Disclaimer: All characters belong to J.K. Rowling. Oh, but they are fun to play with.

Draco wasn't sure when the watching began.

Somewhere between knowing that her favorite breakfast food was blueberry muffins and that she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was nervous, Draco realized he had a problem.

He was aware of her, in a way that he hadn't been before.

Before, her presence meant only the possibility for taunts and jabs, to show off to his friends how clever and cruel he could be. He was a Slytherin, after all, and she was a mudblood Gryffindor.

But now her presence meant something different. It meant that his heart began to race when he caught her scent from across the room, and that he fidgeted when he caught her biting her lip. He was seized by the flush on her cheeks when he noticed her laughing with Girl Weasley. Classes became counting the shades of gold and brown and red in her hair, and wishing he was the curl nestling at her cheek and falling down the hollow of her throat.

His notes were abysmal.

Not many of his classmates had come back to Hogwarts to make up for the lost year. He couldn't blame them. He wasn't sure he would be here, if the courts hadn't mandated it as a requirement of his probation. Ghosts of the past, of his actions, haunted the stones and reverberated in every step he took.

Sometimes, the nightmares took his breath away.

Of those that had returned, only Theo seemed to notice his strange distance. He'd caught him one day, head propped in his hand and eyes slightly unfocused as he watched Hermione trace the feathers of her quill across her lips, whisper-soft. Draco never knew he had the ability to be jealous of feathers.

Theo had nudged his arm, knocking him back into the land of the living. Seeing an opportunity to take the mickey out of one of his best mates, Theo had teased him incessantly about brooding over Pansy. She hadn't returned for the year, and Theo assumed that the girl who had once satisfied all Draco had thought he wanted was still on his mind.

He let him think it. He and Pansy had been over since before sixth year, and never particularly close before that. Pansy was flat, one-dimensional.

Her eyes didn't flash with a vivacity that seemed to light up her face, animate her person.

Her hair never escaped from its hold in an uprising of unruly wisps and curls, never moved or flowed or danced in the wind.

Her scent wasn't his own personal weakness.

He realized that when he played Quidditch he was playing for her, that the second after his fingers curled around the cool metal of the snitch his eyes were seeking her out in the crowd, and it made his chest tight to see her scowling back at him.

Because damn, if she wasn't something when she was fuming.

Those few times when he actually answered a question in class, it was to show her that he wasn't just another Slytherin prince.

That was part of the reason for his increased presence in the library. Sometimes he watched her, in this place where she was so in her element, wild curls falling down and over her shoulder as she crouched over some ancient tome, ink flicking on her face as she furiously took notes.

But he studied, too. Because the war had taught him a lesson, had opened his eyes, and he wasn't about to waste the opportunity the clarity brought him. A chance to escape the infamy of the Malfoy name, of the empire built on Dark Arts and generations of mistreatment.

He had placed it upon himself to usher in a new age of Malfoy.

He hoped that one day she would know that, see that he wasn't his father.

He chuckled as he ran the thought through his head. What Hermione Granger thought of him had suddenly begun to mean a great deal.

Lost in his thoughts, he may have let the sound escape him a little louder than he intended, and he froze as a startled Hermione looked up at him from a few tables away.

She seemed motionless as well, staring back at him with those flashing eyes that set his heart racing. She quirked her head; blinked.

And then she smiled.

The curve of her mouth lifted, and the corners of her eyes crinkled.

And Draco thought that maybe, this world might turn out alright after all.