Paper Faces on Parade

Section 4:

It was in the summer before his seventh year at Hogwarts that Draco came to a new appreciation for Hermione Granger. It began, surprisingly enough, when Cornelius Fudge sentenced Lucius Malfoy to twenty years in Stalagard Prison. The wizarding community was shocked. It wasn’t the length of the sentence that produced the surprise, but the prison itself: Stalagard Prison was where they kept war criminals. The Ministry had finally admitted that they were at war with Voldemort.

Narcissa Malfoy took the next step. Always a pragmatic woman, she looked carefully at the state of affairs, and decided that twenty years in the deplorable Stalagard Prison was not what she wanted for herself, or her son. She had always let Lucius make his decisions without any interference from her, and he had made a fine mess of his life without any assistance at all. Now that he was out of the way, she was free to make her own choices about what allegiances best benefited the honor of the Malfoy name. And to that end, she sent an owl to Dumbledore with a very intriguing offer.

Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place was hers. The house had sealed its doors and flatly refused to let anyone in once Sirius’ death was verified, despite Sirius’ attempt to will it to Harry. Of course, if choosing the heir was as simple as writing a name on a will, Sirius would have lost his rights to the moldy old mansion when he was sixteen years old. When Sirius’ line expired, the house auticatically transferred itself to the ownership of the closest Black line. Andromeda was the oldest child, but she had removed herself from the line of inheritance by marrying a muggle. Narcissa was next in line.

For the year following Sirius’ death, the Order operate a v a very cramped fashion out of the Burrow. The chance to operate once again from Grimmauld Place was more than tempting. When Narcissa offered Dumbledore full access to the mansion in addition to heavy financial support for Order activities on the condition that the Order protect her and her son from any Death Eater retaliation, Dumbledore was very willing to accept. The only problem was that the mansion itself was a bit of a mess. The enchantments binding Kreacher to Sirius forced him to commit suicide after causing his master’s death, meaning that the house hadn’t even received a desultory cleaning in the span of a year. Meanwhile, the household pests had taken decided advantage of the year of free reign. Before the Order could do anything else, they needed to clean house.

Narcissa sent Draco to spend the summer at Grimmauld Place to facilitate the transfer. The door would only open for those he invited inside, and there were several parts of the house that could only be accessed by an heir to the Black line. He was joined by Remus, Tonks, Kingsley (when he could get away), Moody (who often made things worse instead of better by sneaking up on the others to see if he could catch them off-guard), and Hermione.

When he was told that Hermione Granger would be living there with him over the summer, Draco’s first reaction was a malicious sense of pleasure. In *his* house that responded in many ways to his commands, he’d be able to get away with tormenting the girl as much as he liked. He’d like to see her try to ignore him in that maddening way of hers when there was literally no getting away from him. His excitement faded into confusion when she arrived at the house. The giho mho moved in was not the Hermione Granger he knew. She was not bossy. She did not offer comments or suggestions. She did not smile. She did not laugh. And for the first three weeks of her stay, she did not speak. And while many were responsible for placing Draco in his new position, sole responsibility for the new and far-from-improved Hermione Granger could be attributed to Viktor Krum.

Viktor had believed himself in love with Hermione from the moment he saw her, when she was fourteen. The years that passed and the miles between them did not alter his feelings one iota. He was a brilliant seeker not just because he had an eye for spotting things that others missed, but because once he spotted something he wanted, he went after it with single-minded determination, allowing nothing and no one to get in his way.

Hermione, always too trusting for her own good, had been blind to the obsessive nature of Viktor’s love. She told him that she wanted to keep their relationship purely friendly, and believed him when he said that was fine. He cultivated her friendship with meticulous caution, always careful not to scare her away or give her nosy friends any grounds to convince her that he wanted more than friendship. Hermione responded freely, seizing on the opportunity to vent her frustrations about school, class, and her friends to someone far enough outside the situation to have an unbiased opinion.

Meanwhile, Viktor grew increasingly angry and impatient with the constant mention in all of her letters of the wonder that was Harry Potter. He had known from the beginning that Hermione harbored romantic feelings for her green-eyed friend, but Potter had, at the time, been far too busy drooling over somher her girl to notice. For the sake of his peace of mind, Viktor had allowed himself to believe that Hermione’s feelings were just a schoolgirl crush that would fade when she saw that she didn’t stand a chance. As time passed, he found it harder and harder to believe.

The wizarding community in Bulgaria was in an unstable state in the winter of 1996-1997. Death Eaters were on the rise, and showed great perseverance in pursuing Durmstrang alum. Viktor’s Quidditch hero status made him a coveted catch, while his utter lack of social graces rendered him most susceptible to the oily persuasions of the recruiters once they made it clear what they were offering: they promised Viktor glory, honor, power, and most of all, the destruction of Harry Potter, who Krum was convinced was the only obstacle in his path to Hermione’s heart. All he had to do was perform one simple task to prove his loyalty, and he would be accepted into the ranks.

Being incapable of love himself, Voldemort had no understanding of it in others. He viewed Viktor’s relationship with Hermione as an opportunity. Krum’s mission was to attack the airplane schedule to bring the Granger family from London to China for their family vacation. A simple spell would be enough to make the engine fail in midair, forcing the plane to crash. The crash would have the appearance of being the result of engine failure, meaning that Potter would suffer the loss of his best friend without even the comfort of someone to blame. It would drain his spirit without strengthening his resolve. It would be perfect.

It never occurred to Voldemort that Viktor might not find Hermione expendable in his quest for power. The forged letter from Hogwarts that Viktor sent her didn’t stop her parents from boarding the flight to China, but it kept Hermione from joining them. She saw them off at the airport, promising to join them in a few days when her Hogwarts duty was complete. When Viktor flew his broom up alongside the plane and cast his curse, the plane plummeted to the ground while Hermione sat at home, safe and oblivious.

Sadly, Viktor underestimated Voldemort just as Voldemort had underestimated him. When Voldemort found out that Viktor himself was responsible for Hermione’s absence from the plane, Viktor was tortured quite literally to death. His body was found the next morning, battered beyond all non-magical recognition. Hermione seemed to handle the news calmly when Snape came to inform her, the day after her parents’ funeral. Snape was unaware that with his revelation of Viktor’s culpability in her parents’ death, something in her snapped. Within a few days it became clear that she had sunk into a level of grieving so deep that nothing seemed to move her. She continued to function, eating and sleeping and going where she was told to go and doing what she was told to do, but the bossy, know-it-all, vibrant spirit that used to define her seemed lost.

The Weasleys had been named her guardians, and Hermione was bundled off to the Burrow in the hopes that being in such a warm environment with her friends would bring her out of her depression. It didn’t work. If anything, the solicitude that everyone showed her seemed to drive her further into her shell. That was when Dumbledore made the suggestion that Hermione be put to work helping to clean out the Grimmauld Place mansion, where the opportunity to be busy and productive might drive her out of her dark spell. He even mentioned that he had warded the house to allow undetected underage magic, something that would have sent the Hermione-that-was into raptures.

She still didn’t speak. She moved into Grimmauld Place and swept and dusted and scrubbed and cleaned and brewed potions to get rid of pests and cast scouring charms and did everything she was told, but she showed no more signs of life than an animated corpse. She didn’t speak. Even her spells were uttered with a barely audible whisper. Her magic was as flawless as ever and her efforts in the house quickly showed fruit but her spirit remained disturbingly vacant. She didn’t even show any signs of annoyance when Draco made it his personal mission in life to get a response out of her.

She was silent when he fed Crookshanks hair removal potion, leaving the animal completely bald. She was silent when he switched the sugar with salt, and when he swapped her wand with a trick wand that turned into a whoopee cushion, and when he charmed her toothpaste black. She was silent when he performed a partial transfiguration on her brush, leaving it wite ape appearance of a hairbrush but the mobility of a mouse so that it scurried away whenever she reached for it. She was even silent when he started following her around the house, singing every dirty Quidditch song he had ever heard in his life. Nothing he did evoked any response from her, until the day she saved his life.

The tapestry next to the staircase wafestfested with doxies. Draco’s seeker skills made him exceptionally adept at de-doxification, since he easily spotted any doxies trying to sneak away from the doxycide blasts. He had, in fact, such confidence in his abilities to catch and spray each one before they could reach him that he didn’t even bother wearing gloves to avoid their bites. Unfortunately for him, Hermione’s room was on that floor, and when he heard her door open, he looked up. One moment was all it took. One moment of distraction, and the next thing he knew, a doxy had its teeth sunk into his hand and he was losing his balance, slipping on the stairwell, down the steps, until—

“Impedimenta!”

Draco froze in mid-air. Literally. He could feel Hermione’s magic surrounding him, holding him off the ground before gently lowering him on to a stair. It was odd; the magic didn’t *feel* dirty. Forcing the thought out of his head, Draco shakily climbed the stairs back to the top, coming face to face with Hermione.

“Um… thanks,” he said hesitantly, looking everywhere but at her face. She shrugged, avoiding eye contact as well, and Draco felt uncharacteristically disappointed. The sound of her shouting out the spell to save him was the first time he had heard her voice since she arrived at Grimmauld Place. For some reason, he missed the sound of it.

Eager to end the uncomfortable interlude, Draco turned his attention back to the tapestry, and the shards of broken glass on the floor from his dropped bottle of doxycide. A muttered Evanesco cleaned up the mess while a louder accio doxycide sent a spare bottle zooming out to him from the closet where Draco could grab hold of it. The trickle of magic running over his skin made him realize what he had done, but by then, it was too late. Grabbing hold of the bottle was all that it took for the charm he had placed with the intention of pranking Hermione to activate. Cursing under his breath, he looked down at his hand which was covered, along with the rest of him from head to toe, with galleon-sized, Slytherin-green spots.

And then he heard it. A giggle. A sweet, purely feminine, purely amused giggle. Shocked, he looked up at the all together startling sight of Hermione Granger, eyes sparkling, lips smiling, giggling so hard she could barely breathe. When she saw the (no doubt) gobsmacked look on his face, she started laughing even harder, leaning on the banister for support.

“Sorry… Malfoy…” she gasped out, “so… sorry… but… so… funny!”

When the shock faded, Draco started to laugh with her. He couldn’t help it. It *was* pretty funny and besides, her laugh was infectious. They laughed so hard, they cried. They laughed so hard, they couldn’t stand on their feet anymore and had to sit down, which only made them laugh harder. Remus, hearing the noise (which was mostly wheezing and gasping for breath at that point) came charging up the stairs, afraid they were hurt, and the look on his face when he found them made them laugh even harder.

And thus ended the animosity between Draco and Hermione. There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and sharing a laugh like that over a near-death situation and giant green spots is one of them. The pranks continued unabated, but Draco was just as likely to prank one of the adults as Hermione and more often than not, he pranked himself just to make Hermione laugh. He preened like a peacock whenever he was able to make her laugh, not caring what he had to do to himself to make that happen.

He preened even more at all of her signs of attention. For whatever reason, Hermione was definitely more responsive with Draco than with any of the others in the house. Draco was the one who could always make her giggle. Draco was the one who knew how to get her into an argument until her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were sparkling and she was standing with her hands on her hips, looking every inch like the Hermione-that-was. Draco was the one who teased her out of her moods on her darker days and talked her through her nightmares on her darker nights. Draco was her savior, all that summer, helping her through the hard times and bringing her back to life.

She returned the favor in spades when the school year began again. The Slytherins were far from pleased to see their former prince deserting the Dark Lord’s cause. And since the Slytherin motto when it came to persuasion seemed to be ‘if at first you don’t succeed, beat the bloody shit out of them and try again,’ it seemed wiser to find Draco new quarters. The Head Boy quarters fit the bill quite nicely, with the added bonus of sharing his living space with the one person at Hogwarts who he knew was firmly and unswervingly his friend.

Without his goons backing him up, it might have bopenopen season on Draco from everyone who held the slightest grudge against him if not for Hermione. She stood by him without hesitation, and nothing her friends said or did could convince her to abandon him. She adopted him completely, dragging him along with her to study sessions in the library, and butterbeers in Hogsmeade, and even practice sessions out on the Quidditch pitch. He gave up his position on the Slytherin team, knowing they would seize the chance to use him as target practice, but he hated to give up flying altogether. Hermione insisted that she wasn’t going to leave Hogwarts without knowing how to fly a broom, and coerced him into teaching her. She still hated it, but she put up with it to make him happy. It worked. He was happy, surprisingly happy, to have a friend who genuinely cared about him.

He couldn’t have said when the feelings turned into love. It might have happened around those final, stressful weeks before the N.E.W.T.s when it was discovered that the Slytherins had sabotaged Draco’s elaborate Potions project and Hermione worked with him day and night, sleeping only during meals, to help him complete it on time. Or maybe it happened at Christmas when she wore those stunning midnight blue dress robes to the Yule Ball. It could have been back at the beginning of the year when he overheard the tongue-lashing she gave to Potter and Weasley in his defense. It’s also possible that it happened on that summer day when she saved his life and he first made her laugh. But he was certain of it the next summer when she showed up at the manor with a party hat on and a small cake with a single candle in it to celebrate the one year anniversary of their friendship. He smeared some frosting on her nose and she giggled and he knew he would love her as long as he lived.

He had been hurt but not surprised when her relationship with Potter fell into place. He even managed to convince himself that he was alright with the idea of just being her life-long friend. But now Potter had messed something up and had driven her away, and that was something Draco simply could not accept. After skimming the article and bidding a hasty farewell to his mother, he disapparated from the manor with two thoughts on his mind: finding out what Potter did to drive Hermione away, and deciding whether or not Potter deserved to be castrated in retaliation.

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