Chapter Seventeen- Her
Draco didn't know why but she'd been avoiding him. He hadn't seen Granger in over a week, not since that day when he'd held her in his arms as she slept, fever clinging to both of them. He hated to say it but it panicked him. What if she remembered the searing of his lips on her forehead? What if the thought disgusted her, the fact that she'd let her guard down for a Death Eater to touch her?
It wasn't just that they hadn't seen each other, they had. Draco had run into her in the library, where she'd offered him a smile then immediately returned to her book on medieval law, and then again in class, where she hadn't even spared him a glance. Granger also skipped out on their evening meetings. Draco had waited until just before curfew the past few nights but he'd arrived and left alone.
When he saw her sitting on the banking of the Black Lake, he paused and watched her for a moment. There were books scattered around her, on the frosty grass, but she sat with her head tilted back, facing the sky. She had a robe wrapped around her, with her horrible pink coat buttoned over the top and wore her hat, scarf and gloves. Draco almost cursed her. She was never going to overcome a fever if this is what she spent her time doing. She might as well go swimming in the Black Lake naked. Not naked, his mind hastily corrected. Definitely not naked.
The November morning was unusually bright, with yellow sunlight streaming over the mountains, falling on the whitened grounds, lighting them up. It was cool and fresh on his skin as Draco made his way down to meet her.
"Hello," he said, once he got close enough.
Granger looked up at him. "Oh, hello." She turned back to the sky and the lake.
Draco frowned but cleared his face quickly. "Can I join you?"
"Of course."
Sitting beside her, the wetness of the grass seeped through his trousers in no time and he rubbed his arms to try and preserve some heat. His breath solidified as soon as it left his lips. Draco glanced at her and when he noticed she wasn't even shivering, demanded incredulously, "How are you not freezing to death, Granger?"
She rolled her eyes. "An incredible thing called magic, Malfoy."
The use of his surname took him aback. He blinked. Regaining his composure, Draco slipped out his own wand and cast both a drying and warming spell over his body, relishing in the immediate heat that licked his veins. He flashed her a smile. "You're a tricky witch to find, Granger, you know that?"
"It's often the case when said witch doesn't want to be found," replied Granger dryly.
Draco squinted, looking out across the lake. He spoke slowly, quiet and hesitant, not knowing if he had the right to ask, "Have I offended you in some way?"
Granger sighed, finally looking at him for longer than a fleeting second. She said, "No, Draco, you've done nothing of the sort. My brain just overworks itself. What did you call it? Incessant-"
"Prattling," he supplied, then flushed. "What are you thinking about?"
There was something piercing in her eyes, something almost calculating, as she looked at him. Draco didn't know whether to feel reassured or unnerved.
"Something both significant and not."
"How very vague," he rolled his eyes.
Granger smiled a little. "I'm afraid you wouldn't find the contents of my thoughts very entertaining."
"On the contrary," said Draco. "Once, I would've have given my inheritance to know the contents of your thoughts."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Let me guess, during OWLS?"
"To name one such occasion."
He grinned. She scowled and thwacked him.
Rubbing his arm, Draco thought that was probably a good sign; she mustn't have been so averse to touching him.
"How do you feel about Muggleborns and blood purity?" asked Granger abruptly.
Draco flinched. His heart raced in his chest, blood rushing about his body in a panic. He started at her with wide eyes. "Granger, I- where has this come from?"
"Curiosity," she said but she didn't sound curious.
There was a slight crease between her eyebrows, a tension to her lips. Draco wanted to reach up and smooth her uncertainty away. He felt a little bit panicked.
"Granger, you must know I don't see you as my inferior?" he reasoned. "You must."
She bit her lip. Draco budged closer to her, gripping her hand. She was much warmer than him, her magic having thrummed in her veins for longer. She winced a little at his icy touch.
"You're the only thing keeping me going, Granger," he told her in a low, desperate voice. "The only thing. Trust me, please, when I say that I do not maintain the views of my father. I couldn't. Not after everything."
Granger stared at him, searching his face. He could only hope that he showed her what she needed to see. There was panic rearing inside of him, so forceful it bordered on painful, ripping his stability apart, tearing everything he had come to rely on from under his feet. He could not lose it all now, not over this, not when he was changed.
The longer they stared at her, the closer Draco clung to every minute detail of her face. Her eyelashes were congealed and vaguely, he wondered if it was from the cold or because she might've been crying. Her nose was still pink, like she hadn't gotten over her fever and it persisted in the flush of her cheeks and dryness of her lips. Grappling for something, Draco saw a flicker in her eyes. He wondered what she had to worry about. Hadn't he proved his dependency of her? Hadn't he, in the least dignified way possible, with little humility, shred himself of who he was, exposed the very bottom of his soul to her, for her? Wouldn't he humiliate himself, drive himself mad, venture to the very ends of feasibility, do more if only she asked?
Why did she now doubt his feelings for her?
Draco reached out, tentatively because her eyes flicked to follow his hand and back to his face, and held her fingers, squeezing them tightly. Granger faltered. "I don't believe in any of that. I can't because I-" He swallowed. "I only believe in you."
She stared at him, lips parted, and he saw the breath get stolen from her, freezing instantly in the air between them. Granger squeezed his fingers and smiled shakily. Draco forgot how to breathe.
It was as though his reassurance snapped her out of whatever had been concerning her. She cleared her throat, taking her hand away and rubbing her face. His hand went cold without hers to tie him down.
Granger looked at him with her wide eyes. "Do you have the date of your trial yet?" she asked, voice solid and punctual.
The question was so abrupt that he nearly tripped up and told her, but he caught the date on the tip of his tongue, forcing it back with his teeth. He couldn't tell her. Draco wasn't sure why but he knew he couldn't.
"No." It tasted bitter as he swallowed it, threatened to choke him like ash.
She bit her lip. "Oh… I've been-" Granger's nose wrinkled. "I've been reading around the subject a lot, about the Wizengamot, how they work, about similar cases. I haven't found anything yet but I'm still looking."
Draco's stomach flipped. He looked away from her, nodding. "Thank you," the words choked him.
"Marcus Flint got sentenced yesterday," continued Granger. She was watching him. "Twenty five years."
Draco pressed his lips into a line. He had read the headline about that. Flicking through Blaise's Daily Prophet, it had jumped out at him; his former Quidditch Captain looked almost unrecognisable, hair shaved, eyes black, terror soaked in every inch of his face.
"All he did was torture some Muggles." Granger stopped, frowning to herself. She massaged her head. "I say all he did but still, twenty five years for one crime seems a tad excessive. They did it to make an example of him. You know that, don't you?"
Of course he did.
There was an undercurrent to her voice, a warning and she stared at him. He watched the lake, followed every ripple. Despite the cold, there was birdsong, sweet and spring-like. The mountains stood solidly, the air was fresh and moving with the seasons, heavy with the promise of snow. He could not believe that this place was soaked in blood, that students, fighting for both sides, had lived and died here. It all felt like he was in some kind of liminal space, trapped in limbo, between Life Before and whatever waited for him after the 5th June. Looking at Hogwarts, Draco could not fathom how everything had gone so wrong.
"That's all we're good for, isn't it? We're only here to do or die," he said absently, fingers loitering on his forearm. They froze. His eyes refocused and he regarded her. "Doesn't that depress you? To know that all you are is a piece on a chess board that everyone else is moving around for their own sick achievement. That's all you were in the war. It's all Potter has ever been. It's all we are now."
"Then make yourself the Queen," said Granger firmly.
Draco stopped. He raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
She rolled her eyes, but ignored the slight curl of his lip, saying instead, "The Queen is the most powerful piece on any chess board. She's the one in control, the one who has all the other pieces in the palm of her hand. If you're done with your perpetual cynicism and moping-"
"I do not mope-" protested Draco, looking offended at the mere notion.
"-then make yourself the Queen. Refuse to lie down. Take some action."
"Is that how you stayed alive?" he asked after a moment.
Granger faltered then. The sunlight flared in her eyes. "I just figured that if I was going to die, it would be on my own terms."
"If I die, I hope everyone will do me a favour and pretend I was a better person than I was," Draco said glumly.
"You're not going to die," Granger replied, lips pressed into a disagreeable line. She added, as an afterthought, "But hey, it worked for Snape."
"Maybe so. It didn't for Dumbledore."
Granger hesitated. He glanced at her and saw the pain flash across her face.
"He wasn't a bad man," said Granger eventually. There was a heavy sigh in her voice and it made her pause, trying to fathom how she could best put it in a way he would understand. "He just had a lot of power and a lot of pressure forced upon him. He wasn't perfect. He did a lot of terrible things, some I'll never forgive him for. But he always tried to do right. He was consumed with so much guilt that he just wanted to do right. In the end, that's what's important."
Draco stared at her for a very long time. He felt a buzz in his veins. Licking his lips, he laughed a little, and said shrewdly, "You never see anything in black and white, do you?"
Granger's lips quirked, and his eyebrows furrowed together in puzzlement. "Well, how very boring life would be if I did."
Draco looked at her, almost cautiously, almost in surprise. She seemed serene, more relaxed than earlier.
"I think at this point," he said, choosing to humour her, dragging his eyes away and casting them out over the lake, "I'd really like to have a boring life, for once. Maybe my life wouldn't have been such a mess if it was in monochrome."
Granger stared at him. It was a valid point, she supposed, for someone who was such a whirlwind of everything. Draco was like a scribble of various different coloured pens, all entangled lines and haywire explosions, blotches and blank spots, painful fits of never-ending chaos.
"Yes," she said finally, pressing her lips together and smiling at him. "But then you'd miss out on all the colour."
Draco tipped his head sideways to look at her. His lips were tilted in a small smile, and his icy eyes seemed brighter than usual, and soft, bluer like the sky than grey like the lake that simmered at their feet, that blissful shade where the cloud met the water. There was something unguarded about the gesture, like he had done it without thinking. He stared at her with all the intensity of someone staring up at a statue wondering what mortal hands could possibly have carved such beauty, and a bleariness that suggested the sun had risen behind the stone with blinding momentum.
Granger cleared her throat.
Draco blinked as though he had been wrenched out of some reverie that had captured his entire attention. He looked out at the lake. "Well put, Granger."
Her eyes traced him, the sharp decline of his cheekbone to his jaw, the shadows cast by his eyelashes. She drew her knees up, rested her head on them and looked at him sideways.
"What's your favourite colour now?" she asked suddenly.
Draco frowned, glancing at her, then away just as quickly when she met his gaze. "I don't know."
"Well, how fucked up are you feeling at this precise moment in time?" Granger elaborated, mirth tinging her voice, making it lighter.
He paused for a moment, daring to look at her, and noticed that there were flecks of green and gold in her molten eyes. Draco looked back out at the Black Lake, lingering on the way the sunlight burst on its surface and exploded outwards in fractious waves, the way the blue seeped into the black of the deep like ink melting into paper. "Blue," he said.
"Blue," she repeated, testing the word out on her tongue. "Like the blue of the sky or the blue of the lake?"
Draco squinted. "The bit in-between."
"Like the clouds?" Granger questioned.
He glanced at her, then back out at the lake. "That bit, just there," said Draco. Shifting closer, he stretched out his arm, pointing at the thin sliver of blue where the sky kissed the water, at the base of the distant mountains. It simmered like a mirage, glinting almost silver.
"Oh," she said. He felt her breath on his skin and he remembered what her lips had felt like in exactly that place. "It's pretty."
Draco swallowed. Cleared his throat. Shifted away from her. "Uh- yeah."
A content quiet settled between them for a moment or two, it lulled with the lake, cracked with the frost-bitten blades of grass Draco plucked at.
"Are you sleeping any better?" he asked gently.
"Better," she said. She sounded distant. "But still not well."
Draco didn't know how to reply.
"I've tried… potions, and things," continued Granger, pulling a face. "But the blackness always seems to leak through, one way or another. I can't escape it."
"It's not a common cold, Granger," Draco told her. She frowned. "It's not something you can escape with a few medicines and a good night's sleep. It will go one day, but that day won't be today or tomorrow, or anytime soon. It will be when you're finally ready to admit to yourself that what you saw happened, and there isn't any way to change it. And maybe that's terrifying but it's the truth."
"For someone who rejects all form of emotion, you're quite wise, Draco," she said, finally looking at him. His stomach whirled, like a hundred petals were dancing in the wind, fluttering at the sound of the song in her voice and the secretive smile in her eyes.
He shoved the feeling aside and raised his eyebrows. "Maybe it's because I reject all form of emotion."
Granger shook her head. Her curls bounced against her shoulders, tickling her cheeks. "You and I both know that's not how it works."
Draco rolled his eyes and hummed. "Tell yourself what you like, Granger. It won't change what I am."
This made her pause, and that infuriating crease nestled between her eyebrows once more, when she asked, "And what's that?"
"A cold, heartless bastard trying desperately to grapple for any shred of dignity he has left," he informed her, pushing the coil of nerves that writhed in his stomach back down, and offering her a half-smirk. "Before it's too late."
Granger cocked her head. "I don't believe that," she said.
"Which bit?"
"Any of it," she told him and the sincerity in her eyes, the belief she held for him, made Draco want to tear his gaze away but he couldn't. He clung to the resoluteness there. "You're going to push this away Draco, but I think you care quite a bit more than you ever let on. Your heart might be broken but it's still beating. Sometimes, that's all that matters. Sometimes, the shred of decency you're searching for can't be found outside of you because it's already nestled deep in your heart. You just have to believe in yourself enough to find it."
He just stared at her. It was all he could do. She made him breathless and awake all at once. He didn't know if that worked but his heart was beating so hard against his chest, he was sure it would slip through the bone and escape through his ribcage. Draco didn't think that would be such a problem because he knew exactly where it would go.
It would run back to her.