Author's Note: so, this chapter is a bit draggy, I admit. Now, I'm really hoping to get more into the plot soon, as right now I'm trying to ease into these characters (Hermione being the most difficult for me, having her being so eerily similar to me; I'm having a rough time with the way we're so alike. If I'd not been so young when the did the casting for the movies, I would have made a stellar Hermione (if I could act, that is, but I can't, so clearly they made the right choice there)) and their relationships. I have an awesome plot in mind, but I don't know how to get into the action and such. So, for now, I'm afraid we'll have to deal with all the boring stuff in the beginning, here. My apologies.

And, with that, I bestow upon you, the next chapter . . .

Chapter Three: Deny

Draco Malfoy had never been more vile. In Harry's four years of knowing him, he'd never been quite as nasty as he had been since the beginning of the year, forward.

And yet, the meaner he got, the more Harry began to find himself wanting not to fight with him. It was an exhausted pattern: see Malfoy, have a verbal battle, usually wind up with lost points or detentions for both of them, and walk away, fuming. Maybe Harry and Malfoy's reasons for anger after their constant amount of arguments wasn't exactly the same, but they still always managed to rile one another up quite well.

Perhaps, with the return of Voldemort, Malfoy and his family had been thriving. Lucius Malfoy had been there, after all, in the graveyard—had watched Harry be tortured and laughed as it had happened. Harry sometimes wondered if Malfoy knew exactly what his father got up to as a Death Eater and decided that he probably didn't. Why be proud of a murderer? Aspire to be like a murderer? Draco Malfoy could be a cruel, sadistic arse, but he didn't strike Harry as somebody who had the courage to rip away somebody's loved one. He might not be trying to get that image of himself across, and maybe Harry had a bias based on physical appearance (because Harry had tried for years—and failed—to deny that Malfoy was attractive), but it didn't change the fact that that was what Harry thought.

"How could he bring something like that up?" Hermione bristled. "How indecent! I'm sure he wouldn't want to talk about something like that if he were in your position!"

"Well, that's just the point, isn't it?" Harry replied bitterly. "He's always been a hypocrite, Hermione, you know that."

"Yeah, but that doesn't give him the right to be so nasty about it!"

Harry, personally, was just tired. He couldn't care less if somebody brought up those that he'd let die, and Malfoy had never had any trouble making remarks about his dead mother, so he hadn't expected anything about Cedric to be difficult for Malfoy to talk about. Harry would, however, credit him with the fact that it had been around a month since school had begun and he'd managed to hold off on his smart remarks until now. Maybe Malfoy did know what the word empathy meant, if only slightly.

"It doesn't matter," Harry said. "Malfoy will be Malfoy, won't he? Besides, it's not as if I'm not used to it. And he says worse things to you."

"No he doesn't!" Hermione said indignantly. "Calling me a racial slur is a lot different than saying bad things about people who've died!"

Harry sighed. "Look, I don't want to argue with you, Hermione, let's just go eat, all right?"

"Oh, well, fine," she huffed. "But I still think you need to get Malfoy back somehow."

"Hermione, you've already mentioned to me that he's a prefect and that hexing people in the middle of a corridor isn't actually acceptable," Harry said wearily. "Stop contradicting yourself."

She opened her mouth to respond, then decided against that and made her way into the Great Hall. They sat down near Ron, who had come down before them, as Harry and Hermione had decided to be a bit more thorough when putting away their things. Ron, however, had claimed that he'd been too hungry to wait. He was always hungry, of course, but he normally waited for Ron and Hermione. Perhaps there had been something he had meant to do that they weren't intended to know about, Harry wondered suspiciously.

"You two sure took your time," Ron grumbled.

"We ran into Malfoy," Hermione explained.

Ron raised an eyebrow, his mouth being too full of food to get out a proper response. And, after four years of eating around Hermione, he knew better than to open his mouth with food in it. She had never much cared for people who spoke with full mouths.

"The same kind of things as always," Harry said dismissively.

"Well," Ron said, swallowing, "he's a git. Always has been."

Harry frowned, his immediate thought to defend Malfoy. But he pushed this down as quickly as he could. Malfoy didn't deserve Harry's defense, did he? No, he couldn't. Ron was right, he was a git . . . an attractive git, but a git, nonetheles . . .

"Harry, what's wrong?" Hermione prompted, gazing at him curiously.

Harry blinked. "Nothing," he told her hastily. "Nothing at all."

She eyed him in a disbelieving way, but didn't press him. She didn't press him anymore, ever. It was nice, to be able to relish in his own thoughts. Although, "relish" wasn't exactly the right word; more like wallow in them. Harry had been becoming increasingly more negative lately. But who could blame him? It wasn't his fault he was the most miserable person on the planet.

Another thing he'd begun doing: exaggerating things quite excessively. Or downsizing the meaning of things. It really depended on the situation.

Harry shook his head. "Honestly, Hermione, don't stare at me like that!"

"I-I'm sorry," she squeaked, obviously not expecting his anger. Harry was a bit unpredictable, emotionally. But he was fifteen years old, wasn't he? And he also didn't sleep enough. So, combined with all the rubbish the media thought about him, his mood swings were completely justified, if he thought about it. At least, he told himself they were justified. It helped to think that he couldn't control his anger when the guilt at having yelled at his friends came washing over him.

Harry didn't respond, and, as he turned to face towards the food on the table, Ron and Hermione shared a look. While Harry had clearly improved slightly since they'd established, properly, the DA, he was still not exactly normal. And, of course, Malfoy had set him on edge somehow . . . Hermione had been certain that he'd wanted to say something about Malfoy, if the look he'd worn at Ron's comment was anything to go on. It was odd, the way Harry sometimes reacted when Malfoy was brought up. It was almost like there were other feelings than hatred behind their relationship.

Hermione decided she'd rather not dwell on these thoughts. Malfoy and Harry had always had a weird rivalry, hadn't they? They were merciless when it came to each other, but there was something about the way they treated each other below that that was odd. Something that, Hermione thought, definitely went beyond hatred.

She cursed herself. She was dwelling on the thoughts she'd not wanted to dwell on.

"I'm not that hungry," Harry said decidedly, standing up. "And I've got loads of homework I still haven't done. I'll meet you upstairs."

Hermione made a noise of frustration as he left. "He could've waited for us."

"Give it a rest, Mione," Ron said exhaustedly. "He's not gonna come around anytime soon."

Hermione frowned. "We should write to his dad or something, then!"

Ron stared at her incredulously, then burst out laughing. "That's not going to help anything. Have you stopped to think about the fact that London is nowhere close to here and his dad can't do anything from so far away?"

Hermione bristled. "It's called sending a letter!"

"It's not as if you can put anything in a letter, Hermione. Umbridge has a close eye on all the mail that goes in and out, doesn't she?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"But there's nothing you can do." Ron shrugged. "Just leave it be."

Hermione turned to look at the Slytherin table, across the hall, not knowing what to say. All that she could recall was the way Harry had looked when Ron had said a bad word against Malfoy . . .

"Did you notice that, too?" Hermione asked suddenly, facing Ron once more.

He looked blankly at her. "What?"

"When we were talking about Malfoy, the way Harry looked . . ."

"What do you mean?"

Hermione sighed. "You don't pay enough attention to anything!"

"I do so!"

Hermione rolled her eyes, but said nothing. She would let Ron have his fantasies. Maybe one day he would be able to understand properly. For now, pretending seemed to be working well enough for him.

It was one of those nights, where the temptation of crawling into bed had outweighed anything else. And so Harry had obliged and gotten into his four-poster.

He would probably regret it in the morning, when he wasn't actually any better rested than usual, and he felt the leftover cold from nightmares still causing him to shiver and he felt like such a coward for being afraid of his own damn dreams, but for now, he couldn't focus on anything but sleep.

Sleep came quite quickly, too.

Unfortunately, so did the nightmares.

It started out like nothing, just empty space, but there was a sound, a slight sound, reverberating throughout the space in which Harry stood. That sound, the one Harry had never been able to get out of his ears since the moment he'd first remembered it. Lily's scream began quietly, and slowly became louder, and then she was not screaming, but talking, and she was there, as she had been in the graveyard that night. Except, as she regarded Harry, the only kind of illumination in the dark place they stood, she did not speak words of praise, of joy at seeing how brave her son was. No, she did not praise him; she instead looked disappointed. Her words were hardly distinguishable, but there were the slightest traces of a frown in them. She did not tell him that he was the son she had always wanted to raise, that she was so, so proud of him. She did not speak as she had in the graveyard.

And then the scene shifted, and suddenly he was watching as Cedric's body gave a slight spasm before dropping to the ground, the noise masked by Voldemort's voice, that cold, cold voice, demanding Pettigrew to bring him back to the form he once was.

Harry could feel it as clearly as if it were happened all over again, the pain of the Cruciatus Curse, and there was the wound on his arm from the dagger Pettigrew had dug into his skin, and his leg still ached from the maze, of course, but nothing could match the way it felt to be struck by the curse that caused its victims to feel the agonies of torture. It was terrible, to feel so helpless . . . Harry could only imagine what would have happened if Voldemort had not lifted the curse . . .

But he had, oh, thank the stars he had, and then everything else was blurry, but all Harry could think was that Cedric was an unmoving lump not too far away, and that Harry had done nothing and that it was his fault that Cedric had met the same fate that his mother had, and that it had, in all technicalities, been the same people. Voldemort and Pettigrew together. Harry regretted, so much, the way that he had allowed Pettigrew to get away. He'd known that that night was the full moon, and why would he rather see Pettigrew kissed than dead if he'd already spent the twelve years before in Azkaban? Why would he have said that he wasn't fond of the idea of him and Remus becoming murderers if it could've saved them both so much trouble? If it could've saved the Diggorys so much trouble, so much agony?

Harry gasped, sitting up straight in his bed. He was cold with sweat, and he felt dirty, tainted, like he'd never seen those scenes before yet they'd replayed inside his head for ages.

This one had not been that bad, considering the things his mind sometimes liked to show him, but Harry could still feel the pain that had come to him that night. Being tortured . . . his muscles still ached, and his head was pounding, and it felt as if he'd broken all of his bones, or maybe he had deep gashes across his entire body.

The scar on his arm, where Pettigrew had cut him, stung, and so did the scar on his forehead, as it had that night. Why did everything always seem to come back to the graveyard? Even this year he noticed it, in the way Hermione sometimes made offhanded comments on Cho looking at Harry, and how Harry thought, miserably, that she must hate him. He, of course, never caught the looks she gave him, but if Hermione was right in saying that she did focus at least some of attention to him, then he figured they were probably scathing looks. She'd likely not enjoyed the idea of being taught by Harry but was only doing it because he was more able to educate them than Umbridge was.

Harry took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. What time was it? It could hardly be that early, all the boys around him were fast asleep . . .

Placing his feet lightly on the floor, as to not disrupt anybody else, Harry tiptoed out of the dormitory. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do, but he knew he wasn't going to be going back to sleep anytime soon. Maybe he would go down to the kitchens or something . . . but it would be a wonder if he had any appetite to be found after witnessing, again those terrible scenes.

The couch in the common room seemed the best option. Nobody was still up, so it wasn't as if anybody would talk to him. It was, after all, one o'clock in the morning (at least, he thought that was what his watch had said).

But the silence was deafening, worse, perhaps, than the nightmares themselves. Harry was forced to sit, pondering these terrible things, and he could not stop the way his mind was making him think.

Harry really missed James, Sirius, and Remus. They always knew exactly how to deflect the things that were on Harry's mind. It was hard, of course, to get onto a topic that had little to do with Harry's own messed up life, but they managed. Harry wished he was not at Hogwarts. This was not something he wished for really ever, but now he hoped with everything in him that the next while would pass quickly, and it would be Christmas soon. He ached to go back to his dad. Sometimes it was nice to have James there to reassure him that there was nothing Harry couldn't tell his dad. James was a great listener.

He'd even listened the year before, after Harry had come out of that maze, in Dumbledore's office as he recounted the events that had taken place in the graveyard. He had not interrupted Harry, as Sirius had been close to doing a few times, and instead just kept an arm wrapped around his son as a silent comforter. And yet James did not hesitate to talk if he believed something to be wrong.

Sirius and Remus sometimes mused that James had changed a lot since their years in school. They said he'd been carefree then, and hadn't been very sensitive at all. Sirius had told Harry once, sadly, that he thought that Lily had changed James (in a good way, of course)—but that her death had changed him, too.

But everybody changed eventually, didn't they? Harry himself had changed a lot in the past year—even more so in the past five years. He'd come to Hogwarts a bit timid, sure, but he'd been happy. Now, he was not happy. Happiness seemed like a foreign thing at this point, really.

Maybe it always had been. Even at thirteen, Harry had drawn misery to him in the form of Dementors. He'd feared that, that terrible sadness that overwhelmed him when he saw a Dementor. Whether or not his Boggart would remain as that, he did not know; he doubted it had changed, though.

It was funny, Harry thought, that he was not afraid of death. It was a complete mystery. Perhaps it led to nothing, pure darkness, or maybe it led to a grand place where those who were celebrated dwelled. He didn't know. But it didn't matter, for death was merely something he looked to with curiosity. In all seriousness, Harry was more interested in the possibility of communicating with the dead. It seemed impossible, but Harry hoped that he may find a way, if only to cast aside the remaining doubts he had involving his mum and Cedric.

Why were the dead so far? Why did Death effect more people and not touch some at all? Why did people have to die in the first place?

He knew the answer to the last one, at least: because all good things must come to an end. Immortality would not be favourable, to have to sit back and watch as all those you've loved just died. Which, really, only meant that death was inevitable and that there was no escape from its greedy grasps.

Death, amongst many other things, was something that could never be avoided. There were other things like love and like sadness and like fear that could not be averted. But those things were things Harry could deal with, or could at least cover up with the pretense that he did not feel them. Death was not something that could be ignored.

And, as Harry would do well to learn, nor were love, sadness, and fear. Because emotions may seem like nothing, but, truly, they are everything—and there is no escape from the things that surround you.

"Harry, don't be ridiculous." Hermione rolled her eyes. "How can you have missed it? She was all over you!"

"I doubt that," Harry said, his tone a bit cool. This conversation was beginning to tire. Harry was getting sick of Hermione's constant reminder that Cho more than likely despised him.

"She looks at you all the time, Harry!"

"What reason would she have for that, Hermione?" he demanded. "I don't reckon—"

"You're so thick!" Hermione said impatiently, cutting him off. "Harry, she fancies you!"

Harry paused, his mouth still open, then, realizing what Hermione had said snorted. Ron, too, who had been watching the conversation in a rather un-Ron-like silence, gave a small chuckle.

This, Harry thought, was new. Hermione had been hinting at something along the lines of this for ages, but she'd never flat-out said it. Now that she had, Harry found he was rather amused with her thought. Cho, fancying Harry? That was a laugh. Besides, if she'd noticed Cho starring at Harry, then how had she missed Harry starring at Draco Malfoy's perfect figure? Maybe they were always too busy arguing with each other for Hermione to notice the way Harry looked after Malfoy when he strutted through corridors or off the Quidditch pitch or . . .

No, he told himself forcefully. Malfoy might have a bloody nice arse, but he's always a git and you don't like anything other than his arse and there are other men with nice arses out there.

"Hermione," he said after a moment, "you don't think I'd realize something like that, do you?"

"No, I don't!" she said indignantly. At Harry's look of disbelief, she said, "No, really, Harry, girls are confusing! I wouldn't expect you to understand. But she can't take her eyes off you, ever, and she so clearly fancies you!"

Harry blinked. Yes, girls were confusing. He'd been friends with Hermione for years, and while she might have been a bit more bookish than more girls, it didn't change the fact that she was a girl, and she was confusing. But he'd always told himself he wouldn't need to figure out girls, because he didn't want to get involved with a girl beyond friendship, and that was a bit of a different kind of understanding, wasn't it? As far as Harry knew, girls were pretty scary when it came down to romance . . .

"She is pretty, mate," Ron piped up.

"She'd not my type," Harry replied flatly.

"Come on, Harry, don't try and pretend you weren't looking at her during the Yule Ball last year! I noticed it the whole time, when she and Cedric were dancing, you couldn't take your eyes off of them!"

But that hadn't been for her; he'd been watching Cedric. One thing Harry had come out of that night knowing was that Cedric was a bloody good dancer and that he was certainly humble and gentlemanly and knew how to treat a lady. He and Cho had been such a good-looking pair that Harry had had a difficult time actually being jealous. They'd been beautiful together, and Cedric had made up in dancing skill where Cho had clearly lacked.

"Maybe," he said quietly, "I just thought they were good dancers."

Ron snorted from beside Harry, but one look at the way Harry was looking shut him up. Harry was actually quite serious, and even Ron (who lacked certain social skills, such as empathy) was able to pick up on it.

"She wasn't that good of a dancer, though," Hermione mused. "He covered that up, but . . ."

"Your point?"

"Well, Cedric was a good dancer. Harry, stop pretending that you're serious about this, you were definitely looking at—"

"I can assure you," Harry shot back icily, surprisingly calm despite the anger that seemed to have settled deep within his stomach, "that I wasn't looking at her. I really don't give a damn if she fancies me or not, and you're right, Cedric was the better dancer out of the two of them."

Hermione blinked, and opened her mouth, the, appearing quite flustered, closed it again.

Ron was looking equally as shocked, although this seemed to be more the fact that Harry had managed to render Hermione speechless than anything else.

"You . . . you . . ." Hermione looked utterly lost.

She stared at him for another moment, before she began to mutter, "I'm so stupid! I should've realized . . ." She turned up to Harry and burst out with, "Oh, Harry, I'm so sorry! I never realized! I'm so sorry!"

Harry blinked. "Hermione, I don't know what you mean."

"I had it backwards the whole time, didn't I?" She looked down sadly. "It wasn't Cho you were looking at."

Harry knew then that she'd had her suspicions for a while, especially after dinner the other night, when she'd been looking at Harry oddly, and she was only now saying anything because he had so obviously proven her suspicions and maybe he should've been less obvious, but it almost felt nice to get it off his chest . . . Sirius teased him all the time about the blokes at school, sure, but it just wasn't the same. He did not feel overly comfortable with the fact that Draco Malfoy's body was hauntingly beautiful—which, Harry had noticed, always looked so lean and muscular when he leaned over something (although, Harry only really saw him lean over anything in Potions, when he was tending to something within his cauldron). However, if he did not feel comfortable sharing this information with Sirius or Remus or James, then he doubly didn't want to indulge Ron or Hermione with it. For one, Ron had said so himself that Malfoy was a git . . . and he'd called Hermione such profane things . . .

He decided to act dumb. What better way to quell Hermione's curiousity than to refuse to accept the things she was saying.

"Hermione, I don't understand what you mean."

She turned to Ron, looking helpless, but the ginger boy appeared to be quite lost. He hardly seemed able to follow the conversation—it was like Hermione and Harry shared some secret they hadn't mentioned to him. Which, Ron thought with a surge of some emotion he couldn't exactly place, might very well be true. It wasn't as if many people bothered to let him in on secrets, did they?

"Harry, don't be stupid!" she said shrilly. "You do know what I mean, you know perfectly well—"

"And even if I do?" he interrupted, regarding her rather coldly. "I really don't think it's your business, Hermione."

And he stood up, shaking his head. "Look, it's late. We should really go to bed if we want to get up in the morning, don't you think?"

Ron jumped up at the offer, nodding in hurried agreement, leaving a dazed Hermione behind.

She watched Harry's retreating form, and realized that she'd known for a long time, and so had he, and they had never talked about it because neither of them had wanted to face it—and apparently Harry still didn't want to.

But . . . no, that couldn't be . . . Harry had defended Malfoy earlier, but . . . No, not Malfoy. Harry hated Malfoy; Malfoy hated Harry. It didn't add up. It just didn't work.

And yet it fit so perfectly, like the final pieces of a puzzle. A puzzle that had taken years for even Hermione to figure out. It fit so perfectly, and that was so wrong, because Harry could not possibly like a single thing about Draco Malfoy. He was arrogant, on the track to being Dark, and downright mean. Malfoy said bad things about Harry's own dead mother, about Cedric, who, now that Hermione thought, had been someone Harry had rather looked at a lot. Malfoy was an arse, had always been . . .

Hermione sighed. She did not want to think about this. She did not want to fight with Harry. Yet she needed to know. It would drive her insane if she didn't find out . . . so she would start in the simplest of places: James Potter. If anyone knew about Harry's preferences, it would be James, wouldn't it? Hermione would find out all about Harry's internal sufferings if it was the last thing she did. She was his friend, of course.

And friends helped friends, didn't they?

Yes, she told herself, they do. I will.

She would. No matter what it took.

Author's Note Two: oh, Hermione's so badass. I love her. Anyway, apologies again for the boring chapter and the boring ones before this one. Please, please review. I love feedback. Any kind of feedback. Tell me I'm a bad writer, if you want! I don't care, but I'd love to see some words from my readers (I do believe it's quite possible to leave guest reviews on my stories, if you don't want me to know who you are). Also, my thanks to my one continuous reviewer! I don't want to accidentally type your username wrong, so I won't even try (my computer's really slow and it would take hours to get anywhere, considering I'm not near my tablet, which runs much faster), but you know who you are. So, thanks! I really, really appreciate it (and, just between us, you're totally my favourite person ever).