Chapter 5
The next few days passed similarly to the first. Hermione would wake up every morning to bright sunlight streaming through the massive windows of the Ravenclaw dormitory and walk across a faux night sky on her way out of the common room. Her free periods were spent with either Padma, Sue or both, and she quickly stopped worrying about the doorknocker’s riddles. Since before dinner on the first day the house tables were transformed into several smaller tables scattered throughout the room – to discourage division among the houses, Hermione assumed – she had ended up spending most of her mealtimes with Ginny.
The dinner of the first day back, Ginny had waved Hermione over to her empty table, which Hermione couldn’t ignore was on the Gryffindor side of the room.
“Please tell me you don’t hate me,” she had blurted out before Hermione could even sit down.
“Of course not! Why would I hate you?”
“Look at me! Look at this!” She waved her green and silver tie in front of Hermione’s face. “You haven’t told the boys yet, have you? Pleasetellmeyouhaven’ttoldthem!” The words left Ginny’s mouth in a desperate rush.
“I haven’t. Don’t worry.”
“Oh thank Merlin! Do you think Ron will disown me? I think Mum could get used to it, but my brothers…” she slumped onto the table, head in her hands.
“Ron’s not going to dis-”
“And what’s Harry going to think of me? Harry?”
It took a while for Hermione to realise Ginny wasn’t playing at theatrics. Her voice was shaking and her eyes looked suspiciously red.
“Harry’s head over heels for you, Gin! He’s not going to care. Don’t be so silly.”
“But Slytherin! Of all the houses…”
She noticed a nearby fifth year girl who’d been resorted from Slytherin shoot a dirty look at Ginny for this.
“I’ve never told anyone this, but I guess it may as well come out now…” Ginny continued. “The hat wanted to put me in Slytherin from the start. It kept going on about how cunning and ambitious I was… and I just kept shouting at it in my head that I was a Weasley and Gryffindor. I was terrified it wasn’t going to listen. But it did. It didn’t this time though…” Ginny looked truly defeated.
“Gin… look… I think that sort of thing’s more common than we thought. Look at all the people who switched houses. Honestly, the same thing happened to me when I was sorted.”
Ginny looked up at this. “You argued with it?”
Hermione nodded.
“Well, I won’t pretend I didn’t always wonder why you weren’t in Ravenclaw, with your brains and all that… But why did you argue?”
Hermione had thought about this extensively over the past few days. “I suppose I just didn’t want my brains to define me. They always had before Hogwarts. Since it was a new start for me, I thought I had the chance to prove I was more than a walking dictionary. Although… maybe that didn’t go entirely to plan.”
Ginny’s face softened at this. “Anyone who thinks of you like that clearly doesn’t know shit about you.”
Hermione smiled, and there was silence for a few minutes as they dug into their turkey.
Hermione had done a lot of thinking about Ginny’s resorting. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. She was relentlessly ambitious in the pursuit of her passions, particularly Quidditch. And her ruthless streak and penchant for hexes had surprised Hermione more than once. She had the fierce loyalty that Hermione had always associated with Gryffindor, but when she really thought about it, it was a Slytherin kind of loyalty. She would protect her own at all costs, and hex everyone else into oblivion if need be.
“Ginny?”
“Hmmpf?” The redhead replied around a mouthful of peas.
“If it happened to us, do you think it happened to any of your brothers?”
Ginny jerked her head up suddenly to meet Hermione’s eyes.
“I… that makes so much sense… Percy was always such a coward…”
“What about Harry?” Hermione asked.
“I can’t see him being anywhere but Gryffindor,” Ginny asserted.
“I don’t know… That’s what I would have said about you before all this. But I can definitely see the Slytherin now.”
Ginny looked quite offended for a second, before sighing in resignation. “You’re right, it’s definitely there. I’ve been able to see it this whole time if I’m being honest with myself. I think that’s why the chamber messed me up so bad. I thought that there was something… bad about me deep down. And I know it’s irrational, but I feel like maybe that’s why You-Kn- Why Voldemort was able to get his hooks so far into me…”
“Ginny!”
“I know, I know. It was stupid then and it’s stupid now… but that’s how I felt.”
An awkward silence hovered over them for a few minutes before Ginny broke it with a, “So… how does it feel to be sharing a house with the ferret?”
Hermione snorted, hoping to feign disinterest. “Oh shut up, you only narrowly escaped him.”
Ginny became serious then. “If he ever gives you any trouble, you let me know, okay? Now that everyone knows I’m a Slytherin, I may as well act the part.” Her grin was wild at the suggestion.
“I don’t think he will. Not after everything Harry’s done for him.”
And so far, he hadn’t. By the end of the week Malfoy hadn’t so much as made eye contact with her. Not that she was complaining.
But deep down, she knew that he was indeed giving her trouble. Of the mental kind. Hermione being Hermione, she couldn’t simply notice the strangeness of his behaviour and not have her brain latch onto a potential problem to solve. She supposed the persistent tiredness and lack of signature smirk were a logical consequence of everything that had happened. He’d fought – maybe even killed – on the wrong side of a war. His father was in Azkaban. He’d only narrowly escaped it himself. It made sense for him to look so beaten down. He had been. And for good reason.
Muggle Studies, however, was another matter. Why was he so insistent on getting that N.E.W.T? It didn’t seem possible, given his complete lack of knowledge in the field. Malfoy had certainly never seemed like the type to willingly make life hard for himself. And he’d certainly never been interested in understanding muggles before.
Or was that a result of the war too? Was it… guilt?
The thought didn’t sit right with Hermione for some reason, although Malfoy certainly had plenty to feel guilty about. But when she thought of his slouching, his refusal to meet Professor Miller’s eyes when he admitted for the umpteenth time that he didn’t know the answer, it certainly looked like guilt.
A voice inside her said that she should be feeling triumphant over that. Maybe he finally understood the impact of what he’d done. Of who he’d been. Of the pain that he had caused. But there was a strange sort of cognitive dissonance instead. Guilt didn’t suit Malfoy. Deserved or not. It almost made her pity him, and she didn’t want to pity him.
But Malfoy wasn’t the only thing on her mind. Muggle Studies continued to be a painful reminder of her parents, and she even considered dropping it at some points. But her stubbornness kept her there. She couldn’t hide from everything that reminded her of her parents forever. She had to be brave. She had to endure.
This endurance was put to the ultimate test when she walked into her last class on Friday.
“Alright everybody! If you could please open your textbooks to page fifteen – we’ll be working on memory charms today.”
Professor Flitwick’s cheerful words sent her stomach plummeting like a stone.
Nota restituet.
Be strong, Hermione. You have to face this.
And she did face it. Thankfully it was one of the few charms lessons that didn’t have any practical components. Still, the hour felt like an eternity. She spent most of it pretending to take notes while blinking furiously at her parchment, willing the tears not to spill. Flitwick told the class nothing Hermione didn’t already know.
As the bell rang and the eighth years hurried to pack up their belongings and begin their weekends, Hermione made a decision. She took deep breaths as she packed up, willing herself to keep it together for just a little longer, and when all her classmates had left, made her way to Flitwick’s desk.
“Ahh, Miss Granger! How may I help you?” Flitwick squeaked, good natured as always.
Hermione took another deep breath. “I have a question. About memory charms.”
“Well let’s hear it then. That’s what I’m here for.”
“It’s about… one particular memory charm actually. Nota restituet.”
Flitwick’s face fell. “Miss Granger… I heard about what happened to your parents.” At Hermione’s look of shock he continued with, “Don’t worry! It’s not public knowledge. Minerva told me. I’m so very sorry… but from what I know of the charm you used, the effectiveness of the countercharm hasn’t really been tested beyond the timeframe of a few weeks. And in your situation, it was over a year…”
Hermione’s stomach fell ever further, somehow. “But surely there’s something you could tell me. Some other way to reverse it?”
Flitwick looked up at her sorrowfully. “I… regret to tell you this, Miss Granger, but the prevailing theory on the matter – and the one I personally subscribe to – is that after a memory charm is performed, the brain begins to sort of… knit itself back together. The mind needs the world to make sense. That often involves filling in the gaps with the closest reasonable approximation. And if the memories are as close to the core as your parents’ memories of you must have been… well… it’s almost like casting the countercharm on a different person altogether. The spaces where the memories of you should go… they’re already full. Hidden. Buried. For your parents’ sanity.”
The tears finally got the best of Hermione at this point. She didn’t realise how much hope she’d still been holding onto. It seemed stupid now. It seemed like such an arrogant thing to do, to assume that she could accomplish such a task. She’d known full-well that no one had successfully performed this scale of memory erasure and then reinstatement over such a time period before, but in her hubris she had thought that she could.
“Miss Granger, wait!” Flitwick called out as she all but ran out of the room, tears blurring her vision.
She was the brightest witch of her age. She had understood the mechanics of the spell. It would work for her, the same as any other. She had trusted herself so much. And so wrongly. She had taken the risk. And now…
Her brain was buzzing again. Some far away part of her warned her what this feeling was, but she was in no state to listen.
She ran through the corridors, not paying attention to where she was headed. She could hear the laughter of other students from somewhere. Too loud. It hurt her head. It made her dizzy. And her parents were gone. And she couldn’t fix it. And she was useless. And arrogant. And so stupid. She felt like a tidal wave had crashed over her and was pulling her limp body along in its wake.
But then she crashed into something entirely different. She jumped back, catching a glimpse of a Ravenclaw tie before gluing her eyes to the ground. Her hands balled into fists as she turned around and hurried off in the other direction. She knew she should apologise but her mouth wasn’t working. Her brain was a buzzing mess and none of it was words. Words didn’t exist anymore.
“Granger!”
Especially not that one.
A hand grabbed her arm and it burned. She instinctively lashed out, her hand striking something solid before she ran… straight into a dead end.
Her breathing, already ragged with sobs, became impossible as she attacked the wall. For some reason, she couldn’t turn. There was no going back. Only forward. But there was no forward. Hermione, still sobbing, threw her fists against the stone. After a few hits it became surprisingly soft, like she was punching a pillow.
She didn’t know how long she was in this state, but the hitting seemed to help, and eventually the buzzing in her brain died down, making way for regular misery. She had slid down onto the floor at one point and when she had composed herself a little more, she looked around to see…
Malfoy?
Oh god.
He was starring at her with wide eyes and his wand slightly raised. Hermione was very aware of the snot dripping out of her nose and wiped it pathetically on her sleeve. She buried her face in her hands, not wanting him of all people to see her in this state. She felt utterly drained. She didn’t have the energy to think. Didn’t even have the energy to feel truly embarrassed. She was just vaguely aware that there was something very wrong with the current situation.
“Granger?” Malfoy’s voice was surprisingly soft as she curled herself into a ball, resisting the urge to rock back and forth.
Go away go away go away.
But he didn’t go away. Although she couldn’t see, she heard him sit down a few feet to her left, back against the wall. They stayed like that for a long time as Hermione put herself back together. She still felt drained, but eventually she registered that she needed to stand. She needed to get back to her dormitory. She needed to sleep. For several days, if possible.
As she attempted to rise, so did Malfoy. Except only one was successful. She didn’t realise how numb her legs had gone, and fell pathetically back to the floor.
A few seconds later she numbly registered a hand in front of her. She eyed it with distrust, and managed to pull herself up on her own. She looked resolutely at Malfoy’s shoes as he pulled his hand away.
“Are you alright, Granger?” he asked, noticeably colder than before.
She nodded.
“You look like you need to see Madam Pomfrey.”
She shook her head violently. She needed to sleep. She didn’t want to be fussed over. She didn’t want to be touched. Or to talk to anyone. Especially not Malfoy.
He sighed heavily. “Wait there. Don’t run away.”
Her eyes still focused on the ground, she didn’t see where he went but she heard the quiet tap of pacing a few meters away from her. When he came back he simply said, “Come on.” And, too exhausted to argue, she followed.
He led her through a large oak door and into a room that looked like a strange mix of a hospital and a bedroom. There was a soft-looking four poster bed on one side, with an entire stack of potion laden shelves next to it. On the other side was a small sitting area, complete with a couch, coffee table and a tea set. The high ceiling and large windows overlooking the lake reminded her of Ravenclaw tower.
Malfoy strode over to the potion cabinet while Hermione stood somewhat uselessly in the doorway.
“Do you have a headache?”
Hermione starred blankly.
“Nausea?”
Malfoy was riffling through the potion vials with his back to her, which made it much easier to look at him.
“Heartburn?”
He turned to look at her, sighing, before picking out another potion.
“This should do it. Drink.”
Despite her less-than-ideal state, not enough of her sense had left her that she would drink an unknown potion offered by Malfoy.
“It’s a calming draught.” He said as he sighed again. “And if you refuse to drink it I’m handing you over to Pomfrey.”
She cautiously took the vial and read the label. He wasn’t lying. And the last thing she wanted was to go to the hospital wing, with the bright lights and the odd echoing and Madam Pomfrey’s constant fussing. She just wanted to sleep…
She downed the small vial in one gulp, and had just enough time to feel an artificial sense of calm wash over her as she made her way to the bed and collapsed.
***
She woke, very disorientated, to an orange light streaming through the windows. She groaned as she pushed the duvet off herself. Sitting up, she surveyed the room and found Malfoy, sitting on the coach with an open book and a cup of tea in front of him.
“You’re awake. Feeling any better?”
Hermione was filled with relief when she found she had recovered the ability to form words. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t know if I’d call you fine, but you’re talking again which is definitely an improvement.”
Hermione cringed at the knowledge that he’d seen her silence for what it had really been. She would rather he’d assumed she was just being difficult. He walked over to the potion cabinet again and pulled out another vial.
“Drink.”
She eyed the potion distrustfully.
“It’s a pepper-up potion. Should give you enough energy to get up to the common room. You missed dinner.”
Becoming aware of just how exhausted she was, Hermione downed the potion. She was honestly relieved to have slept through dinner. She didn’t think she could have handled the loud and crowded great hall in this state. Her stomach however, disagreed, giving a traitorous rumble.
“I brought you some. It’s on the coffee table.”
Hermione looked over and there was, indeed, a plate of food she hadn’t noticed before. She swung her legs out of bed, noticing her shoes placed neatly on the floor at the foot of it, and padded unsteadily over to the sitting area. She took a few bites of the food before registering it was cold and heating it up with her wand. Malfoy stood uncertainly on the other side of the room.
Without thinking, she reached for the book Malfoy had placed on the edge of the coffee table. World War I: A Comprehensive Summary by John Morrison. The unmoving picture on the cover labelled it as muggle.
“I don’t know how you answer all of Miller’s questions about that damn war. I’ve read that muggles have school before eleven but there’s no way they taught you what an assassination was at ten years old.”
“Not quite, but we learnt some things. Most of what I know comes from… my dad’s war documentaries.” She suppressed the lump in her throat at mentioning her father. Malfoy didn’t seem to notice.
“Documentary? Like a… volume documenting something?”
She almost smiled at this. “It’s more like a film. A moving picture.”
“I know what a film is, Granger,” he said derisively.
“Well, you certainly didn’t know what a documentary was.”
They were silent for a while. At an impasse. Hermione, her judgment still impaired by exhaustion, decided that if she ever wanted to satisfy her irksome curiosity about Malfoy, it was now or never.
“Why are you taking Muggle Studies?”
His answer was instantaneous. “Why are you?”
She sighed internally. Once a Slytherin, always a Slytherin. Of course he wouldn’t give out information for nothing.
“I’m curious… I want to know how the other side sees things.” She paused for several seconds before realising how that must have sounded.
“And when I say other side, I mean wizards.” She added quickly. “I want to know how the average wizard sees muggles, and whether the war changed anything.”
“Sounds like you’d be better off conducting a survey.”
“Well why are you in the class then?” Hermione snapped.
There was a pause of several seconds. Hermione was starting to think he wouldn’t answer.
“I… need to know how the other side sees things. And by other side, I mean muggles.”
She finally turned to face him at this. He was still by the potion cabinet, arms crossed and staring intently out the window. His jaw was clenched tight. He didn’t look angry though, he looked more like he was ready for a fight. Like he expected her to attack.
“You… need to know?” Why would he need information on muggle psychology? Were there still Death Eaters left, planning an attack directly on the muggle population? And if so, why was he telling her this?
“Yes, I…” he breathed out heavily through his nose. “I spent my whole life thinking of muggles as… animals. And muggleborns as…” he paused awkwardly, “Well, you know. And because of that I did horrible things. It took a war and then some to realise I was wrong. I would have realised sooner if I’d just… listened. And learnt. I’d never even met one, you know, until August.”
“You’d never met a muggle until a month ago?” Hermione didn’t know quite how to process the phrase ‘I was wrong’ coming from Malfoy’s mouth, so she latched onto the more simple fact. He still didn’t meet her eyes.
“Why would I have?”
“You know they’re the vast majority of the population, right?”
“Yes, but we don’t exactly frequent the same places, do we?”
“You’ve never walked down a street in muggle Lond- Oh… I’d forgotten. I saw you…”
“Yep. I went out to muggle London one day, determined to enter a shop and speak to someone. Her name was Martha. She was very chatty.”
“I know her name.”
“What?”
“That was my favourite café, before you intruded.”
There was a pause.
“So you weren’t following me?”
Hermione snorted. “I hate to break it to you Malfoy, but the world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“When I saw you there I assumed the Order was tailing me somehow. It made more sense then coincidence honestly.”
Hermione had to admit it did. The Order had indeed had discussions about such tailing of former Death Eaters. In the end, it had been left to the ministry under Kingsley’s supervision.
“So that was the first time you’d ever met a muggle?”
“Yes. Are they all such insistent salespeople?”
Hermione almost laughed. But the next thing that came out of Malfoy’s mouth sent her heart down to her knees.
“What are your parents like?”
Hermione didn’t answer. She just stared at the plate in front of her, unable to even pretend to eat. A sort of shroud had settled over her, making her slow and numb.
Malfoy, with the shrewd eyes that had found flaw after flaw to point out in their younger years, noticed.
“I’m sorry. Did something happen to them?”
It was none of his business, but the words came out anyway.
“I happened to them.”
The spaces where the memories of you should go… they’re already full.
“But… we never found them. We did look, but they’d just disappeared without a trace. Our side couldn’t have-”
“Again, Malfoy, the world doesn’t revolve around you! I erased their memories. Of me. And now I can’t… un-erase them. They’re gone!”
It felt good to yell about it instead of cry for once. It felt good to talk to someone who wouldn’t respond by telling her it would all be okay. Because it wouldn’t.
Malfoy’s reply was simple. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t look at him. What did he expect, forgiveness? She had no one to forgive but herself. And she just couldn’t do that right now. Maybe she never would. Maybe she would have to forever live with the knowledge that she’d taken a daughter from two of the people she loved most in the world. That she’d robbed herself of a family.
The silence stretched into awkwardness. Hermione didn’t touch her food. The sun had set by now, and the room was growing steadily darker.
“If you’re not going to eat that, we should get back up to the tower.”
Hermione stood as Malfoy grabbed his book and vanished her half-eaten plate of food. They left the room and walked through the corridors in heavy silence. She suspected that the only reason she was able to make it up the ridiculous amount of stairs leading to Ravenclaw tower was the pepper-up potion Malfoy had given her.
At the door, the eagle – which Hermione could swear was louder and more screechy than usual – squawked out its riddle.
“What grows as it fractures?”
Malfoy didn’t miss a beat. “Family.” Hermione was just grateful she didn’t have to think.
She was about to walk through the door when she realised the kind of gossip it could cause if they were seen walking into the common room together. Malfoy seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
“You go in first. And…” Looking up at his face for the first time in several minutes, Hermione was surprised to see he looked pained. “I really am sorry about your parents.”
She still didn’t know how to respond to that. “Thank you for the help,” she said instead, and walked into the common room.
The room was crowded after dinner, and she was glad she and Malfoy weren’t showing up together. She didn’t want to have to explain her episode to Sue or Padma. She’d been so good at hiding this embarrassing part of herself for so long. As much as possible, she’d like to keep it that way.
Thankfully, no one stopped her on her way up to the dormitory. More stairs. She’d have the calves of an Olympic sprinter by the end of the year.
She pushed open the door without knocking and was greeted by the sight of a red-faced, sobbing Daphne clutching desperately at her pillow. Hermione stopped dead in her tracks. Daphne immediately fell silent, grabbed her wand and drew the curtains around her.
“A-are you alright?” Hermione managed to stutter out.
There was no answer. If it was her, Hermione would want space and privacy. So she did the best she could do in a dormitory and went to bed.
She pulled the curtains around her own bed, creating a sort of blue cocoon. She drifted off quickly, Daphne’s sobs quiet in the background.