Author's Note: This is my first ever attempt at fanfiction, so here goes. Slightly AU- if you take the events of 6th year and just push them back to occur at the end of 7th year it basically fits. Hermione is Head Girl and all hell hasn't broke loose yet. Reviews are always appreciated :) Enjoy!

The sconces in the walls were slowly dimming, leaving the corridors as murky as spilled polyjuice. Outside a full moon leeched the indigo from the sky and cast pale shadows through the windows, limming Hermione Granger's retreating form in pearly light.

She was on her last round, perfunctorily checking the hallways for straggling students and absently flicking her wand with a murmured cleaning spell when she came across a lost bit of parchment or a broken quill. The last round never took long; she had only come across true stragglers once (that had been an awkward run-in with a disheveled Lavender Brown and a smirking Seamus Finnegan behind one of the knights), and the cleaning up was just a kindness on her part, one less thing for Mr. Filch to worry with. He might be a mean old goat, but he was getting on up there in years, and the castle was a bugger to keep clean even with magic.

She shifted her arm against her side, pinning the book under her robes more securely as she swept away a chocolate frog wrapper. Hermione wasn't sure why she insisted on hiding the book; she hardly ever ran into anyone at this time of night, and even if she did happen to run into someone it wasn't as if the sight of Hermione Granger with a book would be anything unusual. But she hid it anyway, on the off chance that someone would see and someone would ask, and then she would be put in the awkward situation of having to make up a plausible lie.

Or, novel idea, you could just tell them exactly what you are doing with a copy of Lord Byron's poems at midnight, a voice at the back of her head niggled. Honesty is the best policy, don't you know. She resolutely told that voice to stuff it.

She reached the end of the corridor, and her round was officially complete. This was the part where the good little Head Girl would go back to her dormitory in Gryffindor Tower and go to bed, getting plenty of rest so that she could help chaperone the third year's first Hogsmeade trip the next day.

Instead, Hermione turned and walked down the next hall, headed towards the courtyard. She walked as fast as she could without actually running, slipping the poetry book from within her robes and clutching it to her chest.

When she reached the door, she sucked in her breath before she pushed it open. It squealed just a bit, and she muttered a quick muffliato before opening it the rest of the way.

He had beaten her there, as always. The moon was almost the same color as his hair, lighting it up like pale fire in the shadows of the courtyard. It fell over his eyes but he paid no attention to it, absorbed by the book in his lap. The dark green of his robes blended in with the shadows on the stone, and if not for the occasional turn of a page he would look like a statue, hard and pale.

She studied him for a moment. Only when he was reading did his face relax, the semi-permanent line between his pale brows smooth. It was the only time he looked like a seventeen year old boy rather than a war-hardened man.

He didn't remain oblivious to her presence for long. With barely a sound, he closed the book and turned to look back at her. His grey eyes were softer than normal, more like a stormy sky than an iceberg.

He smiled, sort of; a bare lifting of the corner of his mouth. He held up the book. "I'm finished."

Hermione sat next to him on the bench. They sat far enough away from each other that no parts of them were touching, even though to accomplish this meant a fair level of discomfort from both parties. Hermione took the book he held out to her, trading him for the one she held. "How did you like Eliot?"

"Very well. I especially liked that one with the hollow men and the girl with the hyacinths."

"The Wasteland. It's quite good."

Draco nodded once. "It's…fitting."

Their breath puffed out of their mouths in the cold, swirling and intermingling until Hermione couldn't tell whose was whose. Draco studied the new book in his hands.

"This one is a bit different than Eliot. He's…softer, I think. "

Draco smirked. "So not as situationally appropriate, then?"

"I suppose not." Hermione fiddled with the hem of her robes.

Their strange arrangement of meeting every Friday had gone on since almost the beginning of the term, when she had stumbled upon him in the courtyard on her rounds reading a tattered paperback of The Iliad.

"Out after hours, Malfoy?" Hermione crossed her arms and smirked. This was her first time actually finding a wayward student during her rounds and she was spoiling to actually assert her Head Girl authority. The fact that her first victim would be Draco Malfoy was only icing on the proverbial cake.

He had been sitting on the stone bench, bent over something in his lap, blonde hair falling over his forehead. At her voice he jumped up, upsetting whatever had been in his lap. A paperback book fell to the ground, spine up.

"Granger," he snarled. "I could ask you the same question. Why are you skulking around like that flea-bitten cat of yours?"

"I'm Head Girl, Malfoy, if you missed the memo. 'Skulking around' is part of my duties." With a disgusted sigh, she bent to pick up the fallen book. Of course Malfoy would treat a book so; he had no respect for people, so she wasn't surprised that what she considered sacred objects would be no different.

He jumped ahead of her, grabbing the book and stuffing it in his robes. He looked almost…embarrassed? Fearful?

Hermione's brows knit in puzzlement. "Accio book."

The paperback sailed from Malfoy's pocket and into her hands. Snarling, Malfoy reached for his wand.

"Expelliarmus," Hermione muttered, turning the book over in her hands. The Iliad. A Muggle classic. She heard a muffled clatter as Draco's wand landed somewhere behind her. Without taking her eyes from the book cover, she reached down and stuffed the wand in her pocket.

She looked up at the blonde Slytherin, biting her lip. His eyes were like a cornered cat, staring at a spot on the ground; his fists sporadically opened and closed, leaving crescent nail marks in his palms.

Hermione held up the book. "The Iliad?"

Draco nodded. "Yes."

"Yours?"

He didn't answer. He looked up from the ground, at her. He was biting his lip so hard it was white.

"You know this was written by a Muggle, don't you?"

"I'm not bloody stupid, Granger."

"I'm just surprised that someone of your pure, noble upbringing would lower themselves to possessing, let alone reading, a piece of literature written by those of 'inferior blood'-"

"It's not mine, I found it in the bloody hallway!" Malfoy's eyes were dark, like a stormy sea, and his voice was harsh enough to make Hermione take a step back. "If you think I would part with so much a knut to actually own something associated with a filthy Mudblood-"

"I don't care where you got the bloody book, Malfoy." Hermione tucked The Iliad into her pocket with his wand. "With your grades, I'm surprised you can even comprehend it. But you are out after hours, and you have used profanity multiple times during our conversation here, and for that it will be my pleasure to assign you detention with McGonagall for the next three nights, starting at seven and ending at ten."

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Since when is profanity a detention earning offense?"

Hermione gave him a Cheshire grin. "It's not. I'll inform the professor that you will be seeing her tomorrow night.

"Fine. Give me my wand."

"I'll give it to McGonagall. She can give it to you when you report for detention."

Malfoy turned on his heel, muttering things that sounded suspiciously like more profanity. He had almost reached the door to the castle when he turned and looked at her. "If you tell…" he said softly. "If you tell anyone, Granger… you have no idea what the consequences could be." He opened the door and left. It shut behind him with a dull thud.

Malfoy had reported for detention as scheduled. On the third night of his detention, Hermione ran into him coming out of McGonagall's office. She slipped The Iliad she had confiscated and her own copy of The Odyssey out of her robes and into his hands. He looked at her, just for a moment, and then moved on, slipping the books into his robes and not looking back. That Friday he had been in the courtyard, and returned the books without a word. Hermione had had another one in her pocket, The Stranger by Albert Camus. She handed it to him, took the other books, and left without a word. Since then, their strange arrangement had become routine.

Hermione picked at her fingernails nervously. She had debated whether to give Malfoy this particular book, but she was running out of books to lend him. He was a voracious reader, it turned out; he read almost as much as she did. He had read through most of her personal library in only a little over three months.

She had lent him the less personal books first- the novels she read once and then placed carefully in her trunk. He read all of them, and then tore through her biographies in record time, even after she started giving him two or three a week. After that he had started on her poetry collections. Before that, they hadn't really spoken during their encounters. But once he started reading the poetry, they began actually speaking to one another. The conversations started out stilted and awkward, but as time went on they were able to actually discuss the poetry. Sometimes they even made eye contact.

Her copy of Lord Byron's love poems was heavily highlighted and dog-eared, passages marked and notes made on almost every page. It was the book she had owned for the longest and read the most. She hadn't been sure about sharing it with Malfoy, but in the end she stuck it in her robes and came on. She watched his face as he flipped through it.

That bare curve graced the corner of his lip again. "Not situationally appropriate at all, it appears," he said softly. He closed the book and looked at her. "Is it?"

His eyes were exactly like a stormy sky and an iceberg and the ocean all at once, she thought. A sky about to rain on her and an iceberg headed straight towards her ship, an ocean she might drown in. "No," she said quietly. "Not at all."

Malfoy looked at her a moment longer, the breeze teasing his moonbeam hair. Then he smirked. "You should go to bed, Granger. Big day with the kiddies tomorrow and all."

"Yes," Hermione stood, brushing off her robes and smoothing her unruly hair. "I should be going." She turned and walked hurriedly away, towards the safety of her room and her fireplace and the promise of a cup of tea that would hopefully make her not think too much before she tried to sleep.

"Hermione," he called softly. She turned around.

He held up the book of love poems. "Thanks."

"You're welcome, Draco."

He smirked. "Next Friday?"

She nodded. "Next Friday."

Then the turned and walked away in opposite directions, and the courtyard was empty and silent but for the moonlight and the wind.