The first place Eva thought to go was to Gryffindor tower. She'd helped Hermione out with Ron before, on many occasions too, so surely Hermione could do the same for her.

Eva hadn't even realised it, but her feet had been carrying themselves the entire way there, her tears now dry and crusted over her lower eyelids and her nose feeling slightly stuffy.

Without glancing up, she recited the password with an underlying tremble in her voice. "Alea iacta est."

"Oh, it's you," the Fat Lady from the painting remarked in almost disgust. "You must stop visiting so often, but fine," she sighed, "you may enter, I suppose."

The door creaked open and Eva let herself in with her hands still in her pockets, fishing for a tissue. As she entered the room, she noticed a few people were still gathered around the sofas and chairs including Hermione, Ron, and some of the D.A., but no Harry. She couldn't say she was entirely surprised though, especially when he'd been dragged away by the Inquisitorial Squad along with Cho.

"Eva?" Hermione was instantly standing beside her with an arm around her shoulders, leading her towards a space on one of the sofas. "What happened? You look a mess. Did Umbridge do something to you?"

Eva sniffled slightly into her tissue. "No, it's nothing, nothing I want to talk about."

"It's Malfoy, isn't it?" Ron said angrily, standing up from his armchair. "Oh, I'm going to show that slimy git-"

Hermione pushed him back easily with her free hand and sat Eva down beside her. "Not helping, Ronald."

"We'll join him," Fred added with a tone that was usually mischievous but seemed bitter instead.

George shook a small box in his hand. "We still have quite a few Puking Pastilles left, that or our brilliant Nosebleed Nougat-"

"Again," Hermione interjected impatiently, "poisoning fellow students, especially someone with a temperament like Draco Malfoy's, isn't going to help anyone."

"It's not poisoning, Granger," Fred explained as if it was obvious.

"We just won't provide him with the other half," George concluded.

Hermione rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Eva, also placing a hand on her forehead to check her temperature. "Are you ill or upset with Malfoy?" she asked. "Who am I kidding? Of course you're not ill, or otherwise you'd be making much more of a dramatic scene than you are currently."

"I don't want to talk about it," Eva snapped, kicking off her shoes and curling up on the sofa.

"What's he said to you that's got you so worked-up?" Seamus asked.

Eva sighed a trembled breath. "It's . . . not important."

Fred and George suddenly appeared crouched in front of her. "Tell us," George insisted.

"You know you want to," Fred encouraged her hopefully.

She glanced down at her hands in her lap while Ginny and Hermione embraced her from either side. "He called me a filthy little . . ."

Both of their expressions visibly dropped and the entire room was plunged into a tense silence. Eva wasn't entirely sure why they were acting so surprised—they hated Draco.

"George, get the Nosebleed Nougats," Fred ordered sternly as she heard them stand up.

"On it, Fred-"

"No!" Hermione said firmly, the twins freezing in their tracks. "Stop acting like such pathetically irrational infants. Did you stop to think if Eva even wants you to fight her battles for her?"

"Fine," George replied stubbornly and handed Eva the box, "Eva can give Malfoy the Nosebleed Nougats."

Eva tossed the box behind her so that it landed on the floor and the nougats scattered across the carpet. "I'm not feeding Draco your Nosebleed Nougats," Eva argued. "For future reference, no one's feeding Draco anything from those Skiving Snackboxes."

Ron scoffed. "He called you a mudblood and you're still defensive over him."

Eva was now no longer crying but just beyond irritated. "Can we just talk about something else for fuck sake?!"


The next few days were absolutely hell for anyone who came within a few inches of Eva. Not only was she angry, but she was also moody, upset, and downright short-tempered.

Five days into their fight, Eva dragged herself over to their Potions class. As if she wasn't having the worst week possible as it was, she also had to deal with Snape nit-picking at every little error and mistake she brewed into her potions. At least it's Friday, she reminded herself.

On the plus side, it was only a theory lesson, so they wouldn't have to actually brew anything this time around. Eva slumped down in her usual seat with her Potions book in front of her, and it was no surprise when Draco sat himself down in the seat beside her.

The lesson progressed as usual. Harry was ridiculed for every little mistake possible, Eva had lost count of how many times Ron had been whacked around the head with a book, and Hermione had yet again been called an 'Insufferable Know-It-All', for which Snape suggested she put on a badge so that everyone she met would be pre-warned of their suffering.

After a 20 minute recap on Skele-Gro and its ingredients, preparation, and uses, the lesson continued with endless revision notes and essays.

About half way through her essay on Unicorn horns, Eva saw a small scrap of parchment appear in her peripheral vision. Only lifting her eyes from her page, she slid it towards her and saw a small note written in neat cursive handwriting.

I'm sorry.

Eva wasn't entirely sure why, but it annoyed her more than anything, as if a scrawled apology on a note was going to fix everything.

What surprised her even more was when she scrunched it up to a little ball of parchment and threw it at Draco's head so that it bounced off the side of his face and fell onto the desk in front of him. Despite initially believing he'd get annoyed, he instead sighed and tossed the parchment into the bin across the room, landing it in perfectly.

The rest of the lesson dragged on just as quietly. Eventually, Snape dismissed the class but ended up being the first to leave the room, allowing everyone else to pack up at their own pace.

Eva began to stow some of her belongings away in her bag when she saw Pansy approaching their end of the table. Pansy wasn't interested in her though—she seemed to only have eyes for Draco.

"So, Draco," Pansy sat on the edge of the table, arching her spine somewhat awkwardly in an attempt to make her arse look better and sliding her hand over his, "the others and I had plans to go to Honeydukes this weekend, should you want to come," she murmured in what sounded like it was supposed to be a seductive voice.

Eva wasn't sure what was upsetting her more—that Pansy was hitting on Draco or that Draco wasn't trying to stop her. Either way, she quickly grabbed her bag, swiped her book off of her desk and fled the room, wiping any tears from her eyes as she went. She wasn't even sure why she was crying anymore.

The corridors were mostly empty, as they usually were around that area of the school. As she got towards the courtyard, she sighed when she saw that the dark clouds that had begun to circle over the sky had finally started to pour down with rain.

A few other students coming from that end of the school quickly placed their books over their heads and ran, but Eva didn't feel like running. Instead, she walked glumly with her book over her head as she faced the ground.

"Eva!"

She recognised the voice instantly but stubbornly chose to ignore it.

"Eva, will you stop ignoring me?!" Draco snapped over the loud noise of the rain hammering down above them. "I have an umbrella!"

There was a distant bang of thunder. "Congratulations!" Eva snarked as she continued away without looking at him.

"Stop being so stubborn!" He grabbed her elbow and spun her around to face him while she held her Potions book over her head, not that she cared about any of her revision notes at all.

"What do you want Draco?!" she asked impatiently, yanking herself away from him.

Eva heard a few sets of footsteps walk up behind her and turned around to be faced with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Hermione seemed more reluctant to be there, but Ron looked as annoyed as usual and Harry was just plain pissed.

"Malfoy!" Harry snarled with his eyes narrowed while Hermione held her wand transfigured into an umbrella over their heads.

Draco sneered at him. "What do you want, Potter?!"

Eva rolled her eyes. "Guys, just go! I'm not kidding, move your arses away thanks!"

Very reluctantly, the three of them finally left to go indoors, though Eva knew they wouldn't be gone for that long. She just wasn't prepared to have a go at Draco with a live audience too.

"Hm?!" Eva turned to Draco and would've crossed her arms if she wasn't busy sheltering herself from the rain. "Don't just stand there, what do you want?!"

He groaned irritatedly. "I've been trying to apologise for 5 days!"

"Well I don't see why you'd need to!" Eva replied stubbornly as she turned around to continue back indoors. "You have Pansy now, so you can just go on your little Honeydukes date and ride off into the sunset together for all I care! At least she's not a filthy little mudblood like me!"

"Eva, please!" Draco grasped her arm and pulled her back to face him. "You know I didn't mean that, I never would!"

"Do I?! Do I though?!" Tired of holding her book over her head, she moved it to her side without caring about the state of her hair anymore. "Draco, do you have any idea whatsoever how much it hurt when you said that?! Maybe I was right, maybe you are just better off with Pansy!"

"Eva, I'm . . . I'm sorry, okay?!" Eva, who had been walking away again, stopped, still facing the other direction. "It was a stupid thing to say, I don't even know why I thought to say it to you!"

His voice increased in volume slightly as he walked closer to her so that he wouldn't have to shout over the growing thunderstorm. At least now she could feel the edge of his umbrella hovering over her head.

"Nothing about you . . . you're not a mudblood, not at all. You're so much better than that. I mean, not every guy gets to say that they're dating a demon-summoner." He sighed. "I'm sorry, really."

"That's a first," she remarked quietly.

Placing his hand on her elbow, he turned her around to face him much more gently this time. "I really am."

Eva continued to gaze at the ground, only lifting her eyes briefly to look up at him from beneath her eyelashes. "I know."

Slowly and with an undeniable bit of awkwardness, Draco wrapped one arm around her into a hug while the other held the umbrella above their heads. Now that she thought about it, that was the first time he'd ever been the one to properly initiate a genuine hug. Eva encircled her arms around his middle and felt him instantly relax slightly.

"No more secrets?" he requested.

Eva sighed. "No more secrets," she agreed. "It might interest you to know that my Patronus is a ferret," she muttered against his chest. "I was actually waiting to tell you."

"Do you think it still is?" he asked genuinely.

The only reply she gave was a slight nod.

Little did they know that, in the corridors bordering the courtyard, Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George were all watching and listening with varying levels of enthusiasm and interest.

"How long do you think they'll last?" Fred asked them.

"A month," George replied.

"Two weeks," Ron said.

Harry scoffed. "A week at a push."

"I don't know," Hermione sighed with a slight smile at the corners of her lips as she watched their embrace, "I think they might end up surprising us."


That evening, Eva along with the rest of Dumbledore's Army were forced to attend detention with Umbridge. She still had her 'Potter Stinks' badge and her D.A. coin in her pocket and found herself nervously fiddling with them silently the moment she sat down at one of the many desks lining the Great Hall.

Each of the desks had a single sheet of parchment and a quill without any ink provided. After what Harry had gone through, Eva had some idea of what this was, and she felt her heart beat racing and pounding in her head.

"You are going to write some lines for me," Umbridge instructed, sitting in Dumbledore's chair and sipping a tiny cup of tea. "'I must obey the rules', repeated as many times as it takes for the message to truly sink in. Naughty children do deserve punishments."

Eva heard the others around her very slowly pick up their quills. With a trembling hand, she lifted up the actually quite nice-looking quill and braced herself for the pain she was about to feel.

"Actually, my dear," Eva looked up and saw Umbridge suddenly standing over her desk, offering her a different quill, this one slightly larger, "I think this would be better suited to your writing needs."

Her hand was still trembling as she handed Umbitch the blood quill and took the mystery quill from her. When, again, no ink was provided, Eva knew it was just another blood quill, but the size difference couldn't possibly mean anything good.

The only sound in the room was Umbridge slurping her tea, quills scratching on parchment, and quiet hisses of pain. Holding her quill, Eva lowered the tip to the page and began to write along the top line.

I must obey the rules.

For the first moment, the pain Eva had been long anticipating didn't arrive whatsoever. And then it did.

It felt like someone was taking a small blade and slicing her hand right to the bone. She could've sworn she felt the cuts reach her bones and engrave the words into them. Unable to restrain herself, she cried out in pain and grabbed her left hand, her face contorting in agony. What only disturbed her more was the fact that she could feel her right hand covered in a liquid which she was sure wasn't just water or ink, but she didn't feel brave enough to look.

A few of the others in the room gave her sympathetic glances or their eyes widened slightly as they saw her blood beginning to stain her previously white page. Then she heard a set of slow footsteps approach her while she shivered in her seat.

"Everything alright, my dear?" Umbridge asked her politely, as if oblivious to the blood stains now on her clothes and desk.

Eva wanted to scream at her, to tell her to just look down and it would answer her own question, but instead she simply nodded as tears began to fall down her face.

"Good," Umbridge said, lowering her head to face her, "because you all know that you all deserve to be punished for your actions."


By the end of the detention, Eva found herself practically running out of the room. Her eyes moved to her hand and she couldn't help the gasp that escaped her lips.

It was like something out of a horror movie. The skin on the back of her hand between her thumb and index finger had been mangled terribly. There were trails of blood running all the way up her arm past her sleeve, across her right palm, and all over her white school shirt.

"Eva, are you alright?" Hermione walked over and gasped in horror when she saw the state of her hand. "You need to see Madam Pomfrey, Eva, that's a serious injury. You need medical attention right now."

"I-I'm fine," Eva insisted, starting towards the Slytherin Dungeons.

"At least let me heal it for you," Hermione pleaded.

"I said I'm fine," Eva argued over her shoulder.

Before entering the common room, Eva wrapped her robe slightly tighter over herself to make her shirt less visible and kept her left hand held behind her back while her right remained in her pocket. After saying the password, which happened to be 'Unicorn horns' as suggested by Pansy, she entered straight through and started towards her dorm, hoping she could just heal it on her own there.

Not only were most of the Slytherins in her year gathered around the fire at the front of the room, but Draco had also just entered the room from the dormitories. It seemed it didn't take him long at all to realise that something was wrong.

"What happened?" Draco asked her.

Eva shook her head. "It's nothing, it's fine."

"Eva, show me your hand," he demanded.

She kept her hand behind her back. "It's nothing, Draco," she insisted.

"We agreed no more secrets," he reminded her.

He took her arm and pulled her hand away from behind her back. Eva winced in pain at the slight movement but couldn't stand to take one single look at the remnants of her punishment.

"We have to get you to Madam Pomfrey," he muttered as he rolled up her left sleeve to reveal the long streams of blood which were only just beginning to dry.

"No we don't," she countered stubbornly as she attempted to pull herself away.

"I'm not asking you," he told her sternly, "I'm telling you."

"Draco, please, you don't understand . . ." she trailed off.

"Then help me to understand. That is a serious injury, nothing to be taken lightly. One mistake and the wound reopens, and you're at such a risk of infection with that thing."

"I can't go to the hospital wing," she responded exasperatedly. "Umbridge won't allow me to get treatment for something I gained during one of her punishment sessions."

"Man, that's gnarly though," Blaise added from the other end of the room. "I'd get that checked out if I were you."

"I don't care about Umbridge right now," Draco murmured agitatedly. "I care about you, and I care about the fact that you're hurt and refusing to seek treatment for your injury."

"I'm serious, Draco," Eva continued. "Don't do this. You just got yourself back onto the Inquisitorial Squad. Don't lose your position again just because of this."

He sighed defeatedly and led her back upstairs without explaining anything about what he was up to. Eventually, he led her up to his dorm, sat her down on the edge of the bed, and crouched down onto the floor to rummage under his bed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Eva asked bemusedly as she cradled her injured hand.

After a moment, Draco crawled out again, holding what looked like a first aid kit. Once he opened it up, Eva saw that there were an assortment of bandages, and little vials of potions and ointments.

"This is what happens when you have an overbearing mother who insists on sending every single type of care package for every eventuality," Draco explained humouredly as he picked up a small vial of murky brown potion. "This'll probably hurt, but I don't know. I've never had to use this much of it at once."

Popping off the rubber top, he gently poured the entire contents over the injury. It probably would've hurt more if the nerves in her hand weren't so damaged, but it just felt like someone was heating her hand unbearably warmly, not quite but almost to the point of burning her skin.

When she glanced back down at her hand which Draco was still holding as he looked for something else, the injury itself had completely healed. There were still blood stains everywhere, but the edges of the cuts had miraculously sealed themselves together, only leaving the words 'I must obey the rules' scarred into her skin.

She almost jumped when he handed her a small bar of chocolate. "You're a nightmare, you are."

"Thanks," Eva muttered, running her thumb along the smooth scars and chewing on a small piece of chocolate. "I didn't mean what I said, by the way, before I left." For some reason, she couldn't bring herself to repeat it. "If anything, it's the opposite."

Draco paused his efforts in wiping some of the blood off her arm. "The opposite to you too."

⊱ ────── {.⋅ ✯ ⋅.} ────── ⊰

Author's note: You know I couldn't keep these two sons of bitches away from each other for that long, and sometimes all you need to reconcile is Pansy. Also, Umbridge only makes me angrier each chapter, and I feel like I'm hitting peak anger at this point.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading, stay safe, and ily lots!