The Alkahest
Chapter Thirty-Six: Fears and Failures
…
When she appeared from the Floo in the middle of dinner, looking wan and faintly nauseated, Rose had taken one look at her and immediately grabbed a tin of condensed soup. Her father just watched her, looking faintly off-kilter like he always seemed to, these days. He didn't say a word as his wife fussed over Hermione, force-feeding her soup and tea until she was fairly sure her bladder was going to rupture.
When she complained that she felt like she might throw up, it had sent her mother running to the nearest open chemist.
Then he pounced.
"What happened?" he asked, placing himself on the recliner opposite the couch, where Hermione was propped up with forty pillows and no less than ten blankets. She clutched at her tea, mentally sifting through what she should tell him, and he sighed, sounding pained. "Hermione, I don't like this. You haven't been this secretive since the war. Do you have any idea how much it scares me to see you like this, again? The last time you were like this, I woke up missing a year of my life, in Australia."
"You always liked Australia."
"That's not the part I'm objecting to, as you well know," he said, quietly. When Hermione had first told her recently unObliviated parents of her previous plan to remove all memories of her – for their protection and in the event of her death – he'd walked away from her, into his bedroom, and locked the door.
And then she'd heard him crying. He kept it quiet, but it had still filtered out into the hallway.
Swallowing, she looked down at the amber liquid of her tea, her lips trembling. "I didn't want you to- you have no idea what they could have done to you," she whispered.
"What did they do to you?" he returned, and the ache in his voice made her start to cry. "You're my child. I protect you, not the other way around." His voice broke, a little. She heard the recliner squeak in protest as he suddenly got up, closing the distance between them.
The tea was plucked from her hands, and she turned against him, blindly seeking the comfort for the pain she'd had to set aside just an hour earlier to calm Narcissa's panic attack. She'd never told her parents about the horrors of the war. Hell, they saw the news. They knew what war was. They didn't have to know the dirty details, like that there was a spell that made you hurt so badly you prayed for death.
But neither of them were stupid enough to delude themselves too much. Magic was a dangerous Other, and Rose and David Granger were far too educated. They understood that cruelty only knew the limits of imagination. Humanity, magical or not, had quite a lot of both.
The first year after the war had been the toughest. She'd slogged through several months of rebuilding Hogwarts and an awkward half-attempt at starting a relationship with Ron, but neither of them could look at each other without seeing the echoes of all the dead they'd accumulated. She'd spent all those months living at her parents', where she sometimes woke up screaming or descended into panic attacks at the appropriate triggers – a primarily green firework on New Year's Eve had lit up the front yard through the living room window and she'd gone so unhinged that her mother had braved the Floo by herself for the very first time to try and find Harry Potter.
It had taken nearly an hour, but when they burst back through the Floo, Harry's eyes wide with concern, Hermione had just burst into tears. She couldn't remember ever feeling so helpless. That a firework could send her into a state of blind panic was terrifying and the absolute peak of embarrassing. She remembered Harry holding her, rocking back and forth a little as her dad asked him desperate questions that Harry answered as evasively and uninformatively as he could.
She'd left for Barcelona because she was afraid that if she stayed, she wouldn't get better. So maybe that made her a coward, too.
Her parents hadn't minded, since she came back vastly improved. A little more somber than she'd maybe once been, but at least there had been a sense of peace about her. Until now, apparently. Maybe she hadn't let the past go as well as she thought.
David pressed, softly, "What happened?"
She felt as though a dam was breaking loose in her mind. One second she was trying to hold it back, and the next, she was being dragged swiftly downstream. And she told him everything.
0o0o0o0o0o0
"In that house? The one we had tea at?" Rose was demanding. She was trying to stir sugar into her tea, and her trembling hands was making a racket that could be heard across the house. Hermione laid tiredly on the couch, listening dumbly as her parents tried to have a hushed conversation in the kitchen. "I go over there almost every weekend, how- How?"
The clattering of the spoon stopped echoing around, so she knew her Dad must have taken the mug away from her. "Later," he said, quietly.
"She's supposed to get married there," she said, and her voice was wretched. Hermione closed her eyes, drawing one of the blankets over her head. She should have told them both sooner. She didn't know why she hadn't. No, she did, but in the wake of her parents' utter misery over the revelation, somehow the reason as to why seemed paltry and weak. Especially so because she'd ended up caving, so if there had ever once been a noble purpose behind it, it was moot, now.
The doorbell rang, and she heard her mom sniffle desperately, trying to get calm again.
The door in the foyer opened, and she heard her dad, stiff: "Oh. It's you."
Hermione resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She'd told Draco to go talk to his mother. Narcissa wasn't really in any sort of position to have to spend time alone. She needed a network. She almost wanted to get up and yell at him for leaving his mother alone in that state, but then a chilly voice cut through her thoughts like an machete through butter.
"Yes, Mr. Granger," Lucius drawled. The drawl was lazy, but there was no mistaking the ice that permeated it. "I need to speak with your daughter. I understand she's here."
"She is, and I don't think she's in the mood for visitors," David said, gruffly. "And it's quite late. If you'll-"
"Make no mistake, Mr. Granger." His words came out in a snap – still in that pureblood, rich boy drawl, but unmistakably the voice of a man who'd come through the far side of the war by his own cunning, not through dumb luck. "I am only standing outside of your front door and ringing for entry because it is a courtesy. I could have easily appeared inside your house. I would much prefer to be within your house on your invitation, but rest assured that within the next thirty seconds, I will be inside."
"What's going on, David?" Rose whispered, coming out of the kitchen to join her husband in the foyer.
"Don't threaten me," she heard her father say, quietly. "And you will stay the fuck away from my daughter."
"My daughter-in-law," Lucius corrected, and Hermione could hear the sneer. She got up, reaching for her wand. "Has questions to answer, and I'm not leaving without getting those answers. If I have to temporarily remove you as an obstruction, then so be it-"
Hermione stepped into the foyer, her eyes still red-rimmed from her bout of sobbing. "Don't threaten my father, you son of a bitch," she grit out. "Or it will be the last thing you ever do."
"Hermione, go upstairs," David said, not taking his eyes from the former Death Eater.
"Put that wand away, you silly girl," Lucius snapped. A few months ago, she would have said that he looked bored, or bland, even. Now, she could detect the raging fury beneath the facade, and she'd be lying if she said it didn't scare the utter unholy shit out of her. "I'm not here to get into a duel with a child."
"Good thing, too," Hermione said, flashing her left hand at him. "Don't suppose this ring protects you?"
His eyes narrowed. "There are other ways to hurt you," he promised, and his eyes just barely flicked to her mother and father. "For the sake of our future together as one family, I beg of you to not upset me any further, tonight. My wife is in hysterics."
"As well she should be," David said, stonily. "What kind of monsters torture a kid?"
"The kind of monsters that can set aside the mask of humanity long enough to turn this house into a pile of cinders." The snap in his tone made every Granger there go rigid. "Your daughter did manage to beat us, if it comforts you. I have no doubt that should she ever desire to end the ensuing conversation, she could do so. Hermione, I will be waiting across the street, tirelessly reminding myself of the reasons for which a gentleman must never hit a woman."
"Why smack her when you can Crucio, right?" Hermione said, in a dry tone. "I mean, why get your hand dirty?"
His eyes flashed. "Across the street." He turned, and walked down the front path. She resisted the urge to send a stunner at his back, her grip on her wand tightening so abruptly she was almost afraid she was going to crack it. Instead, she lowered her wand, inhaling deeply.
Even as protected by the ring as she was, she couldn't stop the instinctual, primal fear that clawed at her when Lucius was like that – like the man he'd been, before Voldemort died. Cold and cruel and calculating. Not precisely eager to torture, but not a man who hesitated when given the order to do so, either. She supposed it was only natural to be afraid, on some level, of Lucius Malfoy. The man had survived two wars, and it certainly was not because he was a talentless idiot.
And he was going to be her father-in-law. She grit her teeth, feeling the fear of the confrontation ebb away, becoming slowly replaced by annoyance. She didn't want to have to deal with Lucius being a protective little git over Narcissa. She wasn't sure she had the patience.
Then again, she hadn't a lot of choices, she supposed. The conversation was going to happen, sooner or later.
"Dad," she began.
"No. I'm not letting you go out there," he said, firmly, closing the door. "No. Absolutely not."
She forced a tight smile, for him. "I'm a witch. A locked door is nothing to me," she reminded him. "I'll only be fifteen minutes. If you don't see me back here in fifteen minutes, get Harry and tell him to do a full Auror raid on the Manor."
"Five."
"Ten."
He swallowed, and stepped forward to hug her. Her mother's tremulous arms followed suit. "Why did you let me plan this wedding?" she whispered.
"We don't have a choice," Hermione whispered back. "And... And Draco's not- Draco isn't his father. Dad, you remember what I said, he tried not to identify us that night..." She wasn't sure why she was so desperate to defend him. It didn't matter much to the law if her parents liked Draco.
"I remember," he said, gruffly. "And I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was a terrified kid, just like you."
She nodded, stepping back from the both of them.
David pointed at the front door. "But that man, and that woman of his? I'll never forgive them. Never. And you're not having a wedding at that place. I won't give you away at that-" His voice trembled a bit, and he worked to steady it. "At that place."
Hermione nodded again. Then she stepped towards the door, inhaled carefully for fortification, and stepped outside.
It was a nice night. Balmy. Almost a little too warm.
She crossed the street, out of the range of the lamp posts. She didn't keep her wand extended, but only because the ring was on her hand. If it hadn't been, she wouldn't have fled to her parents'; she would have gone straight to Hogwarts and holed up in McGonagall's office until Ron's wedding.
The little park was dark. It was small, and didn't have much in the way of lights. It was really only frequented during the day.
She saw his silhouette in the dark beneath a tree, on a bench. Silently, she walked up to the bench and sat down, pressing her hands together between her knees. The cool metal of the ring bit into her finger, and she slouched a bit.
For a few minutes, neither of them spoke.
"We only have about seven minutes before my Dad calls Harry in a panic," she said, softly.
Lucius straightened a bit. "It was impolite of me to threaten him, and your mother. I apologize," he said, but his voice was still a bit stern and flat. "I am not feeling particularly forgiving."
"She needed to hear it," Hermione said, just as flatly.
"Who are you to decide that?"
"The one who was nearly tortured to death in your house," she snapped. "Or did you do so many that all our faces just blur together?"
He tensed, and she heard a faint squeak as he gripped his damnable cane with his leather gloves. "You have very likely sent her to St. Mungo's," he bit out.
"Seven years of ignoring what happened sent her to St. Mungo's! You know, you all could have very well avoided these nasty little reminders of your morally repugnant misdeeds if you hadn't messed around with bribing those Matchmakers in the first place," she snapped. "Then I'd be far away from all of you."
"She wanted you. Merlin knows why."
"Right, and she didn't care about what I wanted. Good God, are all of you so insufferably self-centered? All because she went and saw some Divinations fraud and I Episkey'd your stupid son's stupid nose."
He was quiet a moment. "Do you recall that?"
"No," she said, irritably. She felt a rant building up, and let it loose. "She mentioned it when we talked. Like it was some sort of beacon to her that I was in secret love with your annoying prat of a sprog. You fix one broken nose, and then seven years later you're getting married to the son of the man who tried to single-mindedly murder you and your friends for years on end with all of his twisted little friends. This is such donkey shite."
"So we're in agreement that this is all your doing."
"Oh, sod off."
And then, against all her expectations, he actually chuckled. She'd been gearing up for a rant, but the noise sucked all the words right out of her. When it passed, he was silent a beat. "That moment meant a lot to her, in the days before the trial. She considered it to a benediction, of sorts. A sign that we would be spared."
"Go ahead and tell your wife, from me, that Divination is absolute and utter nonsense."
He sighed. "It makes her happy. And occasionally, Divination isn't. It foretold the fall of Voldemort," he pointed out, softly.
"All it did was tell Voldemort that somewhere, someone was going to be born that would eventually do him in. And it provided enough details for him to go and find that infant and imbue him with the very powers of destruction he'd been trying to avoid," she huffed. "If Voldemort had been the sort of logical fellow who knew better than to listen to fortune tellers, he'd probably have won the first war."
He exhaled roughly, almost a laugh. "Possibly."
Hermione fell silent again. "She said you were going to hit me when I pulled my wand out."
He hesitated. "I think I was going to stand and knock you over," he said, trying to recall. "Until I saw the look in your eyes. There wasn't any anger there. There wasn't really anything. You'd been emptied." His thoughtful tone did nothing to dampen the shock of his words.
It was an accurate way to put it, she supposed.
"She does, you know," he said, so quietly she almost didn't hear it.
She glanced at his profile. It betrayed nothing. "She does, what?"
"Feel sorry."
Silence reigned again, and they spent the last four minutes just sitting in quiet reflection, watching the moonlight bathe the grass and the pond. When she stood, he stood with her. "My Dad refuses to give me away at the Manor."
"I'll inform her. Given the circumstances, I do not think we could expect otherwise." She started to turn away, and he said, "Hermione."
She turned back, wary.
"Why did you never tell them, before?" he asked, curious.
Hermione sucked in a breath, not sure if she should try to even explain. Or if she could. She shook her head a bit, but he just waited, ever patient. "Seeing how the war affected me already hurt them. I would have broken their hearts," she said, softly. "I remember your face during that last year. Draco was being Crucio'd, wasn't he?"
He didn't answer.
"That's why I didn't tell them. No parent should have to feel like they so utterly failed to protect their child. I mean, not that anyone can blame them. They've nothing to do with our world. They couldn't have saved me." She swallowed, pressing her hands together, twining her fingers together and squeezing. "Enough people were hurt in that awful mess that I wanted to at least keep a couple people shielded from it."
"Were they?"
"No," she said, with a soft, raw laugh. "No. I lived here right after. You can only try and joke away a couple episodes of waking up with screaming night terrors before they realize it's not just a bad day, you know? And then in the daytime, there were the panic attacks. I'm sure they guessed, a long time ago."
"Although not the details," he considered. "That would have been worse, would it not have?"
She looked up at the stairs through the branches of the tree, sober. "I don't know. Sometimes I think that leaving it to their imagination was worse. Muggles can get pretty sick during wartime, too, you know. And they have war a lot more often than wizards do. They've gotten really good at it. They don't have Crucio, though, so they have to get creative," she said, softly. "You ever heard of water-boarding?"
His head cocked, slightly. She couldn't see his expression, but she imagined his slow blink. "No."
"They tie you up so you can't move and put a cloth over your face and tilt you back, until you're about twenty degrees from the ground, your feet higher than your head," she whispered. "And they pour water over it, and the cloth blocks your nose and your mouth and it's all wet, so it feels like you're drowning even when you're not. That's a torture technique Muggles use even to this day to force information out of their enemies. They don't die, but they feel like they are. So you can just keep doing it over and over and over, until you break their will. Until their mind shatters. Actually, I think they can die, but not from the drowning, part. Usually they end up vomiting – a natural reaction to drowning in general, you know – and then they inhale their own vomit, which can kill them. I've heard the psychological effects can last for years."
"Whenever you speak of the extent of Muggle cruelty, I am not sure what lesson you are attempting to relay to me," Lucius admitted, softly.
"I just think it's fascinating, I guess. You Death Eaters think you wrote the book on war-time shenanigans, or something. And you think you're so great, and all. But Muggles are out there every day out-atrocity-ing you. Kind of interesting."
He was silent for a long moment. "What is it, do you suppose, that makes monsters out of men, Hermione?"
She shrugged. "Maybe they don't," she muttered, and then she turned to go. "Maybe during normal life, we're just making men out of monsters." He didn't try and respond, and she didn't turn back. Rose was waiting nervously by the Floo when she re-entered the house, and after spending another four minutes wrapped in her parents' arms... All she wanted to do was collapse into her bed and sleep.
0o0o0o0o0o0
She managed to get in nearly two full hours of it before someone leaned on her bed, startling her awake. A hand covered her mouth as she opened it to scream, and she heard Draco hiss, "Don't scream."
Sitting up, she hissed back. "Draco, what the hell-"
"I should be asking you that."
Hermione groaned, flopping back onto the bed. She'd been sound asleep. "No. I'm not doing this, right now. Your father came in here and threatened to hex my father to bits if I didn't talk to him, and that conversation already rung me out."
"Well, too bad," he snapped, in an undertone. "My father may have gotten the explanation he wanted, but I want to know why my mother is sobbing her fucking brains out."
"Because she bloody well needs to, Draco, okay? Seven years of repression is finally coming out, so why don't you just let it."
He was quiet a beat. When he spoke, his voice was low, and furious. "You had no right to do that."
She sat back up again, getting in his face so she could seethe properly. "I had every right to do that. The woman is going mental and you're letting her. Also she changed my entire life on a stupid whimsy."
"So, this was- what? Revenge?"
"Don't be an arse and act like I have no right to be angry over what she did," Hermione snapped. "Look, I had no intention of bringing all that sordid past up, I really didn't, but after listening to her tripe on why she fudged our match, she brought up something I couldn't ignore, alright? And it just sort of came out."
Draco fell silent for a long beat, and for a second all she could hear was him breathing. She could feel it against her lips, too. It came out in small bursts; he was annoyed. She could almost hear him wondering if he should yell at her or ask her what his mother's reasons were.
"Why did she?" he asked. Apparently curiosity had beaten out annoyance.
She smelled it, then. "Oh, my God. Are you drunk? Are you drunk from that stupid stag party?"
"No," he denied. "So why did she?"
"I can't believe you came over here, drunk. You didn't Apparate, did you? You can really hurt yourself doing-" Even in the dark, she caught his glower. "Alright, fine. There is a fantastical grocery list of utter goddamn nonsense reasons for why she did it. Let's start at the top: One. She went to a fortune teller, who told her we'd-" She stopped short when she heard him snort. No, he snorted twice. Three times. He was snickering. Her tone went flat and icy. "Don't you dare laugh at that, Draco, unless you want to be one limb shorter when you leave this room."
He calmed. "You have to admit, that's kind of funny. A fortune teller. And, you know, you with-"
"Yes, me with my bloody hatred of Divination," she snapped, and he shushed her, glancing at her bedroom door anxiously.
"Calm down," he said, exasperated. "You said grocery list. What else?"
Hermione felt her lip curl. "She decided I wasn't too awful-looking and that I was reasonably intelligent and magically inclined, and might be a better baby machine than all those other yucky Mudbloods. After all, only the best baby machine for her precious little boy," she said, her voice reeking of sarcasm.
"Logical." She punched him in the side, and he bowled over with a pained noise. "Merlin, are you taking punching lessons from Ginny, now?" he hissed.
"Are you done being annoying?"
"Darling, I will never be done being annoying, especially when you're involved. Annoying you is my reason for waking up every morning. Anything else?"
"Oh, she thought I had some secret love for you back at the Battle of bloody Hogwarts," she scoffed. "Because I healed your nose. Do you even remember that? Because I didn't."
He shrugged. "Sure. I thought you were going to hex me."
She flopped back down against the bed. "Your mother's certifiable, Draco. I don't know how else to tell you it."
"In her defense, I'm very handsome. Are you sure you didn't secretly love me at Hogwarts?"
"I should have hexed you. Or at least left your nose ugly."
He leaned over her body, planting his hand on the far side of her ribs. "You know, we never did get the opportunity to say thank you for coming over and giving us water and fixing my wrist. Mostly what I remember is wanting to cut my arm off at the elbow if that meant my wrist would stop hurting. Is this the first time you being a good person has come back to bite you in the arse?" he wondered, and some of the fury had left his tone, leaving him sounding more drunkenly amused than anything.
She rolled away from him, cranky. He laid down beside her (which was annoying, since this was a twin bed), on his back.
"So, yes."
"Shut up."
"No," he said, softly. "I'm still mad at you for saying what you said to my mother."
Hermione shifted uncomfortably. "It was true."
"It was mean."
She didn't say anything. She knew. "You can't treat her like she's porcelain, Draco, or else she'll never be strong enough to handle anything. It's not fair to me to have to be careful around her forever," she mumbled.
"Forever?" he scoffed. "You didn't even make it six months."
"I made it four months longer than I thought I would," she reminded him, tersely. She'd relaxed a bit against him, and this time when he turned to spoon against her, she found that her need to feel close to someone outweighed her annoyance at his effusive body heat.
"I don't think I ever said I was sorry for that night," he whispered against the nape of her neck. She knew, without the clarification, that he was talking about the drawing room. "I didn't do anything to stop it."
"You were scared," she murmured. His hand snuck around her, and she grasped it in her own. "I don't harbor any ill-will towards you for it. You were just a dumb teenager, like me."
"No one in the world would ever class you as 'dumb.' Was the stinging hex your idea?" She nodded, and felt him get closer, his breath hot against the back of her neck. "That was a good idea."
"You recognized him," she said. It wasn't really a question. Neither she nor Harry nor Ron had ever questioned that facet of the story. Draco had, without a doubt, recognized every single one of them, and had balked at identifying them. She could still remember the tortured look on his face as he looked at them, almost like he wanted to scream at them for being so stupid as to get caught and then be brought to his house. Like he resented them for making him feel responsible for their future. For the fact that he was going to be the man who sealed their fates.
He'd never asked for that responsibility, and she'd always remember that look of hatred and terror warring for supremacy on his face.
He was silent a beat. "Yes," he whispered.
"Why didn't you tell her?" she asked, softly. It was that very question – one Harry had never received an answer to – that had prompted the war hero to take the stand to speak for the Malfoys at their trial. That, and Narcissa's late defection.
She heard him swallow. "I was scared."
"But if you identified him, your family would have been-"
"No, you don't understand," he said, his voice raw. He swallowed again, painfully. "I was scared that without him, there'd be no one to finally kill that lunatic. I wanted him dead. Gone. Out of my house." The anger in his tone quickly twisted into hatred, and she felt her mouth go dry. Harry Potter may have outgrown hating, but for Draco, hatred was still alive and well, but this time it was directed at the man he was raised to revere. "And I believed, like everyone else, that Harry bloody Potter was the only one who could do it. And I knew that if Aunt Bella killed him, Voldemort would win. And then I'd probably die. Me and my parents, too."
Her grip on his hand tightened, to a point where she was sure it must be painful. She drew his hand to her chest, against her heart. He pressed his face against her neck, feeling the rapid thump thump thump of her heart against the side of his hand.
"I haven't heard you sound like that in years," she whispered. "Not since the last time you called me a filthy Mudblood. So hateful."
"That was a different hate," he said, quietly. He'd become a sort-of connoisseur of hate, over the last couple of years of the war. "That was just the simple, dumb hate of a boy who's been told a girl has cooties. This kind of hate is the one that still wakes me up at night, sometimes, just when I can't remember the last time I had. The kind where I'm so out of my bloody mind with terror that I have to hate myself, too, for being such a damnable coward."
"You're not a coward." She was surprised by the strength with which she asserted that. She'd certainly believed otherwise her entire life, up until just a couple of days ago. "You're really very brave."
He huffed a soft laugh, and his fingers squeezed against hers. "Not brave enough," he whispered.
She had no idea what that meant, and she wasn't sure how to go about asking.
At some point, she fell asleep. But when her dad woke her up the next morning, even though her body was still curved against where he'd been, he was gone.