The Thing in the Bottom

Draco Malfoy withdraws the wand, and the green light fades. For a long moment he keeps his eyes, empty as mirrors, on Fenrir Greyback's corpse. Death has caught the Death Eater halfway through the transformation – his chest hairy, his face hideously deformed in his last growl. Draco reaches out with a foot and turns him on his back. He suddenly sneers.

"Fancy a fur, Granger?"

Hermione doesn't answer him. As she stares at the battleground, she longs to be able to still feel sorrow at the sight of the Death Eaters' corpses. Of one of them – after the new Weasley twins' machine's explosion – there remains only pieces: blood and rags that drip from the walls of the ancient Great Hall of Hogwarts. But Hermione remembers the first time she saw this place. She remembers candles, students' faces, Albus Dumbledore at the professor's table. She hasn't mercy to gather for the Death Eaters on the ground.
To change someone, she thinks, very little is needed.

Sometimes, one wrong day and it's enough.

Draco crouches near Greyback – he prods the Death Eater's forehead with his wand and laughs delighted when the fur catches fire.

"Oops." He sneers. "I'm afraid there's a hole, now. What a pity."

Hermione Granger – she would be Hermione Weasley in a universe only a little fairer – shivers watching the abyss that is Draco Malfoy's face, Draco Ferret Malfoy, Draco Bloody Pureblood Malfoy. In that famous fairer universe, it would be permitted to him to continue being a little coward.

Perhaps Draco's wrong day started with Severus Snape: he was found by the Order in the bottom of a dungeon, after eight months of torture that played craps with his mind. Perhaps instead it started with the remains of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy; as a consequence of Lucius' umpteenth error, the Dark Lord ran out of patience. He didn't leave much of them.

Perhaps his wrong day started simply with too many tortured men, too many corpses, too many abuses.

Hermione's wrong day started the day Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley died. From then on, it's never ended.

To change someone, very little is needed, Hermione thinks. But then she tells herself that all of this – awful, agonizing, and scary: this – was dormant in Draco yet, in herself, in each of them, buried in the bottom under the layers of a different life, ready to emerge at the right time – the wrong time.

Draco stands up. He aims the wand towards the Great Hall's wall, in the place where a long time ago there hung the Hogwarts' banner. Silvered letters appear on the stone, and Draco sneers reading them. Hermione smiles too. Her wrong day has yet to end, but there are days like this one – days of victory for what remains of the Order of the Phoenix – in which she can almost to remember how it was have a fair day.

Potter's Army, is written now in the Great Hall, recruitment is still open.

Note: Thanks to Rosawyn and to Esther A2J. Their patient work greatly helped me to translate this story. Thank you so much.