Chapter: Stupefy

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"Man is the cruelest animal."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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Hermione was alone. Harry and Ginny turned to one another in their grief, clinging together hopelessly. They obviously tried to include her, the one left behind in it all, but she always noticed the strain in their smiles and knew that they would rather be in solitude, protecting one another from everything outside. The Weasley family had become what Hermione thought of as a tightly compacted unit of raw pain, their misery leaving little room for outsiders. Neville was dead. Luna was dead. Lavender had disappeared, as had the Patil twins. Ron was dead. The list went on.

Hermione was alone.

It was for this reason that she was surprised to hear a knock at her door on Saturday night.

"One moment, please!" She called, hurrying into her room to change into something besides her muggle sleepwear. Finally, breathless, she opened the door to her flat and was shocked into a smile at see a familiar face. "Remus!"

Her old professor looked as tired and peaky as ever, and with a quick calculation in her head Hermione realized that the full moon had only just passed. Trying not to let the sympathy show on her face, she embraced her old friend. He smiled apologetically at her.

"I'm sorry to come so late, Hermione, but I had to see you as soon as I could. I've been busy these past few days, with the moon…" He paused, running a hand through his graying hair, the lines on his face pronounced in his concern. "…and this is as early as I could come. I saw the article in the Prophet. What exactly are you doing for the Ministry?"

Hermione felt a swell of joy somewhere in her middle as her loneliness ebbed away for at least a short while. "Come and sit, Remus," she insisted, having forgone his formal title of "professor" years ago, amidst the chaos and battle of war. "I'll tell you all about it after I bring us a cup of tea."

-

Remus Lupin had had a relatively easy time during the war when compared to his fellow Order members. His undercover job with the werewolves had, if nothing else, secured his safety in the times between battles. The loss of so many of the light, however, had taken a toll on his stability, Hermione could see as she examined his stance and features, but that was ordinary for any survivors. Shortly after the conclusion of the war, he and Tonks had wed. Their union had been a welcome relief from the horrors of the aftermath of conflict.

"And you think you're actually getting through to them, then?" Lupin asked mildly during a brief lull in their animated conversation, cradling the nearly untouched mug of tea in his hands as he furrowed his brow in his fretting. Hermione could see very clearly that he did not like the idea of her standing alone in a room full of almost-Death Eaters (or some full-fledged ones, as in Malfoy's case) who had just narrowly escaped Azkaban sentences.

She sighed, staring down at her lap. "It's a bit early to tell, I should think. I've chosen a rather… unorthodox method of teaching. I'm still not entirely sure if it will have any effect."

Lupin gazed pensively at the floor for a moment before speaking, his voice encouraging in his uniquely kind manner. "Take care to remember that the Death Eater's children were, for the most part, sheltered from the goings on in Voldemort's inner circle. Even during the war, their parents still thought they were too young to fully participate. It's my opinion that these offspring didn't establish full devotion to Voldemort, simply because they had never had much contact with him. Of course, they've all grown up hearing of his greatness, but they never truly had a chance to see it before his death. Your students are not Death Eaters." Hermione shot him a doubtful look, a brief flash of a long-forgotten memory surfacing in her mind of a tall, pale boy brandishing his forearm in the dusky light of Borgin & Burkes years ago. Lupin smiled gently as he continued, seeming to understand her misgiving. "Oh, some of them do have the mark, that's something we can be sure of, but they were certainly of Voldemort's lowly ranks, and surely almost never saw him. Voldemort was a secretive man, Hermione; he only regularly graced the presence of his most trusted Death Eaters. Your students only followed orders. I should think that this fact would be of enormous advantage to you. Their fanaticism is only inherited, not created from nothing like their parents' was."

Hermione nodded slowly. She realized that this had not occurred to her; she had simply branded every single one of her students as inherently evil, and thought now that she had been rather silly and scolded herself for pigeonholing every member of her class into one category. She was not ignorant to her own hypocrisy, as well, for she preached maintaining an open mind during her classes but had failed to follow her own instructions. She felt guilt, at that moment, well up within her chest. She resolved to begin her next class with a completely nonpartisan attitude.

She had been to school with the majority of her students and had seen them as innocent children, just as enthralled with Hogwarts as she had been as a muggle-born. She understood now that there was no possible way that Pansy Parkinson, with her girlish flippancy, or Gregory Goyle, stupid and blundering but not particularly malicious, could be completely malevolent beings. Malfoy, on the other hand, had never shown anything but antagonism and hate towards her, his cruelty unrivaled by anyone else in her class; she was not entirely sure that there was any goodness left in him for her to build off of.

"Are any of them giving you much trouble?" Lupin asked, breaking her from her novel reverie.

Hermione remembered a crushing weight pressing into her and angry words like an oath hissed to her face.

"Not particularly."

-

Hermione's students gazed curiously at her magically rigged slide projector at the start of class next Saturday. She smiled faintly at their confusion but remained mute until exactly one o' clock, when she asked a rather odd question to her class:

"Can any of you imagine the sheer multitude of nine million people?"

Understandably, their confusion worsened.

"I don't suppose so," Hermione continued. "Very few people can. If you'll remember the end of last class, Millicent asked me about a name I mentioned in connection with our old friend Nietzsche. Adolf Hitler was that name, and he changed both the Muggle and Wizarding worlds when his power as the leader of Germany intensified circa 1938.

"It is my opinion that every child, of magic descent or not, should learn about what Hitler did. He was a strong leader, that is inarguable, but good morals do not necessarily come hand in hand with good leadership skills. Through the course of his dictatorship, Hitler essentially exterminated more than nine million human beings, the majority of which were Jewish."

Hermione could see in the faces of her students that this abrupt statement of the facts meant very little to them.

So what?

"I don't know how familiar you all are with the concept of religion. I am aware that it has much more popularity in the muggle world than in the wizards', but I am reasonably sure that you have heard of Judaism and Christianity and the conflicts between them. Hitler believed that Jewish people were dirt, lower than dogs. He fancied his "race," the Aryans, the Christians, the superior race of the world. Everyone else was useless and had to be eliminated for further success of his people. This has obvious connections to Nietzsche's philosophy, and indeed Hitler respected him so much that he was often painted gazing adoringly at the bust of the philosopher. Although Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic, against Jewish people, Hitler could still transpose his ideas effortlessly to appeal to his own. Hitler's use of Nietzsche as justification for his actions was the most radical use of the philosophy known in history, and its consequences were dire. Because of Hitler, the Jewish population in Europe was decimated. It was genocide.

"Nine million is definitely a large number. Hitler's supporters, the Nazi party, packed Jews in trains and carted them off to concentration camps, where they were starved and outright killed by the hundreds of thousands of thousands." Hermione paused, observing the carefully expressionless countenances of her students. They still don't get it.

"Hitler believed himself to be an übermensch, an overman. How many people would Voldemort have been willing to kill? Nine million? More? They both thought themselves overmen, whether consciously or not, no? Do you see the similarities? Hitler, to this day, is hated throughout the world as a racist and mass murderer. How will Voldemort be remembered?"

Silence. Hermione heard someone who she could not identify insist quietly to his neighbor that they were just muggles, so why did it matter? She narrowed her eyes.

"Just muggles, you say?" She asked, her voice very cold.

Her lips set in a thin line, Hermione switched on the projector with a flick of her wand. Bodies piled over bodies, limbs stick-thin and smeared with dirt and other things, appeared as a palpable image on the far wall. She heard several sharp intakes of breath at the horror of the image.

I knew you were all not so heartless as that. I knew.

Hermione continued to switch through the images each more horrifying than the last. Skeletal forms, seeming more dead than alive, clung to barbed wire fences. The mass graves where those who had gone to the chimneys were dumped. A child. An infant. A grandmother. She saw realization dawn on the faces of those who were less firm, those who were less stubborn.

Hermione did not stop the disturbing onslaught of images as she spoke. "They called this the Holocaust. 'A massive slaughter.' 'Great destruction resulting in extensive loss of life.' I think that any words to describe what happened are useless, but the pictures show all. Is this what it would have been like? Is this what Voldemort would have done to all the 'mudbloods'? All those who were unfortunate enough to be born like me? I don't doubt it. Whether you rejoice in that idea or are secretly repulsed by it, you cannot deny that it is an ugly thing. The victims of the Holocaust were not 'just muggles,' they were children, mothers, fathers,and grandparents. These were people.

"Nine million people is us 225,000 times over. Would Voldemort have gone that far? Of course he would have, and he would have called it success." The images kept coming, and a large number of those in the room were beginning to look disgusted. Malfoy sat stonily, the soft light of the projector reflecting off his pale face. Pansy's cheeks were completely white and she gazed, horrified, at the images of destruction. Vulpe had closed her eyes.

"And it would not have stopped," Hermione declared, and the images changed. Now they moved, and were bright with color. Now, they were images of the casualties of their own five year war. Hermione felt a sick feeling in her chest and her voice was very quiet as she named the deceased as their gruesome pictures flashed on the wall.

"Lisa Turpin. Colin Creevy. Luna Lovegood. Professor Sprout. Cornelius Fudge. Susan Bones. Shall I continue?" Hermione swallowed, her mouth very dry. She kept her face as cool as stone, but she felt like screaming. "Albus Dumbledore." This body was a disturbing parody of the power of their old headmaster when he was alive, the thin limbs tangled in the grass below the Astronomy Tower. Hermione watched as Malfoy jerked abruptly, as if a jolt of raw pain had suddenly shot through his body. She felt as if she could not continue, but pressed on. I have to. "G-George Weasley. Bill Weasley. Neville Longbottom. Minerva McGonagall." Hermione blinked repeatedly as the room flooded with a sick hue of red when she switched to the last image. More than several people within the room were looking ill, their faces an unhealthily green. The tears were threatening to spill over her eyes and she raised a hand to her mouth briefly before whispering the last name:

"Ron Weasley."

"Stop! For Merlin's sake, Granger, stop!" This was Pansy, her own tears streaming continually down her face in a glaze of moisture.

"The list is very long, everyone," Hermione whispered, for the first time seeming to her class as something weak, incomplete. "Not quite nine million, but it could have been. You can all go."

They all left very quickly, some heading directly to the bathroom, others trudging slowly down the hall, some looking as if this latest display had not affected them in the least. Right now Hermione didn't particularly care.

Once the classroom was completely empty, she sagged. Her shoulders collapsed and shook feebly and she finally allowed an inhuman sound, like a strangled shriek and sob all at once, to escape from her throat.

Too much.

Her knees unable to support her, Hermione slid down the wall until she was huddled in a tiny ball on the floor. She had tried not to look. Tried not to see the picture before her eyes, the blood and empty expressions that used to be her friends. She couldn't deal with the hate anymore, the looks of utter indifference on some of their faces in the presence of such absolute horrors. It was bringing everything back, all her memories from the past.

Everyone who had told her this would destroy her had been right, she realized. And yet she could do nothing about it, she couldn't stop because it was something she had to do.

The loss exploded violently in her chest and she choked, burying her face in her knees and biting down hard on the cloth-covered skin as she breathed slowly, trying to calm her heartbeat.

"Crying over your boyfriend, Granger?"

Hermione winced and looked up at the tall figure of Malfoy standing before her, her face a glaze of tears and his set in a permanent expression of contempt. But now he was smiling, as if taking perverse pleasure in her grief, a pain so tangible that she felt if he wanted to he could have reached out and touched it.

She was angry with him, then. His complete lack of sympathy, of humanity, was going to demolish her if she didn't do something this instant.

"Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! Get out!" Her voice was high and panicked, and she struggled to rise to her feet, wiping the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve.

Malfoy raised his eyebrows, the lines of his mouth tensing for a reason that Hermione could not understand. But soon the cool mask of unkindness had returned and he chuckled coldly. "No, I won't. Not so strong anymore, are we, Granger? Not so perfect now?" He said, his eyes roaming across her tear-stained face. "No, not perfect at all. Ugly, in fact." His voice was almost triumphant, like he was attempting to prove something to himself. Hermione watched him silently, her failure to analyze his cryptic messages a testament to her agitated state. Her chest heaved as she grasped the edge of her desk with fingers salty from her tears. Malfoy continued, his lip rising in a sneer that spurred fury in her head, rendering her vision blurry.

"All this for the Weasel? Honestly, Granger, I would have thought you much more sensible than this, crying alone over your dead boyfriend. It's really rather pathetic," drawled Malfoy, looking unimpressed.

Hermione clenched her fists, so angry that she felt as if she were literally seeing red. "You are so low, Malfoy. Is it ever enough? You're so insecure that you have to taunt a crying girl to feel good about yourself. That's what is pathetic, you disgusting animal. You don't understand. You can't understand, not with the cold lump of metal you have for a heart! You will never understand why I'm c-crying right now."

His eyes flashed and he looked for a moment like he would very much like to hit her, but the look disappeared after scarcely a second. "You see, Granger, this is why so many people detest you—"

"That's not—" Hermione began, herpsyche screaming at the unfairness of this declaration.

"—you assume too much." He finished, stepping forward to grasp her shoulder roughly and press her back against her desk with the strength of his one arm. Try as she might, Hermione could not stop her tears, and she realized very suddenly that this was the first time she had cried before another human being since the instant, the very moment of Ron's death, when she had fallen apart. This only caused her to cry more. Why now? Why in front of him

She should have been fighting back, but instead found herself frozen on the spot, tears trembling in her eyes. He was very close to her now, and Hermione felt the irate energy buzzing from him in waves, like a high whine in her ears—or was that her pulse? She couldn't tell and now he was spitting words at her, his whisper hoarse and strained with anger.

"You don't know everything. You don't know me. Don't talk about what you don't understand, Hermione." He hissed her name like it was a rough curse, and she started under his fingers at the shock of hearing it from his lips.

And then she unfroze.

Malfoy reeled backwards and clapped his hand over his smarting cheek. Hermione stood, rolling her abused shoulder, the look in her eyes fiery and fierce as a starved lion's. Her anger seemed to almost crackle in the air like electricity, and she stood firmly, an imposing figure with her feet spread wide and strong and tears spilling down her cheeks and neck.

Malfoy stared incredulously at her. "You hit me!"

Hermione growled her response low in her throat. "I should have done worse. Don't ever come near me again, or I will send you to Azkaban for much longer than a year. Do you hear me? I don't care what happens to you. I will send you to prison if you touch me again. I know many people who would demolish you for what you've done today."

He rolled his eyes languidly in response to her bold promise, staring at her with a mixture of disgust and something Hermione thought might have been fascination. This frightened her much more than any physical threat. He was silent, regarding her slowly as she narrowed her eyes, the soft brown turning dark and hard with ire.

Then he stepped towards her again. Hermione shouted at him to stop, to leave, and almost told him to stop looking at her. He didn't seem to pay her any notice, and she started to reach for her wand. She aimed it at his chest, preparing to render him unconscious.

Stupify. Impedimenta. Petrificus Totalus.

She knew the spells. She should have been able to curse him. She just couldn't remember.

"Stop it!"

But he didn't stop, and she fell quiet when he reached up, passing one unforgiving fingertip across her cheekbone. Hermione caught her breath, wanting to shy away and shrink from the contact but unable to do so, her muscles locked in place.

Malfoy's face remained curiously blank as he drew his hand from her face and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, as if feeling the texture of her tears between his fingers. His eyes were stormy and revealed nothing, although Hermione tried with all of her being to discern something within them. She felt as if every part of her was abnormally sensitive and could distinguish the flow of air in the room, the soft sounds of his breathing as he stared at his fingers.

He broke the silence easily, his voice a near whisper. "Your pain… it's different than most. It's… interesting."

Before Hermione could gather her wits enough to respond, he turned and swept from the room. She allowed herself only a minute to stand and stare at the door, to mull over what had just occurred; strangely, it seemed to scare her much more than anything she had yet encountered during this class.

Ridiculous.

"Bloody hell!" Hermione cried, turning to gather her books and such into her bag and hitting her hand, palm flat and hard, on the surface of the desk several times to vent her frustration. She didn't understand any of this. Nothing was making sense.

And Malfoy had apparently lost his mind completely.

-

"Woman was God's second mistake"

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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Author's Note: Wow… that's the quickest chapter I've written in a long time. I hope it doesn't suffer, and that I didn't go a bit overboard on the Hitler/Nietzsche/Voldemort references. Umm…

I thank all of the reviewers and wish I could respond individually to each of you, but unfortunately (damn website administrators, or whoever decides the rules on this site!) I'll have to settle with a few of the more urgent responses:

Eucalyptus, it was interesting and a coincidence that you mentioned the unrealistic aspects of the last chapter, because I had planned Hermione's conversation with Lupin about that exact subject from the beginning of the story. It just so happened that this was the chapter in which it seemed to fit. And for I Still Can't Find What Keeps Me Here: I am a woman, just so you know (you were wonderfully PC about it, though!) :). Several people were a bit concerned with the intellectual content of the last chapter (although the majority of you enjoyed it, or so I am assuming through your reviews), and the fact that the younger readers might not be able to follow it. I totally agree with you; it's tough stuff to grasp sometimes. So if you are younger and having trouble, I apologize profusely. But what can I say? I was inspired, I tell you! Hehe. Nothing can curb that damned inspiration, damnit! Anyway, just skip the tough parts and you'll be able to follow the story pretty well. Or just give up. That's what I would do. :)

Hurrah! The first Draco/Hermione…stuff. Kudos for those who can analyze Draco's psyche during this odd moment correctly. More to come.

Last of all, I believe I will be changing the rating to M at some point in the near future. I realized that I was deluding myself when I decided that I would keep it to a T when I first created this story. I just can't sensor things and stay true to the feeling of the story at the same time. If anyone has a problem with this, let me know either by reviews or e-mail and we'll work something out.

Have fun! Friday is tomorrow, remember! I really, really should be studying right now my exam tomorrow. Really.