This is an updated version of this chapter - please review! It really does help the story move along.
~J
March 24 1998 6:08pm
The moment Bellatrix Lestrange's staccato, wild laugh broke from her lips, Draco Malfoy found himself in the most unimaginable situation: standing over Hermione Granger as his aunt's fingers played with a long tortoise-shell knife. "Do her in, Draco," she said; he didn't look at her, "the muggle way." He looked at her.
She was bloody mad.
Hermione whimpered beneath him, weeping silently, struggling, but unable to move. Her eyes pleaded with Draco. Bellatrix handed him the knife. "Take it!"
He didn't dare contemplate; after a moment, he did. But hesitation was always Draco's forte. And he's already accepted his cowardice tendencies. Yes, Draco wanted all but nothing to do but glide the sky with the new Firebolt 4000. It was a shame really, to be swept - no embedded - into such dark times, dark places, dark families. His dark mark. His mother put a hand to her mouth.
Bellatrix's sing-song voice broke his contemplation and rung the room like broken strings, and she circled him like a bat. "Draco, show me what you couldn't do," and here she raised herself in a hushed voice, "to Albus."
Narcissa stepped forward. "Please."
It was inevitable that he would be punished for his failure. His inability. These moments are the moments he recalls his unexploited byline: "clever, swift, and able." Clever, swift, and able. That was his magic. His essence. His wand - a mantra he's known since his first steps into Ollivander's wandshop those many years ago. "A pliant wand for a pliant boy," Mr. Ollivander told him, "able to bend without breaking."
But why couldn't he bend? He felt like breaking for sure, and he couldn't even bend. He's never bent in his life. He furrowed his eyebrows at Hermione, writhing beneath him, but fierce as ever. Granger.
She's the type that bends without breaking.
He isn't any type. Not once has he lived up to his magical creed. He is what his father condemns: "A cowardice failure of a son," where the thought alone of stabbing the infamous Hermione Granger created a sharp pang of nausea at the back of his throat, and where the image of her blood spilling out beneath him - the image of lifelessness, limpness, empty eyes - quivered every delicate fiber of his nature. He side-glanced his mother, horrified and agape, his father, stern and serious, and then back to Hermione.
Bellatrix tugged at him. "No need to hesitate, Draco." She swiftly grabbed his trembling hands, steadied it, and dragged him down to his knees. "Right through her heart, Draco. Yes, right here. It will be quick."
Hermione cried, hot streaming tears sparking in her eyes like the first hint of fire. Draco felt the world shift beneath him. What good would it do - doing in the little bookworm like this? Couldn't he say something like: "We need her alive for Potter? We need her alive for bait? We need her alive for information?" All cleverness must have dried his tongue months ago, because such words never left his mouth. His knife feathered her collarbone - just for a second - and she gasped, panting and feverish under his tow. She began to cry uncontrollably. Please don't.
He was a pathetic.
Such one, that in one backward glance to his mother, the mouthed 'apparate' brought a leap in his heart. To disappear. To run away. The one item he was good actually good at.
He looked at Hermione with newfound determinism. He turned sharply, resolute, and nodded his head at his aunt.
Gleefully, she let go, bounced upward, and beamed.
In the moment of release, and without a single mark of hesitation, though it did pass through him - he grabbed Hermione's arm and spun the world beneath his heels. The last of glimmer of Bellatrix he knew would not be the last.
March 24 1998. 6:22pm
He first tried to unbind her. She was so frail beneath him. Her brown eyes stared up at him as he muttered spells, calming enchantments, magic like thin blue wreaths that curled around her in fanciful whorls - it seeped in her like Christmas. Her breathing subsided to a soft hum and she closed her eyes. After he was finished, he leaned against a tree and closed his eyes too.
March 25 1998. 12:40am
In public, he was cold, aloof, and somewhat pompous. Even as a boy, he stood casually in pictures, and with his right hand royally, even Napoleonically, tucked into his pocket, the impatient and spoiled expression he wore outshines even his mother, whose sanguine beauty fell short to the little boy with piercing eyes, hair like platinum, and a pose made for the divine, a Michelangelo, a lavished prince. Such ego entailed, and he was well aware of his hubris, his Achilles heel, his Narcissus, the touch of reality he sometimes lost. Such a dark reality.
Inside, he felt empty.
He awoke from his thoughts to the sound of explosions. He saw Hermione's sleeping figure across from him. She didn't even stir. Moss and dead leaves surrounded her and she seemed unaware of reality, deep in sleep, and he wished he could do just the same.
It would be time to go.
March 25 1998. 4:56am
They ran for what it seemed like hours from black hooded figures, spinning dark magic from their wands. Hermione was hit, once, twice, and barely missed a crucio curse. She found a ditch and pulled Draco inside. Magic flared above them, and he knew they had seconds if not less. A groan escaped her chapped lips, as she held her arm, and Draco dropped beside her. Hermione suddenly became determined, breathing heavily, and quickly flashed him a cool set of eyes. "We are going to apparate. This time, no one will know."
He nodded and she grabbed him, pulling him tightly against her. He closed his eyes as his world unfurled-he could no longer feel the damp grass beneath him, or smell the thick musk of evergreen. When he opened his eyes to a blinding white-snow?-drifting above him like glossy sheets, he realized they were no longer near London.
"Where are we?" he rasped, watching the fog from his mouth catch the wind.
The winter above them outmatched the world before, where the crisp air ran low beneath them, and where the snow speckled the skyline like stars.
"We are near the ocean," she said, finding her feet. "The Atlantic."
She lend out her hand to him but he didn't take it.
March 25 1998. 6.55am
Seaweed appeared in bloom along the coast; the light snow weaved through the surrounding mountains, creating a dense fog adrift the Atlantic shore. Ice, sculpted by waves and spray, encrusted the pier where they stopped to rest, where the fogs of their breath stroked the stray rays of morning sunlight through the dingy-lidded wooden pier that shadowed their faces.
Draco couldn't take it anymore. He was freezing, tired, and sore. Even casting heating enchantments on himself every couple ten minutes left him freezing, tired, and sore. And in all, he'd refused to ponder his undoing - yet it did creep the corners of his mind - and he refused to feel fear, guilt, and any other conflicting, complicated emotions. Like being alone, lost - near the Atlantic? - all being next to Granger. Bloody Granger.
"Bloody hell," Draco grunted; his voice was hoarse and tethered. "Where the hell are we? Where are we going?"
Hermione, ahead of him, hiccuped, and coughed deep in her throat the moment his voice found her. She turned to look at him and he realized it was the first time he actually looked at her all evening, all morning. Dried blood crisped the edges of her lashes and streaked to her chin. She wiped her runny nose and stood a while examining her reddened, possibly near-frozen, hands. Her hazelnut curls tumbled out of its loose bun and covered her slight face. She was silent. He presumed she had been crying and felt immediately inadequate.
"Granger." His voice resonated under the pier and seemed to float to her. She did not look at him.
"We can rest here for a few minutes," she suddenly said, turning away, and moving to the other side of the pier.
Sunlit snow fluttered in the breeze, as he watched her sit on a dislodged log, head in her hands, the glitters of constellations prickling her tattered clothes. He muttered under his breath a curse or two, and walked out from the pier to give her space, all the while clearing his tethered throat, coughing, and squinting to look at the brightening sky. Gathering clouds, like raveled skeins of white silk, drifted across the hollow turquoise of the horizon. It reminded him of childhood - just for a moment - a sky that looked very much the same (or was it the salty sea air?) of Christmas spent at family's beach house the north of France. It was silly, trifling thought, but it suprisingly warmed his bones, the places where it ached. It was the Christmas where he received his first broom. He'd sailed it across the sky till his fingers could no longer feel the hawthorn wood.
He glanced at Hermione's small figure, now staring at the horizon, lost in thought. He briefly wondered what she was thinking about.
March 25 1998. 7:24am
He was listening, quite peacefully, to the ocean rasping in under the floes when she finally came to him, faint, with tear-stained cheeks daubed with blood.
"It's my grandfather's old beach house," she said, eyes upon him but not looking at him, "We'll be be safe there for now. It should be another thirty minutes."
"Bollocks Granger. You couldn't apparate us any closer to the bloody house."
She ignored him willfully, and he noticed her run down face seeping in the white-washed glow, her pallid features growing grave, exasperated. She looked at him. Please.
He scowled at her sidelong glare. She pulled her toppled cinnamon locks into a quickly fashioned bun and turned from him. "Come on." She lead the way down the snow-covered coast, and all he could do was watch her hair slowly trickle apart with every step she made.