Mahogany
Hermione
“Blimey, Hermione, you look like you haven’t slept a wink.”
She’d never described Ron as ‘charming’, but his lack of tact never failed to astonish her. She scowled, handing him a napkin.
“And you look like an unsupervised three-year-old.”
He made a face at her as he wiped smears of marmalade from his mouth, and she rubbed her eyes, trying not to dwell on the fact that they felt like sandpaper. Closing them brought little relief.
Her gaze drifted unthinkingly to the Slytherin table, and as they settled upon the icy-blue irises that were already boring into her own, her heart leapt into her mouth: cold fury radiated from his glare, so intense that — for a moment — she could almost swear she felt jolts of ice shooting through her veins, freezing the blood where it flowed, and locking her limbs into stillness. Her body rippled with a chill she couldn't suppress, and despite the indefinite hitching of her breath, every beat of her heart was an audible thump in her ears.
Her thoughts were jumbled and incoherent. Tried as she did to focus, the conversations around her began to fade until they were nothing more than indiscernible chatter. Her pulse became dizzyingly loud. The ebony of the table he sat upon blended into the black of his cloak; it was a stark contrast to the silver of his swept-back hair and the arctic blue of his eyes, but not an unpleasant one. Merely looking at him made her limbs tingle, as though a thousand tiny needles were pricking her skin all at once. She might have believed it if someone had told her that the entirety of the Great Hall, and every student within it, had been coated with a thick layer of frost.
She couldn't have guessed at how much time had passed, as these things often went; time seemed to stop as fear froze her into place, but when he abruptly tore his eyes from hers, the unperturbed movements of the students around them served as a gentle reminder that only seconds could have passed. As if to erase any evidence that he’d looked in her direction at all, a mask of what she could only describe as boredom replaced his glower the very moment he broke her gaze. She willed herself to adopt the same appearance of indifference, but the sharp sense of fear that pulsed through her body, and the erratic beat of her heart, betrayed her.
“I need to talk to you.” She leaned towards Harry conspiratorially, grimacing at the wavering of her voice.
“What have we done this time?” Ron rolled his eyes, shovelling a fork-load of bacon into his mouth.
She bristled at his tone and volume; while everything else felt muffled and far away, as though it were buried beneath mounds of snow, or cotton wool, his voice was uncomfortably present. It revibrated through her eardrum and grated against her frayed nerves like nails on a chalkboard, and it took all she had to fight the childish urge to stand up, scowl, squeeze her eyes closed, and cover both her ears with her hands. She took a calming breath.
“I can’t really say, here. I’ll explain tonight, in the common room. It’s about…”
She inclined her head as much as she dared towards Malfoy – three times, each less subtly than the last – because, instead of following her subtle gesture, Harry did nothing but stare at her, his eyebrows knitted together in confusion. His eventual understanding quickly gave way to exasperation.
“Not you, too, Hermione.”
She blinked in surprise. “You don’t even know what I’m —”
“I’m just —” he slammed his teacup upon the table, splashing lukewarm tea all over its surface, “I’m so... sick of everyone trying to force something bad into existence. Literally ALL the time. Can’t we just... enjoy being back? Just for a bit?”
Her vision became unexpectedly blurry. She averted her eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer.
“Look. I know that what happened before was... a lot. It’ll take all of us a while to get past it. But, for now at least, he’s gone.”
“Yeah, give it a rest, woman.” Ron nudged her in the rib with his elbow. “We’ve only been back for three days, and you’re acting like the bloody world is ending.”
He’d said it with a chuckle, and she knew deep within herself that he meant no harm — but her patience had, unfortunately, reached its end, and she whirled on him with indignance.
“YOU were the one who said he was still involved!”
Harry anxiously shushed the pair of them as Ron put down his fork, and other nearby students suddenly (and conveniently) remembered that they all had places to be.
“Yeah, I did say that, and I’m sure he is!” Ron countered, turning to face her, "but that doesn’t mean anything’s happening now , does it? Like Harry says, can’t we just enjoy being back to normality for a bit? Honestly, anyone would think you WANTED something bad to happen. Stop being so bloody paranoid.”
Her emotions were already simmering far closer to the surface than usual, but his dismissal stunned her into silence. Ginny rolled her eyes at her older brother, but it did nothing to quell the anger that coursed through her veins, and her embarrassment only surged even higher when she caught Neville’s eye, and he smiled sympathetically. She felt her face grow hot.
“Not that either of you even bothered to ask why I’ve brought this up” she began after a while, her voice a furious whisper, “but I saw him threatening a student last night, and when he saw me, he —”
Ron sighed. She found herself wondering if she'd ever felt so close to hexing him before.
“And? Malfoy threatening someone is hardly ground-breaking, is it? How does that prove that Voldemort's involved?”
He shoved half of a bread roll into his mouth before she could say anything else, and the urge to pick up what was left of his breakfast and throw it at his face became so overwhelming that it took all she had to remain seated — but she was nothing if not logical, and it didn’t take long for realisation to seep in. What she’d witnessed wasn’t actually at all out of character for Malfoy, whether she wanted to admit it or not. Had she jumped to the wrong conclusion? Was she being paranoid?
The rest of the day passed slowly, but without incident, although the task of focusing on her lessons was arguably more difficult than were the lessons themselves. While she understood Harry and Ron’s reluctance to face reality, it felt out of character for them to bury their heads in the sand, and she couldn’t quite shake the hurt she felt at their dismissal — nor could she excuse their stupidity. Yes, she inwardly reasoned, there was a chance it was nothing; but how could they turn a blind eye to something like that, after all they'd been through? How could they risk it? And were her concerns really THAT unworthy of their consideration?
She turned it over in her mind as the day wore on, unable to push her gnawing questions to one side. Because, normal as it may be for Malfoy to threaten and belittle other people (she frowned distastefully at everyone’s acceptance of that behaviour as ‘normal’), what didn’t feel normal was the fact that he’d chosen to do it in the dead of night. The ache in her lower back was a constant reminder that, the moment he saw her, he’d pinned her to the wall. And as if that weren’t enough – he’d then glowered at her over breakfast with so much intensity that simply revisiting the memory sent an icy chill down her spine. The more she thought about it, the more certain she felt that she’d witnessed something she definitely wasn’t supposed to – and that it transcended the realms of ‘normal’ behaviour, even for Malfoy.
Hours later, as the final two Gryffindor students left the common room, and the last licks of flame were crackling to smoke in the hearth, she wrapped a thick grey cardigan around her shoulders, and settled into the crook of the large common room sofa. Blankets of gold and scarlet adorned the velvet cushions; it might have been cosy enough to lull her to sleep, were her mind not obsessively attempting to unravel a mystery that no one else seemed to care about. The room faded to almost complete darkness as the night wore on, but her mind was alight with curiosity. For while she had originally viewed everything through a lens of fear and anxiety, near-constant evaluation (and the absence of any attempts on her life... so far) had given way to an approach she was experienced in, and extremely comfortable with: examining the facts from a cool distance, considering context and points of view, and estimating outcomes and motives. Facts and figures, hypotheses, investigations. Few things brought her more reassurance.
It was in the spirit of such an approach that she found herself, once again, treading the familiar path to the Room of Requirement – only this time, thanks to a whispered summoning charm (and a surge of the famous Gryffindor boldness her house was so famous for), she crept unseen, shrouded in the comforting invisibility of Harry’s cloak. A tiny voice in the back of her mind lamented that it was wrong to take it without asking him first; but she knew that sleep would elude her, and Harry had proven that he would rather take no notice of any strange events than investigate them. There was potentially a Death Eater roaming the halls of Hogwarts, conspiring with Lord Voldemort, and threatening innocent students. Yes, it may have been a rash, spur of the moment decision. But if this wasn’t a time to borrow your best friend’s invisibility cloak, when was?
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Walking beneath the cloak wasn’t a new experience, but the sensation felt nothing short of bizarre. Hearing her footsteps without seeing them was a sensation she realized she’d probably never grow accustomed to; whenever she cast her eyes down, expecting to see feet, or a hand, the absence of any body part at all threw her off balance to such an extent that she almost stumbled. She worked to keep her footfalls quiet, but her heart continued to pound loudly in her ears, no matter her efforts to calm it.
A small part of her recognized, even as adrenaline coursed through her body, that her actions were uncharacteristically reckless. The safe thing to do, she knew, would be to return to her room. She should climb into bed, sleep it all off, and divulge her concerns to Dumbledore or McGonagall in the morning. They would know what to do. They could determine what was going on, and tell her – gently, she hoped – if she was being paranoid (paranoid. She scowled into the darkness, the anger she'd felt towards Ron returning with a vengeance).
But an even smaller part of her couldn’t help but wonder... what if they did think her paranoid? What if they waved away her concerns and dismissed them, just like Ron and Harry had? Could she stand that? To be ridiculed and discredited by even more of the people she respected?
Her feet seemed to answer those unspoken question as they propelled her along the path that already felt oddly familiar. She released a shaky breath, unable to suppress an almost overwhelming sense of déjà vu. And though she knew, logically, that the cloak (and the wand she’d remembered to bring, on this occasion) offered her far more protection than she’d had on her previous journey, her senses were heightened, and a sense of unease began to gnaw at her. She wasn’t sure what to expect to find in retracing her steps. She just knew that it felt like a good place to start.
The corner around which the exchange took place came into view. The too-loud, but steady, pulsing of her heart became an uneven thump. She edged closer. Every biological response her body was capable of providing screamed at her to turn around, but she forced her feet to continue forward; she called it bravery, but feared deep down that stopping might mean losing the nerve to start again.
Rounding the corner before she could talk herself out of it, she exhaled with disappointment (that was, actually, relief): the corridor before her was empty, devoid of anything beyond the same statues and pillars that always resided there. Honestly, she scolded herself, feeling ridiculous at having expected anything else. Of course he wouldn’t be in the exact same place. Why would he be? What were you expecting to find?
She stared into the darkness ahead of her, her breathing ragged and shallow, searching for an answer. Darkness didn’t quite cover it, she decided, as she peered into the black. It wasn’t just dark – it was the kind of pitch black nothingness where, the more you looked at it, the more shapes and figures that weren’t really there began to materialize. As though your eyes couldn’t quite handle something so bleak and barren, so they had to invent movement just to fill the void.
Her feet didn't want to take her into that void any more than they’d wanted to take her around the corner. Every step became a struggle, as though she were pushing through water. She considered turning around... but, despite her fear, her curiosity continued to simmer. She had to know what was going on, and something in her gut told her that retracing her steps (no matter how terrifying the journey may be) was the best way to find out.
With the Room of Requirement almost within view, she locked her gaze upon it. Just a few more steps to go. Then, she reasoned inwardly, she could at least tell herself that she’d given it a fair shot. She could return to the comfort of her bedroom, lock the door, and try to forget about it for the night. Then she’d wake up early the next day, go to Dumbledore’s office before classes start, and explain the whole th—
Without warning, as though someone had stolen the very breath from her lungs, her ragged and uneven breathing came to an abrupt stop. His silhouette, illuminated against the rays of moonlight that filtered in through an arched window, morphed without question into the fullness of an all-too familiar figure. An icy feeling expanded across her chest as he stepped calmly from the shadows and her whole body began to tremble: not for fear of him somehow seeing her, as he stared blankly ahead into the darkness – but at the realization that, despite her invisibility, he already had.
Expressionless, he stepped toward her – surely not her? How could he possibly see her? – and extended a hand before him, just inches away from the thin veil of silk that covered her face. She stumbled backwards, and her heart lurched with dread, as her hands and feet slipped back into view.
It occurred to her, as he kicked the heap of silken material to one side, that he didn’t seem even slightly surprised to see her there. As he took another step forward, she found her nerve and drew her wand – only for him to glance at it wordlessly, and send it spinning across the floor with an echoing clatter.
“Look, Malfoy” her voice shook, her chest beginning to tighten, “Please back off. I didn’t come here to cause any—”
He advanced upon her faster than she was able to comprehend; faster than he had the night before - faster than she'd ever seen anyone move, in fact – and a second round of déjà vu that was even more intense, and even more petrifying, made her head swim dizzily. His expression was unexplainable, the only words her brain capable of conjuring being 'Death Eater'. One hand closed tightly around her throat, each slim, pale finger gripping her skin like a vice. She couldn’t see the other, but the rough scraping of a cold wand against her neck was unmistakable. She wrestled futilely in his grasp. Her feet kicked at nothing but air, her voice an almost soundless croak.
“Please –”
“Don’t beg me, mudblood. None of this is my choice.”
He spat the words as though they were venom, disgust in his eyes as they flitted to the hand around her throat. Almost as though it belonged to someone else. He composed himself so quickly that she couldn't be sure she saw it.
“You couldn’t just keep away, could you, Granger? You’re all the fucking same. Always have to be involved in everything, like any of you even have the first clue what’s going on.”
His voice escaped through clenched teeth, and though her own vision was beginning to blur, she felt almost certain that she saw his eyes begin to glisten. He looked away sharply as though she'd spoken the thought aloud, though his uncharacteristic display of vulnerability was short-lived: when his eyes returned to hers, they were alight with a new and terrifying surge of determination. He released his grip on her body and drew his wand, the sudden movement making her stumble. He took a breath and raised his wand higher, before opening his mouth, and—
"You don't have to DO this!"
He blinked in surprise at her outburst. She wasn’t sure what compelled her to scream the words she chose, but they bought her a few seconds. Silence followed.
Without moving a muscle, she strained her eyes through the darkness behind him in search of her wand; a sense of hopelessness settling upon her as she saw nothing but black. Still, he said nothing. She felt her cheeks begin to sting, the cold night air leaving a prickling feeling across her skin, and couldn't help but note inwardly how embarrassing it was to have cried in front of Malfoy – even if he had just tried to kill her. But she didn’t dare wipe her tears away. She hardly dared to breathe. He laughed without humour and dropped his stance, shaking his head at a joke she didn't hear.
"Don’t have to do this” he repeated, his voice a bitter murmur. “Of course I fucking do. You're so ridiculously naïve. You all are. It's always been Potter's biggest mistake – even now, he won't admit to himself that the Dark Lord isn't gone, will he?"
In normal circumstances, she might have rolled her eyes at his almost affectionate term for Voldemort, but the notes of panic and hysteria that leaked into his voice served as an even greater distraction than her fear. The shallow, ragged breathing she could hear didn't in fact belong to her, and as she drank in his frenzied appearance, she realised just how close the edge he looked to be teetering. She took a deep breath, capitalizing on his vulnerability, and willed her voice to remain steady.
"Be that as it may" (her voice shook anyway), "whatever position you're in... it isn't too late to use it for good. To do the right thing."
He laughed a second time, but once again, it was entirely without humour. The waves of danger and hostility that were rolling off him were utterly unpredictable, and it wasn't lost on her that he could snap at any moment and end her life. Panic lacing her words with desperate persuasion, she continued.
"It is possible, and it's been done before. I assume you're – I mean, you must be – well, you're probably aware of that? Snape, for example, was able to—"
"Yeah, Snape did that, and look where it got him!" he spat.
She flinched without forethought. Another stretch of silence lingered on and her heart continued to hammer in her chest. But as she began to notice the way he wrung his hands anxiously, and stared unseeingly at nothing in particular, it became reassuringly apparent that he had no real desire to harm her. The realisation saw her courage return, and her stubbornness walked hand in hand with it.
"What exactly is your plan here, Malfoy? Kill me on the spot and just... just leave me here? For Peeves to find? Or Filch, and his cat?”
He laughed loudly at that. The sound made her small frame jolt in surprise. But even in a state of heart-pounding shock, she noted that the sound wasn't unpleasant.
He released a tired sigh and tilted his head toward the ceiling, tiredly covering his face with his hands, before flinging his wand to the floor with another echoing clatter.
"Fuck knows, Granger, don’t ask me. I just do as I'm told."
Her mind floundered as she searched for the right words to say.
"I think everyone can see that I'm not exactly— this obviously isn't what I—" he continued, sighing again. "Not that it matters. Something will break, one way or the other. Whatever happens, happens."
A tiny voice within her was enraged at the realisation that the feeling in the centre of her chest was sympathy, and she didn’t even fully understand what he’d meant, but she couldn't help it. He looked utterly defeated. His skin was paler than ever in the moonlight, and the dark circles around his eyes more prominent than they'd looked at breakfast. She could hardly believe she preferred the sneering bully she knew him as over this, but it was true: seeing anyone so deeply broken from a situation they didn't ask to be in, and had no control over, would always be difficult to look at.
Astounded by her own bravery, she found herself stepping towards him. The sudden movement caused him to turn to her sharply, wordlessly summoning his wand to his hand, and she raised both her own before her in an obvious display of peace. His wary look of mistrust remained in place, but slowly, he lowered his wand.
"The situation you're in..." she began, looking directly into his eyes, "...I can't even imagine what it must be like. I'm not going to pretend I know, because I don't, and I'm not going to promise that everything will work out for you, because I don't know that either. But what I do know is that there ARE people here who can help. I know it wouldn't be easy, but I can tell that this isn't easy for you either. It doesn't have to be this way and people can help you work out a—"
"WHO can help me? Who the FUCK could have any idea what this is like?"
Another thrill of fear brought her words to an abrupt stop. She pressed her lips together tightly, and waited. She counted to ten in her head before she spoke again, and when she did, she made her voice sound as calm as possible.
"Dumbledore could help you. McGonagall could help you. And so could Harry—"
He rolled his eyes harshly, turning away from her before she'd finished speaking, but she was determined to keep his attention. Grabbing his arm in an effort to turn him back towards her, she almost shouted “I could help you!"
He was, naturally, much stronger than she was, and his back remained turned – but he slowly looked down upon her grip, and as she realised the stupidity of what she’d done, she slowly released her fingers. She stepped away warily as he turned to face her, but he didn’t advance. His expression was soft, despondent; helpless.
"How could you possibly help me?"
She swallowed back her indignation at his emphasis on the word 'you', simply relieved to see his anger subside. "I'd do anything I could. We all would. We could create a plan, we could—"
More humourless laughter. A surge of anger overcame her fear.
"Just THINK about it, Malfoy, for heaven's sake! There's truth to what I'm saying and you have to realise that!”
His laughter died as his expression changed to one of curiosity. He tilted his head ever so slightly to one side, and stared at her for a long time – measuring her intentions, she guessed, or perhaps questioning her sanity. She knew she’d be doing both later on, herself, if she survived.
More of those seconds that felt utterly unquantifiable passed, until the distant cackle of Peeves pierced the silence, and just like it had during breakfast, his expression transitioned suddenly and unyieldingly into that emotionless mask of calm. He never broke eye contact as he stepped into her space, and her breath hitched. It was the third time he'd done it that night; she didn’t quite know why, this time, it felt a little different. She supposed the absence of his hand around her throat probably had something to do with it. His voice was smooth as velvet when he spoke.
"Do yourself a favour and stay as far away from me as you can, Granger."
Eyes unmoving, he retrieved the cloak with the swipe of an open hand, and gave it to her - before turning into the inky blackness without another word, leaving behind an insurmountable number of questions, and the faintest scent of mahogany.