Theirs was a strange arrangement, if not deadly. He was a Death Eater, she a war hero, and had it not been for circumstance, they never would have been.

But she knew him as she never had in Hogwarts. He was a man, but not his own, swearing allegiance to a Dark Lord he hated, all to save the mother he loved. There was no choice in it, only resignation, for it could be said it was his fate, maybe even his destiny, to follow a path that had been carved for him since long before he was born.

Had they come together for that reason alone, or inspite of it? It couldn't really be said. There were circumstances, after all. Draco Malfoy had been a different person when he had arrived on her doorstep three years ago. Not quite the boy she remembered from Hogwarts, but not quite the man she had expected him to become, either. At the tender age of twenty-one, Draco was someone who had learnt how to love and it was a concept so alien that even now she couldn't quite believe it

But if one were to descend upon Malfoy Manor, they would find the evidence of such a change lying on her death bed, her delicate features as pale as her hair and her luminuous blue eyes as vivid as ever. Narcissa Malfoy had spent the last five years teetering on the brink of death, unaware that the only thing standing between her and extinction was a promise. A blood promise.

Few people knew why Draco had taken the Dark Mark on his sixteenth birthday, but those that did pitied him. And those that pitied him mentioned nothing of it, for fear that the man in question would turn that deadly, steely gaze on them.

It was because of this that Hermione Granger would never admit that part of the reason she had allowed Draco to take her to his bed that first night was because she had pitied him, too. She would never tell him that, not only because she would find herself rejected from his bed and his life, but because things had changed since then. Small things that in the end would prove insignificant.

Yes, things have changed, she thought, as she slipped tiredly out of her dress and into bed beside him. She turned to watch him and felt her heart tighten as he shifted in his sleep, pulling away from her and presenting her with the wall of his back. But not enough. Not enough to matter.

She should have been angry. She should have got up, got dressed, and left. This wasn't her home, nor her bed, and the boy sleeping beside her wasn't hers, either. She couldn't keep him and she couldn't make him love her.

And she should have been angry, but she wasn't. She was past that now, or maybe she had yet to reach that point. Right now, at this moment, she was merely a breath away from giving up, which was why, instead of leaving, she simply turned over, let a few silent tears slip free, and prayed that something, anything, would change.

---

He appeared on her doorstep broken and bleeding, drenched from head to foot while rain poured down around him in heavy, icy sheets. Surprised, and maybe a little bit suspicious, she failed to notice that Draco Malfoy was doing something she had never thought him capable of.

He was begging.

It took her an hour to calm him. Despite her better judgement, she dragged him, trembling and incoherent, across her threshold and forced him into a chair. It was only after liberal amounts of whisky and her telling him over and over to calm the hell down before she knocked him unconscious that she was better able to comprehend exactly what he was trying to tell her.

Pansy Parkinson was dead. Pansy Parkinson, Draco's fiancee, and the girl nobody expected him to love so intensely, had been murdered, found with her throat slit and her blood decorating the walls.

And Draco wanted to know who had done it, so he could pay the bastard back in kind. Hermione was the only one he trusted to help, the only one who had the resources to find out who and why, and the only one who would believe his reasons for joining the Dark Lord and his cause.

He was right on all counts, but she refused to offer any kind of help until he got a good nights rest and regained some semblance of sanity. Only then would they both be better prepared for what Draco had to tell her.

So she dosed him with two more shots of whisky, stripped and dried him down, and coaxed him into her bed.

For hours she remained at his bedside, absently watching him sleep. She watched and she waited, and all the while she wondered what his presence meant. Was his being here evidence enough that he was not the boy she remembered? Or was this some sort of trick, to get her to trust him so that one day he would be close enough to kill her?

No. Everybody knew that Draco no longer cared to waste his energy on Harry Potter and his friends. He was Voldemort's right-hand man now and the Dark Lord himself knew that the time would come when Harry would be forced to seek him out and not the other way around. The war was coming and there was nothing they could do to stop it. All they could do was play their part and hope it was enough.

But something didn't make sense. Why would Draco, a known Death Eater, come to her for help? And how was it possible that he, a dark wizard, second only to Voldemort himself, was capable of such devotion that in the end it was powerful enough to break him?

Too many questions and Hermione was far too curious for her own good. There was only one thing she was certain of, one thing she knew without question.

There would never be enough answers.

---

Three long years and her curiosity was never satiated. There were too many what ifs and why nots for that. In the end she had learned only one thing, one harrowing truth that should have had her running for the hills. But every night she came back here, knowing what she knew, and she wondered how long it would be before she started hating him for it.

Because in the end, no matter how she tried to pretend, how hard she lied to herself, the knowledge was still there. She still knew and it hurt. It tied her insides into knots. It made her eyes sting and her chest tighten. It made her want things she couldn't have, made her want someone to tell her it was okay to feel this hollow, that it didn't make her weak or foolish or insane.

But her boys weren't here anymore. Harry was in New Zealand with Ginny and his family, safe and hidden until it came time for him to come home and fight the battle that was waiting for him, and Ron was spending time with his parents and his brothers in Romania, making the most of their time together while everything was quiet on the Voldemort front.

Her problems had no place in their lives anymore. They had families to protect and a war to prepare for.

And her? She was weeping because the man she loved didn't -- couldn't -- love her back. Because Draco was in love with a dead woman.

Pansy. It all came back to Pansy. She was the reason Draco had walked back into her life and she would be the reason he walked back out of it.

So why wasn't she leaving? Why was she waiting for him to walk away first?

Curiousity. Always curiousity. She could leave now and never come back, but days, months, maybe even years would be wasted wondering. What if she had stayed? What if she had waited? Maybe one day she would have been enough.

It was why she stayed. She stayed and she asked the same questions over and over. How long would it be before he walked away? And would she ever, ever be enough?

No, she thought. No. Never enough.

---

She woke to the feel of hands against her skin, fingers brushing across her stomach and trailing a path over her hipbone. She turned instinctively on to her back, tilted her head up and stared through heavy-lidded eyes at the face above her.

It was a beautiful face, more pretty than handsome. But the jaw was strong and the silver eyes sharp, and there was a strength in him that belied the softness of his features.

"Draco," she murmured sleepily and let her eyes slip closed again.

She let him draw patterns across her skin with his fingers as she lay pondering. A year ago -- hell, even a month ago -- she would have reacted. There would have been no room for thought as she arched and moaned at the feel of his touch. Now she found herself distracted by other means, by questions she would never have the answers to.

Because that's what really hurt, wasn't it? That Draco was becoming more and more subdued lately. He spent hours watching her, touching her, studying her with eyes and fingers, all the while his gaze dark and unscrutable. If things were different, Hermione would have been moved by his intense fascination. But there was never any follow-up. It was as if, after careful study, Draco found her sadly lacking. Maybe the curves of her body weren't quite right, or the flare of her hips. Maybe he was wishing that her breasts were a little bigger, the sweep of her jawline a little sharper.

Sometimes she would look into the mirror and try to see what he saw. Darker hair, perhaps? A little shorter, a little straighter. Eyes not quite as sharp, but knowing nonetheless, with a self-assuredness that Hermione would never possess. Is that what he saw, or tried to see, when he looked at her? Was the intense concentration with which he watched her with his only way of creating something out of nothing, of regaining something he had lost three years ago?

Hermione was too horrified to even voice the question, but it was there, in the back of her mind. And more and more lately, it kept pushing it's way into her consciousness, tearing her away from the little security she had managed to build for herself.

Gradually, the reassurance she sought out in his bed had begun to wither. She felt her body growing immune to him, her mind too detached to really lose herself in whatever he had to offer. She supposed that after three years he would know what it was she needed, but now the only effort he seemed to put in was in his careful consideration of her. But this did little to move her these days. It frustrated her. There was no real intent in his touch, no passion.

A year ago he would have had her whimpering in less than five minutes. Nowadays he could barely tease a moan out of her. Not that he cared. Why would he? She never made any objections or voiced any intentions of leaving. As far as he was concerned, Hermione would always be there to warm his bed for as long as he might need her.

Perhaps.

Two years ago she would have left. She hadn't quite grown -- or learnt -- to love him then. It was a matter of convenience, reassurance, maybe even fascination, that their twisted relationship had managed to survive the first few months. But had she felt that it was losing its intrigue back in the beginning, there would have been no hesitation. His bed would have been stone cold by now.

Had she seen it coming, the change? It wasn't there in the first year, but somehow it had crept in during the second, and begun its slow corruption in the third. Because now the thought of leaving hurt too much. She had tried so hard to be brave, but something that had once come so easily to her as a child was now so far out of reach she couldn't remember what it was to be strong.

So when she felt Draco's fingers drift downwards, towards the valley between her thighs that was no longer wet for him, she did nothing.

---

The first time was a pity fuck.

It was after two months of following lead after lead to find Pansy's killer, only to find it was his own father, Lucius Malfoy, who had called in the hit. The motive behind it was no more complex than simple vengeance, a little light revenge between father and son because Draco, aware of it or not, had become Voldemort's new protege. It was an intriguing turn of events that had left Lucius more or less out in the cold, a move which had later resulted in the unfortunate death of Pansy Parkinson, his son's new fiancee.

Hermione was there to witness Lucius' final moments before Draco slit his throat with the same dagger his father had used on Pansy; a family heirloom with a sleek, silver dragon carved into its hilt. It was lost somewhere on the way back to her house, but by then Hermione's prime concern had been to get a dazed Draco somewhere safe and warm so he could rest.

He disappeared into her bathroom the moment they returned and twenty minutes later she found him crying on the floor of the shower. He glared daggers at her when she stepped in to drag him out and then found herself on her knees beside him, his hand a band of iron around her wrist.

He banged her head against the tiles when he kissed her, one hand fisted in her wet hair, the other clenched tightly around her denim-clad thigh. It only took Hermione a second to make her decision, clearly capable of identifying the varied effects of grief when it was staring her in the face, and kissed him back, lips already bruised and trembling. She had barely got used to the taste of him before he was pulling away, both hands sliding down to tear her blouse apart and sending buttons flying everywhere.

Another second later and he was sliding his hands beneath her arms to lift her from the shower to the bathroom floor. He said nothing as he unbuttoned her jeans and dragged them down her legs, repositioning himself between them as he gripped her wrists and pinned them to the floor. There was no foreplay or questions or pointless platitudes, just a sharp jerk of his hips and he was buried inside of her. She was wet, but only from the shower, and it hurt everytime he moved, but she gritted her teeth and waited until she felt him shudder against her.

Afterwards he was almost catatonic again. She led him back to her bedroom, coaxed him yet again into her bed, but this time she joined him and fell asleep to the sound of his hitched breathing.

---

The second time was seven months later on Halloween night. Draco was throwing the usual Malfoy extravaganza, its invitation list a varied array of royalty, aristocracy and celebrities. Hermione didn't know how she ended up on that list or why she even chose to attend, but regardless, she found herself at the front doors of Malfoy Manor, dressed to kill in a striking ivory number, a gilded face mask clutched to her chest.

She hadn't seen Draco since the night he had killed his father. The only evidence that the previous two months and the night in question had even happened was a tattered piece of parchment with the words I owe you written on it. Apart from that, there was nothing.

That was not to say she had heard nothing of him. With Lucius dead and Narcissa in no fit state to overlook his affairs, Draco had inherited everything. At nineteen he was now the CEO of Malfoy International and Master of Malfoy Manor and its surrounding acres. Needless to say, Draco had become a billionaire over night, both in the wizarding world and the muggle one. For all his prejudices, Lucius had known there was money to be made in a society he considered inferior to his own, and for that Draco had benefited greatly. When once he had been admired, the young Malfoy was now revered.

If only they knew that Draco had spent almost three years working side-by-side with the Dark Lord himself. They thought him powerful and beautiful only because of who he was and what he had, but very few knew that beneath the surface lay a sharp mind and an extraordinary talent for dark magic. He wasn't Voldemort's right-hand man for nothing.

But they saw none of that. They didn't care to. She watched them come and go, eager to meet their host, never fully aware of who he was or what he had become. It was sad to watch.

Even sadder was knowing that she didn't care, either. Oh, she was intrigued by him, fascinated by the ever-changing facets of his personality, but mostly she was indifferent to whatever thoughts or feelings he may have had. She had helped him purely because of who she was and maybe because she had pitied him, but past that she cared little about who he was or what he did.

She watched the flutterings of the females as they pouted prettily at their host, clearly able to see what it was about Malfoy that made them so flustered. But despite recognising the beauty of his features, the soft lips and the strong jaw, the pure white hair and mercury eyes, it stirred very little in her.

That is until the wine started to flow more freely than she had expected. One glass too many, or perhaps two or three, and suddenly she found herself fascinated with those lips and those eyes as they feasted upon her in a darkened hallway of Malfoy Manor. Before she had time to even consider the situation, there was a loud crack and the hallway turned into a bedroom, the hooks of her dress were unhooking themselves, and her ivory gown was sliding down to expose her mismatched underwear.

Giggling hysterically at her blue floral panties and bright pink strapless bra, she disposed of them both before Draco managed to tear them in his haste.

What followed was a flurry of activity. The finer details were lost in a drunken haze, but she remembered the subtle changes, the way she leaned into his touch instead of shying away from it, the way she ached to feel him inside of her, the way just looking at him made her breathless. Small things, but something shifted between them and they became something else, something more than they had been just a few hours earlier.

Little else changed after that. Gradually they began to spend more nights together, but then gradually those nights became funerals in themselves, and a little something died each time.

---

When she felt him finally slide home with languid ease, she drifted. She closed her eyes and tried to capture that feeling of complete contentment she felt when the ache for him was finally satiated. But the ache was different this time, so deep and painful that there was little left of her to feel anything else.

Disconnected and deadened, she felt nothing as he moved, but something inside of her snapped when he went rigid and buried his face in her neck.

"I'm finished," she said, and she meant more than just tonight, but tomorrow, and everyday after, and whatever fucked-up future lay ahead of them. She was done.

Draco shifted, lifted his face to look at her, and sneered, "Too much for you?"

Hermione shook her head. "No," she replied. "Not enough. Not anymore."

And then she got up and got dressed, and left him to his demons.

---

It took him three days.

He didn't bother calling, or knocking, he just simply apparated into her bedroom in the middle of the night and said, "I love you. In my own fucked-up, twisted sort-of-way, I love you."

Hermione just stared at him and said nothing. It was too little, too late. Was this how he was going to love her for the rest of their lives? In that quiet, subdued, dispassionate way? She couldn't live like that. She needed more.

"And to be perfectly fuckin' honest with you, I think it would be easier if I didn't."

"Then don't," she replied coldly. "I never asked you to."

"But you expected me to."

True. She had. It almost made her feel guilty to expect something he had never promised. But how long was he expecting her to share his bed and nothing else?

"I don't even know what this is anymore," she said softly. "It's not even something worth fighting for and I'm not sure I even want to do that." She gazed at him and then shook her head sadly. "I don't feel anything for you. It's... there's just nothing."

Draco's eyes sparked with fury and she watched him move towards her bed. And then he was leaning over her, silver gaze fixed on hers, and in a low, soft voice, he said, "You're a liar."

Just those three words left her shaking. She felt her breath hitching in her chest and she scrambled for any kind of defense. "You don't even know how to touch me, anymore, Malfoy," she whispered, and she knew the use of his last name would rile him as much as her accusation.

But it didn't. She expected him to lash out, to deny it, but instead he did nothing except lean further forward until his lips were brushing against her ear, and whispered, "Maybe I just didn't care. Maybe I just wanted you to leave."

And before she had time to realise he had moved, he slid two fingers between her legs and pressed them against her clit.

She keened loudly at the sweet pressure of his fingertips, uncaring as to how he had managed to manuevre himself just so without her noticing. Instead she simply surrendered and it was no longer possible for her to drift off into her thoughts. There was nothing but the white-hot heat and the feel of his lips against her neck.

It didn't take her long to shatter and she came with a sob, eyes squeezed shut and hands clinging to his shoulders. She trembled violently against him and her lips were wet with tears when he kissed her, slow and easy, then hard and bruising. She lay there for a long moment before she plucked up the courage to say what she needed to say.

"Why did you want me to leave?"

He shifted to lay down beside her, turning to face her with his head propped on his hand. "Because I didn't want to love you," he stated bluntly. She noticed that his eyes were no longer a sharp silver, but a subdued charcoal colour that she recognised from the night he first arrived on her doorstep and the night he killed his father.

"It hurts. A lot. I won't pretend that it doesn't. But there's two kinds of hurt. There's the kind that never goes away because whatever you may have lost or cast aside is something you can never get back. Or there's the other kind. The kind that only pops up occasionally and only when necessary. That kind usually comes with loving someone. Kinda like a trade-off. I guess I'm choosing the lesser of two evils."

Hermione stared blankly at him. "That has to be the most unromantic thing you have ever said," she deadpanned. She paused for a long moment. "But I catch your drift."

"And you're catching a draft, by the look of it," Draco said, staring pointedly at her nipples, which were visibly hard beneath the thin material of nightgown.

She laughed softly and whacked him around the head. But her amusement soon wore off and she found herself once again sober and in control of her brain.

"I want forever, Draco," she said seriously. "I won't settle for anything less."

He looked at her, grey eyes dark and sincere, and kissed her softly.

And then he whispered, "I promise."