Fight Club

Hermione was genuinely beginning to question her choices; this was an unforeseen circumstance, and she was incredibly un-used to being wrong. She had not been entirely sure what her plan was, only that the current plan of remaining bunk buddies with Malfoy was not only wholly unsavory, but frankly an incredible overreaction. During the brief time she had spent enthralled by American law—when the government bankrolls your life for saving the world, you pick up some weird hobbies—she remembered a phrase: The punishment must fit the crime. As she had sat up in her bed, she had become oddly fixated on the idea, and decided that the nature of her crime was self-inflicted, with no true victims. Thus, the current arrangement was nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. She had used invenire, the spell she had crafted after the “find” function on a computer, to compile a small, but mighty, corpus of material to defend her case to Harry. A rather tricky piece of magic, but incredibly useful. She could simply stack the books she wished to search, perform the incantation, and watch the words spill out of the texts. The download spell she’d created as a companion pulled the passages from where they hung in the air, projected words in gold, and drew them into her wand. The construction of that spell was rather like a pensieve. Once she arrived at the Potter’s, she could project them back up into the air, and state her case. She had made a grave underestimation, her second in about four hours. She had accounted for the breeze, the height of the window sill, and the drop. She had NOT accounted for the loose shingle directly below said sill. The culmination of this series of mistakes resulted in Malfoy peering down at her, and snickering. She wasn’t sure what was most infuriating, his outright laughter, or his insistence on her first-year exaggeration of le-vi-oh-SAH as he levitated her back through her window.

“Granger”

“Malfoy”

“Why must our conversations always be 50% comprised of our last names? You are aware that we were first and second in our class, respectively”

“I am aware that I was first.”

“Then how is it, exactly, that the two most intelligent Hogwarts graduates in the last 50 years are incapable of a civil exchange?”, “Malfoy, make your case.”,

“Are you going to put me in a position in which I am mandated per the bounds of our contract-“

“Really, Malfoy? Just get to it.” She ground it out, the words knocking against her teeth, begging to pelt him for being so deeply insufferable.

“Do I need to ward you in for your own safety?”

“No.”

“Are you going to calmly attend your mandated therapy appointment?”

“It isn’t going to work, Malfoy. It never works.”

“Maybe you’ve never tried. Not truly.” He was gentler now, his words lilting softly towards her. She was quiet. Quiet, but brewing. The language escaped her, she was searching, growing more frantic, combing her brain for some way to explain. How could she convey that she had done enough talking? How could she begin to communicate how completely and utterly fucked it was that of the two of them, he was the one behaving rationally, sensibly? How could she even begin to—she came abruptly to the realization that she must appear to be panicked. Malfoy had stepped towards her, shoulders down, open. His legs were shoulder width apart, pointing forwards, his head slightly bowed. He was exposing his throat, she realized. Not literally, of course, but his body language was screaming at her, I am not a threat, I will not hurt you, you are safe here. She was taken aback. Thoroughly. She backed away, slowly, just a step. “I am going to sleep.”. She did not speak the words, but they left her all the same. They wafted between the two, swirling in the air, a gentle surrender. An acquiescence, an attempt to consider to try. That was all she could give him, at least for now. 

He couldn’t remember a time he’d seen Granger look defeated. Even in war, in the face of death, torture, despair, she had always had some fight to her. That shrinking? The silent loss, the eyes that pleaded to make it all stop, let it all be over…they had drained the fight from her bones. He knew, no matter how close he and Potter became, she would always harbor some resentment towards him. He couldn’t blame her. He had tormented her, slung slurs in flurries, even incited her to violence (the fight club thing was NOT surprising to him…his nose never had healed perfectly straight). Somehow, that wasn’t even the worst of his bad behavior, wasn’t even his deepest regret. It wasn’t as if he didn’t fully grasp it, either. He knew, innately, what the cruciatus curse felt like. Had received it so often that part of his brain, the very matter of it, had been so damaged that the healers predicted he could likely never produce a patronus. The day he’d learned that little tidbit of information had been…rough, to say the least. He wondered how long Granger was going to sit at the forefront of his mind. He had a tendency to fixate, grasp onto a problem or a hardship and remain encircled within it. There were few things he had been truly grateful for in his life, but the ministry’s choice to bring in muggle therapists had been one of them. Just after the trials, Hermione Granger had lobbied for a select group of muggle therapists who had worked with war survivors to be excluded from the statute of secrecy to aid in some of the cases of PTSD, C-PTSD, and varying degrees of depression and anxiety that had run rampant in the survivors. She fought particularly hard for those who had been forced into the war against their will—people like him. His time with his therapist had begun to peel his occclumency walls down, and force him to face what had actually happened to him. He had assumed that Granger had partaken before, but to hear her say that it didn’t work was shocking. It was late. Certainly too late to be making a phone call. He dialed anyway.

“Malfoy, settling in?”

“Just about, mate. Only one escape attempt so far. I wanted to ask, who’s her session with tomorrow?”

“Let me check the file, got it right here—Wilkins. Same guy she saw before”

“Any chance we can set her up with Ramirez?” “Isn’t that who you see? Any reason?”

“Not in particular, other than the fact that Ramirez used a lot of academic material with me. Objective work, stuff that was hard to refute or get around. I think Granger needs someone she can’t walk over.”

“Yeah, good shout mate. I’ll get it switched. Same time though, make sure she’s there at 2.”

“I’ve got her Potter, don’t worry” There was a long pause, and then the return,

“I know bud. I know you do”.

The line clicked, and Draco slid his phone onto the nightstand. Nearly all of wizarding kind used a patronus for this kind of communication, but Draco’s inability to produce one had caused a bit of a ruckus in the DMLE. Potter had suggested cell phones. They could call and message over just about any distance, and were a good way to keep everyone in the loop. Most baddies didn’t know how to open one, let alone use it, and it had the distinct advantage of making Draco feel like a spy from one of the muggle movies he’d seen during his reintegration program. Maybe he could get Granger to give him a list of spy movies. He wondered if Potter knew any, but then remembered that Potter had effectively grown up inside a broom closet with all the trappings and treatment of a house-elf, and decided Granger was the better ask. He knew her parents had been dentists—muggle tooth healers—and she’d had an idyllic childhood. He had realized when given her file that there wasn’t much he truly knew about her. They’d been ships passing, on opposite sides of a war, only ever nearing close enough to fire a cannon here or there. His cannons, though, were decidedly nastier. As he laid in the too small bed, he wished for 2 things.

1. A better hand at trasfiguration (he’d always been rubbish at it).

2. The first corner piece in the puzzle that was Hermione Granger.