A/N: Believe it or not, I was going to try to reply to all the reviews today. But since portkey is being persnickety, it doesn't look like that's going to be possible. I just hope I'll be able to get this part posted tonight! Thanks as always to my lovely reviewers. I'm sorry if anyone was offended by part 10. I promise, Draco will *not* end up with Hermione. As much as *he* likes the idea, Hermione is head over heels for Harry and, for better or for worse, can't imagine being with anyone but him. Lucky for her, I still have a few tricks up my sleeve and there will be a happy ending for H/Hr by the time I'm through with them. Of course, since we're not at the end (current forecasts have the conclusion in part 17) there's no reason for things to be happy yet! Yes, this chapter is another lovely helping of angst. I hope you all enjoy it!
Section 11:
Harry woke up the next morning from disjointed, disturbing dreams that he didn't clearly remember and immediately began to brace himself for seeing Hermione again. Despite how well he knew her, he simply wasn't sure how she would respond to what had happened the night before. After all, he'd never really seen her in love. How would it make her act, now that her secret was out? Would she miss class? It took something serious to make Hermione miss class, but it wasn't entirely unprecedented. Maybe she would lock herself in the girls' toilets to cry the way she had when Ron hurt her feelings first year. Or maybe she'd yell and scream the way she had fourth year when she and Ron fought over the Yule Ball. Harry knew that his actions had hurt her. He had, unknowingly, been as cruel as Ron had been first year, and as oblivious as Ron had been to Hermione's feelings in fourth year.
The troublesome part was that there was no real way to tell what Hermione would do, meaning there was no real way to prepare himself. Harry, no matter how hard he tried, never understood the ways that girls behaved. Hermione had always been the one to help him in the past. She had been a veritable translation key for every girl he had ever dated. Even now, his instinct was to go to Hermione and see if she could explain the situation to him, and tell him what he should say and do. Without the benefit of her advice and support, he found himself feeling hopelessly lost. The best he could do was mentally resolve to himself that however Hermione chose to handle it, he would be there for her. She was his best friend and he would not let that go, no matter how upset she was, no matter how she yelled or screamed. With this resolution firmly in mind, he headed down to breakfast.
He believed that he was ready to deal with her tears or her screaming. He was prepared for her to make a scene, or to run away to avoid one. What he wasn't prepared for was what he found. Hermione was seated at the Gryffindor table with the Daily Prophet spread out in front of her, eating eggs while chatting a bit with Ginny, looking for all the world as if nothing at all had changed. It was disconcerting. He had braced himself for all sorts of reactions, but he had never thought to anticipate a complete *lack* of reaction. When she caught sight of Harry, she smiled at him with a bland hello, and returned her focus to her paper.
Harry approached her cautiously, attempting to sit down next to her, but she was quick to point him down to the other end of the table where Lavender was seated with her bridesmaids, poring over what looked to be a stack of wedding invitations, and waving for Harry to join them. Harry refused to be so easily dismissed, and stepped closer to her, saying that he really wanted to talk to her about what had happened the previous day. Hermione merely gave him a surprised look and told him that nothing had happened the day before that needed to be discussed, and that he really should be going to join Lavender. Bewildered, Harry left.
Thus was born The Confession That Never Happened. Hermione flatly refused to ever discuss it again. With a grace and dexterity that not even the Golden Snitch could match, Hermione dodged every attempt Harry made to talk to her, or to get her alone. He could only watch helplessly as she slipped further and further away from him. And as simply and gracefully as that, Hermione removed herself from his life. Harry looked about himself to discover that a friendship that had spanned nearly seven years and countless near-death situations had somehow ended.
Hermione didn't openly snub him when she saw him. As far as he could tell, no one even noticed that she had ended their friendship, other than himself. He noticed it every time he found himself turning around (at least a dozen times a day), expecting her to be beside him, as she always had been, to discover that she wasn't. It wasn't like before, when he just *suspected* that she was avoiding him. Now he knew it for a fact, and Hermione no longer made any excuses not to spend time with him. She simply stopped being there.
When Ron asked why she didn't come to Quidditch practices anymore, she informed him that she was tutoring younger students for their end of term exams, at McGonagall's request and that the chosen times for the tutoring sessions, by some unfortunate coincidence, conflicted with Gryffindor's practice schedule.
When Ginny complained that Hermione was never in the Great Hall for meals anymore, Hermione brought up the study group she had with Ravenclaws in the evenings, where they would order a tray of sandwiches from the kitchen and study in one of the library's back rooms for the upcoming N.E.W.T.s. She claimed that she did her other homework during breakfast and lunch times to make up for all the evening time she spent studying.
When Neville, who counted on Hermione to help him get through his classes, mentioned that she showed up to class just before it started and left immediately after it was over to avoid any discussions beforehand or afterwards, and in addition, spent the class periods taking copious notes during classes that prevented her from holding any kind of conversation, she said that Dumbledore requested that she and Draco patrol hallways in between periods, and that she needed the notes to prepare for the N.E.W.T.s.
And when Dean, wanting a portrait of himself and Parvati, complained that she was never in the common room anymore, she replied that she was busy with her duties as Head Girl. None of this sounded odd to anyone else. It was no surprise to any of them that Hermione would devote a considerable amount of time to her duties as Head Girl, and to her studies. Harry seemed to be the only one who noticed that her duties and studies only *recently* took her away from the rest of them, and that she was getting in the habit of leaving them, leaving *him* most of all, and not coming back.
And if he saw her walking with Malfoy one more bloody time, talking to him and turning to him with her questions and her comments, then Harry didn't believe he should be held responsible for what he might do. In her attempt to distance herself from the Gryffindors, Hermione seemed to have made the decision to spend all her spare time with Malfoy. The obvious friendship between them was impossibly hard to stomach. Harry still shuddered whenever he remembered one particularly desperate attempt to talk to Hermione about a week after The Confession.
At first, when Harry realized that Hermione absolutely refused to talk to him alone, he had been determined to give her time to work through her feelings and come to terms with… whatever it was that girls had to come to terms with. Harry didn't understand any of it, really, but he knew that he had to give her some time. So he did. He gave her a week. Then it started to sink in that her absence wasn't a temporary thing. She wasn't just taking a few days to pull herself together; she was taking herself out of his life. Permanently. She was leaving him, and she wasn't going to come back. At that thought, all plans to 'give her time' or 'let her adjust' disappeared from his head. Hermione was a part of him that he was *not* going to give up.
She had gone for one of her late night visits to the library and Harry had followed her, wrapped in his invisibility cloak which was practically a necessity for him by that point, if he wanted to be at all inconspicuous. He was convinced that one of the reasons that Hermione was able to so effectively avoid him was that she could hear him coming from a mile away thanks to the damn fan club following him everywhere he went. By hiding in his invisibility cloak, she wouldn't know that he was there, and he'd be able to finally get her alone and talk some sense into her. He waited for her outside the library for what felt like hours, but eventually was rewarded by the sight of her walking out, alone.
"Hermione," he called out, grabbing her wrist as she walked past and dropping his invisibility cloak at the same time.
Hermione instinctively shrieked when she felt an invisible hand close around her wrist, but not for nothing was she one of the most prized junior members of the Order of the Phoenix. Training had become instinct and at the first sign of attack, she immediately drew her wand. She had it halfway raised into cursing position before she realized it was Harry holding on to her.
"Merlin, Harry, don't do that! I could have hexed you!"
"I-I didn't mean to scare you," he stammered, unaccountably nervous now that he finally had her undivided attention. "I just wanted to talk to you."
Hermione's face hardened into an unemotional mask. "What is there to say?"
"We can talk about anything!" Harry blurted out. He didn't know exactly what he was saying; his plan had mostly focused on getting her alone and talking to her; he hadn't put much thought into what he would say when he got to that point. The words rushing out of him in an only slightly comprehensible flood as he kept talking, desperate to hold her attention, to keep her there with him, to keep her from walking away.
"We don't have to talk about… that… if you don't want to," he stammered, trying his very best to be tactful by not directly naming was he was sure would be a sensitive topic. He was unaware of how much he hurt her by tiptoeing around mentioning her confession, as if it were something horrifying that was best forgotten or pushed to the side.
"I mean, I understand that you don't want to talk about that," he blundered on, "but we can talk about anything! Really! Like… um… Quidditch! I can always come up with something to say about Quidditch, right? Or we could talk about class. You always liked talking about class. Or the N.E.W.T.s! That's what you were studying for just now, right? Or you could tell me about your day, or complain about Snape, or remind me to study more. We could go down to the kitchens; you know how happy Dobby gets when we go down there. He keeps giving me socks, every time I go. I think I've gotten twelve pairs of socks from him in the past week, alone. And he could probably give us some of that chocolate cake that they served with dinner. It's your favorite, right?"
"It's not that easy, Harry," Hermione interrupted. Her voice had that sad, strained quality to it that meant she was holding back tears. Harry hated hearing that sound in her voice, but at least the unemotional mask had faded. That, at least, was progress.
"It could be," Harry pleaded. "It could be exactly that easy. "We could just be friends again. Is that so difficult?"
And just when he started to think that he was getting through to her, he heard that hated voice from behind him.
"Alright, Granger? I heard someone scream."
Draco bloody Malfoy with his absolute gift for showing up at the dead wrong time, and ruining everything for Harry. But this time, a heartsick pain moderated Harry's annoyance at Draco. When he, himself, tried to talk to Hermione, all he could manage to do was bring her close to tears. But when Malfoy showed up, she smiled. As pleased as Harry was to see her smile, it only intensified his urge to turn Malfoy's intestines into carnivorous snakes for being the one to cause it.
Harry had spent seven years sharing his troubles and his adventures and his life with Hermione. They had seen each other through death-defying situations that would have sent most people screaming to St. Mungo's. They had been there for each other through the worst, most terrifying, most hellish experiences two people can share, and Harry had truly believed that he was as close to Hermione as it was possible for two separate people to be. She had put her soul on the line to protect him in his final battle against Voldemort, and Harry knew that if it had come down to it, she would have given her life for him without a moment's hesitation. And he knew that he would do the same for her.
So why was it that when he tried to talk to her, all he could seem to do was make her cry, while Malfoy… Malfoy the prat, the egotist, the self-righteous, bigoted, narrow-minded, cruel, devious pain in their collective arses for the majority of their school years… how was it that seeing Malfoy made her smile when seeing Harry had only made her sad? Where the hell was the justice or even the logic in that?
Hermione was the only person in the world who truly made Harry feel like a hero. With everyone else, he always felt like a sham: like they expected more of him than he could ever hope to deliver. But when Hermione told him that she believed in him, Harry found it possible to believe in himself. The trust and friendship always evident in Hermione's eyes when she looked at him had given him the courage to do everything that everyone else had always expected of him. When had that stopped? When had Hermione's eyes changed? When had Harry stopped being her hero? And when the hell had Malfoy, of all people, started filling that role?
"Alright, Malfoy," she answered softly. Draco stepped closer, putting his hand on her chin so he could turn her face to the light. It took all of Harry's considerable self-control not to knock it away.
"Liar," Malfoy said softly, spotting the tears swimming in her eyes. "You're not alright."
"I will be," she answered with another weak attempt at a smile. "Soon."
"Of course you will be!" Malfoy replied, unaware that Harry was mentally listing all the different curses he could use to make Malfoy's hand rot away. "I'll be there to make sure. Come on, I'll walk you back to our rooms."
"Hermione, wait!" Harry pleaded, grabbing for her wrist again. "I… I just wanted to talk to you."
"Go ahead and keep talking, if you want," Malfoy sneered in reply. "We just won't be listening." And with that, he extracted Hermione's hand from Harry's grip and led her away. Harry's eyes followed her until she disappeared around the turn of the corridor. Hermione didn't look back.