Disclaimer: The Harry Potter universe does not belong to me. Good thing, too. I don't have room for the things I already have.
May my reviewers be showered with good fortune and pink jelly beans, two of the greatest things on the face of the earth: Smenzer, SeekerOfDeath, GMUXMenSoaps, secretspells311, The Black Pearl is Freedom, Danish Pastry 28, and paprika90.
Smenzer: Thank you for the long review. You must stop being so insightful! You'll make me give the story away.
The Black Pearl is Freedom: Can I assume that your penname refers to that oh-so-wonderful movie, Pirates of the Caribbean? If so, let me just say that I adore that movie (and Orlando Bloom) with all my heart and soul.
A/N: I'm glad you didn't find the chapter too boring. I still don't like it much, but it turned out better than I thought. Anyway, it was a necessary detour from the storyline.
Because I felt so bad about Chapter 3 (and still do) here is the chapter, as promised. Enjoy it, because the next one won't be as quick in coming. It still shouldn't be much more than three or four days, but you never know. Two things are slowing Chapter 5 up. One, it isn't written yet (oops!). Second, I have been attacked by another plot bunny (slightly less cliché than this one, I think) and it won't leave me alone. I've begun to work out the basic plotline and the first chapter just flowed out of my fingertips this afternoon is less than half an hour. Linked will remain my priority, of course, but I just thought I should let you know. I will probably begin posting it in late July, so if Book 6 totally blows my story out of the water, I won't be stuck with it. Anyway, on to the chapter!
Chapter 4: Hermione's Memory
The next morning, Malfoy was sitting in library in a quiet corner, staring at a bookshelf but not seeing it at all. When Pansy's vapid chatter and the dull but malignant grumblings of Crabbe, Goyle, and the other Slytherin's began to wear too thinly on his nerves, he came to the library, where at least it was quiet and he could be only with his thoughts. It was early, far early than most Hogwarts students rose on Saturday mornings, but Malfoy had always been fond of morning, when the light was pale and the halls were quiet. The earlier he was up, the less likely it was that he would be disturbed by the members of other houses, whom he despised on principle, or by the Slytherins, who almost worse.
Unfortunately, he did not have long to enjoy his solitude. Malfoy knew the instant that Hermione walked into the library, though he sat in a distant corner and his view of the door was blocked a dozen times over. Her presence seemed to crash through the rows of bookcases and cascade over him like flood water, her trepidation matched by her determination. She had come looking for him, and she was nervous about it.
Knowing the innermost insecurities of one of his mortal enemies ought to have given him satisfaction, at the very least, but it didn't. It rather pissed him off, actually. She was everywhere. Her fears and feelings hovered at the far reaching corners of his mind even when she was no where near him, and when he had awoken that morning, he suspected that her dreams lingered at the edge of his memory. Worst of all was the utter goodness of her. It clung to every thought she had, and he was finding it both nauseating and exasperating. He had always suspected the self-righteousness of the Gryffindors to be a front, a hoax, a little role they played to make themselves feel superior. It seemed, however, that this Gryffindor was as pure and upright as she appeared to be, which only served to piss him off further.
She found his secluded table as though she had neon arrows pointing the way. She stopped across from him, hovering near the bookcase as though she might change her mind and flee at the last moment. He leaned back in his chair and allowed a lazy smirk to settle on his lips, although he knew she could feel his tension and wariness.
"You just can't stay away from me, can you?" he drawled. He felt her flash of irritation and felt a sort of comforting satisfaction at the normalcy of annoying one of the Golden Trio.
"I thought you might want to know that I've been researching the potion," she said in a rushed voice.
"Oh, way to keep them guessing, Granger," he said sarcastically. He had known, even without the aid of their new link, that the first thing Hermione Granger did in a crisis was consult a book. She glared at him, and he felt her temper rise as tangibly as he might have felt a sudden hike in the temperature of the room.
"Look, Malfoy, I'm only trying to help you, and you're being an ass about it." He knew she was telling the truth, about both things, but he was much more comfortable exchanging insults with Granger than accepting her help. He sneered up at her.
"Your help isn't wanted here," he told her coldly. She raised a skeptical eyebrow at him, and he barely resisted the urge to squirm under her penetrating gaze.
"Fine," she said in an annoying haughty and unmoved voice, as though his refusal of her assistance didn't bother her at all. "I was just going to tell you that I think there's a way for us to block each other's knowledge of our feelings, but if you're not interested . . ." She turned and began to walk away.
"Now, just wait a minute, Granger," Malfoy exclaimed in exasperation as he got up to follow her. Without thinking, he grabbed her arm above the elbow to halt her progress, and his breath was stolen from his throat as he was jerked into another time and place.
He blinked and suddenly found himself in a long, grey-walled hallway where the air was thick with an unpleasant smell that he did not recognize himself but which he realized was familiar to Hermione, whose mind he seemed to be inhabiting. She did not like the stale, chemical scent; in fact, it filled her heart, which was racing in her chest, with dread and sorrow.
Malfoy found himself walking down the hall, his footsteps ringing eerily on the dingy white tiles of the floor. He was suddenly aware that his hand -- or really, Hermione's -- was gripped tightly in the much-larger hand of the man walking beside him. He looked up at the man's haggard face, his outdated eyeglasses, his disheveled brown hair, and felt a surge of affection and sadness. Malfoy did not recognize the man, but he knew who he must be -- Hermione's father. Judging from the height difference and the proportional size of the hallway, Malfoy guessed that this memory took place when Hermione was no more than four or five years old.
Hermione's father stopped at a numbered doorway, and Malfoy felt Hermione's heart leap with fear and wrenching sadness. Hermione's father opened the door and Malfoy walked in, reluctance, both his and Hermione's, causing his small feet to drag.
The room was dimly lit by watery light filtered through off-white blinds at the window. The same dingy tiles and grayish walls that lined the hallway were present here, but this room was somehow more desolate, as though hope had long ago been banished from it. His eyes fell with trepidation upon the figure of a child in a tall bed with bars on either side, attached to beeping, flashing boxes by tubing and wires. The little boy appeared to be a year or so younger than Hermione, and his skin was drawn and translucent, stretched thinly over fragile bones. Beside his bed sat a woman with frazzled brown hair and a stricken face. Her eyes were filled with so much grief that they were painful to look at.
Hermione's father guided Malfoy to the side of the bed, and then let him go in order to go to the side of the woman, who Malfoy could only assume to be Hermione's mother. She had obviously been crying, and tears glistened in her eyes, the same shade of honey-brown as Hermione's, as she looked at Malfoy and the young boy. As he looked down at the emaciated child, Hermione's young heart contracted with affection, grief, and confusion, and Malfoy suddenly understood the memory he was experiencing.
Malfoy had been transported into Hermione's memory of the death of her younger brother. He had not even been aware that Granger had ever had a sibling, let alone lost one. It seemed so strange, so out of place in what he'd always assumed to be a past as charmed and perfect as her present.
"Hermione, darling," Hermione's mother said in a choked voice. "You know that Chris has been sick for a long time." Malfoy nodded, for Hermione had known this, and realized that his hand, plump and tiny, was stroking the sweat-slicked hair from the little boy's forehead. "We don't want him to hurt anymore, do we?"
"No," Malfoy heard himself say, his voice that of a timid little girl. Tears were flowing freely down Hermione's mother's face now, and she swallowed hard before she continued.
"Well, soon he won't hurt, baby. Soon he'll go somewhere where he'll be happy, and healthy. He'll be able to talk and laugh and play, like he used to. He'll be with Grandmama and Uncle David, and Scruffy, and he won't ever suffer again . . ." Hermione's mother dissolved into sobs and buried her face in her husband's chest. Hermione's father held his wife and stroked her hair as a single tear escaped his own eye. Hermione was saddened and frightened and confused by her parent's grief, and Malfoy felt a foreign jab of pity in his heart.
"But if Chris will be happy there, why are you sad?" he wondered aloud.
"We're sad because we can't go with him, Hermione," her father explained in a pained voice, and her mother's sobs increased in volume.
"But I want Chris to stay with us," Malfoy heard Hermione protest, and tears of unhappiness and denial stung his eyes. Before her father could respond, the beeping from the boxes changed, becoming loud and constant, and Hermione's mother howled with grief while her father screamed for something called a 'doctor.' People began to rush in from the hallway, shoving Malfoy to the back of the room. A plump woman who smelled, to Hermione, like her long-absent Grandmama who would so soon be with Chris, held her away from her hysterical parents while her childish grief splintered her heart.
Malfoy blinked again and was back in the library at Hogwarts, his heart still racing and his hand, his own hand, latched onto Hermione Granger's arm like a port in a storm. He yanked his fingers away in disgust, both with the contact with a Muggle-born and with the feelings of sympathy and sadness that she was inspiring in him. A single tear was spilling down her pale cheek, and her eyes were eerily like her mother's, the grief in them as raw as it might have been if her brother had died twelve days ago, rather than twelve years. Her pain saturated the air around them, making Malfoy's chest tight with empathy that he neither wanted nor accepted. He briefly considered various snide, cruel, and sarcastic remarks to break the silence, but something in the way her eyes overflowed with grief and vulnerability stayed his tongue. On the other hand, the very idea of offering words of comfort or sympathy to Hermione Granger turned his stomach. He finally settled on something that was neither kind nor cruel.
"I never knew you had a brother, Granger," he said quietly. She hiccupped and wiped the tears from her eyes, showing a streak of strength and self-control that Malfoy found himself admiring.
"I was very young when he died. I barely remember him," she said carefully, avoiding his gaze. He could feel her fear that he would exploit his newfound information, her sense of being exposed and weak, her hatred of being at the mercy of another. He could also feel, but would not acknowledge, her feeling of kinship with him, which he supposed stemmed from her realization of how difficult it was to allow someone else to see the most horrible and secret memories of his past. Another feeling came to him suddenly, and he told her.
"You miss him, though," Malfoy reported. Another wave of loss crashed over him and stole his breath. "God, Granger, do you miss him. How do you live like this?"
"I don't think of him very often. It's only when it hits me when I'm not expecting it that it hurts this much." She closed her eyes, and the raw edge of her grief subsided, allowing Malfoy to take a grateful breath. Hermione opened her eyes suddenly, and she began to back away. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. We'll meet another time, okay?" Her eyes were pleading, and Malfoy nodded his consent, feeling drained himself. She turned and disappeared into the shelves, leaving in her wake the lingering poignancy of her sadness and the faint undertone that Malfoy was coming to think of simply as her presence.
A/N: I'm not sure if I did the right thing in wreaking havoc on Hermione's background here. I despise stories that give Hermione a past or a family that I don't think Hermione-as-written-by-J.K. Rowling could possibly have. I think its presumptuous, and rather off-putting. However, I needed some kind of traumatic event for her when she was young, and since the thing that effects us most when we are young is our family, I thought it was the best way to go. If you, like me, don't like it when Hermione's past is bent for the purpose of the story, don't worry too much. Her brother won't really be brought up again, and the memories to come will (hopefully!) remain within the boundaries of what I think Hermione's past could really be.