Captured

Chapter Eleven: Change

A/N: Hi everyone!! Thank you so much for continuing to read and I'm so so glad so many of you like the story. I've been looking forward to writing this chapter since I started the story so I hope you all like reading it as much as I like writing it! Happy Wednesday, my loves!

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After Malfoy left, Hermione sat staring at the door for longer than she cared to admit. She was... confused at the very least. Theory after theory ran through her head as she tried to look at all the possible reasons for Malfoy's strange responses this time. Everytime she thought she had a good understanding of him, he seemed to react unexpectedly. Or maybe she did understand him, and she just assumed the worst because that's what he'd always shown.

But war... War changes people. Seeing peers and teachers, people you know and respect, tortured or murdered in front of you can quickly change ideals that may otherwise take years to undo, if it's even possible to undo them.

His reaction to her helping his friend with nothing to gain for herself, knowing his viewpoints and choosing to help him anyway... it seemed to have struck a nerve within Malfoy. He had been so angry, but Hermione couldn't help but feel that the anger wasn't primary. She could see the confusion brewing within his eyes like a budding storm. Confusion because she hadn't acted as he expected, hadn't acted like he believed she was supposed to act.

She took a moment to try and imagine what it would be like to grow up in Draco Malfoy's shoes. Malfoy had grown up in a life where, until recently it seemed, he had never been told he was wrong. He had had a mother who was attentive and adoring, who reminded him and confirmed for him that he was every bit as important as he seemed to think he was. He had had parents who affirmed over and over that he was truly better than everyone else. And he nearly was in many aspects. He was objectively handsome - his aristocratic features were some that many witches or wizards would risk incredibly complex bits of transfigurative magic to obtain, and muggles would go under extensive surgery for. He was tall, and had a lean, athletic build. A seeker's build. And he was so very intelligent. Nearly top of their class year over year, only beat out of the number one spot by Hermione herself. His biggest flaw, of course, was a large one - the horrendous, deep set belief that muggles, muggleborns, and any others who were anything other than pureblood witches and wizards were lesser. But that belief... it didn't come from nowhere. It was a belief that was impressed upon him and reaffirmed by those same loving and adoring parents who reminded him so often about how wonderful he was. Parents who had, seemingly, rarely treated him poorly. Who had given him anything and everything he could ever want. And they planted the dark, dangerous seed of bigotry and nurtured it within him until it grew and blossomed into an idea of its own, integrated into the very basis of who he was.

And now, he was here seeing intimately within her mind that whatever disgusting, vicious things he had been told about muggleborns were untrue. She was challenging the most important beliefs he had ever held, dismantling his prejudices one by one.

She was contemplative, serious when she finally rose from the chair she had stayed in long after Malfoy had left and moved to stand by the window, gazing out once again across the twisting, foreboding hedge maze.

She couldn't help feeling, as she tracked the swirling tendrils of mist that danced across the deep green of the maze walls, that tiny ember of hope flare again, sparking the little flame that was so at home within her and that she tried so hard to dim.

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The days passed slowly in her prison, stuck in a repetitive blur. She woke, she moved around the room, she read, she stared out at the hedges on days when the rain wasn't pounding against the windows. On days when the rain was pouring so heavily she couldn't see past the water turning the outside world into a sinister impressionist painting, she analyzed and overthought. She loved the rain, she truly did, but those days left her restless. She hadn't realized how much she had come to depend on that mist-covered view of the manor's grounds until she could no longer see her lifeline tying her to anything outside of this one room, reminding her that there was something outside of this prison.