Through Closed Eyes
Chapter 5Being blind is something you cannot understand until you actually experience it. Sure you can slip a blindfold over your eyes, or turn off every possible light, but in the back of your mind you know that you only have to flip a switch or untie a not and once again you will be able to see. Actually losing your vision was something completely different, and something incredibly hard to cope with.
Hermione Granger was doing an incredible job of coping with the loss of her sight. She still had dreadful nightmares on a nightly basis, and she still tended to panic every morning as she opened her eyes and found herself without sight, but after a few moments of adjustment she was on her feet and ready to go to class. Ginny was helping a great deal, taking her to and from the Great Hall for breakfast and Supper, as well as bringing her books from the library several times a day, but when it came down to it, Draco Malfoy was by far the person who had helped her the most through her classes, which in the end where what she really cared about. Like it or not, Hermione truly owed Draco a debt.
"Granger are you listening to a single word I am saying?" Hermione snapped her head up to the general direction of the voice. They where in Astronomy class, Draco had been copying down the star chart and telling Hermione the locations of things, pointing out the movements they had made and any anomalies, but Hermione had not been paying attention to a word he had said.
"Oh, I'm sorry." She muttered. "I was just thinking." She cursed herself mentally, she never 'just thought' during class, and now she had done it twice in as many days. She was blind, not stupid. She honestly needed to get back with it, but there was just nothing she could do any more. It seemed all she could do these days was burst snot bubbles so a niffler could smell again.
"Yah well, if you have to think about something try thinking about the work, I am getting right sick of doing all the work for the both of us." Draco mumbled, and Hermione heard the metallic sound of his adjusting the telescope.
"Sorry." She mumbled. "How long is there left of class anyway?" She asked.
"A few minutes, but we are supposed to stay as long as it takes to finish our assignments, and ours is hardly done." Hermione gave an embarrassed look. This was in large part her own fault. The class had been working in pairs, one person checking the scope and the other jotting down the location they where told, but as Hermione could not see what she was doing, Draco was forced to do both jobs on his own.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" She asked, and Draco gave an incredibly irritated sound.
"Yah, you could be a less clumsy potions partner." He muttered, but Hermione heard him clearly.
Hermione sighed, doing her best to beat down the urge to fight back. He was being rude and she had every right to snap back at him. His comment had been offensive, but she simply did not want to start a fight with him. He had helped her greatly and she truly had been nothing but a burden on him, she supposed he had the right to be upset with her.
The bell rang shortly after, and Hermione heard the other students get up and leave the class.
"Draco, do you want me to give you my notes so you don't have to be stuck here with that stupid little Granger girl?" She heard Pansy say from some place behind her.
"No Pansy, I don't, I am planning to get good grades in this class." Draco said, and Hermione heard the dark haired Slytherin give an indignant 'hmph' and walk away.
Hermione frowned. "You didn't seem that happy to hear from her." She said.
"Yah well, I wasn't." Draco said.
"Why not? I thought you two got on well, I always hear her talking about you, and in the laboratory last week I heard her telling Blaise and Millicent that you two were going steady."
Draco turned so quickly he knocked over his telescope, but he paid it no mind. "She said what?" he demanded.
Hermione took a step back, and ended up falling over and landing flat on her backside. She gave a slight moan of pain. "She said you where going steady. Jeez what is your problem!" She demanded, not bothering to climb back to her feet.
"My problem is that bint is spreading dirty rotten lies and one day soon she is going to regret it." He said, and there was nothing but malice in his voice.
Hermione sat still where she was. Draco sounded truly angry and seeing as how she could not see him at all, she decided it would be best to simply wait for him to cool down somewhat.
"That bloody girl." He mumbled, and Hermione heard as he started to pick up the telescope he had toppled over. "Thinks she can make something real by telling people it happened. Honestly you would think she was some kind of god, or at least that is what she thinks of herself." He was mumbling.
"Draco, isn't that more or less you see yourself?" Hermione asked, unable to hold back that one comment.
His head snapped to her, and she heard a metallic clang that she could only assume was one of the bits of the telescope falling to the ground. She was certainly glad it was his they where using and not her own, as the poor thing was sustaining quite a deal of damage at Draco's hands.
"I do not think of myself as a god, I simply know that as a Malfoy I am slightly superior to the rest of the world." He said, and Hermione could not hold back the undignified chuckle that broke past her lips. "What?" Draco asked, and his tone made it quite clear that her answer had better be to his liking as he was in a less then charitable mood.
Hermione sighed and got to her feet, feeling around for a chair, and making quite a fool of herself as she did so, though she did not let it show. "I just mean," She said once she found a perch on a desk. "That if you honestly think you don't consider yourself a god, you are incredibly deluded." She said, and had she been able to see she would have surely shied away from the look the young Malfoy boy was sending her.
"You, Miss. Granger, need to get yourself in check before you upset the wrong people." He said. His voice was calm, but full of a malice that would make most grown wizards flinch. Hermione on the other hand, simply smirked and cocked her head slightly to the side.
"I suppose then, that you are the wrong sort to upset? What are you going to do to me Draco you don't have any Daddy to sick on me now? Your name isn't nearly as strong as it once was and you know it."
Draco's eyes narrowed, though the effect was lost completely to Hermione's unseeing eyes. "You need to watch your tongue Mudblood! I can do plenty of damage without any help from that useless ponce!"
Hermione's grin did not waver. He had been throwing around threats like wildfire ever since his father had received his kiss, captured by, as unlikely as it sounded, Neville Longbottom, with a perfectly place leg locker curse. The threats had all been empty though, and Hermione had no doubt that this one was no different. "What can you do to me Draco? What exactly would you do that I couldn't counter, couldn't find a way around? Face it Draco, I am just as good as you and better, me, a muggle born." She was pressing his buttons, and doing so intentionally. She had taken as much of his talk as she was going to. Sure he was helping her out at his own inconvenience, but he was only doing so because Professor Dumbledore had told him to. She had had enough of him and she was done being a doormat to his little games.
Draco was floored. Nobody spoke to him like that, especially not somebody as simple as Hermione Granger. No, simple was not the word for her and he knew that. She was smart, for a muggle born she was a near genius, hell she wasn't even that slow by wizarding standards. She was a muggle-born though, and that was plenty enough to make her shut up and keep in place, especially now that she was so impaired. "Granger you couldn't come close to meeting my strength!" He shouted. He was standing several feet away from her, as she had put nearly the entire room between them when she had fumbled for a place to sit. Somehow he didn't think this had been coincidence. She was sitting atop the desk now, legs crossed and arms stretched behind her holding up her weight. She looked perfectly comfortable with herself, and this only upset Draco more.
"You want to make bet on that?" She asked, and at this Draco could not help but incline an eyebrow.
"What exactly do you mean by that?" He asked, as angry as he was, this statement was not one he was willing to ignore.
Hermione shifted slightly, adjusting her position to make herself more comfortable. "A wizarding duel, with a few extra rules thrown in. We stand still, due to my little handicap and when one surrenders, the other has won, no take backs and no spells after the surrender."
Draco stood looking at her, mouth slightly ajar and feeling completely dumfounded. Was she honestly proposing they have a duel while she couldn't even see? All he had to do was whisper the curse and she would never see it coming. "You want a duel?" He asked he knew the question sounded stupid but he was having an extremely hard time wrapping his mind around exactly what it was she was proposing.
"Yah. I am." She said, and she gave a little hop to take herself off the desk, and there was a bounce to her step as she moved a few steps away. "Stand directly in front of me, no cheating now, and lets see what you can do." She said.
Draco grinned and moved to comply. "Alright Granger, on the count of three then." He said, moving to comply with her orders. "One." He said
"Caecus Visum" Hermione muttered under her breath, waving her wand at herself.
"Two." Both young wizards took deep breaths, both readying themselves for a battle with a foe that, though they would never admit it for anybody to hear, was quite worthy with whom to do battle. "THREE!"
Both cried their spells simultaneously. A deep "Stupefy!" And a slightly higher pitched "Expeliarmus!"
The two spells collided in mid air, and as the blue and red beams collided, instead of one of them overpowering the other and sending through to continue its attack, they both changed to a shade of purple and continued on their paths without missing a beat. Both the children where caught completely off guard; Draco because he had been so sure his spell would win out; and Hermione because she could not see the bright light coming right for her. The spells hit both of them square in the chest, but instead of doing what they where meant to, both spells knocked the wands out of the children's hands, as well as the consciousness out of their bodies.
Hermione was the first to come to, and though she had no idea how long it had been, she was sure it was only a few moments. "Oh, what happened?" She groaned as she sat up, reaching a hand to rub her head where it had collided with the floor.
"Granger what the hell did you do to me?" She heard a grown from someplace across the room, which she was sure was a good deal away from where Draco had been when she sent out her spell.
Both where confused and disoriented, unsure of what had just happened to them, and what effects it would have. "Where is my wand?" Draco asked after a moment, and Hermione noticed that she too was missing her wand.
"My own spell came back at me." Hermione mumbled as she fumbled blindly for the bit of wood that held so much power within it.
Draco looked up at her, wondering exactly what she was talking about. Then he realized, she had used the disarming curse, and he had used stupefy. The spells had not come back on their caster but combined together to create one spell that seemed to have a double purpose.
Hermione too, had come to this conclusion, and Draco stared at her as her mind worked feverishly to come up with the answers. He watched as her nose scrunched up ever so slightly in though, it was really rather cute. He shook his head, realizing the thought that had just ran through it and wondering where on earth it had come from. He did not dwell on it long though, as there where more important things at hand.
"I need to go to the library; can you get the Astronomy notes from Pansy after all?" Hermione asked after a moment. When all else failed, she always fell back on her tried and true books.
Several hours later Hermione sat in her dorm room, her bed covered in books, each of them spattered with bits of paper sticking out from several of their pages. Draco had taken her to the library and helped her find several books that may have been useful to the subject, two or three of them where books she had already read and simply thought may be useful to check through again. Normally when Hermione used her books for research she left them open to whatever pages she needed, putting to memory the page numbers that she thought she may need to check back to, but without her sight, she had to resort to bits of paper, as leaving the books open meant each of them read their pages at once.
She pointed her wand at the clock on her nightstand and muttered a quick 'Affor' to find that it was already two o'clock in the morning. She would have to go to bed if she stood any hope of staying awake for her classes next day so she reluctantly set her books aside. Next day was Thursday, which did not leave her much time to do any more research, and she would need new books for she had thought of several that she was sure could be put to use, but for now she would simply go to sleep.
She sighed as she put the books up, and as she fell asleep her thoughts where of the white haired Slytherin with whom she was forced to spend so much time.
"When are you going to find it?" Asked the boy. He was standing directly behind her again, leaning one hand on the back of her chair. Hermione shuddered slightly at the closeness of him.
"I still don't understand what you are talking about." She said. The mirror before her was now quite foggy; she could still make out each of the figures within it, but just barely.
"No, you wouldn't. I honestly though you where clever enough to understand all this. I suppose I underestimated you; something I didn't think I could do." He said with a chuckle.
"I wish you would just tell me what it is you are talking about. I know it, I'm sure I do, but I just cant seem to pull it to the front of my mind."
The boy's shadowy mouth quirked into a smile and he lifted a lock of her hair into his hand. Hermione was shocked to find that though she could see the lock of hair lifted into his hand, she did not feel the movement of the hair behind her.
"Why do you keep coming back to me if you are not going to help me?" She asked.
"Would you like for me to leave?"
Hermione shook her head. No, she did not want him to leave. He was the only thing in this strange place that seemed to make any sense, even if he was the part of it that frightened her the most. No, that wasn't true, the part that frightened her most was the fact that she was missing something terribly important, something she could not seem to put a name to.
"You can't do this on your own you know, but I can't help you."
Hermione nodded. Yes she knew he could not help her, he had told her that the last time. The last time? Yes, this was the second time they had met; yet she could not seem to find even a few seconds between the two meetings. Everything felt so strange in this place, she longed to be back at Hogwarts where things where normal.
"Normal is an illusion Hermione." He said, and she frowned again. Somehow it felt wrong for him to use her name like that, somehow she was sure he should be calling her something different, yet it did not occur to her that she should find it odd for her to read her thoughts.
"Get up Hermione." He said, but his lips did not move. "Get up Hermione!" This time the voice was not his, but that of -
"Ginny?" Hermione asked, rubbing her palm against her eyes. She felt a quick jolt as she opened them and found she could not see, but it passed quickly and she took a moment to take a deep breath. "I had the strangest dream." She muttered as she struggled to fight off the last remnants of sleep.
"A nightmare?" Ginny asked as she shuffled around the room, setting Hermione's robes on the bed beside her.
"No, not a nightmare." The older girl said as she began to change. "Just strange. I think I have had it before, and it ended nearly the same way, with you breaking through it, as if it was trying to stick around as long as it could." She shook her head. "Oh well, no time to worry about that now is there. Let's get to class." She said, climbing to her feet.
The dream had unnerved her, but it had flitted out of her mind as she awoke, and there was nothing left of it but the shadows of a mouth forming a grin. She sighed and shook off the dream; there were more important things to worry about than simply ponderings of the subconscious mind.
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