Author's Note: This fic has over a hundred reviews. You know how happy I am? Happy. Really happy. Unbelievably happy. Thank you all.

Yeah, what this chapter lacks in funniness, it makes up for in… um… unrealistic dialogue…

Cue the Emo Song.

Chapter Thirteen

Pretty Little Lies

Somehow, Hermione endured until Friday. She really wasn't sure how. Maybe she had some vast untapped reserves of survival abilities that she hadn't previously known about.

Or maybe she was just wasting her life hunched over the latest illiterate letter, and she was so conditioned to it that the weekend didn't even feel like freedom anymore. It felt like a breath of air, yes, but not like a two-day reprieve. Last weekend certainly hadn't been much of a reprieve. Her mother was almost as extraordinarily talented at making her feel like a failure as Helicane was.

Speaking of Helicane, there were so many damn complaint letters that she was beginning to suspect that he wrote some of them himself.

All in all, it just felt like there was a lead weight on her head that wouldn't go away. It was slowly crushing her into the floor.

As she kicked off her heels shortly after crossing the threshold of Number 78, her feet made a vociferous testimony in favor of the lead weight explanation of things.

The moment Draco got home, he put on his pajamas—which meant his bloodstained T-shirt and his liberally-ripped jeans. Those two articles of clothing—if they still entirely qualified as clothing after the beating they'd taken—were becoming very familiar around this place.

Hermione couldn't deny the sense of being comfortable, however. So it was that, right after dinner, she sought out her own pajamas, which consisted of a pair of drawstring pants that were sky blue (with white clouds) and a cotton long-sleeved shirt of a pastel purple. They didn't really match, to tell the truth, but Hermione didn't exactly make a point of showing them off or anything. She glanced in the mirror. For one thing, she looked about twelve dressed this way, and for another, the circles under her eyes and the great untamed mass of her hair made her look dead.

So she was a dead twelve-year-old. Fan-frigging-tastic.

Dragging a brush through her hair helped a little, but not much. She washed her face to rinse off the last of that stuffy-office-feeling, and then she went to go sit uselessly on the couch until her exhaustion metamorphosed into sleepiness.

Except that Draco was draped all the way over it.

He turned in time to see her face fall, and he frowned.

"What's wrong?"

"There isn't anything wrong."

"Fat chance of that."

Hermione wanted to die. Her weight. One more thing to agonize about late into nights she couldn't afford to spend agonizing. All that ice cream yesterday…

She turned away from him and looked at the floor. There, like a dead animal in the middle of the road, was a single white sock, and she remembered another thing she had blissfully forgotten for a few wonderful minutes.

"I'm going to go do the laundry," she said quietly. Even so she heard the tremor in her own voice.

"Forget the damn laundry," Draco told her.

He crept up behind her and slipped his arms around her shoulders. His voice trickled into her ear like clear stream water down a parched throat.

"You are beautiful," he whispered, a finger rising to brush her cheek, softer than a breath of wind. "You are kind, and intelligent, and bursting at the seams with unshakeable conviction, and therein you are beautiful. Maybe you don't have burgeoning feminine curves and voluminous gold tresses. But I think that's because whatever sort of Creator there is up there knew that you wouldn't need them." He drew her in closer, and she could feel his heartbeat against her back, hammering hard despite the even tone of his voice. "Let me hold you. Let me kiss you. Let me prove to you that I believe it."

"And?" she said.

"'And'?" he prompted, admirably calmly.

"And what shall I give you in return for your pretty little lies?" It was a defense mechanism, and she knew it. But it went against everything in her nature to walk into a dark room without her wand raised and her eyes wide open, just in case. It wasn't in her to give up without a fight.

Draco's lips were right up against her ear now, and she felt them shift as he smiled. "You'll throw me on the floor and ravish me," he told her equably.

She pulled away from his chest, disentangling his arms from around her, stepped away, and turned to look at him. There was surprise on his face, and bewilderment, and a bit of hurt. All of it disappeared instantaneously when she said what she said next.

"Take off your shirt," she ordered.

Grinning now, he peeled it off, slowly and distinctly for her benefit, and then dropped it to the floor. He looked good, that much was undeniable; but, as she'd expected, he was a little too thin to be quite breathtaking. There was a raggedness to him, almost palpable in his bearing and the tiny trace of weariness in his smile. He was worn, he was wretched, and he was tired of running.

And—

Hermione released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Everywhere on the pale skin they crawled, varied and enterprising—scars. Scars, and marks, and countless calling cards of old wounds. There were faint welts halfway-healed, broad bruises gone a sickly, fading yellow, and white, ropy scars like tapeworms.

"This one was there before." Draco had seen her mortified, pitying, desperate fascination and was pointing to a short, unobtrusive white line that curved below his collarbone. "From the good old days, messing around at home as a kid." He found a different one. "That one, too. But this one…" He turned his back to her and pointed to a thick scar that arched over his shoulder. "Sectumsempra from Leonine. Hit me in the back while I was running. Guess I was just damn lucky it wasn't anything more potent."

He faced her again, and Hermione looked at him. She wasn't thinking, because if she started thinking now, her brain would explode, and that would be Hell to get out of the carpet. So instead of letting her brain wrap its great girth around anything—anything at all—she stepped forward and kissed the first scar, and then the second, and then the third, softly and carefully and tenderly.

"This was more of his work… And here… I don't think he thought I was alive after this, but you know me; I'm pretty persistent when it comes to doing what'll piss people off most…" He was rambling a little, talking too much. It was because he was slightly disconcerted. Come to think of it, Hermione was pretty disconcerted, too.

No thinking about it. That would be the end of her. And the end of her carpet.

"Here I think I just crashed into a pole while walking… Here's next… and then here…" Methodically, she touched her lips to every one. "This one—I tried to beg money off the wrong guy. I guess he was just having a bad day. I could've hexed him, but I couldn't leave him that way—I don't know how to wipe memories… Then here—and here. And here."

It took maybe a few minutes for him to find them all and explain them all away as if they didn't hurt and never had, as if they'd disappear when he waved his wand and snapped his fingers, but however many tangents he traveled, it was a terribly long time to be listing old injuries.

Hesitantly he stopped. "And… that's everything."

That wasn't true. Hermione knew precisely where the most recent wound resided.

Accordingly, she pushed herself up on her toes and kissed his lip.

He was momentarily taken aback—but then he recovered.

And what a recovery it was. His fingers slipped into her hair, his fingernails skimming her scalp and sending goosebumps rolling down her arms; for the space of a second he cupped her cheek in his free hand, but then his palm brushed her neck, her shoulder, her side; his kiss was at once warm and soft and desolate and hungry. He pulled her closer even as he pressed himself on her, and again she felt his heart pounding—matched beat for slamming beat by hers.

He drew away, panting, and his gray eyes blazed—with elation, with vindication, with triumphant joy. Levelly she met his gaze, as much enraptured as she was appalled. It felt strange—being utterly at odds with yourself. She had been neatly bifurcated. The sensible half of her told her to bitch-slap the shirtless young man with his hand set calmly on the small of her back immediately. (Or at least at the soonest possible convenience.) But the other half—the lonely, empty, hollow half, the half that lurked in corners and huddled under the blankets, the half that pulsated gently in the shadows, giving off a faint blood-red luminescence that coaxed her down towards the darkness in which it dwelled, wanted her to forget that broken hearts couldn't be mended. It wanted her to forget that Ron had moved on and was never coming back; it wanted her to forget that he'd had every reason to do so; it wanted her to forget that Draco Malfoy was a cad and a child at turns; it wanted her to forget that she felt shattered and stranded at the best of times. It wanted her to forget everything—everything that existed in a mad world—and bury herself in Draco until some unspecified time when she had no choice but to remember.

Before she could find a happy medium (she hated picking sides, even of herself; someone always lost and went off to sulk somewhere), Draco moved again, ever the striking serpent one step—or one slither—ahead of its prey.

Once more he kissed her, deeply and fully and meaningfully, and very likely with just about everything in him. His hands were warm, and her eyes were closed, and she felt his fingers grasp the bottom hem of her shirt and tug gently upwards. And upwards. And upwards.

Tearing herself from his arms might well have been the hardest thing she'd ever done.

"What?" he gasped out, reaching for her again almost frantically.

Cautiously she backed out of range, feeling herself tremble, smoothing her shirt out again, imagining she could feel his warmth on the places he'd touched it. "I want to wait," she said.

His hands fell to his sides. His eyes probed her, searching, wary and weary and worried. Then he took a deep breath and put on a smile. "Okay," he said. "I'll wait."

And it was then that she knew that she had fallen in love with the right pompous, reckless, idiotic fool.