Out of Time

Chapter 3

"What sort of idea?" Draco wishes he could feel less apprehensive about this, but the mischievous look she's sporting almost mandates it.

Looking supremely pleased with herself, Hermione admits, "It's going to take some help from your friends. Do you think they would?"

"Help us? ...I think they'd try, but it'll depend on what it is."

"Of course." She waves this off, quite nonchalant about it, and his curiosity is inflamed. "And I can't lie and say I'm wild about the idea, either, but -"

Draco stops her with a hand. "You look entirely too proud of it to not be all in yourself."

Hermione gives a light laugh. "Well, that's probably fair. But I can be proud of thinking it up and still not enthusiastic about doing it."

"What is it, Granger?"

She grimaces slightly, wrinkling her nose, and says in a rushed jumble, "I-think-we-should-date-Pansy-and-Theo."

Draco chokes, swallowing the wrong way, and hacks his way through an extremely painful set of racking coughs across his chest. Hermione thumps him hard on the back like a child several times in quick succession. He gasps in air.

"What?"

"Well, we need it to be secret, still, don't we?" She blasts him with direct eye contact and Draco has an inkling she has the meaning of all this better than he could have guessed. He narrows his eyes at her, considering.

"We do."

"Even if it seems like nothing more than an occasional shag, your association with me could still bring reprisals."

"It could." The ease with which she thought of this, nearly on the spot, gives him pause. Or maybe in light of the stunt he pulled with Finnegan, maybe she's been thinking about a way to seem unassociated with Draco. That hurts. Maybe the idea that his parents know frightens her. When she'd mentioned 'reprisals,' she'd phrased it as if she were worried about him, but maybe she's afraid, too.

He tries to think it over, trying to see it objectively and weighing it against what his mother had said. It needs to seem unmeaningful, in every way.

Hermione and Theo. He does his best to ignore the flaming jealousy already flickering up his feet to his legs, climbing, climbing.

"But what makes you think it would be any better for Theo to be 'shagging' you? Please don't make me say that part out loud again."

Hermione stops, uncertain. "I - I don't know. Look, it's not perfect. And I don't know what they gain from it aside from simply helping to help, and I know that's not a very Slytherin impulse, but I don't know what else to suggest. We could go back to sneaking around, but now people are going to be looking."

"Yes, Potter, for one," Draco grumbles, flexing his right hand into a fist. He feels weak, still, and hates it. He's stuck in a bloody hospital bed in the bloody hospital wing like an invalid. "How did he know where to find me, exactly?"

She looks uncomfortable, as if this is news she'd rather not deliver. "He's suspected you of doing something - something bad, I don't even know what, but he had his house-elf following you. He saw us together. Or saw us entering and then leaving the Come and Go Room, anyway."

That doesn't quite track to Draco, even though he recalls hearing her bicker with Potter about his recent misuse of house-elves. He also recalls them trying to look for a Dark Mark on him, and thinks Hermione might have edited that little detail out on purpose.

But it's not as if he wants to be the one to bring it up.

"But we'd have seen or heard a house-elf. That can't have been all of it."