It was the middle of the night when Draco awoke. Weasley was fast asleep, snoring away on a bed on the other side of the room, and Dobby was nowhere to be seen. Granger was awake, sitting next to Draco's bed, yet maintaining a comfortable distance. Her wand, glowing silver with the Lumos spell, threw light on an old book. Draco observed her, his eyes half closed, as her serious face pored over the book. To avoid thinking about his parents and about the very real risk that Voldemort could target them after his treason, Draco focused as hard as he could on Granger. He had always found her tremendously annoying. There were two types of annoying people, as far as Draco understood it. The ones that had little to no self-respect and that would do anything to be part of a group, and the ones who held their weirdness with great pride, and preferred being alone rather than bullied. The first group was easy to manipulate. To Draco's own shame, he had consciously thought out this classification, and had always regularly attacked the people in the first group. It was easy to hurt someone who was desperate to fit in, as they tended to accept mockery and insults and exchange of a few moments of belonging. But Granger was one of those people in the second category, with such strong grounding and self-confidence that they considered themselves superior because of their annoying traits. She had never shown any shame about her unkept appearance, her way of jumping with the hand in the air as the perfect teacher's pet, about her mudblood heritage, or about her strange hobbies such as spending time in the library or in the company of people like Potter, Weasley, Longbottom or Lovegood. He had tried to bully her, emphasising what to him what the biggest thing she should be ashamed of — her blood status. And she had always looked back at him with that superior air, that smirk she always had, those cold eyes, as if to say: "No word of yours could ever harm me". How deeply he had hated her for the way she existed as if devoid of shame, while his own shame only grew stronger and stronger. Oftentimes, he had hated her more than he hated Potter and Weasley. It was unbearable to him that somehow who ought to have felt so ashamed to be alive, could consider themselves superior to him. He had spent hours at night, sometimes for months on end during their school years, chewing on that hate. But now that so much blood and pus and thoughts and dreams had spilled out of him, Draco couldn't keep his eyes off Granger's absence of shame. It felt like a lifeboat. He remembered the way she had stared at Bellatrix in between moments of being tortured. Even though she had screamed, and cried, and been reduced to barely anything by his aunt, the pride in her eyes had simply not been broken. And he wondered what it was, in her, that allowed for such freedom. He also wondered if there would be any way, one day, for him to feel that sense of confidence in himself. That feeling of not being embarrassed, of not wanting to make other people pay for being embarrassing. That deep internal cringe, inherited by years of being put down by his parents, and seeing them put each other down. What did it mean to never cringe at oneself? To not obsess over one's flaws?
Granger jumped and grabbed her wand, pointing it at him. Draco blinked, and felt his face get prickly. How hard had he been staring for him to be startled so badly?
"Sorry," he muttered. "I woke up."
She didn't say anything, her wand still raised.
"What are you reading?" he asked.
"Lower your voice," she whispered angrily, looking in the direction of Weasley. "He needs some sleep."
"And you don't?" Draco whispered back, barely suppressing the usual sarcasm in his voice.
"I would if it wasn't for you."
Blood flushed to his face. Was he making her shy? His teenage mind could not help but jump to that conclusion.
"You can't sleep?" he asked.
"What? No -" she said, seeming lost for words. "Draco, I don't trust you. If it wasn't for Dobby and Harry you wouldn't even be in this tent, having this conversation with me."
"Harry wants me here?"
"Harry believes that, for some obscure reason, we ought to give you a chance. Don't ask me why."
"Where is he?"
She scoffed.
"Wouldn't you like to know."
A silence drew itself between them. But it didn't felt tense, despite their exchange of words. If anything, it felt less tense than any interaction they had ever had. Draco chuckled, his ribs hurting in the process.
"What's so funny?" she asked. "Going to call me a mudblood again? Finding something to say about my hair?"
Draco shook his head.
"I was actually thinking about our school years. Remember when you punched me in the face?"
Granger's eyes involuntarily brightened, before taking their previous cautious expression.
"It was well-deserved," she said. "You called Hagrid pathetic. You were awful to us."
"It was well-deserved. The slap I mean! But don't you think it's funny, being here now?"
"I don't," she said. But Draco saw the corner of her lip lift itself anyway, briefly. Cautiously.
"Why are you acting so nice all of a sudden?" she asked. "Do you actually think we're going to fall for it?"
Draco wasn't sure how to answer. He stared at her long strands of hair, forming wave patterns over the pages of her book. And at her thin, well-defined hands, with well-trimmed but dirty nails. There was something so human about her. Something that scared him because of how unfamiliar it was, and yet drew him in for that same reason.
"Have you ever wanted to completely change yourself?" he asked back.
"No," she flatly said. "Why would I?"
"I don't know."
He rolled over, and stared at a small spider making its way across the ceiling of the tent.
"I certainly would. But I don't know if I can."
"If you can change?"
"Yeah."
She didn't answer for a while. Draco looked at her again. She seemed lost in thought. As he thought that the conversation was over and was about to fall back to sleep, she spoke up again.
"When you think about it, it's not in the nature of anything to stay the same. Even rocks change over time. We age, we form new opinions, new relationships, let go of parts of ourselves that don't serve us anymore. We adapt. It's the law of life."
"But what if I can't change that aspect of me?" Draco whispered.
"Which one?"
"Most of them."
She stared at him.
"Well… First, you need to figure out what your good traits are."
"I don't have any."
"You must. Take that as homework. Figure out what they are. Hold on tight to them. When in doubt, act according to them. Over time, they will take over the rest. Then, you can do some deeper work if your bad traits come back. You can try to figure out why they keep coming back. But start with identifying the good ones."
He nodded. He hadn't thought about it this way. He had always been good with his homework, perhaps because it always gave him time away from the rest of the world.
"And hey," she added. "You followed us, didn't you? You took that knife in the stomach. I saw you jump in front of it. One of us would have certainly died if it hadn't been for you."
"I didn't think the knife thing through. Like don't get me wrong, I did jump in front of it. But it was more of a reflex than a noble, thought-out plan. It wasn't like that at all."
"Retrospectively, if you could think it through. Would you still have taken it?"
He thought about it seriously. For some reason, Dobby's big watery eyes came to his mind.
"I guess so."
"So there you are. There is some good in there. You just need to feed it."
"Ron…"
"Hermione, are you taking the mickey? First Harry and now you? He's a Death Eater for God's sake."
"Not now that we removed the Dark Mark."
"We removed it while he was asleep!"
"But he's the one who asked for it, remember? He warned us that it possessed a trace."
"He was passing out, he could have meant anything!"
"Listen…"
Granger's voice became inaudible.
"People do not change, Hermione. Not people like him. That's what he told you and you honestly believe him?"
"Well. We can agree to disagree. That aside, we can't just stay in the tent forever. It will be easier to keep a watch on him at Shell Cottage."
"And risk the lives of all the secret keepers?"
More unintelligible muttering. Draco wondered how much time had passed since they left the manor. He had kept going in and out of sleep, awakening only to eat a few bites at a time, drink some water and relieve himself behind a tree in the forest where they had planted the tent. There had been no more deep conversations with Granger, and no conversations at all with Weasley, who always looked at him with disgust. Even though the pain had greatly rescinded, Draco now felt an alarming sort of fatigue. He felt so drowsy that he simply couldn't stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. He assumed that it was normal. That his body was recuperating. But he also had the feeling that his mind needed this drowsiness. Even since Dumbledore's death — no, ever since he had been given the mission to kill Dumbledore almost two years ago, Draco hadn't had one good night's sleep. Every single night, he had woken up four to five times a night. And since Dumbledore's death, nightmares had taken over every sleeping hour of his. For the first time, there was nothing for him to do but sleep. And even though the bed was just a futon, and all of his past enemies constantly kept a watch on him, and none of the usual comforts of Malfoy manor were there, Draco found himself experiencing a sense of safety like he had never known before. And so he slept. Even though the nightmares were there, they were not there all the tine. Granger and Weasley bickered, but they also laughed and cooked, and it smelled delicious. And sometimes, Dobby Apparated to give them news (times during which Granger always put the Muffliato spell on Draco). It rained often, but the inside temperature of the tent was constantly warm, an enchanted fire always crackling away. It felt better than his king-size bed or his servants, or his huge wardrobe of clothes. He was captive, and yet felt freer than he had felt in a very long time.
