Draco waited almost two weeks before Bones' letter arrived. It was barely legible, but Draco had been subjected to Bones' handwriting before. It only took him a few minutes to decipher what would take most wizards an hour.
Am free noon Friday. Advise if suits.
Draco immediately cancelled three engagements and wrote back; Suits. There was no need to add more to his message. It would give her the impression that he cared, and that wouldn't do at all.
Last time too he had pretended fiercely not to care; and last time doing so had been just as difficult even if the motive had been different.
The third day of the Potions detention, she made him laugh. Not a cruel laugh directed at her and meant to hurt; a short, surprised burst of laughter that he regretted the moment it was out.
Smiling at him, she asked hopefully, "Did you like it?"
"Are you mental?" Residual laughter still clung to his words, making him sound good-natured. He tried to make his voice harder when he said, "You sounded like a chipmunk with a head injury."
She looked disheartened for a moment before brightening. "Maybe if I…"
"No," said Draco firmly. "You are not cut out for evil laughs. You're embarrassing yourself. Hell, you're embarrassing me."
"Huh," said Bones, looking thoughtful rather than offended. After a moment she started scrubbing the wall again.
The classroom was barely looking green at all any longer. Draco wasn't sure why he felt a pang of regret at the fact that these detentions would soon be over. With the Easter holidays about to start, he should have been elated.
It wasn't about her, exactly, Draco didn't think, but about the way he was allowed to act around her. He felt almost like a blank canvas with her; and she was waiting for him to fill in the picture. It wasn't that she had no expectations of him; she had misjudged him countless times, always giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming him nobler or kinder than he was. She expected him to be kind, so she believed him to be and he had failed to supply her with ample proof that he was not.
It was a relief; to not have to keep up that exhausting façade of hating and wishing ill on everyone who did not reach his ideals. In this, he was glad that Bones was a Hufflepuff. After all, who would believe her if she told anyone how he acted around her? Hufflepuffs were known for their trust and naiveté, Slytherins were known for their cunning. People would decide that Draco was playing with Bones for some reason, so there was no danger in this.
Still, she couldn't have the impression that anything about her – even her stupid Hufflepuff innocence – appealed to him. It would be mortifying.
By the time he spoke again she had nearly finished the wall she was on – the last green section left in the dungeon now. "So it's a Hogsmead weekend coming up," he drawled.
She jumped a little, clattering scrubbing brush loudly against the bucket before darting a startled look across at him. It occurred to Draco that this Hufflepuff might be so entirely Hufflepuff that she'd gotten carried away with the cleaning and had forgotten that he was even present. Leaning against Snape's desk and smirking at her as he was, he refused to fidget in discomfort. It was an entirely new and awkward feeling for him though, being forgotten, and he didn't like it at all.
She frowned a question and when enough time had lapsed to make it clear she had not heard what he'd said, he scowled at her and said flatly, "Hogsmead."
"Oh," she said, still frowning as though unsure as to what response he wanted from her. He realised a little too late that she might take the curt explanation as an invitation. "For Easter..?" she murmured finally, casting a hopeful look at Draco as though for confirmation that this was the topic they were on.
He laid aside his plans to scorn her to death for daring to assume that she was in any way good enough to date him and nodded abruptly instead. "I imagine you'll be going with Longbottom or Smith, or one of those other near-Squib gits."
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, but this time she reined it in and studied Draco with a pensive frown as though something had occurred to her and she wasn't sure whether she was right about it. Great, she'd decided he wanted to ask her out and he'd have to scorn her after all. "Draco," she said finally, tone cautious.
"Malfoy," he corrected sharply.
She leant back, eyes still fixed on him with the barest hint of a frown playing about her brow. "You know that witches don't need a wizard to ask them to Hogsmead in order to go, right? That law hasn't been around for centuries."
Draco stared at her. That was hardly the point. All he wanted to know was whether or not she was likely to be in Hogsmead and which day. Not that he'd go out of his way to find her, but if the occasion arose and he was bored with what he was doing he could always consider her an option. "So no one's asked you then?" he asked impatiently.
It was an easy enough question, but instead of answering, Bones' features coloured a slow-burn red. This time, Draco thought, it was his fault. One did not keep questioning another's romantic prospects unless they had interests in that direction too. Damn. Was there a stick handy to fight her off with..?
"That's not…" said Bones. "Personal, I mean. It's…I can't…"
Because she was stammering and evidently terribly uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going, Draco fixed her with an expectant look. "I'm sorry, what are you saying precisely?" he asked and was rewarded with a deeper blush sweeping across Bones' face. Hufflepuffs honestly had no defence mechanisms; obviously Draco should have left the angry Gryffindors alone and tormented them instead.
"I'm not…" Bones seemed to make a concentrated effort to find the right word and finally came up with, "available." She said it like a question, watching Draco closely as if to gauge whether it was acceptable.
Like a sheep to the slaughter. Draco tilted his head, frowning at her. "I don't really know what that means, I'm sorry?"
Looking trapped, Bones choked, "I'm not available..?" like a dying woman clutching at a lifeline and unwilling to let go even though it was proving unreliable.
Perhaps it wasn't clever to push when Draco was already worried that his considerable charms would overwhelm her poor Hufflepuffian brain but now that she was flustered, he couldn't resist. "Available in general or available for Hogsmead?" he drawled, tone decidedly bored.
Shifting as though desperate to be anywhere else, Bones said, "In general." She took a breath, smiled a little and said, "Parvati Patil says you flirt with anything on legs. But, for the record, I'm not available."
Draco tried not to gape at her in horror at having been accused of flirting. If she'd been a pretty Hufflepuff like Hannah Abbott he might have been tempted, but her? "Excuse me," he said coolly. "I was not flirting. You are considerably beneath my notice."
Her smile turned full-bloom at once; warm as always but there was a hardness to it that Draco hadn't caught before. He didn't think that it was something new, just that it was something he hadn't yet taken note of. He wondered how she would respond if she knew that all of those comments she was taking as jokes really were insults. There was an edge to her, so thinly razor sharp that it was barely noticeable; insults would probably shred themselves to bits on that before ever finding a mark with her. "Good," she said, and although her tone was carelessly amused, Draco detected some relief to it. He wondered who it was that she was with before realising that he shouldn't care at all about that.
He asked about it later anyway. It was awkward and embarrassing and he didn't know why a plain Hufflepuff's love life mattered at all to him, but he had to know. Curiosity, he assured himself. Curiosity as to which wizard would lower himself to that level.
"What do you know about the Bones'?" he asked Blaise Zabini casually at dinner. Zabini's languid gaze went across to the Hufflepuff table, swept over Bones and came back to Draco.
"Dark Wizard catchers," he said, with a shrug. "Her uncle, his wife and their kids were killed in the last war. If her aunt and parents aren't careful they'll go in this one."
"Evidently she's the same if she's that eager to join up with Potter and his band," said Draco somewhat contemptuously. "I assume that the wizard she's going steady with is against the Dark Arts too?"
Zabini straightened, a frown coming to his brow and, turning in his seat once more, looked across at Bones. Draco had thought that he'd been casual enough in asking about her, but perhaps not. It might have been smarter to go to someone less suspicious than Blaise, but he knew all the gossip and tended to keep up to date with wider politics too. "Didn't know she was with anyone," he said finally, the darkness in his tone suggesting that he didn't like being caught out of the loop. "Must be a recent development."
Draco might have asked why Zabini would keep such close tabs on a witch like Susan Bones, but remembered that she had been part of Potter's DA. With his mother as close to the Dark Lord as she was, Zabini kept an eagle eye on anything that might hurt her. "When you find out who it is," said Draco. "Tell me."
Zabini frowned, evidently trying to work out why Draco would want to know anything about the relationships of Susan Bones. Before he could ask, Draco smiled his knife-bright smile that promised faithfully that he was working on something unforgivably malicious. Zabini relaxed, smiling back, but a languid, more carefree smile. "You're a right prat, Malfoy. Go after the Gryffindors, at least they can take it."
"We're looking at a chain," said Draco, casting his gaze from the Gryffindor table to the Ravenclaw and then lastly to the Hufflepuff. "Which do you think is the weakest link?"
"She may be a Hufflepuff," said Zabini. "But she's also a Bones. I'd test my mettle against Hannah Abbott; her bloodline has no history of standing up to the Dark Lord." He smiled again, lowered his voice and murmured, "or Cho Chang; she's already broken."
"You don't think I'm capable of taking on Susan Bones?" asked Draco. He kept his tone superciliously flat as he was aware it got when he was offended, though he wasn't offended; he was meticulously setting up justifications to be seen with Bones. He didn't know why, but there was an opportunity and he wanted to take it.