A/N: I think I've replied to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, except Claribel, who I couldn't find on so I'll just thank her (?) right now for her kind words. Urk, I've been trying to upload this chapter for HOURS now. Yay for cooperating!

I love reviews of all kinds, except flat-out mean ones, and I have not received any of those yet (or possibly ever)! Thank you again and again to everyone who's left a word or twenty in the nice review box. And, okay, so I think part of this chapter might slightly contradict what I wrote in response to one review, but I swear, it's not a usual state for her. What can I say, it was a party.

Finally, this chapter is kinda filler, but the next is full of action! I promise!

ON TO

Chapter Eight:

Hermione squashed a flare of jealousy that reared when she noticed how Flore was looking at Lucius. Well, at least she would not have to worry about her flatmates disapproving of her… friendship with him. Not that she cared what they thought of Malfoy. But really, the fluttering eyelashes were a bit much.

It was a festive atmosphere that evening, good food and surprisingly good wine. Although everyone present was younger than Lucius, he charmed and conversed and general made all her flatmates a little in love with him. But she was having too much fun to complain much, even to herself.

Ariane, a natural hostess, refilled everyone's plates until they protested and their glasses even when they did. To her delight, Hermione saw a faint blush creep into Malfoy's ivory pallor.

"So tell us you met our Héra," Flore demanded at one point of Lucius. Hermione decided that she wasn't so bad after all, just a little flirt who was making a little fool of herself.

Malfoy swirled his wine in his glass for a moment in a very French manner before answering. His grey eyes met Hermione's, and a smile flitted across his face.

"I'm sorry to say that I was very rude to our dear girl. I was plotting to do something quite evil and acted in a shameful manner towards her and her friends."

Hermione's good mood slipped a little as she remembered the moment he was about to describe. She recalled being twelve years old, defiant and a little scared of the imposing man with cold features and a colder voice. Draco usually seemed a little petty little boy to her, but at the moment, he was heir to a legacy of evil and death, epitomized by his father.

Frightened though she was, Hermione had known her own worth even at that age and glared back at the pair, ignoring the heat that rose in her cheeks. She had never forgotten the feeling that Malfoy the Elder had been looking especially at her, a bookish little girl of so-called inferior ancestry. No, he never would let her forget exactly who he was, and after some initial ire that he had brought up that episode at all, she was glad for it. God forbid she ever forgot that.

"I remember clearly the moment when I saw her for the first time. She was very young, but the pretty young woman she would become was apparent, especially in her dark eyes, full of fire. I already knew that she was clever – my son was extremely jealous of her and her friends and harped about her constantly – but I had no idea how audacious she was. I believe her eyes positively glittered as she glared at me."

He leaned in to address solely her, dropped his voice to a whisper, and unexpectedly switched to English. "Only the very brave and the very foolish look at me like that. I have not yet puzzle out which you are."

"And you fell in love on the spot!" Flore declared.

Lucius chuckled and raised his voice back to a conversational volume. "As I said, she was very young at the time. It was a long time before I came to respect her for the formidable woman she is. As for love…"

Hermione tried desperately to look casual, but it was hard when her lungs refused to contract and expand and her brain froze. This was stupid. They barely knew each other. He was twice her age. Most importantly, he was a ruthless bigot and murderer. She stared into her wine glass as if the secret to immortal life lay therein. It didn't, of course. She and her friends had discovered that in their first year at Hogwarts.

"You'll understand that that is a very personal matter," he finished with his cat-like smile.

Ariane bustled in with a plate of berries and cheese for dessert, breaking with her chatter the strange mood that had threatened to fall over Hermione. She concentrated on eating the tart cherries and gracefully spitting out the pits. What had possessed her to kiss that man, and worse, why did that nosy Flore have to witness it?

Eventually, people began drifting off to their separate rooms. She could not have said how many bottles they had polished off or how much she had helped in that, but she was definitely a little woozy, not to mention fatigued from the troubled sleep she had suffered lately. Playing the gentleman as he had been all evening, Lucius offered her his arm when she stood and walked her up the stairs to her room. She felt as though her face were on fire, conscious of the smirks and giggles her flatmates were exchanging behind her back.

"Thank you," she said when they reached her door, proud that she had kept her footing all that way. "I really am glad that I found you," she mumbled as she wiggled her key in the lock.

"As I recall, it was I who found you, much to my surprise."

"Yeah… okay." She turned to face him after opening the door. "Would you like to step inside? There's…" She paused to peer down the hallway, hoping no one could hear her. "There's something I'd like to ask you. In private." She resolutely did not look at the smirk on his face.

"Of course, Mademoiselle. I am at your service."

Although her ability to coordinate her limbs had somewhat escaped her, the wine had not affected her so much that she forgot her manners. She offered him a cup of tea, and when she saw that she only had three bags remaining, was glad when he refused and asked instead for a glass of water. After filling the kettle, she filled a clean glass and handed it to him.

"I'm sorry about Flore," she said after a pause. "No respect for anyone's privacy." She could feel heat rush into her cheeks as she recalled all the questions her flatmate had posed.

"Anyway," she continued, swallowing hard and fixing her eyes on her desk. "You should have told them that you're married… well, not that it might've made such a difference." Flore was French after all; she would probably think it was exciting.

He laughed. "You're clever but not especially subtle." She could hear him approaching and then sitting on the window seat where he edged into her peripheral vision. "You know nothing of my marriage, of my relationship with my wife, yet you're bothered by the idea that you kissed a married man. I might have shouted and hit her and forced my affections on her when I was not seducing her friends and family, but none of that matters because you like to play by the rules."

Despite herself, she looked up to see a small smile dancing at the corners of his lips. Finally, she had caught him in an outright mistake; he, along with most of the Wizarding World, remained in total ignorance of all the times she had bent and broken the rules at school to accomplish a goal. Like Harry, she got away with it, but unlike Harry, she was rarely even suspected. "I like to preserve the appearance of playing by the rules, Mr. Malfoy." And let him make of that what he would.

"I assure you, the idea of kissing a Death Eater – murderer and probably worse – not to mention Draco's father, is much more repugnant than the fact that you're married." It was fairly difficult to pull off wounded dignity when sloshed and half-asleep, but she found she could manage.

His smile faded as he leaned in closer to her. "Repugnant, am I? That's very strange, coming from an intoxicated young lady who had invited me up to her room at this late hour. As for the other…" He pulled his wedding ring from his finger and set it on the desk with a bang.

She gulped again and returned her attention to the kettle, now releasing pale puffs of steam. "I didn't mean… that isn't why I asked you here." She grasped the kettle handle tightly as she continued. "It's these nightmares I've been having since… you know." She blamed the momentary tremor in her voice on her reduced self-control brought on by the wine.

Her hands shook as she poured the hot water into a cup and over a tea bag. "They're horrible. It's like I'm her, re-living everything she's done. I can never remember the specifics when I wake up, but I know that much." As she spoke, she dunked the tea bag in a failed effort to keep a casual demeanour. She paused, took a couple of deep breaths, and looked up again. Her eyes watered, partly from the steam but mostly from what she did recall of the nightmares.

"I'm afraid to fall asleep, and I was hoping… maybe you knew what was causing this and how to make it stop?" A glint of gold caught her eye, and she dropped her gaze for a moment to inspect his wedding band.

"I'm sorry, Miss Granger," he began, and the wholly unexpected compassion in his voice nearly caused Hermione to lose all composure. As it was, she focused her attention on her tea in one hand and his ring, which she picked up in the other.

"While it's possibly that Bellatrix cast a spell on her wand of which I am not aware, it doesn't seem likely. In truth, I have no idea what could be causing these dreams of yours."

Hermione suddenly hated herself for all the weakness she had shown that day, beginning with her unwarranted panic attack, to that stupid kiss, to excess alcohol consumption, and now this. In her current state, she could almost believe that he did give a damn. Quickly, she changed the subject, though she had been the one to instigate it in the first place.

"What am I supposed to be seeing?" she asked a little sharper than she had intended. She steadied herself and continued in a more civil tone. "It looks normal to me… nice, but normal."

'Nice' was an understatement. It was a thick gold band with a row of minute alternating diamonds and sapphires on the top and bottom edges with a design she could almost make out carved over and over in the gold. She squinted. It looked like a fleurdelys, hardly surprising, considering his very French sounding name, Malfoy.

The colours and motif intrigued her. Before he could answer, she continued her query. "And what…" She set it in her palm to gauge its weight. "What does it mean?"

"As I'm sure you're aware, the fleur de lys is one of the oldest symbols of the French nobility, of which the Malfoy family-" only he pronounced the name a little differently so it came out mal foi. Bad faith. "- has always played a prominent role. Blue lilies on a field of white." That explained the jewels, then. "Look on the inside."

She tilted it until the light struck the inner side of the ring. To her amazement, she saw what appeared to be miniscule printing running all over the inside edge, far too small for her to read.

He told her a spell, which she repeated as she examined the orderly scratches. She nearly fell over in shock when a pool of light gathered inside the ring and shot out to a field of pure white in front of her. An unseen hand traced a long list of names in bright blue Gothic print, each pair separated from the next the next by a fleur de lys. Malfoy followed Malfoy, though rarely she found a pair of names where neither party bore the name, presumably where a daughter or near relative inherited the ring. But the name always returned. There were a couple of names which appeared singly on the list. The names rose slowly, until the list nearly reached the ceiling and ended just in front of Hermione's eyes.

Lucius Malfoy

She glanced over at the man himself. "It stops," she said and immediately felt stupid for it.

"Clever girl. Truly the brightest witch of her age. I shudder to think what that signifies for the rest of your generation."

At this point, she remembered her tea, and instead of returning insult for insult, took a sip. "Why?"

His eyes left hers to gaze the glowing azure letters. "You doubtless realised that the ring carries a record of every marriage it has sealed, every hand it has graced. My father bore it, as did his father before him and so on." He fell silent for a moment, probably overwhelmed with awe at this monument to his family's longevity.

Hermione hoped the sensation would pass quickly – she was finding it more and more difficult to keep her eyes open. She wanted to ask about the single names on the list but thought she could figure that out on her own. The ring must have sealed those marriages, as Malfoy put it, and then they must have dissolved, leaving only the bearer's name on the list. She assumed that only deliberate separations, not unions broken when one spouse died, showed up as single names.

"Why, I cannot say. Perhaps she believed the accusations of treason or was pressured by her sister and the Dark Lord… perhaps she found somebody new who could stay with her… perhaps she finally tired of waiting." He stared a little while longer into the air, then shook himself. "She isn't dead, and for whatever reason, she has dissolved our marriage bond."

Hermione could read neither his voice nor his expression. She wondered if this divorce – if that was the correct term… somehow it did not seem to fit – was public knowledge or if he had just confided to her a potentially scandalous piece of gossip.

"Oh, well…" 'Thank you' seemed vastly inappropriate. "I should get to bed." She stood with admirable steadiness and waited as he also rose. "There's a taxi stand a few, er, hundred metres down the street to your left when you go out." It was late, but it was Paris on Saturday night. He would have no trouble finding transportation home.

She dropped her eyes to her tea, still clutched in her hands. "I'm glad you're all right." For now, at least. If he was right, if Death Eaters were chasing her, he was, sad to say, her best chance of survival at the moment. He knew them better than any Order member could.

"I must say," he began in almost a cheerful tone, "I'm not thrilled at the prospect of wandering the streets at night." She almost reminded him that she had known him to do just that several times before, but kept quiet. He glanced out the window at the garden and the street beyond, now illuminated orange.

"I find I'm quite reluctant to do so. Your friends are already convinced that we're carrying on a torrid affair."

She was glad she had not taken a sip of tea just then or she would have choked and spit it out.

"If I leave now, they'll merely imagine that we had a disagreement or that I had to sneak back to my wife before dawn." He even grinned at her.

"Yes, I'm quite sure. I'd much rather stay here tonight." Without so much as a by-your-leave, of course. She would never admit it, but part of her was relieved that he was to stay with her. Not for… that, but she had wondered if she might sleep better knowing she were not alone. Well, not that she planned to actually share a bed with him. Good God, no.

"As my guest," she said with a heavy sigh, "I insist you take the bed. I should sleep out here anyway, so I'm near a source of water when I wake up."

The list of names hung in the air and cast an eerie light over Malfoy's face. She caught herself staring and turned abruptly, without a word to gather blankets and pillows to soften the loveseat.

When she went to extinguish the light on the main room, she noticed that Malfoy had not retrieved his wedding band from the desk. She wondered what that meant. "Doesn't mean anything," she muttered. It looked much smaller, sitting here, just a sparkly trinket.