Anyone But Me

Chapter Twenty-One

Hermione stood in front of the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy fifteen minutes before Draco was supposed to meet her there. She needed the extra time to gather her out of control thoughts.

Naively she hoped he would have a good excuse and would easily tell her that Harry's imagination was on the run again. That he wasn't a... a... He wasn't evil. Her mind instinctively shied away from using that word when describing him. There was no way for her to reconcile the boy she had spent time with recently and the image of a twisted copy of him, branded with the mark, that kept flashing before her eyes.

As her anxiety continued to mount she was forced to take slow deliberate breaths to keep herself restrained. She needed to have her head on right for the conversation that was about to happen. Not lost in a sea of crippling fear that would do her absolutely no good.

Already exhausted from not sleeping, unwilling to face what her nightmares would show her, she wasn't really up to such a high stakes meeting. But she knew that getting the truth was much more important and to do that she needed to be sure she wouldn't be caught sneaking out. It was only later, after sending off the owl, that she had thought to ask Harry to borrow the Invisibility Cloak so she could execute an earlier time...

Of course, that would have caused questions. Questions that she did not have good answers for, which would have alerted Harry to the fact that something was amiss. Knowing him, he would have ran to the Marauder's map to sedate his curiosity about what she was doing. A risk that was much too great to take.

So she stayed with her original plan and figured she would have time to sleep...

Later.

Trying to fight off the chill in the air she pulled the new charcoal gray cloak around her tightly. It had been a Christmas gift from her parents to replace the winter trench coat she had been using for the last two years. The matching hat and gloves made her feel like a student at Beauxbatons. Admittedly it wasn't her usual style but it was a gift from the only people who had always loved her. No matter what she did. No matter how horrible she acted sometimes. They loved her. And she would wear the frilly impractical garments, just because of the sentimentality behind them.

Out of nowhere the door to the Room of Requirement popped into being and she was left momentarily confused. She hadn't asked for anything...

Then the door opened and Draco stepped through. Her heart instantly started to race, just at the sight of him. He looked... Sickly.

The dark circles under his eyes had not gone away over their vacation. If anything they looked as if they had been permanently etched onto his face. His skin, that was already abnormally pale, had taken on the anemic hue of a ghost and lost what little coloring it did have. What had happened to him over break?

He wasn't wearing a coat or cloak, only his relaxed version of the Hogwarts standard uniform. White dress shirt and black pants. The odd choice left her wondering if it was a matter of convenience or if he was somehow immune to the dreadful cold that had permeated the castle.

She watched as he closed the door. The fact that she was standing there still hadn't registered. His eyes had the cold edge that she had grown to hate over the years and he looked so much like the twisted version of him from her imagination that it took her breath away. At the sound of her gasp his gaze flicked up and settled on her lurking in the shadows, as soon as his eyes found her his hard demeanor melted. Leaving her Draco standing there.

With him standing so close it was hard to lie to herself and say that she had not missed him. That there were not numerous times where she'd had to restrain herself from writing him a letter over break. There had been so much she wanted to say... Now she didn't even know if any of it was true.