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Draco Malfoy is watching Hermione Granger drink firewhisky out of a bottle in the Slytherin Common Room. He has been watching her for more than ten minutes. Considerably more, but he's not acknowledging those extra minutes because he's played and won a game of chess since that period of observation. Therefore, logically, that time period is separate from this one and it has only been ten minutes. So more accurately, Draco Malfoy is again watching Hermione Granger drink firewhisky out of a bottle in the Slytherin Common Room. It hasn't stopped being simultaneously jarring and fascinating yet.
He's sprawled on a sofa, half paying attention to Blaise and Theo's turn at drinking chess. The rules are simple: you have to have a shot every time you lose a piece. Neither of them are especially good at the best of times, and this game is fast losing any semblance of strategy or, well, chess, much to the disgust of the pieces who are threatening to go on strike.
"You can't fucking move there," Zabini protests. "That's further than your knight can-"
"Yes I fucking can, it was on B5 and now-"
"Look even your own piece won't move there, Theo you cheating cun-"
Renard Wilkes drops down next to Draco and offers him the bottle he's holding. Infernobrandy.
Draco eyes the label contemptuously. "I wouldn't offer that to my Gamekeeper, Wilkes. What do you want?"
It's Halloween and it's a Saturday night and so everyone over the age of about fourteen is drinking. Including Hermione Granger. His mind just keeps on sticking on that. Granger. The wireless is on. Some fourth years are dancing. One of them looks like they're about to be sick. Two fifth years are snogging in an upsettingly aggressive manner. It's the closest the Slytherin Common Room has been to fun since the start of sixth year, just before he'd realised he'd ruined his life. For a few days he'd been a king amongst them, all his fear ruthlessly suppressed. He'd really thought it was what he wanted, that was the thing. Then reality had set in and the edges of the trap he'd walked into had become clear.
If they'd forced it onto his arm maybe he wouldn't want to get it off so fucking badly now. And maybe Hermione Granger wouldn't be drinking firewhisky out of a bottle on a familiar green sofa.
"When are you going to do something about the Mudblood?" Wilkes asks, following his gaze. Draco has been waiting for someone to broach this subject. He's surprised it's taken this long. Mostly he's frustrated he - despite being mostly an outcast - still has to deal with this. But he is also slightly flattered that anyone thinks he still has the pull to take on Hermione Granger, firewhisky-drinking-in-the-Slytherin-Common-Room Granger, these days.
Well. That's not true. There are still channels. The Malfoys might be disgraced on both sides of the war, but they aren't without friends and they're certainly not without generations of carefully accumulated blackmail material. They're still Malfoys . They've been on the losing side of things before, and it's always, eventually, been righted. If he wanted to have Hermione Granger expelled or something he could probably do it, though it wouldn't be easy. Expensive and difficult but not impossible. Wilkes's family's only claim to anything has been keeping itself pure but as this has mostly ended up with Wilkes being his own second cousin, Draco doesn't find it particularly impressive.
"'Do something'?" he echoes, mockingly. He's thought over and over about how to handle this moment when it comes and now it's here he's not sure what to do. Maybe he should just make a comment about cousin-swapping. Marrying. Whatever.
It comes down to who he wants to be, and he can't even think about that without wanting to cut his own arm off and blow something up. He only knows what he doesn't want to be, which is the Draco Malfoy he'd been at the Battle of Hogwarts, stuck between a Dark Lord and a hard place.
He thinks about how fierce Granger looked with her wand to his neck. How quickly she reads him these days. How deep she can cut with a few words.
You protect them then. They all look to you. I can see them, waiting for you to do something. But you can't, can you? Because you were stupid and blind enough to follow your father into a war you didn't believe in and couldn't win.
He hates Granger. He does. But he's watching her swig firewhisky from the bottle on a green sofa, laughing at something Erminada Burke is saying. He's seen how she's protected the younger Slytherins. He has no plans to do something .
"She doesn't belong here." Wilkes insists.
[ Had he believed in it? Did he believe in it now? Could they have won? Should they? Was anyone in the world more glad than Draco Malfoy that the Dark Lord was gone? ]
Draco smirks at this, still watching her. She pulls her thick, dark hair back. She's telling a story. She's more lit up than she usually is, but then she is drinking firewhisky - quite a decent label too - from a bottle. From the way Patil keeps interjecting, he can tell she's pushing Granger to speak. It's rare to see her interact with people now she's finally managed to lose Potter and Weasley. (He tries not to think about the look Ron Weasley had had on his face the week before. Satisfied wasn't going far enough. It was disgusting, really it was.) She holds herself aloof these days, not like when she was younger and gagging for approval. Ironically she has never looked more like she belongs in the magical world, he thinks a little bitterly, than she has this term.
She carries herself differently now. She walks around with all the self-assured disregard for public opinion of someone - well.
Someone like the man he, Draco, was supposed to have become.
followed your father followed your father
"So what's your big idea then, Wilkes?"
"I was thinking," Draco doubts it but he listens anyway, curious, "we could get her alone, a few of us. Teach her a bit of a lesson."
He turns his gaze on the other boy now. Wilkes is flushed with cheap brandy, eyes glazed. He's watching Granger too. He looks hungry. Hungry for power, maybe. Revenge.
"What sort of lesson?"
If it's sexual, Malfoy thinks, uncomfortable, irritated, he's going to have to say something to her. She's a fucking nightmare in almost every way and she can more than handle a couple of idiotic seventh years trying to rough her up but that -
He'd have to warn her about that.
"Just a talking to, you know. Rough her up a bit."
Draco can't help it. He laughs.
"Mate," he says, trying it on for size. His mother would hate him saying it. It feels good though and it makes Wilkes' flush deepen. "She fought my Aunt Bella with Bella's own wand. You'd be lucky to just end up in St Mungos."
"I don't believe that," Wilkes sneers. "That's just one of those lies made up about that lot."
Malfoy glances back across the room. followed your father followed your father your father your father your -
"You should believe it," Malfoy says, quiet and vicious. "I was there the day she got the wand, and I was there the day she used it. Where the fuck were you? Get lost, Wilkes I'm tired of you."
"I don't take orders from you," Wilkes says, unwisely. "Your family are finished anyway. Traitors."
"My family isn't any of your business," Malfoy says evenly, then looks the younger boy hard in the eye. "But fucking try me, I dare you."
Maybe it's the whisky in his veins, maybe it's the anger, maybe it's just the way Hermione fucking Granger looked in the corridor seven days and six hours ago, but he holds Renard Wilkes' gaze till the other boy drops his eyes, struggles to his feet, and walks away. He can feel eyes on them, but he's too well-trained to look. Only total impassivity will carry off the exchange with him as the outright victor. He sips his glass - not a bottle, he's not a fucking heathen - as casually as he can.
He hasn't stood up to anyone in so long he'd forgotten how it felt. It floods his veins.
Granger's words have stopped echoing around his head at last.
"Interesting," Theo says once the attention has moved on. "I didn't realise it would take defending Granger's honour to get you riled up."
"Fuck off, Nott," he snarls.
"I certainly will not," Theo protests. "I am mid-way through this very important game of chess."
"Malfoy's right anyway," Blaise says. "That's another shot for you Theo, you shouldn't have moved your pawn there. Though I wouldn't mind watching Granger make a twat of Wilkes."
This is so unexpected from fastidious Blaise Zabini that Theo and Draco can only gape at him.
"What?" he snaps.
"Do you fancy her or something?" Theo asks. "She is quite fit, for a swotty Mudblood but-"
"Nah, Granger scares the shit out of me. Not my kink. Patil's looking good though isn't she?"
Draco tunes them out. He looks back across the room. Theo's right, he thinks, his mind floating on the firewhisky fumes, Granger is looking fit. Her dark eyes meet his and hold as she takes another sip. He hadn't been able to meet them the day the Snatchers brought her. They're very dark now.
She's just a mudblood , he thinks angrily. He doesn't say it aloud any more. It would be a violation of his parole if anyone reported him, but it's not just that. It's starting to feel wrong in his head too. It jitters over itself. Stutters.
Wrong like maybe it's not just that they picked the wrong leader for their side. Wrong like they didn't just lose the war because the Dark Lord had become obsessed with Potter. Wrong like maybe there are deeper wrongs in everything he's been taught. Wrong like seeing her, seeing them all-
"I'm going to bed," he tells the others, pulling his eyes back.
"Probably best mate," Theo says. "Your staring match was starting to turn me on."
Draco kicks Theo's chair legs out from under him as he goes, and enjoys the panic that flashes across the other boy's face as he topples to the ground with a deeply satisfying crash, taking the chessboard with him.
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[He glares at her the next morning. She doesn't even seem hungover. She catches it, and has the temerity to look amused.]
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November brings rain and ever-darkening days. Draco stares out of the library window at the Quidditch pitch and wishes he'd had the courage to try out this year instead of being a fucking coward and assuming they wouldn't have him because of the skull on his arm. Slytherin are playing Ravenclaw in their first game of the season. He can't bear to watch from the sidelines so he's up here instead.
He should have chosen a different desk, one far away from the great floor-to-ceiling arch that gives only too good a view of the swooping players. Draco has always loved flying in the rain and wind. It's a thrill that nothing else has ever quite matched. Him and his magic against the wild weather.
Maybe he should just fly anyway, just get on his broom and keep going up over the mountains and out over the North Sea. Fly so low the spray from the waves soaks him. Fly till he's too tired to stay on, and -
He pulls himself away. Looks down at his book. Tries to read. Drifts into a short but sweet fantasy about Makins the current Seeker getting drowned by the giant squid (they'd beg him to take over, and he'd be so magnanimous -), shoves the daydream away, and reluctantly forces himself to read more.
The thing is this book doesn't have the answers. He knows that. He has to look anyway. Madam Pomfrey has told him if he's sent back to her one more time for trying to remove his Dark Mark she'll have him sent to the psych ward at St Mungos for evaluation. But he has to keep looking, or accept that it's just going to be there forever.
[It's not black now he's gone. It looks more like a burn. A brand. Draco has tried burning over it, conceal it with more scars. It hadn't worked. The skin around it had blistered but the mark itself had resisted. Madam Pomfrey had healed them. He'd tried removing the skin too, that had made her really cross.]
Sometimes he thinks he deserves it stay forever. Sometimes the psych ward seems tempting. Sometimes he wishes he'd died in the war.
He flicks through the book. Nothing . Nothing. He lounges back and scans the room.
She's there. He didn't notice her come in. There's no one else around. She's two tables over. Close, given the rest of the room is empty, but not too close. She's pulled all that ridiculous hair on top of her head in what a blind man might be excused for calling a bun. It's not that frizzy any more, but he pretends it is when he tries to find insults. It's dark and shining these days. Her tan has faded but her skin is luminous. Theo's right. He hates that Theo's right.
Mudblood , he reminds himself.
It doesn't work. He opens his mouth. They haven't spoken since the corridor. A week of glares and silence that is anything but quiet.
"No hot date with the Weasel this weekend?" he jeers and wants to jump off the Astronomy Tower, a place he'd rather avoid at all costs. Pathetic.
Hermione Granger looks up and smirks at him. "I would ask why you're not at the pitch," she says, "but I'm not in the mood to pick such low-hanging fruit."
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This is the thing about Hermione Granger. Nott and Zabini have tried ribbing him for what even he can't deny is a blatant interest - not that it's a romantic one. It isn't. It's something so much more complicated than that.
It's just that she was there. She was there and he was there and no one else will ever know what that was like. No one else, not even her friends, knows what Hermione Granger looks like when she is about to break. She still does it all the time too: Hermione Granger screams herself raw from torture at least once a week in his dreams. Sometimes she looks straight at him and pleads and begs for help and he does nothing.
Sometimes, he saves her. It's worse waking up from those ones only to remember that, when it happened, he really had done nothing.
Draco Malfoy has seen her at what must, surely, have been her lowest moment. It was certainly one of his. He can't ever get away from it now.
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This is the other thing about Granger: she's been seeking him out all term. She never gets close enough to take away her plausible deniability but he can only suppose she too feels that strange and awful bond. And he's sure that she likes it when he makes her angry. She spends most of her time walking about with her mind somewhere else: he likes how a snide remark from him pulls her back, sends colour to her cheeks, makes her eyes flash. He thinks she might like it too.
It's addictive.
"Do you wish you hadn't had to come back?" she asks, surprising him with the change of tack. It's the first genuine question she's asked him all term. She has every right to demand of him what he would grant to no one else. She, tortured on his floor, could demand far more than she realises. He would give a lot in reparations for that day. Too much to fit into an apology.
[ He saw so many other people tortured, but not like that. Not someone in his year, someone he knew, lying on the floor and lying with her mouth. ]
He just manages to swallow his first response - snide, cutting, defensive - and considers it.
"Sometimes," he says. "But it hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be. And they didn't have to let me come."
Saying this aloud makes him hot and sick and aware that his father would sneer at the response. But he is grateful. He doesn't need anyone else to know it. But if she knows, that's… that's not the same. He's heard her scream. Seen her body convulse. She's seen him weak too. Desperate.
When he found out, later, that she'd been lying to Bellatrix, the most famous torturer after the Dark Lord himself, well -
maybe that was when he'd started to think -
Mudblood . Wrong. He feels a little bit dizzy.
"What about you? You could have done anything."
"It sounds stupid," she says, closing her book, "but I just wanted a normal year, you know? No Voldemort -" Draco winces "- no basilisk, no time-turning to save a hippogriff, no tournament, no Umbridge, no-"
"Hippogriff?" his mouth drops open. "Granger, are you telling me you lot saved that murderous chicken?" he demands.
[She'd been brave in a way he cannot wrap his head around, a way that makes shame prickle all over him. Granger would have died rather than give up Harry Potter's secrets. So many people he saw in the war thought they would rather die. Granger is the only one he'd ever seen who'd have gone through with it.]
She grins at him. "You were an absolutely ghastly child, I hope you realise that."
"You weren't exactly a delight yourself," he points out. "Why did you do it?"
"Do what? Save Buckbeak?" her arched brows knit together, confused. He likes the expression, an unusual one on her. Unusual and unguarded and unhaughty.
"At the feast, Granger."
"Oh. You know why. It made me angry. All the booing. They weren't - I know it was hard here last year. Terrible. I know that. But half of them don't even -" She gestures helplessly, wordless.
"They weren't there ," he agrees.
He eyes her speculatively. It's not just that. She sat with him . But asking will seem pathetic. He's about to anyway when voices trail through the stacks. The moment breaks, and they turn back to their books.
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But later, when he packs up his bag and stands, she does too. She doesn't say anything as they walk back to Slytherin together, and if she is as vitally, vibrantly aware of the stares they attract from the students coming back from the match as he is, she remains impassive.
Mudblood, he thinks desperately, as she turns away without a word to walk to the girls' side of the dungeons. Mudbloodmudbloodmudblood.
It doesn't work. He cannot stick this one word to her and let it conceal all the rest of the words that make up who she is now that he has started to see them. There are too many.
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this is my favourite chapter so far. i hope you like it.
