Author's Note: Apologies for the massive delay. Still don't know where I'm going with this story.
HERMIONE
He needed help. He needed serious help, or he was going to destroy himself.
It was very sad, really, that people like that, people who have been handed one delicacy of an opportunity after another on a series of sterling silver platters, were willing to throw it all away. It was profligate, it was disheartening, and it was sad. Draco Malfoy had everything a child could ever want. He was entitled to more in his adolescence than most people could hope to see in their entire lives. He had every chance, every privilege, every opportunity, and he wanted to drink and smoke and kill his organs one by one, substance by substance.
There weren't many times in my life when I was at a total loss. I was no stranger to confusion, to disorientation, to bewilderment, but—it sounds conceited, but truth shouldn't be equated with presumption—I wasn't utterly adrift very often.
Well, right about now, I was in the middle of the Atlantic in a leaky rowboat, and the oars had somehow disappeared. Oh, and the sharks were circling ominously, and I'd cut my hand on his stupid vodka bottle.
Struggling a little, not being a particularly adroit individual, I wrapped a long strip of gauze around the worst of the lacerations on my hand. Fortunately, the afflicted body part was my left hand, which had been closer to the sink and had been commissioned to do the bottle-smashing, and no one would be greatly surprised if I wore a glove against the bitter cold that had set in. Admittedly, a single glove was a bit unusual. It would make me very unluckily reminiscent of Michael Jackson, that American pop star of days past—a fading star now. An especially grotesque sideshow to the blinding coruscation of the gaudy center stage, the new culture, the ever-shifting ocean of it; waves of purses and skirts and logos and photographs of people whose private scandals were the public's secret joys.
My mother always told me I read too much.
People who knew me would probably assume that I'd been one of those fantastically brilliant children who starts to read at two or three and gobbles down War and Peace by the fourth grade. I didn't do anything like that. I was very normal. I went to the park, and the swings were my favorite. I jogged my feet impatiently while my mother tied my shoes, which made it take even longer, and eventually I became so frustrated that I made her teach me how to do it. I wore colors brighter than the sunshine that brought me out of doors like a dog to a whistle, because they made me happy and they were sprightly against the scenery, which was often a dull gray. I was quite average, and I learned to read with all the other average children, and it was only then that things changed.
I remember staggering through the first book I read to my mother, the first book I read aloud entirely independently. In it, a lonely frog went looking for a playmate and encountered a vast variety of different animals, but each one gave an excuse and sent him away. The cat had to warm the step; the dog had to watch the yard; the chickens were busy searching the ground for leftover corn; the horse was inspecting the grass. The frog grew sadder and sadder, and he settled down at the edge of the yard and cried little frog tears. That was what the story called them: "little frog tears." (The word tears was hard, because it was exactly the same as the word tears, like to rip something.) Then all the other animals felt sorry for the frog, and wished they hadn't said those things, and they all went and played together. And even then, as I closed the back cover and placed a small hand on the publishing company emblem that resided there proudly, I knew that this was something special. Something useful. Something powerful. And it filled me with reverence and awe, that little marks on a page could become vivid images in a mind, and I knew that those marks possessed an infinite and untold strength.
So I read. I read everything I could find.
I did not read War and Peace by the fourth grade. In fact, I have still not read War and Peace. But I read just about everything else I could find in libraries and bookshelves and haphazard stacks at school and around the town and within my own house, and I ceased to be a "normal child." I didn't want to go to the park. I didn't want to play on the swings. I didn't want dolls or teddy bears or toys or even other children; I wanted books. Non-fiction, fiction, bizarre conglomerations of the two—I read them all, and I read them always. I learned things, lots of things, and I discovered that if I tried to remember those things, I could recall them later. I corrected my parents. I corrected other children. Sometimes I corrected teachers. My parents bore it, my classmates despised it, and my teachers looked on in disbelief. I didn't see what was so strange. It was all in the books. It was right there, if they cared to look.
Reading transformed my intelligence into arrogance, the cruelest kind of alchemy, and the resulting enmity of my peers sent me seeking solace in my reading. It was a cycle—a serpent that devoured its own tail, ceaselessly, until the end of time.
By the time I had reached the age of eleven, I had realized why I had no friends outside of the pages. Firmly I resolved to turn over a new leaf and desist displaying my hard-earned knowledge. I didn't want to be alone anymore.
Then I got a letter that began, Dear Ms. Granger, We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The first thing I asked was what a Hogwart was. The second thing I asked was where I could find a book about it.
I had tried not to be a know-it-all, when I got to this Hogwarts place. I had tried very hard, and I had been very scared—scared of the people, of the objects, of the strange books and strange ideas and strange abilities I kept unearthing, abilities I wouldn't have dreamed of having. But I had been a know-it-all anyway, because it was what and who I was.
I had thought for sure I was going to be a Ravenclaw—for sure. I've never exactly figured out why I wasn't. That was another of the many, many things that unsettled me deeply in the first few weeks. It took a good while for those things to settle.
And now Draco Malfoy had decided to shake the snow-globe again. How terribly rude of him.
As far as I knew, Hogwarts did not have a school counselor. Perhaps, if one was as favored as Harry, one might seek Dumbledore. But I didn't think Dumbledore would want to help Malfoy. I didn't think anybody would. As just as Dumbledore tried to be, no one really liked Malfoy. I didn't even think Snape really liked him, so much as he liked his father's favor and galling Harry. Cigarettes and alcohol were Draco Malfoy's most reliable friends and his only advisors.
Harry and Ron were begging for my help with the homework they'd been putting off for a good portion of eternity, so I couldn't go looking for Malfoy just yet. What, I wondered as I made sure Ron wasn't copying, would I do if I found him, anyway? Rap him on the wrist with a ruler? Shake my finger in his face and tell him I was very disappointed? What could you say in the face of deliberate self-destruction?
By the time Harry and Ron went to bed muttering about the Transfiguration essay they'd just completed, I had realized that it was time to do something truly drastic.
That was okay. When you hung out with Harry Potter, you got used to drastic.
When everyone had left the common room and gone to bed, I took a pinch from my supply of Floo Powder, swallowed my last inhibitions, prayed that no one from the Floo Network Authority would be listening, tossed the dust into the flames in the fireplace, said the words, closed my eyes, and thrust my head in.
I opened my eyes again, and a sumptuous office came into focus. The perspective was a little odd—a little low. Of course it was; I was basically on the floor. A cursory survey of the room brought the red-cushioned chair into sight, and there he sat, with his long, pale fingers set in a delicate steeple, one leg crossed over the other at the knee, the light of the fire glinting maliciously off of the flawless sheen of his shiny black shoes. His eyes were hard, like clouded diamonds, and the only movement visible in this statue of a god was when the left edge of his lips curled slightly with evident distaste. He looked at me as though I was the festering, molding severed hand of a corpse he'd buried in the backyard, and a flea-ridden dog had dragged me in and left me there on the floor, shrouded in dirt.
Lucius Malfoy's voice was like the knife with which he probably wanted to slit my throat for desecrating so much as his fireplace. "What do you want?" he inquired coldly.
"It's about your son," I told him, trying to keep my voice level. Sounding collected was like guiding that leaky rowboat through the storm of the century, and I succeeded about as well.
A bit of hair the color of a dead man's skin slid as Lucius Malfoy shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair. "What about him?"
"He needs help," I said, the words jostling and tripping over each other as they stampeded out of my mouth. "I thought you might…want to do something. He's—he's doing things I'm sure you wouldn't approve of." I winced inwardly at that—ending a sentence with a preposition in front of someone I was attempting to impress with my vast intelligence. Not that there was any hope after stammering like I had, anyway.
Lucius Malfoy's pale face darkened, and the emerald flame cast an eerie light. The shadows flickered around his remorselessly sharp features, and everything was bathed in that supernatural green. He looked like he was underwater—or dead.
"So you presume first that you know something about me and second that you have some insight on how I should raise my son," he remarked then, in a voice that was softer, icier, and more stifling than a snowdrift blocking your only exit and holding it fast. A single pale eyebrow rose slowly, as if his skepticism was an afterthought. "I would advise you," Lucius Malfoy said quietly, "to get out of my house before you immensely regret your coming."
I decided that he was the most terrifying person I had ever met. But that didn't change the fact that he wasn't listening to me.
"You don't even care what it is?" I demanded, galvanized by my frustration with him. "I go through all of this to tell you that your only son is in trouble, and you don't even care? You're just going to send me away and forget about it?"
With a languid caution that was irritating and a bored disinterest that actively burned, he plucked some fleck of something, real or imaginary, off of the arm of his coat with spider-leg fingers. "I believe," he commented calmly, "that I was grievously misinformed when I was told that you were the most intelligent child at that wretched school." When he raised his ash-colored eyes, tinted that same sepulchral green, to my face, they were merciless. "Go home, girl," he said. "This isn't a place for you."
I wanted to flip him off, but I didn't have fingers. Instead I withdrew angrily from the fireplace, tried to swipe the worst of the ash from my hair, and sat on the carpet by the cheerful, perfectly ordinary flames, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next.