Admission

Hermione blinked at Malfoy dumbly, mute with disbelief and sheer aggravation. He smirked as if she’d already said the words, told the lie he’d had the audacity to ask her to tell.

She set the empty cup down carefully on the sparse grass and dried leaf-covered ground next to her. Calves and feet going numb from sitting on her knees, she let herself fall to the side, on her rump, legs bent beside her and tingling with renewed circulation. She continued to stare at Malfoy without seeing him, instead focusing on the heavy, earthy scent of dead leaves and dying grass, so strong it was in her mouth. Beneath that, unwashed hair; the prat smelled liked anyone else. She heard the faint scratching of an insect moving about under the leaves as she thought how, secretly, she liked that slightly musty, scalp oil smell. Little fuses lit in her stomach.

“Well?” Malfoy prompted, voice rising at the end like he couldn’t believe she hadn’t yelled at, jinxed, or resumed torturing him and was sorely disappointed.

Hermione drew her wand and pointed it at his head. Again. He flinched, his expression—eyes narrowed then wide, mouth slackened—caught between cautious doubt that she’d truly hurt him again, and a kind of smug enjoyment that he might have gotten to her once more.

“Scourgify.”

Malfoy’s hair lifted imperceptibly, regaining some of its usual shine and silky texture. His eyes rolled up, forehead wrinkling, as if he could see the oil disappear from his scalp and roots. Not as clean as a thorough shampoo with actual water, but better than nothing. He looked at her, quirking an eyebrow.

“You smelled,” she answered in reply to his silent question as she put her wand away.

Rolling his eyes, he huffed. Oh no, a Malfoy never stinks. She could fairly read the words as they crossed his mind.

“I’d have thought Weasley’s stench would overpower any minor body odor I might exude, even from all the way outside this blasted tent.” He crinkled his nose as he said it, glancing at the entrance. “Or, maybe you’re so used to it, any foreign scent’s odd. Too bad we won’t find out if even Potter will smell bad to you, seeing as how you’re completely uninterested in his rescue,” he finished snidely.

“Malfoy—” she pushed herself up onto her knees again, reached over and yanked the blanket away. “Stop…fucking with me!” The obscenity sounded shrill and unnatural to her ears, but she couldn’t think what else might dull the stabs of electric energy jolting her stomach and spiraling out from there. Even her toes twitched with it.

“Do you really, truly believe I’m stupid enough to think you’ll tell me where Harry is for something so simple?”

Malfoy’s tongue snuck out to lick at the now-dried blood on his lips before they stretched into a baiting grin. Using the pole behind him as support, he shimmied his bound wrists up it and maneuvered onto his own knees, mirroring Hermione’s posture. The thing she’d seen earlier, that lively thing in his eyes before he’d made his little demand, lit him up again.

“Granger,” he said her name slowly, deliberately, as if she were a small child who’d dismayed him. “You underestimate both the pleasure it will give me to hear you say it, and my knowledge of how difficult it will be for you to make it convincing. Not to mention…” he paused, leisurely tossed his newly clean hair, watched as her face darkened, listened to the scrape of fingernails against denim as she balled her hands into fists, “Potter’s location is only half the battle. You’ll still have to contend with loads of highly skilled, ruthless Death Eaters perfectly willing and eager to torture, if not the Dark Lord himself.” When she opened her mouth to explain or retort—apparently he didn’t care which—he continued, “And, of course, I can’t guarantee that Potter will still be alive if by some miniscule, pixie-sized chance you make it to him.”

“You don’t think I know all that?” Hermione screeched, inwardly wincing at the sound of her own voice. “The second part, anyway,” she added, making a conscious effort to speak calmly through the hysteria Malfoy seemed to incite whenever he opened his mouth. Dropping the blanket behind her, she reached to rake her hands through her tangled curls, only to remember she’d put them up in a low, loose knot.

“Look,” she sighed, “this is ridiculous. You’re an intelligent person, Malfoy,” she started, shifting forward on her knees a few inches, then resting back on her heels. Remarkably, she saw no smirk, no superior lifting of his chin, only a shade of curiosity in the subtle arching of his brows. “It’s just the two of us in here. I think that, deep down, not even you truly feel I’m naturally inferior as a witch. I’m just as skilled with magic as you are, and, not to rub salt in any wounds, I even get better marks.”

With this last observation, she steeled herself for a barrage of defensive derision, but, to Hermione’s confusion, Malfoy merely chuckled and shook his head in barely restrained delight. She seethed, wrapping her arms around herself and digging her fingers into her sides to keep from reflexively slapping him again.

“You’re only proving my point, Mudblood,” he swore, obliterating her entreaties with his use of that one word. “Stalling, evading. This might be harder for you than I thought,” he mused. “I really did pick the perfect price for you to pay.”

She gripped her sides harder and swallowed around the tightness in her throat. Her abdomen tensed as those currents of electricity returned, a conductor for raw fury.

Apparently finished with his self-congratulatory musing, he resumed, “And since you want to know what I really think, I believe that, deep down,” he mocked, “you know you’re inferior and that’s why you’ve always been so eager to be such a know-it-all bookworm. Obviously, that’s where your skill in magic has come from as well. It’s hardly natural. All that studying and memorizing and those treatise-length essays, all that hand-raising and brownnosing—it’s just an effort to make up for your innate inferiority, to prove you belonged at Hogwarts. Maybe even to prove you were worthy of Potter and that blood-traitor, Weasley, as funny as that sounds to someone of status like me.”

As Hermione listened to Malfoy’s patently ridiculous rationalizations for why a Muggleborn like herself could be as capable as a pureblood such as himself, she felt the energy wreaking havoc in her belly disperse into a strange warmth that travelled her veins. It took a space of silence and her captive’s bewildered, slightly nervous expression to alert her to the fact that a serene smile had unexpectedly manifested this internal change externally.

“For your information, Malfoy,” she explained kindly, patiently, “I’ve always been an excellent student, since before Hogwarts.”

She waited, happy to see his eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, perturbed. Had she reached him? Made him see the error in his logic? That logic had nothing to do with these fatal prejudices he’d been brought up to believe?

He sighed heavily, eyes still focused on some dead leaf. But there was a laxness to his controlled defeat, like he couldn’t quite maintain it, and before the first words left his mouth, she knew she’d been a fool.

“So you must feel inferior even to other Muggles, then,” he managed before bursting into hysterical laughter, shoulders shaking, pale face reddening, possibly the most maliciously gleeful she’d ever seen him.

Hermione was either too tired to let herself feel anger, or beyond it; all she could do was bring her hands to her face, fingers pressed along her brows. She listened to Malfoy’s laughter a moment, its pitch increasing, volume decreasing in what she hoped was exhaustion, and smoothed her first and middle fingers along her eyebrows before reaching back and pulling her hair out of the knot. She shook her head briskly and smoothed her hands over her unfurling curls.

When, at long last, she heard nothing but Malfoy trying to regain his breath, she turned her attention to him. Still red-faced, he looked sated, sitting back on his heels, a small smile still twisting his lips.

Hermione made to stand, shifting first high up onto her knees. “You’re a horrible person, Malfoy,” she pronounced, looking down at his crown of platinum hair.

Abruptly, he rose up to his own knees, towering over her and straining forward as far as his bindings would allow, deadly serious. “Yes, a horrible, superior person. Say it, Granger. Tell me.” He was inches away, his breath smelling of tea, his voice constricted as if, instead of there being nothing inside him, there was too much. His pupils dilated with it, fine twitches in the muscles of his jaw and forehead communicating a desperation that startled her.

He really needs to hear me say it, she thought, feeling stupid for not seeing it sooner. This wasn’t about her. It wasn’t some silly power play designed to throw her off, though perhaps that’s what he thought it was. What he told himself it was. This was about reassurance, restoration of equilibrium. All Malfoy had been brought up to believe—his innate superiority through blood and wealth and name—had likely been challenged in the worst ways beginning sixth year with the near-impossible tasks You-Know-Who had set him. Rationalizing hatred when questioned was one thing; hurting, killing, helping to usher in a war for that hatred was another. And God knew what terrors he’d seen, suffered, or had to inflict since.

She could give him this one thing, couldn’t she? She could. It didn’t have to be true; she didn’t have to believe it. He did.

“Astonishing, the way you put your own comfort before Potter’s,” he drawled. “You’re always so quick to point to your accomplishments, but you can’t do this one thing for your best mate, the Savior of the Wizarding World,” he finished with a sneer.

Oh God, Harry. How could she forget the reason Malfoy was kneeling here before her, Ron outside waiting, worrying…

She lifted her chin, met Malfoy’s eyes which glinted with realization before she even spoke.

“How do you want me to say it?”