What the Room Requires

Chapter Five

HERMIONE

            It was one of the bleakest, quietest nights I had ever spent. I noted that I didn’t feel tired or hungry or dirty, and though I’d found a moderately comfortable place to sit between the smooth, cool roots of the trees, I wasn’t inclined to sleep. Apparently, Draco wasn’t either. He sat where he had been, by the clock, gazing straight ahead, eyes unfocused. His tears finally dried, but as I watched him, I found myself wishing he would cry more. His stark, pale face without tears unsettled me.

            I also had no inclination to leave the shelter of this willow. At all. Ever. Deep inside me, a reasonable little voice told me that was madness, but right at the moment, I liked this quiet. I liked the fact that my surroundings weren’t changing as fast as the flipping pages of a picture book. It was a relief, this monotony, this sameness—and if so much as one tiny spider crawled across the back of my hand, I would lose my mind.

            I was still fighting to digest what I had seen.

            It sat like a cold rock in my stomach, like faint nausea at the onset of being ill. I watched him as he sat there—watched the slight rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed; watched his long lashes as he blinked slowly. I bit my lip. I said nothing.

            The moment I first met Draco Malfoy, I had his character pegged: he was a selfish, egotistical, stubborn, arrogant, spoiled only child with a superiority complex coupled with a chip on his shoulder. Then, the day he first called me a Mudblood, I began to hate him. With every encounter, my opinion of him shrank until he was a cockroach in my eyes—cowardly, shallow and worthless.

            I had never wondered if he was lonesome.

            I had never wondered what it would be like to know that my mother was slightly afraid of my father. I had never considered how it would be to worship my father, yet be haunted by doubting his love. I had never asked myself if I could bear living in coldness and darkness and stone, the shadows of Death Eaters often flitting across the walls of my home, with the Dark Lord a frequent subject of discussion around the dinner table.

            Yet I had looked that reality in the eye at least once a week since I was eleven years old. And those thoughts had never entered my mind.

            Until tonight.

            I wrapped my arms around my chest and leaned my head sideways against a root, glancing at Draco for the hundredth time—but then my gaze lingered, and a strange idea crossed the edges of my thoughts.

            What if I had been the child of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy?