Ronald Weasley was seriously irritated; so irritated, in fact, that he had managed to write only six words in the past six hours.
He stared at the sheaf of parchment in front of him, re-tracing each letter for the umpteenth time. The suspect was apprehended in London-
There was supposed to be much more to this particular report. In fact, it was supposed to be twenty pages long. It was also supposed to be handed in the next day.
"All right, I didn't want to ask, but what's the hell's going on?" his friend and partner-in-crime, Harry Potter, asked him. The green-eyed man shook a shock of unruly black hair out of his eyes.
"It's Hermione," Ron muttered through gritted teeth.
"I gathered that, thanks," Harry said, his words, heavy with condescension, puddling on the floor.
"She's getting along with Malfoy." Ron's comment joined Harry's on the ground.
Harry was musing. "I see." The room fell silent for a minute, perhaps two, as the two men thought through the situation. "So your fiancée's doing well, and that's upset you?" Harry's voice was the colour of disbelief.
"She said they're friends."
"Ah," Harry said, nodding knowledgeably. "Friends are the worst."
"Right?" Ron spun around quickly, the office walls passing in a blur as he did so. "I knew you'd get it."
"I hate Ginny's friends," Harry groaned. His jealousy matched his eyes. "And these stupid girls, they never get it."
"Never!" Ron agreed. "They're all, Ooh, he's so sweet! and Ooh, we're such good friends now! The only time a guy can really be friends with a girl is if he's gay."
"They never realize that these guys are in love with them," Harry groaned. His wife, also Ron's sister, was constantly attracting the attention of other men. Harry didn't really blame them, as he knew better than anyone just how attention-grabbing her long red hair could be, but it didn't make him happy either.
"Never," Ron sighed. "And she says they're friends."
Harry shook his head and stared out their shared office window. "Brutal, Ron, absolutely brutal." The red-headed man shook his head dejectedly before spinning back to face his desk. He spun much slower this time; he could make out the various article and photographs pinned to the wall.
"What if she-?"
"She won't," Harry said quickly. "It's Hermione. Besides, if she were going to leave you, she'd have done it ages ago."
"It's just... What if she realizes that she's too good for me?"
Neither Harry nor Ron were very comfortable with Talking About Emotions, however when it comes to his best mate, a man sometimes has to make sacrifices. And Harry Potter, saviour of the wizarding world, was no stranger to sacrificing himself for other people.
"Look, she isn't too good for you," Harry assured Ron. "You're a wicked good Auror, you're funny, you're smart, and you're a damn sight nicer than Malfoy."
"You lied about me being smart," Ron accused weakly. His words collided with the cluttered wall before him and slid slowly downward.
"Well, I meant the rest of it, at least," Harry laughed. Ron smiled as widely as he could- he grimaced.
"I still don't like it."
"Nobody does."
"Except Malfoy." Ron sounded like a man defeated, and Harry did not like it.
"Ron, how many times have you faced Voldemort and lived?" Harry's voice was one thousand large bells being struck at the same time, resounding across their tiny office and demanding the full attention of the desolate Ronald.
"Never, why?"
"Twice, that is how many times. You faced his Horcrux, and then you faced him in person, and both times you were bent on destroying him. How many times did you survive?"
"What are you getting at, Harry?"
"How many times?"
Ron rolled his eyes. "Twice."
"Twice, that's right. Most people don't even survive once. Are you telling me that you can face Voldemort and survive it twice, but you can't fight some swotty little prat for your girl?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying, Harry."
The manufactured sunlight pierced the window, engaging in a complicated dance with the particles of dust which lined the air. "That's pathetic, Ron," Harry said gravely.
"How do you do it?" Ron asked suddenly. "How do you deal with Ginny's friends?"
Harry swallowed, desperately wishing he didn't have to answer the question. His method of coping wasn't quite as manly as he would like to share with the general public. Then again, this was Ron, and Ron was looking one piece of bad news away from jumping off a broomstick.
"I hold her hand whenever they're around." Harry was speaking to the linoleum floor, which was proving to be a most attentive audience.
"Is that it?"
There was a crack in the floor, just visible if Harry tilted his head to the right just so. "I- I squeeze her hand whenever they get too flirty, or whatever. Like, to let her know I'm still there."
Ron nodded slowly, seriously. Harry, who had expected him to explode into laughter, made a mental note to trust his best friend more in the future.
"But I can't hold her hand right now," Ron said, sadness echoing in his words like a rock slide in a cave. "She's off in some town somewhere."
"You could phone her more," Harry suggested.
"I phone her every day as it is."
"Phone her twice a day?"
"I don't want her to think I'm crowding her." Being in love with Hermione was a tricky business.
Harry stared at a long-overdue document which was sitting on his desk. He got the strange impression that it was mocking him. "I don't know what to tell you, mate," he announced solemnly. "I don't know what to do."
"S'all right," Ron sighed, spinning in his chair once more.
"Girls just don't make sense." Harry grimaced. "Defeating Voldemort? Easy. Nothing to it. Figuring out girls? Impossible."
"You know, Harry-" Ron's voice was a muddy blue- "in some ways, girls are a lot scarier than Voldemort."
Harry crumpled the document at which he had been staring and threw it at the wall. Ron was right.
Meanwhile, Draco Malfoy was waging a vicious internal battle on his own thoughts.
She's quite pretty, some part of his brain said.
No, she isn't, Draco retaliated.
You're in denial, the voice sneered.
You're stupid, Draco volleyed.
I'm you, the voice reminded him.
Shit.
It always began like this, these little wars: Draco and Hermione would be doing something completely normal, like working or eating breakfast, and then she would go and do or say something unforgivably endearing, and suddenly Draco's thoughts would turn on him like a pack of hungry lions on a wounded gazelle.
Except it was more violent.
This time, they'd been at work.
"Can I have an appow?" the small child had asked Hermione.
"An apple?" Hermione had said, smiling brightly.
"Appow."
"Ah-pull," Hermione had said slowly.
"Ah-pow," the child had replied.
Laughing, Hermione had fetched an apple. "Here you go, enjoy your apple."
"Appow."
Hermione's smile in that moment was sunshine at dawn. "All right, enjoy."
"Appow!" the child had shouted, his delightment coating the entire café as he returned to the table where his mother anxiously awaited him.
"Cute kid," Hermione had commented after the child had retreated.
"Yeah, too bad about the inability to talk," Draco had laughed.
Hermione had swatted his arm, promptly causing Draco's limbs to melt. "Hey! I used to be unable to say L's properly, too, so be nice!"
Draco had choked on a laugh.
"Is that so?"
"It is," she had said, her voice a playful challenge before turning her attention to a customer.
And so it was that Draco was currently battling it out with his own conscious.
"Are you all right?" the brunette asked, interrupting Draco's thoughts. The only thing brighter than her eyes was her voice. Draco loved her for that. He also hated himself for loving her for that, but he had no time to dwell on that particular predicament.
"Fine," he told her. "Just tired." It wasn't a lie, either. Draco was absolutely exhausted.
"Why?" she asked. It was one of her many Faults Which Were Not Faults, this curiosity. In theory it was a good thing, but it always showed up right when Draco didn't feel like sharing. Like this exact moment.
Because I was up all night thinking about you, Draco thought bitterly. "Couldn't sleep."
"Why?" the damnèd girl asked again.
Because you're very distracting. "Don't know, just couldn't."
"Well, next time come wake me up. We can keep each other company."
Her eyes were wide and shining with concern, the kind of friendly concern which ones feels when one's friend has experienced a problem. Draco wanted to punch everything he had ever come into contact with, and some other things beyond that pool of objects.
"Will do," he said instead, opting for a much less violent response. "Thanks."
While Draco was silently attempting to mask his irritation, Hermione was busy being concerned. Something was very, very wrong. It wasn't just that Draco was being nice to her, which was odd enough. It wasn't even that Draco was turning out to be a lovely person, even though the idea still struck her as odd. The problem was that some dynamic of their relationship had shifted, but she didn't know which one or how.
Hermione was normally quite perceptive as, being an extremely observant and logical person, very little slipped her notice. The only thing which she habitually misinterpreted and misunderstood was the advances of men (and, on occasion, women).
Having said this, she neither understood nor knew how to interpret this change in her relationship with the infuriatingly secretive Draco Malfoy.
It didn't take long for her to put two and two together.
Her feelings quickly fell to the floor, where they crashed and may or may not have spontaneously combusted. She didn't feel like looking down to check.
"You okay?" Draco asked, concerned.
Hermione glanced up to meet his eyes, and, incredibly, felt even worse than she had only a second earlier. Was that admiration in his eyes? Was it just her, or did he seem happier now that he was looking at her?
Draco Malfoy is not in love with you, Hermione told herself firmly. You are his friend, and he is your friend, and he does not have feelings for you.
Hermione was a bad liar. She was also a secret hopeless romantic. For this reason, she could not tell whether or not the disbelieving note in her internal dialogue was due to a badly executed lie, or to some tiny piece of hope which was telling her that she was about to be swept off her feet by a handsome bachelor.
She thought about Ron. She felt like crying. She decided now wasn't the best time.
"Fine, fine," she said. "I'm great." Her voice was nonchalant, but her eyes gave her away. They always did, the traitors. In fact, Draco had spent so much time staring at her eyes that he had the ability read them as easily as he would a large-type book, and he knew for a fact that something was horribly wrong.
"Speak," he instructed.
"I miss Ron," she said, her gaze shifting to the floor. There was a piece of muffin lying just below the till. She would have to remember to sweep that up later.
Draco could hear the truth of that statement in her small, weary voice. She clearly missed the red-headed boy, for some reason or another. But he also heard that there was more to the story than just that, and he was determined to play sleuth until he knew the whole truth.
"Are you sure that's everything?" he prodded. "You can tell me, you know."
"That's it," she lied, still refusing to meet Draco's eyes. She didn't want to see what she thought she had seen there. She didn't think she could handle it.
As per the norm, Hermione was right. She was not at all equipped to handle it. Draco's normally cool eyes were on fire with battling emotions. There was love and hate, happiness and depression, peace and anger, hope and defeat. His eyes in that moment were the definition of torment. It would have killed her stone dead.
"You know I don't believe that, right?" he asked. His voice was softer than he had intended it to be. It was the kind of voice a man only ever used with the person he loved. It was a rare voice, precious and meaningful.
Hermione missed it completely.
"Well, you should," she insisted stubbornly, "because that's it."
"Sure, okay," Draco said. Hermione felt as though, in that moment, Draco understood her better than she did herself. This thought made her uncomfortable; she didn't like the idea of Draco knowing things about her that even she didn't know. It made her wonder what he had discovered about her. It scared her.
"I need to sweep," she said, quickly grabbing a broom and commencing the task.
"I swept twenty minutes ago," Draco said, thrown by the rapid change in conversation. "It's fine." Both looked down at the pristine floor, completely clean save for that lone piece of muffin. It stared at them, and they at it.
"No, the floor is dirty," Hermione insisted. She sounded angry, which Draco interpreted to mean that she was angry with him for some reason or another. Silent, he stepped back to allow her room. The truth was that she was angry with herself for not knowing what was happening, or how to handle herself. She was angry with herself for acting like a child in the face of potential adversity, despite the fact that she knew she was capable of handing whatever would come her way. Including the admiration of Draco Malfoy.
She loathed herself just a little bit for her behaviour.
She took out her anger on the broom and the floor, allowing her fury to run down the broom handle and onto the ground, where it soaked into the dilapidated tiles. By the end of her sweeping session, she was exhausted, drained, and perspiring. She had been quite upset. The sweep had helped, a bit.
"Feeling better?" Draco asked, analyzing her defensively hunched form. The storm in his eyes had ended. A wary peace had replaced it. It looked foreboding.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Hermione responded, her voice a shade too harsh for Draco to even begin to consider believing her. She desperately needed to work on her lying abilities. She was pathetically transparent.
"Well, whenever you're ready to talk about it, I'm here," he said. He cheerfully waved goodbye to a departing customer before peeling the fake smile from his face and resuming his troubled demeanor.
"Why are you so nice all of a sudden?" Hermione asked. It sounded more like an accusation than a question. Draco found himself on the defensive.
"Because we agreed to start again, because I was under the impression we're friends." She took a step back, and he took a step forward. "We are friends, aren't we? Or have I been deluding myself?"
"We're friends, Draco," Hermione said, putting the slightest emphasis on the word 'friends.'
Draco's blood turned to fire and then to dry ice in a mere millisecond. Did she know? How did she know? How did she feel about knowing? Was he supposed to know that she knew?
"Yeah, friends," he said slowly. "Of course." It was like stabbing himself in the heart with a jagged blade except even worse, because not only was she watching him do it, she was practically asking him to. How cruel. She had never struck him as cruel. Naïve, maybe. Arrogant, sometimes. Self-righteous, constantly. But cruel? This was new. He had not expected it from her.
Hermione chose her next words carefully. "It's nice to have a good friend in you, Draco. I really value your friendship."
That was what told Draco, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she knew. He felt like dying, which was funny, because he had thought himself to already be emotionally dead at that point. He supposed there must have been one last shred of hope to kill, one which he had missed the last time. Oh, well. No chance of that now. The deed was done.
"And I yours," he assured her, as if he hadn't just committed emotional suicide while she watched.
Oh, the joys of young love.
He remembered once, when he was a young child, asking his father what the big deal about girls was, and why his father ever bothered with girls at all. Lucius had told him that, when Draco was older, he would understand, and that being in love was like no other feeling in the world. He had said that love was like flying, except sacred; a most remarkable experience which could never be put into words, so long as it is experienced with the right person. Narcissa, Lucius told Draco, was the right person.
Lucius had done a lot of terrible things in his life, but it could never be said that he ever treated his wife like anything less than a goddess.
What Lucius had failed to mention was that, after two seconds of sacred flight, love was like crashing and burning and dying ten thousand painful deaths as you watched the right person laugh and smile and beam over some other man who could never even begin to deserve her. What Lucius had failed to mention was that love was the most painful and horrific experience anybody could ever have the misfortune of living through.
"Are you all right, Draco?" Hermione asked. His face had turned hard and angry, but as he looked at Hermione he softened.
"I'm fine," he said, his voice low and unmistakably sad. "Just thinking."
"What were you thinking about?"
Draco considered lying for a moment, and then realized that to do so would be pointless. She knew he cared for her, how could she not? And she more than likely knew that he knew that she knew, because she was a genius. And so, fear and resolve both curling up in the pit of his stomach, Draco Malfoy told Hermione Granger something which would alter the state of their relationship forever. He told her The Truth.
"I was thinking about how awful it is to see the person you've fallen in love with be happily engaged to someone else, and how I'm stuck between wanting to kill him and having the knowledge that to do so would hurt her, and that if I ever hurt her I might just have to kill myself, but then who would love her enough to comfort her properly after the whole ordeal was over with? And how I really don't deserve her, but then I'm selfish enough to want her despite that fact, but I know she'll never feel the same way because why would she? I'm not even half what she deserves, and I know it, and she knows it, but still every time she smiles I get happy for some reason, and being in love is supposed to be a beautiful thing except I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. That's what I was thinking about."
For the first time in a long time, Hermione didn't know what to say, and that terrified them both.