Note: Plot inspired by the manga "A Silent Voice - Koe no katachi."
Dialogues in italics indicate sentences expressed through sign language.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

He hated having to ask someone for help, but he had a great craving for milk and mint and demanded that it be prepared for him as soon as possible. Lorelayne, the maid, seemed to have disappeared into thin air, which was causing him no small amount of nervousness; capricious and spoiled, they could tell him anything, but he wanted his milk with mint.

"Master Draco?" The child turned toward the kitchen entrance, huffing in the woman's direction. It had taken her a long time to show up!
"I want milk."
"Sure."
"With mint." Lorelayne nodded slowly, suppressing the motion of amusement born of watching that little aristocrat cross his arms over his chest and drum his little foot on the floor in an agitated manner. Nine years old and a concentration of arrogance and cockiness, a great shot indeed.

"I'll get it ready for you right away."
Draco let out a satisfied expression, and as the woman approached the stovetop, the child climbed onto one of the chairs that was too high for him, risking falling but avoiding, of course, seeking help. It had been enough to ask for the damn milk, it could be enough. A few minutes later, Draco was stretching his little arms toward the expensive marble table, grabbing the infamous glass of milk and trying to find the least awkward way to ask the question that was so quivering in his head,
"Look," Lorelayne looked at him interested and, perhaps, a tad regretful that he never called her by her name.

"Earlier, when my mother was angry" Draco nervously sipped the drink before him, watching the concentric motion of the greenish liquid through the transparency of the glass tumbler, and Lorelayne's heart clenched a little, because with those sad little eyes he finally looked like the child he was supposed to be.

"Was she mad at me?" Lorelayne wished she had hugged him. Why was it so hard for that child to act like one?

"Absolutely not, mister." Draco raised his big gray eyes to the woman, attempting to dull them with a highly frangible patina of contemptuous superiority, turning his chin haughtily.

"The lady had an argument with your father, but it's all settled. You need not worry."

She smiled motherly at him, and Draco turned red with embarrassment and hated her, as his pale little hands gripped the glass tightly, sliding across the glassy surface.

"I wasn't worrying."

"Did you hear that? A new one is coming today!"

"Really? And who is she?"

"I have no idea, but it'll probably be some country girl who just arrived. The classic simpleton who shows up in the middle of the school year!"

Could one be so extremely gossipy and irritating at only nine years old? Draco, sounding into his own ears at sickening buzzing of the geese in his class, answered himself that it was certainly possible.

"I wonder what this one will be like!" as if that wasn't enough now Blaise, the one he despite himself considered his "friend," at least before he was reduced to gossiping with those little morons, had gotten into it. Just a great fall from grace.

"Guys! I demand your attention for a minute!" roared their teacher, much to the delight of little Malfoy, who was already tired of all the chatter and this phantom "newcomer." The voices had quieted down suddenly and, pleasantly intrigued by this, Draco looked up at the heavy wooden desk, where the teacher was now flanked by a petite and patently insignificant figure. Draco gazed at the shapeless, bushy mass of the little girl's hair and found himself annoyed to catch a glimpse of the little girl's dark eyes resting on every member of the class curiously. All that fuss over such a little being?

"Come on, introduce yourself to your classmates." The little girl remained silent, serenely facing the rest of the class. A few giggles rose from the back of the classroom, and Draco grinned upon hearing an indistinct "To me this one is retarded." Even the teacher was getting impatient and piqued laid a hand on her bony shoulder, shaking her nervously.

"Hey, I'm talking to you!" The little girl then jumped on the spot at the perception of that firm touch and, as if awakened from a catatonic state, contemplated the teacher's face in an attempt to understand his intentions, and then put on a small smile and nodded decisively as she rummaged inside the dusty folder. She pulled out a notebook with a burgundy-colored cover and under everyone's curious eyes opened it, writing something on the first blank page. Then, she showed it to the class.

"I am Hermione Granger, pleased to meet you."

"But what ..."

"I am deaf-mute, so from now on I will use this notebook to communicate with you. I hope to become your friend!"

Draco read that extremely precise and elegant handwriting for a little girl, while Tiger and Goyle snickered behind him.

"Gonna have some fun with this one, eh Draco?" A grin took his beautiful lips, sadly tearing into his diaphanous, angelic face.

"I guess so."

Teasing Hermione Granger was extremely amusing, beyond gratifying to be surrounded by the amused laughter of her classmates, and yet, on the one hand, highly counterproductive. If they had initially believed she was retarded because she was unaware of her disability, Draco was now sincerely beginning to suspect her of a possible mental disorder. Because it was not normal for her to smile at everyone like that. Why, how could she not get upset when they threw blueberry juice at her, tossing her indelibly stained uniform in the trash? When they grabbed her frizzy hair, pulling at it until it hurt, how did she not cry? And of those times when he had sat in the desk behind hers and yelled in her ear, making her jerk because she had just operated the hearing aid and, frightened, she had fallen out of her chair, thus breaking the seventh device in six months, how did she not hate him? In that entire elementary class at one of London's most prestigious institutions, the only ones who had approached the little girl with the intention of making friends had been those two losers Potter and Weasley, and so it was even more fun to taunt her; as they say, two birds with one stone.

Draco entered class that morning in a foul mood; his parents had quarreled again, and no matter how much he pretended to care, those shouts echoing through the austere walls of their mansion had the power to destabilize him dangerously. He did not even listen to the greetings from Blaise and the others, limiting himself to a glare as he sat down in his seat and pulled his books out of his satchel. When he turned back to the desk, however, he found himself looking annoyed at Granger's burgundy-colored notebook, where in the center of an immaculate sheet of paper timidly towered an inscription.

"Will you be my friend?" He gasped and immediately looked up at the desk in front of his, where Hermione was looking at him shyly, with those eyes so expressive that they spoke for her. She was crazy. Completely. Friend. Had she really asked him to be her friend? To him, the same boy who pursued her mercilessly? Draco gritted his teeth, grabbing the stupid notebook and throwing it at the little girl who, disappointed, picked it up and turned away without lowering her head, hiding her shame as best she could. The little boy stared angrily at Hermione's messy hair, holding his breath. Why had that simple, childish question seemed to him like an offer of help? What did she know about his life, about the problems that were growing in his own home? And above all, how crazy did she have to be to try to approach him, her tormentor, of all people? Draco looked away from her figure and decreed that he hated her, unaware that he had confused loneliness with madness.

The coup de grace for Granger had come a month before the end of school. As every year, in support of the music project, the whole class was required to participate in the national singing competitions where they always managed to snatch first place and a shiny trophy to add to the institution's trophy case. Of course, they were counting on achieving the same result again that year. But, of course, they had not reckoned with Hermione's situation. Professor Hagrid had a character filled with pietas that, personally, little Malfoy hated, and when he had announced to them that Hermione was part of their class and therefore entitled to participate in the singing competition, he had seriously come to hate him. Hermione was only able to emit a few croaky guttural verses and although she was part of the chorus, her presence was quite noticeable and had penalized the team, leading them to defeat. The class was of the same unanimous opinion: despite her incredibly high grades, the Granger was slowing them down, penalizing their teammates and was, overall, a liability. That is why when Harry and Ron had proposed to the class to learn sign language to communicate with the girl, the children had burst out laughing and even the teachers themselves had admitted the futility of the proposal. In any case, defeat burned lethal on their skins, and the desire to take a little revenge pressed violently against their corrupted souls. Draco, certainly, was not to be outdone. The morning after the competition Hermione had entered the classroom for the last time and stood alone in front of the blackboard scrawled and full of malicious epithets against her.

"You're useless!"
"You made us lose!"
"It's your fault!"
"Get out!"

And Hermione, silent and bright-eyed, was really gone. Principal Dumbledore had announced this one morning, after a week of absence on the girl's part. He had been harsh and extremely irate in talking about the bullying behind Granger's transfer, and who knows why, at that moment no one was laughing but they all stood stiff and composed in their desks. They only bothered to point the finger at Draco Malfoy and accuse him of being the only culprit before the elderly principal and Draco, left alone amid the false goodness of those traitors, went from executioner to victim in short order. Every morning he found insults written on his desk by students from other classes, and it was not until two weeks after Hermione's departure that he realized that those writings had been there long before, since he had started picking on her.

Fool.

He shouted in anger at the peeling walls of the empty classroom and pushed the rickety desk away, throwing it on the floor.

The stupid one, that's why she always arrived before the others.

Draco screamed and brought his hands to his hair as with a pang in his heart he caught sight of an abandoned notebook under Hermione's old desk. A notebook with a burgundy-colored cover. He shook his head and swallowed back angry tears.

The stupid girl was erasing the writing on my desk before I got there.

And now becoming the victim of kids who beat him up in amusement in the back of the schoolyard, Draco did not react because, in his heart, he knew he deserved it. A black eye would never have been enough to redeem him from all the harm he had done to her.

10 years later

He had to end it. He had been thinking about it for a month now, but the heartbreaking conviction had come that very morning. He had gotten up late and had therefore rushed toward the closet with an animal eagerness that was not his own at all. As Lorelayne said, he would have looked painfully elegant even smeared with tar in the harbor drainage area. He had grabbed his school uniform and slipped it on within seconds, but, as he pranced around the room in an attempt to slip on his right shoe, he had ignominiously slammed into the low shelf where he kept his old elementary school books. Draco had thrown a few half-curses at the immeasurable emptiness of his cold room, but had shut up as soon as he caught sight of a few books that had ended up on the floor because of the collision. He might as well have left them there, given the delay, but his obnoxious perfectionist streak had forced him to bend to the floor and fleetingly pick them up. He grabbed one and, recognizing the burgundy-colored slipcover, froze. He had kept Hermione Granger's notebook for ten years and he didn't know why either. On the one hand he still felt terribly guilty for what he had done to her, but it certainly wasn't just that, because, for example, how had it occurred to him to learn sign language? "I had time" he had always told himself, considering the afternoons alone at home, after Hermione's departure and his reversal from persecutor to victim, he had plenty of time, and after all, he didn't even feel like listening to the arguments between his parents, which were now the order of the day. So he had studied. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of his bed and stare at that little blue spot on the wall that he had caused with spirit paint when he was five, wondering what the fuck he was really doing. Had he learned sign language because he hoped to see her again? Yes, maybe he was. Did he want to find her to apologize? He had surrendered to the evidence and admitted it. One February night, as the storm raged outside and his parents argued in their room, Draco, staring helplessly at the droplets of water crashing against the glass and running downward, had even promised himself that he would not die without first finding her and receiving her forgiveness. In ten years he had changed. He had grown up and perhaps been forced to fortify himself, to throw away that evil, saccharine tongue, to admit that he was weak. Of the boys who pointed at him at school and excluded him he gave a damn -even though realizing that among them were those he had once called friends had caused a tiny little crack in his right ventricle- and when his father had been thrown in jail for financial fraud or something similar he had cried against his pillow for only five minutes. Then he'd stopped, and looking at his mother with swollen eyes, he'd wondered where the hell he'd been while his family was being destroyed. Hermione Granger, however, had never seen her again. And in the end he might as well have blissfully blown off his delusional promise, for by now he had grown tired of living only for pride. He did not want to take his own life because of depression-his mother was the depressed one among them-but because he hated himself. More and more often he would think back to himself a few years earlier and wonder how it could have been like that, what that little deaf-mute girl had done to him to make him pursue her. Absolutely nothing. Doubly cowardly, Malfoy. He grabbed the notebook and slipped it fleetingly into his school bag, without even thinking about it, then ran off toward the school.

Maybe they would find him paler than usual, glassy-eyed and wide-eyed, next to the damn notebook. Maybe someone would have understood.

He hated the corridors of Hogwarts, his high school, because they were full of people and voices. Once upon a time, the old Draco would have been comfortable in that environment and would certainly have been among the most popular in the school, surrounded by easy-going young girls and fellow facades. Instead, he saw himself reflected in the eyes of the losers in the advanced math class, and he didn't care. All those people around him were driving him to madness, their voices drilling into his eardrums with a sharp, suffocating pain. Draco saw people talking without communicating, people hearing without listening and realized how similar they all were to Hermione. Sometimes he had wondered what it felt like not to hear, like her. He closed his tired eyes and brought his hands to his ears, muffling all those annoying sounds. That's better. He opened them again and stopped. Between that football player's shoulder and the cheerleader who was flirting with him he had caught a glimpse of hair that was familiar. Maybe it was just suggestion and he had panicked, because he had also shouted "Hermione!" only then realizing that, if it had really been her, she certainly could not have heard it.

So he ran. He shoved a couple of first-year boys stopped in the middle of the hallway without ever taking his eyes off the back of his head.
Could it really have been her? Was she really ... back? He grabbed her pale little hand and the girl turned away. Draco could not tell which of the two was more surprised.

She had changed. So much. She was slender and petite, as she had been as a child, but those big teeth that had made him laugh so much ten years earlier were gone to give way to a pair of delicate incisors, and her hair, that frizzy hut that had once been her hair, now fell over her shoulders in such soft ringlets that he immediately felt like grasping one between his fingers. For the first time since he had known her, Draco paused to gaze into her eyes in their simple immensity and gasped a couple of times as he read those words that to her vocal cords had been excluded.

"Hermione ..." he whispered, and she read her own name caught between his lips. "You're back."

Draco lost himself in contemplating Hermione's terrified and confused pupils, and he almost felt as if he was looking at the yellowed screen of an old suburban movie theater, for between her cornea and iris he clearly saw his childish self shouting into the ears of a little girl who could never hear him.

I am learning all about my life by looking through her eyes.*

Hermione had recognized him and was terrified. Draco could tell by the way she tried to back away and immediately a panic attack seized him.

"No no, wait, I ..." he stammered quickly and then called himself an idiot. He had learned that damn sign language, it was time to use it.

"I don't want to hurt you." Hermione's wide eyes gave him confirmation that his madness had not been in vain.

"Do you know sign language?" he was surprised to see Hermione's small, chapped hands trembling as she asked her question, and with a nervous shake of his head he nodded, feeling a ridiculous anxiety assail him. God, Draco Malfoy and his pride had really sunk low. Hermione, however, hadn't stopped backing away, and the collision with the backpack resting on the floor was providential, because Draco didn't even realize how, but seconds later he was the one lying against the hallway linoleum with a nasty bruise on his backside. If nothing else, he could boast of having excellent reflexes. Hermione , standing before him, could look at him for the first time from a different perspective and he seemed helpless. When they were children she had never wanted to hate him. In fact, to be honest, maybe she even liked him a little. Just like that, without a reason. Even if he teased her, even if it hurt her, even if it was so not normal because she was a damn masochist, she didn't want to hate him. She felt sorry for Draco Malfoy because he was alone. Not just like her, but just because he carried himself with an invisible loneliness that she had noticed from the first stinging dig at her and which she had tried to decipher through his lips. She would have loved to become his friend because she believed that behind those magnetic gray eyes was another person crying out to come out and she would not have wanted to leave that school if it were not for her mother, who seemed to suffer bullying more than she did. She had never seen him again but had thought about him every day, and now, as Draco's old elementary school notebook peeked out of Draco's satchel, Hermione discovered that he had been holding on to it all those years, and that he had even learned sign language, and at that point, a question arose in her mind. Draco felt himself grasp a hand, and looking up he discovered Hermione crouched at his side, her eyes downcast and her cheeks red. It must have been ridiculous, lying on that dirty, dusty floor beside a deaf-mute little girl who was more invisible than he was, but in that moment he decided to give a damn about the opinion of others and preferred to focus on Hermione's fingers tracing something important on his palm. "Why?"

Draco could not answer but was only able to look Hermione in the eyes. His lips even trembled as he gave her a tiny little smile but still worth half the answer.

"I'm sorry." Hermione nodded and smiled faintly but still allowing a glimpse of the incisors that were so different from those of the past. Draco cashed in that smile with a new joy, and that idea of killing himself rumbled through his brain like the worst thing in the world. It was the day he had decided to take his own life, and instead he was being saved. At that moment, as Hermione still brushed his hand and smiled, he was reminded of that day ten years earlier when she had tried to save him from himself but he, too small and stupid at the time, had preferred to hurt her and push her away like a wild and lonely fair that wants to lick its own wounds. In his eardrums, meanwhile, his heart rumbled so loudly that he thought he could hear it beating in sync with Hermione's, and that rhythmic melody splashed from all parts of his body, turning into serenity and happiness, the one he had so secretly sought.

"Will you be my friend?" Hermione widened her eyes and cried with the most beautiful smile in the world on her face and, for the first time, Draco felt her, extremely loud and incredibly close, enough to make him tremble.

Hermione could never hear Draco's voice, and that is why she cried. She used to watch him move his lips as he conversed with some person and despaired of imagining what his voice sounded like, whether calm and quiet, deep and scraping, sweet and gentle, going so far as to go mad and shed tears of frustration that Draco promptly secretly wiped away from her. She could never have heard him, but over time she had learned to feel him. When they had shared their first kiss under the stars of Brighton, far from chaotic London, Hermione had wanted so much to tell him that she was the happiest girl on earth, but Draco's embarrassed smile had been enough to answer her implicitly. When she wanted to tell him that she loved him but did not know how to do so she would bring her own trembling little hand to his hairless chest and write it on it, a little imprecisely and messily. Draco would then take that same hand and kiss her skeletal knuckles, then her forehead and then her nose and it was his way of telling her "I feel you," a kiss that matched every word and was worth more than an actual declaration. When he had asked her to marry him she had hated herself for not being able to hear his "will you be my wife?" but it had been enough for her to see him kneeling before her, with the little blue felt box in his hand and the ring standing out in the center of a velvet cushion, and she had known that she was about to join her life to the boy's forever, and there was absolutely nothing else she wanted more in the world. When she was lying on the gynecologist's crib and the cold gel tickled her belly without making her laugh, she could only see a few gray patches, and she was terrified of becoming a mother who would have not hear her baby cry when he was sick or laugh in lighthearted moments. But Draco had heard the baby's heart beating, and when she had seen him with his eyes glazed over and his gaze lost on her belly, Hermione had realized that their baby would have been just fine and that she would make up for missing him by loving him twice as much as she could. When their baby had come into the world and she had not been able to hear his first wail, his hymn to life, but Draco had immediately walked up to her with that tiny blue bundle in his hand and placed it on her milk-swollen chest. Then he had opened his big gray eyes, like her father's, and they had both been moved in a riot of tears and hugs that had made her feel the happiest woman on earth and, for a moment, made her forget what she did not have.

Just then, in those moments, in those arms and in those two pairs of eyes so equal that they made her cry, she had felt them with her, inside her; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close .

Notes:
Quote taken from the song "Through her eyes" by Dream Theater.
Title inspired by the homonymous book by Jonathan Safran Foer.