They didn't stop hanging out. Draco pushed for more time – the bits of space between classes, an hour before classes, and the time after them. He stopped asking why things were as they were or when they would change; and she never told him that she didn't have the time for him. He'd ask her to be somewhere and she was always there.
It didn't hurt because, as long as he didn't ask questions, she was back to her cheerful, easily pleased self. Always laughing more often than him, and usually at things that he meant to be mean but she took as jokes.
Maybe occasionally a shadow would cross her face if they got too close to something they weren't meant to, but he could always tease her out of it.
Things might have continued that way if it weren't for Zabini. He hadn't stayed in the Hospital Wing long, all things considered. Had been out in three days in the worst temper Draco had seen on him. It could have come to hexes again, but Nott smoothed the situation over.
"You overstepped your bounds," he told Zabini. "Malfoy and Parkinson might have over-reacted but you were out of line."
Zabini hadn't forgiven the attack, but he knew better than to retaliate when all of the major players in Slytherin were on Draco's side.
He settled for making caustic remarks, mainly about Bones.
It had the intended effect of riling Draco up, but he'd mostly come to terms with Bones being a coward. It was a flaw in her, but she accepted his flaws so he could hardly hold hers against her.
When the jibes ceased to have an effect on Draco, Zabini ramped it up to the next level.
"Naturally you can't think that she'd see anything in you," he drawled as they sat in the Slytherin Common Room late one night.
Draco had ten minutes before he was meant to meet Bones by the lake so he didn't pay much notice, dusting the shoulders of his robes off instead. He always kept her waiting, so it didn't matter if he was late. "Give it a break, Zabini." His tone was laconically disinterested, mirroring his feelings pretty closely for once.
Zabini's mouth quirked. "You made it ridiculously easy for her. Amazing how starved for attention you must have been to consider her an option, let alone a catch."
Draco smirked at him. "Are you continuing with this just to hear the sound of your own voice? Or are you hoping to put me to sleep and ruin my evening plans with Bones?"
Zabini's eyes narrowed, nose flaring. "You're the weakest link, Malfoy. The blood of your family will be on her hands. By the time she has done with them you will have wished her dead a thousand times over."
Bones had taken Draco down almost effortlessly in their duels, and she had stood her ground against Dementors without flinching. She was a warrior; and her side was directly opposite to that of his family. An ice shiver trailed the ridges of Draco's spine, but he merely straightened, stretching his arms and back. "As lovely as this chat has been, Zabini…"
Zabini's brows rose before he laughed in shocked disbelief. "You actually don't know."
Draco slanted him a grin before rising. "Perhaps I actually don't care." He headed for the doors that opened into the dungeon corridor.
Zabini snorted. "You don't care that your father killed your girlfriend's uncle, aunt and three cousins? Likely she feels differently."
Draco's heart froze. His hands clawed, nails biting into his suddenly clammy palms as he stumbled to a stop.
"I guess you're her best chance at revenge, however unpleasant the notion might be for her. I imagine she thinks about killing all of you every time she forces herself to kiss you."
Bones had never kissed Draco. He had kissed her once and she had pulled away like he had burned her.
"She's a Bones." Zabini's voice was sharp as frost. "Kill her, or she'll destroy you. That's what her kin do. It's what they have always done."
#
The driving rain lashed at the lake, breaking its usually smooth surface to fragments. The downpour was so heavy that Draco didn't see Bones until he was only metres away from her. She was standing on the dock with her back to him, body huddled in on itself to conserve heat as she watched the storm over the lake. Her wand was tucked in the crook of her arm, emitting a faint lumos.
He was twenty minutes late and she was shaking in the cold, but she had waited for him, as though… Draco shook the half-formed thought aside. It didn't matter.
He crossed the last few metres to her. Usually she turned at his approach, but today the storm covered any sound he might have made. He caught her shoulder and dragged her around. She let out a yelp of alarm, so small that it was nearly lost to the wind and the rain.
Maybe she caught a glimpse of the brightness of his hair in the low light or his grip felt familiar to her. Either way she smiled, eyes vivid even by wand light. Then she saw his face. Worry washed any trace of happiness from her expression.
"Malfoy? What..?" She moved in to him, fingers stretching out to catch the fabric of his robes. He'd forgotten to grab a cloak - hadn't thought about much at all after Zabini had dropped that bombshell.
He reared back from her before her fingers could connect.
She put her wand on the dock and shrugged out of her cloak. "You're soaked. What's happened?"
Ignoring the cloak she held out for him, he dragged a hand through his hair and watched her. "Put it back on. You've been out longer than me." His voice came out hoarse, clogged with emotion that he didn't want her to hear. Clearing his throat, he turned away from her and glared across the lake instead.
"You're more delicate than me," she countered, moving into his field of vision and shaking the cloak impatiently.
He laughed at that, a harsh, despondent sound. He was a thousand times more delicate than her. More perhaps. Her wand was still on the dock – out of reach and getting further away as she stepped toward him. As though she was completely oblivious…
"Get your wand."
Her eyes darkened and she tilted her head in confusion. "What?"
Pulling his own wand, he flicked the tip outward. "Accio."
Her wand flew to him and he tossed it to her.
Still looking confused, she tucked it into the pocket of her robes, tip upward so that they still had light. "What's going on?"
He stepped closer to her, wand still out. She didn't seem to notice, watching his face instead as though she was trying to decipher his expression. Her chin was already tilted up to him, body already angled to his.
He put his wand in her robe pocket, caught her upturned face with both hands and kissed her mouth. The cloak slipped from her fingers, pooling at their feet. Her lips were hot despite the chill of the night. He pulled away before she could. "Sorry." His voice came out guttural, too cold to sound sincere.
"No…" She shook her head, a little too vigorously, as though she was trying to shake the situation off. "That wasn't… I can't…" She gave up on words and rubbed her hands over her eyes.
"I get it." Draco's voice was sharp. He tried to soften it as he continued. "It's true, isn't it? My father killed your uncle, your aunt and their kids?"
Her hands froze before she lowered them from her eyes and stared at Draco. "How did you..?"
"It is true?" Draco had been hoping that Zabini had been wrong. That whatever this obstacle was, it was something smaller, something that could be overcome.
Bones looked away, squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. Water ran rivulets down her; making rivers of the lines etched deeply into her face, highlighting a pain that Draco couldn't begin to imagine.
He reached for her before dragging himself back, letting out a snarl – at her, at his father, at the universe. "Why didn't you tell me? Why leave me thinking..?" He broke off and turned away from her, rubbing the back of his neck with both hands. It didn't make sense that she would let him think that she was a coward rather than telling him that she was protecting her family.
"Why would I tell you?" she countered, throwing an arm out in exasperation. "Why would I do that?"
Draco stared at her. She wasn't scared of him – that wasn't it. Never once had she considered her safety around him. She had walked into the Forbidden Forest alone with him without telling anyone where she was. He had hexed her when her back was turned and she had turned her back on him again moments later. She never pulled her wand when he pulled his. If she thought that he would betray her to his father, she wouldn't have done any of those things. He sucked the rainwater off his lower lip. "Why leave me thinking that I wasn't good enough for you? Why not just tell me?"
"I'm not good enough." The wind and rain were sharp, but Bones' voice in that moment was sharper. "This was never about you."
"Of course it's about me." Draco threw his hands up in frustration. She hadn't been too ashamed of his House, or of his name. If he was any other Slytherin – or from a different branch of the Malfoys neither of those things would matter. "If I wasn't who I am – if I was Nott, or Zabini – none of this…"
"This has nothing to do with who you are!" Bones exploded. "I go on adventures with you. When I wake up terrified that my mum, my dad, my aunt, my sister will fall to the next war; I find you and drag you out. You have never once said no. You have probably the nastiest sense of humour that I've come across; and it kills me that I will have to live without it. I don't feel fragile around you…" She broke off and dragged fingers through hair that was too tangled. "If you were Nott or Zabini you would be so fucking easy to leave behind."
Draco scowled at her. Everything she was talking about was beside the point. "If I was Nott or Zabini – If I wasn't me…"
"You are not responsible for anything that happened to my family."
Draco snorted out a breath of disbelief. "My father is! If you'd told me that – don't you think I would have understood?"
"Understood what?" She folded her arms across her chest, eyes narrowing. Her face was tight with whatever emotion she was reining in, and she swallowed hard, as though gulping back a sob. "How is judging you based on your father any different than judging you based on your House or your name?"
He stared at her before dragging in a shuddering breath. She really didn't understand that what Lucius Malfoy had done tainted Draco. The person who raised him had destroyed an entire branch of her family. How the rest of her family must hate him…
That was it. It wasn't her reputation that she was worried about; it was her family. She didn't talk about them often but when she did, she sparkled. Everything about her was brighter – her eyes, her smile, the tone of her voice. Whatever she did, she would never risk losing them.
He reached out a hand, tangled his fingers in her mass of sodden tresses. Nothing would make this right. There were no words he could use, no habits that he could change; this reached deeper, right into his blood. He would never be able to have her – and that realisation made him recognise how much he had wanted to.
He should have let her go then, but these were probably going to be the last moments he had with her and he couldn't bear to be the one who pulled away. Let her make that final cut – she was stronger than him. "They'd never forgive you if they found out about this?" He wouldn't. If anyone touched his family, he would destroy everything on earth that they loved before he killed them.
She leant forward, pressing her face into him, shoulders shaking. "If I killed them they would forgive me." Her voice was muffled against the fabric of his robes. "They're my parents, Malfoy."
Draco stroked her hair. Her thinking always threw him. He could realign his assumptions more easily now than he had been able to when he'd first begun spending time with her. If she wasn't worried about their forgiveness, there was only one other obvious factor. "You don't want to hurt them."
Eyes wide, Bones pulled back to look at him. "Hurt them? This would kill them." She wrapped her arms around herself, hands gripping her elbows so hard they turned white. Shaking her head so sharply that water droplets went flying, she squeezed her eyes shut. "They've never asked me to do anything, but they asked me to stay away from you. I wasn't even eleven."
She had tried to obey them. Draco was the one who had chased her Potions partner away and gotten her into detention with him and blackmailed her into Hogsmeade. Before then he didn't think he'd spoken more than five words to her.
"I didn't want to." She bit the words out like they were noxious. "Even at eleven I knew it was wrong to write someone off for their father's actions. But I did it. It wasn't even just you. I avoided everyone in your House because I was worried that I'd end up speaking to you. I loved my dad more than I cared about doing what was right." She jerked away from him then, eyes narrow and as murky as the lake as she watched him. "I still do."
She said it like a confession. Like a sin to be tallied against her. The same tone she'd used when she'd told him that she was in Hufflepuff because she was a leftover and not because she had the virtues Hufflepuffs exuded.
I've wanted to talk to you a thousand times. That's what she had said to him, that day he'd dragged her to Hogsmeade. He could remember the haunted look in her eyes, the misery in her tone. He'd put it down to how bad-tempered he was being. But – It wouldn't have been that. She'd been apologising for never having given him a chance.
"Your father's not wrong," said Draco. He could barely breathe past the tightness of his chest, but he managed to keep his voice steady. He went on, because he knew that she wouldn't. "This ends here."
Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth to respond, but he spoke over her. If she protested – no matter how weak her argument, he would give in to it.
"It has to, Bones. He'll find out. Someone will tell someone else until it gets back to him."
She pressed her lips together and nodded once; movement jerky as though even that cost her something.
He stroked her cheekbone with the back of his knuckles. "Can I kiss you?" There was no controlling his voice on this question. It lowered, taking on a rough, husky quality that betrayed exactly how much this meant to him.
"You've kissed me twice," she said. "It's my turn."
It was the kind of light, sunny joke that she would usually make, but her words tripped over themselves, so breathless that he had to concentrate to understand them. Then she pushed up onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his; hot and inquisitive. The kiss was just like her; curious and unselfconscious, demanding but giving too. He could taste her tears in it; bitter against the sweetness of her mouth.