Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Harry Potter, except those that clearly aren't from J.K. Rowling's stories. And since I expect anyone reading this by now to be a complete HP aficionado, I'm sure you'll know which ones they are.

Chapter 9 — Less than Enemies

Hermione awoke the next morning with a stiff neck and a very cold bum. She lifted her head slowly, and realized that she had fallen asleep on Draco Malfoy's shoulder. The boy was still asleep, his head thrown back and resting against the leg of a desk. A lock of silky blond hair had flopped forwards and was half-covering one of his eyes, where the crusty tracks of last night's tears could still be seen.

Hermione slowly got to her feet; her sudden lack of warmth roused the boy, and he blinked blearily up at her.

"Good morning," she said warily.

"Is it?" he asked, making no effort to get up.

"Well, I suppose not," she amended, realizing how coarse she sounded.

He smiled up at her wearily. Hermione was startled. I don't think I've ever seen him smile before, she thought unexpectedly. Sneer, yes. But smile?

"It's all right," he said. "Yesterday I was just in shock. I won't break down on you again."

He stared beyond her, into memory. "We were never that close, Mum and I. Father thought that if Mum coddled me, it would make me weak. After I entered Hogwarts, I rarely saw her."

"But she was still your mother," Hermione said simply.

"Yes."

Hermione wasn't certain how to respond, so she just stood there awkwardly, not sure if he wanted her to leave. At last, Malfoy looked up and met her gaze.

"Thank you for staying with me," he said. "After the last few years, you were the last person I would have expected to help me."

"Yeah, well, forget about it," Hermione dismissed uncomfortably.

Malfoy smiled again and took her hand, getting to his feet. "That I will never do."

They walked out into the corridor. It was completely deserted.

"Where is everyone?" Hermione asked, prodding a stray sock with her toe. Malfoy smacked himself on the head.

"It's Christmas break — everyone's left."

"I can't believe I forgot!" Hermione giggled. "I almost broke my ankle last night avoiding Lavender's trunks. Wow."

"I take it you're not going home?" Malfoy asked, looking at the girl with an unreadable expression. She shook her head.

"My mom and dad are…traveling," she hedged. "I'm staying here."

He nodded slowly.

"And you?"

"I doubt very much that my father would want to have me home right now," he remarked dryly.

Hermione clasped her hands to her mouth at her gaff. "I'm sorry!" she apologized again.

"I told you not to worry about it," he said, brushing away her remorse. "I wouldn't trust myself in his presence right now, anyway."

Hermione didn't know what to say to that, so she just kept silent.

"Thank you again, Hermione," Malfoy said, raising a hand to her face.

"You, you said my name," she stammered, feeling herself blush at his touch.

"And I plan to say it for a long time," he agreed. For the first time in all the years he had known her, he truly looked at her. "If anything good came out of last night at all, it was that it showed me there are few people of worth in this world and you, Muggle-born Hermione Granger, are one of them."

She was gaping at him, she knew it. She stared at the place he had stood long after he had walked away. In all the turmoil of thoughts and emotions raging within her, one thought kept popping to the forefront of her mind: she liked the way he said her name.

-:-+-:-+-:-+-:-

It's times like these that I really loathe how well I know my father, Draco thought as he picked up the letter lying on his bed.

With stoic detachment he opened it and skimmed enough to know the news it bore before he crumped it cruelly in his hand.

Dear Draco,

I regret to inform you of the death of your mother. She contracted Wizards' sarcoma and by the time she sought out medical attention, there was nothing the healers could do. The funeral has been arranged for this afternoon. You are not expected to attend.

There it was. A terse, tidy explanation that those aware of the virulent cancer which plagued the pureblood lines would accept. Oh, Draco knew that if he wrote St. Mungo's and checked, they would Owl him falsified papers regarding his mother's illness and death. His father had always been good at hiding his tracks.

You are not expected to attend.

So, he was not even permitted to attend her funeral. Just as well — he doubted that he could control his temper well enough to keep from hexing his father, or denouncing him to the other attendees, who would undoubtedly consist entirely of Death Eaters.

Draco sat on the edge of his bed and tried to summon up the image of his mother, a happy memory — anything other than the silvery woman dropping to the ground in a burst of green light. The best he could produce was the visage of a flaxen-haired woman with a girlish face who smiled wearily at him before fading back into the fog of memory.

-:-+-:-+-:-+-:-

Draco did not leave his room until noon the next day. He might not have left even then, but his stomach was rumbling loudly and besides, he wanted to talk to Hermione.

She wasn't at lunch, which surprised him. Probably in the library, he thought as he ate his way around his plate. It was strange having the Great Hall this quiet. Draco had never stayed at Hogwarts over Christmas break before, and he gazed around in wonder at the long, empty tables and the teachers absent from the head bench. Apparently, with the threat of Voldemort looming so close, many families wanted their children to return home for what could realistically be their last Christmas together.

Those who were left ate together at the Ravenclaw table. Besides himself and the absent Hermione, there were three students — a Hufflepuff first year and two Ravenclaw fourth years, one of who looked vaguely familiar. I probably flirted with her at some point, he thought, trying to place her. He really could not remember.

The students sat a few seats down the table from him and, while they did not intentionally ignore him, they made no attempt to draw him into their conversation either. Professor Flitwick, the only teacher currently present, tried once or twice to talk to Draco, but soon gave it up and left the morose boy to his own thoughts.

Draco, for his part, was trying to determine how best to present his proposal to Hermione so that she wouldn't reject him on the spot. After all, he had been an absolute git to her and her friends for as long as he had known them. He thought back to the first time he had called her "Mudblood." His father had just sent him a private Howler, raging about how a piece of muggle-born filth was beating Draco in every class, he was so disappointed in Draco, he regretted helping Draco onto the Quiddich team…. I'd have made it on my own, anyway, Draco mentally avowed as he listened to the litany in stoic silence. Of course, that wasn't the point. With Lucius Malfoy, everything was about money and power. When the girl in question later accused Draco to his face of buying his way onto the Quiddich team, he had lost it. Although he had heard his father use the slur all his life, he had never before used it himself.

Immediately, a part of him wanted to take it back. But he was a Malfoy. Malfoys did not apologize. He couldn't get away with not calling her by that name again, either. Now that he had let the snake out of its tank, his friends refused to let him put it back in. She was officially "The Mudblood Granger," lowest of the low, and to be treated as such.

Draco buried his head in his hands, earning himself a very strange look from Professor Flitwick. How was he going to explain his actions? This, all of this, was never something he had wanted. All he had desired was to — just once — impress his father. He had thought that by parroting his father's ways, by doing everything he asked, by serving Voldemort, and yes, even by killing Dumbledore, in the end, it would be enough.

"What a fool I have been," Draco muttered, clenching his hands into fists and bending the spoon he held in two.

He could almost see his father standing before of him, lecturing him about the pureblood ways. Then the image turned and it was casting light, green light….

Everything around me that has ever been good or happy, you have taken away saying they are not for me, he addressed his father's mental image. Now I see at last that it was never me you wanted, never a son — just a tool to curry the Dark Lord's favor, and a barricade between you and him when you incurred his wrath.

Well, I'm through playing this game. I'm through with the insults, the hate, the despair. Maybe, just maybe, I can still salvage something of what it means to be happy.

He knew that she wouldn't trust him — he wouldn't trust him if their situations were reversed. And he would be lying if he said that seven years of ingrained habits would be easy to break. But Merlin take them all, he was going to try!

I'll make them pay for what they did to you, Mother, he swore. And I'll become the man you always wanted me to be, and have those things you used to whisper about — fairy tales, I thought they were. How could such things exist in real life? But maybe someday, I, too, will have friends I can trust not to curse me in the back.

-:-+-:-+-:-+-:-

Hermione was in the library when Malf — Draco, she corrected herself. If he was going to call her by her first name, she could certainly call him by his — sought her out.

"I want to stop Voldemort," he said bluntly, pulling up a chair beside her.

"Why?" she asked, equally frank.

"Need you ask?" He didn't wait for an answer, but began ticking off his reasons. "He killed my mum. He wants me dead. Anyone who follows him either ends up a murderer, or tortured, or dead themselves. There is no peace with him as master, only fear. He's evil, he's cruel—"

"Okay, I get the picture," Hermione cut in.

Draco stared at her intensely. "Believe me, this is not a decision made in anger. I've thought about this for a long time. If I don't do something, I'm going to end up like my mother, and I'm not ready to die yet."

"And what makes you think that I know how to stop him?" she demanded. "People have been trying for years and as far as I'm aware, he's still very much alive."

"I've seen you and Potter plotting together when you thought no one was looking. You are all in the Order and you headed Dumbledore's Army and everything. Potter was the only one with Dumbledore before he—" Draco broke off. Hermione was watching him coldly.

"Anyway," he mumbled, feeling his bravado breaking down, "if anyone knows a way to stop Voldemort, it's you."

Hermione tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the desk, brushing against the edges of the papers she had slid under her notebook as soon as Draco sat down.

"Supposing there is a way, why would I want your help? Why should I trust you, of all people, not to betray us?"

Draco swallowed hard. "I don't know. I'd drink Veritaserum if it would convince you of my sincerity, or swear a Binding Vow if that's what you want."

She looked doubtful.

"Look Hermione," he said, leaning forward earnestly. She drew back. "I know I've been an absolute gargoyle to you for practically forever. I'd try and explain, but I know you either wouldn't believe me or wouldn't care. I can't claim I'm changed, because I'm not. At least, not yet. But I'm going to try, because I see what you and Potter and Weasley have" — he missed the rapid blinking of Hermione's eyes — "and I want it. I want it more than anything in the world. And if killing Voldemort is the only way I can ever be free to have that, then that is what I'll do."

Hermione met his gaze at last, searching his eyes intently. "I believe you," she finally said.

Hermione stared at her hands. What she was about to do would brand her a traitor in the eyes of the Order, if they ever knew, and in the eyes of Harry and Ron as well. But with Dumbledore swearing them all to secrecy, and with Harry out of commission and Ron not speaking to her, she was left remarkably short of options. She peered at the blond boy from under her lashes, considering. Of all people to tell, a Malfoy! But Dumbledore had always believed that Draco Malfoy was just a confused boy, a pawn being used by two very evil men. If this was more than a moment's fancy, if he really did mean what he said about wanting to change, then he deserved to have the chance that Dumbledore had asked them to give him.

"If you're wrong about him…." she murmured to the absent headmaster. She could almost see his blue eyes twinkle. Draco looked at her anxiously.

"It turns out there is a way," she began cautiously. "But I need you to do something for me, first."

"What's that?"

"Change Harry back."

Draco looked stricken. "You know I can't do that." Hermione scowled and turned her back on him, poring over her book. "Look, it's not that I don't want to. I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?" she demanded coldly.

"If I change him back, then people will realize that he hasn't been gone all this time. I'll be sent to Azkaban or at the very least, kicked out of Hogwarts. Either is as good as a death sentence for me right now. You'd have an excellent chance of getting expelled, too. You've been lying to everyone, you know."

"Don't remind me," she dismissed. "Besides, I'm sure we can explain it to McGonagall. She'd understand—"

"But would Harry? He hates me — there's no way he would let this pass. If McGonagall doesn't get rid of me, he or one of his fans would."

"Besides," he added, "he's far safer as my cat than wandering around as the Boy Wonder. At least the Death Eaters won't be looking for him in my room."

Hermione had to admit that he had a point. Several, in fact. "Very well," she agreed, knowing that Harry would never forgive her. "But you must promise to never threaten me with him again."

"Deal," Draco said with a smile.

Wondering if she was making a huge mistake, Hermione pulled out the papers she had been working on before Draco sat down.

"Tell me, Draco," she began casually, delighting in the way the boy startled when she said his name, "have you ever heard of a Horcrux?"

Chapter 9 Summary:

Draco gets a letter from his father, and volunteers to help Hermione hunt for Horcruxes.