December came, rainy and biting cold. Care of Magical Creatures was particularly dull, the dreary weather only serving to make the lessons spent out of doors caring for the Flobberworms unbearable. Hagrid seemed terribly depressed, which wasn't helped by the fact that it had been three months now and Draco still hadn't taken off his bandages. He also refused to touch a single Flobberworm-something Hagrid didn't try to argue over- and as a result Draco's Flobberworm was the healthiest one in the class. Everyone else's was overfed by cabbage and lettuce.

There was also their second trip to Hogsmeade, which happened on a freezing and stark white day. Her visit was spent in a similar fashion to how it was the first time, over too many cups of butterbeer and firewhiskey. Seamus and Dean were absolutely sloshed, leaning on one another, so close they practically sat on each other's laps. Frances and Neville were certainly drunk, although much less so than their friends. Seamus kept smashing the small glass tumbler and casting Reparo so it would reassemble itself magically on the table. The sixth time he did it, Madam Rosmerta stormed over and grabbed him by the ear, dragging him out of the shop and throwing him into the cold. Dean stumbled off to find him, laughing the whole time.

Eventually she and Neville walked off to go back to the castle, fearing staying out any longer since the cold threatened to freeze their feet into the snow. Once they parted ways, drunkenly hugging each other, Frances wobbled down the stairs to the dungeons. As soon as she came into the common room, she snuck conspiratorially by a prefect and slouched onto on of the plush velvet couches, passing out almost immediately, warmed by the fire.

She woke up to Pansy sitting at her feet, deep in conversation and leaned forward to speak to Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle. Feeling significantly less drunk, Frances rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and sat upright on the couch, Pansy shooting her a sidelong glance and smiling, motioning with her head to indicate that she should listen to the conversation.

"Anyway, so we're near the Shrieking Shack, and Granger and the blood-traitor are there doing whatever it is that they do. So we come up and are messing around with them, and suddenly we get attacked by something."

Crabbe and Goyle nod gravely.

"What do you mean 'something'?" Pansy asked.

"Well it's a ghost, obviously. We were right by the most haunted building in Britain, how could it not be? I should ask my father to have it torn down."

"Serves you right for harassing Weasley and Granger," Frances interjected.

Draco's face morphed into an ugly scowl. "Didn't know you were listening," he sneered.

Frances laughed good-naturedly, a stark contrast to the way Draco was acting, "Well I'm sitting right here, what else would I be doing?" He rolled his eyes so Frances continued, "I guess it's a tragedy that the ghost didn't gash your other arm open. You could've made a git out of yourself for another three months."

Draco looked like he was about to draw his wand, but as Frances' hand wrapped around her own, the prefect who had threatened them earlier that year walked by and glared at them. They put their wands away, Draco standing abruptly and stalking off to the kitchens, looking to bully some house elves into giving him something to eat. Crabbe and Goyle followed, excited by the prospect of food.

"How was Hogsmeade for you?" Frances asked Pansy, raising her eyebrow warily as Pansy nearly jumped out of her seat at the question.

Barely talking slow enough for Frances to understand, she said, "Well I saw Blaise there, so I followed him around for a bit. And he went to the bookshop and just read. Frances, you don't understand he must be so smart."

Frances rolled her eyes so far back it made her head hurt. Pansy had been suffering a crush with Blaise for so long that Frances wondered why he hadn't brewed his own infatuation reversal potion yet.

"Pansy, all you're telling me is that he is most likely literate. An ability to read doesn't make you smart, it just makes you the statistical average."

"I don't understand why you're so against us being together!"

"Well for one, Pans, you're not together, he doesn't even know you exist and I'm reasonably confident you've never even spoken to him. Secondly, he's a notorious blood purist, and an old-fashioned, run of the mill asshole to boot."

"Well you're one to talk about being friends with blood purists, you're friends with the biggest offender at Hogwarts!"

"I'm not even speaking to him right now!"

She lowered her voice, speaking in a judgemental whisper. "You're not speaking right now because he's trying to get Hagrid fired, not because he cares about blood status."

This time it was Frances' turn to storm off, but she went to the dormitory instead, flopping down on the bed with a groan, feeling sort of hungover. Millicent eyed her annoyedly over the top of her book, but said nothing.

Frances spent Christmas at home, feeling a touch sad that Neville and Augusta wouldn't be visiting for the two weeks she was at home. They'd gone on holiday to some wizard town in Norway. Apparently there were actual, magical reindeer there, or so Neville said.

The break was relaxing, except for the Potions essay that was four rolls long on the Strengthening Solution and the the reading of an incredibly torturous Arithmancy book that Professor Vector had written herself and distributed copies of to the class when she felt the subject material had become too easy.

A few days before the end of Christmas holiday, Frances received an owl from Draco and immediately experienced the strange combination of her heart leaping and her stomach dropping. If they had not been arguing at the time, she would have been excited for the prospect of contact from her friend. Whatever this was though, Frances expected it was not a letter of atonement.

Frances,

Thought I would write to let you know that

the great oaf has a hearing in April. If we're

lucky they should put the beast down by

the end of exams. Happy Holidays!

Your truest and oldest friend,

Draco

Frances crumpled the parchment in her hand, fuming. Far away, Draco was satisfied when he felt the ring burn so hot that he had to take it off for the day. It was just like him to do something so incredibly cruel and callous. She could only imagine what he would say to Harry, Ron, and Hermione when he came back from holiday.

By the time she returned to Hogwarts, she had already decided that ignoring the letter from Draco would be her best bet, especially since if they were made to have a detention together for dueling there's no guarantee they wouldn't fight one another again.

He seemed content to not bring it up as well, and now that he had finally taken his bandages off, he was considerably less annoying towards her. Draco did however mercilessly taunt Harry and his friends about Hagrid, much of this driven to an extreme because he heard that Harry had mysteriously received a Firebolt over Christmas. Despite the fact that Hermione had gotten it confiscated by McGonagall -it seemed likely that Sirius Black had sent it to Potter- Draco was still terribly jealous.

They slogged through their first month back, trapped inside the castle by absolutely foul weather. If it wasn't too cold to step outside without wearing every scarf, sweater, and mitten Frances owned, it was a downpour so heavy that she couldn't walk outside for half a minute without getting entirely soaked.

Frances had been avoiding Draco as well as possible, spending all of her free time with Neville or Hermione and throwing herself into her work to distract from the ever present anger she felt towards her former friend. Hermione was in a similar situation, entirely alienated from Harry and Ron who were angry at her for telling McGonagall about the Firebolt. She was losing hair of the stress of school and of her closest friends entirely ignoring her. Lucky for Frances the only time she really had to interact with Draco was during the classes they had with one another and at mealtimes, and even then she ignored much of the conversation to talk to Pansy alone or to read.

Draco was just starting to forget that Potter had received a Firebolt at all when word got out that McGonagall had finally returned it, deeming it curse-free. The night that the news broke, Draco spent nearly the whole night speaking in hushed tones with Crabbe, Goyle, and Marcus Flint. Frances didn't know what they were up to, and she didn't care to find out.

The day of the Ravenclaw versus Gryffindor match, she was unsurprised to watch Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle try to sabotage Potter by dressing as dementors. She was surprised when Harry drew his wand and produced a bright, white substance that violently pushed the three of them back. Frances, who was standing with Fred and George and helping them with their betting operation, saw it shape itself into something like an animal before it was rendered apart by the high winds.

That night in the common room, Frances watched with glee as the three of them had to polish each and every piece of furniture in that giant, grand space.

They even thought they might get a break, since Sirius Black had broken into the Gryffindor tower and torn the room that Harry shared with Neville, Ron, Seamus, and Dean to shreds, but since Dumbledore had confirmed that Black was no longer in the castle in a short time, Draco and the rest got to keep polishing.

Neville had admitted that he had been writing down all of the passwords to the common room since The Fat Lady had been replaced. Sir Cadogan had been changing the password several times a day and Neville had no hopes of remembering all of them.

The following Tuesday, a still distraught and embarrassed Neville received a particularly cruel howler from Augusta, one that the entire student body talked about for the rest of the week. Frances thought it was odd that for such a kind woman, Augusta loved the concept of public humiliation as punishment.

Draco's bad fortune didn't go on for long, however. His father managed to get Hagrid's hearing bumped up by months, something he found ample time in the day to brag about. On Saturday, the news got out that Buckbeak was to be executed, and Draco was in a state of ecstasy so annoying that Frances stayed out of the common room with Neville as long as possible to avoid having to see him.

Frances was good at avoiding Malfoy at this point in the year, and she went over two months without speaking so much as a word to him. Lucky for her, Draco didn't seem particularly interested in speaking to her either. He was focused on the Slytherin, Gryffindor match, having lost nearly three months of practice time while he was campaigning for Buckbeak's head. He spent his mornings on the pitch with Flint and his nights practicing with the rest of the team.

After all of that practice, Draco was very sure Slytherin would win the match against Gryffindor. He was so sure, in fact, that he didn't stop talking about it the entire week leading up to the match.

Running the betting with Fred and George was particularly tense that day, Frances jabbing at them on all sides about their rivalry. Today it was a lot less friendly than most days. Privately, Frances wished that Slytherin would win by points alone, but Harry would catch the snitch, though she never would have said it aloud.

Gryffindor seemed to be using that same play, so the game ended with Gryffindor winning 230 to 20. Frances was a bit chafed about it, but at least Malfoy had done absolutely nothing to benefit the team.

After the match, exams came up quickly. Everyone seemed to be studying nonstop. The common room was abuzz with activity. It was normal to walk down in the morning for breakfast to find one or two people passed out at one of the tables, head in a book.

Frances was often that person, especially since much of her time was devoted to tutoring many of the third years in Potions, since she was so far ahead of everyone else. Pansy drilled Frances, Crabbe, Goyle, and Draco in History of Magic, not letting anyone rest until they could get through fifty questions without a wrong answer. For his part, Draco was actually relatively helpful for Defense Against the Dark Arts. Despite the mutual animosity between him and Frances, they still spent a lot of time helping one another through studying, often up much later than anyone else. They didn't talk about anything but schoolwork, very careful to dance around any subject that wasn't what they were studying.

Both of them seemed to sense that they were about one misplaced dig away from one of them cursing the other. On the day of their last exam, Frances only had Defense Against the Dark Arts. She finished it rather quickly, leaving at the same time as Draco. They both avoided one another, walking in opposite directions the moment they left the classroom. Frances didn't even have a reason to head that way, she just was entirely unwilling to be around him now that they had nothing to talk about.

That day Buckbeak was supposed to be executed, and the truce that Draco and her had formed over the past month threatened to break at any moment. Frances went to the common room, waiting for Pansy to get back from the Divination exam. She decided to catch up on some much needed sleep. Besides studying for all of her normal classes, Frances had taken the Potions O.W.L. the day before.

She'd spent all night in the library with Fred, George, and Angelina Johnson. At one point Angelina had burst into tears loudly then fallen asleep snoring under the table. The three of them joked about her, but all silently wished that they could do the same. With the amount that they had to learn, they all felt like Snape was trying to run them into the ground. They stumbled out of Potions the next day like they'd just been stunned several times. George looked like he was about to pass out, and he probably was. The fumes from the practical assessment were noxious and threatened to make everyone faint if they breathed too heavily. The four made a truce to not discuss the exam afterwards, feeling like it would be too pointless and stressful to bother.

She was roused at about five in the afternoon by Pansy, who wanted to go to the Great Hall and see if there was any food set out. There was a bit out, probably sent up by some house elves who sensed the general mood of stress and discomfort in the student body that particular day.

She picked apart an apple danish while Pansy ran through the complexities of the exam. It wasn't that Frances didn't care about what Pansy had to say, she just wasn't invested in the details of an exam she didn't have to take. She was staring out of the doors of the Great Hall when she saw Draco dash past, hand pressed against his face. Weird, she thought, but she didn't rush after him as she would have done if they were speaking. And serves him right, today of all days.

But she found herself wondering, as Pansy prattled on, what had happened to him.

They continued with their dinner unhurriedly as students half-dazed from exams ate and left around them. After about two hours elapsed, Pansy announced she was going to go take a bath. Frances made to follow her down to the dungeons, then realized she had no particular desire to sit in the common room. In fact, she was feeling rather restless after sitting for so long.

Instead she wandered around the castle. It was very quiet that evening. With exams done, it seemed most students were in their common rooms or in the Great Hall, so only the thoroughfares between these places were busy.

Frances tactfully avoided making contact with anyone, slipping into shadowy halls whenever she heard footsteps approaching. While wandering slowly through a fourth floor hallway, Frances heard the giggles of Lavender Brown and Pavarti Patil, who were always too much for her taste. A little panicked to get out of their eyesight before they turned the corner, Frances ducked into an empty classroom on her right, mentally patting herself on the back for moving so quickly.

She stopped her self-congratulation short however, seeing Draco sunken down on the wall opposite her, head in his hands. He lifted his head to her sharply as she gently closed the heavy wooden door behind her. His brow furrowed when he saw who it was in the dim light.

"You," he growled. Frances was half expecting him to whip out his wand and shoot a curse at her. When he just put his head back in his clasped hands she was pleasantly surprised, and she walked forward to sit on top of one of the heavy wooden desks that were placed haphazardly about the room.

"I thought you would be in a better mood considering the events of tonight," she mused.

He cracked his fingers, one grey eye peering through. "They didn't kill it."'

Frances smiled excitedly and jabbed, "Are you hiding in here because you found some way to botch that too?"

"Oh, piss off!" he hissed.

She through her arms up in playful exasperation. "What, can you blame me for being happy? You spend a year acting like an ass for absolutely no payoff, how does that feel?"

He pulled his hands away from his face, and through a stripe of moonlight from the paned window, she could see a dark red mark forming just below his right eye. Forgetting the amount of mutual hatred they were feeling in the moment, she hopped off the desk to examine his bruise.

Draco flinched from her touch as she reached to press just below it. He slapped her hands away. "I told you to leave me alone."

Frances ignored him and felt with her thumb the little raised area that surely was hurting him a great deal. His right hand clasped around her wrist, but he didn't squeeze it or rip it away from him. It was a warning that if she went too far, he would.

"What happened?" Frances asked. He had his head rested back on the stone wall, turned slightly to his right to look at her clearly, his legs extended in front of him tiredly. She kneeled with one leg under her, the right pulled up to her chest, perched carefully to examine him.

His right hand relaxed a bit around her, but didn't let her wrist go, even after she let it fall from his face.

"Granger, she punched me."

Frances stifled a laugh, but she knew he still saw it in her face.

"Don't laugh at me, everyone else already has. I expect the whole castle knows by now, I know those three prats wouldn't be able to stop themselves from talking about it, not that they'd want to."

Frances shook her head, shifting to sit cross-legged on the cold floor. Draco was still holding onto her wrist. "No one was saying anything about you, and I haven't seen any of them since this morning."

Draco looked slightly relieved, but then his expression turned dark again. "They should tell the whole school, though. It would make them look great, and make me look like an ass."

Frances chuckled, "Come on, don't tell me you're getting soft on me."

He gave her a withering glare, "I already feel stupid, don't make it worse, Frances."

"Well you deserve to feel stupid, you've been stupid."

"I know!" Draco burst out loudly, right hand releasing Frances to throw his hands up. "Of course I know I've been stupid. I knew that as soon as that big ugly beast slashed me, that's why I did all of this. I wanted to escape with some shred of my dignity."

"That's a piss poor excuse, Draco. Trying to get an innocent animal killed because your ego is bruised. Besides, don't you think we all knew you were embarrassed? What happened was embarrassing, and no one has a more fragile ego than you."

He looked murderous. "Don't call me fragile."

"Don't act like it," Frances retorted with an equally deadly tone.

He dropped his gaze from hers, pulling his knees to his chest and hugging them tightly. "It's just," he began, "When I started this, I didn't know what would happen because of it. I didn't know that you would stop being friends with me. I guess, I guess I should have realized that's exactly what you'd do, but I was being impulsive. And once I'd told Father, I wasn't going to back off."

"Well, I don't know about that. Your father seems to be a big fan of choosing his battles. He renounced You-Know-Who pretty soon after he disappeared."

Draco didn't respond, furrowing his brow into a face of deep concentration.

"What, am I wrong?" Frances asked impatiently. He still didn't respond, so she took his right arm and pulled it into her lap, turning it over so his palm faced up. They were heavily marked and calloused from the endless hours of quidditch practice he'd been enduring since the term began. Draco still wore the same ring that he'd given her a year and a half ago. She'd felt it burn often that year, but she couldn't ask about what had caused him distress though she wanted to so badly. Frances had even felt it burn in the Great Hall shortly before she saw Draco rush by.

"No, you're right about that. Can you promise me you won't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you?" He asked quietly, grabbing her hand in his own two urgently. Frances nodded gravely. Draco breathed in like a man with a hand around his throat. "My father, he was the one that gave Ginny Weasley the diary. He slipped it into her cauldron at Flourish and Blotts at the start of term last year."

Frances jaw dropped, barely able to comprehend what he said. She'd known that Lucius Malfoy was a former Death Eater, but she'd never imagined that he would still be actively trying to kill muggleborns even after all these years out from under the thumb of You-Know-Who.

"Is You-Know-Who back? Did he ask your father to do this?"

Draco shook his head. "That's the worst part. He actually asked my father to do it years ago, when the war was still happening, that's why he had the diary in the first place. But my father just wanted to do it now of his own accord, he thought he could purge Hogwarts of all muggleborns and get Dumbledore fired in one fell swoop. After he failed, Dumbledore couldn't prove he'd done it, but they found other reasons to sack him as a governor. My father is a Death Eater because he hates muggleborns, not because he loves You-Know-Who"

"That's disgusting," Frances said, in horror.

Draco nodded, "I've been having some thoughts about it too, lately. You could've died, it was sheer luck that you didn't, actually. And to top it all off I couldn't even talk to you about it this whole year because of this situation." He looked as if he were about to cry, and Frances suddenly felt very sad for him. Of course, everything he'd done up to this point was stupid and selfish, but that didn't mean he wasn't very obviously in pain.

She went with her gut, and wrapped him in an embrace, pulling his head down to cradle it gently in her arm. It struck her as strange, how often they went from outright shouting to holding each other. Maybe Pansy had a point, she'd stuck with him far longer than she should have. What could be keeping her there if she didn't like him. She never would have put up with all of the blood purity nonsense and the constant fighting if there wasn't something larger. And there was the other thing Pansy had said, that he felt the same way. He wouldn't have put up with all of the fighting either if he didn't like her back.

She was snapped out of her thoughts by the feeling of cold tears dripping down her wrists. Draco was crying, no, not crying. Draco was sobbing, chest heaving and snot running from his nose.

Frances had never seen this, never seen him so vulnerable. She had to stop herself from making a derisive comment, so used to the animosity they'd shared for the past year. Instead, Frances just held him until he stopped crying, sitting up and wiping his nose on his sleeve. He looked terrible, and she could sense how uncomfortable he was. She knew she had to watch what she said to him, as he would likely be even more fragile than he usually was.

"Do you want to go back to the common room?" Frances asked, her voice practically a whisper. He shook his head, but got up anyway, his knees cracking loudly from sitting so long in one position. Draco looked like he was going to start for the door, his face already draining of the color he'd gotten while he wept, but instead he moved suddenly and quickly towards Frances.

Instinctually, she put her hands up, resting them on his chest as he pressed his lips against her cheekbone. His face was still wet, and she felt heat radiating off of him.

She knew she could push him away from her whenever she pleased, but instead she just left her hands on his chest. One of his hands was on her upper arm, the other wrapped around her back. He wasn't trapping her, he was just wrapping her in an embrace, similar to what she had done for him earlier.

Draco pulled away, but not so much that their noses weren't practically touching. "I'm sorry," he murmured. She scarcely heard it, but somehow she felt he meant it. No, she knew how she was feeling it. She was in his mind.

Frances saw herself through Draco's memories. She saw the looks of anger and hatred that she had been giving him the past nine months, the furrowed brow and the corners of her mouth pulled back in disgust. She felt the familiar sharp stab of pain in her chest that she'd experienced when he'd given her those same looks. It never crossed her mind that he had felt the same way.

This was strange however. How was she seeing inside his mind? Frances had spent the whole year doing her very best to try to get in, but there had always been some kind of block on him, something large and amorphous that seemed to occupy his brain, obscuring her sight into his memories and feelings.

Frances had originally assumed that it was because she felt no empathy for him anymore, but that wasn't true. There was a reason she felt his absence like the loss of a limb. There was a reason that when she had been helping him with his potions before exams, she had cracked a smile at his joy when he finally figured how to properly reduce a Sleeping Draught. No, she had never stopped empathizing with him.

She had no idea what it was though, since she had gotten rather good at accessing people's minds. Frances had even managed to get into Hermione's memories one particularly sad day at the library, around the time Ron and Harry were shunning her for the Firebolt.

Frances had felt dirty doing that though, and had tried to use the information she'd gathered to comfort Hermione, telling her that they were being childish, and they'd be back to normal very soon. Lucky for Frances, her assumption had been right.

But no, this thing with Draco was different. That big grey blob in his mind was gone, replaced by clear emotion and memory. Suddenly, it came to Frances why she was just now looking in. It was because he was letting her. In the books she'd read about Legilimency, there'd always been plenty of talk about Occlumency. Frances had never been able to practice it though, because she knew no one else other than Snape that could perform Legilimency.

"Y-you can do Occlumency?" Frances asked, stunned.

He nodded, his body still pressed against her. "My parents taught me very young, they told me that I would need it someday. I thought they were full of it, but I didn't know then that I'd have someone try to break into my mind everyday for a year," he joked.

"I didn't know you could tell, but I guess that explains why I never saw anything. Why are you letting me in now?"

Draco rested his forehead against hers, and whispered, "Because I trust you."