Irresistible Poison DRARRY

Irresistible Poison - Chapter 6

Chapter Six: Missing Completion

You're incomplete until you're in love; then you're finished.

Harry showed the creased note to Hermione during dinner, unfolding it surreptitiously under the table and sliding it over to her. Hermione took it and discreetly read it, then passed it back to Harry, all the while without a change of expression.

"So, are you going to meet him?" Hermione asked in a low voice, so quietly that only Harry could hear her. She needn't have worried, though, since the scattered dinner conversation was noisy enough to drown out anything less than audible speech.

Harry nodded once, shoving the note back into his pocket. "I'll bring my wand along, just in case."

Hermione wasn't surprised at Harry's answer; somehow, even before he'd said anything, she already knew. In fact, even before Harry even showed her the note, she knew that should Malfoy ask Harry to meet again in private, Harry would agree. What still baffled her, however, was that Harry was actually entertaining the issue, instead of dismissing it with a wave of his hand as nothing more than the preposterous rubbish that Malfoy was so adept at throwing in their direction. Hermione's eyes narrowed; she was beginning to wonder if Malfoy had put Harry under the Imperius Curse.

"Are you feeling all right, Harry?" Her anxious concern showed in her voice. "You're acting really strangely about this whole thing, and you've got me worried. Are you sure Malfoy didn't put a spell on you, instead of the other way around?"

"No, he didn't hex me." Harry shook his head. Unless you count the sorcery of lips. "Besides, I can fight off the Imperius Curse, and he's not experienced enough to manage anything more advanced than that. I doubt he can even cast Imperius — not yet."

"I still have a bad feeling about this, Harry," Hermione warned, giving voice to her niggling doubts. "I wouldn't trust Malfoy to trim Crookshanks' claws, and that's a task that I would gladly hand over to almost anyone willing to be scratched half to death."

"I'll be careful," Harry promised.

Hermione took one look in his eyes and gave up trying to discourage him — there wasn't any use, since it was clear that Harry had already made up his mind, and probably no matter what she said short of threatening to tell Ron or Dumbledore about the whole deal, Harry would be there in the disused storage room later that night.

To quell her own uneasiness, Hermione decided to make sure that Harry wasn't being subjected to some dark curse Malfoy put on him, which denied him of conscious control over his actions. She knew a useful Dark-Sensing Spell, which could gauge if a person was under the influence of any sort of dark magical charm or spell and return either a positive or negative result.

When Harry was leaning over to talk to Seamus about the match-day arrangements for the Gryffindor-Slytherin clash, Hermione took out her wand and furtively passed it down the length of Harry's body, whispering the Sensing Spell under her breath, carefully watching for the result.

The tip of her wand glowed a pearly white, then faded to a dull green, which signalled affirmatively that everything was fine and nothing was amiss. Harry was spell-free — that was a relief, to some extent, though not quite a consolation. The question that still begged answering was, Why?

Hermione thought for a moment, then decided it was pointless to ask Harry about it now — firstly, he was clearly adamant about going to meet Malfoy that night; and secondly, she somehow had a feeling that even Harry didn't know the answer to that question.

* * * * * * *

As the late afternoon sun blazed in all its glory across the sky, a rare burst of colour in the spell of bleak, wintry weather in the past days and weeks, Harry headed back to the Gryffindor dormitory to gather his things for Quidditch practice that evening. The schedule was even tighter now that the crucial game had been pushed forward — his team, although more than a worthy match for the Slytherins, needed all the practice they could squeeze in time for.