Eleven
Day: 1216; Hour: 4
"Thanks for the food."
He looks looked up, startled by her voice, from whatever it was he's writing. "What food?"
"That you left on the porch."
He stares blankly back at her. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're on about, Granger. I think you may have really done some damage when you hit that wall the other day."
She smiled at him, which seems to disturb him, but she let him play dumb. No one else had known she would have need of any, and if it was one of the spontaneous food drop-offs the Ministry made, they would have brought it inside. She knew it could have been no one else, but Malfoy walks too close to the side of the good to not want to seem as if he strays a bit from it as well. It isn't in his character to be the nice guy, or want to be the nice guy, so she let him think he's as horrible as he wants to believe - at least about this. Though she's still smiling at him, which is likely grinding that whole plan to a halt.
"Don't give me that smile."
"What?"
"That..." He waves his pen at her. "That slightly deranged grin you give people to let them know you're pleased, when you really look as if you're about to murder them."
"I do not!"
"You do. I shuddered every time I saw you aiming it at Potter or the rest of your friends across the Great Hall."
"Who knew a smile could scare the big, bad Draco Malfoy."
He glowers. "I didn't say it scares me, I said it looks like you're mad."
"Which scares you."
"Trust me, Granger, it'll take a whole lot more from you then that."
Someone snorts behind her, and she finds it's Neville when he throws himself down onto the couch. "Wait until you see her excited dance."
"I do not have an excited dance." She glares.
"She does. She waves her arms about, hops around on her feet, and-"
Hermione is blushing madly. "Shut up, Neville. I do no such thing."
Malfoy looks incredibly amused. "Go on then, Granger. Show us your little dance."
"Little dance?" Lavender asks from the doorway. "Oh, Hermione, remember Fifth year, when we tried to get you to learn that striptease, like in that book Parvati bought?"
"Oh, God," Hermione whispers, looking toward the two men thoroughly interested in the new development. "Which I didn't."
"No. But you-"
"Alright, I'm hungry. Is anyone hungry? I've got to eat something. I'm feeling quite hungry." Hermione mutters rapidly, making a break for the kitchen.
"No, no, no. Let's hear about this-" Malfoy moves to grab her and she takes off at full speed from the living room, laughter echoing behind her.
Malfoy follows her down the hall, Lavender's explanation to Neville fading under the sound of their footfalls, and he grabs her before she can reach one of the open bedroom doors. She squeaks as he grips her waist, pulling her out of the doorway and turning her around. She expects more teasing, but all she gets is a quirk of a smile as he pins her to the doorframe.
"What," she breathes as he leans forward, "are you doing?"
"Stripping in the girls dorm with your roommates, Granger? Color me surprised."
"Color you blue if you don't let go of me this second. And I did not strip. I gave opinions when they did. And no one got naked, I'll have you know, so...so...no. No, no. We can't." She whispers as his lips brush hers, but he ignores her, claiming her mouth fully.
She gives in for a second, four, ten, and then pushes him away. "You're amusing when you're embarrassed, do you know that?"
"They're coming, and we-"
"They're not." He kisses her again, and she sighs heavily, her heart thundering. She can't enjoy it like this though, and so she pushes him away again, shaking her head. "Do you sleep alone?"
"What?" she blurts.
"In your room. Are you alone?"
"Yes."
"I'll meet you there."
"What? Now?" She is flustered, confused, and he must find this amusing as well.
"Later, twit. When they've gone to bed."
"Oh, no. No, I can't-"
"You can." He grabbed her chin, kisses her again, and then turns back for the living room.
Day: 1216; Hour: 22
She waited anxiously, pacing, trying to read, writing a line of a letter, taking a shower, trying to read again. When there is a light tapping at her door, she was just as startled by it as if she hasn't been expecting anyone at all. And even though she had spent the past three hours telling herself to keep the light off and pretend to sleep, she has left it on and moves to the door to open it.
He strides in, far too slowly for people doing things secretly she thinks, and she closes the door quickly and quietly behind him. She locks it and turns, finding him examining his surroundings.
"I've been in here before." She raises her wand, pausing, before casting a silencing charm at his words. Sometimes she has to think and remember that magic is allowed at Headquarters because of its location, because she gets too used to being in Muggle safe houses.
She takes a breath and nods. "Yes. When you were injured."
"The infirmary was full." He looks at her and she nods again, watching as he peels his shirt off. "Going to judge this too?"
"Ha. I was young. It was the only way to make them stop hounding me about doing it myself."
He shrugs, pulling on the string of her pajama pants to urge her toward him. "It could have proved useful."
"I don't see how."
"Like now, for example." He pulls up the hem of her shirt, waiting for her to raise her arms before taking it off all the way.
"I'm perfectly capable of stripping myself." She huffs.
"You'll have to show me sometime," he whispers, a hot hand at her back. It seemed to be the end of their close-to-polite conversation, their mouths too busy with the others to be of much use with words.
He takes her on the bed, fast this time and much harder than he had been last week. The bed creaks in protest under their weight and the furious snapping of their hips. He roughly thumbs her clit, his tongue swirling against the sweat on her neck. This is much different, and though she does not like it at first, it grows on her the more her need for release escalates.
He stops the quickness of his speed suddenly, drawing in and out of her at a pace so slow it is near torturous. His fingers are still working madly at her, his other hand braced against the bed as he pushes himself up and looks down at her. She does not like the distance, the absence of his upper body's skin against hers, and she huffs in frustration as she tries to pull him back down.
"I...that... Why are you going so slow?"
He smirks, a breath of laughter, and bent his head to lick around the pebbled surface of her nipple. "Wrap your legs around me, Granger."
She blinks and does so, skin sliding slick against the sweat on his back and waist. He's deeper, it seems, when he pushes into her again, and she arches up to meet him. She was not sure how to take the difference of this encounter compared to the first, but it was not bad, just not what she had expected. The tightness in her womb had been winding quickly, and now it felt more constricted, slower, and she was beginning to enjoy this nearly just as much.
He raised his head, hot kisses on her neck and her mouth, and she tightens her legs with a moan when he circles and flicks her clit. "Faster, Draco."
"I want to feel you come. I want to feel you clamp down around me," he whispers, deep and raspy, tracing the seam of her lips with his tongue until she opens her mouth.
"I just..." She moans again, closer and closer now, and his pace begins to build again. She kisses him back like an afterthought; too connected to her impending climax, and the harder she digs her heels, the faster he seems to go.
She pulled her mouth from his, too close now to be able to kiss him at all. She grips his head as he moves it to breathe roughly against her cheek, her other hand clamping the bottom of the arm resting near her ear. It breaks suddenly, exploding within her, and she's probably suffocating him against her face but she can't move to stop it. She'll never get over just how good this feels. His own moan joins hers like an undercurrent as his body locks, falling on top of her just seconds after she collapses back onto the bed from the arch her body had risen into. The entire house could burst in, and she still wouldn't move from her position under him.
She breathes out shakily, slowly releasing her death grip on him, the movements of their stomachs in sync as they both pant for air. He's the first to pull himself together, pushing up shakily, but her body is still trembling and she still doesn't want to move. She opens her eyes however, his looking down at the hand on her hip as he pulls out of her. She makes a face at the feel of it, the liquid that comes with it, but his facial expression remains the same.
Malfoy looks younger post-orgasm. With his cheeks colored, and his face covered with a sheen of a sweat, and his damp hair sticking up every which way. His eyes are clear, clear grey, and she wonders if the plain brown of her own looks any different as well.
"I have a mission."
"Okay," she cracks, and he looks back up at her for a few silent moments before moving to place a chaste kiss on her shoulder.
It is her turn to watch him move from the bed and get dressed, and she wonders if he had ever felt as uncomfortable watching her naked self walk around the room as well. She doesn't think so. He looks different when he is not aroused, and she makes sure he isn't looking at her before further inspecting his assets. It's an odd feeling that takes root in her gut, and she isn't sure what she feels or how she should feel, but it's a little different from this side of the bed. To be the one left, rather than the one leaving. She dislikes it just as much.
She pulls the blanket over her, just for now, because she will shower once he leaves. He's pulling up his pants, leaving them unbuttoned, a trail of golden hair disappearing into the blue band of his boxers. He finds his shirt in the corner, tugging it on.
"You'll do well." She thinks he may need to hear this with the determined look that has come over his face now.
"Perhaps."
"You will."
He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. "Don't fucking talk to me about it. I don't want to talk about that shit."
She blinked in surprise, shakes her head and shrugged. "Okay, yeah...sorry."
Day: 1218; Hour: 8
"You know what's strange?" Cho asks, Hermione sitting beside her as she tries to cast simple spells with the three remaining digits of her left hand. The thumb of her right is useless, unaccompanied by fingers, and buried under gauze seeped in potions.
"What?" Hermione prepares herself for care, advice, and sympathy, because she thinks it's going to be something deeper than temperature.
"How if it's sixty degrees outside at night in the summer, we think it's kind of nice out. But on that same summer night, if you walk into a restaurant that sixty degrees, we think it's freezing."
Hermione shrugs. "Humidity outside - that plays a factor. And it's expectations. We know we're exposed to the elements outside. Inside, we expect to be more cocooned."
"Sort of like people." At Hermione's confused look, Cho continues. "People are harder outside, their facade, because they know they are exposed to the world there. But they don't let people in easily, because they want to be cocooned there. They want to feel safe, at ease - not like they have to prepare for the next storm or drop in temperature. You know?"
"Yeah." She shrugs again. "It's a nice metaphor."
"So what do you do when you feel exposed both ways? When you're afraid of yourself, and your own life?"
"You wait to wake up," Hermione mutters, remembering Malfoy's words about the fallout, about handling everything one at a time.
"What?"
"You ride it out, Cho. We can survive ourselves, as long as we hold onto the desire to want to." She picks up Cho's wand, fallen and forgotten on the bed and presses it into her hand again. "We owe ourselves that much."
Day: 1218; Hour: 20
It was half past one when he knocked on her door, looking at her silently once she opened it, before finally explaining that he had seen her light on. The rest played out in rapid succession, until she found herself once again shattered to bits and smushed under him. She stands near the door and watches him dress, having extricated himself from the bed once she informed him she was going to take a shower and go to bed. She feels, strangely enough, that she is kicking him out, but she knows this was what he prefers and he doesn't look bothered by it.
"I can't find my sock, so just..."
"Oh, well that should appease my foot fetish perfectly."
He laughs, fully and outright, and she can't even help but grin back at him from the sound of it. He looks like a very different man when he's thrown into laughter, and she likes the lines around his mouth and the way his eyes squint.
"Taking to sniffing socks, are you?"
"Oh, yes. Nothing excites me more."
He grins and shakes his head, pulling his shirt back on. "Keep it then. I'm sure it'll be of more use for you than me."
"Perhaps you'll be able to find the matching one now." Hermione nods to his blue sock, knowing the other was white.
"I've no time to match socks."
Hermione shrugs a bare shoulder out of the cover of the sheet wrapped around her, deciding not to lecture about matching socks; she finds the quirk cute, though she will never tell him as much. He looks at her oddly then, the smile gone from his face, and she blushes as his eyes slowly travel the length of her body down, and up again.
"You're showering?"
She glowers at him. "Yes, yes, Malfoy, I know I look a fright. You don't exactly look polished either. And need I remind you who, exactly, managed to get me..."
She trails off as he looks like he might be trying to keep himself from laughing. "I look less than polished, do I? Perhaps I should take a shower as well then."
She gives him her best suspicious look before sniffing and making for the door. "Well I've already called the one up here, Malfoy, so you can go downstairs or wait."
He looks slightly confused when she glances at him as she turns from the doorway and toward the bathroom, but she ignores him, scurrying quickly in case anyone decides to step out of their own bedrooms. It isn't until later, when she is in her stripped bed, that she thinks he might have meant to join her. Which isn't exactly something that lets her fall asleep while thinking about.
Day: 1220; Hour: 17
Malfoy, Neville, and an old man she doesn't know look up at her when she enters the safe house. She had thought it was empty given the lack of lights, and the fact that it is only a little past eight; though she can't say she isn't happy with the development. She hates to be alone, and she hasn't seen Malfoy in two days. Her current stress could be relieved through arguing or sex, she didn't much care, just as long as she felt better after it.
Neville stands the second he recognizes her, his face pallid, and she knows she must look worse than what she is. "Are you alright?"
Hermione throws a hand up, waving it in a way she hopes says she's okay, because she didn't much feel like she was. She had killed a person today, and it was Marcus Flint. It was an entirely different feeling, so much worse than it already was, when it is someone that you know.
"Are you hurt? Do you need help?" The old man sounds calm but clipped.
Her boots tread dark red mud across the old, worn wood of the floor, and her fingers feel numb as they struggle with the clasp of her cloak. "I'm fine."
"You're bleeding, Granger."
She looks to Malfoy and exhales heavily, phlegm rattling in her chest as she throws her cloak to the floor. "I don't care if I'm fucking bleeding!"
His eyebrows raise, but this is his only reaction, turning his head to follow her progress through the room. Neville trails after her, gingerly picking up her cloak.
"You're not hurt badly, are you?"
"No."
"Do you want some tea?"
"No."
"Anything?"
"Shower," she whispers, heading down the hall, and leaves Neville nervously shifting at the end of it.
She does not know how long she stands in the shower, boiling hot to ease the ache of her joints and tired muscles. She washes her hair, she stands, she washes her body, she stands. The heat of water is always enough to make her tired, and she waits for that now.
The door to the bathroom creaks open, the hinges rusted, and Hermione stares wide-eyed at the shower curtain. "I'm in here."
Her wand is on the side of the sink, and her clothes are in a pile by the toilet. If all else fails, she thinks she will beat them with shower curtain pole. "I think it's time to get out, Granger."
Her fear turns to annoyance. "Get out of the bathroom."
"You know, my mother used to tell me that when your fingers start to prune, you have to get out or you'll shrink and float down the drain." She looks in the general direction of his voice, too surprised by the mention of his mother to reply at first.
"I'm fine, you know. I only have a cut. I just...need to get tired."
"I know you're fine, but Longbottom seems to think you're drowning in your blood in there."
"Why didn't he come in then?"
"I told him I would. Gryffindors seems to have issues when it comes to coming too close to naked women."
"Jesus, Malfoy, do you know how suspicious that looks?"
"Granger?"
"What?"
"He doesn't really give a shit."
She pauses. "You told him?"
"Of course not. But I'm not exactly his biggest enemy anymore, and frankly, he's too busy shagging men to worry about who you happen to be shagging."
"Neville is not gay!"
"Alright."
She gives an unsure look to the blue blob on the shower curtain. "He's gay?"
"Does it matter?"
"Well...no, but-"
"There you go then. I'm opening the curtain."
"What? No!" she shrieks, and she thinks he's laughing on the other side.
The hand that had invaded the small space of the shower reaches for the knobs instead of the curtain, and when he finds the small lever on the tub tap, he pulls it up. Her wonderful source of heat disappears from the showerhead to the tap, and his hand makes quick work of shutting that off too.
"Come on then. I've already got a towel."
"Is it the blue one?"
"...No."
"I like the blue one."
"Granger, just get the fuck out of the shower."
She huffs and peels back the curtain enough to stick her head out and look at him, his hands holding out an unfolded pink towel. He shakes it and raises his eyebrows at her.
"Are you leaving now?"
"Come on."
"When you leave."
"Granger..." His tone was a warning, and she didn't think he was going to leave no matter how many times she told him to.
"Shut your eyes at least."
He looks at her as if he can't believe she's serious, but does as she says when she remains standing where she is and staring at him. She thinks she can hear a muttered ridiculous, but ignored him in favor of snatching the towel and wrapping it around her. Once it's safely secured, she leaves her haven and gives him a glare, swiping her wand off the sink.
She looks down at the soft wave of magic it sends spiraling up her arm, and she stares at it for a very long time. "I killed Marcus Flint today. Do you remember him?"
She looks up then, because she knows he will. Because Flint had been in his House, had been his Quidditch captain, and there was no way he cannot remember. Malfoy stares back at her until she was afraid he will be angry with her over the news, but he raises his hand instead, another towel held in it.
"There's no use for a towel if you're just going to let that animal on top of your head keep showering you."
She glares at him, but there's no heat behind it, snatching the towel from his hand and bringing it to her dripping head. When she lowers it, her hair modestly damp, her arms get stuck on his chest from his new closeness. His fingers slide across her jaw, his thumb reaching up to skim the cut along her cheekbone.
"We do what we have to do. You rally for fucking house-elves, Granger. You're not a murderer."
And she hopes that now that he's kissing her, he cannot tell that she's crying. If he can, he ignores it, pulling her against him, her heat to his coldness. It isn't until she can't think properly that he leads her from the bathroom with a whisper that no one will see them, and takes her to the room he is staying in.
Malfoy likes rougher sex, she thought. He likes a lot of foreplay, but he likes his sex fast and hard. The second time they had sex, she could have put off the roughness to mood or the moment, but the time after that, and thereafter, meant it was likely a habit or a preference.
He had known she was a virgin, even though she hadn't told him. He was likely clued in with her initial refusal of taking it too far, as well as her awkwardness and how unsure on everything she was. That's why he had been gentler, more careful the very first time. And this knowledge made her look at him with a softer point of a view. Malfoy is not a cruel person, or out to purposely hurt much of anyone anymore. He could have taken her virginity any way he wanted to, and he chose the best way for her rather than the way he preferred it. And she appreciated that, and him for it, in a way she didn't understand fully.
"Slower," she whispers this time, unsure of where she finds the gall to do so, but he listens, ever attentive, and it's exactly what she needs.