Mourning, a harry potter fanfic

oneshot. A few months after the deed, Hermione finds an unexpected visitor at the white tomb. Harsh, broken and disillusioned, he is not the boy she knew… "It's never too late," she tells him. He wants so much to believe her. postHBP DMHG

Narrative breaks, marked by hyphens and extra line breaks, do not indicate a passage of time/place. They are there for stylistic scene-break only.

.mourning.

In the first days of September, with the school still closed, the tomb had visitors. They were unlikely, but at least they mourned.

She draws a sharp breath. She can't help it, she's shocked. That hair. That ridiculous, bleach-blond hair. She'd know it anywhere. She'd know it especially here.

She has made a private pilgrimage to this place, found time for it between Burrow and Godric's Hollow and the distant place called home, and she cannot imagine what he is doing here. She is convinced that it cannot be good. Her conscience seethes for justice.

She takes just one step closer – the bend in the path has hidden him until he is close by – and reaches for her wand.

"Don't," comes the sudden word, ragged, fraying at the edges. She is startled because his back is turned and she knows he cannot see her.

"Don't," he says again, "I only came here to tell him he was right."

The familiar voice is too quiet, too monotone, too laced with something grey and wretched for her to rightly comprehend. Perhaps, she muses, justice for the murder has already been wrought.

She stops, reconsiders her last moment's thoughts. "All right," she concedes, softly, dangerously. "But only because I'd hate for this place to bear the stains of… of mercy lost," she bites out.

He stiffens at her voice; he knows it. He didn't expect the visitor to be her, and her alone. For once.

He tries to act like he doesn't care that she is the one here. "Silly girl," he manages at last, with a ghost of the old drawl. "He died because of mercy."

A pause emerges and stretches itself leisurely for a while.

"Exactly," comes the response at last, the voice firm and a little cold. "And I don't want to let that last sacrifice be totally lost."

He lets out a short half-bark of laughter at this. "It's too late, Granger," he scoffs, and she imagines that she can catch a hint of hysteria in the acrid tones of his voice. "Too late by three months… six minutes… eight lives," he murmurs softly, and now she is sure that the desperation she hears is not just imagination. She steps around to face him from across the tomb where he's kneeling, and sees a crazed, caged light in his pale unearthly eyes.

He notices her watching and stares up at her, eyes blazing. His gaze sears her and she jerks her vision away.

"It's never too late," she tells him, voice steady in its soft strength, and he wants so much to believe her. He wishes that he remembered how to cry.

They are silent for a while, he kneeling, she crouched awkwardly against the smooth stone. It is a long silence, the kind that makes one forgive, or forget, or break down into a million scintillating pieces under the weight of it all.

This is Draco Malfoy, she has to remind herself, because the boy before her is none of what she remembers. He is less frail in body but broken in mind, and his face is pale with more than a simple lack of light.

This is Draco Malfoy, whom Harry says almost lowered the wand. Malfoy, whom Harry told us to forgive.

Draco Malfoy, who cried to Moaning Myrtle in the bathroom. I know it. I was there that time. Malfoy, coward and bully and general slime of the world.

Malfoy, who looks broken, who somehow managed to come here alone.

She wants to tell him that she wishes she could stupefy him and turn him over to the authorities, because it is all true. But he is a coward, she knows. He doesn't need to hear her tell him what she wants to do; he can guess it easily enough.

He has gone against his nature in coming to this place, alone in enemy territory, a price upon his head. He has come, she thinks, because of a kindly old man who gave everything to keep his students together.

But then the old man died, and the Order began to crumble around him. Harry was obsessive, Ron prone to fits of rage, and Hermione frayed at the edges in the attempt to keep them both safe and sane.

She had needed a break, something to reinspire the values she was beginning to question, something to tell her that there was going to be a good, honest end to this war, that light would prevail, that everything she knew and loved would indeed be restored.

She had come to the grave to find the spirit of the cause she had lost. Instead, she found the boy who had first made her lose the cause.

It had been so close, that night on the tower. If Draco Malfoy turned, who would not? Nearly the entire house of Slytherin would follow. They would come to Dumbledore from fear and not from faith, and they would be as indiscriminate and rotten a lot as ever. But however precarious the cooperation, a Hogwarts united would not close, and would never begin to fall.

It was so close. Dumbledore lives, or Dumbledore dies. Light lives, or Light dies. Draco Malfoy lives, Dumbledore dies.

She wants to say this. She does not.

Draco Malfoy dies, Dumbledore still dies.

"I owe him so much," she offers at last, more for the sound of her own voice than for anything else. The silence is far too taxing.

"Yeah?"

She is surprised at getting a response, even if it's just one word. She blinks.

"He was the one who brought me here in the first place, after all," she says slowly, wondering what the blond boy opposite would say to that. This time he doesn't reply.

"Before him I was just a dreamer," she continues after a few seconds. "I was just a silly little girl without a lot of friends… who preferred books over the company of most people… because books were release." She is thoughtful. He is too.

"In a book, you could be taken away to a land of – of magic, because there's just no other way to describe it. You could do anything. And magic was the great equalizer, because it didn't care how you dressed, or if you were pretty, or if you were popular and - liked. Magic – " she hesitates. "Magic solved all problems. And it was fair," she murmurs, wistfully. "It was different from the place that I came from. And… and he was the one who first gave me a piece of that dream," she finishes blandly.

In the long quiet following, she feels as though she's betrayed something. She is determined to betray no more.

Far too long after her voice has ended, the blond boy speaks.

"He didn't even brace you for the let-down."

She looks up askance and catches a fleeting glimpse of something in his eyes. Curiosity, she thinks. Confusion. Perhaps, if she looked really hard, she could even see compassion there – just the tiniest trace, like fluoride in water. Undetectable; necessary still. Her determination to reveal no more is gone.

"No," she replies in a soft murmur, looking at anything but the blond boy opposite. "I don't think he really understood that part, actually... Wizards… my witches and wizards were supposed to be… so simple. Black and white. The good ones and the bad ones. They weren't supposed to have… to have complicated social issues, and disgustingly innocent prejudices, and media brainwashing and corruption in the government and the feeling that the problems are so big that nothing but a miracle could clean them up. Because there isn't even anything to hope for, now. Because magic was a miracle to the muggle world, but nothing's there to be a miracle for magic."

Silence like a pane of clear glass – this time, it feels good to have said all this out loud. She is wondering what the boy – the pureblooded, bigoted, amoral boy – thinks of all this when his voice catches her again off guard.

"Love," he says, quietly.

She blinks and knows that she can't have heard right.

"He would have said Love," the blond boy repeats, face mask-like and expressionless as he gazes vaguely upwards. They both know exactly which He the boy is talking about. "After all, isn't that what… brought the Dark Lord down, the first time?"

She recovers quickly from the shock. But that was just once – a fluke, she wants to say, or shout, or scream. That was then, this is now. What are we going to do, now? Run into battle with big red hearts on the banners? Send Veelas to make love to Voldemort? Write cheesy songs about shared experiences and star-crossed lovers to combat Death Eater propaganda? Her thoughts are ludicrous from desperation. Her faith is lost.

While she is thinking, he is too. From the troubled expression on her face, he guesses her thoughts. And her thoughts are equally troubling, because she is a Gryffindor, and Gryffindors are the brave ones, the idealistic ones, the ones who follow their leaders and their dreams through vast quantities of danger and stupidity and who believe in victory against all odds.

And she, the archetypal Gryffindor with her tainted blood and her low beginnings and her cleverness and stupid, selfless heroism – she no longer believes in -

"You don't believe in victory," he blurts out suddenly, uncharacteristically, as he feels something in him sag. Another corner of the castle falls.

For the first time in a long while she looks up at him, straight at him. "Do you?" she asks him, her voice quiet. Because they both know that this is a war which cannot be won by anybody, but which will cost them all: Gryffindor and Slytherin, Order and Death Eaters, Dumbledore and Snape, Voldemort and Harry, Malfoy and Granger.

He doesn't say anything, and she doesn't need to hear it either.

"So why – " he begins, trying to keep his voice bland, neutral, trying to cut the roiling confusion out.

" –because I believe in fighting still," she says, staring straight at him now, brown eyes burning like sepia photographs on fire. "Because even though I may doubt what's going to happen, I can't afford to tell them. I can't afford to let it show. Because logic and reason and common sense – you know, those things say I should've thrown myself off a bridge a while ago. But belief, conviction…" she searches for words.

"Love," he supplies in a curiously mocking tone, not intending to be helpful but pinning her thoughts down anyway.

"…Yeah. That," she says, blinking, thrown off of her rhetorical path for a few moments by his strange interjection.

"Those things… they tell me to keep trying, to keep telling the others that there's still hope and to try to make me believe it myself…" she trails off at last, and he can feel quiet despair seeping from her in slow waves, pervasive, ever-present, like the stench of an unpleasant memory that has rotted in the mind and which will never, ever go away.

He doesn't like it. It's a feeling that belongs in dank dungeons, in tall, high-ceilinged rooms with dim lighting and dark wooden panels, in desolate, grey-brown washes of endless moors and endless clouds. It is a feeling that does not belong here.

No, not here, not on this still-sunny September day, on this green grass lawn by this shining tomb of white marble with these cotton clouds still puffing through the skies.

The silence is still oppressive, still wrong; it needs to go away.

"I – " He swallows awkwardly. He is not accustomed to awkward. "I sometimes… miss him too," he manages at last, in a burst of something strange and incomprehensible. He tells himself that he just wants to change to the topic.

She looks up, disbelieving and more than a little startled, and she is disappointed to find that he can't meet her eyes.

"Do you?" And it's perfectly, blessedly, blissfully neutral.

"Yeah," he whispers after a while. "Not him, really... But the idea of him. The idea that he's there. The idea of a way… out of this mess," he finishes, rasping, voice sinking so low that she almost misses it.

It's still his turn to fill the silence with words.

"I guess he's a symbol to all of us." He wonders what he is saying, why he is saying it, where all this blasphemy and this bullshit and these bloody stupid bleeding-heart confessions are coming from.

"He gave me a chance," he adds, almost desperately. Because as the words pour out now, it doesn't feel like bullshit any more. Part of him thinks it never did.

"I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. And he gave me a chance."

He stops abruptly. He knows he's said too much.

"Did you try to take it?" She is whispering too now, and she is not sure why.

His mouth opens, then closes once.

"I didn't have a choice," he murmurs in the end.

His words sink to the pit of her stomach with the dead weight of painful sincerity. It is doubly bad, because she has never known him to be anything but mocking – she has never known him to be sincere, not once in his whole life.

As he stares at her staring at her hands, a sudden irrational urge overtakes him, crashing down around him and propelling him forth from deep water to land.

"It was - the Death Eaters came," he says. "And then they all knew that I couldn't do it. And then Snape came, and he did it. And then we ran."

She says nothing.

He feels more than stupid for his words. He plays them over again and hears the pathetic plea in them, and winces inside. The words are a call for pity, understanding. A call for compassion, as if he needs for her to hold back judgment, although he can't imagine why.

She steps back around the tomb between them. "It's never too late," she tells him again at last, catching and holding his gaze.

"Killing isn't for the innocent," he responds, softly, as if he is in pain.

"I know," she says, and reaches out her wand hand. "That's why."

And suddenly he can't breathe. Because all along, all along he has been swept along, from one place to another, from this year to next. All along he has never had a choice, never much of a say in what he did or did not do or liked or did not like. And it never bothered him, this not having of choices. Not until the day – night, rather – when he was forced to choose, and he was so close to making a fateful choice when the path he'd finally decided that he wanted disintegrated before his eyes.

That was the beginning of regret.

Now he is in the presence of the dead man again and he can feel his first choice-that-was-cut-off-dead hovering in the air somewhere close to him. And he stares and stares at her open hand, palm up, as if that could save him from the pain of choosing and losing again. Because what if he chooses wrong? When he didn't have choices, he had nothing to regret. It was so much easier that way.

But nothing he does or does not do or thinks or does not think can change the fact that in the present, in the here and now, she is still waiting with her hand outstretched. And even though he cannot choose he must, he must and he must choose right because he knows – he can feel it in his bones – that his decision will have to answer to himself for the rest of his life.

A sudden wind rattles the crisp September leaves and he looks away inadvertently, his gaze falling on a half-crescent of white moon ensconced in broad daylight, pinned up in a pale blue sky. He thinks of half-moon glasses and a voice echoes in his head. He thinks of red slitted eyes and another voice echoes there, too.

…Until at last he can bring himself to do it, to take the step that he was too afraid to take all those months ago. Now it is different, because now he is punished and beaten and tortured by his own, he knows he is worth nothing and his world is no longer his. Now he has nothing to lose.

After a long pause he moves as if to put his elegant hand in her outstretched one, then he jerks back suddenly. He gives her his wand instead.

She is surprised. She accepts the wand automatically from shock – oak, about a foot long. It is heavy in her hand, burdened, heavier than any wand should be.

The blond boy looks away after handing it over. There is a frightening plummeting sensation in his stomach, and he ignores the temptation to search the sky for vengeful Death Eaters. He hopes he has chosen right. Because this time around, he cannot blame the old man.

Hermione Granger blinks at the wand she now holds, the wand which is not her own, and studies it intently. She blinks again and shoves it swiftly back into Malfoy's grasp.

"Keep it," she says quickly, trying to sound encouraging, biting off the "you'll certainly need it" before that part can get out.

She notes his look of confusion – does this mean she taken back her offer? he wonders – so she reaches for his hand. And then, noting the incredible awkwardness of clutching Draco Malfoy's hand, she shakes it.

She is too busy shaking and being mortified to notice that the hand is clutching back.

She stops, finally, and slowly lets go. Or tries to, because he doesn't allow it.

Because he is past embarrassment, because he is too involved in hanging onto the person that he's now chosen as his only source of hope. He is too involved in noticing that her hands are very warm, now that they are not slapping his face, that they feel small but not fragile, that they are callused in places and not well pampered, but comforting all the same. They are certainly not slimy and cold as he was told – slimy and cold, like mud.

For the entirety of his time here, he has been censoring his language, even in his thoughts. It was supposedly for the memory of the old dead wizard who so hated that word; now he wonders if it isn't also for something else.

He holds her hand tighter, closes his eyes, and dreams of a phoenix living and burning and dying and living again, and equates the bird with Hope.

In the aftermath of June, the white tomb was frequented. The people who could not attend the funeral came pouring in. The tomb was drenched in flowers, some planted nearby. They were watered by copious tears.

In the dead heat of July, the white tomb was left alone. The groundskeeper visited a few times a week, and that was all.

In the faint stirring of August, the groundskeeper was called away.

But in the first days of September, with the school still closed, the tomb had visitors. They were unlikely, but still they mourned.

He doesn't know when the tears started, or whose they were at first. He doesn't remember pulling her so much closer, to feel a bit more of her warmth. He doesn't understand why he is holding her so gently, or why her fingers are clasped at his back, or why they're clinging desperately together or how to next react.

So many choices, too many choices, though he suspects quietly that things are again taken out of his control. This time, it's not necessarily bad.

And he is right. Because now she has dropped her wand – he knows because it was prodding his back, clutched in her fist as it was – and he has lost his too, and her hands are now locked at his neck and her face is buried damply in the crook of his shoulder and chin. And he is sure now that it's out of his power, because he doesn't even want to resist. He tilts her chin up with one elegant finger, and falls with desperation upon her pretty lips.

It is much later again when he next comes to himself. His lips feel strange. A vague memory from what seems a lifetime ago tells him that this means that they are swollen. From the kiss.

And "the kiss" is not a technically accurate designation, either. He pulls her close, too close, to stay away from her eyes. She doesn't seem to mind.

She doesn't mind, because he is a good kisser, this she could have guessed and now most definitely knows. But far more importantly, he is a good man – and though she knows it's not quite true, that strictly he isn't at all, still it has a nice ring and she repeats it in her mind.

"Thank you," she hears, so softly she might have imagined it, and after another second she is sure that indeed she has.

She doesn't say a thing in response, he notes, but stoops instead to pick up both their wands. She passes his back to him, then takes a corner of his sleeve and begins to lead him towards the castle.

"McGonagall," she says, as if that explained everything, the one-word answer to his life. Well, he knows it isn't. Dumbledore may have been, but McGonagall isn't.

McGonagall isn't. He is exposed to danger, he knows, and suddenly the gentle haze left by the kiss is gone. He is shocked again to his senses.

The girl standing beside him is rather lovely, he supposes, but she is no Helen of Troy, no Nimue fit to drive Merlin mad. She is not worth the sacrifice, the risk, the horrible, impossible changing of sides. The sacrifice, he thinks, was for himself, only himself. For the dream of a semi-decent life, for the sad boy who died with his headmaster. And a mere McGonagall would not serve self-preservation well, would she?

For a few moments, it seemed almost as though everything was going to be all right, he thinks bitterly to himself. But for a few moments only.

He stops short and she is surprised at the sudden break in their walking.

When he raises his eyes to meet hers, his smile is pronounced, sardonic, cruel around the edges.

"Draco?" she asks softly, brown eyes sharp and probing, sensing some acute wrong.

He doesn't react to her use of his first name. "Granger, McGonagall can't do anything," he intones coolly, satisfied with his show of self-possession. "At least get me… Moody, or someone! The real Moody."

He is cold, and her eyes do nothing against him.

The words make it real, and a hard pit of ice settles into the pool of warmth that has slowly accumulated in him. All of a sudden the fear is living, breathing, sending clammy breath down his neck and very, very real. He doesn't want to die. He has never wanted to hurt. He wonders (idly, because he knows the past is done for and will not change) what possessed him to take her hand? Or kiss her?

He wonders why he is still clutching her hand. He drops it, jerking his own away. Turning from her to face the lake, his mind rambles idly over the contours of the past few months, even as another part wonders whether her current expression betrays any hurt.

"Draco Malfoy." The words are indignant.

Apparently, she is undaunted, he notes coolly. He tells himself that he feels no fear. There is not much turning back, anyway.

Except for the distinct possibility of confessing to Voldemort and giving a full report on his supposed "changed ways," and spying for the Dark Lord quite contentedly.

He tells himself also that he feels no wrench in his inside at that thought.

"Draco Malfoy, you really are a coward, aren't you…" Her voice is light, keen, and cutting. He is reminded of the icy crust on winter snow.

Her expression, he thinks now with his back still turned, must be mocking, and there is silence for a while.

A whisper of leaves shifting, and suddenly he knows that she is at his side. From hurt pride, a new anger rises and mingles with the acrid taste of his fear.

"Perhaps I am, then," he replies in a slow, frigid fury. He lifts his chin up, knowing full well how the light will catch the clean planes of his face. Perhaps he is a coward... And that is no great fault at all; he has survived because of it. He is a survivor, he thinks to himself grimly. The part of him that wasn't – that part died already, and although it feels like ages he knows that it was not so long ago.

He stares out at the lake and does not see it, finding instead an endless mental snapshot of one five-second scene. It becomes a caricature in his replay. He feels himself stiffen from the cold, and he is glad for the impending buzz of numb.

Something icy pricks inside again. It is not pleasant, but he is good at hiding this from himself.

He is busy ignoring this feeling, this coldness, when something decidedly not cold slips into his hand, slowly unclenching the stiff fingers.

He looks down and finds her fingers entwined with his, her tan skin contrasting lightly brown against his near-white.

Brown is the color of mud, he has to remind himself, in a vain attempt to hold the warmth at bay. He can still take it back, he tells himself again; he thinks hard about how he will go and tell the Dark Lord everything, how he is not insane.

She tugs on his hand until he looks at her. "…Draco, this is your last chance," she says quietly, eyes wide.

He swallows silently and thinks she surely cannot tell.

"It will work out," she says, gently insistent. He sees a determination in her eyes and something in him quails. "We'll go to McGonagall just to… ease it a bit for the others, so they know to trust you later, and then we'll find you a place in Grimmauld… The Order might be suspicious at first, but you're too valuable an addition to just pass up. You won't have to spy," she adds quickly. "Your mother… will be taken care of, I promise," she says, voice earnest, biting her lip.

He notes that it is rather swollen and a dark shade of pink indeed, and he feels an entirely irrational sense of satisfaction.

"Draco… trust me."

It is almost a plea.

He wavers, on the cusp of uncertainty.

"Killing isn't for the – " she begins softly, then stops and just stands there.

There is fear – oceans of it, he thinks. Oceans of fear, of the things that can and will go wrong. Nearly insurmountable odds. She is right. He is a coward. And he is ashamed.

(But shame, he thinks, will not save lives, nor take them, either. Shame mattered on a different plane of being, before white marble became a fixture on these green school lawns.)

A brisk September wind swirls by, gusting the leaves in small eddies of air. It is cold enough to make her shiver through the thinner fabric of her cloak.

(Shame will not take lives, but shame can make lives not worth taking, too. Is yours worth taking?)

She sneezes lightly and retracts her hand from his.

(Fear for life exists because there is an alternative to not being alive...)

She stares at his face, her own unreadable. He stands immobile, frozen, a beautiful statue sculpted from the same pale marble as the tomb, out of place in the richness of the autumnal earth. He does not belong in the way she does; part of her knows that he never will.

It is too much to hope for, she admits to herself at last, and turns to go. She cannot bring herself to turn him in. Mercy, she thinks, and she prays that righteousness will someday, just once, pay off.

She is taking her first step when she feels something around her waist, then something against her back, then hands over her hands, a face in her hair.

She stops, relishing the long silence.

"Not a coward, then," she murmurs at last, turning in the embrace to face him with a hesitant, shaky little laugh.

He looks at her, eyes flat and judgmental and probing and weighing and deciding.

She blinks.

He stares for one second longer, then closes his eyes, pulls her that much closer. She is startled at the dampness of his face.

In the dead heat of July, the white tomb was left alone. The groundskeeper visited a few times a week, and that was all.

In the faint stirring of August, the groundskeeper was called away.

But in the first days of September, with the school still closed, the tomb had visitors. The boy was not a boy and a girl not a girl: instead, they were two half-children losing and seeking and finding something to believe in, to hope for, at last.

I still miss him, she says quietly, but I can't say I wish he hadn't died.

He pulls her closer and is silent.

It has to be this way for victory, doesn't it? she asks. I can feel a difference in my bones, she says, and he doesn't even laugh at the silly remark.

He buries his face in her hair.

I can feel it. You are so much to our cause… Your turning will make us believe again, she says. Harry, Ron, McGonagall, Remus, Tonks… all of us.

He lifts his face, arches an elegant eyebrow. Ah, he says.

But you?

She blinks again, surprised.

…I think I might believe again, she whispers at last.

He moves closer yet again, and there is no more talk.

.fin.

Disclaimer: All of the characters, places, and past events mentioned above are the property of JK Rowling, including indirect quotes.

AN:

So, what do you all think? This is my first one-shot, so let me know!

Draco here is very similar to my Haven version of him, isn't he? Hermione is a bit more bitter and more torn, but I like how the dynamic worked out… I am concerned about a bit of OOC-ness in certain parts (apart from the fact that Draco is basically completely reinvented. . ); what do you think?

If you haven't read Haven and you're curious about what exactly has happened to him, you can hop over there and read the first few chapters for reference. Think of Mourning as an alternate plotbunny that grew from Haven… :)

Thanks to Arctic Demon and ILoveMyDraco for beta-ing this!

PLEASE don't forget to review! It's 3 AM and I'm utterly exhausted; one-word comments are vastly preferred to nothing at all… :)