The images played like a silent movie, to the backdrop of the rushing sound in Draco's ears. Draco saw:
A very tiny brown-haired girl, no older than three, dressed in a polka-dotted bathing suit, eating an ice cream cone at the edge of the waves on a sun-drenched beach. She started, her mouth forming a perfect little 'o' of surprise, when a glob of her ice cream, which was liquefying under a summer sun the warmth of which was so real that Draco could actually feel it, fell onto one of her bare, tanned feet…
XXX
The same girl, older now but not by much- four, or maybe a young five- jumping out of a Muggle transportation device that Draco had several times heard referred to as a 'car'- almost before it had stopped moving; her feet, clad in shiny black patent-leather shoes, slapping down on the pavement of a nicely manicured, squarish brick house with a sign out front; the sign had read "For Sale" originally, but someone had slapped a large red "SOLD" sticker over it, mostly obscuring the words beneath. As two adults- a man with thinning gingerish hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a woman whose exuberant brown locks matched the girl's- climbed out of the car's front seats in a more sedate manner, the little girl ran to the sign and hugged it- then turned a cartwheel on the lawn that caused her dress to flip right up over her head…
(Draco smiled.)
XXX
The girl, another year older, wearing a ballet leotard and tights, her hair barely contained in an extremely messy bun, taping a large construction paper sign to the inside of the living room window of the squarish brick house- Draco strained to see what was written there, but couldn't; the writing faced out, toward the street- as a tolerantly smiling adult looked on; it was neither of the parents (Draco had reached the conclusion that the couple he'd seen exiting the car earlier were, in fact, the girl's parents) but had a family resemblance nonetheless- she could easily be an aunt. Then, through the window the girl saw a car- the same car, a deep burgundy-red- turn from the street into the driveway, and she was off, clapping her hands once in delight and then racing out the door and down the walk, and now that he was outside along with her, Draco could read the childish but oh-so-carefully printed words on the sign. WELCOME HOME ALEXANDER GRANGER, it said; and the father was out of the car and going around to help the mother, who was climbing out carefully, so carefully, with a blue-blanketed bundle in her arms as the girl hopped from foot to foot in an agony of longing to see, to touch, to hold, to own. The father shooed her back up the front walk, but then allowed her to sit down on the stoop, and the mother sat beside her and passed the baby into the girl's eager arms. The father handed a camera which had been hanging from a strap around his neck to the aunt, who'd just come outside, and settled himself on the other side of the girl for a first photo of the newly expanded family…
(This whole scene was somewhat surprising to Draco- he hadn't been aware the girl had any siblings. He'd assumed her an only child, like himself. He wasn't sure why. He just... thought he'd have known if it were otherwise. Looking on, he saw…)
XXX
A birthday party. Tables festooned with pink cloths, arranged out on the grass of the brick house's backyard. Adults in lawn chairs, sipping iced tea and lemonade, eating crudités off a platter as children raced about the yard, laughing, chasing, shrieking. His brown-haired girl was a couple of years older than when he'd seen her last, wearing a shimmery pale-blue party dress, her hair tamed into pigtails, a paper party hat- a contraption Draco had never encountered before- perched atop her head. He followed as she cavorted over to a smallish square table in a corner of the yard; gifts were piled on the grass at the table's base, the table itself given entirely over to a large, decadent pink-frosted cake with the words "HAPPY 8TH BIRTHDAY HERMIONE!" piped onto it in dark brown chocolate icing, surrounded by dozens of pastel candy roses. The girl reached out to touch one of them, gently- reverently, almost- but at just that instant something a lot more forceful than her finger impacted the cake table- two boys chasing a ball, trying to beat each other to it, not paying adequate attention to where they were going, crashed into it at the same time, knocking the table, cake and all, sideways to the grass. The birthday girl clapped both hands to her mouth, her eyes going impossibly wide for a second or two- and then she sat down hard on the ground, the voluminous skirts of her sky-colored dress spreading out around her in a perfect arc of frothy blue fabric, and dropped her face into her hands and cried, and cried as the boys- slightly older cousins, perhaps, one with a wiry frizz of hair on his head, the other with prominent buck teeth, scuffed their feet and hung their heads in shame. Adults came on the run- the girl's father arrived and hunkered down beside her, draping an arm about her tiny, heaving shoulders- but still she cried, until- here came either a very large baby or a small toddler, still young enough to be unsteady on his feet, wobbling over with an anxious expression in his big brown eyes- eyes that were identical to his older sister's. He hovered over her for a moment, but failing to catch her attention was soon distracted by the enormous glob of smashed cake lying nearby on the ground, and moving with sudden and astonishing speed, too quickly for any of the adults to intervene, he hurled himself straight into it, flailing about in the colorful goop with gleeful abandon, screaming and chortling in a transport of delight. The girl looked up at this, and actually cracked a smile through her tears, and then the baby- Alexander, Draco thought; her brother Alexander- was being pulled from the mess by his mother. But he managed to squirm out of her arms- he was quite slippery now- and toddled over to Hermione, holding something out to her in his chubby baby fist; a half-smushed candy rose. She took it from him, her smile widening, and popped it in her mouth- and then she was pulling him into her arms, crushing him up against her, and her party dress was absolutely ruined, it had cake crumbs and frosting all over it, but it didn't matter a bit because she was laughing now, rocking her brother in her arms and laughing every bit as hard as she'd been crying a moment ago, and everyone else had begun to laugh along her with her, children and adults alike. She kissed the frosting from the baby's nose, smacking her lips at the taste of it.
(Draco's own lips curved upward again at the sight, but his smile froze and then died on his face a heartbeat later, died at what he saw next-)
XXX
The girl barely looked any older at all- she may still have been in her eighth year, or perhaps only just into her ninth. It was a lovely sunny day and she was walking across a green field- at first Draco took it for a park- and so he couldn't understand why she was dressed the way she was- in a very formal dress, as frothy as the one she'd been wearing on her birthday but purest black from collar to hem, her hair pulled severely back into a thick French Braid that was so abnormally smooth she hardly looked like herself- or why it was that she looked so sad. No, more than sad, she looked- haggard, as if she hadn't slept in days. (No child should look like that, ever, Draco thought, with a rush of indignation toward her parents. What on earth was going on here? And then he saw what was going on- he understood, though he suddenly wished to Merlin that he hadn't.) It wasn't a park- she was passing neatly regimented rows of grey stones and was, as it turned out, not alone either; she was a part of a small procession, all in black, that were making their way toward a mound of newly turned earth and beside it- a gaping, waiting hole. The mourners gathered at the graveside, Hermione among them. Several adults tried to touch her, offering her comfort, support- but she shrugged them all off. The woman Draco had assumed to be an aunt was there; likewise the careless, cake-ruining older cousins. Hermione's parents were there, but they did not try to touch her because her father was too busy supporting her mother, who looked entirely unable to stand alone. Alexander was not there.
Except, of course, that he was.
Beside the hole in the ground rested the coffin; an impossibly small, baby-blue coffin (and coffins shouldn't come in that size, Draco thought sickly, there should be no such thing as a coffin that small, no such thing on earth-) and as Draco watched, a few words were spoken by a man in a high-collared black robe that looked almost- but not quite- wizardly in nature- and then the coffin was set onto a platform over the hole and slowly lowered in. The mother began to struggle against her husband in an attempt to reach it, but he restrained her until, without warning, she fainted in his arms. He lowered her to the grass and Draco could see that he was shouting, and there was a rush of relatives to her side; aunts fanning and uncles gesturing wildly and milling uselessly about- but the little girl only took advantage of the commotion to move right up to the edge of the hole and stare down at the tiny coffin which now rested at the bottom; unimpeded by any well-meaning adults who might otherwise have attempted to lead her away. She looked down for a very long time, her eyes huge and haunted, red but dry- she looked entirely cried out. In one hand she held a bunch of small, draggly-looking white daisies- it appeared she had picked them on her walk here. In the other she clutched a scruffy-looking teddy bear with a wind-up key sticking out of its back. As Draco watched she tossed the daisies into the hole; they landed scattered about the top of the coffin. Then she slowly wound the toy. He could only assume that music began to play as she raised it to her face, nuzzled her cheek against it for a moment, then kissed it on the nose just as she had done to her brother when he'd been covered head to toe in frosting from her birthday cake. She threw the bear into the hole. She threw her head back to the sky. She howled.
XXX
Draco ripped himself from the pensieve, gasping. Wide awake for the moment, his own injuries seemed distant and unimportant to him just then. He had never seen such a powerful display of raw grief in all his life- and that was saying something; they were in the middle of a war, after all. Mother of Merlin, how had the child survived that sort of trauma with no visible scars in adulthood? He looked over at Hermione, on the other side of the bowl. She was ashen. Trembling. Had her arms wrapped around herself, as if she were suddenly cold. Without putting a whole lot of conscious thought into what he was doing, Draco gently moved the pensieve aside and then, though it required a monumental physical effort considering the state he was in, reached out to her both-handed and drew her to him. She resisted for a second or two, but then came- scooting over into his warmth, allowing his arms to wrap around her, and then crashing her head down on his shoulder, and sobbing.
He got the impression that she had been holding this in for a very long time, because she wept with the abandon of a child. He just held on and let her get it out of her system. It took him several moments to realize, with some surprise, that he was stroking her hair, combing out the tangles as best he could with his fingers. He was amazed by its softness. He hadn't expected hair this bushy to be so soft. It took him even longer to realize that he was mouthing the same words to her over and over again, his lips moving lightly against the top of her head- I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know, I didn't know.
It was obvious from what he'd seen so far that the girl had come from a non-magical background and he felt for some reason as though this fact bore looking down upon- but he couldn't think why. The girl, her parents, her aunts and uncles and cousins, they were people, real people, as real as he and his own family. They shared real joy, real grief, real love. What was there to look down upon in that? He felt vaguely sorry for them, for everything they were missing out on by being Muggles, but that was all… and really, he realized, it wasn't even necessary. They didn't know what they were missing, and besides, they had their compensations- things like cars and light switches and pointy paper party hats. They had come up with some pretty ingenious inventions, he had to admit, in order to make life without magic comfortable for themselves. He rather thought he'd like to sit in a car one day.
At long last Hermione's sobs faded to hiccups, and she raised her head and met his gaze, tried to give him a reassuring smile but couldn't quite manage it. She said something, but he couldn't make out what it was. A final teardrop that had been caught in her thick, dark lashes freed itself at last and streaked down her face- Draco reached out and caught it as if in a dream, wiping it away with his thumb.
Then Hermione was pulling the pensieve back over- apparently she had more to show him yet. She took a moment to check her wand- the stream of golden light, their distress beacon to the Army, was still as strong as ever. Then, using his wand, she checked the time. Both of them were rather surprised to learn that they had been in the pensieve over two hours already. Draco caught her by the hand and gestured at the bowl. Are you sure? He tried to ask. We can stop, you know. She took his meaning, but she shook her head. She didn't want to stop. Sitting next to one another now, instead of on opposite sides of the bowl, they leaned their heads back over it together. The silvery mist swirled up to greet them. Draco saw:
The little girl another year older, in a primary school uniform though she looked nearly ready for Hogwarts, sitting cross-legged at the foot of a tree and reading a book in what Draco assumed to be a park. Her parents were nearby, reclining on a blanket, and the whole scene should have been quite idyllic, except for two things; first, there was the way her parents looked- not significantly better than they had at the funeral. The mother, in particular, was a changed woman; her once bouncy brown hair gone lank, her once bright brown eyes gone dull. The father's face was pinched and white. It was clear that Hermione had distanced herself from them intentionally. Then there was the group of laughing children playing a short distance away, at the edge of a brook. Some had removed their shoes and were wading- some skipping stones- all laughing in a spirit of fun and no-more-school-today camaraderie. Hermione kept stealing longing glances at them and two or three of them were glancing back at her- but their eyes were mocking, not kind. They were sniggering at her. A couple of boys put their heads together and whispered, then one of them picked up a pebble- but instead of skipping it over the water, aimed it at Hermione instead. It thwacked against her book, causing her to drop it in surprise. The boys sniggered harder. Draco had the urge to knock their stupid, mean-spirited heads together. The parents, wrapped in their private misery, noticed nothing.
Then a girl with blonde pigtails, one of the group by the water, saw what was happening. As the boy was aiming yet another pebble at Hermione, this girl marched up to him and knocked it from his hands. She gave him what appeared to be a stern talking-to, followed by a little shove- waited for both boys to move off a bit, then approached Hermione, who had raised her book to cover her face- whether to protect herself from more pebbles or, perhaps, in an attempt to conceal the fact that tears were threatening, Draco wasn't sure. Quite possibly both. The girl with blonde pigtails and kind eyes squatted in front of her. Hermione hesitantly lowered the book. The two spoke, the blonde girl gesturing behind her at the water. Hermione's gaze followed, and one or two of the other children saw her looking and waved, beckoning her over. The pigtailed girl stood again; held out her hand. Hermione appeared in an agony of indecision, which Draco couldn't understand for the life of him. Why didn't she just take it? Then Hermione turned to glance at her parents, and Draco watched the resignation settle over her face, like a blanket snuffing out the light. She shook her head no. Pigtail girl cocked her own head to the side and spoke one more time, but Hermione simply shook her head again, causing her would-have-been playmate to shrug, turn away, and return to her friends. Hermione looked as if she wanted to sink into the ground. Only for a moment, though- then, as Draco watched, he could actually see her gathering her courage together, and with a deep breath she put aside her book, stood, and followed the blonde down to the water's edge.
Blondie turned around and smiled, reached out and took her hand, and as easily as that she was a part of the group- amazing how quickly children could connect. It was to be short-lived, however. Just as the two girls were stooping to admire the flash of a small silver fish in the water, here came the parents at a run- the mother shouting and waving her arms about frantically. Hermione whirled around to face her and if she'd looked like she'd wanted to sink into the ground before, it was nothing to now- her face was burning with humiliation and she was obviously wishing herself a billion miles away. The mother was ranting on, pointing at Hermione and then at the water, mouth working furiously all the while, a hectic, ill-looking flush on her face. The father was attempting to soothe her, but with no success whatsoever. Draco had a sudden epiphany that the baby brother, Alexander Granger, must have drowned. That had to be what this was all about. The baby had drowned and now the mother was permanently just a bit off her rocker, convinced that despite the age difference, and the fact that the water here was no more than a foot deep, her ten-year-old daughter was in danger of sharing the fate of her two-year-old son. Draco's heart ached as he watched Hermione, slump-shouldered with embarrassment and defeat, follow her parents away from the group of children by the water, as the rock-throwing boy from earlier (bloody little bastard! Draco thought furiously) cavorted about with his eyes rolling and his tongue lolling out, one finger drawing circles in the air beside his temple. It was clearly a commentary on the mother's sanity- or lack thereof. Just before Hermione passed out of range, he lobbed another pebble at her back, hitting her squarely between the shoulder blades. Draco wanted to wring his fucking neck. Hermione did not look back.
XXX
Here was a kitchen; it was a part of the squarish brick house that Draco had not seen before. It was so chock full of odd Muggle gadgets he couldn't even begin to puzzle out, that he stopped trying almost as soon as he'd begun, and focused his attention instead on the girl at the round oak table, books spread out about her, diligently working on what Draco assumed to be homework. Her hair was held back from her face by a headband, but otherwise free, tumbling down her back in an unruly- and completely recognizable- mess. This was how her hair had looked all through Hogwarts, he thought, sure of this suddenly although most other details of his school days remained difficult to pin down at the moment. It was still how her hair looked now.
Deeply engrossed in her work, she started violently at a sound Draco couldn't hear. Following her gaze when she looked up, he saw a large barn owl perched on the outer sill of the kitchen window, tapping on the glass repeatedly with its beak. It took him a moment to grasp why it was that the girl looked so shocked- and then it hit him- this was it, he was witnessing her first contact with the wizarding world. She'd never received owl post before in her life- had no idea that such a thing as a post owl existed. He watched as she stood, gripping the edge of the table for a moment as if to steady herself, then made her way cautiously toward the window. The owl, seeing that it had her attention now, tapped once more, then cocked its head meaningfully and extended a foot- showing her, through the glass, the tiny scroll attached to its leg. Hermione's eyes widened and, throwing caution to the wind, she opened the window, her lips moving as she crooned to the bird. Draco watched as she removed the letter and the owl took flight. He recognized the heavy, cream colored parchment with the Hogwarts crest, of course. She took the letter back to her seat at the table, opening it on the way, and sat down to read. By the time she'd finished scanning the letter's contents, her eyes were absolutely huge. She read it again, and then again, her lips moving slightly as she did so, her mind struggling to comprehend what she was seeing. The next time she looked up, though, her eyes were shining- there was no doubt, no hesitation in them. She wanted in- she wanted to be a part of this newly discovered world.
Draco soon saw what it was that had made her head snap up that way; her parents were home, entering the room together in crisp-looking clothing of the Muggle professional style. Draco recalled hearing at one time that they worked together in some sort of Muggle medical practice, something highly specialized… teeth, was it? (He'd always thought it absurd that Muggles had different healers for eyes, for ears, for teeth, for feet. Of all the convoluted nonsense! Every properly trained mediwizard was more than capable of treating any area of the body- much more sensible in Draco's opinion.) At any rate- Hermione leapt to her feet, brandishing the letter and nearly dancing with excitement, and Draco watched as first the father and then the mother read it… and an enormous argument ensued. The father seemed more or less neutral, but the mother- woah. She just about went berserk, screaming and wailing; at one point she left the room and returned a second later clutching a framed photo of baby Alexander. Gesturing wildly, she pointed at the photo and then at Hermione and finally the letter where it lay, now, on the table- Draco could imagine what she was saying, something along the lines of how they'd already lost one child and didn't want to send the other away… a lousy guilt-trip to pull on a child, in Draco's opinion. Little Hermione stood her ground, though, with a defiance that her parents obviously were not accustomed to seeing in her. It reached the point where her mother actually went to slap her- the father caught her hand out of the air, then pulled her bodily from the room.
Hermione stared after them for a moment, head cocked slightly as if listening to sounds of a continuing fight elsewhere in the house- then collapsed back into her chair, crossed her arms on the table in front of her, right over where the letter lay, dropped her head onto them and cried, her little shoulders heaving. Draco wanted desperately to gather her into his arms, rock her, comfort her as he'd just comforted her older self. He actually caught his pensieve-self beginning to reach out to her. Just then the parents returned to the room. The mother was silent, blotchy-faced from crying, sullen. It was the father who went down on one knee beside his daughter, placed a hand gently on her shoulder, causing her to raise her head. He said something to her, his expression grave, but it was clear from the way she threw her arms around his neck that it was the answer she'd wanted to hear. As the scene faded, Draco was left feeling guilty for some reason, that this little girl had had to fight so hard, face down such adversity, for something he'd always taken for granted- a Hogwarts education. What an ordeal it had been for her simply to reach the school- and what would she find there? Some who would welcome her, yes, but many who would not. Draco had a sick certainty that he had been heartily among the latter.
XXX
And this, it transpired, was what he saw next- seven years of Hogwarts, condensed. So strange to be watching his classmates, his friends, his teachers, through the eyes of someone who'd attended school at the exact same time as he had, but whose experience had been so vastly different. He saw it all; the early awkwardness, the bossiness that had acted as a cover for her insecurity in this strange new world, the troll-in-the-bathroom incident that had led to the formation of the "Golden Trio", the adventures they'd shared of both the fun and the terrifying variety. Outings to Hogsmeade, quiet nights studying and playing chess by the fire in the Gryffindor common room, Winter snowball fights and Christmas mornings; and Hermione, solo, often sneaking out to the library at night the way others snuck to the Astronomy tower- and then there were the horrifying brushes with death that came, it seemed, nearly every year- the Shrieking Shack, the Department of Mysteries- through it all he watched her grow in knowledge, in confidence, in ability.
He watched her glide into the Yule Ball on the arm of Victor Krum- watched his younger self staring at her with open-mouthed astonishment, his own date forgotten for the moment, and he knew that in that instant, his younger self had known she was beautiful, though he wouldn't have admitted it, not for the world. And speaking of his younger self- he watched seven years of torture that he had inflicted on Hermione- taunts and sneers and vile names, and worse- hexes and mean-spirited spells (he'd charmed her hair irreversibly chartreuse in sixth year, forcing her to cut it all off to her chin and resulting in, he now saw, night after night of stifled crying in her bed- it made him sick with shame to watch it)- and once, just once, shouldering her out of the way in a corridor between classes, with such force that he'd knocked her down, causing her to scrape her knees bloody on the rough-hewn stone floor. He decided then and there that he would make that up to her- though how, he couldn't say.
He'd find a way, though, he thought fleetingly, before he was pulled along into the next swirl of memory, and the next- Merlin help him, he would find a way.