Rising Above the Odds - a gift for alexajohnson
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling and Warner Bros. All fics posted at this community were written entirely for fun, not for profit, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Title: Rising Above the Odds
Author: midnight_birth
Gift for: alexajohnson
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~5,450
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Warnings: Some pretty heavy angst, very brief mention of OC character death and blood, EWE.
Summary: When Draco is required to live as a Muggle as a part of a rehabilitation project after the war, he thinks it cannot get any worse when one of his childhood enemies is assigned to be his Muggle liaison.
A/N: This was a bit experimental for me, and I hope you like it! :) I had to do Draco/Hermione for you, since you seemed to want it the absolute most, and I really enjoyed writing this. ♥
~*~
I remember when I first met her. That memory is not of two children - one with inherited prejudices and the other with no experiences yet of how cruel they can be, as one may expect. When I first came to Hogwarts, my ideals and thoughts on certain things were already set in stone. I don't think I understood most of the opinions I apparently held, but Father said it was that way, and back then, that was all it took.
Back then, it didn't matter what her name was, or what she looked like. By fifth year I probably conditioned myself enough that she mattered in my mind so little that I willed myself to forget. If someone asked what colour hair she had, or what colour eyes, I would say I didn't know. And I can honestly say I didn't; my belief that I was justified in my actions was that strong.
This is why I say I never met her back then, I suppose. To me, she was one in many, just a little part of a whole that I hated with every cell in my body.
And then the war was over and done with. Two years is what it took for me to learn the price of thoughtlessness and inherited values that I never stopped to think about and choose for myself. The last two years of the war are a blur for me, even to this day, when I've managed to honestly reconstruct most of my actions from my very childhood. I remember being scared, so scared of death and losing my family who, I figured by then, were the only people in this world who thought me worth anything. Even I knew by the end of it all that what I have done was stupid, inexcusable, and deserving of the hate it earned me.
There were many trials, but I was lucky. Of all people, Potter testified for my mother and then, more reluctantly, for me. I couldn't kill, I was conditioned, I loved my family. I sat for days listening to people coming up with more and more excuses for what I had done, and more and more contagious hopes that I could be "rehabilitated". I didn't know whether I could be then. To be honest, back then, when I finally opened my eyes and really realized how many deaths I had enabled and what I was really a part of, I doubted anything could be fixed, least of all me. But even with all my guilt, I couldn't volunteer myself for Azkaban, and sat quietly, hoping against hope that I wouldn't have to go there, and if they decided to "fix" me, that it was possible.
I don't know how Father got out of it relatively unscathed. He withdrew from all his political commitments, of course, and was told he would have to donate a lot of money to any restoration committee that may pop up and otherwise drop off the face of the earth, but he had his Manor, his money, and his wife, and that was everything, I know, he really wanted in the end.
The wizarding world turned their attention to me. Looking at the newspapers of my trials now, I know why I was such a good front-boy for their rehabilitation cause. I looked so young in those pictures, so scared. Most people who didn�t know me must have thought I was much less stupid and much more malicious than I was, but those who did know me knew also that if I succeeded in my rehabilitation, I would solidify the practice in others� eyes. I was a kid with attitude problems, entitlement and inferiority issues, and though I was over making excuses for myself even then, I have a pleasant feeling when I think that those who knew me had faith in the fact that that was true, because that was already more than I deserved. And I would do anything to end the nightmare I was still in � any idiot could tell that by the look of me.
I was terrified of Azkaban, and terrified at having my wand taken away, so I willingly accepted what the Wizengamot required of me in exchange for eventual unsupervised freedom of both body and magic. The Department of Psychology and Mental Health in St. Mungo�s filled me in on the experiment. I was to live as a Muggle for a prolonged period of time decided depending on my progress. I was to interact with them on a regular basis, insert myself into social situations with them, and, most importantly, live without magic for that whole time. I was informed that a volunteer Muggle-born witch of wizard would be assigned to help me out at first. Ironically, the ward just happened not to have any Muggle-borns in it.
I felt like a foster child, which some kindly family had agreed, out of the goodness of their hearts, to look after until he was found a better home. I spent hours looking at myself in the mirror, telling myself that it might have been too late, but the realization that my Father and his friends had it wrong did come. There was still the prejudice, the unconscious repulsion I caught myself feeling when I found myself near a Muggle-born, the word Mudblood that sometimes surfaced in my brain during my train of thoughts, but I was willing to try.
Which brings me back to the part where I met her.
I was so engrossed in her face, I wasn't hearing what I was being told. She wasn't looking at me. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, her eyes looked like they were made of glass, she was staring right through me, and she wore a polite kind of smile that was so cold I almost preferred a hateful look or a harsh comment.
I know I probably stared. I couldn't believe it, then, and I can hardly believe it now, that she would do what she did. Voluntarily, she had agreed to spend time with people who had ruined her teenagehood and made her life hell. I was sure she didn't volunteer for me, and now know that to be the truth, so I kept expecting her to tell the young man who was explaining something to both of us that she refused to work with me. Anyone else but me. I wasn't just a Death Eater, after all, as if that alone wasn't bad enough. I was her classmate, the first person to openly utter the word Mudblood in many years, and to label her thus among my house.
Finally, the young man had left. We stood silently for a very long time in that ward. I stared at her, she stared out of the window. Then, unexpectedly, she outstretched her hand toward me and said, "Hello, my name is Hermione Granger. I will be your Muggle liaison for the next little while, at least."
I didn't take her hand then. I stared dumbly, unsure of why she was acting as if she didn't know me. If she hit or cursed me then, in that little room where no one would come to my aid, I would have let her. It wasn't that I needed her forgiveness, or anyone's yet, but I wanted my own, and in my confused mind I wanted to suffer as much as possible to feel even a moment of peace. Now that my parents were no longer in danger, the blinding fear of death was gone, and the childish unrealistic fantasies about being "cool" shattered, I realized I had a conscience.
"Listen to me," she said, her voice quiet and soft, but so cold it sent shivers down my spine. "Let's get this out of the way right now. Say this all just once so we understand each other and never come back to the point again. I loathe you. I hate you with every fiber in my body. But you are important to this, to the change we are hoping to see in the wizarding world. I've known you a long time, even before you went from being a jerk to being a Death Eater, but you were always a jerk. I don't know if you can change. To say no would be defeatist, but to say yes would be too much to hope for. So I will grit my teeth and do this. You are important to this cause, to this theory, and they wouldn't trust you to just anybody. I don't have a choice."
And then, just like that, she seemed to deflate. Her shoulders fell into a relaxed position, her face softened, and her body seemingly relaxed. She looked as if she needed to get that out as a disclaimer, but once it was over with, she seemed calmer and more acceptant than I could ever expect her, of all people, to be.
Even having not paid any attention to speak of to her in school, I knew how she dealt with the situation. This was a job to her. A long and unpleasant Potions paper that she had to write, one way or another, and she knew the best course of action under such circumstances was to grit her teeth and do it. I didn't yet know why she didn't refuse to work with me (I was sure she could have if she really wanted to; Hermione Granger, best friend to Harry Potter, seemed an unlikely person to be made do anything then).
She handed me a piece of paper. There was an address on it. "I really wish I didn't know you," she said and walked out. Even from her, someone whose opinions didn't matter to me at all, it stung.
~*~
I will not go into details of the ordeals I had to go through to get to the specified address. Me having not even the most basic knowledge of the Muggle metro system, she must have known how much trouble I would have, and allowed it to happen as, probably, an initiation to the next who-knows-how-many-months of my life.
I must have looked insane to the Muggles, but by a twist of undeserved karma, I happened to run into a witch who seemed to realize what my problem was. I saw her watching me, as if deciding whether she wanted to come and assist me or not. I didn't know whether she did so because she wasn't entirely sure that I was a wizard or, more likely, whether she should bother to help me (my face had been on quite a few Prophet front pages by that point). Whether out of pity, fear of that I would reveal myself in some way to Muggles, or sincere human decency, she took quite some time out of her schedule to deliver me safely to the front of a cosy-looking town-house about half-hour metro ride away from where she found me.
She was already there. Somehow, she looked flustered and upset, and I wondered whether it was because the reality of the situation was starting to set in. It was for me, too. There we were, stranded in a place where neither of us knew anyone, faced with only each other for company. I've done some research on her the previous night, and gathered by the fact that her parents were still in Australia, and they were the only family she had that she took bother to hide, that her connections to the Muggle world were frail at best. I doubted, somehow, that she spent a lot of time in it, or knew a lot of people who weren't witches and wizards.
I stopped in front of her, nodded, and waited. My philosophy was to open my mouth as little as I could. In a way, that was my way of trying. I hoped that things could change, but I didn't yet believe it. I resented her. I resented her possibilities, her freedom, her general wisdom that allowed her to pick a winning side from the very beginning, and the respect she now held in our world. My hate for her had been too strong during my most impressionable years to simply disintegrate when I was made see that it was misplaced. And I wasn't quite made see that, yet.
I still thought little of Muggles. I still considered them inferior, even though I no longer believed they should be slaughtered brutally. Like ants to humans, I thought, just because they were inferior, it didn't mean they should be exterminated. By saying as little as I could, I was taking away many possibilities of a slip-up. Insult after insult, sarcastic remark after sarcastic remark kept invading my brain. I had too much pride to try and bend over backwards, pretending we didn't have the history we had, and say nice things to her to try to butter her up the way I saw Father do it with his superiors, but by not saying much, I could keep my pride and not damage my chances.
When she saw me, she took out a set of keys and handed them to me. She nodded towards the town-house.
"The yellow key is for the front door right here. The silver one is for your flat. It's on the first floor, number 104."
She stepped aside, obviously expecting me to take the lead. I was shocked when I walked into what was going to be my home. It didn't hold a candle to the Manor, of course, but it was so much better than I even let myself hope. It was simply-decorated, but very nice. The bedroom had a large bed, a rather old-fashioned-looking wardrobe, two bed-side tables, and a big window with heavy, pastel-couloured blinds. The bathroom was basic, but it had a separate shower stall from the bathtub, which was something I hadn't seen before. The kitchen was small, and made my stomach turn. There were many things in the kitchen aside from counters, and I had no idea what most of them did. The living room had a strange black box, a couple of sofas, a couple of bookshelves filled with books about Muggles, as far as I could see, and a dining table.
She must have seen my surprise at the state of the place, because she frowned and asked, "Not what you were expecting?"
"I wasn't expecting anything," I said, not looking at her. "But I didn't expect it to be nice." As nice as a Muggle dwelling could be, I found the strength not to add.
"You're missing the point of this, then," she snapped, and I turned to her in surprise. She sighed, composed herself, and continued calmly, "The whole point of this is that it's not supposed to be a punishment. If that's what we wanted to achieve, you would have gone to Azkaban with the rest of them. We wouldn't want to reward you with anything too nice, but the general idea is to put you in a Muggle environment, but at a similar level, as close in comfort as you were in the wizarding world. We don't want to force you to see how hard Muggles have it and gain sympathy for them. Sure, there are poor and less fortunate, but there are in the wizarding world, too. We want you to see how little different there really is. Placing you in a situation where you'd have to fight to survive wouldn't accomplish that."
She stared at me, her eyes hard and her arms crossed, obviously expecting having to defend herself from an onslaught of my sarcasm. Somehow, I held it all in, though of course I had plenty to say. Where were these similarities? Only looking around the flat I could plainly see that Muggles lived in a completely different world.
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked her instead of stirring up a fight. I was sure we would get into plenty without me knowingly orchestrating any.
The look of utter discontent I first saw her wear that morning was back. "I received further information today," she told the floor. "I'm expected to teach you how to live in here first." She gestured vaguely around. "How to use the television set and kitchen appliances, for once. Then grocery shopping. Then..." I could practically hear her grit her teeth. "Then, every day, I'm expected to introduce you into the Muggle world of our age-group."
My face fell and the sneer that immediately formed on my lips made her face go defensive again. "What does that mean?" I asked, my voice low.
She produced a piece of paper and looked down at it. "Normal every day things that teenagers do in the Muggle world. Which," she quickly added, "are not at all different from what teenagers do in the wizarding world."
I was expected to go out with her, I realized with shock. We were going to be spending time going to places and seeing things. Together. I understood the look on her face, then. She probably hadn't expected that kind of commitment, either. Teaching me the Muggle ways was one thing, but going out with me the way she would go out with a friend was a different story. I searched her face to see whether she intended to go back and refuse to work with me, but as discontent as she looked at the idea, she showed no signs of throwing in the towel yet. In a way, I realized, I was being rehabilitated, but she was truly getting punished. I couldn't help but smirk. The Golden Boy's necessity to save and sacrifice must have rubbed off on her.
~*~
There is no specific moment when things between us changed, or a big revelation when we realized that they did. At first, we fought like cats and dogs. Neither of us wanted to be there and, for the longest time, neither of us was benefiting from the process, so we took our frustrations out on each other every chance we got. But slowly, steadily, things were changing.
From what I understood, she did have some control over what the two of us did together, because primarily they were things that we could get away doing without saying more than was strictly necessary to each other. Most of the things she did say to me might as well have been lectures in a classroom, because she rattled off impersonal facts that she most likely memorized out of books. She, herself, seemed to be quite unsure of how, exactly, i was supposed to be changing, and what she could do to trigger it.
I would rather die than admit it, but I was right away impressed by at least one aspect of the Muggle culture, and that was its art. She took me to museums and made me read books about how Muggles invented ingenious inventions to function comfortably with no magic at all, but I was always drawn to the art exhibitions much more than detailed diagrams of a plow. I considered myself well cultured, my parents had made sure of that, but Father was adamant that I be exposed as little as possible to any artist, composer, or writer of Muggle or even Muggle-related origin. This meant I could name most Mozart pieces by listening to them, but the name Da Vinci rang no bells.
It was the actual interactions with Muggles that displeased me the most. She left all interactions that were necessary during our days together to me - paying for groceries, buying the tickets, asking for directions, and even calling when I managed to convince her with continuous failed attempts at cooking to order in. Days turned into weeks, and I was surprised to note that while she spent at least two hours with me on most days, and more often than not longer than that, she had not once used her wand, or even taken it out, in my presence. Even though doing things the Muggle way presented no problems to her, I found that small action to be surprisingly considerate. I knew how much I would ache to see someone using magic, which I took for granted my whole life, where I couldn't.
I had been living as a Muggle for two months when we accidentally happened upon a bad auto-accident. There was havoc and many cars, and she was tugging me away, not wanting to see, when she suddenly froze. I followed her eyes to see a girl who couldn't have been more than ten being led away from the cars by a doctor. She seemed to have suffered no significant damage, though there were some pretty bad cuts and bruises all over her exposed arms and legs. There were tears pouring down her face, and she kept trying to break free and run back to the still smoking mess of disfigured vehicles. "Her parents didn't make it," someone murmured beside us.
I was shocked to feel a warm hand grasp my wrist and pull with such force I almost hit the ground with my face. I almost had to run after her while she pulled me away from the people. When she stopped and turned, there were tears in her eyes. There was so much sincere pain in her features that it gave me pause. I had felt bad for the child, of course, but a part of me was still thinking that it was a Muggle child, after all, and I didn't know her, anyway.
"This is why!" she suddenly exclaimed, her voice shaking. "Do you see now? This is why Muggles are no different, absolutely the same as witches and wizards."
I looked at the scene and then back at her face. "Accidents happen everywhere, sure," I replied coldly, though a part of me was feeling bad for it under the circumstances, "but what can one expect from those contraptions, racing in such numbers, so closely to each other on such small roads? This would never have happened in the wizarding world. People have Apparated to mid-air and fallen to their deaths, splinched themselves irreparably, hurt and burned themselves because of dysfunctional Floo powder, and fallen off of broomsticks, but you'll never see something like this, when so many people can be hurt all at once. It's the ridiculous ways of Muggle transportation that is responsible for this."
She turned on me, her face ugly with so much fury I thought I would drop dead from her sheer will to see me do so. With admirable will-power, however, she managed to collect herself before she spoke.
"Perhaps you're right. But her parents died, Malfoy. And there is no spell anyone knows, anyone will ever know, to reverse that, or take away the pain of that. She may not have magic in her, but then again, of course, she might, but right now all she is a scared, hurt human being that had lost her parents and is bleeding and terrified. And you know what? If Voldemort had killed your parents, with your wand and your magic and your pure blood you'd still be able to do nothing. You'd be the same as her. You'd bleed as much, and suffer as much, and probably be as deeply shocked as she is right now, and forever saddened. She's capable of as much emotion as you are. She has as many fingers, two eyes, and the same vascular organ that you seem to lack!"
She was screaming by the end of it, not even caring if anyone overheard anymore. I don't know what happened next. She swayed on her feet and, instinctively, I jumped forward, and suddenly I was holding her. She didn't hug me, and I didn't take her in my arms, but somehow we both ended up like that. We were both tense as boards, frozen in place, both probably too shocked to react in any way, or fast enough.
It seemed we stood there like that forever until she finally pulled away and walked, without as much as giving me a glance. When we reached the town-house, she kept walking. I watched her until she walked out of sight and went in to the most disturbing, restless sleep I've had in months.
~*~
I remember the first time I kissed her. As awfully dramatic as it sounds, I now know that that moment was the one that started the rest of my life.
It was three months since the accident, of which we never spoke again, and I was getting more and more convinced that perhaps I would never pass the test and be allowed to return to my world. It seemed to me that it was time. To be honest, the accident stirred something in me. It didn't single-handedly made me into a changed man, but it gave me a perspective on things I'd never considered, and I couldn't help but think hard and long on it.
Things got easier, too. Even I was surprised when at one point, I no longer needed to include extensive thought process when I used the coffee-maker in the morning. I picked up the telephone the right side up, and no longer had to stare at it for a long time before finally remembering which button would actually cause the thing to dial. When I interacted with Muggles, I could go hours without a conscious thought of the fact that they were Muggles. There were even shows on the black box that I intentionally waited for and watched with interest, forgetting the disdain I once felt at the very thought of lowering myself to using the device in the first place. The thought that I had actually gotten used to being a Muggle and could effectively and comfortably live as one terrified me. Would I have to?
But there was one change that was the most pronounced, and that i could feel more than anything else. Somehow, illogically, unreasonably, without noticing it, I had fallen in love with Hermione Granger. It's hard to say now how it was that I even allowed myself to admit this, forget let it happen at all, but it seemed so sudden and strong that I simply could not deny it, at least not to myself. We fought and we spent hours in absolute silence and, very rarely, we laughed. I was convinced I had gone insane, but stranded in a foreign world with only her for company, she was also the only person I could turn to for comfort. At some point, her presence stopped irritating me and became a calming force. I wasn't alone, and I felt that fact stronger than any other. Aside from Mother, she was the only one, even if unknowingly, who provided me any comfort in my persistent fear and pain.
There was a small "party room" in the town-house which I accidentally discovered only a few doors down from me. It had a piano, and I liked losing myself in it when I felt like sitting inside the flat would drive me crazy. I never felt quite brave enough to venture too far away from home alone, so whenever I needed to get out, I came to the room and played. Mother had once insisted, against Father's arguments that it was neither necessary nor "manly", that I take piano lessons, and I was eternally grateful to her for that. Music had a way of replacing everything in my head with a melodic lull, and even for a few moments, that escape was welcome.
I jumped and slammed my fingers on the piano when she quietly said my name, obviously not wanting to startle me.
"That was beautiful," she murmured, still staring at the keys as if the music I had played was a canvas now painted onto the piano itself.
Uncomfortably, I shrugged and got up. She opened her mouth, probably to ask me not to stop, but then closed it, deciding against it.
"I have something for you," she said quietly. I realized she looked uncomfortable somehow. She handed me a plain white rectangular box, not meeting my eyes. My stomach flipped.
The next moments were so intense I remember them as one big blur. I remember opening the box and then dropping it on the floor. The sound it made sounded too loud, and we both jumped. To my horror, I had somehow lost control over both my emotions and my actions. My body started shaking with something I hadn't realized were sobs until I was on my knees in front of her. I don't know if I was smiling, but I was shaking.
My wand. I had been given back my wand. It felt as if everything I had ever felt since the very beginning of my servitude as a Death Eater - all the fear, pain, hope, and built-up emotion, came pouring out of me all at once. I remember feeling both her hands on my shoulder and looking up to meet her eyes. There was surprise there, and pain, and something else i couldn't recognize.
And then I was kissing her as if I was kissing someone for the last time. I could taste my tears, or maybe it was hers now, and it was sloppy and shaky and by far not among the best kisses I've ever had. I was shaking so much I kept missing her lips, but looking for them with my own again and again, sinking into her when I found them. She didn't pull away, didn't hit or curse me, and only when we finally fell apart, gasping, did she look at me, her eyes full of doubt and questions. She seemed to be undecided on how to react, wavering between anger and confusion. And then, unexpectedly, she leaned in again.
~*~
I would have liked to be able to say that it ended there. That with that kiss, we both changed. That we got together then, and my life became everything it could ever be, but now that I think about it, I'm thankful that it didn't. It took a year of confusion and thinking and growing on both of our parts to even begin to accept that it was possible for us - Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger - to be together. To want to be together. Both of us fought against it with all our mights, trying to convince ourselves that once both our lives went back to what they once were, the fog would clear.
And it did, though, of course, not in the way we expected it to. It was because we rose above so many odds and fought so hard to reach a place where we could both accept things, each other especially, that, I think, we were strong enough to deal with what came after we stopped resisting. The countless Prophet articles, Father's disappearance, our family's and friends' never-ending campaigns to break us up and make us see how ridiculous and unlikely our union was, Weasley's near-attempt on my life and the elder Weasley's near-heart-attack.
It's only in retrospect that we can say with confidence whether things we have done in our life were truly worth it. I know that most people would have probably given up in our place. We came close enough to doing just that more than once, and a part of me is still a little surprised we made it. And yes, it was certainly worth it.
When I look out the window and see her, Mrs Malfoy, sitting on her favourite chair in our gardens, I feel like the last thirty years of my life have been a dream. A pleasant one, at times, and a nightmare, too. It's been only a couple of years since we moved from 104 to the Manor. I think she's still getting used to this place, and so am I, and I wish we could have stayed in 104 forever, but it's simply not big enough for three.
We don't tell our story often. It's been written, re-written, and completely twisted by most newspapers and even a few books, but I wanted you to know the unedited truth of it. There are articles that make it look like something very romantic, and some that make it out to be heart-breaking, but our story were neither one of those. Our story was all our own. It's not easy to describe it in simple turns, and it's unnecessary. I think family is important, and its equally important to know where you come from.
This is where you come from. Pain, suffering, consequences, love that somehow withstood all that, and rising above all the odds.
Title: Rising Above the Odds
Author: midnight_birth
Gift for: alexajohnson
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~5,450
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Warnings: Some pretty heavy angst, very brief mention of OC character death and blood, EWE.
Summary: When Draco is required to live as a Muggle as a part of a rehabilitation project after the war, he thinks it cannot get any worse when one of his childhood enemies is assigned to be his Muggle liaison.
A/N: This was a bit experimental for me, and I hope you like it! :) I had to do Draco/Hermione for you, since you seemed to want it the absolute most, and I really enjoyed writing this. ♥
~*~
I remember when I first met her. That memory is not of two children - one with inherited prejudices and the other with no experiences yet of how cruel they can be, as one may expect. When I first came to Hogwarts, my ideals and thoughts on certain things were already set in stone. I don't think I understood most of the opinions I apparently held, but Father said it was that way, and back then, that was all it took.
Back then, it didn't matter what her name was, or what she looked like. By fifth year I probably conditioned myself enough that she mattered in my mind so little that I willed myself to forget. If someone asked what colour hair she had, or what colour eyes, I would say I didn't know. And I can honestly say I didn't; my belief that I was justified in my actions was that strong.
This is why I say I never met her back then, I suppose. To me, she was one in many, just a little part of a whole that I hated with every cell in my body.
And then the war was over and done with. Two years is what it took for me to learn the price of thoughtlessness and inherited values that I never stopped to think about and choose for myself. The last two years of the war are a blur for me, even to this day, when I've managed to honestly reconstruct most of my actions from my very childhood. I remember being scared, so scared of death and losing my family who, I figured by then, were the only people in this world who thought me worth anything. Even I knew by the end of it all that what I have done was stupid, inexcusable, and deserving of the hate it earned me.
There were many trials, but I was lucky. Of all people, Potter testified for my mother and then, more reluctantly, for me. I couldn't kill, I was conditioned, I loved my family. I sat for days listening to people coming up with more and more excuses for what I had done, and more and more contagious hopes that I could be "rehabilitated". I didn't know whether I could be then. To be honest, back then, when I finally opened my eyes and really realized how many deaths I had enabled and what I was really a part of, I doubted anything could be fixed, least of all me. But even with all my guilt, I couldn't volunteer myself for Azkaban, and sat quietly, hoping against hope that I wouldn't have to go there, and if they decided to "fix" me, that it was possible.
I don't know how Father got out of it relatively unscathed. He withdrew from all his political commitments, of course, and was told he would have to donate a lot of money to any restoration committee that may pop up and otherwise drop off the face of the earth, but he had his Manor, his money, and his wife, and that was everything, I know, he really wanted in the end.
The wizarding world turned their attention to me. Looking at the newspapers of my trials now, I know why I was such a good front-boy for their rehabilitation cause. I looked so young in those pictures, so scared. Most people who didn�t know me must have thought I was much less stupid and much more malicious than I was, but those who did know me knew also that if I succeeded in my rehabilitation, I would solidify the practice in others� eyes. I was a kid with attitude problems, entitlement and inferiority issues, and though I was over making excuses for myself even then, I have a pleasant feeling when I think that those who knew me had faith in the fact that that was true, because that was already more than I deserved. And I would do anything to end the nightmare I was still in � any idiot could tell that by the look of me.
I was terrified of Azkaban, and terrified at having my wand taken away, so I willingly accepted what the Wizengamot required of me in exchange for eventual unsupervised freedom of both body and magic. The Department of Psychology and Mental Health in St. Mungo�s filled me in on the experiment. I was to live as a Muggle for a prolonged period of time decided depending on my progress. I was to interact with them on a regular basis, insert myself into social situations with them, and, most importantly, live without magic for that whole time. I was informed that a volunteer Muggle-born witch of wizard would be assigned to help me out at first. Ironically, the ward just happened not to have any Muggle-borns in it.
I felt like a foster child, which some kindly family had agreed, out of the goodness of their hearts, to look after until he was found a better home. I spent hours looking at myself in the mirror, telling myself that it might have been too late, but the realization that my Father and his friends had it wrong did come. There was still the prejudice, the unconscious repulsion I caught myself feeling when I found myself near a Muggle-born, the word Mudblood that sometimes surfaced in my brain during my train of thoughts, but I was willing to try.
Which brings me back to the part where I met her.
I was so engrossed in her face, I wasn't hearing what I was being told. She wasn't looking at me. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, her eyes looked like they were made of glass, she was staring right through me, and she wore a polite kind of smile that was so cold I almost preferred a hateful look or a harsh comment.
I know I probably stared. I couldn't believe it, then, and I can hardly believe it now, that she would do what she did. Voluntarily, she had agreed to spend time with people who had ruined her teenagehood and made her life hell. I was sure she didn't volunteer for me, and now know that to be the truth, so I kept expecting her to tell the young man who was explaining something to both of us that she refused to work with me. Anyone else but me. I wasn't just a Death Eater, after all, as if that alone wasn't bad enough. I was her classmate, the first person to openly utter the word Mudblood in many years, and to label her thus among my house.
Finally, the young man had left. We stood silently for a very long time in that ward. I stared at her, she stared out of the window. Then, unexpectedly, she outstretched her hand toward me and said, "Hello, my name is Hermione Granger. I will be your Muggle liaison for the next little while, at least."
I didn't take her hand then. I stared dumbly, unsure of why she was acting as if she didn't know me. If she hit or cursed me then, in that little room where no one would come to my aid, I would have let her. It wasn't that I needed her forgiveness, or anyone's yet, but I wanted my own, and in my confused mind I wanted to suffer as much as possible to feel even a moment of peace. Now that my parents were no longer in danger, the blinding fear of death was gone, and the childish unrealistic fantasies about being "cool" shattered, I realized I had a conscience.
"Listen to me," she said, her voice quiet and soft, but so cold it sent shivers down my spine. "Let's get this out of the way right now. Say this all just once so we understand each other and never come back to the point again. I loathe you. I hate you with every fiber in my body. But you are important to this, to the change we are hoping to see in the wizarding world. I've known you a long time, even before you went from being a jerk to being a Death Eater, but you were always a jerk. I don't know if you can change. To say no would be defeatist, but to say yes would be too much to hope for. So I will grit my teeth and do this. You are important to this cause, to this theory, and they wouldn't trust you to just anybody. I don't have a choice."
And then, just like that, she seemed to deflate. Her shoulders fell into a relaxed position, her face softened, and her body seemingly relaxed. She looked as if she needed to get that out as a disclaimer, but once it was over with, she seemed calmer and more acceptant than I could ever expect her, of all people, to be.
Even having not paid any attention to speak of to her in school, I knew how she dealt with the situation. This was a job to her. A long and unpleasant Potions paper that she had to write, one way or another, and she knew the best course of action under such circumstances was to grit her teeth and do it. I didn't yet know why she didn't refuse to work with me (I was sure she could have if she really wanted to; Hermione Granger, best friend to Harry Potter, seemed an unlikely person to be made do anything then).
She handed me a piece of paper. There was an address on it. "I really wish I didn't know you," she said and walked out. Even from her, someone whose opinions didn't matter to me at all, it stung.
~*~
I will not go into details of the ordeals I had to go through to get to the specified address. Me having not even the most basic knowledge of the Muggle metro system, she must have known how much trouble I would have, and allowed it to happen as, probably, an initiation to the next who-knows-how-many-months of my life.
I must have looked insane to the Muggles, but by a twist of undeserved karma, I happened to run into a witch who seemed to realize what my problem was. I saw her watching me, as if deciding whether she wanted to come and assist me or not. I didn't know whether she did so because she wasn't entirely sure that I was a wizard or, more likely, whether she should bother to help me (my face had been on quite a few Prophet front pages by that point). Whether out of pity, fear of that I would reveal myself in some way to Muggles, or sincere human decency, she took quite some time out of her schedule to deliver me safely to the front of a cosy-looking town-house about half-hour metro ride away from where she found me.
She was already there. Somehow, she looked flustered and upset, and I wondered whether it was because the reality of the situation was starting to set in. It was for me, too. There we were, stranded in a place where neither of us knew anyone, faced with only each other for company. I've done some research on her the previous night, and gathered by the fact that her parents were still in Australia, and they were the only family she had that she took bother to hide, that her connections to the Muggle world were frail at best. I doubted, somehow, that she spent a lot of time in it, or knew a lot of people who weren't witches and wizards.
I stopped in front of her, nodded, and waited. My philosophy was to open my mouth as little as I could. In a way, that was my way of trying. I hoped that things could change, but I didn't yet believe it. I resented her. I resented her possibilities, her freedom, her general wisdom that allowed her to pick a winning side from the very beginning, and the respect she now held in our world. My hate for her had been too strong during my most impressionable years to simply disintegrate when I was made see that it was misplaced. And I wasn't quite made see that, yet.
I still thought little of Muggles. I still considered them inferior, even though I no longer believed they should be slaughtered brutally. Like ants to humans, I thought, just because they were inferior, it didn't mean they should be exterminated. By saying as little as I could, I was taking away many possibilities of a slip-up. Insult after insult, sarcastic remark after sarcastic remark kept invading my brain. I had too much pride to try and bend over backwards, pretending we didn't have the history we had, and say nice things to her to try to butter her up the way I saw Father do it with his superiors, but by not saying much, I could keep my pride and not damage my chances.
When she saw me, she took out a set of keys and handed them to me. She nodded towards the town-house.
"The yellow key is for the front door right here. The silver one is for your flat. It's on the first floor, number 104."
She stepped aside, obviously expecting me to take the lead. I was shocked when I walked into what was going to be my home. It didn't hold a candle to the Manor, of course, but it was so much better than I even let myself hope. It was simply-decorated, but very nice. The bedroom had a large bed, a rather old-fashioned-looking wardrobe, two bed-side tables, and a big window with heavy, pastel-couloured blinds. The bathroom was basic, but it had a separate shower stall from the bathtub, which was something I hadn't seen before. The kitchen was small, and made my stomach turn. There were many things in the kitchen aside from counters, and I had no idea what most of them did. The living room had a strange black box, a couple of sofas, a couple of bookshelves filled with books about Muggles, as far as I could see, and a dining table.
She must have seen my surprise at the state of the place, because she frowned and asked, "Not what you were expecting?"
"I wasn't expecting anything," I said, not looking at her. "But I didn't expect it to be nice." As nice as a Muggle dwelling could be, I found the strength not to add.
"You're missing the point of this, then," she snapped, and I turned to her in surprise. She sighed, composed herself, and continued calmly, "The whole point of this is that it's not supposed to be a punishment. If that's what we wanted to achieve, you would have gone to Azkaban with the rest of them. We wouldn't want to reward you with anything too nice, but the general idea is to put you in a Muggle environment, but at a similar level, as close in comfort as you were in the wizarding world. We don't want to force you to see how hard Muggles have it and gain sympathy for them. Sure, there are poor and less fortunate, but there are in the wizarding world, too. We want you to see how little different there really is. Placing you in a situation where you'd have to fight to survive wouldn't accomplish that."
She stared at me, her eyes hard and her arms crossed, obviously expecting having to defend herself from an onslaught of my sarcasm. Somehow, I held it all in, though of course I had plenty to say. Where were these similarities? Only looking around the flat I could plainly see that Muggles lived in a completely different world.
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked her instead of stirring up a fight. I was sure we would get into plenty without me knowingly orchestrating any.
The look of utter discontent I first saw her wear that morning was back. "I received further information today," she told the floor. "I'm expected to teach you how to live in here first." She gestured vaguely around. "How to use the television set and kitchen appliances, for once. Then grocery shopping. Then..." I could practically hear her grit her teeth. "Then, every day, I'm expected to introduce you into the Muggle world of our age-group."
My face fell and the sneer that immediately formed on my lips made her face go defensive again. "What does that mean?" I asked, my voice low.
She produced a piece of paper and looked down at it. "Normal every day things that teenagers do in the Muggle world. Which," she quickly added, "are not at all different from what teenagers do in the wizarding world."
I was expected to go out with her, I realized with shock. We were going to be spending time going to places and seeing things. Together. I understood the look on her face, then. She probably hadn't expected that kind of commitment, either. Teaching me the Muggle ways was one thing, but going out with me the way she would go out with a friend was a different story. I searched her face to see whether she intended to go back and refuse to work with me, but as discontent as she looked at the idea, she showed no signs of throwing in the towel yet. In a way, I realized, I was being rehabilitated, but she was truly getting punished. I couldn't help but smirk. The Golden Boy's necessity to save and sacrifice must have rubbed off on her.
~*~
There is no specific moment when things between us changed, or a big revelation when we realized that they did. At first, we fought like cats and dogs. Neither of us wanted to be there and, for the longest time, neither of us was benefiting from the process, so we took our frustrations out on each other every chance we got. But slowly, steadily, things were changing.
From what I understood, she did have some control over what the two of us did together, because primarily they were things that we could get away doing without saying more than was strictly necessary to each other. Most of the things she did say to me might as well have been lectures in a classroom, because she rattled off impersonal facts that she most likely memorized out of books. She, herself, seemed to be quite unsure of how, exactly, i was supposed to be changing, and what she could do to trigger it.
I would rather die than admit it, but I was right away impressed by at least one aspect of the Muggle culture, and that was its art. She took me to museums and made me read books about how Muggles invented ingenious inventions to function comfortably with no magic at all, but I was always drawn to the art exhibitions much more than detailed diagrams of a plow. I considered myself well cultured, my parents had made sure of that, but Father was adamant that I be exposed as little as possible to any artist, composer, or writer of Muggle or even Muggle-related origin. This meant I could name most Mozart pieces by listening to them, but the name Da Vinci rang no bells.
It was the actual interactions with Muggles that displeased me the most. She left all interactions that were necessary during our days together to me - paying for groceries, buying the tickets, asking for directions, and even calling when I managed to convince her with continuous failed attempts at cooking to order in. Days turned into weeks, and I was surprised to note that while she spent at least two hours with me on most days, and more often than not longer than that, she had not once used her wand, or even taken it out, in my presence. Even though doing things the Muggle way presented no problems to her, I found that small action to be surprisingly considerate. I knew how much I would ache to see someone using magic, which I took for granted my whole life, where I couldn't.
I had been living as a Muggle for two months when we accidentally happened upon a bad auto-accident. There was havoc and many cars, and she was tugging me away, not wanting to see, when she suddenly froze. I followed her eyes to see a girl who couldn't have been more than ten being led away from the cars by a doctor. She seemed to have suffered no significant damage, though there were some pretty bad cuts and bruises all over her exposed arms and legs. There were tears pouring down her face, and she kept trying to break free and run back to the still smoking mess of disfigured vehicles. "Her parents didn't make it," someone murmured beside us.
I was shocked to feel a warm hand grasp my wrist and pull with such force I almost hit the ground with my face. I almost had to run after her while she pulled me away from the people. When she stopped and turned, there were tears in her eyes. There was so much sincere pain in her features that it gave me pause. I had felt bad for the child, of course, but a part of me was still thinking that it was a Muggle child, after all, and I didn't know her, anyway.
"This is why!" she suddenly exclaimed, her voice shaking. "Do you see now? This is why Muggles are no different, absolutely the same as witches and wizards."
I looked at the scene and then back at her face. "Accidents happen everywhere, sure," I replied coldly, though a part of me was feeling bad for it under the circumstances, "but what can one expect from those contraptions, racing in such numbers, so closely to each other on such small roads? This would never have happened in the wizarding world. People have Apparated to mid-air and fallen to their deaths, splinched themselves irreparably, hurt and burned themselves because of dysfunctional Floo powder, and fallen off of broomsticks, but you'll never see something like this, when so many people can be hurt all at once. It's the ridiculous ways of Muggle transportation that is responsible for this."
She turned on me, her face ugly with so much fury I thought I would drop dead from her sheer will to see me do so. With admirable will-power, however, she managed to collect herself before she spoke.
"Perhaps you're right. But her parents died, Malfoy. And there is no spell anyone knows, anyone will ever know, to reverse that, or take away the pain of that. She may not have magic in her, but then again, of course, she might, but right now all she is a scared, hurt human being that had lost her parents and is bleeding and terrified. And you know what? If Voldemort had killed your parents, with your wand and your magic and your pure blood you'd still be able to do nothing. You'd be the same as her. You'd bleed as much, and suffer as much, and probably be as deeply shocked as she is right now, and forever saddened. She's capable of as much emotion as you are. She has as many fingers, two eyes, and the same vascular organ that you seem to lack!"
She was screaming by the end of it, not even caring if anyone overheard anymore. I don't know what happened next. She swayed on her feet and, instinctively, I jumped forward, and suddenly I was holding her. She didn't hug me, and I didn't take her in my arms, but somehow we both ended up like that. We were both tense as boards, frozen in place, both probably too shocked to react in any way, or fast enough.
It seemed we stood there like that forever until she finally pulled away and walked, without as much as giving me a glance. When we reached the town-house, she kept walking. I watched her until she walked out of sight and went in to the most disturbing, restless sleep I've had in months.
~*~
I remember the first time I kissed her. As awfully dramatic as it sounds, I now know that that moment was the one that started the rest of my life.
It was three months since the accident, of which we never spoke again, and I was getting more and more convinced that perhaps I would never pass the test and be allowed to return to my world. It seemed to me that it was time. To be honest, the accident stirred something in me. It didn't single-handedly made me into a changed man, but it gave me a perspective on things I'd never considered, and I couldn't help but think hard and long on it.
Things got easier, too. Even I was surprised when at one point, I no longer needed to include extensive thought process when I used the coffee-maker in the morning. I picked up the telephone the right side up, and no longer had to stare at it for a long time before finally remembering which button would actually cause the thing to dial. When I interacted with Muggles, I could go hours without a conscious thought of the fact that they were Muggles. There were even shows on the black box that I intentionally waited for and watched with interest, forgetting the disdain I once felt at the very thought of lowering myself to using the device in the first place. The thought that I had actually gotten used to being a Muggle and could effectively and comfortably live as one terrified me. Would I have to?
But there was one change that was the most pronounced, and that i could feel more than anything else. Somehow, illogically, unreasonably, without noticing it, I had fallen in love with Hermione Granger. It's hard to say now how it was that I even allowed myself to admit this, forget let it happen at all, but it seemed so sudden and strong that I simply could not deny it, at least not to myself. We fought and we spent hours in absolute silence and, very rarely, we laughed. I was convinced I had gone insane, but stranded in a foreign world with only her for company, she was also the only person I could turn to for comfort. At some point, her presence stopped irritating me and became a calming force. I wasn't alone, and I felt that fact stronger than any other. Aside from Mother, she was the only one, even if unknowingly, who provided me any comfort in my persistent fear and pain.
There was a small "party room" in the town-house which I accidentally discovered only a few doors down from me. It had a piano, and I liked losing myself in it when I felt like sitting inside the flat would drive me crazy. I never felt quite brave enough to venture too far away from home alone, so whenever I needed to get out, I came to the room and played. Mother had once insisted, against Father's arguments that it was neither necessary nor "manly", that I take piano lessons, and I was eternally grateful to her for that. Music had a way of replacing everything in my head with a melodic lull, and even for a few moments, that escape was welcome.
I jumped and slammed my fingers on the piano when she quietly said my name, obviously not wanting to startle me.
"That was beautiful," she murmured, still staring at the keys as if the music I had played was a canvas now painted onto the piano itself.
Uncomfortably, I shrugged and got up. She opened her mouth, probably to ask me not to stop, but then closed it, deciding against it.
"I have something for you," she said quietly. I realized she looked uncomfortable somehow. She handed me a plain white rectangular box, not meeting my eyes. My stomach flipped.
The next moments were so intense I remember them as one big blur. I remember opening the box and then dropping it on the floor. The sound it made sounded too loud, and we both jumped. To my horror, I had somehow lost control over both my emotions and my actions. My body started shaking with something I hadn't realized were sobs until I was on my knees in front of her. I don't know if I was smiling, but I was shaking.
My wand. I had been given back my wand. It felt as if everything I had ever felt since the very beginning of my servitude as a Death Eater - all the fear, pain, hope, and built-up emotion, came pouring out of me all at once. I remember feeling both her hands on my shoulder and looking up to meet her eyes. There was surprise there, and pain, and something else i couldn't recognize.
And then I was kissing her as if I was kissing someone for the last time. I could taste my tears, or maybe it was hers now, and it was sloppy and shaky and by far not among the best kisses I've ever had. I was shaking so much I kept missing her lips, but looking for them with my own again and again, sinking into her when I found them. She didn't pull away, didn't hit or curse me, and only when we finally fell apart, gasping, did she look at me, her eyes full of doubt and questions. She seemed to be undecided on how to react, wavering between anger and confusion. And then, unexpectedly, she leaned in again.
~*~
I would have liked to be able to say that it ended there. That with that kiss, we both changed. That we got together then, and my life became everything it could ever be, but now that I think about it, I'm thankful that it didn't. It took a year of confusion and thinking and growing on both of our parts to even begin to accept that it was possible for us - Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger - to be together. To want to be together. Both of us fought against it with all our mights, trying to convince ourselves that once both our lives went back to what they once were, the fog would clear.
And it did, though, of course, not in the way we expected it to. It was because we rose above so many odds and fought so hard to reach a place where we could both accept things, each other especially, that, I think, we were strong enough to deal with what came after we stopped resisting. The countless Prophet articles, Father's disappearance, our family's and friends' never-ending campaigns to break us up and make us see how ridiculous and unlikely our union was, Weasley's near-attempt on my life and the elder Weasley's near-heart-attack.
It's only in retrospect that we can say with confidence whether things we have done in our life were truly worth it. I know that most people would have probably given up in our place. We came close enough to doing just that more than once, and a part of me is still a little surprised we made it. And yes, it was certainly worth it.
When I look out the window and see her, Mrs Malfoy, sitting on her favourite chair in our gardens, I feel like the last thirty years of my life have been a dream. A pleasant one, at times, and a nightmare, too. It's been only a couple of years since we moved from 104 to the Manor. I think she's still getting used to this place, and so am I, and I wish we could have stayed in 104 forever, but it's simply not big enough for three.
We don't tell our story often. It's been written, re-written, and completely twisted by most newspapers and even a few books, but I wanted you to know the unedited truth of it. There are articles that make it look like something very romantic, and some that make it out to be heart-breaking, but our story were neither one of those. Our story was all our own. It's not easy to describe it in simple turns, and it's unnecessary. I think family is important, and its equally important to know where you come from.
This is where you come from. Pain, suffering, consequences, love that somehow withstood all that, and rising above all the odds.