Reformed
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Goldensnitch18
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Rated M for Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Language, and Violence.
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Summary: Draco Malfoy is released from Azkaban and sent to Hogwarts for his eighth year where he has a year to show that he can be reformed. Hermione Granger, and her friends, are struggling to come to terms with what has happened to them and move on, but she has agreed to be Malfoy's Muggle Studies tutor anyway.
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Disclaimer: I am not profiting from this story.
Anything you recognize belongs to the great and mighty JKR.
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Chapter Eighteen
Friday, December 4th, 1998
The letter was short, but that was fairly normal now. Before all of this, her mother's letters had always been long, filling her in on everything she had missed at home as well as a slew of questions for Hermione, and responses to Hermione's stories and questions in return. Now, they seemed to be in an unbreakable cycle of awkwardly short and impersonal messages. She had already read the words on this particular piece of paper nearly twenty times since it had arrived at breakfast that morning.
"What's that?" Draco asked. She looked up from the letter to see him shutting the classroom door. He locked it behind him, a habit they had recently started. She set the note down on the desk, barely suppressing an audible sigh.
"My mum," she told him. "Wants to know if I'm coming home for Christmas."
"Are you?" he asked, moving across the room to drop his back on the floor beside hers. Hermione watched him move a chair closer as well and waited for him to pull of his robes and drape them across the back. His movements had become so familiar to her, so practiced. Yet, it was still so odd to be so comfortable with him. She could easily remember her nerves that first day back in the summer when she had been nervous to go meet with him. She hadn't been prepared for this version of him at all. He had been broken, just like her, and that had allowed him the chance to start over. She knew that most people wouldn't understand or believe it to be true, but she felt like she had watched the transformation, experienced it before her eyes. "Why are you staring at me Granger?" he asked finally, and she realized he was sitting now, looking back at her with a smug smile.
"Sorry," she said, shaking her head, sure that there would be a flush in her cheeks. "I don't know if I will go home." She wasn't sure what, if anything, there was there for her now. Her parents were still upset obviously. She wasn't sure that she wanted to go home and argue with them or, and possibly worse, pretend like everything was okay the entire visit. Her other choices were staying at Grimmauld or at Hogwarts.
"I wish I could," Draco said, and she realized how terrible she probably seemed to him. His father was in Azkaban, and his mother would likely be spending her Christmas alone as well while he was here at Hogwarts.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't think."
"No, it's not the same." He shook his head, running his hand across the smooth wood of the desk, likely to avoid looking at her.
"It's not, but you have no choice, and I'm over here worried about whether or not it will be uncomfortable to be around them. At least I could be with them."
"If you don't want to go, you shouldn't," he said, shrugging.
"What are you going to do here?" she asked, wondering if Blaise or Theo were staying behind.
"Theo is staying. He doesn't have anyone to go home to," Draco explained.
"So, you guys, things are still good?" she asked. It was sometimes hard to discuss their lives outside of this room, which just highlighted how stupid their actions probably were.
"Yeah. He seems to really just want to be friends. Merlin, I'm becoming a fucking Hufflepuff." He scrunched his face in disgust, but Hermione laughed at him.
"It's okay to have friends." She told him.
"It's sort of new for me still," he told her.
"Harry wants me to come stay at Grimmauld for break."
"Who wouldn't want to spend Christmas with the Potter and Weasley?" Draco said snidely.
Hermione rolled her eyes at him. "Harry is still struggling I think. I'd like to go see him."
"And, Weasley," he said.
"Ron will be there," she agreed. "He lives there."
"Is he still with Brown?" Draco asked, and she itched to point out how ridiculous he was being considering she had tried to talk to him about what they were doing, and he had said that they couldn't be anything, that people wouldn't understand, and yet he was here being jealous, or whatever it was, about Ron. It was frustrating to say the least.
"As far as I know." Draco didn't react. He just reached for his back, pulling it open to search for his book and notes. Hermione just stared at him. "I talked to Ben today," she mentioned, hoping that it sounded causal, knowing that it probably didn't.
Draco stiffened, his hand tightening on his book. "Yeah?" he asked, seeming to suffer from the same issue.
"Yeah," she said. He sat up, dropping his work on the desk. His face was blank.
"What did you talk about?" he asked.
"He wants to talk," she told him, knowing that this extremely vague explanation would irritate him further.
"You talked about talking?" he said, clearly losing his patience.
"I ran into him outside of Professor McGonagall's office," she said. She pulled open her own book.
"So, he wants to talk another time in private." The was he said in private made her think back several years to when she had slapped him, the satisfying sound of her hand hitting his face.
"Yes," Hermione said coldly.
"And?" Draco asked.
"And, I said I don't know," she was refusing to look at him, knowing that she would break if her eyes met his.
"You don't know," he repeated.
"It caught me off guard," she told him, playing innocent.
"Do you want to talk to him?" he asked. There was no pretense now. His knuckles were white against the desk.
"I don't know," Hermione said, even though she was sure she should stop.
"You don't know?"
"Well, he said he was sorry, and I misunderstood him before." This was true. He'd apologized profusely, begging her to meet with him when they could talk along.
"About what?"
"He said … I don't know. When I broke things off, it seemed like he was with me because I'm me." Hermione was starting to regret the direction the conversation had turned, not wanting to relieve her sobbing moments in the bathroom stall.
"Isn't that the goal?" Draco asked, confused.
"No, not like … because I'm just me, but because I'm Hermione Granger, Harry Potter's best friend." She didn't need to look at him to know he was staring daggers at her.
"And, you're thinking about going to talk to him?" he demanded.
"Should I not?" she asked as innocently as possible.
"Is that what this is about? Some stupid girl thing to get me to talk?"
"I don't …" she stopped, flustered, considering. "Maybe!" she retorted indignantly, realizing that was precisely what it was.
"Thank fucking Merlin," he said, relieved.
"What?"
"I thought you were really thinking about going to talk to that idiot," he said.
"Well, maybe I'll let him apologize," Hermione said, finally looking at him.
"He just wants to use you," Draco insisted.
"How is that different from you?" she asked, only partially playing the part. He was so irritating. She had let him in, let him be something she had never experienced before, and he was being an idiot, insisting that things were too complicated to talk about anything outside of just sex.
"I'm not using you!" he snapped.
"Really? I tried to talk to you the other night and you just … you said we couldn't be anything, and then we had sex anyway!"
"That's … it's complicated," he told her, his tone pleading.
"I know it's complicated. It's complicated for me too, but I still want to talk to you about it," she explained, not backing down. She couldn't keep doing this to herself, not after she had finally admitted how she felt.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked.
"I don't care. Something! Anything!" She did care. She cared very much. She needed … wanted … hoped that he was feeling things, seeing them the same way she did, even if it would be hard to navigate.
"I …" He stared at her, his cheeks red, his hair tousled, and his mouth opened and closed several times.
"Just forget it," Hermione said. She bent down to grab her bag, and he stopped her with his hand on hers, clearly frustrated.
"Just give me a fucking second, okay," he huffed. Hermione pulled her hand back and sat back up, looking away from him to avoid having to watch him struggle. Every second that passed without him saying something hurt more than the last. "I don't want you with him, or anyone else. If everything wasn't so fucked up …" He trailed off and scooted his chair forward, closing the distance between them. He reached out, grasping her waist. His other hand slid up her side, grazing the fabric over her breasts with his fingertips and then coming to rest in her unruly hair. "I like you, too," he said, responding to her words from that night. She leaned in expectantly, but he just pressed his forehead against hers, avoiding her lips. "You don't know everything about me."
"You don't know everything about me," she told him. Her hands were on his shirt, pulling at him, bringing him closer.
"I … when I was … I tortured people."
Hermione tried to control her breathing as the words washed over her. "Okay," she said, her voice trembled.
"He …" Draco tightened his grip on her hip, and in her hair, and she inched closer, trying to reassure him that she was listening, that she was giving him the chance to explain. "The first time, it was Rowle and Dolohov."
"Oh." Hermione let go of his shirt in her shock.
He looked at her, his eyes full of pain and remorse. "I'll go," he said. "I'm sorry."
"No," Hermione said, her heart was beating rapidly, her mind racing. "When was it?"
"The night the Ministry fell," he told her.
Hermione nodded at the ground. The night the Ministry fell. The night that they had fought and escaped from those two Death Eaters in particular. She looked up, meeting his eyes. "He wanted them punished because we escaped them, right? Did you want to do it?" she asked.
He huffed, his hand finding the skin at the back of his neck, rubbing at the tension there. "It isn't that simple."
"He made you?" she asked.
"I took the mark," he told her.
"You were a child," she insisted.
"I believed him."
"I don't care."
"How can you not care? A year ago, what I would have done to you …" Draco shook his head, his eyes closing as he seemed to imagine what he had been capable of.
"Do you want to hurt me now?" she asked, her heart aching at his words.
"Of course not."
"If someone made you, if he was here, if he …" – she knew she was crossing into dangerous territory, but she pressed on anyway, needing answers – "If he was here, would you do those things now?"
Draco leaned towards her again, moving his hands around her face. He pulled her closer, his lips touching hers, electricity sparked between them from the intensity of the moment. She felt her body tremble from her toes up, emption running through her in quick bursts. "No," he said, in a moment of breath. "No," he said between kisses. "I couldn't," he told her as he held her close. "You make me-"
"What?" she asked, desperately needing the rest of his words, the things he was struggling so hard to keep inside. "Tell me."
"Bloody … Hermione, you know," he insisted.
"No, I don't," she told him, begging for the words.
"Things are -" he breathed heavily against her mouth.
"Stop thinking about it so damn much," she told him.
"I'm fucking crazy for you, you damn insufferable know-it-all." Draco pressed his mouth against hers, and she gripped his shirt tightly in her fingers once again, pulling him close. It wasn't eloquent, but it was genuine, and it would do, for now.
XXX
Saturday, December 5th, 1998
The moment Ron walked through the Floo and into the kitchen of number twelve Grimmauld Place, he knew something was wrong. Harry was resting against the long table his arms crossed, a half-eaten apple in one hand. His mouth was turned down at the edges, his eyes dark.
"What's wrong?" Ron asked quickly. It couldn't be his family. He had just left Weasley Wizard Wheeze's where he had been working on inventory for George all day. If anything had been wrong with any of the Weasley's he would have been easily reached. "Is it Hermione?" he asked, his mind racing to their best friend miles away at Hogwarts. Professor McGonagall probably would have tried to get ahold of him and Harry after her parents if something was the matter.
Harry lifted the apple to his mouth slowly, his expression growing to display his annoyance more clearly as he bit through the green skin. He took his time, chewing the bite as Ron waited, wondering what on earth he could have done. If someone was hurt or needed them Harry wouldn't be acting like a prat like this. He had gone to the shops yesterday for food. He had even given the floors in the main rooms a once over with his wand. Harry wiped juice from his lips with the back of his hand, and Ron stood still, waiting.
"Lavender," Harry began, his voice low and thick with disdain, "has been here for two hours. Apparently -"
"Fuck!" Ron ignored Harry throwing his arm into the air as he continued to mumbled something about the dinner was supposed to have apparently cooked for his girlfriend, the girlfriend that he hadn't seen in over a week. "Fuck," he said again, his foot hit the bottom stair, and he took them two at a time, leaping up to his room as quickly as possible. She was going to be pissed, and rightly. And, Harry, that fucking wanker just stood there like a -
Ron pushed the door open quickly, flinching as it slammed against the wall and flew back to hit his hand again. Lavender looked up from her perch on his bed, her eyes flying wide open with surprise and then anger hiding hurt he knew would be buried under the surface.
"Hey," she said softly as he struggled to inhale and exhale, his lungs on fire from the effort of getting to the room as quickly as possible.
"I'm … sorry …" he let out between breaths. Lavender just sat on his bed, her legs straight out before her, crossed at the ankles. Her thighs disappeared below the pleated skirt of her dark blue off the shoulder dress which showed the tops of her breasts and much of her scar to him. Her arms were also crossed over her stomach as she waited for him to be able to speak. It seemed he was going to be groveling a bit. "I was doing inventory. Our plans slipped my mind."
"You forgot," she said plainly.
"It wasn't intentional, I just -"
"I didn't say it was intentional. Just that you forgot. You invited me over for dinner because you haven't had time to get together in over a week, and I spent an hour staring at my neck in this dress in the mirror to work up the courage to wear it, and you forgot." Ron took a step closer to the bed, and her eyes grew wide as her hand reached out to stop him.
"Lav, really, I'm so sorry," he pleaded, knowing that she had no reason to do so. He'd been a horrible shit lately, exhausted during the week and coming home to pass out, and at the shop on the weekend. It left no time for them.
"Is this real?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" He took another step closer to the bed, and she seemed to be okay with the movement. He sat at the edge of the bed, and she shifted, pulling her ankles towards her body. For several long, uncomfortable moments, she just looked at him, as if she couldn't decide what to say.
"I know I shouldn't, but I can't help but wonder if you would have forgotten dinner with her." Her fingers ran nervous lines down her leg.
"What? No," Ron said, his tone making it clear how ridiculous this was.
"Really?" Lavender asked, though it didn't seem like a question. "Maybe you would, anyway. I don't know, but I wonder, and I think, maybe that's enough of a reason."
"A reason for what?" Ron asked, knowing exactly where she was going, but not able to accept it without the words.
"Maybe we shouldn't be doing this," she told him. Her hand reached forward, her thumb running across his bottom lip. "I really … I thought we could, but … I just … her."
"Hermione and I aren't anything," he said, but even as the words escaped his lips, his mind reminded him of her beneath him on her bed. He had wanted her, desperately, and he wasn't really sure that all of that was gone. It didn't mean that he didn't care about Lavender, he did. He wasn't lying to her, it was just that every once in a while, he wondered what could have been if Hermione hadn't stopped them on Harry's birthday.
"I know you aren't. I don't think you are, but if you could be, if the timing was right, and you hadn't needed space, and she hadn't gone back to Hogwarts? What then?" Lavender let her hand fall down his neck to his chest, and Ron moved closer, leaning into her. He kissed her hard, desperate to make her understand that he cared, that he wasn't trying to ignore her. He'd never been good with words. He never knew what to say, and when he tried, he nearly always fumbled them. "Ron," Lavender whispered against his lips, and he realized the salty taste was her tears. He pulled back to watch her wipe at her cheeks, looking away as she flushed with embarrassment. "I'm going to go home," she told him. He tried to think, to figure out what on earth to do or say, but nothing at all occurred to him. She gathered her sweater and a small purse from his desk, gave him one last look, and slipped out the still open door. All the while he sat on the bed and watched her go.
A/N: So glad you all are still onboard and enjoying this fic ! I hope you found this chapter particularly enjoyable? Yes? Maybe? You must tell me because I must know ! Please? Pretty Please?
Okay I will stop being annoying and begging now. Love you all !
In other news, I am doing drabble and aesthetic gifts for my birthday next month. Send me an ask on tumblr to request a pairing/situation/whatever you want!
xoxo
Meg
