Alone Together

Draco is Unusually Nice

Sorry for not posting an update on time guys. End of the school year was busy as heck. I'll post two updates to make up for it :)

Hermione awoke more sore than she had ever been in her entire life. But she awoke to-- was that sunlight? There were no windows in the dungeon.

All the sudden, she remembered what had happened. Hermione sat bolt upright, an impressive feat considering her whole body felt like it was pieces of wood with random nails hammered into it. To her horror, she discovered she had not been leaning against a wall or a post, but Draco's chest. They were in the turrets just inside the roof from where they had been sitting.

"Why..?" she managed, her throat on fire. Luckily the current situation of waking up at the top of the inside roof on Draco Malfoy's shoulder was valiantly fending off the suffocating fear and despair from certain events in the near past of which she refused to think about.

"You fell asleep on my shoulder on the roof, and I knew I couldn't make it all the way back to the dungeon with your deadweight." he replied matter-of-factly.

"Why didn't you wake me up?" Hermione couldn't help but blush. Never ever had she imagined sneaking onto the roof of Hogwarts and falling asleep on the shoulder of a boy. And Draco Malfoy!

No. That's not what it was. It was a small act of kindness to get out of the dungeon and I was exhausted from the torture, so it wasn't my fault I fell asleep on him.

But she couldn't help but wonder what Draco had been thinking about when her head was resting on his shoulder.

"Are you saying you wanted to go back to the dungeon?" he drawled. Hermione couldn't think of a good response, and even if she had, her throat was still too fiery and dry from her last question to say anything.

Instead, she examined her newest shame she had collected on her arm- the letters M-U-D-B- all neatly in a row. Why had Draco defended her? Why had he stopped Alecto from finishing that awful word? It was him who had first called her that.

The blonde Slytherin noticed her gaze on the freshly scarred letters. In response, he stuck his two forefingers in his mouth and swirled them around before removing them and swiping it across the partially spelled slur. The one who had first called her the awful word was now the one gently wiping it away with his finger.

Hermione felt his movements both through the chain as well as because of her close proximity. It was strange. Was Draco Malfoy, possibly being nice to her? Hermione Granger?

She considered this for a moment.

If she compared the way Draco treated her last year to now, the difference was astounding. Having been around him constantly Hermione hadn't really noticed how much had really changed. Of course, all of it was thanks to the collar, but even comparing how he had acted since the beginning to now, the change was immense.

Although she hated to admit it, they were very similar. He could match her wit and intelligence, not to mention the tendency to break rules randomly. That last part she had gotten from spending so much time with Ron and Harry, but perhaps it was just a trait all males tended to have.

"But he's evil," she reminded herself. Although they had similar traits, Hermione could never forget that he had been the one to instigate the attack on Hogwarts in their sixth year, and almost killed Dumbledore.

But after being forced to spend so much time around him, she almost couldn't see him as the cold shell of a monster as she used to view him. Instead she saw how he was constantly running his hands through his hair and checking his reflection in every window, mirror, puddle, even the silverware. And sometimes, when he thought she wasn't watching, how he made faces at himself in them. How when he was reading he constantly tapped his fingers on his knee, or sometimes his heel and toe. He never set an open book down upside down and was a complete neat freak.