The Thing With Feathers

He Stuns You By Degrees

There were two days in Hermione Granger’s mind that stood out as the happiest days of her life. The day that she realized Harry and Ron were in fact her friends, and the day the wizarding war ended. Today, she was fairly certain she was about to add a new day to that list. The day she became a professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

She pulled her planner out of the small beaded bag she still carried everywhere with her, a remnant of a war she had yet to truly stop fighting. She didn’t bother shuffling through it, simply summoning the planner she needed. Her compartment on the train was empty, so she reasoned that now was as good a time as any to go through her schedule for the day.

She was meant to visit Hagrid for tea before the banquet in the Great Hall, truly fortunate timing given that she doubted anything had changed about his cooking since her last visit, and therefore she would not be eating much. Next on her schedule was to drink 4.7 liters of pumpkin juice until she bled the stuff. She had fond memories of the sugary drink from her childhood and fully intended upon indulging herself tonight. In fact, where was the trolley witch?

Speak of the devil. A rustle at her compartment door caused Hermione to look up, an expectant smile on her face. It quickly fell away when she was greeted by someone who was most definitely not the trolley witch.

Dark, expensive looking wizard’s robes. Sharp, unnervingly keen blue eyes. And to top it all off? That shock of white blond hair, longer now then it was in their school days, falling into his eyes a little. McGonagall had warned her of her fellow new professor, but she had not been prepared for the reality of the thing.

It wasn’t the first time she had seen Draco since the war. She had seen him at his trial, and then she had seen him frequently at work. She had taken up a job at Flourish and Blotts for a while after it reopened, but while Malfoy had frequented the store, he had never approached her. He hovered creepily in the potions section before spending his limitless fortune on yet another book on the same subject.

Still, sometimes she caught him watching her with a haunted look in those eerie grey eyes, and as the months had drained on and summer had faded into fall, she had not only grown accustomed to his presence but had also found the flashbacks came less and less the more she saw of him. She gripped the ledge of the window now, imagining to herself a dull throb where the words had been carved. She believed phantom pain to be the technical term.

She expected him to say something. Something rude, specifically. Instead, he refused to meet her eyes. He merely mumbled something about how all of the other compartments were full and proceeded to take a seat as far away from her as he possibly could.

Now, Hermione knew they had a history. Knew that better than anyone, had it carved into her arm, a perfect parallel to the brand on his. That being said, she couldn’t help being a little insulted. Shouldn’t she be the one cringing away from him? Where was all that infamous Malfoy swagger now?

For months, he had all but stalked her in the shops. She had at one point had cause to ask her manager to let her work in any section but the potions section. For the first several months of her job, she had found herself frantically retreating to the back room just so she didn’t have to make eye contact with a former Death Eater she had only barely found the nerve to testify for and save from his own teenage stupidity and horrific family legacy, and now he didn’t even have the nerve to speak to her?

“You know I don’t bite. I hex, but I don’t bite.”

The tone in which she said it implied that she might make an exception on her no biting policy just for him.