Disclaimer: all characters and the wider wizarding world belong to J. K. Rowling.
Hermione raced back to the common room and dragged Ginny from Harry's lap, up the stairs to her dorm room, before warding and silencing the door.
"Hello to you too," the younger witch ventured. "What's got your wand in a knot?"
Hermione took a deep breath and sighed.
"Draco Malfoy."
Ginny tried to contain her glee, but she barely managed not to squeal with joy. She plopped down on the bed and proceeded to tap the space next to her until Hermione joined her, though frankly, she was too agitated to sit still.
"So, come on then, spill."
Hermione wrung her hands together.
"There's not much to spill, before you get your hopes up."
She explained at length the goodbye at Christmas and the fact that every time she'd looked his way since - in the prefects meeting on the train, in the great hall, in class - he'd been looking at her too. She told her about the astronomy tower and the patronus project and the extra training and finally about the chaste kisses to the cheek that had her so flustered.
"Just on the cheek? Blimey, Hermione, I know you were with my brother and that's gross and all but I didn't think you were still at cheek-kisses-are-exciting."
Hermione swatted her on the arm even as she blushed crimson.
"Don't be crass, you know the only reason I didn't share any details of my summer was because he was your brother - and because Harry is like my brother and any reciprocation would not have been appreciated."
After much eye-rolling and snickering later, Ginny asked the all-important question.
"So, do you really like him?"
Hermione groaned and hid her face in her hands.
"I don't know, Gin! That's the problem!"
Ginny roared with laughter.
"You do like him! Bloody hell, Mione, ferrety, bad-boy, brooding Malfoy!"
Another bout of groaning was interrupted by a tapping at her window. Hermione and Ginny shared a look before they went to the window and discovered Harry and Ron hovering on their brooms. They threw open the window and the two flew in and touched down.
"The wards!" Hermione screeched, but Ginny smirked.
"They only work on the stairs."
Ron looked a bit disgusted and Harry had the good sense to look sheepish before they dissolved into laughter.
"We were worried, Hermione," Harry explained. "You're back late from dinner and you storm up here with Ginny? What's going on?"
Hermione looked nervously at Ron and he shuffled his feet a bit.
"Look, I've been a right fool and I know it. if it's about Malfoy I can handle it - I'd rather be here for you, Mione, than left out."
Hermione's eyes glistened just a little as she hugged her best friend.
"So it is about Malfoy, then?" Harry ventured.
Ginny took the lead explaining everything, making her opinion of Ron's outburst in DADA painfully clear. Hermione sat cross-legged on her bed, interjecting every now and again when the other girl got carried away or exaggerated some small detail. When she was finished, they all sat around the Head Girl's room in silence.
"So, you really like him, not just as a social justice project, then?" Ron offered.
Hermione nodded. She couldn't make eye contact.
"Are you," he cleared his throat, swallowing the lump that had formed there, and tried again. "Are you falling for him?"
Hermione thought about it for a moment, but the silence seemed to be answer enough.
"Bloody hell, Mione, you are."
"She didn't say that!" Harry attempted to mount a defence, but Hermione caught his eye and a strangled noise escaped him as his eyes bulged.
"I like him," she offered. "I know he can be cruel, and he's spoilt, and he made terrible choices, but I don't know what I'd have done in the same situation."
"No, come on Hermione," Ginny exclaimed. "It's not like you'd have gone death eater - they tried to kill you how many times?"
"Because of an accident of birth, Gin," Hermione explained. "I obliviated my parents and sent them away while I fought a war. I don't know what lengths I'd have gone to to protect them if they'd been a dark wizard and his aristocratic wife instead of muggles.
"None of us had to make that choice."
Ron blanched. For seven years Hermione had been right about - well, pretty much everything - and he had a horrible taste in his mouth as he considered her words, echoing what Bill had said only a few days earlier. They'd done illegal, questionable, and downright dangerous things to protect their loved ones, safe in the knowledge that they were fighting the good fight. But what if they hadn't been? Ron swallowed back bile.
"We disguised a ghoul as me," he mumbled. "Anything to try and protect mum and dad."
Harry looked around awkwardly, he realised this was something he didn't have a great frame of reference for, but at the same time he knew what it felt like to try and protect the ones you loved. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. It was one thing to offer the hand of friendship to someone who repented, it was another to accept their choices might have been your own if the circumstances were different.
"Before we get ahead of ourselves here," Ginny interjected. "How does the ferrety bad boy feel about you?"
More groaning and eye rolling ensued.
"I don't know, Gin!" Hermione exclaimed, falling back on her bed with a sigh. "It's not like I've got a lot of experience in this field."
Harry and Ron snickered until a look from Ginny silenced them.
"There was the Christmas gift…"
Hermione stared daggers at the younger witch from her pillows. She'd deliberately hidden the mortifyingly expensive gift from the boys, knowing that Ron would blow up and Harry would be awkward and ask questions she didn't want to answer. Ginny ignored her, withdrew her wand, and cast a quick accio, and the very fancy quill flew from Hermione's underwear drawer to her hand.
The boys let out a low whistle.
"That's not a gift - that's a fortune!" Harry exclaimed.
"Oh, shut it Harry, it's just because he's incredibly old money and he thinks nothing of giving gifts that cost more than my parents earn in a month. Another strike against him, frankly."
Ron was surprisingly quiet, and Hermione was worried their temporary truce was about to explode with an outburst from him.
"My dad took me aside once," Ron began quietly. "I think he did it will all of us boys at one point or another. Told us that we didn't have much, and all that - I told him it didn't matter - but he said that when the time did come, we still had some Prewett and Weasley trinkets for the girl of our dreams. But he insisted we weren't allowed to see them before, or know where they were kept, because-"
He sighed and nervously rubbed the back of his neck. Hermione realised she'd been holding her breath.
"Because you don't give a diamond until you're ready to marry the girl."
The air was heavy with silence. Hermione was the first to shake off the shock and laughed.
"That's ridiculous - it's a quill! Draco didn't propose, this isn't the eighteenth century, I cannot be bought with a sparkly trinket and I'm not even sure those are real diamonds!"
"They're real, alright." Harry piped up, shocking Hermione into silence and earning him some surprised looks in the same instant. "What? My Aunt Petunia had me clean her jewellery. Turns out Uncle Vernon was something of a cheapskate and I can tell a real from a fake pretty well…"
"Well this just got interesting," Ginny added with a smile.
Hermione stood up and folded her arms.
"This is preposterous!" She huffed. "He is just a friend - yes, a friend that I like - but that gift doesn't mean anything more than a reiteration of the fact that he is appallingly rich, but if you all feel so strongly about it I'll ask him about it tomorrow."
"And then what?" Ron asked, eyebrows disappearing into his hairline.
"Well, either he will deny the diamonds are any kind of symbol of commitment, probably laugh himself sick at the idea of the two of you reacting to them, and we'll all go back to normal. Or he won't."
"And then what?!" Harry mimicked his friend.
"Well," Hermione thought for a moment. "Well then I'll have to politely return the gift."
Not that she wanted to return it - it was a beautiful quill, and it wrote smoothly in any colour she could think of. Plus she didn't like returning gifts, it wasn't very polite.
"On the plus side," Ginny interrupted her thoughts. "At least then you'll know if he likes you back…"
Hermione swatted the girl with a pillow, and they all dissolved into fits of giggles as she shooed them from her room.
Hermione lay in bed after her friends had left and thought over how the evening had turned out. She certainly hadn't expected the kiss on the cheek, but finding out that she might have inadvertently accepted Draco Malfoy's suit because of a Christmas gift was absurd. Or was it? It was going to take a lot of reading to get to sleep tonight.
When Draco swept into the common room he tried to school his features to their usual mask of indifference but the Seventh Years who were gathered in the most desirable chairs by the fire were quick to pick up on his cheerful disposition.
"Evening Draco," Theo drawled, looking up from his Arithmancy homework with a smirk. "Productive evening, studying hard? Earn any extra credit?"
Greg looked on confused.
"Why does he need extra credit, he's nearly best in the school, isn't he? Only Granger's on top of him."
Blaise promptly choked on his butterbeer. Greg looked on more confused than ever as Pansy took pity on her ex and smacked him on the back a couple of times, purely for his own good, she told herself.
"Well, Drakie?" She asked once he'd calmed down. "Stick it in the mudblood yet? I wonder if it'll drop clean off from just one-"
The wand in her face promptly silenced her. Daphne, Tracy, and Millicent all gasped and moved further away from the action. There were still a few younger years in the common room, but they knew when to keep their heads down and see nothing.
"Don't make me tell you again, Pansy. You need to control that mouth of yours."
Pansy paled. As much as they'd been friends for years, she remembered what he'd been like when he'd been marked, what he'd done, what he'd been forced to watch. Only an idiot could forget he'd been a Death Eater, fully admitted to the company of Lord Voldemort himself. She swallowed slowly.
"Drakie, I thought it was just to clear up your name. I don't understand, you don't really like her, do you?" She whispered.
"Draco," Blaise warned. Draco's concentration broke and Pansy fled to the girl's dorm with Daphne at the others on her heels.
"Dorm. Now."
Blaise led the four boys back to their dorm and warded and silenced the door.
"Draco, we need to talk about this," he began.
Draco stormed to his bed and flopped down.
"I don't really want to talk about it, Blaise."
He tried to remember the happy feeling he'd arrived in the dungeons with, but it had swiftly and thoroughly retreated. Much like Pansy.
"Well that's tough because we're talking about it," Blaise added, sitting on the end of Draco's bed. He kicked him but the git wouldn't move so eventually Draco gave up and allowed him to stay.
"Are you using her to clean up your reputation?"
"Blaise-"
"No, Theo!" Blaise stood to face down the shorter wizard. "We all agreed to work hard to fix the reputation of both our house and our families this year. We deserve to know whether this prick is going to ruin it all for a quick roll in the hay with the fucking Gryffindor princess!"
"Watch your mouth Blaise," Draco warned.
"No, I will not watch my fucking mouth!" Blaise countered, rounding on the blond who was still lounging on his bed, a study in nonchalance, even if his friends knew how forced it was.
"Either he's fucking her because he thinks a quick fling with one of the golden trio will redeem him in the eyes of society, which does fuck all for us, or he's fucking her to get one up on Potter and Weasley by shagging the girl and leaving her destitute, which sets us all back," he explained to Theo, turning back to the subject of their debate.
"But the way you've been defending her, spending Christmas making nice with your blood traitor aunt and half-blood cousin for the sake of your mother - Granger's doing, I assume?" The blond ignored him. "And the way you jumped down Pansy's throat...you actually like her, don't you?"
Draco stared at his so-called friend. He didn't know how he felt yet and he certainly wasn't ready to discuss it, let alone defend it to his friends.
"You do, don't you?" Blaise concluded. "Dammit Draco, you're going to fuck this whole redemption thing up for all of us for some doe-eyed, filthy mudblood."
Draco's wand was at Blaise's throat before he'd even finished the last word.
"Draco don't do anything rash," Theo argued.
"Rash is what he does best, Theo, don't be fucking delusional!" Blaise winced as Draco jabbed his wand further into his neck. "Mud- Muggleborn or not, Granger is a war heroine - she is never going to fall for a guy who fought for the other side. How could she possibly end up with a bona fide, branded villain of the piece? Your dad tried to fucking kill her, I mean - Merlin's bollocks, the incident with your aunt!"
"Come on Draco," Theo pleaded, as his oldest friend dug his wand tip a little deeper. He was shaking from the effort of restraint, and Blaise tried to look nonplussed but the sheen of sweat on his face gave him away. "It's not like he knows Hermione like we do, he hasn't spoken to her, he doesn't know her character, Drake. Let the bastard go and we can all go to bed and forget this ever happened."
Greg shifted uncomfortably in the far corner of the room, furthest from the violence and Draco's eyes flitted to him. His friend was cowering - from him, he realised. He dropped his wand and stepped away from the wizard pinned on the bed. His chest was heaving, and he could feel sweat beading in his hairline.
"Fuck!" He screamed as he stormed to the bathroom and shut himself in a shower stall. The other boys pretended not to hear his anguished crying over the running water, and they were all in their beds with their curtains drawn by the time he re-emerged from the shower.
He lay in his four-poster bed; curtains shut against the rest of the world and ran over Pansy and Blaise's words again and again.
If it were this difficult to get his friends to leave Hermione alone - and he wasn't even sure what she was to him at the moment - how difficult would life be if they did try something? Why would she want to do that, to go through so much difficulty for a monster like him - a "bona fide, branded villain" who scared even his oldest friends.
He cast a quick silencing charm before the tears lulled him into a restless sleep, filled with nightmares and memories of snakes, revels, and death.
