A/N: Wow. I had no idea how strongly a few folks feel about Lily and Snape. I'm not shipping them, or saying that it's right; whatever's going on between them here in this very different universe is part of the plot. I hope that doesn't turn too many of you away, because I'd truly be very sad if that were the case! There's so much more to this story and what's to come than Lily and Snape! (Many sincere thanks to all of you who provided supportive comments in the reviews section.)
Dickens and Debacles
Between classes (countless of which she'd already missed), obligatory social duties, and protection spell casting, it was nearly evening two days later by the time Hermione had a chance to sit down and truly examine the crushed "ladybug."
Luckily, she now had a wealth of information living nearby named Draco. Through him she learned that the Sovereignty had been using surveillance devices for the past decade or more… and that getting past them undetected had been one of the primary challenges the conservative resistance had faced during the Second Intervention.
"I can always use Harry's Invisibility Cloak so they don't see me, but I still can't do any sort of magic around them, the need for which is of course the main reason anyone would cross paths with them in the first place," she was musing aloud while sitting beside him on her bedroom's sofa, leaning forward as she carefully regarded the destroyed piece of technology. "I suppose I could cast an Anti-Detection Jinx, but that seems too easy. The spell tracers would no doubt perceive it before it took effect, and if there was more than one camera, it wouldn't work at all."
"There is one way." Draco sat up. Pansy must have convinced Harry to lend him more clothing, because he was wearing different slacks and a jumper that thank Merlin was blue instead of red. "We began to use it several months into the… Second - Intervention. Or... whatever patronising rubbish they've labelled it. You have to cast an Impressions Charm. It's Undetectable, so it won't register on any sensors, even if there's others around."
"'Undetectable' magic?" Hermione frowned. "I've never heard of that."
"You wouldn't have; Riddle invented it. Took him ages; I think he worked out most of it while he was imprisoned. It's a variant of the Fidelius Charm and Unplottable traces. The incantation's Impressionem Solitus, with a flick, right scoop and exactly four twists." He held up his hand and, as he said each direction, went through the motions with an imaginary wand.
Her brows knit together thoughtfully. "'Customary Impression,'" she translated. "So it does what, exactly? Uses the foundation of the Unplottable charm to render it invisible to sensors when it's cast and then makes whatever's within range appear like it usually has in the past rather than how it really is in the present?"
He nodded. "Exactly. So nothing's tripped, and the Phoenix has no indication what's happening in front of that particular camera is anything other than business as usual. It's invisible, so it isn't accompanied by light. You have to watch for a split second distortion in the air between you and your target so you'll know you've actually done it."
Her eyebrows raised. The Fidelius Charm was extremely complicated, as was mastering Unplottability. She had never heard of anyone using them as the foundation to create a derivative spell, let alone combining them for the same goal. "That's… impressive."
Draco sighed and sat back, shoving a hand through his hair. "It is, but performing that level of magic is so difficult, most people couldn't. To this day, I'm surprised I was able to pick it up back then. And the few of us who could do it always had to be present whenever anyone — whole families, villages, even — needed to move through an observed area. The last I knew, Riddle was working on a more accessible alchemical solution, but I don't know if he completed it before…"
He trailed off, and Hermione knew he meant the ambiguous "Final Suppression" that he and Pansy would occasionally mention vaguely before shutting down completely.
"If a few of you knew about it, wouldn't the Sovereignty have discovered that information once...?" She didn't elaborate, but her meaning was clear.
He shook his head. "Again, Evans — the son, not the… mother — or someone else must have Ordered me not to say anything, right after the… procedure. I found there were several secrets I didn't have to reveal upon Orders. I don't know if the same was done for any of the others who knew about it, but from what I've overheard, I'm fairly certain the Phoenix still doesn't know exactly how we did it."
Hermione let out a breath, again repeating the spell and its motions in her mind. Despite his modesty, if Draco had been one of the few who could complete it, he must have been a very talented wizard, though from his intelligence alone, that didn't surprise her at all. She'd have to begin to practise it immediately… though 'practising' here meant she'd have to get it right the first time or face extremely dire consequences.
She fidgeted, contemplating the idea that Tom Riddle seemed to be an almost Dumbledore-esque character in Universe B.
Almost.
The idea of it was utterly inconceivable to her; the Dark Arts had so twisted Lord Voldemort's personality and appearance that she couldn't even begin to imagine a wholesome version of him.
"What was he like?" she burst out.
Draco glanced at her. "Riddle?"
She nodded.
He looked forward again, his eyes ruminative. "He's a… very determined man," he said slowly. "Brilliant, obviously. But mostly determined. Not too unlike your Voldemort in that respect, I suppose, though he used it for good here rather than ill."
Hermione tried to picture Voldemort running through the streets leading innocent families to safety, blowing out spy cameras and casting protection charms as he did.
In her mind's eye, he was barefoot, bald-headed, cradled a babe in one arm and wore a flowing white robe.
Fail, her attempt to form a realistic image did.
"I see your collection of bedside accessories has managed to… recover," Draco commented suddenly.
Hermione followed his mischievous gaze to her repaired lamp, and various other objects she'd thrown at the Sovereignty bug. She frowned suspiciously. "You're making fun of me, aren't you?"
His thin face wore the expression of utmost innocence. "Not at all. Simply making an impartial observation." But then the obvious amusement in his tone stretched into a small smirk. "Though I will admit your method of deactivation was… rather interesting."
She bristled and glared at him. "How else was I supposed to stop the bloody thing without magic? I'd like to see how you'd react when a flea-sized inanimate object with a camera in it watching you comes alive and starts running!"
Draco didn't look the least bit sympathetic. "Well, I hadn't the slightest idea of what was happening over there, and I wasn't about to get up to see. All I knew was that you were screaming about not wearing clothing at what I was fairly certain was an empty room, and things had started shattering at an alarming rate. It was terrifying. For a second, I really thought you'd lost it. Gone completely batty. Barking mad. Off your rocker insane."
Hermione crossed her arms and continued to glare at him, even though she reckoned it all was just a bit amusing in retrospect. "Stop it; it wasn't that bad."
"Oh, it certainly was. I thought surely any moment you were going to dash out of the room and into the Forbidden Forest Bilbo Baggins style, never to be seen again." His grey eyes were distant, as if he were currently reliving it. He shuddered. "Merlin, it was frightening."
Hermione burst out laughing.
Her ploy sounded so absurd when he described it like that, even though she knew he was teasing her, but it must have worked, or Lily would have certainly returned by now to reset the bug, at the very least. When she finally caught her breath, she looked over at him, still smiling, her brow furrowed in amazement. "Did you just reference a Muggle author?"
"Do try not to sound quite so shocked," he said dryly. "We Old-Bloods aren't opposed to all things Muggle."
His comment piqued her interest — she'd been curious about the line between conservatism and anti-Muggle sentiments here. "Aren't you?" she asked, intrigued.
Draco shook his head. "Certainly not. I actually rather think Muggles are quite ingenious, to have come up with everything they have without magic. It's the use of the Dark Arts for Muggle-based technology that many of us have opposed." At her slightly astonished expression - mostly at his easy response - he gave her a small smile. "Bit of a stunner, I know. The me in your world would have never spoken such words, surely."
That certainly was an understatement.
"So you… like Muggles," Hermione said slowly, trying to determine exactly what his position was.
He shrugged and sat back contemplatively. "I suppose the better phrasing would be to say I don't dislike them, as a general whole," he said thoughtfully. "I haven't had the opportunity to get to know many of them particularly well, to be honest. But I enjoyed Muggle Studies, for the most part. The literature was excellent. Tolkien in particular I thought was brilliant, but there were others, of course. Shakespeare, Melville, Austen, Brontë… And Twain. Merlin, I love that man's wit." He feigned seriousness, and an American Southern drawl. " 'It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.'"
Hermione snorted at his impression and held back a laugh. "Someone'd better tell Ronáld."
He grimaced. "I may already have."
They both laughed, but the smile in his eyes had disappeared, something heavy settling into his expression. Hermione immediately regretted even mentioning this world's monstrous substitute for her once-best friend.
"Have you read Dickens?" she asked quickly, changing the subject.
Draco looked toward her briefly, and after a moment he grinned again. "Could I rightly call myself English if I hadn't? Of course I have."
"Which?"
"David Copperfield. My first Muggle novel, actually. Still one of my favorites." He glanced at her questioningly. "Which was yours?"
"A Christmas Carol." Before he could speak, she lifted a hand. "Don't judge me; it's so cliché, I know. Every year, my family would read it during the holidays. We'd bake cookies, play holiday music. My father would use different voices. Merlin, his Marley impersonation was…" She trailed off, shaking her head, a fond smile stretched across her face, though she couldn't help but sigh a bit sadly. "It was our tradition."
He looked down, fiddling with the sofa pillow's lining. "My mum and I would do something similar," he said after a moment. "With Thaddeus and the Christmas Dragons. It was a wizarding story, though. Quite old."
Hermione brightened. "Oh, I've read that."
He seemed to brighten, too. "Have you?" he asked, sounding surprised.
She nodded. "It was written by Gemula Blishwick, wasn't it?"
Draco smiled at her and nodded as well. "The very one."
Hermione couldn't help but smile back. She hadn't had intellectual discussions like this with anyone else here since she'd arrived, let alone had many while she'd been fighting Voldemort with Harry and Ron. Rare was the day she could share her enjoyment of books and knowledge with someone who appreciated them just as much.
With a shock of electricity akin to a lightning strike… Hermione realized that she was having fun. No, even worse, she'd been thoroughly enjoying herself with a volume of laughter that seemed both foreign and alarming.
Nausea and something else ripped through her stomach.
Abruptly, she looked away from Draco.
She wasn't supposed to enjoy being around him, or anyone here. There was nothing about this universe Hermione wanted to enjoy. If she allowed herself that, she was afraid it would mean she was admitting defeat, giving up hope that she'd ever return home, accepting that this awful place was enough for her. Conversely, to not enjoy herself would make her eventual departure from this dark, unwelcome world — and she was going to find a way to get home, she was determined of it — that much easier.
Even so, until that day came, she didn't... she didn't want these conversations with Draco to end, either.
How thoughtless, how selfish, how horrible of a person did that make her?
After a moment, Hermione took a breath and looked back at him. The smile had faded from the Slytherin's face as he watched her, and though his expression was neutral, she thought she saw worry in his eyes.
Guilt crept into her stomach. Heaven forbid he ever guess what was on her mind. She felt like she was betraying their friendship, somehow, by having such thoughts, but she pushed the feeling away before she could dwell on it. Instead, she smiled at him again and reached out, touching a strand of his long hair as she recalled a thought she'd had the day before.
"Would you like this cut?" she asked, changing the subject.
He blinked, then reached up and took a lock of it as well. "What? I thought this was in style." He pulled it away from his face, peering at it. "The surfer look."
"Grunge is more like it," she muttered.
Draco gave her an affronted look and sat up straight, puffing out his chest indignantly. "Perhaps I'd rather keep my grungy surfer hair."
"Would you really?" Hermione asked seriously. She certainly didn't want to make him do something he didn't, or feel as though he had to.
After a second of glaring at her, he slumped and looked down, sighing. "No. If you're offering, I'd actually quite like it gone."
She nodded decisively, then stood. "Alright. Get up then. Come on."
Draco jerked his head up in his haste to look at her. "What? Right here?"
"Of course right here," she said, wondering where else he would have expected to have it done. She walked across her room to her desk chair, pulled it out and patted it. When he didn't move, she gave him an exasperated expression. "It'll only take a minute."
He slowly got up and approached her warily. "I'd really rather it took more than a minute, as it were."
"Oh, don't look at me like that. I used to do this for Harry and Ron all the time."
"I'm fairly certain that's an exaggeration."
"At least four times each," she defended as he cautiously sat down. "Do you have any preferences?"
Draco hesitated. "I'd rather you kept the left side a bit… longer," he said slowly.
She nodded in understanding, quickly realizing he wanted to have the ability to hide Ronáld's macabre handiwork if he wanted. She stood off to his side, tilting her head and assessing his hair. It was fine, unlike Ron and Harry's positive manes, but the same couple of barber spells she'd taught herself on the road should still do the trick.
Shifting in front of him, she crouched down and studied his face critically, determining exactly how she wanted the end result to look. As much as she'd disliked the Draco Malfoy of Universe A, she couldn't deny that both Universes' versions of him had been gifted with an elegant, well-structured countenance. Oh yes, she'd been perfectly aware that plenty of girls had found him attractive in her universe; his personality had been so lacking that Hermione had certainly never been among them, and she'd always rolled her eyes and shook her head.
But now...
With a bit of a jolt, she abruptly realized that in this Universe, any non-bigoted witches - perhaps when things had been a bit more normal, before the "Intervention" - surely must have found this Draco attractive as well, with his ready smile and wit and charm. Hermione blinked momentarily, her lips parting and stomach turning over slightly at this idea. Why it gave her such pause, she didn't know, and after a moment she again shook her head, this time to bring herself back to the task at hand.
Universe A Draco's hairstyles, she thought, had usually been too severe for his long face; the few times that errant spells or circumstances had set it a mess from its typical slickness had actually suited him better (not that she'd considered it at the time). If her- no, if Universe B Draco wanted a medium length style, no doubt it would become him, particularly if she added some layers and used a texturizing spell to taper the base of it to his neck so it wasn't a blunt-end cut-
Draco cleared his throat, shifting in the chair and surprisingly looking the slightest bit uncomfortable. "Is there any particular reason you haven't managed to venture past the appraisal stage yet," he said drolly, "or is my appearance really that hopeless?"
Her distracted gaze shifted to his eyes, her brow furrowing. "What?" she said in surprise. "Don't be ridiculous; of course your appearance isn't-"
She stopped herself and flushed, and then flushed deeper when she realized she'd come off as fixedly staring at him yet again. Profoundly thankful for the layer of My's makeup that hid her embarrassment, she shifted gears and retorted sternly, "Patience makes perfect, young Malfoy."
The uncertainty immediately dropped from his expression, replaced by the burst of an amused smile. "Is that how that saying goes? To think all these years, I've been doing it wrong..."
Hermione bit the corner of her lip to restrain a smile, though she was certain her eyes gave her away. "Cheeky," she commented dryly, standing and moving behind him. Taking a section of his hair between her fingers, she raised her wand-
"Not to dive into semantics, Hermione," Draco said abruptly, twisting slightly, "but I would argue that 'four times each' isn't quite the equivalent of 'all the time.' "
Following his gaze, Hermione saw he was trying to see their reflection in her dresser mirror across the room. She quickly moved to block his view. "Draco, stop fidgeting."
In a heartbeat, he became utterly motionless.
Concern and regret jumped to her throat. "That wasn't an Order, was it?"
"No." Draco winced slightly. "But if it comes between that and losing an ear, of course I'm going to listen to you."
She snorted, thought about smacking him like she wouldn't have hesitated to do with Ron or Harry, but checked herself — after the way Draco had been treated, she didn't ever want to hit him, even if it was playfully. "You won't 'lose an ear'; Merlin, what kind of inept witch do you think I am…"
In spite of her words, perhaps it was because he had been denied any basic care for so long, to his appearance or otherwise, that Hermione felt a strange responsibility - a sense of trepidation, even - to get this right that she never had for the Golden Trio's maintenance haircuts. Brow furrowed in deep concentration, she murmured the first of the three spells she knew, weaving her fingers into and out of his hair as she carefully, repetitively smoothed her wand around its edges and down its length.
Platinum locks spilled to the floor around them. It took longer than it usually did for her two best friends. When she was finally satisfied, she vanished the cut hair and stepped back, assessing.
It was shocking, really, how much one's hairstyle could affect one's appearance... because in the course of five minutes, Draco looked like an entirely different person.
His blond hair no longer fell unevenly past his shoulders but instead loosely twisted appealingly around his face and ears and the topmost half of his neck. A side-parted, asymmetrical fringe spilled over his forehead and down the left length of his face to effectively cover the most visible scar on his cheek, the layered style stopping just at the edge of his mouth. The weightlessness of the comparatively shorter cut gave his hair a professional-looking buoyancy.
Hermione couldn't withhold a small, pleased smile at how well it'd turned out.
Before, Draco had strongly resembled someone who'd spent serious time in Azkaban. Now, he still needed at least a month of Mrs. Weasley's home cooking, of course, but he- he didn't look awful in the least, in her opinion. He actually looked...
She swallowed.
Well, he looked quite good.
"See?" she said, waving a hand toward the mirror he'd been trying to peer at earlier. "Your patience paid off, don't you think?" When he didn't move, she frowned. "Well? Aren't you going to look?"
Draco shifted his gaze sombrely to hers. "I'd rather not."
Hermione put her hands on her hips. "And just what do you expect to see that has you so concerned?"
"It's the thought of what I won't see that horrifies me. D'you think I didn't notice those piles on the ground before you got rid of them? Did you even leave anything up there?"
She glared at him. "Plenty, actually." With an unexpected burst of energy, she was struck by an unusual wave of mischievousness. "Which means you can't leave without your complementary styling."
This time, visible alarm jumped to his expression. "What—?"
Before he could voice the question, she reached out and and ruffled his hair vigorously. After several seconds of tousling, she stepped back, grinning broadly. "There. All finished."
Draco stiffly peered up at her from beneath the wildly mussed hair that now fell directly in his eyes. "Oh, I'm sure that looks much better, Hermione," he said sarcastically.
Hermione hid her smile. "Oh, leagues. That's your standard windblown, debonair Ministry Auror look there."
His gaze became interested. "D'you think they'd hire me?"
"Looking like that? Undoubtedly—"
The sound of a clearing throat interrupted her.
Hermione spun toward the door, and she saw Draco quickly stand beside her.
Harry was waiting outside her doorframe, his arms crossed, wearing an expression that possessed about as much personality as his mother.
She stiffened, her stomach tightening.
Her best friend's likeness raised an eyebrow. "Not interrupting something, am I?"
Oh, she hated the unspoken insinuation in his tone. It was the first time they'd spoken directly since the incident on Monday night. After that, Hermione had sworn she would never talk to him again. At the same time, she knew that wasn't realistic, but she'd vowed to keep their interactions to an absolute minimum, and she certainly wasn't about to let him harass her anymore.
Suddenly, fingers that did not belong to her - Draco's - gently brushed her wrist. The sensation jarred her into action, and she straightened and regarded Harry coldly. "What do you want?"
"We need to talk." Harry's gaze shifted to her right, toward Draco. "In private."
Hermione wasn't about to fall for that another time; she knew very well how all their 'private' conversations had always ended. "I'd say we're all in this together," she said flatly. "Anything you need to say to me, you can say to him."
Harry took a step into the room, his hard gaze unreadable. "In private."
Hermione bristled and stepped forward, disinclined but prepared to do battle...
But then Draco said, "It's alright. I'll go."
She looked back at him. No. Why should he leave? It wasn't that she didn't think she could handle Harry alone — she could — but what could Harry possibly have to say to her that Draco couldn't hear?
"You don't have to listen to him," she said in a low voice.
Draco's eyes met hers and softened. "I know." He glanced down. Hermione followed his gaze to see his fingers were still very close to her wrist. For some reason that she didn't particularly like, her heart gave a little lurch, and she looked back up him quickly as he intently searched her eyes. "Do you need..."
He stopped mid-sentence, his brow knitting, as if he were reconsidering his words. Then he instead nodded slightly, as if coming to an agreement with himself, and pulled his hand away, giving her a small, reassuring smile. "I'll be back in a bit."
The room felt colder once he'd left it, partially closing the door behind him as he did.
Hermione looked back toward Harry apathetically. She was tired of arguing and of feeling belittled and mistrusted from someone with the likeness of a man she'd held dear. This time, she wasn't going to get emotional. She wasn't going to get angry, or sad. He didn't deserve her energy.
Not this Harry.
Not anymore.
For as terrible as Monday night had been for her, it had also helped her see all too clearly, once and for all, that this man was not her best friend anymore, and hoping he would turn into him would never make it so. And she didn't feel desperate to win his friendship, either; she'd managed to make a few other legitimate friends here who actually wanted that title.
So she just waited.
The seconds passed.
Harry Evans seemed to be waiting, too, but Hermione couldn't care less, even as the silence became deafening. When it must have become quite clear she wasn't going to say anything, he took another step closer. "Malfoy needs a permanent supply of sleeping draughts. He'll wake up the entire east side of the building at the rate he's at now."
Hermione kept her expression neutral, though his words at once surprised and concerned her. Draco still looked extremely tired, yes, but he'd never given her any indication that he wasn't sleeping well. Then again, she supposed it wasn't a great shock that he wouldn't be, not with the atrocious things he'd lived through… but he'd usually always been upfront if he'd needed something.
She berated herself for not having noticed it or asked herself, so much so that Harry Evans had actually come to her about it first.
She nodded curtly. "Fine," she said tonelessly.
Harry didn't back down from her emotionless gaze, and another extended silence ensued. Hermione wracked her brain as to what he could have possibly wanted from her. Why did he keep staring at her, like — like he was evaluating her, not necessarily like she was prey, as he certainly had in the past, but like she was some foreign species of leaping toadstool?
She was about to tell him she had better things to do than have a stare-off with him when he said slowly, "We also have a problem."
Oh, of course.
Now the truth came out: he wasn't there out of the kindness of his heart for Draco, or for anyone else, for that matter.
Hermione rolled her eyes and turned away from him and walked over to her desk, pulling out her next Potions assignment. "Go take it up with someone who isn't going to betray you," she said bitterly.
She took a quill in her hand to make notes, gripping it so hard she was afraid she might crush it, but she could only stare at the first word on the scroll, waiting for him to leave.
He didn't.
"I may have been a bit… unfair," he finally said, sounding as though he was speaking through gritted teeth.
Every pent-up emotion Hermione had been trying to bury exploded through her mind.
Was. He. Serious?
She threw down the quill and spun angrily back toward him. "Oh, now you're going to be civil? When you want something from me?" she exclaimed. "Well, I don't care, because I'm through with your insults and your put-downs and your unfounded animosity! Perhaps you're used to people jumping whenever you bark out commands, but I don't help people who treat me like rubbish and can't even apologize after they do!" She swung her wand at the door, and it flung open with a bang. "So you can take your problem and leave."
Harry didn't even look toward the door. True to character, he virtually stepped into her wrath, his gaze piercing. "Do you think I go around blindly hating everyone for the fun of it? Because I fancy living that way?" he snarled. "I have reasons for distrusting people, very good reasons, and up until quite recently, you were no exception to that!"
Her eyebrows raised. "Oh, and you're saying I'm an exception now? Excuse me if I find that a bit difficult to swallow."
His green eyes were angry - that was no surprise. But she was surprised when he looked away from her and took a visible, deep breath, his hands clenched into fists.
"Look," he said tightly, "I understand what the person who looked and sounded like me in your world was to you. But you can't expect that from me. I'm not him. I can never be him—"
"Believe me, I'm well aware of that," she spat. "That doesn't mean you can't afford me the same level of respect you would any other ally! For Merlin's sake, things here are hard enough as it is! Why would you ever bring more suffering on anyone who's working with you toward the same goal?"
He looked back at her then, and something flickered in his eyes that she'd never seen in Harry Evans' face before, though she'd seen it plenty on Harry Potter's.
Vulnerability.
"You have no idea what it's like to be raised in this world with a family like mine," he said in a low voice. "I didn't have the luxury of forming the kind of friendships you did. You all gushed about loyalty and bravery and honor like it's a sodding walk in the park." She wondered who 'you all' were and assumed he must have heard something similar from Pansy and Draco as he continued, "I don't even know how to—"
He stopped speaking abruptly, his jaw tight.
She stared at him, unable to believe this conversation was even occurring. She couldn't help but remember quite clearly how his own mother didn't seem to care about him at all. What kind of childhood must he have had, living in that kind of environment? Where on earth was his father?
Slightly - only slightly - she felt some of her outrage and resentment lessen.
It still didn't mean Hermione would allow him to walk over her. But she didn't want to hate him, either. Not if parental neglect had led him to become the callous cad that he was.
"Be that as it may," she said quietly, "It doesn't mean you can never learn."
Harry reached down to grip the back of the chair Draco'd been sitting on, staring hard at the seat.
"There are some things you need to know about me, Granger," he said stiffly, sounding as though he was forcing every word from his mouth. "I'm blunt. I'm judgemental. I'm not self-sacrificing. I have a temper and I lose it often, I — I don't bloody cry, and I just don't give a damn about what happens to most people because they've never given one blasted damn about me. That isn't the best basis for forming friendships."
Hermione furrowed her brow, shaking her head. "That isn't true at all. Friendship isn't about who you are; it's about how you treat others. I see you with Pansy; you're perfectly capable of it. You just have to want to."
He continued looking down for a long time, his knuckles tight around the chair's wooden frame. Then he looked back at her sharply, a gleam of warning in his eyes. "Don't ever hug me, or hold my hand, or treat me like you would him."
"Don't ever harass me like you continually have since you've discovered the truth," she retorted, wondering if these were to be the conditions of whatever partnership or alliance they were suddenly, inexplicably about to form.
Harry clenched his jaw and nodded once, tightly.
Hermione nodded too, even if she did so warily. She still couldn't say she trusted him, and only time would tell if he would stay true to his word. But she welcomed the prospect of a ceasefire, especially when she suddenly had the looming problem of handling the formidable threat of Lily Evans.
They continued to stand, staring cautiously at each other, as if neither was certain of how to next proceed.
She cleared her throat. "Is that everything, then?"
He shook his head, turning the chair around and sitting down on it. "As you may recall, we have a problem."
Hermione suddenly felt very, very tired, though this time for a different reason completely. "What sort of problem?"
Harry paused, as if he was reframing his thoughts. "They've completed a potion to remove Lucius Malfoy's amnesia," he said after a moment. "It's going to work. And when it does, the conservatives will lose a piece of information so crucial the Sovereign himself has been obsessed with obtaining it for a decade."
Oh Merlin.
Lucius Malfoy.
Hermione's stomach turned over completely at the realization that she hadn't breathed a word about his father's state of existence to Draco — partially because her encounters with Draco had until this point been so tense, madcapped or intense that she'd truly forgotten, partially because she didn't think the knowledge that his father was alive but held in inescapable captivity with no memory of Draco whatsoever would bring him anything more than additional frustration and pain… and partially because she'd honestly hoped she'd be gone from this Universe before the issue came up again.
She swallowed hard, trying to ignore the guilt gnawing at her insides. "How do you know this?"
The expression he flung her screamed serious doubts of her intelligence. "I'm the son of the Viceroy, Granger. Obviously I have more access than anyone else."
That response was appropriately vague enough to destroy any willingness to act on her part, but even an unacceptable lack of information wasn't the most pressing issue to Hermione.
"Why is this my problem?" she snapped waspishly, the question departing her mouth before she could stop it.
For as self-serving and nasty as it was, she realized: She meant it.
Yes, it pained her to her very core every time she'd seen Draco sadistically abused, or Pansy's hopeful eyes, or the House-Wizards that were so monstrously treated around the castle and in her bestial Dark Arts classes. But if Tom bloody Riddle, in all his brilliance, hadn't been able to stop the Sovereignty with the full conservative population behind him, then how on Merlin's green earth was she going to make any kind of difference before she met the same awful fate as everyone else?
If anything, the problem seemed more dire and irreversible now than it had ever been, since virtually all possible allies had been rendered powerless House-Wizards and Tom Riddle was either dead, imprisoned, or irrevocably 'missing.'
No, as much as she detested even thinking it, there was nothing Hermione - as a lone individual acting against the might of the entire Sovereignty - could do here. What was in her power was focusing on trying to get back to Universe A before she encountered Lily Evans again, and everything she'd been trying to hide blew up in her face.
She grew in her resolution as she met Harry's disbelieving gaze. "Well?" she asked.
"It's in your blasted nature, isn't it?" he demanded. "Fighting evil? Defending the downtrodden?" He sat up straight, glaring at her. "Are you going to just sit here and do nothing when you have the ability to do otherwise?"
His comment struck deeper than she cared to admit... mostly because what he said wasn't untrue.
She gritted her teeth, glowering back at him, trying to disregard the sick feeling blossoming in her stomach. "Do nothing? I rather think I've done more than that!" she exclaimed in equal disbelief. "And in my universe, we didn't have a choice — it was either fight back or annihilation!"
His eyebrows flew up. "Do you think it's any different here for people like Pansy and Malfoy? You're just lucky you landed yourself in the body of an Elite, or you'd already be bloody annihilated! What else do you call how they're existing now? Certainly not living!"
That Harry Evans was lecturing her on morality and right action and making an irrefutably good case of it was not something Hermione wanted to consider, and she certainly wasn't willing to discuss it with him any further… because she wouldn't win.
She knew she was going against everything in which she had ever believed — the causes she championed, the rights she defended.
But what could she do when they simply didn't stand a chance?
"And what do you propose we do?" she bit out, simply so she could emphasise the insanity of whatever plan he might be thinking of proposing. "Waltz in and break him out? The most valuable prisoner of war the Sovereignty apparently has? I don't think it'll be quite that simple, do you?"
When Harry continued to evenly stare at her without further response - a response in and of itself - she shoved herself off the edge of her desk, straightening. "Absolutely not! Are you out of your mind mad? Your mother would use Draco as leverage to get him back in an instant, and I — I —" She shook her head, unwilling to even imagine that possibility - "I absolutely refuse to allow that to happen!"
He leaned toward her, his voice low. "The secret Lucius Malfoy knows could be the key to changing everything. To saving every conservative left alive. If one life needs to be sacrificed to obtain it, then so be it."
Hermione's mouth opened and closed before she stared at him in repugnance. "No. I won't do it." She eyed him hawkishly. "And what're you saying — that there's actually a chance to change this?" She gestured around her with both arms. "Because this dictatorship certainly seems insurmountable to me!"
"I don't know!" he snapped. "But if the Sovereign wants this information this badly, and gets it, one can but assume that any chance these poor wretches have, no matter how minuscule, will be completely gone." His jaw set, and he looked away from her. "As will be the happiness of the people who care about them."
Hermione knew he was right. She knew the information Lucius Malfoy held must have been, at the very least, a clue toward cementing Dumbledore's power or destroying it. Dumbledore was clearly as brilliant here as he had been in her universe; there was no way he'd so doggedly seek it otherwise.
Torn in a thousand directions, between her mind and her heart and logic and emotion and bloody common sense, she squeezed her eyes shut.
The image of Draco's expression when he mentioned his deceased and clearly beloved mother instantly appeared. When he thought Pansy had been dead and discovered she wasn't.
He still believed his father had been dead since he was five.
Swiftly, Hermione opened her eyes and shook the image from her mind, feeling physically ill. Why did she have to get embroiled smack in the middle of what could potentially be another war with a far more powerful Dark Lord than even Voldemort had been? Winning Draco in a somewhat insulting bet was one thing - and look where it got her, the wrath of Lily Evans, who would probably kill them all without a second thought if she suspected anything in the slightest.
But aiding the escape of someone in whom Dark Lord Dumbledore himself was personally invested? Bloody Morgana and all the witches… They would be caught. They would be tortured. They would be killed.
And she would never, ever find a way to return home to her family and to everyone she loved.
"No." Hermione took her head, taking a step back from Harry and running into her desk; her ink bottle crashed noisily to the floor, but she didn't give it a second glance. "No, no, no. You judged me for my scheme to save Draco? The very thought of this is ten thousand times more lunatic than that, Harry! How are you proposing this? You! The uncaring, non-sacrificing Slytherin snake! I get that you care about Pansy, I do, but this goes a bit beyond that, don't you suppose? Why would you ever risk yourself for something so incredibly dangerous?"
Though Harry may not have understood her Slytherin reference, something dark flickered behind his gaze. "I have my reasons."
She crossed her arms. "And they are?"
When he didn't respond, she snorted contemptuously and threw up her hands, shaking her head. "No. I can't. I won't. I'm sorry, the lives of the people right here, including my own, are more valuable to me than whatever extremely little might be gained from trying to extricate Lucius Malfoy!"
The corner of her eye suddenly caught motion at the doorway — motion that suddenly stopped dead. Hermione tensed, looking toward the door in dread.
Draco's stunned eyes bore into hers.
Horror and bile jumped to her throat as Pansy suddenly appeared in the doorway beside him, looking breathless and worried. "Hermione, Harry, what's…?"
She looked between all of them and trailed off.
After a moment, Draco said in a very quiet, flummoxed voice, "My- My father… What?"
He had believed he'd been dead since he was five.
Hermione ripped her gaze from his, unable to face the bewilderment and astonishment there that she could have prevented, if only she'd had the nerve and the consideration to be honest with him. Instead, she and Harry had held an entire conversation about the fate of Lucius Malfoy behind his back - and she'd incontestably stated that she'd rather leave his father to whatever awaited him.
And he'd heard her.
"Draco…" Pansy said slowly, hesitantly taking his hand, "Your father… He isn't... What I mean to say is, he's alive." She sounded and looked about as horrified as Hermione was. "Merlin, we should have told you before now. I'm so sorry."
Hermione felt like she might vomit. The sensation only grew worse when Draco pulled his hand away from Pansy and looked between her and Hermione, his face ashen. "You… You knew? All of you?"
The surprise and pain and betrayal in his voice stabbed her straight through the gut.
Before she quite knew what she was doing, Hermione had swept up the small bundle of the Invisibility Cloak, Mauraders' Map and Wizarding Wheezes she took with her everywhere, mumbled something about needing to go, and brushed past him and Pansy, racing down the stairs and through the common room and into the corridor, flinging the Invisibility Cloak over her shoulders. Emotions that she couldn't quite process threatened to overwhelm her, and she fought back tears. She didn't care if they thought she was a coward.
They were right.
Her first thought was to go to the library, but the nausea in her stomach the moment she had the idea directed her the opposite way; the library would only remind her of how thoroughly she had failed to find a way home… and how she had let herself be consumed by that goal to such an extent that it hurt the person in this world she cared about the most.
Harry's words echoed in her mind:
Are you going to just sit here and do nothing when you have the ability to do otherwise?
Despite her best efforts, a tear tricked down her cheek. She viciously wiped it away.
She was a terrible person.
When had she become this way? The Hermione of her world would have been horrified, would have stood up for everything good and right by now, rather than continue to pretend to care but instead pursue her own separate - and selfish - agenda.
Her actions were so My-like it disgusted her.
But... why was wanting, trying to get home so awful? another part of her argued. These people couldn't expect her to stay here forever, to take on their massive problems when she'd already faced plenty of her own. Surely it couldn't be natural, couldn't be right that she remain in a universe that wasn't her own. No, she would be doing herself a great injustice if she didn't try to return.
The dilemma seemed unresolvable, even for logic. And coming up again and again against that insurmountable wall - and the potential possibility that she might never be able to circumvent it - made it difficult to breathe.
As soon as Hermione slipped past the Hogwarts doors and into the night, she gratefully gasped in a great gulps of cold air, the bracing blast of October wind soothing her burning face. Her mind swirled with a whirlpool of conflicting thoughts about how much to get involved, how much to change, how much to care, how much to not care and just focus on finding the solution that would return to her universe.
She doubted she would find clear direction on any one of them this evening.
She began walking vigorously through the grounds with no real destination in mind. After being cooped up inside the castle for what seemed like months, the fresh air and the freedom of the darkness and vast, open spaces was a great relief.
She eventually found herself approaching the lake, quite close to the huge building on the Universe B Hogwarts campus that was called the Hangar. On the ground, it was even more impressive than the outline from her window: a massive, windowless structure that did remind Hermione of a airplane hangar. A lone lantern illuminated a sizable sliding door on the opposite end of the building from a closed but much larger, garage-like entrance that must have been built to allow entry to something massive.
Hermione afforded it brief examination — mostly for signs of life — before she dropped to the ground at the lake's edge, hugging her knees to her chest and listening to the waves gently lap against the shore.
The rhythmic sound did much to soothe her pounding heart.
It did nothing to ease the guilt that wracked her.
"Wrong" didn't even begin to describe what the Sovereignty was doing, and she despised the regime and the entire society that enabled it with every bone in her body. When she had begun to help Draco and Pansy, she had hoped she might be able to juggle everything: her concern for this world with her determination to return to her own.
But after her terrifying encounter with Lily Evans, she'd realized… she just couldn't. The pervasive power and reach of the Sovereignty was staggering. Something was eventually going to give, someone was eventually going to sort out that she wasn't quite who she said she was, and if she focused too much on helping the conservatives here, she could very easily find herself imprisoned or dead before she ever found the way back to Universe A.
No, she had to fully commit to one pathway or the other, but she found herself unwilling to decide upon either.
If given the choice of stepping before a firing squad or escaping in the opposite direction, would anyone willingly choose the former?
Hermione buried her face in her knees, hugging them more tightly.
All she could see was the pain and betrayal on Draco's face.
What if he never forgave her?
Her heart ached at the thought that their friendship might very well be destroyed — a friendship that had formed much more quickly, much more naturally than even her relationships with Ron and Harry had so many years ago. Why hadn't she told him about his father sooner? Why hadn't anyone, for that matter?
A loud, mechanical scraping noise jerked her back into the cold night.
She jumped slightly, and quickly looked behind her to see Hagrid slowly pushing open the Hangar's sliding side door, grumbling irately under his breath. Behind him, though the inside of the Hangar was only dimly lit, Hermione could just make out what she thought were living things.
With a sickening jolt, she suddenly remembered that Ronáld had said the building was used for the Hunting and Trapping of Magical Creatures... and what he had alluded happened to the caught beasts afterward.
As the half-Giant exited the Hangar, his wheezes audible even from here, Hermione jumped to her feet, gnawing on her lip. Her feet itched, and she shifted anxiously from side to side. A hare-brained idea had crossed her mind, and her heart began to pound harder, already knowing subconsciously she was going to go through with it.
After being accused of doing nothing… Hermione was suddenly extremely driven to do the opposite.
She faced the building determinedly.
And as Hagrid drew his wand, presumably to lock the building for the night, she began to sprint.
She slipped inside the closing door a second before it rumbled shut with a slam of finality. Through the wall between them, she heard Hagrid recite an aural-targeted locking spell that would have never allowed her entrance to the building otherwise.
Hermione caught her breath and turned back to face the cavernous space.
Little did she know what she would find there would change everything.
A/N: I know you're eager to have some of the mysteries I've laid out solved, but I saw an opportunity for some extended Dramione at the beginning of this chapter and couldn't pass it up! Answers to many of the questions you've asked and the introduction of some additional characters are all coming in the next several chapters. (!)