Chapter Eight: Parachute

It was a privately owned restaurant called Parachute. It was very warm inside, which was new to him - most of the restaurants he'd gone to had been ice cold on the inside. But then again, most of the restaurants he'd gone to were huge, expensive, and dark. This one was small, cozy, and warmly lit.

"Parachute"? As if I need any additions to my headache.

"So... here we are. Do you have a headache or something?" Hermione asked him, real concern in her eyes.

He gave her a fierce look.

The hostess looked back and forth between them before saying brightly, "Hermione... and...?"

"Draco Malfoy," Hermione said, looking at her. "Oh, hello, Nina. I'd forgotten that school was out - I expected your sister."

"Nope, it's me," Nina said, looking more closely at Draco. "Well, let me get you a table. Follow me."

Really, there's no need for a hostess in a place this small, Draco thought. In reality, he found the girl to be extremely unhelpful to his current state.

Hermione cleared her throat as she opened her menu. Draco stared. She set it down when she noticed - he had the most acusing look on his face, as if he thought she was wasting his time or - trying to distract him. His gaze was making her uncomfortable, and the afternoon was hanging between them, eating up all the air.

"Lovely spot," Draco said quietly. He didn't relinquish his stare.

Hermione immediately regretted taking him. This is so awful and awkward, why did I go through with this? Hermione had made the plans that morning... but then that afternoon had happened. This meeting was designed to get him in a more laid back setting, and get him to talk to her as if she were any other person and not just Hermione Granger. If she was going to keep her head and not let him get to her, she was going to need to be forward. Be the therapist. I should have just given the portkey away... who would have found out? The Ministry has better things to do.

And why am I trying so hard for him anyway?

"So... let's talk about something. How is your job going?"

Silence.

Hermione nodded slowly, cutting her losses. "Okay then. Ron said that you aren't nearly as bad to work with as he'd thought you'd be."

"Do you actually expect me to talk to you right now?" Draco asked her stonily, still staring.

Hermione sighed and looked down. "We don't have to talk about that if you don't want to."

Well, she could do that much for him.

She hesitated before saying, "It's okay, you know - "

He held up his hand to silence her, closing his eyes briefly. Pain was clearly written on his face.

"Hi... my name is Derek... I'll be your server for this evening..."

"Waters," Hermione said without looking at him.

"Right, coming right up..."

"Take your time."

Poor kid. "You know it isn't okay."

She wished he would stop staring at her like that. "You are the only one who is making it not okay, Draco. People do it all the time. I was just... surprised, is all."

He raised an eyebrow at her.

His eyes look really droopy... I wonder if he abused those sleeping pills. I definitely gave him the motivation today.

"You know that it was for your own good." You have been emotionally unstable for a while. You needed release.

Draco finally looked away, nodding. "Sure, okay. Then why do I feel like shit?"

"It's just a phase. When you let your guard go, it hurts, especially when you are hurting anyway. You feel extremely vulnerable. You feel like anyone could just come along... and squish you flat. And the hard part about that fact is that you can't will yourself to care."

He hesitated, then nodded. She had it spot on this time.

"Now. Do you remember what I told you in one of our earlier meetings? I said that you need to forget who I am and who you are, and look at things the way they are. The way they are, minus the fact that we were enemies for the longest time. Because I know that you haven't gotten over that fact yet."

Derek silently set their waters down, looked between them, and backed away slowly.

"Neither have you."

Hermione cocked her head to the side and looked away, raising her eyebrows in recognition. "It's... taken some time. But I'm overcoming it. It took a lot of willpower to get me over to your flat today." He couldn't even begin to understand how hard that must of been... for her at least. He knew she wasn't as much of a beast as he'd like to think she was. "But I did it... because I wouldn't let myself back down. I had already planned for this... but I realized that it was an excellent opportunity to sew you up." She lowered her voice, leaning across the table. "And I wasn't about to leave you like that."

Draco kept looking into her eyes, and he knew that she was serious, and was putting herself, as a person, on the line. Why did she care that much? He was a monumental prick and in ignorant one to boot - but she had still found it in herself to come over and make it up to him.

Draco wanted so many things. He wanted to storm at her, but he couldn't find the energy. He wanted to shake her, but his arms wouldn't move. He wanted to suffocate himself, but he couldn't stop his quickened breathing.

He was empty. The fact that she was muggleborn - a thing he hadn't thought of in a while - didn't make sense to him anymore. He couldn't even see that aura. Her hair, a constant point fit for disgusted expressions and torment, didn't look so out of place. He didn't notice it at all. And the one thing he hated the most - her guarded looks, her huffiness and goodiness, her constant prying, and everything she did to hide her true self from him and everyone else - didn't drill into him like it should have. He couldn't make himself angry.

Because despite all of the mess he'd put her through, she still had decency. He was beginning to understand that. And suddendly, that was all that mattered about her.

His eyes widened of their own accord. "Whoa," he whispered.

Hermione saw it in his eyes - she saw the spark. Did he just... did he just wake up?

A minute passed - they were frozen in time. She stared at him in astonishment; he looked down at the tabletop, eyes wide.

"... Are you ready to order?"

"What was it like?" Hermione asked, twirling her quill between her fingers.

"It was hard - definitely hard. We were constantly moving, constantly hiding. A person could go mad in that environment. I think I did."

She nodded. She hadn't written a single note on her paper yet - she didn't need to. She was the happiest she'd ever been while in his presence - he was singing like a songbird today. He'd even laughed at one point. He looked - and came off - so differently when he was like this.

It was a miracle.

Hermione hesitated before asking her next question. She had made what she liked to call "small talk" before - asking him about his life, his specific experiences, and that sort of thing. The questions were designed to keep him talking, get him used to sharing himself. Now, she needed to go onto something a little tougher. "What is it... that makes you happy?"

Draco stared at her, the calm expression leaving his face to be replaced with a blank look. What makes me happy... was there anything that made him happy?

"You don't have to answer right away. Just think about it. Knowing what makes you happy will be extremely important to living a fulfilling life. In the meantime, let me tell you what makes me happy."

She was actually going to share hersellf with him willingly? Draco squirmed for a more comfortable position.

"My happiness is a combination of my judgement and other people's judgement. I have always liked to think that I don't care what people see when they look at me, or what they say when I'm not around, but I do care. For the longest time, I cared too much. The first factor into my happiness is my own evaluation with what I am doing. Do I like what I'm doing? Am I proud of the effort I have put into it? Are good results yielded? Few people can accurately judge the results for themselves, which is where the second factor comes in - other people's evaluation. Does what I am doing yield positive feedback? Are people proud of what I am doing? Because if I feel that what I'm doing is good but other people don't agree, then I cannot be happy. Does that make sense?"

"But... all those years, all those people who'd roll their eyes when you'd shoot your hand up in class to show off how smart you were - if you knew that they would do that, give you that negative feedback, then why didn't you stop being such a bookworm?"

Hermione nodded and looked down, smiling. It had taken her a while to figure out that people didn'tlike that in a person. "Because they didn't matter that much to me, not truly; of course, I felt constantly outcasted and alone. But I liked being smart, I liked knowing things. Only my teachers, my friends, my family, and what they thought mattered, for the longest time. When I finally started to calm down my rush to answer questions, my rush to prove myself, everyone else came around. And I was complete.

"What you need to do is get something that you like to do and do a good job at it, put the right amount of effort into it. That is where you start. Without that, you have nothing. Think of all the people who were ridiculed for their ideas and their work - and yet they continued. Those people knew that their work was good, and they also knew that it was radical. But they were proud of it. So when people came at them with flaming torches, they just smiled to themselves and kept working.

"But if you know that you cannot judge for yourself, then you need other people to evaluate your work. Friends and family offering support make some of the happiest people alive. The most successful and celebrated politicians and writers were praised for their work, the work they spent so much time on and were so proud of. They became unhappy once they were no longer happy with their work. They became unhappy once they did not value the way that they lived. And lastly, they became unhappy when their support group diminished or turned on them."

Draco hesitated before asking, "So... doing this - helping crazy people like me... makes you happy?"

"I believe in what I'm doing. That alone makes me happy. My positive feedback definitely does not come in the form of my paycheck, or the constant yelling a lot of patients do... but rather, my patients' progress. When someone improves, it makes me very happy. Very few people are completely turned, completely 'cured,' but everyone gets better. That is what allows me to wake up and come here with a smile."

"... Have I been cured? And is that why you are in such a good mood? I mean, you're talking to me, Draco Malfoy, pure-blood prat, about your personal life, and I know... you know... I could use it against you."

Was she really going to tell him this next part? It might send him right back to where he was. But then again, he'd know if she wasn't being honest. And that could just make him angry. She opted for a hyperbole just in case, so he wouldn't take her words too seriously and let it go to his head.

"You are one-thousand percent better... but only to me. You still need to apply that everywhere."

Draco nodded. Okay, fair enough.

"In the meantime, could you tell me why you were so angry at me all the time?"

Draco looked at her squarely for a few seconds before saying flatly, "I've already told you."

Hermione stared at him with confusion, willing him to go on. Apparently, she needed to hear it from him now.

So he continued. "Everything about you just got on my nerves. But it was mostly because of the root of everything - the simple fact that you didn't want to be here. You didn't want to help me. You did everything because you had to, not because you wanted to. And what more could I ask for, being the way I was, and the way I always treated you and your friends? But when I realized that you really were trying to help, and that you wanted to... I just felt an emptiness where my anger used to be."

Hermione brought her whirling quill down to her paper: Is capable of identifying the causes of his anger. "And you realize why I didn't want to help you?"

Draco thought for a second. Another little test. It was one test, however, that he didn't have to cheat on. "Because I was, and always have been, an ignorant prick."

Understands his actions and himself clearly, past and present. Acceptance. "And my last question for today - do you care about what you've done?"

Well, that was a hard one. A test, sure. But did he really care? He opted for the truth: "I don't know yet."

Hermione nodded, paused, and then wrote: Start of the Change of Heart process.