By Moonlight Faded

It seemed to Hermione that she was always cold. Her skin always prickling unpleasantly, hands always reaching for an extra cloak. She shivered even when standing under the warm summer sun, her black robes attracting the sun like flies to spilled butterbeer, and not once had she noticed.

Until tonight. Until the cold bled deeper than her skin. Until it pulled her from a fitful sleep, yanking and twisting and painful as a Crucio Curse. She bundled herself into as many blankets as she could hold, bones rattling so fiercely she could hardly stand to retrieve the extra coverings.

But nothing worked. Not the blankets or heating charms or sheer will power.

She lay in bed, wrapped and fitted in warmth that would not come. She watched the darkness glide across the walls, mixing with moonlight, and thought of Harry. Wondered if he too were lying awake in bed, thinking thoughts she tried her hardest not imagine. Thinking of Sirius.

The image of Sirius was so fresh in her mind, so clear and vivid and so very, very alive.

Her chest clenched, her fingers rounding into fists. He couldn't be dead. Harry needed him to be here. Needed him to be the scrawled handwriting on the other side of Harry's letters, to be the first person he would think of to go to for help. To be the parent he never had.

She bit her lip, anger for Sirius rising in her throat like vomit, filthy and foul. It left her feeling guilty and colder still; animosity towards the dead was a new low, she told herself.

But then she saw Harry's face, worn with lines of grief like granite with time, eyes distant and glassy with tears he wasn't aware of. She heard the fine tremor in his voice as if he was lying beside her, whispering in her ear.

And this time couldn't deny the resentment that prickled her heart.

Hermione slammed her eyes shut and tried to smother her thoughts. For what seemed like the first time in her life, she didn't want to think. She only wanted to lie there and stare blankly at the ceiling until she fell back asleep, without thought or worry. But the cold was still biting at her, and she wasn't even able to do that in peace.

Her body trembled and her teeth chattered until she couldn't stand it a moment longer. She glanced at Pavarati and Lavender, both forms silent behind the drapes of their four post beds. With a great heave, Hermione pushed the pile of blankets aside. She almost cried out as her bare feet met the icy wooden floor, the cold seeming to touch her very bones. Fresh goose bumps amounted on her skin, and she reached for a blanket, and then another. She slid her feet into her favorite slippers, and made her way quietly to the common room.

The fire had already burned itself into the coals, abandoning the common room of its warm glow. Navy shadows stretched through the velvet drapes, smearing the normally scarlet walls, turned pale in the moonlight. The room looked washed out, faded by time and weather. But it was just the moonlight, she told herself.

Everything faded in the moonlight. Colors and sounds and emotions.

The ends of the blankets scraped softly on the floor as she walked past her favorite armchair in front of the quiet fireplace, and took a seat on the cushioned windowsill. She unhooked the metal lock with trembling fingertips that looked ashen with the moonlight on them, and swung the window open.

A smile spread across her lips slowly as the frigid air in the common room escaped into the night and was replaced with warm summer air. The ache of the cold lessened like ice as it melts, slow and soundless. She leaned against the frame of the window, kicking off her slippers and gazing over the grounds of Hogwarts.

Hermione watched the moonlight shine and flicker over the lake, black and endless in the night. The water was always calm in the nighttime. Always peaceful.

She found it funny how, on the surface, something could look so quiet, but just underneath a whole other world raged.

Something caught her gaze suddenly, something like a flicker of movement on the grounds below. She squinted against the darkness, eyes sweeping through a clearing filled with moonlight for the flash of the black she had just seen. She nearly fell from her perch on the window when she saw it again, a figure cloaked in black on the water's edge.

The beat of her heart was thumping softly in her ears, the last traces of sleep falling away as she cast a backwards glance at the stairwell that led to boys' dormitory. She thought of Harry again. She imagined running up the steps and finding Harry's bed empty, the drapes of his four-poster pulled wide and sheets strewn on the floor.

Hermione's gaze strayed from the stairs, crawling slowly over the moonlight-faded walls, over the sleeping portraits, over her slippers, lying scattered beside one of the desks. The shadowy form hadn't moved, and she found them easily. She shivered as she watched the figure, a long smudge of black against the sparkling water, looking so out of place in a field that was swallowed by moonlight.

She felt a sudden surge of sympathy towards the figure, towards Harry, and her hands gripped the windowsill tightly, knuckles whitening. Her heart lurched as she thought of Harry, standing by the lake with no one but his pain to keep him company. She could picture his green eyes perfectly, glistening with grief and searching for a horizon that wasn't visible in the dark.

She wondered how many of his nights were like this, riddled with tears and spent alone. Wondered how he could stand it. Wondered why she had allowed him to stand it.

Without another thought, she pulled the blankets tighter and started out of the Gryffindor tower.

It was brighter outside than it had been in the common room. The sky was clear, the moonlight faint and soft and undisturbed. The grass was wet with early morning dew, and the tails of her blankets were becoming damp as they dragged behind. The cold stung with renewed vigor as she marched across the lawn, her feet still bare, wishing she had remembered her slippers when she was back in the tower.

Hermione slowed as she came up on the lake, the figure still rooted to the same spot as she'd seen from the window. She opened her mouth to call for Harry, but just at that moment caught sight of a flash of silver under the hood, and gasped instead. Draco Malfoy was the last person she'd expected to see standing here.

The figure turned immediately, gray eyes falling on her like a dead weight, dashing her hopes of running away.

He looked as startled as she felt, which unsettled her further. She had never seen Draco with an expression on his face that wasn't contempt or smugness. He pushed the hood of his cloak back--and black cloak--Harry didn't have a black cloak--and looked at her with wide, disbelieving eyes.

"Granger?" he asked, sounding more like an accusation than a question.

She found her voice just in time to echo his. "What are you doing here?" they said together.

He tilted his chin up, eyes narrowing. "I asked you first," he said, recovering the cruel drawl in his tone.

Hermione rolled her eyes at his immature arguing tactics, but answered despite. "I thought you were... someone else," she finished lamely.

"Yeah, well, I'm fortunate enough not to be Potter, so you can get back to your tower already."

He crossed his arms over his chest and turned back towards the lake, leaving her feeling as if she had just been dismissed. An unmistakable heat rose in her cheeks, and she was suddenly glad had decided to turn away.

"The magnificent Potter," he muttered quietly, eyes on the lake, and Hermione had the distinct impression that the words were not meant for her to hear. "Ridding the world of evil one father at a time."

"I didn't think you were Harry," she lied, forcing her voice to remain steady, cutting into his wallowing. She couldn't stand hearing him talk about Harry as if what he had done was wrong.

"Yes, you did," he drawled, voice loud and confident, and she wanted to beat the certainty out of him. "Why else would you come out here," he spared a quick, knowing glace at her out of the corner of his eye, "Still in your nightgown and without any slippers on?"

"I just thought you might like someone to talk to," she murmured, tugging the blankets closer.

He whirled on her suddenly, eyes flashing. "Oh, that's rich, Granger," he spat. "You can't even look at somebody without thinking they need your bloody help."

"You were out here all al--"

"So you figured you'd get your good girl points for the day by coming out here in the middle of the night with good," he spit the word, as if tasted foul, "intentions?"

"No, I only--"

"Thought you'd hold out your arms, gushing sympathy and understanding, and offer some poor, lost soul a shoulder to cry on?"

He was yelling now, approaching her like a predator, slow and dangerous. She opened her mouth to respond, but he began again before she could manage a sound.

"And then I'm just supposed to open myself up to you because you're willing to listen, and tell you all about how bloody hard it is to see my father's name in the paper day after day and be reminded that I'll never see him again?"

The silence was severe after his out burst, sharp and jagged like the scar on Harry's forehead. His voice seemed to carry on forever, but she wasn't sure if it had echoed through the empty school grounds or her own ears.

He was looking at her in the same way he observed a hexed beast. Conquered.

"I never would have offered my sympathy to you."

It was out before she even knew the thought had occurred to her. It hung on the moonlight like a shadow, always right there, but unnoticed until someone pointed it out.

She was reminded of a falling stage curtain as the glint in his eyes died, and he regained that Malfoy composure, pulling away from her. She was struck cold at the hardness in his gaze.

"Fair enough, Granger." His voice was like ice, sleek and flat and so very, very cold. "I never would have accepted sympathy from a dirty Mudblood anyway."

Hermione lowered her eyes, letting the insult roll over her, feeling as if she deserved every stitch of the pain. She hadn't meant it, she really hadn't, and she wanted to tell him so. But the right words escaped her, falling through her fingers like sand. And a part of her let the words fall away, because hadn't he already said he didn't want her sympathy?

She looked at him. His back was to her again; wet looking silver hair haloed by moonlight, already pale skin seeming translucent. The black cloak was glaring at her, mocking her for being so foolish as to come out here with her shoulder poised for tears.

But Draco didn't have any tears.

"Why are you still here?" he asked in a voice that sounded dead, without feeling or importance.

"I don't want you to be alone," Hermione heard herself say, and would have liked to say that it surprised her that she meant it.

But it didn't.

He didn't say anything as she crept up beside him, blankets swishing and swooshing, just kept his eyes on the water. The moonlight reflected off the surface and ricocheted on to his face, shining in his eyes and concealing his emotions from her.

She couldn't take it all in. She had always known Lucius Malfoy was Draco's father, but never truly seen them as a family. And yet here was his son, driven out of a warm bed in the middle of the night, mourning the type of loss that Hermione could never hope to understand.

"It's funny," he said suddenly.

"What is?"

"The lake," he said simply, as if that explained it.

She glanced at the water, taking in the black expanse of water that looked to her as if it would never end, and asked, "How so?"

"Just look at it. Calm and peaceful on the surface, but in a frenzy just below." He spoke softly, and in a tone she had never heard from him before. "There's a whole world down there, where it's just as chaotic as it is up here, but... When you look at it, all you can think is how peaceful it is."

She stared at him, her stomach somersaulting as he echoed her very thoughts from earlier. She didn't speak, couldn't speak, and thankfully he seemed at ease with letting the subject drop.

She suddenly shivered despite the layers of blankets, her gaze braking away as her teeth collided softly and uncontrollably. He laughed suddenly. Not that cruel, barking laughter she had always heard, but a smooth, easy laughter that had her smiling along with him.

"What?" she asked, voice shaking as her teeth chattered.

"Cold?" he asked, looking at her with painless smile.

She nodded, brazenly thinking he might offer her his cloak for a moment, before he shook his head and looked away.

"I can hear your teeth," he said, still chuckling.

She smiled slightly, teeth still pounding relentlessly.

The silence that painted the night wasn't tense like the last had been, but almost peaceful. Almost pleasant.

Almost.

"Were you close?" she asked, voice soft and quiet as the moonlight.

She sensed that he had gone rigid beside her. The temperature seemed to drop with every second that passed and her question went unanswered. She felt herself blush. She had gone too far, overstepped--

"He was my father," Draco said stiffly. "It doesn't matter if we were close or not."

But his tone, strained and calculated, told her otherwise. Her chest suddenly felt heavy, eyes suddenly stinging. She wanted to comfort him. She wanted him to allow it.

And she wanted to reach out to him, but he had never seemed so far away.

She looked up, and was surprised to see him staring down at her, hood pulled over his head again, gray eyes shadowed and hidden.

"Don't tell me how sorry you are over it," he said simply.

His back was to her before she could think of something to say, moving away and towards the castle. He seemed to glide on the moonlit grass, the black cloak trailing smoothly after him. She caught her breath as he stopped suddenly, just at the edge of the clearing, holding the air still as he spoke softly, honestly.

"I already know."

And then he really was gone, black cloak disappearing from the moonlight and blending seamlessly with the shadows. A chill came over her as she searched the darkness, but it seemed to grow darker the harder she looked, as if it were protecting him.

She looked away finally, eyes returning to the lake. She felt like the moonlight was brighter now that he'd gone, taking his grief along with him. He had a presence like a dementor, freezing the air and spreading heartbreak. And yet Draco was so human to her in that moment. So exposed in his sadness.

She realized suddenly that she had never thought of him as a person, but as an opponent. It had always been easier for her to look at everything in black and white. Good and evil.

But everything was graying, fading under the moonlight.