Author's Note: I think this is the first time I've been true to my word in posting up a chapter when I said I would (probably not the best thing to mention to you guys if I want you to keep coming back). This story will be switching up POV quite often, so we'll have dashes of Harry, Ron, Hermione, Draco, Pansy, Blaise, Ginny, and many more. Thanks for reading!

Chapter Two

Harry comes in again , ruffles his hair with his hands while he tries to think of something to say. He's never spoken to Draco Malfoy in this sort of situation before, as a boss to his employee and he's not sure what to say to him. He knows that Ron's wandering around outside, wondering why Malfoy would have requested Hermione's office, why he would have asked or seemed to care why she wasn't here. They're both slightly uneasy about it, how Draco Malfoy had plopped himself in their office a few weeks ago and begged for a job. They couldn't really give it to him; he'd had no field training and as Ron had pointed out at the pub later that night, this sort of job would probably kill him, sniveling coward that he was. But Harry had seen something in Malfoy's face when he came to see them and he still wasn't quite sure what it meant. Why hadn't Malfoy insulted them? Where was the teenager who sneered and wrote derisive lyrics in his spare time? He wasn't there, both he and Ron saw that, and they couldn't understand just where that person had gone to. Was that why Harry had finally relented and given him the job? Was that why he agreed to let him train on the side, let him start out as a Profiler and work his way up?

Now he looks at Malfoy at his desk, already hunched over the papers that one of the secretary's had dropped off for him and Harry wonders again: What the hell was he doing here?

Everything started in the hallway during his Sixth Year, when the sky outside was dark and heavy with incoming rain, and the students were crossing across the stones with anxious, feverish steps. It began when he saw a shimmer of light falling like blissful ecstasy to the floor, ignorant of its obvious death on the ground. It started when he followed that light up past the ankle it had fallen next to, up the slender legs and around the waist, past the collarbone, barely visible from beneath the dark hair. He pulled his eyes over to the face to view her tiny mouth, the slim nose, the high cheekbones, the expressive, brown eyes.

He already knew Hermione Granger's face well, and over time, he would come to memorize the features. He would come to remember exactly how many freckles she had across her cheekbones and how her forehead would crinkle with anxiety. But, in the hallway, she was only an anomaly, a girl he'd once hated and then discovered with alarm that he now wanted to uncover the things that lay locked beneath her skin.

Draco remembered seeing her stoop to retrieve her bracelet before the others trampled it underneath their feet, that her eyes met with his for one uneven moment. He remembered Ginny Weasley's red hair and laughing mouth as she touched Hermione's shoulder, breaking her gaze from him. And then the two girls walked away together, disappearing into the crowd.

At one point in time, Blaise had thought himself in love with Ginny Weasley. It was foolish; Draco had explained this to him multiple times. What he hoped to do, mostly, was to protect him, to protect himself, to shield the both of them from the complicated wreckage of the relationships they both feared that they wanted.

Ginny Weasley had not been ignorant of Blaise's intentions toward her. There was something in her that had made her resentful; the fact that Harry Potter was beginning to distance himself from her had left its mark. She still loved him, probably always would, but she could still let her eyes linger on Blaise's from across the hall.

Draco saw them once, held tight against a wall, their silhouettes barely distinguishable in the dark. He heard them say the word love, hurried and concealed, as if terrified to have the other hear them say it. He'd wanted to laugh, for some sickening, unknown reason, perhaps because he wanted Ginny Weasley to be telling the truth. He wanted her to give up Potter entirely and run off with Blaise until the war ended. But he knew life didn't work that way.

It was only November of his Sixth Year when he saw Blaise and Ginny in the hallway. At that point, he did not expect anything to come out of his and Hermione's occasional glances across the hall, or that brief touch underneath a table. He chocked it up to mere curiosity, that both of them were puzzled by the drop in animosity, perhaps she more than him. He often saw the Trio's head bent together, whispering and furtively glancing at his place across the Great Hall. No, the last thing he'd expected at that point was for anything to happen at all.

Hermione had seen them too, her footsteps quiet behind him, her voice wrapping around his limbs: Malfoy? What are you doing out here? Her voice was confused and startled; she probably expected him to jinx her or them. He turned to her, and he was too tired to insult her, too overcome by the way her eyes slowly lit up the air around her face to point out a flaw in her character, and she didn't say anything to him, either. She glanced over at her friend in the embrace of his and he saw a flash of something like revulsion sweep over her face. Her hand was poised on her wand but she didn't do anything, merely sighed with a heavy shake of her head, hair bouncing across her shoulders. She said something that he can't quite remember anymore, something about Ginny's family and how her brothers wouldn't mind ripping Blaise from limb to limb.

Many months later, Blaise gave up Ginny's name and the address of her safehouse to save his mother. Draco remembers seeing her death in the papers, a picture of her face in the corner, a defiant smirk on her lips. He remembers that thing that Hermione had said in that dark archway, how her brothers would have killed Zabini if they'd been given the chance, and it makes him sick to think that they probably never knew, that they would never know what had happened so that their sister had to die.

Draco does not recall when his disgust for Hermione began turning into something like an academic interest. It had happened gradually during his Sixth Year, a small deluge of feelings and confusions and tangible pain. But when had it started? When had he finally understood that her blood was his blood, that she was somehow exactly like him? Had it really started with just her bracelet? Or had it been the way her eyes had found his from across the room, dark, questioning eyes that bit at skin without touching? Had it been because he could imagine her body wrapping around his so well? Had it been because he could feel her name slip off of his lips like gentle smoke?

He supposes that it had started when she dropped her bracelet in the hallway on her way to class, silver light falling to the floor in a final arch, twisting and tumbling to the ground. He had waited for unaware feet to trample it, for the light to become dull. But then she'd stopped to pick it up, glancing up at him, smiling as if she'd known that he would be watching her, leaving with Ginny as soon as she'd caught his eye.

Had she known that her bracelet would have led to events that had turned his world inside out? Had she dropped it there when she'd seen his face in the middle of that crowd? Had she smirked to the side and gently let out the clasp?

When he returns from the Ministry, he makes a cup of tea that tastes like inherent bitterness and now it lies forgotten on his dresser, steam floating above it. He crawls into his forest green sheets, he cannot force himself to move, to remember, but it seems that his mind is only capable of thinking about her. He wants to forget her. He wants to hate her.

But his body aches for her, the memory of it lying like her beside him, taking her shape and curling to the edge of the bed. He stares at the ceiling.

She comes back tomorrow.