Eye to Eye: A Dramione Fanfic

Chapter 42

"Draco?"

There was no reply.

Hermione, still half drowsy with sleep, frowned as she sat up in bed, fumbling to pull the covers up around her shoulders. The air inside her bedroom was bitter, almost as if someone had left a window open. As soon as that thought crossed her mind, she turned her attention toward the window and found that the curtains had been drawn back slightly, leaving the room exposed to the moonlight that flooded in through the frosted glass of the window pane.

"Not again," she sighed quietly to herself as she slid out of bed and made her way into the main seating area of the Head Prefects Common Room.

As far as Hermione could tell, there wasn't a single light on inside the Common Room - not even the one in the bathroom. In fact, the only sources of light she managed to identity were as follows: the small amount of light that shone into the room from under the main door, and the faint strokes of moonlight that slipped passed the gaps in the curtains in the same way it'd done from within Hermione's room.

"Draco?" She repeated, hoping that she might get a reply this time.

Still, there was no reply.

However, Hermione's gaze did fall on the mass of tousled, platinum blonde hair that seemed to be cowering in the corner of the room. With a small sigh - partly relief, partly exhaustion - she went over and sat beside Draco, who was muttering to himself in the same way he always did whenever this happened.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She asked, trying to approach the subject with as much sensitivity as possible; last time this happened Draco had stormed out of the Common Room.

A heavy sigh escaped his lips, "Does it look like I want to talk about it?"

"Not really, no," Hermione said quietly, leaning her head back against the wall. "But, it might help."

"No, Hermione, I don't think it will," Draco snapped, his voice breaking ever so slightly as his looked up from his hands.

Upon hearing the way he'd chosen to speak to her, Hermione stood up and headed back toward her room. However, before entering, she stopped short and turned back to look at him, "If you keep pushing people away like that you'll have no one left - you'll be alone."

Draco remained on the floor, unmoved by Hermione's words; how dare she speak to him like that! And yet, despite his annoyance, he couldn't help but regard her with some form of admiration. No one, not even Blaise, had ever spoken to him like that - mostly because he wouldn't have let them get away with it.

"Hermione, wait," he called out as he got to his feet and hurried towards her closed door. "Please, I... I want to talk."

And with that, Hermione woke with a start. Her entire body ached and her head felt as though someone had taken a sledge-hammer and was currently pounding it into her brain.

The floor where she lay - where she had been laying for the duration of her time in this hellhole - was cold, as it always had been. However, there was one thing that wasn't quite as it always had been... The bars were gone!

Despite the pain that shot through her extremities when she moved, Hermione struggled to her feet and moved away from the wall she'd been resting against. When she approached the place where the bars should've been, she held out a hand and braced herself for any immediate pain that might come as a result of attempting to push past some kind of barrier spell... But there was none.

With a frown, she overstepped what used to be the edge of her confinement, entirely confused about what was happening. However, before she had chance to voice her questions, someone entered the room.

"Ah, good. You're awake."

The voice sent shivers down Hermione's spine as she attempted to move back towards the wall, back into the space where she used to be confined. But she didn't make it that far; the bars that'd mysteriously vanished reappeared, preventing her from escaping whatever was about to happen.

"Don't worry, Miss Granger," they urged, moving closer. "We're under strict instructions not to hurt you... At least, not until Mr Malfoy arrives."

Hermione said nothing. Instead, she remained against the bars, doing her best to seem unfazed by the person she was confronted by. The hardest part about all of this was knowing that the one person everyone trusted to solve these problems, was actually one of the people causing them.

"Oh, come now, Miss Granger," they sighed, stepping into the light. "There's no need to be frightened."

And there it was. There, in the limited amount of light that'd been provided by the crack in the curtains, stood Kingsley Shacklebolt - a man that Hermione, and the Order, had once trusted.

A man that the whole of the Wizarding World trusted.