Please Be There If I Remember

Chapter Twenty-Four: Confrontations

Draco was walking through the common room when the idea came to him. He had just come back from another library encounter with Hermione—similar to how it had happened two weeks ago—when he realised that Pansy definitely had something against muggle-borns. It happened when she had also walked into the library to see Draco talking with Hermione.

She had stood there in shock, her feet not moving as if they were frozen to the hardwood floor. Her face was stricken and Draco's smile when he had seen her slipped into a frown when the girl quickly turned her shocked face into a piercing sneer at Hermione.

If you saw the sneer on anyone else, you would think the person was over-exaggerating, but the way Pansy managed to pull it off was with just the right amount of sincerity that you couldn't help but see that she meant that dirty look with everything in her.

Hermione didn't appear too shaken by it, though. Instead, she glared right back at her—albeit with less venom than Pansy somehow managed to conjure just by twisting her features into an expression that screamed that everyone and everything was below her.

Draco watched this whole exchange happen in a matter of moments and stiffened when Pansy turned to look at him with the same face. She stalked away before any words were even spoken. Although if they had been, Draco was positive that the word spouted would not have been positive at all.

Draco had slowly started up the conversation they were having before with Hermione again after the silence became too much to bear, but the girl sounded very put-out, even when he tried to lighten the mood by making a joke. Not long after, the girl stood up and, stringing her school bag over her shoulder awkwardly, she uttered a polite goodbye to Draco and left him sitting in the library wondering what the hell had just happened.

It occurred to him right as he wandered by the fireplace and his eyes caught the paper which depicted what the new password was going to be.

Draco read it aloud in disgusted astonishment. "Pureblood? What kind of bigotred-sounding password is that?" he wondered out loud to no one in particular. Thankfully, no one appeared to have heard, but he still kept his next thoughts to himself, still utterly bewildered at who came up with the strange idea to use that as a password to a dormitory.

His next few steps cemented the idea when he thought back to his first conversation with Hermione when she asked what he thought about muggle-borns and her slightly surprised look when he answered that he didn't really care because everyone should be treated equally no matter what kind of family they came from.

Next came Pansy's disgusted look when she saw Draco talking with Hermione, who, if Draco was ever sure about anything in his life, was a muggle-born herself.

Oh, Draco thought in a kind of quick whiplash that almost made him stumble to the ground at the realisation. Pansy is a pureblood supremacist, isn't she? Another thought in his mind said that this was too quick of a deduction to be made about someone so harshly, but the evidence was clear as day when he truly looked at it.

Her response to when he used that thing called Nutella, the way she would glare at or ignore certain people in class, and most recently at her reaction to Hermione. Now that he saw it, it was too late to unsee it. And Draco, for what it was worth, wished desperately that he could unknow it, even though he was glad that he knew anyway.

Because now that he understood, Draco was going to do something to fix it, and he really didn't have the time to change someone's whole worldview when he barely understood it himself.

Great. He thought bitterly to himself. Lucky, lucky me.

~*"*~

Draco cornered his three friends in the common room the next day after classes, waiting until it emptied considerably as half of them left for the Great Hall to eat supper early. He decided it would be best to see what all three felt on this matter since Draco had a very sinking feeling that all three had something against muggle-borns—Pansy was just the most vocal one about it—and he wanted to get it all done at once.