sugar & spice

chapter three

Three meetings was all it took for their tentative truce to go arse over kettle.

The first two meetings had been...polite, almost stilted. As if she and Malfoy, and Theo to a lesser extent, were dancing around each other, trying too hard to be nice, so hard that their personalities were a little...disingenuous. The charade could only go on for so long before cracks appeared in the act. Theo's idea of draining the wound and airing grievances had been a great idea in theory, had cleared the air of the most monumental, ugly issues between them, but apparently they were due a climactic explosion no matter how much effort they put into avoiding one.

Maybe she didn't hate Malfoy, but he was lousy at translation and apparently obsessed with driving her bonkers about the dumbest things and it was so unexpectedly awful she didn't know what to do with herself.

"That is not what that means. You're completing ignoring how grammatical construction of the thirteenth century was different from that of the fifteenth century. There's two hundred years' of linguistic alteration you're trying to apply to the text that doesn't yet exist."

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Last time I checked, one always meant one, Granger."

"Sole." She stressed. "It means sole, as in alone."

Theo cleared his throat, eyes focused on the text before him. "Are we sure we're not all interpreting this incorrectly? Could it mean togetherness?"

"No!" she and Malfoy shouted at the same time before they glared at one another.

"Volume!" Madame Pince poked her head around the shelf, glaring sharply from behind her spectacles.

Seriously? She bit the inside of her cheek. "Sorry."

Pince huffed and slunk away to her post, there and gone, leaving them to their stalemate of an argument.

"It can't mean togetherness," she made sure to keep her tone even and volume low. "If that's what it meant, how do you explain the fact that the entire preceding passage discusses civil war?"

"Wars end," Theo said, shrugging. "It's logical. They were separate and now they're together again."

"Maybe it's meant to be won," she said, brushing her hair out of her face. All this debating was making literal heat rise from her scalp which wasn't doing her hair any favors. "Not one, you know? We're applying our understanding of today's English to a translation that in Old English doesn't stand up."

"What happened to you saying it was one as in alone?" Draco rolled his eyes.

"Only one side can win," she snapped. "The victors won and they're...alone...in their victory."

Even Theo snorted at that reach.

Draco scoffed. "Just admit you were wrong, Granger."

"Well, you weren't bloody correct, either, Malfoy." She took a deep breath. Getting this heated would accomplish nothing. They were meant to be working together as a team on this translation. "It doesn't mean the numeral one."

"It doesn't mean alone either." He was smirking, his stupid lips tilted upward like he found her frustration amusing.

"How about you tell me what it does mean?" she gritted out.

Malfoy went quiet, staring at his textbook for long enough that she nearly lost hope of him ever responding. "Solitary. They aren't the victors. They're the losers, the banished. They lost the war and they've been isolated."

"That's not-" Wait. Maybe that was... "Huh."

It made sense, was a rather...astute interpretation. She dropped her gaze to the text, cheeks flushing. Maybe he wasn't totally hopeless after all.