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ChelseyJ
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samijewell
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For their reviews!
Also I don't remember if I've written a disclaimer for this story and I'm too lazy to go and check so here it is - not jkr not mine except anything you don't recognize.
Although I do hope one day some few enthu ff writers will be writing a disclaimer for my works ;)
One can hope, right?
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CHAPTER 21.
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HERMIONE'S POV :
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One moment we were on the edge and my eyebrows were buried in my hairline, sick with worry.
The other moment Draco is whispering reassuring in my ear and the next thing I know, we are flying.
Or rather falling.
My chest tightens with the loss of air in my lungs.
Before I go giddy due to lack of oxygen, I breathe. Deep.
And then I scream.
And keep screaming.
And I can't stop.
Somewhere in the middle I've shut my eyes tight. So tight that I'm seeing stars because of the pressure.
I feel Draco squeezing my shoulder gently.
He is also screaming with me. But his screams are more like exhilarated ones compared to my petrified ones.
I bet he's done this before.
Slowly I open my eyes when we've descended further.
Everything is upside down.
But yet... It's glorious.
Never ending expanse of green hills and the orange pink sky.
Funnily the sky is below and the hills are all over. Of course. I'm upside down.
I'm still frightened out of my wits after all, but with every pull of gravity that we descend, the fear gets less and less and is replaced by a feeling of nothingness.
There's nothing I feel. I'm still screaming of course, but out of sheer thrill now.
I feel nothing for a while. I don't know who I am or where I am.
I forget my past, my childhood, magic, Hogwarts, the war, Ron, his death, my emptiness, pain, everything.
I'm blank for a moment but then suddenly a realization hits me square.
I'm alive.
I'm defying gravity now.
The rope is pulling us up.
And I'm still alive. Suspended in air and flying. So close to death if even a single thing goes wrong.
But as of now I'm alive.
My face has broken into a wide open grin and my heart is thumping. Loud. So loud.
I bet Draco can hear it as well.
Or maybe not. Because I can't hear his heart. Only I feel his warmth and Merlin, it feels good to have him with me.
The blood is rushing in my ears and all I can hear is the air gushing around me and my own heart running a mile a minute.
I'm breathless and I'm exhilarated.
And I can't get over how alive I feel.
I don't know if it's the result of doing something that I have feared all my life or just throwing caution to the winds and just doing something because I was forced to, but for the first time in years I felt alive.
I felt alive. Like in those few moments that I was bodily upside down, I felt like everything had straightened out and I had stopped existing and started living.
It's not a near death experience where my entire life flashed in front of my eyes or something.
Only the opposite.
We can die in so many ways every day.
Yet we wake up and find a new day ahead of us.
And we exist. Merely exist. Or at least I do that.
Being so close to not having any control over my life, tethered by a rope and still alive, I felt feelings I couldn't express anymore.
I needn't feel guilty to live because of the dead.
Taking life for granted. Living each day as a liability is a disgrace to every breath we take.
Least I could do to honour Ron's memory is to live my life. He would have wanted me to be happy. He did want that. He had told me.
But it's easy for him to say. He left me behind.
But I swear on the rope that's keeping me alive that I'll try. I'll try best to live better. And laugh more.
All too soon it's over and we reach the edge of the bridge again.
The men ahead are trying to pull us closer.
The adrenaline is still bounding in my blood stream and I'm dizzy with all the blood rush to my head.
In a haze, I feel the instructor and his helper catch us and steady us.
They remove our safety harnesses and we sit on the chairs nearby for a while.
I'm still reeling from what just happened.
Unknown to me, my eyes are tearing up and I'm crying copiously but silently.
But I'm happy. Oh so happy. Happiest I've been in a long time.
I feel Draco take me in his arms and cuddle me protectively.
I'm thankful for that because my legs are so weak I can hardly stand straight.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
I don't know if he knows what I'm feeling right now but I think he at least understands what I'm going through if not anything.
I take solace in his arms and we stay like that for a good few minutes or maybe more.
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GENERAL POV :
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Hermione had never understood why she put up with Draco's persuasiveness.
Even when they were enemies.
It was even more difficult to resist him now that they were friends.
His eyes, his reasoning, his words, his silence all spoke volumes in favour of what he was advocating.
Usually Hermione always got what she wanted. No one could win a battle of with against her and she held her own in the arguments department.
But a certain Slytherin had always managed to sidestep all that and get his way.
She didn't know what it was about him that when he made up his mind, there was nothing she could do to dissuade him.
That's probably why he had eventually found her. Well, technically she had found him but somewhere Hermione believed that his wish to meet her was so intense that coincidence itself had arranged the coincidence.
In fact, it was this trait of his that had led them to befriend each other all those years ago at Hogwarts.
Draco Malfoy was fuming.
To say he was pissed was an understatement.
How dare she? How dare a mudblood, a girl that too, punch him right in the nose? And break it?
He hated her more than he ever had for those few moments after she had broken his nose.
But that was not the reason he was ultimately livid about.
His anger touched the skies when he grudgingly admitted that he was awed by her act.
Speechless even.
And dare he say it? That he had a new respect for her?
However much he tried poisoning his mind against her by checking all infuriating things about her in his mental list ; wait a minute.. Did he have a mental list about her?
He had lost it.
Officially lost it.
He tried enumerating all the things his father had taught or rather force-fed him with about mudbloods.
They were impure. Their blood was dirty.
But he had never had the chance to see a bleeding Granger. So how could he be sure if her blood really wasn't red?
They didn't deserve magic. They were inferior to purebloods.
And yet, class after class, year after year she effortlessly beat him in grades while he struggled day in day out to best her, to gain approval from his scowling and whip happy father.
They have no class. People do not care for them or move about them waiting to be ordered and do favours for them like the purebloods.
And yet she seemed to be surrounded everyday by people who one would call friends, laughing, joking, sharing meals.
She would give up a lot for the people she called her friends, he had noticed that.
She was fiercely loyal, not merely a minion.
She helped her friends because she liked them and they needed her help. Not because she was ordered around.
And he knew that her friends would do anything for her.
Her parents are mere muggles. Waste of life. Lowly muggles.
Yet she received letters from them often.
They came to drop and pick her up at Kings Cross each time.
They hugged their child.
And they looked like they loved her.
Because anyone with eyes could see that.
They surely didn't whip her if she came second in class.
They probably spent Christmas together under one roof.
They probably also ate meals together and did things together what a family did.
Draco Malfoy would never know what those things were.
Because he was a Malfoy. Pureblooded.
Alone.
Aloof.
All he had of his family was his name.
The namesake friends he had were sons of people who sucked up to his father and were told to keep him happy.
No one whom he could have a stimulating conversation with.
No one who could challenge him when he was wrong.
Of course outwardly Draco Malfoy was never wrong. Never. But of course he knew sometimes he was wrong. But he was never corrected. Because all his 'friends' wanted to do was suck up to him. Be in his good books.
The girls in Slytherin too had taken up this role. No doubt each one hoped to be the next Mrs. Malfoy. The only prerequisite that was needed was to be a pureblood.
So surrounded by this mindlessness, Draco was yearning for something fresh, something true and something that didn't suffocate him every morning he woke up alone in the cold dungeons.
And Hermione Granger's punch gave him just what he was looking for.
It jolted him out of his existence, the one that he had mentally begun to question, in spite of years of thorough brainwashing from Lucius.
After all, a thinking mind is hard to chain.
Infuriated and appalled as he was, he couldn't help but think how utterly refreshing it was to have someone who finally stood up to him.
Of course Potter and Weasley had tried that too.
But something about receiving a broken nose from a mudblood, the same one who defeated him in everything possible perhaps except quidditch; had given him the reason he was subconsciously looking for to refuse to believe what his father had taught him.
And that day he realised that Hermione Granger, if not superior was most definitely an equal. In all respects.
He found himself having irrestible urges to be around her after that.
Even if it was to taunt an argument out from her.
Her clashes with him were stimulating for him and he seemed to feed on them.
He actually felt energised and mentally sharper after verbal combats with her even though most were just insults.
Although he had completely stopped calling her mudblood. He did not believe in that anymore and he refused to mean anything he said to her.
She seemed to have noticed the change in the insults too. Because she kept giving him confused looks and her insults were not so harsh either.
Many times she realized that he would purposely seek her out and antagonize her.
Sometimes he would just follow her. His steel grey eyes in her direction, trying to penetrate into her, trying to figure her out.
Soon he grew tired of insulting her. He didn't wish to do that anymore. He wanted more.
And that scared the shit out of him.
He took very very long to admit it to himself that he wanted to befriend her.
One day, she was sitting alone at a clearing close to Hagrid's hut studying some book.
She was rarely alone. Usually Potter or/and Weasley were always with her.
Draco never did anything without thinking but seeing her alone, his feet seemed to have a mind of his own and he found himself a few feet away from her.
She didn't look up. Of course she wouldn't. She was reading.
It wasn't until he was shuffling his feet nervously that she looked up.
It didn't take anyone especially smart to say that she was startled to see him there.
She immediately was on her feet, wand at the ready.
"What do you want Malfoy? Why are you here?" She asked, distrust clearly etched in her eyes.
He looked up at her and shuffled some more.
Now that he was here he didn't know what to say.
"Cat got your tongue? Or have you not brushed up on your latest book of insults yet?" She asked.
"Granger. I heard that the hippogriff got away." He said.
She looked at him confused. Not understanding what to make out of the statement.
"No thanks to you." She retorted after a while.
"Yeah. But it did. I guess you're relieved now." He said sincerely.
But mentally he kicked himself. When he saw her sitting alone he had no idea what he was going to say to her. But chatting without any sensible train of thoughts about the exact thing that had caused her to punch him was just stupid.
Since when did he start having trouble making conversation?
"What are you getting at Malfoy? I thought you hated it. It was only because of your stupidity and ego that a poor innocent creature was going to die." She stated.
"I know. But now maybe it's better that it's free and not dead." Draco said.
He mentally slapped himself. If this was how his apology was then it was no wonder that even the brightest witch of her age would not be able to decode his babbling into an apology.
But since when did Malfoy's apologise? Let alone admit their mistakes?
He could have easily just muttered a quiet 'I'm sorry' and be done with it.
But no. He had to use roundabout ways.
He may have had a change of opinion about muggleborns and about her.
But actually admitting mistakes and apologising was still far far away.
He had no practice of using the word sorry and he most certainly wasn't going to start in front of her now.
"I don't say this often but I'm saying it right now. I'm confused." Hermione said after a while.
"You are here minus your usual sneer. You haven't called me a mudblood even once yet. And you're actually telling me that you don't mind that buckbeak is free and alive?" She pointed out.
Draco just stood there, hands in pockets and still fighting mentally with the word sorry.
"You're relieved about the bird. Which is good. It would have been too harsh to kill it anyway." He said.
She scoffed. "Since when did you care about me or about being too harsh?"
He still stood silent. No smirk. No sneer. No cold grey eyes.
Hermione lingered on his eyes for a while more.
They were a deep grey and she saw something swirling in them.
She shook her head. She was imagining things.
She saw them again and there was something she had never seen in them ever before.
Naturalness.
He was saying the truth. He really meant what he was saying.
Was he in his own twisted way trying to feel remorse and apologize about the whole thing?
No. That could not be it. Could it?
"Umm. Okay Granger. I'll leave you to yourself then." He said suddenly and turned to leave.
Hermione could not believe that inspite of the most bizarre conversation she had had with Draco Malfoy, it had actually been civil. For once.
Granted, she may have not understood much of it, but after seeing his eyes she wanted to believe that it was his way of apologizing.
And she gave him credit for it. She could hardly expect him to come up front and say I'm sorry. That would be downright laughable. Not to say unbelievable.
But what he was trying to convey, very badly though, reached her and in that moment she couldn't just let him go like that.
"Wait! Malfoy !" She said to his back.
He turned almost instantly to look at her, his steel grey orbs questioning her.
"Thank you." She said sincerely.
So what if he couldn't say it? She had no qualms in using the 3 magic words that had been taught to her.
The slight brightening of his eyes, which she would have certainly missed if she wasn't looking for it, confirmed that she had said the right thing.
She probably also imagined him giving her a miniscule nod of acknowledgement before he turned back and started walking towards the castle, leaving her completely bewildered.
She didn't know at that time but this was the first encounter she had had with his eyes, which spoke more than he did and very soon there would come a time when she wouldn't be able to refuse those grey eyes without putting up a fight that she would eventually lose.
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Okay so I know this is a bit of a dissociated chapter!
It starts off as Hermione's pov so you'll know how this is changing her and it ends in a flashback of how they started becoming friends!
I have no agenda as such with this story but it just seemed to fit in this scenario.
Somehow I couldn't refrain from writing the flashback about how it all started, in this chapter itself.
The jump has become monumental for Hermione and the punch was monumental for Draco.
Both changing their lives drastically.
So I felt that the parallelness warrants them to be in the same chapter!
Hope you'll were not bored since there weren't many dialogues.
Or worse confused!
I'm a bit nervous about this chapter so do let me know how I did because joining the dots about their past in a haphazard manner without confusing you'll is my aim!
Okay enough rambling!
Thanks for reading!
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