Without Permission
Late December Before Holiday, 5th Year
It’d been nearly three weeks since the debate.
Since Hermione had stood in the Great Hall and quoted The Fifth Principle with her chin held high.
Since Umbridge’s gaze had shifted—from curiosity to calculation.
Since Draco Malfoy had lingered after class and come close to speaking like a peer.
Close. But not quite.
Now it was past curfew. The torches along the seventh-floor corridor had dimmed to a sleepy flicker, casting long shadows across the stone floor. Hermione’s footsteps were soft, careful, but not particularly stealthy. She wasn’t sneaking. Not exactly.
She merely needed space.
Her satchel was heavier than usual—weighted with maps, rejection letters, copies of her reform drafts, and half a dozen scrolls annotated into exhaustion. She’d walked the last two floors without a plan, letting her steps fall wherever they wanted. Maybe that was the point.
She passed a tapestry she’d seen a hundred times—Barnabas the Barmy trying to teach trolls ballet. The trolls weren’t cooperating tonight. They never were.
Hermione stopped in front of it.
She closed her eyes. Breathed in deep. Then out.
“I just need somewhere to think,” she muttered under her breath. “Somewhere to meet. Somewhere... safe.”
She took a step forward.
And then the wall moved.
It didn’t shift loudly. No dramatic cracking of stone. Just a shimmer—like heat on pavement. A doorway, where there hadn’t been one. A brass handle glinting in the low light.
Hermione stared.
Then, slowly, she reached out and opened the door.
It was warm inside—warm in the way an old study is after someone’s left it recently. A few lamps glowed against the stone walls, lighting a wide circular room. One wall was lined with shelves—books, scrolls, a few enchanted journals hovering quietly mid-air. Another wall bore a large blackboard, blank but humming faintly like it wanted to be used. At the center: a wide wooden table surrounded by soft chairs.
There was no dust. No disrepair.
It felt like it had always been here, waiting.
A map of Hogwarts was pinned to one corner of the room, enchanted pins marking random locations: classrooms, library alcoves, practice corridors. Notes floated beside them:
High foot traffic. Avoid.
Open view of Great Hall. Good optics.
Close to Flitwick’s office. Risky.
Hermione stepped further inside. The door closed behind her without a sound.
She didn’t panic nor question it. She just let herself feel—just for a moment—that she might not be entirely alone anymore in wanting more than survival. And maybe, just maybe, the castle wanted that too.
The next night, Hermione returned—satchel on her shoulder, breath visible in the corridor’s chill. The door appeared just as it had the first time: a blank expanse of wood, no markings, no fanfare. But this time, it was answering intention—not uncertainty.
She stepped into a room that felt like possibility incarnate.
The ceiling arched high and soft, candlelit and amber-warm. A circular table stood at the center, surrounded by chairs of different shapes and heights—like the room couldn’t yet decide what kind of gathering this was. Books lined the walls, but none looked quite the same from one moment to the next. One shelf rearranged itself as she watched.
Luna entered first, drifting in like she’d been following the thread of an invisible invitation. “The floor feels like a question,” she said, stepping out of her shoes and padding across the rug. “That’s good. Questions have roots.”
Dean came next, nodding to Hermione as he took a seat and kicked his bag beneath the table. “No warding circles? No formal agenda? I’m impressed.”
“I didn’t want it to feel like a club,” Hermione said. “I wanted it to feel like a start.”
A moment later, a fourth figure appeared in the doorway.
Harry.
He didn’t hesitate. Just stepped in, hands tucked into his pockets, expression open. “So,” he said, scanning the room. “This is the infamous reform lair.”
Hermione half-smiled. “More like a study group with a mission.”
He walked a slow circle, taking in the space. “It’s… nice. Cozier than I expected.”
“Wards and secrecy don’t make something serious,” she replied.
Harry looked over his shoulder at her. “No, but firepower helps.”
Hermione raised an eyebrow.
“I’m kidding,” he added quickly. “Mostly.”
She shook her head, but there was a smile tucked into the motion. “You’re welcome here.”
“I know,” he said. And he meant it.
They sat.
Soon, a quiet Ravenclaw named Priya Patil slipped inside. She nodded to Luna and Dean, then took a seat beside Hermione without speaking. Her notebook was already open, ink ready.
They began slowly.
They talked about curriculum gaps—missing texts, vanished electives, things they weren’t told. Luna mentioned how Divination had quietly dropped any discussion of non-European methods. Dean brought up how History of Magic still glossed over the Goblin Rebellions like they were inconvenient anecdotes.
Hermione jotted notes while Harry listened, nodding. He didn’t interrupt, but when she paused, he leaned forward.
“I still think we need to learn spells they won’t teach us. It’s not just about what’s missing from the syllabus. It’s what we’ll need when things get worse.”
Hermione nodded. “I know. But this is the long game.”
“So we play both,” he said.
She blinked. “You’re agreeing with me?”
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
Dean grinned. “Balance. Who knew.”
The chalkboard shimmered.
Shared knowledge is shared power.
Hermione stared at the words. “That wasn’t me.”
“It was the room,” Luna said softly. “It listens.”
“It believes you,” added Priya.
Hermione turned slowly in her seat, taking in the details—the shifting bookshelves, the flickering ink on the wall, the way one of Luna’s quotes from last week now glowed faintly above the fireplace.
“I think it believes all of us,” she murmured.
Harry leaned back in his chair. “Then let’s not waste that.”
No one stood. No one declared anything. But something took root in the quiet—intentional, shared. Hermione looked around at the circle and saw not agreement, not unity, but alignment.
For the first time in weeks, she felt like she wasn’t carrying this alone.
Later that week, deep into the hush of curfew and the kind of night that made the castle feel older than it was, Hermione slipped into the corridor outside the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. Her steps were soft against the worn stone, the only sound in a hallway lit by restless sconces that flickered more like thoughts than flames.
She passed the tapestry once, pacing with purpose.
Then again.
On the third pass, the door appeared—arched, simple, and wooden, as if it had always belonged there and had only just remembered. Hermione didn’t hesitate. She placed one hand on the latch and drew a steady breath. The magic behind it was already responding to her—shifting, reaching, reshaping itself around what she needed most.
But then—footsteps.
She stilled, breath catching mid-motion.
From the far end of the corridor, someone rounded the bend. Tall. Familiar. Moving with that unmistakable blend of calculation and effortlessness.
Draco.
He didn’t look at her directly. Not quite. But his stride slowed.
The door shimmered at her side, the enchantment holding its breath.
Hermione stepped through without a word. The latch gave beneath her fingers, and the door sealed behind her like water swallowing light—silent, seamless, gone.
Outside, Draco stood before the door.
It hadn't vanished for him. It stood exactly as she'd left it—arched and wooden, warmed by whatever magic had answered her need. The brass handle gleamed faintly in the low torchlight, as if daring him to reach for it.
Hermione set her satchel down on the low bench with a soft thud, the weight of parchment and spellbooks muffled by the thick weave of the rug beneath her. The Room had changed again—subtly. The table remained in the center, the same warm lamplight pooled around its edges, but now the shelves curved inward more closely, half-formed, like a breath drawn in but not yet released. It felt like the Room was listening.
She liked that. It felt like thinking aloud, only quieter.
She lit a candle with the flick of her wand, its flame catching with a sigh. Then she unrolled the scroll in front of her—not to revise it, not yet. Just to remember where she’d been. The ink had faded in places. The arrows she’d drawn between arguments looked too certain now. Too smug. Like someone who hadn’t seen the rejection letter yet. Like someone who hadn’t felt the silence that came after.
She stared at the parchment.
And then, without meaning to—she spoke.
To the room. To herself. To the shelves, maybe.
“What if I’m wrong?” she said, low. “What if it doesn’t work? What if it makes things worse?”
Her fingers curled over the edge of the scroll, anchoring it in place.
“What if no one shows up?”
She didn’t cry. Her voice didn’t break. But something folded in her chest as she stared down at the words she’d once written like spells meant to hold.
“It’s not about being right,” she said. “It’s about… meaning something. Building something. Proving we can.”
She swallowed hard.
“That it’s not just a story we tell ourselves to make it hurt less when they shut the door.”
There was a long pause.
And then she felt it.
A shift.
She turned.
The door hadn’t vanished behind her. It stood ajar now—just slightly.
So did he.
Draco Malfoy stood in the threshold, one hand braced against the frame, as if caught mid-decision. His shoulders were squared, but there was nothing sharp in his expression. No mask. Just stillness. Just him.
His eyes weren’t cold. They weren’t calculating. They were quiet.
She didn’t know how long he’d been there.
Long enough.
He didn’t say anything at first. Just watched her. Not like she was a problem to solve. Not like he was impressed, or unimpressed. Like he’d heard something he wasn’t meant to—but understood it anyway.
Then, without raising his voice, without blinking—
“You sound like you think you’re the only one here who wants it to be different.”
The sentence landed like a dropped wand—no spark, no drama. Just weight.
Hermione stayed still.
She couldn’t summon a reply.
He didn’t wait for one. He stepped back, silent again. The corridor took him like fog, and the door—still open—shivered slightly in his absence.
She didn’t close it.
Not this time.
The next day in Ancient Runes, the chalkboard shimmered softly behind Professor Babbling, glowing with the day’s prompt: Reinterpretive Frameworks in Spellcasting: What’s inherited vs. what’s assumed?
Hermione settled into her usual seat, two rows ahead of Malfoy, parchment already unfurled, quill poised. As Warrick began his slow, deliberate pacing along the front of the classroom, she dove into her argument—mapping the structural bias woven into first-year spellbooks, the glaring omissions of non-European casting principles, the invisible scaffolding that shaped magical understanding long before students knew they were learning anything at all.
She didn’t look back. Not at first.
But halfway through a sentence about absent terminology and cultural myopia, she felt it. A shift. A glance. Not direct, but weighted—like a current of thought passing too close.
She turned.
Draco was bent over his notes, his quill moving in long, deliberate strokes. The tilt of his head was familiar: focused, unhurried. He wasn’t copying. He was thinking. Writing. Not for her. Not against her. In parallel.
Her eyes drifted to his parchment.
His handwriting was neat, slanted, razor-sharp. But one line made her breath hitch: Inherited framework resists reinterpretation not because it’s unchangeable—but because it’s unexamined.
It was her. Almost exactly. Not a quote, not verbatim—but the same idea. The same phrasing she’d offered, two nights ago, to a room with no roster.
She looked up silently. He wasn’t looking at her.
She didn’t say anything; just turned back to her own page. Wrote his sentence down in the margin, her quill catching slightly as she circled it.
Once.
Then she kept writing.