Chapter Fourteen: Caring
Why was she dreading this day? It didn't make any sense.
She should have been excited to see what he'd been working on for her. She hadn't even had to remind him yesterday.
Hermione looked down at her half-opened red button up shirt, wondering why this had happened. And what was it, anyway? Did she even know what she was feeling about the whole thing? Certainly it wasn't what she thought it was:
The possibility that... she was really beginning to care about him more than she ever should.
She snorted humorlessly and finished buttoning her shirt down. As if Draco Malfoy - that cold-hearted bastard - could feel anything close to that. Well, no, that wasn't true. He'd proven that he could feel. Pain, happiness, love.
Over the past couple months, he'd really transformed. He'd become the most sensitive person she knew, if she really thought about it.
Try getting Harry to admit some of the things he had, she thought against her will.
But that didn't change the fact that his heart - his actual heart - couldn't let anyone inside. And even if it could, would he even want someone there?
Hermione covered her face with her hands, realizing just how deep in the shit she really was.
"What the fuck am I doing?" Draco said, looking at his assignment.
He'd woken up that morning, looked at the thing next to him... and suddenly wanted to rewrite the entire thing.
He'd known that he'd be showing it to her. He'd known that he'd be explaining it, reading it, and answering questions until the thing was completely picked apart... but he hadn't felt exactly how difficult that would be.
And especially after yesterday. He must have been strung out on something when he'd told her he'd be giving her the assignment today. There was no way he'd be giving it to her now.
Chicken, she whispered.
Draco stiffened. She'd said that to him the first day he'd walked in her office, and at the time, he hadn't understood why. Now, he knew:
She'd thought he was a coward for not sharing himself. She'd thought he was weak because he was not sensitive. And what was he doing now? Wanting to run and hide; hide from her the event that he'd chosen, hide the fact that he'd been thinking about it ever since it happened. Because what would that show?
That he was beginning to care about her and what she thought more than he ever should.
He looked at his assignment. Work is definitely going to feel like Hell. He had three hours of working in the Hall of Prophecy before his appointment. Hopefully, Ron did not approach him with any difficult questions before he went to his meeting - because he didn't know how properly his brain was going to work.
For the record, Ron was not blind.
He'd seen something going on between them.
He really should have been feeling supremely jealous. He should have wanted to lash out at Draco. But he didn't. Because in reality, he had hoped for as much.
As much as he wouldn't like to admit it, Draco was starting to become his friend. And if that wasn't already weird enough to begin with, he actually found that they could have always been friends if their personalities hadn't gotten in the way.
It was something completely out of an alternate universe that Draco Malfoy liked the same quidditch team, the same players, and even the same style of gameplay. Then, he'd found out more - they could talk for hours about the Hogwarts teachers as well. After listening to Draco go on about Professor Trelawney, and how he'd had to fake that dreadful Dream Diary with the most ridiculous things, he'd found himself telling him about his own Dream Diary. And they'd laughed over some of Snape's mannerisms, even though he had apparently been Draco's favorite teacher.
Of course, he was still a huge prick, and he couldn't forgive him for the torment just yet - but he wasn't stupid enough to think that it was all Malfoy's fault. It was his own fault as well.
"Hey, Draco. Feeling better than yesterday, I hope."
Draco nodded and hung his cloak in the closet across from Ron, who was fixing his shirt.
"It sounded serious, the way Hermione described it."
"It was..." Draco looked up at the ceiling, searching for an adequate word. "Frightful."
Ron looked at him properly now. "What was the dream about?"
Draco shook his head, and Ron thought he wasn't going to answer, understandably. So Draco surprised him when he said: "It was about her. She was bleeding like crazy and I was drowning in her blood."
Ron shivered. "That's... pretty disgusting."
"It was more horrifying than disgusting, really - it was two of my greatest fears, balled into one vision."
"Really?" Ron said, looking distinctly mischievous. He pretended to be deep in thought.
Draco looked at him suspiciously, and then smiled at the joke. "In that case, I also fear a double scoop of ice cream."
"Me too," Ron said admittedly. "Though a slice of apple pie really gets me."
Draco laughed at that, wondering how they managed to turn his nightmare into a joke. It made him feel better about his impending doom.
Impending doom indeed.
"So, you said that you'd have your assignment for me today. What event did you choose to pick apart?"
Draco stared at her, folding and unfolding the parchment between his fingers. This is it. He handed it over to her, taking in her frown at his handiwork as she undid the folds slowly. He watched her face as she began reading.
When I realized that you actually cared about me.
You said that you couldn't leave me the way I was, that day...
Hermione's heart lodged itself in her throat. She could never, in a million years, have predicted that to be his chosen topic. They'd talked about the assignment, and looking back, she realized that he'd revealed nothing about what topic he'd chosen. He'd been very general in his talk about it - and now, she understood why. She put her hand to her chest to try to quell her heartbeat.
He'd taken this way more seriously than she'd ever thought he would.
Suddenly, everything he'd been doing for the past couple of days made sense.
"'You okay?" He was staring at her with what looked like genuine concern. It was a backwards way of asking her what she thought though, and she saw that as well.
Hermione looked up at him, trying to convey what she was feeling. That emotion that had always bit at her when she looked at him turned into something different. She'd wanted, before, to crush him with everything that she felt about her life, and about life in general - all the evil, all the hatred, and all the bitterness of the world. She'd wanted him to feel everything the way it was, and the way he should feel it - he should feel certain emotions towards certain things.
Now, she wanted the same thing - in a different form.
She wanted to take everything she was feeling about him, everything she was feeling about his choice, everything she was feeling about the paper itself, and everything that was probably written inside it, and ball all of it up into a ball of light. She wanted that light to shine brighter than any sun in his life as she pressed all of it down on him, so that he could just know what she thought, and know what she felt.
How could she possibly tell him how... unreasonably happy his choice made her?
He considered their little dinner outing to be a significant event in his life? Just the realization that it was significant showed her that he did have a level of awareness. The assignment was meant as one learning experience amoung many, but he'd turned it into his ultimate turning point. It was incredible. Draco Malfoy, that stick of coal that could never be turned into gold...
But just the fact that it concerned something that she did made it was past the point of a therapist's joy. It was personal. He was going to be a better person because she cared, and he understood what it meant because of her.
"Are you going to read it?" he asked her quietly.
She'd been staring at him. "Um, yes." She looked back down at the page:
... and I did not understand why. Why would anyone, especially you, want to pick me up again after you'd thrown me down? I thought that if our roles were switched, I probably would not have done the same. And I tried to think of why you'd do that - why would someone who'd hated me for years and who'd gotten nothing out of me except for contempt treat me like any other person? I was so angry at you - I felt as if my brain actually grew some nerve endings and began to ache from all the stress. Everything about you annoyed me to no end. But then you said, while we were sitting at that table, that you couldn't leave me that way; in your eyes, I saw something, and I knew that you really meant it. It didn't annoy me, it didn't make me angry that you were doing the right thing, because I think then, I understood what it meant to do the right thing.
Hermione looked back up at him.
Why was she acting like this? Was his paper that much of a spectacle? He'd thought that he'd changed more than that.
"How is it?" he asked her, studying her expression.
Hermione schooled her features and cleared her throat. "It's... excellent."
Doing the right thing has to come from the heart. Genuine honesty, integrity, giving - all of these things suddenly made sense to me, when I had rolled my eyes at these general words before. I understood why people do these things, even though there is not always personal gain - it is the good thing, and the right thing to do. And in order to do the right thing and mean it, you have to care.
Hermione couldn't read any more. She looked at him.
"This is truly fantastic... I'm absolutely gobsmacked."
Draco said nothing, but his face lit up a bit at her words.
"And... I'm sure you know, but this, this assignment, is the thanks I get for my good deed, and it feels wonderful."
You have to be a pretty good person to do something for me and not expect anything in return; but I hadn't realized exactly how much that was until then. I hadn't realized how hard you were trying even though I must have gotten on your last nerve. I'm still trying to see that as a good thing, though it's going to take a while for me to really understand that.
But at least I'm here on the good side now, and I'm dropping anchor.
It was admittedly poorly written, and without prior planning. She knew that he'd probably written it over time; the choppiness of the style was apparent, and the inability to establish a clear thought, but she didn't care. Putting her core of academia away for a time, she saw, through the parchment, the time he'd spent fussing over the thing, and that was what mattered.
Draco, unfortunately, was suddenly unhappy about her reaction. He'd thought, somewhere in the back of his head, that she'd be extremely happy about his choice, and about his paper. And she was. But he'd been hoping that she wouldn't just be happy that he was changing, happy that she, as his therapist, was making an impact on him. He had written that she had cared about him as a person, and that was what inspired his change.
Now he wasn't so sure.
He tried to push this thought out of his head and reached down into the pit of his stomach for his next statement. "There's something else, Granger."
Hermione looked back up at him with the biggest grin on her face, letting it fall a little when she saw his expression.
"I was reading one day, you know, during my research, in a book about ancient emotional magic - "
"Divine magic," Hermione said, nodding. "Divine" magic was the more commonly known term for it, though the type of magic was anything but commonly known.
"And um." He fidgeted a bit. "There was this passage about soulmates." He didn't dare look up for fear that her expression would tell him what she was thinking.