Deny

He was totally absorbed in some sort of reality show on the telly when she brought in the tray of food for him and sat it on the coffee table in front of him. He looked down at the contents of the tray and blinked before eyeing her suspiciously.

"What?" she asked innocently. He picked up the glass full of purple liquid and sniffed gingerly. Instantly she looked offended. "You think I'd poison you?"

"Why are you giving me wine?" He lifted the rim of the glass to his lips and sipped slowly.

"I just thought that..." She cleared her throat and fought the blush that rose into her cheeks under his intense gaze. "I just thought that maybe you drank it with dinner when you lived at home. I mean, you said something about it once at Hogwarts, and I thought it might be a nice change." He arched an eyebrow at her.

"A nice change?"

"Okay, it's my way of apologizing for picking a fight with you earlier," she admitted, averting her eyes. To her surprise, he chuckled before taking a long drink.

"Plying me with liquor to get me to talk to you - really, it's something a Slytherin might have done. Except that traditionally we lace the wine with Veritaserum."

"Oh, naturally," she said, nodding. His hand froze and he turned to look at her.

"You put -?"

"What? Oh!" she shook her head. "Oh, no. I don't keep magical things in my home." He looked relieved and went back to drinking. "But Ron always did." Draco began to choke on the drink he'd just swallowed, and she giggled as she went for some napkins in the kitchen. She sat across from him and tossed them to him.

"You almost had me," he admonished, shaking his head. "Besides, it would be beneath you to be so sneaky. I expect that you'll come up with something more creative to get me to talk to you, since I can tell you really want me to."

"No, I understand your need to keep things about her private," she admitted, sipping from her mug of cocoa. "I don't like talking about my life with Ron to anyone. He was mine, and I don't fancy sharing." His head snapped up and he stared at her intently. "Isn't that what's keeping you from it?"

"Something like that," he said, nodding. She blew gently into her mug, and he ate slowly. He didn't stop her when she refilled his wineglass twice; she was right - it had been a long time since he'd had wine. He used to have it with dinner every night before his father was murdered, but since then, it was too much of a luxury, and he could not afford luxuries with the small amount of money he had to live on.

He watched as Hermione cleared his empty dinner plate and went into the kitchen. He listened as she washed the plate and the cutlery he'd just used, and shook his head. So Weasley's death had made her obsessive-compulsive about washing things? At least she wasn't constantly washing her hands, he thought. When she re-entered the room and resumed her spot in the armchair, he glanced over at her and cringed. Her hands were red and chapped from being over-washed.

He didn't want to know anything about Hermione. Knowing that she was obsessive-compulsive and starved herself was already too much truth for him to digest. The truth was that he was dying for someone to talk to, and anyone would do at this point. How fortuitous, then, that he should be placed in the company of someone who shared pain that was so exquisitely close to his own. Perhaps he should rethink talking to her tonight - but was there a way to talk to her without hearing "I told you so?"

Suddenly an idea entered his mind. Beautiful in its simplicity, it would give him the opportunity to talk without consequence.

"Feeling the Veritaserum taking effect," he said calmly. Her eyes shot up, and he almost laughed at the confusion that filled them. "Ask away." He relaxed back into the cushions.

"But I told you, I didn't-"

"Bollocks," he said, closing his eyes. "Ask away, before it stops working." Her eyebrows shot up. He'd said he didn't want to be friends, and said he hadn't wanted to talk about Ginny, but here he was, offering her whatever information she wanted. It was there for the taking.

"How did she die?" Her soft question cut straight to the quick.

"I should have thought that you'd ask how we met, or how we fell in love, or something along those lines. Didn't expect you to go straight for the jugular. It's called subtlety, Weasley, and you used to have some." She blushed.

"You're part of the Order, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's how you met. And I suspect that falling in love with Ginny was easy since she was probably the only one who believed that you'd turned." His mouth fell open.

"How in the bloody hell-?"

"She always did have a soft spot for you after my fifth year," she confessed, giving him a wry smile. He blinked.

"She did?"

"I found out by accident. Harry had given us both journals for Christmas that year, and they looked identical. I picked hers up once by mistake," she said, shrugging.

"And you read it?"

"I'm not a saint," she said, staring into her mug. "And I was curious."

"And she wrote about me?"

"A little bit. She wrote something about how you seemed different to her, and then it switched tone in the middle of the entry and she started-" she stopped talking and cleared her throat. "Well, that was the part where I stopped reading."

"She wrote naughty bits about me?" he asked, highly amused. Hermione's cheeks went from pink to scarlet. "And you read them! Oi, I have underestimated you. You would have done just fine in Slytherin. That saucy little minx! She never told me that."

"I don't expect that she would," she said, raising her eyebrows at him. "Considering how big your ego already is, and all that. She probably didn't want to tell you and inflate it anymore."

"Oh, that thing," he said, sighing. "My ego. No, somehow I misplaced that when I ran away to join the Order. Misplaced it right along with my pride."

"Why would joining the Order make you lose your pride?" she asked curiously.

"You're joking, right?" She shook her head. He pointed to himself. "Son of a known Death Eater here, remember? To my father, Dumbledore embodied evil."

"Right," she said. Then she burst into raucous laughter. Startled, he watched her giggle until she was breathless. "Sorry," she said after she'd regained her breath. "I just- Dumbledore, evil? By your father?"

"Anyway," he said pointedly, trying to steer the conversation away from his father. "Gin and I became involved not too long ago. You're right; she was the only one who trusted me at first. And she was loyal, even though she had no reason to be. Walked into a meeting one night and overheard her defending me to some other less trustful members. And that was sort of it for us."

"Not really as romantic as I'd hoped," Hermione said, smiling. "But more or less what I expected."

"We started, ah, having relations, as it were," he said, struggling for the words. She suppressed a giggle at his old-fashioned terminology. "But then I made a mistake. I got too comfortable with her, and I wanted to show her off. Wanted the world to know that she was my girl. Got messy. We were seen together, and the Dark Lord ordered her killed."

"Oh," she breathed, tears welling up in her eyes.

"Dumbledore tried to keep me from her and tried to keep me from seeing her body, but I just barged in. They really did a number on her. My poor girl suffered, because she was with me."

"Oh, Malfoy," she said gently, her voice barely above a whisper.

"And I've no one to blame but myself." He downed the remnants of his wine and clenched his jaw. "And now you know."

"It wasn't your fault."

"Bloody well was."

"It was not. Ginny had to have known that when you came to the Order, you'd be making powerful enemies. She had to know the risks of getting involved with you, and she did it anyway. She wasn't a stupid girl, Malfoy. You can't believe that you shoulder all of the blame for her death."

"How can you say that?" he asked, glaring at her. Her form was blurred through the tears that flooded his eyes. "I'm your enemy, too. You should hate me. Rage at me, wail at me, let loose. I got your friend killed."

"Is that why you think I wanted to know? So I could have a reason to hex you into oblivion? As if I'd need a reason?" He stared at the floor, and something occurred to her. "Or is it what you'd hoped for?"

"I don't hope for anything," he said flatly, rising from the sofa. "Thanks for dinner." She didn't try to stop him as he turned and disappeared down the hallway.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Breakfast had never been her strong suit, but she was determined to make the best of it this morning. She flipped the bacon, hissing every time the grease popped out of the pan and onto her skin. She'd done fairly well so far - at least half of the cooked bacon was edible, which was more than she could say for the eggs that she'd tried to poach. She picked a cold egg up and squeezed it in her palm.

"I guess I could use a flat bouncing ball," she mused out loud to herself.

"Who are you talking to?" She dropped the egg in surprise. When she realized it was just Draco, she felt foolish and retrieved the egg from the floor, hoping he hadn't seen it. "And what in Circe's name is that?"

"Uhm... failed experiment?" she offered. He arched an eyebrow and cocked his head to one side. "A really, really failed experiment?"

"Breakfast not really one of your better meals, I take it," he commented, moving straight to the coffee pot. She sighed and tossed the egg into the waste can.

"You don't know how right you are," she mumbled, moving back in front of the frying pan. The grease sizzled and popped, landing right on her hand, causing an ugly red mark to appear. In the next moment, the frying pan was nowhere in sight. Draco did a double take before sitting his mug on the counter and inspecting the stove. It was still hot.

"What the hell did you just do? And how did you do it?"

"What?" she asked, looking confused. "What do you mean?"

"The pan, woman! Where in the bloody hell is it, and how did you get rid of it without a wand? And since when do you start using magic again?"

"I-I don't know," she stammered, looking down at her hand. There were no marks on it.

"Does this happen a lot?" he asked, inspecting her hand.

"I don't know," she repeated, lifting her eyes to meet his.

"Do things disappear when you get angry?"

"Sometimes," she admitted. "But I always thought it was just because I was aggravated, and that they were somewhere else in the house, and I couldn't find them and that was why I was angry to begin with."

"I'll catch that logic train when it circles back around to me," he said, his eyes roaming around the kitchen in search of the frying pan. "Have you ever found anything that you've lost that way?"

"Once," she said, nodding. His eyes darted back to her.

"Where was it?"

"Right where I'd seen it last."

"So if we smell bacon burning anytime soon, I suppose we'll know where the pan is, won't we?" he asked wryly. She sighed. "Now what I want to know is how you manage to do this wandless magic, and better yet, I want to know how it is that it's been flying under everyone's magic radar."

"What are you nattering on about?" she asked, annoyed.

"There are magic monitors around this house. Dumbledore has had them here for quite some time, apparently. They're checked on a daily basis, and they've never once registered any sort of magic use."

"Dumbledore is monitoring me?" Her voice had an edge of disbelief to it.

"When did you learn how to do wandless magic?"

"I didn't," she said, frowning. He stared at her. "What? I didn't!"

"Obviously you did, since you can do it."

"I didn't even know I was doing it, remember?" she pointed out, her hands on her hips.

"Right." He thought for a moment, and then turned to her. "Can you teach me how to do it?"