Theories of Proximity

Early March 4th Year

The Ancient Runes classroom was unusually warm, sunlight slanting through tall arched windows and pooling across the stone floor. Dust hung in the beams of light like suspended stars. The fire in the hearth crackled softly, taking the edge off the early March chill that still clung to the castle corridors.

Hermione stepped into the room and paused.

The desks—usually arranged in solitary rows—had been pushed together in pairs. A half dozen translation kits sat neatly at the front of the room, each containing a curled fragment of runic parchment, a protective rune reader, and a thick workbook of accompanying theory notes.

Group work.

Professor Babbling stood by the board, scribbling instructions in her flowing script:

Translate the Rígr Fragment. Identify spell trigger patterns. Record all discrepancies. Pairs only.

Hermione moved automatically to her usual seat, eyes scanning the room. She didn’t mind partnering—it saved time, if nothing else—but she hadn’t expected it.

Beside her, Professor Babbling clapped her hands twice.

“Pairings are assigned today,” she called, voice cheerful. “We’ll need balanced minds for this one.”

Hermione sat straighter. So did half the class.

Babbling began to read names.

“Corner and Abbott. Boot and Greengrass. Granger and Malfoy.”

There was a pause—not long, but sharp enough that heads turned.

Hermione didn’t react. She set her bag down beside her chair and calmly pulled out her quill and translation chart.

Across the room, Draco pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. He moved toward her table with the practiced indifference of someone used to eyes following him.

He slid into the seat beside her.

“Charmed, as always,” he said, dry but not biting.

“You take clause structure,” Hermione replied, uncapping her ink without looking at him.

“You’re bossy in every language.”

“And yet you’re still wrong about verb roots,” she murmured, pointing at his notes as she pulled the translation scroll between them.

Draco smirked. Just a little.

They got to work.

The scroll unrolled across the desk, runes glinting softly in the parchment like iron filings caught in magnetic pull. It was old—possibly seventh-century, maybe older—and rich with embedded spellwork that had to be interpreted alongside the text itself.

Two rows over, Daphne Greengrass sat beside Terry Boot, their scroll stretched wide between them. Hermione hadn’t thought much of the pairing at first—Ravenclaw and Slytherin, efficient if nothing else. But halfway through the lesson, Daphne leaned in, tapped a rune cluster with the tip of her quill, and murmured something Hermione couldn’t hear.

Terry blinked. Then nodded. “You’re right.”

Daphne didn’t smirk. She didn’t preen. She just adjusted the inkwell between them and moved on.

Hermione watched them for a second longer than necessary.

Daphne had corrected him once. He nodded, offering a quiet thanks. Neither looked embarrassed by it. It wasn’t much—but it was new. And that, Hermione thought, was enough to notice.

Draco and Hermione didn’t speak much as they dived into the assignment. Draco handled syntactic structure. Hermione traced logical flow and spell-coding patterns. Their notes overlapped, once or twice. Their hands moved in mirrored rhythm—quills scratching against parchment, fingers brushing dried ink, eyes scanning line by line with exacting focus.

They didn’t argue. They just worked. For the first time, neither of them was trying to win, and they both knew it. They were not only the first to finish, they were done nearly twenty minutes before class ended.

Hermione added the final rune notation to their shared scroll, her handwriting neat and fast despite the weight of the text. Draco was finishing the spell trigger grid, his brow furrowed in concentration, the side of his hand stained faintly with ink. For the last twenty minutes, they hadn’t spoken except to clarify conjugation or sigil placement.

It had been—strangely—easy.

Quiet, collaborative. Clean.

Then: “Careful, Malfoy. Spend too long with her and you’ll start quoting Muggle philosophers.”

The voice cut through the calm like a blade. Hermione froze, quill paused just above the parchment.

Across the room, a Slytherin boy—Cormac Travers, a year above them, all teeth and swagger—leaned back in his chair, grinning toward Draco like he’d said something clever. A ripple of laughter bubbled from his corner of the room. Two other boys chuckled. One mimicked Hermione’s handwriting with an exaggerated flick of his wrist.

Hermione didn’t look at them. She looked at Draco. As did Pansy, from two rows over—her smile flickering for the briefest second, a question caught in her expression. Draco’s face didn’t move. No smirk. No eye-roll. No echo of the joke.

Just stillness.

Then, slowly, he capped his inkwell. Rolled their scroll with practiced ease. Tapped it twice to straighten the edges. He stood, not hurried, but deliberate. He gathered his things without a word and walked to the front of the classroom to hand in their assignment.

Hermione watched the back of his neck as he moved—straight, quiet, utterly composed.

He didn’t look at her.

He didn’t look at Travers.

He didn’t say anything at all.

Yet somehow, that said more than a hex ever could.

The Great Hall was loud in the way it always was at midday—cutlery clinking, conversation buzzing, laughter peaking and falling in waves. But at the Slytherin table, something felt… off.

The usual arrogance was there, but it sat uneasily beneath the surface. The boys who had laughed earlier in Ancient Runes were quieter now. Travers picked at his lunch without much interest, his shoulders drawn slightly inward. Even Pansy, whose voice normally rang clear above the noise, was subdued, speaking in whispers to Blaise.

At the Gryffindor table, Hermione stirred her soup absently. She wasn’t listening to Ron’s complaint about the new Arithmancy assignment. Wasn’t watching Ginny re-braid her hair. Her eyes flicked once—just once—across the hall.

Draco sat with his housemates, elbows on the table, fingers wrapped around a goblet he hadn’t touched. He wasn’t speaking either. Just staring down at his plate like it was an unfinished essay.

From the staff table, Dumbledore’s teacup paused midair. He didn’t stand. He didn’t speak. He just looked toward Draco—just once. A glance, still and quiet and seen.

Then he returned to his tea.

No fanfare.

But the Hall felt different after that.

The classroom was nearly empty.

Chairs scraped. Bags rustled. A quill clattered to the floor and was scooped up without fanfare. The last few students drifted out in quiet clusters, their footsteps fading down the corridor. The fire in the grate burned low now, casting a thin orange light across the edges of worn runes carved into stone.

Hermione stayed behind.

Her notes were already gathered, but she didn’t rush. She smoothed a page that didn’t need smoothing. Adjusted the strap on her satchel. Shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Time stretched, thin and soft.

Draco had left a minute earlier, his exit as wordless as his entrance. No parting glance. No sharp comment. Simply absence.

But he’d left something behind.

A quill. Slightly bent at the nib. Still uncapped.

Hermione’s eyes found it.

She didn’t call after him.

Instead, she reached into her bag. Her fingers brushed parchment—creased, worn at the edges, folded so many times the creases had started to fray.

The House Unity letter. Unsigned.

She looked at the quill again. Then, slowly, she pulled the parchment free. Smoothed it once on the desk, then folded it into a clean square—neat, sharp, precise. No note. No flourish. Just the letter. She slid it beneath the quill, placed where it would be seen—or not. She didn’t wait. She turned and walked out, the door swinging shut behind her with a soft click.

Later that night, as she pulled her Runes notes from her bag, a square of parchment slipped out—one she hadn’t written. A single line, in unfamiliar handwriting: Change starts with letters, but it doesn’t end with them.

There was no signature. She didn’t know if it was praise or a warning. Maybe both.

The room was empty when he returned.

The torches had burned low, casting long, uneven shadows across the floor. Dust hung motionless in the air, undisturbed. Draco stepped through the doorway without urgency, his footsteps absorbed by the stone. The quiet wrapped around him—not oppressive, just whole. The kind of quiet that made it harder to lie to yourself.

He crossed to the desk where he’d left his things. Reached for his quill without looking and stopped. There, in the center of the table, lay a single piece of parchment. Folded with precision. Unmistakable. Left to be seen.

Deliberate.

He stared at it for a long moment, the weight of silence pressing in. He hadn’t been expecting it. Not exactly. But something in him had been waiting for this—some unnamed tension, stretched too thin between margin notes and glances not held long enough. Something about her—the way she never looked for him, and yet always saw him—had left a space behind. And now it was filled.

He reached for the letter.

No one was watching.

The fold was sharp. The parchment warm beneath his fingers. He opened it. His eyes moved slowly, deliberately, over the words, something in his chest drew tight as he read.

Once.

Then again.

Not to understand it better, but to let it sink in.

It wasn’t flattery. It wasn’t even trust. It was a challenge dressed as invitation. A hand extended without needing to be caught.

He folded it again—just once—and slid it into his bag, tucking it between the pages of his Ancient Runes notes as if it belonged there. As if it always had. Then he picked up his quill and left.