A/N: I was sick in bed all day and got this entire chapter written. Sorry to spam you with updates. Thanks for the reviews. So helpful and motivating!

Just as Draco had divined, on the day of the first Hogsmeade trip of their sixth year, the weather was terrible, wind and sleet. Warm and dry, he sat in McGonagall's office, a half-inked parchment on the desk in front of him, as he watched the grey gap of the window, flying beads of ice hurling itself against the glass.

McGonagall herself said nothing about his distracted watching of the window, interpreting his lack of focus on his essay as a simple, wistful preference to be in town, strutting through the streets with his cronies, ogling Hermione Granger or glaring at Harry Potter from across a barroom, over the top of a stein of butterbeer. That was how she knew Draco Malfoy to enjoy passing his time.

In fact, he was relieved to be under McGonagall's eye, no better alibi to show he wasn't responsible for what he knew was making its way down the lane from Hogsmeade. He had received an owl informing him that the cursed necklace had arrived in the post office nest from Borgin and Burke's shop. He had pressed his charmed galleon to signal the contact his mother had established in town to collect it and get it to a Hogwarts student.

At any time now, at the front gate, Filch would detect the dangerous package with his Secrecy Sensor and it would be confiscated and turned over to the headmaster who, already alerted by Filch of its suspicious nature, would know to handle it and dispose of it safely.

And it would all be recorded in the Dark Lord's ledger as service by the Malfoy family, foiled by the same Hogwarts security measures that were holding the Dark Lord himself at bay. Who could be blamed for that?

This was Draco's own plan to distract and delay the Death Eaters. If nothing changed. it should be perfect - or at least, sufficient. But within it, there was much Draco didn't know and couldn't control. Who had his mother found in Hogsmeade to help them? Why were they doing it? Who were they going to choose from among his classmates to be the courier? It could be anyone at all. And how were they going to be convinced to cooperate? All of the Death Eaters knew the Imperius curse. It was one of the things they'd taught him this summer. Did his mother know it too?

He looked at his parchment. He'd put off this essay for so long to deliberately trigger this detention that it seemed completely unwritable now. Exhausted from worry, his head drooped toward the desktop. It was a move McGonagall was primed to spot and she was raising her eyes, opening her mouth to reprimand him when she seemed to hear something from faraway in the quiet, empty castle that made her pause.

Someone was shrieking.

McGonagall was on her feet and sailing toward the door. "Mr. Malfoy, you may go."

He was alone in her office. It wouldn't do to chase after her, so he crossed the floor to the window. Whatever the ruckus was, it wasn't visible from her view overlooking the quidditch pitch.

Creeping toward the Entrance Hall, Draco dodged to hide himself as a new rush of noise and voices came through the door. McGonagall was speaking loudly and quickly over the high sobbing of a girl, directing her and maybe some other people into her office before slamming the door behind them.

As she did so, everything fell suddenly still. Maybe he just imagined it, but in the quiet, Draco could almost hear someone still screaming from the hospital wing.

He needed to know what happened - if it had anything to do with the delivery of the necklace. He was stepping out of hiding to find Snape and see what he could learn from him when Filch appeared, stomping the slush from his boots, pinching a knotted scarf between two large, knobby fingers and setting off not after McGonagall, but in the direction of Snape's office.

There was no one he could go to, and nothing to do but the thing Draco was very worst at: waiting.

Harry was wrong about Malfoy hexing Katie Bell with the cursed necklace from Borgin and Burkes. Hermione knew he was. Everyone agreed - Ron, McGonagall - they both had excellent reasons to agree with her, grounded in logic and alibis. Harry, on the other hand, was still grieving Sirius Black's death at the hands of the adults of Draco's family. It made sense that Harry had developed this fixation on Draco as another Black-Malfoy villain. It was tragic but based in emotion, not evidence.

Whatever it was, she couldn't listen to another word of it. It wore her down. Instead of staying in the common room with Ron and Harry, she went to her room and fell on her bed next to Crookshanks.

This term, Crookshanks had been no help in putting her mind at ease about Draco's powers to resist corruption by the Death Eaters either. She waited as he stretched, clawing at her quilt before she asked, "He didn't hurt Katie today, did he?"

Crookshanks knew who she meant. In answer he simply blinked his gold eyes and trilled as he bumped his head against her hand. She scratched his ears and looked up at her canopy. She'd already done some excellent thinking through the problem as she and Ron and McGonagall herself argued through each of Harry's accusations.

What wouldn't fall into line were her feelings. The only time she felt completely sure that Draco had the strength to keep up his silent, secret defenses against the Dark Lord was when they were together, when her hands were on his skin and his voice was in her ears.

She needed to see him, and so did Crookshanks. She slipped down the stairs and out the portrait hole, her arms full of lazy, orange fuzz. She set off walking, up to the seventh floor. It was her first time coming to this spot by the troll tapestry since Draco had burst through the wall with the rest of the Inquisitorial squad to attack the DA in fifth year.

She cleared her dry throat and spoke into the empty hall. "I need to meet Draco Malfoy, Draco Malfoy, Draco Malfoy."

The stones ground against each other, realigning, revealing a doorway. She stepped through and found not the Room of Requirement she remembered - a gymnasium-like space for practicing dueling and spells - but a room crammed full of broken and abandoned objects of every kind. It was the Room of Hidden things, dusty and dank, haphazard and haunted. And sitting on a rug at the foot of a mound of broken woodwork and furniture, was Draco, staring at a coin he turned over and over again in his fingers.

Crookshanks bent and twisted in her arms but she held onto him.

Draco's head snapped up and he pocketed the coin when she called his name. "Hermione! How did you find this place?" he began.

"It's the Room of Hidden Things, isn't it?" she said, her voice slow and sad. "And you're hiding here."

He pointed at her middle. "You've brought the cat?"

She nodded, dipping her head low enough to hide her eyes in Crookshanks's coat for a moment before she went on. "Yes. He's proven himself in the past to be able to detect when people are untrustworthy. And all term, I've been ignoring it. But I think it may be why - why he doesn't - any longer…"

Draco stepped toward her but the cat in her arms kept him at a distance. "What happened in Hogsmeade today, Hermione? McGonagall threw me out and there was all that commotion and screaming and I have to know."

She sniffed, took a huge breath, and repeated Leanne's story about Katie Bell in the Three Broomsticks. She told the rest from her own point of view, as someone traumatized by watching a classmate hexed almost to death.

Draco sank back onto the rug, his head between his knees. "What was the necklace wrapped in, that it all came apart with a little bad weather?"

It was not the response Hermione had expected. She knelt beside him, still clinging to Crookshanks as the cat tested her, writhing irregularly in her grasp.

"It was supposed to stay inside the wrapping. No one was supposed to touch it. No one was supposed to get hurt," he said.

Her eyes were wide, shocked with questions, but not daring to interrupt him.

"Katie," he said. "I played quidditch against her for four years. Katie - it could have been anyone. Oh my god, Hermione, it could have been you."

He was sobbing into his hands, confessing and suffering. Her hands prickled with the urge to reach out for him. It was like an electrical current beneath her fingerprints. But if she let go of Crookshanks, he might bolt and become lost in here too. It smelled like other animals had met a similar fate. Finally, Crookshanks resolved the dilemma for her, twisting with a mighty meow, breaking free and bolting into the debris.

Her arms now empty, she lunged toward Draco, taking his head in her hands and raising it to look at her.

"Tell me everything."

He did tell her everything about the necklace plot. She already knew where he got it and from there he told her everything he knew about what Borgin, his mother, the unknown contact in town, and he had done to bring it about. He told her through tears and groans as she held him.

"I even knew the weather wasn't going to be good today. I taunted you about it in the library," he said. "It's all my fault."

It was, and she didn't contradict him. What she did say was, "Speaking from my own experience, things never go as planned. That's one of the thousands of reasons why experimenting with dark magic is so dangerous." It was the kind of thing his parents ought to have taught him, and hadn't.

Draco had unburdened himself thoroughly enough to feel a bump against his elbow. Crookshanks had come back and was rubbing his chin along Draco's upper right arm, on his clothes that had been too long without the scent of his favourite cat. Draco sobbed in relief at the sight of him, but when he reached out a hand to gather the cat up and cuddle it between himself and Hermione, it darted away.

Hermione pressed her palms against Draco's cheeks again. "Wait for me," she said. "Trust in me. Don't go off on your own like this anymore. Remember that you don't belong to the Dark Lord. You belong to me."

He was still shaking and miserable. A part of her was glad of it. Another part was desperate to restore him, to bring him back from being a miserable, beaten Death Eater child soldier, to being her beautiful lovestruck boy once more, the one who taught her to waltz and to kiss.

She pushed his cardigan off his shoulders. He wore a grey T-shirt underneath - the first time she'd seen him in short sleeves for months. His marked arm was between them, still shocking to see. She closed her eyes, gathered her strongest magical intent and bent to kiss it. As she backed away, in the dim grey late afternoon light, fragments of blue flashed beneath his skin.

"Ask me to show you," she said. "Whenever you're overcome and desperate and about to do something dangerous and stupid, find me. Ask me to show you this. It's what you really are."

He watched with her as the blue light faded away, catching her face as she bent to kiss the token again, raising her chin on the ends of two of his fingers to kiss his mouth instead. His lips were still swollen from crying as he pushed them against hers. She felt the difference and answered curiously with her own lips, almost like a first kiss, but nearly two years after their first kiss.

Maybe it was mostly because her emotions were so tangled and painful that afternoon that Hermione pushed herself out into the current of her physical sensations, drifting. Draco's mouth was firmer and hotter than usual. All of him seemed bigger as he leaned toward her. Without much force he was coming closer, his body taking the space hers had filled, moving her backward, descending toward the rug.

His chest was on top of hers, and then the rest of him was on her too. The old discarded rug wasn't plush enough to cushion her from the stone floor beneath. His weight crushed her against the stone and she gasped for breath beneath him. He understood and rolled, using his arms and momentum to keep her pressed to him, bringing her to lay on top of him. All the while, he kissed her as they moved, and she responded with her own lips and tongue, inhaling his scent, her pulse high and fast.

On top of him, her knees fell to either side of his body. She was short enough that when connected to him at the mouth, without stretching her neck, she straddled him across his waist, not his hips. For the first time, she was conscious of how the crux of her body must feel against his stomach in this position. She shifted on her knees, perhaps testing him a little, and as if on cue, his breath shuddered.

Draco's hands kneaded her back through her shirt. The curves of her shoulders were perfect fits for the palms of his hands. They always had been. As he had grown and changed, she had too. Yes, she was a woman now. As a girl or a woman, there was no form in which he felt like he deserved her but here she was, even today, after what he'd done, her body on top of him, her spell underneath his skin, and still not nearly close enough.

His hands moved in unison, curving from her shoulders to her waist. He'd slid them beneath the hem of her shirts before, touched the smooth, warm skin above her waistband. He placed his hands there again, his fingertips finding the groove of her spine, tracing along its arching line, higher. Her breath caught and he trailed his finger tips down again as she exhaled. When he stroked the skin of her back again, it was with open hands, fingers splayed to touch more of her at once, the tentative tickle now more sure, even demanding.

She felt her own heartbeat as if every part of her body was now a pulse point. Inside the back of her shirt, Draco's movements were slow and gentle as always but beginning to range into new territory. His hand slid beneath the strap of her bra for a moment before sliding back out again, and on his downward stroke, his fingers grazed the skin just underneath her waistband.

She tore her mouth away from his. "Draco!"

"Sorry - I'm sorry." His hands were on top of her shirt again. "Sorry. What is it?"

"You just reminded me," she said, pushing herself upright, bracing him with her knees to keep her balance, her hands on his chest, over his still-pounding heart. "I rediscovered something I forgot about in the Mitrian Monks manuscript. I've been meaning to tell you all day."

He lay motionless, still in no condition to sit up and shift her into his lap. He swallowed hard to say, "Great. What is it?"

She cleared the huskiness out of her voice. "The monks say the charm is only effective for pure love."

He dropped his arm over his eyes. "That's nice. And since my charm still shows, I guess we're pure enough, yeah?"

"That's just it," she said, swinging her knees back together and moving to kneel beside him. "We have been pure. But - I mean - we have to stay that way."

He raised himself to sit beside her, pulling up his knees, reaching for his cardigan but then leaving it when he found that Crookshanks had curled up in it. "Yeah, like I said. Looks as if we're doing fairly well. I love you with a beautiful redeeming purity."

"Right, but the Monks," she continued, all business when it came to her research, "the monks would have had primitive, medieval ideas about pure love. It would have had nothing to do with breeding or feelings or intentions and everything to do with literal, physical - um - chastity."

Draco's head fell forward, onto his knees. "Chastity?"

"Yes," she said. "I cross-referenced the use of the word 'pure' within the manuscript to make sure and - yes. The love charm's strength depends on us being either virgins or husband and wife."

"Virgins?"

"Or married."

Draco was wrenching his signet ring off his finger. "Right. Fine. Put this ring on, Granger - I mean, Madam Malfoy. We'll get married. People marry too young on the verge of war all the time. It's a British tradition. Give that finger here."

She was laughing at him as he tried to catch her left hand to put his ring on it. "Draco Malfoy, you are ridiculous. And you're still sixteen. You can't get married without a certificate of your parents' consent and I think we can be certain that is not forthcoming."

Both of her hands were hidden behind her back, which meant they were soon in full contact again as Draco tackled her back onto the rug and grappled for her ring finger. "Come now, Madam Malfoy. I'd wager it's not like you've never conjured fake documents before."

"Even so, is it a pure thing to do?" she was laughing as they tussled. "Why are you like this? It's not as if we've started doing it yet so - "

"Hermione," he said, drawing her name out, not trying to disguise his voice as anything but pleading. "'Yet' is the keyword, isn't it? In a long relationship, a man has certain hopes - "

"You're not a man, not legally."

"Exactly, and if the Dark Lord murders me before my seventeenth birthday - and he probably will - then I'll die a virgin. Me!"

"He is not going to be able to kill you," Hermione said, her hands no longer hiding but flying up to pull his forehead to hers. He slid his enormous black ring onto her tiny finger as she spoke. "Listen to me. The magic in that ancient love charm is going to get us out of this, somehow. Stop rushing ahead and making horrible messes and wait for me, trust me. If you've learned anything at all from the truly horrifying events of today, Draco, learn that."

He sat up, hazarding a glance at the tall, thin vanishing cabinet standing almost at his feet. Crookshanks sprang to life, kicking Draco's cardigan aside with his hind legs. And Hermione kissed Draco's face once more as she jammed his Malfoy family signet ring back onto his finger.