Disclaimer: We own nothing but the plot.
A/N: here we are with another chapter of…A Murderer amongst Us! Dun dun dun…. Lol. Well, I know that the little cliffhanger we wrote for you last chapter was a little dramatic and it may have had some of you on the edge of you seats asking for more and some of you were probably just like eh…whatever. Here is the Draco/Hermione goodness that we promised last chapter, but I have to finish the little dramatic cliffy first hehe. Enjoy!
Elena burst into the common room, her clothes were covered in blood and she was hysterical. Orion ran up to her immediately and asked her what was wrong.
"Whoa…babe! What happened? Why are you covered in blood? What happened to you?" he asked her and held her hands.
Elena was hyperventilating and was frantic. "Kat! She's-she's-blood everywhere! Stairs! Help!" was what she managed to get out.
"Elena calm down and take me to Kat." Orion told her.
Elena took his hand and led him out of the portrait hole to the bottom of the stairs where Kat was laying in a pool of her own blood. Her hair was soaked in blood and she was deathly pale. Elena ran to her and cradled her head in her lap again. She touched a certain spot on Kat's head showed Orion. Her hand was covered in fresh blood.
"We need to get her help! I'm too scared to move her on my own." Elena told him.
Orion kneeled down next to Kat also and looked over Kat. "Even if we levitate her, we can't risk the trip all the way to the infirmary. She's bleeding far too much to move her that far."
There was now a small crowd of Gryffindors gathered on the stairs. They were staring and talking. Harry, Ginny, and Ron made their way through the crowd.
"What the bloody hell happened here?" Ron asked shocked.
"Go get Mcgonagall or someone! Now!" Elena told them.
Ron and Ginny left. Harry helped Orion and Elena levitate Kat to the common room. Orion levitated her while Elena and Harry kept her head wound from bleeding. They had a difficult time getting through the people since they were standing there stupefied.
"Move people! If she dies from blood loss I will personally hunt all of y'all down and curse y'all to kingdom come. Now move!" Elena yelled.
Almost immediately everyone moved off to the side and they went up the stairs quickly. Once in the common room, Harry ordered everyone go to his or her rooms. A few younger ones resisted but Harry soon convinced them. They laid Kat down on a couch and tried to stop the bleeding. Chad came down to see what all the fuss was about and he saw Kat. He stood there frozen at the bottom of the stairs. Suddenly, Mcgonagall, Dumbledore, and Madam Pomfrey came into the common room.
"What happened here!" all of them exclaimed.
They looked at Elena who seemed to have the most blood on her and directed the question to her.
This caused Elena to burst into tears again and become frantic. Dumbledore placed a hand on her shoulder and led her to an armchair so she could sit down. His kind eyes met with hers.
"Calm down Ms. Del Rio and tell us what happened." He told her kindly.
"Yes because this poor child looks like she's been clubbed with a baseball bat!" Madam Pomfrey said shrilly.
Elena burst into more tears. "Please just attend to Ms. Tucker while I try to find out what happened poppy."
Madam Pomfrey turned back around to Kat with a "Humph."
"Please…can you tell us what happened?" Dumbledore asked Elena again.
"I was-trying-late-fight-blood-stairs-I-all over." Elena tried to say.
Dumbledore nodded. "Okay okay. Right now all I want you to do is try to calm down. Have Madam Pomfrey give you a calming drought."
Madam Pomfrey had conjured up a roll of gauze bandages and bandaging Kat's head. She levitated her and went out of the portrait hole. Dumbledore told Elena to go with them and told Orion to help her.
"Harry, I want you to go inform Ms. Granger of what has happened. I'm sure that she would like to know what has happened to her friend and professor Mcgonagall, would you so kind as to do some damage control." Dumbledore instructed the rest of them.
Harry set out to find the heads and prefect's tower. He soon found it and knocked loudly on the portrait. Hermione awoke to some banging. She headed down the stairs and went to the portrait she opened it and saw harry with blood on his shirt.
"Harry! What happened to you?" she asked.
"Nothing just that Kat has had an accident and Elena found her at the bottom of the stairs in front of the Gryffindor tower in a pool of her own blood. Madam Pomfrey took her and Elena down to the hospital wing. Dumbledore told me to tell you." Harry explained.
"What's going on? Potter? What are you doing here this time of night?" Draco came down the stairs in just his pajama bottoms.
"It's nothing that concerns you Malfoy." Harry told him.
"Fine. I'm going back to bed." Draco went back up the stairs without a fight. He was too tired.
"Let me get dressed and we'll go down to the hospital wing. Oh, screw it. I'll just go like this." Hermione said. She was in her tank top and pajama pants. She followed Harry as they ran to the hospital wing.
As they entered, Dumbledore told them to go back to bed. "Ms. Del Rio told us that she just found Ms. Tucker in that state so we will just have to wait until Ms. Tucker wakes up to find out what actually happened. Go back to bed and don't worry. You'll be able to see her tomorrow morning."
Harry, Hermione, Orion, and Elena left and went back to bed. As Hermione walked into her common room, she saw Draco was sitting in one of the armchairs. Hermione pretended not to see him and walked towards the stairs.
"Hermione, stop. We have to talk." Draco stood up.
Hermione stopped walking but didn't turn around. "What do we have to talk about?"
"About what happened at the Halloween ball, about why you've been avoiding me." He said.
"What are you talking about? I haven't been avoiding you."
"Then what do you call whenever I try to talk to you, you turn around and talk to someone else. When I try to look at you, you turn away. When I try to approach you, you walk away. When I come into the common room, you go up to your room. If that's not avoiding me then I don't know what is."
"I'm not…I just…I have to go to sleep. I have class in the morning."
"Today is Friday. We don't have any classes tomorrow."
"Well I have to go see Kat in the morning okay. Good night."
"No Hermione. I am not going to let you walk away this time. We need to talk."
"There is nothing to talk about."
"Yes there is and you know it!" he walked up in front of her.
Hermione looked up into his pale blue eyes. They weren't as cold as they used to be anymore. But, she couldn't look into them. Every time that she looked at him she remembered the feeling of his lips on hers and how for a minute everything seemed to be perfect. Then, she remembered that at the same time it was so wrong.
"Draco, what happened at the Halloween ball was…an accident. That's all. An accident."
"It wasn't an accident and you know it. That couldn't have been an accident."
"I am going to bed Draco and I suggest that you do the same." She walked around him and started towards the stairs again.
Draco walked after her and grabbed her arm gently. "Hermione, why don't you want to talk about it? Why can't you just admit that it wasn't an accident?"
"Let me go Draco." She said and twisted her arm away.
"No Hermione. We need to talk!" he said again.
"NO!" Hermione yelled and ran up to her room.
Draco ran after her but he was too late. She had already locked herself in her room. He knocked on her door and asked for her to open the door. She wouldn't even answer him much less open the door. He finally gave up and went back to his room. He couldn't stand that she wouldn't talk to him about the kiss. She just wanted to act like the kiss never happened or that it was an accident. But to him, it wasn't. He never believed that things happened for a reason. That was until he met her.
Until he actually got to know her, he thought that he was the one that controlled his destiny. He was the one that would decide what he was going to do with his life and no one else. Then he realized that sometimes when you let go of trying to control life and just go with the flow, it's a wonderful experience and that things that are supposed to happen will. You just have to relax and wait for them to.
The next morning, Hermione went to see Kat. She still hadn't woken up though. Madam Pomfrey had said that she had lost a lot of blood from lying there for so many hours. A while longer and she could have died. Elena burst into tears again at this point and had to be given another calming drought.
Hermione walked back to her tower with Ginny. Along the way, Ginny noticed that Hermione was being a little too quiet.
"Mione? What's wrong with you?" Ginny asked. "You're being a little too quiet. You usually are talking about…something."
"What?" Hermione snapped back to reality.
"I said that you're being a little too quiet. What's wrong?"
"Nothing, I just have a lot on my mind. That's all."
"Come on Mione. You can tell me. I'm supposed to be your best friend right?"
"I know…well...there's something that happened at the Halloween ball that shouldn't have and I can't stop thinking about it. I know I should but I can't. Is that totally horrible?"
"Well I can't tell you unless you tell me what happened."
They walked into the common room and Draco was surprisingly not there. Hermione dragged Ginny up to her room and began to tell her about the kiss.
"You got to kiss Draco Malfoy? Good going!" Ginny said laughing.
"Ginny! You are supposed to tell me that it was a total mistake and I should stop thinking about it!" Hermione scolded her.
"Well, even I have to say that he isn't the total jerk he was at the beginning of the year you now? You've changed him slowly and I wouldn't be mad if you went out with him."
"Ginny! How can you be so calm about this? The real Ginny would be yelling and screaming at me. What did you do with her?"
"Hermione, over the last few weeks, me, Kat, and Elena have been sort of stalking him."
"You have been doing what!"
"Don't get mad. It's just that I had this feeling about him and I wanted to find out of it was true. So I asked the girls if they would help me out. What is so wrong about that?"
"What's wrong is that you guys have been stalking him! What if he caught you or something? What would happen then? I can't believe that you guys did that!"
"Well, what we found out was very interesting. Don't you at least want to know what we found out about your boyfriend?"
"He's not my boyfriend!"
"Yeah whatever, anyway" Ginny waved her response away. "It turns out that he's actually a pretty nice guy. He's not a cocky jerk anymore and I think that you two have a chance."
"Ginny! Do you realize whom you are talking about! We are talking about Draco Malfoy here!"
"I know that it may seem weird but I think that you two should talk. No matter what others say, I can tall that he cares about you a lot. I gotta go meet harry so I'll stop by later okay?"
"yeah, okay. I guess I finally gotta go talk to him huh?"
"Yes ma'am and I think that the sooner that you do it, the better it will be."
"Alright. Later Ginny."
"Later." Ginny left Hermione's room
Hermione grabbed a pillow and used it to cover her mouth. She let out a loud frustrated scream that was muffled by the pillow. Had the whole world gone wacky on her? Ginny was telling her that she thought her and Draco had a chance.
Sighing, she went downstairs to face the inevitable.
Draco was downstairs reading by the fire, book in one hand and the other running through his hair as if he was frustrated. His uniform shirt was somewhat unbuttoned and he had rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. Hermione stopped in her tracks and just stared for a while with her mouth open. He looked so cute.
She regained herself and then finally cleared her throat to get his attention. He turned his head towards her and had a look of slight surprise.
"What do you want?" he asked as gently as he could given that he was pissed at her for avoiding him.
"I was thinking about it and I realized that…we do need to talk. Is that okay with you?" she didn't take offense to the way he had spoken to her.
His face immediately softened and he put his book down. " Yeah. Sure. Here, um…sit." He got off of the couch and offered it to her.
She smiled and laughed slightly. "Just because I want to talk to you doesn't mean that you can't sit either."
"Right." He sat down next to her but a safe distance away. "So what is it that you wanted to talk about?"
"Um…well…um…I thought that we could talk about…um…." She was so nervous she couldn't finish her sentence.
"Um…do you want to…I mean do you wanna talk about that…I mean…" he couldn't bring himself to say it either.
"I guess we're both at a loss for words." She laughed awkwardly. He also laughed awkwardly.
"So…where does that leave us?" he asked.
"If I say that I enjoyed the kiss, would you hold it against me?" she asked really softly.
"No…because I enjoyed it too." He said just as softly.
"But you know that we can't right?"
He got closer to her and put his hand on hers. "Why? Why can't we?"
She turned away from him and stood up. "Because Draco…there's already too much between us. There's already too much bad blood."
"Why does that matter?" he stood up and went behind her. "Why does any of that have to matter? We could if we wanted to."
She turned around. "Draco, do you now what we would have to put up with if we were together? People would constantly try to separate us. It would be horrible." She turned to face him. Her eyes were sparkling and tears were threatening to fall down.
"We could do it. As long as we have each other, it wouldn't matter. No one would be able to touch us as long as we have each other."
"You know that's not true. Things would come between us and you know it."
He held her face in his hands. "No, I don't. All I know is that I want to be with you and no one else." He kissed her.
Hermione almost pushed him off but then decided not to. She kissed him back and they just stood there kissing. Eventually, they broke apart and Hermione looked into his eyes until she couldn't stand it any longer. She buried her head into the crook of his neck and he immediately wrapped his arms around her.
"We shouldn't be doing this. We could get in a lot of trouble from everybody." Hermione's statement came almost lost. "We are breaking a lot of rules."
"Since when have I ever cared about breaking the rules? Besides, they are meant to be broken." He told her and lifted her chin up with his index finger and kissed her sweetly.
She broke away briefly and murmured. "I can tell you're going to be bad for me." Draco smirked handsomely and kissed her again.
A/N: well, there was chapter 11! Hope you enjoyed and thank you to all the faithful readers! You keep us going! i promise that the next chapter will be up soon, i am typing it as we speak!R&R!