24

Sunday – September 12th (cont.)

The cupboard door creaked open and Daphne Greengrass stepped out. Her blonde hair was tied up into a perfect chignon at the base of her neck, and she wore flawless charcoal gray robes over her form-fitting black dress. The rest of the boggart's form as the eldest Greengrass sister may have been beautiful but the obvious look of disgust on her face as she looked down her nose at Nicola was anything but. Her nose was curled up in revulsion and rather than stalking toward her as Greyback had to Hermione, the boggart took a step away from Nicola, as if it were in fear of being contaminated.

"You're disgusting. I told you to leave me alone! Why would I want anything to do with you after –"

"Riddikulus," Nicola said, her voice barely above a whisper. The form of Astoria swirled momentarily and then turned into a little girl, complete with a white nappy and blonde pigtails, who spun in a wobbly circle before falling and bouncing down onto her bottom. "Oof," the little girl said, as her diaper hit the floor with a soft plump.

For some reason, that sight seemed to affect Nicola in a way that the boggart's original form had not. She'd merely looked at her elder daughter as if she wasn't quite seeing her. She'd been fixated but completely dissociated from it, but now, with presumably an image of her daughter as a toddler in front of her, Nicola's tough exterior crumbled. Her face screwed up in pain before she buried it in her hands and turned her back to the faux-daughter in front of her. Walt silently waved his wand, sending the boggart back into the cupboard and clicking the latch into place.

They all took their seats and waited silently for Nicola to calm down. After a moment, her tears faded, and she wiped her eyes with the tissue that Susan handed her. Her eyes were splotchy and swollen from tears, standing out sharply against her ashen complexion.

"Would you like to explain what happened, Nicola?"

She scoffed at him in response. "I think that speaks for itself, Walt. Don't you?"

"No, I don't," he said calmly, despite Nicola's harsh tone toward him.

Nicola sighed, dropping her face away from Walt's penetrating stare. "My daughter wants nothing to do with me. I've already told you. All of you saw it yourself last Sunday."

"Nicola, do you think your daughter is upset with you because of what happened to you at Lestrange Manor?"

Nicola said nothing, but Hermione saw as a tear dropped from her downcast face onto the ash gray skirt she was wearing, turning the spot where it fell into a murky black.

"Do you think she's ashamed of you?"

"Why wouldn't she be?" Nicola said, never looking up. Her voice broke and her shoulders bobbed as sobs racked through her body.

"Nicola, you have nothing to be ashamed of. What happened to you at Lestrange Manor was not your fault."

Hermione realized that she'd never truly seen Nicola cry. She'd lost a stray tear here and there, but she'd always pulled it back in before actually allowing herself to truly let go. Now, she seemed broken in a way that Hermione had only ever seen in Nicola's memories.

"Have you ever talked to her about it?"

Nicola's eyes snapped up to Walt's, and in them Hermione saw fear. "No. No. Definitely not." She shook her head, clearing the idea from her mind, and continued. "I'm not sure we'll ever get back to that kind of relationship again."

Susan sighed and reached across the short space between herself and Nicola to take Nicola's hand in her own. "I think that perhaps Daphne just needs more time." She nodded kindly and offered Nicola a sad smile, squeezing her hand in comfort.

Nicola returned Susan's nod and dried her eyes with a tissue. There was a moment of silence before Walt looked between Draco and Parvati. "That leaves you two. Any takers?"

Parvati glanced toward Draco hesitantly causing him to stand up and straighten the cuffs on his white oxford. "I'll do it." Hermione's completely forgot about his lack of a wand until he pulled one from his pocket. It clearly wasn't his based on the conditions of his parole, and Hermione couldn't recall seeing this particular wand before. It was considerably shorter than her own and the one Harry took from Draco during their duel at Malfoy Manor. She and the others rose to return to the back of the room, leaving the center open once again, and Hermione lost all concentration on the nature of Draco's borrowed wand as he lifted it and wordlessly opened the cabinet in front of him.

Just like he always did, he appeared almost bored on the surface, but after three weeks of getting to know him substantially better, she picked up on the tells that she once would have missed. His left hand lay at his waist, his hand clenched into a tight fist, and the muscle in his jaw stood out sharply enough that Hermione could make out the exact outline across the side of his face from where she stood ten paces to his left.

The cabinet door creaked open and out stepped Lucius Malfoy. His platinum hair was shorter but still slicked back pulling it from the sides of his face the way he'd worn it the few times she'd had the misfortune of seeing him. He seemed a bit younger too, and his eyes were –

Hermione couldn't hold in the gasp that escaped from her mouth when she realized she wasn't looking at Lucius Malfoy at all, but an older version of Draco himself. She cut her eyes quickly to see the real Draco, his chest rising and falling quickly and his dark eyes never leaving those of the twin across from him.

As she watched, the boggart Draco curled his nose up in disgust, tilting his head back slightly to gaze down his nose at the real Draco in front of him. This look made the look the real Draco gave her prior to entering this room look like a smile in comparison. It was an almost identical expression to the one almost always on the face of his father, and the cane in the boggart's right hand cemented that Draco's fear was becoming his father.

"Mudblood swine," the boggart spat, with such vitriol that Hermione sat back quickly in her seat. He – it – hadn't even been looking at her, but the words stung, nonetheless. "Muggle filth," the boggart said, and in the same breath waved a hand across its face, covering it with a silver Death Eater mask. The boggart lifted the cane at its side and unsheathed the wand inside, before Hermione or any of the others who had jumped to their feet had a chance to speak, Draco straightened the arm holding his wand and shouted "Riddikulus!"

All at once the boggart spun in place, rematerializing as a large white peacock, complete with Lucius Malfoy's characteristic long white locks. Just like the gasp a few seconds sooner, she couldn't hold in the guffaw that busted out of her mouth then either. She quickly covered her mouth with her hand, just as the peacock began to prance around the center of the room, fanning its tail out in all its feathery platinum glory.

Draco turned away from it, the ghost of a smirk on his lips, and Walt sent it flying back into the cabinet with a flourish of his wand.

The group all returned to their seats, and unlike the rest of the guests who had all appeared distraught or at least visibly shaken by their interaction with the boggart, Draco looked satisfied. Relieved even. As if banishing the boggart was the same as banishing the fear itself. Hermione supposed that was what he was doing here all along, attempting to become better than the future that had been laid out before him.

"Draco, you handled that very well. That was …" The words drifted off, as Walt looked for Draco to finish the sentence.

"Me, yes." Draco looked toward Walt, nodding his head slightly condescendingly toward him.

"Tell us about that fear please."

Draco took a breath, seeming to resolve himself to his inability to get out of sharing, and said, "I used to really look up to him, but now I'd rather die than turn into my father."

Hermione was shocked that he was so forthright, but really there was no denying what they'd just seen. She chanced a glance toward Seamus, worried that he'd have something to say to send Draco retracting back into himself. Instead, she found Seamus looking at the floor, a look of confliction on his face, but he remained silent.

"Why is that, Draco?" Walt asked, nudging Draco to keep speaking.

Draco's face shifted from annoyance to anger. He was looking at Walt like the question was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. "Why? What do you mean why? Everyone here knows who he is. Everyone here has some idea of what he's done but that isn't even –" Draco stopped abruptly, clenching his teeth together sharply and looking away for a moment. He took a breath and closed his eyes. Hermione noticed when he opened his eyes again, they were completely devoid of the emotion she'd seen in them seconds before. She looked down at the wand still clutched in his hand and knew he was Occluding. She recognized the expression on his face as the same one she'd seen in Luna's memory of when she was abducted from King's Cross and from her own memory of Malfoy Manor.

She went back momentarily, focusing on the look of terror on his face and the way it had morphed into one of complete indifference as he looked down at her as she bled out on his drawing room floor. At the time, she'd thought it was because she was a Mudblood. She was beneath him. He had only seemed afraid because someone was about to die in front of him. That would be traumatic for anyone, wouldn't it? She had assumed that he'd been indifferent once the shock of it had worn off. The way his eyes shifted from the wide and wild-eyed frantic look of a terrified teenage boy to the appearance of almost triviality. In her mind, she half expected to see him look down at his nails in boredom, but now, looking at modern-day Draco sitting across from her with his Occlumency shields snapped shut, she knew he had cared that day, with her writhing on the floor at his feet. Otherwise, why would he have been Occluding. What did he have to hide?

"He's not the type of man that I want to be. He's not the type of man that I am," Draco finished, his words empty of emotion.

Seamus finally spoke up, and Hermione winced thinking he was about to start a fight, but what he said astonished her. "What's with the fucking peacock, mate?"

Draco's snapped toward Seamus, and he blinked a few times before smirking. "My mother and I used to make fun of him. Not many people knew him very well, but he was immensely proud."

"No? A Malfoy that's proud," Seamus said, sarcastically.

The whole room seemed to hold its breath, but Draco laughed and said, "I know. Shocking, isn't it? We had a dozen white peacocks, and we used to tell him that he fit in perfectly with them, the way he strutted around preening." Draco looked down into his lap, the smile vanishing from his face as he twisted the ring around his pinky. "He hated it."

He clearly was finished speaking, so Walt, rather than pushing him further, turned to Parvati. "That leaves only you, Miss Patil."

Parvati nodded and took a shaky breath as she stood, the others following in unison. They all stepped toward the back of the room, where Parvarti walked tentatively toward the cupboard. She pulled her wand from her shirt sleeve and shook both hands at her sides. She looked toward Seamus, and he nodded encouragingly, his lips turned into a half smile.

She stepped her right foot a pace behind her left and bent her knees slightly, causing Hermione to smile at the stance Harry had taught them all during their Dumbledore's Army training sessions.

She took one last breath, exhaling loudly through her mouth, and unlocked the cabinet. For a split second, nothing happened. As soon as Hermione began to think that perhaps the boggart had had enough, the cabinet door swung open wide, engulfing Parvati in a swirling smoky darkness. She was still distinguishable through the fog. Hermione could make out her outline as Parvati waved a hand in front of her face trying to clear the smoke around her. Parvati glanced behind her, looking for the reassurance of Seamus most likely, but from the look on her face, she saw only smoke.

Parvati turned back toward where the cabinet had been a second prior. Hermione wasn't sure if anyone else could see what Parvati was looking at, but she surely couldn't. The closer Hermione looked in the direction of the cabinet, the heavier the fog became. It swirled around the center of the room in varying shades of charcoal, black, and deep purple, completely hiding whatever it was stepping out, but Hermione could tell from the way Parvati took a step backward that something was there.

Seamus stood along with Walt, both raising their wands, but before either of them could speak, they heard a muffled spell shoot through the darkness, and the darkness was replaced with confetti raining down around them. Thousands of brightly colored bits of confetti reigned down onto their heads, getting caught in Hermione's lashes and littering Parvati's hair in the center of the room.

Walt flicked his wand toward the cabinet, and the confetti was snatched out of the air, off the places where it had landed, and thrown into the cabinet, the door closing sharply with a bang.

Hermione had never seen or heard of a boggart breaking into individual pieces like that before, but she remembered reading back in third year that the study of boggarts has been extremely limited due to the subjectivity of its form.

She started to take a step toward her seat but stopped when Seamus leaped across the table separating them from the center of the room and pulled Parvati into a tight hug. Hermione could hear him saying something to her, but the words were unclear, and she knew it wasn't something they were all meant to hear either way.

She smiled at the sight. No matter where she stood with Seamus these days, it was nice to see that they had both found some sort of comfort in one another.

The others sat down, as the two in the center broke their embrace and took their seats as well. Parvati smoothed her skirt down and dried her eyes with the tissue that Seamus handed her.

"I've never seen anything like that, Parvati. I'm not sure what you saw, but to us it seemed to be a room full of smoke. What did you see?" Walt asked.

"Nothing," Parvati said unsteadily. "There was only black."

Seamus twisted his fingers around hers and pulled her hand into his lap, engulfing her hand completely between his.

She swallowed and continued. "The longer I stood there, the darker it became, like night falling only it was heavy. I could actually feel it pushing in around me. And… I couldn't see any of you behind me, and… I … I was all alone."

"You're not alone, love. Never alone," Seamus said. She wouldn't have known he had it in him, this burly, wide-shouldered man whom Hermione had seen throwing back firewhiskys with the best of them and throwing punches after his temper had gotten the best of him. But here he sat, teary-eyed and unfazed by the onlookers, as he comforted Parvati, rubbing slow soothing circles into the back of her knuckles.

"Why do you think your fear was to be alone, Parvati?" Walt asked, drawing Parvati's attention back to him after it had strayed to Seamus's face.

"After Padma and Lavender died, I was all alone. My parents… they, they were grieving themselves, so they didn't hear me when… when I woke up with nightmares. I spent the first few months after the war was over by myself, and I… it was awful. I can't handle being alone at all anymore. It's," she shook her head and looked up to meet Walt's gaze, "oppressive. Overbearing."

"I think that's a very normal fear, being alone. Especially after losing someone who has always been a part of you."

Walt took a deep breath and shifted his gaze around the room. "I'm very proud of all of you. Each of you stood up to your own fear, what's more is you did it with an audience. I think you all learned something valuable about yourselves and one another, not just about what others have gone through but how each of you are trustworthy and able to be counted on in times of need. I've witnessed genuine care, understanding, and support toward one another from each of you, and that's a major improvement from only a few short weeks ago. I know this was a very difficult task, but each of you behaved admirably and courageously. I hope that you'll remember this as you move forward in your healing. The worst is over. The war is over. You are each well on your way to changing your future."

After they were dismissed from group, each of them heading to their own rooms, Hermione headed to the kitchen to boil some water for tea.

So that's where he got the wand? Hermione thought, as she saw him slip the wand he'd been using into Susan's hands right before he left the room.

Draco's outburst from earlier had pissed her off at first. How dare he insinuate anything about their … their what exactly? Their friendship? Their forced snuggling due to close proximity? Hell, you couldn't even call it that. She'd woken up to his foot in her sternum or her knees banging his. One would hardly refer to that as snuggling, and no one in their right mind would consider it wrapping around his legs, as he'd so crudely put it.

She supposed, if she were being honest, that wasn't exactly a lie, though it was definitely implying more than was actually going on.

However, after considering the possibility that jealousy and insecurity had caused his anger, she'd calmed down. Also, he'd been there for her last night, after her boggart confrontation had gone decidedly south. She felt like she had every right to be angry with him, but she didn't want to be. She wanted to try to repay the favor.

So, she made a pot of tea, and after putting a stasis charm on it, she shrunk the pot and two glasses in order to not rouse suspicion on her way to their normal nightly spot. She was halfway there before she considered the possibility that he wouldn't be there.

Maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe he wasn't jealous. Why would he be? The few instances where she thought she'd seen his eyes flicker toward her lips were typically when her thoughts had been slightly swayed by whisky. And, though he'd made it clear he didn't consider himself superior to her based on her blood status anymore, the fact still remained that they were leagues apart, both in caste and in just the world itself. By the time she'd actually made it to the art therapy room, she'd convinced herself that she was completely wrong and there was some other explanation to Draco's outrageous behavior following visits today.

She opened the door, half expecting to find the room empty, but instead she found him already sitting on his normal side of the couch. He never looked up, though she knew he heard the doors open. She strolled toward her side of the couch and pulled the teapot and cups from her bag, releasing them from their stasis and enlarging them to their normal size.

He glanced at her, his brows slightly furrowed, as his eyes flicked between her face and the magic she was doing to return their teacups to normal.

When she took her seat, sitting the teapot on the table beside her, she offered a cup to him. "Peace offering?" she asked, and the scowl on his face softened slightly.

They sat in silence, for a moment, before Hermione remembered what Harry had brought her. She sat her teacup down and stood, and made it halfway across the room, before Draco said, "Where are you going?" causing Hermione to smirk to herself.

He thought I was leaving, she thought, as she called back to him, "I found something a few days ago." She picked up the small black CD player atop the counter by the door and walked back toward the couch.

"I had Harry bring my CD collection after I found this." A few paces away from the couch she found the electrical outlet she'd been searching for and plugged it in.

Draco sat up and leaned over the arm of the couch to look down at her. "What's that?" he asked, nodding his chin toward the radio.

"It's a CD player, and these," she said as she pulled the black case from her pocket, "are CDs." She enlarged the case and pulled one of the discs from the clear protective sleeve. "Or compact discs. It's Muggle music. I thought it would help me with Occlumency, but really, I … sometimes it helps with missing my parents when I can listen to their music. Do you do that? Do you have music that reminds you of your parents?"

She realized she'd been rambling, and that Draco hadn't said a word, so she turned to look back up at him. He stared at her for a moment, the lamplight turning his white blonde hair almost blindingly so as it shined directly above his head. His face was completely in shadow, but Hermione could tell he was looking at her with a strange expression, as if there was a question he didn't quite know the answer to. Then, he just shook his head.

She stood and placed the small radio onto the table beside her coffee cup. Taking her seat back on her side of the couch, she began flipping through the discs. "What are you in the mood for? Something fun and upbeat, melodic and mellow, sad and emotional?"

"Surprise me."

She smiled to herself as she stumbled upon her mother's favorite album. She went through the motions of pulling it from the sleeve and getting it maneuvered into the CD player. She leaned her head onto the seat back behind her and relished in the sound of Freddy Mercury's voice. She imagined this was the first time Draco had ever heard Muggle music, so she wanted to start him off as epically as possible.

She remembered her and her mother, each with their hair tied up in bandanas, singing this at the top of their lungs as melodramatically as they could, Hermione using a broom handle as a microphone and her mother using a spatula. They'd put their heads side by side and belted, "Maaamaaaaaaa, ooooooooOOOOoooo! Didn't mean –"

"Quite depressing, don't you think, Granger," Malfoy said, pulling her from the memory of her and her mother, their sock feet sliding across the kitchen tiles as they gave her father a concert.

"Just keep listening," she replied, never opening her eyes.

When Brian May's first guitar solo started, she peeked through her lashes to see Draco leaning back the same way she was, staring at the ceiling with his mouth slightly agape. She smirked, thinking it's impossible to listen to Queen and not be in awe, even if you've never heard rock and roll before. She watched his face at the transition to the opera, and Draco looked comically surprised.

She bit back a chuckle as the song transitioned again and she closed her eyes to enjoy her favorite part. She remembered her and her mother dropping their "microphones" to their waist and playing air guitar as the song reached its crescendo, each of them swinging their hair in what could only have been a ridiculous interpretation of headbanging.

She was lost in her own memory as the song faded.

She opened her eyes and looked over at him. The music definitely had the desired result at least. He was no longer scowling, but the look on his face was of complete bewilderment.

"Is all Muggle music like that?"

She laughed, shaking her head and tucking a stray lock of amber brown curls behind her ear. "Absolutely not. Queen is far superior to most Muggle music."

She turned the radio down just as "Another One Bites the Dust" began playing. They sat in silence again, each of them drinking their tea, while the music hummed along beside them just loud enough to make out the words.

She picked up on Draco's foot tapping along rhythmically on the floor just as he said, "I like this one better."

"That album was met with considerably mixed reviews in the 70s, though it's quite the hit now." She paused to take a drink of her now lukewarm tea and added almost as an afterthought, "This was – is – my mother's favorite band."

As that song came to a close as well, she said, "You did really well tonight. With the boggart I mean."

"Thanks," he said and lifted his teacup to his lips. She waited for him to continue, and when he didn't, it was clear that he didn't want to talk about it.

She thought that he'd done his fair share of trying to help her, so again, she decided to be the first one to try to cross the bridge and get them back to the somewhat easy friendship they seemed to have fallen into.

"Ron, isn't my boyfriend, by the way." She tried to sound as nonchalant as he always did, and she kept her eyes focused on her tea, as if her heart wasn't hammering away in her chest at the thought that he might set her proverbial olive branch on fire and tell her she was stupid for thinking he cared.

There was a full minute of silence, wherein Hermione had to force herself not to fill it with her normal rambling about one thing or another just to rid the room of her nervous tension.

Finally, after she thought she couldn't last another second, he said, "Hmm, I would've thought you'd be engaged by now. Doesn't he need to get started early to carry on the tradition of having far more children than he can aff-"

The look she gave him effectively cut him off before he could finish the sentence, though it was obvious where he was going with it.

He shrugged. "Old habits die hard."

"Apparently, playing an integral part in saving the entire wizarding world has its merits. He can afford pretty much anything he wants these days." She took a breath and shifted her legs beneath her as she twisted, leaning her back against the armrest and her head on the back of the couch. "But no, we are not engaged or, as I said, together at all."

He turned to mirror the way she was sitting, except, instead of tucking his knees beneath him as she'd done, he stretched them out toward her and crossed them at the ankle.

"Why not?"

Was he really asking her about why she wasn't dating Ron? They'd talked about trauma. They'd talked about torture. But, for some reason, this normal conversation seemed the most far-fetched.

"We tried. After the war. It was…." She paused for a moment, trying to summarize what it had felt like to try and force something with Ron. She remembered sweaty palms and nervous laughs. She thought back to his hand in her shirt, his calloused fingers hot against her skin, and the way she'd frozen, panicking, and pushed him away. She remembered waking up after a nightmare to feel an arm wrapped tightly around her stomach and it wasn't until she'd punched and kicked and clawed her way away that she'd realized it'd been Ron's. She remembered him kissing the place behind her ear, and the moment his breath coursed over her neck she'd broken into a shaking, sweating mess, fumbling excuses and hiding in the bathroom until the tremors passed.

"Uncomfortable," she finished, swallowing back those painful memories. "We're just better as friends." Hermione tried to smile, but she wasn't sure if it came across as genuine. She tried to hide it behind her teacup but realized she was empty, so she turned to set it down onto the table behind her.

As she situated herself back into her seat properly, she thought back to the few nights she'd been patrolling after hours and caught Draco nestled into a corner or behind a tapestry with Pansy. She felt her face redden as she remembered the way they'd so freely been tangled around one another, Draco's tie undone, Pansy's skirt askew, hands dipping into each other's shirts. With a quick stab of pain, she wondered if she'd ever be able to have that with anyone, that easy comfortability, without dissolving into flashbacks and tears.

She realized he'd been staring at her, so she checked her features and leaned onto the back of the couch again. "I'm actually surprised you and Pansy aren't still together." She grimaced, hoping he didn't catch on to the fact that obviously she'd at some point found out that he and Pansy weren't, and she hasilty added, "What, with all the times I had to see that disgusting display."

He must not have noticed, as he chuckled and at least had the decency to look away as he said, "No, Pansy was just… a distraction."

A distraction? She should've pegged him for that kind of guy. His blowhard nature and pride should've been a dead giveaway. She knew Pansy wasn't deserving of any sort of pity, but the idea of any woman being looked at as just a distraction was appalling.

The look on her face as he turned back to her must've given away her thoughts, because he quickly corrected, "Let me rephrase. We were distractions. We had… an understanding. Whenever our home lives or our familial responsibilities became too much, we'd… lean on one another."

He seemed uncomfortable at admitting that he and Pansy were friends with benefits, so she tried to lighten the mood. "What a diplomatic way to say you'd shag to let off steam."

He laughed outright then and sat his own teacup on the table behind him. "Well, we didn't actually shag, but yes, that was the general idea."

That was news to Hermione. Granted, she'd never actually seen them shagging, thank Merlin for that, but she definitely found them partially disrobed and thoroughly entangled on enough occasions to know that they were surely well versed in knowing their way around one another's bits. She thought perhaps she'd just interrupted them before they'd gotten that far, but surely those weren't the only instances they'd snogged one another.

Then she remembered that he'd actually been engaged to Astoria before her death. Had he snogged her? Nicola had seemed to think that neither of them were too thrilled at having been affianced but did that mean they didn't like one another or that they just didn't want to get married. Those weren't really questions she could ask him, and besides, why did she even care?

I don't care, she told herself, but the small burning in her chest told her that was a lie. Gods, you're pathetic. She almost groaned before she could stop herself, but then his words pulled her from her self-deprecation.

"Potter then?"

Confused, she asked, "Potter what?"

"Are you dating the savior?" He looked down at his ring. The way he asked would have indicated that he didn't actually care, but then he began twirling it around.

Her laugh rang through the air, causing him to look up. She didn't mean to laugh, and she surely didn't want him to think that she was laughing at him, but the idea that she'd be dating Harry was just completely ludicrous. Honestly, her mother had asked her dozens of times since she and Harry had first become friends, and she was sure that many people expected it as they got older, but the idea had never once crossed her mind. She could honestly and objectively say that Harry was an attractive man, and he was easily the most caring and understanding person she'd ever known, but it would be like dating a brother. The idea caused her to wrinkle her nose in disgust.

"Absolutely not! He's with Ginny Weasley, and besides, he's like a brother to me."

She scooted down further on the couch, stretching her legs out too, before noticing that his brow was furrowed as he looked down at his hands. She started to ask if something was wrong, but he spoke first.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that to you after the visits earlier."

"Why did you?" she asked before she could stop herself.

He looked up, his features guarded as he searched her face. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead, before saying, "I was angry. I could hear what they were insinuating, that I did that to you." His eyes dropped to the bruises that dotted her neck. "I know who people expect me to be. It isn't just your friends. It's the whole world, but I forget it sometimes. Here, where it isn't always in my face. Hearing them talk about me…" He pulled his legs up, planting his feet firmly on the couch and resting his arms on top of his knees. He turned his face away, looking out the window behind their couch, and swallowed. "I didn't like the reminder."

She leaned up to reach across the couch and placed her hand in his. They'd touched one another before, a hand across the other's arm comfortingly or grabbing the other by the forearm to stop them from walking away, even touching the other's face at times, but somehow this was different. She put her right hand into his, twisting her own in between his long fingers just as Seamus had done with Parvati earlier. She didn't let go as he turned back to face her, his eyes flitting quickly to their hands before moving back up to her face.

"You went inside before you heard the end of the conversation. I told them that I trusted you." She offered him half a smile and said, "Your past doesn't determine who you are, Draco. Neither does the rest of the world. You get to make that decision. And you did tonight when you cast that boggart away without even blinking."

She realized she'd stopped speaking and still held his hand in hers, so she let go and pulled back to lean against her side of the couch again. She blinked a few times, hoping he didn't notice the blush rising up her cheeks. The warmth in her face wasn't enough to counter the clear coldness that was left in her palm without the warmth of his hand pressed inside it.

He was looking at her strangely, like he was afraid somehow, and she thought surely, she'd offended him. Her first thought was her dirty Mudblood hands touching him, and then she shook the thought from her mind. He'd already addressed that multiple times, saying that wasn't how he looked at her, but the look on his face said he definitely didn't want her touching him. So, why didn't he pull away?

"Sorry, I… I didn't… I'm going to go to bed, I think. I –"

"You don't want to sleep here again?" he interrupted.

She stopped, one foot on the floor, one foot still curled beneath her, and turned her upper body to face him. He had stretched his legs out again, and was leaning forward, one hand lying flat on the couch as if he'd started to reach for her. She didn't want to leave. She definitely didn't want to spend a sleepless night tossing and turning in her bed and the alternative, yet another nightmare that would send her spiraling into a panic attack, sounded even more terrifying. But, after the way he looked at her now, after she'd wrapped her fingers around his, and after what he'd said to her earlier tonight, a look of clear resentment on his face as he snarled I'm sure your boyfriend would really love to hear that you spend your nights wrapped around my legs then, wouldn't he, she didn't think she wanted to face whatever was to come of this. She knew from the burning in her chest when she thought about him kissing Pansy or Astoria earlier that she'd started developing some sort of feelings for him, though she was sure it was nothing more than their forced close proximity, but she certainly didn't want to be on the receiving end of that look when he figured it out and said worse than that to her. She remembered the way it hurt when he'd said over a week ago, I'm not here to make friends. She wasn't sure she could handle another one of his mood swings. She realized with a stab of self-loathing that she was blinking back tears yet again.

You really are pathetic.

"I, um…"

"It helps me sleep too," he said.

She looked over at him again, saw the way he was looking at her, like he genuinely wanted her to stay, his graphite eyes boring into hers as he licked his lips, and she knew she wouldn't leave.