Flying Lessons
Hermione returns to the mirror. Just once. Just to change the picture she’s had of her parents for a decade. There was always a frame of fear.
Now, she can see them behind her eyes with soft smiles and joy in their faces. As they lived. Not how they died.
It has been over a month since she started at Hogwarts.
Tom hasn’t left her alone.
After Hermione made hail fall on Draco, Lucius had summoned her home to punish her. He’d lain twenty lashes across the backs of her calves. Luckily the rest of her schoolmates had decided that it was a burst of accidental magic. One any one of them could have done themselves. She manages to hide in plain sight.
When she’d returned to her dormitory, she’d pulled the journal out for the first time in weeks.
You wouldn’t have to suffer under anyone else’s power if you did as I asked.
She writes accusations in response.
You would have me kill my friends.
You would allow Lucius to serve you as long as he continues to please you.
I would lose myself in your creation.
He whispers back.
We, dear child. You and I would bring about a world where we bow to no one.
Hermione shoves the diary into the space between her bed and the outer wall of the castle.
“Hermione?” A voice comes from the doorway.
Harry.
“I was just tidying up a bit,” she lies, standing up from where she had just been hiding the diary and reaching for her robes. “Ready?”
Harry nods, taking her words as the truth and smiling as she walks past him into the hall.
They have flying lessons this morning.
Hermione had skipped the first three. And gotten detentions for each absence.
It isn’t that she is afraid of flying. It is more that she’s not sure she’ll be able to control her magic should anything happen while she’s in the air.
She isn’t afraid of flying.
Just a healthy aversion.
Which was why she’d made up excuses and outright skipped every past class.
Unfortunately, Severus caught on.
He’d threatened her to attend with a subtle threat.
I’m sure you wouldn’t wish for your guardian to become aware of your penchant for missing classes.
So because Hermione doesn’t need Lucius on her case about anything else, she’s decided to attend for once.
Theo joins the pair as they make their way out of the castle towards the green training grounds.
“I bet she lets us try barrel rolls today,” Harry says, bouncing on the balls of his feet as they wait for Hooch to arrive for the lesson.
Hooch arrives moments later and indeed tells them all that they are ready to try barrel rolls.
“Oh goody,” Theo says.
He doesn’t like to fly either. Though he’d at least gone to every lesson.
“Just what a bunch of eleven year olds should be doing. Rocketing through the air on brooms older than we are,” Hermione complains, not even making an effort to find a broomstick.
Hermione is proven right about the safety of flying about ten minutes later when a Gryffindor- she’s not sure of his name- falls off of his broom.
Everyone touches down and gathers to stare as he limps off the pitch, held up by Hooch.
“Look!” Draco says, darting forward and snatching something up off the ground. “It’s that stupid thing Longbottom’s gran sent him.”
Longbottom, right. Another pureblood.
The stupid thing glitters in the sun as Draco waves it around over his head.
Hermione thinks that that will be the end of things. Simply Draco taking another thing that he doesn’t deserve.
But of course, Harry sticks his half Gryffindor nose into it.
Hermione watches as he risks life and limb for a trinket. Diving through the air as though a fall from a hundred feet would do nothing but leave behind a few bruises.
Her heart thunders in her chest until the moment that he touches down, sticking the remembrall into his robes and grinning like a banshee.
And then Hermione watches in horror as Severus stalks across the glass and shouts at Harry like he wants to hang him from the castle turrets.
Harry’s face falls and Hermione wonders- not for the first time- if she could reverse time. Just a little while. Not the years she’d dreamed of going back as a child.
Just long enough to stop the Longbottom boy from falling from his broom.
Because Severus isn’t going to be kind about this, even knowing what he does about Harry.
As he drags Harry off the grass, Hermione turns on Draco, suddenly more angry than she can ever remember being before.
She blinks away from where she is standing and grabs Draco’s arm, taking them both to the middle of the Forbidden forest.
“Let me go this instant!” Draco shrieks as soon as he finds his footing. The thick roots of a tree surround them and Hermione struggles to find a flat place to stand as well.
Hermione lets go- more so pushes him actually.
“What is wrong with you?” Hermione demands.
“Me? You’ve just accosted me!”
“Draco!” Hermione finally loses it. “I need you to stop!”
He stammers. Then goes quiet.
“Being a terror isn’t going to get you the things you think it will,” she snaps.
His glare becomes even more dramatic.
“My father was right about you. You have no loyalty to our family.”
What does that have to do with anything?
“Why would I?” Hermione takes the bait anyways. “Loyalty? To your family? Draco, your father killed my parents.”
“No, he didn’t,” Draco shakes his head.
She wants to show him. To press into his mind and show every second that she had stolen from Lucius of the night he slaughtered them in their home. Left them lying there in the home they had built together.
“Please,” she says instead. It is a word she loathes.
“Take me back this instant.”
She presses into Draco’s mind and shows him something else. Hermione’s punishment just days prior. Her tears as his father beat her.
Draco tries pushing her out. His mother has given him lessons as well. But never as many and never with as little regard as she shows Hermione. One day he’ll probably be very good at occlumency. But not today. Not like Hermione.
She shows him that too, Narcissa slicing at Hermione until her eyes are rimmed in red and exhaustion covers her face.
And then she pulls back.
“Please,” she says again.
He has the decency to look cowed. To believe that his parents have hurt her. That they aren’t the heroes he’s made them in his mind.
“You were meant to be my friend.”
“What?”
He’s all over the place. Not making any sense. Not seeming to understand that Hermione just wants him to leave Harry Potter alone. That she didn’t bring him deep into the forest for some heart to heart.
“We talked about it. Being in the same house. Sneaking into the kitchens together. You were supposed to be my friend. Not his.”
She lets out a disbelieving scoff.
“That’s why you’ve been an absolute terror to me? Because I’ve made friends? Draco, I didn’t exactly see you jumping to sit next to me after we were sorted. You didn’t even speak to me for days after. You made it quite clear that you didn’t want to be my friend.”
“We talked about it,” he repeats, defending his actions.
Yes, they’d talked about it. In hypotheticals. In theory. They’d be friends if. Always if.
“Forgive me if I thought the way you acted meant you changed your mind,” she replies, frustrated by his stupidity.
“I have to act this way!”
Draco is breathing heavily.
Hermione gives him a moment.
“If my father thought that I wanted to be your friend, he’d never let me see you again. He’d keep you locked away in the east wing like he did when we were children. He hates you. I don’t know why. And I wish more than anything that he didn’t. But he does. So I have to act like I loathe you. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be your friend.”
He is a complete idiot.
How was she supposed to pick up on his desire to remain friends if he didn’t hint at it? All he’s done is say horrible things about her and ignore her.
Why was it her responsibility to see him in secret?
“Draco-,” she starts, voice tired.
“No, stop. I know I handled it wrong. I know I should have found a way.”
A Malfoy apology.
“Do you think we could find a place, somewhere just for the two of us? Where we could be… you and me?”
Hermione has been so angry with him.
“Yes,” she answers.
Draco is home. Even if it doesn’t always feel good or natural. He is the only part of her childhood that comes with happy memories.
“And we’ll need a signal,” Draco points out, seeming relieved.
So Hermione and Draco figure out a place- the library, near the section on magical cooking that no one ever bothers visiting. And they pick a signal- Draco will sneeze twice. Hermione will press into his mind. Request his presence.
“I am sorry, you know,” Draco whispers into the forest.
Hermione doesn’t think she’s ever heard him apologise to anyone.
She reaches for his wrist and apparates them back to the quidditch pitch. Luckily everyone is so busy chattering on about what is going to happen to Harry that they don’t notice Draco and her reappear.
He offers a small private smile and she nods.
“I’m sorry too,” she pushes into his mind.