He Was Brave Enough

Disclaimer: If I owned them, I wouldn't do this to them. I'd do something longer which would result in the death of Voldemort and lots of snogging. But I don't own them, so I wrote this instead.

A/N: This fic was written for a contest on the Fawkes Ashes forums. I seem to write a lot of my one-shots for contests… contests are fun! Anyway, the challenge specified that the fic had to be set on either the last day of sixth year or the last day of seventh year, and it had to include at least two events out of: 1) A student becomes a member of the staff. 2) A current staff member retires. 3) A couple get married. 4) Core characters (Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville etc) begin/are about to begin new jobs. 5) A couple begin a family.

I managed to fit three in here – see if you can spot them!

This was written after two weeks of revision, exams and more revision in which I didn't write anything. Then I wrote this entire thing in two sittings, broken only by a food-and-television break of an hour. You could say it's my first gulp of air after being underwater too long…

Onto the story. Enjoy!

She was up before the sun rose fully, when the sky was a perfectly neutral shade of a perfectly neutral grey, and the moon hovered low and ghostly on the horizon. The grass beneath her feet was still wrapped in the monochrome shroud of the night, only just beginning to flush with emerald colour, crunching with dew as she crossed the lawns to where she knew – by instinct as much as knowledge – she'd find him.

It was his place, after all, and it was inconceivable that today of all days – their last day in Hogwarts – he wouldn't be sitting there to watch the sun come up.

It was doing so now. The horizon was splitting in two, dividing blue-tinged sky from dark, rugged trees, and from that single whisper of light colour was spilling into the world. The walls of the school, already far behind her, were glowing amber and honey in the warm light, and the Forbidden Forest to her left was turning the colour of darkened malachite.

She paused a moment as she reached her destination; two trees which stood alone in the lawns, providing shade on sunny days and shelter in the rain. One was a graceful silver birch, its bark almost shining in the dawn light, and its elegant leaves a translucent green. The other, growing so close to the first that the branches entwined higher up, was more unusual. Its leaves were the deep red of old blood, its trunk and branches thick and sturdy.

It was this one which she climbed, cursing her wizarding robes and cloak for hampering her movement. She scrambled onto the first branch without much problem, almost slipped on the dew-slicked wood, and then climbed carefully into the crimson canopy.

He was there. When she reached the point where the trees entwined, she found him, sitting comfortably with his back against the birch's trunk and his legs trailing down a branch, head turned away from her, staring through a gap in the leaves at the sunrise. Exactly the place he'd been sitting when she first found him here.

He never looked real, in the half-light of dawn. Like something she'd dreamed up amongst the soft rustlings of the leaves, the first early chirps of the birds: all in black and white and grey, as though he'd sold his soul to the night and lost all colour, as though the light of dawn would wash him away.

With some difficulty, she arranged herself so that she was sitting on the thickest branch of the crimson-leaved tree, her legs dangling into free space, holding carefully to a side branch that sprang from the one she sat on. Brushing a wild strand of chestnut hair from her face, she waited for him to speak.

When the entire disc of the sun could be seen above the trees, he sighed a little and turned his face towards her, the corners of his mouth twitching almost imperceptibly into the closest thing to a smile she'd seen on his face for weeks.

'Morning, Granger,' he said in his accustomed drawl – for all the conversations they'd had, the confidences they'd shared, they'd never progressed to using first names.

'Morning, Malfoy,' she said back – it was ritual – and curled her hand closer around the side branch. 'The last morning…'

He didn't respond to that. There was nothing much that could be said, after all.

Hermione let the silence stretch on long enough to be certain that he wasn't going to bring up the topic himself. 'It's tomorrow, isn't it?'

He turned his face away as though to stop her seeing his expression, though she knew full well that he could hide any feeling he chose to. 'Tomorrow.'

Two weeks earlier, his owl had arrived at her tower window at midnight, waking her from a deep and dreamless sleep. It had carried two pieces of parchment. The first had been a letter from Malfoy's father, telling him, without ever explicitly stating it, that he would be initiated into the Death Eaters the day after the final day of school.

The second letter had been written very quickly in Malfoy's hand, the script unusually shaky, and had read simply: I don't want to.

Malfoy never told her much, but from the fragments of things he'd told her or alluded to, the shards of information she'd gleaned, Hermione had developed a fairly good picture of the consequences if he refused to join. His family and friends would disown him immediately, followed by torture, followed by murder. He was a Malfoy: he'd been practically destined for the Dark Mark since birth.

But he didn't want it.

She'd come to wait for him here every dawn since then; but he'd never turned up. She'd written letters, advising him to stand up for what he believed and refuse, but he hadn't replied. He'd ignored her in the corridors as though, having reached out for help, he was afraid to accept it.

But at the last, he was here, staring at the newborn sun as though its light could save him from Voldemort's darkness, as though he could stay hidden here, in the canopy of these trees, and never have to choose.

'Have you decided?' she asked softly.

He didn't move his eyes away from the sunlight. 'No,' he said after a moment's pause.

'You don't have long…'

'I know that!' he interrupted, snapping at her, turning his head sharply to meet her gaze. She looked down and slipped unconsciously a few millimetres backwards; his eyes were cold and grey and filled with pain. They reminded her of knives.

When his face had turned back to the sun, she spoke again. 'I already said in my letters. What you could do…' He didn't speak, so Hermione kept going. 'You can do what your father wants, and join him… and that would be easier in the short term, but you'll have to kill people and serve Voldemort, and… and that might be harder over time. Or… you can refuse. And that'll be harder. I don't know what they'll do to you, but Dumbledore will help as much as he can. They might kill you, or torture you, or… I don't know what they'll do. But you'll have done the right thing.'

There was a brief pause before he replied, not turning to face her. 'You have it so lucky,' he said, so quietly it could almost have been mistaken for a rustle of the leaves. Before she could ask what he meant, he was explaining.

'You've got your own choices. Your own decisions. You're taking over from Professor McGonagall next year, and Potter's becoming an Auror, and even Weasley's going to work in that joke shop of his brothers'… and I have the biggest decision of my life tomorrow and I don't know what to choose.'

He hissed the last part with such vehemence that Hermione felt almost afraid of him.

'I… I can't choose for you,' she said, however much she wanted to beg him to come to the Order. 'And I know it's a hard choice. You just have to work out which is the lesser of two evils and… and hope it all turns out okay.'

'But I know which choice is the right one,' he said, and though she expected him to be angry or frustrated, his voice was too weary to show it. 'I've read enough stories to know what the heroes do. They wouldn't even consider joining the Dark Lord.'

'Then don't,' she said, her voice soft and oddly gentle. 'You can go and see Dumbledore, now if you want, and he'll help you, he'll keep you safe from the Death Eaters and-'

She was cut off by the sudden snapping of a twig, and looked up, startled, to see Malfoy facing her. His ice-white face was tinted palest pink with anger, the nearest thing it ever came to flushed, and his eyes were the colour of grey flames.

'Do you really think it's that easy?' he hissed. 'Just a quick conversation with the headmaster and all the problems go away?'

'I didn't mean-' she began, but was cut off again.

'Do you really think Dumbledore can keep me safe that long? That the Death Eaters won't track me down and kill me?'

'Malfoy, listen for a minute-'

'And even if he could, what if the Death Eaters win the war, what do you think they'll do to me then, when Dumbledore's a corpse and no one's left to help me? They know curses you can't even begin to imagine…'

'Then you should suffer them, rather than inflicting them on other people!'

Hermione's outburst shocked even herself: Malfoy fell silent, his eyes still hot and angry but refusing to meet her own; he looked down to the ground as if ashamed.

Hermione spoke first. 'Malfoy, I'm sorry, I shouldn't-'

'I'm not brave enough.'

It wasn't really an interruption this time. His words were spoken so softly they seemed as indefinable as the sunlight that cast patterns in white and grey across his skin, or the leaf-scented air that surrounded them.

'I'm not one of your bloody Gryffindors,' Malfoy carried on, raising his head to look at her. 'We aren't all heroes and heroines who're ready to fight to the death for… whatever it is you fight for.'

He was practically admitting he was scared; and the worst part of it was that Hermione didn't know how to help him.

'You just have to do it anyway,' she tried. 'Even if it scares you. If you know it's right…'

'So just because I don't want to murder people, I'm going to be imbued with some divine courage and miraculously defeat all evil? What then, am I going to get a scar on my forehead and turn into Harry Potter the Second?'

'Malfoy…'

'Things don't happen that way. You don't suddenly become brave enough to turn your back on… on the Dark Lord, and the Death Eaters, just because you find out you've got a shred of moral decency. If they captured me…'

Hermione bit her lip, looking at the Slytherin where he sat, surrounded by green and silver and a halo of sunlight, his face in shadows. Between the darkness and the light, and he had to choose now.

It was all or nothing.

'I know it's a sacrifice. And I know if they get their hands on you they'll…' She searched for the right words. 'Hurt you. And torture you, and use Dark curses I can't even begin to imagine on you… But if you join them you'll have to torture other people. And… and I don't think you could do that.'

There was a pause, and she watched him fight with himself: his fears against his morals. Torture or be tortured, suffer or inflict suffering…

She held out her hand.

'Malfoy. Come with me. We can go to Professor Dumbledore; you can explain that you don't want to be a Death Eater. And yes, they might hurt you, but isn't that better than torturing other people?'

He raised his head, looking at her outstretched hand, and nothing in the world seemed to matter any more but the girl in the red tree reaching out to the boy in the green tree and begging him to make the right choice.

His hand lifted into the air for a second; wavered, and fell to his lap again, but he looked at her hand in the same way he'd looked at the dawning sun. She kept it held out, reaching towards him, and in the privacy of her head she whispered please be brave enough, please be brave enough…

Malfoy's eyes snapped up to meet hers, and in them she saw pain and fear and an apology for something that could never be apologised for, and she knew what he'd chosen, and she choked back her cry of no, forced it to wither and die in her throat.

'I'm sorry,' he said, softer than a whisper, softer than a breath of air, and as if he couldn't stand to be near her any longer he slid off the tree branch to a neat landing on the ground beneath, than turned and ran away from her, away from the trees and the outstretched hand and the dawning sun.

Her hand dropped to her side, and she fought back aching tears.

Malfoy…

A year had passed the next time Hermione made her way out to the trees; a year spent teaching Transfiguration in McGonagall's old role. It had taken some time to get used to teaching rather than learning – especially as her oldest pupils were only a year younger than herself – but her NEWT scores in Transfiguration had been the best for more than a century, and she'd discovered that she had a natural knack for teaching.

It had been an uneventful year, if you didn't count the winter solstice. The twenty-first of December, the day when a huge-scale Death Eater attack had been planned on Hogwarts, an attack which would have resulted in massacre, if Voldemort's intent hadn't been leaked by one of his inner circle only hours beforehand.

Hermione had cried herself to sleep every night that week, and her dreams had been filled with terrible imaginings of what the Death Eaters were doing to him, to their traitor.

On New Year's Day, a Muggle had found the corpse tossed unceremoniously in a rubbish dump. Twisted and battered and bloodied and bruised and tortured to the point where Hermione could barely recognise him, he'd lain amongst the broken bottles and plastic bags with the faintest of smiles on his cold dead face, a smile that could almost be called triumphant.

She'd gone to Dumbledore and told him everything, and insisted that he was buried here, beneath these trees, the gravestone angled to catch the dawn's first light. She hadn't attended the funeral. The night before, she'd broken down in floods of tears, and Madam Pomfrey – Poppy now – had been forced to sedate her for her own sanity. She hadn't woken up for two days, and been forced to stay in the Hospital Wing for a week more, and then term had started. And even though she could see the trees from the window of her Transfiguration classroom, she'd never gone out there, until now.

Dawn was just turning the greys and blacks of the night world into their proper colours, and she couldn't help but remember the last time she'd made this journey, and what might have been if she'd said something different. The trees towered over her as before, silver birch and crimson-leaved, and she reached the gravestone and knelt before it, her tears obscuring the text.

It read, very simply,

Draco Malfoy

1980-1999.

Hermione knelt before the stone for a moment, trying to swallow the lump in her throat, and remembered the pale boy who'd belonged to the night, all in monochrome, too afraid to do more than look at the dawn through the veil of leaves and wish to belong to it. Who'd chosen the darkness out of fear, and then found courage too late, and sacrificed himself to save the lives of others.

She drew her wand and touched it to the gravestone. 'Caelo,' she whispered, and carved a fitting epitaph into the cool grey rock.

He was brave enough.

Translations: 'Caelo' is Latin for, 'I engrave'.

A/N: I'd been dying to use those two trees for ages; they're based on two I can see from one of my classroom windows. The silver birch was a bit of artistic licence, however: while the branches are actually strong enough to support a human, they wouldn't be very easy to sit on. However, it's growing in the grounds of a magical school, so we can assume things could be a little different then usual. Silver birches are just very Draco-esque in my mind…

I'm quite pleased with this one. And I hope you enjoyed it too… Now, normally I'd try to beg or threaten or guilt you into reviewing, but really, I shouldn't have to plead to get people to review. So I won't. I'll just sit here and with a pleading, sorrowful expression and look at you until you hit the review button…