They're waiting for her on the platform, as they do every year. Dad, beaming, and Mum's face glowing with pride.
She tries to muster a small smile for them, but she knows it is weak. This year had been particularly difficult. It's written all over the faces of the students, in the weary way they greet their families, the shock still not dissolved from their expressions.
She sinks wordlessly into her mother's arms .
"How about some ice cream before we head back?" Her mother's soothing voice brushes against her ear.
She shakes her head. "I just want to go home."
Her mother sits with her in the back of the car the whole ride home, holding her hand.
Her dad makes her a cup of hot chocolate. They sit with her as she tells them everything. They don't say anything — they can't. It's not a world they understand. But they listen. They listen until she has run out of words and the tears dry from her cheeks.
She wakes up the next morning, under a soft blanket on the living room couch. Mum's asleep on the sofa and Dad's stretched out on the floor.
It's such a simple thing, but it makes her just a little more ready to face what's coming.
He comes back to her with a knock on the door.
She hears it as she is fitting a freshly laundered pillowcase over her pillow and knows instantly that it is him. Maybe it is the reticence in the hollows of the sound. Maybe it is the long seconds that pass between the sound of his footfalls on the stairs and the knock itself.
He's staring at his shoes when she opens the door. His eyes fly up to meet hers as though he wasn't expecting her to answer it. It doesn't look like he's slept in days.
"Look, I—" The words are there, on the tip of his tongue. "I was angry and I— I took it out on you and it wasn't right and I—"
She doesn't wait for him to finish but takes him in her arms and rests her cheek against his chest. He exhales and wraps his arms around her. "I'm sorry," he breathes into her hair.
She shakes her head. Don't be.
Because she's just glad he's here, because she realises now, with a small twinge in her heart, how much she has missed him.
"Come in," she sniffs, opening the door to let him through.
"You know the MUMPS rally is happening this afternoon," she says after a long, reflective pause, stretched out on his sofa with her head on his lap.
"So you've said, at least five times."
"I think we should go."
"Absolutely not."
She sits up and turns around on the sofa to face him. "You need to see the people who are fighting to stop this, to change things for the better."
"There are going to be loads of people there."
"Yes, people that are on your side. Who believe in the cause of rehabilitating and reintegrating former criminals, not ostracizing them."
He shakes his head on a deep exhale. "I don't know—"
"I'll be there, I won't let anyone do anything to you. Not again."
"You're willing to be seen in public with me? Heads will explode."
She simply shrugs. "I don't want to hide anymore. Do you?"
He doesn't say anything, but just regards her with a look she doesn't quite understand.
She takes his hands in hers. "Come with me, Draco. It'll be a safe space. We don't need to stay for very long."
They Apparate together in front of Flourish and Blotts, because it is the one part of Diagon Alley she remembers almost perfectly. The large red sign with two quills poised in the middle. The gold-embossed spellbooks displayed in the front windows. The narrow, twisting, street outside.
She's about to take his hand when she notices the look on his face. Like a freed prisoner seeing the outside world for the first time in years. The awe of a child, but tempered, beaten down by the vigilant instincts of a hunted man.
A crowd has already started to gather in the middle of the street, where a small stage has been set up with a large orange MUMPS banner stretched out above it. Curious shoppers are starting to stop along the street to get a better view of the stage. The low buzz of excited conversation hangs overhead.
People dotted throughout the crowd are holding up signs. Absence of war does not make peace.
"Let's stay on the outside," he mutters as she grips his hand. "Claustrophobia."
They skirt along the edge of the crowd, aiming for a spot with a direct view of the stage. The crowd begins to thicken as they near the middle of the gathering, their bodies at first brushing, but then inevitably pressing against others.
She isn't blind to the stares. Double-takes, sideways glances and outright gawking — first at both their faces, then at their interlocked hands, and back to their faces again.
The whispers are a bit harder to drown out.
"...they can't be…"
"...they're holding hands…"
"...brave of her…"
She looks at him and his face has that unreadable look on it again, eyes fixed ahead of him, jaw slightly tensed. She squeezes his hands, and he turns to her with a suppressed half-smile.
They choose a spot somewhere to the right of the stage, where they're both partially hidden from view.
A young man she recognises as James Davies walks on stage to raucous applause from the crowd. He's of slighter build than he appeared in the papers but carries himself with poise.
"Not many people know this," he begins, his voice magically amplified, and the chatter quickly dissipates. "And I haven't exactly been open about it, but I was sorted into Slytherin." A collective murmur ripples through the crowd.
"I remember being a bit surprised, because I thought I was a good child. I did my homework, I shared my toys with my sisters, I fetched grandmother her glasses whenever she asked for it. I thought only bad children were sorted into Slytherin. And I remember feeling scared, wondering if, deep down, I actually was a bad child, and that I just hadn't realised it yet.
"I couldn't sleep at all the first night, so I came down to the common room, and sat shivering in my pajamas in front of the fire. An older student, a fourth-year I think he was, came up to me, and said he understood what I was feeling, that he'd felt the same on his first day.
"He told me I'd get used to it eventually. That I'd been sorted into Slytherin for a reason. That everyone at Hogwarts was sorted into their Houses for a reason. And that I should be proud, not scared or ashamed."
Draco is rapt. His eyes are fixed unwaveringly on Davies and she hasn't seen him quite so engaged in anything.
"And I believed it. I started making friends with students who believed it too. When we took classes with other Houses, or sat in the Great Hall for breakfast, I saw the judgement in other kids' eyes, felt their hatred burning from across the room. The war had been over for four years, but people still looked at Slytherin as some sort of breeding ground for evil, where all the dangerous people of our world came from."
A faint murmur seems to have broken out on the other side of the crowd. People are being jostled about.
"I didn't really understand it, but I think, on some level, I accepted it. I knew what was expected of me. In my second and third-year, I started disobeying teachers, I started calling other students cruel names. Especially the Gryffindors. We were supposed to hate them the most.
"In my fourth year, I set a girl's dress on fire. I remember how bright the flames were as they leapt from her dress onto her skin, her hair. She was in the hospital wing for weeks. When she came back, I remember she looked at me, with, it wasn't hate so much as fear. She was afraid of me."
From where she is standing, Hermione spots a group of people, perhaps ten or twelve of them, pushing their way toward them. From the glimpses of their faces she can catch in between the crowd, they're angry, scowling. She can hear bits of what they're saying as they approach closer.
"...fucking bleeding hearts…"
"...ruining us…"
"...the nerve of holding this shit in Diagon Alley…"
Davies doesn't appear to have noticed them. "A teacher, Professor Slughorn, called me into his office that day, and asked me plainly why I did it. I didn't have an answer for him. Because the answer in my head sounded stupid. He wasn't angry at me, though. He didn't shout at me, or tell me what an idiot I was being. Instead he said that it wasn't me that was broken, but a world that taught its children that they were essentially one thing. That their personalities, their friends, their whole lives, could be determined at the age of eleven.
"And what a powerful thing that is. How it crept into my brain and made me say and do unlikely things. That might be alright for brave Gryffindors, or wise Ravenclaws, or loyal Hufflepuffs. But what did it mean for Slytherins, who were expected to be the worst of the worst?"
One member of the group spots Draco while barging past the two of them, and stops abruptly in front of him, glowering, his breath hot and phlegmy. A few people around them have started to whisper and back away, looking slightly alarmed.
"Get out of my face," Draco sneers, looking the man resolutely in the eye.
"...we're not standing here today to excuse the crimes of those who presently sit inside a cell in Azkaban. What they did was wrong and will always be so..."
Hermione reaches into her pocket, her hand curling around her wand. The man flinches at her movement, narrowing his eyes as he studies her face with vague recognition. He seems only then to notice the curious, wary looks that he has started to attract. He shoots Draco another burning glare and spits at his feet before disappearing once more through the crowd.
"...recognition of the fact that criminals are made, not born. That dividing and classifying ourselves and offering no one any room for change or growth, were exactly what led to the war that devastated our community not ten years ago…"
"I think I'd like to leave now," Draco whispers in her ear, glancing after the man's retreating figure with renewed agitation.
"...MUMPS welcomed the abolishment of the Hogwarts Houses. Now, we endeavor to do more. We want changes in our laws that continue to protect bigotry. We want to rehabilitate and reintegrate those we have cast out of our community, to show them that one decision that was made for them at the age of eleven does not have to determine the rest of their lives…"
"Don't let them intimidate you, Draco. They were just trying to scare you—"
"...but we have a lot of convincing to do. We're going to hold rallies like this in a new wizarding quarter each month until we've reached all of them. If every one of you here brought one new person to these rallies when we're in your neighbourhood, it could make a huge impact. We're going to tell our stories…"
"There are at least four hundred people here," he hisses. "All believing in a cause those idiots desperately want to stamp out. I'm just saying it would be all too easy to-"
"...write letters to the Minister and to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement…"
"We can't keep running away." Her voice is cracking and her hands are on his shoulders. "You can't. We've got, at some point, to say, enough's enough. No more hiding. Look at how much support MUMPS is getting and all the things they've said they're going to do next. This a good thing, Draco, they're helping to make the world safer for you-"
The crowd erupts in applause as Davies ends his speech. More members of MUMPS join him onstage to further deafening cheers and hoots of approval.
They're all so young, she thinks, watching them thump Davies on the shoulder and wave energetically at the crowd. And they've managed to capture something in all these people's hearts. It's such a beautiful thing.
"Alright, can we go now? I believe I've fulfilled your requirements," mutters Draco.
"Fine," she smiles.
He grunts something in response as he leads her out of the enthused crowd, searching for a quiet spot they can Disapparate from. Davies' speech is still ringing in her ears, reverberating in her chest, every word filled with a daring hope she hasn't felt in years.
The sun is setting onto a cool spring evening as they Apparate into the alley behind her apartment. There aren't many people out and about at this hour, most of them having already retreated into their homes to enjoy the last precious hours of the weekend.
"So, what did you think?"
"It was fine, though I can't help but think they were preaching to the choir."
"They probably were, but they're going to keep pushing. More people are going to start talking about them. That's how any movement grows."
"And they're all young, which doesn't hurt—"
"Exactly, I thought—"
It all happens so soundlessly, like silk slipping through her fingers. The words die on her tongue when the alley is illuminated in burst of fiery orange light. She hears Draco's strangled yell in the pit of her stomach, and then the thud of his body as it hits the concrete.