Love's Sweetest Sorrows Chapter 2
"Malfoy," Hermione responded, trying to keep her voice measured so he wouldn't pick up on her anxiety.
His gaze was steady and she felt her insides bristle under his scrutiny. She refused to let him see how he unnerved her. He looked like a man who had been pushed to the brink of death repeatedly, only to be brought back two steps and kept alive until his next brush with Death's cold fingers. Hermione found herself drowning in his eyes, the grey smoke choking the air from her lungs.
"Why is she here?" Malfoy asked Theo, never blinking and never relenting.
"Hermione is my partner," the burly wizard responded, waving her over to sit next to him and across from the inmate.
"Are you fucking her?" the blond asked, an icy edge to his tone.
"Not at all—I've actually been seeing Luna Lovegood," Theo responded. "And please don't speak of Hermione that way."
"Then how did you end up mixed up with the likes of the Golden Trio's swotty little princess?" Malfoy asked, finally turning his stare from Hermione as she sat.
"Draco, Hermione is my partner in the firm. And she's a damn good research collector. We're both going to try and save you from the Kiss, so you might want to hold your tongue," Theo replied coolly, though Hermione could hear a little amusement in his voice.
Malfoy uncrossed his arms and sat forward, leaning on the table and folding his hands neatly. "Why now? I've been in here for five years, Nott."
"You weren't given a proper trial. That dolt Hiram did you no justice the first time—it's part of the reason why I went through the Ministry's program to become a barrister. It had nothing to do with my father. Hermione and I just finished the program last summer…" Theo explained, opening his hands in an "I'm sorry" manner, his voice laced with apology.
"Not to mention, Malfoy," Hermione finally found her voice and prayed it wouldn't crack, "an appeal is nearly unheard of within the Wizengamot. We need to collect information and gather a strong case against the Kiss—the entire Wizarding world wants your head on a platter."
Malfoy's eyes were narrowed on his friend, full of questions but void of life or the will to ask said questions. He looked back at the witch, who tugged at the collar of her shirt and smoothed a hand over her skirt. "What do you even know about me, my role in the War, my role within the Death Eaters? My family?"
Hermione bit her lip and picked at a hangnail on her thumb. "Admittedly, not much. But we need to change that. I need to know everything. From the beginning."
Malfoy raised an eyebrow at her. "And how do you suppose we do that? You want me to write in a diary?" he asked, his voice dripping with condescension.
"No. But we need to see your memories, Draco," Theo interjected.
"No," Malfoy said, his voice stony.
"Draco—"
Malfoy looked to his longtime friend. "No. You will not watch the memories. You don't need to see the things we only ever heard rumors of come to fruition, Theodore. You don't need the nightmares your father and best friend's actions would bring."
Hermione felt her lips part as she gaped at Malfoy. He didn't want Theo watching because he worried for his mental faculties? She looked at Theo who was staring at his friend, his gaze softened some. She and Theo had carefully skirted the subject of his father's role as a Death Eater. Theo never spoke of his childhood growing up with his father's Dark influence.
"I'll watch them," she volunteered, feeling her stomach tumble dangerously.
Both Theo and Malfoy looked at her. She could tell Theo was about to protest, but Malfoy put a hand up to silence him. "I will only show them to Granger."
"Hermione," Theo began, "we've never represented a Death Eater before…some of his memories may be…foul."
"Malfoy himself is foul," she replied, staring at the dirty and discontent face of her childhood foe.
Theo let out a loud laugh but neither of the other two occupants of the room said anything. Hermione could feel the seething hatred rolling off of Malfoy in palpable waves. She felt the same kind of emotions welling within her own body. Every nerve in her body was on edge. She had read stories of the Death Eaters' antics and though she had never been intimidated by Malfoy in her years at Hogwarts, somehow knowing that he had been a part of those activities heightened her wariness of him just that much more.
"You will come here each Monday and I will show you memories between the hours of noon and two. You will watch them all first and extract what you need later," Malfoy told her, an air of finality in his words.
"I will come here each Monday, Wednesday and Friday until you have run out of memories to show me. I need to collect them quickly because we need to build a case and get an appeal quickly. The Kiss is three months away. The first month is information collecting and case building. The next two months will consist of a trial and hopefully a pardon on the kiss," she replied, crossing her leg and swinging her foot cockily.
Malfoy looked down the table at it and then back up at her. "Monday. And don't be late, or I will head back into the cell and you can wait until Wednesday," he told her, standing.
"What makes you think you can call the shots? When we're the ones helping you?" Hermione demanded.
Theo put a hand on her arm and Malfoy leaned forward on the table, the metallic rattle of his chains vibrating her eardrums unpleasantly. "I resolved myself to dying a long time ago, Granger. You are doing my mother a favor, not me."
And with that, he waved to the prison guard and was immediately ushered from the room without another word. Hermione stared at his retreating form, watching his inmate-waddle as he shimmied one small, shackled step at a time down the corridor. "Well, he's pleasant. I can see why you were best mates," Hermione said sarcastically.
"He wasn't always so…"
"Evil?" Hermione supplied.
"Cold," Theo corrected, glaring at her.
o-o-o
Hermione went through her nightly routine the same as she always did—washed and dried her hair, put the creams Luna made on her clean face, slipped into cozy flannel pajamas, fed an ailing, elderly Crookshanks and climbed into her bed with a book and a cup of chamomile tea.
But this particular evening, she couldn't get comfortable. No matter how much she tried, she just couldn't relax properly. She couldn't slip into the ease that the familiarity of her cottage and a routine brought.
Hermione tried to tell herself that it had nothing to do with her unnerving morning with Malfoy. She had a very brief encounter with him and she had agreed to future meetings. Malfoy was no different than any other client. And he was Theo's best friend.
She tossed and turned in her bed, kicking the covers off when she grew too warm, then shivering when it was too cold. Her mattress felt too hard, her pillow too soft. She sat up and tried to read, but her eyes were too tired and glazed over to focus on the printed word. She stood up and went into the living room and flipped on the television. There was nothing on except late night infomercials, advertising non-stick pans she didn't need since she never cooked and wonderbras she couldn't wear because her breasts were unfavorably small.
Crookshanks watched his owner's antsy behavior with one eye open, following her as she paced to the kitchen and peered blankly into an open refrigerator. After too many long moments, Hermione pulled the items out to make herself a sandwich. She went through the motions and once she had a magnificent looking sandwich, she tossed it, untouched into the sink basin and stormed back into her room.
This was ridiculous. It was Draco Malfoy. The boy had once been turned into a ferret. He had once danced poorly in a crowd at the Yule Ball. He had sat opposite of her and learned how to make a pepper-up potion. How dangerous could he possibly be? What could he have possibly done? Harry had said he'd lowered his wand on Dumbledore, so he wasn't as hardened as he seemed. Was he?
Hermione grumpily tossed herself back into her bed, determined to get those piercing steel eyes out of her mind. But it was no use—they were branded behind her eyelids, searching deeper into her brain.
After a combined hour or so of sleep, she pried herself out of her bed the next morning and made a cup of strong coffee. Her fireplace roared to life and Ron Weasley stepped through, a lop-sided grin on his face. He leaned in and kissed her cheek before peering into her cup. "No milk or sugar. Long night?" he asked, placing a bag of Molly's homemade muffins on the counter.
Ron had recently quit the Auror position and had been working at the Quidditch Supplies Store in Hogsmeade, two doors down from the office, while he gathered himself. Hermione nearly groaned at the sight of him, cringed as he wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her neck. Their relationship, once passionate and romantic, was cracking, deep fault-lines being forged with every bickering argument they'd had in recent times. She held out hope that everything would go back to normal when Ron found a career path he could enjoy.
He had once loved being an Auror, but the constant Dark energy had worn him down and he'd quit just before Christmas and moved back home with his mother. He had hinted hard at moving in with Hermione, but she hadn't felt right about living together just yet. Truth be told—she enjoyed her privacy. No one there to whine about her light being on at all hours of the night as she read in bed. No red headed git using up all of her hot water every morning—doing what, she would never figure out. No man to demand a cooked meal or joke her anal-retentive behaviors in her own home. She felt guilty about denying Ron this next level in their relationship, especially after years in a relationship. His sister and Harry were already two children deep and Neville and Hannah had just announced their first pregnancy. Theo and Luna were going strong and he'd mentioned to Hermione that he was close to purchasing a ring. And she and Ron were living separately, he with his mother, and she was over-watering her plant and sobbing into a pint of ice cream as she watched rom coms alone in her flat.
"Malfoy," Hermione said as a reply to Ron's question.
Ron dropped his hands from her and stepped around to lean on the counter, retrieving one of the muffins from the bag and stuffing it unceremoniously into his mouth. "Draco Malfoy? What about him?" he asked, narrowing his eyes and spitting crumbs as he spoke.
"Ronald, close your mouth," she chided, once again feeling more like a mother than a girlfriend. "And, Theo and I are taking him on as a case."
Ron stopped chewing and swallowed hard, focusing on the sleep-deprived witch before him. "Why in the hell would you do something like that?" he asked, his voice rising angrily. "I told you Theo was trouble. But would you listen to me? No, because what the hell do I know?"
"Can you calm down?" she asked calmly.
"No! Malfoy is a Death Eater, Hermione. I caught men like him on a weekly basis! He's dangerous and well-versed in the Dark Arts!" Ron yelled, stepping away from the counter.
"He's wandless, in prison, shackled and so weak that I doubt he could attack me if he even wanted to," Hermione told him.
"You can't see him! I-I forbid it, Hermione!" Ron told her, crossing his arms.
If there was one thing in this world Hermione hated, it was being told what she could and couldn't do. "Oh, you forbid it, huh? Well, I've already agreed to it and I have an appointment to see him Monday morning," she told him. "And if you don't like it, tough! This is my livelihood. I am trying to buy fifty percent of that firm, Ron. You know this!"
"You and Nott are such good friends, why doesn't he just give you half?" he demanded.
"I want you to leave," she told him, scooping up Crookshanks and heading toward her room. "And don't come back until you have a better attitude."
o-o-o
Hermione headed into the office later that morning, her nerves frazzled between Malfoy and Ron. Theo was sitting at his desk, his feet propped up and flipping through a stack of parchment rolls. She took a seat across from him and dropped her bag to the floor. "What are you going through?"
"Eye witness accounts from Draco's first trial," he replied, pushing the stack toward her.
Hermione grabbed the top one and unrolled it to read it over. It was the account of the third of September 1997 as told by Antonin Dolohov during his trial. "The other Death Eaters turned their backs on him," she commented.
The acts Dolohov described were despicable and painted Malfoy in a grotesque light. Theo nodded and sighed. "They all thought that the more they talked, the less likely they would be to get the Kiss."
Every Death Eater rounded up in the first sweep after the war had ended up being sentenced to indefinite imprisonment and the Kiss. The Ministry had been executing one Kiss a month since the war, nearly sixty soul deaths total thus far, and there were dozens more yet. "Who did he give up, then?" she asked quietly, sombered by Dolohov's words.
"Only one," Theo told her, tossing the roll of parchment he'd been pouring over back into the stack. "His father."
Hermione let those words wash over her. Lucius Malfoy was a hardened, evil man with absolutely no redeeming qualities. But for Draco to despise him so much that he gave his own father up spoke volumes to her. There was more than meets the eye in that situation and she found a tiny little itch at the back of her mind—she wanted to know what had driven Malfoy to join Voldemort's army and why he hated Lucius so.
Theo was staring at her from across the desk, his head back against the chair as he looked down over his nose at her. "Hermione. You have to understand what it was like growing up in that environment. How toxic that belief system was. That prejudice was beaten into us from a very early age."
"You turned out normally. You didn't join the Death Eaters," she told him.
"Only because the War ended. Had it kept going, upon my eighteenth birthday, it would have been expected of me by my father, by Draco's father, by the Dark Lord himself. Sixteen was young to take the Mark, but Draco faced extenuating circumstances," he shrugged, as though speaking about joining a team of evil dark wizards was the most normal conversation he'd had all week.
"But you wouldn't have done it," Hermione voiced with conviction.
Theo stared for a long minute and then closed his eyes to avoid her steady look. "I don't honestly know what I would have done. I was prepared to but hoped I wouldn't have to."
She felt the hair on the back of her arms stand up as she thought about the former Slytherin she had thought she knew so well taking the Mark. He was nearly admitting that he would have done the same had it not been for the War's end. "How could you say that, Theo?"
"Hermione…things were different back then. I was different. My mindset was…unsettling. I'm simply stating that I don't know what I would have done had things gone the other way. Luckily for me—they didn't," Theo explained in a measured tone.
o-o-o
