a silver cauldron, no less. He wondered briefly where she got before deciding that McGonagall must have ordered it for her. Of course the Golden Girl could have anything she wanted.
He opened the reference book to the side of the room and cross referenced the three ingredients, but he found no potions that they had in common. He supposed the reference book wasn't an all inclusive text, and it was probably quite old from the looks of it, so perhaps she'd found instructions for a newer potion that she wanted to try. It didn't surprise him that she'd want to be an overachiever in potions along with everything else she knew. Though her mistake had been a pretty dumb one, he thought, for someone trying brew complicated new potions.
He considered dumping out the contents of the cauldron and taking the opportunity to use the silver cauldron for himself before she came to her senses and returned, but his curiosity got the better of him.
"Alright, Granger, let's see what you're up to," he said to himself as he crouched down to count how many sage petals had fallen out of her hand. "Ten petals of lavender, then."
He'd watched her crush the sage petals lightly with the side of her knife, so he likewise crushed the lavender with the side of his. Ten petals later, he hovered his hand over the cauldron, and thinking he was surely going to regret this, he let go.
The moment the lavender hit the liquid, a swell of soft, sky blue smoke rose to the ceiling and the liquid turned a remarkable shade of bright, royal purple. And the smell. It reminded him of something, but he couldn't quite place a finger on it. The sense of nostalgia grew, and soon he was lost in a memory he couldn't remember but somehow knew had happened.
His mother was holding him, looking down at him from above. Rationally, he knew she was speaking, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. But he knew it was English. Why couldn't he understand? He felt warm. He wanted to sleep. No, he wanted to eat. No he wanted to sleep and eat.
He was jolted out of the memory as he fell back onto the floor behind him. The face looking down at him was no longer his mother's, it was Grangers.
"Have you lost your mind? Are you alright?"
Are you alright? Yes, that's what he'd been wondering earlier. That's right. "I was looking for you earlier," he told her. Wait, what? "You look so pale when you turned around, I thought maybe you were sick or something." Shut up, shut up. "I just wanted to be sure you were alright." Why are you still talking? The rational part of his head couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth, but they kept coming out anyway.
"What have you done to yourself?" she asked. Her incredulous look had become a concerned one.
"Oh that's nice," he said. "That's nice of you to be worried about me. No one every worries about me except mother. Maybe father, but he only worries if I'm going to embarrass him. Not like mother." Inside his head, he felt like he was going to die of humiliation.
Suddenly a wave of dizziness passed over him, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he'd come to his senses.
He sat up so quickly he felt a muscle in his neck burn in protest. He threw his feet out to put as much distance between himself and Granger as possible. Had he really just said all of those things out loud? No, of course, he didn't, he thought. But the way she was looking at him, he knew he had.
He caught sight of the sky blue smoke out of the corner of his eye. He remembered.
"What is that?!" he exclaimed, pulling himself to his feet.
She placed a steadying hand out as he swayed, but she ignored his question. "What happened? What did you feel? You didn't drink it, did you?"
"No, I didn't drink it! What kind of an idiot do you take me for?"
"The kind that messes around with someone else's potion that he knows nothing about!"
"Yea well you kind of left me with it!"
"I came back! I was only gone a few minutes. Besides, how should I have known you'd do something stupid?"
"You were the one that was about to blow up a potion in your face!"
"And how did you know you weren't about to? You don't even know what I put in there."
"Of course I know what you put it there. I'm not terrible at potions, you know, I wouldn't have done anything if I didn't know what was in it."
"You were watching me?"
"No, I was…No! It's a silver cauldron, I was curious, and I happen to be very observant."
They fell into a heavy silence, both of them feeling that the other's stupidity exceeded their own. The only sound to be heard was the simmer of the cauldron gently boiling beside them.
"What were you trying to make?" he asked.
Her shoulders slumped. "Nothing, it doesn't matter. I was just being foolish."
"You, being foolish? Come on, what is it?"
She looked at him with doubt, trying to decide whether she wanted to trust him. Well, she didn't trust him, that was certain, but he did know a lot about potion ingredients. Maybe he could help? But that would mean telling him about her parents, about what she'd done. Maybe she could frame it as an academic exercise and not mention her parents. Yes, that would do.
"I'm trying to combine the properties ingredients used in various truth, clarity and calming potions to find a combination that could reserve the effects of memory charms. Or potions," she finally told him.
"Oh well if that's all," he said rolling his eyes. "Leave it to you…wait, you said you're trying to reverse memory charms? As in, give memory back to someone who's been obliviated?"
She shrugged her shoulders in response. He knew he was going to regret the thing he said next.
"I think you're onto something."
"What, because you couldn't keep your mouth shut? I'm not trying to recreate a truth serum, we already have one of those…"
"No," he cut her off. "Before you came back, I had a dream. Or well, not a dream. It was a memory. But it wasn't like a normal memory. I'd never remembered it before, but it was like I was reliving it. It was…" he stopped short of telling her what the actual memory was. She didn't seem to be listening anymore anyway. She was looking at the cauldron with an odd combination of desperation and joy.
"You mean it helped you remember something you'd forgotten?" she asked quietly, like she was unsure of her words.
"Well, I suppose you could put it like that," he replied.
When she looked up from the potion and turned back to him, he was surprised to see tears forming in her eyes. More surprisingly, he felt some unnamed emotion that made him want to reach out and hold her until they stopped. She sniffed, and the feeling quickly passed.
"What's the matter with you, Granger? Get ahold of yourself," he said gruffly.
"What did you do? What did you add?" she asked, ignore his slight.
He found himself answering her, then drawn into a conversation about the ingredients in front of them, then draw into yet another conversation about other ingredients with similar or contradictory properties, that segued into a conversation about different potions they each had experience making and somehow, they even discussed their favorite colors (hers was a sky blue similar to the smoke emitted from the potion, his was silver like the cauldron).
The rest of the day was lost to them, and when they finally made their way back upstairs to the Great Hall for dinner, they each thought the walk down the hallway together felt a little less awkward.
