Disclaimer: Hogwarts etc belongs to JKR.
He was never one to beg. A Malfoy never begs. That is what she expected him to say. Never show weakness. Never break and shatter and cry on the floor like a baby. Alone.
She watches the reunion from the sidelines.
The meeting on the hill… It had been unlike anything she had ever experienced. It was a dream. A nightmare. An impossible imagining uncovered under a night sky.
Witches. Wizards. Alive and magical with the ability to create flowers from air and hide from the world for a thousand years. The ability to kill and heal and understand the inexplicable. Real. That is what they were and the thought was terrible and impossible and incredible. She didn't know whether to fear or rejoice in the knowledge.
The man was on the floor. Shaking with his face an ashen mask of tears. His eyes unblinking behind a thin fringe of white blond he stared at the woman. At Hermione Granger.
The witch, for her part, was still. Her exclamation of recognition cut off by the opening of his eyes. Since their gazes met she had neither looked away or closed her mouth from speaking. A hundred feelings flitting over her face, pink cheeked from the cold, bright eyed from shock and something else. Her hands shook hard as clutched the cuff of her shirt.
"Granger".
He recognised. He recognised because he wanted nothing more than to return to the past he never appreciated enough. He'd hated her before, but the helpless look on his face, the trembling of his thin, thin, thin fingers, the tears and the barely whispered word as he nearly fell from his bed – that spoke of something beyond hate, something cold with disbelief and strangled with hope he never expected to gain. Wretched.
He had never been meant to survive that war.
He didn't deserve it.
He was the one that started it all.
He drove them from their home. He shut Hogwarts. He killed. He killed and with that action, he forced them to as well. With his cowardice he secured her future. He destroyed so much of what she worked to achieve. Without him… without him would they still have Dumbledore? Would that have won that bit quicker? Would Harry have required less of a sacrifice? Would it have been easier?
Would it have happened at all?
He was the root. The beginning. The beginning that didn't even have the guts to stay to witness the end. He was the coward.
He was a coward and three or five or four or a hundred thousand years ago she would have hated him for that. But now. Now as he shook on his knees before her, now she could feel nothing but shock and… something heavy, dark and suspiciously like guilt. Suspiciously like pity.
She'd known this boy, and he was farther now than he had ever been to sneering little Draco Malfoy, all slick hair and slick voice, snooty and proud. No longer a shadow of his father he was a shadow of himself. That scared her somehow… He was broken more than anyone had been in the war. Broken past the shattered souls in Azkaban. Broken to a point past recognition.
She looks at him cry and cannot see any resemblance to her schoolyard rival. Lying asleep on the bed he looked almost the same, but now, awake and so vastly different he could have been a whole other person.
She doesn't know him anymore.
She stares and stares and the questions flutter through her while not an answer is to be found.
Would he have been different? If it had been her to catch him? Would it have been better for him?
She had hated him still, then when she searched with the Order and the aurors, when, in the dying moments of the war he was their priority (his blood the very thing that could ensure their passage safely into the very Manor in which Lord Voldemort spent out his final days). She had been in charge of the tracking of Draco Malfoy while Harry worked on that final horcrux and Ron rallied the straggling remains of their Hogwarts friends into fighting. She had found much, but when the war ended she abandoned the trail and rejoiced with the rest of her world. We should never have stopped looking…
Had she caught him then he would have been thrown into Azkaban with no trial. It was the way of war – actions deemed so unfair in the face of the innocent Sirius Black seemed far more logical when people were dying and the person in question was undoubtedly capable of bribing their way out if the sentence was not stated in no uncertain terms. Had she caught him then he would have been in the same situation as his father, perhaps more hated but still undergoing therapy and rehabilitation programs, perhaps he would even have been able to visit his dying mother. Indeed, it was her Vow that ensured he lived in the first place. But she had died in St Mungo's, her last visitor Pansy Parkinson, accompanied by Ron Weasley and Harry Potter.
Had Draco Malfoy been caught when he was wanted and feared most he would never be crying at her feet. He would be bitter and broken in Azkaban, but he would have been among his own people and he's most likely still have his pride. Would that make him better off?
The figure on the floor raises his head slightly, chin up and the light reflects off the same high cheekbones. His skin is translucent under the artificial glow of neon, the sharp panes of his face damp and cold with tears, accentuated with neglect and crippling emotion. If only he could see himself, she thinks and wishes she could hate him. Wishes he could look less pathetic. Wishes he would stand and shout and swear and snarl. Wishes he could show some sign he was alive at all, anything more than a shell.
His palms pressed against the glass, his breath making clouds on the window. She waited for the steam to clear, with each breath waiting for it to disappear and leave the boy she once refused to know beyond it, sneering and hateful but alive all the same. Alive and waiting to taunt her with retorts that really stung.
She's not aware of willing it but her left hand rises to rest over his, through the glass. Her knees are folding and she sits level with him, eyes fixed on grey.
They sit opposite each other, faces wrought with raw emotion, all of it negative and hopeless.
She feels so out of place here. Like she's invading something so intimate it is beyond her understanding (beyond her right to understand).
She's telling herself she should leave, telling herself she should lock the door behind her and allow them their privacy, but every rule and regulation of her job prohibits it. She should never have bought the woman here. It was a lapse of judgement fuelled by shock and were anyone to find out here job would be well and truly gone.
"Miss Granger?" she croaks out.
The brunette does not reply.
"Hermione?"
No response; the witch has fallen into a kind of trance, fixated on the figure in front of her and apparently unable to hear, see or sense anything beyond that.
"Please?" Her voice is cracking and in dull panic her eyes flick between the doors, as if at any moment someone could appear. Middle of the night or not, there are armed watchmen stationed throughout the building.
The woman by the glass issues a soft sob, the first sound she's made since she fell to her knees, and Isabelle's heart is racing.
"Miss Granger, you're going to have to leave! I should never have bought you here!"
Nothing.
The sound of a door being opened far off in the depths of the building makes her jump. Breathing not quite steady she steps over to the glass, refusing to look at the man she now knows to be Draco Malfoy she takes the witch by her arm.
Wet brown eyes snap to hers in horror. Malfoy whimpers at the loss of eye contact.
"You're going to have to leave. Someone could come at any minute."
Startled the witch half raises the stick that's never left her hand.
Malfoy lets out a distressed moan.
He doesn't know what's happening.
He woke up and she was there and it was all he could do to look at her and marvel. She was magical and she was beautiful. Muggle blood as good as forgotten, she was his first link to his own world for near countless years. It had been so long.
She had stood and watched with a stillness that was neither calculating nor confused. She had purpose and determination and an unbroken wand, hanging loose in her fingers.
Save me, his eyes and mind and heart and soul appealed to her. If she heard she didn't show it. Just stood. Unreal beyond the glass. She was judging him. There was pity and there was remembrance in her gaze. He could not look away.
He was not aware of how it happened but she was right in front of him, kneeling with her hand pressed to his, a world away and yet so close he could almost feel the warmth of her body through the triple glazed barrier.
And then suddenly there was movement and her eyes were taken from him, leaving him forgotten as the pale girl, the Granger look alike who, he decided, would never come close to the real thing, talked quickly with syllables of panic.
Granger's wand was raising and her tried to cry out. He didn't want them to fight. She was here to take him away, surely, not to punish the muggle with the clipboard.
The pale muggle was clasping Granger's arm, imploring something his brain wouldn't function to understand. The word 'leave' left her lips and his eyes widened in panic. Thin fingers clawing at the glass he was on his feet, but they couldn't hear him.
Granger was crying and shouting and the muggle was trying to make her stop and make her leave and he wanted nothing more than to have his wand and his magic.
Then, as suddenly as she had come, she left.
A distant door slammed shut far away and he was left alone. Staring tear-stricken in the wake of the two figures.
In the back of his consciousness he was aware of a neon light flickering and numb with shock and self-pity he slumped onto the edge of his bed.
Stripped of hope and more alone than ever he cried.
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