Beneath Appearances

Beneath Appearances

Chapter 5

Storytelling

Draco stared at the proffered case as if it were a bunny that had just sprouted fangs and crouched to leap at his throat.

"No?" Hermione sounded a bit disappointed as she tucked the case back into her robes. She lit her own cigarette from her wand and inhaled greedily. Draco goggled again as she blew out a cloud of smoke.

"It smokes pink!"

"Well, you wouldn't expect me to smoke a normal cigarette, would you?"

"I'm not sure whether I'm more shocked that you smoke at all or that you expected me to smoke a pink cigarette."

"It's rose by the way," she replied testily. "I like rose. And it's part of the project. You'll hear about it in a bit."

"Then you'd better bloody well start talking."

Hermione slumped back against the sofa cushions with the air of someone settling in for a long sit. "How much should I tell you?" she inquired.

"You said everything."

"There's everything and there's everything. How much do you want to know?"

Draco paused. "You've never told anyone about this, have you?" he asked slowly.

"One person knows - sort of - but not from me telling him."

"Tell me as much - tell me everything you want to tell me."

Hermione gazed at him for a moment with a half smile on her lips, then nodded. She took another deep drag of her cigarette and began. "It started in August. Dumbledore asked me to come back to Hogwarts a couple weeks early. I had no idea what it was about, but of course I came."

"Of course."

"Shut up. When I got here, I wasn't halfway through unpacking before he called me to his office. It was like no time I've talked to Dumbledore before. You know how he twinkles?"

Draco scoffed. "It's the most daft, obnoxious thing I've ever seen."

"It's completely sincere, and it just happens to conveniently lull his enemies into underestimating him. But my point is he wasn't doing it. He told me he had a proposal for me that he very much hoped I'd accept, but if I didn't I'd be memory charmed to forget he'd even asked me. Have you ever heard of Performance Potions - not that kind of performance potion before you even say one word. I'll ask you to remember we're talking about Dumbledore at the moment."

"Thank gods you draw the line on age gaps somewhere."

"No, it's just that he doesn't need them," - she inserted a pause Draco found truly frightening - "or so I've heard."

Draco began breathing again but looked no less scandalized. "From whom?!"

"From the little voice in my head that tells me how to get you to make that face. Anyway, the Performance Potions I'm talking about are an experimental form of magic. They're controversial because they draw on Muggle psychology, and like Muggle psychology, they vary enormously in their effectiveness, which has kept them obscure. But you know how generally any spell dealing with emotions or relationships is either a flop or a very bad idea? Like Soothing Draughts are hardly anything but sedatives, love spells nearly always go wonky, and there simply isn't a charm we can use to make Voldemort play nicely with us other wizards. Magic just isn't subtle enough to deal with the human mind."

"Tell that to my fucking father."

"Someone should have. Now, Performance Potions incorporate the Muggle idea that acting things out can have psychological benefits - it can help a person form good habits, it can be rehearsal for something someone wants to happen, or it can relieve stress or help a person come to terms with a tragedy. For example, if someone can't cope with a loved one's death, they can act out saying good-bye to whomever it was, and it might make them feel like they got more closure."

"Sounds pretty damn froufy."

"That's psych. And Performance Potions are even a little hazier because essentially they try to bottle that effect. The brewer mixes the potion, then he charges it by acting out whatever he wants the thing to do. Theoretically, you can get potions that will have very precise effects - instead of a love spell that'll practically drive the subject mad with lust, you could brew something that would get them to agree to a first date, or you could end an argument by convincing the person to talk to you rather than by brainwashing them into seeing everything your way."

"You're saying these things take all the fun out of bewitching people."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "That's if they work at all. Their effectiveness depends on how in line the desired result is with the subject's nature and character - I mean acting like a chicken has yet to actually turn anyone into a chicken or even to convince them they've become a chicken. And again -- no spell for making Voldemort into Father Christmas. The realism and sincerity of the acting plays a tremendous role as well. The perfect situation would be a 'performance' in which the thing you want to happen actually happens; then the potion would be almost guaranteed to make it happen again. And it all gets even harder when a potion's meant to deal with an interaction between multiple people -- that takes multiple actors, you see, which introduces that many more variables. In that case everyone has to be a stellar performer, capable of virtually living the event, in order to create a really good potion."

"How very Stanislavsky."

Hermione stared at him, impressed. "Exactly; you have been reading."

"It's rather addictive."

"Anyway, " she stressed, though she was grinning broadly, "There's a wizard by the name of Eleptherios Karkadoulias. He was Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor here for a while during the first war with Voldemort. He was also very deeply involved in Dumbledore's resistance, not Order of the Phoenix - sorry, I'll explain that later - but very big in the way of information-gathering. His particular project was investigating Voldemort's alliances with dark creatures; he managed to figure out all kinds of things - lines of communication and power dynamics between the Death Eaters and the creatures, locations of lairs - but he went mad before he passed what he knew on to anyone else. Then Harry lived and Voldemort didn't quite die, and it didn't matter the information had been lost."

"Except that some poor bloke had lost his mind."

Hermione's voice grew suddenly hard. "One of many. It didn't really stand out to people."

"Understandable."

"Oh, yes, perfectly," she replied tightly, "still I would have expected better of our side..."

"Watch it with that "our" business."

"...but Eleptherios's case was complicated, and everyone was so happy the fighting was over, it wasn't the time to dwell on losses. He was just shipped off to St. Mungo's and forgotten. Then we get into a second war, and there's Hagrid to keep an eye on the giants for us and Lupin to deal with werewolves, but then last July there was a vampire attack near Liverpool. Well, damn it if we don't seem to be missing a vampire on the staff. Then, suddenly, there's a way to cure Eleptherios."

"Performance Potions."

"Right in one."

"Which have no reason to involve you that I can see."

"When Eleptherios taught here, he had a prize pupil, Loreena Watson. Ravenclaw, DADA genius. They had the kind of relationship no one could quite pin down - the sort where no matter what's actually going on, the girl's mum had better never find out. Well, he thought the world of her skills..."

"I'll bet he did."

"...in DADA, and he pressed for her to be allowed to be active in the resistance. And she died. That's what drove him mad. So Dumbledore wanted me to help Severus act out a scene that would convince Eleptherios Loreena forgave him for any hand he'd had in her death."

"Did she really?"

"We don't know, so to hell with the truth, right?"

"Nothing I love more than a really good magical deception."

"Well, at first trying to prepare this potion was absolutely impossible. Severus was just as disgusted as I was that the two of us had to work together. He'd figured out the basic recipe before Dumbledore contacted me, and he refused to tell me what it was, so I couldn't even get a grasp of how the physical half of the potion was operating. We had this script he and Dumbledore had pieced together based on everything known about Eleptherios and Loreena, but since no one does know how they really were together, that didn't go too far. Gods, it was awful. Even if the situation hadn't been so extreme, anything that repeatedly uses names like Eleptherios and Loreena, which, come to think of it, is the entire wizarding world, can't help sounding like a soap opera - sorry, Muggle reference."

"Muggles have soap operas too?"

"Too? Um, yeah, definitely. So anyway, what we had right at the beginning was Severus reading lines in his very most hateful, sneering voice, and all I wanted was for the godsdamned potion to work so I could leave, so I was trying as hard as I could - which ended up making me sound even more like a soap star most of the time. We had this string of potions that didn't work at all, and they kept not working, and we kept getting more and more frustrated until we reached a point where Severus would be ripping into me and I'd be screaming at him after every attempt. And those potions were something to see - they'd turn out so terrifyingly acidy and foul drinking them would probably have killed Eleptherios. Within a week, we'd both built ourselves up to this level of loathing where the potion would blacken just from our being in the same room together. Finally, during one of our shouting matches, or rather shouting versus sneering matches, I accused him of not really trying to make the potion work and said that was why we'd never be done with it. And the funny thing is we both wanted to be done with it so badly that that was what got us back to being civil. And the other funny thing is that Severus really trying to act out a warm, fuzzy scene sounds one sliver less hateful and ten times more pained than Severus being his typical self. On top of that was the fact that I'm really a poor actress..."

"Like hell you are."

"...so the potion still wasn't working. So one night I walked into the lab and announced we were never going to get anywhere if we didn't stop hating one another."

Draco practically chortled. "I rather wish I could have heard that. I'm sure he loved it."

"Adored it, which is why I had to make a very good case."

"This is the part where you stripped naked and offered yourself to him on his desk?"

"Hardly. I think what I actually said was 'This fucking potion is smarter than either of us, so as long as what we're feeling is stronger than what we're saying, that's all it's going to recognize. My thought was that we could reach some sort of neutrality that at least wouldn't interfere with the work."

"You mean you weren't planning on the seamy love affair?"

"Not remotely."

"No stripping and desk sex?"

"Not for a while yet. That night he simply really didn't want to listen to what I had to say, so I had to sit in the lab refusing to work on the potion for six hours before I could even get him to acknowledge what I was saying. See, I told him the only way for us to get over the hatred issue was to get to know one another..."

"That would have been a great lead-in to the stripping, if you'd said 'know' in a really slinky voice..."

"Could you get over that already?" Hermione exclaimed, finally letting her exasperation show.

"I doubt it. Either I've latched onto it to help myself cope with the frightening prospect of you two together or I'm strangely comforted by the idea of people more fucked up than I am."

"I'd be strangely comforted by your silence."

"That is strange; the sound of my own voice is one of my greatest joys" - he noted the deadly glower on his companion's face - "but I suppose this might be one of those rare, inappropriate times."

"Thank you." Hermione huffed. She fished another rose cigarette out of her robes, lit it, and inhaled thoughtfully. "You know what really happened that first night? For the six hours I wouldn't work on the potion and he wouldn't cooperate with me, I talked. I started with the first thing I can remember, and I just came out with all sorts of random information about myself. For the first hour or two, I think he really managed not to hear me, acting like he was going to work on the potion whether or not I helped him. But since that would have been completely impossible, after he stalked around the lab for a while arranging things and tidying up and glowering, there came a point when he could only pretend to ignore me. I started to get afraid he could do that forever, but I just kept talking; we were both being so stubborn.

"And finally, long after my voice had gone all raspy, he stopped me. He sneered, of course. I'd been saying something about Crookshanks - that's my cat - and he'd been sitting at his desk still pretending to work on something he didn't need to do in the least, when all of a sudden he stood up and struck that towering black pillar of gloom pose he so likes to pull on the first years, and I think what he actually said was...hmm, let me think... 'Miss Granger, I have suffered to endure this mindless prattle for a seeming eternity in the hope your much-touted intelligence would eventually make known to you how foolish you are being. However, as you insist on clinging to the delusion that relating tales of your detestable pet will somehow enable us to work together more productively, I must conclude that your cleverness is as mythical as I, for one, have always suspected it to be. I assure you if you persist in this 'getting to know one another' scheme, you will only waste more of our time, and that it is solely by virtue of what you do not know about me that we are able to work together at all.' Then he told me he'd see me tomorrow, and he went and shut himself up in his chambers.

"He was very proud of that speech, you know. When I got down here the next night, he clearly thought he'd put me in my place. He had everything set up for getting back to work as usual."

"Poor dense sod."

"I walked in and sat down on the other side of the room from the lab equipment. I started talking again. I started with the basilisk in second year. How its gaze isn't this instantaneous, simple poison like everyone assumes. How it's hypnotic and irresistible, and how I'd felt my body shutting down against my will, and it felt like falling asleep only very, very wrong and terrifying. How even looking in a mirror, I could see the dumb hatred and hunger in its eyes and I knew the only thing that would keep it from swallowing me was that something even stronger and more evil wanted my body to be found. How that moment seemed to go on and on as I realized I was absolutely helpless. How the eyes come back in dreams, and even when it's been months and I start to hope they won't come anymore, I'm always proven wrong. And how that's one of the most comforting memories I have because that's when I saw pure evil. That's the one time it was really simple. There was evil, and when Harry was down in the Chamber of Secrets, he showed Dumbledore pure loyalty, and that was good, and Fawkes came to help him. And he won with all the ends tied up neatly. No one died, and only a memory was killed. And Dobby was freed."

"At some point, you'll have to explain what my family's house elf has to do with memories and a fox," Draco murmured, but softly enough not to break the flow of Hermione's tale.

"I told him that was the only time I could think of that everything worked out that way. Like a fairytale. And it was probably only because I was petrified half the time and missed how fucked up it all really was. I told him that the year before when Harry, Ron, and I went after the Philosopher's Stone, along the way Harry and I were sure, completely positive, Ron had been killed. That we had to leave him, that no 12-year-old, that no anyone should have to do that. That it's wrong to leave your friend that way, and it's wrong not to. That it breaks you somehow, and it's an absolute miracle that Ron woke up and was able to make it all better. That that's another of my greatest comforts - that sometimes you're not held accountable for the things you have to do.

"And I told him how every year after those two I've just seen things get worse. How there's a godsforsaken war going on virtually in my school, and if he thought the adults were the only ones to notice or lose sleep over it then Professor Binns had a better grip on reality than he did. That you don't need to see scores of people die to talk about horror and tragedy, that every single student who saw Harry reappear on the Quidditch pitch with Cedric's body in his arms understands those things perfectly. That I've gotten to find out more than I ever wanted about deception and people dying for misplacing their trust and people who should have been trusted being punished for reasons that really made beautiful sense at the time and about keeping secrets from the people who ought to be closest to you.

"That I had this sliver of hope that with S.P.E.W. I'd found a pure cause. Enslavement was evil; I was so sure, and I clung to that. But I did more research into house elf history last year, and you know what I found? They used to be free-living, a subspecies of brownies. They'd steal into people's homes at night and do chores, the whole elves and the shoemaker story. It was part of their inherent magic. And wizards picked up on this and captured some elves and bred them to strengthen the trait. Eventually they turned it into the dominant facet of the elves' personality to the point where today they're incapable of living independently. So wrong as enslavement is, it would actually destroy most elves to free them. And even if you could breed them backwards that kind of manipulation would be wrong as well.

"I said I've seen my heroes fail, and watched my friends - my good friends who are essentially good people - filling up with rage. And that I've learned to swallow my doubts just to keep going and to cover up my own fear so I can tell other people it'll all be fine. That I just keep fucking smiling through it all because they need to have someone to come to. And that when I feel the rage getting to me too, or feel helpless like I did with the basilisk, or pretty much everyday when I think how unbelievably awful all this is, I don't know if I can stand it, and I wish a thousand times over not to be part of it. And I fantasize about ways to run away. Then I think that there's simply no one I'd trust to be in my place. And when I finished he just sat there silently - like you're finally doing. And he didn't pretend he hadn't heard me. And after a very long time he said 'I see.' Just 'I see.' Then I stood up and walked out. And the next night we sat without speaking for I don't know how long before he started to talk.

"That was another of his great speeches. It went something like, 'Miss Granger, as perceptive as your choice of last night's topic may have been and as fully as you may have demonstrated your lack of innocence, I must point out that you have failed to consider how vastly different witnessing horrors is from having committed them. However grievous your experiences in the last few years, I offer my strongest assurance they do not equip you to "understand" or, I'm sure, to tolerate in more than an abstract sense the knowledge that your working partner is a murderer.'

"I told him that if he frightened me into running off weeping, he wouldn't have lost anything since the two of us were getting nowhere on the potion anyway. Plus he'd be rid of me, which he'd been wanting for weeks. He said even that would be small compensation for disclosing his personal secrets to a foolish girl. I pointed out that if I quit the project, Dumbledore was sure to memory charm away anything I remembered from working on it. And that if I ran off screaming, he'd have proved me wrong and himself right, and we both knew he'd like nothing better. And I may have said something to the effect that if he didn't tell me, it meant he was scared that I was right after all. And as juvenile as that was, it worked. He told me -- all sorts of things. Absolutely terrible things that it's not my place to pass along to you. But suffice it to say I wanted to bolt from the room. I sat there gripping the edge of my desk, but really the only thing that kept me from running was the sound of his voice -- it was so clear that he hated the things he was telling me more than he hated me, or this project, or Harry even. And it reminded me that everything he was saying was in the past -- only it wasn't in the past for him. It was something that preyed on him, constantly, after years and years.

"When he was finished he looked up -- neither of us had been looking at one another the whole time -- and he seemed surprised that I was still there. I was sure that if I had run out at any point, he wouldn't have noticed; he would have just kept on talking 'til the end of it all. I forced myself to sneer a bit, and I said 'I see.' He looked absolutely dumbstruck. And I so wanted to be sick, but I managed not to show it. And the next night, we talked.

"We actually, civilly spoke with one another about -- I don't even know...things, anything. It was suddenly so easy because we'd both already heard the worst the other could say. He couldn't resent me for being too naive, and I couldn't attack him for being horrible since I'd said nothing when he told me really horrible things.

"We got back to working on the potion again, and we'd talk while we set up and in between trials and when we were tidying up afterwards. And the first time I really worried about the situation was when I realized you can get to need that sort of thing. That even though we loathed one another -- and we did -- we were getting to depend on the time in lab just so we could stop pretending for a little while to be better or braver than we were. Finding that I'd started looking forward to time with someone I didn't even like, it was...unsettling. But it did make it easier to work together, which was my whole idea in the first place.

"I got him to show me the procedure for making up the physical base of our potion, and that was another weird moment because it was the first time I ever admired him. Performance Potions aren't simple even before you add the acting element, and there's no standard base to use for them; each potion has to be designed specially according to its intended task. And he'd been able to do that without ever studying this sort of potion before. That's when I realized the reason Dumbledore will never give him the DADA job isn't because he's a vicious, untrustworthy git, but because he's brilliant at Potions. And that realization felt really strange. And so it went on, and it gets harder to hate someone the better you know them, but hard as that is, it can be bloody impossible to forget that you do hate them, and that's a very complicated, very safe place to be. But then you add in magic, and magic gets you into trouble.

"See, even though we were doing better working together, the script we had was still preposterous. So we considered rewriting it, but we didn't know how. Instead we started improvising. We tried all sorts of things -- Loreena telling Eleptherios she'd never blamed him, Loreena ordering him to pull himself together and avenge her death, even one where she said the afterlife was very nice and she was glad to be there. And we tried a lot with her forgiving him. And damn me if there's not something to Performance Potions after all. We'd gotten into such a habit of talking. At least once a night one of our trials would somehow blur into a regular discussion, and sometimes we'd just let the potion go the whole time. Well, finally one night -- I don't know if it was the psychology of constantly repeating these forgiveness scenes, or some sort of magical build-up we'd created pushing me into it, or just that we'd miraculously gotten past so much of our hostility by then -- but we started talking and I forgave him for Sirius's death. You have no idea what I mean. Long story short: Harry's godfather, Sirius Black. A lot of people made mistakes that led to his death, including Severus. He was the one I couldn't forgive. But that night I did, truly. And I knew he knew and that he was as shocked as I was. A moment like that is, well, it's surreal -- you look back and suddenly see what an unbelievably long way you've come; it seems like it should never have happened or at least it should have taken a lifetime, but you think and realize it's not been two months. And you can figure out what happened, but how...that's so much harder." Hermione shut her eyes and drew a shaky breath; Draco suspected she was seeing that night again in her mind. After another breath, her eyes opened and she shook her head a bit ruefully.

"Well, like I told you the most successful Performance Potions are the ones where the performance is the event itself occurring. So we looked over at the sample we'd had going just then, and even though we'd been talking about ourselves and not Loreena and Eleptherios, it looked better than anything had before. So we sent it along to Dumbledore, and he sent it to St. Mungo's, and they gave it to Eleptherios and reported that he started to show almost immediate improvement. Then Dumbledore was just so delighted Severus and I made such a good team, wouldn't we consider taking on another project? And we couldn't very well say no when we'd just had this brilliant success.

"That's when things got confusing. We were both desperate to walk off in opposite directions and let everything that had happened just go away. But instead we were thrown together again, and this time where these walls were supposed to be, suddenly they weren't anymore. It would have been completely different if I hadn't forgiven him. Even after we started talking -- it was bizarre; we actually knew each other better than anyone else, but that was fine, or, well, it was manageable. It was just knowledge. There was still this underlying resentment keeping things in order between us. But forgiving him was...intimate. It was something happening on an emotional level, and he told me later he doesn't know if anyone before that has forgiven him for anything. At least he said he hadn't felt they had.

"So the status quo was simply gone, and there wasn't any walking away, and no points of reference, and certainly no one ask about any of it. And the first time you have a thought like 'that was really snarky, but pretty funny, too,' and there's nothing to make you say 'yes, but he's an evil git...'

"Also this second project was rather like my official induction into the war effort -- I wasn't just on for an assignment, and I wasn't just attached to Harry and Ron. So I started to hear things, or at least now what Dumbledore tells Severus, he tells me as well. And it's horrible. And people draw closer in the face of horror...for comfort." Hermione had gotten quite wrapped up and raced through the last bit of her story; this time when she stopped the pause was trace breathless; it gave Draco the impression of someone drawing up short at the brink of a cliff. She glanced over at Draco, and her lips curled wryly, "This is where it gets into sex. Think you get the picture, or would you like it filled in? There is a bit involving the desk if you're really interested."

Draco's head swiveled as if he were trying to see the furnishing in question through the stone wall. "Classroom," he murmured, "Innocent, unsuspecting students..." He sounded impressed underneath his distress. Hermione cleared her throat, and he managed to refocus his attention. "Comfort?" he directed a doubtful gaze at Hermione. "Now that's rather anti-climactic."

"More catalytic, I'd say." Draco for once waited patiently. "Severus and I really do fit well together. It's not a relationship that needs sex; I don't know if we'd ever have taken that step under different circumstances. If everything were more physical, there's a chance I'd be talking less vaguely right now -- satisfying your prurient curiosity or getting you to make that amusing scandalized face, one or the other. At least something physical would be easier to explain. But so much of this is about what we know about one another, and not only is that hard to talk about; I can't talk about it without betraying Severus. Gods, I feel like I've been appointed Slytherin's official Secret Keeper. And now I'm rambling. Comfort. Yes, that started it."

"Where did it end?" Draco asked mildly.

"You care?"

"You did say everything, Granger. I'm hardly letting a promise like that go -- knowledge, power, etc. and so forth. And it is curious -- I had you pegged as more of a romantic."

"I would have thought you'd noticed that I'm not exactly relating a romance here. But if you must know, I do think I love him." Draco sat up at that, and Hermione snorted softly. "It's not what I would have looked for in life, you know? And I don't think it is my one great love affair of all time; I rather hope not, at least not as things are. I...there's pity in the way I love Severus, and I admire things about him that he hates -- like the way he's too good at Potions to ever teach DADA, which he thinks would be a bigger contribution to the war effort. Right now it's good for him -- good for us -- but forever... But relationships change; maybe this will, or maybe there'll never be a reason for us to separate. One of those 'who knows?' types of thing."

"Doesn't sound much like love."

"I think the surest way to tell when someone's talking about love is when they're saying what you'd least expect to hear. I mean, how do you feel about Harry?"

Draco was suddenly sitting bolt upright, grey eyes pinning Hermione like dagger points. "What has some random fit of lust got to do with a conversation on love?" he demanded. Hermione looked slightly taken aback, and he slumped into the sofa again, muttering, "And if you must know, that feels like I don't have any choice."

"I'll tell you about the second project Dumbledore gave us then, shall I?" she asked carefully. Draco nodded. "Good. This is the one I'm hoping you'll help me with. Severus does the best he can, but he's always getting asked to mix up these emergency potions and ship them off in the dark of night. Even when I don't have to help with the orders it puts a real stitch in the experiments.

"What we're trying to do is -- there are two major ways to administer potions, right? The most common is via ingestion, and then there's a smaller number of recipes for ointments and salves. Dumbledore asked Severus and I to investigate the feasibility of a third option -- vaporous potions, enchantment by inhalation. Potions designed to be used this way are virtually non-existent, but they could potentially be immensely powerful -- anyone who's ever accidentally gotten a good breath of cauldron fumes during class can vouch for that. And in combat they'd be an incredible weapon. Imagine a potion you could administer to a roomful of people simultaneously just by smashing a little vial. It would be able to travel past a Shielding Spell -- no one would ever shield against the very air they breath. Imagine being able to develop a magic dampening hex -- temporary, of course -- that worked that way. Aurors train in physical combat and Muggle weaponry far more than Death Eaters; a spell like that would give them a huge advantage. And if you could create an antidote able to be administered to your forces beforehand -- if you could make that work with any incapacitating spell at all -- that'd be it, all it took to turn a battle into a helpless mess of Death Eaters ready to be rounded up."

"Bloody impressive."

"Yeah, if we can make it work. There are a whole new set of principles to define for the vapor phase. It'd be ideal if we could discover a way to convert known potions -- bind them to some sort of magically inert, cold-boiling carrier maybe, but so far we're lacking even the most basic knowledge to tell us whether that might be possible. We've been running countless experiments with simple, original potions, just trying to work out some rules and gradually increase the potions' complexity. That's where these came from." She held up a half-smoked rose cigarette, and Draco realized she must have been discreetly Banishing the butts as she told her story; he had no idea how many she'd smoked, and there was no incriminating evidence to be seen.

"What are they anyway?" he asked curiously.

"Well, besides being a very logical means of concentrated delivery for a vaporous potion -- which is much easier for us to deal with at this point than something that would be released into the air and diluted a thousand-fold -- these contain a sort of mild Pepper-Up Potion. I figured what with the amount of sleep I lose for this project, I was rather justified in suiting the experiment to my selfish ends. Severus hassles me mercilessly about them, so I worked out a way to add a few wards against illness and general collapse."

"You're telling me you managed to create the fag of good health?"

"Gods no! Severus wouldn't be so insufferable if these were actually harmless. Something that enables me to sleep even less than I normally would? And they're just as addictive as ordinary cigarettes."

"You crazy rebel, you," the corner of Draco's mouth and his right eyebrow quirked upwards simultaneously, "What have you done with our real Head Girl?"

"Look, Malfoy," Hermione's face wore a look of equally dry amusement, "when we start working together, the first thing you're going to find out is that I'm not a healthy person. I'm rather obsessive, actually -- classes, S.P.E.W., books... I had a Time Turner back in third year to let me take extra classes -- I was only supposed to use it for attending lectures, but there was just so much I could read if I had the time. I'd generally give myself three extra days a week; my birthday is technically months earlier now. Harry and Ron tell horror stories about how often I send them to fetch me midnight coffee, and yes, I still do that because one addiction doesn't cancel out another and I can only smoke in the dungeon anyway."

"Said with an admirable lack of remorse."

"Admirable?"

"You are talking to a Slytherin after all."

"Indeed," Hermione sighed, "and I was beginning to think the general Slytherin position here was atop some obnoxious moral high ground."

"Watch who you're accusing of moral high ground!"

"Well, after Severus's know-better-than-thou act, and your going into shock not so long ago..."

"Were you expecting something besides shock?"

"...and refusing to smoke with me..."

"Pink, Granger. Yes, I am morally -- and artistically -- above pink."

"...and it just seems a bit sad, Gryffindors apparently being the rebels of Hogwarts..."

"Oh, fucking fine!" he cried and held out his hand. Hermione passed him a cigarette, which he lit and sucked experimentally. She watched him for a long minute, smugly noting that he didn't choke. "Not bad," he declared at last, "but you do realize I couldn't possibly do this again?"

"I'll get back to you on that," she replied brightly, and he eyed her with suspicion.

"You have the unmistakable look of a bad influence on your face, Granger. I've worn it too many times myself not to know."

"You look like a bad influence when you're looking in the mirror?"

"I always look like a bad influence."

"Or you're always mooning into a mirror."

Draco rolled his eyes dramatically. "Any more of your sordid tale I still have to hear?" He was disturbed to see Hermione give him a very definite smirk.

"What an artful change of subject that was...Dandy."

"'Snipe," he grumbled, but Hermione only grinned infuriatingly.

"I think the only thing I've got left to tell you is 'same time tomorrow, Potions lab,'" she was saying. "Unless there's anything else you want to discuss? Don't want you feeling you haven't heard 'everything.'"

Draco smirked wickedly -- he did it better, after all. "Actually, there is something else. In her last letter your mum asked me whether you're getting enough rest. Now, Granger, take a look at yourself, and tell me, just how am I supposed to answer her?"

"My mother did not write to you about my well-being."

"Oh, but she did," Draco replied smugly, delighted to see Hermione gaping at him. "Tomorrow, then." And he strolled to the door, flicking aside the heavy green drape that covered it so it swished behind him in a most satisfactory way. A Malfoy always gets the last word. Draco chose not to consider that in this case the last word was a message from someone's mother.