“The same again this week?” she asked quietly, glancing away from him.
“No.” He said it so abruptly that she looked up sharply at him.
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. It was the most overt gesture of discomfort she had ever seen from him.
“I — overstepped,” he said, which was not an apology. “I won't do that to you again.”
“Alright,” she agreed automatically, not trusting him at all. She was sure that if given enough time, he would find some new vindictive action that he could rationalise.
He stared at her for several seconds. Hermione suspected she still had a slightly wounded expression on her face. For some reason, no matter how much occlumency she used, she wasn't able to wipe it entirely away.
He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something else, but then swallowed the words.
“What?” she asked bitterly. Bracing herself for whatever he was about to do next was the worst part.
“I — said I wasn't going to hurt you,” he said in a low voice. “And then I did. I'm sorry.”
She looked at him in confusion. He was such a pile of contradictions.
“I always expected you would.”
His eyes flashed with irritation. Ah, she'd clearly offended his moral code again.
“And yet here you are,” he said.
“Yes.” She shrugged and met his eyes. “Because if the Order loses this war, I'm going to die. And Harry, and Ron, and Ginny, and everyone else that I know. So — being hurt by you doesn't really matter.”
“No, I suppose not,” he agreed, his expression cold.
“If you're going to do it again, just do it. Don't make it a farce by having me try to fight it off,” she said woodenly. “Just own it.”
His mouth twisted slightly. His rage suddenly rose a little closer to the surface. Hermione braced herself.
He abruptly subsided.
“The first thing we need to work on is your aim,” he said, changing the subject.
“Alright.”
He drew his wand and conjured up a practice dummy. With the tip of his wand he carved an X in the center of it and then sent it across the room.
“Whatever spells you want, just do ten. I want to see your accuracy rate,” he instructed her.
She put her satchel down and got into position beside him, feeling keenly aware of his proximity.
The target was about fifteen feet away.
She aimed for the X and cast a stunner, a petrification hex, several stinging hexes, and a immobilising spell at it. She hit it eight out of ten times but only got four directly on the X.
She stopped and braced herself for Malfoy's scathing criticism. He was silent, which felt even worse.
“You do mostly close spellwork, don't you?” he inquired at length.
“Yes,” Hermione said stiffly.
“Thought so,” he said, and nodded thoughtfully. “Your spell technique is fine but you're so precise you pay unnecessary attention to controlling your wand tip and then forget to focus on where you're pointing. Hexes and curses don't require that much fine motor control; most of them don't have complicated wand movements. Your over-attentiveness is doing you a disservice in combat.”
“Oh…”
“On the upside, that's a fairly easy thing to fix. It's much harder to train a poor caster. Try a curse with a complicated wand movement and remember to aim your wand tip while you're finishing it.”
Hermione cast about in her mind for a curse with a complicated movement. Malfoy was right, most curses were simple. Stabbing, slashing, there was rarely more to them than that. She hadn't realized what a reversal in technique that detail was from healing.
A spell came to her.
Taking a deep breath, she whipped out the motion and made sure her wandpoint was over the X as the final words of the incantation slipped past her lips.
A scarlet light darted across the room and landed squarely on the X. Immediately, a small jet of hot, black tar exploded from spot where the spell had made contact. If it had been an actual person, the tar would have kept producing itself, but on a practice dummy it promptly ceased.
Malfoy chuckled. “My, my, Granger, does your Order approve of the curses you know?”
“No,” Hermione said in a bitter voice. There was no point in lying. The Death Eaters couldn't possibly be unaware that the Resistance almost exclusively used non-lethal spells.
“I imagine not. Tell me, Granger, are you willing to kill someone?” Malfoy was staring intently at her as he asked.
She looked up at him, meeting his eyes. He was only a few inches away from her. His expression reminded her of the moment before she'd kissed him. Intent. Amused.
“I don't want to be cruel. But — if it's between me or them, or to protect someone I care about, I'll do it.”
He kept looking down at her for another moment, before smirking faintly. The cold deadliness of his eyes glimmered, and Hermione suddenly realized how very close to each other they were standing.
“I imagine you would,” he said quietly, then he turned to look at the target again. “Ten more spells. See if your accuracy improves now that you understand why you were missing.”