Emily awoke hung-over.

Which was odd really, as she hadn't had but a sip of firewhiskey for days.

Clutching her thumping head with a pale hand and curling into a ball, she breathed in deeply.

Her throat wobbled as she struggled to drink in large, choking, gasps of air.

"Oh Merlin, I'm going to die!"

"Probably."

The voice that accompanied her painfully spoken comment was unexpected.

Too dizzy to open her eyes, she mentally pieced together a face to go with the whispered remark.

Shaggy blonde hair, pale skin, full lips, and eyes of molten metal.

Sirens of alarm began to go off in her skull and Emily's eyes popped open to spot the very face she had imagined.

Grumbling a long string of cusses, she looked down at herself and released a sigh of relief at the sight of her still-dressed body.

"What..?"

The question brushed past her lips as she sat up and adjusted to the light.

Draco didn't respond, choosing to awkwardly push a small bowl of porridge towards her instead.

"Eat."

His words came out as a croak.

"Am I in the dungeons," she persisted, stubbornly refusing to change the subject.

Draco winced.

"Sort of."

"Sort of? Sort of?!"

"Yeah."

Narrowing her eyes at the monosyllable reply, Emily crossed her arms and glared.

"Great! Awesome! Effing dandy!"

"Yeah."

This time his answer was an amused snarl, sadistic and completely in control.

It was all she could do not to slap him.

Draco knew Emily wasn't a morning person.

He also knew that she would wake up, for all intensive purposes, drunk.

And in pain.

That was what non-lethal poison did to you.

But he hadn't had an even remotely enjoyable week either, and the guilt he expected to feel at her awakening simmered down to almost nothing once the verbal fight began.

The nostalgia was there, of course, but she was a mudblood, one with her own personal death warrant no less, and some things weren't worth mourning.

Draco had decided this last night during the seven dismal hours in which she had slept, and was now decidedly quite proud with himself for it.

He could do this.

He could, he would, finally revive his families name.

She mumbled something from her spot on the floor and he turned his neck to her, arching an eyebrow, and forcing a smirk onto his regal face.

"D-draco? This isn't funny. Where am I?"

His stomach turned, and he closed his eyes to signify his not answering.

He could practically feel the hitch in her breath as realization dawned on her.

They weren't friends here, in this secret passage of his Common Rooms.

They were, in fact, enemies.

And he was, in fact, going to kill her.

Emily had long since stopped struggling.

Her wand was gone, her head was exploding, and Draco had a frenzy of protective spells placed over himself.

So much for strangling you in your sleep, she thought, a bitter smile on her face, as she leaned against the wall and watched him snooze.

She was in a bare cement room, the size of maybe three broom cupboards, and there wasn't so much as a door or window in sight. The room was the epitome of depressing, but that may have also been due to her only company being a sleeping boy who wanted to literally murder her, a fly, and a bowl of watery oatmeal.

She slid the bowl over to where the bug was flying and pulled her knees into her chest.

It was going to be a long day.

When Draco jolted himself awake, after a short twenty minutes or so, he pulled his wand out and shot a Silencio at Emily offhandedly.

She had resorted to, it seemed, counting brick tiles, and was looking ironically pleased to at least be going somewhere.

He mumbled another spell, in a language she couldn't identify, and the room shifted, spinning out of control.

Draco felt himself turning green, almost as surely as he felt Emily's hand clench onto his arm, struggling to remain balanced upright.

After what felt much, much, longer than five seconds, the motion stopped and she fell into his arms.

There was a moment, no, not even a moment, more like a split second, where he paused at the feeling of her in his arms. The shape and coconut scent of her was familiar, as if he had known it before, and flashes of a different reality shot through him. She could have been a pure-blood witch he'd just finished snogging, or a friend he was comforting after a particularly hard exam. She could have even been, in a completely twisted-ly different world where he didn't care about blood status, herself. His brain jolted and he shook his thoughts away as he shoved her off of him. His hand pulled blindly at a door that had appeared during the room's twisting, and it creaked open under his grasp.

Draco refused to meet her eyes as he pointed to a room not much bigger than the one they currently occupied.

Then, speaking in a practiced voice laced with malice and exhaustion, he finally introduced Emily to her surroundings.

"Welcome to the Manor."