Chapter 36: Seeking Knowledge

Disclaimer: There once was a fic and it had a little disc(laimer) / Intended to make amends. / When it was good, it said 'J.K.Rowling should Own Harry and all of his friends.

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A/N: I really wanted to call this chapter, 'Draco: Not Only Has He The Emotional Range Of A Teaspoon, But That Of A Full Set Of Cutlery, One Of The Ones With Different Forks For Every Course.' But space did not permit it, sadly.

As for problems with chapters not showing up – in the first day after an update it can sometimes say the chapter isn't there. There isn't much you can do about that, unfortunately. Going to the chapter before and clicking the next arrow, if it's there, might work. As for chapters before the most recent being inaccessible, I really don't know why. If anyone has that, reporting it to is probably the best course of action.

Quite a few people have asked where I got the idea for half-Fallens from. The answer is I have absolutely no idea. The concept of half-Fallens was the first thing that struck me, and the cornerstone for the plot – other elements such as the spy and prejudice were added during the plotting process. If I recall correctly, one of my friends said that Draco looked 'angelic', I got struck with the idea, 'What if he really was angelic?' and it all spread out from there. I have no idea where any of the half-Fallen concepts came from apart from that. Even the Genesis quote was found about a week after I'd finalised what they were like, and I hastily added t in and pretended it had been there all along. I blame the muses.

Oh, and also since someone asked: OOC means Out Of Character, OC means Original Character. Oh, and since someone mentioned it; Harry Potter in Latin absolutely rocks.

With that, onot the chapter. Enjoy!

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Aristotle, 384BCE – 322BCE, Metaphysics.

'Check.'

Harry stared rather stupidly at the board for a moment, then groaned. 'I can't believe I didn't see that.' Ron merely settled back in his chair with a wide grin, while Harry desperately tried to find a way of getting himself out of trouble.

Ginny glanced up from her book. 'Won again, Ron?' she asked.

'Not if I can help it,' Harry muttered, frowning at the chess game. 'How do you always manage to win?'

Ron grinned and shrugged. 'I don't always win,' he pointed out. 'You won a game last week…'

'Yes, and you won three the week before,' Harry pointed out, before carefully moving his king a square to the left into relative safety. The figure stared in horror at a particularly vicious pawn nearby and cowered on its square.

Ron made another move, and the endgame continued in a nervous silence. Ginny resisted the urge to whisper a suggestion for a particularly good move into Harry's ear – it wouldn't be fair – and simply attempted to will the idea into his head instead. She was quite surprised when, grinning suddenly, he made the one she'd thought of.

The portrait hole opened at that moment and Ginny glanced briefly towards it, her eyes flicking back almost instantly when she realised who she'd seen entering: Hermione.

Smiling widely, she got to her feet and hurried towards her. 'Hermione!' she called out. 'You're back.'

'Hey,' Harry called out, and Ron gave a small wave, still engrossed in the game. Hermione smiled back, then bit her lip.

'Er, about the DA…'

'Oh, yes, I found your note,' Ginny said firmly Hermione looked confused.

'Note? I…'

'The note you left at the table where you usually sit in the library,' Ginny said. 'The one about how one of the first years was being bullied, and you had to comfort her and then go see teachers about it, so that's why you missed the DA meeting. I found it when I went to go and look for you after you didn't turn up.'

She'd told that story to Harry and Ron earlier, when she'd returned from the library to the DA meeting. They'd needed some kind of acceptable story to stop them worrying, and she couldn't tell them about what she'd seen, not until she knew what had happened.

Ginny didn't approve of Malfoy, and she hadn't approved of Hermione comforting him, but she also knew that Hermione was sensible, and if she was spending time in the company of Malfoy, she had to have a reason. She'd decided to wait until she could hear Hermione's side of the story before she decided whether or not to tell Harry and Ron

'Er…' Hermione began, her expression having gone from completely confused to rather pale. She swallowed. 'Thanks, Ginny.'

Thanks for not telling the boys? Ginny wondered. At any rate, she smiled back. 'Oh, and before I forget…' she began. 'I was wondering if you'd come to the library with me later to look up something on dragons. Charlie mentioned it in one of his letters, and I can't find it myself.'

Hermione looked quite nervous at that. 'Okay,' she said.

Grinning, Ron made a move; Harry groaned before falling to a more dedicated perusal of the board. Ron looked up. 'What happened with that first year, anyway?' he asked.

'Er… she's fine now, it's all sorted,' Hermione replied, and then with a momentary stroke of genius, replied, 'I can't tell you any details, I promised her I'd keep it all confidential… apart from the teachers, of course. Sorry about missing the meeting.'

'Don't worry about it,' Ron replied. 'It went fine. Feel like playing a game against me after I've beaten Harry?'

Hermione glanced at Ginny, who gave a barely perceptible nod. Permission. 'Sure.'

The good thing about winter was that it grew dark early, and under the cover of night no one could see Draco flying; or if they did, they took him for an overlarge owl or a trick of the light and forgot it. The bad side, of course, was that it was freezing cold; his breath turned white as he swooped and swerved in the dark sky, shivering when he stopped, hovering.

Flying helped, in a way: while you were rushing through the wintry air, breathless and cold, you didn't think about emotions, somehow. Perhaps the coldness and the speed crowded it out, so there wasn't any room for anything but the sharp clarity of the night, the crisp-edged moon, the silhouette of the Forbidden Forest on his left. Perhaps it was simply distracting.

Perhaps it was too cold for his feelings to work – they did say cold-hearted and warm-hearted, after all; perhaps when it was cold emotions stopped working so well, and that was where the expressions came from. It would explain why the Slytherins were so heartless, down in their chilly dungeons, and the Gryffindors were caring and compassionate up in their fire lit tower with its gentle crimsons and glowing golds. It was a nice theory, and he should ask Hermione about it later.

Perhaps it was just the feathers brushing lightly across his back and arms as they beat; he could feel the gentle feeling of mindless contentment radiating from them where they touched. It was useful, he supposed, but not really pleasant. It was almost like wearing a blindfold, or earmuffs, and dulling the senses. Emotions must be like that to normal humans, he realised; as indispensable, reliable and simple as sight, as hearing.

After an hour or so of flying, with a few pauses now and then to catch his breath, he decided to fly up to his favourite place – the roof of the Gryffindor Tower, as it happened – and rest for a while. He could feel the blood almost burning under his skin as it pulsed, trying to get oxygen to tired muscles and warmth to freezing skin.

From the top of the tower, there was a truly magnificent view. To the south, the lake rippled in the moonlight, with sparks of silver on top of deep and secretive black; then, in the far distance, he could just make out Hogsmeade. To the east was the forbidding mass of trees that made up the Forbidden Forest, rustling in the wind and managing to look impossibly dark, as though someone had torn out a forest-sized piece of the grounds and left a hole into absolute nothingness. To the west was the more familiar and reassuring shape of the Quidditch pitch, the hoops and stands rising proudly into the sky, and to the north hills rose up, a gentle rise and fall in the distance.

The Forest made him feel uncomfortable; so he sat on the west side of the tower and looked out at the pitch, with the lake and hills on either side if he turned his head. The tower's roof also blocked him from the wind, keeping him slightly warmer than he would have been otherwise. With a sigh, he shifted back to human form and sat on the roof, leaning back against the cold slates and closing his eyes.

Slytherins weren't meant to cry.

Of course, that only held true for him if he was a Slytherin; but was he, any more? They didn't treat him like one. He hovered at the edges of their group, and he knew full well that if it wasn't for his ability with the Dark Arts – he shivered – they'd treat him exactly as they did Ellen; to be hexed and hated. They hated him anyway, of course, but they didn't dare show it beyond ignoring his presence.

And Hermione hadn't told him not to cry, as such, though she had seemed worried. That could mean anything. Was she worried because the crying showed that something was wrong with Draco himself, and that made her worried for him, or was it because the act of crying itself was wrong? He hadn't been taught any of this: all he'd learnt was that crying showed weakness and should be responded to with derision.

Hermione hadn't mocked him. She'd been… kind. Caring. He smiled a little as he remembered that; it hadn't felt like he'd thought it would. If you needed comforting, that meant you had a weakness, and comforting showed you were too weak to deal with it on your own. He'd imagined it would feel rather unpleasant. It hadn't, though, even though he'd felt terrible about the crying itself. The comforting had felt… nice.

He was having to learn everything about emotions from scratch, he thought, and there was simply far too much to learn. How many emotions were there? He doubted that anyone had counted, and then thee were the times when two emotions mingled to create a new one – even such opposites as hate and love would do it – and then there were three at once, and four, and more. The total number must be almost infinite. How on earth was he meant to learn what they all were?

Humans managed it, though if Hermione was anything to go by, they didn't even think about emotions and what each one was called and meant. As if they could feel a new emotion and know what it was simply by instinct. It was a talent he envied. Perhaps after years of living with emotions it became automatic? Would he ever be able to feel an emotion and know it instinctively, without needing to think about it and analyse it and ask someone else for advice?

The simple answer was that he had no idea. Hermione wouldn't know either; he was the only living half-Fallen that had turned human, and there wasn't likely to be much information about it. There might be some in his mother's archives, he supposed.

Draco sighed, clambering to his feet. He was tired of thinking; it only left him more confused than he had been when he started, and if he kept thinking his mind would move onto the topic of using Dark Arts, and then… He didn't know; but he felt that he didn't want to think about that. Another one he couldn't name or understand.

Shifting back to his winged form, he leapt lightly off the tower and flew away.

'Checkmate,' Hermione said, smiling as she moved her bishop. Ron scrutinised the board, making doubly and triply sure that it was truly a checkmate, and then gave her a grin.

'You're getting better,' he remarked as he started to pack the pieces away. 'I'll have to stop playing against you; can't risk losing my place as the chess champion of Gryffindor, can I?'

Hermione laughed. 'Don't be silly, Ron, you win most of the time…'

'Did Hermione win?' Ginny asked, appearing quite suddenly from where she'd been sitting quietly by the fire reading. 'Well done!'

'Thanks,' Hermione replied, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. Over the course of the chess match she'd completely forgotten that Ginny had seen her with Draco – while he was crying, no less – and needed an explanation.

She'd been avoiding telling her friends about Draco, mainly because she knew they wouldn't approve. He'd been their enemy for years, after all, and saying 'He's changed now,' would be utterly meaningless to them unless she explained in depth the exact nature of that change. Which would mean telling them all about Fallens and half-Fallens, and she wasn't willing to do that. She wouldn't betray Draco's secrets.

Which, of course, meant that she'd have to try and make the 'He's changed now,' excuse sound like something halfway decent. The fact that he'd been at the Order should count for something…

Sighing, she glanced at Ginny – she was standing nearby, looking perfectly polite and civil, and you cold only have seen the tension and disapproval in her face if you looked very hard at the set of her jaw, the look in her eyes. It was probably best to get it over with. 'Ginny,' she said, getting to her feet, 'do you want to go to the library now? Look up that thing on dragons you wanted to find?'

Ginny looked quite surprised; she'd probably been expecting to have to pester Hermione to discuss it. 'Sure,' she said, and headed for the portrait hole. Hermione gave Ron and Harry a parting smile and hurried after her, feeling suddenly quite nervous. What on earth was she going to say?

When she stepped into the corridor, she saw Ginny heading off to the right. 'Ginny?' she called then hurried after her. 'Listen, I can explain…'

She turned round. 'Yes, but not here. Anyone could hear us here, and I assume you want to keep this quiet, considering that you didn't even tell your best friends?'

Hermione bit her lip, wincing. 'Sorry. I did want to tell you, but…'

Ginny cut her off with an impatient hand gesture. 'Not here. And you do realise that if you don't have a decent explanation I'll be telling Ron and Harry about this anyway, don't you?'

Hermione nodded dumbly – there wasn't much else she could do – and Ginny headed off down the corridor again. Second left, first right, then she pulled aside a tapestry and opened a small door inside. A pleasant little room was revealed, with a pair of sofas and a coffee table, and a wide window with a view over the lake.

'Dean and I used to come in here,' Ginny said nostalgically, then sat down on one of the sofas, all softness gone. 'Right. Explain.'

Hermione took a seat opposite her, took a deep breath, and paused. 'I'm not sure where to begin…'

'The beginning, perhaps?'

Hermione flinched. 'Ginny, don't…'

The redhead leaned back against the deep brown leather of the sofa, folding her arms. 'Don't what?'

'Be so… so caustic,' Hermione replied, frowning. 'It's not…'

'Caustic?' Ginny asked, looking faintly amused. 'Only you would say caustic. Most of us would just say mean.' She bit her lip then, looking rather less cruel and more uncertain. 'I'd have thought you've be used to it, with Malfoy.'

Hermione shook her head. 'He's never mean, unless he's… upset or something's going wrong, or something like that.' Or someone threatens a defenceless first-year and he uses Dark Arts on them. She wisely didn't say that; Ginny would likely have a fit. Knowing what a cliché it was, how unbelievable it would be, she said, 'he's… he's changed.'

Ginny scoffed. 'He's always been a scumbag, he always will be one,' she remarked. 'Why the change? How?'

'I can't tell you why,' Hermione said slowly.

'Then why should I believe it happened?' Ginny asked. 'He could easily just be pretending. Why happened? Why did he change?'

'I can't tell you,' Hermione repeated. 'Just like… I wouldn't tell him about Harry being depressed over Sirius, or about…' She took a breath. 'About what happened to you in your first year. What happened to him is… is just as big, and I'm not going to tell his secrets.'

Ginny frowned. 'It was his father who caused that, you know,' she said cruelly. 'Putting Riddle's diary in my cauldron…'

'Draco isn't his father…'

'He's always acted like it!' Ginny replied fiercely. 'He's always hated you and Muggleborns and supported Voldemort and generally acted like a spoilt Death Eater brat. What's changed?'

Hermione took a deep breath. 'A lot, and I can't tell you. I would if I could, believe me, but…' She sighed. 'Can't you just trust me? You know I don't make stupid decisions, or do things without a real reason. And something huge did happen to him, and it more than explains why he's changed…'

'But you can't tell me about it.' Ginny said dryly.

'Because it's his secret and it's his decision who knows.' Hermione replied simply. 'I found out by accident, and… and it was big enough for me to try and befriend him. Look, doesn't the fact that Dumbledore let him stay at the Order show that something big must have happened to him?'

Ginny thought about this. 'I suppose,' she replied. 'But it doesn't explain why he's become 'nice' all of a sudden.'

Hermione sighed. 'I know, but trust me, there is a reason. And it is a good one.'

'All right,' Ginny said, then gave her a scrutinising look. 'I still don't think he's all that nice, though. He was horrible at the Order.'

'I know,' Hermione said, pausing and glancing out of the window over the dark grounds. 'Things were… very difficult for him, I guess. He was surrounded by people who hated him, and then with what had happened…' She sighed. 'He was being defensive, I think. We haven't really talked about that much…'

Ginny raised a sceptical eyebrow. 'Defensive?'

There was a long pause. 'Yes,' Hermione said firmly. 'And I… I think he's a decent person. He defended that Muggleborn Slytherin in first year when the others tried to pick on her. More than once.' She didn't mention that he'd used Dark Arts to do it.

Ginny have her a long and very calculating look. 'Alright. I don't like this, but I guess you aren't stupid. If for some reason you think Malfoy's worth talking to, I won't stop you. But,' she fixed a firm stare on Hermione, 'I want you to tell Harry and Ron.'

'Ron will do mad,' Hermione pointed out, 'and Harry will be suspicious. You know what your brother's like, Ginny, he'll murder Draco…'

'Perhaps, but as it stands, you're lying to your two best friends who you've known for years, or hiding the truth from them at the very best,' Ginny said firmly. 'If you're off chatting to their enemy in the library they deserve to know. I'll give you a week to tell them, and if you don't do it in that time I'll tell them myself.'

Hermione bit her lip. 'I suppose,' she said. 'On the condition that you're there when I tell them, and you help me stop Ron from storming off to murder him. And help me to explain.'

'Deal,' Ginny replied, giving her a smile. 'I assume you aren't going to tell me why he was crying?' Hermione shook her head. 'Alright. What on earth do you two have in common to talk about?'

Dear Narcissa,

It feels very odd to be writing to you, especially since we've never spoken, so I hope you don't think me too rude. My name's Hermione Granger, and since I don't know exactly what Draco's said about me, I'd better summarise. I found out about what he is – as in a half-Fallen – completely by accident; we were both staying at the Order in summer and I went to fetch him for lunch, happened to walk on him with his wings out, and… well, you can imagine.

When I found out what all that entailed I… well, I wanted to help, I guess. I don't know why. I suppose I felt sympathetic, and I was the only one there who knew - well, apart from Dumbledore, and possibly a few people in the Order. So I was the only one who could help, really. And the very idea of being emotionless both scared me and amazed me; it was such an impossible idea. Like something out of a book, but true, so I suppose it was something like a moth to a candle flame…

I think I've caught the habit of over-analysing emotions from Draco. Basically, I wanted to help, and eventually I managed to get him to let me. I don't know what we are now; I'd say friends, but I don't think he understand what that is yet. We certainly act like friends, so I suppose it's the best word, as the English language lacks a noun for 'the relationship between a half-Fallen who has just become human and the human who is helping him; what would probably be friendship if he knew what it was.'

He is getting better though; he understands quite a lot now. We made a list a week or two ago; most of the basic ones, like fear and happiness and things like that, and a few of the harder ones. And he's getting better all the time. I think he's getting used to it as well; at the beginning when we were at the Order he was miserable. Now… he smiles more, I think. And he acts happier, just like any normal person would, most of the time.

He's nothing like he used to be. Which is a good thing, I suppose.

And that's kind of what I'm writing about – Draco said there are diaries and notes and things made by the husbands and wives of Fallens, and I was wondering if there's anything about Fallens who turn human that could help. It's a bit of a big brief, but I don't know much – just the story of where Fallens came from and what they're like. So anything, really, would be useful.

Thank you in advance for anything you can tell me. I hope to hear from you soon.

-Hermione Granger.

A/N: Since I seem to be spending a lot of the beginning A/Ns answering reviewers' questions, I thought I'd do it a little more formally for once. Ask me anything you like in your review (because you're all going to review, aren't you?) and next week I'll pick five questions to answer. You can ask about the story, about me, about the definition of the word 'syzygy'… Questions that would give away too much about the plot (like 'Who's the spy?' which I get a lot) will be discarded, as will anything very personal or rude (there's not much in either category I wouldn't answer) and five will be chosen. Questions that are interesting, witty, amusing or asked multiple times get priority.

What are you waiting for? Review!