Chapter Text
She’d got another letter from the Ministry that morning. It was from the Muggle Liaison Office this time.
Dear Miss Granger,
We were honoured to receive your thoughts on our Muggle-born outreach programme.
However, given the events of the last year, we are still in the process of returning to our previous systems. We are not currently looking to make any alterations.
In addition, as we have heard that you are aware, it is against Ministry policy to work with consultants who do not have a minimum of four NEWTs, grades A or above.
We encourage you to contact us again after you have completed your final year at Hogwarts. We would be delighted to talk with you further at that time.
(PS—Enclosed is a clipping from last June’s Daily Prophet. Could you sign it and send it back? My daughter is a big fan.)
Hermione scoffed and shoved the letter back into her bag. It was just as useless on the fourth reread.
It had been over six months since the end of the war. Six months and, as of this morning, Hermione had received forty-nine letters from Ministry officials telling her, in slightly wordier terms, to stop trying to stick her nose in.
Oh, the Ministry had been very effusive at first. Various departments had reached out with offers of discussions and meetings (and, of course, press photographs). They had even insisted on arranging Mind Healers for her, Ron and Harry as a gesture of recognition of everything they had been through.
But even the Mind Healers had shut Hermione down when she’d asked for advice on getting somebody (anybody) to listen to her.
“Have you considered that your need to help people is a response to your own trauma?” they’d asked. “Is it possible that you feel like you yourself lacked proper care and assistance, and you are trying to ensure nobody else feels that way?”
“Well,” Hermione had said with a frown. “Maybe. But I don’t see why that’s a bad thing.”
“It’s not your responsibility to help everyone,” the Mind Healer had said gently. “You’re eighteen years old. Don’t you think you’ve done enough for now?”
Codswallop. It was the attitude of Don’t you think we’ve done enough that had got the magical world into such a mess in the first place.
There had been a couple of officials who had seemed to realise that there were better ways of doing things—but even they had been reluctant to talk. They couldn’t be seen to be taking ideas from the public, they’d said. To discuss anything further, Hermione would have to be considered a freelance consultant.
And to be a consultant, you needed the NEWTs.
Well, fine. Hermione would get the NEWTs.
That is, if she could concentrate.
“It’s so loud in here,” she hissed to Harry.
Harry blinked and looked up from his homework. “We’re in the library,” he said slowly, as if she hadn’t noticed. “It’s the quietest place in the castle. That’s sort of the point.”
Hermione sniffed. “Please.”
Harry frowned and went back to his essay on the Anti-Alohomora Charm. There was a mistake at the beginning of his third paragraph. Hermione bit her lip to stop herself from pointing it out. He’d never learn, if she did.
She turned back to her own homework, but even An Arithmetic Approach to Curse-Breaking couldn’t hold her attention. She felt jittery in a way she never had done before the war. Homework was good fun, but she needed to be doing something.
“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” she whispered.
Harry looked even more confused. “A walk? It’s the middle of January. It’s freezing.”
“Not outside. Just around the castle. Stretch my legs.”
“Right. Well, okay. I’ll see you at dinner, then?”
Hermione smiled tightly.
It wasn’t that she wanted Harry to come with her. She didn’t—she had never understood the need to travel in groups that other girls her age seemed to have.
It was just—
It would have been nice if he’d asked whether she wanted company. Ron would have asked, if he’d been there—if he’d come back to Hogwarts instead of jumping straight into Auror training. He would have complained a bit, would have rolled his eyes—but he would have asked. He would have wanted to go with her.
“Yes,” she whispered, packing away her things and standing. “See you at dinner.”
Hermione had always considered herself a very independent person. She didn’t need friends or a relationship or popularity. But that year, Ron’s absence was an ache she could never quite forget. Of course, she wrote to him, and saw him every Hogsmeade weekend. But it really wasn’t the same as having him there with them.
She knew Harry felt it too. Hermione loved Harry dearly, and they got along splendidly—but they were a bit unbalanced, just the two of them. Their lonely childhoods had made them both instinctively solitary, and they were both impatient and intense in their own ways. They needed a third person, really, to even them out a bit. To make them laugh.
A couple of first years dashed across her path.
“Sorry!” one of them yelled over their shoulder.
“That’s all right,” Hermione said, but she doubted they heard her—they’d already skidded around the corner and out of sight.
A few years ago, she would have been annoyed by running and shouting in corridors, which was against school rules. But that year, it was refreshing—bowed heads and fearful glances were still a much more common sight than any sort of youthful exuberance. The Carrows had certainly left their mark.
Hermione was reminded of an idea she’d been meaning to suggest to Professor McGonagall—a wellbeing club, to encourage healthy discussion and collaborative healing from the terrors of last year.
McGonagall had been one of the only people who seemed to understand that Hermione needed to feel useful. Hermione had practically cornered her a few weeks before term had started, prepared to argue her case and then be completely and utterly ignored.
But McGonagall had sat down with her, had listened to her concerns, and had actually made changes. Thanks to that discussion, the Hogwarts house-elves had been freed and re-hired as staff members if they’d wanted to stay. (To Hermione’s delight, several of them had opted to take a severance package and had, presumably, left to live a life of elfin leisure.)
It had been a small victory—and one that was long overdue—but it had been something. And if Hermione could approach McGonagall with a solid plan, she was sure the idea of a wellbeing club would at least be considered.
She didn’t know where to suggest as a meeting space, though. The Room of Requirement still refused to appear, so that was out. But, unlike with the DA, they wouldn’t need to hide what they were doing. With McGonagall’s permission, the whole castle was open to them.
Her feet had taken her to the Charms corridor. Hermione cocked her head and considered the doors that lined the stone walls. There was only one classroom used for teaching, but there were several classrooms reserved for practical Charms practice—they could be perfect.
But were they big enough? There would need to be space for at least, say, fifty students. The practical classrooms were bigger than regular classrooms, but not by much…
Her mind already spinning with possibilities—she’d known a walk was a good idea!—Hermione pushed open the nearest door.
The practical Charms classrooms were famously useless. Since everybody practised their charmwork in their common rooms, the most activity the practical classrooms saw were during the rare breaktimes that the weather was so awful that students were allowed to remain indoors. So, when Hermione had pushed open the door, she hadn’t expected anybody to be inside.
She certainly hadn’t expected to see Draco Malfoy pressed against the wall by a boy with light brown skin and copper hair. A boy who was kissing him.
“Goodness!”
Malfoy and the boy—Archie Campbell, a Ravenclaw in Ginny and Luna’s year—sprang apart.
“Granger!” Campbell squawked. He shot a look at Malfoy, grimaced, and fled the classroom without another word, shoving Hermione with his shoulder as he rushed by.
Hermione blinked. The practical Charms classrooms were usually empty, yes—but it wasn’t completely unheard of for students to utilise quiet corners of the castle for moments of intimacy.
It was just—Malfoy.
And Archie Campbell.
He was a half-blood, Campbell, Hermione remembered distantly.
And Malfoy was—
“Well,” Hermione said. “I’m sorry for barging in like that. But, really—locking spells.”
She was hoping for an embarrassed chuckle. She was expecting some kind of defensive insult. But Malfoy just stood there.
Hermione cleared her throat. “So…do you often come here, or is this classroom usually empty?”
The silence was awkward. Hermione would have been relieved to hear even a Piss off, Granger—but instead, Malfoy let out a strange little gasp.
Hermione had been politely avoiding Malfoy’s gaze, but at that, she looked at him properly.
She’d expected him to be leaning smugly against the wall, his flushed face and pink lips a taunt: Look what I have and you don’t—but he wasn’t.
He was, in fact, deathly pale. His eyes weren’t narrowed in a malicious smirk. They were wide and watery.
He didn’t look smug at all.
He looked terrified.
“Malfoy?”
“Please don’t tell anyone,” he said in a rush.
“Well, no,” Hermione said, “it’s none of my business—”
“Especially not the teachers, I can’t get in trouble, I can’t—”
“I won’t—”
“If this gets back to my parents, I don’t know what I’ll do— They can’t know, please—”
“Malfoy,” Hermione snapped, and Malfoy flinched. “Sorry,” Hermione said. “But I said I won’t tell anyone.”
But Malfoy did not seem reassured. He let out another short, strangled gasp. His eyes were darting around the room in a way Hermione recognised. Carefully, she took a step to the side so she was no longer blocking the only exit.
“Malfoy,” Hermione said in a gentler voice. “Are you okay?”
Malfoy shook his head quickly.
“Is there anything I can help with?”
The harsh sound that came out of Malfoy’s mouth was probably supposed to be a snort of laughter, but it sounded much more like a desperate sort of wheeze.
“Are you sure? I’m quite willing to lend a hand if there’s something—”
“I’m gay.”
Hermione waited for Malfoy to continue, but he was biting his lip, his face screwed up, his breathing quick and shallow.
“Well,” Hermione said, when nothing else appeared to be forthcoming. “Yes, I recently began to suspect something like that.”
“What?” Malfoy’s voice slipped up an octave. “When? Why? Who else knows?”
“About three minutes ago, when I saw you snogging Archie Campbell,” Hermione said slowly. “So if I had to guess, I’d say he might have an idea, too.”
Malfoy screwed up his pointy face even more. He was starting to go rather blotchy.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of, you know,” Hermione said. “Aside from not thinking to lock the door when you’re getting off with your boyfriend.”
“He’s not—” Malfoy dragged in a ragged breath. “He’s not my boyfriend. Campbell. I barely speak to him. He’s just— When I’m with him, it’s the only time someone is—”
“Yes, well, I don’t need to hear the details,” Hermione said quickly. “But whatever he is to you, it’s no more wrong than it would be if he were a witch.”
“Not to you, maybe. Muggles are better with—with queerness.”
That had not been Hermione’s experience, actually.
In the Muggle world, she’d been shunned by adults and children alike. Her teachers had called her parents into school on several occasions to have stern words with them for “encouraging their son down a dangerous path” and other such nonsense—despite Hermione’s level-headed insistence that she was nobody’s son, and never had been. But even Hermione couldn’t deny that strange things would happen around her with alarming frequency—and it had been easier for other people to blame that on the fact that she wore dresses than to consider that she might be developing magical powers.
Then, on the afternoon of Hermione’s eleventh birthday, Professor McGonagall had shown up at the Grangers’ front door.
The Hogwarts letter had been a revelation. A lifeline. It had been the first time someone other than her parents had said it’s okay, you’re not broken, you’re just special. Better still had been McGonagall’s reaction when Hermione had raised her chin and said, “You addressed the letter wrong. I’m Miss Granger, not Mister. My name is Hermione.”
McGonagall hadn’t frowned, hadn’t exchanged concerned glances with her parents, hadn’t tittered and waved a dismissive hand with an “Oh, what’s he like!” She’d nodded, quite seriously, and said, “I’m very sorry for the mistake, Miss Granger. You know, if you’re interested, there are potions…?”
And that had been that. Nobody in the wizarding world seemed to think it was the slightest bit strange that Hermione had been declared a boy when she’d been born. They found it much stranger that nobody except her parents had believed her when she’d told them otherwise.
So it was difficult to swallow that Malfoy thought wizards were the prejudiced ones. Hermione was about to say so when Malfoy continued, forcing out words between gasps.
“It’s not just my parents, though Merlin knows what they’ll do to me if they find out. It’s everyone. The other pure-bloods. The Sacred Twenty-Eight are dropping like flies—the Gaunts, the Crouches, the Blacks, the Lestranges, and I doubt the Averys or Yaxleys will be having much luck, with them in Azkaban. The Prewetts are basically out, and nobody’s heard from the Burkes in years. For me to be around, alive and”—another strange, wheezing laugh—“whole and healthy, and refuse to carry on the line? It’ll be all anyone will talk about, and I can’t, I can’t give everyone another reason to—to—!”
He covered his face with his hands, but there was no disguising the sob that wrenched its way out of him.
“Oh, come here,” Hermione said, stepping towards him and repressing the urge to point out that the world was undoubtedly a better place without more Gaunts, Lestranges, Averys or Yaxleys in it. She’d only meant to stand nearby so he knew he wasn’t alone, but he curled into her as soon as she got close, clutching at her robes and burying his face into her shoulder—quite a feat, since he was at least half a foot taller than her.
“I didn’t want to come back,” he said thickly. “I hate it here, but it was either this or a year’s house arrest at the Manor and I couldn’t— As soon as this year is over, I’m leaving, I’m getting away—”
Hermione shushed him, rocking him like she did with the younger students who’d woken from nightmares, sure the castle was about to be attacked.
Because that was what Malfoy was afraid of, wasn’t it? That he’d be attacked—for something he couldn’t help. It was a feeling Hermione knew intimately from her childhood, and from being Muggle-born during the war. She was hardly Malfoy’s biggest fan, but she wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone.
She held Malfoy, patting his back and making little soothing noises until his breath came easier and his thin body stopped heaving. He stayed there for a minute more, sniffling, then straightened, wiping his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said stiffly, his attempt at sounding dignified rather ruined by the rough stuffiness of his voice. “I apologise.”
“Don’t be silly.” Hermione studied the miserable set of Malfoy’s mouth, then cocked her head. “It’s a good job nobody walked in just then,” she said, teasing. “They might have thought we were the ones kissing.”
It was a poor attempt at a joke, but Malfoy huffed a sad little laugh anyway. “That would solve one of my problems, at least.”
Hermione went still.
What if…?
No.
But…
She would be helping someone, wouldn’t she? She’d be making an actual, tangible difference. She wouldn’t feel so dismissed, so jittery, so bloody well useless.
Malfoy looked at her. Then he froze too.
There was a strange light in his pink-rimmed eyes, and Hermione was sure they were having the same thought. Then he let out another huff of laughter, harsher this time.
“Can you imagine? Ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?”
“You cannot possibly be asking that question.”
“I am asking it,” Hermione said. “It would help you, wouldn’t it? If people thought you and I were together.”
“But we’re not together,” Malfoy pointed out. “No offence, but as recently discussed, my preferences lie elsewhere.”
“I don’t mean we should really get together.” Hermione pulled a face. “Obviously. But if people thought that we were…”
“Why on earth would anyone think that? Unless you plan to follow me around, being annoyingly comforting whenever I have a bloody breakdown, and hope that someone barges in on us while I’m sobbing pathetically into your shoulder.”
“Ideally not,” Hermione said. “But what if we pretended? Just while we’re still at Hogwarts. You said you’re leaving after school’s over. That’s only, what? Six months?”
It wouldn’t be difficult. They wouldn’t need to do much at all—just spread the rumour and spend some time together. Ron wasn’t at Hogwarts, so nothing would need to change there. And hadn’t Hermione been thinking, less than an hour ago, that she and Harry would benefit from someone else spending time with them?
Granted, Malfoy would probably not be Harry’s first choice. Malfoy wouldn’t have been Hermione’s first choice, either—but she knew how awful it was to live in fear of people finding out a secret you were sure would make them hate you. She’d spent most of her first year terrified that the stairs to the girls’ dormitories would change their mind about her, or that one of the other students would learn about her past.
(She’d told Ron and Harry on the Hogwarts Express at the end of that year, figuring that she’d at least have the summer to adjust to not having friends again if they took it badly—but Ron had just blinked and said, “Oh. Cool,” and Harry had nodded in an awkward sort of way and offered her a chocolate frog, and nothing had changed between them at all.)
Malfoy was still looking doubtful, and something else occurred to Hermione. “Unless it would actually be worse for you to be seen with a Muggle-born.”
“No!” Malfoy said. “At least, not unless I declared my intention to marry you. But until then, being involved with a witch of any blood would certainly deflect suspicion. If anything, it would be good that you’re— It would probably help with”—he grimaced—“image rehabilitation.”
“Well, then.”
“Look, what is this, some kind of revenge thing? Weasley broke up with you, and you want to get back at him by pretending to go out with the person who would piss him off most?”
“As if I’d ever be so childish,” Hermione sniffed, determinedly ignoring her ill-considered date with Cormac McLaggen in sixth year when she’d tried to do just that. “And Ron and I are still together, actually.”
“Then I suspect he might have something to say about this plan of yours.”
“Let me talk to Ron,” Hermione said firmly. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”
Malfoy raised an incredulous eyebrow, but she stood her ground. Ron would understand. He’d probably question her sanity, would probably call Malfoy all kinds of colourful insults, but he’d support her. He always did.
“Then why?” Malfoy asked. “Why would you help me?”
Hermione looked at him levelly. “Because I want to make a difference,” she said. “Because nobody deserves to be punished for who they are, and, frankly, because I’m a better person than you—but also because I think you’re not quite as rotten as you used to be, and you won’t have a decent chance to grow if you’re busy looking over your shoulder and having breakdowns in empty classrooms.”
Malfoy was gaping, his eyes suspiciously shiny again.
“So?” Hermione asked. “What do you think?”
“I—” Malfoy said. “I mean, it’s ridiculous. But I—I suppose it would— And if you’re sure, then…”
“Excellent,” Hermione said. The jittery feeling inside her was already giving way to the warmth of being able to do some bloody good. “Give me a week to sort things out with Ron. Then we’ll get started.”