Author's Note: If you see any typos, tell me. I'll send 'em to meet their maker.
Which would be me.
Reviewers will get an imaginary cookie frosted with real thankfulness!
Fishing for reviews makes me feel like a fanfiction whore.
Oh well! I am!
Chapter Three
Not Stupid (Thanks)
If there was one thing Hermione Granger was not, it was stupid. If there was another adjective to which she categorically had no claim, it was "rich." Ministry work was thankless in more ways than one, and her apartment reflected the sad state of things quite succinctly.
So it was with no little amount of surprise that she watched Dra—Malfoy poking around gleefully, making excited little comments about "feminine touches" and "homey ambiance." He took a particular liking to the silk flowers in a plastic vase that adorned the tiny table in her kitchen, the word magnets on her fridge that allowed you to spell out things like "The dog is eating purple anguish" and "King Picasso lives under your bed," and the relentlessly cushy orange couch in the less-than-spacious living room. His approval of the lattermost was constructive, at least; that was where he'd be sleeping, provided that she didn't murder him in cold blood between now and bedtime.
"Charming; simply charming," Malfoy concluded contentedly, flopping down on the aforementioned couch, which might once have been a blinding orange color and was now reduced to a shade somewhere between radioactive sludge and molding sweet potatoes.
"I thought this was a hellhole," Hermione noted dryly.
Malfoy smiled that same cocksure, devil-may-care, hopelessly endearing smile. "The rest is," he decided. "This is better. This is a purgatory-hole."
Clearly, he was incorrigible.
He looked at her, and there was a lazy tilt to his smile now. "I'll interpret your unwavering gaze to mean that you're too shy to offer a verbal come-on," he remarked.
"Don't," she responded immediately.
"Then why, fair maiden, are you so intently eyeing me, if not to imagine me bereft of my clothing?"
Fighting down a blush, she cut to the chase. "I want to know why you didn't kill the Death Eater."
Malfoy's smile disappeared like a candle flame extinguished. Then, slowly, a ghost of it returned. "It's harder to kill a man than you might think, Miss Granger," he replied in an airy tone of ersatz blitheness. "Even for one so irretrievably morally dissolute as myself."
Hermione looked at him—really looked at him, discerningly, from head to toe. There were things laid bare in the yellowish lamplight of her apartment that the original astonishment, the persistent image of his pink tongue against the contours of the plastic spoon, and the desperation of flight had shielded from her notice. Malfoy had been working on a set of broad shoulders and a suave swagger even before they'd graduated from Hogwarts. Those shoulders were still there, as was the swagger—but there was a bit of a stiffness to him, a tautness to his bearing that hinted at matching tension within. His clothes hung a little off of his body, and the fabric, which had once been pristinely fine, showed traces of wear. There was a hint of something haggard in his face, something hunted, that appeared only in unpredictable flickers and was otherwise entirely invisible. He was thin, he was tired, and he was still maintaining that smile with a hint of a smirk.
"Undressing me with your eyes again so soon?" he inquired. "That was quick."
Hermione chose to ignore the comment—though some small, unashamed part of her brain wanted to go ahead and prove him right—and folded her arms across her chest. "Are you hungry?"
Malfoy's ever-mutable smile did another about-face, becoming that of a kid in a candy store. "What'cha makin', Mommy?" he asked gleefully.
Hermione sighed. It was going to be a long indeterminate period of time.
"What are you in the mood for?" she asked in reply.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Once Malfoy had devoured a considerable quantity of pea soup (from a can) and an equally considerable quantity of spaghetti (from a box) topped with marinara sauce (from a jar) and washed it all down with some lemonade (from concentrate), Hermione deemed it meet to begin the interrogation.
She had just opened her mouth when Malfoy began, very suggestively, to lick his fork.
"Could you not?" she burst out.
"Could I not what?" he inquired sweetly.
She dropped it. "What have you been doing to bring you here, Malfoy?" she demanded.
He paused in sucking on the tines of the fork and looked at her. "What?"
Hermione tried not to roll her eyes. She really did. Unfortunately, she failed. "Don't give me that. You come waltzing into the Ministry begging for sanctuary, a Death Eater tries to kill us in the street, and you're eating like you've recently survived a famine. What have you been doing?"
Malfoy returned his attention to the fork. "Well, you know," he answered lightly. "Pissing people off was always one of my specialties." His eyes darted to hers momentarily. "And if you're any indication, I haven't lost my touch."
Playing up the fact that she wasn't taking the bait, Hermione folded her arms on the table and looked at him intently.
Malfoy smiled. "It is a story," he said, "for a dark and stormy night with much melodramatic thunder and lightning, rising in a crescendo of blasting sound and light, the power of which drives two old enemies closer together… on the couch… possibly without all their clothes on…" She raised an eyebrow, and he grinned and went on. "…A tempest that sends branches scratching like demons' claws at the windowpanes; or that would, were the windowpanes not portals to a purgatory-hole seven floors off the ground, well out of reach of even the most enterprising trees."
"You're not going to tell me," Hermione concluded flatly.
A shadow crossed Malfoy's complacent smile. "I don't think either of us is ready for that just yet," he replied equably.
If that wasn't spine-tinglingly ominous, Hermione didn't know what was. And, as she had painstakingly established to herself and to others, Hermione Granger was not stupid—thanks very much. Therefore, when she stumbled upon things that made her feel as if a cockroach was climbing her spine like it was a miniature Mount Everest with vertebrae, she ran the Hell in the other direction. Sometimes with arms flailing.
"All right," she conceded. "Then we'll wait for a dark and stormy night. In the meantime, what shall we do?"
Malfoy waved his fork around ostentatiously, as if conducting an orchestra composed of the peas and carrots floating in the dregs of his soup bowl. "I haven't the faintest idea, my dear. Do you have any good movies lying around, or are you far too busy for that sort of frivolous thing?"
Hermione's eyebrows rose higher than they had yet. Pretty soon, she reflected wryly, she'd be breaking some serious eyebrow-raising records. "You've discovered films, have you?" was what she said.
Emphatically, Malfoy nodded. "Brilliant, aren't they? The one thing I can't believe the wizarding world has done without…" He gazed absently off into space, and Hermione got the distinct feeling that he had given this idea some thought. "And think about if they hadn't. I mean, you could have the most amazing special effects, right? 'Cause they'd be magic, right? You could have the most bloody awesome explosions and all—" Abruptly he paused and chewed on his lip. "Of course, it wouldn't very well impress anyone, seeing as how any wizard worth his salt is blowing cars up in his backyard by the time he's eight. Little Reparo, and it's all patched up, and everything. So it'd have to be high drama, I guess, since that's not something you can conjure with a wand, right, and why are you looking at me that way?"
It took Hermione a moment to realize that he had shifted topics and was addressing her. "Oh," she said eloquently. "Because you were digressing hugely."
Blithely, Malfoy shrugged and smiled. "Caught you anyway, didn't I?"
Instead of admitting that he had, Hermione busied herself arranging his bed on the couch. It wasn't too long later that she was settling down to sleep herself—or to try to. She had the strangest urge to go peek at Malfoy where she'd left him, sprawled out on the orange abomination that was her couch.
But she didn't obey that urge. That would have been terribly stupid.