Chapter 39
It turned out the afternoon Draco and Harry had spent up in the Astronomy tower was going to be the last good weather they would get in a while. The very next day the sky had turned grey again and it was pouring down from the heavy bellies of ominously dark clouds. The students retracted back into the castle and holed up in their common rooms between classes.
Draco and Pansy had taken up each end of the sofa nearest to the fireplace and sat with their backs to the armrests and their legs tangled together in the middle. Draco was trying to read, Pansy was half-heartedly following Daphne and Matthew's chess game. Blaise was there too, writing letters with a calm look of concentration on his face. Draco couldn't remember the last time he had been in the same room as all of them with this little tension between them. Blaise had been a pest in the beginning of the year, all of his snarky comments to try to get a rise out of Draco, knowing how high strung he was with the way the other students looked at him. But Draco had made it pretty easy for him too. It was likely he had far overestimated how much talk there was about him in the school. Most people probably hadn't cared too much. As soon as Draco had occupied himself with other things, all the rest of it had quieted down a lot too. He remembered how desperate he had been to claw his way back to the top of the pureblood hierarchy. What a stupid idea that had been.
He closed his book and put it down on the table. Pansy looked up at him.
"You going somewhere?" she asked.
Draco disentangled his legs from hers and stood up.
"I need to go pick up a book from the library," he said.
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He didn't need anything from the library. He would have much preferred to stay down in the Slytherin common room, rather than make his way all the way to the Northern Tower, but he had started to feel bad that he hadn't tried harder to figure out what to do about Azkaban. Harry had mentioned that Granger was spending a lot of time up in the secret room, enough that Weasley was getting worried about her, whereas Draco had hardly spared it a thought since Lovegood had her stroke of genius with the patronus chain. He knew that it was important, he wasn't about to let himself forget that again. It was just that he had no clue about how to move forward from there. It had taken them forever to come up with anything in the first place, and they still couldn't be sure that their idea would even work. And sure, they had figured that out with a minimum of knowledge about dementors, but they knew absolutely nothing about the pit or even about Azkaban. They didn't know when it had been constructed or by whom or what it had been used for, nothing except that it had been discovered a couple of hundred years ago and someone decided to turn it into a prison.
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Draco reached the empty corridor and counted his steps down to the blank stretch of wall that was the entrance. He whispered the password and pushed the door open when it materialized.
He stepped inside to find Granger sitting on the sofa with her legs pulled up and her face turned to the windows where raindrops were hurling themselves against the glass and trickling downwards in tiny rivers. There were no open books near her or even on the table and she sat unmoving, lost in thought, as if she hadn't even noticed him. He cleared his throat and she started.
"Oh, Malfoy. I didn't hear you come in."
"Sorry. I thought I would come up here to – I assume we're still doing research on Azkaban?"
Granger sighed and buried her fingers in her hair.
"I suppose we are," she said.
"I actually have no idea where to start," said Draco, taking one of the chairs across from her. "Harry says you've been up here a lot, so maybe you have a suggestion?"
She let her hand fall and was rested her arms on her knees. She was looking past him again, at the windows behind him instead of at him.
"I haven't found anything. Or thought of anything."
"Really?" he said, trying not to sound too disappointed.
"It's not like there is much else we can find out without going, is there?" she continued.
"If that's what you think, then what are we waiting for?"
"I don't know."
He fought back irritation – he couldn't blame her that she hadn't gotten anywhere. He should have been working too, pulling his part of it.
"You're the one who insisted we don't tell the others," he said.
"I know."
"So why-"
"I don't know why I'm even talking to you about this," she snapped.
"Why would you not talk to me about it? I'm as much as part of this as any of you - I'm going to Azkaban too."
"You wouldn't understand."
"Why not?" he said. "Because I'm not in Gryffindor?"
"Because you haven't done this before. It's always like this. We find something that's impossible to do, and then we find out we have to do it, and then we try to plan or prepare and then we go there and find out we missed something important and then all of our plans fall apart and someone looses a limb or gets caught or dies. And I just thought it would be nice if, just for once, we had actually prepared enough."
"But if we can't-"
"I know, Malfoy. I just… I thought I was done with this, alright? I thought that I would never have to do this again. Or at least that it would be a very long time."
She said it evenly, no one could ever have heard her and claimed that she was complaining. But there was also something in her voice like this was something she had carried around for a while, that it had been weighing her down more than she cared to admit even to herself, and he guessed she probably hadn't told anyone else.
"Then don't go," he said, but carefully.
No matter how many hours they had spent working together on this by now, he knew that in her eyes, this still wasn't his place.
"I have to," she said.
"No, you don't."
The look he got was searing.
"It's been less than two months since you sat there trying to convince us all of how important this was and we both know that place is evil-"
"Yes, but it doesn't have to be you," he said. "Someone has to go, and currently it's on our odd little group, because we seem to be the only ones who've noticed and we don't believe there is a chance of getting someone else, someone more qualified, to listen, but if we could just have reported this to the ministry and be done with it, we would have. I would have done it in a second. I tried to get the headmistress to listen before I even mentioned it to Potter. And if I knew someone else was doing it, I wouldn't go. And no one says all of us have to either. Pansy isn't going, and I don't blame her."
"That's different."
"How is it different?"
"You know how."
He took a deep breath.
"Okay, I know you don't want to talk about this with me, I know how you feel about me-"
"You don't know shit, Malfoy."
"Can't you see how ridiculous it is that you think you have to go because of the colour of your robe?"
"It has nothing to with my house, Malfoy."
"It's about all of you thinking of yourself as heroes."
"I'm not how I am because I'm trying to act like a Gryffindor, I'm in Gryffindor because of the way I am, that's a really important distinction, and-"
"But it isn't all on you!" he said, louder than he had intended. "It's great that you think you're obligated to try to save the world and it's great to know that sometimes you can't rely on others to do the things that have to be done, but you also have to trust that you're not the only one who's trying. Besides, there is more than one way to save the world, just because you're in Gryffindor that doesn't mean you can only do things that matter when you run in wands blazing with no idea what you're doing, the way Harry does. If you had been in Ravenclaw you'd probably have been fine with doing practically all the research, basically solving the problem of how to kill a dementor, and then not go with us to Azkaban. It's not like you don't know you're one of the most talented witches to graduate from Hogwarts in years, so aren't you planning to save the world in other ways too? Politics and science and philosophy, that's still important even if it looks less impressive."
She stared at him.
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
Draco stared back.
"Yeah," he said. "That's what I tell myself."
She sighed.
"It's not that simple."
"I didn't say it was simple."
She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand.
"God," she said quietly. "I just… I really don't want to have this conversation with you, alright? I… appreciate what you said, but I just can't."
He nodded.
"Okay," he said. "I'll leave you alone, then."
He stood up and crossed over to the door. He had his hand on the handle when she spoke again:
"Malfoy?"
He stopped.
"Why are you going to Azkaban? What's your reason?"
Her tone had changed, it was more gentle now. He turned back to her.
"I'm the one who brought it up in the first place," he said. "And I haven't really been doing my part of the heroics these last few years. It would look pretty bad if I tried to pull out, wouldn't it? I can't imagine the Weasleys letting me get away with that."
She scoffed, but that was a quiet sound too.
"I didn't mean that. There's some other reason, isn't there?"
He hesitated. He didn't know what to tell her – not about Harry, obviously, but she was looking at him now, and listening, and he didn't want to waste that on some vague half-truths.
"Before Harry and I became… friends, I had this fight with him," he began slowly. "I don't even remember how it started, but I remember that I told him it didn't matter what he had done, his side winning the war, because the next generation would be no different from the last one. I don't think he has any idea how our government really works. You've probably noticed?"
She grimaced; a pained, exhausted expression.
"I've noticed," she said.
"I think Potter still sort of believes that it was all because of the Death Eaters, so I tried to explain why it's not. How it's an entire system, not a single incident, not just one evil person. How all the same families have been running the country for centuries and how they'll probably continue to do that for the coming centuries too. And how we're playing some sort of political game in Slytherin, and if I ever have kids they'll be playing that game too, befriending the Zabinis or the Greengrasses, or whoever is the most important pureblood family at that time."
"Yeah, I know, Malfoy. How does any of that relate to Azkaban?" she asked, not sharply, just prodding to make sure he was going somewhere.
"I don't know if it does, it's just that I think that's what I'm afraid of," he said. "I don't want that. Can you imagine if we all came back to that platform some day, content and married with our own kids, and all of my friends were still Slytherins and yours were all Gryffindors? Just the fact that we don't stop belonging to the houses even when we leave school... I can't stand that thought. The circularity of it. I mean, what's the point? My father used to talk about the legacy of the Malfoy family and how I needed to carry on the traditions, and I was terrified of letting him down, but I've been thinking about it, and now I'm not so sure that it's really all that important. To spend my whole life making sure that my family doesn't change, that in seven generations, being a Malfoy will still mean exactly the same thing. So I suppose… Sorry, I don't know what I'm trying to say. Just that maybe that's another reason for going to Azkaban. I just want to make sure something changes."
She was frowning, but nodded to herself when he finished.
"Alright," she said.
He waited for her to say more, but when she didn't he reached for the door again.
"I'll see you around, then?" he said.
"Yeah. And I'll... think about what you said."
He nodded with a quick smile in her direction, and then let himself out.
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He stood for a moment out in the hallway, gathering himself and watching the door fade away into the stones. He had no idea why he had just had this conversation. Or what exactly it was he had been trying to tell Granger.
One thing did seem pretty clear though. They were never going to figure out what to do about the pit no matter how much time they spent on research. He would have to tell Harry that they had found a way to kill the dementors. They didn't have any more excuses to wait. And it would probably turn out to be exactly as Granger predicted: they would go and try to do the impossible, probably find themselves underprepared for it, and then wait for chaos to break loose around them. It was nice to know that at least some of them had tried that before, because personally, he was terrified.