24 Scarsdale Villas
"And, unfortunately, a bit of tragic news this evening. Helen Rollason, beloved sport journalist and television presenter, has died at the age of forty-three following a two year battle with cancer of the colon."
"Oh, no! That's awful! I've loved her during the Olympics!" exclaimed Hermione's mother. Hermione looked up from the card in her hand and feigned a look of deep concern.
"What's happened?"
Her father frowned. "Helen Rollason died. The sporting presenter."
"Oh. That's too bad." Hermione dragged her thumb over the edge of the card and finally said, "Mum, Dad, I have to… go somewhere. I've got to go see Ron. I'll be back. Tomorrow, probably."
"Tomorrow?" Her mother cocked up a brow and smirked as she sipped from her tea. Her father looked a little embarrassed, but he rolled his eyes and said,
"She's almost twenty years old. Let her go."
"Right. See you." Hermione stepped quickly out of the sitting-room, away from the television and the tea and the biscuits. It had been three days since she'd seen Draco Malfoy in the Leaky Cauldron. She wasn't going to see Ron; Ron and Harry were at Auror training right now. She was going to the address on the card.
She stared at it for a long moment in the dining room.
D. Malfoy
24 Scarsdale Villas
Kensington, London
Hermione concentrated hard on the location and then whirled to her right, Disapparating in expert silence. When she came to, she was on the sidewalk outside a neat row of white Victorian houses. She stared up at number twenty-four, sighing a little as she studied the painted black door and the wrought iron gate. She opened the gate and shut it behind her, walking with completely falsified confidence up to the front door. She raised her fist to knock and hesitated.
If Ron knew she was here, he'd be furious. If Harry knew, he'd be even more irate. In a way, Hermione could hardly blame them. Draco Malfoy was the son of Death Eaters; he'd become a Death Eater himself. He'd been tasked with the murder of Albus Dumbledore and had nearly succeeded, saved only by Severus Snape's self-sacrificing bravery. He had been taught Occlumency by Bellatrix Lestrange. He'd been a bully, a tormenting git who had mocked and derided and spat slurs for years.
They were meant to hate Draco Malfoy, and for many years, all three of them had done just that. And that was exactly why Hermione rapped her fist five times on the slick black door before her.
She waited for what felt like an eternity. Finally, the door swung open, and Hermione expected to see a House-Elf standing there. It would have been most appropriate, she thought, that a Malfoy have an elf open the door on his behalf. Instead, Draco himself stood before her, his blond hair carefully combed, standing in a neatly tailored suit of the darkest blue. He looked completely surprised, then steadied his face and said,
"Hello."
"May I come inside?" Hermione asked, tipping her chin up a little. "I'd like to talk a bit more."
"Erm… yes. Of course." Draco opened the door and stepped aside. The elegant Victorian home was beautifully appointed in rich dark greens and burgundies and blues, but it seemed profoundly empty. The grandfather clock in the corridor chimed six, and it seemed to be calling out to no one at all. There were little dust motes in the air, highlighted by the golden summer evening light streaming through the windows, but all they did was show how very still the air was.
"D-Do you care for tea?" Draco shut the door, and Hermione scowled as she realised that Draco Malfoy of all people had just offered her tea. She shook her head and followed Draco into a small, uncrowded sitting room with stout dark furniture and heather grey walls. She sat on a sofa of black and grey tweed, and Draco sat opposite her, seeming very uneasy as he asked, "What brings you to Kensington, Miss Granger?"
"You're very different than you once were," Hermione noted suddenly. "You used to scoff all the time. You were loud. Brash. You were very confident in hating me."
Draco dragged his tongue over his teeth and tipped his head. "I did apologise, I think."
"Yes, you did. But something's changed. Are you Imperiused?" Hermione set her wand beside her, and Draco laughed darkly.
"Would I know if I were?" he pointed out. Then, shaking his head, he said, "No. I… woke up, as it were. I looked around me and saw villains. All sorts of villains. Weak ones, like my parents. Heartless ones like my Aunt Bellatrix. Power-hungry ones the Dark Lord. Sycophants willing to do anything - Yaxley and Avery, Nott and Mulciber. All around me, I saw people who were idiots and best and wicked at worst, very convinced that people like you ought not to exist at all."
Hermione stared at her hands in her lap. She dragged the pad of her thumb over her sharp nail edge and said,
"Ron and Harry. Ginny Weasley. People like them would be very pleased to see you rot away in a cell in Azkaban for everything you've done."
Draco said nothing. Finally, still staring at her nail, Hermione told him,
"I need to know this is not some sort of trap. Why are you reaching out to me? Why not the others?"
"The others will never forgive me," Draco said simply. "Harry Potter and I will never be friends. Ronald Weasley will never see me as a halfway decent wizard. Katie Bell will never forgive the way I nearly snuffed her life. I know better than to expect any semblance of absolution from them."
"Absolution," Hermione repeated with a bitter little snort. "And what makes you think you'll get any absolution from me?"
Suddenly she could see Draco, much younger, his face twisted with blind hatred as he called her a Mudblood. She turned her face from him and whispered,
"You were so awful."
"I know. And the only reason I expect… well, I don't expect anything of you. It's only that I suspect you might actually think about it, where the others won't."
"And why do you want to be forgiven in the first place?" Hermione snapped her face up, and Draco's pale bottom lip shook just a little. He finally shrugged and told her,
"I don't mean to play the victim here, but it is rather a difficult task to reconcile that perhaps you don't… shit gold. If you know I mean."
It was a vile analogy, but Hermione did suspect she knew what he meant. Draco Malfoy had been raised as the treasured only child of two of the haughtiest creatures ever to exist. He'd been dragged into a gang of vile, vicious foot soldiers for the worst wizard who had ever existed. Was there some chance, some niggling little hope that perhaps Draco's actual soul was not tainted all the way through? That perhaps, just maybe, Draco Malfoy himself was not the sum of his upbringing?
"I've been trying to explain to the others - to my friends - that there needs to be some sort of reconciliation if the wizarding world is going to move past any of this," Hermione said, folding her ankles primly. "You see, I did study Muggle history, and… well, after the Second World War, there were entire nations of people who had done awful things. Terrible things. Some of them were very guilty, and they were imprisoned or executed. Others just went along with it, feeling like they didn't have much of a choice. And after the war, those people did have a choice. Set fire to their pasts and move forward in decency, or… drown in the crimes of a war that had ended."
Draco's pale eyes seemed wet, and Hermione could hear the shake in his breath from where she sat. He finally shrugged and said,
"I don't much care about whether the wizarding world finds some great harmony, some beautiful unity. I just want… the nightmares to stop. And something tells me that an attempt to make amends, even if it's only with one person…"
He trailed off then, and Hermione felt a sudden flush of pity for him. Pity. For him, for Draco Malfoy. A tear unexpectedly wormed its way over the bottom lid of her eye, and she wrenched it away with a knuckle. She took a steadying breath and said,
"Draco, I want you to remember something. When the time came, when you had run out of stalling tactics and failed attempts… at the end of it, you could not bring yourself to kill him."
Dumbledore, she meant. Draco lowered his eyes and nodded. He huffed a little breath and whispered,
"Well. I've apologised to you, Hermione. Take it or leave it. There's nothing more I can do."
"You can help me," Hermione corrected him, and Draco frowned as he looked up. Hermione had ideas running through her might all of a sudden, and she blinked quickly as she said, "Who better to illustrate the potential for widespread reconciliation than one of the Golden Trio and Draco Malfoy himself?"
Draco snorted and shook his head, the familiar little snarl working its way over his lips. "You think I'm going to appear on the front page of the Prophet, grinning like a fool and shaking your hand, Granger?"
"Ah. There he is. I thought perhaps he'd died, that Draco Malfoy." Hermione smirked a little at him, and Draco wiped the look of contempt from his face.
"I'm not going to humiliate myself for your cause," he said. "This is your damned House-Elf Rights crusade all over again."
"S.P.E.W.," Hermione said tightly. "I've applied for a Ministry position that would allow me to continue that work, as it happens."
"Well, good. I hope you get it. Fight for the House-Elves. I'm not going to be the poster boy of Dark Witches and Wizards Reformed. And, no, you should not start that organisation."
Hermione couldn't help but laugh a little at that. She let out a very long sigh and studied Draco again. There was something so fragile about him, something that seemed like a tap from the wrong direction might shatter him. His pale blue eyes bored straight into Hermione's, and finally she said,
"Well, think on it. On the idea of helping me. Our world needs examples of forgiveness. So I'll begin. I forgive you, Draco Malfoy. For all the times you put my life and the lives of my friends at risk, I forgive you. For your horrid bigotry - the hate you claim to no longer possess - I forgive you. For your childish cruelty and for accepting the deeply flawed mentalities of those around you, I forgive you. And because you severed yourself from that world, from those people, I am… surprisingly pleased. I have hope. I have hope that you will live a good life, be a good wizard. I have hope that our world can find peace at last, that people can just… be. Together. I do forgive you, Draco Malfoy."
He was chewing so hard on his lip that Hermione saw a thin little trickle of blood ooze from between his teeth. She picked up her wand and aimed it at him, and for a moment she saw a flash of terror in his eyes. But she just whispered,
"Episkey."
His lip healed up at once, and Draco adjusted the way he sat on his own sofa. He turned his face to stare at a painting on the wall, a morbid sort of portrait of a starving woman begging an uncaring rich man for a coin to feed her infant. It was a hamfisted choice of decoration, Hermione thought, and it almost certainly felt like a self-portrait to Draco. He gazed up at the painting as he informed her,
"I was always insanely jealous of you, you know. You did magic like it was nothing. I was born into it; I practically hand a wand in my hand when I came out of the womb. But you… a girl plucked out of the Muggle world and shoved onto the Hogwarts Express… you had more intelligence and pluck and ability than I could even conceptualise. I hated you not just because of who your parents were, but because you were so very damned powerful. And pretty."
"Pretty." Hermione chuckled and shook her head. Her eyes seared as she said, "What, you didn't think a Muggle-born could be pretty? Thank the Sleekeazy's; my hair was a total rat's nest for years until I figured out how to use it properly."
"It wasn't the Sleekeazy's," Draco mumbled, still staring at the painting. "It was your mind that made you pretty, and that annoyed me. You annoyed me because I envied you and the people around you, and… I had stupid reasons for hating you, reasons I was regurgitating and making even worse all on my own. But I hope you know how very jealous I was."
There was a very long silence then. Hermione listened to the ticking of the clock on the fireplace mantle and studied the bright white crown moulding around the perimeter of the room.
"This is a nice house," she said rather absently, and Draco immediately said,
"I know what you're thinking. A nice house bought with Malfoy family money." He snapped his face to her and shook his head vehemently. "I've insisted my father write me out of his will. I don't take a Sickle from them. I bought this house a few months ago with my salary from my own work."
"Your own work." Hermione's brows flew up. "And what work is that?"
Draco's lips parted a little, and he said curtly, "Department of Mysteries. I can't say any more than that."
"Oh." Hermione felt profoundly surprised at that. She finally stammered, "R-Ron and Harry. They're training to be Aurors."
"I know," Draco nodded, and Hermione shrugged.
"Yes, I suppose you would. I've got an interview next week for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. I suppose you knew that, too."
Draco just blinked, and finally he said, "Good luck."
"Thanks," Hermione mumbled. She felt her cheeks go a little warm for some reason. The wizard before her was not the same little boy who had hurled insults and slurs at her. He wasn't the weak-minded pawn of his hateful parents. He'd grown up; he'd developed his own thought processes. He'd matured into something very different than the little monster Hermione had so despised.
"I do forgive you," she whispered, and Draco nodded once. Hermione rose from her sofa, and Draco slowly followed her out to the front door. She had her hand on the knob as she told him,
"See you in the lifts at the Ministry sometime, perhaps. If I get the position."
Draco tipped his head. "You'll get the position. Goodbye, Hermione."
She frowned a little but said, "Goodbye, Draco."
Author's Note: So Draco knows better than to ask forgiveness from the ones who could never forgive him, but he also wants no part in Hermione's S.P.E.W.-like crusade to publicize reconciliation in the wizarding world. Oh, and he thought she was pretty. And he works for the Department of Mysteries. Lots to process here. Now… what happens when Hermione tells Harry, Ron, and Ginny that she verbally forgave Draco Malfoy? Hmm… Thanks as always for reading and please do leave a review if you get a moment.