Chapter: Something Broken
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"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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Caution: There's some unpleasant language later in this chapter, but probably nothing you haven't heard before. I'm resisting as much as I can to keep from changing it to an "M" rating. If anyone has problems with the content, tell me so and I will change it immediately. I kind of feel like a lot of my fics are rated mature, so I'm trying to keep this one not so scandalous so more people can enjoy it.
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"You did what?"
Hermione stared at the floor. "I took Draco Malfoy to my flat and he slept on my couch and then he left."
Ginny laughed dryly and threw her hands up into the air, eyes directed skyward as if supplicating the heavens for anything in the same vicinity as sanity. "Of course you did," she sighed.
"Well it sounds worse when you make me say it like that!" Hermione exclaimed, defending herself lamely. "You should have seen him, Ginny. He…" She trailed off, her eyes darkening as she remembered the previous night.
He was lost. Something was destroyed completely inside.
She continued softly, shaking her head as if she were physically capable of expelling the thought from her memory. "You would have done the same thing."
"It's Malfoy."
"I know."
"It's Draco bloody Malfoy, Hermione. Remember him? The smarmy bloke who introduced you to a charming little term starting with 'M' and who taunted you and made you cry in school? The disgusting little ferret who was recruited by his Death Eater friends to kill Dumbledore, the shining leader of the Light?" By now the redhead was growing a bit hysterical, and Hermione actually heard her take a deep breath before resuming her tirade in a somewhat quieter tone. "I can't believed you helped him."
Hermione curled her legs into her chest where she sat in Ginny's plushy armchair, resting her chin on her knees. "Gin, I don't know what he would have done if I'd left him. The poor man had just seen his criminal, mad-as-a-hatter father for the first time in who knows how long."
"So?"
"I couldn't…" Hermione struggled, both trying and failing to put into words the complexity of her sentiments. "I just couldn't."
Ginny stared at her blankly, an accusatory air to her expression.
Hermione huffed her exasperation, ramming her forehead into her knees and talking quickly into the worn denim of her muggle jeans. "Well I'm sorry if I'm just a little too sympathetic sometimes! He looked so… broken. I suppose I felt a bit guilty."
"Hermione, he could have murdered you in your sleep."
Hermione tipped over onto her side, drawing her head up from her knees to gaze at her friends unforgiving face wearily. "I truly believe he's not that sort of person anymore, Ginny. I don't think he ever was. Something's changed, and I've been trying vainly to figure out what it is." There was something calculating in Ginny's eyes now, and Hermione squirmed before speaking again. "You won't tell Harry, will you?" Her voice sounded small. She didn't want to think of her friend's reaction if he discovered that she had helped his mortal enemy.
Ginny stared at her for several moments more, her expression unreadable except for that unnerving cognizance in her gaze. After a minute or so, she replied, "Of course not… Not if you don't want me to." She hesitated for a moment, a sad smile emerging that both lifted and shadowed her face. "Can you imagine what Ron would've said?"
This caused Hermione's features to draw blank and stony, her face impassive save for a glint of grief shining at the corner of her eye. She had wondered what Ron's response to all of this would have been, and the thought caused something in her chest to constrict painfully.
She tried not to think of how much she had left out when relaying the story of the night before to Ginny. She hadn't told her about the look on Draco's face when she had touched him. She hadn't told her about the embrace that had seemed to draw both of them back to something real. She hadn't told her that she had woken up several times during the night to confirm that he hadn't tried to hurt himself and had stared for perhaps too long at the way the light from the window glanced across the planes of his face, listening to the quiet, tortured sounds he made as he slept.
Yes, Ron would have been undoubtedly furious at her.
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The following night, Hermione dreamt a very strange thing. She did not dream of the memories that usually swam before her closed eyelids like a horrifying promise, but instead awoke, panting, her skin tingling curiously, to a once-familiar hot slick at the apex of her thighs and visions of something pale and beautiful and broken.
She did not delude herself into believing that she did not recognize the face in her dream. She remained awake far longer than it took for the tightness in her womb to dissipate, her eyes wide and shining in the dark as she considered her fear and the fact that she was yearning for something that was essentially forbidden.
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Hermione was having a difficult time coming to terms with the knowledge that the six weeks of her class were nearly finished. Five weeks ago the course had seemed like an unimaginably large task, something that she would have to wade through painfully, fingertips scratching for purchase. It was almost a revolution; she had lived for so long absorbed in lesson plans and contemplation, and now she didn't really know what to do with herself. There was no more negotiating with the Ministry, no more wondering if her students would finally crack and hex her into the oblivion. The last lesson of her six-week course had been meticulously planned many times over, and she had enough knowledge of her students' temperaments to know that it was unlikely that they would resort to physical violence.
And so, to ward off boredom and idle thoughts of that forbidden subject, she took walks and visited her few remaining friends. She ate supper at Harry and Ginny's three times that week and visited the Weasley's once. She invited Lupin and Tonks over for lunch and the trio laughed in remembrance of the would-be Death Eaters' expressions as they shuffled through the National Gallery. She walked daily to the quaint park near her flat and read by the stagnant pond until it became too dark to see.
She fancied she saw his face once, in the crowd. That lost, forlorn look that she'd memorized more times than she liked to consider. After a second glance, a swift double-take that caused some part of her neck to crack unpleasantly, she came to her senses and continued on her way. She was being stupid, she thought, but something was changing involuntarily and she hated that she had no control.
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Hermione didn't look at Draco as he sat at his desk—far away, nestled in a corner so he could see the wall instead of her, she rather thought—and he seemed perfectly content to return the sentiment…until she began to speak; then she felt his eyes on her always.
She resolutely ignored this as well as the absence of six students that stood out in stark emptiness against the other occupants of the room, whose eyes wandered occasionally to their empty seats in half horror, half curiosity. Hermione had indeed reported those six students' refusal to enter Azkaban to the Ministry, as was required of her, but she had also explained to them the circumstances of said refusal and hoped that the Ministry would be lenient. She paid absolutely no attention to the murmurs flicking about the room and, once each body had been planted firmly into a chair, spoke in a cool and unruffled tone as per usual.
"We won't be here too long today, and you've all heard it before, so I'll spare any pleasantries." This drew several raised eyebrows, which she predictably disregarded. "Can I presume that you're all glad this is our last remaining lesson?" Hermione noticed that this warranted a smile or two amongst the crowd, and she ventured a small one of her own in return. "Mmm. Well, you're all not out of the woods yet, I'm afraid. Within the past six weeks, you've read a piece of classic Muggle literature, studied one of their philosophers, examined arguably the darkest period of the histories of both the Muggle and Wizarding worlds, and observed some of the most famous works of art in the world. You've been to Azkaban."
The collective shudder around the room was palpable. Draco's eyes were locked on her face, and she saw him falter then, if only for a moment.
"Today, however, we're going to talk science."
Oh, the confusion over that. Hermione smiled at the many raised eyebrows and sideways looks to neighbors. She knew for a fact that most purebloods heard very little about Muggle science throughout their lives, if anything; they were bound to be a bit puzzled.
"But what does that have to do with anything, Granger? Isn't 'science' just a horde of foolish muggles piddling about with beakers and migrospokes?" Asked Pansy, her slightly squashed face scrunching in bewilderment.
"Microscopes," Hermione corrected as she grinned thoughtfully. "And yes, I suppose you could say that, minus the 'foolish'. Scientists are most definitely not foolish—well, most of them, that is. And they have a bit more than beakers and microscopes at their disposal." With that, she turned and, coincidently, collected a beaker containing a clear, slightly filmy substance and a small glass rod from her desk. She stirred the contents of the beaker carefully, and, with a painfully steady hand and infinite care, lifted the glass rod from the beaker to expose several miniscule, clear strands of what appeared to be the substance in the beaker that stretched the several inches from the surface of the liquid to the glass of the stirring rod. They glinted faintly in the light, like water charmed to hold its place. There was a spark of genuine excitement and thrill in Hermione's eyes now, and she flicked her gaze from her ministrations to her class.
"You all are very lucky I've had biology in Muggle schools, because this is an amazing thing to see. This," she began, but frowned as the strands broke and had to spend several seconds retrieving another, "is Deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA. Do any of you know what DNA is?"
Two hands.
Two.
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Hermione was tempted to call on Vulpe, knowing that she would supply an answer to her question that was reasonably accurate. Instead, she bit the bullet and pointed to the only other remaining hand, belonging to Millicent Bulstrode, of all people. After she responded hesitantly ("It's like… a spell or potion that tells the body how to perform all its functions, right?"), Hermione suppressed a snort of amusement and explained.
"Um… sort of. DNA are tiny, strand-shaped molecules that exist in the nucleus—the center—of every single cell in our bodies. Our bodies are made of cells. They look a bit like a twisted ladder, and are composed of a sugar-phosphate backbone and four bases. The order of these bases dictate what proteins are made inside our bodies, which in turn controls the color of our skin, the function of our organs, the hormones we create, whether we are healthy or have a debilitating genetic disease, and, to some degree, our personality, although that is debatable depending on your beliefs. Basically, the order of those four bases determines our appearance and everything else inside our bodies. It's a remarkably simple but ingenious method of controlling the body, shaped and developed over billions of years of evolution. As far as we know, every living thing on the earth uses DNA in this manner." Hermione paused, glancing at the faintly impressed faces of her students. "Wizard or no, pureblood or otherwise, we all have DNA inside our bodies and it is used exactly the same way.
"That's simple enough, really. Complications begin to arise when the system makes a mistake. DNA replicates in order to create new cells, but an error occurs. An alteration in the order of the bases by one can cause anything from a genetic disease that kills children by the time they reach the age of two to absolutely nothing.
"In Paris there is a select group of wizards who use a mixture of muggle technology and magic in their studies. They have been examining the differences between muggle and wizard DNA and last year set their sights on sequencing both types and discovering what exactly makes wizards different than muggles or vice versa. In November they published their findings: what determines a wizard from a muggle is the order of one 'rung' in the 'ladder' of DNA, an adenine-thymine pair in place of a guanine-cytosine pair. One. This causes a mutated hormone to form, which in turn activates a usually dormant part of the brain that triggers and controls magic."
Hermione quieted then, taking a deep breath to calm her whirling head. She felt heated and unsteady, and for an instant wavered and her eyes connected with Draco's, for he had been gazing intently at her the entire time. She dropped her eyes quickly and continued. "We are all wizards and witches because of a genetic mutation. We are not the norm, muggles are."
This prompted several bursts of protests from various occupants of the room, and Hermione waited patiently for them to subside, her expression eerily tranquil.
"But how can you know for sure that it isn't the opposite?" This from Vulpe, who looked rather amused, as if she enjoyed both challenging Hermione and the sullen objections of her peers.
Hermione smiled, close-lipped and eyes sparking with what could have been mirth. "Good question. Our scientist friends thought of that, too. Their conclusion is obviously the most obvious, considering how many muggleborns exist. They also discovered that this mutation is dominant, which means that it is passed hereditarily almost 100 percent of the time; if both your parents are wizards, it's almost certain that you will be as well. If one parent is a wizard and the other a muggle, you have either a 50 or 100 percent chance of being born with magical powers, depending on whether the wizard parent is a pureblood or half-blood. But they did consider other options. The most intelligent thing to do when contemplating the opposite of this theory would be to study squibs. Perhaps, they thought, squibs were the product of a mutation in the wizard genome and muggles were actually the result of a diversion from the norm? They eventually determined that squibs occur due to a malfunction later in the process of creating the hormone, during the procedure of transcribing the messenger RNA, which we won't explore further lest I confuse you even more than I already have. In short, squibs are generally the product of another mutation entirely, which in part explains their rarity. In contrast, muggleborns are very common. This evidence points to the fact that wizards are actually the outcome of a mutation, which means, of course, that there is actually no such thing as a pureblood, because every family had to originate from a muggle at one point in history. It's just that it was so long ago that no one can remember."
Hermione hesitated for a moment, registering the expressions on the faces of her pupils (ranging from shocked to skeptical to outright disbelief) and the silence of the room. On an impulse, Hermione flicked her gaze to the silent inhabitant of the chair in the corner and spoke, in a tone somewhat more brusque than before. "Draco, how many generations can your family trace its lineage back to, just out of curiosity?"
He looked up sharply, his eyes narrowing as they met hers. When he spoke, however, his voice was utterly calm, a monotone tenor that caused Hermione to flinch without warning. "Forty or so, I should think."
"The first recorded member, if you recall?" Her voice fluttered and she hated it.
"Alexandre Ferrau du Malfoi,"—his accent was impeccable—"born 1032 A.D., died 1081." He looked a bit perturbed to be questioned about his family, and his eyes were flat and hard on hers.
"Ahh." Hermione found the fact that he knew this quite freakish, but didn't voice her reaction. "Well, let's guess that the first…er…Malfoi was actually born some one hundred years before this, but by the time anyone thought to record the family history, he could only remember as far back as their grandfather. Don't you think that it is perfectly plausible that the first Malfoy could have been born to muggle parents?" She could not gauge Draco's reaction to this, and tore her eyes from his to examine the remainder of the class. "Just speculation, mind you. Now, whether you choose to take this to heart or not, please attempt to understand that blood, despite what your parents may have told you, doesn't make much of a difference in our world. Muggleborns do just as well in society, are just as intelligent, and are just as magically-capable as quote-unquote 'purebloods'."
Grudging silence.
"As I said, we won't be here much longer. I'm not telling you how to live your life, here. I'm not even telling you to change anything. The only thing I'm asking you to do is to think about what we've discussed in this class. Think about Nietzsche, and how he believed that an overman, someone so perfect and above the line of morality, could essentially wipe out the mediocre majority to 'advance' society. Think about how that relates to Voldemort. Think about Adolf Hitler, his millions of victims, and how the war could have been. Remember that Muggle society has its values and merits as well. Consider the option that we are physically different from Muggles because of one mutation, because of something as unpredictable as chance, and that the term 'pureblooded' might be nothing but an illusion, meant to categorize people into groups that produce cruelty and prejudice." Hermione exhaled unsteadily, clasping her hands in a rigid entwinement before her, her knuckles white.
I have to make them see. Everything they know is deception.
Before she could register that this was bad, that this was not what she should be doing, she was walking over to the last place on earth she wanted to be and grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. Dragged him to the front of the room and ripped his left sleeve up to his elbow. He stared at her, face set in stone and lips pressed thinly. Not struggling. Letting her do it. Letting her show it.
Much of the class recoiled in their seats, unaccustomed to seeing one of theirs (so young, so unready) marked with that burning blackness. Hermione offered his pale forearm to them, her fingers digging into his flesh. His muscles were rigid beneath her hands (what are you doing, you silly girl?), the skin hot. She was breathing hard, her heart fluttering weakly in her chest as she fought sudden vertigo.
She couldn't look at it. She couldn't.
"This is not a symbol of glory, or power, or loyalty!" She nearly screamed, so lost in anger and grief that she could feel it like a wave coming to bury her.
Draco was shaking. It could have been her, though, trembling and wanting to scream because these people couldn't seem to get it.
I have to make them see.
"This is a symbol of hatred and brutality, and…and fucking inhumanity! It's not…" And here she weakened, curling in on her pain so that she was almost using the marked man next to her for support, her hands clenching his arm so hard. She took a breath, and straightened. "It's not something to be proud of."
And then she let him go and wanted to say something (I'm sorry?) but didn't. He looked at her for a long moment, looked at the side of her face that was turned away from him because she didn't want to see, and then went back to his seat and pulled his sleeve over that faded mark with her handprints in red all around it.
Hermione didn't care that she'd finally had the breakdown that they all said she would have. She simply went on. "Just… think for your self. Remember what the consequences of prejudice can be. And, for God's sake, never forget those we have lost, and why we have lost them," she whispered at last, sinking back to lean against her desk in her exhaustion, not caring that tears carved tracks down her face (you cry so much, silly girl). She forgot to be embarrassed. She had cracked her chest and bared her heart for them all to see, but she forgot to be humiliated. The class was completely hushed, shocked as they stared at this broken, sad girl. She felt the steady heat of Draco's eyes and looked up, her gaze holding his with a thing that was unspoken and secret. She saw a resolution in his face then, and felt what could have been dread or something else pool in her gut. She looked away.
Ron, I miss you.
She didn't know why the thought pervaded her mind just then, but it brought her some brand of strength. With a deep, collecting breath, Hermione spoke again, clearly and without tears, if a bit flat. "I wish to thank you all for being cooperative over these past six weeks; it has made my job much easier. I hope I've made some impact on your lives. You're all free to leave."
As they were collecting their bags and shooting furtive, uncertain looks in her direction, Hermione remembered one last thing. "You may all keep your copy of Crime and Punishment. A memento, let's call it."
She received more than several withered glances in response to that. More than one person touched her arm as they walked out of the room in thanks or comfort. She wasn't sure.
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They all left and she stayed still, head in her hands as she breathed. In and out, and again.
"I should be furious at you, you know." She knew his voice.
She didn't raise her head, but shook it slowly and stared at the ground. "I know. I know. I'm so sorry, Draco. That was not…kind of me."
A pause. Sought-after silence "You are so fucked up, Hermione Granger."
She looked up at him in surprise—was that some kind of a smile in the curve of his lips? Something in her body trembled. "So are you, hypocrite. Don't patronize me," she snapped coldly.
The some kind of smile disappeared. "I just…" He stopped like it pained him, and then tried again. "I wanted to thank you."
She could have fallen over. "W-What?"
"For last week."
"Oh."
More silence, only not so sought-after.
"Why are you so…different, Draco?" She asked as her tears dried and she felt normalcy begin to ease everything again.
He didn't answer for such a long time and only looked at her, the whole thing written out in the sharp lines of his face like a perverted fairy tale. "Merlin, Granger. Haven't you figured it out yet?"
Now was the time to explode. She was so confused. "No! Goddamnit, no! Was it the war? Voldemort cursing your mum until her brains leaked out her ears?"
Oh yeah, she knew about that. She read the papers, after all.
He flinched and looked like he wanted to physically shut her up with his hands or something else. He took a step towards her. "Granger—"
"No! You don't get to do that anymore! Come on, Draco, tell me, because I'm at the end of my rope. God, I hate you! Was it your dad? That bloody vacant house you live in? You are not supposed to be civil! You're supposed to be the bigoted prick that called me 'mudblood' and would've killed Dumbledore if he weren't such a fucking coward! You're not supposed to…" She couldn't go on and her face crumpled but she didn't cry.
He stepped forward again and grabbed her shoulders and shook her, because they both thought maybe she needed it. Her hair fell out of its styling and brushed his hands as it tumbled harshly down her back. When he spoke his voice was very quiet, and his body was stiff with the effort of controlling it. "Shut up, you stupid bint, and don't talk about things you don't understand."
"You're right, Draco, I don't understand!" She shouted this to his face, pounding on his chest with her stupid, pathetic little fists. "So please, just tell me something so I'm not so fucking confused!"
His hands on her shoulders grew tighter, and she just knew that the next day there would be five finger-shaped bruises on each side. He was staring at her, his eyes flicking back and forth as he studied hers, and then once down for nary a moment, to what could have been her lips. "You want answers, Granger?"
She let her head loll down, her hair covering her face because she was so tired. "Just help me to not be so confused, Draco. I just want things to be normal again."
"You'd rather I hate you and call you names and fucking kill people?"
"I don't know."
"You'd rather I be to disgusted to touch you?" And here his grip on her shoulders loosened, almost to a caress, and he stroked one finger down the side of her neck, across the shallow curve that made her shiver.
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
She looked up at him, staring straight into those gray eyes that held something that scared her, and jumped. "Is it me?"
He laughed, then. He threw back his head and laughed, his hands still on her. "It's everything," he hissed after he stopped laughing, abruptly and unnaturally. He leaned in close to her, his cheek almost touching hers as he whispered into her ear. "You come in to this classroom and you tell us everything we know is wrong. You come in looking like you do with your fucking confidence that covers up how truly messed up you really are and your muggle clothes and your hair and the knowledge that you're so smart that no one can argue with you. You say our parents are racist pigs who deserve nothing, not even Azkaban, and then you smile and say all you want for us to do is think. You tell us that Voldemort, the mentor of my crackpot father, was a fraud and not worth the time of day. You say there's no difference between mudbloods and people like me. You say muggles are just…like…us. You wanted answers? There you are."
Hermione stood completely still, skin humming and lips trembling. "I s-say that because it's true, Draco."
He finally stepped back from her, his eyes so intense that she nearly buckled. "Damn it, Granger, you're slow. The reason I've changed is because I fucking know that."
Her mouth opened but no sound came out. She finally managed a quiet exclamation, a shocked "o-oh."
"Remember the museum, when I said I'd lost everything?" He began, his fists clenched hard at his sides like he was trying to not touch her again. "I said that because I have. Because you've ripped everything I've ever known right out from under my feet like it was so easy for you. And I can't…hate you for it."
Now it was she who took a step closer to him, wanting to sooth the tremor in his jaw, the quiet desperation that the position of his body told of. "It wasn't easy for me."
He turned on her, grabbing her wrists and pushing her back until her bum pressed against the desk and he pressed against her. But she was not afraid. "Oh yeah?" He murmured harshly, squeezing her wrists hard enough to cause the bones to grind together unpleasantly. Hermione winced. "Well, it certainly looked it. You tore everything apart, Granger, and then you smiled at us like it was nothing."
And then she was crying again. "But it wasn't! I knew how much it would be hurting you all, but I had to do it!"
"Really? Why did you 'have' to do it, you sanctimonious bitch? Who was forcing you?"
"I did it because it's the right thing to do!" This she said in a broken voice, and something in her heart shattered with his face crushed just as hers had done and he dropped his head so that it was almost touching her, his grip on her wrists loosening.
She saw that his face was wet, and he finally allowed his forehead to rest on her shoulder. "Merlin, Granger. Have mercy, will you? Every time you speak you undo me."
And then he was kissing her, broken, silly little girl and all.
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"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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Author's Note: Whoop! That was long! I hope it was sufficiently beautiful; the last 500 words or so were meant to be.
EDIT: I changed the eensy bitty little mistake I made concerning the explaination of genetics in Hermione's lesson, because I'm anal like that and I can't stand to break some little pea-growing Austrian monk's rules. Blah. I actually realized my error when I read through the chapter several days after posting it, and have only now gotten around to fixing it. Kudos if you can figure out what it was Thanks to those who pointed it out, all you science majors you. I bet you can tell that genetics are a bit rusty in my brain, like just about everything else.
Awww… I love Draco so much. Angst galore.
I know that this chapter was a long time in coming. It's getting harder and harder for me to get into the writing mode—once I'm there, however, I can write for hours and hours on end. I think it has something to do with the holidays and laziness. What can you do?
Anyway, this fic might end up being longer than I said it was going to be. I've found some new inspiration. Not too much longer, mind you, but longer than eleven chapters, at least.
I love you all, and tell me what you think.