Chapter Text
Hermione was blissfully slaving away at her assignments when she noticed him enter the library.
Draco Malfoy, clad only in socks and a pair of pants.
A year or two ago she might've blushed, and looked away with a swiftness, but a year on the run with two guys had chipped away at any old sense of modesty. In its place was birthed a critical eye automatically taking stock of a body, and defaulting to concern about any small scratches or bruises.
In the case of Malfoy, she was surprised to find that there was plenty to be concerned about at first glance.
His skin, for starters, was deathly pale.
He wasn't tan to begin with, but his cheeks at least held a kiss of colour a few years ago. He used to be an elegant sort of pale - a shade stemming from nobility.
As it currently stood, he barely looked alive, and when she let her eyes wander from his pallid face to his other features, she discovered the rest of his body wasn't fairing particularly well either.
The hair atop his head had lost its old signature sheen - the one that likely required a strict beauty regime that only a Malfoy would be vain enough to follow - and in its place was a straw blond mop on the verge of growing over his brow to cover his eyes.
Hermione traced her eyes further down, and finally spared some thought to his bare torso.
She'd seen him shirtless before - sometime during their Fifth Year, before Umbridge became Headmistress. It was the one time Snape had called in sick, leaving the class with a free period, which everyone decided to celebrate by skinny dipping in the Black Lake, in spite of the fact that it was a chilly autumn morning.
At the time, Hermione prioritised studying for her OWLS - as she should - but from her perch atop a transfigured blanket by the lake, she caught a few glances of Malfoy sporting an impressive array of lean muscle.
The current Malfoy was a couple of inches taller - somewhere in the ballpark of 6'1" - but looked as if a giant had simply grabbed him by the head and ankles, tugging on either side to force his body to grow.
His muscle had somewhat shrunk out of necessity to keep his body stocked with fuel to grow, and the accompanying healthy layer of fat that he used to have was all but gone, with his skin pulled taught across his body.
Without school robes to conceal every inch of him, Malfoy looked surprisingly brittle - ready to collapse into a lose pile of bones at a moment's notice, and when coupled with the sectumsempra scars crisscrossing from his knees to his jaw, the only thing that convinced her he wasn't an animated corpse were his eyes - alive and very much piercing.
And staring directly at her.
The eye contact was enough to snap her out of her analysing and back to reality, where the chances that this was really Malfoy standing near nude in the library were slim.
It must've been a spell of some sort, or at the very least a magical item.
She'd heard that George had just recently reopened Weasley's Wizard Wheezes for the school year, and she wouldn't put it past a First Year Gryffindor to ignorantly put it to the test in the library.
She reached into her robes, all the while maintaining eye contact, and watched Malfoy tense slightly as she pulled out her wand.
"Finite Incantatem."
Malfoy, much to her disbelief, didn't have clothes appear on his person, nor magically disappear. Instead, he began walking towards her desk.
He didn't make it very far before Hermione regained her bearings and rose to her feet, her wand pointed in his direction.
"Not another step Malfoy."
He shot a glance at her wand hand, and she noted with displeasure that he didn't look the least bit threatened.
"You can see me."
Hermione wasn't sure whether his words were meant more as a general statement or a question, but from the way he looked expectantly at her, he was hoping for a response at the very least.
"You're walking around practically naked in the middle of the day. You couldn't be more visible if you tried."
Malfoy hummed noncommittally. "Strange."
"Yes, you are." She replied. "If this is a case of you fudging up the Disillusionment charm, I'm sure there's a First Year class you can pop in on."
She waited for him to make some attempt at either leaving or covering up, but he did no such thing, opting instead to take the last few steps towards her table and reach for the chair opposite hers.
Her wand might as well have been invisible, considering how Malfoy paid it absolutely no mind while it tracked him as he sat down.
She felt inclined to question him - to ask what exactly it was that he was doing.
But years of Malfoy experience had taught her that any curiosity on her end would be met with scorn and sarcasm, so she opted for the smarter option:
Ignoring him.
Returning her wand to her robes, she spared him a final glance, and saw that he had an ankle propped up his knee with his arms folded across his bare chest, watching her expectantly.
To his credit, he didn't seem phased when, instead of shooting off a dozen questions a second as she usually might've, she simply returned to her own chair, and continued working on her assignments.
Hermione had always been dimly aware of how stubborn she was, but she didn't expect Malfoy's patience to extend far enough for his own stubbornness to match her own.
3 hours passed, and neither had yet to utter a another word to the other.
The only noteworthy development took place 15 minutes ago, when Malfoy left and returned 10 minutes later with a pocket-sized Honeydukes bag filled with sweets, and a novel.
If she wasn't sworn to her self-imposed silence she would've scolded him for bringing food into the library. It was a wonder that Madam Pince hadn't bitten his ear off herself.
(Although, it was a wonder that she hadn't come over to scold him for his nudity either, but she had a feeling that mystery could only be solved through interrogating Malfoy.)
Still, she wasn't going to let 3 hours of self-restraint go down the toilet over some twat and his candy, so she returned dutifully to her studies and purged thoughts of Malfoy's disregard for the rules from her mind.
In her peripheral, after another 5 minutes of selectively making his way through half the sweets, Malfoy scrunched up the bag's top and slid it across the table to rest alongside her stack of books.
It took half an hour for Hermione to cave and start digging indiscriminately into the treats.
It was an action fuelled by logic, she reasoned. She planned on studying for another hour, and if she didn't want fatigue to extend that hour to two, she needed a quick fix of fuel, so she ignored the smug look he was poorly concealing behind his book and decided to simply indulge herself.
She didn't make it 10 seconds before Madam Pince appeared at her table, causing Hermione to very nearly choke on the candy in her mouth while the librarian shot a very baleful glance at the sweets in her hand.
"Ma'am — I can explain—"
Her professor simply sighed.
"Of all my students, I'd have thought you'd be the least likely to flaunt my rules."
Hermione's eyes widened in the direction of Malfoy, who finally snapped his book shut, and had the audacity to wink at Madam Pince.
"I'm afraid I'll need to bar you from the library, young lady. A day ought to suffice."
A squeak couldn't help but slip through her lips, and Hermione's already sour mood was dampened further by the sight of Malfoy masking a chuckle as a cough.
"So you can excuse this whoreish twit, but draw the line at snacking?" She asked astoundingly.
"Language, Miss Granger!"
Hermione's mouth shut into a thin line, containing her frustration.
She knew the librarian was a no-nonsense type of woman, but she'd hoped 7 years of relationships building might've led to an dash of favouritism.
"And I'll be confiscating these-"
She caught a glimpse of the smugness sliding off of Malfoy's expression in the background, and before Pince could retrieve the sweets, he all but dived across the table, grasping her hand between both of his own and scrunching the bag in her grip.
She practically felt her heart drop into her stomach at the sudden contact, and prepared to rip herself out of his grasp when she noticed Madam Pince take a step back.
Directing her sole focus back towards her teacher, Hermione was shocked to find her making her way back to her station at the library's centre, and spun her head back to face Malfoy.
"What did you just do?"
She felt Malfoy release her hand, but not before snatching the sweets from her grip.
"Win."
The colour drained from Hermione's face as the realisation set in.
She caved first.
"And for the record, if I was a whore, I'd like to think my clientele would be a tad classier than you."
Hermione gave up on all pretence of composure, digging her hand in her mane and letting out a frustrated groan.
4 hours of enduring his uncomfortable ghoulish presence for absolutely nothing.