"Everything is fine," Hermione said. She pulled her hair out of the pony tail she'd tied it into and tried to smooth it back into an even tighter, even smoother knot. She could get this hair out of her face and under control because she couldn't work with it just hanging there and she needed to work. She needed to copy these files on the Carrows. She would copy every word and she would send them off to Molly and she would do what she was here for and then maybe she would have worth. Then maybe she would prove herself, redeem herself, justify herself.

Draco set a hand on her shoulder. He'd been hovering. He'd gone with her to get the day's papers, then stood over her and the way his eyes creased together into worry made her snappish and irritable. She didn't need someone watching her. She didn't need someone worrying about her. She was fine. Fine. She was Hermione Granger, the smartest witch of their year, and she could do things. That's what Harry had called her. He'd defended her that way. Hermione is the smartest witch of our year, he'd said. And she's a Muggle-born. And he'd trusted her to come over to this hell, to go through with this insane Death Eater trade, and find intelligence for the Order and she was going to keep up her end of that deal. She was going to find things and do things and Ron would be sorry he'd ever doubted her. He'd look at his beautiful, blonde, Veela wife with her perfect, smooth hair and their perfect, Veela baby and he'd realize he'd made a horrible mistake and then –

She would get this hair of hers under control. She tried pulling it back again.

"Let me," Draco said. He took the hair out of her hands with so much care she wasn't able to stop him. He had some sort of spell in his fingers, some magic she didn't know, and she sat stiff and angry as he gently coaxed her curls back into an immaculate pony tail and slipped the band over them. That done, he twisted one spiral around a finger. "I do love your hair," he said. "I think I'd sell my soul for this much life."

"It's just hair," she said.

"You try having fine, thin hair and see how you like it," he said. She turned and glanced up at him. That fine, thin hair had fallen into his face and he blinked at her through a veil of blond. "You can't do anything with it," he said.

"Blond is more attractive," she said.

His mouth quirked up. "Well, I am glad you've come to see my aesthetic value at last."

She could feel the heat rising into her cheeks. She hadn't been thinking of him at all.

"Of course," he went on, "I do burn. Malfoy family curse. I think I knew how to do sun charms before I could fly."

She scowled at him. "And I was thinking," he said. "We should go out."

"What?"

"You aren't a prisoner," he said. He settled one hand on her shoulder and continued playing with a curl with the other. He wrapped it around a finger, then unwound it. "Sitting around here, just copying these things, hiding away from the endless trooping visitors, that's not good." She knew she looked sullen and petulant and all sorts of resentful but she set her mouth against his idea anyway. He ignored that. "And I want to get out," he said. "Go dancing, maybe. Have a drink."

"It's not a date," she said. She knew she was capitulating but she wanted to make that clear. She was not going to date Draco Malfoy.

"Of course not," he said. He reached over and gathered up all the originals so he could return them. "I only go on dates with women who ask me out. I'm much too afraid of rejection to make the first move."

She snorted. "So, Pansy asked you to the Yule Ball?"

He'd tucked all the papers into a folder and turned to go but stopped at the door at that. "Would you believe me if I said yes?" he asked.

She sighed. "Yes," she admitted. She'd probably believe anything he told her.

"She cornered me under a portrait of angry unicorns who looked like they were about to run some princess through with their horns and informed me we would be going together," he said. "I'm not sure it counts as being asked, but -."

"Figures," Hermione said. "Dinner?"

"If we eat with my parents, we might lose the will to live," he said, "much less the will to go out to a club."

She knew that meant there would be guests tonight and the plan to escape into someplace loud with alcohol began to seem much more appealing. "Who?" she asked.

"Lord Yaxley himself," Draco said. "There's a dress code so look hot." Then he was gone and she twisted her mouth into what tried to be a frown but kept turning into a rueful grin instead. Look hot, he told her. She wondered what she'd find in the depths of her wardrobe that counted. Was it creepy to try to look hot using clothing a man's mother had purchased for you?

. . . . . . . . . . .

Hermione admired herself, twisting first to the left, then the right. It might indeed be creepy to make yourself sexually attractive via clothes a Death Eater's wife - and your date's mother – had bought, but she couldn't deny it had worked. She might not be a blonde wisp of a Veela but she wasn't an eyesore either. Black, black, and more black, everything on top as tight as she could make it, the skirts below twirling out in a storm of motion, desperate to escape the bondage of the laced corset. The diamonds at her wrist sparkled with the only color.

She'd picked flat shoes. She planned to fling herself into movement to escape it all and heels might look good but they hurt and she had enough pain to not need stilettos contributing more.

Narcissa smiled her politician's smile at the doorway and Hermione knew it wasn't fair but she wanted to rake her nails across the woman's face and scrape away every bit of her hypocrisy. The accusation you've always despised me, and you would have forever, but now I'm useful to you so you'll trade me for your son's freedom sat on the edge of her tongue until she swallowed it away, half choking, and smiled back. It wasn't Narcissa's fault she was on edge. Narcissa wasn't the one who'd traded her away.

"Have fun tonight," Narcissa said. "Be careful."

"You too," Hermione said automatically, then spit out a laugh. Be careful might be good advice, but no one had fun around Yaxley.

"They're always watching," Narcissa said a bit obliquely, then stepped back as Draco rounded the corner.

He was in black too – the Death Eater dress code – but he'd designed his own outfit to disappear into a crowd while she wanted to stand out. You hate me, she thought off toward Ron. Fine. I'll give you something to hate. She smiled slowly at Draco Malfoy, letting lips she'd painted as red as every wound she'd ever gotten on the battlefield curl up. "Are you ready?" she asked.

"Let's go," he said but she'd seen his eyes flicker with appreciation before he'd pushed it back down. She hooked her arm though his and smiled. Cormac had wanted her. He'd been stupider than any rock, but he'd wanted her. Victor wanted her still. He'd written letters past the point of safety, past the point she'd begged him to take care of himself and not get caught talking to a Phoenix.

Ron wasn't the only bird in the sky.

"Side along me," she said.

Draco quirked a brow up but nodded to his mother, walked with her out to the front drive, then said, "Hold on," and they were gone, sucked into a void where you saw nothing, felt nothing, needed nothing.

They fell back into reality outside a club off to one side of Diagon Alley. The door sat, tucked away between a shop selling pet supplies and a used broom shop. Hermione was quite sure the club itself used enough illegal extension charms it shimmered in constant danger of collapse.

If you were in a building charmed to exist via extension magic, and the magic failed, what happened to you?

If it happened, she supposed she would find out.

The bar was loud, filled with people, and pulsing with energy. Writhing bodies danced under magically changing lights and more pressed up against the walls, watching. The crowd at the bar was so thick every witch and wizard in London had to be here. She pushed her way through with a jab of an elbow here and hip thrust there and smiled up at the barkeep. "Fire whiskey," she said. "Neat."

He quirked an eyebrow up at that but poured her the shot without question.

"I'll have the same whiskey but add ice and water to mine," Draco said. "Malfoy tab."

"Done," the barkeep said, and by the time he returned with Draco's drink, Hermione was pushing her empty shot back toward him. "Another?" he asked.

She downed that, and then a third, and then strode her way back out toward the dance floor, Draco in her wake. The liquor had started to hit her and the burn it had left in a trail down her throat had turned to a warm glow. Screw this. Screw everyone. Screw everything. She could do what she wanted and she would.

Draco set a hand on her lower back in what might have been caution but it was too late. Rodolphus Lestrange had already seen her and was bowing over her hand with a courtly grace borne of an earlier era. His deranged, blood-purist parents had probably raised him on a diet of bowdlerized chivalry leaving him thinking this kind of absurdity was polite. "Hermione Granger," he said with a gleam in his eye. "How good to see you."

She was going to shake her hand free of his polluted, polluting touch when an idea stuck her. She moved in closer so her lips were at his ear and tried not to recoil from the too heavy scent of cologne. Subtlety was not Rodolphus' strength in any area including grooming. "Free Percy," she said in what, thanks to the pounding noise didn't even approach a whisper. She didn't care if it was reckless or stupid. Sometimes you had to act. "You want to help Harry? Prove it. Get Percy Weasley out."

When she pulled away from him she half-expected to see him grinning, delighted to have caught her in a trap. He was delighted all right, but her fear he'd turn on her became fear he'd fall at her feet in ecstasy because he had a task. He grabbed her and pressed his damp mouth first to one cheek and then the other. "I won't fail," he said. "We must put the Chosen One into place."

"And he needs his loyal friends," she said. She meant Percy but the words were no sooner out of her mouth than she saw Rodolphus assumed something different.

"And he shall have them," the man said. He seemed to consider kissing her again, then decided against it in favor of another bow over her hand followed by a dramatic twirl and exit.

She blinked and stared after him.

"That was interesting," Draco said. He'd moved up closer and pressed the long line of his Seeker's body against hers. Where Rodolphus bathed in scent, Draco had put on just enough that only a hint of it brushed against her senses as he moved his mouth to her ear. "Care to explain?"

She turned and smiled up at him. "Dance with me," she said. "We came here to dance."

His expression had the careful blankness of a man who'd seen too many unstable people, but he nodded and set his drink on a ledge and let her pull him to the center of the dance floor. Neither of them were good dancers. She hadn't been the kind of child who got picked to be Clara in the Nutcracker and whatever dancing lessons he'd had had probably focused more attention on flattering old ladies with a graceful waltz than a gyrating, sexualized pantomime. She didn't care. She flung an arm around his neck and pulled herself against him and laughed with the release of it all. Draco Malfoy. Who would have thought it?

The music seemed to time itself to the beating of her heart and the pounding of her veins and she couldn't hear anything but that, and couldn't think, and couldn't feel and Draco Malfoy was looking down at her with shuttered eyes as they swayed together and every angled line of his face had become beautiful. She lifted a hand and ran it along a cheekbone, then down the edge of one side of his jaw, and stopped with her finger on his pointed chin. Too thin. Too pale. Too so many things and yet also somehow perfect. She pushed herself up onto her toes and brushed her nose against his before she kissed him. On a face that sharp and hard you wouldn't expect lips to be soft but they were. They were soft and tasted of the same whiskey she'd downed and they parted ever so slightly under her mouth.

Then he wrenched himself away and stood, staring at her and breathing hard for a long moment before he turned on one heel and followed where Rodolphus had gone, out the door, away from the club, away from her.

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N – Many thanks to Salazars for beta reading for me.

I'm looking for a gay male beta/sensitivity reader for an original project. Please PM me if you are interested and have the time.