Disclaimer: all characters and the wider wizarding world belong to J. K. Rowling.
The following morning, Hermione arrived early to Arithmancy and sat in her usual spot. The two Slytherins arrived late and sat down silently, robbing Hermione of her chance to ask Draco about the quill which had been burning a hole in her bag since the night before. She worked out that they wouldn't share another class until Defence after lunch and she didn't want to wait that long, so she scribbled a quick note and passed it to Theo.
Theo was still reeling from the events of the night before. Damn Blaise and his need to turn this into a power play - hadn't enough of their formative years been ruined by the war? Could they not just have a year of being school kids, flirting with whoever they wanted? Merlin knows Theo wanted nothing more than to be - as the muggles said it - out of the closet for good, but Slytherins could use that information against you. He was only momentarily annoyed when he realised Hermione Granger knew his secret - you could trust a Gryffindor with that sort of information.
Theo barely flinched as Hermione slipped a note into his hand under the table. She was not remotely subtle. For a woman who broke into Gringotts disguised as the woman who tortured her, she was an easy read. Or maybe it was just Draco that made her like that.
Theo - please ask Draco to meet me before lunch. He'll know where. Thanks, H
He nodded nearly imperceptibly and tried to keep the grin off his face. He should have made a bet with Blaise - probably would have if it hadn't been quite so tense in the dorm after Draco stormed out. Secret rendezvous in the middle of the day? It didn't matter that Draco was smitten, this girl was falling and falling hard. He tucked the note into his pocket and went back to half-listening to the lesson.
He caught up with Draco, who was powering to the boy's dorm faster than Theo could realistically walk, as lunch began.
"Drake - slow down!"
Years of friendship stopped him in his tracks - he really didn't want to talk to anyone and was looking forward to locking himself away until his next lesson. If it had been anyone else, he probably could have ignored him, but Theo was different.
"What do you want, Theo?"
The smirk on Theo's face was a clue. He reached into his pocket and removed a small slip of parchment.
"Blaise is a fucking idiot."
Draco took the note, making sure not to react as he read the familiar scrawl. The corner of his lip slid up into the smallest of smiles.
"What are you waiting for? Go get the girl."
Theo's laughter followed his friend down the corridor as he sprinted to the familiar classroom and, checking the coast was clear, slipped in the room and locked the door behind him.
Hermione looked up as the door opened. He was slightly out of breath like he'd run all the way from the dungeons - which he may well have done, she realised. She wondered briefly what that meant, was he so excited to see her, or was he just running late?
"Granger."
"You got my message," she replied, somewhat uselessly. "Obviously. Sorry, I'm a little flustered."
Draco simply smirked in response, he was quite enjoying Hermione Granger flustered, particularly as he guessed he was the cause of that. He wondered if he could get her this flustered again.
"Look, I need to talk to you about this."
She fished around in her bag and withdrew the black pen case he recognised from Christmas. He kept his face impassive, people tended to talk to fill the silence if you let them.
"I was talking to, well, to Ginny to begin with, and then Ron and Harry crashed - somewhat literally - and, well, that's not important. I was talking to them and they said something about, well, diamonds."
"Diamonds?"
She considered his face. He was obviously trying not to react, but she could see the amusement in his eyes.
"Oh, this is ridiculous!" She huffed, removing the pen from its case, and holding it out in front of her. "Are these real diamonds?"
"Is this some rude muggle thing that I'm not aware of? Because generally witches don't ask wizards whether or not their gift contains real jewels."
She made a rather unladylike noise of frustration and he smirked as he quirked an eyebrow.
"I am not trying to be rude," she managed through gritted teeth, taking a deep breath to calm herself before continuing. "I'm really not, I just wasn't sure what the correct protocol was and the friends I have who grew up in a magical family seemed to think that a wizard gifting diamonds to a witch was significant. So, I'm asking you if these are real diamonds."
"Fine, Granger, don't bite my head off. Yes, they're real." He shook his head as if he couldn't believe he needed to point this out. "Nobody would expect any less of a Malfoy."
Her eyebrows knitted together as she considered his answer. As per usual, there was nothing in his words or tone to give away how he really felt.
"Ok, well, do they have any significance?"
He quirked an eyebrow, urging her to continue. He wasn't sure where this was going but he hoped he could get her to lose her cool again. She huffed again, clearly disappointed that she was going to have to elaborate.
"Like I said, my friends who grew up in magical families seemed to think it was significant. Like, well, not an engagement, but a betrothal, an understanding of sorts, I suppose."
Draco schooled his features into a passive mask. Blaise's words from the night before were repeating in his head and he tried to block them out. He knew if he just kept his temper under control and let the silence continue, she would desperately fill the void with more words, and maybe explain what she meant.
"Which is preposterous, and frankly, disgusting because this is not the eighteenth century and I am not some maiden who can be bought with a sparkly bauble, and anyway, we aren't even-" she cleared her throat and fiddled with the pen in her hands. "I mean - I'd think if you were looking to, well, it would have to be with someone you actually liked, and, well, I'm not, I mean-"
She stopped herself and tried to read anything in his face, but he seemed to have shut her out completely.
"It's not like you're trying to trick me into anything I wouldn't understand because I wasn't born into a magical family, right? Because that would be, frankly, sickening-"
Draco reminded himself to breathe. He had bounded here with a smile on his face, ready to prove Blaise wrong and to shove his growing friendship with Hermione in his smirking face. Now all he could hear was Pansy and Blaise mocking him for his feelings, his father telling him he's not good enough, the Wizengamot and strangers in the street judging him for the mark on his arm.
Granger telling him that an understanding with him would be sickening.
He knew he was overreacting, but he had to push her away before she could twist the knife one final time and reject him. He was a Malfoy, after all, and he'd had more than enough rejection of late.
"It means nothing," he huffed out, his knuckles whitening as his hand tightened on the strap of his bag. "You needn't worry your frizzy head about it, Granger, I wasn't trying to trap you into anything. I'm sure when the time is right my mother will have an iron-clad contract written up with some simpering pureblood girl a few years my junior who knows exactly what she's getting into. I may be a Death Eater but I'm still Sacred Twenty-Eight so I should be something of a commodity. No need to get your knickers in a twist, Princess."
Hermione paled. She knew he could be cold and cruel; she knew he did it to protect himself. She even knew, deep down, that he didn't mean to hurt her, he just wanted to deflect the hurt he was feeling from her clumsy attempt to clarify the situation.
But all that logic and reasoning got shoved to the back of her mind and she saw red.
"Well, I'm glad we cleared that up," she replaced the pen in her bag as quickly as possible, her hands shaking with barely suppressed rage. "For all that you snakes call me Princess, I'm not actually good enough for the Prince to sully himself with. Good to know."
She marched to the door, unlocking it with a wave of her wand, too flustered to attempt wandless magic at this point. On the threshold of the doorway she turned back to the blond wizard who had yet to move but whose eyes had followed her progress across the room.
"And don't for one second think you had any effect whatsoever on my knickers, Draco Malfoy!"
Some second years were stunned to silence in the corridor as she stormed out. She knew she should be mortified but she was too angry to care. She skipped lunch and went for a long walk outside. She realised she was going to have to calm down enough to share a classroom with the Slytherins in the afternoon.
Draco sat down in the Great hall with as much force and anger as he could muster.
"Well, how did it go?" Theo asked, not looking up from his book.
"Not now, Theo."
Theo's dark eyebrows knotted together as he carefully marked his page and turned to his oldest friend, who seemed to be staring at his lunch so intently as to make it spontaneously combust.
"What the fuck did you do? She was all sweetness and light this morning so you must have done something."
"I said not now," he ground out.
Pansy interrupted them with a giggle and promptly sat opposite them with a huge smile on her face.
"Haven't you heard, Theo?" she squeaked with delight. "Drakie here has finally broken up with her."
"The way I heard it she broke up with him because of her underwear," Daphne added. "Although I always suspected she'd be a sensible granny-pants kind of girl so I'm not sure where they fit into the story."
Draco was shaking with the effort of remaining calm, his knuckles white as he gripped his pumpkin juice.
"A little sooner than I expected, I'll admit," Blaise interjected, helping himself to some bread in front of Draco. "But you have to admit, I told you so."
"Piss off, you wanker!" Draco hissed as he left the table and stormed out. The whispers of the lower years followed him out, only adding fuel to the rumours.
Theo watched sadly, but realised his friend probably needed to cool off before he approached him. He had no doubt whatever this was, Draco and Hermione would get over it.
"You're wrong, you know."
Blaise quirked an eyebrow but indicated for Theo to continue.
"You're wrong. She's into him, and if you just paid attention, you'd see it. I bet you 20 galleons if you looked for it, you'd see the unresolved tension between them. It's bound to happen, whether Pansy here accepts that or not."
Theo gathered his things and headed for the door, leaving the rest of the seventh year Slytherins in stunned silence.
Hermione walked outside until the end of lunch, feeling the anger and hurt seep from her body with each step. She slowly made her way back to the castle in time for Defence. Harry slipped her an apple as they waited outside, and she threw him a grateful smile.
"Any particular reason the lunchtime gossip was that you and Malfoy had a massive breakup after he did something unmentionable with your underwear?" He mumbled so low she could only just hear him. Hermione rolled her eyes in response and a little colour crept into her cheeks.
"I can assure you that is not what happened-"
"Bloody hell, Mione, you must think we're completely stupid," Ron interjected. "We're not firsties who believe everything we hear in the great hall. Just tell us if we get to beat him up yet."
"No, no beating anyone up," she huffed. "We had something of a noisy disagreement, and I may have said something about knickers in my anger, but I can assure you they were barely part of it."
She was spared from explaining any further by Bill arriving. As they shuffled into the classroom, Hermione realised she would have to sit next to Malfoy as she had done since the beginning of term, and quickly took her seat and started to remove her belongings from her bag.
"Don't unpack," Bill ordered from the front. "We're going to have a practical lesson!"
"Great," muttered Hermione, as her usual desk partner appeared. They made eye contact for a painfully long second before she busied herself helping clear the desks to the sides of the room.
"Right, in your pairs I want you to work on one of two things," Bill explained. "You can either practice your patronus charms, or, if you'd rather, you can practice duelling using non-verbal spells. Disarming only, please, and remember that creativity is key for your NEWTs!"
Harry threw her an apologetic glance as he and Ron paired off to practice disarming one another. She made eye contact with the impassive blond Slytherin long enough to jerk her head in the direction of the far end of the classroom. She didn't even wait to see if he followed her before marching over there, dumping her bag, and shedding her heavy outer robe.
"Would you like to work on your patronus?"
Draco looked at the petite woman currently rolling up her sleeves. He wondered briefly whether he'd gone too far in rejecting her before she could do it to him, but when she looked up her eyes were completely devoid of emotion so he quickly schooled his features and got ready.
"No, I don't think I could handle the Weasel mocking me from across the room."
She nodded.
"Duelling it is then," she said quietly. "No dark spells, please."
He scoffed at that. So this was what she thought of him. Once a Death Eater, always a dark wizard. Just because Bellatrix had trained him didn't mean he didn't remember how to duel like a regular wizard.
They lined up facing one another and he made a formal wand salute before bowing to her, his eyes never once breaking contact.
"Ladies first."
Hermione threw a non-verbal jelly-legs jinx at him, which he blocked easily. He countered with an itching jinx which she didn't even use her wand to block.
"I said no dark spells, Malfoy," she spat. "I didn't say you shouldn't try at all."
The use of his surname shocked him - he hadn't been Malfoy since before the Yule Ball. A flicker of hurt flashed across his face. It was gone in a moment, but not before she spotted it. Her whole face changed, and he recognised the beginnings of pity in her look.
"No," he muttered. "No pitying the bona fide villain because he doesn't want to hurt the heroine. If you want a proper duel, you shall have one, Princess."
Hermione didn't have time to process his words before he started his assault.
He was good; she'd always known that, and her experience of him during the war had only confirmed it, but he hadn't lost any of his edge since the fighting had ended. She started blocking and parrying as best she could without uttering a word, her eyes sparking with passion.
He started to enjoy it, it felt good to spar with someone who could keep up, where the threat of torture didn't hang over him if he failed, and she laughed breathily in response to his smirk. He thought for a moment that they would put this morning behind them, but at that moment he got a stinging hex off which bounced round her shield charm and hit her on the jaw.
He stopped when she swore and gripped her face. They were both out of breath and he was sweating in his long sleeves. He realised at some point during their spat the rest of their class had stopped their own work and gathered around to watch them. He pushed some damp hair out of his face and cursed under his breath.
"Hermione," he whispered. "I'm so-"
"Avis oppugno!"
He didn't have time to register that she was fine before a flock of furious canaries were attacking his face. He held his hands up to protect himself from beaks and claws and suddenly felt his wand slip from his fingers and watched it fly to Hermione's open hand.
She dismissed the birds with a flick of her wand. They stood looking at one another for a moment, her face red where the stinging jinx had hit her, his face and hands covered in tiny red marks, both breathing hard, the air around them coursing with magic.
Bill's slow clapping brought them out of their trance. Hermione flipped the wand in her hand and held the handle out for him.
"Well done, both, although Hermione you did vocalise that last spell, but ultimately you disarmed him wordlessly so five points each to both of you."
The class slowly dispersed and continued with their own studies now the show had ended. Harry pulled Ron away, a strange smile on the red-head's face, and soon it was just the two of them and Bill in their now quiet corner of the room.
"I trust whatever it is, you two have worked out all your frustrations now," Bill warned, his voice low enough that only the two of them could hear him. "Both of you report to Madam Pomfrey to be patched up and I want to hear no more about this. I especially don't want the younger years discussing your underwear over lunch anymore, understood?"
Hermione blushed crimson as they mumbled their assent and gathered their belongings and left the classroom in silence.
Blaise sauntered up to Theo as they left the classroom later and handed over a small leather bag, which, if Theo had to guess, contained 20 galleons. He didn't say a word.
