HEY BIG IMPORTANT A/N AT THE END
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It's not like they become friends after that. They're hardly even more civil.
Draco Malfoy's moods are as unpredictable and stormy as the Scottish autumn. He's angry. Hermione thinks he is unravelling. She thinks he deserves it. She thinks he deserves other things too.
So no. She is not friends with Malfoy. She can't imagine ever being friends with him.
The trouble is that now he's not bullying her, she finds him funny. She can't help it. Every now and then, she catches herself laughing at his jokes. Even the ones he makes at her, the ones he's baited with just enough to make her bite, but not enough to really put her back up. The ones that make her feel a little more of a girl again. He's witty, in his own venomous way.
Hermione writes long letters to Ron and gets short ones back. They're affectionate, but distracted. He's never been the best correspondent, but he is trying.
He's too busy to come up for another weekend, he says, because he's helping George in the shop on his days off. [He leaves unsaid that George needs him, that he's struggling. She feels a surge of warmth at this. A surge of sorrow too.] He'll see her in December, he promises. He can't wait.
She dreams about the day he left, and hates herself for it. They swept it under the rug in the aftermath of the battle, in the relief and the grief of it all. They've never really dealt with it.
She knows he, like George, is struggling with Fred's death, but though she asks about that he skirts around it in his answers.
She thinks about him. She thinks about Harry. She dreams about them. They're woven into her in ways pulled taut by their absence.
Harry comes to Hogsmeade to visit. It's not a Hogsmeade weekend and only the top two years are allowed out, so it doesn't cause a riot, exactly, but it's certainly busier than normal. They have dinner, her and Harry and Ginny and everyone who stops by to say hello Harry mate how are you, in The Three Broomsticks. They order the stew and a hearty bottle of Nain Rouge, a lutin-made wine. Too hearty for Hermione. She prefers burgundy. The first sip conjures up Normandy in what is supposed to be an idyllic way. It reminds Hermione of a holiday she'd taken with her parents when she was - oh, twelve, maybe thirteen. They'd gone to France a lot.
"I've never been to France," Harry says when they snap out of the illusion of cliffs and coast and rolling farmland. "Looks nice though. Actually, I've never left the UK. Uncle Vernon didn't like foreigners much more than he liked Wizards. Big fan of Kent though."
Hermione snorts and his green eyes dance. She doesn't understand - has never understood - how he's so full of love when he was treated so badly.
"I've been to Egypt and Romania," Ginny says. "That's it."
"We should go," Hermione says, repressing the memory of all the many international holidays she, privileged only child of professionals with intellectual leanings, has taken. "You might even be anonymous in France, Harry."
She doubts it but he grins at the idea, and much of the meal is lost to planning all the places Harry can now go, now he's of age, wealthy, in charge of his own life. No Dursleys, no Dumbledore.
Harry asks her about Slytherin, but his heart's not in it. It's easy to move him onto his new life, onto Auror training and days at Quidditch matches and the Grimmauld Place renovations he's paid someone else to take care of. He still forgets it's all over, sometimes, he tells Hermione. Almost all the known Death Eaters have been caught. They've turned on each other like starving dogs. The cases are going to be easy to build. More difficult is finding the people who quietly supported Voldemort's ideas, if not his violence. "Kingsley says it'll take years but we're already making a difference," he reports, rather cheerfully.
Hermione is amused by how many times Kingsley says by the end of the meal.
After dinner, he and Ginny vanish upstairs to their room with unconvincing claims of fatigue. Hermione goes to walk back to Hogwarts but she's hailed by Parvati. She's sitting with Neville, Seamus and Dean. A few other students are dotted around the pub, including Theo Nott and Blaise Zabini. No Malfoy, of course, not in Madam Rosmerta's queendom.
"Hermione," Parvati calls out to her warmly, "won't you join us?"
Parvati has made friends more effortlessly in Slytherin than Hermione has. She's also been better about seeing their old housemates too. Hermione doesn't really envy her the former. She's never wanted those friends. But she knows she has been withdrawn with the Gryffindors, knows she's avoided them.
It's just, they always want to talk to her about the war and about Harry and Ron, ask her in hushed tones how she's coping in the dungeons like it's a real snake pit and not just a group of privileged snobs with their fangs ripped out.
"Did you hear?" Parvati asks eagerly, pouring Hermione a glass of wine from the bottle. "I got a letter from her mum today. She's awake. They're going to let me see her next week."
"Lavender?" Hermione asks, genuinely stunned.
"You saved her life, Hermione," Parvati says, dark eyes glossy with tears.
Hermione's skin itches. She feels like she is watching the conversation from three feet above the table. Like she is floating.
"That's amazing," she says automatically. "I'm so glad she's awake."
And she is, she is glad. She's relieved and she's thrilled and she feels nothing and Parvati is giving her the look, the one that makes her want to flee.
The urge fades as they move onto other topics and it's a nice evening all round. It's good to see Neville especially. He asks after Ron, of course, asks her if she's alright in Slytherin, but after all that he talks to her about Herbology, confides that Professor Sprout has recommended him for a programme in the Amazon Rainforest, that he'll be spending a year there and then a year in Tibet.
"That's wonderful ," Hermione tells him, and means it.
Before the end of November Draco Malfoy is back in the hospital wing. This time Hermione takes him her notes without being asked. He's in the same bed and when she asks for him Madam Pomfrey looks genuinely concerned.
"That boy," she sighs. "Try to talk some sense into him."
He looks worse than last time. It's easy to forget the unravelling when he's in class or at dinner, his robes pressed and hair neat and his demeanour impassive. He sneers at the Muggle notebook she hands him full of Potions notes.
"What's that?"
"Don't be such a bigot. It's more practical than parchment."
He opens it and examines the pages.
"It is easier to read than the last lot I suppose," he says with his customary grace. Her rebellion has extended to a biro. It's a lot easier to read.
She bites back a smile and for some reason, maybe because he's unguarded again or because she has nowhere to be or because she senses a paradigm shift and just can't fucking help herself, she sits down on the chair next to his hospital bed.
"What is it about Muggle culture that scares you so much?" she asks.
"I'm not scared," he says defensively.
"We can talk about why you're in the hospital wing if you'd rather have that conversation," she says pointedly. His arm is bound up this time. Maybe they should have that conversation.
"Fine. I don't care what muggles do with their own stuff or existing or whatever -"
"Generous of you," she can't help herself snapping.
"But," he continues emphatically, "it is a different culture and it's sapping away at ours. We celebrate Muggle holidays, people wear Muggle clothes, hold themselves to Muggle morals... it's making us less magical."
It's an insidious fallacy, but she's not going to point that out. Not yet. Malfoy, raised as he was, won't value learning from another culture on her word. He'll have to find things to respect all for himself.
"I don't know anything about what you see as Wizarding culture," Hermione says after a moment. "You don't share it and then you resent us for keeping elements of our own."
He hisses out a breath.
"That's fair," he says reluctantly.
"Maybe… maybe you could tell me about some of it, and I could tell you about where I come from." She is tentative, brittle, scared. Angry at these old families for the world they have hoarded. Angry at how hopeful she feels. If she can win this boy around, maybe the war wasn't so terrible.
Maybe there's something left, now, after, to fight for.
He flips the notebook over, picking at the staples in the binding.
"Does it come with the lines on?"
He looks awfully young today, grey eyes soft and sleepy with pain potions.
She nods. She can't wait to tell Harry about this. Draco Malfoy's curiosity stoked by a schoolbook.
"Useful."
He leans back against the piled pillows, eyelids closing.
"Why don't you read me a bit of one of those Muggle books you've got stashed in your bag. Let's see what all the fuss is about."
Awake, alive, seen.
"I'm not very good at reading aloud," she protests.
"You'll be fine."
Hermione thinks about the few works of Muggle fiction in her bag, thinks about how she stopped reading their novels to learn about the world she was thrust into. How she's been trying again.
She summons one silently. He watches through half-closed eyes.
"I knew that bag was highly illegal," he says, smiling with satisfaction. "Pretending to be a good girl swot while breaking every rule ever thought up is very Slytherin of you, Granger."
It's the nicest thing he has ever said to her, in terms of intention rather than effect. But she feels a prickle of embarrassment that he's noticed her bag. She's charmed the beads off, turned it black. She keeps it in her book bag these days but she ties it to her robes for meals. She should try leaving it in her room. She will. Soon.
"I haven't read this one," she says, feeling a little bashful then firmly repressing it. It's just Malfoy. Malfoy with his left forearm all bandaged up in violence and hope. "My mum really liked it though. It's set at a university in America - like Hogwarts but for after school." She clears her throat slightly. " The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston."
"What's a helicopter?"
"A Muggle flying machine."
"I've seen them in the sky."
"Those are probably planes. These are smaller and don't go as far but they're easier to manoeuvre. They're searching from the air for a missing boy."
She draws one made of flame in the air with her wand. It hovers over his bed, lands, and disolves into nothing.
"Thank you, Professor Granger," he says meekly, a smile flickering around his mouth.
She reads on until he stops interrupting with questions and falls asleep, and when she goes she leaves a duplicated copy of The Secret History by his bed.
On the 30th of November The Daily Prophet publishes the full list of casualties from the war.
It's a bad day, a day to be got through. Hermione doesn't read it. She knows the names, doesn't need to see them in black on white. She will one day. But not yet. It's too soon to carry the weight of all the people she doesn't know, with the deaths of Fred, Tonks, Remus and Dobby still so raw.
It's a very bad day to be the only former Death Eater within reach. Hermione is watching and not reading so she is the only one to see the fear and sorrow slide over his face before he puts on his mask of impassivity.
[She does read the next page. The page listing everyone who's been freed from Azkaban and reunited with their families. The page of reasons it was worth fighting, worth losing her innocence.]
By lunchtime, Hermione is tired of watching Theo, always two paces behind Malfoy, try to deflect the hexes shot at his back. She catches him up on the stairs after Arithmancy. He'd been late. He'd been at the Hospital Wing. She doesn't think he put himself there, this time.
"What method did you use for 14b? Professor Vector said my working was accurate but there's a better alternative."
She looks up at him, sees the fury, softens at the defeat in his grey eyes.
"Changley would work," he says after a moment, "but I prefer the Nocten take. It's trickier to get right but once you do it's a smoother working overall."
"Can I see?"
He makes to go left, avoid the Great Hall.
"You can show me over lunch," she says firmly.
"I thought I told you already I wasn't a house-elf," he mutters. "Or that orange monstrosity you call a cat. I don't need your pity, Granger."
"This isn't just about you," she says, trying not to let the dig about Crookshanks rankle. And it's not. They have to come out of the war better, or what was the point? She feels panic, and thinks of the names. Aberley, Lavinia (released). Ackton, George (released). Addwell, Peter (released).
He doesn't look pleased, but he walks with her into the hall and past the other three tables. They're already busy. It's a long way down from Arithmancy. Hermione pastes a smile on her face.
"Where did you find Nocten?" she asks. "I've only seen it in footnotes."
"This will irritate you," he says, his face lightening into amusement, "but we have a much better selection of Arithmancy texts at home than at school."
"That is incredibly annoying," she agrees, "and yet I've beaten you every single year."
He smiles a little at that, as they sit down. It's not much but it's something. Enough to echo around the school, she hopes. If she must be a symbol and not a girl, then at least here too is a symbol instead of a boy.
"Today is terrible," Hermione says quietly, "and it's not that I think you shouldn't carry responsibility for what you did. You should. I think you are. But this list - that's not on you and it's not fair that you're the target."
He doesn't reply, but he hands her his Arithmancy homework, and talks her through the alternative. It is better. He's cleverer than she's realised, approaches problems from a different angle than her. Sometimes he gets it wrong but she has a feeling Vector prefers the riskier way. Otherwise why prompt Hermione to seek alternatives?
"This is amazing. Lend me your books," she murmurs looking up from the parchment, "please."
"They're at home," he says, watching carefully for her reaction. "I'll ask my mother to send some."
"Thank you," she says, amazed she can thank this symbol-boy-man for anything.
"For what it's worth," he says, unsure, a little hoarse, "I am sorry for it. All of it. The things I did that contributed to this."
He taps the copy of the paper left discarded on the table. It's not an edition many people want to hold on to.
Hermione has never seen Draco Malfoy humble before. Humbled, yes, but never humble.
It's a breath of oxygen for the fragile fire that has sparked inside her. Hope .
"You can't change any of that," she says after a moment, "but you can change what comes next."
He stares at the table for a moment, then fills up his plate thoughtfully.
"So," Draco Malfoy, scion of a dynasty, asks her around a bite of ham and leek quiche, as he pulls a piece of parchment out of his pocket, "I have some questions about your book. What is a Xerox? And what is a Montblanc pen? And is Bunny really a normal sort of Muggle name? and -"
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guys I'm gonna just post on AO3 for a bit - the format here isn't working, the site isn't sending emails to let ppl know a chapter is up or if there's a review or DM etc etc so... I might repost here one day but CHAPTER NINE ! IS UP THERE so that's nice isn't it happy scorpio season x
