A/N: Sorry it's been so long between updates, everyone! I had the WORST case of writer's block EVER! Finally got it finished though, but it wasn't easy, let me tell you! So you'd better appreciate it, damn it! (just kidding, my love)

Let us all give a big round of applause to Lorett, my new beta! She nursed me through my battle with the inspiration-stealing demons, and then kept me from posting a less-than-exemplary chapter in order to get it out sooner! You all owe her BIG TIME for that, because the chapter rather sucked before she helped me out.

Anyway, on to the chapter!

Chapter 17: Something Has Changed

Draco wanted to be reading the journal in which his salvation might be found, but two things were stopping him. The first was that Hermione refused to relinquish the slim, white, leather-bound volume. The second was that he could not stop staring at her.

He'd been trying for perhaps the last ten minutes to wrench his gaze away, and found the task utterly impossible. He suspected that his mind was searching desperately for any reason to doubt the sincerity of the kindness she had just shown him.

It shouldn't have been possible for someone to be so compassionate. Forced to relive a night that, according to the highly-accurate Hogwarts rumor mill, had caused her grievous injury and had nearly cost her the loss of her friends and her life, she'd responded by . . . worrying about his mother. His mother! A woman she'd never met, and who, though she might not know it, considered people like Hermione of no more importance or worth than the dirt beneath her Louis Vuitton-clad feet (the women of the wizarding rich did not allow their prejudice to get in the way of high fashion).

Of all the things she could have said, Draco could not think of a single one that would have been more troublesome or upsetting to him. It was not that he didn't appreciate that she cared; that, in fact, was the problem. He did appreciate it. He soaked up her quiet kindness like a man dying of thirst, hungered after it like he was on the brink of starvation, craved more of it already though it had only been minutes since he'd last been blessed with it. How pathetic he was, he sneered at himself, and Malfoys were not pathetic, with the possible and glaring exception of his father.

He had not given the matter more than thirty seconds of thought before he'd realized exactly why her compassion had moved him so: no one had ever really cared about him before. His mother -- his poor, lovely, oh-so-fragile mother -- had only so much love to give, and what love she did not reserve for herself belonged solely to Lucius. As for his father . . . Well, Draco doubted that his father had ever had the capacity to love, but if he had, it had been eradicated by the Dark Lord long before Draco could remember.

This lack of caring from the two people who should have loved him above all else in the world made it even harder for Draco to accept that Hermione, who had every reason to loathe him, could give a damn whether he lived or lay dying in a thousand pieces. It was most perplexing for him, and Draco was unused to being perplexed by anything.

He didn't know what to make of kindness that was offered simply for its own sake, and not with cunning, manipulation, or ulterior motives behind it. It was confusing and foreign and it meant too much to him. He didn't want this, didn't want her kindness or her compassion, didn't want to feel anything other than disgust when he looked at her . . . Now, damn it, if he could only look away from her, he might be able to convince himself of those things.

A slight intensifying of her level of excitement caused Draco to raise an eyebrow at her. Apparently sensing his curiosity, Hermione looked up at him, the smile that had so recently been on her lips still shining in her eyes.

"Find something?" he asked. He was surprised to find that his voice sounded normal, even amused. Perhaps he should have become a Death Eater after all; he was apparently a superb actor.

"Nothing much, just a reference to a potion that looked rather promising. It didn't work, but she talks about doing a little more experimentation with it before giving up entirely." She blinked and then laughed suddenly, giving him an apologetic smile.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Draco, I've been sitting here hogging it, haven't I? I didn't mean to, I just get so excited sometimes . . ." She trailed off, her eyes on his face. "What's the matter?" He paused, making sure his voice didn't reveal the shock he was feeling when he spoke.

"You called me Draco," he replied very quietly. She furrowed her brows, her eyes and the air clouding with confusion.

"What?"

"You've never called me that before," he explained. Realization and embarrassment dawned on her, and she blushed rather prettily, dropping her gaze.

"Haven't I?" she asked, and though he might have imagined it, it seemed to him that her voice trembled ever so slightly. "I didn't mean to. It just slipped out."

"It's alright," he said quickly, cutting off further explanation. "I don't mind." Her eyes finally met his again, and an emotion he didn't quite recognize began to swirl around her, just beyond his ability to feel it with any clarity.

"Okay," she said carefully, an appraising, rather puzzled look on her face. "You can call me Hermione, if you like."

"Okay," he echoed quietly. He continued to stare at her until she looked away with another delicate blush. Absentmindedly, she twisted a rogue curl around one finger.

"It's not really fair for only one of us to read this," she said suddenly, looking everywhere but at him. "I suppose we could sit together and read it at the same time." It seemed more like a question than a suggestion, but he wasn't going to give her the easy out and make the decision for her.

Whatever pensiveness had characterized his thoughts a few moments ago had vanished, replaced by something lighthearted, even playful (he would not give the credit for this to hearing his name on her lips, he would NOT). He sat calmly, not responding to her words and watching her squirm uncomfortably. The silence stretched between them, growing more awkward by the minute.

She was distinctly nervous now, her discomfiture obvious even without the aid of their link It would have amused him once. Thank God some things never changed. He put his trademark smirk firmly in place and waited, feeling bemused and rather relieved that he wasn't the only one who was ruffled by the strange interactions that seemed to characterize their relationship nowadays. Finally, with a twinge of irritation and an aggravated huff, she pushed herself out of her chair and rounded the table to sit beside him.

She put the journal down on the table between them with more force than was strictly necessary and scooted her chair closer to his own with another small sound of annoyance. He wasn't aware when his smirk became a full-fledged smile, but neither was she, so that was alright. With their heads close together, they began to read.

The morning passed quickly, and when lunch rolled around, since neither of them had eaten breakfast, Hermione allowed herself to be persuaded to go in search of food. Though reluctant to leave at first, half-an-hour of Draco's whining finally drove her out. She left, but only after making him swear on all his hair products that he would report anything he learned her absence as soon as she returned.

Following that brief interruption, they returned to their work with renewed purpose. When it became clear that Delilah James's research on the subject might not be confined to this particular journal, Hermione continued to read on while Draco searched for references to the Iunctus Mens Effect in the other journals.

An hour after splitting up the task, Hermione had finished the white volume without any luck. Though Delilah James considered herself to be on the right track, Hermione couldn't see that she'd made much progress at all in the several hundred pages of text that were bound in the journal. She could only hope that the answer lay somewhere else.

Draco had already found three more volumes that mentioned Delilah's research into the cure, and since no dates were included to help guide them as to the chronology of the texts, they were going to have to read through them all. Hermione didn't mind the work. It gave her something to do besides steal glances at Draco out of the corner of her eye.

Draco. She cringed inwardly as she though of her slip earlier that day. Several weeks before, she had begun to refer to him in her own mind by his given name. She understood that, to him, the use of his first name was a sign of intimacy that he shared with a very small few, so she had never even attempted to call him that to his face, but he had been Draco to her practically since that Sunday afternoon they had spent in each other's company.

His given name came so easily and naturally to her mind that she hadn't even noticed she'd said it until he pointed it out to her. She had a brief moment to be mortified by her slip-up before he had surprised the embarrassment right out of her by not only NOT biting her head off, but telling her very calmly and sincerely that he didn't mind if she called him by that strangely intimate name.

The look in his eyes when he had offered this privilege to her had sent a very strange jolt of something through her veins. She had no more idea what it was than he had, but it had made her extremely uneasy. And, damn the git, he had delighted in her discomfort! She could feel his bemusement in the air even as she'd sat there, but the lack of any real malevolence behind it had allowed her to let it pass unacknowledged.

She looked at him now, wondering what that strange interaction had meant, and why it had happened. She suspected that it had something to do with the memory she'd witnessed that morning; he'd been troubling over something ever since. Oddly enough, his preoccupation appeared to accompanied by foreign, positive emotions she had never sensed from him before. In fact, with the exception of a little good-natured teasing that held no malice whatsoever, he hadn't said a single mean thing to her since. It was disturbing, to say the very least.

Unless she was mistaken (and it was quite possible that she was, as she'd been wrong about him before), Draco was either letting his bad-boy act slip dangerously away from him, or that morning's memory had changed something between them. She wasn't sure what it was yet, but it couldn't be a bad thing.

Eventually, the afternoon drifted away, and, because she was so damned easy to manipulate and because he rather enjoyed seeing her get all annoyed, Draco wheedled and whined until Hermione agreed to go find some dinner for them. She left with a scowl, but her eyes twinkled at him the way they sometimes twinkled at Potty and the Weasel, and he didn't bother to try denying that he rather liked it when she looked at him that way.

He had promised to continue to search, so, obviously, he immediately tossed the journal he was holding aside and leaned back in his chair, intending to do no such thing. He slid his legs, which felt stiff and cramped, onto the table, and in doing so, knocked several dusty journals to the floor. With a long-suffering sigh, he swung his legs down and bent to retrieve them.

He distinctly remembered seeing three volumes fall from the table, but for a moment, he could only find two. Finally, he spotted the rogue journal several feet away, lying open beneath the chair Hermione had recently vacated.

He picked it up and was about to place it back on the table when an underlined phrase on the open page caught his eye: "Something has changed." Bringing the journal closer to him, he studied the text further.

The paragraph in question was written rather haphazardly, and it appeared to him that when she had written it, Delilah James had pressed unnecessarily hard, nearly puncturing the parchment in her excitement (or distress). He furrowed his brow as he began to read.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't care about him. I don't even LIKE him. But if that's true, why am I worried about him when he's away from me? Why do I feel calmer, happier, safer when I'm with him? Why is it that I sit here writing about him when I should be looking for a cure? I used to hate him so much, and it was so very easy to feel that way. Something is different now, though. Something has changed.

Draco blinked stupidly at the page. Surely she wasn't talking about that partner of hers (what the devil was his name?). They had hated one another; everything he and Hermione had run across had told them so. Delilah had pages and pages of journal entries in which she ranted endlessly about . . . Edward, that was it! . . . and how utterly insufferable he was. A smug, half-blooded ass, he believed she had called him, who thought he could do and say no wrong. Draco had commented that he sounded a lot like Potter; Hermione had commented that he sounded a lot like Draco, minus the half-blood part.

Whoever he most resembled, though, one thing was certainly clear: there was no love lost between Edward Flannigan and Delilah James. So what on earth was she rambling on about? The silly girl didn't sound as though she hated him at all; she sounded as though she were trying very hard to convince herself that she wasn't falling for him, if she hadn't already. Could that be it, he wondered? Had being linked been enough to overcome what seemed to be a pure and well-founded hatred between two people so obviously different from and ill-suited to one another?

Draco's blood seemed to freeze in his veins. Oh, no, no, no! He couldn't even begin to process how very wrong that was, on so many, many levels. He began a frantic series of rationalizations, snatching onto anything that might make this revelation any less terrifying.

Whatever had transpired between Delilah James and her partner, it had absolutely no bearing on what was happening now, between Hermione and himself. Besides, the girl had ended up married to a Malfoy, hadn't she, not some arrogant, half-blooded prat. However confused the link might have made her, she had righted it in the end. Draco clung to that thought, fearing that it was the only thing that was saving him from full-out hysteria. And Malfoys, he thought somewhat desperately, did not do hysteria.

Forcing down his rising panic, Draco had just succeeded in bringing his emotions back under control when the doors to the library banged open distantly. Hermione's presence flowed tranquilly through the bookshelves to pool pleasantly in the alcove that he had tried very hard not to think of as "theirs," a task at which he had failed miserably. She arrived several minutes after her emotions had washed over him. Her arms were laden with food.

Clearing a space on the table, she chatted happily about meeting Professor Flitwick in the halls on the way down to the kitchens and learning that she had received 112 on their Charms end-of-term exam. It wasn't until she had finished recalling the hours she had spent fretting over the accuracy of her response to a certain short-answer question that she cast a concerned look at him with her wide, dark eyes.

"Are you okay, Draco?" she asked. He nodded after a split-second's hesitation. In that second, he had suddenly decided not to share the journal with her, at least not yet. He felt oddly drawn to it, considering how vehemently he had tried to disregard its contents not five minutes before, and felt compelled to read further, if for no other reason than to confirm his own suspicions.

Hermione did not see him drop the slim black volume into his bag.

Neither did Draco see the small, puzzled frown that she sent him after he'd done so.

They ate in companionable silence, but, once again, something had changed.