Author Note: Good response to this so I've added a chapter. Let me know if you want more.

It was only the evening of the first day of classes in her sixth year, but Hermione was already in the library, getting started on ancient runes, the closest thing there was to a course on literature at Hogwarts. The book she needed was shelved high over her head, and as she reached for it, a long, lean arm curved around her waist from behind, while a white hand moved over hers and past it, sliding the book free for her.

There was a voice hot in her ear. "What was Slughorn saying in class today, over those fussy potions? Something about not underestimating the power of obsessive love?"

She spun around to face Draco Malfoy, this close to her for the first time since she'd shared a tortured goodbye with him in the hospital wing before summer holidays.

"You. You have been behaving very badly," she began immediately, bending her arms at the elbows and cramming them between them, like a wedge. She was working to be stern, even angry, but it was too much of a relief to be touching him again after weeks of tense separation. She was already warm and melting, and he knew it.

He lowered his face toward hers. "Bad. And so you've been punishing me, avoiding me," he said, his hands moving up and down her back, rolling the curves of her shoulders against his palms. "We arrived yesterday and you still haven't come to find me. Neither has that great orange beast."

"You mean Ron?" she chirped.

"No, not Weasley," he said, outraged as she laughed at him, and loud enough for someone two aisles over to shush him. He whispered into her face. "Where's our cat been off sulking?"

She tossed her head. "Crookshanks isn't like a human. His love isn't stupidly obsessive. It's purposeful. He's only good to you when you're good."

Draco frowned. "Granger, I've been as good as I can be, under the circumstances. Did you forget already? When I saw you at Madam Malkin's the first thing I did was ask about your black eye." He leaned in to kiss her fully healed eyelid, slowly, lingering on it, cutting off her view of anything else but him.

She pulled back. "You said you wanted to send flowers to whoever gave it to me."

He smirked. "Did you see flowers in your mind when I said it though? At the time, it was the best way for me to conjure any kind of get-well tribute for you, with my mother standing at my elbow and all." He kissed her other eyelid. "Think back. At the start of every school year, when I run into you lot, my first comment is often directed right at you."

She huffed as he buried his face in her hair, telling him, "In the future, freezing disdain will do just as well as a vulgar insult for a greeting."

He pulled away, smoothing her hair with one hand. "Yes, well don't think I don't know you went into Borgin and Burkes after I left, telling them I was your boyfriend and that you wanted to buy me a gift."

She batted at his chest. "I did not say that."

"Close enough."

"Well, I had to do something to call Harry off. He's obsessed with you too, you know. He's sure you've taken the Dark Mark and that you're a threat to all of us this year."

Draco twitched, his left arm drifting away from where it rested against her.

"And what happened between the two of you alone in the train compartment at Hogsmeade Station yesterday," she said, the trace of a smile that had been playing about her face disappearing completely, "it was ghastly. The sight of either of you covered in blood at the hands of the other - it's something I never want to see again."

He let go of her, stepping backward, away. She didn't let him retreat, snatching both of his hands in hers. "So far, everyone agrees Harry is overreacting," she said. "Please, Draco. Don't prove them wrong."

He pried his hands away a second time. "Did Potter send you here to see if you could get me to show you my arm? To confirm or refute his theory? Are you on another fake-girlfriend fact-finding mission for him, like you were in Knockturn Alley?"

She sighed. "Draco, it was you who found me here tonight. And I am happy you did." She crossed her arms behind his neck. "I missed you terribly. I worried constantly. Seeing you here so close to me, still so much like yourself after all you must have been through this summer - it's like a miracle."

Rising to her toes, she kissed him, softly and sweetly. His arms closed around her torso as he responded, his mouth growing hungrier, more forceful as the seconds rushed by, the edge of his teeth against her lip, tantalizing but too sharp and dangerous, especially for the library. She pulled away, breath ragged.

He startled, remembering. "Your injuries, are they alright now? Did I hurt you?"

She shook her head. "No, it's fine, so fine. Hold me as tightly as you need to."

He did, grinning into the crown of her head. "Still good."

"Not quite," she said, shoving against his chest.

He groaned. "For the love of Boggarts, Granger, what now?"

She folded her arms between them again. "Harry saw everything when he was hiding in the luggage rack in your compartment, Malfoy - EVERYTHING."

He looked up at the ceiling, replaying the scene from the train in his mind. "Obviously. What are you trying to say?"

She batted her eyes and spoke in a high wheedling voice, "Oh Draco, your hair is so silky and pretty, lay back and rest your head on my thighs and let me touch it all over."

"You're on about Parkinson?"

"Yes, Pansy Parkinson, the girl who fondled you all the way from London yesterday."

Draco gathered Hermione higher and tighter against himself. "Wait, wait," he said. "I'm trying to remember exactly how you explained to me that it was for the best if we look like we're interested in other people. It was when you let Viktor Krum fish you out of the bottom of the lake as his treasure during the Triwizard tournament while the press snapped photos and rhapsodized your sweet young romance. How did that go again? We're in the library right now. You want to look it up? It's carefully preserved in the newspaper archive section. Pictures of Krum with the water beading on his muscles, carrying you like a bride, soaking wet and only half dressed, rising out of the lake together to everyone's cheers?"

She struggled weakly against him. "That event was not at all romantic. Bride indeed. Fleur's hostage was her sister and it was Ron that Harry rescued."

"You know, I've always wondered about Potter and Weasley. What is going on with them? How else could anyone explain the way neither of them fancies you?"

She let out a laugh much too loudly. "Who says neither of them fancies me? As a matter of fact - "

"Right, stop," he said. "The thing is, when we're outside school, I'm being watched. I have to be who they want me to be in all the small ways, like cuddling with their pure-blood girls, so they won't be so quick to harass me about all the big ways I disappoint them."

Her expression had turned sad, and not because of Pansy Parkinson. Hermione had always been able to connect to Draco so perfectly in and so many ways that the gaping chasm between them was something they could fool themselves into thinking they could ignore, just a little longer. But it was now wider than ever, and more dangerous. What would she find if she were to look at his arm? It was an impossible topic to raise. She crept only around the edge of the chasm.

"So they're really at your house?"

"Yes."

"Is it scary?"

He paused, swallowing hard. "Yes."

"Do you," she began, watching him wince, ready to recoil from her if she pressed too hard. She kept her question general, playful, silly as she could make it. "Do you feel any more evil than you used to?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. When I broke Potter's nose on the train, what I was feeling more than anything was sickening, crazy love for my father."

His father who had given the Death Eaters under his command permission to kill her if she got in their way. It was another item on the growing list of things they could not talk about.

Draco knew it as well, and was re-routing the conversation. "And," he said in a brighter voice, "as I stand here I am sorely tempted to flip your skirt up and - well - but that may not be something I can blame on a Dark Lord."

"No, that's just my Malfoy," she said. "And don't you dare."

Ron Weasley came stomping into the library, no bag, no books, just an old parchment in his hands, reading it like a map, searching for something.

"You can't get back there right now." Pansy Parkinson spoke from where she sat at a nearby table, calling him back as he was about to step behind a tall, densely packed bookcase.

He glanced at her, looking away as his face flushed ever so slightly red. Bloody Parkinson with all the dark lipstick. Ron ignored her and walked around the bookcase just to find himself turned around and emerging exactly where he'd started.

He swore. "How do they do that?"

"It's a passageway spell," Parkinson explained. "You find them in large old houses. like Malfoy Manor. It seals off entrances and exits but invisibly. There's a whole section of the Malfoy's private library on old magical architecture. And it looks like Draco has read it very carefully."

Ron tried getting to the other side of the bookcase again. It was no good. He fell into the chair beside Pansy instead. "Are you waiting for them? Trying to catch them?" he asked her.

She raised her dark eyebrows. "You think after all this time we could finally shame them into leaving each other alone just by calling them out again?"

Ron let out his breath. "Suppose not. But - I mean - honestly, they can't keep this up. His father tried to kill us, for stars' sake. This has got to be the year it ends."

Pansy tapped the plume of her quill against her lower lip. "Well I, for one, will not sit here waiting for Hermione Granger's leavings. Draco will come to me but it has got to be in spite of Miss Perfect, or I'll have no self-respect at all."

Ron shook his head, dumbfounded that any girl could want Draco Malfoy, especially ones as brilliant as Hermione or as fit as Parkinson. It was too bad about Parkinson's personality, and her background, and her attitude - everything but her looks, really. "Just move on," he offered.

Pansy scoffed. "I could tell you the same."

He slumped against the tabletop. "Impossible. She's had me locked up since second year. Takes me for granted though, that's what she does."

"Yes, exactly," Pansy said. "On the train yesterday, I thought I had reason to hope but it turns out it was all just a show to keep the adults happy."

Harry had told him about that, and it almost made him sorry for her. "We've got to find new ways to flaunt our value. Because, we don't need this, Parkinson. I'm a bloody quidditch keeper. And you - " He waved a hand at her figure. "I'm just saying, loads of people would be happy to have us."

"Weasley," she groaned. "The answer is obvious, isn't it?"

"What? More lipstick?"

She was tucking her unopened new school books back into her bag. "Something like that." She leaned closer to him, talking low. "Look, Weasley. There are few people at school Draco would hate to see me with more than you."

"Thanks."

"And you and I - it's not like we don't have a bit of a history, a certain compatibility, sickening as it may be."

"For me and all, Parkinson."

"Shut up. I don't need you to talk. I need you for an experiment." She withdrew a tube of lipstick from the same pocket where she kept her wand. "No one else at school wears this shade. If you're seen with it on you, everyone will be gossiping about us having our own secret fling. And if it gets back to them," she nodded at the impenetrable bookcase, "they might start to see us a bit differently."

He gaped at her. "So you're saying, you'd take that - " He reached for the lipstick, but then yanked his hands away. "Take that and draw - on me."

"No, you daft prat. I would have to actually peck you with my lips. But you would live through it. I promise." She cocked her head. "What do you say? Should I find some other insufferable Gryffindor git to help me? Fine. I'll do that. Sorry to have bothered you."

"Wait," he said, snagging her arm as she rose to leave. "Promise not to bite me and we've got a deal."

"Brilliant," she said.

He watched her as she re-applied her dark plum lipstick. He hadn't noticed that he'd licked his own lips until she smirked and asked, "Want some? Can't say it's your colour, Ginger, but you're welcome to it."

"Nah, I'm good."

"Right," she said, capping the lipstick. "No sudden movements."

"Wha?"

She sprung forward and smacked a quick kiss on the side of his neck, over his carotid artery, marking him with her lipstick, dark against his white flesh. She frowned as she sat back to inspect it. "A bit smeared, but I'm not doing it again."

Ron made a nonverbal sound of assent, not sure if saying thanks would be at all appropriate.

"No, don't wipe it off, Weasley," she scolded as his fingers rose toward the mark she'd left. "That's the whole point. All you need to do now is let everyone see it. We'll build from there."

Later, Draco lay in bed awake in the Slytherin dungeons. No cat. He had hoped going back to school would make it easier to sleep. But now that he was here, the clock was ticking on his impossible task - the one upon which the survival of his entire branch of the Malfoy family depended.

He had hoped seeing Hermione again would make everything easier, less bleak and doomed. During the time when they were actually together, it did. But somehow, their time apart was more difficult now, knowing she was here, in danger, but her not knowing it, even sticking up for him to Potter. Did Potter have good instincts, some kind of gift of divination, or was he just paranoid enough to be right once in awhile, like a stopped clock? In bed, Draco curled his body in on itself, tight like a spring.

In the darkness of his room under the lake, Draco couldn't see the Dark Mark, but he knew it was there, on his left arm, in front of his face. When he opened his eyes and the darkness started to move and flicker, like pixels on a Muggle screen, he could almost believe he saw the original mark still in place, the one Hermione had inscribed on his left arm - the hand, heart, and hope. While he had it, her mark had glowed in the dark when he breathed on it, pulsing with his heartbeat as he fell asleep every night.

It hadn't last long. He hadn't been back at the manor for two full weeks before Aunt Bella dragged him into the drawing room one night, its walls ringed with sweaty masked Death Eaters, the Dark Lord standing before the highest fire Draco had ever seen on that marble hearth. Wormtail had sat hunched behind him, arranging iron pokers in the flames.

"Ah, Master Draco," the Dark Lord had crooned. "Come, we have assembled to honor you."

Draco's mother had been there too, sitting in an armchair, her face red with firelight, Bellatrix's fingers clamped around her shoulders. "Your arm, Draco," she had said.

He had removed his jacket, his cuff link.

"All of it," said the Dark Lord. "We are an intimate society. Let us look on you."

Draco had unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall in a heap with the rest of his clothing. He stood in just his trousers and shoes in the hot drawing room, his skin clammy with cold sweat, his eyes closed as the reptile-cool hands moved across his shoulders and down the length of his left arm. Hermione's magic snapped against the corpse-like fingertips.

"What is this?" the Dark Lord had grinned. "Madam Malfoy, your young son has a love token inscribed on his arm. How charming."

Narcissa had startled. "Has he? Draco, you never said so. That would be the Parkinson girl. Wouldn't it, darling?"

The Dark Lord had tutted her. "Now, Madam Malfoy, Master Draco's love affairs demand privacy. He is, after all, not a boy any longer." He had pushed the sleeves of his robe above his elbows. A cloud of blue sparks flared as he passed his hand over Hermione's mark. "Formidable magic for a young witch. I daresay the process of inscription must have been painful."

"Not at all, my lord." It was the first and only thing Draco would say that night.

"Chivalrous of you to say, Draco," the Dark Lord had grinned. "Ah, it says, 'Hope.' Yes, my son, but with our return, you have no need to merely hope. You may tell your witch that very thing, when you see her again. And do beg her pardon on my behalf, for spoiling her spell."

With that, he had swirled the tip of his wand over Hermione's mark. It had flashed to life, its usual blue glow burning white, sparking and snapping between the wand and Draco's flesh. The white mass had grown denser, rounding at the edges, buzzing like a swarm of bees, rippling and bending.

The Dark Lord's smirk had tightened into a hard line, his mouth a slit, like the ones in his nose. He had snarled, jerking the end of his wand hard, throwing the white hot swarm toward the fire. It had come free of Draco's arm but rather than being consumed in the fire, it had flown into hundreds of tiny lights, singing as they dispersed through the gloom of the drawing room. From somewhere within their chords, Draco had thought he heard Hermione's voice, laughing.

Bellatrix had shrieked, swatting at the lights, shaking them out of her hair. Narcissa had covered her face with her hands, bending into her own lap, shaking with tears. The lights had sparked and flamed against the masks of the other Death Eaters, standing unmoved around the room like empty suits of armour. Draco could not have hidden his smile.

"Wormtail," the Dark Lord had hissed, his hand outstretched. "The brands."