Welcome Back, Hermione
Chapter Two: Of Melodrama and Fairy Tale Knights
Disclaimer: Hmm…what was I gonna say again? Oh right, I don't own Harry Potter. Shame…he seemed like such a nice boy…
A/N: yes, I realize I've made Draco a little OOC here, but I always did like child abuse/trauma/recovery fics.
He stood there, shaking, as the foundations of his world crashed down around him and he was plunged into darkness again.
He had thought he would be able to escape the darkness which had been forever clawing at him since the moment he had been born, to run away from his destiny and to actually live a semi-normal life for once.
Guess he'd thought wrong.
A tiny part of his mind shouted that he was being melodramatic and utterly stupid, that she hadn't known what she was doing, and that he was totally overreacting.
He knew that the tiny part was right.
But it didn't help the fact that he felt totally and utterly betrayed. Unknowingly, his hand reached up to touch the place where she had slapped him. It was his right cheek, and his hand caressed the slightly red area, the same place where she had slapped him in third year and he had gained an unwilling respect for the girl who dared to stand up to him.
Only this time around, it hurt a lot more because she wasn't the Mudblood friend of Potter. She was Hermione, his wife.
His long strands of platinum-blond hair fell forward as he bowed his head slightly to look away from Weasley's questioning, piercing gaze. The man, doltish and slow as he was, had an unfortunately keen perception sometimes, and he had no wish to allow those blue eyes to stare at him now, when his defenses were so ravaged.
So broken.
Who knew a simple slap could do that to him?
He was so hyper-sensitive.
But damn, for a moment when she had hit him he had seen Lucius in her eyes, in her slap, in her words, and the tone of her words had cut him far more deeply than he cared to admit. In that moment of pain, he had shown himself far too vulnerable to Potter, and he had no wish to reenact that embarrassing display of Hufflepuff weakness again.
Instead he stared off into the distance.
"Are you all right?" Weasley.
"Yes. I'm fine." His voice was curt, and he could feel Weasley's palpable disbelief, but he refused to say anymore, and apparently even Weasley could tell when he wasn't wanted, because the red-head actually fell silent, instead staring out in perfect silence at the window.
He wondered what Potter was saying to her in there.
He wondered if she was going to see him again.
He wondered if he'd ever get over this stupid habit of falling apart because of her.
But most of all, he wondered if she'd ever love him again, or if the first time had just been a fluke, a weird mishap, and she wasn't ever going to come back to him.
Because of course, someone like her could do so much better than someone like him. And maybe, the second time around, she was going to realize that.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
She lay there, trying to process it all and longing for the nice safe dark again. The man who called himself Harry, and who she was pretty sure was Harry, even if his hair didn't stick up in the back, had said she was twenty-six. That was the first thing to deal with.
She didn't feel twenty-six. Actually, she didn't even feel sixteen. Right now, she felt six. A very scared, insecure six. Though she could remember everything pretty well up until the point she was sixteen, which meant she was pretty sure she was at least sixteen.
Yes, at least sixteen. That was a start, anyway, from six. Now let's see if I can fast-forward ten more years. Nope, not working.
Twenty-six. That seemed impossibly old. Twenty-six. To a sixteen-year-old, that was prehistoric! She lay there, trying to come to terms with it all, trying to understand that she was a wife, had a job, and for crying out loud, was twenty-six.
And oh, that hurt too, because as sixteen-year-old girls tend to do, she had gone over every detail of her perfect wedding with Ginny, complete with flower decorations, dress, shoes, and place, and it stung not to be able to remember her 'perfect day.'
Or, come to think of it, her 'perfect first night.' Ouch. That was rather embarrassing to think about.
And shite, there it was. She was a wife. And not Ron's wife, as she would have expected. Malfoy's. Ferret boy's. You know, the boy who tried to get Hagrid sacked and Buckbeak killed? The boy who was part of damn Inquisitorial squad last year—I mean eleven years ago? That boy? She still wasn't sure they were talking about the same person here.
It was beyond weird.
It was impossible.
She was half-expecting Harry and Ron to jump out at her and shout, "April's Fools," or some such thing. Except that wizards didn't do April Fools, as she had learned the hard way when Ron didn't appreciate one of her pranks on aforementioned day. It was a purely Muggle holiday, one of the better ideas of Muggles really, which wizards should pick up.
Which really wasn't comforting.
And which brought her back to the speech the twenty-six-year-old Harry had so scared her with. She was pretty sure he was Harry—only Harry could be that intense, that vivid, that alive and passionate with life.
Only Harry could be that angry.
Though she did wonder what had happened to make him that intense about Malfoy.
Because if she knew him—and she did, ten years screwed—he only got that way about things he really, really believed in—or people he really, really cared about. And she hated that she didn't know when he had gotten so close to Malfoy that he got that intense about him.
And if she was allowed to read yet, because she dearly needed to calm down a bit. And relax. And reading always did that for her. What she would give for a good old romance novel again, maybe Pride and Prejudice, to sooth her nerves, which were probably rivaling Mrs. Bennet's right now. Or anything, come to that. Even a Potions textbook. There was something just so comforting about running her eyes over the black and white of printed word, seeing the familiar sight, shaping the sounds silently with her tongue in her mind's eye. Very friendly.
But she didn't have a book, and she didn't want to ask for one in case she ran into Harry again—long experience had taught her that you didn't run into Harry after one of those speeches for quite some times—, so she settled for telling herself a story. A fairy tale.
"Once upon a time," she whispered as she snuggled down in her sheets. "There was a beautiful princess whom everyone loved. She was beautiful, and kind, and smart. Everyone in the whole land loved her because she was so wonderful. The poor sang her praises; the widows cried her name; the animals sang for her and her only. She was very happy.
"But then one day, something terrible happened.
"A wicked prince stole her from the castle by the dark of night and carried her away to where it was always darkness, never light. Where everything was hidden and contaminated by the spreading fingers of darkness and nowhere was not pervaded by his sight.
"She was very unhappy.
"But then a beautiful knight in shining armor came and rescued her. He took her from that land of everlasting darkness and swept her up on a white horse. She thanked him most graciously and they rode away into the sunset to live happily ever after. The End."
She then drifted off to a troubled sleep haunted by dreams of knights in shining white armor with platinum blond hair and grey eyes that were so sad they seemed to have the weight of the world on them.
