On The Color Of Fur
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"Granger."
His voice echoed through the corridor she was walking down, stone walls reverberating the drawl of her name. Hermione's lungs locked up, a gasp of breath escaping her mouth as her steps faltered and his picked up, their thud-thud-thud mirrored by her heart. Constant vigilance! yelled a voice in her head, What have I been teaching you all along? Face your enemy, you never want to be hit when your back is turned. Hermione spun but the world around her did, too, though slower, its motion delayed. Her field of vision whirled and blotted at the corners as a result, ink-black, any light filtering through the tall windows leached away. When her wand slid from her arm holster, it slipped past her fingers and fell to the floor.
The sound of wood clattering on stone was deafening.
Time stood, suspended, the only movement that of a trickle of sweat running down the base of her spine.
The voice in her head changed.
The little mudblood likes to lie, it sang. And she could almost feel the hand gripping her chin, forcing it up, forcing her to meet those eyes. Little liar. Filthy, isn't she? Since she can't speak the truth, let's see how she likes to SCREAM IT!
Everything was black—the colour of the ceiling she stared at, the shade of the floor she lay on. Black were the clothes, the eyes, and the hair of her torturer. Black, too, had her name been, once.
Hermione saw unseeing, saw far beyond the school around her. And, when she blinked, she saw none of it. Somehow, she was still standing, back against solid rock. Hogwarts' walls surrounded them and where everything had been harsh black, things were now a soft, brownish yellow. Unlike the ghost of his aunt, Malfoy stood unarmed, palms up, keeping a distance. It mattered little. The sound of his voice had transported her to that night, to the cool, hard floors of his manor's drawing room where pain, pain, pain burned her, scorched her body, reduced to ashes whatever made Hermione Granger a person and made her instead like an unloved pet to be tortured at will. Cattle, to be branded.
Her skin still crawled with it, the tar of feeling sub-human.
"No," she said once out loud, even as in her head it was made a chant: no, no, stop!
"No?" came the question, and she forced herself to focus on the here and now, on arrogant grey-blue eyes. Those she could deal with. They were snotty, but not deranged—it was a distinction she had learnt to make. In fact, she found that, when they weren't reflecting her own horror and panic as they had that day, she could withstand them. Barely, but still…
"I don't want to hear it, Malfoy." Her voice didn't shake—her hands did. She hid them.
He stood, not tall—remorse weighed on one's shoulders, she supposed.
"Fine," Malfoy said. "That's rich. I thought your side was the forgiving one. The one all about fairness."
There was still a bite to his tone, and it heartened her. If he was still Malfoy, perhaps, by contrast, she could still be Hermione—altered, yes, but not unrecognizable.
An almost hysterical laugh escaped her before she could cut it short. "Nothing about this is fair. If you can find a single thing about this entire situation that is, I suggest you write to the Quibbler. Merlin knows the Daily Prophet never cared much for it in the first place."
He quirked an eyebrow. "I take it you won't suggest we hug it out and love each other, then?"
Hermione scoffed. "That's preposterous. And not what I signed up for. Though we can coexist—it's a great deal more than your side ever offered me."
There was no resentment. No, there was a great deal of that—she knew it to be misguided, but she didn't have it in her to do much about it at the moment. All her energy had been dispensed into keeping herself from spiralling.
"Granger?" Once she looked up, he continued. "I… appreciate you speaking before the Ministry on my behalf."
"I don't hate you, Malfoy. Strongly dislike you, yes, but the feeling is mutual, I believe. And still, you didn't identify us."
He shrugged and cleared his throat, grey-blue eyes not meeting hers. "Odd how petty revenge seems stupid in that context, isn't it?"
"See? That's why I can't hate you, and believe me, it would be easier if I could." She forced her neck muscles to relax. They refused. "There's this thing called civil disobedience, a muggle author called Thoreau wrote a book about it. I suggest you read it."
It was as close to acknowledging his bravery as she would—he had failed to kill Professor Dumbledore, and that could have been seen as cowardice. But he had stared Hermione, Harry, and Ron in the eye and told his family he wasn't sure.
The trouble with Slytherins was that they were also victims. Most pureblood children had been raised with a cult-like mentality. Very few—such as the Weasleys and Sirius, were strong enough to defy it. It was a bitter truth, their almost innocence, one that her old self had to remind her of as her pieces still lay on the floor of that manor.
Once their exchange was over, Hermione retrieved her wand from the floor, dropped her put-on front, and hid. Her eyes watered, but she couldn't feel the tears running down her face as her skin had lost all feeling. Numbness overtook everything but her core. Her lungs fought to expand as her chest constricted, her ribcage a too-tight corset wrapped around her. The air had turned too thick to inhale, viscous where it should have been weightless, unsubstantial. She gasped it in, clinging to a chair in the abandoned classroom she had found refuge in, gripping the wood until it creaked underneath her fingers. Ever so slowly, it started to ebb. Feeling returned: first, the throbs in her hands where the edges of the chair had dug angry red grooves as retaliation, then the itchy wetness on her face and the slight dampness on the thighs of her jeans where her tears had landed. A layer of dust clung to her palms, so Hermione pushed her hair away from her face with the heel of her hands, sniffing and swallowing against the rawness left behind. She was alright. If she could avoid Malfoy for the remainder of the school year and the rest of her life, she'd be fine.
Hermione grabbed her abandoned wand and cast a Tempus charm.
She was late for tea with Remus.
A/N: I'm late! Sorry, I've been a bit unwell for most of last week, we had an unseasonable heatwave (it's spring where I live, but this was far too hot even for summer standards - 37ºC was just insane) and my blood pressure kept going down. But I'm back now, and Tuesdays will now be the updating day for this (unless I delay until the weekend at some point).
As usual, I hope you guys like this chapter and I appreciate you joining me for this ride :)