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Chosen	By : TillieJupiter Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Draco/Hermione Views: 8284 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: In its use of intellectual property and characters of Harry Potter belonging to JK Rowling, Warner Bros, Bloomsbury Publishing, et cetera, this work is intended to be transformative commentary on the original. No profit is being made from this wor

Chapter List
- 7
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- 9
“Is that all you have to say?” a female voice said from behind Draco.
Draco spun around and watched as Hermione stood up from the couch on the other side of the Common Room. At first, she was just a dark figure that loomed upwards, but as she walked a few steps towards him, the low light from the one lit candle brought her details into focus. Her hair was wild—more wild than usual—and her eyes looked slightly red and puffy as if she had been crying. The school uniform she wore was shambled on her figure, with the white button-up untucked from her skirt and her robes hanging off of her shoulders uncaringly. Her visage demonstrated the chaos that was swirling in her eyes.
The bewilderment Draco felt made him tongue-tied as she walked towards him, and her eyes seemed to bore into him. The moment he prayed would never happen was upon him, and he was as unprepared to answer her questions as he had been the moment he left those pages behind for her to find. He looked her over, and felt the confusion bellow off her in waves; he couldn’t decipher if she was mad or sad, which made him further perplexed on how to respond.
“Are you going to say anything?” Hermione asked as she stepped up to Draco. The few feet between them were filled with anticipation as she looked into his face that was darkened by the shadow of the room. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth downturned as stared at him with accusation.
“I…” Draco faltered. Instead of the usual scowl, his face seemed more candid, as if he didn’t have the wherewithal to censor himself; too shocked and bewildered to muster his pose, he just stared at her as if staring into a mirror. “I…don’t have anything to say,” he said softly. The voices in his mind were screaming in discord; the various cries swirled in a confusing mess of panic, anger, and distress. As the silence continued to build between them as she looked up at him, her eyes pleading for answers, a voice came through that urged him to run away. “And…and I don’t have to say anything to you,” he bit out, and his normal scowl returned as his walls quickly went up in defense. Draco quickly brushed past her and bounded up the stairs to his room; his fight or flight instincts were on full blast, and he couldn’t muster the nerve within him to fight her, and himself.
“You can’t just run away!” Hermione cried desperately as she whipped around to watch him go. She ran to the bottom of the stairs and extended her left arm up the railing as if she was going to bound after him. “You…you have to have courage! You have to face challenges head-on! You can’t just pretend this didn’t happen!” she yelled at him. Tears started to gather in her eyes as she clenched her teeth in her rallying cry—those words were as much of encouragement for her as they were for him.
Draco stopped in his tracks, his back to her, as he held the door knob to his bedroom door, ready to open it, and escape from the scene below. Her words echoed in his head, and Snape’s words earlier whirled in his mind in unison. He gripped the doorknob tightly within his hand as he willed himself to turn it and run, but he felt stuck by his own destiny before him. Clenching his jaw, he let go of the doorknob and slowly turned around to face her. In the darkened room, the low candle light only lit his features in sharp shadows that highlighted the grimace on his face as he was about to face demons he had fought to ignore since he was a child.
He took in her wild hair, her pleading face, and her disheveled outfit, and saw the epitome of angst and chaos. Though he had turned around to face her, he still heard shrieks within for him to run away. But as he drank in her image, and heard her cries, he saw she too was fighting the same battle within herself. Though, he noted, it was just like Hermione Granger to face a struggle directly, even if she was scared, and could further be hurt by facing her challenges; staring back at him was the essence of the person that Snape had been calling for him to be: brave, strong, and willing to fight.
His hand tentatively met the stone banister as he slowly walked down the steps towards the bottom. Hermione backed up as he approached her, and she seemed to falter in her resolve as he came face to face with her. Like him, she did not know what to say, or what destiny had planned for them. To Hermione, not only could she not guess about the future, but she was completely unsure about her past.
“Wh-why didn’t you run?” Hermione asked after a few moments passed. Her voice wavered in her question, which was an impulse that she did not think through. Though the answer seemed unimportant, she felt the need to hear him say that he wanted to confront the truth that was ahead of them, if only to not feel alone in her pursuit of it.
“I can’t keep running,” Draco answered. His voice was low, almost tender, and his face began to mimic the desolation of the revelation as he looked upon Hermione. She exuded strength as she held back tears.
Another pregnant pause fell between them, and Hermione’s eyes pleaded for answers, and she soon realized she would have to ask the questions in order to get those answers. Within her mind, she too heard howls of voices that swirled with questions and accusation that were tainted with desperation, fear, anger, and anticipation.
“You left me the page in the library—the one this year…” Hermione began. She appeared to be hurt by the words that came out of her mouth, as each word seemed to ebb at her resolve to remain calm. “…and those years ago,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Draco whispered.
His answer, which was shockingly direct, hit Hermione like lightning, and she took a quick breath of air that seemed to be the only thing that kept her upright. She tried not to buckle from the weakness she felt through her limbs from the adrenaline that plagued her. After a moment, as she tried to compose herself to dredge on, she spoke again. “But why?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Draco answered immediately.
“No, you can’t just cop out on this—you have to answer me!” she yelled. Again, she rallied for both of them to have courage and strength to face these hard truths. Draco seemed startled by her aggression again as she called for him to explain.
“What do you want me to say, Hermione?!” he yelled back.
She too seemed startled by his aggression, and she jumped back slightly away from him. Her demeanor at first seemed to weaken at his booming voice, but she again, with her Gryffindor courage, soldiered ahead. “The truth!” she called. “Why would you leave me this page?” she hollered as she took a few steps to the left towards the open books and clasped the page from the book with the information on 'Spiritual Displacement'. “What are you trying to tell me?!” she cried.
“You’re the one that’s supposed to be so bright—can’t you read?!” he yelled back. He seemed to garner the same belligerence he was known for, and his voice resounded in their quarters like it had in their previous other squabbles; as he easily fell into his normal hostility, he tried to protect himself from the truths he had denied for so long.
“Are you trying to tell me something about Volde–” Hermione began.
“Don’t say his name,” Draco interrupted, his features growing dark.
“Why? What are you trying to tell me?!” Hermione cried desperately.
Draco clenched his teeth tightly, and his masculine jawline protruded from his cheeks at the force. The glare in his eyes indicated that the path she was going down with her accusations was doing nothing but angering him. Seeing this, Hermione decided to abandon her pursuit for information on the page and decided she needed real answers. She didn’t want him to shut her out before she explored the more bewildering of accusations. Quickly, she grabbed the other page from the book. “And this?” she said more softly as she held up the page from their second year at Hogwarts. The page was worn and weak from the time it had spent crumpled in Hermione’s petrified hand before Harry had found it. She had found it in the library—which she never told Harry and Ron, though she thought it would be obvious that Hermione would never rip a page from a book—and it had revealed to her how to survive an encounter with the monster in the Chamber of Secrets. “This told me about the Basilisk,” she whispered as tears started to gather in her eyes and threaten to spill over. She clenched her jaw and scrunched her brow to try and push back those vulnerable tears.
Draco looked at the page she held in her hand. His handwriting of “Pipes” in cursive was written on the bottom of the page, and memories of his younger self ripping the page from the book in his father’s collection and quickly scribing the words on it flew through his mind. He remembered leaving it for her at her desk, which she had claimed as her own their first year. He remembered insulting her to the point of tears out in the courtyard in one of their more aggressive run-ins. He knew she’d seek solace in the books in the library and find the secret page left for her. It was the first time he had called her a Mudblood. “I know,” he whispered—it was all he could manage to say. His mind was still whirling with voices that screamed that his memories, and her words, must be a lie—it was his father’s voice.
“Why? Why did you want me to find this?” she begged.
“Because you would have died, Hermione!” he yelled, angrily.
Hermione again seemed taken aback by his words and aggression as her arm fell to her side grasping the pages in her right hand. His booming voice, and his answer, made her feel weak. “So what?” she said softly, indicating her life didn’t seem to matter—or that it shouldn’t to him, at least.
“I wasn’t going to let you die, and be like bloody Moaning Myrtle—forever haunting the library in your desperate pursuit of answers to your afterlife of misery!” he yelled as thrashed his hands in bewilderment.
“Why do you care? I’m a Mudblood, remember?!” she cried. A tear escaped her eye in her desperation.
“I don’t know!” he bellowed as he pulled at his hair in anguish. “I couldn’t just let you die!” He appeared unhinged in his desperation.
“But why?! How can you not know?!” she pleaded as she stepped towards him as she motioned her hands as if she was trying to hold onto her reason.
Draco began to pace slightly as he felt his emotions and the voices in his head bubble over, and he felt overwhelmed. His father’s voice, Snape’s voice, and his own voice, which usually was the weakest, but seemed to be rising above them all, resounded in his mind and began to tear away at his sanity.
“I don’t know!” he cried out again.
“Why would you try and save me, a Mudblood?! You hate me, you hate my kind; I’m unpure, unworthy, without!” she cried as she recited all the words and feelings she had throughout the years about herself displaying the angst she had felt. Tears were now falling down her face. She ground her teeth together as the words that left her mouth tore at her heart and soul.
“You’re not!” Draco suddenly shouted as he stopped in his tracks and his bewildered eyes bore into her.
Both of them appeared shocked by the words that tumbled impulsively out of his mouth. Draco seemed to struggle with the words, as their meaning began to penetrate his consciousness.
“You’re not…” he whispered as he looked down at the ground, his eyes far off in thought as began to absorb the truth of his sentiment. After a few moments, as his eyes seemed to search the vault of his mind, he looked up at her. His brows were furrowed in incredulity at the recognition of his thoughts. His mouth opened again as if he was going to speak, but then he closed it.
“What?” she asked softly. She looked broken, but her tears were beginning to dry as astonishment of his words began to fill her and repress the pain of her teenage angst.
“I never meant any of those things,” he finally admitted. “I mean, I don’t know if I meant them!” he leveled desperately, displaying his confusion as he paced for a moment. He felt unwilling to contend that every interaction with the girl was a fabrication—he was, after all, aggressive in his interactions in general. “Things aren’t that black and white,” he finally said.
“Yes, it is. You either meant it, or you didn’t,” Hermione said as she gestured her hand to display two columns of reason.
“No, it’s not that easy! Maybe in your world you can just do and say whatever you like; for me, it’s so much more complicated than that,” he explained with frustration. In his mind, the voices were beginning to quiet as one came forward as the victor: his own, as he came to one truth: “I just know the times when I was the cruelest,” he explained, “were the times I wanted you to find those pages; I knew you would go to the library if I hurt you enough.”
Hermione’s left hand went to her mouth to stifle the ragged gasp that came at his words. The same look of shock she had when she discovered he had left those pages came over her face again as another piece of the puzzle came into place. She remembered the times he was the cruelest, in her memory, were the times she found those pages waiting for her in the library.
“Everything about you,” he explained in exasperation—now that his true voice was speaking from within, he found it hard to censor himself, “and everything my father said, taught me that I should hate you. But when I realized that the Chamber of Secrets was reopened, and a Muggle-born was going to die again, the voice that said ‘I wished it was you,’ was just the words my father would want me to say. Even after I said it to Crabbe and Goyle–” he began.
In Hermine’s mind, she remembered the story that Harry and Ron had told her when they had used the Polyjuice Potion, becoming Crabbe and Goyle, to interrogate Draco about the heir of Slytherin. His harsh words always resonated within her as a reason to hate the boy.
“–I realized I didn’t really mean it. And then the idea that you could die hit me, and I knew I had to stop that from happening—that’s why I left you that page to warn you,” he continued to explain.
His words blew through Hermione’s soul like cold air; it seemed to weaken the part of her that used to be so full of ire for the Slytherin Head Boy. She was now full of feelings she could not identify, and the very thought of identifying these feelings was too frightening to fathom. All she could do was look at him with awe. He appeared more genuine, vulnerable, and honest than she had ever seen him before; it was as if an entirely new person was in front of her, and it shocked her to the core that it was Draco Malfoy—the boy that was supposed to be her tormentor and enemy. But the revelations before her put into question everything she had ever thought about him, and it appeared everything he had thought about her.
“I-I could have figured it out,” Hermione said as she found herself feeling slightly defensive that he didn’t seem to believe she was capable. In truth, her words were impulsive as part of her desperately wished their conversation was a simple argument that they usually had; the truth and depth of their discussion were difficult for her to accept and continue. But her voice was weak and portrayed she wasn’t really looking to fight. Her left hand fell from her mouth as she tried to push through her bewilderment.
Somehow, Draco actually smiled slightly at her remark, as if he found her childish response charming. But then his smile quickly faded. “I couldn’t take that chance,” he said softly.
“Did…” Hermione began but then stopped as she regarded him. She decided the question was too important to not ask. “Did you know about Ginny? Did you know about Tom Riddle’s diary?”
“Of course not!” he defended.
“Then how did you know about the Basilisk?” Hermione asked, further pressing the issue, as this was possibly her only chance to get these answers.
“Just like you, I often go to books for my answers. I received Head Boy just like you did—I’m not a total idiot like Weasley,” he explained gruffly. He gestured to his bookcase nearby that was full of his family’s books.
Hermione’s eyes narrowed slightly at his insult to her friend, but she quickly moved past it to analyze his explanation. It appeared that Draco was just as in the dark as they were about the Chamber of Secrets; therefore, he used the only resource he had his disposal to find an answer, just like Hermione had: books. Luckily for Hermione, Draco’s repertoire of books held much darker and secret histories than were available in the library. Hermione imagined all the books all the Malfoys would have collected, through pomp and circumstance, and through their inane attempt at vanity through the purchase of rare literature at places like Borgin and Burks. It was a wonder they had survived the purge of dangerous items by the ministry. It was there that he had found the dark answers to the dark questions everyone had. Deep in Hermione’s mind, she felt impressed with his abilities.
They both looked emotionally broken as they gazed into each other’s eyes as the revelation of Draco’s secret influence came to light. Draco looked just as worn down from the shock of his own truth as Hermione did.
“Why now?” Hermione suddenly asked. “Why couldn’t you just tell me back then? Why did you use this,” she said holding up the pages again in her right hand, “to tell me?”
Draco sighed. He closed his eyes as if he was gathering up strength to push ahead in her inquiries. “What? As if we were friends?” he said sarcastically. “Would you really have trusted anything I said? You probably would have accused me of being the heir to Slytherin and that I had opened up the Chamber,” he explained gruffly.
Hermione thought about his words and nodded her head in acknowledgement that what he said was most likely true; back then, in her hatred for the boy who called her ‘Mudblood,’ she probably would have never trusted him. She did not have the maturity or rationale she had now, at the age of 18, to review her own prejudices to have understanding and compassion. “You’re probably right,” she admitted and mustered up a small smile. “Did you ever plan on telling me?” Hermione questioned boldly. Since they were already so far into this ordeal, she let her thoughts flow from her mouth with little analysis.
Draco stood there for a moment and regarded the girl, who had seemed to calm slightly from her previous bewilderment. As his mind churned her questioned, a frown appeared on his face as he shook his head no.
“Why not?” she asked brazenly, again.
“Because,” Draco began, but then closed his mouth as he thought about his words. A pregnant pause stretched between them as he looked at the Head Girl before him, the softness he felt for her reflected in his eyes as he regarded her. “Because I would never admit it to myself,” he said softly.
Hermione looked perplexed at his answer and tilted her head in question as her eyes tenderly urged him to continue. “Why?” she asked softly.
“Because, Hermione!” he started aggressively. “I’m a Malfoy, and I say and do as I’m told. Anything other than this is blasphemy, and an affront against my name, and my father.”
“Then why do this?” she asked desperately holding up the pages again.
“Because I guess I’m not as good as a Malfoy—or son—as I thought I was,” he said softly. “And now,” he sighed, “I have no idea who I am.”
A silence stretched between them as they regarded one another with broken weakness. Hermione’s whole being displayed how defeated she was, from her hair to her glistening eyes and shambled clothing. Draco, however, looked almost calm except for the furrow in his brow and the melancholy in his gray eyes; instead of having a deep scowl on his face, as per usual, he regarded the Head Girl with a sad grimace of empathy, for they both were fighting through their demons. He had answered her questions, but they were still no closer to a conclusion. In her eyes swirled a question of what the meaning of it all was, but he didn’t know the answer. In the end, he simply had one last question, as if to the universe, or to himself. “If I can’t believe in myself, what can I believe in?”
“I don’t know,” Hermione said softly. She had no answers, and now she only had one question. “If it isn’t true that you hate me, then what is the truth?”
And there it was—the real question. And again, Draco was at a loss for an answer. “I don’t know,” Draco whispered.
They only were a couple feet from one another, and their desperate eyes bore into each other’s souls as the moments stretched through the thick air between them. The shadows that had painted the scene of their outpouring of pleas and revelations felt stifling between them as Draco regarded the flickering candle light that shone from beside them at the desk. Her glassy eyes shimmered in the dancing light, and he realized he could still see the fiery shimmers of gold illuminating out from her stare. He remembered how he felt when he had come upon her looking out her bedroom window in silence as the ruminating dusk colors filled her vision and calmed his soul. And even now, as she looked at him through defeated, glassy eyes that displayed the hell they had gone through—together—he was still reminded of the secret yearning within him. And then an impulse began to grow in him, and it was an impulse that could only be truly his own—uncorrupted by any other voices or influences. It was then he decided to trust it, have courage, and be strong. Fuck it, he thought.
Suddenly, he closed the gap between them and his lips came crashing down on hers in an impassioned kiss as his hands cupped her face tenderly and desperately. His eyes clamped shut as he reveled in the feeling of his lips against hers while he could, prepared for her retaliation at his impulsive action.

Chapter Note(s):
Special thanks to Beta Reader Free_Buckbeak.
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