A/N: Quick shout-out to my favorite beta and favorite everything else - Jo/Johnnie Blue! I recently took a gander at my profile and realized that I've spent 9 awesome years as attica and I couldn't have done it without someone to fangirl and swap fanfic recs with. She's been with me since the beginning. She deserves all the love! It's so hard not to get mushy because she's just the bee's knees/cat's pajamas/the best.

This is a relatively short chapter BUT you'll see why it was worth posting. *cackles and runs away into the night*

Chapter Six

She stared at the man who had forcibly pulled her into a dark alleyway, her heart thudding with the force of a stampede inside her chest.

"Ronald!" she hissed. "Are you insane? Do you have a death wish? Snatching people, dragging them into alleys? Is there any part of your mind at all where that screams 'suspicious behavior'?"

"You missed," he said, looking at her wand, confused. "You never miss."

"If you would like me to try again, I promise impeccable aim," she snapped. She took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. Adrenaline was rushing through her veins now and she could feel her fight or flight instinct kicking in. Scowling, she tucked her wand back into her coat pocket. "That was a damn stupid move, Ronald Weasley."

"I'm sorry, I didn't exactly think that part through," he muttered, scratching his ear. "But I was here because Harry let it slip that you were out on a date and I had to come see it for myself. You know, you and Blaise."

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," she said. "It was just dinner – not peace negotiations with the Middle East."

"I know! But I couldn't believe it, not to mention Harry and I may or may not have started a betting pool that you'd end dinner with a nice little hex in his direction – a great deal nastier than the one you missed me with, for sure – and. . ." he trailed off, looking at her expectantly. "Well?"

She gave him a dry look. "How much did you lose?"

His broad shoulders slumped. "Sod it all! Really? He really didn't try anything? I've even got a few knuts on him mentioning 'blood traitors' at least once."

She reminded herself this was exactly why some things were better kept to herself. "He was a perfect gentleman."

Ron frowned. "Hermione. Please. Let's not try to fit a sweater on a pig." He sighed. "Well, I guess I better go pay up. I should've known – betting against Slytherins hasn't exactly been my forte these last few months." He held his arm out to her, albeit begrudgingly. "Bar?"

Hermione sighed, placing her hand on his. "Bar it is."

ooo

Three and a half years ago

"Hold still."

She dipped her hand into a jar of medi-ooze she had stolen from the one of the abandoned buildings they'd ransacked for supplies. The thick slime tingled on her fingers while she applied it liberally to his wound.

She watched the rib bones underneath his bruised skin contract when he sucked in a sharp breath. He cursed through gritted teeth, his eyes shut tightly for a second, before he opened them back again and glared at her. She bit back a smile of satisfaction.

"I'm sorry, did that hurt?" she said.

"This stings enough without your fucking sarcasm, Granger."

"Allow me to play the world's smallest violin for you," she said, as she cleaned off her hands and screwed the lid back on the jar. She watched as he sat up, and she reached for the shirt he had discarded to give back to him – but not before she caught another glance of it again. The ugliness of war. The remnants of violence. It was all over him, in layers it seemed like, ranging from black to purple to an angry, crimson red. And then there were the ones on the verge of healing – halos of unsightly yellow where she was sure would never fully heal before he was marked again.

For a second she tried to imagine him without them. The stony, toned expanse of his chest that served as a testament to just how strategic and preordained his genetic profile had been – after all, the matching of old money purebloods was like racehorse breeding. Good family, good genes, good faces. It was no lie that Draco Malfoy was beautiful with the faint echoes of an Adonis link – it was just that this was more or less easy to forget when he was in her face, snarling unpleasant things. Hermione had always been more of a soldier for inner beauty, and she highly doubted this was a concept Malfoy ever took seriously.

"I'm quite the masterpiece, aren't I?" he drawled, when he caught her staring. Flustered, she handed him his shirt, which he snatched back from her. "What's the matter? Am I not as pretty as you imagined?"

Despite herself, she felt her face get hot. "Don't make me laugh, Malfoy. As if I'd spend precious brain cells trying to picture you in any capacity that didn't involve public humiliation or revenge."

"Why don't you show me yours, then?" he said, pulling on his shirt and getting to his feet. He neared her but she didn't back away – this wasn't Hogwarts anymore. He had no power here. No cronies to egg him on, no adoring followers to help him get away with malicious deeds. She would make him realize that, soon enough. It was a level playing field here and she could crush him under her heel like a gnat if she wanted to.

"Huh, Granger?" he taunted. "I've showed you mine, now you show me yours."

"Sure, I'll show you," she said. He froze when the tip of her wand met his throat. "Nice, isn't it?" she smirked. She kept her eyes on him, unwavering, not backing down from the challenge – despite how close she could feel him against her. She could feel the heat of his body roaring against her bloodstream. She fought hard to keep her head from going fuzzy at that.

He wasn't afraid. She blinked at this.

"I'll bet I know exactly where they are," he said to her, lowly. His voice had gone raspy, his eyes mercurial and dark, and she involuntarily sucked in a sharp breath when she felt something against her hip. She was afraid to look down. Her heart was beating itself bloody against her ribcage and she didn't want to look down and prove to herself that it was the tip of his thumb tracing an invisible line from her hipbone that was responsible for it.

Her senses went haywire for a moment, before it hit her and in a delayed surge of awareness she pushed him away, raising the point of her wand to his face. She tingled where he touched her, as if she had just doused herself in scalding hot water. She felt dirty wherever he looked at her – which was everywhere. She didn't like the hunger that simmered in eyes and imagined gouging them out. Not just from him, but from her, from where the fire awakened at the pit of her stomach, that whimpered when he was within arm's length.

"Don't," she said, firmly. "This isn't Hogwarts anymore, Malfoy. There's no one to protect you here, so drop the act. You're no good to us if you're dead, and here I've got more friends than you who would be more than happy to lie for me if I happen to find myself with a corpse."

There was a trace of smugness on his face, a faint shine of victory. "Shove your threats in somebody else's face. You're transparent, Granger. And it's pathetic when you pretend otherwise," he sneered.

She flicked her wand. He went flying across the room.

ooo

On Monday morning she entered the office with Blaise's voice still inside her head. Malfoy'd had his eye on her firm since the beginning. Could she let herself wonder why? Aside from the fact that his decision to make her miserable had been far more premeditated than she had originally thought?

It pissed her off. It confused her. Worse, it had caused her little tumor of hope to grow even bigger. She had spent all night trying to detangle the past from present, the delusion from the real, and the desperation from the deserved. She thought of Blaise shattering her assumptions, laughing at her jokes, kissing her hand like a swoon-worthy 18th century gentleman. That was what she was supposed to want. Something rooted in the now, something with the potential for happiness, something good.

Instead she had greeted the early morning light thinking of that look she had caught on Malfoy's face when she realized he had known perfectly well what was happening. It had hit her, hard. Irrationally, infuriatingly so. She thought of how she had never met a more insufferable man who had once stood in front of her, broken and bleeding and bruised – a living collage of pain and everything else that comes with war – and called himself a masterpiece.

Determined not to let anyone else see her hidden chaos, she wore these thoughts like an underskin. She said hello to Wendelin and a few other coworkers before heading into her office, taking off her coat and purse. She had just reached for the stack of owls on the corner of her desk when she noticed something else, set perfectly in the middle of the table. She froze. It was a parchment with that blasted gold M on it again.

She opened it. She read it once. Then again.

She went to his office.

She held up the memo. "What the hell is this?"

His look of cool indifference was almost too much for her to handle. "Granger, don't tell me you forgot your reading glasses today."

"Company fraternizing?" she said. "You had your secretary write up a memo to remind everyone that in-company fraternizing wasn't allowed?"

He met her eyes dead on, every bit of amusement gone. "After last night, I realized you and your employees could do with a reminder that there are some rules you must abide by, now that I own your firm."

She laughed. "You are so full of shit. I read your sodding handbook cover to cover, and this so-called 'rule' wasn't anywhere in it."

"Well, see, that's the perk of being the boss, Granger," he drawled, sharpness seeping out in his voice. His eyes flashed. "The handbook only means something if I say it means something. If I wanted, I could make a dozen new rules today and a dozen more tomorrow, and you'd still be in here wasting my time fighting me on it, because you aren't me. I am me. What I say goes. This is a newly-reinstated rule. Take it seriously. If you don't, it will result in yours or anyone else's termination from this firm. Is that clear?"

"You are completely unbelievable, you know that?" she scoffed, shaking her head. "All of this, just because you happened to see me with Blaise having dinner at a restaurant?"

She noticed that small muscle in his jaw pulse. "Blaise," he emphasized with contempt, "works for me. He advises me on my acquisitions and I can't afford him to get mixed up with anyone who might be troublesome."

"Troublesome? I'm only troublesome because there's no fucking breathing room around you, is there?" she snapped. "You've invaded this firm, my friends, my life. Now you're invading what little semblance of a romantic life I have left, and you're shoving that under the excuse of company policy!"

He stood up. "No, you're troublesome because you seem to have nothing else to do with your day than to march in here, unannounced, and challenge every single decision I've made involving your firm. You are completely hostile and toxic to this work environment, do you know that?"

"I'm the one who's hostile? The one who's toxic?" she echoed, stung. The two words hit her like a wall. Her bones involuntarily quivered. There was a riot in her brain. Suddenly she found it very hard to breathe.

She felt him grab her by the shoulders. She stepped back, her head on a tilting axis. "Don't touch me. Don't you dare." She took a shuddering breath that made her feel brave. "Why her?"

Had she unknowingly walked into some alternate universe where he made sense and she didn't? Where he seemed perfectly okay shagging her best friend's sister and she wanted to jump out of her skin whenever she thought of him? Where she was hopelessly caught in the muggy in-between of wanting him and hating him so passionately, all at the same time?

His eyes flickered over her face. Something broke over the sternness and the barrier he was so good at putting up. She caught its blinding flashes, felt the heat of its glare: longing. Or something an awful lot like it.

"Why do you get to be happy," she asked, wanting to unstick the words from the bones in her throat, "and I don't?"

A beat passed in-between them. She waited for him to say something – anything. Slowly, she began to realize just how bare she'd laid herself. In his office. Over a stupid fucking memo. And just as she felt her sanity returning to her, with the proverbial fog of her volcanic emotional turmoil lifting, along with a certain kind of dread settling in at what she had done and exactly how much of herself she had shown, he had grabbed her in precisely the way she had warned him against doing, and he had kissed her.

Kissed her. Kissed her the way he had always kissed her in the past. Like they were still in the throes of war, as if they were still embarking on suicide missions, as if it – this – could end at any given moment. He kissed her like she was the end-all, be-all. He kissed her and her sad, fumbling brains went nuclear and he blew her willpower away into dust.

He spun her and pushed her against the edge of his desk, his fingers clawing at the buttons of her blouse. He ran his mouth down her neck, his hands greedily searching her. Her eyes, in a moment of sensory overstimulation, closed. Every part of her was humming, every current crackling and alive. He was a fever, and she could die from him right now and she wouldn't notice.

Her eyes jolted open.

"No," she said, struggling to find her voice, shoving him. Malfoy stumbled back, disheveled and out of focus. A brief wave of confusion rippled across his face. "No. This isn't happening. This can't happen. I'm-I'm leaving."

She couldn't spend another second in here with him. She quickly magicked the buttons back on her blouse and straightened herself out, before she headed towards his door. She was reeling – from the high came a devastating fall and that was where she was, now. She was suffering from whiplash. Her legs felt numb and she could feel her shame already creeping up around her, like weeds.

"Granger," he said.

She could feel the heaviness of the word. If she cut it open, right here, right now, it would drown them both.

She had heard enough people in her life call her by her name to know that he did things to her name nobody else could. Filled it. Gave it layers. Tangled it up and made her hate it then smoothed it out and made it feel warm and alive. Gave it a heartbeat. Made it worth stopping for.

She kept her hand on the doorknob, her back to him. "It's not like before, Malfoy. It's not just one-off fucks whenever we're sad or lonely or horny or need a distraction. This is different. There are consequences." She opened his door. "I'm leaving. Fire me, if you want."

She grabbed her things from her office, and exited the building.

Outside, turning into the sidewalk, she caught a flash of strawberry hair, heading towards the place she had just left.

Please review! And I may or may not have written this while listening to "Wrecking Ball" on loop. I can't even feel bad about it. It just sets up such a good atmosphere for some angsty goodness!