Atrophy in the Library

Disclaimer: Names, terms, etc. don't belong to me. The book titles do, however. Took me the better part of an hour trying to make them up *headdesk* Author's Notes: Written for second_hazard for the Celebrate the Season D/Hr Fic Exchange at livejournal. HBP spoilers are included. Special thanks to One Crimson Tie for the usual beta and feedback routine!

Oh, place your hands on my whole Run your fingers through my soul. ~ Place Your Hands, Reef

Draco Malfoy is waiting for her. He's managed to fill the tiny space with smoke, and she frowns in distaste. He ignores her disapproval.

"Here," he says loftily, retrieving the item she has thought on all week and tossing it at her.

She gives him a scandalized look at this mistreatment, and he studiously ignores this as well. She pushes away her frustration at not being able to bother him, and turns her attention to what she now holds carefully.

It's heavy. She feels the familiar sensation of eager butterflies start up low in her stomach, and she tries for indifference, like this doesn't mean anything to her.

It makes no difference; he's watching her with a curious, knowing look. He has gone to school with her for seven years now, and by now he recognizes her looks. He can identify and categorize which expression means what, and this one of hunger is one he has slowly grown accustomed to seeing.

She runs nimble fingers down the spine of the tome, tracing the fading gold letters on the cover. Healing Herbcraft, Vol. 1, the Hippocratic Lessons. There are only eight copies left of volume 1-two of them given to museums of magical artifacts, one in the library at Alexandria, three at wizarding universities, and the last two were officially unaccounted for. Unofficially, it was believed they resided in private collections, and now she was holding one of them.

He watches her, fascinated by how fascinated she is. Sometimes he wonders idly what he looks like looking at her looking at the books he brings.

***

It started when she caught him in the library hastily sliding a book into his bag. She had been going down each aisle, trying to jog her memory for the book she needed for Advanced Transfiguration, and when she rounds the bookshelf, she must have startled him, for he made a sudden, jerky movement and she saw him shouldering his bag and refusing to look at her.

"Are you stealing that book, Malfoy?"

He frowns at her. "That's none of your business."

"That book might be the one I'm looking for," she maintains.

He smirks. "I highly doubt that." And he attempts to brush past her.

She grabs onto his shirt to stop him. "I'm not letting you steal that book."

He jerked himself out of her grasp quickly and says with exasperation, "It's not the library's, all right? It's mine. I brought it here to compare it to something else I read."

"I don't believe you."

His pale face flushes with anger. "Well, then that's not my problem. Get out of my way, Granger, or you'll be sorry."

"Let me see it," she insists.

He heaves a sigh, assessment in his eyes, and pulls out the book in question. She stares at the cover in disbelief: Lycanthropy: Lore and Lineage.

When she realizes what it is, she cannot stop her wordless cry of surprise. She reaches out and takes it from him; he relinquishes it as though he meant it for her all along. "Where did you get this?" she whispers, feeling its weight.

"I told you, it's mine," he says testily.

"I asked Professor Lupin in fifth year about possibly getting this book, but he said there weren't any more copies left!" She remembered the conversation clearly...the hot, sticky summer of July, the heat and secrets trapped in No. 12 Grimmauld Place, unsure of whether Harry would join them or not, having read all her schoolbooks once and then twice. Lupin had brought back books from other members of the Order, and one day they had spoken about werewolves and a historically and factually accurate book on the issue.

"There have been great advancements; the wolfsbane potion is still a relatively new invention—few know how to brew it properly. There are rumors of a book detailing lycanthropy, tracing its roots back to the first werewolf. It was written in the Dark Ages, you know, most magic inventions we have today made its leap then, it was somewhat of a magic revolution for us…but it was lost shortly afterwards in the popularity of the Church."

"Well, he was wrong," Draco snaps.

Hermione looks up at him distractedly, finally seeing just how uncomfortable he is. His jaw is clenched, his body held tense and rigid. His eyes aren't that flat, sleet color, but a darker, metal shade. His mouth is a tight-lipped line.

"What do you mean it's yours?" she asks slowly.

"I mean it belongs to my family."

The Malfoys are an old wizarding family-of course, Hermione realizes, of course Draco Malfoy would have access to possibly one of the most extensive libraries of magic and wizardry. It was an injustice-it wasn't fair!

"What?" His voice stops her line of righteously indignant thought.

"What?" she echoes irritably, still clutching the book.

"You looked like you were about to be ill." He studies her face some more, and then he gives a short bark of laughter. "Oh, I see. You're jealous. Because you want to read this book."

He would have seen through any lie, and so she admitted shortly, "Yes."

"Well, don't look so grumpy." He laughs again and teases, a glint in his eyes, "If you're a good girl, I just might lend it to you."

At first she can't believe her ears-he's managed successfully to shock her beyond speech in the span of five minutes. But no, the insinuation is there, and so is the meaningful look that is not unlike a leer. Hermione flushes bright red and she is suddenly so furious that she wants to hex him.

"You-are-despicable, Malfoy," she spits, trying to think of something more hateful, something that would convey to him just how revolting and foul she found him. "After all these years, you've only gotten worse-"

He colors and grabs his book from her. "You're crazy, Granger. I try to be decent-" He makes a gesture at this word, like he is brushing it away, "-and you become psychotic. Typical."

"You wanted me to-you wanted-in exchange for just reading the book," she snarls.

He looks confused, and then strangely furious. "You mean-you thought I wanted to trade, what, sex? Are you out of your mind? With you-" He blanches, and then with noticeable effort, schools his face into a cold blankness. His voice is hard when he finally speaks again. "It was just a turn of phrase. Fucking shite, Granger. You're unbelievable."

And there it was, she was shocked again. Mortified, this time. Her face burns at her misjudgment and assumption.

"I'm sorry-I shouldn't have thought...I'm sorry," she apologizes, humiliation tingeing her voice, and because, what the hell, it's a long shot and she's just insulted him, another wrong on a long list of wrongs he thinks she's done him, she might as well try. She asks evenly, "Is that offer still open?"

He raises his eyebrows as if to say, you've got a lot of nerve, but he remarks only, "Why the hell not?"

***

It's not like they're friends. They're not study buddies. They don't talk about the books they read. The secret knowledge that they two are among the few who have read these books is enough. They two are touching the same books that historical figures they've read about have touched, absorbing a sort of lost knowledge, a treasure, a vanished, ancient world, the Holy Grail. They two have joined the ranks of others older and probably better than they.

Over the course of her seventh year, Hermione reads: Apogee of Wizarding Philosophy, Bewitching Brews, 50 Most Common Harbingers of the Apocalypse, Empyrean: A History of Ancient Astronomy, Famous (And Infamous) Phantasms, Comte de Saint-Germain, An Autobiography, Tombstones: Necromancy, and Oswald on Omens and Portents.

"Why the hell not?" he'd said, and then, "After I finish."

"And how long will that be?"

He cocked his head toward her and said, "Not as long as you think. I'm a fast reader. I'll let you know when I'm finished."

At the end of the week, he seemed to be tarrying in the library, lagging behind after the group of Slytherins he studied Arithmancy with had gone, so she'd stood up and approached him.

"Not here," he'd said harshly, shooting a pointed look at Madam Pince.

He'd headed out of the library, and she'd hurried after him. A little ways down from the library, he stopped in front of a statue of the wizard astrologer Nostradamus. A purple curtain hangs behind it and acts as its backdrop. He ducks behind the statue-it's a narrow space-and pushes aside the heavy curtain to reveal a shallow, hollow niche in the wall-a sort of half-dome carved into the bricks. There is a window from which she can see nothing but the roofs and shorter turrets of Hogwarts. They cannot see the grounds, and no one can see them.

He whispers a locking spell and adds a silencio as well. Brushing past her-the space is hardly two arms lengths wide-he pushes open a square pane of glass.

"Was hiding from Filch here, once," he told her matter-of-factly, tapping out a cigarette from a box into his palm. "Thought I'd be able to hide behind the statue because of the shadows. Ended up falling into this. I don't think anyone else knows."

"Do you come here often?" she had asked him, watching him light the cigarette and inhale deeply.

His eyes crinkled as he smiled slightly. "Just to smoke."

Sometimes she finds slips of paper torn from a larger piece of parchment between select pages that he found of interest, and she always peruses those pages with extra attention. And that becomes part of the private tradition as well, although she doesn't know whether they have been left for him or for her.

She finds herself staring at him. She watches as he walks in and out and sits down and rises from the Slytherin table in the Great Hall. She observes the way he wears his sweaters and how he unknots his green and silver tie absently with one hand, pulling it apart slowly as he turns the page of a book with the other. She notices the way the lit cigarette lights up his eyes when he brings it close to his face, making the pewter eyes seem almost warm.

She is used to this: the briskness of their meeting. Sometimes she arrives first and other times he is early. He usually lingers on behind her, finishing his cigarette in solitude. She has, gradually, lost the wariness she had when they first began to meet; she no longer keeps her hand near her wand. Instead, she reaches for the books and handles them with care.

One time, he mentions that there's something he wanted to show her. As he flips through the book, she stands just behind him, to the side. She catches him half in the profile and half in portrait form. He's grown into his patrician features.

His voice is low, and his tongue seems to caress the words as he reads aloud Saint-Germain's points on alchemy, and then he turns to her and continues to muse on Nicholas Flamel's work, exhaling smoke that curls like the corner of his lip does when he's pleased.

She's become used to the subtle smell of smoke on her clothes. It comes from being in close quarters with him, having him stand near because there's hardly enough room to even turn. He usually opens the little corner of the window, but with December came howling winds that made the cigarettes short-lived and caused them both to shiver. So she often left with her sweaters reeking of smoke. She notices this less and less and stops charming away the smell. It is only when she is helping Neville think of a thesis for his Potions essay and he draws back from her and remarks in surprise and befuddlement, "Hermione, you smell like smoke."

After that she's careful about charming his smell away again. Hermione Granger does not make the same mistake twice.

***

Someone has been trying to break into Hogwarts since October. McGonagall had carried on Dumbledore's philosophy of informed students equaling smart students, and they were given a concise account of the attempted break-in. An unauthorized Portkey was made and activated to just outside the grounds.

"Probably just testing the response they would get," Harry speculated.

Hermione agreed. "Now they know Hogwarts is working with the Ministry in its security."

There were two more attempts in November.

"They're after something in here," Hermione thinks aloud grimly.

She exchanges looks with Harry and Ron, and they think the unsaid word. Horcrux? Maybe. Wouldn’t it have been clever, to hide a horcrux in Hogwarts? The most obvious places are often the last places searched, after all.

On some nights, warm from dinner, completing her homework, Hermione watches from Gryffindor Tower as Flitwick heads out each night to cast up wards and defensive charms, each spark of light a stark reminder that Hogwarts is not impenetrable.

On Tuesday (or maybe it was Wednesday), caught in the time between pale morning and dark night, they try to save themselves. Neville is there, Luna too, and Ginny of course. They speak in hushed, low voices that carry only to each other's ears.

Harry has gone over the Marauder's Map again and again and again until he can navigate Hogwarts in the dark. Only seven secret passages, but then again, the Room of Requirement didn't show up on the map, so seven was the best they could do.

Harry hovers over the map for a moment, pushing up his glasses. "Okay, the one on the fourth floor, behind the mirror. I've never tried it."

"I did," Ron says with a grimace. "It's definitely blocked in."

"Suppose someone, I don't know, transfigures the rocks? Or uses a banishment charm on them?" Ginny put forth.

"Better include it in the rounds," Ron agrees.

"Right, then. The Whomping Willow, the one to Honeydukes, and Gregory the Smarmy. The twins said that Filch knows about the other four, but no chances taken, right?"

Hermione writes this all down, and at the end she writes up a timetable for checking the secret passageways in and out of Hogwarts.

After she checks on the Hogwarts entrance behind the mirror on the fourth floor, she continues on. She walks past the library and past Nostradamus. Sometimes she thinks she smells that smoke, clinging to the purple drapery.

***

Hermione never goes there on her own, and she doesn't go near it without purpose. When she passes it by on her way to the library, if she glances at it, if she isn't preoccupied with Harry and Voldemort, school, she'll spare a moment to wonder if he's there, leaning against the wall or bracing his elbows on the edge of the window, smoking and staring out at nothing because there's nothing to see from that alcove.

Friday before the Slytherin-Ravenclaw Quidditch game, they meet to exchange books. He's wearing a charcoal jumper that matches his eyes, and he's brought his broom into the tight space.

"Got practice," he says briefly by way of explanation as he bends down to dig out Hamadryads, Lampades, and Other Forgotten Creatures.

She returns Components of A Wand. They don't leave immediately. He knows she likes to look at the book, just the book itself, the binding, the feel of it, examine the paper, and he accommodates her in not spoiling the moment.

"Malfoy," she says, looking up from the book at him.

He looks back at her questioningly as he pulls on his Seeker's gloves and flexes his fingers to adjust the fist.

"Does your...father know about this?"

"Does he know that I'm lending the Malfoy books to a Mudblood?" he drawls, straightening. "No," he says succinctly. He stares at her and comments, "It's enough that I know."

Hermione has no idea what that means. She only knows that somehow he has taken the sting away from the slur.

She doesn't wish him good luck on his game tomorrow (but she thinks it) because she knows that he wouldn't see it that way and would probably think she was mocking him.

He doesn't smoke today because he has practice, and so it is one of the few times that she is left behind in the oppressive non-space. Hermione looks out to see what he sees when he stands here to smoke, but she can't see anything, not the gates, not the courtyard, not the Quidditch pitch.

She tucks the new lend into her schoolbag and leaves.

***

It's a long shot, but she's desperate.

There comes a day when she must-she must-pretend that this is just for her, that this book is no different from the others, that it is just another guilty pleasure for her to eat up. He can't suspect anything else. She practices her request. She wants to make sure her words are right and unsuspicious, that nothing she says will alert him to a meaning she is trying to hide. She practices the meter of how she speaks, eyes herself in the mirror, thinks on where to look at him-the eyes? But not too long-and how many times she ought to blink. She must make this natural.

When she makes her request, he isn't even looking at her. He's flipping through one of Snape's books and jotting down notes for the Potions essay she hasn’t even started on, hasn’t even given thought to.

"Sure," he says offhandedly. "I'll look."

She stares at his precise handwriting on the rich parchment, which is oddly neat and self-conscious, and she stares a moment too long because he looks up and gives her an annoyed look.

She isn't quite sure what it is she feels, but she feels a twinge of something when he does not even seem to suspect her.

***

He hands the book to her, and she tries not to reach for it too eagerly. She holds it in her hands, looks at it unseeingly, feeling the rapid beating of her heart.

"Thank you," she says, and tries not to sound too feelingly.

He gives her a strange look that she missed. She seems unenthusiastic about this book. Something is different about this book, and he wishes that he had taken the time to look through it more attentively.

She thanks him in an odd voice, and she deliberates on something for a moment before flashing him a quick, fleeting smile and leaving him alone.

Outside the corridor, she presses the book to her chest, feels her heart beat against it. She realizes that she is shaking, and she can't tell whether she's afraid or excited.

Behind the curtain, Draco takes one last drag on the cigarette and stubs it out in the wall.

***

Harry and Ron want to know how she got the book.

She tries at first to give them impatient, non-answers-automatic responses as a reflex, a leftover from her third year of having to hide the time turner. But this is too important, and their curiosity is harder to beat back.

Finally, they accept it because, as Ron says, she is Hermione and that's the end of his sentence. Still, she knows that Harry wonders. Even that stops, eventually, because soon they are too busy to wonder.

The Lost Dark Arts by Warricke the Warlord. Chapter 11 is on horcruxes. Hermione is amazed that she has nine pages detailing horcruxes-its function, its etiology, and how to make one.

They reexamine the map, rethink assumptions they've made.

She can feel that they are hunting down something that they once thought elusive. In her dreams, she is eating up the distance, closing ground on something she can't see but knows is there, right in front of her, just an arm's length or two away.

Hermione can't find the horcruxe-she wasn't meant to-but she does catch Draco Malfoy.

She corners him, advances into his personal space. He gazes back at her, slouched against the window, unlit cigarette in one hand and book ready for trade in the next.

She doesn't want the kiss to feel like gratitude for the book. She wants it to be something else, to mean something more than gratefulness she cannot voice.

When he straightens off the window, she has to step back and he's still looking at her, assessing her again, and then he nods almost to himself and he bends his head and touches his lips to hers.

It starts slow and humble.

***

The taste of Draco's mouth is strange because it is not strange. She knows the taste of cigarette smoke, paper and ash and nicotine, bitter coffee, some spicy-sweet chai tea he must have had at some point during his day. There's some marmalade on his upper lip, the only sweet part of his mouth. His teeth taste like mandarin oranges and toothpaste, sour and strong mint.

He's got her pressed against the wall, and he's so much more forceful and demanding than she's ever seen him. He grasps her upper arms, his touch not ungentle, and his mouth is hard and pressing against hers. She thinks that he's trying to tell her something in the way he kisses, but he moves his mouth and tongue and teeth and she can't think. She can only raise a shaky hand to touch him, touch his face, slide her fingers down his cheek and jaw and trace the aristocratic features.

He breaks away from her to mutter furiously, "You think I hate this? Because you're right. I hate this." before he catches her lips with his again.

He finally stops, breathing harsh in her ear. "That's how much I hate this, damn you," he says raggedly, voice low.

She doesn't know what he's talking about, but this time she has an idea.

When he makes as though to back away, she digs her fingers into the softness of his sweater, feeling the expensiveness of it, and holds him to her.

"Kiss me again," she requests.

Several indecipherable emotions flow across his face, change his eyes, then he raises an eyebrow at her appeal that sounds more like a command, and he obliges her.

***

If he found her behavior strange, he never mentioned it. He appears to not even think on it.

She recalls the feeling of her arm brushing the velvet of the curtain and the heat of his mouth fused to the base of her throat and his body and the coldness from the wall and window at her back. When she stands still, in the open space, she can feel the tightness of the hollow in the wall and the weight and hard leanness of his body crowding hers. She hears the sound of the book dropping from his fingers to the ground with a soft plop of open pages.

Harry thinks he knows where one of the horcruxes may be, and his instinct is enough for them to spend their waking moments concentrated on checking, on making sure.

She never did get the last book he brought. Hermione doesn't have time to read for pleasure anymore.

***

"You never returned one of my books" is the first thing he says to her when they see each other again.

He's taller, or maybe it just seems that way because he's thinner. There are shadows and hollows in that proudly haughty face, and Hermione aches.

Her heart pounds at his accusation. "Which one?"

He names the title she has never forgotten.

"I...lost that one," she admits.

The disbelief is evident in his voice. "You lost it?"

She meets his skeptical gaze. "It's true. I don't have it anymore. To be honest, I kind of ruined it."

His eyes fairly gleam with something hidden, and he looks like he means to say "On purpose?" but he doesn't.

"I think it's fair that I ask you for something," he says, his tone light and cavalier. He gives her a faint smile.

"What? What is it?" she breathes.

He makes his request.

Hermione reaches out and holds him carefully and preciously.

He is hard and soft at the same time, and she clasps her arms around his neck, pressing her chin down on his shoulder.

He turns his head so his lips brush her ear and he murmurs, "You can have your damn books. And I can have you."

FINIS.

Three things you want your fic to include: 1. A mysterious meeting place no one has ever been before. 2. A heart to heart talk between Hermione and Draco. 3. A disturbance in the school. Three things you do not want your fic to include: 1. Ron or Harry getting jealous because they like Hermione too! And thats it!