He doesn't appear when she walks through the door. He isn't in the library or his study either.
"Draco?"
"Up—here." His voice wafts down the stairs with an indefinable quality Hermione cannot quite put her finger on.
She ascends the stairs slowly, wand drawn, until she comes to his room. The door is slightly ajar.
She hesitates for a moment. The odds currently stand evenly split. She'll either push it open to find him waiting for her, decoratively garbed in chocolate, or discover him held at wand-point by vengeful Death Eaters.
It's almost impossible to ever predict anything when it comes to Draco Malfoy.
She draws a deep breath and flicks her wand, swinging the door open.
He is not naked.
Or held hostage.
Instead she finds him standing casually upon a precariously small side table in the middle of the room.
"Ah, you're here," he says as though his current location is normal.
She stares at him for several moments in silence. "What are you doing?"
He quirks an aristocratic eyebrow and looks down his nose at her. "I do live here, last I checked. I believe the deed for this house lists me as it's possessor. I can stand wherever I want."
Hermione sighs and glances around the room. "Where is it?"
"Where's what?"
Hermione raises an eyebrow of her own. "The spider. Where is it?"
"What spider? There's no spider. Is a man unable to stand on his own side table—"
Hermione rolls her eyes and casts a point-me charm, while Draco waxes eloquent on individual rights and freedom, parroting all of Hermione's favourite talking points from the many occasions when she's lectured him.
There is a cardinal spider lurking beneath the bookshelf.
"Draco, it's nothing," she says as she kneels down and reaches under, gently catching it. "They're entirely harmless."
"It's enormous." Draco sounds as though he's being strangled to death.
Hermione stands up, and the spider scurries rapidly around her hand as she turns to face Draco again.
"Oh fuck! Please don't do that again. Kill it. For god's sake, it's a spider, you're supposed to kill them. Why do you always have to let them climb on you?" He buries his face in his hands, and the side table wobbles dangerously.
"I don't always let them climb on me. This kind is harmless." She flicks her wand, and the spider levitates through the air as she sends it out the open window and into a nearby tree.
"All gone and nobody died." She closes the window and looks up at him again. "Still exercising your right to stand on the side table, or will you come down now?"
