Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling. I own nothing. This is not for profit.

Beneath the Floorboards

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

—Sufjan Stevens, "John Wayne Gacy, Jr."

Hermione Granger had never taken Draco Malfoy seriously as a villain. Sure, he was spoiled and prejudiced and a bully and…well, a plethora of "ands," all adding up to his being the greatest git she had ever had the misfortune to meet. But for all that, she had never feared him. His antagonism with the Gryffindors, his rivalry with Harry, had always seemed so schoolboyish, so petty in comparison with their conflicts with real-life evildoers like Quirrell and Lucius Malfoy and Rita Skeeter and Voldemort. Perhaps she had never stopped thinking of him as that eleven-year-old boy they had first met on the train almost six years ago and, no matter how nasty he was, it was hard to fear an eleven-year-old boy.

Besides, Malfoy had never focused that anger and cruelty on her, not really. They weren't nemeses, like Harry and Malfoy or even Ron and Malfoy. Certainly, he occasionally called her a mudblood or a Know-It-All—though even her best friends barely refrained from the latter—or sneered at her wild hair. But, as unpleasant as it may have been, it never really felt like it was about her; it always seemed like he was trying to get a rise out of Harry or Ron. He had never particularly extended this hatred to Hermoine, muggleborn though she was. When she encountered him in the hallways or in Ancient Runes—the one class they shared without Harry and Ron—his hassling was dramatically toned down: a snarky comment here or there, an eye roll or sneer at a particularly quick answer of hers. He was practically indifferent, as far as blood feuds went. Perhaps he had no feelings for her one way or the other about her outside of her role as Harry and Ron's friend, or perhaps he thought she was unworthy of his attention, too muggle and common to be a threat.

Perhaps he focused his anger on Harry and Ron because they should have been on his side, Harry for his power and fame, Ron for his ancient and pure bloodline. Malfoy had even offered Harry his friendship, once upon a time. They had rejected him, betrayed what he stood for. Hermione was never meant to be on that side, wouldn't have been welcome even if she wanted to join, and so she was just a run-of-the-mill muggleborn.

That slap in third year had been the only time she felt that they were well and truly enemies. She had never hit anyone in her life before that day, and she hadn't since. She was not a violent person by nature, preferring to think, to intellectualize things until the sting was gone—What does it matter if Malfoy calls me a mudblood, she remembered thinking in second year, Mud may have negative connotations, but it's really just earth. Besides, we're all made of Carbon... She had emotions of course, and a temper to go along with them, as Ron could attest, but this took serious provocation.

But Malfoy was being so cruel that day, mocking Hagrid at his lowest. Besides, she had had so little sleep for almost an entire year, and she had spent so much time alone, fighting with Harry and Ron over that blasted Firebolt, that she had just snapped. And, she was ashamed to admit it, a large part of her anger and frustration had stemmed from the fact that Malfoy had gotten a whole five points better than her on their last Ancient Runes essay. She had always beaten his marks, even in Potions, where he was Snape's favourite, maybe not by much, but enough to satisfy her pride. But amid all the stress of that year, the tumult of a life scrambled up by the Time-Turner, she had slipped, and suddenly Professor Babbling was congratulating Malfoy for being so clever, and Hermione was left feeling stupid and useless. So she had no choice but to target him when he had only half-heartedly targeted her.

But despite the murder in his eyes, she hadn't been afraid of him, feeling so tall and mighty next to his slight—what people generously called "aristocratic"—figure. His attempts at revenge had been petty: an impersonation of her hopping up and down, hand in the air; a leg stuck out in the aisle to trip her; a drawing of a her with exaggerated hair and buck teeth on the blackboard.

So when, during their sixth year, Harry had grown increasingly paranoid about Malfoy, sure that Malfoy harboured a Dark Mark and was behind the attacks on Angelina and Ron, Hermoine hadn't believed it. How, Hermione had asked herself, could such a snivelling, cowardly little boy, whom she herself had physically dominated, be a serious threat?

But then in her sixth year, one day near the end of term, Hermione ducked into the second floor girls' bathroom and got her answer.

She generally avoided the second floor girls' lavatory as a rule; Moaning Myrtle had never been fond of her, ever since those ill-fated comments she made at Nick's Death Day Party. Whenever she tried to use the facilities, Myrtle would hassle her endlessly, flying in and out of the stall and making alternatively teasing and tearful comments. It was a very unpleasant process, but sometimes a girl, through various circumstances and no fault of her own, was not able to make it to the safety of the first floor bathroom, but was forced to submit to such a fate.

She opened the lavatory door with a flourish, never one to let fear diminish her Gryffindor spirit, but immediately stopped short. The room was dark; one of Myrtle's tantrums must have knocked out most of the lights. Through the dim lighting, she noticed a figure sitting on the floor next to the sinks—it must have been very near the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, though she couldn't be sure, having been petrified at the time. Moaning Myrtle hovered next to the figure, making sympathetic cooing noises.

Hermione thought she could hear crying, a low, desperate cry unlike Myrtle's gushing, over-the-top sobs. It reminded her of herself, crying in the girls' bathroom in her first year, feeling so alone and unloved and missing her parents fiercely. Though the prejudice against muggleborns had not been so explicit back then, at least not among the first years, she had felt instinctively unwelcome in that strange, archaic place. Perhaps unconsciously, she had gone over the top, trying to compensate for her ignorance of the magical world, full of bizarre rules and strange subjects so unlike the ones at her primary school. But then Harry and Ron saved her from that troll and she became a part of something so very wonderful, accepted and valued and called the cleverest witch of her age. Filled with these bittersweet memories, she thought about turning back to give whoever it was some privacy, but at that moment, the crying stopped.

Myrtle looked up at her and began to shriek, "Get out of here, you dreadful girl! Can't you see he's upset enough as it is! He doesn't need to see your ugly cat-face, not when he's under so much pressure!" Her piercing tone shifted into a cloying mewling as she turned toward the figure. Hermione just caught a hint of blonde hair from behind the shadow of the sink. "The poor thing, he feels absolutely awful about his failure—"

"Enough, Myrtle." The voice was commanding but surprisingly gentle, something she would never have expected from that voice, so familiar to her. Myrtle fell silent as Draco Malfoy lifted his head. His cheeks were damp, that much she could tell in this half-light, but his expression was hard. He stood up quickly and gracefully. While he had seemed such a pitiful figure a moment before, he suddenly struck her as very tall and grown up and beyond her reach. For the first time, she wondered if Harry's suspicions were true. Could he be a Death Eater? But his still-red eyes betrayed the vulnerability from before and made her doubt.

"Malfoy?" Hermoine asked, only half-believing that this ambiguous figure could be the boy she had known since she was eleven years old. "Have you been—"

But before that word could pass her lips and make this strange, terribly moving moment real, Malfoy had his wand pointed at her and was shouting "Crucio!"

It happened before she could think. Perhaps Harry, with those Seeker reflexes he and Malfoy shared, would have been able to cast a counter-curse or a Protego or at the very least would have managed to duck. She heard echoes of Harry's voice, Are you a witch or aren't you? But Hermione had never been quick on her feet or with her wand, oh, answers for class were different, simple memorization, purely theoretical, nothing like the smouldering red light that enveloped her—

—and then there was pain, so much pain, excruciating and exquisite, all over her body, visceral, deep down in her bones, her blood thick like mud, and now it was beyond her body, more than she'd ever felt before, for a second she thought she was dead—

—and then it was over.

She numbly felt the cold tile beneath her body. A ghost harped faintly in the background. A boy stood over her, or was he a man? She recognized him, but she did not know him. She looked up into his cool grey eyes, which burned sharply through the haze of her mind. She felt very cold and afraid, beneath that flinty gaze. He was Malfoy, she thought, but the name didn't mean much to her.

She opened her mouth and croaked out, "Crying?" the word still caught in her throat from before. As if it had been a spell, Malfoy dropped down beside her onto the bathroom floor and began to weep bitter tears. A few dripped onto Hermoine's exposed legs and felt like needles against her skin.

She tried to sit up, suddenly remembering. Malfoy had attacked her. She had to get somewhere safe. She had to find Harry and Ron, the Gryffindors, a professor. But she was so very tired and the best she could do was weakly lift up her head and let it drop back to the ground with a thunk.

Malfoy jerked at the noise and grew quiet. He wiped his eyes on the arm of his sleeve.

"Why...?" Hermoine began, but she didn't know what she was asking—Why were you crying? Why did you attack? Why did you stop?—and so she fell silent. It was easier anyhow to stay quiet, a first for her, since her tongue felt so heavy in her mouth. She realized with a dull surprise that she had bitten it in the midst of the Cruciatus. She had read about the dangers of biting one's tongue back in her fourth year, she knew all about the recommended countermeasures for this, more useless theory she wasn't quick enough to put into practice when it mattered.

"You shouldn't have come in here," Malfoy said hoarsely. It was the nicest thing he'd ever said to her, with the possible exception of Granger, they're after Muggles. D'you want to be showing off your knickers in midair? Because if you do, hang around…they're moving this way, and it would give us all a laugh. She had hated him in that moment, but seeing him here, sitting over her, coming apart at the seams, she felt a tiny spark of gratitude for what he did that day. A faint feeling of warmth toward this man-boy, this fragile, newly-minted villain, filled her chest.

Regaining some of her characteristic practicality, Hermione fumbled with her stiff hands to pull down her robes, which must have ridden up while she writhed on the floor. He didn't seem like he was about to start laughing anytime soon, but she didn't want to show off her knickers here, either.

"I had to," he tried, not looking at her. She supposed he was talking about necklace and the mead—she had little doubt now that he had been responsible for the attacks, not after he used the Cruciatus Curse on her. Her heart hardened a bit, thinking about it. "You don't understand. You don't know what they're like, what they'll do to me and my family."

She began to regain her strength. She couldn't quite manage to sit all the way up, but she pushed herself away from him, repulsed by his weakness, even as it provoked a reluctant sympathy in her. She stopped when she felt the wall against her back, and sat, hunched over and clutching the wand in her pocket. She didn't think he would attack again, not like this, and what good would her slow wits and shaking hand do against him? But she liked to be in control, and even this modicum of it comforted her and made her feel bold enough to speak.

"It couldn't be much worse than what you did to me," she said in a low voice.

He gave her a deep, stony look that said you can't even imagine, but of course she knew that. A short bout of the Cruciatus Curse would be the least a true Death Eater would do to her. Thoughts of Lily and James Potter, dead before their son's second birthday, and of Neville's parents, tortured to insanity, flitted through her mind. But this was Hogwarts—the safest place on Earth—and Malfoy was a boy from her school. He played Quidditch with Harry and sat behind her in Ancient Runes and had once, at the Yule Ball, looked at her as though she were actually quite pretty. And that made what he did much, much worse.

"Why did you do it?" Her previously half-asked question seemed suddenly vital. For some reason, here in this dreary lavatory she always avoided, in the aftermath of her first experience of torture, she knew he would tell her the truth.

"Because I couldn't stand you seeing me cry," Malfoy said, almost sneering but not quite. No longer crumpled on the ground, he sat up with his usual perfect posture. His wand lay forgotten on the floor beside him.

"Because I'm muggleborn?" she asked. She hated bringing her lineage up, preferring to make irrelevant what was so important to so many Purebloods. But all the wishing in the world couldn't make a dynamic between Hermione and Malfoy that didn't center around it some way or another.

"Father and Mother," he said, "and all the others, always talked about how inferior you lot were, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't beat you in classes. I couldn't figure out how you always got better marks than me."

"Even in Potions," Hermione added, a hint of smugness creeping into her voice despite everything.

Malfoy scowled at her. "Potions was never my best subject," he said. She had to acknowledge the justness of his statement. She had made up a chart of the strengths and weaknesses of all her scholastic rivals in her fifth year. Charms had been his best subject, followed by Ancient Runes, while Potions had clearly been his worst.

"Besides," he continued, "you slapped me once, in our third year."

She sat up straighter, watching as he briefly touched his cheek. "So that was it, revenge for a three-year-old grievance?" she asked incredulously. "A curse for a slap?"

Malfoy shrugged.

"That's not an answer."

"It wasn't that, exactly," he said, looking down. His platinum hair, for once not slicked back, fell haphazardly across his face. "I hated losing to you in classes, to a mudblood with no prior knowledge of the Wizarding World. How could you do so much better than me, when you hadn't been tutored from the age of six in things like Charms and Transfiguration and Potions? And then you slapped me, and were you standing over me, so fierce and proud. It was humiliating."

His voice had gotten louder and angrier as he spoke, but then he looked up her. No matter what terrible things he had done before—the attempts on Professor Dumbledore's life, his dealings with the Dark Lord—she knew he had crossed a line today, one he hadn't been ready to cross.

He continued, desperation replacing his anger. "So I couldn't let you see me like that, I couldn't bear it."

In some twisted way, she understood. All her righteousness, her grand ideals of good and evil, seemed suddenly like some ridiculous farce. She had lashed out at him in third year, not because it was the right thing to do, not because she was fighting for a better world, but because it made her feel powerful. For a second, looking back on their history together, all she could see was two desperate people, scrambling over marks and power and pride.

But he was spoiled and prejudiced and a bully and he had used the Cruciatus on her. You couldn't just forgive something like that; it was right there in the name.

"Do you still believe all that rubbish about blood purity?" she asked. She could feel her heart beating where she'd bitten her tongue. She was afraid her question would push him over the edge, would turn him back into that scary, grown-up villain from moments ago, but she had to know.

"It doesn't matter," he said savagely. "This whole world—my whole world—is based on that bloody premise. It'll never stop being important whether I believe in it or not."

It wasn't really an answer one way or the other. She wondered whether he even knew what he believed. She knew the old Hermione, the pre-Cruciatus and pre-Draco-Malfoy-crying-in-the-girls'-toilet Hermione, would have tried to exploit that doubt, to make him face everything he stood for, to convince him to talk to Professor Dumbledore. But she felt so much older now.

"You should go to Professor Dumbledore," she said, a half-hearted attempt to be that optimistic girl from ten minutes ago.

"I can't," Malfoy said, pained. At her unmoved expression, "I don't have any options. It's done now." He pushed up his left sleeve. The angry red tattoo nearly glowed against the pale skin of his forearm. Deep down, she'd known it was there, after what he'd done, but seeing it still startled her.

As she looked at it, really looked at a Dark Mark for the first time, she decided it wasn't so very ugly. It was just a snake, coming out of a skull. It rather looked like something a muggle motorcycle gang would wear beneath their leather jackets and bandanas. But what it symbolized, here on Malfoy's arm or up in the sky, took her breath away.

He was watching her reaction, and when he saw that spark of fear and loathing, he abruptly dropped his arm. He pulled down his sleeve and the Dark Mark disappeared once more beneath his dark robes. "I don't have a choice."

It was her turn to shrug, her aching muscles protesting at the movement. She struggled to stand up, suddenly done with it all. Malfoy stood up easily, but didn't make a move to help her. Grabbing onto the doorknob for support, she finally wrenched herself into a standing position.

"Where'd Myrtle go?" asked Hermione, finally noticing the ghost's absence from her new vantage point.

Malfoy gestured vaguely toward the toilets. "She likes drama, but I think it reminded her a bit too much of her death. Not that the Cruciatus is much like a Basilisk, but pretty much everything reminds her of her death."

"You've really spent a lot of time here, haven't you?" she marveled.

He shrugged again.

She finally felt steady enough to release her grip on the doorknob. She stood there for a moment, waiting for him to do something, to Oblivate her or threaten her into silence. He had to know she would go to Professor Dumbledore; he couldn't just use an Unforgivable Curse on a fellow Prefect and not expect repercussions. But he just stood there silently, face unreadable, hands tucked into his robe pockets. She noticed he hadn't picked up his wand. So she turned, pulled the door open, and walked out into the light of the hallway.

She had barely taken two steps when she ran into Professor McGonagall.

"Are you alright?" Professor McGonagall asked sharply, taking in her pale face and disheveled robes.

She couldn't answer that. The world "alright" seemed to have lost all meaning to her—the whole world was mixed up now. Draco Malfoy was a Death Eater. Hermione Granger wasn't the girl she thought she was. How could anything ever be "alright" again?

However, she was saved from responding when Malfoy appeared, having followed her into the hallway. Professor McGonagall gazed at him suspiciously. "Now what are you doing here, Mr. Malfoy? Do you not know this is a girls' toilet?" she asked, as if that had any relevance when it came to this particular toilet.

The lies usually fell so easily from his lips, outrageous claims made in a cool drawl. There was none of that now. Hermione felt Malfoy's gaze, but she refused to look over at him.

Professor McGonagall continued, watching them mistrustfully. "A student reported hearing screaming from the second floor girls' toilet not ten minutes ago. I had assumed it was just Myrtle but I now I wonder if it wasn't something more."

She must have screamed while under the Cruciatus. She didn't remember doing it, but then, didn't remember much besides pain. She turned to Malfoy, to see his reaction. His face was impassive, but his eyes were clouded over, swirling with misery and terror and she knew not what else. He just stood there, waiting for her words of condemnation.

"Well?" McGonagall's lips were very thin and her eyes were as sharp as diamonds. "What's going on here?"

She should tell McGonagall. She was a professor. McGonagall would fix everything. It would be a mistake not to tell her.

She remembered the feel of those tears, strange and piercing against her skin. You shouldn't have come in here, he had said. Then, I don't have a choice.

She was making a terrible mistake.

"Nothing," Hermione said. Her voice calm and confident, the same voice from six years ago when she first lied to a professor. "Myrtle was making a ruckus and, as the only Prefects currently on the second floor," she gestured to their matching Prefect badges, "Malfoy and I went to check it out. We did manage to calm her down, but it was a bit of a struggle." She returned McGonagall's piercing gaze, struggling to look earnest and trustworthy. That expression used to come naturally to her.

McGonagall perhaps did not look as convinced as Hermione would have hoped, but she nodded nonetheless. "Very well. I thank you both for performing your Prefect duties so thoroughly." With one last purse of her lips, she left them.

They stood in silence, watching their professor stride off. When she finally disappeared around the corner, Malfoy asked, "Why?"

She turned to him. She felt so much older than him in so many ways. "There is always a choice," she said, her voice pitying and scornful all at once.

And then, without waiting for his reaction, she walked away as fast as her wavering legs could carry her, back to the Gryffindor common room. Back to Harry and Ron and her books and a plethora of "ands." Back to the semblance that remained of her old life.