Hermione's narrowed eyes homed in on Malfoy as he ducked below the table, her thin fingers tightening around her wand even as her blood pulsated like wildfire through her veins, even as her pent-up rage brewed uncontrollably in her abdomen.
For she hated, hated Draco Malfoy. She despised him, both for who he was and what he had done, for how he had jeopardized all their lives. She couldn't very well attack him in the middle of the Order's headquarters, but if she so chose to hex him in the privacy of her own common room, well. Who would be any the wiser?
"Reducto! Densaugo!"
The table was blasted out of her path and landed on top of the couch with a heavy thud.
Malfoy rolled to the side.
"Stupefy!"
Hermione sidestepped his predictable stunner and fired off a stinging hex, which Malfoy parried effectively as he moved toward the fireplace. Hermione opposed him step for step, matching his movements until they were circling the common room.
"Oppugno!"
The books on the topmost shelf sailed toward him -
"Repello!"
- and then hung suspended in the air, as though confused about what they were supposed to be doing there.
"Oppugno!"
Two of the chairs that had surrounded the table flew aggressively at Malfoy -
"Spongify!"
- and collided with him, soft and harmless as pillows.
"Granger! What the fuck is your problem?" Malfoy demanded angrily, not appearing to struggle at all as he parried her Jelly-Legs jinx.
"Relashio!" Hermione felt the blood rush to her cheeks with every hex he dodged, every jinx he so easily countered. "You slimy, awful - you foul - you… you poisoned Ron! You Imperio Madam Rosmerta, you pass Katie Bell a cursed necklace that nearly killed her, and you try to do Professor Dumbledore, and then you just come to live with the Order, you just arrive and start trying to be a part of things, like it's all just fine, like you haven't got a bloody Dark Mark on your arm! Like you weren't one of them!"
Every bitter thought came rushing up and out: every resentment she had harbored against him over the summer as she watched him sulk about at Grimmauld place, as she watched his parents whisper quietly to one another, never quite sure if they were about to be tossed out on the front step, as his entire family slept and ate and breathed under the same roof as Harry and had the audacity to presume to be forgiven after they had failed to bring about his downfall.
On the other side of the room, Malfoy watched her warily, his wand aloft. "Listen, Mudblood," he hissed.
Hermione stiffened. That word. It was easy to ignore it on a day when Malfoy was just trying to goad her, it was nothing to pretend like it didn't affect her when uttered by a Death Eater, but just then, when she was ready to wring Malfoy's neck for all he'd done, the word struck at her with an entirely different depth. Her blood boiled.
"Who runs the Order?" Draco asked rhetorically. "Dumbledore, isn't it? He's the one you lot all defer to, he's the one leading the resistance, yea?"
Hermione bristled. "Don't talk to me about Professor Dum -"
"I'm not finished," he interrupted. "Dumbledore's the one who brought my family to the Order. He's the one who offered me protection. So if you've got a fucking problem, Granger, you can bloody well take it to him, because he trusts me!"
"He's mistaken," Hermione countered cruelly.
"Would you rather I have killed him?" Malfoy was shouting now. "Is that how you'd have it, Granger? That way you and your sodding friends can fight the rest of the war without my family on your side crowding the airspace? And without Dumbledore, because he'd be dead? Have some fucking perspective."
"Perspective?" Hermione shrilled disbelievingly. "Oh, yes, you're quite right, Malfoy. So please, do give me a broader worldview, and enlighten me as to how the most prejudiced bigot in the school sees fit to give lectures on perspective!"
"I reckon the most prejudiced bigot in the school has rather a more reasonable perspective than the Head Girl just now." Draco snorted. "Seeing as she's so busy trying to curse the Head Boy she set the fucking common room on fire and didn't bother to put it right! Aguamenti!"
Malfoy carefully aimed the jet of water away from the books as he assaulted the flame, which had reduced a large portion of the banister to ash in a matter of moments. Hermione felt briefly ashamed. So caught up was she in her rage that she had very nearly destroyed the common room's meager library.
"You put everyone, all of us, in danger!" Hermione accused bitterly. "You let Death Eaters into this school, you compromised the one place where we were supposed to be safe. You tried to kill Dumbledore!"
"But I didn't," Malfoy stated quite calmly. "The time came, and I didn't. So tell me, Granger, since you're such the clever witch, what that means?"
"It means you're just as much the coward as you've always been," she spat disdainfully. "You're a coward who was too afraid to say the curse, and then you slithered under the first rock you could find, and now you and your pathetic excuse for a father -"
"Don't talk about my family, Granger!" he shouted and raised his wand. "Sectum -"
"Expelliarmus!"
Malfoy's wand flew from his hand and sailed into Hermione's, but he recovered and advanced swiftly toward her.
"Impedimenta!" she shrieked, but Malfoy stepped around the couch and out of the way of the spell. He was too quick, and Hermione had scarcely enough time to take a step back before he was on her, grabbing her by the wrist and twisting.
Hermione gave a cry of pain and tried in vain to wrench her arm free of his grip.
"Drop it!" he ordered, and she did, her wand clattering to the stone floor uselessly as he snatched his own from her other hand. Nearly out of options, Hermione then did the only thing she could think of and swung her left fist up, hitting him square in the jaw.
There was a short grunt and, in the first moment after the blow connected, Malfoy loosened his grasp minutely.
It was enough.
Hermione braced her left hand against Malfoy's shoulder and shoved, giving herself the leverage she needed to pull her wrist away from him. But her force was not enough to move him and she staggered backward. Malfoy followed, catching her by the front of her robes and pulling her upright.
"Get off me!" she yelled.
"Or what?" he roared, and she was aware of the deranged look in his eyes for one short moment before she felt her feet leave the ground. Air expelled harshly from her chest when her back collided with the wall, and there was no time to register the pain that shot through her shoulder blades, for his wand was pressed against her throat. "You leave my parents out of this, Granger. Don't ever, ever talk about my father. Filthy little Mudblood."
Hermione knew she could not swing out at him; with his wand at the base of her neck, she was prone and, since Malfoy was holding her at arm's length, she would not have been able to reach him anyway. She turned up her gaze, meeting his thunderous, storm cloud eyes with fearless resolution.
And Hermione grinned.
"You're still a coward, Malfoy. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it."
Hermione saw a muscle in his jaw twitch. He leaned in close, his nose inches from her own.
"You know nothing. You know nothing of how brave I had to be to make the decisions I made. You think because you're a bloody Gryffindor, you're the only one who knows the meaning of courage?"
Malfoy released her abruptly and took several long strides backward, then with a last contemptuous look in her direction, ascended the stairs. He disappeared into one of the doors that stood side by side on the landing and was gone.
Hermione exhaled a long, shuddering breath, allowing her shoulders to relax as she leaned back against the wall. Jesus Christ, what had she done? What was it about Malfoy that elicited such uncontrollable reactions in her? She knew that the tremor in her hands and the loud rush of her heightened heart rate was only adrenaline, but the flashbacks to her third year were very surreal. Hermione could now remember acutely the feeling of finally eliciting a response from him for once, of having something over him that she'd never accomplished before, at least not in the same way. It was petty and trivial and, she knew, out of her character - but Hermione found that she could hardly resist it.
Her eyelids fluttered closed and she focused on breathing steadily until she was calm enough to cross the room and collect her wand from the floor. She set about putting the common room right again, levitating the tables and chairs to their proper places and magicking the books back to onto the shelf; she also repaired the banister, which proved more difficult since it had been mostly burnt to a crisp.
Tomorrow, she would delve into what mysteries and information the library had to offer. Tomorrow, she would permit herself to be distracted by what she had to admit was quite a lovely dorm. But tonight, she needed to do the only logical thing she could think to do.
Hermione needed to talk to Harry.
.
.
It was a short walk from the Heads' common room to the Fat Lady (as both were on the seventh floor,) but it had taken longer than anticipated to actually get past the portrait because, to her extreme frustration, she did not know the password.
After Hermione spent about twenty minutes pacing back and forth impatiently, the Fat Lady swung forward to reveal Ron, who had evidently been checking every so often to see if she was there.
"Well, we weren't sure if you knew the password or not - it's Hinky Punk, by the way - since you hadn't come up when we did," Ron said reasonably as they climbed through the portrait hole together. "But, blimey, Hermione, you're Head Girl, aren't you? We figured you'd know it for sure."
"Not this year," she mumbled ambiguously.
Hermione could not help but feel relieved when the common room came into view with a brilliant burst of scarlet and gold, and even more so when she spotted Ginny and Harry comfortably sharing a fluffy armchair by the fire. This tower was her home and had been for six years; the other was merely a pathetic excuse for one, imposed upon her by a Headmaster who was obviously more senile than she'd thought.
"Took you long enough," Harry said genially, and Hermione gave a small smile as she fell, exhausted, into the chair which they had saved for her.
Ginny, always quick on the uptake, narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow. "What's wrong, Hermione?" she asked shrewdly, but Hermione shook her head.
"Later," Hermione muttered, and there was no need for her to clarify any further: they knew that she meant to wait until the rest of the Gryffindors filed off to their dormitories.
In the meantime, they talked about Quidditch, which Hermione understood just fine but rather had to feign interest in, and professors (Trelawney had appeared exceptionally fraudulent with her misty-eyed gazing at dinner; Slughorn seemed perhaps a little drunk,) and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, which was profiting stupendously despite the dark political setting.
Hermione had even allowed Ron to talk her into a game of Wizard's Chess, which was a welcome distraction. She was losing horribly when the last of the third years finally vanished upstairs.
"Malfoy and I are… sharing a common room," Hermione said unceremoniously as soon as they were alone, compelling her knight forward as she spoke.
"What?" Ron and Ginny exclaimed together.
Ron's rook destroyed her knight and Hermione glanced up.
"That's where Professor Snape took the pair of us to. It isn't far from here. It's on the west side of the castle, seventh floor. Not far from the Ravenclaw tower, actually."
"Since when have the Head Boy and Girl had a dorm of their own?" Ron demanded furiously. "Is that - that's not even - well, it's not appropriate at all, is it?"
"Malfoy tried to warn me about it after the Prefects meeting." She ordered a pawn toward the opposing end, not really caring that it would be vulnerable to one of Ron's own: it wasn't as though Hermione was going to win anyway. She never did. "He said - he said that Dumbledore showed up last night. He said Dumbledore had told Malfoy himself."
"When?" Harry asked sharply, and Hermione knew that she was not the only person who was surprised by the fact that Dumbledore had appeared at Grimmauld Place to talk to Malfoy without any of them having heard about it.
"That's what I thought," she said resignedly.
Predictably, Ron took out her pawn and Hermione sighed, scrubbing her face with her hands.
"But the real question is why Dumbledore's having you two share a private dormitory in the first place," Ron said angrily, his fist clenched. "That's never happened before, ever."
"I've never read anything like that in Hogwarts, A History," Hermione agreed. "But Professor Snape said something that implied that the Heads have actually had their own quarters all along."
"Well, maybe they have," suggested Ginny with a shrug. "How would any of us know? None of us has ever been Head Girl or Boy."
But Ron shook his head. "No, when Percy was Head Boy, he slept here. He lived here… Hermione, it's your go."
She swept her gaze over the board, unsure of how to move - she hadn't really been paying attention to the game at all. In the end, she moved her bishop to take out Ron's rook, which may not have been the most strategic play... frankly, she was beyond caring.
Harry was staring unseeingly into the fire, his arms wrapped around Ginny's waist, when he said, "Well, I think it's a brilliant idea."
All three of them looked up quite suddenly, Ginny with her mouth slightly open and Ron looking dumbfounded. "How do you reckon Hermione living with a Death Eater for a brilliant idea, mate?" Ron asked.
"Well, it's going to be hard to have a head on him if he's living in the dungeons. This way, we'll know what he's up to. He won't be able to hide anything with Hermione around."
"I dunno, Harry," Ron objected as he moved his knight, apparently in preparation to take the pawn that was just one more move away. "Malfoy's dangerous. No matter what Dumbledore says. He's still a Death Eater."
"Not to mention a right foul git," Hermione grumbled, and her queen charged ahead to take the knight which Ron had compelled forward.
"If Dumbledore's the one who decided to have them share a common room, then he's got his own reasons. He'll have a plan," Harry insisted. "At least we'll know if Malfoy's up to something."
"Harry," Hermione admonished sternly. "You can't spend all year on Malfoy's heels again, trying to figure out what he's up to. You have more important things to worry about. Has Dumbledore talked to you at all about the… you know. The things we're supposed to find?"
Harry shook his head silently and Hermione knew what he was thinking: why hadn't Dumbledore been to see Harry when he called at Grimmauld Place? Surely whatever business he had with Malfoy was not - could not possibly be - more important than the hunt for the Horcruxes.
"But, come on, Hermione. You can't expect me just to dismiss Malfoy. He's a threat. I'm not going to just forget about what he did because he's in the Order." Harry's voice was becoming notably angrier. "People don't just change overnight."
"Harry, none of us are going to make the mistake of underestimating him again, of course," Hermione tried to assure him. "Not after last year. We should have listened to you and we didn't. But now we know."
Before she had time to register what was happening, Ron had taken her queen. "Check Mate, Hermione," Ron gloated as his queen moved into position, effectively trapping her king into defeat.
"We can't just jump to conclusions, Harry," Ginny said wisely. "As much as we all hate Malfoy, we have to look at the facts for what they are - not our opinions. And one of the facts is that he had a chance to kill Dumbledore and he chose not to. Maybe he's not trustworthy, but he's evidently not a murderer either. And It's not as if the Death Eaters would have him back, is it?"
Hermione winced as Ron's queen maced her king into a pile of white rubble, and then stared thoughtfully at the chessboard.
"No, they would not," Hermione admitted. "But I doubt very much that everything is as it seems."
.
.
Hermione started awake the next morning to the chiming of her clock. She had been very tired indeed by the time she finally made her way back to the common room and trudged up the staircase. Her bedroom door, though not a portrait, had asked her to present her wand and then politely informed her that, in order to gain access again, all she would have to do was rap twice with it and it would unlock. Hermione supposed this was because of the close proximity of the two bedroom doors - it really wouldn't do to be muttering passwords where others could hear them so clearly.
In her haste to get to bed, Hermione had not observed her new quarters closely. Now that she was awake, she could see that they were not particularly spectacular. It consisted mostly of a full-sized four-poster bed which took up the majority of the room and was absent of the hideous curtains that hung from her bed in the Gryffindor tower. The only other furniture was a tall dresser, a writing desk, and a bedside table. To her relief, she did have a private bathroom, small though it was. Hermione guessed that whichever tower this dorm was in must have been very narrow for everything to be so cramped.
But the little room was not without its charms. The main redeeming quality was a window that spanned at least a quarter of the entire dorm, with a sill that was deep enough to be a perfect spot for reading. The mirror was, of course, enchanted, and the bath was larger than the ones she was used to seeing in her dormitory.
It was all very… quaint. In fact, she might have really been able to get comfortable here if she didn't know that Draco Malfoy was on the other side of the wall.
After Hermione had bathed, she stood in front of the mirror armed with a hairbrush - and sighed.
She had tried literally everything to tame her hair. She'd tried drying charms, she'd tried air-drying, towel drying; she'd tried brushing it before and after, she'd tried brushing it while it was still wet, she'd tried brushing it constantly until it was dry, and not brushing it at all. The only thing that had yielded any kind of result was having Ginny braid it into a plait straight down her back, and that was, unfortunately, quite a lot of work for Ginny.
Hermione pulled her too-voluminous and not-curly-enough hair into a bun and scowled at her reflection, which replied primly, "Have you tried Sleekeazy's, my dear?"
She left without replying.
.
.
"Look sharp, Mudblood," Malfoy mocked as he descended the stairs. "First day of lessons, lots of showing off to do."
Somehow, he had managed to be leaving for breakfast at exactly the same time as her, which was irritating.
"Oh, had I been insensitive all these years, Malfoy?" she said sweetly. "I shouldn't have made you feel so low about being in second place. I do apologize."
"All that studying did seem to pay off," he conceded falsely. "Pity you can't just do it effortlessly, like a real witch."
She climbed out of the portrait hole. "Pity you're family fell so hard from grace," she said airily as they stepped into the corridor. "Then your father could keep buying your good marks. I wonder how he'll feel when your grades drop and he has no influence to change them."
"I told you not to talk about my family, Granger," he snapped, grabbing her by the shoulder and turning her to face him.
Hermione squared her shoulders. "Well, go on then!" Hermione dared him. "Go on and hex me in the corridors, Malfoy. I'd hate for anyone to accuse you of not following through with your threats."
Malfoy's eyes flashed ominously, looking as though his anger was boiling quickly to the surface. He opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment, a crowd of fifth-year Ravenclaw girls rounded the corner and stopped in their tracks to observe the exchange.
Hermione smiled knowingly and turned pompously on her heel to continue down the corridor.
She didn't need to look back over her shoulder to know that he had to be furious.